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16186	----	April 2005 2005 is the 150th anniversary of Mrs. Hungerford's birthday. Mrs. HUNGERFORD (Margaret Wolfe Hamilton) (1855?-1897), A little Rebel (1890) Lovell edition A LITTLE REBEL A NOVEL BY THE DUCHESS _Author of "Her Last Throw," "April's Lady," "Faith and Unfaith," etc. etc._ Montreal: JOHN LOVELL & SON, 23 ST. NICHOLAS STREET. Entered according to Act of Parliament in the year 1891, by John Lovell & Son, in the office of the Minister of Agriculture and Statistics at Ottawa. A LITTLE REBEL. CHAPTER I. "Perplex'd in the extreme." "The memory of past favors is like a rainbow, bright, vivid and beautiful." The professor, sitting before his untasted breakfast, is looking the very picture of dismay. Two letters lie before him; one is in his hand, the other is on the table-cloth. Both are open; but of one, the opening lines--that tell of the death of his old friend--are all he has read; whereas he has read the other from start to finish, already three times. It is from the old friend himself, written a week before his death, and very urgent and very pleading. The professor has mastered its contents with ever-increasing consternation. Indeed so great a revolution has it created in his mind, that his face--(the index of that excellent part of him)--has, for the moment, undergone a complete change. Any ordinary acquaintance now entering the professor's rooms (and those acquaintances might be whittled down to quite a _little_ few), would hardly have known him. For the abstraction that, as a rule, characterizes his features--the way he has of looking at you, as if he doesn't see you, that harasses the simple, and enrages the others--is all gone! Not a trace of it remains. It has given place to terror, open and unrestrained. "A girl!" murmurs he in a feeble tone, falling back in his chair. And then again, in a louder tone of dismay--"A _girl!"_ He pauses again, and now again gives way to the fear that is destroying him--"A _grown_ girl!" After this, he seems too overcome to continue his reflections, so goes back to the fatal letter. Every now and then a groan escapes him, mingled with mournful remarks, and extracts from the sheet in his hand-- "Poor old Wynter! Gone at last!" staring at the shaking signature at the end of the letter that speaks so plainly of the coming icy clutch that should prevent the poor hand from forming ever again even such sadly erratic characters as these. "At least," glancing at the half-read letter on the cloth--_"this_ tells me so. His solicitor's, I suppose. Though what Wynter could want with a solicitor---- Poor old fellow! He was often very good to me in the old days. I don't believe I should have done even as much as I _have_ done, without him... It must be fully ten years since he threw up his work here and went to Australia!... ten years. The girl must have been born before he went,"--glances at letter--"'My child, my beloved Perpetua, the one thing on earth I love, will be left entirely alone. Her mother died nine years ago. She is only seventeen, and the world lies before her, and never a soul in it to care how it goes with her. I entrust her to you--(a groan). To you I give her. Knowing that if you are living, dear fellow, you will not desert me in my great need, but will do what you can for my little one.'" "But what is that?" demands the professor, distractedly. He pushes his spectacles up to the top of his head, and then drags them down again, and casts them wildly into a sugar-bowl. "What on earth am I to do with a girl of seventeen? If it had been a boy! even _that _would have been bad enough--but a girl! And, of course--I know Wynter--he has died without a penny. He was bound to do that, as he always lived without one. _Poor_ old Wynter!"-- as if a little ashamed of himself. "I don't see how I can afford to put her out to nurse." He pulls himself up with a start. "To nurse! a girl of seventeen! She'll want to be going out to balls and things--at her age." As if smitten to the earth by this last awful idea, he picks his glasses out of the sugar and goes back to the letter. "You will find her the dearest girl. Most loving, and tender-hearted; and full of life and spirits." "Good heavens!" says the professor. He puts down the letter again, and begins to pace the room. "'Life and spirits.' A sort of young kangaroo, no doubt. What will the landlady say? I shall leave these rooms"--with a fond and lingering gaze round the dingy old apartment that hasn't an article in it worth ten sous--"and take a small house--somewhere--and-- But--er---- It won't be respectable, I think. I--I've heard things said about--er--things like that. It's no good in _looking_ an old fogey, if you aren't one; it's no earthly use,"--standing before a glass and ruefully examining his countenance--"in looking fifty, if you are only thirty-four. It will be a scandal," says the professor mournfully. "They'll cut _her_, and they'll cut me, and--what the _deuce_ did Wynter mean by leaving me his daughter? A real live girl of seventeen! It'll be the death of me," says the professor, mopping his brow. "What"--wrathfully--"that determined spendthrift meant, by flinging his family on _my_ shoulders, I---- Oh! _Poor_ old Wynter!" Here he grows remorseful again. Abuse a man dead and gone, and one, too, who had been good to him in many ways when he, the professor, was younger than he is now, and had just quarrelled with a father who was only too prone to quarrel with anyone who gave him the chance, seems but a poor thing. The professor's quarrel with his father had been caused by the young man's refusal to accept a Government appointment--obtained with some difficulty--for the very insufficient and, as it seemed to his father, iniquitous reason, that he had made up his mind to devote his life to science. Wynter, too, was a scientist of no mean order, and would, probably, have made his mark in the world, if the world and its pleasures had not made their mark on him. He had been young Curzon's coach at one time, and finding the lad a kindred spirit, had opened out to him his own large store of knowledge, and steeped him in that great sea of which no man yet has drank enough--for all begin, and leave it, athirst. Poor Wynter! The professor, turning in his stride up and down the narrow, uncomfortable room, one of the many that lie off the Strand, finds his eyes resting on that other letter--carelessly opened, barely begun. From Wynter's solicitor! It seems ridiculous that Wynter should have _had_ a solicitor. With a sigh, he takes it up, opens it out and begins to read it. At the end of the second page, he starts, re-reads a sentence or two, and suddenly his face becomes illuminated. He throws up his head. He cackles a bit. He looks as if he wants to say something very badly--"Hurrah," probably--only he has forgotten how to do it, and finally goes back to the letter again, and this time--the third time--finishes it. Yes. It is all right! Why on earth hadn't he read it _first?_ So the girl is to be sent to live with her aunt after all--an old lady--maiden lady. Evidently living somewhere in Bloomsbury. Miss Jane Majendie. Mother's sister evidently. Wynter's sisters would never have been old maids, if they had resembled him, which probably they did--if he had any. What a handsome fellow he was! and such a good-natured fellow too. The professor colors here in his queer sensitive way, and pushes his spectacles up and down his nose, in another nervous fashion of his. After all, it was only this minute he had been accusing old Wynter of anything but good nature. Well! He had wronged him there. He glances at the letter again. He has only been appointed her guardian, it seems. Guardian of her fortune, rather than of her. The old aunt will have the charge of her body, the--er--pleasure of her society--_he,_ of the estate only. Fancy Wynter, of all men, dying rich--actually _rich_. The professor pulls his beard, and involuntarily glances round the somewhat meagre apartment, that not all his learning, not all his success in the scientific world--and it has been not unnoteworthy, so far--has enabled him to improve upon. It has helped him to live, no doubt, and distinctly outside the line of _want,_ a thing to be grateful for, as his family having in a measure abandoned him, he, on his part, had abandoned his family in a _measure_ also (and with reservations), and it would have been impossible to him, of all men, to confess himself beaten, and return to them for assistance of any kind. He could never have enacted the part of the prodigal son. He knew this in earlier days, when husks were for the most part all he had to sustain him. But the mind requires not even the material husk, it lives on better food than that, and in his case mind had triumphed over body, and borne it triumphantly to a safe, if not as yet to a victorious, goal. Yet Wynter, the spendthrift, the erstwhile master of him who now could be _his_ master, has died, leaving behind him a fortune. What was the sum? He glances back to the sheet in his hand and verifies his thought. Yes--eighty thousand pounds! A good fortune even in these luxurious days. He has died worth £80,000, of which his daughter is sole heiress! Before the professor's eyes rises a vision of old Wynter. They used to call him "old," those boys who attended his classes, though he was as light-hearted as the best of them, and as handsome as a dissipated Apollo. They had all loved him, if they had not revered him, and, indeed, he had been generally regarded as a sort of living and lasting joke amongst them. Curzon, holding the letter in his hand, and bringing back to his memory the handsome face and devil-may-care expression of his tutor, remembers how the joke had widened, and reached its height when, at forty years of age, old Wynter had flung up his classes, leaving them all _planté là_ as it were, and declared his intention of starting life anew and making a pile for himself in some new world. Well! it had not been such a joke after all, if they had only known. Wynter _had_ made that mythical "pile," and had left his daughter an heiress! Not only an heiress, but a gift to Miss Jane Majendie, of somewhere in Bloomsbury. The professor's disturbed face grows calm again. It even occurs to him that he has not eaten his breakfast. He so _often_ remembers this, that it does not trouble him. To pore over his books (that are overflowing every table and chair in the uncomfortable room) until his eggs are India-rubber, and his rashers gutta-percha, is not a fresh experience. But though this morning both eggs and rasher have attained a high place in the leather department, he enters on his sorry repast with a glad heart. Sweet are the rebounds from jeopardy to joy! And he has so _much_ of joy! Not only has he been able to shake from his shoulders that awful incubus--and ever-present ward--but he can be sure that the absent ward is so well-off with regard to this world's goods, that he need never give her so much as a passing thought--dragged, _torn_ as that thought would be from his beloved studies. The aunt, of course, will see about her fortune. _He_ has only a perfunctory duty--to see that the fortune is not squandered. But he is safe there. Maiden ladies _never_ squander! And the girl, being only seventeen, can't possibly squander it herself for some time. Perhaps he ought to call on her, however. Yes, of course, he must call. It is the usual thing to call on one's ward. It will be a terrible business no doubt. _All_ girls belong to the genus nuisance. And _this_ girl will be at the head of her class no doubt. "Lively, spirited," so far went the parent. A regular hoyden may be read between those kind parental lines. The poor professor feels hot again with nervous agitation as he imagines an interview between him and the wild, laughing, noisy, perhaps horsey (they all ride in Australia) young woman to whom he is bound to make his bow. How soon must this unpleasant interview take place? Once more he looks back to the solicitor's letter. Ah! On Jan. 3rd her father, poor old Wynter, had died, and on the 26th of May, she is to be "on view" at Bloomsbury! and it is now the 2nd of February. A respite! Perhaps, who knows? She may never arrive at Bloomsbury at all! There are young men in Australia, a hoyden, as far as the professor has read (and that is saying a good deal), would just suit the man in the bush. CHAPTER II. "A maid so sweet that her mere sight made glad men sorrowing." Nevertheless the man in the bush doesn't get her. Time has run on a little bit since the professor suffered many agonies on a certain raw February morning, and now it is the 30th of May, and a glorious finish too to that sweet month. Even into this dingy old room, where at a dingy old table the professor sits buried in piles of notes, and with sheets of manuscript knee-deep scattered around him, the warm glad sun is stealing; here and there, the little rays are darting, lighting up a dusty corner here, a hidden heap of books there. It is, as yet, early in the afternoon, and the riotous beams, who are no respecter of persons, and who honor the righteous and the ungodly alike, are playing merrily in this sombre chamber, given so entirely up to science and its prosy ways, daring even now to dance lightly on the professor's head, which has begun to grow a little bald. "The golden sun, in splendor likest heav'n," is proving perhaps a little too much for the tired brain in the small room. Either that, or the incessant noises in the street outside, which have now been enriched by the strains of a broken-down street piano, causes him to lay aside his pen and lean back in a weary attitude in his chair. What a day it is! How warm! An hour ago he had delivered a brilliant lecture on the everlasting Mammoth (a fresh specimen just arrived from Siberia), and is now paying the penalty of greatness. He had done well--he knew that--he had been _interesting,_ that surest road to public favor--he had been applauded to the echo; and now, worn-out, tired in mind and body, he is living over again his honest joy in his success. In this life, however, it is not given us to be happy for long. A knock at the professor's door brings him back to the present, and the knowledge that the landlady--a stout, somewhat erratic person of fifty--is standing on his threshold, a letter in her hand. "For you, me dear," says she, very kindly, handing the letter to the professor. She is perhaps the one person of his acquaintance who has been able to see through the professor's gravity and find him _young._ "Thank you," says he. He takes the letter indifferently, opens it languidly, and---- Well, there isn't much languor after the perusal of it. The professor sits up; literally this time slang is unknown to him; and re-reads it. _That girl has come!_ There can't be any doubt of it. He had almost forgotten her existence during these past tranquil months, when no word or hint about her reached him, but now, _here_ she is at last, descending upon him like a whirlwind. A line in a stiff, uncompromising hand apprises the professor of the unwelcome fact. The "line" is signed by "Jane Majendie," therefore there can be no doubt of the genuineness of the news contained in it. Yes! that girl _has_ come! The professor never swears, or he might now perhaps have given way to reprehensible words. Instead of that, he pulls himself together, and determines on immediate action. To call upon this ward of his is a thing that must be done sooner of later, then why not sooner? Why not at once? The more unpleasant the duty, the more necessity to get it off one's mind without delay. He pulls the bell. The landlady appears again. "I must go out," says the professor, staring a little helplessly at her. "An' a good thing too," says she. "A saint's day ye might call it, wid the sun. An' where to, sir, dear? Not to thim rascally sthudents, I do thrust?" "No, Mrs. Mulcahy. I--I am going to see a young lady," says the professor simply. "The divil!" says Mrs. Mulcahy with a beaming smile. "Faix, that's a turn the right way anyhow. But have ye thought o' yer clothes, me dear?" "Clothes?" repeats the professor vaguely. "Arrah, wait," says she, and runs away lightly, in spite of her fifty years and her too, too solid flesh, and presently returns with the professor's best coat and a clothes brush that, from its appearance, might reasonably be supposed to have been left behind by Noah when he stepped out of the Ark. With this latter (having put the coat on him) she proceeds to belabor the professor with great spirit, and presently sends him forth shining--if not _in_ternally, at all events _ex_ternally. In truth the professor's mood is not a happy one. Sitting in the hansom that is taking him all too swiftly to his destination, he dwells with terror on the girl--the undesired ward--who has been thrust upon him. He has quite made up his mind about her. An Australian girl! One knows what to expect _there!_ Health unlimited; strength tremendous; and noise--_much_ noise. Yes, she is sure to be a _big_ girl. A girl with branching limbs, and a laugh you could hear a mile off. A young woman with no sense of the fitness of things, and a settled conviction that nothing could shake, that "'Strailia" is _the_ finest country on earth! A bouncing creature who _never_ sits down; to whom rest or calm is unknown, and whose highest ambition will be to see the Tower and the wax-works. Her hair is sure to be untidy; hanging probably in straight, black locks over her forehead, and her frock will look as if it had been pitchforked on to her, and requires only the insubordination of _one_ pin to leave her without it again. The professor is looking pale, but has on him all the air of one prepared for _anything_ as the maid shows him in the drawing-room of the house where Miss Jane Majendie lives. His thoughts are still full her niece. _Her_ niece, poor woman, and _his_ ward--poor _man!_ when the door opens and _some one_ comes in. _Some one!_ The professor gets slowly on to his feet, and stares at the advancing apparition. Is it child or woman, this fair vision? A hard question to answer! It is quite easy to read, however, that "some one" is very lovely! "It is you, Mr. Curzon, is it not?" says the vision. Her voice is sweet and clear, a little petulant perhaps, but still _very_ sweet. She is quite small--a _little_ girl--and clad in deep mourning. There is something pathetic about the dense black surrounding such a radiant face, and such a childish figure. Her eyes are fixed on the professor, and there is evident anxiety in their hazel depths; her soft lips are parted; she seems hesitating as if not knowing whether she shall smile or sigh. She has raised both her hands as if unconsciously, and is holding them clasped against her breast. The pretty fingers are covered with costly rings. Altogether she makes a picture--this little girl, with her brilliant eyes, and mutinous mouth, and soft black clinging gown. Dainty-sweet she looks, "Sweet as is the bramble-flower." "Yes," says the professor, in a hesitating way, as if by no means certain of the fact. He is so vague about it, indeed, that "some one's" dark eyes take a mischievous gleam. "Are you _sure?"_ says she, and looks up at him suddenly, a little sideways perhaps, as if half frightened, and gives way to a naughty sort of little laugh. It rings through the room, this laugh, and has the effect of frightening her _altogether_ this time. She checks herself, and looks first down at the carpet with the big roses on it, where one little foot is wriggling in a rather nervous way, and then up again at the professor, as if to see if he is thinking bad things of her. She sighs softly. "Have you come to see me or Aunt Jane?" asks she; "because Aunt Jane is out--_I'm glad to say"_--this last pianissimo. "To see you," says the professor, absently. He is thinking! He has taken her hand, and held it, and dropped it again, all in a state of high bewilderment. "Is _this_ the big, strong, noisy girl of his imaginings? The bouncing creature with untidy hair, and her clothes pitchforked on to her?" "Well--I hoped so," says she, a little wistfully as it seems to him, every trace of late sauciness now gone, and with it the sudden shyness. After many days the professor grows accustomed to these sudden transitions that are so puzzling yet so enchanting, these rapid, inconsequent, but always lovely changes "From grave to gay, from lively to severe." "Won't you sit down?" says his small hostess, gently, touching a chair near her with her slim fingers. "Thank you," says the professor, and then stops short. "You are----" "Your ward," says she, ever so gently still, yet emphatically. It is plain that she is now on her very _best_ behavior. She smiles up at him in a very encouraging way. "And you are my guardian, aren't you?" "Yes," says the professor, without enthusiasm. He has seated himself, not on the chair she has pointed out to him, but on a very distant lounge. He is conscious of a feeling of growing terror. This lovely child has created it, yet why, or how? Was ever guardian mastered by a ward before? A desire to escape is filling him, but he has got to do his duty to his dead friend, and this is part of it. He has retired to the far-off lounge with a view to doing it as distantly as possible, but even this poor subterfuge fails him. Miss Wynter, picking up a milking-stool, advances leisurely towards him, and seating herself upon it just in front of him, crosses her hands over her knees and looks expectantly up at him with a charming smile. "_Now_ we can have a good talk," says she. CHAPTER III. "And if you dreamed how a friend's smile And nearness soothe a heart that's sore, You might be moved to stay awhile Before my door." "About?" begins the professor, and stammers, and ceases. "Everything," says she, with a little nod. "It is impossible to talk to Aunt Jane. She doesn't talk, she only argues, and always wrongly. But you are different. I can see that. Now tell me,"--she leans even more forward and looks intently at the professor, her pretty brows wrinkled as if with extreme and troublous thought--"What are the duties of a guardian?" "Eh?" says the professor. He moves his glasses up to his forehead and then pulls them down again. Did ever anxious student ask him question so difficult of answer as this one--that this small maiden has propounded? "You can think it over," says she most graciously. "There is no hurry, and I am quite aware that one isn't made a guardian _every_ day. Do you think you could make it out whilst I count forty?" "I think I could make it out more quickly if you didn't count at all," says the professor, who is growing warm. "The duties of a guardian--are--er--to--er--to see that one's ward is comfortable and happy." "Then there is a great deal of duty for _you_ to do," says she solemnly, letting her chin slip into the hollow of her hand. "I know--I'm sure of it," says the professor with a sigh that might be called a groan. "But your aunt, Miss Majendie--your mother's sister--can----" "I don't believe she is my mother's sister," says Miss Wynter calmly. "I have seen my mother's picture. It is lovely! Aunt Jane was a changeling--I'm sure of it. But never mind her. You were going to say----?" "That Miss Majendie, who is virtually your guardian--can explain it all to you much better than I can." "Aunt Jane is _not_ my guardian!" The mild look of enquiry changes to one of light anger. The white brown contracts. "And certainly she could never make one happy and comfortable. Well--what else?" "She will look after----" "I told you I don't care about Aunt Jane. Tell me what _you_ can do----" "See that your fortune is not----" "I don't care about my fortune either," with a little petulant gesture. "But I _do_ care about my happiness. Will you see to _that?_" "Of course," says the professor gravely. "Then you will take me away from Aunt Jane!" The small vivacious face is now all aglow. "I am not happy with Aunt Jane. I"--clasping her hands, and letting a quick, vindictive fire light her eyes--"I _hate_ Aunt Jane. She says things about poor papa that---- _Oh!_ how I hate her!" "But--you shouldn't--you really should not. I feel certain you ought not," says the professor, growing vaguer every moment. "Ought I not?" with a quick little laugh that is all anger and no mirth. "I _do_ though, for all that! I"--pausing, and regarding him with a somewhat tragic air that sits most funnily upon her--"am not going to stay here much longer!" _"What!"_ says the professor aghast. "But my dear---- Miss Wynter, I'm afraid you _must."_ "Why? What is she to me?" "Your aunt." "That's nothing--nothing at all--even a _guardian_ is better than that. And you are my guardian. Why," coming closer to him and pressing five soft little fingers in an almost feverish fashion upon his arm, "why can't _you_ take me away?" _"I?"_ "Yes, yes, you." She comes even nearer to him, and the pressure of the small fingers grows more eager--there is something in them that might well be termed coaxing. _"Do,"_ says she. "Oh! Impossible!" says the professor. The color mounts to his brow. He almost _shakes_ off the little clinging fingers in his astonishment and agitation. Has she no common sense--no knowledge of the things that be? She has drawn back from him and is regarding him somewhat strangely. "Impossible to leave Aunt Jane?" questions she. It is evident she has not altogether understood, and yet is feeling puzzled. "Well," defiantly, "we shall see!" _"Why_ don't you like your Aunt Jane?" asks the professor distractedly. He doesn't feel nearly as fond of his dead friend as he did an hour ago. "Because," lucidly, "she _is_ Aunt Jane. If she were _your_ Aunt Jane you would know." "But my dear----" "I really wish," interrupts Miss Wynter petulantly, "you wouldn't call me 'my dear.' Aunt Jane calls me that when she is going to say something horrid to me. Papa----" she pauses suddenly, and tears rush to her dark eyes. "Yes. What of your father?" asks the professor hurriedly, the tears raising terror in his soul. "You knew him--speak to me of him," says she, a little tremulously. "I knew him well indeed. He was very good to me when--when I was younger. I was very fond of him." "He was good to everyone," says Miss Wynter, staring hard at the professor. It is occurring to her that this grave sedate man with his glasses could never have been younger. He must always have been older than the gay, handsome, _debonnaire_ father, who had been so dear to her. "What were you going to tell me about him?" asks the professor gently. "Only what he used to call me--_Doatie!_ I suppose," wistfully, "you couldn't call me that?" "I am afraid not," says the professor, coloring even deeper. "I'm sorry," says she, her young mouth taking a sorrowful curve. "But don't call me Miss Wynter, at all events, or 'my dear.' I do so want someone to call me by my Christian name," says the poor child sadly. "Perpetua--is it not?" says the professor, ever so kindly. "No--'Pet,'" corrects she. "It's shorter, you know, and far easier to say." "Oh!" says the professor. To him it seems very difficult to say. Is it possible she is going to ask him to call her by that familiar--almost affectionate--name? The girl must be mad. "Yes--much easier," says Perpetua; "you will find that out, after a bit, when you have got used to calling me by it. Are you going now, Mr. Curzon? Going _so soon?_" "I have classes," says the professor. "Students?" says she. "You teach them? I wish I was a student. I shouldn't have been given over to Aunt Jane then, or," with a rather wilful laugh, "if I had been I should have led her, oh!" rapturously, _"such a life!"_ It suggests itself to the professor that she is quite capable of doing that now, though she is _not_ of the sex male. "Good-bye," says he, holding out his hand. "You will come soon again?" demands she, laying her own in it. "Next week--perhaps." "Not till then? I shall be dead then," says she, with a rather mirthless laugh this time. "Do you know that you and Aunt Jane are the only two people in all London whom I know?" "That is terrible," says he, quite sincerely. "Yes. Isn't it?" "But soon you will know people. Your aunt has acquaintances. They--surely they will call; they will see you--they----" "Will take an overwhelming fancy to me? just as you have done," says she, with a quick, rather curious light in her eyes, and a tilting of her pretty chin. "There! _go,"_ says she, "I have some work to do; and you have your classes. It would never do for you to miss _them._ And as for next week!--make it next month! I wouldn't for the world be a trouble to you in any way." "I shall come next week," says the professor, troubled in somewise by the meaning in her eyes. What is it? Simple loneliness, or misery downright? How young she looks--what a child! That tragic air does not belong to her of right. She should be all laughter, and lightness, and mirth---- "As you will," says she; her tone has grown almost haughty; there is a sense of remorse in his breast as he goes down the stairs. Has he been kind to old Wynter's child? Has he been true to his trust? There has been an expression that might almost be termed despair in the young face as he left her. Her face, with that expression on it, haunts him all down the road. Yes. He will call next week. What day is this? Friday. And Friday next he is bound to deliver a lecture somewhere--he is not sure where, but certainly somewhere. Well, Saturday then he might call. But that---- Why not call Thursday--or even Wednesday? Wednesday let it be. He needn't call every week, but he had said something about calling next week, and--she wouldn't care, of course--but one should keep their word. What a strange little face she has--and strange manners, and--not able to get on evidently with her present surroundings. What an old devil that aunt must be! CHAPTER IV. "Dear, if you knew what tears they shed, Who live apart from home and friend, To pass my house, by pity led, Your steps would tend." He makes the acquaintance of the latter very shortly. But requires no spoon to sup with her, as Miss Majendie's invitations to supper, or indeed to luncheon, breakfast or dinner, are so few and rare that it might be rash for a hungry man to count on them. The professor, who has felt it to be his duty to call on his ward regularly every week, has learned to know and (I regret to say) to loathe that estimable spinster christened Jane Majendie. After every visit to her house he has sworn to himself that _"this one"_ shall be his last, and every Wednesday following he has gone again. Indeed, to-day being Wednesday in the heart of June, he may be seen sitting bolt upright in a hansom on his way to the unlovely house that holds Miss Majendie. As he enters the dismal drawing-room, where he finds Miss Majendie and her niece, it becomes plain, even to his inexperienced brain, that there has just been a row on, somewhere. Perpetua is sitting on a distant lounge, her small vivacious face one thunder-cloud. Miss Majendie, sitting on the hardest chair this hideous room contains, is smiling. A terrible sign. The professor pales before it. "I am glad to see you, Mr. Curzon," says Miss Majendie, rising and extending a bony hand. "As Perpetua's guardian, you may perhaps have some influence over her. I say 'perhaps' advisedly, as I scarcely dare to hope _anyone_ could influence a mind so distorted as hers." "What is it?" asks the professor nervously--of Perpetua, not of Miss Majendie. "I'm dull," says Perpetua sullenly. The professor glances keenly at the girl's downcast face, and then at Miss Majendie. The latter glance is a question. "You hear her," says Miss Majendie coldly--she draws her shawl round her meagre shoulders, and a breath through her lean nostrils that may be heard. "Perhaps _you_ may be able to discover her meaning." "What is it?" asks the professor, turning to the girl, his tone anxious, uncertain. Young women with "wrongs" are unknown to him, as are all other sorts of young women for the matter of that. And _this_ particular young woman looks a little unsafe at the present moment. "I have told you! I am tired of this life. I am dull--stupid. I want to go out." Her lovely eyes are flashing, her face is white--her lips trembling. _"Take_ me out," says she suddenly. "Perpetua!" exclaims Miss Majendie. "How unmaidenly! How immodest!" Perpetua looks at her with large, surprised eyes. "Why," says she. "I really think," interrupts the professor hurriedly, who see breakers ahead, "if I were to take Perpetua for a walk--a drive--to--er--to some place or other--it might destroy this _ennui_ of which she complains. If you will allow her to come out with me for an hour or so, I----" "If you are waiting for _my_ sanction, Mr. Curzon, to that extraordinary proposal, you will wait some time," says Miss Majendie slowly, frigidly. She draws the shawl still closer, and sniffs again. "But----" "There is no 'But,' sir. The subject doesn't admit of argument. In my young days, and I should think"--scrutinising him exhaustively through her glasses--_"in yours_, it was not customary for a young _gentlewoman _to go out walking, alone, with _'a man'!!"_ If she had said with a famished tiger, she couldn't have thrown more horror into her tone. The professor had shrunk a little from that classing of her age with his, but has now found matter for hope in it. "Still--my age--as you suggest--so far exceeds Perpetua's--I am indeed so much older than she is, that I might be allowed to escort her wherever it may please her to go." "The _real_ age of a man nowadays, sir, is a thing impossible to know," says Miss Majendie. "You wear glasses--a capital disguise! I mean nothing offensive--_so far_--sir, but it behoves me to be careful, and behind those glasses, who can tell what demon lurks? Nay! No offence! An _innocent_ man would _feel_ no offence!" "Really, Miss Majendie!" begins the poor professor, who is as red as though he were the guiltiest soul alive. "Let me proceed, sir. We were talking of the ages of men." _"We?"_ "Certainly! It was you who suggested the idea that, being so much older than my niece, Miss Wynter, you could therefore escort her here and there--in fact _everywhere_--in fact"--with awful meaning--_"any_ where!" "I assure you, madam," begins the professor, springing to his feet--Perpetua puts out a white hand. "Ah! let her talk," says she. _"Then_ you will understand." "But men's ages, sir, are a snare and a delusion!" continues Miss Majendie, who has now mounted her hobby, and will ride it to the death. "Who can tell the age of any man in this degenerate age? We look at their faces, and say _he_ must be so and so, and _he_ a few years younger, but looks are vain, they tell us nothing. Some look old, because they _are_ old, some look old--through _vice!"_ The professor makes an impatient gesture. But Miss Majendie is equal to most things. "'Who excuses himself _accuses_ himself,'" quotes she with terrible readiness. "Why that gesture, Mr. Curzon? I made no mention of _your_ name. And indeed, I trust your age would place you outside of any such suspicion, still, I am bound to be careful where my niece's interests are concerned. You, as her guardian if a _faithful_ guardian" (with open doubt as to this, expressed in eye and pointed finger), "should be the first to applaud my caution." "You take an extreme view," begins the professor, a little feebly, perhaps. That eye and that pointed finger have cowed him. "One's views _have_ to be extreme in these days if one would continue in the paths of virtue," said Miss Majendie. _"Your_ views," with a piercing and condemnatory glance, "are evidently _not_ extreme. One word for all, Mr. Curzon, and this argument is at an end. I shall not permit my niece, with my permission, to walk with you or any other man whilst under my protection." "I daresay you are right--no doubt--no doubt" mumbles the professor, incoherently, now thoroughly frightened and demoralized. Good heavens! What an awful old woman! And to think that this poor child is under her care. He happens at this moment to look at the poor child, and the scorn _for him_ that gleams in her large eyes perfects his rout. To say that she was _right!_ "If Perpetua wishes to go for a walk," says Miss Majendie, breaking through a mist of angry feeling that is only half on the surface, "I am here to accompany her." "I don't want to go for a walk--with you," says Perpetua, rudely it must be confessed, though her tone is low and studiously reserved. "I don't want to go for a walk _at all."_ She pauses, and her voice chokes a little, and then suddenly she breaks into a small passion of vehemence. "I want to go somewhere, to _see_ something," she cries, gazing imploringly at Curzon. "To _see_ something!" says her aunt, "why it was only last Sunday I took you to Westminster Abbey, where you saw the grandest edifice in all the world." "Most interesting place," says the professor, _sotto voce,_ with a wild but mad hope of smoothing matters down for Perpetua's sake. If it _was_ for Perpetua's sake, she proves herself singularly ungrateful. She turns upon him a small vivid face, alight with indignation. "You support her," cries she. _"You!_ Well, I shall tell you! I"--defiantly--"I don't want to go to churches at all. I want to go to _theatres!_ There!" There is an awful silence. Miss Marjorie's face is a picture! If the girl had said she wanted to go to the devil instead of to the theatre, she could hardly have looked more horrified. She takes a step forward, closer to Perpetua. "Go to your room! And pray--_pray_ for a purer mind!" says she. "This is hereditary, all this! Only prayer can cast it out. And remember, this is the last word upon this subject. As long as you are under _my_ roof you shall never go to a sinful place of amusement. I forbid you ever to speak of theatres again." "I shall not be forbidden!" says Perpetua. She confronts her aunt with flaming eyes and crimson cheeks. "I _do_ want to go to the theatre, and to balls, and dances, and _everything_. I"--passionately, and with a most cruel, despairing longing in her young voice, "want to dance, to laugh, to sing, to amuse myself--to be the gayest thing in all the world!" She stops as if exhausted, surprised perhaps at her own daring, and there is silence for a moment, a _little_ moment, and then Miss Majendie looks at her. "'The gayest thing in all the world!' _and your father only four months dead!"_ says she, slowly, remorselessly. All in a moment, as it were, the little crimson angry face grows white--white as death itself. The professor, shocked beyond words, stands staring, and marking the sad changes in it. Perpetua is trembling from head to foot. A frightened look has come into her beautiful eyes--her breath comes quickly. She is as a thing at bay--hopeless, horrified. Her lips part as if she would say something. But no words come. She casts one anguished glance at the professor, and rushes from the room. It was but a momentary glimpse into a heart, but it was terrible. The professor turns upon Miss Majendie in great wrath. "That was cruel--uncalled for!" says he, a strange feeling in his heart that he has not time to stop and analyse _then_. "How could you hurt her so? Poor child! Poor girl! She _loved_ him!" "Then let her show respect to his memory," says Miss Majendie vindictively. She is unmoved--undaunted. "She was not wanting in respect." His tone is hurried. This woman with the remorseless eye is too much for the gentle professor. "All she _does_ want is change, amusement. She is young. Youth must enjoy." "In moderation--and in proper ways," says Miss Majendie stonily. "In moderation," she repeats mechanically, almost unconsciously. And then suddenly her wrath gets the better of her, and she breaks out in a violent rage. That one should dare to question _her_ actions! "Who are _you?"_ demands she fiercely, "that you should presume to dictate right and wrong to _me."_ "I am Miss Wynter's guardian," says the professor, who begins to see visions--and all the lower regions let loose at once. Could an original Fury look more horrible than this old woman, with her grey nodding head, and blind vindictive passion. He hears his voice faltering, and knows that he is edging towards the door. After all, what can the bravest man do with an angry old woman, except to get away from her as quickly as possible? And the professor, through brave enough in the usual ways, is not brave where women are concerned. "Guardian or no guardian, I will thank you to remember you are in _my_ house!" cries Miss Majendie, in a shrill tone that runs through the professor's head. "Certainly. Certainly," says he, confusedly, and then he slips out of the room, and having felt the door close behind him, runs tumultuously down the staircase. For years he has not gone down any staircase so swiftly. A vague, if unacknowledged, feeling that he is literally making his escape from a vital danger, is lending wings to his feet. Before him lies the hall-door, and that way safety lies, safety from that old gaunt, irate figure upstairs. He is not allowed to reach it, however--just yet. A door on the right side of the hall is opened cautiously; a shapely little head is as cautiously pushed through it, and two anxious red lips whisper:-- "Mr. Curzon," first, and then, as he turns in answer to the whisper, "Sh--_Sh!"_ CHAPTER V. "My love is like the sea, As changeful and as free; Sometimes she's angry, sometimes rough, Yet oft she's smooth and calm enough-- Ay, much too calm for me." It is Perpetua. A sad-eyed, a tearful-eyed Perpetua, but a lovely Perpetua for all that. "Well?" says he. _"Sh!"_ says she again, shaking her head ominously, and putting her forefinger against her lip. "Come in here," says she softly, under her breath. "Here," when he does come in, is a most untidy place, made up of all things heterogeneous. Now that he is nearer to her, he can see that she has been crying vehemently, and that the tears still stand thick within her eyes. "I felt I _must_ see you," says she, "to tell you--to ask you. To--Oh! you _heard_ what she said! Do--do _you_ think----?" "Not at all, not at all," declares the professor hurriedly. "Don't--_don't_ cry, Perpetua! Look here," laying his hand nervously upon her shoulder and giving her a little angry shake. _"Don't_ cry! Good heavens! Why should you mind that awful old woman?" Nevertheless, he had minded that awful old woman himself very considerably. "But--it _is_ soon, isn't it?" says she. "I know that myself, and yet--" wistfully--"I can't help it. I _do_ want to see things, and to amuse myself." "Naturally," says the professor. "And it isn't that I _forget_ him," says she in an eager, intense tone, "I _never_ forget him--never--never. Only I do want to laugh sometimes and to be happy, and to see Mr. Irving as Charles I." The climax is irresistible. The professor is unable to suppress a smile. "I'm afraid, from what I have heard, _that_ won't make you laugh," says he. "It will make me cry then. It is all the same," declares she, impartially. "I shall be enjoying myself, I shall be _seeing_ things. You--" doubtfully, and mindful of his last speech--"Haven't you seen him?" "Not for a long time, I regret to say. I--I'm always so busy," says the professor apologetically. _"Always_ studying?" questions she. "For the most part," returns the professor, an odd sensation growing within him that he is feeling ashamed of himself. "'All work and no play,'" begins Perpetua, and stops, and shakes her charming head at him. _"You_ will be a dull boy if you don't take care," says she. A ghost of a little smile warms her sad lips as she says this, and lights up her shining eyes like a ray of sunlight. Then it fades, and she grows sorrowful again. "Well, _I_ can't study," says she. "Why not?" demands the professor quickly. Here he is on his own ground; and here he has a pupil to his hand--a strange, an enigmatical, but a lovely one. "Believe me knowledge is the one good thing that life contains worth having. Pleasures, riches, rank, _all_ sink to insignificance beside it." "How do you know?" says she. "You haven't tried the others." "I know it, for all that. I _feel_ it. Get knowledge--such knowledge as the short span of life allotted to us will allow you to get. I can lend you some books, easy ones at first, and----" "I couldn't read _your_ books," says she; "and--you haven't any novels, I suppose?" "No," says he. "But----" "I don't care for any books but novels," says she, sighing. "Have you read 'Alas?' I never have anything to read here, because Aunt Jane says novels are of the devil, and that if I read them I shall go to hell." "Nonsense!" says the professor gruffly. "You mustn't think I'm afraid about _that,"_ says Perpetua demurely; "I'm not. I know the same place could never contain Aunt Jane and me for long, so _I'm_ all right." The professor struggles with himself for a moment and then gives way to mirth. "Ah! _now_ you are on my side," cries his ward exultantly. She tucks her arm into his. "And as for all that talk about 'knowledge'--don't bother me about that any more. It's a little rude of you, do you know? One would think I was a dunce--that I knew nothing--whereas, I assure you," throwing out her other hand, "I know _quite_ as much as most girls, and a great deal more than many. I daresay," putting her head to one side, and examining him thoughtfully, "I know more than you do, if it comes to that. I don't believe you know this moment who wrote 'The Master of Ballantrae.' Come now, who was it?" She leans back from him, gazing at him mischievously, as if anticipating his defeat. As for the professor, he grows red--he draws his brows together. Truly this is a most impertinent pupil! 'The Master of Ballantrae.' It _sounds_ like Sir Walter, and yet--The professor hesitates and is lost. "Scott," says he, with as good an air as he can command. "Wrong," cries she, clapping her hands softly, noiselessly. "Oh! you _ignorant _man! Go buy that book at once. It will do you more good and teach you a great deal more than any of your musty tomes." She laughs gaily. It occurs to the professor, in a misty sort of way, that her laugh, at all events, would do _anyone_ good. She has been pulling a ring on and off her finger unconsciously, as if thinking, but now looks up at him. "If you spoke to her again, when she was in a better temper, don't you think she would let you take me to the theatre some night?" She has come nearer, and has laid a light, appealing little hand upon his arm. "I am sure it would be useless," says he, taking off his glasses and putting them on again in an anxious fashion. They are both speaking in whispers, and the professor is conscious of feeling a strange sort of pleasure in the thought that he is sharing a secret with her. "Besides," says he, "I couldn't very well come here again." "Not come again? Why?" "I'd be afraid," returns he simply. Whereon Miss Wynter, after a second's pause, gives way and laughs "consumedly," as they would have said long, long years before her pretty features saw the light. "Ah! yes," murmurs she. "How she did frighten you. She brought you to your knees--you actually"--this with keen reproach--"took her part against me." "I took her part to _help_ you," says the professor, feeling absurdly miserable. "Yes," sighing, "I daresay. But though I know I should have suffered for it afterwards, it would have done me a world of good to hear somebody tell her his real opinion of her for once. I should like," calmly, "to see her writhe; she makes me writhe very often." "This is a bad school for you," says the professor hurriedly. "Yes? Then why don't you take me away from it?" "If I could----but---- Well, I shall see," says he vaguely. "You will have to be very quick about it," says she. Her tone is quite ordinary; it never suggests itself to the professor that there is meaning beneath it. "You have _some_ friends surely?" says he. "There is a Mrs. Constans who comes here sometimes to see Aunt Jane. She is a young woman, and her mother was a friend of Aunt Jane's, which accounts for it, I suppose. She seems kind. She said she would take me to a concert soon, but she has not been here for many days. I daresay she has forgotten all about it by this time." She sighs. The charming face so near the professor's is looking sad again. The white brow is puckered, the soft lips droop. No, she cannot stay _here,_ that is certain--and yet it was her father's wish, and who is he, the professor, that he should pretend to know how girls should be treated? What if he should make a mistake? And yet again, should a little brilliant face like that know sadness? It is a problem difficult to solve. All the professor's learning fails him now. "I hope she will remember. Oh! she _must,_" declares he, gazing at Perpetua. "You know I would do what I could for you, but your aunt--you heard her--she would not let you go anywhere with me." "True," says Perpetua. Here she moves back, and folds her arms stiffly across her bosom, and pokes out her chin, in an aggressive fashion, that creates a likeness on the spot, in spite of the youthful eyes, and brow, and hair. "'Young _gentle_women in _our_ time, Mr. Curzon, never went out walking, _alone,_ with _A Man!'"_ The mimicry is perfect. The professor, after a faint struggle with his dignity, joins in her naughty mirth, and both laugh together. _"'Our'_ time! she thinks you are a hundred and fifty!" says Miss Wynter. "Well, so I am, in a way," returns the professor, somewhat sadly. "No, you're not," says she. _"I_ know better than that, I" patting his arm reassuringly, "can guess your age better than she can. I can see _at once,_ that you are not a day older than poor, darling papa. In fact you may be younger. I am perfectly certain you are not more than fifty." The professor says nothing. He is staring at her. He is beginning to feel a little forlorn. He has forgotten youth for many days, has youth in revenge forgotten him? "That is taking off a clear hundred at once," says she lightly. "No small account." Here, as if noticing his silence, she looks quickly at him, and perhaps something in his face strikes her, because she goes on hurriedly. "Oh! and what is age after all? I wish _I_ were old, and then I should be able to get away from Aunt Jane--without--without any _trouble."_ "I am afraid you are indeed very unhappy here," says the professor gravely. "I _hate_ the place," cries she with a frown. "I shan't be able to stay here. Oh! _why_ didn't poor papa send me to live with you?" Why indeed? That is exactly what the professor finds great difficulty in explaining to her. An "old man" of "fifty" might very easily give a home to a young girl, without comment from the world. But then if an "old man of fifty" _wasn't_ an old man of fifty---- The professor checks his thoughts, they are growing too mixed. "We should have been _so_ happy," Perpetua is going on, her tone regretful. "We could have gone everywhere together, you and I. I should have taken you to the theatre, to balls, to concerts, to afternoons. You would have been _so_ happy, and so should I. You would--wouldn't you?" The professor nods his head. The awful vista she has opened up to him has completely deprived him of speech. "Ah! yes," sighs she, taking that deceitful nod in perfect good faith. "And you would have been good to me too, and let me look in at the shop windows. I should have taken such _care_ of you, and made your tea for you, just" sadly, "as I used to do for poor papa, and----" It is becoming too much for the professor. "It is late. I must go," says he. It is a week later when he meets her again. The season is now at its height, and some stray wave of life casting the professor into a fashionable thoroughfare, he there finds her. Marching along, as usual, with his head in the air, and his thoughts in the ages when dates were unknown, a soft, eager voice calling his name brings him back to the fact that he is walking up Bond Street. In a carriage, exceedingly well appointed, and with her face wreathed in smiles, and one hand impulsively extended, sits Perpetua. Evidently the owner of the carriage is in the shop making purchases, whilst Perpetua sits without, awaiting her. "Were you going to cut me?" cries she. "What luck to meet you here. I am having such a _lovely_ day. Mrs. Constans has taken me out with her, and I am to dine with her, and go with her to a concert in the evening." She has poured it all out, all her good news in a breath, as though sure of a sympathetic listener. He is too good a listener. He is listening so hard, he is looking so intensely, that he forgets to speak, and Perpetua's sudden gaiety forsakes her. Is he angry? Does he think----? "It's _only_ a concert," says she, flushing and hesitating. "Do you think that one should not go to a concert when----" "Yes?" questions the professor abstractedly, as she comes to a full stop. He has never seen her dressed like this before. She is all in black to be sure, but _such_ black, and her air! She looks quite the little heiress, like a little queen indeed--radiant, lovely. _"Well_--when one is in mourning," says she somewhat impatiently, the color once again dyeing her cheek. Quick tears have sprung to her eyes. They seem to hurt the professor. "One cannot be in mourning always," says he slowly. His manner is still unfortunate. "You evade the question," says she frowning. "But a concert _isn't_ like a ball, is it?" "I don't know," says the professor, who indeed has had little knowledge of either for years, and whose unlucky answer arises solely from inability to give her an honest reply. "You hesitate," says she, "you disapprove then. But," defiantly, "I don't care--a concert is _not_ like a ball." "No--I suppose not." "I can see what you are thinking," returns she, struggling with her mortification. "And it is very _hard_ of you. Just because _you_ don't care to go anywhere, you think I oughtn't to care either. That is what is so selfish about people who are old. You," wilfully, "are just as bad as Aunt Jane." The professor looks at her. His face is perplexed--distressed--and something more, but she cannot read that. "Well, not quite perhaps," says she, relenting slightly. "But nearly. And if you don't care you will grow like her. I hate people who lecture me, and besides, I don't see why a guardian should control one's whole life, and thought, and action. A guardian," resentfully, "isn't one's conscience!" "No. No. Thank Heaven!" says the professor, shocked. Perpetua stares at him a moment and then breaks into a queer little laugh. "You evidently have no desire to be mixed up with _my_ conscience," says she, a little angry in spite of her mirth. "Well, I don't want you to have anything to do with it. That's _my_ affair. But, about this concert,"--she leans towards him, resting her hand on the edge of the carriage. "Do you think one should go _nowhere_ when wearing black?" "I think one should do just as one feels," says the professor nervously. "I wonder if one should _say_ just what one feels," says she. She draws back haughtily, then wrath gets the better of dignity, and she breaks out again. "What a _horrid_ answer! _You_ are unfeeling if you like!" "_I_ am?" "Yes, yes! You would deny me this small gratification, you would lock me up for ever with Aunt Jane, you would debar me from everything! Oh!" her lips trembling, "how I wish--I _wish--_guardians had never been invented." The professor almost begins to wish the same. Almost--perhaps not quite! That accusation about wishing to keep her locked up for ever with Miss Majendie is so manifestly unjust that he takes it hardly. Has he not spent all this past week striving to open a way of escape for her from the home she so detests! But, after all, how could she know that? "You have misunderstood me," says he calmly, gravely. "Far from wishing you to deny yourself this concert, I am glad--glad from my _heart_--that you are going to it--that some small pleasure has fallen into your life. Your aunt's home is an unhappy one for you, I know, but you should remember that even if--if you have got to stay with her until you become your own mistress, still that will not be forever." "No, I shall not stay there for ever," says she slowly. "And so--you really think----" she is looking very earnestly at him. "I do, indeed. Go out--go everywhere--enjoy yourself, child, while you can." He lifts his hat and walks away. "Who was that, dear?" asks Mrs. Constans, a pretty pale woman, rushing out of the shop and into the carriage. "My guardian--Mr. Curzon." "Ah!" glancing carelessly after the professor's retreating figure. "A youngish man?" "No, old," says Perpetua, "at least, I think--do you know," laughing, "when he's _gone_ I sometimes think of him as being pretty young, but when he is _with_ me, he is old--old and grave!" "As a guardian should be, with such a pretty ward," says Mrs. Constans, smiling. "His back looks young, however." "And his laugh _sounds_ young." "Ah! he can laugh then?" "Very seldom. Too seldom. But when he does, it is a nice laugh. But he wears spectacles, you know--and--well--oh, yes, he _is_ old, distinctly old!" CHAPTER VI. "He is happy whose circumstances suit his temper; but he is more excellent who can suit his temper to any circumstances." "The idea of _your_ having a ward! I could quite as soon imagine your having a wife," says Hardinge. He knocks the ash off his cigar, and after meditating for a moment, leans back in his chair and gives way to irrepressible mirth. "I don't see why I shouldn't have a wife as well as another," says the professor, idly tapping his forefinger on the table near him. "She would bore me. But a great many fellows are bored." "You have grasped one great truth if you never grasp another!" says Mr. Hardinge, who has now recovered. "Catch _me_ marrying." "It's unlucky to talk like that," says the professor. "It looks as though your time were near. In Sophocles' time there was a man who----" "Oh, bother Sophocles, you know I never let you talk anything but wholesome nonsense when I drop in for a smoke with you," says the younger man. "You began very well, with that superstition of yours, but I won't have it spoiled by erudition. Tell me about your ward." "Would that be nonsense?" says the professor, with a faint smile. They are sitting in the professor's room with the windows thrown wide open to let in any chance gust of air that Heaven in its mercy may send them. It is night, and very late at night too--the clock indeed is on the stroke of twelve. It seems a long, long time to the professor since the afternoon--the afternoon of this very day--when he had seen Perpetua sitting in that open carriage. He had only been half glad when Harold Hardinge--a young man, and yet, strange to say, his most intimate friend--had dropped in to smoke a pipe with him. Hardinge was fonder of the professor than he knew, and was drawn to him by curious intricate webs. The professor suited him, and he suited the professor, though in truth Hardinge was nothing more than a gay young society man, with just the average amount of brains, but not an ounce beyond that. A tall, handsome young man, with fair brown hair and hazel eyes, a dark moustache and a happy manner, Mr. Hardinge laughs his way through life, without money, or love, or any other troubles. "Can you ask?" says he. "Go on, Curzon. What is she like?" "It wouldn't interest you," says the professor. "I beg your pardon, it is profoundly interesting; I've got to keep an eye on you, or else in a weak moment you will let her marry you." The professor moves uneasily. "May I ask how you knew I _had_ a ward?" "That should go without telling. I arrived here to-night, to find you absent and Mrs. Mulcahy in possession, pretending to dust the furniture. She asked me to sit down--I obeyed her." "'How's the professor?'" said I. "'Me dear!' said she, 'that's a bad story. He's that distracted over a young lady that his own mother wouldn't know him!' "I acknowledge I blushed. I went even so far as to make a few pantomimic gestures suggestive of the horror I was experiencing, and finally I covered my face with my handkerchief. I regret to say that Mrs. Mulcahy took my modesty in bad part. "'Arrah! git out wid ye!' says she, 'ye scamp o' the world. 'Tis a _ward _the masther has taken an' nothin' more.' "I said I thought it was quite enough, and asked if you had taken it badly, and what the doctor thought of you. But she wouldn't listen to me. "'Look here, Misther Hardinge,' said she. 'I've come to the conclusion that wards is bad for the professor. I haven't seen the young lady, I confess, but I'm cock-sure that she's got the divil's own temper!'" Hardinge pauses, and turns to the professor--"Has she?" says he. "N--o," says the professor--a little frowning lovely crimson face rises before him--and then a laughing one. "No," says he more boldly, "she is a little impulsive, perhaps, but----" "Just so. Just so," says Mr. Hardinge pleasantly, and then, after a kindly survey of his companion's features, "She is rather a trouble to you, old man, isn't she?" "She? No," says the professor again, more quickly this time. "It is only this--she doesn't seem to get on with the aunt to whom her poor father sent her--he is dead--and I have to look out for some one else to take care of her, until she comes of age." "I see. I should think you would have to hurry up a bit," says Mr. Hardinge, taking his cigar from his lips, and letting the smoke curl upwards slowly, thoughtfully. "Impulsive people have a trick of being impatient--of acting for themselves----" _"She_ cannot," says the professor, with anxious haste. "She knows nobody in town." "Nobody?" "Except me, and a woman who is a friend of her aunt's. If she were to go to her, she would be taken back again. Perpetua knows that." "Perpetua! Is that her name? What a peculiar one? Perpetua----" "Miss Wynter," sharply. "Perpetua--Miss Wynter! Exactly so! It sounds like--Dorothea--Lady Highflown! Well, _your_ Lady Highflown doesn't seem to have many friends here. What a pity you can't send her back to Australia!" The professor is silent. "It would suit all sides. I daresay the poor girl is pining for the freedom of her old home. And, I must say, it is hard lines for you. A girl with a temper, to be----" "I did not say she had a temper." Hardinge has risen to get himself some whisky and soda, but pauses to pat the professor affectionately on the back. "Of _course_ not! Don't I know you? You would die first! She might worry your life out, and still you would rise up to defend her at every corner. You should get her a satisfactory home as son as you can--it would ease your mind; and, after all, as she knows no one here, she is bound to behave herself until you can come to her help." "She would behave herself, as you call it," says the professor angrily, "any and every where. She is a lady. She has been well brought up. I am her guardian, she will do nothing without _my_ permission!" _Won't she!_ A sound, outside the door, strikes on the ears of both men at this moment. It is a most peculiar sound, as it were the rattle of beads against wood. "What's that?" says Hardinge. "Everett" (the man in the rooms below) "is out, I know." "It's coming here," says the professor. It is, indeed! The door is opened in a tumultuous fashion, there is a rustle of silken skirts, and there--there, where the gas-light falls full on her from both room and landing--stands Perpetua! The professor has risen to his feet. His face is deadly white. Mr. Hardinge has risen too. "Perpetua!" says the professor; it would be impossible to describe his tone. "I've come!" says Perpetua, advancing into the room. "I have done with Aunt Jane _for ever,"_ casting wide her pretty naked arms, "and I have come to you!" As if in confirmation of this decision, she flings from her on to a distant chair the white opera cloak around her, and stands revealed as charming a thing as ever eye fell upon. She is all in black, but black that sparkles and trembles and shines with every movement. She seems, indeed, to be hung in jet, and out of all this sombre gleaming her white neck rises, pure and fresh and sweet as a little child's. Her long slight arms are devoid of gloves--she had forgotten them, no doubt, but her slender fingers are covered with rings, and round her neck a diamond necklace clings as if in love with its resting place. Diamonds indeed are everywhere. In her hair, in her breast, on her neck, her fingers. Her father, when luck came to him, had found his greatest joy in decking with these gems the delight of his heart. The professor turns to Hardinge. That young man, who had risen with the intention of leaving the room on Perpetua's entrance, is now staring at her as if bewitched. His expression is half puzzled, half amused. Is _this_ the professor's troublesome ward? This lovely, graceful---- "Leave us!" says the professor sharply. Hardinge, with a profound bow, quits the room, but not the house. It would be impossible to go without hearing the termination of this exciting episode. Everett's rooms being providentially empty, he steps into them, and, having turned up the gas, drops into a chair and gives way to mirth. Meantime the professor is staring at Perpetua. "What has happened?" says he. CHAPTER VII. "Take it to thy breast; Though thorns its stem invest, Gather them, with the rest!" "She is unbearable. _Unbearable!"_ returns Perpetua vehemently. "When I came back from the concert to-night, she---- But I won't speak of her. I _won't._ And, at all events, I have done with her; I have left her. I have come"--with decision--"to stay with you!" "Eh?" says the professor. It is a mere sound, but it expresses a great deal. "To stay with you. Yes," nodding her head, "it has come to that at last. I warned you it _would._ I couldn't stay with her any longer. I hate her! So I have come to stay with you--_for ever!"_ She has cuddled herself into an armchair, and, indeed, looks as if a life-long residence in this room is the plan she has laid out for herself. "Good heavens! What can you mean?" asks the poor professor, who should have sworn by the heathen gods, but in a weak moment falls back upon the good old formula. He sinks upon the table next him, and makes ruin of the notes he had been scribbling--the ink is still wet--even whilst Hardinge was with him. Could he only have known it, there are first proofs of them now upon his trousers. "I have told you," says she. "Good gracious, what a funny room this is! I told you she was abominable to me when I came home to-night. She said dreadful things to me, and I don't care whether she is my aunt or not, I shan't let her scold me for nothing; and--I'm afraid I wasn't nice to her. I'm sorry for that, but--one isn't a bit of stone, you know, and she said something--about my mother," her eyes grow very brilliant here, "and when I walked up to her she apologized for that, but afterwards she said something about poor, _poor_ papa--and--well, that was the end. I told her--amongst _other _things--that I thought she was 'too old to be alive,' and she didn't seem to mind the 'other things' half as much as that, though they were awful. At all events," with a little wave of her hands, "she's lectured me now for good; I shall never see _her_ again! I've run away to you! See?" It must be acknowledged that the professor _doesn't_ see. He is sitting on the edge of the table--dumb. "Oh! I'm so _glad_ I've left her," says Perpetua, with indeed heartfelt delight in look and tone. "But--do you know--I'm hungry. You--you couldn't let me make you a cup of tea, could you? I'm dreadfully thirsty! What's that in your glass?" "Nothing," says the professor hastily. He removes the half-finished tumbler of whisky and soda, and places it in the open cupboard. "It looked like _something,"_ says she. "But what about tea?" "I'll see what I can do," says he, beginning to busy himself amongst many small contrivances in the same cupboard. It has gone to his heart to hear that she is hungry and thirsty, but even in the midst of his preparations for her comfort, a feeling of rage takes possession of him. He pulls his head out of the cupboard and turns to her. "You must be _mad!"_ says he. "Mad? Why?" asks she. "To come here. Here! And at this hour!" "There was no other place: and I wasn't going to live under _her_ roof another second. I said to myself that she was my aunt, but you were my guardian. Both of you have been told to look after me, and I prefer to be looked after by you. It is so simple," says she, with a suspicion of contempt in her tone, "that I wonder why you wonder at it. As I preferred _you_--of course I have come to live with you." "You _can't!"_ gasps the professor, "you must go back to Miss Majendie at once!" "To _her!_ I'm not going back," steadily. "And even if I would," triumphantly, "I couldn't. As she sleeps at the top of the house (to get _air,_ she says), and so does her maid, you might ring until you were black in the face, and she wouldn't hear you." "Well! you can't stay here!" says the professor, getting off the table and addressing her with a truly noble attempt at sternness. "Why can't I?" There is some indignation in her tone. "There's lots of room here, isn't there?" "There is _no_ room!" says the professor. This is the literal truth. "The house is full. And--and there are only men here." "So much the better!" says Perpetua, with a little frown and a great deal of meaning. "I'm tired of women--they're horrid. You're always kind to me--at least," with a glance, "you always used to be, and _you're _a man! Tell one of your servants to make me up a room somewhere." "There isn't one," says the professor. "Oh! nonsense," says she, leaning back in her chair and yawning softly. "I'm not so big that you can't put me away somewhere. _That woman_ says I'm so small that I'll never be a grown-up girl, because I can't grow up any more. Who'd live with a woman like that? And I shall grow more, isn't it?" "I daresay," says the professor vaguely. "But that is not the question to be considered now. I must beg you to understand, Perpetua, that your staying here is out of the question!" "Out of the---- Oh! I _see,"_ cries she, springing to her feet and turning a passionately reproachful face on his. "You mean that I shall be in your way here!" "No, _no_, NO!" cries he, just as impulsively, and decidedly very foolishly; but the sight of her small mortified face has proved too much for him, "Only----" "Only?" echoes the spoiled child, with a loving smile--the child who has been accustomed to have all things and all people give way to her during her short life. "Only you are afraid _I_ shall not be comfortable. But I shall. And I shall be a great comfort to you too--a great _help._ I shall keep everything in order for you. Do you remember the talk we had that last day you came to Aunt Jane's? How I told you of the happy days we should have together, if we _were_ together. Well, we are together now, aren't we? And when I'm twenty-one, we'll move into a big, big house, and ask people to dances and dinners and things. In the meantime----" she pauses and glances leisurely around her. The glance is very comprehensive. "To-morrow," says she with decision, "I shall settle this room!" The professor's breath fails him. He grows pale. To "settle" his room! "Perpetua!" exclaims he, almost inarticulately, "you don't understand." "I do indeed," returns she brightly. "I've often settled papa's den. What! do you think me only a silly useless creature? You shall see! I'll settle _you_ too, by and by." She smiles at him gaily, with the most charming innocence, but oh! what awful probabilities lie within her words. _Settle him!_ "Do you know I've heard people talking about you at Mrs. Constans'," says she. She smiles and nods at him. The professor groans. To be talked about! To be discussed! To be held up to vulgar comment! He writhes inwardly. The thought is actual torture to him. "They said----" _"What?"_ demands the professor, almost fiercely. How dare a feeble feminine audience appreciate or condemn his honest efforts to enlighten his small section of mankind! "That you ought to be married," says Perpetua, sympathetically. "And they said, too, that they supposed you wouldn't ever be now; but that it was a great pity you hadn't a daughter. _I_ think that too. Not about your having a wife. That doesn't matter, but I really think you ought to have a daughter to look after you." This extremely immoral advice she delivers with a beaming smile. _"I'll_ be your daughter," says she. The professor goes rigid with horror. What has he _done_ that the Fates should so visit him? "They said something else too," goes on Perpetua, this time rather angrily. "They said you were so clever that you always looked unkempt. That?" thoughtfully, "means that you didn't brush your hair enough. Never mind, _I'll_ brush it for you." "Look here!" says the professor furiously, subdued fury no doubt, but very genuine. "You must go, you know. Go, _at once!_ D'ye see? You can't stay in this house, d'ye _hear?_ I can't permit it. What did your father mean by bringing you up like this!" "Like what?" She is staring at him. She has leant forward as if surprised--and with a sigh the professor acknowledges the uselessness of a fight between them; right or wrong she is sure to win. He is bound to go to the wall. She is looking not only surprised, but unnerved. The ebullition of wrath on the part of her mild guardian has been a slight shock to her. "Tell me?" persists she. "Tell you! what is there to tell you? I should think the veriest infant would have known she oughtn't to come here." "I should think an infant would know nothing," with dignity. "All your scientific researches have left you, I'm afraid, very ignorant. And I should think that the very first thing even an infant would do, if she could walk, would be to go straight to her guardian when in trouble." "At this hour?" "At any hour. What," throwing out her hands expressively, "is a guardian _for,_ if it isn't to take care of people?" The professor gives it up. The heat of battle has overcome him. With a deep breath he drops into a chair, and begins to wonder how long it will be before happy death will overtake him. But in the meantime, whilst sitting on a milestone of life waiting for that grim friend, what is to be done with her? If--Good heavens! if anyone had seen her come in! "Who opened the door for you?" demands he abruptly. "A great big fat woman with a queer voice! Your Mrs. Mulcahy of course. I remember your telling me about her." Mrs. Mulcahy undoubtedly. Well, the professor wishes now he had told his ward _more_ about her. Mrs. Mulcahy he can trust, but she--awful thought-- will she trust him? What is she thinking now? "I said, 'Is Mr. Curzon at home?' and she said, 'Well I niver!' So I saw she was a kindly, foolish, poor creature with no sense, and I ran past her, and up the stairs, and I looked into one room where there were lights but you weren't there, and then I ran on again until I saw the light under _your_ door, and, "brightening, "there you were!" Here _she_ is now, at all events, at half-past twelve at night! "Wasn't it fortunate I found you?" says she. She is laughing a little, and looking so content that the professor hasn't the heart to contradict her--though where the fortune comes in---- "I'm starving," says she, gaily, "will that funny little kettle soon boil?" The professor has lit a spirit-lamp with a view to giving her some tea. "I haven't had anything to eat since dinner, and you know she dines at an ungodly hour. Two o'clock! I didn't know I wanted anything to eat until I escaped from her, but now that I have got _you,"_ triumphantly, "I feel as hungry as ever I can be." "There is nothing," says the professor, blankly. His heart seems to stop beating. The most hospitable and kindly of men, it is terrible to him to have to say this. Of course Mrs. Mulcahy--who, no doubt, is still in the hall waiting for an explanation, could give him something. But Mrs. Mulcahy can be unpleasant at times, and this is safe to be a "time." Yet without her assistance he can think of no means by which this pretty, slender, troublesome little ward of his can be fed. "Nothing!" repeats she faintly. "Oh, but surely in that cupboard over there, where you put the glass, there is something; even bread and butter I should like." She gets up, and makes an impulsive step forward, and in doing so brushes against a small ricketty table, that totters feebly for an instant and then comes with a crash to the ground, flinging a whole heap of gruesome dry bones at her very feet. With a little cry of horror she recoils from them. Perhaps her nerves are more out of order than she knows, perhaps the long fast and long drive here, and her reception from her guardian at the end of it--so different from what she had imagined--have all helped to undo her. Whatever be the cause, she suddenly covers her face with her hands and burst into tears. "Take them away!" cries she frantically, and then--sobbing heavily between her broken words--"Oh, I see how it is. You don't want me here at all. You wish I hadn't come. And I have no one but you--and poor papa said you would be good to me. But you are _sorry_ he made you my guardian. You would be glad if I were _dead!_ When I come to you in my trouble you tell me to go away again, and though I tell you I am hungry, you won't give me even some bread and butter! Oh!" passionately, "if _you_ came to _me_ starving, I'd give _you_ things, but--you----" _"Stop!"_ cries the professor. He uplifts his hands, and, as though in the act of tearing his hair, rushes from the room, and staggers downstairs to those other apartments where Hardinge had elected to sit, and see out the farce, comedy, or tragedy, whichever it may prove, to its bitter end. The professor bursts in like a maniac! CHAPTER VIII. "The house of everyone is to him as his castle and fortress, as well for his defence against injury and violence as for his repose." "She's upstairs still," cries he in a frenzied tone. "She says she has come _for ever._ That she will not go away. She doesn't understand. Great Heaven! what am I to do?" "She?" says Hardinge, who really in turn grows petrified for the moment--_only _for the moment. "That girl! My ward! All women are _demons!"_ says the professor bitterly, with tragic force. He pauses as if exhausted. _"Your_ demon is a pretty specimen of her kind," says Hardinge, a little frivolously under the circumstances it must be confessed. "Where is she now?" "Upstairs!" with a groan. "She says she's _hungry,_ and I haven't a thing in the house! For goodness sake think of something, Hardinge." "Mrs. Mulcahy!" suggests Hardinge, in anything but a hopeful tone. "Yes--ye-es," says the professor. "You--_you _wouldn't ask her something, would you, Hardinge?" "Not for a good deal," says Hardinge, promptly. "I say," rising, and going towards Everett's cupboard, "Everett's a Sybarite, you know, of the worst kind--sure to find something here, and we can square it with him afterwards. Beauty in distress, you know, appeals to all hearts. _Here we are!"_ holding out at arm's length a pasty. "A 'weal and ammer!' Take it! The guilt be on my head! Bread--butter--pickled onions! Oh, _not_ pickled onions, I think. Really, I had no idea even Everett had fallen so low. Cheese!--about to proceed on a walking tour! The young lady wouldn't care for that, thanks. Beer! No. _No_. Sherry-Woine!" "Give me that pie, and the bread and butter," says the professor, in great wrath. "And let me tell you, Hardinge, that there are occasions when one's high spirits can degenerate into offensiveness and vulgarity!" He marches out of the room and upstairs, leaving Hardinge, let us hope, a prey to remorse. It is true, at least of that young man, that he covers his face with his hands and sways from side to side, as if overcome by some secret emotion. Grief--no doubt. Perpetua is graciously pleased to accept the frugal meal the professor brings her. She even goes so far as to ask him to share it with her--which invitation he declines. He is indeed sick at heart--not for himself--(the professor doesn't often think of himself)--but for her. And where is she to sleep? To turn her out now would be impossible! After all, it was a puerile trifling with the Inevitable, to shirk asking Mrs. Mulcahy for something to eat for his self-imposed guest--because the question of _Bed_ is still to come! Mrs. Mulcahy, terrible, as she undoubtedly can be, is yet the only woman in the house, and it is imperative that Perpetua should be given up to her protection. Whilst the professor is writhing in spirit over this ungetoutable fact, he becomes aware of a resounding knock at the door. Paralyzed, he gazes in the direction of the sound. It _can't_ be Hardinge, he would never knock like that! The knock in itself, indeed, is of such force and volume as to strike terror into the bravest heart. It is--it _must_ be--the Mulcahy! And Mrs. Mulcahy it is! Without waiting for an answer, that virtuous Irishwoman, clad in righteous indignation and a snuff-colored gown, marches into the room. "May I ask, Mr. Curzon," says she, with great dignity and more temper, "what may be the meanin' of all this?" The professor's tongue cleaves to the roof of his mouth, but Perpetua's tongue remains normal. She jumps up, and runs to Mrs. Mulcahy with a beaming face. She has had something to eat, and is once again her own buoyant, wayward, light-hearted little self. "Oh! it is all right _now,_ Mrs. Mulcahy," cries she, whilst the professor grows cold with horror at this audacious advance upon the militant Mulcahy. "But do you know, he said first he hadn't anything to give me, and I was starving. No, you mustn't scold him--he didn't mean anything. I suppose you have heard how unhappy I was with Aunt Jane?--he's told you, I daresay,"--with a little flinging of her hand towards the trembling professor--"because I know"--prettily--"he is very fond of you--he often speaks to me about you. Oh! Aunt Jane is _horrid!_ I _should_ have told you about how it was when I came, but I wanted so much to see my guardian, and tell _him_ all about it, that I forgot to be nice to anybody. See?" There is a little silence. The professor, who is looking as guilty as if the whole ten commandments have been broken by him at once, waits, shivering, for the outburst that is so sure to come. It doesn't come, however! When the mists clear away a little, he finds that Perpetua has gone over to where Mrs. Mulcahy is standing, and is talking still to that good Irishwoman. It is a whispered talk this time, and the few words of it that he catches go to his very heart. "I'm afraid he didn't _want_ me here," Perpetua is saying, in a low distressed little voice--"I'm sorry I came now--but, you don't _know_ how cruel Aunt Jane was to me, Mrs. Mulcahy, you don't indeed! She--she said such unkind things about--about----" Perpetua breaks down again--struggles with herself valiantly, and finally bursts out crying. "I'm tired, I'm sleepy," sobs she miserably. Need I say what follows? The professor, stung to the quick by those forlorn sobs, lifts his eyes, and--behold! he sees Perpetua gathered to the ample bosom of the formidable, kindly Mulcahy. "Come wid me, me lamb," says that excellent woman. "Bad scran to the one that made yer purty heart sore. Lave her to me now, Misther Curzon, dear, an' I'll take a mother's care of her." (This in an aside to the astounded professor.) "There now, alanna! Take courage now! Sure 'tis to the right shop ye've come, anyway, for 'tis daughthers I have meself, me dear--fine, sthrappin' girls as could put you in their pockits. Ye poor little crather! Oh! Murther! Who could harm the like of ye? Faix, I hope that ould divil of an aunt o' yours won't darken these doors, or she'll git what she won't like from Biddy Mulcahy. There now! There now! 'Tis into yer bed I'll tuck ye meself, for 'tis worn-out ye are--God help ye!" She is gone, taking Perpetua with her. The professor rubs his eyes, and then suddenly an overwhelming sense of gratitude towards Mrs. Mulcahy takes possession of him. _What_ a woman! He had never thought so much moral support could be got out of a landlady--but Mrs. Mulcahy has certainly tided him safely over _one_ of his difficulties. Still, those that remain are formidable enough to quell any foolish present attempts at relief of mind. "To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow!" How many to-morrows is she going to remain here? Oh! Impossible! Not an _hour_ must be wasted. By the morning light something must be put on foot to save the girl from her own foolhardiness, nay ignorance! Once again, sunk in the meshes of depression, the persecuted professor descends to the room where Hardinge awaits him. "Anything new?" demands the latter, springing to his feet. "Yes! Mrs. Mulcahy came up." The professor's face is so gloomy, that Hardinge may be forgiven for saying to himself, "She has assaulted him!" "I'm glad it isn't visible," says he, staring at the professor's nose, and then at his eye. Both are the usual size. "Eh?" says the professor. "She was visible of course. She was kinder than I expected." "So, I see. She might so easily have made it your lip--or your nose--or----" _"What_ is there in Everett's cupboard besides the beer?" demands the professor angrily. "For Heaven's sake! attend to me, and don't sit there grinning like a first-class chimpanzee!" This is extremely rude, but Hardinge takes no notice of it. "I tell you she was kind--kinder than one would expect," says the professor, rapping his knuckles on the table. "Oh! I see. She? Miss Wynter?" "No--Mrs. Mulcahy!" roars the professor frantically. "Where's your head, man? Mrs. Mulcahy came into the room, and took Miss Wynter into her charge in the--er--the most wonderful way, and carried her off to bed." The professor mops his brow. "Oh, well, _that's_ all right," says Hardinge. "Sit down, old chap, and let's talk it over." "It is _not_ all right," says the professor. "It is all wrong. Here she is, and here she apparently means to stay. The poor child doesn't understand. She thinks I'm older than Methusaleh, and that she can live here with me. I can't explain it to her--you--don't think _you_ could, do you, Hardinge?" "No, I don't, indeed," says Hardinge, in a hurry. "What on earth has brought her here at all?" "To _stay._ Haven't I told you? To stay for ever. She says"--with a groan--"she is going to settle me! To--to _brush my hair!_ To--make my tea. She says I'm her guardian, and insists on living with me. She doesn't understand! Hardinge," desperately, "what _am_ I to do?" "Marry her!" suggests Hardinge, who, I regret to say is choking with laughter. "That is a _jest!"_ says the professor haughtily. This unusual tone from the professor strikes surprise to the soul of Hardinge. He looks at him. But the professor's new humor is short-lived. He sinks upon a chair in a tired sort of way, letting his arms fall over the sides of it. As a type of utter despair he is a distinguished specimen. "Why don't you take her home again, back to the old aunt?" says Hardinge, moved by his misery. "I can't. She tells me it would be useless, that the house is locked up, and--and besides, Hardinge, her aunt--after _this,_ you know-- would be----" "Naturally," says Hardinge, after which he falls back upon his cigar. "Light your pipe," says he, "and we'll think it over." The professor lights it, and both men draw nearer to each other. "I'm afraid she won't go back to her aunt any way," says the professor, as a beginning to the "thinking it over." He pushes his glasses up to his forehead, and finally discards them altogether, flinging them on the table near. "If she saw you now she might understand," says Hardinge--for, indeed, the professor without his glasses loses thirty per cent. of old Time. "She wouldn't," says the professor. "And never mind that. Come back to the question. I say she will never go back to her aunt." He looks anxiously at Hardinge. One can see that he would part with a good deal of honest coin of the realm, if his companion would only _not_ agree with him. "It looks like it," said Hardinge, who is rather enjoying himself. "By Jove! what a thing to happen to _you,_ Curzon, of all men in the world. What are you going to do, eh?" "It isn't so much that," says the professor faintly. "It is what is _she_ going to do?" _"Next!"_ supplements Hardinge. "Quite so! It would be a clever fellow who would answer that, straight off. I say, Curzon, what a pretty girl she is, though. Pretty isn't the word. Lovely, I----" The professor gets up suddenly. "Not that," says he, raising his hand in his gentle fashion--that has now something of haste in it. "It--I--you know what I mean, Hardinge. To discuss her--herself, I mean--and here----" "Yes. You are right," says Hardinge slowly, with, however, an irrepressible stare at the professor. It is a prolonged stare. He is very fond of Curzon, though knowing absolutely nothing about him beyond the fact that he is eminently likeable; and it now strikes him as strange that this silent, awkward, ill-dressed, clever man should be the one to teach him how to behave himself. Who _is_ Curzon? Given a better tailor, and a worse brain, he might be a reasonable-looking fellow enough, and not so old either--forty, perhaps--perhaps less. "Have you no relation to whom you could send her?" he says at length, that sudden curiosity as to who Curzon may be prompting the question. "Some old lady? An aunt, for example?" "She doesn't seem to like aunts," says the professor, with deep dejection. "Small blame to her," says Hardinge, smoking vigorously. _"I've_ an aunt--but 'that's another story!' Well--haven't you a cousin then?--or something?" "I have a sister," says the professor slowly. "Married?" "A widow." ("Fusty old person, out somewhere in the wilds of Finchley," says Hardinge to himself. "Poor little girl--she won't fancy that either!") "Why not send her to you sister then?" says he aloud. "I'm not sure that she would like to have her," says the professor, with hesitation. "I confess I have been thinking it over for some days, but----" "But perhaps the fact of your ward's being an heiress----" begins Hardinge--throwing out a suggestion as it were--but is checked by something in the professor's face. "My sister is the Countess of Baring," says he gently. Hardinge's first thought is that the professor has gone out of his mind, and his second that he himself has accomplished that deed. He leans across the table. Surprise has deprived him of his usual good manners. "Lady Baring!--_your _sister!" says he. CHAPTER IX. "Your face, my Thane, is as a book, where men May read strange matters." "I see no reason why she shouldn't be," says the professor calmly--is there a faint suspicion of hauteur in his tone? "As we are on the subject of myself, I may as well tell you that my brother is Sir Hastings Curzon, of whom"--he turns back as if to take up some imaginary article from the floor--"you may have heard." "Sir Hastings!" Mr. Hardinge leans back in his chair and gives way to thought. This quiet, hard-working student--this man whom he had counted as a nobody--the brother of that disreputable Hastings Curzon! "As good as got the baronetcy," says he still thinking. "At the rate Sir Hastings is going he can't possibly last for another twelvemonth, and here is this fellow living in these dismal lodgings with twenty thousand a year before his eyes. A lucky thing for him that the estates are so strictly entailed. Good heavens! to think of a man with all that almost in his grasp being _happy_ in a coat that must have been built in the Ark, and caring for nothing on earth but the intestines of frogs and such-like abominations." "You seem surprised again," says the professor, somewhat satirically. "I confess it," says Hardinge. "I can't see why you should be." _"I_ do," says Hardinge drily. "That you," slowly, _"you_ should be Sir Hastings' brother! Why----" "No more!" interrupts the professor sharply. He lifts his hand. "Not another word. I know what you are going to say. It is one of my great troubles, that I always know what people are going to say when they mention him. Let him alone, Hardinge." "Oh! _I'll_ let him alone," says Hardinge, with a gesture of disgust. There is a pause. "You know my sister, then?" says the professor presently. "Yes. She is very charming. How is it I have never seen you there?" "At her house?" "At her receptions?" "I have no taste for that sort of thing, and no time. Fashionable society bores me. I go and see Gwen on off days and early hours, when I am sure that I shall find her alone. We are friends, you will understand, she and I; capital friends, though sometimes," with a sigh, "she--she seems to disapprove of my mode of living. But we get on very well on the whole. She is a very good girl," says the professor kindly, who always thinks of Lady Baring as a little girl in short frocks in her nursery--the nursery he had occupied with her. To hear the beautiful, courted, haughty Lady Baring, who has the best of London at her feet, called "a good girl," so tickles Mr. Hardinge, that he leans back in his chair and bursts out laughing. "Yes?" says the professor, as if asking for an explanation of the joke. "Oh! nothing--nothing. Only--you _are_ such a queer fellow!" says Hardinge, sitting up again to look at him. "You are a _rara avis,_ do you know? No, of course you don't! You are one of the few people who don't know their own worth. I don't believe, Curzon, though I should live to be a thousand, that I shall ever look upon your like again." "And so you laugh. Well, no doubt it is a pleasant reflection," says the professor dismally. "I begin to wish now I had never seen myself." "Oh, come! cheer up," says Hardinge, "your pretty ward will be all right. If Lady Baring takes her in hand, she----" "Ah! But will she?" says the professor. "Will she like Per---- Miss Wynter?" "Sure to," said Hardinge, with quite a touch of enthusiasm. "'To see her is to love her, and love but'----" "That is of no consequence where anyone is concerned except Lady Baring," says the professor, with a little twist in his chair, "and my sister has not seen her as yet. And besides, that is not the only question--a greater one remains." "By Jove! you don't say so! What?" demands Mr. Hardinge, growing earnest. "Will Miss Wynter like _her?"_ says the professor. "That is the real point." "Oh! I see!" says Hardinge thoughtfully. The next day, however, proves the professor's fears vain in both quarters. An early visit to Lady Baring, and an anxious appeal, brings out all that delightful woman's best qualities. One stipulation alone she makes, that she may see the young heiress before finally committing herself to chaperone her safely through the remainder of the season. The professor, filled with hope, hies back to his rooms, calls for Mrs. Mulcahy, tells her he is going to take his ward out for a drive, and gives that worthy and now intensely interested landlady full directions to see that Miss Wynter looks--"er--nice! you know, Mrs. Mulcahy, her _best_ suit, and----" Mrs. Mulcahy came generously to the rescue. "Her best frock, sir, I suppose, an' her Sunday bonnet. I've often wished it before, Mr. Curzon, an' I'm thinkin' that 'twill be the makin' of ye; an' a handsome, purty little crathur she is an' no mistake. An' who is to give away the poor dear, sir, askin' yer pardon?" "I am," says the professor. "Oh no, sir; the likes was never known. 'Tis the father or one of his belongings as gives away the bride, _niver_ the husband to be, an' if ye _have_ nobody, sir, you two, why I'm sure I'd be proud to act for ye in this matther. Faix I don't disguise from ye, Misther Curzon, dear, that I feels like a mother to that purty child this moment, an' I tell ye _this,_ that if ye don't behave dacent to her, ye'll have to answer to Mrs. Mulcahy for that same." "What d'ye mean, woman?" roars the professor, indignantly. "Do you imagine that _--_--?" "No. I'd belave nothin' bad o' ye," says Mrs. Mulcahy solemnly. "I've cared ye these six years, an' niver a fault to find. But that child beyant, whin ye take her away to make her yer wife----" "You must be mad," says the professor, a strange, curious pang contracting his heart. "I am not taking her away to---- I--I am taking her to my sister, who will receive her as a guest." "Mad!" repeats Mrs. Mulcahy furiously. "Who's mad? Faix," preparing to leave the room, "'tis yerself was born widout a grain o' sinse!" The meeting between Lady Baring and Perpetua is eminently satisfactory. The latter, looking lovely, but a little frightened, so takes Lady Baring's artistic soul by storm, that that great lady then and there accepts the situation, and asks Perpetua if she will come to her for a week or so. Perpetua, charmed in turn by Lady Baring's grace and beauty and pretty ways, receives the invitation with pleasure, little dreaming that she is there "on view," as it were, and that the invitation is to be prolonged indefinitely--that is, till either she or her hostess tire one of the other. The professor's heart sinks a little as he sees his sister rise and loosen the laces round the girl's pretty, slender throat, begging her to begin to feel at home at once. Alas! He has deliberately given up his ward! _His_ ward! Is she any longer his? Has not the great world claimed her now, and presently will she not belong to it? So lovely, so sweet she is, will not all men run to snatch the prize?--a prize, bejewelled too, not only by Nature, but by that gross material charm that men call wealth. Well, well, he has done his best for her. There was, indeed, nothing else left to do. CHAPTER X. "The sun is all about the world we see, The breath and strength of very Spring; and we Live, love, and feed on our own hearts." The lights are burning low in the conservatory, soft perfumes from the many flowers fill the air. From beyond--somewhere--(there is a delicious drowsy uncertainty about the where)--comes the sound of music, soft, rhythmical, and sweet. Perhaps it is from one of the rooms outside--dimly seen through the green foliage--where the lights are more brilliant, and forms are moving. But just in here there is no music save the tinkling drip, drip of the little fountain that plays idly amongst the ferns. Lady Baring is at home to-night, and in the big, bare rooms outside dancing is going on, and in the smaller rooms, tiny tragedies and comedies are being enacted by amateurs, who, oh, wondrous tale! do know their parts and speak them, albeit no stage "proper" has been prepared for them. Perhaps that is why stage-fright is not for them--a stage as big as "all the world" leaves actors very free. But in here--here, with the dainty flowers and dripping fountains, there is surely no thought of comedy or tragedy. Only a little girl gowned all in white, with snowy arms and neck, and diamonds glittering in the soft masses of her waving hair. A happy little girl, to judge by the soft smile upon her lovely lips, and the gleam in her dark eyes. Leaning back in her seat in the dim, cool recesses of the conservatory, amongst the flowers and the greeneries, she looks like a little nymph in love with the silence and the sense of rest that the hour holds. It is broken, however. "I am so sorry you are not dancing," says her companion, leaning towards her. His regret is evidently genuine, indeed; to Hardinge the evening is an ill-spent one that precludes his dancing with Perpetua Wynter. "Yes?" she looks up at him from her low lounge amongst the palms. "Well, so am I, do you know!" telling the truth openly, yet with an evident sense of shame. "But I don't dance now, because--it is selfish, isn't it?--because I should be so unhappy afterwards if I _did!"_ "A perfect reason," says Hardinge very earnestly. He is still leaning towards her, his elbows on his knees, his eyes on hers. It is an intent gaze that seldom wanders, and in truth why should it? Where is any other thing as good to look at as this small, fair creature, with the eyes, and the hair, and the lips that belong to her? He has taken possession of her fan, and gently, lovingly, as though indeed it is part of her, is holding it, raising it sometimes to sweep the feathers of it across his lips. "Do you think so?" says she, as if a little puzzled. "Well, I confess I don't like the moments when I hate myself. We all hate ourselves sometimes, don't we?" looking at him as if doubtfully, "or is it only I myself, who----" "Oh, no!" says Hardinge. _"All!_ All of us detest ourselves now and again, or at least we think we do. It comes to the same thing, but you--you have no cause." "I should have if I danced," says she, "and I couldn't bear the after reproach, so I don't do it." "And yet--yet you would _like_ to dance?" "I don't know----" She hesitates, and suddenly looks up at him with eyes as full of sorrow as of mirth. "At all events I know _this,"_ says she, "that I wish the band would not play such nice waltzes!" Hardinge gives way to laughter, and presently she laughs too, but softly, and as if afraid of being heard, and as if too a little ashamed of herself. Her color rises, a delicate warm color that renders her absolutely adorable. "Shall I order them to stop?" asks Hardinge, laughing still, yet with something in his gaze that tells her he _would_ forbid them to play if he could, if only to humor her. "No!" says she, "and, after all,"--philosophically--"enjoyment is only a name." "That's all!" says Hardinge, smiling. "But a very good one." "Let us forget it," with a little sigh, "and talk of something else, something pleasanter." "Than enjoyment?" She gives way to his mood and laughs afresh. "Ah! you have me there!" says she. "I have not, indeed," he returns quietly, and with meaning. "Neither there, nor anywhere." He gets up suddenly, and going to her, bends over the chair on which she is sitting. "We were talking of what?" asks she, with admirable courage, "of names, was it not? An endless subject. _My_ name now? An absurd one surely. Perpetua! I don't like Perpetua, do you?" She is evidently talking at random. "I do indeed!" says Hardinge, promptly and fervently. His tone accentuates his meaning. "Oh, but so harsh, so unusual!" "Unusual! That in itself constitutes a charm." "I was going to add, however--disagreeable." "Not that--never that," says Hardinge. "You mean to say you really _like_ Perpetua?" her large soft eyes opening with amazement. "It is a poor word," says he, his tone now very low. "If I dared say that I _adored_ 'Perpetua,' I should be----" "Oh, you laugh at me," interrupts she with a little impatient gesture, "you _know_ how crude, how strange, how----" "I don't, indeed. Why should you malign yourself like that? You--_you--_who are----" He stops short, driven to silence by a look in the girl's eye. "What have _I_ to do with it? I did not christen myself," says she. There is perhaps a suspicion of hauteur in her tone. "I am talking to you about my _name._ You understand that, don't you?"--the hauteur increasing. "Do you know, of late I have often wished I was somebody else, because then I should have had a different one." Hardinge, at this point, valiantly refrains from a threadbare quotation. Perhaps he is too far crushed to be able to remember it. "Still it is charming," says he, somewhat confusedly. "It is absurd," says Perpetua coldly. There is evidently no pity in her. And alas! when we think what _that_ sweet feeling is akin to, on the highest authority, one's hopes for Hardinge fall low. He loses his head a little. "Not so absurd as your guardian's, however," says he, feeling the necessity for saying something without the power to manufacture it. "Mr. Curzon's? What is his name?" asks she, rising out of her lounging position and looking, for the first time, interested. "Thaddeus." Perpetua, after a prolonged stare, laughs a little. "What a name!" says she. "Worse than mine. And yet," still laughing, "it suits him, I think." Hardinge laughs with her. Not _at_ his friend, but _with_ her. It seems clear to him that Perpetua is making gentle fun of her guardian, and though his conscience smites him for encouraging her in her naughtiness, still he cannot refrain. "He is an awfully good old fellow," says he, throwing a sop to his Cerberus. "Is he?" says Perpetua, as if even _more_ amused. She looks up at him, and then down again, and trifles with the fan she has taken back from him, and finally laughs again; something in her laugh this time, however, puzzles him. "You don't like him?" hazards he. "After all, I suppose it is hardly natural that a ward _should_ like her guardian." "Yes? And _why?"_ asks Perpetua, still smiling, still apparently amused. "For one thing, the sense of restraint that belongs to the relations between them. A guardian, you know, would be able to control one in a measure." "Would he?" "Well, I imagine so. It is traditionary. And you?" "I don't know about _other_ people," says Miss Wynter, calmly, "I know only this, that nobody ever yet controlled _me,_ and I don't suppose now that anybody ever will." As she says this she looks at him with the prettiest smile; it is a mixture of amusement and defiance. Hardinge, gazing at her, draws conclusions. ("Perfectly _hates_ him," decides he.) It seems to him a shame, and a pity too, but after all, old Curzon was hardly meant by Nature to do the paternal to a strange and distinctly spoiled child, and a beauty into the bargain. "I don't think your guardian will have a good time," says he, bending over her confidentially, on the strength of this decision of his. "Don't you?" She draws back from him and looks up. "You think I shall lead him a very bad life?" "Well, as _he_ would regard it. Not as I should," with a sudden, impassioned glance. Miss Wynter puts that glance behind her, and perhaps there is something--something a little dangerous in the soft, _soft_ look she now turns upon him. "He thinks so, too, of course?" says she, ever so gently. Her tone is half a question, half an assertion. It is manifestly unfair, the whole thing. Hardinge, believing in her tone, her smile, falls into the trap. Mindful of that night when the professor in despair at her untimely descent upon him, had said many things unmeant, he answers her. "Hardly that. But----" "Go on." "There was a little word or two, you know," laughing. "A hint?" laughing too, but how strangely! "Yes? And----?" "Oh! a _mere_ hint! The professor is too loyal to go beyond that. I suppose you know you have the best man in all the world for your guardian? But it was a little unkind of your people, was it not, to give you into the keeping of a confirmed bookworm--a savant--with scarcely a thought beyond his studies?" "He could study me!" says she. "I should be a fresh specimen." "A _rara avis_, indeed! but not such as the professor's soul covets. No, believe me, you are as dust before the wind in his learned eye." "You think then--that I--am a trouble to him?" "It is inconceivable," says he, with a shrug of apology, "but he has no room in his daily thoughts, I verily believe, for anything beyond his beloved books, and notes, and discoveries." "Yet _I_ am a discovery," persists she, looking at him with anxious eyes, and leaning forward, whilst her fan falls idly on her knees. "Ah! But so unpardonably _recent!"_ returns he with a smile. "True!" says she. She gives him one swift brilliant glance, and then suddenly grows restless. "How _warm_ it is!" she says fretfully. "I wish----" What she was going to say, will never now be known. The approach of a tall, gaunt figure through the hanging oriental curtains at the end of the conservatory checks her speech. Sir Hastings Curzon is indeed taller than most men, and is, besides, a man hardly to be mistaken again when once seen. Perpetua has seen him very frequently of late. CHAPTER XI. "But all was false and hollow; though his tongue Dropped manna, and could make the worse appear The better reason, to perplex and dash Maturest counsels." "Shall I take you to Lady Baring?" says Hardinge, quickly, rising and bending as if to offer her his arm. "No, thank you," coldly. "I think," anxiously, "you once told me you did not care for Sir----" "Did I? It seems quite terrible the amount of things I have told everybody." There is a distinct flash in her lovely eyes now, and her small hand has tightened round her fan. "Sometimes--I talk folly! As a fact" (with a touch of defiance), "I like Sir Hastings, although he _is_ my guardian's brother!--my guardian who would so gladly get rid of me." There is bitterness on the young, red mouth. "You should not look at it in that light." "Should I not? You should be the last to say that, seeing that you were the one to show me how to regard it. Besides, you forget Sir Hastings is Lady Baring's brother too, and--you haven't anything to say against _her,_ have you? Ah!" with a sudden lovely smile, "you, Sir Hastings?" "You are not dancing," says the tall, gaunt man, who has now come up to her. "So much I have seen. Too warm? Eh? You show reason, I think. And yet, if I might dare to hope that you would give me this waltz----" "No, no," says she, still with her most charming air. "I am not dancing to-night. I shall not dance this year." "That is a Median law, no doubt," says he. "If you will not dance with me, then may I hope that you will give me the few too short moments that this waltz may contain?" Hardinge makes a vague movement but an impetuous one. If the girl had realized the fact of his love for her, she might have been touched and influenced by it, but as it is she feels only a sense of anger towards him. Anger unplaced, undefined, yet nevertheless intense. "With pleasure," says she to Sir Hastings, smiling at him almost across Hardinge's outstretched hand. The latter draws back. "You dismiss me?" says he, with a careful smile. He bows to her--he is gone. "A well-meaning young man," says Sir Hastings, following Hardinge's retreating figure with a delightfully lenient smile. "Good-looking too; but earnest. Have you noticed it? Entirely well-bred, but just a little earnest! _Such_ a mistake!" "I don't think that," says Perpetua. "To be earnest! One _should_ be earnest." "Should one?" Sir Hastings looks delighted expectation. "Tell me about it," says he. "There is nothing to tell," says Perpetua, a little petulantly perhaps. This tall, thin man! what a _bore_ he is! And yet, the other--Mr. Hardinge--well _he_ was worse; he was a _fool,_ anyway; he didn't understand the professor one bit! "I like Mr. Hardinge," says she suddenly. "Happy Hardinge! But little girls like you are good to everyone, are you not? That is what makes you so lovely. You could be good to even a scapegrace, eh? A poor, sad outcast like me?" He laughs and leans towards her, his handsome, dissipated, abominable face close to hers. Involuntarily she recoils. "I hope everyone is good to you," says she. "Why should they not be? And why do you call yourself an outcast? Only bad people are outcasts. And bad people," slowly, "are not known, are they?" "Certainly not," says he, disconcerted. This little girl from a far land is proving herself too much for him. And it is not her words that disconcert him so much as the straight, clear, open glance from the thoughtful eyes. To turn the conversation into another channel seems desirable to him. "I hope you are happy here with my sister," says he, in his anything but everyday tone. "Quite happy, thank you. But I should have been happier still, I think, if I had been allowed to stay with your brother." Sir Hastings drops his glasses. Good heavens! what kind of a girl is this! "To stay with my brother! To _stay,"_ stammers he. "Yes. He _is_ your brother, isn't he? The professor, I mean. I should quite have enjoyed living with him, but he wouldn't hear of it. He--he doesn't like me, I'm afraid?" Perpetua looks at him anxiously. A little hope that he will contradict Hardinge's statement animates her mind. To feel herself a burden to her guardian--to anyone--she, who in the old home had been nothing less than an idol! Surely Sir Hastings, his own brother, will say something, will say something, will tell her something to ease this chagrin at her heart. "Who told you that?" asks Sir Hastings. "Did he himself? I shouldn't put it beyond him. He is a misogynist; a mere bookworm! Of no account. Do not waste a thought on him." "You mean----" "That he detests the best part of life--that he has deliberately turned his back on all that makes our existence here worth having. I should call him a fool, but that one so dislikes having an imbecile in one's family." "The best part of life! You say he has turned his back on that." She lets her hands fall upon her knees, and turns a frowning, perplexed, but always lovely face to his. "What is it," asks she, "that best part?" "Women!" returns he, slowly, undauntedly, in spite of the innocence, the serenity, that shines in the young and exquisite face before him. Her eyes do not fall before his. She is plainly thinking. Yes; Mr. Hardinge was right, he will never like her. She is only a stay, a hindrance to him! "I understand," says she sorrowfully. "He will not care--_ever._ I shall be always a trouble to him. He----" "Why think of him?" says Sir Hastings contemptuously. He leans towards her; fired by her beauty, that is now enhanced by the regret that lies upon her pretty lips, he determines on pushing his cause at once. "If _he_ cannot appreciate you, others can--_I_ can. I----" He pauses; for the first time in his life, on such an occasion as this, he is conscious of a feeling of awkwardness. To tell a woman he loves her has been the simplest thing in the world hitherto, but now, when at last he is in earnest--when poverty has driven him to seek marriage with an heiress as a cure for all his ills--he finds himself tongue-tied; and not only by the importance of the situation, so far as money goes, but by the clear, calm, waiting eyes of Perpetua. "Yes?" says she; and then suddenly, as if not caring for the answer she has demanded, "You mean that he---- You _too_ think that he dislikes me?" There is woe in the pale, small, lovely face. "Very probably. He was always eccentric. Perfect nuisance at home. None of us could understand him. I shouldn't in the least wonder if he had taken a rooted aversion to you, and taken it badly too! Miss Wynter! it quite distresses me to think that it should be _my _brother, of all men, who has failed to see your charm. A charm that----" He pauses effectively, to let his really fine eyes have some play. The conservatory is sufficiently dark to disguise the ravages that dissipation has made upon his handsome features. He can see that Perpetua is regarding him earnestly, and with evident interest. Already he regards his cause as won. It is plain that the girl is attracted by his face, as indeed she is! She is at this moment asking herself, who is it he is like? "You were saying?" says she dreamily. "That the charm you possess, though of no value in the eyes of your guardian, is, to _me,_ indescribably attractive. In fact--I----" A second pause, meant to be even more effective. Perpetua turns her gaze more directly upon him. It occurs to her that he is singularly dull, poor man. "Go on," says she. She nods her head at him with much encouragement. Her encouragement falls short. Sir Hastings, who had looked for girlish confusion, is somewhat disconcerted by this open patronage. "May I" says he--"You _permit_ me then to tell you what I have so long feared to disclose. I"--dramatically--_"love you!"_ He is standing over her, his hand on the back of her chair, waiting for the swift blush, the tremor, the usual signs that follow on one of his declarations. Alas! there is no blush now, no tremor, no sign at all. "That is very good of you," says Perpetua, in an even tone. She moves a little away from him, but otherwise shows no emotion whatever. "The more so, in that it must be so difficult for you to love a person in fourteen days! Ah! that is kind, indeed." A curious light comes into Sir Hastings' eyes. This little Australian girl, is she _laughing_ at him? But the fact is that Perpetua is hardly thinking of him at all, or merely as a shadow to her thoughts. Who _is_ he like? that is the burden of her inward song. At this moment she knows. She lifts her head to see the professor standing in the curtained doorway down below. Ah! yes, that is it! And, indeed, the resemblance between the two brothers is wonderfully strong at this instant! In the eyes of both a quick fire is kindled. CHAPTER XII. "Love, like a June rose, Buds and sweetly blows-- But tears its leaves disclose, And among thorns it grows." The professor had been standing inside the curtain for a full minute before Perpetua had seen him. Spell-bound he had stood there, gazing at the girl as if bewitched. Up to this he had seen her only in black--black always--severe, cold--but _now!_ It is to him as though he had seen her for the first time. The graceful curves of her neck, her snowy arms, the dead white of the gown against the whiter glory of the soft bosom, the large, dark eyes so full of feeling, the little dainty head! Are they _all_ new--or some sweet, fresher memory of a picture well beloved? Then he had seen his brother!--Hastings--the disgrace, the _roué_-- and bending over _her!..._ There had been that little movement, and the girl's calm drawing back, and---- The professor's step forward at that moment had betrayed him to Perpetua. She rises now, letting her fan fall without thought to the ground. "You!" cries she, in a little, soft, quick way. _"You!"_ Indeed it seems to her impossible that it can be he. She almost runs to him. If she had quite understood Sir Hastings is impossible to know, for no one has ever asked her since, but certainly the advent of her guardian is a relief to her. "You!" she says again, as if only half believing. Her gaze grows bewildered. If he had never seen her in anything but black before, she had never seen him in aught but rather antiquated morning clothes. Is this really the professor? Her eyes ask the question anxiously. This tall, aristocratic, perfectly appointed man; this man who looks positively _young_. Where are the glasses that until now hid his eyes? Where is that old, old coat? "Yes." Yes, the professor certainly and as disagreeable as possible. His eyes are still aflame; but Perpetua is not afraid of him. She is angry with him, in a measure, but not afraid. One _might_ be afraid of Sir Hastings, but of Mr. Curzon, no! The professor had seen the glad rush of the girl towards him, and a terrible pang of delight had run through all his veins--to be followed by a reaction. She had come to him because she _wanted_ him, because he might be of use to her, not because-- What had Hastings been saying to her? His wrathful eyes are on his brother rather than on her when he says: "You are tired?" "Yes," says Perpetua. "Shall I take you to Gwendoline?" "Yes," says Perpetua again. "Miss Wynter is in my care at present," says Sir Hastings, coming indolently forward. "Shall I take you to Lady Baring?" asks he, addressing Perpetua with a suave smile. "She will come with me," says the professor, with cold decision. "A command!" says Sir Hastings, laughing lightly. "See what it is, Miss Wynter, to have a hard-hearted guardian." He shrugs his shoulders. Perpetua makes him a little bow, and follows the professor out of the conservatory. "If you are tired," says the professor, somewhat curtly, and without looking at her, "I should think the best thing you could do would be to go to bed!" This astounding advice receives but little favor at Miss Wynter's hands. "I am tired of your brother," says she promptly. "He is as tiresome a creation as I know--but not of your sister's party; and--I'm too old to be sent to bed, even by a _Guardian!!"_ She puts a very big capital to the last word. "I don't want to send you to bed," says the professor simply. "Though I think little girls like you----" "I am not a little girl," indignantly. "Certainly you are not a big one," says he. It is an untimely remark. Miss Wynter's hitherto ill-subdued anger now bursts into flame. "I can't help it if I'm not big," cries she. "It isn't my fault. I can't help it either that papa sent me to you. _I_ didn't want to go to you. It wasn't my fault that I was thrown upon your hands. And--and"--her voice begins to tremble--"it isn't my fault either that you _hate_ me." "That I--hate you!" The professor's voice is cold and shocked. "Yes. It is true. You need not deny it. You _know_ you hate me." They are now in an angle of the hall where few people come and go, and are, for the moment, virtually alone. "Who told you that I hated you?" asks the professor in a peremptory sort of way. "No," says she, shaking her head, "I shall not tell you that, but I have heard it all the same." "One hears a great many things if one is foolish enough to listen." Curzon's face is a little pale now. "And--I can guess who has been talking to you." "Why should I not listen? It is true, is it not?" She looks up at him. She seems tremulously anxious for the answer. "You want me to deny it then?" "Oh no, _no!"_ she throws out one hand with a little gesture of mingled anger and regret. "Do you think I want you to _lie_ to me? There I am wrong. After all," with a half smile, sadder than most sad smiles because of the youth and sweetness of it, "I do not blame you. I _am_ a trouble, I suppose, and all troubles are hateful. I"--holding out her hand--"shall take your advice, I think, and go to bed." "It was bad advice," says Curzon, taking the hand and holding it. "Stay up, enjoy yourself, dance----" "Oh! I am not dancing," says she as if offended. "Why not?" eagerly. "Better dance than sleep at your age. You--you mistook me. Why go so soon?" She looks at him with a little whimsical expression. "I shall not know you _at all_, presently," says she. "Your very appearance to-night is strange to me, and now your sentiments! No, I shall not be swayed by you. Good-night, good-bye!" She smiles at him in the same sorrowful little way, and takes a step or two forward. "Perpetua," says the professor sternly, "before you go, you must listen to me. You said just now you would not hear me lie to you--you shall hear only the truth. Whoever told you that I hated you is the most unmitigated liar on record!" Perpetua rubs her fan up and down against her cheek for a little bit. "Well--I'm glad you don't hate me," says she, "but still I'm a worry. Never mind,"--sighing--"I daresay I shan't be so for long." "You mean?" asks the professor anxiously. "Nothing--nothing at all. Good-night. Good-night _indeed."_ "Must you go? Is enjoyment nothing to you?" "Ah! you have killed all that for me," says she. This parting shaft she hurls at him--_malice prepense_. It is effectual. By it she murders sleep as thoroughly as ever did Macbeth. The professor spends the remainder of the night pacing up and down his rooms. CHAPTER XIII. "Through thick and thin, both over bank and bush, In hopes her to attain by hook or crook." "You will begin to think me a fixture," says Hardinge, with a somewhat embarrassed laugh, flinging himself into an armchair. "You know you are always welcome," says the professor gently, if somewhat absently. It is next morning, and he looks decidedly the worse for his sleeplessness. His face seems really old, his eyes are sunk in his head. The breakfast lying untouched upon the table tells its own tale. "Dissipation doesn't agree with you," says Hardinge with a faint smile. "No. I shall give it up," returns Curzon, his laugh a trifle grim. "I was never more surprised in my life than when I saw you at your sister's last evening. I was relieved, too--sometimes it is necessary for a man to go out, and--and see how things are going on with his own eyes." "I wonder when that would be?" asks the professor indifferently. "When a man is a guardian," replies Hardinge promptly, and with evident meaning. The professor glances quickly at him. "You mean----?" says he. "Oh! yes, of course I mean something," says Hardinge impatiently. "But I don't suppose you want me to explain myself. You were there last night--you must have seen for yourself." "Seen what?" "Pshaw!" says Hardinge, throwing up his head, and flinging his cigarette into the empty fireplace. "I saw you go into the conservatory. You found her there, and--_him._ It is beginning to be the chief topic of conversation amongst his friends just now. The betting is already pretty free." "Go on," says the professor. "I needn't go on. You know it now, if you didn't before." "It is you who know it--not I. _Say it!"_ says the professor, almost fiercely. "It is about her?" "Your ward? Yes. Your brother it seems has made up his mind to bestow upon her his hand, his few remaining acres, and," with a sneer, "his spotless reputation." _"Hardinge!"_ cries the professor, springing to his feet as if shot. He is evidently violently agitated. His companion mistakes the nature of his excitement. "Forgive me!" says he quickly. "Of course _nothing_ can excuse my speaking of him like that--to you. But I feel you ought to be told. Miss Wynter is in your care, you are in a measure responsible for her future happiness--the happiness of her whole _life,_ Curzon--and if anything goes wrong with her----" The professor puts up his hand as if to check him. He has grown ashen-grey, and the other hand resting on the back of the chair is visibly trembling. "Nothing shall go wrong with her," says he, in a curious tone. Hardinge regards him keenly. Is this pallor, this unmistakable trepidation, caused only by his dislike to hear his brother's real character exposed? "Well, I have told you," says he coldly. "It is a mistake," says the professor. "He would not dare to approach a young, innocent girl. The most honorable proposal such a man as he could make to her would be basely dishonorable." "Ah! you see it in that light too," says Hardinge, with a touch of relief. "My dear fellow, it is hard for me to discuss him with you, but yet I fear it must be done. Did you notice nothing in his manner last night?" Yes, the professor _had_ noticed something. Now there comes back to him that tall figure stooping over Perpetua, the handsome, leering face bent low--the girl's instinctive withdrawal. "Something must be done," says he. "Yes. And quickly. Young girls are sometimes dazzled by men of his sort. And Per--Miss Wynter-- Look here, Curzon," breaking off hurriedly. "This is _your_ affair, you know. You are her guardian. You should see to it." "I could speak to her." "That would be fatal. She is just the sort of girl to say 'Yes' to him because she was told to say 'No.'" "You seem to have studied her," says the professor quietly. "Well, I confess I have seen a good deal of her of late." "And to some purpose. Your knowledge of her should lead you to making a way out of this difficulty." "I have thought of one," says Hardinge boldly, yet with a quick flush. "You are her guardian. Why not arrange another marriage for her, before this affair with Sir Hastings goes too far?" "There are two parties to a marriage," says the professor, his tone always very low. "Who is it to whom you propose to marry Miss Wynter?" Hardinge, getting up, moves abruptly to the window and back again. "You have known me a long time, Curzon," says he at last. "You--you have been my friend. I have family--position--money--I----" "I am to understand then, that _you_ are a candidate for the hand of my ward," says the professor, slowly, so slowly that it might suggest itself to a disinterested listener that he has great difficulty in speaking at all. "Yes," says Hardinge, very diffidently. He looks appealingly at the professor. "I know perfectly well she might do a great deal better," says he, with a modesty that sits very charmingly upon him. "But if it comes to a choice between me and your brother, I--I think I am the better man. By Jove, Curzon," growing hot, "it's awfully rude of me, I know, but it is so hard to remember that he _is_ your brother." But the professor does not seem offended. He seems, indeed, so entirely unimpressed by Hardinge's last remark, that it may reasonably be supposed he hasn't heard a word of it. "And she?" says he. "Perpetua. Does she----" He hesitates, as if finding it impossible to go on. "Oh! I don't know," says the younger man, with a rather rueful smile. "Sometimes I think she doesn't care for me more than she does for the veriest stranger amongst her acquaintances, and sometimes----" expressive pause. "Yes? Sometimes?" "She has seemed kind." "Kind? How kind?" "Well--friendly. More friendly than she is to others. Last night she let me sit out three waltzes with her, and she only sat out one with your brother." "Is it?" asks the professor, in a dull, monotonous sort of way. "Is it--I am not much in your or her world, you know--is it a very marked thing for a girl to sit out three waltzes with one man?" "Oh, no. Nothing very special. I have known girls do it often, but she is not like other girls, is she?" The professor waves this question aside. "Keep to the point," says he. "Well, _she_ is the point, isn't she? And look here, Curzon, why aren't you of our world? It is your own fault surely; when one sees your sister, your brother, and--and _this,"_ with a slight glance round the dull little apartment, "one cannot help wondering why you----" "Let that go by," says the professor. "I have explained it before. I deliberately chose my own way in life, and I want nothing more than I have. You think, then, that last night Miss Wynter gave you--encouragement?" "Oh! hardly that. And yet--she certainly seemed to like--that is not to _dislike_ my being with her; and once--well,"--confusedly--"that was nothing." "It must have been something." "No, really; and I shouldn't have mentioned it either--not for a moment." The professor's face changes. The apathy that has lain upon it for the past five minutes now gives way to a touch of fierce despair. He turns aside, as if to hide the tell-tale features, and going to the window, gazes sightlessly on the hot, sunny street below. What was it--_what?_ Shall he never have the courage to find out? And is this to be the end of it all? In a flash the coming of the girl is present before him, and now, here is her going. Had he--had she--what _was_ it he meant? No wonder if her girlish fancy had fixed itself on this tall, handsome, young man, with his kindly, merry ways and honest meaning. Ah! that was what she meant perhaps when last night she had told him "she would not be a worry to him _long!"_ Yes, she had meant that; that she was going to marry Hardinge! But to _know_ what Hardinge means! A torturing vision of a little lovely figure, gowned all in white--of a little lovely face uplifted--of another face down bent! No! a thousand times, no! Hardinge would not speak of that--it would be too sacred; and yet this awful doubt---- "Look here. I'll tell you," says Hardinge's voice at this moment. "After all, you are her guardian--her father almost--though I know you scarcely relish your position; and you ought to know about it, and perhaps you can give me your opinion, too, as to whether there was anything in it, you know. The fact is, I,"--rather shamefacedly--"asked her for a flower out of her bouquet, and she gave it. That was all, and," hurriedly, "I don't really believe she meant anything _by_ giving it, only," with a nervous laugh, "I keep hoping she _did!"_ A long, long sigh comes through the professor's lips straight from his heart. Only a flower she gave him! Well---- "What do _you_ think?" asks Hardinge after a long pause. "It is a matter on which I could not think." "But there is this," says Hardinge. "You will forward my cause rather than your brother's, will you not? This is an extraordinary demand to make I know--but--I also know _you."_ "I would rather see her dead than married to my brother," says the professor, slowly, distinctly. "And----?" questions Hardinge. The professor hesitates a moment, and then: "What do you want me to do?" asks he. "Do? 'Say a good word for me' to her; that is the old way of putting it, isn't it? and it expresses all I mean. She reveres you, even if----" "If what?" "She revolts from your power over her. She is high-spirited, you know," says Hardinge. "That is one of her charms, in my opinion. What I want you to do, Curzon, is to--to see her at once--not to-day, she is going to an afternoon at Lady Swanley's--but to-morrow, and to--you know,"--nervously--"to make a formal proposal to her." The professor throws back his head and laughs aloud. Such a strange laugh. "I am to propose to her--I?" says he. "For me, of course. It is very usual," says Hardinge. "And you are her guardian, you know, and----" "Why not propose to her yourself?" says the professor, turning violently upon him. "Why give me this terrible task? Are you a coward, that you shrink from learning your fate except at the hands of another--another who----" "To tell you the truth, that is it," interrupts Hardinge, simply. "I don't wonder at your indignation, but the fact is, I love her so much, that I fear to put it to the touch myself. You _will_ help me, won't you? You see, you stand in the place of her father, Curzon. If you were her father, I should be saying to you just what I am saying now." "True," says the professor. His head is lowered. "There, go," says he, "I must think this over." "But I may depend upon you"--anxiously--"you will do what you can for me?" "I shall do what I can for _her."_ CHAPTER XIV. "Now, by two-headed Janus, Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time." Hardinge is hardly gone, before another--a far heavier--step sounds in the passage outside the professor's door. It is followed by a knock, almost insolent in its loudness and sharpness. "What a hole you do live in," says Sir Hastings, stepping into the room, and picking his way through the books and furniture as if afraid of being tainted by them. "Bless me! what strange beings you scientists are. Rags and bones your surroundings, instead of good flesh and blood. Well, Thaddeus--hardly expected to see _me_ here, eh?" "You want me?" says the professor. "Don't sit down there--those notes are loose; sit here." "Faith, you've guessed it, my dear fellow, I _do_ want you, and most confoundedly badly this time. Your ward, now, Miss Wynter! Deuced pretty little girl, isn't she, and good form too? Wonderfully bred--considering." "I don't suppose you have come here to talk about Miss Wynter's good manners." "By Jove! I have though. You see, Thaddeus, I've about come to the length of my tether, and--er--I'm thinking of turning over a new leaf--reforming, you know--settling down--going in for dulness--domesticity, and all the other deuced lot of it." "It is an excellent resolution, that might have been arrived at years ago with greater merit," says the professor. "A preacher and a scientist in one! Dear sir, you go beyond the possible," says Sir Hastings, with a shrug. "But to business. See here, Thaddeus. I have told you a little of my plans, now hear the rest. I intend to marry--an heiress, _bien entendu_--and it seems to me that your ward, Miss Wynter, will suit me well enough." "And Miss Wynter, will you suit _her_ well enough?" "A deuced sight too well, I should say. Why, the girl is of no family to signify, whereas the Curzons---- It will a better match for her than in her wildest dreams she could have hoped for." "Perhaps, in her wildest dreams, she hoped for a good man, and one who could honestly love her." "Pouf! You are hardly up to date, my dear fellow. Girls, now-a-days, are wise enough to know they can't have everything, and she will get a good deal. Title, position---- I say, Thaddeus, what I want of you is, to--er--to help me in this matter--to--crack me up a bit, eh?--to--_you_ know." The professor is silent, more through disgust than want of anything to say. Staring at the man before him, he knows he is loathsome to him--loathsome, and his own brother! This man, who with some of the best blood of England in his veins, is so far, far below the standard that marks the gentleman. Surely vice is degrading in more ways than one. To the professor, Sir Hastings, with his handsome, dissipated face, stands out, tawdry, hideous, vulgar--why, every word he says is tinged with coarseness and yet, what a pretty boy he used to be, with his soft, sunny hair and laughing eyes---- "You will help me, eh?" persists Sir Hastings, with his little dry chronic cough, that seems to shake his whole frame. "Impossible," says the professor, simply, coldly. _"No?_ Why?" The professor looks at him (a penetrating glance), but says nothing. "Oh! damn it all!" says his brother, his brow darkening. "You had _better,_ you know, if you want the old name kept above water much longer." "You mean----?" says the professor, turning a grave face to his. "Nothing but what is honorable. I tell you I mean to turn over a new leaf. 'Pon my word, I mean _that._ I'm sick of all this old racket, it's killing me. And my title is as good a one as she can find anywhere, and if I'm dipped--rather--her money would pull me straight again, and----" He pauses, struck by something in the Professor's face. "You mean----?" says the latter again, even more slowly. His eyes are beginning to light. "Exactly what I have said," sullenly. "You have heard me." "Yes, I _have_ heard you," cries the professor, flinging aside all restraints and giving way to sudden violent passion--the more violent, coming from one so usually calm and indifferent. "You have come here to-day to try and get possession, not only of the fortune of a young and innocent girl, but of her body and _soul_ as well! And it is me, _me_ whom you ask to be a party to this shameful transaction. Her dead father left her to my care, and am I to sell her to you, that her money may redeem our name from the slough into which _you_ have flung it? Is innocence to be sacrificed that vice may ride abroad again? Look here," says the professor, his face deadly white, "you have come to the wrong man. I shall warn Miss Wynter against marriage with _you,_ as long as there is breath left in my body." Sir Hastings has risen too; _his_ face is dark red; the crimson flood has reached his forehead and dyed it almost black. Now, at this terrible moment, the likeness between the two brothers, so different in spirit, can be seen; the flashing eyes, the scornful lips, the deadly hatred. It is a shocking likeness, yet not to be denied. "What do _you_ mean, damn you?" says Sir Hastings; he sways a little, as if his passion is overpowering him, and clutches feebly at the edge of the table.__ "Exactly what _I_ have said," retorts the professor, fiercely. "You refuse then to go with me in this matter?" _"Finally._ Even if I would, I could not. I--have other views for her." "Indeed! Perhaps those other views include yourself. Are you thinking of reserving the prize for your own special benefit? A penniless guardian--a rich ward; as a situation, it is perfect; full of possibilities." "Take care," says the professor, advancing a step or two. "Tut! Do you think I can't see through your game?" says Sir Hastings, in his most offensive way, which is nasty indeed. "You hope to keep me unmarried. You tell yourself, I can't live much longer, at the pace I'm going. I know the old jargon--I have it by heart--given a year at the most the title and the heiress will both be yours! I can read you--I--" He breaks off to laugh sardonically, and the cough catching him, shakes him horribly. "But, no, by heaven!" cries he. "I'll destroy your hopes yet. I'll disappoint you. I'll marry. I'm a young man yet--yet--with life--_long_ life before me--life----" A terrible change comes over his face, he reels backwards, only saving himself by a blind clinging to a book-case on his right. The professor rushes to him and places his arm round him. With his foot he drags a chair nearer, into which Sir Hastings falls with a heavy groan. It is only a momentary attack, however; in a little while the leaden hue clears away, and, though still ghastly, his face looks more natural. "Brandy," gasps he faintly. The professor holds it to his lips, and after a minute or two he revives sufficiently to be able to sit up and look round him. "Thought you had got rid of me for good and all," says he, with a malicious grin, terrible to see on his white, drawn face. "But I'll beat you yet! There!--Call my fellow--he's below. Can't get about without a damned attendant in the morning, now. But I'll cure all that. I'll see you dead before I go to my own grave. I----" "Take your master to his carriage," says the professor to the man, who is now on the threshold. The maunderings of Sir Hastings--still hardly recovered from his late fit--strike horribly upon his ear, rendering him almost faint. CHAPTER XV. "My love is like the sky, As distant and as high; Perchance she's fair and kind and bright, Perchance she's stormy--tearful quite-- Alas! I scarce know why." It is late in the day when the professor enters Lady Baring's house. He had determined not to wait till the morrow to see Perpetua. It seemed to him that it would be impossible to go through another sleepless night, with this raging doubt, this cruel uncertainty in his heart. He finds her in the library, the soft light of the dying evening falling on her little slender figure. She is sitting in a big armchair, all in black--as he best knows her--with a book upon her knee. She looks charming, and fresh as a new-born flower. Evidently neither lest night's party nor to-day's afternoon have had power to dim her beauty. Sleep had visited _her_ last night, at all events. She springs out of her chair, and throws her book on the table near her. "Why, you are the very last person I expected," says she. "No doubt," says the professor. Who was the _first_ person she had expected? And will Hardinge be here presently to plead his cause in person? "But it was imperative I should come. There is something I have to tell you--to lay before you." "Not a mummy, I trust," says she, a little flippantly. "A proposal," says the professor, coldly. "Much as I know you dislike the idea, still, it was your poor father's wish that I should, in a measure, regulate your life until your coming of age. I am here to-day to let you know--that--Mr. Hardinge has requested me to tell you that he----" The professor pauses, feeling that he is failing miserably. He, the fluent speaker at lectures, and on public platforms, is now bereft of the power to explain one small situation. "What's the matter with Mr. Hardinge," asks Perpetua, "that he can't come here himself? Nothing serious, I hope?" "I am your guardian," says the professor--unfortunately, with all the air of one profoundly sorry for the fact declared, "and he wishes _me_ to tell you that he--is desirous of marrying you." Perpetua stares at him. Whatever bitter thoughts are in her mind, she conceals them. "He is a most thoughtful young man," says she, blandly. "And--and you're another." "I hope I am thoughtful, if I am not young," says the professor, with dignity. Her manner puzzles him. "With regard to Hardinge, I wish you to know that--that I--have known him for years, and that he is in my opinion a strictly honorable, kind-hearted man. He is of good family. He has money. He will probably succeed to a baronetcy--though this is not _certain,_ as his uncle is, comparatively speaking, young still. But even without the title, Hardinge is a man worthy of any woman's esteem, and confidence, and----" He is interrupted by Miss Wynter's giving way to a sudden burst of mirth. It is mirth of the very angriest, but it checks him the more effectually because of that. "You must place great confidence in princes!" says she. "Even _'without _the title, he is worthy of esteem.'" She copies him audaciously. "What has a title got to do with esteem?--and what has esteem got to do with love?" "I should hope----" begins the professor. "You needn't. It has nothing to do with it, nothing _at all._ Go back and tell Mr. Hardinge so; and tell him, too, that when next he goes a-wooing, he had better do it in person." "I am afraid I have damaged my mission," says the professor, who has never once looked at her since his first swift glance. _"Your_ mission?" "Yes. It was mere nervousness that prevented him coming to you first himself. He said he had little to go on, and he said something about a flower that you gave him----" Perpetua makes a rapid movement toward a side table, takes a flower from a bouquet there, and throws it at the professor. There is no excuse to be made for her beyond the fact that her heart feels breaking, and people with broken hearts do strange things every day. "I would give a flower to _anyone!"_ says she in a quick scornful fashion. The professor catches the ungraciously given gift, toys with it, and--keeps it. Is that small action of his unseen? "I hope," he says in a dull way, "that you are not angry with him because he came first to me. It was a sense of duty--I know, I _feel_--compelled him to do it, together with his honest diffidence about your affection for him. Do not let pride stand in the way of----" "Nonsense!" says Perpetua, with a rapid movement of her hand. "Pride has no part in it. I do not care for Mr. Hardinge--I shall not marry him." A little mist seems to gather before the professor's eyes. His glasses seem in the way, he drops them, and now stands gazing at her, as if disbelieving his senses. In fact he does disbelieve in them. "Are you sure?" persists he. "Afterwards you may regret----" "Oh, no!" says she, shaking her head. _"Mr. Hardinge_ will not be the one to cause me regret." "Still, think----" "Think! Do you imagine I have not been thinking?" cries she, with sudden passion. "Do you imagine I do not know why you plead his cause so eloquently? You want to get _rid_ of me. You are _tired_ of me. You always thought me heartless, about my poor father even, and unloving, and--hateful, and----" "Not heartless; what have I done, Perpetua, that you should say that?" "Nothing. That is what I _detest_ about you. If you said outright what you were thinking of me, I could bear it better." "But my thoughts of you. They are----" He pauses. What _are_ they? What are his thoughts of her at all hours, all seasons? "They are always kind," says he, lamely, in a low tone, looking at the carpet. That downward glance condemns him in her eyes--to her it is but a token of his guilt towards her. "They are _not!"_ says she, with a little stamp of her foot that makes the professor jump. "You think of me as a cruel, wicked, worldly girl, who would marry _anyone_ to gain position." Here her fury dies away. It is overcome by something stronger. She trembles, pales, and finally bursts into a passion of tears that have no anger in them, only intense grief. "I do not," says the professor, who is trembling too, but whose utterance is firm. "Whatever my thoughts are, _your_ reading of them is entirely wrong." "Well, at all events you can't deny one thing," says she checking her sobs, and gazing at him again with undying enmity. "You want to get rid of me, you are determined to marry me to some one, so as to get me out of your way. But I shan't marry to please _you._ I needn't either. There is somebody else who wants to marry me besides your--_your_ candidate!" with an indignant glance. "I have had a letter from Sir Hastings this afternoon. And," rebelliously, "I haven't answered it yet." "Then you shall answer it now," says the professor. "And you shall say 'no' to him." "Why? Because you order me?" "Partly because of that. Partly because I trust to your own instincts to see the wisdom of so doing." "Ah! you beg the question," says he, "but I'm not so sure I shall obey you for all that." "Perpetua! Do not speak to me like that, I implore you," says the professor, very pale. "Do you think I am not saying all this for your good? Sir Hastings--he is my brother--it is hard for me to explain myself, but he will not make you happy." "Happy! _You_ think of my happiness?" "Of what else?" A strange yearning look comes into his eyes. "God knows it is _all_ I think of," says he. "And so you would marry me to Mr. Hardinge?" "Hardinge is a good man, and--he loves you." "If so, he is the only one on earth who does," cries the girl bitterly. She turns abruptly away, and struggles with herself for a moment, then looks back at him. "Well, I shall not marry him," says she. "That is in your own hands," says the professor. "But I shall have something to say about the other proposal you speak of." "Do you think I want to marry your brother?" says she. "I tell you no, no, _no!_ A thousand times no! The very fact that he _is_ your brother would prevent me. To be you ward is bad enough, to be your sister-in-law would be insufferable. For all the world I would not be more to you than I am now." "It is a wise decision," says the professor icily. He feels smitten to his very heart's core. Had he ever dreamed of a nearer, dearer tie between them?--if so the dream is broken now. "Decision?" stammers she. "Not to marry my brother." "Not to be more to you, you mean!" "You don't know what you are saying," says the professor, driven beyond his self-control. "You are a mere child, a baby, you speak at random." "What!" cries she, flashing round at him, "will you deny that I have been a trouble to you, that you would have been thankful had you never heard my name?" "You are right," gravely. "I deny nothing. I wish with all my soul I had never heard your name. I confess you have troubled me. I go beyond even _that,_ I declare that you have been my undoing! And now, let us make an end of it. I am a poor man and a busy one, this task your father laid upon my shoulders is too heavy for me. I shall resign my guardianship; Gwendoline--Lady Baring--will accept the position. She likes you, and--you will find it hard to break _her_ heart." "Do you mean," says the girl, "that I have broken yours? _Yours?_ Have I been so bad as that? Yours? I have been wilful, I know, and troublesome, but troublesome people do not break one's heart. What have I done then that yours should be broken?" She has moved closer to him. Her eyes are gazing with passionate question into his. "Do not think of that," says the professor, unsteadily. "Do not let that trouble you. As I just now told you, I am a poor man, and poor men cannot afford such luxuries as hearts." "Yet poor men have them," says the girl in a little low stifled tone. "And--and girls have them too!" There is a long, long silence. To Curzon it seems as if the whole world has undergone a strange, wild upheaval. What had she meant--what? Her words! Her words meant something, but her looks, her eyes, oh, how much more _they_ meant! And yet to listen to her--to believe--he, her guardian, a poor man, and she an heiress! Oh! no. Impossible. "So much the worse for the poor men," says he deliberately. There is no mistaking his meaning. Perpetua makes a little rapid movement towards him--an almost imperceptible one. _Did_ she raise her hands as if to hold them out to him? If so, it is so slight a gesture as scarcely to be remembered afterwards, and at all events, the professor takes no notice of it, presumably, therefore, he does not see it. "It is late," says Perpetua a moment afterwards. "I must go and dress for dinner." _Her_ eyes are down now. She looks pale and shamed. "You have nothing to say, then?" asks the professor, compelling himself to the question. "About what?" "Hardinge." The girl turns a white face to his. "Will you then _compel_ me to marry him?" says she. "Am I"--faintly--"nothing to you? Nothing----" She seems to fade back from him in the growing uncertainty of the light into the shadow of the corner beyond. Curzon makes a step towards her. At this moment the door is thrown suddenly open, and a man--evidently a professional man--advances into the room. "Sir Thaddeus," begins he, in a slow, measured way. The professor stops dead short. Even Perpetua looks amazed. "I regret to be the messenger of bad news, sir," says the solemn man in black. "They told me I should find you here. I have to tell you, Sir Thaddeus, that your brother, the late lamented Sir Hastings, is dead." The solemn man spread his hands abroad. CHAPTER XVI. 'Till the secret be secret no more In the light of one hour as it flies, Be the hour as of suns that expire Or suns that rise.' It is quite a month later. August, hot and sunny, is reigning with quite a mad merriment, making the most of the days that be, knowing full well that the end of the summer is nigh. The air is stifling; up from the warm earth comes the almost overpowering perfume of the late flowers. Perpetua moving amongst the carnations and hollyhocks in her soft white cambric frock, gathers a few of the former in a languid manner to place in the bosom of her frock. There they rest, a spot of blood color upon their white ground. Lady Baring, on the death of her elder brother, had left town for the seclusion of her country home, carrying Perpetua with her. She had grown very fond of the girl, and the fancy she had formed (before Sir Hastings' death) that Thaddeus was in love with the young heiress, and that she would make him a suitable wife, had not suffered in any way through the fact of Sir Thaddeus having now become the head of the family. Perpetua, having idly plucked a few last pansies, looked at them, and as idly flung them away, goes on her listless way through the gardens. A whole _long_ month, and not one word from him! Are his social duties now so numerous that he has forgotten he has a ward? "Well," emphatically, and with a vicious little tug at her big white hat, _"some_ people have strange views about duty." She has almost reached the summer-house, vine-clad, and temptingly cool in all this heat, when a quick step behind her causes her to turn. "They told me you were here," says the professor, coming up with her. He is so distinctly the professor still, in spite of his new mourning, and the better cut of his clothes, and the general air of having been severely looked after--that Perpetua feels at home with him at once. "I have been here for some time," says she calmly. "A whole month, isn't it?" "Yes, I know. Were you going into that green little place. It looks cool." It is cool, and particularly empty. One small seat occupies the back of it, and nothing else at all, except the professor and his ward. "Perpetua!" says he, turning to her. His tone is low, impassioned. "I have come. I could not come sooner, and I _would_ not write. How could I put it all on paper? You remember that last evening?" "I remember," says she faintly. "And all you said?" "All _you_ said." "I said nothing. I did not dare. _Then_ I was too poor a man, too insignificant to dare to lay bare to you the thoughts, the fears, the hopes that were killing me." "Nothing!" echoes she. "Have you then forgotten?" She raises her head, and casts at him a swift, but burning glance. _"Was_ it nothing? You came to plead your friend's cause, I think. Surely that was something? I thought it a great deal. And what was it you said of Mr. Hardinge? Ah! I _have_ forgotten that, but I know how you extolled him--praised him to the skies--recommended him to me as a desirable suitor." She makes an impatient movement, as if to shake something from her. "Why have you come to-day?" asks she. "To plead his cause afresh?" "Not his--to-day." "Whose then? Another suitor, maybe? It seems I have more than even I dreamt of." "I do not know if you have dreamed of this one," says Curzon, perplexed by her manner. Some hope had been in his heart in his journey to her, but now it dies. There is little love truly in her small, vivid face, her gleaming eyes, her parted, scornful lips. "I am not given to dreams," says she, with a petulant shrug_. "I_ know what I mean always. And as I tell you, if you _have_ come here to-day to lay before me, for my consideration, the name of another of your friends who wishes to marry me, why I beg you to save me from suitors. I can make my choice from many, and when I _do_ want to marry, I shall choose for myself." "Still--if you would permit me to name _this_ one," begins Curzon, very humbly, "it can do you no harm to hear of him. And it all lies in your own power. You can, if you will, say yes, or----". He pauses. The pause is eloquent, and full of deep entreaty. "Or no," supplies she calmly. "True! You," with a half defiant, half saucy glance, "are beginning to learn that a guardian cannot control one altogether." "I don't think I ever controlled you, Perpetua." "N--o! Perhaps not. But then you tried to. That's worse." "Do you forbid me then to lay before you--this name--that I----?" "I have told you," says she, "that I can find a name for myself." "You forbid me to speak," says he slowly. _"I_ forbid! A ward forbid her guardian! I should be afraid!" says she, with an extremely naughty little glance at him. "You trifle with me," says the professor slowly, a little sternly, and with uncontrolled despair. "I thought--I believed--I was _mad _enough to imagine, from your manner to me that last night we met, that I was something more than a mere guardian to you." "More than _that._ That seems to be a Herculean relation. What more would you be?" "I am no longer that, at all events." "What!" cries she, flushing deeply. "You--you give me up----" "It is you who give _me_ up." "You say you will no longer be my guardian!" She seems struck with amazement at this declaration on his part. She had not believed him when he had before spoken of his intention of resigning. "But you cannot," says she. "You have promised. Papa _said_ you were to take care of me." "Your father did not know." "He _did._ He said you were the one man in all the world he could trust." "Impossible," says the professor. "A--lover--cannot be a guardian!" His voice has sunk to a whisper. He turns away, and makes a step towards the door. "You are going," cries she, fighting with a desperate desire for tears, that is still strongly allied to anger. "You would leave me. You will be no longer my guardian. Ah! was I not right? Did I not _tell_ you you were in a hurry to get rid of me?" This most unfair accusation rouses the professor to extreme wrath. He turns round and faces her like an enraged lion. "You are a child," says he, in a tone sufficient to make any woman resentful. "It is folly to argue with you." "A child! What are you then?" cries she tremulously. "A _fool!"_ furiously. "I was given my cue, I would not take it. You told me that it was bad enough to be your ward, that you would not on any account be closer to me. _That_ should have been clear to me, yet, like an idiot, I hoped against hope. I took false courage from each smile of yours, each glance, each word. There! Once I leave you now, the chain between us will be broken, we shall never, with _my_ will, meet again. You say you have had suitors since you came down here. You hinted to me that you could mention the name of him you wished to marry. So be it. Mention it to Gwendoline--to any one you like, but not to me." He strides towards the doorway. He has almost turned the corner. "Thaddeus!" cries a small, but frantic voice. If dying he would hear that and turn. She is holding out her hands to him, the tears are running down her lovely cheeks. "It is to you--to _you_ I would tell his name," sobs she, as he returns slowly, unwillingly, but _surely,_ to her. "To you alone." "To me! Go on," says Curzon; "let me hear it. What is the name of this man you want to marry?" "Thaddeus Curzon!" says she, covering her face with her hands, and, indeed, it is only when she feels his arms round her, and his heart beating against hers, that she so far recovers herself as to be able to add, "And a _hideous_ name it is, too!" But this last little firework does no harm. Curzon is too ecstatically happy to take notice of her small impertinence. THE END. Obvious typographical errors silently corrected by the transcriber: chapter 1: =leaving them all _planté la_ as it were,= silently corrected as =leaving them all _planté là_ as it were,= chapter 2: ='From grave to gay,= silently corrected as ="From grave to gay,= chapter 5: =don't you think she would let you take me to the theatre some night? She has come nearer,= silently corrected as =don't you think she would let you take me to the theatre some night?" She has come nearer,= chapter 6: =She asked me to sit down--I obeyed her.= silently corrected as =She asked me to sit down--I obeyed her."= chapter 6:_ ="Won't she!"= _silently corrected as_ =Won't she!=_ chapter 7: =or condemn his honest efforts to enlighten his small section of mankind!"= silently corrected as =or condemn his honest efforts to enlighten his small section of mankind!= chapter 7: =Of course Mrs: Mulcahy--who, no doubt,= silently corrected as =Of course Mrs. Mulcahy--who, no doubt,= chapter 8: ="How many to-morrows is she going to remain here?= silently corrected as =How many to-morrows is she going to remain here?= chapter 10: =His regret is evidently genuine, indeed. to Hardinge the evening= silently corrected as =His regret is evidently genuine, indeed; to Hardinge the evening= chapter 10: ="Oh, you laugh at me." interrupts she= silently corrected as ="Oh, you laugh at me," interrupts she= chapter 12: =she had never seen him in ought but rather antiquated= silently corrected as =she had never seen him in aught but rather antiquated= chapter 12: =says he. "It is an untimely remark. Miss Wynter's hitherto= silently corrected as =says he. It is an untimely remark. Miss Wynter's hitherto__= chapter 12: =cries she. It isn't my fault=. Silently corrected as =cries she. "It isn't my fault=. chapter 12: =if one is foolish enough to listen," Curzon's face is a little pale= silently corrected as =if one is foolish enough to listen." Curzon's face is a little pale= chapter 13: =caused only by his dislike to hear his brother's real character exposed.= silently corrected as =caused only by his dislike to hear his brother's real character exposed?= chapter 13: =at the professor. I know perfectly well= silently corrected as =at the professor. "I know perfectly well= chapter 15: =Well. I shall not marry him= silently corrected as =Well, I shall not marry him= 
19175	----	file was produced from images generously made available by the Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions (www.canadiana.org)) A LITTLE REBEL A NOVEL BY THE DUCHESS _Author of "Her Last Throw," "April's Lady," "Faith and Unfaith," etc., etc._ Montreal: JOHN LOVELL & SON, 23 St. Nicholas Street. Entered according to Act of Parliament in the year 1891, by John Lovell & Son, in the office of the Minister of Agriculture and Statistics at Ottawa. A LITTLE REBEL. CHAPTER I. "Perplex'd in the extreme." "The memory of past favors is like a rainbow, bright, vivid and beautiful." The professor, sitting before his untasted breakfast, is looking the very picture of dismay. Two letters lie before him; one is in his hand, the other is on the table-cloth. Both are open; but of one, the opening lines--that tell of the death of his old friend--are all he has read; whereas he has read the other from start to finish, already three times. It is from the old friend himself, written a week before his death, and very urgent and very pleading. The professor has mastered its contents with ever-increasing consternation. Indeed so great a revolution has it created in his mind, that his face--(the index of that excellent part of him)--has, for the moment, undergone a complete change. Any ordinary acquaintance now entering the professor's rooms (and those acquaintances might be whittled down to quite a _little_ few), would hardly have known him. For the abstraction that, as a rule, characterizes his features--the way he has of looking at you, as if he doesn't see you, that harasses the simple, and enrages the others--is all gone! Not a trace of it remains. It has given place to terror, open and unrestrained. "A girl!" murmurs he in a feeble tone, falling back in his chair. And then again, in a louder tone of dismay--"A _girl_!" He pauses again, and now again gives way to the fear that is destroying him--"A _grown_ girl!" After this, he seems too overcome to continue his reflections, so goes back to the fatal letter. Every now and then, a groan escapes him, mingled with mournful remarks, and extracts from the sheet in his hand-- "Poor old Wynter! Gone at last!" staring at the shaking signature at the end of the letter that speaks so plainly of the coming icy clutch that should prevent the poor hand from forming ever again even such sadly erratic characters as these. "At least," glancing at the half-read letter on the cloth--"_this_ tells me so. His solicitor's, I suppose. Though what Wynter could want with a solicitor----Poor old fellow! He was often very good to me in the old days. I don't believe I should have done even as much as I _have_ done, without him.... It must be fully ten years since he threw up his work here and went to Australia! ... ten years. The girl must have been born before he went,"--glances at letter--"'My child, my beloved Perpetua, the one thing on earth I love, will be left entirely alone. Her mother died nine years ago. She is only seventeen, and the world lies before her, and never a soul in it to care how it goes with her. I entrust her to you--(a groan). To you I give her. Knowing that if you are living, dear fellow, you will not desert me in my great need, but will do what you can for my little one.'" "But what is that?" demands the professor, distractedly. He pushes his spectacles up to the top of his head, and then drags them down again, and casts them wildly into the sugar-bowl. "What on earth am I to do with a girl of seventeen? If it had been a boy! even _that_ would have been bad enough--but a girl! And, of course--I know Wynter--he has died without a penny. He was bound to do that, as he always lived without one. _Poor_ old Wynter!"--as if a little ashamed of himself. "I don't see how I can afford to put her out to nurse." He pulls himself up with a start. "To nurse! a girl of seventeen! She'll want to be going out to balls and things--at her age." As if smitten to the earth by this last awful idea, he picks his glasses out of the sugar and goes back to the letter. "You will find her the dearest girl. Most loving, and tender-hearted; and full of life and spirits." "Good heavens!" says the professor. He puts down the letter again, and begins to pace the room. "'Life and spirits.' A sort of young kangaroo, no doubt. What will the landlady say? I shall leave these rooms"--with a fond and lingering gaze round the dingy old apartment that hasn't an article in it worth ten sous--"and take a small house--somewhere--and ... But--er----It won't be respectable, I think. I--I've heard things said about--er--things like that. It's no good in _looking_ an old fogey, if you aren't one; it's no earthly use"--standing before a glass and ruefully examining his countenance--"in looking fifty if you are only thirty-four. It will be a scandal," says the professor mournfully. "They'll _cut_ her, and they'll cut me, and--what the _deuce_ did Wynter mean by leaving me his daughter? A real live girl of seventeen! It'll be the death of me," says the professor, mopping his brow. "What"----wrathfully----"that determined spendthrift meant, by flinging his family on _my_ shoulders, I----Oh! _Poor_ old Wynter!" Here he grows remorseful again. Abuse a man dead and gone, and one, too, who had been good to him in many ways when he, the professor, was younger than he is now, and had just quarrelled with a father who was always only too prone to quarrel with anyone who gave him the chance seems but a poor thing. The professor's quarrel with his father had been caused by the young man's refusal to accept a Government appointment--obtained with some difficulty--for the very insufficient and, as it seemed to his father, iniquitous reason, that he had made up his mind to devote his life to science. Wynter, too, was a scientist of no mean order, and would, probably, have made his mark in the world, if the world and its pleasures had not made their mark on him. He had been young Curzon's coach at one time, and finding the lad a kindred spirit, had opened out to him his own large store of knowledge, and steeped him in that great sea of which no man yet has drank enough--for all begin, and leave it, athirst. Poor Wynter! The professor, turning in his stride up and down the narrow, uncomfortable room, one of the many that lie off the Strand, finds his eyes resting on that other letter--carelessly opened, barely begun. From Wynter's solicitor! It seems ridiculous that Wynter should have _had_ a solicitor. With a sigh, he takes it up, opens it out and begins to read it. At the end of the second page, he starts, re-reads a sentence or two, and suddenly his face becomes illuminated. He throws up his head. He cackles a bit. He looks as if he wants to say something very badly--"Hurrah," probably--only he has forgotten how to do it, and finally goes back to the letter again, and this time--the third time--finishes it. Yes. It is all right! Why on earth hadn't he read it _first_? So, the girl is to be sent to live with her aunt after all--an old lady--maiden lady. Evidently living somewhere in Bloomsbury. Miss Jane Majendie. Mother's sister evidently. Wynter's sisters would never have been old maids if they had resembled him, which probably they did--if he had any. What a handsome fellow he was! and such a good-natured fellow too. The professor colors here in his queer sensitive way, and pushes his spectacles up and down his nose, in another nervous fashion of his. After all, it was only this minute he had been accusing old Wynter of anything but good nature. Well! He had wronged him there. He glances at the letter again. He has only been appointed her guardian, it seems. Guardian of her fortune, rather than of her. The old aunt will have the charge of her body, the--er--pleasure of her society--_he_, of the estate only. Fancy Wynter, of all men, dying rich--actually _rich_. The professor pulls his beard, and involuntarily glances round the somewhat meagre apartment, that not all his learning, not all his success in the scientific world--and it has been not unnoteworthy, so far--has enabled him to improve upon. It has helped him to live, no doubt, and distinctly outside the line of _want_, a thing to be grateful for, as his family having in a measure abandoned him, he, on his part, had abandoned his family in a _measure_ also (and with reservations), and it would have been impossible to him, of all men, to confess himself beaten, and return to them for assistance of any kind. He could never have enacted the part of the prodigal son. He knew this in earlier days, when husks were for the most part all he had to sustain him. But the mind requires not even the material husk, it lives on better food than that, and in his case mind had triumphed over body, and borne it triumphantly to a safe, if not as yet to a victorious, goal. Yet Wynter, the spendthrift, the erstwhile master of him who now could be _his_ master, has died, leaving behind him a fortune. What was the sum? He glances back to the sheet in his hand and verifies his thought. Yes--eighty thousand pounds! A good fortune even in these luxurious days. He has died worth £80,000, of which his daughter is sole heiress! Before the professor's eyes rises a vision of old Wynter. They used to call him "old," those boys who attended his classes, though he was as light-hearted as the best of them, and as handsome as a dissipated Apollo. They had all loved him, if they had not revered him, and, indeed, he had been generally regarded as a sort of living and lasting joke amongst them. Curzon, holding the letter in his hand, and bringing back to his memory the handsome face and devil-may-care expression of his tutor, remembers how the joke had widened, and reached its height when, at forty years of age, old Wynter had flung up his classes, leaving them all _planté la_ as it were, and declared his intention of starting life anew and making a pile for himself in some new world. Well! it had not been such a joke after all, if they had only known. Wynter _had_ made that mythical "pile," and had left his daughter an heiress! Not only an heiress, but a gift to Miss Jane Majendie, of somewhere in Bloomsbury. The professor's disturbed face grows calm again. It even occurs to him that he has not eaten his breakfast. He so _often_ remembers this, that it does not trouble him. To pore over his books (that are overflowing every table and chair in the uncomfortable room) until his eggs are India-rubber, and his rashers gutta-percha, is not a fresh experience. But though this morning both eggs and rasher have attained a high place in the leather department, he enters on his sorry repast with a glad heart. Sweet are the rebounds from jeopardy to joy! And he has so _much_ of joy! Not only has he been able to shake from his shoulders that awful incubus--and ever-present ward--but he can be sure that the absent ward is so well-off with regard to this word's goods, that he need never give her so much as a passing thought--dragged, _torn_ as that thought would be from his beloved studies. The aunt, of course, will see about her fortune. _He_ has has only a perfunctory duty--to see that the fortune is not squandered. But he is safe there. Maiden ladies _never_ squander! And the girl, being only seventeen, can't possibly squander it herself for some time. Perhaps he ought to call on her, however. Yes, of course, he must call. It is the usual thing to call on one's ward. It will be a terrible business no doubt. _All_ girls belong to the genus nuisance. And _this_ girl will be at the head of her class no doubt. "Lively, spirited," so far went the parent. A regular hoyden may be read between those kind parental lines. The poor professor feels hot again with nervous agitation as he imagines an interview between him and the wild, laughing, noisy, perhaps horsey (they all ride in Australia) young woman to whom he is bound to make his bow. How soon must this unpleasant interview take place? Once more he looks back to the solicitor's letter. Ah! On Jan. 3rd her father, poor old Wynter, had died, and on the 26th of May, she is to be "on view" at Bloomsbury! and it is now the 2nd of February. A respite! Perhaps, who knows? She may never arrive at Bloomsbury at all! There are young men in Australia, a hoyden, as far as the professor has read (and that is saying a good deal), would just suit the man in the bush. CHAPTER II. "A maid so sweet that her mere sight made glad men sorrowing." Nevertheless the man in the bush doesn't get her. Time has run on a little bit since the professor suffered many agonies on a certain raw February morning, and now it is the 30th of May, and a glorious finish too to that sweet month. Even into this dingy old room, where at a dingy old table the professor sits buried in piles of notes, and with sheets of manuscript knee-deep scattered around him, the warm glad sun is stealing; here and there, the little rays are darting, lighting up a dusty corner here, a hidden heap of books there. It is, as yet, early in the afternoon, and the riotous beams, who are no respecter of persons, and who honor the righteous and the ungodly alike, are playing merrily in this sombre chamber, given so entirely up to science and its prosy ways, daring even now to dance lightly on the professor's head, which has begun to grow a little bald. "The golden sun, in splendor likest heav'n," is proving perhaps a little too much for the tired brain in the small room. Either that, or the incessant noises in the street outside, which have now been enriched by the strains of a broken-down street piano, causes him to lay aside his pen and lean back in a weary attitude in his chair. What a day it is! How warm! An hour ago he had delivered a brilliant lecture on the everlasting Mammoth (a fresh specimen just arrived from Siberia), and is now paying the penalty of greatness. He had done well--he knew that--he had been _interesting_, that surest road to public favor--he had been applauded to the echo; and now, worn out, tired in mind and body, he is living over again his honest joy in his success. In this life, however, it is not given us to be happy for long. A knock at the professor's door brings him back to the present, and the knowledge that the landlady--a stout, somewhat erratic person of fifty--is standing on his threshold, a letter in her hand. "For you, me dear," says she, very kindly, handing the letter to the professor. She is perhaps the one person of his acquaintance who has been able to see through the professor's gravity and find him _young_. "Thank you," says he. He takes the letter indifferently, opens it languidly, and----Well, there isn't much languor after the perusal of it. The professor sits up; literally this time slang is unknown to him; and re-reads it. _That girl has come!_ There can't be any doubt of it. He had almost forgotten her existence during these past tranquil months, when no word or hint about her reached him, but now, _here_ she is at last, descending upon him like a whirlwind. A line in a stiff, uncompromising hand apprises the professor of the unwelcome fact. The "line" is signed by "Jane Majendie," therefore there can be no doubt of the genuineness of the news contained in it. Yes! that girl _has_ come! The professor never swears, or he might now perhaps have given way to reprehensible words. Instead of that, he pulls himself together, and determines on immediate action. To call upon this ward of his is a thing that must be done sooner or later, then why not sooner? Why not at once? The more unpleasant the duty, the more necessity to get it off one's mind without delay. He pulls the bell. The landlady appears again. "I must go out," says the professor, staring a little helplessly at her. "An' a good thing too," says she. "A saint's day ye might call it, wid the sun. An' where to, sir, dear? Not to thim rascally sthudents, I do thrust?" "No, Mrs. Mulcahy. I--I am going to see a young lady," says the professor simply. "The divil!" says Mrs. Mulcahy with a beaming smile. "Faix, that's a turn the right way anyhow. But have ye thought o' yer clothes, me dear?" "Clothes?" repeats the professor vaguely. "Arrah, wait," says she, and runs away lightly, in spite of her fifty years and her too, too solid flesh, and presently returns with the professor's best coat and a clothes brush that, from its appearance, might reasonably be supposed to have been left behind by Noah when he stepped out of the Ark. With this latter (having put the coat on him) she proceeds to belabor the professor with great spirit, and presently sends him forth shining--if not _in_ternally, at all events _ex_ternally. In truth the professor's mood is not a happy one. Sitting in the hansom that is taking him all too swiftly to his destination, he dwells with terror on the girl--the undesired ward--who has been thrust upon him. He has quite made up his mind about her. An Australian girl! One knows what to expect _there_! Health unlimited; strength tremendous; and noise--_much_ noise. Yes, she is sure to be a _big_ girl. A girl with branching limbs, and a laugh you could hear a mile off. A young woman with no sense of the fitness of things, and a settled conviction that nothing could shake, that "'Strailia" is _the_ finest country on earth! A bouncing creature who _never_ sits down; to whom rest or calm is unknown, and whose highest ambition will be to see the Tower and the wax-works. Her hair is sure to be untidy; hanging probably in straight, black locks over her forehead, and her frock will look as if it had been pitchforked on to her, and requires only the insubordination of _one_ pin to leave her without it again. The professor is looking pale, but has on him all the air of one prepared for _anything_ as the maid shows him into the drawing-room of the house where Miss Jane Majendie lives. His thoughts are still full of her niece. _Her_ niece, poor woman, and _his_ ward--poor _man_! when the door opens and _some one_ comes in. _Some one!_ The professor gets slowly on to his feet, and stares at the advancing apparition. Is it child or woman, this fair vision? A hard question to answer! It is quite easy to read, however, that "some one" is very lovely! "It is you; Mr. Curzon, is it not?" says the vision. Her voice is sweet and clear, a little petulant perhaps, but still _very_ sweet. She is quite small--a _little_ girl--and clad in deep mourning. There is something pathetic about the dense black surrounding such a radiant face, and such a childish figure. Her eyes are fixed on the professor, and there is evident anxiety in their hazel depths; her soft lips are parted; she seems hesitating as if not knowing whether she shall smile or sigh. She has raised both her hands as if unconsciously, and is holding them clasped against her breast. The pretty fingers are covered with costly rings. Altogether she makes a picture--this little girl, with her brilliant eyes, and mutinous mouth, and soft black clinging gown. Dainty-sweet she looks, "Sweet as is the bramble-flower." "Yes," says the professor, in a hesitating way, as if by no means certain of the fact. He is so vague about it, indeed, that "some one's" dark eyes take a mischievous gleam. "Are you _sure_?" says she, and looks up at him suddenly, a little sideways perhaps, as if half frightened, and gives way to a naughty sort of little laugh. It rings through the room, this laugh, and has the effect of frightening her _altogether_ this time. She checks herself, and looks first down at the carpet with the big roses on it, where one little foot is wriggling in a rather nervous way, and then up again at the professor, as if to see if he is thinking bad things of her. She sighs softly. "Have you come to see me or Aunt Jane?" asks she; "because Aunt Jane is out--_I'm glad to say_"--this last pianissimo. "To see you," says the professor absently. He is thinking! He has taken her hand, and held it, and dropped it again, all in a state of high bewilderment. Is _this_ the big, strong, noisy girl of his imaginings? The bouncing creature with untidy hair, and her clothes pitchforked on to her? "Well--I hoped so," says she, a little wistfully as it seems to him, every trace of late sauciness now gone, and with it the sudden shyness. After many days the professor grows accustomed to these sudden transitions that are so puzzling yet so enchanting, these rapid, inconsequent, but always lovely changes "From grave to gay, from lively to severe." "Won't you sit down?" says his small hostess gently, touching a chair near her with her slim fingers. "Thank you," says the professor, and then stops short. "You are----" "Your ward," says she, ever so gently still, yet emphatically. It is plain that she is now on her very _best_ behavior. She smiles up at him in a very encouraging way. "And you are my guardian, aren't you?" "Yes," says the professor, without enthusiasm. He has seated himself, not on the chair she has pointed out to him, but on a very distant lounge. He is conscious of a feeling of growing terror. This lovely child has created it, yet why, or how? Was ever guardian mastered by a ward before? A desire to escape is filling him, but he has got to do his duty to his dead friend, and this is part of it. He has retired to the far-off lounge with a view to doing it as distantly as possible, but even this poor subterfuge fails him. Miss Wynter, picking up a milking-stool, advances leisurely towards him, and seating herself upon it just in front of him, crosses her hands over her knees and looks expectantly up at him with a charming smile. "_Now_ we can have a good talk," says she. CHAPTER III. "And if you dreamed how a friend's smile And nearness soothe a heart that's sore, You might be moved to stay awhile Before my door." "About?" begins the professor, and stammers, and ceases. "Everything," says she, with a little nod. "It is impossible to talk to Aunt Jane. She doesn't talk, she only argues, and always wrongly. But you are different. I can see that. Now tell me,"--she leans even more forward and looks intently at the professor, her pretty brows wrinkled as if with extreme and troublous thought--"What are the duties of a guardian?" "Eh?" says the professor. He moves his glasses up to his forehead and then pulls them down again. Did ever anxious student ask him question so difficult of answer as this one--that this small maiden has propounded? "You can think it over," says she most graciously. "There is no hurry, and I am quite aware that one isn't made a guardian _every_ day. Do you think you could make it out whilst I count forty?" "I think I could make it out more quickly if you didn't count at all," says the professor, who is growing warm. "The duties of a guardian--are--er--to--er--to see that one's ward is comfortable and happy." "Then there is a great deal of duty for _you_ to do," says she solemnly, letting her chin slip into the hollow of her hand. "I know--I'm sure of it," says the professor with a sigh that might be called a groan. "But your aunt, Miss Majendie--your mother's sister--can----" "I don't believe she's my mother's sister," says Miss Wynter calmly. "I have seen my mother's picture. It is lovely! Aunt Jane was a changeling--I'm sure of it. But never mind her. You were going to say----?" "That Miss Majendie, who is virtually your guardian--can explain it all to you much better than I can." "Aunt Jane is _not_ my guardian!" The mild look of enquiry changes to one of light anger. The white brow contracts. "And certainly she could never make one happy and comfortable. Well--what else?" "She will look after----" "I told you I don't care about Aunt Jane. Tell me what you can do----" "See that your fortune is not----" "I don't care about my fortune either," with a little gesture. "But I _do_ care about my happiness. Will you see to _that_?" "Of course," says the professor gravely. "Then you will take me away from Aunt Jane!" The small vivacious face is now all aglow. "I am not happy with Aunt Jane. I"--clasping her hands, and letting a quick, vindictive fire light her eyes--"I _hate_ Aunt Jane. She says things about poor papa that----_Oh!_ how I hate her!" "But--you shouldn't--you really should not. I feel certain you ought not," says the professor, growing vaguer every moment. "Ought I not?" with a quick little laugh that is all anger and no mirth. "I _do_ though, for all that! I"--pausing, and regarding him with a somewhat tragic air that sits most funnily upon her--"am not going to stay here much longer!" "_What?_" says the professor aghast. "But my dear----Miss Wynter, I'm afraid you _must_." "Why? What is she to me?" "Your aunt." "That's nothing--nothing at all--even a _guardian_ is better than that. And you are my guardian. Why," coming closer to him and pressing five soft little fingers in an almost feverish fashion upon his arm, "why can't _you_ take me away?" _"I!"_ "Yes, yes, you." She comes even nearer to him, and the pressure of the small fingers grows more eager--there is something in them now that might well be termed coaxing. "_Do_," says she. "Oh! Impossible!" says the professor. The color mounts to his brow. He almost _shakes_ off the little clinging fingers in his astonishment and agitation. Has she no common-sense--no knowledge of the things that be? She has drawn back from him and is regarding him somewhat strangely. "Impossible to leave Aunt Jane?" questions she. It is evident she has not altogether understood, and yet is feeling puzzled. "Well," defiantly, "we shall see!" "_Why_ don't you like your Aunt Jane?" asks the professor distractedly. He doesn't feel nearly as fond of his dead friend as he did an hour ago. "Because," lucidly, "she _is_ Aunt Jane. If she were _your_ Aunt Jane you would know." "But my dear----" "I really wish," interrupts Miss Wynter petulantly, "you wouldn't call me 'my dear.' Aunt Jane calls me that when she is going to say something horrid to me. Papa----" she pauses suddenly, and tears rush to her dark eyes. "Yes. What of your father?" asks the professor hurriedly, the tears raising terror in his soul. "You knew him--speak to me of him," says she, a little tremulously. "I knew him well indeed. He was very good to me, when--when I was younger. I was very fond of him." "He was good to everyone," says Miss Wynter, staring hard at the professor. It is occurring to her that this grave sedate man with his glasses could never have been younger. He must always have been older than the gay, handsome, _debonnaire_ father, who had been so dear to her. "What are you going to tell me about him?" asks the professor gently. "Only what he used to call me--_Doatie_! I suppose," wistfully, "you couldn't call me that?" "I am afraid not," says the professor, coloring even deeper. "I'm sorry," says she, her young mouth taking a sorrowful curve. "But don't call me Miss Wynter, at all events, or 'my dear.' I do so want someone to call me by my Christian name," says the poor child sadly. "Perpetua--is it not?" says the professor, ever so kindly. "No--'Pet,'" corrects she. "It's shorter, you know, and far easier to say." "Oh!" says the professor. To him it seems very difficult to say. Is it possible she is going to ask him to call her by that familiar--almost affectionate--name? The girl must be mad. "Yes--much easier," says Perpetua; "you will find that out, after a bit, when you have got used to calling me by it. Are you going now, Mr. Curzon? Going _so soon_?" "I have classes," says the professor. "Students?" says she. "You teach them? I wish I was a student. I shouldn't have been given over to Aunt Jane then, or," with a rather wilful laugh, "if I had been I should have led her, oh!" rapturously, "_such a life_!" It suggests itself to the professor that she is quite capable of doing that now, though she is _not_ of the sex male. "Good-bye," says he, holding out his hand. "You will come soon again?" demands she, laying her own in it. "Next week--perhaps." "Not till then? I shall be dead then," says she, with a rather mirthless laugh this time. "Do you know that you and Aunt Jane are the only two people in all London whom I know?" "That is terrible," says he, quite sincerely. "Yes. Isn't it?" "But soon you will know people. Your aunt has acquaintances. They--surely they will call; they will see you--they----" "Will take an overwhelming fancy to me? just as you have done," says she, with a quick, rather curious light in her eyes, and a tilting of her pretty chin. "There! _go_," says she, "I have some work to do; and you have your classes. It would never do for you to miss _them_. And as for next week!--make it next month! I wouldn't for the world be a trouble to you in any way." "I shall come next week," says the professor, troubled in somewise by the meaning in her eyes. What is it? Simple loneliness, or misery downright? How young she looks--what a child! That tragic air does not belong to her of right. She should be all laughter, and lightness, and mirth---- "As you will," says she; her tone has grown almost haughty; there is a sense of remorse in his breast as he goes down the stairs. Has he been kind to old Wynter's child? Has he been true to his trust? There had been an expression that might almost be termed despair in the young face as he left her. Her face, with that expression on it, haunts him all down the road. Yes. He will call next week. What day is this? Friday. And Friday next he is bound to deliver a lecture somewhere--he is not sure where, but certainly somewhere. Well, Saturday then he might call. But that---- Why not call Thursday--or even Wednesday? Wednesday let it be. He needn't call every week, but he had said something about calling next week, and--she wouldn't care, of course--but one should keep their word. What a strange little face she has--and strange manners, and--not able to get on evidently with her present surroundings. What an old devil that aunt must be. CHAPTER IV. "Dear, if you knew what tears they shed, Who live apart from home and friend, To pass my house, by pity led, Your steps would tend." He makes the acquaintance of the latter very shortly. But requires no spoon to sup with her, as Miss Majendie's invitations to supper, or indeed to luncheon, breakfast or dinner, are so few and rare that it might be rash for a hungry man to count on them. The professor, who has felt it to be his duty to call on his ward regularly every week, has learned to know and (I regret to say) to loathe that estimable spinster christened Jane Majendie. After every visit to her house he has sworn to himself that "_this one_" shall be his last, and every Wednesday following he has gone again. Indeed, to-day being Wednesday in the heart of June, he may be seen sitting bolt upright in a hansom on his way to the unlovely house that holds Miss Jane Majendie. As he enters the dismal drawing-room, where he finds Miss Majendie and her niece, it becomes plain, even to his inexperienced brain, that there has just been a row on somewhere. Perpetua is sitting on a distant lounge, her small vivacious face one thunder-cloud. Miss Majendie, sitting on the hardest chair this hideous room contains, is smiling. A terrible sign. The professor pales before it. "I am glad to see you, Mr. Curzon," says Miss Majendie, rising and extending a bony hand. "As Perpetua's guardian, you may perhaps have some influence over her. I say 'perhaps' advisedly, as I scarcely dare to hope _anyone_ could influence a mind so distorted as hers." "What is it?" asks the professor nervously--of Perpetua, not of Miss Majendie. "I'm dull," says Perpetua sullenly. The professor glances keenly at the girl's downcast face, and then at Miss Majendie. The latter glance is a question. "You hear her," says Miss Majendie coldly--she draws her shawl round her meagre shoulders, and a breath through her lean nostrils that may be heard. "Perhaps _you_ may be able to discover her meaning." "What is it?" asks the professor, turning to the girl, his tone anxious, uncertain. Young women with "wrongs" are unknown to him, as are all other sorts of young women for the matter of that. And _this_ particular young woman looks a little unsafe at the present moment. "I have told you! I am tired of this life. I am dull--stupid. I want to go out." Her lovely eyes are flashing, her face is white--her lips trembling. "_Take_ me out," says she suddenly. "Perpetua!" exclaims Miss Majendie. "How unmaidenly! How immodest!" Perpetua looks at her with large, surprised eyes. "Why?" says she. "I really think," interrupts the professor hurriedly, who sees breakers ahead, "if I were to take Perpetua for a walk--a drive--to--er--to some place or other--it might destroy this _ennui_ of which she complains. If you will allow her to come out with me for an hour or so, I----" "If you are waiting for _my_ sanction, Mr. Curzon, to that extraordinary proposal, you will wait some time," says Miss Majendie slowly, frigidly. She draws the shawl still closer, and sniffs again. "But----" "There is no 'But,' sir. The subject doesn't admit of argument. In my young days, and I should think"--scrutinizing him exhaustively through her glasses--"_in yours_, it was not customary for a young _gentlewoman_ to go out walking, alone, with '_a man_'!!" If she had said with a famished tiger, she couldn't have thrown more horror into her tone. The professor had shrunk a little from that classing of her age with his, but has now found matter for hope in it. "Still--my age--as you suggest--so far exceeds Perpetua's--I am indeed so much older than she is, that I might be allowed to escort her wherever it might please her to go." "The _real_ age of a man now-a-days, sir, is a thing impossible to know," says Miss Majendie. "You wear glasses--a capital disguise! I mean nothing offensive--_so far_--sir, but it behoves me to be careful, and behind those glasses, who can tell what demon lurks? Nay! No offence! An _innocent_ man would _feel_ no offence!" "Really, Miss Majendie!" begins the poor professor, who is as red as though he were the guiltiest soul alive. "Let me proceed, sir. We were talking of the ages of men." _"We?"_ "Certainly! It was you who suggested the idea, that, being so much older than my niece, Miss Wynter, you could therefore escort her here and there--in fact _everywhere_--in fact"--with awful meaning--"_any_ where!" "I assure you, madam," begins the professor, springing to his feet--Perpetua puts out a white hand. "Ah! let her talk," says she. "_Then_ you will understand." "But men's ages, sir, are a snare and a delusion!" continues Miss Majendie, who has mounted her hobby, and will ride it to the death. "Who can tell the age of any man in this degenerate age? We look at their faces, and say _he_ must be so and so, and _he_ a few years younger, but looks are vain, they tell us nothing. Some look old, because they _are_ old, some look old--through _vice_!" The professor makes an impatient gesture. But Miss Majendie is equal to most things. "'Who excuses himself _accuses_ himself,'" quotes she with terrible readiness. "Why that gesture, Mr. Curzon? I made no mention of _your_ name. And, indeed, I trust your age would place you outside of any such suspicion, still, I am bound to be careful where my niece's interests are concerned. You, as her guardian, if a _faithful_ guardian" (with open doubt, as to this, expressed in eye and pointed finger), "should be the first to applaud my caution." "You take an extreme view," begins the professor, a little feebly, perhaps. That eye and that pointed finger have cowed him. "One's views _have_ to be extreme in these days if one would continue in the paths of virtue," said Miss Majendie. "_Your_ views," with a piercing and condemnatory glance, "are evidently _not_ extreme. One word for all, Mr. Curzon, and this argument is at an end. I shall not permit my niece, with my permission, to walk with you or any other man whilst under my protection." "I daresay you are right--no doubt--no doubt," mumbles the professor, incoherently, now thoroughly frightened and demoralized. Good heavens! What an awful old woman! And to think that this poor child is under her care. He happens at this moment to look at the poor child, and the scorn _for him_ that gleams in her large eyes perfects his rout. To say that she was _right_! "If Perpetua wishes to go for a walk," says Miss Majendie, breaking through a mist of angry feeling that is only half on the surface, "I am here to accompany her." "I don't want to go for a walk--with you," says Perpetua, rudely it must be confessed, though her tone is low and studiously reserved. "I don't want to go for a walk _at all_." She pauses, and her voice chokes a little, and then suddenly she breaks into a small passion of vehemence. "I want to go somewhere, to _see_ something," she cries, gazing imploringly at Curzon. "To _see_ something!" says her aunt, "why it was only last Sunday I took you to Westminster Abbey, where you saw the grandest edifice in all the world." "Most interesting place," says the professor, _sotto voce_, with a wild but mad hope of smoothing matters down for Perpetua's sake. If it _was_ for Perpetua's sake, she proves herself singularly ungrateful. She turns upon him a small vivid face, alight with indignation. "You support her," cries she. "_You!_ Well, I shall tell you! I"--defiantly--"I don't want to go to churches at all. I want to go to _theatres_! There!" There is an awful silence. Miss Majendie's face is a picture! If the girl had said she wanted to go to the devil instead of to the theatre, she could hardly have looked more horrified. She takes a step forward, closer to Perpetua. "Go to your room! And pray--_pray_ for a purer mind!" says she. "This is hereditary, all this! Only prayer can cast it out. And remember, this is the last word upon this subject. As long as you are under _my_ roof you shall never go to a sinful place of amusement. I forbid you ever to speak of theatres again." "I shall not be forbidden!" says Perpetua. She confronts her aunt with flaming eyes and crimson cheeks. "I _do_ want to go to the theatre, and to balls, and dances, and _everything_. I"--passionately, and with a most cruel, despairing longing in her young voice, "want to dance, to laugh, to sing, to amuse myself--to be the gayest thing in all the world!" She stops as if exhausted, surprised perhaps at her own daring, and there is silence for a moment, a _little_ moment, and then Miss Majendie looks at her. "'The gayest thing in all the world:' _and your father only four months dead_!" says she, slowly, remorselessly. All in a moment, as it were, the little crimson angry face grows white--white as death itself. The professor, shocked beyond words, stands staring, and marking the sad changes in it. Perpetua is trembling from head to foot. A frightened look has come into her beautiful eyes--her breath comes quickly. She is as a thing at bay--hopeless, horrified. Her lips part as if she would say something. But no words come. She casts one anguished glance at the professor, and rushes from the room. It was but a momentary glimpse into a heart, but it was terrible. The professor turns upon Miss Majendie in great wrath. "That was cruel--uncalled for!" says he, a strange feeling in his heart that he has not time to stop and analyze _then_. "How could you hurt her so? Poor child! Poor girl! She _loved_ him!" "Then let her show respect to his memory," says Miss Majendie vindictively. She is unmoved--undaunted. "She was not wanting in respect." His tone is hurried. This woman with the remorseless eye is too much for the gentle professor. "All she _does_ want is change, amusement. She is young. Youth must enjoy." "In moderation--and in proper ways," says Miss Majendie stonily. "In moderation," she repeats mechanically, almost unconsciously. And then suddenly her wrath gets the better of her, and she breaks out into a violent range. That one should dare to question _her_ actions! "Who are _you_?" demands she fiercely, "that you should presume to dictate right and wrong to _me_." "I am Miss Wynter's guardian," says the professor, who begins to see visions--and all the lower regions let loose at once. Could an original Fury look more horrible than this old woman, with her grey nodding head, and blind vindictive passion. He hears his voice faltering, and knows that he is edging towards the door. After all, what can the bravest man do with an angry old woman, except to get away from her as quickly as possible? And the professor, though brave enough in the usual ways, is not brave where women are concerned. "Guardian or no guardian, I will thank you to remember you are in _my_ house!" cries Miss Majendie, in a shrill tone that runs through the professor's head. "Certainly. Certainly," says he, confusedly, and then he slips out of the room, and having felt the door close behind him, runs tumultuously down the staircase. For years he has not gone down any staircase so swiftly. A vague, if unacknowledged, feeling that he is literally making his escape from a vital danger, is lending wings to his feet. Before him lies the hall-door, and that way safety lies, safety from that old gaunt, irate figure upstairs. He is not allowed to reach, however--just yet. A door on the right side of the hall is opened cautiously; a shapely little head is as cautiously pushed through it, and two anxious red lips whisper:-- "Mr. Curzon," first, and then, as he turns in answer to the whisper, "Sh--_Sh_!" CHAPTER V. "My love is like the sea, As changeful and as free; Sometimes she's angry, sometimes rough, Yet oft she's smooth and calm enough-- Ay, much too calm for me." It is Perpetua. A sad-eyed, a tearful-eyed Perpetua, but a lovely Perpetua for all that. "Well?" says he. "_Sh!_" says she again, shaking her head ominously, and putting her forefinger against her lip. "Come in here," says she softly, under her breath. "Here," when he does come in, is a most untidy place, made up of all things heterogeneous. Now that he is nearer to her, he can see that she has been crying vehemently, and that the tears still stand thick within her eyes. "I felt I _must_ see you," says she, "to tell you--to ask you. To--Oh! you _heard_ what she said! Do--do _you_ think----?" "Not at all, not at all," declares the professor hurriedly. "Don't--_don't_ cry, Perpetua! Look here," laying his hand nervously upon her shoulder and giving her a little angry shake. "_Don't_ cry! Good heavens! Why should you mind that awful old woman?" Nevertheless, he had minded that awful old woman himself very considerably. "But--it _is_ soon, isn't it?" says she. "I know that myself, and yet--" wistfully--"I can't help it. I _do_ want to see things, and to amuse myself." "Naturally," says the professor. "And it isn't that I _forget_ him," says she in an eager, intense tone, "I _never_ forget him--never--never. Only I do want to laugh sometimes and to be happy, and to see Mr. Irving as Charles I." The climax is irresistible. The professor is unable to suppress a smile. "I'm afraid, from what I have heard, _that_ won't make you laugh," says he. "It will make me cry then. It is all the same," declares she, impartially. "I shall be enjoying myself, I shall be _seeing_ things. You--" doubtfully, and mindful of his last speech--"Haven't you seen him?" "Not for a long time, I regret to say. I--I'm always so busy," says the professor apologetically. "_Always_ studying?" questions she. "For the most part," returns the professor, an odd sensation growing within him that he is feeling ashamed of himself. "'All work and no play,'" begins Perpetua, and stops, and shakes her charming head at him. "_You_ will be a dull boy if you don't take care," says she. A ghost of a little smile warms her sad lips as she says this, and lights up her shining eyes like a ray of sunlight. Then it fades, and she grows sorrowful again. "Well, _I_ can't study," says she. "Why not?" demands the professor quickly. Here he is on his own ground; and here he has a pupil to his hand--a strange, an enigmatical, but a lovely one. "Believe me knowledge is the one good thing that life contains worth having. Pleasure, riches, rank, _all_ sink to insignificance beside it." "How do you know?" says she. "You haven't tried the others." "I know it, for all that. I _feel_ it. Get knowledge--such knowledge as the short span of life allotted to us will allow you to get. I can lend you some books, easy ones at first, and----" "I couldn't read _your_ books," says she; "and--you haven't any novels, I suppose?" "No," says he. "But----" "I don't care for any books but novels," says she, sighing. "Have you read 'Alas?' I never have anything to read here, because Aunt Jane says novels are of the devil, and that if I read them I shall go to hell." "Nonsense!" said the professor gruffly. "You mustn't think I'm afraid about _that_" says Perpetua demurely; "I'm not. I know the same place could never contain Aunt Jane and me for long, so _I'm_ all right." The professor struggles with himself for a moment and then gives way to mirth. "Ah! _now_ you are on my side," cries his ward exultantly. She tucks her arm into his. "And as for all that talk about 'knowledge'--don't bother me about that any more. It's a little rude of you, do you know? One would think I was a dunce--that I knew nothing--whereas, I assure you," throwing out her other hand, "I know _quite_ as much as most girls, and a great deal more than many. I daresay," putting her head to one side, and examining him thoughtfully, "I know more than you do if it comes to that. I don't believe you know this moment who wrote 'The Master of Ballantrae.' Come now, who was it?" She leans back from him, gazing at him mischievously, as if anticipating his defeat. As for the professor, he grows red--he draws his brows together. Truly this is a most impertinent pupil! 'The Master of Ballantrae.' It _sounds_ like Sir Walter, and yet--The professor hesitates and is lost. "Scott," says he, with as good an air as he can command. "Wrong," cries she, clapping her hands softly, noiselessly. "Oh! you _ignorant_ man! Go buy that book at once. It will do you more good and teach you a great deal more than any of your musty tomes." She laughs gaily. It occurs to the professor, in a misty sort of way, that her laugh, at all events, would do _anyone_ good. She has been pulling a ring on and off her finger unconsciously, as if thinking, but now looks up at him. "If you spoke to her again, when she was in a better temper, don't you think she would let you take me to the theatre some night?" She has come nearer, and has laid a light, appealing little hand upon his arm. "I am sure it would be useless," says he, taking off his glasses and putting them on again in an anxious fashion. They are both speaking in whispers, and the professor is conscious of feeling a strange sort of pleasure in the thought that he is sharing a secret with her. "Besides," says he, "I couldn't very well come here again." "Not come again? Why?" "I'd be afraid," returns he simply. Whereon Miss Wynter, after a second's pause, gives way and laughs "consumedly," as they would have said long, long years before her pretty features saw the light. "Ah! yes," murmurs she. "How she did frighten you. She brought you to your knees--you actually"--this with keen reproach--"took her part against me." "I took her part to _help_ you;" says the professor, feeling absurdly miserable. "Yes," sighing, "I daresay. But though I know I should have suffered for it afterwards, it would have done me a world of good to hear somebody tell her his real opinion of her for once. I should like," calmly, "to see her writhe; she makes me writhe very often." "This is a bad school for you," says the professor hurriedly. "Yes? Then why don't you take me away from it?" "If I could----but----Well, I shall see," says he vaguely. "You will have to be very quick about it," says she. Her tone is quite ordinary; it never suggests itself to the professor that there is meaning beneath it. "You have _some_ friends surely?" says he. "There is a Mrs. Constans who comes here sometimes to see Aunt Jane. She is a young woman, and her mother was a friend of Aunt Jane's, which accounts for it, I suppose. She seems kind. She said she would take me to a concert soon, but she has not been here for many days, I daresay she has forgotten all about it by this time." She sighs. The charming face so near the professor's is looking sad again. The white brow is puckered, the soft lips droop. No, she cannot stay _here_, that is certain--and yet it was her father's wish, and who is he, the professor, that he should pretend to know how girls should be treated? What if he should make a mistake? And yet again, should a little brilliant face like that know sadness? It is a problem difficult to solve. All the professor's learning fails him now. "I hope she will remember. Oh! she _must_," declares he, gazing at Perpetua. "You know I would do what I could for you, but your aunt--you heard her--she would not let you go anywhere with me." "True," says Perpetua. Here she moves back, and folds her arms stiffly across her bosom, and pokes out her chin, in an aggressive fashion, that creates a likeness on the spot, in spite of the youthful eyes, and brow, and hair. "'Young _gentle_women in _our_ time, Mr. Curzon, never, went out walking, _alone_, with _A Man_!" The mimicry is perfect. The professor, after a faint struggle with his dignity, joins in her naughty mirth, and both laugh together. "'_Our_' time! she thinks you are a hundred and fifty!" says Miss Wynter. "Well, so I am, in a way," returns the professor, somewhat sadly. "No, you're not," says she. "_I_ know better than that. I," patting his arm reassuringly, "can guess your age better than she can. I can see _at once_, that you are not a day older than poor, darling papa. In fact, you may be younger. I am perfectly certain you are not more than fifty." The professor says nothing. He is staring at her. He is beginning to feel a little forlorn. He has forgotten youth for many days, has youth in revenge forgotten him? "That is taking off a clear hundred all at once," says she lightly. "No small amount." Here, as if noticing his silence, she looks quickly at him, and perhaps something in his face strikes her, because she goes on hurriedly. "Oh! and what is age after all? I wish _I_ were old, and then I should be able to get away from Aunt Jane--without--without any _trouble_." "I am afraid you are indeed very unhappy here," says the professor gravely. "I _hate_ the place," cries she with a frown. "I shan't be able to stay here. Oh! _why_ didn't poor papa send me to live with you?" Why indeed? That is exactly what the professor finds great difficulty in explaining to her. An "old man" of "fifty" might very easily give a home to a young girl, without comment from the world. But then if an "old man of fifty" _wasn't_ an old man of fifty----The professor checks his thoughts, they are growing too mixed. "We should have been _so_ happy," Perpetua is going on, her tone regretful. "We could have gone everywhere together, you and I. I should have taken you to the theatre, to balls, to concerts, to afternoons. You would have been _so_ happy, and so should I. You would--wouldn't you?" The professor nods his head. The awful vista she has opened up to him has completely deprived him of speech. "Ah! yes," sighs she, taking that deceitful nod in perfect good faith. "And you would have been good to me too, and let me look in at the shop windows. I should have taken such _care_ of you, and made your tea for you, just," sadly, "as I used to do for poor papa, and----" It is becoming too much for the professor. "It is late. I must go," says he. * * * * * It is a week later when he meets her again. The season is now at its height, and some stray wave of life casting the professor into a fashionable thoroughfare, he there finds he. Marching along, as usual, with his head in the air, and his thoughts in the ages when dates were unknown, a soft, eager voice calling his name brings him back to the fact that he is walking up Bond Street. In a carriage, exceedingly well appointed, and with her face wreathed in smiles, and one hand impulsively extended, sits Perpetua. Evidently the owner of the carriage is in the shop making purchases, whilst Perpetua sits without, awaiting her. "Were you going to cut me?" cries she. "What luck to meet you here. I am having such a _lovely_ day. Mrs. Constans has taken me out with her, and I am to dine with her, and go with her to a concert in the evening." She has poured it all out, all her good news in a breath, as though sure of a sympathetic listener. He is too good a listener. He is listening so hard, he is looking so intensely, that he forgets to speak, and Perpetua's sudden gaiety forsakes her. Is he angry? Does he think----? "It's _only_ a concert," says she, flushing and hesitating. "Do you think that one should not go to a concert when----" "Yes?" questions the professor abstractedly, as she comes to a full stop. He has never seen her dressed like this before. She is all in black to be sure, but _such_ black, and her air! She looks quite the little heiress, like a little queen indeed--radiant, lovely. "_Well_--when one is in mourning," says she somewhat impatiently, the color once again dyeing her cheek. Quick tears have sprung to her eyes. They seem to hurt the professor. "One cannot be in mourning always," says he slowly. His manner is still unfortunate. "You evade the question," says she frowning. "But a concert _isn't_ like a ball, is it?" "I don't know," says the professor, who indeed has had little knowledge of either for years, and whose unlucky answer arises solely from inability to give her an honest reply. "You hesitate," says she, "you disapprove then. But," defiantly, "I don't care--a concert is _not_ like a ball." "No--I suppose not!" "I can see what you are thinking," returns she, struggling with her mortification. "And it is very _hard_ of you. Just because _you_ don't care to go anywhere, you think _I_ oughtn't to care either. That is what is so selfish about people who are old. You," wilfully, "are just as bad as Aunt Jane." The professor looks at her. His face is perplexed--distressed--and something more, but she cannot read that. "Well, not quite perhaps," says she, relenting slightly. "But nearly. And if you don't take care you will grow like her. I hate people who lecture me, and besides, I don't see why a guardian should control one's whole life, and thought, and action. A guardian," resentfully, "isn't one's conscience!" "No. No. Thank Heaven!" says the professor, shocked. Perpetua stares at him a moment and then breaks into a queer little laugh. "You evidently have no desire to be mixed up with _my_ conscience," says she, a little angry in spite of her mirth. "Well, I don't want you to have anything to do with it. That's _my_ affair. But, about this concert,"--she leans towards him, resting her hand on the edge of the carriage. "Do you think one should go _nowhere_ when wearing black?" "I think one should do just as one feels," says the professor nervously. "I wonder if one should _say_ just what one feels," says she. She draws back haughtily, then wrath gets the better of dignity, and she breaks out again. "What a _horrid_ answer! _You_ are unfeeling if you like!" "_I_ am?" "Yes, yes! You would deny me this small gratification, you would lock me up forever with Aunt Jane, you would debar me from everything! Oh!" her lips trembling, "how I wish--I _wish_--guardians had never been invented." The professor almost begins to wish the same. Almost--perhaps not quite! That accusation about wishing to keep her locked up forever with Miss Majendie is so manifestly unjust that he takes it hardly. Has he not spent all this past week striving to open a way of escape for her from the home she so detests! But, after all, how could she know that? "You have misunderstood me," says he calmly, gravely. "Far from wishing you to deny yourself this concert, I am glad--glad from my _heart_--that you are going to it--that some small pleasure has fallen into your life. Your aunt's home is an unhappy one for you, I know, but you should remember that even if--if you have got to stay with her until you become your own mistress, still that will not be forever." "No, I shall not stay there forever," says she slowly. "And so--you really think----" she is looking very earnestly at him. "I do, indeed. Go out--go everywhere--enjoy yourself, child, while you can." He lifts his hat and walks away. "Who was that, dear?" asks Mrs. Constans, a pretty pale woman, rushing out of the shop and into the carriage. "My guardian--Mr. Curzon." "Ah!" glancing carelessly after the professor's retreating figure. "A youngish man?" "No, old," says Perpetua, "at least I think--do you know," laughing, "when he's _gone_ I sometimes think of him as being pretty young, but when he is _with_ me, he is old--old and grave!" "As a guardian should be, with such a pretty ward," says Mrs. Constans, smiling. "His back looks young, however." "And his laugh _sounds_ young." "Ah! he can laugh then?" "Very seldom. Too seldom. But when he does, it is a nice laugh. But he wears spectacles, you know--and--well--oh, yes, he _is_ old, distinctly old!" CHAPTER VI "He is happy whose circumstances suit his temper; but he is more excellent who can suit his temper to any circumstances." "The idea of _your_ having a ward! I could quite as soon imagine your having a wife," says Hardinge. He knocks the ash off his cigar, and after meditating for a moment, leans back in his chair and gives way to irrepressible mirth. "I don't see why I shouldn't have a wife as well as another," says the professor, idly tapping his forefinger on the table near him. "She would bore me. But a great many fellows are bored." "You have grasped one great truth if you never grasp another!" says Mr. Hardinge, who has now recovered. "Catch _me_ marrying." "It's unlucky to talk like that," says the professor. "It looks as though your time were near. In Sophocles' time there was a man who----" "Oh, bother Sophocles, you know I never let you talk anything but wholesome nonsense when I drop in for a smoke with you," says the younger man. "You began very well, with that superstition of yours, but I won't have it spoiled by erudition. Tell me about your ward." "Would that be nonsense?" says the professor, with a faint smile. They are sitting in the professor's room with the windows thrown wide open to let in any chance gust of air that Heaven in its mercy may send them. It is night, and very late at night too--the clock indeed is on the stroke of twelve. It seems a long, long time to the professor since the afternoon--the afternoon of this very day--when he had seen Perpetua sitting in that open carriage. He had only been half glad when Harold Hardinge--a young man, and yet, strange to say, his most intimate friend--had dropped in to smoke a pipe with him. Hardinge was fonder of the professor than he knew, and was drawn to him by curious intricate webs. The professor suited him, and he suited the professor, though in truth Hardinge was nothing more than a gay young society man, with just the average amount of brains, but not an ounce beyond that. A tall, handsome young man, with fair brown hair and hazel eyes, a dark moustache and a happy manner, Mr. Hardinge laughs his way through life, without money, or love, or any other troubles. "Can you ask?" says he. "Go on, Curzon. What is she like?" "It wouldn't interest you," says the professor. "I beg your pardon, it is profoundly interesting; I've got to keep an eye on you, or else in a weak moment you will let her marry you." The professor moves uneasily. "May I ask how you knew I _had_ a ward?" "That should go without telling. I arrived here to-night to find you absent and Mrs. Mulcahy in possession, pretending to dust the furniture. She asked me to sit down--I obeyed her. "'How's the professor?'" said I. "'Me dear!' said she, 'that's a bad story. He's that distracted over a young lady that his own mother wouldn't know him!' "I acknowledge I blushed. I went even so far as to make a few pantomimic gestures suggestive of the horror I was experiencing, and finally I covered my face with my handkerchief. I regret to say that Mrs. Mulcahy took my modesty in bad part. "'Arrah! git out wid ye!' says she, 'ye scamp o' the world. 'Tis a _ward_ the masther has taken an' nothin' more.' "I said I thought it was quite enough, and asked if you had taken it badly, and what the doctor thought of you. But she wouldn't listen to me. "'Look here, Misther Hardinge,' said she. 'I've come to the conclusion that wards is bad for the professor. I haven't seen the young lady, I confess, but I'm cock-sure that she's got the divil's own temper!'" Hardinge pauses, and turns to the professor--"Has she?" says he. "N----o,"--says the professor--a little frowning lovely crimson face rises before him--and then a laughing one. "No," says he more boldly, "she is a little impulsive, perhaps, but----" "Just so. Just so," says Mr. Hardinge pleasantly, and then, after a kindly survey of his companion's features, "She is rather a trouble to you, old man, isn't she?" "She? No," says the professor again, more quickly this time. "It is only this--she doesn't seem to get on with the aunt to whom her poor father sent her--he is dead--and I have to look out for some one else to take care of her, until she comes of age." "I see. I should think you would have to hurry up a bit," says Mr. Hardinge, taking his cigar from his lips, and letting the smoke curl upwards slowly, thoughtfully. "Impulsive people have a trick of being impatient--of acting for themselves----" "_She_ cannot," says the professor, with anxious haste. "She knows nobody in town." "Nobody?" "Except me, and a woman who is a friend of her aunt's. If she were to go to her, she would be taken back again. Perpetua knows that." "Perpetua! Is that her name? What a peculiar one? Perpetua----" "Miss Wynter," sharply. "Perpetua--Miss Wynter! Exactly so! It sounds like--Dorothea--Lady Highflown! Well, _your_ Lady Highflown doesn't seem to have many friends here. What a pity you can't send her back to Australia!" The professor is silent. "It would suit all sides. I daresay the poor girl is pining for the freedom of her old home. And, I must say, it is hard lines for you. A girl with a temper, to be----" "I did not say she had a temper." Hardinge has risen to get himself some whisky and soda, but pauses to pat the professor affectionately on the back. "Of _course_ not! Don't I know you? You would die first! She might worry your life out, and still you would rise up to defend her at every corner. You should get her a satisfactory home as soon as you can--it would ease your mind; and, after all, as she knows no one here, she is bound to behave herself until you can come to her help." "She would behave herself, as you call it," says the professor angrily, "any and everywhere. She is a lady. She has been well brought up. I am her guardian, she will do nothing without _my_ permission!" _"Won't she!"_ A sound, outside the door strikes on the ears of both men at this moment. It is a most peculiar sound, as it were the rattle of beads against wood. "What's that?" said Hardinge. "Everett" (the man in the rooms below,) "is out, I know." "It's coming here," says the professor. It is, indeed! The door is opened in a tumultuous fashion, there is a rustle of silken skirts, and there--there, where the gas-light falls full on her from both room and landing--stands Perpetua! The professor has risen to his feet. His face is deadly white. Mr. Hardinge has risen too. "Perpetua!" says the professor; it would be impossible to describe his tone. "I've come!" says Perpetua, advancing into the room. "I have done with Aunt Jane, _for ever_," casting wide her pretty naked arms, "and I have come to you!" As if in confirmation of this decision, she flings from her on to a distant chair the white opera cloak around her, and stands revealed as charming a thing as ever eye fell upon. She is all in black, but black that sparkles and trembles and shines with every movement. She seems, indeed, to be hung in jet, and out of all this sombre gleaming her white neck rises, pure and fresh and sweet as a little child's. Her long slight arms are devoid of gloves--she had forgotten them, do doubt, but her slender fingers are covered with rings, and round her neck a diamond necklace clings as if in love with its resting place. Diamonds indeed are everywhere. In her hair, in her breast, on her neck, her fingers. Her father, when luck came to him, had found his greatest joy in decking with these gems the delight of his heart. The professor turns to Hardinge. That young man, who had risen with the intention of leaving the room on Perpetua's entrance, is now standing staring at her as if bewitched. His expression is half puzzled, half amused. In _this_ the professor's troublesome ward? This lovely, graceful---- "Leave us!" says the professor sharply. Hardinge, with a profound bow, quits the room, but not the house. It would be impossible to go without hearing the termination of this exciting episode. Everett's rooms being providentially empty, he steps into them, and, having turned up the gas, drops into a chair and gives way to mirth. Meantime the professor is staring at Perpetua. "What has happened?" says he. CHAPTER VII. "Take it to thy breast; Though thorns its stem invest, Gather them, with the rest!" "She is unbearable. _Unbearable!_" returns Perpetua vehemently. "When I came back from the concert to-night, she----But I won't speak of her. I _won't_. And, at all events, I have done with her; I have left her. I have come"--with decision--"to stay with you!" "Eh?" says the professor. It is a mere sound, but it expresses a great deal. "To stay with you. Yes," nodding her head, "it has come to that at last. I warned you it _would_. I couldn't stay with her any longer. I hate her! So I have come to stay with you--_for ever_!" She has cuddled herself into an armchair, and, indeed, looks as if a life-long residence in this room is the plan she has laid out for herself. "Great heavens! What do you mean?" asks the poor professor, who should have sworn by the heathen gods, but in a weak moment falls back upon the good old formula. He sinks upon the table next him, and makes ruin of the notes he had been scribbling--the ink is still wet--even whilst Hardinge was with him. Could he only have known it, there are first proofs of them now upon his trousers. "I have told you," says she. "Good gracious, what a funny room this is! I told you she was abominable to me when I came home to-night. She said dreadful things to me, and I don't care whether she is my aunt or not, I shan't let her scold me for nothing; and--I'm afraid I wasn't nice to her. I'm sorry for that, but--one isn't a bit of stone, you know, and she said something--about my mother," her eyes grow very brilliant here, "and when I walked up to her she apologized for that, but afterwards she said something about poor, _poor_ papa--and ... well, that was the end. I told her--amongst _other_ things--that I thought she was 'too old to be alive,' and she didn't seem to mind the 'other things' half as much as that, though they were awful. At all events," with a little wave of her hands, "she's lectured me now for good; I shall never see _her_ again! I've run away to you! See?" It must be acknowledged that the professor _doesn't_ see. He is still sitting on the edge of the table--dumb. "Oh! I'm so _glad_ I've left her," says Perpetua, with indeed heartfelt delight in look and tone. "But--do you know--I'm hungry. You--you couldn't let me make you a cup of tea, could you? I'm dreadfully thirsty! What's that in your glass?" "Nothing," says the professor hastily. He removes the half-finished tumbler of whisky and soda, and places it in the open cupboard. "It looked like _something_," says she. "But what about tea?" "I'll see what I can do," says he, beginning to busy himself amongst many small contrivances in the same cupboard. It has gone to his heart to hear that she is hungry and thirsty, but even in the midst of his preparations for her comfort, a feeling of rage takes possession of him. He pulls his head out of the cupboard and turns to her. "You must be _mad_!" says he. "Mad? Why?" asks she. "To come here. Here! And at this hour!" "There was no other place; and I wasn't going to live under _her_ roof another second. I said to myself that she was my aunt, but you were my guardian. Both of you have been told to look after me, and I prefer to be looked after by you. It is so simple," says she, with a suspicion of contempt in her tone, "that I wonder why you wonder at it. As I preferred _you_--of course I have come to live with you." "You _can't_!" gasps the professor, "you must go back to Miss Majendie at once!" "To _her_! I'm not going back," steadily. "And even if I would," triumphantly, "I couldn't. As she sleeps at the top of the house (to get _air_, she says), and so does her maid, you might ring until you were black in the face, and she wouldn't hear you." "Well! you can't stay here!" says the professor, getting off the table and addressing her with a truly noble attempt at sternness. "Why can't I?" There is some indignation in her tone. "There's lots of room here, isn't there?" "There is _no_ room!" says the professor. This is the literal truth. "The house is full. And--and there are only men here." "So much the better!" says Perpetua, with a little frown and a great deal of meaning. "I'm tired of women--they're horrid. You're always kind to me--at least," with a glance, "you always used to be, and _you're_ a man! Tell one of your servants to make me up a room somewhere." "There isn't one," says the professor. "Oh! nonsense," says she leaning back in her chair and yawning softly. "I'm not so big that you can't put me away somewhere. _That woman_ says I'm so small that I'll never be a grown-up girl, because I can't grow up any more. Who'd live with a woman like that? And I shall grow more, shan't I?" "I daresay," says the professor vaguely. "But that is not the question to be considered now. I must beg you to understand, Perpetua, that your staying here is out of the question!" "Out of the----Oh! I _see_" cries she, springing to her feet and turning a passionately reproachful face on his. "You mean that I shall be in your way here!" "No, _no_, NO!" cries he, just as impulsively, and decidedly very foolishly; but the sight of her small mortified face has proved too much for him. "Only----" "Only?" echoes the spoiled child, with a loving smile--the child who has been accustomed to have all things and all people give way to her during her short life. "Only you are afraid _I_ shall not be comfortable. But I shall. And I shall be a great comfort to you too--a great _help_. I shall keep everything in order for you. Do you remember the talk we had that last day you came to Aunt Jane's? How I told you of the happy days we should have together, if we _were_ together. Well, we are together now, aren't we? And when I'm twenty-one, we'll move into a big, big house, and ask people to dances and dinners and things. In the meantime----" she pauses and glances leisurely around her. The glance is very comprehensive. "To-morrow," says she with decision, "I shall settle this room!" The professor's breath fails him. He grows pale. To "settle" his room! "Perpetua!" exclaims he, almost inarticulately, "you don't understand." "I do indeed," returns she brightly. "I've often settled papa's den. What! do you think me only a silly useless creature? You shall see! I'll settle _you_ too, by and by." She smiles at him gaily, with the most charming innocence, but oh! what awful probabilities lie within her words. _Settle him!_ "Do you know I've heard people talking about you at Mrs. Constans'," says she. She smiles and nods at him. The professor groans. To be talked about! To be discussed! To be held up to vulgar comment! He writhes inwardly. The thought is actual torture to him. "They said----" "_What?_" demands the professor, almost fiercely. How dare a feeble feminine audience appreciate or condemn his honest efforts to enlighten his small section of mankind! "That you ought to be married," says Perpetua, sympathetically. "And they said, too, that they supposed you wouldn't ever be now; but that it was a great pity you hadn't a daughter. _I_ think that too. Not about your having a wife. That doesn't matter, but I really think you ought to have a daughter to look after you." This extremely immoral advice she delivers with a beaming smile. "_I'll_ be your daughter," says she. The professor goes rigid with horror. What has he _done_ that the Fates should so visit him? "They said something else too," goes on Perpetua, this time rather angrily. "They said you were so clever that you always looked unkempt. That," thoughtfully, "means that you didn't brush your hair enough. Never mind, _I'll_ brush it for you." "Look here!" says the professor furiously, subdued fury no doubt, but very genuine. "You must go, you know. Go, _at once_! D'ye see? You can't stay in this house, d'ye _hear_? I can't permit it. What did your father mean by bringing you up like this!" "Like what?" She is staring at him. She has leant forward as if surprised--and with a sigh the professor acknowledges the uselessness of a fight between them; right or wrong she is sure to win. He is bound to go to the wall. She is looking not only surprised, but unnerved. This ebullition of wrath on the part of her mild guardian has been a slight shock to her. "Tell me?" persists she. "Tell you! what is there to tell you? I should think the veriest infant would have known she oughtn't to come here." "I should think an infant would know nothing," with dignity. "All your scientific researches have left you, I'm afraid, very ignorant. And I should think that the very first thing even an infant would do, if she could walk, would be to go straight to her guardian when in trouble." "At this hour?" "At any hour. What," throwing out her hands expressively, "is a guardian _for_, if it isn't to take care of people?" The professor gives it up. The heat of battle has overcome him. With a deep breath he drops into a chair, and begins to wonder how long it will be before happy death will overtake him. But in the meantime, whilst sitting on a milestone of life waiting for that grim friend, what is to be done with her? If--Good heavens! if anyone had seen her come in! "Who opened the door for you?" demands he abruptly. "A great big fat woman with a queer voice! Your Mrs. Mulcahy of course. I remember your telling me about her." Mrs. Mulcahy undoubtedly. Well, the professor wishes now he had told this ward _more_ about her. Mrs. Mulcahy he can trust, but she--awful thought--will she trust him? What is she thinking now? "I said, 'Is Mr. Curzon at home?' and she said, 'Well I niver!' So I saw she was a kindly, foolish, poor creature with no sense, and I ran past her, and up the stairs, and I looked into one room where there were lights but you weren't there, and then I ran on again until I saw the light under _your_ door, and," brightening, "there you were!" Here _she_ is now at all events, at half-past twelve at night! "Wasn't it fortunate I found you?" says she. She is laughing a little, and looking so content that the professor hasn't the heart to contradict her--though where the fortune comes in---- "I'm starving," says she, gaily, "will that funny little kettle soon boil?" The professor has lit a spirit-lamp with a view to giving her some tea. "I haven't had anything to eat since dinner, and you know she dines at an ungodly hour. Two o'clock! I didn't know I wanted anything to eat until I escaped from her, but now that I have got _you_," triumphantly, "I feel as hungry as ever I can be." "There is nothing," says the professor, blankly. His heart seems to stop beating. The most hospitable and kindly of men, it is terrible to him to have to say this. Of course Mrs. Mulcahy--who, no doubt, is still in the hall waiting for an explanation, could give him something. But Mrs. Mulcahy can be unpleasant at times, and this is safe to be a "time." Yet without her assistance he can think of no means by which this pretty, slender, troublesome little ward of his can be fed. "Nothing!" repeats she faintly. "Oh, but surely in that cupboard over there, where you put the glass, there is something; even bread and butter I should like." She gets up, and makes an impulsive step forward, and in doing so brushes against a small rickety table, that totters feebly for an instant and then comes with a crash to the ground, flinging a whole heap of gruesome dry bones at her very feet. With a little cry of horror she recoils from them. Perhaps her nerves are more out of order than she knows, perhaps the long fast and long drive here, and her reception from her guardian at the end of it--so different from what she had imagined--have all helped to undo her. Whatever be the cause, she suddenly covers her face with her hands and bursts into tears. "Take them away!" cries she frantically, and then--sobbing heavily between her broken words--"Oh, I see how it is. You don't want me here at all. You wish I hadn't come. And I have no one but you--and poor papa said you would be good to me. But you are _sorry_ he made you my guardian. You would be glad if I were _dead_! When I come to you in my trouble you tell me to go away again, and though I tell you I am hungry, you won't give me even some bread and butter! Oh!" passionately, "if _you_ came to _me_ starving, I'd give _you_ things, but--you----" "_Stop!_" cries the professor. He uplifts his hands, and, as though in the act of tearing his hair, rushes from the room, and staggers downstairs to those other apartments where Hardinge had elected to sit, and see out the farce, comedy, or tragedy, whichever it may prove, to its bitter end. The professor bursts in like a maniac! CHAPTER VIII. "The house of everyone is to him as his castle and fortress, as well for his defence against injury and violence as for his repose." "She's upstairs still," cries he in a frenzied tone. "She says she has come _for ever_. That she will not go away. She doesn't understand. Great Heaven! What I am to do?" "She?" says Hardinge, who really in turn grows petrified for the moment--_only_ for the moment. "That girl! My ward! All women are _demons_!" says the professor bitterly, with tragic force. He pauses as if exhausted. "_Your_ demon is a pretty specimen of her kind," says Hardinge, a little frivolously under the circumstances it must be confessed. "Where is she now?" "Upstairs!" with a groan. "She says she's _hungry_, and I haven't a thing in the house! For goodness sake think of something, Hardinge." "Mrs. Mulcahy!" suggests Hardinge, in anything but a hopeful tone. "Yes--ye-es," says the professor. "You--_you_ wouldn't ask her for something, would you, Hardinge?" "Not for a good deal," says Hardinge, promptly. "I say," rising, and going towards Everett's cupboard, "Everett's a Sybarite, you know, of the worst kind--sure to find something here, and we can square it with him afterwards. Beauty in distress, you know, appeals to all hearts. _Here we are!_" holding out at arm's length a pasty. "A 'weal and ammer!' Take it! The guilt be on my head! Bread--butter--pickled onions! Oh, _not_ pickled onions, I think. Really, I had no idea even Everett had fallen so low. Cheese!--about to proceed on a walking tour! The young lady wouldn't care for that, thanks. Beer! No. _No._ Sherry-Woine!" "Give me that pie, and the bread and butter," says the professor, in great wrath. "And let me tell you, Hardinge, that there are occasions when one's high spirits can degenerate into offensiveness and vulgarity!" He marches out of the room and upstairs, leaving Hardinge, let us hope, a pray to remorse. It is true, at least of that young man, that he covers his face with his hands and sways from side to side, as if overcome by some secret emotion. Grief--no-doubt. Perpetua is graciously pleased to accept the frugal meal the professor brings her. She even goes so far as to ask him to share it with her--which invitation he declines. He is indeed sick at heart--not for himself--(the professor doesn't often think of himself)--but for her. And where is she to sleep? To turn her out now would be impossible! After all, it was a puerile trifling with the Inevitable, to shirk asking Mrs. Mulcahy for something to eat for his self-imposed guest--because the question of _Bed_ still to come! Mrs. Mulcahy, terrible as she undoubtedly can be, is yet the only woman in the house, and it is imperative that Perpetua should be given up to her protection. Whilst the professor is writhing in spirit over this ungetoutable fact, he becomes aware of a resounding knock at his door. Paralyzed, he gazes in the direction of the sound. It _can't_ be Hardinge, he would never knock like that! The knock in itself, indeed, is of such force and volume as to strike terror into the bravest breast. It is--it _must_ be--the Mulcahy! And Mrs. Mulcahy it is! Without waiting for an answer, that virtuous Irishwoman, clad in righteous indignation and a snuff-colored gown, marches into the room. "May I ask, Mr. Curzon," says she, with great dignity and more temper, "what may be the meanin' of all this?" The professor's tongue cleaves to the roof of his mouth, but Perpetua's tongue remains normal. She jumps up, and runs to Mrs. Mulcahy with a beaming face. She has had something to eat, and is once again her own buoyant, wayward, light-hearted little self. "Oh! it is all right _now_, Mrs. Mulcahy," cries she, whilst the professor grows cold with horror at this audacious advance upon the militant Mulcahy. "But do you know, he said first he hadn't anything to give me, and I was starving. No, you mustn't scold him--he didn't mean anything. I suppose you have heard how unhappy I was with Aunt Jane?--he's told you, I daresay,"--with a little flinging of her hand towards the trembling professor--"because I know"--prettily--"he is very fond of you--he often speaks to me about you. Oh! Aunt Jane is _horrid_! I _should_ have told you about how it was when I came, but I wanted so much to see my guardian, and tell _him_ all about it, that I forgot to be nice to anybody. See?" There is a little silence. The professor, who is looking as guilty as if the whole ten commandments have been broken by him at once, waits, shivering, for the outburst that is so sure to come. It doesn't come, however! When the mists clear away a little, he finds that Perpetua has gone over to where Mrs. Mulcahy is standing, and is talking still to that good Irishwoman. It is a whispered talk this time, and the few words of it that he catches go to his very heart. "I'm afraid he didn't _want_ me here," Perpetua is saying, in a low distressed little voice--"I'm sorry I came now--but, you don't _know_ how cruel Aunt Jane was to me, Mrs. Mulcahy, you don't indeed! She--she said such unkind things about--about----" Perpetua breaks down again--struggles with herself valiantly, and finally bursts out crying. "I'm tired, I'm sleepy," sobs she miserably. Need I say what follows? The professor, stung to the quick by those forlorn sobs, lifts his eyes, and--behold! he sees Perpetua gathered to the ample bosom of the formidable, kindly Mulcahy. "Come wid me, me lamb," says that excellent woman. "Bad scran to the one that made yer purty heart sore. Lave her to me now, Misther Curzon, dear, an' I'll take a mother's care of her." (This in an aside to the astounded professor.) "There now, alanna! Take courage now! Sure 'tis to the right shop ye've come, anyway, for 'tis daughthers I have meself, me dear--fine, sthrappin' girls as could put you in their pockits. Ye poor little crather! Oh! Murther! Who could harm the likes of ye? Faix, I hope that ould divil of an aunt o' yours won't darken these doors, or she'll git what she won't like from Biddy Mulcahy. There now! There now! 'Tis into yer bed I'll tuck ye meself, for 'tis worn-out ye are--God help ye!" She is gone, taking Perpetua with her. The professor rubs his eyes, and then suddenly an overwhelming sense of gratitude towards Mrs. Mulcahy takes possession of him. _What_ a woman! He had never thought so much moral support could be got out of a landlady--but Mrs. Mulcahy has certainly tided him safely over _one_ of his difficulties. Still, those that remain are formidable enough to quell any foolish present attempts at relief of mind. "To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow!" How many to-morrows is she going to remain here? Oh! Impossible! Not an _hour_ must be wasted. By the morning light something must be put on foot to save the girl from her own foolhardiness, nay ignorance! Once again, sunk in the meshes of depression, the persecuted professor descends to the room where Hardinge awaits him. "Anything new?" demands the latter, springing to his feet. "Yes! Mrs. Mulcahy came up." The professor's face is so gloomy, that Hardinge may be forgiven for saying to himself, "She has assaulted him!" "I'm glad it isn't visible," says he, staring at the professor's nose, and then at his eye. Both are the usual size. "Eh?" says the professor. "She was visible of course. She was kinder than I expected." "So, I see. She might so easily have made it your lip--or your nose--or----" "_What_ is there in Everett's cupboard besides the beer?" demands the professor angrily. "For Heaven's sake! attend to me, and don't sit there grinning like a first-class chimpanzee!" This is extremely rude, but Hardinge takes no notice of it. "I tell you she was kind--kinder than one would expect," says the professor, rapping his knuckles on the table. "Oh! I see. She? Miss Wynter?" "No--Mrs. Mulcahy!" roars the professor frantically. "Where's your head, man? Mrs. Mulcahy came into the room, and took Miss Wynter into her charge in the--er--the most wonderful way, and carried her off to bed." The professor mops his brow. "Oh, well, _that's_ all right," says Hardinge. "Sit down, old chap, and let's talk it over." "It is _not_ all right," says the professor. "It is all wrong. Here she is, and here she apparently means to stay. The poor child doesn't understand. She thinks I'm older than Methusaleh, and that she can live here with me. I can't explain it to her--you--don't think _you_ could, do you, Hardinge?" "No, I don't, indeed," says Hardinge, in a hurry. "What on earth has brought her here at all?" "To _stay_. Haven't I told you? To stay for ever. She says"--with a groan--"she is going to settle me! To--to _brush my hair_! To--make my tea. She says I'm her guardian, and insists on living with me. She doesn't understand! Hardinge," desperately, "what _am_ I to do?" "Marry her!" suggests Hardinge, who I regret to say is choking with laughter. "That is a _jest_!" says the professor haughtily. This unusual tone from the professor strikes surprise to the soul of Hardinge. He looks at him. But the professor's new humor is short-lived. He sinks upon a chair in a tired sort of a way, letting his arms fall over the sides of it. As a type of utter despair he is a distinguished specimen. "Why don't you take her home again, back to the old aunt?" says Hardinge, moved by his misery. "I can't. She tells me it would be useless, that the house is locked up, and--and besides, Hardinge, her aunt--after _this_, you know--would be----" "Naturally," says Hardinge, after which he falls back upon his cigar. "Light your pipe," says he, "and we'll think it over." The professor lights it, and both men draw nearer to each other. "I'm afraid she won't go back to her aunt any way," says the professor, as a beginning to the "thinking it over." He pushes his glasses up to his forehead, and finally discards them altogether, flinging them on the table near. "If she saw you now she might understand," says Hardinge--for, indeed, the professor without his glasses loses thirty per cent. of old Time. "She wouldn't," says the professor. "And never mind that. Come back to the question. I say she will never go back to her aunt." He looks anxiously at Hardinge. One can see that he would part with a good deal of honest coin of the realm, if his companion would only _not_ agree with him. "It looks like it," said Hardinge, who is rather enjoying himself. "By Jove! what a thing to happen to _you_, Curzon, of all men in the world. What are you going to do, eh?" "It isn't so much that," says the professor faintly. "It is what is _she_ going to do?" "_Next!_" supplements Hardinge. "Quite so! It would be a clever fellow who would answer that, straight off. I say, Curzon, what a pretty girl she is, though. Pretty isn't the word. Lovely, I----" The professor gets up suddenly. "Not that," says he, raising his hand in his gentle fashion--that has now something of haste in it. "It--I--you know what I mean, Hardinge. To discuss her--herself, I mean--and here----" "Yes. You are right," says Hardinge slowly, with, however, an irrepressible stare at the professor. It is a prolonged stare. He is very fond of Curzon, though knowing absolutely nothing about him beyond the fact that he is eminently likeable; and it now strikes him as strange that this silent, awkward, ill-dressed, clever man should be the one to teach him how to behave himself. Who _is_ Curzon? Given a better tailor, and a worse brain, he might be a reasonable-looking fellow enough, and not so old either--forty, perhaps--perhaps less. "Have you no relation to whom you could send her?" he says at length, that sudden curiosity as to who Curzon may be prompting the question. "Some old lady? An aunt, for example?" "She doesn't seem to like aunts" says the professor, with deep dejection. "Small blame to her," says, Hardinge, smoking vigorously. "_I've_ an aunt--but 'that's another story!' Well--haven't you a cousin then?--or something?" "I have a sister," says the professor slowly. "Married?" "A widow." ("Fusty old person, out somewhere in the wilds of Finchley," says Hardinge to himself. "Poor little girl--she won't fancy that either!") "Why not send her to your sister then?" says he aloud. "I'm not sure that she would like to have her," says the professor, with hesitation. "I confess I have been thinking it over for some days, but----" "But perhaps the fact of your ward's being an heiress----" begins Hardinge--throwing out a suggestion as it were--but is checked by something in the professor's face. "My sister is the Countess of Baring," says he gently. Hardinge's first thought is that the professor has gone out of his mind, and his second that he himself has accomplished that deed. He leans across the table. Surprise has deprived him of his usual good manners. "Lady Baring!--_your_ sister!" says he. CHAPTER IX. "Your face, my Thane, is as a book, where men May read strange matters." "I see no reason why she shouldn't be," says the professor calmly--is there a faint suspicion of hauteur in his tone? "As we are on the subject of myself, I may as well tell you that my brother is Sir Hastings Curzon, of whom"--he turns back as if to take up some imaginary article from the floor--"you may have heard." "Sir Hastings!" Mr. Hardinge leans back in his chair and gives way to thought. This quiet, hard-working student--this man whom he had counted as a nobody--the brother of that disreputable Hastings Curzon! "As good as got the baronetcy," says he still thinking. "At the rate Sir Hastings is going he can't possibly last for another twelvemonth, and here is this fellow living in these dismal lodgings with twenty thousand a year before his eyes. A lucky thing for him that the estates are so strictly entailed. Good heavens! to think of a man with all that almost in his grasp being _happy_ in a coat that must have been built in the Ark, and caring for nothing on earth but the intestines of frogs and such-like abominations." "You seem surprised again," says the professor, somewhat satirically. "I confess it," says Hardinge. "I can't see why you should be." "_I_ do," says Hardinge drily. "That you," slowly, "_you_ should be Sir Hastings' brother! Why----" "No more!" interrupts the professor sharply. He lifts his hand. "Not another word. I know what you are going to say. It is one of my greatest troubles, that I always know what people are going to say when they mention him. Let him alone, Hardinge." "Oh! _I'll_ let him alone," says Hardinge, with a gesture of disgust. There is a pause. "You know my sister, then?" says the professor presently. "Yes. She is very charming. How is it I have never seen you there?" "At her house?" "At her receptions?" "I have no taste for that sort of thing, and no time. Fashionable society bores me. I go and see Gwen, on off days and early hours, when I am sure that I shall find her alone. We are friends, you will understand, she and I; capital friends, though sometimes," with a sigh, "she--she seems to disapprove of my mode of living. But we get on very well on the whole. She is a very good girl," says the professor kindly, who always thinks of Lady Baring as a little girl in short frocks in her nursery--the nursery he had occupied with her. To hear the beautiful, courted, haughty Lady Baring, who has the best of London at her feet, called "a good girl," so tickles Mr. Hardinge, that he leans back in his chair and bursts out laughing. "Yes?" says the professor, as if asking for an explanation of the joke. "Oh! nothing--nothing. Only--you are such a queer fellow!" says Hardinge, sitting up again to look at him. "You are a _rara avis_, do you know? No, of course you don't! You are one of the few people who don't know their own worth. I don't believe, Curzon, though I should live to be a thousand, that I shall ever look upon your like again." "And so you laugh. Well, no doubt it is a pleasant reflection," says the professor dismally. "I begin to wish now I had never seen myself." "Oh, come! cheer up," says Hardinge, "your pretty ward will be all right. If Lady Baring takes her in hand, she----" "Ah! But will she?" says the professor. "Will she like Per----Miss Wynter?" "Sure to," said Hardinge, with quite a touch of enthusiasm. "'To see her is to love her, and love but'----" "That is of no consequence where anyone is concerned except Lady Baring," says the professor, with a little twist in his chair, "and my sister has not seen her as yet. And besides, that is not the only question--a greater one remains." "By Jove! you don't say so! What?" demands Mr. Hardinge, growing earnest. "Will Miss Wynter like _her_?" says the professor. "That is the real point." "Oh! I see!" says Hardinge thoughtfully. The next day, however, proves the professor's fears vain in both quarters. An early visit to Lady Baring, and an anxious appeal, brings out all that delightful woman's best qualities. One stipulation alone she makes, that she may see the young heiress before finally committing herself to chaperone her safely through the remainder of the season. The professor, filled with hope, hies back to his rooms, calls for Mrs. Mulcahy, tells her he is going to take his ward for a drive, and gives that worthy and now intensely interested landlady full directions to see that Miss Wynter looks--"er--nice! you know, Mrs. Mulcahy, her _best_ suit, and----" Mrs. Mulcahy came generously to the rescue. "Her best frock, sir, I suppose, an' her Sunday bonnet. I've often wished it before, Mr. Curzon, an' I'm thinkin' that 'twill be the makin' of ye; an' a handsome, purty little crathur she is an' no mistake. An' who is to give away the poor dear, sir, askin' yer pardon?" "I am," says the professor. "Oh no, sir; the likes was never known. 'Tis the the father or one of his belongings as gives away the bride, _niver_ the husband to be, 'an if ye _have_ nobody, sir, you two, why I'm sure I'd be proud to act for ye in this matther. Faix I don't disguise from ye, Misther Curzon, dear, that I feels like a mother to that purty child this moment, an' I tell ye _this_, that if ye don't behave dacent to her, ye'll have to answer to Mrs. Mulcahy for that same." "What d'ye mean, woman?" roars the professor, indignantly. "Do you imagine that I----?" "No. I'd belave nothin' bad o' ye," says Mrs. Mulcahy solemnly. "I've cared ye these six years, an' niver a fault to find. But that child beyant, whin ye take her away to make her yer wife----" "You must be mad," says the professor, a strange, curious pang contracting his heart. "I am not taking her away to----I--I am taking her to my sister, who will receive her as a guest." "Mad!" repeats Mrs. Mulcahy furiously. "Who's mad? Faix," preparing to leave the room, "'tis yerself was born widout a grain o' sinse!" The meeting between Lady Baring and Perpetua is eminently satisfactory. The latter, looking lovely, but a little frightened, so takes Lady Baring's artistic soul by storm, that that great lady then and there accepts the situation, and asks Perpetua if she will come to her for a week or so. Perpetua, charmed in turn by Lady Baring's grace and beauty and pretty ways, receives the invitation with pleasure, little dreaming that she is there "on view," as it were, and that the invitation is to be prolonged indefinitely--that is, till either she or her hostess tire one of the other. The professor's heart sinks a little as he sees his sister rise and loosen the laces round the girl's pretty, slender throat, begging her to begin to feel at home at once. Alas! He has deliberately given up his ward! _His_ ward! Is she any longer his? Has not the great world claimed her now, and presently will she not belong to it? So lovely, so sweet she is, will not all men run to snatch the prize?--a prize, bejewelled too, not only by Nature, but by that gross material charm that men call wealth. Well, well, he has done his best for her. There was, indeed, nothing else left to do. CHAPTER X. "The sun is all about the world we see, The breath and strength of very Spring; and we Live, love, and feed on our own hearts." The lights are burning low in the conservatory, soft perfumes from the many flowers fill the air. From beyond--somewhere--(there is a delicious drowsy uncertainty about the where)--comes the sound of music, soft, rhymical, and sweet. Perhaps it is from one of the rooms outside--dimly seen through the green foliage--where the lights are more brilliant, and forms are moving. But just in here there is no music save the tinkling drip, drip of the little fountain that plays idly amongst the ferns. Lady Baring is at home to-night, and in the big, bare rooms outside dancing is going on, and in the smaller rooms, tiny tragedies and comedies are being enacted by amateurs, who, oh, wondrous tale! do know their parts and speak them, albeit no stage "proper" has been prepared for them. Perhaps that is why stage-fright is not for them--a stage as big as "all the world" leaves actors very free. But in here--here, with the dainty flowers and dripping fountains, there is surely no thought of comedy or tragedy. Only a little girl gowned all in white, with snowy arms and neck, and diamonds gittering in the soft masses of her waving hair. A happy little girl, to judge by the soft smile upon her lovely lips, and the gleam in her dark eyes. Leaning back in her seat in the dim, cool recesses of the conservatory, amongst the flowers and the greeneries, she looks like a little nymph in love with the silence and the sense of rest that the hour holds. It is broken, however. "I am so sorry you are not dancing," says her companion, leaning towards her. His regret is evidently genuine, indeed, to Hardinge the evening is an ill-spent one that precludes his dancing with Perpetua Wynter. "Yes?" she looks up at him from her low lounge amongst the palms. "Well, so am I, do you know!" telling the truth openly, yet with an evident sense of shame. "But I don't dance now because--it is selfish, isn't it?--because I should be so unhappy afterwards if I _did_!" "A perfect reason," says Hardinge very earnestly. He is still leaning towards her, his elbows on his knees, his eyes on hers. It is an intent gaze that seldom wanders, and in truth why should it? Where is any other thing as good to look at as this small, fair creature, with the eyes, and the hair, and the lips that belong to her? He has taken possession of her fan, and gently, lovingly, as though indeed it is part of her, is holding it, raising it sometimes to sweep the feathers of it across his lips. "Do you think so?" says she, as if a little puzzled. "Well, I confess I don't like the moments when I hate myself. We all hate ourselves sometimes, don't we?" looking at him as if doubtfully, "or is it only I myself, who----" "Oh, no!" says Hardinge. "_All!_ All of us detest ourselves now and again, or at least we think we do. It comes to the same thing, but you--you have no cause." "I should have if I danced," says she, "and I couldn't bear the after reproach, so I don't do it." "And yet--yet you would _like_ to dance?" "I don't know----" She hesitates, and suddenly looks up at him with eyes as full of sorrow as of mirth. "At all events I know _this_," says she, "that I wish the band would not play such nice waltzes!" Hardinge gives way to laughter, and presently she laughs too, but softly, and as if afraid of being heard, and as if too a little ashamed of herself. Her color rises, a delicate warm color that renders her absolutely adorable. "Shall I order them to stop?" asks Hardinge, laughing still, yet with something in his gaze that tells her he _would_ forbid them to play if he could, if only to humor her. "No!" says she, "and after all,"--philosophically--"enjoyment is only a name." "That's all!" says Hardinge, smiling. "But a very good one." "Let us forget it," with a little sigh, "and talk of something else, something pleasanter." "Than enjoyment?" She gives way to his mood and laughs afresh. "Ah! you have me there!" says she. "I have not, indeed," he returns, quietly and with meaning. "Neither there, nor anywhere." He gets up suddenly, and going to her, bends over the chair on which she is sitting. "We were talking of what?" asks she, with admirable courage, "of names, was it not? An endless subject. _My_ name now? An absurd one surely. Perpetua! I don't like Perpetua, do you?" She is evidently talking at random. "I do indeed!" says Hardinge, promptly and fervently. His tone accentuates his meaning. "Oh, but so harsh, so unusual!" "Unusual! That in itself constitutes a charm." "I was going to add, however--disagreeable." "Not that--never that," Says Hardinge. "You mean to say you really _like_ Perpetua?" her large soft eyes opening with amazement. "It is a poor word," says he, his tone now very low. "If I dared say that I _adored_ 'Perpetua,' I should be----" "Oh, you laugh at me," interrupts she with a little impatient gesture, "you _know_ how crude, how strange, how----" "I don't indeed. Why should you malign yourself like that? You--_you_--who are----" He stops short, driven to silence by a look in the girl's eyes. "What have _I_ to do with it? I did not christen myself," says she. There is perhaps a suspicion of hauteur in her tone. "I am talking to you about my _name_. You understand that, don't you?"--the hauteur increasing. "Do you know, of late I have often wished I was somebody else, because then I should have had a different one." Hardinge, at this point, valiantly refrains from a threadbare quotation. Perhaps he is too far crushed to be able to remember it. "Still it is charming," says he, somewhat confusedly. "It is absurd," says Perpetua coldly. There is evidently no pity in her. And alas! when we think what _that_ sweet feeling is akin to, on the highest authority, one's hopes for Hardinge fall low. He loses his head a little. "Not so absurd as your guardian's, however," says he, feeling the necessity for saying something without the power to manufacture it. "Mr. Curzon's? What is his name?" asks she, rising out of her lounging position and looking, for the first time, interested. "Thaddeus." Perpetua, after a prolonged stare, laughs a little. "What a name!" says she. "Worse than mine. And yet," still laughing, "it suits him, I think." Hardinge laughs with her. Not _at_ his friend, but _with_ her. It seems clear to him that Perpetua is making gentle fun of her guardian, and though his conscience smites him for encouraging her in her naughtiness, still he cannot refrain. "He is an awfully good old fellow," says he, throwing a sop to his Cerberus. "Is he?" says Perpetua, as if even _more_ amused. She looks up at him, and then down again, and trifles with the fan she has taken back from him, and finally laughs again; something in her laugh this time, however, puzzles him. "You don't like him?" hazards he. "After all, I suppose it is hardly natural that a ward _should_ like her guardian." "Yes? And _why_?" asks Perpetua, still smiling, still apparently amused. "For one thing, the sense of restraint that belongs to the relations between them. A guardian, you know, would be able to control one in a measure." "Would he?" "Well, I imagine so. It is traditionary. And you?" "I don't know about _other_ people," says Miss Wynter, calmly, "I know only this, that nobody ever yet controlled _me_, and I don't suppose now that anybody ever will." As she says this she looks at him with the prettiest smile; it is a mixture of amusement and defiance. Hardinge, gazing at her, draws conclusions. ("Perfectly _hates_ him," decides he.) It seems to him a shame, and a pity too, but after all, old Curzon was hardly meant by Nature to do the paternal to a strange and distinctly spoilt child, and a beauty into the bargain. "I don't think your guardian will have a good time," says he, bending over her confidentially, on the strength of this decision of his. "Don't you?" She draws back from him and looks up. "You think I shall lead him a very bad life?" "Well, as _he_ would regard it. Not as I should," with a sudden, impassioned glance. Miss Wynter puts that glance behind her, and perhaps there is something--something a little dangerous in the soft, _soft_ look she now turns upon him. "He thinks so, too, of course?" says she, ever so gently. Her tone is half a question, half an assertion. It is manifestly unfair, the whole thing. Hardinge, believing in her tone, her smile, falls into the trap. Mindful of that night when the professor in despair at her untimely descent upon him, had said many things unmeant, he answers her. "Hardly that. But----" "Go on." "There was a little word or two, you know," laughing. "A hint?" laughing too, but how strangely! "Yes? And----?" "Oh! a _mere_ hint! The professor is too loyal to go beyond that. I suppose you know you have the best man in all the world for your guardian? But it was a little unkind of your people, was it not, to give you into the keeping of a confirmed bookworm--a savant--with scarcely a thought beyond his studies?" "He could study me!" says she. "I should be a fresh specimen." "A _rara avis_, indeed! but not such as the professor's soul covets. No, believe me, you are as dust before the wind in his learned eye." "You think then--that I--am a trouble to him?" "It is inconceivable," says he, with a shrug of apology, "but he has no room in his daily thoughts, I verily believe, for anything beyond his beloved books, and notes, and discoveries." "Yet _I_ am a discovery," persists she, looking at him with anxious eyes, and leaning forward, whilst her fan falls idly on her knees. "Ah! But so unpardonably _recent_!" returns he with a smile. "True!" says she. She gives him one swift brilliant glance, and then suddenly grows restless. "How _warm_ it is!" she says fretfully. "I wish----" What she was going to say, will never now be known. The approach of a tall, gaunt figure through the hanging oriental curtains at the end of the conservatory checks her speech. Sir Hastings Curzon is indeed taller than most men, and is, besides, a man hardly to be mistaken again when once seen. Perpetua has seen him very frequently of late. CHAPTER XI. "But all was false and hollow; though his tongue Dropped manna, and could make the worse appear The better reason, to perplex and dash Maturest counsels." "Shall I take you to Lady Baring?" says Hardinge, quickly, rising and bending as if to offer her his arm. "No, thank you," coldly. "I think," anxiously, "you once told me you did not care for Sir----" "Did I? It seems quite terrible the amount of things I have told everybody." There is a distinct flash in her lovely eyes now, and her small hand has tightened round her fan. "Sometimes--I talk folly! As a fact" (with a touch of defiance), "I like Sir Hastings, although he _is_ my guardian's brother!--my guardian who would so gladly get rid of me." There is bitterness on the young, red mouth. "You should not look at it in that light." "Should I not? You should be the last to say that, seeing that you were the one to show me how to regard it. Besides, you forget Sir Hastings is Lady Baring's brother too, and--you haven't anything to say against _her_, have you? Ah!" with a sudden lovely smile, "you, Sir Hastings?" "You are not dancing," says the tall, gaunt man, who has now come up to her. "So much I have seen. Too warm? Eh? You show reason, I think. And yet, if I might dare to hope that you would give me this waltz----" "No, no," says she, still with her most charming air. "I am not dancing to-night. I shall not dance this year." "That is a Median law, no doubt," says he. "If you will not dance with me, then may I hope that you will give me the few too short moments that this waltz may contain?" Hardinge makes a vague movement but an impetuous one. If the girl had realized the fact of his love for her, she might have been touched and influenced by it, but as it is she feels only a sense of anger towards him. Anger unplaced, undefined, yet nevertheless intense. "With pleasure," says she to Sir Hastings, smiling at him almost across Hardinge's outstretched hand. The latter draws back. "You dismiss me?" says he, with a careful smile. He bows to her--he is gone. "A well-meaning young man," says Sir Hastings, following Hardinge's retreating figure with a delightfully lenient smile. "Good-looking too; but earnest. Have you noticed it? Entirely well-bred, but just a little earnest! _Such_ a mistake!" "I don't think that," says Perpetua. "To be earnest! One _should_ be earnest." "Should one?" Sir Hastings looks delighted expectation. "Tell me about it," says he. "There is nothing to tell," says Perpetua, a little petulantly perhaps. This tall, thin man! what a _bore_ he is! And yet, the other--Mr. Hardinge--well _he_ was worse; he was a _fool_, anyway; he didn't understand the professor one bit! "I like Mr. Hardinge," says she suddenly. "Happy Hardinge! But little girls like you are good to everyone, are you not? That is what makes you so lovely. You could be good to even a scapegrace, eh? A poor, sad outcast like me?" He laughs and leans towards her, his handsome, dissipated, abominable face close to hers. Involuntarily she recoils. "I hope everyone is good to you," says she. "Why should they not be? And why do you call yourself an outcast? Only bad people are outcasts. And bad people," slowly, "are not known, are they?" "Certainly not," says he, disconcerted. This little girl from a far land is proving herself too much for him. And it is not her words that disconcert him so much as the straight, clear, open glance from her thoughtful eyes. To turn the conversation into another channel seems desirable to him. "I hope you are happy here with my sister," says he, in his anything but everyday tone. "Quite happy, thank you. But I should have been happier still, I think, if I had been allowed to stay with your brother." Sir Hastings drops his glasses. Good heavens! what kind of a girl is this! "To stay with my brother! To _stay_," stammers he. "Yes. He _is_ your brother, isn't he? The professor, I mean. I should quite have enjoyed living with him, but he wouldn't hear of it. He--he doesn't like me, I'm afraid?" Perpetua looks at him anxiously. A little hope that he will contradict Hardinge's statement animates her mind. To feel herself a burden to her guardian--to anyone--she, who in the old home had been nothing less than an idol! Surely Sir Hastings, his own brother, will say something, will tell her something to ease this chagrin at her heart. "Who told you that?" asks Sir Hastings. "Did he himself? I shouldn't put it beyond him. He is a misogynist; a mere bookworm! Of no account. Do not waste a thought on him." "You mean----?" "That he detests the best part of life--that he has deliberately turned his back on all that makes our existence here worth the having. I should call him a fool, but that one so dislikes having an imbecile in one's family." "The best part of life! You say he has turned his back on that." She lets her hands fall upon her knees, and turns a frowning, perplexed, but always lovely face to his. "What is it," asks she, "that best part?" "Women!" returns he, slowly, undauntedly, in spite of the innocence, the serenity, that shines in the young and exquisite face before him. Her eyes do not fall before his. She is plainly thinking. Yes; Mr. Hardinge was right, he will never like her. She is only a stay, a hindrance to him! "I understand," says she sorrowfully. "He will not care--_ever_. I shall be always a trouble to him. He----" "Why think of him?" says Sir Hastings contemptuously. He leans towards her: fired by her beauty, that is now enhanced by the regret that lies upon her pretty lips, he determines on pushing his cause at once. "If _he_ cannot appreciate you, others can--_I_ can. I----" He pauses; for the first time in his life, on such an occasion as this, he is conscious of a feeling of awkwardness. To tell a woman he loves her has been the simplest thing in the world hitherto, but now, when at last he is in earnest--when poverty has driven him to seek marriage with an heiress as a cure for all his ills--he finds himself tongue-tied; and not only by the importance of the situation, so far as money goes, but by the clear, calm, waiting eyes of Perpetua. "Yes?" says she; and then suddenly, as if not caring for the answer she has demanded. "You mean that he----You, _too_, think that he dislikes me?" There is woe in the pale, small, lovely face. "Very probably. He was always eccentric. Perfect nuisance at home. None of us could understand him. I shouldn't in the least wonder if he had taken a rooted aversion to you, and taken it badly too! Miss Wynter! it quite distresses me to think that it should be _my_ brother, of all men, who has failed to see your charm. A charm that----" He pauses effectively, to let his really fine eyes have some play. The conservatory is sufficiently dark to disguise the ravages that dissipation has made upon his handsome features. He can see that Perpetua is regarding him earnestly, and with evident interest. Already he regards his cause as won. It is plain that the girl is attracted by his face, as indeed she is! She is at this moment asking herself, who is it he is like? "You were saying?" says she dreamily. "That the charm you possess, though of no value in the eyes of your guardian, is, to _me_, indescribably attractive. In fact--I----" A second pause, meant to be even more effective. Perpetua turns her gaze more directly upon him. It occurs to her that he is singularly dull, poor man. "Go on," says she. She nods her head at him with much encouragement. Her encouragement falls short. Sir Hastings, who had looked for girlish confusion, is somewhat disconcerted by this open patronage. "May I?" says he--"You _permit_ me then to tell you what I have so longed, feared to disclose. I"--dramatically--"_love you_!" He is standing over her, his hand on the back of her chair, waiting for the swift blush, the tremor, the usual signs that follow on one of his declarations. Alas! there is no blush now, no tremor, no sign at all. "That is very good of you," says Perpetua, in an even tone. She moves a little away from him, but otherwise shows no emotion whatever. "The more so, in that it must be so difficult for you to love a person in fourteen days! Ah! that is kind, indeed." A curious light comes into Sir Hastings' eyes. This little Australian girl, is she _laughing_ at him? But the fact is that Perpetua is hardly thinking of him at all, or merely as a shadow to her thoughts. Who _is_ he like? that is the burden of her inward song. At this moment she knows. She lifts her head to see the professor standing in the curtained doorway down below. Ah! yes, that is it! And, indeed, the resemblance between the two brothers is wonderfully strong at this instant! In the eyes of both a quick fire is kindled. CHAPTER XII. "Love, like a June rose, Buds and sweetly blows-- But tears its leaves disclose, And among thorns it grows." The professor had been standing inside the curtain for a full minute before Perpetua had seen him. Spell-bound he had stood there, gazing at the girl as if bewitched. Up to this he had seen her only in black--black always--severe, cold--but _now_! It is to him as though he had seen her for the first time. The graceful curves of her neck, her snowy arms, the dead white of the gown against the whiter glory of the soft bosom, the large, dark eyes so full of feeling, the little dainty head! Are they _all_ new--or some sweet, fresher memory of a picture well beloved? Then he had seen his brother!--Hastings--the disgrace, the _roué_ ... and bending over _her_!... There had been that little movement, and the girl's calm drawing back, and---- The professor's step forward at that moment had betrayed him to Perpetua. She rises now, letting her fan fall without thought to the ground. "You!" cries she, in a little, soft, quick way. "_You!_" Indeed it seems to her impossible that it can be he. She almost runs to him. If she had quite understood Sir Hastings is impossible to know, for no one has ever asked her since, but certainly the advent of her guardian is a relief to her. "You!" she says again, as if only half believing. Her gaze grows bewildered. If he had never seen her in anything but black before, she had never seen him in ought but rather antiquated morning clothes. Is this really the professor? Her eyes ask the question anxiously. This tall, aristocratic, perfectly-appointed man; this man who looks positively _young_. Where are the glasses that until now hid his eyes? Where is that old, old coat? "Yes." Yes, the professor certainly and as disagreeable as possible. His eyes are still aflame; but Perpetua is not afraid of him. She is angry with him, in a measure, but not afraid. One _might_ be afraid of Sir Hastings, but of Mr. Curzon, no! The professor had seen the glad rush of the girl towards him, and a terrible pang of delight had run through all his veins--to be followed by a reaction. She had come to him because she _wanted_ him, because he might be of use to her, not because.... What had Hastings been saying to her? His wrathful eyes are on his brother rather than on her when he says: "You are tired?" "Yes," says Perpetua. "Shall I take you to Gwendoline?" "Yes," says Perpetua again. "Miss Wynter is in my care at present," says Sir Hastings, coming indolently forward. "Shall I take you to Lady Baring?" asks he, addressing Perpetua with a suave smile. "She will come with me," says the professor, with cold decision. "A command!" says Sir Hastings, laughing lightly. "See what it is, Miss Wynter, to have a hard-hearted guardian." He shrugs his shoulders. Perpetua makes him a little bow, and follows the professor out of the conservatory. "If you are tired," says the professor, somewhat curtly, and without looking at her, "I should think the best thing you could do would be to go to bed!" This astounding advice receives but little favor at Miss Wynter's hands. "I am tired of your brother," says she promptly. "He is as tiresome a creation as I know--but not of your sister's party; and--I'm too old to be sent to bed, even by a _Guardian_!!" She puts a very big capital to the last word. "I don't want to send you to bed," says the professor simply. "Though I think little girls like you----" "I am not a little girl," indignantly. "Certainly you are not a big one," says he. It is an untimely remark. Miss Wynter's hitherto ill-subdued anger now bursts into flame. "I can't help it if I'm not big," cries she. "It isn't my fault. I can't help it either that papa sent me to you. _I_ didn't want to go to you. It wasn't my fault that I was thrown upon your hands. And--and"--her voice begins to tremble--"it isn't my fault either that you _hate_ me." "That I--hate you!" The professor's voice is cold and shocked. "Yes. It is true. You need not deny it. You _know_ you hate me." They are now in an angle of the hall where few people come and go, and are, for the moment, virtually alone. "Who told you that I hated you?" asks the professor in a peremptory sort of way. "No," says she, shaking her head, "I shall not tell you that, but I have heard it all the same." "One hears a great many things if one is foolish enough to listen," Curzon's face is a little pale now. "And--I can guess who has been talking to you." "Why should I not listen? It is true, is it not?" She looks up at him. She seems tremulously anxious for the answer. "You want me to deny it then?" "Oh, no, _no_!" she throws out one hand with a little gesture of mingled anger and regret. "Do you think I want you to _lie_ to me? There I am wrong. After all," with a half smile, sadder than most sad smiles because of the youth and sweetness of it, "I do not blame you. I _am_ a trouble, I suppose, and all troubles are hateful. I"--holding out her hand--"shall take your advice, I think, and go to bed." "It was bad advice," says Curzon, taking the hand and holding it. "Stay up, enjoy yourself, dance----" "Oh! I am not dancing," says she as if offended. "Why not?" eagerly, "Better dance than sleep at your age. You--you mistook me. Why go so soon?" She looks at him with a little whimsical expression. "I shall not know you _at all_, presently," says she. "Your very appearance to-night is strange to me, and now your sentiments! No, I shall not be swayed by you. Good-night, good-bye!" She smiles at him in the same sorrowful little way, and takes a step or two forward. "Perpetua," says the professor sternly, "before you go you must listen to me. You said just now you would not hear me lie to you--you shall hear only the truth. Whoever told you that I hated you is the most unmitigated liar on record!" Perpetua rubs her fan up and down against her cheek for a little bit. "Well--I'm glad you don't hate me," says she, "but still I'm a worry. Never mind,"--sighing--"I daresay I shan't be so for long." "You mean?" asks the professor anxiously. "Nothing--nothing at all. Good-night. Good-night, _indeed_." "Must you go? Is enjoyment nothing to you?" "Ah! you have killed all that for me," says she. This parting shaft she hurls at him--_malice prepense_. It is effectual. By it she murders sleep as thoroughly as ever did Macbeth. The professor spends the remainder of the night pacing up and down his rooms. CHAPTER XIII. "Through thick and thin, both over bank and bush, In hopes her to attain by hook or crook. "You will begin to think me a fixture," says Hardinge with a somewhat embarrassed laugh, flinging himself into an armchair. "You know you are always welcome," says the professor gently, if somewhat absently. It is next morning, and he looks decidedly the worse for his sleeplessness. His face seems really old, his eyes are sunk in his head. The breakfast lying untouched upon the table tells its own tale. "Dissipation doesn't agree with you," says Hardinge with a faint smile. "No. I shall give it up," returns Curzon, his laugh a trifle grim. "I was never more surprised in my life than when I saw you at your sister's last evening. I was relieved, too--sometimes it is necessary for a man to go out, and--and see how things are going on with his own eyes." "I wonder when that would be?" asks the professor indifferently. "When a man is a guardian," replies Hardinge promptly, and with evident meaning. The professor glances quickly at him. "You mean----?" says he. "Oh! yes, of course I mean something," says Hardinge impatiently. "But I don't suppose you want me to explain myself. You were there last night--you must have seen for yourself." "Seen what?" "Pshaw!" says Hardinge, throwing up his head, and flinging his cigarette into the empty fireplace. "I saw you go into the conservatory. You found her there, and--_him_. It is beginning to be the chief topic of conversation amongst his friends just now. The betting is already pretty free." "Go on," says the professor. "I needn't go on. You know it now, if you didn't before." "It is you who know it--not I. _Say it!_" says the professor, almost fiercely. "It is about her?" "Your ward? Yes. Your brother it seems has made his mind to bestow upon her his hand, his few remaining acres, and," with a sneer, "his spotless reputation." "_Hardinge!_" cries the professor, springing to his feet as if shot. He is evidently violently agitated. His companion mistakes the nature of his excitement. "Forgive me!" says he quickly. "Of course _nothing_ can excuse my speaking of him like that--to you. But I feel you ought to be told. Miss Wynter is in your care, you are in a measure responsible for her future happiness--the happiness of her whole _life_, Curzon--and if anything goes wrong with her----" The professor puts up his hand as if to check him. He has grown ashen-grey, and the other hand resting on the back of the chair is visibly trembling. "Nothing shall go wrong with her," says he, in a curious tone. Hardinge regards him keenly. Is this pallor, this unmistakable trepidation, caused only by his dislike to hear his brother's real character exposed. "Well, I have told you," says he coldly. "It is a mistake," says the professor. "He would not dare to approach a young, innocent girl. The most honorable proposal such a man as he could make to her would be basely dishonorable." "Ah! you see it in that light too," says Hardinge, with a touch of relief. "My dear fellow, it is hard for me to discuss him with you, but yet I fear it must be done. Did you notice nothing in his manner last night?" Yes, the professor _had_ noticed something. Now there comes back to him that tall figure stooping over Perpetua, the handsome, leering face bent low--the girl's instinctive withdrawal. "Something must be done," says he. "Yes. And quickly. Young girls are sometimes dazzled by men of his sort. And Per--Miss Wynter ... Look here, Curzon," breaking off hurriedly. "This is _your_ affair, you know. You are her guardian. You should see to it." "I could speak to her." "That would be fatal. She is just the sort of girl to say 'Yes' to him because she was told to say 'No.'" "You seem to have studied her," says the professor quietly. "Well, I confess I have seen a good deal of her of late." "And to some purpose. Your knowledge of her should lead you to making a way out of this difficulty." "I have thought of one," says Hardinge boldly, yet with a quick flush. "You are her guardian. Why not arrange another marriage for her, before this affair with Sir Hastings goes too far." "There are two parties to a marriage," says the professor, his tone always very low. "Who is it to whom you propose to marry Miss Wynter?" Hardinge, getting up, moves abruptly to the window and back again. "You have known me a long time, Curzon," says he at last. "You--you have been my friend. I have family--position--money--I----" "I am to understand, then, that _you_ are a candidate for the hand of my ward," says the professor slowly, so slowly that it might suggest itself to a disinterested listener that he has great difficulty in speaking at all. "Yes," says Hardinge, very diffidently. He looks appealingly at the professor. "I know perfectly well she might do a great deal better," says he, with a modesty that sits very charmingly upon him. "But if it comes to a choice between me and your brother, I--I think I am the better man. By Jove, Curzon," growing hot, "it's awfully rude of me, I know, but it is so hard to remember that he _is_ your brother." But the professor does not seem offended. He seems, indeed, so entirely unimpressed by Hardinge's last remark, that it may reasonably be supposed he hasn't heard a word of it. "And she?" says he. "Perpetua. Does she----" He hesitates as if finding it impossible to go on. "Oh! I don't know," says the younger man, with a rather rueful smile. "Sometimes I think she doesn't care for me more than she does for the veriest stranger amongst her acquaintances, and sometimes----" expressive pause. "Yes? Sometimes?" "She has seemed kind." "Kind? How kind?" "Well--friendly. More friendly than she is to others. Last night she let me sit out three waltzes with her, and, she only sat out one with your brother." "Is it?" asks the professor, in a dull, monotonous sort of way. "Is it--I am not much in your or her world, you know--is it a very marked thing for a girl to sit out three waltzes with one man?" "Oh, no. Nothing very special. I have known girls do it often, but she is not like other girls, is she?" The professor waves this question aside. "Keep to the point," says he. "Well, _she_ is the point, isn't she? And look here, Curzon, why aren't you of our world? It is your own fault surely; when one sees your sister, your brother, and--and _this_," with a slight glance round the dull little apartment, "one cannot help wondering why you----" "Let that go by," says the professor. "I have explained it before. I deliberately chose my own way in life, and I want nothing more than I have. You think, then, that last night Miss Wynter gave you--encouragement?" "Oh! hardly that. And yet--she certainly seemed to like--that is not to _dislike_ my being with her: and once--well,"--confusedly--"that was nothing." "It must have been something." "No, really; and I shouldn't have mentioned it either--not for a moment." The professor's face changes. The apathy that has lain upon it for the past five minutes now gives way to a touch of fierce despair. He turns aside, as if to hide the tell-tale features, and going to the window, gazes sightlessly on the hot, sunny street below. What was it--_what_? Shall he ever have the courage to find out? And is this to be the end of it all? In a flash the coming of the girl is present before him, and now, here is her going. Had she--had she--what _was_ it he meant? No wonder if her girlish fancy had fixed itself on this tall, handsome, young man, with his kindly, merry ways and honest meaning. Ah! that was what she meant perhaps when last night she had told him "she would not be a worry to him _long_." Yes, she had meant that; that she was going to marry Hardinge! But to _know_ what Hardinge means! A torturing vision of a little lovely figure, gowned all in white--of a little lovely face uplifted--of another face down bent! No! a thousand times, no! Hardinge would not speak of that--it would be too sacred; and yet this awful doubt---- "Look here. I'll tell you," says Hardinge's voice at this moment. "After all, you are her guardian--her father almost--though I know you scarcely relish your position; and you ought to know about it, and perhaps you can give me your opinion, too, as to whether there was anything in it, you know. The fact is, I,"--rather shamefacedly--"asked her for a flower out of her bouquet, and she gave it. That was all, and," hurriedly, "I don't really believe she meant anything _by_ giving it, only," with a nervous laugh, "I keep hoping she _did_!" A long, long sigh comes through the professor's lips straight from his heart. Only a flower she gave him! Well---- "What do _you_ think?" asks Hardinge after a long pause. "It is a matter on which I could not think." "But there is this," says Hardinge. "You will forward my cause rather than your brother's, will you not? This is an extraordinary demand to make I know--but--I also know _you_." "I would rather see her dead than married to my brother," says the professor, slowly, distinctly. "And----?" questions Hardinge. The professor hesitates a moment, and then: "What do you want me to do?" asks he. "Do? 'Say a good word for me' to her; that is the old way of putting it, isn't it? and it expresses all I mean. She reveres you, even if----" "If what?" "She revolts from your power over her. She is high-spirited, you know," says Hardinge. "That is one of her charms, in my opinion. What I want you to do, Curzon, is to--to see her at once--not to-day, she is going to an afternoon at Lady Swanley's--but to-morrow, and to--you know,"--nervously--"to make a formal proposal to her." The professor throws back his head and laughs aloud. Such a strange laugh. "I am to propose to her--I?" says he. "For me, of course. It is very usual," says Hardinge. "And you are her guardian, you know, and----" "Why not propose to her yourself?" says the professor, turning violently upon him. "Why give me this terrible task? Are you a coward, that you shrink from learning your fate except at the hands of another--another who----" "To tell you the truth, that is it," interrupts Hardinge, simply. "I don't wonder at your indignation, but the fact is, I love her so much, that I fear to put it to the touch myself. You _will_ help me, won't you? You see, you stand in the place of her father, Curzon. If you were her father, I should be saying to you just what I am saying now." "True," says the professor. His head is lowered. "There, go," says he, "I must think this over." "But I may depend upon you"--anxiously--"you will do what you can for me?" "I shall do what I can for _her_." CHAPTER XIV. "Now, by a two-headed Janus, Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time." Hardinge is hardly gone before another--a far heavier--step sounds in the passage outside the professor's door. It is followed by a knock, almost insolent in its loudness and sharpness. "What a hole you do live in," says Sir Hastings, stepping into the room, and picking his way through the books and furniture as if afraid of being tainted by them. "Bless me! what strange beings you scientists are. Rags and bones your surroundings, instead of good flesh and blood. Well, Thaddeus--hardly expected to see _me_ here, eh?" "You want me?" says the professor. "Don't sit down there--those notes are loose; sit here." "Faith, you've guessed it, my dear fellow, I _do_ want you, and most confoundedly badly this time. Your ward, now, Miss Wynter! Deuced pretty little girl, isn't she, and good form too? Wonderfully bred--considering." "I don't suppose you have come here to talk about Miss Wynter's good manners." "By Jove! I have though. You see, Thaddeus, I've about come to the length of my tether, and--er--I'm thinking of turning over a new leaf--reforming, you know--settling down--going in for dulness--domesticity, and all the other deuced lot of it." "It is an excellent resolution, that might have been arrived at years ago with greater merit," says the professor. "A preacher and a scientist in one! Dear sir, you go beyond the possible," says Sir Hastings, with a shrug. "But to business. See here, Thaddeus. I have told you a little of my plans, now hear the rest. I intend to marry--an heiress, _bien entendu_--and it seems to me that your ward, Miss Wynter, will suit me well enough." "And Miss Wynter, will you suit _her_ well enough?" "A deuced sight too well, I should say. Why, the girl is of no family to signify, whereas the Curzons----It will be a better match for her than in her wildest dreams she could have hoped for." "Perhaps, in her wildest dreams, she hoped for a good man, and one who could honestly love her." "Pouf! You are hardly up to date, my dear fellow. Girls, now-a-days, are wise enough to know they can't have everything, and she will get a good deal. Title, position----I say, Thaddeus, what I want of you is to--er--to help me in this matter--to--crack me up a bit, eh?--to--_you_ know." The professor is silent, more through disgust than want of anything to say. Staring at the man before him, he knows he is loathsome to him--loathsome, and his own brother! This man, who with some of the best blood of England in his veins, is so far, far below the standard that marks the gentleman. Surely vice is degrading in more ways than one. To the professor, Sir Hastings, with his handsome, dissipated face, stands out, tawdry, hideous, vulgar--why, every word he says is tinged with coarseness; and yet, what a pretty boy he used to be, with his soft, sunny hair and laughing eyes---- "You will help me, eh?" persists Sir Hastings, with his little dry chronic cough, that seems to shake his whole frame. "Impossible," says the professor, simply, coldly. "_No?_ Why?" The professor looks at him (a penetrating glance), but says nothing. "Oh! damn it all!" says his brother, his brow darkening. "You had _better_, you know, if you want the old name kept above water much longer." "You mean----?" says the professor, turning a grave face to his. "Nothing but what is honorable. I tell you I mean to turn over a new leaf. 'Pon my soul, I mean _that_. I'm sick of all this old racket, it's killing me. And my title is as good a one as she can find anywhere, and if I'm dipped--rather--her money would pull me straight again, and----" He pauses, struck by something in the professor's face. "You mean----?" says the latter again, even more slowly. His eyes are beginning to light. "Exactly what I have said," sullenly. "You have heard me." "Yes, I _have_ heard you," cries the professor, flinging aside all restraints and giving way to sudden violent passion--the more violent, coming from one so usually calm and indifferent. "You have come here to-day to try and get possession, not only of the fortune of a young and innocent girl, but of her body and _soul_ as well! And it is me, _me_ whom you ask to be a party to this shameful transaction. Her dead father left her to my care, and I am to sell her to you, that her money may redeem our name from the slough into which _you_ have flung it? Is innocence to be sacrificed that vice may ride abroad again? Look here," says the professor, his face deadly white, "you have come to the wrong man. I shall warn Miss Wynter against marriage with _you_, as long as there is breath left in my body." Sir Hastings has risen too; _his_ face is dark red; the crimson flood has reached his forehead and dyed it almost black. Now, at this terrible moment, the likeness between the two brothers, so different in spirit, can be seen; the flashing-eyes, the scornful lips, the deadly hatred. It is a shocking likeness, yet not to be denied. "What do _you_ mean, damn you?" says Sir Hastings; he sways a little, as if his passion is overpowering him, and clutches feebly at the edge of the table. "Exactly what _I_ have said," retorts the professor, fiercely. "You refuse then to go with me in this matter?" "_Finally._ Even if I would, I could not. I--have other views for her." "Indeed! Perhaps those other views include yourself. Are you thinking of reserving the prize for your own special benefit? A penniless guardian--a rich ward; as a situation, it is perfect; full of possibilities." "Take care," says the professor, advancing a step or two. "Tut! Do you think I can't see through your game?" says Sir Hastings, in his most offensive way, which is nasty indeed. "You hope to keep me unmarried. You tell yourself, I can't live much longer, at the pace I'm going. I know the old jargon--I have it by heart--given a year at the most the title and the heiress will both be yours! I can read you--I--" He breaks off to laugh sardonically, and the cough catching him, shakes him horribly. "But, no, by heaven!" cries he. "I'll destroy your hopes yet. I'll disappoint you. I'll marry. I'm a young man yet--yet--with life--_long_ life before me--life----" A terrible change comes over his face, he reels backwards, only saving himself by a blind clinging to a book-case on his right. The professor rushes to him and places his arm round him. With his foot he drags a chair nearer, into which Sir Hastings falls with a heavy groan. It is only a momentary attack, however; in a little while the leaden hue clears away, and, though still ghastly, his face looks more natural. "Brandy," gasps he faintly. The professor holds it to his lips, and after a minute or two he revives sufficiently to be able to sit up and look round him. "Thought you had got rid of me for good and all," says he, with a malicious grin, terrible to see on his white, drawn face. "But I'll beat you yet! There!--Call my fellow--he's below. Can't get about without a damned attendant in the morning, now. But I'll cure all that. I'll see you dead before I go to my own grave. I----" "Take your master to his carriage," says the professor to the man, who is now on the threshold. The maunderings of Sir Hastings--still hardly recovered from his late fit--strike horribly upon his ear, rendering him almost faint. CHAPTER XV. My love is like the sky, As distant and as high; Perchance she's fair and kind and bright, Perchance she's stormy--tearful quite-- Alas! I scarce know why." It is late in the day when the professor enters Lady Baring's house. He had determined not to wait till the morrow to see Perpetua. It seemed to him that it would be impossible to go through another sleepless night, with this raging doubt, this cruel uncertainty in his heart. He finds her in the library, the soft light of the dying evening falling on her little slender figure. She is sitting in a big armchair, all in black--as he best knows her--with a book upon her knee. She looks charming, and fresh as a new-born flower. Evidently neither last night's party nor to-day's afternoon have had power to dim her beauty. Sleep had visited _her_ last night, at all events. She springs out of her chair, and throws her book on the table near her. "Why, you are the very last person I expected," says she. "No doubt," says the professor. Who was the _first_ person she has expected? And will Hardinge be here presently to plead his cause in person? "But it was imperative I should come. There is something I have to tell you--to lay before you." "Not a mummy, I trust," says she, a little flippantly. "A proposal," says the professor, coldly. "Much as I know you dislike the idea, still; it was your poor father's wish that I should, in a measure, regulate your life until your coming of age. I am here to-day to let you know--that--Mr. Hardinge has requested me to tell you that he----" The professor pauses, feeling that he is failing miserably. He, the fluent speaker at lectures, and on public platforms, is now bereft of the power to explain one small situation. "What's the matter with Mr. Hardinge," asks Perpetua, "that he can't come here himself? Nothing serious, I hope?" "I am your guardian," says the professor--unfortunately, with all the air of one profoundly sorry for the fact declared, "and he wishes _me_ to tell you that he--is desirous of marrying you." Perpetua stares at him. Whatever bitter thoughts are in her mind, she conceals them. "He is a most thoughtful young man," says she, blandly. "And--and you're another." "I hope I am thoughtful, if I am not young," says the professor, with dignity. Her manner puzzles him. "With regard to Hardinge, I wish you to know that--that I--have known him for years, and that he is in my opinion a strictly honorable, kind-hearted man. He is of good family. He has money. He will probably succeed to a baronetcy--though this is not _certain_, as his uncle is, comparatively speaking, young still. But, even without the title, Hardinge is a man worthy of any woman's esteem, and confidence, and----" He is interrupted by Miss Wynter's giving way to a sudden burst of mirth. It is mirth of the very angriest, but it checks him the more effectually, because of that. "You must place great confidence in princes!" says she. "Even '_without_ the title, he is worthy of esteem.'" She copies him audaciously. "What has a title got to do with esteem?--and what has esteem got to do with love?" "I should hope----" begins the professor. "You needn't. It has nothing to do with it, nothing _at all_. Go back and tell Mr. Hardinge so; and tell him, too, that when next he goes a-wooing, he had better do it in person." "I am afraid I have damaged my mission," says the professor, who has never once looked at her since his first swift glance. "_Your_ mission?" "Yes. It was mere nervousness that prevented him coming to you first himself. He said he had little to go on, and he said something about a flower that you gave him----" Perpetua makes a rapid movement toward a side table, takes a flower from a bouquet there, and throws it at the professor. There is no excuse to be made for her beyond the fact that her heart feels breaking, and people with broken hearts do strange things every day. "I would give a flower to _anyone_!" says she in a quick scornful fashion. The professor catches the ungraciously given gift, toys with it, and--keeps it. Is that small action of his unseen? "I hope," he says in a dull way, "that you are not angry with him because he came first to me. It was a sense of duty--I know, I _feel_--compelled him to do it, together with his honest diffidence about your affection for him. Do not let pride stand in the way of----" "Nonsense!" says Perpetua, with a rapid movement of her hand. "Pride has no part in it. I do not care for Mr. Hardinge--I shall not marry him." A little mist seems to gather before the professor's eyes. His glasses seem in the way, he drops them, and now stands gazing at her as if disbelieving his senses. In fact he does disbelieve in them. "Are you sure?" persists he. "Afterwards you may regret----" "Oh, no!" says she, shaking her head. "_Mr. Hardinge_ will not be the one to cause me regret." "Still think----" "Think! Do you imagine I have not been thinking?" cries she, with sudden passion. "Do you imagine I do not know why you plead his cause so eloquently? You want to get _rid_ of me. You are _tired_ of me. You always thought me heartless, about my poor father even, and unloving, and--hateful, and----" "Not heartless; what have I done, Perpetua, that you should say that?" "Nothing. That is what I _detest_ about you. If you said outright what you were thinking of me, I could bear it better." "But my thoughts of you. They are----" He pauses. What _are_ they? What are his thoughts of her at all hours, all seasons? "They are always kind," says he, lamely, in a low tone, looking at the carpet. That downward glance condemns him in her eyes--to her it is but a token of his guilt towards her. "They are _not_!" says she, with a little stamp of her foot that makes the professor jump. "You think of me as a cruel, wicked, worldly girl, who would marry _anyone_ to gain position." Here her fury dies away. It is overcome by something stronger. She trembles, pales, and finally bursts into a passion of tears that have no anger in them, only an intense grief. "I do not," says the professor, who is trembling too, but whose utterance is firm. "Whatever my thoughts are, _your_ reading of them is entirely wrong." "Well, at all events you can't deny one thing," says she checking her sobs, and gazing at him again with undying enmity. "You want to get rid of me, you are determined to marry me to some one, so as to get me out of your way. But I shan't marry to please _you_. I needn't either. There is somebody else who wants to marry me besides your--_your_ candidate!" with an indignant glance. "I have had a letter from Sir Hastings this afternoon. And," rebelliously, "I haven't answered it yet." "Then you shall answer it now," says the professor. "And you shall say 'no' to him." "Why? Because you order me?" "Partly because of that. Partly because I trust to your own instincts to see the wisdom of so doing." "Ah! you beg the question," says she, "but I'm not so sure I shall obey you for all that." "Perpetua! Do not speak to me like that, I implore you," says the professor, very pale. "Do you think I am not saying all this for your good? Sir Hastings--he is my brother--it is hard for me to explain myself, but he will not make you happy." "Happy! _You_ think of my happiness?" "Of what else?" A strange yearning look comes into his eyes. "God knows it is _all_ I think of," says he. "And so you would marry me to Mr. Hardinge?" "Hardinge is a good man, and he loves you." "If so, he is the only one on earth who does," cries the girl bitterly. She turns abruptly away, and struggles with herself for a moment, then looks back at him. "Well. I shall not marry him," says she. "That is in your own hands," says the professor. "But I shall have something to say about the other proposal you speak of." "Do you think I want to marry your brother?" says she. "I tell you no, no, _no_! A thousand times no! The very fact that he _is_ your brother would prevent me. To be your ward is bad enough, to be your sister-in-law would be insufferable. For all the world I would not be more to you than I am now." "It is a wise decision," says the professor icily. He feels smitten to his very heart's core. Had he ever dreamed of a nearer, dearer tie between them?--if so the dream is broken now. "Decision?" stammers she. "Not to marry my brother." "Not to be more to you, you mean!" "You don't know what you are saying," says the professor, driven beyond his self-control. "You are a mere child, a baby, you speak at random." "What!" cries she, flashing round at him, "will you deny that I have been a trouble to you, that you would have been thankful had you never heard my name?" "You are right," gravely. "I deny nothing. I wish with all my soul I had never heard your name. I confess you troubled me. I go beyond even _that_, I declare that you have been my undoing! And now, let us make an end of it. I am a poor man and a busy one, this task your father laid upon my shoulders is too heavy for me. I shall resign my guardianship; Gwendoline--Lady Baring--will accept the position. She likes you, and--you will find it hard to break _her_ heart." "Do you mean," says the girl, "that I have broken yours? _Yours?_ Have I been so bad as that? Yours? I have been wilful, I know, and troublesome, but troublesome people do not break one's heart. What have I done then that yours should be broken?" She has moved closer to him. Her eyes are gazing with passionate question into his. "Do not think of that," says the professor, unsteadily. "Do not let that trouble you. As I just now told you, I am a poor man, and poor men cannot afford such luxuries as hearts." "Yet poor men have them," says the girl in a little low stifled tone. "And--and girls have them too!" There is a long, long silence. To Curzon it seems as if the whole world has undergone a strange, wild upheaval. What had she meant--what? Her words! Her words meant something, but her looks, her eyes, oh, how much more _they_ meant! And yet to listen to her--to believe--he, her guardian, a poor man, and she an heiress! Oh! no. Impossible. "So much the worse for the poor men," says he deliberately. There is no mistaking his meaning. Perpetua makes a little rapid movement towards him--an almost imperceptible one. _Did_ she raise her hands as if to hold them out to him? If so, it is so slight a gesture as scarcely to be remembered afterwards, and at all events the professor takes no notice of it, presumably, therefore, he does not see it. "It is late," says Perpetua a moment afterwards. "I must go and dress for dinner." _Her_ eyes are down now. She looks pale and shamed. "You have nothing to say, then?" asks the professor, compelling himself to the question. "About what?" "Hardinge." The girl turns a white face to his. "Will you then _compel_ me to marry him?" says she. "Am I"--faintly--"nothing to you? Nothing----" She seems to fade back from him in the growing uncertainty of the light into the shadow of the corner beyond. Curzon makes a step towards her. At this moment the door is thrown suddenly open, and a man--evidently a professional man--advances into the room. "Sir Thaddeus," begins he, in a slow, measured way. The professor stops dead short. Even Perpetua looks amazed. "I regret to be the messenger of bad news, sir," says the solemn man in black. "They told me I should find you here. I have to tell you, Sir Thaddeus, that your brother, the late lamented Sir Hastings is dead." The solemn man spread his hands abroad. CHAPTER XVI. 'Till the secret be secret no more In the light of one hour as it flies, Be the hour as of suns that expire Or suns that rise." It is quite a month later. August, hot and sunny, is reigning with quite a mad merriment, making the most of the days that be, knowing full well that the end of the summer is nigh. The air is stifling; up from the warm earth comes the almost overpowering perfume of the late flowers. Perpetua moving amongst the carnations and hollyhocks in her soft white cambric frock, gathers a few of the former in a languid manner to place in the bosom of her frock. There they rest, a spot of blood color upon their white ground. Lady Baring, on the death of her elder brother, had left town for the seclusion of her country home, carrying Perpetua with her. She had grown very fond of the girl, and the fancy she had formed (before Sir Hastings' death) that Thaddeus was in love with the young heiress, and that she would make him a suitable wife, had not suffered in any way through the fact of Sir Thaddeus having now become the head of the family. Perpetua, having idly plucked a few last pansies, looked at them, and as idly flung them away, goes on her listless way through the gardens. A whole _long_ month and not one word from him! Are his social duties now so numerous that he has forgotten he has a ward? "Well," emphatically, and with a vicious little tug at her big white hat, "_some_ people have strange views about duty." She has almost reached the summer-house, vine-clad, and temptingly cool in all this heat, when a quick step behind her causes her to turn. "They told me you were here," says the professor, coming up with her. He is so distinctly the professor still, in spite of his new mourning, and the better cut of his clothes, and the general air of having been severely looked after--that Perpetua feels at home with him at once. "I have been here for some time," says she calmly. "A whole month, isn't it?" "Yes, I know. Were you going into that green little place. It looks cool." It is cool, and particularly empty. One small seat occupies the back of it, and nothing else at all, except the professor and his ward. "Perpetua!" says he, turning to her. His tone is low, impassioned. "I have come. I could not come sooner, and I _would_ not write. How could I put it all on paper? You remember that last evening?" "I remember," says she faintly. "And all you said?" "All _you_ said." "I said nothing. I did not dare. _Then_ I was too poor a man, too insignificant to dare to lay bare to you the thoughts, the fears, the hopes that were killing me." "Nothing!" echoes she. "Have you then forgotten?" She raises her head, and casts at him a swift, but burning glance. "_Was_ it nothing? You came to plead your friend's cause, I think. Surely that was something? I thought it a great deal. And what was it you said of Mr. Hardinge? Ah! I _have_ forgotten that, but I know how you extolled him--praised him to the skies--recommended him to me as a desirable suitor." She makes an impatient movement, as if to shake something from her. "Why have you come to-day?" asks she. "To plead his cause afresh?" "Not his--to-day." "Whose then? Another suitor, maybe? It seems I have more than even I dreamt of." "I do not know if you have dreamed of this one," says Curzon, perplexed by her manner. Some hope had been in his heart in his journey to her, but now it dies. There is little love truly in her small, vivid face, her gleaming eyes, her parted, scornful lips. "I am not given to dreams," says she, with a petulant shrug, "_I_ know what I mean always. And as I tell you, if you _have_ come here to-day to lay before me, for my consideration, the name of another of your friends who wishes to marry me, why I beg you to save yourself the trouble. Even the country does not save me from suitors. I can make my choice from many, and when I _do_ want to marry, I shall choose for myself." "Still--if you would permit me to name _this_ one," begins Curzon, very humbly, "it can do you no harm to hear of him. And it all lies in your own power. You can, if you will, say yes, or----" He pauses. The pause is eloquent, and full of deep entreaty. "Or no," supplies she calmly. "True! You," with a half defiant, half saucy glance, "are beginning to learn that a guardian cannot control one altogether." "I don't think I ever controlled you, Perpetua." "N--o! Perhaps not. But then you tried to. That's worse." "Do you forbid me then to lay before you--this name--that I----?" "I have told you," says she, "that I can find a name for myself." "You forbid me to speak," says he slowly. "_I_ forbid! A ward forbid her guardian! I should be afraid!" says she, with an extremely naughty little glance at him. "You trifle with me," says the professor slowly, a little sternly, and with uncontrolled despair. "I thought--I believed--I was _mad_ enough to imagine, from your manner to me that last night we met, that I was something more than a mere guardian to you." "More than _that_. That seems to be a Herculean relation. What more would you be?" "I am no longer that, at all events." "What!" cries she, flushing deeply. "You--you give me up----" "It is you who give _me_ up." "You say you will no longer be my guardian!" She seems struck with amazement at this declaration on his part. She had not believed him when he had before spoken of his intention of resigning. "But you cannot," says she. "You have promised. Papa _said_ you were to take care of me." "Your father did not know." "He _did_. He said you were the one man in all the world he could trust." "Impossible," says the professor. "A--lover--cannot be a guardian!" His voice has sunk to a whisper. He turns away, and makes a step towards the door. "You are going," cries she, fighting with a desperate desire for tears, that is still strongly allied to anger. "You would leave me. You will be no longer my guardian, Ah! was I not right? Did I not _tell_ you you were in a hurry to get rid of me?" This most unfair accusation rouses the professor to extreme wrath. He turns round and faces her like an enraged lion. "You are a child," says he, in a tone sufficient to make any woman resentful. "It is folly to argue with you." "A child! What are you then?" cries she tremulously. "A _fool_!" furiously. "I was given my cue, I would not take it. You told me that it was bad enough to be your ward, that you would not on any account be closer to me. _That_ should have been clear to me, yet, like an idiot, I hoped against hope. I took false courage from each smile of yours, each glance, each word. There! Once I leave you now, the chain between us will be broken, we shall never, with _my_ will, meet again. You say you have had suitors since you came down here. You hinted to me that you could mention the name of him you wished to marry. So be it. Mention it to Gwendoline--to any one you like, but not to me." He strides towards the doorway. He has almost turned the corner. "Thaddeus" cries a small, but frantic voice. If dying he would hear that and turn. She is holding out her hands to him, the tears are running down her lovely cheeks. "It is to you--to _you_ I would tell his name," sobs she, as he returns slowly, unwillingly, but _surely_, to her. "To you alone." "To me! Go on," says Curzon; "let me hear it. What is the name of this man you want to marry?" "Thaddeus Curzon!" says she, covering her face with her hands, and, indeed, it is only when she feels his arms round her, and his heart beating against hers, that she so far recovers herself as to be able to add, "And a _hideous_ name it is, too!" But this last little firework does no harm. Curzon is too ecstatically happy to take notice of her small impertinence. THE END. * * * * * JELLY OF CUCUMBER AND ROSES. MADE BY W. A. DYER & CO., MONTREAL, is a delightfully fragrant Toilet article. Removes freckles and sun-burn, and renders chapped and rough skin, after one application, smooth and pleasant. No Toilet-table is complete without a tube of Dyer's Jelly of Cucumber and Roses. Sold by all Druggists. Agents for United States-- CASWELL, MASSEY & CO., New York & Newport. * * * * * Teeth Like Pearls! Is a common expression. The way to obtain it, use Dyer's Arnicated Tooth Paste, fragrant and delicious. 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COVERNTON & CO., Dispensing Chemists, CORNER OF BLEURY AND DORCHESTER STREETS, _Branch, 469 St. Lawrence Street,_ MONTREAL. 
22398	----	Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 22398-h.htm or 22398-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/2/2/3/9/22398/22398-h/22398-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/2/2/3/9/22398/22398-h.zip) THE HEIRESS OF WYVERN COURT by E. SEARCHFIELD Author of "Claimed at Last" Illustrated [Illustration: "'GOOD MORNING, MADAME GICHE'" (p. 65).] Cassell and Company, Limited London, Paris, New York & Melbourne 1900 All Rights Reserved CONTENTS. PAGE CHAPTER I.--In the Railway Carriage--New Friends 9 " II.--Willett's Farm--Tea in the Dining-room 21 " III.--Dr. Willett--The Nutting Expedition--The Fire 35 " IV.--Oscar's Burnt Arm--Black Hole 47 " V.--Inna at the Owl's Nest--More Wrong Steps 61 " VI.--Inna's Firstfruits--On the Tor 73 " VII.--Oscar Lost--A Fruitless Search 86 " VIII.--At the Owl's Nest--The Song--The Surprise 96 " IX.--Oscar's Return--The Mystery Cleared--On the Tor Again 109 " X.--The Expedition to Swallow's Cliff--Caught by the Tide 119 " XI.--The Rescue--Cloudy Days--Good News at Last 133 " XII.--New Thoughts and Ways--The Heiress of Wyvern Court 146 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS "'Good morning, Madame Giche'" Frontispiece "A donkey and cart came driving up" To face page 40 "It snapped, and he was gone" " 130 "Dick shook her by the hand" " 144 THE HEIRESS OF WYVERN COURT. CHAPTER I. IN THE RAILWAY CARRIAGE--NEW FRIENDS. "Well, little friend, and where do you hail from?" The speaker was a merry-faced, brown-eyed boy of eleven, with curly brown hair--just the school-boy all over. He had leaped into a railway carriage with cricket-bat, fishing-rod, and a knowing-looking little hamper, which he deposited on the seat beside him; then away went the snorting steam horse, train, people, and all, and out came this abrupt question. "Little friend" was a mite of a girl of nine, dressed in a homely blue serge frock and jacket, with blue velvet hat to match: a shy little midge of a grey-eyed maiden, with sunny brown curls twining about her forehead and rippling down upon her shoulders, nestling in one corner of the carriage--the sole occupant thereof until this merry questioner came to keep her company. "I don't quite know what you mean," was the little girl's reply--a sweet, refined way of speaking had she, and her eyes sparkled with shy merriment, although there was a startled look in them too. "Well, where do you come from, my dear mademoiselle?" and now the merry speaker made a courtly bow. "From London--but I'm not French, you know," was the retort, with the demurest of demure smiles. "No--just so; and where are you going?" One could but answer him, his questions came with such winning grace of manner. "To Cherton--to uncle--to Mr. Jonathan Willett's." "Cherton! why, that's not far from my happy destination. I get out only one station before you." "Little friend" smiled her demure little smile again, as if she was glad to hear it. "So you're going to Mr. Willett's--Dr. Willett he's generally called, being a physician," continued the boy, after glancing from the window a second or two, as if to note how fast the landscape was rushing past the train, or the train past the landscape. "Yes; do you know him?" inquired the silvery tongue of the other. "Oh yes; I know him!"--a short assent, comically spoken. "I don't," sighed the little girl, as if the thought oppressed her. "Then you'd like to know what he's like," spoke the boy, using the word like twice for want of another. "Yes--only--only would it be nice to talk about a person--one's uncle, one doesn't know, be----" she did not like to say behind his back, but the faltering little tongue stuck fast, and the small sensitive face of the child looked a little confused. "Ah! behind his back," spoke the boy readily. "Well, perhaps not; but you'll know him soon enough, I'm quite sure, and all about Peggy, too. Peggy is the best of the couple," he added. "Do you mean Mrs. Grant, my uncle's housekeeper?" "Yes, that very lady--only, you see, I like to call her Peggy." "Yes," returned the child, supposing she ought to say something. "'Tis a farm, you know--jolly old place. Do you know that?" "Yes--that is, I know 'tis a farm; mamma told me that. But I didn't know 'twas jolly; mamma said 'twas very pretty, and home-like, and nice." "Ah, yes! just a lady's view of the place," nodded the boy approvingly. "The farm is the best part of it all, and so you'll say when----" "Perhaps we'll not talk about it," broke in "little friend" timidly. "Well, you are a precise little lady not to talk about a farm, your uncle's farm, behind its back," laughed the boy. "It's mamma's uncle," corrected the little maiden. "Ah, yes! and your great uncle. Well, I thought he was an old fogey to be your uncle--I beg your pardon--old _gentleman_ I mean." He laughed and made a low bow, but his cheeks took a rosier tint at that real slip of his tongue. "Well, suppose we talk about ourselves; that wouldn't be behind our own backs, would it?" "Oh no!" came with a pretty jingle of laughter. "Do you know my name? Dick." "I thought so," replied the little girl. "You did!--why?" "You look like a Dick." "Well, that's just like a girl's bosh--but still, you're right: I am Dick Gregory, son of George Gregory, surgeon, living at Lakely, next station to Cherton, where you get out, you know." The girl nodded. "Now, mademoiselle, what may your name be?" he asked, as the train carried them into the station with a whiz. "Inna Weston." "Inna: is that short for anything?" "Yes--for Peninnah: papa's mother's name is Peninnah; and so, and so----" "And so your father chose to let you play grandmother to yourself in the matter of names?" "Yes," a little ripple of a word full of laughter--her companion was so funny. "Now guess what's in this hamper?" was Dick's next proposition; "that's safe ground, you know, to guess over a hamper when the owner bids you," he added, by way of encouragement. "A kitten." The train was carrying them on again, without any intruder to cut off the thread of their talk, except the guard, who put his head in at the window, and beamed a smile on Inna, as her caretaker; then he shut the door, and locked them in, and here was the train tearing on again. "Well, now, you are a good guesser for a girl," said Dick. "I didn't guess: I knew it. I heard her mew," smiled Inna. "Ah! Miss Inna is a little pitcher, pussy; she has sharp ears," said pussy's master, peering and speaking through the hamper. "Me--e--e--w!" came like a prolonged protest against all the hurry-scurry and noise, so confusing to a kitten shut up in a hamper, not knowing why nor whither she was travelling. "Now, who am I taking her to? guess that; and if you guess right, I should say you're a seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, and of gipsy origin"--so the merry boy challenged her. "To your sister." "Right!" laughed Dick. "But I'm not a seventh daughter--I'm only daughter to mamma, and so was mamma before me; and I'm not a gipsy." Inna's face was brimming over with shy merriment. "Well, you ought to be, for you're a clever guesser of dark secrets," returned the boy. "Yes: I'm taking pussy home to my sister. Her name is--now, what is her name?" Inna shook her head. "Something pretty I should say, but I don't know what." "Oh! you're not much of a witch after all," said Dick. "No, it isn't anything pretty--it's Jane." Inna smiled, and looked wise. "Well, what is it, Miss Inna? Out with it!" cried Dick, watching her changeful little face. "Mamma says, when one has an ugly name one must try to live a life to make it beautiful." "Hum! Well, that isn't bad. And when one has a beautiful name--like Dick, for instance," said he waggishly, "what then?" "Then the name should help the life, and the life the name--so mamma said when I asked her." "Well, your mother must be good," said Dick to this. "Yes, she is." Wistful lights were stealing into Inna's eyes, and Dick had a suspicion that there were tears in them. "I'm not blest with one," spoke he, carelessly to all seeming. "With no mother?" inquired his companion gently. "I'm sort of foster-child to Meggy, our cook and housekeeper--ours is Meggy, you know, and yours is Peggy, at Willett's Farm." "Yes," smiled Inna, "yes." She had tided over that tenderness of spirit caused by speaking of her mother. The train was steaming into a station again, but no passenger intruded; only the guard peeped in, as caretaker, to see if she was safe, as Dick remarked, when they were moving on again. "Has he got you under his wing?" asked he. "The guard has me under his care; ma--mamma asked him to see me safe." The wistfulness was coming into her eyes again. "So she has a mother; I thought perhaps she hadn't," thought Dick. Aloud he said bluffly, "'Tis well to be a girl, to have all made smooth for one. Now here am I, come all the way from Wenley, turned out of school because of the measles, and never a creature as much as to say, 'Have you got a ticket, or money to buy one?'" "Oh, but they'd not let you come without a ticket," smiled Inna. "I mean our chums at school, and father at home. Of course my father knew I was all right about money, because he'd just sent my quarter's allowance." "And have they got the measles at your school?" "Yes: are you afraid of me? Infection, you know." "Afraid? oh no!" "Well, if you caught it you'd be all right, your uncle being a doctor. A doctor at a farm--queer, isn't it, now?" So Dick went skimming from subject to subject, very like a swallow skimming over the surface of water after flies and gnats. "Yes," Inna could but confess it was--very guardedly, though, lest they might verge upon gossip again. "But Peggy's the farmer; your uncle has enough to do to look after his patients. He's a clever fo--man--so clever that some say he's got medicine on the brain." Inna's lips were sealed conscientiously; but out of the brief silence that followed she put the safe question-- "What colour's your kitten?" "White. Wouldn't you like to take a peep at her?" and good-natured Dick held the hamper so that she might catch a glimpse of the small four-legged traveller. "She's a beauty!"--such was Inna's opinion of her. "And, according to you, she ought to have a beautiful name. But what of my sister Jane? I call her Jenny, and Jin; and that reminds me of the other gin with a g, you know; and that carries me on to trap, and trapper. I sometimes call her Trapper. That sounds quite romantic, and carries one away into North American Indian story life. Have you ever read any North American Indian stories--about Indians, and scalps, and all that?" "No," was the decisive, though smiling, reply. Ah! they were steaming into a station again. "Lakely at last, and this is my station!" cried Dick, gathering his belongings together, so as to be ready to leap out when the train stopped, while a porter went shouting up and down the platform, "Lakely! Lakely!" "Well, good-bye, little friend; mind, Cherton comes next, then 'twill be your turn to turn out." He wrung her hand, and was out on the platform in a twinkle, loaded like a bee, happy as a boy. "I say, Miss Inna, I should like you to come over to our place to see Jenny, or Trapper. I shall ask the doctor to give you a lift over in his gig," he put his head back into the carriage to say. Now he was scudding away down the platform, and claiming a trunk and portmanteau from a medley of luggage, had it set aside by the porter, who seemed to know him; this done, he darted back again, smiled in at the carriage window, where that sweet girlish face still watched him, and then vanished. CHAPTER II. WILLETT'S FARM--TEA IN THE DINING-ROOM. "Cherton! Cherton! Cherton!" Inna sprang from the corner of her lonely carriage, and stepped out upon the platform, helped by the kindly guard. "Now, my dear, what's to be done? There's nobody here waiting for you, as I see," said the man, looking up and down the small platform, where she seemed to be the only arrival--she and her neat little trunk, which a porter brought and set down at her feet. "No, they don't know I'm coming," returned the child, with a sober shake of her head. "Where for, miss?" inquired the porter, as the guard looked at him. "My--Mr. Willett's, at Willett's Farm," said Inna, in a sort of startled importance at having to speak for herself. "Do you know the way?" asked the man. "No; but I should if you told me--I mean----" "Yes, miss; I know what you mean," replied the porter, noting her childish confusion. "I'll see to her, and send her safely," he promised the busy guard, and took her small gloved hand in his, and led her away out into the open road by the station, stretching away among fields, all bathed in crimson and golden sunshine. "Now, miss," said he, pointing with his finger, "you go along this road and turn to your right, and along a lane, turn to your right, and along another; don't turn to your left at all; then turn to your right again, and there you are at Willett's Farm. Do you understand?" he asked kindly, bending down to something like her height, so as to get her view of the way. "Yes, thank you; I must keep to the right all the way, and turn three times--but I don't think I quite know what a farm is like," confessed she bravely. "Oh, miss, that's easy; there isn't another house before you reach the farm--the village is above Willett's Farm." "Thank you; then I'll think I'll go now." "You'll not lose yourself? I'd go with you, but I expect another train in almost directly, and there isn't a soul about here that I could send. And about your box, miss: will you send for it?" "Yes, I'll send for it; and--and I don't think I shall lose myself." "Then good evening, miss." The porter touched his hat, and she bade him "good evening" in return; then the child went wandering down the road from the station--a blue dot in the evening sunshine. Well, she took her three turnings to the right, and they brought her to the farm, lying not far up the last lane; the farm-buildings--barn, stable, and a whole clump of outbuildings--lying back from the road a little, and all lit up by the last rays of sunset. The house looked out upon the lane, where the shadows were gathering fast, under the many-tinted elm trees overshadowing it. Three spotlessly white steps led up to the front door, a strip of green turf lying each side, enclosed by green iron railings, and shut in by a little green gate. A quaint old house it was, with many crooks, corners, and gables, and small lattice diamond-paned windows, through one of which gleamed the ruddy glow of a fire. Ah! the air was crisp, the sun well-nigh gone, the evening creeping on. Inna sighed, and, tripping through the little green gate, mounted the three white steps, and, by dint of straining, reached up, and knocked with the knocker almost as loudly as a timid mouse. But it brought an answer, in the shape of a middle-aged woman, in a brown stuff gown, white apron and cap, dainty frillings of lace encircling her face. A sober face it was, yet kindly, peering down in astonishment at our small heroine, standing silent there among the deepening shadows in the crisp chilly air. "Well, dearie, what is it?" she questioned, as the child opened her lips to speak, and said nothing. "I'm Inna: please may I come in and tell you all about it?" asked the silvery tongue then. "Yes, of course--that is, if you have anything to tell;" and with this the woman made way for the little girl to pass her, and shut the door. "This way," she said; and that was to the kitchen. Such a clean, cheery, comfortable place, with its wood fire filling it with ruddy glow and warmth, which was like a silent welcome. "Now, who's ill and wants a doctor? Sick folks' messengers shouldn't lag," said the woman, scanning her visitor as they both stood in the firelight glow. "Oh, nobody is ill; and I only--I mean--I don't know where to begin," was the bewildering answer. "Well, of course you know what brought you," suggested the other. "Oh, the train brought me; and I've come to stay here." "You have?" asked the woman. "Yes; because Uncle Jonathan gave mamma a home once, when she was a little girl; and she said he would me, if she sent me." "And who are you? and who's your mamma?" "I'm Inna; and mamma is Uncle Jonathan's niece." "You aren't Miss Mercy's daughter?" said the woman. "Yes, I'm Miss Mercy's daughter; and now, please, may I sit down?" asked the little tired voice. "Yes, poor little unwelcome lamb; I'll not be the one to deny that to Miss Mercy's daughter. Come here;" and she set her own cushioned rocking-chair forward on the hearth. "But where is Miss Mercy? and why did she send you here?" "Mamma is gone abroad with papa. Some people are afraid he's dying; and"--Inna's heart was full--"I've a letter in my pocket for Uncle Jonathan, to tell him all about it." "Well, well, this will be news for master--unwelcome news, I'm thinking," muttered the woman as to herself, but speaking aloud. "Do you mean I shan't be welcome?" asked a strained little voice from the rocking-chair. "Well, dearie, welcome or not, here you are, and here you must stay for to-night, at any rate. You see, Dr. Willett has one child on his hands already, and he's a handful. I doubt if he'll want another. But then, we must all have what we don't want sometimes--eh, miss?" To this Inna sighed a troubled little "Yes." Then Mrs. Grant--for she it was--bethought her to help her off with her jacket and hat, and inquired had she any belongings at the station? Yes, she had a trunk there; and an unknown Will--at least, unknown to Inna--was despatched for it. "But maybe you'd like some tea?" suggested the housekeeper. "Yes, I should, please," the little lady assured her, folding her jacket neatly, as she had been taught. "Well, they're just having tea in the dining-room. Come along." No use for Inna to shrink or shiver, for Mrs. Grant was leading the way to those unknown tea-drinkers of whom she was to form one; the fire-light from the kitchen showing them the way along a passage. Then a door was opened, and the small shiverer thrust in, not unkindly, with the words-- "A little lady come for a bit and a sup with you, sir." Then the door closed, and she was in another fire-lit room. A lamp, too, burnt on a table in front of a wood fire, on which was laid a quaint old-fashioned tea equipage, with a hissing urn, and all complete. On the hearth knelt a lad, making toast; and by his side, leaning against the mantelpiece, was a tall man--red-haired, with streaks of grey in that of both head and closely-clipped beard. He had keen grey eyes, which seemed to scan Inna through; a small mouse-like figure by the door, afraid to advance. "Oscar, where are your manners?" asked the gentleman, "to treat a lady in this way, when she's thrust upon you?" Thrust: here was another word which seemed to say she was not welcome. "I beg your pardon," lisped the child, thinking she ought to speak. "No, no; a lady is very like a king--she never does wrong or needs pardon; 'tis this great lout of a boy here that is the aggressor." Whereupon the somewhat awkward, shy lad on the hearth laid down knife and toasting-fork, and came towards her. "Well, whoever you are, will you please sit here?" said he, setting her a chair by the table, and taking another himself behind the urn. "With a lady in the room, you'll never do that," said the gentleman, spying comically at him from where he still stood on the hearth, as the boy began to brew the tea. "Oh no, thank you; I couldn't manage the urn," said Inna. "I thought not," growled Oscar, a big, handsome, fair-haired boy of eleven, with grey-blue eyes. "And now, here I am without a cup for you." Inna had not taken the seat he offered her by the table, but had glided round to the gentleman on the hearth. Oscar made a bolt from the room to fetch a cup and saucer. "Won't you say you will like to have me here, Uncle--Uncle Jonathan?" she asked hesitatingly. Such a mite she was, glancing up at the tall red-haired gentleman turning grey, such blushes coming and going in her cheeks. "My dear little lady, I think you're just the one element wanting in our male community: a little girl in our midst will save us from settling down into the savages we're fast becoming," replied the gentleman, glancing down in an amused way at her from his superior height. "Well, isn't that welcome enough?" he asked, still with that comical smile, as Inna gave a puzzled glance at him, as if not quite comprehending his high talk, and fumbling in her dress pocket. "I have a letter that will tell you all about me--why I've come, you know," said she. "Ah yes, Dr. Willett's letter," he remarked, taking the missive from her and balancing it between his finger and thumb. Just then Oscar came back with a rush. "I know all about you, and who you are," said he, putting down the cup and saucer he had brought with a clatter. "You're a sort of half-cousin of mine, and a great-niece of Uncle Jonathan's," he blurted out. "Well, since you know so much, suppose you come here and enlighten your new half-cousin as to who I am. She has mistaken me for her uncle--and naturally too, since you, as host for the time being, were rude enough not to introduce us." At this reproach Oscar left his tea-making, and approached the two: Inna with burning cheeks, at her mistake about this unknown gentleman, not her uncle. "Well, this is Mr. Barlow--Dr. Barlow, some people call him, but he's no such thing; he's a surgeon, and the one who plays David to Uncle Jonathan--you understand?" questioned the boy, with humour sparkling in his blue-grey eyes. "Yes," nodded Inna shyly; "his very dear friend, you mean." "Yes, that's about the figure," was the response, while the two bowed with ceremony. "And now, I am--tell Mr. Barlow who I am, please," pleaded the small maiden. "Well, this is Miss Inna Weston, the daughter of a certain Mercy Willett, niece of Jonathan Willett, Doctor, who lived here years ago, before my time. Now, old man, come to tea." With this, the boy slapped the other on the arm with pleasant familiarity, and went back to his tea-making. Mr. Barlow led Inna to her seat, and saw her comfortable there, taking his own chair beside her, while Oscar sat with his back to the fire--like a cat on a frosty night, Mr. Barlow told him. Inna wondered where her uncle was, but asked no questions as yet--only munched away at her toast in her dainty way, and sipped her tea, trying hard to feel that she was at home. As for Oscar, he made such sloppy work with the urn, that Mr. Barlow had to say presently-- "Don't make a sea of the table, boy. You see what incapable creatures we are, Miss Inna. I never could make tea, and your own eyes tell you what Oscar can do." "I suppose Uncle Jonathan makes tea when he is here," was Inna's reply. At which the two gentlemen looked comically at each other. "Well, I can't say I ever saw the doctor come down from the clouds enough for that," observed Mr. Barlow dryly; "but I hope his little great-niece--am I right in the pedigree, Oscar?--will set us to rights, and bring in the age of civilisation for us." Inna could but laugh a tinkling laugh at this, and asked timidly, "Do you live here, Mr. Barlow?" "No, dear; but I'm here morning, noon, and night. My head-quarters are at Mrs. Tussell's, whose name ought to be, now, guess what?" People must suppose she had an aptitude for guessing, Inna thought, and asked with rosy cheeks was it "Fussy"? "Just the word; only you mustn't tell her so," was the reply; at which Inna shook her head, and said she could not be so rude. Then came the sound of the doctor's gig outside the house, a step and a voice in the passage. "He'll not come in here, dear," Mr. Barlow told Inna, seeing her start and change colour; "he'll have a cup of tea in his den, as we call it," at which Oscar nodded, and said, "And a good name too!" Tea over, Mr. Barlow rose, and said "Good-bye for to-night, Miss Inna; David is going to Jonathan," patted her head, and was gone. "Is his real name David?" she asked shyly of this cousin she had no idea of finding at Uncle Jonathan's; nor had her mamma either, she decided in her own mind. "No; William--Billy Barlow they call him in the village, only I didn't say so just now," returned Oscar drily. "Mind your lessons, Master Oscar," said Mrs. Grant, when she came in to fetch the tea equipage. "Fudge!" was the boy's response, he and Inna established on the hearth, roasting chestnuts; and they were still there when Dr. Willett surprised them by a footfall close behind them. Up sprang Inna, like a startled daisy. "So you're Mercy's little daughter?" said he, by way of greeting. CHAPTER III. DR. WILLETT--THE NUTTING EXPEDITION--THE FIRE. "So you're Mercy's little daughter?" said the doctor, by way of greeting. "Yes," faltered Inna; but she put her hand in his; this Uncle Jonathan, with whom she had come to live, was all she had in England now, except Oscar and Mr. Barlow, who was nobody as yet. The doctor pressed her small hand in his big strong one. Tall--taller than his friend David--was he, with dark hair and beard--at least, they had been dark, but were fast turning grey; his eyes were dark, piercing, and observant, full of fire; still, a kindly face, a kindly manner had he. "Well, little woman, I've read your mother's letter. I never intended to be troubled with any more children after Oscar fell to my lot; but for your mother's sake, and her mother's before her, I can't shut my door against you. So now stay, and see if you can't open another door on your own account." This is what he said, still holding her hand in his. "Do you know what door I mean?" he asked, as the child darted an upward glance at him. "Yes," she nodded, "yes." She could not say more, her heart was thumping so, but her small twining fingers in the doctor's palm told him a great deal. He patted her on the head, and let her go; he did not kiss her. Inna wished he had when, later on, she was in bed, thinking of the many to-morrows she was to spend in this new uncle's house. Her chamber was up in one of the gables of the quaint old house; the windows overlooked the garden and the home orchard, where, in the former, Michaelmas daisies and sunflowers flaunted in the sunshine when she looked out the next morning, and apples, rosy and golden, were waiting to be gathered in the latter. Birds were twittering and peeping at her through the ivy-wreathed window; away in the stubble fields, under the hills, sheep were straying, all in a glory of golden light; while rooks cawed and clamoured in the many-coloured elms by the house and garden, and all sweet morning freshness was everywhere. You may be sure she soon dressed, and tripped down the old-fashioned staircase--a dainty midge, in blue serge frock and white-bibbed apron. Below, she found Mary, the servant under the housekeeper, laying breakfast in the dining-room; and while the child stood shyly aloof by a window, in came Mrs. Grant with the urn, and her master behind her. Inna stepped forward, but her uncle took no notice of her; he only passed on to his seat at the table, took up his letters and newspaper, and, as it were, thus stepped into a world of his own. Oscar stole in like a thief, and began his usual tea-making--placing a cup by his uncle's plate, upon which he laid slices of ham, carved as best he could; Inna, at a nod from him, cutting a piece of bread to keep company with the ham; while Mrs. Grant gave sundry nods, which the boy understood and returned, then she retired from the scene. Not a word was spoken during breakfast-time. Oscar helped himself and Inna to what the table afforded--ham, eggs, rolls, honey, golden butter--all so sweet and clean and homely. Before the young people had finished, the doctor rose and went tramping out. "Good morning," said he at the door, breaking the spell of silence. Inna, rising, wished to spring toward him, but he was gone. "There, he's safe till two o'clock," sighed Oscar. "Safe?" said Inna. "Yes; booked with his patients, you know. Some say he has patients on the brain. I wish them joy of him." "Don't--don't you like him?" she inquired falteringly. "Do you?" asked the other, helping himself to an egg. "I ought." "Ought! I can't bear that word ought: 'tis dinned into my ears morning, noon, and night. Now, I tell you what we'll do: we'll fling 'ought' to the winds, and go a nutting expedition this morning." In came Mrs. Grant. "Well, Master Oscar, I should hope you'd go down to Mr. Fane's for lessons to-day," said she. "I can't; I've a prior engagement," said he, as loftily as a mouth full of bread and butter and egg could utter it. "And what's that, may I ask?" "I've made a promise to a lady to go elsewhere." "Oh, Oscar! never mind me; you ought to do your lessons, you know." "I thought we flung that horrid word to the winds just now. There's no ought in the case; I had a holiday yesterday, and I mean to to-day. I mean to take Inna to Black Hole, and round through the woods, on a nutting expedition--so there!" This last to Mrs. Grant. "Very well, Master Oscar; I shall have to set the doctor on to you again. I hope, Miss Inna, you'll be a good little influence with him and teach him to obey his uncle." Oscar laughed, pushed back his plate, and left the table. "Now, Inna, run and put on your hat and jacket, and we'll be off," said he to the little girl. "Go, dear," said the housekeeper, as the child hesitated. "I suppose he means all right for this once, but he must take the consequence;" and away went Inna for hat and jacket, wondering if it was right to go. When she came down, Oscar showed her a packet of sandwiches in the nutting basket, which Mrs. Grant had cut for them to eat if they were hungry. "She isn't a bad sort; her bark is worse than her bite," said Oscar of her, when the two were well on their way. On and on--over stubble fields they went, till by-and-by they were taking a short cut through a carriage drive in Owl's Nest Park, as Oscar informed Inna. It was a pretty bowery walk, overarched with beeches and elms in all their autumn glory, and full of the clamour of rooks. Here they met an old lady in a wheel-chair, pushed by a page-boy--such a sweet sad-faced old lady was the occupant of the chair, with shining grey curls peeping out from beneath her black satin hood. She was wrapped in some sort of fur-lined cloak; and by her side walked two little dark-faced, shy-looking girls of seven, quaintly dressed in rich black velvet, very like two wee maidens stepped out of some old picture, and each wearing a hood similar to that worn by their aged companion. [Illustration: "A DONKEY AND CART CAME DRIVING UP."] "This is Madame Giche--spelt G-i-c-h-e--and her two grand-nieces; a queer party, all of them," said Oscar, still leading on. "This isn't her place: she can't live at her own place, they say, all about some trouble she's had; and so she took the Owl's Nest of Sir Hubert Larch, who never lives there, on lease." "Are we intruding here?" inquired Inna. "Oh, no; there is a right of way: that is, madame gives it, and people take it. Come on." He had the grace to raise his hat to the party as they passed them by, and anon they were out of the park, and on a well-worn road. Here the sound of wheels greeted them, and a donkey and cart came driving up--Dick Gregory charioteer, and a girl of about Inna's age seated in the bed of the cart behind him. "Why, little friend," cried the boy, recognising Inna, "this is a happy meeting!" and down he sprang, and seized her hand with a boyish grip. "How d'ye do, Willett?" this to Oscar, who returned the salutation. "Now you must be introduced to Trapper. Here, Trapper," said Dick, turning to the donkey-cart. "Don't be silly, Dick," cried the pretty little maiden. "You know I'm not Trapper: at least, only to you, who call me Gin and then Trap and Trapper. My name is Jenny;" and down she sprang to Inna's side. "And I am Inna." "Yes; Dick has told me your name." "And how is your kitten?" Inna liked the pretty, free, fair-haired, fair-faced girl. "Oh, first-rate, thank you, isn't she, Dick?" said she, appealing to her brother, who was just settling with Oscar. "Oh yes! We'll just manage a morning of it in the woods; you can show your cousin Black Hole another time. Isn't what?" he questioned of his sister. "Isn't Snowdrop first-rate?" "Rather," returned he, with a nod at Inna, which made her blush and laugh. "I'm glad she's well. And so you call her Snowdrop?" "Yes; and what do you think of our donkey? We call him Rameses: that's Dick's choice of a name." "He's a beautiful creature," returned Inna, stroking the animal's wise old head. "Yes," replied Dick, "I'm a lover of old names, so I thought I'd go back to the Pharaohs. Not a bad idea, was it? though no compliment, I daresay, to the old fogies." "No," laughed Oscar; "but never mind about compliments for dead and gone fogies." "And what of the fogies of this generation?" inquired ready Dick. "The same--never mind." "But come, we must make hay while the sun shines. In with you, you two girls, into the cart," said Dick, which they did, Jenny helping Inna. Then up sprang the charioteer, Oscar beside him; crack went the whip, and off they drove like the wind. That nutting expedition was like a fairy dream to London-reared Inna; the lads showed her a squirrel or two, a dormouse not yet gone to its winter snooze, in its mossy bed-chamber. A snake wriggled past them, which made her shudder; frogs and toads leaped here and there in dark places. Then, oh, the whir and whisper of the autumn wind among the trees! the lights and shadows! Oh, for the magic hand of her artist father to make them hers for ever in a picture for her bedroom! But the delight of a morning's nutting must come to an end--so did theirs; the sandwiches demolished--share and share, as Oscar put it--they bethought themselves of dinner and the road leading thereto, so once more they were on their backward way, and parting company. "Good-bye, mademoiselle!" cried Dick, as Inna stood at Oscar's side, after she had kissed Jenny, and the two had vowed a girls' eternal friendship. Then away went the donkey and cart, and our young people hastened home, just in time for dinner. A meal silent as breakfast was dinner, so far as they were concerned, for Mr. Barlow and the doctor kept a learned conversation high above their heads all the time--so Oscar said; and after it was over the boy vanished, nobody knew where. As for Inna, she roamed in the orchard all the afternoon in a dream of beauty, eating rosy apples, followed by tea--she and Mr. Barlow alone--she making the toast and managing the urn: a living proof of what can be done by trying, so the surgeon told her. Then he and the doctor went out, and Inna crept out to the kitchen, to wonder with Mrs. Grant where Oscar was, and what was keeping him. "No good, Miss Inna; that boy'll go to the dogs if somebody don't take him in hand. You try, dearie, what you can do with him," said the housekeeper. "I!" cried astonished Inna. She try what she could do with a big boy like Oscar! "But hark! that's the fire-bell; there must be a fire somewhere," said Mrs. Grant, and out she went, with her apron over her head, to listen at the back gates. Inna, with no apron over her head, stole out to keep her company. "Oh my!" said Mrs. Grant to shivering Inna. "I wish Master Oscar was at home. I'm thinking he's a finger in the pie." Ah! there was the fire, sure enough; it was a flare and a flame against the darkening sky. "What's alight?" inquired Mrs. Grant of a man who went hurrying by. "Poor Jackson's little farm; they say 'tis going like tinder, and he's half crazed," came back to them as the man ran on. "Oh dear! that boy, what he'll have to answer for!" cried the housekeeper. "But we're not sure 'tis his work," said sensible Inna. "No, dear; but there's seldom any mischief going that he don't help in the brewing of." Inna was silent, watching the red glare of the fire mounting heavenwards. CHAPTER IV. OSCAR'S BURNT ARM--BLACK HOLE. "You see, dearie," went on the housekeeper, "he's playing truant these two days, and I don't like to bother the doctor, and get him into trouble. I hide what I can, in pity for his friendlessness." "Hasn't he anybody but Uncle Jonathan?" inquired Inna. "No, dearie; father and mother both dead, leaving him not a penny. 'Twould have been a sad life but for master, as I tell him; but I think that sets him more against the right than ever." "Suppose you weren't to tell him, but ask him to do his studies, and--and right things, for love of duty and love of pleasing you?" suggested Inna. "That's where it is. I think if he had a sister--now, if you were to get him to love you, you'd be able to do anything with him. Love for anybody is a mighty power, though 'tis said to be like a silk thread--something not seen, but felt--you see, 'tis stronger than it seems." "Yes," sighed Inna; "mamma says a loving heart will find work to do anywhere. Yes, mamma, I will try," said she inwardly, thinking of her last talk with her dear mother, and that only on the evening before yesterday, so short, and yet so long a time ago. Well, Oscar did not come, so the two went in, leaving the fire to flare itself out. Neither did Dr. Willett and Mr. Barlow return. It was quiet anxious work, sitting there by the log-fire, hearkening to the ticking of the old clock, waiting for someone who did not come--someone up to mischief, as Mrs. Grant said. Out she went again, with her apron over her head. "Burnt to the ground, dearie--burnt to a tinder, is the farm: so Sam, our carter, says; and 'twas done by some idle boys lighting a bonfire of dry furze near." This was her report when she returned to the kitchen. Then they heard the master and Mr. Barlow come in, and the housekeeper went to carry them in supper. Ten o'clock, and they were going out again, Inna heard them say. The little girl now stole out herself to the back gates; there, in the shadow of the wall, she saw a moving shadow. "Oscar!" She spoke his name; and Oscar stepped out into the moonlight beside her. "Where have you been?" she ventured. "Where I like." "Yes; but have you seen the fire?" "Yes, I suppose I have." "Did you--did you have----" "Did I have a hand in setting it alight? Ah yes! there you go--you're all alike." "No, Oscar; no, but----" her small hands were clinging to his arm. "Hands off!" cried he, shaking her off, as if he could not bear her even to touch him. His sleeve was in tatters, she felt, before he shook himself free. "I want you to do something for me," said he, gloomily enough. A startled "Yes," was the reply. "Go and get some oil and some flour, and come up to my room--you know your way in the dark, don't you?" "Yes, I think----" "Think! be sure, and be quick!" With this grumpy injunction he swung himself away, hugging the shadows, and so into the house and upstairs. Tap! tap! Gentle little Samaritan--she had the oil, if not the wine; and when he bade her enter, she saw that she had indeed to bind up his wounds. He stood with his arm bare to the elbow--a poor scorched arm, from which charred skin was hanging. "Now, see here: mix some flour and oil into a paste in this pomatum-pot, and spread it on this handkerchief; then bind it on to my arm, and hold your tongue. Can you do it, do you think?" "Yes;" and the small girlish hands soon had the plaster ready. "Poor arm!" said she, as the boy winced at her kindly but bungling dressing. "Fudge!" scoffed he. "Oh, I wish you hadn't had anything to do with it!" tearing a handkerchief into strips to bind it on with. "Yes, that's all you know about it. What has Mother Peggy been saying about me? I'm the dog with a bad name; I suppose she's hanged me." "No; she said only kind words of you--at least, what she thought were kind." "Oh, ay! everybody is kind after that fashion, I suppose. Now, about holding your tongue?" "Do you mean I mustn't say anything about your burnt arm?" "Yes." "I won't, if I can help it." "We know you can help it. Good night." He let her go out, and she stole down to the kitchen, there to tell Mrs. Grant, when she came in from the dining-room, that Oscar was in, and gone to bed, without saying anything of what she had done. "I say, come up here, and help me on with my jacket," called Oscar, the next morning, from above stairs, to Inna below in the hall. Up she ran, like a willing little friend in need, to the needy boy. "This is my best jacket," said he, when the injured arm was safe in its sleeve. "Now you hear what Mother Peggy will say when she sees me adorned with it." "Yes," returned Inna; "has it pained you to-night?" "Well, yes; I never slept a wink till 'twas almost get-up time." She looked at him; his face was worn, his eyes wild. "Tell Uncle Jonathan, and let him see to it, or let me tell him." "At your peril, if you do!" said he, like a very despot. "And besides, 'tis more like Billy Barlow's job than the doctor's." "Let me tell Mr. Barlow, then," she pleaded. "I tell you, you shan't. That's the worst of having a girl in a mess--she won't hold her tongue." "Yes, I will, if they don't ask me about it," said the child. To which Oscar returned "Hum!" and ran downstairs, challenging her to catch him. Well-nigh over Mrs. Grant he went, she carrying in the urn, Inna like a dancing tom-tit behind. "Have a care, Master Oscar," said the housekeeper, coming to a full stop to let him pass. "And what's that best jacket on for?" "Because the one I wore yesterday is in holes," was the moody reply; and he slipped away into the dining-room, to end the discussion. There must be silence there, for the doctor was in his place at the table, buried in his papers, waiting for someone to minister to his wants. "I can't," whispered Oscar, after a vain attempt to wield the carving-knife; and he and Inna changed places like two shadows. Well, trying generally brings some sort of success: it did to Inna. Carved very creditably were the slices of meat she laid on her uncle's plate; and, fearing more of a deluge than usual at the urn, she took her seat at that, and presided over the meal with dainty dignity. "I hope you're going to lessons to-day," said Mrs. Grant, as, the doctor gone, Oscar sauntered out into the passage. "Yes, I am," was the curt reply. "And bring me that torn jacket to mend." "'Tis past mending," was the reply, and, shouldering his book bag, the boy was gone. "Do you think you could find your way down to the village, dearie, and inquire for Mrs. Jackson?" said the housekeeper to Inna. "I've known her from a girl, poor dear. Since she's married she's had losses, and now 'tis said she's lost all by the fire." "I could find her by asking," returned Inna. "True, dearie; you have a tongue in your head." So a few minutes found Inna down in the heart of Cherton, asking for Mrs. Jackson. She found her in a neat cottage, and helping the mistress of the same to cook a monster dinner for two families. She looked pale and sad, but brightened at Inna's kindly message, and the baskets of comforts she told her Mrs. Grant sent with her and the doctor's compliments. "Thank you, dear; and my compliments in return; and my heart's best thanks to that brave boy, your--your--what is he to you, miss? I suppose he's something?" said Mrs. Jackson. "Do you mean Oscar?" "Yes--he who saved my boy at the risk of his own young life." Inna's cheeks flushed, and sweet lights stole into her eyes. "Do you mean----?" she faltered. "I mean he rushed up the burning staircase, and brought down this little chap," returned Mrs. Jackson, drawing a sunbeam of a boy of two to her side, "when strong men hesitated and stood back. Didn't you know?" "No; I know he burnt his arm." "Burnt, miss! 'Twas a wonder he wasn't burnt to a cinder. Give him my blessing--a mother's blessing--and tell him he ought to make a noble man." This was Mrs. Jackson's message to Oscar as she stood at the door, and watched the little girl away. "Well, dear, that shows 'tisn't wise to condemn people before they're tried," was Mrs. Grant's comment when Inna told her of Oscar's brave deed. Dr. Willett and Mr. Barlow would dine late, and would be away all day. Oscar also failed to put in an appearance at dinner-time, so Inna dined in solitary state in the great dining-room, and had a pleasant afternoon in the orchard, where a man or two were gathering in apples. Still, she wished she knew why Oscar did not come to dinner, and where he was, for her heart was beginning to yearn already over the wilful, noble, undisciplined boy. It had always been her dream to have a brother--a big strong brother to lean upon, and here was one whom she would like to gather to her. "I didn't want any dinner, so saw no use in coming home," was the account Oscar gave of himself that evening, when, at sundown, he came sauntering in. But he took his revenge by doing wonders at tea-time, sitting by the kitchen fire on a low stool, and eating his dinner, kept hot for him. Inna was in the dining-room, presiding at her uncle's meal, like a small queen. "Does it hurt, dear lad?" inquired Mrs. Grant of the boy. "No; what good is it to make a fuss about a scratch like that?" returned he, wielding knife and fork as best he could, now one, now the other in his left hand. But lo! to the astonishment of all, out came Dr. Willett and Mr. Barlow into the kitchen--who so seldom came there--followed by Inna. "Oscar, let me see your arm," said the doctor. Ah! well the thing was out--so much for a girl. "I hardly know that I can, 'tis such a tight fit of a sleeve," returned the boy, with a reproachful look at Inna. "Well, it went in, I suppose, and it must come out," said Mr. Barlow, coming to his side. "Oh, don't, sir!" It was pitiful to hear the boy plead thus at the very thought. "Cut the sleeve," spoke the decisive doctor. "Oh don't, sir, do that!"--it was Mrs. Grant's turn to plead now--"'tis his best jacket." "Yes, and his best arm, being the right; better sacrifice a jacket than an arm"; and Mr. Barlow's scissors did the work, and laid bare Inna's surgical dressing. A nasty burn, but not unskilfully dressed for such young hands, they said; then they dressed it their own way, prescribed a sling for the arm, and a good night's rest for the boy. "And, my boy," said the doctor impressively, "I've heard two reports of you in the village, both bad and good; and I will let the good plead with me against the bad this once, and prevail. But remember, one noble deed doesn't make a life work: there's the boy's plodding on, learning, and doing as you're bid, and a hundred other things--the very foundation of a good useful life." "'Tis such humdrum work," grumbled Oscar. "And so is ours--noble art of healing, as it's sometimes called--eh, Mr. Barlow?" "Yes, it would be, if we weren't applying a salve to somebody's sore; and I suppose that's what almost all work amounts to--salving somebody's sore, easing the wheels of life somewhere," was that gentleman's reply. "And the humdrum drudging of a schoolboy, in learning and unlearning, is but the easing the wheels of his ignorant brain." Well, whether Oscar laid this new thought to heart or not, certain it is that he kept zealously to lessons and Mr. Fane, took kindly to Inna, and called her "a little brick," and all the many flattering names found in a boy's vocabulary. But his wound would not heal, for which the weather was blamed, and the constant friction he gave it, until his two doctors advised he should not race about so much; and so it came about that November was well on its way before the arm was well, and Inna saw that abyss of mystery, the Black Hole. Very like a lake, with an unfathomable hole in the centre--or said to be unfathomable, because it had been sounded by the villagers and no bottom found--over-spanned by a bridge, its water having some hidden outlet, and lying on the north side of Owl's Nest Park, among tangled bushes and faded herbage: such was Black Hole. It was on a sunless hazy afternoon when they paid their visit to the gloomy place. Oscar betook himself with boy-like zest to testing the depth of the so-called unfathomable hole with a long pole he used for leaping with, Inna watching him, and wondering the while whether the hole, with its darkly swirling waters, were bottomless, as it was said to be. "Have a care," her companion had warned her. "Don't lean against the rails of the bridge; the old thing is as crazy as crazy." But, like a girl, as he said afterwards, she must needs forget; and lo! as he poked and fathomed as he had often done before and made no new discovery, a scream rang out, and he looked up to find Inna and the rail had both vanished. "I told you so," said he, like a lad in a nightmare, his hair standing on end; and then in he sprang, with the forlorn hope of bringing her out. Ah! there was a dark story told of the victim once sucked in by that yawning mouth. CHAPTER V. INNA AT THE OWL'S NEST--MORE WRONG STEPS. But that strong unseen Hand, so often stretched out in our great extremities, was stretched out now, although only for the saving of one little girl. It guided the boy to the spot where the poor little floundering bundle rose to the surface, helped him to play the hero, and to snatch her from those yawning watery jaws, that would fain have swallowed her--she was shudderingly near to her end, but after a time he grasped her tightly, and drew her to him. At last he was landing after such a brief long struggle, his burden in his arms, on the dreary bank, little dreaming that any spectator was watching him play the man. Yet there were four--Madame Giche, her nieces, and Phil, her page; and all four came bearing down upon him, chair and all, as he laid Inna down among the rough grass a moment, to just take breath, shake himself, and then home, or the poor mite would die of cold. Her eyes were closed, and she looked very death-like, as it was. "Take her to the house, to the Owl's Nest," came the command, with the tone of authority, from the depths of Madame Giche's black hood. "I thought of taking her home," returned Oscar without ceremony. "Yes, young people think a great many wrong thoughts; but if you take her to the house, you'll be glad in an hour's time you did an old woman's bidding," was the decisive reply. Oscar caught up the insensible girl in his arms in moody silence; truth to tell, he would be glad to get her into something dry and warm; she certainly did look death-like. "Do you know the short cut to the house?" inquired Madame Giche. "Yes, thank you; I know." "Can you carry her, or shall Phil help you?" At this, he might have been the giant-killer in the old nursery tale, carrying poor little Jack, by the way he took up his burden, and struck away for the boundary of the park; a curt "No, thank you," ringing back over his shoulder in scant courtesy as he went. Then Madame Giche's party turned and went homeward by a less direct road, because of her chair, and Black Hole was again deserted. Madame Giche, however, despatched Phil to run forward with her message to the servants, that the child was to be taken in and attended to; her nieces propelling her along at a brisk canter, because she wished to be herself early on the spot. So Phil and Oscar mounted the north terrace together. Phil gave the alarm, the servants flocked out, and Long, Madame's own maid, took possession of Inna, and bore her away to her own little room, next to her mistress's bedchamber, on the first floor. Of course, Oscar loitered about outside, on the terrace, like a lad in a book, to wait for tidings; he was there when Madame arrived, and assisted her up the steps, he on one side, Phil on the other, because a trembling fit, brought on by the shock, was upon her. A frail little mite of a gentlewoman was she between the two sturdy lads, her nieces, like meek little handmaids, following behind them. "Now, boy, if you're mad, I'm not. Come in and take off those wet garments, and put on some of Phil's." So she half commanded half persuaded him, still grasping his arm with her clinging fingers. And for once the boy obeyed, and submitted to be so equipped, Phil taking him under his especial care and leading the way to his bedroom. Anon, when he descended the stairs, longing for tidings of Inna, Phil grinning slily behind him at his second self, out stepped Long from somewhere, and told him the little lady had come out of her swoon, and they had given her something comforting, and tucked her up in bed. "Madame Giche's compliments to Dr. Willett, and they would take good care of her till to-morrow." Then Phil appeared with a cup of steaming coffee, which Long made him drink before he left; then he set forth homeward. Willett's Farm was more dreary that evening than ever before, with little cheery Inna away, if she had only known it. But she was sweetly sleeping all the evening, in a bed hastily wheeled in to keep company with Long's; and when, at midnight, she awoke to find herself there, Long bending over her, the fire-light rosy on the hearth, a shaded lamp somewhere behind her, you may be sure she felt like a story-book heroine, not herself. Still she was herself, and when she had taken some soup, been told that Oscar had gone home, and she was at the Owl's Nest, she fell asleep, and woke the next morning to breakfast in bed. After this she dressed herself, and went down to form the acquaintance of Madame Giche and her grand-nieces. "And so you're none the worse for your wetting, my dear?" said her hostess, drawing her to her, and kissing her, after the little girl had gone up to her, as she sat by the log fire, and timidly said-- "Good morning, Madame Giche. Thank you for being so good to me." The child assured her that she was none the worse, her rosy face testifying to the same. "Then, dear, don't think about thanks. You are quite a pleasant surprise visitor to us--lonely people; to me and my two little shy nieces, who will be the better for having a little girl friend. Let me introduce you; they're on the very tip-toe of waiting." Then the two wee maidens came round from behind their aged relative's chair, and were introduced as Olive and Sybil. Two dark-haired, brown-skinned damsels were they, in quaintly cut velvet frocks, with frillings of lace at throat and wrists. "Now see, dear, it's pouring with rain. Do you think you could be happy as our guest to-day, or must I send you home in the carriage?" questioned Madame Giche. They were in what was called the tapestried chamber, a room lined with needlework, done by dead fingers of long ago: those of some of the ladies whose portraits Inna was to see by-and-by in the grand staircase, and the gallery running round the hall. "I should like--what would you like me to do, ma'am?" faltered Inna. "We should much like you to stay, dear," returned Madame Giche, still holding her hand. "Then, thank you, I should like to stay." So it was decided, and Olive and Sybil, the twin sisters, drew away their guest to look at pretty foreign ornaments, in profusion all about the room. "All grand-auntie's own," as they told her, "which we brought from abroad. You see, this isn't our own home, but grand-auntie took it on lease from a gentleman we met abroad. Grand-auntie has lived abroad for years and years, ever since her heart was broken." So they chatted, and enlightened Inna. This was in the afternoon, after they had lunched with Madame Giche in the tapestried room, and had wandered away up into the picture-gallery, to look at some of the pictures. "There, that is grand-auntie; isn't it like? That was done abroad," said Sybil, who was the talker. Olive was sedate and somewhat silent. There was no mistaking the sweet aged face peering down at them from the canvas, and Inna said so. "And that is grand-auntie's son--he who broke her heart, you know. He disappointed her, went abroad, married, and died," whispered the child. "Ah! whisper it," so she expressed it, "because it is all so sad. Grand-auntie was never reconciled to him, you see, and so can never make it up in this world. He had a wife and a little boy, and grand-auntie has searched Europe over, she says, and can't find them." A dark, handsome, wilful young face had Madame Giche's son, as seen in his portrait--a young man just on the threshold of manhood. Inna stood to gaze at it, wondering what it was stirring the depths of her sensitive little heart, and filling it with a lingering pain. "Grand-auntie says these two pictures have no right here, and calls them alien pictures among aliens, because the house isn't ours and the pictures don't rightly belong here; but she took her son's portrait with her in all her travels, and her own was done abroad, and of course she brought them here." "His wife wrote the letter telling of his death, and that he asked grand-auntie to forgive him--and that was all. She has never been able to find the wife nor the son." "'Tis sad," sighed Inna; "because she might have been so fond of the son." "Papa's portrait is at Wyvern Court--that's grand-auntie's own place, you know. Grand-auntie says we shall be twin heiresses by-and-by." "And your papa is--" here Inna flushed at her inquisitive question. "Dead; and mamma too," said grave-browed Olive. "Do you like living at the farm with your uncle?" inquired sprightly Sybil. "Yes; only I haven't been there long--and--and a grand-uncle isn't like a grand-auntie," said Inna. "And Dr. Willett hasn't got a broken heart," returned Sybil; "I suppose doctors don't have broken hearts." Well, the three dined in state at six with Madame Giche; the children were having a rather free-and-easy time of it, for their governess, Miss Gordon, was away nursing somebody ill, and so they did very much as they listed, so long as they did not weary their aged relative. What a charmed life was that into which Inna took her one day's peep, and the outcome of it all was that when Miss Gordon returned she was to go up to the Owl's Nest, and have lessons with the twins. Meantime, she often spent a day there, and was brought home of an evening in the carriage; then Sybil and Olive came for tea at the farm, and, after a delightful evening spent in roasting chestnuts and the like, went back in their turn in the carriage, the happiest girls, perhaps, alive. Thus for a time all went merrily as Christmas bells; but one morning Oscar broke the pleasant spell by announcing, "I'm not going down to Mr. Fane's to-day," as Inna waited for him at the door to walk as far as the Rectory gates with him, on her way to the Owl's Nest, her seat of learning. "Oh! I wish you were," said Inna. "Why?" gruffly. "Because you ought; because 'tis right." "Oh, bother right! I'm not going; in fact, I can't. Dick Gregory's coming over; there's to be steam threshing in the yard, no end of fun, and I can't disappoint him. Besides, it can't be far wrong; doing it under uncle's very nose;" and away went the boy, out of sight of his cousin's reproachful eyes. When Inna came home from the Owl's Nest in the evening, a drizzling rain had come on. Oscar was absent somewhere with Dick Gregory, the two gentlemen still out; so after tea the little girl sat down with her knitting somewhat drearily by Mrs. Grant's side, with tears not far from her eyes, because her cousin would persist in taking these sudden and backward steps. "I know he's to be a farmer, but there, even farmers mustn't be blockheads of dunces, as Oscar'll be if he don't alter," said Mrs. Grant. "To be a farmer?" inquired Inna. "Yes, dearie, that's why his uncle is keeping on the farm. He talked of selling or letting it years ago, when it fell to him by heirship, but he didn't, but kept it on and on; and when his brother's orphan came to him, he said he'd keep it for him, if I didn't mind seeing to it a few years longer; and I said I didn't, being a farmer's daughter. I think I've made a better farmer than--than your uncle," laughed the good woman. "So the farm is for Master Oscar." "So Oscar is to be a farmer," mused the little girl, hearkening for his coming, as she sat by the wood fire, while Mrs. Grant went presently to attend to the two hard-working doctors, just come in. In he came at last. "Well, Master Oscar, I hope you've had your swing," said the housekeeper, meeting him in the passage. "Yes, I have; and now I am going at once to make it straight with the doctor," he peeped into the kitchen to say to Inna. "That's a step in the right direction, you must confess;" and was gone. CHAPTER VI. INNA'S FIRSTFRUITS--ON THE TOR. The going in to make confession of his neglect of his lessons by Oscar, that night, was like a very firstfruits to loving little Inna, in her endeavour to influence this big, strong, wilful cousin for good. Nay, she shamed him into industry and painstaking by her own application to studies, going to and from the Owl's Nest, "like clockwork, you little grinder!" as the boy expressed it, making his awkward admission to her on Christmas Eve, the two wreathing the house with holly and evergreens. This was something which Carlo and Smut the black cat thought it their duty to look into, to judge from the way they pryingly inspected the monster heap of greenery in the wide passage, where the boy and girl worked, making Inna laugh and laugh again, till her uncle peeped out of his study door to inquire what was the matter. "I'm only laughing at Carlo and Smut, uncle," was her shamefaced reply. "Ah! laugh and grow fat." With this, he went in and shut the door. "Not at all a speech to address to a lady," remarked Mr. Barlow, crossing the hall at the moment. "But Christmas is the time for liberties of all sorts and unheard-of requests--have you any of the latter, fair lady?" and the surgeon halted behind her. "I have one little wish, and 'tis about uncle and his den," ventured Inna, blushing a little. "Well, suppose you tell me, and let me be the go-between--no enviable part to play, remember, to put a finger in anybody's pie, much more in that of a doctor and a young lady combined." "May I put a bit of holly in uncle's den?" "Make Christmas in the lion's den, eh, Oscar! Well, I'm off; but let me make sure of my errand. I go to prefer a petition from the lamb to the lion for permission to enter his den with a flag of truce." In he went into the study. "In the name of the lion, I say go in, little lamb, and at once," he came out almost immediately to say, and he stood by Oscar and the holly heap, while Fairy Inna went on her magic mission. After that evening the doctor's study doors were open to Inna once and again; she tapped timidly for permission to go in and make up his fire on the cold evenings which came in with the new year, when snow lay upon the ground, and Mrs. Grant told her that most likely her studious, absorbed uncle was sitting with his fire gone out, and she herself dared not intrude to replenish it. "Come in, dear," he would say at such times. "You'll not disturb me." And before the winter was over he named her his "Little Salamander;" and once or twice peeped out and called for her when she did not come. Well, winter was over at last, and March on its blustering way; the lambs in the fields, the colts in their paddock, and young exultant life everywhere. It was holiday time with Inna, for Miss Gordon was away with that invalid somebody again. Dick Gregory was still running wild in his happy banishment from school; Jenny, _alias_ Trapper, was running wild with him whenever she could persuade the dear old lady who played the part of governess to her to forego her tales of ill-learnt lessons. A sad dunce was busy Mr. Gregory allowing his merry little daughter to grow up to be. Well, with so many holiday keepers, Oscar dared to join hands, and to take French leave, as he called it, in plotting and planning an expedition to the Tor without asking permission of his uncle. Not that he anticipated a refusal, but just because young people will persist in thinking stolen waters are sweet--sweeter than any other waters. Ah, well! we know what the wise man says about the bread of deceit; it points out much the same moral. But about the Tor. This was a high elevation--almost a mountain compared with the surrounding hills for miles--whence the sea could be descried, a misty mystery, not so far away; and around which sudden fogs wreathed themselves, shutting in those unfortunate enough to be on its heights in a rare tangle of perplexity when it thus chose to wrap itself up in this sullen mood. For there were ugly holes, pitfalls, and crevices in its ragged sides, making its descent a serious thing, except for adepts in climbing and scrambling down, even in the fair light of day. Moreover, there was on one side a disused flint-quarry, called by the ominous name of the Ugly Leap, because, once in the remote past, a shepherd boy, seeking a wandering lamb, had lost his way in the fog, having doubled and turned in his course unknowingly, and finally had fallen over the quarry side. Ah, well! he lost his life; and so his sad tale was told, and the Ugly Leap, with its suggestive name, bore witness to the same. There were sea-fogs which swept up, and made the Tor so dangerous, Mrs. Grant affirmed; but Oscar always said "Fudge!" to this--a pet word of his, as he did on that fair March morning, when not a cloud or an atom of fog was to be seen anywhere, but all was cold and brilliant, as some March mornings are. "Just the morning for the old Tor," the lad said decisively: "the views splendid, sea and all." "But how about school and your uncle?" inquired Mrs. Grant. "Oh, they'll do very well, if you don't split upon me. I mean to go, and Inna won't be mean enough to go with me and play tell-tale-tit afterwards; and besides, uncle wouldn't refuse me this one day, just to show Inna the Tor." "But suppose we were to wait and ask him?" suggested Inna. "I can't wait. Dick Gregory and his sister are coming over. We shall make such a jolly party, and there'll be more fun to steal a march upon someone:" this was Oscar's reasoning. Perhaps Inna ought to have stood out against this stealing a march, as it was for her the expedition was said to be planned, but she said nothing; she had set her heart upon seeing the Tor, and realising somewhat of the thrilling sensation of an Alpine climber; and she was but nine--no great age for unerring wisdom. "Young people's heads are renowned for folly." Mrs. Grant said something like this when Dick and Jenny mustered at the gates, and the four set off, fortified with a good supply of sandwiches and other nice things in a satchel, which Oscar swung over his shoulder, traveller fashion; and so they started. The two little dwellers at the Owl's Nest looked out at them longingly at the park gates, as they passed that way; not far from the Black Hole, with its thrilling memories, did their road lead them. Then away on through young corn, and other crops that dared put forth their greenness in the cold health-giving March air; and anon they had reached the Tor. Up, up, still mounting up, they went, putting their best foot before, as their two guides admonished the girls, giving them many a tug and many a pull; and when they were half-way up, down they sat in the sunshine, and ate a lunch picnic, taking sundry sips of cold water from a bottle Oscar insisted on bringing, because he said climbing was such thirsty work in the clear cold air of the old Tor. Well, after this they went mounting up again, sometimes, like spiders, on all fours. "It does take the breath out of one," said Dick, tugging at Trapper, who, girl-like, kept slipping back, Oscar doing the same with Inna. Inna, the Londoner, was a very poor climber; but once on the summit, what exultant delight was there!--the blue heavens above their heads; the sunny landscape, in its dainty spring dress, at their feet; the Owl's Nest in the distance not nearly so imposing to look upon seen from that elevation; the sea--they could even discern somewhat of its shimmering upheaving, in this clearest of clear March mornings. Dick, who was gifted with far-reaching sight, affirmed he could see the sails of the fishing-smacks, but none of the others could; still they all clapped their hands, and sang in a wild chorus: "The sea! the sea! the open sea! The blue, the fresh, the ever-free!" "I mean to be a sailor," said Oscar, when the singing ended. Silence reigned on the old Tor, save for the blustering wind, which played havoc with the girls' hair, and clutched at all their hats. "Oh, Oscar! and uncle intends you to be a farmer!" cried Inna, her tongue running away with her better judgment, which would have whispered her to think twice before she spoke once. But her heart was stirred with pity for Oscar, and for her uncle, knowing what Mrs. Grant had said about the boy's future. "And so Mother Peggy has been whispering that into your ear," was the scoffing reply. "Mrs. Grant told me so; but I don't know that there was any whispering about it," returned the little girl. "Well, she told you what'll never be. I mean to be a sailor, so there!" "To be a farmer is no bad berth," said sensible Dick. "Oh yes, for them who take to it; but that's not I. I mean to be a sailor, like my father before me." "Oh! but, Oscar, what will uncle say?" cried Inna. "Oh, he'll get over it. Every boy has a right to choose his own profession, and he knows it." "Yes; but 'tisn't a right every boy goes in for. I meant to be a farmer, and my father set his heel upon that notion, and said I must be a doctor," said Dick. "Well?" and Oscar waited to hear more. "I shall be a doctor; no good comes of a boy going on trying to go against his father's way or will." "No," said the other, somewhat taken aback; "a father is different from an uncle." "Yes," was Dick's retort. "I suppose an uncle would expect a little more yielding of number one to number two." "Why?" growled Oscar, not liking Dick's views of the case. "Because of gratitude. I suppose gratitude ought to have a voice with a fellow about his father's wishes; but it ought to have two voices with those of an uncle playing a father's part." "Well, an uncle's wish ought not to make one wreck one's life; and that's what I shall do if I am a farmer." "Phew! you'd be more likely to be wrecked as a sailor now," replied Dick loftily. "Well, I mean to stand up for my rights," contended Oscar. "Better not, if you value your peace of mind. Since I've given up youth's charming dream of farming--ha! how the words rhyme!--I've been as happy as a peg-top," answered Dick. The girls smiled. "Oh yes," grumbled Oscar, "well enough for you to laugh. You girls never have to choose or wish--you always have all you want." "Oh, come, Willett; little friend there could contradict that, I know," said Dick. "But we didn't come up here to discuss our wants and wishes. Suppose we look about a bit, and see the sights. Look, Miss Inna, that jutting rock yonder, by the sea, is Swallow's Cliff, and behind it is a little bay;" and then he drew her away to look down the Ugly Leap. A dizzy height it was to gaze down from above, with a deep gorge at its foot, in which a stream of water gurgled, said by some to have a connection with Black Hole, the lad told her; over which Inna shuddered and turned away. Then they all sat down, and lunched in earnest--a late lunch, for the afternoon was fast slipping away--and took more sips from Oscar's water-bottle. And while they chatted, laughed, and loitered on foot, for it was becoming bitterly cold to sit down any longer, up came the enemy, from the sea it may be, behind their backs; at any rate, it was there with them--ere they realised it the mist was come. Surely the old Tor wasn't going to turn nasty and ill-natured to-day, of all days! they said, in startled dismay; and Oscar affirmed he had seen the fog settle and rise, settle and rise, as fickle as any girl's temper. "'Twas nothing," he said; "it would lift." But it was something, and it did not lift; instead, it shut them in so that they could not see one another's faces; and oh! the girls' teeth chattered with cold. Worse, snow began to fall--blinding snow, which enveloped them quite. Well for them that they had put on fur-lined cloaks and overcoats, but---- "I say, we're in for it!" cried Dick; that was when they stood deep in snow, and the cold was chilling them to the very bone. "Don't you think you could steer us down out of this, Willett? You know the old villain better than I do. We shall freeze!" And Oscar said, "No; better freeze than lose one's way, and----" They knew he was thinking of the shepherd lad and the Ugly Leap. "Still, something must be done," urged Dick; then the two lads made the shivering girls move and spring up and down, and hoped that the storm would clear. But it did not. Would anyone come to find them? they wondered. "Well, I'll make the attempt to go down and get a lantern, and bring back someone," volunteered Oscar at last. "I don't mind for myself, but I can't play guide for----" "Ay, I know," agreed Dick; "to be hampered with other people's lives is a great responsibility. Well, take your own life in your hands and go, and I'd take mine and go with you; but----" "You stay there with the girls," growled Oscar, and gripped their hands, as in parting, all the way round. They let him go a few steps away, and his shadowy form was lost. The girls clung to Dick, too cold, too scared, too much as in a dreadful dream, to cry--ay, too much benumbed. The boy shouted, Oscar responded; once and again shouts were exchanged, then came a scream--a scream so shrill that it seemed to cleave their poor failing hearts in two--and then silence, blank silence, save for the howl of the wind as it whirled the snow. Dick shouted himself hoarse, but there came no answer. Something terrible must have happened to Oscar. CHAPTER VII. OSCAR LOST--A FRUITLESS SEARCH. The dead silence that followed, save for the hooting of the storm, was more terrible, if that could be, than Oscar's scream, for it told of what? They did not say, but their hearts throbbed out what they feared. "Oh, Dick! what shall we do?" cried the little girls, clinging to him. He was a boy so strong, so brave--surely he could think of something. Well, he did think of something, but that was after they had shouted "Oscar! Oscar!" till the storm itself seemed the name. This is what he thought of. "There is nothing to be done but for me to go and look for him." It sounded like a miserably forlorn hope, and the girls thought so; for they clung to him, crying, "Oh, Dick, Dick!" and almost unnerved him. "Well, I can do no good up here, and it seems heartless to hear that cry, and not to go a step to see what can be done. You know he ventured his life for us." "Yes; but throwing away your life wouldn't save his if--if it isn't lost," faltered fond little Jenny. "No," returned her brother; "and, God willing, I don't mean to throw away my life." They were silent for a moment, while the storm raved on. I think they all breathed a sort of wordless prayer, then Dick spoke. "Now, you girls must stand by each other, and comfort each other; and, whatever you do, don't sit down and give in to sleep. Good-bye." There was no wringing of hands; the three could not bear it with that scream of Oscar ringing in their ears. He went away, his shadowy figure vanishing in the obscurity almost immediately, as Oscar's had done. Then the two girls were alone. Shout after shout rang reassuringly back to them, and they screamed back theirs in reply. True, Dick's shouts were farther away each time, but no screams followed; then there came a break, and they heard nothing. Very, very much alone they were now. Well, down in the village people were shutting doors, closing shutters, and heaping up fires, and saying what a cold snowy ending it was to such a fair day, as they made themselves cosy, little dreaming there were two small wanderers up on the old Tor in the storm. The two children could picture it all, and wondered what was doing at the farm: whether they were in a great fright about them--Mrs. Grant, Dr. Willett, and Mr. Barlow. Jenny thought too of what they were saying and doing at her home, but oh! where was Dick, where was Oscar? How the minutes lengthened into hours in the cold, the weariness, ay, even drowsiness. But they must not yield to sleep--Dick had warned them of this; they knew that sleep up there in that extreme cold meant death. What should they do? Oh! what was that? An ugly shadow of some monster beast looming upon them from out that vast whirling waste of snow. This was when hope was very low in their hearts; it seemed that it was an hour or two since Dick had left them, and no help had come--nothing; and they had pictured themselves two little maidens, stiff, stark, dead, and cold, found by someone, at some time, up there all alone. Now here was this apparition bearing down upon them. They shrieked and clung to each other; they could not move; they had no boy to fight for them. Fight! Why, it was dear old Carlo from the farm. How he barked, and whined, and caressed them! They could but laugh and cry in the same breath at his funny antics. And this laughter and crying, and the efforts they made to keep on their feet under his wild hugs and leaps, stirred their blood; and with this, hope leaped up within them again. "Oh, Carlo! where are they all? are they coming?" cried Inna, her arms about his neck. At which he licked her face, barked, and seemed to hearken, as if he too wanted someone. Why, surely the storm was clearing: they could see the glimmer of a lantern bobbing, now here, now there, as if someone was seeking and searching; and when Carlo barked a shout followed, and the dog bounded away, with his back covered with snow, like a very Father Christmas of a dog. They did not think of what they were like, with help coming--an assurance, as they took it, that Dick's life had not been thrown away. Back came Carlo, and with him Dr. Willett, Mr. Barlow, and Sam the carter from the farm, and--and that was all. Where was Dick? Both children rushed into the arms of the rescuers. "Thank Heaven!" said Dr. Willett, pressing his snowy little niece close to him. "Thank Heaven!" muttered Mr. Barlow over Jenny, just such another snowball. "But where is Dick--where is Oscar?" "Lost, both lost!" sobbed the two poor little troubled hearts, as they poured out their story. "No, no; boys are not so easily lost," said Mr. Barlow, he and the doctor shaking the snow from the cloaks of their two small charges, and preparing to bid "Good night" to the old Tor. "'Tis true we've seen nothing of them, but that proves nothing--they may be at the farm and in bed by this time." But in an aside he whispered to the doctor, "I don't like Oscar's scream, though;" and the doctor shook his head, as over an obstinate patient, when he scarcely knew what to do with him. "Do you take the lantern, Sam," went on the surgeon to the carter, "and search about for them. Of course, even give the Ugly Leap a call, and make inquiry for them; and when I've played the polite man, and seen the doctor well on his way with these young ladies, I'll join you--two heads are better than one even in the matter of looking up two boys that we're not sure are lost on a snowy night." With this, Sam marched off with the lantern, and Carlo with him, as if he understood the plan of operation, and that the lads were missing, and he must play his part in finding them. "Better walk, dears; 'twill stir your blood," said Dr. Willett at starting; and so they did for a time, but before they reached the farm they were glad to be carried, like two small over-done children as they were. By the time they had reached the foot of the Tor the snow clouds had quite cleared, and the moon shone. Ah! upon what were those pale beams falling on those snowy heights? Not upon Dick, for when the party reached the farm they found that he was there, safe in bed, after being held almost a prisoner by Mrs. Grant. "You see, sir, he was that mad to be off again, when he heard you and Mr. Barlow had started for the Tor, that I had to shake some sense into him, and put him to bed--the best place for him, too, for he was ready to drop," so the housekeeper told her master. Mr. Gregory, too, had just arrived to make inquiries for his two missing ones, so the three doctors turned into the snowy night again, to follow in Sam's and Carlo's wake, and hear of what success they had met with in their search. None; nothing; nobody: this was Sam's three-worded account of his failure--for it was failure--while Carlo hung his head, dropped his tail forlornly, and whined like a dog baffled. He, Sam, had been to the Ugly Leap, and beat about everywhere he could think of, but could find no trace of the boy. All the dreary round he and the two doctors went again; all the long night they were out in the snow; but it was a fruitless quest--they were fain to return home in the grey light of the morning, with only this bare certainty, that Oscar was lost--to them at least. Dr. Willett was very sore at heart, as he and Carlo walked a little apart from the others of the returning party, the dog abject and depressed in attitude as he trotted by his side, as if conscious of what his master was feeling. Mr. Gregory looked upon his sleeping children and returned home; the others retired for an hour's rest before going out to their sick patients. Besides, there were new search parties to be organised. To the Ugly Leap went the doctor again as the day wore on; the dark waters of the gorge were searched, so far as such a mysterious stream could be searched, emerging from the heart of the earth, and only flowing a few yards, it may be, in the light of day, ere it dived away into the darkness and secrecy from which it had come. Ah! there was neither sign nor token of the missing boy, there or elsewhere. Nothing, nowhere--these were the words that went the round of Cherton, with their dreary hopelessness, as the days flowed on, and tidings went here and there of the lost boy, while his description was sent to the police authorities, far and wide. But there came no answer as day succeeded day, and March blustered itself away, and sweet fickle April took its place; all was silence, as if the lad had indeed vanished from the earth. Had he? Inna went daily for lessons to the Owl's Nest. It was well to get away from the house, Mrs. Grant said, for the child moped and grew pale under the suspense and mystery of what had befallen this strong, wilful, good-natured cousin of hers, whom she had been gathering to her as the brother she had long sighed for. True, Jenny came over to see her, for she too was lonely, with Dick gone back to school; but what could Jenny understand about her heartache?--she with her brother safe at school, while Oscar, Inna's all but brother, was nobody knew where. "I wish he hadn't played truant that day, and I wish I hadn't let him:" this was the burdened little plaint, making her heart so heavy, and which she ventured to pour out to Mr. Barlow one day. "Oh, my dear little lady, don't think that what happened came of his playing truant. I know it isn't a pleasant thought that there was that little hitch of underhand doings; and if he'd only mentioned the going to the Tor, we could have told you all snow was coming, thanks to the glass. But, mind me, we don't get our deserts in that way, or we should be always having a whipping. And I never give up hope with a patient till the last remedy has been tried and fails; and, remember, there is no last remedy with a wise unfailing Providence." This was the surgeon's reply. "Oh, yes. But suppose he is dead, was killed, washed under the Tor by the dark waters of the brook at the Ugly Leap," sighed the child. "Oh, well," was the answer, "we can suppose almost anything--at least, a little imaginative girl can; but suppose he is dead--which I do not--dead or alive, he is in God's good keeping," was the reply. CHAPTER VIII. AT THE OWL'S NEST--THE SONG--THE SURPRISE. Inna now had two new thoughts to ponder over. "Remember, there is no last remedy with a wise unfailing Providence;" "Oscar in God's good keeping." They came to her with thrilling freshness one day in the gallery at Owl's Nest, as she wandered from picture to picture, musing and dreaming. She was often at the Owl's Nest. Besides going to and fro to lessons, Madame Giche invited her to stay there for days together; it was good for her little nieces to have a child companion, and it was good for the little girl herself, for, as has been said, she moped and grew pale over Oscar's disappearance. So, although they missed her at the farm, they were glad to send her there. Jenny Gregory was invited also: quite a bevy of young people did the four make, wandering through the old house, not intruding upon its aged mistress, save at stated times and seasons, but making a pleasant holiday of it; notwithstanding lessons with Miss Gordon again, and the strumming through of many scales and exercises on the piano. They never tired of roaming the terraces, where the peacocks eyed them askance, and spread out their beautiful tails at them as in proud disdain--those walking flowers of girls, who seemed to vie with them and their plumage in their pretty bright spring dresses. Glorious weather had followed Oscar's disappearance. It was May now, and the other little girls were out in the park, gathering daisies, and having a romp with Carlo, who would often come self-invited when Inna was there. But, Inna had stolen away from them, for the rare treat of being alone in the gallery, to admire and think about the pictures. That of Madame Giche's son had a strange interest for her, a stranger picture in a strange house, save for that of his mother keeping it company, like loving hearts that could not be separated. Those dark, smiling, beautiful eyes of his thrilled her through; she could not say why they always made her think of her father and mother; but then, perhaps, it was because they were strangers in the land of beautiful pictures. At any rate, the eyes seemed to belong to her, to follow her, as picture eyes will, with a strange wistfulness; she could but wonder that the possessor of such beautiful eyes could ever give his mother pain, part from her in anger, and break her heart. Of this last he never knew; he sent her a loving message at the end, begging her forgiveness; and she gave it to him, so far as it can be accorded to the absent and the dead--but it broke her heart. Then followed her search for his little son, whom she had never found. If life had no losses, no mistakes, she wondered where this missing little one was, in that indistinct shadowy uncertainty where Oscar was. Would either ever be found? Outside lay the park, bathed in afternoon sunshine; she could see it all from the side window, and her young companion idling by the moat, where the marsh marigolds were blooming bright and yellow in the sunshine. There came a rustle as of a garment, and Madame Giche, leaning on her gold-headed cane, appeared, travelling towards her. "You here, my dear?" said she, in her gentle way, laying her hand on the little girl's bright head. "Yes, Madame Giche." "Wouldn't you be better out in the sunshine with the rest, rather than up here moping?" "I wasn't moping, dear Madame Giche. I was looking at the pictures, and thinking about them;" and the child gave a little forced laugh over her confession. "Well, what do you think of them all? Now, which do you think is the handsomest face here?" And Madame Giche gave a sweeping glance round, as she stood leaning on her stick. "This is the face I like best," was the child's reply, glancing up at that stranger face, "save for that of his mother." "This is the face I like best, my dear, but he broke my heart. Do you know who it is?" inquired the mother, a thrill in her voice. "Yes, dear Madame Giche--your son," returned Inna, with a child's sensitive shame at having listened to so much from Sybil. "Then--then, you know his story?" "Yes; Sybil told me. Forgive me, dear Madame Giche, if I ought not to have heard it. Sybil said I might; it was no secret, when we were talking of it." Inna's small fingers grasped Madame Giche's thin ones. "Yes, dear; it is no secret." The child stroked the hand she held, wondering what she ought to say next, a tear trickling down her cheek; and Madame Giche saw it. "Are those tears for me, little Inna?" she asked gently. "Yes." A shy "Yes" it was. "My dear, that will never do--young people's sunshine should not be overshadowed by old people's clouds. Now, do you know what I want you to do?" "No, dear Madame Giche." "To come down and sing to me." The beautiful mellow-toned piano from the drawing-room had been removed to the tapestried chamber, and a new one sent from London to fill its place. Quite little musical parties did the aged lady have, now and then, of an evening, in the gloaming, the four children, with lights at the piano, trilling in their bird-like voices some little snatch of a juvenile song, duet, trio, and sometimes a quartette, their nimble fingers wandering among the keys the while in a tangle of melody. But of all the four, their aged listener loved best to hear Inna sing: her voice was so plaintive, so expressive. The charm lay in this: that she was always thinking of her mother at such times, and her heart seemed to speak in her voice. It did to-night, when she sat down to the piano, her gentle old friend on the hearth by the smouldering log fire. "Sing that little thing I heard you practising so nicely yesterday," came to her across the room. So, with a tinkling little prelude, she began-- "A daisy wept in the moonlight pale, And bowed her beautiful head, And a little white moth came dancing by-- 'Why weep, sweet daisy?' it said. "'I weep for that which can never be, I sigh for a wider sphere-- Would, little moth, I had wings like thine! Instead, I am rooted here.' "'A moth, my life is a sweet content, But no worthy life for thee.' 'Change!' cried the daisy; 'take my place; A little white moth I'd be.' "And lo! the daisy took silver wings, And forth from the meadow flew; The little white moth became a flower, A daisy-cup dash'd with dew. "The wide earth blessed the changeling flower, The heavens smil'd down above; A boundless life was the daisy's life, Her mission, a lowly love. "A little white moth, with broken wings, Came home, when nights were drear, To breathe her last on the daisy's breast. She had missed her rightful sphere." "Yes, dear; it's not so much what we are, or where we are, but what we're doing, that makes a life of usefulness and fulness," said Madame Giche, when the ditty came to an end. "Yes; in filling others' lives we fill our own. Is that what you mean, Madame Giche?" inquired Inna, leaving the piano, and coming to kneel on the hearth. "Yes. The daisy wasn't thinking of what she was doing, but rather of herself; seeking great things for herself, not seeing--poor little thing!--that in just blooming where she was placed she was in a way blessing heaven and earth, and making her own crown; and missing that, her life was a failure." Just then in came the three little girls from the park, Miss Gordon with them. "Oh, grand-auntie, we've brought such a lovely bunch of marsh marigolds," cried Sybil. "Jenny has them;" and Jenny came forward, dropping on one knee to present them, and tossing her hat on the floor. The kindly old lady patted the yellow-haired fluffy head, taking the flowers from her, and touching their petals as in fond reverence. "Children, at the sight of these flowers I always see myself a child again," said she, a sweet far-away light in her dark eyes. "And what do you see, grand-auntie--what were you like?" inquired nimble-tongued Sybil. "Yes, dear Madame Giche, what were you like?" echoed Jenny. "My dear, I was just what Sybil is now. I half fancy, sometimes, that it must be myself, when I see her running about on the terraces." "But your home wasn't here, grand-auntie," said Olive, surprised out of her silence. "No, dear; 'tis the house recalls me to myself. Wyvern Court was very different from this." "Was that the name of your home, Madame Giche?" inquired matter-of-fact Jenny, out of the silence that followed. "The dearest spot on earth to you--wasn't it, grand-auntie?" prattled Sybil. "Yes; our childhood's home is that, I suppose, be it a cottage or a castle, revisited in imagination at life's close," sighed the old lady. "And that was your--your womanhood's home--as well," replied Sybil, hesitating a little to find a suitable word. "Yes, dear; there I had all my joys and sorrows." "And now?" whispered Inna, who was kneeling by her side, stroking one of her soft wrinkled hands. "It is life's sweet after-glow with me; peace after pain and sorrow, like the light in the sky after sunset." "Oh, grand-auntie, how beautiful that must be to you if it is at all like that!" cried Sybil, pointing at a distant window. Outside lay the park, the copse, and surrounding landscape, all aglow with the changeful tints which follow a fair sun-setting. "Yes, dear; and life's after-glow is even more beautiful than that; for instead of being the blending of day and night together, it is the blending of day with day." "Day with day?" lisped thoughtful Olive. "Yes; life's beautiful days here with life's long beautiful day hereafter," returned Madame Giche, her eyes glistening with her own sweet thoughts. "But come, dears, the present time is the day with which you have to do, with all its hopes and opportunities. I want you young larks to sing me the quartette we were talking of the other day. Where is Miss Gordon?" "I am here, Madame Giche," came from a distant window. "Do you require my services?" "Do you play the accompaniment, and let me fancy myself--where shall I say, Sybil?" "Sailing down the river in the park by moonlight, the same as we and Miss Gordon did last summer," was the ready answer. Madame Giche laughed. "But that would be too romantic. Fancy what it would be to come back from such fairyland doings to find myself an old woman, sitting on her hearth, with four magpies chattering around her, asking her to make herself ridiculous." "I don't think you could be that," said flattering Jenny. Then the four swept away to the piano, like a breath of a sweet spring breeze, where Miss Gordon played, and the quartette was rendered fairly well, Madame Giche sitting, a listening shadow, on the hearth. "Thank you, dears," said she, when it came to an end, and a servant announced, "Mary from the farm is come for the two young ladies, Madame." "Was it anything like sailing down the river?" asked Sybil, as they all clustered round her. "It was very sweet and beautiful," said the old lady kindly; then she kissed her two guests "good night," and said, "No; not so late," to her two nieces, when they pleaded to accompany them as far as the five-barred gate. Jenny was really a guest at the farm for a few days, sleeping with Inna, but spending most of her time at the Owl's Nest. It was just what Inna needed, with her pale cheeks and troubled heart. "If I only knew _where_ Oscar was, I think I could bear it better," was her cry. But Dr. Willett had to bear his ifs and regrets in silence, as best he could, without change or comfort from anything or anybody, save the going out among his patients. His fine face grew very grave and sorrowful, his hair was whitening too, as the days glided on into weeks, and no tidings came of the missing boy. Down the quiet shadowy drive from the Owl's Nest went the two little girls and their attendant. Inna little knew to what she was going, tripping along and talking to Jenny. Clear of the drive, their path home lay in the moonlight, and not far had they gone when a little wailing mew came to them from behind a hedge, and then a small white and black kitten emerged therefrom, and came and rubbed herself round Inna's feet. She caught it up and fondled it, the knowing little pleader mewing such a pleased mew then, that you may be sure it went straight to the little girl's heart. "Oh, if I might keep it as my very own!" she cried; "but I'm afraid that Smut wouldn't like it." "I'm afraid Mrs. Grant wouldn't like it," said Mary, as a stronger objection. "Take the kitten home and ask her," advised Jenny; "and if she says 'No,' you could but ask your uncle, and if he says 'Yes,' she wouldn't dare to say 'No.'" "I don't think she would wish to say 'No' to anything that she thought would make uncle or me happy," mused Inna aloud, and in this happy confidence she hugged the foundling to her, and went on her way through the moonlight, just as if she was not going home to the unlooked-for, that which would stir her poor little heart to its centre. How would she bear it? CHAPTER IX. OSCAR'S RETURN--THE MYSTERY CLEARED--ON THE TOR AGAIN. How did Inna bear it? As she bounded into the fire-lit kitchen, to prefer her request to Mrs. Grant about her kitten, there sat Oscar by the fire, in his own especial chair, just as if he had sat there nightly for the last six weeks: save for this, that he had an ugly scar on his forehead scarcely healed, that his face was thin and wan, and that he wore somebody's clothes, not his own--those in which he had vanished. "Oscar!" she cried, and sat down and wept over her joy as if it were a sorrow, like a very excited little maiden--that is how she bore her surprise. Mary knew nothing of his arrival; he had come after she had left to bring the little girls home. The poor kitten went flying somewhere, anywhere to be out of the way of such sobs and tears. "Master--Dr. Willett," called the housekeeper from out of the open kitchen door, wondering what effect the sight of Oscar would have upon the two doctors, who had to bear the sight of so much. "Yes--what is it?" came wandering back up the passage. The speaker followed close behind, Mr. Barlow behind him. Oscar come back, Inna crying over it. Well, with the coming of the two doctors she soon dried her eyes and inquired for her kitten. "Kitten, dear?" Mrs. Grant thought there was something a little wrong with her head still, just a cobweb not cleared away, because of her crying so, you know. Not so the doctor, for there came a piteous prolonged mew, and up scrambled the kitten, inside one of the legs of the doctor's trousers. She had missed her way, you see, but had chosen a friend next best to Inna. "Well, you're no beauty," quoth the doctor, drawing her down from her hiding-place, and holding her on his arm to stroke her; "and you're nothing to cry over, lost or found." Dr. Willett put her into Inna's arms, where the little thing nestled, as if she knew her rightful place already. "I didn't cry over the kitten, uncle; I cried over Oscar," said the little girl. Mr. Barlow had drawn Oscar from the room and himself stayed with him, to keep him there. "Where is Oscar?--it isn't a dream, is it?" and Inna's eyes swept the room. "Dream? no, my dear; he was here just now. Isn't it his rightful place?" spoke the doctor drily. "Yes, only--only----" "Ah! yes, only you want to know where he has been, what he has been doing, and what right he had to come back in this matter-of-fact way, when you had been imagining all sorts of unlikely things about him; and so you cried over it, to give the whole thing the girl-like touch it lacked. Ha--ha!" This was Mr. Barlow's speech, putting his head in at the kitchen door, to see how they were getting on. "Yes, come in, both of you," said the doctor, that sorrowful gravity lifted from his face already. "Well, my boy, you have taken a heavy weight from my heart and added years to my life by coming back," was what he said, drawing the lad to him, and laying his hand on his shoulder. "Have you missed me so much, uncle?" asked Oscar. "Missed!" A look passed over Dr. Willett's face, which Inna, watching, thought very like that on her father's face when he kissed her "Good-bye," before she came down to the farm. "Missed you, Master Oscar! yes, we're all missed, even when 'tis a boy we're keeping the farm for," was Mrs. Grant's unlooked-for remark. "Very silly of Mrs. Grant, to bring up that question of the farm on the first night of the boy's return," observed the doctor, when he and his friend were sipping their coffee together, the young folk gone to bed, the budget of Oscar's adventures to be opened on the morrow. "You see, dear," said that lady to Inna, after Jenny was asleep; and Inna's eyes were sadly wakeful. "You see, dear, I wanted Master Oscar to see, while his heart was tender, on this first night, that as he had been missed and wanted by his uncle, it ought to be 'give and take' with him, when I spoke about the farm." "Give and take?" "Yes, Miss Inna, give and take; it's that as smooths life's rough places. Master Oscar has nothing to give his uncle for all he's doing for him, but his will--letting go that foolish nonsense about the sea. He ought to give up the sea and take to the farm--that would be his giving and taking; and his uncle would give him the farm, and take his--his obedience to his wishes, as a sort of harvest of love after all the years of sowing." "Sowing?" said Inna. "Yes, the doctor has sown a deal of trouble, thought, and anxiety over this young brother of his, at last lost at sea--that's Oscar's father, you know. I think, in his quiet way, he's set his heart on the boy making him some return, in the way of love and gratitude; and besides, he says, putting him into the farm is the best thing he can do for him, leaving out the love, obedience, and gratitude, and----" But Inna was asleep. Well, the next evening's tea-drinking, over which Inna presided, was a sort of state tea-drinking at which Dr. Willett sat down, a thing he had scarcely ever been known to do before. But then, Oscar was to tell his adventures during tea; a poor, thin, hollow-eyed narrator was he, who had been down well-nigh to death's door. The tea-table was gay with spring flowers, and through the open window came a chorus of sweet sounds, the bleating of lambs from the meadows, the lowing of the cows being driven home to their milking, the song of birds, the hum of insects--bees and gnats--the one toiling, the others dancing in idleness: types and shadows of the human race, as Mr. Barlow remarked. To which Jenny added, "Yes; and of boys and girls--the girls working, the boys idle." But to this there was no time to make reply, for Inna had supplied them all with tea, and Oscar had cleared his throat like a story-teller in a book, and was waiting to begin. "Well, you know when I started, and you shouted, and I shouted back," said he. "Yes, we know--hurry up!" spoke Jenny, like an unmannerly boy. "I went on first-rate for a time, then I came to a full stop, for I was at the Ugly Leap; and before I knew it I was over." "Not much of a full stop; I should say a note of exclamation was dashed in there," remarked Mr. Barlow. "I don't think I uttered a sound; I think I was too horrified--that is as girlish, I know, as if I'd screamed!" "Oh! Oscar, you did scream: 'twas that which told us something was wrong," put in the interrupting damsel Jenny. "And no wonder. I'm not sure I shouldn't have screamed myself; and boys are but mortal, the same as doctors," remarked Mr. Barlow. "But not nearly so wise," interrupted Jenny again. "Nor yet so talkative as young ladies; and if present company will excuse me, I should like some of them to be quiet," said Oscar. "Well, my boy, after the scream----" prompted Mr. Barlow. "Well, if I _did_ scream, after that there was a silence and the full stop, for I fell to the bottom; and when I came to my senses I was jolting along in a caravan--such jolting, and I full of pain and dizziness. That was a ride to town, and no mistake--Bulverton, the town was called, where they took me to a hospital." "Who?" inquired irrepressible Jenny. "The gipsies--I was in a gipsy caravan; they were passing the road at the bottom of the Leap, hurrying away from justice of some sort, I should say, and, hearing me moan, were humane enough to pick me up out of my snowy bed, and carry me along with them. By the time they reached Bulverton I was unconscious, in a high fever, and I don't know what. They made it all right with the hospital people, somehow, that they had no hand in bringing me to the state I was in. I was terribly knocked about--a blow on my head, besides this on my forehead, a broken arm, and a good shaking generally. 'Twas a wonder I escaped with my life, the doctors told me, when I came out of my bad turn--you know the dodge, Mr. Barlow; you all make a miracle of what you do for sick people." Mr. Barlow shook his fist at him. "I kept who I was a secret, though, and wouldn't tell my name. I didn't want to make a fuss here, you know, but on the last morning it all came out. One of the doctors saw your description of me, uncle, and the police came ferreting me out as well, I believe; and so I'd nothing to do but throw off my disguise, and come home like a bad penny. I daresay you'll have a bill, uncle, for sticking-plaster and so on." "Which I shall be happy to pay, Oscar," said the grave doctor. This was Oscar's story. Well, the bill came from the Bulverton hospital, and was duly settled by Dr. Willett, and all things fell into their usual train, save that Oscar, being unfit for study, and Dick away at school, had rather a dull time of it. The weather was glorious, and of course he roamed about, and went some excursions with Inna, Jenny, and the donkey and cart, the twins from the Owl's Nest sometimes swelling the number; but an outing with a pack of girls, as he said, was but a very tame affair, and often he sighed for midsummer and Dick. Both came at last, as all good things are said to do to the waiting ones, and the meeting on the Lakely platform was almost overwhelming as Dick sprang out among them all; Oscar and the four girls clustering round him like bees, while Rameses, with the cart at a respectful distance, stretched out his neck, and brayed such a note of welcome, that the attendant porter laughed till he held his sides. With Dick's coming, the state of affairs looked up--here, there, and everywhere went the two boys, not always with a string of girls after them, as Dick slightingly expressed it. Once, according to their own words, they took revenge upon the old Tor, and had picnics upon its wind-swept heights in a body; but where the revenge lay they themselves best knew. But the girls looked down the Ugly Leap with awe, Oscar, with his scarred forehead, looking down with the rest. A wonderfully clear view they had of the sea and the Swallow's Cliff. "I say," cried Dick, the happy thought striking him as he gazed, "couldn't we take the girls over as far as the cliffs and the sea? They've never been there, you know, Willett, and 'twouldn't be too far, if we took old Rameses and the cart." "Just a nice little outing," agreed Oscar; and down they all sat in council to sketch out the programme, to use their own words. CHAPTER X. THE EXPEDITION TO SWALLOW'S CLIFF--CAUGHT BY THE TIDE. "How far is it?" was Inna's leading question. "Three miles as the crow flies," returned Dick. "It would be delightful," smiled she. "It would be jolly," said Jenny, using a word of Dick's. "And I hope grand-auntie will let us go," sighed Sybil. "Oh, she'll be sure to if I stand surety for your safety, like a good old grandfather," Dick assured them. "And, I say, it ought to be to-morrow, Willett," he suggested. "Short notice." "Yes; but it can be done. I'll see Madame Giche on our way home." So when the gold was intermingling with the grey under the park trees, and it was hard upon sundown, the whole party went bounding up the avenue at the Owl's Nest, the rooks over their heads cawing a noisy "good night" to them and the world in general. They found Madame Giche pacing to and fro on the terrace with the peacocks. At first the aged lady was hard to manage: if her nieces were of the party, they must take Rance, their nurse, she said; but, as Dick assured her, there was no need. "They'll be as safe as safe, dear Madame Giche," were his words, spoken with the persuasive grace of a courtier, smiling his boyish smile into her face. "With two such safeguards as Willett and me, they can't come to any harm--in fact, there's nothing they can come to harm in--'tis a safe shore, even if they took into their heads to bathe, which none of the young ladies will, I daresay." "No, grand-auntie; we don't want to bathe or do anything dangerous," pleaded Sybil. "And we don't want to be babies, and take our nurse," objected Olive. "Well, dears, you shall have your way," promised over-persuaded grand-auntie; and so "the midges," to use Dick's words, "won the day." Oh, the joy of waking with a whole long summer's day of pleasure in store! An excursion to the beautiful sea--she had scarcely seen it in her short life. Inna was up, and dressed and looking out of her chamber window, when Oscar came into the paddock below to attend to some lambs. "Hurry up, old lady! 'tis a glorious morning," cried he, looking up and catching sight of her at the window. She waved her hand and was gone. She had to fill the vases with flowers; one she always placed in her uncle's study. Since Christmas Eve, when she carried in her holly spray, she always contrived some sort of a nosegay for him. It was pleasant to hear her tripping feet, and her young voice singing little snatches of ditties, through the house; to see her stand and feed the chickens in the morning sunshine. A willing little handmaid was she anywhere, and to anybody who needed her. "I know she begins to save me a deal," Mrs. Grant said of her. "Well, Sunbeam, what do I read in your eyes this morning?" said Mr. Barlow, meeting her in the passage. "An excursion to the sea--to Swallow's Cliff." "'Tis well to be a young lady of leisure. Are you going to foot it?" "No; we're going in Dick Gregory's donkey-cart." "Ah! and 'tis well to be young to bear such jolting." He passed on. The two young people waited for the doctor at the breakfast-table, but Mr. Barlow did not keep him long; then passed the usually silent meal to its close, but not before Dick peeped in at the rose-wreathed window, and intimated by sundry nods that Jenny and the donkey and cart were waiting outside in the lane. Away went the busy doctor into the passage, just as Inna was saying-- "Oscar, you haven't told uncle--you ought, you know." So Oscar, in the spirit of obedience for once, followed him. "Uncle, may I and Inna go with Dick Gregory and his sister to Swallow's Cliff to-day?" he asked. "Swallow's Cliff--that's rather a long walk for a young lady." "Only three miles, sir, as the crow flies," put in Dick, appearing from somewhere. "Yes; but as you're not crows, and can't fly, into the bargain, 'twould mean more than that to you--or rather, 'tis Inna I'm thinking of," still objected the doctor. "You forget the donkey-cart, Dr. Willett; the young ladies will ride--all of them," observed Dick. "All?" the doctor stood ready to start. "Yes, sir; there are four of them: the mid----, Madame Giche's nieces, Miss Inna, and my sister Jenny." "Well, I suppose I mustn't be a bear, and say no." Dr. Willett wheeled round upon Oscar. "Yes, I've no objection; only take good care of the little girls. A pleasant day to you." The busy physician was gone. Now a tempest of preparation swept through the house for a few minutes; then Mrs. Grant stood on the steps at the front door to watch them off. Dick touched up old Rameses, and drove along the lane with a flourish. Picking up the midges at the Owl's Nest gates, with many injunctions from Rance to take good care of her charges, they made the best of their way onward, not exactly as the crow flies, but taking all the short cuts adventurous wheels could roll over: the more jolts and bumps the more the merriment; Jenny driving, the boys on foot. So, without hitch or hindrance, the sea was reached. A glorious sight it was: not smooth, calm, and still, but with a beautiful ripple breaking over it, with glad little waves running here and there--just the mood to please the children. They all kept to the boundary-line of shore; there was to be no boating, no bathing: the boys had bound themselves by promise to Mrs. Grant that there were to be no seaside pranks or dangerous doings. "No; no one shall come to a watery grave or an untimely end, if I can help it--I promise that:" these were Dick's last words to the housekeeper, giving Rameses the touch which set him off with a bolt. So now he bade the little girls to pick up shells, look out for mermaids, and disport themselves in harmless lady-like fashion, while he and Oscar went here and there, scaled heights, and took a glance seaward from the height of the Swallow's Cliff. "But first we'll consult the luncheon hamper," suggested he: which they did; and a very neat spread it was which the girls laid out for them on the unfrequented beach. This over, with a lifting of the hat, and "Good-bye for the present," from Dick, and "Mind, Inna, the midges don't get into mischief," from Oscar, the two went straying away; and the girls, having cleared away luncheon, began to enjoy themselves. Such pretty shells they picked, such beautiful sprays of seaweed, and, oh, how the waves curled and ran races together! Once and again they saw a distant ship sail past, and Inna thought of the happy days when her father and mother would come sailing home in a ship like that. Then they all ran races and sat in the sun, while Jenny sang one of Dick's songs, with the refrain-- "Three cheers for the briny-ho!" and Inna sang one of Mrs. Grant's, with this chorus-- "Ho-ho! for the fisherman's child to-night, Ho-ho! for the fisherman's wife; Ho-ho! for the fisherman's bark to-night, Ho-ho! for the fisherman's life." By-and-by the boys came back to consult the hamper again--nothing like the sea to make people hungry, and nothing like the sea to steal away the time. So down they sat to the delights of pork-pie, sandwiches, tarts, and the like; and, at last, all had vanished, save a little lemonade, reserved for fear they should be thirsty at starting. As for Rameses, he munched his hay and drank his one jar of water, poured into a bucket which Dick had hung on under the cart. "The old chap won't be able to drink of the briny," he had said in the morning, drawing attention to his forethought for the animal's comfort. "Now, just a whisk round, and we shall have to be moving homeward," said Dick, consulting his watch as they sat together. "I promised Madame Giche not to be after sunset, and we're keeping company hours with a vengeance with our late dinner. Why, 'tis between six and seven o'clock!" "There'll be a moon," remarked Oscar. "Yes; but that's not a sun," returned Dick, with a laugh. Then they all laughed--they were so happy, so light-hearted and gay. "Now, you girls, make the most of the next half-hour or so, and then 'twill be, 'Britons, strike home!'" So Dick admonished them; and then he and Oscar went strolling away for their last bout, as they called it. Who does not know how swiftly the last half-hour of a very enjoyable time whirls away? The four girls sat down in the glory of it all to sort their shells, arrange their seaweed, and just rest and, as it were, digest the day's pleasure. "And there has been no coming to grief, and no anything," remarked Sybil: a speech which doubtless would have shocked Madame Giche, had she heard it. No, so they thought--still, they must have been blind not to see that foe of foes, which will not be repulsed nor stayed, stealing up and up, and hemming them in. They must have been blind, as Dick said, shouting out to them from above their heads. What had happened? The tide--a high one to-night--had shut them in; the waters were already beat-beating against a jutting rock, which made a bend in the shore on their one side; on their other the sea lay a wide waste of water; there was no retreating or fleeing, for the tide had shut them in. Up the rocks they must go, or----the boys held their breath at this point, talking together above, where the sunlight still glinted about them, though the grey evening shadows were upon the little band of terrified maidens, wringing their hands, pale-faced and with startled eyes, looking this way and that, and seeing no way of escape. "Oh, Dick! what can we do? You surely know some way to get us away?" cried Jenny. But Dick shook his head. "There is but one way: and that is, you must come up the rocks, and in pretty quick time too--see that!" A defiant wave broke not far from them, and dashed its spray over them. "As for old Rameses, he's safe round the corner, where you ought to be; but if we were to go down and try to wade in to you on his back, he'd never do it. He's game for anything a donkey can do, but not for that." So that forlorn hope had to be given up. "They must come up here: that's their only chance," said Oscar. "But how?" was Dick's answer. "I must try to go down and fetch them up," was the other's reply, with paling cheeks but resolute eyes. "Yes," said Dick, peering down; "and if we could land them on that ledge of rock down there, 'twould be something; the tide may not reach that--at least, not yet." There was a friendly ledge of rock, not so far above where the girls stood. "But why should you go down? Let me," volunteered ready Dick. "No," objected Oscar; "let me go. I ought to be game for that." And he laughed. "Well, yes, half sailor and all, you ought to know best." How lightly those boys could speak, though their hearts were throbbing quickly with the thought of what might happen. "If I had a rope, I'd let you down; then if you'd land them on the ledge, I'd run for help, for we should never tug them up here by ourselves." "No," mused Oscar. "And there is a rope in the donkey-cart--a strongish one, I think." Away went Dick as with winged feet, while the other stood crowned with red sunbeams, and viewed their position. Back came Dick. "'Twould never bear my weight," observed Oscar, tossing off his jacket and tightening his belt for action. "No, but it would steady you, if you'll scramble down; or let me go down, and you hold the rope--I'm your man for either." "No, no, I must go down. See there, I can't resist that," whispered Oscar, pointing below. It was poor little Inna's pale pleading face upturned to him in silence. The boys had been talking and doing; the rope was fast round Oscar's waist: a strong-looking rope, but weak, when one considered that it was in a sense to hold a life in its keeping. "Oh, Dick!" cried Jenny from below, "the water is dashing up to our feet!" Yes, the boys could see it was so--the twins were clinging together, and Inna stood with her arms thrown about them both. "I'm coming!" cried Oscar reassuringly, and stepped over. "Steady, old man, and the thing is done," whispered Dick, gripping the rope with his strong young hands. [Illustration: "IT SNAPPED AND HE WAS GONE."] It was an heroic feat, yet no more than bold venturesome lads of their age have done before and since. There were ledges here and there for strongly planted feet to rest upon, and to which young grasping hands could cling, although steep as the walls of a house. A giddy descent, but one to be accomplished with a steady head--that of a half sailor, to use Dick's words. The girls below were silent; even Jenny held her breath, although the water now was washing all their feet. Dick held the rope and his breath also. But not far had the deliverer gone down his adventurous way when he stumbled, reeled, his hands forgot to cling, and poor panic-stricken Dick, who was clinging to that broken reed of a rope, knew it could not sustain the strain of Oscar's weight; it snapped, and he was gone, falling down, to be caught by that very ledge of rock upon which he was to land the girls. He would never do it now; he moaned as he fell, then he lay, face downward, terribly motionless and still. And the girls were not rescued. "Oh, Dick! the water is lifting us off our feet," wailed Jenny. "Do you think he's dead?" cried Inna, still holding the affrighted twins in her embrace. "Jenny, you know how to climb almost like a boy; help Inna to land on the ledge: there's room," cried Dick in desperation, peering down in awe at Oscar, lying so still on his narrow resting-place. "Then between you tug up the twins, and I'll go down to the shore yonder and get help and a rope, and come down to you." Thus instructed and admonished, Jenny took heart, and, thanks to the knowledge of climbing trees which Dick had taught her, she scrambled up with Inna, and planted her safe by her cousin's side. Then down she slid again, brave little maiden, like a very boy, and tugged and twisted up the midges, as they sobbed in their forsaken terror, Inna reaching down and lending a helping hand. They were safe at last, for the time being, from the clutching water, rising and still rising below them; then Dick sped away. But what of Oscar: was he dead? and what if help should not reach them in time, and the tide should overwhelm them, after all? CHAPTER XI. THE RESCUE--CLOUDY DAYS--GOOD NEWS AT LAST. Like the wind sped Dick--it must be now or never. The fear was upon him that _high_ tides, at any rate, did reach the ledge of safety where the girls were sheltering. He fancied he had seen water-marks above that. Then about Oscar: that was a terrible height to fall. What if he was dead? what if he should revive, and, not being sensible, fall off the shelf of rock?--the girls could not hold him back. He must have struck his head fearfully. "I thought, having such a craze for being a sailor, he would have had a steadier head and more of sea-legs. I wish _I_'d gone down, and he held the rope." Such thoughts came crowding into the boy's head as he scudded along. Away to the right were the fishing-boats coming in, their sails dashed with gold and crimson, but not a craft of any kind lay to the left, where lives, so to speak, were being weighed in the balance. At last Dick was among the fisher-folk, telling his story, and a band of the hardy fellows put off in a boat for the scene of peril, a party mounting over the cliffs with a strong rope, Dick foremost of all. "Let me go down: they are more to me than to you," he pleaded, when they were on the cliffs, above where the little party crouched on their narrow strip of ledge. "I ought to have gone down instead of Willett; let me go down now." But the fishermen set him aside. "No, sir, not while we men can go down better"; and one, a giant in height, strength, and kindliness of heart, tied the rope about himself, and, as poor unfortunate Oscar had done, stepped over to the rescue. "Will the rope bear him?" asked Dick, thinking of the other's failure. "Yes, sir, bear a house; never you fear!" replied he who took charge of the rope. The sun had set, the sea looked grey and frowning, the wind sighed and moaned among the rocks. Oscar lay perfectly still and motionless; the girls had turned him over, and Inna sat with his head on her lap, his face covered with her handkerchief--it was so terrible to look upon: that was all the change since Dick had left. Jenny sat holding a hand of each of the twins. "For Dick's sake; because he promised for them to Madame Giche," she kept whispering to herself, trying not to shudder when the spray from the rising waters dashed over them. Dick was right; the tide would wash the ledge presently, it was doing its best to reach it now. How boldly the fisherman made the descent! It was as nothing to him, Dick thought, peering over. He was standing among the little prisoners. "These first, please," said Jenny, nodding at her two charges, "because they were given into our care, and they are the youngest." "All right, missie," returned the man, and, taking one of them under his arm, went mounting up like a big fly or a spider. Hurrah! one was safe, and back he went again. His comrades, with their boat, were standing off at no great distance, on the grey shadowy sea--the whole scene Dick never forgot. "How is it with Master Willett down there?" he asked of the man, as he landed with the first little girl. While down there he had bent over the lad a moment, and had examined him, so was able to report. "Well, sir, he's senseless, and his face terribly battered, but he's alive." He brought up the other little girl and Jenny, but as for Inna and Oscar-- "Better signal to our chaps out yonder to run in with the boat; 'twill be easier for the young gentleman to get him off that way," shouted the man to Dick, watching from above, and made signs to his comrades to row in with the boat. While this was being done Dick hurried away with Jenny and the twins to put Rameses into the cart, if the poor brute was to be found, and drive home without delay. "Yes, sir, quick home is the word for them, for they're wet, and cold, and frightened, poor dears!" said one of the men, who had children of his own. So they left Oscar and Inna to the boatmen's kindly care, and hurried away to look for Rameses. The dear old creature hailed them with such a prolonged braying, standing beside the cart, as if he knew they ought to be going. Dick put him in and drove home briskly, dropping the twins at the Owl's Nest, where no ill tidings had as yet found its way. But they met Dr. Willett and Mr. Barlow well on the road, with the gig and some sort of stretcher-bed, hastily made, for someone had handed on the news to the farm; therefore Dick was thankful to meet the two doctors, as he could direct them to the spot where the boat was likely to land. Poor, poor Oscar! he moaned sadly when the boatmen moved him; he was alive to pain, if to naught besides. "Softly! softly!" so they whispered, handling him as if he had been a baby; but Inna's heart ached, hearing him groan and moan, as she stepped into the boat, and nestled beside him, and more, taking his head in her lap; and so they moved off over the darkening seas. Oscar had fallen into silent insensibility again when they landed. Then followed another moaning time of pain; they laid him on the stretcher-bed, and put him and it into the gig, as the doctor had arranged beforehand. Inna crept in beside him, the doctor after that, with his legs tucked up as best he could; then away they drove, as briskly as the state of the poor sufferer allowed, leaving Mr. Barlow to come after on foot. Mr. Gregory was at the farm when they arrived there; heavy tidings had been reported to him--whether it was Dick or Oscar killed, report did not know, but it fancied it was both; and two, if not more, of the little girls were drowned--that was the story report had told about the little party. The first thing to be done was to hurry Dick and Jenny off to bed, and to put Oscar into his. Such a getting upstairs of sighs and moans was it, and of aching hearts, suffering over it all. Inna broke down at last, and sobbed as if her heart would break, when there was nothing more for her to bear or do, and Mary took charge of her, to see her to bed, Mrs. Grant and the doctors taking Oscar into their keeping. Well, there was no use in mincing matters--the boy's face was much beaten and battered by the fall; it would show the scars for some time to come--perhaps for ever: concussion of the brain, a fractured leg; even Mrs. Grant's heart grew sick, hearing the doctors enumerate the evils that had befallen him. "Yes, he'll live--at least, I don't see why he shouldn't," said his uncle. "Yes, God willing, he'll live;" but he went out to his patients the next morning with an anxious brow. A terrible awakening came to Oscar, after that long death-like stillness; weary days of restless insensibility and pain followed. Poor suffering boy, it was hard to hear him moan and rave over the fancied peril of the girls. "Inna, Inna!" he would cry. "I believe she cared for me more than anybody else in the world, and now I'm leaving her to die. I would save her if I could," and he would try to spring out of his bed--only try, poor maimed lad; but these fits of restless insensibility wasted his strength sadly. In vain Mrs. Grant tried to soothe him; sometimes his uncle sent to the Owl's Nest for Inna, exiled there against her will, because being in the house, hearing his moans and wild cries, made her pale and ill, following close upon the strain to her childish nerves before. The doctor's heart misgave him terribly at this time. Would his dear dead brother's son die--slip, as it were, away from him, his father's brother, who had taken the friendless lad to his heart, in the place of the younger brother he had well-nigh idolised? Only in his quiet, reserved, absent-minded way he had never thought how much he cared for him. He sent for his small niece--the child who had stolen into all their hearts with her gentle, unobtrusive love, and would stand aside from the bed when she came with a heavy sigh, while she spoke the boy's name. She had more power to soothe him than he; she laid her small cool hand on Oscar's feverish one, holding it till he seemed to understand who it was near him. Then he would sink into long, unrefreshing, heavy slumber, to awake to all the wild frenzy again. Thus, to and fro went the little maiden from the farm to the Owl's Nest and Madame Giche, who chatted to and tried to amuse her when there, and to beguile her from her childish anxiety. "Yes, dear, my husband descended from a French family," she said one evening, finding her in the picture-gallery, where she so loved to be, as usual passing from picture to picture, and always stopping at that of Madame Giche's son, to think over the sad tale, and to wonder where that little child was whom Madame Giche had never found. "Yes, dear, he was of French family. Some said my son was like him, but I think he was more like me;" and the aged lady regarded his portrait fondly, standing behind her little guest. "I think he's very much like you, dear Madame Giche; and, do you know, he always reminds me of mamma; 'tis the eyes, I think--they look at me so!" There came a quiver into the child's voice. "Were mamma's eyes dark?" questioned Madame Giche. "Oh, no! Mamma's eyes are like mine. People say I am very like mamma." "And papa--what is he like?" "He is dark, and--and that is all." "An artist, is he not?" "Yes; he was painting the portrait of the gentleman with whom he's gone abroad when--when he was taken ill"--the child's sweet grey eyes filled with tears. "He broke a blood-vessel, and--and 'twas said he would die if he spent the winter in England." "And so the gentleman took him abroad?" "Yes; it was very kind of him. A Mr. Mortimer--his father was rich once, only he lost his estate, so his son was poor, only he married a rich lady; and they are so happy, and Mrs. Mortimer is so beautiful," went on the child. "Mortimer! Mortimer!"--the ancient lady shook her head. "No, I don't know the name," she sighed, looking at her son's picture again. "I wonder where the little boy is, Madame Giche?" said Inna, out of the silence that followed, noting the aged mother's fond gaze. "Little boy, dear?" was the dreamy response. "Yes, Madame Giche, your dear little grandson." "My dear, he's not a little boy--he's thirty-three years of age--that is, if he's living." "Oh, how strange! why, he is just as old as papa, and I keep fancying him a little boy." "No, dear, no," sighed Madame Giche. "And so papa is thirty-three?" she asked. "Yes, just the age of Mr. Mortimer; they kept their last birthday together--you know--in Italy," was the quivering response. She could not speak of her absent ones so calmly as her aged friend. "But papa is better, is he not, my dear?" questioned Madame Giche cheerfully, noting the tremor in her voice. "Oh, yes! and seeing and doing so much, he is almost well--and--and having his heart's desire, at last, in seeing Rome." "Was he never there before?" "No, not since he was a very little boy. But Mr. Mortimer was; he has travelled a great deal; he married his wife abroad--in Switzerland, I think." "Ah, indeed!" and again Madame Giche sighed. "Yes, I think--I think he was tutor to a young gentleman there. You know, he does not mind my telling you; he often talks to people about that time--he doesn't mind a bit," said the conscientious little girl. Just then the twins brought Inna a letter from Italy, and from her mamma. Madame Giche saw how the child's hand trembled at taking it, and drew the two little girls away, to let her read it in peace. This she did, sitting down on the topmost stair of the grand staircase, among the coloured lights. It brought her good news--her father and mother were to come home early next summer, and she had thought when parted from them that they would not return for three years. "Madame Giche," said she, after she had wiped away the happy tears which would come, dancing into the tapestried room, almost like one of the twins, "papa and mamma are coming home next summer." "Indeed, dear: that won't be long to wait," returned the kindly old lady; and Inna, remembering the long, long years of waiting she had known, nestled to her side and kissed her. Another joy came to Inna that same evening. Oscar was better, was conscious at last; he had just awoke from a sweet refreshing sleep, and cheered all their hearts at the farm, and his uncle had pronounced him out of danger. Dick Gregory brought the news to the Owl's Nest. The change for the better in his friend had come at the right time; to-morrow he was to go back to school, he told Inna, as she strayed out to him on the moonlit terrace. [Illustration: "DICK SHOOK HER BY THE HAND."] "And now, hurrah!" cried the happy boy, tossing up his cap, and making Inna laugh a tinkling, happy laugh, such as she had not indulged in for so many anxious days. Then Dick shook her by the hand as she told him of her letter, with its good news, bade her cheer up, and promised to tell Jenny, whom he pointed out to her away down the shadowy avenue, standing by the donkey and cart--not to shock Madame Giche with the rumbling old thing by bringing it nearer, he told her. CHAPTER XII. NEW THOUGHTS AND WAYS--THE HEIRESS OF WYVERN COURT. Spring again, and Oscar and his uncle had been out round the farm. The boy was somewhat spiritless and weary-looking; he could not be pronounced to be ill or really weak now, yet there was something wanting in him which ought to have been there, making him more atune to spring-time. His face was not much the worse for its battering on the rocks. He was still a good-looking youth, as Mr. Barlow told him one day; to which Inna responded, as the boy was silent, that she was glad, because nice looks were nice. This made Oscar laugh at last, and remark that nice, as used in the sense she used it, was only a girl's way of using it. Yet he could be grumpy still, though there was certainly a change for the better in him in that way. As for Inna, she had been like a little shadow about him all through the winter, sitting by him through the long, cold, snowy days in the dining-room, he on a couch by the fire, she on a footstool, reading to him, chatting, working out puzzles--she and he together--and heaping up the fire till it blazed again. Once they had an earnest talk of that which was always making Oscar's heart heavy and his brow gloomy, of the time when he would have to take to the farming. Thus Oscar was, in a way, prepared for what his uncle said to him after their walk round the farm that fine spring day. "Oscar, do you know why I've taken you round the farm to-day?" The boy had thrown himself listlessly on a couch near the fire. "Yes, I suppose to remind me of what I'm to be," returned he. "Well, yes, you have guessed rightly; and, my boy, has it ever struck you that you're not fitted for what you want to be?" asked Dr. Willett, doctor-like, going to the point at once, and so saving suffering. "Yes, I know I'm too big a coward for it; and I suppose other people know it as well." "No, not a coward, Oscar--events have proved that not to be correct. For instance, no coward would have saved that child at the fire; yet they told me you fainted as soon as 'twas done. The doctor at Bulverton Hospital wrote me that he thought there was something peculiar in the formation of your brain: what happened at Swallow's Cliff proves the same thing, and confirms my opinion of you, formed years ago--that your head would never do for climbing giddy heights, nor steer you through dangers in safety to yourself or to others. So, my boy, your sailor dream will have to be set aside." "It was more than a dream, it was--it was----" the boy broke down and sobbed, burying his face among the pillows of the couch. There was silence for a while, and when Oscar looked up he saw a tear trickling down his uncle's cheek, as he stood with his back to the fire. "Uncle Jonathan, is that tear for me?" he asked, in wistful surprise. "Yes, my boy; because I know what you are feeling. My life has been a silent one--too silent perhaps--but there are things that I, too, have missed in that same life. I doubt if there are many lives without the miss and the loss." Something prompted the boy to stretch out his hand toward his uncle, and he took it with such a warm grasp. "Uncle, I'll be a farmer; I've intended to tell you so for days--only----" "Well, never mind, we understand each other now; and let me say this much, Oscar: the humdrum farm-life, as I've heard you call it behind my back"--Dr. Willett smiled somewhat sadly--"won't be so humdrum as you think, if you make of it a life work--a something to be handled nobly, and made the most of. A tinker's life could be hardly humdrum with that end in view." "If I were a tinker, no tinker beside Should mend an old kettle like me; Let who will be second, whatever betide, The first I'm determined to be," came jingling through the boy's brain, and made him smile. "Yes, uncle, I see; thank you for speaking out." He raised his uncle's hand to his lips and kissed it, as a girl might have done; the distance between him and his uncle was bridged over at last for ever. "You see, I never thought Uncle Jonathan cared for me before," he said to Inna afterward. And now Inna seemed to walk on air; going here and there about the farm with Oscar, who was too weak for study still, but trying with all his might to take an interest in what was going on out of doors. "A good long voyage would cure him of his sea-fever, and quite set him up for hard work," remarked Mr. Barlow to the doctor; and both wondered if it could be managed. * * * * * Well, in the midst of all this, home came Mr. and Mrs. Weston one fine May day, like swallows, to make Inna's summer complete. They arrived suddenly, as travellers often do, the letter that was sent to announce them making its appearance the morning after they were at the farm--for such things do happen now and then. Now the days followed on indeed like a happy dream to Inna, she and her mother comparing notes together, and joining the threads of their divided lives again. Mr. Mortimer spirited her father off to London, for they all came in a bunch to the farm; Mrs. Mortimer also accompanied the gentlemen; but when the business which took them there was arranged, they were to return to keep holiday with Mrs. Weston and Inna. Meanwhile, the little girl introduced her mother to Madame Giche and her nieces, and showed her, at her aged friend's request, the fine old house, took her to the picture-gallery, to hear the story of Madame Giche's son, who broke her heart; and if Mrs. Weston's very soul was stirred within her, hearing the sad tale and looking at its poor dead subject's face, nobody knew it--she kept it to herself. Then back came the three from London, like happy children, to join the rest. "With his house full of company, the doctor felt bound to come out of his shell to entertain them," as Mr. Barlow remarked to Oscar. But Dr. Willett was quite equal to playing host, and taking the lead in all the clever talk going on at his table, between his old friend, who slily looked amused--an artist, a gentleman with a rich wife, and a beauty--and two ladies; the younger members hearing, and saying nothing, but wondering at Uncle Jonathan's ease and eloquence. But there came a break to this; Madame Giche would like Inna to bring her artist father and his friend to the Owl's Nest, to be introduced to her, and to see the pictures, some of which were supposed to be good. So one day they all went, Inna feeling the importance of the part she had to play, and hoping she should come out of it all gracefully. Ah! she need not have disquieted herself. Sweetly gracious was Madame Giche, wrapped about with a black lace shawl, sitting by the wood fire in the tapestried room, and rising in her stately way when Inna led the gentlemen in, holding a hand of each, and saying-- "Madame Giche, this is papa, and this is Mr. Mortimer." Little dreamt she what would follow, nor they either. Inna fancied she heard her aged friend murmur, like an echo, her last word, "Mortimer!" as she glided from them, to stand by her side, then---- "Hugh!" they all heard that: 'twas like a musical wail of gladness; and Madame Giche sank into her high-backed chair--like a snowflake was her face for whiteness--and fainted. "She is dead! Madame Giche is dead!" sobbed the little girl, but Long, whom they hastily summoned, said-- "No, miss; 'tis only a faint," and asked if the gentlemen would carry her to her chamber, so that she could be revived in quiet. This Mr. Weston did, lingering with his little daughter and Mr. Mortimer on the terrace outside, to hear tidings of the poor lady's state before leaving. Here a servant came to them before many minutes had passed, though the time seemed long to them in their perplexity. Madame Giche was better, she said, but begged them to excuse her seeing them now, and would they come by appointment to-morrow, at ten o'clock? You may be sure Inna lived in a state of continual excitement and curiosity, so mysterious was Madame Giche's fainting fit to her, for the remainder of that day and until ten o'clock on the morrow; and when she saw the two gentlemen set forth alone for the interview, she not being needed now, she felt like a very inquisitive little girl, who did not half like being left behind and so not to see and hear what might happen next. In the meantime, the two arrived at the Owl's Nest, and reached the tapestried room, where Madame Giche, still like a snowflake for paleness, and sweetly weak and trembling, received them, not rising from her chair this time. Ah! well, it was no time for ceremony. Question followed question from the poor old lady's lips as to who was Mr. Weston's father, when born, his real name, and so forth, until the artist sat down and told her his story--for he had one. "My father was a gentleman, and died rather suddenly in Italy, when I was three years old; my mother followed him three weeks after, of a broken heart, 'twas said, and I was adopted by a friend of my father's, an artist, named Welthorp, a great traveller, but kind and good, who took me to Australia--in fact, almost all round the world--and finally to London, where he and his wife died--both died while I was a mere lad. But I had learnt to dabble and paint, and so, making the most of my knowledge, have managed by degrees to struggle up to what I am." This was his meagre story. "My father? no, I never knew who he was, nor his name--not Weston; Mr. Welthorp knew that much--but my father was a reserved man: he never mentioned who he was, nor what his position or property, not even to him. I've heard he sent a message to his mother when dying, but----" The interruption came from Madame Giche, who suddenly clasped his hand, crying, "That ring, where did you get it--say?" "It was my father's ring, all he had to show of his former life, so to speak;" and Mr. Weston took the ring from his finger like a man in a dream--a costly gold ring, studded with diamonds. "It is my dead husband's ring; I gave it to my son to wear in memory of him when he attained his eighteenth birthday," cried Madame Giche. "See here"--and her trembling fingers touched a spring--"here are their initials, my boy's and his father's." Ah! yes, there they were, there was no denying it. Denying it! sweet-eyed, eager old lady, she led them to the gallery, and made them look at that all-convincing portrait of her son, over which unconscious Inna had dreamt so often, longing for her mother, she scarcely knew why, while it was her father's face spoke to her mystified little heart. Ah! it was as clear as the light of day before Mr. Weston and Mr. Mortimer left the Owl's Nest that morning. Mr. Weston was the rightful master of Wyvern Court, and Inna its heiress to come after--Madame Giche's great-granddaughter. * * * * * There was a right joyful Christmas keeping at Wyvern Court that year: it was all joy, peace, and home-coming to Madame Giche; all a fairy dream to Inna and the twins, to have Dick and Jenny as their guests, Dr. Willett, Mr. Barlow, and Oscar coming up for the Twelfth Night. "I say, who would have thought you'd prove to be the heiress of Wyvern Court that day when I met you in the railway carriage?" said Dick Gregory--he, Jenny, Inna, the twins, all out on the terrace, in the moonlight, at the old court, listening to the bells on Christmas evening. "I didn't know it myself," returned Inna. "You see, papa's illness and all was like the cloud with the silver lining." "Your cloud was lined with gold, Miss Giche," remarked Dick, "and no mistake!" "It is _our_ cloud as well--mine and Olive's--isn't it, Inna dear?" spoke Sybil, clinging to the new little heiress's hand. "We are to be co-heiresses, all three, and grand-auntie knows how." "Oh, ay! share and share, like dividing one apple between the three of you; but Inna is _the_ heiress," said Dick. THE END Printed by Cassell & Company, Limited, La Belle Sauvage, London, E.C. * * * * * _"The extraordinary popularity of LITTLE FOLKS has placed it beyond both rivalry and criticism. 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23069	----	Janet McLaren, The Faithful Nurse, by W.H.G. Kingston. ________________________________________________________________________ The Morrison family lose both parents in an epidemic. One little girl, Margaret, and two little boys, David and Donald are left. There is an old woman who has been a nurse in the family. There appear to be no resources, and after selling up what there is, all rather too well-used to fetch much money, old Janet takes the children to a big town on the East coast of Scotland, where she rents a single garret room, and settles in. She can send the boys to school, where they do well, but she wishes to do what she can, despite her own limited ability, for Margaret, at home. The boys do extremely well in their classes, winning books as prizes. A boy called Alec Galbraith beats Donald to first place, but David comes top in his class. Margaret has an illness, and is recommended sea bathing to help her recovery. She almost drowns, and is saved by a boy whom few recognise, but who turns out to be Alec. Poor old Janet labours away to bring up these children. Alec, now grown up, goes to Canada, and in due course the boys follow him. The rest of the book deals with what happens there, and how they lose touch with one another for a while, and then regain it under strange circumstances. All comes out more or less well in the end. A short book, but an easy one to read or listen to. ________________________________________________________________________ JANET MCLAREN, THE FAITHFUL NURSE, BY W.H.G. KINGSTON. CHAPTER ONE. DONALD MORRISON, WHOSE WIFE HAS LATELY BEEN CALLED AWAY, DYING IN HIS HIGHLAND MANSE, HIS CHILDREN LEFT DESTITUTE, ARE TAKEN CARE OF BY THEIR OLD NURSE.--SHE CONVEYS THEM TO A SEA-SIDE TOWN, WHERE SHE TAKES UP HER ABODE WITH THEM IN A SMALL ATTIC, AND LABOURS FOR THEIR MAINTENANCE, WHILE SHE PLACES THE TWO BOYS, DONALD AND DAVID, AT SCHOOL.--HER ANXIETY ABOUT THE EDUCATION OF MARGARET. In his Highland manse, far away among the hills, where he had dwelt as pastor for many years over a wayward flock, Donald Morrison lay on a sick-bed. The same fever which had carried off his dear wife a few weeks before, had now stricken him down. He knew that he was dying. As far as he himself was concerned he was willing to yield up his spirit to his Maker; but what would become of his motherless children, his sweet young Margaret, and his two boys, Donald and David, their principles unformed, and ignorant of the evils of the world? "Father in heaven protect them," he ejaculated. "Give me faith to know that Thou wilt take care of them, teach them and guide them in their course through life." But he felt that his mind was clouded, his spirit was cast down, the disease was making rapid progress. It was hard to think, hard even to pray, gloomy ideas, and doubts, and fears, such as assail even true Christians, crowded on his mind. He forgot--it was but for a time--the sincere faith which had animated him through life. The victory was not to be with the Evil One. Soon there came hope, and joy, and confidence. "All will be well with the righteous, those who put on Christ's righteousness," he mentally exclaimed, and peace came back to his soul. As he gazed out through the window he could see, down away on the wild hill side, his children at play, their young spirits too buoyant to be long suppressed by the recollection of their late bereavement, and unconscious that they were soon to be deprived of their remaining parent. His eye for a moment rested on the familiar landscape, the blue waters of the loch glittering in the sunshine, a bleak moorland sprinkled here and there with white-fleeced sheep stretching away on one side, and on the other a valley, down which flowed, with ceaseless murmurings, a rapid stream, a steep hill covered with gorse and heather, the summit crowned with a wood of dark pines rising beyond it. Just above the manse could be seen the kirk, which, with a few cottages, composed the village; while scattered far around were the huts in which the larger part of the pastor's flock abode. As he gazed forth on the scene he prayed--he knew it might be for the last time--that his successor might be more honoured than he feared he had been in bringing home those wandering sheep to the true fold. Once more his thoughts turned to his little ones. "Janet," he whispered, as a woman of middle age, of spare form, with strongly marked features, betokening firmness and good sense, and clothed in the humblest style of attire, glided noiselessly into the room. "I feel that I am going." He lifted up his pale and shrivelled hand, and pointed to his children. "What is to become of them, it is hard to leave them destitute, utterly destitute, not a friend in the world from whom they may claim assistance." "Dinna talk so, minister," said the woman, approaching him, and placing his arm beneath the bed-clothes. "Ye yoursel have often told us to put faith in God, that He is the Father of the fatherless, and the husband of the widow. The dear bairns will nay want while He looks after them. I hanna dwelt forty years or more with the mistress that's gone, and her sainted mother before her, to desert those she has left behind, while I ha' finger to work with, and eyes to see. I'll never forget either to impress on their minds all the lessons you have taught me. It would have been little worth ganging to kirk if I had not remembered them too. I am a poor weak body mysel, it will not be me but He who watches over us will do it, let that comfort you, minister. The bairns will never be so badly off as ye are thinking, now that fever has made body and soul weak, but the soul will soon recover, and ye will rejoice with joy unspeakable. I repeat but your ain words, minister, and I ken they are true." "Ye are right, Janet. My soul is reviving," whispered the dying man. "Call in the bairns. I would have them round me once more. The end is near." Janet knew that her master spoke too truly; though it grieved her loving heart to put a stop to the play of the happy young creatures, and to bring them to a scene of sorrow and death. "But it maun be," she said to herself, as she went to the door of the manse. "He who kens all things kens what is best, and the minister is ganging away from his toils and troubles here to that happy home up there, where he will meet the dear mistress, and, better still, be with Him who loved him, and shed His blood to redeem him, as he himsel has often and often told us from the pulpit." She went some way down the hill, unwilling to utter her usual shrill call to the young ones. "Ye maun come in now, bairns," she said, in a gentle tone; when the children came running up on seeing her beckoning. "The minister is sair ill, and ye'll be good and quiet, and listen to what he says to you, he is ganging awa on a long long journey, and ye'll promise to do what he'll tell you till ye are called to the same place he'll reach ere lang." Something in her tone struck Margaret, who took her hand, and looking up into her face burst into tears. She already knew what death was. Donald, the eldest boy, had lingered a short distance behind. David, seeing Margaret's tears, with a startled, anxious look, took Janet's other hand. "Is father ganging to heaven?" he asked, as they got close to the house, showing how his mind had been occupied as they came along. "I am sure of it, and it is a happy, happy place," was the answer. "Ye'll speak gently, Donald," she said, turning round to the eldest boy, who, ignorant of his father's state, might not, she feared, restrain his exuberant spirits. There was no need of the caution, for the minister's altered look struck even Donald with awe. Janet led the children up to the bedside. The dying father stretched out his hands, and placed them on their heads, as they clustered up to him, while his already dim eyes turned a fond glance at their young fresh faces. "You will listen to Janet when I am away, and pray God to help you to meet me in heaven. Make His word your guide, and you cannot mistake the road." "I will try to mind that, and tell Donald and David, too," was all that Margaret could answer. "Canna ye stay longer with us, father?" asked Donald, touching the minister's hand, as he was wont to do when speaking to him. "He we should all obey has called me," said Mr Morrison. "May He bless you, and guard and keep you. Bless you! bless you!" His voice was becoming fainter and fainter, and so he died, with his hands on his children's heads, his loving eyes on their cherub faces. "Blessed are they who die in the Lord," said Janet, as she observed the smile which seemed to rest on the minister's features. Taking the children, scarcely yet conscious of what had occurred, she led them from the room, and then stepped back to close the eyes of the dead. Having put the sobbing orphans to bed, she hastened out to obtain the assistance of a neighbour in preparing the body for burial. She insisted on paying the woman for the office she had performed, remarking, as she did so, "I have the charge of the manse and the bairns till the minister's friends come to take them awa', and they would na' wish to be beholden to any one, or to leave any of his lawful debts unpaid." In the same way she took upon herself the arrangement and expense of the funeral. She sold the goods and chattels, as her master had directed her to do, for the benefit of his children; but they were old and worn, and the purchasers were few and poor, so that the proceeds placed but a very limited sum in Janet's hands for the maintenance of the little ones. As she received them she observed, "It's as muckle as I could ha' hoped for; but yet those who had benefited by his ministrations might have shown their gratitude by geeing a trifle above the value for the chattels." Human nature is much the same in an Highland glen as it is in other parts of the world. The day arrived when Janet and her charges must quit the manse. She had sent up to Jock McIntyre, the carrier, to call for the kist which contained her's and the children's clothing, as he passed down the glen. The most weighty article was the minister's Bible, with which, although it might have brought more than anything else, she would not part. She had reserved also a few other books for the children's instruction. Taking Margaret and David by the hand, Donald leading the way with a bundle of small valuables over his shoulder, she set forth from the house which had sheltered her for many long years, into the cold world. Margaret's eyes were filled with tears, and David cast many a longing glance behind him, while Donald, with his bundle, trudged steadily on with his gaze ahead, as if he was eager to overtake something in the distance. Whatever thoughts were passing in his mind he did not make them known. Janet's head was bent slightly forward, her countenance calm, almost stern. A difficult task was before her, and she meant, with God's grace, to perform it. She had not told the children where she was going, though she had made up her own mind on the subject. Several of the cottagers came out to bid them farewell; but as she had made cronies of none of them, there was little exhibition of feeling, and she had taken good care that no one should be aware of the destitute condition in which the orphans were left. Humble presents and offers of assistance would undoubtedly have been made, but Janet shrunk from the feeling that her charges should be commiserated by those among whom their parents had lived, and she returned but brief thanks to the farewells offered her. She would far rather have been left to pursue her way without interruption. "Fare-ye-weel, neighbours, just tack Miss Margaret's, and the laddies, and my ain thanks, but we canna delay, for Jock will be spearing for us, and we ha' a lang journey to make before nightfall," she said, bending her head towards one and the other as she wended her way among them down the hill side. Janet had a horror of cities and towns, having been bred and lived all her life in the Highlands, with the exception of a brief visit she once paid, with Mrs Morrison's mother, to beautiful --, on the east coast. It being the only town with which she was acquainted, she had made up her mind to go there. She had heard also that there was a school in the place, and to that school Donald and David must forthwith be sent. Without learning, she was well aware, she could not expect them to get on in the world as she wished. With regard to Margaret, the consideration of how she was to be brought up in a way befitting a young lady, caused her more anxiety than anything else. She might, indeed, teach her many useful things, but she was herself incompetent, she felt, to train the little damsel's manners, or to give her instruction from books. Still, "where there's a will there's a way," she said to herself, "and I ha' a tongue in my head, and that tongue I can wag whene'er it can do the bairns good." The journey was a long one, and though honest Jock charged but little for their conveyance, a large hole was made in Janet's means before they arrived at the end of it. The gaunt grave woman, with her three fresh blooming children, caused some curiosity, as she went about looking for lodgings. A single upper room was all she could venture to engage. Here she took up her quarters with her young charges, and thanking her merciful Father who had brought her thus far in safety, she felt like a hen which had safely gathered her brood under her wings. She furnished her abode with two truckle-beds, one for the boys, the other for Margaret and herself. She procured also a small table and four three-legged stools, a similar number of mugs and plates, and a few other inexpensive articles. That same evening, determined not to lose a moment of time, with well used spinning-wheel set up, she began to spin away as if she had been long settled, while the children played around her, glad once more to find themselves alone, and free from the gaze of strangers. She waited till they were asleep, and then set to work, to manufacture out of the minister's best suit some fresh garments for the boys, such as she considered befitting their condition. Her busy needle was going the greater part of the night, still she was up betimes, and again at work. She, however, allowed the children to sleep on as long as they would. "They will weary up here in this sma' room, the poor bairns, instead of running about on their aine free heathery hills, and I must na' spare the time to take them out on the links just now till their clays are ready, and I can send them to school." One of those admirable institutions in Scotland for the education of all classes enabled Janet to carry out her project without difficulty. Mr and Mrs Morrison had carefully taught their children, and the two boys were well advanced for their age. The master of the school, on hearing who they were, at once received the orphans, and promised, as far as he could, to befriend them. "If you will be obedient boys, and try and say your lessons well, you will get on," he observed. Donald looked him full in the face, and at once said he would try, and he always meant what he said. David made no answer, but clung to Janet's gown, as if unwilling to be left behind among so many strange people. "Ye will be back in the afternoon, and we will be spearing for you, bairns," she said. "They are precious, sir, very precious," she added, turning to the master. "If they are shown the right way, as their father showed it them, they will walk in it; but the deil's a cunning deceiver, and ever ganging about to get hold of young souls as weel as old ones. Ye'll doubtless warn them, and keep them out of bad company." "I'll do my best, my good woman," answered the master, struck at Janet's earnestness for the interests of her charges; and having bid her farewell, he led off Donald and David, while Janet, taking Margaret by the hand, returned to her lodging to resume her daily labour, well satisfied with the arrangements she had made for the education of the two boys. Donald and David returned safe home in the evening from their first day at school. Donald was full of all he had seen and done, and was especially delighted at finding that he was superior to many boys of his own age. Having made several friends, he said he thought school a very fine place. He might have gone out to play a game of golf on the links, and he would have done so had he not promised Janet to return at once, but he hoped that she would let him go another day. David had not been behind hand with his brother in his class, but he had not been so happy, and the boys had asked him questions to which he had been unable to frame replies, without betraying the truth, which Janet had especially charged them not to do. "They wanted to ken all about us," exclaimed Donald, "and I told them that they must just mind their ain business; my home might be a castle in the Highlands some day, and whatever it might now be, I was contented with it." "A very proper answer," exclaimed Janet, smiling for the first time for many a long day. "Ye maunna be ashamed of your home, or those in it, laddie; just gang on doing your duty, but dinna mind what young or old, or rich or poor, think of ye." "But I said nothing, I would na answer them," said David, sobbing. "Ye did weel, too, laddie," observed Janet. "The wise man knows where his strength lies, the weakest may thus come off the conqueror." She had now to make arrangements for Margaret's education. This was more difficult than for that of the boys. She could not trust her sweet, gentle, blue-eyed maid among girls who might be rough or unmannerly, and yet she could not possibly afford to send her to one of the upper class of schools. Margaret already read much better than she did, for her own attainments extended no further than a limited amount of reading and writing. The few books, besides the Bible, she had brought away from the minister's library, were mostly on theological subjects, somewhat, she felt sure, beyond Margaret's comprehension. She lived on dry crusts for many a day to sanction her extravagance in purchasing several books, one after the other, suited to the little maiden's taste. Margaret was delighted to receive them, and while Janet sat and span she read them aloud to her, and amply rewarded was the kind nurse for her self-denial. Not dreaming that Margaret could possibly educate herself, she still continued turning in her mind how that desirable object should be accomplished. "Dinna ye think that if we ask God He will show us the way," said Margaret, one day, looking up into the face of her nurse, who had made some remark on the subject. "We will do as ye propose, my sweet bairn," answered Janet. "He is sure to hear us," and, accordingly, when the chapter from the Bible had been read, which Janet never omitted doing, she, with her young flock around her, knelt in prayer, as had been the custom at the manse, and she did not fail to ask for guidance and direction in the matter which had so sorely perplexed her mind. CHAPTER TWO. THE BOYS OBTAIN PRIZES.--JANET DECLINES RECEIVING VISITS FROM ALEC GALBRAITH, OR ANY OF THEIR SCHOOL-MATES.--MARGARET'S ILLNESS.--IS ORDERED FRESH AIR AND SEA-BATHING.--CARRIED OFF BY A WAVE, AND SAVED BY ALEC GALBRAITH.--MARGARET AND HER BROTHERS ARE INTRODUCED TO HIS MOTHER. It gave joy to the loving heart of Janet, when one day her two bairns came home, each with a prize under his arm. "But mine is only the second in my form; David got the first prize in his," said Donald, as they exhibited their books to the eager eyes of their nurse and sister. "Weel, they are bonny--they are bonny," exclaimed Janet, as still mechanically spinning away, she bent over the books which Margaret, with sisterly eagerness, was examining. "I thought I should have had the first, but another fellow ran me hard and gained it," said Donald. "Who was he?" asked Margaret, looking up, inclined to quarrel with the boy who had deprived her brother of the honour which she thought ought to have been his. "A very fine fellow--one Alec Galbraith--he beat me fairly; and there's as much in him as any boy at school." Margaret felt that she had been too hasty in her conclusions. "I intended to bring him here for you to see, Margaret," continued Donald. "Though he lives in a fine house, and has a father and mother, and several big brothers away in foreign parts, I am not going to let him suppose that I am ashamed of my home. He has often asked me, and I am determined to be able to say, `That's where I live, and now what do you think of me?'" "Nay, nay, my bairn, dinna ye bring him here," exclaimed Janet. She thought she knew more of the world than her young charge, and scarcely comprehended his independent spirit, though her own in reality was very similar. "He will just be laughing at you afterwards, and tell others that ye live in an attic with a poor old woman." "He had better not," exclaimed Donald, in an angry tone. "But I ken he will na do ony sic thing--he is an honest fellow, and if he likes me it is for what I am, and not for where I live." "Dinna ask Galbraith to come here," put in David. "Though he may be the same to you, he may be letting out to others, and maybe they will ne'er he so kind in their remarks, and will be asking to come here themselves." This last observation of David's decided Janet. "We will ne'er have Alec Galbraith, nor any other of your school-mates, coming here, Donald, so just tell them that Janet McLaren does not wish to receive visitors," she exclaimed, in a more authoritative tone than she usually employed. Donald promised to act as she desired, and Alec Galbraith continued to be known only by name to her and Margaret. Although the two boys, in consequence of the active life they led going to and from school, and playing on the open links, retained their health, Margaret, unaccustomed to the confinement to which she was subjected, began to grow thin and pale. Her cheeks lost their bloom, her spirit, and the joyous elasticity of her step, were gone. Janet at length perceived the change in the sweet child, and saw that something must be done for her. She took her to a doctor, who advised fresh air, with a romp every day on the links, and sea-bathing. The remedies were cheap; but Janet could not think of allowing Margaret to go out without her, and she could not afford the time unless she took out her knitting-needles, which usually employed her fingers when her spinning-wheel was laid aside. The next morning the old Highland woman was to be seen pacing the links, knitting as she walked, while Margaret, delighted with her newly gained freedom, went bounding away before her, only wishing that she had her brothers to share her happiness. When they came home in the evening she easily persuaded Janet to go out again; and as the three children set off together, they felt as they had not since they left their Highland home. Still, as the doctor had prescribed bathing, Janet, who had paid for the advice, considered that it would be throwing away the siller if it was not carried out. The maidens, of high and low degree, in that unpretending little town, both then and long after, were accustomed to enjoy the salt water in a primitive fashion. Neither tents nor bathing machines were thought of. Each matron stood ready with a large sheet, under which her charge put on her bathing-dress, and then ran off to frolic amid the waves, resuming her wonted garments in the same way, after her bath. Margaret, till now, had never seen the ocean. It inspired no fear--only delight and pleasure--and she hurried into the water like a sea nymph, enjoying its bracing freshness. For many successive mornings she went down, in company with several other girls of various ages, to bathe and sport with glee in the bright waters of a little bay, sheltered on either side by high rocks from the gaze of passers by. One morning the sea, though still bright, came rolling in with greater force than usual, dashing the sparkling spray high up against the dark rocks. Several of the other girls exclaimed that they should enjoy a delightful bath, and Janet, unaware of the treacherous character of the ocean, did not hesitate to allow Margaret to join them. Now a wave came rolling in, sweeping in a snowy sheet of foam high up the beach, now it receded with a murmuring sound over the rounded pebbles. The girls, taking each other's hands, ventured in as far as they were accustomed to go, waiting till they saw a wave approaching, when they hurried back again up the beach, where they could escape its force. Margaret, as the last comer, was the outer one of the line. Not comprehending the necessity of caution, she let go her companion's hand at the moment the rest of the party were making their escape from the coming sea. In an instant she felt herself lifted off her feet; she endeavoured to spring forward, but the wave had her in its grasp, and, as with a loud roar it receded, she was carried away towards the entrance of the bay. For the first moment Janet did not perceive the danger of her darling. "Oh my bairn! my bairn!" she shrieked out, when she discovered what had occurred, and throwing down the sheet she rushed into the water vainly attempting to reach her. Several of the elder girls, horror-stricken, held her back, scarcely conscious of what they were doing. Louder and louder she raised her imploring cries for help, as she endeavoured to break loose from the agitated group surrounding her. Margaret continued floating on the surface; but was every instant being borne further away towards the white-topped waves which rose outside the bay. At that instant a lad was seen to run along the top of the rocks till he neared the end, when, without a moment's hesitation, he sprung off into the water, and swam boldly towards the little girl. She had not from the first struggled, and she lay perfectly quiet, while he grasped her dress with one hand and struck out with the other towards the beach. The danger of both was great. Now they appeared to have made good progress, and now the sea carried them out again towards the mouth of the bay; but the lad still swam on with undaunted courage towards the eager arms which were stretched out to assist him in landing. At length he succeeded in getting near enough to allow Janet to grasp her charge, and once having her in her arms, she bore her away up the beach to a warm nook under the rocks, while the lad, his task accomplished, made good his footing, and then, without waiting to receive the congratulations of the girls, and the thanks which Janet would have poured out, hurried off towards his home to change his wet clothing. Margaret, who had fainted, quickly returned to consciousness; and from the remarks she made while Janet was putting on her dry clothing, she seemed scarcely aware of what had occurred, nor till the other girls, who had speedily dressed, gathered round her, did she understand the danger in which she had been placed. "Who is he? Can ony o' ye tell me the brave laddie's name? that I may thank him and love him for saving my bairn," asked Janet. Some of the girls gave one name, some another. "Na, na, he is neither o' them," exclaimed one of the elder girls. "He is young Alec Galbraith, whose father and mother live in the big house over the links there. He gangs to the school, and my brothers ken him weel." Taking her bairn in her arms, Janet hastened homewards. The boys had already started for school, ignorant of the danger to which their sister had been exposed. Janet placed her on the bed, and now, for the first time, giving way to her feelings, burst into tears. "I'll ne'er again trust you to that treacherous sea, my own sweet bairn," she exclaimed, bending over her. "If it had taken you away, I could na have lived to come home and see the poor boys breaking their hearts, and they would have had no one left to care for them. But our God is kind and merciful, and we maun lift up our hearts to Him in praise and thanksgiving." "I will try to do so, dear Janet, though I feel that I cannot be grateful enough to Him," said Margaret, in a faint voice, and comprehending perhaps now far more than before, from the unusual agitation of her nurse, the fearful peril through which she had been preserved. "And, Janet," she added, in a whisper, "I should like to thank, with my whole heart, the brave boy who swam out to me and brought me safely on shore. I remember seeing him running along the rocks and coming towards me, and then I felt sure I was safe." "Yes, we will thank him. If I had to live a hundred years, I would thank him to the end of my days," exclaimed Janet. "But his parents are rich people, and a poor body like me can give him ne'er more than empty thanks." "But if they come from the bottom of our hearts he'll prize them," observed Margaret. "And do ye ken who he is?" "Ay, that I do--he is Donald's class-mate, no other than Alec Galbraith, your brother is always talking about." "Oh, I am so glad," exclaimed Margaret. "I can believe all Donald says of him. I must go with you and thank him too, and I will never more be jealous though he keeps at the head of the class, and Donald is only second. He must be as brave as he is clever, or he would not have risked his life to save that of a poor little stranger girl like me, and then to have gone away without even stopping to be thanked." Janet guessed that young Galbraith was not likely at that time to be found at his house, and indeed Margaret was not fit to go out again at present. She therefore waited till the boys came home in the evening from school. They had heard nothing of what had occurred. All they knew was, that Alec Galbraith had come later than usual to school, that the master had received his excuse's, and that he had performed his tasks with even more than his ordinary ability. They listened with panting breath to the account Janet gave of the occurrence. "Bless him," cried Donald, "I will never again try to take him down. I would rather he had done it than any other fellow in the school." "I will give him all my prizes, and pray for him as long as I live," exclaimed David. Janet thought Margaret sufficiently recovered in the evening to venture out. "We must go with you," exclaimed Donald. "I want to take Galbraith by the hand, and tell him all I feel." The party set off--Janet, as usual, taking her knitting as she quitted her wheel, from which her active fingers had been spinning yarn even while the conversation above described had been going on. Margaret was rather pale, and somewhat weak, but her sturdy brothers supported her on either side. Though she was eager to thank Alec Galbraith, she felt somewhat timid at the thoughts of encountering him and his parents. "I know Alec well enough to be sure that he will make light of the matter," observed Donald. "He will tell you that he ran no danger, and enjoyed the swim. But that must not make us less grateful to him. I do not know what sort of people his parents are--perhaps high and mighty, and may be angry with you for placing their son in danger. However, I don't care what they say; nothing shall make any difference in my feelings towards Alec." "Nor in mine either," whispered Margaret. "Nor in mine," said David. "I only wish that I had more to offer him, not that I can ever pay him, but just to show my love and gratitude." Would that people were as grateful to God for the benefits daily received, and above all, to Jesus, for the great salvation He has wrought for us, as these young people were to the brave boy who had risked his life to save that of little Margaret. The above conversation took place as they approached the handsome residence of Mr Galbraith. Alec had seen them. He ran out to meet his friends. "I am so glad you have come, Donald. My mother wants to know you--for I have often told her about you, and how hard you pressed me in the class. And is this little girl your sister? Why!" and he looked up from Margaret to Janet, and blushed, as if he had done something to be ashamed of. "I do believe that I had the pleasure of towing you on shore this morning; but don't talk about it--it was no trouble at all, and I have often wetted these old clothes through and through before." "Oh, but I maun talk about it," exclaimed Janet, grasping his hands, and pouring out her thanks with all the impetuosity which her grateful feelings prompted. "I knew that was what you would say, Alec," exclaimed Donald. "But we know better about the danger and trouble. You might have been carried away by the sea, for I am very sure you would never have let go of Maggie while you had life." Margaret tried to say something, but she could never exactly remember what words she uttered. "If there was any danger, I am sure I did not think about it," said Alec. "And I am very glad, for your sakes that we got safe to shore. But now come in and see my mother, for I have often told her that as you would not lot me go to pay you a visit, we must get you to come here." Mrs Galbraith, a very amiable and gentle looking woman, received her visitors with the greatest kindness, and tried at once to make Janet at home. The old nurse expressed to her the gratitude she felt to her young son for the service he had rendered. "It is indeed a happiness to me to find that my boy has behaved rightly and bravely," answered the lady. "It would have been a sad thing if the life of that sweet little girl had been lost, and I can only rejoice that my dear boy was the means of preserving it. I should like to become better acquainted with her, and you will, I hope, allow her and her brothers to remain here. I'll send them home at night, or perhaps you would like to come for them." "I'll come for them, mem, and am grateful to you for your kindness," said Janet, who dreaded any one visiting her humble abode, while, at the same time her heart beat with satisfaction at the hope that at length her dear little Margaret might obtain a friend who would give her that assistance in her education which she herself was unable to afford. Leaving the children with their new friends, she cheerfully went to her solitary home to sit and spin, and think over what might be their future fate in life; and as she span many were the schemes she drew out in her imagination of their destiny. The boys would do well she was sure, though they might have a hard tussle with the world. Donald would do battle bravely with any foes he might have to encounter, and David would not be behind hand, although he might meet them in a more quiet manner. Maybe he will wish to follow in the steps of his father, and become a minister of the gospel, she thought. Weel, weel, its a true saying, that "Man proposes, and God disposes." If we trust in Him all will be for the best. CHAPTER THREE. MRS. GALBRAITH PROMISES TO BEFRIEND MARGARET.--ALEC'S FIRST VISIT TO JANET'S ATTIC.--HER SCHEMES FOR CLOTHING AND SUPPORTING THE BOYS.-- ASSISTED BY A KIND BANKER AND OTHERS.--THE BOYS MAKE GOOD PROGRESS AT SCHOOL.--JANET'S HUMBLE FAITH REWARDED. The children had a great deal to tell of all they had seen at Mistress Galbraith's when Janet came to take them home. "She is, indeed, a very kind lady," said Margaret. "She told me that once she had a little daughter just like _me_, but God had taken her to Himself, and asked me if I would like to come and see her very often; but I said that I couldna leave you, Janet, all alone, when the boys were at school, with no one to talk to you." "I can talk to myself, Margaret, ye ken," answered Janet. "I would na hae ye say nae to the good lady, for I like her looks and her way of speaking, and she may be a true friend to ye. And if she asks you again ye will just say ye will do what she pleases, and that ye are obliged to her. And what do you think of the big house and the great people?" she asked, turning to Donald. "It's all very braw and fine; but I would rather hae a house of my ain, and you in it, Janet," answered Donald. "May be you will get that, laddie, some day." "I hope I may; and then I'll ask Alec to come and stay with me, since you will na let him come here," said Donald. "I could na deny him onything--so, if he wishes to come, he must come," said Janet. "Then I will tell him," said Donald, "and I am sure he will not carry tales to the other boys." The next morning Alec found out the house on his road to school, and made his way up to Janet's attic. He tapped gently at the door. Donald went out to meet him. "I told you we did not live in a fine house, and so you see," he observed, pointing round the room. "But I am sure you do not think the worse of us, or our good nurse. We should have been starving if it was not for her--that's what I have got to tell you." "No, indeed, I do not think the worse of you or her," answered Alec. "If I thought it would vex you I would not have come; and I promise you that I will not say a word to others which you would not wish me to say. But my mother desired me to call and invite your sister Margaret to spend the day with her, if Mistress Janet will give her leave." "She will go, and gladly, as soon as the boys are off to school," said Janet, answering at once for Margaret. "Come along then," exclaimed Alec to his companions. "My mother is longing to see Miss Margaret again, and we will not delay her." As soon as the boys were away Janet set off with her charge. Mrs Galbraith received her with the greatest kindness, and would have had Janet to stay with her also. "Thank ye, Mistress Galbraith," answered Janet. "But I ha' my household affairs to attend to, and they will na get on very weel unless I am present." From that day forward Janet escorted Margaret to the house of her new friend every morning at the same hour. Janet greatly missed her young companion, but she sat on in her solitude rejoicing in the thought that Margaret was gaining the instruction she so much desired her to obtain. As she span and span she turned in her mind various plans for supporting the children and for ultimately establishing them in life. "Their claithes will soon be worn out. Donald is already too big for his, and though they may do for David for a few months longer, with patching and mending, I would na' like to ha' the poor boys pointed out by their school-mates as young gaberlunzies; and the siller I get for the yarn will only just pay the rent and find porridge for the bairns," she thought to herself. "The Bible says that it is the duty of Christians to support the fatherless and widows. I would na' beg for mysel' while I ha' got fingers to spin wee, but I maun nay let my pride stand in the way o' the bairns. They maun be clothed and fed, so I need find out those who ha' got the means, and gi'e them the privilege of helping the young orphans. The good lady, Mistress Galbraith, will look after Margaret, I ha' little fear o' that, but I canna let her ha' the charge of the boys." Janet having made up her mind to act never lost time in setting about it. As yet she was unacquainted with the names of any of the people in the place, with the exception of Margaret's new friend. This knowledge she had to gain; but, as she said to herself, "wi' a tongue in her mouth, and lugs to listen wee, that was na' a difficult matter." She first visited the few shops at which she dealt, and getting into conversation with the masters or mistresses, quickly gleaned from them some of the desired information. Having, with much acuteness, made up her mind as to those most likely to respond to her appeal, she went forth the next morning, having deposited Margaret with Mrs Galbraith, to commence the series of visits she proposed making. The first was to Mr McTavish, the banker, an elder in the church, and a man much respected, she heard. He listened to her tale with his keen eyes fixed on her countenance. "You speak the truth," he said at length, putting his hand in his pocket and drawing out his purse. "Na, na, sir, I dinna want the siller," said Janet. "If you ha' a mind, sir, to gie a jacket or a pair of breeks to the minister's son, or ony other article of dress ye think fit, I'll be grateful, but I dinna come to beg. It must be a free gift on your part. I dinna want any man's siller." The banker, somewhat amused at the good woman's reply, promised to supply Donald with a new suit; and writing an order to his clothier, desired her to present it, and obtain what she wanted. Highly delighted with her success she took Donald in the evening to be measured for a suit, having first begged the master not to allow the boy to know how it was obtained. "Its not that I would na' wish him to be thankful, but it would be bad for him to feel that he is supported by charity. And I will pray for blessings on the head of the good gentleman, and the day may come when he is able to show that he is sensible of his kindness," she observed. The worthy clothier appreciated her motives. "You have another bairn, I understand, to look after," he observed. "When he is in want of a suit let me know, and I will try what I can do for him." Janet thanked him for his kindness, and promised not to forget his offer. She was not always so successful as in these first instances. Some people refused to believe her story, or declared that they had already more people looking to them for assistance than they could support; others again gave full credit to her tale, and admiring her faithfulness and honesty, were glad of an opportunity of helping the destitute orphans of whom she had nobly taken charge. Frequently she brought home a supply of food, but not a particle of it would she touch herself. "It was given for the fatherless bairns, and they alone have the right to it," she would say, contenting herself with a bowl of brose, the usual coarse fare on which she subsisted. The sale of her yarn enabled her to pay her rent, and to find food for herself, and a portion for the children. Her own rough garments appeared never to wear out, while the roof of a neighbouring house below the window of her attic afforded her a drying ground on washing days. Money she would never receive; but as the history of the orphans became known, she was amply supplied with clothing for them of all descriptions. Donald and David continued to make excellent progress at school, obtaining the approbation of all their masters, and gaining, in addition to Alec Galbraith, several friends among their school-mates. "Your boys, if they continue as they have began, are sure to do well, Mrs McLaren," said the head-master, when she went to pay their school fees. "Weel, sir, I am sure too o' that, for the prayers of the minister and my dear mistress could na' have been offered in vain, and though I am but an humble woman, it is the chief thing I ask o' God, and I ken He will na' refuse my request." Margaret went daily to Mrs Galbraith, but that lady did not offer to take her entirely under her charge. She had her reasons for this; her own health was failing, and she felt that should she be taken away, and the young girl be again thrown back on Janet's hands she would feel the change more than if she continued to reside with her kind nurse. Although she had never visited Janet, she guessed the limited accommodation her attic must afford, and had, therefore, engaged, giving Janet the money to pay the rent, another small chamber on the same floor, which was devoted to the use of the two boys. Janet gladly accepted the offer. She felt that as the children were growing up such an arrangement was absolutely necessary for their comfort, though it might have been beyond her means to supply it. When the days shortened the two boys might have been seen in their little room, seated on their three-legged stools, with a table, manufactured by themselves, between them, their heads bent down close together over their books, to obtain as much light as the farthing candle, placed in the most advantageous position, could afford. When the cold of winter came on they were compelled to seek Janet's fire-side, where she would sit silent as a mouse, watching them with fond eyes, as they conned their tasks, while Margaret, on the other side, actively plied her needle, either making her own clothes, or performing some work for her kind patroness. Margaret had lost the bloom of childhood, and though her features were not sufficiently regular to allow her to be considered decidedly pretty, she had grown into an interesting girl, with an amiable expression of countenance--a faithful index of her mind. Donald had become a strong active fine looking lad, with features which betokened firmness and decision of character, while David, though not so robust as his brother, was handsomer, and a stranger, seeing the two together, would at once have pronounced him possessed of more mildness and gentleness than his elder brother, and less able to buffet with the rude world. CHAPTER FOUR. DONALD HAVING RECEIVED AN OFFER FROM MR. TODD OF AN APPOINTMENT IN CANADA, ACCEPTS IT, AND PREPARES FOR HIS DEPARTURE.--MRS. GALBRAITH'S UNHAPPINESS ABOUT HER SON'S RELIGIOUS PRINCIPLES.--ALEC RECEIVING AN APPOINTMENT IN CANADA, SAILS WITHOUT RETURNING HOME, TO HIS MOTHER'S AND MARGARET'S GRIEF.--DONALD ALSO LEAVES HOME FOR HIS DESTINATION. Janet and David were the sole occupants of the attic. The lad was seated at his little table with his hooks and papers before him, Janet looking on wondering at the strange figures he rapidly formed as he worked away at his mathematical studies. The weather was still cold, and she had pressed him to keep her company, and enjoy the warmth of her fire, which the early season rendered necessary. Not a word had she uttered lest it might interrupt him, when, as she drew forth the thread from her wheel, which had been idle but a few hours out of the twenty-four, Sabbath days excepted, since her arrival at her present abode, David looked up and inquired how many yards she could spin in a minute. "I ne'er thought anent it," she answered. "But why do ye ask, my bairn?" "Because I wish to calculate how many times the yarn you have spun since we came here would encircle the globe," answered David. "Oh, but to be sure a puir body like o' me could na' do sic a thing as that," she exclaimed, rather aghast at the very idea of such a performance. David, however, marking the yarn with his pen, bade her spin away while he counted sixty. He was engaged in his calculations when a quick eager step was heard on the stair, and Donald, his countenance glowing with health and animation, entered the room. "Janet, I have had an offer, a magnificent offer," he exclaimed, breathless from some other cause beyond the mere effort of mounting the stairs. "I would consult no one, and would tell no one till I had seen you. I was playing at golf on the links, when, rushing along, I ran right against a gentleman who was standing watching the game. I stopped to beg his pardon, when, looking up in his face, I was sure he was Mr Todd, he who was grieve o' the laird of Glenvarlock, and used to come often to the manse and ha' a crack with our father. Many is the time he has carried me in front of him on his horse, and lent me a pony to ride. I asked him--I was right--I told him my name, and that I was at the High School here, and Margaret and David and I were living with you. He shook me warmly by the hand, and said he was very glad to meet with me, inquiring what I thought of doing, and many other questions. He then begged, as soon as the game was over, that I would accompany him to his lodgings. `I have been thinking of something for you, Donald,' he said, when I rejoined him. `I am preparing to start, as soon as the spring commences, at the head of a party of emigrants to settle on a large tract of land in Upper Canada, and I want the assistance of one or two active young men, with heads on their shoulders, who have their way to make in the world. I have been out there for two years, and know the wants of the country. Active surveyors are especially required, and I can assure you that you will be able to obtain a sufficient knowledge of surveying, for all practical purposes, before we start. All your expenses will be paid, and you will receive a small salary to commence with. Say that you will accompany me, and I will not look elsewhere for an assistant.' I told him I could not say yes till I had asked you, Janet, and talked to Margaret and David. I do not like to leave you all, but you see I may make my fortune, and have a home for you all to come to some day; and if I stay in Scotland it may be long before I can obtain a situation, and longer still before I can have a house of my own." Janet remained silent for some minutes, gazing fondly at Donald, revolving the matter in her mind, with her lips apart as if the announcement had taken away her breath. David, with his pen still on the paper, looked up eagerly at his brother, participating in his feelings. A sigh which burst from Janet's bosom broke the silence. "Ye maun go my bairn, as it seems to me that the Lord in His goodness points out the way. We will ask Him to guide and direct us. Ye should not go forth into the world without feeling sure that ye are under His protection, and that He will gie ye, my bairn, if ye ask Him with faith." "I know He will, and may be it was He who sent Mr Todd on to the links this afternoon to meet with me," answered Donald, who, in his eagerness, was perfectly ready to agree with Janet. "He orders the steps aright of all who serve Him," observed Janet. "Janet speaks the truth," said David firmly. "I wish that I could go with you." "Na! na! my bairn, you are not old eno' or hardy eno' to bear the rough life which Donald will ha' to lead in that strange country," exclaimed Janet, who was not prepared to lose both of her boys at once. "And oh, it is that terrible sea you will ha' to cross which troubles me to think of. Is there no other way of getting there?" "I should be sorry if there was, for I have often longed to sail over the ocean, and I look forward to the voyage with delight," answered Donald. "You must not think of the danger. Nothing worth having is to be gained without that, in my opinion, and we shall be having you safe on the other side of the ocean before long, I hope, Janet." "Na, na, my bairn, you maun come back to me, but that terrible ocean I could ne'er cross." Donald no longer pressed that matter, and was content with the full permission Janet gave him to accept Mr Todd's offer, provided Margaret, on her return home, did not object. The young lady soon arrived, and, to Janet's surprise, entered at once warmly into Donald's projects. That evening, as the family knelt down in prayer, Janet earnestly lifted up her voice in a petition that her bairn might be directed aright, and protected amid the dangers to which he would be exposed. The next day, before returning to Mr Todd, Donald consulted his kind master, who advised him to accept the offer, and put him in the way of obtaining the instruction he required. Janet, who had never allowed her charge to discover the means she employed for obtaining their support, told him to set his mind at rest about his outfit, which it had naturally occurred to him he should have a difficulty in obtaining. She at once went to Mr McTavish, who had continued her firm friend. "An excellent opening for the lad," he answered. "I should be glad to help him, and let him come and shake me by the hand before he starts." Margaret, who besides obtaining many other female accomplishments from Mrs Galbraith, had learned to use her needle, had ample employment in manufacturing various articles of dress from the cloth Janet from time to time brought home with her. Mrs Galbraith, knowing how she was occupied, begged her to return home each day at an early hour that she might assist Janet, assuring her that she could readily spare her services. How eagerly Janet and Margaret sat and stitched away, allowing themselves but a short time for meals. They were determined to save expense, by making all Donald's underclothing themselves. Mr McTavish had desired Janet to let him order what outer clothing he required at the tailors, with a promise that he would see to the payment. Donald meantime attended assiduously to his studies to prepare himself for the work he was expected to perform, so that he was longer absent from home than usual every day. His studies were congenial to his taste, and he entered into them with the more zeal that they were preparing him for the real work of life in which he had so long wished to engage. David was always studious; and now that he had less of Donald's society, who was apt, when he could, to entice him out to join in the sports in which he himself delighted, he had more time than ever to attend to his books. Janet's great wish was that he should enter the ministry, but she had not yet broached the subject to him. Observing, however, his habits, she had little doubt that he would willingly agree to her proposal whenever she might make it. "Surely the minister would like to have one of his bairns to follow in his footsteps," she said to herself, "and though it may cost more siller to prepare him for the work, I pray that what is needful may be supplied, and my old fingers will na' fail me for many a year to come." The time was approaching for Donald to take his departure. Margaret would have preferred consequently, as she had lately done, remaining with Janet, but her kind friend, Mrs Galbraith, was ill, and much required her services. Had Alec been at home, it is possible that she might not have thought it wise to have had so attractive a girl constantly with her, but Alec had been now for upwards of a year absent. He had obtained, through his father's interest, a good situation in a mercantile house in London, and had latterly passed several months in Germany, where he had been sent on business with one of the partners of the firm. He frequently wrote home, giving a full account of himself and his proceedings, as well as of the thoughts which occupied his mind. Of late Mrs Galbraith had not been so well satisfied as formerly with the tenor of his letters. His mind, she was afraid, had become tinctured with that German philosophy which is so sadly opposed to all true spiritual religion. Mr Galbraith, who was inclined to admire his son's sayings and doings, told her not to fash herself on the subject, and that he had no doubt Alec would remain faithful to the kirk, though at his age it was but natural, mixing in the world, that he should indulge in a few fancies not in accordance with her notions. The answer did not satisfy the wise and affectionate mother. "Such fancies ruin souls," she observed. "While indulging in them he may be called hence without faith and hope, what then must his fate be?" She wrote an earnest letter to Alec. The reply was in his usual affectionate style; but the part touching the matter she considered of most importance, was as utterly beyond her comprehension as she suspected it was beyond that of the writer, lucid as he apparently considered it. The replies to several letters she wrote in succession, left matters much as they were at first, and she could only pray and look forward to his return, when she trusted that her tender exhortations would produce a beneficial effect upon his mind. "When he comes I must part with dear Margaret," she said to herself. "It will not do to have the two together. Alec may possibly attempt to impress his opinions on her mind, and may unsettle it should he fail to do more permanent injury; or, even should he keep them to himself, her sweet disposition, and other attractive qualities, may win his heart, while she may give her's in return, and I am sure that his father would never consent to his marrying a penniless orphan, and blame me for throwing them together." These thoughts, however, she kept within her own breast. Once entertained, they caused her much anxiety. While, on the one hand, she earnestly wished to have Alec home that she might speak to him personally; on the other, as her eyes fell on Margaret's sweet face, she feared the effect that face might have on her son. She must let her remain with Janet, that was settled; but Alec was sure to find his way to Janet's humble abode, as he had been accustomed to do when a boy to visit his schoolfellows, and he was very likely to suspect the cause of Margaret's absence from his mother's house. Had she been able to look into the hearts of the young people, Mrs Galbraith would have had considerable cause for anxiety on the score of their meeting. Alec had had for many a day what might have been considered a boyish fancy for Margaret, while she regarded him as a brave, generous youth, who had saved her life, and her brother's best friend; and though she had never examined her own feelings, she would have acknowledged that she considered him superior to any one else in the world. Mr Galbraith, who never having for a moment thought about the subject, had no reason for speaking cautiously, came into the room one day while Margaret was seated with his wife, and exclaimed-- "Alec writes word that he wishes if possible to come home and see us, as he has had a fine offer made him which I have advised him to accept, and which will keep him away from England for some years. He is doubtful, however, whether he will be allowed time to come home, and if not we must console ourselves with the thoughts of his bright prospects. I should have been glad if you could have had a glimpse of him, but I purpose myself going up to London to see him off." "Oh, do try and get him to come home, if only for a few days," exclaimed Mrs Galbraith. "I could not bear the thoughts of his going away without seeing him. But you have not said where he is going?" "I will tell him to come if he can," said Mr Galbraith, "he is not, however, going to a distant country, but merely to Canada, where he is to assist in forming a branch of the firm, either at Montreal or Toronto, as the partners are anxious to commence without delay. I consider the appointment a feather in the cap of so young a man." Margaret listened eagerly to all that was said. She was very certain that Alec was fitted for any post which might be assigned to him. She trusted, however, he would find time to get home and see them. "Donald and he will meet to a certainty; how delightful for both of them, and we shall hear from each how the other is getting on, and they will be of mutual assistance. Perhaps they will go out in the same ship," she thought. Both Mrs Galbraith and Margaret were to be disappointed. A letter was received from Alec two days later, saying that the vessel which was to convey Mr Elliott, the principal of the firm, and himself, was to sail immediately, and that no time could be allowed him to run down to Scotland. Mrs Galbraith greatly felt this announcement, but this was not the chief cause of her sorrow. She had long felt her health failing, and knowing that her days were numbered, she feared that she should never again see her son. All she could do was to commend him to the protecting care of Heaven, and to pray, from the very depths of her soul, that even though it might be through trials and troubles, he might be brought to accept the truth as it is in Christ Jesus, and have a living faith in His all-sufficient sacrifice. Would that all mothers prayed thus for their absent sons exposed to the wiles of Satan and the snares and temptations of the world. Such prayers would assuredly be heard; how many wandering sheep would be brought into the fold of Christ? Margaret felt very sad when she heard that Alec was not coming, but she kept her feelings to her own bosom. She had to return home to assist Janet in completing Donald's outfit. She and her old nurse worked harder than ever, there still seemed so much to be done, and Mr Todd had sent Donald word that he must hold himself in readiness to start at a short notice. The expected order came. "Fare-ye-weel my bairn, fare-ye-weel, ne'er forget that the deil, like a roaring lion, is ganging about to seek whom he may devour, and put your trust in Him who is able and willing to save you out of all your troubles. They maun come; dinna fancy all is sunshine in the world, but He will be your shield and buckler in time of danger if you love and serve Him." Janet, as she spoke, threw her arms round Donald's neck, and big tears dropped from her eyes. Margaret clung to him, and kissed his cheek again and again, till he had to tear himself away; when accompanied by David, he went on board the vessel which was to convey him to Leith, whence he was to proceed on to London. David remained with him till the last, and then returned to Janet's humble abode to apply himself to his books. CHAPTER FIVE. DONALD'S VOYAGE TO CANADA.--HE GAINS THE FRIENDSHIP OF MR. SKINNER.-- REACHES QUEBEC.--VOYAGE UP THE ST LAWRENCE.--ARRIVAL AT THE NEW TOWNSHIP.--DESCRIPTION OF THE SETTLEMENT.--MR. SKINNER PREACHES THE GOSPEL, AND TAKES UP HIS RESIDENCE IN THE PLACE. Donald found himself in a new world on board the fine emigrant ship, which was conveying him and nearly three hundred settlers to Canada. They were of every rank, calling, and character, but one object seemed to animate them all--an eager desire to establish themselves and obtain wealth in the new country to which they were bound. Some talked loudly of the honour and glory of subduing the wilderness, and creating an inheritance for their children; though among them Donald observed many whom he was sure would never do either the one or the other. Though frank and open-hearted, influenced by the usual caution of a Scotchman, Donald did not feel disposed to form friendships with any of his fellow-passengers until he had ascertained their characters. His time, indeed, was fully occupied in pursuing the professional studies he had commenced at home, and in doing work for Mr Todd. There was one person on board, however, who excited his interest. He was a man of middle age, and of mild and quiet manners, while the expression of his eyes and mouth betokened firmness and determination. Donald could hear nothing about him except that his name was Skinner, and that he was not connected with any of the parties of settlers on board. His conversation showed an enlightened mind, but he seemed at first rather inclined to obtain information than to impart it. Perhaps he also wished to gain an insight into the characters of his companions before he allowed of any intimacy. Wherever he was, however he would allow of no light or frivolous conversation, and he did not hesitate to rebuke those who gave utterance to any profane or coarse expressions. Donald had heard him spoken of as an over religious man. That he was a strict one he had evidence, when one day, while several fellow-voyagers were indulging in unseemly conversation, Mr Skinner approached them. "Will you allow me to ask you a question, and I trust you will not be offended, are you Christians?" he asked. "Of course, Mr Skinner, of course we are," answered two or three of the party, in the same breath. "Then you will desire to follow the example of the Master whose name you bear," he replied. "And He has said, `Be ye holy for I am holy.' `By their fruits shall ye know them.' Now the fruits of the lips which you have been producing are directly opposed to His commands. Can you suppose that He who hears all you utter will be otherwise than grieved and offended with the words you have just been speaking? Out of the mouth the heart speaketh. Let me entreat you to examine your hearts, and judge what is within them, and then ask yourselves whether they have been changed. Whether `you are holy as God is holy,' whether you are real or only nominal Christians. You are voyaging together to a country where you expect to prosper--to secure an independence, and to enjoy happiness and contentment for the remainder of your lives; but, my friends, would you not act wisely to look beyond all this? As our voyage in this ship must come to an end, so must our voyage through life, and what then? Again I repeat, that though by nature depraved, prone to evil, full of sin, with hearts desperately wicked, God says to all who desire to enter the kingdom of heaven, to become heirs of eternal life, to be prepared to go and dwell with Him, to enjoy eternal happiness instead of eternal misery, `Be ye holy as I am holy.' You will ask me, how can that be? I reply, take God at His word. He would not tell us to be what we cannot be. He does not mock us with His commands. He has said, `Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.' But He does not mean that your belief is to be merely affirmative; it is not sufficient only to acknowledge that Christ lived and died on the cross. All Scripture shows that you must have a living active faith in the complete and finished work of Christ. You must look to Him as _your_ Saviour; you must know that His blood was shed for _you individually_, and acknowledge His great love for you, which brought Him down from the glories of heaven to suffer on the cross, and that love must create a love in your hearts, and make you desirous of imitating Him and serving Him. You must turn from your sins and strive to hate sin, and in this you will have the all-sufficient aid of His Holy Spirit. Thus, though as I have said, in yourselves unrighteous, sinful, impure and doing things that you would not, yet, washed in the blood of Jesus, God no longer looks on your iniquities. He blots your sins out of remembrance. He puts them away as far as the east is from the west He imputes Christ's righteousness to you. He clothes you in Christ's pure and spotless garments. He declares you to be `holy as He is holy.'" Some of the young men he addressed hung down their heads, and others tried to make their escape, but two or three fixed their eyes earnestly on the speaker, whose manner was so kind and gentle that none could be offended, however little they might have been disposed to agree with the doctrine he enunciated. Among the latter was Donald Morrison. He had heard many excellent sermons; he had listened respectfully to the religious instruction which Janet, according to the light within her, attempted to give him, but he had seldom heard the truth so plainly and earnestly put before him, or at all events he had never so clearly comprehended it. Finding several of the party inclined to listen, Mr Skinner continued his address, urging his hearers at once to accept the merciful offers of salvation so freely made. As is generally the case where the gospel is preached, some were inclined to side with the preacher, while others were stirred by the natural depravity of the human heart, instigated by Satan to more determined opposition. Donald was induced from what he heard to examine his own heart. He had not before been aware that it was depraved by nature and prone to evil; that it must be renewed before he could love and truly serve Christ. He had been trusting to his own good principles, to his desire to do right; and he had been prepared to go forward and fight the battle of life, relying on his own strength. Happy are those who make the important discovery he did before the strife commences, before temptation comes in their way, or an overthrow, often a fatal one, is certain. Donald had believed that by living morally and honestly, and by labouring hard, he should merit admission to that heaven where Christ would reign as king; but he had never truly comprehended the necessity of the atonement--that sins must remain registered against the sinner unless washed away by the blood of Jesus, and that His blood can alone be applied through the simple faith of the sinner. From that day forward Donald sought every opportunity of conversing with Mr Skinner, who was never weary of answering his questions and solving his doubts. Mr Todd expressed some fears that his young friend would become so engrossed with religious subjects, that he would neglect his professional duties, and yet Mr Todd held religion in great respect, and believed that he made the Bible his guide in life. "I am very sure, my dear sir, that no man who truly loves and obeys the Saviour will, in consequence, become a worse citizen, or be less attentive to his worldly duties," answered Mr Skinner, to whom the remark was made. "And I trust you will find Donald Morrison no exception to the rule." Donald spent a portion of each day with Mr Skinner, sometimes reading with him, at others walking the deck, as the ship glided smoothly over the ocean. Their passage was somewhat long, for calms prevailed, but it was prosperous, and at length the emigrant ship entered the waters of the magnificent St Lawrence, and finally came to an anchor before the renowned city of Quebec, which looked down smiling on the voyagers from its rocky heights. There was eager hurry and bustle on board, for the emigrants were anxious to land, while on shore a general activity prevailed, as it was the busy time of the year, when merchantmen, long barred by the ice which bound up the river during winter, were daily arriving, and the huge timber ships were receiving their cargoes of logs, brought down through innumerable streams and lakes which intersect the country, hundreds of miles from the far-off interior. The emigrants now separated, some to go to the eastern townships or other parts of the Lower Province, but the greater number to proceed up the St Lawrence, and across Lake Ontario to the magnificent district then being opened up, bounded west and south by Lakes Ontario, St Clare, and Erie. Donald found, to his satisfaction, that Mr Skinner was going in the same direction. Donald knew no more than at first who Mr Skinner was; he was satisfied, however, that he was a true man, with a single eye to God's service. "I may possibly settle among you," said his new friend. "Wherever human beings are collected together, there I find my work." "Are you a minister then?" asked Donald. "Are not all Christ's faithful servants His ministers?" asked Mr Skinner, "called on by Him to make known His great love to perishing sinners; to tell them the only way by which they can be saved? In that sense I reply yes to your question. My young friend I desire not to eat the bread of idleness, nor to take aught from other men's hands." Donald felt that he ought not to press his question further. The party ascended the river in a sailing vessel to Montreal, and from thence Kingston was reached by stage waggons, which conveyed them along the banks of the river where the navigation was impeded by rapids, though the greater part of the journey was performed in large boats up the St Lawrence and through the beautiful lake of the "Thousand Islands." "I wish Margaret and David could have a sight of this lovely scenery," said Donald to his friend, as they glided by numberless islets in succession, covered with rich and varied foliage. "Their steps may some day be directed hither," answered Mr Skinner, who was even a warmer admirer of the beauties of nature than his young companion. At Kingston they embarked on board a large schooner. Next morning, when Donald came on deck, his surprise was great to find the vessel out of sight of land. The water was perfectly smooth; a thin mist hung over it, which probably concealed the nearer northern shore, for as the sun rose, he could distinguish in that direction a long low line of coast, fringed with the trees of the primeval forest. Here and there, as they sailed along, small openings could be perceived, where settlements had lately been formed, and the giants of the forest had fallen beneath the woodman's axe. The voyage terminated at Toronto, till lately called Little York, on the western shore of the lake, but a long journey had yet to be performed across the peninsula to the district Mr Todd had undertaken to settle. Waggons and drays were put in requisition to convey the party and their goods through the forest, while the leader and his staff, with other gentlemen, rode on ahead to prepare for their reception. Donald wondered how vehicles with wheels could make their way amid the stumps of trees, along the track which then formed the only road to the settlement. Here and there were swamps, which were made passable by huge trunks of trees laid across the track, and bridges of timber, of a primitive, though of a strong character, had already been thrown across the streams. "You see pioneers have been before us," observed Mr Todd to Donald. "Settlers direct from the old country would have been appalled with the difficulties the well-trained backwoodsmen have overcome." Here and there were small clearings, in the centre of which log-houses had been put up, to serve as wayside inns. At one of these Mr Todd and his party halted as evening closed in. The accommodation was scanty, though an ample meal of eggs and bacon and corn cakes, was served on a long table which stood in the middle of the public room. Upon it, beneath, and on the benches at the sides, the guests, wrapped in their cloaks, with their saddles for pillow's, passed the night. Donald, before lying down, went out to take a turn in front of the hut. As he looked along the cutting towards the west, a bright glare met his eyes. It at once struck him that the forest must be on fire, and he was hastening back to warn his companions, when he met Mr Skinner. "There is no danger," observed the latter. "We will proceed along the road, and you will see the cause." The light from the fire enabled them to find their way among the stumps, and they soon saw before them an opening in the forest, in the centre of which blazed a huge pile of vast trunks of trees, surrounded by men, who, with long pitchforks, were throwing faggots under the trunks to assist in consuming them. "Although these trees would be worth many pounds by the water-edge, here they are valueless and in the way, and no other mode has been discovered of disposing of them," observed Mr Skinner to Donald. "Yet I always regret to see the destruction of those magnificent productions with which God has clothed the earth, but thousands and tens of thousands of those monarchs of the forest are destined ere long to fall to make way for the habitation of man. Yet one living soul is of more value than them all, and we may hope that many a voice may be raised to Him in hymns of praise amid this region, hitherto a wilderness, and which has resounded only with the howl of the savage wolf, or the fierce war songs of the long benighted inhabitants of the land." A busy scene presented itself as the cavalcade at length reached the new settlement. Here and there, amid the stumps of trees, were scattered tents, shanties, and log-huts, either finished or in the course of erection. Women were cooking over fires in front of their rude dwellings, while their children played around. Oxen, urged on by the cries of their drivers, were dragging up huge logs to form the walls of the huts. Drays were conveying sawn timber from the banks of the broad stream which flowed by on one side--a saw-mill, turned by its water, being already busily at work. A little way off, the tall trees were falling with loud crashes before the woodmen's axes, engaged in enlarging the borders of the settlement. While here and there arose edifices of greater pretensions than their neighbours, with weather-boarded sides and roofs. Several broad roads intersected the projected town at right angles, from which, however, no attempt had as yet been made to remove the stumps of the trees; while all around arose the dark wall formed by the forest, closely hemming in the clearing, with the exception of the single opening through which the travellers had made their way. "This is a wild place, indeed," said Donald, as he surveyed the scene. "It was wilder a few months ago," answered Mr Todd. "It is our task to reduce it into order, and ere long we shall see handsome houses, gaily painted cottages, blooming orchards, green pastures, and fields waving with rich corn, in lieu of the scene which now meets our eyes. But we have no time to lose. We must select a spot by the river for the new settlers to camp on, obtain a supply of wood for their fires, and get some shanties put up for the women and children and old people." Mr Todd and his attendants dismounted at the door of the chief inn. It was also a store, at which every iron article, from a plough to a needle, all sorts of haberdashery and clothing, groceries, stationery, drugs and beer, wines and spirits, could be procured, as the proprietor, who shook hands with the new arrivals, informed them. Donald was soon actively engaged under Mr Todd in the duties of his office, and from that day forward till the close of the summer he had very few minutes he could call his own, with the exception of those granted during the blessed day of rest. He now learned to value the Sabbath more than ever, when he could rest from the toils of the week, and leave his surveying staff and chains, his axe and note-book, and turn with earnest faith to God's Word. No chapel or church had as yet arisen, and the gospel would not have been proclaimed had not Mr Skinner invited the inhabitants to meet him beneath the shade of the lofty trees, where, with his own hands, he had cleared away the brushwood. Here he proclaimed the glad tidings of salvation by the blood of the Lamb, to many who had never before heard the glorious news. Many assembled gladly, especially the settlers from bonnie Scotland; some came from curiosity, or to pass away the time; and a few to mock at the unauthorised preacher, who, in his ordinary dress, ventured, as they asserted, to set himself up among his fellows. Provided souls were won, the stranger cared nothing for the remarks which might be made. He had purchased a plot of ground on the banks of the stream, some way removed from the township, and here, with the aid of three or four hired labourers, he had made a clearing and erected a log-hut, at which Donald was always a welcome guest, with several others who came to hear God's Word explained. The winter came on, and snow covered the ground, but the axemen went on with their labours, and the tall trunks they felled could now with greater ease be dragged either to the saw-mill, to the spots where log-huts were to be erected, to form snake fencing, or to the great heaps prepared for burning. Donald was surprised to find how rapidly the months went by, and how soon the period of the year at which he had arrived in Canada had returned. CHAPTER SIX. LETTERS FROM HOME.--MARGARET LOSES HER FRIEND.--UNSATISFACTORY REPORT OF ALEC.--DAVID RESOLVES TO GO OUT.--DONALD URGES HIS SISTER AND JANET TO COME ALSO, AND PREPARES FOR THEIR RECEPTION.--NO TIDINGS CAN BE OBTAINED OF ALEC.--DAVID'S ARRIVAL.--MR. SKINNER EXPLAINS TO HIM IMPORTANT GOSPEL TRUTHS. Donald had frequently written home, and had heard from Margaret and David in return. Every word from them was of interest to him, and all kind Janet's sayings and doings were faithfully recorded. She seemed to work even harder than ever; but as Margaret remarked:-- "She manages to make her purchases at a cheapness that surprises me, and I often cannot account for the number of articles she brings home for the money she has to expend. Perhaps she gets more for her yarn than formerly, or has a hoard with which we are unacquainted. Mrs Galbraith is as kind as ever, and gives me a number of things which assist me greatly. Her health is, I fear, however, failing rapidly, and if she is taken away I shall lose the best friend I ever expect to have, next to Janet. She hears occasionally from Alec, who is at Montreal, which is, I suppose, a long way from you, or you would have mentioned him. Mr Galbraith has much altered; he looks grave and anxious, and is often irritable with his dear wife. I pray that she may be spared, but I am very very anxious about her." The next letter to this acknowledged with pleasure and gratitude the receipt of the first sum of money Donald was able to send home. Margaret wrote:--"It has made us rich beyond our most sanguine hope; but Janet seems unwilling to spend any of it, and says she does not like to deprive you of your siller; so pray do not send any more unless we really require it. Mrs Galbraith is kinder than ever, and insists on giving me everything I can possibly want, saying that I am of so much service to her that I ought to receive a salary in addition. I, of course, only do what I can to show my gratitude for her kindness to me since I was a little girl." Another letter came from Margaret some months after this, when Donald had been in the colony upwards of a couple of years. Her kind friend, Mrs Galbraith, had been taken away, and though she had died with the hope that Alec would be brought to know the truth, she had been for the last few months of her life so deeply anxious about his spiritual welfare, that she could not help speaking on the subject to Margaret, who had hitherto not been aware of the dangerous notions he had imbibed. Margaret expressed herself deeply grieved with what she heard, and promised to unite her prayers with those of her friend for Alec's conversion. A few months later Donald again heard from Margaret. Mr Galbraith had followed his wife to the grave. Her exhortations to him had not been in vain, and having accepted the truth himself, he was as anxious about his son as she had been. "I visited him frequently during his illness, as Mrs Galbraith had entreated me to do," said Margaret, "and though he was undoubtedly most anxious about Alec's spiritual state, he also, from what he said, seemed to fear that his worldly prospects were very different from what he had hoped. The mercantile house with which he is connected has failed, and I fear that the greater part--if not all--of Mr Galbraith's property has been lost also, so that Alec will be left without support unless he can obtain another situation. I need not suggest to you, my dear brother, to write to your old friend, and ascertain his position, and if he requires it give him a helping hand. I must now tell you the determination to which David has come, though he will write to you himself on the subject. We were not till lately aware of the assistance we have received from dear Mrs Galbraith and other friends, from whom we have discovered our kind Janet has been in the habit of demanding whatever she considered necessary for us. I am sure that she would not have begged a sixpence for her own support. I am now thrown more completely than ever on her hands, and though I am anxious to do anything I can to maintain myself she will not hear of my leaving her. I would take a situation as a child's governess, or as a companion to a lady, such as I have been to Mrs Galbraith, or go into service, but she insists that I must bide at home with her, as she could not trust me out of her sight, but that I am welcome to ply my needle as much as I please, and that she doubts not she shall find work for me if I follow her wishes, which David is anxious that I should do. He cannot bring himself to draw on her resources, so as to continue his studies till he can become a minister, which will not be for some years yet. He has often talked of going out to join you in Canada, and his heart is, I am sure, set on so doing. He has his doubts as to his fitness for the ministry, and says that head-learning and book-learning are not sufficient, and that he is conscious of being destitute of all other qualifications. He declares he should sink down with nervousness directly he enters a pulpit, that his voice and memory would fail him, and that he does not possess that love of souls and desire to win them to Christ, which he considers the chief qualification for the preacher of the gospel. I agreed with him when he made the last remark; but still I trust that he is mistaken about his qualifications. Nothing I have urged has had any effect in inducing him to alter his determination. Though he studies as hard as ever, he almost starves himself in his anxiety not to be a burden to Janet, he will not buy any fresh books, or spend more money than he can possibly help; indeed, I must own to you that she would have great difficulty in giving him any, though she tries to make him believe, as usual, that she has as much as he can require. I begged you before not to send us home any of your earnings; but I do not hesitate now to ask you to remit as much as will be sufficient for David's voyage, if you approve of his going out to join you." "The very thing of all others I have been longing for," exclaimed Donald, as he finished Margaret's letter. "I have ample to enable him to come out, and I am sure Mr Todd will find employment for him. But Margaret and Janet must not remain with straitened means; I wish they would come out also. I will send home sufficient for their voyage, and use every argument to induce them to come. If they will not they must spend the money on their own support at home. Margaret will, I am sure, be perfectly happy out here, though Janet would find the country rather strange, yet neither of them would mind the rough life they would be compelled to live, any more than others do, many of whom have been far more accustomed than they are to the luxuries and refinements of the old country." Thus Donald meditated till he persuaded himself that in a few months he should see his sister and brother and their faithful nurse arrive to take possession of the log-hut he proposed building for them. He lost no time in writing a letter, and in arranging with Mr Todd to send home a considerable portion of the salary due to him. He insisted that Margaret should receive whatever David did not require for his passage-money and journey to the township, and should spend it on the support of Janet and herself, should they decline accompanying David. He thought it impossible that they could refuse, and forthwith set to work to build a substantial log-hut on a plot of ground which, by Mr Todd's advice and assistance, he had purchased not far from Mr Skinner's location. Mr Skinner had made inquiries about his family when he heard of his hopes of being joined by his brother and sister and old nurse. He at once begged that he would apply to him for whatever he might require for their comfort and convenience. "I am a bachelor, and as my personal expenses are trifling, I shall consider it a privilege to be allowed to be of use to those who are so well deserving of assistance," he observed. "That old nurse of yours has excited my warm admiration. Her knowledge may be limited, but from your account she has lived a practical Christian life, and though you may justly desire to be independent, and to support yourself by your own labour, you cannot wish her and your sister to decline whatever aid God puts it into the hearts of others to offer to them." Donald warmly thanked his friend; and seeing the justness of his remarks, without hesitation accepted his offer. His mind was thereby greatly relieved from any anxiety he might have felt in supporting those who had become dependent upon him, till he himself should be able to gain sufficient for the purpose. He wrote immediately to Alec Galbraith, but some time passed, and no answer was received to his letter. He then got Mr Todd to make inquiries of some acquaintances at Montreal, and through them he at last heard that after the house in which Alec had been engaged had broken up, the young man having vainly attempted to find employment in other firms, had left the place without letting anyone know in what direction he had gone. He had created many enemies by the opinions he publicly expressed on religious and political subjects, and was looked upon as a disloyal and dangerous person. This account greatly grieved Donald, who had not supposed it possible that the fine manly and talented friend of his youth would be otherwise than liked, and succeed wherever he might go. "What can possibly have changed Alec so much?" he asked himself more than once. Donald mentioned the subject to Mr Skinner. "What was the foundation of his good qualities?" inquired his friend. "Were they built on the rock which, when the floods of trial and temptation came would stand firm, or on the sandy soil, whence they were sure to be washed away." Donald considered. "He resided in Germany for some time, and I know that his religious opinions underwent a change for the worse, and from some remarks Margaret let drop, that his mother was very anxious about him." "That is a sufficient explanation," observed Mr Skinner, with a sigh. "We must pray that like the prodigal son he may find that he has husks alone to eat, and be brought back to the loving Father, who, with open arms, is ever ready to receive those who, having made that important discovery, return to Him." The two Christian friends knelt down and offered up their petitions that the wanderer might be found out and restored. Few people in the settlement were more busy than Donald Morrison. Besides building his log house, at which he worked with his own hands, and superintending the clearing of the ground, he had his official duties to attend to, which he in no way neglected; and, as the settlement increased, they became more onerous than at first. "If David were with me he would find plenty to do," he said, over and over again. "I wish that he were coming, and I have no doubt Mr Todd would obtain for him a situation under me." When Donald wrote home he had begged his brother and sister not to wait till they could write and announce their intended coming, but if they could persuade Janet to accompany them, to set off immediately. As each party of settlers arrived he looked out eagerly, hoping to find those so dear to him among them. He was destined frequently to be disappointed. At last, one evening he was seated in his new house, now nearly completed, busily employed on some plans which he had taken home from Mr Todd's office, when he was aroused by a knock at the door. On opening it he saw standing before him a tall slight young man, whom he knew by his bonnet and tartan coat to be Scotch, "Does one Donald Morrison live here?" asked the stranger, gazing eagerly at his face. The moment he spoke Donald knew the voice; it was David's, and the brothers' hands were clasped together. "I should not have known you," exclaimed David, scanning Donald's sunburnt countenance, and sturdy strongly built figure. "Nor I you, till I heard you speak," answered Donald. "But have you not brought Margaret and Janet?" "I am sorry to say no. Janet would not venture across the salt ocean, and Margaret would not quit her. Janet, indeed, did her utmost to dissuade me from coming to this land of impenetrable forests, fierce red men, savage wolves, roaring cataracts, and numberless other dangers, such as she believes it is, and her dread of exposing Margaret to them, I suspect, made her more determined to stay at home than had she herself alone been asked to come, as for our sakes I believe she would have risked all could she have been satisfied that Margaret would have been in safety. Finding all my arguments useless, I set off as you wished me." "She is a good faithful creature, and we must still hope to overcome her fears for our dear sister's safety," said Donald. "However, I am thankful you have come, and I am sure that you will not be disappointed." Donald lost no time in placing an abundant supply of bachelor's fare, prepared by his own hands, on the table. As may be supposed, the brothers sat up the greater part of the night, talking over the past as well as their future prospects. Donald was not disappointed in his hopes of obtaining employment for David, Mr Todd being glad at once, on his brother's recommendation, to secure his services. David gave his mind to the work he had undertaken, and soon became a very efficient assistant to Donald. Though he looked pale and delicate when he first arrived, and was unable to go through the physical exertion required of him without fatigue, he rapidly gained strength, and in a short time became strong and hardy. Shortly after his arrival Donald took him to call on Mr Skinner, who welcomed him kindly, and led him to enter freely into conversation, that he might, as Donald suspected, ascertain his opinions. Donald, when speaking of his brother, had merely stated that he declined entering the ministry, and preferred coming out to join him as a settler. Mr Skinner allowed several days to pass, during which they frequently met, before he offered any remarks to David on the choice he had made. "You have abandoned the most important of callings, my young friend, for one which, though honourable and useful, and which may obtain to you worldly advantages, is not, in the nature of things, likely to render spiritual service to your fellow-creatures," he observed. "Several reasons prompted me to take the course I have pursued," answered David. "The principle one, however, was, that I felt myself unfitted for the ministry, and had a strong desire to come out and join my brother. I had no spiritual life in myself, and could not impart it to others." "Certainly you could not impart to others what you did not possess yourself," observed Mr Skinner. "But, my dear friend, are you content to remain without that spiritual life? It is required, not only for those engaged in the ministry, but for all who rightly bear the name of Christ, for all who desire to be His subjects, to enter into the kingdom of heaven. The Holy Spirit alone can impart it to you or to others, but having it, whether set apart or not for Christ's service, you may be made the instrument by which many of your fellow-creatures may obtain it likewise. It should be the object of all Christ's subjects to win souls for Him. When Christ spoke to Nicodemus and told him that he must be born again, He addressed a learned man, an expounder of the law of Moses. If a physician, a merchant, or person of any other calling, had come to Him He would have said the same. And now I entreat you to ask yourself the question, which Christ would have put had you gone to Him. He would have said, as He said to Nicodemus, `Ye must be born again.' He would not have first inquired whether or not you were intended for the ministry. He would have said, as He does to all human beings, high and low, rich and poor, men and women, boys and girls, who desire to live with Him in heaven for ever and ever. You may be very industrious, and energetic, and honest, and moral, and well conducted in your secular calling, but that will not stand you instead of what Christ requires. The old man must be put off, the new nature be received. I repeat, `You must be born again.'" "And how can that be brought about?" exclaimed Donald, much perturbed in mind. "Christ says, `the wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth, so is everyone that is born of the Spirit.' Christ did not leave Nicodemus with this answer, which might well have perplexed him, as it has those who have turned aside from it as incomprehensible; but He shows how man must do his part to bring about that new birth. It is by _simple faith, by taking God at His word_, by looking to Christ and trusting to His blood as all-sufficient to wash away sin, to His sacrifice as being accepted in lieu of our punishment. He explains it in those most blessed words--that most perfect of all similes--`As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have eternal life.' Know and feel that you are bitten by sin, dying eternally from its rank poison, and then look to Jesus as the certain, the only cure, just as the Israelites, bitten by the fiery serpents, were commanded to look at the brazen serpent, held up by Moses in the wilderness, as the only way by which they could be cured. Thus, through simple faith, is the necessary change brought about. All God demands from us is faith. He, through the Holy Spirit, does the rest. My dear young friend read that all-important portion of God's Word with earnest prayer for enlightenment, and you will understand the simple plan of salvation, which His loving mercy has formed, far more clearly than you can by any words I may use. The question is, Do you believe that the Bible is God's Word, that Jesus Christ, His Son, came into the world to suffer, the just for the unjust--that the world, through Him, might be saved? If you do, then hear His words,--`He that believeth on me is not condemned.' If you do believe, then you are born again, for all who are not born again remain under condemnation. What you require, what we all require, is more grace, more faith, more love, more trust. For all those things we can pray, and wrestle, and strive, and God will not allow us to pray in vain. Faith may be a strong rope or a thin rope, so thin that we dread its giving way; but God _forms_ it, _God holds it fast_. In His hands it will not break. Let us then trust in Him, and ever seek the aid of the Holy Spirit to hold us up, and we shall find the thin line increasing in size till it becomes a stout cable, capable of, ay certain of, holding our wave-tossed bark amid the fiercest tempest which can break around us." David returned home rejoicing. He did not regret abandoning his former intention and coming out to Canada; but he resolved to give himself up to the study of the Bible, and while following his secular calling, to assist his friend in spreading the truths of the gospel among the surrounding population. CHAPTER SEVEN. DONALD'S EXPEDITION THROUGH THE FOREST.--ATTACKED BY WOLVES.--RELIEVED FROM THEM BY A HURRICANE, AND NARROWLY ESCAPES BEING CRUSHED BY FALLING TREES. Donald having David now to attend to his office work, frequently made expeditions to long distances where it was proposed to establish fresh townships. These were performed on foot, and he had become so expert a backwood's man, that he had no hesitation in trusting himself without a guide. He, however, carried his gun, and in summer a fishing rod, that he might supply himself with provisions by the way. His gun also he required for defence against any wolves or bears he might encounter, both of which were at that time common in the country, though long since driven off to the wilder regions of the far west and north. He was returning from one of these expeditions in the early spring, when night approaching, as he was making his way through the forest, he prepared to encamp. His axe quickly enabled him to cut some sticks for his shanty, for which a quantity of large pieces of birch bark scattered about served as a covering. The tops of some young spruce firs strewed on the ground made a luxurious couch, while there was no lack of dry broken branches to furnish a supply of firewood. He quickly formed his hunter's camp, and commenced cooking a couple of fish he had caught in a stream he had shortly before forded, and a bird he had shot during the day. This, with a handful of Indian meal made into porridge, gave him a sumptuous repast. After reading God's Word by the light of his blazing fire, he commended himself to His merciful care, and having renewed his fire, lay down within his hut fearless of danger. His journey had been long and fatiguing, which made him sleep soundly. He was at length awakened by a long low howl. He opened his eyes and discovered that his fire had gone out, but he was still too much oppressed by sleep to rise. He was under the impression that he had merely dreamed of the noise he had heard. It shortly came again, however, and this time he was aware that it was a reality. Mixed with the howl were the sounds of savage barks and yelps. He knew them to be the voices of wolves, disputing, probably, over the body of some deer they had pulled down, or found dead after it had escaped from the hunter's rifle. Their repast finished, they might come in the direction of his camp. Starting up he prepared to relight his fire, and drawing the wood together, which he had kept for the purpose, he quickly produced a flame, and then looked to the priming of his gun to be ready in case of an attack. To sleep longer was out of the question; he therefore sat up, listening to the appalling sounds which ever and anon echoed through the forest. He had hitherto in his journeys never fallen in with a pack of wolves, though he had frequently met solitary individuals, whose savage jaws had shown what fearful foes, a number combined together, would prove. His stout Highland heart was not, however, inclined to give way to fear; besides which, his faith was firm, and he knew in whom he trusted. At the same time, not being a mere enthusiast, he felt that it was his duty to consider what were the best means of preserving his life by his own exertions, should the wolves discover him, and venture on an attack. He first collected all the fuel he could find near at hand, and made his fire blaze up brightly. As, however, it might not last till the morning, it occurred to him that it would be wise to examine the neighbouring trees, and to select one up which he might climb, should the savage creatures come round him. The larger trees were inaccessible; but he found one near at hand, the lower branches of which he might reach, could he manage to drive a few pegs into the trunk. With his axe he at once cut some holes as high as he could reach, and then sharpening several pieces of wood, hardening them in the fire. The trunk was soft, and to his satisfaction he found that he could make a ladder, by which he could reach the lowest branches, and thence gain a part of the tree which would afford him a secure seat, and enable him to fire down upon his assailants, and, as he hoped, drive them away. The night wind blowing keenly, he had no wish to take his seat on the tree till compelled by necessity. Having therefore made his arrangements he again threw fuel on the fire, and sat down within the shelter of his hut, with his gun by his side. The howling of the wolves had ceased, and he hoped that they had turned away from him, and that he should not be troubled by a visit. A feeling of security stole over him, and fatigue overcoming his prudence, he again dropped off to sleep. How long he had thus sat with his eyes closed he could not tell, when he was awakened by hearing the savage howls of the wolves close to him. Starting up he caught sight of numberless dark forms, with glaring eyes, making a circle round the fire, which they were evidently unwilling to approach, eager as they were to seize their prey. The fire had burnt somewhat low, and he feared that should the flames cease to ascend they might make a dash across the embers, and rush upon him. The tree he had selected was at hand, and he now regretted that he had not ascended it at first. A few dry sticks were still within his reach. Springing out of his hut he seized them, and threw them on the fire. At that moment a savage wolf, either one of the leaders of the pack, or more hungry than its companions, made a rush at him from one side. Happily he was prepared, and firing, the creature rolled over. The instant it was dead the rest of the animals sprang on the body, tearing it to pieces. Donald on this, after re-loading his gun, having stirred up the fire so as to make it burn more brightly, ran towards the tree, up which he began to climb. The short delay of loading his gun might have proved fatal, for part of the pack perceiving him, came yelping on furiously, and he had scarcely got his feet out of the reach of their fangs before the whole pack had collected round him. His gun, which he had slung at his back, being rather weighty, he was afraid that the pegs would give way, and that he should fall among the ravenous jaws below him, but he succeeded at length in reaching a firm branch, and he drew himself up on to it, and thence climbed to the point he had selected. Here he sat securely. Though he had escaped from the wolves they showed no signs of quitting him; the light of the fire, which still blazed up brightly, exhibiting their savage forms, as they stood howling beneath the tree, or circled round and round, looking up with eager eyes towards him. He refrained from firing, believing that they were more likely to go away when they found that they could not reach him, than if he should kill some of their number, when the pack would remain to devour the carcases of their companions. At last, when morning dawned, and they still continued round the tree, he began to lose patience, and to fear that they would carry on the siege till they had starved him out. "I cannot kill the whole pack," he said to himself, "but I may knock over so many that the others may at length take warning and make their escape." He had no difficulty in firing, and as a branch offered him a good rest for his gun, he was able to take steady aim, and never missed a shot. He had killed half a dozen or more, still the wolves continued round the tree. It was in a dense part of the forest, through which the beams of the sun did not penetrate, or the creatures, disliking the bright light of day, would probably have retreated to their fastness. Hour after hour passed by, the air became unusually sultry and hot, even in the forest. Donald was growing, at the same time, very hungry, and though, as yet, he had rather enjoyed the adventure, he now began to feel seriously anxious about his safety. He had but a few bullets remaining, and the small shot in his pouch would produce but little effect on the heads of the wolves, and only render them more savage. He waited for some time, and then again began to fire, hoping that the sound of his piece might be heard by any party of Indians or travellers in the forest, who would come to his assistance, for he knew that the wolves, cowardly though savage, will seldom venture to attack several people together. He had expended his bullets. He felt more and more sensible of the increased heat, and on looking upwards through the branches he observed an unusual appearance in the sky. The wolves, at the same instant, became silent, and then seized, so it seemed, by a panic, the whole pack set off at full speed amid the trees, and were lost to sight. The heat grew more intense than ever, not a breath of wind was stirring, the thunder roared in the distance, gradually the sky, as he could see it through the branches, became of an inky blackness, till a dark pall collected overhead, then the clouds appeared to break up, and whirled round and round each other in a state of dreadful commotion, forked lightening darted from the heavens, and the thunder, in rapid heavy peals, roared and rattled again and again till the very trees of the forest seemed to shake with the concussion. Far away out of the forest arose a black cone-shaped column, which soon joined itself to the mass of clouds overhead, the lightening flashing with greater vividness and rapidity, the thunder becoming more deafening than ever. The sound increased to a dreadful roar, coming nearer and nearer. He had no doubt that it was indeed a whirlwind sweeping through the forest, he could hear the tree tops dashed together, the rending branches, the crashing of falling trees, as the stout branches were twisted round and round, torn up by the roots, or snapped off as if they had been mere saplings. Should the devastating tempest pass across where he stood, he could scarcely hope to avoid being crushed by the falling trees. He now remembered an open space a short distance off, which, had the ground not been swampy, he would have selected for his camp. He hurried towards it. As he made his way through the forest he could hear behind him those dreadful sounds which betokened the rapid approach of the hurricane. Already the tree tops were waving furiously above his head, as he sprang out into the open space, towards which he was directing his steps. In an instant after the tall trees came crashing down, and almost lifted off his feet, he found himself encircled by masses of leaves and boughs torn off and whirled through the air. On he sped till he gained the centre of the meadow, when, on looking back, a wide opening appeared in the part of the forest through which he had lately passed. An avenue had been formed nearly two hundred yards in width, in which not a tree remained standing, while it seemed to extend far away into the depths of the forest. As he was anxious to continue his journey, as soon as all was quiet, he set off in the direction taken by the newly formed avenue. He had to proceed a considerable distance towards the track which led to the township, and he kept as near it as the fallen trees would allow, that he might observe the havoc which had been produced. He calculated, as he walked along, that upwards of three miles of forest had been levelled of the width already mentioned, and that many thousand trees had, in a few seconds, been destroyed. CHAPTER EIGHT. DONALD RESUMING HIS JOURNEY, HEARS A CRY OF DISTRESS.--FINDS A MAN UNDER A FALLEN TREE, WHO, AFTER CARRYING HIM SOME DISTANCE, HE DISCOVERS TO BE ALEC GALBRAITH.--THEY CAMP FOR THE NIGHT. Donald was about to leave the scene of havoc caused by the whirlwind, when a groan, as if from a person in pain, reached his ears. It was repeated with a faint cry of "Help! help!" He made his way among the fallen branches in the direction from whence the sound came. At length he saw, beneath a fallen tree, a man of strong frame, so pressed down by a bough that he could not extricate himself. "Get me out of this, for I can endure the agony no longer," cried the man. Donald hastened up to him. "I'll do my best to release you, my friend; but let me see how I can best manage it," he said. At first he thought of chopping away the bough, but then he saw that the man would suffer by the blows. He soon, on examination, determined how alone it could be done. With his axe he cut two pieces of wood, one of which would serve as a crowbar, the other thicker and shorter, to place under the bough after he had raised it. It was a work of time, and his heart was grieved at the pain which the poor man was enduring during the operation. At length, by great exertion, he raised the bough sufficiently off the crushed limb to enable him to drag out the sufferer. "Water! water!" were the only words the latter could utter. Donald had a small quantity in a flask, with which he moistened his lips. It somewhat revived the man; but how, in his crippled state, he could be conveyed to the township, was now the question. The stranger was strongly built and heavy, and Donald felt that, sturdy as he himself was, he could scarcely hope to carry him along the uneven track so great a distance. Still, to leave him in his present exhausted condition was not to be thought of; the wolves, too, from which he had escaped, might come back before he could possibly return with assistance. "I must take you on my back, my friend," he said to the stranger, who appeared to have recovered sufficiently to understand him. "I see no other way of preserving your life. Trust to me. I can at all events carry you some distance before nightfall, we will then encamp, and continue our journey to-morrow." "I am not worth the exertion and trouble it must cause you," said the man, gloomily. "The pain overcame me, and I would that the trunk itself had fallen on me, and put me out of existence altogether." "Nay, nay, my friend," answered Donald. "You should rather be thankful to the merciful God who, though He has allowed you to suffer injury, has preserved your life, that you may yet have an opportunity of devoting it to His service." "I do not comprehend your philosophy. I know that I have been suffering unspeakable agony. I have nothing to be thankful for on that account," answered the man. "We will not dispute the point now, my friend," said Donald. "But let us make the best of our way to the township. This stout stick, which I used as crowbar, will serve to support me as I walk. Now let me lift you on my shoulders, and we will proceed on our journey." Donald, on this, stooped down, and placed himself so that the stranger could cling to his back, and with his heavy weight he made his way through the forest. He had not gone far, however, before he began to fear that he should make but slow progress, even should he not be compelled to abandon his intentions altogether, and to leave the unhappy sufferer by himself in the forest. He staggered on till he reached a small stream, where he could obtain water to quench the sufferer's burning thirst. He examined also the injured limb--the bone did not appear to be broken, although the flesh was fearfully bruised and discoloured. The clay was already far advanced, and when in a short time he began to feel the strain which had been put on his own muscles, he came to the resolution of encamping where they were, and should no one appear, to continue the journey the next day. Having first bathed the sufferer's leg in the cold waters of the stream, and bound it up as he best could, he commenced making preparations for encamping, by cutting some spruce fir tops for a bed, collecting stakes and slabs of birch bark to form a hut, and dry branches for a fire. This did not take him long. He hurried through the work, for he wished to shoot some birds or catch some fish for supper. Having lighted a fire, he left his patient, suffering less apparently than before, and went off up the stream hoping to find the necessary provisions. He was more successful even than he expected, and returned with an ample supply of fish and fowl. Hitherto the stranger had been in too much pain to speak more than a few words. The food greatly revived him; and as he sat up, leaning against the side of the hut, Donald observed that his eyes were fixed on him with an inquiring look. Donald had spoken several times in broad Scotch. "It must be so," exclaimed the stranger at length, "though I am not surprised, Donald Morrison, that you do not know me." Donald gazed eagerly at the stranger's countenance, then leaning forward, grasped his hand. "Yes, I know you now, Alec Galbraith, my dear friend," he exclaimed, "though till this moment I had no suspicion who you were. How thankful I am that I should have been sent to your help." Donald then told Alec how anxiously he had been inquiring for him, and how sorry he had been at being unable to discover where he was. "I don't like to make you talk now, though," he added. "You must tell me all about yourself by-and-by." "That would not take long, Donald," answered Alec. "Though, as the subject is not a pleasant one, I will gladly defer it. Just before I had discovered who you were I had been intending to insist on your leaving me till you could send some one back from the township to bring me in, if any one could be found to perform so thankless an office for a wretched pauper like me. I had been counting on my strong arm and resolution to make my way in the backwoods, as many another determined fellow has done, and now I find myself suddenly brought down, and for what I can tell to the contrary, a helpless cripple for life." "You are right in supposing that I would not leave you, my dear Alec," answered Donald gently. "Indeed, I would not have done so had you been a stranger. Trust to God's loving mercy for the future. Your leg is not, I hope, materially injured, and on your recovery you may be able to carry out the plan you proposed, for I feel sure you will find employment for your head as well as your arm, and the two together, in this magnificent country, will secure you all you can require. But oh, Alec, if you would but put faith in the love of God and His protecting care you would no longer be in dread of the future." Alec sat silent for some minutes. "If God is such as I was always taught to suppose Him, He can only visit with His vengeance a being like myself, who has dared His power, and done numberless things which He is said to prohibit. No, I feel that I am a wretched outcast sinner in His sight, worthy only of punishment. He has for some time past been pursuing me with His vengeance, and I see no reason why He should stop till He has crushed me quite." "Of course, my dear Alec, you are perfectly right in your estimation of yourself, and right, too, with regard to God, if you judge Him as man judges. His justice demands your punishment, but His love and mercy would preserve you if you would accept the plan He has formed for saving you and restoring you to that favour which you have justly lost. He asks you to do what you have just done, to acknowledge yourself a sinner, and now do what He demands besides, and throw yourself unreservedly upon Him." "Your system is a beautiful one, Donald, but I confess that I cannot comprehend it," said Alec, with a groan, produced by the pain he was suffering, then he added, in his old careless and somewhat sarcastic tone, "Tell me, old fellow, is it thoroughly orthodox." "It is according to God's word, and that I dare not dispute," answered Donald. "And I will pray that His Holy Spirit will make it as clear to your mind, and bring it home to your soul, as He has to mine. We will not, however, talk further now, as it is important that you should get some sleep. I will watch over you, and keep the fire burning, and I hope that to-morrow we shall be able to resume our journey. Before you sleep, dear friend, we will offer up a prayer for God's direction and assistance." "As you think fit," answered Alec, expressing no satisfaction at the proposal. Donald knelt and prayed, and then read a portion of God's Word. Alec sat listening, but made no remark, though he pressed his friend's hand when he had finished, and then lying down closed his eyes. As Donald sat by the side of his friend he observed that though his slumbers were troubled he appeared to sleep soundly. He had resolved to carry him till he could get help, though he felt that the task was almost beyond his strength; but he did not despair. He prayed for that aid he so much needed, and felt sure that it would be sent in the way God might judge best. The faithful believer does not expect a miracle to be wrought in his favour, but he knows that the Most High, who allows not a sparrow to fall to the ground without knowing it, so orders and arranges all the movements of His creatures, that He accomplishes, by apparently ordinary means, whatever He desires to bring about. Thus when the believer prays he is sure that his prayer will be answered, though it may not be in the way he, in his finite judgment would desire. Resting securely on God's love and mercy, he is sure that all will be ordered aright. CHAPTER NINE. WHEN ENCAMPED, DONALD IS VISITED BY AN INDIAN, WHO ASSISTS IN CARRYING ALEC TO THE TOWNSHIP--INFLUENCED BY THE CONDUCT OF THE CHRISTIAN INDIANS AND THE EXHORTATIONS OF HIS FRIENDS, ALEC IS BROUGHT TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE TRUTH.--HIS BROTHER REQUIRES HIS PRESENCE IN ENGLAND, TO RECOVER HIS FATHER'S PROPERTY, AND HE SETS OFF. Donald was still reading from his pocket Bible, but had begun to feel somewhat drowsy, when he was fully aroused by seeing a tall figure moving through the forest towards him. As the stranger approached, the light of the fire exhibited a person of a dark countenance, with black hair, in which were stuck a few tall feathers, while his coat and leggings, ornamented with fringe, were of untanned leather. Donald at once knew him to be one of the natives of the land. The Indian approached fearlessly, and sat down beside him. "I see your fire from my camp," he said, in tolerable English. "I white man's friend. Where you go?" Donald, who knew that the natives in that district were on friendly terms with the settlers, at once told him who he was, and the difficulty in which he was placed. "I help you," said the Indian. "We not far from river. Canoe take up your friend to township." The assistance offered was just what Donald had been praying for. "God has sent you to my help, my friend," he said to the Indian, "and I gratefully accept your offer." "You know God and His Son Jesus Christ?" asked the Indian. "I do, my friend, praise His name that He has made Himself known to me." "I know and love Him too," said the Indian. "He good Master; I wish all my people knew Him and served Him, then they not drink the fire-water, and vanish out of the land, as they are doing." Donald grasped the Indian's hand. "I do, indeed, wish that not only your people, but mine also, were subjects of the Lord," he said. "Let us pray that we may have grace to make His name known among them." The white man and the red knelt as brothers, side by side, and together offered up their prayers for the conversion of their countrymen. "Please read God's Word to me," said the Indian. "I love to hear it." Donald gladly did as he was requested, his companion occasionally asking him questions. It was nearly midnight before the Indian rose to return to his own camp, promising to come back in the morning with some of his people to convey Alec to the river. Soon after daybreak, he appeared with a litter, which he had had constructed, and a supply of food, in case, as he said, his white brother might require it. Alec had been for some time awake. He did not appear surprised when the Indians arrived. "I heard you reading to the stranger," he said, "but I was too weary to speak." As soon as breakfast was over, Alec was placed on the litter, and the Indians bore him along lightly and easily through the forest. It was past noon before the bank of the stream was reached. Here they launched two of their canoes, which together were sufficient to convey the whole party. Alec was placed in one, under charge of the chief, and Donald took his seat in the other. At night they camped on shore, when Donald read the Bible to his redskin friends, Alec being apparently an attentive listener. "It is strange," he afterwards remarked to Alec, "that that book should have such a power over the men of the wilderness as apparently to change their savage natures." "God's Holy Spirit is the power applied to those who accept His offer made to them by means of the book," continued Donald. "You, my dear Alec, will experience the same change if you will but take God at His word and trust Him, although you, from having had these offers often made and rejected, may have to pass through many troubled waters, such as these children of the desert have not experienced. But remember His words, `Seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you.' `What encouragement does that promise afford sinners, conscious that they are such, and tossed about with doubts and fears.'" Alec made no reply. Donald, however, felt sure that the conduct and conversation of his Indian friends had had a great effect on his mind. On the evening of the second day, the party reached the township, when the Indians conveyed Alec to Donald's house. The sincerity of the chief was proved, when he refused to receive any reward for the service he had rendered. "No, no, my friend," he answered. "I rejoice to help brother Christians, for I remember the Lord's words, `I was hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.'" Alec, who had been laid on Donald's bed, desired to bid farewell to the Indians before they took their departure, and to thank them for the service they had rendered him. "Do not speak of it, friend," answered the Indian. "Jesus, our Master, went about doing good. I only try to be like Him, and I very, very far away from that." "It is wonderful, very wonderful," murmured Alec, after the Indians had left him. "I do not think my philosophy could have changed them as their faith in the Bible appears to have done." Notwithstanding this, it was long before Donald perceived the desired change in his friend's heart. The surprise of David may be supposed, when, on his arrival from the office, he found a stranger in the house, and discovered who he was, and though he grieved to see him in so sad a condition, yet he was thankful that he had thus been placed under his and his brother's care. Like brothers, indeed, they watched over him, assisted by Mr Skinner, who, as they had to be constantly absent, proposed taking up his abode with them till Alec's recovery. "I shall make a capital nurse," he said, "and may be able to minister to a mind diseased." Donald had also obtained the assistance of a surgeon, who at first seemed very doubtful whether Alec would ever recover the use of his limb, and expressed himself somewhat carelessly to that effect in the hearing of his patient. Alec groaned. "To be a miserable cripple and a friendless beggar for the rest of my life," he muttered. "No, no, dear Alec, you will not be either friendless or a beggar," said David, who sat by his side. "While Donald and I live you will find means of employment, even if you lose the use of your leg; and I am sure you know enough of us to feel that we can only rejoice to have you beneath our roof." For many days Alec continued ill and feverish, and seemed to pay but little attention to what Mr Skinner from time to time said to him, although his kind friend spoke most judiciously, and always sought the right season for speaking. He did not always, indeed, address him directly. "It seems surprising to me," he observed, one day, "that anyone should fail to acknowledge that man is composed of two parts, the physical and spiritual, and that God, his maker, who has so amply provided for his physical wants, and formed this world so beautifully and so perfect, should have neglected supplying the wants of his spiritual part--by far the most important--with what it so greatly requires, guidance and direction; and above all things, what it so yearns after, a knowledge of Him who formed it. Now those who really study the book (which professes to be given by God) according to the way He in it points out,--namely, in a humble spirit,--with prayer for enlightenment--invariably find that want fully supplied; and making due allowance for the various constitutions of the human mind, they are entirely agreed on all cardinal points regarding the Bible, while its opponents, who profess to be guided by the light of reason alone, differ in every possible way, their theories being almost countless; while they agree only in denying the authority of a book, of the Divine nature of which they have no experimental knowledge, declining, in their pride, to follow the directions it gives them for obtaining that knowledge. Then, when we take a glance round the heathen world, past and present, we find men following courses, with habits and customs destructive to human happiness, and abhorrent to the conscience which God has given man when uncontaminated by them. Contrast the result which the theories of philosophers and the heathen systems produced, with that which the mild loving faith Christ taught, if universally adopted, would bring about in the world, and who would hesitate between the two? And then when, in addition, we remember that Christ ensures to His followers eternal happiness, greater even than the mind of man can comprehend, what madness is it in those who hesitate to accept His offers! True, there are mysteries which even the Bible does not explain, such as the existence of Satan; but it does explain why Satan has power over man, and why sin and misery and death came into the world. This was the reason that man was disobedient, that man refused to trust to his Maker and listened to Satan. Man, in the pride of youth, health, and strength, and mental powers, may look with contempt on the Gospel, but God, in His loving mercy brings down those He loves, by poverty, suffering, and loss of friends, and then they feel their weakness and the vanity of all human systems, and are led to turn to Him who alone can lift them up and give them comfort, and a promise of a better life. How plain and easy are the demands He makes; how full of mercy; how simple is the plan He has arranged." Alec, as usual, had had been listening attentively to all Mr Skinner had said. He never attempted to argue with him. He had long lost all confidence in the correctness of the notions he had held. Tears filled his eyes. "I believe, help Thou my unbelief," he ejaculated, in a broken voice. His health and strength had been rapidly improving. Through the assistance of his friends, when perfectly recovered, he obtained employment, and was soon able to lay by money, and to feel himself independent. Notwithstanding this, by his life and conversation, he showed that the good seed had taken root; the only companionship he sought was that of Donald and David, and Mr Skinner, and other true Christians whom he could meet with in the neighbourhood. He had followed his friends' example, and purchased a piece of land, which he had commenced cultivating, and on which he told them he hoped soon to put up a substantial log-house. "You will not like to live a solitary life," said Donald. "You will want a companion. I did not get on half as well as I do now before David came out." "Perhaps I may some day find one," answered Alec, smiling. "I shall live on in hopes that one of congenial tastes to my own may be sent me." "Till you find him you must promise to remain on with us," said Donald. "We cannot part with you, and I suspect that we should be jealous of any one whom you might select." A short time after this Alec received a letter from one of his long absent brothers, who had returned to England. He wrote saying that he had looked into their father's affairs, and found that there was yet some property which might be recovered, but that it would require his presence and that of the rest of the family, to settle the matter. A remittance, to enable him, without inconvenience, to pay his passage home, was enclosed in the letter. Donald and David were truly glad to hear of this. "You must not be persuaded, Alec, however, to stay away," they exclaimed. "You must promise to come back as soon as your affairs are arranged. You are wanted in this country." Mr Skinner, while he congratulated his young friend on the brightening of his worldly prospects, cautioned him affectionately against the temptations to which he might be exposed. "I know that I am very weak," answered Alec, humbly. "But I go forth, not in my own strength but seeking the aid and direction of God's Holy Spirit." "While that is sought, and it will never be denied, you will be strong, and I have no fear of the result," was the answer. The Morrisons and Mr Skinner undertook to look after Alec's property during his absence, and he set off on his journey to England. CHAPTER TEN. A LETTER FROM MARGARET.--JANET'S ILLNESS.--ANXIETY ABOUT ALEC'S RETURN.--A DELIGHTFUL SURPRISE.--ARRIVAL OF ALEC AND MARGARET WITH JANET.--MARGARET HAS BECOME ALEC'S WIFE. CONDUCTED BY THE BROTHERS TO THEIR NEW HOUSE.--ARRIVAL OF MR. SKINNER'S SISTER, MRS. RAMSDEN AND HER DAUGHTERS, WHO, AS MIGHT POSSIBLY BE EXPECTED, BECOME THE WIVES OF DONALD AND DAVID JANET CONTINUING TO LIVE WITH MARGARET, PAYS FREQUENT VISITS TO HER OTHER BAIRNS, AND IS EVER WELCOMED BY THEM, AND THE NUMEROUS WEE BAIRNS WHO SPRING UP IN THEIR MIDST.--CONCLUSION. In those days, when no magnificent ocean steamers, with rapid speed, crossed weekly the Atlantic, the settlers in Canada, whose friends had returned to the old country, had often to wait three or four months before they could hear of their safe arrival. Some time after Alec had gone a letter was received from Margaret, written in a less happy strain than was usual to her. Janet had been suffering from rheumatism, and found it impossible to spin as much as she had been accustomed to do. The state of her health made her feel an unwonted anxiety about the future prospects of her beloved charge. "I know, however, that all will be well," wrote Margaret, "so I do my best to keep up her spirits, by reminding her of God's loving kindness, in which she has hitherto so firmly confided. Were it not, however, for the assistance you have given us, my dear brothers, I confess that we should have a great difficulty in supporting ourselves. I do all I can to repay our kind and loving friend for the years of tender care she has bestowed on us. What would have become of us all had it not been for her?" Donald and David had a short time before this sent home a larger sum than usual, which they hoped would have been received soon after the letter was written, and they trusted that it would assist to restore Janet's spirits, and convince her that as long as they lived Margaret would not be left destitute. Weeks and weeks passed by, and no acknowledgment of the sum was received, and no other letter came to hand. As they hoped that Alec Galbraith would not be long absent, wishing to give him a pleasant surprise, they had gone on with the erection of his house, and completed it, declaring that as their reward they would sell their property, for which they had had several advantageous offers, and go and live with him till they should fix on another location further off in the wilderness, to bring under cultivation. "He must have been at home several weeks, and had plenty of time to arrange his affairs with his brothers," observed David. "I wonder he has not written to us. Perhaps the letter, or the vessel herself bringing it, may have been lost," observed Donald. "That has been the fate of several of Margaret's letters. Depend upon it we shall hear from him or our sister before long, and he is sure to pay her a visit before he comes back, that he may bring us news of her and Janet." They were seated together one evening in their log-house, their meal just placed on the table. "I fancy I heard footsteps," said David. "Yes, some one hails." It was Alec Galbraith's voice. Donald and David rushed out. There stood Margaret and Alec Galbraith, while dear old Janet followed with eager looks close behind them. Donald, seizing his sister's hands, drew her to him, while David grasped those of Alec, till his brother could relinquish Margaret to him, and then land Janet, rushing forward, threw her arms around both the brother's necks, and sobbed out, "My bairns, my bairns, though I feared the salt sea I would have gone over more than twice the distance to hold ye thus agen!" The new arrivals were soon seated at the already spread board. As Margaret happened to place her hand on the table Donald observed a plain gold ring on her finger. "What!" he exclaimed, turning quickly to Alec. "Is it really so?" "I thought we should surprise you," he answered, laughing. "But I would not come away without her, and as she knew that you would mourn my absence, she at last consented to return with me as my wife, provided Janet would come also. It was a hard matter, however, I can assure you, to persuade her to venture across the ocean." "Indeed, my dear Donald," said Margaret, when she and her brother were shortly afterwards together, and her husband was absent, "much as I found I loved him, and had loved him since I was a girl, I would not have consented to be his wife had I not been convinced that he had abandoned those infidel principles which had caused his poor mother so much grief, and had also become a faithful follower of the Lord. I was at first delighted to see him, and then my heart sank within me for fear that he was unchanged. He did not leave me long in doubt on the subject. I knew by his gentle and subdued manners, by the unmistakable expressions he used, and then by the deep sorrow that he expressed, that the opinions he once held had grieved his poor mother, that he no longer adhered to the vain philosophy in which he had formerly gloried. I soon discovered that he loved me, and then I had no hesitation in giving him my heart in return." "You acted wisely and rightly, dear Margaret and David and I are truly glad to welcome him as a brother, whom we have long looked upon as the most intimate of our friends." The next day, Alec and Margaret, accompanied by Janet, were conducted in due form by Donald and David to the house which they had but lately finished on Alec's property. The surprise was indeed a great and delightful one. As it did not take long to get in as much furniture as was required at that season of the year, Margaret and her husband, with her faithful nurse, in a few days took up their abode there. Alec's worldly circumstances had greatly improved, for much more of his father's property had been recovered than he expected, so that his share was considerable, and with the experience he had gained, he was able to employ his capital in farming, with great advantage. "What will you two poor bachelors do by yourselves," said Margaret. "Could you not manage to come and live with us in this house as you purposed doing had Alec returned alone?" "We have work enough in drawing our plans, and other business of our office to employ nearly every hour of the day," answered Donald. "And besides, we are anxious to assist Mr Skinner, who wishes to enlarge his house as soon as possible, as he expects a widowed sister and her family to join him shortly, and he does not consider the accommodation he can now offer them, sufficient." "Oh, I suppose he wishes to have a nursery built where the children may be out of hearing," said Margaret, laughing. "He has not mentioned the ages of his nieces, or how many there are of them," said David, "but I should think, from a remark he made, that they cannot be little children." The young men made no inquiry of their friend about the more juvenile portion of the family of his expected relatives. As he had himself now been some time absent from England, he might have been able to give them very little information. David, however, confessed to Margaret that he felt somewhat curious on the subject. This was increased when the new part of the house having been finished, Mr Skinner fitted up one chamber which he said was for his sister, and two other pretty little rooms for his elder nieces, and certainly the furniture, which he put in to them, was scarcely such as he would have chosen for young children. Just at the time Mr Skinner was expecting the arrival of his sister, Mrs Ramsden and her family, Donald and David had to leave home to visit some distant township on business. Mr Skinner had, before this asked the assistance of Margaret and Janet in fitting up his house. Janet, with her usual kindness of heart, offered to remain for a day or two to receive the new comers, whom she understood had no servant with them. "The poor lady may be tired, and the bairns will ha' na one to gie them their supper, and put them to bed, and it will be just like old times coming back, and be a muckle pleasure to me," she observed, to Margaret. Mr Skinner was very glad to accept her services, feeling sure that she would be of much assistance, although he might not have supposed that his nieces would require the attendance of a nurse. Janet was to bring word to Margaret when Mrs Ramsden would be able to see her, and she proposed then walking over with Alec to visit her. She had numberless occupations which kept her and Janet fully employed; for though her husband had engaged a sturdy Scotch girl to milk the cows, and perform some of the rougher work of the farm, the damsel herself required her constant superintendence. There were poultry of several varieties, as well as pigs, to be fed; the flower and kitchen garden to be cultivated, and numerous household duties to be attended to, Alec himself being constantly engaged in clearing fresh ground, and in the more laborious work about the farm. Margaret had greatly missed Janet the days she had been absent, and with much satisfaction, therefore, she saw her with her knitting in hand-- without which, even in Canada, she never moved abroad--approaching the house. "Oh yes, they are come, my bairn," she said, to Margaret's inquiry. "Mistress Ramsden herself is a brave lady, and seldom have my eyes rested on twa mair bonny lassies than her daughters, na pride, na nonsense about the young leddies, Mistress Mary and Emily Ramsden, and just as gentle, and loving, and kind as lambs to the younger children. They thanked me for my help; but they put their hands to everything themselves, and would nae let me do half as much as I wished. I'll tell you what, Margaret, I have set my heart on having them for my twa bairns. They would make them bonny wives, indeed, but don't ye gang and tell your brothers, for there is that obstinacy in human nature that they might back, and kick, and run off into the woods rather than do what, if left alone, they would be eager after." Margaret promised to be discreet, and allow her brothers to judge for themselves, without praising the Misses Ramsden, should her opinion of them, as she had little doubt it would agree with that formed by Janet. Next morning she and Alec paid their promised visit, and she was fully as much disposed as Janet to admire the Misses Ramsden and their mother. The more she saw of them the more pleased she was, not only with their appearance, but with their earnest piety, their simple unassuming manners, and their apparent energy and determination, and their evident readiness to submit to all the inconveniences to which settlers in a new country must, of necessity, be subjected. A few days after this Donald and David returned, and called on Margaret on their way home. They naturally inquired whether Mrs Ramsden and her family had arrived. She wisely said but little about the young ladies, and Janet was equally discreet. They, however, managed to find their way that evening to Mr Skinner's. They were always glad to pay their kind friend a visit; but from their sister's and Janet's discreet silence, they suspected that the change in the character of his establishment would be a drawback to the pleasure of their previous intercourse. Not, however, till a much later hour than usual on the evening in question did they discover that it was high time to take up their hats and wish Mr Skinner and his sister and her daughters good-bye. As they walked homewards, Donald, after a long silence, burst out laughing, exclaiming, "Weel, I expected to see a number of bairns in pinafores, but eh! she's a braw lassie." "She is the sweetest young creature I have ever had the happiness of meeting," said David. "But I am talking of the elder sister," exclaimed Donald. "And I speak of the younger," observed David. "But they are both very nice girls--there is no doubt as to that--no nonsense about them--so full of spirits and fun, and yet so lady-like and quite, and I heard Emily's voice, when joining in the prayer, it was so true and earnest." "I was nearest Mary, and was struck by the genuine tone of her's," observed Donald. "Do you know, David, that I had made up my mind to follow the example of Mr Skinner, and to live a bachelor for ten years to come at least, and then, perhaps, to go back to the old country to look out for a wife. But eh! that looking out for a wife must be unsatisfactory work at best. How can a man possibly discover the real character and disposition of a lady when the object he has in view is suspected, if not well known." "We may be sure we shall be guided aright if we seek guidance in that as in all other matters," answered David. "But I cannot help hoping that neither you nor I need be compelled to make the expedition you suggest. I have sought guidance, and I am sure that in God's good time we shall be directed aright." Day after day, when their work was over, they had some cogent reason for calling at their friend's house; and when Margaret next met them, Donald confessed that if he ever could venture to marry he should be thankful to make Mary Ramsden his wife, while David made the same acknowledgment with regard to her younger sister. Happily, in a prosperous country like Canada, to steady and industrious men like the young Morrisons, the impediments were not insuperable, nor, indeed, did they take long to overcome. Faithful Janet was overjoyed when she heard that the lassies she so much admired had promised to become the wives of her twa bairns, with a full approval of their mother and uncle. As they agreed that their old house might not always be sufficiently large to hold them both, they moved further off to the west, where they were enabled to purchase, by the sale of their already well cultivated farm, two good sized allotments of land, on each of which they reared a comfortable log-house, where, shortly afterwards, they and their brides took up their abode. "My work is among my fellow-creatures," observed Mr Skinner, "or I should be much inclined, my dear nephews, to follow your example, and move nearer you." He therefore remained at the now well advanced township, though before long, to their great satisfaction, the Galbraiths became their near neighbours, Alec having purchased a property a little beyond theirs. The Morrisons gratefully remembered the kindness they had received from Mr McTavish and other friends in the old country. To many young men who came out with introductions from them they gave a hearty welcome, extending a helping hand to those who required assistance, while they rendered a still greater service to not a few whom they saw falling into evil ways, by perseveringly, though gently and lovingly, warning and exhorting them--not leaving them in spite of ingratitude and opposition, till they had been the means of bringing them back into the right path. In the latter respect especially, Alec followed their example. He remembered into what a depth of sin he had sunk, and that it was through the love of Jesus, and by no merit of his own, he was drawn out of it. His sin he knew was washed away. Gratitude to that loving Saviour urged him to try and call those sheep who were wandering away along the thorny paths he had followed into the true fold, where they might rest secure under charge of the faithful Shepherd who never forsakes those who seek Him. Janet, though continuing to live with Margaret, paid frequent visits to the other houses of the family, at which her coming was always hailed with delight by the numerous wee bairns, who, in the course of time, made their appearance among them, as she was also warmly welcomed by Donald and David, who, though they felt that to Mr Skinner they were, humanly speaking, indebted for the spiritual life they enjoyed, could never forget how devotedly she had watched over their infancy and youth, and that it was mainly to her training and instruction their present prosperity was owing. 
23758	----	produced from images generously made available by The Kentuckiana Digital Library) [Illustration: WORK AND WIN OLIVER OPTIC] [Illustration] [Illustration] [Illustration: Signature: William T. Adams] WORK AND WIN OR NODDY NEWMAN ON A CRUISE A Story for Young People BY OLIVER OPTIC AUTHOR OF "BOAT CLUB," "ALL ABOARD," "NOW OR NEVER," ETC., ETC. NEW YORK HURST & COMPANY PUBLISHERS To MY YOUNG FRIEND, Edward C. Bellows, THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED. PREFACE. In the preparation of this volume, the author has had in his mind the intention to delineate the progress of a boy whose education had been neglected, and whose moral attributes were of the lowest order, from vice and indifference to the development of a high moral and religious principle in the heart, which is the rule and guide of a pure and true life. The incidents which make up the story are introduced to illustrate the moral status of the youth, at the beginning, and to develop the influences from which proceeded a gentle and Christian character. Mollie, the captain's daughter, whose simple purity of life, whose filial devotion to an erring parent, and whose trusting faith in the hour of adversity, won the love and respect of Noddy, was not the least of these influences. If the writer has not "moralized," it was because the true life, seen with the living eye, is better than any precept, however skilfully it may be dressed by the rhetorical genius of the moralist. Once more the author takes pleasure in acknowledging the kindness of his young friends, who have so favorably received his former works; and he hopes that "WORK AND WIN," the fourth of the Woodville Stories, will have as pleasant a welcome as its predecessors. WILLIAM T. ADAMS. HARRISON SQUARE. MASS., November 10, 1865. CONTENTS. CHAPTER PAGE I. The Mischief-Makers 9 II. The Circus at Whitestone 21 III. A Moral Question 33 IV. Noddy's Confession 45 V. Squire Wriggs at Woodville 57 VI. Noddy's Engagement 70 VII. The Ring-Master 81 VIII. Good-by to Woodville 93 IX. An Attempt to Work and Win 105 X. Poor Mollie 117 XI. The Schooner Roebuck 129 XII. The Drunken Captain 141 XIII. The Shark 154 XIV. The Yellow Fever 167 XV. The Demon of the Cup 180 XVI. Night and Storm 193 XVII. After the Storm 206 XVIII. The Beautiful Island 217 XIX. The Visitors 228 XX. Homeward Bound 239 XXI. The Clergyman and his Wife 247 WORK AND WIN; OR, NODDY NEWMAN ON A CRUISE. CHAPTER I. THE MISCHIEF-MAKERS. "Here, Noddy Newman! you haven't washed out the boat-house yet," said Ben, the boatman, as the young gentleman thus addressed was ambling down towards the river. "Hang the boat-house!" exclaimed Noddy, impatiently, as he stopped short in his walk, and seemed to be in doubt whether he should return or continue on his way. "You know what Miss Bertha says--don't you?" "Yes, I know what she says," added Noddy, rubbing his head, as though he were trying to reconcile his present purpose, whatever it was, with the loyalty he owed to Bertha. "I suppose it don't make much difference to her whether I wash out the boat-house now or by and by." "I don't know anything about that, my boy," said the old man. "Miss Bertha told me to find some regular work for you to do every day. I found it, and she say you must wash out the boat-house every morning before nine o'clock. If you don't do it, I shall report you to her. That's all I've got to say about it." "I calculate to wash out the boat-house." "You've only half an hour to do it in, then. You've not only got to wash it out every morning, but you have got to do it before nine o'clock. Them's the orders. I always obey orders. If Miss Bertha should tell me to tie you up, and give you as big a licking as you deserve, I should do it." "No, you wouldn't." "I haven't got any such orders, mind ye, Noddy; so we won't dispute about that. Now, go and wash out the boat-house like a good boy, and don't make any fuss about it." Noddy deliberated a few moments more. He evidently disliked the job, or did not wish to do it at that particular time; but Miss Bertha's influence was all-powerful; and though he would have fought, tooth and nail, against anything like compulsion on the part of Ben, he could not resist the potent spell which the name of his young mistress cast upon him. "Hang the old boat-house!" exclaimed he, as he stamped his foot upon the ground, and then slowly retraced his steps towards the boatman. "Hang it, if you like, Noddy, but wash it out first," said Ben, with a smile, as he observed the effect of the charm he had used to induce the wayward youth to do his duty. "I wish the boat-house was burned up!" added Noddy, petulantly. "No, you don't." "Yes, I do. I wish it was a pile of ashes at this moment." "Don't say so, Noddy. What would Miss Bertha think to hear you talk like that?" "You can tell her, if you like," replied Noddy, as he rushed desperately into the boat-house to do the disagreeable job. Noddy Newman was an orphan; and no one in the vicinity of Woodville even knew what his real name was. Two years before, Bertha Grant had taken the most tender care of him, after an accident by which he had been severely injured. Previous to that time he had been a vagabond, roaming about the woods and the villages, sleeping in barns and out-buildings, and stealing his food when he could obtain it by no other means. Efforts had been made to commit him to the poorhouse; but he had cunningly avoided being captured, and retained his freedom until the accident placed him under the influence of Bertha Grant, who had before vainly attempted to induce him to join her mission-school in the Glen. Noddy had been two years at Woodville. He was neither a servant nor a member of the family, but occupied a half-way position, eating and sleeping with the men employed on the estate, but being the constant companion of Bertha, who was laboring to civilize and educate him. She had been partially successful in her philanthropic labors; for Noddy knew how to behave himself with propriety, and could read and write with tolerable facility. But books and literature were not Noddy's _forte_, and he still retained an unhealthy relish for his early vagabond habits. Like a great many other boys,--even like some of those who have been brought up judiciously and carefully,--Noddy was not very fond of work. He was bold and impulsive, and had not yet acquired any fixed ideas in regard to the objects of life. Bertha Grant had obtained a powerful influence over him, to which he was solely indebted for all the progress he had made in learning and the arts of civilized life. Wayward as he always had been, and as he still was, there was a spirit in him upon which to build a hope that something might yet be made of him, though this faith was in a great measure confined to Bertha and the old boatman. He had a great many good qualities--enough, in the opinion of his gentle instructress, to redeem him from his besetting sins, which were neither few nor small. He was generous, which made him popular among those who were under no moral responsibility for his future welfare. He was bold and daring, and never hesitated to do anything which the nerve or muscle of a boy of fourteen could achieve. His feats of strength and daring, often performed from mere bravado, won the admiration of the thoughtless, and Noddy was regarded as a "character" by people who only wanted to be amused. Noddy had reached an age when the future became an interesting problem to those who had labored to improve his manners and his morals. Mr. Grant had suggested to Bertha the propriety of having him bound as an apprentice to some steady mechanic; and, at the time of our story, she and her father were in search of such a person. The subject of this kind solicitude did not relish the idea of learning a trade, though he had not positively rebelled at the disposition which it was proposed to make of him. He had always lived near the river; and during his residence at Woodville he had been employed, so far as he could be employed at all, about the boats. He was a kind of assistant to the boatman, though there was no need of such an official on the premises. For his own good, rather than for the labor he performed, he was required to do certain work about the boat-house, and in the boats when they were in use. We could recite a great many scrapes, of which Noddy had been the hero, during the two years of his stay at Woodville; but such a recital would hardly be profitable to our readers, especially as the young man's subsequent career was not devoid of stirring incidents. Noddy drew a bucket of water at the pier, and carried it into the boat-house. Ben, satisfied now that the work was actually in progress, left the pier, and walked up to the house to receive his morning instructions. He was hardly out of sight before Miss Fanny Grant presented herself at the door. Miss Fanny was now a nice young lady of twelve. She was as different from her sister Bertha as she could be. She was proud, and rather wayward. Like some other young ladies we have somewhere read about, she was very fond of having her own way, even when her own way had been proved to be uncomfortable and dangerous. But when we mention Miss Fanny's faults, we do not wish to be understood that she had no virtues. If she did wrong very often, she did right in the main, and had made a great deal of progress in learning to do wisely and well, and, what was just as good, in doing it after she had learned it. Fanny Grant walked up to the boat-house with a very decided step, and it soon appeared that she was not there by chance or accident; which leads us sorrowfully to remark, that in her wrongdoing she often found a ready companion and supporter in Noddy Newman. She was rather inclined to be a romp; and though she was not given to "playing with the boys," the absence of any suitable playmate sometimes led her to invite the half-reformed vagabond of Woodville to assist in her sport. "You are a pretty fellow, Noddy Newman!" said she, her pouting lips giving an added emphasis to her reproachful remark. "Why didn't you come down to the Point, as you said you would?" "Because I couldn't, Miss Fanny," growled Noddy. "I had to wash out this confounded boat-house, or be reported to Miss Bertha." "Couldn't you do that after you got back?" "Ben said I must do it before nine o'clock. I wanted to go down to the Point, as I agreed, but you see I couldn't." "I waited for you till I got tired out," pouted Fanny; but she neglected to add that five minutes on ordinary occasions were the full limit of her patience. "Hang the old boat-house! I told Ben I wished it was burned up." "So do I; but come along, Noddy. We will go now." "I can't go till I've washed out the boat-house." "Yes, you can." "But if Ben comes down and finds the place hasn't been washed out, he will tell Miss Bertha." "Let him tell her--who cares?" "She will talk to me for an hour." "Let her talk--talking won't kill you." "I don't like to be talked to in that way by Miss Bertha." "Fiddle-de-dee! You can tell her I wanted you," said Fanny, her eyes snapping with earnestness. "Shall I tell her what you wanted me for?" asked Noddy, with a cunning look. "Of course you needn't tell her that. But come along, or I shall go without you." "No--you wouldn't do that, Miss Fanny. You couldn't." "Well, won't you come?" "Not now." "I can't wait." "I will go just as soon as I have done washing the boat-house." "Plague on the boat-house!" snapped Fanny. "I wish it was burned up. What a nice fire it would make!--wouldn't it, Noddy?" The bright eyes of the wayward miss sparkled with delight as she thought of the blazing building; and while her more wayward companion described the miseries which he daily endured in his regular work, she hardly listened to him. She seemed to be plotting mischief; but if she was, she did not make Noddy her confidant this time. "Come, Noddy," said she, after a few moments' reflection, "I will promise to make it all right with Bertha." Noddy dropped the broom with which he had begun to sweep up some chips and shavings Ben had made in repairing a boat-hook. "If you will get me out of the scrape, I will go now," said he. "I will; you may depend upon me." "Then I will go." "Where is Ben, now?" "He has gone up to the house." "Then you run down to the Point, and bring the boat up to the pier. I am tired, and don't want to walk down there again." Noddy was entirely willing, and bounded off like a deer, for he had fully made up his mind to disobey orders, and his impulsive nature did not permit him to consider the consequences. He was absent but a few moments, and presently appeared rowing a small boat up the river. At the pier he turned the boat, and backed her up to the landing steps. "All ready, Miss Fanny!" shouted the young boatman, for his companion in mischief was not in sight. Still she did not appear; and Noddy was about to go in search of her, when she came out of the boat-house, and ran down to the steps. Her face was flushed, and she seemed to be very much agitated. Noddy was afraid, from her looks, that something had happened to spoil the anticipated sport of the morning; but she stepped into the boat, and told him, in hurried tones, to push off. "What's the matter, Miss Fanny?" he asked, not a little startled by her appearance. "Nothing, Noddy; pull away just as fast as ever you can." "Are we caught?" said he, as he followed Fanny's direction. "No; caught! no. Why don't you row faster, Noddy? You don't pull worth a cent." "I am pulling as hard as I can," replied he, unable to keep pace with her impatience. "I wouldn't be seen here now for anything!" exclaimed Fanny, earnestly, as she glanced back at the boat-house, with a look so uneasy that it almost unmanned her resolute companion. Noddy pulled with all his might, and the light boat darted over the waves with a speed which ought to have satisfied his nervous passenger. As they reached the point of Van Alstine's Island, a dense smoke was seen to rise from the boat-house on the pier; and a few moments later, the whole building was wrapped in flames. CHAPTER II. THE CIRCUS AT WHITESTONE. "Do you see that?" exclaimed Noddy, as he stopped rowing, and gazed at the flames which leaped madly up from the devoted building. "I see it," replied Fanny, with even more agitation than was manifested by her companion. "I don't understand it," added Noddy. "The boat-house is on fire, and will burn up in a few minutes more. I think it is plain enough;" and Fanny struggled to be calm and indifferent. "We must go back and see to it." "We shall do nothing of the kind. Pull away as hard as ever you can, or we shall not get to Whitestone in season." "I don't care about going to Whitestone now; I want to know what all that means." "Can't you see what it means? The boat-house is on fire." "Well, how did it catch afire? That's what bothers me." "You needn't bother yourself about it. My father owns the boat-house, and it isn't worth much." "All that may be; but I want to know how it got afire." "We shall find out soon enough when we return." "But I want to know now." "You can't know now; so pull away." "I shall have the credit of setting that fire," added Noddy, not a little disturbed by the anticipation. "No, you won't." "Yes, I shall. I told Ben I wished the boat-house would catch afire and burn up. Of course he will lay it to me." "No matter if he does; Ben isn't everybody." "Well, he is 'most everybody, so far as Miss Bertha is concerned; and I'd rather tumbled overboard in December than have that fire happen just now." "You were not there when the fire broke out," said Fanny, with a strong effort to satisfy her boatman. "That's the very reason why they will lay it to me. They will say I set the boat-house afire, and then ran away on purpose." "I can say you were with me when the fire broke out, and that I know you didn't do it," replied Fanny. "That will do; but I would give all my old shoes to know how the fire took, myself." "No matter how it took." "Yes, it is matter, Miss Fanny. I want to know. There wasn't any fire in the building when I left it." "Perhaps somebody stopped there in a boat, and set it on fire." "Perhaps they did; but I know very well they didn't," answered Noddy, positively. "There hasn't been any boat near the pier since we left it." "Perhaps Ben left his pipe among those shavings." "Ben never did that. He would cut his head off sooner than do such a thing. He is as scared of fire as he is of the Flying Dutchman." "Don't say anything more about it. Now row over to Whitestone as quick as you can," added Fanny, petulantly. "I'm not going over to Whitestone, after what has happened. I shouldn't have a bit of fun if I went." "Very well, Noddy; then you may get out of the scrape as you can," said the young lady, angrily. "What scrape?" "Why, they will accuse you of setting the boat-house afire; and you told Ben you wished it was burned down." "But I didn't set it afire." "Who did, then?" "That's just what I want to find out. That's what worries me; for I can't see how it happened, unless it took fire from that bucket of water I left on the floor." Fanny was too much disturbed by the conduct of her boatman, or by some other circumstance, to laugh at Noddy's joke; and the brilliant sally was permitted to waste itself without an appreciative smile. She sat looking at the angry flames as they devoured the building, while her companion vainly attempted to hit upon a satisfactory explanation of the cause of the fire. Noddy was perplexed; he was absolutely worried, not so much by the probable consequences to himself of the unfortunate event, as by the cravings of his own curiosity. He did not see how it happened; and if a potent juggler had performed a wonderful feat in his presence, he could not have been more exercised in mind to know how it was done. Noddy was neither a logician nor a philosopher; and therefore he was utterly unable to account for the origin of the fire. In vain he wasted his intellectual powers in speculations; in vain he tried to remember some exciting cause to which the calamity could be traced. Meanwhile, Miss Fanny was deliberating quite as diligently over another question; for she apparently regarded the destruction of the boat-house as a small affair, and did not concern herself to know how it had been caused. But she was very anxious to reach Whitestone before ten o'clock, and her rebellious boatman had intimated his intention not to carry out his part of the agreement. "What are you thinking about, Noddy?" asked she, when both had maintained silence for the full space of three minutes, which was a longer period than either of them had ever before kept still while awake. "I was thinking of that fire," replied Noddy, removing his gaze from the burning building, and fixing it upon her. "Are you going to Whitestone, or not?" continued she, impatiently. "No; I don't want to go to Whitestone, while all of them down there are talking about me, and saying I set the boat-house afire." "They will believe you did it, too." "But I didn't, Miss Fanny. You know I didn't." "How should I know it?" "Because I was with you; besides, you came out of the boat-house after I did." "If you will row me over to Whitestone, I will say so; and I will tell them I know you didn't do it." Noddy considered the matter for a moment, and, perhaps concluding that it was safer for him to keep on the right side of Miss Fanny, he signified his acceptance of the terms by taking up his oars, and pulling towards Whitestone. But he was not satisfied; he was as uneasy as a fish out of water; and nothing but the tyranny of the wayward young lady in the boat would have induced him to flee from the trouble which was brewing at Woodville. He had quite lost sight of the purpose which had induced him to disobey Bertha's orders. Our young adventurers had not left Woodville without an object. There was a circus at Whitestone--a travelling company which had advertised to give three grand performances on that day. Miss Fanny wanted to go; but, either because her father was otherwise occupied, or because he did not approve of circuses, he had declined to go with her. Bertha did not want to go, and also had an engagement. Fanny had set her heart upon going; and she happened to be too wilful, just at that period, to submit to the disappointment to which her father's convenience or his principles doomed her. Bertha had gone to the city at an early hour in the morning to spend the day with a friend, and Fanny decided that she would go to the circus, in spite of all obstacles, and in the face of her father's implied prohibition. When she had proceeded far enough to rebel, in her own heart, against the will of her father, the rest of the deed was easily accomplished. Noddy had never been to a circus; and when Fanny told him what it was,--how men rode standing up on their horses; how they turned somersets, and played all sorts of antics on the tight rope and the slack rope; and, above all, what funny things the clowns said and did,--he was quite ready to do almost anything to procure so rare a pleasure as witnessing such a performance must afford him. It did not require any persuasion to induce him to assist Fanny in her disobedience. The only obstacle which had presented itself was his morning work in the boat-house, which Bertha's departure for the city had prevented him from doing at an earlier hour. To prevent Ben from suspecting that they were on the water, in case they should happen to be missed, he had borrowed a boat and placed it at the Point, where they could embark without being seen, if Ben or any of the servants happened to be near the pier. The boatman, who made it his business to see that Noddy did his work on time in the morning, did not neglect his duty on this occasion; and when Noddy started to meet Fanny at the appointed place, he had been called back, as described in the first chapter. As he pulled towards Whitestone, he watched the flames that rose from the boat-house; and he had, for the time, lost all his enthusiasm about the circus. He could think only of the doubtful position in which his impulsive words to the boatman placed him. Above all things,--and all his doubts and fears culminated in this point,--what would Miss Bertha say? He did not care what others said, except so far as their words went to convince his mistress of his guilt. What would she do to him? But, after all had been said and done, he was not guilty. He had not set the boat-house on fire, and he did not even know who had done the malicious act. Noddy regarded this as a very happy thought; and while the reflection had a place in his mind, he pulled the oars with redoubled vigor. Yet it was in vain for him to rely upon the voice of an approving conscience for peace in that hour of trouble. If he had not, at that moment, been engaged in an act of disobedience, he might have been easy. He had been strictly forbidden by Mr. Grant, and by Bertha, ever to take Fanny out in a boat without permission; and Miss Fanny had been as strictly forbidden to go with him, or with any of the servants, without the express consent, each time, of her father or of Bertha. It is very hard, while doing wrong in one thing, to enjoy an approving conscience in another thing; and Noddy found it so in the present instance. We do not mean to say that Noddy's conscience was of any great account to him, or that the inward monitor caused his present uneasiness. He had a conscience, but his vagabond life had demoralized it in the first place, and it had not been sufficiently developed, during his stay at Woodville, to abate very sensibly his anticipated pleasure at the circus. His uneasiness was entirely selfish. He had got into a scrape, whose probable consequences worried him more than his conscience. By the time the runaways reached Whitestone, the boat-house was all burned up, and nothing but the curling smoke from the ruins visibly reminded the transgressors of the event which had disturbed them. Securing the boat in a proper place, Noddy conducted the young lady to the large tent in which the circus company performed, and which was more than a mile from the river. Fanny gave him the money, and Noddy purchased two tickets, which admitted them to the interior of the tent. If Noddy had been entirely at ease about the affair on the other side of the river, no doubt he would have enjoyed the performance very much; but in the midst of the "grand entree of all the horses and riders of the troupe," the sorrowing face of Bertha Grant thrust itself between him and the horsemen, to obscure his vision and diminish the cheap glories of the gorgeous scene. When "the most daring rider in the world" danced about, like a top, on the bare back of his "fiery, untamed steed," Noddy was enthusiastic, and would have given a York shilling for the privilege of trying to do it himself. The "ground and lofty tumbling," with the exception of the spangled tunics of the performers, hardly came up to his expectations; and he was entirely satisfied that he could beat the best man among them at such games. As the performance proceeded, he warmed up enough to forget the fire, and ceased to dread the rebuke of Bertha; but when all was over,--when the clown had made his last wry face, and the great American acrobat had achieved his last gyration, Bertha and the fire came back to him with increased power. Moody and sullen, he walked down to the river with Fanny, who, under ordinary circumstances, would have been too proud to walk through the streets of Whitestone with him. If he had been alone, it is quite probable that he would have taken to the woods, so much did he dread to return to Woodville. He pushed off the boat, and for some time he pulled in silence, for Miss Fanny now appeared to have her own peculiar trials. Her conscience seemed to have found a voice, and she did not speak till the boat had reached the lower end of Van Alstine's Island. "The fire is all out now," said she. "Yes; but I would give a thousand dollars to know how it caught," added Noddy. "I know," continued Fanny, looking down into the bottom of the boat. "Who did it?" demanded Noddy, eagerly. "I did it myself," answered Fanny, looking up into his face to note the effect of the astonishing confession. CHAPTER III. A MORAL QUESTION. Noddy dropped his oars, and, with open mouth and staring eyes, gazed fixedly in silence at his gentle companion, who had so far outstripped him in making mischief as to set fire to a building. It was too much for him, and he found it impossible to comprehend the depravity of Miss Fanny. He would not have dared to do such a thing himself, and it was impossible to believe that she had done so tremendous a deed. "I don't believe it," said he; and the words burst from him with explosive force, as soon as he could find a tongue to express himself. "I did," replied Fanny, gazing at him with a kind of blank look, which would have assured a more expert reader of the human face than Noddy Newman that she had come to a realizing sense of the magnitude of the mischief she had done. "No, you didn't, Miss Fanny!" exclaimed her incredulous friend. "I know you didn't do that; you couldn't do it." "But I did; I wouldn't say I did if I didn't." "Well, that beats me all to pieces!" added Noddy, bending forward in his seat, and looking sharply into her face, in search of any indications that she was making fun of him, or was engaged in perpetrating a joke. Certainly there was no indication of a want of seriousness on the part of the wayward young lady; on the contrary, she looked exceedingly troubled. Noddy could not say a word, and he was busily occupied in trying to get through his head the stupendous fact that Miss Fanny had become an incendiary; that she was wicked enough to set fire to her father's building. It required a good deal of labor and study on the part of so poor a scholar as Noddy to comprehend the idea. He had always looked upon Fanny as Bertha's sister. His devoted benefactress was an angel in his estimation, and it was as impossible for her to do anything wrong as it was for water to run up hill. If Bertha was absolutely perfect,--as he measured human virtue,--it was impossible that her sister should be very far below her standard. He knew that she was a little wild and wayward, but it was beyond his comprehension that she should do anything that was really "naughty." Fanny's confession, when he realized that it was true, gave him a shock from which he did not soon recover. One of his oars had slipped overboard without his notice, and the other might have gone after it, if his companion had not reminded him where he was, and what he ought to do. Paddling the boat around with one oar, he recovered the other; but he had no clear idea of the purpose for which such implements were intended, and he permitted the boat to drift with the tide, while he gave himself up to the consideration of the difficult and trying question which the conduct of Fanny imposed upon him. Noddy was not selfish; and if the generous vein of his nature had been well balanced and fortified by the corresponding virtues, his character would have soared to the region of the noble and grand in human nature. But the generous in character is hardly worthy of respect, though it may challenge the admiration of the thoughtless, unless it rests upon the sure foundation of moral principle. Noddy forgot his own trials in sympathizing with the unpleasant situation of his associate in wrongdoing, and his present thought was how he should get her out of the scrape. He was honestly willing to sacrifice himself for her sake. While he was faithfully considering the question, in the dim light of his own moral sense, Miss Fanny suddenly burst into tears, and cried with a violence and an unction which were a severe trial to his nerves. "Don't cry, Fanny," said he; "I'll get you out of the scrape." "I don't want to get out of it," sobbed she. Now, this was the most paradoxical reply which the little maiden could possibly have made, and Noddy was perplexed almost beyond the hope of redemption. What in the world was she crying about, if she did not wish to get out of the scrape? What could make her cry if it was not the fear of consequences--of punishment, and of the mean opinion which her friends would have of her, when they found out that she was wicked enough to set a building on fire? Noddy asked no questions, for he could not frame one which would cover so intricate a matter. "I am perfectly willing to be punished for what I have done," added Fanny, to whose troubled heart speech was the only vent. "What are you crying for?" asked the bewildered Noddy. "Because--because I did it," replied she; and her choked utterance hardly permitted her to speak the words. "Well, Miss Fanny, you are altogether ahead of my time; and I don't know what you mean. If you cry about it now, what did you do it for?" "Because I was wicked and naughty. If I had thought only a moment, I shouldn't have done it. I am so sorry I did it! I would give the world if I hadn't." "What will they do to you?" asked Noddy, whose fear of consequences had not yet given place to a higher view of the matter. "I don't care what they do; I deserve the worst they can do. How shall I look Bertha and my father in the face when I see them?" "O, hold your head right up, and look as bold as a lion--as bold as two lions, if the worst comes." "Don't talk so, Noddy. You make me feel worse than I did." "What in the world ails you, Miss Fanny?" demanded Noddy, grown desperate by the perplexities of the situation. "I am so sorry I did such a wicked thing! I shall go to Bertha and my father, and tell them all about it, as soon as they come home," added Fanny, as she wiped away her tears, and appeared to be much comforted by the good resolution which was certainly the best one the circumstances admitted. "Are you going to do that?" exclaimed Noddy, astonished at the declaration. "I am." "And get me into a scrape too! They won't let me off as easy as they do you. I shall be sent off to learn to be a tinker, or a blacksmith." "You didn't set the boat-house on fire, Noddy. It wasn't any of your doings," said Fanny, somewhat disturbed by this new complication. "You wouldn't have done it, if it hadn't been for me. I told you what I said to Ben--that I wished the boat-house was burned up; and that's what put it into your head." "Well, you didn't do it." "I know that; but I shall have to bear all the blame of it." Noddy's moral perceptions were strong enough to enable him to see that he was not without fault in the matter; and he was opposed to Fanny's making the intended confession of her guilt. "I will keep you out of trouble, Noddy," said she, kindly. "You can't do it; when you own up, you will sink me to the bottom of the river. Besides, you are a fool to do any such thing, Miss Fanny. What do you want to say a word about it for? Ben will think some fellow landed from the river, and set the boat-house on fire." "I must do it, Noddy," protested she. "I shall not have a moment's peace till I confess. I shall not dare to look father and Bertha in the face if I don't." "You won't if you do. How are they going to know anything about it, if you don't tell them?" "Well, they will lay it to you if I don't." "No matter if they do; I didn't do it, and I can say so truly, and they will believe me." "But how shall I feel all the time? I shall know who did it, if nobody else does. I shall feel mean and guilty." "You won't feel half so bad as you will when they look at you, and know all the time that you are guilty. If you are going to own up, I shall keep out of the way. You won't see me at Woodville again in a hurry." "What do you mean, Noddy?" asked Fanny, startled by the strong words of her companion. "That's just what I mean. If you own up, they will say that I made you do it; and I had enough sight rather bear the blame of setting the boat-house afire, than be told that I made you do it. I can dirty my own hands, but I don't like the idea of dirtying yours." "You don't mean to leave Woodville, Noddy?" asked Fanny, in a reproachful tone. "If you own up, I shall not go back. I've been thinking of going ever since they talked of making a tinker of me; so it will only be going a few days sooner. I want to go to sea, and I don't want to be a tinker." Fanny gazed into the water by the side of the boat, thinking of what her companion had said. She really did not think she ought to "own up," on the terms which Noddy mentioned. "If you are sorry, and want to repent, you can do all that; and I will give you my solemn promise to be as good as you are, Miss Fanny," said Noddy, satisfied that he had made an impression upon the mind of his wavering companion. His advice seemed to be sensible. She was sorry she had done wrong; she could repent in sorrow and silence, and never do wrong again. Her father and her sister would despise her if they knew she had done such a wicked and unladylike thing as to set the boat-house on fire. She could save all this pain and mortification, and repent just the same. Besides, she could not take upon herself the responsibility of driving Noddy away from Woodville, for that would cause Bertha a great deal of pain and uneasiness. Fanny had not yet learned to do right though the heavens fall. "Well, I won't say anything about it, Noddy," said she, yielding to what seemed to her the force of circumstances. "That's right, Fanny. Now, you leave the whole thing to me, and I will manage it so as to keep you out of trouble; and you can repent and be sorry just as much as you please," replied Noddy, as he began to row again. "There is nothing to be afraid of. Ben will never know that we have been on the river." "But I know it myself," said the conscience-stricken maiden. "Of course you do; what of that?" "If I didn't know it myself, I should feel well enough." "You are a funny girl." "Don't you ever feel that you have done wrong, Noddy?" "I suppose I do; but I don't make any such fuss about it as you do." "You were not brought up by a kind father and a loving sister, who would give anything rather than have you do wrong," said Fanny, beginning to cry again. "There! don't cry any more; if you do, you will 'let the cat out of the bag.' I am going to land you here at the Glen. You can take a walk there, and go home about one o'clock. Then you can tell the folks you have been walking in the Glen; and it will be the truth." "It will be just as much a lie as though I hadn't been there. It will be one half the truth told to hide the other half." This was rather beyond Noddy's moral philosophy, and he did not worry himself to argue the point. He pulled up to the landing place at the Glen, where he had so often conveyed Bertha, and near the spot where he had met with the accident which had placed him under her kindly care. Fanny, with a heavy heart and a doubting mind, stepped on shore, and walked up into the grove. She was burdened with grief for the wrong she had done, and for half an hour she wandered about the beautiful spot, trying to compose herself enough to appear before the people at the house. When it was too late, she wished she had not consented to Noddy's plan; but the fear of working a great wrong in driving him from the good influences to which he was subjected at Woodville, by doing right, and confessing her error, was rather comforting, though it did not meet the wants of her case. In season for dinner, she entered the house with her hand full of wild flowers, which grew only in the Glen. In the hall she met Mrs. Green, the housekeeper, who looked at her flushed face, and then at the flowers in her hand. "We have been wondering where you were, all the forenoon," said Mrs. Green. "I see you have been to the Glen by the flowers you have in your hand. Did you know the boat-house was burned up?" "I saw the smoke of it," replied Fanny. "It is the strangest thing that ever happened. No one can tell how it took fire." Fanny made no reply, and the housekeeper hastened away to attend to her duties. The poor girl was suffering all the tortures of remorse which a wrong act can awaken, and she went up to her room with the feeling that she did not wish to see another soul for a month. Half an hour later, Noddy Newman presented himself at the great house, laden with swamp pinks, whose fragrance filled the air, and seemed to explain where he had been all the forenoon. With no little flourish, he requested Mrs. Green to put them in the vases for Bertha's room; for his young mistress was very fond of the sweet blossoms. He appeared to be entirely satisfied with himself; and, with a branch of the pink in his hand, he left the house, and walked towards the servants' quarters, where, at his dinner, he met Ben, the boatman. CHAPTER IV. NODDY'S CONFESSION. The old boatman never did any thing as other people did it; and though Noddy had put on the best face he could assume to meet the shock of the accusation which he was confident would be brought against him, Ben said not a word about the boat-house. He did not seem to be aware that it had been burned. He ate his dinner in his usual cheerful frame of mind, and talked of swamp pinks, suggested by the branch which the young reprobate had brought into the servants' hall. Noddy was more perplexed than he had been before that day. Why didn't the old man "pitch into him," and accuse him of kindling the fire? Why didn't he get angry, as he did sometimes, and call him a young vagabond, and threaten to horsewhip him? Ben talked of the pinks, of the weather, the crops, and the latest news; but he did not say a word about the destruction of the boat-house, or Noddy's absence during the forenoon. After dinner, Noddy followed the old man down to the pier by the river in a state of anxiety which hardly permitted him to keep up the cheerful expression he had assumed, and which he usually wore. They reached the smouldering ruins of the building, but Ben took no notice of it, and did not allude to the great event which had occurred. Noddy was inclined to doubt whether the boat-house had been burned at all; and he would have rejected the fact, if the charred remains of the house had not been there to attest it. Ben hobbled down to the pier, and stepped on board the Greyhound, which he had hauled up to the shore to enable him to make some repairs on the mainsail. Noddy followed him; but he grew more desperate at every step he advanced, for the old man still most provokingly refused to say a single word about the fire. "Gracious!" exclaimed Noddy, suddenly starting back in the utmost astonishment; for he had come to the conclusion, that if Ben would not speak about the fire, he must. The old boatman was still vicious, and refused even to notice his well-managed exclamation. Noddy thought it was very obstinate of Ben not to say something, and offer him a chance, in the natural way, to prove his innocence. "Why, Ben, the boat-house is burned up!" shouted Noddy, determined that the old man should have no excuse for not speaking about the fire. Ben did not even raise his eyes from the work on which he was engaged. He was adjusting the palm on his hand, and in a moment began to sew as though nothing had happened, and no one was present but himself. Noddy was fully satisfied now that the boatman was carrying out the details of some plot of his own. "Ben!" roared Noddy, at the top of his lungs, and still standing near the ruins. "What do you want, Noddy?" demanded Ben, as good-naturedly as though everything had worked well during the day. "The boat-house is burned up!" screamed Noddy, apparently as much excited as though he had just discovered the fact. Ben made no reply, which was another evidence that he was engaged in working out some deep-laid plot, perhaps to convict him of the crime, by some trick. Noddy was determined not to be convicted if he could possibly help it. "Ben!" shouted he again. "Well, Noddy, what is it?" "Did you _know_ the boat-house was burned up?" There was no answer; and Noddy ran down to the place where the sail-boat was hauled up. He tried to look excited and indignant, and perhaps he succeeded; though, as the old man preserved his equanimity, he had no means of knowing what impression he had produced. "Did you know the boat-house was burned up?" repeated Noddy, opening his eyes as though he had made a discovery of the utmost importance. "I did," replied Ben, as indifferently as though it had been a matter of no consequence whatever. "Why didn't you tell me about it?" demanded Noddy, with becoming indignation. "Because I decided that I wouldn't say a word about it to any person," answered Ben. "How did it happen?" "I haven't anything to say about it; so you mustn't ask me any questions." "Don't you know how it caught afire?" persisted Noddy. "I've nothing to say on that subject." Noddy was vexed and disheartened; but he felt that it would not be prudent to deny the charge of setting it on fire before he was accused, for that would certainly convict him. The old man was playing a deep game, and that annoyed him still more. "So you won't say anything about it, Ben?" added he, seating himself on the pier. "Not a word, Noddy." "Well, I wouldn't if I were you," continued Noddy, lightly. Ben took no notice of this sinister remark, thus exhibiting a presence of mind which completely balked his assailant. "I understand it all, Ben; and I don't blame you for not wanting to say anything about it. I suppose you will own up when Mr. Grant comes home to-night." "Don't be saucy, Noddy," said the old man, mildly. "So you smoked your pipe among the shavings, and set the boat-house afire--did you, Ben? Well, I am sorry for you, you are generally so careful; but I don't believe they will discharge you for it." Ben was as calm and unruffled as a summer sea. Noddy knew that, under ordinary circumstances, the boatman would have come down upon him like a northeast gale, if he had dared to use such insulting language to him. He tried him on every tack, but not a word could he obtain which betrayed the opinion of the veteran, in regard to the origin of the fire. It was useless to resort to any more arts, and he gave up the point in despair. All the afternoon he wandered about the estate, and could think of nothing but the unhappy event of the morning. Fanny did not show herself, and he had no opportunity for further consultation. About six o'clock Bertha returned with her father; and after tea they walked down to the river. Fanny complained of a headache, and did not go with them. It is more than probable that she was really afflicted, as she said; for she had certainly suffered enough to make her head ache. Of course the first thing that attracted the attention of Mr. Grant and his daughter was the pile of charred timbers that indicated the place where the boat-house had once stood. "How did that happen?" asked Mr. Grant of Ben, who was on the pier. "I don't know how it happened," replied the boatman, who had found his tongue now, and proceeded to give his employer all the particulars of the destruction of the building, concluding with Noddy's energetic exclamation that he wished the boat-house was burned up. "But did Noddy set the building on fire?" asked Bertha, greatly pained to hear this charge against her pupil. "I don't know, Miss Bertha. I went up to the house to get my morning instructions, as I always do, and left Noddy at work washing up the boat-house. I found you had gone to the city, and I went right out of the house, and was coming down here. I got in sight of the pier, and saw Miss Fanny come out of the boat-house." "Fanny?" "Yes; I am sure it was her. I didn't mind where she went, for I happened to think the mainsail of the Greyhound wanted a little mending, and I went over to my room after some needles. While I was in my chamber, one of the gardeners rushed up to tell me the boat-house was afire. I came down, but 'twasn't no use; the building was most gone when I got here." "Did you leave anything in the building in the shape of matches, or anything else?" asked Mr. Grant. "No, sir; I never do that," replied the old man, with a blush. "I know you are very careful, Ben. Then I suppose it was set on fire." "I suppose it was, sir." "Who do you suppose set it afire, Ben?" said Bertha, anxiously. "Bless you, miss, I don't know." "Do you think it was Noddy?" "No, Miss Bertha, I don't think it was." "Who could it have been?" "That's more than I know. Here comes Noddy, and he can speak for himself." Noddy had come forward for this purpose when he saw Mr. Grant and Bertha on the pier, and he had heard the last part of the conversation. He was not a little astonished to hear Ben declare his belief that he was not guilty, for he had been fully satisfied that he should have all the credit of the naughty transaction. "Do you know how the fire caught, Noddy?" said Mr. Grant. "I reckon it caught from a bucket of water I left there," replied Noddy, who did not know what to say till he had felt his way a little. "No trifling, Noddy!" added Mr. Grant, though he could hardly keep from laughing at the ridiculous answer. "How should I know, sir, when Ben don't know? I tried to make him tell me how it caught, and he wouldn't say a word about it." "I thought it was best for me to keep still," said Ben. "This is very strange," continued Mr. Grant. "Who was the last person you saw in the boat-house, Ben?" "Miss Fanny, sir. I saw her come out of it only a few moments before the fire broke out." Noddy was appalled at this answer, for it indicated that Fanny was already suspected of the deed. "Of course Fanny would not do such a thing as set the boat-house on fire," said Bertha. "Of course she wouldn't," added Noddy. "What made you say you did not think Noddy set the fire, Ben?" asked Mr. Grant. "Because I think he had gone off somewhere before the fire, and that Miss Fanny was in the building after he was. Noddy was sculling off before he had done his work, and I called him back. That's when he wished the boat-house was burned down." "It is pretty evident that the fire was set by Noddy or Fanny," said Mr. Grant; and he appeared to have no doubt as to which was the guilty one, for he looked very sternly at the wayward boy before him. "I think so, sir," added Ben. "And you say that it was not Noddy?" continued Mr. Grant, looking exceedingly troubled as he considered the alternative. The boatman bowed his head in reply, as though his conclusion was so serious and solemn that he could not express it in words. Noddy looked from Ben to Mr. Grant, and from Mr. Grant to Ben again. It was plain enough what they meant, and he had not even been suspected of the crime. The boatman had seen Fanny come out of the building just before the flames appeared, and all hope of charging the deed upon some vagabond from the river was gone. "Do you mean to say, Ben, that you think Fanny set the boat-house on fire?" demanded Mr. Grant, sternly. "I don't see who else could have set it," added Ben, stoutly. "I do," interposed Noddy. "I say she didn't do it." "Why do you say so?" "Because I did it myself." "I thought so!" exclaimed Mr. Grant, greatly relieved by the confession. Ben was confused and annoyed, and Noddy was rather pleased at the position in which he had placed the old man, who, in his opinion, had not treated him as well as usual. "Why didn't you own it before?" said Mr. Grant, "and not allow an innocent person to be suspected." "I didn't like to," answered the culprit, with a smile, as though he was entirely satisfied with his own position. "You must be taken care of." "I am going to take care of myself, sir," said Noddy, with easy indifference. This remark was capable of so many interpretations that no one knew what it meant--whether Noddy intended to run away, or reform his vicious habits. Bertha had never seen him look so self-possessed and impudent when he had done wrong, and she feared that all her labors for his moral improvement had been wasted. Some further explanations followed, and Noddy was questioned till a satisfactory theory in regard to the fire was agreed upon. The boy declared that he had visited the boat-house after Fanny left it, and that she was walking towards the Glen when he kindled the fire. He made out a consistent story, and completely upset Ben's conclusions, and left the veteran in a very confused and uncomfortable state of mind. Mr. Grant declared that something must be done with the boy at once; that if he was permitted to continue on the place, he might take a notion to burn the house down. Poor Bertha could not gainsay her father's conclusion, and, sad as it was, she was compelled to leave the culprit to whatever decision Mr. Grant might reach. For the present he was ordered to his room, to which he submissively went, attended by Bertha, though he was fully resolved not to be "taken care of;" for he understood this to mean a place in the workhouse or the penitentiary. CHAPTER V. SQUIRE WRIGGS AT WOODVILLE. Bertha was deeply pained at the reckless wrong which her _protégé_ had done, and more deeply by the cool indifference with which he carried himself after his voluntary confession. There was little to hope for while he manifested not a single sign of contrition for the crime committed. He was truly sorry for the grief he had caused her; but for his own sin he did not speak a word of regret. "I suppose I am to be a tinker now," said Noddy to her, with a smile, which looked absolutely awful to Bertha, for it was a token of depravity she could not bear to look upon. "I must leave you now, Noddy, for you are not good," replied Bertha, sadly. "I am sorry you feel so bad about me, Miss Bertha," added Noddy. "I wish you would be sorry for yourself, instead of me." "I am--sorry that you want to make a tinker of me;" and Noddy used this word to express his contempt of any mechanical occupation. He did not like to work. Patient, plodding labor, devoid of excitement, was his aversion; though handling a boat, cleaning out a gutter on some dizzy height of the mansion, or cutting off a limb at the highest point of the tallest shade tree on the estate, was entirely to his taste, and he did not regard anything as work which had a spice of danger or a thrill of excitement about it. He was not lazy, in the broad sense of the word; there was not a more active and restless person on the estate than himself. A shop, therefore, was a horror which he had no words to describe, and which he could never endure. "I want to see you in some useful occupation, where you can earn your living, and become a respectable man," said Bertha. "Don't you want to be a respectable man, Noddy?" "Well, I suppose I do; but I had rather be a vagabond than a respectable tinker." "You must work, Noddy, if you would win a good name, and enough of this world's goods to make you comfortable. Work and win; I give you this motto for your guidance. My father told me to lock you up in your room." "You may do that, Miss Bertha," laughed Noddy. "I don't care how much you lock me in. When I want to go out, I shall go. I shall work, and win my freedom." Noddy thought this application of Bertha's motto was funny, and he had the hardihood to laugh at it, till Bertha, hopeless of making any impression on him at the present time, left the room, and locked the door behind her. "Work and win!" said Noddy. "That's very pretty, and for Miss Bertha's sake I shall remember it; but I shan't work in any tinker's shop. I may as well take myself off, and go to work in my own way." Noddy was tired, after the exertions of the day; and so deeply and truly repentant was he for the wrong he had done, that he immediately went to sleep, though it was not yet dark. Neither the present nor the future seemed to give him any trouble; and if he could avoid the miseries of the tinker's shop, as he was perfectly confident he could, he did not concern himself about any of the prizes of life which are gained by honest industry or patient well doing. When it was quite dark, and Noddy had slept about two hours, the springing of the bolt in the lock of his door awoke him. He leaped to his feet, and his first thought was, that something was to be done with him for burning the boat-house. But the door opened, and, by the dim light which came through the window, he recognized the slight form of Fanny Grant. "Noddy," said she, timidly. "Well, Miss Fanny, have you come to let me out of jail?" "No; I came to see you, and nobody knows I am here. You won't expose me--will you?" "Of course I won't; that isn't much like me." "I know it isn't, Noddy. What did you say that you set the fire for?" "Because I thought that was the best way to settle the whole thing. Ben saw you come out of the boat-house, and told your father he believed you set the building on fire. That was the meanest thing the old man ever did. Why didn't he lay it to me, as he ought to have done?" "I suppose he knew you didn't do it." "That don't make any difference. He ought to have known better than tell your father it was you." "I am so sorry for what you have done!" "What are you sorry for? It won't hurt me, any how; and it would be an awful thing for you. They were going to make a tinker of me before, and I suppose they will do it now--if they can. I wouldn't care a fig for it if Miss Bertha didn't feel so bad about it." "I will tell her the truth." "Don't you do it, Miss Fanny. That wouldn't help me a bit, and will spoil you." "But I must tell the truth. They don't suspect me even of going on the water." "So much the better. They won't ask you any hard questions. Now, Miss Fanny, don't you say a word; for if you do, it will make it all the worse for me." "Why so, Noddy?" "Because, according to my notion, I did set the building afire. If I hadn't said what I did, you never would have thought of doing it. So I was the fellow that did it, after all. That's the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." "But you didn't set it afire, and you didn't mean to do any such thing." "That may be; but you wouldn't have done it if it hadn't been for me. It was more my fault than it was yours; and I want you to leave the thing just where it is now." "But it would be mean for me to stand still, and see you bear all the blame." "It would be enough sight meaner for you to say anything about it." "I don't think so." "I do; for don't you see it is a good deal worse for me to put you up to such a thing than it was for me to do it myself? Your father would forgive me for setting the fire sooner than they would for making you do it. I'm bad enough already, and they know it; but if they think I make you as bad as I am myself, they would put me in a worse place than a tinker's shop." Noddy's argument was too much for the feminine mind of Miss Fanny, and again she abandoned the purpose she had fully resolved upon, and decided not to confess her guilt. We must do her the justice to say, that she came to this conclusion, not from any fear of personal consequences, but in order to save Noddy from the terrible reproach which would be cast upon him if she did confess. Already, in her heart and before God, she had acknowledged her error, and was sorrowfully repenting her misconduct. But she could not expose Noddy to any penalty which he did not deserve. She knew that he did not mean to set the fire; that his words were idle, petulant ones, which had no real meaning; and it would be wrong to let her father and Bertha suppose that Noddy had instigated her to the criminal act. Fanny had not yet learned that it is best to cleave unto the truth, and let the consequences take care of themselves. She yielded her own convictions to those of another, which no person should ever do in questions of right and wrong. She sacrificed her own faith in the simple truth, to another's faith in policy, expediency. The question was settled for the present, and Fanny crept back to her chamber, no easier in mind, no better satisfied with herself, than before. Noddy went to sleep again; but the only cloud he saw was the displeasure of Bertha. He was simply conscious that he had got into a scrape. He had not burned the boat-house, and he did not feel guilty. He had not intended to induce Fanny to do the deed, and he did not feel guilty of that. He was so generous that he wished to save her from the consequences of her error, and the deception he used did not weigh very heavily on his conscience. He regarded his situation as merely a "scrape" into which he had accidentally fallen, and his only business was to get out of it. These thoughts filled his mind when he awoke in the morning. He was too restless to remain a quiet prisoner for any great length of time; and when he had dressed himself, he began to look about him for the means of mitigating his imprisonment, or bringing it to a conclusion, as the case might require. The window would be available at night, but it was in full view of the gardeners in the daytime, who would be likely to report any movement on his part. The door looked more hopeful. One of the men brought his breakfast, and retired, locking the door behind him. While he was eating it,--and his appetite did not seem to be at all impaired by the situation to which he had been reduced,--he saw Mr. Grant on the lawn, talking with a stranger. His interest was at once excited, and a closer examination assured him that the visitor was Squire Wriggs, of Whitestone. The discovery almost spoiled Noddy's appetite, for he knew that the squire was a lawyer, and had often been mixed up with cases of house-breaking, horse-stealing, robbery, and murder; and he at once concluded that the legal gentleman's business related to him. His ideas of lawyers were rather confused and indistinct. He knew they had a great deal to do in the court-house, when men were sent to the penitentiary and the house of correction for various crimes. He watched the squire and Mr. Grant, and he was fully satisfied in his own mind what they were talking about when the latter pointed to the window of his chamber. He had eaten only half his breakfast, but he found it impossible to take another mouthful, after he realized that he was the subject of the conversation between Mr. Grant and the lawyer. It seemed just as though all his friends, even Miss Bertha, had suddenly deserted him. That conference on the lawn was simply a plot to take him to the court-house, and then send him to the penitentiary, the house of correction, or some other abominable place, even if it were no worse than a tinker's shop. He was absolutely terrified at the prospect. After all his high hopes, and all his confidence in his supple limbs, the judges, the lawyers, and the constables might fetter his muscles so that he could not get away--so that he could not even run away to sea, which was his ultimate intention, whenever he could make up his mind to leave Miss Bertha. Noddy watched the two gentlemen on the lawn, and his breast was filled with a storm of emotions. He pictured the horrors of the prison to which they were about to send him, and his fancy made the prospect far worse than the reality could possibly have been. Mr. Grant led the way towards the building occupied by the servants. Noddy was desperate. Squire Wriggs was the visible manifestation of jails, courts, constables, and other abominations, which were the sum of all that was terrible. He decided at once not to wait for a visit from the awful personage, who was evidently coming into the house to see him. He raised the window a little, intending to throw it wide open, and leap down upon the lawn, when his persecutor entered the door. There was not a man or boy at Woodville who could catch him when he had the use of his legs, and the world would then be open to him. But the gentlemen paused at the door, and Noddy listened as a criminal would wait to hear his sentence from the stern judge. "Thirty thousand dollars is a great deal of money for a boy like him," said Mr. Grant. "Of course he must have a guardian." "And you are the best person in the world for that position," added Squire Wriggs. "But he is a young reprobate, and something must be done with him." "Certainly; he must be taken care of at once." "I'm afraid he will burn my house down, as he did the boat-house. My daughter is interested in him; if it wasn't for her, I would send him to the house of correction before I slept again." "When you are his guardian, you can do what you think best for him." "That will be no easy matter." "We will take the boy over to the court now, and then--" Noddy did not hear any more, for the two gentlemen entered the house, and he heard their step on the stairs. But he did not want to know anything more. Squire Wriggs had distinctly said they would take him over to the court, and that was enough to satisfy him that his worst fears were to be realized. The talk about thirty thousand dollars, and the guardian, was as unintelligible to him as though it had been in ancient Greek, and he did not bestow a second thought upon it. The "boy like him," to whom thirty thousand dollars would be a great deal of money, meant some other person than himself. The court was Noddy's peculiar abomination; and when he heard the words, he clutched the sash of the window with convulsive energy. Mr. Grant and Squire Wriggs passed into the house, and Noddy Newman passed out. To a gymnast of his wiry experience, the feat was not impossible, or even very difficult. Swinging out of the window, he placed his feet on the window-cap below, and then, stooping down, he got hold with his hands, and slipped down from his perch with about the same ease with which a well-trained monkey would have accomplished the descent. He was on the solid earth now, and with the feeling that the court-house and a whole regiment of constables were behind him, he took to his heels. A stiff-kneed gardener, who had observed his exit from the house, attempted to follow him; but he might as well have chased a northwest gale. Noddy reached the Glen, and no sound of pursuers could be heard. The phantom court-house had been beaten in the race. CHAPTER VI. NODDY'S ENGAGEMENT. When Noddy reached the Glen, he had time to stop and think; and the consequences of the sudden step he had taken came to his mind with tremendous force. He had fled from Miss Bertha, and all the comforts and luxuries which had surrounded him at Woodville. He was a vagabond again. It was a great deal better to be a vagabond than it was to be an inmate of a prison, or even of a tinker's shop. He had committed no crime; the worst that could be said of him was, that he was a victim of circumstances. It was unfortunate for him that he had used those petulant words, that he wished the boat-house was burned down, for they had put the idea into Fanny's head. He did not mean to kindle the fire, but he believed that he had been the cause of it, and that it was hardly fair to let the young lady suffer for what he had virtually done. He was sorry to leave Woodville, and above all, sorry to be banished from the presence of Miss Bertha. But that had already been agreed upon, and he was only anticipating the event by taking himself off as he did. He would rather have gone in a more honorable manner than running away like a hunted dog; but he could not help that, and the very thought of the horrible court-house was enough to drive him from the best home in the world. He walked up to a retired part of the Glen, where he could continue his retreat without being intercepted, if it became necessary, and sat down on a rock to think of the future. He had no more idea what he should do with himself, than he had when he was a wanderer before in these regions. Undoubtedly his ultimate purpose was to go to sea; but he was not quite ready to depart. He cherished a hope that he might contrive to meet Bertha in some of her walks, and say good-bye to her before he committed himself to his fortunes on the stormy ocean. While he was deliberating upon his prospects, a happy thought, as he regarded it, came to his mind. He could turn somersets, and cut more capers than any man in the circus company which he had seen on the preceding day. With a little practice, he was satisfied that he could learn to stand up on the back of a horse. A field of glory suddenly opened to his vision, and he could win the applause of admiring thousands by his daring feats. He had performed all sorts of gyrations for the amusement of the idlers about Woodville, and he might now turn his accomplishments to a useful purpose--indeed, make them pay for his food and clothing. Noddy had no idea that circus performances were not entirely respectable; and it seemed to him that his early training had exactly fitted him to shine in this peculiar sphere. It might not be decent business for Mr. Grant and Bertha, but it was just the thing for him. Whitestone was a very large town, and the circus was still there. He had not a moment to lose; and, under the impulse of his new resolution, he left the Glen, intending to walk up the river to the ferry, a couple of miles distant. Noddy went over the river, and reached the great tent of the circus company about one o'clock. He was rather disturbed by the fear that he might meet Squire Wriggs, or some of the constables; but all his hopes were now centred on the circus, and he could not avoid the risk of exposing himself. He boldly inquired for the "head man" of the establishment; but this distinguished functionary was not on the premises at that time; he would be there in the course of half an hour. He walked down to a shop, and having a small sum of money in his pocket, he obtained something to eat. On his return to the tent, the head man was pointed out to him. Noddy, as a general rule, was not troubled with bashfulness; and he walked resolutely up to the manager, and intimated to him that he should like to be engaged as a performer. "What do you want, my boy?" demanded the head man, who was quite confident that he had mistaken the applicant's meaning, for it was hardly possible that a youth like him could be a circus performer. "I want a place to perform, sir," repeated Noddy, who was entirely ignorant of the technical terms belonging to the profession. "To perform!" laughed the manager, measuring him from head to foot with his eye. "Yes, sir." "What kind of business can you do, my boy?" "Almost anything, sir." "Do you ride?" "No, sir; I'm not much used to standing up on a horse, but I think I could go it, after doing it a little while." "Do you, indeed!" sneered the man. "Well, we don't want anybody that can do almost any kind of business." "I'm used to this thing, sir," pleaded Noddy. "Used to it! I suppose you want a place as a bill-sticker, or to take care of the horses." "No, sir; I want to perform. If you will give me a chance to show what I can do, I think you'll have me," persisted Noddy, not at all pleased with the decided refusal he had received. "Well, come in here," laughed the head man, who had no doubt that the applicant would soon be brought to grief. It was almost time for the doors to be opened for the afternoon performance, and the man conducted Noddy to the ring, where he saw a number of the riders and gymnasts, all dressed in their silks and spangles to appear before the public. "Here, Whippleby, is a young man that wants an engagement," said the manager to the man who had acted as ring-master when Noddy was present. "What can he do?" "Almost everything; but he isn't much used to riding." Whippleby laughed, and the manager laughed; and it was quite evident, even to the aspirant for circus honors, that all present intended to amuse themselves at his expense. But Noddy felt able to outdo most of the circus people at their own profession, and he confidently expected to turn the laugh upon them before the game was ended. "A versatile genius," said Whippleby. "Just try him, and see what he can do," added the manager, significantly. "Well, my little man, what do you say to a little ground and lofty tumbling," said Whippleby, winking at the performers, who stood in a circle around them. "I'm at home in that," replied Noddy, throwing off his jacket. "Good! You have got pluck enough, at any rate. Here, Nesmond, do something," said the ring-master to a wiry young man of the group. Nesmond did what Noddy had seen him do the day before; he whirled over and over across the ring, like a hoop, striking his hands and feet alternately on the ground. "There, youngster, do you see that?" said Whippleby. "Yes, sir, I see it," replied Noddy, unabashed by the work which was expected of him. "Now, let us see you do it." Noddy did it, and if anything, more rapidly and gracefully than the professional man. The men applauded, and Nesmond--"the great American vaulter and tumbler"--looked exceedingly disconcerted when he saw his wonderful act so easily imitated. "Try it again, Nesmond," said Whippleby. The distinguished athlete went on for half an hour, performing his antics; and Noddy repeated them, though he had never before attempted some of them. Nesmond gave it up. "Well, young man, you can do almost everything, but you are as clumsy and ungraceful as a bear about it. You need a little training on your positions, and you will make a first-class tumbler," said the manager. The men had ceased to laugh, and even looked admiringly on the prodigy who had so suddenly developed himself. Noddy felt that his fortune was already made, and he was almost ready to snap his fingers at the court-house. Here was a chance for him to "work and win," and it was entirely to his taste. The manager then questioned him in regard to his family connections; but as Noddy had none, his answers were very brief. He had no father nor mother, and he had no home; he was no runaway, for there was no one living who had any claim upon him. These answers were entirely satisfactory to the head man. "What salary do you expect?" asked the manager, when he had assured himself there was no one to interfere with any arrangement he might make. "What do you give?" asked Noddy. "Well, we give different salaries, depending on the men." "You have seen what I can do--what will you give me? Talk right up, or I shall have nothing to do with it," added Noddy, borrowing an expression from a highly respectable horse jockey, who had a language of his own. "I'll give you your board and clothes, and your dresses for the first season." "Nothing of that sort for me," replied Noddy, promptly. "I want to know how much I am to have in hard cash." "Very well; I'll give you five dollars a week, and you find yourself." Five dollars a week looked like a large salary to Noddy, though it was not one-fourth of what the distinguished Mr. Nesmond received, and he immediately closed the bargain. "I'll put you on the bills for the next town we visit. What's your name?" "Noddy Newman." "What?" The embryo performer repeated his name. "That won't do; you must have a better name than that. Arthur De Forrest--how will that suit you?" "First rate," replied Noddy, who was very accommodating in minor matters. "We show in Disbury to-morrow night, and you must be ready to do your business then, Mr. De Forrest," added the manager. "After the performance this afternoon Mr. Whippleby will give you a few lessons." "But where shall I get a dress?" "I will furnish you one, and take it out of your salary. You had better put it on when you practice, so as to get used to it." Noddy was highly pleased with all these arrangements, and could not help congratulating himself on the happy thought which had induced him to join the circus. It was true, and he could not help noticing it, that the men around him were not such people as Mr. Grant, and others whom he had been in the habit of seeing at Woodville. All of them swore terribly; their breath smelt of liquor, and they talked the language of a depravity to which Noddy, with all his waywardness, was a stranger. There were boys no older than himself in the company, but they did not seem a whit less depraved than the older ones. Though the novice was not a young man of high aims and purposes, he was not much pleased with his companions. He was what they termed "green," and it was quite plain to him that there would be a fight before many days had passed by, for he was too high-spirited to submit tamely to the insults which were heaped upon him. During the afternoon performance, he stood at the gates of the ring, where the horses enter; and Mr. Whippleby sent him before the public for the first time, to bring out a whip which had been left there. "Noddy Newman!" shouted a boy among the spectators. The young athlete heard his name, and too late he remembered that he had exposed himself to the gaze of the constables, who might by this time be in search of him. During the rest of the afternoon he kept himself out of sight; but the mischief had already been done. CHAPTER VII. THE RING-MASTER. When the performance was over, Noddy, with the assistance of one of his companions, dressed himself in "trunk and tights," and appeared in the ring to take his first lesson in graceful movements. He could turn the somersets, and go through with the other evolutions; but there was a certain polish needed--so the ring-master said--to make them pass off well. He was to assume a graceful position at the beginning and end of each act; he must recover himself without clumsiness; he must bow, and make a flourish with his hands, when he had done a brilliant thing. Noddy had not much taste for this branch of the profession. He did not like the bowing and the flourishing. If the feat itself did not please the people, he could not win them by smirking. He was much pleased with his costume, and this kept him good-natured, under the severe training of the ring-master, for a time. Mr. Whippleby was coarse and rough in his manners. During the show he had been all grace and elegance, and did not use any big words, but now he was as rough as a bear, and swore like a pirate. He was just like a cat's paw,--he kept the sharp claws down while the dear people were present; but now he thrust them out. Noddy found the "business" was no joke. Mr. Whippleby did not so regard it, now that the training had commenced; and the novice found that he had placed himself under a very tyrannical master. He made his bows and flourished his arms, with all the grace he could command for a time; but he did not come up to his severe teacher's standard. "Do that again," said Mr. Whippleby, with savage emphasis. "Don't hurry it." Noddy did it again, as slowly as he could; but he was apparently just as far from perfection as before. "If you don't do better than that, I'll put the whip around your legs!" shouted the impatient ring-master. "One of the mules could do it better." "I did it as well as I could," replied Noddy, rather tartly. "You will do it better than that, or your legs will smart. Now do it again." Noddy obeyed. He did not think the ring-master really intended to strike him with the long whip he held in his hand, but supposed he was so much in the habit of threatening the clown with the lash, that he did it now from the force of habit. His last attempt did not satisfy Mr. Whippleby, who stormed at him more furiously than before. "Do you think I have nothing better to do than waste my time over a blockhead like you? I haven't had my bitters yet. Now do it again; and if you fail this time you will catch it." Noddy turned his somerset; but he had hardly recovered himself before he received a smart cut from the whip in the tenderest part of his leg. There was a young lion in the novice, and a blow from any man was more than he could endure. He expressed his mind in regard to the outrage with such freedom, that Mr. Whippleby lost his temper, if he ever had any to lose, and he began to lash the unfortunate youth in the most brutal manner. Noddy, finding there was no satisfaction to be obtained by facing the ring-master, fled from the spot, leaping up on the seats where the spectators sat. He was maddened to fury by the harsh treatment he had received; and thirsting for vengeance, he seized whatever missiles he could find, and hurled them at his persecutor. His legs seemed to be on fire from the effects of the blows he had received. He rubbed them for a moment, while he hurled the most bitter denunciations at the ring-master. "Now, come down, and try again," called Mr. Whippleby, who did not seem to be much disconcerted by what had taken place, when he had in some measure recovered his equanimity. "No, I won't!" replied Noddy. "Have you got enough, Mr. Arthur De Forrest?" "I will give _you_ enough before you get through." While this colloquy was going on, the manager appeared in the ring. Whippleby laughingly told him what had happened, and he seemed to be much amused by it; but the ring-master had certainly changed his tone at the appearance of the "head man." "Come, my boy, come down, and let me see how well you do your business," said the manager. "I've had enough of it," replied Noddy, as he returned to the ring. "I'm not a horse, and I'm not going to be treated like one." "That's your initiation, my boy," said Whippleby. "We always try new beginners in that way, to find out what they are made of." "You will find out what I'm made of, if you hit me again with that whip." "I know now. You won't need any more, if you try to do what you are told." "I'm not going to be whipped, whether I try or not," added Noddy, doggedly. "You shall not be whipped, my boy," said the manager. "Now show me your ground act." The novice was about to comply,--for he had already come to the conclusion that the "head man" would protect him,--when he saw two men enter the tent. They did not belong to the company, and Noddy was quite sure he had often seen them in Whitestone. "We don't allow visitors in here now," said the manager. "We come on business. There is a boy here that we want to find," replied one of the men. "You must leave the tent," said the manager, rather sharply. "I am a constable, and there is a boy about here that I want." "What's his name?" "They call him Noddy Newman." "What do you want of him?" "That's my business," answered the constable, rudely. "The boy came into the ring this afternoon during the show, and I suppose he belongs to the company." "That's the fellow!" exclaimed the other constable, pointing to Noddy, who was trying to take himself off without being noticed. "That's Arthur De Forrest," interposed the manager. "No, it isn't; I've known him this five years," said the man who had recognized the culprit. Both of them walked towards Noddy, with the intention, apparently, of laying violent hands on him; but the young gentleman in "trunk and tights" was not prepared to yield up his personal liberty, and he retreated. The officers were in a position where they could stop him from leaving the tent by either of the two entrances; and Noddy, finding his exit prevented, seized a rope which was hanging down by the centre-pole, and climbed up out of the reach of his pursuers. "What do you want of me?" demanded the young athlete, as he perched himself in a comfortable position on the "slack-rope," which was suspended to the pole. "We shall not do you any harm, my boy," said one of the officers. "What do you want of me?" "There is good news for you; and you are wanted over at Squire Wriggs's office." "I know ye! You want to take me to the court-house. You can't humbug me," said Noddy, fully confirmed in his suspicions by the conduct of the men. "We won't hurt you." "You want to take me up." "No, we don't; we only want to take you up to Squire Wriggs's office. It's all for your good." "No, you don't," replied Noddy. "You can't cheat me." "We don't want to cheat you. We are only sent to find you. We will not arrest you." "I know better. You can't fool me. I heard Squire Wriggs say he wanted to take me up to the court-house; and you don't catch me near no court-house. I know what you mean." "You are mistaken, my boy. Come down, and I will tell you all about it." "When I do, you let me know," replied Noddy, who felt so secure from arrest in his present quarters that he expressed his mind with perfect freedom. "We promise not to arrest you," persisted the constable who did the talking. "We have been looking for you all day." "You may look another day, if you like," added the defiant refugee. "You want me for setting fire to the boat-house; but I am not to blame, if I did do it." "We don't know anything about the boat-house; Squire Wriggs has a lot of money for you." "You can't catch an old bird in any such trap as that," answered Noddy, shaking his head significantly. The officers used all their powers of persuasion to induce him to come down; but Noddy, satisfied that they had been sent by Squire Wriggs, was fully persuaded that they were trying to deceive him. The story about a "lot of money" for a poor boy like him, who had not a friend in the world, was too absurd, in his estimation, to be entertained for a moment. He had heard the squire speak to Mr. Grant about thirty thousand dollars; but such a sum was beyond his comprehension. He did not believe any man, not even the owner of Woodville, had so much money; and of course it was nothing to him. The constables got out of patience at last; and though they showed no signs of anger or malice, they exhibited an intention to catch him, which was much worse. One of them commenced the ascent of the pole in the centre of the tent. The circus people, who seemed to be in full sympathy with Noddy, remained neutral, for the intruders were officers of the law, and it was not prudent to oppose them. Noddy perceived the object of his pursuers, and grasping one of the tent-ropes, he scrambled up to the very apex of the canvas structure, and crawled through the aperture around the pole. From this point he slid down to the short poles, and then dropped upon the ground, before the man in the ring could pass round to the outside of the tent. Dodging under the curtains, he reached the place which served as a dressing-room. Removing his "trunks," he hurried on his clothes, and rushed out into the open air again. His persecutors were not in sight, and he did not lose a moment in putting a safe distance between himself and them. Precisely as a well-educated duck or other water-fowl would have done, he hastened to the river, as his most natural element. He had made a complete circuit of the town in his flight. He did not dare to show himself to a living being; for it seemed to him just as though the whole country was after him. When he reached the river, he sat down on the bank, exhausted by his efforts and by the excitement of the afternoon. "I reckon I've got about circus enough," said he to himself,--for there was no one else to whom he could say it. "That Whippleby is worse than a heathen. I don't like any of them." He rubbed his legs, which were not yet done smarting; and the pain seemed to be an emphatic protest against circuses in general, and the "Great Olympian Circus" in particular. But whether he liked the circus or not, it was no longer safe for him to remain with the company. He had taken "French leave" of the manager, and had cheated him out of the tights which enveloped his body from neck to heels. This thought reminded him that they did not feel at all comfortable, and he wished the manager had his own again. Having abandoned the circus profession in disgust, he wondered what he should do next. It was useless for him to stay in the vicinity of Woodville; and the only safe plan for him to adopt was, to go away to some other part of the country, or go to sea at once. He could not tolerate the idea of leaving without letting Bertha know where he was. The officers were on his track, and he could not hope always to escape them. The court-house was terrible, and prompt action was necessary. He must have a sight of Bertha, even if he did not speak to her; and at the risk of being captured, he determined to stay in the neighborhood of Woodville till the next morning. Near the place where he sat there was a skiff moored to the bank. He hauled it in, and took up the oars. He did not mean to steal it, only to borrow it till the next morning. With this comfortable reflection he cast off the painter, and pulled over to the other side of the river. It was now quite late in the evening. He had not eaten any supper, and, like other boys, he was always hungry at meal times. He wanted something to eat; and it occurred to him that there were generally some crackers and cheese in the locker of the Greyhound, and he rowed down to her moorings. He found what he wanted there, and made a hearty supper. He was satisfied then, and soon went to sleep in the stern-sheets of the sail-boat. Fortunately for him he waked up about daylight, and was not seen by any of the early risers at Woodville. Appropriating the rest of the crackers and cheese for his breakfast, he got into the skiff and rowed up to the Glen, where he hoped, in the course of the forenoon, to see Bertha. CHAPTER VIII. GOOD-BYE TO WOODVILLE. Bertha often walked to the Glen before breakfast, and Noddy expected to find her there on the present occasion. As she did not appear, he followed the path toward Woodville, and actually reached the lawn which surrounded the mansion before he thought of the danger he incurred. But it was breakfast time in the servants' quarters, and he was not seen. Keeping on the outskirts of the lawn, where he could make good his retreat in case of necessity, he walked nearly around to the pier, and was so fortunate as to discover Bertha at the turn of a winding path, near his route. The sight of her filled him with emotion, and brought to his mind the remembrance of the many happy days he had spent in her presence. He could hardly restrain the tears which the thought of leaving the place brought to his eyes, though Noddy was not given to the feminine custom of weeping. "Miss Bertha," said he, as she approached the spot where he stood. She started back with alarm; but he stepped forward from the concealment of the bushes, and with a smile of pleasure she recognized him. "Why, Noddy, is that you?" said she, walking towards the spot where he stood. "It's me, Miss Bertha; but I suppose you don't want to see me now." "I am very glad to see you. What did you go away for?" "Because they were going to put me in the court-house." "In the court-house!" exclaimed Bertha, who was better acquainted with legal affairs than her pupil. "Yes, for setting the boat-house afire." "I don't think they intended to take you to the court-house." "O, I know they did. I have had two constables after me; but I got away from them. Besides, I heard Squire Wriggs say they were going to take me to the court-house. I heard him say so myself." "Perhaps it is so," said Bertha, musing. "Squire Wriggs came to see father yesterday morning. They went out together, and were speaking of you as they left the house." "I'm glad you didn't have anything to do with it," said Noddy, delighted to find that Bertha was not one of his persecutors. Then, with the utmost simplicity, and apparently with the feeling that he was a persecuted youth, he told her everything that had occurred from the time he first saw Mr. Grant and Squire Wriggs on the lawn. "I don't know what my father's plans are," said Bertha, sadly; "but he thinks it is no longer safe to permit you to roam about the place. He is afraid you will set the house on fire, or do some other terrible thing." "But I wouldn't, Miss Bertha," protested Noddy. "Why did you do such a wicked thing?" "I couldn't help it." "Yes, you could, Noddy. That's only making a bad matter worse. Of course you could help setting a building on fire." "It wasn't my fault, Miss Bertha," stammered he; "I can't explain it now--perhaps some time I may; and when you understand it, you won't think so bad of me." "If there is anything about it I don't know, why don't you tell me?" added Bertha, mystified by his strange remark. "I can't say anything now. Please don't ask me anything about it, Miss Bertha. I'm not half so much to blame as you think I am; but I set the fire, and they are after me for it. They have used all sorts of tricks to catch me; but I'm not going into any court-house, or any tinker's shop." "What tricks do you mean?" "They said they had a lot of money for me, and that Squire Wriggs wouldn't do me any harm." "Well, I don't know anything about that. Father went over to Whitestone with Squire Wriggs, after you ran away. He went over again last night, after he came from the city, and I haven't seen him for more than a moment since." "He is going to send me to the court-house," said Noddy, fully satisfied that Bertha knew nothing about the proceedings of her father. "I am going to sea, now." "To sea, Noddy?" "Yes, I'm going to work and win, as you told me, and when I come back I shall be respectable." Bertha had her doubts on this point. She had almost lost all hope of her _protégé_, and she did not think that a voyage in the forecastle of a ship would be likely to improve his manners or his morals. "I can't let you go, Noddy," said she. "I must go; if I stay here they will put me in prison. You don't want to see me put in prison, Bertha." "I don't." "Then what can I do? The officers are after me this moment." "But I shall have to tell my father that I have seen you." "You may do that; and you may tell him, too, that it won't be any use for him to try to find me, for I shall keep out of the way. If they catch me they will be smarter than I am," added Noddy, confidently. "I want to see you again, Noddy, after I have talked with father about you. I don't believe he intends to send you to prison." "I know he does. I come over here to see you before I went away. I couldn't go without seeing you, or I shouldn't have come. I may never see you again, for I shan't run any more risks after this." Bertha said all she could to induce him to meet her again; but the cunning youth was afraid that some trap might be set to catch him, and he assured her that this was positively his last appearance at Woodville for the present. He was satisfied that Mr. Grant had taken the case into his own hands, and that she could not save him if she would. "Now, good-bye, Miss Bertha," said he, wiping a tear from his face. "Don't go, Noddy," pleaded she. "I must." "You haven't any clothes but those you have on, and you have no money." "I don't want any. I can get along very well. Won't you shake hands with me before I go?" "Certainly, I will," replied she, giving him her hand. "You will not let me do anything for you now?" "You have done more than I deserve. Good-bye, Miss Bertha," said he, pressing the hand he held. "Good-bye, Noddy," replied she. "Good-bye, if you must go." "There comes your father," exclaimed he, as he bounded off into the grove with the speed of an antelope. "Was that Noddy?" asked Mr. Grant, as he joined Bertha a few minutes later. "Yes, father." "Why didn't you tell me he was here, Bertha?" "He came but a few moments ago. He came to bid me good-bye." "Where is he going?" "He is going to sea. He says you intend to take him to the court-house." "This is very unfortunate. A most remarkable event in regard to the boy has occurred, which I haven't time to tell you about now. It is very important that I should find him at once." "I don't think you can catch him. He is very much afraid of being sent to prison." "I had no intention of sending him to prison," laughed Mr. Grant. "But he heard Squire Wriggs say he must take him over to the court." "That was for another matter--in a word, to have a guardian appointed, for Noddy will be a rich man when he is of age." "Noddy?" exclaimed Bertha. "Yes; but I haven't a moment to spare. I have been at work on his affairs since yesterday morning. They are all right now; and all we want to enable us to complete the business is the presence of the boy." "Poor fellow! He is terribly worked up at the idea of going to the court-house, or even to a tinker's shop, as he calls it." "Well, he is running away from his own fortune and happiness; and I must find him." "I hope you will, father," said Bertha, earnestly, as Mr. Grant hastened away to organize a pursuit of the refugee. All the male servants on the place were summoned, and several started off in the direction in which Noddy had retreated. The boatman and others were sent off in the boats; and the prospect was, that the fugitive would be captured within a few hours. As our story relates more especially to the runaway himself, we shall follow him, and leave the well-meaning people of Woodville to pursue their investigations alone. When Noddy discovered Mr. Grant, he was satisfied that the gentleman saw him, for he quickened his pace, and walked towards the place where he stood holding Bertha's hand. He ran with all his might by the familiar paths till he reached the Glen. There were, at present, no signs of a pursuit; but he was confident that it would not be delayed, and he did not even stop to take breath. Rushing down to the water, he embarked in the skiff, and rowed up the river, taking care to keep in shore, where he could not be seen from below. Above Van Alstine's Island, he crossed the river, and began to work his way down; but the white sails of the Greyhound were seen, with all the boats belonging to the estate, headed up stream. They were chasing him in earnest, and he saw that it was not safe to remain on the river. "Do you know where Mr. Grover lives?" he asked of a ragged boy who was fishing on the bank of the river. "Below Whitestone?" "Yes." "Will you take this boat down there?" "I will," replied the boy, glad of the job, and willing to do it without any compensation. Noddy had taken off the tights belonging to the circus company, and rolled them up in a bundle. In order to be as honest as Bertha had taught him to be,--though he was not always so particular,--he engaged the boy to leave them at the circus tent. The boy got into the boat, and began his trip down the river. Noddy felt that he had been honest, and he was rather proud of the record he was to leave behind him; for it did not once occur to him that borrowing the boat without leave was only a little better than stealing it, even if he did return it. The servants at Woodville and the constables at Whitestone were on his track, and he had no time to spare. Taking a road leading from the river, he walked away from it as fast as he could. About three miles distant, he found a road leading to the northward; and thinking it better to suffer by excess of prudence than by the want of it, he took this direction, and pursued his journey till he was so tired he could go no farther. A farmer on the road gave him some dinner; and when he had rested himself, he resumed his walk. At sunset he reached a large town on the river, where he felt safe from pursuit until he saw the flaming hand-bills of the Great Olympian Circus, which was almost as bad as meeting one of the constables, for these worthies would expect to find him at the tent, and probably were on the watch for him. Noddy was too tired to walk any farther that day. He wanted to reach some large seaport, like New York or Boston, where he could find a vessel bound on a foreign voyage. He was almost afraid to go to the former city, for he had heard about the smart detectives they have there, who catch any person guilty of crime, though they never saw him before. He had told Bertha that he intended to go to sea; and he was afraid that Mr. Grant would be on the watch for him, or set some of these detectives to catch him, if he went there. It was almost time for the steamers for Albany, which went up in the night, to reach the town, and he determined to go on board of one, and proceed as far up the river as he could with the small sum of money in his possession. He soon found the landing-place, and presently a steamer came along. "Where do you want to go, boy?" asked one of the officers of the boat. "I want to go to Albany; but I haven't money enough to pay my fare." "How much money have you got?" "Thirty-five cents. I will go as far as that will pay my fare." "That will only be to the next landing-place." "Couldn't you give me some work to do, to pay my fare up to Albany?" The officer happened to be rather pleased with Noddy, and told him he might stand by and help land the baggage at the stopping-places. He gave the little wanderer some supper in the mess-room, after the boat got off, and Noddy was as grateful as though the man had given him a gold mine. When the steamer made another landing, he worked with all his might, and was highly commended for his skill and activity. And so he passed the night, sleeping between the stoppages, and working like a mule at every landing. In the morning the boat reached Albany, and the officer gave him his breakfast with the engineers. Noddy felt safe from pursuit now; he went on shore, and walked about the city, thinking what he should do next. CHAPTER IX. AN ATTEMPT TO WORK AND WIN. Boston was two hundred miles distant, and Noddy was principally excited to know how he should get there, for he had decided to ship in that city. It would take him a week to go on foot, and his funds were now completely exhausted, so that he could not pay his fare by railroad. If he could neither ride nor walk, the question was narrowed down to a point where it needed no further consideration. "Here, boy, do you want a job?" said a gentleman, coming out of a dwelling with a valise and a large bundle in his hands. "Yes, sir; thank you, sir," replied Noddy, springing forward, and taking the heavier articles, without giving the gentleman the trouble to state what he wanted of him. This incident seemed to solve the problem for him. He could remain in Albany long enough to earn a sufficient sum of money to pay his fare to Boston. He followed the gentleman to the railroad station, and handed the valise to the baggage-master. The gentleman gave him a quarter of a dollar for his services. It was a liberal return for the short time he had been employed, and a few more such jobs as that would soon put him in funds. Noddy was sanguine now that he could earn money with entire ease, and all the difficulties which had beset him began to disappear. There was something exceedingly pleasant in the idea of being independent; of putting his hand into his pocket and always finding some money there which had been earned by his own labor. It was a novel sensation to him. "Work and win!" exclaimed he, as he walked out of the railroad station. "I understand it all now, and I may thank Miss Bertha for the idea." In the enthusiasm of the moment, he began to consider whether it would not be better to remain on shore and amass a fortune, which he believed could be done in a short time. He could carry bundles and valises till he got money enough to buy a horse and wagon, when he could go into the business on a more extensive scale. The road to fortune was open to him; all his trials and difficulties had suddenly vanished, and he had only to reach out his hand to pluck the golden harvest. The rattling of a train which had just arrived disturbed this pleasant dream, and Noddy hastened back to secure the fruit of his brilliant resolution. There were plenty of gentlemen with bags and valises in their hands, but not a single one of them wanted any assistance; and some of them answered his civil salutation with insult and harshness. The experiment did not work so well as he had anticipated, for Noddy's great expectations led him to believe that he should make about half a dollar out of the arrival of this train, instead of which he did not make a single cent. "Work and win; but where are you going to get your work?" said Noddy to himself. No more trains were to arrive for some hours, and he posted himself in the street, asking for a job whenever there was the least prospect of obtaining one. At noon, Noddy was hungry, and was obliged to spend half his morning's earnings for a coarse dinner, for his circumstances did not permit him to indulge in the luxury of roast beef and plum pudding. During the afternoon he lay in wait for a job at the railroad stations, and in the most public places of the city. But the sum of his earnings was only five cents. "Work and win!" said he. "Sum total of day's work, thirty cents; not enough to buy what I want to eat. It don't pay." If work did not pay, stealing certainly would not; and we are happy to say, Bertha Grant had done her duty by him so faithfully, that he did not feel tempted to resort to any irregular means of obtaining a subsistence. If work did not pay, it was only because he could not obtain it. He had not yet struck a productive vein. He had been a fishing a great many times; but when he had no success, he neither concluded that fish were not good, nor that there were no fish in the river. There was a train to arrive, after dark, from New York city, and he determined to make one more effort to improve his fortunes. As the passengers came out of the station with small parcels of baggage in their hands, he offered his services to them. His heart almost leaped with rapture when a gentleman handed him a small carpet-bag, and told him to follow to the Delavan House. He took the bag, and then, to his horror, he discovered that the gentleman was Mr. Grant! What had brought him to Albany? As Noddy's sphere of observation was confined to the little world of his own affairs, he concluded that the owner of Woodville must be there for the purpose of arresting him. Probably some of those smart constables had traced him to the town where he had embarked for Albany. Again the horrors of the court-house, the jail, and the tinker's shop were present to his mind. He had taken the valise, and was now following Mr. Grant to the hotel. It was dark at the place where he had received the carpet-bag, otherwise he would have been recognized. Noddy had no doubt in regard to the correctness of his conclusions; and he could not help thinking that a great man, like Mr. Grant, was taking a good deal of pains to capture a poor boy, like him. His arrest was a matter of a great deal more consequence than he had supposed, which made it all the more necessary to his future peace and happiness that he should escape. The bag tied him to his persecutor, or he would have run away as fast as he could. He could not carry off the baggage, for that would subject him to another penalty, even if he had been dishonest enough to do such a thing. He decided to follow Mr. Grant to the hotel, drop the bag, and run. "Boy, do you know where the police office is?" said Mr. Grant, suddenly turning round upon him. "No, sir," replied Noddy, whose natural boldness prompted him, when fairly cornered, to face the danger. "What! Noddy?" exclaimed Mr. Grant. "I came to look for you." "Thank you, sir," replied Noddy. "You were a foolish fellow to run away. I'm not going to hurt you; neither is anybody else." Noddy was not a little astonished to find Mr. Grant, in his own homely terms, "trying it on" in this manner. It was not strange that the constable, or even Squire Wriggs, should resort to deception to entrap him; but he was not quite prepared for it from the upright proprietor of Woodville. If he was wanted "bad enough" to induce a gentleman of wealth and position to make a journey to Albany after him, it was the very best reason in the world why he should get out of the way as soon as possible. "How is Miss Bertha, sir?" asked Noddy, who did not know what else to say. "She is quite well, and feels very badly now at your absence. You have made a great mistake, Noddy," replied Mr. Grant. "Is Miss Fanny pretty well, sir?" "Very well. We don't wish to injure you, or even to punish you, for setting the boat-house on fire. The worst that I shall do will be to send you----" "Is Ben any better than he was?" continued Noddy, fully satisfied in his own mind in regard to the last remark. "Ben is very well," said Mr. Grant, impatiently. "Now, you will come with me, Noddy, and not try to run away again." "How is Mrs. Green and the rest of the folks?" asked Noddy, fully resolved that even Mr. Grant should not "pull wool over his eyes," as he quaintly expressed his view of this attempt to deceive him. "She is well. Now come with me, Noddy. I will give you a good supper, and you shall have everything you need. Your circumstances have changed now, and you will be a rich man when you are of age." "Have you heard from Mr. Richard lately, sir?" "Never mind Richard, now. Come with me, Noddy. If you attempt to run away again, I shall be obliged to hand you over to a policeman." That looked much more like it, in Noddy's opinion, and he had no doubt of Mr. Grant's entire sincerity in the last remark. "I will follow you, sir," replied Noddy, though he did not intend to continue on this route much farther. "You understand that I am your friend, Noddy, and that no harm shall come to you." "Yes, sir; I understand that." "Come here now, and walk by my side. I don't want to call a policeman to take charge of you." Noddy did not want him to do so either, and did not intend that he should. He placed himself by the side of his powerful persecutor, as he still regarded him, and they walked together towards the hotel. The young refugee was nervous and uneasy, and watched with the utmost diligence for an opportunity to slip away. As they were crossing a street, a hack, approaching rapidly, caused Mr. Grant to quicken his pace in order to avoid being run over. Noddy, burdened with the weight of the carpet-bag, did not keep up with him, and he was obliged to fall back to escape the carriage. "Here, boy, you take this bag, and follow the owner to the hotel, and he will give you something," said Noddy to a ragged boy at the corner of the street. Without waiting for an answer, he darted down the cross street, and made his best time in the rush for liberty. The boy, to whom Noddy had given the bag, ran over the street, and placed himself behind Mr. Grant, whom he judged to be the owner of the baggage. "Where is the other boy?" demanded Mr. Grant. "Gone down State Street to find ten cents he lost there," replied the wicked boy. "I'll carry your bag, sir." "But I want the boy! Which way did he go?" said Mr. Grant, in hurried tones. "Down there, sir. His mother'll lick him if he don't find the ten cents he lost. I'll carry the bag." But Mr. Grant was unwilling to trust his property to the hands of such a boy, and he immediately reclaimed it. "I want that boy!" exclaimed Mr. Grant, in great agitation. "Which way did he go?" "Down there," replied the ragged boy, pointing down a street in exactly the opposite direction from that taken by the fugitive. But Mr. Grant was too wise a man to follow. He was in search of a policeman just then. As these worthy functionaries are never at hand when they are wanted, of course he did not find one. He called a carriage, and ordered the driver to convey him with all speed, and at double fare, to the police office. On his arrival, he immediately stated his business, and in a few hours the whole police force of the city were on the lookout for poor Noddy Newman. The object of all this friendly solicitude was unconscious of the decided steps taken by Mr. Grant; but he ran till he had placed a safe distance between himself and his potent oppressor. He saw plenty of policemen in his flight, but he paid no attention to them, nor even thought what a powerful combination they formed against a weak boy like himself. He was satisfied, however, that he must leave the city; and when he was out of breath with running, he walked as nearly on a straight course as the streets would permit, till he reached the outskirts of the city. "Stop that heifer!" shouted a man, who was chasing the animal. Noddy headed her off, and she darted away in another direction. Our refugee was interested in the case at once; for he could not permit any horned beast to circumvent him. He ran as though he had not run before that evening, and brought the wayward animal up in a corner when the man came to his assistance. "You are a smart boy," said the drover. "That's so," puffed Noddy, modestly. "If you haven't got nothin' better to do, I'll make it wuth your while to help drive these cattle down to the keers," added the man. As Noddy had nothing better to do, he at once accepted the offer, without even stipulating the price. They started the heifer again, and she concluded to join the drove which was in the adjoining street. It was no easy matter to drive the animals, which were not accustomed to the ways of the city, through the streets, and Noddy won a great deal of credit for the vigor and agility with which he discharged his duty. They reached the ferry boat, and crossing, came to the "keers," into which the young drover assisted in loading the cattle. His employer gave him a quarter of a dollar, which hardly came up to Noddy's expectations; for it seemed to him like working very hard, and winning very little for it. The man asked him some questions about his home. Noddy told as much of the truth as suited his purpose, and concluded by saying he wanted to get to Boston, where he could find something to do. "O, you want sunthin to do--do ye?" replied the drover. "Well, I'll give you your victuals, and what clothes you want, to help me drive." This was not exactly Noddy's idea of "work and win," and he told the drover he wanted to go to sea. "I'll tell you what I'll do. You may go down to Brighton, and help take keer of the cattle in the keers, and I'll take keer of you on the way." Noddy was more than satisfied with all these "keers," and he promptly accepted the offer. In half an hour the train started, and he was on the way to Brighton, which is only a few miles from Boston. CHAPTER X. POOR MOLLIE. Noddy's duty on the journey to Brighton was to assist in keeping the cattle on their feet. When the poor animals become weary, they are disposed to lie down; but they are so closely packed that this is not possible for more than one or two in a car; and if one lies down he is liable to be trampled to death by the others. The persons in charge of the cattle, therefore, are obliged to watch them, and keep them on their feet. The train occasionally stopped during the night, and was several times delayed, so that it did not reach its destination till the middle of the following forenoon. The drover provided him a hearty breakfast in the morning, and Noddy was in no haste. The future was still nothing but a blank to him, and he was in no hurry to commence the battle of life. When he arrived at Brighton he assisted in driving the cattle to the pens; and then, with half a dollar, which the drover gave him for his extra services, he started for Boston, whose spires he could even then see in the distance. He reached the city, and from the Mill Dam--the long bridge he had just crossed--he walked to the Common. Being quite worn out by two nights of hard work, and the long walk he had just taken, he seated himself on one of the stone benches near the Frog Pond. It was a warm and pleasant day, and he watched the sports of the happy children who were at play, until his eyelids grew heavy, and he hardly knew the State House from the Big Tree. For a boy of his age he had undergone a severe experience. The exciting circumstances which surrounded him had kept him wide awake until his physical nature could endure no more. Leaving the seat he had occupied, he sought out the quietest place he could find, and stretching himself on the grass, went to sleep. It was nearly sunset when he awoke; but he felt like a new being, ready now to work and win at any business which might offer. He wandered about the streets of the city for two hours, and then ate a hearty supper at a restaurant. It was too late to do anything that night, and he asked a policeman to tell him where he could sleep. The officer, finding he was a friendless stranger, gave him a bed at the station-house. In the morning he made his way to the wharves, and during the long day he went from vessel to vessel in search of a berth as cabin-boy. He asked for this situation, because he had frequently heard the term; but he was willing to accept any position he could obtain. No one wanted a cabin-boy, or so small a sailor as he was. Night came on again, with a hopeless prospect for the future; and poor Noddy began to question the wisdom of the course he had taken. A tinker's shop, with plenty to eat, and a place to sleep, was certainly much better than wandering about the streets. He could not help thinking of Woodville, and the pleasant room he had occupied in the servants' quarters; of the bountiful table at which he had sat; and, above all, of the kindness and care which Miss Bertha had always bestowed upon him. With all his heart he wished he was there; but when he thought of the court-house and the prison, he was more reconciled to his fate, and was determined to persevere in his efforts to obtain work. It was the close of a long summer day. He had been wandering about the wharves at the north part of the city; and as the darkness came on, he walked up Hanover Street in search of a policeman, who would give him permission to sleep another night in the station-house. As he did not readily find one, he turned into another street. It made but little difference to him where he went, for he had no destination, and he was as likely to find a policeman in one place as another. He had gone but a short distance before he saw a crowd of ragged boys pursuing and hooting at a drunken man who was leading a little girl ten or eleven years of age,--or rather, she was trying to lead him. Under ordinary circumstances, we are afraid that Noddy would have joined the ragamuffins and enjoyed the senseless sport as well as any of them; but his own sorrows raised him above this meanness in the present instance, and he passed the boys without a particle of interest in the fun. He was going by the drunken man and the little girl, when one of the boldest of the pursuers rushed up and gave the man a push, which caused him to fall on the pavement. The young vagabonds raised a chorus of laughter, and shouted with all their might. The little girl, who was evidently the drunkard's daughter, did not desert him. She bent over him, and used all her feeble powers to assist him to his feet again. "My poor father!" sobbed she; and her heart seemed to be broken by the grief and peril which surrounded her. The tones with which these words were spoken touched the heart of Noddy; and without stopping to consider any troublesome questions, he sprang to the assistance of the girl. The man was not utterly helpless; and with the aid of Noddy and his daughter he got upon his feet again. At that moment another of the unruly boys, emboldened by the feat of the first, rushed up and grasped the arm of the little girl, as if to pull her away from her father's support. "Don't touch me! Don't touch me!" pleaded the grief-stricken girl, in tones so full of sorrow that our wanderer could not resist them, if her vagabond persecutor could. He sprang to her assistance, and with one vigorous and well-directed blow, he knocked the rude assailant halfway across the street, and left him sprawling on the pavement. Noddy did not wait to see what the boy would do next, but turned his attention to the poor girl, whose situation, rather than that of her father, had awakened his sympathy. "What is your father's name?" asked Noddy, who proceeded as though he had a sovereign remedy for the miseries of the situation. "Captain McClintock," sobbed the little girl, still clinging to her father, with no sting of reproach in her words or her manner. "Don't cry, little girl; I will do what I can for you," said Noddy, warmly. "I can lick those boys, if I can't do anything more." "Thank you!" replied the afflicted daughter. "If I can only get him down to the vessel, I shall be so glad!" "Want to fight?" shouted the young ruffian, whom Noddy had upset, coming as near the party as he dared. "I'll give you fight, if you come near me again," replied the champion of the poor girl. "Come on, if you want to fight," cried the little bully, who had not the pluck to approach within twenty feet of his late assailant. The crowd of boys still shouted, and some of them carried their hostility so far as to throw sticks and stones at the little party; but as long as they kept at a respectful distance, Noddy did not deem it wise to meddle with them, though he kept one eye on them, and stood ready to punish those who ventured too near. "Come, Captain McClintock," said he, as he attempted to lead the drunken father, "let's go on board." "Heave ahead, my hearty!" replied the captain, as he pressed forward, though his steps were so uncertain that his two feeble supporters could hardly keep him on his feet. The remarkable trio passed down Fleet Street, and, after many difficulties and much "rough weather," reached the head of the wharf, where the little girl said her father's vessel lay. They were still closely followed by the merciless ragamuffins, who had pelted them with stones and sticks, until the patience of Noddy was severely tried. "Come, my boy, now we'll--hic--now we'll go and--hic--go and take something 'fore we go on board," said the drunken captain, suddenly coming to a dead halt in the middle of the street. "O, no, father!" cried the daughter; "let us go on board." "Something to take, Mollie, and you shall--hic--you shall have some--hic--some soda water." "I don't want any, father. Do come on board." "You are a good girl, Mollie, and you shall--hic--you shall have some cake." "Not to-night, father. We will get it in the morning," pleaded poor Mollie, trembling with apprehension for the consequences which must follow another glass of liquor. "Come, Captain McClintock, let's go on board," said Noddy. "Who are you?" demanded the inebriated man. "I'm the best fellow out; and I want to see your vessel." "You shall see her, my boy. If you are--hic--the best fellow out, come and take something with me," stammered the captain. "Let's see the vessel first," replied Noddy, tugging away at the arm of the drunken man. "She's a very fine--hic--fine vessel." "Let me see her, then." "Heave ahead, my jolly roebuck. I've got some of the best--hic--on board zever you tasted. Come along." Noddy and Mollie kept him going till they reached the part of the wharf where the captain's vessel was moored; and the end of their troubles seemed to be at hand, when the boys, aware that their sport was nearly over, became very bold and daring. They pressed forward, and began to push the drunken man, until they roused his anger to such a degree that he positively refused to go on board till he chastised them as they deserved. He had broken away from his feeble protectors, and in attempting to pursue them, had fallen flat upon the planks which covered the wharf. Mollie ran to his assistance; and as she did so, one of the boys pushed her over upon him. Noddy's blood was up in earnest, for the little girl's suffering made her sacred in his eyes. He leaped upon the rude boy, bore him down, and pounded him till he yelled in mortal terror. Some of the boldest of the ragamuffins came to his relief when they realized how hard it was going with him, and that he was in the hands of only one small boy. Noddy was as quick as a flash in his movements, and he turned upon the crowd, reckless of consequences. One or two of the boys showed fight; but the young lion tipped them over before they could make up their minds how to attack him. The rest ran away. Noddy gave chase, and in his furious wrath felt able to whip the whole of them. He pursued them only a short distance; his sympathy for poor Mollie got the better even of his anger, and he hastened back to her side. As he turned, the cowardly boys turned also, and a storm of such missiles as the wharf afforded was hurled after him. By this time two men from the vessel had come to the assistance of the captain, and raised him to his feet. He was still full of vengeance, and wanted to chastise the boys. The young ruffians followed Noddy down the wharf, and he was compelled, in self-defence, to turn upon them again, and in presence of the drunken man he punished a couple of them pretty severely. One of the sailors came to his aid, and the foe was again vanquished. The appearance of a policeman at the head of the wharf now paralyzed their efforts, and they disbanded and scattered. "You are a good fellow!" exclaimed Captain McClintock, extending his hand to Noddy as he returned to the spot. "The best fellow out," replied the little hero, facetiously, as he took the offered hand. "So you be! Now come on board, and--hic--and take something." "Thank you, captain. I should like to go on board of your vessel." "Come along, then, my jolly fellow," added the captain, as he reeled towards the vessel. "You are a smart little--hic--you are a smart little fellow. If you hadn't--hic--licked them boys, I should--hic." Noddy thought he did "hic;" but with the assistance of the sailors, the captain got on board, and went down into his cabin. His first movement was to bring out a bottle of gin and a couple of glasses, into which he poured a quantity of the fiery liquor. He insisted that Noddy should drink; but the boy had never tasted anything of the kind in his life; and from the lessons of Bertha and Ben he had acquired a certain horror of the cup, which had not been diminished by the incidents of the evening. He could not drink, and he could not refuse without making trouble with his intoxicated host. But Mollie saw his difficulty, and slyly substituted a glass of water for the gin, which he drank. Captain McClintock was satisfied, and overcome by his last potion, he soon sank back on the locker, and dropped asleep. With the assistance of the mate he was put into the berth in his state-room, to sleep off the effects of his debauch. "I'm so grateful to you!" exclaimed Mollie, when all her trials seemed to have ended. "O, never mind me." "Where do you live?" "Nowhere." "Have you no home?" "No." "Where do you stay?" "Anywhere." "Where were you going to sleep to-night?" "Anywhere I could." "Then you can sleep here." Noddy was entirely willing, and one of the eight berths in the cabin was appropriated by the mate to his use. CHAPTER XI. THE SCHOONER ROEBUCK. "What is your name?" asked Mollie, when the arrangements for the night were completed. "Noddy Newman." "Noddy? What a queer name! That isn't your real name--is it?" "Yes, I never knew any other." Mollie was certainly a very pleasing young lady, and Noddy had become quite interested in her, as we always are in those to whom we are so fortunate as to render needed assistance. She had a pretty face, and her curly hair might have challenged the envy of many a fair damsel who was wicked enough to cherish such a feeling. There was nothing rough or coarse about her, and one would hardly have expected to find so lady-like a person in such a situation in life. We make this statement in apology for the interest which Noddy took in the little maiden. The service he had rendered her was quite sufficient to create a kindly feeling towards her; and then she was so pretty, so modest, and so gentle, that his sympathy grew into admiration before she went to her little state-room. Mollie asked him a great many questions about his past life, and Noddy told her all he knew about himself--about Bertha, Fanny, and others at Woodville. He did not tell her about the affair of the boat-house, though he determined to do so at some future time, if he had the opportunity. In return for all this information, Mollie told him that the schooner in which they then were was called the Roebuck; that she belonged to her father, and that they were bound to the Sandwich Islands, where the vessel was to run as a packet between certain islands, whose names she had forgotten. Captain McClintock belonged in the State of Maine, where Mollie's mother had died two years before. Her father had some property, and learning that there was a good chance to improve his fortunes at the Sandwich Islands, he had built the Roebuck for this purpose. As these distant islands were to be his future home, he was to take his only child with him, and he had fitted up a state-room in the cabin, next to his own for her special use. Mollie told Noddy how much pleased she was with all the arrangements, and how happy she had been on the passage to Boston, where the Roebuck was to pick up an assorted cargo for the port of her destination. Then she wept when she thought of the terrible scenes through which she had just passed in the streets. She said her father did not often drink too much; that he was the very best father in the whole world; and she hoped he never would get intoxicated again as long as he lived. Noddy hoped so too; and when the little maiden had finished her story, he thought she was almost equal to Miss Bertha; and he could not think of such a thing as parting with her in the morning, again to buffet the waves of disappointment on shore. "Does your father want a boy on board of the vessel?" asked he. "I don't know. Do you want to go with us?" said Mollie, with a smile which spoke the pleasure the thought afforded her. "I should like to go with you first-rate," replied Noddy. "I want to do something, and earn some money for myself. I want to work." "Then you shall go with us!" exclaimed Mollie. "Out where we are going is a nice place to get rich. My father is going to get rich out there, and then we are coming home again." Poor child! She knew not what the future had in store for them. The bells of the city rang for nine o'clock, and Mollie said she went to bed at this time. "Can you read, Noddy?" asked she. "Yes, some." "I always read my Testament before I go to bed; I promised my mother, years ago, that I would; and I like to do it, too. I suppose you read your Testament every night--don't you?" "Sometimes; that is, I did once," replied Noddy, in some confusion, for he could not help recalling the teachings of Bertha on this subject. "Well, we will read it together. You would like to--wouldn't you?" "Yes; I don't care if I do." There was a want of enthusiasm on his part which was rather painful to the little maiden; but she got the Testament, and when she had read a few verses aloud, she passed the book to Noddy, who stumbled through his portion, and she then finished the chapter. She bade him good night, and retired to her state-room, leaving her new-made friend to meditate upon the singular events of the evening. He did not meditate a great while--he never did. His thoughts were disposed to stray from one subject to another; and from the little maiden, he found himself wondering whether Mr. Grant had finished searching for him in Albany, and whether Miss Fanny had "let the cat out of the bag" yet. Noddy was too tired and sleepy to think a great while about anything; and he turned into his berth, and went to sleep. Early in the morning Noddy was on his feet. He went on deck, and found that the Roebuck was a beautiful vessel, almost handsome enough to be a gentleman's yacht. He went upon the wharf, where he could obtain a fair view of her bow, and he was sure she would make good time with a fair breeze. When he had satisfied himself with the examination, he was more than ever inclined to go out in her. When he went down into the cabin again, Mollie was there, setting the table for breakfast. She looked as fair and as fresh as a country maiden. She gave him a very friendly greeting. "Do you do these things, Mollie?" asked he. "O, yes; I always work, and do what I can. I like to do something." "How old are you, Mollie?" "Eleven last May." "But you can't do this work when you are out at sea." "O, yes, I can." "You will be seasick." "I never was sick, and I have been to sea a great deal with my father." "How is the captain this morning?" "I don't know; I haven't seen him yet," replied she, looking very sad, as she thought of her kind father's infirmity. Captain McClintock soon came out of his state-room. He looked pale and haggard, and seemed to be thoroughly ashamed of himself for what he had done the evening before, as he ought to have been. Mollie sprang to him, as he stepped out of his room, and kissed him as lovingly as though he had never done a wrong thing in his life. He glanced at Noddy, as he entered the main cabin, and with a look of astonishment, as though his connection with the events of the previous evening were a blank to him. The captain did not say a word to Noddy, which made the boy feel as though he was an intruder in the cabin; and when he had the opportunity, he went on deck, leaving Mollie to say whatever the circumstances required in explanation of his presence. "I will never do it again, Mollie," said the fond father, as he kissed his daughter. "I am very sorry, and you must forgive me, my child." He was a penitent man, and felt how great was the wrong he had done the poor child. He had taken her out to walk, and to see the sights of the city, and had become intoxicated. He remembered the whole scene, when the boys had chased him; and to Mollie, whom he loved with all his heart, he was willing to own his fault, and to make her happy by promising never to do the wrong again. Mollie then told him about her conversation with Noddy, and of the boy's desire to go to sea with them. Captain McClintock remembered in part what the boy had done for them; and Mollie supplied what he had not seen, or had forgotten. "Why, yes; we want a cabin-boy. I should have shipped one at home, if I could have found the right one," replied the captain. "You say he is a good boy?" "I know he is. He wants to work." "Does he know anything about a vessel? I want one who can go aloft, and shake out the top-gallant sail." "He is used to boats and the water." "Well, we will see what he is good for, after breakfast." "I hope you will take him, for we have become fast friends." "If he is good for anything, I will, Mollie. Call him down. Here comes the doctor with the grub." The "doctor" was the black cook of the Roebuck, who was now descending the companion-way with the morning meal. Noddy was called, and Captain McClintock spoke very kindly to him. He inquired particularly into his knowledge of vessels, and wanted to know whether he would be afraid to go aloft. Noddy smiled, and thought he should not be afraid. He ate his breakfast with a boy's appetite, and then the captain took him on deck. "Do you see that fore-top-gallant yard?" asked the captain. "Yes, sir, I see it," replied Noddy, who had been thoroughly instructed in these matters by the old man-of-war's-man of Woodville, though he had no practical experience in seamanship, even on as large a scale as a topsail schooner, which was the rig of the Roebuck. "Well, my boy, that's a pretty high place. Should you dare to go up there?" "I think I should," answered Noddy. "Let me see you do it." "Now?" "Yes. I want to see what you are good for. If we can't make a sailor of you, it won't be worth while to take you out to the Pacific. Let me see how long it will take you to run up to that fore-top-gallant yard." Noddy started. Captain McClintock was evidently satisfied that it would make the boy dizzy; and that, perhaps, if he had to do this kind of work, he would not care to make a voyage. Mollie stood by her father's side, deeply interested in the experiment, and fearful that her heroic friend would fail to meet her father's expectations, thus depriving her of a pleasant companion on her long voyage. The candidate for a position on the Roebuck skipped lightly forward to the fore-shrouds of the vessel, ran up, as chipper as a monkey, to the mast head, then up the fore-topmast rigging to the yard. Planting his feet in the foot-ropes, he danced out to the port yard-arm. At this point he astonished the spectators below by performing certain feats which he had seen at the Great Olympian Circus. Descending from the yard, he grasped the main-topmast stay, and ran over upon it to the main-topmast, and then made his way to the deck by the main-topmast back-stay. "You'll do, my boy!" said the captain, emphatically. "You will make a smart sailor." "Am I to go with you, sir?" asked Noddy. "Yes, if you like." "What will you give me?" This was a more difficult question; but the captain finally agreed to give him eight dollars a month, and to advance money enough to buy him an outfit. Mollie actually danced about the deck with joy when the terms were arranged, and it was certain that Noddy was to go on the voyage. The boy's work had been carefully stated by the captain. He was to take care of the cabin, wait upon the captain and his daughter at table, and do duty forward when required. He was to have a berth in the cabin, and was not to be in either watch, unless the vessel became short-handed. "Now we shall be happy!" exclaimed Mollie, who had already formed many plans for the long and lonely cruise. "I think we shall. Do you know when we sail, Mollie?" "Perhaps to-day; perhaps not till to-morrow." "I want to write a letter to Miss Bertha before we go." "That's right, Noddy; never forget your friends. I will give you pen, ink, and paper, by and by." In the forenoon Captain McClintock took the young sailor ashore, and purchased for him a supply of clothing. Noddy always dressed like a sailor at Woodville. This was Ben's idea, and it was quite proper, as his work was in the boats. His new garments were not strange to him, therefore, though they were much coarser than those he wore. After dinner the captain went on shore alone to do his business, and Noddy wrote his letter. About five o'clock he returned, and poor Mollie was dreadfully grieved to find that he was partially intoxicated. He immediately gave the order to get under way, and went down into the cabin, leaving the mate to haul the vessel out of the dock. Noddy made himself as useful as possible, and in a short time the Roebuck was clear of the wharf. The captain came on deck again, when the jib was hoisted, and the sails began to draw. The voyage had actually commenced, and Noddy did not believe that Mr. Grant and the constables would be able to catch him. CHAPTER XII. THE DRUNKEN CAPTAIN. "Lay aloft, and help shake out the fore-topsail," said the captain to Noddy, who was standing by the wheel-man, watching the movements of the vessel. "Be lively! What are you staring at?" The captain's tones were stern and ugly. He had evidently taken another glass of gin since he came on board. He was sufficiently intoxicated to be unreasonable, though he could walk straight, and understood perfectly what he was about. Noddy did not like the harsh tones in which the order was given, and he did not move as lively as he would have done if the words had been spoken pleasantly. He had not yet learned the duty of prompt obedience, be the tones what they may. He went aloft, and helped the men who were at work on the topsail. As soon as the sheets were hauled home, the captain hailed him from the deck, and ordered him to shake out the fore-top-gallant sail. Noddy had moved so leisurely before, that the command came spiced with a volley of oaths; and the cabin-boy began to feel that he was getting something more than he had bargained for. He shook out the sail, and when the yard had been raised to its proper position, he went on deck again. The Roebuck was dashing briskly along with a fresh southerly breeze; and if Noddy had not been troubled with a suspicion that something was wrong, he would have enjoyed the scene exceedingly. He had begun to fear that Captain McClintock was a tyrant, and that he was doomed to undergo many hardships before he saw his native land again. "Don't be troubled, Noddy," said Mollie, in a low tone, as she placed herself by his side at the lee rail. "My father isn't cross very often." "I don't like to be spoken to in that way," replied he, trying to banish a certain ill feeling which was struggling for expression in his words and manner. "You mustn't mind that, Noddy. That's the way all sea captains speak." "Is it?" "It is indeed, Noddy. You must get used to it as quick as you can." "I'll try," answered the cabin-boy; but he did not feel much like trying; on the contrary, he was more disposed to manifest his opposition, even at the risk of a "row," or even with the certain prospect of being worsted in the end. Mollie, hoping that he would try, went aft again. She knew what her father was when partially intoxicated, and she feared that one who was high-spirited enough to face a dozen boys of his own size and weight, as Noddy had done in the street, would not endure the harsh usage of one made unreasonable by drinking. Some men are very cross and ugly when they are partially intoxicated, and very silly and good-natured when they are entirely steeped in the drunkard's cup. Such was Captain McClintock. If he continued his potations up to a certain point, he would pass from the crooked, cross-grained phase to that of the jolly, stupid, noisy debauchee. Entirely sober, he was entirely reasonable. "Here, youngster!" called the captain, as he stepped forward to the waist, where Noddy was looking over the rail. "Sir," replied Noddy rather stiffly, and without turning his head. "Do you hear?" yelled the captain, filled with passion at the contempt with which he was treated by the boy. "I hear," said Noddy, turning round as slowly as though he had a year in which to complete his revolution. "Swab up that deck there; and if you don't move a little livelier than you have yet, I'll try a rope's end to your legs." "No, you won't!" retorted Noddy, sharply, for he could endure a whipping as easily as he could a threat. "Won't I?" cried the captain, as he seized a piece of rope from one of the belaying pins. "We'll see." He sprang upon the high-spirited boy, and began to beat him in the most unmerciful manner. Noddy attempted to get away from him, but the captain had grasped him by the collar, and held on with an iron grip. "Let me alone!" roared Noddy. "I'll knock your brains out if you don't let me alone!" "We'll see!" gasped Captain McClintock, furious with passion and with gin. Unfortunately for him, he did see when it was too late; for Noddy had laid hold of a wooden belaying pin, and aimed a blow with it at the head of his merciless persecutor. He did not hit him on the head, but the blow fell heavily on his shoulder, causing him to release his hold of the boy. Noddy, puffing like a grampus from the violence of the struggle, rushed forward to the forecastle. The captain ordered the sailors to stop him; but either because they were not smart enough, or because they had no relish for the business, they failed to catch him, and the culprit ran out on the bowsprit. The angry man followed him as far as the bowsprit bitts, but prudence forbade his going any farther. "Come here, you young rascal!" shouted the captain. "I won't," replied Noddy, as he perched himself on the bight of the jib-stay. "Come here, I say!" "I'll go overboard before I go any nearer to you. I'm not going to be pounded for nothing." "You'll obey orders aboard this vessel," replied the captain, whose passion was somewhat moderated by the delay which kept him from his victim. "I'm ready to obey orders, and always have been," answered Noddy, who had by this time begun to think of the consequences of his resistance. "Will you swab up the deck, as I told you?" "I will, sir; but I won't be whipped by no drunken man. "Drunken man!" repeated the captain. "You shall be whipped for that, you impudent young villain!" The captain mounted the heel of the bowsprit, and was making his way up to the point occupied by the refractory cabin-boy, when Mollie reached the forecastle, and grasped her father in her little arms. "Don't, father, don't!" pleaded she. "Go away, Mollie," said he, sternly. "He is impudent and mutinous, and shall be brought to his senses." "Stop, father, do stop!" cried Mollie, piteously. He might as well stop, for by this time Noddy had mounted the jib-stay, and was halfway up to the mast head. "He called me a drunken man, Mollie, and he shall suffer for it!" replied Captain McClintock, in tones so savage that the poor girl's blood was almost frozen by them. "Stop, father!" said she, earnestly, as he turned to move aft again. "Go away, child." "He spoke the truth," replied she, in a low tone, as her eyes filled with tears, and she sobbed bitterly. "The truth, Mollie!" exclaimed her father, as though the words from that beloved child had paralyzed him. "Yes, father, you have been drinking again. You promised me last night--you know what you promised me," said she, her utterance broken by the violence of her emotions. He looked at her in silence for an instant; but his breast heaved under the strong feelings which agitated him. That glance seemed to overcome him; he dropped the rope's end, and, rushing aft, disappeared down the companion-way. Mollie followed him into the cabin, where she found him with his head bent down upon the table, weeping like an infant. Noddy leisurely descended from his perch at the mast head, from which he had witnessed this scene without hearing what was said; indeed, none of the crew had heard Mollie's bitter words, for she had spoken them in an impressive whisper. "Well, youngster, you have got yourself into hot water," said the mate, when the boy reached the deck. "I couldn't help it," replied Noddy, who had begun to look doubtfully at the future. "Couldn't help it, you young monkey!" Noddy was disposed at first to resent this highly improper language; but one scrap at a time was quite enough, and he wisely concluded not to notice the offensive remark. "I'm not used to having any man speak to me in that kind of a way," added Noddy, rather tamely. "You are not in a drawing-room! Do you think the cap'n is going to take his hat off to the cabin-boy?" replied the mate, indignantly. "I don't ask him to take his hat off to me. He spoke to me as if I was a dog." "That's the way officers do speak to men, whether it is the right way or not; and if you can't stand it, you've no business here." "I didn't know they spoke in that way." "It's the fashion; and when man or boy insults an officer as you did the captain, he always knocks him down; and serves him right too." Noddy regarded the mate as a very reasonable man, though he swore abominably, and did not speak in the gentlest tones to the men. He concluded, therefore, that he had made a blunder, and he desired to get out of the scrape as fast as he could. The mate explained to him sundry things, in the discipline of a ship, which he had not before understood. He said that when sailors came on board of a vessel they expected more or less harsh words, and that it was highly impudent, to say the least, for a man to retort, or even to be sulky. "Captain McClintock is better than half of them," he added; "and if the men do their duty, they can get along very well with him." "But he was drunk," said Noddy. "That's none of your business. If he was, it was so much the more stupid in you to attempt to kick up a row with him." Noddy began to be of the same opinion himself; and an incipient resolution to be more careful in future was flitting through his mind, when he was summoned to the cabin by Mollie. He went below; the captain was not there--he had retired to his state-room; and his daughter sat upon the locker, weeping bitterly. "How happy I expected to be! How unhappy I am!" sobbed she. "Noddy you have made me feel very bad." "I couldn't help it; I didn't mean to make you feel bad," protested Noddy. "My poor father!" she exclaimed, as she thought again that the blame was not the boy's alone. "I am very sorry for what I did. I never went to sea before, and I didn't know the fashions. Where Is your father? Could I see him?" "Not now; he has gone to his state-room. He will be better by and by." "I want to see him when he comes out. I will try and make it right with him, for I know I was to blame," said Noddy, whose ideas were rapidly enlarging. "I am glad to hear you say so, Noddy," added Mollie, looking up into his face with such a sad expression that he would have done anything to comfort her. "Now go on deck; but promise me that you will not be impudent to my father, whatever happens." "I will not, Mollie." Noddy went on deck. The Roebuck had passed out of the harbor. She was close-hauled, and headed to the southeast. She was pitching considerably, which was a strange motion to the cabin-boy, whose nautical experience had been confined to the Hudson River. But there was something exhilarating in the scene, and if Noddy's mind had been easy, he would have been delighted with the situation. The mate asked him some questions about the captain, which led to a further discussion of the matter of discipline on board a vessel. "I want to do well, Mr. Watts," said Noddy. "My best friend gave me the motto, 'Work and Win;' and I want to do the very best I know how." "I don't think you have begun very well. If you are impudent to your officers, I can assure you that you will work a great deal and win very little. Neither boy nor man can have all his own way in the world; and on board ship you will have to submit to a great many little things that don't suit you. The sooner you learn to do so with a good grace, the sooner you will be comfortable and contented." "Thank you, Mr. Watts, for your good advice, and I will try to follow it." "That's right," replied the mate, satisfied that Noddy was not a very bad boy, after all. Noddy was fully determined to be a good boy, to obey the officers promptly, and not to be impudent, even if they abused him. Captain McClintock did not come on deck, or into the cabin, again that night. He had probably drank until he was completely overcome, and the vessel was left to the care of Mr. Watts, who was fortunately a good seaman and a skilful navigator. Noddy performed his duties, both on deck and in the cabin, with a zeal and fidelity which won the praise of the mate. "Captain McClintock," said Noddy, when the master of the vessel came on deck in the morning. "Well, what do you want, youngster?" replied the captain, in gruff and forbidding tones. "I was wrong yesterday; I am very sorry for it, and I hope you will forgive me this time." "It is no light thing to be saucy to the captain." "I will never do so again," added Noddy. "We'll see; if you behave well, I'll pass it by, and say nothing more about it." "Thank you, sir." The captain did not speak as though he meant what he said. It was evident from his conduct during the forenoon, that he had not forgotten, if he had forgiven, Noddy's impudent speech. He addressed him rather harshly, and appeared not to like his presence. In the forenoon the vessel passed Highland Light, and before night Noddy saw the last of the land. There was a heavy blow in the afternoon, and the Roebuck pitched terribly in the great seas. The cabin-boy began to experience some new and singular sensations, and at eight bells in the evening he was so seasick that he could not hold up his head. CHAPTER XIII. THE SHARK. For two days Noddy suffered severely from seasickness, and Mollie was full of tenderness and sympathy. Captain McClintock still mocked the poor child's hopes, and still broke the promises which should have been sacred, for he was intoxicated each day. On the second, while Noddy was lying in his berth, the captain, rendered brutal by the last dram he had taken, came out of his state-room, and halted near the sick boy. "What are you in there for, you young sculpin?" said he. "Why are you not on deck, attending to your duty?" "I am sick, sir," replied Noddy, faintly. "Sick! We don't want any skulking of that sort on board this vessel. You want to shirk your duty. Turn out lively, and go on deck." "But he is sick, father," said Mollie. "Go away, Mollie. You will spoil the boy. Come, tumble out, youngster, or I shall bring down the rope's end," replied the captain. The daughter pleaded for her patient; but the father was ugly and unreasonable, and persisted in his purpose. Noddy did not feel able to move. He was completely prostrated by the violence of his disagreeable malady; and five minutes before, he would not have considered it possible for him to get out of his berth. He must do so now or be whipped; for there was no more reason in the captain than there was in the main-mast of the schooner. He was not able to make any resistance, if he had been so disposed. It was very hard to be obliged to go on deck when he was sick, especially as there was no need of his services there. He raised his head, and sat upright in the berth. The movement seemed completely to overturn his stomach again. But what a chance this was, thought he, to show poor Mollie that he was in earnest, and to convince her that he had really reformed his manners. With a desperate struggle he leaped out of his berth, and put on his jacket. The Roebuck was still pitching heavily, and it was almost impossible for him to keep on his feet. He had hardly tasted food for two days, and was very weak from the effects of his sickness. He crawled on deck as well as he was able, followed by Captain McClintock, who regarded him with a look of malignant triumph. Poor Noddy felt like a martyr; but for Mollie's sake, he was determined to bear his sufferings with patience and resignation, and to obey the captain, even if he told him to jump overboard. He did what was almost as bad as this, for he ordered the sick boy to swab up the deck--an entirely useless operation, for the spray was breaking over the bow of the Roebuck, and the water was rushing in torrents out of the lee scuppers. But Noddy, true to his resolution, obeyed the order, and dragged his weary body forward to perform his useless task. For half an hour he labored against nature and the elements, and of course accomplished nothing. It was all "work" and no "win." A boy who had the resolution and courage to face a dozen angry fellows as large as himself, certainly ought not to lack the power to overcome the single foe that beset him from within. Noddy was strong enough for the occasion, even in his present weakly condition. It was hard work, but the victory he won was a satisfactory reward. The captain's vision was rather imperfect in his present state, and he took it into his head that the foretop-gallant sail was straining the topmast. Mr. Watts respectfully assured him the topmast was strong enough to stand the strain; but the master was set in his own opinion. Apparently his view was adopted for the occasion, for he ordered Noddy to go aloft and furl the sail. Mollie protested when she heard this order, for she was afraid Noddy was so weak that he would fall from the yard. The cabin-boy, strong in the victory he had just won, did not even remonstrate against the order; but, with all the vigor he could command, he went up the fore-rigging. He was surprised to find how much strength an earnest spirit lent to his weak body. The pitching of the Roebuck rendered the execution of the order very difficult to one unaccustomed to the violent motion of a vessel in a heavy sea; but in spite of all the trials which lay in his path, he furled the sail. When he came down to the deck, the captain had gone below again, and the weary boy was permitted to rest from his severe labors. Instead of being overcome by them, he actually felt better than when he had left his berth. The fresh air, and the conquest of the will over the feeble body, had almost wrought a miracle in his physical frame. The mate told him that what he had done was the best thing in the world for seasickness; in fact, earnest exertion was the only remedy for the troublesome complaint. At supper-time Noddy took some tea and ate a couple of ship biscuits with a good relish. He began to feel like a new person, and even to be much obliged to the captain for subjecting him to the tribulations which had wrought his cure. The next morning he ate a hearty breakfast, and went to his work with the feeling that "oft from apparent ills our blessings rise." The captain kept sober during the next five days, owing, it was believed by Noddy, to the influence of his daughter, who had the courage to speak the truth to him. Shortly after the departure of the Roebuck, it had been ascertained that, from some impurity in the casks, the water on board was not fit for use; and the captain decided to put into Barbadoes and procure a fresh supply. When the schooner took a pilot, on the twelfth day out, it was found that the yellow fever was making terrible ravages in the island; but the water was so bad on board that the captain decided to go into port and remain long enough to procure new casks and a supply of water. If he had been entirely sober, he would undoubtedly have turned his bow at once from the infected island. The Roebuck came to anchor, and the captain, regardless of his own safety, went on shore to transact the business. The casks were purchased, but it was impossible to get them on board before the next morning, and the vessel was compelled to remain at anchor over night. The weather was excessively hot in the afternoon, but towards night a cool breeze came in from the sea, which was very refreshing; and Noddy and Mollie were on deck, enjoying its invigorating breath. The boat in which the captain had just returned lay at the accommodation ladder. The confinement of twelve days on board the vessel had been rather irksome, and both of the young people would have been delighted to take a run on shore; but the terrible sickness there rendered such a luxury impossible. They observed with interest everything that could be seen from the deck, especially the verdure-crowned hills, and the valleys green with the rich vegetation of the country. If they could not go on shore, they could at least move about a little in the boat, which would be some relief from the monotony of their confined home. They got into the boat with a warning from Mr. Watts not to go far from the schooner, and not to approach any other vessel, which might have the yellow fever on board. Noddy sculled about on the smooth water for a time, till it was nearly dark, and Mollie thought it was time to return on board. As she spoke, she went forward and stood up in the bow of the boat, ready to step upon the accommodation ladder. "Noddy, do you see these great fishes in the water?" asked she. "Yes, I see them." "Do you know what they are?" continued she, as she turned to receive the answer. She was accustomed to boats, and her familiarity with them made her as fearless as her companion. "I never saw any like them before," replied Noddy, still sculling the boat towards the Roebuck. "What do you think they are?" added she, with one of those smiles which children wear when they are conscious of being wiser than their companions. "I haven't any idea what they are; but they look ugly enough to be snakes." "I've seen lots of them before, and I know what they are. I like you very well, Noddy; and I ask you, as a particular favor, not to fall overboard," said she, with a smile, at what she regarded as a very pretty joke. "What are they, Mollie?" "They are sharks, Noddy." "Sharks!" exclaimed the boy, who had heard Ben tell awful stories about the voracity of these terrible creatures. "Yes, they are sharks, and big ones, too." "Sit down, Mollie. I don't like to see you stand up there. You might fall overboard," said Noddy, who actually shuddered as he recalled the fearful stories he had heard about these savage fish. "I'm not afraid. I'm just as safe here as I should be on board the Roebuck. I've seen sharks before, and got used to them. I like to watch them." At that moment the boat struck upon something in the water, which might have been a log, or one of the ravenous monsters, whose back fins could be seen above the water, as they lay in wait for their prey. It was some heavy body, and it instantly checked the progress of the boat, and the sudden stoppage precipitated the poor girl over the bow into the sea. Noddy's blood seemed to freeze in his veins as he realized the horrible situation of Mollie in the water, surrounded by sharks. He expected to see her fair form severed in twain by the fierce creatures. He could swim like a duck, and his first impulse was to leap overboard, and save the poor girl or perish with her in the attempt. A shout from the schooner laden with the agony of mortal anguish saluted his ears as Mollie struck the water. It was the voice of Captain McClintock, who had come on deck, and had witnessed the fearful catastrophe. The voice went to Noddy's soul. He saw the slight form of Mollie as she rose to the surface, and began to struggle towards the boat. The cabin-boy sculled with all his might for an instant, which brought the boat up to the spot; but he was horrified to see that she was followed by a monstrous shark. Noddy seized the boat-hook, and sprang forward just as the greedy fish was turning over upon his side, with open mouth, to snap up his prey. Noddy, aware that the decisive moment for action had come, and feeling, as by instinct, that a miscalculation on his part would be fatal to poor Mollie, poised his weapon, and made a vigorous lunge at the savage fish. By accident, rather than by design, the boat-hook struck the shark in the eye; and with a fearful struggle he disappeared beneath the surface. Grasping the extended arm of Mollie, he dragged her into the boat before another of the monsters could attack her. "O, Noddy!" gasped she, as she sank down upon the bottom of the boat, overcome by terror, rather than by her exertions,--for she had been scarcely a moment in the water. "You are safe now, Mollie. Don't be afraid," said Noddy, in soothing tones, though his own utterance was choked by the fearful emotions he had endured. "Our Father, who art in heaven, I thank thee that thou hast preserved my life, and saved me from the terrible shark," said Mollie, as she clasped her hands and looked up to the sky. It was a prayer from the heart, and the good Father seemed to be nearer to Noddy than ever before. He felt that some other hand than his own had directed the weapon which had vanquished the shark. "O, Noddy, you have saved me," cried Mollie, as she rose from her knees, upon which she had thrown herself before she uttered her simple but devout prayer. "I am so glad you are safe, Mollie! But was it me that saved you?" asked Noddy, as he pointed up to the sky, with a sincere feeling that he had had very little to do with her preservation, though he was so deeply impressed by the event that he could not utter the sacred name of the Power which in that awful moment seemed to surround him, and to be in his very heart. "It was God who preserved me," said she, looking reverently upward again; "but he did it through you; and I may thank you, too, for what you have done. O, Noddy, you have been my best earthly friend; for what would my poor father have done if the shark had killed me?" Noddy sculled towards the Roebuck, for he knew that Captain McClintock was anxiously awaiting their return. When the boat touched the accommodation ladder, the anxious father sprang on board, not knowing even then that his daughter was entirely safe. He had seen Noddy draw her into the boat, but he feared she had lost a leg or an arm, for he was aware that the harbor swarmed with the largest and fiercest of the merciless "sea-pirates." "My poor child!" exclaimed he, as he clasped her in his arms, dreading even then to know the worst. "Dear father!" replied she. "Are you hurt?" "Not at all." "Were there any sharks out there?" "I guess there were!" replied she, significantly. "One of them had just heeled over to snap at her," added Noddy. "I never was so frightened in my life." "Good Heaven!" gasped the captain. "I gave myself up for lost," said Mollie, shuddering, as she recalled that fearful moment. "Well, what prevented him from taking hold of you?" asked Captain McClintock, who had not been near enough to discern precisely what had taken place in the boat. "Noddy saved me, father. He jammed the boat-hook right into the shark's head. In another instant the creature would have had me in his mouth. O, father, it was such an awful death to think of--to be bitten by a shark!" "Horrible!" groaned the father. "Noddy, your hand! You and I shall be friends to the last day of my life." "Thank you, sir," replied the heroic boy, as he took the proffered hand. "I did the best I could; but I was so scared! I was afraid the shark would catch her in spite of me." "God bless you, Noddy! But come on board, and we will talk it over." Captain McClintock handed Mollie, still dripping with water, to Mr. Watts, who had been an interested spectator of the touching scene in the boat; and she was borne to the cabin amid the congratulations of the crew, with whom she was a great favorite. CHAPTER XIV. THE YELLOW FEVER. Mollie went to her state-room, and changed her clothes; and she did not come out till she had kneeled down and poured forth another prayer of thanksgiving for her safety from the horrible monster that would have devoured her. Her father kissed her again, as she returned to the cabin. He was as grateful as she was, and he took no pains to conceal the emotions which agitated him. "Now tell me all about it, Mollie," said he. "How happened you to fall overboard?" "I was careless, father. Noddy was persuading me to sit down at the moment when I went overboard," replied she. "I was afraid of the sharks as soon as I knew what they were; and I was thinking what an awful thing it would be if she should fall overboard," added Noddy. "If I had minded you, Noddy, I shouldn't have been in danger." The story was told by the two little adventurers, each correcting or helping out the other, till the whole truth was obtained. It was evident to the captain and the mate, that Noddy had behaved with vigor and decision, and that, if he had been less prompt and energetic, poor Mollie must have become the victim of the ravenous shark. "You have saved her life, Noddy; that's plain enough," said Captain McClintock, as he rose and went to his state-room. "You were smart, my boy, and you deserve a great deal of credit," added Mr. Watts. "I don't mind that; I was too glad to get her out of the water to think of anything else." "Well, Noddy, you did good work that time, and you have won a great deal of honor by it." "You shall win something better than that, Noddy," said the captain, as he returned to the cabin with a little bag in his hand. "Here are ten gold pieces, my boy--one hundred dollars." He handed Noddy the bright coins; but the little hero's face flushed, and he looked as discontented as though he had been robbed of the honor of his exploit. "You shall win a hundred dollars by the operation," continued the captain. "Thank you, sir, but I don't want any money for that," replied Noddy, whose pride revolted at the idea, however tempting the money looked to him. "Take it, Noddy. You have done a good piece of work, and you ought to win something for it," added the captain. "I don't want to win any money for a job like that, Captain McClintock. I am already well paid for what I have done. I can't take any money for it. I feel too good already; and I am afraid if I take your gold I should spoil it all." "You are as proud as a lord, Noddy." "I'm sure, if we had lost Miss Mollie, I should have missed her as much as anybody, except her father. I shouldn't feel right to be paid for doing such a thing as knocking a shark in the head. I hated the monster bad enough to kill him, if he hadn't been going to do any mischief." "Then you won't take this money, Noddy?" continued the captain. "I'd rather not, sir. I shouldn't feel right if I did." "And I shouldn't feel right if you didn't. You don't quite understand the case, Noddy." "I think I do, sir." "No, you don't. Let me tell you about it. You have done something which fills me with gratitude to you. I want to do something to express that gratitude. I don't know that I can do it in any other way just now than by making you a little present. I don't mean to pay you." "It looks like that." "No it don't look a bit like it. Do you think I value my daughter's life at no more than a hundred dollars?" "I know you do, captain." "If I expected to pay you for what you have done, I should give you every dollar I have in the world, and every dollar which my property would bring if it were sold; and then I should feel that you had not half got your due." "I don't care about any money, sir," persisted Noddy. "Let me make you a present, then. It would make me feel better to do something for you." "I'm sure I would do anything to accommodate you." "Then take the money." Noddy took it very reluctantly, and felt just as though he was stealing it. Mr. Watts joined with the captain in arguing the matter, and he finally felt a little better satisfied about it. When he realized that he was the honest possessor of so large a sum, he felt like a rich man, and could not help thinking of the pleasure it would afford him to pour all these gold coins into Bertha's lap, and tell how he had won them. Mollie had something to say about the matter, and of course she took her father's side of the question; and the captain concluded the debate by assuring Noddy, if his daughter had to die, he would give more than a hundred dollars to save her from the maw of a shark, that she might die less horribly by drowning. On the whole, the cabin-boy was pretty well satisfied that he had won the money honestly, and he carefully bestowed it with his clothing in his berth. Early in the morning Mr. Watts went on shore with a boat's crew, to commence bringing off the water casks. It required the whole forenoon to remove the old casks, and stow the new ones in the hold. About eleven o'clock the mate complained of a chilly sensation, and a pain in his back, which was followed up by a severe headache. He was soon compelled to leave his work, and take to his berth in the cabin. The next boat from the shore brought off a surgeon, who promptly pronounced the disease the yellow fever. Before the Roebuck could get off, two of the sailors were attacked by the terrible malady. The only safety for the rest was in immediate flight; and the schooner got under way, and stood out to sea. The doctor had left ample directions for the treatment of the disease, but the medicines appeared to do no good. Mr. Watts was delirious before night. The two men in the forecastle were no better, and the prospect on board the vessel was as gloomy as it could be. Mollie stood by the sufferer in the cabin, in spite of the protest of her father. She knew what the fever was; but she seemed to be endued with a courage which was more than human. She nursed the sick man tenderly, and her simple prayer for his recovery ascended every hour during the long night. One of the men forward died before morning, and was committed to the deep by his terrified messmates, without even a form of prayer over his plague-stricken remains. Towards night, on the second day out of Barbadoes, Mr. Watts breathed his last. By the light of the lanterns, his cold form was placed on a plank extended over the rail. Mollie would not permit him to be buried in his watery grave without a prayer, and Captain McClintock read one. Many tears were shed over him, as his body slid off into the sea. Noddy and Mollie wept bitterly, for they felt that they had lost a good friend. There was only one more patient on board, and he seemed to be improving; but before the morning sun rose, red and glaring on the silent ocean, there were three more. Captain McClintock was one of them. There was none to take care of him but Mollie and Noddy; and both of them, regardless of the demands of their own bodies, kept vigil by his couch. More faithful nurses a sick man never had. They applied the remedies which had been used before. On the following day two more of the crew were committed to their ocean graves, and despair reigned throughout the vessel. The captain grew worse every hour, and poor Mollie was often compelled to leave the bedside that he might not see her weeping over him. He soon became delirious, and did not even know her. "O, Noddy," exclaimed she, when she fully realized the situation of her father, "I shall soon be alone." "Don't give up, Mollie," replied the cabin-boy sadly. "I have prayed till I fear my prayers are no longer heard," sobbed she. "Yes, they are, Mollie. Don't stop praying," said Noddy, who knew that the poor girl had derived a great deal of hope and comfort from her prayers. He had seen her kneel down when she was almost overcome by the horrors which surrounded them, and rise as calm and hopeful as though she had received a message direct from on high. Perhaps he had no real faith in her prayers, but he saw what strength she derived from them. Certainly they had not warded off the pestilence, which was still seeking new victims on board. But they were the life of Mollie's struggling existence; and it was with the utmost sincerity that he had counselled her to continue them. "My father will die!" groaned the poor girl. "Nothing can save him now." "No, he won't die. He isn't very bad yet, Mollie." "O, yes, he is. He does not speak to me; he does not know me." "He is doing very well, Mollie. Don't give it up yet." "I feel that he will soon leave me." "No, he won't, Mollie. I _know_ he will get well," said Noddy, with the most determined emphasis. "How do you know?" "I feel that he will. He isn't half so bad as Mr. Watts was. Cheer up, and he will be all right in a few days." "But think how terrible it would be for my poor father to die, away here in the middle of the ocean," continued Mollie, weeping most bitterly, as she thought of the future. "But he will not die; I am just as sure that he will get well, as I am that I am alive now." Noddy had no reason whatever for this strong assertion, and he made it only to comfort his friend. It was not made in vain, for the afflicted daughter was willing to cling to any hope, however slight, and the confident words of the boy made an impression upon her. The morrow came, and the captain was decidedly better; but from the forecastle came the gloomy report that two more of the men had been struck down by the disease. There were but three seamen left who were able to do duty, and Mr. Lincoln, the second mate, was nearly exhausted by watching and anxiety. Fortunately, the weather had been fine, and the Roebuck had been under all sail, with a fair wind. Noddy had obtained a little sleep during the second night of the captain's illness, and he went on deck to report to the mate for duty. He was competent to steer the vessel in a light breeze, and he was permitted to relieve the man at the wheel. He stood his trick of two hours, and then went below, to ascertain the condition of the captain. As he descended the ladder, he discovered the form of Mollie extended on one of the lockers. Her face was flushed, and she was breathing heavily. Noddy was appalled at this sight, for he knew too well what these indications meant. "What is the matter, Mollie?" asked he, hardly able to speak the words from the violence of his emotion. "It is my turn now, Noddy," replied she, in faint tones. "Who will pray for me?" "I will, Mollie; but what ails you?" "I am burning up with heat, and perishing with cold. My back feels as if it was broken, and the pain darts up through my neck into my head. I know very well what it means. You will take care of my poor father--won't you, Noddy?" "To be sure I will. You must turn in, Mollie, and let me take care of you, too," said he, trying to be as calm as the terrible situation required of him. He assisted the stricken maiden to her state-room, and placed her in her berth. Taking from the medicine chest the now familiar remedy, he gave her the potion, and tenderly ministered to all her wants. She was very sick, for she had struggled with the destroying malady for hours before she yielded to its insidious advances. "Thank you, Noddy. I feel better now, and I shall soon be happy. Go now and see to my father; don't let him want for anything." "I will not, Mollie; I will take first-rate care of him," answered Noddy, as he smoothed down the clothing around her neck. "My father is the captain of the ship, you know," added she, with a smile. "He is a great man; bigger than any shark you ever saw." Her mind had begun to wander already; and her patient nurse could hardly keep down his tears, as he gazed at her flushed cheeks, and smoothed down the curls upon her neck. She was beautiful to him--too beautiful to die there in mid ocean, with none but rude men to shed great tears over her silent form. How he wished that Bertha was there, to watch over that frail little form, and ward off the grim tyrant that was struggling to possess it! She would not fear the pangs of the pestilence; she would be an angel in the little state-room, and bring down peace and hope, if not life, to the lovely sufferer. Noddy felt as he had never felt before, not even when the dread monster of the deep had almost snapped up the slight form before him. All the good lessons he had ever learned in his life came to him with a force they had never possessed in the sunny hour of prosperity. He wanted to pray. He felt the need of a strength not his own. Mollie could not pray now. Her mind was darkened by the shadows of disease. He went out into the cabin. It looked as cheerless, and cold, and gloomy, as the inside of a tomb. But God was there; and though Noddy could not speak the words of his prayer, his heart breathed a spirit which the infinite Father could understand. He prayed, as he had promised the sick girl he would, and the strength which prayer had given to her was given to him. "Here is work for me," said he, as he approached the door of the captain's state-room. "But I am able to do it. I will never give up this work." He did not know what he was to win by this work of love, amid trials and tribulation. He had struggled with the disposition to despond; he had worked like a hero to keep his spirits up; and that which he was called upon to do with his hands was small and trivial compared with that which was done by his mind and heart. He had conquered fear and despair. Thus prepared to battle with the giant ills which surrounded him, he entered Captain McClintock's room. CHAPTER XV. THE DEMON OF THE CUP. "Is that you, Noddy?" asked the captain, faintly. "Yes, sir. How do you feel, captain?" "I think I'm a little better. I wish you would ask Mollie to come in; I want to see her." "Does your head ache now, sir?" asked Noddy, who did not like to tell him that his daughter had just been taken with the fever. "Not so bad as it did. Just speak to Mollie." "I think you are ever so much better, sir. You will be out in a day or two." "Do you think so, Noddy?" "Yes, sir; I'm certain you will," answered the boy, who knew that faith was life in the present instance. "I'm glad you think so. I certainly feel a great deal better," replied the captain, as though he was already cheered by the inspiration of hope. "You must be careful, and keep still; and you will be all right in a week, at the most." "I hope so; for I couldn't help thinking, when I was taken down, what a bitter thing it would be to poor Mollie if I should die so far from home and friends." "You have got over the worst of it now, captain." "Is Mollie out in the cabin?" asked the sufferer, persistently returning to the subject near his heart. "No, sir; she is not, just now." "Has she gone on deck?" "No, sir." "Where is she, Noddy?" demanded he, earnestly, as he attempted to raise himself up in his cot. "Don't stir, captain; it will make you worse, if you do." "Tell me where Mollie is at once, or I shall jump out of my berth. Is she--is she--" "She is in her room, captain. Don't be worried about her," replied Noddy, who was afraid that the truth would have a bad effect upon the devoted father. "She laid down a little while ago." "Is she dead?" gasped the captain, with a mighty effort to utter the appalling word. "O, no, sir! She was taken sick a little while ago." "O, mercy!" groaned the sick man. "I know it all now." "It's no use to deny it, sir. She has got the fever." "And I lay here helpless!" "She said she felt a little better when I came out. I gave her the medicine, and did everything for her." "I must go to her." "You will worry her to death, if you do, captain. She is more troubled about you than she is about herself. If you lay still, so I can report that you are doing well, it will be the best thing in the world for her. It will do her more good than the medicine." "Tell her I am well, Noddy!" "It won't do to tell her too much; she won't believe anything, if I do," said Noddy, sorely troubled about the moral management of the cases. "Tell her I am well, Noddy; and I will go and sit by her," replied the sufferer, who was no more able to get out of his bed than he was to cure the fearful disease. "I can't do anything, captain, if you don't keep still in your bed. She is a little out just now; but I think she will do very well, if you only let her alone." Captain McClintock was in an agony of suspense; but Noddy succeeded in consoling him so that he promised to remain quietly in his bed. As physician and nurse, as well as friend and comforter, the cabin-boy found his hands full; but he had a heart big enough for the occasion; and all day and all night he went from one patient to another, ministering to their wants with as much skill and judgment as though he had been trained in a sick room. Mollie grow worse as the hours wore heavily away; but this was to be expected, and the patient nurse was not discouraged by the progressive indications of the disease. Towards morning the captain went to sleep; but it required all the faithful boy's energies to keep Mollie in her bed, as she raved with the heated brain of the malady. In the morning one of the seamen was reported out of danger, and the others in a hopeful condition. Noddy was completely exhausted by his labors and his solicitude. Mr. Lincoln saw that he could endure no more; and as he had obtained a few hours' sleep on deck during the night, he insisted that the weary boy should have some rest, while he took care of the sick. Noddy crawled into his berth, and not even his anxiety for poor Mollie could keep him awake any longer. He slept heavily, and the considerate mate did not wake him till dinner-time, when he sprang from his berth and hastened to the couch of the sick girl. Another day passed, and Mollie began to exhibit some hopeful symptoms. Her father was still improving. The patients in the forecastle were also getting better. Noddy felt that no more of the Roebuck's people were to be cast into the sea. Hope gave him new life. He was rested and refreshed by the bright prospect quite as much as by the sleep which the kindness of Mr. Lincoln enabled him to obtain. The schooner still sped on her course with favoring breezes; while Noddy, patient and hopeful, performed the various duties which the fell disease imposed upon him. He had not regarded the danger of taking the fever himself. He had no thought now for any one but poor Mollie, who was daily improving. One by one the crew, who had been stricken down with the malady, returned to the deck; but it was a long time before they were able to do their full measure of duty. In a week after Mollie was taken sick, her father was able to sit a portion of the day by her side; and a few days later, she was able to sit up for a few moments. The terrible scourge had wasted itself; but the chief mate and three of the crew had fallen victims to the sad visitation. Yellow fever patients convalesce very slowly; and it was a fortnight before Captain McClintock was able to go on deck; but at the same time, Mollie, weak and attenuated by her sufferings, was helped up the ladder by her devoted friend and nurse. The cloud had passed away from the vessel, and everybody on board was as happy as though disease and death had never invaded those wooden walls. But the happiness was toned to the circumstances. Hearts had been purified by suffering. Neither the officers nor the men swore; they spoke to each other in gentle tones, as though the tribulations through which they had passed had softened their hearts, and bound them together in a holier than earthly affection. As Mr. Watts and three sailors had died, the vessel was short-handed, but not crippled; and the captain decided to prosecute his voyage without putting into any port for assistance. Mr. Lincoln was appointed chief mate, and a second mate was selected from the forecastle. Everything went along as before the storm burst upon the devoted vessel. "How happy I am, Noddy!" exclaimed Mollie, as they sat on deck one afternoon, when she had nearly recovered her strength. "My father was saved, and I am saved. How grateful I am!" "So am I, Mollie," replied Noddy. "And how much we both owe to you! Wasn't it strange you didn't take the fever?" "I think it was." "Were you not afraid of it?" "I didn't think anything about it, any way; but I feel just as though I had gone through with the fever, or something else." "Why?" "I don't know; everything looks odd and strange to me. I don't feel like the same fellow." Mollie persisted in her desire to know how the cabin-boy felt, and Noddy found it exceedingly difficult to describe his feelings. Much of the religious impressions which he had derived from the days of tribulation still clung to him. His views of life and death had changed. Many of Bertha's teachings, which he could not understand before, were very plain to him now. He did not believe it would be possible for him to do anything wrong again. Hopes and fears had been his incentives to duty before; principle had grown up in his soul now. The experience of years seemed to be crowded into the few short days when gloom and death reigned in the vessel. The Roebuck sped on her way, generally favored with good weather and fair winds. She was a stanch vessel, and behaved well in the few storms she encountered. She doubled Cape Horn without subjecting her crew to any severe hardships, and sped on her way to more genial climes. For several weeks after his recovery, Captain McClintock kept very steady, and Mollie hoped that the "evil days" had passed by. It was a vain hope; for when the schooner entered the Pacific, his excesses were again apparent. He went on from bad to worse, till he was sober hardly a single hour of the day. In vain did Mollie plead with him; in vain she reminded him of the time when they had both lain at death's door; in vain she assured him that she feared the bottle more than the fever. He was infatuated by the demon of the cup, and seemed to have no moral power left. The Roebuck was approaching the thick clusters of islands that stud the Pacific; and it was important that the vessel should be skilfully navigated. Mr. Lincoln was a good seaman, but he was not a navigator; that is, he was not competent to find the latitude and longitude, and lay down the ship's position on the chart. The captain was seldom in condition to make an observation, and the schooner was in peril of being dashed to pieces on the rocks. The mate was fully alive to the difficulties of his position; and he told Mollie what must be the consequences of her father's continued neglect. The sea in which they were then sailing was full of islands and coral reefs. There were indications of a storm, and he could not save the vessel without knowing where she was. "Noddy," said the troubled maiden, after Mr. Lincoln had explained the situation to her, "I want you to help me." "I'm ready," replied he, with his usual promptness. "We are going to ruin. My poor father is in a terrible state, and I am going to do something." "What can you do?" "You shall help me, but I will bear all the blame." "You would not do anything wrong, and I am willing to bear the blame with you." "Never mind that; we are going to do what's right, and we will not say a word about the blame. Now come with me," she continued, leading the way to the cabin. "I am willing to do anything that is right, wherever the blame falls." "We must save the vessel, for the mate says she is in great danger. There is a storm coming, and Mr. Lincoln don't know where we are. Father hasn't taken an observation for four days." "Well, are you going to take one?" asked Noddy, who was rather bewildered by Mollie's statement of the perils of the vessel. "No; but I intend that father shall to-morrow." "What are you going to do?" She opened the pantry door, and took from the shelf a bottle of gin. "Take this, Noddy, and throw it overboard," said she, handing him the bottle. "I'll do that;" and he went to the bull's eye, in Molli's state-room, and dropped it into the sea. "That's only a part of the work," said she, as she opened one of the lockers in the cabin, which was stowed full of liquors. She passed them out, two at a time, and Noddy dropped them all into the ocean. Captain McClintock was lying in his state-room, in a helpless state of intoxication, so that there was no fear of interruption from him. Every bottle of wine, ale, and liquor which the cabin contained was thrown overboard. Noddy thought that the sharks, which swallow everything that falls overboard, would all get "tight;" but he hoped they would break the bottles before they swallowed them. The work was done, and everything which could intoxicate was gone; at least everything which Mollie and the cabin-boy could find. They did not tell Mr. Lincoln what they had done, for they did not wish to make him a party to the transaction. They were satisfied with their work. The vessel would be saved if the storm held off twelve hours longer. The captain rose early the next morning, and Noddy, from his berth, saw him go to the pantry for his morning dram. There was no bottle there. He went to the locker; there was none there. He searched, without success, in all the lockers and berths of the cabin. While he was engaged in the search, Mollie, who had heard him, came out of her room. The captain's hand shook, and his whole frame trembled from the effects of his long-inebriation. His nerves were shattered, and nothing but liquor could quiet them. Mollie could not help crying when she saw to what a state her father had been reduced. He was pale and haggard; and when he tried to raise a glass of water to his lips his trembling hand refused its office, and he spilled it on the floor. "Where is all the liquor, Mollie?" he asked, in shaken, hollow tones. "I have thrown it all overboard," she replied, firmly. He was too weak to be angry with her; and she proceeded to tell him what must be the fate of the vessel, and of all on board, if he did not attend to his duty. He listened, and promised not to drink another drop; for he knew then, even when his shattered reason held but partial sway, that he would be the murderer of his daughter and of his crew, if the vessel was wrecked by his neglect. He meant to keep his promise; but the gnawing appetite, which he had fostered and cherished until it became a demon, would not let him do so. In the forenoon, goaded by the insatiate thirst that beset him, he went into the hold, which could be entered from the cabin, and opened a case of liquors, forming part of the cargo. He drank long and deep, and lay down upon the merchandise, that he might be near this demon. Twelve o'clock came, and no observation could be taken. Mollie looked for her father, and with Noddy's help she found him in the hold, senseless in his inebriation. Mr. Lincoln was called down, and he was conveyed to his berth. The liquor was thrown overboard, but it was too late; before dark the gale broke upon the Roebuck, and fear and trembling were again in the vessel. CHAPTER XVI. NIGHT AND STORM. Sudden and severe was the gale which came down upon the Roebuck, while her captain was besotted and helpless in his berth. Mr. Lincoln did all that a skilful seaman could do, and while the wind and the waves were the only perils against which the schooner had to contend, there was no serious alarm for her safety. The night had come, and the time had passed by when even Captain McClintock could do anything more than the mate. Mr. Lincoln had kept the "dead reckoning" as well as he could without any knowledge of the currents; and it was evident that the vessel was in a perilous situation, and not far distant from the region of islands and coral reefs. The first hours of the stormy night wore gloomily away, for none knew at what moment the schooner might be dashed to pieces upon some hidden rock. When the captain revived a little from the stupor of intoxication, he seemed not to heed the situation of the vessel. Taking the cabin lantern, he went into the hold again. His only thought seemed to be of the liquor on which he lived. All the cases that Mollie and Noddy could find had been thrown overboard; but the drunkard overhauled the cargo till he found what he wanted, and taking a bottle of gin to his state-room, he was soon as senseless as the fiery fluid could make him. Mollie did all that she could do under these trying circumstances; she prayed that the good Father who had saved them before, would be with them now; and she knew that the strong arm of Omnipotence could move far from them the perils with which they were surrounded. She felt better every time she prayed. But the storm increased in fury, and she knew not the purposes of the Infinite in regard to them. "I am afraid we shall never see the light of another day, Noddy," said she, as the great seas struck with stunning force against the side of the vessel. "Why not? We have been out in a worse gale than this," replied Noddy, who felt that it was his peculiar office to keep hope alive in the heart of his gentle companion. "But we may be in the midst of the rocks and shoals." "We shall do very well, Mollie. Don't give it up." "I don't give it up; but I am ready for anything. I want to be resigned to my fate whenever it comes." "Don't be so blue about it, Mollie. It will be all right with us in the morning." "You heard what Mr. Lincoln said, and you know we are in great danger." "Perhaps we are." "You know we are, Noddy." "Well, we are; but for all that, the vessel will ride out the gale, and to-morrow you will laugh to think how scared you were." "I am not scared; I am ready to die. Promise me one thing, Noddy." "Anything," answered he, promptly. "You will not blame my father if the vessel is lost. He is insane; he can't help what he does. He never did so before, and I know he don't mean to do wrong." "I suppose he don't, and I won't blame him, whatever happens," replied he, willing to comfort the poor girl in any way he could. "I should not care so much if it didn't look as though it was all father's fault." "It will be all right to-morrow. We will throw the rest of the liquor overboard. We will search through the hold, and not leave a single bottle of anything there. Then we shall be safe." "It will be too late then," sighed Mollie. "No, it won't; the vessel will be saved. I _know_ it will," added Noddy, resolutely. "You don't know." "Yes, I do; I am just as certain of it as I am of my own existence." Noddy had hardly uttered these confident words, before a tremendous shock threw them upon the cabin floor. It was followed by a terrible crashing sound, as though every timber in the vessel had been rent and broken; and they could hear the rush of waters, as the torrents poured in through the broken sides. Noddy, without stopping to think of the vain prophecy he had made, seized the light form of Mollie, and bore her to the deck. The sea was running riot there; the great waves swept over the deck with a force which no human strength could resist, and Noddy was compelled to retreat to the cabin again. The lantern still swung from a deck beam, but the water had risen in the cabin so that his descent was prevented. The Roebuck had run upon a reef or shoal in such a manner that her bow was projected far out of the water, while her stern was almost submerged in the waves. Noddy's quick perception enabled him to comprehend the position of the vessel, and he placed his charge on the companion ladder, which was protected in a measure from the force of the sea by the hatch, closed on the top, and open only on the front. "My father!" gasped Mollie. "Save him, Noddy!" "I will try," replied Noddy. "Hold on tight," added he, as a heavy volume of water rolled down the companion-way. "Save him, and don't mind me," groaned the poor girl, unselfish to the last. The brave boy stepped down to the cabin floor, where the water was up to his hips. Creeping on the top of the lockers, and holding on to the front of the berths, he reached the door of the captain's state-room. In this part of the vessel the water had risen nearly to the top of the door, and the berth in which the unfortunate inebriate lay was entirely beneath its surface. He crawled into the room, and put his hand into the berth. The captain was not there. The water was still rising, and Noddy had no doubt that the poor man had already perished. The shock of the collision when the schooner struck, or the rising waters, had forced him from his position on the bed. The water was over Noddy's head in the state-room; but the agony of Mollie induced him to make a desperate effort to save her father. He dropped down on the floor, and felt about with his feet, till he found the body. The question was settled. Captain McClintock was dead. He was one of the first victims of his criminal neglect. It was not safe to remain longer in the state-room, even if there had been any motive for doing so, and Noddy worked his way forward again as he had come. He found Mollie still clinging to the ladder, suffering everything on account of her father, and nothing for herself. "My poor father!" said she, when she discovered her friend coming back without him. "Where is he, Noddy?" "I couldn't do anything for him, Mollie," replied he. "Is he lost?" "He is gone, Mollie; and it was all over with him before I got there. Don't cry. He is out of trouble now." "Poor father," sobbed she. "Couldn't you save him? Let me go and help you." "No use, Mollie," added Noddy, as he climbed up the ladder, and looked out through the aperture at the hatch. "Are you sure we can't do anything for him?" she asked, in trembling tones. "Nothing, Mollie. He was dead when I opened the door of his room. I found him on the floor, and had to go down over my head to find him. He did not move or struggle, and I'm sure he is dead. I am sorry, but I can't help it." "O, dear, dear!" groaned she, in her anguish. She heeded not the cracking timbers and the roaring sea. Her heart was with the unfortunate man who lay cold and still beneath the invading waters. She was ready to go with him to the home in the silent land. "You hold on tight a little while, and I will go on deck, and see if I can make out where we are," said Noddy. "It matters little to me where we are. I shall soon be with my father," replied Mollie. "Don't say that. Your father is at rest now." "And I shall soon be at rest with him. Do you hear those terrible waves beat against the vessel? They will break her in pieces in a few moments more." "Perhaps they will, and perhaps they won't. You mustn't give up, Mollie. If I should lose you now, I shouldn't care what became of me." "You have been very good to me, Noddy; and I hope God will bless you." "I want to save you if I can." "You cannot, Noddy, in this terrible storm. We are poor weak children, and we can do nothing." "But I am bound to work and win. I shall not give it up yet, Mollie. We have struck upon a rock or a shoal, and the land can't be a great ways off." "Such an awful sea! We could never reach the land." "We can try--can't we?" "Where is Mr. Lincoln?" "I don't know. I have not heard a sound but the noise of the sea since the vessel struck. I suppose he and the rest of the men were washed overboard." "How horrible!" "I don't know. They may have left in one of the boats." "I haven't any courage, Noddy. My poor father is gone, and I don't feel as though it made any difference what became of me." "Don't talk so, Mollie. Save yourself for my sake, if you don't for your own." "What can we do?" asked she, blankly, for the situation seemed utterly hopeless. "I don't know; I will see," replied Noddy, as he crawled through the aperture, and reached the deck. A huge wave struck him as he rose upon his feet, and bore him down to the lee side of the vessel; but he grasped the shrouds, and saved himself from being hurled into the abyss of waters that boiled in the fury of the storm on both sides of the stranded schooner. He ran up the shrouds a short distance, and tried to penetrate the gloom of the night. He could see nothing but the white froth on the waves, which beat on all sides. There was no land to be seen ahead, as he had expected, and it was evident that the Roebuck had struck on a shoal, at some distance from any shore. It was impossible to walk forward on the deck, for the savage waves that broke over the vessel would have carried him overboard. The sight suggested the manner in which the men had so suddenly disappeared. They had probably been swept away the moment the vessel struck. The rigging of the schooner was all standing, and Noddy decided to go forward to ascertain if there was any comfortable position there for Mollie. He went to the main-mast head, and, by the spring-stay, reached the fore-mast. Descending by the fore-shrouds, he reached the forecastle of the schooner. The bow had been thrown up so high on the shoal that the sea did not break over this part of the vessel with anything like the force it did farther aft. The hatch was on the fore-scuttle, and it was possible that the men had taken refuge in the forecastle. Removing the hatch, he called the names of Mr. Lincoln and others; but there was no response. He then went down, and attempted to make his way aft through the hold. This was impossible, and he was obliged to return by the way he had come. "My poor father!" sighed Mollie, as Noddy reached the ladder to which she was clinging; "I shall never see you again." "Come, Mollie. I want you to go with me now," said he, taking her by the arm. "Did you find any of the crew?" she asked. "Not a single one." "Poor men!" "I am afraid they are all drowned; but we may be saved if we only work. If we stay here we shall certainly be lost. If the sea should carry off the companion-hatch, we should be drowned out in spite of all we could do." "What can we do?" "We must go forward." "That is impossible for me, Noddy." "No, it isn't." "Save yourself, Noddy, if you can. I do not feel like doing anything." "I shall stay by you, and if you are lost I shall be lost with you." "Then I will go with you, and do anything you say," said she, earnestly; for when the life of another was at stake, she was willing to put forth any exertion. "The vessel holds together first-rate, and if we stick by her till morning, we may find some way to save ourselves. Don't give it up, Mollie. Work and win; that's my motto, you know." "I am ready to work with you, Noddy, whether you win or not." The persevering boy got a rope, which he made fast around the little girl's body, and watching his time, at the intervals of the breaking waves, he bore her to the main shrouds. She went up to the mast head without much difficulty, though the force of the wind was so great that Noddy had to hold on to her, to keep her from being blown from the ropes. At this point he made a sling for her on the spring-stay, in which she sat as a child does in a swing. It was adjusted to the big rope so that it would slip along, and permit her to hold on to the stay with her hands. The vessel seemed to be so wedged in the rocks or sand, on which she had struck, that she did not roll, and the only obstacle to a safe passage from one mast to the other, was the violence of the gale. By Noddy's careful and skilful management, the transit was made in safety through the most imminent peril. The descent to the deck, forward, was more easily accomplished, and the heroic youth soon had the pleasure of seeing his gentle charge safe, for the present, in the forecastle. He had worked and won, so far. He was satisfied with the past, and hopeful of the future. Having conducted Mollie to a safe place, he turned his attention once more to the situation of the vessel. Looking over the bow, he discovered the dark, ragged rocks, rising a few feet above the water, on which she had struck, but he could not see any land. CHAPTER XVII. AFTER THE STORM. The Roebuck had been built, under the direction of Captain McClintock, for the voyage around Cape Horn. She was a new vessel, and of extra strength, and she held together in spite of the hard thumping she received on the rocks. As she struck, a hole was knocked in her bottom; but her bow had been forced so far up on the rocks that the water which she made all settled aft. With tender care Noddy had wrapped up his frail companion in a pea jacket he found in the forecastle, and together they waited anxiously for the morning light. The waves beat fiercely against the side of the vessel, pounded on the decks as they rolled over the bulwarks; and the survivors were in continual fear that each moment would witness the destruction of their ark of safety. Noddy had made the best arrangements he could for a speedy exit, in case the worst should be realized. With the first signs of daylight Noddy was on deck endeavoring to obtain a better knowledge of the location of the wreck. It seemed to him then that the force of the gale had abated, though the sea was hardly less savage than it had been during the night. As the day dawned, he discovered the outline of some dark object, apparently half a mile distant. He watched this sombre pile till there was light enough to satisfy him that it was an island. "Hurrah!" shouted Noddy,--forgetting, in the joy of this discovery, that death and destruction had reigned on board the Roebuck. "What is it?" asked Mollie, hardly moved by the gladness of her companion. "Land ho!" replied he, as he descended the ladder to the forecastle. "Where is it?" said she, languidly, as though she did not feel much interested in the announcement. "Right over here, about half a mile off." "It might as well be a thousand miles off; for we can never get there." "O, yes, we can. We have the boat on deck. I'm afraid you are discouraged, Mollie." "I can't help thinking of poor father," said she, bursting into tears again. Noddy comforted her as well as he could. He told her she ought not to repine at the will of God, who had saved her, though he had permitted her father to be lost; that she ought to be grateful for her own preservation; and, what seemed to be the strongest argument to him, that weeping and "taking on" would do no good. He was but a poor comforter, and only repeated what he had often heard her say in the dark hours of their former tribulation. Her father was dead, and she could not help weeping. Whatever were his faults, and however great had been the error which had brought her to the present extremity, he was her father. In his sober days he had loved her tenderly and devotedly; and it seemed like sacrilege to her to dry the tears which so readily and so freely flowed. They were the natural tribute of affection from a child to a lost parent. Noddy did not dare to say all he believed, for he was convinced that the death of the captain was a blessing to himself and to his daughter. He was so besotted by the demon that life could henceforth be only a misery to him, and a stumbling-block to her. It required no great faith for him to believe, in the present instance, that the good Father doeth all things well. The daylight came, and with it the hope of brighter hours. The clouds were breaking away, and the winds subsided almost as suddenly as they had risen. Still the waves broke fiercely over the wreck, and it was impossible to take any steps towards reaching the land, whose green hills and bright valleys gladdened the heart of the storm-tossed sailor-boy. With an axe which he found in the forecastle, he knocked away a couple of the planks of the bulkhead which divided the seamen's quarters from the hold. He passed through, by moving a portion of the miscellaneous cargo, to the cabin, where he obtained some water, some ship bread, and boiled beef. Poor Mollie had no appetite; but to please her anxious friend, she ate half a biscuit. They passed the forenoon in the forecastle, talking of the past and the future; but the thoughts of the bereaved daughter continually reverted to her father. She talked of him; of what he had been to her, and of the bright hopes which she had cherished of the future. She was positive she should never be happy again. After much persuasion, Noddy induced her to lie down in one of the bunks, and being thoroughly exhausted by anxiety and the loss of rest, she went to sleep, which gave her patient friend a great deal of satisfaction. She slept, and Noddy went on deck again. The waves had now subsided, so that he could go aft. He found that the jolly-boat was gone from the stern davits. At first he supposed it had been washed away by the heavy sea; but a further examination convinced him that it had been lowered by the men. It was possible, if not probable, the crew had taken to the boat, and he might find them on the island, or a portion of them, for it was hardly to be expected that the whole crew had escaped. From the deck he went below. He had anticipated that the fall of the tide would enable him to enter the state-room of the captain; but there was no perceptible change in the height of the water. In this locality the whole range of the tide was not more than a foot. There were many things which might be of great value to Mollie, if they ever escaped from this region, and he was anxious to save them for her use. The captain had a considerable sum of money in gold and silver. The cabin-boy, knowing where it was, set himself at work to obtain it. He was obliged to dive several times before he succeeded; but at last he brought it up, and deposited it in the safest place he could find. Other articles of value were saved in the same manner, including the captain's chronometer and sextant, the sad neglect of which had caused the terrible disaster. Towards night a change in the wind "knocked down" the sea, and the waves no longer dashed against the shattered vessel. The galley had been washed away; but the boat on deck, though thrown from the blocks, was still uninjured; and Noddy was sorely perplexed to find a means of getting it overboard. It was too late, and he was too tired to accomplish anything that night. Mollie was awake when he went to the forecastle again; and rest and refreshment had made her more cheerful and more hopeful. She spoke with greater interest of the future, and dwelt less mournfully on the sad event which had made her an orphan. Noddy told her his plans for the morrow; that he intended to launch the long-boat, and visit the island the next day; that he would build a house for her; and that they would be happy there till some passing whaler picked them up. The tired boy, now secure of life, went to sleep. His fair companion wept again, as she thought of the pleasant days when her father had been a joy to every hour of her existence; but she, too, went to sleep, with none to watch over her but the good Father who had saved her in all the perils through which she had passed. The sun rose clear and bright the next morning, and Noddy went on deck to prepare their simple breakfast. He had constructed a fireplace of iron plates, and he boiled some water to make tea. Mollie soon joined him; and sad as she still was, she insisted that the cooking was her duty. She performed it, while Noddy employed himself in devising some plan by which, with his feeble powers, he could hoist the heavy boat into the water. The bulwarks had been partially stove on one side, and he cleared away the wreck till there was nothing to obstruct the passage of the boat over the side. They sat down on the deck to eat their breakfast; and during the meal Noddy was very quiet and thoughtful. Occasionally he cast his eyes up at the rigging over their heads. Mollie could not help looking at him. She had a great admiration for him; he had been so kind to her, and so brave and cheerful in the discharge of the duties which the awful catastrophe imposed upon him. Besides, he was her only friend--her only hope now. "What are you thinking about, Noddy?" asked she, perplexed by his unusually meditative mood. "I was thinking how I should get the boat into the water." "You can't get it into the water. What can a small boy like you do with a great boat like that?" "I think I can manage it somehow." "I am afraid not." "Don't give it up, Mollie; our salvation depends on that boat. I found out something more, when I went aloft this morning." "What?" "There is another island off here to the northward, just as far as you can see. We may wish to go there, and the boat would be wanted then." "Noddy, perhaps there are savages on those islands, who will kill us if we go on shore." "Two can play at that game," replied Noddy, in his confident tone. "What could a boy like you do against a mob of Indians?" "There are two or three pistols in the cabin, and I think I know how to use them; at any rate I shall not be butchered, nor let you be, without showing them what I am made of," answered Noddy, as he rose from the planks, and turned his attention once more to the moving of the boat. "You wouldn't shoot them--would you?" "Not if I could help it. I shouldn't want to shoot them; and I won't do it, if they behave themselves. But I must go to work on the boat now." "Let me help you, Noddy, I am real strong, and I can do a great deal." "I will tell you when you can help me, Mollie, for I may need a little assistance." "I don't see how you are going to do this job." "I will show you in a moment," replied Noddy, as he ran up the main shrouds. He carried a small hatchet in his belt, with which he detached the starboard fore-brace from the mast. This was a rope, the end of which was tied to the main-mast, and extended through a single sheaf-block at the starboard fore-yard-arm. After passing through this block, the brace returned to the main-mast, passed through another block, and led down upon the deck. There was another rope of the same kind on the port side of the vessel. They were used to swing round the yard, in order to place the sail so that it would draw in the wind. When Noddy cut it loose, the brace dropped to the deck. It was now simply a rope passing through a single block at the end of the yard. The little engineer made fast one end of the brace to the ring in the bow of the boat. He then unhooked the peak halliards of the fore-sail, and attached them to the ring in the stern of the boat. Now, if he had had the strength, he would have pulled on the yard-arm rope till he dragged the bow out over the water; the stern line being intended merely to steady the boat, if necessary, and keep it from jamming against the mast. When he had drawn the bow out as far as he could with the brace, he meant to attach the same rope to the stern, and complete the job. "That's all very pretty," said Mollie, who had carefully noticed all her companion's proceedings; "but you and I can't hoist the boat up with that rigging." "I know that, Mollie," replied Noddy, wiping the perspiration from his brow. "I haven't done yet." "I am afraid you won't make out, Noddy." "Yes, I shall. Work and win; that's the idea." "You are working very hard, and I hope you will win." "Did you know I made an improvement on Miss Bertha's maxim?" "Indeed! What?" "He that works shall win." "That's very encouraging; but it isn't always true." "It is when you work in the right way," answered Noddy, as he took the end of the yard-arm rope, and, after passing it through a snatch-block, began to wind it around the barrel of the small capstan on the forecastle. "Perhaps you haven't got the right way." "If I haven't I shall try again, and keep trying till I do get it," replied Noddy, as he handed Mollie the end of the rope which he had wound four times round the capstan. "Do you think you can hold this rope and take in the slack?" "I am afraid there will not be any to take in; but I can hold it, if there is," said she, satirically, but without even a smile. Noddy inserted one of the capstan bars, and attempted to "walk round;" but his feeble powers were not sufficient to move the boat a single inch. He tightened up the rope, and that was all he could accomplish. "I was afraid you could not stir it," said Mollie; but her tones were full of sympathy for her companion in his disappointment. He struggled in vain for a time; but it required a little more engineering to make the machinery move. Taking a "gun-tackle purchase," or "tackle and fall," as it is called on shore, he attached one hook to the extreme end of the capstan bar, and the other to the rail. This added power accomplished the work; and he made the capstan revolve with ease, though the business went on very slowly. He was obliged to shift back the bar four times for every revolution of the barrel. But the boat moved forward, and that was success. He persevered, and skill and labor finally accomplished the difficult task. The boat floated in the water alongside the wreck. He had worked; he had won. CHAPTER XVIII. THE BEAUTIFUL ISLAND. "There, Mollie, what do you think now!" exclaimed the youthful engineer, as he made fast the painter of the boat to a ring in the deck of the schooner. "You have worked very hard, Noddy, but you have succeeded. You must be very tired." "I am tired, for I have done a hard day's work." "You ought to rest now." "I think I will. We are in no hurry, for we are very comfortable here, and storms don't come very often." It was late in the afternoon when the work of getting out the boat was finished. Noddy had labored very hard, and he was perfectly willing to rest during the remainder of the day. Mollie made some tea, and they had supper at an early hour. It was a remarkably pleasant day, and the air was as soft and balmy as a poet's dream. Both the young workers were very much fatigued, and they sat upon the deck till dark. "Where is my father now?" asked Mollie, as she cast a nervous glance towards the beautiful island which they hoped to reach on the following day. "Where is he?" repeated Noddy, surprised at the question, and not knowing what she meant. "I mean his remains." "In his state-room," answered Noddy, very reluctant to have the subject considered. "Will you do one thing more for me, Noddy?" demanded she, earnestly and impressively. "Certainly, I will, Mollie." "It shall be the last thing I shall ask you to do for me." "Don't say that, for I've always been ready to do everything you wished me to do." "I know you have, Noddy; and you work so hard that I don't feel like asking you to do any extra labor." "I will do anything you wish, Mollie. You needn't be afraid to ask me, either. If you knew how much pleasure it gives me to work for you, I'm sure you would keep me busy all the time." "I don't wish to wear you out, and you may think this is useless work." "I'm sure I shall not, if you want it done." "If you knew how sad it makes me feel to think of my poor father lying in the water there, you would understand me," added she, bursting into tears. "I know what you mean, Mollie, and it shall be done the first thing to-morrow." "Thank you, Noddy. You are so good and so kind! I hope I shall see Miss Bertha, some time, and tell her what you have done for me," continued she, wiping away her tears. They retired to the forecastle soon after dark; and when Mollie had said her simple prayer for both of them, they lay down in the bunks, and were soon asleep. Noddy's first work the next morning was to rig a mast and sail for the long-boat. In this labor he was assisted by Mollie, who sewed diligently on the sail all the forenoon. While she was thus engaged, Noddy, without telling her what he was going to do, went into the cabin, carrying a boat-hook, and, with a feeling of awe amounting almost to superstitious terror, proceeded to fish up the body of Captain McClintock. He knew just where it lay, and had no difficulty in accomplishing the task. He dragged the remains out into the cabin, and floated the corpse in the water to the foot of the ladder. It was an awful duty for him to perform; and when he saw the ghastly, bloated face, he was disposed to flee in terror from the spot. Noddy was strong for his years, or he could not have placed the body on the locker, out of the reach of the water. He prepared the remains for burial precisely as those of Mr. Watts had been. The most difficult part of the task was yet to be performed--to get the corpse on deck, and lower it into the boat. He procured a long box in the hold, from which he removed the merchandise, and found that it would answer the purpose of a coffin. By much hard lifting, and by resorting to various expedients, he placed the remains in the box and nailed down the lid. He felt easier now, for the face of the corpse no longer glared at him. When he had bent on the sail, and shipped the rudder, he contrived to set Mollie at work in the forecastle, where she could not see what he was doing; for he thought his work must be revolting to her feelings, especially as it would be very clumsily performed. Having put a sling on the box, he rigged a purchase, and hoisted it out of the cabin. Then, with suitable rigging, he lowered it into the boat, placing it across the thwarts, amidships. "Come, Mollie," said he, in a gentle, subdued tone, at the fore-scuttle. "What, Noddy?" asked she, impressed by his voice, and by his manner, as she came up from below. "We will go on shore now." "To-day?" "Yes; but we will return. The boat is ready, and I have done what you asked me to do." "What?" "Your father." She was awed by his manner, and did not readily understand what he meant. He pointed to the long box in the boat, and she comprehended the loving labor he had performed. She did not inquire how he had accomplished the task, and did not think of the difficulties which attended it. Noddy did not allude to them. "I am ready, Noddy; but can you get me the prayer-book?" said she, her eyes filling with tears, as she prepared to perform the pious duty which the exigencies of the occasion required of her. The book was fortunately on a shelf to which the water had not risen, and he brought it up and gave it to her. He had before placed a pick and shovel, an axe, a couple of boards and some cords in the boat. He helped her to a seat in the stern-sheets, and shoved off. There was hardly a breath of wind, and Noddy sculled the boat towards an opening in the reef, which was of coral, and surrounded the island. The afflicted daughter gazed in silent grief at the box, and did not speak a word till the boat entered a little inlet, which Noddy had chosen as a landing-place. He stepped on shore, and secured the boat to a bush which grew on the bank. Mollie followed him in silence, and selected a place for the grave. It was at the foot of a cocoa palm. The spot was as beautiful as the heart could desire for such a holy purpose; and Noddy commenced his work. The soil was light and loose, and after much severe labor, he made a grave about three feet deep. It would be impossible for him to lower the box into the grave; and, from one end, he dug out an inclined plane, down which he could roll the corpse to its final resting-place. It required all his skill, strength, and ingenuity to disembark the box; but this was finally accomplished, with such assistance as the weeping daughter could render. The rude coffin was then moved on rollers to the foot of the tree, and deposited in the grave. Mollie opened the book to the funeral prayer, and handed it to her companion. Severe as the labor he had performed had been, he regarded this as far more trying. He could not refuse, when he saw the poor girl, weeping as though her heart would break, kneel down at the head of the grave. Fortunately he had read this prayer many times since it had been used at the obsequies of Mr. Watts, and it was familiar to him. Awed and impressed by the solemn task imposed upon him, he read the prayer in trembling, husky tones. But he was more earnest and sincere than many who read the same service in Christian lands. It touched his own heart, and again the good Father seemed to be very near to him. The reading was finished, and the loving girl, not content with what had been done, gathered wild flowers, rich and luxuriant in that sunny clime, and showered them, as a tribute of affection, on the rough coffin. Noddy filled up the trench first, and then, amid the sobs of the poor child, covered all that remained of her father. With what art he possessed he arranged the green sods, as he had seen them in the graveyard at Whitestone. Mollie covered the spot with flowers, and then seemed loath to leave the grave. From the beginning, Noddy had trembled lest she should ask to look once more on the face of the departed. He had been horrified at the sight himself, and he knew that the distorted visage would haunt her dreams if she was permitted to gaze upon it; but she did not ask to take that last look. Though she said nothing about it, she seemed to feel, instinctively, that the face was not that she had loved, which had smiled upon her, and which was still present in her remembrance. "Come, Mollie, it is almost dark, and we must go now," said he, tenderly, when he had waited some time for her. "I am ready, Noddy; and you cannot tell how much better I feel now that my poor father sleeps in a grave on the land--on the beautiful island!" replied she, as she followed him to the boat. "You have been very kind to do what you have. It has cost you a whole day's labor." "It is the best day's work I have done, Mollie, if it makes you feel better," replied Noddy, as he hoisted the sail. They did not reach the wreck till it was quite dark, for the wind was light. Mollie was more cheerful than she had been since the vessel struck. She had performed a religious duty, which was very consoling to her feelings in her affliction; and Noddy hoped that even her sadness would wear away amid the active employments which would be required of her. In the morning, Noddy loaded the boat with provisions, and such useful articles as they would need most on the island, and in the middle of the forenoon they again sailed for the land. They entered the little inlet, and moored the boat in a convenient place, for it was decided that they should explore the island before the goods were landed. "We are real Robinson Crusoes now, Noddy," said Mollie, as they stepped on shore. "Who's he?" She told him who Crusoe was, and some of the main features of his residence on the lonely island. She was surprised to learn that he had never read the story. "But we have everything we can possibly need, while Crusoe had scarcely anything. We have provisions enough in the vessel to last us a year," added she. "We shall do very well. I don't think we shall have to stay here long. There are whale ships in all parts of the South Seas, and if they don't come to us, we can go to them, for we have a first-rate boat." They walked up the hill which rose from the little plain by the sea-side, where they found a small table-land. But it did not take them long to explore the island, for it was hardly a mile in diameter. Portions of it were covered with trees, whose shape and foliage were new and strange to the visitors. No inhabitants dwelt in this little paradise; but the reason was soon apparent to Noddy; for, when Mollie was thirsty, their search for water was unavailing. There was none on the island. This was an appalling discovery, and Noddy began to consider the situation of the water casks on board the wreck. They returned to the boat, and having selected a suitable spot, the goods were landed, and carefully secured under a sail-cloth brought off for the purpose. For two weeks Noddy labored diligently in bringing off the most serviceable goods from the wreck. He had constructed a tent on shore, and they made their home on the island. For the present there was nothing but hard work, for a storm might come and break up the schooner. Noddy rigged a series of pulleys, which enabled him to handle the water casks with ease. Other heavy articles were managed in the same way. Farther up the inlet than his first landing-place he found a tree near the shore, to which he attached his ropes and blocks, to hoist the barrels out of the boat. We are sorry that our space does not permit a minute description of these contrivances, for many of them were very ingenious. The labor was hard, and the progress often very slow; but Noddy enjoyed the fruit of his expedients, and was happy in each new triumph he achieved. He had found a joy in work which did not exist in play. "Now, Mollie, we must build a house," said he, when he had brought off sufficient supplies from the wreck. "Do you think you can make a house, Noddy?" "I know I can." "Well, I suppose you can. I think you can do anything you try to do." "I have brought off all the boards I could get out of the wreck, and I am sure I can build a very nice house." The work was immediately commenced. Near the spot selected for the mansion of the exiles there was a grove of small trees. The wood was light and soft, and Noddy found that he could fell the trees with his sharp hatchet quickly and easily. Four posts, with a crotch in the top of each, were set in the ground, forming the corners of the house. The frame was secured with nails and with ropes. The sides and the roof were then covered with the hibiscus from the grove. Noddy worked like a hero at his task, and Mollie watched him with the most intense interest; for he would not permit her to perform any of the hard labor. The frame was up, and covered, but the house was like a sieve. It was the intention of the master builder to cover the roof with tough sods, and plaster up the crevices in the sides with mud. But Mollie thought the fore-topsail of the schooner would be better than sods and mud, though it was not half so romantic. They had whole casks of nails, small and large, and the sail was finally chosen, and securely nailed upon the roof and sides. A floor was made of the boards, and the house banked up so as to turn the water away from it when it rained. Two rooms, one for each of the exiles, were partitioned off with sail-cloth. A bunk was made in each, which was supplied with a berth-sack and bed-clothes from the schooner. Besides these two rooms, there was one apartment for general purposes. This important work occupied three weeks; but it was perfectly luxurious when completed. CHAPTER XIX. THE VISITORS. The house was finished, and the satisfaction which it afforded to the young exiles cannot be expressed in words. Noddy had exercised his ingenuity in the construction of a fireplace, a chimney, and a table. The stern-lights of the Roebuck furnished the windows of the principal apartment; while single panes of glass, obtained from the assorted cargo of the vessel, admitted the light to the sleeping-rooms. They had knives, forks, spoons, dishes, and cooking utensils in abundance. Everything they wanted was at hand; and in this respect they differed from all the Crusoes of ancient and modern times. The miscellaneous cargo of the schooner supplied the house with all the comforts and many of the luxuries of civilization; and if Noddy had been familiar with the refinements of social life, he would probably have added the "modern improvements" to the mansion. If the house had been an elegant residence on Fifth Avenue or Blackstone Square, the occupants could not have enjoyed it more. Day after day Noddy added some new feature of comfort, until he was as proud of the dwelling as though he had been the architect of St. Peter's. The work was done, and they had nothing to do but sit down under their "own vine and fig-tree," and enjoy themselves. They had provisions and water enough to last them six months. But Noddy had discovered that idleness was the sum of all miseries; and after he had thoroughly explored the island, and amused himself for a few days among the novelties of the place, he realized that work was a positive luxury. Even patient, plodding labor, without any excitement, was better than doing nothing. Though there had been a storm, the Roebuck still held together; and the most profitable employment that presented itself was bringing off the rest of the cargo from the wreck; and everything which it was possible for him to move was transferred to the shore. He built a storehouse of sail-cloth, in which all the merchandise and provisions were carefully secured, though it was not probable that any considerable portion of it would ever be of any value to the islanders. Noddy had built a fence around the grave of Captain McClintock, and on a smooth board had cut the name and age of the deceased. Every day Mollie visited the spot, and placed fresh flowers on the green sod. The sharp pangs of her great affliction had passed away, and she was cheerful, and even hopeful of the future, while she fondly cherished the memory of her father. The islands which were just visible in the distance were a source of interest and anxiety to the sailor-boy and his gentle companion. Noddy had carefully examined them through the spy-glass a great many times; and once he had seen a large canoe, under sail, with a ponderous "out-rigger" to keep it from upsetting; but it did not come near the home of the exiles. This proved that the other islands were inhabited, and he was in constant dread of a visit from the savages. He put all the pistols he had found in the cabin in readiness for use, and practised firing at a mark, that he might be able to defend himself and his fair charge if occasion required. They did not come, and there were no signs on the island that they ever visited it, and he hoped to avoid the necessity of fighting them. There were plenty of fish in the waters which surrounded the island, and Noddy had no difficulty in catching as many of them as he wanted. There were no animals to be seen, except a few sea-fowl. He killed one of these, and roasted him for dinner one day; but the flesh was so strong and so fishy that salt pork and corned beef were considered better. A two months' residence on the island had accustomed both the boy and the girl to the novelties of the situation; and though, as might be reasonably expected, they were anxious to return to the great world from which they had been banished, they were tolerably contented with the life they led. Noddy was continually planning some new thing to add to the comfort of their daily life, and to provide supplies for the future. As in many large cities, a supply of pure water was a question, of momentous importance to him, and he early turned his attention to the subject. He made spouts of canvas for the "mansion" and the storehouse, by which the water, when it rained, was conducted to barrels set in the ground, so as to keep it cool. This expedient promised a plentiful supply, for the rains were heavy and frequent, and the quality was much better than that of the water casks. When all the necessary work had been accomplished, and when the time at last hung heavily on his hands, Noddy began to consider the practicability of a garden, to keep up the supply of peas, beans, and potatoes, of which a considerable quantity had been obtained from the wreck. Mollie was delighted with the idea of a "farm," as she called it, and the ground was at once marked off. Noddy went to work; but the labor of digging up the soil, and preparing it for the seed, was very hard. There was no excitement about this occupation, and the laborer "punished" himself very severely in performing it; but work had become a principle with him, and he persevered until an incident occurred which suspended further operations on the garden, and gave him all the excitement his nature craved. "What's that, Noddy?" said Mollie, one day, when he was industriously striving to overcome his dislike to plodding labor. "Where?" asked he, dropping his shovel, for the manner of his companion betrayed no little alarm. "On the water," replied she, pointing in the direction of the islands which had given them so much anxiety. "It is a native canoe loaded with savages," said Noddy, hastening to the house for his spy-glass and pistols. He examined the canoe long and attentively. It was only four or five miles distant, and looked like quite a large boat. "They are coming here," said Noddy. "O, what shall we do?" exclaimed the timid maiden, recalling all she knew about cannibals and fierce savages found on the South Sea Islands. "Perhaps they will not come here," added Noddy; but it was more to cheer up his friend, than from any hope he cherished of avoiding the issue. "I hope they will not. What do you think they will do to us, if they do?" "I think I can manage them, Mollie. Don't be alarmed." "How many are there in the canoe?" "A dozen or fifteen, I should think," replied he, after he had again examined the object with the glass. "What can you do with so many as that?" asked she, in despair. "They are savages, you know; and they are afraid of powder. If I should shoot one of them, the rest would run away." "Can't we hide?" "That will do no good. They would certainly find us. The best way is to face the music." "And they will steal all our things, Noddy." "I won't let them steal anything," said he, examining his pistol. "I hope you won't have to shoot any of them. It would be awful to kill the poor creatures." "I won't fire if I can help it. They are all looking this way, and I'm sure they can see the house and the tent." "What shall we do?" cried Mollie, who certainly felt that the end of all things had come. "We can do nothing; and we may as well take it easy. I can't tell what to do now; but I think I will go down and hide the boat, for they may carry that off." Mollie went with him to the inlet, and the boat was moved up among the bushes where the savages would not be likely to find it. The wind was light, and the great canoe advanced but slowly. The men on board of her appeared to be watching the island with as much interest as its occupants regarded the approach of the intruders. Off the reef the big canoe came up into the wind, and the savages appeared to be debating what they should do next. They could see the remains of the wrecked schooner now; and the question appeared to be, whether they should visit that or the shore. But she soon filled away again, and passed through the opening in the reef. Noddy had three pistols, all of which he put in his belt, and finished this hostile array by adding a huge butcher-knife to the collection. He looked formidable enough to fight a whole army; but he intended only to make a prudent display of force. Mollie thought it was rather ridiculous for a small boy like him to load himself down with so many weapons, which could not avail him, if a conflict became necessary, against sixteen savages, full grown, and accustomed to fighting. But Noddy was general-in-chief of the forces, and she did not remonstrate any further than to beg him to be prudent. The canoe slowly approached the shore. Those in her seemed to be familiar with the land, for they steered directly up the little inlet which Noddy had chosen as his landing-place. The "lord of the isle," as our sailor-boy felt himself to be, moved down to the shore, followed by Mollie. The savages could now be distinctly seen. They were horribly tattooed, and they did not look very friendly. As the canoe touched the shore, they sprang to their feet, and Noddy's calculations were set at nought by the discovery that several were armed with guns. One of them stepped on shore. There was a broad grin on his ugly face, which was intended for a conciliatory smile. The savage walked towards Noddy with his hand extended, and with his mouth stretched open from ear to ear, to denote the friendly nature of his mission. The boy took the hand, and tried to look as amiable as the visitor; but as his mouth was not half so large, he probably met with only a partial success. "Americals?" said the savage, in tones so loud that poor Mollie was actually frightened by the sound. He spoke in a nasal voice, as a man does who has a cold in the head; but the lord of the isle was surprised and pleased to hear even a single word of his mother tongue. He pointed impressively to the American flag, which had been hoisted on a pole, as he had seen Captain McClintock do when he had a slight difficulty with a custom-house officer at Barbadoes, and politely replied that he and Mollie were Americans. "Big heap thigs," added the savage, pointing to the tent filled with stores and merchandise. "They are mine," said Noddy. "Americals--yes." "What do you want?" "Big wreck," said the visitor, pointing over to the schooner. "Big lot mel ol the other islal." "Americans?" asked Noddy, clearly understanding the speaker, whose enunciation was principally defective in the substitution of l's for n's. "Four Americals; big storm; come in boat." "Do you hear that, Mollie?" exclaimed Noddy. "He says that four Americans came to the other island in a boat." "They must be some of the crew of the Roebuck." "Big wreck; log time; fild it low," said the savage, pointing to the schooner again. They had been looking for the wreck from which the four men had been saved, but had not been able to find it before. "Whale ship over there," added he. "Take four mel off." "Is she there now?" asked Noddy, breathless with interest. "Go sool--to-morrow--lext week." This was not very definite; but the way to his native land seemed to be open to him, and he listened with deep emotion to the welcome intelligence. "Can we go over there?" asked Noddy, pointing to his companion. "Go with we." "We will." "Big heap thigs," added the savage, pointing to the storehouse again. "Walt to trade?" "Yes; what will you give for the lot?" asked Noddy, facetiously. "Big heap thigs," replied the man, not comprehending the wholesale trade. It was of no use to attempt to bargain with these people; they had no money, and they could help themselves to what they pleased. Noddy gave them heavy articles enough to load their boat, for he felt that he had no further use for them, if there was a whale ship at the other island. He questioned the savage very closely in regard to the vessel, and was satisfied that he spoke the truth. The welcome intelligence that a portion of the Roebuck's crew had been saved, rendered the exiles the more anxious to visit the island. The savages all landed and gazed at Mollie with the utmost interest and curiosity. Probably they had never before seen an American girl. But they were respectful to her, and she soon ceased to be afraid of them. She laughed with them, and soon became quite intimate with the whole party. They treated her like a superior being; and certainly her pretty face and her gentle manners were quite enough to inspire them with such an idea. The savages had loaded their goods into the canoe, and were ready to return. The man who spoke English offered them a passage in his craft; but Noddy decided that it would be better and safer for them to go over in their own boat. He proceeded to secure all his valuables, including all his own money and that he had saved from the state-room of the captain, which he concealed about his clothes. The boat was well loaded with such articles as he thought would be useful to Mollie, or would sell best when a chance offered. He had quite a cargo, and the savages began to be impatient before his preparations were completed. While he was thus employed, Mollie gathered fresh flowers, and paid her last visit, as she supposed, to the grave of her father. She wept there, as she thought of leaving him in that far-off, lonely island; but she was consoled by the belief that her father's spirit dwelt in the happy land, where spring eternal ever reigns. The boat was ready; she wiped away her tears, and stepped on board. Both of them felt sad at the thought of leaving the island; but home had hopes which reconciled them to the change. CHAPTER XX. HOMEWARD BOUND. Noddy shook out the sail of the boat, and pushing her off, followed the canoe. Though the exiles had been on the island but little over two months, they had become much attached to their new home, and it was with a feeling of sadness that they bade adieu to it. The house and other improvements had cost Noddy so much hard labor that he was sorry to leave them before he had received the full benefit of all the comfort and luxury which they were capable of affording. "Don't you think we ought to live on the island for a year or so, after all the work we have done there?" said Noddy, as the boat gathered headway, and moved away from the shore. "I'm sure I should be very happy there, if we had to stay," replied Mollie, "But I don't think I should care to remain just for the sake of living in the house you built." "Nor I; but it seems to me just as though I had done all the work for nothing." "You worked very hard." "But I enjoyed my work, for all that." "And you think you did not win anything by it," added she, with a smile. "I don't think that. I used to hate to work when I was at Woodville. I don't think I do hate it now." "Then you have won something." "I think I have won a great deal, when I look the matter over. I have learned a great many things." Noddy had only a partial appreciation of what he had "won," though he was satisfied that his labor had not been wasted. He had been happy in the occupation which the necessities of his situation demanded of him. Many a boy, wrecked as he had been, with no one but a weak and timid girl to support him, would have done nothing but repine at his hard lot; would have lived "from hand to mouth" during those two months, and made every day a day of misery. Noddy had worked hard; but what had he won? Was his labor, now that he was to abandon the house, the cisterns, the stores, and the garden,--was it wasted? Noddy had won two months of happiness. He had won a knowledge of his own powers, mental and physical. He had won a valuable experience in adapting means to ends, which others might be years in obtaining. He had won a vast amount of useful information from the stubborn toil he had performed. He had won the victory over idleness and indifference, which had beset him for years. He had won a cheerful spirit, from the trials and difficulties he had encountered. He had won a lively faith in things higher than earth, from the gentle and loving heart that shared his exile, for whom, rather than for himself, he had worked. His labor was not lost. He had won more than could be computed. He had won faith and hope, confidence in himself, an earnest purpose, which were to go through life with him, and bless him to the end of his days, and through the endless ages of eternity. He had worked earnestly; he had won untold riches. The wind was tolerably fresh after the boats passed the reef, and in two hours they were near enough to a large island to enable the young voyagers to see the objects on the shore. But they followed the canoe beyond a point of the land; and, after a run of several miles more, they rounded another point, and discovered the tall masts of a ship, at anchor in a small bay. "It may be many months before we can get home. This ship may have to cruise a year or two before she obtains her full cargo of oil." "I hope not." "But we may find some way to get home. I have all the money I saved from the vessel, and we can pay our passage home." The money reminded the orphan girl of her father, and she mused upon the past. The boat sped on its way, and in a short time reached the ship. "Hallo, Noddy!" shouted Mr. Lincoln, as the boat approached. "And Mollie too!" The mate was overjoyed to see them, and to find that they had been saved from the wreck. He leaped into the boat, took Mollie in his arms, and kissed her as though she had been his own child. He grasped the hand of Noddy, and wrung it till the owner thought it would be crushed in his grip. "I was sure you were lost," said Mr. Lincoln. "And we were sure you were lost," replied Noddy. "How did it happen? The cabin was full of water when we left the schooner." "You didn't wait long, Mr. Lincoln." "We couldn't wait long. The sea made a clean breach over the wreck. Only four of us were saved; the rest were washed away, and we never saw anything more of them!" Noddy and Mollie were conducted to the deck of the whale ship, where they were warmly welcomed by the captain and his officers. The three sailors who had been saved from the wreck of the Roebuck were rejoiced to see them alive and well. In the presence of the large group gathered around himself and Mollie, Noddy told his story. "Captain McClintock was lost, then?" "Yes," replied Noddy, breaking through the crowd, for he did not like to tell the particulars of his death in poor Mollie's presence. At a later hour he found an opportunity to inform his late shipmates of the manner in which the corpse of the captain had been found, and of its burial on the island. In return, Mr. Lincoln told him that he had cast off the boat a moment after the schooner struck the reef. The men who happened to be on the quarter-deck with him had been saved; the others were not seen after the shock. With the greatest difficulty they had kept the boat right side up, for she was often full of water. For hours they had drifted in the gale, and in the morning, when the storm subsided, they had reached the island. They had been kindly treated by natives, who were partially civilized by their intercourse with vessels visiting the island, and with which they carried on commerce, exchanging the products of the island for guns, ammunition, and other useful and ornamental articles. The savages knew that, if they killed or injured any white men, the terrible ships of war would visit them with the severest punishment. "What ship is this?" asked Noddy, when the past had been satisfactorily explained by both parties. "The Atlantic, of New Bedford," replied the mate. "She is full of oil, and is homeward bound." "Good!" exclaimed Noddy. "I suppose I have nothing further to do in this part of the world, and I may as well go in her." "This hasn't been a very profitable cruise to me," added Mr. Lincoln. "Well, I suppose there is no help for it; and I hope you will have better luck next time." "I don't grumble; these things can't always be helped. We were lucky to escape with our lives, and we won't say a word about the wages we have lost." "Perhaps you won't lose them," added Mollie; and there was a slight flush on her fair cheeks, for her pride and her filial affection were touched by the reflection that these men had suffered from her father's infirmity. The captain of the whale ship was entirely willing to take the exiles as passengers; and Noddy told him he had saved a great many articles, which might be of service to him. The next day, when the vessel had taken in her water, she sailed for the beautiful island. Outside the reef she lay to, and the boats were sent on shore to bring off such of the goods as would be useful on the voyage. Noddy and Mollie had an opportunity to visit their island home once more; and, while the former assisted the men in selecting and loading the goods, the latter gathered fresh flowers, and for the last time strewed them on the grave of her father. The "big heap thigs" was very much reduced by the visit of the boats; but there was still enough left to reward the natives who had befriended the young islanders for the service they had rendered. According to the captain's estimate,--which was rather low,--he took about four hundred dollars' worth of goods from the island. Mollie, as her father's heir, was the owner of the property, subject to Noddy's claim for salvage. With Mr. Lincoln's aid the accounts were settled. Mollie insisted upon paying the mate and the three seamen their wages up to the time they would reach their native land. This, with their own passage, consumed nearly the whole sum. Besides the property saved from the island, there were about sixteen hundred dollars in gold and silver, and the valuable nautical instruments of Captain McClintock, making a total of over two thousand dollars. Though the disposition of this property was properly a subject for the maritime courts to settle, Mr. Lincoln and the officers of the ship talked it over, and decided that one half belonged to Mollie, in right of her father, and the other half to Noddy, as salvage,--which is the part of property saved from a wrecked imperilled ship, awarded to those who save it. Noddy at first positively objected to this decree, and refused to take a dollar from the poor orphan girl; but when the captain told him that a court would probably award him a larger share, and when Mollie almost cried because he refused, he consented to take it; but it was with a determination to have it applied to her use when he got home. The whale ship filled away when the goods had been taken on board, and weeks and months she stood on her course, till the welcome shores of their native land gladdened the sight of the exiled children. Mollie had been a great favorite with the officers and crew during the voyage, and many of them were the wiser and the better for the gentle words she spoke to them. The captain sold the nautical instruments, and the money was divided according to the decision of the council and officers. Noddy was now the possessor of about twelve hundred dollars, which was almost a fortune to a boy of twelve. It had been "work and win" to some purpose, in spite of the disastrous conclusion of the voyage. CHAPTER XXI. THE CLERGYMAN AND HIS WIFE. The captain of the whale ship very kindly took the young voyagers to his own house until their affairs were settled up. He had dealt fairly and justly by them in all things, and both were grateful to him for the interest he had manifested in their welfare. "What are you going to do now, Noddy?" asked Mollie, after the instruments had been sold and the proceeds paid over to them. "I'm going to Woodville, now, to face the music," replied Noddy. "I suppose they will take me to the court-house; but I have made up my mind to submit to the penalty, whatever it may be, for setting the boat-house afire." "Fanny has told all about it before this time, you may be certain," added Mollie, to whom he had related the story of the fire. "I hope she has not; for I think I am the guilty one. She wouldn't have set the fire if it hadn't been for me. I am going to stand right up to it, and take the consequences, even if they send me to prison; but I hope they won't do that." "I'm sure they won't. But, Noddy, suppose Miss Fanny has not told the truth yet. Will you still deceive your kind friends? You told me you had been made over new since you left Woodville, and I know you have. You said you meant to live a good life, and not lie, or steal, or get angry, or do anything that is bad." "Well, I mean so, Mollie. I intend to stick to it. They won't know anything about that. They won't believe anything I say." "They must believe you. I'll go with you, Noddy!" exclaimed she, smiling at the happy thought. "I will tell them all about you." "That will be jolly; and the sooner we go the better." Their good friend the captain found a gentleman who was going to New York, and they accompanied him, though Noddy felt abundantly able to take care of himself and his fair charge. They arrived the next morning, and took an early train for Woodville. Noddy conducted Mollie down the road to the lawn in front of the house. His heart bounded with emotion as he once more beheld the familiar scenes of the past. As he walked along he pointed out to his interested companion the various objects which were endeared to him by former associations. He talked because he could not help it; for he was so agitated he did not know whether he was on his head or his heels. He heard a step on one of the side paths. He turned to see who it was, and Bertha Grant rushed towards him. "Why, Noddy! It that you?" cried she, grasping him with both hands. "I am so glad to see you!" "You'd better believe I'm glad to see you again," said he, trying to keep from crying. The poor fellow actually broke down, he was so much affected by the meeting. "I didn't expect to see you again for years, after the letter you wrote me." "Been cast away, Miss Bertha, and lived two months on an island where nobody lived," blubbered Noddy. "Who is this little girl with you? Is this Mollie, of whom you spoke in your letter?" "Yes, Miss Bertha, that's Mollie; and she is the best girl in the world, except yourself." "I'm very glad to see you, Mollie," said Bertha, taking her hand, and giving her a kind reception. "Now, come into the house." Bertha, finding Noddy so completely overcome by his emotions, refrained from asking him any more questions, though she was anxious to hear the sad story of the shipwreck. Mr. Grant had not yet gone to the city, and he received the returned exiles as though they had been his own children. "I've come back, Mr. Grant, to settle up old affairs, and you can send me to the court-house or the prison now. I did wrong, and I am willing to suffer for it." "I have told them all about it, Noddy," interrupted Miss Fanny, blushing. "I couldn't stand it after you went away." "It was my fault," said Noddy. "I said so then, and I say so now." "We won't say anything about that until after breakfast. We are very glad you have come back; and we don't care about thinking of anything else, at present," said Mr. Grant. Breakfast was provided for the wanderer and his friend, and Mollie was soon made quite at home by the kind attentions of Bertha and Fanny. When the meal was ended, Noddy insisted upon "settling up old affairs," as he called it. He declared that the blame ought to rest on him, and he was willing to suffer. Mr. Grant said that he was satisfied. Fanny was to blame, and she had already been severely punished for her fault. "You will not send poor Noddy to prison--will you?" interposed Mollie. "He is a good boy now. He saved my life, and took care of me for months. You will find that he is not the same Noddy, he used to be. He is made over new." "I'm glad to hear that," replied Mr. Grant. "But Noddy, did you really think I intended to send you to jail?" "Yes, sir; what was the constable after me for, if not for that?" "It's a mistake, and I told you so in Albany. Didn't I say you would be a rich man?" "You did, sir; but I thought that was only to catch me. All of them said something of that sort. I knew I couldn't be a rich man, because my father never had a cent to leave me. That's what they told me." "But you had an uncle." "Never heard of him," replied Noddy, bewildered at the prospect before him. "Your father's only brother died in California more than a year ago. He had no family; but an honest man who went with him knew where he came from; and Squire Wriggs has hunted up all the evidence, which fully proves that all your uncle's property, in the absence of other heirs, belongs to you. He left over thirty thousand dollars, and it is all yours." "Dear me!" exclaimed Noddy, utterly confounded by this intelligence. "This sum, judiciously invested, will produce at least fifty thousand when you are of age. I have been appointed your guardian." "I don't think I'm Noddy Newman after this," added the heir, in breathless excitement. "I know you are not," added Bertha, laughing. "Your real name is Ogden Newman." "How are you, Ogden?" said Noddy, amused at his new name. "I suppose Noddy came from Ogden," said Mr. Grant. "If that's what's the matter, I don't see what you wanted to take me to court for." "As you have come to years of discretion, you might have had the privilege of naming your own guardian; and we were going to take you to the court for that purpose. As you were not here to speak for yourself, I was appointed. If you are not satisfied, the proceedings can be reviewed." "I'm satisfied first rate," laughed Noddy. "But you said something about sending me off." "My plan was to send you to the Tunbrook Military Institute, where Richard is, and make a man of you." "I should like that--perhaps." "You gave me a great deal of trouble to find you; and I did not succeed, after all," added Mr. Grant. "I didn't know what you was after. If I had, I shouldn't have been in such a hurry. But I guess it was all for the best. I've been at work, Miss Bertha, since I went away," said Noddy, turning to his teacher and friend. "Did you win?" "I rather think I did," replied he, depositing his twelve hundred dollars on the table. "That's rather better than being a tinker, I reckon, Miss Bertha." "O, if you had seen him work. He did things which a great man could not have done," said Mollie, with enthusiasm. "And he's real good, too. He'll never do anything wrong again." "We must hear all about it now, Ogden," continued Mr. Grant. "Who?" "Ogden; that's your name now." Between Noddy and Mollie the story was told; and there was hardly a dry eye in the room when the parts relating to the yellow fever and the funeral of Captain McClintock were narrated. Noddy told the burden of the story; but he was occasionally interrupted by Mollie, who wanted to tell how her friend watched over her and her father when they were sick with the fever, and what kindness and consideration he had used in procuring and burying the remains of her father. Noddy only told facts; she supplied what she regarded as very important omissions. When the narrative was finished, Mr. Grant, and Bertha were willing to believe that Noddy had been made over new; that he had worked, morally as well as physically, and won, besides the treasure on the table, good principles enough to save him from the errors which formerly beset him; had won a child's faith in God, and a man's confidence in himself. The whole family were deeply interested in Mollie; they pitied and loved her; and as she had no near relatives, they insisted upon her remaining at Woodville. "This is your money, Ogden, and I suppose I am to invest it with the rest of your property," said Mr. Grant. "No, sir;" replied Noddy, promptly. "You know how I got that money, and I don't think it belongs to me. Besides, I'm rich, and don't want it. Mollie must have every dollar of it." "Bravo, Noddy," exclaimed Mr. Grant. "I approve of that with all my heart." "Why, no, Noddy. You earned it all," said Mollie. "One hundred dollars of it was yours before the wreck." "I don't care for that. Mr. Grant shall take care of the whole of it for you, or you may take it, as you please." Mollie was in the minority, and she had to yield the point; and Mr. Grant was instructed to invest all she had, being the entire net proceeds of what was saved from the wreck. After the story had been told, all the young people took a walk on the estate, during which Noddy saw Ben and the rest of the servants. The old man was delighted to meet him again, and the others were hardly less rejoiced. The boat-house had been rebuilt. It was winter, and every craft belonging to the establishment was housed. In the spring, Noddy, or Ogden, as he was now called, was sent to the Tunbrook Institute; while Bertha found a faithful pupil, and Fanny a devoted friend, in Mollie. Three months at Woodville convinced Mr. Grant and Bertha that the change in Noddy was radical and permanent. Though not now required to work, he was constantly employed in some useful occupation. He was no longer an idler and a vagabond, but one of the most industrious, useful, and reliable persons on the estate. He did not work with his hands only. There was a work for the mind and the heart to do, and he labored as perseveringly and as successfully in this field as in the other. At Tunbrook he was a hard student, and graduated with the highest intellectual honors. From there he went to college. The influence of those scenes when the yellow fever was raging around him, when the stormy ocean threatened to devour him, and perhaps more than all others, when he stood at the open, grave of Captain McClintock, was never obliterated from his mind. They colored his subsequent existence; and when he came to choose a profession, he selected that of a minister of the gospel. The Rev. Ogden Newman is not, and never will be, a brilliant preacher; but he is a faithful and devoted "shepherd of the sheep." The humble parish over whose moral and spiritual welfare he presides is not more rejoiced and comforted by his own ministrations than by the loving words and the pure example of the gentle being who now walks hand in hand with him in the journey of life, cheered by his presence and upheld by his strong arm, as she was in the days of the storm and the pestilence. Mollie McClintock is Mrs. Ogden Newman; and as together they work, together they shall win. [Illustration] [Illustration] * * * * * Transcriber's Notes: Obvious punctuation errors repaired. Page 15, "fond" changed to "found" (found a ready) Page 28, line of repeated text was deleted. The original text read: except so far as their words went to convince his mistress of his guilt. What would she do to him? mistress of his guilt. What would she do to him? Page 119, "rooom" changed to "room" (pleasant room he) Page 126, "vanguished" changed to "vanquished" (was again vanquished) Page 220, line of repeated text was deleted. The original text read: "Come, Mollie," said he, in a gentle, subdued tone, at the fore-scuttle. tone; at the fore-scuttle. Page 222, "tremling" changed to "trembling" (prayer in trembling) 
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13071	----	HELENA BY MRS. HUMPHRY WARD AUTHOR OF LADY ROSE'S DAUGHTER, MISSING, ELIZABETH'S CAMPAIGN, ETC. 1919 CHAPTER I "I don't care a hang about the Middle Classes!" said Lord Buntingford, resting his head on his hand, and slowly drawing a pen over a printed sheet that lay before him. The sheet was headed "Middle Class Defence League," and was an appeal to whom it might concern to join the founders of the League in an attempt to curb the growing rapacity of the working-classes. "Why should we be snuffed out without a struggle?" said the circular. "We are fewer, no doubt, but we are better educated. Our home traditions are infinitely superior. It is on the Middle Classes that the greatness of England depends." "Does it?" thought Lord Buntingford irritably. "I wonder." He rose and began to pace his library, a shabby comfortable room which he loved. The room however had distinction like its master. The distinction came, perhaps, from its few pictures, of no great value, but witnessing to a certain taste and knowledge on the part of the persons, long since dead, who hung them there; from one or two cases of old Nankin; from its old books; and from a faded but enchanting piece of tapestry behind the cases of china, which seemed to represent a forest. The tapestry, which covered the whole of the end wall of the room, was faded and out of repair, but Lord Buntingford, who was a person of artistic sensibilities, was very fond of it, and had never been able to make up his mind to spare it long enough to have it sent to the School of Art Needlework for mending. His cousin, Lady Cynthia Welwyn, scolded him periodically for his negligence in the matter. But after all it was he, and not Cynthia, who had to live in the room. She had something to do with the School, and of course wanted jobs for her workers. "I hope that good woman's train will be punctual," he thought to himself, presently, as he went to a window and drew up a blind. "Otherwise I shall have no time to look at her before Helena arrives." He stood awhile absently surveying the prospect outside. There was first of all a garden with some pleasant terraces, and flights of stone steps, planned originally in the grand style, but now rather dilapidated and ill-kept, suggesting either a general shortage of pelf on the part of the owner--or perhaps mere neglect and indifference. Beyond the garden stretched a green rim of park, with a gleam of water in the middle distance which seemed to mean either a river or a pond, many fine scattered trees, and, girdling the whole, a line of wooded hill. Just such a view as any county--almost--in this beautiful England can produce. It was one of the first warm days of a belated spring. A fortnight before, park and hills and garden had been deep in snow. Now Nature, eager, and one might think ashamed, was rushing at her neglected work, determined to set the full spring going in a minimum of hours. The grass seemed to be growing, and the trees leafing under the spectator's eyes. There was already a din of cuckoos in the park, and the nesting birds were busy. The scene was both familiar and unfamiliar to Lord Buntingford. He had been brought up in it as a child. But he had only inherited the Beechmark property from his uncle just before the war, and during almost the whole of the war he had been so hard at work, as a volunteer in the Admiralty, that he had never been able to do more than run down once or twice a year to see his agent, go over his home farm, and settle what timber was to be cut before the Government commandeered it. He was not yet demobilized, as his naval uniform showed. There was a good deal of work still to do in his particular office, and he was more than willing to do it. But in a few months' time at any rate--he was just now taking a fortnight's leave--he would be once more at a loose end. That condition of things must be altered as soon as possible. When he looked back over the years of driving work through which he had just passed to the years of semi-occupation before them, he shrank from those old conditions in disgust. Something must be found to which he could enslave himself again. Liberty was the great delusion--at least for him. Politics?--Well, there was the House of Lords, and the possibility of some minor office, when his Admiralty work was done. And the whole post-war situation was only too breathless. But for a man who, as soon as he had said Yes, was immediately seized with an insensate desire to look once more at all the reasons which might have induced him to say No, there was no great temptation in politics. Work was what the nation wanted--not talk. Agriculture and the Simple Life?--Hardly! Five years of life in London, four of them under war conditions, had spoilt any taste for the country he had ever possessed. He meant to do his duty by his estate, and by the miscellaneous crowd of people, returned soldiers and others, who seemed to wish to settle upon it. But to take the plunge seriously, to go in heart and soul for intensive culture or scientific dairy-farming, to spend lonely winters in the country with his bailiffs and tenants for company--it was no good talking about it--he knew it could not be done. And--finally--what was the good of making plans at all?--with these new responsibilities which friendship and pity and weakness of will had lately led him to take upon himself?--For two years at least he would not be able to plan his life in complete freedom. His thoughts went dismally off in the new direction. As he turned away from the window, a long Venetian mirror close by reflected the image of a tall man in naval uniform, with a head and face that were striking rather than handsome--black curly hair just dusted with grey, a slight chronic frown, remarkable blue eyes and a short silky beard. His legs were slender in proportion to the breadth of his shoulders, and inadequate in relation to the dignity of the head. One of them also was slightly--very slightly--lame. He wandered restlessly round the room again, stopping every now and then with his hands in his pockets, to look at the books on the shelves. Generally, he did not take in what he was looking at, but in a moment less absent-minded than others, he happened to notice the name of a stately octavo volume just opposite his eyes-- "Davison, on Prophecy." "Damn Davison!"--he said to himself, with sudden temper. The outburst seemed to clear his mind. He went to the bell and rang it. A thin woman in a black dress appeared, a woman with a depressed and deprecating expression which was often annoying to Lord Buntingford. It represented somehow an appeal to the sentiment of the spectator for which there was really no sufficient ground. Mrs. Mawson was not a widow, in spite of the Mrs. She was a well-paid and perfectly healthy person; and there was no reason, in Lord Buntingford's view, why she should not enjoy life. All the same, she was very efficient and made him comfortable. He would have raised her wages to preposterous heights to keep her. "Is everything ready for the two ladies, Mrs. Mawson?" "Everything, my Lord. We are expecting the pony-cart directly." "And the car has been ordered for Miss Pitstone?" "Oh, yes, my Lord, long ago." "Gracious! Isn't that the cart!" There was certainly a sound of wheels outside. Lord Buntingford hurried to a window which commanded the drive. "That's her! I must go and meet her." He went into the hall, reaching the front door just as the pony-cart drew up with a lady in black sitting beside the driver. Mrs. Mawson looked after him. She wondered why his lordship was in such a flurry. "It's this living alone. He isn't used to have women about. And it's a pity he didn't stay on as he was." Meanwhile the lady in the pony-cart, as she alighted, saw a tall man, of somewhat remarkable appearance, standing on the steps of the porch. Her expectations had been modest; and that she would be welcomed by her employer in person on the doorstep of Beechmark had not been among them. Her face flushed, and a pair of timid eyes met those of Lord Buntingford as they shook hands. "The train was very late," she explained in a voice of apology. "They always are," said Lord Buntingford. "Never mind. You are in quite good time. Miss Pitstone hasn't arrived. Norris, take Mrs. Friend's luggage upstairs." An ancient man-servant appeared. The small and delicately built lady on the step looked at him appealingly. "I am afraid there is a box besides," she said, like one confessing a crime. "Not a big one--" she added hurriedly. "We had to leave it at the station. The groom left word for it to be brought later." "Of course. The car will bring it," said Lord Buntingford. "Only one box and those bags?" he asked, smiling. "Why, that's most moderate. Please come in." And he led the way to the drawing-room. Reassured by his kind voice and manner, Mrs. Friend tripped after him. "What a charming man!" she thought. It was a common generalization about Lord Buntingford. Mrs. Friend had still--like others--to discover that it did not take one very far. In the drawing-room, which was hung with French engravings mostly after Watteau, and boasted a faded Aubusson carpet, a tea-table was set out. Lord Buntingford, having pushed forward a seat for his guest, went towards the tea-table, and then thought better of it. "Perhaps you'll pour out tea--" he said pleasantly. "It'll be your function, I think--and I always forget something." Mrs. Friend took her seat obediently in front of the tea-table and the Georgian silver upon it, which had a look of age and frailty as though generations of butlers had rubbed it to the bone, and did her best not to show the nervousness she felt. She was very anxious to please her new employer. "I suppose Miss Pitstone will be here before long?" she ventured, when she had supplied both the master of the house and herself. "Twenty minutes--" said Lord Buntingford, looking at his watch. "Time enough for me to tell you a little more about her than I expect you know." And again his smile put her at ease. She bent forward, clasping her small hands. "Please do! It would be a great help." He noticed the delicacy of the hands, and of her slender body. The face attracted him--its small neat features, and brown eyes. Clearly a lady--that was something. "Well, I shouldn't wonder--if you found her a handful," he said deliberately. Mrs. Friend laughed--a little nervous laugh. "Is she--is she very advanced?" "Uncommonly--I believe. I may as well tell you candidly she didn't want to come here at all. She wanted to go to college. But her mother, who was a favourite cousin of mine, wished it. She died last autumn; and Helena promised her that she would allow me to house her and look after her for two years. But she regards it as a dreadful waste of time." "I think--in your letter--you said I was to help her--in modern languages--" murmured Mrs. Friend. Lord Buntingford shrugged his shoulders-- "I have no doubt you could help her in a great many things. Young people, who know her better than I do, say she's very clever. But her mother and she were always wandering about--before the war--for her mother's health. I don't believe she's been properly educated in anything. Of course one can't expect a girl of nineteen to behave like a schoolgirl. If you can induce her to take up some serious reading--Oh, I don't mean anything tremendous!--and to keep up her music---I expect that's all her poor mother would have wanted. When we go up to town you must take her to concerts--the opera--that kind of thing. I dare say it will go all right!" But the tone was one of resignation, rather than certainty. "I'll do my best--" began Mrs. Friend. "I'm sure you will. But--well, we'd better be frank with each other. Helena's very handsome--very self-willed--and a good bit of an heiress. The difficulty will be--quite candidly--_lovers_!" They both laughed. Lord Buntingford took out his cigarette case. "You don't mind if I smoke?" "Not at all." "Won't you have one yourself?" He held out the case. Mrs. Friend did not smoke. But she inwardly compared the gesture and the man with the forbidding figure of the old woman in Lancaster Gate with whom she had just completed two years of solitary imprisonment, and some much-baffled vitality in her began to revive. Lord Buntingford threw himself back in his arm-chair, and watched the curls of smoke for a short space--apparently in meditation. "Of course it's no good trying the old kind of thing--strict chaperonage and that sort of business," he said at last. "The modern girl won't stand it." "No, indeed she won't!" said Mrs. Friend fervently. "I should like to tell you--I've just come from ----" She named a university. "I went to see a cousin of mine, who's in one of the colleges there. She's going to teach. She went up just before the war. Then she left to do some war work, and now she's back again. She says nobody knows what to do with the girls. All the old rules have just--_gone_!" The gesture of the small hand was expressive. "Authority--means nothing. The girls are entering for the sports--just like the men. They want to run the colleges--as they please--and make all the rules themselves." "Oh, I know--" broke in her companion. "They'll just allow the wretched teachers and professors to teach--what their majesties choose to learn. Otherwise--they run the show." "Of course, they're awfully _nice_ girls--most of them," said Mrs. Friend, with a little, puzzled wrinkling of the brow. "Ripping! Done splendid war work and all that. But the older generation, now that things have begun again, are jolly well up a tree--how to fit the new to the old. I have some elderly relations at Oxbridge--a nice old professor and his wife. Not stick-in-the-muds at all. But they tell me the world there--where the young women are concerned--seems to be standing on its head. Well!--as far as I can gather--I really know her very slightly--my little cousin Helena's in just the same sort of stage. All we people over forty might as well make our wills and have done with it. They'll soon discover some kind device for putting us out of the way. They've no use for us. And yet at the same time"--he flung his cigarette into the wood-fire beside him--"the fathers and mothers who brought them into the world will insist on clucking after them, or if they can't cluck themselves, making other people cluck. I shall have to try and cluck after Helena. It's absurd, and I shan't succeed, of course--how could I? But as I told you, her mother was a dear woman--and--" His sentence stopped abruptly. Mrs. Friend thought--"he was in love with her." However, she got no further light on the matter. Lord Buntingford rose, and lit another cigarette. "I must go and write a letter before post. Well, you see, you and I have got to do our best. Of course, you mustn't try and run her on a tight rein--you'd be thrown before you were out of the first field--" His blue eyes smiled down upon the little stranger lady. "And you mustn't spy upon her. But if you're really in difficulties, come to me. We'll make out, somehow. And now, she'll be here in a few minutes. Would you like to stay here--or shall I ring for the housemaid to show you your room?" "Thank you--I--think I'll stay here. Can I find a book?" She looked round shyly. "Scores. There are some new books"--he pointed to a side-table where the obvious contents of a Mudie box, with some magazines, were laid out--"and if you want old ones, that door"--he waved towards one at the far end of the room--"will take you into the library. My great-grandfather's collection--not mine! And then one has ridiculous scruples about burning them! However, you'll find a few nice ones. Please make yourself at home!" And with a slight bow to her, the first sign in him of those manners of the _grand seigneur_ she had vaguely expected, he was moving away, when she said hurriedly, pursuing her own thought: "You said Miss Pitstone was very good-looking?" "Oh, very!" He laughed. "She's exactly like Romney's Lady Hamilton. You know the type?" "Ye-es," said Mrs. Friend. "I think I remember--before the war--at Agnew's? My husband took me there once." The tone was hesitating. The little lady was clearly not learned in English art. But Lord Buntingford liked her the better for not pretending. "Of course. There's always an Emma, when Old Masters are on show. Romney painted her forty or fifty times. We've got one ourselves--a sketch my grandfather bought. If you'll come into the hall I'll show it you." She followed obediently and, in a rather dark corner of the hall, Lord Buntingford pointed out an unfinished sketch of Lady Hamilton--one of the many Bacchante variants--the brown head bent a little under the ivy leaves in the hair, the glorious laughing eyes challenging the spectator. "Is she like that?" asked Mrs. Friend, wondering. "Who?--my ward?" laughed Lord Buntingford. "Well, you'll see." He walked away, and Mrs. Friend stayed a few minutes more in front of the picture--thinking--and with half an ear listening for the sound of a motor. She was full of tremors and depression. "I was a fool to come--a fool to accept!" she thought. The astonishing force of the sketch--of the creature sketched--intimidated her. If Helena Pitstone were really like that--"How can she ever put up with me? She'll just despise me. It will be only natural. And then if things go wrong, Lord Buntingford will find out I'm no good--and I shall have to go!" She gave a long sigh, lifting her eyes a little--against her will--to the reflection of herself in an old mirror hanging beside the Romney. What a poor little insignificant figure--beside the other! No, she had no confidence in herself--none at all--she never had had. The people she had lived with had indeed generally been fond of her. It was because she made herself useful to them. Old Mrs. Browne had professed affection for her,--till she gave notice. She turned with a shiver from the recollection of an odious scene. She went bade to the drawing-room and thence to the library, looking wistfully, as she passed through it, at the pleasant hall, with its old furniture, and its mellowed comfort. She would like to find a home here, if only they would put up with her. For she was very homeless. As compared with the drawing-room, the library had been evidently lived in. Its books and shabby chairs seemed to welcome her, and the old tapestry delighted her. She stood some minutes before it in a quiet pleasure, dreaming herself into the forest, and discovering an old castle in its depths. Then she noticed a portrait of an old man, labelled as by "Frank Holl, R. A.," hanging over the mantelpiece. She supposed it was the grandfather who had collected the books. The face and hair of the old man had blanched indeed to a singular whiteness; but the eyes, blue under strong eyebrows, with their concentrated look, were the eyes of the Lord Buntingford with whom she had just been talking. The hoot of a motor startled her, and she ran to a window which commanded the drive. An open car was rapidly approaching. A girl was driving it, with a man in chauffeur's uniform sitting behind her. She brought the car smartly up to the door, then instantly jumped out, lifted the bonnet, and stood with the chauffeur at her side, eagerly talking to him and pointing to something in the chassis. Mrs. Friend saw Lord Buntingford run down the steps to greet his ward. She gave him a smile and a left hand, and went on talking. Lord Buntingford stood by, twisting his moustache, till she had finished. Then the chauffeur, looking flushed and sulky, got into the car, and the girl with Lord Buntingford ascended the steps. Mrs. Friend left the window, and hurriedly went back to the drawing-room, where tea was still spread. Through the drawing-room door she heard a voice from the hall full of indignant energy. "You ought to sack that man, Cousin Philip. He's spoiling that beautiful car of yours." "Is he? He suits me. Have you been scolding him all the way?" "Well, I told him a few things--in your interest." Lord Buntingford laughed. A few words followed in lowered tones. "He is telling her about me," thought Mrs. Friend, and presently caught a chuckle, very merry and musical, which brought an involuntary smile to her own eyes. Then the door was thrown back, and Lord Buntingford ushered in his ward. "This is Mrs. Friend, Helena. She arrived just before you did." The girl advanced with sudden gravity and offered her hand. Mrs. Friend was conscious that the eyes behind the hand were looking her all over. Certainly a dazzling creature!--with the ripe red and white, the astonishing eyes, and brown hair, touched with auburn, of the Romney sketch. The beautiful head was set off by a khaki close cap, carrying a badge, and the khaki uniform, tunic, short skirt, and leggings, might have been specially designed to show the health and symmetry of the girl's young form. She seemed to walk on air, and her presence transformed the quiet old room. "I want some tea badly," said Miss Pitstone, throwing herself into a chair, "and so would you, Cousin Philip, if you had been battling with four grubby children and an idiot mother all the way from London. They made me play 'beasts' with them. I didn't mind that, because my roaring frightened them. But then they turned me into a fish, and fished for me with the family umbrellas. I had distinctly the worst of it." And she took off her cap, turning it round on her hand, and looking at the dints in it with amusement. "Oh, no, you never get the worst of it!" said Lord Buntingford, laughing, as he handed her the cake. "You couldn't if you tried." She looked up sharply. Then she turned to Mrs. Friend. "That's the way my guardian treats me, Mrs. Friend. How can I take him seriously?" "I think Lord Buntingford meant it as a compliment--didn't he?" said Mrs. Friend shyly. She knew, alack, that she had no gift for repartee. "Oh, no, he never pays compliments--least of all to me. He has a most critical, fault-finding mind. Haven't you, Cousin Philip?" "What a charge!" said Lord Buntingford, lighting another cigarette. "It won't take Mrs. Friend long to find out its absurdity." "It will take her just twenty-four hours," said the girl stoutly. "He used to terrify me, Mrs. Friend, when I was a little thing ... May I have some tea, please? When he came to see us, I always knew before he had been ten minutes in the room that my hair was coming down, or my shoes were untied, or something dreadful was the matter with me. I can't imagine how we shall get on, now that he is my guardian. I shall put him in a temper twenty times a day." "Ah, but the satisfactory thing now is that you will have to put up with my remarks. I have a legal right now to say what I like." "H'm," said Helena, demurring, "if there are legal rights nowadays." "There, Mrs. Friend--you hear?" said Lord Buntingford, toying with his cigarette, in the depths of a big chair, and watching his ward with eyes of evident enjoyment. "You've got a Bolshevist to look after--a real anarchist. I'm sorry for you." "That's another of his peculiarities!" said the girl coolly, "queering the pitch before one begins. You know you _might_ like me!--some people do--but he'll never let you." And, bending forward, with her cup in both hands, and her radiant eyes peering over the edge of it, she threw a most seductive look at her new chaperon. The look seemed to say, "I've been taking stock of you, and--well!--I think I shan't mind you." Anyway, Mrs. Friend took it as a feeler and a friendly one. She stammered something in reply, and then sat silent while guardian and ward plunged into a war of chaff in which first the ward, but ultimately the guardian, got the better. Lord Buntingford had more resource and could hold out longer, so that at last Helena rose impatiently: "I don't feel that I have been at all prettily welcomed--have I, Mrs. Friend? Lord Buntingford never allows one a single good mark. He says I have been idle all the winter since the Armistice. I haven't. I've worked like a nigger!" "How many dances a week, Helena?--and how many boys?" Helena first made a face, and then laughed out. "As many dances--of course--as one could stuff in--without taxis. I could walk down most of the boys. But Hampstead, Chelsea, and Curzon Street, all in one night, and only one bus between them--that did sometimes do for me." "When did you set up this craze?" "Just about Christmas--I hadn't been to a dance for a year. I had been slaving at canteen work all day"--she turned to Mrs. Friend--"and doing chauffeur by night--you know--fetching wounded soldiers from railway stations. And then somebody asked me to a dance, and I went. And next morning I just made up my mind that everything else in the world was rot, and I would go to a dance every night. So I chucked the canteen and I chucked a good deal of the driving--except by day--and I just dance--and dance!" Suddenly she began to whistle a popular waltz--and the next minute the two elder people found themselves watching open-mouthed the whirling figure of Miss Helena Pitstone, as, singing to herself, and absorbed apparently in some new and complicated steps, she danced down the whole length of the drawing-room and back again. Then out of breath, with a curtsey and a laugh, she laid a sudden hand on Mrs. Friend's arm. "Will you come and talk to me--before dinner? I can't talk--before _him_. Guardians are impossible people!" And with another mock curtsey to Lord Buntingford, she hurried Mrs. Friend to the door, and then disappeared. Her guardian, with a shrug of the shoulders, walked to his writing-table, and wrote a hurried note. "My dear Geoffrey--I will send to meet you at Dansworth to-morrow by the train you name. Helena is here--very mad and very beautiful. I hope you will stay over Sunday. Yours ever, Buntingford." "He shall have his chance anyway," he thought, "with the others. A fair field, and no pulling." CHAPTER II "There is only one bathroom in this house, and it is a day's journey to find it," said Helena, re-entering her own bedroom, where she had left Mrs. Friend in a dimity-covered arm-chair by the window, while she reconnoitred. "Also, the water is only a point or two above freezing--and as I like boiling--" She threw herself down on the floor by Mrs. Friend's side. All her movements had a curious certainty and grace like those of a beautiful animal, but the whole impression of her was still formidable to the gentle creature who was about to undertake what already seemed to her the absurd task of chaperoning anything so independent and self-confident. But the girl clearly wished to make friends with her new companion, and began eagerly to ask questions. "How did you hear of me? Do you mind telling me?" "Just through an agency," said Mrs. Friend, flushing a little. "I wanted to leave the situation I was in, and the agency told me Lord Buntingford was looking for a companion for his ward, and I was to go and see Lady Mary Chance--" The girl's merry laugh broke out: "Oh, I know Mary Chance--twenty pokers up her backbone! I should have thought--" Then she stopped, looking intently at Mrs. Friend, her brows drawn together over her brilliant eyes. "What would you have thought?" Mrs. Friend enquired, as the silence continued. "Well--that if she was going to recommend somebody to Cousin Philip--to look after me, she would never have been content with anything short of a Prussian grenadier in petticoats. She thinks me a demon. She won't let her daughters go about with me. I can't imagine how she ever fixed upon anyone so--" "So what?" said Mrs. Friend, after a moment, nervously. Lost in the big white arm-chair, her small hand propping her small face and head, she looked even frailer than she had looked in the library. "Well, nobody would ever take you for my jailer, would they?" said Helena, surveying her. Mrs. Friend laughed--a ghost of a laugh, which yet seemed to have some fun in it, far away. "Does this seem to you like prison?" "This house? Oh, no. Of course I shall do just as I like in it. I have only come because--well, my poor Mummy made a great point of it when she was ill, and I couldn't be a brute to her, so I promised. But I wonder whether I ought to have promised. It is a great tyranny, you know--the tyranny of sick people. I wonder whether one ought to give in to her?" The girl looked up coolly. Mrs. Friend felt as though she had been struck. "But your _mother_!" she said involuntarily. "Oh, I know, that's what most people would say. But the question is, what's reasonable. Well, I wasn't reasonable, and here I am. But I make my conditions. We are not to be more than four months in the year in this old hole"--she looked round her in not unkindly amusement at the bare old-fashioned room; "we are to have four or five months in London, _at least_; and when travelling abroad gets decent again, we are to go abroad--Rome, perhaps, next winter. And I am jolly well to ask my friends here, or in town--male and female--and Cousin Philip promised to be nice to them. He said, of course, 'Within limits.' But that we shall see. I'm not a pauper, you know. My trustees pay Lord Buntingford whatever I cost him, and I shall have a good deal to spend. I shall have a horse--and perhaps a little motor. The chauffeur here is a fractious idiot. He has done that Rolls-Royce car of Cousin Philip's balmy, and cut up quite rough when I spoke to him about it." "Done it what?" said Mrs. Friend faintly. "Balmy. Don't you know that expression?" Helena, on the floor with her hands under her knees, watched her companion's looks with a grin. "It's _our_ language now, you know--English--the language of us young people. The old ones have got to learn it, as _we_ speak it! Well, what do you think of Cousin Philip?" Mrs. Friend roused herself. "I've only seen him for half an hour. But he was very kind." "And isn't he good-looking?" said the girl before her, with enthusiasm. "I just adore that combination of black hair and blue eyes--don't you? But he isn't by any means as innocent as he looks." "I never said--" "No. I know you didn't," said Helena serenely; "but you might have--and he isn't innocent a bit. He's as complex as you make 'em. Most women are in love with him, except me!" The brown eyes stared meditatively out of window. "I suppose I could be if I tried. But he doesn't attract me. He's too old." "Old?" repeated Mrs. Friend, with astonishment. "Well, I don't mean he's decrepit! But he's forty-four if he's a day--more than double my age. Did you notice that he's a little lame?" "No!" "He is. It's very slight--an accident, I believe--somewhere abroad. But they wouldn't have him for the Army, and he was awfully cut up. He used to come and sit with Mummy every day and pour out his woes. I suppose she was the only person to whom he ever talked about his private affairs--he knew she was safe. Of course you know he is a widower?" Mrs. Friend knew nothing. But she was vaguely surprised. "Oh, well, a good many people know that--though Mummy always said she never came across anybody who had ever seen his wife. He married her when he was quite a boy---abroad somewhere--when there seemed no chance of his ever being Lord Buntingford--he had two elder brothers who died--and she was an art student on her own. An old uncle of Mummy's once told me that when Cousin Philip came back from abroad--she died abroad--after her death, he seemed altogether changed somehow. But he never, _never_ speaks of her"--the girl swayed her slim body backwards and forwards for emphasis--"and I wouldn't advise you or anybody else to try. Most people think he's just a bachelor. I never talk about it to people--Mummy said I wasn't to--and as he was very nice to Mummy--well, I don't. But I thought you'd better know. And now I think we'd better dress." But instead of moving, she looked down affectionately at her uniform and her neat brown leggings. "What a bore! I suppose I've no right to them any more." "What is your uniform?" "Women Ambulance Drivers. Don't you know the hostel in Ruby Square? I bargained with Cousin Philip after Mummy's death I should stay out my time, till I was demobbed. Awfully jolly time I had--on the whole--though the girls were a mixed lot. Well--let's get a move on." She sprang up. "Your room's next door." Mrs. Friend was departing when Helena enquired: "By the way--have you ever heard of Cynthia Welwyn?" Mrs. Friend turned at the door, and shook her head. "Oh, well, I can tot her up very quickly--just to give you an idea--as she's coming to dinner. She's fair and forty--just about Buntingford's age--quite good-looking--quite clever--lives by herself, reads a great deal--runs the parish--you know the kind of thing. They swarm! I think she would like to marry Cousin Philip, if he would let her." Mrs. Friend hurriedly shut the door at her back, which had been slightly ajar. Helena laughed--the merry but very soft laugh Mrs. Friend had first heard in the hall--a laugh which seemed somehow out of keeping with the rest of its owner's personality. "Don't be alarmed. I doubt whether that would be news to anybody in this house! But Buntingford's quite her match. Well, ta-ta. Shall I come and help you dress?" "The idea!" cried Mrs. Friend. "Shall I help you?" She looked round the room and at Helena vigorously tackling the boxes. "I thought you had a maid?" "Not at all. I couldn't be bored with one." "Do let me help you!" "Then you'd be my maid, and I should bully you and detest you. You must go and dress." And Mrs. Friend found herself gently pushed out of the room. She went to her own in some bewilderment. After having been immured for some three years in close attendance on an invalided woman shut up in two rooms, she was like a person walking along a dark road and suddenly caught in the glare of motor lamps. Brought into contact with such a personality as Helena Pitstone promised to be, she felt helpless and half blind. A survival, too; for this world into which she had now stepped was one quite new to her. Yet when she had first shut herself up in Lancaster Gate she had never been conscious of any great difference between herself and other women or girls. She had lived a very quiet life in a quiet home before the war. Her father, a hard-working Civil Servant on a small income, and her mother, the daughter of a Wesleyan Minister, had brought her up strictly, yet with affection. The ways of the house were old-fashioned, dictated by an instinctive dislike of persons who went often to theatres and dances, of women who smoked, or played bridge, or indulged in loud, slangy talk. Dictated, too, by a pervading "worship of ancestors," of a preceding generation of plain evangelical men and women, whose books survived in the little house, and whose portraits hung upon its walls. Then, in the first year of the war, she had married a young soldier, the son of family friends, like-minded with her own people, a modest, inarticulate fellow, who had been killed at Festubert. She had loved him--oh, yes, she had loved him. But sometimes, looking back, she was troubled to feel how shadowy he had become to her. Not in the region of emotion. She had pined for his fondness all these years; she pined for it still. But intellectually. If he had lived, how would he have felt towards all these strange things that the war had brought about--the revolutionary spirit everywhere, the changes come and coming? She did not know; she could not imagine. And it troubled her that she could not find any guidance for herself in her memories of him. And as to the changes in her own sex, they seemed to have all come about while she was sitting in a twilight room reading aloud to an old woman. Only a few months after her husband's death her parents had both died, and she found herself alone in the world, and almost penniless. She was not strong enough for war work, the doctor said, and so she had let the doors of Lancaster Gate close upon her, only looking for something quiet and settled--even if it were a settled slavery. After which, suddenly, just about the time of the Armistice, she had become aware that nothing was the same; that the women and the girls--so many of them in uniform!--that she met in the streets when she took her daily walk--were new creatures; not attractive to her as a whole, but surprising and formidable, because of the sheer life there was in them. And she herself began to get restive; to realize that she was not herself so very old, and to want to know--a hundred things! It had taken her five months, however, to make up her mind; and then at last she had gone to an agency--the only way she knew--and had braved the cold and purely selfish wrath of the household she was leaving. And now here she was in Lord Buntingford's house--Miss Helena Pitstone's chaperon. As she stood before her looking-glass, fastening her little black dress with shaking fingers, the first impression of Helena's personality was upon her, running through her, like wine to the unaccustomed. She supposed that now girls were all like this--all such free, wild, uncurbed creatures, a law to themselves. One moment she repeated that she was a fool to have come; and the next, she would not have found herself back in Lancaster Gate for the world. * * * * * Meanwhile, in the adjoining room, Helena was putting on a tea-gown, a white and silver "confection," with a little tail like a fish, and a short skirt tapering down to a pair of slim legs and shapely feet. After all her protestations, she had allowed the housemaid to help her unpack, and when the dress was on she had sent Mary flying down to the drawing-room to bring up some carnations she had noticed there. When these had been tucked into her belt, and the waves of her brown hair had been somehow pinned and coiled into a kind of order, and she had discovered and put on her mother's pearls, she was pleased with herself, or rather with as much of herself as she could see in the inadequate looking-glass on the toilet-table. A pier-glass from somewhere was of course the prime necessity, and must be got immediately. Meanwhile she had to be content with seeing herself in the eyes of the housemaid, who was clearly dazzled by her appearance. Then there were a few minutes before dinner, and she ran along the passage to Mrs. Friend's room. "May I come in? Oh, let me tie that for you?" And before Mrs. Friend could interpose, the girl's nimble fingers had tied the narrow velvet carrying a round locket which was her chaperon's only ornament. Drawing back a little, she looked critically at the general effect. Mrs. Friend flushed, and presently started in alarm, when Helena took up the comb lying on the dressing-table. "What are you going to do?" "Only just to alter your hair a little. Do you mind? Do let me. You look so nice in black. But your hair is too tight." Mrs. Friend stood paralysed, while with a few soft touches Helena applied the comb. "Now, isn't that nice! I declare it's charming! Now look at yourself. Why should you make yourself look dowdy? It's all very well--but you can't be much older than I am!" And dancing round her victim, Helena effected first one slight improvement and then another in Mrs. Friend's toilette, till the little woman, standing in uneasy astonishment before the glass to which Helena had dragged her, plucked up courage at last to put an end to the proceedings. "No, please don't!" she said, with decision, warding off the girl's meddling hand, and putting back some of the quiet bands of hair. "You mustn't make me look so unlike myself. And besides--I couldn't live up to it!" Her shy smile broke out. "Oh, yes, you could. You're quite nice-looking. I wonder if you'd mind telling me how old you are? And must I always call you 'Mrs. Friend'? It is so odd--when everybody calls each other by their Christian names." "I don't mind--I don't mind at all. But don't you think--for both our sakes--you'd better leave me all the dignity you can?" Laughter was playing round the speaker's small pale lips, and Helena answered it with interest. "Does that mean that you'll have to manage me? Did Cousin Philip tell you you must? But that--I may as well tell you at once--is a vain delusion. Nobody ever managed me! Oh, yes, my superior officer in the Women's Corps--she was master. But that was because I chose to make her so. Now I'm on my own--and all I can offer--I'm afraid!--is an alliance--offensive and defensive." Mrs. Friend looked at the radiant vision opposite to her with its hands on its sides, and slowly shook her head. "Offensive--against whom?" "Cousin Philip--if necessary." Mrs. Friend again shook her head. "Oh, you're in his pocket already!" cried Helena with a grimace. "But never mind. I'm sure I shall like you. You'll come over to my side soon." "Why should I take any side?" asked Mrs. Friend, drawing on a pair of black gloves. "Well, because"--said Helena slowly--"Cousin Philip doesn't like some of my pals--some of the men, I mean--I go about with--and we _may_ quarrel about it. The question is which of them I'm going to marry--if I marry any of them. And some of them are married. Don't look shocked! Oh, heavens, there's the gong! But we'll sit up to-night, if you're not sleepy, and I'll give you a complete catalogue of some of their qualifications--physical, intellectual, financial. Then you'll have the _carte du pays_. Two of them are coming to-morrow for the Sunday. There's nobody coming to-night of the least interest. Cynthia Welwyn, Captain Vivian Lodge, Buntingford's cousin--rather a prig--but good-looking. A girl or two, no doubt--probably the parson--probably the agent. Now you know. Shall we go down?" * * * * * The library was already full when the two ladies entered. Mrs. Friend was aware of a tall fair woman, beautifully dressed in black, standing by Lord Buntingford; of an officer in uniform, resplendent in red tabs and decorations, talking to a spare grey-haired man, who might be supposed to be the agent; of a man in a round collar and clerical coat, standing awkward and silent by the tall lady in black; and of various other girls and young men. All eyes were turned to Helena as she entered, and she was soon surrounded, while Lord Buntingford took special care of Helena's companion. Mrs. Friend found herself introduced to Lady Cynthia Welwyn, the tall lady in black; to Mr. Parish, the grey-haired man, and to the clergyman. Lady Cynthia bestowed on her a glance from a pair of prominent eyes, and a few civil remarks, Mr. Parish made her an old-fashioned bow, and hoped she had not found the journey too dusty, while the clergyman, whose name she caught as Mr. Alcott, showed a sudden animation as they shook hands, and had soon put her at her ease by a manner in which she at once divined a special sympathy for the stranger within the gates. "You have just come, I gather?" "I only arrived this afternoon." "And you are to look after Miss Helena?" he smiled. Mrs. Friend smiled too. "I hope so. If she will let me!" "She is a radiant creature!" And for a moment he stood watching the girl, as she stood, goddess-like, amid her group of admirers. His eyes were deep-set and tired; his scanty grizzled hair fell untidily over a furrowed brow; and his clothes were neither fresh nor well-brushed. But there was something about him which attracted the lonely; and Mrs. Friend was glad when she found herself assigned to him. But though her neighbour was not difficult to talk to, her surroundings were so absorbing to her that she talked very little at dinner. It was enough to listen and look--at Lady Cynthia on Lord Buntingford's right hand, and Helena Pitstone on his left; or at the handsome officer with whom Helena seemed to be happily flirting through a great part of dinner. Lady Cynthia was extremely good-looking, and evidently agreeable, though it seemed to Mrs. Friend that Lord Buntingford only gave her divided attention. Meanwhile it was very evident that he himself was the centre of his own table, the person of whom everyone at it was fundamentally aware, however apparently busy with other people. She herself observed him much more closely than before, the mingling in his face of a kind of concealed impatience, an eagerness held in chains and expressed by his slight perpetual frown, with a courtesy and urbanity generally gay or bantering, but at times, and by flashes--or so it seemed to her--dipped in a sudden, profound melancholy, like a quenched light. He held himself sharply erect, and in his plain naval uniform, with the three Commander's stripes on the sleeve, made, in her eyes, an even more distinguished figure than the gallant and decorated hero on his left, with whom Helena seemed to be so particularly engaged, "prig" though she had dubbed him. As to Lady Cynthia's effect upon her host, Mrs. Friend could not make up her mind. He seemed attentive or amused while she chatted to him; but towards the end their conversation languished a good deal, and Lady Cynthia must needs fall back on the stubby-haired boy to her right, who was learning agency business with Mr. Parish. She smiled at him also, for it was her business, Mrs. Friend thought, to smile at everybody, but it was an absent-minded smile. "You don't know Lord Buntingford?" said Mr. Alcott's rather muffled voice beside her. Mrs. Friend turned hastily. "No--I never saw him till this afternoon." "He isn't easy to know. I know him very little, though he gave me this living, and I have business with him, of course, occasionally. But this I do know, the world is uncommonly full of people--don't you find it so?--who say 'I go, Sir'--and don't go. Well, if Lord Buntingford says 'I go, Sir'--he does go!" "Does he often say it?" asked Mrs. Friend. And the man beside her noticed the sudden gleam in her quiet little face, that rare or evanescent sprite of laughter or satire that even the dwellers in Lancaster Gate had occasionally noticed. Mr. Alcott considered. "Well, no," he said at last. "I admit he's difficult to catch. He likes his own ways a great deal better than other people's. But if you do catch him--if you do persuade him--well, then you can stake your bottom dollar on him. At least, that's my experience. He's been awfully generous about land here--put a lot in my hands to distribute long before the war ended. Some of the neighbours about--other landlords--were very sick--thought he'd given them away because of the terms. They sent him a round robin. I doubt if he read it. In a thing like that he's adamant. And he's adamant, too, when he's once taken a real dislike to anybody. There's no moving him." "You make me afraid!" said Mrs. Friend. "Oh, no, you needn't be--" Mr. Alcott turned almost eagerly to look at her. "I hope you won't be. He's the kindest of men. It's extraordinarily kind of him--don't you think?"--the speaker smilingly lowered his voice--"taking on Miss Pitstone like this? It's a great responsibility." Mrs. Friend made the slightest timid gesture of assent. "Ah, well, it's just like him. He was devoted to her mother--and for his friends he'll do anything. But I don't want to make a saint of him. He can be a dour man when he likes--and he and I fight about a good many things. I don't think he has much faith in the new England we're all talking about--though he tries to go with it. Have you?" He turned upon her suddenly. Mrs. Friend felt a pang. "I don't know anything," she said, and he was conscious of the agitation in her tone. "Since my husband died, I've been so out of everything." And encouraged by the kind eyes in the plain face, she told her story, very simply and briefly. In the general clatter and hubbub of the table no one overheard or noticed. "H'm--you're stepping out into the world again as one might step out of a nunnery--after five years. I rather envy you. You'll see things fresh. Whereas we--who have been through the ferment and the horror--" He broke off--"I was at the front, you see, for nearly two years--then I got invalided. So you've hardly realized the war--hardly known there was a war--not since--since Festubert?" "It's dreadful!" she said humbly--"I'm afraid I know just nothing about it." He looked at her with a friendly wonder, and she, flushing deeper, was glad to see him claimed by a lively girl on his left, while she fell back on Mr. Parish, the agent, who, however, seemed to be absorbed in the amazing--and agreeable--fact that Lord Buntingford, though he drank no wine himself, had yet some Moet-et-Charidon of 1904 left to give to his guests. Mr. Parish, as he sipped it, realized that the war was indeed over. But, all the time, he gave a certain amount of scrutiny to the little lady beside him. So she was to be "companion" to Miss Helena Pitstone--to prevent her getting into scrapes--if she could. Lord Buntingford had told him that his cousin, Lady Mary Chance, had chosen her. Lady Mary had reported that "companions" were almost as difficult to find as kitchenmaids, and that she had done her best for him in finding a person of gentle manners and quiet antecedents. "Such people will soon be as rare as snakes in Ireland"--had been the concluding sentence in Lady Mary's letter, according to Lord Buntingford's laughing account of it. Ah, well, Lady Mary was old-fashioned. He hoped the young widow might be useful; but he had his doubts. She looked a weak vessel to be matching herself with anything so handsome and so pronounced as the young lady opposite. Why, the young lady was already quarrelling with her guardian! For the whole table had suddenly become aware of a gust in the neighbourhood of Lord Buntingford--a gust of heated talk--although the only heated person seemed to be Miss Pitstone. Lord Buntingford was saying very little; but whatever he did say was having a remarkable effect on his neighbour. Then, before the table knew what it was all about, it was over. Lord Buntingford had turned resolutely away, and was devoting himself to conversation with Lady Cynthia, while his ward was waging a fresh war of repartee with the distinguished soldier beside her, in which her sharpened tones and quick breathing suggested the swell after a storm. Mrs. Friend too had noticed. She had been struck with the sudden tightening of the guardian's lip, the sudden stiffening of his hand lying on the table. She wondered anxiously what was the matter. In the library afterwards, Lady Cynthia, Mrs. Friend, and the two girls--his daughter and his guest--who had come with Mr. Parish, settled into a little circle near the wood-fire which the chilliness of the May evening made pleasant. Helena Pitstone meanwhile walked away by herself to a distant part of the room and turned over photographs, with what seemed to Mrs. Friend a stormy hand. And as she did so, everyone in the room was aware of her, of the brilliance and power of the girl's beauty, and of the energy that like an aura seemed to envelop her personality. Lady Cynthia made several attempts to capture her, but in vain. Helena would only answer in monosyllables, and if approached, retreated further into the dim room, ostensibly in search of a book on a distant shelf, really in flight. Lady Cynthia, with a shrug, gave it up. Mrs. Friend felt too strange to the whole situation to make any move. She could only watch for the entry of the gentlemen. Lord Buntingford, who came in last, evidently looked round for his ward. But Helena had already flitted back to the rest of the company, and admirably set off by a deep red chair into which she had thrown herself, was soon flirting unashamedly with the two young men, with Mr. Parish and the Rector, taking them all on in turn, and suiting the bait to the fish with the instinctive art of her kind. Lord Buntingford got not a word with her, and when the guests departed she had vanished upstairs before anyone knew that she had gone. "Have a cigar in the garden, Vivian, before you turn in? There is a moon, and it is warmer outside than in," said Lord Buntingford to his cousin, when they were left alone. "By all means." So presently they found themselves pacing a flagged path outside a long conservatory which covered one side of the house. The moon was cloudy, and the temperature low. But the scents of summer were already in the air--of grass and young leaf, and the first lilac. The old grey house with its haphazard outline and ugly detail acquired a certain dignity from the night, and round it stretched dim slopes of pasture, with oaks rising here and there from bands of white mist. "Is that tale true you told me before dinner about Jim Donald?" said Lord Buntingford abruptly. "You're sure it's true--honour bright?" The other laughed. "Why, I had it from Jim himself!" He laughed. "He just made a joke of it. But he is a mean skunk! I've found out since that he wanted to buy Preston out for the part Preston had taken in another affair. There's a pretty case coming on directly, with Jim for hero. You have heard of it." "No," said Buntingford curtly; "but in any case nothing would have induced me to have him here. Preston's a friend of mine. So when Helena told me at dinner she had asked him for Saturday, I had to tell her I should telegraph to him to-morrow morning not to come. She was angry, of course." Captain Lodge gave a low whistle. "Of course she doesn't know. But I think you would be wise to stop it. And I remember now she danced all night with him at the Arts Ball!" CHAPTER III There was a light tap on Mrs. Friend's door. She said "Come in" rather unwillingly. Some time had elapsed since she had seen Helena's fluttering white disappear into the corridor beyond her room; and she had nourished a secret hope that the appointment had been forgotten. But the door opened slightly. Mrs. Friend saw first a smiling face, finger on lip. Then the girl slipped in, and closed the door with caution. "I don't want that 'very magnificent three-tailed Bashaw' to know we are discussing him. He's somewhere still." "What did you say?" asked Mrs. Friend, puzzled. "Oh, it's only a line of an old poem--I don't know by whom--my father used to quote it. Well, now--did you see what happened at dinner?" Helena had established herself comfortably in a capacious arm-chair opposite Mrs. Friend, tucking her feet under her. She was in a white dressing-gown, and she had hastily tied a white scarf round her loosened hair. In the dim light of a couple of candles her beauty made an even more exciting impression on the woman watching her than it had done in the lamp-lit drawing-room. "It's war!" she said firmly, "war between Buntingford and me. I'm sorry it's come so soon--the very first evening!--and I know it'll be beastly for you--but I can't help it. I _won't_ be dictated to. If I'm not twenty-one, I'm old enough to choose my own friends; and if Buntingford chooses to boycott them, he must take the consequences." And throwing her white arms above her head, her eyes looked out from the frame of them--eyes sparkling with pride and will. Mrs. Friend begged for an explanation. "Well, I happened to tell him that I had invited Lord Donald for Sunday. I'll tell you about Lord Donald presently--and he simply--behaved like a brute! He said he was sorry I hadn't told him, that he couldn't have Donald here, and would telegraph to him to-morrow--not to come. Just think of that! So then I said--why? And he said he didn't approve of Donald--or some nonsense of that sort. I was quite calm. I reminded him he had promised to let me invite my friends--that was part of the bargain. Yes--he said--but within limits--and Donald was the limit. That made me savage--so I upped and said, very well, if I couldn't see Donald here, I should see him somewhere else--and he wouldn't prevent me. I wasn't going to desert my friends for a lot of silly tales. So then he said I didn't know what I was talking about, and turned his back on me. He kept his temper provokingly--and I lost mine--which was idiotic of me. But I mean to be even with him--somehow. And as for Donald, I shall go up to town and lunch with him at the Ritz next week!" "Oh, no, no, you can't!" cried Mrs. Friend in distress. "You can't treat your guardian like that! Do tell me what it's all about!" And bending forward, she laid her two small hands entreatingly on the girl's knee. She looked so frail and pitiful as she did so, in her plain black, that Helena was momentarily touched. For the first time her new chaperon appeared to her as something else than a mere receiver into which, or at which, it suited her to talk. She laid her own hand soothingly on Mrs. Friend's. "Of course I'll tell you. I really don't mean to be nasty to you. But all the same I warn you that it's no good trying to stop me, when I've made up my mind. Well, now, for Donald. I know, of course, what Cousin Philip means. Donald ran away with the wife of a friend of his--of Buntingford's, I mean--three or four weeks ago." Mrs. Friend gasped. The modern young woman was becoming altogether too much for her. She could only repeat foolishly--"ran away?" "Yes, ran away. There was no harm done. Sir Luke Preston--that's the husband--followed them and caught them--and made her go back with him. But Donald didn't mean any mischief. She'd quarrelled with Sir Luke--she's an empty-headed little fluffy thing. I know her a little--and she dared Donald to run away with her--for a lark. So he took her on. He didn't mean anything horrid. I don't believe he's that sort. They were going down to his yacht at Southampton--there were several other friends of his on the yacht--and they meant to give Sir Luke a fright--just show him that he couldn't bully her as he had been doing--being sticky and stupid about her friends, just as Cousin Philip wants to be about mine--and quarrelling about her dress-bills--and a lot of things. Well, that's all! What's there in that?" And the girl sat up straight, dropping her slim, white feet, while her great eyes challenged her companion to say a word in defence of her guardian. Mrs. Friend's head was turning. "But it was surely wrong and foolish--" she began. Helena interrupted her. "I daresay it was," she said impatiently, "but that's not my affair. It's Lord Donald's. I'm not responsible for him. But he's done nothing that I know of to make _me_ cut him--and I won't! He told me all about it quite frankly. I said I'd stick by him--and I will." "And Sir Luke Preston is a friend of Lord Buntingford's?" "Yes--" said Helena unwillingly--"I suppose he is. I didn't know. Perhaps I wouldn't have asked Donald if I'd known. But I did ask him, and he accepted. And now Buntingford's going to insult him publicly. And that I won't stand--I vow I won't! It's insulting me too!" And springing up, she began a stormy pacing of the room, her white gown falling back from her neck and throat, and her hair floating behind her. Mrs. Friend had begun to collect herself. In the few hours she had passed under Lord Buntingford's roof she seemed to herself to have been passing through a forcing house. Qualities she had never dreamed of possessing or claiming she must somehow show, or give up the game. Unless she could understand and get hold of this wholly unexpected situation, as Helena presented it, she might as well re-pack her box, and order the village fly for departure. "Do you mind if I ask you some questions?" she said presently, as the white skirts swept past her. "Mind! Not a bit. What do you want to know?" "Are you in love with Lord Donald?" Helena laughed. "If I were, do you think I'd let him run away with Lady Preston or anybody else? Not at all! Lord Donald's just one of the men I like talking to. He amuses me. He's very smart. He knows everybody. He's no worse than anybody else. He did all sorts of plucky things in the war. I don't ask Buntingford to like him, of course. He isn't his sort. But he really might let me alone!" "But you asked him to stay in Lord Buntingford's house--and without consulting--" "Well--and it's going to be _my_ house, too, for two years--if I can possibly bear it. When Mummy begged me, I told Buntingford my conditions. And he's broken them!" And standing still, the tempestuous creature drew herself to her full height, her arms rigid by her side--a tragic-comic figure in the dim illumination of the two guttering candles. Mrs. Friend attempted a diversion. "Who else is coming for the week-end?" Instantly Helena's mood dissolved in laughter. She came to perch herself on the arm of Mrs. Friend's chair. "There--now let's forget my tiresome guardian. I promised to tell you about my 'boys.' Well, there are two of them coming--and Geoffrey French, besides a nephew of Buntingford's, who'll have this property and most of the money some day, always supposing this tyrant of mine doesn't marry, which of course any reasonable man would. Well--there's Peter Dale--the dearest, prettiest little fellow you ever saw. He was aide-de-camp to Lord Brent in the war--_very_ smart--up to everything. He's demobbed, and has gone into the City. Horribly rich already, and will now, of course, make another pile. He dreadfully wants to marry me--but--" she shook her head with emphasis--"No!--it wouldn't do. He tries to kiss me sometimes. I didn't mind it at first. But I've told him not to do it again. Then there's Julian--Julian Horne--Balliol--awfully clever"--she checked off the various items on her fingers--"as poor as a rat--a Socialist, of course--they all are, that kind--but a real one--not like Geoffrey French, who's a sham, though he is in the House, and has joined the Labour party. You see"--her tone grew suddenly serious--"I don't reckon Geoffrey French among my boys." "He's too old?" "Oh, he's not so very old. But--I don't think he likes me very much--and I'm not sure whether I like him. He's good fun, however--and he rags Julian Horne splendidly. That's one of his chief functions--and another is, to take a hand in my education--when I allow him--and when Julian isn't about. They both tell me what to read. Julian tells me to read history, and gives me lists of books. Geoffrey talks economics--and philosophy--and I adore it--he talks so well. He gave me Bergson the other day. Have you ever read any of him?" "Never," said Mrs. Friend, bewildered. "Who is he?" Helena's laugh woke the echoes of the room. But she checked it at once. "I don't want _him_ to think we're plotting," she said in a stage-whisper, looking round her. "If I do anything I want to spring it on him!" "Dear Miss Pitstone--please understand!--I can't help you to plot against Lord Buntingford. You must see I can't. He's my employer and your guardian. If I helped you to do what he disapproves I should simply be doing a dishonourable thing." "Yes," said Helena reflectively. "Of course I see that. It's awkward. I suppose you promised and vowed a great many things--like one's godmothers and godfathers?" "No, I didn't promise anything--except that I would go out with you, make myself useful to you, if I could--and help you with foreign languages." "Goody," said Helena. "Do you _really_ know French--and German?" The tone was incredulous. "I wish I did." "Well, I was two years in France, and a year and a half in Germany when I was a girl. My parents wanted me to be a governess." "And then you married?" "Yes--just the year before the war." "And your husband was killed?" The tone was low and soft. Mrs. Friend gave a mute assent. Suddenly Helena laid an arm round the little woman's neck. "I want you to be friends with me--will you? I hated the thought of a chaperon--I may as well tell you frankly. I thought I should probably quarrel with you in a week. That was before I arrived. Then when I saw you, I suddenly felt--'I shall like her! I'm glad she's here--I shan't mind telling her my affairs.' I suppose it was because you looked so--well, so meek and mild--so different from me--as though a puff would blow you away. One can't account for those things, can one? Do tell me your Christian name! I won't call you by it--if you don't like it." "My name is Lucy," said Mrs. Friend faintly. There was something so seductive in the neighbourhood of the girl's warm youth and in the new sweetness of her voice that she could not make any further defence of her "dignity." "I might have guessed Lucy. It's just like you," said the girl triumphantly. "Wordsworth's Lucy--do you remember her?--'A violet by a mossy stone'--That's you exactly. I _adore_ Wordsworth. Do you care about poetry?" The eager eyes looked peremptorily into hers. "Yes," said Mrs. Friend shyly--"I'm very fond of some things. But you'd think them old-fashioned!" "What--Byron?--Shelley? They're never old-fashioned!" "I never read much of them. But--I love Tennyson--and Mrs. Browning." Helena made a face-- "Oh, I don't care a hang for her. She's so dreadfully pious and sentimental. I laughed till I cried over 'Aurora Leigh.' But now--French things! If you lived all that time in France, you must have read French poetry. Alfred de Musset?--Madame de Noailles?" Mrs. Friend shook her head. "We went to lectures. I learnt a great deal of Racine--a little Victor Hugo--and Rostand--because the people I boarded with took me to 'Cyrano'!" "Ah, Rostand--" cried Helena, springing up. "Well, of course he's _vieux jeu_ now. The best people make mock of him. Julian does. I don't care--he gives me thrills down my back, and I love him. But then _panache_ means a good deal to me. And Julian doesn't care a bit. He despises people who talk about glory and honour--and that kind of thing. Well--Lucy--" She stopped mischievously, her head on one side. "Sorry!--but it slipped out. Lucy--good-night." Mrs. Friend hurriedly caught hold of her. "And you won't do anything hasty--about Lord Donald?" "Oh, I can't promise anything. One must stand by one's friends. One simply must. But I'll take care Cousin Philip doesn't blame you." "If I'm no use, you know--I can't stay." "No use to Cousin Philip, you mean, in policing me?" said Helena, with a good-humoured laugh. "Well, we'll talk about it again to-morrow. Good-night--Lucy!" The sly gaiety of the voice was most disarming. "Good-night, Miss Pitstone." "No, that won't do. It's absurd! I never ask people to call me Helena, unless I like them. I certainly never expected--there, I'll be frank!--that I should want to ask you--the very first night too. But I do want you to. Please, Lucy, call me Helena. _Please_!" Mrs. Friend did as she was told. "Sleep well," said Helena from the door. "I hope the housemaid's put enough on your bed, and given you a hot water-bottle? If anything scares you in the night, wake me--that is, if you can!" She disappeared. Outside Mrs. Friend's door the old house was in darkness, save for a single light in the hall, which burnt all night. The hall was the feature of the house. A gallery ran round it supported by columns from below, and spaced by answering columns which carried the roof. The bedrooms ran round the hall, and opened into the gallery. The columns were of yellow marble brought from Italy, and faded blue curtains hung between them. Helena went cautiously to the balustrade, drew one of the blue curtains round her, and looked down into the hall. Was everybody gone to bed? No. There were movements in a distant room. Somebody coughed, and seemed to be walking about. But she couldn't hear any talking. If Cousin Philip were still up, he was alone. Her anger came back upon her, and then curiosity. What was he thinking about, as he paced his room like a caged squirrel? About the trouble she was likely to give him--and what a fool he had been to take the job? She would like to go and reason with him. The excess of vitality that was in her, sighing for fresh worlds to conquer, urged her to vehement and self-confident action,--action for its own sake, for the mere joy of the heat and movement that go with it. Part of the impulse depended on the new light in which the gentleman walking about downstairs had begun to appear to her. She had known him hitherto as "Mummy's friend," always to be counted upon when any practical difficulty arose, and ready on occasion to put in a sharp word in defence of an invalid's peace, when a girl's unruliness threatened it. Remembering one or two such collisions, Helena felt her cheeks burn, as she hung over the hall, in the darkness. But those had been such passing matters. Now, as she recalled the expression of his eyes, during their clash at the dinner-table, she realized, with an excitement which was not disagreeable, that something much more prolonged and serious might lie before her. Accomplished modern, as she knew him to be in most things, he was going to be "stuffy" and "stupid" in some. Lord Donald's proceedings in the matter of Lady Preston evidently seemed to him--she had been made to feel it--frankly abominable. And he was not going to ask the man capable of them within his own doors. Well and good. "But as I don't agree with him--Donald was only larking!--I shall take my own way. A telegram goes anyway to Donald to-morrow morning--and we shall see. So good-night, Cousin Philip!" And blowing a kiss towards the empty hall, she gathered her white skirts round her, and fled laughing towards her own room. But just as she neared it, a door in front of her, leading to a staircase, opened, and a man in khaki appeared, carrying a candle. It was Captain Lodge, her neighbour at the dinner-table. The young man stared with amazement at the apparition rushing along the gallery towards him,--the girl's floating hair, and flushed loveliness as his candle revealed it. Helena evidently enjoyed his astonishment, and his sudden look of admiration. But before he could speak, she had vanished within her own door, just holding it open long enough to give him a laughing nod before it shut, and darkness closed with it on the gallery. "A man would need to keep his head with that girl!" thought Captain Lodge, with tantalized amusement. "But, my hat, what a beauty!" Meanwhile in the library downstairs a good deal of thinking was going on. Lord Buntingford was taking more serious stock of his new duties than he had done yet. As he walked, smoking, up and down, his thoughts were full of his poor little cousin Rachel Pitstone. She had always been a favourite of his; and she had always known him better than any other person among his kinsfolk. He had found it easy to tell her secrets, when nobody else could have dragged a word from him; and as a matter of fact she had known before she died practically all that there was to know about him. And she had been so kind, and simple and wise. Had she perhaps once had a _tendresse_ for him--before she met Ned Pitstone?--and if things had gone--differently--might he not, perhaps, have married her? Quite possibly. In any case the bond between them had always been one of peculiar intimacy; and in looking back on it he had nothing to reproach himself with. He had done what he could to ease her suffering life. Struck down in her prime by a mortal disease, a widow at thirty, with her one beautiful child, her chief misfortune had been the melancholy and sensitive temperament, which filled the rooms in which she lived as full of phantoms as the palace of Odysseus in the vision of Theoclymenus. She was afraid for her child; afraid for her friend; afraid for the world. The only hope of happiness for a woman, she believed, lay in an honest lover, if such a lover could be found. Herself an intellectual, and a freed spirit, she had no trust in any of the new professional and technical careers into which she saw women crowding. Sex seemed to her now as always the dominating fact of life. Votes did not matter, or degrees, or the astonishing but quite irrelevant fact, as the papers announced it, that women should now be able not only to fit but to plan a battleship. Love, and a child's clinging mouth, and the sweetness of a Darby and Joan old age, for these all but the perverted women had always lived, and would always live. She saw in her Helena the strong beginnings of sex. But she also realized the promise of intelligence, of remarkable brain development, and it seemed to her of supreme importance that sex should have the first innings in her child's life. "If she goes to college at once, as soon as I am gone, and her brain and her ambition are appealed to, before she has time to fall in love, she will develop on that side, prematurely--marvellously--and the rest will atrophy. And then when the moment for falling in love is over--and with her it mayn't be a long one--she will be a lecturer, a member of Parliament perhaps--a Socialist agitator--a woman preacher,--who knows?--there are all kinds of possibilities in Helena. But she will have missed her chance of being a woman, and a happy one; and thirty years hence she will realize it, when it is too late, and think bitterly of us both. Believe me, dear Philip, the moment for love won't last long in Helena's life. I have seen it come and go so rapidly, in the case of some of the most charming women. For after all, the world is now so much richer for women; and many women don't know their own minds in time, or get lost among the new landmarks. And of course all women can't marry; and thank God, there are a thousand new chances of happiness for those who don't. But there are some--and Helena, I am certain, will be one--who will be miserable, and probably wicked, unless they fall in love, and are happy. And it is a strait gate they will have to pass through. For their own natures and the new voices in the world will tempt them to this side and that. And before they know where they are--the moment will have gone--the wish--and the power. "So, dear Philip, lend yourself to my plan; though you may seem to yourself the wrong person, and though it imposes--as I know it will--a rather heavy responsibility on you. But once or twice you have told me that I have helped you--through difficult places. That makes me dare to ask you this thing. There is no one else I can ask. And it won't be bad for you, Philip,--it is good for us all, to have to think intimately--seriously--for some other human being or beings; and owing to circumstances, not your own fault, you have missed just this in life--except for your thoughts and care for me--bless you always, my dear friend. "Am I preaching? Well, in my case the time for make-believe is over. I am too near the end. The simple and austere soul of things seems to shine out-- "And yet what I ask you is neither simple, nor austere! Take care of Helena for two years. Give her fun, and society,--a good time, and every chance to marry. Then, after two years, if she hasn't married--if she hasn't fallen in love---she must choose her course. "You may well feel you are too young--indeed I wish, for this business, you were older!--but you will find some nice woman to be hostess and chaperon; the experiment will interest and amuse you, and the time will soon go. You know I _could_ not ask you--unless some things were--as they are. But that being so, I feel as if I were putting into your hands the chance of a good deed, a kind deed,--blessing, possibly, him that gives, and her that takes. And I am just now in the mood to feel that kindness is all that matters, in this mysterious life of ours. Oh, I wish I had been kinder--to so many people!--I wish--I wish! The hands stretched out to me in the dark that I have passed by--the voices that have piped to me, and I have not danced-- "I mustn't cry. It is hard that in one of the few cases when I had the chance to be kind, and did not wholly miss it, I should be making in the end a selfish bargain of it--claiming so much more than I ever gave! "Forgive me, my best of friends-- "You shall come and see me once about this letter, and then we won't discuss it again--ever. I have talked over the business side of it with my lawyer, and asked him to tell you anything you don't yet know about my affairs and Helena's. We needn't go into them." "One of the few cases where I had the chance to be kind." Why, Rachel Pitstone's life had been one continuous selfless offering to God and man, from her childhood to her last hour! He knew very well what he had owed her--what others had owed--to her genius for sympathy, for understanding, for a compassion which was also a stimulus. He missed her sorely. At that very moment, he was in great practical need of her help, her guidance. Whereas it was _he_--worse luck!--who must be the stumbling and unwelcomed guide of Rachel's child! How, in the name of mystery, had the child grown up so different from the mother? Well, impatience wouldn't help him--he must set his mind to it. That scoundrel, Jim Donald! CHAPTER IV Mrs. Friend passed a somewhat wakeful night after the scene in which Helena Pitstone had bestowed her first confidences on her new companion. For Lucy Friend the experience had been unprecedented and agitating. She had lived in a world where men and women do not talk much about themselves, and as a rule instinctively avoid thinking much about themselves, as a habit tending to something they call "morbid." This at least had been the tone in her parents' house. The old woman in Lancaster Gate had not been capable either of talking or thinking about herself, except as a fretful animal with certain simple bodily wants. In Helena, Lucy Friend had for the first time come cross the type of which the world is now full--men and women, but especially women, who have no use any longer for the reticence of the past, who desire to know all they possibly can about themselves, their own thoughts and sensations, their own peculiarities and powers, all of which are endlessly interesting to them; and especially to the intellectual _élite_ among them. Already, before the war, the younger generation, which was to meet the brunt of it, was an introspective, a psychological generation. And the great war has made it doubly introspective, and doubly absorbed in itself. The mere perpetual strain on the individual consciousness, under the rush of strange events, has developed men and women abnormally. Only now it is not an introspection, or a psychology, which writes journals or autobiography. It is an introspection which _talks_; a psychology which chatters, of all things small and great; asking its Socratic way through all the questions of the moment, the most trivial, and the most tremendous. Coolness, an absence of the old tremors and misgivings that used especially to haunt the female breast in the days of Miss Austen, is a leading mark of the new type. So that Mrs. Friend need not have been astonished to find Helena meeting her guardian next morning at breakfast as though nothing had happened. He, like a man of the world, took his cue immediately from her, and the conversation--whether it ran on the return of Karsavina to the Russian Ballet, or the success of "Abraham Lincoln"; or the prospects of the Peace, or merely the weddings and buryings of certain common acquaintances which appeared in the morning's _Times_--was so free and merry, that Mrs. Friend began soon to feel her anxieties of the night dropping away, to enjoy the little luxuries of the breakfast table, and the pleasant outlook on the park, of the high, faded, and yet stately room. "What a charming view!" she said to Lord Buntingford, when they rose from breakfast, and she made her way to the open window, while Helena was still deep in the papers. "You think so?" he said indifferently, standing beside her. "I'm afraid I prefer London. But now on another matter--Do you mind taking up your duties instanter?" "Please--please let me!" she said, turning eagerly to him. "Well--there is a cook-housekeeper somewhere--who, I believe, expects orders. Do you mind giving them? Please do not look so alarmed! It is the simplest matter in the world. You will appear to give orders. In reality Mrs. Mawson will have everything cut and dried, and you will not dare to alter a thing. But she expects you or me to pretend. And I should be greatly relieved if you would do the pretending?" "Certainly," murmured Mrs. Friend. Lord Buntingford, looking at the terrace outside, made a sudden gesture--half despair, half impatience. "Oh, and there's old Fenn,--my head gardener. He's been here forty years, and he sits on me like an old man of the sea. I know what he wants. He's coming up to ask me about something he calls a herbaceous border. You see that border there?"--he pointed--"Well, I barely know a peony from a cabbage. Perhaps you do?" He turned towards her hopefully; and Mrs. Friend felt the charm, as many other women had felt it before her, of the meditative blue eyes, under the black and heavy brow. She shook her head smiling. He smiled in return. "But, if you don't--would you mind--again--pretending? Would you see the old fellow, some time this morning--and tell him to do exactly what he damn pleases--I beg your pardon!--it slipped out. If not, he'll come into my study, and talk a jargon of which I don't understand a word, for half an hour. And as he's stone deaf, he doesn't understand a word I say. Moreover when he's once there I can't get him out. And I've got a bit of rather tough county business this morning. Would you mind? It's a great deal to ask. But if you only let him talk--and look intelligent--" "Of course I will," said Mrs. Friend, bewildered, adding rather desperately, "But I don't know anything at all about it." "Oh, that doesn't matter. Perhaps Helena does! By the way, she hasn't seen her sitting-room." He turned towards his ward, who was still reading at the table. "I have arranged a special sitting-room for you, Helena. Would you like to come and look at it?" "What fun!" said Helena, jumping up. "And may I do what I like in it?" Buntingford's mouth twisted a little. "Naturally! The house is at your disposal. Turn anything out you like--and bring anything else in. There is some nice old stuff about, if you look for it. If you send for the odd man he'll move anything. Well, I'd better show you what I arranged. But you can have any other room you prefer." He led the way to the first floor, and opened a door in a corner of the pillared gallery. "Oh, jolly!" cried Helena. For they entered a lofty room, with white Georgian panelling, a few pretty old cabinets and chairs, a chintz-covered sofa, a stand of stuffed humming-birds, a picture or two, a blue Persian carpet, and a large book-case full of books. "My books!" cried Helena in amazement. "I was just going to ask if the cases had come. How ever did you get them unpacked, and put here so quickly?" "Nothing easier. They arrived three days ago. I telephoned to a man I know in Leicester Square. He sent some one down, and they were all finished before you came down. Perhaps you won't like the arrangement? Well, it will amuse you to undo it!" If there was the slightest touch of sarcasm in the eyes that travelled from her to the books, Helena took it meekly. She went to the bookshelves. Poets, novelists, plays, philosophers, economists, some French and Italian books, they were all in their proper places. The books were partly her own, partly her mother's. Helena eyed them thoughtfully. "You must have taken a lot of trouble." "Not at all. The man took all the trouble. There wasn't much." As he spoke, her eye caught a piano standing between the windows. "Mummy's piano! Why, I thought we agreed it should be stored?" "It seemed to me you might as well have it down here. We can easily hire one for London." "Awfully nice of you," murmured Helena. She opened it and stood with her hand on the keys, looking out into the park, as though she pursued some thought or memory of her own. It was a brilliant May morning, and the windows were open. Helena's slim figure in a white dress, the reddish touch in her brown hair, the lovely rounding of her cheek and neck, were thrown sharply against a background of new leaf made by a giant beech tree just outside. Mrs. Friend looked at Lord Buntingford. The thought leaped into her mind--"How can he help making love to her himself?"--only to be immediately chidden. Buntingford was not looking at Helena but at his watch. "Well, I must go and do some drivelling work before lunch. I have given Mrs. Friend _carte blanche_, Helena. Order what you like, and if Mrs. Mawson bothers you, send her to me. Geoffrey comes to-night, and we shall be seven to-morrow." He made for the door. Helena had turned suddenly at his last words, eye and cheek kindling. "Hm--" she said, under her breath--"So he has sent the telegram." She left the window, and began to walk restlessly about the room, looking now at the books, now at the piano. Her face hardened, and she paid no attention to Mrs. Friend's little comments of pleasure on the room and its contents. Presently indeed she cut brusquely across. "I am just going down to the stables to see whether my horse has arrived. A friend of mine bought her for me in town--and she was to be here early this morning. I want, too, to see where they're going to put her." "Mayn't I come too?" said Mrs. Friend, puzzled by the sudden clouding of the girl's beautiful looks. "Oh, no--please don't. You've got to see the housekeeper! I'll get my hat and run down. I found out last night where the stables are. I shan't be more than ten minutes or so." She hurried away, leaving Mrs. Friend once more a prey to anxieties. She recalled the threat of the night before. But no, _impossible_! After all the kindness and the forethought! She dismissed it from her mind. The interview with the housekeeper was an ordeal to the gentle inexperienced woman. But her entire lack of any sort of pretension was in itself ingratiating; and her manner had the timid charm of her character. Mrs. Mawson, who might have bristled or sulked in stronger hands, in order to mark her distaste for the advent of a mistress in the house she had been long accustomed to rule, was soon melted by the docility of the little lady, and graciously consented to see her own plans approved _en bloc_, by one so frankly ignorant of how a country house party should be conducted. Then it was the turn of old Fenn; a more difficult matter, since he did genuinely want instructions, and Mrs. Friend had none to give him. But kind looks, and sympathetic murmurs, mingled with honest delight in the show of azaleas in the conservatory carried her through. Old Fenn too, instead of resenting her, adopted her. She went back to the house flushed with a little modest triumph. Housewifely instincts revived in her. Her hands wanted to be doing. She had ventured to ask Fenn for some flowers, and would dare to arrange them herself if Mrs. Mawson would let her. Then, as she re-entered the house, she came back at a bound to reality. "If I can't keep Miss Pitstone out of mischief, I shan't be here a month!" she thought pitifully; and how was it to be done? She found Helena sitting demurely in the sitting-room, pretending to read a magazine, but really, or so it seemed to Mrs. Friend, keeping both eyes and ears open for events. "I'm trying to get ready for Julian--" she said impatiently, throwing away her book. "He sent me his article in the _Market Place_, but it's so stiff that I can't make head or tail of it. I like to hear him talk--but he doesn't write English." Mrs. Friend took up the magazine, and perceived a marked item in the table of contents--"A New Theory of Value." "What does it mean?" she asked. "Oh, I wish I knew!" said Helena, with a little yawn. "And then he changes so. Last year he made me read Meredith--the novels, I mean. _One of Our Conquerors_, he vowed, was the finest thing ever written. He scoffed at me for liking _Diana_ and _Richard Feverel_ better, because they were easier. And _now_, nothing's bad enough for Meredith's 'stilted nonsense'--'characters without a spark of life in them'--'horrible mannerisms'--you should hear him. Except the poems--ah, except the poems! He daren't touch them. I say--do you know the 'Hymn to Colour'?" The girl's eager eyes questioned her companion. Her face in a moment was all softness and passion. Mrs. Friend shook her head. The nature and deficiencies of her own education were becoming terribly plain to her with every hour in Helena's company. Helena sprang up, fetched the book, put Mrs. Friend forcibly into an arm-chair, and read aloud. Mrs. Friend listened with all her ears, and was at the end, like Faust, no wiser than before. What did it all mean? She groped, dazzled, among the Meredithian mists and splendours. But Helena read with a growing excitement, as though the flashing mysterious verse were part of her very being. When the last stanza was done, she flung herself fiercely down on a stool at Mrs. Friend's feet, breathing fast: "Glorious!--oh, glorious!-- "Look now where Colour, the soul's bridegroom, makes The House of Heaven splendid for the Bride." She turned to look up at the little figure in the chair, half laughing, half passionate: "You do understand, don't you?" Mrs. Friend again shook her head despairingly. "It sounds wonderful--but I haven't a notion what it means!" Helena laughed again, but without a touch of mockery. "One has to be taught--coached--regularly coached. Julian coached me." "What is meant by Colour?" asked Mrs. Friend faintly. "Colour is Passion, Beauty, Freedom!" said Helena, her cheek glowing. "It is just the opposite of dulness--and routine--and make-believe. It's what makes life worth while. And it is the young who feel it--the young who hear it calling--the young who obey it! And then when they are old, they have it to remember. Now, do you understand?" Lucy Friend did not answer. But involuntarily, two shining tears stood in her eyes. There was something extraordinarily moving in the girl's ardour. She could hardly bear it. There came back to her momentary visions from her own quiet past--a country lane at evening where a man had put his arm round her and kissed her--her wedding-evening by the sea, when the sun went down, and all the ways were darkened, and the stars came out--and that telegram which put an end to everything, which she had scarcely had time to feel, because her mother was so ill, and wanted her every moment. Had she--even she--in her poor, drab, little life--had her moments of living Poetry, of transforming Colour, like others--without knowing it? Helena watched her, as though in a quick, unspoken sympathy, her own storm of feeling subsiding. "Do you know, Lucy, you look very nice indeed in that little black dress!" she said, in her soft, low voice, like the voice of an incantation, that she had used the night before. "You are the neatest, daintiest person!--not prim--but you make everything you wear refined. When I compare you with Cynthia Welwyn!" She raised her shoulders scornfully. Lucy Friend, aghast at the outrageousness of the comparison, tried to silence her--but quite in vain. Helena ran on. "Did you watch Cynthia last night? She was playing for Cousin Philip with all her might. Why doesn't he marry her? She would suit his autocratic ideas very well. He is forty-four. She must be thirty-eight if she is a day. They have both got money--which Cynthia can't do without, for she is horribly extravagant. But I wouldn't give much for her chances. Cousin Philip is a tough proposition, as the American says. There is no getting at his real mind. All one knows is that it is a tyrannical mind!" All softness had died from the girl's face and sparkling eyes. She sat on the floor, her hands round her knees, defiance in every tense feature. Mrs. Friend was conscious of renewed alarm and astonishment, and at last found the nerve to express them. "How can you call it tyrannical when he spends all this time and thought upon you!" "The gilding of the cage," said Helena stubbornly. "That is the way women have always been taken in. Men fling them scraps to keep them quiet. But as to the _real_ feast--liberty to discover the world for themselves, make their own experiments--choose and test their own friends--no, thank you! And what is life worth if it is only to be lived at somebody's else's dictation?" "But you have only been here twenty-four hours--not so much! And you don't know Lord Buntingford's reasons--" "Oh, yes, I do know!" said Helena, undisturbed--"more or less. I told you last night. They don't matter to me. It's the principle involved that matters. Am I free, or am I not free? Anyway, I've just sent that telegram." "To whom?" cried Mrs. Friend. "To Lord Donald, of course, asking him to meet me at the Ritz next Wednesday. If you will be so good"--the brown head made her a ceremonial bow--"as to go up with me to town--we can go to my dressmaker's together--I have got heaps to do there--then I can leave you somewhere for lunch--and pick you up again afterwards!" "Of course, Miss Pitstone--Helena!--I can't do anything of the sort, unless your guardian agrees." "Well, we shall see," said Helena coolly, jumping up. "I mean to tell him after lunch. Don't please worry. And good-bye till lunch. This time I am really going to look after my horse!" A laugh, and a wave of the hand--she had disappeared. Mrs. Friend was left to reflect on the New Woman. Was it in truth the war that had produced her?--and if so, how and why? All that seemed probable was that in two or three weeks' time, perhaps, she would be again appealing to the same agency that had sent her to Beechmark. She believed she was entitled to a month's notice. Poor Lord Buntingford! Her sympathies were hotly on his side, so far as she had any understanding of the situation into which she had been plunged with so little warning. Yet when Helena was actually there at her feet, she was hypnotized. The most inscrutable thing of all was, how she could ever have supposed herself capable of undertaking such a charge! The two ladies were already lunching when Lord Buntingford appeared, bringing with him another neighbouring squire, come to consult him on certain local affairs. Sir Henry Bostock, one of those solid, grey-haired pillars of Church and State in which rural England abounds, was first dazzled by Miss Pitstone's beauty, and then clearly scandalized by some of her conversation, and perhaps--or so Mrs. Friend imagined--by the rather astonishing "make-up" which disfigured lips and cheeks Nature had already done her best with. He departed immediately after lunch. Lord Buntingford accompanied him to the front door, saw him mount his horse, and was returning to the library, when a white figure crossed his path. "Cousin Philip, I want to speak to you." He looked up at once. "All right, Helena. Will you come into the library?" He ushered her in, shut the door behind her, and pushed forward an arm-chair. "You'll find that comfortable, I think?" "Thank you, I'd rather stand. Cousin Philip, did you send that telegram this morning?" "Certainly. I told you I should." "Then you won't be surprised that I too sent mine." "I don't understand what you mean?" "When this morning you said there would be seven for dinner to-night, I of course realized that you meant to stick to what you had said about Lord Donald yesterday; and as I particularly want to see Lord Donald, I sent the new groom to the village this morning with a wire to him to say that I should be glad if he would arrange to give me luncheon at the Ritz next Wednesday. I have to go up to try a dress on." Lord Buntingford paused a moment, looking apparently at the cigarette with which his fingers were playing. "You proposed, I imagine, that Mrs. Friend should go with you?" "Oh, yes, to my dressmaker's. Then I would arrange for her to go somewhere to lunch--Debenham's, perhaps." "And it was your idea then to go alone--to meet Lord Donald?" He looked up. "He would wait for me in the lounge at the Ritz. It's quite simple!" Philip Buntingford laughed--good-humouredly. "Well, it is very kind of you to have told me so frankly, Helena--because now I shall prevent it. It is the last thing in the world that your mother would have wished, that you should be seen at the Ritz alone with Lord Donald. I therefore have her authority with me in asking you either to write or telegraph to him again to-night, giving up the plan. Better still if you would depute me to do it. It is really a very foolish plan--if I may say so." "Why?" "Because--well, there are certain things a girl of nineteen can't do without spoiling her chances in life--and one of them is to be seen about alone with a man like Lord Donald." "And again I ask--why?" "I really can't discuss his misdoings with you, Helena. Won't you trust me in the matter? I thought I had made it plain that having been devoted to your mother, I was prepared to be equally devoted to you, and wished you to be as happy and free as possible." "That's an appeal to sentiment," said Helena, resolutely. "Of course I know it all sounds horrid. You've been as nice as possible; and anybody who didn't sympathize with my views would think me a nasty, ungrateful toad. But I'm not going to be coaxed into giving them up, any more than I'm going to be bullied." Lord Buntingford surveyed her. The habitual slight pucker--as though of anxiety or doubt--in his brow was much in evidence. It might have meant the chronic effort of a short-sighted man to see. But the fine candid eyes were not short-sighted. The pucker meant something deeper. "Of course I should like to understand what your views are," he said at last, throwing away one cigarette, and lighting another. Helena's look kindled. She looked handsomer and more maenad-like than ever, as she stood leaning against Buntingford's writing-table, her arms folded, one slim foot crossed over the other. "The gist of them is," she said eagerly, "that _we_--the women of the present day--are not going to accept our principles--moral--or political--or economic--on anybody's authority. You seem, Cousin Philip, in my case at any rate, to divide the world into two sets of people, moral and immoral, good and bad--desirable and undesirable--that kind of thing! And you expect me to know the one set, and ignore the other set. Well, we don't see it that way at all. We think that everybody is a pretty mixed lot. I know I am myself. At any rate I'm not going to begin my life by laying down a heap of rules about things I don't understand--or by accepting them from you, or anybody. If Lord Donald's a bad man, I want to know why he is a bad man--and then I'll decide. If he revolts my moral sense, of course I'll cut him. But I won't take anybody else's moral sense for judge. We've got to overhaul that sort of thing from top to bottom." Buntingford looked thoughtfully at the passionate speaker. Should he--could he argue with her? Could he show her, for instance, a letter, or parts of it, which he had received that very morning from poor Luke Preston, his old Eton and Oxford friend? No!--it would be useless. In her present mood she might treat it so as to rouse his own temper--let alone the unseemliness of the discussion it must raise between them. Or should he give her a fairly full biography of Jim Donald, as he happened to know it? He revolted against the notion, astonished to find how strong certain old-fashioned instincts still were in his composition. And, after all, he had said a good deal the night before, at dinner, when Helena's invitation to a man he despised as a coward and a libertine had been first sprung upon him. There really was only one way out. He took it. "Well, Helena, I'm very sorry," he said slowly. "Your views are very interesting. I should like some day to discuss them with you. But the immediate business is to stop this Ritz plan. You really won't stop it yourself?" "Certainly not!" said Helena, her breath fluttering. "Well, then, I must write to Donald myself. I happen to possess the means of making it impossible for him to meet you at the Ritz next Wednesday, Helena; and I shall use them. You must make some other arrangement." "What means?" she demanded. She had turned very pale. "Ah, no!--that you must leave to me. Look here, Helena"--his tone softened--"can't we shake hands on it, and make up? I do hate quarrelling with your mother's daughter." Involuntarily, through all her rage, Helena was struck by the extreme sensitiveness of the face opposite her--a sensitiveness often disguised by the powerful general effect of the man's head and eyes. In a calmer mood she might have said to herself that only some past suffering could have produced it. At the moment, however, she was incapable of anything but passionate resentment. All the same there was present in her own mind an ideal of what the action and bearing of a girl in her position should be, which, with the help of pride, would not allow her to drift into mere temper. She put her hands firmly behind her; so that Buntingford was forced to withdraw his; but she kept her self-possession. "I don't see what there is but quarrelling before us, Cousin Philip, if you are to proceed on these lines. Are you really going to keep me to my promise?" "To let me take care of you--for these two years? It was not a promise to me, Helena." The girl's calm a little broke down. "Mummy would never have made me give it," she said fiercely, "if she had known--" "Well, you can't ask her now," he said gently. "Hadn't we better make the best of it?" She scorned to reply. He opened the door for her, and she swept through it. Left to himself, Buntingford gave a great stretch. "That was strenuous!"--he said to himself--"uncommonly strenuous. How many times a week shall I have to do it? Can't Cynthia Welwyn do anything? I'll go and see Cynthia this afternoon." With which very natural, but quite foolish resolution, he at last succeeded in quieting his own irritation, and turning his mind to a political speech he had to make next week in his own village. CHAPTER V Cynthia Welwyn was giving an account of her evening at Beechmark to her elder sister, Lady Georgina. They had just met in the little drawing-room of Beechmark Cottage, and tea was coming in. It would be difficult to imagine a greater contrast than the two sisters presented. They were the daughters of a peer belonging to what a well-known frequenter of great houses and great families before the war used to call "the inferior aristocracy"--with an inflection of voice caught no doubt from the great families themselves. Yet their father had been an Earl, the second of his name, and was himself the son of a meteoric personage of mid-Victorian days--parliamentary lawyer, peer, and Governor of an Indian Presidency, who had earned his final step in the peerage by the skilful management of a little war, and had then incontinently died, leaving his family his reputation, which was considerable, and his savings, which were disappointingly small. Lady Cynthia and Lady Georgina were his only surviving children, and the earldom was extinct. The sisters possessed a tiny house in Brompton Square, and rented Beechmark Cottage from Lord Buntingford, of whom their mother, long since dead, had been a cousin. The cottage stood within the enclosure of the park, and to their connection with the big house the sisters owed a number of amenities,--game in winter, flowers and vegetables in summer--which were of importance to their small income. Cynthia Welwyn, however, could never have passed as anybody's dependent. She thanked her cousin occasionally for the kindnesses of which his head gardener and his game-keeper knew much more than he did; and when he said impatiently--"Please never thank for that sort of thing!" she dropped the subject as lightly as she had raised it. Secretly she felt that such things, and much more, were her due. She had not got from life all she should have got; and it was only natural that people should make it up to her a little. For Cynthia, though she had wished to marry, was unmarried, and a secret and melancholy conviction now sometimes possessed her that she would remain Cynthia Welwyn to the end. She knew very well that in the opinion of her friends she had fallen between two stools. Her neighbour, Sir Richard Watson, had proposed to her twice,--on the last occasion some two years before the war. She had not been able to make up her mind to accept him, because on the whole she was more in love with her cousin, Philip Buntingford, and still hoped that his old friendship for her might turn to something deeper. But the war had intervened, and during its four years she and Buntingford had very much lost sight of each other. She had taken her full share in the county war work; while he was absorbed body and soul by the Admiralty. And now that they were meeting again as of old, she was very conscious, in some undefined way, that she had lost ground with him. Uneasily she felt that her talk sometimes bored him; yet she could not help talking. In the pre-war days, when they met in a drawing-room full of people, he had generally ended his evening beside her. Now his manner, for all its courtesy, seemed to tell her that those times were done; that she was four years older; that she had lost the first brilliance of her looks; and that he himself had grown out of her ken. Helena's young unfriendly eyes had read her rightly. She did wish fervently to recapture Philip Buntingford; and saw no means of doing so. Meanwhile Sir Richard, now demobilized, had come back from the war bringing great glory with him, as one of the business men whom the Army had roped in to help in its vast labour and transport organization behind the lines. He too had reappeared at Beechmark Cottage. But he too was four years older--and dreadfully preoccupied, it seemed to her, with a thousand interests which had mattered nothing to him in the old easy days. Yet Cynthia Welwyn was still an extremely attractive and desirable woman, and was quite aware of it, as was her elder sister, Lady Georgina, who spent her silent life in alternately admiring and despising the younger. Lady Georgina was short, thin, and nearly white-haired. She had a deep voice, which she used with a harsh abruptness, startling to the newcomer. But she used it very little. Cynthia's friends, were used to see her sitting absolutely silent behind the tea-urn at breakfast or tea, filling the cups while Cynthia handed them and Cynthia talked; and they had learned that it was no use at all to show compassion and try to bring her into the conversation. A quiet rather stony stare, a muttered "Ah" or "Oh," were all that such efforts produced. Some of the frequenters of the cottage drawing-room were convinced that Lady Georgina was "not quite all there." Others had the impression of something watchful and sinister; and were accustomed to pity "dear Cynthia" for having to live with so strange a being. But in truth the sisters suited each other very fairly, and Lady Georgina found a good deal more tongue when she was alone with Cynthia than at other times. To the lively account that Cynthia had been giving her of the evening at Beechmark, and the behaviour of Helena Pitstone, Lady Georgina had listened in a sardonic silence; and at the end of it she said-- "What ever made the man such a fool?" "Who?--Buntingford? My dear, what could he do? Rachel Pitstone was his greatest friend in the world, and when she asked him just the week before she died, how could he say No?" Lady Georgina murmured that in that case Rachel Pitstone also had been a fool-- "Unless, of course, she wanted the girl to marry Buntingford. Why, Philip's only forty-four now. A nice age for a guardian! Of course it's not proper. The neighbours will talk." "Oh, no,--not with a chaperon. Besides nobody minds anything odd nowadays." Cynthia meanwhile as she lay stretched in a deep arm-chair, playing with the tea-spoon in her shapely fingers, was a pleasant vision. Since coming in from the village, she had changed her tweed coat and skirt for a tea-frock of some soft silky stuff, hyacinth blue in colour; and Georgina, for whom tea-frocks were a silly abomination, and who was herself sitting bolt upright in a shabby blue serge some five springs old, could not deny the delicate beauty of her sister's still fresh complexion and pale gold hair, nor the effectiveness of the blue dress in combination with them. She did not really want Cynthia to look older, nor to see her ill-dressed; but all the same there were many days when Cynthia's mature perfections roused a secret irritation in her sister--a kind of secret triumph also in the thought that, in the end, Time would be the master even of Cynthia. Perhaps after all she would marry. It did look as though Sir Richard Watson, if properly encouraged, and indemnified for earlier rebuffs, might still mean business. As for Philip Buntingford, it was only Cynthia's vanity that had ever made her imagine him in love with her. Lady Georgina scoffed at the notion. These fragmentary reflections, and others like them were passing rapidly and disconnectedly through the mind of the elder sister, when her ear caught the sound of footsteps in the drive. Drawing aside a corner of the muslin curtain beside her, which draped one of the French windows of the low room, she perceived the tall figure and scarcely perceptible limp of Lord Buntingford. Cynthia too saw him, and ceased to lounge. She quietly re-lit the tea-kettle, and took a roll of knitting from a table near her. Then as the front bell rang through the small house, she threw a scarcely perceptible look at her sister. Would Georgie "show tact," and leave her and Philip alone, or would she insist on her rights and spoil his visit? Georgina made no sign. Buntingford entered, flushed with his walk, and carrying a bunch of blue-bells which he presented to Lady Georgina. "I gathered them in Cricket Wood. The whole wood is a sea of blue. You and Cynthia must really go and see them." He settled himself in a chair, and plunged into tea and small talk as though to the manner born. But all the time Cynthia, while approving his naval uniform, and his general picturesqueness, was secretly wondering what he had come about. For although he was enjoying a well-earned leave, the first for two years, and had every right to idle, the ordinary afternoon call of country life, rarely, as she knew, came into the scheme of his day. The weather was beautiful and she had made sure that he would be golfing on a well-known links some three miles off. Presently the small talk flagged, and Buntingford began to fidget. Slowly Lady Georgina rose from her seat, and again extinguished the flame under the silver kettle. Would she go, or would she not go? Cynthia dropped some stitches in the tension of the moment. Then Buntingford got up to open the door for Georgina, who, without deigning to make any conventional excuse for her departure, nevertheless departed. Buntingford returned to his seat, picked up Cynthia's ball of wool, and sat holding it, his eyes on the down-dropped head of his cousin, and on the beautiful hands holding the knitting-needles. Yes, she was still very good-looking, and had been sensible enough not to spoil herself by paint and powder, unlike that silly child, Helena, who was yet so much younger--twenty-two years younger, almost. It seemed incredible. But he could reckon Cynthia's age to a day; for they had known each other very well as children, and he had often given her a birthday present, till the moment when, in her third season, Cynthia had peremptorily put an end to the custom. Then he had gone abroad, and there had been a wide gap of years when they had never seen each other at all. And now, it was true, she did often bore him, intellectually. But at this moment, he was not bored--quite the contrary. The sunny cottage room, with its flowers and books and needlework, and a charming woman as its centre, evidently very glad to see him, and ready to welcome any confidences he might give her, produced a sudden sharp effect upon him. That hunger for something denied him--the "It" which he was always holding at bay--sprang upon him, and shook his self-control. "We've known each other a long time, haven't we, Cynthia?" he said, smiling, and holding out her ball of wool. Cynthia hardly concealed her start of pleasure. She looked up, shaking her hair from her white brow and temples with a graceful gesture, half responsive, half melancholy. "So long!" she said--"it doesn't bear thinking of." "Not at all. You haven't aged a bit. I want you to help me in something, Cynthia. You remember how you helped me out of one or two scrapes in the old days?" They both laughed. Cynthia remembered very well. That scrape, for instance, with the seductive little granddaughter of the retired village school-master--a veritable Ancient of Days, who had been the witness of an unlucky kiss behind a hedge, and had marched up instanter, in his wrath, to complain to Lord Buntingford _grand-père._ Or that much worse scrape, when a lad of nineteen, with not enough to do in his Oxford vacation, had imagined himself in love with a married lady of the neighbourhood, twenty years older than himself, and had had to be packed off in disgrace to Switzerland with a coach:--an angry grandfather breathing fire and slaughter. Certainly in those days Philip had been unusually--remarkably susceptible. Cynthia remembered him as always in or out of a love-affair, while she to whom he never made love was alternately champion and mentor. In those days, he had no expectation of the estates or the title. He was plain Philip Bliss, with an artistic and literary turn, great personal charm, and a temperament that invited catastrophes. That was before he went to Paris and Rome for serious work at painting. Seven years he had been away from England, and she had never seen him. He had announced his marriage to her in a short note containing hardly any particulars--except that his wife was a student like himself, and that he intended to live abroad and work. Some four years later, the _Times_ contained the bare news, in the obituary column, of his wife's death, and about a year afterwards he returned to England, an enormously changed man, with that slight lameness, which seemed somehow to draw a sharp, dividing line between the splendid, impulsive youth who had gone abroad, and the reserved, and self-contained man of thirty-two--pessimist and dilettante--who had returned. His lameness he ascribed to an accident in the Alps, but would never say anything more about it; and his friends presently learned to avoid the subject, and to forget the slight signs of something unexplained which had made them curious at first. In the intervening years before the war, Cynthia felt tolerably sure that she had been his only intimate woman friend. His former susceptibility seemed to have vanished. On the whole he avoided women's society. Some years after his return he had inherited the title and the estates, and might have been one of the most invited men in London had he wished to be; while Cynthia could remember at least three women, all desirable, who would have liked to marry him. The war had swept him more decidedly than ever out of the ordinary current of society. He had made it both an excuse and a shield. His work was paramount; and even his old friends had lost sight of him. He lived and breathed for an important Committee of the Admiralty, on which as time went on he took a more and more important place. In the four years Cynthia had scarcely seen him more than half a dozen times. And now the war was over. It was May again, and glorious May with the world all colour and song, the garden a wealth of blossom, and the nights clear and fragrant under moon or stars. And here was Philip again--much more like the old Philip than he had been for years--looking at her with those enchanting blue eyes of his, and asking her to do something for him. No wonder Cynthia's pulses were stirred. The night before, she had come home depressed--very conscious that she had had no particular success with him at dinner, or afterwards. This unexpected _tête-à-tête_, with its sudden touch of intimacy, made up for it all. What could she do but assure him--trying hard not to be too forthcoming--that she would be delighted to help him, if she could? What was wrong? "Nothing but my own idiocy," he said, smiling. "I find myself guardian to an extremely headstrong young woman, and I don't know how to manage her. I want your advice." Cynthia lay back in her chair, and prepared to give him all her mind. But her eyes showed a certain mockery. "I wonder why you undertook it!" "So do I. But--well, I couldn't help it. We won't discuss that. But what I had very little idea of--was the modern girl!" Cynthia laughed out. "And now you have discovered her--in one day?" He laughed too, but rather dismally. "Oh, I am only on the first step. What I shall come to presently, I don't know. But the immediate problem is that Helena bombed me last night by the unexpected announcement that she had asked Donald--Lord Donald--for the week-end. Do you know him?" Cynthia's eyebrows had gone up. "Very slightly." "You know his reputation?" "I begin to remember a good deal about him. Go on." "Well, Helena had asked that man, without consulting me, to stay at my house, and she sprang the announcement on me, on Thursday, the invitation being for Saturday. I had to tell her then and there--that he couldn't come." "Naturally. How did she take it?" "Very ill. You see, in a rash moment, I had told her to invite her friends for week-ends as she pleased. So she holds that I have broken faith, and this morning she told me she had arranged to go up and lunch with Donald at the Ritz next week--alone! So again I had to stop it. But I don't play the jailer even decently. I feel the greatest fool in creation." Cynthia smiled. "I quite believe you! And this all happened in the first twenty-four hours? Poor Philip!" "And I have also been informed that Helena's 'views' will not allow her--in the future--to take my advice on any such questions--that she prefers her liberty to her reputation--and 'wants to understand a bad man.' She said so. It's all very well to laugh, Cynthia! But what am I to do?" Cynthia, however, continued to laugh unrestrainedly. And he joined in. "And now you want advice?" she said at last, checking her mirth. "I'm awfully sorry for you, Philip. What about the little chaperon?" "As nice a woman as ever was--but I don't see her preventing Helena from doing anything she wants to do. Helena will jolly well take care of that. Besides she is too new to the job." "She may get on better with Helena, perhaps, than a stronger woman," mused Cynthia. "But I am afraid you have got your work cut out. Wasn't it very rash of you?" "I couldn't help it," he repeated briefly. "And I must just do my best. But I'd be awfully grateful if you'd take a hand, Cynthia. Won't you come up and really make friends with her? She might take things from you that she wouldn't from me." Cynthia looked extremely doubtful. "I am sure last night she detested me." "How could you tell? And why should she?" "I'm twenty years older. That's quite enough." "You scarcely look a day older, Cynthia." She sighed, and lightly touched his hand, with a caressing gesture he remembered of old. "Very nice of you to say it--but of course it isn't true. Well, Philip, I'll do what I can. I'll wander up some time--on Sunday perhaps. With your coaching, I could at least give her a biography of Jim Donald. One needn't be afraid of shocking her?" His eyebrows lifted. "Who's shocked at anything nowadays? Look at the things girls read and discuss! I'm old-fashioned, I suppose. But I really couldn't talk about Donald to her this morning. The fellow is such a worm! It would come better from you." "Tell me a few more facts, then, about him, than I know at present." He gave her rapidly a sketch of the life and antecedents of Lord Donald of Dunoon--gambler, wastrel, _divorcé_, et cetera, speaking quite frankly, almost as he would have spoken to a man. For there was nothing at all distasteful to him in Cynthia's knowledge of life. In a woman of forty it was natural and even attractive. The notion of a discussion of Donald's love-affairs with Helena had revolted him. It was on the contrary something of a relief--especially with a practical object in view--to discuss them with Cynthia. They sat chatting till the shadows lengthened, then wandered into the garden, still talking. Lady Georgina, watching from her window upstairs, had to admit that Buntingford seemed to like her sister's society. But if she had been within earshot at the last five minutes of their conversation, she would perhaps have seen no reason, finally, to change her opinion. Very agreeable that discursive talk had been to both participants. Buntingford had talked with great frankness of his own plans. In three months or so, his Admiralty work would be over. He thought very likely that the Government would then give him a modest place in the Administration. He might begin by representing the Admiralty in the Lords, and as soon as he got a foot on the political ladder prospects would open. On the whole, he thought, politics would be his line. He had no personal axes to grind; was afraid of nothing; wouldn't care if the Lords were done away with to-morrow, and could live on a fraction of his income if the Socialists insisted on grabbing the rest. But the new world which the war had opened was a desperately interesting one. He hadn't enough at stake in it to spoil his nerve. Whatever happened, he implied, he was steeled--politically and intellectually. Nothing could deprive him either of the joy of the fight, or the amusement of the spectacle. And Cynthia, her honey-gold hair blown back from her white temples by the summer wind, her blue parasol throwing a summer shade about her, showed herself, as they strolled backwards and forwards over the shady lawn of the cottage, a mistress of the listening art; and there is no art more winning, either to men or women. Then, in a moment, what broke the spell? Some hint or question from her, of a more intimate kind?--something that touched a secret place, wholly unsuspected by her? She racked her brains afterwards to think what it could have been; but in vain. All she knew was that the man beside her had suddenly stiffened. His easy talk had ceased to flow; while still walking beside her, he seemed to be miles away. So that by a quick common impulse both stood still. "I must go back to the village," said Cynthia. She smiled, but her face had grown a little tired and faded. He looked at his watch. "And I told the car to fetch me half an hour ago. You'll be up some time perhaps--luncheon to-morrow?--or Sunday?" "If I can. I'll do my best." "Kind Cynthia!" But his tone was perfunctory, and his eyes avoided her. When he had gone, she could only wonder what she had done to offend him; and a certain dreariness crept into the evening light. She was not the least in love with Philip--that she assured herself. But his sudden changes of mood were very trying to one who would like to be his friend. Buntingford walked rapidly home. His way lay through an oak wood, that was now a revel of spring; overhead, a shimmering roof of golden leaf and wild cherry-blossom, and underfoot a sea of blue-bells. A winding path led through it, and through the lovely open and grassy spaces which from time to time broke up the density of the wood--like so many green floors cleared for the wood nymphs' dancing. From the west a level sun struck through the trees, breaking through storm-clouds which had been rapidly filling the horizon, and kindling the tall trees, with their ribbed grey bark, till they shone for a brief moment like the polished pillars in the house of Odysseus. Then a nightingale sang. Nightingales were rare at Beechmark; and Buntingford would normally have hailed the enchanted flute-notes with a boyish delight. But this evening they fell on deaf ears, and when the garish sunlight gave place to gloom, and drops of rain began to patter on the new leaf, the gathering storm, and the dark silence of the wood, after the nightingale had given her last trill, were welcome to a man struggling with a recurrent and desperate oppression. Must he always tamely submit to the fetters which bound him? Could he do nothing to free himself? Could the law do nothing? Enquiry--violent action of some sort--rebellion against the conditions which had grown so rigid about him:--for the hundredth time, he canvassed all ways of escape, and for the hundredth time, found none. He knew very well what was wrong with him. It was simply the imperious need for a woman's companionship in his life--for _love_. Physically and morally, the longing which had lately taken possession of him, was becoming a gnawing and perpetual distress. There was the plain fact. This hour with Cynthia Welwyn had stirred in him the depths of old pain. But he was not really in love with Cynthia. During the war, amid the absorption of his work, and the fierce pressure of the national need, he had been quite content to forget her. His work--and England's strait--had filled his mind and his time. Except for certain dull resentments and regrets, present at all times in the background of consciousness, the four years of the war had been to him a period of relief, almost of deliverance. He had been able to lose himself; and in that inner history of the soul which is the real history of each one of us, that had been for long years impossible. But now all that protection and help was gone; the floodgates were loosened again. His work still went on; but it was no longer absorbing; it no longer mattered enough to hold in check the vague impulses and passions that were beating against his will. And meanwhile the years were running on. He was forty-four, Helena Pitstone's guardian, and clearly relegated already by that unmanageable child to the ranks of the middle-aged. He had read her thought in her great scornful eyes. "What has your generation to do with mine? Your day is over!" And all the while the ugly truth was that he had never had his "day"--and was likely now to miss it for good. Or at least such "day" as had shone upon him had been so short, so chequered, so tragically wiped out, it might as well never have dawned. Yet the one dear woman friend to whom in these latter years he had spoken freely, who knew him through and through--Helena Pitstone's mother--had taken for granted, in her quiet ascetic way, that he had indeed had his chance, and must accept for good and all what had come of it. It was because she thought of him as set apart, as debarred by what had happened to him, from honest love-making, and protected by his own nature from anything less, that she had asked him to take charge of Helena. He realized it now. It had been the notion of a fanciful idealist, springing from certain sickroom ideas of sacrifice--renunciation--submission to the will of God--and so forth. It was _not_ the will of God!--that he should live forsaken and die forlorn! He hurled defiance, even at Rachel, his dear dead friend, who had been so full of pity for him, and for whom he had felt the purest and most unselfish affection he had ever known--since his mother's death. And now the presence of her child in his house seemed to represent a verdict, a sentence--of hers upon him, which he simply refused to accept as just or final. If Rachel had only lived a little longer he would have had it out with her. But in those last terrible days, how could he either argue--or refuse? All the same, he would utterly do his duty by Helena. If she chose to regard him as an old fogy, well and good--it was perhaps better so. Not that--if circumstances had been other than they were---he would have been the least inclined to make love to her. Her beauty was astonishing. But the wonderful energy and vitality of her crude youth rather repelled than attracted him. The thought of the wrestles ahead of him was a weariness to an already tired man. Debate with her, on all the huge insoluble questions she seemed to be determined to raise, was of all things in the world most distasteful to him. He would certainly cut a sorry figure in it; nothing was more probable. The rain began to plash down upon his face and bared head, cooling an inner fever. The damp wood, the soft continuous dripping of the cherry-blossoms, the scent of the blue-bells,--there was in them a certain shelter and healing. He would have liked to linger there. But already, at Beechmark, guests must have arrived; he was being missed. The trees thinned, and the broad lawns of Beechmark came in sight. Ah!--there was Geoffrey, walking up and down with Helena. _Suppose_ that really came off? What a comfortable way out! He and Cynthia must back it all they could. CHAPTER VI "Buntingford looks twice as old as he need!" said Geoffrey French, lighting a cigarette as he and Helena stepped out of the drawing-room window after dinner into the May world outside--a world which lay steeped in an after-glow of magical beauty. "What's wrong, I wonder! Have you been plaguing him, Helena?" The laughing shot was fired purely at random. But the slight start and flush it produced in Helena struck him. "I see nothing wrong with him," said Helena, a touch of defiance in her voice. "But of course it's extraordinarily difficult to get on with him." "With Philip!--the jolliest, kindest chap going! What do you mean?" "All right. It's no good talking to anybody with a _parti pris_!" "No--but seriously, Helena--what's the matter? Why, you told me you only began the new arrangement two days ago." "Exactly. And there's been time already for a first-class quarrel. Time also for me to see that I shall never, never get on with him. I don't know how we are to get through the two years!" "_Well_!" ejaculated her companion. "In Heaven's name, what has he been doing?" Helena shrugged her shoulders. She was striding beside him like a young Artemis--in white, with a silver star in her hair, and her short skirts beaten back from her slender legs and feet by the evening wind. Geoffrey French, who had had a classical education, almost looked for the quiver and the bow. He was dazzled at once, and provoked. A magnificent creature, certainly--"very mad and very handsome!"--he recalled Buntingford's letter. "Do tell me, Helena!" he urged. "What's the good? You'll only side with him--and _preach_. You've done that several times already." The young man frowned a little. "I don't preach!" he said shortly. "I say what I think--_when_ you ask me. Twice, if I remember right, you told me of some proceeding of yours, and asked me for my opinion. Well, I gave it, and it didn't happen to be yours. But that isn't preaching." "You gave so many reasons--it _was_ preaching." "Great Scott!--wasn't it more polite to give one's reasons?" "Perhaps. But one shouldn't _burst_ with them. One should be sorry to disagree." "Hm. Well--now kindly lay down for me, how I am to disagree with you about Philip. For I do disagree with you, profoundly." "There it is. Profoundly--that shows how you enjoy disagreeing. Why can't you put yourself at my point of view?" "Well, I'll try. But at least--explain it to me." Helena threw herself into a garden chair, under a wild cherry which rose a pyramid of silver against an orange sky. Other figures were scattered about the lawns, three or four young men, and three or four girls in light dresses. The air seemed to be full of laughter and young voices. Only Mrs. Friend sat shyly by herself just within the drawing-room window, a book on her knee. A lamp behind her brought out the lines of her bent head and slight figure. "I wonder if I like you well enough," said Helena coolly, biting at a stalk of grass--"well enough, I mean, to explain things. I haven't made you my father confessor yet, Geoffrey." "Suppose you begin--and see how it answers," said French lazily, rolling over on the grass in front of her, his chin in his hands. "Well, I don't mind--for fun. Only if you preach I shall stop. But, first of all, let's get some common ground. You admit, I suppose, that the war has changed the whole position of women?" "Yes--with reservations." "Don't state them!" said Helena hastily. "That would be preaching. Yes, or No?" "Yes, then,--you tyrant!" "And that means--doesn't it--at the very least--that girls of my own age have done with all the old stupid chaperonage business--at least nearly all--that we are to choose our own friends, and make our own arrangements?--doesn't it?" she repeated peremptorily. "I don't know. My information is--that the mothers are stiffening." A laughing face looked up at her from the grass. "Stiffening!" The tone was contemptuous. "Well, that may be so--for babes of seventeen--like that one--" her gesture indicated a slight figure in white at the edge of the lawn--"who have never been out of the school-room--but--" "You think nineteen makes all the difference? I doubt," said Geoffrey French coolly, as he sat up tailor-fashion, and surveyed her. "Well, my view is that for the babes, as you call them, chaperonage is certainly reviving. I have just been sitting next Lady Maud, this babe's mother, and she told me an invitation came for the babe from some great house last week, addressed to 'Miss Luton and partner'--whereon Lady Maud wrote back--'My daughter has no partner and I shall be very happy to bring her.' Rather a poke in the eye! Then there are the women of five or six and twenty who have been through the war, and are not likely to give up the freedom of it--ever again. That's all right. They'll take their own risks. Many of them will prefer not to live at home again. They'll live with a friend--and visit their people perhaps every day! But, then there's _you_, Helena--the betwixt and between!--" "Well--what about me?" "You're neither a babe--nor a veteran." "I'm nineteen and a half--and I've done a year and a half of war work--" "Canteen--and driving? All right. Am I to give an opinion?" "You will give it, whatever I say. And it's you all over--to give it, before you've allowed me to explain anything." "Oh, I know your point of view--" said Geoffrey, unperturbed--"know it by heart. Haven't you dinned it into me at half a dozen dances lately? No!--I'm entitled to my say--and here it is. Claim all the freedom you like--but as you're _not_ twenty-five, but nineteen--let a good fellow like Buntingford give you advice--and be thankful!" "Prig!" said Helena, pelting him with a spray of wild cherry, which he caught and put in his button-hole. "If that isn't preaching, I should like to know what is!" "Not at all. Unbiased opinion--civilly expressed. If you really were an emancipated young woman, Helena, you'd take it so! But now--" his tone changed--"let's come to business. What have you and Philip been quarrelling about?" Helena straightened her shoulders, as though to meet certain disapproval. "Because--I asked Lord Donald to spend the week-end here--" "You didn't!" "I did; and Cousin Philip wired to him and forbade him the house. Offence No. 1. Then as I intended all the same to see Jim, I told him I would go up and lunch with him at the Ritz. Cousin Philip vows I shan't, and he seems to have some underhand means of stopping it--I--I don't know what--" "Underhand! Philip! I say, Helena, I wonder whether you have any idea how people who really know him think about Buntingford!" "Oh, of course men back up men!" "Stuff! It's really silly--abominable too--the way you talk of him--I can't help saying it." And this time it was Geoffrey's turn to look indignant. His long face with its deeply set grey eyes, a rather large nose, and a fine brow under curly hair, had flushed suddenly. "If you can't help it, I suppose you must say it. But I don't know why I should stay and listen," said Helena provokingly, making a movement as though to rise. But he laid a hand on her dress: "No, no, Helena, don't go--look here--do you ever happen to notice Buntingford--when he's sitting quiet--and other people are talking round him?" "Not particularly." The tone was cold, but she no longer threatened departure. "Well, I just ask you--some time--to _watch_. An old friend of his said to me the other day--'I often feel that Buntingford is the saddest man I know.'" "Why should he be?" asked Helena imperiously. "I can't tell you. No one can. It's just what those people think who know him best. Well, that's one fact about him--that his _men_ friends feel they could no more torment a wounded soldier, than worry Buntingford--if they could help it. Then there are other facts that no one knows unless they've worked in Philip's office, where all the men clerks and all the women typists just adore him! I happen to know a good deal about it. I could tell you things--" "For Heaven's sake, don't!" cried Helena impatiently. "What does it matter? He may be a saint--with seven haloes--for those that don't cross him. But _I_ want my freedom!"--a white foot beat the ground impatiently--"and he stands in the way." "Freedom to compromise yourself with a scoundrel like Donald! What _can_ you know about such a man--compared with what Philip knows?" "That's just it--I _want_ to know--" said Helena in her most stubborn voice. "This is a world, now, in which we've all got to know,--both the bad and the good of it. No more taking it on trust from other people! Let us learn it for ourselves." "Helena!--you're quite mad!" said the young man, exasperated. "Perhaps I am. But it's a madness you can't cure." And springing to her feet, she sent a call across the lawn--"Peter!" A slim boy who was walking beside the "babe" of seventeen, some distance away, turned sharply at the sound, and running across the grass pulled up in front of Helena. "Well?--here I am." "Shall we go and look at the lake? You might pull me about a little." "Ripping!" said the youth joyously. "Won't you want a cloak?" "No--it's so hot. Shall we ask Miss Luton?" Peter made a face. "Why should we?" Helena laughed, and they went off together in the direction of a strip of silver under distant trees on which the moon was shining. French walked away towards the girlish figure now deserted. Helena watched him out of the corner of her eyes, saw the girl's eager greeting, and the disappearance of the two in the woody walk that bordered the lawn. Then she noticed a man sitting by himself not far away, with a newspaper on his knee. "Suppose we take Mr. Horne, Peter?" "Don't let's take anybody!" said the boy. "And anyway Horne's a nuisance just now. He talks you dead with strikes--and nationalization--and labour men--and all that rot. Can't we ever let it alone? I want to talk to _you_, Helena. I say, you are ripping in that dress! You're just _divine_, Helena!" The girl laughed, her sweetest, most rippling laugh. "Go on like that, Peter. You can't think how nice it sounds--especially after Geoffrey's been lecturing for all he's worth." "Lecturing? Oh well, if it comes to that, I've got my grievance too, Helena. We'll have it out, when I've found the boat." "Forewarned!" said Helena, still laughing. "Perhaps I won't come." "Oh, yes, you will," said the boy confidently. "I believe you know perfectly well what it's about. You've got a guilty conscience, Miss Helena!" Helena said nothing, till they had pushed the boat out from the reeds and the water-lilies, and she was sitting with the steering ropes in her hands opposite a boy in his shirt sleeves, with the head and face of a cherub, and the spare frame of an athlete, who was devouring her with his eyes. "Are you quite done with the Army, Peter?" "Quite. Got out a month ago. You come to me, Helena, if you want any advice about foreign loans--eh? I can tell you a thing or two." "Are you going to be very rich?" "Well, I'm pretty rich already," said the boy candidly. "It seems beastly to be wanting more. But my uncles would shove me into the Bank. I couldn't help it." "You'll never look so nice as you did in your khaki, Peter. What have you done with all your ribbons?" "What, the decorations? Oh, they're kicking about somewhere." "You're not to let your Victoria Cross kick about, as you call it," said Helena severely. "By the way, Peter, you've never told me yet--Oh, I saw the bit in the _Times_. But I want _you_ to tell me about it. Won't you?" She bent forward, all softness, her beautiful eyes on her companion. "No!" said Peter with energy--"_never_!" She considered him. "Was it so awful?" she asked under her breath. "For God's sake, don't ask questions!" said the boy angrily. "You know I want to forget it. I shall never be quite right till I do forget it." She was silent. It was his twin brother he had tried to save--staggering back through a British barrage with the wounded man on his shoulders--only to find, as he stumbled into the trench, that he had been carrying the dead. He himself had spent six months in hospital from the effects of wounds and shock. He had emerged to find himself a V. V. and A. D. C. to his Army Commander; and apparently as gay and full of fun as before. But his adoring mother and sisters knew very well that there were sore spots in Peter. Helena realized that she had touched one. She bent forward presently, and laid her own hand on one of the hands that were handling the sculls. "Dear Peter!" He bent impetuously, and kissed the hand before she could withdraw it. "Don't you play with me, Helena," he said passionately. "I'm not a child, though I look it ... Now, then, let's have it out." They had reached the middle of the pond, and were drifting across a moonlit pathway, on either side of which lay the shadow of deep woods, now impenetrably dark. The star in Helena's hair glittered in the light, and the face beneath it, robbed of its daylight colour, had become a study in black and white, subtler and more lovely than the real Helena. "Why did you do it, Helena?" said Peter suddenly. "Do what?" "Why did you behave to me as you did, at the Arts Ball? Why did you cut me, not once--but twice--three times--for that _beast_ Donald?" Helena laughed. "Now _you're_ beginning!" she said, as she lazily trailed her hand in the water. "It's really comic!" "What do you mean?" "Only that I've already quarrelled with Cousin Philip--and Geoffrey--about Lord Donald--so if you insist on quarrelling too, I shall have no friends left." "Damn Donald! It's like his impudence to ask you to dance at all. It made me sick to see you with him. He's the limit. Well, but--I'm not going to quarrel about Donald, Helena--I'm not going to quarrel about anything. I'm going to have my own say--and you can't escape this time--you witch!" Helena looked round the pond. "I can swim," she said tranquilly. "I should jump in after you--and we'd both go down together. No, but--listen to me, dear Helena! Why won't you marry me? You say sometimes--that you care for me a little." The boy's tone faltered. "Why won't I marry you? Perhaps because you ask me so often," said Helena, laughing. "Neglect me--be rude to me--cut me at a dance, and then see." "I couldn't--it matters too much." "Dear Peter! But can't you understand that I don't want to commit myself just yet? I want to have my life to myself a bit. I'm like the miners and the railway men. I'm full of unrest! I can't and won't settle down just yet. I want to look at things--the world's like a great cinema show just now--everything passing so quick you can hardly take breath. I want to sample it where I please. I want to dance--and talk--and make experiments." "Well--marrying me would be an experiment," said Peter stoutly. "I vow you'd never regret it, Helena!" "But I can't vow that you wouldn't! Let me alone, Peter. I suppose some time I shall quiet down. It doesn't matter if I break my own heart. But I won't take the responsibility of anybody else's heart just yet." "Well, of course, that means you're not in love with anybody. You'd soon chuck all that nonsense if you were." The young, despairing voice thrilled her. It was all experience--life--drama--this floating over summer water--with a beautiful youth, whose heart seemed to be fluttering in her very hands. But she was only thrilled intellectually--as a spectator. Peter would soon get over it. She would be very kind to him, and let him down easily. They drifted silently a little. Then Peter said abruptly: "Well, at least, Helena, you might promise me not to dance with Jim Donald again!" "Peter--my promises of that kind--are worth nothing! ... I think it's getting late--we ought to be going home!" And she gave the rudder a turn for the shore. He unwillingly complied, and after rowing through the shadow of the woods, they emerged on a moonlit slope of lawn, where was the usual landing-place. Two persons who had been strolling along the edge of the water approached them. "Who is that with Buntingford?" asked Dale. "My new chaperon. Aren't you sorry for her?" "I jolly well am!" cried Peter. "She'll have a dog's life!" "That's very rude of you, Peter. You may perhaps be surprised to hear that I like her very much. She's a little dear--and I'm going to be awfully good to her." "Which means, of course, that she'll never dare to cross you!" "Peter, don't be unkind! Dear Peter--make it up! I do want to be friends. There's just time for you to say something nice!" For his vigorous strokes were bringing them rapidly to the bank. "Oh, what's the good of talking!" said the boy impatiently. "I shall be friends, of course--take what you fling me. I can't do anything else." Helena blew him a kiss, to which he made no response. "All right!--I'll bring you in!" said Lord Buntingford from the shore. He dragged the boat up on the sandy edge, and offered a hand to Helena. She stumbled out, and would have fallen into the shallow water but for his sudden grip upon her. "That was stupid of me!" she said, vexed with herself. He made no reply. It was left to Mrs. Friend to express a hope that she had not sprained her foot. "Oh, dear no," said Helena. "But I'm cold. Peter, will you race me to the house? Give me a fair start!" Peter eagerly placed her, and then--a maiden flying and a young god pursuing--they had soon drawn the eyes and laughter of all the other guests, who cheered as the panting Helena, winner by a foot, dashed through the drawing-room window into the house. Helena and Mrs. Friend had been discussing the evening,--Helena on the floor, in a white dressing-gown, with her hair down her back. She had amused herself with a very shrewd analysis--not too favourable--of Geoffrey French's character and prospects, and had rushed through an eloquent account of Peter's performances in the war; she had mocked at Lady Maud's conventionalities, and mimicked the "babe's" simpering manner with young men; she had enquired pityingly how Mrs. Friend had got on with the old Canon who had taken her in to dinner, and had launched into rather caustic and, to Mrs. Friend's ear, astonishing criticisms of "Cousin Philip's wine"--which Mrs. Friend had never even dreamt of tasting. But of Cousin Philip himself there was not a word. Mrs. Friend knew there had been an interview between them; but she dared not ask questions. How to steer her way in the moral hurricane she foresaw, was what preoccupied her; so as both to do her duty to Lord B. and yet keep a hold on this strange being in whose good graces she still found herself--much to her astonishment. Then with midnight Helena departed. But long after she was herself in bed, Mrs. Friend heard movements in the adjoining room, and was aware of a scent of tobacco stealing in through her own open window. Helena, indeed, when she found herself alone was, for a time, too excited to sleep, and cigarettes were her only resource. She was conscious of an exaltation of will, a passionate self-assertion, beating through all her veins, which made sleep impossible. Cousin Philip had scarcely addressed a word to her during the evening, and had bade her a chilly good-night. Of course, if that was to be his attitude it was impossible she could go on living under his roof. Her mother could not for a moment have expected her to keep her word, under such conditions ... And yet--why retreat? Why not fight it out, temperately, but resolutely? "I lost my temper again like an idiot, this morning--I mustn't--mustn't--lose it. He had jolly well the best of it." "Self-determination"--that was what she was bent on. If it was good for nations, it was good also for individuals. Liberty to make one's own mistakes, to face one's own risks--that was the minimum. And for one adult human being to accept the dictation of another human being was the only sin worth talking about. The test might come on some trivial thing, like this matter of Lord Donald. Well,--she must be content to "find quarrel in a straw, where honour is at stake." Yet, of course, her guardian was bound to resist. The fight between her will and his was natural and necessary. It was the clash of two generations, two views of life. She was not merely the wilful and insubordinate girl she would have been before the war; she saw herself, at any rate, as something much more interesting. All over the world there was the same breaking of bonds; and the same instinct towards _violence_. "The violent taketh by force." Was it the instinct that war leaves, and must leave, behind it--its most sinister, or its most pregnant, legacy? She was passionately conscious of it, and of a strange thirst to carry it into reckless action. The unrest in her was the same unrest that was driving men everywhere--and women, too--into industrial disturbance and moral revolt. The old is done with; and the Tree of Life needs to be well shaken before the new fruit will drop. Wild thoughts like these ran through her mind. Then she scoffed at herself for such large notions, about so small a thing. And suddenly something checked her--the physical recollection, as it were, left tingling in her hand, of the grasp by which Buntingford had upheld her, as she was leaving the boat. With it went a vision of his face, his dark, furrowed face, in the moonlight. "The saddest man I know." Why and wherefore? Long after she was in bed, she lay awake, absorbed in a dreamy yet intense gathering together of all that she could recollect of Cousin Philip, from her childhood up, through her school years, and down to her mother's death. Till now he had been part of the more or less pleasant furniture of life. She seemed to be on the way to realize him as a man--perhaps a force. It was unsuspected--and rather interesting. CHAPTER VII The drought continued; and under the hot sun the lilacs were already pyramids of purple, the oaks were nearly in full leaf, and the hawthorns in the park and along the hedges would soon replace with another white splendour the fading blossom of the wild cherries. It was Sunday morning, and none of the Beechmark party except Mrs. Friend, Lady Luton and her seventeen-year-old daughter had shown any inclination to go to church. Geoffrey French and Helena had escorted the churchgoers the short way across the park, taking a laughing leave of them at the last stile, whence the old church was but a stone's throw. There was a circle of chairs on the lawn intermittently filled by talkers. Lord Buntingford was indoors and was reported to have had some ugly news that morning of a discharged soldiers' riot in a neighbouring town where he owned a good deal of property. The disturbance had been for the time being suppressed, but its renewal was expected, and Buntingford, according to Julian Horne, who had been in close consultation with him, was ready to go over at any moment, on a telephone call from the town authorities, and take what other "specials" he could gather with him. "It's not at all a nice business," said Horne, looking up from his long chair, as Geoffrey French and Helena reappeared. "And if Philip is rung up, he'll sweep us all in. So don't be out of the way, Geoffrey." "What's the matter? Somebody has been bungling as usual, I suppose," said Helena in her most confident and peremptory tone. "The discharged men say that nobody pays any attention to them--and they mean to burn down something." "On the principle of the Chinaman, and 'roast pig,'" said French, stretching himself at full length on the grass, where Helena was already sitting. "What an extraordinary state of mind we're all in! We all want to burn something. I want to burn the doctors, because some of the medical boards have been beasts to some of my friends; the soldiers over at Dansworth want to burn the town, because they haven't been made enough of; the Triple Alliance want to burn up the country to cook their roast pig--and as for you, Helena--" He turned a laughing face upon her--but before she could reply, a telephone was heard ringing, through the open windows of the house. "For me, I expect," exclaimed Helena, springing up. She disappeared within the drawing-room, returning presently, with flushed cheeks, and a bearing of which Geoffrey French at once guessed the meaning. "Donald has thrown her over?" he said to himself. "Of course Philip had the trump card!" Helena, however, said nothing. She took up a book she had left on the grass, and withdrew with it to the solitary shelter of a cedar some yards away. Quiet descended on the lawns. The men smoked or buried themselves in a sleepy study of the Sunday papers. The old house lay steeped in sunshine. Occasional bursts of talk arose and died away; a loud cuckoo in a neighbouring plantation seemed determined to silence all its bird rivals; while once or twice the hum of an aeroplane overhead awoke even in the drowsiest listener dim memories of the war. Helena was only pretending to read. The telephone message which had reached her had been from Lord Donald's butler--not even from Lord Donald himself!--and had been to the effect that "his lordship" asked him to say that he had been obliged to go to Scotland for a fortnight, and was very sorry he had not been able to answer Miss Pitstone's telegram before starting. Helena's cheeks were positively smarting under the humiliation of it. Donald _daring_ to send her a message through a servant, when she had telegraphed to him! For of course it was all a lie as to his having left town--one could tell that from the butler's voice. He had been somehow frightened by Cousin Philip, and was revenging himself by rudeness to _her_. She seemed to hear "Jim" and his intimates discussing the situation. Of course it would only amuse them!--everything amused them!--that Buntingford should have put his foot down. How she had boasted, both to Jim and to some of his friends, of the attitude she meant to take up with her guardian during her "imprisonment on parole." And this was the end of the first bout. Cousin Philip had been easily master, and instead of making common cause with her against a ridiculous piece of tyranny, Lord Donald had backed out. He might at least have been sympathetic and polite--might have come himself to speak to her at the telephone, instead-- Her blood boiled. How was she going to put up with this life? The irony of the whole position was insufferable. Geoffrey's ejaculation for instance when she had invited him to her sitting-room after breakfast that he might look for a book he had lent her--"My word, Helena, what a jolly place!--Why, this was the old school-room--I remember it perfectly--the piggiest, shabbiest old den. And Philip has had it all done up for you? Didn't know he had so much taste!" And then, Geoffrey's roguish look at her, expressing the "chaff" he restrained for fear of offending her. Lucy Friend, too, Captain Lodge, Peter--everybody--no one had any sympathy with her. And lastly, Donald himself--coward!--had refused to play up. Not that she cared one straw about him personally. She knew very well that he was a poor creature. It was the _principle_ involved:--that a girl of nineteen is to be treated as a free and responsible being, and not as though she were still a child in the nursery. "Cousin Philip may have had the right to say he wouldn't have Jim Donald in his house, if he felt that way--but he had no right whatever to prevent my meeting him in town, if I chose to meet him--that's _my_ affair!--that's the point! All these men here are in league. It's _not_ Jim's character that's in question--I throw Jim's character to the wolves--it's the freedom of women!" So the tumult in her surged to and fro, mingled all through with a certain unwilling preoccupation. That semi-circular bow-window on the south side of the house, which she commanded from her seat under the cedar, was one of the windows of the library. Hidden from her by the old bureau at which he was writing, sat Buntingford at work. She could see his feet under the bureau, and sometimes the top of his head. Oh, of course, he had a way with him--a certain magnetism--for the people who liked him, and whom he liked. Lady Maud, for instance--how well they had got on at breakfast? Naturally, she thought him adorable. And Lady Maud's girl. To see Buntingford showing her the butterfly collections in the library--devoting himself to her--and the little thing blushing and smiling--it was simply idyllic! And then to contrast the scene with that other scene, in the same room, the day before! "Well, now, what am I going to do here--or in town?" she asked herself in exasperation. "If Cousin Philip and I liked each other it would be pleasant enough to ride together, to talk and read and argue--his brain's all right!--with Lucy Friend to fall back upon between whiles--for just these few weeks, at any rate, before we go to town--and with the week-ends to help one out. But if we are to be at daggers-drawn--he determined to boss me--and I equally determined not to be bossed--why, the thing will be _intolerable_! Hullo!--is that Cynthia Welwyn? She seems to be making for me." It was Lady Cynthia, very fresh and brilliant in airy black and white, with a purple sunshade. She came straight over the grass to Helena's shady corner. "You look so cool! May I share?" Helena rather ungraciously pushed forward a chair as they shook hands. "The rest of your party seem to be asleep," said Cynthia, glancing at various prostrate forms belonging to the male sex that were visible on a distant slope of the lawn. "But you've heard of the Dansworth disturbances?--and that everybody here may have to go?" "Yes. It's probably exaggerated--isn't it?" "I don't know. Everybody coming out of church was talking of it. There was bad rioting last night--and a factory burnt down. They say it's begun again. Buntingford will probably have to go. Where is he?" Helena pointed to the library and to the feet under the bureau. "He's waiting indoors, no doubt, in case there's a summons." "No doubt," said Helena. Cynthia found her task difficult. She had come determined to make friends with this thorny young woman, and to smooth Philip's path for him if she could. But now face to face with Helena she was conscious that neither was Philip's ward at all in a forthcoming mood, nor was her own effort spontaneous or congenial. They were both Buntingford's kinswomen, Helena on his father's side, Cynthia on his mother's, and had been more or less acquainted with each other since Helena left the nursery. But there was nearly twenty years between them, and a critical spirit on both sides. Conversation very soon languished. An instinctive antagonism that neither could have explained intelligibly would have been evident to any shrewd listener. Helena was not long in suspecting that Lady Cynthia was in some way Buntingford's envoy, and had been sent to make friends, with an ulterior object; while Cynthia was repelled by the girl's ungracious manner, and by the gulf which it implied between the outlook of forty, and that of nineteen. "She means to make me feel that I might have been her mother--and that we have nothing in common!" The result was that Cynthia was driven into an intimate and possessive tone with regard to Buntingford, which was more than the facts warranted, and soon reduced Helena to monosyllables, and a sarcastic lip. "You can't think," said Cynthia effusively--"how good he is to us two. It is so like him. He never forgets us. But indeed he never forgets anybody." Helena raised her eyebrows, as though the news astonished her, but she was too polite to contradict. "He sends you flowers, doesn't he?" she said carelessly. "He sends us all kinds of things. But that's not what makes him so charming. He's always so considerate for everybody! The day you were coming, for instance, he thought of nothing but how to get your room finished and your books in order. I hope you liked it?" "Very much." The tone was noncommittal. "I don't suppose he told you how he worked," said Cynthia, smiling. "Oh, he's a great dear, Philip! Only he takes a good deal of knowing." "Did you ever see his wife?" said Helena abruptly. Cynthia's movement showed her unpleasantly startled. She looked instinctively towards the library window, where Buntingford was now standing with his back to them. No, he couldn't have heard. "No, never," she said hurriedly, in a low voice. "Nobody ever speaks to him about her. She was of course not his equal socially." "Is that the reason why nobody speaks of her?" Cynthia flushed indignantly. "Not that I know of. Why do you ask?" "I thought you put the two things together," said Helena in her most detached tone. "And she was an artist?" "A very good one, I believe. A man who had seen her in Paris before her marriage told me long ago--oh, years ago--that she was extraordinarily clever, and very ambitious." "And beautiful?" said Helena eagerly. "I don't know. I never saw a picture of her." "I'll bet anything she was beautiful!" "Most likely. Philip's very fastidious." Helena meditated. "I wonder if she had a good time?" she said at last. "If she didn't, it couldn't have been Philip's fault!" said Cynthia, with some vigour. "No, really?" The girl's note of interrogation was curiously provoking, and Cynthia could have shaken her. Suddenly through the open French windows of the library, a shrill telephone call rang out. It came from the instrument on Buntingford's desk, and the two outside could see him take up the receiver. "Hullo!" "It's a message from Dansworth," said Cynthia, springing to her feet. "They've sent for him." "Yes--yes--" came to them in Buntingford's deep assenting voice, as he stood with the receiver to his ear. "All right--In an hour?--That's it. Less, if possible? Well, I think we can do it in less. Good-bye." Helena had also risen. Buntingford emerged. "Geoffrey!--Peter!--Horne!--all of you!" From different parts of the lawn, men appeared running. Geoffrey French, Captain Lodge, Peter, and Julian Horne, were in a few instants grouped round their host, with Helena and Cynthia just behind. "The Dansworth mob's out of hand," said Buntingford briefly. "They've set fire to another building, and the police are hard pressed. They want specials at once. Who'll come? I've just had a most annoying message from my chauffeur. His wife's been in to say that he's got a temperature--since eight o'clock this morning--and has gone to bed. She won't hear of his coming." "Funk?" said French quietly,--"or Bolshevism?" Buntingford shrugged his shoulders. "We'll enquire into that later. There are two cars--a Vauxhall and a small Renault--a two-seater. Who can drive?" "I think I can drive the Renault," said Dale. "I'll go and get it at once. Hope I shan't kill anybody." He ran off. The other men looked at each other in perplexity. None of them knew enough about the business to drive a high-powered car without serious risk to their own lives and the car's. "I'll go and telephone to a man I know near here," said Buntingford, turning towards the house. "He'll lend us his chauffeur." "Why not let me drive?" said a girl's half-sarcastic voice. "I've driven a Vauxhall most of the winter." Buntingford turned, smiling but uncertain. "Of course! I had forgotten! But I don't like taking you into danger, Helena. It sounds like an ugly affair!" "Lodge and I will go with her," said French, eagerly. "We can stop the car outside the town. Horne can go with Dale." The eyes of the men were on the girl in white--men half humiliated, half admiring. Helena, radiant, was looking at Buntingford, and at his reluctant word of assent, she began joyously taking the hat-pins out of her white lace hat. "Give me five minutes to change. Lucky I've got my uniform here! Then I'll go for the car." Within the five minutes she was in the garage in full uniform, looking over and tuning up the car, without an unnecessary word. She was the professional, alert, cheerful, efficient--and handsomer than ever, thought French, in her close-fitting khaki. "One word, Helena," said Buntingford, laying a hand on her arm, when all was ready, and she was about to climb into her seat. "Remember I am in command of the expedition--and for all our sakes there must be no divided authority. You agree?" She looked up quietly. "I agree." He made way for her, and she took her seat with him beside her. French, Lodge, Jones the butler, and Tomline the odd man, got in behind her. Mrs. Friend appeared with a food hamper that she and Mrs. Mawson had been rapidly packing. Her delicate little face was very pale, and Buntingford stooped to reassure her. "We'll take every care of her. Don't be alarmed. It's always a woman comes to the rescue, isn't it? We're all ashamed. I shall take some lessons next week!" Helena, with her hand on the steering wheel, nodded and smiled to her, and in another minute the splendid car was gliding out of the garage yard, and flying through the park. Cynthia, with Mrs. Friend, Lady Maud Luton, and Mrs. Mawson, were left looking after them. Cynthia's expression was hard to read; she seemed to be rushing on with the car, watching the face beside Buntingford, the young hands on the wheel, the keen eyes looking ahead, the play of talk between them. "What a splendid creature!" said Lady Maud half-unwillingly, as she and Cynthia walked back to the lawn. "I'm afraid I don't at all approve of her in ordinary life. But just now--she was in her element." "Mother, you must let me learn motoring!" cried the girl of seventeen, hanging on her mother's arm. She was flushed with innocent envy. Helena driving Lord Buntingford seemed to her at the top of creation. "Goose! It wouldn't suit you at all," said the mother, smiling. "Please take my prayer-book indoors." The babe went obediently. The miles ran past. Helena, on her mettle, was driving her best, and Buntingford had already paid her one or two brief compliments, which she had taken in silence. Presently they topped a ridge, and there lay Dansworth in a hollow, a column of smoke gashed with occasional flame rising above the town. "A big blaze," said Buntingford, examining it through a field-glass. "It's the large brewery in the market-place. Hullo, you there!" He hailed a country cart, full of excited occupants, which was being driven rapidly towards them. The driver pulled up with difficulty. Buntingford jumped out and went to make enquiries. "It's a bad business, Sir," said the man in charge of the cart, a small farmer whom Buntingford recognized. "The men in it are just mad--they don't know what they've done, nor why they've done it. But the soldiers will be there directly. There's far too few police, and I'm afraid there's some people hurt. I wouldn't take ladies into the town if I was you, Sir." He glanced at Helena. Buntingford nodded, and returned to the car. "You see that farm-house down there on the right?" he said to Helena as they started again. "We'll stop there." They ran down the long slope to the town, the smoke carried towards them by a westerly wind beginning to beat in their faces,--the roar of the great bonfire in their ears. Helena drew up at the entrance of a short lane leading to a farm on the outskirts of the small country town--the centre of an active furniture-making industry, for which the material lay handy in the large beechwoods which covered the districts round it. The people of the farm were all standing outside the house-door, watching the fire and talking. "You're going to leave me here?" said Helena wistfully, looking at Buntingford. "Please. You've brought us splendidly! I'll send Geoffrey back to you as soon as possible, with instructions." She drove the car up to the farm. An elderly man came forward with whom Buntingford made arrangements. The car was to be locked up. "And you'll take care of the lady, till I send?" "Aye, aye, Sir." "I'll come back to you, as soon as I can," said French to Helena. "Don't be anxious about us. We shall get into the market-hall by a back way and find out what's going on. They've probably got the hose on by now. Nothing like a hose-pipe for this kind of thing! Congratters on a splendid bit of driving!" "Hear, hear," said Buntingford. They went off, and Helena was left alone with the farm people, who made much of her, and poured into her ears more or less coherent accounts of the rioting and its causes. A few discontented soldiers, an unpopular factory manager, and a badly-handled strike:--the tale was a common one throughout England at the moment, and behind and beneath the surface events lay the heaving of that "tide in the affairs of men," a tide of change, of restlessness, of revolt, set in motion by the great war. Helena paced up and down the orchard slope behind the house, watching the conflagration which was beginning to die down, startled every now and then by what seemed to be the sound of shots, and once by the rush past of a squadron of mounted police coming evidently from the big country town some ten miles away. Hunger asserted itself, and she made a raid on the hamper in the car, sharing some of its contents with the black-eyed children of the farm. Every now and then news came from persons passing along the road, and for a time things seemed to be mending. The police were getting the upper hand; the Mayor had made a plucky speech to the crowd in the market-place, with good results; the rioters were wavering; and the soldiers had been stopped by telephone. Then following hard on the last rumour came a sudden rush of worse news. A policeman had been killed--two injured--the rioters had gained a footing in the market-hall, and driven out both the police and the specials--and after all, the soldiers had been sent for. Helena wandered down to the gate of the farm lane opening on the main road, consumed with restlessness and anxiety. If only they had let her go with them! Buntingford's last look as he raised his hat to her before departing, haunted her memory--the appeal in it, the unspoken message. Might they not, after all, be friends? There seemed to be an exquisite relaxation in the thought. Another hour passed. Geoffrey French at last! He came on a motor bicycle, and threw himself off beside her, breathless. "Please get the car, Helena, and I'll go on with you. The town's safe. The troops have arrived, and the rioters are scattering. The police have made some arrests, and Philip believes the thing is over--or I shouldn't have been allowed to come for you!" "Why not?" said Helena half-indignantly, as they hurried towards the barn in which the car had been driven. "Perhaps I might have been of some use!" "No--you helped us best by staying here. The last hour's been pretty bad. And now Philip wants you to take two wounded police to the Smeaton Hospital--five miles. He'll go with you. They're badly hurt, I'm afraid--there was some vicious stone-throwing." "All right! Perhaps you don't know that's my job!" French helped her get out the car. "We shall want mattresses and stretcher boards," said Helena, surveying it thoughtfully. "A doctor too and a nurse." "Right you are. They've thought of all that. You'll find everything at the market-hall,--where the two men are." They drove away together, and into the outer streets of the town, where now scarcely a soul was to be seen, though as the car passed, the windows were crowded with heads. Police were everywhere, and the market-place--a sorry sight of smoky wreck and ruin--was held by a cordon of soldiers, behind which a crowd still looked on. French, sitting beside her, watched the erect girl-driver, the excellence of her driving, the brain and skill she was bringing to bear upon her "job." Here was the "new woman" indeed, in her best aspect. He could not but compare the Helena of this adventure--this competent and admirable Helena--with the girl of the night before. Had the war produced the same dual personality in thousands of English men and English women?--in the English nation itself? They drew up at the steps of the market-hall, where a group of persons were standing, including a nurse in uniform. Buntingford came forward, and bending over the side of the car, said to Helena: "Do you want to be relieved? There are several people here who could drive the car." She flushed. "I want to take these men to hospital." He smiled at her. "You shall." He turned back to speak to the doctor who was to accompany the car. Helena jumped out, and went to consult with the nurse. In a very short time, the car had been turned as far as possible into an ambulance, and the wounded men were brought out. "As gently as you can," said the doctor to Helena. "Are your springs good?" "The car's first-rate, and I'll do my best. I've been driving for nearly a year, up to the other day." She pointed to her badge. The doctor nodded approval, and he and the nurse took their places. Then Buntingford jumped into the car, beside Helena. "I'll show you the way. It won't take long." In a few minutes, the car was in country lanes, and all the smoking tumult of the town had vanished from sight and hearing. It had become already indeed almost incredible, in the glow of the May afternoon, and amid the hawthorn white of the hedges, the chattering birds that fled before them, the marvellous green of the fields. Helena drove with the deftness of a practised hand, avoiding ruts, going softly over rough places. "Good!" said Buntingford to her more than once--"that was excellent!" But the suffering of the men behind overshadowed everything else, and it was with a big breath of relief that Buntingford at last perceived the walls of the county hospital rising out of a group of trees in front of them. Helena brought the car gently to a standstill, and, jumping out, was ready to help as a V. A. D. in the moving of the men. The hospital had been warned by telephone, and all preparations had been made. When the two unconscious men were safely in bed, the Dansworth doctor turned warmly to Helena: "I don't know what we should have done without you, Miss Pitstone! But you look awfully tired. I hope you'll go home at once, and rest." "I'm going to take her home--at once," said Buntingford. "We can't do anything more, can we?" "Nothing. And here's the matron with a message." The message was from the mayor of Dansworth. "Situation well in hand. No more trouble feared. Best thanks." "All right!" said Buntingford. He turned smiling to Helena. "Now we'll go home and get some dinner!" The Dansworth doctor and nurse remained behind. Once more Buntingford got into the car beside his ward. "What an ass I am!" he said, in disgust--"not to be able to drive the car. But I should probably kill you and myself." Helena laughed at him, a new sweetness in the sound, and they started. Presently Buntingford said gently: "I want to thank you,--for one thing especially--for having waited so patiently--while we got the thing under." "I wasn't patient at all! I wanted desperately to be in it!" "All the more credit! It would have been a terrible anxiety if you had been there. A policeman was killed just beside us. There was a man with a revolver running amuck. He just missed French by a hair-breadth." Helena exclaimed in horror. "You see--one puts the best face on it--but it might have been a terrible business. But what I shall always remember most--is your part in it" Their eyes met, hers half shy, half repentant, his full of a kindness she had never yet seen there. CHAPTER VIII "Oh, what a jolly day! We've had a glorious ride," said Helena, throwing herself down on the grass beside Mrs. Friend. "And how are you? Have you been resting--or slaving--as you were _expressly_ forbidden to do?" For Mrs. Friend had been enjoying a particularly bad cold and had not long emerged from her bedroom, looking such a pitiful little wreck, that both Lord Buntingford and Helena had been greatly concerned. In the five weeks that had now elapsed since her arrival at Beechmark she had stolen her quiet way into the liking of everybody in the house to such an extent that, during the days she had been in bed with a high temperature, she had been seriously missed in the daily life of the place, and the whole household had actively combined to get her well again. Mrs. Mawson had fed her; and Lucy Friend was aghast to think how much her convalescence must be costing her employer in milk, eggs, butter, cream and chickens, when all such foods were still so frightfully, abominably dear. But they were forced down her throat by Helena and the housekeeper; while Lord Buntingford enquired after her every morning, and sent her a reckless supply of illustrated papers and novels. To see her now in the library or on the lawn again, with her white shawl round her, and the usual needlework on her knee, was a pleasant sight to everybody in the house. The little lady had not only won this place for herself by the sweet and selfless gift which was her natural endowment; she was becoming the practical helper of everybody, of Mrs. Mawson in the house, of old Fenn in the garden, even of Buntingford himself, who was gradually falling into the habit of letting her copy important letters for him, and keep some order in the library. She was not in the least clever or accomplished; but her small fingers seemed to have magic in them; and her good will was inexhaustible. Helena had grown amazingly fond of her. She appealed to something maternal and protecting in the girl's strong nature. Since her mother's death, there had been a big streak of loneliness in Helena's heart, though she would have suffered tortures rather than confess it; and little Lucy Friend's companionship filled a void. She must needs respect Lucy's conscience, Lucy's instincts had more than once shamed her own. "What are you going to wear to-night?" said Mrs. Friend, softly smoothing back the brown hair from the girl's hot brow. "Pale green and apple-blossom." Lucy Friend smiled, as though already she had a vision of the full-dress result. "That'll be delicious," she said, with enthusiasm. "Lucy!--am I good-looking?" The girl spoke half wistfully, half defiantly, her eyes fixed on Lucy. Mrs. Friend laughed. "I asked that question before I had seen you." "Of whom?" said Helena eagerly. "You didn't see anybody but Cousin Philip before I arrived. Tell me, Lucy--tell me at once." Mrs. Friend kept a smiling silence for a minute. At last she said--"Lord Buntingford showed me a portrait of you before you arrived." "A portrait of me? There isn't one in the house! Lucy, you deceiver, what do you mean?" "I was taken to see one in the hall." A sudden light dawned on Helena. "The Romney? No! And I've been showing it to everybody as the loveliest thing going!" "There--you see!" Helena's face composed itself. "I don't know why I should be flattered. She was a horrid minx. That no doubt was what the likeness consisted in!" Mrs. Friend laughed, but said nothing. Helena rose from the grass, pausing to say as she turned towards the house: "We're going to dance in the drawing-room, Mawson says. They've cleared it." "Doesn't it look nice?" Helena assented. "Let me see--" she added slowly--"this is the third dance, isn't it, since I came?" "Yes--the third." "I don't think we need have another"--the tone was decided, almost impatient--"at least when this party's over." Mrs. Friend opened her eyes. "I thought you liked to dance every week-end?" "Well--ye-es--amongst ourselves. I didn't mean to turn the house upside-down every week." "Well, you see--the house-parties have been so large. And besides there have been neighbours." "I didn't ask _them_," said Helena. "But--we won't have another--till we go to Town." "Very well. It might be wise. The servants are rather tired, and if they give warning, we shall never get any more!" Mrs. Friend watched the retreating figure of Helena. There had indeed been a dizzy succession of week-end parties, and it seemed to her that Lord Buntingford's patience under the infliction had been simply miraculous. For they rarely contained friends of his own; his lameness cut him off from dancing; and it had been clear to Lucy Friend that in many cases Helena's friends had been sharply distasteful to him. He was, in Mrs. Friend's eyes, a strange mixture as far as social standards were concerned. A boundless leniency in some cases; the sternest judgment in others. For instance, a woman he had known from childhood had lately left her husband, carried off her children, and joined her lover. Lord Buntingford was standing, stoutly by her, helping her in her divorce proceedings, paying for the education of the children, and defending her whenever he heard her attacked. On the other hand, his will had been iron in the matter of Lord Donald, whose exposure as co-respondent in the particularly disreputable case had been lately filling the newspapers. Mrs. Friend had seen Helena take up the _Times_ on one of the days on which the evidence in this case had appeared, and fling it down again with a flush and a look of disgust. But since the day of the Dansworth riot, she had never mentioned Lord Donald's name. Certainly the relations between her and her guardian had curiously changed. In the first place, since her Dansworth adventure, Helena had found something to do to think about other than quarrelling with "Cousin Philip." Her curiosity as to how the two wounded police, whom she had driven to the County Hospital that day, might be faring had led to her going over there two or three times a week, either to relieve an overworked staff, or to drive convalescent soldiers, still under treatment in the wards. The occupation had been a godsend to her, and everybody else. She still talked revolution, and she was always ready to spar with Lord Buntingford, or other people. But all the same Lucy Friend was often aware of a much more tractable temper, a kind of hesitancy--and appeasement--which, even if it passed away, made her beauty, for the moment, doubly attractive. Was it, after all, the influence of Lord Buntingford--and was the event justifying her mother's strange provision for her? He had certainly treated her with a wonderful kindness and indulgence. Of late he had returned to his work at the Admiralty, only coming down to Beechmark for long week-ends from Friday to Monday. But in these later week-ends he had gradually abandoned the detached and half-sarcastic attitude which he had originally assumed towards Helena, and it seemed to Lucy Friend that he was taking his function towards her with a new seriousness. If so, it had affected himself at least as much as the proud and difficult girl whose guidance had been so hurriedly thrust upon him. His new role had brought out in him unexpected resources, or revived old habits. For instance he had not ridden for years; though, as a young man, and before his accident, he had been a fine horseman. But he now rode whenever he was at Beechmark, to show Helena the country; and they both looked so well on horseback that it was a pleasure of which Lucy Friend never tired to watch them go and to welcome them home. Then the fact that he was a trained artist, which most of his friends had forgotten, became significant again for Helena's benefit. She had some aptitude, and more ambition--would indeed, but for the war, have been a South Kensington student, and had long cherished yearnings for the Slade. He set her work to do during the week, and corrected it with professional sharpness when he reappeared. And more important perhaps than either the riding or the drawing, was the partial relaxation for her benefit of the reserve and taciturnity which had for years veiled the real man from those who liked and respected him most. He never indeed talked of himself or his past; but he would discuss affairs, opinions, books--especially on their long rides together--with a frankness, and a tone of gay and equal comradeship, which, or so Mrs. Friend imagined, had had a disarming and rather bewildering effect on Helena. The girl indeed seemed often surprised and excited. It was evident that they had never got on during her mother's lifetime, and that his habitual bantering or sarcastic tone towards her while she was still in the school-room had roused an answering resentment in her. Hence the aggressive mood in which, after two or three months of that half-mad whirl of gaiety into which London had plunged after the Armistice, she had come down to Beechmark. They still jarred, sometimes seriously; Helena was often provocative and aggressive; and Buntingford could make a remark sting without intending it. But on the whole Lucy Friend felt that she was watching something which had in it possibilities of beauty; indeed of a rather touching and rare development. But not at all as the preliminary to a love-affair. In Buntingford's whole relation to his ward, Lucy Friend, at least, had never yet detected the smallest sign of male susceptibility. It suggested something quite different. Julian Horne, who had taken a great fancy to Helena's chaperon, was now recommending books to her instead of to Helena, who always forgot or disobeyed his instructions. With a little preliminary lecture, he had put the "Greville Memoirs" in her hands by way of improving her mind; and she had been struck by a passage in which Greville describes Lord Melbourne's training of the young Queen Victoria, whose Prime Minister he was. The man of middle-age, accomplished, cynical and witty, suddenly confronted with a responsibility which challenged both his heart and his conscience--and that a responsibility towards an attractive young girl whom he could neither court nor command, towards whom his only instrument was the honesty and delicacy of his own purpose:--there was something in this famous, historical situation which seemed to throw a light on the humbler situation at Beechmark. Four o'clock! In another hour the Whitsuntide party for which the house stood ready would have arrived. Helena's particular "pals" were all coming, and various friends and kinsfolk of Lord Buntingford's; including Lady Mary Chance, a general or two, some Admiralty officials, and one or two distinguished sailors with the halo of Zeebrugge about them. The gathering was to last nearly a week. Mrs. Mawson had engaged two extra servants, and the master of the house had resigned himself. But he had laid it down that the fare was to be simple--and "no champagne." And though of course there would be plenty of bridge, he had given a hint to Vivian Lodge, who, as his heir-apparent, was his natural aide-de-camp in the management of the party, that anything like high play would be unwelcome. Some of Helena's friends during the latter week-ends of May had carried things to extremes. Meanwhile the social and political sky was darkening in the June England. Peace was on the point of being signed in Paris; but the industrial war at home weighed on every thinking mind. London was dancing night after night; money was being spent like water; and yet every man and woman of sense knew that the only hope for Britain lay in work and saving. Buntingford's habitual frown--the frown not of temper but of oppression--had grown deeper; and on their long rides together he had shown a great deal of his mind to Helena--the mind of a patriot full of fear for his country. A man came across the lawn. Lucy Friend was glad to recognize Geoffrey French, who was a great favourite with her. "You are early!" she said, as they greeted. "I came down by motor-bike. London is hateful, and I was in a hurry to get out of it. Where is Helena?" "Gone to change her dress. She has been riding." Frank mopped his brow in silence for a little. Then he said with the half-mischievous smile which in Lucy Friend's eyes was one of his chief physical "points." "How you and Philip have toned her down!" "Oh, not I!" said Lucy, her modesty distressed. "I've always admired her so! Of course--I was sometimes surprised--" Geoffrey laughed. "I daresay we shall all be surprised a good many times yet?" Then he moved a little closer to the small person, who was becoming everybody's confidante. "Do you mind telling me something--if you know it?" he said, lowering his voice. "Ask me--but I can't promise!" "Do you think Helena has quite made up her mind not to marry Dale?" Mrs. Friend hesitated. "I don't know--" "But what do you think?" She lifted her gentle face, under his compulsion, and slowly, pitifully shook her head. Geoffrey drew a long breath. "Then she oughtn't to ask him here! The poor little fellow is going through the tortures of the damned!" "Oh, I'm so sorry. Isn't there anything we can do?" cried Mrs. Friend. "Nothing--but keep him away. After all he's only the first victim." Startled by the note in her companion's voice, Mrs. Friend turned to look at him. He forced a smile, as their eyes met. "Oh, we must all take our chance! But Peter's not the boy he was--before the war. Things bowl him over easily." "She likes him so much," murmured Lucy. "I'm sure she never means to be unkind." "She isn't unkind!" said Geoffrey with energy. "It's the natural fated thing. We are all the slaves of her car and she knows it. When she was in the stage of quarrelling with us all, it was just fun. But if Helena grows as delicious--as she promised to be last week--" He shrugged his shoulders, with a deep breath--"Well,--she'll have to marry somebody some day--and the rest of us may drown! Only, if you're to be umpire--and she likes you so much that I expect you will be--play fair!" He held out his hand, and she put hers into it, astonished to realize that her own eyes were full of tears. "I'm a mass of dust--I must go and change before tea," he said abruptly. He went into the house, and she was left to some agitated thinking. An hour later, the broad lawns of Beechmark, burnt yellow by the May drought, were alive with guests, men in khaki and red tabs, fresh from their War Office work; two naval Commanders, and a resplendent Flag-Lieutenant; a youth in tennis flannels, just released from a city office, who seven months earlier had been fighting in the last advance of the war, and a couple of cadets who had not been old enough to fight at all; girls who had been "out" before the war, and two others, Helena's juniors, who were just leaving the school-room and seemed to be all aglow with the excitement and wonder of this peace-world; a formidable grey-haired woman, who was Lady Mary Chance; Cynthia and Georgina Welwyn, and the ill-dressed, arresting figure of Mr. Alcott. Not all were Buntingford's guests; some were staying at the Cottage, some in another neighbouring house; but Beechmark represented the headquarters of a gathering of which Helena Pitstone and her guardian were in truth the central figures. Helena in white, playing tennis; Helena with a cigarette, resting between her sets, and chaffing with a ring of dazzled young men; Helena talking wild nonsense with Geoffrey French, for the express purpose of shocking Lady Mary Chance; and the next minute listening with a deference graceful enough to turn even the seasoned head of a warrior to a grey-haired general describing the taking of the Vimy Ridge; and finally, Helena, holding a dancing class under the cedars on the yellow smoothness of the lawn, after tea, for such young men as panted to conquer the mysteries of "hesitation" or jazzing, and were ardently courting instruction in the desperate hope of capturing their teacher for a dance that night:--it was on these various avatars of Helena that the whole party turned; and Lady Mary indignantly felt that there was no escaping the young woman. "Why do you let her smoke--and paint--and _swear_--I declare I heard her swear!" she said in Buntingford's ear, as the dressing-bell rang, and he was escorting her to the house. "And mark my words, Philip--men may be amused by that kind of girl, but they won't marry her." Buntingford laughed. "As Helena's guardian I'm not particularly anxious about that!" "Ah, no doubt, she tells you people propose to her--but is it true?" snapped Lady Mary. "You imagine that Helena tells me of her proposals?" said Buntingford, wondering. "My dear Philip, don't pose! Isn't that the special function of a guardian?" "It may be. But, if so, Helena has never given me the chance of performing it." "I told you so! Men will flirt with her, but they _don't_ propose to her!" said Lady Mary triumphantly. Buntingford, smiling, let her have the last word, as he asked Mrs. Friend to show her to her room. Meanwhile the gardens were deserted, save for a couple of gardeners and an electrician, who were laying some wires for the illumination of the rose-garden in front of the drawing-room, and Geoffrey French, who was in a boat, lazily drifting across the pond, and reading a volume of poems by a friend which he had brought down with him. The evening was fast declining; and from the shadow of the deep wood which bordered the western edge of the pond he looked out on the sunset glow as it climbed the eastern hill, transfiguring the ridge, and leaving a rich twilight in the valley below. The tranquillity of the water, the silence of the woods, the gentle swaying of the boat, finally wooed him from his book, which after all he had only taken up as a protection from tormenting thoughts. Had he--had he--any chance with Helena? A month before he would have scornfully denied that he was in love with her. And now--he had actually confessed his plight to Mrs. Friend! As he lay floating between the green vault above, and the green weedy depths below, his thoughts searched the five weeks that lay between him and that first week-end when he had scolded Helena for her offences. It seemed to him that his love for her had first begun that day of the Dansworth riot. She had provoked and interested him before that--but rather as a raw self-willed child--a "flapper" whose extraordinary beauty gave her a distinction she had done nothing to earn. But every moment in that Dansworth day was clear in memory:--the grave young face behind the steering-wheel, the perfect lips compressed, the eyes intent upon their task, the girl's courage and self-command. Still more the patient Helena who waited for him at the farm--the grateful exultant look when he said "Come"--and every detail of the scene in Dansworth:--Helena with her most professional air, driving through soldiers and police, Helena helping to carry and place the two wounded men, and that smiling "good-bye" she had thrown him as she drove away with Buntingford beside her. The young man moved restlessly; and the light boat was set rocking. It was curious how he too, like Lucy Friend, only from another point of view, was beginning to reflect on the new intimacy that seemed to be developing between Buntingford and his ward. Philip of course was an awfully good fellow, and Helena was just finding it out; what else was there in it? But the jealous pang roused by the thought of Buntingford, once felt, persisted. Not for a moment did French doubt the honour or the integrity of a man, who had done him personally many a kindness, and had moreover given him some reason to think---(he recalled the odd little note he had received from Buntingford before Helena's first week-end)--that if he were to fall in love with Helena, his suit would be favourably watched by Helena's guardian. He could recall moreover one or two quite recent indications on Buntingford's part--very slight and guarded--which seemed to point in the same direction. All very well: Buntingford himself might be quite heart-whole and might remain so. French, who knew him well, though there was fourteen years between them, was tolerably certain--without being able to give any very clear reason for the conviction--that Buntingford would never have undertaken the guardianship of Helena, had the merest possibility of marrying her crossed his mind. French did not believe that it had ever yet crossed his mind. There was nothing in his manner towards her to suggest anything more than friendship, deepening interest, affectionate responsibility--all feelings which would have shown themselves plainly from the beginning had she allowed it. But Helena herself? It was clear that however much they might still disagree, Buntingford had conquered her original dislike of him, and was in process of becoming the guide, philosopher, and friend her mother had meant him to be. And Buntingford had charm and character, and imagination. He could force a girl like Helena to respect him intellectually; with such a nature that was half the battle. He would be her master in time. Besides, there were all Philip's endless opportunities of making life agreeable and delightful to her. When they went to London, for instance, he would come out of the shell he had lived in so long, and Helena would see him as his few intimate friends had always seen him:--as one of the most accomplished and attractive of mortals, with just that touch of something ironic and mysterious in his personality and history, which appeals specially to a girl's fancy. And what would be the end of it? Tragedy for Helena?--as well as bitter disappointment and heartache for himself, Geoffrey French? He was confident that Helena had in her the capacity for passion; that the flowering-time of such a nature would be one of no ordinary intensity. She would love, and be miserable--and beat herself to pieces--poor, brilliant Helena!--against her own pain. What could he do? Might there not be some chance for himself--_now_--while the situation was still so uncertain and undeveloped? Helena was still unconscious, unpledged. Why not cut in at once? "She likes me--she has been a perfect dear to me these last few times of meeting! Philip backs me. He would take my part. Perhaps, after all, my fears are nonsense, and she would no more dream of marrying Philip, than he would dream, under cover of his guardianship, of making love to her." He raised himself in the boat, filled with a new inrush of will and hope, and took up the drifting oars. Across the water, on the white slopes of lawn, and in some of the windows of the house, lights were appearing. The electricians were testing the red and blue lamps they had been stringing among the rose-beds, and from the gabled boathouse on the further side, a bright shaft from a small searchlight which had been fixed there, was striking across the water. Geoffrey watched it wandering over the dark wood on his right, lighting up the tall stems of the beeches, and sending a tricky gleam or two among the tangled underwood. It seemed to him a symbol of the sudden illumination of mind and purpose which had come to him, there, on the shadowed water--and he turned to look at a window which he knew was Helena's. There were lights within it, and he pictured Helena at her glass, about to slip into some bright dress or other, which would make her doubly fair. Meanwhile from the rose of the sunset, rosy lights were stealing over the water and faintly glorifying the old house and its spreading gardens. An overpowering sense of youth--of the beauty of the world--of the mystery of the future, beat through his pulses. The coming dance became a rite of Aphrodite, towards which all his being strained. Suddenly, there was a loud snapping noise, as of breaking branches in the wood beside him. It was so startling that his hands paused on the oars, as he looked quickly round to see what could have produced it. And at the same moment the searchlight on the boathouse reached the spot to which his eyes were drawn, and he saw for an instant--sharply distinct and ghostly white--a woman's face and hands--amid the blackness of the wood. He had only a moment in which to see them, in which to catch a glimpse of a figure among the trees, before the light was gone, leaving a double gloom behind it. Mysterious! Who could it be? Was it some one who wanted to be put across the pond? He shouted. "Who is that?" Then he rowed in to the shore, straining his eyes to see. It occurred to him that it might be a lady's maid brought by a guest, who had been out for a walk, and missed her way home in a strange park. "Do you want to get to the house? I can put you across to it if you wish," he said in a loud voice, addressing the unknown--"otherwise you'll have to go a long way round." No answer--only an intensity of silence, through which he heard from a great distance a church clock striking. The wood and all its detail had vanished in profound shadow. Conscious of a curious excitement he rowed still further in to the bank, and again spoke to the invisible woman. In vain. He began then to doubt his own eyes. Had it been a mere illusion produced by some caprice of the searchlight opposite? But the face!--the features of it were stamped on his memory, the gaunt bitterness of them, the brooding misery. How could he have imagined such a thing? Much perplexed and rather shaken in nerve, he rowed back across the pond--to hear the band tuning in the flower-filled drawing-room, as he approached the house. CHAPTER IX About ten o'clock on the night of the ball at Beechmark, a labourer was crossing the park on his way home from his allotment. Thanks to summertime and shortened hours of labour he had been able to get his winter greens in, and to earth up his potatoes, all in two strenuous evenings; and he was sauntering home dead-tired. But he had doubled his wages since the outbreak of war and his fighting son had come back to him safe, so that on the whole he was inclined to think that the old country was worth living in! The park he was traversing was mostly open pasture studded with trees, except where at the beginning of the eighteenth century the Lord Buntingford of the day had planted a wood of oak and beech about the small lake which he had made by the diversion of two streamlets that had once found a sluggish course through the grassland. The trees in it were among the finest in the country, but like so much of English woodland before the war, they had been badly neglected for many years. The trees blown down by winter storms had lain year after year where they fell; the dead undergrowth was choking the young saplings; and some of the paths through the wood had practically disappeared. The path from the allotments to the village passed at the back of the wood. Branching off from it, an old path leading through the trees and round the edge of the lake had once been frequently used as a short cut from the village to the house, but was now badly grown up and indeed superseded by the new drive from the western lodge, made some twenty years before this date. The labourer, Richard Stimson, was therefore vaguely surprised when he turned the corner of the wood and reached the fork of the path, to see a figure of a woman, on the old right-of-way, between him and the wood, for which she seemed to be making. It was not the figure of anyone he knew. It was a lady, apparently, in a dark gown, and a small hat with a veil. The light was still good, and he saw her clearly. He stopped indeed to watch her, puzzled to know what a stranger could be doing in the park, and on that path at ten o'clock at night. He was aware indeed that there were gay doings at Beechmark. He had seen the illuminated garden and house from the upper park, and had caught occasional gusts of music from the band to which no doubt the quality were dancing. But the fact didn't seem to have much to do with the person he was staring at. And while he stared at her, she turned, and instantly perceived--he thought--that she was observed. She paused a moment, and then made an abrupt change of direction; running round the corner of the wood, she reached the path along which he himself had just come and disappeared from view. The whole occurrence filliped the rustic mind; but before he reached his own cottage, Stimson had hit on an explanation which satisfied him. It was of course a stranger who had lost her way across the park, mistaking the two paths. On seeing him, she had realized that she was wrong and had quickly set herself right. He told his wife the tale before he went to sleep, with this commentary; and they neither of them troubled to think about it any more. Perhaps the matter would not have appeared so simple to either of them had they known that Stimson had no sooner passed completely out of sight, leaving the wide stretches of the park empty and untenanted under a sky already alive with stars, than the same figure reappeared, and after pausing a moment, apparently to reconnoitre, disappeared within the wood. "A year ago to-day, where were you?" said one Brigadier to another, as the two Generals stood against the wall in the Beechmark drawing-room to watch the dancing. "Near Albert," said the man addressed. "The brigade was licking its wounds and training drafts." The other smiled. "Mine was doing the same thing--near Armentières. We didn't think then, did we, that it would be all over in five months?" "It isn't all over!" said the first speaker, a man with a refined and sharply cut face, still young under a shock of grey hair. "We are in the ground swell of the war. The ship may go down yet." "While the boys and girls dance? I hope not!" The soldier's eyes ran smiling over the dancing throng. Then he dropped his voice: "Listen!" For a very young boy and girl had come to stand in front of them. The boy had just parted from a girl a good deal older than himself, who had nodded to him a rather patronizing farewell, as she glided back into the dance with a much decorated Major. "These pre-war girls are rather dusty, aren't they?" said the boy angrily to his partner. "You mean they give themselves airs? Well, what does it matter? It's _we_ who have the good time now!" said the little creature beside him, a fairy in filmy white, dancing about him as she spoke, hardly able to keep her feet still for a moment, life and pleasure in every limb. The two soldiers--both fathers--smiled at each other. Then Helena came down the room, a vision of spring, with pale green floating about her, and apple-blossoms in her brown hair. She was dancing with Geoffrey French, and both were dancing with remarkable stateliness and grace to some Czech music, imposed upon the band by Helena, who had given her particular friends instruction on the lawn that afternoon in some of the steps that fitted it. They passed with the admiring or envious eyes of the room upon them, and disappeared through the window leading to the lawn. For on the smooth-shaven turf of the lawn there was supplementary dancing, while the band in the conservatory, with all barriers removed, was playing both for the inside and outside revellers. Peter Dale was sitting out on the terrace over-looking the principal lawn with the daughter of Lady Mary Chance, a rather pretty but stupid girl, with a genius for social blunders. Buntingford had committed him to a dance with her, and he was not grateful. "She is pretty, of course, but horribly fast!" said his partner contemptuously, as Helena passed. "Everybody thinks her such bad style!" "Then everybody is an ass!" said Peter violently, turning upon her. "But it doesn't matter to Helena." The girl flushed in surprise and anger. "I didn't know you were such great friends. I only repeat what I hear," she said stiffly. "It depends on where you hear it," said Peter. "There isn't a man in this ball that isn't pining to dance with her." "Has she given you a dance?" said the girl, with a touch of malice in her voice. "Oh, I've come off as well as other people!" said Peter evasively. Then, of a sudden, his chubby face lit up. For Helena, just as the music was slackening to the close of the dance, and a crowd of aspirants for supper dances were converging on the spot where she stood, had turned and beckoned to Peter. "Do you mind?--I'll come back!" he said to his partner, and rushed off. "Second supper dance!" "All right!" He returned radiant, and in his recovered good humour proceeded to make himself delightful even to Miss Chance, whom, five minutes before, he had detested. But when he had returned her to her mother, Peter wandered off alone. He did not want to dance with anybody, to talk to anybody. He wanted just to remember Helena's smile, her eager--"I've kept it for you, Peter, all the evening!"--and to hug the thought of his coming joy. Oh, he hadn't a dog's chance, he knew, but as long as she was not actually married to somebody else, he was not going to give up hope. In a shrubbery walk, where a rising moon was just beginning to chequer the path with light and shade, he ran into Julian Horne, who was strolling tranquilly up and down, book in hand. "Hullo, what are you doing here?" said the invaded one. "Getting cool. And you?" Julian showed his book--_The Coming Revolution_, a Bolshevist pamphlet, then enjoying great vogue in manufacturing England. "What are you reading such rot for?" said Peter, wondering. "It gives a piquancy to this kind of thing!" was Horne's smiling reply, as they reached an open space in the walk, and he waved his hand towards the charming scene before them, the house with its lights, on its rising ground above the lake, the dancing groups on the lawn, the illuminated rose-garden; and below, the lake, under its screen of wood, with boats on the smooth water, touched every now and then by the creeping fingers of the searchlight from the boathouse, so that one group after another of young men and maidens stood out in a white glare against the darkness of the trees. "It will last our time," said Peter recklessly. "Have you seen Buntingford?" "A little while ago, he was sitting out with Lady Cynthia. But when he passed me just now, he told me he was going down to look after the lake and the boats--in case of accidents. There is a current at one end apparently, and a weir; and the keeper who understands all about it is in a Canada regiment on the Rhine." "Do you think Buntingford's going to marry Lady Cynthia?" asked Peter suddenly. Horne laughed. "That's not my guess, at present," he said after a moment. As he spoke, a boat on the lake came into the track of the searchlight, and the two persons in it were clearly visible--Buntingford rowing, and Helena, in the stern. The vision passed in a flash; and Horne turned a pair of eyes alive with satirical meaning on his companion. "Well!" said Peter, troubled, he scarcely knew why--"what do you mean?" Horne seemed to hesitate. His loose-limbed ease of bearing in his shabby clothes, his rugged head, and pile of reddish hair, above a thinker's brow, made him an impressive figure in the half light--gave him a kind of seer's significance. "Isn't it one of the stock situations?" he said at last--"this situation of guardian and ward?--romantic situations, I mean? Of course the note of romance must be applicable. But it certainly is applicable, in this case." Peter stared. Julian Horne caught the change in the boy's delicate face and repented him--too late. "What rubbish you talk, Julian! In the first place it would be dishonourable!" "Why?" "It would, I tell you,--damned dishonourable! And in the next, why, a few weeks ago--Helena hated him!" "Yes--she began with 'a little aversion'! One of the stock openings," laughed Horne. "Well, ta-ta. I'm not going to stay to listen to you talking bosh any more," said Peter roughly. "There's the next dance beginning." He flung away. Horne resumed his pacing. He was very sorry for Peter, whose plight was plain to all the world. But it was better he should be warned. As for himself, he too had been under the spell. But he had soon emerged. A philosopher and economist, holding on to Helena's skirts in her rush through the world, would cut too sorry a figure. Besides, could she ever have married him--which was of course impossible, in spite of the courses in Meredith and Modern Literature through which he had taken her--she would have tired of him in a year, by which time both their fortunes would have been spent. For he knew himself to be a spendthrift on a small income, and suspected a similar propensity in Helena, on the grand scale. He returned, therefore, more or less contentedly, to his musings upon an article he was to contribute to _The Market Place_, on "The Influence of Temperament in Economics." The sounds of dance music in the distance made an agreeable accompaniment. Meanwhile a scene--indisputably sentimental--was passing on the lake. Helena and Geoffrey French going down to the water's edge to find a boat, had met halfway with Cynthia Welwyn, in some distress. She had just heard that Lady Georgina had been taken suddenly ill, and must go home. She understood that Mawson was looking after her sister, who was liable to slight fainting attacks at inconvenient moments. But how to find their carriage! She had looked for a servant in vain, and Buntingford was nowhere to be seen. French could do no less than offer to assist; and Helena, biting her lip, despatched him. "I will wait for you at the boathouse." He rushed off, with Cynthia toiling after him, and Helena descended to the lake. As she neared the little landing stage, a boat approached it, containing Buntingford, and two or three of his guests. "Hullo, Helena, what have you done with Geoffrey?" She explained. "We were just coming down for a row." "All right. I'll take you on till he comes. Jump in!" She obeyed, and they were soon halfway towards the further side. But about the middle of the lake Buntingford was seized with belated compunction that he had not done his host's duty to his queer, inarticulate cousin, Lady Georgina. "I suppose I ought to have gone to look after her?" "Not at all," said Helena coolly. "I believe she does it often. She can't want more than Lady Cynthia--_and_ Geoffrey--_and_ Mawson. People shouldn't be pampered!" Her impertinence was so alluring as she sat opposite to him, trailing both hands in the water, that Buntingford submitted. There was a momentary silence. Then Helena said: "Lady Cynthia came to see me the other day. Did you send her?" "Of course. I wanted you to make friends." "That we should never do! We were simply born to dislike each other." "I never heard anything so unreasonable!" said Buntingford warmly. "Cynthia is a very good creature, and can be excellent company." Helena gave a shrug. "What does all that matter?" she said slowly--"when one has instincts--and intuitions. No!--don't let's talk any more about Lady Cynthia. But--there's something--please, Cousin Philip--I want to say--I may as well say it now." He looked at her rather astonished, and, dimly as he saw her in the shadow they had just entered, it seemed to him that her aspect had changed. "What is it? I hope nothing serious." "Yes--it is serious, to me. I hate apologizing!--I always have." "My dear Helena!--why should you apologize? For goodness' sake, don't! Think better of it." "I've got to do it," she said firmly, "Cousin Philip, you were quite right about that man, Jim Donald, and I was quite wrong. He's a beast, and I loathe the thought of having danced with him--there!--I'm sorry!" She held out her hand. Buntingford was supremely touched, and could not for the moment find a jest wherewith to disguise it. "Thank you!" he said quietly, at last. "Thank you, Helena. That was very nice of you." And with a sudden movement he stooped and kissed the wet and rather quivering hand he held. At the same moment, the searchlight which had been travelling about the pond, lighting up one boat after another to the amusement of the persons in them, and of those watching from the shore, again caught the boat in which sat Buntingford and Helena. Both figures stood sharply out. Then the light had travelled on, and Helena had hastily withdrawn her hand. She fell back on the cushions of the stern seat, vexed with her own agitation. She had described herself truly. She was proud, and it was hard for her to "climb down." But there was much else in the mixed feeling that possessed her. There seemed, for one thing, to be a curious happiness in it; combined also with a renewed jealousy for an independence she might have seemed to be giving away. She wanted to say--"Don't misunderstand me!--I'm not really giving up anything vital--I mean all the same to manage my life in my own way." But it was difficult to say it in the face of the coatless man opposite, of whose house she had become practically mistress, and who had changed all his personal modes of life to suit hers. Her eyes wandered to the gay scene of the house and its gardens, with its Watteau-ish groups of young men and maidens, under the night sky, its light and music. All that had been done, to give her pleasure, by a man who had for years conspicuously shunned society, and whose life in the old country house, before her advent, had been, as she had come to know, of the quietest. She bent forward again, impulsively: "Cousin Philip!--I'm enjoying this party enormously--it's awfully, awfully good of you--but I don't want you to do it any more--" "Do what, Helena?" "Please, I can get along without any more week-ends, or parties. You--you spoil me!" "Well--we're going up to London, aren't we, soon? But I daresay you're right"--his tone grew suddenly grave. "While we dance, there is a terrible amount of suffering going on in the world." "You mean--after the war?" He nodded. "Famine everywhere--women and children dying--half a dozen bloody little wars. And here at home we seem to be on the brink of civil war." "We oughtn't to be amusing ourselves at all!--that's the real truth of it," said Helena with gloomy decision. "But what are we to do--women, I mean? They told me at the hospital yesterday they get rid of their last convalescents next week. What _is_ there for me to do? If I were a factory girl, I should be getting unemployment benefit. My occupation's gone--such as it was--it's not my fault!" "Marry, my dear child,--and bring up children," said Buntingford bluntly. "That's the chief duty of Englishwomen just now." Helena flushed and said nothing. They drifted nearer to the bank, and Helena perceived, at the end of a little creek, a magnificent group of yew trees, of which the lower branches were almost in the water. Behind them, and to the side of them, through a gap in the wood, the moonlight found its way, but they themselves stood against the faint light, superbly dark, and impenetrable, black water at their feet. Buntingford pointed to them. "They're fine, aren't they? This lake of course is artificial, and the park was only made out of arable land a hundred years ago. I always imagine these trees mark some dwelling-house, which has disappeared. They used to be my chief haunt when I was a boy. There are four of them, extraordinarily interwoven. I made a seat in one of them. I could see everything and everybody on the lake, or in the garden; and nobody could see me. I once overheard a proposal!" "Eavesdropper!" laughed Helena. "Shall we land?--and go and look at them?" She gave a touch to the rudder. Then a shout rang out from the landing-stage on the other side of the water. "Ah, that's Geoffrey," said Buntingford. "And I must really get back to the house--to see people off." With a little vigorous rowing they were soon across the lake. Helena sat silent. She did not want Geoffrey--she did not want to reach the land--she had been happy on the water--why should things end? * * * * * Geoffrey reported that all was well with Lady Georgina, she had gone home, and then stepping into the boat as Buntingford stepped out, he began to push off. "Isn't it rather late?" began Helena in a hesitating voice, half rising from her seat. "I promised Peter a supper dance." Geoffrey turned to look at her. "Nobody's gone in to supper yet. Shall I take you back?" There was something in his voice which meant that this _tête-à-tête_ had been promised him. Helena resigned herself. But that she would rather have landed was very evident to her companion, who had been balked of half his chance already by Lady Georgina. Why did elderly persons liable to faint come to dances?--that was what he fiercely wanted to know as he pulled out into the lake. Helena was very quiet. She seemed tired, or dreamy. Instinctively Geoffrey lost hold on his own purpose. Something warned him to go warily. By way of starting conversation he began to tell her of his own adventure on the lake--of the dumb woman among the trees, whom he had seen and spoken to, without reply. Helena was only moderately interested. It was some village woman passing through the wood, she supposed. Very likely the searchlight frightened her, and she knew she had no business there in June when there were young pheasants about-- "Nobody's started preserving again yet--" put in Geoffrey. "Old Fenn told me yesterday that there were lots of wild ones," said Helena languidly. "So there'll be something to eat next winter." "Are you tired, Helena?" "Not at all," she said, sitting up suddenly. "What were we talking about?--oh, pheasants. Do you think we really shall starve next winter, Geoffrey, as the Food Controller says?" "I don't much care!" said French. Helena bent forward. "Now, you're cross with me, Geoffrey! Don't be cross! I think I really am tired. I seem to have danced for hours." The tone was childishly plaintive, and French was instantly appeased. The joy of being with her--alone--returned upon him in a flood. "Well, then, rest a little. Why should you go back just yet? Isn't it jolly out here?" "Lovely," she said absently--"but I promised Peter." "That'll be all right. We'll just go across and back." There was a short silence--long enough to hear the music from the house, and the distant voices of the dancers. A little northwest wind was creeping over the lake, and stirring the scents of the grasses and sedge-plants on its banks. Helena looked round to see in what direction they were going. "Ah!--you see that black patch, Geoffrey?" "Yes--it was near there I saw my ghost--or village woman--or lady's maid--whatever you like to call it." "It was a lady's maid, I think," said Helena decidedly. "They have a way of getting lost. Do you mind going there?"--she pointed--"I want to explore it." He pulled a stroke which sent the boat towards the yews; while she repeated Buntingford's story of the seat. "Perhaps we shall find her there," said Geoffrey with a laugh. "Your woman? No! That would be rather creepy! To think we had a spy on us all the time! I should hate that!" She spoke with animation; and a sudden question shot across French's mind. She and Buntingford had been alone there under the darkness of the yews. If a listener had been lurking in that old hiding-place, what would he--or she--have heard? Then he shook the thought from him, and rowed vigorously for the creek. He tied the boat to a willow-stump, and helped Helena to land. "I warn you--" he said, laughing. "You'll tear your dress, and wet your shoes." But with her skirts gathered tight round her she was already halfway through the branches, and Geoffrey heard her voice from the further side-- "Oh I--such a wonderful place!" He followed her quickly, and was no less astonished than she. They stood in a kind of natural hall, like that "pillared shade" under the yews of Borrowdale, which Wordsworth has made immortal: beneath whose sable roof Of boughs, as if for festal purpose, decked With unrejoicing berries, Ghostly shapes May meet at noon-tide; Fear and trembling Hope, Silence and Foresight; Death the Skeleton And Time the Shadow:-- For three yew trees of great age had grown together, forming a domed tent of close, perennial leaf, beneath which all other vegetation had disappeared. The floor, carpeted with "the pining members" of the yews, was dry and smooth; Helena's light slippers scarcely sank in it. They groped their way; and Helena's hand had slipped unconsciously into Geoffrey's. In the velvety darkness, indeed, they would have seen nothing, but for the fact that the moon stood just above the wood, and through a small gap in the dome, where a rotten branch had fallen, a little light came down. "I've found the seat!" said Helena joyously, disengaging herself from her companion. And presently a dim ray from overhead showed her to him seated dryad-like in the very centre of the black interwoven trunks. Or, rather, he saw the sparkle of some bright stones on her neck, and the whiteness of her brow; but for the rest, only a suggestion of lovely lines; as it were, a Spirit of the Wood, almost bodiless. He stood before her, in an ecstasy of pleasure. "Helena!--you are a vision--a dream: Don't fade away! I wish we could stay here for ever." "Am I a vision?" She put out a mischievous hand, and pinched him. "But come here, Geoffrey--come up beside me--look! Anybody sitting here could see a good deal of the lake!" He squeezed in beside her, and true enough, through a natural parting in the branches, which no one could have noticed from outside, the little creek, with their boat in it, was plainly visible, and beyond it the lights on the lawn. "A jolly good observation post for a sniper!" said Geoffrey, recollections of the Somme returning upon him; so far as he was able to think of anything but Helena's warm loveliness beside him. Mad thoughts began to surge up in him. But an exclamation from Helena checked them: "I say!--there's something here--in the seat." Her hand groped near his. She withdrew it excitedly. "It's a scarf, or a bag, or something. Let's take it to the light. Your woman, Geoffrey!" She scrambled down, and he followed her unwillingly, the blood racing through his veins. But he must needs help her again through the close-grown branches, and into the boat. She peered at the soft thing she held in her hand. "It's a bag, a little silk bag. And there's something in it! Light a match, Geoffrey." He fumbled in his waistcoat pocket, and obeyed her. Their two heads stooped together over the bag. Helena drew out a handkerchief--torn, with a lace edging. "That's not a village woman's handkerchief!" she said, wondering. "And there are initials!" He struck another match, and they distinguished something like F.M. very finely embroidered in the corner of the handkerchief. The match went out, and Helena put the handkerchief back into the bag, which she examined in the now full moonlight, as they drifted out of the shadow. "And the bag itself is a most beautiful little thing! It's shabby and old, but it cost a great deal when it was new. What a strange, strange thing! We must tell Cousin Philip. Somebody, perhaps, was watching us all the time!" She sat with her chin on her hands, gazing thoughtfully at French, the bag on her knees. Now that the little adventure was over, and she was begging him to take her back quickly to the house, Geoffrey was only conscious of disappointment and chagrin. What did the silly mystery in itself matter to him or her? But it had drawn a red herring across his track. Would the opportunity it had spoilt ever return? CHAPTER X It was a glorious June morning; and Beechmark, after the ball, was just beginning to wake up. Into the June garden, full of sun but gently beaten by a fresh wind, the dancers of the night before emerged one by one. Peter Dale had come out early, having quarrelled with his bed almost for the first time in his life. He was now, however, fast asleep in a garden-chair under a chestnut-tree. Buntingford, in flannels, and as fresh as though he had slept ten hours instead of three, strolled out through the library window, followed by French and Vivian Lodge. "I say, what weather," said French, throwing himself down on the grass, his hands under his head. "Why can't Mother Nature provide us with this sort of thing a little more plentifully?" "How much would any man jack of us do if it were always fine?" said Julian Horne, settling himself luxuriously in a deep and comfortable chair under a red hawthorn in full bloom. "When the weather makes one want to hang oneself, then's the moment for immortal works." "For goodness' sake, don't prate, Julian!" said French, yawning, and flinging a rose-bud at Horne, which he had just gathered from a garden-bed at his elbow. "You've had so much more sleep than the rest of us, it isn't fair." "I saw him sup," said Buntingford. "Who saw him afterwards?" "No one but his Maker," said Lodge, who had drawn his hat over his eyes, and was lying on the grass beside French:--"and _le bon Dieu_ alone knows what he was doing; for he wasn't asleep. I heard him tubbing at some unearthly hour in the room next to mine." "I finished my article about seven a.m.," said Horne tranquilly--"while you fellows were sleeping off the effects of debauch." "Brute!" said Geoffrey languidly. Then suddenly, as though he had remembered something, he sat up. "By the way, Buntingford, I had an adventure yesterday evening--Ah, here comes Helena! Half the story's mine--and half is hers. So we'll wait a moment." The men sprang to their feet. Helena in the freshest of white gowns, white shoes and a white hat approached, looking preoccupied. Lady Mary Chance, who was sitting at an open drawing-room window, with a newspaper she was far too tired to read on her lap, was annoyed to see the general eagerness with which a girl who occasionally, and horribly said "D--mn!" and habitually smoked, was received by a group of infatuated males. Buntingford found the culprit a chair, and handed her a cigarette. The rest, after greeting her, subsided again on the grass. "Poor Peter!" said Helena, in a tone of mock pity, turning her eyes to the sleeping form under the chestnut. "Have I won, or haven't I? I bet him I would be down first." "You've lost--of course," said Horne. "Peter was down an hour ago." "That's not what I meant by 'down.' I meant 'awake.'" "No woman ever pays a bet if she can help it," said Horne, "--though I've known exceptions. But now, please, silence. Geoffrey says he has something to tell us--an adventure--which was half his and half yours. Which of you will begin?" Helena threw a quick glance at Geoffrey, who nodded to her, perceiving at the same moment that she had in her hand the little embroidered bag of the night before. "Geoffrey begins." "Well, it'll thrill you," said Geoffrey slowly, "because there was a spy among us last night--'takin' notes.'" And with the heightening touches that every good story-teller bestows upon a story, he described the vision of the lake--the strange woman's face, as he had seen it in the twilight beside the yew trees. Buntingford gradually dropped his cigarette to listen. "Very curious--very interesting," he said ironically, as French paused, "and has lost nothing in the telling." "Ah, but wait till you hear the end!" cried Helena. "Now, it's my turn." And she completed the tale, holding up the bag at the close of it, so that the tarnished gold of its embroidery caught the light. Buntingford took it from her, and turned it over. Then he opened it, drew out the handkerchief, and looked at the initials, "'F. M.'" He shook his head. "Conveys nothing. But you're quite right. That bag has nothing to do with a village woman--unless she picked it up." "But the face I saw had nothing to do with a village woman, either," said French, with conviction. "It was subtle--melancholy--intense--more than that!--_fierce_, fiercely miserable. I guess that the woman possessing it would be a torment to her belongings if they happened not to suit her. And, my hat!--if you made her jealous!" "Was she handsome?" asked Lodge. Geoffrey shrugged his shoulders. "Must have been--probably--when she was ten years younger." "And she possessed this bag?" mused Buntingford--"which she or some one bought at Florence--for I've discovered the address of a shop in it--Fratelli Cortis, Via Tornabuoni, Firenze. You didn't find that out, Helena." He passed the bag to her, pointing out a little printed silk label which had been sewn into the neck of it. Then Vivian Lodge asked for it and turned it over. "Lovely work--and beautiful materials. Ah!--do you see what it is?"--he held it up--"the Arms of Florence, embroidered in gold and silver thread. H'm. I suppose, Buntingford, you get some Whitsuntide visitors in the village?" "Oh, yes, a few. There's a little pub with one or two decent rooms, and several cottagers take lodgers. The lady, whoever she was, was scarcely a person of delicacy." "She was in that place for an object," said Geoffrey, interrupting him with some decision. "Of that I feel certain. If she had just lost her way, and was trespassing--she must have known, I think, that she was trespassing--why didn't she answer my call and let me put her over the lake? Of course I should never have seen her at all, but for that accident of the searchlight." "The question is," said Buntingford, "how long did she stay there? She was not under the yews when you saw her?" "No--just outside." "Well, then, supposing, to get out of the way of the searchlight, she found her way in and discovered my seat--how long do you guess she was there?--and when the bag dropped?" "Any time between then--and midnight--when Helena found it," said French. "She may have gone very soon after I saw her, leaving the bag on the seat; or, if she stayed, on my supposition that she was there for the purpose of spying, then she probably vanished when she heard our boat drawn up, and knew that Helena and I were getting out." "A long sitting!" said Buntingford with a laugh--"four hours. I really can't construct any reasonable explanation on those lines." "Why not? Some people have a passion for spying and eavesdropping. If I were such a person, dumped in a country village with nothing to do, I think I could have amused myself a good deal last night, in that observation post. Through that hole I told you of, one could see the lights and the dancing on the lawn, and watch the boats on the lake. She could hear the music, and if anyone did happen to be talking secrets just under the yews, she could have heard every word, quite easily." Involuntarily he looked at Helena, Helena was looking at the grass. Was it mere fancy, or was there a sudden pinkness in her cheeks? Buntingford too seemed to have a slightly conscious air. But he rose to his feet, with a laugh. "Well, I'll have a stroll to the village, some time to-day, and see what I can discover about your _Incognita_, Helena. If she is a holiday visitor, she'll be still on the spot. Geoffrey had better come with me, as he's the only person who's seen her." "Right you are. After lunch." Buntingford nodded assent and went into the house. * * * * * The day grew hotter. Lodge and Julian Horne went off for a swim in the cool end of the lake. Peter still slept, looking so innocent and infantine in his sleep that no one had the heart to wake him. French and Helena were left together, and were soon driven by the advancing sun to the deep shade of a lime-avenue, which, starting from the back of the house, ran for half a mile through the park. Here they were absolutely alone. Lady Mary's prying eyes were defeated, and Helena incidentally remarked that Mrs. Friend, being utterly "jacked up," had been bullied into staying in bed till luncheon. So that in the green sunflecked shadow of the limes, Geoffrey had--if Helena so pleased--a longer _tête-à-tête_ before him, and a more generous opportunity, even, than the gods had given him on the lake. His pulses leapt; goaded, however, by alternate hope and fear. But at least he had the chance to probe the situation a little deeper; even if prudence should ultimately forbid him anything more. Helena had chosen a wooden seat round one of the finest limes. Some books brought out for show rather than use, lay beside her. A piece of knitting--a scarf of a bright greenish yellow--lay on the lap of her white dress. She had taken off her hat, and Geoffrey was passionately conscious of the beauty of the brown head resting, as she talked, against the furrowed trunk of the lime. Her brown-gold hair was dressed in the new way, close to the head and face, and fastened by some sapphire pins behind the ear. From this dark frame, and in the half light of the avenue, the exquisite whiteness of the forehead and neck, the brown eyes, so marvellously large and brilliant, and yet so delicately finished in every detail beneath their perfect brows, and the curve of the lips over the small white teeth, stood out as if they had been painted on ivory by a miniature-painter of the Renaissance. Her white dress, according to the prevailing fashion, was almost low--as children's frocks used to be in the days of our great-grandmothers. It was made with a childish full bodice, and a childish sash of pale blue held up the rounded breast, that rose and fell with her breathing, beneath the white muslin. Pale blue stockings, and a pair of white shoes, with preposterous heels and pointed toes, completed the picture. The mingling, in the dress, of extreme simplicity with the cunningest artifice, and the greater daring and _joie de vivre_ which it expressed, as compared with the dress of pre-war days, made it characteristic and symbolic:--a dress of the New Time. Geoffrey lay on the grass beside her, feasting his eyes upon her--discreetly. Since when had English women grown so beautiful? At all the weddings and most of the dances he had lately attended, the brides and the _débutantes_ had seemed to him of a loveliness out of all proportion to that of their fore-runners in those far-off days before the war. And when a War Office mission, just before the Armistice, had taken him to some munition factories in the north, he had been scarcely less seized by the comeliness of the girl-workers:--the long lines of them in their blue overalls, and the blue caps that could scarcely restrain the beauty and wealth of pale yellow or red-gold hair beneath. Is there something in the rush and flame of war that quickens old powers and dormant virtues in a race? Better feeding and better wages among the working-classes--one may mark them down perhaps as factors in this product of a heightened beauty. But for these exquisite women of the upper class, is it the pace at which they have lived, unconsciously, for these five years, that has brought out this bloom and splendour?--and will it pass as it has come? Questions of this kind floated through his mind as he lay looking at Helena, melting rapidly into others much more peremptory and personal. "Are you soon going up to Town?" he asked her presently. His voice seemed to startle her. She returned evidently with difficulty from thoughts of her own. He would have given his head to read them. "No," she said hesitatingly. "Why should we? It is so jolly down here. Everything's getting lovely." "I thought you wanted a bit of season! I thought that was part of your bargain with Philip?" "Yes--but"--she laughed--"I didn't know how nice Beechmark was." His sore sense winced. "Doesn't Philip want you to go?" "Not at all. He says he gets much more work done in Town, without Mrs. Friend and me to bother him--" "He puts it that way?" "Politely! And it rests him to come down here for Sundays. He loves the riding." "I shouldn't have thought the Sundays were much rest?" "Ah, but they're going to be!" she said eagerly. "We're not going to have another party for a whole month. Cousin Philip has been treating me like a spoiled child--stuffing me with treats--and I've put an end to it!" And this was the Helena that had stipulated so fiercely for her week-ends and her pals! The smart deepened. "And you won't be tired of the country?" "In the winter, perhaps," she said carelessly. "Philip and I have all sorts of plans for the things we want to do in London in the winter. But not now--when every hour's delicious!" "_Philip and I_!"--a new combination indeed! She threw her head back again, drinking in the warm light and shade, the golden intensity of the fresh leaf above her. "And next week there'll be frost, and you'll be shivering over the fire," he threw at her, in a sarcastic voice. "Well, even that--would be nicer--than London," she said slowly. "I never imagined I should like the country so much. Of course I wish there was more to do. I told Philip so last night." "And what did he say?" But she suddenly flushed and evaded the question. "Oh, well, he hadn't much to say," said Helena, looking a little conscious. "Anyway, I'm getting a little education. Mrs. Friend's brushing up my French--which is vile. And I do some reading every week for Philip--and some drawing. By the way"--she turned upon her companion--"do you know his drawings?--they're just ripping! He must have been an awfully good artist. But I've only just got him to show me his things. He never talks of them himself." "I've never seen one. His oldest friends can hardly remember that time in his life. He seems to want to forget it." "Well, naturally!" said Helena, with an energy that astonished her listener; but before he could probe what she meant, she stooped over him: "Geoffrey!" "Yes!" He saw that she had coloured brightly. "Do you remember all that nonsense I talked to you a month ago?" "I can remember it if you want me to. Something about old Philip being a bully and a tyrant, wasn't it?" "Some rubbish like that. Well--I don't want to be maudlin--but I wish to put it on record that Philip _isn't_ a bully and he _isn't_ a tyrant. He can be a jolly good friend!" "With some old-fashioned opinions?" put in Geoffrey mockingly. "Old-fashioned opinions?--yes, of course. And you needn't imagine that I shall agree with them all. Oh, you may laugh, Geoffrey, but it's quite true. I'm not a bit crushed. That's the delightful part of it. It's because he has a genius--yes, a genius--for friendship. I didn't know him when I came down here--I didn't know him a bit--and I was an idiot. But one could trust him to the very last." Her hands lay idly on the bright-coloured knitting, and Geoffrey could watch the emotion on her face. "And one is so glad to be his friend!" she went on softly, "because he has suffered so!" "You mean in his marriage? What do you know about it?" "Can't one guess?" she went on in the same low voice. "He never speaks of her! There isn't a picture of her, of any sort, in the house. He used to speak of her sometimes, I believe, to mother--of course she never said a word--but never, never, to anyone else. It's quite clear that he wants to forget it altogether. Well, you don't want to forget what made you happy. And he says such bitter things often. Oh, I'm sure it was a tragedy!" "Well--why doesn't he marry again?" Geoffrey had turned over on his elbows, and seemed to be examining the performances of an ant who was trying to carry off a dead fly four times his size. Helena did not answer immediately, and Geoffrey, looking up from the ant, was aware of conflicting expressions passing across her face. At last she said, drawing a deep breath: "Well, at least, I'm glad he's come to like this dear old place--He never used to care about it in the least." "That's because you've made it so bright for him," said Geoffrey, finding a seat on a tree-stump near her, and fumbling for a cigarette. The praises of Philip were becoming monotonous and a reckless wish to test his own fate was taking possession of him. "I haven't!"--said Helena vehemently. "I have asked all sorts of people down he didn't like--and I've made him live in one perpetual racket. I've been an odious little beast. But now--perhaps--I shall know better what he wants." "Excellent sentiments!" A scoffer looked down upon her through curling rings of smoke. "Shall I tell you what Philip wants?" "What?" "He wants a wife." The attentive eyes fixed on him withdrew themselves. "Well--suppose he does?" "Are you going to supply him with one? Lady Cynthia, I think, would accommodate you." Helena flushed angrily. "He hasn't the smallest intention of proposing to Cynthia. Nobody with eyes in their head would suggest it." "No--but if you and he are such great friends--couldn't you pull it off? It would be very suitable," said Geoffrey coolly. Helena broke out--the quick breath beating against her white bodice: "Of course I understand you perfectly, Geoffrey--perfectly! You're not very subtle--are you? What you're thinking is that when I call Philip my friend I'm meaning something else--that I'm plotting--intriguing--" Her words choked her. Geoffrey put out a soothing hand--and touched hers. "My dear child:--how could I suggest anything of the kind? I'm only a little sorry--for Philip," "Philip can take care of himself," she said passionately. "Only a _stupid--conventional_--mind could want to spoil what is really so--so--" "So charming?" suggested Geoffrey, springing to his feet. "Very well, Helena!--then if Philip is really nothing more to you than your guardian, and your very good friend--why not give some one else a chance?" He bent over her, his kind, clever face aglow with the feeling he could no longer conceal. Their eyes met--Helena's at first resentful, scornful even--then soft. She too stood up, and put out a pair of protesting hands--"Please--please, Geoffrey,--_don't_." "Why not--you angel!" He possessed himself of one of the hands and made her move with him along the avenue, looking closely into her eyes. "You must know what I feel! I wanted to speak to you last night, but you tricked me. I just adore you, Helena! I've got quite good prospects--I'm getting on in the House of Commons--and I would work for you day and night!" "You didn't adore me a month ago!" said Helena, a triumphant little smile playing about her mouth. "How you lectured me!" "For you highest good," he said, laughing; though his heart beat to suffocation. "Just give me a word of hope, Helena! Don't turn me down, at once." "Then you mustn't talk nonsense," she said vehemently, withdrawing her hand. "I don't want to be engaged! I don't want to be married! Why can't I be let alone?" Geoffrey had turned a little pale. In the pause that followed he fell back on a cigarette for consolation. "Why can't you be let alone?" he said at last. "Why?--because--you're Helena!" "What a stupid answer!" she said contemptuously. Then, with one of her quick changes, she came near to him again. "Geoffrey!--it's no good pressing me--but don't be angry with me, there's a dear. Just be my friend and help me!" She put a hand on his arm, and the face that looked into his would have bewitched a stone. "That's a very old game, Helena. 'Marry you? Rather not! but you may join the queue of rejected ones if you like.'" A mischievous smile danced in Helena's eyes. "None of them can say I don't treat them nicely!" "I daresay. But I warn you I shan't accept the position for long. I shall begin again." "Well, but not yet!--not for a long time," she pleaded. Then she gave a little impatient stamp, as she walked beside him. "I tell you--I don't want to be bound. I won't be bound! I want to be free." "So you said--_à propos_ of Philip," he retorted drily. He saw the shaft strike home--the involuntary dropping of the eyelids, the soft catch in the breath. But she rallied quickly. "That was altogether different! You had no business to say that, Geoffrey." "Well, then, forgive me--and keep me quiet--just--just one kiss, Helena!" The last passionate words were hardly audible. They had passed into the deepest shadow of the avenue. No one was visible in all its green length. They stood ensiled by summer; the great trees mounting guard. Helena threw a glance to right and left. "Well, then--to keep you quiet--_sans préjudice_!" She demurely offered her cheek. But his lips were scarcely allowed to touch it, she drew away so quickly. "Now, then, that's quite settled!" she said in her most matter-of-fact voice. "Such a comfort! Let's go back." They turned back along the avenue, a rather flushed pair, enjoying each other's society, and discussing the dance, and their respective partners. It happened, however, that this little scene--at its most critical point--had only just escaped a spectator. Philip Buntingford passed across the further end of the avenue on his way to the Horne Farm, at the moment when Helena and Geoffrey turned their backs to him, walking towards the house. They were not aware of him; but he stopped a moment to watch the young figures disappearing under the green shade. A look of pleasure was in his blue eyes. It seemed to him that things were going well in that direction. And he wished them to go well. He had known Geoffrey since he was a little chap in his first breeches; had watched him through Winchester and Oxford, had taken as semi-paternal pride in the young man's distinguished war record, and had helped him with his election expenses. He himself was intimate with very few of the younger generation. His companions in the Admiralty work, and certain senior naval officers with whom that work had made him acquainted:--a certain intimacy, a certain real friendship had indeed grown up between him and some of them. But something old and tired in him made the effort of bridging the gulf between himself and men in their twenties--generally speaking--too difficult. Or he thought so. The truth was, perhaps, as Geoffrey had expressed it to Helena, that many of the younger men who had been brought into close official or business contact with him felt a real affection for him. Buntingford would have thought it strange that they should do so, and never for one moment assumed it. After its languid morning, Beechmark revived with the afternoon. Its young men guests, whom the Dansworth rioters would probably have classed as parasites and idlers battening on the toil of the people, had in fact earned their holiday by a good many months of hard work, whether in the winding up of the war, or the re-starting of suspended businesses, or the renewed activities of the bar; and they were taking it whole-heartedly. Golf, tennis, swimming, and sleep had filled the day, and it was a crowd in high spirits that gathered round Mrs. Friend for tea on the lawn, somewhere about five o'clock. Lucy, who had reached that stage of fatigue the night before when--like Peter Dale, only for different reasons--her bed became her worst enemy, had scarcely slept a wink, but was nevertheless presiding gaily over the tea-table. She looked particularly small and slight in a little dress of thin grey stuff that Helena had coaxed her to wear in lieu of her perennial black, but there was that expression in her pretty eyes as of a lifted burden, and a new friendship with life, which persons in Philip Buntingford's neighbourhood, when they belonged to the race of the meek and gentle, were apt to put on. Peter Dale hung about her, distributing tea and cake, and obedient to all her wishes. More than once in these later weeks he had found, in the dumb sympathy and understanding of the little widow, something that had been to him like shadow in the desert. He was known to fame as one of the smartest young aide-de-camps in the army, and fabulously rich besides. His invitation cards, carelessly stacked in his Curzon Street rooms, were a sight to see. But Helena had crushed his manly spirit. Sitting under the shadow of Mrs. Friend, he liked to watch from a distance the beautiful and dazzling creature who would have none of him. He was very sorry for himself; but, all the same, he had had some rattling games of tennis; the weather was divine, and he could still gaze at Helena; so that although the world was evil, "the thrushes still sang in it." Buntingford and Geoffrey were seen walking up from the lake when tea was nearly over. All eyes were turned to them. "Now, then," said Julian Horne--"for the mystery, and its key. What a pity mysteries are generally such frauds! They can't keep it up. They let you down when you least expect it." "Well, what news?" cried Helena, as the two men approached. Buntingford shook his head. "Not much to tell--very little, indeed." It appeared to Horne that both men looked puzzled and vaguely excited. But their story was soon told. They had seen Richard Stimson, a labourer, who reported having noticed a strange lady crossing the park in the direction of the wood, which, however, she had not entered, having finally changed her course so as to bear towards the Western Lodge and the allotments. "That, you will observe, was about ten o'clock," interjected French, "and I saw my lady about eight." Buntingford found a chair, lit a cigarette, and resumed: "She appeared in the village some time yesterday morning and went into the church. She told the woman who was cleaning there that she had come to look at an old window which was mentioned in her guide-book. The woman noticed that she stayed some time looking at the monuments in the church, and the tombs in the Buntingford chantry, which all the visitors go to see. She ordered some sandwiches at the Rose-and-Crown and got into talk with the landlord. He says she asked the questions strangers generally do ask--'Who lived in the neighbourhood?'--If she took a lodging in the village for August were there many nice places to go and see?--and so on. She said she had visited the Buntingford tombs in the chantry, and asked some questions about the family, and myself--Was I married?--Who was the heir? etc. Then when she had paid her bill, she enquired the way across the park to Feetham Station, and said she would have a walk and catch a six o'clock train back to London. She loved the country, she said--and liked walking. And that really is--all!" "Except about her appearance," put in Geoffrey. "The landlord said he thought she must be an actress, or 'summat o' that sort.' She had such a strange way of looking at you. But when we asked what that meant, he scratched his head and couldn't tell us. All that we got out of him was he wouldn't like to have her for a lodger--'she'd frighten his missus.' Oh, and he did say that she looked dead-tired, and that he advised her not to walk to Feetham, but to wait for the five o'clock bus that goes from the village to the station. But she said she liked walking, and would find some cool place in the park to sit in--till it was time to catch the train." "She was well-dressed, he said," added Buntingford, addressing himself to Cynthia Welwyn, who sat beside him; "and his description of her hat and veil, etc., quite agreed with old Stimson's account." There was a silence, in which everybody seemed to be trying to piece the evidence together as to the mysterious onlooker of the night, and make a collected whole of it. Buntingford and Geoffrey were especially thoughtful and preoccupied. At last the former, after smoking a while without speaking, got up with the remark that he must see to some letters before post. "Oh, no!"--pleaded Helena, intercepting him, and speaking so that he only should hear. "To-morrow's Whitsunday, and Monday's Bank Holiday. What's the use of writing letters? Don't you remember--you promised to show me those drawings before dinner--and may Geoffrey come, too?" A sudden look of reluctance and impatience crossed Buntingford's face. Helena perceived it at once, and drew back. But Buntingford said immediately: "Oh, certainly. In half an hour, I'll have the portfolios ready." He walked away. Helena sat flushed and silent, her eyes on the ground, twisting and untwisting the handkerchief on her lap. And, presently, she too disappeared. The rest of the party were left to discuss with Geoffrey French the ins and outs of the evidence, and to put up various theories as to the motives of the woman of the yew trees; an occupation that lasted them till dressing-time. Cynthia Welwyn took but little share in it. She was sitting rather apart from the rest, under a blue parasol which made an attractive combination with her semi-transparent black dress and the bright gold of her hair. In reality, her thoughts were busy with quite other matters than the lady of the yews. It did not seem to her of any real importance that a half-crazy stranger, attracted by the sounds and sights of the ball, on such a beautiful night, should have tried to watch it from the lake. The whole tale was curious, but--to her--irrelevant. The mystery she burned to find out was nearer home. Was Helena Pitstone falling in love with Philip? And if so, what was the effect on Philip? Cynthia had not much enjoyed her dance. The dazzling, the unfair ascendency of youth, as embodied in Helena, had been rather more galling than usual; and the "sittings out" she had arranged with Philip during the supper dances had been all cancelled by her sister's tiresome attack. Julian Horne, who generally got on with her, chivalrously moved his seat near to her, and tried to talk. But he found her in a rather dry and caustic mood. The ball had seemed to her "badly managed"; and the guests, outside the house-party, "an odd set." Meanwhile, exactly at the hour named by Buntingford, he heard a knock at the library door. Helena appeared. She stood just inside the door, looking absurdly young and childish in her white frock. But her face was grave. "I thought just now"--she said, almost timidly,--"that you were bored by my asking you to show us those things. Are you? Please tell me. I didn't mean to get in the way of anything you were doing." "Bored! Not in the least. Here they are, all ready for you. Come in." She saw two or three large portfolios distributed on chairs, and one or two drawings already on exhibition. Her face cleared. "Oh, what a heavenly thing!" She made straight for a large drawing of the Val d'Arno in spring, and the gap in the mountains that leads to Lucca, taken from some high point above Fiesole. She knelt down before it in an ecstasy of pleasure. "Mummy and I were there two years before the war. I do believe you came too?" She looked up, smiling, at the face above her. It was the first time she had ever appealed to her childish recollections of him in any other than a provocative or half-resentful tone. He could remember a good many tussles with her in her frail mother's interest, when she was a long-legged, insubordinate child of twelve. And when Helena first arrived at Beechmark, it had hurt him to realize how bitterly she remembered such things, how grossly she had exaggerated them. The change indicated in her present manner, soothed his tired, nervous mood. His smile answered her. "Yes, I was there with you two or three days. Do you remember the wild tulips we gathered at Settignano?" "And the wild cherries--and the pear-blossoms! Italy in the spring is _Heaven_!" she said, under her breath, as she dropped to a sitting posture on the floor while he put the drawings before her. "Well!--shall we go there next spring?" "Don't tempt me--and then back out!" "If I did," he said, laughing, "you could still go with Mrs. Friend." She made no answer. Another knock at the door. "There's Geoffrey. Come in, old boy. We've only just begun." Half an hour's exhibition followed. Both Helena and French were intelligent spectators, and their amazement at the quality and variety of the work shown them seemed half-welcome, half-embarrassing to their host. "Why don't you go on with it? Why don't you exhibit?" cried Helena. He shrugged his shoulders. "It doesn't interest me now. It's a past phase." She longed to ask questions. But his manner didn't encourage it. And when the half-hour was done he looked at his watch. "Dressing-time," he said, smiling, holding it out to Helena. She rose at once. Philip was a delightful artist, but the operations of dressing were not to be trifled with. Her thanks, however, for "a lovely time!" and her pleading for a second show on the morrow, were so graceful, so sweet, that French, as he silently put the drawings back, felt his spirits drop to zero. What could have so changed the thorny, insolent girl of six weeks before--but the one thing? He stole a glance at Buntingford. Surely he must realize what was happening--and his huge responsibility--he _must_. Helena disappeared. Geoffrey volunteered to tie up a portfolio they had only half examined, while Buntingford finished a letter. While he was handling it, the portfolio slipped, and a number of drawings fell out pell-mell upon the floor. Geoffrey stooped to pick them up. A vehement exclamation startled Buntingford at his desk. "What's the matter, Geoffrey?" "Philip! _That's_ the woman I saw!--that's her face!--I could swear to it anywhere!" He pointed with excitement to the drawing of a woman's head and shoulders, which had fallen out from the very back of the portfolio, whereof the rotting straps and fastenings showed that it had not been opened for many years. Buntingford came to his side. He looked at the drawing--then at French. His face seemed suddenly to turn grey and old. "My God!" he said under his breath, and again, still lower--"_My God_! Of course. I knew it!" He dropped into a chair beside Geoffrey, and buried his face in his hands. Geoffrey stared at him in silence, a bewildering tumult of ideas and conjectures rushing through his brain. Another knock at the door. Buntingford rose automatically, went to the door, spoke to the servant who had knocked, and came back with a note in his hand, which he took to the window to read. Then with steps which seemed to French to waver like those of a man half drunk he went to his writing-desk, and wrote a reply which he gave to the servant who was waiting in the passage. He stood a moment thinking, his hand over his eyes, before he approached his nephew. "Geoffrey, will you please take my place at dinner to-night? I am going out. Make any excuse you like." He moved away--but turned back again, speaking with much difficulty--"The woman you saw--is at the Rectory. Alcott took her in last night. He writes to me. I am going there." CHAPTER XI Buntingford walked rapidly across the park, astonishing the old lodge-keeper who happened to see him pass through, and knew that his lordship had a large Whitsuntide party at the house, who must at that very moment be sitting down to dinner. The Rectory lay at the further extremity of the village, which was long and straggling. The village street, still bathed in sun, was full of groups of holiday makers, idling and courting. To avoid them, Buntingford stepped into one of his own plantations, in which there was a path leading straight to the back of the Rectory. He walked like one half-stunned, with very little conscious thought. As to the blow which had now fallen, he had lived under the possibility of it for fourteen years. Only since the end of the war had he begun to feel some security, and in consequence to realize a new ferment in himself. Well--now at least he would _know_. And the hunger to know winged his feet. He found a gate leading into the garden of the Rectory open, and went through it towards the front of the house. A figure in grey flannels, with a round collar, was pacing up and down the little grass-plot there, waiting for him. John Alcott came forward at sight of him. He took Buntingford's hand in both his own, and looked into his face. "Is it true?" he said, gently. "Probably," said Buntingford, after a moment. "Will you come into my study? I think you ought to hear our story before you see her." He led the way into the tiny house, and into his low-roofed study, packed with books from floor to ceiling, the books of a lonely man who had found in them his chief friends. He shut the door with care, suggesting that they should speak as quietly as possible, since the house was so small, and sound travelled so easily through it. "Where is she?" said Buntingford, abruptly, as he took the chair Alcott pushed towards him. "Just overhead. It is our only spare room." Buntingford nodded, and the two heads, the black and the grey, bent towards each other, while Alcott gave his murmured report. "You know we have no servant. My sister does everything, with my help, and a village woman once or twice a week. Lydia came down this morning about seven o'clock and opened the front door. To her astonishment she found a woman leaning against the front pillar of our little porch. My sister spoke to her, and then saw she must be exhausted or ill. She told her to come in, and managed to get her into the dining-room where there is a sofa. She said a few incoherent things after lying down and then fainted. My sister called me, and I went for our old doctor. He came back with me, said it was collapse, and heart weakness--perhaps after influenza--and that we must on no account move her except on to a bed in the dining-room till he had watched her a little. She was quite unable to give any account of herself, and while we were watching her she seemed to go into a heavy sleep. She only recovered consciousness about five o'clock this evening. Meanwhile I had been obliged to go to a diocesan meeting at Dansworth and I left my sister and Dr. Ramsay in charge of her, suggesting that as there was evidently something unusual in the case nothing should be said to anybody outside the house till I came back and she was able to talk to us. I hurried back, and found the doctor giving injections of strychnine and brandy which seemed to be reviving her. While we were all standing round her, she said quite clearly--'I want to see Philip Buntingford.' Dr. Ramsay knelt down beside her, and asked her to tell him, if she was strong enough, why she wanted to see you. She did not open her eyes, but said again distinctly--'Because I am'--or was--I am not quite sure which--'his wife.' And after a minute or two she said twice over, very faintly--'Send for him--send for him.' So then I wrote my note to you and sent it off. Since then the doctor and my sister have succeeded in carrying her upstairs--and the doctor gives leave for you to see her. He is coming back again presently. During her sleep, she talked incoherently once or twice about a lake and a boat--and once she said--'Oh, do stop that music!' and moved her head about as though it hurt her. Since then I have heard some gossip from the village about a strange lady who was seen in the park last night. Naturally one puts two and two together--but we have said nothing yet to anyone. Nobody knows that she--if the woman seen in the park, and the woman upstairs are the same--is here." He looked interrogatively at his companion. But Buntingford, who had risen, stood dumb. "May I go upstairs?" was all he said. The rector led the way up a small cottage staircase. His sister, a grey-haired woman of rather more than middle age, spectacled and prim, but with the eyes of the pure in heart, heard them on the stairs and came out to meet them. "She is quite ready, and I am in the next room, if you want me. Please knock on the wall." Buntingford entered and shut the door. He stood at the foot of the bed. The woman lying on it opened her eyes, and they looked at each other long and silently. The face on the pillow had still the remains of beauty. The powerful mouth and chin, the nose, which was long and delicate, the deep-set eyes, and broad brow under strong waves of hair, were all fused in a fine oval; and the modelling of the features was intensely and passionately expressive. That indeed was at once the distinction and, so to speak, the terror of the face,--its excessive, abnormal individualism, its surplus of expression. A woman to fret herself and others to decay--a woman, to burn up her own life, and that of her lover, her husband, her child. Only physical weakness had at last set bounds to what had once been a whirlwind force. "Anna!" said Buntingford gently. She made a feeble gesture which beckoned him to come nearer--to sit down--and he came. All the time he was sharply, irrelevantly conscious of the little room, the bed with its white dimity furniture, the texts on the distempered walls, the head of the Leonardo Christ over the mantelpiece, the white muslin dressing-table, the strips of carpet on the bare boards, the cottage chairs:--the spotless cleanliness and the poverty of it all. He saw as the artist, who cannot help but see, even at moments of intense feeling. "You thought--I was dead?" The woman in the bed moved her haggard eyes towards him. "Yes, lately I thought it. I didn't, for a long time." "I put that notice in--so that--you might marry again," she said, slowly, and with difficulty. "I suspected that." "But you--didn't marry." "How could I?--when I had no real evidence?" She closed her eyes, as though any attempt to argue, or explain was beyond her, and he had to wait while she gathered strength again. After what seemed a long time, and in a rather stronger voice she said: "Did you ever find out--what I had done?" "I discovered that you had gone away with Rocca--into Italy. I followed you by motor, and got news of you as having gone over the Splugen. My car had a bad accident on the pass, and I was ten weeks in hospital at Chur. After that I lost all trace." "I heard of the accident," she said, her eyes all the while searching out the changed details of a face which had once been familiar to her. "But Rocca wasn't with me then. I had only old Zélie--you remember?" "The old _bonne_--we had at Melun?" She made a sign of assent.--"I never lived with Rocca--till after the child was born." "The child! What do you mean?" The words were a cry. He hung over her, shaken and amazed. "You never knew!"--There was a faint, ghastly note of triumph in her voice. "I wouldn't tell you--after that night we quarrelled--I concealed it. But he is your son--sure enough." "My son!--and he is alive?" Buntingford bent closer, trying to see her face. She turned to look at him, nodding silently. "Where is he?" "In London. It was about him--I came down here. I--I--want to get rid of him." A look of horror crossed his face, as though in her faint yet violent words he caught the echoes of an intolerable past. But he controlled himself. "Tell me more--I want to help you." "You--you won't get any joy of him!" she said, still staring at him. "He's not like other children--he's afflicted. It was a bad doctor--when I was confined--up in the hills near Lucca. The child was injured. There's nothing wrong with him--but his brain." A flickering light in Buntingford's face sank. "And you want to get rid of him?" "He's so much trouble," she said peevishly. "I did the best I could for him. Now I can't afford to look after him. I thought of everything I could do--before--" "Before you thought of coming to me?" She assented. A long pause followed, during which Miss Alcott came in, administered stimulant, and whispered to Buntingford to let her rest a little. He sat there beside her motionless, for half an hour or more, unconscious of the passage of time, his thoughts searching the past, and then again grappling dully with the extraordinary, the incredible statement that he possessed a son--a living but, apparently, an idiot son. The light began to fail, and Miss Alcott slipped in noiselessly again to light a small lamp out of sight of the patient. "The doctor will soon be here," she whispered to Buntingford. The light of the lamp roused the woman. She made a sign to Miss Alcott to lift her a little. "Not much," said the Rector's sister in Buntingford's ear. "It's the heart that's wrong." Together they raised her just a little. Miss Alcott put a fan into Buntingford's hands, and opened the windows wider. "I'm all right," said the stranger irritably. "Let me alone. I've got a lot to say." She turned her eyes on Buntingford. "Do you want to know--about Rocca?" "Yes." "He died seven years ago. He was always good to me--awfully good to me and to the boy. We lived in a horrible out-of-the-way place--up in the mountains near Naples. I didn't want you to know about the boy. I wanted revenge. Rocca changed his name to Melegrani. I called myself Francesca Melegrani. I used to exhibit both at Naples and Rome. Nobody ever found out who we were." "What made you put that notice in the _Times_?" She smiled faintly, and the smile recalled to him an old expression of hers, half-cynical, half-defiant. "I had a pious fit once--when Rocca was very ill. I confessed to an old priest--in the Abruzzi. He told me to go back to you--and ask your forgiveness. I was living in sin, he said--and would go to hell. A dear old fool! But he had some influence with me. He made me feel some remorse--about you--only I wouldn't give up the boy. So when Rocca got well and was going to Lyons, I made him post the notice from there--to the _Times_. I hoped you'd believe it." Then, unexpectedly, she slightly raised her head, the better to see the man beside her. "Do you mean to marry that girl I saw on the lake?" "If you mean the girl that I was rowing, she is the daughter of a cousin of mine. I am her guardian." "She's handsome." Her unfriendly eyes showed her incredulity. He drew himself stiffly together. "Don't please waste your strength on foolish ideas. I am not going to marry her, nor anybody." "You couldn't--till you divorce me--or till I die," she said feebly, her lids dropping again--"but I'm quite ready to see any lawyers--so that you can get free." "Don't think about that now, but tell me again--what you want me to do." "I want--to go to--America. I've got friends there. I want you to pay my passage--because I'm a pauper--and to take over the boy." "I'll do all that. You shall have a nurse--when you are strong enough--who will take you across. Now I must go. Can you just tell me first where the boy is?" Almost inaudibly she gave an address in Kentish Town. He saw that she could bear no more, and he rose. "Try and sleep," he said in a voice that wavered. "I'll see you again to-morrow. You're all right here." She made no reply, and seemed again either asleep or unconscious. As he stood by the bed, looking down upon her, scenes and persons he had forgotten for years rushed back into the inner light of memory:--that first day in Lebas's atelier when he had seen her in her Holland overall, her black hair loose on her neck, the provocative brilliance of her dark eyes; their close comradeship in the contests, the quarrels, the ambitions of the atelier; her patronage of him as her junior in art, though her senior in age; her increasing influence over him, and the excitement of intimacy with a creature so unrestrained, so gifted, so consumed with jealousies, whether as an artist or a woman; his proposal of marriage to her in one of the straight roads that cut the forest of Compiegne; the ceremony at the Mairie, with only a few of their fellow students for witnesses; the little apartment on the Rive Gauche, with its bits of old furniture, and unframed sketches pinned up on the walls; Anna's alternations of temper, now fascinating, now sulky, and that steady emergence in her of coarse or vulgar traits, like rocks in an ebbing sea; their early quarrels, and her old mother who hated him; their poverty because of her extravagance; his growing reluctance to take her to England, or to present her to persons of his own class and breeding in Paris, and her frantic jealousy and resentment when she discovered it; their scenes of an alternate violence and reconciliation and finally her disappearance, in the company, as he had always supposed, of Sigismondo Rocca, an Italian studying in Paris, whose pursuit of her had been notorious for some time. The door opened gently, and Miss Alcott's grey head appeared. "The doctor!" she said, just audibly. Buntingford followed her downstairs, and found himself presently in Alcott's study, alone with a country doctor well known to him, a man who had pulled out his own teeth in childhood, had attended his father and grandfather before him, and carried in his loyal breast the secrets and the woes of a whole countryside. They grasped hands in silence. "You know who she is?" said Buntingford quietly. "I understand that she tells Mr. Alcott that she was Mrs. Philip Bliss, that she left you fifteen years ago, and that you believed her dead?" He saw Buntingford shrink. "At times I did--yes, at times I did--but we won't go into that. Is she ill--really ill?" Ramsay spoke deliberately, after a minute's thought: "Yes, she is probably very ill. The heart is certainly in a dangerous state. I thought she would have slipped away this morning, when they called me in--the collapse was so serious. She is not a strong woman, and she had a bad attack of influenza last week. Then she was out all last night, wandering about, evidently in a state of great excitement. It was as bad a fainting fit as I have ever seen." "It would be impossible to move her?" "For a day or two certainly. She keeps worrying about a boy--apparently her own boy?" "I will see to that." Ramsay hesitated a moment and then said--"What are we to call her? It will not be possible, I imagine, to keep her presence here altogether a secret. She called herself, in talking to Miss Alcott, Madame Melegrani." "Why not? As to explaining her, I hardly know what to say." Buntingford put his hand across his eyes; the look of weariness, of perplexity, intensified ten-fold. "An acquaintance of yours in Italy, come to ask you for help?" suggested Ramsay. Buntingford withdrew his hand. "No!" he said with decision. "Better tell the truth! She was my wife. She left me, as she has told the Alcotts, and took steps eleven years ago to make me believe her dead. And up to seven years ago, she passed as the wife of a man whom I knew by the name of Sigismondo Rocca. When the announcement of her death appeared, I set enquiries on foot at once, with no result. Latterly, I have thought it must be true; but I have never been quite certain. She has reappeared now, it seems, partly because she has no resources, and partly in order to restore to me my son." "Your son!" said Ramsay, startled. "She tells me that a boy was born after she left me, and that I am the father. All that I must verify. No need to say anything whatever about that yet. Her main purpose, no doubt, was to ask for pecuniary assistance, in order to go to America. In return she will furnish my lawyers with all the evidence necessary for my divorce from her." Ramsay slowly shook his head. "I doubt whether she will ever get to America. She has worn herself out." There was a silence. Then Buntingford added: "If these kind people would keep her, it would be the best solution. I would make everything easy for them. To-morrow I go up to Town--to the address she has given me. And--I should be glad if you would come with me?" The doctor looked surprised. "Of course--if you want me--" "The boy--his mother says--is abnormal--deficient. An injury at birth. If you will accompany me I shall know better what to do." A grasp of the hand, a look of sympathy answered; and they parted. Buntingford emerged from the little Rectory to find Alcott again waiting for him in the garden. The sun had set some time and the moon was peering over the hills to the east. The mounting silver rim suddenly recalled to Buntingford the fairy-like scene of the night before?--the searchlight on the lake, the lights, the music, and the exquisite figure of Helena dancing through it all. Into what Vale of the Shadow of Death had he passed since then?-- Alcott and he turned into the plantation walk together. Various practical arrangements were discussed between them. Alcott and his sister would keep the sick woman in their house as long as might be necessary, and Buntingford once more expressed his gratitude. Then, under the darkness of the trees, and in reaction from the experience he had just passed through, an unhappy man's hitherto impenetrable reserve, to some extent, broke down. And the companion walking beside him showed himself a true minister of Christ---humble, tactful, delicate, yet with the courage of his message. What struck him most, perhaps, was the revelation of what must have been Buntingford's utter loneliness through long years; the spiritual isolation in which a man of singularly responsive and confiding temper had passed perhaps a quarter of his life, except for one blameless friendship with a woman now dead. His utmost efforts had not been able to discover the wife who had deserted him, or to throw any light upon her subsequent history. The law, therefore, offered him no redress. He could not free himself; and he could not marry again. Yet marriage and fatherhood were his natural destiny, thwarted by the fatal mistake of his early youth. Nothing remained but to draw a steady veil over the past, and to make what he could of the other elements in life. Alcott gathered clearly from the story that there had been no other woman or women in the case, since his rupture with his wife. Was it that his marriage, with all its repulsive episodes, had disgusted a fastidious nature with the coarser aspects of the sex relation? The best was denied him, and from the worse he himself turned away; though haunted all the time by the natural hunger of the normal man. As they walked on, Alcott gradually shaped some image for himself of what had happened during the years of the marriage, piecing it together from Buntingford's agitated talk. But he was not prepared for a sudden statement made just as they were reaching the spot where Alcott would naturally turn back towards the Rectory. It came with a burst, after a silence. "For God's sake, Alcott, don't suppose from what I have been telling you that all the fault was on my wife's side, that I was a mere injured innocent. Very soon after we married, I discovered that I had ceased to love her, that there was hardly anything in common between us. And there was a woman in Paris--a married woman, of my own world--cultivated, and good, and refined--who was sorry for me, who made a kind of spiritual home for me. We very nearly stepped over the edge--we should have done--but for her religion. She was an ardent Catholic and her religion saved her. She left Paris suddenly, begging me as the last thing she would ever ask me, to be reconciled to Anna, and to forget her. For some days I intended to shoot myself. But, at last, as the only thing I could do for her, I did as she bade me. Anna and I, after a while, came together again, and I hoped for a child. Then, by hideous ill luck, Anna, about three months after our reconciliation, discovered a fragment of a letter--believed the very worst--made a horrible scene with me, and went off, as she has just told me,--not actually with Rocca as I believed, but to join him in Italy. From that day I lost all trace of her. Her concealment of the boy's birth was her vengeance upon me. She knew how passionately I had always wanted a son. But instead she punished him--the poor, poor babe!" There was an anguish in the stifled voice which made sympathy impertinent. Alcott asked some practical questions, and Buntingford repeated his wife's report of the boy's condition, and her account of an injury at birth, caused by the unskilful hands of an ignorant doctor. "But I shall see him to-morrow. Ramsay and I go together. Perhaps, after all, something can be done. I shall also make the first arrangements for the divorce." Alcott was silent a moment--hesitating in the dark. "You will make those arrangements immediately?" "Of course." "If she dies? She may die." "I would do nothing brutal--but--She came to make a bargain with me." "Yes--but if she dies--might you not have been glad to say, 'I forgive'?" The shy, clumsy man was shaken as he spoke, with the passion of his own faith. The darkness concealed it, as it concealed its effect on Buntingford. Buntingford made no direct reply, and presently they parted, Alcott engaging to send a messenger over to Beechmark early, with a report of the patient's condition, before Buntingford and Dr. Ramsay started for London. Buntingford walked on. And presently in the dim moonlight ahead he perceived Geoffrey French. The young man approached him timidly, almost expecting to be denounced as an intruder. Instead, Buntingford put an arm through his, and leaned upon him, at first in a pathetic silence that Geoffrey did not dare to break. Then gradually the story was told again, as much of it as was necessary, as much as Philip could bear. Geoffrey made very little comment, till through the trees they began to see the lights of Beechmark. Then Geoffrey said in an unsteady voice: "Philip!--there is one person you must tell--perhaps first of all. You must tell Helena--yourself." Buntingford stopped as though under a blow. "Of course, I shall tell Helena--but why?--" His voice spoke bewilderment and pain. "Tell her _yourself_--that's all," said Geoffrey, resolutely--"and, if you can, before she hears it from anybody else." CHAPTER XII Buntingford and French reached home between ten and eleven o'clock. When they entered the house, they heard sounds of music from the drawing-room. Peter Dale was playing fragments from the latest musical comedy, with a whistled accompaniment on the drawing-room piano. There seemed to be nothing else audible in the house, in spite of the large party it contained. Amid the general hush, unbroken by a voice or a laugh, the "funny bits" that Peter was defiantly thumping or whistling made a kind of goblin chorus round a crushed and weary man, as he pushed past the door of the drawing-room to the library. Geoffrey followed him. "No one knows it yet," said the young man, closing the door behind them. "I had no authority from you to say anything. But of course they all understood that something strange had happened. Can I be any help with the others, while--" "While I tell Helena?" said Buntingford, heavily. "Yes. Better get it over. Say, please--I should be grateful for no more talk than is inevitable." Geoffrey stood by awkwardly, not knowing how to express the painful sympathy he felt. His very pity made him abrupt. "I am to say--that you always believed--she was dead?" Under what name to speak of the woman lying at the Rectory puzzled him. The mere admission of the thought that however completely in the realm of morals she might have forfeited his name, she was still Buntingford's wife in the realm of law, seemed an outrage. At the question, Buntingford sprang up suddenly from the seat on which he had fallen; and Geoffrey, who was standing near him involuntarily retreated a few steps, in amazement at the passionate animation which for the moment had transformed the whole aspect of the elder man. "Yes, you may say so--you must say so! There is no other account you can give of it!--no other account I can authorize you to give it. It is four-fifths true--and no one in this house--not even you--has any right to press me further. At the same time, I am not going to put even the fraction of a lie between myself and you, Geoffrey, for you have been--a dear fellow--to me!" He put his hand a moment on Geoffrey's shoulder, withdrawing it instantly. "The point is--what would have come about--if this had not happened? That is the test. And I can't give a perfectly clear answer." He began to pace the room--thinking aloud. "I have been very anxious--lately--to marry. I have been so many years alone; and I--well, there it is!--I have suffered from it, physically and morally; more perhaps than other men might have suffered. And lately--you must try and understand me, Geoffrey!--although I had doubts--yes, deep down, I still had doubts--whether I was really free--I have been much more ready to believe than I used to be, that I might now disregard the doubts--silence them!--for good and all. It has been my obsession--you may say now my temptation. Oh! the divorce court would probably have freed me--have allowed me to presume my wife's death after these fifteen years. But the difficulty lay in my own conscience. Was I certain? No! I was not certain! Anna's ways and standards were well known to me. I could imagine various motives which might have induced her to deceive me. At the same time"--he stopped and pointed to his writing-table--"these drawers are stuffed full of reports and correspondence, from agents all over Europe, whom I employed in the years before the war to find out anything they could. I cannot accuse myself of any deliberate or wilful ignorance. I made effort after effort--in vain. I was entitled--at last--it often seemed to me to give up the effort, to take my freedom. But then"--his voice dropped--"I thought of the woman I might love--and wish to marry. I should indeed have told her everything, and the law might have been ready to protect us. But if Anna still lived, and were suddenly to reappear in my life--what a situation!--for a sensitive, scrupulous woman!" "It would have broken--spoiled--everything!" said Geoffrey, under his breath, but with emphasis. He was leaning against the mantelpiece, and his face was hidden from his companion. Buntingford threw him a strange, deprecating look. "You are right--you are quite right. Yet I believe, Geoffrey, I might have committed that wrong--but for this--what shall I call it?--this 'act of God' that has happened to me. Don't misunderstand me!" He came to stand beside his nephew, and spoke with intensity. "It was _only_ a possibility--and there is no guilt on my conscience. I have no real person in my mind. But any day I might have failed my own sense of justice--my own sense of honour--sufficiently--to let a woman risk it!" Geoffrey thought of one woman--if not two women--who would have risked it. His heart was full of Helena. It was as though he could only appreciate the situation as it affected her. How deep would the blow strike, when she knew? He turned to look at Buntingford, who had resumed his restless walk up and down the room, realizing with mingled affection and reluctance the charm of his physical presence, the dark head, the kind deep eyes, the melancholy selfishness that seemed to enwrap him. Yet all the time he had not been selfless! There had been no individual woman in the case. But none the less, he had been consumed with the same personal longing--the same love of loving; the _amor amandi_--as other men. That was a discovery. It brought him nearer to the young man's tenderness; but it made the chance of a misunderstanding on Helena's part greater. "Shall I tell Helena you would like to speak to her?" he said, breaking the silence. Buntingford assented. Philip, left alone, tried to collect his thoughts. He did not conceal from himself what had been implied rather than said by Geoffrey. The hint had startled and disquieted him. But he could not believe it had any real substance; and certainly he felt himself blameless. A creature so radiant, with the world at her feet!--and he, prematurely aged, who had seemed to her, only a few weeks ago, a mere old fogy in her path! That she should have reconsidered her attitude towards him, was surely natural, considering all the pains he had taken to please her. But as to anything else--absurd! Latterly, indeed, since she had come to that tacit truce with Jim, he was well aware how much her presence in his house had added to the pleasant moments of daily life. In winning her good will, in thinking for her, in trying to teach her, in watching the movements of her quick untrained intelligence and the various phases of her enchanting beauty, he had found not only a new occupation, but a new joy. Rachel's prophecy for him had begun to realize itself. And, all the time, his hopes as to Geoffrey's success with her had been steadily rising. He and Geoffrey had indeed been at cross-purposes, if Geoffrey really believed what he seemed to believe! But it was nothing--it could be nothing--but the fantasy of a lover, starting at a shadow. And suddenly his mind, as he stood waiting, plunged into matters which were not shadows--but palpitating realities. _His son_!--whom he was to see on the morrow. He believed the word of the woman who had been his wife. Looking back on her character with all its faults, he did not think she would have been capable of a malicious lie, at such a moment. Forty miles away then, there was a human being waiting and suffering, to whom his life had given life. Excitement--yearning--beat through his pulses. He already felt the boy in his arms; was already conscious of the ardour with which every device of science should be called in, to help restore to him, not only his son's body, but his mind. There was a low tap at the door. He recalled his thoughts and went to open it. "Helena!--my dear!" He took her hand and led her in. She had changed her white dress of the afternoon for a little black frock, one of her mourning dresses for her mother, with a bunch of flame-coloured roses at her waist. The semi-transparent folds of the black brought out the brilliance of the white neck and shoulders, the pale carnations of the face, the beautiful hair, following closely the contours of the white brow. Even through all his pain and preoccupation, Buntingford admired; was instantly conscious of the sheer pleasure of her beauty. But it was the pleasure of an artist, an elder brother--a father even. Her mother was in his mind, and the strong affection he had begun to feel for his ward was shot through and through by the older tenderness. "Sit there, dear," he said, pushing forward a chair. "Has Geoffrey told you anything?" "No. He said you wanted to tell me something yourself, and he would speak to the others." She was very pale, and the hand he touched was cold. But she was perfectly self-possessed. He sat down in front of her collecting his thoughts. "Something has happened, Helena, to-day--this very evening--which must--I fear--alter all your plans and mine. The poor woman whom Geoffrey saw in the wood, whose bag you found, was just able to make her escape, when you and Geoffrey landed. She wandered about the rest of the night, and in the early morning she asked for shelter--being evidently ill--at the Rectory, but it was not till this evening that she made a statement which induced them to send for me. Helena!--what did your mother ever tell you about my marriage?" "She told me very little--only that you had married someone abroad--when you were studying in Paris--and that she was dead." Buntingford covered his eyes with his hand. "I told your mother, Helena, all I knew. I concealed nothing from her--both what I knew--and what I didn't know." He paused, to take from his pocket a small leather case and to extract from it a newspaper cutting. He handed it to her. It was from the first column of the _Times_, was dated 1907, and contained the words:--"On July 19th at Lyons, France, Anna, wife of Philip Bliss, aged 28." Helena read it, and looked up. Buntingford anticipated the words that were on her lips. "Wait a moment!--let me go on. I read that announcement in the _Times_, Helena, three years after my wife had deserted me. I had spent those three years, first in recovering from a bad accident, and then in wandering about trying to trace her. Naturally, I went off to Lyons at once, and could discover--nothing! The police there did all they could to help me--our own Embassy in Paris got at the Ministry of the Interior--useless! I recovered the original notice and envelope from the _Times_. Both were typewritten, and the Lyons postmark told us no more than the notice had already told. I could only carry on my search, and for some years afterwards, even after I had returned to London, I spent the greater part of all I earned and possessed upon it. About that time my friendship with your mother began. She was already ill, and spent most of her life--as you remember--except for those two or three invalid winters in Italy--in that little drawing-room, I knew so well. I could always be sure of finding her at home; and gradually--as you recollect--she became my best friend. She was the only person in England who knew the true story of my marriage. She always suspected, from the time she first heard of it, that the notice in the _Times_--" Helena made a quick movement forward. Her lips parted. "--was not true?" Buntingford took her hand again, and they looked at each other, she trembling involuntarily. "And the woman last night?" she said, breathlessly--"was she someone who knew--who could tell you the truth?" "She was my wife--herself!" Helena withdrew her hand. "How strange!--how strange!" She covered her eyes. There was a silence. After it, Buntingford resumed: "Has Geoffrey told you the first warning of it--you left this room?" "No." He described the incident of the sketch. "It was a drawing I had made of her only a few weeks before she left me. I had no idea it was in that portfolio. We had scarcely time to put it away before Mr. Alcott's note arrived--sending for me at once." Helena's hands had dropped, while she hung upon his story. And a wonderful unconscious sweetness had stolen into her expression. Her young heart was in her eyes. "Oh, I am so glad--so glad--you had that warning!" Buntingford was deeply touched. "You dear child!" he said in a rather choked voice, and, rising, he walked away from her to the further end of the room. When he returned, he found a pale and thoughtful Helena. "Of course, Cousin Philip, this will make a great change--in your life--and in mine." He stood silently before her--preferring that she should make her own suggestions. "I think--I ought to go away at once. Thanks to you--I have Mrs. Friend--who is such a dear." "There is the London house, Helena. You can make any use of it you like." "No, I think not," she said resolutely. Then with an odd laugh which recalled an earlier Helena--"I don't expect Lucy Friend would want to have the charge of me in town; and you too--perhaps--would still be responsible--and bothered about me--if I were in your house." Buntingford could not help a smile. "My responsibility scarcely depends--does it--upon where you are?" Then his voice deepened. "I desire, wherever you are, to cherish and care for you--in your mother's place. I can't say what a joy it has been to me to have you here." "No!--that's nonsense!--ridiculous!--" she said, suddenly breaking down, and dashing the tears from her eyes. "It's very true," he said gently. "You've been the dearest pupil, and forgiven me all my pedantic ways. But if not London--I will arrange anything you wish." She turned away, evidently making a great effort not to weep. He too was much agitated, and for a little while he busied himself with some letters on his table. When, at her call, he returned to her, she said, quite in her usual voice: "I should like to go somewhere--to some beautiful place--and draw. That would take a month--perhaps. Then we can settle." After a pause, she added without hesitation--"And you?--what is going to happen?" "It depends--upon whether it's life at the Rectory--or death." She was evidently startled, but said nothing, only gave him her beautiful eyes again, and her unspoken sympathy. Then an impulse which seemed invincible came upon him to be really frank with her--to tell her more. "It depends, also,--upon something else. But this I asked Geoffrey not to tell the others in the drawing-room--just yet--and I ask you the same. Of course you may tell Mrs. Friend." She saw his face work with emotion. "Helena, this woman that was my wife declares to me--that I have a son living." He saw the light of amazement that rushed into her face, and hurried on:--"But in the same breath that she tells me that, she tells me the tragedy that goes with it." And hardly able to command his voice, he repeated what had been told him. "Of course everything must be enquired into--verified. I go to town to-morrow--with Ramsay. Possibly I shall bring him back--perhaps to Ramsay's care, for the moment. Possibly, I shall leave him with someone in town." "Couldn't I help," she said, after a moment, "if I stayed?" "No, no!" he said with repugnance, which was almost passion. "I couldn't lay such a burden upon you, or any young creature. You must go and be happy, dear Helena--it is your duty to be happy! And this home for a time will be a tragic one. Well, but now, where would you like to go? Will you and Geoffrey and Mrs. Friend consult? I will leave any money you want in Geoffrey's hands." "You mean"--she said abruptly--"that I really ought to go at once--to-morrow." "Wouldn't it be best? It troubles me to think of you here--under the shadow--of this thing." "I see!--I see! All right. You are going to London to-morrow morning?" She had risen, and was moving towards the door. "Yes, I shall go to the Rectory first for news. And then on to the station." She paused a moment. "And if--if she--I don't know what to call her--if she lives?" "Well, then--I must be free," he said, gravely; adding immediately--"She passed for fifteen years after she left me as the wife of an Italian I used to know. It would be very quickly arranged. I should provide for her--and keep my boy. But all that is uncertain." "Yes, I understand." She held out her hand. "Cousin Philip--I am awfully sorry for you. I--I realized--somehow--only after I'd come down here--that you must have had--things in your life--to make you unhappy. And you've been so nice--so awfully nice to me! I just want to thank you--with all my heart." And before he could prevent her, she had seized his hands and kissed them. Then she rushed to the door, turning to show him a face between tears and laughter. "There!--I've paid you back!" And with that she vanished. Helena was going blindly through the hall, towards her own room, when Peter Dale emerged from the shadows. He caught her as she passed. "Let me have just a word, Helena! You know, everything will be broken up here. I only want to say my mother would just adore to have you for the season. We'd all make it nice for you--we'd be your slaves--just let me wire to Mater to-morrow morning." "No, thank you, Peter. Please--please! don't stop me! I want to see Mrs. Friend." "Helena, do think of it!" he implored. "No, I can't. It's impossible!" she said, almost fiercely. "Let me go, Peter! Good-night!" He stood, a picture of misery, at the foot of the stairs watching her run up. Then at the top she turned, ran down a few steps again, kissed her hand to him, and vanished, the bright buckles on her shoes flashing along the gallery overhead. But in the further corner of the gallery she nearly ran into the arms of Geoffrey French, who was waiting for her outside her room. "Is it too late, Helena--for me to have just a few words in your sitting-room?" He caught hold of her. The light just behind him showed him a tense and frowning Helena. "Yes--it is much too late! I can't talk now." "Only a few words?" "No"--she panted--"no!--Geoffrey, I shall _hate_ you if you don't let me go!" It seemed to her that everybody was in league to stand between her and the one thing she craved for--to be alone and in the dark. She snatched her dress out of his grasp, and he fell back. She slipped into her own room, and locked the door. He shook his head, and went slowly downstairs. He found Peter pacing the hall, and they went out into the June dark together, a discomfited pair. Meanwhile Mrs. Friend waited for Helena. She heard voices in the passage and the locking of Helena's door. She was still weak from her illness, so it seemed wisest to get into bed. But she had no hope or intention of sleep. She sat up in bed, with a shawl round her, certain that Helena would come. She was in a ferment of pity and fear,--she scarcely knew why--fear for the young creature she had come to love with all her heart; and she strained her ears to catch the sound of an opening door. But Helena did not come. Through her open window Lucy could hear steps along the terrace coming and going--to and fro. Then they ceased; all sounds in the house ceased. The church clock in the distance struck midnight, and a little owl close to the house shrieked and wailed like a human thing, to the torment of Lucy's nerves. A little later she was aware of Buntingford coming upstairs, and going to his room on the further side of the gallery. Then, nothing. Deep silence--that seemed to flow through the house and all its rooms and passages like a submerging flood. Except!--What was that sound, in the room next to hers--in Helena's room? Lucy Friend got up trembling, put on a dressing-gown, and laid an ear to the wall between her and Helena. It was a thin wall, mostly indeed a panelled partition, belonging to an old bit of the house, in which the building was curiously uneven in quality--sometimes inexplicably strong, and sometimes mere lath and plaster, as though the persons, building or re-building, had come to an end of their money and were scamping their work. Lucy, from the other side of the panels, had often heard Helena singing while she dressed, or chattering to the housemaid. She listened now in an anguish, her mind haunted alternately by the recollection of the scene in the drawing-room, and the story told by Geoffrey French, and by her rising dread and misgiving as to Helena's personal stake in it. She had observed much during the preceding weeks. But her natural timidity and hesitancy had forbidden her so far to draw hasty deductions. And now--perforce!--she drew them. The sounds in the next room seemed to communicate their rhythm of pain to Lucy's own heart. She could not bear it after a while. She noiselessly opened her own door, and went to Helena's. To her scarcely audible knock there was no answer. After an interval she knocked again--a pause. Then there were movements inside, and Helena's muffled voice through the door. "Please, Lucy, go to sleep! I am all right." "I can't sleep. Won't you let me in?" Helena seemed to consider. But after an interval which seemed interminable to Lucy Friend, the key was slowly turned and the door yielded. Helena was standing inside, but there was so little light in the room that Lucy could only see her dimly. The moon was full outside, but the curtains had been drawn across the open window, and only a few faint rays came through. As Mrs. Friend entered Helena turned from her, and groping her way back to the bed, threw herself upon it, face downwards. It was evidently the attitude from which she had risen. Lucy Friend followed her, trembling, and sat down beside her. Helena was still fully dressed, except for her hair, which had escaped from combs and hairpins. As her eyes grew used to the darkness, Lucy could see it lying, a dim mass on the white pillow, also a limp hand upturned. She seized the hand and cherished it in hers. "You are so cold, dear! Mayn't I cover you up and help you into bed?" No answer. She found a light eiderdown that had been thrown aside, and covered the prone figure, gently chafing the cold hands and feet. After what seemed a long time, Helena, who had been quite still, said in a voice she had to stoop to hear: "I suppose you heard me crying. Please, Lucy, go back to bed. I won't cry any more." "Dear--mayn't I stay?" "Well, then--you must come and lie beside me. I am a brute to keep you awake." "Won't you undress?" "Please let me be! I'll try and go to sleep." Lucy slipped her own slight form under the wide eiderdown. There was a long silence, at the end of which Helena said: "I'm only--sorry--it's all come to an end--here." But with the words the girl's self-control again failed her. A deep sob shook her from head to foot. Lucy with the tears on her own cheeks, hung over her, soothing and murmuring to her as a mother might have done. But the sob had no successor, and presently Helena said faintly--"Good-night, Lucy. I'm warm now. I'm going to sleep." Lucy listened for the first long breaths of sleep, and seemed to hear them, just as the dawn was showing itself, and the dawn-wind was pushing at the curtains. But she herself did not sleep. This young creature lying beside her, with her full passionate life, seemed to have absolutely absorbed her own. She felt and saw with Helena. Through the night, visions came and went--of "Cousin Philip,"--the handsome, melancholy, courteous man, and of all his winning ways with the girl under his care, when once she had dropped her first foolish quarrel with him, and made it possible for him to show without reserve the natural sweetness and chivalry of his character. Buntingford and Helena riding, their well-matched figures disappearing under the trees, the sun glancing from the glossy coats of their horses; Helena, drawing in some nook of the park, her face flushed with the effort to satisfy her teacher, and Buntingford bending over her; or again, Helena dancing, in pale green and apple-blossom, while Buntingford leaned against the wall, watching her with folded arms, and eyes that smiled over her conquests. It all grew clear to Lucy--Helena's gradual capture, and the innocence, the unconsciousness, of her captor. Her own shrewdness, nevertheless, put the same question as Buntingford's conscience. Could he ever have been quite sure of his freedom? Yet he had taken the risks of a free man. But she could not, she did not blame him. She could only ask herself the breathless question that French had already asked: "How far has it gone with her? How deep is the wound?" CHAPTER XIII Cynthia and Georgina Welwyn were dining at Beechmark on the eventful evening. They took their departure immediately after the scene in the drawing-room when Geoffrey French, at his cousin's wish, gathered Buntingford's guests together, and revealed the identity of the woman in the wood. In the hurried conversation that followed, Cynthia scarcely joined, and she was more than ready when Georgina proposed to go. Julian Horne found them their wraps, and saw them off. It was a beautiful night, and they were to walk home through the park. "Shall I bring you any news there is to-morrow?" said Horne from the doorstep--"Geoffrey has asked me to stay till the evening. Everybody else of course is going early. It will be some time, won't it,"--he lowered his voice--"before we shall see the bearing of all this?" Cynthia assented, rather coldly; and when she and her sister were walking through the moonlit path leading to the cottage, her silence was still marked, whereas Georgina in her grim way was excited and eager to talk. The truth was that Cynthia was not only agitated by the news of the evening. She was hurt--bitterly hurt. Could not Buntingford have spared her a word in private? She was his kinswoman, his old and particular friend, neglectful as he had shown himself during the war. Had he not only a few weeks before come to ask her help with the trouble-some girl whose charge he had assumed? She had been no good, she knew. Helena had not been ready to make friends; and Cynthia's correctness had always been repelled by the reckless note in Helena. Yet she had done her best on that and other occasions and she had been rewarded by being treated in this most critical, most agitated moment like any other of Buntingford's week-end guests. Not a special message even--just the news that everybody might now know, and--Julian Horne to see them off! Yet Helena had been sent for at once. Helena had been closeted with Philip for half an hour. No doubt he had a special responsibility towards her. But what use could she possibly be? Whereas Cynthia felt herself the practical, experienced woman, able to give an old friend any help he might want in a grave emergency. "Of course we must all hope she will die--and die quickly!" said Lady Georgina, with energy, after some remarks to which Cynthia paid small attention. "It would be the only sensible course for Providence--after making such a terrible mistake." "Is there any idea of her dying?" Cynthia looked down upon her sister with astonishment. "Geoffrey didn't say so." "He said she was 'very ill,' and from her conduct she must be crazy. So there's hope." "You mean, for Philip?" "For the world in general," said Georgina, cautiously, with an unnoticed glance at her companion. "But of course Philip has only himself to blame. Why did he marry such a woman?" "She may have been very beautiful--or charming--you don't know." Lady Georgina shrugged her shoulders. "Well, of course there must have been something to bait the hook! But when a man marries out of his own class, unless the woman dies, the man goes to pieces." "Philip has not gone to pieces!" cried Cynthia indignantly. "Because she removed herself. For practical purposes that was as good as dying. He has much to be grateful for. Suppose she had come home with him! She would have ruined him socially and morally." "And if she doesn't die," said Cynthia slowly, "what will Philip do then?" "Ship her off to America, as she asks him, and prove a few little facts in the divorce court--simple enough! It oughtn't to take him much more than six months to get free--which he never has been yet!" added Georgina, with particular emphasis. "It's a mercy, my dear, that you didn't just happen to be Lady Buntingford!" "As if I had ever expected to be!" said Cynthia, much nettled. "Well, you would, and you wouldn't have been!" said Georgina obstinately. "It's very complicated. You would have had to be married again--after the divorce." "I don't know why you are so unkind, Georgie!" There was a little quaver in Cynthia's voice. "Philip's a very old friend of mine, and I'm very sorry and troubled about him. Why do you smirch it all with these horrid remarks?" "I won't make any more, if you don't like them," said Georgina, unabashed--"except just to say this, Cynthia--for the first time I begin to believe in your chance. There was always something not cleared up about Philip, and it might have turned out to be something past mending. Now it is cleared up; and it's bad--but it might have been worse. However--we'll change the subject. What about that handsome young woman, Helena?" "Now, if you'd chanced to say it was a mercy _she_ didn't happen to be Lady Buntingford, there'd have been some sense in it!" Cynthia's tone betrayed the soreness within. Lady Georgina laughed, or rather chuckled. "I know Philip a great deal better than you do, my dear, though he is your friend. He has made himself, I suspect, as usual, much too nice to that child; and he may think himself lucky if he hasn't broken her heart. He isn't a flirt--I agree. But he produces the same effect--without meaning it. Without meaning anything indeed--except to be good and kind to a young thing. The men with Philip's manners and Philip's charm--thank goodness, there aren't many of them!--have an abominable responsibility. The poor moth flops into the candle before she knows where she is. But as to marrying her--it has never entered his head for a moment, and never would." "And why shouldn't it, please?" "Because she is much too young for him--and Philip is a tired man. Haven't you seen that, Cynthy? Before you knew him, Philip had exhausted his emotions--that's my reading of him. I don't for a moment believe his wife was the only one, if what Geoffrey said of her, and what one guesses, is true. She would never have contented him. And now it's done. If he ever marries now, it will be for peace--not passion. As I said before, Cynthy--and I mean no offence--your chances are better than they were." Cynthia winced and protested again, but all the same she was secretly soothed by her odd sister's point of view. They began to discuss the situation at the Rectory,--how Alice Alcott, their old friend, with her small domestic resources, could possibly cope with it, if a long illness developed. "Either the woman will die, or she will be divorced," said Georgina trenchantly. "And as soon as they know she isn't going to die, what on earth will they do with her?" As she spoke they were passing along the foot of the Rectory garden. The Rectory stood really on the edge of the park, where it bordered on the highroad; and their own cottage was only a hundred yards beyond. There were two figures walking up and down in the garden. The Welwyns identified them at once as the Rector and his sister. Cynthia stopped. "I shall go and ask Alice if we can do anything for her." She made for the garden gate that opened on the park and called softly. The two dim figures turned and came towards her. It was soon conveyed to the Alcotts that the Welwyns shared their knowledge, and a conversation followed, almost in whispers under a group of lilacs that flung round them the scents of the unspoilt summer. Alice Alcott, to get a breath of air, had left her patient in the charge of their old housemaid, for a quarter of an hour, but must go back at once and would sit up all night. A nurse was coming on the morrow. Then, while Georgina employed her rasping tongue on Mr. Alcott, Cynthia and the Rector's sister conferred in low tones about various urgent matters--furniture for the nurse's room, sheets, pillows, and the rest. The Alcotts were very poor, and the Rectory had no reserves. "Of course, we could send for everything to Beechmark," murmured Miss Alcott. "Why should you? It is so much further. We will send in everything you want. What are we to call this--this person?" said Cynthia. "Madame Melegrani. It is the name she has passed by for years." "You say she is holding her own?" "Just--with strychnine and brandy. But the heart is very weak. She told Dr. Ramsay she had an attack of flu last week--temperature up to 104. But she wouldn't give in to it--never even went to bed. Then came the excitement of travelling down here and the night in the park. This is the result. It makes me nervous to think that we shan't have Dr. Ramsay to-morrow. His partner is not quite the same thing. But he is going to London with Lord Buntingford." "Buntingford--going to London?" said Cynthia in amazement. Miss Alcott started. She remembered suddenly that her brother had told her that no mention was to be made, for the present, of the visit to London. In her fatigue and suppressed excitement she had forgotten. She could only retrieve her indiscretion--since white lies were not practised at the Rectory--by a hurried change of subject and by reminding her brother it was time for them to go back to the house. They accordingly disappeared. "What is Buntingford going to London for?" said Georgina as they neared their own door. Cynthia could not imagine--especially when the state of the Rectory patient was considered. "If she is as bad as the Alcotts say, they will probably want to-morrow to get a deposition from her of some kind," remarked Georgina, facing the facts as usual. Cynthia acquiesced. But she was not thinking of the unhappy stranger who lay, probably dying, under the Alcotts' roof. She was suffering from a fresh personal stab. For, clearly, Geoffrey French had not told all there was to be known; there was some further mystery. And even the Alcotts knew more than she. Affection and pride were both wounded anew. But with the morning came consolation. Her maid, when she called her, brought in the letters as usual. Among them, one in a large familiar hand. She opened it eagerly, and it ran:-- "Saturday night, 11 p.m. "MY DEAR CYNTHIA:--I was so sorry to find when I went to the drawing-room just now that you had gone home. I wanted if possible to walk part of the way with you, and to tell you a few things myself. For you are one of my oldest friends, and I greatly value your sympathy and counsel. But the confusion and bewilderment of the last few hours have been such--you will understand! "To-morrow we shall hardly meet--for I am going to London on a strange errand! Anna--the woman that was my wife--tells me that six months after she left me, a son was born to me, whose existence she has till now concealed from me. I have no reason to doubt her word, but of course for everybody's sake I must verify her statement as far as I can. My son--a lad of fifteen--is now in London, and so is the French _bonne_--Zélie Ronchicourt--who originally lived with us in Paris, and was with Anna at the time of her confinement. You will feel for me when you know that he is apparently deaf and dumb. At any rate he has never spoken, and the brain makes no response. Anna speaks of an injury at birth. There might possibly be an operation. But of all this I shall know more presently. The boy, of course, is mine henceforth--whatever happens. "With what mingled feelings I set out to-morrow, you can imagine. I feel no bitterness towards the unhappy soul who has come back so suddenly into my life. Except so far as the boy is concerned--(_that_ I feel cruelly!)--I have not much right--For I was not blameless towards her in the old days. She had reasons--though not of the ordinary kind--for the frantic jealousy which carried her away from me. I shall do all I can for her; but if she gets through this illness, there will be a divorce in proper form. "For me, in any case, it is the end of years of miserable uncertainty--of a semi-deception I could not escape--and of a moral loneliness I cannot describe. I must have often puzzled you and many others of my friends. Well, you have the key now. I can and will speak freely when we meet again. "According to present plans, I bring the boy back to-morrow. Ramsay is to find me a specially trained nurse and will keep him under his own observation for a time. We may also have a specialist down at once. "I shall of course hurry back as soon as I can--Anna's state is critical-- "Yours ever effectionately, "BUNTINGFORD." "P.S.--I don't know much about the domestic conditions in the Ramsays' house. Ramsay I have every confidence in. He has always seemed to me a very clever and a very nice fellow. And I imagine Mrs. Ramsay is a competent woman." "She isn't!" said Cynthia, suddenly springing up in bed. "She is an incompetent goose! As for looking after that poor child and his nurse--properly--she couldn't!" Quite another plan shaped itself in her mind. But she did not as yet communicate it to Georgina. After breakfast she loaded her little pony carriage with all the invalid necessaries she had promised Miss Alcott, and drove them over to the Rectory. Alcott saw her arrival from his study, and came out, his finger on his lip, to meet her. "Many, many thanks," he said, looking at what she had brought. "It is awfully good of you. I will take them in--but I ask myself--will she ever live through the day? Lord Buntingford and Ramsay hurried off by the first train this morning. She has enquired for the boy, and they will bring him back as soon as they can. She gives herself no chance! She is so weak--but her will is terribly strong! We can't get her to obey the doctor's orders. Of course, it is partly the restlessness of the condition." Cynthia's eyes travelled to the upper window above the study. Buntingford's wife lay there! It seemed to her that the little room held all the secrets of Buntingford's past. The dying woman knew them, and she alone. A new jealousy entered into Cynthia--a despairing sense of the irrevocable. Helena was forgotten. At noon Julian Horne arrived, bringing a book that Cynthia had lent him. He stayed to gossip about the break-up of the party. "Everybody has cleared out except myself and Geoffrey. Miss Helena and her chaperon went this morning before lunch. Buntingford of course had gone before they came down. French tells me they have gone to a little inn in Wales he recommended. Miss Helena said she wanted something to draw, and a quiet place. I must say she looked pretty knocked up!--I suppose by the dance?" His sharp greenish eyes perused Cynthia's countenance. She made no reply. His remark did not interest a preoccupied woman. Yet she did not fail to remember, with a curious pleasure, that there was no mention of Helena in Buntingford's letter. Between five and six that afternoon a party of four descended at a station some fifteen miles from Beechmark, where Buntingford was not very likely to be recognized. It consisted of Buntingford, the doctor, a wrinkled French _bonne_, in a black stuff dress, and black bonnet, and a frail little boy whom a spectator would have guessed to be eleven or twelve years old. Buntingford carried him, and the whole party passed rapidly to a motor standing outside. Then through a rainy evening they sped on at a great pace towards the Beechmark park and village. The boy sat next to Buntingford who had his arm round him. But he was never still. He had a perpetual restless motion of the head and the emaciated right hand, as though something oppressed the head, and he were trying to brush it away. His eyes wandered round the faces in the car,--from his father to the doctor, from the doctor to the Frenchwoman. But there was no comprehension in them. He saw and did not see. Buntingford hung over him, alive to his every movement, absorbed indeed in his son. The boy's paternity was stamped upon him. He had Buntingford's hair and brow; every line and trait in those noticeable eyes of his father seemed to be reproduced in him; and there were small characteristics in the hands which made them a copy in miniature of his father's. No one seeing him could have doubted his mother's story; and Buntingford had been able to verify it in all essential particulars by the evidence of the old _bonne_, who had lived with Anna in Paris before her flight, and had been present at the child's birth. The old woman was very taciturn, and apparently hostile to Buntingford, whom she perfectly remembered; but she had told enough. The June evening was in full beauty when the car drew up at the Rectory. Alcott and Dr. Ramsay's partner received them. The patient they reported had insisted on being lifted to a chair, and was feverishly expecting them. Buntingford carried the boy upstairs, the _bonne_ following. The doctors remained on the landing, within call. At sight of her mistress, Zélie's rugged face expressed her dismay. She hurried up to her, dropped on her knees beside her, and spoke to her in agitated French. Anna Melegrani turned her white face and clouded eyes upon her for a moment; but made no response. She looked past her indeed to where Buntingford stood with the boy, and made a faint gesture that seemed to summon him. He put him down on his feet beside her. The pathetic little creature was wearing a shabby velveteen suit, with knickerbockers, which bagged about his thin frame. The legs like white sticks appearing below the knickerbockers, the blue-veined hollows of the temples, and the tiny hands--together with the quiet wandering look--made so pitiable an impression that Miss Alcott standing behind the sick woman could not keep back the tears. The boy himself was a centre of calm in the agitated room, except for the constant movement of the head. He seemed to perceive something familiar in his mother's face, but when she put out a feeble hand to him, and tried to kiss him, he began to whimper. Her expression changed at once; with what strength she had she pushed him away. "_Il est afreux_!" she said sombrely, closing her eyes. Buntingford lifted him up, and carried him to Zélie, who was in a neighbouring room. She had brought with her some of the coloured bricks, and "nests" of Japanese boxes which generally amused him. He was soon sitting on the floor, aimlessly shuffling the bricks, and apparently happy. As his father was returning to the sickroom a note was put into his hand by the Rector. It contained these few words--"Don't make final arrangements with the Ramsays till you have seen me. Think I could propose something you would like better. Shall be here all the evening. Yours affectionately--Cynthia." He had just thrust it into his pocket, when the Rector drew him aside at the head of the stairs, while the two doctors were with the patient. "I don't want to interfere with any of your arrangements," whispered the Rector, "but I think perhaps I ought to tell you that Mrs. Ramsay is no great housewife. She is a queer little flighty thing. She spends her time in trying to write plays and bothering managers. There's no harm in her, and he's very fond of her. But it is an untidy, dirty little house! And nothing ever happens at the right time. My sister said I must warn you. She's had it on her mind--as she's had a good deal of experience of Mrs. Ramsay. And I believe Lady Cynthia has another plan." Buntingford thanked him, remembering opportunely that when he had proposed to Ramsay to take the boy into his house, the doctor had accepted with a certain hesitation, which had puzzled him. "I will go over and see my cousin when I can be spared." But a sudden call from the sickroom startled them both. Buntingford hurried forward. When Buntingford entered he found the patient lying in a deep old-fashioned chair propped up by pillows. She had been supplied with the simplest of night-gear by Miss Alcott, and was wearing besides a blue cotton overall or wrapper in which the Rector's sister was often accustomed to do her morning's work. There was a marked incongruity between the commonness of the dress, and a certain cosmopolitan stamp, a touch of the grand air, which was evident in its wearer. The face, even in its mortal pallor and distress, was remarkable both for its intellect and its force. Buntingford stood a few paces from her, his sad eyes meeting hers. She motioned to him. "Send them all away." The doctors went, with certain instructions to Buntingford, one of them remaining in the room below. Buntingford came to sit close by her. "They say I shall kill myself if I talk," she said in her gasping whisper. "It doesn't matter. I must talk! So--you don't doubt the boy?" Her large black eyes fixed him intently. "No. I have no doubts--that he is my son. But his condition is very piteous. I have asked a specialist to come down." There was a gleam of scorn in her expression. "That'll do no good. I suppose--you think--we neglected the boy. _Niente_. We did the best we could. He was under a splendid man--in Naples--as good as any one here. He told me nothing could be done--and nothing can be done." Buntingford had the terrible impression that there was a certain triumph in the faint tone. He said nothing, and presently the whisper began again. "I keep seeing those people dancing--and hearing the band. I dropped a little bag--did anybody find it?" "Yes, I have it here." He drew it out of his pocket, and put it in her hand, which feebly grasped it. "Rocca gave it to me at Florence once, I am very fond of it. I suppose you wonder that--I loved him?" There was a strange and tragic contrast between the woman's weakness, and her bitter provocative spirit; just as there was between the picturesque strength of Buntingford--a man in his prime--and the humble, deprecating gentleness of his present voice and manner. "No," he answered. "I am glad--if it made you happy." "Happy!" She opened her eyes again. "Who's ever happy? We were never happy!" "Yes--at the beginning," he said, with a certain firmness. "Why take that away?" She made a protesting movement. "No--never! I was always--afraid. Afraid you'd get tired of me. I was only happy--working--and when they hung my picture--in the Salon--you remember?" "I remember it well." "But I was always jealous--of you. You drew better--than I did. That made me miserable." After a long pause, during which he gave her some of the prepared stimulant Ramsay had left ready, she spoke again, with rather more vigour. "Do you remember--that Artists' Fête--in the Bois--when I went as Primavera--Botticelli's Primavera?" "Perfectly." "I was as handsome then--as that girl you were rowing. And now--But I don't want to die!"--she said with sudden anguish--"Why should I die? I was quite well a fortnight ago. Why does that doctor frighten me so?" She tried to sit more erect, panting for breath. He did his best to soothe her, to induce her to go back to bed. But she resisted with all her remaining strength; instead, she drew him down to her. "Tell me!--confess to me!"--she said hoarsely--"Madame de Chaville was your mistress!" "Never! Calm yourself, poor Anna! I swear to you. Won't you believe me?" She trembled violently. "If I left you--for nothing--" She closed her eyes, and tears ran down her cheeks. He bent over her--"Won't you rest now--and let them take you back to bed? You mustn't talk like this any more. You will kill yourself." He left her in Ramsay's charge, and went first to find Alcott, begging him to pray with her. Then he wandered out blindly, into the summer evening. It was clear to him that she had only a few more hours--or at most--days to live. In his overpowering emotion--a breaking up of the great deeps of thought and feeling--he found his way into the shelter of one of the beechwoods that girdled the park, and sat there in a kind of moral stupor, till he had somehow mastered himself. The "old unhappy far-off things" were terribly with him; the failures and faults of his own distant life, far more than those of the dying woman. The only thought--the only interest--which finally gave him fresh strength--was the recollection of his boy. Cynthia!--her letter--what was it she wanted to say to him? He got up, and resolutely turned his steps towards the cottage. Cynthia was waiting for him. She brought him into the little drawing-room where a lamp had been lighted, and a tray of food was waiting of which she persuaded him to eat some mouthfuls. But when he questioned her as to the meaning of her letter, she evaded answering for a little while, till he had eaten something and drunk a glass of wine. Then she stretched out a hand to him, with a quiet smile. "Come and see what I have been doing upstairs. It will be dreadful if you don't approve!" He followed her in surprise, and she led him upstairs through the spotless passages of the cottage, bright with books and engravings, where never a thing was out of place, to a room with a flowery paper and bright curtains, looking on the park. "I had it all got ready in a couple of hours. We have so much room--and it is such a pleasure--" she said, in half apology. "Nobody ever gets any meals at the Ramsays'--and they can't keep any servants. Of course you'll change it, if you don't like it. But Dr. Ramsay himself thought it the best plan. You see we are only a stone's throw from him. He can run in constantly. He really seemed relieved!" And there in a white bed, with the newly arrived special nurse--kind-faced and competent--beside him, lay his recovered son, deeply and pathetically asleep. For in his sleep the piteous head movement had ceased, and he might have passed for a very delicate child of twelve, who would soon wake like other children to a new summer day. Into Buntingford's strained consciousness there fell a drop of balm as he sat beside him, listening to the quiet breathing, and comforted by the mere peace of the slight form. He looked up at Cynthia and thanked her; and Cynthia's heart sang for joy. CHAPTER XIV The Alcotts' unexpected guest lingered another forty-eight hours under their roof,--making a hopeless fight for life. But the influenza poison, recklessly defied from the beginning, had laid too deadly a grip on an already weakened heart. And the excitement of the means she had taken to inform herself as to the conditions of Buntingford's life and surroundings, before breaking in upon them, together with the exhaustion of her night wandering, had finally destroyed her chance of recovery. Buntingford saw her whenever the doctors allowed. She claimed his presence indeed, and would not be denied. But she talked little more; and in her latest hours it seemed to those beside her both that the desire to live had passed, and that Buntingford's attitude towards her had, in the end, both melted and upheld her. On the second night after her arrival, towards dawn she sent for him. She then could not speak. But her right hand made a last motion towards his. He held it, till Ramsay who had his fingers on the pulse of the left, looked up with that quiet gesture which told that all was over. Then he himself closed her eyes, and stooping, he kissed her brow-- "_Pardonnons--nous! Adieu_!" he said, under his breath, in the language familiar to their student youth together. Then he went straight out of the room, and through the dewy park, and misty woods already vocal with the awakening birds; he walked back to Beechmark, and for some hours shut himself into his library, where no one disturbed him. When he emerged it was with the air of a man turning to a new chapter in life. Geoffrey French was still with him. Otherwise the big house was empty and seemed specially to miss the sounds of Helena's voice, and tripping feet. Buntingford enquired about her at once, and Geoffrey was able to produce a letter from Mrs. Friend describing the little Welsh Inn, near the pass of Aberglasslyn, where they had settled themselves; the delicious river, shrunken however by the long drought, which ran past their windows, and the many virtues--qualified by too many children--of the primitive Welsh pair who ran the inn. "I am to say that Miss Pitstone likes it all very much, and has found some glorious things to draw. Also an elderly gentleman who is sketching on the river has already promised her a lesson." "You'll be going down there sometime?" said Buntingford, turning an enquiring look on his nephew. "The week-end after next," said Geoffrey--"unless Helena forbids it. I must inspect the inn, which I recommended--and take stock of the elderly gentleman!" The vision of Helena, in "fresh woods and pastures new" radiantly transfixing the affections of the "elderly gentleman," put them both for the moment in spirits. Buntingford smiled, and understanding that Geoffrey was writing to his ward, he left some special messages for her. But in the days that followed he seldom thought of Helena. He buried his wife in the village church-yard, and the wondering villagers might presently read on the headstone he placed over her grave, the short inscription--"Anna Buntingford, wife of Philip, Lord Buntingford," with the dates of her birth and death. The Alcotts, authorized by Philip, made public as much of the story as was necessary, and the presence of the poor son and heir in the Welwyns' house, together with his tragic likeness to his father, both completed and verified it. A wave of unspoken but warm sympathy spread through the countryside. Buntingford's own silence was unbroken. After the burial, he never spoke of what had happened, except on one or two rare occasions to John Alcott, who had become his intimate friend. But unconsciously the attitude of his neighbours towards him had the effect of quickening his liking for Beechmark, and increasing the probability of his ultimate settlement there, at least for the greater part of the year. Always supposing that it suited the boy--Arthur Philip--the names under which, according to Zélie, he had been christened in the church of the hill village near Lucca where he was born. For the care of this innocent, suffering creature became, from the moment of his mother's death, the dominating thought of Buntingford's life. The specialist, who came down before her death, gave the father however little hope of any favourable result from operation. But he gave a confident opinion that much could be done by that wonderful system of training which modern science and psychology combined have developed for the mentally deficient or idiot child. For the impression left by the boy on the spectator was never that of genuine idiocy. It was rather that of an imprisoned soul. The normal soul seemed somehow to be there; but the barrier between it and the world around it could not be broken through. By the specialist's advice, Buntingford's next step was to appeal to a woman, one of those remarkable women, who, unknown perhaps to more than local or professional fame, are every year bringing the results of an ardent moral and mental research to bear upon the practical tasks of parent and teacher. This woman, whom we will call Mrs. Delane, combined the brain of a man of science with the passion of motherhood. She had spent her life in the educational service of a great municipality, varied by constant travel and investigation; and she was now pensioned and retired. But all over England those who needed her still appealed to her; and she failed no one. She came down to see his son at Buntingford's request, and spent some days in watching the child, with Cynthia as an eager learner beside her. The problem was a rare one. The boy was a deaf-mute, but not blind. His very beautiful eyes--; his father's eyes--seemed to be perpetually interrogating the world about him, and perpetually baffled. He cried--a monotonous wailing sound--but he never smiled. He was capable of throwing all his small possessions into a large basket, and of taking them out again; an operation which he performed endlessly hour after hour; but of purpose, or any action that showed it, he seemed incapable. He could not place one brick upon another, or slip one Japanese box inside its fellow. His temper seemed to be always gentle; and in simple matters of daily conduct and habit Zélie had her own ways of getting from him an automatic obedience. But he heard nothing; and in his pathetic look, however clearly his eyes might seem to be meeting those of a companion, there was no answering intelligence. Mrs. Delane set patiently to work, trying this, and testing that; and at the end of the first week, she and Cynthia were sitting on the floor beside the boy, who had a heap of bricks before him. For more than an hour Mrs. Delane had been guiding his thin fingers in making a tower of bricks one upon another, and then knocking them down. Then, at one moment, it began to seem to her that each time his hand enclosed in hers knocked the bricks down, there was a certain faint flash in the blue eyes, as though the sudden movement of the bricks gave the child a thrill of pleasure. But to fall they must be built up. And his absorbed teacher laboured vainly, through sitting after sitting, to communicate to the child some sense of the connection between the two sets of movements. Time after time the small waxen hand lay inert in hers as she put a brick between its listless fingers, and guided it towards the brick waiting for it. Gradually the column of bricks mounted--built by her action, her fingers enclosing his passive ones--and, finally, came the expected crash, followed by the strange slight thrill in the child's features. But for long there was no sign of spontaneous action of any kind on his part. The ingenuity of his teacher attempted all the modes of approach to the obstructed brain that were known to her, through the two senses left him--sight and touch. But for many days in vain. At last, one evening towards the end of June, when his mother had been dead little more than a fortnight, Cynthia, Mrs. Delane's indefatigable pupil, was all at once conscious of a certain spring in the child's hand, as though it became--faintly--self-moved, a living thing. She cried out. Buntingford was there looking on; and all three hung over the child. Cynthia again placed the brick in his hand, and withdrew her own. Slowly the child moved it forward--dropped it--then, with help, raised it again--and, finally, with only the very slight guidance from Cynthia, put it on top of the other. Another followed, and another, his hand growing steadier with each attempt. Then breathing deeply,--flushed, and with a puckered forehead--the boy looked up at his father. Tears of indescribable joy had rushed to Buntingford's eyes. Cynthia's were hidden in her handkerchief. The child's nurse peremptorily intervened and carried him off to bed. Mrs. Delane first arranged with Buntingford for the engagement of a special teacher, taught originally by herself, and then asked for something to take her to the station. She had set things in train, and had no time to lose. There were too many who wanted her. Buntingford and Cynthia walked across the park to Beechmark. From the extreme despondency they were lifted to an extreme of hope. Buntingford had felt, as it were, the spirit of his son strain towards his own; the hidden soul had looked out. And in his deep emotion, he was very naturally conscious of a new rush of affection and gratitude towards his old playfellow and friend. The thought of her would be for ever connected in his mind with the efforts and discoveries of the agitating days through which--with such intensity--they had both been living. When he remembered that wonder-look in his son's, eyes, he would always see Cynthia bending over the child, no longer the mere agreeable and well-dressed woman of the world, but, to him, the embodiment of a heavenly pity, "making all things new." Cynthia's spirits danced as she walked beside him. There was in her a joyous, if still wavering certainty that through the child, her hold upon Philip, whether he spoke sooner or later, was now secure. But she was still jealous of Helena. It had needed the moral and practical upheaval caused by the reappearance and death of Anna, to drive Helena from Philip and Beechmark; and if Helena--enchanting and incalculable as ever, even in her tamer mood--were presently to resume her life in Philip's house, no one could expect the Fates to intervene again so kindly. Georgina might be certain that in Buntingford's case the woman of forty had nothing to fear from the girl of nineteen. Cynthia was by no means so certain; and she shivered at the risks to come. For it was soon evident that the question of his ward's immediate future was now much on Philip's mind. He complained that Helena wrote so little, and that he had not yet heard from Geoffrey since the week-end he was to spend in Wales. Mrs. Friend reported indeed in good spirits. But obviously, whatever the quarters might be, Helena could not stay there indefinitely. "Of course I suggested the London house to her at once--with Mrs. Friend for chaperon. But she didn't take to it. This week I must go back to my Admiralty work. But we can't take the boy to London, and I intended to come back here every night. We mustn't put upon you much longer, my dear Cynthia!" The colour rushed to Cynthia's face. "You are going to take him away?" she said, with a look of consternation. "Mustn't I bring him home, some time?" was his half-embarrassed reply. "But not yet! And how would it suit--with week-ends and dances for Helena?" "It wouldn't suit at all," he said, perplexed--"though Helena seems to have thrown over dancing for the present." "That won't last long!" He laughed. "I am afraid you never took to her!" he said lightly. "She never took to me!" "I wonder if that was my fault? She suspected that I had called you in to help me to keep her in order!" "What was it brought her to reason--so suddenly?" said Cynthia, seeking light at last on a problem that had long puzzled her. "Two things, I imagine. First that she was the better man of us all, that day of the Dansworth riot. She could drive my big car, and none of the rest of us could! That seemed to put her right with us all. And secondly--the reports of that abominable trial. She told me so. I only hope she didn't read much of it!" They had just passed the corner of the house, and come out on the sloping lawn of Beechmark, with the lake, and the wood beyond it. All that had happened behind that dark screen of yew, on the distant edge of the water, came rushing back on Philip's imagination, so that he fell silent. Cynthia on her side was thinking of the moment when she came down to the edge of the lake to carry off Geoffrey French, and saw Buntingford and Helena push off into the puckish rays of the searchlight. She tasted again the jealous bitterness of it--and the sense of defeat by something beyond her fighting--the arrogance of Helena's young beauty. Philip was not in love with Helena; that she now knew. So far she, Cynthia, had marvellously escaped the many chances that might have undone her. But if Helena came back? Meanwhile there were some uneasy thoughts at the back of Philip's mind; and some touching and tender recollections which he kept sacred to himself. Helena's confession and penitence--there, on that still water--how pretty they were, how gracious! Nor could he ever forget her sweetness, her pity on that first tragic evening. Geoffrey's alarms were absurd. Yet when he thought of merely reproducing the situation as it had existed before the night of the ball, something made him hesitate. And besides, how could he reproduce it? All his real mind was now absorbed in this overwhelming problem of his son; of the helpless, appealing creature to whose aid the whole energies of his nature had been summoned. He walked back some way with Cynthia, talking of the boy, with an intensity of hope that frightened her. "Don't, or don't be too certain--yet!" she pleaded. "We have only just seen the first sign--the first flicker. If it were all to vanish again!" "Could I bear it?" he said, under his breath--"Could I?" "Anyway, you'll let me keep him--a little longer?" She spoke very softly and sweetly. "If your kindness really wishes it," he said, rather reluctantly. "But what does Georgina say?" "Georgina is just as keen as I am," said Cynthia boldly. "Don't you see how fond she is of him already?" Buntingford could not truthfully say that he had seen any signs on Georgina's part, so far, of more than a decent neutrality in the matter. Georgina was a precisian; devoted to order, and in love with rules. The presence of the invalid boy, his nurse, and his teacher, must upset every rule and custom of the little house. Could she really put up with it? In general, she made the impression upon Philip of a very wary cat, often apparently asleep, but with her claws ready. He felt uncomfortable; but Cynthia had her way. A specially trained teacher, sent down by Mrs. Delane, arrived a few days later, and a process began of absorbing and fascinating interest to all the spectators, except Georgina, who more than kept her head. Every morning Buntingford would motor up to town, spend some strenuous hours in demobilization work at the Admiralty, returning in the evening to receive Cynthia's report of the day. Miss Denison, the boy's teacher, who had been trained in one of the London Special Schools, was a little round-faced lady with spectacles, apparently without any emotions, but really filled with that educator's passion which in so many women of our day fills the place of motherhood. From the beginning she formed the conclusion that the pitiable little fellow entrusted to her was to a great extent educable; but that he would not live to maturity. This latter conclusion was carefully hidden from Buntingford, though it was known to Cynthia; and Philip knew, for a time, all the happiness, the excitement even of each day's slight advance, combined with a boundless hope for the future. He spent his evenings absorbed in the voluminous literature dealing with the deaf-mute, which has grown up since the days of Laura Bridgman and Helen Keller. But Laura Bridgman and Helen Keller--as he eagerly reminded himself--were both of them blind; only one sense--that of touch--was left to them. Arthur's blue eyes, the copy of his own, already missed his father when he left home in the morning, and greeted him when he came home at night. They contained for Philip a mystery and a promise that he was never tired of studying. Every evening he would ride over from Dansworth station to the cottage, put up his horse, and spend the long summer twilights in carrying his son about the garden or the park, or watching Miss Denison at her work. The boy was physically very frail, and soon tired. But his look was now placid; the furrows in the white brow were smoothed away; his general nutrition was much better; his delicate cheeks had filled out a little; and his ghostly beauty fascinated Philip's artistic sense, while his helplessness appealed to the tenderest instinct of a strong man. Buntingford had discovered a new and potent reason for living; and for living happily. And meanwhile with all this slowly growing joy, Cynthia was more and more closely connected. She and Buntingford had a common topic, which was endlessly interesting and delightful to them both. Philip was no longer conscious of her conventionalities and limitations, as he had been conscious of them on his first renewed acquaintance with her after the preoccupations of the war. He saw her now as Arthur's fairy godmother, and as his own daily companion and helper in an exquisite task. But Georgina was growing impatient. One evening she came home tired and out of temper. She had been collecting the rents of some cottages belonging to her, and the periodical operation was always trying to everybody concerned. Georgina's secret conviction that "the poor in a loomp is bad" was stoutly met by her tenants' firm belief that all landlords are extortionate thieves. She came home, irritated by a number of petty annoyances, to find the immaculate little drawing-room, where every book and paper-knife knew its own place and kept it, given up to Arthur and Miss Denison, with coloured blocks, pictures and models used in that lady's teaching, strewn all over the floor, while the furniture had been pushed unceremoniously aside. "I won't have this house made a bear-garden!" she said, angrily, to the dismayed teacher; and she went off straightway to find her sister. Cynthia was in her own little den on the first floor happily engaged in trimming a new hat. Georgina swept in upon her, shut the door, and stood with her back to it. "Cynthia--is this house yours or mine?" As a matter of fact the house was Buntingford's. But Georgina was formally the tenant of it, while the furniture was partly hers and partly Cynthia's. In fact, however, Georgina had been always tacitly held to be the mistress. Cynthia looked up in astonishment, and at once saw that Georgina was seriously roused. She put down her work and faced her sister. "I thought it belonged to both of us," she said mildly. "What is the matter, Georgie?" "I beg you to remember that I am the tenant. And I never consented to make it an institution for the training of imbeciles!" "Georgie!--Arthur is not an imbecile!" "Of course I know he is an interesting one," said Georgina, curtly. "But all the same, from my point of view--However, I won't repeat the word, if it annoys you. But what I want to know is, when are we to have the house to ourselves again? Because, if this is to go on indefinitely, I depart!" Cynthia came nearer to her sister. Her colour fluttered a little. "Don't interfere just at present, Georgie," she said imploringly, in a low voice. The two sisters looked at each other--Georgina covered with the dust and cobwebs of her own cottages, her battered hat a little on one side, and her coat and skirt betraying at every seam its venerable antiquity; and Cynthia, in pale grey, her rose-pink complexion answering to the gold of her hair, with every detail of her summer dress as fresh and dainty as the toil of her maid could make it. "Well, I suppose--I understand," said Georgina, at last, in her gruffest voice. "All the same, I warn you, I can't stand it much longer. I shall be saying something rude to Buntingford." "No, no--don't do that!" "I haven't your motive--you see." Cynthia coloured indignantly. "If you think I'm only pretending to care for the child, Georgie, you're very much mistaken!" "I don't think so. You needn't put words into my mouth, or thoughts into my head. All the same, Cynthia,--cut it short!" And with that she released the door and departed, leaving an anxious and meditative Cynthia behind her. A little later, Buntingford's voice was heard below. Cynthia, descending, found him with Arthur in his arms. The day had been hot and rainy--an oppressive scirocco day--and the boy was languid and out of sorts. The nurse advised his being carried up early to bed, and Buntingford had arrived just in time. When he came downstairs again, he found Cynthia in a garden hat, and they strolled out to look at the water-garden which was the common hobby of both the sisters. There, sitting among the rushes by the side of the little dammed-up stream, he produced a letter from Mrs. Friend, with the latest news of his ward. "Evidently we shan't get Helena back just yet. I shall run up next week to see her, I think, Cynthia, if you will let me. I really will take Arthur to Beechmark this week. Mrs. Mawson has arranged everything. His rooms are all ready for him. Will you come and look at them to-morrow?" Cynthia did not reply at once, and he watched her a little anxiously. He was well aware what giving up the boy would mean to her. Her devotion had been amazing. But the wrench must come some time. "Yes, of course--you must take him," said Cynthia, at last. "If only--I hadn't come to love him so!" She didn't cry. She was perfectly self-possessed. But there was something in her pensive, sorrowful look that affected Philip more than any vehement emotion could have done. The thought of all her devotion--their long friendship--her womanly ways--came upon him overwhelmingly. But another thought checked it--Helena!--and his promise to her dead mother. If he now made Cynthia the mistress of Beechmark, Helena would never return to it. For they were incompatible. He saw it plainly. And to Helena he was bound; while she needed the shelter of his roof. So that the words that were actually on Philip's lips remained unspoken. They walked back rather silently to the cottage. At supper Cynthia told her sister that the boy, with Zélie and his teacher, would soon trouble her no more. Georgina expressed an ungracious satisfaction, adding abruptly--"You'll be able to see him there, Cynthy, just as well as here." Cynthia made no reply. CHAPTER XVI Mrs. Friend was sitting in the bow-window of the "Fisherman's Rest," a small Welsh inn in the heart of Snowdonia. The window was open, and a smell of damp earth and grass beat upon Lucy in gusts from outside, carried by a rainy west wind. Beyond the road, a full stream, white and foaming after rain, was dashing over a rocky bed towards some rapids which closed the view. The stream was crossed by a little bridge, and beyond it rose a hill covered with oak-wood. Above the oak-wood and along the road to the right--mountain forms, deep blue and purple, were emerging from the mists which had shrouded them all day. The sun was breaking through. A fierce northwest wind which had been tearing the young leaf of the oak-woods all day, and strewing it abroad, had just died away. Peace was returning, and light. The figure of Helena had just disappeared through the oak-wood; Lucy would follow her later. Behind Mrs. Friend, the walls of the inn parlour were covered deep in sketches of the surrounding scenery--both oil and water-colour, bad and good, framed and unframed, left there by the artists who haunted the inn. The room was also adorned by a glass case full of stuffed birds, badly moth-eaten, a book-case containing some battered books mostly about fishing, and a large Visitors' Book lying on a centre-table, between a Bradshaw and an old guide-book. Shut up, in winter, the little room would smell intolerably close and musty. But with the windows open, and a rainy sun streaming in, it spoke pleasantly of holidays for plain hard-working folk, and of that "passion for the beauty flown," which distils, from the summer hours of rest, strength for the winter to come. Lucy had let Helena go out alone, of set purpose. For she knew, or guessed, what Nature and Earth had done for Helena during the month they had passed together in this mountain-land, since that night at Beechmark. Helena had made no moan--revealed nothing. Only a certain paleness in her bright cheek, a certain dreamy habit that Lucy had not before noticed in her; a restlessness at night which the thin partitions of the old inn sometimes made audible, betrayed that the youth in her was fighting its first suffering, and fighting to win. Lucy had never dared to speak--still less to pity. But her love was always at hand, and Helena had repaid it, and the silence it dictated, with an answering love. Lucy believed--though with trembling--that the worst was now over, and that new horizons were opening on the stout soul that had earned them. But now, as before, she held her peace. Her diary lay on her lap, and she was thoughtfully turning it over. It contained nothing but the barest entries of facts. But they meant a good deal to her, as she looked through them. Every letter, for instance, from Beechmark had been noted. Lord Buntingford had written three times to Helena, and twice to herself. She had seen Helena's letters; and Helena had read hers. It seemed to her that Helena had deliberately shown her own; that the act was part of the conflict which Lucy guessed at, but must not comment on, by word or look. All the letters were the true expression of the man. The first, in which he described in words, few; but singularly poignant, the death of his wife, his recognition of his son, and the faint beginnings of hope for the boy's maimed life, had forced tears from Lucy. Helena had read it dry-eyed. But for several hours afterwards, on an evening of tempest, she had vanished out of ken, on the mountainside; coming back as night fell, her hair and clothes, dripping with rain, her cheeks glowing from her battle with the storm, her eyes strangely bright. Her answers to her guardian's letters had been, to Lucy's way of thinking, rather cruelly brief; at least after the first letter written in her own room, and posted by herself. Thenceforward, only a few post-cards, laid with Lucy's letters, for her or any one else to read, if they chose. And meanwhile Lucy was tolerably sure that she was slowly but resolutely making her own plans for the months ahead. The little diary contained also the entry of Geoffrey French's visit--a long week-end, during which as far as Lucy could remember, Helena and he had never ceased "chaffing" from morning till night, and Helena had certainly never given him any opportunity for love-making. She, Lucy, had had a few short moments alone with him, moments in which his gaiety had dropped from him, like a ragged cloak, and a despondent word or two had given her a glimpse of the lover he was not permitted to be, beneath the role of friend he was tired of playing. He was coming again soon. Helena had neither invited nor repelled him. Whereas she had peremptorily bidden Peter Dale for this particular Sunday, and he had thrown over half a dozen engagements to obey her. "Good afternoon, Mrs. Friend. Is Miss Pitstone at home?" The speaker was a shaggy old fellow in an Inverness cape and an ancient wide-awake, carrying a portfolio and a camp-stool. He had stopped in his walk outside the open window, and his disappointed look searched the inn parlour for a person who was not there. "Oh, Mr. McCready, I'm so sorry!--but Miss Pitstone is out, and I don't know when she will be back." The artist undid his portfolio, and laid a half-finished sketch--a sketch of Helena's--on the window-sill. "Will you kindly give her this? I have corrected it--made some notes on the side. Do you think Miss Helena will be likely to be sketching to-morrow?" "I'm afraid I can't promise for her. She seems to like walking better than anything else just now." "Yes, she's a splendid walker," said the old man, with a sigh. "I envy her strength. Well, if she wants me, she knows where to find me--just beyond that bend there." He pointed to the river. "I'll tell her--and I'll give her the sketch. Good-bye." She watched him heavily cross the foot-bridge to the other side of the river. Her quick pity went with him, for she herself knew well what it meant to be solitary and neglected. He seldom sold a picture, and nobody knew what he lived on. The few lessons he had given Helena had been as a golden gleam in a very grey day. But alack, Helena had soon tired of her lessons, as she had tired of the mile of coveted trout-fishing that Mr. Evans of the farm beyond the oak-wood had pressed upon her--or of the books the young Welsh-speaking curate of the little mountain church near by was so eager to lend her. Through and behind a much gentler manner, the girl's familiar self was to be felt--by Lucy at least--as clearly as before. She was neither to be held nor bound. Attempt to lay any fetter upon her--of hours, or habit--and she was gone; into the heart of the mountains where no one could follow her. Lucy would often compare with it the eager docility of those last weeks at Beechmark. * * * * * Helena's walk had taken her through the dripping oak-wood and over the crest of the hill to a ravine beyond, where the river, swollen now by the abundant rains which had made an end of weeks of drought, ran, noisily full, between two steep banks of mossy crag. From the crag, oaks hung over the water, at fantastic angles, holding on, as it seemed, by one foot and springing from the rock itself; while delicate rock plants, and fern fringed every ledge down to the water. A seat on the twisted roots of an overhanging oak, from which, to either side, a little green path, as though marked for pacing, ran along the stream, was one of her favourite haunts. From up-stream a mountain peak now kerchiefed in wisps of sunlit cloud peered in upon her. Above it, a lake of purest blue from which the wind, which had brought them, was now chasing the clouds; and everywhere the glory of the returning sun, striking the oaks to gold, and flinging a chequer of light on the green floor of the wood. Helena sat down to wait for Peter, who would be sure to find her wherever she hid herself. This spot was dear to her, as those places where life has consciously grown to a nobler stature are dear to men and women. It was here that within twenty-four hours of her last words with Philip Buntingford, she had sat wrestling with something which threatened vital forces in her that her will consciously, desperately, set itself to maintain. Through her whole ripened being, the passion of that inner debate was still echoing; though she knew that the fight was really won. It had run something like this: "Why am I suffering like this? "Because I am relaxed--unstrung. Why should I have everything I want--when others go bare? Philip went bare for years. He endured--and suffered. Why not I? "But it is worse for me--who am young! I have a right to give way to what I feel--to feel it to the utmost. "That was the doctrine for women before the war--the old-fashioned women. The modern woman is stronger. She is not merely nerves and feeling. She must _never_ let feeling--pain--destroy her will! Everything depends upon her will. If I choose I _can_ put this feeling down. I have no right to it. Philip has done me no wrong. If I yield to it, if it darkens my life, it will be another grief added to those he has already suffered. It shan't darken my life. I will--and can master it. There is so much still to learn, to do, to feel. I must wrench myself free--and go forward. How I chattered to Philip about the modern woman!--and how much older I feel, than I was then! If one can't master oneself, one is a slave--all the same. I didn't know--how could I know?--that the test was so near. If women are to play a greater and grander part in the world, they must be much, much greater in soul, firmer in will. "Yet--I must cry a little. No one could forbid me that. But it must be over soon." Then the letters from Beechmark had begun to arrive, each of them bringing its own salutary smart as part of a general cautery. No guardian could write more kindly, more considerately. But it was easy to see that Philip's whole being was, and would be, concentrated on his unfortunate son. And in that ministry Cynthia Welwyn was his natural partner, had indeed already stepped into the post; so that gratitude, if not passion, would give her sooner or later all that she desired. "Cynthia has got the boy into her hands--and Philip with him. Well, that was natural. Shouldn't I have done the same? Why should I feel like a jealous beast, because Cynthia has had her chance, and taken it? I won't feel like this! It's vile!--it's degrading! Only I wish Cynthia was bigger, more generous--because he'll find it out some day. She'll never like me, just because he cares for me--or did. I mean, as my guardian, or an elder brother. For it was never--no never!--anything else. So when she comes in at the front door, I shall go out at the back. I shall have to give up even the little I now have. Let me just face what it means. "Yet perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps Cynthia isn't as mean-spirited as I think. "It's wonderful about the boy. I envy Cynthia--I can't help it. I would have given my whole life to it. I would have been trained--perhaps abroad. No one should have taught him but me. But then--if Philip had loved me--only that was never possible!--he would have been jealous of the boy--and I should have lost him. I never do things in moderation. I go at them so blindly. But I shall learn some day." Thoughts like these, and many others, were rushing through Helena's mind, as after a long walk she found her seat again over the swollen stream. The evening had shaken itself free of the storm, and was pouring an incredible beauty on wood and river. The intoxication of it ran through Helena's veins. For she possessed in perfection that earth-sense, that passionate sense of kinship, kinship both of the senses and the spirit, with the eternal beauty of the natural world, which the gods implant in a blest minority of mortals. No one who has it can ever be wholly forlorn, while sense and feeling remain. Suddenly:--a little figure on the opposite bank, and a child's cry. Helena sprang to her feet in dismay. She saw the landlord's small son, a child of five, who had evidently lost his footing on the green bank above the crag which faced her, and was sliding down, unable to help himself, towards the point where nothing could prevent his falling headlong into the stream below. The bank, however, was not wholly bare. There were some thin gnarled oaks upon it, which might stop him. "Catch hold of the trees, Bobby!" she shouted to him, in an agony. The child heard, turned a white face to her, and tried to obey. He was already a stalwart little mountaineer, accustomed to trot over the fells after his father's sheep, and the physical instinct in his, sturdy limbs saved him. He caught a jutting root, held on, and gradually dragged himself up to the cushion of moss from which the tree grew, sitting astride the root, and clasping the tree with both arms. The position was still extremely dangerous, but for the moment he was saved. "All right, Bobby--clever boy! Hold tight--I'm coming!" And she rushed towards a little bridge at the head of the ravine. But before she could reach it, she saw the lad's father, cautiously descending the bank, helped by a rope tied to an oak tree at the top. He reached the child, tied the rope to the stem of the tree where the little fellow was sitting, and then with the boy under one arm and hauling on the rope with the other hand, he made his way up the few perilous yards that divided them from safety. At the top he relieved his parental feelings by a good deal of smacking and scolding. For Bobby was a notorious "limb," the terror of his mother and the inn generally. He roared vociferously under the smacking. But when Helena arrived on the scene, he stopped at once, and put out a slim red tongue at her. Helena laughed, congratulated the father on his skill, and returned to her seat. "That's a parable of me!" she thought, as she sat with her elbows on her knees, staring at the bank opposite. "I very nearly slipped in!--like Bobby--but not quite. I'm sound--though bruised. No desperate harm done." She drew a long breath--laughing to herself--though her eyes were rather wet. "Well, now, then--what am I going to do? I'm not going into a convent. I don't think I'm even going to college. I'm going to take my guardian's advice. 'Marry--my dear child--and bring up children.' 'Marry?'--Very well!"--she sprang to her feet--"I shall marry!--that's settled. As to the children--that remains to be seen!" And with her hands behind her, she paced the little path, in a strange excitement and exaltation. Presently from the tower of the little church, half a mile down the river, a bell began to strike the hour. "Six o'clock!--Peter will be here directly. Now, _he's_ got to be lectured--for his good. I'm tired of lecturing myself. It's somebody else's turn--" And taking a letter from her pocket, she read and pondered it with smiling eyes. "Peter will think I'm a witch. Dear old Peter! ... Hullo!" For the sound of her name, shouted by some one still invisible, caught her ear. She shouted back, and in another minute the boyish form of Peter Dale emerged among the oaks above her. Three leaps, and he was at her side. "I say, Helena, this is jolly! You were a brick to write. How I got here I'm sure I don't know. I seem to have broken every rule, and put everybody out. My boss will sack me, I expect. Never mind!--I'd do it again!" And dropping to a seat beside her, on a fallen branch that had somehow escaped the deluge of the day, he feasted his eyes upon her. She had clambered back into her seat, and taken off her water-proof hat. Her hair was tumbling about her ears, and her bright cheeks were moist with rain, or rather with the intermittent showers that the wind shook every now and then from the still dripping oak trees above her. Peter thought her lovelier than ever--a wood-nymph, half divine. Yet, obscurely, he felt a change in her, from the beginning of their talk. Why had she sent for him? The wildest notions had possessed him, ever since her letter reached him. Yet, now that he saw her, they seemed to float away from him, like thistle-down on the wind. "Helena!--why did you send for me?" "I was very dull, Peter,--I wanted you to amuse me!" The boy laughed indignantly. "That's all very well, Helena--but it won't wash. You're jolly well used to getting all you want, I know--but you wouldn't have ordered me up from Town--twelve hours in a beastly train--packed like sardines--just to tell me that." Helena looked at him thoughtfully. She began to eat some unripe bilberries which she had gathered from the bank beside her, and they made little blue stains on her white teeth. "Old boy--I wanted to give you some advice." "Well, give it quick," said Peter impatiently. "No--you must let me take my time. Have you been to a great many dances lately, Peter?" "You bet!" The young Adonis shrugged his shoulders. "I seem to have been through a London season, which I haven't done, of course, since 1914. Never went to so many dances in my life!" "Somebody tells me, Peter, that--you're a dreadful flirt!" said Helena, still with those grave, considering eyes. Peter laughed--but rather angrily. "All very well for you to talk, Miss Helena! Please--how many men were you making fools of--including your humble servant--before you went down to Beechmark? You have no conscience, Helena! You are the 'Belle Dame sans merci.'" "All that is most unjust--and ridiculous!" said Helena mildly. Peter went off into a peal of laughter. Helena persisted. "What do you call flirting, Peter?" "Turning a man's head--making him believe that you're gone on him--when, in fact, you don't care a rap!" "Peter!--then of course you _know_ I never flirted with you!" said Helena, with vigour. Peter hesitated, and Helena at once pursued her advantage. "Let's talk of something more to the point. I'm told, Peter, that you've been paying great attentions--marked attentions--to a very nice girl--that everybody's talking about it,--and that you ought long ago either to have fixed it up,--or cleared out. What do you say to that, Peter?" Peter flushed. "I suppose you mean--Jenny Dumbarton," he said slowly. "Of course, she's a very dear, pretty, little thing. But do you know why I first took to her?" He looked defiantly at his companion. "No." "Because--she's rather like you. She's your colour--she has your hair--she's a way with her that's something like you. When I'm dancing with her, if I shut my eyes, I can sometimes fancy--it's you!" "Oh, goodness!" cried Helena, burying her face in her hands. It was a cry of genuine distress. Peter was silent a moment. Then he came closer. "Just look at me, please, Helena!" She raised her eyes unwillingly. In the boy's beautiful clear-cut face the sudden intensity of expression compelled her--held her guiltily silent. "Once more, Helena"--he said, in a voice that shook--"is there no chance for me?" "No, no, dear Peter!" she cried, stretching out her hands to him. "Oh, I thought that was all over. I sent for you because I wanted just to say to you--don't trifle!--don't shilly-shally! I know Jenny Dumbarton a little. She's charming--she's got a delicate, beautiful character--and such a warm heart! Don't break anybody's heart, Peter--for my silly sake!" The surge of emotion in Peter subsided slowly. He began to study the moss at his feet, poking at it with his stick. "What makes you think I've been breaking Jenny's heart?" he said at last in another voice. "Some of your friends, Peter, yours and mine--have been writing to me. She's--she's very fond of you, they say, and lately she's been looking a little limp ghost--all along of you, Mr. Peter! What have you been doing?" "What any other man in my position would have been doing--wishing to Heaven I knew _what_ to do!" said Peter, still poking vigorously at the moss. Helena bent forward from the oak tree, and just whispered--"Go back to-morrow, Peter,--and propose to Jenny Dumbarton!" Peter could not trust himself to look up at what he knew must be the smiling seduction of her eyes and lips. He was silent; and Helena withdrew--dryad-like--into the hollow made by the intertwined stems of the oak, threw her head back against the main trunk, dropped her eyelids, and waited. "Are you asleep, Helena?" said Peter's voice at last. "Not at all." "Then sit up, please, and listen to me." She obeyed. Peter was standing over her, his hands on his sides, looking very manly, and rather pale. "Having disposed of me for the last six months--you may as well dispose of me altogether," he said slowly. "Very well--I will go--and propose to Jenny Dumbarton---the day after to-morrow. Her people asked me for the week-end. I gave a shuffling answer. I'll wire to her to-morrow that I'm coming--" "Peter--you're a darling!" cried Helena in delight, clapping her hands. "_Oh_!--I wish I could see Jenny's face when she opens the wire! You'll be very good to her, Peter?" She looked at him searchingly, stirred by one of the sudden tremors that beset even the most well-intentioned match-maker. Peter smiled, with a rather twisted lip, straightening his shoulders. "I shouldn't ask any girl to marry me, that I couldn't love and honour, not even to please you, Helena! And she knows all about you!" "She doesn't!" said Helena, in consternation. "Yes, she does. I don't mean to say that I've told her the exact number of times you've refused me. But she knows quite enough. She'll take me--if she does take me--with her eyes open. Well, now that's settled!--But you interrupted me. There's one condition, Helena!" "Name it." She eyed him nervously. --"That in return for managing my life, you give me some indication of how you're going to manage your own!" Helena fell back on the bilberry stalk, to gain time. --"Because--" resumed Peter--"it's quite clear the Beechmark situation is all bust up. Philip's got an idiot-boy to look after--with Cynthia Welwyn in constant attendance. I don't see any room for you there, Helena!" "Neither do I," said Helena, quietly. "You needn't tell me that." "Well, then, what are you going to do?" "You forget, Peter, that I possess the dearest and nicest little chaperon. I can roam the world where I please--without making any scandals." "You'll always make scandals--" "_Scandals_, Peter!" protested Helena. "Well, victories, wherever you go--unless somebody has you pretty tightly in hand. But you and I--both know a man--that would be your match!" He had moved, so as to stand firmly across the little path that ran from Helena's seat to the inn. She began to fidget--to drop one foot, that had been twisted under her, to the ground, as though "on tiptoe for a flight." "It's time for supper, Peter. Mrs. Friend will think we're drowned. And I caught such a beautiful dish of trout yesterday,--all for your benefit! There's a dear man here who puts on the worms." "You don't go, till I get an answer, Helena." "There's nothing to answer. I've no plans. I draw, and fish, and read poetry. I have some money in the bank; and Cousin Philip will let me do what I like with it. Lastly--I have another month in which to make up my mind." "About what?" "Goose!--where to go next, of course." Peter shook his head. His mood was now as determined, as hot in pursuit, as hers had been, a little earlier. "I bet you'll have to make up your mind about something much more important than that--before long. I happened to be--in the Gallery of the House of Commons yesterday--" "Improving your mind?" "Listening to a lot of wild men talking rot about the army. But there was one man who didn't talk rot, though I agreed with scarcely a thing he said. But then he's a Labour man--or thinks he is--and I know that I'm a Tory--as blue as you make 'em. Anyway I'm perfectly certain you'd have liked to be there, Miss Helena!" "Geoffrey?" said Helena coolly. "Right you are. Well, I can tell you he made a ripping success! The man next to me in the gallery, who seemed to have been born and bred there--knew everybody and everything--and got as much fun out of it as I do out of 'Chu-Chin-Chow'--he told me it was the first time Geoffrey had really got what he called the 'ear of the House'--it was pretty full too!--and that he was certain to get on--office, and all that kind of thing--if he stuck to it. He certainly did it jolly well. He made even an ignorant ass like me sit up. I'd go and hear him again--I vow I would! And there was such a fuss in the lobby! I found Geoffrey there, shovelling out hand-shakes, and talking to press-men. An old uncle of mine--nice old boy--who's sat for a Yorkshire constituency for about a hundred years, caught hold of me. 'Know that fellow, Peter?' 'Rather!' 'Good for you! _He's_ got his foot on the ladder--he'll climb.'" "Horrid word!" said Helena. "Depends on what you mean by it. If you're to get to the top, I suppose you must climb. Now, then, Helena!--if you won't take a man like me whom you can run--take a man like Geoffrey who can run you--and make you jolly happy all the same! There--I can give advice too, you see--and you've no right to be offended!" Helena could not keep her features still. Her eyes shot fire, though of what kind the fire might be Peter was not quite sure. The two young creatures faced each other. There was laughter in each face, but something else; something strenuous, tragic even; as though "Life at its grindstone set" had been at work on the radiant pair, evoking the Meredithian series of intellect from the senses,--"brain from blood"; with "spirit," or generous soul, for climax. But unconsciously Peter had moved aside. In a flash Helena had slipped past him, and was flying through the wood, homeward, looking back to mock him, as he sped after her in vain. CHAPTER XVI A week had passed. Mrs. Friend at ten o'clock in the morning had just been having a heart to heart talk with the landlady of the inn on the subject of a decent luncheon for three persons, and a passable dinner for four. Food at the inn was neither good nor well-cooked, and as criticism, even the mildest, generally led to tears, Mrs. Friend's morning lot, when any guest was expected, was not a happy one. It was a difficult thing indeed to get anything said or settled at all; since the five-year old Bobby was generally scrimmaging round, capturing his mother's broom and threatening to "sweep out" Mrs. Friend, or brandishing the meat-chopper, as a still more drastic means of dislodging her. The little villain, having failed to drown himself, was now inclined to play tricks with his small sister, aged eight weeks; and had only that morning, while his mother's back was turned, taken the baby out of her cradle, run down a steep staircase with her in his arms, and laid her on a kitchen chair, forgetting all about her a minute afterwards. Even a fond mother had been provoked to smacking, and the inn had been filled with howls and roarings, which deadened even the thunder of the swollen stream outside. Then Helena, her fingers in her ears, had made a violent descent upon the kitchen, and carried off the "limb" to the river, where, being given something to do in the shape of damming up a brook that ran into the main stream, he had suddenly developed angelic qualities, and tied himself to Helena's skirts. There they both were, on the river's pebbly bank, within hail, Helena in a short white skirt with a green jersey and cap. She was alternately helping Bobby to build the dam, and lying with her hands beneath her head, under the shelter of the bank. Moderately fine weather had returned, and the Welsh farmer had once more begun to hope that after all he might get in his oats. The morning sun sparkled on the river, on the freshly washed oak-woods, and on Bobby's bare curly head, as he sat busily playing beside Helena. What was Helena thinking of? Lucy Friend would have given a good deal to know. On the little table before Lucy lay two telegrams: one signed "Geoffrey" announced that he would reach Bettws station by twelve, and the "Fisherman's Rest" about half an hour later. The other announced the arrival of Lord Buntingford by the evening train. Lord Buntingford's visit had been arranged two or three days before; and Mrs. Friend wished it well over. He was of course coming to talk about plans with his ward, who had now wasted the greater part of the London season in this primitive corner of Wales. And both he and Geoffrey were leaving historic scenes behind them in order to spend these few hours with Helena. For this was Peace Day, when the victorious generals and troops of the Empire, and the Empire's allies, were to salute England's king amid the multitudes of London, in solemn and visible proof that the long nightmare of the war had found its end. Buntingford had naturally no heart for pageants; but Helena had been astonished by Geoffrey's telegram, which had arrived the night before from the Lancashire town he represented in Parliament. As an M.P. he ought surely to have been playing his part in the great show. Moreover, she had not expected him so soon, and she had done nothing to hurry his coming. His telegram had brought a great flush of colour into her face. But she made no other sign. "Oh, well, we can take them out to see bonfires!" she had said, putting on her most careless air, and had then dismissed the subject. For that night the hills of the north were to run their fiery message through the land, blazoning a greater victory than Drake's; and Helena, who had by now made close friends with the mountains, had long since decided on the best points of view. Since then Lucy had received no confidences, and asked no questions. A letter had reached her, however; by the morning's post, from Miss Alcott, giving an account of the situation at Beechmark, of the removal of the boy to his father's house, and of the progress that had been made in awakening his intelligence and fortifying his bodily health. "It is wonderful to see the progress he has made--so far, entirely through imitation and handwork. He begins to have some notion of counting and numbers--he has learnt to crochet and thread beads---poor little lad of fifteen!--he has built not only a tower but something like a house, of bricks--and now his enthusiastic teacher is attempting to teach him the first rudiments of speech, in this wonderful modern way--lip-reading and the like. He has been under training for about six weeks, and certainly the results are most promising. I believe his mother protested to Lord Buntingford that he had not been neglected. Nobody can believe her, who sees now what has been done. Apparently a brain-surgeon in Naples was consulted as to the possibility of an operation. But when that was dropped, nothing else was ever tried, no training was attempted, and the child would have fared very badly, if it had not been for the old _bonne_--Zélie--who was and is devoted to him. His mother was ashamed of him, and came positively to hate the sight of him. "But the tragic thing is that as his mind develops, his body seems to weaken. Food, special exercise, massage--poor Lord Buntingford has been trying everything--but with small result. It is pitiful to see him watching the child, and hanging on the doctors. 'Shall we stop all the teaching?' he said to John the other day in despair--'my first object is that he should _live_,' But it would be cruel to stop the teaching now. The child would not allow it. He himself has caught the passion of it. He seems to me to live in a fever of excitement and joy, as one step follows another, and the door opens a little wider for his poor prisoned soul. He adores his father, and will sit beside him, stroking his silky beard, with his tiny fingers, and looking at him with his large pathetic eyes ... They have taken him to Beechmark, as you know, and given him a set of rooms, where he and his wonderful little teacher, Miss Denison--trained in the Séguin method, they say--and the old _bonne_ Zélie live. The nurse has gone. "I am so sorry for Lady Cynthia--she seems to miss him so. Of course she goes over to Beechmark a good deal, but it is not the same as having him under her own roof. And she was so good to him! She looks tired of late, and rather depressed. I wonder if her dragoon of a sister has been worrying her. Of course Lady Georgina is enchanted to have got rid of Arthur. "I am very glad to hear Lord Buntingford is going to Wales. Miss Pitstone has been evidently a great deal on his mind. He said to John the other day that he had arranged everything at Beechmark so that, when you and she came back, he did not think you would find Arthur in the way. The boy's rooms are in a separate wing, and would not interfere at all with visitors. I said to him once that I was sure Miss Helena would be very fond of the little fellow. But he frowned and looked distressed. 'I should scarcely allow her to see him,' he said. I asked why. 'Because a young girl ought to be protected from anything irremediably sad. Life should be always bright for her. And I can still make it bright for Helena--I intend to make it bright.' "Good-bye, my dear Mrs. Friend. John and I miss you very much." A last sentence which gave Lucy Friend a quite peculiar pleasure. Her modest ministrations in the parish and the school had amply earned it. But it amazed her that anyone should attach any value to them. And that Mr. Alcott should miss her--why, it was ridiculous! Her thoughts were interrupted by the sight of Helena, returning to the inn along the river bank, with Bobby clinging to her skirt. "Take him in tow, please," said Helena through the window. "I am going to walk a little way to meet Geoffrey." Bobby's chubby hand held her so firmly that he could only be detached from her by main force. He was left howling in Mrs. Friend's grasp, till Helena, struck with compunction, turned back from the bend of the road, to stuff a chocolate into his open mouth, and then ran off again, laughing at the sudden silence which had descended on hill and stream. Through the intermittent shade and sunshine of the day, Helena stepped on. She had never held herself so erect; never felt so conscious of an intense and boundless vitality. Yet she was quite uncertain as to what the next few hours would bring her. Peter had given a hint--that she was sure; and she was now, it seemed, to be wooed in earnest. On Geoffrey's former visit, she had teased him so continuously, and put so many petty obstacles of all kinds in his way, that he had finally taken his cue from her, and they had parted, in a last whirlwind of "chaff," but secretly angry, with each other or themselves. "He might have held out a little longer," thought Helena. "When shall I ever get a serious word from her?" thought French. Slowly she descended the long and winding hill leading to the village. From the few scattered cottages and farms in sight, flags were fluttering out. Groups of school children were scattered along the road, waving little flags and singing. Over the wide valley below her, with its woody hills and silver river, floated great cloud-shadows, chasing and chased by the sun. There were wild roses in the hedges, and perfume in every gust of wind. The summer was at its height, and the fire and sap of it were running full-tilt in Helena's pulses. Far down the winding road she saw at last a man on a motor bicycle--bare-headed, and long-bodied. Up he came, and soon was near enough to wave to her, while Helena was still scolding her own emotions. When he flung himself off beside her, she saw at once that he had come in an exultant mood expecting triumph. And immediately something perverse in her--or was it merely the old primeval instinct of the pursued maiden--set itself to baffle him. "Very nice to see you!" she smiled, as she gave him a passive hand--"but why aren't you in the Mall?" "My Sovereign had not expressed any burning desire for my presence. Can't we go to-night and feed a bonfire?" "Several, if you like. I have watched the building of three. But it will rain." "That won't matter," he said joyously. "Nothing will matter!" And again his ardent look challenged in her the Eternal Feminine. "I don't agree. I hate a wet mackintosh dripping into my boots, and Cousin Philip won't see any fun in it if it rains." He drew up suddenly. "Philip!" he said, with a frown of irritation. "What has Philip to do with it?" "He arrives to-night by the London train." He resumed his walk beside her, in silence, pushing his bicycle. Had she done it of malice prepense? No--impossible! He had only telegraphed his own movements to her late on the previous evening, much too late to make any sudden arrangement with Philip, who was coming from an Eastern county. "He is coming to find out your plans?" "I suppose so. But I have no plans." He stole a look at her. Yes--there was change in her, even since they had met last:--a richer, intenser personality, suggested by a new self-mastery. She seemed to him older--and a thought remote. Fears flew through him. What had been passing in her mind since he had seen her last? or in Philip's? Had he been fooled after all by those few wild words from Peter, which had reached him in Lancashire, bidding him catch his opportunity, or rue the loss of it for ever? She saw the effervescence in him die down, and became gracious at once. Especially because they were now in sight of the inn, and of Lucy Friend sitting in the little garden beside the road. Geoffrey pulled himself together, and prepared to play the game that Helena set him, until the afternoon and the walk she could not deny him, should give him his chance. The little meal passed gaily, and after it Lucy Friend watched--not without trepidation--Helena's various devices for staving off the crisis. She had two important letters to write; she must go and watch Mr. McCready sketching, as she had promised to do, or the old fellow would never forgive her; and finally she invited the fuming M.P. to fish the preserved water with her, accompanied by the odd-man as gilly. At this Geoffrey's patience fairly broke. He faced her, crimson, in the inn parlour; forgetting Lucy altogether and standing in front of the door, so that Lucy could not escape and could only roll herself in a curtain and look out of the window. "I didn't come here to fish, Helena--or to sketch--but simply and solely to talk to you! And I have come a long way. Suppose we take a walk?" Helena eyed him. She was a little pale--but composed. "At your service. Lead on, Sir Oracle!" They went out together, Geoffrey taking command, and Lucy watched them depart, across the foot-bridge, and by a green path that would lead them before long to the ferny slopes of the mountain beyond the oak-wood. As Helena was mounting the bridge, a servant of the inn ran out with a telegram which had just arrived and gave it her. Helena peered at the telegram, and then with a dancing smile thrust it into her pocket without a word. Her mood, as they walked on, was now, it seemed, eagerly political. She insisted on hearing his own account of his successful speech in the House; she wished to discuss his relations with the Labour party, which were at the moment strained, on the question of Coal Nationalization; she asked for his views on the Austrian Treaty, and on the prospects of the Government. He lent himself to her caprice, so long as they were walking one behind the other through a crowded oak-wood and along a narrow path where she could throw her questions back over her shoulder, herself well out of reach. But presently they came out on a glorious stretch of fell, clothed with young green fern, and running up into a purple crag fringed with junipers. Then he sprang to her side, and Helena knew that the hour had come and the man. There was a flat rock on the slope below the crag, under a group of junipers, and Helena presently found herself sitting there, peremptorily guided by her companion, and feeling dizzily that she was beginning to lose control of the situation, as Geoffrey sank down into the fern beside her. "At last!" he said, drawing a long breath--"_At last_!" He lay looking up at her, his long face working with emotion--the face of an intellectual, with that deep scar on the temple, where a fragment of shrapnel had struck him on the first day of the Somme advance. "Unkind Helena!" he said, in a low voice that shook--"_unkind Helena_!" Her lips framed a retort. Then suddenly the tears rushed into her eyes, and she covered them with her hands. "I'm not unkind. I'm afraid!" "Afraid of what?" "I told you," she said piteously, "I didn't want to marry--I didn't want to be bound!" "And you haven't changed your mind at all?" She didn't answer. There was silence a moment. Then she said abruptly: "Do you want to hear secrets, Geoffrey?" He pondered. "I don't know. I expect I guess them." "What do you guess?" She lifted a proud face. He touched her hand tenderly. "I guess that when you came here--you were unhappy?" Her lip trembled. "I was--very unhappy." "And now?" he asked, caressing the hand he held. "Well, now--I've walked myself back into--into common sense. There!--I had it out with myself. I may as well have it out with you! Two months ago I was a bit in love with Cousin Philip. Now, of course, I love him--I always shall love him--but I'm not _in_ love with him!" "Thank the Lord!" cried French--"since it has been the object of my life for much more than two months to persuade you to be in love with me!" "I don't think I am--yet," said Helena slowly. Her look was strange--half repellent. On both sides indeed there was a note of something else than prosperous love-making. On his, the haunting doubt lest she had so far given her heart to Philip that full fruition for himself, that full fruition which youth at its zenith instinctively claims from love and fortune, could never be his. On hers, the consciousness, scarcely recognized till now, of a moment of mental exhaustion caused by mental conflict. She was half indignant that he should press her, yet aware that she would miss the pressure if it ceased; while he, believing that his cause was really won, and urged on by Peter's hints, resented the barriers she would still put up between them. There was a short silence after her last speech. Then Helena said softly--half laughing: "You haven't talked philosophy to me, Geoffrey, for such a long time!" "What's the use?" said Geoffrey, who was lying on his face, his eyes covered by his hands--"I'm not feeling philosophical." "All the same, you made me once read half a volume of Bergson. I didn't understand much of it, except that--whatever else he is, he's a great poet. And I do know something about poetry! But I remember one sentence very well--Life--isn't it Life?--is 'an action which is making itself, across an action of the same kind which is unmaking itself.' And he compares it to a rocket in a fire-works display rushing up in flame through the falling cinders of the dead rockets." She paused. "Go on--" "Give the cinders a little time to fall, Geoffrey!" she said in a faltering voice. He looked up ardently. "Why? It's only the living fire that matters! Darling--let's come to close quarters. You gave a bit of your warm heart to Philip, and you imagined that it meant much more than it really did. And poor Philip all the time was determined--cribbed and cabined--by his past,--and now by his boy. We both know that if he marries anybody it will be Cynthia Welwyn; and that he would be happier and less lonely if he married her. But so long as your life is unsettled he will marry nobody. He remembers that your mother entrusted you to him in the firm belief that, in his uncertainty about his wife, he neither could nor would marry anybody. So that for these two years, at any rate, he holds himself absolutely bound to his compact with her and you." "And the moral of that is--" said Helena, flushing. "Marry me!--Nothing simpler. Then the compact falls--and at one stroke you bring two men into port." The conflict of expressions passing through her features showed her shaken. He waited. "Very well, Geoffrey--" she said at last, with a long, quivering breath, as though some hostile force rent her and came out. "If you want me so much--take me!" But as she spoke she became aware of the lover in him ready to spring. She drew back instantly from his cry of joy, and his outstretched arms. "Ah, but give me time--dear Geoffrey, give me time! You have my word." He controlled himself, warned by her agitation, and her pallor. "Mayn't we tell Philip--when he comes?" "Yes, we'll tell Philip--and Lucy--to-night. Not a word!--till then." She jumped up--"Are you going to climb that crag before tea? I am!" She led him breathlessly up its steep side and down again. When they regained the inn, Geoffrey had not even such a butterfly kiss to remember as she had once given him in the lime-walk at Beechmark; and Lucy, trying in her eager affection to solve the puzzle they presented her with, had simply to give it up. * * * * * The day grew wilder. Great flights of clouds came up from the west and fought the sun, and as the afternoon declined, light gusts of rain, succeeded by bursts of sunshine, began to sweep across the oak-woods. The landlord of the inn and his sons, who had been mainly responsible for building the great bonfire on Moel Dun, and the farmers in their gigs who stopped at the inn door, began to shake their heads over the prospects of the night. Helena, Lucy Friend, and Geoffrey spent the afternoon chiefly in fishing and wandering by the river. Helena clung to Lucy's side, defying her indeed to leave her, and Geoffrey could only submit, and count the tardy hours. They made tea in a green meadow beside the stream, and immediately afterwards Geoffrey, looking at his watch, announced to Mrs. Friend that he proposed to bicycle down to Bettws to meet Lord Buntingford. Helena came with him to the inn to get his bicycle. They said little to each other, till, just as he was departing, French bent over to her, as she stood beside his machine. "Do I understand?--I may tell him?" "Yes." And then for the first time she smiled upon him; a smile that was heavenly soft and kind; so that he went off in mounting spirits. Helena retraced her steps to the river-side, where they had left Lucy. She sat down on a rock by Lucy's side, and instinctively Lucy put down some knitting she held, and turned an eager face--her soul in her eyes. "Lucy--I am engaged to Geoffrey French." Lucy laughed and cried; held the bright head in her arms and kissed the cheek that lay upon her shoulder. Helena's eyes too were wet; and in both there was the memory of that night at Beechmark which had made them sisters rather than friends. "And of course," said Helena--"you'll stay with me for ever." But Lucy was far too happy to think of her own future. She had made friends--real friends--in these three months, after years of loneliness. It seemed to her that was all that mattered. And half guiltily her memory cherished those astonishing words--"_Mr. Alcott_ and I miss you very much." A drizzling rain had begun when towards eight o'clock they heard the sound of a motor coming up the Bettws road. Lucy retreated into the inn, while Helena stood at the gate waiting. Buntingford waved to her as they approached, then jumped out and followed her into the twilight of the inn parlour. "My dear Helena!" He put his arm round her shoulder and kissed her heartily. "God bless you!--good luck to you! Geoffrey has given me the best news I have heard for many a long day." "You are pleased?" she said, softly, looking at him. He sat down by her, holding her hands, and revealing to her his own long-cherished dream of what had now come to pass. "The very day you came to Beechmark, I wrote to Geoffrey, inviting him. And I saw you by chance the day after the dance, together, in the lime-walk." Helena's start almost drew her hands away. He laughed. "I wasn't eavesdropping, dear, and I heard nothing. But my dream seemed to be coming true, and I went away in tip-top spirits--just an hour, I think, before Geoffrey found that drawing." He released her, with an unconscious sigh, and she was able to see how much older he seemed to have grown; the touches of grey in his thick black hair, and the added wrinkles round his eyes,--those blue eyes that gave him his romantic look, and were his chief beauty. But he resumed at once: "Well, now then, the sooner you come back to Beechmark the better. Think of the lawyers--the trousseau--the wedding. My dear, you've no time to waste!--nor have I. Geoffrey is an impatient fellow--he always was." "And I shall see Arthur?" she asked him gently. His look thanked her. But he did not pursue the subject. Then Geoffrey and Lucy Friend came in, and there was much talk of plans, and a merry dinner _à quatre_. Afterwards, the rain seemed to have cleared off a little, and through the yellow twilight a thin stream of people, driving or on foot, began to pour past the inn, towards the hills. Helena ran upstairs to put on an oilskin hat and cape over her white dress. "You're coming to help light the bonfire?" said Geoffrey, addressing Philip. Buntingford shook his head. He turned to Lucy. "You and I will let the young ones go--won't we? I don't see you climbing Moel Dun in the rain, and I'm getting too old! We'll walk up the road a bit, and look at the people as they go by. I daresay we shall see as much as the other two." So the other two climbed, alone and almost in silence. Beside them and in front of them, scattered up and along the twilight fell, were dim groups of pilgrims bent on the same errand with themselves. It was not much past nine o'clock, and the evening would have been still light but for the drizzle of rain and the low-hanging clouds. As it was, those bound for the beacon-head had a blind climb up the rocks and the grassy slopes that led to the top. Helena stumbled once or twice, and Geoffrey caught her. Thenceforward he scarcely let her go again. She protested at first, mountaineer that she was; but he took no heed, and presently the warmth of his strong clasp seemed to hypnotize her. She was silent, and let him pull her up. On the top was a motley crowd of farmers, labourers and visitors, with a Welsh choir from a neighbouring village, singing hymns and patriotic songs. The bonfire was to be fired on the stroke of ten, by a neighbouring landowner, whose white head and beard flashed hither and thither through the crowd and the mist, as he gave his orders, and greeted the old men, farmers and labourers, he had known for a lifetime. The sweet Welsh voices rose in the "Men of Harlech," "Land of My Fathers," or in the magnificent "Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory of the Coming of the Lord." And when the moment arrived, and the white-haired Squire, with his three chosen men, fired the four corners of the high-built pile, out rushed the blaze, flaring up to heaven, defying the rain, and throwing its crimson glow on the faces ringed round it. "God Save the King!" challenged the dark, and then, hand in hand, the crowd marched round about the pyramid of fire in measured rhythm, while "Auld Lang Syne," sorrowfully sweet, echoed above the haunted mountain-top where in the infancy of Britain, Celt and Roman in succession had built their camps and reared their watch-towers. And presently from all quarters of the great horizon sprang the answering flames from mountain peaks that were themselves invisible in the murky night, while they sent forward yet, without fail or break, the great torch-race of victory, leaping on, invincible by rain or dark, far into the clouded north. But Geoffrey's eyes could not tear themselves from Helena. He saw her bathed in light, from top to toe, now gold, now scarlet, a fire-goddess, inimitably beautiful. They danced hand in hand, intoxicated by the music, and by the movement of their young swaying bodies. He felt Helena unconsciously leaning on him, her soft breath on his cheek. Her eyes were his now, and her smiling lips, just parted over her white teeth, tempted him beyond his powers of resistance. "Come!" he whispered to her, and with a quick turn of the hand he had swung her out of the fiery circle, and drawn her towards the surrounding dark. A few steps and they were on the mountainside again, while behind them the top was still aflame, and black forms still danced round the drooping fire. But they were safely curtained by night and the rising storm. After the first stage of the descent, suddenly he flung his arms round her, his mouth found hers, and all Helena's youth rushed at last to meet him as he gathered her to his breast. "Geoffrey--my Tyrant!--let me go!" she panted. "Are you mine--are you mine, at last?--you wild thing!" "I suppose so--" she said, demurely. "Only, let me breathe!" She escaped, and he heard her say with low sweet laughter as though to herself: "I seem at any rate to be following my guardian's advice!" "What advice? Tell me! you darling, tell me everything. I have a right now to all your secrets." "Some day--perhaps." Darkness hid her eyes. Hand in hand they went down the hillside, while the Mount of Victory still blazed behind them. Philip and Lucy were waiting for them. And then, at last, Helena remembered her telegram of the afternoon, and read it to a group of laughing hearers. "Right you are. I proposed last night to Jennie Dumbarton. Wedding, October--Await reply. PETER." "He shall have his reply," said Helena. And she wrote it with Geoffrey looking on. Not quite twenty-four hours later, Buntingford was walking up through the late twilight to Beechmark. After the glad excitement kindled in him by Helena's and Geoffrey's happiness, his spirits had dropped steadily all the way home. There before him across the park, rose his large barrack of a house, so empty, but for that frail life which seemed now part of his own. He walked on, his eyes fixed on the lights in the rooms where his boy was. When he reached the gate into the gardens, a figure came suddenly out of the shrubbery towards him. "Cynthia!" "Philip! We didn't expect you till to-morrow." He turned back with her, inexpressibly comforted by her companionship. The first item in his news was of course the news of Helena's engagement. Cynthia's surprise was great, as she showed; so also was her relief, which she did not show. "And the wedding is to be soon?" "Geoffrey pleads for the first week in September, that they may have time to get to some favourite places of his in France before Parliament meets. Helena and Mrs. Friend will be here to-morrow." After a pause he turned to her, with another note in his voice: "You have been with Arthur?" She gave an account of her day. "He misses you so. I wanted to make up to him a little." "He loves you--so do I!" said Buntingford. "Won't you come and take charge of us both, dear Cynthia? I owe you so much already--I would do my best to pay it." He took her hand and pressed it. All was said. Yet through all her gladness, Cynthia felt the truth of Georgina's remark--"When he marries it will be for peace--not passion." Well, she must accept it. The first-fruits were not for her. With all his chivalry he would never be able to give her what she had it in her to give him. It was the touch of acid in the sweetness of her lot. But sweet it was all the same. When she told Georgina, her sister broke into a little laugh--admiring, not at all unkind. "Cynthia, you are a clever woman! But I must point out that Providence has given you every chance." Peace indeed was the note of Philip's mood that night, as he paced up and down beside the lake after his solitary dinner. He was, momentarily at least, at rest, and full of patient hope. His youth was over. He resigned it, with a smile and a sigh; while seeming still to catch the echoes of it far away, like music in some invisible city that a traveller leaves behind him in the night. His course lay clear before him. Politics would give him occupation, and through political life power might come to him. But the real task to which he set his most human heart, in this moment of change and reconstruction, was to make a woman and a child happy. 
28444	----	TURN ABOUT ELEANOR [Illustration: Eleanor] Turn About Eleanor By ETHEL M. KELLEY ILLUSTRATED BY F. GRAHAM COOTES INDIANAPOLIS THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY PUBLISHERS Copyright 1917 The Bobbs-Merrill Company Printed in the United States of America PRESS OF BRAUNWORTH & CO. BOOK MANUFACTURERS BROOKLYN, N. Y. TO MY MOTHER CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I Enter Eleanor 1 II The Cooperative Parents 14 III The Experiment Begins 27 IV Peter Elucidates 40 V Eleanor Enjoys Herself in Her Own Way 48 VI Jimmie Becomes a Parent 63 VII One Descent into Bohemia 72 VIII The Ten Hutchinsons 84 IX Peter 101 X The Omniscient Focus 113 XI Gertrude Has Trouble with Her Behavior 124 XII Madam Bolling 138 XIII Brook and River 158 XIV Merry Christmas 167 XV Growing Up 181 XVI Margaret Louisa's Birthright 195 XVII A Real Kiss 203 XVIII Beulah's Problem 219 XIX Mostly Uncle Peter 234 XX The Makings of a Triple Wedding 251 XXI Eleanor Hears the News 261 XXII The Search 271 XXIII The Young Nurse 281 XXIV Christmas Again 292 XXV The Lover 304 TURN ABOUT ELEANOR TURN ABOUT ELEANOR CHAPTER I ENTER ELEANOR A child in a faded tam-o'-shanter that had once been baby blue, and a shoddy coat of a glaring, unpropitious newness, was sitting uncomfortably on the edge of a hansom seat, and gazing soberly out at the traffic of Fifth Avenue. The young man beside her, a blond, sleek, narrow-headed youth in eye-glasses, was literally making conversation with her. That is, he was engaged in a palpable effort to make conversation--to manufacture out of the thin crisp air of that November morning and the random impressions of their progress up the Avenue, something with a general resemblance to tête-à-tête dialogue as he understood it. He was succeeding only indifferently. "See, Eleanor," he pointed brightly with his stick to the flower shop they were passing, "see that building with the red roof, and all those window boxes. Don't you think those little trees in pots outside look like Christmas trees? Sometimes when your Aunts Beulah and Margaret and Gertrude, whom you haven't met yet--though you are on your way to meet them, you know--sometimes when they have been very good, almost good enough to deserve it, I stop by that little flower shop and buy a chaste half dozen of gardenias and their accessories, and divide them among the three." "Do you?" the child asked, without wistfulness. She was a good child, David Bolling decided,--a sporting child, willing evidently to play when it was her turn, even when she didn't understand the game at all. It was certainly a new kind of game that she would be so soon expected to play her part in,--a rather serious kind of game, if you chose to look at it that way. David himself hardly knew how to look at it. He was naturally a conservative young man, who had been brought up by his mother to behave as simply as possible on all occasions, and to avoid the conspicuous as tacitly and tactfully as one avoids a new disease germ. His native point of view, however, had been somewhat deflected by his associations. His intimate circle consisted of a set of people who indorsed his mother's decalogue only under protest, and with the most stringent reservations. That is, they were young and healthy, and somewhat overcharged with animal spirits, and their reactions were all very intense and emphatic. He was trying at this instant to look rather more as if he were likely to meet one of his own friends than one of his mother's. His mother's friends would not have understood his personal chaperonage of the shabby little girl at his elbow. Her hair was not even properly brushed. It looked frazzled and tangled; and at the corner of one of her big blue eyes, streaking diagonally across the pallor in which it was set, was a line of dirt,--a tear mark, it might have been, though that didn't make the general effect any less untidy, David thought; only a trifle more uncomfortably pathetic. She was a nice little girl, that fact was becoming more and more apparent to David, but any friend of his mother's would have wondered, and expressed him or herself as wondering, why in the name of all sensitiveness he had not taken a taxicab, or at least something in the nature of a closed vehicle, if he felt himself bound to deliver in person this curious little stranger to whatever mysterious destination she was for. "I thought you'd like a hansom, Eleanor, better than a taxi-cab, because you can see more. You've never been in this part of New York before, I understand." "No, sir." "You came up from Colhassett last Saturday, didn't you? Mrs. O'Farrel wrote to your grandmother to send you on to us, and you took the Saturday night boat from Fall River." "Yes, sir." "Did you travel alone, Eleanor?" "A friend of Grandpa's came up on the train with me, and left me on the vessel. He told the colored lady and gentleman to see if I was all right,--Mr. Porter and Mrs. Steward." "And were you all right?" David's eyes twinkled. "Yes, sir." "Not sea sick, nor homesick?" The child's fine-featured face quivered for a second, then set again into impassive stoic lines, and left David wondering whether he had witnessed a vibration of real emotion, or the spasmodic twitching of the muscles that is so characteristic of the rural public school. "I wasn't sea sick." "Tell me about your grandparents, Eleanor." Then as she did not respond, he repeated a little sharply, "Tell me about your grandparents, won't you?" The child still hesitated. David bowed to the wife of a Standard Oil director in a passing limousine, and one of the season's prettiest débutantes, who was walking; and because he was only twenty-four, and his mother was very, very ambitious for him, he wondered if the tear smudge on the face of his companion had been evident from the sidewalk, and decided that it must have been. "I don't know how to tell," the child said at last, "I don't know what you want me to say." "I don't want you to say anything in particular, just in general, you know." David stuck. The violet eyes were widening with misery, there was no doubt about it. "Game, clean through," he said to himself. Aloud he continued. "Well, you know, Eleanor.--Never say 'Well,' if you can possibly avoid it, because it's a flagrant Americanism, and when you travel in foreign parts you're sure to regret it,--well, you know, if you are to be in a measure my ward--and you are, my dear, as well as the ward of your Aunts Beulah and Margaret and Gertrude, and your Uncles Jimmie and Peter--I ought to begin by knowing a little something of your antecedents. That is why I suggested that you tell me about your grandparents. I don't care what you tell me, but I think it would be very suitable for you to tell me something. Are they native Cape Codders? I'm a New Englander myself, you know, so you may be perfectly frank with me." "They're not summer folks," the child said. "They just live in Colhassett all the year round. They live in a big white house on the depot road, but they're so old now, they can't keep it up. If it was painted it would be a real pretty house." "Your grandparents are not very well off then?" The child colored. "They've got lots of things," she said, "that Grandfather brought home when he went to sea, but it was Uncle Amos that sent them the money they lived on. When he died they didn't have any." "How long has he been dead?" "Two years ago Christmas." "You must have had some money since then." "Not since Uncle Amos died, except for the rent of the barn, and the pasture land, and a few things like that." "You must have had money put away." "No," the little girl answered. "We didn't. We didn't have any money, except what came in the way I said. We sold some old-fashioned dishes, and a little bit of cranberry bog for twenty-five dollars. We didn't have any other money." "But you must have had something to live on. You can't make bricks without straw, or grow little girls up without nourishing food in their tummies." He caught an unexpected flicker of an eyelash, and realized for the first time that the child was acutely aware of every word he was saying, that even his use of English was registering a poignant impression on her consciousness. The thought strangely embarrassed him. "We say tummies in New York, Eleanor," he explained hastily. "It's done here. The New England stomick, however, is almost entirely obsolete. You'll really get on better in the circles to which you are so soon to be accustomed if you refer to it in my own simple fashion;--but to return to our muttons, Eleanor, which is French for getting down to cases, again, you must have had something to live on after your uncle died. You are alive now. That would almost seem to prove my contention." "We didn't have any money, but what I earned." "But--what you earned. What do you mean, Eleanor?" The child's face turned crimson, then white again. This time there was no mistaking the wave of sensitive emotion that swept over it. "I worked out," she said. "I made a dollar and a half a week running errands, and taking care of a sick lady vacations, and nights after school. Grandma had that shock, and Grandpa's back troubled him. He tried to get work but he couldn't. He did all he could taking care of Grandma, and tending the garden. They hated to have me work out, but there was nobody else to." "A family of three can't live on a dollar and a half a week." "Yes, sir, they can, if they manage." "Where were your neighbors all this time, Eleanor? You don't mean to tell me that the good, kindly people of Cape Cod would have stood by and let a little girl like you support a family alone and unaided. It's preposterous." "The neighbors didn't know. They thought Uncle Amos left us something. Lots of Cape Cod children work out. They thought that I did it because I wanted to." "I see," said David gravely. The wheel of their cab became entangled in that of a smart delivery wagon. He watched it thoughtfully. Then he took off his glasses, and polished them. "Through a glass darkly," he explained a little thickly. He was really a very _young_ young man, and once below the surface of what he was pleased to believe a very worldly and cynical manner, he had a profound depth of tenderness and human sympathy. Then as they jogged on through the Fifty-ninth Street end of the Park, looking strangely seared and bereft from the first blight of the frost, he turned to her again. This time his tone was as serious as her own. "Why did you stop working out, Eleanor?" he asked. "The lady I was tending died. There wasn't nobody else who wanted me. Mrs. O'Farrel was a relation of hers, and when she came to the funeral, I told her that I wanted to get work in New York if I could,--and then last week she wrote me that the best she could do was to get me this place to be adopted, and so--I came." "But your grandparents?" David asked, and realized almost as he spoke that he had his finger on the spring of the tragedy. "They had to take help from the town." The child made a brave struggle with her tears, and David looked away quickly. He knew something of the temper of the steel of the New England nature; the fierce and terrible pride that is bred in the bone of the race. He knew that the child before him had tasted of the bitter waters of humiliation in seeing her kindred "helped" by the town. "Going out to work," he understood, had brought the family pride low, but taking help from the town had leveled it to the dust. "There is, you know, a small salary that goes with this being adopted business," he remarked casually a few seconds later. "Your Aunts Gertrude and Beulah and Margaret, and your three stalwart uncles aforesaid, are not the kind of people who have been brought up to expect something for nothing. They don't expect to adopt a perfectly good orphan without money and without price, merely for the privilege of experimentation. No, indeed, an orphan in good standing of the best New England extraction ought to exact for her services a salary of at least fifteen dollars a month. I wouldn't consent to take a cent less, Eleanor." "Wouldn't you?" the child asked uncertainly. She sat suddenly erect, as if an actual burden had been dropped from her shoulders. Her eyes were not violet, David decided, he had been deceived by the depth of their coloring; they were blue, Mediterranean blue, and her lashes were an inch and a half long at the very least. She was not only pretty, she was going to be beautiful some day. A strange premonition struck David of a future in which this long-lashed, stoic baby was in some way inextricably bound. "How old are you?" he asked her abruptly. "Ten years old day before yesterday." They had been making their way through the Park; the searer, yellower Park of late November. It looked duller and more cheerless than David ever remembered it. The leaves rattled on the trees, and the sun went down suddenly. "This is Central Park," he said. "In the spring it's very beautiful here, and all the people you know go motoring or driving in the afternoon." He bowed to his mother's milliner in a little French runabout. The Frenchman stared frankly at the baby blue tam-o'-shanter and the tangled golden head it surmounted. "Joseph could make you a peachy tam-o'-shanter looking thing of blue velvet; I'll bet I could draw him a picture to copy. Your Uncle David, you know, is an artist of a sort." For the first time since their incongruous association began the child met his smile; her face relaxed ever so little, and the lips quivered, but she smiled a shy, little dawning smile. There was trust in it and confidence. David put out his hand to pat hers, but thought better of it. "Eleanor," he said, "my mother knows our only living Ex-president, and the Countess of Warwick, one Vanderbilt, two Astors, and she's met Sir Gilbert Parker, and Rudyard Kipling. She also knows many of the stars and satellites of upper Fifth Avenue. She has, as well, family connections of so much weight and stolidity that their very approach, singly or in conjunction, shakes the earth underneath them.--I wish we could meet them all, Eleanor, every blessed one of them." CHAPTER II THE COOPERATIVE PARENTS "I wonder how a place like this apartment will look to her," Beulah said thoughtfully. "I wonder if it will seem elegant, or cramped to death. I wonder if she will take to it kindly, or with an ill concealed contempt for its limitations." "The poor little thing will probably be so frightened and homesick by the time David gets her here, that she won't know what kind of a place she's arrived at," Gertrude suggested. "Oh, I wouldn't be in your shoes for the next few days for anything in the world, Beulah Page; would you, Margaret?" The third girl in the group smiled. "I don't know," she said thoughtfully. "It would be rather fun to begin it." "I'd rather have her for the first two months, and get it over with," Beulah said decisively. "It'll be hanging over your head long after my ordeal is over, and by the time I have to have her again she'll be absolutely in training. You don't come until the fifth on the list you know, Gertrude. Jimmie has her after me, then Margaret, then Peter, and you, and David, if he has got up the courage to tell his mother by that time." "But if he hasn't," Gertrude suggested. "He can work it out for himself. He's got to take the child two months like the rest of us. He's agreed to." "He will," Margaret said, "I've never known him to go back on his word yet." "Trust Margaret to stick up for David. Anyway, I've taken the precaution to put it in writing, as you know, and the document is filed." "We're not adopting this infant legally." "No, Gertrude, we can't,--yet, but morally we are. She isn't an infant, she's ten years old. I wish you girls would take the matter a little more seriously. We've bound ourselves to be responsible for this child's whole future. We have undertaken her moral, social and religious education. Her body and soul are to be--" "Equally divided among us," Gertrude cut in. Beulah scorned the interruption. "--held sacredly in trust by the six of us, severally and collectively." "Why haven't we adopted her legally then?" Margaret asked. "Well, you see, there are practical objections. You have to be a corporation or an institution or something, to adopt a child as a group. A child can't have three sets of parents in the eyes of the law, especially when none of them is married, or have the least intention of being married, to each other.--I don't see what you want to keep laughing at, Gertrude. It's all a little unusual and modern and that sort of thing, but I don't think it's funny. Do you, Margaret?" "I think that it's funny, but I think that it's serious, too, Beulah." "I don't see what's funny about--" Beulah began hotly. "You don't see what's funny about anything,--even Rogers College, do you, darling? It is funny though for the bunch of us to undertake the upbringing of a child ten years old; to make ourselves financially and spiritually responsible for it. It's a lot more than funny, I know, but it doesn't seem to me as if I could go on with it at all, until somebody was willing to admit what a _scream_ the whole thing is." "We'll admit that, if that's all you want, won't we, Beulah?" Margaret appealed. "If I've got this insatiable sense of humor, let's indulge it by all means," Gertrude laughed. "Go on, chillun, go on, I'll try to be good now." "I wish you would," Margaret said. "Confine yourself to a syncopated chortle while I get a few facts out of Beulah. I did most of my voting on this proposition by proxy, while I was having the measles in quarantine. Beulah, did I understand you to say you got hold of your victim through Mrs. O'Farrel, your seamstress?" "Yes, when we decided we'd do this, we thought we'd get a child about six. We couldn't have her any younger, because there would be bottles, and expert feeding, and well, you know, all those things. We couldn't have done it, especially the boys. We thought six would be just about the right age, but we simply couldn't find a child that would do. We had to know about its antecedents. We looked through the orphan asylums, but there wasn't anything pure-blooded American that we could be sure of. We were all agreed that we wanted pure American blood. I knew Mrs. O'Farrel had relatives on Cape Cod. You know what that stock is, a good sea-faring strain, and a race of wonderfully fine women, 'atavistic aristocrats' I remember an author in the _Atlantic Monthly_ called them once. I suppose you think it's funny to groan, Gertrude, when anybody makes a literary allusion, but it isn't. Well, anyway, Mrs. O'Farrel knew about this child, and sent for her. She stayed with Mrs. O'Farrel over Sunday, and now David is bringing her here. She'll be here in a minute." "Why David?" Gertrude twinkled. "Why not David?" Beulah retorted. "It will be a good experience for him, besides David is so amusing when he tries to be, I thought he could divert her on the way." "It isn't such a crazy idea, after all, Gertrude." Margaret Hutchinson was the youngest of the three, being within several months of her majority, but she looked older. Her face had that look of wisdom that comes to the young who have suffered physical pain. "We've got to do something. We're all too full of energy and spirits, at least the rest of you are, and I'm getting huskier every minute, to twirl our hands and do nothing. None of us ever wants to be married,--that's settled; but we do want to be useful. We're a united group of the closest kind of friends, bound by the ties of--of--natural selection, and we need a purpose in life. Gertrude's a real artist, but the rest of us are not, and--and--" "What could be more natural for us than to want the living clay to work on? That's the idea, isn't it?" Gertrude said. "I can be serious if I want to, Beulah-land, but, honestly, girls, when I come to face out the proposition, I'm almost afraid to. What'll I do with that child when it comes to be my turn? What'll Jimmie do? Buy her a string of pearls, and show her the night life of New York very likely. How'll I break it to my mother? That's the cheerful little echo in my thoughts night and day. How did you break it to yours, Beulah?" Beulah flushed. Her serious brown eyes, deep brown with wine-colored lights in them, met those of each of her friends in turn. Then she laughed. "Well, I do know this is funny," she said, "but, you know, I haven't dared tell her. She'll be away for a month, anyway. Aunt Ann is here, but I'm only telling her that I'm having a little girl from the country to visit me." Occasionally the architect of an apartment on the upper west side of New York--by pure accident, it would seem, since the general run of such apartments is so uncomfortable, and unfriendly--hits upon a plan for a group of rooms that are at once graciously proportioned and charmingly convenient, while not being an absolute offense to the eye in respect to the details of their decoration. Beulah Page and her mother lived in such an apartment, and they had managed with a few ancestral household gods, and a good many carefully related modern additions to them, to make of their eight rooms and bath, to say nothing of the ubiquitous butler's-pantry, something very remarkably resembling a home, in its most delightful connotation: and it was in the drawing room of this home that the three girls were gathered. Beulah, the younger daughter of a widowed mother--now visiting in the home of the elder daughter, Beulah's sister Agatha, in the expectation of what the Victorians refer to as an "interesting event"--was technically under the chaperonage of her Aunt Ann, a solemn little spinster with no control whatever over the movements of her determined young niece. Beulah was just out of college,--just out, in fact, of the most high-minded of all the colleges for women;--that founded by Andrew Rogers in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and sixty-one. There is probably a greater percentage of purposeful young women graduated from Rogers College every year, than from any other one of the communities of learning devoted to the education of women; and of all the purposeful classes turned out from that admirable institution, Beulah's class could without exaggeration be designated as the most purposeful class of them all. That Beulah was not the most purposeful member of her class merely argues that an almost abnormally high standard of purposefulness was maintained by practically every individual in it. At Rogers every graduating class has its fad; its propaganda for a crusade against the most startling evils of the world. One year, the sacred outlines of the human figure are protected against disfigurement by an ardent group of young classicists in Grecian draperies. The next, a fierce young brood of vegetarians challenge a lethargic world to mortal combat over an Argentine sirloin. The year of Beulah's graduation, the new theories of child culture that were gaining serious headway in academic circles, had filtered into the class rooms, and Beulah's mates had contracted the contagion instantly. The entire senior class went mad on the subject of child psychology and the various scientific prescriptions for the direction of the young idea. It was therefore primarily to Beulah Page, that little Eleanor Hamlin, of Colhassett, Massachusetts, owed the change in her fortune. At least it was to Beulah that she owed the initial inspiration that set the wheel of that fortune in motion; but it was to the glorious enterprise and idealism of youth, and the courage of a set of the most intrepid and quixotic convictions that ever quickened in the breasts of a mad half dozen youngsters, that she owed the actual fulfillment of her adventure. The sound of the door-bell brought the three girls to their feet, but the footfalls in the corridor, double quick time, and accentuated, announced merely the arrival of Jimmie Sears, and Peter Stuyvesant, nicknamed _Gramercy_ by common consent. "Has she come?" Peter asked. But Jimmie struck an attitude in the middle of the floor. "My daughter, oh! my daughter," he cried. "This suspense is killing me. For the love of Mike, children, where is she?" "She's coming," Beulah answered; "David's bringing her." Gertrude pushed him into the _chaise-lounge_ already in the possession of Margaret, and squeezed in between them. "Hold my hand, Jimmie," she said. "The feelings of a father are nothing,--_nothing_ in comparison to those which smolder in the maternal breast. Look at Beulah, how white she is, and Margaret is trembling this minute." "I'm trembling, too," Peter said, "or if I'm not trembling, I'm frightened." "We're all frightened," Margaret said, "but we're game." The door-bell rang again. "There they come," Beulah said, "oh! everybody be good to me." The familiar figure of their good friend David appeared on the threshold at this instant, and beside him an odd-looking little figure in a shoddy cloth coat, and a faded blue tam-o'-shanter. There was a long smudge of dirt reaching from the corner of her eye well down into the middle of her cheek. A kind of composite gasp went up from the waiting group, a gasp of surprise, consternation, and panic. Not one of the five could have told at that instant what it was he expected to see, or how his imagination of the child differed from the concrete reality, but amazement and keen disappointment constrained them. Here was no figure of romance and delight. No miniature Galatea half hewn out of the block of humanity, waiting for the chisel of a composite Pygmalion. Here was only a grubby, little unkempt child, like all other children, but not so presentable. "What's the matter with everybody?" said David with unnatural sharpness. "I want to present you to our ward, Miss Eleanor Hamlin, who has come a long way for the pleasure of meeting you. Eleanor, these are your cooperative parents." The child's set gaze followed his gesture obediently. David took the little hand in his, and led the owner into the heart of the group. Beulah stepped forward. "This is your Aunt Beulah, Eleanor, of whom I've been telling you." "I'm pleased to make your acquaintance, Aunt Beulah," the little girl said, as Beulah put out her hand, still uncertainly. Then the five saw a strange thing happen. The immaculate, inscrutable David--the aristocrat of aristocrats, the one undemonstrative, super-self-conscious member of the crowd, who had been delegated to transport the little orphan chiefly because the errand was so incongruous a mission on which to despatch him--David put his arm around the neck of the child with a quick protecting gesture, and then gathered her close in his arms, where she clung, quivering and sobbing, the unkempt curls straggling helplessly over his shoulder. He strode across the room where Margaret was still sitting upright in the _chaise-lounge_, her dove-gray eyes wide, her lips parted. "Here, you take her," he said, without ceremony, and slipped his burden into her arms. "Welcome to our city, Kiddo," Jimmie said in his throat, but nobody heard him. Peter, whose habit it was to walk up and down endlessly wherever he felt most at home, paused in his peregrination, as Margaret shyly gathered the rough little head to her bosom. The child met his gaze as he did so. "We weren't quite up to scratch," he said gravely. Beulah's eyes filled. "Peter," she said, "Peter, I didn't mean to be--not to be--" But Peter seemed not to know she was speaking. The child's eyes still held him, and he stood gazing down at her, his handsome head thrown slightly back; his face deeply intent; his eyes softened. "I'm your Uncle Peter, Eleanor," he said, and bent down till his lips touched her forehead. CHAPTER III THE EXPERIMENT BEGINS Eleanor walked over to the steam pipes, and examined them carefully. The terrible rattling noise had stopped, as had also the choking and gurgling that had kept her awake because it was so like the noise that Mrs. O'Farrel's aunt, the sick lady she had helped to take care of, made constantly for the last two weeks of her life. Whenever there was a sound that was anything like that, Eleanor could not help shivering. She had never seen steam pipes before. When Beulah had shown her the room where she was to sleep--a room all in blue, baby blue, and pink roses--Eleanor thought that the silver pipes standing upright in the corner were a part of some musical instrument, like a pipe organ. When the rattling sound had begun she thought that some one had come into the room with her, and was tuning it. She had drawn the pink silk puff closely about her ears, and tried not to be frightened. Trying not to be frightened was the way she had spent a good deal of her time since her Uncle Amos died, and she had had to look out for her grandparents. Now that it was morning, and the bright sun was streaming into the windows, she ventured to climb out of bed and approach the uncanny instrument. She tripped on the trailing folds of that nightgown her Aunt Beulah--it was funny that all these ladies should call themselves her aunts, when they were really no relation to her--had insisted on her wearing. Her own nightdress had been left in the time-worn carpetbag that Uncle David had forgotten to take out of the "handsome cab." She stumbled against the silver pipes. They were _hot_; so hot that the flesh of her arm nearly blistered, but she did not cry out. Here was another mysterious problem of the kind that New York presented at every turn, to be silently accepted, and dealt with. Her mother and father had once lived in New York. Her father had been born here, in a house with a brownstone front on West Tenth Street, wherever that was. She herself had lived in New York when she was a baby, though she had been born in her grandfather's house in Colhassett. She had lived in Cincinnati, Ohio, too, until she was four years old, and her father and mother had died there, both in the same week, of pneumonia. She wished this morning, that she could remember the house where they lived in New York, and the things that were in it. There was a knock on the door. Ought she to go and open the door in her nightdress? Ought she to call out "Come in?" It might be a gentleman, and her Aunt Beulah's nightdress was not very thick. She decided to cough, so that whoever was outside might understand she was in there, and had heard them. "May I come in, Eleanor?" Beulah's voice called. "Yes, ma'am." She started to get into bed, but Miss--Miss--the nearer she was to her, the harder it was to call her aunt,--Aunt Beulah might think it was time she was up. She compromised by sitting down in a chair. Beulah had passed a practically sleepless night working out the theory of Eleanor's development. The six had agreed on a certain sketchily defined method of procedure. That is, they were to read certain books indicated by Beulah, and to follow the general schedule that she was to work out and adapt to the individual needs of the child herself, during the first phase of the experiment. She felt that she had managed the reception badly, that she had not done or said the right thing. Peter's attitude had shown that he felt the situation had been clumsily handled, and it was she who was responsible for it. Peter was too kind to criticize her, but she had vowed in the muffled depths of a feverish pillow that there should be no more flagrant flaws in the conduct of the campaign. "Did you sleep well, Eleanor?" she asked. "Yes, ma'am." "Are you hungry?" "No, ma'am." The conversation languished at this. "Have you had your bath?" "I didn't know I was to have one." "Nice little girls have a bath every day." "Do they?" Eleanor asked. Her Aunt Beulah seemed to expect her to say something more, but she couldn't think of anything. "I'll draw your bath for you this morning. After this you will be expected to take it yourself." Eleanor had seen bathrooms before, but she had never been in a bath-tub. At her grandfather's, she had taken her Saturday night baths in an old wooden wash-tub, which had water poured in it from the tea kettle. When Beulah closed the door on her she stepped gingerly into the tub: the water was twice too hot, but she didn't know how to turn the faucet, or whether she was expected to turn it. Mrs. O'Farrel had told her that people had to pay for water in New York. Perhaps Aunt Beulah had drawn all the water she could have. She used the soap sparingly. Soap was expensive, she knew. She wished there was some way of discovering just how much of things she was expected to use. The number of towels distressed her, but she finally took the littlest and dried herself. The heat of the water had nearly parboiled her. After that, she tried to do blindly what she was told. There was a girl in a black dress and white apron that passed her everything she had to eat. Her Aunt Beulah told her to help herself to sugar and to cream for her oatmeal, from off this girl's tray. Her hand trembled a good deal, but she was fortunate enough not to spill any. After breakfast she was sent to wash her hands in the bathroom; she turned the faucet, and used a very little water. Then, when she was called, she went into the sitting-room and sat down, and folded her hands in her lap. Beulah looked at her with some perplexity. The child was docile and willing, but she seemed unexpectedly stupid for a girl ten years old. "Have you ever been examined for adenoids, Eleanor?" she asked suddenly. "No, ma'am." "Say, 'no, Aunt Beulah.' Don't say, 'no, ma'am' and 'yes, ma'am.' People don't say 'no, ma'am' and 'yes, ma'am' any more, you know. They say 'no' and 'yes,' and then mention the name of the person to whom they are speaking." "Yes, ma'am," Eleanor couldn't stop herself saying it. She wanted to correct herself. "No, Aunt Beulah, no, Aunt Beulah," but the words stuck in her throat. "Well, try to remember," Beulah said. She was thinking of the case in a book of psychology that she had been reading that morning, of a girl who was "pale and sleepy looking, expressionless of face, careless of her personal appearance," who after an operation for adenoids, had become "as animated and bright as before she had been lethargic and dull." She was pleased to see that Eleanor's fine hair had been scrupulously combed, and neatly braided this morning, not being able to realize--as how should she?--that the condition of Eleanor's fine spun locks on her arrival the night before, had been attributable to the fact that the O'Farrel baby had stolen her comb, and Eleanor had been too shy to mention the fact, and had combed her hair mermaid-wise, through her fingers. "This morning," Beulah began brightly, "I am going to turn you loose in the apartment, and let you do what you like. I want to get an idea of the things you do like, you know. You can sew, or read, or drum on the piano, or talk to me, anything that pleases you most. I want you to be happy, that's all, and to enjoy yourself in your own way." "Give the child absolute freedom in which to demonstrate the worth and value of its ego,"--that was what she was doing, "keeping it carefully under observation while you determine the individual trend along which to guide its development." The little girl looked about her helplessly. The room was very large and bright. The walls were white, and so was the woodwork, the mantle, and some of the furniture. Gay figured curtains hung at the windows, and there were little stools, and chairs, and even trays with glass over them, covered with the same bright colored material. Eleanor had never seen a room anything like it. There was no center-table, no crayon portraits of different members of the family, no easels, or scarves thrown over the corners of the pictures. There were not many pictures, and those that there were didn't seem to Eleanor like pictures at all, they were all so blurry and smudgy,--excepting one of a beautiful lady. She would have liked to have asked the name of that lady,--but her Aunt Beulah's eyes were upon her. She slipped down from her chair and walked across the room to the window. "Well, dear, what would make this the happiest day you can think of?" Beulah asked, in the tone she was given to use when she asked Gertrude and Margaret and Jimmie--but not often Peter--what they expected to do with their lives. Eleanor turned a desperate face from the window, from the row of bland elegant apartment buildings she had been contemplating with unseeing eyes. "Do I have to?" she asked Beulah piteously. "Have to what?" "Have to amuse myself in my own way? I don't know what you want me to do. I don't know what you think that I ought to do." A strong-minded and spoiled younger daughter of a widowed mother--whose chief anxiety had been to anticipate the wants of her children before they were expressed--with an independent income, and a beloved and admiring circle of intimate friends, is not likely to be imaginatively equipped to explore the spiritual fastnesses of a sensitive and alien orphan. Beulah tried earnestly to get some perspective on the child's point of view, but she could not. The fact that she was torturing the child would have been outside of the limits of her comprehension. She searched her mind for some immediate application of the methods of Madame Montessori, and produced a lump of modeling clay. "You don't really have to do anything, Eleanor," she said kindly. "I don't want you to make an effort to please me, only to be happy yourself. Why don't you try and see what you can do with this modeling clay? Just try making it up into mud pies, or anything." "Mud pies?" "Let the child teach himself the significance of contour, and the use of his hands, by fashioning the clay into rudimentary forms of beauty." That was the theory. "Yes, dear, mud pies, if you wish to." Whereupon Eleanor, conscientiously and miserably, turned out a neat half-dozen skilful, miniature models of the New England deep dish apple-pie, pricked and pinched to a nicety. Beulah, with a vision related to the nebulous stages of a study by Rodin, was somewhat disconcerted with this result, but she brightened as she thought at least she had discovered a natural tendency in the child that she could help her develop. "Do you like to cook, Eleanor?" she asked. In the child's mind there rose the picture of her grim apprenticeship on Cape Cod. She could see the querulous invalid in the sick chair, her face distorted with pain and impatience; she could feel the sticky dough in her fingers, and the heat from the stove rising round her. "I hate cooking," she said, with the first hint of passion she had shown in her relation to her new friends. The day dragged on wearily. Beulah took her to walk on the Drive, but as far as she was able to determine the child saw nothing of her surroundings. The crowds of trimly dressed people, the nursemaids and babies, the swift slim outlines of the whizzing motors, even the battleships lying so suggestively quiescent on the river before them--all the spectacular, vivid panorama of afternoon on Riverside Drive--seemed absolutely without interest or savor to the child. Beulah's despair and chagrin were increasing almost as rapidly as Eleanor's. Late in the afternoon Beulah suggested a nap. "I'll sit here and read for a few minutes," she said, as she tucked Eleanor under the covers. Then, since she was quite desperate for subjects of conversation, and still determined by the hot memory of her night's vigil to leave no stone of geniality unturned, she added: "This is a book that I am reading to help me to know how to guide and educate you. I haven't had much experience in adopting children, you know, Eleanor, and when there is anything in this world that you don't know, there is usually some good and useful book that will help you to find out all about it." Even to herself her words sounded hatefully patronizing and pedagogic, but she was past the point of believing that she could handle the situation with grace. When Eleanor's breath seemed to be coming regularly, she put down her book with some thankfulness and escaped to the tea table, where she poured tea for her aunt, and explained the child's idiosyncrasies swiftly and smoothly to that estimable lady. Left alone, Eleanor lay still for a while, staring at the design of pink roses on the blue wall-paper. On Cape Cod, pink and blue were not considered to be colors that could be combined. There was nothing at all in New York like anything she knew or remembered. She sighed. Then she made her way to the window and picked up the book Beulah had been reading. It was about _her_, Aunt Beulah had said,--directions for educating her and training her. The paragraph that caught her eye where the book was open had been marked with a pencil. "This girl had such a fat, frog like expression of face," Eleanor read, "that her neighbors thought her an idiot. She was found to be the victim of a severe case of ad-e-noids." As she spelled out the word, she recognized it as the one Beulah had used earlier in the day. She remembered the sudden sharp look with which the question had been accompanied. The sick lady for whom she had "worked out" had often called her an idiot when her feet had stumbled, or she had failed to understand at once what was required of her. Eleanor read on. She encountered a text replete with hideous examples of backward and deficient children, victims of adenoids who had been restored to a state of normality by the removal of the affliction. She had no idea what an adenoid was. She had a hazy notion that it was a kind of superfluous bone in the region of the breast, but her anguish was rooted in the fact that this, _this_ was the good and useful book that her Aunt Beulah had found it necessary to resort to for guidance, in the case of her own--Eleanor's--education. When Beulah, refreshed by a cup of tea and further sustained by the fact that Margaret and Peter had both telephoned they were coming to dinner, returned to her charge, she found the stolid, apathetic child she had left, sprawling face downward on the floor, in a passion of convulsive weeping. CHAPTER IV PETER ELUCIDATES It was Peter who got at the heart of the trouble. Margaret tried, but though Eleanor clung to her and relaxed under the balm of her gentle caresses, the child remained entirely inarticulate until Peter gathered her up in his arms, and signed to the others that he wished to be left alone with her. By the time he rejoined the two in the drawing-room--he had missed his after-dinner coffee in the long half-hour that he had spent shut into the guest room with the child--Jimmie and Gertrude had arrived, and the four sat grouped together to await his pronouncement. "She thinks she has adenoids. She wants the doll that David left in that carpetbag of hers he forgot to take out of the 'Handsome cab.' She wants to be loved, and she wants to grow up and write poetry for the newspapers," he announced. "Also she will eat a piece of bread and butter and a glass of milk, as soon as it can conveniently be provided for her." "When did you take holy orders, Gram?" Jimmie inquired. "How do you work the confessional? I wish I could make anybody give anything up to me, but I can't. Did you just go into that darkened chamber and say to the kid, 'Child of my adoption,--cough,' and she coughed, or are you the master of some subtler system of choking the truth out of 'em?" "Anybody would tell anything to Peter if he happened to want to know it," Margaret said seriously. "Wouldn't they, Beulah?" Beulah nodded. "She wants to be loved," Peter had said. It was so simple for some people to open their hearts and give out love,--easily, lightly. She was not made like that,--loving came hard with her, but when once she had given herself, it was done. Peter didn't know how hard she had tried to do right with the child that day. "The doll is called the rabbit doll, though there is no reason why it should be, as it only looks the least tiny bit like a rabbit, and is a girl. Its other name is Gwendolyn, and it always goes to bed with her. Mrs. O'Farrels aunt said that children always stopped playing with dolls when they got to be as big as Eleanor, but she isn't never going to stop.--You must get after that double negative, Beulah.--She once wrote a poem beginning: 'The rabbit doll, it is my own.' She thinks that she has a frog-like expression of face, and that is why Beulah doesn't like her better. She is perfectly willing to have her adenoids cut out, if Beulah thinks it would improve her, but she doesn't want to 'take anything,' when she has it done." "You are a wonder, Gram," Gertrude said admiringly. "Oh! I have made a mess of it, haven't I?" Beulah said. "Is she homesick?" "Yes, she's homesick," Peter said gravely, "but not for anything she's left in Colhassett. David told you the story, didn't he?--She is homesick for her own kind, for people she can really love, and she's never found any of them. Her grandfather and grandmother are old and decrepit. She feels a terrible responsibility for them, but she doesn't love them, not really. She's too hungry to love anybody until she finds the friends she can cling to--without compromise." "An emotional aristocrat," Gertrude murmured. "It's the curse of taste." "Help! Help!" Jimmie cried, grimacing at Gertrude. "Didn't she have any kids her own age to play with?" "She had 'em, but she didn't have any time to play with them. You forget she was supporting a family all the time, Jimmie." "By jove, I'd like to forget it." "She had one friend named Albertina Weston that she used to run around with in school. Albertina also wrote poetry. They used to do poetic 'stunts' of one poem a day on some subject selected by Albertina. I think Albertina was a snob. She candidly admitted to Eleanor that if her clothes were more stylish, she would go round with her more. Eleanor seemed to think that was perfectly natural." "How do you do it, Peter?" Jimmie besought. "If I could get one damsel, no matter how tender her years, to confide in me like that I'd be happy for life. It's nothing to you with those eyes, and that matinée forehead of yours; but I want 'em to weep down my neck, and I can't make 'em do it." "Wait till you grow up, Jimmie, and then see what happens," Gertrude soothed him. "Wait till it's your turn with our child," Margaret said. "In two months more she's coming to you." "Do I ever forget it for a minute?" Jimmie cried. "The point of the whole business is," Peter continued, "that we've got a human soul on our hands. We imported a kind of scientific plaything to exercise our spiritual muscle on, and we've got a real specimen of womanhood in embryo. I don't know whether the situation appalls you as much as it does me--" He broke off as he heard the bell ring. "That's David, he said he was coming." Then as David appeared laden with the lost carpetbag and a huge box of chocolates, he waved him to a chair, and took up his speech again. "I don't know whether the situation appalls you, as much as it does me--if I don't get this off my chest now, David, I can't do it at all--but the thought of that poor little waif in there and the struggle she's had, and the shy valiant spirit of her,--the sand that she's got, the _sand_ that put her through and kept her mouth shut through experiences that might easily have killed her, why I feel as if I'd give anything I had in the world to make it up to her, and yet I'm not altogether sure that I could--that we could--that it's any of our business to try it." "There's nobody else who will, if we don't," David said. "That's it," Peter said, "I've never known any one of our bunch to quit anything that they once started in on, but just by way of formality there is one thing we ought to do about this proposition before we slide into it any further, and that is to agree that we want to go on with it, that we know what we're in for, and that we're game." "We decided all that before we sent for the kid," Jimmie said, "didn't we?" "We decided we'd adopt a child, but we didn't decide we'd adopt this one. Taking the responsibility of this one is the question before the house just at present." "The idea being," David added, "that she's a fairly delicate piece of work, and as time advances she's going to be _delicater_." "And that it's an awkward matter to play with souls," Beulah contributed; whereupon Jimmie murmured, "Browning," sotto voice. "She may be all that you say, Gram," Jimmie said, after a few minutes of silence, "a thunderingly refined and high-minded young waif, but you will admit that without an interpreter of the same class, she hasn't been much good to us so far." "Good lord, she isn't refined and high-minded," Peter said. "That's not the idea. She's simply supremely sensitive and full of the most pathetic possibilities. If we're going to undertake her we ought to realize fully what we're up against, and acknowledge it,--that's all I'm trying to say, and I apologize for assuming that it's more my business than anybody's to say it." "That charming humility stuff, if I could only remember to pull it." The sofa pillow that Gertrude aimed at Jimmie hit him full on the mouth and he busied himself pretending to eat it. Beulah scorned the interruption. "Of course, we're going to undertake her," Beulah said. "We are signed up and it's all down in writing. If anybody has any objections, they can state them now." She looked about her dramatically. On every young face was reflected the same earnestness that set gravely on her own. "The 'ayes' have it," Jimmie murmured. "From now on I become not only a parent, but a soul doctor." He rose, and tiptoed solemnly toward the door of Eleanor's room. "Where are you going, Jimmie?" Beulah called, as he was disappearing around the bend in the corridor. He turned back to lift an admonitory finger. "Shush," he said, "do not interrupt me. I am going to wrap baby up in a blanket and bring her out to her mothers and fathers." CHAPTER V ELEANOR ENJOYS HERSELF IN HER OWN WAY "I am in society here," Eleanor wrote to her friend Albertina, with a pardonable emphasis on that phase of her new existence that would appeal to the haughty ideals of Miss Weston, "I don't have to do any housework, or anything. I sleep under a pink silk bedquilt, and I have all new clothes. I have a new black pattern leather sailor hat that I sopose you would laugh at. It cost six dollars and draws the sun down to my head but I don't say anything. I have six aunts and uncles all diferent names and ages but grown up. Uncle Peter is the most elderly, he is twenty-five. I know becase we gave him a birthday party with a cake. I sat at the table. I wore my crape da shine dress. You would think that was pretty, well it is. There is a servant girl to do evry thing even passing your food to you on a tray. I wish you could come to visit me. I stay two months in a place and get broghut up there. Aunt Beulah is peculiar but nice when you know her. She is stric and at first I thought we was not going to get along. She thought I had adenoids and I thought she dislikt me too much, but it turned out not. I take lessons from her every morning like they give at Rogers College, not like publick school. I have to think what I want to do a good deal and then do it. At first she turned me loose to enjoy myself and I could not do it, but now we have disapline which makes it all right. My speling is weak, but uncle Peter says Stevanson could not spel and did not care. Stevanson was the poat who wrote the birdie with a yellow bill in the reader. I wish you would tel me if Grandma's eye is worse and what about Grandfather's rheumatism. "Your fond friend, Eleanor. "P. S. We have a silver organ in all the rooms to have heat in. I was afrayd of them at first." * * * * * In the letters to her grandparents, however, the undercurrent of anxiety about the old people, which was a ruling motive in her life, became apparent. * * * * * "Dear Grandma and Dear Grandpa," she wrote, "I have been here a weak now. I inclose my salary, fifteen dollars ($15.00) which I hope you will like. I get it for doing evry thing I am told and being adoptid besides. You can tell the silectmen that I am rich now and can support you just as good as Uncle Amos. I want Grandpa to buy some heavy undershurts right of. He will get a couff if he doesn't do it. Tell him to rub your arm evry night before you go to bed, Grandma, and to have a hot soapstone for you. If you don't have your bed hot you will get newmonia and I can't come home to take care of you, becase my salary would stop. I like New York better now that I have lived here some. I miss seeing you around, and Grandpa. "The cook cooks on a gas stove that is very funny. I asked her how it went and she showed me it. She is going to leve, but lucky thing the hired girl can cook till Aunt Beulah gets a nother cook as antyseptic as this cook. In Rogers College they teach ladies to have their cook's and hired girl's antyseptic. It is a good idear becase of sickness. I inclose a recipete for a good cake. You can make it sating down. You don't have to stir it much, and Grandpa can bring you the things. I will write soon. I hope you are all right. Let me hear that you are all right. Don't forget to put the cat out nights. I hope she is all right, but remember the time she stole the butter fish. I miss you, and I miss the cat around. Uncle David pays me my salary out of his own pocket, because he is the richest, but I like Uncle Peter the best. He is very handsome and we like to talk to each other the best. Goodbye, Eleanor." * * * * * But it was on the varicolored pages of a ruled tablet--with a picture on its cover of a pink cheeked young lady beneath a cherry tree, and marked in large straggling letters also varicolored "The Cherry Blossom Tablet"--that Eleanor put down her most sacred thoughts. On the outside, just above the cherry tree, her name was written with a pencil that had been many times wet to get the desired degree of blackness, "Eleanor Hamlin, Colhassett, Massachusetts. Private Dairy," and on the first page was this warning in the same painstaking, heavily shaded chirography, "This book is sacrid, and not be trespased in or read one word of. By order of owner. E. H." It was the private diary and Gwendolyn, the rabbit doll, and a small blue china shepherdess given her by Albertina, that constituted Eleanor's _lares et penates_. When David had finally succeeded in tracing the ancient carpetbag in the lost and found department of the cab company, Eleanor was able to set up her household gods, and draw from them that measure of strength and security inseparable from their familiar presence. She always slept with two of the three beloved objects, and after Beulah had learned to understand and appreciate the child's need for unsupervised privacy, she divined that the little girl was happiest when she could devote at least an hour or two a day to the transcribing of earnest sentences on the pink, blue and yellow pages of the Cherry Blossom Tablet, and the mysterious games that she played with the rabbit doll. That these games consisted largely in making the rabbit doll impersonate Eleanor, while the child herself became in turn each one of the six uncles and aunts, and exhorted the victim accordingly, did not of course occur to Beulah. It did occur to her that the pink, blue and yellow pages would have made interesting reading to Eleanor's guardians, if they had been privileged to read all that was chronicled there. * * * * * "My aunt Beulah wears her hair to high of her forrid. "My aunt Margaret wears her hair to slic on the sides. "My aunt Gertrude wears her hair just about right. "My aunt Margaret is the best looking, and has the nicest way. "My aunt Gertrude is the funniest. I never laugh at what she says, but I have trouble not to. By thinking of Grandpa's rheumaticks I stop myself just in time. Aunt Beulah means all right, and wants to do right and have everybody else the same. "Uncle David is not handsome, but good. "Uncle Jimmie is not handsome, but his hair curls. "Uncle Peter is the most handsome man that ere the sun shown on. That is poetry. He has beautiful teeth, and I like him. "Yesterday the Wordsworth Club--that's what Uncle Jimmie calls us because he says we are seven--went to the Art Museum to edjucate me in art. "Aunt Beulah wanted to take me to one room and keep me there until I asked to come out. Uncle Jimmie wanted to show me the statures. Uncle David said I ought to begin with the Ming period and work down to Art Newvoo. Aunts Gertrude and Margaret wanted to take me to the room of the great masters. While they were talking Uncle Peter and I went to see a picture that made me cry. I asked him who she was. He said that wasn't the important thing, that the important thing was that one man had nailed his dream. He didn't doubt that lots of other painters had, but this one meant the most to him. When I cried he said, 'You're all right, Baby. You know.' Then he reached down and kissed me." * * * * * As the month progressed, it seemed to Beulah that she was making distinct progress with the child. Since the evening when Peter had won Eleanor's confidence and explained her mental processes, her task had been illumined for her. She belonged to that class of women in whom maternity arouses late. She had not the facile sympathy which accepts a relationship without the endorsement of the understanding, and she was too young to have much toleration for that which was not perfectly clear to her. She had started in with high courage to demonstrate the value of a sociological experiment. She hoped later, though these hopes she had so far kept to herself, to write, or at least to collaborate with some worthy educator, on a book which would serve as an exact guide to other philanthropically inclined groups who might wish to follow the example of cooperative adoption; but the first day of actual contact with her problem had chilled her. She had put nothing down in her note-book. She had made no scientific progress. There seemed to be no intellectual response in the child. Peter had set all these things right for her. He had shown her the child's uncompromising integrity of spirit. The keynote of Beulah's nature was, as Jimmie said, that she "had to be shown." Peter pointed out the fact to her that Eleanor's slogan also was, "No compromise." As Eleanor became more familiar with her surroundings this spirit became more and more evident. "I could let down the hem of these dresses, Aunt Beulah," she said one day, looking down at the long stretch of leg protruding from the chic blue frock that made her look like a Boutet de Monvil. "I can't hem very good, but my stitches don't show much." "That dress isn't too short, dear. It's the way little girls always wear them. Do little girls on Cape Cod wear them longer?" "Yes, Aunt Beulah." "How long do they wear them?" "Albertina," they had reached the point of discussion of Albertina now, and Beulah was proud of it, "wore her dresses to her ankles, be--because her--her legs was so fat. She said that mine was--were getting to be fat too, and it wasn't refined to wear short dresses, when your legs were fat." "There are a good many conflicting ideas of refinement in the world, Eleanor," Beulah said. "I've noticed there are, since I came to New York," Eleanor answered unexpectedly. Beulah's academic spirit recognized and rejoiced in the fact that with all her docility, Eleanor held firmly to her preconceived notions. She continued to wear her dresses short, but when she was not actually on exhibition, she hid her long legs behind every available bit of furniture or drapery. The one doubt left in her mind, of the child's initiative and executive ability, was destined to be dissipated by the rather heroic measures sometimes resorted to by a superior agency taking an ironic hand in the game of which we have been too inhumanly sure. On the fifth week of Eleanor's stay Beulah became a real aunt, the cook left, and her own aunt and official chaperon, little Miss Prentis, was laid low with an attack of inflammatory rheumatism. Beulah's excitement on these various counts, combined with indiscretions in the matter of overshoes and overfatigue, made her an easy victim to a wandering grip germ. She opened her eyes one morning only to shut them with a groan of pain. There was an ache in her head and a thickening in her chest, the significance of which she knew only too well. She found herself unable to rise. She lifted a hoarse voice and called for Mary, the maid, who did not sleep in the house but was due every morning at seven. But the gentle knock on the door was followed by the entrance of Eleanor, not Mary. "Mary didn't come, Aunt Beulah. I thought you was--were so tired, I'd let you have your sleep out. I heard Miss Prentis calling, and I made her some gruel, and I got my own breakfast." "Oh! how dreadful," Beulah gasped in the face of this new calamity; "and I'm really so sick. I don't know what we'll do." Eleanor regarded her gravely. Then she put a professional hand on her pulse and her forehead. "You've got the grip," she announced. "I'm afraid I have, Eleanor, and Doctor Martin's out of town, and won't be back till to-morrow when he comes to Aunt Ann. I don't know what we'll do." "I'll tend to things," Eleanor said. "You lie still and close your eyes, and don't put your arms out of bed and get chilled." "Well, you'll have to manage somehow," Beulah moaned; "how, I don't know, I'm sure. Give Aunt Annie her medicine and hot water bags, and just let me be. I'm too sick to care what happens." After the door had closed on the child a dozen things occurred to Beulah that might have been done for her. She was vaguely faint for her breakfast. Her feet were cold. She thought of the soothing warmth of antiphlogistine when applied to the chest. She thought of the quinine on the shelf in the bathroom. Once more she tried lifting her head, but she could not accomplish a sitting posture. She shivered as a draft from the open window struck her. "If I could only be taken in hand this morning," she thought, "I know it could be broken." The door opened softly. Eleanor, in the cook's serviceable apron of gingham that would have easily contained another child the same size, swung the door open with one hand and held it to accommodate the passage of the big kitchen tray, deeply laden with a heterogeneous collection of objects. She pulled two chairs close to the bedside and deposited her burden upon them. Then she removed from the tray a goblet of some steaming fluid and offered it to Beulah. "It's cream of wheat gruel," she said, and added ingratiatingly: "It tastes nice in a tumbler." Beulah drank the hot decoction gratefully and found, to her surprise, that it was deliciously made. Eleanor took the glass away from her and placed it on the tray, from which she took what looked to Beulah like a cloth covered omelet,--at any rate, it was a crescent shaped article slightly yellow in tone. Eleanor tested it with a finger. "It's just about right," she said. Then she fixed Beulah with a stern eye. "Open your chest," she commanded, "and show me the spot where it's worst. I've made a meal poultice." Beulah hesitated only a second, then she obeyed meekly. She had never seen a meal poultice before, but the heat on her afflicted chest was grateful to her. Antiphlogistine was only Denver mud anyhow. Meekly, also, she took the six grains of quinine and the weak dose of jamaica ginger and water that she was next offered. She felt encouraged and refreshed enough by this treatment to display some slight curiosity when the little girl produced a card of villainous looking safety-pins. "I'm going to pin you in with these, Aunt Beulah," she said, "and then sweat your cold out of you." "Indeed, you're not," Beulah said; "don't be absurd, Eleanor. The theory of the grip is--," but she was addressing merely the vanishing hem of cook's voluminous apron. The child returned almost instantly with three objects of assorted sizes that Beulah could not identify. From the outside they looked like red flannel and from the way Eleanor handled them it was evident that they also were hot. "I het--heated the flatirons," Eleanor explained, "the way I do for Grandma, and I'm going to spread 'em around you, after you're pinned in the blankets, and you got to lie there till you prespire, and prespire good." "I won't do it," Beulah moaned, "I won't do any such thing. Go away, child." "I cured Grandma and Grandpa and Mrs. O'Farrel's aunt that I worked for, and I'm going to cure you," Eleanor said. "No." Eleanor advanced on her threateningly. "Put your arms under those covers," she said, "or I'll dash a glass of cold water in your face,"--and Beulah obeyed her. Peter nodded wisely when Beulah, cured by these summary though obsolete methods, told the story in full detail. Gertrude had laughed until the invalid had enveloped herself in the last few shreds of her dignity and ordered her out of the room, and the others had been scarcely more sympathetic. "I know that it's funny, Peter," she said, "but you see, I can't help worrying about it just the same. Of course, as soon as I was up she was just as respectful and obedient to my slightest wish as she ever was, but at the time, when she was lording it over me so, she--she actually slapped me. You never saw such a--blazingly determined little creature." Peter smiled,--gently, as was Peter's way when any friend of his made an appeal to him. "That's all right, Beulah," he said, "don't you let it disturb you for an instant. This manifestation had nothing to do with our experiment. Our experiment is working fine--better than I dreamed it would ever work. What happened to Eleanor, you know, was simply this. Some of the conditions of her experience were recreated suddenly, and she reverted." CHAPTER VI JIMMIE BECOMES A PARENT The entrance into the dining-room of the curly headed young man and his pretty little niece, who had a suite on the eighth floor, as the room clerk informed all inquirers, was always a matter of interest to the residents of the Hotel Winchester. They were an extremely picturesque pair to the eye seeking for romance and color. The child had the pure, clear cut features of the cameo type of New England maidenhood. She was always dressed in some striking combination of blue, deep blue like her eyes, with blue hair ribbons. Her good-looking young relative, with hair almost as near the color of the sun as her own, seemed to be entirely devoted to her, which, considering the charm of the child and the radiant and magnetic spirit of the young man himself, was a delightfully natural manifestation. But one morning near the close of the second week of their stay, the usual radiation of resilient youth was conspicuously absent from the young man's demeanor, and the child's face reflected the gloom that sat so incongruously on the contour of an optimist. The little girl fumbled her menu card, but the waitress--the usual aging pedagogic type of the small residential hotel--stood unnoticed at the young man's elbow for some minutes before he was sufficiently aroused from his gloomy meditations to address her. When he turned to her at last, however, it was with the grin that she had grown to associate with him,--the grin, the absence of which had kept her waiting behind his chair with a patience that she was, except in a case where her affections were involved, entirely incapable of. Jimmie's protestations of inability to make headway with the ladies were not entirely sincere. "Bring me everything on the menu," he said, with a wave of his hand in the direction of that painstaking pasteboard. "Coffee, tea, fruit, marmalade, breakfast food, ham and eggs. Bring my niece here the same. That's all." With another wave of the hand he dismissed her. "You can't eat it all, Uncle Jimmie," Eleanor protested. "I'll make a bet with you," Jimmie declared. "I'll bet you a dollar to a doughnut that if she brings it all, I'll eat it." "Oh! Uncle Jimmie, you know she won't bring it. You never bet so I can get the dollar,--you never do." "I never bet so I can get my doughnut, if it comes to that." "I don't know where to buy any doughnuts," Eleanor said; "besides, Uncle Jimmie, I don't really consider that I owe them. I never really say that I'm betting, and you tell me I've lost before I've made up my mind anything about it." "Speaking of doughnuts," Jimmie said, his face still wearing the look of dejection under a grin worn awry, "can you cook, Eleanor? Can you roast a steak, and saute baked beans, and stew sausages, and fry out a breakfast muffin? Does she look like a cook to you?" he suddenly demanded of the waitress, who was serving him, with an apologetic eye on the menu, the invariable toast-coffee-and-three-minute-egg breakfast that he had eaten every morning since his arrival. The waitress smiled toothily. "She looks like a capable one," she pronounced. "I _can_ cook, Uncle Jimmie," Eleanor giggled, "but not the way you said. You don't roast steak, or--or--" "Don't you?" Jimmie asked with the expression of pained surprise that never failed to make his ward wriggle with delight. There were links in the educational scheme that Jimmie forged better than any of the cooperative guardians. Not even Jimmie realized the value of the giggle as a developing factor in Eleanor's existence. He took three swallows of coffee and frowned into his cup. "I can make coffee," he added. "Good coffee. Well, we may as well look the facts in the face, Eleanor. The jig's up. We're moving away from this elegant hostelry to-morrow." "Are we?" Eleanor asked. "Yes, Kiddo. Apologies to Aunt Beulah (mustn't call you Kiddo) and the reason is, that I'm broke. I haven't got any money at all, Eleanor, and I don't know where I am going to get any. You see, it is this way. I lost my job six weeks ago." "But you go to work every morning, Uncle Jimmie?" "I leave the house, that is. I go looking for work, but so far no nice juicy job has come rolling down into my lap. I haven't told you this before because,--well--when Aunt Beulah comes down every day to give you your lessons I wanted it to look all O. K. I thought if you didn't know, you couldn't forget sometime and tell her." "I don't tattle tale," Eleanor said. "I know you don't, Eleanor. It's only my doggone pride that makes me want to keep up the bluff, but you're a game kid,--you--know. I tried to get you switched off to one of the others till I could get on my feet, but--no, they just thought I had stage fright. I couldn't insist. It would be pretty humiliating to me to admit that I couldn't support one-sixth of a child that I'd given my solemn oath to be-parent." "To--to what?" "Be-parent, if it isn't a word, I invent it. It's awfully tough luck for you, and if you want me to I'll own up to the crowd that I can't swing you, but if you are willing to stick, why, we'll fix up some kind of a way to cut down expenses and bluff it out." Eleanor considered the prospect. Jimmie watched her apparent hesitation with some dismay. "Say the word," he declared, "and I'll tell 'em." "Oh! I don't want you to tell 'em," Eleanor cried. "I was just thinking. If you could get me a place, you know, I could go out to work. You don't eat very much for a man, and I might get my meals thrown in--" "Don't, Eleanor, don't," Jimmie agonized. "I've got a scheme for us all right. This--this embarrassment is only temporary. The day will come when I can provide you with Pol Roge and diamonds. My father is rich, you know, but he swore to me that I couldn't support myself, and I swore to him that I could, and if I don't do it, I'm damned. I am really, and that isn't swearing." "I know it isn't, when you mean it the way they say in the Bible." "I don't want the crowd to know. I don't want Gertrude to know. She hasn't got much idea of me anyway. I'll get another job, if I can only hold out." "I can go to work in a store," Eleanor cried. "I can be one of those little girls in black dresses that runs between counters." "Do you want to break your poor Uncle James' heart, Eleanor,--do you?" "No, Uncle Jimmie." "Then listen to me. I've borrowed a studio, a large barnlike studio on Washington Square, suitably equipped with pots and pans and kettles. Also, I am going to borrow the wherewithal to keep us going. It isn't a bad kind of place if anybody likes it. There's one dinky little bedroom for you and a cot bed for me, choked in bagdad. If you could kind of engineer the cooking end of it, with me to do the dirty work, of course, I think we could be quite snug and cozy." "I know we could, Uncle Jimmie," Eleanor said. "Will Uncle Peter come to see us just the same?" It thus befell that on the fourteenth day of the third month of her residence in New York, Eleanor descended into Bohemia. Having no least suspicion of the real state of affairs--for Jimmie, like most apparently expansive people who are given to rattling nonsense, was actually very reticent about his own business--the other members of the sextette did not hesitate to show their chagrin and disapproval at the change in his manner of living. "The Winchester was an ideal place for Eleanor," Beulah wailed. "It's deadly respectable and middle class, but it was just the kind of atmosphere for her to accustom herself to. She was learning to manage herself so prettily. This morning when I went to the studio--I wanted to get the lessons over early, and take Eleanor to see that exhibition of Bavarian dolls at Kuhner's--I found her washing up a trail of dishes in that closet behind the screen--you've seen it, Gertrude?--like some poor little scullery maid. She said that Jimmie had made an omelet for breakfast. If he'd made fifty omelets there couldn't have been a greater assortment of dirty dishes and kettles." Gertrude smiled. "Jimmie made an omelet for me once for which he used two dozen eggs. He kept breaking them until he found the yolks of a color to suit him. He said pale yolks made poor omelets, so he threw all the pale ones away." "I suppose that you sat by and let him," Beulah said. "You would let Jimmie do anything. You're as bad as Margaret is about David." "Or as bad as you are about Peter." "There we go, just like any silly, brainless girls, whose chief object in life is the--the other sex," Beulah cried inconsistently. "Oh! I hate that kind of thing." "So do I--in theory--" Gertrude answered, a little dreamily. "Where do Jimmie and Eleanor get the rest of their meals?" "I can't seem to find out," Beulah said. "I asked Eleanor point-blank this morning what they had to eat last night and where they had it, and she said, 'That's a secret, Aunt Beulah.' When I asked her why it was a secret and who it was a secret with, she only looked worried, and said she guessed she wouldn't talk about it at all because that was the only way to be safe about tattling. You know what I think--I think Jimmie is taking her around to the cafés and all the shady extravagant restaurants. He thinks it's sport and it keeps him from getting bored with the child." "Well, that's one way of educating the young," Gertrude said, "but I think you are wrong, Beulah." CHAPTER VII ONE DESCENT INTO BOHEMIA "Aunt Beulah does not think that Uncle Jimmie is bringing me up right," Eleanor confided to the pages of her diary. "She comes down here and is very uncomforterble. Well he is bringing me up good, in some ways better than she did. When he swears he always puts out his hand for me to slap him. He had enough to swear of. He can't get any work or earn wages. The advertisement business is on the bum this year becase times are so hard up. The advertisers have to save their money and advertising agents are failing right and left. So poor Uncle Jimmie can't get a place to work at. "The people in the other studios are very neighborly. Uncle Jimmie leaves a sine on the door when he goes out. It says 'Don't Knock.' They don't they come right in and borrow things. Uncle Jimmie says not to have much to do with them, becase they are so queer, but when I am not at home, the ladies come to call on him, and drink Moxie or something. I know becase once I caught them. Uncle Jimmie says I shall not have Behemiar thrust upon me by him, and to keep away from these ladies until I grow up and then see if I like them. Aunt Beulah thinks that Uncle Jimmie takes me around to other studios and I won't tell but he does not take me anywhere except to walk and have ice-cream soda, but I say I don't want it because of saving the ten cents. We cook on an old gas stove that smells. I can't do very good housekeeping becase things are not convenient. I haven't any oven to do a Saturday baking in, and Uncle Jimmie won't let me do the washing. I should feel more as if I earned my keap if I baked beans and made boiled dinners and layer cake, but in New York they don't eat much but hearty food and saluds. It isn't stylish to have cake and pie and pudding all at one meal. Poor Grandpa would starve. He eats pie for his breakfast, but if I told anybody they would laugh. If I wrote Albertina what folks eat in New York she would laugh. "Uncle Jimmie is teaching me to like salud. He laughs when I cut up lettice and put sugar on it. He teaches me to like olives and dried up sausages and sour crought. He says it is important to be edjucated in eating, and everytime we go to the Delicate Essenn store to buy something that will edjucate me better. He teaches me to say 'I beg your pardon,' and 'Polly vous Fransay?' and to courtesy and how to enter a room the way you do in private theatricals. He says it isn't knowing these things so much as knowing when you do them that counts, and then Aunt Beulah complains that I am not being brought up. "I have not seen Uncle Peter for a weak. He said he was going away. I miss him. I would not have to tell him how I was being brought up, and whether I was hitting the white lights as Uncle Jimmie says.--He would know." * * * * * Eleanor did not write Albertina during the time when she was living in the studio. Some curious inversion of pride kept her silent on the subject of the change in her life. Albertina would have turned up her nose at the studio, Eleanor knew. Therefore, she would not so much as address an envelope to that young lady from an interior which she would have beheld with scorn. She held long conversations with Gwendolyn, taking the part of Albertina, on the subject of this snobbishness of attitude. * * * * * "Lots of people in New York have to live in little teny, weeny rooms, Albertina," she would say. "Rents are perfectly awful here. This studio is so big I get tired dusting all the way round it, and even if it isn't furnished very much, why, think how much furnishing would cost, and carpets and gold frames for the pictures! The pictures that are in here already, without any frames, would sell for hundreds of dollars apiece if the painter could get anybody to buy them. You ought to be very thankful for such a place, Albertina, instead of feeling so stuck up that you pick up your skirts from it." * * * * * But Albertina's superiority of mind was impregnable. Her spirit sat in judgment on all the conditions of Eleanor's new environment. She seemed to criticize everything. She hated the nicked, dun colored dishes they ate from, and the black bottomed pots and pans that all the energy of Eleanor's energetic little elbow could not restore to decency again. She hated the cracked, dun colored walls, and the mottled floor that no amount of sweeping and dusting seemed to make an impression on. She hated the compromise of housekeeping in an attic,--she who had been bred in an atmosphere of shining nickle-plated ranges and linoleum, where even the kitchen pump gleamed brightly under its annual coat of good green paint. She hated the compromise, that was the burden of her complaint--either in the person of Albertina or Gwendolyn, whether she lay in the crook of Eleanor's arm in the lumpy bed where she reposed at the end of the day's labor, or whether she sat bolt upright on the lumpy cot in the studio, the broken bisque arm, which Jimmie insisted on her wearing in a sling whenever he was present, dangling limply at her side in the relaxation Eleanor preferred for it. The fact of not having adequate opportunity to keep her house in order troubled the child, for her days were zealously planned by her enthusiastic guardians. Beulah came at ten o'clock every morning to give her lessons. As Jimmie's quest for work grew into a more and more disheartening adventure, she had difficulty in getting him out of bed in time to prepare and clear away the breakfast for Beulah's arrival. After lunch, to which Jimmie scrupulously came home, she was supposed to work an hour at her modeling clay. Gertrude, who was doing very promising work at the art league, came to the studio twice a week to give her instruction in handling it. Later in the afternoon one of the aunts or uncles usually appeared with some scheme to divert her. Margaret was telling her the stories of the Shakespeare plays, and David was trying to make a card player of her, but was not succeeding as well as if Albertina had not been brought up a hard shell Baptist, who thought card playing a device of the devil's. Peter alone did not come, for even when he was in town he was busy in the afternoon. As soon as her guests were gone, Eleanor hurried through such housewifely tasks as were possible of accomplishment at that hour, but the strain was telling on her. Jimmie began to realize this and it added to his own distress. One night to save her the labor of preparing the meal, he took her to an Italian restaurant in the neighborhood where the food was honest and palatable, and the service at least deft and clean. Eleanor enjoyed the experience extremely, until an incident occurred which robbed her evening of its sweetness and plunged her into the purgatory of the child who has inadvertently broken one of its own laws. Among the belongings in the carpetbag, which was no more--having been supplanted by a smart little suit-case marked with her initials--was a certificate from the Massachusetts Total Abstinence Society, duly signed by herself, and witnessed by the grammar-school teacher and the secretary of the organization. On this certificate (which was decorated by many presentations in dim black and white of mid-Victorian domestic life, and surmounted by a collection of scalloped clouds in which drifted three amateur looking angels amid a crowd of more professional cherubim) Eleanor had pledged herself to abstain from the use as a beverage of all intoxicating drinks, and from the manufacture or traffic in them. She had also subscribed herself as willing to make direct and persevering efforts to extend the principles and blessings of total abstinence. "Red ink, Andrea," her Uncle Jimmie had demanded, as the black-eyed waiter bent over him, "and ginger ale for the offspring." Eleanor giggled. It was fun to be with Uncle Jimmie in a restaurant again. He always called for something new and unexpected when he spoke of her to the waiter, and he was always what Albertina would consider "very comical" when he talked to him. "But stay," he added holding up an admonitory finger, "I think we'll give the little one _eau rougie_ this time. Wouldn't you like _eau rougie_, tinted water, Eleanor, the way the French children drink it?" Unsuspectingly she sipped the mixture of water and ice and sugar, and "red ink" from the big brown glass bottle that the glowing waiter set before them. As the meal progressed Jimmie told her that the grated cheese was sawdust and almost made her believe it. He showed her how to eat spaghetti without cutting it and pointed out to her various Italian examples of his object lesson; but she soon realized that in spite of his efforts to entertain her, he was really very unhappy. "I've borrowed all the money I can, Angelface," he confessed finally. "Tomorrow's the last day of grace. If I don't land that job at the Perkins agency I'll have to give in and tell Peter and David, or wire Dad." "You could get some other kind of a job," Eleanor said; "plumbing or clerking or something." On Cape Cod the plumber and the grocer's clerk lost no caste because of their calling. "Couldn't you?" "I _could_ so demean myself, and I will. I'll be a chauffeur, I can run a car all right; but the fact remains that by to-morrow something's got to happen, or I've got to own up to the bunch." Eleanor's heart sank. She tried hard to think of something to comfort him but she could not. Jimmie mixed her more _eau rougie_ and she drank it. He poured a full glass, undiluted, for himself, and held it up to the light. "Well, here's to crime, daughter," he said. "Long may it wave, and us with it." "That isn't really red ink, is it?" she asked. "It's an awfully pretty color--like grape juice." "It is grape juice, my child, if we don't inquire too closely into the matter. The Italians are like the French in the guide book, 'fond of dancing and light wines.' This is one of the light wines they are fond of.--Hello, do you feel sick, child? You're white as a ghost. It's the air. As soon as I can get hold of that sacrificed waiter we'll get out of here." Eleanor's sickness was of the spirit, but at the moment she was incapable of telling him so, incapable of any sort of speech. A great wave of faintness encompassed her. She had broken her pledge. She had lightly encouraged a departure from the blessings and principles of total abstinence. That night in her bed she made a long and impassioned apology to her Maker for the sin of intemperance into which she had been so unwittingly betrayed. She promised Him that she would never drink anything that came out of a bottle again. She reviewed sorrowfully her many arguments with Albertina--Albertina in the flesh that is--on the subject of bottled drinks in general, and decided that again that virtuous child was right in her condemnation of any drink, however harmless in appearance or nomenclature, that bore the stigma of a bottled label. She knew, however, that something more than a prayer for forgiveness was required of her. She was pledged to protest against the evil that she had seemingly countenanced. She could not seek the sleep of the innocent until that reparation was made. Through the crack of her sagging door she saw the light from Jimmie's reading lamp and knew that he was still dressed, or clothed at least, with a sufficient regard for the conventionalities to permit her intrusion. She rose and rebraided her hair and tied a daytime ribbon on it. Then she put on her stockings and her blue Japanese kimono--real Japanese, as Aunt Beulah explained, made for a Japanese lady of quality--and made her way into the studio. Jimmie was not sitting in the one comfortable studio chair with his book under the light and his feet on the bamboo tea table as usual. He was not sitting up at all. He was flung on the couch with his face buried in the cushions, and his shoulders were shaking. Eleanor seeing him thus, forgot her righteous purpose, forgot her pledge to disseminate the principles and blessings of abstinence, forgot everything but the pitiful spectacle of her gallant Uncle Jimmie in grief. She stood looking down at him without quite the courage to kneel at his side to give him comfort. "Uncle Jimmie," she said, "Uncle Jimmie." At the sound of her voice he put out his hand to her, gropingly, but he did not uncover his face or shift his position. She found herself smoothing his hair, gingerly at first, but with more and more conviction as he snuggled his boyish head closer. "I'm awfully discouraged," he said in a weak muffled voice. "I'm sorry you caught me at it, Baby." Eleanor put her face down close to his as he turned it to her. "Everything will be all right," she promised him, "everything will be all right. You'll soon get a job--tomorrow maybe." Then she gathered him close in her angular, tense little arms and held him there tightly. "Everything will be all right," she repeated soothingly; "now you just put your head here, and have your cry out." CHAPTER VIII THE TEN HUTCHINSONS "My Aunt Margaret has a great many people living in her family," Eleanor wrote to Albertina from her new address on Morningside Heights. "She has a mother and a father, and two (2) grandparents, one (1) aunt, one (1) brother, one (1) married lady and the boy of the lady, I think the married lady is a sister but I do not ask any one, oh--and another brother, who does not live here only on Saturdays and Sundays. Aunt Margaret makes ten, and they have a man to wait on the table. His name is a butler. I guess you have read about them in stories. I am taken right in to be one of the family, and I have a good time every day now. Aunt Margaret's father is a college teacher, and Aunt Margaret's grandfather looks like the father of his country. You know who I mean George Washington. They have a piano here that plays itself like a sewing machine. They let me do it. They have after-dinner coffee and gold spoons to it. I guess you would like to see a gold spoon. I did. They are about the size of the tin spoons we had in our playhouse. I have a lot of fun with that boy too. At first I thought he was very affected, but that is just the way they teach him to talk. He is nine and plays tricks on other people. He dares me to do things that I don't do, like go down-stairs and steal sugar. If Aunt Margaret's mother was my grandma I might steal sugar or plum cake. I don't know. Remember the time we took your mother's hermits? I do. I would like to see you. You would think this house was quite a grand house. It has three (3) flights of stairs and one basement. I sleep on the top floor in a dressing room out of Aunt Margaret's only it isn't a dressing room. I dress there but no one else can. Aunt Margaret is pretty and sings lovely. Uncle David comes here a lot. I must close. With love and kisses." * * * * * In her diary she recorded some of the more intimate facts of her new existence, such facts as she instinctively guarded from Albertina's calculating sense. * * * * * "Everybody makes fun of me here. I don't care if they do, but I can't eat so much at the table when every one is laughing at me. They get me to talking and then they laugh. If I could see anything to laugh at, I would laugh too. They laugh in a refined way but they laugh. They call me Margaret's protegay. They are good to me too. They say to my face that I am like a merry wilkins story and too good to be true, and New England projuces lots of real art, and I am art, I can't remember all the things, but I guess they mean well. Aunt Margaret's grandfather sits at the head of the table, and talks about things I never heard of before. He knows the govoner and does not like the way he parts his hair. I thought all govoners did what they wanted to with their hairs or anything and people had to like it because (I used to spell because wrong but I spell better now) they was the govoners, but it seems not at all. "Aunt Margaret is lovely to me. We have good times. I meant to like Aunt Beulah the best because she has done the most for me but I am afrayd I don't. I would not cross my heart and say so. Aunt Margaret gives me the lessons now. I guess I learn most as much as I learned I mean was taught of Aunt Beulah. Oh dear sometimes I get descouraged on account of its being such a funny world and so many diferent people in it. And so many diferent feelings. I was afrayd of the hired butler, but I am not now." * * * * * Eleanor had not made a direct change from the Washington Square studio to the ample house of the Hutchinsons, and it was as well for her that a change in Jimmie's fortunes had taken her back to the Winchester and enabled her to accustom herself again to the amenities of gentler living. Like all sensitive and impressionable children she took on the color of a new environment very quickly. The strain of her studio experience had left her a little cowed and unsure of herself, but she had brightened up like a flower set in the cheerful surroundings of the Winchester and under the influence of Jimmie's restored spirits. The change had come about on Jimmie's "last day of grace." He had secured the coveted position at the Perkins agency at a slight advance over the salary he had received at the old place. He had left Eleanor in the morning determined to face becomingly the disappointment that was in store for him, and to accept the bitter necessity of admitting his failure to his friends. He had come back in the late afternoon with his fortunes restored, the long weeks of humiliation wiped out, and his life back again on its old confident and inspired footing. He had burst into the studio with his news before he understood that Eleanor was not alone, and inadvertently shared the secret with Gertrude, who had been waiting for him with the kettle alight and some wonderful cakes from "Henri's" spread out on the tea table. The three had celebrated by dining together at a festive down-town hotel and going back to his studio for coffee. At parting they had solemnly and severally kissed one another. Eleanor lay awake in the dark for a long time that night softly rubbing the cheek that had been so caressed, and rejoicing that the drink Uncle Jimmie had called a high-ball and had pledged their health with so assiduously, had come out of two glasses instead of a bottle. Her life at the Hutchinsons' was almost like a life on another planet. Margaret was the younger, somewhat delicate daughter of a family of rather strident academics. Professor Hutchinson was not dependent on his salary to defray the expenses of his elegant establishment, but on his father, who had inherited from his father in turn the substantial fortune on which the family was founded. Margaret was really a child of the fairies, but she was considerably more fortunate in her choice of a foster family than is usually the fate of the foundling. The rigorous altitude of intellect in which she was reared served as a corrective to the oversensitive quality of her imagination. Eleanor, who in the more leisurely moments of her life was given to visitations from the poetic muse, was inspired to inscribe some lines to her on one of the pink pages of the private diary. They ran as follows, and even Professor Hutchinson, who occupied the chair of English in that urban community of learning that so curiously bisects the neighborhood of Harlem, could not have designated Eleanor's description of his daughter as one that did not describe. "Aunt Margaret is fair and kind, And very good and tender. She has a very active mind. Her figure is quite slender. "She moves around the room with grace, Her hands she puts with quickness. Although she wears upon her face The shadow of a sickness." It was this "shadow of a sickness," that served to segregate Margaret to the extent that was really necessary for her well being. To have shared perpetually in the almost superhuman activities of the family might have forever dulled that delicate spirit to which Eleanor came to owe so much in the various stages of her development. Margaret put her arm about the child after the ordeal of the first dinner at the big table. "Father does not bite," she said, "but Grandfather does. The others are quite harmless. If Grandfather shows his teeth, run for your life." "I don't know where to run to," Eleanor answered seriously, whereupon Margaret hugged her. Her Aunt Margaret would have been puzzling to Eleanor beyond any hope of extrication, but for the quick imagination that unwound her riddles almost as she presented them. For one terrible minute Eleanor had believed that Hugh Hutchinson senior did bite, he looked so much like some of the worst of the pictures in Little Red Riding Hood. "While you are here I'm going to pretend you're my very own child," Margaret told Eleanor that first evening, "and we'll never, never tell anybody all the foolish games we play and the things we say to each other. I can just barely manage to be grown up in the bosom of my family, and when I am in the company of your esteemed Aunt Beulah, but up here in my room, Eleanor, I am never grown up. I play with dolls." "Oh! do you really?" "I really do," Margaret said. She opened a funny old chest in the corner of the spacious, high studded chamber. "And here are some of the dolls that I play with." She produced a manikin dressed primly after the manner of eighteen-thirty, prim parted hair over a small head festooned with ringlets, a fichu, and mits painted on her fingers. "Beulah," she said with a mischievous flash of a grimace at Eleanor. "Gertrude,"--a dashing young brunette in riding clothes. "Jimmie,"--a curly haired dandy. "David,"--a serious creature with a monocle. "I couldn't find Peter," she said, "but we'll make him some day out of cotton and water colors." "Oh! can you make dolls?" Eleanor cried in delight, "real dolls with hair and different colored eyes?" "I can make pretty good ones," Margaret smiled; "manikins like these,--a Frenchwoman taught me." "Oh; did she? And do you play that the dolls talk to each other as if they was--were the persons?" "Do I?" Margaret assembled the four manikins into a smart little group. The doll Beulah rose,--on her forefinger. "I can't help feeling," mimicked Margaret in a perfect reproduction of Beulah's earnest contralto, "that we're wasting our lives,--criminally dissipating our forces." The doll Gertrude put up both hands. "I want to laugh," she cried, "won't everybody please stop talking till I've had my laugh out. Thank you, thank you." "Why, that's just like Aunt Gertrude," Eleanor said. "Her voice has that kind of a sound like a bell, only more ripply." "Don't be high-brow," Jimmie's lazy baritone besought with the slight burring of the "r's" that Eleanor found so irresistible. "I'm only a poor hard-working, business man." The doll David took the floor deliberately. "We intend to devote the rest of our lives," he said, "to the care of our beloved cooperative orphan." On that he made a rather over mannered exit, Margaret planting each foot down deliberately until she flung him back in his box. "That's the kind of a silly your Aunt Margaret is," she continued, "but you mustn't ever tell anybody, Eleanor." She clasped the child again in one of her warm, sudden embraces, and Eleanor squeezing her shyly in return was altogether enraptured with her new existence. "But there isn't any doll for _you_, Aunt Margaret," she cried. "Oh! yes, there is, but I wasn't going to show her to you unless you asked, because she's so nice. I saved the prettiest one of all to be myself, not because I believe I'm so beautiful, but--but only because I'd like to be, Eleanor." "I always pretend I'm a princess," Eleanor admitted. The Aunt Margaret doll was truly a beautiful creation, a little more like Marie Antoinette than her namesake, but bearing a not inconsiderable resemblance to both, as Margaret pointed out, judicially analyzing her features. Eleanor played with the rabbit doll only at night after this. In the daytime she looked rather battered and ugly to eyes accustomed to the delicate finish of creatures like the French manikins, but after she was tucked away in her cot in the passion flower dressing-room--all of Margaret's belongings and decorations were a faint, pinky lavender,--her dear daughter Gwendolyn, who impersonated Albertina at increasingly rare intervals as time advanced, lay in the hollow of her arm and received her sacred confidences and ministrations as usual. * * * * * "When my two (2) months are up here I think I should be quite sorry," she wrote in the diary, "except that I'm going to Uncle Peter next, and him I would lay me down and dee for, only I never get time enough to see him, and know if he wants me to, when I live with him I shall know. Well life is very exciting all the time now. Aunt Margaret brings me up this way. She tells me that she loves me and that I've got beautiful eyes and hair and am sweet. She tells me that all the time. She says she wants to love me up enough to last because I never had love enough before. I like to be loved. Albertina never loves any one, but on Cape Cod nobody loves anybody--not to say so anyway. If a man is getting married they say he _likes_ that girl he is going to marry. In New York they act as different as they eat. The Hutchinsons act different from anybody. They do not know Aunt Margaret has adoptid me. Nobody knows I am adoptid but me and my aunts and uncles. Miss Prentis and Aunt Beulah's mother when she came home and all the bohemiar ladies and all the ten Hutchinsons think I am a little visiting girl from the country. It is nobody's business because I am supported out of allowances and salaries, but it makes me feel queer sometimes. I feel like "'Where did you come from, baby dear, Out of the nowhere unto the here?' Also I made this up out of home sweet home. "'Pleasures and palaces where e'er I may roam, Be it ever so humble I wish I had a home.' "I like having six homes, but I wish everybody knew it. I am nothing to be ashamed of. Speaking of homes I asked Aunt Margaret why my aunts and uncles did not marry each other and make it easier for every one. She said they were not going to get married. That was why they adoptid me. 'Am I the same thing as getting married?' I ast. She said no, I wasn't except that I was a responsibility to keep them unselfish and real. Aunt Beulah doesn't believe in marriage. She thinks its beneth her. Aunt Margaret doesn't think she has the health. Aunt Gertrude has to have a career of sculpture, Uncle David has got to marry some one his mother says to or not at all, and does not like to marry anyway. Uncle Jimmie never saw a happy mariage yet and thinks you have a beter time in single blesedness. Uncle Peter did not sign in the book where they said they would adopt me and not marry. They did not want to ask him because he had some trouble once. I wonder what kind! Well I am going to be married sometime. I want a house to do the housework in and a husband and a backyard full of babies. Perhaps I would rather have a hired butler and gold spoons. I don't know yet. Of course I would like to have time to write poetry. I can sculpture too, but I don't want a career of it because it's so dirty." * * * * * Physically Eleanor throve exceedingly during this phase of her existence. The nourishing food and regular living, the sympathy established between herself and Margaret, the régime of physical exercise prescribed by Beulah which she had been obliged guiltily to disregard during the strenuous days of her existence in Washington Square, all contributed to the accentuation of her material well-being. She played with Margaret's nephew, and ran up and down stairs on errands for her mother. She listened to the tales related for her benefit by the old people, and gravely accepted the attentions of the two formidable young men of the family, who entertained her with the pianola and excerpts from classic literature and folk lore. * * * * * "The We Are Sevens meet every Saturday afternoon," she wrote--on a yellow page this time--"usually at Aunt Beulah's house. We have tea and lots of fun. I am examined on what I have learned but I don't mind it much. Physically I am found to be very good by measure and waite. My mind is developing alright. I am very bright on the subject of poetry. They do not know whether David Copperfield had been a wise choice for me, but when I told them the story and talked about it they said I had took it right. I don't tell them about the love part of Aunt Margaret's bringing up. Aunt Beulah says it would make me self conscioush to know that I had such pretty eyes and hair. Aunt Gertrude said 'why not mention my teeth to me, then,' but no one seemed to think so. Aunt Beulah says not to develope my poetry because the theory is to strengthen the weak part of the bridge, and make me do arithmetic. 'Drill on the deficiency,' she says. Well I should think the love part was a deficiency, but Aunt Beulah thinks love is weak and beneath her and any one. Uncle David told me privately that he thought I was having the best that could happen to me right now being with Aunt Margaret. I didn't tell him that the David doll always gets put away in the box with the Aunt Margaret doll and nobody else ever, but I should like to have. He thinks she is the best aunt too." * * * * * Some weeks later she wrote to chronicle a painful scene in which she had participated. * * * * * "I quarreled with the ten Hutchinsons. I am very sorry. They laughed at me too much for being a little girl and a Cape Codder, but they could if they wanted to, but when they laughed at Aunt Margaret for adopting me and the tears came in her eyes I could not bare it. I did not let the cat out of the bag, but I made it jump out. The Grandfather asked me when I was going back to Cape Cod, and I said I hoped never, and then I said I was going to visit Uncle Peter and Aunt Gertrude and Uncle David next. They said 'Uncle David--do you mean David Bolling?' and I did, so I said 'yes.' Then all the Hutchinsons pitched into Aunt Margaret and kept laughing and saying, 'Who is this mysterious child anyway, and how is it that her guardians intrust her to a crowd of scatter brain youngsters for so long?' and then they said 'Uncle David Bolling--_what_ does his mother say?' Then Aunt Margaret got very red in the face and the tears started to come, and I said 'I am not a mysterious child, and my Uncle David is as much my Uncle David as they all are,' and then I said 'My Aunt Margaret has got a perfect right to have me intrusted to her at any time, and not to be laughed at for it,' and I went and stood in front of her and gave her my handkercheve. "Well I am glad somebody has been told that I am properly adoptid, but I am sorry it is the ten Hutchinsons who know." CHAPTER IX PETER Uncle Peter treated her as if she were grown up; that was the wonderful thing about her visit to him,--if there could be one thing about it more wonderful than another. From the moment when he ushered her into his friendly, low ceiled drawing-room with its tiers upon tiers of book shelves, he admitted her on terms of equality to the miraculous order of existence that it was the privilege of her life to share. The pink silk coverlet and the elegance of the silver coated steampipes at Beulah's; the implacable British stuffiness at the Winchester which had had its own stolid charm for the lineal descendant of the Pilgrim fathers; the impressively casual atmosphere over which the "hired butler" presided distributing after-dinner gold spoons, these impressions all dwindled and diminished and took their insignificant place in the background of the romance she was living and breathing in Peter's jewel box of an apartment on Thirtieth Street. Even to more sophisticated eyes than Eleanor's the place seemed to be a realized ideal of charm and homeliness. It was one of the older fashioned duplex apartments designed in a more aristocratic decade for a more fastidious generation, yet sufficiently adapted to the modern insistence on technical convenience. Peter owed his home to his married sister, who had discovered it and leased it and settled it and suddenly departed for a five years' residence in China with her husband, who was as she so often described him, "a blooming Englishman, and an itinerant banker." Peter's domestic affairs were despatched by a large, motherly Irishwoman, whom Eleanor approved of on sight and later came to respect and adore without reservation. Peter's home was a home with a place in it for her--a place that it was perfectly evident was better with her than without her. She even slept in the bed that Peter's sister's little girl had occupied, and there were pictures on the walls that had been selected for her. She had been very glad to make her escape from the Hutchinson household. Her "quarrel" with them had made no difference in their relation to her. To her surprise they treated her with an increase of deference after her outburst, and every member of the family, excepting possibly Hugh Hutchinson senior, was much more carefully polite to her. Margaret explained that the family really didn't mind having their daughter a party to the experiment of cooperative parenthood. It appealed to them as a very interesting try-out of modern educational theory, and their own theories of the independence of the individual modified their criticism of Margaret's secrecy in the matter, which was the only criticism they had to make since Margaret had an income of her own accruing from the estate of the aunt for whom she had been named. "It is very silly of me to be sensitive about being laughed at," Margaret concluded. "I've lived all my life surrounded by people suffering from an acute sense of humor, but I never, never, never shall get used to being held up to ridicule for things that are not funny to me." "I shouldn't think you would," Eleanor answered devoutly. In Peter's house there was no one to laugh at her but Peter, and when Peter laughed she considered it a triumph. It meant that there was something she said that he liked. The welcome she had received as a guest in his house and the wonderful evening that succeeded it were among the epoch making hours in Eleanor's life. It had happened in this wise. The Hutchinson victoria, for Grandmother Hutchinson still clung to the old-time, stately method of getting about the streets of New York, had left her at Peter's door at six o'clock of a keen, cool May evening. Margaret had not been well enough to come with her, having been prostrated by one of the headaches of which she was a frequent victim. The low door of ivory white, beautifully carved and paneled, with its mammoth brass knocker, the row of window boxes along the cornice a few feet above it, the very look of the house was an experience and an adventure to her. When she rang, the door opened almost instantly revealing Peter on the threshold with his arms open. He had led her up two short flights of stairs--ivory white with carved banisters, she noticed, all as immaculately shining with soap and water as a Cape Cod interior--to his own gracious drawing-room where Mrs. Finnigan was bowing and smiling a warmhearted Irish welcome to her. It was like a wonderful story in a book and her eyes were shining with joy as Uncle Peter pulled out her chair and she sat down to the first meal in her honor. The grown up box of candy at her plate, the grave air with which Peter consulted her tastes and her preferences were all a part of a beautiful magic that had never quite touched her before. She had been like a little girl in a dream passing dutifully or delightedly through the required phases of her experience, never quite believing in its permanence or reality; but her life with Uncle Peter was going to be real, and her own. That was what she felt the moment she stepped over his threshold. After their coffee before the open fire--she herself had had "cambric" coffee--Peter smoked his cigar, while she curled up in silence in the twin to his big cushioned chair and sampled her chocolates. The blue flames skimmed the bed of black coals, and finally settled steadily at work on them nibbling and sputtering until the whole grate was like a basket full of molten light, glowing and golden as the hot sun when it sinks into the sea. Except to offer her the ring about his slender Panatela, and to ask her if she were happy, Peter did not speak until he had deliberately crushed out the last spark from his stub and thrown it into the fire. The ceremony over, he held out his arms to her and she slipped into them as if that moment were the one she had been waiting for ever since the white morning looked into the window of the lavender dressing-room on Morningside Heights, and found her awake and quite cold with the excitement of thinking of what the day was to bring forth. "Eleanor," Peter said, when he was sure she was comfortably arranged with her head on his shoulder, "Eleanor, I want you to feel at home while you are here, really at home, as if you hadn't any other home, and you and I belonged to each other. I'm almost too young to be your father, but--" "Oh! are you?" Eleanor asked fervently, as he paused. "--But I can come pretty near feeling like a father to you if it's a father you want. I lost my own father when I was a little older than you are now, but I had my dear mother and sister left, and so I don't know what it's like to be all alone in the world, and I can't always understand exactly how you feel, but you must always remember that I want to understand and that I will understand if you tell me. Will you remember that, Eleanor?" "Yes, Uncle Peter," she said soberly; then perhaps for the first time since her babyhood she volunteered a caress that was not purely maternal in its nature. She put up a shy hand to the cheek so close to her own and patted it earnestly. "Of course I've got my grandfather and grandmother," she argued, "but they're very old, and not very affectionate, either. Then I have all these new aunts and uncles pretending," she was penetrating to the core of the matter, Peter realized, "that they're just as good as parents. Of course, they're just as good as they can be and they take so much trouble that it mortifies me, but it isn't just the same thing, Uncle Peter!" "I know," Peter said, "I know, dear, but you must remember we mean well." "I don't mean you; it isn't you that I think of when I think about my co--co-woperative parents, and it isn't any of them specially,--it's just the idea of--of visiting around, and being laughed at, and not really belonging to anybody." Peter's arms tightened about her. "Oh! but you do belong, you do belong. You belong to me, Eleanor." "That was what I hoped you would say, Uncle Peter," she whispered. They had a long talk after this, discussing the past and the future; the past few months of the experiment from Eleanor's point of view, and the future in relation to its failures and successes. Beulah was to begin giving her lessons again and she was to take up music with a visiting teacher on Peter's piano. (Eleanor had not known it was a piano at first, as she had never seen a baby grand before. Peter did not know what a triumph it was when she made herself put the question to him.) "If my Aunt Beulah could teach me as much as she does and make it as interesting as Aunt Margaret does, I think I would make her feel very proud of me," Eleanor said. "I get so nervous saving energy the way Aunt Beulah says for me to that I forget all the lesson. Aunt Margaret tells too many stories, I guess, but I like them." "Your Aunt Margaret is a child of God," Peter said devoutly, "in spite of her raw-boned, intellectual family." "Uncle David says she's a daughter of the fairies." "She's that, too. When Margaret's a year or two older you won't feel the need of a mother." "I don't now," said Eleanor; "only a father,--that I want you to be, the way you promised." "That's done," Peter said. Then he continued musingly, "You'll find Gertrude--different. I can't quite imagine her presiding over your moral welfare but I think she'll be good at it. She's a good deal of a person, you know." "Aunt Beulah's a good kind of person, too," Eleanor said; "she tries hard. The only thing is that she keeps trying to make me express myself, and I don't know what that means." "Let me see if I can tell you," said Peter. "Self-expression is a part of every man's duty. Inside we are all trying to be good and true and fine--" "Except the villains," Eleanor interposed. "People like Iago aren't trying." "Well, we'll make an exception of the villains; we're talking of people like us, pretty good people with the right instincts. Well then, if all the time we're trying to be good and true and fine, we carry about a blank face that reflects nothing of what we are feeling and thinking, the world is a little worse off, a little duller and heavier place for what is going on inside of us." "Well, how can we make it better off then?" Eleanor inquired practically. "By not thinking too much about it for one thing, except to remember to smile, by trying to be just as much at home in it as possible, by letting the kind of person we are trying to be show through on the outside. By gosh! I wish Beulah could hear me." "By just not being bashful, do you mean?" "That's the idea." "Well, when Aunt Beulah makes me do those dancing exercises, standing up in the middle of the floor and telling me to be a flower and express myself as a flower, does she just mean not to be bashful?" "Something like that: she means stop thinking of yourself and go ahead--" "But how can I go ahead with her sitting there watching?" "I suppose I ought to tell you to imagine that you had the soul of a flower, but I haven't the nerve." "You've got nerve enough to do anything," Eleanor assured him, but she meant it admiringly, and seriously. "I haven't the nerve to go on with a moral conversation in which you are getting the better of me at every turn," Peter laughed. "I'm sure it's unintentional, but you make me feel like a good deal of an ass, Eleanor." "That means a donkey, doesn't it?" "It does, and by jove, I believe that you're glad of it." "I do rather like it," said Eleanor; "of course you don't really feel like a donkey to me. I mean I don't make you feel like one, but it's funny just pretending that you mean it." "Oh! woman, woman," Peter cried. "Beulah tried to convey something of the fact that you always got the better of every one in your modest unassuming way, but I never quite believed it before. At any rate it's bedtime, and here comes Mrs. Finnigan to put you to bed. Kiss me good night, sweetheart." Eleanor flung her arms about his neck, in her first moment of abandonment to actual emotional self-expression if Peter had only known it. "I will never really get the better of you in my life, Uncle Peter," she promised him passionately. CHAPTER X THE OMNISCIENT FOCUS One of the traditional prerogatives of an Omnipotent Power is to look down at the activities of earth at any given moment and ascertain simultaneously the occupation of any number of people. Thus the Arch Creator--that Being of the Supreme Artistic Consciousness--is able to peer into segregated interiors at His own discretion and watch the plot thicken and the drama develop. Eleanor, who often visualized this proceeding, always imagined a huge finger projecting into space, cautiously tilting the roofs of the Houses of Man to allow the sweep of the Invisible Glance. Granting the hypothesis of the Divine privilege, and assuming for the purposes of this narrative the Omniscient focus on the characters most concerned in it, let us for the time being look over the shoulder of God and inform ourselves of their various occupations and preoccupations of a Saturday afternoon in late June during the hour before dinner. Eleanor, in her little white chamber on Thirtieth Street, was engaged in making a pink and green toothbrush case for a going-away gift for her Uncle Peter. To be sure she was going away with him when he started for the Long Island beach hotel from which he proposed to return every day to his office in the city, but she felt that a slight token of her affection would be fitting and proper on the eve of their joint departure. She was hurrying to get it done that she might steal softly into the dining-room and put it on his plate undetected. Her eyes were very wide, her brow intent and serious, and her delicate lips lightly parted. At that moment she bore a striking resemblance to the Botticelli head in Beulah's drawing-room that she had so greatly admired. Of all the people concerned in her history, she was the most tranquilly occupied. Peter in the room beyond was packing his trunk and his suit-case. At this precise stage of his proceedings he was trying to make two decisions, equally difficult, but concerned with widely different departments of his consciousness. He was gravely considering whether or not to include among his effects the photograph before him on the dressing-table--that of the girl to whom he had been engaged from the time he was a Princeton sophomore until her death four years later--and also whether or not it would be worth his while to order a new suit of white flannels so late in the season. The fact that he finally decided against the photograph and in favor of the white flannels has nothing to do with the relative importance of the two matters thus engrossing him. The health of the human mind depends largely on its ability to assemble its irrelevant and incongruous problems in dignified yet informal proximity. When he went to his desk it was with the double intention of addressing a letter to his tailor, and locking the cherished photograph in a drawer; but, the letter finished, he still held the picture in his hand and gazed down at it mutely and when the discreet knock on his door that constituted the announcing of dinner came, he was still sitting motionless with the photograph propped up before him. Up-town, Beulah, whose dinner hour came late, was rather more actively, though possibly not more significantly, occupied. She was doing her best to evade the wild onslaught of a young man in glasses who had been wanting to marry her for a considerable period, and had now broken all bounds in a cumulative attempt to inform her of the fact. Though he was assuredly in no condition to listen to reason, Beulah was reasoning with him, kindly and philosophically, paying earnest attention to the style and structure of her remarks as she did so. Her emotions, as is usual on such occasions, were decidedly mixed. She was conscious of a very real dismay at her unresponsiveness, a distress for the acute pain from which the distraught young man seemed to be suffering, and the thrill, which had she only known it, is the unfailing accompaniment to the first eligible proposal of marriage. In the back of her brain there was also, so strangely is the human mind constituted, a kind of relief at being able to use mature logic once more, instead of the dilute form of moral dissertation with which she tried to adapt herself to Eleanor's understanding. "I never intend to marry any one," she was explaining gently. "I not only never intend to, but I am pledged in a way that I consider irrevocably binding never to marry,"--and that was the text from which all the rest of her discourse developed. Jimmie, equally bound by the oath of celibacy, but not equally constrained by it apparently, was at the very moment when Beulah was so successfully repulsing the familiarity of the high cheek-boned young man in the black and white striped tie, occupied in encouraging a familiarity of a like nature. That is, he was holding the hand of a young woman in the darkened corner of a drawing-room which had been entirely unfamiliar to him ten days before, and was about to impress a caress on lips that seemed to be ready to meet his with a certain degree of accustomed responsiveness. That this was not a peculiarly significant incident in Jimmie's career might have been difficult to explain, at least to the feminine portion of the group of friends he cared most for. Margaret, dressed for an academic dinner party, in white net with a girdle of pale pink and lavender ribbons, had flung herself face downward on her bed in reckless disregard of her finery; and because it was hot and she was homesick for green fields and the cool stretches of dim wooded country, had transported herself in fancy and still in her recumbent attitude to the floor of a canoe that was drifting down-stream between lush banks of meadow grass studded with marsh lilies. After some interval--and shift of position--the way was arched overhead with whispering trees, the stars came out one by one, showing faintly between waving branches; and she perceived dimly that a figure that was vaguely compounded of David and Peter and the handsomest of all the young kings of Spain, had quietly taken its place in the bow and had busied itself with the paddles,--whereupon she was summoned to dinner, where the ten Hutchinsons and their guests were awaiting her. David, the only member of the group whose summer vacation had actually begun, was sitting on the broad veranda of an exclusive country club several hundreds of miles away from New York and looking soberly into the eyes of a blue ribbon bull dog, whose heavy jowl rested on his knees. His mother, in one of the most fashionable versions of the season's foulards, sleekly corseted and coifed, was sitting less than a hundred yards away from him, fanning herself with three inches of hand woven fan and contemplating David. In the dressing-room above, just alighted from a limousine de luxe, was a raven-haired, crafty-eyed ingénue (whose presence David did not suspect or he would have recollected a sudden pressing engagement out of her vicinity), preening herself for conquest. David's mind, unlike the minds of the "other gifted members of the We Are Seven Club," to quote Jimmie's most frequent way of referring to them, was to all intents and purposes a total blank. He answered monosyllabically his mother's questions, patted the dog's beetling forehead and thought of nothing at all for practically forty-five minutes. Then he rose, and offering his arm to his mother led her gravely to the table reserved for him in the dining-room. Gertrude, in her studio at the top of the house in Fifty-sixth Street where she lived with her parents, was putting the finishing touches on a faun's head; and a little because she had unconsciously used Jimmie's head for her model, and a little because of her conscious realization at this moment that the roughly indicated curls over the brow were like nobody's in the world but Jimmie's, she was thinking of him seriously. She was thinking also of the dinner on a tray that would presently be brought up to her, since her mother and father were out of town, and of her coming two months with Eleanor and her recent inspiration concerning them. In Colhassett, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, the dinner hour and even the supper hour were long past. In the commodious kitchen of Eleanor's former home two old people were sitting in calico valanced rockers, one by either window. The house was a pleasant old colonial structure, now badly run down but still marked with that distinction that only the instincts of aristocracy can bestow upon a decaying habitation. A fattish child made her way up the walk, toeing out unnecessarily, and let herself in by the back door without knocking. "Hello, Mis' Chase and Mr. Amos," she said, seating herself in a straight backed, yellow chair, and swinging her crossed foot nonchalantly, "I thought I would come in to inquire about Eleanor. Ma said that she heard that she was coming home to live again. Is she, Mr. Amos?" Albertina was not a peculiar favorite of Eleanor's grandfather. Amos Chase had ideas of his own about the proper bringing up of children, and the respect due from them to their elders. Also Albertina's father had come from "poor stock." There was a strain of bad blood in her. The women of the Weston families hadn't always "behaved themselves." He therefore answered this representative of the youngest generation rather shortly. "I don't know nothing about it," he said. "Why, father," the querulous old voice of Grandmother Chase protested, "you know she's comin' home somewhere 'bout the end of July, she and one of her new aunties and a hired girl they're bringing along to do the work. I don't see why you can't answer the child's question." "I don't know as I'm obligated to answer any questions that anybody sees fit to put to me." "Well, I _be_. Albertina, pass me my glasses from off the mantel-tree-shelf, and that letter sticking out from behind the clock and I'll read what she says." Albertina, with a reproachful look at Mr. Amos, who retired coughing exasperatedly behind a paper that he did not read, allowed herself to be informed through the medium of a letter from Gertrude and a postscript from Eleanor of the projected invasion of the Chase household. "I should think you'd rather have Eleanor come home by herself than bringing a strange woman and a hired girl," Albertina contributed a trifle tartly. The distinction of a hired girl in the family was one which she had long craved on her own account. "All nonsense, I call it," the old man ejaculated. "Well, Eleena, she writes that she can't get away without one of 'em comin' along with her and I guess we can manage someways. I dunno what work city help will make in this kitchen. You can't expect much from city help. They ain't clean like home folks. I shall certainly be dretful pleased to see Eleena, and so will her grandpa--in spite o' the way he goes on about it." A snort came from the region of the newspaper. "I shouldn't think you'd feel as if you had a grandchild now that six rich people has adopted her," Albertina suggested helpfully. "It's a good thing for the child," her grandmother said. "I'm so lame I couldn't do my duty by her. Old folks is old folks, and they can't do for others like young ones. I'd d'ruther have had her adopted by one father and mother instead o' this passel o' young folks passing her around among themselves, but you can't have what you'd d'ruther have in this world. You got to take what comes and be thankful." "Did she write you about having gold coffee spoons at her last place?" Albertina asked. "I think they was probably gilded over like ice-cream spoons, and she didn't know the difference. I guess she has got a lot of new clothes. Well, I'll have to be getting along. I'll come in again." At the precise moment that the door closed behind Albertina, the clock in Peter Stuyvesant's apartment in New York struck seven and Eleanor, in a fresh white dress and blue ribbons, slipped into her chair at the dinner table and waited with eyes blazing with excitement for Peter to make the momentous discovery of the gift at his plate. CHAPTER XI GERTRUDE HAS TROUBLE WITH HER BEHAVIOR "Dear Uncle Peter," Eleanor wrote from Colhassett when she had been established there under the new régime for a week or more. "I slapped Albertina's face. I am very awfully sorry, but I could not help it. Don't tell Aunt Margaret because it is so contrary to her teachings and also the golden rule, but she was more contrary to the golden rule that I was. I mean Albertina. What do you think she said? She said Aunt Gertrude was homely and an old maid, and the hired girl was homely too. Well, I think she is, but I am not going to have Albertina think so. Aunt Gertrude is pretty with those big eyes and ink like hair and lovely teeth and one dimple. Albertina likes hair fuzzed all over faces and blonds. Then she said she guessed I wasn't your favorite, and that the gold spoons were most likely tin gilded over. I don't know what you think about slapping. Will you please write and say what you think? You know I am anxsuch to do well. But I think I know as much as Albertina about some things. She uster treat me like a dog, but it is most a year now since I saw her before. "Well, here we are, Aunt Gertrude and me, too. Grandpa did not like her at first. She looked so much like summer folks, and acted that way, too. He does not agree with summer folks, but she got him talking about foreign parts and that Spanish girl that made eyes at him, and nearly got him away from Grandma, and the time they were wrecked going around the horn, and showing her dishes and carvings from China. Now he likes her first rate. She laughs all the time. Grandma likes her too, but not when Grandpa tells her about that girl in Spain. "We eat in the dining-room, and have lovely food, only Grandpa does not like it, but we have him a pie now for breakfast,--his own pie that he can eat from all the time and he feels better. Aunt Gertrude is happy seeing him eat it for breakfast and claps her hands when he does it, only he doesn't see her. "She is teaching me more manners, and to swim, and some French. It is vacation and I don't have regular lessons, the way I did while we were on Long Island. "Didn't we have a good time in that hotel? Do you remember the night I stayed up till ten o'clock and we sat on the beach and talked? I do. I love you very much. I think it is nice to love anybody. Only I miss you. I would miss you more if I believed what Albertina said about my not being your favorite. I am. "I wish you could come down here. Uncle Jimmie is coming and then I don't know what Albertina will say. "About teaching me. Aunt Gertrude's idea of getting me cultivated is to read to me from the great Masters of literature and funny books too, like Mark Twain and the Nonsense Thology. Then I say what I think of them, and she just lets me develop along those lines, which is pretty good for summer. "Here is a poem I wrote. I love you best. "The sun and wind are on the sea, The waves are clear and blue, This is the place I like to be, If I could just have you. "The insects chirrup in the grass, The birds sing in the tree, And oh! how quick the time would pass If you were here with me." "What do you think of slapping, Aunt Gertrude?" Eleanor asked one evening when they were walking along the hard beach that the receding tide had left cool and firm for their pathway, and the early moon had illumined for them. "Do you think it's awfully bad to slap any one?" "I wouldn't slap you, if that's what you mean, Eleanor." "Would you slap somebody your own size and a little bigger?" "I might under extreme provocation." "I thought perhaps you would," Eleanor sighed with a gasp of relieved satisfaction. "I don't believe in moral suasion entirely, Eleanor," Gertrude tried to follow Eleanor's leads, until she had in some way satisfied the child's need for enlightenment on the subject under discussion. It was not always simple to discover just what Eleanor wanted to know, but Gertrude had come to believe that there was always some excellent reason for her wanting to know it. "I think there are some quarrels that have to be settled by physical violence." Eleanor nodded. Then, "What about refinement?" she asked unexpectedly. "I want to bring myself up good when--when all of my aunts and uncles are too busy, or don't know. I want to grow up, and be ladylike and a credit, and I'm getting such good culture that I think I ought to, but--I get worried about my refinement. City refinement is different from country refinement." "Refinement isn't a thing that you can worry about," Gertrude began slowly. She realized perhaps better than any of the others, being a better balanced, healthier creature than either Beulah or Margaret, that there were serious defects in the scheme of cooperative parentage. Eleanor, thanks to the overconscientious digging about her roots, was acquiring a New England self-consciousness about her processes. A child, Gertrude felt, should be handed a code ready made and should be guided by it without question until his maturer experience led him to modify it. The trouble with trying to explain this to Eleanor was that she had already had too many things explained to her, and the doctrine of unselfconsciousness can not be inculcated by an exploitation of it. "If you are naturally a fine person your instinct will be to do the fine thing. You must follow it when you feel the instinct and not think about it between times." "That's Uncle Peter's idea," Eleanor said, "that not thinking. Well, I'll try--but you and Uncle Peter didn't have six different parents and a Grandpa and Grandma and Albertina all criticizing your refinement in different ways. Don't you ever have any trouble with your behavior, Aunt Gertrude?" Gertrude laughed. The truth was that she was having considerable trouble with her behavior since Jimmie's arrival two days before. She had thought to spend her two months with Eleanor on Cape Cod helping the child to relate her new environment to her old, while she had the benefit of her native air and the freedom of a rural summer. She also felt that one of their number ought to have a working knowledge of Eleanor's early surroundings and habits. She had meant to put herself and her own concerns entirely aside. If she had a thought for any one but Eleanor she meant it to be for the two old people whose guest she had constituted herself. She explained all this to Jimmie a day or two before her departure, and to her surprise he had suggested that he spend his own two vacation weeks watching the progress of her experiment. Before she was quite sure of the wisdom of allowing him to do so she had given him permission to come. Jimmie was part of her trouble. Her craving for isolation and undiscovered country; her eagerness to escape with her charge to some spot where she would not be subjected to any sort of familiar surveillance, were all a part of an instinct to segregate herself long enough to work out the problem of Jimmie and decide what to do about it. This she realized as soon as he arrived on the spot. She realized further that she had made practically no progress in the matter, for this curly headed young man, bearing no relation to anything that Gertrude had decided a young man should be, was rapidly becoming a serious menace to her peace of mind, and her ideal of a future lived for art alone. She had definitely begun to realize this on the night when Jimmie, in his exuberance at securing his new job, had seized her about the waist and kissed her on the lips. She had thought a good deal about that kiss, which came dangerously near being her first one. She was too clever, too cool and aloof, to have had many tentative love-affairs. Later, as she softened and warmed and gathered grace with the years she was likely to seem more alluring and approachable to the gregarious male. Now she answered her small interlocutor truthfully. "Yes, Eleanor, I do have a whole lot of trouble with my behavior. I'm having trouble with it today, and this evening," she glanced up at the moon, which was seemingly throwing out conscious waves of effulgence, "I expect to have more," she confessed. "Oh! do you?" asked Eleanor, "I'm sorry I can't sit up with you then and help you. You--you don't expect to be--provocated to _slap_ anybody, do you?" "No, I don't, but as things are going I almost wish I did," Gertrude answered, not realizing that before the evening was over there would be one person whom she would be ruefully willing to slap several times over. As they turned into the village street from the beach road they met Jimmie, who had been having his after-dinner pipe with Grandfather Amos, with whom he had become a prime favorite. With him was Albertina, toeing out more than ever and conversing more than blandly. "This virtuous child has been urging me to come after Eleanor and remind her that it is bedtime," Jimmie said, indicating the pink gingham clad figure at his side. "She argues that Eleanor is some six months younger than she and ought to be in bed first, and personally she has got to go in the next fifteen minutes." "It's pretty hot weather to go to bed in," Albertina said. "Miss Sturgis, if I can get my mother to let me stay up half an hour more, will you let Eleanor stay up?" Just beyond her friend, in the shadow of her ample back, Eleanor was making gestures intended to convey the fact that sitting up any longer was abhorrent to her. "Eleanor needs her sleep to-night, I think," Gertrude answered, professionally maternal. "I brought Albertina so that our child might go home under convoy, while you and I were walking on the beach," Jimmie suggested. As the two little girls fell into step, the beginning of their conversation drifted back to the other two, who stood watching them for a moment. "I thought I'd come over to see if you was willing to say you were sorry," Albertina began. "My face stayed red in one spot for two hours that day after you slapped me." "I'm not sorry," Eleanor said ungraciously, "but I'll say that I am, if you've come to make up." "Well, we won't say any more about it then," Albertina conceded. "Are Miss Sturgis and Mr. Sears going together, or are they just friends?" "Isn't that Albertina one the limit?" Jimmie inquired, with a piloting hand under Gertrude's elbow. "She told me that she and Eleanor were mad, but she didn't want to stay mad because there was more going on over here than there was at her house and she liked to come over." "I'm glad Eleanor slapped her," Gertrude said; "still I'm sorry our little girl has uncovered the clay feet of her idol. She's through with Albertina for good." "Do you know, Gertrude," Jimmy said, as they set foot on the glimmering beach, "you don't seem a bit natural lately. You used to be so full of the everlasting mischief. Every time you opened your mouth I dodged for fear of being spiked. Yet here you are just as docile as other folks." "Don't you like me--as well?" Gertrude tried her best to make her voice sound as usual. "Better," Jimmie swore promptly; then he added a qualifying--"I guess." "Don't you know?" But she didn't allow him the opportunity to answer. "I'm in a transition period, Jimmie," she said. "I meant to be such a good parent to Eleanor and correct all the evil ways into which she has fallen as a result of all her other injudicious training, and, instead of that, I'm doing nothing but think of myself and my own hankerings and yearnings and such. I thought I could do so much for the child." "That's the way we all think till we tackle her and then we find it quite otherwise and even more so. Tell me about your hankerings and yearnings." "Tell me about your job, Jimmie." And for a little while they found themselves on safe and familiar ground again. Jimmie's new position was a very satisfactory one. He found himself associated with men of solidity and discernment, and for the first time in his business career he felt himself appreciated and stimulated by that appreciation to do his not inconsiderable best. Gertrude was the one woman--Eleanor had not yet attained the inches for that classification--to whom he ever talked business. "Now, at last, I feel that I've got my feet on the earth, Gertrude; as if the stuff that was in me had a chance to show itself, and you don't know what a good feeling that is after you've been marked trash by your family and thrown into the dust heap." "I'm awfully glad, Jimmie." "I know you are, 'Trude. You're an awfully good pal. It isn't everybody I'd talk to like this. Let's sit down." The moonlight beat down upon them in floods of sentient palpitating glory. Little breathy waves sought the shore and whispered to it. The pines on the breast of the bank stirred softly and tenderly. "Lord, what a night," Jimmie said, and began burying her little white hand in the beach sand. His breath was not coming quite evenly. "Now tell me about your job," he said. "I don't think I want to talk about my job tonight." "What do you want to talk about?" "I don't know." There was no question about her voice sounding as usual this time. Jimmie brushed the sand slowly away from the buried hand and covered it with his own. He drew nearer, his face close, and closer to hers. Gertrude closed her eyes. It was coming, it was coming and she was glad. That silly old vow of celibacy, her silly old thoughts about art. What was art? What was anything with the arms of the man you loved closing about you. His lips were on hers. Jimmie drew a sharp breath, and let her go. "Gertrude," he said, "I'm incorrigible. I ought to be spanked. I'd make love to--Eleanor's grandmother if I had her down here on a night like this. Will you forgive me?" Gertrude got to her feet a little unsteadily, but she managed a smile. "It's only the moon," she said, "and--and young blood. I think Grandfather Amos would probably affect me the same way." Jimmie's momentary expression of blankness passed and Gertrude did not press her advantage. They walked home in silence. "It's awfully companionable to realize that you also are human, 'Trude," he hazarded on the doorstep. Gertrude put a still hand into his, which is a way of saying "Good night," that may be more formal than any other. "The Colonel's lady, and July O'Grady," she quoted lightly. "Good night, Jimmie." Up-stairs in her great chamber under the eaves, Eleanor was composing a poem which she copied carefully on a light blue page of her private diary. It read as follows: "To love, it is the saddest thing, When friendship proves unfit, For lots of sadness it will bring, When e'er you think of it. Alas! that friends should prove untrue And disappoint you so. Because you don't know what to do, And hardly where to go." CHAPTER XII MADAM BOLLING "Is this the child, David?" "Yes, mother." Eleanor stared impassively into the lenses of Mrs. Bolling's lorgnette. "This is my mother, Eleanor." Eleanor courtesied as her Uncle Jimmie had taught her, but she did not take her eyes from Mrs. Bolling's face. "Not a bad-looking child. I hate this American fashion of dressing children like French dolls, in bright colors and smart lines. The English are so much more sensible. An English country child would have cheeks as red as apples. How old are you?" "Eleven years old my next birthday." "I should have thought her younger, David. Have her call me madam. It sounds better." "Very well, mother. I'll teach her the ropes when the strangeness begins to wear off. This kind of thing is all new to her, you know." "She looks it. Give her the blue chamber and tell Mademoiselle to take charge of her. You say you want her to have lessons for so many hours a day. Has she brains?" "She's quite clever. She writes verses, she models pretty well, Gertrude says. It's too soon to expect any special aptitude to develop." "Well, I'm glad to discover your philanthropic tendencies, David. I never knew you had any before, but this seems to me a very doubtful undertaking. You take a child like this from very plain surroundings and give her a year or two of life among cultivated and well-to-do people, just enough for her to acquire a taste for extravagant living and associations. Then what becomes of her? You get tired of your bargain. Something else comes on the docket. You marry--and then what becomes of your protégée? She goes back to the country, a thoroughly unsatisfied little rustic, quite unfitted to be the wife of the farmer for whom fate intended her." "I wish you wouldn't, mother," David said, with an uneasy glance at Eleanor's pale face, set in the stoic lines he remembered so well from the afternoon of his first impression of her. "She's a sensitive little creature." "Nonsense. It never hurts anybody to have a plain understanding of his position in the world. I don't know what foolishness you romantic young people may have filled her head with. It's just as well she should hear common sense from me and I intend that she shall." "I've explained to you, mother, that this child is my legal and moral responsibility and will be partly at least under my care until she becomes of age. I want her to be treated as you'd treat a child of mine if I had one. If you don't, I can't have her visit us again. I shall take her away with me somewhere. Bringing her home to you this time is only an experiment." "She'll have a much more healthful and normal experience with us than she's had with any of the rest of your violent young set, I'll be bound. She'll probably be useful, too. She can look out for Zaidee--I never say that name without irritation--but it's the only name the little beast will answer to. Do you like dogs, child?" Eleanor started at the suddenness of the question, but did not reply to it. Mrs. Bolling waited and David looked at her expectantly. "My mother asked you if you liked dogs, Eleanor; didn't you understand?" Eleanor opened her lips as if to speak and then shut them again firmly. "Your protégée is slightly deaf, David," his mother assured him. "You can tell her 'yes,'" Eleanor said unexpectedly to David. "I like dogs, if they ain't treacherous." "She asked you the question," David said gravely; "this is her house, you know. It is she who deserves consideration in it." "Why can't I talk to you about her, the way she does about me?" Eleanor demanded. "She can have consideration if she wants it, but she doesn't think I'm any account. Let her ask you what she wants and I'll tell you." "Eleanor," David remonstrated, "Eleanor, you never behaved like this before. I don't know what's got into her, mother." "She merely hasn't any manners. Why should she have?" Eleanor fixed her big blue eyes on the lorgnette again. "If it's manners to talk the way you do to your own children and strange little girls, why, then I don't want any," she said. "I guess I'll be going," she added abruptly and turned toward the door. David took her by the shoulders and brought her right about face. "Say good-by to mother," he said sternly. "Good-by, ma'am--madam," Eleanor said and courtesied primly. "Tell Mademoiselle to teach her a few things before the next audience, David, and come back to me in fifteen minutes. I have something important to talk over with you." David stood by the open door of the blue chamber half an hour later and watched Eleanor on her knees, repacking her suit-case. Her face was set in pale determined lines, and she looked older and a little sick. Outside it was blowing a September gale, and the trees were waving desperate branches in the wind. David had thought that the estate on the Hudson would appeal to the little girl. It had always appealed to him so much, even though his mother's habits of migration with the others of her flock at the different seasons had left him so comparatively few associations with it. He had thought she would like the broad sweeping lawns and the cherubim fountain, the apple orchard and the kitchen garden, and the funny old bronze dog at the end of the box hedge. When he saw how she was occupied, he understood that it was not her intention to stay and explore these things. "Eleanor," he said, stepping into the room suddenly, "what are you doing with your suit-case? Didn't Mademoiselle unpack it for you?" He was close enough now to see the signs of tears she had shed. "Yes, Uncle David." "Why are you packing it again?" Her eyes fell and she tried desperately to control a quivering lip. "Because I am--I want to go back." "Back where?" "To Cape Cod." "Why, Eleanor?" "I ain't wanted," she said, her head low. "I made up my mind to go back to my own folks. I'm not going to be adopted any more." David led her to the deep window-seat and made her sit facing him. He was too wise to attempt a caress with this issue between them. "Do you think that's altogether fair to me?" he asked presently. "I guess it won't make much difference to you. Something else will come along." "Do you think it will be fair to your other aunts and uncles who have given so much care and thought to your welfare?" "They'll get tired of their bargain." "If they do get tired of their bargain it will be because they've turned out to be very poor sports. I've known every one of them a long time, and I've never known them to show any signs of poor sportsmanship yet. If you run away without giving them their chance to make good, it will be you who are the poor sport." "She said you would marry and get tired of me, and I would have to go back to the country. If you marry and Uncle Jimmie marries--then Uncle Peter will marry, and--" "You'd still have your Aunts Beulah and Margaret and Gertrude," David could not resist making the suggestion. "They could do it, too. If one person broke up the vow, I guess they all would. Misfortunes never come singly." "But even if we did, Eleanor, even if we all married, we'd still regard you as our own, our child, our charge." "_She_ said you wouldn't." The tears came now, and David gathered the little shaking figure to his breast. "I don't want to be the wife of the farmer for whom fate intended me," she sobbed. "I want to marry somebody refined with extravagant living and associations." "That's one of the things we are bringing you up for, my dear." This aspect of the case occurred to David for the first time, but he realized its potency. "You mustn't take mother too seriously. Just jolly her along a little and you'll soon get to be famous friends. She's never had any little girls of her own, only my brother and me, and she doesn't know quite how to talk to them." "The Hutchinsons had a hired butler and gold spoons, and they didn't think I was the dust beneath their feet. I don't know what to say to her. I said ain't, and I wasn't refined, and I'll only just be a disgrace to you. I'd rather go back to Cape Cod, and go out to work, and stand Albertina and everything." "If you think it's the square thing to do," David said slowly, "you may go, Eleanor. I'll take you to New York to-morrow and get one of the girls to take you to Colhassett. Of course, if you do that it will put me in rather an awkward position. The others have all had you for two months and made good on the proposition. I shall have to admit that I couldn't even keep you with me twenty-four hours. Peter and Jimmie got along all right, but I couldn't handle you at all. As a cooperative parent, I'm such a failure that the whole experiment goes to pieces through me." "Not you--her." "Well, it's the same thing,--you couldn't stand the surroundings I brought you to. You couldn't even be polite to my mother for my sake." "I--never thought of that, Uncle David." "Think of it now for a few minutes, won't you, Eleanor?" The rain was beginning to lash the windows, and to sweep the lawn in long slant strokes. The little girl held up her face as if it could beat through the panes on it. "I thought," she said slowly, "that after Albertina I wouldn't _take_ anything from anybody. Uncle Peter says that I'm just as good as anybody, even if I have been out to work. He said that all I had to do was just to stand up to people." "There are a good many different ways of standing up to people, Eleanor. Be sure you've got the right way and then go ahead." "I guess I ought to have been politer," Eleanor said slowly. "I ought to have thought that she was your own mother. You couldn't help the way she acted, o' course." "The way you acted is the point, Eleanor." Eleanor reflected. "I'll act different if you want me to, Uncle David," she said, "and I won't go and leave you." "That's my brave girl. I don't think that I altogether cover myself with glory in an interview with my mother," he added. "It isn't the thing that I'm best at, I admit." "You did pretty good," Eleanor consoled him. "I guess she makes you kind of bashful the way she does me," from which David gathered with an odd sense of shock that Eleanor felt there was something to criticize in his conduct, if she had permitted herself to look for it. "I know what I'll do," Eleanor decided dreamily with her nose against the pane. "I'll just pretend that she's Mrs. O'Farrel's aunt, and then whatever she does, I shan't care. I'll know that I'm the strongest and could hit her if I had a mind to, and then I shan't want to." David contemplated her gravely for several seconds. "By the time you grow up, Eleanor," he said finally, "you will have developed all your cooperative parents into fine strong characters. Your educational methods are wonderful." * * * * * "The dog got nearly drownded today in the founting," Eleanor wrote. "It is a very little dog about the size of Gwendolyn. It was out with Mademoiselle, and so was I, learning French on a garden seat. It teetered around on the edge of the big wash basin--the founting looks like a wash basin, and suddenly it fell in. I waded right in and got it, but it slipped around so I couldn't get it right away. It looked almost too dead to come to again, but I gave it first aid to the drownded the way Uncle Jimmie taught me to practicing on Gwendolyn. When I got it fixed I looked up and saw Uncle David's mother coming. I took the dog and gave it to her. I said, 'Madam, here's your dog.' Mademoiselle ran around ringing her hands and talking about it. Then I went up to Mrs. Bolling's room, and we talked. I told her how to make mustard pickles, and how my mother's grandpa's relation came over in the Mayflower, and about our single white lilac bush, and she's going to get one and make the pickles. Then I played double Canfield with her for a while. I'm glad I didn't go home before I knew her better. When she acts like Mrs. O'Farrel's aunt I pretend she is her, and we don't quarrel. She says does Uncle David go much to see Aunt Beulah, and I say, not so often as Uncle Jimmie does. Then she says does he go to see Aunt Margaret, and I say that he goes to see Uncle Peter the most. Well, if he doesn't he almost does. You can't tell Mrs. Madam Bolling that you won't tattle, because she would think the worst." * * * * * Eleanor grew to like Mademoiselle. She was the aging, rather wry faced Frenchwoman who had been David's young brother's governess and had made herself so useful to Mrs. Bolling that she was kept always on the place, half companion and half resident housekeeper. She was glad to have a child in charge again, and Eleanor soon found that her crooked features and severe high-shouldered back that had somewhat intimidated her at first, actually belonged to one of the kindest hearted creatures in the world. Paris and Colhassett bore very little resemblance to each other, the two discovered. To be sure there were red geraniums every alternating year in the gardens of the Louvre, and every year in front of the Sunshine Library in Colhassett. The residents of both places did a great deal of driving in fine weather. In Colhassett they drove on the state highway, recently macadamized to the dismay of the taxpayers who did not own horses or automobiles. In Paris they drove out to the Bois by way of the Champs Elysees. In Colhassett they had only one ice-cream saloon, but in Paris they had a good many of them out-of-doors in the parks and even on the sidewalk, and there you could buy all kinds of sirups and 'what you call cordials' and _aperitifs_; but the two places on the whole were quite different. The people were different, too. The people of Colhassett were all religious and thought it was sinful to play cards on Sundays. Mademoiselle said she always felt wicked when she played them on a week day. "I think of my mother," she said; "she would say 'Juliette, what will you say to the Lord when he knows that you have been playing cards on a working day. Playing cards is for Sunday.'" "The Lord that they have in Colhassett is not like that," Eleanor stated without conscious irreverence. "She is a vary fonny child, madam," Mademoiselle answered Mrs. Bolling's inquiry. "She has taste, but no--experience even of the most ordinary. She cooks, but she does no embroidery. She knits and knows no games to play. She has a good brain, but Mon Dieu, no one has taught her to ask questions with it." "She has had lessons this year from some young Rogers graduates, very intelligent girls. I should think a year of that kind of training would have had its effect." Mrs. Bolling's finger went into every pie in her vicinity with unfailing direction. "Lessons, yes, but no teaching. If she were not vary intelligent I think she would have suffered for it. The public schools they did somesing, but so little to elevate--to encourage." Thus in a breath were Beulah's efforts as an educator disposed of. "Would you like to undertake the teaching of that child for a year?" Mrs. Bolling asked thoughtfully. "Oh! but yes, madam." "I think I'll make the offer to David." Mrs. Bolling was unsympathetic but she was thorough. She liked to see things properly done. Since David and his young friends had undertaken a venture so absurd, she decided to lend them a helping hand with it. Besides, now that she had no children of her own in the house, Mademoiselle was practically eating her head off. Also it had developed that David was fond of the child, so fond of her that to oppose that affection would have been bad policy, and Mrs. Bolling was politic when she chose to be. She chose to be politic now, for sometime during the season she was going to ask a very great favor of David, and she hoped, that by first being extraordinarily complaisant and kind and then by bringing considerable pressure to bear upon him, he would finally do what he was asked. The favor was to provide himself with a father-in-law, and that father-in-law the multi-millionaire parent of the raven-haired, crafty-eyed ingénue, who had begun angling for him that June night at the country club. She made the suggestion to David on the eve of the arrival of all of Eleanor's guardians for the week-end. Mrs. Bolling had invited a house-party comprised of the associated parents as a part of her policy of kindness before the actual summoning of her forces for the campaign she was about to inaugurate. David was really touched by his mother's generosity concerning Eleanor. He had been agreeably surprised at the development of the situation between the child and his mother. He had been obliged to go into town the day after Eleanor's first unfortunate encounter with her hostess, and had hurried home in fear and trembling to try to smooth out any tangles in the skein of their relationship that might have resulted from a day in each other's vicinity. After hurrying over the house and through the grounds in search of her he finally discovered the child companionably currying a damp and afflicted Pekinese in his mother's sitting-room, and engaged in a grave discussion of the relative merits of molasses and sugar as a sweetening for Boston baked beans. It was while they were having their after-dinner coffee in the library, for which Eleanor had been allowed to come down, though nursery supper was the order of the day in the Bolling establishment, that David told his friends of his mother's offer. "Of course, we decided to send her to school when she was twelve anyway," he said. "The idea was to keep her among ourselves for two years to establish the parental tie, or ties I should say. If she is quartered here with Mademoiselle we could still keep in touch with her and she would be having the advantage of a year's steady tuition under one person, and we'd be relieved--" a warning glance from Margaret, with an almost imperceptible inclination of her head in the direction of Beulah, caused him to modify the end of his sentence--"of the responsibility--for her physical welfare." "Mentally and morally," Gertrude cut in, "the bunch would still supervise her entirely." Jimmie, who was sitting beside her, ran his arm along the back of her chair affectionately, and then thought better of it and drew it away. He was, for some unaccountable reason, feeling awkward and not like himself. There was a girl in New York, with whom he was not in the least in love, who had recently taken it upon herself to demonstrate unmistakably that she was not in love with him. There was another girl who insisted on his writing her every day. Here was Gertrude, who never had any time for him any more, absolutely without enthusiasm at his proximity. He thought it would be a good idea to allow Eleanor to remain where she was and said so. "Not that I won't miss the jolly times we had together, Babe," he said. "I was planning some real rackets this year,--to make up for what I put you through," he added in her ear, as she came and stood beside him for a minute. Gertrude wanted to go abroad for a year, "and lick her wounds," as she told herself. She would have come back for her two months with Eleanor, but she was glad to be relieved of that necessity. Margaret had the secret feeling that the ordeal of the Hutchinsons was one that she would like to spare her foster child, and incidentally herself in relation to the adjustment of conditions necessary to Eleanor's visit. Peter wanted her with him, but he believed the new arrangement would be better for the child. Beulah alone held out for her rights and her parental privileges. The decision was finally left to Eleanor. She stood in the center of the group a little forlornly while they awaited her word. A wave of her old shyness overtook her and she blushed hot and crimson. "It's all in your own hands, dear," Beulah said briskly. "Poor kiddie," Gertrude thought, "it's all wrong somehow." "I don't know what you want me to say," Eleanor said piteously and sped to the haven of Peter's breast. "We'll manage a month together anyway," Peter whispered. "Then I guess I'll stay here," she whispered back, "because next I would have to go to Aunt Beulah's." Peter, turning involuntarily in Beulah's direction, saw the look of chagrin and disappointment on her face, and realized how much she minded playing a losing part in the game and yet how well she was doing it. "She's only a straight-laced kid after all," he thought. "She's put her whole heart and soul into this thing. There's a look about the top part of her face when it's softened that's a little like Ellen's." Ellen was his dead fiancée--the girl in the photograph at home in his desk. "I guess I'll stay here," Eleanor said aloud, "all in one place, and study with Mademoiselle." It was a decision that, on the whole, she never regretted. CHAPTER XIII BROOK AND RIVER "Standing with reluctant feet, Where the brook and river meet." "I think it's a good plan to put a quotation like Kipling at the top of the page whenever I write anything in this diary," Eleanor began in the smart leather bound book with her initials stamped in black on the red cover--the new private diary that had been Peter's gift to her on the occasion of her fifteenth birthday some months before. "I think it is a very expressive thing to do. The quotation above is one that expresses me, and I think it is beautiful too. Miss Hadley--that's my English teacher--the girls call her Haddock because she does look rather like a fish--says that it's undoubtedly one of the most poignant descriptions of adolescent womanhood ever made. I made a note to look up adolescent, but didn't. Bertha Stephens has my dictionary, and won't bring it back because the leaves are all stuck together with fudge, and she thinks she ought to buy me a new one. It is very honorable of her to feel that way, but she never will. Good old Stevie, she's a great borrower. "'Neither a borrower nor a lender be, For borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.' "Shakespeare. "Well, I hardly know where to begin. I thought I would make a resumé of some of the events of the last year. I was only fourteen then, but still I did a great many things that might be of interest to me in my declining years when I look back into the annals of this book. To begin with I was only a freshie at Harmon. It is very different to be a sophomore. I can hardly believe that I was once a shivering looking little thing like all the freshmen that came in this year. I was very frightened, but did not think I showed it. "'Oh! wad some power the giftie gie us, To see ourselves as others see us.' "Robert Burns had twins and a rather bad character, but after he met his bonnie Jean he wrote very beautiful poetry. A poet's life is usually sad anyhow--full of disappointment and pain--but I digress. "I had two years with Mademoiselle at the Bollings' instead of one the way we planned. I haven't written in my Private Diary since the night of that momentous decision that I was to stay in one place instead of taking turns visiting my cooperative parents. I went to another school one year before I came to Harmon, and that brings me to the threshold of my fourteenth year. If I try to go back any farther, I'll never catch up. I spent that vacation with Aunt Margaret in a cottage on Long Island with her sister, and her sister's boy, who has grown up to be the silly kind that wants to kiss you and pull your hair, and those things. Aunt Margaret is so lovely I can't think of words to express it. 'Oh! rare pale Margaret,' as Tennyson says. She wears her hair in a coronet braid around the top of her head, and all her clothes are the color of violets or a soft dovey gray or white, though baby blue looks nice on her especially when she wears a fishyou. "I went down to Cape Cod for a week before I came to Harmon, and while I was there my grandmother died. I can't write about that in this diary. I loved my grandmother and my grandmother loved me. Uncle Peter came, and took charge of everything. He has great strength that holds you up in trouble. "The first day I came to Harmon I saw the girl I wanted for my best friend, and so we roomed together, and have done so ever since. Her name is Margaret Louise Hodges, but she is called Maggie Lou by every one. She has dark curly hair, and deep brown eyes, and a very silvery voice. I have found out that she lies some, but she says it is because she had such an unhappy childhood, and has promised to overcome it for my sake. "That Christmas vacation the 'We Are Sevens' went up the Hudson to the Bollings' again, but that was the last time they ever went there. Uncle David and his mother had a terrible fight over them. I was sorry for Madam Bolling in a way. There was a girl she wanted Uncle David to marry, a rich girl who looked something like Cleopatra, very dark complexioned with burning eyes. She had a sweet little Pekinese something like Zaidee. "Uncle David said that gold could never buy him, and to take her away, but Madam Bolling was very angry, of course. She accused him of wanting to marry Aunt Margaret, and called her a characterless, faded blonde. Then it was Uncle David's turn to get angry, and I have never seen any one get any angrier, and he told about the vow of celibacy, and how instead of having designs on him the whole crowd would back him up in his struggle to stay single. It was an awful row. I told Madam Bolling that I would help her to get Uncle David back, and I did, but she never forgave the other aunts and uncles. I suppose the feelings of a mother would prompt her to want Uncle David settled down with a rich and fashionable girl who would soon be the mother of a lot of lovely children. I can't imagine a Cleopatra looking baby, but she might have boys that looked like Uncle David. "Vacations are really about all there is to school. Freshman year is mostly grinding and stuffing. Having six parents to send you boxes of 'grub' is better than having only two. Some of the girls are rather selfish about the eats, and come in and help themselves boldly when you are out of the room. Maggie Lou puts up signs over the candy box: 'Closed for Repairs,' or 'No Trespassing by Order of the Board of Health,' but they don't pay much attention. Well, last summer vacation I spent with Uncle Jimmie. I wouldn't tell this, but I reformed him. I made him sign the pledge. I don't know what pledge it was because I didn't read it, but he said he was addicted to something worse than anything I could think of, and if somebody didn't pull him up, he wouldn't answer for the consequences. I asked him why he didn't choose Aunt Gertrude to do it, and he groaned only. So I said to write out a pledge, and sign it and I would be the witness. We were at a hotel with his brother's family. It isn't proper any more for me to go around with my uncles unless I have a chaperon. Mademoiselle says that I oughtn't even to go down-town alone with them but, of course, that is French etiquette, and not American. Well, there were lots of pretty girls at this hotel, all wearing white and pink dresses, and carrying big bell shaped parasols of bright colors. They looked sweet, like so many flowers, but Uncle Jimmie just about hated the sight of them. He said they were not girls at all, but just pink and white devices of the devil. On the whole he didn't act much like my merry uncle, but we had good times together playing tennis and golf, and going on parties with his brother's family, all mere children but the mother and father. Uncle Jimmie was afraid to go and get his mail all summer, although he had a great many letters on blue and lavender note paper scented with Roger et Gallet's violet, and Hudnut's carnation. We used to go down to the beach and make bonfires and burn them unread, and then toast marshmallows in their ashes. He said that they were communications from the spirits of the dead. I should have thought that they were from different girls, but he seemed to hate the sight of girls so much. Once I asked him if he had ever had an unhappy love-affair, just to see what he would say, but he replied 'no, they had all been happy ones,' and groaned and groaned. "Aunt Beulah has changed too. She has become a suffragette and thinks only of getting women their rights and their privileges. "Maggie Lou is an anti, and we have long arguments about the cause. She says that woman's place is in the home, but I say look at me, who have no home, how can I wash and bake and brew like the women of my grandfather's day, visiting around the way I do? And she says that it is the principle of the thing that is involved, and I ought to take a stand for or against. Everybody has so many different arguments that I don't know what I think yet, but some day I shall make up my mind for good. "Well, that about brings me up to the present. I meant to describe a few things in detail, but I guess I will not begin on the past in that way. I don't get so awfully much time to write in this diary because of the many interruptions of school life, and the way the monitors snoop in study hours. I don't know who I am going to spend my Christmas holidays with. I sent Uncle Peter a poem three days ago, but he has not answered it yet. I'm afraid he thought it was very silly. I don't hardly know what it means myself. It goes as follows: "A Song "The moon is very pale to-night, The summer wind swings high, I seek the temple of delight, And feel my love draw nigh. "I seem to feel his fragrant breath Upon my glowing cheek. Between us blows the wind of death,-- I shall not hear him speak. "I don't know why I like to write love poems, but most of the women poets did. This one made me cry." CHAPTER XIV MERRY CHRISTMAS Margaret in mauve velvet and violets, and Gertrude in a frock of smart black and white were in the act of meeting by appointment at Sherry's one December afternoon, with a comfortable cup of tea in mind. Gertrude emerged from the recess of the revolving door and Margaret, sitting eagerly by the entrance, almost upset the attendant in her rush to her friend's side. "Oh! Gertrude," she cried, "I'm so glad to see you. My family is trying to cut me up in neat little quarters and send me north, south, east and west, for the Christmas holidays, and I want to stay home and have Eleanor. How did I ever come to be born into a family of giants, tell me that, Gertrude?" "The choice of parents is thrust upon us at an unfortunately immature period, I'll admit," Gertrude laughed. "My parents are dears, but they've never forgiven me for being an artist instead of a dubby bud. Shall we have tea right away or shall we sit down and discuss life?" "Both," Margaret said. "I don't know which is the hungrier--flesh or spirit." But as they turned toward the dining-room a familiar figure blocked their progress. "I thought that was Gertrude's insatiable hat," David exclaimed delightedly. "I've phoned for you both until your families have given instructions that I'm not to be indulged any more. I've got a surprise for you.--Taxi," he said to the man at the door. "Not till we've had our tea," Margaret wailed. "You couldn't be so cruel, David." "You shall have your tea, my dear, and one of the happiest surprises of your life into the bargain," David assured her as he led the way to the waiting cab. "I wouldn't leave this place unfed for anybody but you, David, not if it were ever so, and then some, as Jimmie says." "What's the matter with Jimmie, anyhow?" David inquired as the taxi turned down the Avenue and immediately entangled itself in a hopeless mesh of traffic. "I don't know; why?" Gertrude answered, though she had not been the one addressed at the moment. "What's the matter with this hat?" she rattled on without waiting for an answer. "I thought it was good-looking myself, and Madam Paran robbed me for it." "It is good-looking," David allowed. "It seems to be a kind of retrieving hat, that's all. Keeps you in a rather constant state of looking after the game." "What about my hat, David?" Margaret inquired anxiously. "Do you like that?" "I do," David admitted. "I'm crazy about it. It's a lovely cross between the style affected by the late Emperor Napoleon and my august grandmother, with some frills added." The chauffeur turned into a cross street and stopped abruptly before an imposing but apparently unguarded entrance. "Why, I thought this was a studio building," Gertrude said. "David, if you're springing a tea party on us, and we in the wild ungovernable state we are at present, I'll shoot the way my hat is pointing." "Straight through my left eye-glass," David finished. "You wait till you see the injustice you have done me." But Margaret, who often understood what was happening a few moments before the revelation of it, clutched at his elbow. "Oh! David, David," she whispered, "how wonderful!" "Wait till you see," David said, and herded them into the elevator. Their destination was the top floor but one. David hurried them around the bend in the sleekly carpeted corridor and touched the bell on the right of the first door they came to. It opened almost instantly and David's man, who was French, stood bowing and smiling on the threshold. "Mr. Styvvisont has arrive'," he said; "he waits you." "Welcome to our city," Peter cried, appearing in the doorway of the room Alphonse was indicating with that high gesture of delight with which only a Frenchman can lead the way. "Jimmie's coming up from the office and Beulah's due any minute. What do you think of the place, girls?" "Is it really yours, David?" "Surest thing you know." He grinned like a schoolboy. "It's really ours, that's what it is. I've broken away from the mater at last," he added a little sheepishly. "I'm going to work seriously. I've got an all-day desk job in my uncle's office and I'm going to dig in and see what I can make of myself. Also, this is going to be our headquarters, and Eleanor's permanent home if we're all agreed upon it,--but look around, ladies. Don't spare my blushes. If you think I can interior decorate, just tell me so frankly. This is the living-room." "It's like that old conundrum--black and white and red all over," Gertrude said. "I never saw anything so stunning in all my life." "Gosh! I admire your nerve," Peter cried, "papering this place in white, and then getting in all this heavy carved black stuff, and the red in the tapestries and screens and pillows." "I wanted it to look studioish a little," David explained, "I wanted to get away from Louis Quartorze." "And drawing-rooms like mother used to make," Gertrude suggested. "I like your Oriental touches. Do you see, Margaret, everything is Indian or Chinese? The ubiquitous Japanese print is conspicuous by its absence." "I've got two portfolios full of 'em," David said, "and I always have one or two up in the bedrooms. I change 'em around, you know, the way the Japs do themselves, a different scene every few days and the rest decently out of sight till you're ready for 'em." "It's like a fairy story," Margaret said. "I thought you'd appreciate what little Arabian Nights I was able to introduce. I bought that screen," he indicated a sweep of Chinese line and color, "with my eye on you, and that Aladdin's lamp is yours, of course. You're to come in here and rub it whenever you like, and your heart's desire will instantly be vouchsafed to you." "What will Eleanor say?" Peter suggested, as David led the way through the corridor and up the tiny stairs which led to the more intricate part of the establishment. "This is her room, didn't you say, David?" He paused on the threshold of a bedroom done in ivory white and yellow, with all its hangings of a soft golden silk. "She once said that she wanted a yellow room," David said, "a daffy-down-dilly room, and I've tried to get her one. I know last year that Maggie Lou child refused to have yellow curtains in that flatiron shaped sitting-room of theirs, and Eleanor refused to be comforted." A wild whoop in the below stairs announced Jimmie; and Beulah arrived simultaneously with the tea tray. Jimmie was ecstatic when the actual function of the place was explained to him. "Headquarters is the one thing we've lacked," he said; "a place of our own, hully gee! It makes me feel almost human again." "You haven't been feeling altogether human lately, have you, Jimmie?" Margaret asked over her tea cup. "No, dear, I haven't." Jimmie flashed her a grateful smile. "I'm a bad egg," he explained to her darkly, "and the only thing you can do with me is to scramble me." "Scrambled is just about the way I should have described your behavior of late,--but that's Gertrude's line," David said. "Only she doesn't seem to be taking an active part in the conversation. Aren't you Jimmie's keeper any more, Gertrude?" "Not since she's come back from abroad," Jimmie muttered without looking at her. "Eleanor's taken the job over now," Peter said. "She's made him swear off red ink and red neckties." "Any color so long's it's red is the color that suits me best," Jimmie quoted. "Lord, isn't this room a pippin?" He swam in among the bright pillows of the divan and so hid his face for a moment. It had been a good many weeks since he had seen Gertrude. "I want to give a suffrage tea here," Beulah broke in suddenly. "It's so central, but I don't suppose David would hear of it." "Angels and Ministers of Grace defend us--" Peter began. "My _mother_ would hear of it," David said, "and then there wouldn't be any little studio any more. She doesn't believe in votes for women." "How any woman in this day and age--" Beulah began, and thought better of it, since she was discussing Mrs. Bolling. "Makes your blood boil, doesn't it--Beulahland?" Gertrude suggested helpfully, reaching for the tea cakes. "Never mind, I'll vote for women. I'll march in your old peerade." "The Lord helps those that help themselves," Peter said, "that's why Gertrude is a suffragist. She believes in helping herself, in every sense, don't you, 'Trude?" "Not quite in every sense," Gertrude said gravely. "Sometimes I feel like that girl that Margaret describes as caught in a horrid way between two generations. I'm neither old-fashioned nor modern." "I'd rather be that way than early Victorian," Margaret sighed. "Speaking of the latest generation, has anybody any objection to having our child here for the holidays?" David asked. "My idea is to have one grand Christmas dinner. I suppose we'll all have to eat one meal with our respective families, but can't we manage to get together here for dinner at night? Don't you think that we could?" "We can't, but we will," Margaret murmured. "Of course, have Eleanor here. I wanted her with me but the family thought otherwise. They've been trying to send me away for my health, David." "Well, they shan't. You'll stay in New York for your health and come to my party." "Margaret's health is merely a matter of Margaret's happiness anyhow. Her soul and her body are all one," Gertrude said. "Then cursed be he who brings anything but happiness to Margaret," Peter said, to which sentiment David added a solemn "Amen." "I wish you wouldn't," Margaret said, shivering a little, "I feel as if some one were--were--" "Trampling the violets on your grave," Gertrude finished for her. Christmas that year fell on a Monday, and Eleanor did not leave school till the Friday before the great day. Owing to the exigencies of the holiday season none of her guardians came to see her before the dinner party itself. Even David was busy with his mother--installed now for a few weeks in the hotel suite that would be her home until the opening of the season at Palm Beach--and had only a few hurried words with her. Mademoiselle, whom he had imported for the occasion, met her at the station and helped her to do her modest shopping which consisted chiefly of gifts for her beloved aunts and uncles. She had arranged these things lovingly at their plates, and fled to dress when they began to assemble for the celebration. The girls were the first arrivals. Then Peter. "How's our child, David?" Gertrude asked. "I had a few minutes' talk with her over the telephone and she seemed to be flourishing." "She is," David answered. "She's grown several feet since we last saw her. They've been giving scenes from Shakespeare at school and she's been playing Juliet, it appears. She has had a fight with another girl about suffrage--I don't know which side she was on, Beulah, I am merely giving you the facts as they came to me--and the other girl was so unpleasant about it that she has been visited by just retribution in the form of the mumps, and had to be sent home and quarantined." "Sounds a bit priggish," Peter suggested. "Not really," David said, "she's as sound as a nut. She's only going through the different stages." "To pass deliberately through one's ages," Beulah quoted, "is to get the heart out of a liberal education." "Bravo, Beulah," Gertrude cried, "you're quite in your old form to-night." "Is she just the same little girl, David?" Margaret asked. "Just the same. She really seems younger than ever. I don't know why she doesn't come down. There she is, I guess. No, it's only Alphonse letting in Jimmie." Jimmie, whose spirits seemed to have revived under the holiday influence, was staggering under the weight of his parcels. The Christmas presents had already accumulated to a considerable mound on the couch. Margaret was brooding over them and trying not to look greedy. She was still very much of a child herself in relation to Santa Claus. "Merry Christmas!" Jimmie cried. "Where's my child?" "Coming," David said. "Look at the candy kids. My eyes--but you're a slick trio, girls. Pale lavender, pale blue, and pale pink, and all quite sophisticatedly décolleté. You go with the decorations, too. I don't know quite why you do, but you do." "Give honor where honor is due, dearie. That's owing to the cleverness of the decorator," David said. "No man calls me dearie and lives to tell the tale," Jimmie remarked almost dreamily as he squared off. "How'll you have it, Dave?" But at that instant there was an unexpected interruption. Alphonse threw open the big entrance door at the farther end of the long room with a flourish. "Mademoiselle Juliet Capulet," he proclaimed with the grand air, and then retired behind his hand, smiling broadly. Framed in the high doorway, complete, cap and curls, softly rounding bodice, and the long, straight lines of the Renaissance, stood Juliet--Juliet, immemorial, immortal, young--austerely innocent and delicately shy, already beautiful, and yet potential of all the beauty and the wisdom of the world. "I've never worn these clothes before anybody but the girls before," Eleanor said, "but I thought"--she looked about her appealingly--"you might like it--for a surprise." "Great jumping Jehoshaphat," Jimmie exclaimed, "I thought you said she was the same little girl, David." "She was half an hour ago," David answered, "I never saw such a metamorphosis. In fact, I don't think I ever saw Juliet before." "She is the thing itself," Gertrude answered, the artist in her sobered by the vision. But Peter passed a dazed hand over his eyes and stared at the delicate figure advancing to him. "My God! she's a woman," he said, and drew the hard breath of a man just awakened from sleep. [Illustration: "I thought"--she looked about her appealingly--"you might like it--for a surprise"] CHAPTER XV GROWING UP "Dear Uncle Jimmie: "It was a pleasant surprise to get letters from every one of my uncles the first week I got back to school. It was unprecedented. You wrote me two letters last year, Uncle David six, and Uncle Peter sixteen. He is the best correspondent, but perhaps that is because I ask him the most advice. The Christmas party was lovely. I shall never forget the expressions on all the different faces when I came down in my Juliet suit. I thought at first that no one liked me in it, but I guess they did. "You know how well I liked my presents because you heard my wild exclamations of delight. I never had such a nice Christmas. It was sweet of the We Are Sevens to get me that ivory set, and to know that every different piece was the loving thought of a different aunt or uncle. I love the yellow monogram. It looks entirely unique, and I like to have things that are not like anybody else's in the world, don't you, Uncle Jimmie? I am glad you liked your cuff links. They are 'neat,' but not 'gaudy.' You play golf so well I thought a golf stick was a nice emblem for you, and would remind you of me and last summer. "I am glad you think it is easier to keep your pledge now. I made a New Year's resolution to go without chocolates, and give the money they would cost to some good cause, but it's hard to pick out a cause, or to decide exactly how much money you are saving. I can eat the chocolates that are sent to me, however!!!! "Uncle David said that he thought you were not like yourself lately, but you seemed just the same to me Christmas, only more affectionate. I love you very much. I was really only joking about the chocolates. Eleanor." * * * * * "Dear Uncle David: "I was glad to get your nice letter. You did not have to write in response to my bread and butter letter, but I am glad you did. When I am at school, and getting letters all the time I feel as if I were living two beautiful lives all at once, the life of a 'cooperative child' and the life of Eleanor Hamlin, schoolgirl, both together. Letters make the people you love seem very near to you, don't you think they do? I sleep with all my letters under my pillow whenever I feel the least little bit homesick, and they almost seem to breathe sometimes. "School is the same old school. Maggie Lou had a wrist watch, too, for Christmas, but not so pretty as the one you gave me. Miss Hadley says I do remarkable work in English whenever I feel like it. I don't know whether that's a compliment or not. I took Kris Kringle for the subject of a theme the other day, and represented him as caught in an iceberg in the grim north, and not being able to reach all the poor little children in the tenements and hovels. The Haddock said it showed imagination. "There was a lecture at school on Emerson the other day. The speaker was a noted literary lecturer from New York. He had wonderful waving hair, more like Pader--I can't spell him, but you know who I mean--than Uncle Jimmie's, but a little like both. He introduced some very noble thoughts in his discourse, putting perfectly old ideas in a new way that made you think a lot more of them. I think a tall man like that with waving hair can do a great deal of good as a lecturer, because you listen a good deal more respectfully than if they were plain looking. His voice sounded a good deal like what I imagine Romeo's voice did. I had a nice letter from Madam Bolling. I love you, and I have come to the bottom of the sheet. Eleanor." * * * * * "Dear Uncle Peter: "I have just written to my other uncles, so I won't write you a long letter this time. They deserve letters because of being so unusually prompt after the holidays. You always deserve letters, but not specially now, any more than any other time. "Uncle Peter, I wrote to my grandfather. It seems funny to think of Albertina's aunt taking care of him now that Grandma is gone. I suppose Albertina is there a lot. She sent me a post card for Christmas. I didn't send her any. "Uncle Peter, I miss my grandmother out of the world. I remember how I used to take care of her, and put a soapstone in the small of her back when she was cold. I wish sometimes that I could hold your hand, Uncle Peter, when I get thinking about it. "Well, school is the same old school. Bertha Stephens has a felon on her finger, and that lets her out of hard work for a while. I will enclose a poem suggested by a lecture I heard recently on Emerson. It isn't very good, but it will help to fill up the envelope. I love you, and love you. Eleanor. "Life "Life is a great, a noble task, When we fulfill our duty. To work, that should be all we ask, And seek the living beauty. We know not whence we come, or where Our dim pathway is leading, Whether we tread on lilies fair, Or trample love-lies-bleeding. But we must onward go and up, Nor stop to question whither. E'en if we drink the bitter cup, And fall at last, to wither. "P. S. I haven't got the last verse very good yet, but I think the second one is pretty. You know 'love-lies-bleeding' is a flower, but it sounds allegorical the way I have put it in. Don't you think so? You know what all the crosses stand for." * * * * * Eleanor's fifteenth year was on the whole the least eventful year of her life, though not by any means the least happy. She throve exceedingly, and gained the freedom and poise of movement and spontaneity that result from properly balanced periods of work and play and healthful exercise. From being rather small of her age she developed into a tall slender creature, inherently graceful and erect, with a small, delicate head set flower-wise on a slim white neck. Gertrude never tired of modeling that lovely contour, but Eleanor herself was quite unconscious of her natural advantages. She preferred the snappy-eyed, stocky, ringleted type of beauty, and spent many unhappy quarters of an hour wishing she were pretty according to the inexorable ideals of Harmon. She spent her vacation at David's apartment in charge of Mademoiselle, though the latter part of the summer she went to Colhassett, quite by herself according to her own desire, and spent a month with her grandfather, now in charge of Albertina's aunt. She found Albertina grown into a huge girl, sunk in depths of sloth and snobbishness, who plied her with endless questions concerning life in the gilded circles of New York society. Eleanor found her disgusting and yet possessed of that vague fascination that the assumption of prerogative often carries with it. She found her grandfather very old and shrunken, yet perfectly taken care of and with every material want supplied. She realized as she had never done before how the faithful six had assumed the responsibility of this household from the beginning, and how the old people had been warmed and comforted by their bounty. She laughed to remember her simplicity in believing that an actual salary was a perquisite of her adoption, and understood for the first time how small a part of the expense of their living this faithful stipend had defrayed. She looked back incredulously on that period when she had lived with them in a state of semi-starvation on the corn meal and cereals and very little else that her dollar and a half a week had purchased, and the "garden sass," that her grandfather had faithfully hoed and tended in the straggling patch of plowed field that he would hoe and tend no more. She spent a month practically at his feet, listening to his stories, helping him to find his pipe and tobacco and glasses, and reading the newspaper to him, and felt amply rewarded by his final acknowledgment that she was a good girl and he would as soon have her come again whenever she felt like it. On her way back to school she spent a week with her friend, Margaret Louise, in the Connecticut town where she lived with her comfortable, commonplace family. It was while she was on this visit that the most significant event of the entire year took place, though it was a happening that she put out of her mind as soon as possible and never thought of it again when she could possibly avoid it. Maggie Lou had a brother of seventeen, and one night in the corner of a moonlit porch, when they happened to be alone for a half hour, he had asked Eleanor to kiss him. "I don't want to kiss you," Eleanor said. Then, not wishing to convey a sense of any personal dislike to the brother of a friend to whom she was so sincerely devoted, she added, "I don't know you well enough." He was a big boy, with mocking blue eyes and rough tweed clothes that hung on him loosely. "When you know me better, will you let me kiss you?" he demanded. "I don't know," Eleanor said, still endeavoring to preserve the amenities. He took her hand and played with it softly. "You're an awful sweet little girl," he said. "I guess I'll go in now." "Sit still. Sister'll be back in a minute." He pulled her back to the chair from which she had half arisen. "Don't you believe in kissing?" "I don't believe in kissing _you_," she tried to say, but the words would not come. She could only pray for deliverance through the arrival of some member of the family. The boy's face was close to hers. It looked sweet in the moonlight she thought. She wished he would talk of something else besides kissing. "Don't you like me?" he persisted. "Yes, I do." She was very uncomfortable. "Well, then, there's no more to be said." His lips sought hers and pressed them. His breath came heavily, with little irregular catches in it. She pushed him away and turned into the house. "Don't be angry, Eleanor," he pleaded, trying to snatch at her hand. "I'm not angry," she said, her voice breaking, "I just wish you hadn't, that's all." There was no reference to this incident in the private diary, but, with an instinct which would have formed an indissoluble bond between herself and her Uncle Jimmie, she avoided dimly lit porches and boys with mischievous eyes and broad tweed covered shoulders. For her guardians too, this year was comparatively smooth running and colorless. Beulah's militant spirit sought the assuagement of a fierce expenditure of energy on the work that came to her hand through her new interest in suffrage. Gertrude flung herself into her sculpturing. She had been hurt as only the young can be hurt when their first delicate desires come to naught. She was very warm-blooded and eager under her cool veneer, and she had spent four years of hard work and hungry yearning for the fulness of a life she was too constrained to get any emotional hold on. Her fancy for Jimmie she believed was quite over and done with. Margaret, warmed by secret fires and nourished by the stuff that dreams are made of, flourished strangely in her attic chamber, and learned the wisdom of life by some curious method of her own of apprehending its dangers and delights. The only experiences she had that year were two proposals of marriage, one from a timid professor of the romance languages and the other from a young society man, already losing his waist line, whose sensuous spirit had been stirred by the ethereal grace of hers; but these things interested her very little. She was the princess, spinning fine dreams and waiting for the dawning of the golden day when the prince should come for her. Neither she nor Gertrude ever gave a serious thought to the five-year-old vow of celibacy, which was to Beulah as real and as binding as it had seemed on the first day she took it. Peter and David and Jimmie went their own way after the fashion of men, all of them identified with the quickening romance of New York business life. David in Wall Street was proving to be something of a financier to his mother's surprise and amazement; and the pressure relaxed, he showed some slight initiative in social matters. In fact, two mothers, who were on Mrs. Bolling's list as suitable parents-in-law, took heart of grace and began angling for him adroitly, while their daughters served him tea and made unabashed, modern-débutante eyes at him. Jimmie, successfully working his way up to the top of his firm, suffered intermittently from his enthusiastic abuse of the privileges of liberty and the pursuit of happiness. His mind and soul were in reality hot on the trail of a wife, and there was no woman among those with whom he habitually foregathered whom his spirit recognized as his own woman. He was further rendered helpless and miserable by the fact that he had not the slightest idea of his trouble. He regarded himself as a congenital Don Juan, from whom his better self shrank at times with a revulsion of loathing. Peter felt that he had his feet very firmly on a rather uninspired earth. He was getting on in the woolen business, which happened to be the vocation his father had handed down to him. He belonged to an amusing club, and he still felt himself irrevocably widowed by the early death of the girl in the photograph he so faithfully cherished. Eleanor was a very vital interest in his life. It had seemed to him for a few minutes at the Christmas party that she was no longer the little girl he had known, that a lovelier, more illusive creature--a woman--had come to displace her, but when she had flung her arms around him he had realized that it was still the heart of a child beating so fondly against his own. The real trouble with arrogating to ourselves the privileges of parenthood is that our native instincts are likely to become deflected by the substitution of the artificial for the natural responsibility. Both Peter and David had the unconscious feeling that their obligation to their race was met by their communal interest in Eleanor. Beulah, of course, sincerely believed that the filling in of an intellectual concept of life was all that was required of her. Only Jimmie groped blindly and bewilderedly for his own. Gertrude and Margaret both understood that they were unnaturally alone in a world where lovers met and mated, but they, too, hugged to their souls the flattering unction that they were parents of a sort. Thus three sets of perfectly suitable and devoted young men and women, of marriageable age, with dozens of interests and sympathies in common, and one extraordinarily vital bond, continued to walk side by side in a state of inhuman preoccupation, their gaze fixed inward instead of upon one another; and no Divine Power, happening upon the curious circumstance, believed the matter one for His intervention nor stooped to take the respective puppets by the back of their unconscious necks, and so knock their sluggish heads together. CHAPTER XVI MARGARET LOUISA'S BIRTHRIGHT "I am sixteen years and eight months old to-day," Eleanor wrote, "and I have had the kind of experience that makes me feel as if I never wanted to be any older. I know life is full of disillusionment and pain, but I did not know that any one with whom you have broken bread, and slept in the same room with, and told everything to for four long years, could turn out to be an absolute traitor and villainess. Let me begin at the beginning. For nearly a year now I have noticed that Bertha Stephens avoided me, and presented the appearance of disliking me. I don't like to have any one dislike me, and I have tried to do little things for her that would win back her affection, but with no success. As I was editing the Lantern I could print her essayettes (as she called them) and do her lots of little favors in a literary way, which she seemed to appreciate, but personally she avoided me like the plague. "Of course Stevie has lots of faults, and since Margaret Louise and I always talked everything over we used to talk about Stevie in the same way. I remember that she used to try to draw me out about Stevie's character. I've always thought Stevie was a kind of piker, that is that she would say she was going to do a thing, and then from sheer laziness not do it. My dictionary was a case in point. She gummed it all up with her nasty fudge and then wouldn't give it back to me or get me another, but the reason she wouldn't give it back to me was because her feelings were too fine to return a damaged article, and not fine enough to make her hump herself and get me another. That's only one kind of a piker and not the worst kind, but it was _pikerish_. "All this I told quite frankly to Maggie--I mean Margaret Louise, because I had no secrets from her and never thought there was any reason why I shouldn't. Stevie has a horrid brother, also, who has been up here to dances. All the girls hate him because he is so spoony. He isn't as spoony as Margaret Louise's brother, but he's quite a sloppy little spooner at that. Well, I told Margaret Louise that I didn't like Stevie's brother, and then I made the damaging remark that one reason I didn't like him was because he looked so much like Stevie. I didn't bother to explain to Maggie--I will not call her Maggie Lou any more, because that is a dear little name and sounds so affectionate,--Margaret Louise--what I meant by this, because I thought it was perfectly evident. Stevie is a peachy looking girl, a snow white blonde with pinky cheeks and dimples. Well, her brother is a snow white blond too, and he has pinky cheeks and dimples and his name is Carlo! We, of course, at once named him Curlo. It is not a good idea for a man to look too much like his sister, or to have too many dimples in his chin and cheeks. I had only to think of him in the same room with my three uncles to get his number exactly. I don't mean to use slang in my diary, but I can't seem to help it. Professor Mathews says that slang has a distinct function in the language--in replenishing it, but Uncle Peter says about slang words, that 'many are called, and few are chosen,' and there is no need to try to accommodate them all in one's vocabulary. "Well, I told Margaret Louise all these things about Curlo, and how he tried to hold my hand coming from the station one day, when the girls all went up to meet the boys that came up for the dance,--and I told her everything else in the world that happened to come into my head. "Then one day I got thinking about leaving Harmon--this is our senior year, of course--and I thought that I should leave all the girls with things just about right between us, excepting good old Stevie, who had this queer sort of grouch against me. So I decided that I'd just go around and have it out with her, and I did. I went into her room one day when her roommate was out, and demanded a show down. Well, I found out that Maggie--Margaret Louise had just repeated to Stevie every living thing that I ever said about her, just as I said it, only without the explanations and foot-notes that make any kind of conversation more understandable. "Stevie told me all these things one after another, without stopping, and when she was through I wished that the floor would open and swallow me up, but nothing so comfortable happened. I was obliged to gaze into Stevie's overflowing eyes and own up to the truth as well as I could, and explain it. It was the most humiliating hour that I ever spent, but I told Stevie exactly what I felt about her 'nothing extenuate, and naught set down in malice,' and what I had said about her to our mutual friend, who by the way, is not the mutual friend of either of us any longer. We were both crying by the time I had finished, but we understood each other. There were one or two things that she said she didn't think she would ever forget that I had said about her, but even those she could forgive. She said that my dislike of her had rankled in her heart so long that it took away all the bitterness to know that I wasn't really her enemy. She said that my coming to her that way, and not lying had showed that I had lots of character, and she thought in time that we could be quite intimate friends if I wanted to as much as she did. "After my talk with Stevie I still hoped against hope that Margaret Louise would turn out to have some reason or excuse for what she had done. I knew she had done it, but when a thing like that happens that upsets your whole trust in a person you simply can not believe the evidence of your own senses. When you read of a situation like that in a book you are all prepared for it by the author, who has taken the trouble to explain the moral weakness or unpleasantness of the character, and given you to understand that you are to expect a betrayal from him or her; but when it happens in real life out of a clear sky you have nothing to go upon that makes you even _believe_ what you know. "I won't even try to describe the scene that occurred between Margaret Louise and me. She cried and she lied, and she accused me of trying to curry favor with Stevie, and Stevie of being a backbiter, and she argued and argued about all kinds of things but the truth, and when I tried to pin her down to it, she ducked and crawled and sidestepped in a way that was dreadful. I've seen her do something like it before about different things, and I ought to have known then what she was like inside of her soul, but I guess you have to be the object of such a scene before you realize the full force of it. "All I said was, 'Margaret Louise, if that's all you've got to say about the injury you have done me, then everything is over between us from this minute;' and it was, too. "I feel as if I had been writing a beautiful story or poem on what I thought was an enduring tablet of marble, and some one had come and wiped it all off as if it were mere scribblings on a slate. I don't know whether it would seem like telling tales to tell Uncle Peter or not; I don't quite know whether I want to tell him. Sometimes I wish I had a mother to tell such things to. It seems to me that a real mother would know what to say that would help you. Disillusion is a very strange thing--like death, only having people die seems more natural somehow. When they die you can remember the happy hours that you spent with them, but when disillusionment comes then you have lost even your beautiful memories. "We had for the subject of our theme this week, 'What Life Means to Me,' which of course was the object of many facetious remarks from the girls, but I've been thinking that if I sat down seriously to state in just so many words what life means to _me_, I hardly know what I would transcribe. It means disillusionment and death for one thing. Since my grandfather died last year I have had nobody left of my own in the world,--no real blood relation. Of course, I am a good deal fonder of my aunts and uncles than most people are of their own flesh and blood, but own flesh and blood is a thing that it makes you feel shivery to be without. If I had been Margaret Louise's own flesh and blood, she would never have acted like that to me. Stevie stuck up for Carlo as if he was really something to be proud of. Perhaps my uncles and aunts feel that way about me, I don't know. I don't even know if I feel that way about them. I certainly criticize them in my soul at times, and feel tired of being dragged around from pillar to post. I don't feel that way about Uncle Peter, but there is nobody else that I am certain, positive sure that I love better than life itself. If there is only one in the world that you feel that way about, I might not be Uncle Peter's one. "Oh! I wish Margaret Louise had not sold her birthright for a mess of pottage. I wish I had a home that I had a perfect right to go and live in forevermore. I wish my mother was here to comfort me to-night." CHAPTER XVII A REAL KISS At seventeen, Eleanor was through at Harmon. She was to have one year of preparatory school and then it was the desire of Beulah's heart that she should go to Rogers. The others contended that the higher education should be optional and not obligatory. The decision was finally to be left to Eleanor herself, after she had considered it in all its bearings. "If she doesn't decide in favor of college," David said, "and she makes her home with me here, as I hope she will do, of course, I don't see what society we are going to be able to give her. Unfortunately none of our contemporaries have growing daughters. She ought to meet eligible young men and that sort of thing." "Not yet," Margaret cried. The two were having a cozy cup of tea at his apartment. "You're so terribly worldly, David, that you frighten me sometimes." "You don't know where I will end, is that the idea?" "I don't know where Eleanor will end, if you're already thinking of eligible young men for her." "Those things have got to be thought of," David answered gravely. "I suppose they have," Margaret sighed. "I don't want her to be married. I want to take her off by myself and growl over her all alone for a while. Then I want Prince Charming to come along and snatch her up quickly, and set her behind his milk white charger and ride away with her. If we've all got to get together and connive at marrying her off there won't be any comfort in having her." "I don't know," David said thoughtfully; "I think that might be fun, too. A vicarious love-affair that you can manipulate is one of the most interesting games in the world." "That's not my idea of an interesting game," Margaret said. "I like things very personal, David,--you ought to know that by this time." "I do know that," David said, "but it sometimes occurs to me that except for a few obvious facts of that nature I really know very little about you, Margaret." "There isn't much to know--except that I'm a woman." "That's a good deal," David answered slowly; "to a mere man that seems to be considerable of an adventure." "It is about as much of an adventure sometimes as it would be to be a field of clover in an insectless world.--This is wonderful tea, David, but your cream is like butter and floats around in it in wudges. No, don't get any more, I've got to go home. Grandmother still thinks it's very improper for me to call upon you, in spite of Mademoiselle and your ancient and honorable housekeeper." "Don't go," David said; "I apologize on my knees for the cream. I'll send out and have it wet down, or whatever you do to cream in that state. I want to talk to you. What did you mean by your last remark?" "About the cream, or the proprieties?" "About women." "Everything and nothing, David dear. I'm a little bit tired of being one, that's all, and I want to go home." "She wants to go home when she's being so truly delightful and cryptic," David said. "Have you been seeing visions, Margaret, in my hearth fire? Your eyes look as if you had." "I thought I did for a minute." She rose and stood absently fitting her gloves to her fingers. "I don't know exactly what it was I saw, but it was something that made me uncomfortable. It gives me the creeps to talk about being a woman. David, do you know sometimes I have a kind of queer hunch about Eleanor? I love her, you know, dearly, dearly. I think that she is a very successful kind of Frankenstein; but there are moments when I have the feeling that she's going to be a storm center and bring some queer trouble upon us. I wouldn't say this to anybody but you, David." As David tucked her in the car--he had arrived at the dignity of owning one now--and watched her sweet silhouette disappear, he, too, had his moment of clairvoyance. He felt that he was letting something very precious slip out of sight, as if some radiant and delicate gift had been laid lightly within his grasp and as lightly withdrawn again. As if when the door closed on his friend Margaret some stranger, more silent creature who was dear to him had gone with her. As soon as he was dressed for dinner he called Margaret on the telephone to know if she had arrived home safely, and was informed not only that she had, but that she was very wroth at him for getting her down three flights of stairs in the midst of her own dinner toilet. "I had a kind of hunch, too," he told her, "and I felt as if I wanted to hear your voice speaking." But she only scoffed at him. "If that's the way you feel about your chauffeur," she said, "you ought to discharge him, but he brought me home beautifully." The difference between a man's moments of prescience and a woman's, is that the man puts them out of his consciousness as quickly as he can, while a woman clings to them fearfully and goes her way a little more carefully for the momentary flash of foresight. David tried to see Margaret once or twice during that week but failed to find her in when he called or telephoned, and the special impulse to seek her alone again died naturally. One Saturday a few weeks later Eleanor telegraphed him that she wished to come to New York for the week-end to do some shopping. He went to the train to meet her, and when the slender chic figure in the most correct of tailor made suits appeared at the gateway, with an obsequious porter bearing her smart bag and ulster, he gave a sudden gasp of surprise at the picture. He had been aware for some time of the increase in her inches and the charm of the pure cameo-cut profile, but he regarded her still as a child histrionically assuming the airs and graces of womanhood, as small girl children masquerade in the trailing skirts of their elders. He was accustomed to the idea that she was growing up rapidly, but the fact that she was already grown had never actually dawned on him until this moment. "You look as if you were surprised to see me, Uncle David,--are you?" she said, slipping a slim hand, warm through its immaculate glove, into his. "You knew I was coming, and you came to meet me, and yet you looked as surprised as if you hadn't expected me at all." "Surprised to see you just about expresses it, Eleanor. I am surprised to see you. I was looking for a little girl in hair ribbons with her skirts to her knees." "And a blue tam-o'-shanter?" "And a blue tam-o'-shanter. I had forgotten you had grown up any to speak of." "You see me every vacation," Eleanor grumbled, as she stepped into the waiting motor. "It isn't because you lack opportunity that you don't notice what I look like. It's just because you're naturally unobserving." "Peter and Jimmie have been making a good deal of fuss about your being a young lady, now I think of it. Peter especially has been rather a nuisance about it, breaking into my most precious moments of triviality with the sweetly solemn thought that our little girl has grown to be a woman now." "Oh, does _he_ think I'm grown up, does he really?" "Jimmie is almost as bad. He's all the time wanting me to get you to New York over the weekend, so that he can see if you are any taller than you were the last time he saw you." "Are they coming to see me this evening?" "Jimmie is going to look in. Peter is tied up with his sister. You know she's on here from China with her daughter. Peter wants you to meet the child." "She must be as grown up as I am," Eleanor said. "I used to have her room, you know, when I stayed with Uncle Peter. Does Uncle Peter like her?" "Not as much as he likes you, Miss Green-eyes. He says she looks like a heathen Chinee but otherwise is passable. I didn't know that you added jealousy to the list of your estimable vices." "I'm not jealous," Eleanor protested; "or if I am it's only because she's blood relation,--and I'm not, you know." "It's a good deal more prosaic to be a blood relation, if anybody should ask you," David smiled. "A blood relation is a good deal like the famous primrose on the river's brim." "'A primrose by the river's brim a yellow primrose was to him,--and nothing more,'" Eleanor quoted gaily. "Why, what more--" she broke off suddenly and colored slightly. "What more would anybody want to be than a yellow primrose by the river's brim?" David finished for her. "I don't know, I'm sure. I'm a mere man and such questions are too abstruse for me, as I told your Aunt Margaret the other day. Now I think of it, though, you don't look unlike a yellow primrose yourself to-day, daughter." "That's because I've got a yellow ribbon on my hat." "No, the resemblance goes much deeper. It has something to do with youth and fragrance and the flowers that bloom in the spring." "The flowers that bloom in the spring, tra la," Eleanor returned saucily, "have nothing to do with the case." "She's learning that she has eyes, good Lord," David said to himself, but aloud he remarked paternally, "I saw all your aunts yesterday. Gertrude gave a tea party and invited a great many famous tea party types, and ourselves." "Was Aunt Beulah there?" "I said all your aunts. Beulah was there, like the famous Queenie, with her hair in a braid." "Not really." "Pretty nearly. She's gone in for dress reform now, you know, a kind of middy blouse made out of a striped portière with a kilted skirt of the same material and a Scotch cap. She doesn't look so bad in it. Your Aunt Beulah presents a peculiar phenomenon these days. She's growing better-looking and behaving worse every day of her life." "Behaving worse?" "She's theory ridden and fad bitten. She'll come to a bad end if something doesn't stop her." "Do you mean--stop her working for suffrage? I'm a suffragist, Uncle David." "And quite right to remind me of it before I began slamming the cause. No, I don't mean suffrage. I believe in suffrage myself. I mean the way she's going after it. There are healthy ways of insisting on your rights and unhealthy ways. Beulah's getting further and further off key, that's all. Here we are at home, daughter. Your poor old cooperative father welcomes you to the associated hearthstone." "This front entrance looks more like my front entrance than any other place does," Eleanor said. "Oh! I'm so glad to be here. George, how is the baby?" she asked the black elevator man, who beamed delightedly upon her. "Gosh! I didn't know he had one," David chuckled. "It takes a woman--" Jimmie appeared in the evening, laden with violets and a five pound box of the chocolates most in favor in the politest circles at the moment. David whistled when he saw them. "What's devouring you, papa?" Jimmie asked him. "Don't I always place tributes at the feet of the offspring?" "Mirror candy and street corner violets, yes," David said. "It's only the labels that surprised me." "She knows the difference, now," Jimmie answered, "what would you?" The night before her return to school it was decreed that she should go to bed early. She had spent two busy days of shopping and "seeing the family." She had her hours discussing her future with Peter, long visits and talks with Margaret and Gertrude, and a cup of tea at suffrage headquarters with Beulah, as well as long sessions in the shops accompanied by Mademoiselle, who made her home now permanently with David. She sat before the fire drowsily constructing pyramids out of the embers and David stood with one arm on the mantel, smoking his after-dinner cigar, and watching her. "Is it to be college, Eleanor?" he asked her presently. "I can't seem to make up my mind, Uncle David." "Don't you like the idea?" "Yes, I'd love it,--if--" "If what, daughter?" "If I thought I could spare the time." "The time? Elucidate." "I'm going to earn my own living, you know." "I didn't know." "I am. I've got to--in order to--to feel right about things." "Don't you like the style of living to which your cooperative parents have accustomed you?" "I love everything you've ever done for me, but I can't go on letting you do things for me forever." "Why not?" "I don't know why not exactly. It doesn't seem--right, that's all." "It's your New England conscience, Eleanor; one of the most specious varieties of consciences in the world. It will always be tempting you to do good that better may come. Don't listen to it, daughter." "I'm in earnest, Uncle David. I don't know whether I would be better fitted to earn my living if I went to business college or real college. What do you think?" "I can't think,--I'm stupefied." "Uncle Peter couldn't think, either." "Have you mentioned this brilliant idea to Peter?" "Yes." "What did he say?" "He talked it over with me, but I think he thinks I'll change my mind." "I think you'll change your mind. Good heavens! Eleanor, we're all able to afford you--the little we spend on you is nothing divided among six of us. It's our pleasure and privilege. When did you come to this extraordinary decision?" "A long time ago. The day that Mrs. Bolling talked to me, I think. There are things she said that I've never forgotten. I told Uncle Peter to think about it and then help me to decide which to do, and I want you to think, Uncle David, and tell me truly what you believe the best preparation for a business life would be. I thought perhaps I might be a stenographer in an editorial office, and my training there would be more use to me than four years at college, but I don't know." "You're an extraordinary young woman," David said, staring at her. "I'm glad you broached this subject, if only that I might realize how extraordinary, but I don't think anything will come of it, my dear. I don't want you to go to college unless you really want to, but if you do want to, I hope you will take up the pursuit of learning as a pursuit and not as a means to an end. Do you hear me, daughter?" "Yes, Uncle David." "Then let's have no more of this nonsense of earning your own living." "Are you really displeased, Uncle David?" "I should be if I thought you were serious,--but it's bedtime. If you're going to get your beauty sleep, my dear, you ought to begin on it immediately." Eleanor rose obediently, her brow clouded a little, and her head held high. David watched the color coming and going in the sweet face and the tender breast rising and falling with her quickening breath. "I thought perhaps you would understand," she said. "Good night." She had always kissed him "good night" until this visit, and he had refrained from commenting on the omission before, but now he put out his hand to her. "Haven't you forgotten something?" he asked. "There is only one way for a daughter to say good night to her parent." She put up her face, and as she did so he caught the glint of tears in her eyes. "Why, Eleanor, dear," he said, "did you care?" And he kissed her. Then his lips sought hers again. With his arms still about her shoulder he stood looking down at her. A hot tide of crimson made its way slowly to her brow and then receded, accentuating the clear pallor of her face. "That was a real kiss, dear," he said slowly. "We mustn't get such things confused. I won't bother you with talking about it to-night, or until you are ready. Until then we'll pretend that it didn't happen, but if the thought of it should ever disturb you the least bit, dear, you are to remember that the time is coming when I shall have something to say about it; will you remember?" "Yes, Uncle David," Eleanor said uncertainly, "but I--I--" David took her unceremoniously by the shoulders. "Go now," he said, and she obeyed him without further question. CHAPTER XVIII BEULAH'S PROBLEM Peter was shaving for the evening. His sister was giving a dinner party for two of her husband's fellow bankers and their wives. After that they were going to see the latest Belasco production, and from there to some one of the new dancing "clubs,"--the smart cabarets that were forced to organize in the guise of private enterprises to evade the two o'clock closing law. Peter enjoyed dancing, but he did not as a usual thing enjoy bankers' wives. He was deliberating on the possibility of excusing himself gracefully after the theater, on the plea of having some work to do, and finally decided that his sister's feelings would be hurt if she realized he was trying to escape the climax of the hospitality she had provided so carefully. He gazed at himself intently over the drifts of lather and twisted his shaving mirror to the most propitious angle from time to time. In the room across the hall--Eleanor's room, he always called it to himself--his young niece was singing bits of the Mascagni intermezzo interspersed with bits of the latest musical comedy, in a rather uncertain contralto. "My last girl came from Vassar, and I don't know where to class her." Peter's mind took up the refrain automatically. "My last girl--" and began at the beginning of the chorus again. "My last girl came from Vassar," which brought him by natural stages to the consideration of the higher education and of Beulah, and a conversation concerning her that he had had with Jimmie and David the night before. "She's off her nut," Jimmie said succinctly. "It's not exactly that there's nobody home," he rapped his curly pate significantly, "but there's too much of a crowd there. She's not the same old girl at all. She used to be a good fellow, high-brow propaganda and all. Now she's got nothing else in her head. What's happened to her?" "It's what hasn't happened to her that's addled her," David explained. "It's these highly charged, hypersensitive young women that go to pieces under the modern pressure. They're the ones that need licking into shape by all the natural processes." "By which you mean a drunken husband and a howling family?" Jimmie suggested. "Yes, or its polite equivalent." "That is true, isn't it?" Peter said. "Feminism isn't the answer to Beulah's problem." "It is the problem," David said; "she's poisoning herself with it. I know what I'm talking about. I've seen it happen. My cousin Jack married a girl with a sister a great deal like Beulah, looks, temperament, and everything else, though she wasn't half so nice. She got going the militant pace and couldn't stop herself. I never met her at a dinner party that she wasn't tackling somebody on the subject of man's inhumanity to woman. She ended in a sanitorium; in fact, they're thinking now of taking her to the--" "--bug house," Jimmie finished cheerfully. "And in the beginning she was a perfectly good girl that needed nothing in the world but a chance to develop along legitimate lines." "The frustrate matron, eh?" Peter said. "The frustrate matron," David agreed gravely. "I wonder you haven't realized this yourself, Gram. You're keener about such things than I am. Beulah is more your job than mine." "Is she?" "You're the only one she listens to or looks up to. Go up and tackle her some day and see what you can do. She's sinking fast." "Give her the once over and throw out the lifeline," Jimmie said. "I thought all this stuff was a phase, a part of her taking herself seriously as she always has. I had no idea it was anything to worry about," Peter persisted. "Are you sure she's in bad shape--that she's got anything more than a bad attack of Feminism of the Species in its most virulent form? They come out of _that_, you know." "She's batty," Jimmie nodded gravely. "Dave's got the right dope." "Go up and look her over," David persisted; "you'll see what we mean, then. Beulah's in a bad way." Peter reviewed this conversation while he shaved the right side of his face, and frowned prodigiously through the lather. He wished that he had an engagement that evening that he could break in order to get to see Beulah at once, and discover for himself the harm that had come to his friend. He was devoted to Beulah. He had always felt that he saw a little more clearly than the others the virtue that was in the girl. He admired the pluck with which she made her attack on life and the energy with which she accomplished her ends. There was to him something alluring and quaint about her earnestness. The fact that her soundness could be questioned came to him with something like a shock. As soon as he was dressed he was called to the telephone to talk to David. "Margaret has just told me that Doctor Penrose has been up to see Beulah and pronounces it a case of nervous breakdown. He wants her to try out psycho-analysis, and that sort of thing. He seems to feel that it's serious. Margaret is fearfully upset, poor girl. So'm I, to tell the truth." "And so am I," Peter acknowledged to himself as he hung up the receiver. He was so absorbed during the evening that one of the ladies--the wife of the fat banker--found him extremely dull and decided against asking him to dinner with his sister. The wife of the thin banker, who was in his charge at the theater, got the benefit of his effort to rouse himself and grace the occasion creditably, and found him delightful. By the time the evening was over he had decided that Beulah should be pulled out of whatever dim world of dismay and delusion she might be wandering in, at whatever cost. It was unthinkable that she should be wasted, or that her youth and splendid vitality should go for naught. He found her eager to talk to him the next night when he went to see her. "Peter," she said, "I want you to go to my aunt and my mother, and tell them that I've got to go on with my work,--that I can't be stopped and interrupted by this foolishness of doctors and nurses. I never felt better in my life, except for not being able to sleep, and I think that is due to the way they have worried me. I live in a world they don't know anything about, that's all. Even if they were right, if I am wearing myself out soul and body for the sake of the cause, what business is it of theirs to interfere? I'm working for the souls and bodies of women for ages to come. What difference does it make if my soul and body suffer? Why shouldn't they?" Her eyes narrowed. Peter observed the unnatural light in them, the apparent dryness of her lips, the two bright spots burning below her cheek-bones. "Because," he answered her slowly, "I don't think it was the original intention of Him who put us here that we should sacrifice everything we are to the business of emphasizing the superiority of a sex." "That isn't the point at all, Peter. No man understands, no man can understand. It's woman's equality we want emphasized, just literally that and nothing more. You've pauperized and degraded us long enough--" "Thou canst not say I--" Peter began. "Yes, you and every other man, every man in the world is a party to it." "I had to get her going," Peter apologized to himself, "in order to get a point of departure. Not if I vote for women, Beulah, dear," he added aloud. "If you throw your influence with us instead of against us," she conceded, "you're helping to right the wrong that you have permitted for so long." "Well, granting your premise, granting all your premises, Beulah--and I admit that most of them have sound reasoning behind them--your battle now is all over but the shouting. There's no reason that you personally should sacrifice your last drop of energy to a campaign that's practically won already." "If you think the mere franchise is all I have been working for, Peter,--" "I don't. I know the thousand and one activities you women are concerned with. I know how much better church and state always have been and are bound to be, when the women get behind and push, if they throw their strength right." Beulah rose enthusiastically to this bait and talked rationally and well for some time. Just as Peter was beginning to feel that David and Jimmie had been guilty of the most unsympathetic exaggeration of her state of mind--unquestionably she was not as fit physically as usual--she startled him with an abrupt change into almost hysterical incoherence. "I have a right to live my own life," she concluded, "and nobody--nobody shall stop me." "We are all living our own lives, aren't we?" Peter asked mildly. "No woman lives her own life to-day," Beulah cried, still excitedly. "Every woman is living the life of some man, who has the legal right to treat her as an imbecile." "Hold on, Beulah. How about the suffrage states, how about the women who are already in the proud possession of their rights and privileges? They are not technical imbeciles any longer according to your theory. The vote's coming. Every woman will be a super-woman in two shakes,--so what's devouring you, as Jimmie says?" "It's after all the states have suffrage that the big fight will really begin," Beulah answered wearily. "It's the habit of wearing the yoke we'll have to fight then." "The anti-feminists," Peter said, "I see. Beulah, can't you give yourself any rest, or is the nature of the cause actually suicidal?" To his surprise her tense face quivered at this and she tried to steady a tremulous lower lip. "I am tired," she said, a little piteously, "dreadfully tired, but nobody cares." "Is that fair?" "It's true." "Your friends care." "They only want to stop me doing something they have no sympathy with. What do Gertrude and Margaret know of the real purpose of my life or my failure or success? They take a sentimental interest in my health, that's all. Do you suppose it made any difference to Jeanne d'Arc how many people took a sympathetic interest in her health if they didn't believe in what she believed in?" "There's something in that." "I thought Eleanor would grow up to take an interest in the position of women, and to care about the things I cared about, but she's not going to." "She's very fond of you." "Not as fond as she is of Margaret." Peter longed to dispute this, but he could not in honesty. "She's a suffragist." "She's so lukewarm she might just as well be an anti. She's naturally reactionary. Women like that aren't much use. They drag us back like so much dead weight." "I suppose Eleanor has been a disappointment to you," Peter mused, "but she tries pretty hard to be all things to all parents, Beulah. You'll find she won't fail you if you need her." "I shan't need her," Beulah said, prophetically. "I hoped she'd stand beside me in the work, but she's not that kind. She'll marry early and have a family, and that will be the end of her." "I wonder if she will," Peter said, "I hope so. She still seems such a child to me. I believe in marriage, Beulah, don't you?" Her answer surprised him. "Under certain conditions, I do. I made a vow once that I would never marry and I've always believed that it would be hampering and limiting to a woman, but now I see that the fight has got to go on. If there are going to be women to carry on the fight they will have to be born of the women who are fighting to-day." "Thank God," Peter said devoutly. "It doesn't make any difference why you believe it, if you do believe it." "It makes all the difference," Beulah said, but her voice softened. "What I believe is more to me than anything else in the world, Peter." "That's all right, too. I understand your point of view, Beulah. You carry it a little bit too far, that's all that's wrong with it from my way of thinking." "Will you help me to go on, Peter?" "How?" "Talk to my aunt and my mother. Tell them that they're all wrong in their treatment of me." "I think I could undertake to do that"--Peter was convinced that a less antagonistic attitude on the part of her relatives would be more successful--"and I will." Beulah's eyes filled with tears. "You're the only one who comes anywhere near knowing," she said, "or who ever will, I guess. I try so hard, Peter, and now when I don't seem to be accomplishing as much as I want to, as much as it's necessary for me to accomplish if I am to go on respecting myself, every one enters into a conspiracy to stop my doing anything at all. The only thing that makes me nervous is the way I am thwarted and opposed at every turn. I haven't got nervous prostration." "Perhaps not, but you have something remarkably like _ideê fixe_," Peter said to himself compassionately. He found her actual condition less dangerous but much more difficult than he had anticipated. She was living wrong, that was the sum and substance of her malady. Her life was spent confronting theories and discounting conditions. She did not realize that it is only the interest of our investment in life that we can sanely contribute to the cause of living. Our capital strength and energy must be used for the struggle for existence itself if we are to have a world of balanced individuals. There is an arrogance involved in assuming ourselves more humane than human that reacts insidiously on our health and morals. Peter, looking into the twitching hectic face before him with the telltale glint of mania in the eyes, felt himself becoming helpless with pity for a mind gone so far askew. He felt curiously responsible for Beulah's condition. "She wouldn't have run herself so far aground," he thought, "if I had been on the job a little more. I could have helped her to steer straighter. A word here and a lift there and she would have come through all right. Now something's got to stop her or she can't be stopped. She'll preach once too often out of the tail of a cart on the subject of equal guardianship,--and--" Beulah put her hands to her face suddenly, and, sinking back into the depths of the big cushioned chair on the edge of which she had been tensely poised during most of the conversation, burst into tears. "You're the only one that knows," she sobbed over and over again. "I'm so tired, Peter, but I've got to go on and on and on. If they stop me, I'll kill myself." Peter crossed the room to her side and sat down on her chair-arm. "Don't cry, dear," he said, with a hand on her head. "You're too tired to think things out now,--but I'll help you." She lifted a piteous face, for the moment so startlingly like that of the dead girl he had loved that his senses were confused by the resemblance. "How, Peter?" she asked. "How can you help me?" "I think I see the way," he said slowly. He slipped to his knees and gathered her close in his arms. "I think this will be the way, dear," he said very gently. "Does this mean that you want me to marry you?" she whispered, when she was calmer. "If you will, dear," he said. "Will you?" "I will,--if I can, if I can make it seem right to after I've thought it all out.--Oh! Peter, I love you. I love you." "I had no idea of that," he said gravely, "but it's wonderful that you do. I'll put everything I've got into trying to make you happy, Beulah." "I know you will, Peter." Her arms closed around his neck and tightened there. "I love you." He made her comfortable and she relaxed like a tired child, almost asleep under his soothing hand, and the quiet spell of his tenderness. "I didn't know it could be like this," she whispered. "But it can," he answered her. In his heart he was saying, "This is best. I am sure this is best. It is the right and normal way for her--and for me." In her tri-cornered dormitory room at the new school which she was not sharing with any one this year Eleanor, enveloped in a big brown and yellow wadded bathrobe, was writing a letter to Peter. Her hair hung in two golden brown braids over her shoulders and her pure profile was bent intently over the paper. At the moment when Beulah made her confession of love and closed her eyes against the breast of the man who had just asked her to marry him, two big tears forced their way between Eleanor's lids and splashed down upon her letter. CHAPTER XIX MOSTLY UNCLE PETER "Dear Uncle Peter," the letter ran, "I am very, very homesick and lonely for you to-day. It seems to me that I would gladly give a whole year of my life just for the privilege of being with you, and talking instead of writing,--but since that can not be, I am going to try and write you about the thing that is troubling me. I can't bear it alone any longer, and still I don't know whether it is the kind of thing that it is honorable to tell or not. So you see I am very much troubled and puzzled, and this trouble involves some one else in a way that it is terrible to think of. "Uncle Peter, dear, I do not want to be married. Not until I have grown up, and seen something of the world. You know it is one of my dearest wishes to be self-supporting, not because I am a Feminist or a new woman, or have 'the unnatural belief of an antipathy to man' that you're always talking about, but just because it will prove to me once and for all that I belong to myself, and that my _soul_ isn't, and never has been cooperative. You know what I mean by this, and you are not hurt by my feeling so. You, I am sure, would not want me to be married, or to have to think of myself as engaged, especially not to anybody that we all knew and loved, and who is very close to me and you in quite another way. Please don't try to imagine what I mean, Uncle Peter--even if you know, you must tell yourself that you don't know. Please, please pretend even to yourself that I haven't written you this letter. I know people do tell things like this, but I don't know quite how they bring themselves to do it, even if they have somebody like you who understands everything--everything. "Uncle Peter, dear, I am supposed to be going to be married by and by when the one who wants it feels that it can be spoken of, and until that happens, I've got to wait for him to speak, unless I can find some way to tell him that I do not want it ever to be. I don't know how to tell him. I don't know how to make him feel that I do not belong to him. It is only myself I belong to, and I belong to you, but I don't know how to make that plain to any one who does not know it already. I can't say it unless perhaps you can help me to. "I am different from the other girls. I know every girl always thinks there is something different about her, but I think there are ways in which I truly am different. When I want anything I know more clearly what it is, and why I want it than most other girls do, and not only that, but I know now, that I want to keep myself, and everything I think and feel and am,--_sacred_. There is an inner shrine in a woman's soul that she must keep inviolate. I know that now. "A liberty that you haven't known how, or had the strength to prevent, is a terrible thing. One can't forget it. Uncle Peter, dear, twice in my life things have happened that drive me almost desperate when I think of them. If these things should happen again when I know that I don't want them to, I don't think there would be any way of my bearing it. Perhaps you can tell me something that will make me find a way out of this tangle. I don't see what it could be, but lots of times you have shown me the way out of endless mazes that were not grown up troubles like this, but seemed very real to me just the same. "Uncle Peter, dear, dear, dear,--you are all I have. I wish you were here to-night, though you wouldn't be let in, even if you beat on the gate ever so hard, for it's long after bedtime. I am up in my tower room all alone. Oh! answer this letter. Answer it quickly, quickly." * * * * * Eleanor read her letter over and addressed a tear splotched envelope to Peter. Then she slowly tore letter and envelope into little bits. "He would know," she said to herself. "I haven't any real right to tell him. It would be just as bad as any kind of tattling." She began another letter to him but found she could not write without saying what was in her heart, and so went to bed uncomforted. There was nothing in her experience to help her in her relation to David. His kiss on her lips had taught her the nature of such kisses: had made her understand suddenly the ease with which the strange, sweet spell of sex is cast. She related it to the episode of the unwelcome caress bestowed upon her by the brother of Maggie Lou, and that half forgotten incident took on an almost terrible significance. She understood now how she should have repelled that unconscionable boy, but that understanding did not help her with the problem of her Uncle David. Though the thought of it thrilled through her with a strange incredible delight, she did not want another kiss of his upon her lips. "It's--it's--like that," she said to herself. "I want it to be from somebody--else. Somebody _realer_ to me. Somebody that would make it seem right." But even to herself she mentioned no names. She had definitely decided against going to college. She felt that she must get upon her own feet quickly and be under no obligation to any man. Vaguely her stern New England rearing was beginning to indicate the way that she should tread. No man or woman who did not understand "the value of a dollar," was properly equipped to do battle with the realities of life. The value of a dollar, and a clear title to it--these were the principles upon which her integrity must be founded if she were to survive her own self-respect. Her Puritan fathers had bestowed this heritage upon her. She had always felt the irregularity of her economic position; now that the complication of her relation with David had arisen, it was beginning to make her truly uncomfortable. David had been very considerate of her, but his consideration frightened her. He had been so afraid that she might be hurt or troubled by his attitude toward her that he had explained again, and almost in so many words that he was only waiting for her to grow accustomed to the idea before he asked her to become his wife. She had looked forward with considerable trepidation to the Easter vacation following the establishment of their one-sided understanding, but David relieved her apprehension by putting up at his club and leaving her in undisturbed possession of his quarters. There, with Mademoiselle still treating her as a little girl, and the other five of her heterogeneous foster family to pet and divert her at intervals, she soon began to feel her life swing back into a more accustomed and normal perspective. David's attitude to her was as simple as ever, and when she was with the devoted sextet she was almost able to forget the matter that was at issue between them--almost but not quite. She took quite a new kind of delight in her association with the group. She found herself suddenly on terms of grown up equality with them. Her consciousness of the fact that David was tacitly waiting for her to become a woman, had made a woman of her already, and she looked on her guardians with the eyes of a woman, even though a very newly fledged and timorous one. She was a trifle self-conscious with the others, but with Jimmie she was soon on her old familiar footing. * * * * * "Uncle Jimmie is still a great deal of fun," she wrote in her diary. "He does just the same old things he used to do with me, and a good many new ones in addition. He brings me flowers, and gets me taxi-cabs as if I were really a grown up young lady, and he pinches my nose and teases me as if I were still the little girl that kept house in a studio for him. I never realized before what a good-looking man he is. I used to think that Uncle Peter was the only handsome man of the three, but now I realize that they are all exceptionally good-looking. Uncle David has a great deal of distinction, of course, but Uncle Jimmie is merry and radiant and vital, and tall and athletic looking into the bargain. The ladies on the Avenue all turn to look at him when we go walking. He says that the gentlemen all turn to look at me, and I think perhaps they do when I have my best clothes on, but in my school clothes I am quite certain that nothing like that happens. "I have been out with Uncle Jimmie Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday and Friday,--four days of my vacation. We've been to the Hippodrome and Chinatown, and we've dined at Sherry's, and one night we went down to the little Italian restaurant where I had my first introduction to _eau rougie_, and was so distressed about it. I shall never forget that night, and I don't think Uncle Jimmie will ever be done teasing me about it. It is nice to be with Uncle Jimmie so much, but I never seem to see Uncle Peter any more. Alphonse is very careful about taking messages, I know, but it does seem to me that Uncle Peter must have telephoned more times than I know of. It does seem as if he would, at least, try to see me long enough to have one of our old time talks again. To see him with all the others about is only a very little better than not seeing him at all. He isn't like himself, someway. There is a shadow over him that I do not understand." * * * * * "Don't you think that Uncle Peter has changed?" she asked Jimmie, when the need of speaking of him became too strong to withstand. "He is a little pale about the ears," Jimmie conceded, "but I think that's the result of hard work and not enough exercise. He spends all his spare time trying to patch up Beulah instead of tramping and getting out on his horse the way he used to. He's doing a good job on the old dear, but it's some job, nevertheless and notwithstanding--" "Is Aunt Beulah feeling better than she was?" Eleanor's lips were dry, but she did her best to make her voice sound natural. It seemed strange that Jimmie could speak so casually of a condition of affairs that made her very heart stand still. "I didn't know that Uncle Peter had been taking care of her." "Taking care of her isn't a circumstance to what Peter has been doing for Beulah. You know she hasn't been right for some time. She got burning wrong, like the flame on our old gas stove in the studio when there was air in it." "Uncle David thought so the last time I was here," Eleanor said, "but I didn't know that Uncle Peter--" "Peter, curiously enough, was the last one to tumble. Dave and I got alarmed about the girl and held a consultation, with the result that Doctor Gramercy was called. If we'd believed he would go into it quite so heavily we might have thought again before we sicked him on. It's very nice for Mary Ann, but rather tough on Abraham as they said when the lady was deposited on that already overcrowded bosom. Now Beulah's got suffrage mania, and Peter's got Beulah mania, and it's a merry mess all around." "Is Uncle Peter with her a lot?" "Every minute. You haven't seen much of him since you came, have you?--Well, the reason is that every afternoon as soon as he can get away from the office, he puts on a broad sash marked 'Votes for Women,' and trundles Beulah around in her little white and green perambulator, trying to distract her mind from suffrage while he talks to her gently and persuasively upon the subject. Suffrage is the only subject on her mind, he explains, so all he can do is to try to cuckoo gently under it day by day. It's a very complicated process but he's making headway." "I'm glad of that," Eleanor said faintly. "How--how is Aunt Gertrude? I don't see her very often, either." "Gertrude's all right." It was Jimmie's turn to look self-conscious. "She never has time for me any more; I'm not high-brow enough for her. She's getting on like a streak, you know, exhibiting everywhere." "I know she is. She gave me a cast of her faun's head. I think it is lovely. Aunt Margaret looks well." "She is, I guess, but don't let's waste all our valuable time talking about the family. Let's talk about us--you and me. You ask me how I'm feeling and then I'll tell you. Then I'll ask you how you're feeling and you'll tell me. Then I'll tell you how I imagine you must be feeling from the way you're looking,--and that will give me a chance to expatiate on the delectability of your appearance. I'll work up delicately to the point where you will begin to compare me favorably with all the other nice young men you know,--and then we'll be off." "Shall we?" Eleanor asked, beginning to sparkle a little. "We shall indeed," he assured her solemnly. "You begin. No, on second thoughts, I'll begin. I'll begin at the place where I start telling you how excessively well you're looking. I don't know, considering its source, whether it would interest you or not, but you have the biggest blue eyes that I've, ever seen in all my life,--and I'm rather a judge of them." "All the better to eat you with, my dear," Eleanor chanted. "Quite correct." He shot her a queer glance from under his eyebrows. "I don't feel very safe when I look into them, my child. It would be a funny joke on me if they did prove fatal to me, wouldn't it?--well,--but away with such nonsense. I mustn't blither to the very babe whose cradle I am rocking, must I?" "I'm not a babe, Uncle Jimmie. I feel very old sometimes. Older than any of you." "Oh! you are, you are. You're a regular sphinx sometimes. Peter says that you even disconcert him at times, when you take to remembering things out of your previous experience." "'When he was a King in Babylon and I was a Christian Slave?'" she quoted quickly. "Exactly. Only I'd prefer to play the part of the King of Babylon, if it's all the same to you, niecelet. How does the rest of it go, 'yet not for a--' something or other 'would I wish undone that deed beyond the grave.' Gosh, my dear, if things were otherwise, I think I could understand how that feller felt. Get on your hat, and let's get out into the open. My soul is cramped with big potentialities this afternoon. I wish you hadn't grown up, Eleanor. You are taking my breath away in a peculiar manner. No man likes to have his breath taken away so suddint like. Let's get out into the rolling prairie of Central Park." But the rest of the afternoon was rather a failure. The Park had that peculiar bleakness that foreruns the first promise of spring. The children, that six weeks before were playing in the snow and six weeks later would be searching the turf for dandelions, were in the listless between seasons state of comparative inactivity. There was a deceptive balminess in the air that seemed merely to overlay a penetrating chilliness. "I'm sorry I'm not more entertaining this afternoon," Jimmie apologized on the way home. "It isn't that I am not happy, or that I don't feel the occasion to be more than ordinarily propitious; I'm silent upon a peak in Darien,--that's all." "I was thinking of something else, too," Eleanor said. "I didn't say I was thinking of something else." "People are always thinking of something else when they aren't talking to each other, aren't they?" "Something else, or each other, Eleanor. I wasn't thinking of something else, I was thinking--well, I won't tell you exactly--at present. A penny for your thoughts, little one." "They aren't worth it." "A penny is a good deal of money. You can buy joy for a penny." "I'm afraid I couldn't--buy joy, even if you gave me your penny, Uncle Jimmie." "You might try. My penny might not be like other pennies. On the other hand, your thoughts might be worth a fortune to me." "I'm afraid they wouldn't be worth anything to anybody." "You simply don't know what I am capable of making out of them." "I wish I could make something out of them," Eleanor said so miserably that Jimmie was filled with compunction for having tired her out, and hailed a passing taxi in which to whiz her home again. * * * * * "I have found out that Uncle Peter is spending all his time with Aunt Beulah," she wrote in her diary that evening. "It is beautiful of him to try to help her through this period of nervous collapse, and just like him, but I don't understand why it is that he doesn't come and tell me about it, especially since he is getting so tired. He ought to know that I love him so dearly and deeply that I could help him even in helping her. It isn't like him not to share his anxieties with me. Aunt Beulah is a grown up woman, and has friends and doctors and nurses, and every one knows her need. It seems to me that he might think that I have no one but him, and that whatever might lie heavy on my heart I could only confide in him. I have always told him everything. Why doesn't it occur to him that I might have something to tell him now? Why doesn't he come to me? "I am afraid he will get sick. He needs a good deal of exercise to keep in form. If he doesn't have a certain amount of muscular activity his digestion is not so good. There are two little creases between his eyes that I never remember seeing there before. I asked him the other night when he was here with Aunt Beulah if his head ached, and he said 'no,' but Aunt Beulah said her head ached almost all the time. Of course, Aunt Beulah is important, and if Uncle Peter is trying to bring her back to normality again she is important to him, and that makes her important to me for his sake also, but nobody in the world is worth the sacrifice of Uncle Peter. Nobody, nobody. "I suppose it's a part of his great beauty that he should think so disparagingly of himself. I might not love him so well if he knew just how dear and sweet and great his personality is. It isn't so much what he says or does, or even the way he looks that constitutes his charm, it's the simple power and radiance behind his slightest move. Oh! I can't express it. He doesn't think he is especially fine or beautiful. He doesn't know what a waste it is when he spends his strength upon somebody who isn't as noble in character as he is,--but I know, and it makes me wild to think of it. Oh! why doesn't he come to me? My vacation is almost over, and I don't see how I could bear going back to school without one comforting hour of him alone. "I intended to write a detailed account of my vacation, but I can not. Uncle Jimmie has certainly tried to make me happy. He is so funny and dear. I could have so much fun with him if I were not worried about Uncle Peter! "Uncle David says he wants to spend my last evening with me. We are going to dine here, and then go to the theater together. I am going to try to tell him how I feel about things, but I am afraid he won't give me the chance. Life is a strange mixture of things you want and can't have, and things you can have and don't want. It seems almost disloyal to put that down on paper about Uncle David. I do want him and love him, but oh!--not in that way. Not in that way. There is only one person in a woman's life that she can feel that way about. Why--why--why doesn't my Uncle Peter come to me?" CHAPTER XX THE MAKINGS OF A TRIPLE WEDDING "Just by way of formality," David said, "and not because I think any one present"--he smiled on the five friends grouped about his dinner table--"still takes our old resolution seriously, I should like to be released from the anti-matrimonial pledge that I signed eight years ago this November. I have no announcement to make as yet, but when I do wish to make an announcement--and I trust to have the permission granted very shortly--I want to be sure of my technical right to do so." "Gosh all Hemlocks!" Jimmie exclaimed in a tone of such genuine confusion that it raised a shout of laughter. "I never thought of that." "Nor I," said Peter. "I never signed any pledge to that effect." "We left you out of it, Old Horse, regarding you as a congenital celibate anyway," Jimmie answered. "Some day soon you will understand how much you wronged me," Peter said with a covert glance at Beulah. "I wish I could say as much," Jimmie sighed, "since this is the hour of confession I don't mind adding that I hope I may be able to soon." Gertrude clapped her hands softly. "Wonderful, wonderful!" she cried. "We've the makings of a triple wedding in our midst. Look into the blushing faces before us and hear the voice that breathed o'er Eden echoing in our ears. This is the most exciting moment of my life! Girls, get on your feet and drink to the health of these about-to-be Benedicts. Up in your chairs,--one slipper on the table. Now!"--and the moment was saved. Gertrude had seen Margaret's sudden pallor and heard the convulsive catching of her breath,--Margaret rising Undine-like out of a filmy, pale green frock, with her eyes set a little more deeply in the shadows than usual. Her quick instinct to the rescue was her own salvation. David was on his feet. "On behalf of my coadjutors," he said, "I thank you. All this is extremely premature for me, and I imagine from the confusion of the other gentlemen present it is as much, if not more so, for them. Personally I regret exceedingly being unable to take you more fully into my confidence. The only reason for this partial revelation is that I wished to be sure that I was honorably released from my oath of abstinence. Hang it all! You fellows say something," he concluded, sinking abruptly into his chair. "Your style always was distinctly mid-Victorian," Jimmie murmured. "I've got nothing to say, except that I wish I had something to say and that if I _do_ have something to say in the near future I'll create a real sensation! When Miss Van Astorbilt permits David to link her name with his in the caption under a double column cut in our leading journals, you'll get nothing like the thrill that I expect to create with my modest announcement. I've got a real romance up my sleeve." "So've I, Jimmie. There is no Van Astorbilt in mine." "Some simple bar-maid then? A misalliance in our midst. Now about you, Peter?" "The lady won't give me her permission to speak," Peter said. "She knows how proud and happy I shall be when I am able to do so." Beulah looked up suddenly. "It is better we should marry," she said. "I didn't realize that when I exacted that oath from you. It is from the intellectual type that the brains to carry on the great work of the world must be inherited." "I pass," Jimmie murmured. "Where's the document we signed?" "I've got it. I'll destroy it to-night and then we may all consider ourselves free to take any step that we see fit. It was really only as a further protection to Eleanor that we signed it." "Eleanor will be surprised, won't she?" Gertrude suggested. Three self-conscious masculine faces met her innocent interrogation. "_Eleanor_," Margaret breathed, "_Eleanor_." "I rather think she will," Jimmie chuckled irresistibly, but David said nothing, and Peter stared unseeingly into the glass he was still twirling on its stem. "Eleanor will be taken care of just the same," Beulah said decisively. "I don't think we need even go through the formality of a vote on that." "Eleanor will be taken care of," David said softly. The Hutchinsons' limousine--old Grandmother Hutchinson had a motor nowadays--was calling for Margaret, and she was to take the two other girls home. David and Jimmie--such is the nature of men--were disappointed in not being able to take Margaret and Gertrude respectively under their accustomed protection. "I wanted to talk to you, Gertrude," Jimmie said reproachfully as she slipped away from his ingratiating hand on her arm. "I thought I should take you home to-night, Margaret," David said; "you never gave me the slip before." "The old order changeth," Gertrude replied lightly to them both, as she preceded Margaret into the luxurious interior. "It's Eleanor," Gertrude announced as the big car swung into Fifth Avenue. "Which is Eleanor?" Margaret cried hysterically. "What do you mean?" Beulah asked. "Jimmie or David--or--or both are going to marry Eleanor. Didn't you see their faces when Beulah spoke of her?" "David wants to marry Eleanor," Margaret said quietly. "I've known it all winter--without realizing what it was I knew." "Well, who is Jimmy going to marry then?" Beulah inquired. "Who is Peter going to marry for that matter?" Gertrude cut in. "Oh! it doesn't make any difference,--we're losing them just the same." "Not necessarily," Beulah said. "No matter what combinations come about, we shall still have an indestructible friendship." "Indestructible friendship--shucks," Gertrude cried. "The boys are going to be married--married--married! Marriage is the one thing that indestructible friendships don't survive--except as ghosts." "It should be Peter who is going to marry Eleanor," Margaret said. "It's Peter who has always loved her best. It's Peter she cares for." "As a friend," Beulah said, "as her dearest friend." "Not as a friend," Margaret answered softly, "she loves him. She has always loved him. It comes early sometimes." "I don't believe it. I simply don't believe it." "I believe it," Gertrude said. "I hadn't thought of it before. Of course, it must be Peter who is going to marry her." "If it isn't we've succeeded in working out a rather tragic experiment," Margaret said, "haven't we?" "Life is a tragic experiment for any woman," Gertrude said sententiously. "Peter doesn't intend to marry Eleanor," Beulah persisted. "I happen to know." "Do you happen to know who he is going to marry?" "Yes, I do know, but I--I can't tell you yet." "Whoever it is, it's a mistake," Margaret said. "It's our little Eleanor he wants. I suppose he doesn't realize it himself yet, and when he does it will be too late. He's probably gone and tied himself up with somebody entirely unsuitable, hasn't he, Beulah?" "I don't know," Beulah said; "perhaps he has. I hadn't thought of it that way." "It's the way to think of it, I know." Margaret's eyes filled with sudden tears. "But whatever he's done it's past mending now. There'll be no question of Peter's backing out of a bargain--bad or good, and our poor little kiddie's got to suffer." "Beulah took it hard," Gertrude commented, as they turned up-town again after dropping their friend at her door. The two girls were spending the night together at Margaret's. "I wonder on what grounds. I think besides being devoted to Eleanor, she feels terrifically responsible for her. She isn't quite herself again either." "She is almost, thanks to Peter." "But--oh! I can't pretend to think of anything else,--who--who--who--are our boys going to marry?" "I don't know, Gertrude." "But you care?" "It's a blow." "I always thought that you and David--" Margaret met her eyes bravely but she did not answer the implicit question. "I always thought that you and Jimmie--" she said presently. "Oh! Gertrude, you would have been so good for him." "Oh! it's all over now," Gertrude said, "but I didn't know that a living soul suspected me." "I've known for a long time." "Are you really hurt, dear?" Gertrude whispered as they clung to each other. "Not really. It could have been--that's all. He could have made me care. I've never seen any one else whom I thought that of. I--I was so used to him." "That's the rub," Gertrude said, "we're so used to them. They're so--so preposterously necessary to us." Late that night clasped in each other's arms they admitted the extent of their desolation. Life had been robbed of a magic,--a mystery. The solid friendship of years of mutual trust and understanding was the background of so much lovely folly, so many unrealized possibilities, so many nebulous desires and dreams that the sudden dissolution of their circle was an unthinkable calamity. "We ought to have put out our hands and taken them if we wanted them," Gertrude said, out of the darkness. "Other women do. Probably these other women have. Men are helpless creatures. They need to be firmly turned in the right direction instead of being given their heads. We've been too good to our boys. We ought to have snitched them." "I wouldn't pay that price for love," Margaret said. "I couldn't. By the time I had made it happen I wouldn't want it." "That's my trouble too," Gertrude said. Then she turned over on her pillow and sobbed helplessly. "Jimmie had such ducky little curls," she explained incoherently. "I do this sometimes when I think of them. Otherwise, I'm not a crying woman." Margaret put out a hand to her; but long after Gertrude's breath began to rise and fall regularly, she lay staring wide-eyed into the darkness. CHAPTER XXI ELEANOR HEARS THE NEWS "Dear Uncle Jimmie: "I said I would write you, but now that I have taken this hour in which to do it, I find it is a very, very hard letter that I have got to write. In the first place I can't believe that the things you said to me that night were real, or that you were awake and in the world of realities when you said them. I felt as if we were both dreaming; that you were talking as a man does sometimes in delirium when he believes the woman he loves to be by his side, and I was listening the same way. It made me very happy, as dreams sometimes do. I can't help feeling that your idea of me is a dream idea, and the pain that you said this kind of a letter would give you will be merely dream pain. It is a shock to wake up in the morning and find that all the lovely ways we felt, and delicately beautiful things we had, were only dream things that we wouldn't even understand if we were thoroughly awake. "In the second place, you can't want to marry your little niecelet, the funny little 'kiddo,' that used to burn her fingers and the beefsteak over that old studio gas stove. We had such lovely kinds of make-believe together. That's what our association always ought to mean to us,--just chumship, and wonderful and preposterous _pretends_. I couldn't think of myself being married to you any more than I could Jack the giant killer, or Robinson Crusoe. You're my truly best and dearest childhood's playmate, and that is a great deal to be, Uncle Jimmie. I don't think a little girl ever grows up quite _whole_ unless she has somewhere, somehow, what I had in you. You wouldn't want to marry Alice in Wonderland, now would you? There are some kinds of playmates that can't marry each other. I think that you and I are that kind, Uncle Jimmie. "My dear, my dear, don't let this hurt you. How can it hurt you, when I am only your little adopted foster child that you have helped support and comfort and make a beautiful, glad life for? I love you so much,--you are so precious to me that you _must_ wake up out of this distorted, though lovely dream that I was present at! "We must all be happy. Nobody can break our hearts if we are strong enough to withhold them. Nobody can hurt us too much if we can find the way to be our bravest all the time. I know that what you are feeling now is not real. I can't tell you how I know, but I do know the difference. The roots are not deep enough. They could be pulled up without too terrible a havoc. "Uncle Jimmie, dear, believe me, believe me. I said this would be a hard letter to write, and it has been. If you could see my poor inkstained, weeping face, you would realize that I am only your funny little Eleanor after all, and not to be taken seriously at all. I hope you will come up for my graduation. When you see me with all the other lumps and frumps that are here, you will know that I am not worth considering except as a kind of human joke. "Good-by, dear, my dear, and God bless you. "Eleanor." * * * * * It was less than a week after this letter to Jimmie that Margaret spending a week-end in a town in Connecticut adjoining that in which Eleanor's school was located, telephoned Eleanor to join her overnight at the inn where she was staying. She had really planned the entire expedition for the purpose of seeing Eleanor and preparing her for the revelations that were in store for her, though she was ostensibly meeting a motoring party, with which she was going on into the Berkshires. She started in abruptly, as was her way, over the salad and cheese in the low studded Arts and Crafts dining-room of the fashionable road house, contrived to look as self-conscious as a pretty woman in new sporting clothes. "Your Uncle David and your Uncle Jimmie are going to be married," she told her. "Did you know it, Eleanor?" "No, I didn't," Eleanor said faintly, but she grew suddenly very white. "Aren't you surprised, dear? David gave a dinner party one night last week in his studio, and announced his intentions, but we don't know the name of the lady yet, and we can't guess it. He says it is not a society girl." "Who do you think it is?" "Who do you think it is, Eleanor?" "I--I can't think, Aunt Margaret." "We don't know who Jimmie is marrying either. The facts were merely insinuated, but he said we should have the shock of our lives when we knew." "When did he tell you?" "A week ago last Wednesday. I haven't seen him since." "Perhaps he has changed his mind by now," Eleanor said. "I don't think that's likely. They were both very much in earnest. Aren't you surprised, Eleanor?" "I--I don't know. Don't you think it might be that they both just thought they were going to marry somebody--that really doesn't want to marry them? It might be all a mistake, you know." "I don't think it's a mistake. David doesn't make mistakes." "He might make one," Eleanor persisted. Margaret found the rest of her story harder to tell than she had anticipated. Eleanor, wrapped in the formidable aloofness of the sensitive young, was already suffering from the tale she had come to tell,--why, it was not so easy to determine. It might be merely from the pang of being shut out from confidences that she felt should have been shared with her at once. She waited until they were both ready for bed (their rooms were connecting)--Eleanor in the straight folds of her white dimity nightgown, and her two golden braids making a picture that lingered in Margaret's memory for many years. "It would have been easier to tell her in her street clothes," she thought. "I wish her profile were not so perfect, or her eyes were shallower. How can I hurt such a lovely thing?" "Are the ten Hutchinsons all right?" Eleanor was asking. "The ten Hutchinsons are very much all right. They like me better now that I have grown a nice hard Hutchinson shell that doesn't show my feelings through. Haven't you noticed how much more like other people I've grown, Eleanor?" "You've grown nicer, and dearer and sweeter, but I don't think you're very much like anybody else, Aunt Margaret." "I have though,--every one notices it. You haven't asked me anything about Peter yet," she added suddenly. The lovely color glowed in Eleanor's cheeks for an instant. "Is--is Uncle Peter well?" she asked. "I haven't heard from him for a long time." "Yes, he's well," Margaret said. "He's looking better than he was for a while. He had some news to tell us too, Eleanor." Eleanor put her hand to her throat. "What kind of news?" she asked huskily. "He's going to be married too. It came out when the others told us. He said that he hadn't the consent of the lady to mention her name yet. We're as much puzzled about him as we are about the other two." "It's Aunt Beulah," Eleanor said. "It's Aunt Beulah." She sat upright on the edge of the bed and stared straight ahead of her. Margaret watched the light and life and youth die out of the face and a pitiful ashen pallor overspread it. "I don't think it's Beulah," Margaret said. "Beulah knows who it is, but I never thought of it's being Beulah herself." "If she knows--then she's the one. He wouldn't have told her first if she hadn't been." "Don't let it hurt you too much, dear. We're all hurt some, you know. Gertrude--and me, too, Eleanor. It's--it's pain to us all." "Do you mean--Uncle David, Aunt Margaret?" "Yes, dear," Margaret smiled at her bravely. "And does Aunt Gertrude care about Uncle Jimmie?" "She has for a good many years, I think." Eleanor covered her face with her hands. "I didn't know that," she said. "I wish somebody had told me." She pushed Margaret's arm away from her gently, but her breath came hard. "Don't touch me," she cried, "I can't bear it. You might not want to--if you knew. Please go,--oh! please go--oh! please go." As Margaret closed the door gently between them, she saw Eleanor throw her head back, and push the back of her hand hard against her mouth, as if to stifle the rising cry of her anguish. * * * * * The next morning Eleanor was gone. Margaret had listened for hours in the night but had heard not so much as the rustle of a garment from the room beyond. Toward morning she had fallen into the sleep of exhaustion. It was then that the stricken child had made her escape. "Miss Hamlin had found that she must take the early train," the clerk said, "and left this note for Miss Hutchinson." It was like Eleanor to do things decently and in order. * * * * * "Dear Aunt Margaret," her letter ran. "My grandmother used to say that some people were trouble breeders. On thinking it over I am afraid that is just about what I am,--a trouble breeder. "I've been a worry and bother and care to you all since the beginning, and I have repaid all your kindness by bringing trouble upon you. Perhaps you can guess what I mean. I don't think I have any right to tell you exactly in this letter. I can only pray that it will be found to be all a mistake, and come out right in the end. Surely such beautiful people as you and Uncle David can find the way to each other, and can help Uncle Jimmie and Aunt Gertrude, who are a little blinder about life. Surely, when the stumbling block is out of the way, you four will walk together beautifully. Please try, Aunt Margaret, to make things as right as if I had never helped them to go wrong. I was so young, I didn't know how to manage. I shall never be that kind of young again. I grew up last night, Aunt Margaret. "You know the other reason why I am going. Please do not let any one else know. If the others could think I had met with some accident, don't you think that would be the wisest way? I would like to arrange it so they wouldn't try to find me at all, but would just mourn for me naturally for a little while. I thought of sticking my old cap in the river, but I was afraid that would be too hard for you. There won't be any use in trying to find me. I am going where you can not. I couldn't ever bear seeing one of your faces again. I have done too much harm. Don't let Uncle Peter _know_, please, Aunt Margaret. I don't want him to know,--I don't want to hurt him, and I don't want him to know. "Oh! I have loved you all so much. Good-by, my dears, my dearests. I have taken all of my allowance money. Please forgive me. "Eleanor." CHAPTER XXII THE SEARCH Eleanor had not bought a ticket at the station, Margaret ascertained, but the ticket agent had tried to persuade her to. She had thanked him and told him that she preferred to buy it of the conductor. He was a lank, saturnine individual and had been seriously smitten with Eleanor's charms, it appeared, and the extreme solicitousness of his attitude at the suggestion of any mystery connected with her departure made Margaret realize the caution with which it would be politic to proceed. She had very little hope of finding Eleanor back at the school, but it was still rather a shock when she telephoned the school office and found that there was no news of her there. She concocted a somewhat lame story to account for Eleanor's absence and promised the authorities that she would be sent back to them within the week,--a promise she was subsequently obliged to acknowledge that she could not keep. Then she fled to New York to break the disastrous news to the others. She told Gertrude the truth and showed her the pitiful letter Eleanor had left behind her, and together they wept over it. Also together, they faced David and Jimmie. "She went away," Margaret told them, "both because she felt she was hurting those that she loved and because she herself was hurt." "What do you mean?" David asked. "I mean--that she belonged body and soul to Peter and to nobody else," Margaret answered deliberately. David bowed his head. Then he threw it back again, suddenly. "If that is true," he said, "then I am largely responsible for her going." "It is I who am responsible," Jimmie groaned aloud. "I asked her to marry me and she refused me." "I asked her to marry me and didn't give her the chance to refuse," David said; "it is that she is running away from." "It was Peter's engagement that was the last straw," Margaret said. "The poor baby withered and shrank like a flower in the blast when I told her that." "The damned hound--" Jimmie said feelingly and without apology. "Who's he engaged to anyway?" "Eleanor says it's Beulah, and the more I think of it the more I think that she's probably right." "That would be a nice mess, wouldn't it?" Gertrude suggested. "Remember how frank we were with her about his probable lack of judgment, Margaret? I don't covet the sweet job of breaking it to either one of them." Nevertheless she assisted Margaret to break it to them both late that same afternoon at Beulah's apartment. "I'll find her," Peter said briefly. And in response to the halting explanation of her disappearance that Margaret and Gertrude had done their best to try to make plausible, despite its elliptical nature, he only said, "I don't see that it makes any difference why she's gone. She's gone, that's the thing that's important. No matter how hard we try we can't really figure out her reason till we find her." "Are you sure it's going to be so easy?" Gertrude asked. "I mean--finding her. She's a pretty determined little person when she makes up her mind. Eleanor's threats are to be taken seriously. She always makes good on them." "I'll find her if she's anywhere in the world," Peter said. "I'll find her and bring her back." Margaret put out her hand to him. "I believe that you will," she said. "Find out the reason that she went away, too, Peter." Beulah pulled Gertrude aside. "It wasn't Peter, was it?" she asked piteously. "She had some one else on her mind, hadn't she?" "She had something else on her mind," Gertrude answered gravely, "but she had Peter on her mind, too." "She didn't--she couldn't have known about us--Peter and me. We--we haven't told any one." "She guessed it, Beulah. She couldn't bear it. Nobody's to blame. It's just one of God's most satirical mix-ups." "I was to blame," Beulah said slowly. "I don't believe in shifting responsibility. I got her here in the first place and I've been instrumental in guiding her life ever since. Now, I've sacrificed her to my own happiness." "It isn't so simple as that," Gertrude said; "the things we start going soon pass out of our hands. Somebody a good deal higher up has been directing Eleanor's affairs for a long time,--and ours too, for that matter." "Don't worry, Beulah," Peter said, making his way to her side from the other corner of the room where he had been talking to Margaret. "You mustn't let this worry you. We've all got to be--soldiers now,--but we'll soon have her back again, I promise you." "And I promise you," Beulah said chokingly, "that if you'll get her back again, I--I will be a soldier." * * * * * Peter began by visiting the business schools in New York and finding out the names of the pupils registered there. Eleanor had clung firmly to her idea of becoming an editorial stenographer in some magazine office, no matter how hard he had worked to dissuade her. He felt almost certain she would follow out that purpose now. There was a fund in her name started some years before for the defraying of her college expenses. She would use that, he argued, to get herself started, even though she felt constrained to pay it back later on. He worked on this theory for some time, even making a trip to Boston in search for her in the stenography classes there, but nothing came of it. Among Eleanor's effects sent on from the school was a little red address book containing the names and addresses of many of her former schoolmates at Harmon. Peter wrote all the girls he remembered hearing her speak affectionately of, but not one of them was able to give him any news of her. He wrote to Colhassett to Albertina's aunt, who had served in the capacity of housekeeper to Eleanor's grandfather in his last days, and got in reply a pious letter from Albertina herself, who intimated that she had always suspected that Eleanor would come to some bad end, and that now she was highly soothed and gratified by the apparent fulfillment of her sinister prognostications. Later he tried private detectives, and, not content with their efforts, he followed them over the ground that they covered, searching through boarding houses, and public classes of all kinds; canvassing the editorial offices of the various magazines Eleanor had admired in the hope of discovering that she had applied for some small position there; following every clue that his imagination, and the acumen of the professionals in his service, could supply;--but his patient search was unrewarded. Eleanor had apparently vanished from the surface of the earth. The quest which had seemed to him so simple a matter when he first undertook it, now began to assume terrible and abortive proportions. It was unthinkable that one little slip of a girl untraveled and inexperienced should be able permanently to elude six determined and worldly adult New Yorkers, who were prepared to tax their resources to the utmost in the effort to find her,--but the fact remained that she was missing and continued to be missing, and the cruel month went by and brought them no news of her. The six guardians took their trouble hard. Apart from the emotions that had been precipitated by her developing charms, they loved her dearly as the child they had taken to their hearts and bestowed all their young enthusiasm and energy and tenderness upon. She was the living clay, as Gertrude had said so many years before, that they had molded as nearly as possible to their hearts' desire. They loved her for herself, but one and all they loved her for what they had made of her--an exquisite, lovely young creature, at ease in a world that might so easily have crushed her utterly if they had not intervened for her. They kept up the search unremittingly, following false leads and meeting with heartbreaking discouragements and disappointments. Only Margaret had any sense of peace about her. "I'm sure she's all right," she said; "I feel it. It's hard having her gone, but I'm not afraid for her. She'll work it out better than we could help her to. It's a beautiful thing to be young and strong and free, and she'll get the beauty out of it." "I think perhaps you're right, Margaret," David said. "You almost always are. It's the bread and butter end of the problem that worries me." Margaret smiled at him quaintly. "The Lord provides," she said. "He'll provide for our ewe lamb, I'm sure." "You speak as if you had it on direct authority." "I think perhaps I have," she said gravely. Jimmie and Gertrude grew closer together as the weeks passed, and the strain of their fruitless quest continued. One day Jimmie showed her the letter that Eleanor had written him. "Sweet, isn't she?" he said, as Gertrude returned it to him, smiling through her tears. "She's a darling," Gertrude said fervently. "Did she hurt you so much, Jimmie dear?" "I wanted her," Jimmie answered slowly, "but I think it was because I thought she was mine,--that I could make her mine. When I found she was Peter's,--had been Peter's all the time, the thought somehow cured me. She was dead right, you know. I made it up out of the stuff that dreams are made of. God knows I love her, but--but that personal thing has gone out of it. She's my little lost child,--or my sister. A man wants his own to be his own, Gertrude." "Yes, I know." "My--my real trouble is that I'm at sea again. I thought that I cared,--that I was anchored for good. It's the drifting that plays the deuce with me. If the thought of that sweet child and the grief at her loss can't hold me, what can? What hope is there for me?" "I don't know," Gertrude laughed. "Don't laugh at me. You've always been on to me, Gertrude, too much so to have any respect for me, I guess. You've got your work," he waved his arm at the huge cast under the shadow of which they were sitting, "and all this. You can put all your human longings into it. I'm a poor rudderless creature without any hope or direction." He buried his face in his hands. "You don't know it," he said, with an effort to conceal the fact that his shoulders were shaking, "but you see before you a human soul in the actual process of dissolution." Gertrude crossed her studio floor to kneel down beside him. She drew the boyish head, rumpled into an irresistible state of curliness, to her breast. "Put it here where it belongs," she said softly. "Do you mean it?" he whispered. "Sure thing? Hope to die? Cross your heart?" "Yes, my dear." "Praise the Lord." "I snitched him," Gertrude confided to Margaret some days later,--her whole being radiant and transfigured with happiness. "You snitch David." CHAPTER XXIII THE YOUNG NURSE The local hospital of the village of Harmonville, which was ten miles from Harmon proper, where the famous boarding-school for young ladies was located, presented an aspect so far from institutional that but for the sign board tacked modestly to an elm tree just beyond the break in the hedge that constituted the main entrance, the gracious, old colonial structure might have been taken for the private residence for which it had served so many years. It was a crisp day in late September, and a pale yellow sun was spread thin over the carpet of yellow leaves with which the wide lawn was covered. In the upper corridor of the west wing, grouped about the window-seat with their embroidery or knitting, the young nurses were talking together in low tones during the hour of the patients' siestas. The two graduates, dark-eyed efficient girls, with skilled delicate fingers taking precise stitches in the needlework before them, were in full uniform, but the younger girls clustered about them, beginners for the most part, but a few months in training, were dressed in the simple blue print, and little white caps and aprons, of the probationary period. The atmosphere was very quiet and peaceful. A light breeze blew in at the window and stirred a straying lock or two that escaped the starched band of a confining cap. Outside the stinging whistle of the insect world was interrupted now and then by the cough of a passing motor. From the doors opening on the corridor an occasional restless moan indicated the inability of some sufferer to take his dose of oblivion according to schedule. Presently a bell tinkled a summons to the patient in the first room on the right--a gentle little old lady who had just had her appendix removed. "Will you take that, Miss Hamlin?" the nurse in charge of the case asked the tallest and fairest of the young assistants. "Certainly." Eleanor, demure in cap and kerchief as the most ravishing of young Priscillas, rose obediently at the request. "May I read to her a little if she wants me to?" "Yes, if you keep the door closed. I think most of the others are sleeping." The little old lady who had just had her appendix out, smiled weakly up at Eleanor. "I hoped 'twould be you," she said, "and then after I'd rung I lay in fear and trembling lest one o' them young flipperti-gibbets should come, and get me all worked up while she was trying to shift me. I want to be turned the least little mite on my left side." "That's better, isn't it?" Eleanor asked, as she made the adjustment. "I dunno whether that's better, or whether it just seems better to me, because 'twas you that fixed me," the little old lady said. "You certainly have got a soothin' and comfortin' way with you." "I used to take care of my grandmother years ago, and the more hospital work I do, the more it comes back to me,--and the better I remember the things that she liked to have done for her." "There's nobody like your own kith and kin," the little old lady sighed. "There's none left of mine. That other nurse--that black haired one--she said you was an orphan, alone in the world. Well, I pity a young girl alone in the world." "It's all right to be alone in the world--if you just keep busy enough," Eleanor said. "But you mustn't talk any more. I'm going to give you your medicine and then sit here and read to you." * * * * * On the morning of her flight from the inn, after a night spent staring motionless into the darkness, Eleanor took the train to the town some dozen miles beyond Harmonville, where her old friend Bertha Stephens lived. To "Stevie," to whom the duplicity of Maggie Lou had served to draw her very close in the ensuing year, she told a part of her story. It was through the influence of Mrs. Stephens, whose husband was on the board of directors of the Harmonville hospital, that Eleanor had been admitted there. She had resolutely put all her old life behind her. The plan to take up a course in stenography and enter an editorial office was to have been, as a matter of course, a part of her life closely associated with Peter. Losing him, there was nothing left of her dream of high adventure and conquest. There was merely the hurt desire to hide herself where she need never trouble him again, and where she could be independent and useful. Having no idea of her own value to her guardians, or the integral tenderness in which she was held, she sincerely believed that her disappearance must have relieved them of much chagrin and embarrassment. Her hospital training kept her mercifully busy. She had the temperament that finds a virtue in the day's work, and a balm in its mere iterative quality. Her sympathy and intelligence made her a good nurse and her adaptability, combined with her loveliness, a general favorite. She spent her days off at the Stephens' home. Bertha Stephens had been the one girl that Peter had failed to write to, when he began to circulate his letters of inquiry. Her name had been set down in the little red book, but he remembered the trouble that Maggie Lou had precipitated, and arrived at the conclusion that the intimacy existing between Eleanor and Bertha had not survived it. Except that Carlo Stephens persisted in trying to make love to her, and Mrs. Stephens covertly encouraged his doing so, Eleanor found the Stephens' home a very comforting haven. Bertha had developed into a full breasted, motherly looking girl, passionately interested in all vicarious love-affairs, though quickly intimidated at the thought of having any of her own. She was devoted to Eleanor, and mothered her clumsily. It was still to her diary that Eleanor turned for the relief and solace of self-expression. * * * * * "It is five months to-day," she wrote, "since I came to the hospital. It seems like five years. I like it, but I feel like the little old woman on the King's Highway. I doubt more every minute if this can be I. Sometimes I wonder what 'being I' consists of, anyway. I used to feel as if I were divided up into six parts as separate as protoplasmic cells, and that each one was looked out for by a different cooperative parent. I thought that I would truly be I when I got them all together, and looked out for them myself, but I find I am no more of an entity than I ever was. The puzzling question of 'what am I?' still persists, and I am farther away from the right answer than ever. Would a sound be a sound if there were no one to hear it? If the waves of vibration struck no human ear, would the sound be in existence at all? This is the problem propounded by one of the nurses yesterday. "How much of us lives when we are entirely shut out of the consciousness of those whom we love? If there is no one to _realize_ us day by day,--if all that love has made of us is taken away, what is left? Is there anything? I don't know. I look in the glass, and see the same face,--Eleanor Hamlin, almost nineteen, with the same bow shaped eyebrows, and the same double ridge leading up from her nose to her mouth, making her look still very babyish. I pinch myself, and find that it hurts just the same as it used to six months ago, but there the resemblance to what I used to be, stops. I'm a young nurse now in hospital training, and very good at it, too, if I do say it as shouldn't; but that's all I am. Otherwise, I'm not anybody _to_ anybody,--except a figure of romance to good old Stevie, who doesn't count in this kind of reckoning. I take naturally to nursing they tell me. A nurse is a kind of maternal automaton. I'm glad I'm that, but there used to be a lot more of me than that. There ought to be some heart and brain and soul left over, but there doesn't seem to be. Perhaps I am like the Princess in the fairy story whose heart was an auk's egg. Nobody had power to make her feel unless they reached it and squeezed it. "I feel sometimes as if I were dead. I wish I could know whether Uncle Peter and Aunt Beulah were married yet. I wish I could know that. There is a woman in this hospital whose suitor married some one else, and she has nervous prostration, and melancholia. All she does all day is to moan and wring her hands and call out his name. The nurses are not very sympathetic. They seem to think that it is disgraceful to love a man so much that your whole life stops as soon as he goes out of it. What of Juliet and Ophelia and Francesca de Rimini? They loved so they could not tear their love out of their hearts without lacerating them forever. There is that kind of love in the world,--bigger than life itself. All the big tragedies of literature were made from it,--why haven't people more sympathy for it? Why isn't there more dignity about it in the eyes of the world? "It is very unlucky to love, and to lose that which you cherish, but it is unluckier still never to know the meaning of love, or to find 'Him whom your soul loveth.' I try to be kind to that poor forsaken woman. I am sorry for his sake that she calls out his name, but she seems to be in such torture of mind and body that she is unable to help it. "They are trying to cut down expenses here, so they have no regular cook, the housekeeper and her helper are supposed to do it all. I said I would make the desserts, so now I have got to go down-stairs and make some fruit gelatin. It is best that I should not write any more to-day, anyway." * * * * * Later, after the Thanksgiving holiday, she wrote: * * * * * "I saw a little boy butchered to-day, and I shall never forget it. It is wicked to speak of Doctor Blake's clean cut work as butchery, but when you actually see a child's leg severed from its body, what else can you call it? "The reason that I am able to go through operations without fainting or crying is just this: _other people do_. The first time I stood by the operating table to pass the sterilized instruments to the assisting nurse, and saw the half naked doctors hung in rubber standing there preparing to carve their way through the naked flesh of the unconscious creature before them, I felt the kind of pang pass through my heart that seems to kill as it comes. I thought I died, or was dying,--and then I looked up and saw that every one else was ready for their work. So I drew a deep breath and became ready too. I don't think there is anything in the world too hard to do if you look at it that way. "The little boy loved me and I loved him. We had hoped against hope that we would be able to save his poor little leg, but it had to go. I held his hand while they gave him the chloroform. At his head sat Doctor Hathaway with his Christlike face, draped in the robe of the anesthetist. 'Take long breaths, Benny,' I said, and he breathed in bravely. It was over quickly. To-morrow, when he is really out of the ether, I have got to tell him what was done to him. Something happened to me while that operation was going on. He hasn't any mother. I think the spirit of the one who was his mother passed into me, and I knew what it would be like to be the mother of a son. Benny was not without what his mother would have felt for him if she had been at his side. I can't explain it, but that is what I felt. "To-night it is as black as ink outside. There are no stars. I feel as if there should be no stars. If there were, there might be some strange little bit of comfort in them that I could cling to. I do not want any comfort from outside to shine upon me to-night. I have got to draw all my strength from a source within, and I feel it welling up within me even now. "I wonder if I have been selfish to leave the people I love so long without any word of me. I think Aunt Gertrude and Aunt Beulah and Aunt Margaret all had a mother feeling for me. I am remembering to-night how anxious they used to be for me to have warm clothing, and to keep my feet dry, and not to work too hard at school. All those things that I took as a matter of course, I realize now were very significant and beautiful. If I had a child and did not know to-night where it would lie down to sleep, or on what pillow it would put its head, I know my own rest would be troubled. I wonder if I have caused any one of my dear mothers to feel like that. If I have, it has been very wicked and cruel of me." CHAPTER XXIV CHRISTMAS AGAIN The ten Hutchinsons having left the library entirely alone in the hour before dinner, David and Margaret had appropriated it and were sitting companionably together on the big couch drawn up before the fireplace, where a log was trying to consume itself unscientifically head first. "I would stay to dinner if urged," David suggested. "You stay," Margaret agreed laconically. She moved away from him, relaxing rather limply in the corner of the couch, with a hand dangling over the farther edge of it. "You're an inconsistent being," David said. "You buoy all the rest of us up with your faith in the well-being of our child, and then you pine yourself sick over her absence." "It's Christmas coming on. We always had such a beautiful time on Christmas. It was so much fun buying her presents. It isn't like Christmas at all with her gone from us." "Do you remember how crazy she was over the ivory set?" "And the bracelet watch?" "Do you remember the Juliet costume?" David's eyes kindled at the reminiscence. "How wonderful she was in it." Margaret drew her feet up on the couch suddenly, and clasped her hands about her knees. David laughed. "I haven't seen you do that for years," he said. "What?" "Hump yourself in that cryptic way." "Haven't you?" she said. "I was just wondering--" but she stopped herself suddenly. "Wondering what?" David was watching her narrowly, and perceiving it, she flushed. "This is not my idea of an interesting conversation," she said; "it's getting too personal." "I can remember the time when you told me that you didn't find things interesting unless they were personal. 'I like things very personal,' you said--in those words." "I did then." "What has changed you?" David asked gravely. "The chill wind of the world, I guess; the most personal part of me is frozen stiff." "I never saw a warmer creature in my life," David protested. "On that same occasion you said that being a woman was about like being a field of clover in an insectless world. You don't feel that way nowadays, surely,--at the rate the insects have been buzzing around you this winter. I've counted at least seven, three bees, one or two beetles, a butterfly and a worm." "I didn't know you paid that much attention to my poor affairs." "I do, though. If you hadn't put your foot down firmly on the worm, I had every intention of doing so." "Had you?" "I had." "On that occasion to which you refer I remember I also said that I had a queer hunch about Eleanor." "Margaret, are you deliberately changing the subject?" "I am." "Then I shall bring the butterfly up later." "I said," Margaret ignored his interruption, "that I had the feeling that she was going to be a storm center and bring some kind of queer trouble upon us." "Yes." "She did, didn't she?" "I'm not so sure that's the way to put it," David said gravely. "We brought queer trouble on her." "She made--you--suffer." "She gave my vanity the worst blow it has ever had in its life," David corrected her. "Look here, Margaret, I want you to know the truth about that. I--I stumbled into that, you know. She was so sweet, and before I knew it I had--I found myself in the attitude of making love to her. Well, there was nothing to do but go through with it. I wanted to, of course. I felt like Pygmalion--but it was all potential, unrealized--and ass that I was, I assumed that she would have no other idea in the matter. I was going to marry her because I--I had started things going, you know. I had no choice even if I had wanted one. It never occurred to me that she might have a choice, and so I went on trying to make things easy for her, and getting them more tangled at every turn." "You never really--cared?" Margaret's face was in shadow. "Never got the chance to find out. With characteristic idiocy I was keeping out of the picture until the time was ripe. She really ran away to get away from the situation I created and she was quite right too. If I weren't haunted by these continual pictures of our offspring in the bread line, I should be rather glad than otherwise that she's shaken us all till we get our breath back. Poor Peter is the one who is smashed, though. He hasn't smiled since she went away." "You wouldn't smile if you were engaged to Beulah." "Are they still engaged?" "Beulah has her ring, but I notice she doesn't wear it often." "Jimmie and Gertrude seem happy." "They are, gloriously." "That leaves only us two," David suggested. "Margaret, dear, do you think the time will ever come when I shall get you back again?" Margaret turned a little pale, but she met his look steadily. "Did you ever lose me?" "The answer to that is 'yes,' as you very well know. Time was when we were very close--you and I, then somehow we lost the way to each other. I'm beginning to realize that it hasn't been the same world since and isn't likely to be unless you come back to me." "Was it I who strayed?" "It was I; but it was you who put the bars up and have kept them there." "Was I to let the bars down and wait at the gate?" "If need be. It should be that way between us, Margaret, shouldn't it?" "I don't know," Margaret said, "I don't know." She flashed a sudden odd look at him. "If--when I put the bars down, I shall run for my life. I give you warning, David." "Warning is all I want," David said contentedly. He could barely reach her hand across the intervening expanse of leather couch, but he accomplished it,--he was too wise to move closer to her. "You're a lovely, lovely being," he said reverently. "God grant I may reach you and hold you." She curled a warm little finger about his. "What would Mrs. Bolling say?" she asked practically. "To tell you the truth, she spoke of it the other day. I told her the Eleanor story, and that rather brought her to her senses. She wouldn't have liked that, you know; but now all the eligible buds are plucked, and she wants me to settle down." "Does she think I'm a settling kind of person?" "She wouldn't if she knew the way you go to my head," David murmured. "Oh, she thinks that you'll do. She likes the ten Hutchinsons." "Maybe I'd like them better considered as connections of yours," Margaret said abstractedly. David lifted the warm little finger to his lips and kissed it swiftly. "Where are you going?" he asked, as she slipped away from him and stood poised in the doorway. "I'm going to put on something appropriate to the occasion," she answered. When she came back to him she was wearing the most delicate and cobwebby of muslins with a design of pale purple passion flowers trellised all over it, and she gave him no chance for a moment alone with her all the rest of the evening. Sometime later she showed him Eleanor's parting letter, and he was profoundly touched by the pathetic little document. As the holidays approached Eleanor's absence became an almost unendurable distress to them all. The annual Christmas dinner party, a function that had never been omitted since the acquisition of David's studio, was decided on conditionally, given up, and again decided on. "We do want to see one another on Christmas day,--we've got presents for one another, and Eleanor would hate it if she thought that her going away had settled that big a cloud on us. She slipped out of our lives in order to bring us closer together. We'll get closer together for her sake," Margaret decided. But the ordeal of the dinner itself was almost more than they had reckoned on. Every detail of traditional ceremony was observed even to the mound of presents marked with each name piled on the same spot on the couch, to be opened with the serving of the coffee. "I got something for Eleanor," Jimmie remarked shamefacedly as he added his contributions to the collection. "Thought we could keep it for her, or throw it into the waste-basket or something. Anyhow I had to get it." "I guess everybody else got her something, too," Margaret said. "Of course we will keep them for her. I got her a little French party coat. It will be just as good next year as this. Anyhow as Jimmie says, I had to get it." "I got her slipper buckles," Gertrude admitted. "She has always wanted them." "I got her the Temple _Shakespeare_," Beulah added. "She was always carrying around those big volumes." "You're looking better, Beulah," Margaret said. "Are you feeling better?" "Jimmie says I'm looking more human. I guess perhaps that's it,--I'm feeling more--human. I needed humanizing--even at the expense of some--some heartbreak," she said bravely. Margaret crossed the room to take a seat on Beulah's chair-arm, and slipped an arm around her. "You're all right if you know that," she whispered softly. "I thought I was going to bring you Eleanor herself," Peter said. "I got on the trail of a girl working in a candy shop out in Yonkers. My faithful sleuth was sure it was Eleanor and I was ass enough to believe he knew what he was talking about. When I got out there I found a strawberry blonde with gold teeth." "Gosh, you don't think she's doing anything like that," Jimmie exclaimed. "I don't know," Peter said miserably. He was looking ill and unlike himself. His deep set gray eyes were sunken far in his head, his brow was too white, and the skin drawn too tightly over his jaws. "As a de-tec-i-tive, I'm afraid I'm a failure." "We're all failures for that matter," David said. "Let's have dinner." Eleanor's empty place, set with the liqueur glass she always drank her thimbleful of champagne in, and the throne chair from the drawing-room in which she presided over the feasts given in her honor, was almost too much for them. Margaret cried openly over her soup. Peter shaded his eyes with his hand, and Gertrude and Jimmie groped for each other's hands under the shelter of the table-cloth. "This--this won't do," David said. He turned to Beulah on his left, sitting immovable, with her eyes staring unseeingly into the centerpiece of holly and mistletoe arranged by Alphonse so lovingly. "We must either turn this into a kind of a wake, and kneel as we feast, or we must try to rise above it somehow." "I don't see why," Jimmie argued. "I'm in favor of each man howling informally as he listeth." "Let's drink her health anyhow," David insisted. "I cut out the Sauterne and the claret, so we could begin on the wine at once in this contingency. Here's to our beloved and dear absent daughter." "Long may she wave," Jimmie cried, stumbling to his feet an instant after the others. While they were still standing with their glasses uplifted, the bell rang. "Don't let anybody in, Alphonse," David admonished him. They all turned in the direction of the hall, but there was no sound of parley at the front door. Eleanor had put a warning finger to her lips, as Alphonse opened it to find her standing there. She stripped off her hat and her coat as she passed through the drawing-room, and stood in her little blue cloth traveling dress between the portières that separated it from the dining-room. The six stood transfixed at the sight of her, not believing the vision of their eyes. "You're drinking my health," she cried, as she stretched out her arms to them. "Oh! my dears, and my dearests, will you forgive me for running away from you?" CHAPTER XXV THE LOVER They left her alone with Peter in the drawing room in the interval before the coffee, seeing that he had barely spoken to her though his eyes had not left her face since the moment of her spectacular appearance between the portières. "I'm not going to marry you, Peter," Beulah whispered, as she slipped by him to the door, "don't think of me. Think of her." But Peter was almost past coherent thought or speech as they stood facing each other on the hearth-rug,--Eleanor's little head up and her breath coming lightly between her sweet, parted lips. "Where did you go?" Peter groaned. "How could you, dear--how could you,--how could you?" "I'm back all safe, now, Uncle Peter. I took up nursing in a hospital." "I didn't even find you. I swore that I would. I've searched for you everywhere." "I'm sorry I made you all that trouble," Eleanor said, "but I thought it would be the best thing to do." "Tell me why," Peter said, "tell me why, I've suffered so much--wondering--wondering." "You've suffered?" Eleanor cried. "I thought it was only I who did the suffering." She moved a step nearer to him, and Peter gripped her hard by the shoulders. "It wasn't that you cared?" he said. Then his lips met hers dumbly, beseechingly. * * * * * "It was all a mistake,--my going away," she wrote some days after. "I ought to have stayed at the school, and graduated, and then come down to New York, and faced things. I have my lesson now about facing things. If any other crisis comes into my life, I hope I shall be as strong as Dante was, when he 'showed himself more furnished with breath than he was,' and said, 'Go on, for I am strong and resolute.' I think we always have more strength than we understand ourselves to have. "I am so wonderfully happy about Uncle David and Aunt Margaret, and I know Uncle Jimmie needs Aunt Gertrude and has always needed her. Did my going away help those things to their fruition? I hope so. "I can not bear to think of Aunt Beulah, but I know that I must bear to think of her, and face the pain of having hurt her as I must face every other thing that comes into my life from this hour. I would give her back Peter, if I could,--but I can not. He is mine, and I am his, and we have been that way from the beginning. I have thought of him always as stronger and wiser than any one in the world, but I don't think he is. He has suffered and stumbled along, trying blindly to do right, hurting Aunt Beulah and mixing up his life like any man, just the way Uncle Jimmie and Uncle David did. "Don't men know who it is they love? They seem so often to be struggling hungrily after the wrong thing, trying to get, or to make themselves take, some woman that they do not really want. When women love it is not like that with them. "When women love! I think I have loved Peter from the first minute I saw him, so beautiful and dear and sweet, with that _anxious_ look in his eyes,--that look of consideration for the other person that is always so much a part of him. He had it the first night I saw him, when Uncle David brought me to show me to my foster parents for the first time. It was the thing I grew up by, and measured men and their attitude to women by--just that look in his eyes, that tender warm look of consideration. "It means a good many things, I think,--a gentle generous nature, and a tender chivalrous heart. It means selflessness. It means being a good man, and one who _protects_ by sheer unselfish instinct. I don't know how I shall ever heal him of the hurt he has done Aunt Beulah. Aunt Margaret tells me that Aunt Beulah's experience with him has been the thing that has made her whole, that she needed to live through the human cycle of emotion--of love and possession and renunciation before she could be quite real and sound. This may be true, but it is not the kind of reasoning for Peter and me to comfort ourselves with. If a surgeon makes a mistake in cutting that afterwards does more good than harm, he must not let that result absolve him from his mistake. Nothing can efface the mistake itself, and Peter and I must go on feeling that way about it. "I want to write something down about my love before I close this book to-night. Something that I can turn to some day and read, or show to my children when love comes to them. 'This is the way I felt,' I want to say to them, 'the first week of my love--this is what it meant to me.' "It means being a greater, graver, and more beautiful person than you ever thought you could be. It means knowing what you are, and what you were meant to be all at once, and I think it means your chance to be purified for the life you are to live, and the things you are to do in it. Experience teaches, but I think love forecasts and points the way, and shows you what you can be. Even if the light it sheds should grow dim after a while, the path it has shown you should be clear to your inner eye forever and ever. Having been in a great temple is a thing to be better for all your life. "It means that the soul and the things of the soul are everlasting,--that they have got to be everlasting if love is like this. Love between two people is more than the simple fact of their being drawn together and standing hand in hand. It is the holy truth about the universe. It is the rainbow of God's promise set over the land. There comes with it the soul's certainty of living on and on through time and space. "Just my loving Peter and Peter's loving me isn't the important thing,--the important thing is the way it has started the truth going; my knowing and understanding mysterious laws that were sealed to me before; Peter taking my life in his hands and making it consecrated and true,--so true that I will not falter or suffer from any misunderstandings or mistaken pain. "It means warmth and light and tenderness, our love does, and all the poetry in the world, and all the motherliness, (I feel so much like his mother). Peter is my lover. When I say that he is not stronger or wiser than any one in the world I mean--in living. I mean in the way he behaves like a little bewildered boy sometimes. In loving he is stronger and wiser than any living being. He takes my two hands in his and gives me all the strength and all the wisdom and virtue there is in the world. "I haven't written down anything, after all, that any one could read. My children can't look over my shoulder on to this page, for they would not understand it. It means nothing to any one in the world but me. I shall have to translate for them or I shall have to say to them, 'Children, on looking into this book, I find I can't tell you what love meant to me, because the words I have put down would mean nothing to you. They were only meant to inform me, whenever I should turn back to them, of the great glory and holiness that fell upon me like a garment when love came.' "And if there should be any doubt in my heart as to the reality of the feeling that has come to them in their turn, I should only have to turn their faces up to the light, and look into their eyes and _know_. "I shall not die as my own mother did. I know that. I know that Peter will be by my side until we both are old. These facts are established in my consciousness I hardly know how, and I know that they are there,--but if such a thing could be that I should die and leave my little children, I would not be afraid to leave them alone in a world that has been so good to me, under the protection of a Power that provided me with the best and kindest guardians that a little orphan ever had. God bless and keep them all, and make them happy." THE END 
39802	----	scanned images of public domain material from the Google Print archive. TOMMY WIDEAWAKE TOMMY WIDEAWAKE BY H. H. BASHFORD * * * * * PUBLISHED BY JOHN LANE The Bodley Head NEW YORK AND LONDON MCMIII _Copyright, 1903_ By JOHN LANE CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I--In which four men make a promise 9 II--In which two rats meet a sudden death 19 III--In which a hat floats down stream 34 IV--In which a young lady is left upon the bank 46 V--In which April is mistress 55 VI--In which four men meet a train 69 VII--In which Madge whistles in a wood 79 VIII--In which two adjectives are applied to Tommy 90 IX--In which Tommy climbs a stile 100 X--In which I receive two warnings, and neglect one 114 XI--In which Tommy is in peril 121 XII--In which Tommy makes a resolve 133 XIII--In which the poet plucks a foxglove 142 XIV--In which Tommy converses with the Pale Boy 153 XV--In which some people meet in a wheatfield 160 XVI--In which Tommy crosses the ploughing 169 XVII--In which Tommy takes the upland road 173 XVIII--And last 186 I IN WHICH FOUR MEN MAKE A PROMISE We were sitting round the fire, in the study--five men, all of us middle-aged and sober-minded, four of us bachelors, one a widower. And it was he who spoke, with an anxious light in his grey eyes, and two thoughtful wrinkles at the bridge of his military nose. "Tommy," he observed, "Tommy is not an ordinary boy." We were silent, and I could see the doctor's lips twitching beneath his moustache, as he gazed hard into the fire, and sucked at his cigar. The colonel knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and resumed: "I suppose," he said, "that it is a comparatively unusual circumstance to find five men, unrelated by birth or marriage, who, having been friends at school and college and having reached years of maturity, find themselves resident in the same village, with that early friendship not merely still existent, but, if I may say so, stronger than ever." We nodded. "It is unusual," observed the vicar. "As you know," proceeded the colonel, a little laboriously, for he was a poor conversationalist, "the calls of my profession have forbidden me, of late years, to enjoy as much of your company as I could have wished--and now, after a very pleasant winter together, I must once again take the Eastern trail for an indefinite period." We were regretfully silent--perhaps also a little curious, for our friend was not wont to discourse thus fully to us. The poet appeared even a little dismayed, owing, doubtless, to that intuition which has made him so justly renowned in his circle of admirers, for the colonel's next remarks filled us all with a similar emotion. "Dear friends," he said, leaning forward in his chair, and placing his pipe upon the whist table, "may I--would you allow me so to trespass on this friendship of ours, as to ask for your interest in my only son, Thomas?" For a minute all of us, I fancy, trod the fields of memory. The poet's thoughts hovered round a small grave in his garden, wherein lay an erstwhile feline comrade of his solitude, whose soul had leaped into space at the assault of an unerring pebble. The vicar and the doctor would seem to have had similar reminiscences--and had I not seen a youthful figure wading complacently through my cucumber frames? We all were interested in Tommy. Another chord was touched. "He is motherless, you see, and very alone," the colonel pleaded, as though our thoughts had been audible. We remembered the brief bright years, and the long grey ones, and steeled our hearts for service. "I have seen so little of him, myself," continued the colonel. "He is at school and he will go to college, but a boy needs more than school and college can give him--he needs a hand to guide his thoughts and fancies, and liberty, in which they may unfold. He needs developing in a way in which no school or college can develop him. I would have him see nature, and learn her lessons; see men and things, and know how to discern and appreciate. I would have him a little different--wider shall I say?--than the mere stereotyped public-school and varsity product--admirable as it is. I would have him cultured, but not a worshipper of culture, to the neglect of those deeper qualities without which culture is a mere husk. "I would have him athletic, but not of those who deify athletics. "Above all, I would have him such a gentleman as only he can be who realises that the privilege of good birth is in no way due to indigenous merit." He paused, and for a while we smoked in silence. "He will, of course, be away at school for the greater part of each year. But if you, dear friends, would undertake--in turn, if you will--to supervise his holidays, I should be more than grateful. We grown men regard our life in terms--a boy punctuates his, by holidays--and it is in them, that I would beg of you to influence him for good." He turned to the poet. "Tommy," he said, "has, I feel sure, a deeply imaginative nature, and I am by no means certain that he is not poetical. In fact, I believe he once wrote something about a star, which was really quite creditable--quite creditable." The poet looked a little bewildered. "And I believe that Tommy has scientific bents"--the colonel looked at the doctor, who bowed silently. Then he regarded me a little doubtfully--after a pause. "Tommy is not an ordinary boy," he repeated, somewhat ambiguously I thought. Lastly, he turned to the vicar, "I could never repay the man who taught my boy to love God," he said simply, and we fell once more to our silence, and our smoking, while the flames leaped merrily in the old grate, and flung strange shadows over the black wainscot and polished floor. Camslove Grange was old and serene and aristocratic, an antithesis, in all respects, to its future owner, whose round head pressed a pillow upstairs, while his spirit wandered, at play, through a boy's dreamland. The colonel waved his hand. "It will all be his, you see, one day," he said, almost apologetically, "and I want the old place to have a good master." I have said that the colonel's request had filled us with dismay, and this indeed was very much the case. We all had our habits. We all--even the doctor, who was the youngest of us by some years--loved peace and regularity. Moreover, we all, if not possessed of an actual dislike for boys, nevertheless preferred them at a considerable distance. And yet, in spite of all these things, we could not but fall in with the colonel's appeal, both for the sake of unbroken friendship--and in one case, at least (he will not mind, if I confess it), for the sake of a sweet lost face. And so it came about that we clasped hands, in the silence of the old study, where, if rumour be true, more than one famous treaty has been made and signed, and took upon our shoulders the burden of Thomas, only son of our departing friend. The colonel rose to his feet, and there was a glad light in his eyes. He held out both hands towards us. "God bless you, old comrades," he said. Then, in answer to a question, "Tommy returns to school, to-morrow, for the Easter term, and his holiday will be in April, I fancy. To whom is he to go first?" We all looked at each other with questioning eyes--then we looked at the fire. The silence began to get awkward. "Shall we--er--shall we toss--draw lots, that is?" suggested the vicar, rather nervously. The idea seemed good, and we resorted to the time-honoured, yet most unsatisfactory, expedient of spinning a penny in the air. The results, combined with a process of exclusion, left the choice between the poet and the doctor. The vicar spun, and the poet called. "Heads!" he cried, feverishly. And heads it was. A smile of relief and triumph was dawning on the doctor's face, when the poet looked at him, anxiously. "Is there not--" he asked. "Is there not a method of procedure, by which one may call thrice?" "Threes," remarked the vicar, genially. "Of course there is--would you like me to toss again?" "I--I think I would," said the poet, meekly. Then turning, apologetically, to the colonel, "It's better to make _quite_ sure, don't you think?" The doctor looked a little crestfallen, but agreed, and the vicar once more sent the coin into the air. "Tails," cried the poet, and as the coin fell, the sovereign's head lay upward. The poet drew a deep breath. "It would seem," he said, bowing to the doctor, "that Tommy may yet become your guest." "There is another go," said the doctor, and the vicar tossed a third time. "Heads," cried the poet, and heads it proved to be. The poet wiped his forehead, after which the colonel grasped his hand. "Write and tell me how he gets on," he said. "I cannot tell you how grateful I am to you--to all of you." "No, of course not--that is, it's nothing you know--only too delighted to have the dear boy," stammered the poet. "Er--does he--can he undress himself and--and all that, you know?" The colonel laughed. "Why, he's thirteen," he cried. A little later we took our departure. In a shadowy part of the drive the poet pulled my sleeve. "Can boys of that age undress themselves and brush their own teeth, do you suppose?" he asked. "I believe so," I answered. The poet shook his head sorrowfully. "I don't know what Mrs. Chundle will say," he remarked. And at the end of the drive we parted, with averted looks and scarce concealed distress, each taking a contemplative path to the hitherto calm of his bachelor shrine. II IN WHICH TWO RATS MEET A SUDDEN DEATH "The country is just now at its freshest," said the poet, waving his hand towards the open window and the green lawn. "The world is waking again to its--er, spring holiday, Tommy, and you must be out in the air and the open fields, and share it while you may." The poet beamed, a little apprehensively it is true, across the breakfast table at Tommy, who was mastering a large plate of eggs and bacon with courage and facility. "It's jolly good of you to have me, you know," observed Tommy, pausing a moment to regard his host. "On the contrary, it is my very glad privilege. I have often felt that my youth has been left behind a little oversoon--I am getting, I fancy, a trifle stiff and narrowed. You must lead me, Tommy, into the world of action and sport--we will play games together--hide and go seek. You must buy me a hoop, and we will play marbles and cricket--" and the poet smiled complacently over his spectacles. Tommy wriggled a little uneasily in his chair, and looked out of the window. The trees were bending to the morning wind, which sang through the budding branches and hovered over the garden daffodils. Away beyond the lawn and the meadows the hills rose clear and bracing to the eye, and through a chain of willows sped the wavering blue gleam of sunny waters. "I--I'm an awful duffer at games," said Tommy, with a blush on his brown cheeks, and horrid visions of the poet and himself bowling hoops. The poet drew a deep breath of relief. "You love nature, dear boy--the sights and sounds and mysteries of the hedgerow and the stream--is it not so?" "Yes," said Tommy, dubiously. "I--I'm rather a hot shot with a catapult." The poet gazed out across the garden. A small green mound beneath the chestnut tree marked the grave of the fond Delicia--a tribute to Tommy's skill. Involuntarily, the poet sighed. Tommy looked up from the marmalade. "You don't mind, do you?" he asked anxiously. "No, no, of course not, dear boy," said the poet with an effort. "That is--you--you won't hit anything, will you?" "Rather," cried Tommy. "You jolly well see if I don't." Delicia's successor looked up from her saucer on the rug, and the "Morning Post" slipped from the poet's nerveless grasp. "You--oh Tommy, you will spare the tabby," he gasped tragically, indicating the rug and its occupant. Tommy grinned. "All right," he said,--adding as a comforting afterthought, "And cats are awful poor sport, you know--they're so jolly slow." But the poet was far away. With every meal Mrs. Chundle brought a pencil and paper, for as likely as not inspiration would not scorn to come with coffee or hover over a rasher of bacon. And it was even so, at this present. Tommy watched the process with some curiosity. Then he stole to the window, for all the world was calling him. But he paused with one foot on the first step, as the poet looked up from his manuscript. "How do you like this?" he asked eagerly: Oh the daffodils sing of my lady's gown, The hyacinths dream of her eyes, And the wandering breezes across the down, The harmonies dropt from the skies, Are full of the song of the love that swept My citadel by surprise. Oh the woods they are bright with my lady's voice, The paths they are sweet with her tread, And the kiss of her gown makes the lawn rejoice, The violet lift her head. Yet, lady, I know not if I must smile Or weep for the days long sped. The poet blinked rapturously through his glasses at Tommy, listening respectfully, by the window. "They're jolly good--but I say, who is she?" The poet seemed a little puzzled. "I am afraid I do not comprehend you," he said. "The lady," observed Tommy. "I didn't know you were in love, you know, or anything of that sort." The poet rose to his feet, with some dignity. "I am not in love, Thomas," he said. "I--I never even think about such things." Tommy turned back. "I say, if you're going to the post-office with that will you buy me some elastic--for my catty, you know?" he said. Just then the housekeeper entered, and Tommy went out upon the lawn. "Please, sir, there's a friend o' Mister Thomas's a settin' in the kitchen, an' 'e's bin there a hower, pretty nigh--an' 'is talk--it fairly makes me blood rise, and me pore stomach that sour--an', please, 'e wants ter know if Mister Thomas is ready to go after them rats 'e was talkin' of, an' if the Cholmondeleys, which is me blood relations, 'ad 'eard 'im--Lord." Mrs. Chundle wiped her brow at this appalling supposition, and the poet gazed helplessly at her. "Did you say a friend of Mr. Thomas's?" he asked. "Yes, sir, an' that common 'e--'e's almost took the shine off of the plates." "Dear, dear! how very--very peculiar, Mrs. Chundle." A genial, red countenance appeared at the doorway. "Beg pawdon, sir, but the young gemman 'e wanted me to show 'im a nest or two o' rats down Becklington stream, sir--rare fat uns they be, sir, too." "I--I do not approve of sport--of slaying innocent beings--even if they be but rodents; I must ask you to leave me." The poet waved his hand. The rubicund sportsman looked disappointed. "Beg pawdon, sir, I'm sure. Thought 's 'ow it were all right, sir." "I do not blame you, my good man. I merely protest against the ruling spirit of destruction which our country worships so deplorably. You may go." And all this while Tommy stood bare-headed on the lawn, filling his lungs with the morning's sweetness, and feeling the grip of its appeal in his heart and blood and limbs. A sturdy little figure he was, clad in a short jacket and attenuated flannel knickerbockers which left his brown knees bare above his stockings. The blood in his round cheeks shone red beneath the tan, and there were some freckles at the bridge of his nose. In his hand was a battered wide-awake hat--his usual headgear--and the origin of his sobriquet--for he will, I imagine, be known as Tommy Wideawake until the crack of doom, and, maybe, even after that. With all his appreciation of the day, however, no word of the conversation just recorded missed his ears, and I regret to say that when the red-cheeked intruder turned a moment at the garden gate, Tommy's right eyelashes trembled a moment upon his cheek while his lips parted over some white teeth for the smallest fraction of a second. Then he kicked viciously at a daisy and blinked up at the friendly sun. The poet stepped out on the lawn beside him with a worried wrinkle on his forehead. "I feel rather upset," he said. "Let's go for a walk," suggested Tommy. The poet considered a moment. An epic, which lagged somewhat, held out spectral arms to him from the recesses of his writing-desk, but the birds' spring songs were too winsome for prolonged resistance, and to their wooing the poet capitulated. "Let us come," he said, and they stepped through the wicker gate into the water-meadows. The Becklington brook is only a thin thread here, but lower down it receives tributaries from two adjoining valleys and becomes a stream of some importance, turning, indeed, a couple of mills, before it reaches the Arrowley, which enters the Isis. The day was hot--one of those early heralds of June so often encountered in late April, and the meadows basked dreamily in the sun, while from the hills came a dull glow of budding gorse. The poet was full of fancies, and as the house grew farther behind them, and the path led ever more deeply among copse and field, his natural calm soon reasserted itself. From time to time he would jot down a happy phrase or quaint expression, enlarging thereon to Tommy, who listened patiently enough. Plop. A lazy ripple cut the surface of the stream, and another, and another. Tommy lifted a warning hand and held his breath. Yes, sure enough, there was a brown nose stemming the water. In an instant Tommy was crouching in the reeds, his hand feeling in his pocket, and his small body quivering. The poet's mouth was open. Followed a twang, and the whistle of a small projectile, and the rat disappeared. But the stone had not hit him. "Tommy!" protested the poet. But his appeal fell on deaf ears, for Tommy was watching the far side of the stream with an anxious gaze. Suddenly the brown nose reappeared. He was a very ugly rat. "Tommy!" said the poet again, weakly. The rat was making for a bit of crumbled bank opposite, and Tommy stood up for better aim. The poet held his breath. One foot more and the prey would be lost, but Tommy stood like a young statue--then whang; and slowly the rat turned over on his back and vanished from sight, to float presently--a swollen corpse--down the quiet stream. "Well hit, sir," cried the poet. Tommy turned with dancing eyes. "Jolly nearly lost him," he said. "You should just see young Collins with a catty. He's miles better than me." But the poet had remembered himself. "Tommy," he said, huskily, "I--I don't approve of sport of this kind. Cannot you aim at--at inanimate objects?" "It's a jolly poor game," said Tommy--then holding out the wooden fork, with its pendant elastic. "Have a try," he said. The poet accepted a handful of ammunition. "I must amuse the boy and enter into his sports as far as I may if I would influence his character," he said to himself. Tommy stuck a clod of earth on a stick some few yards away, at which, for some time, the poet shot wildly enough. Yet, with each successive attempt, the desire for success grew stronger within him, and when at last the clod flew into a thousand crumbs, he flushed with triumph, and had to wipe the dimness from his glasses. Oh, poets! it is dangerous to play with fire. Plop. And another lusty rat held bravely out into the stream. "Oh, get him, get him!" cried Tommy, jumping up and down. "Lend me the catty. Let me have a shot. Do buck up." But the poet waved him aside. "There shall be no--" he hesitated. This rat was surely uglier than the last. "No unseemly haste," concluded the poet. Did the rat scent danger? I know not, but, on a sudden, he turned back to shelter. And, alas, this was too much for even Principle and Conscience--and whang went the catapult, and lo, even as by a miracle (which, indeed, it surely was), the bullet found its mark. And I regret to say that the vicar, leaning unnoticed on a neighbouring gate, heard the poet exclaim, with some exultation: "Got him." "Oh, _well_ hit!" cried Tommy. "By Jove, that was a ripping shot." The poet blushed at the praise--but alas for human pleasures, and notably stolen ones, for they are fleeting. "Hullo," said a sonorous voice. They both turned, and the vicar smiled. The poet was hatless and flushed. From one hand dangled a catapult; in the other he clutched some convenient pebbles. "Really," said the vicar, "I should never have thought it." The poet sighed, and handed the weapon to Tommy. "Run away now, old chap," he said, "and have a good time. I think I shall go home." Tommy trotted off into the wood, and the vicar and the poet held back towards the village. "How goes the experiment?" asked the former, magnanimously ignoring the scene he had just witnessed. The poet shook his head. "It is hard to say yet," he replied. "I have not seen any _marked_ development of the poetical and imaginative side of him--and he brings some very queer friends to my house. But he's a good boy, on the whole, and the holidays have only just begun." In the village street they paused. "I--I want to go to the post-office," said the poet. "All right," said the vicar. "Don't--please don't wait for me," said the poet. "It's a pleasure," replied the vicar. "The day is fine and young, and it is also Monday. I am not busy." "I really wish you wouldn't." The vicar was a man of tact, and had known the poet since boyhood, so he bowed. "Good day," he said, and strolled towards the parsonage. The poet looked up and down the long, lazy street. There was no one in sight. Then he plunged into the little shop. "Some elastic, please," he said, nervously. "Thick and square--for a catapult." III IN WHICH A HAT FLOATS DOWN STREAM "And so my boy has taken up his abode with our friend, the poet," wrote the colonel to me. "Do you know, I fancy it will be good for both of them. I have long felt that our poet was getting too solitary and remote--too self-centred, shall I say? "And yet I have, too, some misgivings as to his power of controlling Tommy--although my faith in Mrs. Chundle is profound. "Tommy, as you know, is not perhaps quite so strong as he might be, and needs careful watching--changing clothes and so on. You recollect his sudden and quite severe illness just after the Chantrey's garden party last year." I laid down the letter and smiled, for I had wondered at the time at Tommy's survival, so appalling had been his powers of absorption. "Poor colonel," I reflected. "He is too ridiculously wrapped up in the young rascal, for anything." The letter ran on: "Spare no expense as to his keep and the supplying of his reasonable wishes, but do not let him know, at any rate for the present, that he is heir to Camslove--I think he does not realise it yet--and for a while it is better he should not. "My greeting to all the brothers. There are wars and rumours of wars in the air of the Northwest...." I restored the letter to my pocket, and lay back in the grass, beneath the branches. Wars and rumours of wars--well, they were far enough from here, as every twittering birdling manifested. The colonel had always been the man of action among us, though he, of us all, had the wherewithal to be the most at ease. One of those strange incongruities with which life abounds, and which, I reflected, must be accepted with resignation. I had always rather prided myself upon the completeness with which I had resigned myself to my lot of idleness and obscurity, and to my own mind was a philosopher of no small merit. I lay back under the trees full of the content of the day and the green woods and abandoned myself to meditation. Whether it was the spirit of Spring or some latent essence of activity in my being, I do not know, but certain it is that a wave of discontent spread over me--a weariness (very unfamiliar) of myself and my cheap philosophy. I sat up, wondering at the change and its suddenness, groping in my mind for a solution to the problem. Could it be that my rule of life was based on a fallacy? Surely not. Suddenly I thought of Tommy and took a deep breath of the sweet woodland air, for I had found what I had wanted. Resignation--it was a sacrilege to use the word on such a day. Yes, I thought, there is no doubt that the instinctive philosophy of boyhood is the true rule of life, as indeed one ought to have suspected long ago. To enjoy the present with all the capacity of every sense, to regard the past with comparative indifference, since it is irrevocable, and the future with a healthy abandonment, since it is unknown, and to leave the sorrows of introspection to those who know no better--avaunt with your resignation. And even as I said it I saw the reeds by the pool quiver and a pair of brown eyes twinkle joyously at me from their midst. "Hello, Tommy!" I cried. He emerged, clad only in an inconspicuous triangular garment about his waist. "I've been watching you ever so long," he said triumphantly. "Been bathing?" I asked. "Rather. It's jolly fine and not a bit cold. I say, you should have seen the old boy potting rats." "The poet?" I murmured in amaze. Tommy nodded. "He is getting quite a good shot," he said. "He was doing awful well till the vicar saw him about an hour ago--an' then he wouldn't go on any more." "I should think not," said I. "The humanitarian, the naturalist, the anti-vivisectionist, the anti-destructionist--it passes comprehension." Tommy took a header and came up on to the sunny bank beside me, where he stood a moment with glowing cheeks and lithe shining limbs. "This is ripping," he said--every letter an italic. "This is just ab-solutely ripping." I laughed at his enthusiasm, and, as I laughed, shared it--oh the wine of it, of youth and health and spring--was I talking about resignation just now?--surely not. Tommy squatted down beside me on his bare haunches, with his hands clasped over his knees. "I have heard from your father to-day," I said. Tommy grunted, and threw a stick at an early butterfly. He was always most uncommunicative where he felt most, so I waited with discretion. "All right?" he queried, presently, in a nonchalant voice. I nodded. "He says he's afraid you're not very strong." Tommy stared, then he looked a little frightened. "I--of course I'm not _very_ strong, you know," he said thoughtfully, casting a glance down his sturdy young arms. "But I can lick young Collins, an' he weighs seven pounds more than me, an' I can pull up on the bar at gym--" I hastened to reassure him. "He referred to your attack last summer, you know, after the Chantrey affair." Tommy grinned expansively. "I expect the pater didn't know what it was," he said. "But I did." "You--you never told him?" in an anxious voice. "No." Tommy sighed. "The pater does hate a chap being greedy, you see, and--those strawbobs were so awfully good. I couldn't help it--an' father thought I'd got a--intestinal chill, I think he said." Tommy gave a passing moment to remembrance. Then he jumped up. "I'm quite dry again," he said, looking down at me. "So I guess I'll hop in." The remark appeared to me slightly inconsequent, but Tommy laughed and drew back under the shade of the tree. Then came a rush of white limbs, and he was bobbing up again in the middle of the sunny pool. "Well dived," I cried, encouragingly, but he looked a little contemptuous. "It was a jolly bad one," he said, "a beastly...." Delicacy forbids me to record the exact word he used, but it ended with "flopper." He crawled out again, and shook the water from his eyes. "I say, won't you come in?" he cried eagerly. "It's simply grand in there, and a gravel bottom." But I am a man of careful habits, and sober ways, with a reputation for some stateliness both of behaviour and bearing, and I shook my head. Tommy urged again. "It's not as if you were an old man," he cried. The thought had not occurred to me. Age, in our little fraternity had been a matter of but small interest. We had pursued the same routine of gentle exercise, and dignified diversion, quiet jest and cultured occupation, for so many years now, that we had seemed to be alike removed from youth and age, in a quiet, unalterable, back-water of life, quite apart from the hurrying stream of contemporary event. No, I was certainly not an old man, unless a well preserved specimen of forty-eight, with simple habits, can so be styled. Tommy stood expectant before me, his bare feet well apart, a very embodiment of young health, and, as I looked at him, a horrid doubt crept into my mind--had I--could I possibly have become that most objectionable of persons, a man in a groove? "Do come," said Tommy. "Don't be a fool," said Wisdom (only I was not quite sure of the speaker). I looked round at the meadow, and the wood, and saw that we were alone. "It is April," I said weakly. "But it's quite warm--it is really." And so I fell. To you, O reader, it may seem a quite small matter, but to me it was far from being so, for as I climbed the bank from each glad plunge I felt in my blood a strange desire growing to do something, to achieve, to surmount. Such emotions I had not known for years--not since--a time, when, on a day, I had set myself to love seclusion and inactivity, and to live in study and retrospect, on the small means that were mine. Ah, Tommy, never think that if any one desire be unfulfilled, life has therefore lost its sweetness, and its mission, and its responsibility! "Cave," hissed Tommy, from the water. I held my breath, and sure enough there were voices along the path, and close at hand, too. I made a desperate leap, and entered the water with a quite colossal flop, for I am moderately stout. And, even so, I had barely time to wade in up to my neck, before two figures, those of a little girl and a young lady, tripped into sight. "Why," said the little girl, "there's old Mr. Mathews and a little boy in the pool. How funny." The young lady--it was Lady Chantrey's governess--hesitated a moment and then courageously held on. "Yes," I heard her say. "It certainly is peculiar, quite peculiar." Whether she referred to me, or the situation, or an affair of previous conversation, I did not know. I did not, indeed, much care, for surely this was enough that I, a philosopher of dignity, a bachelor of some importance, at any rate in Camslove, should have been seen in a small pool, with only a draggled head above the surface, by Lady Chantrey's daughter, and her governess. I crept out, and had perforce to sit in the sun to dry, praying earnestly lest any other members of the surrounding families should come that way. Tommy was in high spirits. "It's done you lots of good," he said. I glared at him. "What do you mean?" I asked coldly, for his words seemed suggestive. "You look so jolly fresh," he observed, dressing himself leisurely. I felt that it was time I returned, and invited Tommy to partake of lunch with me. He declined, however, as he had thoughtfully provided himself with food, before starting out with the poet. "So long," he said. As I glanced up the brook, before returning homewards, I saw a sailor hat, navigating a small rapid. "But I have no walking-stick," I reflected. "And it is in the middle of the stream." IV IN WHICH A YOUNG LADY IS LEFT UPON THE BANK The sailor hat bobbed, merrily, down the stream, scorning each friendly brown boulder that would have stopped it, and dodging every drooping bough that would have held it back. For was not its legend of H. M. S. Daring, and must not the honour of Britain's navy be manfully maintained? Tommy sat peacefully just above the bathing pool, munching his sandwiches, and letting the clear water trickle across his toes, very much contented with himself, and, consequently, with his environment also. "Oh please--my hat," said a pathetic voice. Tommy turned round, and on the path behind him stood the little girl, who had passed, a short while before. She was quite breathless, and her hair was very tangled, as it crept about her cheeks, and hung over her brow. Her hands were clasped, and she looked at Tommy, appealingly. Tommy surveyed the hat, which had swung into the pool. "It's too deep, just there, for me to go in, with my clothes on," he said. "But there's a shallow part a little way down, and I'll go for it there. Come on." He jumped up, and crammed his stockings and shoes into his pockets, as they ran down the path, beside the brook. "How did you lose it?" he asked. "I was climbing a tree--and--and the wind blowed it off." "Oh!" "My governess is reading a book, about half a mile up the stream, where the poplars are." "Oh!" Tommy felt strangely tongue-tied--a new and wholly perplexing experience. He was relieved when they arrived at the shallows, and waded carefully into the stream. As the hat sailed down, he dexterously caught it, and came back in triumph. "Oh, thank you so much. I hope you aren't very wet." Tommy examined the upturned edge of his knickerbockers, and then looked into a pair of wide black eyes. "Not a bit, hardly," he said, and he thought her cheeks were redder than any he had seen. He did not, as a rule, approve of girls, but he felt that there was a kindred spirit twinkling behind those black eyes. "I think I must go back," said she. "Wh--what is your name?" stammered Tommy, with a curious desire to prolong the time. She laughed. "I think you might tell me yours." "I got your hat for you." "You liked getting it." "You'd have lost it, if I hadn't gone in." "No, I shouldn't. I could have got it myself. I'm not afraid." Tommy capitulated. "They call me Tommy Wideawake," he said. "What a funny name. I thought you looked rather sleepy, when I saw you on the bank just now." "You looked jolly untidy," retorted Tommy irrelevantly. "Are you the browny whitey colonel's son?" Tommy spoke with aroused dignity. "You must not call my father names," he said. "I'm not. I think he's a splendid brave man, and I always call him that, because his face is so brown and his moustache and hair so very white." Tommy blushed. Then he said very slowly, and with some hesitation, for to no one before had he confided so much: "I think he is the bravest--the bravest officer in the whole army." Then his eyes fell, and he looked confusedly at his toes. The stream was rippling softly over the shallows, full of its young dream. Then-- "I'm Madge Chantrey," said a shy voice. Tommy looked up eagerly. "Why, then I must have seen you in church--but you looked so different you know, so jolly--jolly different." Madge laughed. "I've often seen you, in an eton jacket, with a very big collar, and you always went to sleep in the sermon, and forgot to get up when the vicar said 'And now.'" Tommy grinned. Then an inspiration seized him. "I say; let's go on to the mill, an' we'll pot water-rats on the way, an' get some tea there. He's an awful good sort, is the miller. His name's Berrill, and he's ridden to London and back in a day, and it's a hundred and fifty miles, and he can carry two bags of wheat at once, and there's sure to be some rats up at Becklington End, and it's only about three o'clock--and it's such an absolutely ripping day." He stopped and pulled up some grass. "You might as well," he concluded, in a voice which implied that her choice was of no consequence to him. Her black eyes danced, and she swung her hat thoughtfully round her finger. "It would be rather nice," she said. "But there is Miss Gerald, you know; she will wonder where I am." "Never mind. I'll bring you home." And down the chain of water-meadows from one valley to another they wandered through the April afternoon, till the old mill-pool lay before them deep and shadowy beneath the green, wet walls. A long gleam of light lay athwart its surface, dying slowly as the sunset faded. "It is tea-time," said Tommy. "Poor Miss Gerald," murmured Madge. "She's all right," replied Tommy, cheerfully. "I expect she's jolly well enjoying herself." * * * * * As I passed the poet's gate I saw him pacing the lawn, and hailed him. "Have you enjoyed the morning?" I asked. He looked at me a little suspiciously. "You haven't seen the vicar?" he queried. I shook my head. "Yes," he observed. "Thomas and I have been bathed, I may say, in nature." He waved his hand. "I saw Tommy bathing," said I. Again the poet looked at me sharply. "Did you--did you have any converse with the boy?" he asked. "Only a little. He seemed to be thoroughly happy." The poet smiled. "Ah! the message of Spring is hope, and happiness, and life," he said, "and Tommy is even now in Spring." I bowed. "I saw a dead rat floating down stream," I remarked, casually. The poet gave me a dark glance, but my expression was innocent and frank. "_In media vitae, sumus in morte_," he observed, sententiously, and walked back to the lawn. As I turned away, I met the doctor hurrying home. He greeted me pleasantly, but there was curiosity in his eyes. "What's the matter?" I asked, genially, for I felt I had scored one against the poet. "Whatever has happened to your hair? It looks very clammy and streaky--and it's hanging over your ears." I crammed my hat on a little tighter. "Nothing at all," I said, hurriedly. "It's--it's rather warm work, you know, walking in this weather." But I could see he didn't believe me. "Seen Tommy?" he asked. "Yes." "Been fooling up the stream, I suppose?" I coloured. "No, of course not--er, that is, yes----Tommy has." The doctor smiled. "Good day, Mathews," he said. And we parted. Miss Gerald sat reading, on the bank. V IN WHICH APRIL IS MISTRESS I have heard the song that the Spring-time sings In my journey over the hills, The wild _reveille_ of life, that rings To the broad sky over the hills: For the banners of Spring to the winds are spread, Her hosts on the plain overrun, And the front is led, where the earth gleams red, And the furze-bush flares to the sun. I have seen the challenge of Spring-time flung To the wide world over the hills; I have marched its resolute ranks among, In my journey over the hills. The strong young grass has carried the crest, And taken the vale by surprise, As it leapt from rest on the Winter's breast To its conquest under the skies. I have heard the secret of Spring-time told In a whisper over the hills, That life and love shall arise and hold Dominion over the hills Till the Summer, at length, shall awake from sleep, Warm-cheeked, on the wings of the day, Where the still streams creep, and the lanes lie deep, And the green boughs shadow the way. "Four o'clock!" sang the church bells down the valley, as the poet stooped to cull an early blue-bell. "Daring little blossom--why, your comrades are still sleeping," he said. The blue-bell was silent, but all the tiny green leaves laughed, blowing cheekily in the sun. "Poor, silly poet," they seemed to say, "why not wake up, like the blue-bell, from your land of dreams, and drink the real nectar--live for a day or two in a real, wild, glorious Spring?" But the poet dreamed on, stringing his conceits heavily together, and with a knitted brow; for, somehow, the feet of the muse lagged tardily this April afternoon. Then he stumbled over a parasol which lay across the path. He looked up. "I beg your pardon," he said, looking into a pair of blue eyes--or were they grey, or hazel? He was not quite sure, but they seemed, at any rate, Hibernian. "It was quite my fault; I am so sorry." "Nay, I was dreaming," said the poet. "And, sure, so was I, too." "I have not hurt it, I trust." "Not at all, but it must be quite late." "It is four o'clock." "Good gracious, where can the child have got to?" "You have lost some one?" "My pupil." The poet bowed. "A sorrow that befalls all leaders of disciples," he observed. Miss Gerald stared, and the poet continued, "The young will only learn when they have fledged their wings and found them weak." "And then?" "They come to us older ones for a remedy. Knowledge is associated, madam, with broken wings." "But I cannot take philosophy home to her mother--she will most certainly require Madge--and can you tell me where this path leads?" The poet waved his hand. "Up-stream to the village--down-stream to the mill," he said. Miss Gerald thought a moment. "She will have gone down stream," she exclaimed. The poet meditated. "I, too, have lost a boy," he said. Miss Gerald looked surprised. "The son of a friend," explained the poet. "I must look for Madge at once," cried Miss Gerald, gathering up her books. "May we search together--you know the proverb about the heads?" She laughed. "If you like," she said, and they followed the stream together. "You are the poet, are you not?" asked Miss Gerald presently. "A mere amateur." "Lady Chantrey has a copy of your works. I have read some of them." "I trust they gave you pleasure--at any rate amusement." "A little of both," said Miss Gerald. "You are very frank." "Some of them puzzled me a little--and--and I think you belie your writings." "For instance?" "You sing of action, and Spring, and achievement--and love. But you live in dreams, and books, and solitude." "I believe what I write, nevertheless." Miss Gerald was silent, and in a minute the poet spoke again. "You think my writings lack the ring of conviction?" he asked. She laughed. "They would be stronger if they bore the ring of experience," she said. "_Experientia docet_, you know, and the poets are supposed to teach us ordinary beings." "I don't pretend to teach." "Then you ought to. Is it not the duty of 'us older ones,' as you said just now?--The old leaves living over again in the new, you know," and she smiled. "That's quite poetical, isn't it, even if it is a bit of a platitude?" "And be laughed at for our pains, even as those hopeful young debutantes are laughing at the dowdy old leaves, on that dead tree yonder." "I knew you were no true singer of Spring." * * * * * Two children wandered back along the path. "I say, you're not a bad sort," said Tommy. Madge laughed. "Hullo, Tommy," cried the poet. "My dear Madge, where _have_ you been?" cried Miss Gerald. The poet smiled. "It is April, Miss Gerald," he said. "We must not be too severe on the young people. As you know, this is proverbially an irresponsible, changeable, witch of a month." "We must hurry home, Madge," said Miss Gerald, holding out a graceful, though strong, hand to the poet. He clasped it a moment. "That was an interesting chat we had, Miss Gerald. I shall remember it. Come, Tommy, it is time that we also returned." They walked slowly home together, Tommy chattering away freely of the day's adventures. The poet seemed more than usually abstracted. In a pause of Tommy's babbling, the name on the fly leaf of a book came back to him. He had seen it, in the sunshine, by the stream. "Mollie Gerald," he murmured. "I beg your pardon," said Tommy, politely. "Nothing," snapped the poet. * * * * * "Which I says to Berrill, 'Berrill,' I says, 'Jest look 'ee 'ere now, if the pote ain't a-walkin' along o' Miss Gerald from the 'all, as close an' hinterested as never was, an' 'im, fer all the world, a 'missusogynist,' I says, meanin' a wimming-'ater. "An' Berrill 'e said 'imself as 'e'd 'ardly a believed it if 'e 'adn't seed it wi' 'is own heyes, so to speak. "'It do be a masterpiece,' 'e said, 'a reg'lar masterpiece it be.'" They were sitting in Mrs. Chundle's kitchen, and Mrs. Berrill seemed excited. Mrs. Chundle wiped a moist forehead with her apron, and shook her head. "What with Mister Thomas, an' catapults--I could believe hanythink, Mrs. Berrill," she said. "The pote's changin' 'is ways, Mrs. Chundle." "'E is that, Mrs. Berrill, which as me haunt Jane Chundle, as is related to me blood-relations, the Cholmondeleys, 'eard Mrs. Cholmondeley o' Barnardley say to the rector's wife, an' arterwards told me private, 'Yer never do know oo's oo nowadays'--be they poits or hanybody else." "It bees just what the parson wer a sayin' a fortnight Sunday, wars an' rumours o' wars, an' bloody moons, an' disasters an' catapults, in the last days, 'e says--they be hall signs o' the times, Mrs. Chundle." Mrs. Chundle sipped her tea, and looked round her immaculate kitchen. Then she lowered her voice, "I'm 'opin', Mrs. Berrill, I'm 'opin' hearnest as 'ow when Mister Thomas goes back, the master will come to 'imself, like the prodigale." Mrs. Berrill looked doubtful. "When once the worm hentereth Eden, Mrs. Chundle," she began, enigmatically--and they both shook their heads. "The worm bein' Mister Thomas," remarked Mrs. Chundle. "An' 'im that vilent an' himpetuous I never does know what 'e's agoin' hafter next." "You should be firm, Mrs. Chundle." "Which I ham, Mrs. Berrill, by nature hand intention, an' if I 'ad me own way I'd spank 'im 'earty twice a week, Mrs. Berrill, Wednesdays an' Saturdays." "Why Wednesdays an' Saturdays, Mrs. Chundle?" "Wednesdays ter teach 'im the hemptiness o' riches, Mrs. Berrill, which 'e gets 'is pocket-money on Wednesdays--an' Saturdays to give 'im a chastened spirit fer the Sabbath--an' ter keep 'im from a sittin' sleepy in church, Mrs. Berrill." Here the door opened suddenly and Tommy came in, very muddy, with a peaceful face, and a large rent in his coat. "I say, Mrs. Chundle, do sew this up for me--hullo, Mrs. Berrill, that was a ripping tea you gave us last week--you are an absolute gem, Mrs. Chundle," and Tommy sat himself down on the kitchen bench, while Mrs. Chundle ruefully examined the coat. In Mrs. Berrill's eye was a challenge, as who should say, "Now, Mrs. Chundle, arise and assert your authority, put down a firm foot and say, this shall not be.'" That lady doubtless saw it, for she pursed her lips and gazed at Tommy with some dignity. "Mister Thomas," she began--but Tommy interrupted her. "I say, I didn't know you an' Mrs. Berrill were pals. Mrs. Berrill gave me a huge tea the other day, Mrs. Chundle--awful good cake she makes, don't you, Mrs. Berrill? An', I say, Mrs. Berrill, has old--has Mrs. Chundle told you all about the Cholmondeleys, an' how they married, an' came to England--how long ago was it?" Mrs. Chundle blushed modestly. "With William the Norming," she said gently. "An' how she was derived from them, you know, an' all that?" Mrs. Berrill nodded. "We hall know as 'ow Mrs. Chundle is a--a very superior person," she said. Mrs. Chundle stitched away in silent graciousness. "Tommy," cried a distant voice--it was the poet's--"Tommy, come here, I've just hit the bottle three times running." Tommy grinned. "I must go," he said. "I'm jolly glad you and Mrs. Berrill are pals," and he disappeared in the direction of the poet. "Which I 'ope 'e won't turn out no worse than 'is dear father. God bless 'im," said Mrs. Berrill, as they discussed the tattered jacket. And so the days tripped by, sunny and showery--true April days. Up in the downs was a new shrill bleating of lambs, and down in the valley rose the young wheat, green and strong and hopeful. The water-meadows grew each day more velvety and luscious, as the young grass thickened, and between the stems, in the copse, came a shimmer of blue and gold, of blue-bell and primrose. The stream sang buoyantly down to the mill, and Tommy wandered over the country-side, happy in it all--and indeed almost part of it. Moreover, Madge and her governess would often come upon him, all unexpectedly, too, in some byway of their daily travel, and he would show them flowers and bird's-nests, and explain for their benefit the position of each farmhand and labourer in the commonwealth of Camslove, and thus the days went by so happily that they seemed to have vanished almost as they came, and on a morning Tommy woke up to the fact that the holidays had ended. A grim showery day it was, too--a day of driving wind and cold rain--and Tommy loitered dismally from arbour to house, and house to arbour. The poet was busy on a new work, and Mrs. Chundle, too intent on marking and packing his clothes to be good company. Madge would be indoors, as it was raining, and it was too cold and uninviting for a bathe. He spent the afternoon trudging about the muddy lanes with the doctor, but the evening found him desolate. Ah, these sad days that form our characters, as men tell us--characters that, at times, we feel we could willingly dispense with, so that the days might be always sunny, and the horizons clear. Even the longest of dreary days ends at last, however, and Tommy fell sorrowfully asleep in the summer house, a rain-drop rolling dismally down his freckled nose, and his mind held captive by troubled visions of school. A day or two after Tommy's departure, the poet stooped, in a side path of his garden, to pick up a stray sheet of paper. On it he saw two words in his own handwriting. "Mollie--folly--" He sighed. "I remember," he said. Then he looked again, for in a round, sprawling hand was written yet another word--"jolly." The poet wiped his glasses and folded up the paper. Then he coughed. "I had not thought of that," he observed, meditatively. VI IN WHICH FOUR MEN MEET A TRAIN A hot August noon blazed over Becklington common, as I lay thinking and thinking, staring up into the blue sky, and for all the richness of the day, sad enough in heart. In the valley below me the stream still splashed happily down to the mill, and away on the far hills the white flocks were grazing peacefully as ever. And above my head poised and quivering sang a lark. The Spring had rounded into maturity, and Summer, lavish and wonderful and queenly, rested on her throne. Why should there be war anywhere in the world? I asked. And yet along a far frontier it flickered even now, sinister and relentless. A little war and, to me, a silent one--yet there it rose and fell and smouldered, and grew fierce, and in the grip of it two brave grey eyes had closed forever. I heard the quiet, well-known voice. "Tommy is not an ordinary boy," it said. How we had smiled at the simple honest pride that this soldier had taken in his son. I turned over and groaned, as I thought of it all--our parting in the old study--our promise--the half-comedy, half-responsibility of the situation. And we had borne it so lightly, tossed for the boy, taken him more as an obstreperous plaything than a serious charge. And now--well it matters not upon which of us the mantle of his legal guardian had fallen, nor upon whom lay the administration of his affairs--for we all had silently renewed our vows to one who was dead, and felt that there was something sacred in this mission, which lay upon the shoulders of each one of us. Poor Tommy--none of us knew how the blow had taken him, for to none of us had he written since the news reached England, save indeed when, in a brief line to me, he had announced his return next week. We had all written to him, as our separate natures and feelings had dictated, but no reply had reached us--and how should we know that of all the letters he had received, only one was deemed worthy of preservation--and that written in a round childish hand? "Dear Tommy--I am so sorry. Your loving Madge." A damp sorry little note it was, but it remained in Tommy's pocket long after our more stately compositions had been torn up and forgotten. To us, leading our quiet commonplace peaceful life in this little midland village, the shock had come with double force. Perhaps we had been apt to dwell so little on the eternal verities of chance and change and life and death as to have become almost oblivious of their existence, at any rate in our own sphere. Those of the villagers who, year by year, in twos and threes, were gathered to their fathers, were old and wrinkled and ready for death, resting quietly under the good red earth, well content with sleep. And these we had missed, but scarcely mourned, feeling that, in the fitness of things, it was well that they should cease from toil. But here was our friend, straight and strong and vigorous, cut down by some robber bullet in an Indian pass--and to us all, I fancy, the shock came with something of terror, and something of awakening in its tragedy. Outwardly we had shown little enough. The poet, when the first stun of the blow had passed, had written his grief in the best lines I had ever seen from his pen. The vicar had preached a quiet scholarly sermon in our friend's memory. And now all reference to the dead had ceased among us, for the time. To-morrow, Tommy was to come back from school, and all of us, I fancy, dreaded the first meeting. We had arranged that each of our houses was to be open to him, and that in each a bed should be prepared, so that, as the mood took him, he might sleep where he thought best. But the meeting, at the station, was a matter of considerable trepidation to us. I strolled down the hill to the poet's house. "Good morning," I said, "I--I am rather keen on running up to town, to-morrow, to see those pictures, you know." The poet smiled. "I did not know you were a patron of art," he observed. "I am gratified at this development." "Ah--could you meet Tommy at 2.15?" The poet's face fell. "I--I am very busy," he said, deprecatingly. "'Lucien and Angelica' ought to be concluded by to-morrow evening." We were silent, both looking into the trembling haze, up the valley. "The doctor," suggested the poet. "I will try." But the doctor was also very much engaged. "Two cases up at Bonnor, in the downs," he explained. I called on the vicar. "I--I want to go up to town to see that china exhibit," I observed. He looked interested. "I didn't know you were a connoisseur," he remarked. "Not at all, not at all--the merest tyro." "I am glad. You will find the show well worth your attention." I bent my head to the vicar's roses. "These Richardsons are very lovely," I said. The vicar smiled. "I think they have repaid a little trouble," he said modestly. "Ah--could you possibly meet the 2.15 to-morrow?" "You are expecting a parcel?" "No--not exactly. Tommy, you know." The vicar took a turn on the lawn. Then he came to a standstill in front of me. "I had planned a visit to Becklington," he said. I bowed. "I am sorry," said I, and turned to go. At the gate he touched my shoulder. "Mathews!" I paused. "I am a coward, Mathews--but I will go." We looked into each other's eyes, and I repented. "No, old friend. I ought to go and I will go. By Jove, I will." "So be it," said the vicar. I had played with my luncheon, to the concern of my man, who regarded me anxiously. "Are you not well, sir?" he asked. "Quite well," I replied, icily, with a remark about bad cooking, and careless service, and strode towards the station. I paced the platform moodily twenty minutes before the advertised arrival of the train. I was very early, but somebody, apparently, was before me. I caught a glimpse of a strangely characteristic hat in the corner of the little waiting-room. Its shapelessness was familiar. I looked in, and the poet seemed a little confused. "Lucien and Angel--?" I began, enquiringly. He waved his hand, with some superiority. "Inspiration cannot be commanded," he observed. "They shall wait until Saturday." We sat down in the shade, and conversation flagged. Presently steps approached, pacing slowly along the wooden platform. It was the vicar. He looked a little conscious, and no doubt read the enquiry in my eyes. "It is too hot," he said, "to drive to Becklington before tea," and the three of us sat silently down together. At last a porter came, and looked up and down the line. Apparently he saw no obstruction, for he proceeded to lower the signal. We rose and paced to and fro, with valorously concealed agitation. A trap dashed along the white road, and some one ran, breathlessly, up the stairs. He seemed a little surprised at the trio which awaited him. "I thought you had two cases in Bonnor," I observed, with a piercing glance. The doctor looked away, but did not reply, and I forbore to press the point. Far down the line shone a cloudlet of white smoke and the gleam of brass through the dust. "Becklington, Harrowley, Borcombe and Hoxford train," roared the porter, apparently as a reminder to the station-master, for there were no passengers. We stood, a nervous group, in the shadow of the waiting-room. "Poor boy--poor little chap," said the vicar at last. "We must cheer him up--God bless him." Youth is not careless of grief, but God has made it the master of sorrow, and Tommy's eyes were bright, as he jumped onto the platform. He smiled complacently into our anxious faces--so genuine a smile that our poor carved ones relaxed into reality. "I've got a ripping chameleon," he observed cheerfully. VII IN WHICH MADGE WHISTLES IN A WOOD Through the still boughs the sunlight fell, as it seemed to me, in little molten streams, and I pushed back my chair still deeper into the shadow of the elm. Even there it was not cool, but at any rate the contrast to the glaring close-cropped lawn was welcome. I stared up through the listless, delicate leaves into a sky of Mediterranean blue. Surely, it was the hottest day of summer--of memory. The flowers with which my little garden is so profusely peopled hung languorously above the borders, and the hum of a binder in the neighbouring wheat field seemed an invitation to siesta. Down sunny paths, I dropped into oblivion. A touch awoke me, but my eyes were held tight beneath a pair of cool hands. "Good gracious," I gasped. "Bless my----" Tommy laughed and sauntered into view. "You were making a beastly row," he observed, frankly. "I thought it was a thunderstorm." I looked at him with envious eyes. His sole attire consisted of a striped blazer and a pair of knickerbockers. He was crowned in a battered wide-awake hat, and from this to the tips of his brown toes he looked buoyant and cool despite the tan on his chest and legs. He deposited the rest of his garments and a towel upon the grass, and sprawled contentedly beside them. "It was so jolly hot that I didn't bother about dressing," he observed, lazily. Then he sat up quickly. "I say; you don't mind, do you? it's awful slack of me to come round here like this." "Not a bit," said I, as my thoughts fled back to the days when I also was lean and springy, and blissfully contemptuous of changes in the weather. Ah, well-a-day--well-a-day! Linger the dreams of the golden days-- They were bright, though they fled so soon, Rosy they gleamed in the early rays Of the sun, that dispelled them at noon. The joys of reminiscence are mellow, but at times they may become a little soporific--I awoke with a start. "Whoo--ee." It was a whistle, low and penetrating, and would seem to have risen from the wood beyond the stream. I noticed that Tommy was alert and listening. "Whoo--ee." Again it rose, with something of caution in its tone, but a spice of daring in the higher note of its conclusion. I watched Tommy, idly, with half-closed eyes. He was performing a rapid toilet. Presently he looked up at me from his shoe-laces. "I taught her that whistle," he observed, complacently. "Whom?" I asked. "Why, Madge--Madge Chantrey," he said. "You seem to have found an apt pupil." "Rather." "But I hope," I spoke severely, "I trust, Tommy, that you haven't taught her to play truant." He looked at me, cheekily; then he vanished through the gate. "Happy dreams," he said, "and, I say, don't snore _quite_ so loudly, you know." And I heard him singing as he ran through the wood. Said Madge, from the first stile, on the right: "I managed it beautifully; she was reading some of those stupid rhymes by the poet--only I oughtn't to call them names, because he's a friend of yours--and I watched her getting sleepier and sleepier, and then I came through the little gate behind the greenhouse and simply ran all the way, and, I expect, she's fast asleep, and I wonder why grown-up people always go to sleep in the very best part of all the day." "I think it's their indigestions, you know," said Tommy thoughtfully. "But they never eat anything all day--only huge big feeds at night." "I think everybody's a _little_ sleepy after lunch." "I'm not." "Not after two helps of jam roll?" "How do you know I had two helps?" "Never mind," said Tommy, then. "See that spadger," he cried suddenly. "Got him, no--missed him, by Jove." The sparrow was twittering, mockingly, behind the hedge, and a bright-eyed rabbit scuttled into safety. "Let's go through the park," cried Tommy. "I'll show you a ripping little path, right by the house, where there's a cave I made before--no one knows it but father and I, an' you can go right by it, an' never see it. Come on." They scrambled over the iron railings that bound the neat, though modest, domain surrounding Camslove Grange. Through the tall tree trunks they could see the old house with its rough battlements and extended wings. In front of it the trim lawns sloped down to the stream, while behind, the Italian garden was cut out of a wild tangle of shrubs and brushwood. Into this Tommy plunged, with the unerring steps of long acquaintance, holding back the branches, as Madge followed close upon his heels. Once he turned, and looked back eagerly into her eyes. "We're just by the path now--Isn't it grand?" "Rather," she said. Presently, with much labour, they reached a microscopical track through the underwood. "There," observed Tommy, with the proud air of a proprietor, "Didn't I tell you?" "No one could possibly find it, I should think," said Madge. "Rather not. Let's go to the cave." Followed some further scrambling, and Tommy drew back the bushes triumphantly. "See--" he began, but the words died upon his lips, for there, standing all unabashed upon this sacred ground, was a boy about his own age. Tommy stammered and grew silent, looking amazedly at the stranger. He was a pale boy with dark eyes, and a Jewish nose. "You are trespassing," he said coolly. Tommy gasped. "Who--who are you?" he asked at last. "I tell you you are trespassing." Tommy flushed. "I'm not," he said. "I--I belong here." The other boy gave a shout. "Father," he cried, "Here's some trespassers." Tommy stood his ground, surveying the intruder with some contempt, while Madge wide-eyed held his arm. There were footsteps through the bushes, and a tall stout man in a panama hat came into view. "Hullo," he said, "This is private property, you know." Tommy looked at him gravely. "I don't understand--I--I belong here, you know." The big man smiled. "You're a native, are you?" he said cheerfully. "Well, you're a pretty healthy looking specimen--but this place here is mine--for the time, at any rate." "It was my father's," said Tommy, with a strange huskiness in his throat. "Don't know anything about that--got it from the agents for six years--like to see the deed, heh?" and he chuckled, a little ponderously. Tommy looked downcast and hesitant, and the big man turned to his son. "Well, well," he said, "I guess they'll know better next time. Take 'em down the drive, Ernie, and show 'em out decently." The three walked silently down the old avenue. At the gate, the pale boy turned to Tommy. "Back my father's got more money than yours," he said. Tommy's eyes swept him with a look of profound contempt, but a lump in his throat forbade retort, and he turned away silent. Madge, dear little woman, saw the sorrow in his eyes, and held her peace, picking flowers from the bank as they walked slowly down the path. On a green spray a little way ahead a bird was singing full-throated and joyous, but to Tommy its music was mockery. He took a long aim and brought the little songster, warm and quivering, on to the pathway in front of them. As they came to it he kicked it aside, but Madge, stooping, lifted it from the long grass and hid it, quite dead, in her frock. The tears had risen to her eyes, and she was on the point of challenging this seemingly wanton cruelty. But there was something in Tommy's face that her eyes were quick to notice, and she was silent. Thus is tact so largely a matter of instinct. And, in a minute, Tommy turned to her. "I--I should jolly well like to--to kill that chap," he said. Madge said nothing, fondling the warm little body that she held beneath her pinafore. As they turned the corner of the hedge, they came into the full flood of the sunlight over the meadows, and Tommy smiled. "I say, I'm awfully sorry we should have got turned out like that, Madge, but I--I didn't know there was somebody else in there--an' that I wasn't to go there, an' that." "Never mind," said Madge, "let's come up home, and I'll show you my cave--I've got one, too. It's not so good as yours, of course, because you're a boy, but I think it's very pretty all the same, and it's _almost_ as hard to get at." VIII IN WHICH TWO ADJECTIVES ARE APPLIED TO TOMMY My lady's lawn is splashed with shade All intertwined with sun, And strayingly beneath the boughs Their tapestry is spun, For the angel hands of summer-time Have woven them in one. My lady's lawn is wrapped with peace, Its life throbs sweet and strong. Caressingly across its breast The laughing breezes throng, And the angel wings of summer-time Have touched it into song. "Thank you," said Lady Chantrey. "I feel so honoured, you know, to have my little garden immortalised in verse." The poet wrapped up his papers and restored them to his pocket, with a smile. "Not immortalised, Lady Chantrey," he replied modestly, "not even described--only, if I may say so, appreciated." From her invalid chair, in the shade, Lady Chantrey looked out over the lawn, sunny and fragrant, a sweet foreground to the wide hills beyond. She turned to the poet with something like a sigh. "I wonder why it is that we fortunate ones are so few," she said. "Why we few should be allowed to drown ourselves in all this beauty, that so many can only dream about. It would almost seem a waste of earth's good things." The poet was silent. "After all, they can dream--the others, I mean," he said, presently. "But never attain." "It is good that they know it is all here--somewhere." Lady Chantrey lay back in her chair. "I wish I could give it to them," she said, opening her hands. "I wish I could give it to them, but I am so stupid, and weak, and poor;--you can." "I?" stammered the poet. She looked at him, with bright eyes. "You have the gift," she said. "You can at any rate minister to their dreams." "But nobody reads poetry, and I--I do not write for the crowd." She shook her head. "I think everybody reads poetry," she said, "and I think, in every house, if one could but find it, there is some line or thought or dream, if you will, cut out, long since, and guarded secretly--and more, read--read often, as a memory, perhaps only as a dream, but, for all that, a very present help--I would like to be the writer of such a poem." "It would certainly be gratifying," assented the poet. "It would be worth living for." The poet looked at her gravely--at the sweet-lined face, and the white hair, and tired grey eyes. "Do you know, Lady Chantrey," he said, "you always give me fresh inspiration. I--I wonder--" But what the poet wondered was only the wonder, I suppose, of all writers of all ages, and, in any case, it was not put into words, for across the lawn came a rustle of silk and muslin, heralding visitors, and the poet became busy about tea-cups and cream. Though physical weakness, and want of means, prevented Lady Chantrey from entertaining to any large extent, yet I doubt if any woman in the county was more really popular than this gentle hostess of Becklington Hall; for Lady Chantrey was of those who had gained the three choicest gifts of suffering--sweetness and forbearance and sympathy. Such as Lady Chantrey never want for friends, for indeed they give, I fancy, more than they receive. On this sunny afternoon several groups were dotted about the cool lawns of Becklington, when Tommy and Madge came tea-wards from the cave. Lady Chantrey beckoned them to her side. "I am so glad to see you again, Tommy," she said. "You never come to see me now. I suppose old women are poor company." "I wish they were all like you," said Tommy, squatting upon the grass at her feet. Then he remembered a question he had meant to ask her, "I say, Lady Chantrey, who's living at the Grange?" She shook her head. "I don't know, Tommy. I heard that your guardian had let it--it was your father's wish, you know--but I did not know the tenants had arrived." "Oh, Lady Chantrey, there's a boy there, an' he's such an awful cad." "Cad?" echoed Lady Chantrey, questioningly. "He--he isn't one little atom of a gentleman." "And therefore a cad?" Tommy coloured. "He's an awful bounder, Lady Chantrey." Everybody was busy in conversation, and Lady Chantrey laid a frail hand on Tommy's shoulder--then, "Tommy," she said in a low voice, "a gentleman never calls anyone a cad--for that reason. It implies a comparison, you see." Tommy blushed furiously, and looked away. "I--I'm awful sorry. Lady Chantrey," he mumbled. "Tell me about your holidays," she said. A servant stepped across the lawn to Lady Chantrey's chair followed by a stout lady, in red silk. "Mrs. Cholmondeley," she announced. "And how do you do, my dear Lady Chantrey? Feeling a little stronger, I hope. Ah, that's very delightful. Isn't it too hot for anything? I have just been calling at the dear Earl's--Lady Florence is looking so well--" Mrs. Cholmondeley swept the little circle gathered about the tea-table with a quick glance. It is good to have the Earl on one's visiting list. Her eyes rested on Mollie Gerald, pouring out tea, and she turned to Lady Chantrey: "Is that the young person who has been so successful with your daughter's music, Lady Chantrey?" Mollie's cheeks were scarlet, as she bent over the tea-pot, for Mrs. Cholmondeley's lower tones were as incisive as her ordinary voice was strident. "Yes, that is my friend, Miss Gerald," said Lady Chantrey, smiling at Mollie. Mrs. Cholmondeley continued a diatribe upon governesses. "You never know, _dear_ Lady Chantrey, who they may be. So many of them are so exceedingly--" She shrugged her shoulders. "I have been very fortunate," said Lady Chantrey. Tommy wandered up with some cake, which he offered to Mrs. Cholmondeley, who smiled graciously. "And who is this?" she asked. Lady Chantrey explained. "Not the poor colonel's heir?" Lady Chantrey nodded. "Really; how interesting--how are you, my dear?" "All right," said Tommy, in obvious good health. "This is Mrs. Cholmondeley, of Barnardley." Tommy looked interested. "I've heard about you from Mrs. Chundle," he said. "She's a sort of relation of yours, derived from the same lot, you know." Mrs. Cholmondeley looked a little bewildered, and the poet patently nervous. "Really I--" "She's an awful good sort--Mrs. Chundle. She's the poet's housekeeper--so I expect she has to work for her living, you know." The poet gasped. "It's--it's all a mistake," he stammered, but not before Mrs. Cholmondeley had turned a violent purple, and a smile had travelled round the little ring of visitors. All at once Tommy became aware that somehow things had gone wrong and retreated hastily from the lawn, seeking the refuge of the cave among the laurels, and in a minute or two, the poet, with a murmured pretext about a view, also vanished. Tommy wandered disconsolately down the flagged path between the bushes, ruminating upon the strange contrariness of affairs on this chequered afternoon. Near the arbour in the laurels Miss Gerald met him. Her eyes were dancing. "O, Tommy, you celestial boy," she cried. Tommy was doubtful of the adjective, but the tone was certainly one of approbation, and he looked modestly at the path. "You're a perfect young angel," proceeded Miss Gerald, enthusiastically, "and I'd kiss you only I suppose you wouldn't like it." Tommy looked at her, dubiously. "I shouldn't very much," he observed, but chivalry stepped manfully to the fore, and he turned a brown cheek towards her. "You can if you like, you know," he added, looking resignedly across the valley. She stooped and dropped a kiss upon his cheek. "You're the very broth of a boy," she said, as she ran back to the house. Presently the laurels rustled, and the poet stole out into the pathway. Tommy was disappearing into a sidewalk, and the poet looked after him with a curious expression. "O you incomprehensible person," said he. IX IN WHICH TOMMY CLIMBS A STILE "You daren't climb into the hay-loft." "Daren't I?" said Tommy, scornfully. "You see if I don't." And he shinned easily up the ladder. The hay-loft was cool and fragrant--a welcome contrast to the glaring yard. "Come up too," said Tommy. Madge's black eyes flashed. "I will," she said, clambering up the steps. Tommy stooped down and gave her a hand. "Good girl," he said, approvingly. Then he laid his hand on her lips, and they crouched back into the shade. For into the barn stepped one of the farm labourers. "We mustn't get found out, for the man here is an awful beast of a chap," said Tommy, in a low whisper. The labourer had not perceived them and was soon bent over a machine chopping up fodder for the cattle. His back was towards them, and he breathed heavily, for the work was hard. His red neck formed a tempting target, and Tommy was an accurate shot. Moreover, his pockets were full of peas. He took a careful aim and let fly, and there was a hoarse exclamation from the man at the wheel. Tommy drew back into shelter, where Madge was curled up in the new hay. "Got him rippingly," said Tommy, "plumb in the back of the neck." Madge looked a little reproachful. "O Tommy, it must have hurt him dreadfully." Tommy chuckled. "'Spect it did tickle him a bit," he said, looking cautiously round the corner. The man had resumed work and the hum of the wheel filled the barn. Tommy selected another portion of the man's anatomy and let fly a little harder. There was a shout and a sound of muttered exclamation in the barn below them, as Tommy backed into the hay with quiet enjoyment. As they listened they could hear the man stumping round the barn, swearing softly, and presently he was joined by some one else, for a loud voice broke into his grumbling. "What the dickens are you doing, Jake?" "Darned if I know," said the man. "On'y there bees summat as hits I unnever I goes at the wheel, master." "That's the farmer himself just come in," said Tommy burrowing deeper into the hay. They could hear him speaking. "Get on wi' your work, Jake, an' don't get talkin' your nonsense to me, man." The man grumbled. "Darned if it are nonsense, master," he said. "Just you wait till you be hit yoursen--right in the bark o' your neck, too." "O Tommy, do hit him--the farmer I mean." Tommy shook his head. "It wouldn't do," he said. Madge looked at him with a challenge in her eyes. "You daren't," she whispered. Tommy flushed. "We should be caught." "Oh--then you daren't?" Tommy was silent, and the farmer's foot was heavy in the barn below. "You daren't," repeated Madge. Tommy looked at her, with bright eyes. "All right," he said. "If you want to see, look round the corner, only don't let him cob you." Then he drew back a little from the opening and took a flying shot, finding a target in one of the farmer's rather conspicuous ears. He gave a sudden yell, and his pale eyes seemed to stand out from his head, as he looked amazedly round the building. The man at the wheel spat into his hands, with a quiet grin. "Darned if they ain't hit you, master," he said, grinding with some zest. "My word, they shall pay for it," shouted the farmer, conning the situation with frowning brows. Then he stepped to the ladder. "See as they don't get out, Jake, if I send anyone down," he said loudly, and Jake grunted an assent. Madge was trembling. "O Tommy, I'm so sorry. It's all my fault. Tell him it's all my fault." "It's all right," said Tommy cheerfully, "He--he won't dare to touch me." A pair of red cheeks appeared above the floor of the loft, and the pale eyes looked threateningly into the gloom. In a minute they encountered Tommy's brown ones, bright and defiant. The farmer grunted. "Bees you there, eh?" he asked. Tommy grinned. "All right, you needn't get shirty," he said. "Shirty, eh? I wunt get shirty. Don't you make no mistake. Jake!" "Ah!" "My stick down there?" "Ah." "Will you 'ave it up 'ere or down yon, young man?" Tommy flushed hotly, and Madge held his arm. "You daren't hit me," he said. The farmer laughed. "You've bin trespassin' more'n once, young man, wi' your catapult an' your sharp tongue, an' now I'm goin' to 'ave my bit. Up 'ere or down yon?" Tommy temporized. "Let us come down," he said, eyeing the door warily. "Young miss, you get down first," said the farmer. Madge obeyed with pale cheeks, and stood, half in sunlight, at the door. "Jake!" "Ah!" "See the young rip don't get out." "Ah!" Tommy clambered down, standing between the two men. Then he made a bolt for freedom, dodging Jake's half-hearted attempt at resistance. But the farmer held him as he recoiled from Jake and jerked him over a truss of hay. And for the next few minutes Tommy was very uncomfortable. "Oh, you cad, you cad, you beastly, putrid cad." Tommy spoke between his teeth at each stroke of the farmer's stick. The man released him in a minute or two, and Tommy rushed at him with both fists. The farmer laughed. "Guess you won't come knockin' about this barn again in a hurry," he said as he pushed him easily into the yard and closed the great door with a thud. For a moment Tommy stood, white with anger. Then he thought of Madge, who had been a spectator of the tragedy. But she was nowhere to be seen, and he walked gloomily down the lane. Now Madge, with a beating heart and a stricken conscience, had fled for help, running blindly down the lane, with the idea of securing the first ally who should appear. And she almost ran into the arms of the pale boy from the Grange. "Hullo, what's the matter?" he asked, looking at Madge curiously. Madge blurted out the story, with eager eyes. 'Could he help her? Was there anybody near who could save Tommy from a probable and violent death?' The pale boy looked at her admiringly, as he considered the question. Then, "My father knows the man--he owes my father some money, I think. I'll see if I can do anything." They ran down the lane together, and doing so encountered Tommy, flushed and ruffled. "O, Tommy"--Madge began, but stopped suddenly, at the look on Tommy's face. For to Tommy this seemed the lowest depth of his degradation, that the pale boy should be a witness of his discomfiture. He looked at them angrily, and then, turning on his heel, struck out across the fields, the iron entering deeply into his soul. Youth is imitative, and Tommy had often heard the phrase. "I--I don't care a damn," he said. For a moment he felt half-frightened, but the birds were still singing in the hedge, and, in the next field, the reapers still chattered gaily at their work. Moreover, the phrase seemed both consolatory and emphatic. "I don't care a damn," he repeated, slowly, climbing the stile, into the next field. Said a voice from behind the hedge: "Girl in it?" Tommy looked round, and encountered a tall young man in tweeds. He was looking at him, with amused eyes. "I--I don't know what you mean," said Tommy. The young man laughed. "They're the devil, girls are," he observed. Tommy was puzzled and eyed the stranger cautiously, thinking him the handsomest man he had seen. Nor, in a way, was he at fault, for the young man was straight, and tall, and comely. But there was something in the eyes--a lack of honest lustre--and in the lips--too sensuous for true manliness, that would have warned Tommy, had he been older, or even in a different frame of mind. Just now, however, a friend was welcome, and Tommy told his tale, as they strolled through the fields together. Presently, "You belong to Camslove Grange, don't you?" asked the stranger. "I did." "And will again, I suppose, eh?" Tommy looked doubtful, and the young man laughed. "Sorry--I ought to have put it the other way round, for it will belong to you." Tommy shook his head. "I don't think so," he said. "Some other Johnny's got it, you see." The young man looked at his watch. "My name's Morris--I live at Borcombe House--you'd better come and feed with me." "Thanks, I'd like to, awfully." "That's right--the old man will be glad to see you, and we'll have a game of billiards." "I can't play." "Never mind. I'll teach you--good game, pills." Squire Morris was cordial from the grip of his hand to the moisture in his baggy eyes. "The heir of Camslove," he said. "Well, well, I am so glad to see you, dear boy, so very glad to see you. You must come often." For a moment a misgiving arose in Tommy's heart. "Did you know my father?" he asked, as the old man held his hand. "Yes, yes; not as well as I would have liked to know him, by no means as well as I would have liked to know him--but I knew him, oh yes. I knew him well enough." Tommy felt reassured, and the three entered the old hall, hung with trophies of gun and rod and chase. "A bachelor's abode," laughed the young man. "We're wedded to sport--no use for girls here, eh dad?" The squire laughed wheezily. "The dog," he chuckled, "the young dog." Presently the squire led them to the dining room, where a bountiful meal was spread--so bountiful that Tommy, already predisposed for friendship, rapidly thawed into intimacy. Both the squire and his son seemed intent on amusing him, and Tommy took the evident effort for the unaccomplished deed--for, in truth, the stories that they told were almost unintelligible to him, though, to the others, they appeared humorous enough. Presently the squire grew even more affectionate. He had always loved boys, he said, and Tommy was not to forget it. He was a stern enemy, but a good friend, and Tommy was not to forget it. He would always be proud to shake hands with Tommy, wherever he met him, and Tommy was to keep this in remembrance. Presently he retired to the sofa, with a cigar, which he was continually dropping. The young man winked, genially, at Tommy. "He always gets sleepy about this time," he explained. "Sleepy?" interrupted his father, "not a bit of it. See here," and he filled the three glasses once more from the decanter. "To the master of Camslove Grange," he cried, lifting his glass. And they drank the health, standing. As Tommy walked home over the starlit fields, the scene came back to him. The old man, wheezy but gracious, his son flushed and handsome, the panelled walls and their trophies, and the sparkling glasses--a brave picture. True--he was still sore, but the episode of the farmer and his stick seemed infinitely remote, and Madge and the pale boy, ghosts of an era past: for had he not drunk of the good red wine, and kept company with gentlemen? X IN WHICH I RECEIVE TWO WARNINGS, AND NEGLECT ONE I suppose that, by this time, I had grown fond of Tommy, in a very real way, for, as the weeks passed by, I was quick to notice the change in the boy. There was a suggestion of swagger and an assumption of manliness in his manner, that troubled me. I noticed, too, that he avoided many of his old haunts. Often he would strike out across the downs and be away from early morning until starlight, and concerning his adventures he would be strangely reticent. But I do not profess to have fathomed the ways and moods of boys, and I merely shrugged my shoulders, perhaps a little sorrowfully. "I suppose he is growing up," thought I. And yet, for all that, I could not keep myself from wondering what influence was at work upon the boy's development. Even the doctor, who, of us all, saw the least of him, noticed the change, for he asked me suddenly, one late September day, "What's the matter with Tommy?" I looked at him with feigned surprise. "I--he's all right, isn't he?" The doctor shook his head. "He has altered very much this summer, and I am afraid the alteration has not been good." I cut at a nettle with my walking-stick. "He is growing, of course." The doctor raised his eyebrows. "Then you have noticed nothing else--nothing in his demeanour or conversation--or friends?" I abandoned my defences. "Yes, I have noticed it, and I cannot understand it--and I am sorry for it." "When does he return to school?" "To-morrow." The doctor appeared to be thinking. In a minute he looked into my face. "It is a good thing, on the whole," he said, adding slowly. "Don't drive the boy; let him forget." He drove away, and I looked after him in some wonderment, for his words seemed enigmatical. As I walked back to my garden I could hear Tommy whistling in his bedroom. There was a light in the room, and I could see him, half undressed, fondling one of his white rats. I remembered how he had insisted on their company and smiled. "Sir." From the shadow of the hedge a voice addressed me. "Sir." "Hullo," I said. Then, as I peered through the gloom, I saw a young woman standing before me, and, even in the dusk, I could read the eagerness in her eyes. Her face was familiar. "Surely I know you?" I asked. "I'm Liza Berrill." She spoke rapidly; yet, over her message she seemed hesitant. Then: "Oh, sir, don't let him be friends wi' that gentleman." I stared. "What do you mean?" She pointed to the window! Tommy was in his night-shirt, with the white rat running over his shoulders. "Well?" "Master Tommy, sir. There's a-many 'ave noticed it; don't let 'im get friends wi'----" "With whom?" Even in the dusk I could see the dull crimson creep into her cheeks. "Squire Morris's son," she muttered. We stood silent and face to face for a minute. "You understand, sir?" I remembered, and held out my hand. "Yes, Liza; I understand. Thank you." "Good night, sir." "Good night." She ran, with light footsteps, down the lane, and I stood alone beneath the poplars. Far up into the deepening sky they reached, like still black sentinels, and between them glimmered a few early stars. In his bedroom I could see Tommy, holding the white rat in one hand and kneeling a moment at his very transient prayers. I remembered a day whereon the colonel's riding-whip had been laid about Squire Morris's shoulders. My heart beat high at the thought, for the squire had insulted one whose sweet face had long lain still. I thought of the son. "Poor Liza," I murmured, and lifted the garden latch. And as I looked up at Tommy's darkened window: "God forbid," I said. * * * * * Next morning I called Tommy aside. "Do you know young Morris, of Borcombe?" He nodded. "Tommy, I--I wish you would endeavour to avoid him in the future. He is no fit companion for you." "Why?" "I--you would not understand yet, Tommy; you must take my word for it." Tommy looked a little sullen. "He's a jolly good sort," he said. "I know him well; he's a jolly good sort." "I am asking you, Tommy,"--I hesitated then. "For your father's sake," I added. Tommy looked straight into my eyes. "He was a friend of father's," he said, quietly. "Your father thrashed the squire with his own hand; I saw him do it." Tommy stood very still. "Why?" "I--I cannot explain it exactly; you must take my word." Tommy turned on his heels. "He's a jolly good sort," he muttered. "But you must not make him a friend." Tommy was silent, kicking at the carpet. "I shall if I like," he said, presently; and that was the last word. And it was only when I came back, rather sadly, from the station that I remembered the doctor's words and found a meaning for them. "Oh, what a fool I am!" I said. XI IN WHICH TOMMY IS IN PERIL Tommy spent his Christmas in town, with a distant relative, for I had been called abroad upon a matter of business, and his Easter holidays, since I was still away, were passed in Camslove vicarage. It was, therefore, a year before I saw Tommy again, and on an August morning I met him at the little station. I think we were both glad to see each other, and I found Tommy a little longer, perhaps a little leaner, but as brown and ruddy as ever. "I say, it is ripping to get back here again, an' I've got into the third eleven, an' that bat you sent me is an absolute clinker, an' how's the poet, an' did you have a good time in Italy, an', I say, you are shoving on weight, you know, an' there's old Berrill, an' I say, Berrill, that's a ripping young jackdaw you sent, an' he's an' awful thief--that is, he was, you know, but young Jones's dog eat him, or most of him, an' I punched young Jones's head for letting 'em be together, an' I say--how ripping the downs are looking, aren't they?" Tommy's spirits were infectious, and on the way home it would be hard to say which of us talked the most nonsense. Our journey through the village was slow, for Tommy's friends were numerous, and spread out over the whole social scale, from the hand-to-mouth daysman to the unctuous chemist and stationer. They included the vicar, leaning over his garden gate, in his shirt-sleeves, surrounded by implements of horticulture, and also, I regret to say, the pot-boy of the Flaming Lion--a graceless young scamp, with poacher written in every lineament of his being. I was not unprepared for his royal progress, since, during the summer, I had been frequently accosted by his friends, of varying rank and respectability, enquiring of "Master Thomas, sir." "That young 'awk, sir, as I sent him last week?" "Made many runs this year, sir, d'ye know?" "Master Thomas in pretty good 'ealth, sir. Bad livin' in they big schools, sir, ben't it?" And so on. Far down the road I saw a horseman, but Tommy could not, by any means, be hurried, and a meeting I did not wish became inevitable. As young Morris rode up he looked at me a little insolently--maybe it was only my fancy, for prejudice is a poor interpreter of expression--and nodded good day. I saw that Tommy looked a little uncomfortable and his flow of chatter ceased suddenly. Morris bent from the saddle and called him, and as I turned to the shop window I could hear them greeting one another. I did not hear their further conversation, and it was only brief, but the Tommy who walked home with me thenceforward was not the same who had met me so buoyantly at the station. Ah, these clouds, that are no greater than a man's hand and by reason of their very slenderness are so difficult to dispel! The early days of August sped away happily enough, and their adventures were merely those of field, and stream, and valley, engrossing enough of the time and fraught no doubt with lessons of experience, but too trivial, I suppose, for record. And yet I would rather write of them than of the day--the 8th of August--when the Borcombe eleven beat Camslove by many runs. And yet again, I am not sure, for a peril realised early, even through a fall, may be the presage of ultimate victory. I had been in town all day myself, and therefore had not been amongst the enthusiastic little crowd gathered in the field behind the church to watch this annual encounter, and a typical English country crowd it was, brimful of sport--see the eager movements of those gnarled hands and the light in the clear open-air eyes and wrinkled faces. Camslove, too, had more than justified the prediction of their adherents and had made a hundred and fifty runs, a very creditable score. "An' if they can stand Berrill's fast 'uns they bees good 'uns," chuckled they of Camslove, as they settled down to watch the Borcombe innings. Tommy was hanging about the little tin-roofed pavilion, divided between a natural patriotism and a desire to see his hero perform wonders, for Squire Morris's son had consented to represent Borcombe. Young Morris had never played for his village before, but his reputation as a cricketer was considerable, and the country-side awaited his display with some curiosity. Nor were they disappointed, for in every way he played admirable cricket, and even Berrill's fast ones merely appeared to offer him opportunities of making boundary hits. His fellow cricketers spent more or less brief periods in his company, and disconsolately sought the shade of the pavilion and the trees, but Morris flogged away so mercilessly that the Camslove score was easily surpassed, with three wickets yet to fall, and in the end Borcombe obtained a very solid victory. Young Morris was not held in high esteem in the country-side, and there were many who cordially disliked him--it was even whispered that one or two had sworn, deeply, a condign revenge for certain deeds of his--but he had played the innings of a master, and, as such, he received great applause on his return to the pavilion. Tommy was in the highest spirits, and, full of a reflected glory, strode manfully, on his hero's arm, down the village street. In the bar-room of the Flaming Lion many healths were drunk to the victors, to the defeated, to Berrill's fast 'uns, to the young squire's long success, to Tommy Wideawake. Tommy, flushed and exultant, stood among the little group, with glowing cheeks. Presently a grimy hand pulled his sleeve. It was the pot-boy. "Don't 'ee 'ave no more, sir--not now," he whispered. But Tommy looked at him hotly. "Can't a gentleman drink when he likes--damn you?" he asked. The pot-boy slunk away, and a loud laugh rang round the little audience. "Good on you, Tommy," cried Morris. "Gentlemen, the girls--bless 'em." He filled their glasses, at his expense, and coupled a nameless wish with his toast. Tommy, unconscious of its meaning, drank with the others. Then he walked unsteadily to the door. There was a strange buzzing in his head, and a dawning feeling of nausea in him, which he strove to fight down. And as he stood at the porch, flushed and bright-eyed, Madge Chantrey and the pale boy passed along the road. They were going to meet Miss Gerald, but Tommy staggered out and faced them. "Hullo, Madge, old girl," he said, but she drew back, staring at him, with wide eyes. The pale boy laughed. "Why, he's drunk--dead drunk," he said. Tommy lurched forward and struck him in the face, and in a moment the pale boy had sent him rolling heavily in the road. I picked him up, for I was passing on my way home from the station, and noticed the flush on his cheeks, and saw that they were streaked with blood and dust. They tell me that I, too, lost my temper, and even now I cannot remember all I said to Morris and his satellites and the little crowd in the Flaming Lion. I remember taking Tommy home, and helping my man to undress and wash him and put him to bed, and I shall never forget the evening that I spent downstairs in my study, staring dumbly over the misty valley to the far downs, and seeing only two grave grey eyes looking rebukingly into mine. Late in the evening the vicar joined me, and we sat silently together in the little study. My man lit the lamp, and brought us our coffee, and came again to fetch it away, untasted. Perhaps you smile as you read this. "You ridiculous old men," I can hear you say. "To magnify so trivial an incident into a veritable calamity." And, again, I can only plead that, in our quiet life, maybe, we attached undue importance to such a slight occurrence. Yet, nevertheless, to us it was very real, almost overwhelmingly real, and the tragedy of it lay, nearly two years back, in the panelled study of Camslove Grange. Presently the vicar looked at me, and his face, in the red lamplight, seemed almost haggard. "'I could never repay the man who taught my boy to love God,'" he repeated, "and he said those words to me--to me." I bowed my head. "And I--I accepted the responsibility, and it has come to this." I was silent, and, indeed, what was there to say? I suppose we both tried to think out the best course for the future, but for myself my brain refused to do aught but call up, and recall, and recall again, that last meeting in Camslove Grange: "I want the old place to have a good master. "I want my son to be a gentleman. "God bless you, old comrades." Back they came, those old ghosts of the past, until the gentle, well-bred voice seemed even now appealing to me, and the well-loved form apparent before my eyes. And I writhed in my chair. A little later the poet came in. He looked almost frightened, and spoke in a hushed voice. "Is--is he better?" he asked. "He is asleep," I answered, moodily. The poet sighed. "Ah! that's good, that's good." For a little while we talked, the aimless, useless talk of unnerved men, and at last the poet suggested we should go upstairs. As I held the candle over Tommy's bed we could see that the flush had faded from his cheeks, and as he lay there he might well have been a healthy cherub on some earthly holiday. I think the sight cheered us all, and in some measure restored our hope. The vicar turned to us, gravely. "There is one thing we can all do," he said; "we ought to have thought of it first, and it is surely the best." As we parted, the poet turned to me. "I will take him over the downs with me to-morrow; they always appeal to Tommy, and one is never saner, or nearer to God, or more ready for repentance, than out there upon the ranges." There was a sound of wheels down the lane, and in a minute the doctor drove by. "Hullo," he called out, cheerily, "I have just got myself a new bat." XII IN WHICH TOMMY MAKES A RESOLVE It is one of the privileges of youth that alimentary indulgence is but rarely penalized, and if either of us next morning was pale and disinclined for breakfast it was certainly not Tommy. On the contrary, he seemed cool, and fit, and hungry, and although he looked at me occasionally in a shy, questioning way, yet he chattered away much as usual, and made no reference to yesterday's adventures. Only when the poet called for him and at the window I laid a hand upon his shoulder to bid him a happy day, he turned to me, impulsively: "You are a ripper," he said. There is no sweeter or more genuine praise than a boy's. I watched them down the lane, and my eyes sought the downs, clear, and wide, and sunny. I thought of the tawdry inn, and its associations, and prayed that Tommy might learn a lesson from the contrast. Says Jasper the gipsy: "Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?" Hark back to your well-thumbed Lavengro and you will find, if you do not remember, his reasons. Nor are they weightier than these: "Night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon and stars, all sweet things; there's likewise a wind on the heath." Deep in the heart of every boy lies something of the gipsy, and even if, in after life, it grows sick and stifled by reason of much traffic among crowded streets, yet I doubt if it ever so far vanishes that to it the wind on the heath shall appeal in vain. Nor was the poet wrong in his prognosis, for to Tommy, at any rate, it was full of unspoken messages on this August morning. Wind on the heath--yes, it is always there, clean, and strong, and happy, lingering with soft wings over furze and bracken, full of whispered melodies from the harp of God. Are you in trouble? Go up and face this wind on the heath. Bare your head to it, open your lungs to it. Let it steal about your heart, with its messages of greatness, and futurity, and hope. Are you listless and discouraged? Go up and breathe this wind on the heath, and it will sting to life the ambition and resolve in you, and in it you will hear, if you listen aright, the saga of victory. "In sickness, Jasper?" "There's the sun and stars, brother." "In blindness, Jasper?" "There's the wind on the heath, brother: if I could only feel that, I would gladly live forever. Dosta, we'll now go to the tents and put on the gloves, and I'll try to make you feel what a sweet thing it is to be alive, brother." Tommy and the poet were bound for some ruins which lay across Becklington common and beyond the downs. Harvest ruled the world, and the fields in the valley and on the hillside were dotted with stooks and stacks. It was a day on which it was good to be alive, and, if a little subdued, yet they were both in good spirits. The poet's latest volume, ahead of the autumn rush of poetry and fiction, had been favourably criticised. It was stronger, happier, more real, said the critics, than any other from his pen. If not great, said they, it was at any rate graceful, and even, in some places, vigorous. Therefore was the poet happy. And Tommy--well, there was the sun and the wind, good red blood in his arteries, and no care in his heart--and though he could not have told you so, these, no doubt, were strong enough reasons for the buoyancy of his spirit. As they climbed the green side of the downs they met a shepherd singing, a happy, irresponsible fellow, with his coat over his head, and his sleek flock browsing round him. And as they passed him with a welcome, the poet remembered some lines which he repeated to Tommy: Wouldst a song o' shepherding, out upon the down, Splendid days o' summer-time, an' roaring days o' spring? I could sing it fine, If e'er a word were mine, But there's no words could tell it you--the song that I would sing. Wide horizons beckoning, far beyond the hill, Little lazy villages, sleeping in the vale, Greatness overhead The flock's contented tread An' trample o' the morning wind adown the open trail. Bitter storms o' winter-time ringing down the range, Angel nights above the hill, beautiful with rest, I would sing o' Life, O' Enterprise, and Strife, O' Love along the upland road, an' God beyond the crest. An' this should be my matin song--magic o' the down, Mystery, an' majesty, an' wistfulness, an' hope, I would sing the lay O' Destiny an' Day, As morning mounts the hill with me, an' summer storms the slope. But this would be my vesper song--best at last is Peace Whispered where the valleys lie, all deep in dying gold, Stealing through the gloam To speed the shepherd home With one last dreamy echo o' the music in the fold. Wouldst a song o' shepherding, out upon the down, Splendid days o' summer-time, an' roaring days o' spring? I could sing it fine, If e'er a word were mine, But there's no words could tell it you--the song that I would sing. "Jolly good," said Tommy, easiest of critics, and the poet smiled. "Ah, Tommy," he said, "I wish you were a publisher." Over the crest of the downs rose a thin wisp of blue smoke; and as they descended on the other side, some dark-eyed children looked out of a little brown tent. They reminded the poet of Jasper and his company of Pharaoh's children, and he repeated to Tommy the conversation I have touched upon. Tommy's eyes sparkled. "That's good," he said, approvingly. "Just what a fellow feels, you know." They walked on across the green springy turf, and for a time both were silent. There was something, too, in the day and its purity that was speaking to Tommy. Presently he spoke, hesitatingly. "I--I was drunk last night, wasn't I?" he asked anxiously. The poet affected not to have heard the question, but Tommy persisted. "Yes." Tommy sighed. "I say," he said, after a pause, "I--I'd have licked that fellow hollow if my head hadn't been so jolly queer." The poet looked at him, curiously. "I expect you would," he said. Tommy took a deep breath, and looked straight at the poet. "I'll never touch it again--never," he said slowly. They shook hands there on the hillside. Thus it was, and for this reason, that Tommy took upon himself a vow that he has to my best belief never broken. "Ah, but the motive?" you ask. Well, maybe the shrug of your shoulder is justified, but, after all, the result was brought about by nature, who seldom errs, and to the poet, who, in spite of all, was really a simple soul--the result was abundantly gratifying. As they walked home in the evening, Tommy turned to the poet. "I say, what was it that gipsy fellow said--at the end, you know?" "Dosta, we'll now go to the tent and put on the gloves, and I'll try to make you feel what a sweet thing it is to be alive, brother." Tommy looked grimly into the twilight. "It would be a jolly good thing to teach that fellow at the Grange," he said, "only I'm blowed if I'll take any gloves." XIII IN WHICH THE POET PLUCKS A FOXGLOVE Madge sat by the window, swinging disconsolate legs and struggling, with a nauseated heart, to master those Latin prepositions which govern the ablative case. A more degraded army she had never encountered, and though some misguided sage had committed them to rhyme, this device merely added a flavour of hypocrisy to their obvious malevolence. Moreover, the whole universe appeared to be so disgustingly cheerful that the contrast was well nigh unbearable. Beyond the open window the day was young and bright, and the honey bees sang briskly over the lawn. Even the gardener, most dismal of men, was humming: "A few more years shall roll," a sure sign of unwonted buoyancy of spirit. Miss Gerald was writing some letters for Lady Chantrey in another room, and Madge was alone in the study. Thus, every factor combined to make temptation almost irresistible. And, naturally enough, it came, and in the guise of a well-known, long-agreed-on whistle. From the laurels it rose, low and clear, and Madge's heart jumped quickly as she heard, for the whistle was Tommy's, and she could not remember how long ago it was since she had heard it. Then she remembered that it must not be answered--for was not Tommy in disgrace--at any rate, as far as she was concerned? And had they not quarrelled so deeply that repair was almost an impossibility? It was very presumptuous of him to think that she should answer it. She would remain where she was, in icy stillness, mastering the prepositions with an iron hand. A pleasing sense of virtue stole into her being, mixed with visions of a downcast, brown face somewhere in the shrubbery, and for five long minutes silence reigned. Then the whistle rang out again, a little louder, and surely it sounded almost penitent. A picture of a broken-hearted Tommy, whistling in dry-eyed sorrow, rose to her eyes. It was true that his offences had been great, but then, was not forgiveness divine? Madge felt sure that this was so. Was it not written in fair characters in her last copy-book? She closed her book and stood by the glass doors. It is but rarely that we rise to the divine. Yet here was an opportunity, and down the steps she ran, light-footed, over the thin strip of lawn and into the deep laurels. And it was not Tommy after all, but only the pale boy who, with commendable perspicacity, had borrowed Tommy's whistle. For a moment Madge flushed angrily, for she did not greatly like the pale boy, and this was a deception. But the morning was sweet, and the pale boy was surely better than a preposition. "I say: let's go through the wood," he said. "I've hidden some sandwiches in a tree up there and we'll have a picnic, and you can be back in time for lunch." "All right," said Madge, "come along." And in the wood they met Tommy, with the light of resolve in his eye and battle written in his face. Madge was not quite sure whether she was glad or sorry to meet him, nor could she tell, as they looked straight into one another's eyes, the nature of Tommy's feelings on the subject. He looked a little grave, and spoke as one who had rehearsed against a probable encounter. "I want to apologise to you for our meeting the other day," he said stiffly. Madge stared, and Tommy turned to the pale boy. "And to you," he said. The pale boy looked a little puzzled, but grinned. "That's all right," he said. "I could see--" "Excuse me, I haven't quite finished"--and the pale boy stopped, with his mouth open. "I think you had better go home, Madge." "Why--Tommy?" Tommy looked down. "You had better--really," he repeated. The pale boy interposed. "She is out with me," he said. "So I see--she had better go home." "Why--who says so?" "If she doesn't she will see you get a licking. P'raps--p'raps she wouldn't like that." Tommy still looked at the path. "I--I'm not going to fight anyone to-day." "You are--you're jolly well going to fight me, now." The pale boy smiled, a little uncertainly. "You--I shouldn't have thought you'd want a second dose," he said. "Rather," said Tommy, cheerfully. Madge looked from one to the other. "Don't fight," she said. "Please--please don't fight--why should you?" "You'd much better run home," said Tommy again. "I shan't--I shall stay here." Tommy sighed. "All right," he said, taking off his coat. "Then, of course, you must, you know." "I tell you I'm not going to fight," repeated the pale boy. "Rot," said Tommy. Five minutes later Tommy contentedly resumed his coat, his face flushed with victory. The pale boy was leaning against a tree, with a handkerchief to his nose and one eye awry, whimpering vindictive epithets at his opponent--but Madge was nowhere to be seen. Tommy looked up and down the leafy vistas a little disappointedly. Then, "Never mind," he said, philosophically. "By Jove, it's a jolly sweet thing is life--ripping, simply ripping. Good bye, old chap. Sniff upwards and it'll soon stop. So long." * * * * * In a brake where the wood falls back a little from the inroad of the common the poet paused, for the gleam of a straw hat against a dark background caught his eye. "Why surely--no--yes, it is--how singular--so it is," he murmured, wiping his glasses. He left the path and struck out over the springy turf into the shade of the wood, keeping his eyes nevertheless upon the ground, and walking guilelessly, as one who contemplates. And by chance his meditations were broken, and before him, among some tall foxgloves, stood Mollie Gerald. The poet looked surprised. "How--how quietly you must walk, Miss Gerald," he said. She laughed. "How deeply you must think," she said. "It--it is good to wake from thought to--to this, you know," he answered, with a bow. Miss Gerald looked comprehensively into the wood. "It is pretty, isn't it?" she said. "I was not referring to the wood," said the poet, hardily. Miss Gerald bent over a foxglove rising gracefully over the bracken: "Aren't they lovely?" she asked, showing the poet a handful of the purple flowers. "You came out to gather flowers?" "Why, no. I came to look for my pupil." "Surely not again a truant?" "I am afraid so." "It is hard to believe." "And I stopped in my search to gather some of these. After all, it isn't much good looking for a child in a wood, is it?" "Quite useless, I should think." "If they want to be found they'll come home, and if they don't, they know the woods far better than we, and they'll hide." "They always come back at meal-times--at least, Tommy does." "I think meal-times are among the happiest hours of an average childhood." "Before the higher faculties have gained their powers of appreciation--it depends on the child." "Madge is not an imaginative child." "Nor Tommy, I think, and yet I don't know. It is hard to appraise the impressions that children receive and cannot record." "And the experiment--how does it progress?" "Alas, it is an experiment no longer; it is a very real responsibility, and I am inadequate. Individually, I fancy we are all inadequate, and, collectively, we do not seem quite to have found the way." Miss Gerald nodded emphatically. "Good," she said. "Eh?" "To feel inadequate is the beginning of wisdom; is it not so? There, I have gathered my bunch." "May I beg one foxglove for my coat?" She laughed. "There are plenty all round you. Why, you are standing in the middle of a plant at this moment." The poet stooped a little disconsolately, and plucked a stalk, and when he looked up Miss Gerald was already threading her way through the slender trunks. "Good-bye," she cried, gaily, over her shoulder, and the poet raised his hat. As he sauntered back to the path the doctor rode by on his pony. "Hullo," he said; "been picking flowers?" The poet looked up. "A pretty flower, the foxglove," he murmured. "Digitalis purpurea--a drug, too, is it not?" The doctor nodded. "It has an action on the heart," he said. "Steadies and slows it, you know." But the poet shook his head. "I fancy you are mistaken," he observed. XIV IN WHICH TOMMY CONVERSES WITH THE PALE BOY A sky of stolid grey had communicated a certain spirit of melancholy to the country-side--a spirit not wholly out of keeping with Tommy's mood. The holidays were nearly over. The doctor was busy, the poet had a cold, Madge had been sent away to school, and Tommy, for the nonce, felt a little at a loss to know how to occupy these last mournful days of freedom. As he tramped, a trifle moodily, down the lane, a point of light against a dark corner of the hedge caught his eye, and further examination revealed the pale boy, smoking a cigarette. Tommy had not yet aspired to tobacco, and for a moment felt a little resentful. But the memory of last week's battle restored his equanimity, and, indeed, brought with it a little complacent contempt for the pale boy and his ways. "Hullo," said Tommy, pulling up in front of his reposing foe, and not sorry to have some one to talk to. The pale boy looked at him coldly. "Well," he observed, cheerlessly. Tommy sat down on the grass. "I say, let's forget about all that," he said. The pale boy puffed away in silence. "Let's forget; you--you'd probably have whopped me, you know, if you'd done some boxing at our place. You've a much longer reach than me, an'--an' you got me an awful nasty hit in the chest, you know." The pale boy looked at him gloomily. "I don't profess to know much about fighting," he said, with some dignity. "I think it's jolly low." For a few minutes they sat in silence, then, "Where do you go to school?" asked Tommy. "I don't go anywhere; I've got a tutor." "Oh!" "You see, I'm not at all strong." "Bad luck. You--ought you to smoke, if you're--if your constitution's rocky, you know?" The pale boy knocked the ashes off his cigarette. "I find it very soothing," he said. "Besides, it's all right, if you smoke good stuff. I wouldn't advise fellows who didn't know their way about a bit to take it up." The pale boy spoke with an air of superiority that awed Tommy a little. "How--how did you come to know all about it?" he asked. "Oh--just knocking about town, you know," replied the other, carelessly. Tommy sighed. "I hardly know anything about London," he said. The pale boy looked at him, pityingly. "I've lived there all my life," he said, "Dormanter Gardens, in Bayswater--one of the best neighbourhoods, you know." Tommy racked his memory. "I was in London, at Christmas, with a sort of aunt-in-law," he said. "She lives in Eaton Square, I think it is--somewhere near Maskelyne & Cook's." "I haven't heard of it," said the pale boy. "But London's so jolly big that it's impossible to know all of it, and I've spent most of my time in the West End." Tommy was silent, but the pale boy seemed at home with his subject. "I suppose you don't know the Cherry House," he continued. "It's an awful good place to feed in--near the Savoy, you know. Reggie, he's my cousin, takes me there sometimes. He always goes. He says there are such damned fine girls there. I don't care a bit about 'em, though." The pale boy smoked contemplatively. "I think it's awful rot, thinking such a beastly lot about girls, and all that sort of thing, you know, don't you?" said Tommy. The pale boy nodded. "Rather," he said. "I agree with dad. He says there's only one thing worth bothering about down here." "What's that?" "Money," snapped the pale boy, looking at Tommy, between narrowed eyelids. "I'm going to be a financier when I'm old enough to help dad." Tommy stretched himself lazily. "I'd rather be strong," he said. The pale boy looked at him, curiously. "What a rum chap you are. What's that got to do with it?" Tommy lay back on the grass, and stared up at the passing clouds. "I'm not a bit keen on making money, somehow," he said. "I'd just like to knock around, and have a dog, and--a jolly good time, you know." "What--always?" Tommy sat up. "Yes--why not?" The pale boy shrugged his shoulders, and laughed. "Oh, I don't know," he said. "But it seems funny, and don't you think you'd find it rather slow?" Tommy stared at him, with open eyes. "Rather not," he said. "Why, think how ripping it would be to go just where you liked, and come back when you liked, an' not to have any beastly meal-times to worry about, an' no terms, an' a horse or two to ride, an' wear the oldest clothes you had; by Jove, it would be like--something like Heaven, I should think." The pale boy laughed as he rose to his feet. "It's beginning to rain," he said. "Never mind," said Tommy, "I like the rain. It doesn't hurt, either, and I like talking to you; you make me think of things." The pale boy turned up his collar, and shivered a little. "Let's find a shelter, somewhere," he said, looking round anxiously. "We'd better walk home over the common," said Tommy. "Besides, it's ripping walking in the rain, don't you think, an' it makes you feel so good, an' fit, when you're having grub afterwards, in front of the fire." But the pale boy shook his head. "I hate it," he said, "and I'm going up to the farm there, till it stops." Tommy cast an accustomed eye round the horizon. "It won't stop for a jolly long while," he said. "However, do as you like. We don't seem to agree about things much, do we? So long." "Good-bye. It's all the way a fellow's brought up, you know." And as Tommy shouldered sturdily through the rain, the pale boy lit another cigarette and turned back towards the farm door. XV IN WHICH SOME PEOPLE MEET IN A WHEAT-FIELD Never was such a harvest--such crops--such long splendid days--such great yellow moons. Even now the folk tell of it when harvest-time comes round. "Ah," say they, and shake their heads, "that were a harvest an' no mistake, an' long, an' long will it be afore us sees another such a one." Through the great white fields of wheat the binders sang from dew-dry to dew-fall, and over the hills rang the call of the reapers. All hands were called to the gathering, the gipsies from the hedge and the shepherd from his early fold, and the stooks were built over the stubble and drawn away into stacks, and still the skies shone cloudless and the great moons rose over the dusk. Never was such a harvest. And little we at home saw of Tommy in these days, save when, late at night, he would wander back from one and another field, lean and sunburnt and glad of sleep. One day the poet tracked him to the harvesting on the down-side fields, and found him in his shirt-sleeves, stooking with the best. For a little while the poet, under considerable pressure from Tommy, assisted also, but the unaccustomed toil soon became distasteful, and he retired to the shade of a stook for purposes of rest and meditation. And here, as he sat, he was joined by the same genial shepherd whom they had met on the day they trod the downs to the Roman ruins. "Deserted the flocks, then?" asked the poet. The shepherd grinned. "'Ess, sir. Folded 'em early, do 'ee see, sir, an' come down to make some money at the harvest, sir." He paused to fill his mouth with bread, taking at the same time a long pull of cold tea. "Hungry work, sir, it be, this harvest work." "It must undoubtedly stimulate the appetite, as you say." "'Ess, sir, that it do. But it's good work fer the likes o' I, sir, it be, means more money, doan't 'ee see, sir; not as I bees in want o' money, sir, but it's always welcome, sir. No, sir, I needn't do no work fer a year an' more, sir, an' live like a gen'lman arl the time, too, sir." "You have saved, then?" "'Ess, that I have, an' there's a many as knows it, sir, an' asked I to marry 'em, sir, too, they 'as, but not I, sir. I sticks to what I makes, sir. An' look 'ee 'ere, sir, money's easy spent along o' they gals, sir, ben't it, onst they gets their 'ands on it?" The poet looked at him reflectively. "They ask you then, do they?" "'Ess, sir, fower or five on 'em, sir. But I wants none on 'em, sir, an' I tells 'em straight, sir." The poet sighed. "It must save a lot of trouble to--when the suggestion comes from the fairer side." The shepherd wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "Fower or five on 'em," he observed, meditatively. "Dear, dear, what a--what a conqueror of hearts you must be!" The shepherd looked at him a little dubiously. "Fower or five on 'em," he repeated. "An' one on 'em earnin' eighteen shillin' a week an' forty pound laid by. An' I walked out wi' 'er a bit, I did, sir, but I warn't 'avin' none on 'er when she asked I to marry 'er, an' I told 'er, an' my parents, they was main angry, too, wi' me, they was, sir. "But there y'are, sir. I didn't want none o' 'er forty pounds, sir, an' you bees got to stick to 'em wen you marries 'em, ben't 'ee, sir?" The shepherd shook his head. "No, sir, I don't believe in marryin' no one as you doesn't kind o' like, do 'ee see, sir." The poet nodded. "An excellent sentiment," he said. "Money ben't everything sir, bee 't, as I told 'em, sir, all on 'em. Money ben't everythin'." "But isn't it--isn't it a little embarrassing to be sought in matrimony by four or five ladies?" The shepherd paused, between two bites, and looked at the poet, in some bewilderment. "If 'ee means worrittin', sir--it bees a deal more worrittin' to ask 'em, yourself, sir--fower or five on 'em." He rose and lurched off to join his comrades, and the poet looked after him, with something of envy in his eyes. "O you fortunate man," he murmured, as he lay back, watching the busy scene, with half-closed eyes. Presently he half started to his feet, for at the far end of the field he could see Tommy talking to two newcomers, a tall, slender figure, with a carriage and poise possessed by one alone, and a little girl in a smock frock. He rose and wandered slowly down the field. "Four or five," he murmured, "and they asked him--O the lucky, lucky man--they asked him. Dear me, dear me." "A lovely evening, Miss Gerald." Mollie looked up, with a smile, from the sheaf she was binding. "Isn't it jolly--it must be a glad life these open-air folk lead, don't you think?" "The best of lives--but they don't know it." Mollie rose, and tossed back a wisp or two of hair from her forehead. "I am sure I should love it, if it were my lot--the white stems on my arms and the warm sun on my face, and the songs in the wagon, at dusk. Listen to that man singing there--I'm sure he is just glad of life." "A strange man," said the poet, following her gaze. "A most curious, fortunate person." "You know him?" "A little--he is quite a Napoleon of hearts." Mollie laughed. "He doesn't look even a little bit romantic." "Oh, he isn't. I fancy the romance, if there is any, must be usually on the other side. He has had four or five offers of marriage." "What a perfectly horrid idea." The poet stroked his chin. "Yet think of the confusion and questioning of heart, and of the hours of agony that it would save a diffident man." "He doesn't look diffident." "He may not be. I merely make a supposition." "I think it's an appalling idea." "Oh, I know, I know, and yet I can imagine it a bridge to paradise." "I don't understand." "Then, suppose a man so stormed by love that by it all life has been renewed and made beautiful for him; and suppose this man so utterly and in every way unsuited to its realisation, that though all there is in him urges him to speak of it, yet he dare not lest he should lose even the cold solace of friendship. Do you not see how it might----?" Mollie's grey eyes looked him straight in the face. "No," she said. "It would be better for him never to speak, than to lose his ideal, as he assuredly would." "You--you would bid him never speak?" Mollie laughed. "It depends on so many things--on how and why he was unsuitable, and by whose standard he gauged his shortcoming." "His own." "He might be wrong." "Who could know better?" "The girl he asked." "You would bid him ask?" She was silent; then, "If--if he were quite sure the girl were worthy," she said, in a low voice. The poet held out his hands. "Mollie--my dear, my dear," he said. * * * * * "And she's quite young, too," observed Tommy, as they walked home in the starlight. The poet waved his hand. "Love laughs at age--takes no account of it," he said. "Hurrah," cried Tommy. XVI IN WHICH TOMMY CROSSES THE PLOUGHING The early days of January were shadowed by Lady Chantrey's illness. I fancy that over all hung the presentiment that it would bear her away from our midst, and there was no home in Camslove or Becklington, nor a heart in any of the far-scattered farms around them, but would be the sadder for the loss. And on a January afternoon she kissed Madge for the last time. To Madge it seemed that heaven and earth alike had become black and desolate, for ever, as she sobbed upon the bed-clothes, and besought her mother to come back. The household was too overwhelmed, and itself too sorrow-stricken to take much notice at first of the child, and for an hour or more she lay with her arms about her mother's neck. Then, at last, she slipped from the bed and stole out into the dusk. A thin rain was falling over the country-side, but she hardly noticed it as she crossed the barren fields and stumbled through the naked hedges. At the ploughing she stopped. Something in the long, relentless furrows seemed to speak to her of the finality of it all, and it was only when she flung herself down upon the upturned earth that, as to all in sorrow, the great mother put forth her words of cheer to her, as who should say: "See, now, the plough is set, the furrow drawn, and the old life hidden away; and who can make it any more the same? But Spring, little girl, is surely coming, and even, after long months, harvest." Down the path, across the fields, came Tommy, dangling a contented catapult, and ruminating on the day's successes. As he passed the ploughing he stopped, and gave a low whistle of surprise--then guessed quickly enough what had happened. Madge lay stretched out, face downwards, upon the black loam, and for a moment Tommy stood perplexed. Then he called, in a low voice, almost as he would have spoken in a church: "Madge, Madge." But she did not move. He knelt beside her, and some strange instinct bade him doff his cap. Then he touched her shoulder and her black hair, with shy fingers. "Madge," he called, again. The child jumped to her feet, and tossing back her hair, looked at him with half-frightened eyes. He noticed that her cheeks were stained with the soft earth, and he saw tears upon them. Tommy had never willingly kissed anyone in his life--he had not known a mother--but now, without thought or hesitation--almost without consciousness, for he was still very much a child--he laid his arms about her neck and kissed her cheek--once, twice. But what he said to her only the great night, and the old plough, know. XVII IN WHICH TOMMY TAKES THE UPLAND ROAD If I have not, so far, touched upon Tommy's religious life it is chiefly for the reason that, to me, at this time, it was practically as a sealed book. Nor had I ever talked with him on these matters. And this for two reasons--one of them being, no doubt, the natural hesitation of the average Englishman to lay his hands upon the veil of his neighbour's sanctuary, and one, a dawning doubt in my mind as to the capacity of my own creed to meet the requirements of Tommy's nature. For, to me, at this time, the idea of God was of One in some distant Olympus watching His long-formulated laws work out their appointed end--a Being infinitely beneficent, and revealed in all nature and beauty, but, spiritually, entirely remote. And my religion had been that of a reverent habit and a peaceable moderation, and to live contented with my fellows. But here was a boy put into my hands, with a future to be brought about, and already at the outset I had seen a glimpse of the dangers besetting his path, and the glimpse had, as I have already confessed, frightened me not a little. Nor had my musings so far comforted me, but rather shown me the lamentable weakness of my position. True, I could lay down rules, and advise and warn, but the whole of Tommy's every word and action showed me the powerlessness of such procedure. And I dared not let things drift. The matter I felt sure should be approached on religious grounds, and it was this conviction that revealed to me my absolute impotence. So far as I remembered, no great temptations had assailed me, no violent passions had held me in thrall. My life had been a smooth one, and of moral struggle and defeat I seemed to know nothing. But that such would be Tommy's lot I felt doubtful, and the doubt (it was almost a certainty) filled me with many apprehensions. So full was I of my musings that I had not noticed how in my walk I had reached the doctor's garden. The click of a cricket bat struck into my thoughts and brought me into the warm afternoon again, with all its sweetness of scent and sound. I could hear Tommy laughing, and as I drew back the bushes, I caught a glimpse of the doctor coaching him in the right manipulation of the bat. "I say, I never knew you played cricket, you know," said Tommy. "I thought you were an awful ass at games, and all that sort of thing." The doctor laughed. "I'm jolly rusty at 'em, anyway," he said. "But I used to play a bit in the old days." Tommy continued to bat, and I lounged, unnoticed, upon the rails, watching the practice. Presently the doctor took a turn, and I, too, was surprised at his evident mastery of the art, for I had long since disregarded him as a sportsman. Tommy's lobs were easy enough, and once the doctor drove a hot return straight at his legs. Tommy jumped out of the way, but the doctor called to him sharply: "Field up," he said, and Tommy coloured. Another return came straight and hard, but Tommy stooped and held it, and the doctor dropped his bat. "Good," I heard him say. "Stand up to 'em like a man--hurts a bit at the time--but it saves heaps of trouble in the end, and--and the other fellow doesn't score." They were looking straight into each other's eyes, as man to man, and after a pause the doctor spoke again, in a low voice. I could not hear what he said, but Tommy's face was grave as he listened. I sauntered on down the lane, and a few minutes later felt a hand on my arm. "Well, and what did you think of it?" "Of what?" "The boy's batting. I saw you watching." "I am not an expert, but he'll do, won't he?" "Yes--he'll do." "I didn't know that you had kept up your cricket." "I haven't. But I mean to revive it if I can. We--we must beat Borcombe next time, you know." We walked on in silence for a little, then. "Tommy's main desire appears to be a cricketer just now," observed the doctor. "As it was to be a poacher, yesterday." "Or a steam-roller driver, in the years gone by." "And what, I wonder, to-morrow?" The doctor was looking thoughtfully over the wide fields, red with sunset. "To-morrow? Ah, who knows?" He pointed to a pile of cumulus clouds, marching magnificently in the southern sky, bright as Heaven, and changeable as circumstance. "A boy's dreams," he said. "A little while here and a little while there, always changing but always tinged with a certain fleeting magnificence." "And never realised?" "Oh, I don't know. I don't know. We most of us march and march to our cloud mountain-tops, and, maybe, some of us at the day's end find a little low-browed hill somewhere where our everlasting Alps had seemed to stand." "Surely you are a pessimist." "Not at all. If we had not marched for the clouds, maybe we should never have achieved the little hill." "You would have Tommy march, then, for the clouds?" The doctor laughed. "He is an average boy. He will do that anyway. But I would have the true light on the clouds, to which he lifts his eyes." "Ah--if his face were set upon them now," I said half to myself. On the road to the downs was a small figure. "See," said my companion, "He is on the upland road. Let us take it as an omen." And we turned homeward. Late into the night we talked, and I unfolded my fears for Tommy with a fulness that was foreign to me. And our talk drifted, as such conversation will, into many and intimate matters, such as men rarely discuss between each other. And in the end, as I rose to depart, the doctor held my hand. "See, old friend," he said, "we are nearer to-night than ever for all our seeming fundamental differences, and you will not mind what I have to say. "To you the idea of God is so great, so infinitely high, that the notion of personal friendship with such an One would seem to be an almost criminal impertinence, and the idea of His interference in our trivial hum-drum lives a gross profanity. "To me, a plain man, and not greatly read, this personal God, this Friend Christ, is more than all else has to offer me. "It is life's motive, and weapon, and solace, and joy. It is its light and colour and its very _raison d'etre_. And I believe that for the great majority of men this idea of the Divine, and this only, is powerful enough to assure them real victory and moral strength. "I grant you all the beauty, and majesty, and truth, of your ideal, but I would no more dare to lay it before an average healthy, passionate man alone than I would to send an army into battle--with a position to take--unarmed and leaderless." The doctor paused. Then: "Forgive me," he said, "I don't often talk like this, but, believe me, it is the knowledge of his God, as a strong, sympathetic, personal friend, that Tommy needs--that most of us need--to ensure life's truest success." We shook hands again and parted. "I am glad you have spoken," said I, "and thank you for your words." * * * * * "A tramp--merely a tramp," said the stranger, puffing contentedly at his pipe, on the winding road that led over the dim downs. Tommy looked at him doubtfully. He was very tall and broad, and clean, and his Norfolk suit was well made and of stout tweed. "You don't look much like one," he said. The stranger laughed. "For the matter of that no more do you," he observed. "I'm not one," said Tommy. The stranger smoked in silence for a little, and Tommy sat down beside him on the grass. "I'm not one," he repeated. "Shakespeare says we are all players in a great drama, of which the world is the stage, you know. I don't quite know if that's altogether true, but I'm pretty sure that we're all of us tramps, going it with more or less zest, it is true, and in different costumes--but tramps at the last, every one of us." Tommy looked at him with puzzled eyes. "What a rum way of talking you have--something like the poet, only different somehow." "The poet?" "Down there at Camslove." "Ah, I remember. I read some of his things; pretty little rhymes, too, if I remember rightly." "They're jolly good," said Tommy, warmly. "A friend of yours, eh?" Tommy nodded. "He wrote one just here, where we're sitting." "Did he, by Jove--which was it?" Tommy pondered. "I forget most of it, but it was jolly good. He told it me one day on the downs, just as we met a shepherd singing, and it was about life and enterprise, and all that sort of thing, and love on the upland road and--and God beyond the crest." "Sounds good, and partly true." "How do you mean; why isn't it altogether true?" The stranger smoked a minute or two in silence, then: "Where is the crest?" he asked. Tommy pointed up into the twilight. "It's a long way to the crest," he said. "Ah--and the fellows who never get there?" "I don't understand." "If God be only beyond the crest, how shall they fare?" Tommy was silent, looking away down the dusky valley. He saw a light or two glimmering among the trees. "It's time I went back," he muttered, but sat where he was. "You see what I mean?" continued the stranger. "There is only one crest worth striving for, and that is always beyond our reach, and God is beyond it and above it, all right. But there's many a poor fellow who would have his back to it now if he were not sure that God was also on the upland road, among the tramps." Tommy was silent, plucking uncomfortably at the grass. "You haven't thought much about these things?" "No." "Ah, but you must, though. You see, until a fellow knows the road he is on, he cannot achieve, nor even begin to surmount." "How did you know the road you're on, then?" "I had a friend." "And he knew?" "Yes, been over it all before, knew every turn, and all the steep places. He has come with me. He is with me now." Tommy peered up the darkening road. "I can't see him," he said. "Ah, but you will. I'm sure you will." "What is his name?" The stranger rose to his feet, and held out his hand. "Christ," he said, as Tommy looked into his eyes. Then, "Good-bye, old chap--meet again somewhere, perhaps--and, I say, about the road, shall it be the upland road for both of us?" Tommy was silent, then, as they shook hands. "Yes," he said. * * * * * "Hullo, Tommy," said I, on my return that night, from the doctor's study, "Enjoyed the evening?" "Had some awful good practice with the doctor's bat." "We saw you on the downs afterwards." Tommy looked at me, with bright eyes, as if about to tell me something, but he changed his mind. "Yes," he said, "I met a stranger there." XVIII AND LAST And so these brief sketches plucked here and there from the boyhood of Tommy Wideawake, and patched unskilfully together, must be gathered up and docketed as closed, even as the boyhood from which they have been drawn. Yet the story of Tommy Wideawake is still being written, where all may read who have eyes for the strength, and godliness of a country squire's life, and a hand for his stalwart grip. On the occasion of Tommy's twenty-first birthday, there were, of course, great rejoicings in Camslove, and a general gathering of the country-side to the old Grange. Tommy, in the course of a successful, if not eloquent speech, made some extravagant remarks as to the debt he owed to his four friends, and guardians--the poet, the vicar, the doctor, and myself. Modesty forbids their repetition, and doubtless youthful enthusiasm accounted for their absurdity. One other he mentioned in his speech--a stranger whom, long ago, he had met on the upland road. Thus Tommy in his maiden speech. Three years later he brought a bride to Camslove, and her name was Madge, and the rest of us live on in much the old way, excepting of course the poet, who, as a married man, affects a fine pity for us less fortunate ones. And yet we are not altogether the same men, I fancy, as in those days. The vicar's house has become a perfect playground for the poet's children, and my own is occasionally sadly mauled by certain sacrilegious nephews, much to the annoyance of my man. The doctor is president, and indeed the shining light of the village cricket team, and we, at Camslove, flatter ourselves that we can put up a very decent game. So I lay aside my pen awhile and read what I have written, and as I read I am glad that I am led from garden to valley, and stream, and mill, and over the common, and up the windy down. For if a boy's will be indeed the wind's will, let it be that of the wind on the heath, which the gipsies breathe. And if the thoughts of a boy be long, long thoughts, let them be born of earth, and air, and sun. And his sins, since sin and sunlight are incompatible, must needs be easy of correction. And his faith, when of a sudden he shall find that there is God in all these things, shall be so deep that not all the criticism of all the schools shall be able to root it out of his heart. And the moral, if you must needs hammer one out, would be this, that soundness is more to be desired than scholarship, and that the heart of boyhood is, by nature, nearer to God than that of later life. But let him who would draw the veil aside, do so with tender hands. TO THE EDITOR OF "THE OUTLOOK" FOR PERMISSION TO REPRINT SUNDRY VERSES THE AUTHORS THANKS ARE DUE TWO BOOKS VERY LIKE TOMMY WIDEAWAKE ARE KENNETH GRAHAME'S THE GOLDEN AGE AND DREAM DAYS MR. RICHARD LEGALLIENNE: "I can think of no truer praise of Mr. Kenneth Grahame's 'Golden Age' than that it is worthy of being called 'A Child's Garden--of Prose.'" MR. ISRAEL ZANGWILL: "No more enjoyable interpretation of the child's mind has been accorded us since Stevenson's 'Child's Garden of Verses.'" MR. SWINBURNE: "The art of writing adequately and acceptably about children is among the rarest and most precious of arts.... 'The Golden Age' is one of the few books which are well-nigh too praiseworthy for praise.... The fit reader--and the 'fit' readers should be far from 'few'--finds himself a child again while reading it. Immortality should be the reward.... Praise would be as superfluous as analysis would be impertinent." THE NEW YORK TIMES SATURDAY REVIEW: "In this province, the reconstruction of child life, Kenneth Grahame is masterly. In fact we know of no one his equal." The International STUDIO An Illustrated Magazine of Arts and Crafts Subscription, 35 cents per month, $3.50 per year [Illustration] Three Months' Trial Subscription, $1.00 It is the aim of "The International Studio" to treat of every Art and Craft--Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, Ceramics, Metal, Glass, Furniture, Decoration, Design, Bookbinding, Needlework, Gardening, etc. Color supplements and every species of black-and-white reproduction appear in each number. In fact this magazine authoritatively presents to the reader the progress of the Arts and Crafts. * * * * * JOHN LANE, _The Bodley Head_ 67 Fifth Avenue, New York * * * * * 
26986	----	THE GHOST GIRL BY THE SAME AUTHOR Sea Plunder $1.30 net The Gold Trail $1.30 net The Pearl Fishers $1.30 net The Presentation $1.30 net The New Optimism $1.00 net Poppyland $2.00 net The Poems of François Villon Translated by H. DE VERE STACPOOLE Boards $3.00 net Half Morocco $7.50 net THE GHOST GIRL BY H. DE VERE STACPOOLE AUTHOR OF "THE MAN WHO LOST HIMSELF," "SEA PLUNDER," "THE PEARL FISHERS," "THE GOLD TRAIL," ETC. NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD TORONTO: S. B GUNDY--MCMXVIII Copyright, 1918 By JOHN LANE COMPANY PRESS OF VAIL-BALLOU COMPANY BINGHAMTON, N. Y. U. S. A. THE GHOST GIRL PART I CHAPTER I It was a warm, grey, moist evening, typical Irish weather, and Miss Berknowles was curled up in a window-seat of the library reading a book. Kilgobbin Park lay outside with the rooks cawing in the trees, miles of park land across which the dusk was coming, blotting out all things from Arranakilty to the Slieve Bloom Mountains. The turf fire burning on the great hearth threw out a rich steady glow that touched the black oak panelling of the room, the book backs, and the long-nosed face of Sir Nicholas Berknowles "attributed to Lely" and looking down at his last descendant from a dusty canvas on the opposite wall. The girl made a prettier picture. Red hair when it is of the right colour is lovely, and Phylice Berknowles' hair was of the right red, worn in a tail--she was only fifteen--so long that she could bite the end with ease and comfort when she was in a meditative mood, a habit of perdition that no schoolmistress could break her of. She was biting her tail now as she read, up to her eyes in the marvellous story of the Gold Bug, and now, unable to read any more by the light from the window, she came to the fire, curled herself on the hearthrug and continued the adventures of the treasure-seekers by the light of the burning turf. What a pretty face it was, seen by the full warm glow of the turf, and what a perfectly shaped head! It was not the face and head of a Berknowles as you could easily have perceived had you compared it with the portraits in the picture gallery, but of a Mascarene. Phyl's mother had been a Mascarene, a member of the old, adventurous family that settled in Virginia when Virginia was a wilderness and spread its branches through the Carolinas when the Planter was king of the South. Red hair had run among the Mascarenes, red hair and a wild spirit that brooked no contradiction and knew no fear. Phyl had inherited something of this restless and daring spirit. She had run away from the Rottingdean Academy for the Daughters of the Nobility and Gentry where she had been sent at the age of twelve; making her way back to Ireland like a homing pigeon, she had turned up one morning at breakfast time, quite unshaken by her experiences of travel and with the announcement that she did not like school. Had her mother been alive the traveller would have been promptly returned, but Phyl's father, good, easy man, was too much taken up with agrarian disputes, hunting, and the affairs of country life to bother much about the small affair of his daughter's future and education. He accepted her rejection of his plans, wrote a letter of apology to the Rottingdean Academy, and hired a governess for her. She wore out three in eighteen months, declared herself dissatisfied with governesses and competent to finish the process of educating and polishing herself. This she did with the aid of all the books in the library, old Dunn, the rat-catcher of Arranakilty, a man profoundly versed in the habits of rodents and birds, Larry the groom, and sundry others of low estate but high intelligence in matters of sport and woodcraft. Now it might be imagined from the foregoing that hardihood, self-assertion, and other unpleasant characteristics would be indicated in the manner and personality of this lover of freedom and rebel against restraint. Not at all. She was a most lovable and clinging person, when she could get hold of anything worth clinging to, with a mellifluous Irish voice at once soothing and distracting, a voice with pockets in it but not a trace of a brogue or only the very faintest suspicion. Yet when she spoke she had the Irish turn of words and she used the word "sure" in a manner strange to the English. She had reached the point in the "Gold Bug" where Jupp is threatening to beat Legrand, when, laying the book down beside her on the hearthrug, she sat with her hands clasping her knees and her eyes fixed on the fire. The tale had suddenly lost interest. She was thinking of her dead father, the big, hearty man who had gone to America only eight weeks ago and who would never return. He had gone on a visit to some of his wife's people, fallen ill, and died. Phyl could not understand it at all. She had cried her heart out amongst the ruins of her little world, but she could not understand why it had been ruined, or what her father had done to be killed like that, or what she had done to deserve such misery. The Reverend Peter Graham of Arranakilty could explain nothing about the matter to her understanding. She nearly died and then miraculously recovered. Acute grief often ends like that, suddenly. The mourner may be maimed for life but the sharpness of the pain of that dreadful, dreadful disease is gone. Phyl found herself one morning discussing rats with old Dunn, asking him how many he had caught in the barn and taking a vague sort of interest in what the old fellow was saying; books began to appeal to her again and the old life to run anew in a crippled sort of way. Then other things happened. Mr. Hennessey, the family lawyer, who had been a crony of her father's and who had known her from infancy, came down to Kilgobbin to arrange matters. It seemed that Mr. Berknowles before dying had made a will and that the will was being brought over from the States by Mr. Pinckney, his wife's cousin in whose house he had died. "I'm sure I don't know what the chap wants coming over with it for," said Mr. Hennessey. "He said it was by your father's request he was coming, but it's a long journey for a man to take at this season of the year--and I hope the will is all right." There was an implied distrust in his tone and an antagonism to Mr. Pinckney that was not without its effect on Phyl. She disliked Mr. Pinckney. She had never seen him but she disliked him all the same, and she feared him. She felt instinctively that this man was coming to make some alteration in her way of life. She did not want any change, she wanted to go on living just as she was with Mrs. Driscoll the housekeeper to look after her and all the old servants to befriend her and Mr. Hennessey to pay the bills. Mr. Hennessey was in the house now. He had come down that morning from Dublin to receive Mr. Pinckney, who was due to arrive that night. Phyl, sitting on the hearthrug, was in the act of picking up her book when the door opened and in came Mr. Hennessey. He had been out in the grounds overlooking things and he came to the fire to warm his hands, telling Phyl to sit easy and not disturb herself. Then, as he held a big foot to the warmth he talked down at the girl, telling her of what he had been about and the ruination Rafferty was letting the greenhouses go to. "Half-a-dozen panes of glass out--and 'I've no putty,' says he. 'Putty,' said I to him, 'and what's that head of yours made of?' The stoves are all out of order and there's a hole in one of the flues I could get my thumb in." "Rafferty's awfully good to the dogs," said Phyl in her mellow voice, so well adapted for intercession. "He may be a bit careless, but he never does forget to feed the animals. He's got the chickens to look after, too, and then there's the beagles, he knows every dog in the pack and every dog knows him--oh, dear, what's the good of it all!" The thought of the beagles had brought up the vision of their master who would never hunt with them again. Her voice became tinged with melancholy and Hennessey changed the subject, taking his seat in one of the armchairs that stood on either side of the fireplace. He was a big, loosely-made man, an easy going man with a kind heart who would have come to financial disaster long ago only for his partner, Niven. "He's almost due to be here by now," said he, taking out his watch and looking at it, "unless the express from Dublin is late." "What'll he be like, do you think?" said Phyl. "There's no saying," replied Mr. Hennessey. "He's an American and I've never had much dealings with Americans except by letter. By all accounts they are sharp business men, but I daresay he is all right. The thing that gets me is his coming over. Americans don't go thousands of miles for nothing, but if it's after any hanky-panky business about the property, maybe he'll find Jack Hennessey as sharp as any American." "He's some sort of a relation of ours," said Phyl. "Father said he was a sort of cousin." "On your mother's side," said Hennessey. "Yes," said Phyl. Then, after a moment's pause, "D'you know I've often thought of all those people over there and wondered what they were like and how they lived--my mother's people. Father used to talk of them sometimes. He said they kept slaves." "That was in the old days," said Hennessey. "The slaves are all gone long ago. They used to have sugar plantations and suchlike, but the war stopped all that." "It's funny," said Phyl, "to think that my people kept slaves--my mother's people--Oh, if one could only see back, see all the people that have gone before one so long ago-- Don't you ever feel like that?" Mr. Hennessey never had; his forebears had been liquor dealers in Athlone and he was content to let them lie without a too close inquisition into the romances of their lives. "Mr. Hennessey," said Phyl, after a moment's silence, "suppose Father has left Mr. Pinckney all his money--what will become of me?" "The Lord only knows," said Hennessey; "but what's been putting such fancies in your head?" "I don't know," replied the girl. "I was just thinking. Of course he wouldn't do such a thing--It's your talking of the will the last time you were here set me on, I suppose, but I dreamed last night Mr. Pinckney came and he was an American with a beard like Uncle Sam in _Punch_ last week, and he said Father had made a will and left him everything--he'd left him me as well as everything else, and the dogs and all the servants and Kilgobbin--then I woke up." "Well, you were dreaming nonsense," said the practical Hennessey. "A man can't leave his daughter away from him, though I'm half thinking there's many a man would be willing enough if he could." Phyl raised her head. Her quick ear had caught a sound from the avenue. Then the crash of wheels on gravel came from outside and her companion, rising hurriedly from his chair, went to the window. "That's him," said the easy-speaking Hennessey. CHAPTER II He left the room and Phyl, rising from the hearthrug, stood with her hand on the mantelpiece listening. Hennessey had left the door open and she could hear a confused noise from the hall, the sound of luggage being brought in, the bustle of servants and a murmur of voices. Then a voice that made her start. "Thanks, I can carry it myself." It was the newcomer's voice, he was being conducted to his room by Hennessey. It was a cheerful, youthful voice, not in the least suggestive of Uncle Sam with the goatee beard as depicted by the unimaginative artist of _Punch_. And it was a voice she had heard before, so she fancied, but where, she could not possibly tell--nor did she bother to think, dismissing the idea as a fancy. She stood listening, but heard nothing more, only the wind that had risen and was shaking the ivy outside the windows. Byrne, the old manservant, came in and lit the lamps and then after a few minutes Hennessey entered. He looked cheerful. "He seems all right and he'll be down in a minute," said the lawyer; "not a bit of harm in him, though I haven't had time to tackle him over money affairs." "How old is he?" asked the girl. "Old! Why, he's only a boy, but he's got all a man's ways with him--he's American, they're like that. I've heard say the American children order their own mothers and fathers about and drive their own motor-cars and gamble on the Stock Exchange." He pulled out his watch and looked at it; it pointed to ten minutes past seven; then he lit a cigar and sat smoking and smoking without a word whilst Phyl sat thinking and staring at the fire. They were seated like this when the door opened and Byrne shewed in Mr. Pinckney. Hennessey had called him a boy. He was not that. He was twenty-two years of age, yet he looked only twenty and you would not have been particularly surprised if you had been told that he was only nineteen. Good-looking, well-groomed and well-dressed, he made a pleasant picture, and as he came across the room to greet Phyl he explained without speaking what Mr. Hennessey meant about "all the manners of a man." Pinckney's manner was the manner of a man of the world of thirty, easy-going, assured, and decided. He shook hands with Phyl as Hennessey introduced them, and then stood with his back to the fireplace talking, as she took her seat in the armchair on the right, whilst the lawyer remained standing, hands in pockets and foot on the left corner of the fender. The newcomer did most of the talking. By a downward glance every now and then he included Phyl in the conversation, but he addressed most of his remarks to Mr. Hennessey. "And you came over by the Holyhead route?" said the lawyer. "I did," replied Pinckney. "And what did you think of Kingstown?" "Well, upon my word, I saw less of it than of a gentleman with long hair and a bundle of newspapers under his arm who received me like a mother just as I landed, hypnotised me into buying half-a-dozen newspapers and started me off for Dublin with his blessing." "That was Davy Stevens," said Phyl, speaking for the first time. Pinckney's entrance had produced upon her the same effect as his voice. You know the feeling that some places produce on the mind when first seen-- "I have been here before But when or how I cannot tell I know the lights along the shore--" It seemed to her that she had known Pinckney and had met him in some place, but when or how she could not possibly remember. The feeling had almost worn off now. It had thrilled her, but the thrill had vanished and the concrete personality of the man was dominating her mind--and not very pleasantly. There was nothing in his manner or his words to give offence; he was quite pleasant and nice but--but--well, it was almost as though she had met some one whom she had known and liked and who had changed. The little jump of the heart that his voice caused in her had been followed by a chill. His manner displeased her vaguely. He seemed so assured, so every day, so cold. It seemed to her that not only did he hold his entertainers at a critical distance, but that he was somehow wanting in respectfulness to herself--Lunatic ideas, for the young man could not possibly have been more cordial towards two utter strangers and as for respectfulness, one does not treat a girl in a pigtail exactly as one treats a full-grown woman. "Oh, Davy Stevens, was it?" said Pinckney, glancing down at Phyl. "Well, I never knew the meaning of peaceful persuasion till he had sold out his stock on me. Now in the States that man would likely have been President by this--Things grow quicker over there." "And what did you think of Dublin?" asked Hennessey. "Well," said the young man, "the two things that struck me most about Dublin were the dirt and the want of taxicabs." A dead silence followed this remark. Never tell an Irishman that Dublin is dirty. Hennessey was dumb, and as for Phyl, she knew now that she hated this man. "Of course," went on the other, "it's a fine old city and I'm not sure that I would alter it or even brush it up. I should think it's pretty much the same to-day as when Lever wrote of it. It's a survival of the past, like Nuremberg. All the same, one doesn't want to live in a survival of the past--does one?" "I've lived there a good many years," said Hennessey; "and I've managed to survive it. It's not Chicago, of course; it's just Dublin, and it doesn't pretend to be anything else." "Just so," said Pinckney. He felt that he had put his foot in it; recalling his own lightly spoken words he felt shocked at his want of tact, and he was casting about for something to say about the sacred city of a friendly nature but not too fulsome, when Byrne opened the door and announced that dinner was served. CHAPTER III Phyl led the way and they crossed the hall to the dining-room, a room oak-panelled like the library and warm with the light of fire and candles. Once upon a time there had been high doings in this sombre room, hunt breakfasts and dinners, rousing songs, laughter, and the toasting of pretty women--now dust and ashes. Here highly coloured gentlemen had slept the sleep of the just, under the table, whilst the ladies waited in vain for them in the drawing-room, here Colonel Berknowles had drunk a glass of mulled wine on that black morning over a hundred-and-thirty years ago when he went out with Councillor Kinsella and shot him through the lungs by the Round House on the Arranakilty Road. The diminutive Tom Moore had sung his songs here "put standing on the table" by the other guests, and the great Dan had held forth and the wind had dashed the ivy against the windows just as it did to-night with fist-fulls of rain from the Slieve Bloom Mountains. Byrne had put the big silver candlesticks on the table in honour of the guest, and he now appeared bearing in front of him a huge dish with a cover a size too small for it. He placed the dish before Mr. Hennessey and removed the cover, disclosing a cod's "head and shoulders" whilst a female servant appeared with a dish of potatoes boiled in their jackets and a tureen of oyster sauce. Now a cod's head and shoulders served up like this in the good old Irish way is, honestly, a ghastly sight. The thing has a countenance and an expression most forbidding and all its own. The appearance of the old dish cover, clapped on by the cook in a hurry in default of the proper one, had given Phyl a turn and now she was wondering what Mr. Pinckney was thinking of the fish and the manner of its serving. All at once and as if stimulated into life by the presence of the new guest, all sorts of qualms awoke in her mind. The dining arrangements of the better class Irish are, and always have been, rather primitive, haphazard, and lacking in small refinements. Phyl was conscious of the fact that Byrne had placed several terrible old knives on the table, knives that properly belonged to the kitchen, and when the second course, consisting of a boiled chicken, faced by a piece of bacon reposing on a mat of boiled cabbage, appeared, the fact that one of the dishes was cracked confronted her with the equally obvious fact that the cook in her large-hearted way had sent up the chicken with the black legs unremoved. It seemed to Phyl's vision--now thoroughly distorted--that the eyes of the stranger were everywhere, cool, critical, and amused; so obsessed was her mind with this idea that it could take no hold upon the conversation. Pinckney was talking of the States; he might just as well have been talking about Timbuctoo for all the impression he made on her with her unfortunate head filled with cracked dishes, chickens' black legs, Byrne's awkwardness and the suddenly remembered crumb-brush. It was twenty years old and it had lost half of its bristles in the service of the Berknowles who had clung to it with a warm-hearted tenacity purely Irish. "Sure, that old brush is a disgrace to the table," was the comment Phyl's father had made on it once, just as though he were casually referring to some form of the Inevitable such as the state of the weather. The disgrace had not been removed and it was coming to the table, now, in the hand of Byrne. Phyl watched the crumbs being swept up, she watched the cloth being taken off and the wine and dessert placed in the good old fashion, on the polished mahogany, then leaving the gentlemen to their wine, she retired upstairs and to her bedroom. She felt angry with Byrne, with the cook, with Mr. Hennessey and with herself. Plenty of people had been to dinner at Kilgobbin, yet she had never felt ashamed of the _ménage_ till now. This stranger from over the water, notwithstanding her dislike for him, had the power to disturb her mind as few other people had disturbed it in the course of her short life. Other people had put her into worse tempers, other people had made her dislike them, but no one else had ever roused her into this feeling of unrest, this criticism of her belongings, this irritation against everything including herself. Her bedroom was a big room with two windows looking upon the park; it was almost in black darkness, but the windows shewed in dim, grey oblongs and she made her way to one of them, took her place in the window-seat and pressed her forehead against the glass. The rain had ceased and the clouds had risen, but the moon was not yet high enough to pierce them. Phyl could just make out the black masses of the distant woods and the movement of the near fir-trees shaking their tops like hearse plumes to the wind. The park always fascinated her when it was like that, almost blotted out by night. These shapes in the dark were akin to shapes in the fire in their power over the fancy of the gazer. Phyl as she watched them was thinking: not one word had this stranger said about her dead father. Mr. Berknowles had died in his house and this man had buried him in Charleston; he had come over here to Ireland on the business of the will and he had come into the dead man's house as unconcernedly as though it were an hotel, and he had laughed and talked about all sorts of things with never a word of Him. If Phyl had thought over the matter, she might have seen that, perhaps, this silence of Pinckney's was the silence of delicacy, not of indifference, but she was not in the humour to hold things up to the light of reason. She had decided to dislike this man and when the Mascarenes came to a decision of this sort they were hard to be shaken from it. She had decided to dislike him long before she saw him. What Phyl really wanted now was perhaps a commonsense female relative to stiffen her mind against fancies and give her a clear-sighted view of the world, but she had none. Philip Berknowles was the last of his race, the few distant connections he had in Ireland lived away in the south and were separated from him by the grand barrier that divides Ireland into two opposing camps--Religion. Berknowles was a Protestant, the others Papists. Phyl, as she sat watching saw, now, the line of the woods strengthen against the sky; the moon was breaking through the clouds and its light increasing minute by minute shewed the parkland clearly defined, the leafless oaks standing here and there, oaks that of a summer afternoon stood in ponds of shadow, the clumps of hazel, and away to the west the great dip, a little valley haunted by a fern-hidden river, a glen mysterious and secretive, holding in its heart the Druids' altar. The Druids' altar was the pride of Kilgobbin Park; it consisted of a vast slab of stone supported on four other stones, no man knew its origin, but popular imagination had hung it about with all sorts of gruesome fancies. Victims had been slaughtered there in the old days, a vein of ironstone in the great slab had become the bloodstain of men sacrificed by the Druids; the glen was avoided by day and there were very few of the country people round about who would have entered it by night. Phyl, who had no fear of anything, loved the place; she had known it from childhood and had been accustomed to take her worries and bothers there and bury them. It was a friend, places can become friends and, sometimes, most terrific enemies. The girl listening, now, heard voices below stairs. Hennessey and his companion were evidently leaving the dining-room and crossing the hall to the library. Going out on the landing she caught a glimpse of them as they stood for a moment looking at the trophies in the hall, then they went into the library, the door was closed, and Phyl came downstairs. In the hall she slipped on a pair of goloshes over her thin shoes, put on a cloak and hat and came out of the front door, closing it carefully behind her. To put it in her own words, she couldn't stand the house any longer. Not till this very evening did she feel the great change that her father's death had brought in her life, not till now did she fully know that her past was dead as well as her father, and not till she had left the house did the feeling come to her that Pinckney was to prove its undertaker. There was something alike cold and fateful in the impression that this man had made upon her, an extraordinary impression, for it would be impossible to imagine anything further removed from the ideas of Coldness and Fate than the idea of the cheerful and practical Pinckney. However, there it was, her heart was chilled with the thought of him and the instinctive knowledge that he was going to make a great alteration in her life. She crossed the gravelled drive to the grass sward beyond. The night had altered marvellously; nearly every vestige of cloud had vanished, blown away by the wind. The wind and the moon had the night between them and the air was balmy as the air of summer. Phyl turned and looked back at the house with all its windows glittering in the moonlight, then she struck across the grass now almost dried by the wind. Phyl had something of the night bird in her composition. She had often been out long before dawn to pick up night lines in the river and she knew the woods by dark as well as by day. She was out now for nothing but a breath of fresh air, she did not intend to stay more than ten minutes, and she was on the point of returning to the house when a cry from the woods made her pause. One might have fancied that some human being was crying out in agony, but Phyl knew that it was a fox, a fox caught in a trap. She was confirmed in her knowledge by the barking of its mates; they would be gathered round the trapped one lending all the help they could--with their voices. The girl did not pause to think; forgetting that she had no weapon with which to put the poor beast out of its misery, and no means of freeing it without being bitten, she started off at a run in the direction of the sound, entering the woods by a path that led through a grove of hazel; leaving this path she struck westward swift as an Indian along the road of the call. Her mother's people had been used to the wilds, and Phyl had more than a few drops of tracker blood in her veins; better than that, she had a trace of the wood instinct that leads a man about the forest and makes him able to strike a true line to the west or east or north or south without a compass. The trees were set rather sparsely here and the moonlight shewed vistas of withered fern. The wind had fallen, and in the vast silence of the night this place seemed unreal as a dream. The fox had evidently succeeded in liberating itself from the trap, for its cries had ceased, cut off all of a sudden as though by a closing door. Phyl paused to listen and look around her. Through all the night from here, from there, came thin traces of sound, threads fretting the silence. The trotting of a horse a mile away on the Arranakilty road, the bark of a dog from near the Round House, the shaky bleat of a sheep from the fold at Ross' farm came distinct yet diminished almost to vanishing point. It was like listening to the country sounds of Lilliput. With these came the vaguest whisper of flowing water, broken now and again by a little shudder of wind in the leafless branches of the trees. "He's out," said Phyl to herself. She was thinking of the fox. She knew that the trap must be somewhere about and she guessed who had set it. Rafferty, without a doubt, for only the other day he had been complaining of the foxes having raided the chickens, but there was no use in hunting for the thing by this light and without any indication of its exact whereabouts, so she struck on, determined to return to the house by the more open ground leading through the Druids' glen. She had been here before in the very early morning before sunrise on her way to the river, Rafferty following her with the fish creel, but she had never seen the place like this with the moonlight on it and she paused for a moment to rest and think, taking her seat on a piece of rock by the cromlech. Phyl, despite her American strain, was very Irish in one particular: though cheerful and healthy and without a trace of morbidness in her composition, she, still, was given to fits of melancholy--not depression, melancholy. It is in the air of Ireland, the moist warm air that feeds the shamrock and fills the glens with soft-throated echoes and it is in the soul of the people. Phyl, seated in this favourite spot of hers, where she had played as a child on many a warm summer's afternoon, gave herself over to the moonlight and the spirit of Recollection. She had forgotten Pinckney, and the strange disturbance that he had occasioned in her mind had sunk to rest; she was thinking of her father, of all the pleasant days that were no more--she remembered her dolls, the wax ones with staring eyes, dummies and effigies compared with that mysterious, soulful, sinful, frightful, old rag doll with the inked face, true friend in affliction and companion in joy, and even more, a Ju-ju to be propitiated. That thing had stirred in her a sort of religious sentiment, had caused in her a thrill of worship real, though faint, far more real than the worship of God that had been cultivated in her mind by her teachers. The old Druid stone had affected her child's mind in somewhat the same way, but with a difference. The Ju-ju was a familiar, she had even beaten and punched it when in a temper; the stone had always filled her with respect. There are some people the doors of whose minds are absolutely closed on the past; we call them material and practical people; there are others in which the doors of division are a wee crack open, or even ajar, so that their lives are more or less haunted by whisperings from that strange land we call yesterday. In some of the Burmese and Japanese children the doors stand wide open so that they can see themselves as they were before they passed through the change called death, but the Westerners are denied this. In Phyl's mind as a child one might suppose that through the doors ajar some recollections of forgotten gods once worshipped had stolen, and that the power of the Ju-ju and the Druids' stone lay in their power of focussing those vague and wandering threads of remembrance. To-night this power seemed regained, for she passed from the contemplation of concrete images into a vague and pleasant state, an absolute idleness of the intellect akin to that which people call daydreaming. With her cloak wrapped round her she sat, elbows on knees and her chin in the palms of her hands giving herself up to Nothing before starting to resume her way to the house. Sitting like this she suddenly started and turned. Some one had called her: "Phylice!" For a moment she fancied that it was a real voice, and then she knew that it was only a voice in her head, one of those sounds we hear when we are half asleep, one of those hails from dreamland that come now as the ringing of a bell that never has rung, or the call of a person who has never spoken. She rose up and resumed her way, striking along the glen to the open park, yet still the memory of that call pursued her. "Phylice!" It seemed Mr. Pinckney's voice, it _was_ his voice, she was sure of that now, and she amused herself by wondering why his voice had suddenly popped up in her head. She had been thinking about him more than about any one else that evening and that easily accounted for the matter. Fancy had mimicked him--yet why did Fancy use her name and clothe it in Pinckney's voice?--and it was distinctly a call, the call of a person who wishes to draw another person's attention. Pinckney had never called her by her name and she felt almost irritated at the impertinence of the phantom voice in doing so. This same irritation made her laugh when she realised it. Then the idea that Byrne might lock the hall door before she could get back drove every other thought away and she began to run, her shadow running before her over the moonlit grass. Half way across the sward, which was divided from the grass land proper by a Ha-ha, she heard the stable clock striking eleven. CHAPTER IV When Phyl withdrew from the dining-room, Hennessey filled his glass with port, Pinckney, who took no wine, lit a cigarette and the two men drew miles closer to one another in conversation. They were both relieved by the withdrawal of the girl, Hennessey because he wanted to talk business, Pinckney because her presence had affected him like a wet blanket. His first impression of Phyl had been delightful, then, little by little, her stiffness and seeming lifelessness had communicated themselves to him. It seemed to him that he had never met a duller or more awkward schoolgirl. His mind was of that quick order which requires to be caught in the uptake rapidly in order to shine. Slowness, coldness, dulness or hesitancy in others depressed him just as dull weather depressed him. He did not at all know with what a burning interest his arrival had been awaited, or the effect that his voice had produced and his first appearance. He did not know how the dull schoolgirl had weighed him in a mysterious balance which she herself did not quite comprehend and had found him slightly wanting. Neither could he tell the extent of the paralyses produced in that same mind of hers by the cracked china, the old dish cover, Byrne's awkwardness, and the deboshed crumb-brush. He should have kept to his first impression of her, for first impressions are nearly always right; he should have sought for the reason of so much charm proving charmless, so much positive attraction proving so negative in effect. But he did not. He just took her as he found her and was glad she was gone. "And I believe," said Hennessey, "the South is different now. It used to be all cotton before the war." "Oh, no," said Pinckney. "Before the war there was a lot of cotton grown but we used to grow other things as well, we used to feed ourselves, the plantation was economically independent. The war broke us. We had to get money, so we grew cotton as cotton was never grown before; the South became a great sheet of cotton. You see, cotton is the only crop you can mortgage, so we grew cotton and mortgaged it. Of course the old-time planter is gone, everything is done now by companies, and that's the devil of it--" Pinckney was silent for a moment and sat staring before him as though he were looking at the Past. "Companies, you see, don't grow sunflowers to look at, don't grow trees to shade them, don't make love in a wild and extravagant manner and shoot other companies for crossing them in their affections--don't play the guitar, in short. "Companies don't breed trotting horses and wear panama hats and put flowers in their buttonholes. The old Planter used to do these things and a lot of others. He was a bit of a patriarch in his way, too--well, he's gone and more's the pity. He's like an old house pulled down. No one can ever build it again as it was. The South's a big industrial region now. Not only cotton--ore and coal and machinery. We supply the North and East with pig-iron, machinery, God knows what. Berknowles was very keen on Southern industries, regularly bitten. He was talking of selling off here and coming to settle in Charleston when the illness took him-- and that reminds me." He took a document from his pocket. "This is the will. I've kept it on my person since I started for here. It's not the thing to trust to a handbag. It's in correct form, I believe. Temperley, our solicitor, made it out for him and it leaves everything to the girl when she's twenty--but just read it and see what you think." He lit another cigarette whilst Hennessey, putting on his glasses and pushing his dessert plate away, spread the will on the table. Pinckney watched him as he read it. Hennessey was a new order of being to him. This easy-going, slipshod, garrulous gentleman, fond of his glass of wine, contrasted strangely with the typical lawyer of the States. Flushed and not in his business mood, the man of law cast his eyes over the document before him, reading bits of it here and there and seeming not inclined to bother himself by a concentration of his full energies on the matter. Then, suddenly, his eyes became fixed on a paragraph which he re-read as though puzzled by the meaning of it. Then he looked up at the other over his glasses. "Why, what's this?" said he. "He has made _you_ Phyl's guardian. _You!_" Pinckney laughed. "Yes, that was the chief thing that brought me over. He has made me her guardian, till she's twenty, and he made me promise to look after her interests and see to all business arrangements. He said he had no near relations in Ireland, and he said that he'd sooner trust the devil than the few relatives he had, that they were Papists--that is to say Roman Catholics--he seemed to fear them like the deuce and their influence on the girl. I couldn't understand him. I've never seen any harm in Roman Catholics; there are loads in the States and they seem to be just as good citizens as the others, better, for they seem to stick tighter by their religion. Anyhow, there you are. Berknowles had them on the brain and nothing would do him but I must come over to look after the business myself." Hennessey, with his finger on the will, had been staring at Pinckney during this. He looked down now at the document and then up again. "But you--her guardian--why, it's absurd," said he. "You aren't old enough to be a guardian, why, Lord bless my soul, what'll people be doing next? A young chap like you to be the guardian of a girl like Phyl--why, it's not proper." "Not only am I to be her guardian," said Pinckney with a twinkle in his eyes, "but she's to come and live under my roof at Charleston. I promised Berknowles that--He was dying, you see, and one can refuse nothing to a dying man." Hennessey rose up in an abstracted sort of way, went to the sideboard, poured himself out a whisky and soda, took a sip, and sat down again. "Extraordinary, isn't it?" said Pinckney, tapping the ash off his cigarette. "All the same, you need not be worried at the impropriety of the business; there's none, nothing improper could live in the same house with my aunt, Maria Pinckney. Vernons belongs to her though I live there." "Vernons," put in the other. "What's that?" "It's the name of our house in Charleston. It's mine, really, but my father left it to Maria to live in; it comes to me at her death. I don't want that house at all. I want her to keep it forever, but it's such a pleasant old place, I like to live there instead of buying a house of my own. Vernons isn't exactly a house, it's more like a family tree--hollow--with all the ancestors inside instead of hanging on the branches." "But why on earth didn't Berknowles make your aunt guardian to the girl?" asked Hennessey. "There'd have been some sense in that--a middle-aged woman--" "I beg your pardon," said Pinckney, "my aunt is not a middle-aged woman, she's not fifteen." "Not what?" said Hennessey. "Not fifteen--in years of discretion, though she's over seventy as time goes. She has no knowledge at all of what money is or what money means--she flings it away, doesn't spend it--just flings it away on anything and everything but herself. I don't believe there's a charity in the States that hasn't squeezed her, or a beggar-man in the South that hasn't banked on her. She was sent into the world to grow flowers and look after stray dogs and be robbed by hoboes; she has been nearly seventy years at it and she doesn't know she has ever been robbed. She's not a fool by any manner of means, and she rules the servants at Vernons in the good old patriarchal way, but she's lost where money is concerned. That's why Berknowles wanted me to look after the girl's interests. As for anything else, I guess Maria Pinckney will be the real guardian." "Well, I don't know," said Hennessey. He was confused by all these new ideas shot into his mind suddenly like this after dinner, he could see that Pinckney was genuine enough, all the same it irritated him to think that Philip Berknowles should have chosen a youth like this to be second father to Phyl. What was the matter with himself, Hennessey? Hadn't he a fine house in Merrion Square and a wife who would have treated the girl like a daughter? "Well, I don't know," said he. "It's not for me to dispute the wishes of a client, but I've known Phyl since she was born and I've known her father since we were together at Trinity College and I'd have taken it more handsome if he'd left the looking after of her to me." "I wonder he didn't," said Pinckney. "He spoke of you a good deal to me, spoke of you as his best friend; all the same he seemed set on the idea of us taking care of the girl. He fell in love with Charleston and he cottoned to us; then, of course, there were the family reasons. Phyl's mother was a Mascarene; my mother was her mother's first cousin. Vernons belonged to the Mascarenes, my mother brought it to my father as part of her wedding portion. The Pinckneys' old house was lost to us in the smash up after the war. So, you see, Phyl ought to be as much at home at Vernons as I am. Funny, isn't it, how things get mixed up and old family houses change hands?" "And when do you want to take her away?" asked Hennessey. "Upon my word, I've never thought of that," replied the other. "I want to see things settled up here and to go over the accounts with you. Berknowles said the house had better be let--I should think it would be easy to find a good tenant--then I want to go to London on business and get back as quick as possible. She need not come back with me, it would scarcely give her time to get things ready. There's a Mrs. Van Dusen, a friend of ours who lives in New York, she's coming over in a month or so and Phyl might come with her as far as New York. It's all plain sailing after that." "Well," said Hennessey, folding up the will and putting it in his pocket. "I suppose it's all for the best, but it's hard lines for a man to lose his best friend and see a good old estate like Kilgobbin taken off to the States--Oh, you needn't tell me, if Phyl goes out there she's done for as far as Ireland is concerned. Sure, they never come back, the people that go there, and if she does come back it'll be with an American husband and he master of Kilgobbin. I know what America is, it never lets go of the man or woman it catches hold of." "You're not far wrong there," said Pinckney. "You see, life is set to a faster pace in America than over here and once you learn to step that pace you feel coming back here as if you were living in a country where people are hobbled. At least that's my experience. Then the air is different. There's somehow a feeling of morning in America that goes through the whole day--almost--here, afternoon begins somewhere about eleven." Hennessey yawned, and the two men, rising from the table, left the room and crossed the hall to the library. Here, after a while, Hennessey bade the other good night and departed for bed, whilst Pinckney, leaning back in his armchair, fell into a lazy and contemplative mood, his eyes wandering from point to point. All this business was very new to him. Pinckney had inherited his father's brains as well as his money. He had discovered that a large fortune requires just as much care and attention as a large garden and that a man can extract just as much interest and amusement and the physical health that comes from both, out of money-tending as out of flower and vegetable growing. Knowing all about cotton and nearly everything about wheat, he managed occasionally to do a bit of speculative dealing without the least danger of burning his fingers. Self-reliant and self-assured, knowing his road and all its turnings, he had moved through life up to this with the ease of a well-oiled and almost frictionless mechanism. But here was a new thing of which he had never dreamed. Here was another destiny suddenly thrust into his charge and another person's property to be conserved and dealt with. Never, never, did he dream when acceding to Berknowles' request, of the troubles, little difficulties and causes of indecision that were preparing to meet him. Up till now, one side of his character had been almost unknown to him. He had been quite unaware that he possessed a conscience most painfully sensitive with regard to the interests of others, a conscience that would prick him and poison his peace were he to leave even little things undone in the fulfilment of the trust he had undertaken so lightheartedly. Possessing a keen eye for men he began to recognise now why Berknowles had not chosen the easy-going Hennessey to look after Phyl and her affairs, and he guessed, just by the little bit he had seen of Kilgobbin and the servants, the slipshoddedness and waste going on behind the scenes in the absence of a master and mistress. Pinckney loathed waste as he loathed inefficiency and as he loathed dirt. They were all three brothers with Drink in his eyes and as he leaned back in the chair now, his gaze travelling about the room, he could not but perceive little things that would have brought exclamations from the soul of a careful housekeeper. The furniture had been upholstered, or rather re-upholstered in leather some five years ago. There is nothing that cries out so much against neglect as leather, and the chairs and couch in the library of Kilgobbin, without exactly crying out, still told their tale. Some of the buttons were gone, and some of them hung actually by the thread in the last stage of departure. There was a tiny triangular rent in the leather of the armchair wherein Phyl had been sitting and another armchair wanted a castor. The huge Persian rug that covered the centre of the floor shewed marks left by cigar and cigarette ash, and under a Jacobean book-case in the corner were stuffed all sorts of odds and ends, old paper-backed novels, a pair of old shoes, a tennis racquet and a boxing glove--besides other things. Pinckney rose up, went to the book-case and placed his fingers on top of it, then he looked at his fingers and the bar of dust upon them, brushed his hand clean and came back to his chair by the fire. He heard the stable clock striking eleven. The sound of the wind that had been raging outside all during dinner time had died away and the sounds of the house made themselves manifest, the hundred stealthy accountable and unaccountable little sounds that night evolves from an old house set in the stillness of the country. Just as the night jasmine gives up its perfume to the night, so does an old house its past in the form of murmurs and crackings and memories and suggestions. Notwithstanding Dunn's attentions there were rats alive in the cellars and under the boarding--and mice; the passages leading to the kitchen premises made a whispering gallery where murderers seemed consulting together if the scullery window were forgotten and left open--as it usually was, and boards in the uneven flooring that had been preparing for the act for weeks and months would suddenly "go off with a bang," a noise startling in the dead of night as the crack of a pistol, and produced, heaven knows how, but never by daylight. Even Pinckney, who did not believe in ghosts, became aware as he sat now by the fire that the old house was feeling for him to make him creep, feeling for him with its old disjointed fingers and all the artfulness of inanimate things. He was aware that Sir Nicholas Berknowles was looking down at him with the terrible patient gaze of a portrait, and he returned the gaze, trying to imagine what manner of man this might have been and how he had lived and what he had done in those old days that were once real sunlit days filled with people with real voices, hearts, and minds. A gentle creak as though a light step had pressed upon the flooring of the hall brought his mind back to reality and he was rising from his chair to retire for the night when a sound from outside the window made him sit down again. It was the sound of a step on the gravel path, a step stealthy and light, a real sound and no contraption of the imagination. The idea of burglars sprang up in his mind, but was dismissed; that was no burglar's footstep--and yet! He listened. The sound had ceased and now came a faint rubbing as of a hand feeling for the window followed by the sharp rapping of a knuckle on the glass. "Hullo," cried Pinckney, jumping to his feet and approaching the shuttered window. "Who's there?" "It's me," said a voice. "I'm locked out. Byrne's bolted the front door. Go to the hall door, will you, please, and let me in?" "Phyl," said Pinckney to himself. "Good heavens!" Then to the other, "I'm coming." Byrne had left a lamp lighted in the hall and the guest's candlestick waiting for him on the table. The lamp was sufficient to show him the executive side of the big front door that had been nearly battered in in the time of the Fenians and still possessed the ponderous locks and bars of a past day when the tenants of Kilgobbin had fought the pikemen of Arranakilty and Rupert Berknowles had hung seventeen rebels, no less, on the branches of the big oak "be the gates." Pinckney undid bolt and bar, turned the key in the great lock and flung the door open, disclosing Phyl standing in the moonlight. The contrast between the forbidding and ponderous door and the charming little figure against which it had stood as a barrier might have struck him had his mind been less astonished. As it was he could think of nothing but the strangeness of the business in hand. "Where on earth have you been?" said he. "Out in the woods," said Phyl, entering quite unconcerned and removing her cloak. "A fox got trapped in the woods and I went to let it out and couldn't find it, then that old fool Byrne locked the door; lucky you were up. I saw the light in the library shining through a crack in the shutters and knocked." Pinckney was putting up the bar and sliding the bolts. He said nothing. Had Phyl been another girl, he might have laughed and joked over the matter, but care of Phyl's well-being was now part of his business in life and that consideration just checked his speech. There was nothing at all wrong in the affair, and never for a moment did he dream of making the slightest remonstrance; still, the unwisdom of a young girl wandering about in the woods at night after trapped foxes was a patent fact which disturbed the mind of this guardian unto dumbness. Phyl, who was as sensitive to impressions as a radiometer to light, noted the silence of the other and resented it as she hung up her old hat and cloak. She knew nothing of the true facts of the case, she looked on Pinckney as a being almost of her own age, and that he should dare to express disapproval of an act of hers not concerning him, even by silence, was an intolerable insult. She knew that she loathed him now.--Prig! This was the first real meeting of these two and Fate, with the help of Irish temper and the Pinckney conscience, was making a fine fiasco of it. Phyl, having hung up the hat and coat, turned without a word, marched into the library and finding the book she had been reading that day, put it under her arm. "Good night," said she as she passed him in the hall. "Good night," he replied. He watched her disappearing up the stairs, stood for a moment irresolute, and then went into the library. He knew he had offended her and he knew exactly how he had offended her. There are silences that can be more hurting than speech--yet what could he have said? He rummaged in his mind to find something he might have said and could find nothing more appropriate than a remark about the weather and the fineness of the night. Yet a bald and decrepit remark like that would have been as bad almost as silence, for it would have ignored the main point at issue--the night-wandering of his ward. He sat down again for a moment in the armchair by the fireplace and began to wrestle with the position in which he found himself. This was a small business, but if Phyl in the future was to do things that he did not approve of it would be his plain duty to remonstrate with her. An odious position for youth to be placed in. How she would loathe and hate him! Pinckney, though a man of the world in many ways and a good business man, was still at heart a boy just as young as Phyl; even in years he was very little older than she, and the boy side of his mind was in full revolt at the job set before him by fate. Then he came to a resolution. "She can do jolly well what she pleases," said he to himself, "without my interference. Aunt Maria can attend to that. My business will be to look after her property and keep sharks off it. _I'm_ not going to set up in business to tell a girl what she ought or oughtn't to do--that's a woman's job." Satisfied with this seeming solution of the difficulty he went to bed. Meanwhile, Phyl, having marched off with the book under her arm found, when she reached her room, that she had forgotten a matchbox, and, too proud to return to the hall for one, went to bed in the dark. She lay awake for an hour, her mind obsessed by thoughts of this man who had suddenly stepped into her life, and who possessed such a strange power to disturb her being and fill it with feelings of unrest, irritation and, strangely enough, a vague attraction. The attraction one might fancy the iron to feel for the distant magnet, or the floating stick for the far-off whirlpool. Then she fell asleep and dreamed that they were at dinner and Mr. Hennessey was waiting at table. Her father was there and, before the dream converted itself into something equally fatuous she heard Pinckney's voice, also in the dream; he seemed looking for her in the hall and he was calling to her, "Phyl--Phyl!" CHAPTER V Next morning came with a burst of sunshine and a windy, cloudless sky. Pinckney, dressing with his window open, could see the park with the rooks wheeling and cawing over the trees, whilst the warm wind brought into the room all sorts of winter scents on the very breath of summer. This rainy land where the snow rarely comes has all sorts of surprises of climate and character. Nothing is truly logical in Ireland, not even winter. That is what makes the place so delightful to some minds and so perplexing to others. Hennessey was staying for a day or two to go over accounts and explain the working of the estate to Pinckney. He was in the hall when the latter came down, and gave him good morning. "Where's your mistress?" said Hennessey to old Byrne, as they took their seats at the breakfast table. "Faith, she's been out since six," said Byrne. "She came down threatenin' to skin Rafferty alive for layin' fox thraps in the woods, then she had a bite of bread and butter and a cup of tea Norah made for her, and off she went with Rafferty to hunt out the thraps and take them up. It's little she cares for breakfast." "I was the same way myself when I was her age," said Hennessey to Pinckney. "Up at four in the morning and out fishing in Dublin Bay--it's well to be young." "Look here," said the young man, as Byrne left the room, "she was out till eleven last night in the woods; she knocked me up as I was sitting in the library and I let her in. _I_ don't see anything wrong in the business, but all the same, it's not a particularly safe proceeding and I suppose a mother or father would have jawed her--I couldn't. I suppose I showed by my manner that I didn't approve of her being out so late, for she seemed in a huff as she went up to bed. My position is a bit difficult, but I'm hanged if I'm going to do the heavy father or careful mother business. If she was only a boy, I could talk to her like a Dutch uncle, but I don't know anything about girls. I wish--" Pinckney's wish remained forever unexpressed, for at the moment the door opened and in came Phyl. Her face was glowing with the morning air and she seemed to have forgotten the business of the night before as she greeted Pinckney and the lawyer and took her place at the table. "Phyl," said the lawyer, half jocularly, "here's Mr. Pinckney been complaining that you were wandering about all night in the woods, knocking him up to let you in at two o'clock in the morning." Phyl, who was helping herself to bacon, looked up at Pinckney. "Oh, you cad," said her eyes. Then she spoke: "I came in at eleven. If I had known, I would have called up Byrne or one of the servants to let me in." Pinckney could have slain Hennessey. "Good gracious," he said. "_I_ wasn't complaining. I only just mentioned the fact." "The fact that I was out till two," said Phyl, with another upward glance of scorn. "I never said any such thing. I said eleven." "It was my loose way of speaking; but, sure, what's the good of getting out of temper?" put in Hennessey. "Mr. Pinckney wasn't meaning anything, but you see, Phyl, it's just this way, your father has made him your guardian." "My _what!_" cried the girl. "_Oh_, Lord!" said Pinckney, in despair at the blundering way of the other. Then finding himself again and the saving vein of humour, without which man is just a leaden figure: "Yes, that's it. I'm your guardian. You must on no account go out without my permission, or cough or sneeze without a written permit--Oh, Phyl, don't be thinking nonsense of that sort. I _am_ your guardian, it seems, and by your father's special request, but you are absolutely free to do as you like." "A nice sort of guardian," put in Hennessey with a grin. "I am only, really, guardian of your money and your interests," went on the other, "and your welfare. When you came in last night late, I was a bit taken aback and I thought--as a matter of fact, I thought it might be dangerous being out alone in this wild part of the country so late at night, but I did not want to interfere; you can understand, can't you? What I want you to get out of your mind is, that I am that odious thing, a meddling person. I'm not." Phyl was very white. She had risen from the table and was at the window. Here was her dream come true of the bearded American who had suddenly appeared to claim her and Kilgobbin and the servants and everything. Pinckney had not a beard, but he was an American and he had come to claim everything. The word guardian carried such a force and weight and was so filled with fantastic possibilities to the mind of Phyl, that she scarcely heard his soft words and excuses. Phyl had the Irish trick of running away with ideas and embroidering the most palpable truths with fancies. It was an inheritance from her father, and she stood by the window now unable to speak, with the word "Guardian" ringing in her ears and the idea pressing on her mind like an incubus. Hennessey had risen up. He was the first to break silence. "There's no use in meeting troubles half way," said he vaguely. "You and Phyl will get along all right when you know each other better. Come out, the two of you, and we'll go round the grounds and you will be able to see for yourself the state of the house and what repairs are wanting." "One moment," said Pinckney. "I want to tell Phyl something--I'm going to call you Phyl because I'm your guardian--d'you mind?" "No," said Phyl, "you can call me anything you like, I suppose." "I'm not going to call you anything I like--just Phyl-- Well, then, I want to tell you what we have to do. It's not my wishes I have to carry out but your father's. He wanted to let this house." "Let Kilgobbin!" "Yes, that is what he said. He wanted to let it to a good tenant who would look after it till you are of age. I think he was right. You see, you could not live here all alone, and if the place was shut up it would deteriorate." "It would go to wrack and ruin," said Hennessey. "And the servants?" said Phyl. "We will look after them," said Pinckney, "the new tenant might take them on; if not, we'll give them time to get new places." "Byrne's been here before I was born," said the girl, with dry lips, "so has Mrs. Driscoll. They are part of the place; it would ruin their lives to send them away." "Well," said Pinckney, "I don't want to be the ogre to ruin their lives; you can do anything you like about them. If the new tenant didn't take them, you might pension them. I want you to be perfectly happy in your mind and I want you to feel that though I am, so to speak, the guardian of your money, still, that money is yours." She was beginning to understand now that not only was he striving to soothe her feelings and propitiate her, but that he was very much in earnest in this business, and crowding through her mind came a great wave of revulsion against herself. Phyl's nature was such that whilst always ready to fly into wrath and easily moved to bitter resentment, one touch of kindness, one soft word, had the power to disarm her. One soft word from an antagonist had the power to wound her far more than a dozen words of bitterness. Filled now with absolutely superfluous self-reproach, she stood for a moment unable to speak. Then she said, raising her eyes to his: "I am sure you mean to do what is for the best.--It was stupid of me--" "Not a bit," said the other, cheerfully. "I want to do the things that will make you happy--that's all. I'm a business man and I know the value of money. Money is just worth the amount of happiness it brings." "Faith, that's true," said Hennessey, who had taken his seat again and was in the act of lighting a cigar. "When I was a boy," went on the other. "I was always kept hard up by my father. It was like pulling gum teeth to get the price of a fishing rod out of him. When I think of all the fun I might have bought with a few dollars, it makes me wild. You can't buy fun when you get old; you may buy an opera house or a yacht, but you can't buy the real stuff that makes life worth living." Phyl glanced out of the window at the park, then as though she had found some inspiration there, she turned to Pinckney. "If you don't mind about the money, then why don't you let me live here instead of letting the place? I can live here by myself and I would be happy here. I won't be happy if I leave it." "Well," said Pinckney, "there's your father's wish, first of all." "I'm sure if he knew how I felt, he wouldn't mind," said Phyl mournfully, turning her gaze again to the park. "On top of that," went on Pinckney, "there's--your age. Phyl, it wouldn't ever do; it's not I that am saying it, it's custom, the world, society." Phyl, like the hooked salmon that has taken the gaudy fly, felt a check and recognised that a Power had her in hand, recognised in the light-going and fair-speaking Pinckney something of adamant, a will not to be broken or bent. She felt for a moment a revolt against herself for having fallen to the lure and allowed herself to come to friendly terms with him. Then this feeling faded a bit. The very young are very weak in the face of constituted authority--besides, there was always at the back of Pinckney her father's wish. "And then again, on top of that," he went on, "there's the question of your coming to live with us; your father wished it." "In America!" cried Phyl. "Do you mean I am to live in America?" "Well, we live there; why not? It's not a bad place to live in--and what else are you to do?" She could not answer him. This time she saw that the bogey man had got her and no mistake. America to her seemed as far as the moon and far less familiar. If Pinckney had declared that it was necessary for her to die, she would have been a great deal more frightened, but the prospect would not have seemed much more desolate and forbidding and final. He saw at once the trouble in her mind and guessed the cause. He had a rare intuition for reading minds, and it seemed to him he could read Phyl's as easily as though the outside of her head were clear glass--he had cause to modify this cocksure opinion later on. "Don't worry," he said. "If you don't like America when you see it, you can come back to Ireland. I daresay we can arrange something; anyhow, don't let us meet troubles half way." "When am I to go?" said Phyl. "Sure, Phyl, you can stay as long as you like with us," said Mr. Hennessey. "The doors of 10, Merrion Square, are always open to you, and never will they be shut on you except behind your back." Pinckney laughed; and a servant coming in to clear the breakfast things, Hennessey led the way from the room to show Pinckney the premises. CHAPTER VI They crossed the hall, and passing through a green-baize covered door went down a passage that led to the kitchen. "This is the housekeeper's room," said Hennessey, pointing to a half open door, "and the servants' hall is that door beyond. This is the kitchen." They paused for a moment in the great old-fashioned kitchen, with an open range capable of roasting a small ox, one might have fancied. Norah, the cook, was busy in the scullery with her sleeves tucked up, and under the table was seated Susie Gallagher, a small and grubby hanger-on engaged in the task of washing potatoes. The potatoes were beside her on the floor and she was washing them in a tin basin of water with the help of an old nail-brush. There was a horse-shoe hung up, for luck, on the wall over the range, and a pile of dinner plates, from last night's dinner and still unwashed, stood on the dresser, where also stood a half-bottle of Guinness' stout and a tumbler; an old setter bitch lay before the fire and a jackdaw in a wicker cage set up a yell at the sight of the visitors, that brought Norah out of the scullery to receive them, a broad smile on her face and her arms tucked up in her apron. "He always yells like that at the sight of tramps or stray people about," apologised the cook. "He's better than a watch-dog. Hold your tongue, you baste; don't you know your misthress when you see her?" "Rafferty caught him in the park," said Phyl, "and cut his tongue with a sixpence so as to make him able to speak." They left the kitchen and came into the yard. A big tin can of refuse was standing by the kitchen door, and on top of all sorts of rubbish, potato peelings, cabbage stalks and so forth, lay the carcass of a boiled fowl. It was the fowl they had dined off the night before and it lay there just as it had gone from the table, that is to say, minus both wings and the greater part of the breast, but with the legs intact. Pinckney stared at this sinful sight. Then he pointed to it. "What's that doing there?" he asked. "Waitin' to be took away be the stable boy, sor," replied the cook, who had followed them to the door. "All the rubbish is took away in that ould can every mornin'." "Good God!" said Pinckney under his breath. The expression was shaken out of him, so to speak, and out of a pocket of his character which had never been fully explored, of whose existence, indeed, he was not particularly aware. This Irish expedition was to show him a good many things in life and in himself of which up to this he had been in ignorance. He had never been brought face to face with waste, bald waste without a hat on or covering of any sort, before. "Haven't you any poor people about here?" he asked. "Hapes, sor." Pinckney was on the point of saying something more, but he checked himself, remembering that in the eyes of the servants he was here in the position of a guest. He followed Hennessey across to the stable yard, where Larry, the groom, was washing the carriage that had fetched him from the station the night before. "The servants won't eat chicken," said Phyl, in an apologetic way. She had noted everything and she guessed his thoughts. "They won't eat game either--and they throw things away if they don't like them--of course, it's wasteful, but they _do_ give things to the poor. Lots of poor people come here, every day nearly, but they don't care for scraps--you see, it _is_ insulting to give a poor person scraps, just as though they were animals. I remember the cook we had before Norah did it when she came first, and all the poor people stopped coming to the house. Said she ought to know better than to offer them the leavings." "Cheek!" "Well, I don't know," said Phyl. "We've done it for hundreds of years." She closed her mouth in a way she had when she did not wish to pursue a subject further. Despite the fact that she had made friends with Pinckney, she was galled by his attitude of criticism. Guardian or no guardian, he was a stranger; relation or no relation, he was a stranger, and what right had a stranger to dare to come and turn up his nose at the poor people or make remarks--he hadn't said a word--about the wastefulness of the servants? The redoubtable Rafferty was standing in the yard chewing a straw and watching Larry at work. Rafferty was a man of genius, who had started as a helper and odd job person, and had risen to the position of factotum. He had ousted the Scotch gardener and insinuated a relation of his own in his place. There was scarcely a servant about the estate that was not a relation of Rafferty's. Philip Berknowles had put up with a lot from Rafferty simply because Rafferty was an invaluable person in his way when not crossed. Everything went smoothly when the factotum was not interfered with. Cross him and there were immediate results ranging from ill-groomed horses to general unrest. He was a dark individual, half groom, half game-keeper in dress, a "wicked-looking divil," according to the description of his enemies, and an exceedingly foxy-looking individual in the eyes of Pinckney. "Rafferty," said Mr. Hennessey, "I want to show this gentleman round. Let's see the stables." Rafferty touched his cap and led the way, showing first the stalls and boxes where four or five horses were stabled, and then leading the way through the coach-house to the path from which opened the kitchen gardens. They were immense and walled in with red brick, capable, one might fancy, of supplying the wants of three or four houses the size of Kilgobbin. Pinckney noted this fact, also that the home farm to which the kitchen gardens led was apparently a prosperous and going little concern, with its fowls and chickens penned or loose, styes filled with grunting pigs, and turkeys gobbling and spreading their tails in the sun. "Who looks after all this?" asked Pinckney. "I do, sor," replied Rafferty. "What are the takings?" "I beg your pardon, sor?" "The profits, I mean. You sell these things, don't you?" "Kilgobbin isn't a farm, sor, it's a gintleman's estate." Pinckney, not at all set back by this snub, turned and looked the factotum in the face. "Just so," said he, "but I've never heard of gentlemen growing pigs to look at; peacocks, maybe, but not pigs. However, we'll have another look at the business later." He turned and they went on, Rafferty disturbed in his mind and much put about by the manner of the other in whom he began to divine something more than a casual guest, Phyl almost as much put out as Rafferty. The idea that the factotum might have been robbing her father right and left never occurred to her; even if it had, it would not have softened the fact that a strange hand was at work in her old home turning over things, inspecting them, holding them up for comment. She managed to drop behind as they left the farm yard for the paddocks, then turning down the yew lane that led back to the house, she ran as though hounds were after her, reached the house, locked herself in her bedroom, and flung herself on the bed in a tempest of weeping, dragging a pillow over her head as if to shield herself from the blows that the world was aiming at her. Phyl, without mother, brothers or sisters, had centred all her affection on her father and Kilgobbin; the servants, the place itself and all the things and people about it were part and parcel with her life, and the death of her father had intensified her love of the place and the people. If Pinckney had only known, he might have put the business of the inspection of the property and the dealing with the servants into other hands, but Pinckney was young and full of energy and business ability; he was full of conscientiousness and the determination to protect his ward's interests; he had scented a rogue in Rafferty, and at this very minute returning to the house with Hennessey, he was declaring his intention to make an overhaul of the working of the estate. Rafferty was to appear before him and produce his accounts and make explanations. Mrs. Driscoll was to be examined as to the expenditure, etc. He little knew the hornet's nest into which he was about to poke his finger. CHAPTER VII The grand inquisition began that evening after dinner--Phyl did not appear at dinner, alleging a headache--and Rafferty, summoned to the library, had to stand whilst Pinckney, seated at the table with a pen in his hand and a sheet of paper before him, went into the business of accounts. Mark how the unexpected occurs in life. Rafferty, who had been pilfering for years, selling garden produce and keeping the profits, robbing corn from the corn bin in the stable, poaching and selling birds and ground game to a dealer in Arranakilty, receiving illicit commissions and so forth, had on the death of his master shaken off all restraint and prepared for a campaign of open plunder. The very last thing he could have imagined was the sudden appearance of an American business man on the scene, armed with absolute power and possessing the eye of a hawk. "Your master asked me just before he died to look after this estate," began Pinckney; "in fact, he has appointed me to act as guardian to Miss Berknowles, so I just want to see how things stand. Now, to begin with the horses. I want to know everything about the stables during the last--shall we say--six months. Who supplies the corn and the hay and the straw?" "I've been gettin' some from Faulkner of Arranakilty, sor, and some from Doyle of Bally-brack." "Don't you grow any horse food on the estate?" "We don't grow no corn, sor." "Well, hay and straw?" "You can't get straw, sor, widout you grow corn." "I know that--but how about hay--surely you grow lots of grass?" "We graze the grass, sor." "Do you let the grazing?" "Well, sor, it's this way; the masther was never very shtrict about the grazin'; we puts some of the horses out to grass, ourselves, and we lets poor folk have a bit of grazin' now and then for their cattle, though master was never after makin' money from the estate--" "Just so. Have you the receipted bills for the fodder during the last six months?" "Yes, sor. The master always sent me wid the money to pay the bills." "You have got the receipts?" "The which, sor?" "The bills receipted." "Bills, sure, what's the good of keepin' bills, sor, when the money's paid. I b'lave they're somewhere in an ould crock in the stable, at laste that's where I saw thim last." "Well," said Pinckney, "you can fetch them for me to-morrow morning, and now let's talk about the garden." Rafferty, not knowing what Pinckney might discover and so being unable to lie with confidence, had a very bad quarter of an hour over the garden. Pinckney was not a man to press another unduly, nor was he a man to haggle about halfpence or worry servants over small peccadillos. He knew quite well that grooms are grooms, and will be so as long as men are men. He would never have bothered about little details had Rafferty been an ordinary servant. He recognised in Rafferty, not a servant to be dismissed or corrected, but an antagonist to be fought. It was the case of the dog and badger. Rafferty was Graft and all it implies, Pinckney was Straight Dealing. And Straight Dealing knew quite well that the only way to get Graft by the throat is to ferret out details, no matter how small. So Rafferty was taken over details. He had to admit that he had "given away" some of the stuff from the garden and sold "a bit," sending it up to Dublin for that purpose; but he was not to be caught. "And the profits," said Pinckney. "I suppose you handed them over to Mr. Berknowles?" "No, sor; the master always tould me to keep any bit of money I might draa from anything I planted extra for me perkisites, that was the understandin' I had with him." "And over the farmyard, I suppose anything you could make by selling any extra animals you planted was your perquisite?" "Yes, sor." "Very well, Rafferty, that will do for to-night; get me those receipted bills to-morrow morning. Come here at ten o'clock and we will have another talk." Rafferty went off, feeling more comfortable in his mind. The word Perquisites might be made to cover a multitude of sins, but he would not have been so easy if he had known that Mrs. Driscoll had been called up immediately after his departure. Mrs. Driscoll was one of those terrible people who say nothing yet see everything; for the last year and a half she had been watching Rafferty; knowing it to be quite useless to report what she knew to her easy-going master, she had, none the less, kept on watching. As a result, she was now able to bring up a hard fact, a small hard fact more valuable than worlds of ductile evidence. Rafferty had "nicked"--it was the lady's expression--a brand-new lawn mower. "I declare to God, sir, I don't know what he _has_ took, for me eyes can't be everywhere, but I do know he's took the mower." "Why did you not tell Miss Phyl?" "I did, sir, and she only said, 'Oh, there must be a mistake--what would he be doin' with it,' says she. 'Sellin' it,' says I. 'Nonsense,' says she. You see, sir, Rafferty and she has always been hand in glove, what with the fishin' and shootin', and the horses and such like, and she won't hear a word against him." Mrs. Driscoll had called Rafferty a sly devil--he was. At eleven o'clock next morning, Phyl, crossing the stable yard with some sugar for the horses, met Rafferty. He was crying. "Why, what on earth's the matter, Rafferty?" asked the girl. "I've got the shove, miss," replied Rafferty, "after all me years of service, I'm put out to end me days in a ditch." "You mean you're discharged!" she cried. "Was it Mr. Pinckney?" "That's him," replied Rafferty. "Says he's the masther of us all. 'Out you get,' says he, 'or it's I that'll be callin' a p'leeceman to put you,' says he. Flung it in me face that I'd stolen a laan mower. Me that's ben on the estate man and boy for forty year. A laan mower! Sure, Miss Phyl, what would I be doin' with a laan mower?" Phyl turned from him and ran to the house. Pinckney and Hennessey were seated in the library when the door burst open and in came Phyl. Her eyes were bright and her lips were pale. "You told me you would keep all the servants," said she. "Rafferty tells me you have dismissed him." "I should think I had," said Pinckney lightly, and not gauging the mad disturbance of the other, "and it's lucky for him I haven't put him in prison." The word prison was all that was wanted to fire the mine. Pinckney stood for a moment aghast at the change in the girl. "I _hate_ you," she cried, coming a step closer to him. "I loathe you--master of us all, are you? Dare to touch any one here and I'll burn the house down with my own hands--you--you--" She paused for want of breath, her chest heaving and her hands clenched. Then Pinckney exploded. The good old fiery Pinckney blood was up. Oh, without any manner of doubt our ancestors are still able to speak, and it was old Roderick Pinckney--"Pepper Pinckney" was his nickname--that blazed out now. It was also the fire of youth answering the fire of youth. "Damn it!" he cried. "I've come here to do my best--I don't care--keep who you want--be robbed if you like it--I'm off--" He caught up all the sheets of paper he had been covering with figures and tore them across. "Beast!" cried Phyl. She rushed from the room and upstairs like a mad creature. The bang of her bedroom door closed the incident. "Now don't be taking on so," said Hennessey. "You've both of you lost your temper." "Lost my temper--maybe. I'm going all the same. Right back to the States. I'm off to Dublin by the next train and you'd better come and finish the business there. You'd better have her to stay with you in Dublin. I don't want to see her again. Anyhow, we'll settle all that later." "Maybe that's the best," said Hennessey. "My wife will look after her till she's ready to go to the States--if she wants to." "Please God she doesn't," replied the other. Phyl did not see Pinckney again. He went off to Dublin by the two-ten train with Hennessey, the latter promising to be back on the morrow to arrange things. CHAPTER VIII Dublin can never have been a cheerful city. Even in the days when the butchers joined in street fights and hung their antagonists when caught on steel hooks--like legs of mutton--the gaiety of Dublin one may fancy to have been more a matter of spirits than of spirit. Echoes from the days when the Parliament sat in Stephen's Green come down to us through the works of Charles Lever, but the riotous gaiety of the old days when Barrington was a judge of the Admiralty Court, the Hell Fire Club an institution, and Count Considine a figure in society, must be taken with a grain of salt. Mangan shows you the old Dublin as it was in those glorious times, and in the new Dublin of to-day the shade of Mangan seems still to walk arm in arm with the shade of Mathurin. Gloomy ghosts addicted to melancholy, noting with satisfaction that the streets are as dirty as ever, the old Public Houses still standing, that, despite the tramways--those extraordinary new modern inventions--the tide of life runs pretty much the same as of old. The ghosts of Mangan and Mathurin have never seen a taxi cab. Dublin at the present day is a splendid city for old ghosts to wander in without having their corns trodden on or their susceptibilities injured. Phyl had come to Dublin to live with the Hennesseys in Merrion Square. "Never shall my door be shut on you except behind your back," Hennessey had said, and he meant it. The girl was worth several thousand a year; had she been penniless it would have been just the same. You may meet many geniuses in your journey through life, many brilliant people, many beautiful people, many fascinating people, but you will not meet many friends. Hennessey belonged to the society of Friends, his wife was a member of the same community, and he would have been ruined only for his partner Niven, who was an ordinary lowdown human creature who believed in no one and kept the business together. On the day of her arrival at Merrion Square and during her first interview with Mrs. Hennessey in the large, cheerless drawing-room where decalcomanied flower pots lingered like relics of the Palæolithic age of Art, Phyl kept herself above tears, just as a swimmer keeps his head above water in a choppy sea. It was all so gloomy, yet so friendly, that the mind could not openly revolt at the gloom; it was all so different from the wind and trees and freedom of Kilgobbin, and Mrs. Hennessey, whom she had only seen once before, was so different, on closer acquaintance, from any of the people she had hitherto met in her little world. Mrs. Hennessey, with a soul above dust and housekeeping, a faded woman, not very tidy, with an exalted air, pouring out tea from a Britannia metal ware teapot and talking all the time about Willy Yeates, the Irish Players and Lady Gregory's last play, fascinated the girl, who did not know who Willy Yeates was and who had never seen the Irish Players. Nor could she learn from Mrs. Hennessey. It was impossible to get a word in edgeways with that lady. Sometimes, indeed, during a lull in her mind disturbance, she would remain quiet whilst you answered some question, only to find that she had totally forgotten the question and was not listening to your reply. Phyl got so used to Mrs. Hennessey after a few days that she did not listen to her questions, and so the two being matched, they got on well together. Young people soon accommodate themselves to their surroundings, and in a month the girl had grown to the colour of her new life, at least, on the outside of her mind. It seemed to her that she had lived years in Merrion Square. Kilgobbin--Hennessey had managed to let the place--seemed a dream of her childhood. She saw no future, and rebellion was impossible; there was nothing to rebel against--except the dulness and greyness of life. No people could have been kinder than the Hennesseys; unfortunately they had numerous friends, and the friends of the Hennesseys did not appeal to Phyl. A boy in her position would have adapted himself quickly enough, and been hail fellow well met with Mr. Mattram, the dentist of Westland Row, or the young Farrels, whose father owned one of the biggest wine merchants' businesses in the city; but the feminine instinct told Phyl that these were not the sort of people from whose class she had sprung, that their circle was not her circle and that she had stepped down in life in some mysterious way. This fact was brought sharply home to her by a young Farrel, a male of the Farrel brood, a hobbledehoy, good-looking enough but with a Dublin accent and a cheeky manner. This immature wine merchant at a party given by Mrs. Hennessey had made love to Phyl and had tried to kiss her behind the dining-room door. The recollection of the smack in the face she had given him soothed her that night as she lay tossing in her bed, and it was on this night and for the first time since she left Kilgobbin that the recollection of Pinckney came before her otherwise than as a shadow. He stood with the Hennessey circle as his background, a bright, good-looking figure and a gentleman to his finger-tips. Why had she cast aside her own people--even though they were distant relations? What stupidity had caused her to insult Pinckney by telling him she hated him? She found herself asking that question without being able to answer it. After all that fuss at Kilgobbin and Pinckney's departure, Mr. Hennessey had proved to her that Rafferty was a rogue who deserved no quarter; the man had been dismissed, the whole business was done with and over, and now, looking back in cool blood, she was utterly unable to reconstruct and put together the reasons for the outburst of anger that had severed her from the one kinsman who had put out his hand to help her. She could no longer conjure up the feeling that Pinckney was an interloper come to break up Kilgobbin and spoil the home she had known from childhood. Fate had done that. Kilgobbin was gone--let to strangers; Hennessey had taken over her guardianship _pro tem_, and it was entirely owing to herself that she was in her present position. She had no right to criticise the friends of the Hennesseys; she had deliberately walked into that circle from which she felt she never could escape now. Just as Pinckney had discovered that guardianship was showing him traits in his character hitherto unknown to him, Phyl was discovering her woman's instinct as regards social matters. She recognised that once having taken her place amongst the Hennessey set, her position for life was fixed, as far as Ireland was concerned. She was branded. The Berknowles were an old family, but she was the last of them. The relatives living in the south could be no help to her; they were poor, rabid Catholics and had fallen to little account, owing to unwise marriages and that irresponsible fatuous apathy in affairs which is the dry rot of Ireland and the Irish people. They were proud as Lucifer, but no one was proud of them. If only Philip Berknowles had been a man to make fast friends amongst his own class, some of those friends might have come to his daughter's rescue now. But Berknowles had lived his own life since the death of his wife, an easy-going country gentleman in a county mostly inhabited by squireens and cottage folk, caring little for the _convenances_ and with no taste for women's society. Thoughts born of all these facts, some of which were only half understood, filled the mind of the girl as she lay awake with the noise of that raucous party ringing in her ears; and when she fell asleep, it was only to awake with a sense of despondency weighing upon her and the odious Farrel incident waiting to follow her through the day. About a week later, coming down to breakfast one morning, she found a letter on her plate. A letter with American stamps on it and the address, Miss Phylice Berknowles, Merrion Square, Dublin, Ireland, written in a firm, bold hand. Mrs. Hennessey was not down and Mr. Hennessey had departed for the office, so Phyl had the breakfast table to herself--and the letter. She knew at once whom it was from, even before she read the postmark, "Charleston." Pinckney, the man who had been in her thoughts during the past six or seven days, the man who had left Ireland righteously disgusted with her, the man to whom she had said, "I hate you!" The scene flashed before her as she tore the envelope open, his sudden blaze of anger, the way he had torn the papers up, his departure. What was he going to say to her now? She flushed at the thought that this thing in her hand might prove to be his opinion of her in cold blood, a reproof, a remonstrance--she opened the folded sheet--ah! "Dear Phyl, "Aunt Maria was greatly disappointed when I returned here without you, she had quite made up her mind that you were coming back with me. We both lost our temper that day, but I was the worse, for I said a word I shouldn't have said, and for which I apologise. Aunt Maria says it was the Pinckney temper. However that may be, we shall be delighted to see you. Mrs. Van Dusen leaves on the 6th of next month. I am sending all particulars to Mr. Hennessey. You could meet Mrs. Van Dusen at Liverpool and go with her as far as New York. Let me have a cable to know if you are coming. Pinckney, Vernons, Charleston, U. S. A., is the cable address. "Your affectionate guardian--also cousin-- "R. Pinckney." Then underneath, in an angular, old-fashioned hand, one of those handwritings we associate with crossed letters, rosewood desks, valentines and wafers: "Be sure to come. I am very anxious to see you, and I only hope you will like me as much as I am sure to like you. "Maria Pinckney." Phyl caught her breath back when she read this and her eyes filled with tears. It was the woman's voice that touched her, coming after Pinckney's business-like and jerky sentences. Then she sat with the letter before her, looking at the new prospect it had opened for her. Was Pinckney still angry, despite his talk about the Pinckney temper; had he written not of his own free will but at the desire of Maria Pinckney? She read the thing over again without finding any solution to this question. But one fact was clear. Maria Pinckney was genuine in her invitation. "I'll go," said Phyl. She rose up from the table as though determined then and there to start off for America, left the room, went upstairs and knocked at Mrs. Hennessey's door. That lady was sitting up in bed with a stocking tied round her throat--she was suffering from a slight attack of tonsilitis--and the Irish _Times_ spread on her knees. "Mrs. Hennessey," said Phyl, "I have just had a letter from my cousins in America, and they want me to go out to them." "Want you to go to America!" said Mrs. Hennessey. "On a visit, I suppose?" "No, to stay there." "To stay in America; but what on earth do they want you to do that for? Who on earth would dream of leaving Dublin to live in America! It's extraordinary the ideas some people get hold of. Then, of course, they don't know, that's all that's to be said for them. It's like hearing people talking and talking of all the fine views abroad, and you'd think they'd never seen the Dargle or the Glen of the Downs; they don't know the beauty of their own country or haven't eyes to see it, and they must go raving of the Bay of Naples with Kiliney Bay a stone's throw away from them, and talking of Paris with Dublin outside their doors, and praising up foreign actors with never a word of the Irish Players. Dublin giving her best to them, and they with deaf ears to her music and blind eyes to her sons." "But, you see, Mrs. Hennessey, the Pinckneys are my relations." "Irish?" cried the good woman, absolutely unconscious of everything but the vision before her. "Those that can't see their own land aren't Irish. Mongrels is the name for them, without pride of heart or light of understanding." She was off. With a far, fixed gaze and her mind in a state of internal combustion, she seemed a thousand miles away from Phyl and her affairs, fighting the battles of Ireland. Phyl gathered the impression that, if she went to America Mrs. Hennessey would grieve less over the fact that she (Phyl) was leaving Merrion Square, than over the fact that she was leaving Dublin. She escaped, carrying this impression with her, went upstairs, dressed, and then started off for Mr. Hennessey's office. It was a cold, bright day and Dublin looked almost cheerful in the sunlight. The lawyer looked surprised when she was shown into his private room; then, when she had told him her business, he fumbled amongst the papers on his desk and produced a letter. "This is from Pinckney," said he. "It came by the same post as yours, only it was directed to the office. It's the same story, too. He wants you to go over." "I've been thinking over the whole business," said Phyl, "and I feel I ought to go." "Aren't you happy in Dublin?" asked he. "M'yes," answered the other. "But, you see--at least, I'm as happy as I suppose I'll be anywhere, only they are my people and I feel I ought to go to them. It's very lonely to have no people of one's own. You and Mrs. Hennessey have been very kind to me, and I shall always be grateful, but--" "But we aren't your own flesh and blood. You're right. Well, there it is. We'll be sorry to lose you, but, maybe, though you haven't much experience of the world, you've hit the nail on the head. We aren't your flesh and blood, and though the Pinckneys aren't much more to you, still, one drop of blood makes all the difference in the world. Then again, you're a cut above us; we're quite simple people, but the Berknowles were always in the Castle set and a long chalk above the Hennesseys. I was saying that to Norah only last night when I was reading the account of the big party at the Viceregal Lodge and the names of all the people that were there, and I said to her, 'Phyl ought to be going to parties like that by and by when she grows older, and we can't do much for her in that way,' and off she goes in a temper. 'Who's the Aberdeens?' says she. 'A lot of English without an Irish feather in their tails, and he opening the doors to visitors in his dressing gown--Castle,' she says, 'it's little Castle there'll be when we have a Parliament sitting in Dublin.'" "I don't want to go to parties at the Viceregal Lodge," said Phyl, flushing to think of what a snob she had been when only a few days back she had criticised the Hennesseys and their set in her own mind. These honest, straightforward good people were not snobs, whatever else they might be, and if her desire for America had been prompted solely by the desire to escape from the social conditions that environed her friends, she would now have smothered it and stamped on it. But the call from Charleston that had come across the water to her was an influence far more potent than that. That call from the country where her mother had been born and where her mother's people had always lived had more in it than the voices that carried the message. "Well," said Hennessey, "you mayn't want to go to parties now, but you will when you are a bit older. However, you can please yourself--Do you want to go to America?" "I do," said Phyl. "It's not that I want to leave you, but there is something that tells me I have got to go. When I read the letter first this morning, I was delighted to think that Mr. Pinckney was not still angry with me, and I liked the idea of the change, for Dublin is a bit dreary after Kilgobbin and--and well, I _will_ say it--I don't care for some of the people I have met in Dublin. But since then a new feeling has come over me. I think it came as I was walking down here to the office. It's a feeling as if something were pulling me ever so slightly, yet still pulling me from over there. My father said that there was more of mother in me than him. I remember he said that once--well, perhaps it's that. She came from over there." "Maybe it is," said Hennessey. CHAPTER IX The thing was settled definitely that night, Mrs. Hennessey resisting the idea at first, more, one might have fancied from her talk, because the idea was anti-national than from love of Phyl, though, as a matter of fact, she was fond enough of the girl. "It's what's left Ireland what it is," went on the good lady. "Cripples and lunatics, that's all that's left of us with your emigration; all the good blood of Ireland flowing away from her and not a drop, scarcely, coming back." "I'll come back," said Phyl, "you need not fear about that--some day." "Ay, some day," said Mrs. Hennessey, and stared into the fire. Then the spirit moving her, she began to discant on things past and people vanished. Synge, and Oscar Wilde and Willie Wilde, who was the real genius of the family, only his genius "stuck in him somehow and wouldn't come out." She passed from people who had vanished to places that had changed, and only stopped when the servant came in with the announcement that supper was ready. Then at supper, lo and behold! she discussed the going away of Phyl, as though it were a matter arranged and done with and carrying her full consent and approval. During the weeks following, Phyl's impending journey kept Mrs. Hennessey busy in a spasmodic way. One might have fancied from the preparations and lists of things necessary that the girl was off to the wilds of New Guinea or some region equally destitute of shops. Hennessey remonstrated, and then let her have her way--it kept her quiet, and Phyl, nothing loath, spent most of her time now in shops, Tod and Burns, and Cannock and White's, examining patterns and being fitted, varying these amusements by farewell visits. She was invited out by all the Hennesseys' friends, the Farrels and the Rourkes, and the Longs and the Newlands, and the Pryces and the Oldhams, all prepared tea-parties in her honour, made her welcome, and made much of her, just as we make much of people who have not long to live. She was the girl that was going to America. She did not appreciate the real kindness underlying this terrible round of festivities till she was standing on the deck of the _Hybernia_ at Kingstown saying good-bye to Hennessey. Then, as the boat drew away from the Carlisle pier, as it passed the guardship anchorage and the batteries at the ends of the east and west piers, all those people from whom she had longed to escape seemed to her the most desirable people on earth. Bound for a world unknown, peopled with utter strangers, Ireland, beloved Ireland, called after her as a mother calls to her child. Oh, the loneliness! the desolation! As she stood watching the Wicklow mountains fading in the grey distance, she knew for the first time the meaning of those words, "Gone West"; and she knew what the thousands suffered who, driven from their cabins on the hillside or the moor, went West in the old days when the emigrant ship showed her tall masts in Queenstown Harbour and her bellying canvas to the sunset of the Atlantic. At Liverpool, she found Mrs. Van Dusen, a tall, rather good-looking, rather hard-looking but exceedingly fashionable individual, at the hotel where it was arranged they should meet. Phyl, looking like a lost dog, confused by travel and dumb from dejection, had little in common with this lady, nor did a rough passage across the Atlantic extend their knowledge of one another, for Mrs. Van Dusen scarcely appeared from her state-room till the evening when, the great ship coming to her moorings, New York sketched itself and its blazing skyscrapers against the gloom before the astonished eyes of Phyl. PART II CHAPTER I Holyhead, Liverpool, New York, each of these stopping places had impressed upon Phyl the distance she was putting between herself and her home, making her feel that if this business was not death it was, at least, a very good imitation of dying. But the south-bound express from New York was to show her just what people may be expected to feel _after_ they are dead. America had been for Phyl little more than a geographical expression. "Uncle Tom's Cabin," "The Last of the Mohicans," "The Settlers in Canada" and "Round the World in Eighty Days," had given her pictures, and from these she had built up a vague land of snow and forests, log huts, plains, Red Indians, runaway negroes and men with bowie knives. New York had given this fantastic idea a rough joggle, the south-bound express tumbled it all to pieces. Forests and mountains and plains would have been familiar to her imagination, but the south-bound express was producing for her inspection quite different things from these. New Jersey with its populous towns, for instance, towns she never could have imagined or dreamed of, filled with people whose existence she could not picture. What gave her a cold grue was the suddenly grasped fact that all this great mechanism of life, cities, towns, roaring railways, agricultural lands, manufacturing districts filled with English speaking people--that all this was alien, knew nothing of Ireland or England, except as it might know of Japan or a dream of the past. The people in the train were talking English--were English to all intents and purposes, and yet, as far as England and Ireland were concerned, she knew them to be dead. It had been freezing in New York, a great rainstorm was blowing across the world as they crossed the Delaware; it passed, sweeping away east under the arch of a vast rainbow, even the rainbow seemed alien and different to Irish rainbows--it was too big. Then came Philadelphia, where some of the dead folk left the train and others got in. One had an Irish voice and accent. He was a big man with a hard, pushful face and a great under jaw. Phyl knew him at once for what he was, and that he had died to Ireland long years ago. Then came Wilmington and Baltimore, and then, long after sunset in the dark, a warmer air that entered the train like a viewless passenger, nerve soothing and mind lulling--the first breath of the South. Next morning, looking from the windows of the car, she saw the South. Vast spaces of low-lying land broken by river and bayou, flooded by the light of the new risen sun and touched by a vague mist from the sea, soft as a haze of summer, warm with light and everywhere hinting at the blue deep sky beyond. Youth, morning, and the spirit of the sea all lay in that luminous haze, that warm light filled with the laziness of June; and, for one delightful moment, it seemed to Phyl that summer days long forgotten, rapturous mornings half remembered were here again. The rumble of trestle and boom of bridge filled the train, and now the masts of ships showed thready against the hazy blue of the sky; frame houses sprang up by the track and fences with black children roosting on them; then the mean streets of the coloured quarter and now, as the cars slackened speed, came the bustle that marks the end of a journey. People were getting their light luggage together, and as Phyl was strapping the bundle that held her travelling rug and books, a waft of tepid, salt-scented air came through the compartment and on it the voice of the negro attendant rousing some drowsy passenger. "Charleston, sah." She got out, dazed and numbed by the journey, and stood with the rug bundle in her hand looking about her, half undecided what to do, half absorbed by the bustle and movement of the platform. Then, pushing towards her through the crowd, she saw Pinckney. He had come to meet her, and as they shook hands, Phyl laughed. He seemed so bright and cheerful, and the relief at finding a friend after that long, friendless journey was so great that she laughed right out with pleasure, like a little child--laughed right into his eyes. It seemed to Pinckney that he had never seen the real Phyl before. He took the bundle from her and gave it to a negro servant, and then, giving the luggage checks to the servant and leaving him to bring on the luggage, he led the girl through the crowd. "We'll walk to the house," said he, "if you are not too tired; it's only a few steps away--well--how do you like America?" "America?" she replied. "I don't know--it's different from what I thought it would be, ever so much different--and this place--why, it is like summer here." "It's the South," said Pinckney. "Look, this is Meeting Street." They had turned from the street leading from the station into a broad, beautiful highway, placid, sun flooded, and leading away to the Battery, that chief pride and glory of Charleston. On either side of the street, half hidden by their garden walls, large stately houses of the Georgian era showed themselves. Mansions that had slumbered in the sun for a hundred years, great, solid houses whose yellow-wash seemed the incrustation left by golden and peaceful afternoons, houses of old English solidity yet with the Southern touch of deep verandas and the hint of palm trees in their jealously walled gardens. "Oh, how beautiful!" said Phyl. She stopped, looked about her, and then gazed away down the street. It was as though the old stately street--and surely the Street of Other Days might be its name--had been waiting for her all her life, waiting for her to turn that corner leading from the commonplace station, waiting to greet her like the ghost of some friend of childhood. Surely she knew it! Like the recollection of a dream once dreamed, it lay before her with its walled gardens, its vaguely familiar houses, its sunlight and placidity. Pinckney, proud of his native town and pleased at this appreciation of it, stood by without speaking, watching the girl who seemed to have forgotten his existence for a moment. Her head was raised as if she were inhaling the sea wind lazily blowing from the Battery, and bearing with it stray scents from the gardens by the way. Then she came back to herself, and they walked on. "It's just as if I knew the place," said she, "and yet I never remember seeing anything like it before." "I've felt that way sometimes about places," said Pinckney. "It seemed to me that I knew Paris quite well when I went there, though I'd never been there before. Charleston is pretty English, anyway, and maybe it's that that makes it seem familiar. But I'm glad you like it. You like it, don't you?" "Like it!" said she. "I should think I did--It's more than liking--I love it." He laughed. "Better than Dublin?" It was her turn to laugh. "I never loved Dublin." She turned her head to glance at a peep of garden showing through a wrought iron gate. "Oh, Dublin!--don't talk to me about it here. I want to keep on feeling I'm here really and that there's nowhere else." "There isn't," said he, disclosing for the first time in his life, and quite unconsciously, his passion for the place where he had been born. "There's nowhere else but Charleston worth anything--I don't know what it is about, but it's so." They were passing a wall across whose top peeped an elbow of ivy geranium. It was as though the unseen garden beyond, tired of constraint and drowsily stretching, had disclosed this hint of a geranium coloured arm. Pinckney paused at a wrought iron gate and opened it. "This is Vernons," said he. CHAPTER II A grosbeak was singing in the magnolia tree by the gate and the warmth of the morning sun was filling the garden with a heart-snatching perfume of jessamine. Jessamine and the faint bitterness of sun warmed foliage. It was a garden sure to be haunted by birds; not large and, though well kept, not trim, and sing the birds as loud as they might, they never could break the charm of silence cast by Time on this magic spot. In the centre of the lawn stood a dial, inscribed with the old dial motto: The Hours Pass and are Numbered. Phyl paused for a moment just as she had paused in the street, and Pinckney looking at her noticed again that uptilt of the head, and that far away look as of a person who is trying to remember or straining to hear. Then a voice from the house came across the broad veranda leading from the garden to the lower rooms. A female voice that seemed laughing and scolding at the same time. "Dinah! Dinah! bless the girl, will she never learn sense-- Dinah! Ah, there you are. How often have I told you to put General Grant in the sun first thing in the morning?-- You've been dusting! I'll dust you. Here, get away." Out on the veranda, parrot cage in hand, came a most surprising lady. Antique yet youthful, dressed as ladies were wont to dress of a morning in long forgotten years, bright eyed, and wrathfully agitated. "Aunt," cried Pinckney. "Here we are." The sun was in Miss Pinckney's eyes; she put the cage down, shaded her eyes and stared full at Phyl. "God bless me!" said Miss Pinckney. "This is Phyl," said he, as they came up to the verandah steps. Miss Pinckney, seeming not to hear him in the least, took the girl by both hands, and holding her so as if for inspection stared at her. Then she turned on Pinckney with a snap. "Why didn't you tell me--she's--why, she's a Mascarene. Well, of all the astonishing things in the world-- Child--child, where did you get that face?" Before Phyl could answer this recondite question, she found herself enveloped in frills and a vague perfume of stephanotis. Maria Pinckney had taken her literally to her heart, and was kissing her as people kiss small children, kissing her and half crying at the same time, whilst Pinckney stood by wondering. He thought that he knew everything about Maria Pinckney, just as he had fancied he knew himself till Phyl had shewn him, over there in Ireland, that there were a lot of things in his mind and character still to be known by himself. This, as regards him, seemed the special mission of Phyl in the world. "It's the likeness," said Miss Pinckney. "I thought it was Juliet Mascarene there before me in the sun, Juliet dead those years and years." Then commanding herself, and with one of those reverses, sudden changes of manner and subject peculiar to herself: "Where's your luggage?" "Abraham is bringing it along." "Abraham! Do you mean you didn't drive, _walked_ here from the station?" "Yes," said Pinckney shamefacedly, almost, and wondering what sin against the _covenances_ he had committed now. "And she after that journey from N'York. Richard Pinckney, you are a--man--I was going to have called you a fool--but it's the same thing. Here, come on both of you--the child must be starving. This is the breakfast room, Phyl--Phyl! I will never get used to that name; no matter, I'm getting an old woman, and mustn't grumble--mustn't grumble--umph!" She took Pinckney's walking-stick from him and, with the end of it, picked up a duster that the mysterious Dinah, evidently, had left lying on the floor. She put the duster out on the veranda, rang a bell and ordered the coloured boy who answered it to send in breakfast. Phyl, commanded by Miss Pinckney, sat down to table just as she was without removing her hat. The old lady had come to the conclusion that the newcomer must be faint with hunger after her journey, and when Miss Pinckney came to one of her conclusions, there was nothing more to be said on the matter. It was a pleasant room, chintzy and sunny; they sat down to a gate-legged table that would just manage to seat four comfortably whilst the urn was brought in, a copper urn in which the water was kept at boiling point by a red hot iron contained in a cylinder. Phyl knew that urn. They had one like it at Kilgobbin and she said so, but Miss Pinckney did not seem to hear her. There were times when this lady was almost rude--or seemed so owing to inattention, her bustling mind often outrunning the conversation or harking back to the past when it ought to have been in the present. Tea making, and the making of tea was a solemn rite at Vernons, absorbed her whole attention, but Pinckney noticed this morning that the hand, that old, perfect, delicately shaped hand, trembled ever so slightly as it measured the tea from the tortoise-shell covered tea caddy, and that the thin lips, lips whose thinness seemed only the result of the kisses of Time, were moving as though debating some question unheard. He recognised that the coming of Phyl had produced a great effect on Maria Pinckney. No one knew her better than he, for no one loved her so well. It was she who ordered him about, still, just as though he were a small boy, and sometimes as he sat watching her, so fragile, so indomitable, like the breath of winter would come the thought that a day would come--a day might come soon when he would be no longer ordered about, told to put his hat in the hall--which is the proper place for hats--told not to dare to bring cigars into the drawing-room. To Phyl, Maria Pinckney formed part of the spell that was surrounding her; Meeting Street had begun the weaving of this spell, Vernons was completing it with the aid of Maria Pinckney. The song of the Cardinal Grosbeak in the garden, the stirring of the window curtains in the warm morning air, the feel of morning and sunlight, the scent of the tea that was filling the room, the room itself old-fashioned yet cheerful, chintzy and sunny, all the things had the faint familiarity of the street. It was as though the blood of her mother's people coursing in her veins had retained and brought to her some thrill and warmth from all these things; these things they knew and loved so well. "There's the carriage," said Miss Pinckney, whose ears had picked out the sound of it drawing up at the front door. "They know where to take the luggage. Richard, go and see that they don't knock the bannisters about. Abraham is all thumbs and has no more sense in moving things than Dinah has'n dusting them. Only last week when Mrs. Beamis was going away, he let that trunk of hers slip and I declare to goodness I thought it was a church falling down the stairs and tearing the place to pieces." There was little of the stately languor of the South in Miss Pinckney's speech. She was Northern on the mother's side. But in her prejudices she was purely Southern, or, at least, Charlestonian. Pinckney laughed. "I don't think Phyl's luggage will hurt much even if it falls," said he. "English luggage is generally soft." "It's only a trunk and a portmanteau," said Phyl, as he left the room, but Miss Pinckney did not seem to hear; pouring herself out another cup of tea (she was the best and the worst hostess in the whole world) and seeming not to notice that Phyl's cup was empty, she was off on one of her mind wandering expeditions, a state of soul that sometimes carried her into the past, sometimes into the future, that led her anywhere and to the wrapt, inward contemplation of all sorts of things and subjects from the doings of the Heavenly Host to the misdoings of Dinah. She talked on these expeditions. "Well, I'm sure and I'm sure I don't know what folk want with the luggage they carry about with them nowadays-- The old folk didn't. Not Saratoga trunks, anyhow. I remember 'swell as if it was yesterday way back in 1880, when Richard's father and mother were married, old Simon Mascarene--he belonged to your mother's lot, the Mascarenes of Virginia-- He came to the wedding, and all he brought was a carpet-bag. I can see the roses on it still. He wore a beaver hat. They'd been out of fashion for years and years. So was he. Twenty dollars apiece they cost him, and his clothes were the same. Looked like a picture out of Dickens. Your grandmother was there, too, came from Richmond for the wedding, drove here in her own carriage. She and Simon were the last of the Virginia Mascarenes and they looked it. Seems to me some people never can be new nor get away from their ancestors. If you'd dressed Simon in kilts it wouldn't have made any difference, much, he'd still have been Simon Mascarene of Virginia, just as stiff and fine and proud and old-fashioned." "It seems funny that my people should have been the Virginia Mascarenes," said Phyl, "because--because--well, I feel as if my people had always lived here--this feels like home--I don't know what it is, but just as I came into the street outside there I seemed to know it, and this house--" "Why, God bless my soul," said Miss Pinckney, whose eyes had just fallen on the girl's empty cup, "here have I been talking and talking, and you waiting for some more tea. Why didn't you ask, child?--What were you saying? The Virginia Mascarenes-- Oh, they often came here, and your mother knew this house as well as Planters. That was the name of their house in Richmond. But what I can't get over is your likeness to Juliet. She might have been your sister to look at you both--and she dead all these years." "Who was Juliet?" "She was the girl who died," said Miss Pinckney. "You know, although Richard calls me Aunt, I am not really his aunt; it's just an easy name for an old woman who is an interloper, a Pinckney adrift. It was this way I came in. Long before the Civil War, the Pinckneys lived at a house called Bures in Legare Street. A fine old house it was, and is still. Well, I was a cousin with a little money of my own, and I was left lonely and they took me in. James Pinckney was head of the family then, and he had two sons, Rupert and Charles. I might have been their sister the way we all lived together and loved each other--and quarrelled. Dear me, dear me, what is Time at all that it leaves everything the same? The same sun, and flowers and houses, and all the people gone or changed-- Well, I am trying to tell you-- Rupert fell in love with Juliet Mascarene, who lived here. He was killed suddenly in '61-- I don't want to talk of it--and she died of grief the year after. She died of grief--simply died of grief. Charles lived and married in 1880 when he was forty years old. He married Juliet's brother's daughter and Vernons came to him on the marriage. He hadn't a son till ten years later. That son was Richard. Charles left Richard all his property and Vernons on the condition that I always lived here--till I died, and that's how it is. I'm not Richard's aunt, it's only a name he gives me--I'm only just an old piece of furniture left with the house to him. I'm so fond of the place, it would kill me to leave it; places grow like that round one, though I'm sure I don't know why." "I don't wonder at you loving Vernons," said Phyl. "I was just the same about our place in Ireland, Kilgobbin--I thought it would kill me to leave it." "Tell me about it," said Miss Pinckney. Phyl told, or tried to tell. Looking back, she found between herself and Ireland the sunlight of Charleston, the garden with the magnolia trees where the red bird was singing and the jessamine casting its perfume. Ireland looked very far away and gloomy, desolate as Kilgobbin without its master and with the mist of winter among the trees. All that was part of the Past gone forever, and so great was the magic of this new place that she found herself recognising with a little chill that this Past had separated itself from her, that her feeling towards it was faintly tinged by something not unlike indifference. "Well," said Miss Pinckney, when she had finished, "it must be a beautiful old place, though I can't seem to see it-- You see, I've never been in Ireland and I can't picture it any more than the new Jerusalem. Now Dinah knows all about the new Jerusalem, from the golden slippers right up she sees it--I can't. Haven't got the gift of seeing things, and it seems strange that the A'mighty should shower it on a coloured girl and leave a white woman wanting; but it appears to be the A'mighty knows his own business, so I don't grumble. Now I'm going to show you the house and your room. I've given you a room looking right on the garden, this side. You've noticed how all our houses here are built with their sides facing the street and their fronts facing the garden, or maybe you haven't noticed it yet, but you will. 'Pears to me our ancestors had some sense in their heads, even though they didn't invent telegraphs to send bad news in a hurry and railway cars to smash people to bits, and telephones to let strangers talk right into one's house just by ringing a bell. Not that I'd let one into Vernons. You may hunt high or low, garret or basement, you won't find one of those boxes of impudence in Vernons--not while I have servants to go my messages." Miss Pinckney was right. For years she had fought the telephone and kept it out, making Richard Pinckney's life a tissue of small inconveniences, and suffering this epitaph on her sanity to be written by all sorts of inferior people, "Plumb crazy." She led the way from the breakfast-room and passed into the hall. The spirit of Vernons inhabited the hall. One might have fancied it as a stout and prosperous gentleman attired in a blue coat with brass buttons, shorts, and wearing a bunch of seals at his fob. Oak, brought from England, formed the panelling, and a great old grandfather's clock, with the maker's name and address, "Whewel. Coggershall," blazoned on its brass face, told the time, just as it had told the time when the Regent was ruling at St. James's in those days which seem so spacious, yet so trivial in their pomp and vanity. Sitting alone here of an afternoon with the sun pointing fingers through the high leaded windows, Whewel of Coggershall took you under his spell, the spell of old ghosts of long forgotten afternoons, spacious afternoons filled with the cawing of rooks and the drone of bees. English afternoons of the good old time when the dust of the post chaise was the only mark of hurry across miles of meadow land and cowslip weather. And then as you sat held by the sound of the slow-slipping seconds, maybe, from some door leading to the servants' quarters suddenly left open a voice would come, the voice of some darky singing whilst at work. A snatch of the South mixing with your dream of England and the past, and making of the whole a charm beyond words. That is Charleston. Set against the panelling and almost covering it in parts were prints, wood-cuts, engravings, portraits in black and white. Here was a silhouette of Colonel Vernon, the founder of the house, and another of his wife. Here was an early portrait of Jeff Davis, hollow-cheeked and goatee-bearded, and here was Mayflower, the property of Colonel Seth Mascarene, the fastest trotting horse in Virginia, worshipped by her owner whose portrait hung alongside. Phyl glanced at these pictures as she followed Miss Pinckney, who opened doors shewing the dining-room, a room rather heavily furnished, hung with portraits of long-faced gentlemen and ladies of old time, and then the drawing-room. A real drawing-room of the Sixties, a thing preserved in its entirety, in all its original stiffness, interesting as a valentine, perfumed like an old rosewood cabinet. Keepsakes and Books of Beauty lay on the centre table, a gilt clock beneath a glass shade marked the moment when it had ceased to keep time over twenty-five years ago, the antimacassars on the armchairs were not a line out of position; not a speck of dust lay anywhere, and the Dresden shepherds and shepherdesses simpered and made love in the same old fashion, preserving unaltered the sentiment of spring, the suggestion of Love, lambs, and the song of birds. "It's just as it used to be," said Miss Pinckney. "Nothing at all has been changed, and I dust it myself. I would just as soon let a servant loose here with a duster as I'd let one of the buzzards from the market-place loose in the larder. Those water-colours were done by Mary Mascarene, Juliet's sister, who died when she was fifteen; they mayn't be masterpieces but they're Mary's, and worth more'n if they were covered with gold. Mrs. Beamis sniffed when she came in here--she's the woman whose trunk got loose on the stairs I told you about--sniffed as if the place smelt musty. She's got a husband who's made a million dollars out of dry goods in Chicago, and she thought the room wanted re-furnishing. Didn't say it, but I knew. A player-piano is what she wanted. Didn't say it, but _I_ knew. Umph!" Miss Pinckney, having shown Phyl out, looked round the room as if to make sure that all the familiar ghosts were in their places, then she shut the door with a snap, and turning, led the way upstairs murmuring to herself, and with the exalted and far away look which she wore when put out. Phyl's room lay on the first landing, a bright and cheerful room papered with a rather cheap flower and sprig patterned paper, spring-like for all its cheapness, and just the background for children's heads when they wake up on a bright morning. A bowl of flowers stood on the dressing-table, and the open window shewed across the verandah a bit of the garden, where the cherokee roses were blooming. "This is your room," said Miss Pinckney. "It's one of the brightest in the house, and I hope you'll like it-- Listen!" Through the open window came the chime of church-bells. "It's the chimes of St. Michael's. You'll never want a clock here, the bells ring every quarter, just as they've rung for the last hundred years; they're the first thing I remember, and maybe they'll be the last. Well, come on and I'll show you some more of the house, if you're not tired and don't want to rest." She led the way from the room and along the corridor, opening doors and shewing rooms, and then up a back stairs to the top floor beneath the attics. The house seemed to grow in age as they ascended. Not a door in Vernons was exactly true in line; the old house settling itself down quietly through the years and assisted perhaps by the great earthquake, though that had left it practically unharmed, shewed that deviation from the right line in cornice and wainscoting and door space, which is the hall mark left on architecture by genius or age. The builders of the Parthenon knew this, the builders of Vernons did not-- Age supplied their defects. Up here the flooring of the passages and rooms frankly sagged in places, and the beams bellied downwards ever so little and the ceilings bowed. "I've seen all these bed-rooms filled in the old days," said Miss Pinckney. "We had wounded soldiers here in the war. What Vernons hasn't seen of American history isn't worth telling--much. Here's the nursery." She opened a door with bottle-glass panels, real old bottle-glass worth its weight in minted silver, and shewed Phyl into a room. "This is the nursery," said she. It was a large room with two windows, and the windows were barred to keep small people from tumbling into the garden. The place had the air of silence and secrecy that haunts rooms long closed and deserted. An old-fashioned paper shewing birds of Paradise covered the walls. A paper so old that Miss Pinckney remembered it when, as a child, she had come here to tea with the Mascarene children, so good that the dye of the gorgeous Paradise birds had scarcely faded. A beam of morning sun struck across the room, a great solid, golden bar of light. Phyl, as she stood for a moment on the threshold, saw motes dancing in the bar of light; the air was close and almost stuffy owing to the windows being shut. A rocking-horse, much, much the worse for wear stood in one corner, he was piebald and the beam of light just failed to touch his brush-like tail. A Noah's Ark of the good old pattern stood on the lid of a great chest under one of the windows, and in the centre of the room a heavy table of plain oak nicked by knives and stained with ink told its tale. There were books in a little hanging book-case, books of the 'forties' and 'fifties': "Peter Parley," "The Child's Pilgrim's Progress," "The Dairy-Maid's Daughter," an odd volume of _Harper's_ _Magazine_ containing an instalment of "Little Dorrit," Caroline Chesebro's "Children of Light," and Samuel Irenæus Prime's "Elizabeth Thornton or the Flower and Fruit of Female Piety, and other Sketches." Miss Pinckney opened one of the windows to let in air; Phyl, who had said nothing, stood looking about her at the forsaken toys, the chairs, and the little three-legged stool most evidently once the property of some child. All nurseries have a generic likeness. It seemed to her that she knew this room, from the beam of light with the motes dancing in it to the bird-patterned paper. Kilgobbin nursery was papered with a paper giving an endless repetition of one subject--a man driving a pig to market--with that exception, the two rooms were not unlike. Yet those birds were the haunting charm of this place, the things that most appealed to her, things that seemed the ghosts of old friends. She came to the window and looked out through the bars. Across the garden of Vernons one caught a glimpse of other gardens, palmetto-tree tops, and away, beyond the battery, a hint of the blue harbour. Just the picture to fill an imaginative child's mind with all sorts of pleasant fancies about the world, and Phyl, forgetting for a moment Miss Pinckney, herself, and the room in which she was, stood looking out, caught in a momentary day dream, just like a child in one of those reveries that are part of the fairy tale of childhood. That touch of blue sea beyond the red roofs and green palmetto fronds gave her mind wings for a moment and a world to fly through. Not the world we live in, but the world worth living in. Old sailor-stories, old scraps of thought and dreams from nowhere pursued her, haunted her during that delightful and tantalising moment, and then she was herself again and Miss Pinckney was saying: "It's a pretty view and hasn't changed since I was a child. Now, in N'York they'd have put up skyscrapers; Lord bless you, they'd have put them up at a _loss_ so's to seem energetic and spoil the view. That's a N'Yorker in two words, happy so long as he's energetic and spoiling views--" Then gazing dreamily towards the touch of blue sea. "Well, I guess the Lord made N'Yorkers same as he made you and me. His ways are _in_scrutable and past finding out; so'r the ways of some of his creatures." She turned from the window, and her eye fell on the great chest by the other window. Going to it, she opened the lid. It was full of old toys, mostly broken. She seemed to have forgotten the presence of Phyl. Holding the chest's lid open, she gazed at the coloured and futile contents. Then she closed the lid of the chest with a sigh. CHAPTER III The South dines at four o'clock--at least Charleston does. It was the old English custom and the old Irish custom, too. In the reign of William the Conqueror people dined at eleven A.M. or was it ten? Then, as civilisation advanced, the dinner hour stole forward. In the time of the Georges it reached four o'clock. In Ireland, the most conservative country on earth, some people even still sit down to table at four--in Charleston every one does. One would not change the custom for worlds, just as one would not change the old box pews of St. Michael's or replace the cannon on the Battery with modern ordinance. Richard Pinckney did not dine at home that day. He was dining with the Rhetts in Calhoun Street, so Miss Pinckney said as they sat down to table. She sniffed as she said it, for the Rhetts, though one of the best families in the town, were people not of her way of thinking. The two Rhett girls had each a motor-car of her own and drove it--abomination! The automobile ranked in her mind with the telephone as an invention of the devil. Phyl had not seen Richard Pinckney since the morning and now he was dining out. Her heart had warmed to him at the station on the way to Vernons, and at breakfast he had appeared to her as a quite different person to the Richard Pinckney who had come to Kilgobbin, more boyish and frank, less of a man of the world. She had not seen him since he left the room at breakfast-time to look after her luggage. Miss Pinckney said he had gone off "somewhere or another" and grumbled at him for going off leaving his breakfast not quite finished, she said that he was always "scatter braining about" either at the yacht club or somewhere else. Phyl, as she sat now at the dining-table with the dead and gone Mascarene men and women looking at her from the canvases on the wall, felt ever so slightly hurt. Youth calls to youth irrespective of sex. She felt as a young person feels when another young person shows indifference. Then came the thought: was he avoiding her? Was he angry still about the affair at Kilgobbin, or was it just that he did not want to be bothered talking to her, looked on her as a nuisance in the house, a guest of no interest to him and yet to whom he had to be polite? She could not tell. Neither could she tell why the problem exercised her mind in the way it did. Even at Kilgobbin, despite the fact of her antagonism towards him, Pinckney had possessed the power of disturbing her mind and making her think about him in a way that no one else had ever succeeded in doing. No one else had made her feel the short-comings in the household _ménage_ at Kilgobbin, no one else had made her so fiercely critical of herself and her belongings. She did not recognise the fact, but the fact was there, that it was a necessity of her being to stand well in this man's eyes. When a woman falls in love with a man or a man with a woman, the first necessity of his or her being is to stand well in the eyes of the loved one, anything that may bring ridicule or adverse criticism or disdain is death. Phyl was not in love with Richard Pinckney, nor had she been in love with him at Kilgobbin, all the same the sensitiveness to appearances felt by a lover was there. Her anger that night when he had let her in at eleven o'clock was due, perhaps, less to his implied reproof then the fact that she had felt cheap in his eyes, and now, sitting at dinner with Miss Pinckney the idea that he was still angry with her was obscured by the far more distasteful idea that she was of absolutely no account in his eyes, a creature to whom he had to be civil, an interloper. Her cheeks flushed and her eyes brightened at the thought, but Miss Pinckney did not notice it. She had turned from the subject of the Rhetts and their automobiles to Charleston society in general. "Now that you've come," said she, "you will find there's not a moment you won't enjoy yourself if you're fond of gadding about. All the society here is in the hands of young people, balls and parties! The St. Cecilias give three balls a year. I go always, not to dance but to look on. Richard is a St. Cecilia--St. Cecilias? Why, it's just a club a hundred-and-forty years old. There are two hundred of them, all men, and they know how to entertain. I have been at every ball for the last half century. Not one have I missed. Then there's the yacht club and picnics to Summerville and the Isle of Palms, and bathing parties and boating by moonlight. If you are a gad-about you will enjoy all that." "But I'm not," said Phyl. "I've never been used to society, much. I like books better than people, unless they're--" "Unless they're what?" "Well--people I really like." "Well," said Miss Pinckney, "one wouldn't expect you to like people you _didn't_ like--there's no 'really' in liking, it's one thing or the other--you don't care for girls, maybe?" "I haven't seen much of them," replied Phyl, "except at school, and that was only for a short time. I--I ran away." "Ran away! And why did you run away?" "I was miserable; they were kind enough to me, but I wanted to get home--Father was alive then--I felt I had to get home or die--I can't explain it--It felt like a sort of madness. I had to get back home." Miss Pinckney was watching the girl, she scarcely seemed listening to her--Then she spoke: "Impulsive. If I wasn't sitting here in broad daylight, I'd fancy it was Juliet Mascarene. What makes you so like her? It's not the face so much, though the family likeness runs strong, still, the face is different, though like--It's just you yourself--well, I'm sure I don't know, seems to me there's a lot of things hid from us. Look at the Pringles, Anthony's family, the ones that live in Tradd Street. If you put their noses together, they'd reach to Legare Street. It runs in the family. Julian Pringle, he died in '70, he was just the same. Now why should a long nose run through a family like that, or a bad temper, or the colour of hair? I don't know. The world's a puzzle and the older one grows, the more it puzzles one." After dinner, Miss Pinckney ordered Phyl to put on her hat and they started out for a drive. Every day at five o'clock, weather permitting, Miss Pinckney took an airing. She was one of the sights of Charleston, she, and the dark chestnut horses driven by Abraham the coloured coachman, and the barouche in which she drove; a carriage of other times, one of those deathless conveyances turned out in Long Acre in the days when varnish was varnish and hand labour had not been ousted by machinery. It was painted in a basket-work pattern, the pattern peculiar to the English Royal carriages, and the whole turn-out had an excellence and a style of its own--a thing unpurchasable as yesterday. They drove in the direction of the Battery and here they drew up to look at the view. On one side of them stood the great curving row of mansions facing the sea, old Georgian houses and houses more modern, yet without offence, set in gardens where the palmetto leaves shivered in the sea wind and the pink mimosa mixed its perfume with the salt-scented air. On the other side lay the sea. Afternoon, late afternoon, is the time of all times to visit this spacious and sunlit place. It is then that the old ghosts return, if ever they return, to discuss the news brought by the last packet from England, the doings of Mr. Pitt, the Paris fashions. Looking seaward they would see no change in the changeless sea and little change in the city if they turned their eyes that way. Miss Pinckney got out and they walked a bit, inspecting the guns, each with its brass plate and its story. Far away in the haze stood Fort Sumter,--a fragment of history, a sea warrior of the past, voiceless and guarding forever the viewless. It may have been some recollection of the Brighton front and of the great harbour of Kingstown with the sun upon it, and all this seemed vaguely familiar to Phyl, pleasantly familiar and homely. She breathed the sea air deeply and then, as she turned, glancing towards the land, a recollection came to her of the story she had been reading that evening in the library at Kilgobbin--"The Gold Bug." It was near here that Legrand had found the treasure. He had come to Charleston to buy the mattocks and picks--no, it was Jupp the negro who had come to buy them. She turned to Miss Pinckney. "Did you ever read a story called 'The Gold Bug' by Edgar Allan Poe?" she asked. "It is about a place near here--Sullivan's Island--that's it--I remember now." "Why, I knew him," said Miss Pinckney. "Knew Edgar Allan Poe!" said Phyl. "I knew him when I was a child and I have sat on his knee and I can see his face--what a face it was! and the coat he wore--it had a velvet collar--his teeth were beautiful, and his hair--beautiful glossy hair it was, but he was not handsome as people use that expression, he was extraordinary, such eyes--and the most wonderful voice in the world. I'm seventy-five years of age and he died in October '49, and I met him three years before he died, so you see I was a pretty small child. It was at Fordham. He'd just taken a cottage there for his wife, who was ailing with consumption, and my aunt, Mary Pinckney, who was a friend of the Osgoods, took me there. It must have been summer for I remember a bird hanging in a cage in the sunshine, a bob-o'-link it was, he had caught it in the woods. "Dear Lord! I wonder where that summer day's gone to, and the bob-o'-link--'pears to me we aren't even memories, for memories live and we don't." They were walking along, Abraham slowly following with the carriage, and Miss Pinckney was walking in an exultant manner as though she saw nothing about her, as though she were treading air. Phyl had unconsciously set free a train of thought in the mind of Miss Pinckney, a train that always led to an explosion, and this is exactly how it happened and what she said. "But his memory will live. Look right round you, do you see his statue?" "No," said Phyl, sweeping the view. "Where is it?" "Just so, where is it? It's not here, it's not in N'York, it's not in Baltimore, it's not in Philadelphia, it's not in Boston. The one real splendid writing man that America has produced she's ashamed to put up a statue to. Why? Because he drank! Why, God bless my soul, Grant drank. No, it wasn't drink, it was Griswold. The man who hated him, the man who crucified his reputation and sold the remains for thirty pieces of silver to a publisher, Griswold, Rufus Griswold--Judas Griswold that was his real name, and he hid it--" Miss Pinckney had lowered her parasol in her anger, she shut it with a snap and then shot it up again; as she did so an automobile driven by a girl and which was approaching them, passed, and a young man seated by the girl raised his hat. It was Richard Pinckney. The girl was a very pretty brunette. This thing was too much for Miss Pinckney in her present temper; all her anger against Griswold seemed suddenly diverted to the automobile. She snorted. "There goes Richard with Venetia Frances Rhett," said she. "Ought to be ashamed of herself driving along the Battery in that outrageous thing; goodness knows, they're bad enough driven by men, scaring people to death and killing dogs and chickens, without girls taking to them--" She stared after the car, then signalling to Abraham, she got into the barouche, Phyl followed her and they continued their drive. That evening after supper Miss Pinckney's mind warmed to thoughts of the good old days when motor-cars were undreamed of, and stirred up by the recollection of Edgar Allan Poe, discharged itself of reminiscences worth much gold could they have been taken down by a stenographer. She was sitting with Phyl in the piazza, for the night was warm, and whilst a big southern moon lit the garden, she let her mind stray over the men and women who had made American literature in the '50's and '60's, many of whom she had known when young. Estelle Anna Lewis of Baltimore, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Cullen Bryant, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Cornelius Mathews, Frances Sargent Osgood, N. P. Willis, Laughton Osborn. She had known Lowell and Longfellow, yet her mind seemed to cling mostly to the lesser people, writers in the _Southern Literary Messenger_, the _Home Journal_, the _Mirror_ and the _Broadway Journal_. People well-known in their day and now scarcely remembered, yet whose very names are capable of evoking the colour and romance of that fascinating epoch beyond and around the Civil War. "They're all dead and gone," said she, "and folk nowadays don't seem to trouble about the best of them, or remember their lines, yet there's nothing they write now that's as good--I remember poor Thomas Ward. 'Flaccus' was the name he wrote under, a thin skeleton of a man always with his head in the air and his mind somewhere else, used to write in the _Knickerbocker Journal_; I heard him recite one of his things. "'And, straining, fastened on her lips a kiss, That seemed to suck the life blood from her heart.' "That stuck in my head, mostly, I expect, because Thomas Ward didn't look as if he'd ever kissed a girl, but they are good lines and a lot better than they write nowadays." The wind had risen a bit and was stirring in the leaves of the magnolias, white carnations growing near the sun dial shook their ruffles in the moonlight, and from near and far away came the sounds of Charleston, voices, the sound of traffic and then, a thread of tune tying moonbeams, magnolias, carnations and cherokee roses in a great southern bunch, came the notes of a banjo, plunk, plunk, and a voice from somewhere away in the back premises, the voice of a negro singing one of the old Plantation songs. Just a snatch before some closing door cut the singer off, but enough to make Phyl raise her head and listen, listen as though a whole world vaguely guessed, a world forgotten yet still warm and loving, youthful and sunlit, were striving to reach her and speak to her--As though Charleston the mysterious city that had greeted her first in Meeting Street were trying to tell her of things delightful, once loved, once known and forever vanished. As she lay awake that night with the moonlight showing through the blinds, the whole of that strange day came before her in pictures: the face of Frances Rhett troubled her, yet she did not know in the least why; it seemed part of the horribleness of automobiles and the anger of Miss Pinckney and the tribulations of Edgar Allan Poe. Then the fantastic band of forgotten _literati_ trooped before her, led by "Flaccus," the man who didn't look as if he had ever kissed a girl, yet who wrote: "And, straining, fastened on her lips a kiss, That seemed to suck the life blood from her heart." CHAPTER IV Phyl awoke to the early morning sunlight and the sounds of Charleston. The chimes of St. Michael's were striking six and through the summery sunlit air carried by the sea wind stirring the curtains came the cries of the streets and the rumbling of early morning carts. Oh, those negro cries! the cry of the crab-seller, the orange vendor, the man who sells "monkey meat" dolorous, long drawn out, lazy, you do not know the South till you have heard them. The sound of a mat being shaken and beaten on the piazza, adjoining that on which her window opened came now, and two voices in dispute. "Mistress Pinckney she told me to tell you--she mos' sholey did." "Go wash yo' face, yo' coloured trash, cummin' here wid yo' orders--skip out o' my piazza--'clar' to goodness I dunno what's cummin' to niggers dese days." Then Miss Pinckney's voice as from an upper window: "Dinah! Seth! what's that I hear? Get on with your work the pair of you and stop your chattering. You hear me?" When Phyl came down Richard Pinckney was in the garden smoking a cigarette and gathering some carnations. "They're for aunt," said he, "to propitiate her for my being late last night. I wasn't in till one. I'm worse even than you, you see, and the next time you are out till eleven and I let you in and grumble at you, you can hit back. Have a flower." He gave her the finest in his bunch and Phyl put it in her belt. If she had any doubt as to the sincerity of his welcome his manner this morning ought to have set her mind at rest. She stood looking at him as he tied the stalks of the flowers together and he was worth looking at, a fresh, bright figure, the very incarnation of youth and health and one might almost say innocence. Clear eyed, well-groomed, good to look upon. "I generally pick a flower and put it on her plate," said he, "but this morning she shall have a whole bunch--hope you slept all right?" "Rather," said Phyl, "I never sleep much the first night in a new place--but somehow--oh, I don't know how to express it--but nothing here seems new." "Nothing is," said he laughing, "it's all as old as the hills--you like it, don't you?" "It's not a question of liking--of course I like it, who could help liking it--it's more than that. It's a feeling I have that I will either love it or hate it, and I don't know which yet, all sorts of things come back to me here, you see, my mother knew the place--do people remember what their mothers and fathers knew, I wonder? But, if you understood me, it's not so much remembering as feeling. All yesterday it seemed to me that I had only to turn some corner and come upon something waiting for me, something I knew quite well, and the smells and sounds and things are always reminding me of something--you know how it is when you have forgotten a name and when it's lying just at the back of your mind--that's how I feel here, about nearly everything--strange, isn't it?" "Oh, I don't know," said the practical Pinckney. "This place is awfully English for one thing, sure to remind you of a lot of things in Ireland and England, and then there's of course the fact that you are partly American, but I don't see why you should ever hate it." "_Indeed_, I didn't mean that," said she flushing up at the thought that in trying to express herself she had made such a blunder. "I meant--I meant, that this something about the place that is always reminding me of itself might make me hate _it_." "Or love it?" "Yes, but I can't explain--the place itself no one could hate, you must have thought me rude." "Not a bit--not the least little bit in the world. Well, I believe you'll come to love it, not hate it." "It," said Phyl. "I don't know that, because I don't know what it is--this something that is always peeping round corners at me yet hiding itself." "_Richard_!" came Miss Pinckney's voice from the piazza where she had just appeared, "smoking cigarettes before breakfast, how often have I told you I won't have you smoking before breakfast--why, God bless my soul, what are you doing with all those carnations?" He flung the cigarette-end away, but she refused to kiss him on account of the tobacco fumes, though she took the flowers. Cigarettes, like telephones, automobiles, and the memory of Edgar Allan Poe, formed a subject upon which once started Miss Pinckney was hard to check, and whilst she poured out the tea, she pursued it. "Dr. Cotton it was who told me, the one who used to live in Tradd Street, he was a relative of Dr. Garden the man that gave his name to that flower they call the gardenia--had it sent him from somewhere in the South, but I'm sure I don't know where--New Orleans, I think, but it doesn't matter. I was saying about Dr. Cotton, _old_ Dr. Cotton of Tradd Street, he told me that the truth about young William Pringle's death was that he was black when he died, from cigarette smoking, black as a crow. Used to smoke before breakfast, used to smoke all day, used to smoke in his sleep, I b'lieve. Couldn't get rid of the pesky habit and died clinging to it, black as a crow. I can't abide the things. Your father used to smoke Bull Durham in a corn cob, or a cigar, he'd a' soon have smoked one of those cigarettes of yours as soon as he'd have been caught doing tatting. Don't tell me, there's no manhood in them, it's just vice in thimble-fulls. I'd much sooner see a man lying healthily under the table once in a way than always half fuddled, and I'd sooner be poisoned out by a green cigar now and then, than always having that nasty sickly cigarette smell round the place." "But good gracious, Aunt, I'm not a cigarette smoker, only once and away and at odd times." "I wasn't talking about you so much as the young men of to-day, and the young women, they're the worst, for they encourage the others to make fools of themselves, and if they're not smoking themselves they're sucking candy. Candy sucking and cigarette smoking is the ruin of the States. Those Rhett girls _live_ on candy, and they look it--pasty faces." "Why!" said he, "what grudge have you got against the Rhetts now, Aunt--it's as bad to take a girl's complexion away as a man's character--what have the Rhetts been doing to you?" Miss Pinckney did not seem to hear the question for a moment, then she said, speaking as if to some invisible person: "That Frances Rhett may be reckoned the belle of Charleston, that's what I heard old Mr. Outhwaite call her, but she's a belle I wouldn't care to have tied round my neck. Belle! She's no more a belle than I am, there are hundreds of prettier girls between here and the Battery, but she's one of those sort that have the knack of setting young men against each other and making them fight for her; she's labelled herself as a prize, which she isn't. I declare to goodness the world frightens me at times, the way I see fools going about labelled as clever men, and women your grandfathers wouldn't have cast an eye at going about labelled as beauties. I do believe if I was to give myself out as a beauty to-morrow I'd have half the young idiots in Charleston after me, believing me." "They're after you already," said Pinckney, "only yesterday I heard young Reggy Calhoun saying--" "I know," said Miss Pinckney, "and I want no more of your impudence. Now take yourself off if you've finished your breakfast, for Phyl and I have work to do." He got up and went off laughing by way of the piazza and they could hear his cheery voice in the garden talking to the old negro gardener. Miss Pinckney's eyes softened. She was fiddling with a spoon and when she spoke she seemed speaking to it, turning it about as if to examine its pattern all the time. "I don't know what mothers with boys feel like, but I do want to see that boy safe and married before I go. He's just the sort to be landed in unhappiness; he is, most surely; well, I don't know, there's no use in warning young folk, you may spank 'em for stealing the jam but you can't spank 'em from fooling with the wrong sort of girl." Miss Pinckney had talked the night before of Phyl's father and had proposed taking her this morning to the Magnolia cemetery to see the grave. She broke off the conversation suddenly as this fact strayed into her mind, and, rising up, invited Phyl to follow her to the kitchen premises where she had orders to give before starting. "I always look after my own house," said she, "and always will. Fine ladies nowadays sit in their drawing-rooms and ring their bells for the servants to rob them and they aren't any more respected. That's what makes the Charleston negro the impudentest lump of blackness under the sun, that and knowing they're emancipated. They've got to look on themselves as part of the Heavenly Host. Well, I'll have no emancipated rubbish in my house, and the consequence is I never lose a servant and I never get impudence. They'll all get a pension when they're too old to work, and good food and good pay whilst they're working, and I've said to them 'you're no more emancipated than I am, we're all slaves to our duty and the only difference between now and the old days is I can't sell you--and if you were idle enough to make me want to sell you there's no one would buy such rubbish nowadays.' Half the trouble is that people these times don't know how to talk to coloured folk, and the other half is that they don't want to talk to them." She led the way down passages to the great kitchen, stonebuilt, clean and full of sunlight. The door was open on to the yard and through an open side door one could get a glimpse of the scullery, the great washing up sink, generations old, and worn with use, and above it the drying dresser. There were no new-fangled cooking inventions at Vernons, everything was done at an open range of the good old fashion still to be found in many an English country house. Miss Pinckney objected to "baked meat" and the joints at Vernons were roast, swinging from a clockwork Jack and basted all the time with a long metal ladle. By the range this morning was seated an old coloured woman engaged in cutting up onions. This was Prue the oldest living thing in Vernons and perhaps in Charleston; she had been kitchen maid before Miss Pinckney was born, then cook, and now, long past work, she was just kept on. Twenty-five years ago she had been offered a pension and a cottage for herself but she refused both. She wanted to die where she was, so she said. So they let her stay, doing odd jobs and bossing the others just as though she were still mistress of the kitchen--as in fact she was. She had become a legend and no one knew her exact age, she was creepin' close to a hundred, and her memory which carried her back to the slave days was marvellous in its retentiveness. She had cooked a dinner for Jeff Davis when he was a guest at Vernons, she could still hear the guns of the Civil War, so she said, and the Mascarene family history was her Bible. She looked down on the Pinckneys as trash beside the Mascarenes, and interlopers, and this attitude and point of view though well known to Miss Pinckney was not in the least resented by her. But during the last few years this old lady's intellect had been steadily coming under eclipse; still insisting on doing little jobs in a futile sort of way, silence had been creeping upon her so that she rarely spoke now, and when she did, by chance, her words revealed the fact that her mind was dwelling in the past. Rachel, the cook, a sturdy coloured woman with her head bound up in an isabelle-coloured handkerchief was standing by the kitchen table on which she was resting the fore-finger of her left hand, whilst with the right she was turning over some fish that had just been sent in from the fishmonger's. She seemed in a critical mood, but what she said to Miss Pinckney was lost to Phyl whose attention was attracted by a chuckling sound from near the range. It was Prue. The old woman at sight of Phyl had dropped the knife and the onion on which she had been engaged. She was now seated, hands on knees, chuckling and nodding to the girl, then, scarcely raising her right hand from her knee, she made a twiddling movement with the fore-finger as if to say, "come here--come here--I have something to tell you." Phyl glanced at Miss Pinckney who was so taken up with what Rachel was saying about the fish that she noticed nothing. Then she looked again at Prue and, unable to resist the invitation, came towards her. The old woman caught her by the arm so that she had to bend her head. "Miss Julie," whispered Prue, "Massa Pinckney told me tell yo' he be at de gate t'night same time 'slas' night. Done you let on 's I told yo'," she gave the arm a pinch and relapsed into herself chuckling whilst Phyl stood with a little shiver, half of relief at her escape from that bony clutch, half of dread--a vague dread as though she had come in contact with something uncanny. She came to the table again and stood without looking at Prue, whilst Miss Pinckney completed her orders, then, that lady, having finished her business and casting an eye about the place on the chance of finding any dirt or litter, saw Prue and asked how she was doing. "Well, miss, she's doin' fa'r," replied Rachel, "but I'm t'inking she's not long fore de new Jerusalem. Sits didderin' dere 'n' smokin' her pipe, 'n' lays about her wid her stick times, fancyin' there'er dogs comin' into de kitchen." "A dog bit her once way back in the '60's," said Miss Pinckney; "they used to keep dogs here then. She don't want for anything?" "Law no, miss, _she_ done want for nothin'; look at her now laffin' to herself. Haven't seen her do that way dis long time. Hi, Prue, what yo' laffin' at?" Prue, instead of answering leant further forward hiding her face without checking her merriment. "Crazy," said Miss Pinckney, "but it's better to be laughing crazy than crying crazy like some folk--here's a quarter and get her some candy." She put the coin on the table and marched off followed by Phyl. "She wanted to tell me something," said Phyl as they were driving to the cemetery; "she beckoned me to her and took hold of my arm and whispered something." "What did she say?" Phyl, somehow, could not bring herself to betray that crazy confidence. "I don't know, exactly, but she called me Miss Julie." "Oh--she called you Miss Julie," said the other. Then she relapsed into thought and nothing more was said till they reached their destination. CHAPTER V Charleston's Magnolia Cemetery like everything else about Charleston shows the touch of the War. Here the soldiers lie who fought so bravely under Wade Hampton and here lies the general himself. Go south, go north, and you will not find a place touched by the War where you will not find noble memories, echoes of heroic deeds, legends of brave men. Miss Pinckney was by no means a peace party and this thought was doubtless in her head as she stood surveying the confederate graves. There were relations here and men whom she had known as a child. "That's the War," said she, "and people abuse war as if it was the worst thing in the world, insulting the dead. 'Clare to goodness it makes me savage to hear the pasty-faces talking of war and making plans to abolish it. It's like hearing a lot of children making plans to abolish thunder storms. Where would America be now without the War, and where'd her history be? You tell me that. It'd just be the history of a big canning factory. These men aren't dead, they're still alive and fighting--fighting Chicago; fighting pork, and wheat, and cotton and railway-stock and everything else that's abolishing the soul of the nation. "There's Matt Carey's grave. He had everything he wanted, and he wasn't young. Now-a-days he'd have been driving in his automobile killing old women and chickens, or tarpoon fishing down 'n Florida letting the world go rip, or full of neur--what do they call it--that thing that gets on their nerves and makes crazy old men of them at forty--I've forgotten. _He_ didn't. He took up a gun and died like a lion, and he was a middle-aged business man. No one remembers him, I do believe, except, maybe me, clean forgotten--and yet he helped to put a brick into the only monument worth ten cents that America has got--The War. "And some northern people would say 'nice sort of brick, seeing he was fighting on the wrong side.' Wrong side or right side he was fighting for something else than his own hand. _That's_ the point." She closed up her lips and they went on. Phyl found her father's grave in a quiet spot where the live-oaks stood, the long grey moss hanging from their branches. Miss Pinckney, having pointed out the grave, strayed off, leaving the girl to herself. The gloomy, strange-looking trees daunted Phyl, and the grave, too young yet to have a headstone, drew her towards it, yet repelled her. It was like meeting in a dream some one she had loved and who had turned into a stranger in a strange place. Just as Charleston had dimmed Ireland in her mind as a bright light dims a lesser light, so had some influence come between her and the memory of her father. That memory was just as distinct as ever, but grief had died from it, as though Time had been at work on it for years and years. The Phyl who had stepped out of the south-bound express and the girl of this morning were the same in mind and body, but in soul and outlook they had changed and were changing as though the air of the south had some magic in it, some food that had always been denied her and which was necessary for her full being. Miss Pinckney returned from her wanderings amongst the graves and they turned to the gate. "It used to seem strange to me coming here when I was a girl," said she. "It always seemed as if I was come to visit people who could never come to see me. I used to pity them, but one gets older and one gets wiser, and I fancy it's they that pity us, if they can see us at all, which isn't often likely." "D'you think they come back?" said Phyl. "My dear child, if I told you what I thought, you'd say I was plum crazy. But I'll say this. What do you think the Almighty made folk for? to live a few years and then lie in a grave with folk heaping flowers on them? There's no such laziness in nature. I don't say there aren't folk who live their lives like as if they were dead, covered with flowers and never moving a hand to help themselves like some of those N'York women--but they don't count. They're against nature and I guess when they die they die, for they haven't ever lived." Then, vehemently: "Of course, they come back, not as ghosts peekin' about and making nuisances of themselves, but they come back as people--which is the sensible way and there's nothing unsensible in nature. Mind you, I don't say there aren't ghosts, there are, for I've seen 'em; I saw Simon Pinckney, the one that died of drink, as plain as my hand same day he died, but he was a no account. He hadn't the making of a man, so he couldn't come back as a man, and he wasn't a woman, so he couldn't come back as a woman; so he came back as a ghost. He was always an uneasy creature, else I don't suppose he'd have come back as anything. When a man wears out a suit of clothes he doesn't die, he gets a new one, and when he wears out a body--which isn't a bit more than a suit of clothes--he gets a new one. If he hasn't piled up grit enough in life to pay for a new body, he goes about without one and he's a ghost. That's my way of thinking and I know--I know--n'matter." She put up her sunshade and they returned, driving through the warm spring weather. Phyl was silent, the day had taken possession of her. The scent of pink mimosa filled the air, the blue sky shewed here and there a few feather traces of white cloud and the wind from the sea seemed the very breath of the southern spring. It seemed to Phyl as they drove that never before had she met or felt the loveliness of life, never till this moment when turning a corner the song of a bird from a garden met them with the perfume of jessamine. Charleston is full of surprises like that, things that snatch you away from the present or catch you for a moment into the embrace of some old garden lurking behind a wrought iron gate, or tell you a love story no matter how much you don't want to hear it--or tease you, if you are a practical business man, with some other futility which has nothing at all to do with "real" life. It seemed to Phyl as though, somehow, the whole of the morning had been working up to that moment, as though the perfume of the jessamine and the song of the birds were the culmination of the meaning of all sorts of things seen and unseen, heard and unheard. The message of the crazy old negress came back to her. Who was Miss Julie? and who was the Mr. Pinckney that was to meet her, and where was the gate at which they were to meet in such a secretive manner? Was it just craziness, or was it possible that this was some real message delivered years and years ago. A real lover's message which the old woman had once been charged to deliver and which she had repeated automatically and like a parrot. Miss Julie--could it be possible that she meant Miss Juliet--The Juliet Mascarene to whom she, Phyl, bore such a strong family likeness, could it be possible that the likeness had started the old woman's mind working and had recalled the message of a half-a-century ago to her lips. It was a fascinating thought. Juliet had been in love with one of the Pinckneys and this message was from a Pinckney and one day, perhaps, most likely a fine spring day like to-day, Pinckney had given the negro girl a message to give to Juliet, and the lovers and the message and the bright spring day had vanished utterly and forever leaving only Prue. The gate would no doubt be the garden gate. Phyl in all her life had never given a thought to Love, she had known nothing of sentiment, that much abused thing which is yet the salt of life, and Romance for her had meant Adventure; all the same she was now weaving all sorts of threads into dreams and fancies. What appealed to her most was her own likeness to Juliet, the girl who had died so many, many years ago. A likeness incomplete enough, according to Miss Pinckney, yet strong enough to awaken memories in the mind of Prue. CHAPTER VI "Miss Pinckney," said Phyl, as they sat at luncheon that day, "you remember you said yesterday that I was like Juliet Mascarene?" "So you are," replied the other, "though the likeness is more noticeable at first sight as far as the face goes--I've got a picture of her I will show you, it's upstairs in her room, the one next yours on the same piazza--why do you ask me?" "I was thinking," replied Phyl, "that the old woman in the kitchen--Prue--may have meant Juliet when she called me Julie, and that it was the likeness that set her mind going." "It's not impossible. Prue's like that crazy old clock Selina Pinckney left me in her will. It'd tell you the day and the hour _and_ the minute and the year and the month and the weather. A little man came out if it was going to rain and a little woman if it was going to shine. But if you wanted to know the time, it couldn't tell you nearer than the hour before last of the day before yesterday, and if you sneezed near it, it'd up and strike a hundred and twenty. I gave it to Rachel. She said it was 'some' clock, said it was a dandy for striking and the time didn't matter as the old kitchen clock saw to that. It's the same with Prue, the time doesn't matter, and they look up to her in the kitchen mostly, I expect, because she's an oddity, same as Selina Pinckney's clock. Seems to me anything crazy and useless is reckoned valuable these days, and not only among coloured folk but whites--Dinah, hasn't Mr. Richard come in yet?" "No, Mistress Pinckney," replied the coloured girl, who had just entered the room, "I haven't seen no sign of him." "Running about without his luncheon," grumbled the lady, "said he had a deal in cotton on. I might have guessed it." Then when Dinah had left the room and talking half to herself, "There's nothing Richard seems to think of but business or pleasure. I'm not saying anything against the boy, he's as good and better than any of the rest, but like the rest of them his character wants forming round something real. It wasn't so in the old days, they were bad enough then and drank a lot more, but they had in them something that made for something better than business or pleasure. Matt Curry didn't go out and get killed for business or pleasure, and all the old Pinckneys didn't fight in the war or fight with one another for business or pleasure. There's more in life than fooling with girls or buying cotton or sailing yacht races, but Richard doesn't seem to see it. I did think that having a ward to look after would have sobered him a bit and helped to form his character--well, maybe it will yet." "I don't want to be looked after," said Phyl flushing up, "and if Mr. Pinckney--" she stopped. What she was going to say about Pinckney was not clear in her mind, clouded as it was with anger--anger at the thought that she was an object to be looked after by her "guardian," anger at the implication that he was not bothering to look after her, being too much engaged in the business of fooling with girls and buying cotton, and a reasonable anger springing from and embracing the whole world that held his beyond Vernons. "Yes?" said Miss Pinckney. "Oh, nothing," replied the other, trying to laugh and making a failure of the business. "I was only going to say that Mr. Pinckney must have lots to do instead of wasting his time looking after strangers, and if he hadn't I don't want to be looked after. I don't want him to bother about me--I--I--" It did not want much more to start her off in a wild fit of weeping about nothing, her mind for some reason or other unknown even to herself was worked up and seething just as on that day at Kilgobbin when the woes of Rafferty had caused her to make such an exhibition of herself in the library. Anything was possible with Phyl when under the influence of unreasoning emotion like this, anything from flinging a knife at a person to breaking into tears. Miss Pinckney knew it. Without understanding in the least the psychological mechanism of Phyl, she knew as a woman and by some electrical influence the state of her mind. She rose from the table. "Stranger," said she, taking the other by the arm, "you call yourself a stranger. Come along upstairs with me. I want to show you something." Still holding her by the arm, caressingly, she led her off across the hall and up the stairs; on the first floor landing she opened a door; it was the door of the bedroom next to Phyl's, a room of the same shape and size and with the same view over the garden. Just as the drawing-room had been kept in its entirety without alteration or touch save the touch of a duster, so had this room, the bedroom of a girl of long ago, a girl who would now have been a woman old and decrepit--had she lived. "Here's the picture you wanted to see," said Miss Pinckney leading Phyl up to a miniature hanging on the wall near the bed. "That's Juliet, and if you don't see the family likeness, well, then, you must be blind.--And you calling yourself a stranger!" Phyl looked. It was rather a stiff and finicking little portrait; she fancied it was like herself but was not sure, the colour of the hair was almost the same but the way it was dressed made a lot of difference, and she said so. "Well, they did their hair different then," replied Miss Pinckney, "and that reminds me, it's near time you put that tail up." She sat down in a rocker by the window and with her hands on her knees contemplated Phyl. "I'm your only female relative, and Lord knows I'm far enough off, anyhow I'm something with a skirt on it, and brains in its head, and that's what a girl most wants when she comes to your age. You'll be asked to parties and things here and you'll find that tail in the way; it's good enough for a schoolgirl, but you aren't that any longer. I'll get Dinah to do your hair, something simple and not too grown-up--you don't mind an old woman telling you this--do you?" "Indeed I don't," said Phyl. "I don't care how my hair is done, you can cut it off if you like, but I don't want to go to parties." "Well, maybe you don't," said Miss Pinckney, "but, all the same, we'll get Dinah to look to your hair. Dinah can do most anything in that way; she'd get twice the wages as a lady's maid elsewhere and she knows it, but she won't go. I've told her over and again to be off and better herself, but she won't go, sticks to me like a mosquito. Well, this was Juliet's room just as that's her picture; she died in that bed and everything is just exactly as she left it. It was kept so after her death. You see, it wasn't like an ordinary person dying, it was the tragedy of the whole thing that stirred folk so, dying of a broken heart for the man she was in love with. It set all the crazy poets off like that clock of Selina Pinckney's I was telling you of. The _News and Courier_ had yards of obituary notice and verses. It made people forget the war for a couple of days. There's all her books on that shelf and the diary the poor thing used to keep. Open one of the drawers in that chest." Phyl did so. The drawer was packed with clothes neatly folded. The air became filled with the scent of lavender. "There are her things, everything she ever had when she died. It may seem foolish to keep everything like that, foolish and sentimental, and if she'd died of measles or fallen down the stairs and killed herself maybe her old things would have been given away, but dying as she did--well, somehow, it didn't seem right for coloured girls to be parading about in her things. Mrs. Beamis sniffed here just as she sniffed in the drawing-room, and she said, one night, something about sentiment, as if she was referring to chicken cholera. I knew what she meant. She meant we were a pack of fools. Well, she ought to know. I reckon she ought to be a judge of folly--the life she leads in Chicago. Umph!--Now I'm going to lie down for an hour, and if you take my advice you'll do the same. The middle of the day was meant to rest in. You can get to your room by the window." She kissed Phyl and went off. Phyl, instead of going to her room, took her seat in the rocker and looked around her. The place held her, something returned to it that had been driven away perhaps by Miss Pinckney's cheerful and practical presence, the faint odour of lavender still clung to the air, and the silence was unbroken except for a faint stirring of the window curtains now and then to the breeze from outside. Everything was, indeed, just as it had been left, the toilet tidies and all the quaint contraptions of the '50's and '60's in their places. On the wall opposite the bed hung several water colours evidently the work of that immature artist Mary Mascarene, a watch pocket hung above the bed, a thing embroidered with blue roses, enough to disturb the sleep of any æsthete, yet beautiful enough in those old days. There was only one stain mark in the scrupulous cleanliness and neatness of the place--a panel by the window, once white painted but now dingy-grey and scored with lines. Phyl got up and inspected it more closely. Children's heights had evidently been measured here. There was a scale of feet marked in pencil, initials, and dates. Here was "M. M.," probably Mary Mascarene, "2 ft. 6 inches. Nineteen months," and the date "April, 1845," and again a year later, "M. M. 2 ft. 9-1/2 inches, May, 1846." So she had grown three and a half inches in a year. "J. M."--Juliet without doubt--"3 feet, 3 years old, 1845." Juliet was evidently the elder--so it went on right into the early '60's, mixed here and there with other initials, amongst which Phyl made out "J. J." and "R. P.," children maybe staying at the house and measured against the Mascarene children--children now old men and women, possibly not even that. It was in the kindly spirit of Vernons not to pass a painter's brush over these scratchings, records of the height of a child that lingered only in the memory of the old house. Phyl turned from them to the bookshelf and the books it contained. "Noble Deeds of American Women," "Precept on Precept," "The Dairyman's Daughter," and the "New England Primer"--with a mark against the verses left "by John Rogers to his wife and nine small children, and one at the breast, when he was burned at the stake at Smithfield in 1555." There were also books of poetry, Bryant, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, "Powhatan, a metrical romance in seven cantos by Seba Smith," and several others. Phyl did something characteristic. She gathered every single book into a pile in her arms and sat down on the floor with them to have a feast. This devourer of books was omnivorous in her tastes, especially if it were a question of sampling, and she had enough critical faculty to enable her to enjoy rubbish. She lingered over Powhatan and its dedication to the "Young People of the United States" and then passed on to the others till she came to a little black book. It was Juliet Mascarene's diary and proclaimed the fact openly on the first page with the statements: "I am twelve years old to-day and Aunt Susan has given me this book to keep as my diary and not to forget to write each day my evil deeds as well as my good, which I will if I remember them. She didn't give me anything else. I had to-day a Paris doll from Cousin Jane Pinckney who has winking eyes which shut when you lay her on her back and pantalettes with scallops which take off and on and a trunk of clothes with a little key to it. Father gave me a Bible and I have had other things too numerous for mension. "Signed Juliet Mascarene." with never a date. Then: "I haven't done any evil deeds, or good ones that I can remember, so I haven't written in this book for maybe a week. Mary and I, we went to a party at the Pinckneys to-day at Bures, the Calhoun children and the Rutledges were there and we had Lady Baltimore cake and a good time. Mary wore her blue organdie and looked very nice and Rupert Pinckney was there, he's fourteen and wouldn't talk to the children because they were too small for him, I expect. He told me he was going to have a pony same as Silas Rhett that threw him in the market place Wednesday last and galloped all the way to Battery before he was stopped, only his was to be a better one with more shy in it, said Silas Rhett ought to be tied on next time. Then old Mr. Pinckney came in and shewed us a musical snuff-box and we went home, and driving back Mary kicked me on the shin by axident and I pinched her and she didn't cry till we'd got home, then she began to roar and mother said it was my ungovernable temper, and I said I wished I was dead. "I shan't go to any more parties because it's always like that after them. Father told me I was to pray for a new heart and not to have any supper but Prue has brought me up a cake of her own making. So that's one evil deed to put down--It's just like Mary, any one else would have cried right out in the carriage and not bottled it up and kept it up till she got home. "This is a Friday and Prue says Friday parties are always sure to end in trouble for the devil puts powder in the cakes and the only way to stop him is to turn them three times round when they're baking and touch them each time with a forked hazel twig." Phyl read this passage over twice. The mention of Prue interested her vastly. Prue even then had evidently been a favourite of Juliet's. She read on hoping to find the name of the coloured woman again, but it did not occur. The diary, indeed, did not run over more than a year and a half, but scrappy as it was and short in point of time, the character of Juliet shone forth from it, uneasy, impetuous, tormenting and loving. Many books could not have depicted the people round Vernons so well as this scribbling of a child. Mary Mascarene, quiet, rather a spoil-sport and something of a tale-teller, dead and gone Pinckneys and Rhetts. Aunt Susan, Cousin Jane Pinckney, Uncle George who beat his coloured man, Darius, because the said Darius had let him go out with one brass button missing from his blue coat. Simon Pinckney--the one whose ghost walked--and who "fell down in the garden because he had the hiccups," these and others of their time lived in the little black book given by the miserly Aunt Susan "to keep as my diary and not to forget to write each day my evil deeds as well as my good." Towards the end there was another reference to Rupert Pinckney, the tragic lover of the future: "Rupert Pinckney was here to-day with his mother to luncheon and we had a palmetto salad and mother said when he was gone he was the most frivulus boy in Charleston, whatever that was, and too much of a dandy, but father said he had stuff in him and Aunt Susan, who was here too, said 'Yes, stuff and nonsense,' and I said he could ride his pony without tumbling off like Silas Rhett, anyhow. "Then they went on talking about his people and how they hadn't as much money as they used to have, and Aunt Susan said that was so, and the worst of it is they're spending more money than they used to spend, and father said, well, anyhow, that wasn't a very common complaint with _some_ people and he left the room. He never stays long in the room with Aunt S. "I think the Pinckneys are real nice." "Mr. Simon Mascarene from Richmond and his wife came to see us to-day and stay for a week. They drove here in their own carriage with four brown horses and you could not tell which horse was which, they are so alike, they are very fine people and Mr. M. has a red face--not the same red as Mr. Simon Pinckney's, but different somehow--more like an apple, and a high nose which makes him look very grand and fine." The same Simon Mascarene, no doubt, that came to the wedding of Charles Pinckney in 1880 as old Simon Mascarene, the one whose flowered carpet bag still lingered in the memory of Miss Pinckney. "Mrs. M. is very fine too and beautifully dressed and mother gave her a great bouquet of geraniums and garden flowers with a live green caterpillar looping about in the green stuff which nobody saw but me, till it fell on Mrs. M.'s knee and she screamed. There is to be a big party to-morrow and the Pinckneys are coming and Rupert." There the diary ended. Phyl put it back on the shelf with the books. She had not the knowledge necessary to visualise the people referred to, those people of another day when Planters kept open house, when slaves were slaves and Bures the home of the old gentleman with the musical snuff-box, but she could visualise Juliet as a child. The writing in the little book had brought the vision up warm from the past and it seemed almost as though she might suddenly run in from the sunlit piazza that lay beyond the waving window curtains. There was a bureau in one corner, or rather one of those structures that went by the name of Davenports in the days of our fathers. Phyl went to it and raised the lid. She did so without a second thought or any feeling that it was wrong to poke about in a place like this and pry into secrets. Juliet seemed to belong to her as though she had been a sister, her own likeness to the dead girl was a bond of attraction stronger than a family tie, and Juliet's mournful love story completed the charm. The desk contained very little, a seal with a dove on it, some sticks of spangled sealing-wax, a paper knife of coloured wood with a picture of Benjamin Franklin on the handle and some sheets of note-paper with gilt edges. Phyl noticed that the gilt was still bright. She took out the paper knife and looked at it, and then held the blade to her lips to feel the smoothness of it, drawing it along so that her lips touched every part of the blade. Then she put it back, and as she did so a little panel at the back of the desk fell forward disclosing a cache containing a bundle of letters tied round with ribbon. Phyl started as though a hand had been laid on her arm. The point of the paper knife must have touched the spring of the panel, but it seemed as though the desk had suddenly opened its hand, closed and clasping those letters for so many years. For a moment she hesitated to touch them. Then she thought of all the time they had lain there and a feeling that Juliet wouldn't mind and that the old bureau had told its secret without being asked, overcame her scruples. She took the letters and sitting down again on the floor, untied the ribbon. There were no envelopes. Each sheet of paper had been carefully folded and sealed with green wax, with the seal leaving the impression of the dove. There was no address, and they had evidently been tied together in chronological order. But the handwriting was the handwriting of Juliet Mascarene fully formed now. The first of these things ran: "It wasn't my fault. I didn't create old Mr. Gadney and send him to church to keep us talking in the street like that. I did _not_ see you. You couldn't have passed, and if you did you must have been invisible. I feel dreadfully wicked writing to you. Do you know this is a clandestine correspondence and must stop at once? You mustn't _ever_ write to me again, nor I mustn't see you. Of course I can't help seeing you in church and on the street--and I can't help thinking about you. They'll be making me try and stop breathing next. I don't care a button for the whole lot of them. It was all Aunt Susan's doing, only for her my people would never have quarrelled with yours and I wouldn't have been so miserable. I feel sometimes as if I could just take a boat and sail off to somewhere where I would never see any people again. "It was clever of you to send your letter by P. This goes to you by the same hand." There was no signature and no date. Phyl turned the sheet of paper over to make sure again that there was no address. As she did so a faint, quaint perfume came to her as though the old-fashioned soul of the letter were released for a moment. It was vervain, the perfume of long ago, beloved of the Duchesse de Chartres and the ladies of the forties. She laid the letter down and took up the next. "It is _wicked_ of you. My people never would be so mean as to quarrel with your people or look down on them because they have lost money. Why did you say that--and you know I said in my last letter that I could not write to you again. I was shocked when P. pinched my arm as I was passing her on the stairs and handed me your note--Don't you--don't you--how shall I say it? Don't you think you and I could meet and speak to one another somewhere instead of always writing like this? Somewhere where no one could see us. Do you know--do you know--do you, ahem! O dear me--know that just inside our gate there's a little arbour. The tiniest place. When I was a child I used to play there with Mary at keeping house, there's a seat just big enough for two and we used to sit there with our dolls. No one can see the gate from the lower piazza, and the gate doesn't make any noise opening, for father had it oiled--it used to squeak a bit from rust, but it doesn't now and I'll be there to-morrow night at nine--in the arbour--at least I _may_ be there. I just want to tell you in a way I can't in a letter that my people aren't the sort of folk to sneer at any one because they have lost money. "I am sending this by P. "The arbour is just back of the big magnolia as you come in, on the left." Phyl gave a little laugh. Then with half-closed eyes she kissed the letter, laid it softly on the floor beside the first and went on to the next. "Not to-night. I have to go to the Calhouns. It is just as well, for I have a dread of people suspecting if we meet too often. No one sees us meet. No one knows, and yet I fear them finding out just by instinct. Father said to me the other day, 'What makes you seem so happy these times?' If Mary had been alive she would have found out long ago, for I never could keep anything hid from her. I was nearly saying to him, 'If you want to know why I am so happy go and ask the magnolia tree by the gate.' "Sometimes I feel as if I were deceiving him and everybody. I am, and I don't care--I don't care if they knew. O my darling! My darling! My darling! If the whole world were against you I would love you all the more. I will love you all my life and I will love you when I am dead." Phyl's eyes grew half blind with tears. This cry from the Past went to her heart like a knife. The wind, strengthening for a moment, moved the window curtains, bringing with it the drowsy afternoon sounds of Charleston, sounds that seemed to mock at this voice declaring the deathlessness of its love. It was impossible to go on reading. Impossible to expose any more this heart that had ceased to beat. The meetings in the arbour behind the magnolia tree, the kisses, the words that the leaves and birds alone could hear--they had all ended in death. It did not matter now if the garden gate creaked on its hinges, or if watching eyes from the piazza saw the glossy leaves stirring when no wind could shake them--nothing mattered at all to these people now. She put all the letters back in the bureau, carefully closing them in the secret drawer. CHAPTER VII "Miss Pinckney," said Phyl that night as they sat at supper, "when you left me this afternoon in Juliet's room I stopped to look at the books and things and when I opened the bureau I touched a spring by accident and a little panel fell out and I found a lot of old letters behind it. It was wrong of me to go meddling about and I thought I ought to tell you." "Old letters," said Miss Pinckney, "you don't say--what were they about?" "I read one or two," said the girl. "I'd never, never have dreamed of touching them only--only they were hers--they were to him." "Rupert?" "Yes." "Love letters?" "Yes." Miss Pinckney sighed. "He kept all her letters," said she, "and they came back to her after he was killed. He was killed here in Charleston, at Fort Sumter, in the war; they brought him across here and carried him on a stretcher and she--well, well, it's all done with and let it rest, but it is strange that those letters should have fallen into your hands." "Why, strange?" "Why?" burst out Miss Pinckney. "Why I have dusted that old bureau inside and out a hundred times, and pulled out the drawers and pushed them in and it never shewed sign of having anything in it but emptiness, and you don't do more'n look at it and you find those letters. It's just as if the thing had deceived me. I don't mind, and I don't want to see them, they weren't intended for other eyes than his and hers--and maybe yours since they were shewn you like that." "Was it wrong of me to look at them?" asked Phyl. "I never would have done it only--only--Oh, I don't know, I somehow felt she wouldn't mind. She seemed like a sister--I would never dream of looking at another person's letters but she did not seem like another person. I can't explain. It was just as though the letters were my own--just exactly as though they were my own when I found them in my hands." Phyl was talking with her eyes fixed before her as though she were looking across some great distance. Miss Pinckney gave a little shiver, then supper being over she rose from the table and led the way from the room. Richard Pinckney had dined with them but he was out for supper somewhere or another. They went to the drawing-room and had not been there for more than a few minutes when Frances Rhett was announced. The Rhetts were on intimate enough terms with the Pinckneys to call in like this without ceremony; Frances had called to speak to Miss Pinckney about some charity affair she was getting up in a hurry, but she had not been five minutes in the room before Phyl knew that she had called to look at her. To look at the girl who had come to live with the Pinckneys, the red headed girl. Phyl did not know that girls of Frances' type dread red haired girls, if they are pretty, as rabbits dread stoats, but she did know in some uncanny way that Frances Rhett considered Richard Pinckney as her own property to be protected against all comers. All at once and new born, the woman awoke in her instinctive, mistrustful and armed. Frances Rhett, despite Miss Pinckney's dispraise of her, was a most formidable person as far as the opposite sex was concerned. One of the women of whom other women say, "Well, I don't know what he sees in her, I'm sure." A brunette of eighteen who looked twenty, full-blooded, full lipped, full curved, sleepy-eyed, she seemed dressed by nature for the part of the world and the flesh--with a hint of the devil in those deep, dark, pansy blue eyes that seemed now by artificial light almost black. "Well, I'll subscribe ten dollars," said Miss Pinckney; "I reckon the darkie babies won't be any the worse for a _crêche_ and maybe not very much better for it. If you could get up an institution to distil good manners and respect for their betters into their heads I'd give you forty. I'm sure I don't know what the coloured folk of Charleston are coming to, one of them nearly pushed me off the sidewalk the other day, bag of impudence! and the way they look at one in the street with that sleery leery what-d'-you-call-yourself-you-white-trash grin on their faces s'nough to raise Cain in any one's heart." "I know," replied the dark girl, "and they are getting worse; the whip is the only thing that as far as I can see ever made them possible, and what we have now is the result of your beautiful Abolitionists." "Don't call them my beautiful Abolitionists," replied the other. "I didn't make 'em. All the same I don't believe in whipping and never did. It's the whip that whipped us in the war. If white folk had treated black folk like Christians slavery would have been the greatest god-send to blacks. It was what stays are to women. But they didn't. The low down white made slavery impossible with his whipping and oppression and _we_ had to suffer. Well, we haven't ended our sufferings and if these folk go on multiplying like rabbits there's no knowing what we've got to suffer yet." Miss Rhett concurred and took her departure. "Now, that girl," said the elder lady when Frances Rhett was gone, "is just the type of the people I was telling her about. No idea but whipping. _She_ wouldn't have much mercy on a human creature black or tan _or_ white. Thick skinned. She didn't even see that I was telling her so to her face. Wonder what brought her here this hour with her _crêche_. It's just a fad. If they got up a charity to make alligator bait of the black babies so's to sell the alligator skins to buy pants with texts on them for the Hottentots it'd be all the same to her. Something to gad about with. I wish I'd kept that ten dollars in my pocket." Miss Pinckney went to bed early that night--before ten--and Phyl, who was free to do as she chose, sat for a while in the lower piazza watching the moon rising above the trees. She had a little plan in her mind, a plan that had only occurred to her just before the departure of Miss Pinckney for bed. She sat now watching the garden growing ghostly bright, the sun dial becoming a moon dial, the carnations touched by that stillness and mystery which is held only in the light of the moon and the light of the dawn. Phyl found herself sitting between two worlds. In the light of the northern moon in summer there is a vague rose tinge to be caught at times and in places when it falls full on house wall or the road on which one is walking. The piazza to-night had this living and warm touch. It seemed lit by a glorified ethereal day. A day that had never grown up and would never lose the charm of dawn. Yet the garden to which she would now turn her eyes shewed nothing of this. Night reigned there from the cherokee roses moving in the wind to the carnations motionless, moon stricken, deathly white. Sure that Miss Pinckney would not come down again, Phyl rose and crossed the garden towards the gate. She wanted to see if the trysting place behind the magnolia and the bushes that grew about it were still there. At the gate she paused for a moment, glancing back at the house as Juliet Mascarene might have done on those evenings when she had an appointment with her lover. Then, pushing through the bushes and past the magnolia trees she found herself in a little half moonlit space, a natural arbour through whose roof of leaves the moonlight came in quavering shafts. She stood for a moment absolutely still whilst her eyes accustomed themselves to the light. Then she began to search for the seat she guessed to be there, and found it. It was between an oak bole and the wall of the garden, and the bushes behind had grown so that their branches half covered it. Neglected, forsaken, unknown, perhaps, to the people now living in Vernons it had lingered with the fidelity of inanimate things, protected by the foliage of the southern garden from prying eyes. She pushed back the leaves and branches and bent them out of the way, then she took her seat, and as she did so several of the bent branches released themselves and closed half round her in a delightful embrace. From here she could see brokenly the garden and the walk leading from the gate, with the light of the moon now strong upon the walk. The night sounds of the street just beyond the wall came mixed with the stir of foliage as the wind from the sea pressed over the trees like the hand of a mesmerist inducing sleep. So it was here that Juliet Mascarene had sat with Rupert Pinckney on those summer nights when the world was younger, before the war. The war that had changed everything whilst leaving the roses untouched and the moonlight the same on the bird-haunted garden of Vernons. Everything was the same here in this little space of flowers and trees. But the lovers had vanished. "For man walketh in a vain shadow and disquieteth himself in vain." The words strayed across Phyl's mind brought up by recollection. "He cometh up and is cut down like a flower, he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay." The trees seemed whispering it, the eternal statement that leaves the eternal question unanswered. The garden was talking to her, the night, the very bushes that clasped her in a half embrace; perfumes, moonlight, the voice of the wind, all were part of the spell that bound her, held her, whispered to her. It was as though the love letter of Juliet had led her here to show her as in a glass darkly the vainness of love in the vainness of life. Vainly, for as she sat watching in imagination the forms of the lost lovers parting there at the gate, suddenly there came upon her a stirring of the soul, a joyous uplifting as though wings had been given to her mind for one wild second raising it to the heights beyond earthly knowledge. "Love can never die." It was as though some ghostly voice had whispered this fact in her ear. Juliet was not dead nor the man she loved, changed maybe but not dead. In some extraordinary way she knew it as surely as though she herself had once been Juliet. Religion to Phyl had meant little, the Bible a book of fair promises and appalling threats, vague promises but quite definite threats. As a quite small child she had gathered the impression that she was sure to be damned unless she managed to convert herself into a quite different being from the person she knew herself to be. Death was the supreme bogey, the future life a thing not to be thought of if one wanted to be happy. Yet now, just as if she had been through it all, the truth came flooding on her like a golden sea, the truth that life never loses touch with life, that the body is only a momentary manifestation of the ever living spirit. Meeting Street, the old house so full of memories, Juliet's letters, the garden, they had all been stretching out arms to her, trying to tell her something, whispering, suggesting, and now all these vague voices had become clear, as though strengthened by the moonlight and the mystery of night. Clear as lip-spoken words came the message: "You have lived before and we say this to you, we, the things that knew you and loved you in a past life." A step that halted outside close to the garden gate broke the spell, the gate turned on its hinges shewing through its trellis work the form of a man. It was Pinckney just returned from some supper-party or club. Phyl caught her breath back. Suddenly, and at the sight of Pinckney, Prue's words of that morning entered her mind. "Miss Julie, Massa Pinckney told me tell yo' he be at de gate t'night same's las' night. Done you let on as I told you." And here he was, the man who had been occupying her thoughts and who was beginning to occupy her dreams, and here she was as though waiting for him by appointment. But there was much more than that. Worlds and worlds more than that, a whole universe of happiness undreamed of. She rose from the seat and the parted bushes rustled faintly as they closed behind her. Pinckney, who had just shut the gate, heard the whisper of the leaves, he turned and saw a figure standing half in shadow and half in moonlight. For a moment he was startled, fancying it a stranger, then he saw that it was Phyl. "Hullo," said he. "Why, Phyl, what are you doing here?" The commonplace question shattered everything like a false note in music. "Nothing," she answered. Then without a word more she ran past him and vanished into the house. Pinckney cast the stump of his cigar away. "What on earth is the matter with her now?" said he to himself. "What on earth have I done?" The word she had uttered carried half a sob with it, it might have been the last word of a quarrel. He stood for a moment glancing around. The wild idea had entered his mind that she had been there to meet some one and that his intrusion had put her out. But there was no one in the garden; nothing but the trees and the flowers, wind shaken and lit by the moon, the same placid moon that had lit the garden of Vernons for the lovers of whom he knew nothing except by hearsay, and for whom he cared nothing at all. CHAPTER VIII When Phyl awoke from sleep next morning, the brightness of the South had lost some of its charm. Something magical that had been forming in her mind and taking its life from Vernons had been shattered last night by Pinckney's commonplace question. This morning, looking back on yesterday, she could remember details but she could not recapture the essence. The exaltation that had raised her above and beyond herself. It was like the remembrance of a rose contrasted with the reality. The whole day had been working up to that moment in the little arbour, when her mind, tricked or led, had risen to heights beyond thought, to happiness beyond experience, only to be cast down from those heights by the voice of reality. The thing was plain enough to common sense; she had let herself be over-ruled by Imagination, working upon splendid material. Prue's message, her own likeness to Juliet, Juliet's letters, the little arbour, those and the magic of Vernons had worked upon her mind singly and together, exalting her into a soul-state utterly beyond all previous experience. It was as though she had played the part of Juliet for a day, suffered vaguely and enjoyed in imagination what Juliet had suffered and enjoyed in life, known Love as Juliet had known it--for a moment. The brutal touch of the Real coming at the supreme moment to shatter and shrivel everything. And the strange thing was that she had no regrets. Looking back on yesterday, the things that had happened seemed of little interest. Sleep seemed to have put an Atlantic ocean between her and them. Coming down to breakfast she found Pinckney just coming in from the garden; he said nothing about the incident of the night before, nor did she, there were other things to talk about. Seth, one of the darkies, had been 'kicking up shines,' he had given impudence to Miss Pinckney that morning. Impudence to Miss Pinckney! You can scarcely conceive the meaning of that statement without a personal knowledge of Miss Pinckney, and a full understanding of the magic of her rule. Seth was, even now, packing up the quaint contraptions he called his luggage, and old Darius, the coloured odd job man, was getting a barrow out of the tool-house to wheel the said luggage to Seth's grandmother's house, somewhere in the negro quarters of the town. The whole affair of the impudence and dismissal had not taken two minutes, but the effects were widespread and lasting. Dinah was weeping, the kitchen in confusion; one might have thought a death had occurred in the house, and Miss Pinckney presiding at the breakfast table was voluble and silent by turns. "Never mind," said Pinckney with all the light-heartedness of a man towards domestic affairs. "Seth's not the only nigger in Charleston." "I'm not bothering about his going," replied Miss Pinckney. "He was all thumbs and of no manner of use but to make work; what upsets me is the way he hid his nature. Time and again I've been good to that boy. He looked all black grin and frizzled head, nothing bad in him you'd say--and then! It's like opening a cupboard and finding a toad, and there's Dinah going on like a fool; she's crying because he's going, not because he gave me impudence. Rachel's the same, and I'm just going now to the kitchen to give them a talking to all round." Off she went. "I know what that means," said Pinckney. "It's only once in a couple of years that there's any trouble with servants and then--oh, my! You see Aunt Maria is not the same as other people because she loves every one dearly, and looks on the servants as part of the family. I expect she loves that black imp Seth, for all his faults, and that's what makes her so upset." "Same as I was about Rafferty," said Phyl with a little laugh. Pinckney laughed also and their eyes met. Just like a veil swept aside, something indefinable that had lain between them, some awkwardness arising, maybe, from the Rafferty incident, vanished in that moment. Phyl had been drawing steadily towards him lately, till, unknown to her, he had entered into the little romance of Juliet, so much so that if last night, at that magical moment when he met her on entering the gate--if at that moment he had taken her in his arms and kissed her, Love might have been born instantly from his embrace. But the psychological moment had passed, a crisis unknown to him and almost unknown to her. And now, as if to seal the triumph of the commonplace, suddenly, the vague reservation that had lain between them, disappeared. "Do you know," said he, "you taught me a lesson that day, a lesson every man ought to be taught before he leaves college." "What was that?" asked Phyl. "Never to interfere in household affairs. Of course Rafferty wasn't exactly a household affair because he belonged mostly to the stable, still he was your affair more than mine. Household affairs belong to women, and men ought to leave them alone." "Maybe you're right," said Phyl, "but all the same I was wrong. Do you know I've never apologised for what I said." "What did you say?" asked he with an artless air of having forgotten. "Oh, I said--things, and--I apologise." "And I said--things, and I apologise--come on, let's go out. I have no business this morning and I'd like to show you the town--if you'd care to come." "What about Miss Pinckney?" asked Phyl. "Oh, she's all right," he replied. "The Seth trouble will keep her busy till lunch time and I'll leave word we've gone out for a walk." Phyl ran upstairs and put on her hat. As they were passing through the garden the thought came to her just for a moment to show him the little arbour; then something stopped her, a feeling that this humble little secret was not hers to give away, and a feeling that Pinckney wouldn't care. Dead lovers vanished so long and their affairs would have little interest for his practical mind. The morning was warmer even than yesterday. The joyous, elusive, intoxicating spirit of the Southern spring was everywhere, the air seemed filled with the dust of sunbeams, filled with fragrance and lazy sounds. The very business of the street seemed part of a great universal gaiety over which the sky heat hazy beyond the Battery rose in a dome of deep, sublime tranquil blue. They stopped to inspect the old slave market. Then the remains of the building that had once been the old Planters Hotel held Phyl like a wizard whilst Pinckney explained its history. Here in the old days the travelling carriages had drawn up, piled with the luggage of fine folk on a visit to Charleston on business or pleasure. The Planters was known all through the Georgias and Virginia, all through the States in the days when General Washington and John C. Calhoun were living figures. The ghost of the place held Phyl's imagination. Just as Meeting Street seemed filled with friendly old memories on her first entering it, so did the air around the ruins of the "Planters." Then having paused to admire the gouty pillars of St. Michael's they went into the church. The silence of an empty church is a thing apart from all other silences in the world. Deeper, more complete, more filled with voices. As they were entering a negro caretaker engaged in dusting and tidying let something fall, and as the silence closed in on the faint echo that followed the sound they stopped, just by the font to look around them. Here the spirit of spring was not. The shafts of sunlight through the windows lit the old fashioned box pews, the double decked pulpit, and the font crowned with the dove with the light of long ago. Sunday mornings of the old time assuredly had found sanctuary here and the old congregations had not yet quite departed. The occasional noise of the caretaker as he moved from pew to pew scarcely disturbed the tranquillity, the scene was set beyond the reach of the sounds and daily affairs of this world, and the actors held in a medium unshakable as that which holds the ghostly life of bees in amber and birds in marqueterie. "That was George Washington's pew," whispered Pinckney, "at least the one he sat in once. That's the old Pinckney pew, belonged to Bures--other people sit there now. This is our pew--Vernons. The Mascarenes had it in the old days, of course." Phyl looked at the pew where Juliet Mascarene had sat often enough, no doubt, whilst the preacher had preached on the vanity of life, on the delusions of the world and the shortness of Time. Many an eloquent divine had stood in the pulpit of St. Michael's, but none have ever preached a sermon so poignant, so real, so searching as that which the old church preaches to those who care to hear. They turned to go. Outside Phyl was silent and Pinckney seemed occupied by thoughts of his own. They had got to that pleasant stage of intimacy where conversation can be dropped without awkwardness and picked up again haphazard, but you cannot be silent long in the streets of Charleston on a spring day. They visited the market-place and inspected the buzzards and then, somehow, without knowing it, they drifted on to the water side. Here where the docks lie deserted and the green water washes the weed grown and rotting timbers of wharves they took their seats on a baulk of timber to rest and contemplate things. "There used to be ships here once," said he. "Lots of ships--but that was before the war." He was silent and Phyl glanced sideways at him, wondering what was in his mind. She soon found out. A struggle was going on between his two selves, his business self that demanded up-to-dateness, bustle, and the energetic conduct of affairs, and his other self that was content to let things lie, to see Charleston just as she was, unspoiled by the thing we call Business Prosperity. It was a battle between the South and the North in him. He talked it out to her. Went into details, pointed to Galveston and New Orleans, those greedy sea mouths that swallow the goods of the world and give out cotton, whilst Charleston lay idle, her wharves almost deserted, her storehouses empty. He spoke almost vehemently, spoke as a business man speaks of wasted chances and things neglected. Then, when he had finished, the girl put in her word. "Well," said she, "it may be so but I don't want it any different from what it is." Pinckney laughed, the laugh of a man who is confessing a weakness. "I don't know that I do either," said he. It was rank blasphemy against Business. At the club you would often find him bemoaning the business decay of the city he loved, but here, sitting by the girl on the forsaken wharf, in the sunshine, the feeling suddenly came to him that there was something here that business would drive away. Something better than Prosperity. It was as though he were looking at things for a moment through her eyes. They came back through the sunlit streets to find Miss Pinckney recovered from the Seth business, and after luncheon that day, assisted by Dinah and the directions of Miss Pinckney, Phyl's hair "went up." "It's beautiful," said the old lady, as she contemplated the result, "and more like Juliet than ever. Take the glass and look at yourself." Phyl did. She did not see the beauty but she saw the change. Her childhood had vanished as though some breath had blown it away in the magic mirror. PART III CHAPTER I In a fortnight Phyl had adjusted herself to her new environment so completely that to use Pinckney's expression, she might have been bred and born in Charleston. Custom and acquaintanceship had begun to dull without destroying the charm of the place and the ghostly something, the something that during the first two days had seemed to haunt Vernons, the something indefinable she had called "It" had withdrawn. The spell, whatever it was, had been broken that night in the garden, when Pinckney's commonplace remark had shattered the dream-state into which she had worked herself with the assistance of Prue, Juliet's letters, the little secret arbour and the moonlight of the South. One morning, coming down to breakfast, she found Miss Pinckney in agitation, an open telegram in one hand and a feather duster in the other. It was one of the early morning habits of Miss Pinckney to range the house superintending things with a feather duster in hand, not so much for use as for the purpose of encouraging others. She was in the breakfast room now dusting spasmodically things that did not require dusting and talking all the time, pausing every now and then to have another glance at the telegram whilst Richard Pinckney, unable to get a word in, sat on a chair, and Jim, the little coloured page, who had brought in the urn, stood by listening and admiring. "Forty miles from here and ten from a railway station," said Miss Pinckney, "and how am I to get there?" "Automobile," said Pinckney. It was evidently not his first suggestion as to this means of locomotion, for the suggestion was received without an outburst, neither resented nor assented to in fact. They took their seats at table and then it all came out. Colonel Seth Grangerson of Grangerson House, Grangerville, S. Carolina, was ill. Miss Pinckney was his nearest relative, the nearest at least with whom he was not fighting, and he had wired to her, or rather his son had wired to her, to come at once. "As if I were a bird," said the old lady. Grangerville was a backwater place, badly served by the railway, and it would take the best part of a day to get there by ordinary means. "A car will get you there inside a couple of hours," said Pinckney. "As if he couldn't have sent for Susan Revenall," went on she as though oblivious to the suggestion, "but I suppose he's fought with them again. I patched up a peace between them last midsummer, but I suppose the patches didn't stick; he's fought with the Revenalls, he's fought with the Calhouns, he's fought with the Beauregards, he's fought with the Tredegars--that man would fight with his own front teeth if he couldn't get anything better to fight with, and now he's dying I expect he reckons to have a fight with me, just to finish off with. He killed his poor wife, and Dick Grangerson would never have gone off and got drowned only for him--Oh, he's not so bad," turning to Phyl, "he's good enough only for that--will fight." "Too much pep," said Pinckney. "I'm sure I don't know what it is. They're the queerest lot the Almighty ever put feet on, and I don't mind saying it, even though they are relatives." Turning to Phyl. "I suppose you know, least I suppose you think, that the Civil War was fought for the emancipation of the darkies and that they _were_ emancipated." "Yes!" "Well, they weren't--at least not at Grangersons. While the Colonel's father was fighting in the Civil War, his first wife, she was a Dawson, kept things going at home, and after the war was over and he was back he took up the rule again. Emancipation--no one would have dared to say the word to him, he'd have killed you with a look. The North never beat Grangerson, it beat Davis and one man and another but it never beat Grangerson, he carried on after the war just as he carried on before, told the darkies that emancipation was nigger talk and they believed him. People came round telling them they were free, and all they got was broken heads. They were a very tetchy lot, those niggers, are still what are left of them. You see, they've always been proud of being Grangerson's niggers, that's the sort of man he is, able to make them feel like that." "Silas helps to carry on the place, doesn't he?" asked Pinckney. "Yes, and just in the same tradition, only he's finding it doesn't work, I suspect. You see, the old darkies are all right, but when he's forced to get new labour he has to get the new darkies and they're all wrong, and he thrashes them and they run away. They never take the law of him either. I reckon when they get clear of Silas they don't stop running till they get to Galveston." They talked of other things and then, breakfast over, Miss Pinckney turned to Richard. "Well, what about that automobile?" "I'll have one at the door for you at ten," said he. She turned to Phyl. "You'd better go with me--if you'd like to; you'd be lonely here all by yourself, and you may as well see Grangersons whilst the old man's there, though maybe he'll be gone before we arrive. We may be there for a couple of days, so you'd better take enough things." Then she went off to dress herself for the journey, and an hour later she appeared veiled and apparelled, Dick following her with the luggage, a bandbox and a bag of other days. She got into the big touring car without a word. Phyl followed her and Pinckney tucked the rug round their knees. "You've got the most careful driver in Charleston," said he, "and he knows the road." Miss Pinckney nodded. She was flying straight in the face of her pet prejudice. She was not in the least afraid of a break down or an overset. An accident that did not rob her of life or limb would indeed have been an opportunity for saying "I told you so." She was chiefly afraid of running over things. As Pinckney was closing the door on them who should appear but Seth--Seth in a striped sleeved jacket, all grin and frizzled head and bearing a bunch of flowers in his hand. He had not been dismissed after all. When Miss Pinckney had gone into the kitchen to pay him his wages he had carried on so that she forgave him. The flowers--her own flowers just picked from the garden--were an offering, not to propitiate but to please. Pinckney laughed, but Miss Pinckney as she took the bouquet scarcely noticed either him or Seth, her mind was busy with something else. She leaned over towards the chauffeur. "Mind you don't run over any chickens," said she. It was a gorgeous morning, with the sea mists blowing away on the sea wind, swamp-land and river and bayou showing streets and ponds of sapphire through the vanishing haze. Phyl was in high spirits; the tune of Camptown Races, which a street boy had been whistling as they started, pursued her. Miss Pinckney, dumb through the danger zone where chickens and dogs and nigger children might be run over, found her voice in the open country. The bunch of flowers presented to her by Seth and which she was holding on her lap started her off. "I hope it is not a warning," said she; "wouldn't be a bit surprised to find Seth Grangerson in his coffin waiting for the flowers to be put on him; what put it in to the darkey's head to give me them! I don't know, I'm sure, same thing I suppose that put it into his head to give me impudence." "You've taken him back," said Phyl. "Well, I suppose I have," said the other in a resigned voice, "and likely to pay for my foolishness." Pinckney had said that it was only a two hours' run from Charleston to Grangerville, but he had reckoned without taking into consideration the badness of some of the roads, and the intricacies of the way, for it was after one o'clock when they reached the little town beyond which, a mile to the West, lay the Colonel's house. Grangerville lies on the border of Clarendon county, a tiny place that yet supports a newspaper of its own, the _Grangerville Courier_. The _Courier_ office, the barber's shop and the hotel are the chief places in Grangerville, and yellow dogs and black children seem the bulk of the population, at least of a warm afternoon, when drowsiness holds the place in her keeping, and the light lies broad and steadfast and golden upon the cotton fields, and the fields of Indian corn, and the foliage of the woods that spread to southward, enchanted woods, fading away into an enchanted world of haze and sun and silence. When the great Southern moon rises above the cotton fields, Romance touches even Grangerville itself, the baying of the yellow dog, darkey voices, the distant plunking of a banjo, the owl in the trees--all are the same as of old--and the houses are the same, nearly, and the people, and it is hard to believe that over there to the North the locomotives of the Atlantic Coast railway are whistling down the night, that men are able to talk to one another at a distance of a thousand miles, fly like birds, live like fish, and perpetuate their shadows in the "movies." Grangersons lay a mile beyond the little town, a solidly built mansion set far back from the road, and approached by an avenue of cypress. As they drew up before the pillared piazza, upon which the front door opened, from the doorway, wide open this warm day, appeared an old gentleman. A very fine looking old man he was. His face, with its predominant nose, long white moustache and firm cleft chin, was of that resolute and obstinate type which seems a legacy of the Roman Empire, whose legionaries left much more behind them in Gaul and Britain than Trajan arches and Roman roads. He was dressed in light grey tweeds, his linen was immaculate--youthful and still a beau in point of dress, and bearing himself erect with the aid of a walking stick, a crutch handled stick of clouded malacca, Colonel Seth Grangerson, for he it was, had come to his front door, drawn by the sound of the one thing he detested more than anything in life, a motor car. "Why, Lord! He's not even in bed," cried the outraged Miss Pinckney, who recognised him at once. "All this journey and he up and about--it beats Seth and his impudence!" The Colonel, whose age dimmed eyes saw nothing but the automobile, came down the steps, panama hat in hand, courtly, freezing, yet ready to explode on the least provocation. Within touch of the car he recognised the chief occupant. "Why, God bless my soul," cried he, "it's Maria Pinckney." "Yes, it's me," said the lady, "and I expected to find you in bed or worse, and here you are up. Silas sent me a telegram." "He's a fool," cut in the old gentleman. "I had one of my old attacks last night, and I told him I'd be up and about in the morning--and I am. Good Gad! Maria, you're the last person in the world I'd ever have expected to see in one of these outrageous things." He had opened the door of the car and was presenting his arm to the lady. "You can shut the door," said Miss Pinckney. "I'm not getting out. The thing's not more outrageous than your getting up like that right after an attack and dragging me a hundred miles from Charleston over hill and dale--I'm not getting out, I'm going right back--right back to Charleston." The Colonel turned his head and called to a darkey that had appeared at the front door. "Take the luggage in," said he. Miss Pinckney got out of the car despite herself, half laughing, half angry, and taking the gallantly proffered arm found herself being led up the steps of Grangersons, pausing half way up to introduce Phyl, whom she had completely forgotten till now. The Colonel, like his son Silas, as will presently be seen, had a direct way with women; the Grangersons had pretty nearly always fallen in love at sight and run away with their wives. Colonel Seth's father had done this, meeting, marrying and fascinating the beautiful Maria Tredegar, and carrying her off under his arm like a hypnotised fowl, and from under the noses of half a dozen more eligible suitors, just as now, the Colonel was carrying Maria Pinckney off into his house half against her will. Phyl following them, gazed round at the fine old oak panelled hall, from which they were led into the drawing room, a room not unlike the drawing room at Vernons, but larger and giving a view of the garden where the oleanders and cherokee money and the crescent leaves of the blue gum trees were moving in the wind. Colonel Seth, despite the war, had plenty of roses and Grangersons was kept up in the old style. Just as in Nuremberg and Vittoria we see mediæval cities preserved, so to speak, under glass, so at Grangersons one found the old Plantation, house and all, miraculously intact, living, almost, one might say, breathing. The price of cotton did not matter much to the Colonel, nor the price of haulage. This son of the Southerner who had refused to be beaten by the North in the war, cared for nothing much beyond the ring of sky that made his horizon. Twice a year he made a visit to Charleston, driving in his own carriage, occasionally he visited Richmond or Durham, where he had an interest in tobacco; New York he had never seen. He loathed railways and automobiles, mainly, perhaps, because they were inventions of the North, that is to say the devil. He had a devilish hatred of the North. Not of Northerners, but just of the North. The word North set his teeth on edge. It did not matter to him that Charleston was picking up some prosperity in the way of phosphates, or that Chattanooga was smelting ore into money, or that industrial prosperity was abroad in the land; he was old enough to have a recollection of old days, and from the North had come the chilly blast that had blown away that age. A servant brought in cake and wine to stay the travellers till dinner time, refreshment that Miss Pinckney positively refused at first. "You will stay the night," said the Colonel, as he helped her, "and Sarah will show you to your rooms when we have had a word together." Miss Pinckney, sipping her wine, made no reply, then placing the scarcely touched glass on the table and with her bonnet strings thrown back, she turned to the Colonel. "Do you see the likeness?" said she. "What likeness?" asked the old gentleman. "Why, God bless my soul, the likeness to Juliet Mascarene. Phyl, turn your face to the light." The Colonel, searching in his waistcoat pocket, found a pair of folding glasses and put them on. "She gets it from her mother's side," said Miss Pinckney, "the Lord knows how it is these things happen, but it's Juliet, isn't it?" The Colonel removed his glasses, wiped them with his handkerchief, and returned them to his pocket. "It is," said he. Then in the fine old fashion he turned to the girl, raised her hand to his lips and kissed it. "Phyl," said Miss Pinckney, "would not you like to have a look at the garden whilst we have a chat? Old people's talk isn't of much interest to young people." "Old people," cried the warrior. "There are no old people in this room." He made for the door and opened it for Phyl, then he accompanied her into the hall, where at the still open door he pointed the way to the garden. CHAPTER II Outside Phyl stood for a moment to breathe the warm scented air and look around her. To be treated like a child by any other person than Maria Pinckney would have incensed her, all the same to be told to do a thing because it was good for her, or because it was a pleasant thing to do, in the teller's opinion, was an almost certain way of making her do the exact opposite. The garden did not attract her, the place did. That cypress avenue with the sun upon it, that broad sweep of drive in front of the house, the distant peeps of country between trees and the languorous lazy atmosphere of the perfect day fascinated her mind. She came along the house front to the right, and found herself at the gate of the stable yard. The stable yard of Grangersons was an immense flagged quadrangle bounded on the right, counting from the point of entrance, by the kitchen premises. There was stable room for forty horses, coach-house accommodation for a dozen or more carriages. The car had been run into one of the coach-houses and the yard stood empty, sunlit, silent, save for the voices of the pigeons wheeling in the air, or strutting on the roof of the great barn adjoining the stables. One of the stable doors was open and as Phyl crossed the yard a young man appeared at the open door, shaded his eyes and looked at her. Then he came forward. It was Silas Grangerson, and Phyl thought he was the handsomest and most graceful person she had ever seen in her life. Silas was a shade over six feet in height, dark, straight, slim yet perfectly proportioned; his face was extraordinary, the most vivid thing one would meet in a year's journey, and with a daring, and at times, almost a mad look unforgettable when once glimpsed. Like the Colonel and like his ancestors Silas had a direct way with women. "Hallo," said he, with the sunny smile of old acquaintanceship, "where have _you_ sprung from?" Phyl was startled for a moment, then almost instantly she came in touch with the vein and mood and mind of the other and laughed. "I came with Miss Pinckney," said she. "You're not from Charleston?" "Yes, indeed I am." "But where do you live in Charleston? I've never seen you and I know every--besides you don't look as if you belonged to Charleston--I don't believe you've come from there." "Then where do you think I've come from?" "I don't know," said Silas laughing, "but it doesn't matter as long as you're here, does it? 'Scuse my fooling, won't you--I wouldn't with a stranger, but you don't seem a stranger somehow--though I don't know your name." "Phylice Berknowles," said Phyl, glancing up at him and half wondering how it was that, despite his good looks, his manhood, and their total unacquaintanceship, she felt as little constrained in his presence as though he were a boy. "And my name is Silas Grangerson. Say, is Maria Pinckney in the house with father?" "She is." "Talking over old times, I s'pose?" said Silas. "Yes!" "I can hear them. It's always the same when they get together--and I suppose you got sick of it and came out?" "No, they put me out--asked me wouldn't I like to look at the garden." Already she had banded herself with him in mild opposition to the elders. "Great--Jerusalem. They're just like a pair of old horses wanting to be left quiet and rub their nose-bags together. Look at the garden! I can hear them--come on and look at the horses." He led the way to a loose box and opened the upper door. "That's Flying Fox, she's mine, the fastest trotter in the Carolinas--you know anything about horses?" "Rather!" "I thought you did, somehow. Mind! she doesn't take to strangers. Mind! she bites like an alligator." "Not me," said Phyl, fondling the lovely but fleering-eyed head protruding above the lower door. "So she doesn't," said Silas admiringly, "she's taken to you--well, I don't blame her. Here's John Barleycorn," opening another door, "own brother to the Fox, he's Pap's; he's a bolter, and kicks like a duck gun. She's got all her vice at one end of her and he at the other, match pair." He whistled between his teeth as he put up the bars, then he shewed other horses, Phyl watching his every movement, and wondering what it was that gave pleasure to her in watching. Silas moved, or seemed to move, absolutely without effort, and his slim brown hands touched everything delicately, as though they were touching fragile porcelain, yet those same hands could bend an iron bar, or rein in John Barleycorn even when the bit was between the said J. B.'s teeth. "That's the horses," said he, flinging open a coach-house door, "and that's the shandrydan the governor still drives in when he goes to Charleston. Look at it. It was made in the forties, and you should see it with a darkey on the box and Pap inside, and all his luggage behind, and he going off to Charleston, and the nigger children running after it." Phyl inspected the mustard-yellow vehicle. Then he closed the door on it, put up the bar, and, the business of showing things over, did a little double shuffle as though Phyl were not present, or as though she were a boy friend and not a strange young woman. "Say, do you like poetry?" said he, breaking off and seeming suddenly to remember her presence. "No," said Phyl. "At least--" "Well, here's some. "'There was an old hen and she had a wooden leg, She went to the barn and she laid a wooden egg, She laid it right down by the barn--don't you think.'" "Well?" said she, laughing. "'It's just about time for another little drink--' some sense in poetry like that, isn't there? But all the drinks are in the house and I don't want to go in. I'm hiding from Pap. Last night when he was ratty with rheumatism, he let out at me, saying the young people weren't any good, saying Maria Pinckney was the only person he knew with sense in her head, called me a name because I poured him out a dose of liniment instead of medicine, by mistake--though he didn't swallow it--and wished Maria was here. So I just sent Jake, the page boy, off with a wire to her; didn't tell any one, just sent it. Come on and look at the garden--you've got to look at the garden, you know." He led the way past the barn to a farmyard, where hens were clucking and scratching and scraping in the sunshine; the deep double bass grunting of pigs came from the sties, by the low wall across which one could see the country stretching far away, the cotton fields, the woods, all hazed by the warmth of the afternoon. "Let's sit down and look at the garden," said he, pointing to a huge log by the near wall--"and aren't the convolvuluses beautiful?" "Beautiful," said Phyl, falling into the vein of the other. "And listen to the roses." "They grunt like that because it's near dinner time--they're pretty much like humans." He took a cigarette case from his pocket and a cigarette from the case. "You don't mind smoking, do you?" "Not a bit." "Have one?" "I daren't." "Maria Pinckney won't know." "It's not her--I smoked one once and it made me sick." "Well, try another--I won't look if you are." "They'll--she'll smell it." "Not she, you can eat some parsley, that takes the smell away." "Oh, I don't mind telling her--it's only--well, there." She took a cigarette and he lit it for her. "Blow it through your nose," he commanded, "that's the way. Now let's pretend we're two old darkies sitting on a log, you push against me and I'll push against you, you're Jim and I'm Uncle Joseph. 'What yo' crowding me for, Jim,'" he squeezed up gently against her, and Phyl jumped to her feet. He glanced up at her, sideways, laughing, and for the life of her she could not be angry. "Don't you think we'd better go and look at the garden?" said she. "In a minute, sit down again. I won't knock against you. It was only my fun. We'll pretend I'm Pap, and you're Maria Pinckney, if you like. You've let your cigarette go out." "So I have." "You can light it from mine." Phyl hesitated and was lost. It was the nearest thing to a kiss, and as she drew back with the lighted cigarette between her lips, she felt a not unpleasant sense of wickedness, such as the virtuous boy feels when led to adventure by the bad boy. Sitting on a log, smoking cigarettes, talking familiarly with a stranger, taking a light from him in such a fashion with her face so close to his that his eyes-- They smoked in silence for a moment. Then Silas spoke: "Do you ever feel lonesome?" said he. "Awfully--sometimes." "So do I." Silence for a moment. Then: "I go off to Charleston when I feel like that--once in a fortnight or so--Where do you live in Charleston?" "I live with Miss Pinckney--I thought you knew." "You didn't say that. You only said you came with her." "Well, I live with her at Vernons. I'm Irish, y' know. My--my father died in Charleston, and I came from Ireland to live with Miss Pinckney. Mr. Richard Pinckney is my guardian." "Your which? Dick Pinckney your guardian! Why, he's not older than I am--that fellow your guardian--why, he wears a flannel petticoat." "He doesn't," cried Phyl, flinging away the cigarette, which had become noxious, and roused to sudden anger by the slighting tone of the other. "What do you mean by saying such a thing?" "Oh, I only meant that he's too awfully proper for this life. He goes to Charleston races, but never backs a horse, scarcely, and one Mint Julep would make him see two crows. He's a sort of distant relation of ours." Phyl was silent. She resented his criticism of her friend, and just in this moment the something mad and harum scarum in the character of Silas seemed shown up to her with electrical effect. Criticism is a most dangerous thing to indulge in, unless anonymously in the pages of a journal, for the right to criticise has to be made good in the mind of the audience, unless the audience is hostile to the criticised. Then she said: "I don't know anything about Mint Juleps or race courses, but I do know that Mr. Pinckney has been--is--is my friend, and I'd rather not talk about him, if you please." "Now, you're huffed," cried Silas exultingly, as though he had scored a point at some game. "I'm not." "You are--you've flushed." Phyl turned pale, a deadly sign. "I'd never dream of getting out of temper with _you_," said she. It was his turn to flush. You might have struck Silas Grangerson without upsetting his balance, but the slightest suspicion of a sneer raised all the devil in him. Had Phyl been a man he would have knocked him off the log. He cast the stump of his cigarette on the ground and pounded it with his heel. Had there been anything breakable within reach he would have broken it. Her anger with him vanished and she laughed. "You've flushed now," said she. CHAPTER III When they came round to the front of the house they found Colonel Grangerson and Miss Pinckney coming down the steps. They were going to the garden in search of Phyl. "We've been looking at the horses," said Silas, after he had greeted Miss Pinckney. "No, sir, I did not leave any of the doors open, but I've been looking for Sam with a blacksnake whip to liven him up. He left the grey without grooming after she was brought in this morning, and I was rubbing her down myself when this lady came into the yard." "I'll skin that nigger," cried the Colonel. "I reckon I'll save you that trouble, sir," replied the son, as they turned garden-wards. Silas had little use for "r's" and said "suh" for "sir" and "wah" for "war." He was also quite a different person in the presence of his father from what he was when alone or in the presence of strangers. In the presence of his father, past generations spoke in his every word and action, he became sedate, deferential, leisurely. It was not fear of the elder man that caused this change, it was reflection from him. The shadows were long in the garden, and away across the pastures, glimpsed beyond the cypress hedge and bordering the cotton fields, the pond-shadows cast by the live oaks at noon had become river shadows, flowing eastward; the murmur of bees filled the air like a haze of sound, and here and there as they passed a bush coloured flowers detached themselves and became butterflies. They sat down on a great old stone bench lichened and sun warmed to enjoy the view, and the Colonel talked of tobacco and politics and cotton, including them all in his conversation in the grand patriarchal manner. Phyl understanding little, and half drowsed by the warmth and the buzzing of the bees and the voice of the speaker, had given herself up to that lazy condition of mind which is the next best thing to sleep, when she was suddenly aroused. She was seated between Miss Pinckney and Silas. Silas had pinched her little finger. She snatched her hand away, and turned towards him. He was looking away over the pastures; his profile showed nothing but its absolute correctness. Miss Pinckney had noticed nothing, and the Colonel, who had finished with cotton, looking at his watch, declared that it was close on dinner time. After supper that night, Phyl found herself in the garden. Silas had not appeared at supper; the Colonel had brought down a book of old photographs, photographs of people and places dead or changed, and he and Miss Pinckney became so absorbed in them that they had little thought for the girl. She went out to look at the moon, and it was worth looking at, rising like a honey coloured shield above the belt of the eastern woods. The whole world was filled with the moonlight, warm tinted, and ghostly as the light of vanished days, white moths were flitting above the bushes, and on the almost windless air the voice of an owl came across the cotton fields. Phyl reached the seat where they had all sat that afternoon. It was still warm from the all-day sunshine, and she sat down to rest and listen. The owl had ceased crying, and through the league wide silence faint sounds far and near told of the life moving and thrilling beneath the night; the boom of a beetle, voices from the distant road, and now and then a whisper of wind rising and dying out across the garden and the trees. A faint sound came from behind the seat, and before Phyl could turn two warm hands covered her eyes. She plucked them away and stood up. "I _wish_ you wouldn't do things like that," she cried. "How _dare_ you?" "I couldn't help it," replied the other, "you looked so comfortable. I didn't mean to startle you. I thought you must have heard me coming across the grass." "I didn't--and you shouldn't have done it." "Well, I'm sorry. There, I've apologised, make friends." "There is nothing to make friends about," she replied stiffly. "No, I don't want to shake hands--I'm not angry, let us go into the house." "Don't," said Silas imploringly. "He and she are sitting over that old album, comparing notes. I saw them through the window, that's why I came to look for you in the garden. Do you know, I believe the Governor was gone once on Maria, years ago, but they never got married. He married my mother instead." Phyl forgot her resentment. The faint idea that Colonel Grangerson and Maria Pinckney had perhaps been more than friends in long gone days, had strayed across her mind, to be dismissed as a fancy. It interested her to find Silas confirming it. "Of course, I can't say for certain," he went on, lighting a cigarette. "I only judge by the way they go on when they're together, and the way he talks of her. Say, do you ever want to grow old?" "No, I don't--ever." "Neither do I. I hope I'll be kicked to death by a horse, or drowned or shot before I'm forty. I don't want to die in any beds with doctors round me. I reckon if I'm ever like that I'll drink the liniment instead of the medicine--same as I nearly drenched Pap--and go to heaven with a red label for my ticket. Sit down for a while and let's talk." "No, I don't care to sit down." "I won't touch you. I promise." Phyl hesitated a moment and then sat down. She was not afraid of Silas in the least, but his tricks of an overgrown boy did not please her; it seemed to her sometimes as though his irresponsibility was less an inheritance from youth, than from some ancestor ill-balanced to the point of craziness. If any other man of his age had acted and spoken to her as he had done she would have smacked his face, but Silas was Silas, and his good looks and seeming innocence, and something really charming that lay away at the back of his character and gave colour to this personality, managed, somehow, to condone his queerness of conduct. All the same she sat a foot away from him on the seat, and kept her hands folded on her lap. Silas sat for a while smoking in silence, then he spoke. "Where's this you said you came from?" "Ireland." "You don't talk like a Paddy a bit." "Don't I?" "Not a bit, nor look like one." "Have you seen many Irish people?" "No, mostly in pictures--comic papers, you know, like _Puck_." "I think it's a shame," broke out Phyl. "People are always making fun of the Irish, drawing them like monkeys with great upper lips--but it's only ignorant people who never travel who think of them like that." "That's so, I expect," replied Silas, either unconscious of the dig at himself or undesirous of a quarrel, "and the next few dollars I have to spare I'll go to Ireland. I'm crazy now to see it." "What's made you crazy to see it?" "Because it's the place you come from." Phyl sniffed. "I hate compliments." "I wasn't complimenting you, I was complimenting Ireland," said Silas sweetly. She was silent, a white moth passing close to her held her gaze for a moment, then it flitted away across the bushes. "Let's forget Ireland for a moment," said she, "and talk of Charleston. Do you know many people there?" "I know most every one. The Pinckneys and Calhouns and Tredegars and Revenalls and--" "Rhetts." "Yes--but there are a dozen Rhetts; same as there's half a hundred Pinckneys and Calhouns, families, I mean. What's his name--Richard Pinckney, your guardian, is engaged to a Rhett." "He is not." "He is--Venetia Frances, the one that lives in Legare Street. Why, I've seen them canoodling often, and every one says they are engaged." "Well, he's not, or Miss Pinckney would have told me." "Oh, she's blind. I tell you he is, and she'll be your guardian when he's married her." "That she won't," said Phyl. "How'll you help it? A man and wife are one." "He's only guardian of my property." "Well, Heaven help your property when she gets a finger in the pie; she'll spend it on hats--sure." This outrageous statement, uttered with a laugh, left Phyl cold. The statement about Frances Rhett had disturbed her, she could not tell exactly why, for it was none of her business whom Pinckney might choose to marry--still--Frances Rhett! It was almost as though an antagonism had existed between them since that afternoon when she had seen Frances first, driving in the car with Richard Pinckney. She rose to her feet and Silas rose also, throwing away the end of his cigarette. "Going into the house?" said he. "Yes!" "Well, you'll be off to-morrow morning, and I won't see you, for I have to be out early, but I'll see you in Charleston, though not at Vernons maybe, for I'm not in love with Richard Pinckney, and I don't care much for visiting his house. But I'll see you somewhere, sure." "Good-bye," said she holding out her hand. He took it, held it, and then, all of a sudden, she found herself in his arms. Helpless as a child, in his arms and smothered with kisses. He kissed her on the mouth, on the forehead, on the chin, and with a last kiss on the mouth that made her feel as though her life were going from her, he vanished. Vanished amidst the bushes whilst she stood, tottering, dazed, breathless, outraged, yet--in some extraordinary way not angry. Pulled between tears and laughter, resentment, and a strange new feeling suddenly born in her from his burning lips, and the strength that had held her for a moment to itself. In one moment, and as though with the stroke of a sword, Silas had cut down the barrier that had divided her from the reality of things. He had kissed away her childhood. Then throwing out her hands as though pushing away some presence that was surrounding her, she ran to the house. In the hall she sat down for a moment to recover herself before going into the drawing room, where Miss Pinckney and the Colonel were closing the book which held for them the people and the places they had known in youth, and between its leaves who knows what old remembrances, like the withered flower that has once formed part of a summer's day. CHAPTER IV They started at ten o'clock next morning for Charleston, the Colonel standing on the house steps and waving his hand to them as they drove off. Silas was nowhere to be seen, he had gone out before breakfast, so the butler said, and had not returned. Miss Pinckney resented this casual treatment. "He ought to have been here to bid us good-bye," said she, as they cleared the avenue. "He's got the name for being a mad creature, but even mad creatures may show common courtesy. I'm sure I don't know where he gets his manners from unless it's his mother's lot, same place as he got his good looks." "Why do you say he's mad?" asked Phyl. "Because he is. Not exactly mad, maybe, but eccentric, he swum Charleston harbour with his clothes on because some one dared him, and was nearly drowned with the tide coming in or going out, I forget which; and another day he got on the engine at Charleston station and started the train, drove it too, till they managed to climb over the top of the carriages or something and stop him--at least that's the story. He'll come to a bad end, that boy, unless he mends his ways. Lots of people say he's got good in him. So he has, perhaps, but it's just that sort that come to the worst end, unless the good manages to fight the bad and get it under in time." Phyl said nothing. Her mind was disturbed. She had slept scarcely at all during the night, and her feelings towards Silas Grangerson, now that she was beyond his reach, were alternating in the strangest way between attraction and repulsion. They would have repelled the thought of him entirely but for the instinctive recognition of the fact that his conduct had been the result of impulse, the impulse of a child, ill governed, and accustomed to seize what it wanted. Added to that was the fact of his entire naturalness. From the moment of their first meeting he had talked to her as though they were old acquaintances. Unless when talking to his father, everything in his manner, tone, conversation was free, unfettered by convention, fresh, if at times startling. This was his great charm, and at the same time his great defect, for it revealed his want of qualities no less than his qualities. Do what she could she was unable to escape from the incident of last night, it was as though those strong arms had not quite released their hold upon her, as though Pan had broken from the bushes, shown her by his magic things she had never dreamed of, and vanished. It was nearly two o'clock when they reached Vernons. Richard Pinckney was at home, and at the sight of him Phyl's heart went out towards him. Clean, well groomed, honest, kindly, he was like a breath of fresh sea air after breathing tropical swamp atmosphere. Strange to say Miss Pinckney seemed to feel somewhat the same. "Yes, we're back," said she, as they passed into the dining-room where some refreshments were awaiting them, "and glad I am to be back. Vernons smells good after Grangersons. Oh, dear me, what is it that clings to that place? It's like opening an old trunk that's been shut for years. I told Seth Grangerson, right out flat, he ought to get away from there into the world somewhere, but there he sits clinging to his rheumatism and the past. I declare I nearly cried last night as he was showing me all those old pictures." "He's not very ill then," said Richard. "Ill! Not he. It was that fool Silas sent the telegram. Just an attack of rheumatism." She went upstairs to change and the two young people went into the garden, where Richard Pinckney was having some alterations done. On the day Phyl's hair went up it seemed to Richard that a new person had come to live with them. Phyl had suddenly turned into a young woman--and such a young woman! He had never considered her looks before, to young men of his age and temperament girls in pigtails are, as far as the manhood in them is concerned, little more and sometimes less than things. But Phyl with her hair up was not to be denied, and had he not been philandering after Frances Rhett, and had Phyl been a total stranger suddenly seen, it is quite possible that a far warmer feeling than admiration might have been the result. As it was she formed a new interest in life. He showed her the alterations he was making, slight enough and causing little change in the general plan of the garden. "I scarcely like doing anything," said he, "but that new walk will be no end of an improvement, and it will save that bit of grass which is being trodden to death by people crossing it, then there's all those bushes by the gate, they're going, those behind the tree,--a little space there will make all the difference in the world." "Behind the magnolia?" "Yes." "I wish you wouldn't," said Phyl. "Why?" "Because they have been there always and--well, look!" She led the way behind the tree, pushed the bushes aside and disclosed the seat. She no longer felt that she was betraying a secret. Her experience at Grangersons had in some way made Vernons seem to her now really her home, and Richard Pinckney closer to her in relationship. "Why, how did you know that was there?" said Richard. "I've never seen it." "Juliet Mascarene used to sit there with--with some one she was in love with. I found some of her old letters and they told about it--see, it's a little arbour, used to be, though it's all so overgrown now." "Juliet," said he. "That was the girl who died. I have heard Aunt Maria talk about her and she keeps her room just as it used to be. Who was the somebody?" "It was a Mr. Rupert Pinckney." "I knew there was a love story of some sort connected with her, but I never worried about the details. So they used to come and sit here." "Yes, he'd come to the gate at night and she'd meet him. Her people did not want her to marry him and so they had to meet in secret." "That was a long time ago." "Before you were born," said Phyl. He looked at her. "Aunt is always saying how like you are to her," said he, "but she's mad on family likenesses, and I never thought of it. It may be a want in me but I've never taken much interest in dead relatives; but somehow, finding this little place tucked away here gives one a jog. It's like finding a nest in a tree. How long have you known of it?" "Oh, some time. I found a bundle of her old letters--" she paused. Richard Pinckney had taken his place on the little seat, just as one sits down in an armchair to see if it is comfortable, and was leaning back amidst the bush branches. "This is all right," said he, "sit down, there's lots of room--you found her letter, tell us all about it." Phyl sat down and told the little story. It seemed to interest him. "The Pinckneys lost money," said he, "and that's why the old Mascarene birds were set against her marrying him, I suppose. Makes one wild that sort of thing. What right have people to interfere?" "Money seems everything in this world," said Phyl. "It's not--it seems to be, but it's not. Money can't buy happiness after one is grown up. You remember I told you that over in Ireland; when candy and fishing rods mean happiness money is all right--after that money is useful enough, but it's the making of it and not the spending it that counts,--that and a lot of things that have nothing to do with money. If the Mascarenes hadn't been fools they'd have seen that a poor man with kick in him--and the Pinckneys always had that--was as good as a rich man, and those two might have got married." "No," said Phyl, "they never could have got married, he had to die. He was killed, you know, at the beginning of the war." "You're a fatalist." "Well, things happen." "Yes, but you can stop them happening very often." "How?" "Just by willing it." "Yes," said Phyl meditatively, "but how are you to use your will against what comes unexpectedly. Now that telegram yesterday morning took me to Grangersons with Miss Pinckney. Suppose--suppose I had broken my leg or, say, fallen into a well there and got drowned--that would have been Fate." "No," said Pinckney, "carelessness, the telegram would not have drowned you, but your carelessness in going too close to the well." "Suppose," said Phyl, "instead of that, Mr. Silas Grangerson had shot me by accident with a gun--the telegram would have brought me to that without any carelessness of mine." "No, it couldn't," said Pinckney lightly, "it would still have been your own fault for going near such a hare-brained scamp. Oh, I'm only joking, what I really mean is that nine times out of ten the thing people call Fate is nothing more than want of foresight." "And the tenth time it is Fate," said Phyl rising. CHAPTER V Next morning brought Phyl a letter. It came by the early post, so that she got it in her bedroom before coming down. Phyl had few correspondents and she looked at the envelope curiously before opening it. "Miss Berknowles, at Vernons. Charleston." ran the address written in a large, boyish, yet individual hand. She knew at once and by instinct whom it was from. "I'm coming to Charleston in a day or two, and I want to see you," ran the letter which had neither address nor date, "but I'm not coming to Pinckneys. I'll be about town and sure to find you somewhere. I can't get you out of my mind since last night. Tried to, but can't." That was all. Phyl put the letter back in its envelope. She was not angry, she was disturbed. There was an assurance about Silas Grangerson daunting in its simplicity and directness. Something that raised opposition to him in her heart, yet paralysed it. Instinct told her to avoid him, to drive him from her mind, ay and something more than instinct. The spirit of Vernons, the calm sweet soul of the place, that seemed to hold the past and the present, Juliet and herself, peace and happiness with the promise of all good things in the future, this spirit rose up against Silas Grangerson as though he were the antagonist to happiness and peace, Juliet and herself, the present and the past. Rose up, without prevailing entirely. Silas had impressed himself upon her mind in such a manner that she could not free herself from the impression. Young as she was, with the terribly clear perception of the male character which all women possess in different degrees, she recognised that Silas was dangerous to that logical and equitable state of existence we call happiness, not on account of his wildness or his eccentricities, but because of some want inherent in his nature, something that spoke vaguely in his words and his actions, in his handsome face and in his careless and graceful manner. All the same she could not free herself from the impression he had made upon her, she could not drive him from her mind, he had in some way paralysed her volition, called forces to his aid from some unknown part of her nature, perhaps with those kisses which she still felt upon the very face of her soul. She came down to breakfast, and afterwards finding herself alone with Miss Pinckney, she took Silas's letter from her pocket and handed it to her. She had been debating in her own mind all breakfast time as to whether she ought to show the letter; the struggle had been between her instinct to do the right thing, and a powerful antagonism to this instinct which was a new thing in her. The latter won. And then, lo and behold, when she found herself alone with Miss Pinckney in the sunlit breakfast room, almost against her will and just as though her hand had moved of its own volition, she put it in her pocket and produced the letter. Miss Pinckney read it. "Well, of all the crazy creatures!" said she. "Why, he has only met you once. He's mad! No, he isn't--he's a Grangerson. I know them." She stopped short and re-read the letter, turned it about and then laid it down. "Just as if he'd known you for years. And you scarcely spoke to him. Did he _say_ anything to you as if he cared for you?" "No, he didn't," said Phyl quite truthfully. "Did he look at you as if he cared for you?" "No," replied the other, dreading another question. But Miss Pinckney did not put it. She could not conceive a man kissing a girl who had never betrayed his feelings for her by word or glance. "Well, it gets me. It does indeed; acting like a dumb creature and then writing this-- Do you care for _him_?" "I--I--no--you see, I don't know him--much." "Well, he seems to know you pretty well, there's no doubt about one thing, Silas Grangerson can make up his mind pretty quick. He won't come to Vernons, won't he? Well, maybe it's better for him not, for I've no patience with oddities. That's what's wrong with him, he's an oddity, and it's those sort of people make the trouble in life--they're worse than whisky and cards for bringing unhappiness. Years and years and years ago--I'm telling you this though I've never told it to any one else--Seth Grangerson, Silas's father, seemed to care for me, not much, still he seemed to care. Then one day all at once he came into the room where I was, through the window, and told me to come off and get married to him, wanted me to go away right off. I was a fool in those days, but not all a fool, and when he tried to put his arm round my waist, my hand went up and smacked his face. "We are good enough friends now, but I've often thought of what I escaped by not marrying him. You saw him and the life he's leading at that out of the way place, but you didn't see his obstinacy and his queerness, and Silas is ten times worse, more crazy--well, there, you're warned--but mind you I don't want to be meddling. I've seen so many carefully prepared marriages turn out pure miseries, and so many crazy matches turn out happily, that I'm more than cautious in giving advice. Seems to me that people before they are married are quite different creatures to what they turn out after they are married." "But I don't want to get married," said Phyl. "No, but, seems to me, Silas does," replied the other. CHAPTER VI One bright morning three days later, as Phyl was crossing Meeting Street near the Charleston Hotel, whom should she meet but Silas. Silas in town get up, quite a different looking individual from the Silas of Grangersons, dressed in perfectly fitting light grey tweed, a figure almost condoning one for the use of that old-time, half-discredited word "Elegant." "There you are," said Silas, his face lighting up. "I thought it wouldn't be long before I met you. Meeting Street is like a rabbit run, and I reckon the whole of Charleston passes through it twice a day." His manner was genuinely frank and open, and he seemed to have completely forgotten the incident of the kissing. Phyl said nothing for a moment; she felt put out, angry at having been caught like a rabbit, and not over pleased at being compared to one. Then she spoke freezingly enough: "I don't know much about the habits of Charleston; you will not find _me_ here every day. I have only been out twice here alone and--I'm in a hurry." "Why, what's the matter with you?" cried Silas in a voice of astonishment. "Nothing." "But there is, you're not angry with me, are you?" "Not in the least," replied the other, quite determined to avoid being drawn into explanations. "Well, that's all right. You don't mind my walking with you a bit?" "No!" "I only came here last night, and I'm putting up at the Charleston," said Silas. "Of course there are a lot of friends I could stay with but I always prefer being free; one is never quite free in another person's house; for one thing you can't order the servants about, though, upon my word, now-a-days one can't do that, much, anywhere." "I suppose not," said Phyl. The fact was being borne in upon her that Silas in town was a different person from Silas in the country, or seemed so; more sedate and more conventional. She also noticed as they walked along that he was saluted by a great many people, and also, before she had done with him that morning, she noticed that the leery, impudent looking, coloured folk seemed to come under a blight as they passed him, giving him the wall and yards to spare. It was as though the impersonification of the blacksnake whip were walking with her as well as a most notoriously dangerous man, a man who would strike another down, white or coloured, for a glance, not to say a word. She had come out on business, commissioned by Miss Pinckney to purchase a ball of magenta Berlin wool. Miss Pinckney still knitted antimacassars, and the construction of antimacassars is impossible without Berlin wool--that obsolete form of German Frightfulness. She bestowed the things on poor folk to brighten their homes. When Phyl went into the store to buy the wool Silas waited outside, and when she came out they walked down the street together. She had intended returning straight home after making her purchase but they were walking now not towards Vernons but towards the Battery. "What do you do with yourself all day?" asked Silas, suddenly breaking silence. "Oh, I don't know," she replied, "nothing much--we go out for drives." "In that old basket carriage thing?" "With Miss Pinckney." "I know, I've seen her often--what else do you do?" "Oh, I read." "What do you read?" "Books." "Doesn't Pinckney ever take you out?" "No, I don't go out much with Mr. Pinckney; you see, he's generally so busy." Silas sniffed. They had reached the Battery and were standing looking over the blue water of the harbour. The day was perfect, dreamy, heavenly, warm and filled with sea scents and harbour sounds; scarcely a breath of wind stirred across the water where a three-master was being towed to her moorings by a tug. "She's coming up to the wharves," said Silas. "They steer by the spire of St. Philips, the line between there and Fort Sumpter is all deep water. How'd you like to be a sailor?" "Wouldn't mind," said Phyl. "How'd you like to take a boat--I mean a decent sized fishing yawl and go off round the world, or even down Florida way? Florida's fine, you don't know Florida, it's got two coasts and it's hard to tell which is the best. From Indian River right round and up to Cedar Keys there's all sorts of fishing, and you can camp out on the reefs; one cooks one's own food and you can swim all day. There's tarpon and barracuda and sword fish, and nights when there's a moon you could see to read a book." "How jolly!" "Let's go there?" "How do you mean?" "Oh, just you and I. I'm fed up with everything. We could have a boatman to help sail and steer." He spoke lightly and laughingly, and without much enthusiasm and as though he were talking to some one of his own sex, and Phyl, not knowing how to take him, said nothing. He went on, his tone growing warmer. "I'm not joking, I'm dead sick of Grangersons and Charleston, and I reckon you are too--aren't you?" "No." "You may think so, but you are, all the same, without knowing it." "I think you are talking nonsense," said Phyl hurriedly, fighting against a deadly sort of paralysis of mind such as one may suppose comes upon the mind of a bird under the spell of a serpent. "No one could be kinder than Miss Pinckney, and so no one could be happier than I am. I love Vernons." "All the same," said Silas, "you are not really alive there. It's the life of a cabbage, must be, there's only you and Maria and--Pinckney. Maria is a decent old sort but she's only a woman, and as for Pinckney--he doesn't care for you." This statement suddenly brought Phyl to herself. It went through her like a knife. She had ceased to think of Richard Pinckney in any way but as a friend. At one time, during the first couple of days at Vernons, her heart had moved mysteriously towards him; the way he had connected himself through Prue's message with the love story of Juliet had drawn her towards him, but that spell had snapped; she was conscious only of friendliness towards Richard Pinckney. Why, then, this sudden pain caused by Silas's words? "How do you know?" she flashed out. "What right have you to dare--" She stopped. The blaze of her anger seemed to Silas evidence that she cared for Pinckney. "You're in love with him," said he, flying out. The bald and brutal statement took Phyl's breath from her. She turned on him, saw the anger in his face, and then--turned away. His state of mind condoned his words. To a woman a blow received from the passion she has roused is a rude sort of compliment, unlike other compliments it is absolutely honest. "I am in love with no one," said she; "you have no right to say such things--no right at all--they are insulting." A gull, white as snow, came flitting by and wheeled out away over the harbour; as her eyes followed it he stood looking at her, his anger gone, but his mind only half convinced by her feeble words. "I didn't mean to insult you," he said; "don't let us quarrel. When I'm in a temper I don't know what I say or do--that's the truth. I want to have you all for myself, have ever since the first moment I saw you over there at Grangersons." "Don't," said Phyl. "I can't listen to you if you talk like that--Please don't." "Very well," said Silas. The quick change that was one of his characteristics showed itself in his altered voice. His was a mind that seemed always in ambush, darting out on predatory expeditions and then vanishing back into obscurity. They turned away from the sea front and began to retrace their steps, silently at first, and then little by little falling into ordinary conversation again as though nothing had happened. Silas knew every corner of Charleston, and the history of every corner, and when he chose he could make his knowledge interesting. In this mood he was a pleasant companion, and Phyl, her recent experience almost forgotten, let herself be led and instructed, not knowing that this armistice was the equivalent of a defeat. She had already drawn much closer to him in mind, this companionship and quiet conversation was a more sure and deadly thing than any kisses or wild words. It would linger in her mind warm and quietly. Put in a woman's mind a pleasant recollection of yourself and you have established a force whose activity may seem small, but is in reality great, because of its permanency. They did not take a direct line in the direction of Vernons, and so presently found themselves in front of St. Michael's. The gate of the cemetery was open and they wandered in. The place was deserted, save by the birds, and the air perfumed by all manner of Southern growing things. Sun, shadow, silence, and that strange peace which hangs over the homes of the dead, all were here, ringed in by the old walls and the faint murmur of the living city beyond. They walked along the paths, looking at the tombstones, and pausing to read the inscriptions, Phyl gradually entering into that state of mind wherein reality and material things fall out of perspective. The fragrant elusive poetry of death, which can speak in the songs of birds and the scent of flowers in the sunshine and the shade of trees more clearly than in the voice of man, was speaking to her now. All these people here lying, all these names here inscribed, all these were the representatives of days once bright and now forgotten, love once sweet and now unknown. Then, as though something had led or betrayed her to the place, she paused where the graves lay half shadowed by a magnolia, she read the nearest inscription with a little catch of her breath. Then the further one. They were the graves of Juliet Mascarene and Rupert Pinckney, the dead lovers who had passed from the world almost together, whose bodies lay side by side in the cold bed of earth. In a moment the spell of the little arbour was around her again, in a moment the pregnant first impression of Vernons had re-seized her, fresh as though the commonplace touch of everyday life had never spoiled it. It was as though the spirit of Juliet and the spirit of the old house were saying to her "Have you forgotten us?" Tears welled to her eyes. Silas standing beside her was saying something, she did not know what. She scarcely heard him. Misinterpreting her silence, unconscious as an animal of her state of mind and the direction of her thoughts, the man at her side moved towards her slightly, seemed to hesitate, and then, suddenly clasping her by the waist kissed her upon the side of the neck. Phyl straightened like a bow when the string is released. Then she struck him, struck him open handed in the face, so that the sound of the blow might have been heard beyond the wall. His face blanched so that the mark on it showed up, he took a step back. For a moment Phyl thought he was going to spring upon her. Then he mastered himself, but if murder ever showed itself upon the countenance of man it showed itself in that half second on the countenance of Silas Grangerson. "You'll be sorry for that," said he. "Don't speak to me," said Phyl. "You are horrible--bad--wicked--I will tell Richard Pinckney." "Do," said Silas. "Tell him also I'll be even with him yet. You're in love with him, that's what's the matter with you--well, wait." He turned on his heel and walked off. He did not look back once. As he vanished from sight Phyl clasped her hands together. It was as though she had suddenly been shown the real Silas--or rather the something light and evil and dangerous, the something inscrutable and allied to insanity that inhabited his mind. She was not thinking of herself, she was thinking of Richard Pinckney. She felt that she had been the unconscious means of releasing against him an evil force. A force that might injure or destroy him. CHAPTER VII She came out of the cemetery. There was no sign of Silas in the street nor on the front of the church. Phyl had a full measure of the Celtic power to meet trouble halfway, to imagine disaster. As she hurried home she saw all manner of trouble, things happening to Richard Pinckney, and all brought about through herself. Amidst all these fancies she saw one fact: He must be warned. She found Miss Pinckney in the linen room. The linen room at Vernons was a treasure house beyond a man's description, perhaps even beyond his true appreciation. There in the cupboards with their thin old fashioned ring handles and on the shelves of red cedar reposed damask and double damask of the time when men paid for their purchases in guineas, miraculous preservations. Just as the life of a china vase is a perpetual escape from the stupidity of servant maids and the heaviness of clumsy fingers, so the life of these cream white oblongs, in which certain lights brought forth miraculous representations of flowers, festoons and birds, was a perpetual preservation from the moth, from damp, from dryness, from the dust that corrupts. A house like Vernons exists not by virtue of its brick and mortar; to keep it really alive it must be preserved in all its parts, not only from damp and decay, but from innovation; one can fancy a gas cooker sending a perpetual shudder through it, a telephone destroying who knows what fragrant old influences; the store cupboards and still room are part of its bowels, its napery, bed sheets, and hangings part of its dress. The man knew what he was doing who left Miss Pinckney a life interest in Vernons, it was that interest that kept Vernons alive. She was exercising it on the critical examination of some sheets when Phyl came into the room, now, with the wool she had purchased and the tale she had to tell. Miss Pinckney carefully put the sheet she was examining on one side, opened the parcel and looked at the wool. "I met Silas Grangerson," said Phyl as the other was examining the purchase with head turned on one side, holding it now in this light, now in that. "Silas Grangerson! Why, where on earth has he sprung from?" asked Miss Pinckney in a voice of surprise. "I don't know, but I met him in the street and we walked as far as the Battery and--and--" She hesitated for a moment, then it all came out. To no one but Maria Pinckney could she have told that story. "Well, of all the astounding creatures," said Miss Pinckney at last. "Did he ask you to marry him?" "No." "Just to run away with him--kissed you." "He kissed me at Grangersons." "At Grangersons. When?" "That night. I went into the garden and he came out from amongst some bushes." "Umph-- It's the family disease-- Well, if I get my fingers in his hair I promise to cure him. He wants curing. He'll just apologise, and that before he's an hour older. Where's he staying?" "No, no," said Phyl, "you mustn't ever say I told you. I don't mind. I would have said nothing only for Mr. Pinckney." "You mean Richard?" "Yes." "What has he to do with it?" Phyl did not hesitate nor turn her head away, though her cheeks were burning. "Silas Grangerson thinks I care for Mr. Pinckney, he said he would be even with him. I know he intends doing him some injury. I feel it--and I want you to warn him to be careful--without telling him, of course, what I have said." Miss Pinckney was silent for a moment. She had already matched Phyl and Richard in her mind. She had come to a very full understanding of her character, and she would have given all the linen at Vernons for the certainty that those two cared for one another. Frances Rhett rode her like an obsession. Life and nature had given Maria Pinckney an acquired and instinctive knowledge of character, and in the union of Richard and Frances Rhett she divined unhappiness, just as a clever seaman divines the unseen ice-berg in the ship's track. She smelt it. "Phyl," said she, "do you care for Richard?" The question quickly put and by those lips caused no confusion in the girl's mind. "No," said she. "At least-- Oh, I don't know how to explain it--I care for everything here, for Vernons and everything in it, it is all like a story that I love--Juliet and Vernons and the past and the present. He's part of it too. I want to have it always just as it is. I didn't tell you, but when that happened in the cemetery, I was looking at her grave; you never told me it was there with his. I came on it by accident and she was seeming to speak to me out of it. I was thinking of her and him, when--that happened. It was just as though some one had struck _her_ and him. I can't explain exactly." "Strange," said Miss Pinckney. She turned and began to put away with a thoughtful air the linen she had been examining. Then she said: "I'll tell Richard and warn him to keep away from that fool, not that there is any danger--but it is just as well to warn him." Phyl helped to put away the linen and then she went upstairs to her room. She felt easier in her mind and taking her seat on a cane couch by the window she fell into a book. The History of the Civil War. This bookworm had always one sure refuge in trouble--books. Books! Have we ever properly recognised the mystery and magic that lies in that word, the magic that allows a man to lead ever so many other lives than his own, to be other people, to travel where he has never been, to laugh with folk he has never seen, to know their sorrows as he can never know the sorrows of "real people"--and their joys. Phyl had been Robinson Crusoe and Jane Eyre, Monte Cristo and Jo. History which is so horribly unreal because it deals with real people had never appealed to her, but the history of the Civil War was different from others. It had to do with Vernons. CHAPTER VIII After luncheon that day Phyl, having nothing better to do, went up to her room and resumed her book. Richard Pinckney had not come in to luncheon, he rarely returned home for the meal, yet all the same, his absence made her uneasy. Suppose Silas Grangerson had met him--suppose they had fought? She called to recollection Silas's face just after she had struck him, the insane malevolence in it, the ugliness that had suddenly destroyed his good looks. Silas was capable of anything, he would never forgive that blow and he would try to return it, of that she felt certain. He could not avenge himself on her but he could on Richard. He imagined that she cared for Richard Pinckney. Did she? The question came to her again in Miss Pinckney's voice--she did not even try to answer it. As though it irritated her, she tossed the book she was holding in her hand to the floor and lay with her eyes fixed on the lace window curtains that were moving slightly to the almost imperceptible stirring of the air from outside. Beyond the curtains lay the golden afternoon. Sometimes a bird shadow, the loveliest thing in shadow-land, would cross the curtains, sometimes a note of song or the sound of a bird's flight from tree to tree would tell that there was a garden down below. The street beyond the garden and the city beyond the street could be heard, but were little more evident to the senses than those things in a picture which we guess but cannot see. Phyl, allowing her mind to be led by these faint and fugitive sounds, fell into a reverie. Then she fell asleep and straight way began to dream. She dreamed that Miss Pinckney was in the room moving about dusting things, a duster in one hand, an open letter in the other. There was troublous news of some sort in the letter, but what it was Miss Pinckney would not say. Then the room turned into the piazza, where Juliet Mascarene was standing with her hands on the rail, looking down on the garden. She seemed to know Juliet quite well and was not a bit surprised to see her there; she touched her but she did not turn. Phyl slipped her arm round Juliet's waist and stood with her looking at the garden, and as they stood thus the most curious dream feeling came upon her, a feeling of duality, Juliet was herself, she was Juliet. Then as this feeling died away Juliet vanished and she was standing alone on the piazza. Then she half woke, falling asleep again to be awakened fully by a sound. A sound, deep, sonorous, now rhythmical, now confused. It was the sound of guns. She had heard it once long ago on the Brighton coast, and now as she sat up every nerve and muscle tense, and her mind filled with a vague dread, it came so heavily that the walls of Vernons shook. She ran on to the piazza. There was no one there. The garden gate was wide open, there was no one in the garden, and she noticed, though without any astonishment, that some one had been at work in the garden altering the paths. A white butterfly was flittering above the flowers, and a red bird leaving the magnolia tree by the gate, flew, a splash of colour, across to the garden beyond. These things she saw but did not heed. She was under the spell of the guns, the sound rose against the brightness of the day as a black cloud rises across the sky or a sorrow across one's life, insistent, rhythmical, a pall of sound now billowing, now sinking, as though blown under by a wind. She sought the piazza stairs and next moment was in the garden, then she found herself in the street. Meeting Street was almost deserted. On the opposite side two stout, elderly and rather quaintly dressed gentlemen were walking along in the direction of the station, but away down towards the Charleston Hotel there was a crowd. The sight of this crowd filled her with terror, a terror remote from reason, an impersonal terror, as though the deadliest peril were threatening not herself but all things and everything she loved. She ran, and as she drew close to the striving mass of people she saw men bearing stretchers. They were pushing their way through the crowd, making to enter a house on the right. Then came a voice. The voice of one man shouting to another. "Young Pinckney's killed." The words pierced her like a sword, she felt herself falling. Falling through darkness to unconsciousness, from which she awoke to find herself lying on the cane couch in her room. She sat up. The curtains were still stirring gently to the faint wind from outside, on the floor lay the history of the Civil War open just as she had cast it there before falling asleep. The sound of the guns had ceased, and nothing was to be heard but the stray accustomed sounds of the city and the street. She struggled to her feet and came out on the piazza. The garden gate was closed and the garden was unaltered. She had dreamt all that, then. For a minute she tried to persuade herself that it was a dream, then she gave up the attempt. That was no dream. Everything in it was four square. She could still see the shadows of the two gentlemen who had been walking on the other side of the street, shadows cast clearly before them by the sun. The first part of her experience had been a dream, all that about Miss Pinckney and Juliet. But right from the sound of the guns all had been reality. She had seen, touched, heard. Glancing back into the room she saw the book lying on the floor, the sight of it was like a crystallising thread for thought. She had seen the past, she had heard the guns of the war. She went back into the room and took her seat on the couch and held her head between her hands. She recalled the terror that told her that everything she loved was in danger. When the man had cried out that young Pinckney was killed, it was the thought of the death of Richard Pinckney that struck her into unconsciousness. Yet she knew that what she had seen was the day of the death of Rupert Pinckney, that one of those figures carried on the stretchers was his figure, that her grief was for him. Had she then experienced what Juliet once experienced, seen what she saw, suffered what she suffered? Was she Juliet? The thought had approached her vaguely before this, so vaguely and so stealthily that she had not really perceived it. It stood before her now frankly in the full light of her mind. Was she Juliet, and was Richard Rupert Pinckney? She recalled that evening in Ireland when she had heard his voice for the first time, and the thrill of recognition that had passed through her, how, at the Druids' Altar that night she had heard her name called by his voice, the feeling in Dublin that something was drawing her towards America. Her feelings when she had first entered Meeting Street and the garden of Vernons, Miss Pinckney's surprise at her likeness to Juliet. Prue's recognition of her, the finding of those letters, the finding of the little arbour--any one of these things meant little in itself, taken all together they meant a great deal--and then this last experience. Her mind like a bird caught in a trap made frantic efforts to escape from the bars placed around it by conclusion; the idea seemed hateful, monstrous, viewed as reality. Fateful too, for that feeling of terror in the vision had all the significance of a warning. Then as she sat fighting against the unnatural, her imaginative and superstitious mind trembling at that which seemed beyond imagination, a miracle happened. The thought of danger to Richard Pinckney brought it about. All at once fear vanished, the fantastic clouds surrounding her broke, faded, passing, showing the blue sky, and Truth stood before her in the form of Love. It was as though the vision had brought it to her wrapped up in that terror she had felt for him. In a moment the fantasy of Juliet became as nothing beside the reality. If it were a thousand times true that she had once been Juliet what did it matter? She had loved Richard Pinckney always, so it seemed to her, and nothing at all mattered beside the recognition of that fact. Perfect love casteth out fear, even fear of the supernatural, even fear of Fate. * * * * * "Richard," said Miss Pinckney that night, finding herself alone with him, "that Silas Grangerson is in town and I want you to beware of him." "Silas," said he, "why I saw him at the club, he's gone back home by this, I expect, at least he said he was going back to-night. Why should I beware of him?" "He's such an irresponsible creature," she replied. "I'm going to tell you something, and mind, what I'm going to tell you is a secret you mustn't breathe to any one: he's in love with Phyl." "Silas?" "Yes. I knew it wouldn't be long before some one was after her. She's the prettiest girl in Charleston, and she's different from the others somehow." The cunning of the woman held her from praise of Phyl's goodness and mental qualities, or any over praise of the goods she was bringing to his attention. "Has he spoken to her about it?" asked he. "I'm sure to goodness I don't know what I'm about telling you a thing that was told to me in confidence," said the other. "Well, you promise never to say a word to Phyl or to any one else if I tell you." "I promise." "Well, he's--he's kissed her." Richard Pinckney leaned forward in his chair. He seemed very much disturbed in his mind. "Does she care for him?" "I don't believe she does--yet. They always begin like that; girls don't know their minds till all of a sudden they find some man who does." "Well, let's hope she never cares for Silas Grangerson," said he rising from his chair. "You know what he is." He left the room and went out on the piazza where the girl was sitting. He sat down beside her and they fell into talk. Richard Pinckney's mind was disturbed. Only the day before he had proposed to Frances Rhett and had been accepted. No one knew anything of the engagement; they had decided to say nothing about it for a while, but just keep it to themselves. The trouble with Pinckney was that Frances had, so to say, put the words of the proposal into his mouth. Frances had flirted with every man in Charleston; out of them all she had chosen Pinckney as a permanent attaché, not because she was in love with him but because he pleased her best. She matched him against the others, as a woman matches silk. Pinckney had allowed himself to be led along; there is nothing easier than to be led along by a pretty woman. When the trap had closed on him he recognised the fact without resenting it. He was no longer a free man. Phyl had told him this without speaking. For some time past he had been admiring her, and yesterday on returning in chains from Calhoun Street, Phyl picking roses in the garden seemed to him the prettiest picture he had seen for a long time, but it did not give him pleasure; it stirred the first vague uneasy recognition that his chains had wrought. He had no right to look at any girl but Frances--and he had been looking at her for a year without the picture stirring any wild enthusiasm in his mind. Miss Pinckney's revelation as to Silas had come to him as a blow. He could not tell what had hit him or exactly where he had been hit. What did it matter to him if a dozen men were in love with Phyl? What right had he to feel injured? None, yet he felt injured all the same. As he sat by her now in the lamp-lit piazza, the thought that would not leave his mind was the thought that Silas had kissed her. Behind the thought was the feeling of the boy who sees the other boy going off with the ripest and rosiest apple. And Phyl was charming to-night. Something seemed to have happened to her, increasing the power of her personality, her voice seemed ever so slightly changed, her manner was different. This was a woman, distinct from the girl of yesterday, as the full blown from the half blown flower. They talked of trifles for a while, and then he remembered something that he ought to have mentioned before. The Rhetts were giving a dance and they had sent an invitation to Phyl as well as Miss Pinckney. "It will be here by the morning post, I expect," said he. "You'd like to go, wouldn't you?" Phyl hesitated for a moment. "Is that--I mean is that young lady Miss Frances Rhett--the one who called here?" "Yes," cut in Pinckney, "those are the people. You'll come, won't you?" "Is Miss Pinckney going?" "She--of course she's going, she goes to everything, and old Mrs. Rhett is anxious to meet you." "It is very kind of them," said Phyl. "Yes, I'll come." But she spoke without enthusiasm, and it seemed to him that a chill had come over her. Did she know of his entanglement with Frances Rhett? And could it be-- He put the question aside. He had no right to indulge in any fancies at all about Phyl as regarded himself. Then Miss Pinckney came out on the piazza and Phyl rose to go into the house. CHAPTER IX When Silas Grangerson left the cemetery of St. Michael's he walked for half a mile without knowing or caring in what direction he was going. Phyl had done more than slap his face. She had slapped his pride, his assurance of himself, and his desire for her all at the same time. Silas rarely bothered about girls, yet he knew that he had the power to fascinate any woman once he put his mind to the work. He had not tried his powers of fascination on Phyl. It was the other way about. Phyl absolutely unconsciously had used her fascination upon him. Something in her, recognised by him on their first meeting in the stable yard, had put away the barrier of sex. He had talked to her as if she had been a boy. Sitting on the seat beside her whilst the Colonel had been prosing over politics and tobacco, the prompting came to Silas to pinch her finger just for fun; when he had put his hands over her eyes that night it was in obedience to the same prompting, but at the moment of parting from her, a desire quite new had overmastered him. He had kissed a good many girls, but never in his life had he kissed a girl as he kissed Phyl. Something cynical in his feelings for the other sex had always left him somewhat cold, but Phyl was different from the others, she had in some way struck straight at his real being. When he left her that night at Grangersons he was almost as disturbed as she. He scarcely slept. He was out at dawn and on his return after she had left he sat down and wrote the letter which Phyl received next morning. Silas was in love for the first time in his life, but love with Silas was a thing apart from the love of ordinary men. There was no worship of the object; the something that crystallises out in the form of love-letters, verses, bouquets, and candy was not there. He wanted Phyl. He had no more idea of marriage than the great god Pan. If she had consented he would have taken her off on that yawl of his imagination round the world or down to Florida, without thought of the morrow or the _convenances_, or Society; but please do not imagine this rather primitive gentleman a chartered libertine. He would have married her as soon as not, but he had neither the genius nor the inclination for the courtship that leads by slow degrees up to the question, "Will you marry me?" He wanted her at once. As he walked along now with the devil awake in his heart, he felt no anger towards Phyl; all his rage was against Pinckney; he had never liked Pinckney, he more than suspected that Phyl cared for him and he wanted some one to hate badly. He had walked himself into a reasonable state of mind when he found himself outside the Queen City Club. He went in and one of the first men he met was Pinckney. So well did he hold himself in hand that Pinckney suspected nothing of his feelings. Silas was far too good a sportsman to shout at the edge of the wood, too much of a gentleman to desire a brawl in public. He was going to knife Pinckney, he was also going to capture Phyl, but the knifing of Pinckney was the main objective and that required time and thought. He did not desire the blood of the gentleman; he wanted his pride and _amour propre_. He wanted to hit him on the raw, but he did not know yet where, exactly, the raw was nor how to hit it. Time would tell him. He was specially civil to his intended victim, and he went off home that evening plotting all the way, but arriving at nothing. He was trying to make bricks without straw. Pinckney did not drink, nor did he gamble, and he was far too good a business man to be had in that way. However, all things come to him who waits, and next morning's post brought him a ray of light in the midst of his darkness. It brought him an invitation to the Rhetts' dance on the following Wednesday; nearly a week to wait, but, still, something to wait for. "What are you thinking about, Silas?" asked old Seth Grangerson as they sat at breakfast. "I'm thinking of a new rabbit trap, suh," responded the son. The rabbit trap seemed to give him a good deal of food for thought during the week that followed; food that made him hilarious and gloomy by turns, restless also. Had he known it, Phyl away at Charleston, was equally restless. She no longer thought of Silas. She had dismissed him from her mind, she no longer feared him as a possible source of danger to the man she loved. Love had her entirely in his possession to torture as he pleased. She knew only one danger, the danger that Richard Pinckney did not care in the least for her, and as day followed day that danger grew more defined and concrete. Richard had taken to avoiding her, she became aware of that. She fancied that she displeased him. If she had only known! CHAPTER X Silas Grangerson came to town on the Wednesday, driving in and reaching the Charleston Hotel about five o'clock in the afternoon. The Grangersons scarcely ever used the railway. Silas, often as he had been in Charleston, had never put foot in a street car; even a hired conveyance was against the prejudices of these gentlemen. This antagonism towards public means of locomotion was not in the least the outcome of snobbishness or pride; they had come from a race of people accustomed to move in a small orbit in their own particular way, an exclusive people, breeders and lovers of horses, a people to whom locomotion had always meant pride in the means and the method; to take a seat in a stuffy railway car at so much a mile, to grab a ticket and squeeze into a tram car, to drive in a cab drawn by an indifferent horse would have been hateful to these people; it was scarcely less so to their descendants. So Silas came to Charleston driving a pair of absolutely matched chestnuts, a coloured manservant in the Grangerson livery in attendance. After dinner he strolled into the bar of the hotel, met some friends, made some bets on the forthcoming races and at eight o'clock retired upstairs to dress. He was one of the first of the guests to arrive. The Rhetts' house in Legare Street was about the same size as Vernons and equally old, but it had not the same charm, the garden was much larger than that at Vernons, but it had not the same touch of the past. Houses, like people, have personalities and the house of the Rhetts had a telephone without resenting the intruder, electric everythings, even to an elevator, modern cookers, modern stoves, everything in a modern way to save labour and make life easy, and all so cunningly and craftily done that the air of antiquity was supposed not to be disturbed. Illusion! Nothing is gained without some sacrifice; you cannot hold the past and the present in the same hand, the concealed elevator spoke in all the rooms once its presence was betrayed, the telephone talked--everywhere was evident the use of yesterday as a veneer of to-day. However that may be, the old house was gay enough to-night with flowers and lights, and Silas, looking better perhaps than he had ever looked in his life, found himself talking to Frances Rhett with an animation that surprised himself. Frances had never had a chance of leading Silas behind her chariot; to fool with her would have meant an expenditure of time and energy in journeys to Charleston quite beyond his inclination. This aloofness coupled with his good looks had set him apart from others. But to-night he was quite a different being; to-night, in some mysterious way, he managed to convey the impression, pleasing enough, that he had come to see her and her alone. As they stood together for a moment, he led the talk into Charleston channels, asking about this person and that till the folk at Vernons came on the _tapis_. "Is it true what I hear, that Richard Pinckney has become engaged to the girl who is staying there?" asked Silas. Frances smiled. "I don't think so," she replied. "Who told you?" "Upon my word I forget," said he, "but I judged mostly by my own eyes--they seemed like an engaged couple when I saw them last." New guests were arriving and she had to go forward to help in receiving them. Silas moved towards her, but in the next moment they had for a snatch of conversation, she did not refer to the subject, nor did he. The Vernons people were late, so late that when they arrived they were the last of the guests; dancing was in progress and, on entering the ballroom, Richard Pinckney was treated to the pleasing sight of his _fiancée_ whirling in the arms of Silas Grangerson. Phyl, looking lovely in the simple, rather old-fashioned dress evolved for her by the combined geniuses of Maria Pinckney and Madame Organdie, produced that sensation which can only be evoked by newness, her effect was instantaneous and profound, it touched not only every one of these strangers but also Maria Pinckney and Richard. They had come with her, but it was only in the ballroom that they recognised with whom they had come. So with a book, a picture, a play, the producer and his friends only recognise its merits fully when it is staged and condemned or praised by the public. A _débutante_ fails or succeeds at first glance, and the instantaneous success of Phyl was a record in successes. And Frances Rhett had to watch it and dance. The Inquisition had its torments; Society has improved on them, for her victims cannot cry out and the torments of Frances Rhett were acute. Not that she was troubling much about Richard Pinckney and what the poisonous Silas had said; she was not in love with Richard Pinckney, but she was passionately in love with herself. She was the belle of Charleston; had been for the last year; and one of her chief incentives to marriage was an intuitive knowledge that prestige fades, that the position of principal girl in any society is like the position of the billiard ball the juggler balances on the end of a cue--precarious. She wanted to get married and ring down the curtain on an unspoiled success, and now in a moment she saw herself dethroned. In a moment. For no jeweller of Amsterdam ever had an eye for the quality of diamonds surer than the eye of Frances Rhett for the quality of other women's beauty. At the first glance to-night, she saw what others saw, though more clearly than they, that it was the touch of the past that gave Phyl her _cachet_, a something indefinable from yesterday, the lack of which made the other girls, by contrast, seem cheap. Never could she have imagined that the "red-headed girl at Vernons" could gain so much from setting, a setting due to the instinct as well as the taste of "that old Maria Pinckney." She had always laughed at Maria, as young people sometimes will at the old. When Richard came up to her a little later on, he found himself coldly received; she had no dances for him except a few at the bottom of the programme. "You shouldn't have been late," said she. "Well," he said, "it was not my fault. You know what Aunt Maria is, she kept us ten minutes after the carriage was round, and then Phyl wasn't ready." "She looks ready enough now," said the other, looking at Phyl and the cluster of young men around her. "What delayed her? Was she dyeing her head? It doesn't look quite so loud as when I saw her last." "Her head's all right," replied Pinckney, irritated by the manner of the other, "inside and out, and one can't say the same for every one." Frances looked at him. "Do you know what Silas Grangerson asked me to-night?" she said. "No." "He asked me were you engaged to her." "Phyl?" "Miss Berknowles. I don't know her well enough to call her Phyl." "He asked you that?" "Yes, said every one was talking of it, and the last time he saw you together you looked like an engaged couple the way you were carrying on." "But he has never seen us together," cried the outraged Pinckney; "that was a pure lie." "I expect he saw you when you didn't see him; anyhow, that's the impression people have got, and it's not very pleasant for me." Richard Pinckney choked back his anger. He fell to thinking where Silas could have seen them together. "I don't know whether he saw us or not," said he, "but I am certain of one thing; he never saw us 'carrying on' as you call it; anyhow, I'll have a personal explanation from Silas to-morrow." "_Please_ don't imagine that I object to your flirting with any one you like," said Frances with exasperating calm. "If you have a taste for that sort of thing it is your own business." Pinckney flushed. "I don't know if you _want_ to quarrel with me," said he, "if you do, say so at once." "Not a bit," she replied, "you know I never quarrel with any one, it's bad form for one thing and it is waste of energy for another." A man came up to claim her for the next dance and she went off with him, leaving Pinckney upset and astonished at her manner and conduct. It was their first quarrel, the first result of their engagement. Frances had seemed all laziness and honey up to this; like many another woman she began to show her real nature now that Pinckney was secured. But it was not an ordinary lovers' quarrel; her anger had less to do with Richard Pinckney than with Phyl. Her hatred of Phyl, big as a baobab tree, covered with its shadow Vernons, Miss Pinckney, and Richard. He was part of the business of her dethronement. Richard wandered off to where Maria Pinckney was seated watching the dancers. "Why aren't you dancing?" asked she. "Oh, I don't know," he replied. "I'm not keen on it and there are loads of men." Miss Pinckney had watched him talking to Frances Rhett and she had drawn her own deductions, but she said nothing. He sat down beside her. He had been wanting to tell her of his engagement for a long time past, but had put it off and put it off, waiting for the psychological moment. Maria Pinckney was a very difficult person to fit into a psychological moment. "I want to tell you something," said he. "I'm engaged to Frances Rhett." "Engaged to be married to her?" "Yes." Miss Pinckney was dumb. What she had always dreaded had come to pass, then. "You don't congratulate me?" "No," she replied. "I don't." Then, all of a sudden, she turned on him. "Congratulate you! If I saw you drowning in the harbour, would you expect me to stand at the Battery waving my hand to you and congratulating you? No, I don't congratulate you. You had the chance of being happy with the most beautiful girl in the world, and the best, and you've thrown it away to pick up with _that_ woman. Phyl would have married you, I know it, she would have made you happy, I know it, for I know her and I know you. Now it's all spoiled." He rose to his feet. It was the first time in his life that he had seen Maria Pinckney really put out. "I'll talk to you again about it," said he. Then he moved away. He had the pleasure of watching Frances dancing the next waltz with Silas Grangerson, and Silas had the pleasure of watching him as he stood talking to one of the elderly ladies and looking on. Silas's rabbit trap was in reality a very simple affair, it was a plan to pick a quarrel with Richard through Frances, if possible; to make the imperturbable Pinckney angry, knowing well how easily an angry man can be induced to make a fool of himself. To keep cool and let Richard do the shouting. Unfortunately for Silas, the sight of Phyl in all her beauty had raised his temperature far above the point of coolness. There were moments when he was dancing, when he could have flung Frances aside, torn Phyl from the arms of her partner and made off with her through the open window. This dance was a deadly business for him. It was the one thing needed to cap and complete the strange fascination this girl exercised upon his mind, his imagination, his body. It was only now that he realised that nothing else at all mattered in the world, it was only now that he determined to have her or die. Silas was of the type that kills under passion, the type that, unable to have, destroys. Preparing a trap for another, he himself had walked into a trap constructed by the devil, stronger than steel. Yet he never once approached or tried to speak to Phyl. He fed on her at a distance. Fleeting glimpses of the curves of her figure, the Titian red of her hair, the face that to-night might have turned a saint from his vows, were snatched by him and devoured. He would not have danced with her if he could. To take her in his arms would have meant covering her face with kisses. Nor did he feel the least anger against the men with whom she danced. All that was a sham and an unreality, they were shadows. He and Phyl were the only real persons in that room. Later on in the evening, Richard Pinckney, tired with the lights and the noise, took a stroll in the garden. The garden was lit here and there with fairy lamps and there were coigns of shadow where couples were sitting out chatting and enjoying the beauty of the night. The moon was nearing the full and her light cut the tree shadows distinctly on the paths. Passing a seat occupied by one of the sitting out couples, Pinckney noticed the woman's fan which her partner was playing with; it was his own gift to Frances Rhett. The man was Silas Grangerson and the woman was Frances. They were talking, but as he passed them their voices ceased. He felt their eyes upon him, then, when he had got twenty paces or so away, he heard Frances laugh. He imagined that she was laughing at him. Already angry with Silas, he halted and half turned, intending to go back and have it out with him, then he thought better of it and went his way. He would deal with Silas later and in some place where he could get him alone or in the presence of men only. Pinckney had a horror of scenes, especially in the presence of women. Twenty minutes later he had his opportunity. He was crossing the hall from the supper room, when he came face to face with Silas. They were alone. "Excuse me," said Richard Pinckney, halting in front of the other, "I want a word with you." "Certainly," answered Silas, guessing at once what was coming. "You made some remarks about me to Miss Rhett this evening," went on the other. "You coupled my name with the name of a lady in a most unjustifiable manner and I want your explanation here and now." "Who was the lady?" asked Silas, seemingly quite unmoved. "Miss Berknowles." "In what way did I couple your name with her, may I ask?" "No, you mayn't." Richard had turned pale before the calm insolence of the other. "You know quite well what you said and if you are a gentleman you will apologise-- If you aren't you won't and I will deal with you in Charleston accordingly." Phyl was at that moment coming out of the supper room with young Reggie Calhoun--the same who, according to Richard that morning at breakfast long ago, was an admirer of Maria Pinckney. She saw the two men, in profile, facing one another, and she saw Silas's right hand, which he was holding behind his back, opening and shutting convulsively. She saw the blow given by Pinckney, she saw Silas step back and the knife which he always carried, as the wasp carries its sting, suddenly in his hand. Then she was gripping his wrist. Face to face with madness for a moment, holding it, fighting eye to eye. Had she faltered, had her gaze left his for the hundredth part of a second, he would have cast her aside and fallen upon his prey. It was her soul that held him, her spirit--call it what you will, the something that speaks alone through the eye. Calhoun and Pinckney stood, during that tremendous moment, stricken, breathless, without making the slightest movement. They saw she was holding him by the power of her eye alone; so vividly did this fact strike them that for a dazed moment it seemed to them that the battle was not theirs, that the contest was beyond the earthly plane, that this was no struggle between human beings, but a battle between sanity and madness. Its duration might have been spanned by three ticks of the great old clock that stood in the corner of the hall telling the time. Then came the ring of the knife falling on the floor. It was like the breaking of a spell. Silas, white and bewildered-looking as a man suddenly awakened from sleep, stood looking now at his released hand as though it did not belong to him, then at Pinckney, and then at Phyl who had turned her back upon him and was tottering as though about to fall. Pinckney, stepping forward, was about to speak, when at that moment the door of the supper room opened and a band of young people came out chatting and laughing. Calhoun, who was a man of resource, kicked the knife which slithered away under one of the seats. Phyl, recovering herself, walked away towards the stairs; Silas without a word, turned and vanished from sight past the curtain of the corridor that led to the cloakroom. Calhoun and Pinckney were left alone. "What are you going to do?" asked Calhoun. "I am at his disposal," replied the other. "I struck him." "Struck him, damnation! He drew a knife on you; he ought to be hoofed out of the club; he'd have had you only for that girl. I never saw anything so splendid in my life." "Yes," said Pinckney, "she saved my life. He was clean mad, but thank God no one knows anything about it and we avoided a scene. Say nothing to any one unless he wants to push the matter further. I am quite at his disposal." PART IV CHAPTER I When Silas reached the cloakroom he took a glance at himself in the mirror, then putting on his overcoat and taking his hat from the attendant he came back into the hall. Pinckney and Calhoun had just strolled away into the ballroom; there was no one in the hall, and without a thought of saying good-bye to his hostess, he left the house. He felt no anger against Pinckney, nor did he think as he walked down Legare Street that but for the mercy of God and the intervention of Phyl he might at that moment have been walking between two constables, a murderer with the blood of innocence on his hands. Not that he was insensible to reason or the fitness of things, he had always known and acknowledged that when in a passion he was not accountable for his acts; he admitted the fact with regret and also with a certain pride. To-night he might have felt the regret without any pride to leaven it but for the fact that his mind was lost to every consideration but one--Phyl. All through his life Silas had followed with an iron will the line that pleased him, never for a moment had he counted the cost of his actions; just as he had swum the harbour with his clothes on so had he plunged into any adventure that came to hand; he knew Fear just as little as he knew Consequence. Well, now he found himself for the first time in his life face to face with Fate. All his adventures up to this had been little things involving at worst loss of life by accident. This was different; it involved his whole future and the future of the girl who had mastered his mind. Leaving Legare Street he reached Meeting Street and passed up it till he reached Vernons. The moon, high in the sky now, showed the garden through the trellis-work of the iron gate, and Silas paused for a moment and looked in. The garden, seen like this with the moonlight upon the roses and the glossy leaves of the southern trees, presented a picture charming, dream-like, almost unreal in its beauty. He tried the gate. It was locked. On ordinary nights it would be open till the house closed, or in the event of Pinckney being out, until he returned, but to-night, owing to the absence of the family, it was locked. Then, turning from the gate he crossed the road and took up his position in a corner of shadow. Five minutes passed, then twenty, but still he kept watch. There were few passers-by at that hour and little traffic; he had a long view of the moonlit street and presently he saw the carriage he was waiting for approaching. It drew up at the front door of Vernons and he watched whilst the occupants got out; he caught a glimpse of Phyl as she entered the house following Miss Pinckney and followed by Richard, then the door shut and the carriage drove away. Silas left his concealment and crossed the road. He paced for a while up and down outside the door of Vernons, then he came to the garden gate again and looked in. From here one could get a glimpse of the first and second floor piazzas and the windows opening upon them. He could not tell which was the window of Phyl's room, it was enough for him that the place held her. In the way in which he had crossed the road, in his uneasy prowling up and down before the house, and now in his attitude as he stood motionless with head raised there was something ominous, animal-like, almost wolfish. As he stood a call suddenly came from the garden. It was the call of an owl, a white owl that rose on the sound and flitted softly as a moth across the trees to the garden beyond. Silas turned away from the gate and came back down the street towards his hotel, arrived there he went straight to his room and to bed. But he did not go to sleep. His head was full of plans, the craziest and maddest plans. Pinckney he had quite dismissed from his mind, the consciousness of having committed a vile action in drawing a knife upon an unarmed man was with him, and the knowledge that the consequences might include his expulsion from Charleston society, but all that instead of sobering him made him more reckless. He would have Phyl despite the Devil himself. He would seize her and carry her off, trap her like a bird. He determined on the morrow to return early to Grangersons and think things out. CHAPTER II Whilst he was lying in bed thinking things out, the folk at Vernons were retiring to rest. Maria Pinckney knew nothing of what had occurred between Silas and Richard. Richard Pinckney, Phyl and Reggie Calhoun were the only three persons in Charleston, leaving Silas aside, who knew of the business and in a hurried consultation just before leaving the Rhetts they had agreed to say nothing. Calhoun was for publishing the affair. "The man's dangerous," said he; "some day or another he'll do the same thing again to some one and succeed and swing." "I think he's had his lesson," said Pinckney; "he went clean mad for the moment. Then there's the fact that I struck him. No, taking everything into consideration, we'll let it be. I don't feel any animosity against him, not half as much as if he'd stabbed me behind the back with a libel-- He did tell a lie about me to-night but it was the stupid sort of lie a child might have told. The man has his good points as well as his bad and I don't want to push the thing against him." "I don't think he will do it again," said Phyl. She, like Richard, felt no anger against Silas; it was as though they recognised that Silas was the man really attacked that night, attacked by the Devil. They both recognised instinctively his good qualities. Miss Pinckney, it will be remembered, once said that it is the man with good in him that comes to the worst end unless the good manages to fight the bad and get it under in time. She had a terrible instinct for the truth of things. "Well," said Calhoun, "it's not my affair; if you choose to take pity on him, well and good; if it were my business I'd give him a cold bath, that might stop him from doing a thing like that again. I'll say nothing." Though Miss Pinckney was in ignorance of the affair she was strangely silent during the drive home and when Phyl went to her room to bid her good night, she found her in tears, a very rare occurrence with Miss Pinckney. She was seated in an armchair crying and Phyl knelt down beside her and took her hand. Then it all came out. "I had hoped and hoped and hoped for him, goodness knows he has been my one thought, and now he has thrown himself away. Richard is engaged to Frances Rhett. He told me so to-night--well, there, it's all ended, there's no hope anywhere, she'll never let him go, and she'll have Vernons when I'm gone. She picked him out from all the other men--why?-- Why, because he's the best of the lot for money and position. Care about him! She cares no more for him than I do for old Darius. I'm sure I don't know why this trouble should have fallen on me. I suppose I have committed some sin or another though I can't tell what. I've tried to live blameless and there's others that haven't, yet they seem to prosper and get their wishes--and there's no use telling me to be resigned," finished she with a snap and as if addressing some viewless mentor. "I can't--and what's more I won't. Never will I resign myself to wickedness, and stupidity is wickedness, not even a decent, honest wickedness, but a crazy, sap-headed sort of wickedness, same as influenza isn't a disease but just an ailment that kills you all the same." Phyl, kneeling beside Miss Pinckney, had turned deathly white. Only half an hour ago when the little conference with Calhoun had been concluded, Richard Pinckney had taken her hand. His words were still ringing in her ears: "You saved my life. I can't say what I feel, at least not now." He had looked straight into her eyes, and now half an hour later--This. Engaged to Frances Rhett! She rose up and stood beside Miss Pinckney for a moment whilst that lady finished her complaints. Then she made her escape and returned to her room-- As she closed the door she caught a glimpse of herself in the old-fashioned cheval glass that had been brought up by Dinah and Seth to help her in dressing for the dance and which had not been removed. Every picture in every mirror is the work of an artist--the man who makes a mirror is an artist; according to the perfection of his work is the perfection of the picture. The old cheval glass was as truthful in its way as Gainsborough, but Gainsborough had never such a lovely subject as Phyl. She started at her own reflection as though it had been that of a stranger. Then she looked mournfully at herself as a man might look at his splendid gifts which he has thrown away. All that was no use now. She sat down on the side of her bed with her hands clasped together just as a child clasps its hands in grief. Sitting like this with her eyes fixed before her she was looking directly at Fate. It was not only Richard Pinckney that she was about to lose but Vernons and the Past-- Just as Juliet Mascarene had lost everything so was it to happen to her. Or rather so had it happened, for she felt that the game was lost--some vague, mysterious, extraordinary game played by unknown powers had begun on that evening in Ireland when standing by the window of the library she had heard Pinckney's voice for the first time. The sense of Fatality came to her from the case of Juliet. Consciously and unconsciously she had linked herself to Juliet. The extravagant idea that she herself was Juliet returned and that Richard Pinckney was Rupert had come to her more than once since that dream or vision in which the guns had sounded in her ears. The idea had frightened her at first, then pleased her vaguely. Then she had dismissed it, her _ego_ refusing any one else a share in her love for Richard, any one--even herself masquerading under the guise of Juliet. The idea came back to her now leaving her utterly cold, and yet stirring her mind anew with the sense of Fate. * * * * * When she fell asleep that night she passed into the dreamless condition which is the nearest thing we know to oblivion, yet her sub-conscious mind must have carried on its work, for when she awoke just as dawn was showing at the window it was with the sense of having passed through a long season of trouble, of having fought with--without conquering--all sorts of difficulties. She rose and dressed herself, put on her hat and came down into the garden. Vernons was just wakening for the day, and in the garden alive with birds, she could hear the early morning sounds of the city, and from the servants' quarters of the house, voices, the sound of a mat being beaten and now and then the angry screech of a parrot. General Grant slept in the kitchen and his cage was put out in the yard every morning at this hour. Later it would be brought round to the piazza. He resented the kitchen yard as beneath his dignity and he let people know it. Phyl tried the garden gate, it was locked and Seth appearing at that moment on the lower piazza, she called to him to fetch the key. He let her out and she stood for a moment undecided as to whether she would walk towards the Battery or in the opposite direction. Meeting Street never looked more charming than now in the very early morning sunlight; under the haze-blue sky, almost deserted, it seemed for a moment to have recaptured its youth. A negro crab vendor was wheeling his barrow along, crying his wares. His voice came lazily on the warm scented air. She turned in the direction of the station. The voice of the crab seller had completed in some uncanny way the charm of the deserted street and the early sunlight. She was going to lose all this. Vernons and the city she loved, Juliet, Miss Pinckney, the past and the present, she was going to lose them all, they were all in some miraculous way part of the man she loved, her love of them was part of her love for him. She could no longer stay in Charleston; she must go--where? She could think of nowhere to go but Ireland. To stay here would be absolutely impossible. As she walked without noticing whither she was going her mind cleared, she began to form plans. She would go that very day. Nothing would stop her. The thing had to be done. Let it be done at once. She would explain everything to Miss Pinckney. She would escape without seeing Richard again. What she was proposing to herself was death, the ruin of everything she cared for, the destruction of all the ties that bound her to the world, the present and the past. It was the recognition that these ties had been broken for her and all these things taken away by the woman who had taken away Richard. Presently she found herself in the suburbs, in a street where coloured children were playing in the gutter, and where the houses were unsubstantial looking as rabbit-hutches, but there was a glimpse of country beyond and she did not turn back. She did not want breakfast. If she returned to Vernons by ten o'clock it would give her plenty of time to pack her things, say good-bye to Miss Pinckney and take her departure before Richard returned to luncheon--if he did return. It did not take her long to pass through the negro quarter, and now, out in the open country, out amidst those great flat lands in the broad day and under the lonely blue sky her mood changed. Phyl was no patient Grizel, the very last person to be trapped in the bog of love's despondency. Abstract melancholy produced by colours, memories, or sounds was an easy enough matter with her, but she was not the person to mourn long over the loss of a man snatched from her by another woman. As she walked, now, breathing the free fresh air, a feeling of anger and resentment began to fill her mind. Anger at first against Frances Rhett but spreading almost at once towards Richard Pinckney. Soon it included herself, Maria Pinckney, Charleston--the whole world. It was the anger which brings with it perfect recklessness, akin to that which had seized her the day in Ireland when in her rage over Rafferty's dismissal she had called Pinckney a Beast. Only this anger was less acute, more diffuse, more lasting. The sounds of wheels and horses' hoofs on the road behind her made her turn her head. A carriage was approaching, an English mail phaëton drawn by two high-stepping chestnuts and driven by a young man. It was Silas Grangerson. Returning to Grangerson's to make plans for the capture of Phyl, here she was on the road before him and going in the same direction. For a moment he could scarcely believe his eyes. Then reining in and leaving the horses with the groom he jumped down and ran towards her. After the affair of last night one might fancy that he would have shown something of it in his manner. Not a bit. "I didn't expect to come across _you_ on the road," said he. "Won't you speak to me--are you angry with me?" "It's not a question of being angry," said Phyl, stiffly. She walked on and he walked beside her, silent for a moment. "If you mean about that affair last night," said he, "I'm sorry I lost my temper--but he hit me--you don't understand what that means to me." "You tried to--" "Kill him, I did, and only for you I'd have done it. You can't understand it all. I can scarcely understand it myself. He _hit_ me." "I don't think you knew what you were doing," said Phyl. "I most surely did not. I was rousted out of myself. I reckon he didn't know what he was doing either when he struck. He ought to have known I was not the person to hit. I'll show you, just stand before me for a moment." Phyl faced him. He pretended to strike at her and she started back. "There you are," said he; "you know I wasn't going to touch you but you had to dodge. Your mind had nothing to do with it, just your instinct. That was how I was. When he landed his blow I went for my knife by instinct. If you tread on a snake he lets out at you just the same way. He doesn't think. He's wound up by nature to hit back." "But you are not a snake." "How do you know what's in a man? I reckon we've all been animals once, maybe I was a snake. There are worse things than snakes. Snakes are all right, they don't meddle with you if you don't meddle with them. They've got a bad name they don't deserve. I like them. They're a lot better citizens, the way they look after their wives and families, than some others and they know how to hit back prompt--say, where are you going to?" "I don't know," said Phyl. "I just came for a walk--I'm leaving Charleston." She spoke with a little catch in her voice. All Silas's misdoings were forgotten for the moment, the fact that the man was dangerous as Death to himself and others had been neutralised in her mind by the fact, intuitively recognised, that there was nothing small or mean in his character. Despite his conduct in the cemetery, despite his lunatic outburst of the night before, in her heart of hearts she liked him; besides that, he was part of Charleston, part of the place she loved. Ah, how she loved it! Had you dissected her love for Richard Pinckney you would have found a thousand living wrappings before you reached the core. Vernons, the garden, the birds, the flowers, the blue sky, the sunlight, Meeting Street, the story of Juliet, Miss Pinckney, even old Prue. Memories, sounds, scents, and colours all formed part of the living thing that Frances Rhett had killed. "Leaving Charleston!" said Silas, speaking in a dazed sort of way. "Yes. I cannot stay here any longer." "Going--say--it's not because of what I did last night." "You--oh, no. It has nothing to do with you." She spoke almost disdainfully. "But where are you going?" "Back to Ireland." "When?" "To-day." Then, suddenly, in some curious manner, he knew. But he was clever enough, for once in his life, to restrain himself and say nothing. "I will go this afternoon," said she, as though she were talking of a journey of a few miles. "Have you any friends to go to?" Phyl thought of Mr. Hennessy sitting in his gloomy office in gloomy Dublin. "Yes, one." "In Ireland?" "Yes." "Can't you think of any other friends?" "No." "Not even me?" "I don't know," said poor Phyl, "I never could understand you quite, but now that I am in trouble you seem a friend--I'm miserable--but there's no use having friends here. It only makes it the worse having to go." "Do you remember the day I asked you to run off to Florida with me," said Silas, "and leave this damned place? It's no good for any one here and you've found it out--the place is all right, it's the people that are wrong." Phyl made no reply. "You're not going back," he finished. She glanced at him. "You're going to stay here--here with me." "I am going back to Ireland to-day," said Phyl. "You are not, you are going to stay here." "No. I am going back." She spoke as a person speaks who is half drowsy, and Silas spoke like a person whose mind is half absent. It was the strangest conversation to listen to, knowing their relationship and the point at issue. "You are going to stay here," he went on. "If I lost you now I'd never find you again. I've been wanting you ever since I saw you that day first in the yard-- D'you remember how we sat on the log together?--you can't tramp all the way back to Charleston-- Come with me and you'll be happy always, all the time and all your life--" "No," said Phyl, "I mustn't--I can't." Her mind, half dazed by all she had gone through, by the mesmerism of his voice, by the brilliant light of the day, was capable of no real decision on any point. The dark streets of Dublin lay before her, a vague and nightmare vision. To return to Vernons would be only her first step on the return to Ireland, and yet if she did not return to Vernons, where could she go? Silas's invitation to go with him neither raised her anger nor moved her to consent. Phyl was an absolute Innocent in the ways of the world. No careful mother had sullied her mind with warnings and suggestions, and her mind was by nature unspeculative as to the material side of life. Instinctively she knew a great deal. How much knowledge lies in the sub-conscious mind is an open question. They walked on for a bit without speaking and then Silas began again. "You can't go back all that way. It's absurd. You talk of going off to-day, why, good heavens, it takes time even to start on a journey like that. You have to book your passage in a ship--and how are you to go alone?" "I don't know," said Phyl. His voice became soft. It was the first time in his life, perhaps, that he had spoken with tenderness, and the effect was perfectly magical. "You are not going," he said, "you are not; indeed, I want you far too much to let you go; there's nothing else I want at all in the world. I don't count anything worth loving beside you." No reply. He turned. The coloured groom was walking the horses, they were only a few yards away. He went to the man and gave him some money with the order to return to Charleston and go back to Grangersons by train, or at least to the station that was ten miles from Grangerville. Then as the man went off along the road he stood holding the near horse by the bridle and talking to Phyl. "You can't walk back all that way; put your foot on the step and get in, leave all your trouble right here. I'll see that you never have any trouble again. Put your foot on the step." Phyl looked away down the road. She hesitated just as she had hesitated that morning long ago when she had run away from school. She had run away, not so much to get home as to get away from homesickness. Still she hesitated, urged by the recklessness that prompted her to break everything at one blow, urged by the dismal and hopeless prospect towards which the road to Charleston led her mind, held back by all sorts of hands that seemed reaching to her from the past. Confused, bewildered, tempted yet resisting, all might have been well had not a vision suddenly risen before her clear, definite, and destructive to her reason. The vision of Frances Rhett. Everything bad and wild in Phyl surged up before that vision. For a second it seemed to her that she loathed the man she loved. She put her foot on the step and got into the phaëton. Silas, without a word, jumped up beside her, and the horses started. CHAPTER III She had committed the irrevocable. When the contract is signed, when the china vase is broken, all the regret in the world will not alter the fact. It was not till they had gone ten miles on their way that the regret came, sudden and painful as the stab of a dagger. Miss Pinckney's kindly old face suddenly rose up before Phyl. She would have been waiting breakfast for her. She saw the breakfast room, sunny and pleasant, the tea urn on the table, the garden through the open window-- Then came the thought--what matter. All that was lost to her anyhow. It did not matter in the least what she did. She was running away with Silas Grangerson. She had a vague sort of idea that they were running away to be married, that she would have to explain things to Colonel Grangerson when they got to the house and that things would arrange themselves somehow. But now, she sat voiceless beside her companion, answering only in monosyllables when he spoke; a voice began to trouble her, a voice that repeated the half statement, half question, over and over again. "You are running away to be married to Silas Grangerson?" She was running away from her troubles, from the prospect of returning to Ireland, from the idea of banishment from Vernons. She was running away out of anger against the woman who had taken Richard. She was running away because of pique, anger and the reckless craving to smash everything and dash everything to pieces--but to marry Silas Grangerson! "Stop!" cried Phyl. Silas glanced sideways at her. "What's the matter now?" "I want to go back." "Back to Charleston!" "Yes, stop, stop at once--I must go back, I should never have come." Silas was on the point of flashing out but he shut his lips tight, then he reined in. "Wait a moment," said he with his hand on her arm, "you can't walk back, we are nearly half way to Grangersons. I can't drive you because I don't want to return to Charleston. If you have altered your mind you can go back when we reach Grangersons, you can wire from there. The old man will make it all right with Maria Pinckney." Phyl hesitated, then she began to cry. It was the rarest thing in the world for her to cry like this. Tears with her meant a storm, but now she was crying quietly, hopelessly, like a lost child. "Don't cry," said he, "everything will be all right when we get to Grangersons--we'll just go on." The horses started again and Phyl dried her eyes. They covered another five miles without speaking, and then Silas said: "You don't mean to stick to me, then?" "I can't," said Phyl. "You care for some one else better?" "Yes." "Is it Pinckney?" "Yes." "God!" said he. He cut the off horse with the whip. The horses nearly bolted, he reined them in and they settled down again to their pace. The country was very desolate just here, cotton fields and swampy grounds with here and there a stretch of water reflecting the blue of the sky. After a moment's silence he began again. There was something in Silas's mentality that seemed to have come up from the world of automata, something tireless and persistent akin to the energy that drives a beetle over all obstacles in its course, on or round them. "That's all very well," said he, "but you can't always go on caring for Pinckney." "Can't I?" said Phyl. "No, you can't. He's going to get married and then where will you be?" Phyl, staring over the horses' heads as though she were staring at some black prospect, set her teeth. Then she spoke and her voice was like the voice of a person who speaks under mesmerism. "I cared for him before he was born and I'll care for him after I'm dead and there's no use in bothering a bit about it now. _You_ couldn't understand. No one can understand, not even he." The road here bordered a stretch of waste land; Silas gazed over it, his face was drawn and hard. Then he suddenly blazed out. Laying the whip over the horses and turning them so sharply that the phaëton was all but upset he put them over the waste land; another touch of the whip and they bolted. Beyond the waste land lay a rice field and between field and waste land stood a fence; there was doubtless a ditch on the other side of the fence. "You'll kill us!" cried Phyl. "Good--so," replied Silas, "horses and all." She had half risen from her seat, she sat down again holding tight to the side rail and staring ahead. Death and destruction lay waiting behind that fence, leaping every moment nearer. She did not care in the least. She could see that Silas, despite his words, was making every effort to rein in, the impetus to drive to hell and smash everything up had passed; she watched his hands grow white all along the tendon ridges with the strain. The whole thing was extraordinary and curious but unfearful, a storm of wind seemed blowing in her face. Then like a switched out light all things vanished. CHAPTER IV Twenty yards from the fence the off side wheel had gone. The phaëton, flinging its occupants out, tilted, struck the earth at the trace coupling just as a man might strike it with his shoulder, dragged for five yards or so, breaking dash board and mud guard and brought the off side horse down as though it had been poleaxed. Silas, with the luck that always fell to him in accidents, was not even stunned. Phyl was lying like a dead creature just where she had been flung amongst some bent grass. He rushed to her. She was not dead, her pulse told that, nor did she seem injured in any way. He left her, ran to the horses, undid the traces and got the fallen horse on its feet, then he stripped them of their harness and turned them loose. Having done this he returned to the girl. Phyl was just regaining consciousness; as he reached her she half sat up leaning on her right arm. "Where are the horses?" said she. They were her first thought. "I've let them loose--there they are." She turned her head in the direction towards which he pointed. The horses, free of their harness, had already found a grass patch and were beginning to graze. The broken phaëton lay in the sunshine and the cushions flung to right and left showed as blue squares amidst the green of the grass; a light wind from the west was stirring the grass tops and a bird was singing somewhere its thin piping note, the only sound from all that expanse of radiant blue sky and green forsaken country. "How do you feel now?" asked Silas. "All right," said Phyl. "We'd better get somewhere," he went on; "there are some cabins beyond that rice field, I can see their tops. There's sure to be some one there and we can send for help." Phyl struggled to her feet, refusing assistance. "Let us go there," said she. She turned to look at the horses. "They'll be all right," said Silas; "there's lots of grass and there's a pond over there--they'd live here a month without harm." He led the way to the fence, helped her over, and then, without a word they began to plod across the rice field. When they reached the cabins they found them deserted, almost in ruins. They faced a great tract of tree-grown ground. In the old plantation days this place would have been populous, for to the right there were ruins of other cabins stretching along and bordering an old grass road that bent westward to lose itself amongst the trees, but now there was nothing but desolation and the wind that stirred the mossy beards of the live oaks and the rank green foliage of weeds and sunflowers. An old disused well faced the cabins. Phyl gave a little shudder as she looked around her. Her mind, still slightly confused by the accident and beaten upon by troubles, could find nothing with which to reply to the facts of the situation--alone here with Silas Grangerson, lost, both of them, what explanation could she make, even to herself, of the position? In the nearest cabin to the right some rough dry grass had been stored as if for the bedding of an animal. It was too coarse for fodder. Silas made her sit down on it to rest. Then he stood before her in the doorway. For the first time in his life he seemed disturbed in mind. "I'll have to go and get help," said he, "and find out where we are. It's my fault. I'm sorry, but there's no use in going over that. You aren't fit to walk. I'll go and leave you here. You won't be afraid to stay by yourself?" "No," said Phyl. "You needn't be a bit, there's no danger here." "I am thirsty," said she. "Wait." He went to the well head. The windlass and chain were there rusty but practicable and a bucket lay amongst the grass. It was in good repair and had evidently been used recently. He lowered it and brought up some water. The water was clear diamond bright, and cold as ice. Having satisfied himself that it was drinkable he brought the bucket to Phyl and tilted it slightly whilst she drank. Then he put it by the door. "Now I'll go," said he, "and I shan't be long. Sure you won't be afraid?" "No," she replied. "You're not angry with me?" "No, I'm not angry." He bent down, took her hand and kissed it. She did not draw it away or show any sign of resentment; it was cold like the hand of a dead person. He glanced back as he turned to go. She saw him stand at the doorway for a moment looking down along the grass road, his figure cut against the blaze of light outside, then the doorway was empty. She was never to see him again. * * * * * Outside in the sunlight Silas hesitated for a moment as though he was about to turn back, then he went on, striking along the grass road and between the trees. Although he had never been over the ground before, he guessed it to be a part of the old Beauregard plantation and the distance from Grangerville to be not more than eight miles as the crow flies. By the road, reckoning from where the accident had occurred, it would be fifteen. But the lie of the place or the distance from Grangersons mattered little to Silas. His mind was going through a process difficult to describe. Silas had never cared for anything, not even for himself. Danger or safety did not enter into his calculations. Religion was for him the name of a thing he did not understand. He had no finer feelings except in relationship to things strong, swift and brilliant, he had no tenderness for the weakness of others, even the weakness of women. He had seized on Phyl as a Burgomaster gull might seize on a puffin chick, he had picked her up on the road to carry her off regardless of everything but his own desire for her--a desire so strong that he would have dashed her and himself to pieces rather than that another should possess her. Well, as he watched her seated on the straw in that ruined cabin, subdued, without energy, and entirely at his mercy, a will that was not his will rose in opposition to him. Some part of himself that had remained in utter darkness till now woke to life. It was perhaps the something that despite all his strange qualities made him likeable, the something that instinct guessed to be there. It stood between him and Phyl. He was conscious of no struggle with it because it took the form of helplessness. Nothing but force could make her give him what he wanted. The thing was impossible, beyond him. He felt that he could do everything, fight everything, subdue everything--but the subdued. There was something else. Weakness had always repelled him, whether it was the weakness of the knees of a horse or the weakness of the will of a man. Phyl's weakness did not repel him but it took the edge from his passion. It was almost a form of ugliness. He had determined on finding help to send some one back for Phyl; any of the coloured folk hereabouts would be able to pilot her to Grangersons. He was not troubling about the broken phaëton or the horses; the horses had plenty of food and water; so far from suffering they would have the time of their lives. They might be stolen--he did not care, and nothing was more indicative of his mental upset than this indifference toward the things he treasured most. All to the left of the grass road, the trees were thin, showing tracts of marsh land and pools, and the melancholy green of swamp weeds and vegetation. The vegetable world has its reptiles and amphibians no less than the animal; its savages, its half civilised populations, and its civilised. The two worlds are conterminous, and just as cultivated flowers and civilised people are mutually in touch, here you would find poisonous plants giving shelter to poisonous life, and the amphibious giving home to the amphibious. The woods on the right were healthier, more dense, more cheerful, on higher ground; one might have likened the grass road to the life of a man pursuing its way between his two mysteriously different characters. Silas had determined to make straight for home after having sent assistance for Phyl, what he was going to do after arriving home was not evident to his mind; he had a vague idea of clearing out somewhere so that he might forget the business. He had done with Phyl, so he told himself. But Phyl had not done with him. He had been scarcely ten minutes on his road when her image came into his mind. He saw her, not as he had seen her last seated on the straw in the miserable cabin, but as he had seen her at the ball. The curves of her limbs, the colour of her hair, her face, all were drawn for him by imagination, a picture more beautiful even than the reality. Well, he had done with her, and there was no use in thinking of her--she cared for that cursed Pinckney and she was as good as dead to him, Silas. An ordinary man would have seen hope at the end of waiting, but Silas was not an ordinary man, a long and dubious courtship was beyond his imagination and his powers. Courtship, anyhow, as courtship is recognised by the world was not for him. He wanted Phyl, he did not want to write letters to her. There is something to be said for this manner of love-making, it is sincere at all events. He tried to think of something else and he only succeeded in thinking of Phyl in another dress. He saw her as he saw her that first day in the stable yard at Grangersons. Then he saw her as she was dressed that day in Charleston. Then he remembered the scene in the churchyard. He could still feel the smack she had given him on the face. The smack had not angered him with her but the remembrance of it angered him now. She would not have done that to Pinckney. Turning a corner of the road he came upon a clear space and on the borders of the clearing to the right some cottages. There were some half-naked pikaninnies playing in the grass before them; and a coloured woman, washing at a tub set on trestles, catching sight of him, stood, shading her eyes and looking in his direction. Silas paused for a moment as if undecided, then he came on. He asked the woman his whereabouts and then whether she could sell him some food. She had nothing but some corn bread and cold bacon to offer him and he bought it, paying her a dollar and not listening to her when she told him she could not make change. He was like a man doing things in his sleep; his mind seemed a thousand miles away. The woman packed the bread and bacon in a mat basket with a plate and knife and watched him turn back in his tracks and vanish round the bend of the road, glad to see the last of him. She reckoned him crazy. He was going back to Phyl. His resolution never to see her again had vanished. She was his and he was going to keep her, no matter what happened. He would never part with her alive, if she killed him, if he killed her, what matter. Nothing would stand in his path. He reached the turning and there in the sunlight lay the half ruined cabins and the well. Walking softly he came to the door of the cabin where he had left Phyl. She was there lying on the straw fast asleep. It was the sleep that comes after exhaustion or profound excitement; she scarcely seemed to breathe. Putting his bundle down by the door he came in softly and knelt down beside her. His face was so close to hers that he could feel her breath upon his mouth. It only wanted that to complete his madness. He was about to cast himself beside her when a pain, vicious and sharp as the stab of a red hot needle struck him just above his right instep. CHAPTER V When Richard Pinckney came down to breakfast that morning, he found Miss Pinckney seated at the table reading letters. "Phyl went out early and has not come back yet," said she putting the letters aside and pouring out the tea. "Gone out," said he. "Where can she have gone to?" Miss Pinckney did not seem to hear the question. She was not thinking of Phyl or her whereabouts. Richard's engagement to Frances Rhett was still dominating her mind, casting a shadow upon everything. It was like a death in the family. "I hope she's not bothered about what happened last night," went on Richard. "I didn't tell you at the time, but I had--some words with Silas Grangerson, and--Phyl was there. Silas is a fool, but it's just as well the thing happened for it has brought matters to a head. I want to tell you something--I'm not engaged to Frances Rhett." "Not engaged?" "I was, but it's broken off. I had a moment's talk with her before we left last night. I was in a temper about a lot of things, and the business with Silas put the cap on it. Anyhow, we had words, and the thing is broken off." "Oh, dear me," said Miss Pinckney. The joyful shock of the news seemed to have reduced her mind to chaos for a moment. One could not have told from her words or manner whether the surprise was pleasant or painful to her. She drew her chair back from the table a little, and sought for and found her handkerchief. She dried her eyes with it as she found her voice. "I don't know, I don't know, I'm sure. I've prayed all night that this might be, and now that the Lord has heard my prayer and answered it, I feel cast right down with the wonder of it. Had I the right to interfere? I don't know, I'm sure. It seems terrible to separate two people but I had no thought only for you. I've spoken against the girl, and wished against her, and felt bad in my heart against her, and now it's all over I'm just cast down." "She did not care for me," said Pinckney. "Why she was laughing at me last night with him. They were sitting outside together, and when I passed them I heard them laughing at me." Miss Pinckney put her handkerchief away, drew in her chair, and poured herself out some more tea energetically and with a heightened colour. "I don't want to speak bad about any one," said she, "but there are girls and girls. I know them, and time and again I've seen girls hanging themselves out with labels on them. 'I'm the finest apple on the tree,' yet no one has picked them for all their labels, because every one has guessed that they aren't--That crab apple labelling itself a pippin and daring to laugh at you! And that long loony Silas Grangerson, a man without a penny to bless himself with, a creature whose character is just kinks. Well, I'm sure--pass me the butter--laughing at you. And what were they laughing at pray? Aren't you straight and the best looking man in Charleston? Couldn't you buy the Rhetts twice over if you wanted to buy such rubbish? Aren't you the top man in Charleston in name and position and character? Why, they'll be laughing at the jokes in the N'York papers next--They'll be appreciating their own good sense and cleverness and personal beauty next thing--They'll be worshipping Bryan." "Oh, I don't think they'll ever get as bad as that," said he laughing, "but I don't think I care whether people grin at me or not; it's only just this, she and I were never meant for each other, and I found it out, and found it out in time. You see the engagement was never made public, so the breaking of it won't do her any harm. She would not let me tell people about it, she said it would be just as well to keep it secret for a while, and then if either of us felt disposed we could break it off and no harm done." "Meaning that she could break it off if she wanted to but you couldn't." "Perhaps. When I went back last night and told her I wanted to be free, she flew out." "Said you must stick to your word?" "Nearly that. Then I told her she herself had said that it was open to either of us to break the business off." "What did she say to that?" "Nothing. She had nothing to say. She asked why I wanted to break it off." "And you told her it was because of her conduct, I hope." "No. I told her it was because I had come to care for some one else." Miss Pinckney said nothing for a moment. Then she looked at him. "Richard, do you care for Phyl?" "Yes." "Thank God," said she. The one supreme wish of her life had been granted to her. Her gaze wandered to the glimpse of garden visible through the open window and rested there. She was old, she had seen friend and relative fade and vanish, the Mascarenes, the Pinckneys, children, old people, all had become part of that mystery, the past. Richard alone remained to her, and Phyl. On the morning of Phyl's arrival Miss Pinckney had felt just as though some door had opened to let this visitor in from the world of long ago. It was not only her likeness to Juliet Mascarene, but all the associations that likeness brought with it. Vernons became alive again, as in the good old days. Charleston itself caught some tinge of its youth. And there was more than that. "Richard," said she, coming back from her fit of abstraction, "I will tell you something I'd never have spoken of if you didn't care for her. It may be an old woman's fancy, but Phyl is more to us, seems to me, than we think, she's Juliet come back--Oh, it's more than the likeness. I'm sure I can't explain what I mean, it's just she herself that's the same. There's a lot more to a person than a face and a figure. I know it sounds absurd, so would most things if we had never heard them before. What's more absurd than to be born, and look at that butterfly, what's more absurd than to tell me that yesterday it was a worm? Well, it doesn't much matter whether she was Juliet or not, now she's going to be yours, and to save you from that pasty--no matter she's over and done with, but I reckon she's laughing on the wrong side of her face this morning." Miss Pinckney rose from the table. The absence of Phyl did not disturb her. Phyl sometimes stayed out and forgot meals, though this was the first time she had been late for breakfast. Richard, who had business to transact that morning in the town looked at his watch. "I'm going to Philips', the lawyers," said he, "and then I'll look in at the club. I'll be back to luncheon." An hour later to Miss Pinckney engaged in dusting the drawing-room appeared Rachel the cook. Rachel was the most privileged of the servants, a trustworthy woman with a character and will of her own, and absolutely devoted to the interests of the house. "Mistress Pinckney," said the coloured woman closing the door. "Ole Colonel Grangerson's coachman's in de kitchen, an' he says Miss Phyl's been an' run off with young Silas Grangerson dis very mornin'." Miss Pinckney without dropping the duster stood silent for a moment before Rachel. Then she broke out. "Miss Phyl run off with young Silas Grangerson! What on earth are you talking about, what rubbish is this, who's dared to come here talking such nonsense? Go on--what more have you to say?" Rachel had a lot to say. Phyl had met Silas on the road beyond the town. They had talked together, then Silas had sent the groom back to Charleston to return to Grangerville by train, and had driven off with Phyl. The groom, a relation of Dinah's, having some three hours to wait for a train, had dropped into Vernons to pass the time and tell the good news. He was in the kitchen now. Miss Pinckney could not but believe. She threw the duster on a chair, left the room and went to the kitchen. Prue was still in her corner by the fireplace, and Colonel Grangerson's coloured man was seated at the table finishing a meal and talking to Dinah who scuttled away as he rose up before the apparition of Miss Pinckney. "What's all this nonsense you have been talking," said she, "coming here saying Miss Phyl has run away with Mr. Silas? She started out this morning to meet him and drive to Grangersons; I'm going there myself at eleven--and you come here talking of people running away. Do you know you could be put in prison for saying things like that? You _dare_ to say it again to any one and I'll have you taken off before you're an hour older, you black imp of mischief." There was a rolling pin on the table, and half unconsciously her hand closed on it. Colonel Grangerson's man, grey and clutching at his hat, did not wait for the sequel, he bolted. Then the unfortunate woman, nearly fainting, but supported by her grand common sense and her invincible nature, left the kitchen and, followed by Rachel, went to the library. Here she sat down for a moment to collect herself whilst Rachel stood watching her and waiting. "It is so and it's not so," said she at last, talking half to herself half to the woman. "It's some trick of Silas Grangerson's. But the main thing is no one must know. We have got to get her back. No one must know--Rachel, go and find Seth and send him off at once to the garage place and tell them to let me have an automobile at once, at once, mind you. Tell them I want the quickest one they've got for a long journey." Rachel went off and Miss Pinckney left to herself went down on her knees by the big settee adjoining the writing table and began to wrestle with the situation in prayer. Miss Pinckney was not overgiven to prayer. She held that worriting the Almighty eternally about all sorts of nonsense, as some people do who pray for "direction" and weather, etc., was bad form to say the least of it. She even went further than that, and held that praising him inordinately was out of place and out of taste. Saying that, if Seth or Dinah came singing praises at her bedroom door in the morning instead of getting on with their work, she would know exactly what it meant--Laziness or concealed broken china, or both. But in moments of supreme stress and difficulty, Miss Pinckney was a believer in prayer. Her prayer now was speechless, one might compare it to a mental wrestle with the abominable situation before God. When she rose from her knees everything was clear to her. Two things were evident. Phyl must be got back at any cost, and scandal must be choked, even if it had to be choked with solid lies. To save Phyl's reputation, Miss Pinckney would have perjured herself twice over. Miss Pinckney had many faults and limitations, but she had the grand common sense of a clean heart and a clear mind. She could tell a lie with a good conscience in a good cause, but to hide even a small fault of her own, the threat of death on the scaffold would not have made her tell a lie. She went to the writing table now and taking a sheet of paper, wrote: _Dear Richard,_ Seth Grangerson is bad again, and I am going over there now with Phyl. We mayn't be back to-night. I am taking the automobile. We will be back to-morrow most likely. Your affectionate Aunt, Maria Pinckney. She read the note over. If all went well then everything would be well. If the worst occurred then she could explain everything to Richard. It was a desperate gamble; well she knew how the dice were loaded against her, but the game had to be played out to the very last moment. Already she had stopped the mouth of slander by her prompt action with Colonel Grangerson's coloured man, but she well knew how coloured servants talk; Grangerson's man was safe enough, he was frightened and he would have to get back to Grangerville. Rachel was absolutely safe, Dinah alone was doubtful. She called Rachel in, gave her the note for Richard and told her to keep a close eye on Dinah. "Don't let her get talking to any one," said Miss Pinckney, "and when Mr. Richard comes in give him that note yourself. If he asks about Miss Phyl, say she came back and went with me. You understand, Rachel, Miss Phyl has done a foolish thing, but there's no harm in it, only what fools will make of it if they get chattering. No one must know, not even Mr. Richard." "I'll see to that, Miss Pinckney, an' if I catch Dinah openin' her mouth to say more'n 'potatoes' I'll dress her down so's she won't know which end of her's which." Miss Pinckney went upstairs, dressed hurriedly, packed a few things in a bag and the automobile being now at the door, started. It was after one o'clock when she reached Grangersons. Just as on the day when she had arrived with Phyl, Colonel Grangerson, hearing the noise of the car, came out to inspect. He came down the steps, hat in hand, saw the occupant, started back, and then advanced to open the door. "Why, God bless my soul, it's you," cried the Colonel. "What has happened?" Miss Pinckney without a word got out and went up the steps with him. In the hall she turned to him. "Where is Silas?" "Silas," replied the Colonel. "I haven't seen him since he went to Charleston to attend some dance or another. What on earth is the matter with you, Maria?" "Come in here," said Miss Pinckney. She went into the drawing room and they shut the door. "Silas has run away with Phyl," said she, "that's what's the matter with me. Your son has taken that girl off, Seth Grangerson, and may God have mercy upon him." "The red-headed girl?" said the Colonel. "Phyl," replied she, "you know quite well whom I mean." Colonel Grangerson made a few steps up and down the room to calm himself. Maria Pinckney was speaking to him in a tone which, had it been used by any one else, would have caused an explosion. "But when did it happen," he asked, "and where have they gone? Explain yourself, Maria. Good God! Why the fellow never spoke to her scarcely--are you sure of what you say?" Miss Pinckney told her tale. "I came here to try and get her back," said she, "thinking he and she might possibly have come here or that you might know their whereabouts--they have not come, but there is just the chance that they may come here yet." "But if they have run off with each other," said the Colonel, "how are we to stop them--they'll be married by this." Miss Pinckney who had taken off her gloves sat down and began to fold them, neatly rolling one inside the other. "_Married,_" said she. The Colonel standing by the window with his hands in his pockets turned. "And why not?" said he. "The girl's a lady, and you told me she was not badly off. Silas might have done worse it seems to me." "Done worse! He couldn't have done worse. I'd sooner see her dead in her coffin than married to Silas--There, you have it plain and straight. He'll make her life a misery. Let me speak, Seth Grangerson, you are just going to hear the truth for once. You have ruined that boy the way you've brought him up, he was crazy wild to start with and you've never checked him. Oh, I know, he has always been respectful to you and flattered your pride and vanity, he calls you sir when he speaks to you, and you are the only person in the world to whom he shews respect. I don't say he acts like that from any double dealing motive, it's just the old southern tradition he's inherited; he does respect you, and I daresay he's fond of you, but he respects nothing else, especially women. I know him. And I know her, and he'll make her life a misery. If he'd left her alone she'd have been happy. Richard loves her, and would have made her a good husband. My mind was set on it, and now it's all over." Miss Pinckney began to weep, and the Colonel who had been swelling himself up found his anger collapsing. She was only a woman. Women have queer fancies--This especial woman too was part of the past and privileged. He came to her and stood beside her and rested his hand on her shoulder. "My dear Maria," said the Colonel, "youth is youth--There is not any use in laying down the law for young people or making plans for their marriages. Leave it in the hands of Providence. The most carefully arranged marriages often turn out the worst, and a scratch match has often as not turned out happily. Anyhow, you will stay here till news comes of them?" "Yes, I will stay," said Miss Pinckney. CHAPTER VI At eleven o'clock that night, just as Miss Pinckney was on the point of retiring to bed the news came in the form of Phyl herself. She arrived in a buggy driven by the farmer who owned the land through which the grass road ran. She gave a little glad cry when she saw Miss Pinckney and ran into her arms. Upstairs and alone with the lady, she told her story. Told her how she had met Silas on the road that morning, how, tired of life and scarce knowing what she did, she had got into the phaëton, how he had upset it and smashed it, how she had sheltered in the cabin whilst he went in search of help. "Then I went to sleep," said Phyl, "and when I woke up it was afternoon. He was not there, but he must have come back when I was asleep and left some food for me, for there was a bundle outside the door with some bread and bacon in it. Then I started off to walk and found a village with some coloured people. I told them I was lost and wanted to get to Grangersons. They were kind to me, but I had to wait a long time before they could find that gentleman, the farmer, and he could get a cart to drive me here." "Thank God it is all over and you are back," said Miss Pinckney. "But oh, Phyl! what made you do it?" "I don't know," said Phyl. But Miss Pinckney did. "Listen," said she. "You know what I told you about Richard and Frances Rhett--that's all done with. He has broken off the engagement." Phyl flushed, then she hid her burning face on Miss Pinckney's shoulder. Miss Pinckney held her for awhile. Then she began to talk. "We will get right back to-morrow early; no one knows anything and I'll take care they never do. Well, it's strange--I can understand everything but I can't understand that crazy creature. What's become of him? That's what I want to know." * * * * * This is what had become of him. Kneeling beside Phyl the sudden sharp pain just above his instep made him turn. In turning he caught a glimpse of his assailant. It had been creeping towards the door when he entered and had taken refuge beneath the straw. He had almost knelt on it. Escaping, a movement of his foot had raised its anger and it had struck, it was now whisking back into the darkness of the cabin beyond the straw heap. He recognised it as the deadliest snake in the South. For a moment he recognised nothing else but the fact that he had been bitten. His passion and desire had vanished utterly. Phyl might have been a thousand miles away from him for all that he thought of her. He rose up and came out into the sunlight, went to the well head, sat down on the frame and removed his shoe and sock. The mark of the bite was there between the adductor tendons. A red hot iron and a bottle of whisky might have saved him. He had not even a penknife to cut the wound out--He thought of Phyl, she could do nothing. He thought of the bar of the Charleston Hotel, and the verse of the song about the old hen with a wooden leg and the statement that it was just about time for another little drink, ran through his head. Then suddenly the idea came to him that there might possibly be help at the village where he had obtained the food from the coloured woman. It was a long way off, but still it was a chance. He put the sock in his pocket, put on the shoe and started. He ran for the first couple of hundred yards, then he slackened his pace, then he stopped holding one hand to his side. The poison already had hold of him. The game was up and he knew it. It was useless to go on, he would not live to reach the village or reaching it would die there. And every one would pity him with that shuddering pity people extend to those who meet with a horrible form of death. Death from snake bite was a low down business, it was no end for a Grangerson; but there in the swamp to the left a man might lie forever without being found out. He turned from the road to the left and walked away among the trees. The ground here sank beneath the foot, a vague haze hung above the marsh and the ponds. Here nothing happened but the change of season, night and day, the chorus of frogs and the crying of the white owl amidst the trees. CHAPTER VII Miss Pinckney and Phyl left Grangersons next morning at seven o'clock to return to Charleston. During the night the Colonel had sent after the horses and they had been captured and brought back. The broken phaëton was left for the present. "I'll make Silas go and fetch it himself when he comes back," said the Colonel. "I reckon the exercise will do him good." "Do," said Miss Pinckney, "and then send him on to me. I reckon what I'll give him will help him to forget the exercise." On the way back she said little. She was reckoning with the fact that she had deceived Richard. Now that everything had turned out so innocently and so well she decided to tell him the bare facts of the matter. There was nothing to hide except the fact of Phyl's stupidity in going with Silas. Richard Pinckney was not in when they arrived but he returned shortly before luncheon time and Miss Pinckney, who was waiting for him, carried him off into the library. She shut the door and faced him. "Richard," said Miss Pinckney, "Seth Grangerson is as well as you are. I didn't go to see him because he was ill, I went because of Phyl. She did a stupid thing and I went to set matters right." She explained the whole affair. How Phyl had met Silas, how he had persuaded her to get into the phaëton with him, the accident and all the rest. The story as told by Miss Pinckney was quite simple and without any dark patches, and no man, one might fancy, could find cause for offence in it. Miss Pinckney, however, was quite unconscious of the fact that Silas Grangerson had attempted to take Richard Pinckney's life on the night of the Rhetts' dance. To Richard the thought that Phyl should have met Silas only a few hours after that event, talked to him, made friends with him, and got into his carriage was a monstrous thought. He could not understand the business in the least, he could only recognise the fact. Had he known that it was her love for him and her despair at losing him that led her to the act it would have been different. He said nothing for a moment after Miss Pinckney had finished. Having already confessed to her his love for Phyl he was too proud to show his anger against her now. "It was unwise of her," he said at last, turning away to the window and looking out. "Most," replied she, "but you cannot put old heads on young shoulders. Well, there, it's over and done with and there's no more to be said. Well, I must go up and change before luncheon. You are having luncheon here?" "No," said he, "I have to meet a man at the club. I only just ran in to see if you were back." He went off and that day Miss Pinckney and Phyl had luncheon alone. CHAPTER VIII Richard Pinckney, like most people, had the defects of his qualities, but he was different from others in this: his temper was quick and blazing when roused, yet on rare occasions it could hold its heat and smoulder, and keep alive indefinitely. When in this condition he shewed nothing of his feelings except towards the person against whom he was in wrath. Towards them he exhibited the two main characteristics of the North Pole--Distance and Ice. Phyl felt the frost almost immediately. He talked to her just the same as of old but his pleasantness and laughter were gone and he never sought her eye. She knew at once that it was the business with Silas that had caused this change, and she would have been entirely miserable but for the knowledge of two great facts: she was innocent of any disloyalty to him, he had broken off his engagement to Frances Rhett. Instinct told her that he cared for her, Miss Pinckney had told her the same thing. Yet day after day passed without bringing the slightest change in Richard Pinckney. That gentleman after many debates with himself had arrived at the determination against will, against reason, against Love, and against nature to have nothing more to do with Phyl. Old Pepper Pinckney, that volcano of the past had suffered a fancied insult from his wife; no one knew of it, no one suspected it till on his death his will disclosed it by the fact that he had left the lady--one dollar. The will being unwitnessed--that was the sort of man he was--did not hold; all the same, it held an unsuspected part of his character up for public inspection. Richard, incapable of such an act, still had Pepper Pinckney for an ancestor. Ancestors leave us more than their pictures. Having come to this momentous decision, he arrived at another. One morning at breakfast he announced his intention of going to New York on business, he would start on the morrow and be gone a month. The Beauregards had always been bothering him to go on a visit and he might as well kill two birds with one stone. Miss Pinckney made little resistance to the idea. She had noticed the coolness between the young people; knowing how much they cared one for the other she had little fear as to the end of the matter and she fancied a change might do good. But to Phyl it seemed that the end of the world had come. All that day she scarcely spoke except to Miss Pinckney. She was like a person stunned by some calamity. Richard Pinckney, notwithstanding the fact that he was to leave for New York on the morrow, did not return to dinner that night. Phyl went upstairs early but she did not go to her room, she went to Juliet's. Sorrow attracts sorrow. Juliet had always seemed more than a friend, more than a sister, even. There were times when the ungraspable idea came before her that Juliet was herself. The vision of the Civil War sometimes came back to her and always with the hint, like a half veiled threat, that Richard the man she loved was Rupert the man she had loved, that following the dark law of duplication that works alike for types and events, forms and ideas, her history was to repeat the history of Juliet. She had saved Richard from death at the hands of Silas Grangerson, her love for him had met Fate face to face and won, but Fate has many reserve weapons. She is an old warrior, and the conqueror of cities and kings does not turn from her purpose because of a momentary defeat. Phyl shut the door of the room, put the lamp she was carrying on a table and opened the long windows giving upon the piazza. The night was absolutely still, not a breath of wind stirred the foliage of the garden and the faint sounds of the city rose through the warm night. The waning moon would not rise yet for an hour and the stars had the sky to themselves. She turned from the window and going to the little bureau by the door opened the secret drawer and took out the packet of letters. Then drawing an armchair close to the table and the lamp she sat down, undid the ribbon and began to read the letters. She felt just as though Juliet were talking to her, telling her of her troubles. She read on placing each letter on the table in turn, one upon the other. The chimes of St. Michael's came through the open window but they were unheeded. When she had read through all the letters she picked out one. The one containing the passionate declaration of Juliet's love. She re-read it and then placed it on the table on top of the others. If she could speak of Richard like that! But she could do nothing and say nothing. It is one of the curses of womanhood that a woman may not say to a man "I love you," that the initiative is taken out of her hands. Phyl was a creature of impulse and it was now for the first time in her life that she recognised this fatal barrier on the woman's side. With the recognition came the impulse to over jump it. He cared for her, she knew, or had cared for her. She felt that it only required a movement on her side, a touch, a word to destroy the ice that had formed between them. If he were to go away he might never return, nay, he would never return, of that she felt sure. And he would go away unless she spoke. She must speak, not to-morrow in the cold light of day when things were impossible, but now, at once, she would say to him simply the truth, "I love you." If he were to turn away or repulse her it would kill her. No matter, life was absolutely nothing. She rose from her chair and was just on the point of turning to the door when something checked her. It was the clock of St. Michael's striking one. One o'clock. The whole household would be in bed. He would have retired to his room long ago--and to-morrow it would be too late. She could never say that to him to-morrow; even now the impulse was dying away, the strength that would have broken convention and disregarded all things was fading in her. She had been dreaming whilst she ought to have been doing, and the hour had passed and would never return. She sat down again in the chair. The moon in the cloudless sky outside cast a patch of silver on the floor, then it shewed a silver rim gradually increasing against the sky as it pushed its way through the night to peep in at Phyl. Leaning back in the chair limp and exhausted, with closed eyes, one might have fancied her dead or in a trance and the moon as if to make sure pushed on, framing itself now fully in the window space. The clock of St. Michael's struck two, then it chimed the quarter after and almost on the chime Phyl sat up. It was as though she had suddenly come to a resolve. She clasped her hands together for a moment, then she rose, gathered up the letters and put them away, all except one which she held in her hand as though to give her courage for what she was about to do. She carefully extinguished the lamp and then led by the moonlight came out on to the piazza. Charleston was asleep under the moon; the air was filled with the scent of night jessamine and the faint fragrance of foliage, and scarcely a sound came from all the sleeping city beyond the garden walls and the sea beyond the city. As she stood with one hand on the piazza rail, suddenly, far away but shrill, came the crowing of a cock. She shivered as though the sound were a menace, then rigidly gliding like a ghost escaped from the grave and warned by the cockcrow that the hour of return was near, she came along the piazza, mounted the stair to the next floor and came along the upper piazza to the window of Richard Pinckney's bedroom. The window was open and, pushing the curtains aside, she went in. CHAPTER IX Richard Pinckney went to his room at eleven that night. He rarely retired before twelve, but to-night he had packing to do as Jabez, his man, was away and he knew better than to trust Seth. He packed his portmanteau and left it lying open in case he had forgotten anything that could be put in at the last moment. Then he packed a kit-bag and, having smoked a cigarette, went to bed. But he did not fall asleep. As a rule he slept at once on lying down, but to-night he lay awake. He was miserable; going away was death to him, but he was going. First of all, because he had said that he was going. Secondly, because he wanted to hit and hurt Phyl whom he loved, thirdly, because he wanted to torture himself, fourthly, because he loathed and hated Silas Grangerson, fifthly, because in his heart of hearts he knew what he was doing was wrong. You never know really what is in a man till he is pinched by Love. Love may stun him with a blow or run a dagger into him without bringing his worst qualities to light whilst a sly pinch will raise devils--all the miserable devils that march under the leadership of Pique. If he had not loved Phyl the fact of her going off with Silas for a drive after what had occurred on the night before would have hurt him. Loving her it had maddened him. He was not angry with her now, so he told himself--just disgusted. Meanwhile he could not sleep. The faithful St. Michael's kept him well aware of this fact. He lit a candle and tried to read, smoked a cigarette and then, blowing the candle out, tried to sleep. But insomnia had him fairly in her grip; to-night there was no escape from her and he lay whilst the moon, creeping through the sky, cast her light on the piazza outside. St. Michael's chimed the quarter after two and sleep, long absent, was coming at last when, suddenly, the sound of a light footstep on the piazza drove her leagues away. Then outside in the full moonlight he saw a figure. It was Phyl, fully dressed, standing with outstretched hands. Her eyes wide open, fixed, and sightless, told their tale. She was asleep. She moved the curtains aside and entered the room, darkening the window space, passed across the room without the least sound, reached the bed, and knelt down beside it. Her hand was feeling for him, it touched his neck, he raised his head slightly from the pillow and her arm, gliding like a snake round his neck drew his head towards her; then her lips, blindly seeking, found his and clung to them for a moment. Nothing could be more ghostly, more terrible, and yet more lovely than that kiss, the kiss of a spirit, the embrace of a soul rising from the profound abysm of sleep to find its mate. Then her lips withdrew and he lay praying to God, as few men have ever prayed, that she might not wake. He felt the arm withdrawing from around his neck, she rose, wavered for a moment, and then passed away towards the window. The lace curtains parted as though drawn aside, closed again, and she was gone. He left his bed and came out on the piazza. Craning over he caught a glimpse of her returning along the lower piazza and vanishing. Coming back to his room he saw something lying on the floor by his bed; it was a letter; he struck a match, lit the candle and picked the letter up. It was just a folded piece of paper, it had been sealed, but the seal was broken, and sitting down on the side of the bed he spread it open, but his hands were shaking so that he had to rest it on his knee. It was not from Phyl. That letter had been written many, many years ago, the ink was faded and the handwriting of another day. He read it. "Not to-night. I have to go to the Calhouns. It is just as well for I have a dread of people suspecting if we meet too often.... "Sometimes I feel as if I were deceiving him and everybody. I am, and I don't care. Oh, my darling! my darling! my darling! If the whole world were against you I would love you all the more. I will love you all my life, and I will love you when I am dead." It was the letter of Juliet to her lover. He turned it over and looked at the seal with the little dove upon it. He knew of Juliet's letters, and he knew at once that this was one of them, and he guessed vaguely that she had been reading it when sleep overtook her and that it had formed part of the inspiration that led her to him. But the whole truth he would never know. * * * * * A blazing red Cardinal was singing in the magnolia tree by the gate, butterflies were chasing one another above the flowers; it was seven o'clock and the blue, lazy, lovely morning was unfolding like a flower to the sea wind. Richard Pinckney was standing in the piazza before his bedroom window looking down into the garden. To him suddenly appeared Seth. "If you please, sah," said Seth, "Rachel tole me tell yo' de train for N'York--" "Damn New York," said Pinckney. "Get out." Seth vanished, grinning, and he returned to his contemplation of the garden. She must never know.--In the years to come, perhaps, he might tell her-- In the years to come-- He was turning away when a step on the piazza below made him come to the rail again and lean over. It was Phyl. She vanished and then reappeared again, leaving the lower piazza and coming right out into the garden. He waited till the sun had caught her in both hands, holding her against the background of the cherokee roses, then he called to her: "Phyl!" She started, turned, and looked up. THE END 
32954	----	THE BLACK ARROW A TALE OF THE TWO ROSES ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON ILLUSTRATED BY N. C. WYETH [Illustration] NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS MCMXXXIII COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS Printed in the United States of America _All rights reserved._ _No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the permission of Charles Scribner's Sons._ CRITIC ON THE HEARTH: No one but myself knows what I have suffered, nor what my books have gained, by your unsleeping watchfulness and admirable pertinacity. And now here is a volume that goes into the world and lacks your _imprimatur_: a strange thing in our joint lives; and the reason of it stranger still! I have watched with interest, with pain, and at length with amusement, your unavailing attempts to peruse _The Black Arrow_; and I think I should lack humour indeed, if I let the occasion slip and did not place your name in the fly-leaf of the only book of mine that you have never read--and never will read. That others may display more constancy is still my hope. The tale was written years ago for a particular audience and (I may say) in rivalry with a particular author; I think I should do well to name him, Mr. Alfred R. Phillips. It was not without its reward at the time. I could not, indeed, displace Mr. Phillips from his well-won priority; but in the eyes of readers who thought less than nothing of _Treasure Island_, _The Black Arrow_ was supposed to mark a clear advance. Those who read volumes and those who read story papers belong to different worlds. The verdict on _Treasure Island_ was reversed in the other court; I wonder, will it be the same with its successor? R. L. S. SARANAC LAKE, April 8, 1888 CONTENTS PROLOGUE PAGE JOHN AMEND-ALL 3 BOOK I THE TWO LADS CHAPTER I. AT THE SIGN OF THE SUN IN KETTLEY 25 II. IN THE FEN 36 III. THE FEN FERRY 44 IV. A GREENWOOD COMPANY 54 V. "BLOODY AS THE HUNTER" 64 VI. TO THE DAY'S END 75 VII. THE HOODED FACE 84 BOOK II THE MOAT HOUSE I. DICK ASKS QUESTIONS 97 II. THE TWO OATHS 108 III. THE ROOM OVER THE CHAPEL 118 IV. THE PASSAGE 127 V. HOW DICK CHANGED SIDES 133 BOOK III MY LORD FOXHAM I. THE HOUSE BY THE SHORE 147 II. A SKIRMISH IN THE DARK 156 III. ST. BRIDE'S CROSS 164 IV. THE "GOOD HOPE" 169 V. THE "GOOD HOPE" (_Continued_) 180 VI. THE "GOOD HOPE" (_Concluded_) 188 BOOK IV THE DISGUISE I. THE DEN 197 II. "IN MINE ENEMIES' HOUSE" 206 III. THE DEAD SPY 218 IV. IN THE ABBEY CHURCH 228 V. EARL RISINGHAM 240 VI. ARBLASTER AGAIN 245 BOOK V CROOKBACK I. THE SHRILL TRUMPET 261 II. THE BATTLE OF SHOREBY 270 III. THE BATTLE OF SHOREBY (_Concluded_) 279 IV. THE SACK OF SHOREBY 285 V. NIGHT IN THE WOODS: ALICIA RISINGHAM 298 VI. NIGHT IN THE WOODS (_Concluded_): DICK AND JOAN 308 VII. DICK'S REVENGE 320 VIII. CONCLUSION 325 ILLUSTRATIONS FACING PAGE "Now, mark me, mine host," Sir Daniel said, "follow but mine orders and I shall be your good lord ever" 26 In the fork, like a mastheaded seaman, there stood a man in a green tabard, spying far and wide 56 Lastly, a little before dawn, a spearman had come staggering to the moat side, pierced by arrows 98 "We must be in the dungeons," Dick remarked 128 The little cockle dipped into the swell and staggered under every gust of wind 174 And Lawless, keeping half a step in front of his companion and holding his head forward like a hunting-dog upon the scent, ... studied out their path 198 First came the bride, a sorry sight, as pale as the winter, clinging to Sir Daniel's arm 234 There were seven or eight assailants, and but one to keep head against them 262 "But be at rest; the Black Arrow flieth nevermore" 324 PROLOGUE PROLOGUE JOHN AMEND-ALL On a certain afternoon, in the late springtime, the bell upon Tunstall Moat House was heard ringing at an unaccustomed hour. Far and near, in the forest and in the fields along the river, people began to desert their labours and hurry towards the sound; and in Tunstall hamlet a group of poor countryfolk stood wondering at the summons. Tunstall hamlet at that period, in the reign of old King Henry VI., wore much the same appearance as it wears to-day. A score or so of houses, heavily framed with oak, stood scattered in a long green valley ascending from the river. At the foot, the road crossed a bridge, and mounting on the other side, disappeared into the fringes of the forest on its way to the Moat House, and further forth to Holywood Abbey. Half-way up the village, the church stood among yews. On every side the slopes were crowned and the view bounded by the green elms and greening oak-trees of the forest. Hard by the bridge, there was a stone cross upon a knoll, and here the group had collected--half-a-dozen women and one tall fellow in a russet smock--discussing what the bell betided. An express had gone through the hamlet half an hour before, and drunk a pot of ale in the saddle, not daring to dismount for the hurry of his errand; but he had been ignorant himself of what was forward, and only bore sealed letters from Sir Daniel Brackley to Sir Oliver Oates, the parson, who kept the Moat House in the master's absence. But now there was the noise of a horse; and soon, out of the edge of the wood and over the echoing bridge, there rode up young Master Richard Shelton, Sir Daniel's ward. He, at the least, would know, and they hailed him and begged him to explain. He drew bridle willingly enough--a young fellow not yet eighteen, sun-browned and grey-eyed, in a jacket of deer's leather, with a black velvet collar, a green hood upon his head, and a steel cross-bow at his back. The express, it appeared, had brought great news. A battle was impending. Sir Daniel had sent for every man that could draw a bow or carry a bill to go post-haste to Kettley, under pain of his severe displeasure; but for whom they were to fight, or of where the battle was expected, Dick knew nothing. Sir Oliver would come shortly himself, and Bennet Hatch was arming at that moment, for he it was who should lead the party. "It is the ruin of this kind land," a woman said. "If the barons live at war, ploughfolk must eat roots." "Nay," said Dick, "every man that follows shall have sixpence a day, and archers twelve." "If they live," returned the woman, "that may very well be; but how if they die, my master?" "They cannot better die than for their natural lord," said Dick. "No natural lord of mine," said the man in the smock. "I followed the Walsinghams; so we all did down Brierly way, till two years ago, come Candlemas. And now I must side with Brackley! It was the law that did it; call ye that natural? But now, what with Sir Daniel and what with Sir Oliver--that knows more of law than honesty--I have no natural lord but poor King Harry the Sixt, God bless him!--the poor innocent that cannot tell his right hand from his left." "Ye speak with an ill tongue, friend," answered Dick, "to miscall your good master and my lord the king in the same libel. But King Harry--praised be the saints!--has come again into his right mind, and will have all things peaceably ordained. And as for Sir Daniel, y'are very brave behind his back. But I will be no tale-bearer; and let that suffice." "I say no harm of you, Master Richard," returned the peasant. "Y'are a lad; but when ye come to a man's inches, ye will find ye have an empty pocket. I say no more: the saints help Sir Daniel's neighbours, and the Blessed Maid protect his wards!" "Clipsby," said Richard, "you speak what I cannot hear with honour. Sir Daniel is my good master, and my guardian." "Come, now, will ye read me a riddle?" returned Clipsby. "On whose side is Sir Daniel?" "I know not," said Dick, colouring a little; for his guardian had changed sides continually in the troubles of that period, and every change had brought him some increase of fortune. "Ay," returned Clipsby, "you, nor no man. For, indeed, he is one that goes to bed Lancaster and gets up York." Just then the bridge rang under horse-shoe iron, and the party turned and saw Bennet Hatch come galloping--a brown-faced, grizzled fellow, heavy of hand and grim of mien, armed with sword and spear, a steel salet on his head, a leather jack upon his body. He was a great man in these parts; Sir Daniel's right hand in peace and war, and at that time, by his master's interest, bailiff of the hundred. "Clipsby," he shouted, "off to the Moat House, and send all other laggards the same gate. Bowyer will give you jack and salet. We must ride before curfew. Look to it: he that is last at the lych-gate Sir Daniel shall reward. Look to it right well! I know you for a man of naught. Nance," he added, to one of the women, "is old Appleyard up town?" "I'll warrant you," replied the woman. "In his field, for sure." So the group dispersed, and while Clipsby walked leisurely over the bridge, Bennet and young Shelton rode up the road together, through the village and past the church. "Ye will see the old shrew," said Bennet. "He will waste more time grumbling and prating of Harry the Fift than would serve a man to shoe a horse. And all because he has been to the French wars!" The house to which they were bound was the last in the village, standing alone among lilacs; and beyond it, on three sides, there was open meadow rising towards the borders of the wood. Hatch dismounted, threw his rein over the fence, and walked down the field, Dick keeping close at his elbow, to where the old soldier was digging, knee-deep in his cabbages, and now and again, in a cracked voice, singing a snatch of song. He was all dressed in leather, only his hood and tippet were of black frieze, and tied with scarlet; his face was like a walnut-shell, both for colour and wrinkles; but his old grey eye was still clear enough, and his sight unabated. Perhaps he was deaf; perhaps he thought it unworthy of an old archer of Agincourt to pay any heed to such disturbances; but neither the surly notes of the alarm bell, nor the near approach of Bennet and the lad, appeared at all to move him; and he continued obstinately digging, and piped up, very thin and shaky: "Now, dear lady, if thy will be, I pray you that you will rue on me." "Nick Appleyard," said Hatch, "Sir Oliver commends him to you, and bids that ye shall come within this hour to the Moat House, there to take command." The old fellow looked up. "Save you, my masters!" he said, grinning. "And where goeth Master Hatch?" "Master Hatch is off to Kettley, with every man that we can horse," returned Bennet. "There is a fight toward, it seems, and my lord stays a reinforcement." "Ay, verily," returned Appleyard. "And what will ye leave me to garrison withal?" "I leave you six good men, and Sir Oliver to boot," answered Hatch. "It'll not hold the place," said Appleyard; "the number sufficeth not. It would take two-score to make it good." "Why, it's for that we came to you, old shrew!" replied the other. "Who else is there but you that could do aught in such a house with such a garrison?" "Ay! when the pinch comes, ye remember the old shoe," returned Nick. "There is not a man of you can back a horse or hold a bill; and as for archery--St. Michael! if old Harry the Fift were back again, he would stand and let ye shoot at him for a farthen a shoot!" "Nay, Nick, there's some can draw a good bow yet," said Bennet. "Draw a good bow!" cried Appleyard. "Yes! But who'll shoot me a good shoot? It's there the eye comes in, and the head between your shoulders. Now, what might you call a long shoot, Bennet Hatch?" "Well," said Bennet, looking about him, "it would be a long shoot from here into the forest." "Ay, it would be a longish shoot," said the old fellow, turning to look over his shoulder; and then he put up his hand over his eyes, and stood staring. "Why, what are you looking at?" asked Bennet, with a chuckle. "Do you see Harry the Fift?" The veteran continued looking up the hill in silence. The sun shone broadly over the shelving meadows; a few white sheep wandered browsing; all was still but the distant jangle of the bell. "What is it, Appleyard?" asked Dick. "Why, the birds," said Appleyard. And, sure enough, over the top of the forest, where it ran down in a tongue among the meadows, and ended in a pair of goodly green elms, about a bowshot from the field where they were standing, a flight of birds was skimming to and fro, in evident disorder. "What of the birds?" said Bennet. "Ay!" returned Appleyard, "y'are a wise man to go to war, Master Bennet. Birds are a good sentry; in forest places they be the first line of battle. Look you, now, if we lay here in camp, there might be archers skulking down to get the wind of us; and here would you be, none the wiser!" "Why, old shrew," said Hatch, "there be no men nearer us than Sir Daniel's, at Kettley; y'are as safe as in London Tower; and ye raise scares upon a man for a few chaffinches and sparrows!" "Hear him!" grinned Appleyard. "How many a rogue would give his two crop ears to have a shoot at either of us? St. Michael, man! they hate us like two polecats!" "Well, sooth it is, they hate Sir Daniel," answered Hatch, a little sobered. "Ay, they hate Sir Daniel, and they hate every man that serves with him," said Appleyard; "and in the first order of hating, they hate Bennet Hatch and old Nicholas the bow-man. See ye here: if there was a stout fellow yonder in the wood-edge, and you and I stood fair for him--as, by St. George, we stand!--which, think ye, would he choose?" "You, for a good wager," answered Hatch. "My surcoat to a leather belt, it would be you!" cried the old archer. "Ye burned Grimstone, Bennet--they'll ne'er forgive you that, my master. And as for me, I'll soon be in a good place, God grant, and out of bow-shoot--ay, and cannon-shoot--of all their malices. I am an old man, and draw fast to homeward, where the bed is ready. But for you, Bennet, y'are to remain behind here at your own peril, and if ye come to my years unhanged, the old true-blue English spirit will be dead." "Y'are the shrewishest old dolt in Tunstall Forest," returned Hatch, visibly ruffled by these threats. "Get ye to your arms before Sir Oliver come, and leave prating for one good while. An' ye had talked so much with Harry the Fift, his ears would ha' been richer than his pocket." An arrow sang in the air, like a huge hornet; it struck old Appleyard between the shoulder-blades, and pierced him clean through, and he fell forward on his face among the cabbages. Hatch, with a broken cry, leapt into the air; then, stooping double, he ran for the cover of the house. And in the meanwhile Dick Shelton had dropped behind a lilac, and had his cross-bow bent and shouldered, covering the point of the forest. Not a leaf stirred. The sheep were patiently browsing; the birds had settled. But there lay the old man, with a cloth-yard arrow standing in his back; and there were Hatch holding to the gable, and Dick crouching and ready behind the lilac bush. "D'ye see aught?" cried Hatch. "Not a twig stirs," said Dick. "I think shame to leave him lying," said Bennet, coming forward once more with hesitating steps and a very pale countenance. "Keep a good eye on the wood, Master Shelton--keep a clear eye on the wood. The saints assoil us! here was a good shoot!" Bennet raised the old archer on his knee. He was not yet dead; his face worked, and his eyes shut and opened like machinery, and he had a most horrible, ugly look of one in pain. "Can ye hear, old Nick?" asked Hatch. "Have ye a last wish before ye wend, old brother?" "Pluck out the shaft, and let me pass, a' Mary's name!" gasped Appleyard. "I be done with Old England. Pluck it out!" "Master Dick," said Bennet, "come hither, and pull me a good pull upon the arrow. He would fain pass, the poor sinner." Dick laid down his cross-bow, and pulling hard upon the arrow, drew it forth. A gush of blood followed; the old archer scrambled half upon his feet, called once upon the name of God, and then fell dead. Hatch, upon his knees among the cabbages, prayed fervently for the welfare of the passing spirit. But even as he prayed, it was plain that his mind was still divided, and he kept ever an eye upon the corner of the wood from which the shot had come. When he had done, he got to his feet again, drew off one of his mailed gauntlets, and wiped his pale face, which was all wet with terror. "Ay," he said, "it'll be my turn next." "Who hath done this, Bennet?" Richard asked, still holding the arrow in his hand. "Nay, the saints know," said Hatch. "Here are a good two-score Christian souls that we have hunted out of house and holding, he and I. He has paid his shot, poor shrew, nor will it be long, mayhap, ere I pay mine. Sir Daniel driveth overhard." "This is a strange shaft," said the lad, looking at the arrow in his hand. "Ay, by my faith!" cried Bennet. "Black, and black-feathered. Here is an ill-favoured shaft, by my sooth! for black, they say, bodes burial. And here be words written. Wipe the blood away. What read ye?" "'_Appulyaird fro Jon Amend-All,_'" read Shelton. "What should this betoken?" "Nay, I like it not," returned the retainer, shaking his head. "John Amend-All! Here is a rogue's name for those that be up in the world! But why stand we here to make a mark? Take him by the knees, good Master Shelton, while I lift him by the shoulders, and let us lay him in his house. This will be a rare shog to poor Sir Oliver; he will turn paper colour; he will pray like a windmill." They took up the old archer, and carried him between them into his house, where he had dwelt alone. And there they laid him on the floor, out of regard for the mattress and sought, as best they might, to straighten and compose his limbs. Appleyard's house was clean and bare. There was a bed, with a blue cover, a cupboard, a great chest, a pair of joint-stools, a hinged table in the chimney-corner, and hung upon the wall the old soldier's armoury of bows and defensive armour. Hatch began to look about him curiously. "Nick had money," he said. "He may have had three-score pounds put by. I would I could light upon't! When ye lose an old friend, Master Richard, the best consolation is to heir him. See, now, this chest. I would go a mighty wager there is a bushel of gold therein. He had a strong hand to get, and a hard hand to keep withal, had Appleyard the archer. Now may God rest his spirit! Near eighty year he was afoot and about, and ever getting; but now he's on the broad of his back, poor shrew, and no more lacketh; and if his chattels came to a good friend, he would be merrier, methinks, in heaven." "Come, Hatch," said Dick, "respect his stone-blind eyes. Would ye rob the man before his body? Nay, he would walk!" Hatch made several signs of the cross; but by this time his natural complexion had returned, and he was not easily to be dashed from any purpose. It would have gone hard with the chest had not the gate sounded, and presently after the door of the house opened and admitted a tall, portly, ruddy, black-eyed man of near fifty, in a surplice and black robe. "Appleyard--" the newcomer was saying, as he entered; but he stopped dead. "Ave Maria!" he cried. "Saints be our shield! What cheer is this?" "Cold cheer with Appleyard, sir parson," answered Hatch, with perfect cheerfulness. "Shot at his own door, and alighteth even now at purgatory gates. Ay! there, if tales be true, he shall lack neither coal nor candle." Sir Oliver groped his way to a joint-stool, and sat down upon it, sick and white. "This is a judgment! O, a great stroke!" he sobbed, and rattled off a leash of prayers. Hatch meanwhile reverently doffed his salet and knelt down. "Ay, Bennet," said the priest, somewhat recovering, "and what may this be? What enemy hath done this?" "Here, Sir Oliver, is the arrow. See, it is written upon with words," said Dick. "Nay," cried the priest, "this is a foul hearing! John Amend-All! A right Lollardy word. And black of hue, as for an omen! Sirs, this knave arrow likes me not. But it importeth rather to take counsel. Who should this be? Bethink you, Bennet. Of so many black ill-willers, which should he be that doth so hardily outface us? Simnel? I do much question it. The Walsinghams? Nay, they are not yet so broken; they still think to have the law over us, when times change. There was Simon Malmesbury, too. How think ye, Bennet?" "What think ye, sir," returned Hatch, "of Ellis Duckworth?" "Nay, Bennet, never. Nay, not he," said the priest. "There cometh never any rising, Bennet, from below--so all judicious chroniclers concord in their opinion; but rebellion travelleth ever downward from above; and when Dick, Tom, and Harry take them to their bills, look ever narrowly to see what lord is profited thereby. Now, Sir Daniel, having once more joined him to the Queen's party, is in ill odour with the Yorkist lords. Thence, Bennet, comes the blow--by what procuring, I yet seek; but therein lies the nerve of this discomfiture." "An't please you, Sir Oliver," said Bennet, "the axles are so hot in this country that I have long been smelling fire. So did this poor sinner, Appleyard. And, by your leave, men's spirits are so foully inclined to all of us, that it needs neither York nor Lancaster to spur them on. Hear my plain thoughts: You, that are a clerk, and Sir Daniel, that sails on any wind, ye have taken many men's goods, and beaten and hanged not a few. Y'are called to count for this; in the end, I wot not how, ye have ever the uppermost at law, and ye think all patched. But give me leave, Sir Oliver: the man that ye have dispossessed and beaten is but the angrier, and some day, when the black devil is by, he will up with his bow and clout me a yard of arrow through your inwards." "Nay, Bennet, y'are in the wrong. Bennet, ye should be glad to be corrected," said Sir Oliver. "Y'are a prater, Bennet, a talker, a babbler; your mouth is wider than your two ears. Mend it, Bennet, mend it." "Nay, I say no more. Have it as ye list," said the retainer. The priest now rose from the stool, and from the writing-case that hung about his neck took forth wax and a taper, and a flint and steel. With these he sealed up the chest and the cupboard with Sir Daniel's arms, Hatch looking on disconsolate; and then the whole party proceeded, somewhat timorously, to sally from the house and get to horse. "'Tis time we were on the road, Sir Oliver," said Hatch, as he held the priest's stirrup while he mounted. "Ay; but, Bennet, things are changed," returned the parson. "There is now no Appleyard--rest his soul!--to keep the garrison. I shall keep you, Bennet. I must have a good man to rest me on in this day of black arrows. 'The arrow that flieth by day,' saith the evangel; I have no mind of the context; nay, I am a sluggard priest, I am too deep in men's affairs. Well, let us ride forth, Master Hatch. The jackmen should be at the church by now." So they rode forward down the road, with the wind after them, blowing the tails of the parson's cloak; and behind them, as they went, clouds began to arise and blot out the sinking sun. They had passed three of the scattered houses that make up Tunstall hamlet, when, coming to a turn, they saw the church before them. Ten or a dozen houses clustered immediately round it; but to the back the churchyard was next the meadows. At the lych-gate, near a score of men were gathered, some in the saddle, some standing by their horses' heads. They were variously armed and mounted; some with spears, some with bills, some with bows, and some bestriding plough-horses, still splashed with the mire of the furrow; for these were the very dregs of the country, and all the better men and the fair equipments were already with Sir Daniel in the field. "We have not done amiss, praised be the cross of Holywood! Sir Daniel will be right well content," observed the priest, inwardly numbering the troop. "Who goes? Stand! if ye be true!" shouted Bennet. A man was seen slipping through the churchyard among the yews; and at the sound of this summons he discarded all concealment, and fairly took to his heels for the forest. The men at the gate, who had been hitherto unaware of the stranger's presence, woke and scattered. Those who had dismounted began scrambling into the saddle; the rest rode in pursuit; but they had to make the circuit of the consecrated ground, and it was plain their quarry would escape them. Hatch, roaring an oath, put his horse at the hedge, to head him off; but the beast refused, and sent his rider sprawling in the dust. And though he was up again in a moment, and had caught the bridle, the time had gone by, and the fugitive had gained too great a lead for any hope of capture. The wisest of all had been Dick Shelton. Instead of starting in a vain pursuit, he had whipped his cross-bow from his back, bent it, and set a quarrel to the string; and now, when the others had desisted, he turned to Bennet and asked if he should shoot. "Shoot! shoot!" cried the priest, with sanguinary violence. "Cover him, Master Dick," said Bennet. "Bring me him down like a ripe apple." The fugitive was now within but a few leaps of safety; but this last part of the meadow ran very steeply up-hill; and the man ran slower in proportion. What with the greyness of the falling night, and the uneven movements of the runner, it was no easy aim; and as Dick levelled his bow, he felt a kind of pity, and a half desire that he might miss. The quarrel sped. The man stumbled and fell, and a great cheer arose from Hatch and the pursuers. But they were counting their corn before the harvest. The man fell lightly; he was lightly afoot again, turned and waved his cap in a bravado, and was out of sight next moment in the margin of the wood. "And the plague go with him!" cried Bennet. "He has thieves' heels; he can run, by St. Banbury! But you touched him, Master Shelton; he has stolen your quarrel, may he never have good I grudge him less!" "Nay, but what made he by the church?" asked Sir Oliver. "I am shrewdly afeared there has been mischief here. Clipsby, good fellow, get ye down from your horse, and search thoroughly among the yews." Clipsby was gone but a little while ere he returned, carrying a paper. "This writing was pinned to the church door," he said, handing it to the parson. "I found naught else, sir parson." "Now, by the power of Mother Church," cried Sir Oliver, "but this runs hard on sacrilege! For the king's good pleasure, or the lord of the manor--well! But that every run-the-hedge in a green jerkin should fasten papers to the chancel door--nay, it runs hard on sacrilege, hard; and men have burned for matters of less weight. But what have we here? The light falls apace. Good Master Richard, y' have young eyes. Read me, I pray, this libel." Dick Shelton took the paper in his hand and read it aloud. It contained some lines of very rugged doggerel, hardly even rhyming, written in a gross character, and most uncouthly spelt. With the spelling somewhat bettered, this is how they ran: "I had four blak arrows under my belt, Four for the greefs that I have felt, Four for the nomber of ill menne That have opressid me now and then. One is gone; one is wele sped; Old Apulyaird is ded. One is for Maister Bennet Hatch, That burned Grimstone, walls and thatch. One for Sir Oliver Oates, That cut Sir Harry Shelton's throat. Sir Daniel, ye shull have the fourt; We shall think it fair sport. Ye shull each have your own part, A blak arrow in each blak heart. Get ye to your knees for to pray: Ye are ded theeves, by yea and nay! "JON AMEND-ALL of the Green Wood, And his jolly fellaweship. "Item, we have mo arrowes and goode hempen cord for otheres of your following." "Now, well-a-day for charity and the Christian graces!" cried Sir Oliver, lamentably. "Sirs, this is an ill world, and groweth daily worse. I will swear upon the cross of Holywood I am as innocent of that good knight's hurt, whether in act or purpose, as the babe unchristened. Neither was his throat cut; for therein they are again in error, as there still live credible witnesses to show." "It boots not, sir parson," said Bennet. "Here is unseasonable talk." "Nay, Master Bennet, not so. Keep ye in your due place, good Bennet," answered the priest. "I shall make mine innocence appear. I will, upon no consideration, lose my poor life in error. I take all men to witness that I am clear of this matter. I was not even in the Moat House. I was sent of an errand before nine upon the clock----" "Sir Oliver," said Hatch, interrupting, "since it please you not to stop this sermon, I will take other means. Goffe, sound to horse." And while the tucket was sounding, Bennet moved close to the bewildered parson, and whispered violently in his ear. Dick Shelton saw the priest's eye turned upon him for an instant in a startled glance. He had some cause for thought; for this Sir Harry Shelton was his own natural father. But he said never a word, and kept his countenance unmoved. Hatch and Sir Oliver discussed together for awhile their altered situation; ten men, it was decided between them, should be reserved, not only to garrison the Moat House, but to escort the priest across the wood. In the meantime, as Bennet was to remain behind, the command of the reinforcement was given to Master Shelton. Indeed, there was no choice; the men were loutish fellows, dull and unskilled in war, while Dick was not only popular, but resolute and grave beyond his age. Although his youth had been spent in these rough, country places, the lad had been well taught in letters by Sir Oliver, and Hatch himself had shown him the management of arms and the first principles of command. Bennet had always been kind and helpful; he was one of those who are cruel as the grave to those they call their enemies, but ruggedly faithful and well willing to their friends; and now, while Sir Oliver entered the next house to write, in his swift, exquisite penmanship, a memorandum of the last occurrences to his master, Sir Daniel Brackley, Bennet came up to his pupil to wish him God-speed upon his enterprise. "Ye must go the long way about, Master Shelton," he said; "round by the bridge, for your life! Keep a sure man fifty paces afore you, to draw shots; and go softly till y'are past the wood. If the rogues fall upon you, ride for't; ye will do naught by standing. And keep ever forward, Master Shelton; turn me not back again, an ye love your life; there is no help in Tunstall, mind ye that. And now, since ye go to the great wars about the king, and I continue to dwell here in extreme jeopardy of my life, and the saints alone can certify if we shall meet again below, I give you my last counsels now at your riding. Keep an eye on Sir Daniel; he is unsure. Put not your trust in the jack-priest; he intendeth not amiss, but doth the will of others; it is a hand-gun for Sir Daniel! Get your good lordship where ye go; make you strong friends; look to it. And think ever a paternoster while on Bennet Hatch. There are worse rogues afoot than Bennet. So, God-speed!" "And Heaven be with you, Bennet!" returned Dick. "Ye were a good friend to meward, and so I shall say ever." "And, look ye, master," added Hatch, with a certain embarrassment, "if this Amend-All should get a shaft into me, ye might, mayhap, lay out a gold mark or mayhap a pound for my poor soul; for it is like to go stiff with me in purgatory." "Ye shall have your will of it, Bennet," answered Dick. "But, what cheer, man! we shall meet again, where ye shall have more need of ale than masses." "The saints so grant it, Master Dick!" returned the other. "But here comes Sir Oliver. An he were as quick with the long-bow as with the pen, he would be a brave man-at-arms." Sir Oliver gave Dick a sealed packet, with this superscription: "To my ryght worchypful master. Sir Daniel Brackley, knyght, be thys delyvered in haste." And Dick, putting it in the bosom of his jacket, gave the word and set forth westward up the village. BOOK I THE TWO LADS CHAPTER I AT THE SIGN OF THE SUN IN KETTLEY Sir Daniel and his men lay in and about Kettley that night, warmly quartered and well patrolled. But the Knight of Tunstall was one who never rested from money-getting; and even now, when he was on the brink of an adventure which should make or mar him, he was up an hour after midnight to squeeze poor neighbours. He was one who trafficked greatly in disputed inheritances; it was his way to buy out the most unlikely claimant, and then, by the favour he curried with great lords about the king, procure unjust decisions in his favour; or, if that was too roundabout, to seize the disputed manor by force of arms, and rely on his influence and Sir Oliver's cunning in the law to hold what he had snatched. Kettley was one such place; it had come very lately into his clutches; he still met with opposition from the tenants; and it was to overawe discontent that he had led his troops that way. By two in the morning, Sir Daniel sat in the inn room, close by the fireside, for it was cold at that hour among the fens of Kettley. By his elbow stood a pottle of spiced ale. He had taken off his visored headpiece, and sat with his bald head and thin, dark visage resting on one hand, wrapped warmly in a sanguine-coloured cloak. At the lower end of the room about a dozen of his men stood sentry over the door or lay asleep on benches; and somewhat nearer hand, a young lad, apparently of twelve or thirteen, was stretched in a mantle on the floor. The host of the Sun stood before the great man. "Now, mark me, mine host," Sir Daniel said, "follow but mine orders, and I shall be your good lord ever. I must have good men for head boroughs, and I will have Adam-a-More high constable; see to it narrowly. If other men be chosen, it shall avail you nothing; rather it shall be found to your sore cost. For those that have paid rent to Walsingham I shall take good measure--you among the rest, mine host." "Good knight," said the host, "I will swear upon the cross of Holywood I did but pay to Walsingham upon compulsion. Nay, bully knight, I love not the rogue Walsinghams; they were as poor as thieves, bully knight. Give me a great lord like you. Nay; ask me among the neighbours, I am stout for Brackley." "It may be," said Sir Daniel, drily. "Ye shall then pay twice." The innkeeper made a horrid grimace; but this was a piece of bad luck that might readily befall a tenant in these unruly times, and he was perhaps glad to make his peace so easily. "Bring up yon fellow, Selden!" cried the knight. And one of his retainers led up a poor, cringing old man, as pale as a candle, and all shaking with the fen fever. "Sirrah," said Sir Daniel, "your name?" [Illustration: _"Now, mark me, mine host," Sir Daniel said, "follow but mine orders, and I shall be your good lord ever"_] "An't please your worship," replied the man, "my name is Condall--Condall of Shoreby, at your good worship's pleasure." "I have heard you ill reported on," returned the knight. "Ye deal in treason, rogue; ye trudge the country leasing; y'are heavily suspicioned of the death of severals. How, fellow, are ye so bold? But I will bring you down." "Right honourable and my reverend lord," the man cried, "here is some hodge-podge, saving your good presence. I am but a poor private man, and have hurt none." "The under-sheriff did report of you most vilely," said the knight. "'Seize me,' saith he, 'that Tyndal of Shoreby.'" "Condall, my good lord; Condall is my poor name," said the unfortunate. "Condall or Tyndal, it is all one," replied Sir Daniel, coolly. "For, by my sooth, y'are here, and I do mightily suspect your honesty. If ye would save your neck, write me swiftly an obligation for twenty pound." "For twenty pound, my good lord!" cried Condall. "Here is midsummer madness! My whole estate amounteth not to seventy shillings." "Condall or Tyndal," returned Sir Daniel, grinning, "I will run my peril of that loss. Write me down twenty, and when I have recovered all I may, I will be good lord to you, and pardon you the rest." "Alas! my good lord, it may not be; I have no skill to write," said Condall. "Well-a-day!" returned the knight. "Here, then, is no remedy. Yet I would fain have spared you, Tyndal, had my conscience suffered. Selden, take me this old shrew softly to the nearest elm, and hang me him tenderly by the neck, where I may see him at my riding. Fare ye well, good Master Condall, dear Master Tyndal; y'are post-haste for Paradise; fare ye then well!" "Nay, my right pleasant lord," replied Condall, forcing an obsequious smile, "an ye be so masterful, as doth right well become you, I will even, with all my poor skill, do your good bidding." "Friend," quoth Sir Daniel, "ye will now write two-score. Go to! y'are too cunning for a livelihood of seventy shillings. Selden, see him write me this in good form, and have it duly witnessed." And Sir Daniel, who was a very merry knight, none merrier in England, took a drink of his mulled ale, and lay back, smiling. Meanwhile, the boy upon the floor began to stir, and presently sat up and looked about him with a scare. "Hither," said Sir Daniel; and as the other rose at his command and came slowly towards him, he leaned back and laughed outright. "By the rood!" he cried, "a sturdy boy!" The lad flushed crimson with anger, and darted a look of hate out of his dark eyes. Now that he was on his legs, it was more difficult to make certain of his age. His face looked somewhat older in expression, but it was as smooth as a young child's; and in bone and body he was unusually slender, and somewhat awkward of gait. "Ye have called me, Sir Daniel," he said. "Was it to laugh at my poor plight?" "Nay, now, let laugh," said the knight. "Good shrew, let laugh, I pray you. An ye could see yourself, I warrant ye would laugh the first." "Well," cried the lad, flushing, "ye shall answer this when ye answer for the other. Laugh while yet ye may!" "Nay, now, good cousin," replied Sir Daniel, with some earnestness, "think not that I mock at you, except in mirth, as between kinsfolk and singular friends. I will make you a marriage of a thousand pounds, go to! and cherish you exceedingly. I took you, indeed, roughly, as the time demanded; but from henceforth I shall ungrudgingly maintain and cheerfully serve you. Ye shall be Mrs. Shelton--Lady Shelton, by my troth! for the lad promiseth bravely. Tut! ye will not shy for honest laughter; it purgeth melancholy. They are no rogues who laugh, good cousin. Good mine host, lay me a meal now for my cousin, Master John. Sit ye down, sweetheart, and eat." "Nay," said Master John, "I will break no bread. Since ye force me to this sin, I will fast for my soul's interest. But, good mine host, I pray you of courtesy give me a cup of fair water; I shall be much beholden to your courtesy indeed." "Ye shall have a dispensation, go to!" cried the knight. "Shalt be well shriven, by my faith! Content you, then, and eat." But the lad was obstinate, drank a cup of water, and, once more wrapping himself closely in his mantle, sat in a far corner, brooding. In an hour or two, there rose a stir in the village of sentries challenging and the clatter of arms and horses; and then a troop drew up by the inn door, and Richard Shelton, splashed with mud, presented himself upon the threshold. "Save you, Sir Daniel," he said. "How! Dickie Shelton!" cried the knight; and at the mention of Dick's name the other lad looked curiously across. "What maketh Bennet Hatch?" "Please you, sir knight, to take cognisance of this packet from Sir Oliver, wherein are all things fully stated," answered Richard, presenting the priest's letter. "And please you farther, ye were best make all speed to Risingham; for on the way hither we encountered one riding furiously with letters, and by his report, my Lord of Risingham was sore bested, and lacked exceedingly your presence." "How say you? Sore bested?" returned the knight. "Nay, then, we will make speed sitting down, good Richard. As the world goes in this poor realm of England, he that rides softliest rides surest. Delay, they say, begetteth peril; but it is rather this itch of doing that undoes men; mark it, Dick. But let me see, first, what cattle ye have brought. Selden, a link here at the door!" And Sir Daniel strode forth into the village street, and, by the red glow of a torch, inspected his new troops. He was an unpopular neighbour and an unpopular master; but as a leader in war he was well beloved by those who rode behind his pennant. His dash, his proved courage, his forethought for the soldiers' comfort, even his rough gibes, were all to the taste of the bold blades in jack and salet. "Nay, by the rood!" he cried, "what poor dogs are these? Here be some as crooked as a bow, and some as lean as a spear. Friends, ye shall ride in the front of the battle; I can spare you, friends. Mark me this old villain on the piebald! A two-year mutton riding on a hog would look more soldierly! Ha! Clipsby, are ye there, old rat? Y'are a man I could lose with a good heart; ye shall go in front of all, with a bull's eye painted on your jack, to be the better butt for archery; sirrah, ye shall show me the way." "I will show you any way, Sir Daniel, but the way to change sides," returned Clipsby, sturdily. Sir Daniel laughed a guffaw. "Why, well said!" he cried. "Hast a shrewd tongue in thy mouth, go to! I will forgive you for that merry word. Selden, see them fed, both man and brute." The knight re-entered the inn. "Now, friend Dick," he said, "fall to. Here is good ale and bacon. Eat, while that I read." Sir Daniel opened the packet, and as he read his brow darkened. When he had done he sat a little, musing. Then he looked sharply at his ward. "Dick," said he, "y' have seen this penny rhyme?" The lad replied in the affirmative. "It bears your father's name," continued the knight; "and our poor shrew of a parson is, by some mad soul, accused of slaying him." "He did most eagerly deny it," answered Dick. "He did?" cried the knight, very sharply. "Heed him not. He has a loose tongue; he babbles like a jack-sparrow. Some day, when I may find the leisure, Dick, I will myself more fully inform you of these matters. There was one Duckworth shrewdly blamed for it; but the times were troubled, and there was no justice to be got." "It befell at the Moat House?" Dick ventured, with a beating at his heart. "It befell between the Moat House and Holywood," replied Sir Daniel, calmly; but he shot a covert glance, black with suspicion, at Dick's face. "And now," added the knight, "speed you with your meal; ye shall return to Tunstall with a line from me." Dick's face fell sorely. "Prithee, Sir Daniel," he cried, "send one of the villains! I beseech you let me to the battle. I can strike a stroke, I promise you." "I misdoubt it not," replied Sir Daniel, sitting down to write. "But here, Dick, is no honour to be won. I lie in Kettley till I have sure tidings of the war, and then ride to join me with the conqueror. Cry not on cowardice; it is but wisdom, Dick; for this poor realm so tosseth with rebellion, and the king's name and custody so changeth hands, that no man may be certain of the morrow. Toss-pot and Shuttle-wit run in, but my Lord Good-Counsel sits o' one side, waiting." With that, Sir Daniel, turning his back to Dick, and quite at the farther end of the long table, began to write his letter, with his mouth on one side, for this business of the Black Arrow stuck sorely in his throat. Meanwhile, young Shelton was going on heartily enough with his breakfast, when he felt a touch upon his arm, and a very soft voice whispering in his ear. "Make not a sign, I do beseech you," said the voice, "but of your charity tell me the straight way to Holywood. Beseech you, now, good boy, comfort a poor soul in peril and extreme distress, and set me so far forth upon the way to my repose." "Take the path by the windmill," answered Dick, in the same tone; "it will bring you to Till Ferry; there inquire again." And without turning his head, he fell again to eating. But with the tail of his eye he caught a glimpse of the young lad called Master John stealthily creeping from the room. "Why," thought Dick, "he is as young as I. 'Good boy' doth he call me? An I had known, I should have seen the varlet hanged ere I had told him. Well, if he goes through the fen, I may come up with him and pull his ears." Half an hour later, Sir Daniel gave Dick the letter, and bade him speed to the Moat House. And, again, some half an hour after Dick's departure, a messenger came, in hot haste, from my Lord of Risingham. "Sir Daniel," the messenger said, "ye lose great honour, by my sooth! The fight began again this morning ere the dawn, and we have beaten their van and scattered their right wing. Only the main battle standeth fast. An we had your fresh men, we should tilt you them all into the river. What, sir knight! Will ye be the last? It stands not with your good credit." "Nay," cried the knight, "I was but now upon the march. Selden, sound me the tucket. Sir, I am with you on the instant. It is not two hours since the more part of my command came in, sir messenger. What would ye have? Spurring is good meat, but yet it killed the charger. Bustle, boys!" By this time the tucket was sounding cheerily in the morning, and from all sides Sir Daniel's men poured into the main street and formed before the inn. They had slept upon their arms, with chargers saddled, and in ten minutes five-score men-at-arms and archers, cleanly equipped and briskly disciplined, stood ranked and ready. The chief part were in Sir Daniel's livery, murrey and blue, which gave the greater show to their array. The best armed rode first; and away out of sight, at the tail of the column, came the sorry reinforcement of the night before. Sir Daniel looked with pride along the line. "Here be the lads to serve you in a pinch," he said. "They are pretty men, indeed," replied the messenger. "It but augments my sorrow that ye had not marched the earlier." "Well," said the knight, "what would ye? The beginning of a feast and the end of a fray, sir messenger"; and he mounted into his saddle. "Why! how now!" he cried. "John! Joanna! Nay, by the sacred rood! where is she? Host, where is that girl?" "Girl, Sir Daniel?" cried the landlord. "Nay, sir, I saw no girl." "Boy, then, dotard!" cried the knight. "Could ye not see it was a wench? She in the murrey-coloured mantle--she that broke her fast with water, rogue--where is she?" "Nay, the saints bless us! Master John, ye called him," said the host. "Well, I thought none evil. He is gone. I saw him--her--I saw her in the stable a good hour agone; 'a was saddling a grey horse." "Now, by the rood!" cried Sir Daniel, "the wench was worth five hundred pound to me and more." "Sir knight," observed the messenger, with bitterness, "while that ye are here, roaring for five hundred pounds, the realm of England is elsewhere being lost and won." "It is well said," replied Sir Daniel. "Selden, fall me out with six cross-bowmen; hunt me her down. I care not what it cost; but, at my returning, let me find her at the Moat House. Be it upon your head. And now, sir messenger, we march." And the troop broke into a good trot, and Selden and his six men were left behind upon the street of Kettley, with the staring villagers. CHAPTER II IN THE FEN It was near six in the May morning when Dick began to ride down into the fen upon his homeward way. The sky was all blue; the jolly wind blew loud and steady; the windmill sails were spinning; and the willows over all the fen rippling and whitening like a field of corn. He had been all night in the saddle, but his heart was good and his body sound, and he rode right merrily. The path went down and down into the marsh, till he lost sight of all the neighbouring landmarks but Kettley windmill on the knoll behind him, and the extreme top of Tunstall Forest far before. On either hand there were great fields of blowing reeds and willows, pools of water shaking in the wind, and treacherous bogs, as green as emerald, to tempt and to betray the traveller. The path lay almost straight through the morass. It was already very ancient; its foundation had been laid by Roman soldiery; in the lapse of ages much of it had sunk, and every here and there, for a few hundred yards, it lay submerged below the stagnant waters of the fen. About a mile from Kettley, Dick came to one such break in the plain line of causeway, where the reeds and willows grew dispersedly like little islands and confused the eye. The gap, besides, was more than usually long; it was a place where any stranger might come readily to mischief; and Dick bethought him, with something like a pang, of the lad whom he had so imperfectly directed. As for himself, one look backward to where the windmill sails were turning black against the blue of heaven--one look forward to the high ground of Tunstall Forest, and he was sufficiently directed and held straight on, the water washing to his horse's knees, as safe as on a highway. Half-way across, and when he had already sighted the path rising high and dry upon the farther side, he was aware of a great splashing on his right, and saw a grey horse, sunk to its belly in the mud, and still spasmodically struggling. Instantly, as though it had divined the neighbourhood of help, the poor beast began to neigh most piercingly. It rolled, meanwhile, a bloodshot eye, insane with terror; and as it sprawled wallowing in the quag, clouds of stinging insects rose and buzzed about it in the air. "Alack!" thought Dick, "can the poor lad have perished? There is his horse, for certain--a brave grey! Nay, comrade, if thou criest to me so piteously, I will do all man can to help thee. Shalt not lie there to drown by inches!" And he made ready his cross-bow, and put a quarrel through the creature's head. Dick rode on after this act of rugged mercy, somewhat sobered in spirit, and looking closely about him for any sign of his less happy predecessor in the way. "I would I had dared to tell him further," he thought; "for I fear he has miscarried in the slough." And just as he was so thinking, a voice cried upon his name from the causeway-side, and, looking over his shoulder, he saw the lad's face peering from a clump of reeds. "Are ye there?" he said, reining in. "Ye lay so close among the reeds that I had passed you by. I saw your horse bemired, and put him from his agony; which, by my sooth! an ye had been a more merciful rider, ye had done yourself. But come forth out of your hiding. Here be none to trouble you." "Nay, good boy, I have no arms, nor skill to use them if I had," replied the other, stepping forth upon the pathway. "Why call me 'boy'?" cried Dick. "Y'are not, I trow, the elder of us twain." "Good Master Shelton," said the other, "prithee forgive me. I have none the least intention to offend. Rather I would in every way beseech your gentleness and favour, for I am now worse bested than ever, having lost my way, my cloak, and my poor horse. To have a riding-rod and spurs, and never a horse to sit upon! And before all," he added, looking ruefully upon his clothes--"before all, to be so sorrily besmirched!" "Tut!" cried Dick. "Would ye mind a ducking? Blood of wound or dust of travel--that's a man's adornment." "Nay, then, I like him better plain," observed the lad. "But, prithee, how shall I do? Prithee, good Master Richard, help me with your good counsel. If I come not safe to Holywood, I am undone." "Nay," said Dick, dismounting, "I will give more than counsel. Take my horse, and I will run awhile, and when I am weary we shall change again, that so, riding and running, both may go the speedier." So the change was made, and they went forward as briskly as they durst on the uneven causeway, Dick with his hand upon the other's knee. "How call ye your name?" asked Dick. "Call me John Matcham," replied the lad. "And what make ye to Holywood?" Dick continued. "I seek sanctuary from a man that would oppress me," was the answer. "The good Abbot of Holywood is a strong pillar to the weak." "And how came ye with Sir Daniel, Master Matcham?" pursued Dick. "Nay," cried the other, "by the abuse of force! He hath taken me by violence from my own place; dressed me in these weeds; ridden with me till my heart was sick; gibed me till I could 'a' wept; and when certain of my friends pursued, thinking to have me back, claps me in the rear to stand their shot! I was even grazed in the right foot, and walk but lamely. Nay, there shall come a day between us; he shall smart for all!" "Would ye shoot at the moon with a hand-gun?" said Dick. "'Tis a valiant knight, and hath a hand of iron. An he guessed I had made or meddled with your flight, it would go sore with me." "Ay, poor boy," returned the other, "y'are his ward, I know it. By the same token, so am I, or so he saith; or else he hath bought my marriage--I wot not rightly which; but it is some handle to oppress me by." "Boy again!" said Dick. "Nay, then, shall I call you girl, good Richard?" asked Matcham. "Never a girl for me," returned Dick. "I do abjure the crew of them!" "Ye speak boyishly," said the other. "Ye think more of them than ye pretend." "Not I," said Dick, stoutly. "They come not in my mind. A plague of them, say I! Give me to hunt and to fight and to feast, and to live with jolly foresters. I never heard of a maid yet that was for any service, save one only; and she, poor shrew, was burned for a witch and the wearing of men's clothes in spite of nature." Master Matcham crossed himself with fervour, and appeared to pray. "What make ye?" Dick inquired. "I pray for her spirit," answered the other, with a somewhat troubled voice. "For a witch's spirit?" Dick cried. "But pray for her, an ye list; she was the best wench in Europe, was this Joan of Arc. Old Appleyard the archer ran from her, he said, as if she had been Mahoun. Nay, she was a brave wench." "Well, but, good Master Richard," resumed Matcham, "an ye like maids so little, y'are no true natural man; for God made them twain by intention, and brought true love into the world, to be man's hope and woman's comfort." "Faugh!" said Dick. "Y'are a milk-sopping baby, so to harp on women. An ye think I be no true man, get down upon the path, and whether at fists, backsword, or bow and arrow, I will prove my manhood on your body." "Nay, I am no fighter," said Matcham, eagerly. "I mean no tittle of offence. I meant but pleasantry. And if I talk of women, it is because I heard ye were to marry." "I to marry!" Dick exclaimed. "Well, it is the first I hear of it. And with whom was I to marry?" "One Joan Sedley," replied Matcham, colouring. "It was Sir Daniel's doing; he hath money to gain upon both sides; and, indeed, I have heard the poor wench bemoaning herself pitifully of the match. It seems she is of your mind, or else distasted to the bridegroom." "Well! marriage is like death, it comes to all," said Dick, with resignation. "And she bemoaned herself? I pray ye now, see there how shuttle-witted are these girls: to bemoan herself before that she had seen me! Do I bemoan myself? Not I. An I be to marry, I will marry dry-eyed! But if ye know her, prithee, of what favour is she? fair or foul? And is she shrewish or pleasant?" "Nay, what matters it?" said Matcham. "An y'are to marry, ye can but marry. What matters foul or fair? These be but toys. Y'are no milksop, Master Richard; ye will wed with dry eyes, anyhow." "It is well said," replied Shelton. "Little I reck." "Your lady wife is like to have a pleasant lord," said Matcham. "She shall have the lord Heaven made her for," returned Dick. "I trow there be worse as well as better." "Ah, the poor wench!" cried the other. "And why so poor?" asked Dick. "To wed a man of wood," replied his companion. "O me, for a wooden husband!" "I think I be a man of wood, indeed," said Dick, "to trudge afoot the while you ride my horse; but it is good wood, I trow." "Good Dick, forgive me," cried the other. "Nay, y'are the best heart in England; I but laughed. Forgive me now, sweet Dick." "Nay, no fool words," returned Dick, a little embarrassed by his companion's warmth. "No harm is done. I am not touchy, praise the saints." And at that moment the wind, which was blowing straight behind them as they went, brought them the rough flourish of Sir Daniel's trumpeter. "Hark!" said Dick, "the tucket soundeth." "Ay," said Matcham, "they have found my flight, and now I am unhorsed!" and he became pale as death. "Nay, what cheer!" returned Dick. "Y' have a long start, and we are near the ferry. And it is I, methinks, that am unhorsed." "Alack, I shall be taken!" cried the fugitive. "Dick, kind Dick, beseech ye help me but a little!" "Why, now, what aileth thee?" said Dick. "Methinks I help you very patently. But my heart is sorry for so spiritless a fellow! And see ye here, John Matcham--sith John Matcham is your name--I, Richard Shelton, tide what betideth, come what may, will see you safe in Holywood. The saints so do to me again if I default you. Come, pick me up a good heart, Sir Whiteface. The way betters here; spur me the horse. Go faster! faster! Nay, mind not for me; I can run like a deer." So, with the horse trotting hard, and Dick running easily alongside, they crossed the remainer of the fen, and came out upon the banks of the river by the ferryman's hut. CHAPTER III THE FEN FERRY The river Till was a wide, sluggish, clayey water, oozing out of fens, and in this part of its course it strained among some score of willow-covered, marshy islets. It was a dingy stream; but upon this bright, spirited morning everything was become beautiful. The wind and the martens broke it up into innumerable dimples; and the reflection of the sky was scattered over all the surface in crumbs of smiling blue. A creek ran up to meet the path, and close under the bank the ferryman's hut lay snugly. It was of wattle and clay, and the grass grew green upon the roof. Dick went to the door and opened it. Within, upon a foul old russet cloak, the ferryman lay stretched and shivering; a great hulk of a man, but lean and shaken by the country fever. "Hey, Master Shelton," he said, "be ye for the ferry? Ill times, ill times! Look to yourself. There is a fellowship abroad. Ye were better turn round on your two heels and try the bridge." "Nay; time's in the saddle," answered Dick. "Time will ride, Hugh Ferryman. I am hot in haste." "A wilful man!" returned the ferryman, rising. "An ye win safe to the Moat House, y' have done lucky; but I say no more." And then catching sight of Matcham, "Who be this?" he asked, as he paused, blinking, on the threshold of his cabin. "It is my kinsman, Master Matcham," answered Dick. "Give ye good day, good ferryman," said Matcham, who had dismounted, and now came forward, leading the horse. "Launch me your boat, I prithee; we are sore in haste." The gaunt ferryman continued staring. "By the mass!" he cried at length, and laughed with open throat. Matcham coloured to his neck and winced; and Dick, with an angry countenance, put his hand on the lout's shoulder. "How now, churl!" he cried. "Fall to thy business, and leave mocking thy betters." Hugh Ferryman grumblingly undid his boat, and shoved it a little forth into the deep water. Then Dick led in the horse, and Matcham followed. "Ye be mortal small made, master," said Hugh, with a wide grin; "something o' the wrong model, belike. Nay, Master Shelton, I am for you," he added, getting to his oars. "A cat may look at a king. I did but take a shot of the eye at Master Matcham." "Sirrah, no more words," said Dick. "Bend me your back." They were by that time at the mouth of the creek, and the view opened up and down the river. Everywhere it was enclosed with islands. Clay banks were falling in, willows nodding, reeds waving, martens dipping and piping. There was no sign of man in the labyrinth of waters. "My master," said the ferryman, keeping the boat steady with one oar, "I have a shrew guess that John-a-Fenne is on the island. He bears me a black grudge to all Sir Daniel's. How if I turned me up stream and landed you an arrow-flight above the path? Ye were best not meddle with John Fenne." "How, then, is he of this company?" asked Dick. "Nay, mum is the word," said Hugh. "But I would go up water, Dick. How if Master Matcham came by an arrow?" and he laughed again. "Be it so, Hugh," answered Dick. "Look ye, then," pursued Hugh. "Sith it shall so be, unsling me your cross-bow--so: now make it ready--good; place me a quarrel. Ay, keep it so, and look upon me grimly." "What meaneth this?" asked Dick. "Why, my master, if I steal you across, it must be under force or fear," replied the ferryman; "for else, if John Fenne got wind of it, he were like to prove my most distressful neighbour." "Do these churls ride so roughly?" Dick inquired. "Do they command Sir Daniel's own ferry?" "Nay," whispered the ferryman, winking. "Mark me! Sir Daniel shall down. His time is out. He shall down. Mum!" And he bent over his oars. They pulled a long way up the river, turned the tail of an island, and came softly down a narrow channel next the opposite bank. Then Hugh held water in mid-stream. "I must land you here among the willows," he said. "Here is no path but willow swamps and quagmires," answered Dick. "Master Shelton," replied Hugh, "I dare not take ye nearer down, for your own sake now. He watcheth me the ferry, lying on his bow. All that go by and owe Sir Daniel good-will, he shooteth down like rabbits. I heard him swear it by the rood. An I had not known you of old days--ay, and from so high upward--I would 'a' let you go on; but for old days' remembrance, and because ye had this toy with you that's not fit for wounds or warfare, I did risk my two poor ears to have you over whole. Content you; I can no more, on my salvation!" Hugh was still speaking, lying on his oars, when there came a great shout from among the willows on the island, and sounds followed as of a strong man breasting roughly through the wood. "A murrain!" cried Hugh. "He was on the upper island all the while!" He pulled straight for shore. "Threat me with your bow, good Dick; threat me with it plain," he added. "I have tried to save your skins, save you mine!" The boat ran into a tough thicket of willows with a crash. Matcham, pale, but steady and alert, at a sign from Dick, ran along the thwarts and leaped ashore; Dick, taking the horse by the bridle, sought to follow, but what with the animal's bulk, and what with the closeness of the thicket, both stuck fast. The horse neighed and trampled; and the boat, which was swinging in an eddy, came on and off and pitched with violence. "It may not be, Hugh; here is no landing," cried Dick; but he still struggled valiantly with the obstinate thicket and the startled animal. A tall man appeared upon the shore of the island, a long-bow in his hand. Dick saw him for an instant, with the corner of his eye, bending the bow with a great effort, his face crimson with hurry. "Who goes?" he shouted. "Hugh, who goes?" "'Tis Master Shelton, John," replied the ferryman. "Stand, Dick Shelton!" bawled the man upon the island. "Ye shall have no hurt, upon the rood! Stand! Back out, Hugh Ferryman." Dick cried a taunting answer. "Nay, then, ye shall go afoot," returned the man; and he let drive an arrow. The horse, struck by the shaft, lashed out in agony and terror; the boat capsized, and the next moment all were struggling in the eddies of the river. When Dick came up, he was within a yard of the bank; and before his eyes were clear, his hand had closed on something firm and strong that instantly began to drag him forward. It was the riding-rod, that Matcham, crawling forth upon an overhanging willow, had opportunely thrust into his grasp. "By the mass!" cried Dick, as he was helped ashore, "that makes a life I owe you. I swim like a cannon-ball." And he turned instantly towards the island. Midway over, Hugh Ferryman was swimming with his upturned boat, while John-a-Fenne, furious at the ill-fortune of his shot, bawled to him to hurry. "Come, Jack," said Shelton, "run for it! Ere Hugh can hale his barge across, or the pair of 'em can get it righted, we may be out of cry." And adding example to his words, he began to run, dodging among the willows, and in marshy places leaping from tussock to tussock. He had no time to look for his direction; all he could do was to turn his back upon the river, and put all his heart to running. Presently, however, the ground began to rise, which showed him he was still in the right way, and soon after they came forth upon a slope of solid turf, where elms began to mingle with the willows. But here Matcham, who had been dragging far into the rear, threw himself fairly down. "Leave me, Dick!" he cried, pantingly; "I can no more." Dick turned, and came back to where his companion lay. "Nay, Jack, leave thee!" he cried. "That were a knave's trick, to be sure, when ye risked a shot and a ducking, ay, and a drowning too, to save my life. Drowning, in sooth; for why I did not pull you in along with me, the saints alone can tell!" "Nay," said Matcham, "I would 'a' saved us both, good Dick, for I can swim." "Can ye so?" cried Dick, with open eyes. It was the one manly accomplishment of which he was himself incapable. In the order of the things that he admired, next to having killed a man in single fight came swimming. "Well," he said, "here is a lesson to despise no man. I promised to care for you as far as Holywood, and, by the rood, Jack, y'are more capable to care for me." "Well, Dick, we're friends now," said Matcham. "Nay, I never was unfriends," answered Dick. "Y'are a brave lad in your way, albeit something of a milksop, too. I never met your like before this day. But, prithee, fetch back your breath, and let us on. Here is no place for chatter." "My foot hurts shrewdly," said Matcham. "Nay, I had forgot your foot," returned Dick. "Well, we must go the gentlier. I would I knew rightly where we were. I have clean lost the path; yet that may be for the better, too. An they watch the ferry, they watch the path, belike, as well. I would Sir Daniel were back with two-score men; he would sweep me these rascals as the wind sweeps leaves. Come, Jack, lean ye on my shoulder, ye poor shrew. Nay, y'are not tall enough. What age are ye, for a wager?--twelve?" "Nay, I am sixteen," said Matcham. "Y'are poorly grown to height, then," answered Dick. "But take my hand. We shall go softly, never fear. I owe you a life; I am a good repayer, Jack, of good or evil." They began to go forward up the slope. "We must hit the road, early or late," continued Dick; "and then for a fresh start. By the mass! but y' 'ave a rickety hand, Jack. If I had a hand like that, I would think shame. I tell you," he went on, with a sudden chuckle, "I swear by the mass I believe Hugh Ferryman took you for a maid." "Nay, never!" cried the other, colouring high. "A' did, though, for a wager!" Dick exclaimed. "Small blame to him. Ye look liker maid than man; and I tell you more--y'are a strange-looking rogue for a boy; but for a hussy, Jack, ye would be right fair--ye would. Ye would be well favoured for a wench." "Well," said Matcham, "ye know right well that I am none." "Nay, I know that; I do but jest," said Dick. "Ye'll be a man before your mother, Jack. What cheer, my bully! Ye shall strike shrewd strokes. Now, which, I marvel, of you or me, shall be first knighted, Jack? for knighted I shall be, or die for't. 'Sir Richard Shelton, Knight': it soundeth bravely. But 'Sir John Matcham' soundeth not amiss." "Prithee, Dick, stop till I drink," said the other, pausing where a little clear spring welled out of the slope into a gravelled basin no bigger than a pocket. "And O, Dick, if I might come by anything to eat!--my very heart aches with hunger." "Why, fool, did ye not eat at Kettley?" asked Dick. "I had made a vow--it was a sin I had been led into," stammered Matcham; "but now, if it were but dry bread, I would eat it greedily." "Sit ye, then, and eat," said Dick, "while that I scout a little forward for the road." And he took a wallet from his girdle, wherein were bread and pieces of dry bacon, and, while Matcham fell heartily to, struck farther forth among the trees. A little beyond there was a dip in the ground, where a streamlet soaked among dead leaves; and beyond that, again, the trees were better grown and stood wider, and oak and beech began to take the place of willow and elm. The continued tossing and pouring of the wind among the leaves sufficiently concealed the sounds of his footsteps on the mast; it was for the ear what a moonless night is to the eye; but for all that Dick went cautiously, slipping from one big trunk to another, and looking sharply about him as he went. Suddenly a doe passed like a shadow through the underwood in front of him, and he paused, disgusted at the chance. This part of the wood had been certainly deserted, but now that the poor deer had run, she was like a messenger he should have sent before him to announce his coming; and instead of pushing farther, he turned him to the nearest well-grown tree, and rapidly began to climb. Luck had served him well. The oak on which he had mounted was one of the tallest in that quarter of the wood, and easily out-topped its neighbours by a fathom and a half; and when Dick had clambered into the topmost fork and clung there, swinging dizzily in the great wind, he saw behind him the whole fenny plain as far as Kettley, and the Till wandering among woody islets, and in front of him, the white line of highroad winding through the forest. The boat had been righted--it was even now midway on the ferry. Beyond that there was no sign of man, nor aught moving but the wind. He was about to descend, when, taking a last view, his eye lit upon a string of moving points about the middle of the fen. Plainly a small troop was threading the causeway, and that at a good pace; and this gave him some concern as he shinned vigorously down the trunk and returned across the wood for his companion. CHAPTER IV A GREENWOOD COMPANY Matcham was well rested and revived; and the two lads, winged by what Dick had seen, hurried through the remainder of the outwood, crossed the road in safety, and began to mount into the high ground of Tunstall Forest. The trees grew more and more in groves, with healthy places in between, sandy, gorsy, and dotted with old yews. The ground became more and more uneven, full of pits and hillocks. And with every step of the ascent the wind still blew the shriller, and the trees bent before the gusts like fishing-rods. They had just entered one of the clearings, when Dick suddenly clapped down upon his face among the brambles, and began to crawl slowly backward towards the shelter of the grove. Matcham, in great bewilderment, for he could see no reason for this flight, still imitated his companion's course; and it was not until they had gained the harbour of a thicket that he turned and begged him to explain. For all reply, Dick pointed with his finger. At the far end of the clearing, a fir grew high above the neighbouring wood, and planted its black shock of foliage clear against the sky. For about fifty feet above the ground the trunk grew straight and solid like a column. At that level, it split into two massive boughs; and in the fork, like a mastheaded seaman, there stood a man in a green tabard, spying far and wide. The sun glistened upon his hair; with one hand he shaded his eyes to look abroad, and he kept slowly rolling his head from side to side, with the regularity of a machine. The lads exchanged glances. "Let us try to the left," said Dick. "We had near fallen foully, Jack." Ten minutes afterwards they struck into a beaten path. "Here is a piece of forest that I know not," Dick remarked. "Where goeth me this track?" "Let us even try," said Matcham. A few yards farther, the path came to the top of a ridge and began to go down abruptly into a cup-shaped hollow. At the foot, out of a thick wood of flowering hawthorn, two or three roofless gables, blackened as if by fire, and a single tall chimney marked the ruins of a house. "What may this be?" whispered Matcham. "Nay, by the mass, I know not," answered Dick. "I am all at sea. Let us go warily." With beating hearts, they descended through the hawthorns. Here and there, they passed signs of recent cultivation; fruit trees and pot herbs ran wild among the thicket; a sun-dial had fallen in the grass; it seemed they were treading what once had been a garden. Yet a little farther and they came forth before the ruins of the house. It had been a pleasant mansion and a strong. A dry ditch was dug deep about it; but it was now choked with masonry, and bridged by a fallen rafter. The two farther walls still stood, the sun shining through their empty windows; but the remainder of the building had collapsed, and now lay in a great cairn of ruin, grimed with fire. Already in the interior a few plants were springing green among the chinks. "Now I bethink me," whispered Dick, "this must be Grimstone. It was a hold of one Simon Malmesbury; Sir Daniel was his bane! 'Twas Bennet Hatch that burned it, now five years agone. In sooth, 'twas pity, for it was a fair house." Down in the hollow, where no wind blew, it was both warm and still; and Matcham, laying one hand upon Dick's arm, held up a warning finger. "Hist!" he said. Then came a strange sound, breaking on the quiet. It was twice repeated ere they recognised its nature. It was the sound of a big man clearing his throat; and just then a hoarse, untuneful voice broke into singing. "Then up and spake the master, the king of the outlaws: 'What make ye here, my merry men, among the greenwood shaws?' And Gamelyn made answer--he looked never adown: 'O, they must need to walk in wood that may not walk in town!'" The singer paused, a faint clink of iron followed, and then silence. [Illustration: _In the fork, like a mastheaded seaman, there stood a man in a green tabard, spying far and wide_] The two lads stood looking at each other. Whoever he might be, their invisible neighbour was just beyond the ruin. And suddenly the colour came into Matcham's face, and next moment he had crossed the fallen rafter, and was climbing cautiously on the huge pile of lumber that filled the interior of the roofless house. Dick would have withheld him, had he been in time; as it was, he was fain to follow. Right in the corner of the ruin, two rafters had fallen crosswise, and protected a clear space no larger than a pew in church. Into this the lads silently lowered themselves. There they were perfectly concealed, and through an arrow-loophole commanded a view upon the farther side. Peering through this, they were struck stiff with terror at their predicament. To retreat was impossible; they scarce dared to breathe. Upon the very margin of the ditch, not thirty feet from where they crouched, an iron caldron bubbled and steamed above a glowing fire; and close by, in an attitude of listening, as though he had caught some sound of their clambering among the ruins, a tall, red-faced, battered-looking man stood poised, an iron spoon in his right hand, a horn and a formidable dagger at his belt. Plainly this was the singer; plainly he had been stirring the caldron, when some incautious step among the lumber had fallen upon his ear. A little farther off, another man lay slumbering, rolled in a brown cloak, with a butterfly hovering above his face. All this was in a clearing white with daisies; and at the extreme verge, a bow, a sheaf of arrows, and part of a deer's carcase hung upon a flowering hawthorn. Presently the fellow relaxed from his attitude of attention, raised the spoon to his mouth, tasted its contents, nodded, and then fell again to stirring and singing. "'O, they must need to walk in wood that may not walk in town,'" he croaked, taking up his song where he had left it. "O, sir, we walk not here at all an evil thing to do. But if we meet with the good king's deer to shoot a shaft into." Still as he sang, he took from time to time another spoonful of the broth, blew upon it, and tasted it, with all the airs of an experienced cook. At length, apparently, he judged the mess was ready; for taking the horn from his girdle, he blew three modulated calls. The other fellow awoke, rolled over, brushed away the butterfly, and looked about him. "How now, brother?" he said. "Dinner?" "Ay, sot," replied the cook, "dinner it is, and a dry dinner, too, with neither ale nor bread. But there is little pleasure in the greenwood now; time was when a good fellow could live here like a mitred abbot, set aside the rain and the white frosts; he had his heart's desire both of ale and wine. But now are men's spirits dead; and this John Amend-All, save us and guard us! but a stuffed booby to scare crows withal." "Nay," returned the other, "y'are too set on meat and drinking, Lawless. Bide ye a bit; the good time cometh." "Look ye," returned the cook, "I have even waited for this good time sith that I was so high. I have been a Grey Friar; I have been a king's archer; I have been a shipman, and sailed the salt seas; and I have been in greenwood before this, forsooth! and shot the king's deer. What cometh of it? Naught! I were better to have bided in the cloister. John Abbot availeth more than John Amend-All. By 'r Lady! here they come." One after another, tall, likely fellows began to stroll into the lawn. Each as he came produced a knife and a horn cup, helped himself from the caldron, and sat down upon the grass to eat. They were very variously equipped and armed; some in rusty smocks, and with nothing but a knife and an old bow; others in the height of forest gallantry, all in Lincoln green, both hood and jerkin, with dainty peacock arrows in their belts, a horn upon a baldrick, and a sword and dagger at their sides. They came in the silence of hunger, and scarce growled a salutation, but fell instantly to meat. There were, perhaps, a score of them already gathered, when a sound of suppressed cheering arose close by among the hawthorns, and immediately after five or six woodmen carrying a stretcher debouched upon the lawn. A tall, lusty fellow, somewhat grizzled, and as brown as a smoked ham, walked before them with an air of some authority, his bow at his back, a bright boar-spear in his hand. "Lads!" he cried, "good fellows all, and my right merry friends, y' have sung this while on a dry whistle and lived at little ease. But what said I ever? Abide Fortune constantly; she turneth, turneth swift. And lo! here is her little firstling--even that good creature, ale!" There was a murmur of applause as the bearers set down the stretcher and displayed a goodly cask. "And now haste ye, boys," the man continued. "There is work toward. A handful of archers are but now come to the ferry; murrey and blue is their wear; they are our butts--they shall all taste arrows--no man of them shall struggle through this wood. For, lads, we are here some fifty strong, each man of us most foully wronged; for some they have lost lands, and some friends; and some they have been outlawed--all oppressed! Who, then, hath done this evil? Sir Daniel, by the rood! Shall he then profit? shall he sit snug in our houses? shall he till our fields? shall he suck the bone he robbed us of? I trow not. He getteth him strength at law; he gaineth cases; nay, there is one case he shall not gain--I have a writ here at my belt that, please the saints, shall conquer him." Lawless the cook was by this time already at his second horn of ale. He raised it, as if to pledge the speaker. "Master Ellis," he said, "y'are for vengeance--well it becometh you!--but your poor brother o' the greenwood, that had never lands to lose nor friends to think upon, looketh rather, for his poor part, to the profit of the thing. He had liever a gold noble and a pottle of canary wine than all the vengeances in purgatory." "Lawless," replied the other, "to reach the Moat House, Sir Daniel must pass the forest. We shall make that passage dearer, pardy, than any battle. Then, when he hath got to earth with such ragged handful as escapeth us--all his great friends fallen and fled away, and none to give him aid--we shall beleaguer that old fox about, and great shall be the fall of him. 'Tis a fat buck; he will make a dinner for us all." "Ay," returned Lawless, "I have eaten many of these dinners beforehand; but the cooking of them is hot work, good Master Ellis. And meanwhile what do we? We make black arrows, we write rhymes, and we drink fair cold water, that discomfortable drink." "Y'are untrue, Will Lawless. Ye still smell of the Grey Friars' buttery; greed is your undoing," answered Ellis. "We took twenty pounds from Appleyard. We took seven marks from the messenger last night. A day ago we had fifty from the merchant." "And to-day," said one of the men, "I stopped a fat pardoner riding apace for Holywood. Here is his purse." Ellis counted the contents. "Five-score shillings!" he grumbled. "Fool, he had more in his sandal, or stitched into his tippet. Y'are but a child, Tom Cuckow; ye have lost the fish." But, for all that, Ellis pocketed the purse with nonchalance. He stood leaning on his boar-spear, and looked round upon the rest. They, in various attitudes, took greedily of the venison pottage, and liberally washed it down with ale. This was a good day; they were in luck; but business pressed, and they were speedy in their eating. The first-comers had by this time even despatched their dinner. Some lay down upon the grass and fell instantly asleep, like boa-constrictors; others talked together, or overhauled their weapons; and one, whose humour was particularly gay, holding forth an ale-horn, began to sing: "Here is no law in good green shaw, Here is no lack of meat; 'Tis merry and quiet, with deer for our diet, In summer, when all is sweet. "Come winter again, with wind and rain-- Come winter, with snow and sleet, Get home to your places, with hoods on your faces, And sit by the fire and eat." All this while the two lads had listened and lain close; only Richard had unslung his cross-bow, and held ready in one hand the windac, or grappling-iron that he used to bend it. Otherwise they had not dared to stir; and this scene of forest life had gone on before their eyes like a scene upon a theatre. But now there came a strange interruption. The tall chimney which overtopped the remainder of the ruins rose right above their hiding-place. There came a whistle in the air, and then a sounding smack, and the fragments of a broken arrow fell about their ears. Some one from the upper quarters of the wood, perhaps the very sentinel they saw posted in the fir, had shot an arrow at the chimney-top. Matcham could not restrain a little cry, which he instantly stifled, and even Dick started with surprise, and dropped the windac from his fingers. But to the fellows on the lawn, this shaft was an expected signal. They were all afoot together, tightening their belts, testing their bow-strings, loosening sword and dagger in the sheath. Ellis held up his hand; his face had suddenly assumed a look of savage energy; the white of his eyes shone in his sun-brown face. "Lads," he said, "ye know your places. Let not one man's soul escape you. Appleyard was a whet before a meal; but now we go to table. I have three men whom I will bitterly avenge--Harry Shelton, Simon Malmesbury, and"--striking his broad bosom--"and Ellis Duckworth, by the mass!" Another man came, red with hurry, through the thorns. "'Tis not Sir Daniel!" he panted. "They are but seven. Is the arrow gone?" "It struck but now," replied Ellis. "A murrain!" cried the messenger. "Methought I heard it whistle. And I go dinnerless!" In the space of a minute, some running, some walking sharply, according as their stations were nearer or farther away, the men of the Black Arrow had all disappeared from the neighbourhood of the ruined house; and the caldron, and the fire, which was now burning low, and the dead deer's carcase on the hawthorn, remained alone to testify they had been there. CHAPTER V "BLOODY AS THE HUNTER" The lads lay quiet till the last footstep had melted on the wind. Then they arose, and with many an ache, for they were weary with constraint, clambered through the ruins, and recrossed the ditch upon the rafter. Matcham had picked up the windac and went first, Dick following stiffly, with his cross-bow on his arm. "And now," said Matcham, "forth to Holywood." "To Holywood!" cried Dick, "when good fellows stand shot? Not I! I would see you hanged first, Jack!" "Ye would leave me, would ye?" Matcham asked. "Ay, by my sooth!" returned Dick. "An I be not in time to warn these lads, I will go die with them. What! would ye have me leave my own men that I have lived among? I trow not! Give me my windac." But there was nothing further from Matcham's mind. "Dick," he said, "ye sware before the saints that ye would see me safe to Holywood. Would ye be forsworn? Would you desert me--a perjurer?" "Nay, I sware for the best," returned Dick. "I meant it too; but now! But look ye, Jack, turn again with me. Let me but warn these men, and, if needs must, stand shot with them; then shall all be clear, and I will on again to Holywood and purge mine oath." "Ye but deride me," answered Matcham. "These men ye go to succour are the same that hunt me to my ruin." Dick scratched his head. "I cannot help it, Jack," he said. "Here is no remedy. What would ye? Ye run no great peril, man; and these are in the way of death. Death!" he added. "Think of it! What a murrain do ye keep me here for? Give me the windac. St. George! shall they all die?" "Richard Shelton," said Matcham, looking him squarely in the face, "would ye, then, join party with Sir Daniel? Have ye not ears? Heard ye not this Ellis, what he said? or have ye no heart for your own kindly blood and the father that men slew? 'Harry Shelton,' he said; and Sir Harry Shelton was your father, as the sun shines in heaven." "What would ye?" Dick cried again. "Would ye have me credit thieves?" "Nay, I have heard it before now," returned Matcham. "The fame goeth currently, it was Sir Daniel slew him. He slew him under oath; in his own house he shed the innocent blood. Heaven wearies for the avenging on't; and you--the man's son--ye go about to comfort and defend the murderer!" "Jack," cried the lad, "I know not. It may be; what know I? But, see here: This man hath bred me up and fostered me, and his men I have hunted with and played among; and to leave them in the hour of peril--O, man, if I did that, I were stark dead to honour! Nay, Jack, ye would not ask it; ye would not wish me to be base." "But your father, Dick?" said Matcham, somewhat wavering. "Your father? and your oath to me? Ye took the saints to witness." "My father?" cried Shelton. "Nay, he would have me go! If Sir Daniel slew him, when the hour comes this hand shall slay Sir Daniel; but neither him nor his will I desert in peril. And for mine oath, good Jack, ye shall absolve me of it here. For the lives' sake of many men that hurt you not, and for mine honour, ye shall set me free." "I, Dick? Never!" returned Matcham. "An ye leave me, y'are forsworn, and so I shall declare it." "My blood heats," said Dick. "Give me the windac! Give it me!" "I'll not," said Matcham. "I'll save you in your teeth." "Not?" cried Dick. "I'll make you!" "Try it," said the other. They stood, looking in each other's eyes, each ready for a spring. Then Dick leaped; and though Matcham turned instantly and fled, in two bounds he was overtaken, the windac was twisted from his grasp, he was thrown roughly to the ground, and Dick stood across him, flushed and menacing, with doubled fist. Matcham lay where he had fallen, with his face in the grass, not thinking of resistance. Dick bent his bow. "I'll teach you!" he cried, fiercely. "Oath or no oath, ye may go hang for me!" And he turned and began to run. Matcham was on his feet at once, and began running after him. "What d'ye want?" cried Dick, stopping. "What make ye after me? Stand off!" "I will follow an I please," said Matcham. "This wood is free to me." "Stand back, by 'r Lady!" returned Dick, raising his bow. "Ah, y'are a brave boy!" retorted Matcham. "Shoot!" Dick lowered his weapon in some confusion. "See here," he said. "Y' have done me ill enough. Go, then. Go your way in fair wise; or, whether I will or not, I must even drive you to it." "Well," said Matcham, doggedly, "y'are the stronger. Do your worst. I shall not leave to follow thee, Dick, unless thou makest me," he added. Dick was almost beside himself. It went against his heart to beat a creature so defenceless; and, for the life of him, he knew no other way to rid himself of this unwelcome and, as he began to think, perhaps untrue companion. "Y'are mad, I think," he cried. "Fool-fellow, I am hasting to your foes; as fast as foot can carry me, go I thither." "I care not, Dick," replied the lad. "If y'are bound to die, Dick, I'll die too. I would liever go with you to prison than to go free without you." "Well," returned the other, "I may stand no longer prating. Follow me, if ye must; but if ye play me false, it shall but little advance you, mark ye that. Shalt have a quarrel in thine inwards, boy." So saying, Dick took once more to his heels, keeping in the margin of the thicket and looking briskly about him as he went. At a good pace he rattled out of the dell, and came again into the more open quarters of the wood. To the left a little eminence appeared, spotted with golden gorse, and crowned with a black tuft of firs. "I shall see from there," he thought, and struck for it across a heathy clearing. He had gone but a few yards, when Matcham touched him on the arm, and pointed. To the eastward of the summit there was a dip, and, as it were, a valley passing to the other side; the heath was not yet out; all the ground was rusty, like an unscoured buckler, and dotted sparingly with yews; and there, one following another, Dick saw half a score green jerkins mounting the ascent, and marching at their head, conspicuous by his boar-spear, Ellis Duckworth in person. One after another gained the top, showed for a moment against the sky, and then dipped upon the farther side, until the last was gone. Dick looked at Matcham with a kindlier eye. "So y'are to be true to me, Jack?" he asked. "I thought ye were of the other party." Matcham began to sob. "What cheer!" cried Dick. "Now the saints behold us! would ye snivel for a word?" "Ye hurt me," sobbed Matcham. "Ye hurt me when ye threw me down. Y'are a coward to abuse your strength." "Nay, that is fool's talk," said Dick, roughly. "Y' had no title to my windac, Master John. I would 'a' done right to have well basted you. If ye go with me, ye must obey me; and so, come." Matcham had half a thought to stay behind; but, seeing that Dick continued to scour full-tilt towards the eminence and not so much as looked across his shoulder, he soon thought better of that, and began to run in turn. But the ground was very difficult and steep; Dick had already a long start, and had, at any rate, the lighter heels, and he had long since come to the summit, crawled forward through the firs, and ensconced himself in a thick tuft of gorse, before Matcham, panting like a deer, rejoined him, and lay down in silence by his side. Below, in the bottom of a considerable valley, the short cut from Tunstall hamlet wound downwards to the ferry. It was well beaten, and the eye followed it easily from point to point. Here it was bordered by open glades; there the forest closed upon it; every hundred yards it ran beside an ambush. Far down the path, the sun shone on seven steel salets, and from time to time, as the trees opened, Selden and his men could be seen riding briskly, still bent upon Sir Daniel's mission. The wind had somewhat fallen, but still tussled merrily with the trees, and, perhaps, had Appleyard been there, he would have drawn a warning from the troubled conduct of the birds. "Now, mark," Dick whispered. "They be already well advanced into the wood; their safety lieth rather in continuing forward. But see ye where this wide glade runneth down before us, and in the midst of it, these two-score trees make like an island? There were their safety. An they but come sound as far as that, I will make shift to warn them. But my heart misgiveth me; they are but seven against so many, and they but carry cross-bows. The long-bow, Jack, will have the uppermost ever." Meanwhile, Selden and his men still wound up the path, ignorant of their danger, and momently drew nearer hand. Once, indeed, they paused, drew into a group, and seemed to point and listen. But it was something from far away across the plain that had arrested their attention--a hollow growl of cannon that came, from time to time, upon the wind, and told of the great battle. It was worth a thought, to be sure; for if the voice of the big guns were thus become audible in Tunstall Forest, the fight must have rolled ever eastward, and the day, by consequence, gone sore against Sir Daniel and the lords of the dark rose. But presently the little troop began again to move forward, and came next to a very open, heathy portion of the way, where but a single tongue of forest ran down to join the road. They were but just abreast of this, when an arrow shone flying. One of the men threw up his arms, his horse reared, and both fell and struggled together in a mass. Even from where the boys lay they could hear the rumour of the men's voices crying out; they could see the startled horses prancing, and, presently, as the troop began to recover from their first surprise, one fellow beginning to dismount. A second arrow from somewhat farther off glanced in a wide arch; a second rider bit the dust. The man who was dismounting lost hold upon the rein, and his horse fled galloping, and dragged him by the foot along the road, bumping from stone to stone, and battered by the fleeing hoofs. The four who still kept the saddle instantly broke and scattered; one wheeled and rode, shrieking, towards the ferry; the other three, with loose rein and flying raiment, came galloping up the road from Tunstall. From every clump they passed an arrow sped. Soon a horse fell, but the rider found his feet and continued to pursue his comrades till a second shot despatched him. Another man fell; then another horse; out of the whole troop there was but one fellow left, and he on foot; only, in different directions, the noise of the galloping of three riderless horses was dying fast into the distance. All this time not one of the assailants had for a moment shown himself. Here and there along the path, horse or man rolled, undespatched, in his agony; but no merciful enemy broke cover to put them from their pain. The solitary survivor stood bewildered in the road beside his fallen charger. He had come the length of that broad glade, with the island of timber, pointed out by Dick. He was not, perhaps, five hundred yards from where the boys lay hidden; and they could see him plainly, looking to and fro in deadly expectation. But nothing came; and the man began to pluck up his courage, and suddenly unslung and bent his bow. At the same time, by something in his action, Dick recognised Selden. At this offer of resistance, from all about him in the covert of the woods there went up the sound of laughter. A score of men, at least, for this was the very thickest of the ambush, joined in this cruel and untimely mirth. Then an arrow glanced over Selden's shoulder; and he leaped and ran a little back. Another dart struck quivering at his heel. He made for the cover. A third shaft leaped out right in his face, and fell short in front of him. And then the laughter was repeated loudly, rising and re-echoing from different thickets. It was plain that his assailants were but baiting him, as men, in those days, baited the poor bull, or as the cat still trifles with the mouse. The skirmish was well over; farther down the road, a fellow in green was already calmly gathering the arrows; and now, in the evil pleasure of their hearts, they gave themselves the spectacle of their poor fellow-sinner in his torture. Selden began to understand; he uttered a roar of anger, shouldered his cross-bow, and sent a quarrel at a venture into the wood. Chance favoured him, for a slight cry responded. Then, throwing down his weapon, Selden began to run before him up the glade, and almost in a straight line for Dick and Matcham. The companions of the Black Arrow now began to shoot in earnest. But they were properly served; their chance had past; most of them had now to shoot against the sun; and Selden, as he ran, bounded from side to side to baffle and deceive their aim. Best of all, by turning up the glade he had defeated their preparations; there were no marksmen posted higher up than the one whom he had just killed or wounded; and the confusion of the foresters' counsels soon became apparent. A whistle sounded thrice, and then again twice. It was repeated from another quarter. The woods on either side became full of the sound of people bursting through the underwood; and a bewildered deer ran out into the open, stood for a second on three feet, with nose in air, and then plunged again into the thicket. Selden still ran, bounding; ever and again an arrow followed him, but still would miss. It began to appear as if he might escape. Dick had his bow armed, ready to support him; even Matcham, forgetful of his interest, took sides at heart for the poor fugitive; and both lads glowed and trembled in the ardour of their hearts. He was within fifty yards of them, when an arrow struck him and he fell. He was up again, indeed, upon the instant; but now he ran staggering, and, like a blind man, turned aside from his direction. Dick leaped to his feet and waved to him. "Here!" he cried. "This way! here is help! Nay, run, fellow--run!" But just then a second arrow struck Selden in the shoulder, between the plates of his brigandine, and, piercing through his jack, brought him, like a stone, to earth. "O, the poor heart!" cried Matcham, with clasped hands. And Dick stood petrified upon the hill, a mark for archery. Ten to one he had speedily been shot--for the foresters were furious with themselves, and taken unawares by Dick's appearance in the rear of their position--but instantly, out of a quarter of the wood surprisingly near to the two lads, a stentorian voice arose, the voice of Ellis Duckworth. "Hold!" it roared. "Shoot not! Take him alive! It is young Shelton--Harry's son." And immediately after a shrill whistle sounded several times, and was again taken up and repeated farther off. The whistle, it appeared, was John Amend-All's battle trumpet, by which he published his directions. "Ah, foul fortune!" cried Dick. "We are undone. Swiftly, Jack, come swiftly!" And the pair turned and ran back through the open pine clump that covered the summit of the hill. CHAPTER VI TO THE DAY'S END It was, indeed, high time for them to run. On every side the company of the Black Arrow was making for the hill. Some, being better runners, or having open ground to run upon, had far outstripped the others, and were already close upon the goal; some, following valleys, had spread out to right and left, and outflanked the lads on either side. Dick plunged into the nearest cover. It was a tall grove of oaks, firm underfoot and clear of underbrush, and as it lay down-hill, they made good speed. There followed next a piece of open, which Dick avoided, holding to his left. Two minutes after, and the same obstacle arising, the lads followed the same course. Thus it followed that, while the lads, bending continually to the left, drew nearer and nearer to the highroad and the river which they had crossed an hour or two before, the great bulk of their pursuers were leaning to the other hand, and running towards Tunstall. The lads paused to breathe. There was no sound of pursuit. Dick put his ear to the ground, and still there was nothing; but the wind, to be sure, still made a turmoil in the trees, and it was hard to make certain. "On again," said Dick; and, tired as they were, and Matcham limping with his injured foot, they pulled themselves together, and once more pelted down the hill. Three minutes later, they were breasting through a low thicket of evergreen. High overhead, the tall trees made a continuous roof of foliage. It was a pillared grove, as high as a cathedral, and except for the hollies among which the lads were struggling, open and smoothly swarded. On the other side, pushing through the last fringe of evergreen, they blundered forth again into the open twilight of the grove. "Stand!" cried a voice. And there, between the huge stems, not fifty feet before them, they beheld a stout fellow in green, sore blown with running, who instantly drew an arrow to the head and covered them. Matcham stopped with a cry; but Dick, without a pause, ran straight upon the forester, drawing his dagger as he went. The other, whether he was startled by the daring of the onslaught, or whether he was hampered by his orders, did not shoot; he stood wavering; and before he had time to come to himself, Dick bounded at his throat, and sent him sprawling backward on the turf. The arrow went one way and the bow another with a sounding twang. The disarmed forester grappled his assailant; but the dagger shone and descended twice. Then came a couple of groans, and then Dick rose to his feet again, and the man lay motionless, stabbed to the heart. "On!" said Dick; and he once more pelted forward, Matcham trailing in the rear. To say truth, they made but poor speed of it by now, labouring dismally as they ran, and catching for their breath like fish. Matcham had a cruel stitch, and his head swam; and as for Dick, his knees were like lead. But they kept up the form of running with undiminished courage. Presently they came to the end of the grove. It stopped abruptly; and there, a few yards before them, was the highroad from Risingham to Shoreby, lying, at this point, between two even walls of forest. At the sight Dick paused; and as soon as he stopped running, he became aware of a confused noise, which rapidly grew louder. It was at first like the rush of a very high gust of wind, but soon it became more definite, and resolved itself into the galloping of horses; and then, in a flash, a whole company of men-at-arms came driving round the corner, swept before the lads, and were gone again upon the instant. They rode as for their lives, in complete disorder; some of them were wounded; riderless horses galloped at their side with bloody saddles. They were plainly fugitives from the great battle. The noise of their passage had scarce begun to die away towards Shoreby, before fresh hoofs came echoing in their wake, and another deserter clattered down the road; this time a single rider and, by his splendid armour, a man of high degree. Close after him there followed several baggage-waggons, fleeing at an ungainly canter, the drivers flailing at the horses as if for life. These must have run early in the day; but their cowardice was not to save them. For just before they came abreast of where the lads stood wondering, a man in hacked armour, and seemingly beside himself with fury, overtook the waggons, and with the truncheon of a sword, began to cut the drivers down. Some leaped from their places and plunged into the wood; the others he sabred as they sat, cursing them the while for cowards in a voice that was scarce human. All this time the noise in the distance had continued to increase; the rumble of carts, the clatter of horses, the cries of men, a great, confused rumour, came swelling on the wind; and it was plain that the rout of a whole army was pouring, like an inundation, down the road. Dick stood sombre. He had meant to follow the highway till the turn for Holywood, and now he had to change his plan. But above all, he had recognised the colours of Earl Risingham, and he knew that the battle had gone finally against the rose of Lancaster. Had Sir Daniel joined, and was he now a fugitive and ruined? or had he deserted to the side of York, and was he forfeit to honour? It was an ugly choice. "Come," he said, sternly; and, turning on his heel, he began to walk forward through the grove, with Matcham limping in his rear. For some time they continued to thread the forest in silence. It was now growing late; the sun was setting in the plain beyond Kettley; the tree-tops overhead glowed golden; but the shadows had begun to grow darker and the chill of the night to fall. "If there were anything to eat!" cried Dick, suddenly, pausing as he spoke. Matcham sat down and began to weep. "Ye can weep for your own supper, but when it was to save men's lives, your heart was hard enough," said Dick, contemptuously. "Y' 'ave seven deaths upon your conscience, Master John; I'll ne'er forgive you that." "Conscience!" cried Matcham, looking fiercely up. "Mine! And ye have the man's red blood upon your dagger! And wherefore did ye slay him, the poor soul? He drew his arrow, but he let not fly; he held you in his hand, and spared you! 'Tis as brave to kill a kitten, as a man that not defends himself." Dick was struck dumb. "I slew him fair. I ran me in upon his bow," he cried. "It was a coward blow," returned Matcham. "Y'are but a lout and bully, Master Dick; ye but abuse advantages; let there come a stronger, we will see you truckle at his boot! Ye care not for vengeance, neither--for your father's death that goes unpaid, and his poor ghost that clamoureth for justice. But if there come but a poor creature in your hands that lacketh skill and strength, and would befriend you, down she shall go!" Dick was too furious to observe that "she." "Marry!" he cried, "and here is news! Of any two the one will still be stronger. The better man throweth the worse, and the worse is well served. Ye deserve a belting, Master Matcham, for your ill-guidance and unthankfulness to meward; and what ye deserve ye shall have." And Dick, who, even in his angriest temper, still preserved the appearance of composure, began to unbuckle his belt. "Here shall be your supper," he said, grimly. Matcham had stopped his tears; he was as white as a sheet, but he looked Dick steadily in the face, and never moved. Dick took a step, swinging the belt. Then he paused, embarrassed by the large eyes and the thin, weary face of his companion. His courage began to subside. "Say ye were in the wrong, then," he said, lamely. "Nay," said Matcham, "I was in the right. Come, cruel! I be lame; I be weary; I resist not; I ne'er did thee hurt; come, beat me--coward!" Dick raised the belt at this last provocation; but Matcham winced and drew himself together with so cruel an apprehension, that his heart failed him yet again. The strap fell by his side, and he stood irresolute, feeling like a fool. "A plague upon thee, shrew!" he said. "An ye be so feeble of hand, ye should keep the closer guard upon your tongue. But I'll be hanged before I beat you!" and he put on his belt again. "Beat you I will not," he continued; "but forgive you?--never. I knew ye not; ye were my master's enemy; I lent you my horse; my dinner ye have eaten; y' 'ave called me a man o' wood, a coward, and a bully. Nay, by the mass! the measure is filled, and runneth over. 'Tis a great thing to be weak, I trow: ye can do your worst, yet shall none punish you; ye may steal a man's weapons in the hour of need, yet may the man not take his own again;--y'are weak, forsooth! Nay, then, if one cometh charging at you with a lance, and crieth he is weak, ye must let him pierce your body through! Tut! fool words!" "And yet ye beat me not," returned Matcham. "Let be," said Dick--"let be. I will instruct you. Y' 'ave been ill-nurtured, methinks, and yet ye have the makings of some good, and, beyond all question, saved me from the river. Nay, I had forgotten it; I am as thankless as thyself. But, come, let us on. An we be for Holywood this night, ay, or to-morrow early, we had best set forward speedily." But though Dick had talked himself back into his usual good-humour, Matcham had forgiven him nothing. His violence, the recollection of the forester whom he had slain--above all, the vision of the upraised belt, were things not easily to be forgotten. "I will thank you, for the form's sake," said Matcham. "But, in sooth, good Master Shelton, I had liever find my way alone. Here is a wide wood; prithee, let each choose his path; I owe you a dinner and a lesson. Fare ye well!" "Nay," cried Dick, "if that be your tune, so be it, and a plague be with you!" Each turned aside, and they began walking off severally, with no thought of the direction, intent solely on their quarrel. But Dick had not gone ten paces ere his name was called, and Matcham came running after. "Dick," he said, "it were unmannerly to part so coldly. Here is my hand, and my heart with it. For all that wherein you have so excellently served and helped me--not for the form, but from the heart, I thank you. Fare ye right well." "Well, lad," returned Dick, taking the hand which was offered him, "good speed to you, if speed you may. But I misdoubt it shrewdly. Y'are too disputatious." So then they separated for the second time; and presently it was Dick who was running after Matcham. "Here," he said, "take my cross-bow; shalt not go unarmed." "A cross-bow!" said Matcham. "Nay, boy, I have neither the strength to bend nor yet the skill to aim with it. It were no help to me, good boy. But yet I thank you." The night had now fallen, and under the trees they could no longer read each other's face. "I will go some little way with you," said Dick. "The night is dark. I would fain leave you on a path, at least. My mind misgiveth me, y'are likely to be lost." Without any more words, he began to walk forward, and the other once more followed him. The blackness grew thicker and thicker. Only here and there, in open places, they saw the sky, dotted with small stars. In the distance, the noise of the rout of the Lancastrian army still continued to be faintly audible; but with every step they left it farther in the rear. At the end of half an hour of silent progress they came forth upon a broad patch of heathy open. It glimmered in the light of the stars, shaggy with fern and islanded with clumps of yew. And here they paused and looked upon each other. "Y'are weary?" Dick said. "Nay, I am so weary," answered Matcham, "that methinks I could lie down and die." "I hear the chiding of a river," returned Dick. "Let us go so far forth, for I am sore athirst." The ground sloped down gently; and, sure enough, in the bottom, they found a little murmuring river, running among willows. Here they threw themselves down together by the brink; and putting their mouths to the level of a starry pool, they drank their fill. "Dick," said Matcham, "it may not be. I can no more." "I saw a pit as we came down," said Dick. "Let us lie down therein and sleep." "Nay, but with all my heart!" cried Matcham. The pit was sandy and dry; a shock of brambles hung upon one hedge, and made a partial shelter; and there the two lads lay down, keeping close together for the sake of warmth, their quarrel all forgotten. And soon sleep fell upon them like a cloud, and under the dew and stars they rested peacefully. CHAPTER VII THE HOODED FACE They awoke in the grey of the morning; the birds were not yet in full song, but twittered here and there among the woods; the sun was not yet up, but the eastern sky was barred with solemn colours. Half starved and over-weary as they were, they lay without moving, sunk in a delightful lassitude. And as they thus lay, the clang of a bell fell suddenly upon their ears. "A bell!" said Dick, sitting up. "Can we be, then, so near to Holywood?" A little after, the bell clanged again, but this time somewhat nearer hand; and from that time forth, and still drawing nearer and nearer, it continued to sound brokenly abroad in the silence of the morning. "Nay, what should this betoken?" said Dick, who was now broad awake. "It is some one walking," returned Matcham, "and the bell tolleth ever as he moves." "I see that well," said Dick. "But wherefore? What maketh he in Tunstall Woods? Jack," he added, "laugh at me an ye will, but I like not the hollow sound of it." "Nay," said Matcham, with a shiver, "it hath a doleful note. An the day were not come----" But just then the bell, quickening its pace, began to ring thick and hurried, and then it gave a single hammering jangle, and was silent for a space. "It is as though the bearer had run for a paternoster while, and then leaped the river," Dick observed. "And now beginneth he again to pace soberly forward," added Matcham. "Nay," returned Dick--"nay, not so soberly, Jack. 'Tis a man that walketh you right speedily. 'Tis a man in some fear of his life, or about some hurried business. See ye not how swift the beating draweth near?" "It is now close by," said Matcham. They were now on the edge of the pit; and as the pit itself was on a certain eminence, they commanded a view over the greater proportion of the clearing, up to the thick woods that closed it in. The daylight, which was very clear and grey, showed them a riband of white foot-path wandering among the gorse. It passed some hundred yards from the pit, and ran the whole length of the clearing, east and west. By the line of its course, Dick judged it should lead more or less directly to the Moat House. Upon this path, stepping forth from the margin of the wood, a white figure now appeared. It paused a little, and seemed to look about; and then, at a slow pace, and bent almost double, it began to draw near across the heath. At every step the bell clanked. Face, it had none; a white hood, not even pierced with eye-holes, veiled the head; and as the creature moved, it seemed to feel its way with the tapping of a stick. Fear fell upon the lads, as cold as death. "A leper!" said Dick, hoarsely. "His touch is death," said Matcham. "Let us run." "Not so," returned Dick. "See ye not?--he is stone blind. He guideth him with a staff. Let us lie still; the wind bloweth towards the path, and he will go by and hurt us not. Alas, poor soul, and we should rather pity him!" "I will pity him when he is by," replied Matcham. The blind leper was now about half-way towards them, and just then the sun rose and shone full on his veiled face. He had been a tall man before he was bowed by his disgusting sickness, and even now he walked with a vigorous step. The dismal beating of his bell, the pattering of the stick, the eyeless screen before his countenance, and the knowledge that he was not only doomed to death and suffering, but shut out for ever from the touch of his fellow-men, filled the lads' bosoms with dismay; and at every step that brought him nearer, their courage and strength seemed to desert them. As he came about level with the pit, he paused, and turned his face full upon the lads. "Mary be my shield! He sees us!" said Matcham, faintly. "Hush!" whispered Dick. "He doth but hearken. He is blind, fool!" The leper looked or listened, whichever he was really doing, for some seconds. Then he began to move on again, but presently paused once more, and again turned and seemed to gaze upon the lads. Even Dick became dead-white and closed his eyes, as if by the mere sight he might become infected. But soon the bell sounded, and this time, without any further hesitation, the leper crossed the remainder of the little heath and disappeared into the covert of the woods. "He saw us," said Matcham. "I could swear it!" "Tut!" returned Dick, recovering some sparks of courage. "He but heard us. He was in fear, poor soul! An ye were blind, and walked in a perpetual night, ye would start yourself, if ever a twig rustled or a bird cried 'Peep.'" "Dick, good Dick, he saw us," repeated Matcham. "When a man hearkeneth, he doth not as this man; he doth otherwise, Dick. This was seeing; it was not hearing. He means foully. Hark, else, if his bell be not stopped!" Such was the case. The bell rang no longer. "Nay," said Dick, "I like not that. Nay," he cried again, "I like that little. What may this betoken? Let us go, by the mass!" "He hath gone east," added Matcham. "Good Dick, let us go westward straight; I shall not breathe till I have my back turned upon that leper." "Jack, y'are too cowardly," replied Dick. "We shall go fair for Holywood, or as fair, at least, as I can guide you, and that will be due north." They were afoot at once, passed the stream upon some stepping-stones, and began to mount on the other side, which was steeper, towards the margin of the wood. The ground became very uneven, full of knolls and hollows; trees grew scattered or in clumps; it became difficult to choose a path, and the lads somewhat wandered. They were weary, besides, with yesterday's exertions and the lack of food, and they moved but heavily and dragged their feet among the sand. Presently, coming to the top of a knoll, they were aware of the leper, some hundred feet in front of them, crossing the line of their march by a hollow. His bell was silent, his staff no longer tapped the ground, and he went before him with the swift and assured footsteps of a man who sees. Next moment he had disappeared into a little thicket. The lads, at the first glimpse, had crouched behind a tuft of gorse; there they lay, horror-struck. "Certain, he pursueth us," said Dick--"certain! He held the clapper of his bell in one hand, saw ye? that it should not sound. Now may the saints aid and guide us, for I have no strength to combat pestilence!" "What maketh he?" cried Matcham. "What doth he want? Who ever heard the like, that a leper, out of mere malice, should pursue unfortunates? Hath he not his bell to that very end, that people may avoid him? Dick, there is below this something deeper." "Nay, I care not," moaned Dick; "the strength is gone out of me; my legs are like water. The saints be mine assistance!" "Would ye lie there idle?" cried Matcham. "Let us back into the open. We have the better chance; he cannot steal upon us unawares." "Not I," said Dick. "My time is come, and peradventure he may pass us by." "Bend me, then, your bow!" cried the other. "What! will ye be a man?" Dick crossed himself. "Would ye have me shoot upon a leper?" he cried. "The hand would fail me. Nay, now," he added--"nay, now, let be! With sound men I will fight, but not with ghosts and lepers. Which this is I wot not. One or other, Heaven be our protection!" "Now," said Matcham, "if this be man's courage, what a poor thing is man! But sith ye will do naught, let us lie close." Then came a single, broken jangle on the bell. "He hath missed his hold upon the clapper," whispered Matcham. "Saints! how near he is!" But Dick answered never a word; his teeth were near chattering. Soon they saw a piece of the white robe between some bushes; then the leper's head was thrust forth from behind a trunk, and he seemed narrowly to scan the neighbourhood before he once again withdrew. To their stretched senses, the whole bush appeared alive with rustlings and the creak of twigs; and they heard the beating of each other's heart. Suddenly, with a cry, the leper sprang into the open close by, and ran straight upon the lads. They, shrieking aloud, separated and began to run different ways. But their horrible enemy fastened upon Matcham, ran him swiftly down, and had him almost instantly a prisoner. The lad gave one scream that echoed high and far over the forest, he had one spasm of struggling, and then all his limbs relaxed, and he fell limp into his captor's arms. Dick heard the cry and turned. He saw Matcham fall; and on the instant his spirit and his strength revived. With a cry of pity and anger, he unslung and bent his arblast. But ere he had time to shoot, the leper held up his hand. "Hold your shot, Dickon!" cried a familiar voice. "Hold your shot, mad wag! Know ye not a friend?" And then laying down Matcham on the turf, he undid the hood from off his face, and disclosed the features of Sir Daniel Brackley. "Sir Daniel!" cried Dick. "Ay, by the mass, Sir Daniel!" returned the knight. "Would ye shoot upon your guardian, rogue? But here is this----" And there he broke off, and pointing to Matcham, asked: "How call ye him, Dick?" "Nay," said Dick, "I call him Master Matcham. Know ye him not? He said ye knew him!" "Ay," replied Sir Daniel, "I know the lad"; and he chuckled. "But he has fainted; and, by my sooth, he might have had less to faint for! Hey, Dick? Did I put the fear of death upon you?" "Indeed, Sir Daniel, ye did that," said Dick, and sighed again at the mere recollection. "Nay, sir, saving your respect, I had as lief 'a' met the devil in person; and to speak truth, I am yet all a-quake. But what made ye, sir, in such a guise?" Sir Daniel's brow grew suddenly black with anger. "What made I?" he said. "Ye do well to mind me of it! What? I skulked for my poor life in my own wood of Tunstall, Dick. We were ill sped at the battle; we but got there to be swept among the rout. Where be all my good men-at-arms? Dick, by the mass, I know not! We were swept down; the shot fell thick among us; I have not seen one man in my own colours since I saw three fall. For myself, I came sound to Shoreby, and being mindful of the Black Arrow, got me this gown and bell, and came softly by the path for the Moat House. There is no disguise to be compared with it; the jingle of this bell would scare me the stoutest outlaw in the forest; they would all turn pale to hear it. At length I came by you and Matcham. I could see but evilly through this same hood, and was not sure of you, being chiefly, and for many a good cause, astonished at the finding you together. Moreover, in the open, where I had to go slowly and tap with my staff, I feared to disclose myself. But see," he added, "this poor shrew begins a little to revive. A little good canary will comfort me the heart of it." The knight, from under his long dress, produced a stout bottle, and began to rub the temples and wet the lips of the patient, who returned gradually to consciousness, and began to roll dim eyes from one to another. "What cheer, Jack!" said Dick. "It was no leper, after all; it was Sir Daniel! See!" "Swallow me a good draught of this," said the knight. "This will give you manhood. Thereafter, I will give you both a meal, and we shall all three on to Tunstall. For, Dick," he continued, laying forth bread and meat upon the grass, "I will avow to you, in all good conscience, it irks me sorely to be safe between four walls. Not since I backed a horse have I been pressed so hard; peril of life, jeopardy of land and livelihood, and to sum up, all these losels in the wood to hunt me down. But I be not yet shent. Some of my lads will pick me their way home. Hatch hath ten fellows; Selden, he had six. Nay, we shall soon be strong again; and if I can but buy my peace with my right fortunate and undeserving Lord of York, why, Dick, we'll be a man again and go a-horseback!" And so saying, the knight filled himself a horn of canary, and pledged his ward in dumb show. "Selden," Dick faltered--"Selden--" And he paused again. Sir Daniel put down the wine untasted. "How!" he cried, in a changed voice. "Selden? Speak! What of Selden?" Dick stammered forth the tale of the ambush and the massacre. The knight heard in silence; but as he listened, his countenance became convulsed with rage and grief. "Now here," he cried, "on my right hand, I swear to avenge it! If that I fail, if that I spill not ten men's souls for each, may this hand wither from my body! I broke this Duckworth like a rush; I beggared him to his door; I burned the thatch above his head; I drove him from this country; and now, cometh he back to beard me? Nay, but, Duckworth, this time it shall go bitter hard!" He was silent for some time, his face working. "Eat!" he cried, suddenly. "And you here," he added to Matcham, "swear me an oath to follow straight to the Moat House." "I will pledge mine honour," replied Matcham. "What make I with your honour?" cried the knight. "Swear me upon your mother's welfare!" Matcham gave the required oath; and Sir Daniel readjusted the hood over his face, and prepared his bell and staff. To see him once more in that appalling travesty somewhat revived the horror of his two companions. But the knight was soon upon his feet. "Eat with despatch," he said, "and follow me yarely to mine house." And with that he set forth again into the woods; and presently after the bell began to sound, numbering his steps, and the two lads sat by their untasted meal, and heard it die slowly away up-hill into the distance. "And so ye go to Tunstall?" Dick inquired. "Yea, verily," said Matcham, "when needs must! I am braver behind Sir Daniel's back than to his face." They ate hastily, and set forth along the path through the airy upper levels of the forest, where great beeches stood apart among green lawns, and the birds and squirrels made merry on the boughs. Two hours later, they began to descend upon the other side, and already, among the tree-tops, saw before them the red walls and roofs of Tunstall House. "Here," said Matcham, pausing, "ye shall take your leave of your friend Jack, whom y'are to see no more. Come, Dick, forgive him what he did amiss, as he, for his part, cheerfully and lovingly forgiveth you." "And wherefore so?" asked Dick. "An we both go to Tunstall, I shall see you yet again, I trow, and that right often." "Ye'll never again see poor Jack Matcham," replied the other, "that was so fearful and burthensome, and yet plucked you from the river; ye'll not see him more, Dick, by mine honour!" He held his arms open, and the lads embraced and kissed. "And, Dick," continued Matcham, "my spirit bodeth ill. Y'are now to see a new Sir Daniel; for heretofore hath all prospered in his hands exceedingly, and fortune followed him; but now, methinks, when his fate hath come upon him, and he runs the adventure of his life, he will prove but a foul lord to both of us. He may be brave in battle, but he hath the liar's eye; there is fear in his eye, Dick, and fear is as cruel as the wolf! We go down into that house, St. Mary guide us forth again!" And so they continued their descent in silence, and came out at last before Sir Daniel's forest stronghold, where it stood, low and shady, flanked with round towers and stained with moss and lichen, in the lilied waters of the moat. Even as they appeared, the doors were opened, the bridge lowered, and Sir Daniel himself, with Hatch and the parson at his side, stood ready to receive them. BOOK II THE MOAT HOUSE CHAPTER I DICK ASKS QUESTIONS The Moat House stood not far from the rough forest road. Externally, it was a compact rectangle of red stone, flanked at each corner by a round tower, pierced for archery and battlemented at the top. Within, it enclosed a narrow court. The moat was perhaps twelve feet wide, crossed by a single drawbridge. It was supplied with water by a trench, leading to a forest pool and commanded, through its whole length, from the battlements of the two southern towers. Except that one or two tall and thick trees had been suffered to remain within half a bowshot of the walls, the house was in a good posture for defence. In the court, Dick found a part of the garrison, busy with preparations for defence, and gloomily discussing the chances of a siege. Some were making arrows, some sharpening swords that had long been disused; but even as they worked, they shook their heads. Twelve of Sir Daniel's party had escaped the battle, run the gauntlet through the wood, and come alive to the Moat House. But out of this dozen, three had been gravely wounded: two at Risingham in the disorder of the rout, one by John Amend-All's marksmen as he crossed the forest. This raised the force of the garrison, counting Hatch, Sir Daniel, and young Shelton, to twenty-two effective men. And more might be continually expected to arrive. The danger lay not therefore in the lack of men. It was the terror of the Black Arrow that oppressed the spirits of the garrison. For their open foes of the party of York, in these most changing times, they felt but a far-away concern. "The world," as people said in those days, "might change again" before harm came. But for their neighbours in the wood, they trembled. It was not Sir Daniel alone who was a mark for hatred. His men, conscious of impunity, had carried themselves cruelly through all the country. Harsh commands had been harshly executed; and of the little band that now sat talking in the court, there was not one but had been guilty of some act of oppression or barbarity. And now, by the fortune of war, Sir Daniel had become powerless to protect his instruments; now, by the issue of some hours of battle, at which many of them had not been present, they had all become punishable traitors to the State, outside the buckler of the law, a shrunken company in a poor fortress that was hardly tenable, and exposed upon all sides to the just resentment of their victims. Nor had there been lacking grisly advertisements of what they might expect. [Illustration: _Lastly, a little before dawn, a spearman had come staggering to the moat side, pierced by arrows_] At different periods of the evening and the night, no fewer than seven riderless horses had come neighing in terror to the gate. Two were from Selden's troop; five belonged to men who had ridden with Sir Daniel to the field. Lastly, a little before dawn, a spearman had come staggering to the moat side, pierced by three arrows; even as they carried him in, his spirit had departed; but by the words that he uttered in his agony, he must have been the last survivor of a considerable company of men. Hatch himself showed, under his sun-brown, the pallor of anxiety; and when he had taken Dick aside and learned the fate of Selden, he fell on a stone bench and fairly wept. The others, from where they sat on stools or doorsteps in the sunny angle of the court, looked at him with wonder and alarm, but none ventured to inquire the cause of his emotion. "Nay, Master Shelton," said Hatch, at last--"nay, but what said I? We shall all go. Selden was a man of his hands; he was like a brother to me. Well, he has gone second; well, we shall all follow! For what said their knave rhyme?--'A black arrow in each black heart.' Was it not so it went? Appleyard, Selden, Smith, old Humphrey gone; and there lieth poor John Carter, crying, poor sinner, for the priest." Dick gave ear. Out of a low window, hard by where they were talking, groans and murmurs came to his ear. "Lieth he there?" he asked. "Ay, in the second porter's chamber," answered Hatch. "We could not bear him further, soul and body were so bitterly at odds. At every step we lifted him, he thought to wend. But now, methinks, it is the soul that suffereth. Ever for the priest he crieth, and Sir Oliver, I wot not why, still cometh not. 'Twill be a long shrift; but poor Appleyard and poor Selden, they had none." Dick stooped to the window and looked in. The little cell was low and dark, but he could make out the wounded soldier lying moaning on his pallet. "Carter, poor friend, how goeth it?" he asked. "Master Shelton," returned the man, in an excited whisper, "for the dear light of heaven, bring the priest. Alack, I am sped; I am brought very low down; my hurt is to the death. Ye may do me no more service; this shall be the last. Now, for my poor soul's interest, and as a loyal gentleman, bestir you; for I have that matter on my conscience that shall drag me deep." He groaned, and Dick heard the grating of his teeth, whether in pain or terror. Just then Sir Daniel appeared upon the threshold of the hall. He had a letter in one hand. "Lads," he said, "we have had a shog, we have had a tumble; wherefore, then, deny it? Rather it imputeth to get speedily again to saddle. This old Harry the Sixt has had the undermost. Wash we, then, our hands of him. I have a good friend that rideth next the duke, the Lord of Wensleydale. Well, I have writ a letter to my friend, praying his good lordship, and offering large satisfaction for the past and reasonable surety for the future. Doubt not but he will lend a favourable ear. A prayer without gifts is like a song without music: I surfeit him with promises, boys--I spare not to promise. What, then, is lacking? Nay, a great thing--wherefore should I deceive you?--a great thing and a difficult: a messenger to bear it. The woods--y'are not ignorant of that--lie thick with our ill-willers. Haste is most needful; but without sleight and caution all is naught. Which, then, of this company will take me this letter, bear me it to my Lord of Wensleydale, and bring me the answer back?" One man instantly arose. "I will, an't like you," said he. "I will even risk my carcase." "Nay, Dicky Bowyer, not so," returned the knight. "It likes me not. Y'are sly indeed, but not speedy. Ye were a laggard ever." "An't be so, Sir Daniel, here am I," cried another. "The saints forfend!" said the knight. "Y'are speedy, but not sly. Ye would blunder me head-foremost into John Amend-All's camp. I thank you both for your good courage; but, in sooth, it may not be." Then Hatch offered himself, and he also was refused. "I want you here, good Bennet; y'are my right hand, indeed," returned the knight; and then several coming forward in a group, Sir Daniel at length selected one and gave him the letter. "Now," he said, "upon your good speed and better discretion we do all depend. Bring me a good answer back, and before three weeks, I will have purged my forest of these vagabonds that brave us to our faces. But mark it well, Throgmorton: the matter is not easy. Ye must steal forth under night, and go like a fox; and how ye are to cross Till I know not, neither by the bridge nor ferry." "I can swim," returned Throgmorton. "I will come soundly, fear not." "Well, friend, get ye to the buttery," replied Sir Daniel. "Ye shall swim first of all in nut-brown ale." And with that he turned back into the hall. "Sir Daniel hath a wise tongue," said Hatch, aside, to Dick. "See, now, where many a lesser man had glossed the matter over, he speaketh it out plainly to his company. Here is a danger, 'a saith, and here difficulty; and jesteth in the very saying. Nay, by St. Barbary, he is a born captain! Not a man but he is some deal heartened up! See how they fall again to work." This praise of Sir Daniel put a thought in the lad's head. "Bennet," he said, "how came my father by his end?" "Ask me not that," replied Hatch. "I had no hand nor knowledge in it; furthermore, I will even be silent, Master Dick. For look you, in a man's own business there he may speak; but of hearsay matters and of common talk, not so. Ask me Sir Oliver--ay, or Carter, if ye will; not me." And Hatch set off to make the rounds, leaving Dick in a muse. "Wherefore would he not tell me?" thought the lad. "And wherefore named he Carter? Carter--nay, then Carter had a hand in it, perchance." He entered the house, and passing some little way along a flagged and vaulted passage, came to the door of the cell where the hurt man lay groaning. At his entrance Carter started eagerly. "Have ye brought the priest?" he cried. "Not yet awhile," returned Dick. "Y' 'ave a word to tell me first. How came my father, Harry Shelton, by his death?" The man's face altered instantly. "I know not," he replied, doggedly. "Nay, ye know well," returned Dick. "Seek not to put me by." "I tell you I know not," repeated Carter. "Then," said Dick, "ye shall die unshriven. Here am I, and here shall stay. There shall no priest come near you, rest assured. For of what avail is penitence, an ye have no mind to right those wrongs ye had a hand in? and without penitence, confession is but mockery." "Ye say what ye mean not, Master Dick," said Carter, composedly. "It is ill threatening the dying, and becometh you (to speak truth) little. And for as little as it commends you, it shall serve you less. Stay, an ye please. Ye will condemn my soul--ye shall learn nothing! There is my last word to you." And the wounded man turned upon the other side. Now, Dick, to say truth, had spoken hastily, and was ashamed of his threat. But he made one more effort. "Carter," he said, "mistake me not. I know ye were but an instrument in the hands of others; a churl must obey his lord; I would not bear heavily on such an one. But I begin to learn upon many sides that this great duty lieth on my youth and ignorance, to avenge my father. Prithee, then, good Carter, set aside the memory of my threatenings, and in pure good-will and honest penitence give me a word of help." The wounded man lay silent; nor, say what Dick pleased, could he extract another word from him. "Well," said Dick, "I will go call the priest to you as ye desired; for howsoever ye be in fault to me or mine, I would not be willingly in fault to any, least of all to one upon the last change." Again the old soldier heard him without speech or motion; even his groans he had suppressed; and as Dick turned and left the room, he was filled with admiration for that rugged fortitude. "And yet," he thought, "of what use is courage without wit? Had his hands been clean, he would have spoken; his silence did confess the secret louder than words. Nay, upon all sides, proof floweth on me. Sir Daniel, he or his men, hath done this thing." Dick paused in the stone passage with a heavy heart. At that hour, in the ebb of Sir Daniel's fortune, when he was beleaguered by the archers of the Black Arrow and proscribed by the victorious Yorkists, was Dick, also, to turn upon the man who had nourished and taught him, who had severely punished, indeed, but yet unwearyingly protected his youth? The necessity, if it should prove to be one, was cruel. "Pray Heaven he be innocent!" he said. And then steps sounded on the flagging, and Sir Oliver came gravely towards the lad. "One seeketh you earnestly," said Dick. "I am upon the way, good Richard," said the priest. "It is this poor Carter. Alack, he is beyond cure." "And yet his soul is sicker than his body," answered Dick. "Have ye seen him?" asked Sir Oliver, with a manifest start. "I do but come from him," replied Dick. "What said he? what said he?" snapped the priest, with extraordinary eagerness. "He but cried for you the more piteously, Sir Oliver. It were well done to go the faster, for his hurt is grievous," returned the lad. "I am straight for him," was the reply. "Well, we have all our sins. We must all come to our latter day, good Richard." "Ay, sir; and it were well if we all came fairly," answered Dick. The priest dropped his eyes, and with an inaudible benediction hurried on. "He, too!" thought Dick--"he, that taught me in piety! Nay, then, what a world is this, if all that care for me be blood-guilty of my father's death? Vengeance! Alas! what a sore fate is mine, if I must be avenged upon my friends!" The thought put Matcham in his head. He smiled at the remembrance of his strange companion, and then wondered where he was. Ever since they had come together to the doors of the Moat House the younger lad had disappeared, and Dick began to weary for a word with him. About an hour after, mass being somewhat hastily run through by Sir Oliver, the company gathered in the hall for dinner. It was a long, low apartment, strewn with green rushes, and the walls hung with arras in a design of savage men and questioning bloodhounds; here and there hung spears and bows and bucklers; a fire blazed in the big chimney; there were arras-covered benches round the wall, and in the midst the table, fairly spread, awaited the arrival of the diners. Neither Sir Daniel nor his lady made their appearance. Sir Oliver himself was absent, and here again there was no word of Matcham. Dick began to grow alarmed, to recall his companion's melancholy forebodings, and to wonder to himself if any foul play had befallen him in that house. After dinner he found Goody Hatch, who was hurrying to my Lady Brackley. "Goody," he said, "where is Master Matcham, I prithee? I saw ye go in with him when we arrived." The old woman laughed aloud. "Ah, Master Dick," she said, "y' have a famous bright eye in your head, to be sure!" and laughed again. "Nay, but where is he, indeed?" persisted Dick. "Ye will never see him more," she returned--"never. It is sure." "An I do not," returned the lad, "I will know the reason why. He came not hither of his full free will; such as I am, I am his best protector, and I will see him justly used. There be too many mysteries; I do begin to weary of the game!" But as Dick was speaking, a heavy hand fell on his shoulder. It was Bennet Hatch that had come unperceived behind him. With a jerk of his thumb, the retainer dismissed his wife. "Friend Dick," he said, as soon as they were alone, "are ye a moon-struck natural? An ye leave not certain things in peace, ye were better in the salt sea than here in Tunstall Moat House. Y' have questioned me; y' have baited Carter; y' have frighted the jack-priest with hints. Bear ye more wisely, fool; and even now, when Sir Daniel calleth you, show me a smooth face for the love of wisdom. Y'are to be sharply questioned. Look to your answers." "Hatch," returned Dick, "in all this I smell a guilty conscience." "An ye go not the wiser, ye will soon smell blood," replied Bennet. "I do but warn you. And here cometh one to call you." And indeed, at that very moment, a messenger came across the court to summon Dick into the presence of Sir Daniel. CHAPTER II THE TWO OATHS Sir Daniel was in the hall; there he paced angrily before the fire, awaiting Dick's arrival. None was by except Sir Oliver, and he sat discreetly backward, thumbing and muttering over his breviary. "Y' have sent for me, Sir Daniel?" said young Shelton. "I have sent for you, indeed," replied the knight. "For what cometh to mine ears? Have I been to you so heavy a guardian that ye make haste to credit ill of me? Or sith that ye see me, for the nonce, some worsted, do ye think to quit my party? By the mass, your father was not so! Those he was near, those he stood by, come wind or weather. But you, Dick, y'are a fair-day friend, it seemeth, and now seek to clear yourself of your allegiance." "An't please you, Sir Daniel, not so," returned Dick, firmly. "I am grateful and faithful, where gratitude and faith are due. And before more is said, I thank you, and I thank Sir Oliver; y' have great claims upon me both--none can have more; I were a hound if I forgot them." "It is well," said Sir Daniel; and then, rising into anger: "Gratitude and faith are words, Dick Shelton," he continued; "but I look to deeds. In this hour of my peril, when my name is attainted, when my lands are forfeit, when this wood is full of men that hunger and thirst for my destruction, what doth gratitude? what doth faith? I have but a little company remaining; is it grateful or faithful to poison me their hearts with your insidious whisperings? Save me from such gratitude! But, come, now, what is it ye wish? Speak; we are here to answer. If ye have aught against me, stand forth and say it." "Sir," replied Dick, "my father fell when I was yet a child. It hath come to mine ears that he was foully done by. It hath come to mine ears--for I will not dissemble--that ye had a hand in his undoing. And in all verity, I shall not be at peace in mine own mind, nor very clear to help you, till I have certain resolution of these doubts." Sir Daniel sat down in a deep settle. He took his chin in his hand and looked at Dick fixedly. "And ye think I would be guardian to the man's son that I had murdered?" he asked. "Nay," said Dick, "pardon me if I answer churlishly; but indeed ye know right well a wardship is most profitable. All these years have ye not enjoyed my revenues, and led my men? Have ye not still my marriage? I wot not what it may be worth--it is worth something. Pardon me again; but if ye were base enough to slay a man under trust, here were, perhaps, reasons enough to move you to the lesser baseness." "When I was a lad of your years," returned Sir Daniel, sternly, "my mind had not so turned upon suspicions. And Sir Oliver here," he added, "why should he, a priest, be guilty of this act?" "Nay, Sir Daniel," said Dick, "but where the master biddeth there will the dog go. It is well known this priest is but your instrument. I speak very freely; the time is not for courtesies. Even as I speak, so would I be answered. And answer get I none! Ye but put more questions. I rede ye be ware, Sir Daniel; for in this way ye will but nourish and not satisfy my doubts." "I will answer you fairly, Master Richard," said the knight. "Were I to pretend ye have not stirred my wrath, I were no honest man. But I will be just even in anger. Come to me with these words when y'are grown and come to man's estate, and I am no longer your guardian, and so helpless to resent them. Come to me then, and I will answer you as ye merit, with a buffet in the mouth. Till then ye have two courses: either swallow me down these insults, keep a silent tongue, and fight in the meanwhile for the man that fed and fought for your infancy; or else--the door standeth open, the woods are full of mine enemies--go." The spirit with which these words were uttered, the looks with which they were accompanied, staggered Dick; and yet he could not but observe that he had got no answer. "I desire nothing more earnestly, Sir Daniel, than to believe you," he replied. "Assure me ye are free from this." "Will ye take my word of honour, Dick?" inquired the knight. "That would I," answered the lad. "I give it you," returned Sir Daniel. "Upon my word of honour, upon the eternal welfare of my spirit, and as I shall answer for my deeds hereafter, I had no hand nor portion in your father's death." He extended his hand, and Dick took it eagerly. Neither of them observed the priest, who, at the pronunciation of that solemn and false oath, had half arisen from his seat in an agony of horror and remorse. "Ah," cried Dick, "ye must find it in your great-heartedness to pardon me! I was a churl, indeed, to doubt of you. But ye have my hand upon it; I will doubt no more." "Nay, Dick," replied Sir Daniel, "y'are forgiven. Ye know not the world and its calumnious nature." "I was the more to blame," added Dick, "in that the rogues pointed, not directly at yourself, but at Sir Oliver." As he spoke, he turned towards the priest, and paused in the middle of the last word. This tall, ruddy, corpulent, high-stepping man had fallen, you might say, to pieces; his colour was gone, his limbs were relaxed, his lips stammered prayers; and now, when Dick's eyes were fixed upon him suddenly, he cried out aloud, like some wild animal, and buried his face in his hands. Sir Daniel was by him in two strides, and shook him fiercely by the shoulder. At the same moment Dick's suspicions reawakened. "Nay," he said, "Sir Oliver may swear also. 'Twas him they accused." "He shall swear," said the knight. Sir Oliver speechlessly waved his arms. "Ay, by the mass! but ye shall swear," cried Sir Daniel, beside himself with fury. "Here, upon this book, ye shall swear," he continued, picking up the breviary, which had fallen to the ground. "What! Ye make me doubt you! Swear, I say; swear!" But the priest was still incapable of speech. His terror of Sir Daniel, his terror of perjury, risen to about an equal height, strangled him. And just then, through the high, stained-glass window of the hall, a black arrow crashed, and struck, and stuck quivering, in the midst of the long table. Sir Oliver, with a loud scream, fell fainting on the rushes; while the knight, followed by Dick, dashed into the court and up the nearest corkscrew stair to the battlements. The sentries were all on the alert. The sun shone quietly on green lawns dotted with trees, and on the wooded hills of the forest which enclosed the view. There was no sign of a besieger. "Whence came that shot?" asked the knight. "From yonder clump, Sir Daniel," returned a sentinel. The knight stood a little, musing. Then he turned to Dick. "Dick," he said, "keep me an eye upon these men; I leave you in charge here. As for the priest, he shall clear himself, or I will know the reason why. I do almost begin to share in your suspicions. He shall swear, trust me, or we shall prove him guilty." Dick answered somewhat coldly, and the knight, giving him a piercing glance, hurriedly returned to the hall. His first glance was for the arrow. It was the first of these missiles he had seen, and as he turned it to and fro, the dark hue of it touched him with some fear. Again there was some writing: one word--"Earthed." "Ay," he broke out, "they know I am home, then. Earthed! Ay, but there is not a dog among them fit to dig me out." Sir Oliver had come to himself, and now scrambled to his feet. "Alack, Sir Daniel!" he moaned, "y' 'ave sworn a dread oath; y'are doomed to the end of time." "Ay," returned the knight, "I have sworn an oath, indeed, thou chucklehead; but thyself shalt swear a greater. It shall be on the blessed cross of Holywood. Look to it; get the words ready. It shall be sworn to-night." "Now, may Heaven lighten you!" replied the priest; "may Heaven incline your heart from this iniquity!" "Look you, my good father," said Sir Daniel, "if y'are for piety, I say no more; ye begin late, that is all. But if y'are in any sense bent upon wisdom, hear me. This lad beginneth to irk me like a wasp. I have a need for him, for I would sell his marriage. But I tell you, in all plainness, if that he continue to weary me, he shall go join his father. I give orders now to change him to the chamber above the chapel. If that ye can swear your innocency with a good, solid oath and an assured countenance, it is well; the lad will be at peace a little, and I will spare him. If that ye stammer or blench, or anyways boggle at the swearing, he will not believe you; and by the mass, he shall die. There is for your thinking on." "The chamber above the chapel!" gasped the priest. "That same," replied the knight. "So if ye desire to save him, save him; and if ye desire not, prithee, go to, and let me be at peace! For an I had been a hasty man, I would already have put my sword through you, for your intolerable cowardice and folly. Have ye chosen? Say!" "I have chosen," said the priest. "Heaven pardon me, I will do evil for good. I will swear for the lad's sake." "So is it best!" said Sir Daniel. "Send for him, then, speedily. Ye shall see him alone. Yet I shall have an eye on you. I shall be here in the panel room." The knight raised the arras and let it fall again behind him. There was the sound of a spring opening; then followed the creaking of trod stairs. Sir Oliver, left alone, cast a timorous glance upward at the arras-covered wall, and crossed himself with every appearance of terror and contrition. "Nay, if he is in the chapel room," the priest murmured, "were it at my soul's cost, I must save him." Three minutes later, Dick, who had been summoned by another messenger, found Sir Oliver standing by the hall table, resolute and pale. "Richard Shelton," he said, "ye have required an oath from me. I might complain, I might deny you; but my heart is moved towards you for the past, and I will even content you as ye choose. By the true cross of Holywood, I did not slay your father." "Sir Oliver," returned Dick, "when first we read John Amend-All's paper, I was convinced of so much. But suffer me to put two questions. Ye did not slay him; granted. But had ye no hand in it?" "None," said Sir Oliver. And at the same time he began to contort his face, and signal with his mouth and eyebrows, like one who desired to convey a warning, yet dared not utter a sound. Dick regarded him in wonder; then he turned and looked all about him at the empty hall. "What make ye?" he inquired. "Why, naught," returned the priest, hastily smoothing his countenance. "I make naught; I do but suffer; I am sick. I--I--prithee, Dick, I must begone. On the true cross of Holywood, I am clean innocent alike of violence or treachery. Content ye, good lad. Farewell!" And he made his escape from the apartment with unusual alacrity. Dick remained rooted to the spot, his eyes wandering about the room, his face a changing picture of various emotions, wonder, doubt, suspicion, and amusement. Gradually, as his mind grew clearer, suspicion took the upper hand, and was succeeded by certainty of the worst. He raised his head, and, as he did so, violently started. High upon the wall there was the figure of a savage hunter woven in the tapestry. With one hand he held a horn to his mouth; in the other he brandished a stout spear. His face was dark, for he was meant to represent an African. Now, here was what had startled Richard Shelton. The sun had moved away from the hall windows, and at the same time the fire had blazed up high on the wide hearth, and shed a changeful glow upon the roof and hangings. In this light the figure of the black hunter had winked at him with a white eyelid. He continued staring at the eye. The light shone upon it like a gem; it was liquid, it was alive. Again the white eyelid closed upon it for a fraction of a second, and the next moment it was gone. There could be no mistake. The live eye that had been watching him through a hole in the tapestry was gone. The firelight no longer shone on a reflecting surface. And instantly Dick awoke to the terrors of his position. Hatch's warning, the mute signals of the priest, this eye that had observed him from the wall, ran together in his mind. He saw he had been put upon his trial, that he had once more betrayed his suspicions, and that, short of some miracle, he was lost. "If I cannot get me forth out of this house," he thought, "I am dead man! And this poor Matcham, too--to what a cockatrice's nest have I not led him!" He was still so thinking, when there came one in haste, to bid him help in changing his arms, his clothing, and his two or three books, to a new chamber. "A new chamber?" he repeated. "Wherefore so? What chamber?" "'Tis one above the chapel," answered the messenger. "It hath stood long empty," said Dick, musing. "What manner of room is it?" "Nay, a brave room," returned the man. "But yet"--lowering his voice--"they call it haunted." "Haunted?" repeated Dick, with a chill. "I have not heard of it. Nay, then, and by whom?" The messenger looked about him; and then, in a low whisper, "By the sacrist of St. John's," he said. "They had him there to sleep one night, and in the morning--whew!--he was gone. The devil had taken him, they said; the more betoken, he had drunk late the night before." Dick followed the man with black forebodings. CHAPTER III THE ROOM OVER THE CHAPEL From the battlements nothing further was observed. The sun journeyed westward, and at last went down; but, to the eyes of all these eager sentinels, no living thing appeared in the neighbourhood of Tunstall House. When the night was at length fairly come, Throgmorton was led to a room overlooking an angle of the moat. Thence he was lowered with every precaution; the ripple of his swimming was audible for a brief period; then a black figure was observed to land by the branches of a willow and crawl away among the grass. For some half-hour Sir Daniel and Hatch stood eagerly giving ear; but all remained quiet. The messenger had got away in safety. Sir Daniel's brow grew clearer. He turned to Hatch. "Bennet," he said, "this John Amend-All is no more than a man, ye see. He sleepeth. We will make a good end of him, go to!" All the afternoon and evening, Dick had been ordered hither and thither, one command following another, till he was bewildered with the number and the hurry of commissions. All that time he had seen no more of Sir Oliver, and nothing of Matcham; and yet both the priest and the young lad ran continually in his mind. It was now his chief purpose to escape from Tunstall Moat House as speedily as might be; and yet, before he went, he desired a word with both of these. At length, with a lamp in one hand, he mounted to his new apartment. It was large, low, and somewhat dark. The window looked upon the moat, and although it was so high up, it was heavily barred. The bed was luxurious, with one pillow of down and one of lavender, and a red coverlet worked in a pattern of roses. All about the walls were cupboards, locked and padlocked, and concealed from view by hangings of dark-coloured arras. Dick made the round, lifting the arras, sounding the panels, seeking vainly to open the cupboards. He assured himself that the door was strong and the bolt solid; then he set down his lamp upon a bracket, and once more looked all around. For what reason had he been given this chamber? It was larger and finer than his own. Could it conceal a snare? Was there a secret entrance? Was it, indeed, haunted? His blood ran a little chilly in his veins. Immediately over him the heavy foot of a sentry trod the leads. Below him, he knew, was the arched roof of the chapel; and next to the chapel was the hall. Certainly there was a secret passage in the hall; the eye that had watched him from the arras gave him proof of that. Was it not more than probable that the passage extended to the chapel, and, if so, that it had an opening in his room? To sleep in such a place, he felt, would be foolhardy. He made his weapons ready, and took his position in a corner of the room behind the door. If ill was intended, he would sell his life dear. The sound of many feet, the challenge, and the password sounded overhead along the battlements; the watch was being changed. And just then there came a scratching at the door of the chamber; it grew a little louder; then a whisper: "Dick, Dick, it is I!" Dick ran to the door, drew the bolt, and admitted Matcham. He was very pale, and carried a lamp in one hand and a drawn dagger in the other. "Shut me the door," he whispered. "Swift, Dick! This house is full of spies; I hear their feet follow me in the corridors; I hear them breathe behind the arras." "Well, content you," returned Dick, "it is closed. We are safe for this while, if there be safety anywhere within these walls. But my heart is glad to see you. By the mass, lad, I thought ye were sped! Where hid ye?" "It matters not," returned Matcham. "Since we be met, it matters not. But, Dick, are your eyes open? Have they told you of to-morrow's doings?" "Not they," replied Dick. "What make they to-morrow?" "To-morrow, or to-night, I know not," said the other, "but one time or other, Dick, they do intend upon your life. I had the proof of it; I have heard them whisper; nay, they as good as told me." "Ay," returned Dick, "is it so? I had thought as much." And he told him the day's occurrences at length. When it was done, Matcham arose and began, in turn, to examine the apartment. "No," he said, "there is no entrance visible. Yet 'tis a pure certainty there is one. Dick, I will stay by you. An y'are to die, I will die with you. And I can help--look! I have stolen a dagger--I will do my best! And meanwhile, an ye know of any issue, any sally-port we could get opened, or any window that we might descend by, I will most joyfully face any jeopardy to flee with you." "Jack," said Dick, "by the mass, Jack, y'are the best soul, and the truest, and the bravest in all England! Give me your hand, Jack." And he grasped the other's hand in silence. "I will tell you," he resumed. "There is a window, out of which the messenger descended; the rope should still be in the chamber. 'Tis a hope." "Hist!" said Matcham. Both gave ear. There was a sound below the floor; then it paused, and then began again. "Some one walketh in the room below," whispered Matcham. "Nay," returned Dick, "there is no room below; we are above the chapel. It is my murderer in the secret passage. Well, let him come; it shall go hard with him"; and he ground his teeth. "Blow me the lights out," said the other. "Perchance he will betray himself." They blew out both the lamps and lay still as death. The footfalls underneath were very soft, but they were clearly audible. Several times they came and went; and then there was a loud jar of a key turning in a lock, followed by a considerable silence. Presently the steps began again, and then, all of a sudden, a chink of light appeared in the planking of the room in a far corner. It widened; a trap-door was being opened, letting in a gush of light. They could see the strong hand pushing it up; and Dick raised his cross-bow, waiting for the head to follow. But now there came an interruption. From a distant corner of the Moat House shouts began to be heard, and first one voice, and then several, crying aloud upon a name. This noise had plainly disconcerted the murderer, for the trap-door was silently lowered to its place, and the steps hurriedly returned, passed once more close below the lads, and died away in the distance. Here was a moment's respite. Dick breathed deep, and then, and not till then, he gave ear to the disturbance which had interrupted the attack, and which was now rather increasing than diminishing. All about the Moat House feet were running, doors were opening and slamming, and still the voice of Sir Daniel towered above all this bustle, shouting for "Joanna." "Joanna!" repeated Dick. "Why, who the murrain should this be? Here is no Joanna, nor ever hath been. What meaneth it?" Matcham was silent. He seemed to have drawn further away. But only a little faint starlight entered by the window, and at the far end of the apartment, where the pair were, the darkness was complete. "Jack," said Dick, "I wot not where ye were all day. Saw ye this Joanna?" "Nay," returned Matcham, "I saw her not." "Nor heard tell of her?" he pursued. The steps drew nearer. Sir Daniel was still roaring the name of Joanna from the courtyard. "Did ye hear of her?" repeated Dick. "I heard of her," said Matcham. "How your voice twitters! What aileth you?" said Dick. "'Tis a most excellent good fortune, this Joanna; it will take their minds from us." "Dick," cried Matcham, "I am lost; we are both lost. Let us flee if there be yet time. They will not rest till they have found me. Or, see! let me go forth; when they have found me, ye may flee. Let me forth, Dick--good Dick, let me away!" She was groping for the bolt, when Dick at last comprehended. "By the mass!" he cried, "y'are no Jack; y'are Joanna Sedley; y'are the maid that would not marry me!" The girl paused, and stood silent and motionless. Dick, too, was silent for a little; then he spoke again. "Joanna," he said, "y' 'ave saved my life, and I have saved yours; and we have seen blood flow, and been friends and enemies--ay, and I took my belt to thrash you; and all that time I thought ye were a boy. But now death has me, and my time's out, and before I die I must say this: Y' are the best maid and the bravest under heaven, and, if only I could live, I would marry you blithely; and, live or die, I love you." She answered nothing. "Come," he said, "speak up, Jack. Come, be a good maid, and say ye love me!" "Why, Dick," she cried, "would I be here?" "Well, see ye here," continued Dick, "an we but escape whole we'll marry; and an we're to die, we die, and there's an end on't. But now that I think, how found ye my chamber?" "I asked it of Dame Hatch," she answered. "Well, the dame's staunch," he answered; "she'll not tell upon you. We have time before us." And just then, as if to contradict his words, feet came down the corridor, and a fist beat roughly on the door. "Here!" cried a voice. "Open, Master Dick; open!" Dick neither moved nor answered. "It is all over," said the girl; and she put her arms about Dick's neck. One after another, men came trooping to the door. Then Sir Daniel arrived himself, and there was a sudden cessation of the noise. "Dick," cried the knight, "be not an ass. The Seven Sleepers had been awake ere now. We know she is within there. Open, then, the door, man." Dick was again silent. "Down with it," said Sir Daniel. And immediately his followers fell savagely upon the door with foot and fist. Solid as it was, and strongly bolted, it would soon have given way; but once more fortune interfered. Over the thunder-storm of blows the cry of a sentinel was heard; it was followed by another; shouts ran along the battlements, shouts answered out of the wood. In the first moment of alarm it sounded as if the foresters were carrying the Moat House by assault. And Sir Daniel and his men, desisting instantly from their attack upon Dick's chamber, hurried to defend the walls. "Now," cried Dick, "we are saved." He seized the great old bedstead with both hands, and bent himself in vain to move it. "Help me, Jack. For your life's sake, help me stoutly!" he cried. Between them, with a huge effort, they dragged the big frame of oak across the room, and thrust it endwise to the chamber door. "Ye do but make things worse," said Joanna, sadly. "He will then enter by the trap." "Not so," replied Dick. "He durst not tell his secret to so many. It is by the trap that we shall flee. Hark! The attack is over. Nay, it was none!" It had, indeed, been no attack; it was the arrival of another party of stragglers from the defeat of Risingham that had disturbed Sir Daniel. They had run the gauntlet under cover of the darkness; they had been admitted by the great gate; and now, with a great stamping of hoofs and jingle of accoutrements and arms, they were dismounting in the court. "He will return anon," said Dick. "To the trap!" He lighted a lamp, and they went together into the corner of the room. The open chink through which some light still glittered was easily discovered, and, taking a stout sword from his small armoury, Dick thrust it deep into the seam, and weighed strenuously on the hilt. The trap moved, gaped a little, and at length came widely open. Seizing it with their hands, the two young folk threw it back. It disclosed a few steps descending, and at the foot of them, where the would-be murderer had left it, a burning lamp. "Now," said Dick, "go first and take the lamp. I will follow to close the trap." So they descended one after the other, and as Dick lowered the trap, the blows began once again to thunder on the panels of the door. CHAPTER IV THE PASSAGE The passage in which Dick and Joanna now found themselves was narrow, dirty, and short. At the other end of it, a door stood partly open; the same door, without doubt, that they had heard the man unlocking. Heavy cobwebs hung from the roof; and the paved flooring echoed hollow under the lightest tread. Beyond the door there were two branches, at right angles. Dick chose one of them at random, and the pair hurried, with echoing footsteps, along the hollow of the chapel roof. The top of the arched ceiling rose like a whale's back in the dim glimmer of the lamp. Here and there were spy-holes, concealed, on the other side, by the carving of the cornice; and looking down through one of these, Dick saw the paved floor of the chapel--the altar, with its burning tapers--and stretched before it on the steps, the figure of Sir Oliver praying with uplifted hands. At the other end, they descended a few steps. The passage grew narrower; the wall upon one hand was now of wood; the noise of people talking, and a faint flickering of lights, came through the interstices; and presently they came to a round hole about the size of a man's eye, and Dick, looking down through it, beheld the interior of the hall, and some half-a-dozen men sitting, in their jacks, about the table, drinking deep and demolishing a venison pie. These were certainly some of the late arrivals. "Here is no help," said Dick. "Let us try back." "Nay," said Joanna; "maybe the passage goeth farther." And she pushed on. But a few yards farther the passage ended at the top of a short flight of steps; and it became plain that, as long as the soldiers occupied the hall, escape was impossible upon that side. They retraced their steps with all imaginable speed, and set forward to explore the other branch. It was exceedingly narrow, scarce wide enough for a large man; and it led them continually up and down by little breakneck stairs, until even Dick had lost all notion of his whereabouts. At length it grew both narrower and lower; the stairs continued to descend; the walls on either hand became damp and slimy to the touch; and far in front of them they heard the squeaking and scuttling of the rats. "We must be in the dungeons," Dick remarked. "And still there is no outlet," added Joanna. "Nay, but an outlet there must be!" Dick answered. Presently, sure enough, they came to a sharp angle, and then the passage ended in a flight of steps. On the top of that there was a solid flag of stone by way of trap, and to this they both set their backs. It was immovable. "Some one holdeth it," suggested Joanna. [Illustration: _"We must be in the dungeons," Dick remarked_] "Not so," said Dick; "for were a man strong as ten, he must still yield a little. But this resisteth like dead rock. There is a weight upon the trap. Here is no issue; and, by my sooth, good Jack, we are here as fairly prisoners as though the gyves were on our ankle bones. Sit ye then down, and let us talk. After awhile we shall return, when perchance they shall be less carefully upon their guard; and, who knoweth? we may break out and stand a chance. But, in my poor opinion, we are as good as shent." "Dick!" she cried, "alas the day that ever ye should have seen me! For like a most unhappy and unthankful maid, it is I have led you hither." "What cheer!" returned Dick. "It was all written, and that which is written, willy nilly, cometh still to pass. But tell me a little what manner of a maid ye are, and how ye came into Sir Daniel's hands; that will do better than to bemoan yourself, whether for your sake or mine." "I am an orphan, like yourself, of father and mother," said Joanna; "and for my great misfortune, Dick, and hitherto for yours, I am a rich marriage. My Lord Foxham had me to ward; yet it appears Sir Daniel bought the marriage of me from the king, and a right dear price he paid for it. So here was I, poor babe, with two great and rich men fighting which should marry me, and I still at nurse! Well, then the world changed, and there was a new chancellor, and Sir Daniel bought the warding of me over the Lord Foxham's head. And then the world changed again, and Lord Foxham bought my marriage over Sir Daniel's; and from then to now it went on ill betwixt the two of them. But still Lord Foxham kept me in his hands, and was a good lord to me. And at last I was to be married--or sold, if ye like it better. Five hundred pounds Lord Foxham was to get for me. Hamley was the groom's name, and to-morrow, Dick, of all days in the year, was I to be betrothed. Had it not come to Sir Daniel, I had been wedded, sure--and never seen thee, Dick--dear Dick!" And here she took his hand, and kissed it, with the prettiest grace; and Dick drew her hand to him and did the like. "Well," she went on, "Sir Daniel took me unawares in the garden, and made me dress in these men's clothes, which is a deadly sin for a woman; and, besides, they fit me not. He rode with me to Kettley, as ye saw, telling me I was to marry you; but I, in my heart, made sure I would marry Hamley in his teeth." "Ay!" cried Dick, "and so ye loved this Hamley!" "Nay," replied Joanna, "not I. I did but hate Sir Daniel. And then, Dick, ye helped me, and ye were right kind, and very bold, and my heart turned towards you in mine own despite; and now, if we can in any way compass it, I would marry you with right good-will. And if, by cruel destiny, it may not be, still ye'll be dear to me. While my heart beats, it'll be true to you." "And I," said Dick, "that never cared a straw for any manner of woman until now, I took to you when I thought ye were a boy. I had a pity to you, and knew not why. When I would have belted you, the hand failed me. But when ye owned ye were a maid, Jack--for still I will call you Jack--I made sure ye were the maid for me. Hark!" he said, breaking off--"one cometh." And indeed a heavy tread was now audible in the echoing passage, and the rats again fled in armies. Dick reconnoitred his position. The sudden turn gave him a post of vantage. He could thus shoot in safety from the cover of the wall. But it was plain the light was too near him, and, running some way forward, he set down the lamp in the middle of the passage, and then returned to watch. Presently, at the far end of the passage, Bennet hove in sight. He seemed to be alone, and he carried in his hand a burning torch, which made him the better mark. "Stand, Bennet!" cried Dick. "Another step, and y'are dead." "So here ye are," returned Hatch, peering forward into the darkness. "I see you not. Aha! y' 'ave done wisely, Dick; y' 'ave put your lamp before you. By my sooth, but, though it was done to shoot my own knave body, I do rejoice to see ye profit of my lessons! And now, what make ye? what seek ye here? Why would ye shoot upon an old, kind friend? And have ye the young gentlewoman there?" "Nay, Bennet, it is I should question and you answer," replied Dick. "Why am I in this jeopardy of my life? Why do men come privily to slay me in my bed? Why am I now fleeing in mine own guardian's strong house, and from the friends that I have lived among and never injured?" "Master Dick, Master Dick," said Bennet, "what told I you? Y'are brave, but the most uncrafty lad that I can think upon!" "Well," returned Dick, "I see ye know all, and that I am doomed indeed. It is well. Here, where I am, I stay. Let Sir Daniel get me out if he be able!" Hatch was silent for a space. "Hark ye," he began, "I return to Sir Daniel, to tell him where ye are, and how posted; for, in truth, it was to that end he sent me. But you, if ye are no fool, had best be gone ere I return." "Be gone!" repeated Dick. "I would be gone already, an I wist how. I cannot move the trap." "Put me your hand into the corner, and see what ye find there," replied Bennet. "Throgmorton's rope is still in the brown chamber. Fare ye well." And Hatch, turning upon his heel, disappeared again into the windings of the passage. Dick instantly returned for his lamp, and proceeded to act upon the hint. At one corner of the trap there was a deep cavity in the wall. Pushing his arm into the aperture, Dick found an iron bar, which he thrust vigorously upwards. There followed a snapping noise, and the slab of stone instantly started in its bed. They were free of the passage. A little exercise of strength easily raised the trap; and they came forth into a vaulted chamber, opening on one hand upon the court, where one or two fellows, with bare arms, were rubbing down the horses of the last arrivals. A torch or two, each stuck in an iron ring against the wall, changefully lit up the scene. CHAPTER V HOW DICK CHANGED SIDES Dick, blowing out his lamp lest it should attract attention, led the way up-stairs and along the corridor. In the brown chamber the rope had been made fast to the frame of an exceeding heavy and ancient bed. It had not been detached, and Dick, taking the coil to the window, began to lower it slowly and cautiously into the darkness of the night. Joan stood by; but as the rope lengthened, and still Dick continued to pay it out, extreme fear began to conquer her resolution. "Dick," she said, "is it so deep? I may not essay it. I should infallibly fall, good Dick." It was just at the delicate moment of the operations that she spoke. Dick started; the remainder of the coil slipped from his grasp, and the end fell with a splash into the moat. Instantly, from the battlement above, the voice of a sentinel cried, "Who goes?" "A murrain!" cried Dick. "We are paid now! Down with you--take the rope." "I cannot," she cried, recoiling. "An ye cannot, no more can I," said Shelton. "How can I swim the moat without you? Do you desert me, then?" "Dick," she gasped, "I cannot. The strength is gone from me." "By the mass, then, we are all shent!" he shouted, stamping with his foot; and then, hearing steps, he ran to the room door and sought to close it. Before he could shoot the bolt, strong arms were thrusting it back upon him from the other side. He struggled for a second; then, feeling himself overpowered, ran back to the window. The girl had fallen against the wall in the embrasure of the window; she was more than half insensible; and when he tried to raise her in his arms, her body was limp and unresponsive. At the same moment the men who had forced the door against him laid hold upon him. The first he poniarded at a blow, and the others falling back for a second in some disorder, he profited by the chance, bestrode the window-sill, seized the cord in both hands, and let his body slip. The cord was knotted, which made it the easier to descend; but so furious was Dick's hurry, and so small his experience of such gymnastics, that he span round and round in mid-air like a criminal upon a gibbet, and now beat his head, and now bruised his hands, against the rugged stonework of the wall. The air roared in his ears; he saw the stars overhead, and the reflected stars below him in the moat, whirling like dead leaves before the tempest. And then he lost hold, and fell, and soused head over ears into the icy water. When he came to the surface his hand encountered the rope, which, newly lightened of his weight, was swinging wildly to and fro. There was a red glow overhead, and looking up, he saw, by the light of several torches and a cresset full of burning coals, the battlements lined with faces. He saw the men's eyes turning hither and thither in quest of him; but he was too far below, the light reached him not, and they looked in vain. And now he perceived that the rope was considerably too long, and he began to struggle as well as he could towards the other side of the moat, still keeping his head above water. In this way he got much more than half-way over; indeed the bank was almost within reach, before the rope began to draw him back by its own weight. Taking his courage in both hands, he left go and made a leap for the trailing sprays of willow that had already, that same evening, helped Sir Daniel's messenger to land. He went down, rose again, sank a second time, and then his hand caught a branch, and with the speed of thought he had dragged himself into the thick of the tree and clung there, dripping and panting, and still half uncertain of his escape. But all this had not been done without a considerable splashing, which had so far indicated his position to the men along the battlements. Arrows and quarrels fell thick around him in the darkness, thick like driving hail; and suddenly a torch was thrown down--flared through the air in its swift passage--stuck for a moment on the edge of the bank, where it burned high and lit up its whole surroundings like a bonfire--and then, in a good hour for Dick, slipped off, plumped into the moat, and was instantly extinguished. It had served its purpose. The marksmen had had time to see the willow, and Dick ensconced among its boughs; and though the lad instantly sprang higher up the bank, and ran for his life, he was yet not quick enough to escape a shot. An arrow struck him in the shoulder, another grazed his head. The pain of his wounds lent him wings; and he had no sooner got upon the level than he took to his heels and ran straight before him in the dark, without a thought for the direction of his flight. For a few steps missiles followed him, but these soon ceased; and when at length he came to a halt and looked behind, he was already a good way from the Moat House, though he could still see the torches moving to and fro along its battlements. He leaned against a tree, streaming with blood and water, bruised, wounded, alone, and unarmed. For all that, he had saved his life for that bout; and though Joanna remained behind in the power of Sir Daniel, he neither blamed himself for an accident that it had been beyond his power to prevent, nor did he augur any fatal consequences to the girl herself. Sir Daniel was cruel, but he was not likely to be cruel to a young gentlewoman who had other protectors, willing and able to bring him to account. It was more probable he would make haste to marry her to some friend of his own. "Well," thought Dick, "between then and now I will find me the means to bring that traitor under; for I think, by the mass, that I be now absolved from any gratitude or obligation; and when war is open, there is a fair chance for all." In the meanwhile, here he was in a sore plight. For some little way farther he struggled forward through the forest; but what with the pain of his wounds, the darkness of the night, and the extreme uneasiness and confusion of his mind, he soon became equally unable to guide himself or to continue to push through the close undergrowth, and he was fain at length to sit down and lean his back against a tree. When he awoke from something betwixt sleep and swooning, the grey of the morning had begun to take the place of night. A little chilly breeze was bustling among the trees, and as he still sat staring before him, only half awake, he became aware of something dark that swung to and fro among the branches, some hundred yards in front of him. The progressive brightening of the day and the return of his own senses at last enabled him to recognise the object. It was a man hanging from the bough of a tall oak. His head had fallen forward on his breast; but at every stronger puff of wind his body span round and round, and his legs and arms tossed, like some ridiculous plaything. Dick clambered to his feet, and, staggering and leaning on the tree-trunks as he went, drew near to this grim object. The bough was perhaps twenty feet above the ground, and the poor fellow had been drawn up so high by his executioners that his boots swung clear above Dick's reach; and as his hood had been drawn over his face, it was impossible to recognise the man. Dick looked about him right and left; and at last he perceived that the other end of the cord had been made fast to the trunk of a little hawthorn which grew, thick with blossom, under the lofty arcade of the oak. With his dagger, which alone remained to him of all his arms, young Shelton severed the rope, and instantly, with a dead thump, the corpse fell in a heap upon the ground. Dick raised the hood; it was Throgmorton, Sir Daniel's messenger. He had not gone far upon his errand. A paper, which had apparently escaped the notice of the men of the Black Arrow, stuck from the bosom of his doublet, and Dick, pulling it forth, found it was Sir Daniel's letter to Lord Wensleydale. "Come," thought he, "if the world changes yet again, I may have here the wherewithal to shame Sir Daniel--nay, and perchance to bring him to the block." And he put the paper in his own bosom, said a prayer over the dead man, and set forth again through the woods. His fatigue and weakness increased; his ears sang, his steps faltered, his mind at intervals failed him, so low had he been brought by loss of blood. Doubtless he made many deviations from his true path, but at last he came out upon the highroad, not very far from Tunstall hamlet. A rough voice bid him stand. "Stand?" repeated Dick. "By the mass, but I am nearer falling." And he suited the action to the word, and fell all his length upon the road. Two men came forth out of the thicket, each in green forest jerkin, each with long-bow and quiver and short sword. "Why, Lawless," said the younger of the two, "it is young Shelton." "Ay, this will be as good as bread to John Amend-All," returned the other. "Though, faith, he hath been to the wars. Here is a tear in his scalp that must 'a' cost him many a good ounce of blood." "And here," added Greensheve, "is a hole in his shoulder that must have pricked him well. Who hath done this, think ye? If it be one of ours, he may all to prayer; Ellis will give him a short shrift and a long rope." "Up with the cub," said Lawless. "Clap him on my back." And then, when Dick had been hoisted to his shoulders, and he had taken the lad's arms about his neck, and got a firm hold of him, the ex-Grey Friar added: "Keep ye the post, brother Greensheve. I will on with him by myself." So Greensheve returned to his ambush on the wayside, and Lawless trudged down the hill, whistling as he went, with Dick, still in a dead faint, comfortably settled on his shoulders. The sun rose as he came out of the skirts of the wood and saw Tunstall hamlet straggling up the opposite hill. All seemed quiet, but a strong post of some half a score of archers lay close by the bridge on either side of the road, and, as soon as they perceived Lawless with his burthen, began to bestir themselves and set arrow to string like vigilant sentries. "Who goes?" cried the man in command. "Will Lawless, by the rood--ye know me as well as your own hand," returned the outlaw, contemptuously. "Give the word, Lawless," returned the other. "Now, Heaven lighten thee, thou great fool," replied Lawless. "Did I not tell it thee myself? But ye are all mad for this playing at soldiers. When I am in the greenwood, give me greenwood ways; and my word for this tide is: 'A fig for all mock soldiery!'" "Lawless, ye but show an ill example; give us the word, fool jester," said the commander of the post. "And if I had forgotten it?" asked the other. "An ye had forgotten it--as I know y' 'ave not--by the mass, I would clap an arrow into your big body," returned the first. "Nay, an y'are so ill a jester," said Lawless, "ye shall have your word for me. 'Duckworth and Shelton' is the word; and here, to the illustration, is Shelton on my shoulders, and to Duckworth do I carry him." "Pass, Lawless," said the sentry. "And where is John?" asked the Grey Friar. "He holdeth a court, by the mass, and taketh rents as to the manner born!" cried another of the company. So it proved. When Lawless got as far up the village as the little inn, he found Ellis Duckworth surrounded by Sir Daniel's tenants, and, by the right of his good company of archers, coolly taking rents, and giving written receipts in return for them. By the faces of the tenants, it was plain how little this proceeding pleased them; for they argued very rightly that they would simply have to pay them twice. As soon as he knew what had brought Lawless, Ellis dismissed the remainder of the tenants, and, with every mark of interest and apprehension, conducted Dick into an inner chamber of the inn. There the lad's hurts were looked to; and he was recalled, by simple remedies, to consciousness. "Dear lad," said Ellis, pressing his hand, "y'are in a friend's hands that loved your father, and loves you for his sake. Rest ye a little quietly, for ye are somewhat out of case. Then shall ye tell me your story, and betwixt the two of us we shall find a remedy for all." A little later in the day, and after Dick had awakened from a comfortable slumber to find himself still very weak, but clearer in mind and easier in body, Ellis returned, and sitting down by the bedside, begged him, in the name of his father, to relate the circumstance of his escape from Tunstall Moat House. There was something in the strength of Duckworth's frame, in the honesty of his brown face, in the clearness and shrewdness of his eyes, that moved Dick to obey him; and from first to last the lad told him the story of his two days' adventures. "Well," said Ellis, when he had done, "see what the kind saints have done for you, Dick Shelton, not alone to save your body in so numerous and deadly perils, but to bring you into my hands that have no dearer wish than to assist your father's son. Be but true to me--and I see y'are true--and betwixt you and me, we shall bring that false-heart traitor to the death." "Will ye assault the house?" asked Dick. "I were mad, indeed, to think of it," returned Ellis. "He hath too much power; his men gather to him; those that gave me the slip last night, and by the mass came in so handily for you--those have made him safe. Nay, Dick, to the contrary, thou and I and my brave bowmen, we must all slip from this forest speedily, and leave Sir Daniel free." "My mind misgiveth me for Jack," said the lad. "For Jack!" repeated Duckworth. "O, I see, for the wench! Nay, Dick, I promise you, if there come talk of any marriage we shall act at once; till then, or till the time is ripe, we shall all disappear, even like shadows at morning; Sir Daniel shall look east and west, and see none enemies; he shall think, by the mass, that he hath dreamed awhile, and hath now awakened in his bed. But our four eyes, Dick, shall follow him right close, and our four hands--so help us all the army of the saints!--shall bring that traitor low!" * * * * * Two days later Sir Daniel's garrison had grown to such a strength that he ventured on a sally, and at the head of some two-score horsemen, pushed without opposition as far as Tunstall hamlet. Not an arrow flew, not a man stirred in the thicket; the bridge was no longer guarded, but stood open to all comers; and as Sir Daniel crossed it, he saw the villagers looking timidly from their doors. Presently one of them, taking heart of grace, came forward, and with the lowliest salutations, presented a letter to the knight. His face darkened as he read the contents. It ran thus: _To the most untrue and cruel gentylman, Sir Daniel Brackley, Knyght, These:_ I fynde ye were untrue and unkynd fro the first. Ye have my father's blood upon your hands; let be, it will not wasshe. Some day ye shall perish by my procurement, so much I let you to wytte; and I let you to wytte farther, that if ye seek to wed to any other the gentylwoman, Mistresse Joan Sedley, whom that I am bound upon a great oath to wed myself, the blow will be very swift. The first step therinne will be thy first step to the grave. RIC. SHELTON. BOOK III MY LORD FOXHAM CHAPTER I THE HOUSE BY THE SHORE Months had passed away since Richard Shelton made his escape from the hands of his guardian. These months had been eventful for England. The party of Lancaster, which was then in the very article of death, had once more raised its head. The Yorkists defeated and dispersed, their leader butchered on the field, it seemed, for a very brief season in the winter following upon the events already recorded, as if the House of Lancaster had finally triumphed over its foes. The small town of Shoreby-on-the-Till was full of the Lancastrian nobles of the neighbourhood. Earl Risingham was there, with three hundred men-at-arms; Lord Shoreby, with two hundred; Sir Daniel himself, high in favour and once more growing rich on confiscations, lay in a house of his own, on the main street, with three-score men. The world had changed indeed. It was a black, bitter cold evening in the first week of January, with a hard frost, a high wind, and every likelihood of snow before the morning. In an obscure alehouse in a by-street near the harbour, three or four men sat drinking ale and eating a hasty mess of eggs. They were all likely, lusty, weather-beaten fellows, hard of hand, bold of eye; and though they wore plain tabards, like country ploughmen, even a drunken soldier might have looked twice before he sought a quarrel in such company. A little apart before the huge fire sat a younger man, almost a boy, dressed in much the same fashion, though it was easy to see by his looks that he was better born, and might have worn a sword, had the time suited. "Nay," said one of the men at the table, "I like it not. Ill will come of it. This is no place for jolly fellows. A jolly fellow loveth open country, good cover, and scarce foes; but here we are shut in a town, girt about with enemies; and, for the bull's-eye of misfortune, see if it snow not ere the morning." "'Tis for Master Shelton there," said another, nodding his head towards the lad before the fire. "I will do much for Master Shelton," returned the first; "but to come to the gallows for any man--nay, brothers, not that!" The door of the inn opened, and another man entered hastily and approached the youth before the fire. "Master Shelton," he said, "Sir Daniel goeth forth with a pair of links and four archers." Dick (for this was our young friend) rose instantly to his feet. "Lawless," he said, "ye will take John Capper's watch. Greensheve, follow with me. Capper, lead forward. We will follow him this time, an he go to York." The next moment they were outside in the dark street, and Capper, the man who had just come, pointed to where two torches flared in the wind at a little distance. The town was already sound asleep; no one moved upon the streets, and there was nothing easier than to follow the party without observation. The two link-bearers went first; next followed a single man, whose long cloak blew about him in the wind; and the rear was brought up by the four archers, each with his bow upon his arm. They moved at a brisk walk, threading the intricate lanes and drawing nearer to the shore. "He hath gone each night in this direction?" asked Dick, in a whisper. "This is the third night running, Master Shelton," returned Capper, "and still at the same hour and with the same small following, as though his end were secret." Sir Daniel and his six men were now come to the outskirts of the country. Shoreby was an open town, and though the Lancastrian lords who lay there kept a strong guard on the main roads, it was still possible to enter or depart unseen by any of the lesser streets or across the open country. The lane which Sir Daniel had been following came to an abrupt end. Before him there was a stretch of rough down, and the noise of the sea-surf was audible upon one hand. There were no guards in the neighbourhood, nor any light in that quarter of the town. Dick and his two outlaws drew a little closer to the object of their chase, and presently, as they came forth from between the houses and could see a little farther upon either hand, they were aware of another torch drawing near from another direction. "Hey," said Dick, "I smell treason." Meanwhile, Sir Daniel had come to a full halt. The torches were stuck into the sand, and the men lay down, as if to await the arrival of the other party. This drew near at a good rate. It consisted of four men only--a pair of archers, a varlet with a link, and a cloaked gentleman walking in their midst. "Is it you, my lord?" cried Sir Daniel. "It is I, indeed; and if ever true knight gave proof I am that man," replied the leader of the second troop; "for who would not rather face giants, sorcerers, or pagans, than this pinching cold?" "My lord," returned Sir Daniel, "beauty will be the more beholden, misdoubt it not. But shall we forth? for the sooner ye have seen my merchandise, the sooner shall we both get home." "But why keep ye her here, good knight?" inquired the other. "An she be so young, and so fair, and so wealthy, why do ye not bring her forth among her mates? Ye would soon make her a good marriage, and no need to freeze your fingers and risk arrow-shots by going abroad at such untimely seasons in the dark." "I have told you, my lord," replied Sir Daniel, "the reason thereof concerneth me only. Neither do I purpose to explain it further. Suffice it, that if ye be weary of your old gossip, Daniel Brackley, publish it abroad that y'are to wed Joanna Sedley, and I give you my word ye will be quit of him right soon. Ye will find him with an arrow in his back." Meantime the two gentlemen were walking briskly forward over the down; the three torches going before them, stooping against the wind and scattering clouds of smoke and tufts of flame, and the rear brought up by the six archers. Close upon the heels of these, Dick followed. He had, of course, heard no word of this conversation; but he had recognised in the second of the speakers old Lord Shoreby himself, a man of an infamous reputation, whom even Sir Daniel affected, in public, to condemn. Presently they came close down upon the beach. The air smelt salt; the noise of the surf increased; and here, in a large walled garden, there stood a small house of two storeys, with stables and other offices. The foremost torch-bearer unlocked a door in the wall, and after the whole party had passed into the garden, again closed and locked it on the other side. Dick and his men were thus excluded from any farther following, unless they should scale the wall and thus put their necks in a trap. They sat down in a tuft of furze and waited. The red glow of the torches moved up and down and to and fro within the enclosure, as if the link-bearers steadily patrolled the garden. Twenty minutes passed, and then the whole party issued forth again upon the down; and Sir Daniel and the baron, after an elaborate salutation, separated and turned severally homeward, each with his own following of men and lights. As soon as the sound of their steps had been swallowed by the wind, Dick got to his feet as briskly as he was able, for he was stiff and aching with the cold. "Capper, ye will give me a back up," he said. They advanced, all three, to the wall; Capper stooped, and Dick, getting upon his shoulders, clambered on to the cope-stone. "Now, Greensheve," whispered Dick, "follow me up here; lie flat upon your face, that ye may be the less seen; and be ever ready to give me a hand if I fall foully on the other side." And so saying he dropped into the garden. It was all pitch dark; there was no light in the house. The wind whistled shrill among the poor shrubs, and the surf beat upon the beach; there was no other sound. Cautiously Dick footed it forth, stumbling among bushes, and groping with his hands; and presently the crisp noise of gravel underfoot told him that he had struck upon an alley. Here he paused, and taking his cross-bow from where he kept it concealed under his long tabard, he prepared it for instant action, and went forward once more with greater resolution and assurance. The path led him straight to the group of buildings. All seemed to be sorely dilapidated: the windows of the house were secured by crazy shutters; the stables were open and empty; there was no hay in the hay-loft, no corn in the corn-box. Any one would have supposed the place to be deserted. But Dick had good reason to think otherwise. He continued his inspection, visiting the offices, trying all the windows. At length he came round to the sea-side of the house, and there, sure enough, there burned a pale light in one of the upper windows. He stepped back a little way, till he thought he could see the movement of a shadow on the wall of the apartment. Then he remembered that, in the stable, his groping hand had rested for a moment on a ladder, and he returned with all despatch to bring it. The ladder was very short, but yet, by standing on the topmost round, he could bring his hands as high as the iron bars of the windows; and seizing these, he raised his body by main force until his eyes commanded the interior of the room. Two persons were within; the first he readily knew to be Dame Hatch; the second, a tall and beautiful and grave young lady, in a long, embroidered dress--could that be Joanna Sedley? his old wood-companion, Jack, whom he had thought to punish with a belt? He dropped back again to the top round of the ladder in a kind of amazement. He had never thought of his sweetheart as of so superior a being, and he was instantly taken with a feeling of diffidence. But he had little opportunity for thought. A low "Hist!" sounded from close by, and he hastened to descend the ladder. "Who goes?" he whispered. "Greensheve," came the reply, in tones similarly guarded. "What want ye?" asked Dick. "The house is watched, Master Shelton," returned the outlaw. "We are not alone to watch it; for even as I lay on my belly on the wall I saw men prowling in the dark, and heard them whistle softly one to the other." "By my sooth," said Dick, "but this is passing strange! Were they not men of Sir Daniel's?" "Nay, sir, that they were not," returned Greensheve; "for if I have eyes in my head, every man-Jack of them weareth me a white badge in his bonnet, something chequered with dark." "White, chequered with dark," repeated Dick. "Faith, 'tis a badge I know not. It is none of this country's badges. Well, an that be so, let us slip as quietly forth from this garden as we may; for here we are in an evil posture for defence. Beyond all question there are men of Sir Daniel's in that house, and to be taken between two shots is a beggarman's position. Take me this ladder; I must leave it where I found it." They returned the ladder to the stable, and groped their way to the place where they had entered. Capper had taken Greensheve's position on the cope, and now he leaned down his hand, and, first one and then the other, pulled them up. Cautiously and silently, they dropped again upon the other side; nor did they dare to speak until they had returned to their old ambush in the gorse. "Now, John Capper," said Dick, "back with you to Shoreby, even as for your life. Bring me instantly what men ye can collect. Here shall be the rendezvous; or if the men be scattered and the day be near at hand before they muster, let the place be something farther back, and by the entering in of the town. Greensheve and I lie here to watch. Speed ye, John Capper, and the saints aid you to despatch. And now, Greensheve," he continued, as soon as Capper had departed, "let thou and I go round about the garden in a wide circuit. I would fain see whether thine eyes betrayed thee." Keeping well outwards from the wall, and profiting by every height and hollow, they passed about two sides, beholding nothing. On the third side the garden wall was built close upon the beach, and to preserve the distance necessary to their purpose, they had to go some way down upon the sands. Although the tide was still pretty far out, the surf was so high, and the sands so flat, that at each breaker a great sheet of froth and water came careering over the expanse, and Dick and Greensheve made this part of their inspection wading, now to the ankles, and now as deep as to the knees, in the salt and icy waters of the German Ocean. Suddenly, against the comparative whiteness of the garden wall, the figure of a man was seen, like a faint Chinese shadow, violently signalling with both arms. As he dropped again to the earth, another arose a little farther on and repeated the same performance. And so, like a silent watchword, these gesticulations made the round of the beleaguered garden. "They keep good watch," Dick whispered. "Let us back to land, good master," answered Greensheve. "We stand here too open; for, look ye, when the seas break heavy and white out there behind us, they shall see us plainly against the foam." "Ye speak sooth," returned Dick. "Ashore with us, right speedily." CHAPTER II A SKIRMISH IN THE DARK Thoroughly drenched and chilled, the two adventurers returned to their position in the gorse. "I pray Heaven that Capper make good speed!" said Dick. "I vow a candle to St. Mary of Shoreby if he come before the hour!" "Y'are in a hurry, Master Dick?" asked Greensheve. "Ay, good fellow," answered Dick; "for in that house lieth my lady, whom I love, and who should these be that lie about her secretly by night? Unfriends, for sure!" "Well," returned Greensheve, "an John come speedily, we shall give a good account of them. They are not two-score at the outside--I judge so by the spacing of their sentries--and, taken where they are, lying so widely, one score would scatter them like sparrows. And yet, Master Dick, an she be in Sir Daniel's power already, it will little hurt that she should change into another's. Who should these be?" "I do suspect the Lord of Shoreby," Dick replied. "When came they?" "They began to come, Master Dick," said Greensheve, "about the time ye crossed the wall. I had not lain there the space of a minute ere I marked the first of the knaves crawling round the corner." The last light had been already extinguished in the little house when they were wading in the wash of the breakers, and it was impossible to predict at what moment the lurking men about the garden wall might make their onslaught. Of two evils, Dick preferred the least. He preferred that Joanna should remain under the guardianship of Sir Daniel rather than pass into the clutches of Lord Shoreby; and his mind was made up, if the house should be assaulted, to come at once to the relief of the besieged. But the time passed, and still there was no movement. From quarter of an hour to quarter of an hour the same signal passed about the garden wall, as if the leader desired to assure himself of the vigilance of his scattered followers; but in every other particular the neighbourhood of the little house lay undisturbed. Presently Dick's reinforcements began to arrive. The night was not yet old before nearly a score of men crouched beside him in the gorse. Separating these into two bodies, he took the command of the smaller himself, and entrusted the larger to the leadership of Greensheve. "Now, Kit," said he to this last, "take me your men to the near angle of the garden wall upon the beach. Post them strongly, and wait till that ye hear me falling on upon the other side. It is those upon the sea-front that I would fain make certain of, for there will be the leader. The rest will run; even let them. And now, lads, let no man draw an arrow; ye will but hurt friends. Take to the steel, and keep to the steel; and if we have the uppermost, I promise every man of you a gold noble when I come to mine estate." Out of the odd collection of broken men, thieves, murderers, and ruined peasantry, whom Duckworth had gathered together to serve the purposes of his revenge, some of the boldest and the most experienced in war had volunteered to follow Richard Shelton. The service of watching Sir Daniel's movements in the town of Shoreby had from the first been irksome to their temper, and they had of late begun to grumble loudly and threaten to disperse. The prospect of a sharp encounter and possible spoils restored them to good-humour, and they joyfully prepared for battle. Their long tabards thrown aside, they appeared, some in plain green jerkins, and some in stout leathern jacks; under their hoods many wore bonnets strengthened by iron plates; and, for offensive armour, swords, daggers, a few stout boar-spears, and a dozen of bright bills, put them in a posture to engage even regular feudal troops. The bows, quivers, and tabards were concealed among the gorse, and the two bands set resolutely forward. Dick, when he had reached the other side of the house, posted his six men in a line, about twenty yards from the garden wall, and took position himself a few paces in front. Then they all shouted with one voice, and closed upon the enemy. These, lying widely scattered, stiff with cold, and taken at unawares, sprang stupidly to their feet, and stood undecided. Before they had time to get their courage about them, or even to form an idea of the number and mettle of their assailants, a similar shout of onslaught sounded in their ears from the far side of the enclosure. Thereupon they gave themselves up for lost and ran. In this way the two small troops of the men of the Black Arrow closed upon the sea-front of the garden wall, and took a part of the strangers, as it were, between two fires; while the whole of the remainder ran for their lives in different directions, and were soon scattered in the darkness. For all that, the fight was but beginning. Dick's outlaws, although they had the advantage of the surprise, were still considerably outnumbered by the men they had surrounded. The tide had flowed, in the meanwhile; the beach was narrowed to a strip; and on this wet field, between the surf and the garden wall, there began, in the darkness, a doubtful, furious, and deadly contest. The strangers were well armed; they fell in silence upon their assailants; and the affray became a series of single combats. Dick, who had come first into the mellay, was engaged by three; the first he cut down at the first blow, but the other two coming upon him, hotly, he was fain to give ground before their onset. One of these two was a huge fellow, almost a giant for stature, and armed with a two-handed sword, which he brandished like a switch. Against this opponent, with his reach of arm and the length and weight of his weapon, Dick and his bill were quite defenceless; and had the other continued to join vigorously in the attack, the lad must have indubitably fallen. This second man, however, less in stature and slower in his movements, paused for a moment to peer about him in the darkness, and to give ear to the sounds of the battle. The giant still pursued his advantage, and still Dick fled before him, spying for his chance. Then the huge blade flashed and descended, and the lad, leaping on one side and running in, slashed sideways and upwards with his bill. A roar of agony responded, and, before the wounded man could raise his formidable weapon, Dick, twice repeating his blow, had brought him to the ground. The next moment he was engaged, upon more equal terms, with his second pursuer. Here there was no great difference in size, and though the man, fighting with sword and dagger against a bill, and being wary and quick of fence, had a certain superiority of arms, Dick more than made it up by his greater agility on foot. Neither at first gained any obvious advantage; but the older man was still insensibly profiting by the ardour of the younger to lead him where he would; and presently Dick found that they had crossed the whole width of the beach, and were now fighting above the knees in the spume and bubble of the breakers. Here his own superior activity was rendered useless; he found himself more or less at the discretion of his foe; yet a little, and he had his back turned upon his own men, and saw that this adroit and skilful adversary was bent upon drawing him farther and farther away. Dick ground his teeth. He determined to decide the combat instantly; and when the wash of the next wave had ebbed and left them dry, he rushed in, caught a blow upon his bill, and leaped right at the throat of his opponent. The man went down backwards, with Dick still upon the top of him; and the next wave, speedily succeeding to the last, buried him below a rush of water. While he was still submerged, Dick forced his dagger from his grasp, and rose to his feet, victorious. "Yield ye!" he said. "I give you life." "I yield me," said the other, getting to his knees. "Ye fight, like a young man, ignorantly and foolhardily; but, by the array of the saints, ye fight bravely!" Dick turned to the beach. The combat was still raging doubtfully in the night; over the hoarse roar of the breakers steel clanged upon steel, and cries of pain and the shout of battle resounded. "Lead me to your captain, youth," said the conquered knight. "It is fit this butchery should cease." "Sir," replied Dick, "so far as these brave fellows have a captain, the poor gentleman who here addresses you is he." "Call off your dogs, then, and I will bid my villains hold," returned the other. There was something noble both in the voice and manner of his late opponent, and Dick instantly dismissed all fears of treachery. "Lay down your arms, men!" cried the stranger knight. "I have yielded me, upon promise of life." The tone of the stranger was one of absolute command, and almost instantly the din and confusion of the mellay ceased. "Lawless," cried Dick, "are ye safe?" "Ay," cried Lawless, "safe and hearty." "Light me the lantern," said Dick. "Is not Sir Daniel here?" inquired the knight. "Sir Daniel?" echoed Dick. "Now, by the rood, I pray not. It would go ill with me if he were." "Ill with _you_, fair sir?" inquired the other. "Nay, then, if ye be not of Sir Daniel's party, I profess I comprehend no longer. Wherefore, then, fell ye upon mine ambush? in what quarrel, my young and very fiery friend? to what earthly purpose? and, to make a clear end of questioning, to what good gentleman have I surrendered?" But before Dick could answer, a voice spoke in the darkness from close by. Dick could see the speaker's black and white badge, and the respectful salute which he addressed to his superior. "My lord," said he, "if these gentlemen be unfriends to Sir Daniel, it is pity, indeed, we should have been at blows with them; but it were tenfold greater that either they or we should linger here. The watchers in the house----unless they be all dead or deaf----have heard our hammering this quarter-hour agone; instantly they will have signalled to the town; and unless we be the livelier in our departure, we are like to be taken, both of us, by a fresh foe." "Hawksley is in the right," added the lord. "How please ye, sir? Whither shall we march?" "Nay, my lord," said Dick, "go where ye will for me. I do begin to suspect we have some ground of friendship, and if, indeed, I began our acquaintance somewhat ruggedly, I would not churlishly continue. Let us, then, separate, my lord, you laying your right hand in mine; and at the hour and place that ye shall name, let us encounter and agree." "Y'are too trustful, boy," said the other; "but this time your trust is not misplaced. I will meet you at the point of day at St. Bride's Cross. Come, lads, follow!" The strangers disappeared from the scene with a rapidity that seemed suspicious; and while the outlaws fell to the congenial task of rifling the dead bodies, Dick made once more the circuit of the garden wall to examine the front of the house. In a little upper loophole of the roof he beheld a light set; and as it would certainly be visible in town from the back windows of Sir Daniel's mansion, he doubted not that this was the signal feared by Hawksley, and that ere long the lances of the Knight of Tunstall would arrive upon the scene. He put his ear to the ground, and it seemed to him as if he heard a jarring and hollow noise from townward. Back to the beach he went hurrying. But the work was already done; the last body was disarmed and stripped to the skin, and four fellows were already wading seaward to commit it to the mercies of the deep. A few minutes later, when there debouched out of the nearest lanes of Shoreby some two-score horsemen, hastily arrayed and moving at the gallop of their steeds, the neighbourhood of the house beside the sea was entirely silent and deserted. Meanwhile, Dick and his men had returned to the alehouse of the Goat and Bagpipes to snatch some hours of sleep before the morning tryst. CHAPTER III ST. BRIDE'S CROSS St. Bride's Cross stood a little way back from Shoreby, on the skirts of Tunstall Forest. Two roads met: one, from Holywood across the forest; one, that road from Risingham down which we saw the wrecks of a Lancastrian army fleeing in disorder. Here the two joined issue, and went on together down the hill to Shoreby; and a little back from the point of junction, the summit of a little knoll was crowned by the ancient and weather-beaten cross. Here, then, about seven in the morning, Dick arrived. It was as cold as ever; the earth was all grey and silver with the hoar-frost, and the day began to break in the east with many colours of purple and orange. Dick set him down upon the lowest step of the cross, wrapped himself well in his tabard, and looked vigilantly upon all sides. He had not long to wait. Down the road from Holywood a gentleman in very rich and bright armour, and wearing over that a surcoat of the rarest furs, came pacing on a splendid charger. Twenty yards behind him followed a clump of lances; but these halted as soon as they came in view of the trysting-place, while the gentleman in the fur surcoat continued to advance alone. His visor was raised, and showed a countenance of great command and dignity, answerable to the richness of his attire and arms. And it was with some confusion of manner that Dick arose from the cross and stepped down the bank to meet his prisoner. "I thank you, my lord, for your exactitude," he said, louting very low. "Will it please your lordship to set foot to earth?" "Are ye here alone, young man?" inquired the other. "I was not so simple," answered Dick; "and, to be plain with your lordship, the woods upon either hand of this cross lie full of mine honest fellows lying on their weapons." "Y' 'ave done wisely," said the lord. "It pleaseth me the rather, since last night ye fought foolhardily, and more like a savage Saracen lunatic than any Christian warrior. But it becomes not me to complain that had the undermost." "Ye had the undermost indeed, my lord, since ye so fell," returned Dick; "but had the waves not holpen me, it was I that should have had the worst. Ye were pleased to make me yours with several dagger marks, which I still carry. And in fine, my lord, methinks I had all the danger, as well as all the profit, of that little blind-man's mellay on the beach." "Y'are shrewd enough to make light of it, I see," returned the stranger. "Nay, my lord, not shrewd," replied Dick, "in that I shoot at no advantage to myself. But when, by the light of this new day, I see how stout a knight hath yielded, not to my arms alone, but to fortune, and the darkness, and the surf--and how easily the battle had gone otherwise, with a soldier so untried and rustic as myself--think it not strange, my lord, if I feel confounded with my victory." "Ye speak well," said the stranger. "Your name?" "My name, an't like you, is Shelton," answered Dick. "Men call me the Lord Foxham," added the other. "Then, my lord, and under your good favour, ye are guardian to the sweetest maid in England," replied Dick; "and for your ransom, and the ransom of such as were taken with you on the beach, there will be no uncertainty of terms. I pray you, my lord, of your good-will and charity, yield me the hand of my mistress, Joan Sedley; and take ye, upon the other part, your liberty, the liberty of these your followers, and (if ye will have it) my gratitude and service till I die." "But are ye not ward to Sir Daniel? Methought, if y'are Harry Shelton's son, that I had heard it so reported," said Lord Foxham. "Will it please you, my lord, to alight? I would fain tell you fully who I am, how situate, and why so bold in my demands. Beseech you, my lord, take place upon these steps, hear me to a full end, and judge me with allowance." And so saying, Dick lent a hand to Lord Foxham to dismount; led him up the knoll to the cross; installed him in the place where he had himself been sitting; and standing respectfully before his noble prisoner, related the story of his fortunes up to the events of the evening before. Lord Foxham listened gravely, and when Dick had done, "Master Shelton," he said, "ye are a most fortunate-unfortunate young gentleman; but what fortune y' 'ave had, that ye have amply merited; and what unfortune, ye have noways deserved. Be of a good cheer; for ye have made a friend who is devoid neither of power nor favour. For yourself, although it fits not for a person of your birth to herd with outlaws, I must own ye are both brave and honourable; very dangerous in battle, right courteous in peace; a youth of excellent disposition and brave bearing. For your estates, ye will never see them till the world shall change again; so long as Lancaster hath the strong hand, so long shall Sir Daniel enjoy them for his own. For my ward, it is another matter; I had promised her before to a gentleman a kinsman of my house, one Hamley; the promise is old----" "Ay, my lord, and now Sir Daniel hath promised her to my Lord Shoreby," interrupted Dick. "And his promise, for all it is but young, is still the likelier to be made good." "'Tis the plain truth," returned his lordship. "And considering, moreover, that I am your prisoner, upon no better composition than my bare life, and over and above that, that the maiden is unhappily in other hands, I will so far consent. Aid me with your good fellows----" "My lord," cried Dick, "they are these same outlaws that ye blame me for consorting with." "Let them be what they will, they can fight," returned Lord Foxham. "Help me, then; and if between us we regain the maid, upon my knightly honour, she shall marry you!" Dick bent his knee before his prisoner; but he, leaping up lightly from the cross, caught the lad up and embraced him like a son. "Come," he said, "an y'are to marry Joan, we must be early friends." CHAPTER IV THE "GOOD HOPE" An hour thereafter, Dick was back at the Goat and Bagpipes, breaking his fast, and receiving the report of his messengers and sentries. Duckworth was still absent from Shoreby; and this was frequently the case, for he played many parts in the world, shared many different interests, and conducted many various affairs. He had founded that fellowship of the Black Arrow, as a ruined man longing for vengeance and money; and yet among those who knew him best, he was thought to be the agent and emissary of the great king-maker of England, Richard, Earl of Warwick. In his absence, at any rate, it fell upon Richard Shelton to command affairs in Shoreby; and, as he sat at meat, his mind was full of care, and his face heavy with consideration. It had been determined, between him and the Lord Foxham, to make one bold stroke that evening, and, by brute force, to set Joanna free. The obstacles, however, were many; and as one after another of his scouts arrived, each brought him more discomfortable news. Sir Daniel was alarmed by the skirmish of the night before. He had increased the garrison of the house in the garden; but not content with that, he had stationed horsemen in all the neighbouring lanes, so that he might have instant word of any movement. Meanwhile, in the court of his mansion, steeds stood saddled, and the riders, armed at every point, awaited but the signal to ride. The adventure of the night appeared more and more difficult of execution, till suddenly Dick's countenance lightened. "Lawless!" he cried, "you that were a shipman, can ye steal me a ship?" "Master Dick," replied Lawless, "if ye would back me, I would agree to steal York Minster." Presently after, these two set forth and descended to the harbour. It was a considerable basin, lying among sand-hills, and surrounded with patches of down, ancient ruinous lumber, and tumble-down slums of the town. Many decked ships and many open boats either lay there at anchor, or had been drawn up on the beach. A long duration of bad weather had driven them from the high seas into the shelter of the port; and the great trooping of black clouds, and the cold squalls that followed one another, now with a sprinkling of dry snow, now in a mere swoop of wind, promised no improvement but rather threatened a more serious storm in the immediate future. The seamen, in view of the cold and the wind, had for the most part slunk ashore, and were now roaring and singing in the shoreside taverns. Many of the ships already rode unguarded at their anchors; and as the day wore on, and the weather offered no appearance of improvement, the number was continually being augmented. It was to these deserted ships, and, above all, to those of them that lay far out, that Lawless directed his attention; while Dick, seated upon an anchor that was half embedded in the sand, and giving ear, now to the rude, potent, and boding voices of the gale, and now to the hoarse singing of the shipmen in a neighbouring tavern, soon forgot his immediate surroundings and concerns in the agreeable recollection of Lord Foxham's promise. He was disturbed by a touch upon his shoulder. It was Lawless, pointing to a small ship that lay somewhat by itself, and within but a little of the harbour mouth, where it heaved regularly and smoothly on the entering swell. A pale gleam of winter sunshine fell, at that moment, on the vessel's deck, relieving her against a bank of scowling cloud; and in this momentary glitter Dick could see a couple of men hauling the skiff alongside. "There, sir," said Lawless, "mark ye it well! There is the ship for to-night." Presently the skiff put out from the vessel's side, and the two men, keeping her head well to the wind, pulled lustily for shore, Lawless turned to a loiterer. "How call ye her?" he asked, pointing to the little vessel. "They call her the _Good Hope_, of Dartmouth," replied the loiterer. "Her captain, Arblaster by name. He pulleth the bow oar in yon skiff." This was all that Lawless wanted. Hurriedly thanking the man, he moved round the shore to a certain sandy creek, for which the skiff was heading. There he took up his position, and as soon as they were within earshot, opened fire on the sailors of the _Good Hope_. "What! Gossip Arblaster!" he cried. "Why, ye be well met; nay, gossip, ye be right well met, upon the rood! And is that the _Good Hope_? Ay, I would know her among ten thousand!--a sweet shear, a sweet boat! But marry come up, my gossip, will ye drink? I have come into mine estate which doubtless ye remember to have heard on. I am now rich; I have left to sail upon the sea; I do sail now, for the most part, upon spiced ale. Come, fellow; thy hand upon't! Come, drink with an old shipfellow!" Skipper Arblaster, a long-faced, elderly, weather-beaten man, with a knife hanging about his neck by a plaited cord, and for all the world like any modern seaman in his gait and bearing, had hung back in obvious amazement and distrust. But the name of an estate, and a certain air of tipsified simplicity and good-fellowship which Lawless very well affected, combined to conquer his suspicious jealousy; his countenance relaxed, and he at once extended his open hand and squeezed that of the outlaw in a formidable grasp. "Nay," he said, "I cannot mind you. But what o' that? I would drink with any man, gossip, and so would my man Tom. Man Tom," he added, addressing his follower, "here is my gossip, whose name I cannot mind, but no doubt a very good seaman. Let's go drink with him and his shore friend." Lawless led the way, and they were soon seated in an alehouse, which, as it was very new, and stood in an exposed and solitary station, was less crowded than those nearer to the centre of the port. It was but a shed of timber, much like a blockhouse in the backwoods of to-day, and was coarsely furnished with a press or two, a number of naked benches, and boards set upon barrels to play the part of tables. In the middle, and besieged by half a hundred violent draughts, a fire of wreck-wood blazed and vomited thick smoke. "Ay, now," said Lawless, "here is a shipman's joy--a good fire and a good stiff cup ashore, with foul weather without and an off-sea gale a-snoring in the roof! Here's to the _Good Hope_! May she ride easy!" "Ay," said Skipper Arblaster, "'tis good weather to be ashore in, that is sooth. Man Tom, how say ye to that? Gossip, ye speak well, though I can never think upon your name; but ye speak very well. May the _Good Hope_ ride easy! Amen!" "Friend Dickon," resumed Lawless, addressing his commander, "ye have certain matters on hand, unless I err? Well, prithee be about them incontinently. For here I be with the choice of all good company, two tough old shipmen; and till that ye return I will go warrant these brave fellows will bide here and drink me cup for cup. We are not like shore-men, we old, tough tarry-Johns!" "It is well meant," returned the skipper. "Ye can go, boy; for I will keep your good friend and my good gossip company till curfew--ay, and by St. Mary, till the sun get up again! For, look ye, when a man hath been long enough at sea, the salt getteth me into the clay upon his bones; and let him drink a draw-well, he will never be quenched." Thus encouraged upon all hands, Dick rose, saluted his company, and going forth again into the gusty afternoon, got him as speedily as he might to the Goat and Bagpipes. Thence he sent word to my Lord Foxham that, so soon as ever the evening closed, they would have a stout boat to keep the sea in. And then leading along with him a couple of outlaws who had some experience of the sea, he returned himself to the harbour and the little sandy creek. The skiff of the _Good Hope_ lay among many others, from which it was easily distinguished by its extreme smallness and fragility. Indeed, when Dick and his two men had taken their places, and begun to put forth out of the creek into the open harbour, the little cockle dipped into the swell and staggered under every gust of wind, like a thing upon the point of sinking. The _Good Hope_, as we have said, was anchored far out, where the swell was heaviest. No other vessel lay nearer than several cables' length; those that were the nearest were themselves entirely deserted; and as the skiff approached, a thick flurry of snow and a sudden darkening of the weather further concealed the movements of the outlaws from all possible espial. In a trice they had leaped upon the heaving deck, and the skiff was dancing at the stern. The _Good Hope_ was captured. [Illustration: _The little cockle dipped into the swell and staggered under every gust of wind_] She was a good stout boat, decked in the bows and amid-ships, but open in the stern. She carried one mast, and was rigged between a felucca and a lugger. It would seem that Skipper Arblaster had made an excellent venture, for the hold was full of pieces of French wine; and in the little cabin, besides the Virgin Mary in the bulkhead which proved the captain's piety, there were many lock-fast chests and cupboards, which showed him to be rich and careful. A dog, who was the sole occupant of the vessel, furiously barked and bit the heels of the boarders; but he was soon kicked into the cabin, and the door shut upon his just resentment. A lamp was lit and fixed in the shrouds to mark the vessel clearly from the shore; one of the wine pieces in the hold was broached, and a cup of excellent Gascony emptied to the adventure of the evening; and then, while one of the outlaws began to get ready his bow and arrows and prepare to hold the ship against all comers, the other hauled in the skiff and got overboard, where he held on, waiting for Dick. "Well, Jack, keep me a good watch," said the young commander, preparing to follow his subordinate. "Ye will do right well." "Why," returned Jack, "I shall do excellent well indeed, so long as we lie here; but once we put the nose of this poor ship outside the harbour--See, there she trembles! Nay, the poor shrew heard the words, and the heart misgave her in her oak-tree ribs. But look, Master Dick! how black the weather gathers!" The darkness ahead was, indeed, astonishing. Great billows heaved up out of the blackness, one after another; and one after another the _Good Hope_ buoyantly climbed, and giddily plunged upon the farther side. A thin sprinkle of snow and thin flakes of foam came flying, and powdered the deck; and the wind harped dismally among the rigging. "In sooth, it looketh evilly," said Dick, "But what cheer! 'Tis but a squall, and presently it will blow over." But, in spite of his words, he was depressingly affected by the bleak disorder of the sky and the wailing and fluting of the wind; and as he got over the side of the _Good Hope_ and made once more for the landing-creek with the best speed of oars, he crossed himself devoutly, and recommended to Heaven the lives of all who should adventure on the sea. At the landing-creek there had already gathered about a dozen of the outlaws. To these the skiff was left, and they were bidden embark without delay. A little farther up the beach Dick found Lord Foxham hurrying in quest of him, his face concealed with a dark hood, and his bright armour covered by a long russet mantle of a poor appearance. "Young Shelton," he said, "are ye for sea, then, truly?" "My lord," replied Richard, "they lie about the house with horsemen; it may not be reached from the land side without alarum; and Sir Daniel once advertised of our adventure, we can no more carry it to a good end than, saving your presence, we could ride upon the wind. Now, in going round by sea, we do run some peril by the elements; but, what much outweighteth all, we have a chance to make good our purpose and bear off the maid." "Well," returned Lord Foxham, "lead on. I will, in some sort, follow you for shame's sake; but I own I would I were in bed." "Here, then," said Dick. "Hither we go to fetch our pilot." And he led the way to the rude alehouse where he had given rendezvous to a portion of his men. Some of these he found lingering round the door outside; others had pushed more boldly in, and, choosing places as near as possible to where they saw their comrade, gathered close about Lawless and the two shipmen. These, to judge by the distempered countenance and cloudy eye, had long since gone beyond the boundaries of moderation; and as Richard entered, closely followed by Lord Foxham, they were all three tuning up an old, pitiful sea-ditty, to the chorus of the wailing of the gale. The young leader cast a rapid glance about the shed. The fire had just been replenished, and gave forth volumes of black smoke, so that it was difficult to see clearly in the farther corners. It was plain, however, that the outlaws very largely outnumbered the remainder of the guests. Satisfied upon this point, in case of any failure in the operation of his plan, Dick strode up to the table and resumed his place upon the bench. "Hey?" cried the skipper, tipsily, "who are ye, hey?" "I want a word with you without, Master Arblaster," returned Dick; "and here is what we shall talk of." And he showed him a gold noble in the glimmer of the firelight. The shipman's eyes burned, although he still failed to recognise our hero. "Ay, boy," he said, "I am with you. Gossip, I will be back anon. Drink fair, gossip"; and, taking Dick's arm to steady his uneven steps, he walked to the door of the alehouse. As soon as he was over the threshold, ten strong arms had seized and bound him; and in two minutes more, with his limbs trussed one to another, and a good gag in his mouth, he had been tumbled neck and crop into a neighbouring hay-barn. Presently, his man Tom, similarly secured, was tossed beside him, and the pair were left to their uncouth reflections for the night. And now, as the time for concealment had gone by, Lord Foxham's followers were summoned by a preconcerted signal, and the party, boldly taking possession of as many boats as their numbers required, pulled in a flotilla for the light in the rigging of the ship. Long before the last man had climbed to the deck of the _Good Hope_, the sound of furious shouting from the shore showed that a part, at least, of the seamen had discovered the loss of their skiffs. But it was now too late, whether for recovery or revenge. Out of some forty fighting men now mustered in the stolen ship, eight had been to sea, and could play the part of mariners. With the aid of these, a slice of sail was got upon her. The cable was cut. Lawless, vacillating on his feet, and still shouting the chorus of sea-ballads, took the long tiller in his hands: and the _Good Hope_ began to flit forward into the darkness of the night, and to face the great waves beyond the harbour bar. Richard took his place beside the weather rigging. Except for the ship's own lantern, and for some lights in Shoreby town, that were already fading to leeward, the whole world of air was as black as in a pit. Only from time to time, as the _Good Hope_ swooped dizzily down into the valley of the rollers, a crest would break--a great cataract of snowy foam would leap in one instant into being--and, in an instant more, would stream into the wake and vanish. Many of the men lay holding on and praying aloud; many more were sick, and had crept into the bottom, where they sprawled among the cargo. And what with the extreme violence of the motion, and the continued drunken bravado of Lawless, still shouting and singing at the helm, the stoutest heart on board may have nourished a shrewd misgiving as to the result. But Lawless, as if guided by an instinct, steered the ship across the breakers, struck the lee of a great sand-bank, where they sailed for awhile in smooth water, and presently after laid her alongside a rude stone pier, where she was hastily made fast, and lay ducking and grinding in the dark. CHAPTER V THE "GOOD HOPE" (CONTINUED) The pier was not far distant from the house in which Joanna lay; it now only remained to get the men on shore, to surround the house with a strong party, burst in the door and carry off the captive. They might then regard themselves as done with the _Good Hope_; it had placed them on the rear of their enemies; and the retreat, whether they should succeed or fail in the main enterprise, would be directed with a greater measure of hope in the direction of the forest and my Lord Foxham's reserve. To get the men on shore, however, was no easy task; many had been sick, all were pierced with cold; the promiscuity and disorder on board had shaken their discipline; the movement of the ship and the darkness of the night had cowed their spirits. They made a rush upon the pier; my lord, with his sword drawn on his own retainers, must throw himself in front; and this impulse of rabblement was not restrained without a certain clamour of voices, highly to be regretted in the case. When some degree of order had been restored, Dick, with a few chosen men, set forth in advance. The darkness on shore, by contrast with the flashing of the surf, appeared before him like a solid body; and the howling and whistling of the gale drowned any lesser noise. He had scarce reached the end of the pier, however, when there fell a lull of the wind; and in this he seemed to hear on shore the hollow footing of horses and the clash of arms. Checking his immediate followers, he passed forward a step or two alone, even setting foot upon the down; and here he made sure he could detect the shape of men and horses moving. A strong discouragement assailed him. If their enemies were really on the watch, if they had beleaguered the shoreward end of the pier, he and Lord Foxham were taken in a posture of very poor defence, the sea behind, the men jostled in the dark upon a narrow causeway. He gave a cautious whistle, the signal previously agreed upon. It proved to be a signal far more than he desired. Instantly there fell, through the black night, a shower of arrows sent at a venture; and so close were the men huddled on the pier that more than one was hit, and the arrows were answered with cries of both fear and pain. In this first discharge, Lord Foxham was struck down; Hawksley had him carried on board again at once; and his men, during the brief remainder of the skirmish, fought (when they fought at all) without guidance. That was perhaps the chief cause of the disaster which made haste to follow. At the shore end of the pier, for perhaps a minute, Dick held his own with a handful; one or two were wounded upon either side; steel crossed steel; nor had there been the least signal of advantage, when in the twinkling of an eye the tide turned against the party from the ship. Some one cried out that all was lost; the men were in the very humour to lend an ear to a discomfortable counsel; the cry was taken up. "On board, lads, for your lives!" cried another. A third, with the true instinct of the coward, raised that inevitable report on all retreats: "We are betrayed!" And in a moment the whole mass of men went surging and jostling backward down the pier, turning their defenceless backs on their pursuers and piercing the night with craven outcry. One coward thrust off the ship's stern, while another still held her by the bows. The fugitives leaped, screaming, and were hauled on board, or fell back and perished in the sea. Some were cut down upon the pier by the pursuers. Many were injured on the ship's deck in the blind haste and terror of the moment, one man leaping upon another, and a third on both. At last, and whether by design or accident, the bows of the _Good Hope_ were liberated; and the ever-ready Lawless, who had maintained his place at the helm through all the hurly-burly by sheer strength of body and a liberal use of the cold steel, instantly clapped her on the proper tack. The ship began to move once more forward on the stormy sea, its scuppers running blood, its deck heaped with fallen men, sprawling and struggling in the dark. Thereupon, Lawless sheathed his dagger, and turning to his next neighbour, "I have left my mark on them, gossip," said he, "the yelping, coward hounds." Now, while they were all leaping and struggling for their lives, the men had not appeared to observe the rough shoves and cutting stabs with which Lawless had held his post in the confusion. But perhaps they had already begun to understand somewhat more clearly, or perhaps another ear had overheard, the helmsman's speech. Panic-stricken troops recover slowly, and men who have just disgraced themselves by cowardice, as if to wipe out the memory of their fault, will sometimes run straight into the opposite extreme of insubordination. So it was now; and the same men who had thrown away their weapons and been hauled, feet-foremost, into the _Good Hope_, began to cry out upon their leaders, and demand that some one should be punished. This growing ill-feeling turned upon Lawless. In order to get a proper offing, the old outlaw had put the head of the _Good Hope_ to seaward. "What!" bawled one of the grumblers, "he carrieth us to seaward!" "'Tis sooth," cried another. "Nay, we are betrayed for sure." And they all began to cry out in chorus that they were betrayed, and in shrill tones and with abominable oaths bade Lawless go about-ship and bring them speedily ashore. Lawless, grinding his teeth, continued in silence to steer the true course, guiding the _Good Hope_ among the formidable billows. To their empty terrors, as to their dishonourable threats, between drink and dignity he scorned to make reply. The malcontents drew together a little abaft the mast, and it was plain they were like barnyard cocks, "crowing for courage." Presently they would be fit for any extremity of injustice or ingratitude. Dick began to mount by the ladder, eager to interpose; but one of the outlaws, who was also something of a seaman, got beforehand. "Lads," he began, "y'are right wooden heads, I think. For to get back, by the mass, we must have an offing, must we not? And this old Lawless----" Some one struck the speaker on the mouth, and the next moment, as a fire springs among dry straw, he was felled upon the deck, trampled under the feet, and despatched by the daggers of his cowardly companions. At this the wrath of Lawless rose and broke. "Steer yourselves," he bellowed, with a curse; and, careless of the result, he left the helm. The _Good Hope_ was, at that moment, trembling on the summit of a swell. She subsided, with sickening velocity, upon the farther side. A wave, like a great black bulwark, hove immediately in front of her; and, with a staggering blow, she plunged head-foremost through that liquid hill. The green water passed right over her from stem to stern, as high as a man's knees; the sprays ran higher than the mast; and she rose again upon the other side, with an appalling, tremulous indecision, like a beast that has been deadly wounded. Six or seven of the malcontents had been carried bodily overboard; and as for the remainder, when they found their tongues again, it was to bellow to the saints and wail upon Lawless to come back and take the tiller. Nor did Lawless wait to be twice bidden. The terrible result of his fling of just resentment sobered him completely. He knew, better than any one on board, how nearly the _Good Hope_ had gone bodily down below their feet; and he could tell, by the laziness with which she met the sea, that the peril was by no means over. Dick, who had been thrown down by the concussion and half drowned, rose wading to his knees in the swamped well of the stern, and crept to the old helmsman's side. "Lawless," he said, "we do all depend on you; y'are a brave, steady man, indeed, and crafty in the management of ships; I shall put three sure men to watch upon your safety." "Bootless, my master, bootless," said the steersman, peering forward through the dark. "We come every moment somewhat clearer of these sand-banks; with every moment, then, the sea packeth upon us heavier, and for all these whimperers, they will presently be on their backs. For, my master, 'tis a right mystery, but true, there never yet was a bad man that was a good shipman. None but the honest and the bold can endure me this tossing of a ship." "Nay, Lawless," said Dick, laughing, "that is a right shipman's by-word, and hath no more of sense than the whistle of the wind. But, prithee, how go we? Do we lie well? Are we in good case?" "Master Shelton," replied Lawless, "I have been a Grey Friar--I praise fortune--an archer, a thief, and a shipman. Of all these coats, I had the best fancy to die in the Grey Friar's, as ye may readily conceive, and the least fancy to die in John Shipman's tarry jacket; and that for two excellent good reasons: first, that the death might take a man suddenly; and second, for the horror of that great, salt smother and welter under my foot here"--and Lawless stamped with his foot. "Howbeit," he went on, "an I die not a sailor's death, and that this night, I shall owe a tall candle to our Lady." "Is it so?" asked Dick. "It is right so," replied the outlaw. "Do ye not feel how heavy and dull she moves upon the waves? Do ye not hear the water washing in her hold? She will scarce mind the rudder even now. Bide till she has settled a bit lower; and she will either go down below your boots like a stone image, or drive ashore here, under our lee, and come all to pieces like a twist of string." "Ye speak with a good courage," returned Dick. "Ye are not then appalled?" "Why, master," answered Lawless, "if ever a man had an ill crew to come to port with, it is I--a renegade friar, a thief, and all the rest on't. Well, ye may wonder, but I keep a good hope in my wallet; and if that I be to drown, I will drown with a bright eye, Master Shelton, and a steady hand." Dick returned no answer; but he was surprised to find the old vagabond of so resolute a temper, and fearing some fresh violence or treachery, set forth upon his quest for three sure men. The great bulk of the men had now deserted the deck, which was continually wetted with the flying sprays, and where they lay exposed to the shrewdness of the winter wind. They had gathered, instead, into the hold of the merchandise, among the butts of wine, and lighted by two swinging lanterns. Here a few kept up the form of revelry, and toasted each other deep in Arblaster's Gascony wine. But as the _Good Hope_ continued to tear through the smoking waves, and toss her stem and stern alternately high in air and deep into white foam, the number of these jolly companions diminished with every moment and with every lurch. Many sat apart, tending their hurts, but the majority were already prostrated with sickness, and lay moaning in the bilge. Greensheve, Cuckow, and a young fellow of Lord Foxham's whom Dick had already remarked for his intelligence and spirit, were still, however, both fit to understand and willing to obey. These Dick set, as a body-guard, about the person of the steersman, and then, with a last look at the black sky and sea, he turned and went below into the cabin, whither Lord Foxham had been carried by his servants. CHAPTER VI THE "GOOD HOPE" (CONCLUDED) The moans of the wounded baron blended with the wailing of the ship's dog. The poor animal, whether he was merely sick at heart to be separated from his friends, or whether he indeed recognised some peril in the labouring of the ship, raised his cries, like minute-guns, above the roar of wave and weather; and the more superstitious of the men heard, in these sounds, the knell of the _Good Hope_. Lord Foxham had been laid in a berth upon a fur cloak. A little lamp burned dim before the Virgin in the bulkhead, and by its glimmer Dick could see the pale countenance and hollow eyes of the hurt man. "I am sore hurt," said he. "Come near to my side, young Shelton; let there be one by me who, at least, is gentle born; for after having lived nobly and richly all the days of my life, this is a sad pass that I should get my hurt in a little ferreting skirmish, and die here, in a foul, cold ship upon the sea, among broken men and churls." "Nay, my lord," said Dick, "I pray rather to the saints that ye will recover you of your hurt, and come soon and sound ashore." "How!" demanded his lordship. "Come sound ashore? There is, then, a question of it?" "The ship laboureth--the sea is grievous and contrary," replied the lad; "and by what I can learn of my fellow that steereth us, we shall do well, indeed, if we come dry-shod to land." "Ha!" said the baron, gloomily, "thus shall every terror attend upon the passage of my soul! Sir, pray rather to live hard, that ye may die easy, than to be fooled and fluted all through life, as to the pipe and tabour, and, in the last hour, be plunged among misfortunes! Howbeit, I have that upon my mind that must not be delayed. We have no priest aboard?" "None," replied Dick. "Here, then, to my secular interests," resumed Lord Foxham: "ye must be as good a friend to me dead, as I found you a gallant enemy when I was living. I fall in an evil hour for me, for England, and for them that trusted me. My men are being brought by Hamley--he that was your rival; they will rendezvous in the long holm at Holywood; this ring from off my finger will accredit you to represent mine orders; and I shall write, besides, two words upon this paper, bidding Hamley yield to you the damsel. Will he obey? I know not." "But, my lord, what orders?" inquired Dick. "Ay," quoth the baron, "ay--the orders"; and he looked upon Dick with hesitation. "Are ye Lancaster or York?" he asked, at length. "I shame to say it," answered Dick, "I can scarce clearly answer. But so much I think is certain: since I serve with Ellis Duckworth, I serve the house of York. Well, if that be so, I declare for York." "It is well," returned the other; "it is exceeding well. For, truly, had ye said Lancaster, I wot not for the world what I had done. But sith ye are for York, follow me. I came hither but to watch these lords at Shoreby, while mine excellent young lord, Richard of Gloucester,[1] prepareth a sufficient force to fall upon and scatter them. I have made me notes of their strength, what watch they keep, and how they lie; and these I was to deliver to my young lord on Sunday, an hour before noon, at St. Bride's Cross beside the forest. This tryst I am not like to keep, but I pray you, of courtesy, to keep it in my stead; and see that not pleasure, nor pain, tempest, wound, nor pestilence withhold you from the hour and place, for the welfare of England lieth upon this cast." [1] At the date of this story, Richard Crookback could not have been created Duke of Gloucester; but for clearness, with the reader's leave, he shall so be called. "I do soberly take this upon me," said Dick. "In so far as in me lieth, your purpose shall be done." "It is good," said the wounded man. "My lord duke shall order you further, and if ye obey him with spirit and good-will, then is your fortune made. Give me the lamp a little nearer to mine eyes, till that I write these words for you." He wrote a note "to his worshipful kinsman, Sir John Hamley"; and then a second, which he left without external superscripture. "This is for the duke," he said. "The word is 'England and Edward,' and the counter, 'England and York.'" "And Joanna, my lord?" asked Dick. "Nay, ye must get Joanna how ye can," replied the baron. "I have named you for my choice in both these letters; but ye must get her for yourself, boy. I have tried, as ye see here before you, and have lost my life. More could no man do." By this time the wounded man began to be very weary; and Dick, putting the precious papers in his bosom, bade him be of good cheer, and left him to repose. The day was beginning to break, cold and blue, with flying squalls of snow. Close under the lee of the _Good Hope_, the coast lay in alternate rocky headlands and sandy bays; and farther inland the wooded hill-tops of Tunstall showed along the sky. Both the wind and the sea had gone down; but the vessel wallowed deep, and scarce rose upon the waves. Lawless was still fixed at the rudder; and by this time nearly all the men had crawled on deck, and were now gazing, with blank faces, upon the inhospitable coast. "Are we going ashore?" asked Dick. "Ay," said Lawless, "unless we get first to the bottom." And just then the ship rose so languidly to meet a sea, and the water weltered so loudly in her hold, that Dick involuntarily seized the steersman by the arm. "By the mass!" cried Dick, as the bows of the _Good Hope_ reappeared above the foam, "I thought we had foundered, indeed; my heart was at my throat." In the waist, Greensheve, Hawksley, and the better men of both companies were busy breaking up the deck to build a raft; and to these Dick joined himself, working the harder to drown the memory of his predicament. But, even as he worked, every sea that struck the poor ship, and every one of her dull lurches, as she tumbled wallowing among the waves, recalled him with a horrid pang to the immediate proximity of death. Presently, looking up from his work, he saw that they were close in below a promontory; a piece of ruinous cliff, against the base of which the sea broke white and heavy, almost overplumbed the deck; and, above that, again, a house appeared, crowning a down. Inside the bay the seas ran gaily, raised the _Good Hope_ upon their foam-flecked shoulders, carried her beyond the control of the steersman, and in a moment dropped her, with a great concussion, on the sand, and began to break over her half-mast high, and roll her to and fro. Another great wave followed, raised her again, and carried her yet farther in; and then a third succeeded, and left her far inshore of the more dangerous breakers, wedged upon a bank. "Now, boys," cried Lawless, "the saints have had a care of us, indeed. The tide ebbs; let us but sit down and drink a cup of wine, and before half an hour ye may all march me ashore as safe as on a bridge." A barrel was broached, and, sitting in what shelter they could find from the flying snow and spray, the shipwrecked company handed the cup around, and sought to warm their bodies and restore their spirits. Dick, meanwhile, returned to Lord Foxham, who lay in great perplexity and fear, the floor of his cabin washing knee-deep in water, and the lamp, which had been his only light, broken and extinguished by the violence of the blow. "My lord," said young Shelton, "fear not at all; the saints are plainly for us; the seas have cast us high upon a shoal, and as soon as the tide hath somewhat ebbed, we may walk ashore upon our feet." It was nearly an hour before the vessel was sufficiently deserted by the ebbing sea, and they could set forth for the land, which appeared dimly before them through a veil of driving snow. Upon a hillock on one side of their way a party of men lay huddled together, suspiciously observing the movements of the new arrivals. "They might draw near and offer us some comfort," Dick remarked. "Well, an' they come not to us, let us even turn aside to them," said Hawksley. "The sooner we come to a good fire and a dry bed the better for my poor lord." But they had not moved far in the direction of the hillock, before the men, with one consent, rose suddenly to their feet, and poured a flight of well-directed arrows on the shipwrecked company. "Back! back!" cried his lordship. "Beware, in Heaven's name, that ye reply not." "Nay," cried Greensheve, pulling an arrow from his leather jack. "We are in no posture to fight, it is certain, being drenching wet, dog-weary, and three-parts frozen; but for the love of old England, what aileth them to shoot thus cruelly on their poor country people in distress?" "They take us to be French pirates," answered Lord Foxham. "In these most troublesome and degenerate days we cannot keep our own shores of England; but our old enemies, whom we once chased on sea and land, do now range at pleasure, robbing and slaughtering and burning. It is the pity and reproach of this poor land." The men upon the hillock lay, closely observing them, while they trailed upward from the beach and wound inland among desolate sand-hills; for a mile or so they even hung upon the rear of the march, ready, at a sign, to pour another volley on the weary and dispirited fugitives; and it was only when, striking at length upon a firm highroad, Dick began to call his men to some more martial order, that these jealous guardians of the coast of England silently disappeared among the snow. They had done what they desired; they had protected their own homes and farms, their own families and cattle; and their private interest being thus secured, it mattered not the weight of a straw to any one of them, although the Frenchmen should carry blood and fire to every other parish in the realm of England. BOOK IV THE DISGUISE CHAPTER I THE DEN The place where Dick had struck the line of a highroad was not far from Holywood, and within nine or ten miles of Shoreby-on-the-Till; and here, after making sure that they were pursued no longer, the two bodies separated. Lord Foxham's followers departed, carrying their wounded master towards the comfort and security of the great abbey; and Dick, as he saw them wind away and disappear in the thick curtain of the falling snow, was left alone with near upon a dozen outlaws, the last remainder of his troop of volunteers. Some were wounded; one and all were furious at their ill-success and long exposure; and though they were now too cold and hungry to do more, they grumbled and cast sullen looks upon their leaders. Dick emptied his purse among them, leaving himself nothing; thanked them for the courage they had displayed, though he could have found it more readily in his heart to rate them for poltroonery; and having thus somewhat softened the effect of his prolonged misfortune, despatched them to find their way, either severally or in pairs, to Shoreby and the Goat and Bagpipes. For his own part, influenced by what he had seen on board of the _Good Hope_, he chose Lawless to be his companion on the walk. The snow was falling, without pause or variation, in one even, blinding cloud; the wind had been strangled, and now blew no longer; and the whole world was blotted out and sheeted down below that silent inundation. There was great danger of wandering by the way and perishing in drifts; and Lawless, keeping half a step in front of his companion, and holding his head forward like a hunting dog upon the scent, inquired his way of every tree, and studied out their path as though he were conning a ship among dangers. About a mile into the forest they came to a place where several ways met, under a grove of lofty and contorted oaks. Even in the narrow horizon of the falling snow, it was a spot that could not fail to be recognised; and Lawless evidently recognised it with particular delight. "Now, Master Richard," said he, "an y'are not too proud to be the guest of a man who is neither a gentleman by birth nor so much as a good Christian, I can offer you a cup of wine and a good fire to melt the marrow in your frozen bones." "Lead on, Will," answered Dick. "A cup of wine and a good fire! Nay, I would go a far way round to see them." Lawless turned aside under the bare branches of the grove, and, walking resolutely forward for some time, came to a steepish hollow or den, that had now drifted a quarter full of snow. On the verge, a great beech-tree hung, precariously rooted; and here the old outlaw, pulling aside some bushy underwood, bodily disappeared into the earth. [Illustration: _And Lawless, keeping half a step in front of his companion and holding his head forward like a hunting-dog upon the scent, ... studied out their path_] The beech had, in some violent gale, been half uprooted, and had torn up a considerable stretch of turf; and it was under this that old Lawless had dug out his forest hiding-place. The roots served him for rafters, the turf was his thatch; for walls and floor he had his mother the earth. Rude as it was, the hearth in one corner, blackened by fire, and the presence in another of a large oaken chest well fortified with iron, showed it at one glance to be the den of a man, and not the burrow of a digging beast. Though the snow had drifted at the mouth and sifted in upon the floor of this earth cavern, yet was the air much warmer than without; and when Lawless had struck a spark, and the dry furze bushes had begun to blaze and crackle on the hearth, the place assumed, even to the eye, an air of comfort and of home. With a sigh of great contentment, Lawless spread his broad hands before the fire, and seemed to breathe the smoke. "Here, then," he said, "is this old Lawless's rabbit-hole; pray Heaven there come no terrier! Far I have rolled hither and thither, and here and about, since that I was fourteen years of mine age and first ran away from mine abbey, with the sacrist's gold chain and a mass-book that I sold for four marks. I have been in England and France and Burgundy, and in Spain, too, on a pilgrimage for my poor soul; and upon the sea, which is no man's country. But here is my place, Master Shelton. This is my native land, this burrow in the earth! Come rain or wind--and whether it's April, and the birds all sing, and the blossoms fall about my bed--or whether it's winter, and I sit alone with my good gossip the fire, and robin redbreast twitters in the woods--here, is my church and market, and my wife and child. It's here I come back to, and it's here, so please the saints, that I would like to die." "'Tis a warm corner, to be sure," replied Dick, "and a pleasant, and a well hid." "It had need to be," returned Lawless, "for an they found it, Master Shelton, it would break my heart. But here," he added, burrowing with his stout fingers in the sandy floor, "here is my wine cellar; and ye shall have a flask of excellent strong stingo." Sure enough, after but a little digging, he produced a big leathern bottle of about a gallon, nearly three-parts full of a very heady and sweet wine; and when they had drunk to each other comradely, and the fire had been replenished and blazed up again, the pair lay at full length, thawing and steaming, and divinely warm. "Master Shelton," observed the outlaw, "y' 'ave had two mischances this last while, and y'are like to lose the maid--do I take it aright?" "Aright!" returned Dick, nodding his head. "Well, now," continued Lawless, "hear an old fool that hath been nigh-hand everything, and seen nigh-hand all! Ye go too much on other people's errands, Master Dick. Ye go on Ellis's; but he desireth rather the death of Sir Daniel. Ye go on Lord Foxham's; well--the saints preserve him!--doubtless he meaneth well. But go ye upon your own, good Dick. Come right to the maid's side. Court her, lest that she forget you. Be ready; and when the chance shall come, off with her at the saddle-bow." "Ay, but, Lawless, beyond doubt she is now in Sir Daniel's own mansion," answered Dick. "Thither, then, go we," replied the outlaw. Dick stared at him. "Nay, I mean it," nodded Lawless. "And if y'are of so little faith, and stumble at a word, see here!" And the outlaw, taking a key from about his neck, opened the oak chest, and dipping and groping deep among its contents, produced first a friar's robe, and next a girdle of rope; and then a huge rosary of wood, heavy enough to be counted as a weapon. "Here," he said, "is for you. On with them!" And then, when Dick had clothed himself in this clerical disguise, Lawless produced some colours and a pencil, and proceeded, with the greatest cunning, to disguise his face. The eyebrows he thickened and produced; to the moustache, which was yet hardly visible, he rendered a little service; while, by a few lines around the eye, he changed the expression and increased the apparent age of this young monk. "Now," he resumed, "when I have done the like, we shall make as bonny a pair of friars as the eye could wish. Boldly to Sir Daniel's we shall go, and there be hospitably welcome for the love of Mother Church." "And how, dear Lawless," cried the lad, "shall I repay you?" "Tut, brother," replied the outlaw, "I do naught but for my pleasure. Mind not for me. I am one, by the mass, that mindeth for himself. When that I lack, I have a long tongue and a voice like the monastery bell--I do ask, my son; and where asking faileth, I do most usually take." The old rogue made a humorous grimace; and although Dick was displeased to lie under so great favours to so equivocal a personage, he was yet unable to restrain his mirth. With that, Lawless returned to the big chest, and was soon similarly disguised; but, below his gown, Dick wondered to observe him conceal a sheaf of black arrows. "Wherefore do ye that?" asked the lad. "Wherefore arrows, when ye take no bow?" "Nay," replied Lawless, lightly, "'tis like there will be heads broke--not to say backs--ere you and I win sound from where we're going to; and if any fall, I would our fellowship should come by the credit on't. A black arrow, Master Dick, is the seal of our abbey; it showeth you who writ the bill." "An ye prepare so carefully," said Dick, "I have here some papers that, for mine own sake, and the interest of those that trusted me, were better left behind than found upon my body. Where shall I conceal them, Will?" "Nay," replied Lawless, "I will go forth into the wood and whistle me three verses of a song; meanwhile, do you bury them where ye please, and smooth the sand upon the place." "Never!" cried Richard. "I trust you, man. I were base indeed if I not trusted you." "Brother, y'are but a child," replied the old outlaw, pausing and turning his face upon Dick from the threshold of the den. "I am a kind old Christian, and no traitor to men's blood, and no sparer of mine own in a friend's jeopardy. But, fool, child, I am a thief by trade and birth and habit. If my bottle were empty and my mouth dry, I would rob you, dear child, as sure as I love, honour, and admire your parts and person! Can it be clearer spoken? No." And he stumped forth through the bushes with a snap of his big fingers. Dick, thus left alone, after a wondering thought upon the inconsistencies of his companion's character, hastily produced, reviewed, and buried his papers. One only he reserved to carry along with him, since it in nowise compromised his friends, and yet might serve him, in a pinch, against Sir Daniel. That was the knight's own letter to Lord Wensleydale, sent by Throgmorton, on the morrow of the defeat at Risingham, and found next day by Dick upon the body of the messenger. Then, treading down the embers of the fire, Dick left the den, and rejoined the old outlaw, who stood awaiting him under the leafless oaks, and was already beginning to be powdered by the falling snow. Each looked upon the other, and each laughed, so thorough and so droll was the disguise. "Yet I would it were but summer and a clear day," grumbled the outlaw, "that I might see myself in the mirror of a pool. There be many of Sir Daniel's men that know me; and if we fell to be recognised, there might be two words for you, brother, but as for me, in a paternoster while, I should be kicking in a rope's-end." Thus they set forth together along the road to Shoreby, which, in this part of its course, kept near along the margin of the forest, coming forth, from time to time, in the open country, and passing beside poor folks' houses and small farms. Presently at sight of one of these, Lawless pulled up. "Brother Martin," he said, in a voice capitally disguised, and suited to his monkish robe, "let us enter and seek alms from these poor sinners. _Pax vobiscum!_ Ay," he added, in his own voice, "'tis as I feared; I have somewhat lost the whine of it; and by your leave, good Master Shelton, ye must suffer me to practise in these country places, before that I risk my fat neck by entering Sir Daniel's. But look ye a little, what an excellent thing it is to be a Jack-of-all-trades! An I had not been a shipman, ye had infallibly gone down in the _Good Hope_; an I had not been a thief, I could not have painted me your face; and but that I had been a Grey Friar, and sung loud in the choir, and ate hearty at the board, I could not have carried this disguise, but the very dogs would have spied us out and barked at us for shams." He was by this time close to the window of the farm, and he rose on his tip-toes and peeped in. "Nay," he cried, "better and better. We shall here try our false faces with a vengeance, and have a merry jest on Brother Capper to boot." And so saying, he opened the door and led the way into the house. Three of their own company sat at the table, greedily eating. Their daggers, stuck beside them in the board, and the black and menacing looks which they continued to shower upon the people of the house, proved that they owed their entertainment rather to force than favour. On the two monks, who now, with a sort of humble dignity, entered the kitchen of the farm, they seemed to turn with a particular resentment; and one--it was John Capper in person--who seemed to play the leading part, instantly and rudely ordered them away. "We want no beggars here!" he cried. But another--although he was as far from recognising Dick and Lawless--inclined to more moderate counsels. "Not so," he cried. "We be strong men, and take; these be weak, and crave; but in the latter end these shall be uppermost and we below. Mind him not, my father; but come, drink of my cup, and give me a benediction." "Y'are men of a light mind, carnal, and accursed," said the monk. "Now, may the saints forbid that ever I should drink with such companions! But here, for the pity I bear to sinners, here I do leave you a blessed relic, the which, for your souls' interest, I bid you kiss and cherish." So far Lawless thundered upon them like a preaching friar; but with these words he drew from under his robe a black arrow, tossed it on the board in front of the three startled outlaws, turned in the same instant, and, taking Dick along with him, was out of the room and out of sight among the falling snow before they had time to utter a word or move a finger. "So," he said, "we have proved our false faces, Master Shelton. I will now adventure my poor carcase where ye please." "Good!" returned Richard. "It irks me to be doing. Set we on for Shoreby!" CHAPTER II "IN MINE ENEMIES' HOUSE" Sir Daniel's residence in Shoreby was a tall, commodious, plastered mansion, framed in carven oak, and covered by a low-pitched roof of thatch. To the back there stretched a garden, full of fruit-trees, alleys, and thick arbours, and overlooked from the far end by the tower of the abbey church. The house might contain, upon a pinch, the retinue of a greater person than Sir Daniel; but even now it was filled with hubbub. The court rang with arms and horseshoe-iron; the kitchens roared with cookery like a bees'-hive; minstrels, and the players of instruments, and the cries of tumblers, sounded from the hall. Sir Daniel, in his profusion, in the gaiety and gallantry of his establishment, rivalled with Lord Shoreby, and eclipsed Lord Risingham. All guests were made welcome. Minstrels, tumblers, players of chess, the sellers of relics, medicines, perfumes, and enchantments, and along with these every sort of priest, friar, or pilgrim, were made welcome to the lower table, and slept together in the ample lofts, or on the bare boards of the long dining-hall. On the afternoon following the wreck of the _Good Hope_, the buttery, the kitchens, the stables, the covered cartshed that surrounded two sides of the court, were all crowded by idle people, partly belonging to Sir Daniel's establishment, and attired in his livery of murrey and blue, partly nondescript strangers attracted to the town by greed, and received by the knight through policy, and because it was the fashion of the time. The snow, which still fell without interruption, the extreme chill of the air, and the approach of night, combined to keep them under shelter. Wine, ale, and money were all plentiful; many sprawled gambling in the straw of the barn, many were still drunken from the noontide meal. To the eye of a modern it would have looked like the sack of a city; to the eye of a contemporary it was like any other rich and noble household at a festive season. Two monks--a young and an old--had arrived late, and were now warming themselves at a bonfire in a corner of the shed. A mixed crowd surrounded them--jugglers, mountebanks, and soldiers; and with these the elder of the two had soon engaged so brisk a conversation, and exchanged so many loud guffaws and country witticisms, that the group momentarily increased in number. The younger companion, in whom the reader has already recognised Dick Shelton, sat from the first somewhat backward, and gradually drew himself away. He listened, indeed, closely, but he opened not his mouth; and by the grave expression of his countenance, he made but little account of his companion's pleasantries. At last his eye, which travelled continually to and fro, and kept a guard upon all the entrances of the house, lit upon a little procession entering by the main gate and crossing the court in an oblique direction. Two ladies, muffled in thick furs, led the way, and were followed by a pair of waiting-women and four stout men-at-arms. The next moment they had disappeared within the house; and Dick, slipping through the crowd of loiterers in the shed, was already giving hot pursuit. "The taller of these twain was Lady Brackley," he thought; "and where Lady Brackley is, Joan will not be far." At the door of the house the four men-at-arms had ceased to follow, and the ladies were now mounting the stairway of polished oak, under no better escort than that of the two waiting-women. Dick followed close behind. It was already the dusk of the day; and in the house the darkness of the night had almost come. On the stair-landings, torches flared in iron holders; down the long, tapestried corridors, a lamp burned by every door. And where the door stood open, Dick could look in upon arras-covered walls and rush-bescattered floors, glowing in the light of the wood fires. Two floors were passed, and at every landing the younger and shorter of the two ladies had looked back keenly at the monk. He, keeping his eyes lowered, and affecting the demure manners that suited his disguise, had but seen her once, and was unaware that he had attracted her attention. And now, on the third floor, the party separated, the younger lady continuing to ascend alone, the other, followed by the Waiting-maids, descending the corridor to the right. Dick mounted with a swift foot, and holding to the corner, thrust forth his head and followed the three women with his eyes. Without turning or looking behind them, they continued to descend the corridor. "It is right well," thought Dick. "Let me but know my Lady Brackley's chamber, and it will go hard an I find not Dame Hatch upon an errand." And just then a hand was laid upon his shoulder, and, with a bound and a choked cry, he turned to grapple his assailant. He was somewhat abashed to find, in the person whom he had so roughly seized, the short young lady in the furs. She, on her part, was shocked and terrified beyond expression, and hung trembling in his grasp. "Madam," said Dick, releasing her, "I cry you a thousand pardons; but I have no eyes behind, and, by the mass, I could not tell ye were a maid." The girl continued to look at him, but, by this time, terror began to be succeeded by surprise, and surprise by suspicion. Dick, who could read these changes on her face, became alarmed for his own safety in that hostile house. "Fair maid," he said, affecting easiness, "suffer me to kiss your hand, in token ye forgive my roughness, and I will even go." "Y'are a strange monk, young sir," returned the young lady, looking him both boldly and shrewdly in the face; "and now that my first astonishment hath somewhat passed away, I can spy the layman in each word you utter. What do ye here? Why are ye thus sacrilegiously tricked out? Come ye in peace or war? And why spy ye after Lady Brackley like a thief?" "Madam," quoth Dick, "of one thing I pray you to be very sure: I am no thief. And even if I come here in war, as in some degree I do, I make no war upon fair maids, and I hereby entreat them to copy me so far, and to leave me be. For, indeed, fair mistress, cry out--if such be your pleasure--cry but once, and say what ye have seen, and the poor gentleman before you is merely a dead man. I cannot think ye would be cruel," added Dick; and taking the girl's hand gently in both of his, he looked at her with courteous admiration. "Are ye, then, a spy--a Yorkist?" asked the maid. "Madam," he replied, "I am indeed a Yorkist, and, in some sort, a spy. But that which bringeth me into this house, the same which will win for me the pity and interest of your kind heart, is neither of York nor Lancaster. I will wholly put my life in your discretion. I am a lover, and my name----" But here the young lady clapped her hand suddenly upon Dick's mouth, looked hastily up and down and east and west, and, seeing the coast clear, began to drag the young man, with great strength and vehemence, up-stairs. "Hush!" she said, "and come! Shalt talk hereafter." Somewhat bewildered, Dick suffered himself to be pulled up-stairs, bustled along a corridor, and thrust suddenly into a chamber, lit, like so many of the others, by a blazing log upon the hearth. "Now," said the young lady, forcing him down upon a stool, "sit ye there and attend my sovereign good pleasure. I have life and death over you, and I will not scruple to abuse my power. Look to yourself; y' 'ave cruelly mauled my arm. He knew not I was a maid, quoth he! Had he known I was a maid, he had ta'en his belt to me, forsooth!" And with these words, she whipped out of the room and left Dick gaping with wonder, and not very sure if he were dreaming or awake. "Ta'en my belt to her!" he repeated. "Ta'en my belt to her!" And the recollection of that evening in the forest flowed back upon his mind, and he once more saw Matcham's wincing body and beseeching eyes. And then he was recalled to the dangers of the present. In the next room he heard a stir, as of a person moving; then followed a sigh, which sounded strangely near; and then the rustle of skirts and tap of feet once more began. As he stood hearkening, he saw the arras wave along the wall; there was the sound of a door being opened, the hangings divided, and, lamp in hand, Joanna Sedley entered the apartment. She was attired in costly stuffs of deep and warm colours, such as befit the winter and the snow. Upon her head, her hair had been gathered together and became her as a crown. And she, who had seemed so little and so awkward in the attire of Matcham, was now tall like a young willow, and swam across the floor as though she scorned the drudgery of walking. Without a start, without a tremor, she raised her lamp and looked at the young monk. "What make ye here, good brother?" she inquired. "Ye are doubtless ill-directed. Whom do ye require?" And she set her lamp upon the bracket. "Joanna," said Dick; and then his voice failed him. "Joanna," he began again, "ye said ye loved me; and the more fool I, but I believed it!" "Dick!" she cried. "Dick!" And then, to the wonder of the lad, this beautiful and tall young lady made but one step of it, and threw her arms about his neck and gave him a hundred kisses all in one. "Oh, the fool fellow!" she cried. "Oh, dear Dick! Oh, if ye could see yourself! Alack!" she added, pausing. "I have spoilt you, Dick! I have knocked some of the paint off. But that can be mended. What cannot be mended, Dick--or I much fear it cannot!--is my marriage with Lord Shoreby." "Is it decided, then?" asked the lad. "To-morrow, before noon, Dick, in the abbey church," she answered, "John Matcham and Joanna Sedley both shall come to a right miserable end. There is no help in tears, or I could weep mine eyes out. I have not spared myself to pray, but Heaven frowns on my petition. And, dear Dick--good Dick--but that ye can get me forth of this house before the morning, we must even kiss and say good-bye." "Nay," said Dick, "not I; I will never say that word. 'Tis like despair; but while there's life, Joanna, there is hope. Yet will I hope. Ay, by the mass, and triumph! Look ye, now, when ye were but a name to me, did I not follow--did I not rouse good men--did I not stake my life upon the quarrel? And now that I have seen you for what ye are--the fairest maid and stateliest of England--think ye I would turn?--if the deep sea were there, I would straight through it; if the way were full of lions, I would scatter them like mice." "Ay," she said, drily, "ye make a great ado about a sky-blue robe!" "Nay, Joan," protested Dick, "'tis not alone the robe. But, lass, ye were disguised. Here am I disguised; and, to the proof, do I not cut a figure of fun--a right fool's figure?" "Ay, Dick, an' that ye do!" she answered, smiling. "Well, then!" he returned, triumphant. "So was it with you, poor Matcham, in the forest. In sooth, ye were a wench to laugh at. But now!" So they ran on, holding each other by both hands, exchanging smiles and lovely looks, and melting minutes into seconds; and so they might have continued all night long. But presently there was a noise behind them; and they were aware of the short young lady, with her finger on her lips. "Saints!" she cried, "but what a noise ye keep! Can ye not speak in compass? And now, Joanna, my fair maid of the woods, what will ye give your gossip for bringing you your sweetheart?" Joanna ran to her, by way of answer, and embraced her fierily. "And you, sir," added the young lady, "what do ye give me?" "Madam," said Dick, "I would fain offer to pay you in the same money." "Come, then," said the lady, "it is permitted you." But Dick, blushing like a peony, only kissed her hand. "What ails ye at my face, fair sir?" she inquired, curtseying to the very ground; and then, when Dick had at length and most tepidly embraced her, "Joanna," she added, "your sweetheart is very backwards under your eyes; but I warrant you, when first we met, he was more ready. I am all black and blue, wench; trust me never, if I be not black and blue! And now," she continued, "have ye said your sayings? for I must speedily dismiss the paladin." But at this they both cried out that they had said nothing, that the night was still very young, and that they would not be separated so early. "And supper?" asked the young lady. "Must we not go down to supper?" "Nay, to be sure!" cried Joan. "I had forgotten." "Hide me, then," said Dick, "put me behind the arras, shut me in a chest, or what ye will, so that I may be here on your return. Indeed, fair lady," he added, "bear this in mind, that we are sore bested, and may never look upon each other's face from this night forward till we die." At this the young lady melted; and when, a little after, the bell summoned Sir Daniel's household to the board, Dick was planted very stiffly against the wall, at a place where a division in the tapestry permitted him to breathe the more freely, and even to see into the room. He had not been long in this position, when he was somewhat strangely disturbed. The silence in that upper storey of the house, was only broken by the flickering of the flames and the hissing of a green log in the chimney; but presently, to Dick's strained hearing, there came the sound of some one walking with extreme precaution; and soon after the door opened, and a little black-faced, dwarfish fellow, in Lord Shoreby's colours, pushed first his head, and then his crooked body, into the chamber. His mouth was open, as though to hear the better; and his eyes, which were very bright, flitted restlessly and swiftly to and fro. He went round and round the room, striking here and there upon the hangings; but Dick, by a miracle, escaped his notice. Then he looked below the furniture, and examined the lamp; and, at last, with an air of cruel disappointment, was preparing to go away as silently as he had come, when down he dropped upon his knees, picked up something from among the rushes on the floor, examined it, and, with every signal of delight, concealed it in the wallet at his belt. Dick's heart sank, for the object in question was a tassel from his own girdle; and it was plain to him that this dwarfish spy, who took a malign delight in his employment, would lose no time in bearing it to his master, the baron. He was half tempted to throw aside the arras, fall upon the scoundrel, and, at the risk of his life, remove the tell-tale token. And while he was still hesitating, a new cause of concern was added. A voice, hoarse and broken by drink, began to be audible from the stair; and presently after, uneven, wandering, and heavy footsteps sounded without along the passage. "What make ye here, my merry men, among the greenwood shaws?" sang the voice. "What make ye here? Hey! sots, what make ye here?" it added, with a rattle of drunken laughter; and then, once more breaking into song: "If ye should drink the clary wine, Fat Friar John, ye friend o' mine-- If I should eat, and ye should drink, Who shall sing the mass, d'ye think?" Lawless, alas! rolling drunk, was wandering the house, seeking for a corner wherein to slumber off the effect of his potations. Dick inwardly raged. The spy, at first terrified, had grown reassured as he found he had to deal with an intoxicated man, and now, with a movement of cat-like rapidity, slipped from the chamber, and was gone from Richard's eyes. What was to be done? If he lost touch of Lawless for the night, he was left impotent, whether to plan or carry forth Joanna's rescue. If, on the other hand, he dared to address the drunken outlaw, the spy might still be lingering within sight, and the most fatal consequences ensue. It was, nevertheless, upon this last hazard that Dick decided. Slipping from behind the tapestry, he stood ready in the doorway of the chamber, with a warning hand upraised. Lawless, flushed crimson, with his eyes injected, vacillating on his feet, drew still unsteadily nearer. At last he hazily caught sight of his commander, and, in despite of Dick's imperious signals, hailed him instantly and loudly by his name. Dick leaped upon and shook the drunkard furiously. "Beast!" he hissed--"beast and no man! It is worse than treachery to be so witless. We may all be shent for thy sotting." But Lawless only laughed and staggered, and tried to clap young Shelton on the back. And just then Dick's quick ear caught a rapid brushing in the arras. He leaped towards the sound, and the next moment a piece of the wall-hanging had been torn down, and Dick and the spy were sprawling together in its folds. Over and over they rolled, grappling for each other's throat, and still baffled by the arras, and still silent in their deadly fury. But Dick was by much the stronger, and soon the spy lay prostrate under his knee, and, with a single stroke of the long poniard, ceased to breathe. CHAPTER III THE DEAD SPY Throughout this furious and rapid passage, Lawless had looked on helplessly, and even when all was over, and Dick, already re-arisen to his feet, was listening with the most passionate attention to the distant bustle in the lower storeys of the house, the old outlaw was still wavering on his legs like a shrub in a breeze of wind, and still stupidly staring on the face of the dead man. "It is well," said Dick, at length; "they have not heard us, praise the saints! But, now, what shall I do with this poor spy? At least, I will take my tassel from his wallet." So saying, Dick opened the wallet; within he found a few pieces of money, the tassel, and a letter addressed to Lord Wensleydale, and sealed with my Lord Shoreby's seal. The name awoke Dick's recollection; and he instantly broke the wax and read the contents of the letter. It was short, but, to Dick's delight, it gave evident proof that Lord Shoreby was treacherously corresponding with the House of York. The young fellow usually carried his ink-horn and implements about him, and so now, bending a knee beside the body of the dead spy, he was able to write these words upon a corner of the paper: My Lord of Shoreby, ye that writt the letter, wot ye why your man is ded? But let me rede you, marry not. JON AMEND-ALL. He laid this paper on the breast of the corpse; and then Lawless, who had been looking on upon these last manoeuvres with some flickering returns of intelligence, suddenly drew a black arrow from below his robe, and therewith pinned the paper in its place. The sight of this disrespect, or, as it almost seemed, cruelty to the dead, drew a cry of horror from young Shelton; but the old outlaw only laughed. "Nay, I will have the credit for mine order," he hiccupped. "My jolly boys must have the credit on't--the credit, brother"; and then, shutting his eyes tight and opening his mouth like a precentor, he began to thunder, in a formidable voice: "If ye should drink the clary wine"-- "Peace, sot!" cried Dick, and thrust him hard against the wall. "In two words--if so be that such a man can understand me who hath more wine than wit in him--in two words, and, a-Mary's name, begone out of this house, where, if ye continue to abide, ye will not only hang yourself, but me also! Faith, then, up foot! be yare, or, by the mass, I may forget that I am in some sort your captain and in some your debtor! Go!" The sham monk was now, in some degree, recovering the use of his intelligence; and the ring in Dick's voice, and the glitter in Dick's eye, stamped home the meaning of his words. "By the mass," cried Lawless, "an I be not wanted, I can go"; and he turned tipsily along the corridor and proceeded to flounder down-stairs, lurching against the wall. So soon as he was out of sight, Dick returned to his hiding-place, resolutely fixed to see the matter out. Wisdom, indeed, moved him to be gone; but love and curiosity were stronger. Time passed slowly for the young man, bolt upright behind the arras. The fire in the room began to die down, and the lamp to burn low and to smoke. And still there was no word of the return of any one to these upper quarters of the house; still the faint hum and clatter of the supper party sounded from far below; and still, under the thick fall of the snow, Shoreby town lay silent upon every side. At length, however, feet and voices began to draw near upon the stair; and presently after several of Sir Daniel's guests arrived upon the landing, and, turning down the corridor, beheld the torn arras and the body of the spy. Some ran forward and some back, and all together began to cry aloud. At the sound of their cries, guests, men-at-arms, ladies, servants, and, in a word, all the inhabitants of that great house, came flying from every direction, and began to join their voices to the tumult. Soon a way was cleared, and Sir Daniel came forth in person, followed by the bridegroom of the morrow, my Lord Shoreby. "My lord," said Sir Daniel, "have I not told you of this knave Black Arrow? To the proof, behold it! There it stands, and, by the rood, my gossip, in a man of yours, or one that stole your colours!" "In good sooth, it was a man of mine," replied Lord Shoreby, hanging back. "I would I had more such. He was keen as a beagle and secret as a mole." "Ay, gossip, truly?" asked Sir Daniel, keenly. "And what came he smelling up so many stairs in my poor mansion? But he will smell no more." "An't please you, Sir Daniel," said one, "here is a paper written upon with some matter, pinned upon his breast." "Give it me, arrow and all," said the knight. And when he had taken into his hand the shaft, he continued for some time to gaze upon it in a sullen musing. "Ay," he said, addressing Lord Shoreby, "here is a hate that followeth hard and close upon my heels. This black stick, or its just likeness, shall yet bring me down. And, gossip, suffer a plain knight to counsel you; and if these hounds begin to wind you, flee! 'Tis like a sickness--it still hangeth, hangeth upon the limbs. But let us see what they have written. It is as I thought, my lord; y'are marked, like an old oak, by the woodman; to-morrow or next day, by will come the axe. But what wrote ye in a letter?" Lord Shoreby snatched the paper from the arrow, read it, crumpled it between his hands, and overcoming the reluctance which had hitherto withheld him from approaching, threw himself on his knees beside the body and eagerly groped in the wallet. He rose to his feet with a somewhat unsettled countenance. "Gossip," he said, "I have indeed lost a letter here that much imported; and could I lay my hand upon the knave that took it, he should incontinently grace a halter. But let us, first of all, secure the issues of the house. Here is enough harm already, by St. George!" Sentinels were posted close around the house and garden; a sentinel on every landing of the stair, a whole troop in the main entrance-hall; and yet another about the bonfire in the shed. Sir Daniel's followers were supplemented by Lord Shoreby's; there was thus no lack of men or weapons to make the house secure, or to entrap a lurking enemy, should one be there. Meanwhile, the body of the spy was carried out through the falling snow and deposited in the abbey church. It was not until these dispositions had been taken, and all had returned to a decorous silence, that the two girls drew Richard Shelton from his place of concealment, and made a full report to him of what had passed. He, upon his side, recounted the visit of the spy, his dangerous discovery, and speedy end. Joanna leaned back very faint against the curtained wall. "It will avail but little," she said. "I shall be wed to-morrow, in the morning, after all!" "What!" cried her friend. "And here is our paladin that driveth lions like mice! Ye have little faith, of a surety. But come, friend lion-driver, give us some comfort; speak, and let us hear bold counsels." Dick was confounded to be thus outfaced with his own exaggerated words; but though he coloured, he still spoke stoutly. "Truly," said he, "we are in straits. Yet, could I but win out of this house for half an hour, I do honestly tell myself that all might still go well; and for the marriage, it should be prevented." "And for the lions," mimicked the girl, "they shall be driven." "I crave your excuse," said Dick. "I speak not now in any boasting humour, but rather as one inquiring after help or counsel; for if I get not forth of this house and through these sentinels, I can do less than naught. Take me, I pray you, rightly." "Why said ye he was rustic, Joan?" the girl inquired. "I warrant he hath a tongue in his head; ready, soft, and bold is his speech at pleasure. What would ye more?" "Nay," sighed Joanna, with a smile, "they have changed me my friend Dick, 'tis sure enough. When I beheld him, he was rough indeed. But it matters little; there is no help for my hard case, and I must still be Lady Shoreby!" "Nay, then," said Dick, "I will even make the adventure. A friar is not much regarded; and if I found a good fairy to lead me up, I may find another belike to carry me down. How call they the name of this spy?" "Rutter," said the young lady; "and an excellent good name to call him by. But how mean ye, lion-driver? What is in your mind to do?" "To offer boldly to go forth," returned Dick; "and if any stop me, to keep an unchanged countenance, and say I go to pray for Rutter. They will be praying over his poor clay even now." "The device is somewhat simple," replied the girl, "yet it may hold." "Nay," said young Shelton, "it is no device, but mere boldness, which serveth often better in great straits." "Ye say true," she said. "Well, go, a-Mary's name, and may Heaven speed you! Ye leave here a poor maid that loves you entirely, and another that is most heartily your friend. Be wary, for their sakes, and make not shipwreck of your safety." "Ay," added Joanna, "go, Dick. Ye run no more peril, whether ye go or stay. Go; ye take my heart with you; the saints defend you!" Dick passed the first sentry with so assured a countenance that the fellow merely fidgeted and stared; but at the second landing the man carried his spear across and bade him name his business. "_Pax vobiscum,_" answered Dick. "I go to pray over the body of this poor Rutter." "Like enough," returned the sentry; "but to go alone is not permitted you." He leaned over the oaken balusters and whistled shrill. "One cometh!" he cried; and then motioned Dick to pass. At the foot of the stair he found the guard afoot and awaiting his arrival; and when he had once more repeated his story, the commander of the post ordered four men out to accompany him to the church. "Let him not slip, my lads," he said. "Bring him to Sir Oliver, on your lives!" The door was then opened; one of the men took Dick by either arm, another marched ahead with a link, and the fourth, with bent bow and the arrow on the string, brought up the rear. In this order they proceeded through the garden, under the thick darkness of the night and the scattering snow, and drew near to the dimly illuminated windows of the abbey church. At the western portal a picket of archers stood, taking what shelter they could find in the hollow of the arched doorways, and all powdered with the snow; and it was not until Dick's conductors had exchanged a word with these, that they were suffered to pass forth and enter the nave of the sacred edifice. The church was doubtfully lighted by the tapers upon the great altar, and by a lamp or two that swung from the arched roof before the private chapels of illustrious families. In the midst of the choir the dead spy lay, his limbs piously composed, upon a bier. A hurried mutter of prayer sounded along the arches; cowled figures knelt in the stalls of the choir, and on the steps of the high altar a priest in pontifical vestments celebrated mass. Upon this fresh entrance, one of the cowled figures arose, and, coming down the steps which elevated the level of the choir above that of the nave, demanded from the leader of the four men what business brought him to the church. Out of respect for the service and the dead, they spoke in guarded tones; but the echoes of that huge, empty building caught up their words, and hollowly repeated and repeated them along the aisles. "A monk!" returned Sir Oliver (for he it was), when he had heard the report of the archer. "My brother, I looked not for your coming," he added, turning to young Shelton. "In all civility, who are ye? and at whose instance do ye join your supplications to ours?" Dick, keeping his cowl about his face, signed to Sir Oliver to move a pace or two aside from the archers; and, so soon as the priest had done so, "I cannot hope to deceive you, sir," he said. "My life is in your hands." Sir Oliver violently started; his stout cheeks grew pale, and for a space he was silent. "Richard," he said, "what brings you here, I know not; but I much misdoubt it to be evil. Nevertheless, for the kindness that was, I would not willingly deliver you to harm. Ye shall sit all night beside me in the stalls: ye shall sit there till my Lord of Shoreby be married, and the party gone safe home; and if all goeth well, and ye have planned no evil, in the end ye shall go whither ye will. But if your purpose be bloody, it shall return upon your head. Amen!" And the priest devoutly crossed himself, and turned and louted to the altar. With that, he spoke a few words more to the soldiers, and taking Dick by the hand, led him up to the choir, and placed him in the stall beside his own, where, for mere decency, the lad had instantly to kneel and appear to be busy with his devotions. His mind and his eyes, however, were continually wandering. Three of the soldiers, he observed, instead of returning to the house, had got them quietly into a point of vantage in the aisle; and he could not doubt that they had done so by Sir Oliver's command. Here, then, he was trapped. Here he must spend the night in the ghostly glimmer and shadow of the church, and looking on the pale face of him he slew; and here, in the morning, he must see his sweetheart married to another man before his eyes. But, for all that, he obtained a command upon his mind, and built himself up in patience to await the issue. CHAPTER IV IN THE ABBEY CHURCH In Shoreby Abbey Church the prayers were kept up all night without cessation, now with the singing of psalms, now with a note or two upon the bell. Rutter, the spy, was nobly waked. There he lay, meanwhile, as they had arranged him, his dead hands crossed upon his bosom, his dead eyes staring on the roof; and hard by, in the stall, the lad who had slain him waited, in sore disquietude, the coming of the morning. Once only, in the course of the hours, Sir Oliver leaned across to his captive. "Richard," he whispered, "my son, if ye mean me evil, I will certify, on my soul's welfare, ye design upon an innocent man. Sinful in the eye of Heaven I do declare myself; but sinful as against you I am not, neither have been ever." "My father," returned Dick, in the same tone of voice, "trust me, I design nothing; but as for your innocence, I may not forget that ye cleared yourself but lamely." "A man may be innocently guilty," replied the priest. "He may be set blindfolded upon a mission, ignorant of its true scope. So it was with me. I did decoy your father to his death; but as Heaven sees us in this sacred place, I knew not what I did." "It may be," returned Dick. "But see what a strange web ye have woven, that I should be, at this hour, at once your prisoner and your judge; that ye should both threaten my days and deprecate my anger. Methinks, if ye had been all your life a true man and good priest, ye would neither thus fear nor thus detest me. And now to your prayers. I do obey you, since needs must; but I will not be burthened with your company." The priest uttered a sigh so heavy that it had almost touched the lad into some sentiment of pity, and he bowed his head upon his hands like a man borne down below a weight of care. He joined no longer in the psalms; but Dick could hear the beads rattle though his fingers and the prayers a-pattering between his teeth. Yet a little, and the grey of the morning began to struggle through the painted casements of the church, and to put to shame the glimmer of the tapers. The light slowly broadened and brightened, and presently through the southeastern clerestories a flush of rosy sunlight flickered on the walls. The storm was over; the great clouds had disburthened their snow and fled farther on, and the new day was breaking on a merry winter landscape sheathed in white. A bustle of church officers followed; the bier was carried forth to the deadhouse, and the stains of blood were cleansed from off the tiles, that no such ill-omened spectacle should disgrace the marriage of Lord Shoreby. At the same time, the very ecclesiastics who had been so dismally engaged all night began to put on morning faces, to do honour to the merrier ceremony which was about to follow. And further to announce the coming of the day, the pious of the town began to assemble and fall to prayer before their favourite shrines, or wait their turn at the confessionals. Favoured by this stir, it was of course easily possible for any man to avoid the vigilance of Sir Daniel's sentries at the door; and presently Dick, looking about him wearily, caught the eye of no less a person than Will Lawless, still in his monk's habit. The outlaw, at the same moment, recognised his leader, and privily signed to him with hand and eye. Now, Dick was far from having forgiven the old rogue his most untimely drunkenness, but he had no desire to involve him in his own predicament; and he signalled back to him, as plain as he was able, to begone. Lawless, as though he had understood, disappeared at once behind a pillar, and Dick breathed again. What, then, was his dismay to feel himself plucked by the sleeve and to find the old robber installed beside him, upon the next seat, and, to all appearance, plunged in his devotions! Instantly Sir Oliver arose from his place, and, gliding behind the stalls, made for the soldiers in the aisle. If the priest's suspicions had been so lightly wakened, the harm was already done, and Lawless a prisoner in the church. "Move not," whispered Dick. "We are in the plaguiest pass, thanks, before all things, to thy swinishness of yestereven. When ye saw me here, so strangely seated where I have neither right nor interest, what a murrain! could ye not smell harm and get ye gone from evil?" "Nay," returned Lawless, "I thought ye had heard from Ellis, and were here on duty." "Ellis!" echoed Dick. "Is Ellis, then, returned?" "For sure," replied the outlaw. "He came last night, and belted me sore for being in wine--so there ye are avenged, my master. A furious man is Ellis Duckworth! He hath ridden me hot-spur from Craven to prevent this marriage; and, Master Dick, ye know the way of him--do so he will!" "Nay, then," returned Dick, with composure, "you and I, my poor brother, are dead men; for I sit here a prisoner upon suspicion, and my neck was to answer for this very marriage that he purposeth to mar. I had a fair choice, by the rood! to lose my sweetheart or else lose my life! Well, the cast is thrown--it is to be my life." "By the mass," cried Lawless, half arising, "I am gone!" But Dick had his hand at once upon his shoulder. "Friend Lawless, sit ye still," he said. "An ye have eyes, look yonder at the corner by the chancel arch; see ye not that, even upon the motion of your rising, yon armed men are up and ready to intercept you? Yield ye, friend. Ye were bold aboard ship, when ye thought to die a sea-death; be bold again, now that y'are to die presently upon the gallows." "Master Dick," gasped Lawless, "the thing hath come upon me somewhat of the suddenest. But give me a moment till I fetch my breath again; and, by the mass, I will be as stout-hearted as yourself." "Here is my bold fellow!" returned Dick. "And yet, Lawless, it goes hard against the grain with me to die; but where whining mendeth nothing, wherefore whine?" "Nay, that indeed!" chimed Lawless. "And a fig for death, at worst! It has to be done, my master, soon or late. And hanging in a good quarrel is an easy death, they say, though I could never hear of any that came back to say so." And so saying, the stout old rascal leaned back in his stall, folded his arms, and began to look about him with the greatest air of insolence and unconcern. "And for the matter of that," Dick added, "it is yet our best chance to keep quiet. We wot not yet what Duckworth purposes; and when all is said, and if the worst befall, we may yet clear our feet of it." Now that they ceased talking, they were aware of a very distant and thin strain of mirthful music which steadily drew nearer, louder, and merrier. The bells in the tower began to break forth into a doubling peal, and a greater and greater concourse of people to crowd into the church, shuffling the snow from off their feet, and clapping and blowing in their hands. The western door was flung wide open, showing a glimpse of sunlit, snowy street, and admitting in a great gust the shrewd air of the morning; and in short, it became plain by every sign that Lord Shoreby desired to be married very early in the day, and that the wedding-train was drawing near. Some of Lord Shoreby's men now cleared a passage down the middle aisle, forcing the people back with lance-stocks; and just then, outside the portal, the secular musicians could be descried drawing near over the frozen snow, the fifers and trumpeters scarlet in the face with lusty blowing, the drummers and the cymbalists beating as for a wager. These, as they drew near the door of the sacred building, filed off on either side, and, marking time to their own vigorous music, stood stamping in the snow. As they thus opened their ranks, the leaders of this noble bridal train appeared behind and between them; and such was the variety and gaiety of their attire, such the displays of silk and velvet, fur and satin, embroidery and lace, that the procession showed forth upon the snow like a flower-bed in a path or a painted window in a wall. First came the bride, a sorry sight, as pale as winter, clinging to Sir Daniel's arm, and attended, as bridesmaid, by the short young lady who had befriended Dick the night before. Close behind, in the most radiant toilet, followed the bridegroom, halting on a gouty foot; and as he passed the threshold of the sacred building and doffed his hat, his bald head was seen to be rosy with emotion. And now came the hour of Ellis Duckworth. Dick, who sat stunned among contrary emotions, grasping the desk in front of him, beheld a movement in the crowd, people jostling backward, and eyes and arms uplifted. Following these signs, he beheld three or four men with bent bows, leaning from the clerestory gallery. At the same instant they delivered their discharge, and before the clamour and cries of the astounded populace had time to swell fully upon the ear, they had flitted from their perch and disappeared. The nave was full of swaying heads and voices screaming; the ecclesiastics thronged in terror from their places; the music ceased, and though the bells overhead continued for some seconds to clang upon the air, some wind of the disaster seemed to find its way at last even to the chamber where the ringers were leaping on their ropes, and they also desisted from their merry labours. Right in the midst of the nave the bridegroom lay stone-dead, pierced by two black arrows. The bride had fainted. Sir Daniel stood, towering above the crowd in his surprise and anger, a cloth-yard shaft quivering in his left forearm, and his face streaming blood from another which had grazed his brow. Long before any search could be made for them, the authors of this tragic interruption had clattered down a turn-pike stair and decamped by a postern door. But Dick and Lawless still remained in pawn; they had, indeed, arisen on the first alarm, and pushed manfully to gain the door; but what with the narrowness of the stalls and the crowding of terrified priests and choristers, the attempt had been in vain, and they had stoically resumed their places. And now, pale with horror, Sir Oliver rose to his feet and called upon Sir Daniel, pointing with one hand to Dick. "Here," he cried, "is Richard Shelton--alas the hour!--blood guilty! Seize him!--bid him be seized! For all our lives' sakes, take him and bind him surely! He hath sworn our fall." Sir Daniel was blinded by anger--blinded by the hot blood that still streamed across his face. [Illustration: _First came the bride, a sorry sight, as pale as the winter, clinging to Sir Daniel's arm_] "Where?" he bellowed. "Hale him forth! By the cross of Holywood, but he shall rue this hour!" The crowd fell back, and a party of archers invaded the choir, laid rough hands on Dick, dragged him head-foremost from the stall, and thrust him by the shoulders down the chancel steps. Lawless, on his part, sat as still as a mouse. Sir Daniel, brushing the blood out of his eyes, stared blinkingly upon his captive. "Ay," he said, "treacherous and insolent, I have thee fast; and by all potent oaths, for every drop of blood that now trickles in mine eyes, I will wring a groan out of thy carcase. Away with him!" he added. "Here is no place! Off with him to my house. I will number every joint of thy body with a torture." But Dick, putting off his captors, uplifted his voice. "Sanctuary!" he shouted. "Sanctuary! Ho, there, my fathers! They would drag me from the church!" "From the church thou hast defiled with murder, boy," added a tall man, magnificently dressed. "On what probation?" cried Dick. "They do accuse me, indeed, of some complicity, but have not proved one tittle. I was, in truth, a suitor for this damsel's hand; and she, I will be bold to say it, repaid my suit with favour. But what then? To love a maid is no offence, I trow--nay, nor to gain her love. In all else, I stand here free from guiltiness." There was a murmur of approval among the bystanders, so boldly Dick declared his innocence; but at the same time a throng of accusers arose upon the other side, crying how he had been found last night in Sir Daniel's house, how he wore a sacrilegious disguise; and in the midst of the babel, Sir Oliver indicated Lawless, both by voice and gesture, as accomplice to the fact. He, in his turn, was dragged from his seat and set beside his leader. The feelings of the crowd rose high on either side, and while some dragged the prisoners to and fro to favour their escape, others cursed and struck them with their fists. Dick's ears rang and his brain swam dizzily, like a man struggling in the eddies of a furious river. But the tall man who had already answered Dick, by a prodigious exercise of voice restored silence and order in the mob. "Search them," he said, "for arms. We may so judge of their intentions." Upon Dick they found no weapon but his poniard, and this told in his favour, until one man officiously drew it from its sheath, and found it still uncleansed of the blood of Rutter. At this there was a great shout among Sir Daniel's followers, which the tall man suppressed by a gesture and an imperious glance. But when it came to the turn of Lawless, there was found under his gown a sheaf of arrows identical with those that had been shot. "How say ye now?" asked the tall man, frowningly, of Dick. "Sir," replied Dick, "I am here in sanctuary, is it not so? Well, sir, I see by your bearing that ye are high in station, and I read in your countenance the marks of piety and justice. To you, then, I will yield me prisoner, and that blithely, foregoing the advantage of this holy place. But rather than to be yielded into the discretion of that man--whom I do here accuse with a loud voice to be the murderer of my natural father and the unjust retainer of my lands and revenues--rather than that, I would beseech you, under favour, with your own gentle hand, to despatch me on the spot. Your own ears have heard him, how before that I was proven guilty he did threaten me with torments. It standeth not with your own honour to deliver me to my sworn enemy and old oppressor, but to try me fairly by the way of law, and, if that I be guilty indeed, to slay me mercifully." "My lord," cried Sir Daniel, "ye will not hearken to this wolf? His bloody dagger reeks him the lie into his face." "Nay, but suffer me, good knight," returned the tall stranger; "your own vehemence doth somewhat tell against yourself." And here the bride, who had come to herself some minutes past and looked wildly on upon this scene, broke loose from those that held her, and fell upon her knees before the last speaker. "My Lord of Risingham," she cried, "hear me, in justice. I am here in this man's custody by mere force, reft from mine own people. Since that day I had never pity, countenance, nor comfort from the face of man--but from him only--Richard Shelton--whom they now accuse and labour to undo. My lord, if he was yesternight in Sir Daniel's mansion, it was I that brought him there; he came but at my prayer, and thought to do no hurt. While yet Sir Daniel was a good lord to him, he fought with them of the Black Arrow loyally; but when his foul guardian sought his life by practices, and he fled by night, for his soul's sake, out of that bloody house, whither was he to turn--he, helpless and penniless? Or if he be fallen among ill company, whom should ye blame--the lad that was unjustly handled, or the guardian that did abuse his trust?" And then the short young lady fell on her knees by Joanna's side. "And I, my good lord and natural uncle," she added, "I can bear testimony, on my conscience and before the face of all, that what this maiden saith is true. It was I, unworthy, that did lead the young man in." Earl Risingham had heard in silence, and when the voices ceased, he still stood silent for a space. Then he gave Joanna his hand to arise, though it was to be observed that he did not offer the like courtesy to her who had called herself his niece. "Sir Daniel," he said, "here is a right intricate affair, the which, with your good leave, it shall be mine to examine and adjust. Content ye, then; your business is in careful hands; justice shall be done you; and in the meanwhile, get ye incontinently home, and have your hurts attended. The air is shrewd, and I would not ye took cold upon these scratches." He made a sign with his hand; it was passed down the nave by obsequious servants, who waited there upon his smallest gesture. Instantly, without the church, a tucket sounded shrill, and through the open portal archers and men-at-arms, uniformly arrayed in the colours and wearing the badge of Lord Risingham, began to file into the church, took Dick and Lawless from those who still detained them, and closing their files about the prisoners, marched forth again and disappeared. As they were passing, Joanna held both her hands to Dick and cried him her farewell; and the bridesmaid, nothing downcast by her uncle's evident displeasure, blew him a kiss, with a "Keep your heart up, lion-driver!" that for the first time since the accident called up a smile to the faces of the crowd. CHAPTER V EARL RISINGHAM Earl Risingham, although by far the most important person then in Shoreby, was poorly lodged in the house of a private gentleman upon the extreme outskirts of the town. Nothing but the armed men at the doors, and the mounted messengers that kept arriving and departing, announced the temporary residence of a great lord. Thus it was that, from lack of space, Dick and Lawless were clapped into the same apartment. "Well spoken, Master Richard," said the outlaw; "it was excellently well spoken, and, for my part, I thank you cordially. Here we are in good hands; we shall be justly tried, and, some time this evening, decently hanged on the same tree." "Indeed, my poor friend, I do believe it," answered Dick. "Yet have we a string to our bow," returned Lawless. "Ellis Duckworth is a man out of ten thousand; he holdeth you right near his heart, both for your own and for your father's sake; and knowing you guiltless of this fact, he will stir earth and heaven to bear you clear." "It may not be," said Dick. "What can he do? He hath but a handful. Alack, if it were but to-morrow--could I but keep a certain tryst an hour before noon to-morrow--all were, I think, otherwise. But now there is no help." "Well," concluded Lawless, "an ye will stand to it for my innocence, I will stand to it for yours, and that stoutly. It shall naught avail us; but an I be to hang, it shall not be for lack of swearing." And then, while Dick gave himself over to his reflections, the old rogue curled himself down into a corner, pulled his monkish hood about his face, and composed himself to sleep. Soon he was loudly snoring, so utterly had his long life of hardship and adventure blunted the sense of apprehension. It was long after noon, and the day was already failing, before the door was opened and Dick taken forth and led up-stairs to where, in a warm cabinet, Earl Risingham sat musing over the fire. On his captive's entrance he looked up. "Sir," he said, "I knew your father, who was a man of honour, and this inclineth me to be the more lenient; but I may not hide from you that heavy charges lie against your character. Ye do consort with murderers and robbers; upon a clear probation ye have carried war against the king's peace; ye are suspected to have piratically seized upon a ship; ye are found skulking with a counterfeit presentment in your enemy's house; a man is slain that very evening----" "An it like you, my lord," Dick interposed, "I will at once avow my guilt, such as it is. I slew this fellow Rutter; and to the proof"--searching in his bosom--"here is a letter from his wallet." Lord Risingham took the letter, and opened and read it twice. "Ye have read this?" he inquired. "I have read it," answered Dick. "Are ye for York or Lancaster?" the earl demanded. "My lord, it was but a little while back that I was asked that question, and knew not how to answer it," said Dick; "but having answered once, I will not vary. My lord, I am for York." The earl nodded approvingly. "Honestly replied," he said. "But wherefore, then, deliver me this letter?" "Nay, but against traitors, my lord, are not all sides arrayed?" cried Dick. "I would they were, young gentleman," returned the earl; "and I do at least approve your saying. There is more youth than guile in you, I do perceive; and were not Sir Daniel a mighty man upon our side, I were half tempted to espouse your quarrel. For I have inquired, and it appears ye have been hardly dealt with, and have much excuse. But look ye, sir, I am, before all else, a leader in the Queen's interest; and though by nature a just man, as I believe, and leaning even to the excess of mercy, yet must I order my goings for my party's interest, and, to keep Sir Daniel, I would go far about." "My lord," returned Dick, "ye will think me very bold to counsel you; but do ye count upon Sir Daniel's faith? Methought he had changed sides intolerably often." "Nay, it is the way of England. What would ye have?" the earl demanded. "But ye are unjust to the knight of Tunstall; and as faith goes, in this unfaithful generation, he hath of late been honourably true to us of Lancaster. Even in our last reverses he stood firm." "An it pleased you, then," said Dick, "to cast your eye upon this letter, ye might somewhat change your thought of him"; and he handed to the earl Sir Daniel's letter to Lord Wensleydale. The effect upon the earl's countenance was instant; he lowered like an angry lion, and his hand, with a sudden movement, clutched at his dagger. "Ye have read this also?" he asked. "Even so," said Dick. "It is your lordship's own estate he offers to Lord Wensleydale?" "It is my own estate, even as ye say!" returned the earl. "I am your bedesman for this letter. It hath shown me a fox's hole. Command me, Master Shelton; I will not be backward in gratitude, and to begin with, York or Lancaster, true man or thief, I do now set you at freedom. Go, a-Mary's name! But judge it right that I retain and hang your fellow, Lawless. The crime hath been most open, and it were fitting that some open punishment should follow." "My lord, I make it my first suit to you to spare him also," pleaded Dick. "It is an old, condemned rogue, thief, and vagabond, Master Shelton," said the earl. "He hath been gallows-ripe this score of years. And, whether for one thing or another, whether to-morrow or the day after, where is the great choice?" "Yet, my lord, it was through love to me that he came hither," answered Dick, "and I were churlish and thankless to desert him." "Master Shelton, ye are troublesome," replied the earl, severely. "It is an evil way to prosper in this world. Howbeit, and to be quit of your importunity, I will once more humour you. Go, then, together; but go warily, and get swiftly out of Shoreby town. For this Sir Daniel (whom may the saints confound!) thirsteth most greedily to have your blood." "My lord, I do now offer you in words my gratitude, trusting at some brief date to pay you some of it in service," replied Dick, as he turned from the apartment. CHAPTER VI ARBLASTER AGAIN When Dick and Lawless were suffered to steal, by a back way, out of the house where Lord Risingham held his garrison, the evening had already come. They paused in shelter of the garden wall to consult on their best course. The danger was extreme. If one of Sir Daniel's men caught sight of them and raised the view-hallo, they would be run down and butchered instantly. And not only was the town of Shoreby a mere net of peril for their lives, but to make for the open country was to run the risk of the patrols. A little way off, upon some open ground, they spied a windmill standing; and hard by that, a very large granary with open doors. "How if we lay there until the night fall?" Dick proposed. And Lawless having no better suggestion to offer, they made a straight push for the granary at a run, and concealed themselves behind the door among some straw. The daylight rapidly departed; and presently the moon was silvering the frozen snow. Now or never was their opportunity to gain the Goat and Bagpipes unobserved and change their tell-tale garments. Yet even then it was advisable to go round by the outskirts, and not run the gauntlet of the market-place, where, in the concourse of people, they stood the more imminent peril to be recognised and slain. This course was a long one. It took them not far from the house by the beach, now lying dark and silent, and brought them forth at last by the margin of the harbour. Many of the ships, as they could see by the clear moonshine, had weighed anchor, and, profiting by the calm sky, proceeded for more distant parts; answerably to this, the rude alehouses along the beach (although, in defiance of the curfew law, they still shone with fire and candle) were no longer thronged with customers, and no longer echoed to the chorus of sea-songs. Hastily, half running, with their monkish raiment kilted to the knee, they plunged through the deep snow and threaded the labyrinth of marine lumber; and they were already more than half-way round the harbour when, as they were passing close before an alehouse, the door suddenly opened and let out a gush of light upon their fleeting figures. Instantly they stopped, and made believe to be engaged in earnest conversation. Three men, one after another, came out of the alehouse, and the last closed the door behind him. All three were unsteady upon their feet, as if they had passed the day in deep potations, and they now stood wavering in the moonlight, like men who knew not what they would be after. The tallest of the three was talking in a loud, lamentable voice. "Seven pieces of as good Gascony as ever a tapster broached," he was saying, "the best ship out o' the port o' Dartmouth, a Virgin Mary parcel-gilt, thirteen pounds of good gold money----" "I have had losses, too," interrupted one of the others. "I have had losses of mine own, gossip Arblaster. I was robbed at Martinmas of five shillings and a leather wallet well worth ninepence farthing." Dick's heart smote him at what he heard. Until that moment he had not perhaps thought twice of the poor skipper who had been ruined by the loss of the _Good Hope_; so careless, in those days, were men who wore arms of the goods and interests of their inferiors. But this sudden encounter reminded him sharply of the high-handed manner and ill-ending of his enterprise; and both he and Lawless turned their heads the other way, to avoid the chance of recognition. The ship's dog had, however, made his escape from the wreck and found his way back again to Shoreby. He was now at Arblaster's heels, and suddenly sniffing and pricking his ears, he darted forward and began to bark furiously at the two sham friars. His master unsteadily followed him. "Hey, shipmates!" he cried. "Have ye ever a penny piece for a poor old shipman, clean destroyed by pirates? I am a man that would have paid for you both o' Thursday morning; and now here I be, o' Saturday night, begging for a flagon of ale! Ask my man Tom, if ye misdoubt me. Seven pieces of good Gascon wine, a ship that was mine own, and was my father's before me, a Blessed Mary of plane-tree wood and parcel-gilt, and thirteen pounds in gold and silver. Hey! what say ye? A man that fought the French, too; for I have fought the French; I have cut more French throats upon the high seas than ever a man that sails out of Dartmouth. Come, a penny piece." Neither Dick nor Lawless durst answer him a word, lest he should recognise their voices; and they stood there as helpless as a ship ashore, not knowing where to turn nor what to hope. "Are ye dumb, boy?" inquired the skipper. "Mates," he added, with a hiccup, "they be dumb. I like not this manner of discourtesy; for an a man be dumb, so be as he's courteous, he will still speak when he was spoken to, methinks." By this time the sailor, Tom, who was a man of great personal strength, seemed to have conceived some suspicion of these two speechless figures; and being soberer than his captain, stepped suddenly before him, took Lawless roughly by the shoulder, and asked him, with an oath, what ailed him that he held his tongue. To this the outlaw, thinking all was over, made answer by a wrestling feint that stretched the sailor on the sand, and, calling upon Dick to follow him, took to his heels among the lumber. The affair passed in a second. Before Dick could run at all, Arblaster had him in his arms; Tom, crawling on his face, had caught him by one foot, and the third man had a drawn cutlass brandishing above his head. It was not so much the danger, it was not so much the annoyance, that now bowed down the spirits of young Shelton; it was the profound humiliation to have escaped Sir Daniel, convinced Lord Risingham, and now fall helpless in the hands of this old, drunken sailor; and not merely helpless, but, as his conscience loudly told him when it was too late, actually guilty--actually the bankrupt debtor of the man whose ship he had stolen and lost. "Bring me him back into the alehouse, till I see his face," said Arblaster. "Nay, nay," returned Tom; "but let us first unload his wallet, lest the other lads cry share." But though he was searched from head to foot, not a penny was found upon him; nothing but Lord Foxham's signet, which they plucked savagely from his finger. "Turn me him to the moon," said the skipper; and taking Dick by the chin, he cruelly jerked his head into the air. "Blessed Virgin!" he cried, "it is the pirate!" "Hey!" cried Tom. "By the Virgin of Bordeaux, it is the man himself!" repeated Arblaster. "What, sea-thief, do I hold you?" he cried. "Where is my ship? Where is my wine? Hey! have I you in my hands? Tom, give me one end of a cord here; I will so truss me this sea-thief, hand and foot together, like a basting turkey--marry, I will so bind him up--and thereafter I will so beat--so beat him!" And so he ran on, winding the cord meanwhile about Dick's limbs with the dexterity peculiar to seamen, and at every turn and cross securing it with a knot, and tightening the whole fabric with a savage pull. When he had done, the lad was a mere package in his hands--as helpless as the dead. The skipper held him at arm's length, and laughed aloud. Then he fetched him a stunning buffet on the ear; and then turned him about, and furiously kicked and kicked him. Anger rose up in Dick's bosom like a storm; anger strangled him, and he thought to have died; but when the sailor, tired of this cruel play, dropped him all his length upon the sand and turned to consult with his companions, he instantly regained command of his temper. Here was a momentary respite; ere they began again to torture him, he might have found some method to escape from this degrading and fatal misadventure. Presently, sure enough, and while his captors were still discussing what to do with him, he took heart of grace, and, with a pretty steady voice, addressed them. "My masters," he began, "are ye gone clean foolish? Here hath Heaven put into your hands as pretty an occasion to grow rich as ever shipman had--such as ye might make thirty over-sea adventures and not find again--and, by the mass! what do ye? Beat me?--nay; so would an angry child! But for long-headed tarry-Johns, that fear not fire nor water, and that love gold as they love beef, methinks ye are not wise." "Ay," said Tom, "now y'are trussed ye would cozen us." "Cozen you!" repeated Dick. "Nay, if ye be fools, it would be easy. But if ye be shrewd fellows, as I trow ye are, ye can see plainly where your interest lies. When I took your ship from you, we were many, we were well clad and armed; but now, bethink you a little, who mustered that array? One incontestably that hath much gold. And if he, being already rich, continueth to hunt after more even in the face of storms--bethink you once more--shall there not be a treasure somewhere hidden?" "What meaneth he?" asked one of the men. "Why, if ye have lost an old skiff and a few jugs of vinegary wine," continued Dick, "forget them, for the trash they are; and do ye rather buckle to an adventure worth the name, that shall, in twelve hours, make or mar you for ever. But take me up from where I lie, and let us go somewhere near at hand and talk across a flagon, for I am sore and frozen, and my mouth is half among the snow." "He seeks but to cozen us," said Tom, contemptuously. "Cozen! cozen!" cried the third man. "I would I could see the man that could cozen me! He were a cozener indeed! Nay, I was not born yesterday. I can see a church when it hath a steeple on it; and for my part, gossip Arblaster, methinks there is some sense in this young man. Shall we go hear him, indeed? Say, shall we go hear him?" "I would look gladly on a pottle of strong ale, good Master Pirret," returned Arblaster. "How say ye, Tom? But then the wallet is empty." "I will pay," said the other--"I will pay. I would fain see this matter out; I do believe, upon my conscience, there is gold in it." "Nay, if ye get again to drinking, all is lost!" cried Tom. "Gossip Arblaster, ye suffer your fellow to have too much liberty," returned Master Pirret. "Would ye be led by a hired man? Fy, fy!" "Peace, fellow!" said Arblaster, addressing Tom. "Will ye put your oar in? Truly a fine pass, when the crew is to correct the skipper!" "Well, then, go your way," said Tom; "I wash my hands of you." "Set him, then, upon his feet," said Master Pirret. "I know a privy place where we may drink and discourse." "If I am to walk, my friends, ye must set my feet at liberty," said Dick, when he had been once more planted upright like a post. "He saith true," laughed Pirret. "Truly, he could not walk accoutred as he is. Give it a slit--out with your knife and slit it, gossip." Even Arblaster paused at this proposal; but as his companion continued to insist, and Dick had the sense to keep the merest wooden indifference of expression, and only shrugged his shoulders over the delay, the skipper consented at last, and cut the cords which tied his prisoner's feet and legs. Not only did this enable Dick to walk; but the whole network of his bonds being proportionately loosened, he felt the arm behind his back begin to move more freely, and could hope, with time and trouble, to entirely disengage it. So much he owed already to the owlish silliness and greed of Master Pirret. That worthy now assumed the lead, and conducted them to the very same rude alehouse where Lawless had taken Arblaster on the day of the gale. It was now quite deserted; the fire was a pile of red embers, radiating the most ardent heat; and when they had chosen their places, and the landlord had set before them a measure of mulled ale, both Pirret and Arblaster stretched forth their legs and squared their elbows like men bent upon a pleasant hour. The table at which they sat, like all the others in the alehouse, consisted of a heavy, square board, set on a pair of barrels; and each of the four curiously-assorted cronies sat at one side of the square, Pirret facing Arblaster, and Dick opposite to the common sailor. "And now, young man," said Pirret, "to your tale. It doth appear, indeed, that ye have somewhat abused our gossip Arblaster; but what then? Make it up to him--show him but this chance to become wealthy--and I will go pledge he will forgive you." So far Dick had spoken pretty much at random; but it was now necessary, under the supervision of six eyes, to invent and tell some marvellous story, and, if it were possible, get back into his hands the all-important signet. To squander time was the first necessity. The longer his stay lasted, the more would his captors drink, and the surer should he be when he attempted his escape. Well, Dick was not much of an inventor, and what he told was pretty much the tale of Ali Baba, with Shoreby and Tunstall Forest substituted for the East, and the treasures of the cavern rather exaggerated than diminished. As the reader is aware, it is an excellent story, and has but one drawback--that it is not true; and so, as these three simple shipmen now heard it for the first time, their eyes stood out of their faces, and their mouths gaped like codfish at a fishmonger's. Pretty soon a second measure of mulled ale was called for; and while Dick was still artfully spinning out the incidents a third followed the second. Here was the position of the parties towards the end: Arblaster, three-parts drunk and one-half asleep, hung helpless on his stool. Even Tom had been much delighted with the tale, and his vigilance had abated in proportion. Meanwhile, Dick had gradually wormed his right arm clear of its bonds, and was ready to risk all. "And so," said Pirret, "y'are one of these?" "I was made so," replied Dick, "against my will; but an I could but get a sack or two of gold coin to my share, I should be a fool indeed to continue dwelling in a filthy cave, and standing shot and buffet like a soldier. Here be we four; good! Let us, then, go forth into the forest to-morrow ere the sun be up. Could we come honestly by a donkey, it were better; but an we cannot, we have our four strong backs, and I warrant me we shall come home staggering." Pirret licked his lips. "And this magic," he said--"this password, whereby the cave is opened--how call ye it, friend?" "Nay, none know the word but the three chiefs," returned Dick; "but here is your great good fortune, that, on this very evening, I should be the bearer of a spell to open it. It is a thing not trusted twice a year beyond the captain's wallet." "A spell!" said Arblaster, half awakening, and squinting upon Dick with one eye. "Aroint thee! no spells! I be a good Christian. Ask my man Tom, else." "Nay, but this is white magic," said Dick. "It doth naught with the devil; only the powers of numbers, herbs, and planets." "Ay, ay," said Pirret; "'tis but white magic, gossip. There is no sin therein, I do assure you. But proceed, good youth. This spell--in what should it consist?" "Nay, that I will incontinently show you," answered Dick. "Have ye there the ring ye took from my finger? Good! Now hold it forth before you by the extreme finger-ends, at the arm's length, and over against the shining of these embers. 'Tis so exactly. Thus, then, is the spell." With a haggard glance, Dick saw the coast was clear between him and the door. He put up an internal prayer. Then whipping forth his arm, he made but one snatch of the ring, and at the same instant, levering up the table, he sent it bodily over upon the seaman Tom. He, poor soul, went down bawling under the ruins; and before Arblaster understood that anything was wrong, or Pirret could collect his dazzled wits, Dick had run to the door and escaped into the moonlit night. The moon, which now rode in the mid-heavens, and the extreme whiteness of the snow, made the open ground about the harbour bright as day; and young Shelton leaping, with kilted robe, among the lumber, was a conspicuous figure from afar. Tom and Pirret followed him with shouts; from every drinking-shop they were joined by others whom their cries aroused; and presently a whole fleet of sailors was in full pursuit. But Jack ashore was a bad runner, even in the fifteenth century, and Dick, besides, had a start, which he rapidly improved, until, as he drew near the entrance of a narrow lane, he even paused and looked laughingly behind him. Upon the white floor of snow, all the shipmen of Shoreby came clustering in an inky mass, and tailing out rearward in isolated clumps. Every man was shouting or screaming; every man was gesticulating with both arms in air; some one was continually falling; and to complete the picture, when one fell, a dozen would fall upon the top of him. The confused mass of sound which they rolled up as high as to the moon was partly comical and partly terrifying to the fugitive whom they were hunting. In itself, it was impotent, for he made sure no seaman in the port could run him down. But the mere volume of noise, in so far as it must awake all the sleepers in Shoreby and bring all the skulking sentries to the street, did really threaten him with danger in the front. So, spying a dark doorway at a corner, he whipped briskly into it, and let the uncouth hunt go by him, still shouting and gesticulating, and all red with hurry and white with tumbles in the snow. It was a long while, indeed, before this great invasion of the town by the harbour came to an end, and it was long before silence was restored. For long, lost sailors were still to be heard pounding and shouting through the streets in all directions and in every quarter of the town. Quarrels followed, sometimes among themselves, sometimes with the men of the patrols; knives were drawn, blows given and received, and more than one dead body remained behind upon the snow. When, a full hour later, the last seaman returned grumblingly to the harbour side and his particular tavern, it may fairly be questioned if he had ever known what manner of man he was pursuing, but it was absolutely sure that he had now forgotten. By next morning there were many strange stories flying; and a little while after, the legend of the devil's nocturnal visit was an article of faith with all the lads of Shoreby. But the return of the last seaman did not, even yet, set free young Shelton from his cold imprisonment in the doorway. For some time after, there was a great activity of patrols; and special parties came forth to make the round of the place and report to one or other of the great lords, whose slumbers had been thus unusually broken. The night was already well spent before Dick ventured from his hiding-place and came, safe and sound, but aching with cold and bruises, to the door of the Goat and Bagpipes. As the law required, there was neither fire nor candle in the house; but he groped his way into a corner of the icy guest-room, found an end of a blanket, which he hitched around his shoulders, and creeping close to the nearest sleeper, was soon lost in slumber. BOOK V CROOKBACK CHAPTER I THE SHRILL TRUMPET Very early the next morning, before the first peep of the day, Dick arose, changed his garments, armed himself once more like a gentleman, and set forth for Lawless's den in the forest. There, it will be remembered, he had left Lord Foxham's papers; and to get these and be back in time for the tryst with the young Duke of Gloucester could only be managed by an early start and the most vigorous walking. The frost was more rigorous than ever; the air windless and dry, and stinging to the nostril. The moon had gone down, but the stars were still bright and numerous, and the reflection from the snow was clear and cheerful. There was no need for a lamp to walk by; nor, in that still but ringing air, the least temptation to delay. Dick had crossed the greater part of the open ground between Shoreby and the forest, and had reached the bottom of the little hill, some hundred yards below the Cross of St. Bride, when, through the stillness of the black morn, there rang forth the note of a trumpet, so shrill, clear, and piercing, that he thought he had never heard the match of it for audibility. It was blown once, and then hurriedly a second time; and then the clash of steel succeeded. At this young Shelton pricked his ears, and drawing his sword, ran forward up the hill. Presently he came in sight of the cross, and was aware of a most fierce encounter raging on the road before it. There were seven or eight assailants, and but one to keep head against them; but so active and dexterous was this one, so desperately did he charge and scatter his opponents, so deftly keep his footing on the ice, that already, before Dick could intervene, he had slain one, wounded another, and kept the whole in check. Still, it was by a miracle that he continued his defence, and at any moment, any accident, the least slip of foot or error of hand, his life would be a forfeit. "Hold ye well, sir! Here is help!" cried Richard; and forgetting that he was alone, and that the cry was somewhat irregular, "To the Arrow! to the Arrow!" he shouted, as he fell upon the rear of the assailants. These were stout fellows also, for they gave not an inch at this surprise, but faced about, and fell with astonishing fury upon Dick. Four against one, the steel flashed about him in the starlight; the sparks flew fiercely; one of the men opposed to him fell--in the stir of the fight he hardly knew why; then he himself was struck across the head, and though the steel cap below his hood protected him, the blow beat him down upon one knee, with a brain whirling like a windmill-sail. [Illustration: _There were seven or eight assailants, and but one to keep head against them_] Meanwhile the man whom he had come to rescue, instead of joining in the conflict, had, on the first sign of intervention, leaped aback and blown again, and yet more urgently and loudly, on that same shrill-voiced trumpet that began the alarm. Next moment, indeed, his foes were on him, and he was once more charging and fleeing, leaping, stabbing, dropping to his knee, and using indifferently sword and dagger, foot and hand, with the same unshaken courage and feverish energy and speed. But that ear-piercing summons had been heard at last. There was a muffled rushing in the snow; and in a good hour for Dick, who saw the sword-points glitter already at his throat, there poured forth out of the wood upon both sides a disorderly torrent of mounted men-at-arms, each cased in iron, and with visor lowered, each bearing his lance in rest, or his sword bared and raised, and each carrying, so to speak, a passenger, in the shape of an archer or page, who leaped one after another from their perches, and had presently doubled the array. The original assailants, seeing themselves outnumbered and surrounded, threw down their arms without a word. "Seize me these fellows!" said the hero of the trumpet; and when his order had been obeyed, he drew near to Dick and looked him in the face. Dick, returning this scrutiny, was surprised to find in one who had displayed such strength, skill, and energy, a lad no older than himself--slightly deformed, with one shoulder higher than the other, and of a pale, painful, and distorted countenance.[2] The eyes, however, were very clear and bold. [2] Richard Crookback would have been really far younger at this date. "Sir," said this lad, "ye came in good time for me, and none too early." "My lord," returned Dick, with a faint sense that he was in the presence of a great personage, "ye are yourself so marvellous a good swordsman that I believe ye had managed them single-handed. Howbeit, it was certainly well for me that your men delayed no longer than they did." "How knew ye who I was?" demanded the stranger. "Even now, my lord," Dick answered, "I am ignorant of whom I speak with." "Is it so?" asked the other. "And yet ye threw yourself head-first into this unequal battle." "I saw one man valiantly contending against many," replied Dick, "and I had thought myself dishonoured not to bear him aid." A singular sneer played about the young nobleman's mouth as he made answer: "These are very brave words. But to the more essential--are ye Lancaster or York?" "My lord, I make no secret; I am clear for York," Dick answered. "By the mass!" replied the other, "it is well for you." And so saying, he turned towards one of his followers. "Let me see," he continued, in the same sneering and cruel tones--"let me see a clean end of these brave gentlemen. Truss me them up." There were but five survivors of the attacking party. Archers seized them by the arms; they were hurried to the borders of the wood, and each placed below a tree of suitable dimension; the rope was adjusted; an archer, carrying the end of it, hastily clambered overhead; and before a minute was over, and without a word passing upon either hand, the five men were swinging by the neck. "And now," cried the deformed leader, "back to your posts, and when I summon you next, be readier to attend." "My lord duke," said one man, "beseech you, tarry not here alone. Keep but a handful of lances at your hand." "Fellow," said the duke, "I have forborne to chide you for your slowness. Cross me not, therefore. I trust my hand and arm, for all that I be crooked. Ye were backwards when the trumpet sounded; and ye are now too forward with your counsels. But it is ever so; last with the lance and first with tongue. Let it be reversed." And with a gesture that was not without a sort of dangerous nobility, he waved them off. The footmen climbed again to their seats behind the men-at-arms, and the whole party moved slowly away and disappeared in twenty different directions, under the cover of the forest. The day was by this time beginning to break, and the stars to fade. The first grey glimmer of dawn shone upon the countenances of the two young men, who now turned once more to face each other. "Here," said the duke, "ye have seen my vengeance, which is, like my blade, both sharp and ready. But I would not have you, for all Christendom, suppose me thankless. You that came to my aid with a good sword and a better courage--unless that ye recoil from my misshapeness--come to my heart." And so saying, the young leader held out his arms for an embrace. In the bottom of his heart Dick already entertained a great terror and some hatred for the man whom he had rescued; but the invitation was so worded that it would not have been merely discourteous, but cruel, to refuse or hesitate; and he hastened to comply. "And now, my lord duke," he said, when he had regained his freedom, "do I suppose aright? Are ye my Lord Duke of Gloucester?" "I am Richard of Gloucester," returned the other. "And you--how call they you?" Dick told him his name, and presented Lord Foxham's signet, which the duke immediately recognised. "Ye come too soon," he said; "but why should I complain? Ye are like me, that was here at watch two hours before the day. But this is the first sally of mine arms; upon this adventure, Master Shelton, shall I make or mar the quality of my renown. There lie mine enemies, under two old, skilled captains--Risingham and Brackley--well posted for strength, I do believe, but yet upon two sides without retreat, enclosed betwixt the sea, the harbour, and the river. Methinks, Shelton, here were a great blow to be stricken, an we could strike it silently and suddenly." "I do think so, indeed," cried Dick, warming. "Have ye my Lord Foxham's notes?" inquired the duke. And then, Dick, having explained how he was without them for the moment, made himself bold to offer information every jot as good, of his own knowledge. "And for mine own part, my lord duke," he added, "an ye had men enough, I would fall on even at this present. For, look ye, at the peep of day the watches of the night are over; but by day they keep neither watch nor ward--only scour the outskirts with horsemen. Now, then, when the night watch is already unarmed, and the rest are at their morning cup--now were the time to break them." "How many do ye count?" asked Gloucester. "They number not two thousand," Dick replied. "I have seven hundred in the woods behind us," said the duke; "seven hundred follow from Kettley, and will be here anon; behind these, and further, are four hundred more; and my Lord Foxham hath five hundred half a day from here, at Holywood. Shall we attend their coming, or fall on?" "My lord," said Dick, "when ye hanged these five poor rogues ye did decide the question. Churls although they were, in these uneasy times they will be lacked and looked for, and the alarm be given. Therefore, my lord, if ye do count upon the advantage of a surprise, ye have not, in my poor opinion, one whole hour in front of you." "I do think so indeed," returned Crookback. "Well, before an hour, ye shall be in the thick on't, winning spurs. A swift man to Holywood, carrying Lord Foxham's signet; another along the road to speed my laggards! Nay, Shelton, by the rood, it may be done!" Therewith he once more set his trumpet to his lips and blew. This time he was not long kept waiting. In a moment the open space about the cross was filled with horse and foot. Richard of Gloucester took his place upon the steps, and despatched messenger after messenger to hasten the concentration of the seven hundred men that lay hidden in the immediate neighbourhood among the woods; and before a quarter of an hour had passed, all his dispositions being taken, he put himself at their head, and began to move down the hill towards Shoreby. His plan was simple. He was to seize a quarter of the town of Shoreby lying on the right hand of the highroad and make his position good there in the narrow lanes until his reinforcements followed. If Lord Risingham chose to retreat, Richard would follow upon his rear, and take him between two fires; or, if he preferred to hold the town, he would be shut in a trap, there to be gradually overwhelmed by force of numbers. There was but one danger, but that was imminent and great--Gloucester's seven hundred might be rolled up and cut to pieces in the first encounter, and, to avoid this, it was needful to make the surprise of their arrival as complete as possible. The footmen, therefore, were all once more taken up behind the riders, and Dick had the signal honour meted out to him of mounting behind Gloucester himself. For as far as there was any cover the troops moved slowly, and when they came near the end of the trees that lined the highway, stopped to breathe and reconnoitre. The sun was now well up, shining with a frosty brightness out of a yellow halo, and right over against the luminary, Shoreby, a field of snowy roofs and ruddy gables, was rolling up its columns of morning smoke. Gloucester turned round to Dick. "In that poor place," he said, "where people are cooking breakfast, either you shall gain your spurs and I begin a life of mighty honour and glory in the world's eye, or both of us, as I conceive it, shall fall dead and be unheard of. Two Richards are we. Well, then, Richard Shelton, they shall be heard about, these two! Their swords shall not ring more loudly on men's helmets than their names shall ring in people's ears." Dick was astonished at so great a hunger after fame, expressed with so great vehemence of voice and language, and he answered very sensibly and quietly, that, for his part, he promised he would do his duty, and doubted not of victory if every one did the like. By this time the horses were well breathed, and the leader holding up his, sword and giving rein, the whole troop of chargers broke into the gallop and thundered, with their double load of fighting men, down the remainder of the hill and across the snow-covered plain that still divided them from Shoreby. CHAPTER II THE BATTLE OF SHOREBY The whole distance to be crossed was not above a quarter of a mile. But they had no sooner debouched beyond the cover of the trees than they were aware of people fleeing and screaming in the snowy meadows upon either hand. Almost at the same moment a great rumour began to arise, and spread and grow continually louder in the town; and they were not yet half-way to the nearest house before the bells began to ring backwards from the steeple. The young duke ground his teeth together. By these so early signals of alarm he feared to find his enemies prepared; and if he failed to gain a footing in the town, he knew that his small party would soon be broken and exterminated in the open. In the town, however, the Lancastrians were far from being in so good a posture. It was as Dick had said. The night-guard had already doffed their harness; the rest were still hanging--unlatched, unbraced, all unprepared for battle--about their quarters; and in the whole of Shoreby there were not, perhaps, fifty men full armed, or fifty chargers ready to be mounted. The beating of the bells, the terrifying summons of men who ran about the streets crying and beating upon the doors, aroused in an incredibly short space at least two-score out of that half-hundred. These got speedily to horse, and, the alarm still flying wild and contrary, galloped in different directions. Thus it befell that, when Richard of Gloucester reached the first house of Shoreby, he was met in the mouth of the street by a mere handful of lances, whom he swept before his onset as the storm chases the bark. A hundred paces into the town, Dick Shelton touched the duke's arm; the duke, in answer, gathered his reins, put the shrill trumpet to his mouth, and blowing a concerted point, turned to the right hand out of the direct advance. Swerving like a single rider, his whole command turned after him, and, still at the full gallop of the chargers, swept up the narrow by-street. Only the last score of riders drew rein and faced about in the entrance; the footmen, whom they carried behind them, leapt at the same instant to the earth, and began, some to bend their bows, and others to break into and secure the houses upon either hand. Surprised at this sudden change of direction, and daunted by the firm front of the rear-guard, the few Lancastrians, after a momentary consultation, turned and rode farther into town to seek for reinforcements. The quarter of the town upon which, by the advice of Dick, Richard of Gloucester had now seized, consisted of five small streets of poor and ill-inhabited houses, occupying a very gentle eminence, and lying open towards the back. The five streets being each secured by a good guard, the reserve would thus occupy the centre, out of shot, and yet ready to carry aid wherever it was needed. Such was the poorness of the neighbourhood that none of the Lancastrian lords, and but few of their retainers, had been lodged therein; and the inhabitants, with one accord, deserted their houses and fled, squalling, along the streets or over garden walls. In the centre, where the five ways all met, a somewhat ill-favoured alehouse displayed the sign of the Chequers; and here the Duke of Gloucester chose his headquarters for the day. To Dick he assigned the guard of one of the five streets. "Go," he said, "win your spurs. Win glory for me: one Richard for another. I tell you, if I rise, ye shall rise by the same ladder. Go," he added, shaking him by the hand. But, as soon as Dick was gone, he turned to a little shabby archer at his elbow. "Go, Dutton, and that right speedily," he added. "Follow that lad. If ye find him faithful, ye answer for his safety, a head for a head. Woe unto you, if ye return without him! But if he be faithless--or, for one instant, ye misdoubt him--stab him from behind." In the meanwhile Dick hastened to secure his post. The street he had to guard was very narrow, and closely lined with houses, which projected and overhung the roadway; but narrow and dark as it was, since it opened upon the market-place of the town, the main issue of the battle would probably fall to be decided on that spot. The market-place was full of townspeople fleeing in disorder; but there was as yet no sign of any foeman ready to attack, and Dick judged he had some time before him to make ready his defence. The two houses at the end stood deserted, with open doors, as the inhabitants had left them in their flight, and from these he had the furniture hastily tossed forth and piled into a barrier in the entry of the lane. A hundred men were placed at his disposal, and of these he threw the more part into the houses, where they might lie in shelter and deliver their arrows from the windows. With the rest, under his own immediate eye, he lined the barricade. Meanwhile the utmost uproar and confusion had continued to prevail throughout the town; and what with the hurried clashing of bells, the sounding of trumpets, the swift movement of bodies of horse, the cries of the commanders, and the shrieks of women, the noise was almost deafening to the ear. Presently, little by little, the tumult began to subside; and soon after, files of men in armour and bodies of archers began to assemble and form in line of battle in the market-place. A large portion of this body were in murrey and blue, and in the mounted knight who ordered their array Dick recognised Sir Daniel Brackley. Then there befell a long pause, which was followed by the almost simultaneous sounding of four trumpets from four different quarters of the town. A fifth rang in answer from the market-place, and at the same moment the files began to move, and a shower of arrows rattled about the barricade, and sounded like blows upon the walls of the two flanking houses. The attack had begun, by a common signal, on all the five issues of the quarter. Gloucester was beleaguered upon every side; and Dick judged, if he would make good his post, he must rely entirely on the hundred men of his command. Seven volleys of arrows followed one upon the other, and in the very thick of the discharges Dick was touched from behind upon the arm, and found a page holding out to him a leathern jack, strengthened with bright plates of mail. "It is from my Lord of Gloucester," said the page. "He hath observed, Sir Richard, that ye went unarmed." Dick, with a glow at his heart at being so addressed, got to his feet and, with the assistance of the page, donned the defensive coat. Even as he did so, two arrows rattled harmlessly upon the plates, and a third struck down the page, mortally wounded, at his feet. Meantime the whole body of the enemy had been steadily drawing nearer across the market-place; and by this time were so close at hand that Dick gave the order to return their shot. Immediately, from behind the barrier and from the windows of the houses, a counterblast of arrows sped, carrying death. But the Lancastrians, as if they had but waited for a signal, shouted loudly in answer; and began to close at a run upon the barrier, the horsemen still hanging back, with visors lowered. Then followed an obstinate and deadly struggle, hand to hand. The assailants, wielding their falchions with one hand, strove with the other to drag down the structure of the barricade. On the other side, the parts were reversed; and the defenders exposed themselves like madmen to protect their rampart. So for some minutes the contest raged almost in silence, friend and foe falling one upon another. But it is always the easier to destroy; and when a single note upon the tucket recalled the attacking party from this desperate service, much of the barricade had been removed piecemeal, and the whole fabric had sunk to half its height, and tottered to a general fall. And now the footmen in the market-place fell back, at a run, on every side. The horsemen, who had been standing in a line two deep, wheeled suddenly, and made their flank into their front; and as swift as a striking adder, the long, steel-clad column was launched upon the ruinous barricade. Of the first two horsemen, one fell, rider and steed, and was ridden down by his companions. The second leaped clean upon the summit of the rampart, transpiercing an archer with his lance. Almost in the same instant he was dragged from the saddle and his horse despatched. And then the full weight and impetus of the charge burst upon and scattered the defenders. The men-at-arms, surmounting their fallen comrades, and carried onward by the fury of their onslaught, dashed through Dick's broken line and poured thundering up the lane beyond, as a stream bestrides and pours across a broken dam. Yet was the fight not over. Still, in the narrow jaws of the entrance, Dick and a few survivors plied their bills like woodmen; and already, across the width of the passage, there had been formed a second, a higher, and a more effectual rampart of fallen men and disembowelled horses, lashing in the agonies of death. Baffled by this fresh obstacle, the remainder of the cavalry fell back; and as, at the sight of this movement, the flight of arrows redoubled from the casements of the houses, their retreat had, for a moment, almost degenerated into flight. Almost at the same time, those who had crossed the barricade and charged farther up the street, being met before the door of the Chequers by the formidable hunchback and the whole reserve of the Yorkists, began to come scattering backwards, in the excess of disarray and terror. Dick and his fellows faced about, fresh men poured out of the houses; a cruel blast of arrows met the fugitives full in the face, while Gloucester was already riding down their rear; in the inside of a minute and a half there was no living Lancastrian in the street. Then, and not till then, did Dick hold up his reeking blade and give the word to cheer. Meanwhile Gloucester dismounted from his horse and came forward to inspect the post. His face was as pale as linen; but his eyes shone in his head like some strange jewel, and his voice, when he spoke, was hoarse and broken with the exultation of battle and success. He looked at the rampart, which neither friend nor foe could now approach without precaution, so fiercely did the horses struggle in the throes of death, and at the sight of that great carnage he smiled upon one side. "Despatch these horses," he said; "they keep you from your vantage. Richard Shelton," he added, "ye have pleased me. Kneel." The Lancastrians had already resumed their archery, and the shafts fell thick in the mouth of the street; but the duke, minding them not at all, deliberately drew his sword and dubbed Richard a knight upon the spot. "And now, Sir Richard," he continued, "if that ye see Lord Risingham, send me an express upon the instant. Were it your last man, let me hear of it incontinently. I had rather venture the post than lose my stroke at him. For mark me, all of ye," he added, raising his voice, "if Earl Risingham fall by another hand than mine, I shall count this victory a defeat." "My lord duke," said one of his attendants, "is your grace not weary of exposing his dear life unneedfully? Why tarry we here?" "Catesby," returned the duke, "here is the battle, not elsewhere. The rest are but feigned onslaughts. Here must we vanquish. And for the exposure--if ye were an ugly hunchback, and the children gecked at you upon the street, ye would count your body cheaper, and an hour of glory worth a life. Howbeit, if ye will, let us ride on and visit the other posts. Sir Richard here, my namesake, he shall still hold this entry, where he wadeth to the ankles in hot blood. Him can we trust. But mark it, Sir Richard, ye are not yet done. The worst is yet to ward. Sleep not." He came right up to young Shelton, looking him hard in the eyes, and taking his hand in both of his, gave it so extreme a squeeze that the blood had nearly spurted. Dick quailed before his eyes. The insane excitement, the courage, and the cruelty that he read therein filled him with dismay about the future. This young duke's was indeed a gallant spirit, to ride foremost in the ranks of war; but after the battle, in the days of peace and in the circle of his trusted friends, that mind, it was to be dreaded, would continue to bring forth the fruits of death. CHAPTER III THE BATTLE OF SHOREBY (CONCLUDED) Dick, once more left to his own counsels, began to look about him. The arrow-shot had somewhat slackened. On all sides the enemy were falling back; and the greater part of the market-place was now left empty, the snow here trampled into orange mud, there splashed with gore, scattered all over with dead men and horses, and bristling thick with feathered arrows. On his own side the loss had been cruel. The jaws of the little street and the ruins of the barricade were heaped with the dead and dying; and out of the hundred men with whom he had begun the battle, there were not seventy left who could still stand to arms. At the same time, the day was passing. The first reinforcements might be looked for to arrive at any moment; and the Lancastrians, already shaken by the result of their desperate but unsuccessful onslaught, were in an ill temper to support a fresh invader. There was a dial in the wall of one of the two flanking houses; and this, in the frosty winter sunshine, indicated ten of the forenoon. Dick turned to the man who was at his elbow, a little insignificant archer, binding a cut in his arm. "It was well fought," he said, "and, by my sooth, they will not charge us twice." "Sir," said the little archer, "ye have fought right well for York, and better for yourself. Never hath man in so brief space prevailed so greatly on the duke's affections. That he should have entrusted such a post to one he knew not is a marvel. But look to your head, Sir Richard! If ye be vanquished--ay, if ye give way one foot's breadth--axe or cord shall punish it; and I am set if ye do aught doubtful, I will tell you honestly, here to stab you from behind." Dick looked at the little man in amaze. "You!" he cried. "And from behind!" "It is right so," returned the archer; "and because I like not the affair I tell it you. Ye must make the post good, Sir Richard, at your peril. O, our Crookback is a bold blade and a good warrior; but, whether in cold blood or in hot, he will have all things done exact to his commandment. If any fail or hinder, they shall die the death." "Now, by the saints!" cried Richard, "is this so? And will men follow such a leader?" "Nay, they follow him gleefully," replied the other; "for if he be exact to punish, he is most open-handed to reward. And if he spare not the blood and sweat of others, he is ever liberal of his own, still in the first front of battle, still the last to sleep. He will go far, will Crookback Dick o' Gloucester!" The young knight, if he had before been brave and vigilant, was now all the more inclined to watchfulness and courage. His sudden favour, he began to perceive, had brought perils in its train. And he turned from the archer, and once more scanned anxiously the market-place. It lay empty as before. "I like not this quietude," he said. "Doubtless they prepare us some surprise." And, as if in answer to his remark, the archers began once more to advance against the barricade, and the arrows to fall thick. But there was something hesitating in the attack. They came not on roundly, but seemed rather to await a further signal. Dick looked uneasily about him, spying for a hidden danger. And sure enough, about half-way up the little street, a door was suddenly opened from within, and the house continued, for some seconds, and both by door and window, to disgorge a torrent of Lancastrian archers. These, as they leaped down, hurriedly stood to their ranks, bent their bows, and proceeded to pour upon Dick's rear a flight of arrows. At the same time, the assailants in the market-place redoubled their shot, and began to close in stoutly upon the barricade. Dick called down his whole command out of the houses, and facing them both ways, and encouraging their valour both by word and gesture, returned as best he could the double shower of shafts that fell about his post. Meanwhile house after house was opened in the street, and the Lancastrians continued to pour out of the doors and leap down from the windows, shouting victory, until the number of enemies upon Dick's rear was almost equal to the number in his face. It was plain that he could hold the post no longer; what was worse, even if he could have held it, it had now become useless; and the whole Yorkist army lay in a posture of helplessness upon the brink of a complete disaster. The men behind him formed the vital flaw in the general defence; and it was upon these that Dick turned, charging at the head of his men. So vigorous was the attack, that the Lancastrian archers gave ground and staggered, and, at last, breaking their ranks, began to crowd back into the houses from which they had so recently and so vain-gloriously sallied. Meanwhile the men from the market-place had swarmed across the undefended barricade, and fell on hotly upon the other side; and Dick must once again face about, and proceed to drive them back. Once again the spirit of his men prevailed; they cleared the street in a triumphant style, but even as they did so the others issued again out of the houses, and took them, a third time, upon the rear. The Yorkists began to be scattered; several times Dick found himself alone among his foes and plying his bright sword for life; several times he was conscious of a hurt. And meanwhile the fight swayed to and fro in the street without determinate result. Suddenly Dick was aware of a great trumpeting about the outskirts of the town. The war-cry of York began to be rolled up to heaven, as by many and triumphant voices. And at the same time the men in front of him began to give ground rapidly, streaming out of the street and back upon the market-place. Some one gave the word to fly. Trumpets were blown distractedly, some for a rally, some to charge. It was plain that a great blow had been struck, and the Lancastrians were thrown, at least for the moment, into full disorder, and some degree of panic. And then, like a theatre trick, there followed the last act of Shoreby Battle. The men in front of Richard turned tail, like a dog that has been whistled home, and fled like the wind. At the same moment there came through the market-place a storm of horsemen, fleeing and pursuing, the Lancastrians turning back to strike with the sword, the Yorkists riding them down at the point of the lance. Conspicuous in the mellay, Dick beheld the Crookback. He was already giving a foretaste of that furious valour and skill to cut his way across the ranks of war, which, years afterwards upon the field of Bosworth, and when he was stained with crimes, almost sufficed to change the fortunes of the day and the destiny of the English throne. Evading, striking, riding down, he so forced and so manoeuvred his strong horse, so aptly defended himself, and so liberally scattered death to his opponents, that he was now far ahead of the foremost of his knights, hewing his way, with the truncheon of a bloody sword, to where Lord Risingham was rallying the bravest. A moment more and they had met; the tall, splendid, and famous warrior against the deformed and sickly boy. Yet Shelton had never a doubt of the result; and when the fight next opened for a moment, the figure of the earl had disappeared; but still, in the first of the danger, Crookback Dick was launching his big horse and plying the truncheon of his sword. Thus, by Shelton's courage in holding the mouth of the street against the first attack, and by the opportune arrival of his seven hundred reinforcements, the lad, who was afterwards to be handed down to the execration of posterity under the name of Richard III., had won his first considerable fight. CHAPTER IV THE SACK OF SHOREBY There was not a foe left within striking distance; and Dick, as he looked ruefully about him on the remainder of his gallant force, began to count the cost of victory. He was himself, now that the danger was ended, so stiff and sore, so bruised and cut and broken, and, above all, so utterly exhausted by his desperate and unremitting labours in the fight, that he seemed incapable of any fresh exertion. But this was not yet the hour for repose. Shoreby had been taken by assault; and though an open town, and not in any manner to be charged with the resistance, it was plain that these rough fighters would be not less rough now that the fight was over, and that the more horrid part of war would fall to be enacted. Richard of Gloucester was not the captain to protect the citizens from his infuriated soldiery; and even if he had the will, it might be questioned if he had the power. It was, therefore, Dick's business to find and to protect Joanna; and with that end he looked about him at the faces of his men. The three or four who seemed likeliest to be obedient and to keep sober he drew aside; and promising them a rich reward and a special recommendation to the duke, led them across the market-place, now empty of horsemen, and into the streets upon the farther side. Every here and there small combats of from two to a dozen still raged upon the open street; here and there a house was being besieged, the defenders throwing out stools and tables on the heads of the assailants. The snow was strewn with arms and corpses; but except for these partial combats the streets were deserted, and the houses, some standing open, and some shuttered and barricaded, had for the most part ceased to give out smoke. Dick, threading the skirts of these skirmishers, led his followers briskly in the direction of the abbey church; but when he came the length of the main street, a cry of horror broke from his lips. Sir Daniel's great house had been carried by assault. The gates hung in splinters from the hinges, and a double throng kept pouring in and out through the entrance, seeking and carrying booty. Meanwhile, in the upper storeys, some resistance was still being offered to the pillagers; for just as Dick came within eyeshot of the building, a casement was burst open from within, and a poor wretch in murrey and blue, screaming and resisting, was forced through the embrasure and tossed into the street below. The most sickening apprehension fell upon Dick. He ran forward like one possessed, forced his way into the house among the foremost, and mounted without pause to the chamber on the third floor where he had last parted from Joanna. It was a mere wreck; the furniture had been overthrown, the cupboards broken open, and in one place a trailing corner of the arras lay smouldering on the embers of the fire. Dick, almost without thinking, trod out the incipient conflagration, and then stood bewildered. Sir Daniel, Sir Oliver, Joanna, all were gone; but whether butchered in the rout or safe escaped from Shoreby, who should say? He caught a passing archer by the tabard. "Fellow," he asked, "were ye here when this house was taken?" "Let be," said the archer. "A murrain! let be, or I strike." "Hark ye," returned Richard, "two can play at that. Stand and be plain." But the man, flushed with drink and battle, struck Dick upon the shoulder with one hand, while with the other he twitched away his garment. Thereupon the full wrath of the young leader burst from his control. He seized the fellow in his strong embrace, and crushed him on the plates of his mailed bosom like a child; then, holding him at arm's length, he bid him speak as he valued life. "I pray you mercy!" gasped the archer. "An I had thought ye were so angry I would 'a' been charier of crossing you. I was here indeed." "Know ye Sir Daniel?" pursued Dick. "Well do I know him," returned the man. "Was he in the mansion?" "Ay, sir, he was," answered the archer; "but even as we entered by the yard gate he rode forth by the garden." "Alone?" cried Dick. "He may 'a' had a score of lances with him," said the man. "Lances! No women, then?" asked Shelton. "Troth, I saw not," said the archer. "But there were none in the house, if that be your quest." "I thank you," said Dick. "Here is a piece for your pains." But groping in his wallet, Dick found nothing. "Inquire for me to-morrow," he added--"Richard Shelt--Sir Richard Shelton," he corrected, "and I will see you handsomely rewarded." And then an idea struck Dick. He hastily descended to the courtyard, ran with all his might across the garden, and came to the great door of the church. It stood wide open; within, every corner of the pavement was crowded with fugitive burghers, surrounded by their families and laden with the most precious of their possessions, while, at the high altar, priests in full canonicals were imploring the mercy of God. Even as Dick entered, the loud chorus began to thunder in the vaulted roofs. He hurried through the groups of refugees, and came to the door of the stair that led into the steeple. And here a tall churchman stepped before him and arrested his advance. "Whither, my son?" he asked, severely. "My father," answered Dick, "I am here upon an errand of expedition. Stay me not. I command here for my Lord of Gloucester." "For my Lord of Gloucester?" repeated the priest. "Hath, then, the battle gone so sore?" "The battle, father, is at an end, Lancaster clean sped, my Lord of Risingham--Heaven rest him!--left upon the field. And now, with your good leave, I follow mine affairs." And thrusting on one side the priest, who seemed stupefied at the news, Dick pushed open the door and rattled up the stairs four at a bound, and without pause or stumble, till he stepped upon the open platform at the top. Shoreby Church tower not only commanded the town, as in a map, but looked far, on both sides, over sea and land. It was now near upon noon; the day exceeding bright, the snow dazzling. And as Dick looked around him, he could measure the consequences of the battle. A confused, growling uproar reached him from the streets, and now and then, but very rarely, the clash of steel. Not a ship, not so much as a skiff remained in harbour; but the sea was dotted with sails and row-boats laden with fugitives. On shore, too, the surface of the snowy meadows was broken up with bands of horsemen, some cutting their way towards the borders of the forest, others, who were doubtless of the Yorkist side, stoutly interposing and beating them back upon the town. Over all the open ground there lay a prodigious quantity of fallen men and horses, clearly defined upon the snow. To complete the picture, those of the foot soldiers as had not found place upon a ship still kept up an archery combat on the borders of the port, and from the cover of the shoreside taverns. In that quarter, also, one or two houses had been fired, and the smoke towered high in the frosty sunlight, and blew off to sea in voluminous folds. Already close upon the margin of the woods, and somewhat in the line of Holywood, one particular clump of fleeing horsemen riveted the attention of the young watcher on the tower. It was fairly numerous; in no other quarter of the field did so many Lancastrians still hold together; thus they had left a wide, discoloured wake upon the snow, and Dick was able to trace them step by step from where they had left the town. While Dick stood watching them, they had gained, unopposed, the first fringe of the leafless forest, and, turning a little from their direction, the sun fell for a moment full on their array, as it was relieved against the dusky wood. "Murrey and blue!" cried Dick. "I swear it--murrey and blue!" The next moment he was descending the stairway. It was now his business to seek out the Duke of Gloucester, who alone, in the disorder of the forces, might be able to supply him with a sufficiency of men. The fighting in the main town was now practically at an end; and as Dick ran hither and thither, seeking the commander, the streets were thick with wandering soldiers, some laden with more booty than they could well stagger under, others shouting drunk. None of them, when questioned, had the least notion of the duke's whereabouts; and, at last, it was by sheer good fortune that Dick found him, where he sat in the saddle directing operations to dislodge the archers from the harbour side. "Sir Richard Shelton, ye are well found," he said. "I owe you one thing that I value little, my life; and one that I can never pay you for, this victory. Catesby, if I had ten such captains as Sir Richard, I would march forthright on London. But now, sir, claim your reward." "Freely, my lord," said Dick, "freely and loudly. One hath escaped to whom I owe some grudges, and taken with him one whom I owe love and service. Give me, then, fifty lances, that I may pursue; and for any obligation that your graciousness is pleased to allow, it shall be clean discharged." "How call ye him?" inquired the duke. "Sir Daniel Brackley," answered Richard. "Out upon him, double-face!" cried Gloucester. "Here is no reward, Sir Richard; here is fresh service offered, and, if that ye bring his head to me, a fresh debt upon my conscience. Catesby, get him these lances; and you, sir, bethink ye, in the meanwhile, what pleasure, honour, or profit it shall be mine to give you." Just then the Yorkist skirmishers carried one of the shoreside taverns, swarming in upon it on three sides, and driving out or taking its defenders. Crookback Dick was pleased to cheer the exploit, and pushing his horse a little nearer, called to see the prisoners. There were four or five of them--two men of my Lord Shoreby's and one of Lord Risingham's among the number, and last, but in Dick's eyes not least, a tall, shambling, grizzled old shipman, between drunk and sober, and with a dog whimpering and jumping at his heels. The young duke passed them for a moment under a severe review. "Good," he said. "Hang them." And he turned the other way to watch the progress of the fight. "My lord," said Dick, "so please you, I have found my reward. Grant me the life and liberty of yon old shipman." Gloucester turned and looked the speaker in the face. "Sir Richard," he said, "I make not war with peacock's feathers, but steel shafts. Those that are mine enemies I slay, and that without excuse or favour. For, bethink ye, in this realm of England, that is so torn in pieces, there is not a man of mine but hath a brother or a friend upon the other party. If, then, I did begin to grant these pardons, I might sheathe my sword." "It may be so, my lord; and yet I will be overbold, and, at the risk of your disfavour, recall your lordship's promise," replied Dick. Richard of Gloucester flushed. "Mark it right well," he said, harshly. "I love not mercy, nor yet mercymongers. Ye have this day laid the foundations of high fortune. If ye oppose to me my word, which I have plighted, I will yield. But, by the glory of heaven, there your favour dies!" "Mine is the loss," said Dick. "Give him his sailor," said the duke; and wheeling his horse, he turned his back upon young Shelton. Dick was nor glad nor sorry. He had seen too much of the young duke to set great store on his affection; and the origin and growth of his own favour had been too flimsy and too rapid to inspire much confidence. One thing alone he feared--that the vindictive leader might revoke the offer of the lances. But here he did justice neither to Gloucester's honour (such as it was) nor, above all, to his decision. If he had once judged Dick to be the right man to pursue Sir Daniel, he was not one to change; and he soon proved it by shouting after Catesby to be speedy, for the paladin was waiting. In the meanwhile, Dick turned to the old shipman, who had seemed equally indifferent to his condemnation and to his subsequent release. "Arblaster," said Dick, "I have done you ill; but now, by the rood, I think I have cleared the score." But the old skipper only looked upon him dully and held his peace. "Come," continued Dick, "a life is a life, old shrew, and it is more than ships or liquor. Say ye forgive me; for if your life be worth nothing to you, it hath cost me the beginnings of my fortune. Come, I have paid for it dearly; be not so churlish." "An I had had my ship," said Arblaster, "I would 'a' been forth and safe on the high seas--I and my man Tom. But ye took my ship, gossip, and I'm a beggar; and for my man Tom, a knave fellow in russet shot him down. 'Murrain!' quoth he, and spake never again. 'Murrain' was the last of his words, and the poor spirit of him passed. 'A will never sail no more, will my Tom." Dick was seized with unavailing penitence and pity; he sought to take the skipper's hand, but Arblaster avoided his touch. "Nay," said he, "let be. Y' have played the devil with me, and let that content you." The words died in Richard's throat. He saw, through tears, the poor old man, bemused with liquor and sorrow, go shambling away, with bowed head, across the snow, and the unnoticed dog whimpering at his heels, and for the first time began to understand the desperate game that we play in life; and how a thing once done is not to be changed or remedied, by any penitence. But there was no time left to him for vain regret. Catesby had now collected the horsemen, and riding up to Dick he dismounted, and offered him his own horse. "This morning," he said, "I was somewhat jealous of your favour; it hath not been of a long growth; and now, Sir Richard, it is with a very good heart that I offer you this horse--to ride away with." "Suffer me yet a moment," replied Dick. "This favour of mine--whereupon was it founded?" "Upon your name," answered Catesby. "It is my lord's chief superstition. Were my name Richard, I should be an earl to-morrow." "Well, sir, I thank you," returned Dick; "and since I am little likely to follow these great fortunes, I will even say farewell. I will not pretend I was displeased to think myself upon the road to fortune; but I will not pretend, neither, that I am over-sorry to be done with it. Command and riches, they are brave things, to be sure; but a word in your ear--yon duke of yours, he is a fearsome lad." Catesby laughed. "Nay," said he, "of a verity he that rides with Crooked Dick will ride deep. Well, God keep us all from evil! Speed ye well." Thereupon Dick put himself at the head of his men, and giving the word of command, rode off. He made straight across the town, following what he supposed to be the route of Sir Daniel, and spying around for any signs that might decide if he were right. The streets were strewn with the dead and the wounded, whose fate, in the bitter frost, was far the more pitiable. Gangs of the victors went from house to house, pillaging and stabbing, and sometimes singing together as they went. From different quarters, as he rode on, the sounds of violence and outrage came to young Shelton's ears; now the blows of the sledge-hammer on some barricaded door, and now the miserable shrieks of women. Dick's heart had just been awakened. He had just seen the cruel consequences of his own behaviour; and the thought of the sum of misery that was now acting in the whole of Shoreby filled him with despair. At length he reached the outskirts, and there, sure enough, he saw straight before him the same broad, beaten track across the snow that he had marked from the summit of the church. Here, then, he went the faster on; but still, as he rode, he kept a bright eye upon the fallen men and horses that lay beside the track. Many of these, he was relieved to see, wore Sir Daniel's colours, and the faces of some, who lay upon their back, he even recognised. About half-way between the town and the forest, those whom he was following had plainly been assailed by archers; for the corpses lay pretty closely scattered, each pierced by an arrow. And here Dick spied among the rest the body of a very young lad, whose face was somehow hauntingly familiar to him. He halted his troop, dismounted, and raised the lad's head. As he did so, the hood fell back, and a profusion of long brown hair unrolled itself. At the same time the eyes opened. "Ah! lion driver!" said a feeble voice. "She is farther on. Ride--ride fast!" And then the poor young lady fainted once again. One of Dick's men carried a flask of some strong cordial, and with this Dick succeeded in reviving consciousness. Then he took Joanna's friend upon his saddle-bow, and once more pushed toward the forest. "Why do ye take me?" said the girl. "Ye but delay your speed." "Nay, Mistress Risingham," replied Dick. "Shoreby is full of blood and drunkenness and riot. Here ye are safe; content ye." "I will not be beholden to any of your faction," she cried; "set me down." "Madam, ye know not what ye say," returned Dick. "Y'are hurt----" "I am not," she said. "It was my horse was slain." "It matters not one jot," replied Richard. "Ye are here in the midst of open snow, and compassed about with enemies. Whether ye will or not, I carry you with me. Glad am I to have the occasion; for thus shall I repay some portion of our debt." For a little while she was silent. Then, very suddenly, she asked: "My uncle?" "My Lord Risingham?" returned Dick. "I would I had good news to give you, madam; but I have none. I saw him once in the battle, and once only. Let us hope the best." CHAPTER V NIGHT IN THE WOODS: ALICIA RISINGHAM It was almost certain that Sir Daniel had made for the Moat House; but, considering the heavy snow, the lateness of the hour, and the necessity under which he would lie of avoiding the few roads and striking across the wood, it was equally certain that he could not hope to reach it ere the morrow. There were two courses open to Dick: either to continue to follow in the knight's trail, and, if he were able, to fall upon him that very night in camp, or to strike out a path of his own, and seek to place himself between Sir Daniel and his destination. Either scheme was open to serious objection, and Dick, who feared to expose Joanna to the hazards of a fight, had not yet decided between them when he reached the borders of the wood. At this point Sir Daniel had turned a little to his left, and then plunged straight under a grove of very lofty timber. His party had then formed to a narrower front, in order to pass between the trees, and the track was trod proportionally deeper in the snow. The eye followed it, under the leafless tracery of the oaks, running direct and narrow; the trees stood over it, with knotty joints and the great, uplifted forest of their boughs; there was no sound, whether of man or beast--not so much as the stirring of a robin; and over the field of snow the winter sun lay golden among netted shadows. "How say ye," asked Dick of one of the men, "to follow straight on, or strike across for Tunstall?" "Sir Richard," replied the man-at-arms, "I would follow the line until they scatter." "Ye are, doubtless, right," returned Dick; "but we came right hastily upon the errand, even as the time commanded. Here are no houses, neither for food nor shelter, and by the morrow's dawn we shall know both cold fingers and an empty belly. How say ye, lads? Will ye stand a pinch for expedition's sake, or shall we turn by Holywood and sup with Mother Church? The case being somewhat doubtful, I will drive no man; yet if ye would suffer me to lead you, ye would choose the first." The men answered, almost with one voice, that they would follow Sir Richard where he would. And Dick, setting spur to his horse, began once more to go forward. The snow in the trail had been trodden very hard, and the pursuers had thus a great advantage over the pursued. They pushed on, indeed, at a round trot, two hundred hoofs beating alternately on the dull pavement of the snow, and the jingle of weapons and the snorting of horses raising a warlike noise along the arches of the silent wood. Presently, the wide slot of the pursued came out upon the highroad from Holywood; it was there, for a moment, indistinguishable; and, where it once more plunged into the unbeaten snow upon the farther side, Dick was surprised to see it narrower and lighter trod. Plainly, profiting by the road, Sir Daniel had begun already to scatter his command. At all hazards, one chance being equal to another, Dick continued to pursue the straight trail; and that, after an hour's riding, in which it led into the very depths of the forest, suddenly split, like a bursting shell, into two dozen others, leading to every point of the compass. Dick drew bridle in despair. The short winter's day was near an end; the sun, a dull red orange, shorn of rays, swam low among the leafless thickets; the shadows were a mile long upon the snow; the frost bit cruelly at the finger-nails; and the breath and steam of the horses mounted in a cloud. "Well, we are outwitted," Dick confessed. "Strike we for Holywood, after all. It is still nearer us than Tunstall--or should be by the station of the sun." So they wheeled to their left, turning their backs on the red shield of sun, and made across country for the abbey. But now times were changed with them; they could no longer spank forth briskly on a path beaten firm by the passage of their foes, and for a goal to which that path itself conducted them. Now they must plough at a dull pace through the encumbering snow, continually pausing to decide their course, continually floundering in drifts. The sun soon left them; the glow of the west decayed; and presently they were wandering in a shadow of blackness, under frosty stars. Presently, indeed, the moon would clear the hill-tops, and they might resume their march. But till then, every random step might carry them wider of their march. There was nothing for it but to camp and wait. Sentries were posted; a spot of ground was cleared of snow, and, after some failures, a good fire blazed in the midst. The men-at-arms sat close about this forest hearth, sharing such provisions as they had, and passing about the flask; and Dick, having collected the most delicate of the rough and scanty fare, brought it to Lord Risingham's niece, where she sat apart from the soldiery against a tree. She sat upon one horse-cloth, wrapped in another, and stared straight before her at the firelit scene. At the offer of food she started, like one wakened from a dream, and then silently refused. "Madam," said Dick, "let me beseech you, punish me not so cruelly. Wherein I have offended you, I know not; I have, indeed, carried you away, but with a friendly violence; I have, indeed, exposed you to the inclemency of night, but the hurry that lies upon me hath for its end the preservation of another, who is no less frail and no less unfriended than yourself. At least, madam, punish not yourself; and eat, if not for hunger, then for strength." "I will eat nothing at the hands that slew my kinsman," she replied. "Dear madam," Dick cried, "I swear to you upon the rood I touched him not." "Swear to me that he still lives," she returned. "I will not palter with you," answered Dick. "Pity bids me to wound you. In my heart I do believe him dead." "And ye ask me to eat!" she cried. "Ay, and they call you 'sir'! Y' have won your spurs by my good kinsman's murder. And had I not been fool and traitor both, and saved you in your enemy's house, ye should have died the death, and he--he that was worth twelve of you--were living." "I did but my man's best, even as your kinsman did upon the other party," answered Dick. "Were he still living--as I vow to Heaven I wish it!--he would praise, not blame me." "Sir Daniel hath told me," she replied. "He marked you at the barricade. Upon you, he saith, their party foundered; it was you that won the battle. Well, then, it was you that killed my good Lord Risingham, as sure as though ye had strangled him. And ye would have me eat with you--and your hands not washed from killing? But Sir Daniel hath sworn your downfall. He 'tis that will avenge me!" The unfortunate Dick was plunged in gloom. Old Arblaster returned upon his mind, and he groaned aloud. "Do ye hold me so guilty?" he said; "you that defended me--you that are Joanna's friend?" "What made ye in the battle?" she retorted. "Y'are of no party; y'are but a lad--but legs and body, without government of wit or counsel! Wherefore did ye fight? For the love of hurt, pardy!" "Nay," cried Dick, "I know not. But as the realm of England goes, if that a poor gentleman fight not upon the one side, perforce he must fight upon the other. He may not stand alone; 'tis not in nature." "They that have no judgment should not draw the sword," replied the young lady. "Ye that fight but for a hazard, what are ye but a butcher? War is but noble by the cause, and y' have disgraced it." "Madam," said the miserable Dick, "I do partly see mine error. I have made too much haste; I have been busy before my time. Already I stole a ship--thinking, I do swear it, to do well--and thereby brought about the death of many innocent, and the grief and ruin of a poor old man whose face this very day hath stabbed me like a dagger. And for this morning, I did but design to do myself credit, and get fame to marry with, and, behold! I have brought about the death of your dear kinsman that was good to me. And what besides, I know not. For, alas! I may have set York upon the throne, and that may be the worser cause, and may do hurt to England. O, madam, I do see my sin. I am unfit for life. I will, for penance' sake and to avoid worse evil, once I have finished this adventure, get me to a cloister. I will forswear Joanna and the trade of arms. I will be a friar, and pray for your good kinsman's spirit all my days." It appeared to Dick, in this extremity of his humiliation and repentance, that the young lady had laughed. Raising his countenance, he found her looking down upon him, in the firelight, with a somewhat peculiar but not unkind expression. "Madam," he cried, thinking the laughter to have been an illusion of his hearing, but still, from her changed looks, hoping to have touched her heart, "madam, will not this content you? I give up all to undo what I have done amiss; I make heaven certain for Lord Risingham. And all this upon the very day that I have won my spurs, and thought myself the happiest young gentleman on ground." "O boy," she said--"good boy!" And then, to the extreme surprise of Dick, she first very tenderly wiped the tears away from his cheeks, and then, as if yielding to a sudden impulse, threw both her arms about his neck, drew up his face, and kissed him. A pitiful bewilderment came over simple-minded Dick. "But come," she said, with great cheerfulness, "you that are a captain, ye must eat. Why sup ye not?" "Dear Mistress Risingham," replied Dick, "I did but wait first upon my prisoner; but, to say truth, penitence will no longer suffer me to endure the sight of food. I were better to fast, dear lady, and to pray." "Call me Alicia," she said; "are we not old friends? And now, come, I will eat with you, bit for bit and sup for sup; so if ye eat not, neither will I; but if ye eat hearty, I will dine like a ploughman." So there and then she fell to; and Dick, who had an excellent stomach, proceeded to bear her company, at first with great reluctance, but gradually, as he entered into the spirit, with more and more vigour and devotion: until, at last, he forgot even to watch his model, and most heartily repaired the expenses of his day of labour and excitement. "Lion-driver," she said, at length, "ye do not admire a maid in a man's jerkin?" The moon was now up; and they were only waiting to repose the wearied horses. By the moon's light, the still penitent but now well-fed Richard beheld her looking somewhat coquettishly down upon him. "Madam--" he stammered, surprised at this new turn in her manners. "Nay," she interrupted, "it skills not to deny; Joanna hath told me, but come, sir lion-driver, look at me--am I so homely--come!" And she made bright eyes at him. "Ye are something smallish, indeed--" began Dick. And here again she interrupted him, this time with a ringing peal of laughter that completed his confusion and surprise. "Smallish!" she cried. "Nay, now, be honest as ye are bold; I am a dwarf, or little better; but for all that--come, tell me!--for all that, passably fair to look upon; is't not so?" "Nay, madam, exceedingly fair," said the distressed knight, pitifully trying to seem easy. "And a man would be right glad to wed me?" she pursued. "O, madam, right glad!" agreed Dick. "Call me Alicia," said she. "Alicia," quoth Sir Richard. "Well, then, lion-driver," she continued, "sith that ye slew my kinsman, and left me without stay, ye owe me, in honour, every reparation; do ye not?" "I do, madam," said Dick. "Although, upon my heart, I do hold me but partially guilty of that brave knight's blood." "Would ye evade me?" she cried. "Madam, not so. I have told you; at your bidding, I will even turn me a monk," said Richard. "Then, in honour, ye belong to me?" she concluded. "In honour, madam, I suppose--" began the young man. "Go to!" she interrupted; "ye are too full of catches. In honour do ye belong to me, till ye have paid the evil?" "In honour, I do," said Dick. "Hear, then," she continued. "Ye would make but a sad friar, methinks; and since I am to dispose of you at pleasure, I will even take you for my husband. Nay, now, no words!" cried she. "They will avail you nothing. For see how just it is, that you who deprived me of one home, should supply me with another. And as for Joanna, she will be the first, believe me, to commend the change; for, after all, as we be dear friends, what matters it with which of us ye wed? Not one whit!" "Madam," said Dick, "I will go into a cloister, an ye please to bid me; but to wed with any one in this big world besides Joanna Sedley is what I will consent to neither for man's force nor yet for lady's pleasure. Pardon me if I speak my plain thoughts plainly; but where a maid is very bold, a poor man must even be the bolder." "Dick," she said, "ye sweet boy, ye must come and kiss me for that word. Nay, fear not, ye shall kiss me for Joanna; and when we meet, I shall give it back to her, and say I stole it. And as for what ye owe me, why, dear simpleton, methinks ye were not alone in that great battle; and even if York be on the throne, it was not you that set him there. But for a good, sweet, honest heart, Dick, y'are all that; and if I could find it in my soul to envy your Joanna anything, I would even envy her your love." CHAPTER VI NIGHT IN THE WOODS (CONCLUDED): DICK AND JOAN The horses had by this time finished the small store of provender, and fully breathed from their fatigues. At Dick's command, the fire was smothered in snow; and while his men got once more wearily to saddle, he himself, remembering, somewhat late, true woodland caution, chose a tall oak and nimbly clambered to the topmost fork. Hence he could look far abroad on the moonlit and snow-paven forest. On the south-west, dark against the horizon, stood those upland, heathy quarters where he and Joanna had met with the terrifying misadventure of the leper. And there his eye was caught by a spot of ruddy brightness no bigger than a needle's eye. He blamed himself sharply for his previous neglect. Were that, as it appeared to be, the shining of Sir Daniel's camp-fire, he should long ago have seen and marched for it; above all, he should, for no consideration, have announced his neighbourhood by lighting a fire of his own. But now he must no longer squander valuable hours. The direct way to the uplands was about two miles in length; but it was crossed by a very deep, precipitous dingle, impassable to mounted men; and for the sake of speed, it seemed to Dick advisable to desert the horses and attempt the adventure on foot. Ten men were left to guard the horses; signals were agreed upon by which they could communicate in case of need; and Dick set forth at the head of the remainder, Alicia Risingham walking stoutly by his side. The men had freed themselves of heavy armour, and left behind their lances; and they now marched with a very good spirit in the frozen snow, and under the exhilarating lustre of the moon. The descent into the dingle, where a stream strained sobbing through the snow and ice, was effected with silence and order; and on the farther side, being then within a short half-mile of where Dick had seen the glimmer of the fire, the party halted to breathe before the attack. In the vast silence of the wood, the lightest sounds were audible from far; and Alicia, who was keen of hearing, held up her finger warningly and stooped to listen. All followed her example; but besides the groans of the choked brook in the dingle close behind, and the barking of a fox at a distance of many miles among the forest, to Dick's acutest hearkening, not a breath was audible. "But yet, for sure, I heard the clash of harness," whispered Alicia. "Madam," returned Dick, who was more afraid of that young lady than of ten stout warriors, "I would not hint ye were mistaken; but it might well have come from either of the camps." "It came not thence. It came from westward," she declared. "It may be what it will," returned Dick; "and it must be as Heaven please. Reck we not a jot, but push on the livelier, and put it to the touch. Up, friends--enough breathed." As they advanced, the snow became more and more trampled with hoof-marks, and it was plain that they were drawing near to the encampment of a considerable force of mounted men. Presently they could see the smoke pouring from among the trees, ruddily coloured on its lower edge and scattering bright sparks. And here, pursuant to Dick's orders, his men began to open out, creeping stealthily in the covert, to surround on every side the camp of their opponents. He himself, placing Alicia in the shelter of a bulky oak, stole straight forth in the direction of the fire. At last, through an opening of the wood, his eye embraced the scene of the encampment. The fire had been built upon a heathy hummock of the ground, surrounded on three sides by thicket, and it now burned very strong, roaring aloud and brandishing flames. Around it there sat not quite a dozen people, warmly cloaked; but though the neighbouring snow was trampled down as by a regiment, Dick looked in vain for any horse. He began to have a terrible misgiving that he was out-manoeuvred. At the same time, in a tall man with a steel salet, who was spreading his hands before the blaze, he recognised his old friend and still kindly enemy, Bennet Hatch; and in two others, sitting a little back, he made out, even in their male disguise, Joanna Sedley and Sir Daniel's wife. "Well," thought he to himself, "even if I lose my horses, let me get my Joanna, and why should I complain?" And then, from the farther side of the encampment, there came a little whistle, announcing that his men had joined, and the investment was complete. Bennet, at the sound, started to his feet; but ere he had time to spring upon his arms, Dick hailed him. "Bennet," he said--"Bennet, old friend, yield ye. Ye will but spill men's lives in vain, if ye resist." "'Tis Master Shelton, by St. Barbary!" cried Hatch. "Yield me? Ye ask much. What force have ye?" "I tell you, Bennet, ye are both outnumbered and begirt," said Dick. "Cæsar and Charlemagne would cry for quarter. I have two-score men at my whistle, and with one shoot of arrows I could answer for you all." "Master Dick," said Bennet, "it goes against my heart; but I must do my duty. The saints help you!" And therewith he raised a little tucket to his mouth and wound a rousing call. Then followed a moment of confusion; for while Dick, fearing for the ladies, still hesitated to give the word to shoot, Hatch's little band sprang to their weapons and formed back to back as for a fierce resistance. In the hurry of their change of place, Joanna sprang from her seat and ran like an arrow to her lover's side. "Here, Dick!" she cried, as she clasped his hand in hers. But Dick still stood irresolute; he was yet young to the more deplorable necessities of war, and the thought of old Lady Brackley checked the command upon his tongue. His own men became restive. Some of them cried on him by name; others, of their own accord, began to shoot; and at the first discharge poor Bennet bit the dust. Then Dick awoke. "On!" he cried. "Shoot, boys, and keep to cover. England and York!" But just then the dull beat of many horses on the snow suddenly arose in the hollow ear of the night, and, with incredible swiftness, drew nearer and swelled louder. At the same time, answering tuckets repeated and repeated Hatch's call. "Rally, rally!" cried Dick. "Rally upon me! Rally for your lives!" But his men--afoot, scattered, taken in the hour when they had counted on an easy triumph--began instead to give ground severally, and either stood wavering or dispersed into the thickets. And when the first of the horsemen came charging through the open avenues and fiercely riding their steeds into the underwood, a few stragglers were overthrown or speared among the brush, but the bulk of Dick's command had simply melted at the rumour of their coming. Dick stood for a moment, bitterly recognising the fruits of his precipitate and unwise valour. Sir Daniel had seen the fire; he had moved out with his main force, whether to attack his pursuers or to take them in the rear if they should venture the assault. His had been throughout the part of a sagacious captain; Dick's the conduct of an eager boy. And here was the young knight, his sweetheart, indeed, holding him tightly by the hand, but otherwise alone, his whole command of men and horses dispersed in the night and the wide forest, like a paper of pins in a hay barn. "The saints enlighten me!" he thought. "It is well I was knighted for this morning's matter; this doth me little honour." And thereupon, still holding Joanna, he began to run. The silence of the night was now shattered by the shouts of the men of Tunstall, as they galloped hither and thither, hunting fugitives; and Dick broke boldly through the underwood and ran straight before him like a deer. The silver clearness of the moon upon the open snow increased, by contrast, the obscurity of the thickets; and the extreme dispersion of the vanquished led the pursuers into widely divergent paths. Hence, in but a little while, Dick and Joanna paused, in a close covert, and heard the sounds of the pursuit, scattering abroad, indeed, in all directions, but yet fainting already in the distance. "An I had but kept a reserve of them together," Dick cried, bitterly, "I could have turned the tables yet! Well, we live and learn; next time it shall go better, by the rood." "Nay, Dick," said Joanna, "what matters it? Here we are together once again." He looked at her, and there she was--John Matcham, as of yore, in hose and doublet. But now he knew her; now, even in that ungainly dress, she smiled upon him, bright with love; and his heart was transported with joy. "Sweetheart," he said, "if ye forgive this blunderer, what care I? Make we direct for Holywood; there lieth your good guardian and my better friend, Lord Foxham. There shall we be wed; and whether poor or wealthy, famous or unknown, what matters it? This day, dear love, I won my spurs; I was commended by great men for my valour; I thought myself the goodliest man of war in all broad England. Then, first, I fell out of my favour with the great; and now have I been well thrashed, and clean lost my soldiers. There was a downfall for conceit! But, dear, I care not--dear, if ye still love me and will wed, I would have my knighthood done away, and mind it not a jot." "My Dick!" she cried. "And did they knight you?" "Ay, dear, ye are my lady now," he answered, fondly; "or ye shall, ere noon to-morrow--will ye not?" "That will I, Dick, with a glad heart," she answered. "Ay, sir? Methought ye were to be a monk!" said a voice in their ears. "Alicia!" cried Joanna. "Even so," replied the young lady, coming forward. "Alicia, whom ye left for dead, and whom your lion-driver found, and brought to life again, and, by my sooth, made love to, if ye want to know!" "I'll not believe it," cried Joanna. "Dick!" "Dick!" mimicked Alicia. "Dick, indeed! Ay, fair sir, and ye desert poor damsels in distress," she continued, turning to the young knight. "Ye leave them planted behind oaks. But they say true--the age of chivalry is dead." "Madam," cried Dick, in despair, "upon my soul I had forgotten you outright. Madam, ye must try to pardon me. Ye see, I had new found Joanna!" "I did not suppose that ye had done it o' purpose," she retorted. "But I will be cruelly avenged. I will tell a secret to my Lady Shelton--she that is to be," she added, curtseying. "Joanna," she continued, "I believe, upon my soul, your sweetheart is a bold fellow in a fight, but he is, let me tell you plainly, the softest-hearted simpleton in England. Go to--ye may do your pleasure with him! And now, fool children, first kiss me, either one of you, for luck and kindness; and then kiss each other just one minute by the glass, and not one second longer; and then let us all three set forth for Holywood as fast as we can stir; for these woods, methinks, are full of peril and exceeding cold." "But did my Dick make love to you?" asked Joanna, clinging to her sweetheart's side. "Nay, fool girl," returned Alicia; "It was I made love to him. I offered to marry him, indeed; but he bade me go marry with my likes. These were his words. Nay, that I will say: he is more plain than pleasant. But now, children, for the sake of sense, set forward. Shall we go once more over the dingle, or push straight for Holywood?" "Why," said Dick, "I would like dearly to get upon a horse; for I have been sore mauled and beaten, one way and another, these last days, and my poor body is one bruise. But how think ye? If the men, upon the alarm of the fighting, had fled away, we should have gone about for nothing. 'Tis but some three short miles to Holywood direct; the bell hath not beat nine; the snow is pretty firm to walk upon, the moon clear; how if we went even as we are?" "Agreed," cried Alicia; but Joanna only pressed upon Dick's arm. Forth, then, they went, through open leafless groves and down snow-clad alleys, under the white face of the winter moon; Dick and Joanna walking hand in hand and in a heaven of pleasure; and their light-minded companion, her own bereavements heartily forgotten, followed a pace or two behind, now rallying them upon their silence, and now drawing happy pictures of their future and united lives. Still, indeed, in the distance of the wood, the riders of Tunstall might be heard urging their pursuit; and from time to time cries or the clash of steel announced the shock of enemies. But in these young folk, bred among the alarms of war, and fresh from such a multiplicity of dangers, neither fear nor pity could be lightly wakened. Content to find the sounds still drawing farther and farther away, they gave up their hearts to the enjoyment of the hour, walking already, as Alicia put it, in a wedding procession; and neither the rude solitude of the forest, nor the cold of the freezing night, had any force to shadow or distract their happiness. At length, from a rising hill, they looked below them on the dell of Holywood. The great windows of the forest abbey shone with torch and candle; its high pinnacles and spires arose very clear and silent, and the gold rood upon the topmost summit glittered brightly in the moon. All about it, in the open glade, camp-fires were burning, and the ground was thick with huts; and across the midst of the picture the frozen river curved. "By the mass," said Richard, "there are Lord Foxham's fellows still encamped. The messenger hath certainly miscarried. Well, then, so better. We have power at hand to face Sir Daniel." But if Lord Foxham's men still lay encamped in the long holm at Holywood, it was from a different reason from the one supposed by Dick. They had marched, indeed, for Shoreby; but ere they were half-way thither, a second messenger met them, and bade them return to their morning's camp, to bar the road against Lancastrian fugitives, and to be so much nearer to the main army of York. For Richard of Gloucester, having finished the battle and stamped out his foes in that district, was already on the march to rejoin his brother; and not long after the return of my Lord Foxham's retainers, Crookback himself drew rein before the abbey door. It was in honour of this august visitor that the windows shone with lights; and at the hour of Dick's arrival with his sweetheart and her friend, the whole ducal party was being entertained in the refectory with the splendour of that powerful and luxurious monastery. Dick, not quite with his good-will, was brought before them. Gloucester, sick with fatigue, sat leaning upon one hand his white and terrifying countenance; Lord Foxham, half recovered from his wound, was in a place of honour on his left. "How, sir?" asked Richard. "Have ye brought me Sir Daniel's head?" "My lord duke," replied Dick, stoutly enough, but with a qualm at heart, "I have not even the good fortune to return with my command. I have been, so please your grace, well beaten." Gloucester looked upon him with a formidable frown. "I gave you fifty lances,[3] sir," he said. [3] Technically, the term "lance" included a not quite certain number of foot soldiers attached to the man-at-arms. "My lord duke, I had but fifty men-at-arms," replied the young knight. "How is this?" said Gloucester. "He did ask me fifty lances." "May it please your grace," replied Catesby, smoothly, "for a pursuit we gave him but the horsemen." "It is well," replied Richard, adding, "Shelton, ye may go." "Stay!" said Lord Foxham. "This young man likewise had a charge from me. It may be he hath better sped. Say, Master Shelton, have ye found the maid?" "I praise the saints, my lord," said Dick, "she is in this house." "Is it even so? Well, then, my lord the duke," resumed Lord Foxham, "with your good-will, to-morrow, before the army march, I do propose a marriage. This young squire----" "Young knight," interrupted Catesby. "Say ye so, Sir William?" cried Lord Foxham. "I did myself, and for good service, dub him knight," said Gloucester. "He hath twice manfully served me. It is not valour of hands, it is a man's mind of iron, that he lacks. He will not rise, Lord Foxham. 'Tis a fellow that will fight indeed bravely in a mellay, but hath a capon's heart. Howbeit, if he is to marry, marry him in the name of Mary, and be done!" "Nay, he is a brave lad--I know it," said Lord Foxham. "Content ye, then, Sir Richard. I have compounded this affair with Master Hamley, and to-morrow ye shall wed." Whereupon Dick judged it prudent to withdraw; but he was not yet clear of the refectory, when a man, but newly alighted at the gate, came running four stairs at a bound, and, brushing through the abbey servants, threw himself on one knee before the duke. "Victory, my lord," he cried. And before Dick had got to the chamber set apart for him as Lord Foxham's guest, the troops in the holm were cheering around their fires; for upon that same day, not twenty miles away, a second crushing blow had been dealt to the power of Lancaster. CHAPTER VII DICK'S REVENGE The next morning Dick was afoot before the sun, and having dressed himself to the best advantage with the aid of the Lord Foxham's baggage, and got good reports of Joan, he set forth on foot to walk away his impatience. For some while he made rounds among the soldiery, who were getting to arms in the wintry twilight of the dawn and by the red glow of torches; but gradually he strolled farther afield, and at length passed clean beyond the outposts, and walked alone in the frozen forest, waiting for the sun. His thoughts were both quiet and happy. His brief favour with the duke he could not find it in his heart to mourn; with Joan to wife, and my Lord Foxham for a faithful patron, he looked most happily upon the future; and in the past he found but little to regret. As he thus strolled and pondered, the solemn light of the morning grew more clear, the east was already coloured by the sun, and a little scathing wind blew up the frozen snow. He turned to go home; but even as he turned, his eye lit upon a figure behind a tree. "Stand!" he cried. "Who goes?" The figure stepped forth and waved its hand like a dumb person. It was arrayed like a pilgrim, the hood lowered over the face, but Dick, in an instant, recognised Sir Daniel. He strode up to him, drawing his sword; and the knight, putting his hand in his bosom, as if to seize a hidden weapon, steadfastly awaited his approach. "Well, Dickon," said Sir Daniel, "how is it to be? Do ye make war upon the fallen?" "I made no war upon your life," replied the lad; "I was your true friend until ye sought for mine; but ye have sought for it greedily." "Nay--self-defence," replied the knight. "And now, boy, the news of this battle, and the presence of yon crooked devil here in mine own wood, have broken me beyond all help. I go to Holywood for sanctuary; thence overseas, with what I can carry, and to begin life again in Burgundy or France." "Ye may not go to Holywood," said Dick. "How! May not?" asked the knight. "Look ye, Sir Daniel, this is my marriage morn," said Dick; "and yon sun that is to rise will make the brightest day that ever shone for me. Your life is forfeit--doubly forfeit, for my father's death and your own practices to meward. But I myself have done amiss; I have brought about men's deaths; and upon this glad day I will be neither judge nor hangman. An ye were the devil, I would not lay a hand on you. An ye were the devil, ye might go where ye will for me. Seek God's forgiveness; mine ye have freely. But to go on to Holywood is different. I carry arms for York, and I will suffer no spy within their lines. Hold it, then, for certain, if ye set one foot before another, I will uplift my voice and call the nearest post to seize you." "Ye mock me," said Sir Daniel. "I have no safety out of Holywood." "I care no more," returned Richard. "I let you go east, west, or south; north I will not. Holywood is shut against you. Go, and seek not to return. For, once ye are gone, I will warn every post about this army, and there will be so shrewd a watch upon all pilgrims that, once again, were ye the very devil, ye would find it ruin to make the essay." "Ye doom me," said Sir Daniel, gloomily. "I doom you not," returned Richard. "If it so please you to set your valour against mine, come on; and though I fear it be disloyal to my party, I will take the challenge openly and fully, fight you with mine own single strength, and call for none to help me. So shall I avenge my father, with a perfect conscience." "Ay," said Sir Daniel, "y' have a long sword against my dagger." "I rely upon Heaven only," answered Dick, casting his sword some way behind him on the snow. "Now, if your ill-fate bids you, come; and, under the pleasure of the Almighty, I make myself bold to feed your bones to foxes." "I did but try you, Dickon," returned the knight, with an uneasy semblance of a laugh. "I would not spill your blood." "Go, then, ere it be too late," replied Shelton. "In five minutes I will call the post. I do perceive that I am too long-suffering. Had but our places been reversed, I should have been bound hand and foot some minutes past." "Well, Dickon, I will go," replied Sir Daniel. "When we next meet, it shall repent you that ye were so harsh." And with these words, the knight turned and began to move off under the trees. Dick watched him with strangely-mingled feelings, as he went, swiftly and warily, and ever and again turning a wicked eye upon the lad who had spared him, and whom he still suspected. There was upon one side of where he went a thicket, strongly matted with green ivy, and, even in its winter state, impervious to the eye. Herein, all of a sudden, a bow sounded like a note of music. An arrow flew, and with a great, choked cry of agony and anger, the Knight of Tunstall threw up his hands and fell forward in the snow. Dick bounded to his side and raised him. His face desperately worked; his whole body was shaken by contorting spasms. "Is the arrow black?" he gasped. "It is black," replied Dick, gravely. And then, before he could add one word, a desperate seizure of pain shook the wounded man from head to foot, so that his body leaped in Dick's supporting arms, and with the extremity of that pang his spirit fled in silence. The young man laid him back gently on the snow and prayed for that unprepared and guilty spirit, and as he prayed the sun came up at a bound, and the robins began chirping in the ivy. When he rose to his feet, he found another man upon his knees but a few steps behind him, and, still with uncovered head, he waited until that prayer also should be over. It took long; the man, with his head bowed and his face covered with his hands, prayed like one in a great disorder or distress of mind; and by the bow that lay beside him, Dick judged that he was no other than the archer who had laid Sir Daniel low. At length he, also, rose, and showed the countenance of Ellis Duckworth. "Richard," he said, very gravely, "I heard you. Ye took the better part and pardoned; I took the worse, and there lies the clay of mine enemy. Pray for me." And he wrung him by the hand. "Sir," said Richard, "I will pray for you, indeed; though how I may prevail I wot not. But if ye have so long pursued revenge, and find it now of such a sorry flavour, bethink ye, were it not well to pardon others? Hatch--he is dead, poor shrew! I would have spared a better; and for Sir Daniel, here lies his body. But for the priest, if I might anywise prevail, I would have you let him go." A flash came into the eyes of Ellis Duckworth. "Nay," he said, "the devil is still strong within me. But be at rest; the Black Arrow flieth nevermore--the fellowship is broken. They that still live shall come to their quiet and ripe end, in Heaven's good time, for me; and for yourself, go where your better fortune calls you, and think no more of Ellis." [Illustration: _"But be at rest; the Black Arrow flieth nevermore"_] CHAPTER VIII CONCLUSION About nine in the morning, Lord Foxham was leading his ward, once more dressed as befitted her sex, and followed by Alicia Risingham, to the church of Holywood, when Richard Crookback, his brow already heavy with cares, crossed their path and paused. "Is this the maid?" he asked; and when Lord Foxham had replied in the affirmative, "Minion," he added, "hold up your face until I see its favour." He looked upon her sourly for a little. "Ye are fair," he said at last, "and, as they tell me, dowered. How if I offered you a brave marriage, as became your face and parentage?" "My lord duke," replied Joanna, "may it please your grace, I had rather wed with Sir Richard." "How so?" he asked, harshly. "Marry but the man I name to you, and he shall be my lord, and you my lady, before night. For Sir Richard, let me tell you plainly, he will die Sir Richard." "I ask no more of Heaven, my lord, than but to die Sir Richard's wife," returned Joanna. "Look ye at that, my lord," said Gloucester, turning to Lord Foxham. "Here be a pair for you. The lad, when for good services I gave him his choice of my favour, chose but the grace of an old, drunken shipman. I did warn him freely, but he was stout in his besottedness. 'Here dieth your favour,' said I; and he, my lord, with a most assured impertinence, 'Mine be the loss,' quoth he. It shall be so, by the rood!" "Said he so?" cried Alicia. "Then well said, lion-driver!" "Who is this?" asked the duke. "A prisoner of Sir Richard's," answered Lord Foxham; "Mistress Alicia Risingham." "See that she be married to a sure man," said the duke. "I had thought of my kinsman, Hamley, an it like your grace," returned Lord Foxham. "He hath well served the cause." "It likes me well," said Richard. "Let them be wedded speedily. Say, fair maid, will you wed?" "My lord duke," said Alicia, "so as the man is straight--" And there, in a perfect consternation, the voice died on her tongue. "He is straight, my mistress," replied Richard, calmly. "I am the only crookback of my party; we are else passably well shapen. Ladies, and you, my lord," he added, with a sudden change to grave courtesy, "judge me not too churlish if I leave you. A captain, in the time of war, hath not the ordering of his hours." And with a very handsome salutation he passed on, followed by his officers. "Alack," cried Alicia, "I am shent!" "Ye know him not," replied Lord Foxham. "It is but a trifle; he hath already clean forgot your words." "He is, then, the very flower of knighthood," said Alicia. "Nay, he but mindeth other things," returned Lord Foxham. "Tarry we no more." In the chancel they found Dick waiting, attended by a few young men; and there were he and Joan united. When they came forth again, happy and yet serious, into the frosty air and sunlight, the long files of the army were already winding forward up the road; already the Duke of Gloucester's banner was unfolded and began to move from before the abbey in a clump of spears; and behind it, girt by steel-clad knights, the bold, black-hearted, and ambitious hunchback moved on towards his brief kingdom and his lasting infamy. But the wedding party turned upon the other side, and sat down, with sober merriment, to breakfast. The father cellarer attended on their wants, and sat with them at table. Hamley, all jealousy forgotten, began to ply the nowise loth Alicia with courtship. And there, amid the sounding of tuckets and the clash of armoured soldiery and horses continually moving forth, Dick and Joan sat side by side, tenderly held hands, and looked, with ever growing affection, in each other's eyes. Thenceforth the dust and blood of that unruly epoch passed them by. They dwelt apart from alarms in the green forest where their love began. Two old men in the meanwhile enjoyed pensions in great prosperity and peace, and with perhaps a superfluity of ale and wine, in Tunstall hamlet. One had been all his life a shipman, and continued to the last to lament his man Tom. The other, who had been a bit of everything, turned in the end towards piety, and made a most religious death under the name of Brother Honestus in the neighbouring abbey. So Lawless had his will, and died a friar. * * * * * Transcriber's Notes Obvious typographical errors have been corrected, and hyphenation made consistent within the text. Common contractions have been closed up (e.g. 'tis rather than 't is). Where this would lead to two apostrophes together, the space has been retained (e.g. y' 'ave). The oe ligature has been replaced by oe. All other spelling and punctuation has been left as in the original text. Italics are marked with underscores _like this_. All illustrations in the text are marked with the caption "_Copyright by Charles Scribner's Sons_." For ease of reading, this has been removed and placed here. Where full-page illustrations fall within a paragraph, they have been moved to the end of the preceding paragraph. This text contains three footnotes, marked in the text as [1], [2] and [3]. The footnotes follow the paragraphs to which they refer. 
43130	----	Lettice By Mrs Molesworth Illustrations by F. Dadd Published by Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. This edition dated 1884. Lettice, by Mrs Molesworth. ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ LETTICE, BY MRS MOLESWORTH. CHAPTER ONE. "IT HAS COME." "... The Faith ... Which winged quick seeds of hope beyond the boundary walls of death." Dr Walter Smith, _Hilda_. Lettice moved to the window. She choked down a little sob which was beginning to rise in her throat, and by dint of resolutely gazing out at what was before her, tried to imagine not only that she was not crying, but that she had not, never had had, the slightest inclination to cry. A clumsy cart laden with wood, drawn by two bullocks, came stumbling down the hilly street. The stupid patient creatures, having managed to wedge their burden against some stones at the side of the road, stood blinking sleepily, while their driver, not altogether displeased at the momentary cessation of his labours, kept up a great appearance of energy by the series of strange guttural sounds he emitted, in the intervals of strenuous endeavours to light his pipe. Two or three Spanish labourers, looking, with their fine presence and picturesque costume, like princes in disguise, came slowly and gravely up the hill, the brilliant sunshine lighting up the green or scarlet sashes knotted round their waists and hiding the shabbiness of their velveteen breeches. One, a youth of not more than sixteen or seventeen, happened to look up as he passed by the window where the fair-faced, brown-haired girl was standing, and a gleam of gentle, half-comprehending pity, such as one sees sometimes in the expression of a great Newfoundland dog, came into his large, soft, innocent-looking dark eyes. Lettice started indignantly. "What does that boy stare at me for?" she said to herself. "Does he think I am crying?" But the quick movement had played her false. Two or three unmistakable tears dropped on to her dress. More indignantly still, the girl brushed them away. "Absurd!" she half murmured to herself. "I am too silly to take things to heart so. Mamma not quite herself to-day. She is nervous and fanciful, no doubt, like all invalids, and less clearheaded than usual. One should not always pay attention to what an invalid says. She is weak, and that makes her give way to feelings she would not encourage generally." But just then the sound of her mother's voice--low and faint certainly, but in no way nervous or querulous, with even a little undernote of cheerfulness in the calm tones--reached her where she stood. Even Lettice, with all her power of self-deception, could not feel that it seemed like the voice of a person who did not very well know what she was talking about; and, with another little jerk of impatience, she drew out her watch. "I wish it were time to go out," she half muttered to herself. "Nina is so childish; I can't understand how mamma doesn't see it." For the snatches of talk going on about her mother's sofa had to do with nothing more important than the grouping and placing of some lovely ferns and wild-flowers, which eighteen-year-old Nina and Lotty, the baby of the family, had brought in from their morning ramble. "Yes," said the mother, with real pleasure, almost eagerness, in her voice, "that is beautiful, Nina; I shall have the refreshment of those ferns before me all day, without having to turn my head. I shall be able, _almost_, to fancy myself in the woods again." "Why can't you come, mamma?" said Lotty's high-pitched, childish voice. "It really isn't far, and you could have one of those nice low little carriages _nearly_ all the way. I don't think it _could_ tire you." For an instant there was no reply. Lettice felt, though she could not see her mother, that she was striving to regain the self-control which Lotty's innocent speeches now and then almost upset. And tears, sadder but less bitter than those which had preceded them, welled slowly up to the elder sister's eyes. Then came Nina's caressing tones, in half-whispers, as she stooped over her mother. "Darling?" Lettice heard her murmur; and then, turning to Lotty, "Run away and take off your things; mamma is going to sleep a little." And Lettice still stood by the window, though the bullock-cart had jerked and slid down the street and was now lost to view, and the young Spaniard with the gentle lustrous eyes had long since passed out of sight. She was crying now--softly but unrestrainedly; her mood had changed. It would have mattered little to her present feelings though all the world had seen her tears. "Oh! it is so sad, so unutterably sad, for her and for us," she was whispering to herself. "There are times when I could almost find it in my heart to wish it were already over. I cannot _bear_ to think of her suffering more." Just then an arm was passed round her waist, and the same caressing voice whispered, this time in _her_ ear, the same word-- "Darling!" Lettice did not speak, but she leant for a moment against her sister in a more clinging way than was usual with her. "Nina," she said wearily. "Yes, dear," said Nina. She was always very proud, poor girl, when Lettice seemed to turn to her for support or sympathy. "It's so miserable, isn't it?" "Yes, dear," said Nina again. She would dearly have liked to add some words of comfort, but she did not know what to say. It was true. It _was_ very miserable! "Why should _we_ be so unhappy?" Lettice went on. "Why should such troubles come to us; other people go on living happy peaceful lives, without these dreadful earthquakes of trouble? And we have only her." "I know," said Nina softly. "And, as things are, we can't _even_ wish it to go on, can we?" said Lettice, unconsciously raising her voice a little, as she spoke more energetically. "She suffers more and more, and--do you know, Nina?" She hesitated. Nina looked round anxiously. "Come into the other room," she said. "Bertha is in the ante-room; she hears the slightest movement. But I don't think mamma is very soundly asleep, and our talking may disturb her." "We may as well go into the garden a little," said Lettice indifferently. "And what was it you were going to say when I interrupted you?" asked Nina, half timidly, when they found themselves pacing up and down a little raised terrace walk which overlooked the street. Lettice reflected for a moment. "Oh, I remember," she said. "It was about mamma. Don't you think sometimes, Nina, that all this suffering is weakening her mind a little? She doesn't seem so clear about things, and it worries me. For of course, though I would like, after--after mamma is gone, to do exactly as she would have wished, yet one must discriminate between what her real wishes and advice are, or were, and the sort of weak--yielding to feeling--I--I don't quite know what to call it--I don't mean to be disrespectful, of course--that must have come with her long illness and the suffering and all that. And it makes it difficult for me, still more difficult, to discriminate, you know. For it is such a responsibility on me--such a heavy responsibility!" and Lettice gave a little sigh. But something in the sigh seemed to say that the heavy responsibility was not _altogether_ disagreeable to her. Nina walked on, her blue eyes fixed on the ground, her fair face contracted into an expression of unusual perplexity. She could not bear to disagree with or contradict Lettice--Lettice so clever, so unselfish, so devoted--the heroine of all her girlish romance! And yet-- "I don't think quite as you do about mamma," she said at last. "I can't say that I see any sign of--of her mind failing. On the contrary, as she grows bodily weaker it seems to me that her mind--her _soul_, I would almost rather say--grows wiser and stronger, and sees the real right and best of all things more and more clearly." She had forgotten her fear of Lettice in the last few words, but she soon had cause to remember it again. "`Her mind failing,'" repeated Lettice contemptuously. "How coarsely you express things, Nina! Whoever would say such a thing? As if mamma were an old woman in her dotage! What's the matter? Surely you are not going to _cry_--for nothing!" For Nina's face had grown very red, and she fumbled about with her parasol in an uneasy manner. But she was _not_ crying, and Lettice, watching her, saw another cause for the blush and the discomfort, in the person of a young man, who just then crossing the street raised his hat with a shy yet eager deference, which the most scrupulous of chaperones could not have objected to. "That boy!" said Lettice under her breath. "And just now when I wanted to make Nina thoroughly sympathise with me! It is really detestable-- one has no privacy here. We had better go back into the house," she said aloud. "Hush, Lettice; he will hear you!" exclaimed Nina, some stronger feeling overcoming even her awe of her sister. "He is going to speak to us." And before Lettice had time to reply, the young man came to a halt just below where they were standing. "Is--I hope--excuse my interrupting you," he began, for Lettice's expression was not encouraging, to say the least. "I was so anxious to know if Mrs Morison is better to-day." "Thank you," said Lettice, civilly but coldly. "Yes, on the whole I think she _is_ rather better to-day." Nina, from under her parasol, darted on her sister a look half of reproach, half of surprise. "Better!" Mamma any better! How could Lettice say so? To her eyes it was very evident that she was daily growing worse. And she felt sure that Lettice saw it too. "She won't allow it to herself," she thought. "But I think it is better to own the truth. I would like Philip Dexter to know--I like him to be sorry for us." And there was a depth of sadness in her eyes that found its way straight to the young man's heart, as, without having spoken a word, she bent her head in farewell when Mr Dexter turned to go. "Stupid boy!" said Lettice impatiently. "Could he not have seen we did not want to speak to any one? But he is kind-hearted," she went on, relenting, as she often did, after a too hasty speech; "I dare say he means well." "And are you not a little--just a little--prejudiced?" said Nina. "Perhaps I am," Lettice replied calmly; "and so, it seems to me, I and you and all of us _should_ be. It is just that that I am thinking of, Nina. You know how strongly papa felt about his relations, and till now mamma has always seemed to feel the same." "No," interrupted Nina; "mamma has often said to me that though she loved papa for feeling it so, for it was for _her_ sake, she herself could not resent it all so much." "But that is not to say _we_ should not," exclaimed Lettice hotly. "Mamma is an angel, and now especially,"--here, in spite of herself, the girl's voice broke--"she has none but gentle feelings to all. But for _us_--that is what is troubling me so. Mamma has actually said to me that after she is gone she hopes we may make friends--with _them_, that if they show any kindly disposition she hopes we will meet them half-way. How _could_ we do so? Nina, it would not be right. You don't think it would be right?" Nina hesitated. "Besides," pursued Lettice, "we shall have no need of kindness or help from them or any one. We shall have enough to live on, with care and management, and I understand all about that. I have been training myself all this time to replace mamma, and it is her greatest comfort to know this. I am not afraid of anything, except interference." "But about money--you _must_ have some one to help you," said Nina. "About investments, and interest, and dividends,--a girl _can't_ manage all that." "Oh, as for _that_," said Lettice airily, as if such trifling matters were quite beneath her consideration, "of course the lawyers and trustees can see to all that. Our cousin Godfrey Auriol is responsible for all that, and he must be very nice. I don't mind him at all, for of course he would never think of interfering; he is much too young." "Too young!" said Nina; "why, he is not far off thirty! Philip Dexter told me so the other day. He is quite five years older than--" "Philip Dexter has no business to talk of any of our relations at all," said Lettice loftily. "Not even about how old they are?" said Nina. "No, not even that," replied Lettice, though, in spite of herself, a little smile crept round her mouth. Then the two girls stood still for a moment, and from the highest point of the terrace gazed out in silence on the lovely view before them. The fertile valley at their feet, the gently rising ground beyond, and far in the distance the lofty mountains, with their everlasting crown of snow; and over all the intensity of blue sky--the blue sky of the south, glowing and gleaming like a turquoise furnace. "How beautiful it is!" said Nina. "Yes," replied Lettice, "I suppose it is. But I shall never care for that kind of sunshine and blue sky again, Nina. I would rather have it grey and cloudy. It is such a mockery. It seems as if nature were so heartless to smile and shine like that when we are, oh, so miserable!" "I like clouds, too, _some_ clouds, better than that all blue," agreed Nina. "There is no mystery, no _behind_, in that sky. It doesn't make me feel nearer heaven." And then they turned and went in again, for it was but seldom they both together left their mother for even so short a time. Mrs Morison was dying, and she knew it. She had been ill for more than a year, but only since coming to spend a winter in the south had her malady assumed a hopeless form. It was not consumption, for which she was more than thankful for her children's sake. Indeed, it had been the result of over-exerting herself in attendance on her husband, whose death was the consequence of an accident on horseback some years previously. There had been a hope that the change of climate and the peculiarly soothing effect on the nervous system of the air of Esparto might have at least arrested the progress of her disease; but this hope had been of short continuance. For herself she was resigned, and more than resigned, to die; but, for long, the thought of leaving her children had caused a terrible struggle. But with decrease of physical strength had come increase of moral force, and above all, spiritual faith. She could trust God for herself, why not as fully for those far dearer to her than herself? And slowly but surely she had learnt to do so, thankful for such mitigation of the sorrow as had come by its gradual approach, which gave her time to prepare her elder daughters for what would be before them when they should have to face life without her. To endeavour, too, to undo certain prejudices which they had, not unnaturally, imbibed from their father, and even at one time from herself--prejudices which she now saw to have been exaggerated, which she had always in her heart felt to be unchristian. But, alas! prejudice and dislike are seeds more easily sown than uprooted, for they grow apace, and, with a sigh, Mrs Morison realised that, as regarded Lettice, above all, she must leave this trouble, with many others, in wiser hands. "I have said and done all I can for the present," she said to herself; "I must leave it now. I would not have our last days together disturbed by what, after all, is not a vital matter. Lettice is too good and true to stand out should circumstances show her she is wrong." For Lettice _was_ good and true, unselfish and devoted, eager to do right, but with the eagerness and self-confidence of an untried warrior, knowing nought of the battle and thinking she knew all, satisfied as to the temper and perfection of the untested weapons in her possession, full of prejudice and one-sidedness while she prided herself on her fairness and width of judgment. But self and its opinions were kept much in the background during the few days that followed the morning I have been telling you of. Very calm and peaceful days they were, very sweet and blessed to look back upon in afterlife; for their calm was undisturbed by any misgiving that they might be the _last_--nay, to the sisters it was even brightened by a faint return of hope, when they had thought all hope was past. "If mamma keeps as well as she has been the last few days, it will be almost impossible not to begin hoping again," said Lettice one evening, after their mother had been comfortably settled for the night. Nina's less impulsive nature was slower to receive impressions, yet there was a gleam of real brightness in the smile with which she replied to her sister. "Yes, really," she said; "and doctors are _sometimes_ mistaken. We must do all we can to keep her from having the _least_ backcast now, just so near Arthur's coming. How happy--oh, how wonderfully happy--we should be if she were to get even a little better, _really_ better. Oh, Lettice, just think of it!" "And how she will enjoy having us all together again next week. For Auriol's holidays begin then too, you know, Nina; and with Arthur here to keep him quiet, poor little boy, it will be much easier than it was at Christmas." And with these happy thoughts the poor girls went to bed. They had slept the sound peaceful sleep of youth, for three or four hours perhaps, when, with a start, they were both aroused by a soft knocking at the door. Half thinking it was fancy, they waited an instant, each unwilling to disturb the other. But again it came, and this time more distinctly. Trembling already so that she could scarcely stand, Lettice opened the door. Ah! there was no need for words. There stood old Bertha, her mother's maid, with white though composed face, and eyes resolutely refusing to weep _as yet_. "My dears," she whispered, "there is--there is a change. You must come. Miss Lotty, poor thing, too. And I have sent for Master Auriol." Lettice's face worked convulsively. She caught hold of Nina, and for an instant they clung together. "_It has come_," whispered Nina. "Let us be good for her sake, Lettice darling." "Yes," said Bertha, "she wants you all." "All," repeated Nina; "but, oh, Bertha, think of poor Arthur!" CHAPTER TWO. A NEW-COMER. "Who was this gentleman-friend, and whence?" _Lavender Lady_. About ten days later, a sad little group was assembled in the pretty drawing-room of the Villa Martine. It was a lovely evening, but the sunshine outside was not reflected on the young faces of Lettice Morison and her brother and sister. Lotty and Auriol, the children of the family, were amusing themselves quietly enough on the balcony, though now and then a little laugh made itself heard from their direction, causing Lettice to look up with a slight frown of disapproval on her pale face. "How _can_ they?" she said in a low voice, and she was moving to check them, when Nina held her back. "Don't be vexed with them," she said deprecatingly, "they are only children. _She_ would not be vexed--indeed, I think she would be glad for them not to be too crushed down." Lettice's eyes filled with tears--they were never far to seek in these days--and she sank down again in her seat with a sigh. The boy beside her, a slight, dark-haired fellow, with soft eyes like Nina's, put his arm caressingly round her waist. "Dear Lettice," he said, "I can't bear to see you looking so _very_ unhappy." Lettice submitted to the caress, but scarcely responded to it. "I can't help it, Arthur," she replied. "I do not give way to grief wrongly, for I do not allow it to make me neglect any duty. I have been very busy to-day, getting in all the bills and so on that we owe here, writing to the landlord, and all kinds of things. You don't know all there is upon me." A slight glance, which Lettice did not see, passed between Nina and Arthur. It seemed to encourage the boy to say more. "I know," he said. "I have seen how busy you have been. But are you sure that it was necessary? You know none of us have any legal authority--we are all minors--and our trustees _must_ settle these things. And it would be so much less painful for you not to force yourself to do it all yourself. Godfrey Auriol will be here to-morrow; he is coming on purpose to get all settled." "Godfrey Auriol!" repeated Lettice with a slight tone of contempt. "What can _he_ know about such things? His trusteeship is merely nominal. Of course it was natural and right to name him, our only relative, though not a very near one. But I have _never_ thought of him as really to be considered." "You will find yourself mistaken, then, I suspect," said Arthur, a touch of boyish love of teasing breaking through even his present subdued mood. Lettice drew herself away from his arm. "How _can_ you?" she exclaimed, her tears flowing still more freely. "Nina, speak to him. How _can_ he? And--and--Arthur, you can't know what we have gone through, or you wouldn't speak so. You weren't here; you--" "Oh, Lettice, don't say that to him," interrupted Nina. "It is the not having been here that has been the cruellest of all to him, and he has not been selfish about it. Still, Arthur, you shouldn't say _anything_ to hurt Lettice;" for Nina was always assailed at her weakest point, by any approach to "appeal" on the part of her elder sister. "I am very sorry. I didn't mean it. That's a stupid thing to say, but it's true," said Arthur penitently. "And I'm sorry too. I didn't mean what it sounded like," said Lettice. "I know it has been worse for you than for any of us," she went on, looking up in Arthur's face with her tearful eyes. Lettice was one of the few people in the world who seldom show to greater advantage than when in tears. Her eyes were not so fine as Nina's and Arthur's soft brown ones; they were grey--good, sensible, "well-opened" eyes, but in a general way with a want of depth and tenderness in them. And this want the tears supplied. Her recent sorrow, too, had, as it were, etherealised and softened her whole face and its expression, whose real beauty was often marred by a certain hardness which seemed to render square and angular the outlines intended by nature to be curved and graceful. The thought struck Nina as her glance fell upon her. "How _very_ sweet and lovely Lettice looks just at this moment." And the thought, though not in quite the same form, struck another person who just at that moment entered the room. He had never seen her before. "What a lovely girl! Can that be Lettice? I have always heard that Nina was the beauty, but this girl is too dark to be Nina," were the reflections that rushed through his mind in far less time than it takes to tell them. And in a moment his ideas were confirmed, for another girl, whose face had been completely hidden, turned at the slight sound of his approach, and by her exceedingly fair hair and complexion he recognised the Nina who had been described to him. But his eyes turned quickly from her to her sister. "I beg your pardon a thousand times," he said, his own face colouring a little as he spoke. "I rang, but as no one answered, and as the front door was open, I ventured to come in. You know who I am,"--for all the three young people had started to their feet, too surprised as yet to find their voices. "I am Godfrey--Godfrey Auriol, your cousin, I hope I may call myself." By this time Lettice and the others had recovered their wits. Lettice came a step or two forward and held out her hand. "Our cousin," she repeated; "yes, certainly, Mr Auriol, we should be very sorry not to count you our cousin--you who are, I may say, our only relation;" and at these words an expression crossed her face which Godfrey saw but did not understand. But it was gone before it had time to settle there, or to spoil the first pleasing impression which he had received. "I was so grieved," he went on, while he shook hands with them all, "so very grieved that I could not be in time; that it was utterly impossible for me to come over in time for--" He stopped short, but they all knew what he meant. Lettice's lips quivered. "I wish you could have come," she said softly, and again the expression that so embellished it stole over her face. "Indeed, that was really the only reason for your coming so far at all; you will not find much to see to, I think," and she smiled a little, so that Mr Auriol felt puzzled. Her tone was too gentle for him to suspect any assertion of independence to be intended. "But we all knew you could not help it," she added. "You are always very busy, are you not?" said Nina, speaking for the first time. "Pretty well," said Godfrey, smiling. "I lost no time on the journey, and I was very glad to get off a day sooner than I had expected. I came straight here from the station, trusting to you to tell me what hotel I had better go to." "You came straight from the station? Then you've had nothing to eat. How thoughtless of us!" exclaimed Lettice, and, looking round, she saw that Nina had already disappeared. "There is an hotel close by," said Arthur. "I'll go round with you if you like, as soon as you've had some dinner." "Thank you," said Mr Auriol. "I'm very sorry to give you so much trouble, but I wanted to look you up at once. I can only stay so very short a time: I must be back in England within the week." "How can you talk of giving us trouble?" said Arthur; "it is you who are giving yourself a great deal for us;" and he glanced at Lettice as if to hint to her that she should endorse his speech. But she said nothing; only later in the evening, when their visitor was just about leaving, she said to him in a quiet but somewhat studied voice-- "I hope you will be able to see something of the neighbourhood while you are here. There are so many pretty excursions, and in a week one can do a good deal. Arthur himself has not seen much; he has only been three weeks with us all the months we have been here. And he would enjoy going about with you." Godfrey Auriol was not deficient in perception, still less in quick resolution when he saw occasion for it. He hesitated, but for half a second only, before he replied. "Yes," he said calmly, "it would be very pleasant were it feasible. But you know, Miss Morison, it is not for _pleasure_ I have come all this way. There is a great deal of business to be seen to, and for some of it I must have your attention, though I would gladly spare you all trouble if I could. At what hour to-morrow may I come? It is no use putting off what has to be done, however painful." Lettice's colour rose high--all over her face; she felt the mortification doubly, since it was in the presence of her younger sister and brother. But she did her best not to show what she felt, and to any one not knowing her well, her emotion might have passed for what was only natural and almost seemly under the circumstances. And even in the tone of her voice as she answered, it required a nice and skilled observer to detect the latent armour of resistance in which she was determined to clothe herself. Unfortunately for her, her three companions, the two younger ones thanks to their intimate knowledge of her peculiarities, the third by dint of unusual and cultivated power of discrimination, which she herself had raised to suspicion, were not deceived by her words, in themselves perfectly unexceptionable. "At any hour you like," she said. "Of course it is best that we should know all about our money, though I really do know already all that is practically necessary. But these kind of formalities must be gone through, I suppose. So I can be ready at any hour you like. Will ten o'clock do?" "Perfectly, if it will suit you _all_?" said Mr Auriol, glancing inquiringly at Nina and Arthur. "I shall want you all three. The two little ones, of course, it would be absurd to talk to on such matters; but you three are much in the same position. You are all minors. Besides, it is not _only_ about money matters I want to speak to you." These last two or three sentences were bitter pills for Lettice to swallow. Arthur and Nina had the consideration not to look at her. Once she opened her lips as if about to speak, but thought better of it and said nothing. "I can put all that right at the proper time," she reflected. "No use beginning about it now. But it is really too absurd, Nina and Arthur counted on a par with _me_!" And it did seem so very absurd that she felt she could afford to smile at it, and with this consideration her calm returned. So that her brother and sister, and even Mr Auriol himself, were surprised, and somewhat impressed, by the perfectly unruffled tone in which she said pleasantly-- "Very well, then; to-morrow morning at ten o'clock we shall _all_ be ready." "She must be extremely sweet-tempered," thought Godfrey, when Arthur, having shown him to his hotel, had left him alone for the night. "I am afraid I was rather rough to her. Her little assumption of independence was really only touching, poor child," he went on to reflect, little dreaming, deluded man, of what was before him! "And Nina is very pretty and very attractive--I don't wonder at Dexter-- though she is not to be compared with Lettice for real beauty of feature and expression." Few words passed between the sisters after their guest had left them. When Arthur came in he found Lettice sitting alone. Nina had gone to bed, and she too was tired and meant to follow her at once. "And don't you like him?" Arthur could not help saying, as he kissed his sister for good night. "Like him--whom?" said Lettice, as if awaking from a brown study. "Mr Auriol? Oh yes, I like him very well. He is much what I expected;" and Arthur said no more. Notwithstanding his long journey of the preceding days, Mr Auriol was awake and up betimes the following morning. It was several years since he had been out of his own country, and the sights and sounds about him struck him almost as freshly as if he saw and heard them for the first time. The early morning sunshine was softer and less monotonous than the midday effulgence which Lettice had complained of, and seemed to add vividness without glare to every detail of the picturesque scene on which his windows looked out. For it was market-day at Esparto, and the border-land town was a meeting-place for the denizens of many widely varying districts. There were the country people from the near neighbourhood. The women, plain-looking save for their brilliant eyes, weather-beaten and prematurely aged through hard work and exposure, their brown leather-like skin showing harder and browner from the contrast with the light-coloured silk kerchiefs skilfully knotted round their heads, yet as a rule seemingly contented and cheerful enough as they chattered and chaffered round the great ancient fountain, the centre of the "Place." The men, far less numerous and far less energetic, handsome fellows many of them, though less so than the gaudily attired Spanish mountaineers lured to Esparto by the work sometimes to be had there in plenty, while yet looking as if labour or exertion of any kind was completely beneath their lordly selves. And here and there, recognisable at once by those acquainted with their peculiar type, Basques, descendants of that mysterious race whose origin and language have so long puzzled the learned in such subjects. Nor were there wanting specimens of still more remote nationalities. Two or three negro servants were bargaining and purchasing for their masters; and some little fair-haired English children, who had coaxed their maids to get up extra early before it was hot, to see the fun and bustle in the market-place; while a Russian nurse, gorgeous in scarlet and gold embroidery, indolently surveyed the scene from a balcony opposite. It was picturesque in the extreme, and amusing. But after a while, staring out of the window being a diversion he most rarely indulged in, Mr Auriol tired of it, and after his modest breakfast of coffee and a roll, finding it was barely nine o'clock, he strolled out for a walk, though his ideas were of the vaguest as to what direction he should take. "I have nearly an hour before they will expect me at the Villa Martine," he said to himself. "I have no wish to rub Mistress Lettice the wrong way by turning up too soon. It strikes me she would look upon that as almost worse than being too late. Where shall I go?" He was turning the corner of the street, or Place, rather, as he asked himself this question, and before he had time to answer it he almost knocked against a young man who was hurrying in his direction. "Pardon," was on the lips of both, when both exchanged it for a more friendly greeting. "Dexter!"--"Auriol!" they respectively exclaimed, and then the new-comer added-- "I was just going to the hotel to ask if you had come, or were coming. Arthur Morison told me some days ago that you were expected. I met him accidentally." "They did not expect me till to-day, and I came yesterday, so there has not been time for them to tell you. You see them sometimes, do you not?" "You mean, do I visit them? Scarcely. I used to go there sometimes before Mrs Morison got so very ill. _She_ was always kindness and cordiality itself to me. You know I had got to know the second Miss Morison very well a year ago in England, when she was staying with some neighbours of ours." "Yes, I remember," said Mr Auriol. But he spoke absently. "And it is all that horrid family feud. When they--at least I don't know why I should say `they;' I believe it is only Lettice--found out my connections, the difference was most marked, though before then they had been quite friendly, and I had hoped to introduce them and my sister to each other. Those sorts of things are really too bad, carrying them down to the younger generation." Godfrey bent his head in acquiescence, but did not speak. "Do you," Philip went on again after a moment's pause, and with some little embarrassment--"do you think her as pretty as you had been told?" "_Far_ more so. `Pretty!'--pretty is not at all the word for her. I think her distinctly beautiful," Mr Auriol replied, with a sort of burst of enthusiasm which somehow seemed rather to disconcert Philip. "I thought you would. That fair hair with such dark eyes is so very uncommon," he replied quietly. And instantly it flashed upon Mr Auriol that they were speaking at cross purposes. He smiled to himself, but for reasons of his own, and being perfectly unaware of the impression his words had made upon his companion, he decided not to explain his mistake. "Your sister, Mrs Leyland, is much better, I was glad to hear?" he said courteously, thinking it just as well to change the subject. "Oh, much better, thank you; quite well, indeed. We shall be leaving immediately. In fact, we should have left already, but, to tell you the truth, when it became evident that Mrs Morison was sinking I persuaded Anna to stay on a little, just to see if perhaps we could be of some service to those poor children. They seemed so lonely." "It was very good of you," said Godfrey warmly. "I--I thought my uncle and aunt would have wished it, and Anna thought so too," said Philip. "But it was no use. I believe Lettice would rather have applied to any utter stranger than to us." "Really," said Godfrey, surprised, and even a little shocked. "I had no idea they still felt so strongly. Perhaps it's just as well you told me, for I see I shall have some rather ticklish business to manage. But forewarned is forearmed. I may call on Mrs Leyland some evening, I hope? I shall have very few here." "Oh, certainly," said Philip. "She will be delighted to see you." Then the conversation drifted into general matters. Philip escorted Mr Auriol to one or two points of interest in the little town, and at ten o'clock precisely the latter found himself at the gate of the Villa Martine. CHAPTER THREE. THE TUG OF WAR. "Your courage much more than your prudence you showed." Burns. Lettice received her cousin in the drawing-room. She was, of course, expecting him, but there was not a touch of nervousness in her manner as she quietly shook hands with him, and in a friendly, perhaps slightly patronising tone, as if to put him quite at his ease, hoped that he found the hotel comfortable, that he had slept well, was not too tired with his journey, and so on, to all of which Mr Auriol replied with equal composure. But he was eyeing the young lady all the time, taking measure of her much more closely than she had any idea of. He observed her, too, with a certain curiosity as to her appearance. The night before he had seen her in a subdued light--almost, indeed, in shadow, as the consciousness of her recent tears had made her avoid coming forward conspicuously, and he wondered if he should find her as lovely as she had then appeared. "She is, and she is not," he decided. "Her features are all that I pictured them, but the soft sweet expression is gone. Yes, this morning I can believe her to be both prejudiced and self-willed." And his glance rested with pleasure on the somewhat anxious but thoroughly womanly and gentle expression of Nina's fair face, as she just then entered the room, followed by Arthur. Mr Auriol looked round him inquiringly. "Have you any other room at liberty," he said, "where there is perhaps a large table? There are a number of papers I wish to show you;" and he touched a packet which he held under his arm. "We can go into the dining-room," said Lettice, opening a door which led into it as she spoke; "though, really, Mr Auriol, you need not give yourself so much trouble. We are perfectly satisfied that our money is in good hands. Mamma often told me that my father had given himself immense trouble to place it safely, so that at his death there should be no trouble; in short, that our trustees would have nothing to do but leave it as it was." Mr Auriol made no reply. But when the four were seated round the dining-table, he deliberately undid his important-looking packet, and drew from it paper after paper, all neatly labelled and arranged, which he placed beside him. "These," he said, touching two mysterious-looking documents, "are the statements of your capital and of your income. I have had copies made, so that I can leave these with you, in case you ever wish to refer to them, as you are all three of an age to understand such matters to a certain extent. You said just now, Miss Morison, that everything to do with your money matters had been thoroughly seen to before your father's death. I _must_ explain to you that all was not as satisfactory as you imagine. Your father, as he constantly said himself, was not a good man of business. I am not afraid of your misunderstanding me when I say this. You cannot but know how deeply attached to him I was, and how much gratitude I shall always feel to him for much past kindness. I simply state the fact, with no disparagement to him. When he died his affairs were exceedingly confused and involved, and I, as one of his executors--the only one--for, you remember, Colonel Brown died suddenly just when your father did--hardly knew what to do. And I tell you honestly that I never could have got things into the satisfactory state they are now in, but for help which I cannot exaggerate, and from a quarter where, all things considered, one could little have expected it." Mr Auriol paused and looked round him. All the three young faces expressed strong feeling. On Lettice's there was a look of tension painful to see. Her lips moved as if she would have asked her cousin to go on, but no sound came. He understood her, however, and pitying her heartily, he continued, his eyes fixed on the paper before him. "That help came from your father's stepbrother, the only son of his father by his second marriage--the merchant, Mr Ingram Morison." There was a dead silence. The tears were in Nina's eyes, and Arthur's face was quivering, but Lettice's was deadly pale and stony. And when she spoke her voice was so unlike itself that all started. "Did my mother know this?" she said in a tone which matched the look on her face. "Not at first," said Mr Auriol, still avoiding to turn his eyes in her direction; "not till things were all in order would Mr Morison allow her to be told anything. He risked very large sums--of course, not so large to him as to a less wealthy man, but still actually large--to save your fortune. And, thanks to his great acuteness and experience, he succeeded most wonderfully, so that at the present time you do not actually owe him _money_." "Thank Heaven for that," murmured Lettice. Mr Auriol turned upon her with a sharp movement of indignation. But when he went on speaking it was as if continuing his words, and not as if addressing himself to her in particular. "But you do owe him, what to a generous mind is never a painful burden, an _immense_ debt of gratitude." "Then I recall my words," burst out Lettice. "I wish to Heaven it _were_ money, that I could work for it--work my fingers to the bone, till I could repay every farthing. To owe gratitude, that can _not_ be counted in money, to _that_ man! Oh, it is too much! How dared you do it?" she flashed out to Godfrey. "How dared you let _him_ interfere?" "You would rather have had your mother reduced to beggary--you would rather have had her last days tortured by anxiety for all of you? _She_ did not resent it; she, who had far more right than any of you to be influenced by the old quarrel, with which Ingram Morison, remember, had no more to do than I had. _She_ was not ashamed to be grateful and to show her trust and confidence in him, as you will see, when at last she knew a great part, though not the whole, of the truth." "And why did she not tell me, then? Oh, mamma, mamma," wailed Lettice, forgetful of or indifferent to her cousin's presence, "why did you not tell me? I thought I had your whole confidence, and to find this out _now_!" She shook with sobs, and Godfrey's face softened. "Lettice," he said, calling her for the first time by her name--though none of them, himself included, noticed that he did so--"my poor child, try to be reasonable. Your mother did not intentionally deceive you. It was only very lately she knew about it. Ingram Morison acted with the greatest delicacy--exaggerated delicacy, he wanted no one to know what he had done, and even at the last I could only persuade him to let me tell her part of it. She meant to tell it to you--gradually, knowing your strong feelings about it. She wrote so to me. I have the letter. But evidently she had not time to do so, or she may have found it more difficult than she expected." And, as he again paused, there rose before Lettice the remembrance of the morning when her gentle, almost timid mother, had tried to lead to the subject of the Morison relations, of her softened feelings towards them, and how she, Lettice, had repulsed the attempt with decision almost approaching violence, and had afterwards said to Nina that she thought bodily weakness must be affecting her mother's judgment. And then, at the last, it had been, or had _seemed_, as it so often does, so sudden. There had been no time or strength for more than a whispered blessing before the smile of perfect peace with which she closed her eyes on this world, had lighted up the loved, worn features, and she had breathed her gentle soul away. Lettice sobbed still, but more softly now; and Mr Auriol went on. "Had she lived, she would, I know, have wished to know the whole, and wished you all to know it too. And I too confess to some personal feeling in the matter. I too have some family pride. Your mother was my cousin--of the same blood. _I_ could not bear that so great a service should be unrecognised. And, before coming here, I told Mr Morison that, unless he would consent to my stating the facts to you, and having no mystery or concealment about it, I would try to throw up the whole." "And then?" said Arthur. "Then," said Mr Auriol slowly, "if you all--though, no, I will not insult you by supposing such a thing--but _if_ you all retained this terrible prejudice against an innocent man, things would be still worse, for he would be your only guardian." Another blow for Lettice. "Our guardian!" exclaimed Nina in surprise. "Yes. By your father's will your mother and I were your guardians, and while she lived _that_ part of it was merely nominal for me. But she had the power to appoint another in case of her death. And she did so. She appointed--" "_Him_?" exclaimed Nina. "Yes. Your uncle, or step-uncle, if you prefer to be quite exact--Mr Ingram Morison," Godfrey replied simply. Then, without waiting for further remarks, he went on to explain, as clearly as was possible to such inexperienced ears, a number of business details--summing up by giving them a clear idea of what money they were sure of; of some which still remained uncertain, and by making them most distinctly recognise that, but for their uncle's "interference," the post of trustee of their possessions would indeed, long before this, have been a sinecure. "And now," he said, "there remains only one more duty before we talk about less painful and overwhelming subjects. I have here your mother's last letter to me, sending me her will, which she wished me to look over, as I did, and going on to express her last wishes. Shall I read it to you, or shall I leave it for you to read alone?" "Read it now," said Lettice, rather to her brother's and sister's surprise. For they did not hear the words which she whispered to herself: "Better drink the cup of bitterness to the dregs, and have it over." So Mr Auriol read the letter aloud. It was a simply expressed but thoughtfully considered letter, with no word or allusion to distress or wound any of her children. She spoke of her intention to explain to them these facts which had so recently come to her knowledge, but that before doing so she would wish to know more-- the whole, in fact--that her words might have the more weight in overcoming the prejudice which, to a certain extent, she blamed herself for having, if not encouraged, at least not opposed. "My husband," she said, "resented his family's behaviour for _my_ sake. I have a right to do anything I choose towards breaking down the barrier, of which I fear I was in great measure the unwilling cause. And he, had he lived to know his brother as I now know him, would have felt with me in this. For, though he was hasty and impulsive, he was, when he would allow himself to see things clearly, essentially just. And how can any one blame Ingram Morison for events which took place when he was a mere child?" Then she went on to beg Godfrey to convey to her brother-in-law her deep sense of gratitude for what she already knew, and her hope that he would accept the guardianship, which no one else would be so fitted for. She spoke of her children altogether--of the old prejudice as shared by them all--in no way singling out Lettice as the least reasonable or persuadable, so that, as she listened, Lettice could not but feel in her heart that it was thanks to herself alone if she _had_ come to appear so in Mr Auriol's eyes, though it is to be feared that but small self-blame was the result of this consciousness. And then, with some general expression of confidence in Godfrey, and in his good judgment and good feeling, mingled with hopes that she might live long enough to understand all quite clearly and to make some arrangements for her children's future, the letter closed. "I was going to answer this letter," said Mr Auriol--"I could not do so till I had Mr Morison's permission to tell the whole, which caused some delay--but I was just going to answer it when I got Arthur's telegram, telling me of her death. You see, the date is very recent;" and he held out the letter to Nina, who leant eagerly forward, while Lettice held herself stiffly aloof. "I managed to see Mr Morison before I came away--had I not done so, my coming would not have been of much use--and got his answers to all I had to ask him. And this is what he says. He accepts the trusteeship of your money unconditionally, for which you cannot be too thankful. The guardianship which he _might_ legally decline--for he is not forced to accept what he had not first been asked about--he accepts, too, but only to a certain extent. He will not interfere with you in any way disagreeable to you, unless positively obliged to do so. He leaves details to me: if _I_ am satisfied, he will be so. At the same time he earnestly _wishes_ to be to you all not only a guardian but an uncle. I am empowered to invite you all, as soon as you can leave here, to go to his country house, and remain there as long as you like--in any case till some definite arrangement can be made for you." "_Never_!" exclaimed Lettice, interrupting Mr Auriol. "Nina, Arthur, you will support me in this?" Godfrey waited till she was silent, but then, without giving the others time to reply, he went on. "It is premature for you to give any answer as yet. Allow me to go on with what I have to say, without interrupting me, till I have fulfilled my commission. Mr Morison also wished me to say that, if Arthur has any taste for business, he will give him a position in his firm such as he would to a son of his own, if he had one." Arthur's colour rose, and he seemed as if about to say something, but he checked himself. Not so Lettice. "Arthur is going into the army, like papa. He is going up for Woolwich next Christmas. That has been decided long ago." Again with ceremonious politeness Mr Auriol waited till she left off speaking. Then, without taking the slightest notice of what she had said, he proceeded, "Or, if Arthur chooses any other career, he will do his best to help him. I think that is the substance of what I have to say to you from your uncle. You will give me an answer before I leave-- some days before, indeed--the day after to-morrow, suppose we say. It will be the greatest possible satisfaction to me if you accept your uncle's invitation. If not, there is no time to be lost in arranging something else." "We are quite ready to tell you what we intend doing--now at once, if you choose," said Lettice. "Not now. I wish you to think it over, and consult together," he replied. "And I must tell you frankly that what you _intend_ doing is not the question. You may tell me what you _wish_, with all freedom; and if I can, I will help you to carry out your wishes. But if I do _not_ approve of them, I am bound by every consideration to tell you so, and to forbid them. If this sounds very ungracious, I am sorry for it, but I cannot help it. Having undertaken a very,"--here he hesitated, and evidently substituted a milder word for the one that had been on his lips--"onerous task, I will carry it out to the best of my power. But it rests with you three to make it a painful or pleasant one." He rose as he spoke. Nina rose, too, and held out her hand. "Thank you, Cousin Godfrey," she said simply, "for all your kindness." Mr Auriol turned to Lettice. "Will you, too, not shake hands with me, Lettice?" he said, with a tone in his voice which touched her a little. "Of course," she said, rousing herself as it were by an effort. "I can have no possible reason for _not_ shaking hands with you. I am only bitterly, most bitterly grieved that we should be, and have been, the cause of such trouble to you." "Do not be bitterly grieved, then," he said, smiling. "Give me the satisfaction of feeling I have been, and may be, of service to you. I am your kinsman; it is only natural. Be reasonable, and try to trust those who wish to be true friends to you." But at these last words he felt the hand, which he had held for a moment or two, struggle in his grasp, and with an almost inaudible sigh he released it. "Will you give me the names, so far as you know them, of the tradespeople here, and your landlord, and so on?" he said gently. "I must make up as accurate a statement as I can. There is a great deal more to do at such times than you have any idea of;" and then he went on to explain some details--of which till now she had had no idea whatever--to the rather bewildered girl. She replied meekly enough; and when he had got the required information, he went out with Arthur as his guide. CHAPTER FOUR. AN OLD STORY AND A NEW SECRET. "Good nature and good sense must ever join; To err is human; to forgive, divine." Pope. It was the last evening of the young Morisons being all together at the Villa Martine, for Arthur was returning to England the following day. And a fortnight or so later, the sisters and little Auriol, under the convoy of old Bertha, were to follow him there. Lettice had gone early to her room. She was worn out, though she would not allow it, with all she had gone through during the last week or two. And since Mr Auriol had left, she had put less constraint on herself; she no longer felt the necessity of calling pride to her aid. "I am so dreadfully sorry for Lettice," said Nina, as she and Arthur were sitting together unwilling, though it was already late, to lose any of their few remaining hours. "So am I," said Arthur. "But I am sorry for ourselves too, Nina. There is no doubt that all our troubles are very much aggravated by Lettice." "Arthur!" exclaimed Nina. "What do you mean? How could we ever get on without her?" "Oh, I know all that," said the boy--for boy he still was, though nearly seventeen--weariedly. "I know she is very good, and devoted, and clever, too; but, Nina, if she were but less obstinate and self-willed, how much happier--at least, how much less unhappy--we should be! If she had taken the advice of Godfrey Auriol, and made friends with our uncle--knowing, too, that mother wished it! Of course, I won't allow to Godfrey that I disagree with her; at all costs, as you and I determined, we must keep together. But it is a terrible pity." "I don't, however, see that for the present it makes very much difference, and in time Lettice may change." "Too late, perhaps," said Arthur moodily. "It _is_ just now that I think it _does_ make such a miserable difference;" and as Nina looked up, with surprise and some alarm, and was just going to ask him to explain himself, he added hastily, as if eager to change the subject, "Do you know the whole story, Nina--the story of the old quarrel between my father and his family? I have heard it, I suppose; but I have got confused about it, though I didn't like to let Godfrey see that I was so. Lettice has always been so violent about it, so determined that there was only the one way of looking at it, that it was no use asking her. And just these last days it has dawned upon me that I know very little about it. I have accepted it as a sort of legend that was not to be questioned." "I don't know that there is very much to tell--not of actual facts," said Nina. "Of course, it was all complicated by personal feeling, as such things always are. Mamma told me all; and lately, as you know, she regretted very much having not tried more to bring papa and his brother together. He, our uncle, was perfectly blameless, he was fifteen years younger than papa. Papa, you know, was grandpapa's only son by his first marriage. His mother died young, and he, as he often said himself, was dreadfully spoilt. His father married again when he was about twelve; and though his stepmother was very good and nice, he was determined never to like her, and set himself against whatever she said, and fancied she influenced grandpapa very often, when very likely she did not. Grandpapa was in business, as, of course, you know, and very much respected, and very successful. He was of very respectable ancestry. His people had been farmers, but not at all _grand_. And he was the sort of man to be proud of having made his own way, and to despise those who tried to be above their real position. He had always determined that papa should follow him in his business; but, as might have been expected from a spoilt boy, papa _wouldn't_; nothing would please him but going into the army." "Yes, I know that part of it," said Arthur. "There must have been stormy scenes and most miserable discussions. Any way, it ended in papa's running away and enlisting, which by people of grandpapa's class was thought a terrible disgrace. Then grandpapa vowed he would disinherit him, and he made a will, putting his little son Ingram entirely in papa's place, and giving papa only a very small fortune. And _always_ papa persisted in believing that this was his stepmother's doing, though mamma has often told me they had no sort of proof, not even _probability_, that it was so. And the way she acted afterwards certainly did not seem as if she were selfish or scheming." "But," interrupted Arthur, "all this has nothing to do with _mamma_, and she always said it was about her." "Well, listen," said Nina. "Time went on. Papa behaved splendidly, and as soon as it was _possible_ he got a commission. And a year or two after that, he became engaged to mamma, who was the daughter of a very poor and very proud captain in the regiment. Captain Auriol, our other grandfather, liked _papa_, but could not bear his being connected with any one in trade; and when he gave his consent to the marriage, he said, I believe, that he would not have done so had papa been in his father's business, and that he liked him all the better for being no longer his father's heir. Somehow papa's stepmother got to hear of this engagement, and, knowing how poor mamma was, and thinking papa would be feeling softened and anxious about his future, she tried to bring about a reconciliation. Mamma, before she died, had come to feel sure the poor woman did her best. She got grandpapa--Grandpapa Morison--to write to papa, recognising his bravery as a soldier, and speaking of his engagement, and offering to reinstate him in his old position if he would now allow that he had had enough of soldiering, and would enter the business. He even said that, if he would _not_ do so, he would still receive him again--him and his wife when he should be married--and make better provision for him if he would express sorrow for the grief and disappointment he had caused him in the past. This part of the letter must have been injudiciously worded. _Something_ was said of mamma's poverty, which her father and she herself took offence at, when papa showed it them, and consulted them about it--not that he for a moment dreamt of giving up his profession; but he _was_ softened, and would have been glad to be friends again. Only, unfortunately, they took it the other way, and he wrote back a letter, under Grandpapa Auriol's direction, which offended his father so deeply that things were far worse than before. And it was for this that poor mamma always blamed herself, and this was why she said it was for her sake papa had quarrelled with his family. It came to be true, to some extent; for Grandpapa Morison after that always put all the blame on her, and spoke of her very unkindly, which came to papa's ears, and made him furious. And when his father died, a few years afterwards, he was surprised to find that even a small portion had still been left to him; and I don't believe he would ever have taken it, poor as he was, but for a message that was sent him with the news of his father's death, that poor grandpapa had left him his blessing before he died. _I_ believe that he had to thank his stepmother for this, though she did not appear in it. She must have been frightened, poor thing, and no wonder. So the only communication was through the lawyer. And that, I think," said Nina, with a sigh, "is about all there is to tell." "Thank you," said Arthur. "Nina," he went on, after a moment's consideration, "do you think Lettice knows it all as clearly as you do?" "It is her own fault if she doesn't," said Nina, which for her was an unusually bitter speech. "She has had just as much opportunity as I have had for hearing the whole, except that, perhaps,"--and she hesitated a moment--"perhaps that from Philip Dexter I have heard more than she about how good Uncle Ingram is, through Uncle Ingram's having married his aunt, you know. But, Arthur, if people _will_ see things only one way--and Lettice can turn it so, when she talks about it she almost makes me feel as if it would be wrong and _mean_ to look at it any other way." "I know," said Arthur, with a still deeper sigh than Nina's had been. And, indeed, poor boy, he _did_ know. His next remark surprised his sister. "I wonder," he said, "I wonder papa disliked the idea of business." "_Arthur_!" she exclaimed. "I do. I'm in earnest. There is nothing I should like so much. Nina, promise, swear you won't tell any one," he went on boyishly but earnestly, "if I tell you the truth. I would have given _anything_ to accept that offer. I have no wish to go into the army. I don't think I'm a coward, but the life has no attraction for me. I've seen so much of the other side of it. I used to think, when papa was alive, I should like it. But now--I'm not clever, Nina. I'm awfully behind-hand in several of the subjects I shall have to be examined in; and oh, Nina, the very thought of an examination makes my blood run cold. I _know_ I shall fail, and--" "But why--oh, why, Arthur, did you not say all this before?" cried Nina, pale with distress. "I _dared_ not, that's the truth. I'm a moral coward, if you like. I did not realise it so strongly till Godfrey told me of Uncle Ingram's offer, and then I felt how I should like business. I think I have a _sort_ of cleverness that would suit it. I am what is called practical and methodical, and I should like the intercourse with different countries, and the _interest_ of it. I suppose Grandfather Morison's tastes have come out in me. And I should like making money for all of you and for Auriol, who is sure to be a soldier. But, Nina, I _dare_ not tell Lettice. Think of all she would say--that I was false to papa, that I was throwing away the expensive education that has been so difficult to manage; all sorts of bitter things. No, I _dare_ not. I have tried, and even at the least hint of misgiving, that I was not fit for the army--oh, Nina, I saw what it would be. No, I must go through with it till the day that I go up for the examination, and am--" "What?" said Nina. "Spun, hopelessly." "But you will have other chances?" "I can't face them. I _feel_ that I could never face it again. Even now I dream of it with a sort of horror," said the poor boy, raising his delicate, haggard face. "And _if_ I fail. Oh, Nina, sometimes I think I shall drown myself." "Arthur, Arthur, don't speak like that," said Nina imploringly. "Shall _I_ tell Lettice? I will if you like--if you are sure, quite sure of what you say." Arthur laid his hand on her arm. "No, no, Nina. You must promise to tell no one. I must see. Perhaps I may get on better. Mr Downe thinks I should pass if only I were less nervous. Any way, we must wait a while. If it gets _too_ bad I will tell you first of all, and ask you to tell Lettice." "And we shall see you again soon. It is April now. You will be with us all the summer. Oh, Arthur, I do hope things will go on quietly, and that Lettice will not oppose Godfrey any more. They are both so determined." "But he has right on his side." "Yes, I know. But you know, Arthur, she will be of age in less than a year, and then if she chooses to defy our guardians it may come to our being all separated. For think how many years it will be before the little ones are of age." "Lettice would never do that," said Arthur. "In the bottom of her heart she knows she must give in. And she loves us all too much to go too far." "Of course I know how she loves us. Only too much," said Nina. "I wonder if it would not have been better if we had had no guardians? We should have got on very well, I dare say." "Nina," said Arthur solemnly, "mark my words. If there had been no one to keep her in check, Lettice would have grown more and more self-willed, and I don't know what would have become of us. Better far have all the discomfort of the last week or two than have risked anything like that." "If I thought it were over!" said Nina. "But you don't know how I dread our life at Faxleham, and still worse that lady. I don't know what to call her, for she can't be called our governess." "Chaperone," suggested Arthur. "I suppose so. But isn't it awful to think of her?" Arthur could scarcely keep from laughing. "I think that part of it would be rather fun," he said. "I hope--though I'm by no means sure of it, mind you--but I hope she'll still be there when I come, that I may see the skirmishing between her and Lettice." "If it isn't she, it'll be some one else," said Nina in a depressed tone. "Godfrey Auriol said it would be impossible--absolutely unheard of--for us to live alone as Lettice wanted. Oh, Arthur, I wish you weren't going away;" and poor Nina, allowing herself for once the indulgence of giving way to her own feelings regardless of those of others, threw her arms round her boy-brother's neck and burst into tears. And though Arthur did his best to console her, it was, though not precisely from the same cause, with sad enough hearts that the brother and sister lay down to sleep that night. There had been much to try them since the day that Godfrey Auriol, with nothing but good will in his heart to his young relatives, had left his smoke-dried chambers in Lincoln's Inn, where frost and fog were still having it their own way, and came "over the sea" to the sunny brilliant south, intent on advising and assisting the sad little group. He had found things very different from what he expected, and he had gone back again depressed and dispirited, doubtful, though he had manfully stood out for victory, if he had gone the right way about it, more perplexed and disgusted with himself than he ever remembered to have been before. For he was in every sense of the word a very successful man. Starting in life with little but a good old name and a clear and well-stocked head, he was already far on the way to competency. He was made much of in whatever society he entered; he was used to being looked up to and having his opinion and advice asked. He had not married, had scarcely ever been in love--never to a fatal extent--and had acquired a habit of thinking that women were not to be too seriously considered one way or the other. "Take them the right way," and there was never any trouble to be feared. And now when it came to the test he had ignominiously failed. For though Lettice had been obliged to give in, it had been, as she took care to tell him, only to the extent to which she _was_ obliged to do so--not a jot further. And he had an uncomfortable, an exaggerated idea that he had been rough--what the French call "brutal"-- to her. "To her, my own cousin, and an orphan, too, whom I was prepared to care for like a sister--yes, like a sister, that first night when she seemed so sweet and gentle. And to think of the things we have said to each other since!" thought poor Godfrey, during his long solitary journey back again to whence he had come. If Lettice could have seen into his heart I think she would have been moved to regret. And she had been very unreasonable. The "intentions" of which she had spoken no relation or guardian in the world could have approved of. "We do not wish to return to England," she told Godfrey calmly. "I want to spend the summer, while it is too hot here, in travelling about, and next winter we shall come back here again." "And under whose care?" Mr Auriol asked quietly. "_Mine_," said Lettice, rearing her head. "Of course we have old Bertha, who will never leave us. But I am quite old enough to take care of my brothers and sisters." "_You_ may think so. _I_ don't," he replied drily. "Besides, it is not altogether a question of age. If you were married--" "I shall never marry." "Indeed!" Mr Auriol observed with the utmost politeness. "But that, excuse me, is a matter for your private consideration, in no way interfering with what I was saying. If, for supposition's sake, you, or let us say Nina, who is still younger,"--and he turned to Nina with a smile which somehow made the colour rise in her cheeks--"if _Nina_ were married to a reliable sort of man, there would be nothing against your all living together if you chose." "Provided the brother-in-law approved, which, in his place, _I_ wouldn't," observed Arthur, in an aside. "But as things are, why, five, ten years hence even, you could not keep house without a chaperone," said Mr Auriol in conclusion, as if the matter were not open to a question. A very short time before he left, Godfrey told them what he proposed as to their future home. "I have a letter I should like to read to you," he said to Lettice. His tone and manner seemed to her exceedingly cold; the truth was that he was most uncomfortably constrained. "Certainly," she replied. "Do you wish me to call Nina?" "Perhaps it would be as well," said Mr Auriol. And when Nina came he read to them the description that had been sent to him of a small house a few hours' distance from town, which seemed to him just what was wanted. "The neighbourhood is very pretty, and there is an excellent school for Auriol, in the small town of Garford, at half-an-hour's distance. And there are some nice families in the neighbourhood to whom I--to whom introductions could easily be got." "In our deep mourning," said Lettice icily, "nothing of that kind need be taken into consideration. Besides," she added, "if you think us so exceedingly childish and unreasonable, I should say the fewer acquaintances we make the better." "Lettice, oh, please don't," said Nina imploringly. But Lettice had "hardened her heart." "We _must go_ to that place," she said afterwards to Nina; "we cannot help ourselves. For my part I feel perfectly indifferent as to where we live. It is like a choice of prisons--simple endurance for the time being. It is like taking medicine. I will take it because I _must_; but I'm not going to have it dressed up with sugar-plums and pretend it's nice." "But what do you mean by `for the time being'?" asked Nina timidly. To this Lettice would not reply; perhaps, though she would not own it, her ideas were really vague on the subject. Arthur had to be up early the morning he left; and, thanks to their late talk the night before, Nina overslept herself, and Lettice, seeing her looking so tired and pale, had not the heart to wake her. She looked pale and heavy-eyed herself when Arthur found her waiting to give him his breakfast, and he felt sorry for her, and perhaps a little conscience-smitten for some of the things he had said of her. "We shall see you again before _very_ long," she said; "for surely no difficulty will be put in the way of your spending your holidays with us." "Of course not. Who would dream of such a thing?" he said. "I don't know," replied Lettice wearily; "everything has gone so strangely. I ask myself what next?" "Lettice," said Arthur simply, "don't exaggerate; but, to make sure, I will speak of it to Godfrey." "Better you than I, certainly." "He likes Nina very much," went on Arthur innocently, almost as if thinking aloud. "And he thinks her so very pretty." "Does he? Did he say so?" said Lettice quickly; and a curious expression, which Arthur did not observe, passed over her face. "Oh, ever so many times. He thinks her almost an angel, I believe;" and Lettice would have liked to hear more, but there was no time. "Arthur, you will do your best, will you not?" were her last whispered words to her brother. "Remember, if you don't succeed, it will break my heart; and I believe," in a still lower voice, "it would have broken papa's and mamma's." A look of intense pain came into the poor boy's eyes, and he did not speak. Then with sudden resolution he turned to his sister. "Yes," he said, though his voice was unlike itself, "I will do _my best_." CHAPTER FIVE. A CHANGE IN THE BAROMETER. "Give her a word, good or bad, and she'd spin such a web from the hint, And colour a meaningless phrase with so vivid a lint." _Hilda_. It was a lovely evening when the little party arrived at their destination. Many people had noticed them during their long journey, the two pretty sisters and the children, with no one but their old servant to take care of them; for their deep mourning told its own story. Many a kindly heart thought pityingly of them, and sent silent good wishes with them on their way. There had been some talk of their staying a day or two in London, in which case Mr Auriol would have met them. But this Lettice, the ruling spirit, vetoed. "Let us get straight to that place," she said, "and have it over." What she meant Nina did not very well understand. She supposed her to refer to the meeting with Miss Branksome, the lady-companion, or "chaperone," whom Mr Auriol had engaged, and who was to await them at Faxleham Cottage. Nina herself was not without some anticipatory awe of this person, but it was tempered by a strong feeling of pity. And once, when she alluded to her in speaking to Lettice, she was almost amazed to find that her sister shared the latter. "Poor woman!" said Lettice gravely, "she has undertaken a hard task. I could almost find it in my heart to be sorry for her." Nina could not help smiling as she replied, "But it need not be a hard task, Lettice; not--not unless _we_ make it so for her." "False positions are always hard," said Lettice oracularly. "She is coming to take care of us, and we don't want or need to be taken care of." Then, a moment after, she surprised Nina by asking her to write to Mr Auriol to tell him when they were starting, and when they expected to reach Faxleham, as she had promised to let him know. "I am so tired," she said, which was an unusual confession, "and I should be so glad if you would do it for me. Besides, he likes you so much better than me; he will be pleased to get a letter from you." "I don't think he really likes me better," said Nina innocently. "I am not clever enough for him. If he had met you--differently--I am sure he would have liked you best." Lettice did not answer. But a moment or two later, as she was leaving the room, she spoke again on the same subject. "You'll let me see your letter before you send it, won't you?" she said. "Don't be afraid that I shall be vexed if you write cordially. I don't want him to think us ungrateful. It isn't _his_ fault." Nina could scarcely believe her ears. What could be coming ever Lettice? She wished Arthur were at hand to talk over this wonderful change, which she felt completely unable to explain. But it was not Nina's "way" to trouble or perplex herself about problems which, as she said to herself, would probably sooner or later solve themselves. In this, as in most other characteristics, she was a complete contrast to her sister. She wrote the letter--a pretty, girlish, almost affectionate little letter it was--and brought it to Lettice for approval. The elder sister read it, smiling once or twice in a manner that would have puzzled Nina had she been given to puzzling. "Yes," said Lettice, "it will do very well;" and she was turning away, when Nina stopped her. "Lettice," she began. "Well?" "I wanted to tell you--yesterday, when I was out with Bertha, we--I--met Mr Dexter. It is the first time I have seen him since our--our mourning." "I think it was very inconsiderate of him to speak to you in the street," said Lettice. "Here, too, where everything one does is observed." "It was only for one instant," said Nina, appealingly. "He asked me to tell you--they are leaving to-morrow morning--to tell you that he will call this evening to say good-bye, and he hopes he may see us." Lettice's face had grown harder. "I thought they were already gone," she said, as if speaking to herself. Then second thoughts intervened. "I suppose we must see him. I don't want to be rude. Besides, he is a friend of Godfrey's. Yes; perhaps you had better tell Marianne that if he calls she can let him in." The permission was not too gracious, but it was more than Nina had hoped for. "It is evidently for Godfrey's sake," she reflected. "And yet, when he was here, Lettice was so seldom the least pleasant to him." Philip did call. He was nervous, and yet with a certain determination about him that impressed Lettice in spite of herself, and she felt exceedingly glad to hear him repeat that he and his sister were leaving the next morning. "I shall look forward to seeing you again, before very long, in England," he said manfully, as he got up to go. "I don't know much about our plans," said Lettice, and her tone was not encouraging. "We have only taken a house for the summer. I don't know what we shall do then." "Faxleham is not so very far from my part of the country," said Philip. "Is it not?" said Lettice suspiciously; and she looked at Mr Dexter in a way that made the young man's face flush slightly. He was one of those fair-complexioned men who change colour almost as quickly as a girl, and whose good looks are to themselves entirely destroyed by their persistent boyishness. At five and twenty he looked little more than nineteen. "But I am not likely to be there for the next twelve months," he continued coldly, and with a certain dignity. "My place has been let for some years, and the lease will not expire till the spring. No; if I see you at Faxleham or elsewhere I must come expressly." He looked at Lettice and she at him. It was a tacit throwing down of the gauntlet on his part, and angry as she felt, it yet made her respect the young man whom hitherto she had spoken of so contemptuously as a boy. She bade him good-bye with courtesy, not to say friendliness, much to Nina's relief, and even carried her attention so far as to accompany him to the door, talking busily all the time of the details of his journey, so that, as she flattered herself, there was no opportunity for any last words between him and her sister. And as she went upstairs, where Bertha was already beginning the packing--such a sad packing! the hundred and one little possessions of their mother to cry over and wonder what to do with--all the bright-coloured belongings with which, full of the hopefulness of inexperienced youth, they had left England in the autumn, to consign to the bottom of the trunks and wish they could be put out of sight for ever--she said to herself, not without self-congratulation at her perspicacity, that it was evidently time for _that_ to be put a stop to. And she would have been strengthened in her opinion had she known that at that very moment Nina, leaning sadly on the balcony--_she_ had not gone to the door with Philip--was cheered by the sight of his face, as, passing up the street instead of down, certainly not the nearest way to his home, he stood still for a moment on the chance of seeing her again, and, lifting his hat, called out softly, not "goodbye" but "au revoir." Lettice wondered at Nina's good spirits that evening. "Evidently she does not, as yet, care much about him. She was so very young when she first met him--how unfortunate it was!--and was, no doubt, flattered by his attention. But she _cannot_ but see how superior Godfrey Auriol is--how much more of a _man_--and then by-and-by it will be easy to suggest how mother would have liked it. One of her own name, and altogether so closely connected with her!" And the imaginary castle in the air which Lettice had constructed for her sister's happiness assumed more and more imposing and attractive proportions. Lettice had such faith in herself as an architect; she knew so much better than people themselves the sort of castle they _should_ live and be happy in. So that, on _her_ side, Nina wondered at Lettice's improved spirits during the last few days at Esparto, and even through the journey. For, besides the other recommendations of the project she had built upon such slender foundations, Lettice felt that there was a good deal of magnanimity in herself for approving of and encouraging such an idea. "It shows I am _not_ prejudiced," she said to herself with satisfaction. "And if dear mamma could but know it, she would see how ready I am to sacrifice any personal feelings of mine when _hers_ would have been concerned. For, of course, though Godfrey is not actually connected with the Morisons, he has entirely ranged himself on their side." We have wandered a long way from the evening of the arrival at Faxleham, but perhaps it was necessary to explain how it came to pass that the outer sunshine was matched by greater inward serenity than might, all things considered, have been expected. It was, as I said, a most lovely evening. The drive from the station at Garford was through pretty country lanes, where the hedges were at their freshest, untouched as yet by summer dust, and the wild roses and honeysuckle were already in bud, giving promise of their later beauty. And to the young travellers, after their several months' absence in different scenery, the sweet, homely beauty of their own country was very attractive. "Is it not pretty? So peaceful and yet bright! Just think how mamma would have liked it!" exclaimed Nina; and, though Lettice did not speak, she pressed her sister's hand sympathisingly. The children, of course, were in ecstasies, though once or twice they glanced up at Lettice, half ashamed of their own delight; but she smiled back at them so kindly that they were quickly reassured; and a whisper which she overheard of Lotty's gave her greater pleasure than she could have expressed. "Lettice is getting like mamma," the child said. "When she is so kind, she always makes me think of mamma." And Lettice always was kind when she felt thoroughly pleased with herself, as she did just now. If only her foundation had been the rock of real principle, and not the sands of passing moods and impulses! "Don't you think, Lettice," said Nina, in a low voice, venturing a little further--"don't you think we are going to be happy--at least, peaceful--here?" Lettice had not the heart to repulse her. "I shall be very glad, dear, if you feel so," she said, "and I am sure I want to make the best of things. If--if there were not that unhappy Miss Branksome looming in the distance--in the nearness, rather! I know exactly what she will be like. I know those decayed gentlewomen so well. Tall and lank and starved-looking, always having headaches and nerves, and tears in her eyes for nothing, and yet everlastingly interfering. Of course, she must interfere. It's her business; it's what she's there for." But before Nina had time to reply, the carriage stopped. They had reached their destination. Faxleham Cottage was what its name implied--a real cottage. It had no drive or "approach," save the simple, old-fashioned little footpath, leading from the garden-gate to the wide, low porch entrance. But unpretending as it was, an exclamation of pleasure broke involuntarily from the lips of its new tenants, as they stepped out of the carriage and entered the sweet, trim, and yet luxuriant little garden, gay with early flowers, not a weed to be seen, bright and smiling in the soft evening sunlight. Lettice, too, felt the pleasant influence. "How I wish mamma could see it!" was her unspoken thought. "If it were _she_ who was to welcome us instead of--" And as she went forward she glanced before her apprehensively, half expecting to see realised the unattractive personage she had ingeniously constructed in her imagination. A lady was standing in the porch, and, as the new-comers came forward, she stepped out to meet them. "I am so glad to see you all safe," she said in a bright, pleasant voice. "I must introduce myself, but you know who I am?" "Miss Branksome," said Nina, always the ready one on such occasions, probably because her mind was never over occupied with herself or her own concerns. But, with her usual tact, she stepped back a very little, leaving Lettice, as the eldest, to shake hands first with the lady-companion. And Lettice, to her own surprise as she did so, found herself thinking, "How pretty she is! She is certainly _not_ like a decayed gentlewoman." Miss Branksome was very pretty; some people might think it better to say "had been," for she was more than middle-aged; she was almost elderly. Her hair was perfectly white, and her soft face had the faint delicate pink flush that comes to fair complexions with age, so different from the brilliant roses of youth. Her eyes were bright, but very gentle in expression, and her figure was daintily small. "She looks like an old fairy," Nina said afterwards, and the description was not a bad one. Everything that genuine kindliness, based on thorough good principle, and aided by great natural tact, could do to make the orphans feel as happy in their new home as was possible for them, was done by Miss Branksome that first evening. Even Lettice succumbed to the pleasant influence. It was new for her to be taken care of, even, as it were, petted, and it came so naturally to the bright, kind-hearted, active little woman to make everybody about her happy, or at least comfortable, that she could not help trying her hand on even the redoubtable Miss Morison, as to whom Mr Auriol had given her some salutary warning. "You must be so tired, my dears," she said, with the smiles and tears struggling together at the same time, "I thought you would like tea better than anything; and perhaps--this first evening--would you like me to pour it out?" It was perfectly impossible to stand on one's dignity or to keep up any prejudice with one so genuine and single-minded; and Nina's heart was relieved of an immense weight when they all went to bed that night. For some time everything went better than could have been hoped. By dint of her simple goodness, by dint, perhaps, of in no way planning or scheming to get it, Miss Branksome unconsciously gained Lettice's confidence; and when Mr Auriol came down to see his young charges two or three weeks after their arrival, he was most agreeably surprised by the happy state of things. Not being above human weakness, he could not help congratulating himself on the skill which he had displayed in an undoubtedly awkward situation, though, at the same time, he was only too ready to give credit to all concerned. "You have done marvels," he said to Miss Branksome, who had been a friend of his from his childhood. "They all seem as fond of you as possible. Not that I had any fear for Nina or the little ones; only for--Lettice." "And yet of all, she, I think, has most gained my heart," said the little lady. "She is so thorough; there is nothing small or ungenerous about her. Nina is very sweet; but if there is any triumph for me, or satisfaction rather, it is certainly with regard to Lettice. I feel so sure of her. I cannot quite understand your having found her what you described. Are you sure--forgive me now, Godfrey--are you sure there was no sort of prejudice on _your_ side?" Godfrey's face flushed. "None whatever," he exclaimed. "I met her as free from prejudice, from any preconceived idea even, as was possible. And the first time I saw her I thought her as charming and gentle as she is personally attractive. It all came out when the question of the Morison feud was raised. It seemed to change her very nature. You have not come upon that as yet, I suppose?" "Not in the least. Of course I have no right to do so, unless she does; but she knows that I do not know her uncle and aunt, and that they do not know me. I think that has given me an advantage with her. At first I fancied she suspected, or was ready to suspect, that Mr and Mrs Morison had had to do with my being chosen, and I was glad to be able, indirectly, to let her see they had not." Mr Auriol seemed lost in reflection. "I wonder when I should speak to her--to them all--about their uncle again," he said at last. "He is so very anxious for some happier state of things, and he trusts to me to bring it about. Lettice could not be pleasanter than she is now, just like what she was at the very first. I wonder if I dare risk it?" "Not yet," said Miss Branksome. "At least, that is my impression. Let her not think that you came down this time with any purpose except to see how they all are. Leave it all a little longer to her own good sense. She might commit herself to some decision she would afterwards be ashamed to withdraw from, if you spoke of it all again before she has had time thoroughly to consider it." Mr Auriol shrugged his shoulders. "She has had time enough, it seems to me," he said. "However, I know you are wiser than I." Just at that moment Lettice and Nina joined them in the garden. "We are going to fetch Auriol home from school," said Lettice. "Would you come with us?" she added, looking up at her cousin. "Certainly, with the greatest pleasure," he said; and the three set off. But they had not gone far when Lettice stopped and hesitated. "If you won't think me rude for changing my mind," she said, "I think I would rather not go to-day. I want to write to Arthur." Nina looked at her in surprise, and a slight look of annoyance crossed Mr Auriol's face. But Lettice did not see it. "Of course it doesn't matter," said Nina good-naturedly. "But I don't think you need be in such a very great hurry about writing to Arthur." "I want to write to-night," Lettice repeated, "and I know Mr Auriol won't mind;" and she smiled so pleasantly that the annoyance left his face. "She is an odd girl," he thought to himself. "However, it is as well perhaps that my walk is to be _tete-a-tete_ with Nina and not with her. I might have been tempted to try the ground again in spite of Miss Branksome's advice, and might have done more harm than good. With Nina I am quite safe." And, so far as Nina was concerned, the result of their talk was perfectly satisfactory. It was with a more hopeful feeling than he had yet had on the subject that Mr Auriol re-entered the cottage on their return from the walk to Gardon. He and Nina stood for a moment in the porch--they did not notice that Lettice was at an open window above, whence she could clearly see them, and for a moment or two Godfrey stood with Nina's hand in his, her fair face, in which was more colour than usual, raised towards him. "You may depend on me," she said softly, "to do all I can. There is nothing--really nothing almost, that I wish so earnestly." "I am sure of it," said Godfrey. "Perhaps, indeed," he added with a little hesitation, "I understand more about what you feel than you think. Not that I think you are selfish, dear Nina. I think you one of the most unselfish people I ever knew, and,"--he hesitated still more this time--"he will be a happy man who wins you." Nina's face was crimson by now. But she stood by her cousin a moment longer. He was leaving the next morning, and it might be her last chance of seeing him alone. "Then I am to do what I can, and, in a sort of way, to report progress. You will come down again in two or three weeks?" "Yes, and in the meantime I shall see Arthur;" and then he released her hand and she ran upstairs to take off her hat. "Have you had a nice walk, dear?" said Lettice, who was waiting in their room. "_Very_," said Nina heartily. "I think you and Godfrey are getting to understand each other wonderfully," lattice remarked. "Yes?" said Nina, with a happy little laugh. "I almost think so too;" and Lettice, observing the flush on her face, congratulated herself on her generalship. "She is evidently forgetting all about Philip Dexter," she thought. "How pretty she looks! How nice it must be to be so sweet and attractive; not hard, and cold, and repellent, like me. But it is _forced_ on me." And though she told herself things were going just as she wished, there was a little sigh in her heart as she kissed her sister on their way downstairs. CHAPTER SIX. A CAVALIER RECEPTION. "Fell his warm wishes chilled by wintry fear, And resolution sicken at the view: As near the moment of decision drew." _Trans. of_ Dante. But things seldom turn out as even the most reasonable people expect. Much more than two or three weeks elapsed before Godfrey Auriol came down to Faxleham again. This was owing to a complication of circumstances--unusual pressure of business on him, for one thing, Lotty Morison's catching the measles for another; and the difficulties in the way were yielded to more easily than might have been the case had the same urgency existed for bringing matters to a decision. But Mr Ingram Morison and his wife were early in the summer obliged to go for several months to an out-of-the-way part of Ireland, where some of Mrs Morison's family lived, on account of sudden and serious trouble among them. So the question he, and, indeed, she, too, had so much at heart, was left dormant for the time, and Nina heard no more, except a few words of explanation which Godfrey enclosed to her in a letter to Miss Branksome. It is an ill wind that blows nobody any good. Perhaps, had he known it, Godfrey did not lose in the good graces of his cousins during these rather dull and monotonous weeks. Nina, for more reasons than one, longed to see him, and would have made him most heartily welcome had he appeared. And even Lettice, though she had sturdily refused all offers of introductions to any families in the neighbourhood, would in her heart have been glad of some break in the tranquil round of their daily life. She was disappointed, too, that Godfrey did not seem more eager to see Nina again, and there were times when Nina's rather troubled and anxious expression made her tremble for the success of her scheme. "If that Philip Dexter were to appear just now, there is no saying what influence he might again acquire over her," she said to herself. "It is very stupid of Godfrey." But he came at last, though not till Arthur's holidays were more than half over, and the lanes were no longer without their summer coating of dust, for it was an unusually dry season. The rain could not be far off, however, for the law of average required that the drought should be compensated for. "There must be a break in the weather soon," said Mr Auriol, the evening of his arrival, "and I suppose rain will be welcome when it comes. But, if it is not _too_ selfish, I hope it will hold off for two days. I have _never_ felt so tired of London in my life as during the last three weeks; and I do want to enjoy my breath of country air." "I am afraid you won't get much air even here," remarked Arthur cheerfully. "It has been stifling these two or three days." Something in the tone of his voice struck his cousin, and he glanced up at him. "You don't look very bright yourself, my boy," he said. "You've not been working too hard, I hope?" "He _has_ been working rather hard even during the holidays," said Lettice, though not without a certain complacence in her tone. "You know, Arthur is not merely to _get through_, cousin Godfrey, he is to come off with flying colours." "But in the meantime the colour is all flying out of his face," said Godfrey kindly, and with concern. "That won't do;" and Nina, whose own face had grown paler during this conversation, was startled on looking at her brother to see how white, almost ghastly he had grown. She was helping Lettice with afternoon tea, which in these fine days they were fond of having under a big tree on the little lawn, and she made some excuse for sending Arthur to the house on an errand. "They will all think there is something the matter," she whispered to him, "if you look like that;" though in her heart she would scarcely have regretted anything which would have brought to an end the unhappiness which she felt convinced Arthur was enduring, though she had not succeeded in getting him again to confide in her as he had done that last evening at Esparto. "Arthur is really looking ill," Godfrey went on. "And he seems so dull and quiet. Of course I have seen too little of him to judge, and the last time there was every reason for his looking very depressed--but even then he had not the same dull, hopeless look. He must either be ill, or--But that is impossible!" "What?" said Lettice coldly. "I was going to say he looks as if he had something on his mind." Lettice smiled with a sort of contemptuous superiority. "He _has_ something on his mind," she said, "as every one might understand. He is exceedingly anxious to do more than well at his examination, and he is perhaps working a _little_ too hard." Mr Auriol was silent for a moment. When he spoke again he did not seem to be addressing any one in particular. "I don't feel satisfied about him," he said shortly. Lettice's face flushed. "I do not see, Mr Auriol, that you need feel uneasy about him if _we_ do not," she said. "It is impossible to judge of any one you know so little. Of course, naturally, Arthur is unusually anxious to do well. He knows it would half break _my_ heart if he failed. He knows, what matters far more, that it would have been a most bitter disappointment to my father and mother. It is enough to make him serious." Mr Auriol glanced up quickly. "Were they--were your father and mother so very desirous that he should go into the army?" he said. "I should rather have thought--" But here he stopped. "I wish you would say all you mean," said Lettice curtly. "I have no objection whatever to doing so, except the fear of annoying _you_," he replied. "I was going to say that, remembering his own experience I should have thought your father the very last man to force, or even advise a profession unless the lad himself thoroughly liked it." "_Force_ it?" exclaimed Lettice, really surprised, and Nina added hastily-- "Oh no, while papa was alive there was no question but that Arthur wished it." "While papa was alive, Nina," repeated Lettice. "What do you mean? You speak as if Arthur did not wish it _now_." Nina blushed painfully, and seemed at a loss for an answer. "I did not mean to say that," she said at last. And Lettice, too prepossessed by her own wishes and beliefs to take in the possibility of any others, thought no more of Nina's agitation. But Mr Auriol did not forget it. He was, however, painfully anxious to come to an understanding with his cousins as to their relations with their uncle. Mr Morison was now at home again, and eager to receive his nephews and nieces and to discuss with them the best arrangements for a permanent home, which he and his wife earnestly hoped would be, if not with, at least near them. But though he had plenty of opportunities for talks with Nina, he tried in vain to have any uninterrupted conversation with Lettice. She almost seemed to avoid it purposely, and he disliked to ask for it in any formal and ceremonious way. "Though I shall be forced to do so," he said to Nina one day, when, as usual, he found himself alone with her, Lettice having made some excuse at the last minute for not going out with them. "Do you think she avoids me on purpose, Nina?" he asked, with some irritation. "I really do not know," said Nina. "Sometimes I do not understand Lettice at all." "I fear I rubbed her the wrong way that first day by the way I spoke of Arthur," said Godfrey reflectively. "And Arthur, too, baffles me. I have tried to talk to him and to lead him on to confide in me if he has anything on his mind, but it is no use. So I must just leave him for the present. But about this other matter I must do and say something. It is not my own concern. I have promised to see about it." Nina listened with great sympathy and great anxiety. "I wish I could do anything," she said. "But I, too, have tried in vain. Lettice seems to avoid the subject." "Well, then there is nothing for it but to meet it formally. I must ask Lettice to give me half an hour, and I will read her your uncle's last letter. There she is," he added hurriedly, pointing to a figure which suddenly appeared in the lane a short way before them. "So she has been out, after all." "Where have you been, Lettice?" asked Nina, as they came up with her, for she was walking slowly. "I thought you were not coming out." "I changed my mind," said Lettice. "I have been some little way on the Garford road." The words were slightly defiant, but the tone was subdued, and Nina, looking at her sister, was struck by the curious expression of her face. It had a distressed, almost a frightened look. What could it be? Mr Auriol, intent on his own ideas, did not notice it. "Lettice," he began, "I never seem to see you at leisure, and I must leave the day after to-morrow. When can you give me half an hour?" "Any time you like--any time to-morrow, I mean," said Lettice. "It is too late this evening." "Very well," he said; "just as you like." Lettice was longing to get away--to be alone in her own room to think over what had happened, and what she had done that afternoon. She had not meant to go out after refusing to walk with Nina and her cousin. But Lotty had come to ask her advice about a little garden she was making; and, after this important business was settled, Lettice, feeling at a loss what to do with herself, strolled a short way down the road. It was too soon to meet Nina and Mr Auriol; they would not be back for an hour at least, and Arthur was as usual shut up in his own room with his books. Who, then, could the figure be whom she saw, when about a quarter of a mile from the house, coming quickly up the road? It was not Godfrey, nor Arthur, and yet it was but seldom that any one not making for the cottage came along this road, which for half a mile or so was almost like a private one. And then, too--yes, it did seem to Lettice that there was something familiar about the walk and carriage of the gentleman she now clearly perceived to be such, though he was still too far off for her to distinguish his features. Another moment or two and she no longer hesitated. It was--there could be no doubt about it-- it was the person whom of all others she most dreaded to see--Philip Dexter! And yet there was nothing very alarming in the young man's appearance as, on catching sight of her, he hastened his steps and came on hurriedly, his features lit up with eagerness, while Lettice walked more and more slowly, at every step growing more dignified and icy. The smile faded from Philip's face as he distinguished her clearly. "Miss Morison!" he exclaimed. "I saw you some way off, but I was not sure--I thought--" "You thought I was my sister, probably," said Lettice calmly, as she held out her hand. "I, too, saw you some way off, Mr Dexter, and at first I could scarcely believe my eyes. Are you staying anywhere near here?" "No," said Philip, braced by her coldness to an equal composure; "I have no acquaintances close to this. I came by rail to Garford, and left my portmanteau at the hotel there, and walked on here. I have come, Miss Morison, on purpose to see--you." "Not me, personally?" said Lettice, raising her eyebrows. "Yes, you, personally, though not _only_ you. I am, I think, glad to have met you alone. If that is your house,"--for they were approaching the cottage--"will you turn and walk back a little? I would rather talk to you a little first, before any one knows I am here." With the greatest readiness, though she strove to conceal it, Lettice agreed. They retraced their steps down the road, and then she led him along a lane to the left, also in the Garford direction, though she knew that by it Mr Auriol and Nina could _not_ return. "I will not beat about the bush, Miss Morison," said Philip. "I have come to see Nina--to ask her to marry me. I would have done so already--last winter at Esparto--but your mother's illness, the difficulty of seeing any of you the latter part of the time, interfered, and I thought it, for other reasons too, better to wait. Nina has no father and mother--you are not much older, but you _are_ the eldest, and I know you have immense influence over her. Before seeing her, I should like to know my ground with you. Do you wish me well?" In face of this straightforward address Lettice felt, for a moment, off her guard. "You have never consulted me hitherto," she said evasively. "That is not the question now," said Philip. "Tell me, do you wish me well, and, still more, do you--do you think I am likely to succeed?" At this Lettice looked up at him. "I don't know," she said, and she spoke honestly. "Almost the only thing I am sure of is that I wish you had not thought of it--not come here." Philip's bright, handsome face fell; he looked in a moment years older. "You think there is something in the way, I see," he said. "Ah! well, there is nothing for it but to make sure. I must see Nina herself. Where is she?" "She is out," said Lettice, and her face flushed. "She is out walking with Godfrey Auriol." Something in her tone and expression made Philip stop short and look at her sharply. She bore his look unflinchingly, and that perhaps impressed him more than her words. She was able to do so, for she was not conscious of deceiving him. She deceived herself; her determined prejudice and self-will blinded her to all but their own tendencies and conclusions. Mr Dexter's eyes dropped. At this same moment there flashed before his memory the strangely enthusiastic tone with which Godfrey had spoken of--as Philip thought--_Nina_, that first morning at Esparto. His face was very pale when he looked up again. "Miss Morison--Lettice," he said, "you do not like me, but you are incapable of misleading me. You think there is something between Nina and Mr Auriol?" "He is very fond of her," said Lettice. "I do not know exactly, but I think--" "You think she returns it?" Lettice bowed her head in agreement. "Then I will go--as I came--and no one need know anything about my having been," said Philip. "You will tell no one?" "Not if you wish me not to do so; certainly not," she replied, only too delighted to be, as she said to herself, _obliged_ to conceal his visit. "I very earnestly beg you not to tell of it," he said; "it could serve no purpose, things being as you say they are." Lettice made a little movement as if she would have interrupted him. Then she hesitated. At last-- "I did not--exactly--" was all she got out. "No, you did not exactly in so many words say, `Nina is engaged, or just going to be, to Godfrey Auriol.' But you have said all you _could_, and I thank you for your honesty. It must have been difficult for you, disliking me, and knowing that I _know_ you dislike me, to have been honest." Philip spoke slowly, as if weighing every word. Something in his manner, in his white, almost ghastly face, appalled Lettice. "Mr Dexter," she exclaimed, involuntarily laying her hand on his arm, "I don't think I do dislike you, _personally_;" and she felt that never before had she been so near liking, and certainly respecting, the young man. "But you know all the feelings involved. I am very, very sorry it should have gone so far with you. Yet I could not have warned you sooner last winter; it would have been impossible. I had no reason to think there was anything so serious." "Last winter," repeated Philip. "I don't understand you. There was no _reason_ to warn me off then. Before she had ever seen him? I had all the field to myself. You don't suppose I am giving it up now out of deference to that shameful, wicked nonsense of prejudice and dig like to the best man in the world--your uncle, and mine, as I am proud to call him?" And Philip gave a bitter and contemptuous laugh. "I am going away because I see I have no chance. I esteem and admire Godfrey Auriol too much to enter into useless rivalry with him. He is not likely to care for any woman in vain. But if I had not been so afraid of hurting you last winter, if I had thrown all the prejudice to the winds, I believe I might have won her. Godfrey would _never_ have come between us had he had any idea of how it was with me. So, after all, it _is_ that wicked, unchristian nonsense that has done it all. You may think it is right; you cannot expect _me_ to agree with you. At the same time, I repeat that I thank you for your honesty. Good-bye. Can I reach Garford by this way?" and Philip, in a white fever of indignation and most bitter disappointment, turned to go. Lettice had never perhaps in all her life felt more discomposed. "Mr Dexter," she said, "don't leave me like this; don't be so angry with me. I have tried to do rightly--by you, too." "I have not denied it; but I cannot stand and discuss it as if it were anything else. I am only human. I must go. I am afraid of--of meeting _them_. Tell me, is this the right way?" "Yes," replied Lettice mechanically; "straight on brings you out on the road again. It is a short cut." Philip raised his hat; and before Lettice had time for another word, had she indeed known what to say, he was gone. She stood and looked after him for some moments with a blank, half-scared expression; and then, retracing her steps, she walked slowly back, and thus came to be observed by her sister and Godfrey returning in the other direction. It was not a happy moment for Mr Auriol to choose for his renewed attempt. Lettice slept badly, and woke in the morning feverish and excited; but, by way perhaps of shifting the misgiving and self-reproach which _would_ insinuate themselves, more blindly determined than ever to stand to her colours. She listened to her uncle's letter and to all Mr Auriol had to say, and then quietly announced her decision. Nothing could induce her to regard as a relation the man who had supplanted her father, the representative of the unnatural family who had treated him all his life long as a pariah and an outcast, and had been the cause of sorrows and trials without end to him and her mother. "I am the eldest," she said. "I can remember more distinctly than the others the privations and trials they went through--at the very time when my father's father and brother were rolling in riches, some part of which _surely_, by every natural law, should have been his." "And some part of which _was_ his," said Godfrey. "Everything he had came from his father. And why it was not more was his own fault. He would not take it." "Neither will I," said Lettice, crimsoning. "What my father accepted and left to us I considers ours; but I will take no more in any shape, directly or indirectly." "Then," said Godfrey, also losing his self-control, "you had better give up all you have. For, is surely as I stand here, you would not, as I have already explained to you, have had one farthing left but for what Ingram Morison did and risked. You owe _all_ to him." Lettice turned upon him, very pale now. "You may some day repent taunting me so cruelly with what I am in no way responsible for," she said. Godfrey, recognising the truth of this, tried to make her better understand him; but it was useless. "I must bear it for the present," was all she would say; and Nina heard her mutter something to herself about "once I am of age," which made her still more uneasy. "I have done more harm than good," said Godfrey at last. "There is no more to be said." He glanced at Nina and Arthur, but neither spoke. Lettice saw the glance. "We are all of one mind," she said proudly. "Are we not, Nina? Are we not, Arthur?" Nina's eyes filled with tears; Arthur was very pale. "You know, Lettice," said Nina, "at all costs we must cling together;" and Lettice preferred not to press her more closely. And Godfrey Auriol returned to town the next morning. CHAPTER SEVEN. A TRAMP IN THE SNOW. "There is no dearth of kindness In this world of ours, Only in our blindness We gather thorns for flowers!" Gerald Massey. A very cold winter morning, colder than is often the case before Christmas, and Christmas was still some days off. Snow had fallen in the night; and while some weather optimists were maintaining that on this account it would feel warmer now, others, more experienced, if less hopeful, were prophesying a much heavier fall before night--what lay on the ground was but the precursor of much more. The family party round the breakfast table in the pretty Rectory of Thorncroft were discussing the question from various points of view. "If it would stop snowing now, and go on freezing _hard_ till the end of the holidays, so that we could have skating all the time, then I don't care what it does after," said Tom, a typical youth of fourteen, to be met with, it seems to me, in at least six of every seven English country families. "No," said Ralph, his younger brother, "I'd rather it'd go on snowing for about a week, so that we could have lots of snow-balling. I like that better than skating." "There wouldn't be much of you or Tom left to skate or snowball either, if it went on snowing for a week. We'd be snowed up bodily," remarked their father. "Have you forgotten grandpapa's stories?" For Thorncroft was in an out-of-the-way part of the country, all hills and valleys, where snowings-up were not altogether legend. "But, independently of that, I don't like you to talk quite so thoughtlessly. Either heavy snow or hard frost long prolonged brings terrible suffering." And the kind-hearted clergyman sighed, as he rose from the table and walked over to the window, where he stood looking out for a few moments without speaking. "I must tell cook to begin the winter soup at once," said the mother, speaking to her eldest daughter. For in this family there was a sort of private soup kitchen in severe weather--independently of charity to their own parishioners--for the benefit of poor, storm-driven waifs and strays, many of whom passed this way on their tramp to the northern towns, which they were too poor to attain by the railway. It was an old custom, and had never been found productive of abuse. "Yes," replied the young girl; "for I am sure the weather is going to be dreadful. Shall I go and speak about it, mamma?" "Do, dear; your father may want me for a few minutes." Daisy left the room, but only to reappear again very shortly with a troubled face. "Papa, mamma," she said, "there is a tramp at the door now. He seems nearly fainting, and cook says he must have been out in the snow all night. There is no soup ready; might I have a cup of tea for him?" "Certainly," said her mother. "Run, one of you boys, for a kitchen cup; it will taste just as good, and I don't like to risk one of my dear old china ones." "Mamma," said Daisy, in a low voice--she was always a little afraid of the boys laughing at her--"I don't think it would have mattered about the cup. Do you know, he looks quite like a gentleman?" Her father, who was standing near, overheard the last words. He had been reading a letter, which he threw aside. "There is nothing from Ingram," he remarked to his wife. "I had hoped for a letter. I am so sorry for him, just at Christmas time again the old disappointment. But what is Daisy saying?" The young girl repeated what she had told her mother, and Ralph just then appearing with a substantial cup and saucer, Mrs Winthrop poured out the tea, and Daisy, carrying it, went off with her father to the kitchen door. "A _gentleman_, you say, Daisy?" he repeated. "Yes, papa, and quite young. Cook says she is sure he is a gentleman." "And _begging_?" added her father. "Oh no--at least, I don't think so. He just knocked at the door and asked if he might warm himself at the fire. And she said he looks so ill. I did not quite see him. I just peeped in." "Well, wait a moment, I'll speak to him first," said her father; for by this time they had traversed the long passage which led to the kitchen and offices--the Rectory at Thorncroft was a large roomy old house, and the Winthrops were rich--and so saying the clergyman went in to have a look at the stranger. Almost immediately, Daisy, waiting at the door, heard herself called. "Quick, my child--the hot tea. He is nearly fainting, poor fellow!" And Daisy, hurrying in, saw her father half lifting on to a chair a tall thin figure with white face and closed eyes; while cook stood by looking very frightened, and perhaps not altogether pleased at this desecration of her spotless kitchen. For the snow, melted by the heat, was running off the stranger in little rivulets. He was only half-fainting, however. They made him swallow the tea, and sent for another cup, into which Mrs Winthrop put a spoonful of brandy. Then the young man sat up and looked about him confusedly. Recognising that he was among strangers, he thanked them earnestly for their kindness, and struggling to his feet said that he must be going on. "Going on, my good fellow!" said Mr Winthrop. "You are not fit for it. You must stay here an hour or two at least, and get dried and have something to eat. Have you far to go to-day?" The young man coloured. "I wanted to get to Clough," he said. "It is ten days since I started. I got on well enough, though it has been horribly cold," and he shivered as he thought of it, "till last night." "Were you out in the snow?" asked the rector compassionately. "Not all night. Oh no; I sheltered in a barn till early this morning. Then it looked as if it were clearing, and I set off again. I was anxious to get on as far as I could before it came on again; but I lost my way, I think; there was moonlight at first, but since daylight I have been wandering about, not able to find the road. Am I far from the high-road to Clough?" "Not very; you must have taken the wrong turn a couple of miles off. We are accustomed to--people,"--"tramps," he was going to have said, but he changed the word in time--"making that mistake. Now you had better take off your wet things and get them dried, and have something to eat; and, if you must go on, we will set you on your way. And,"--here the good rector hesitated--"you seem very young," he went on; "if I can give you any counsel, remember, it is my business to do so." The young fellow coloured up again painfully. "You are very kind, sir," he said. "Think it over. I will see you again. Peters," he called, and a man-servant, brimful of curiosity appeared, "this,"--again an instant's almost imperceptible hesitation--"this young gentleman has lost his way. Take him to Master Tom's old room and help him to change his things. We must find you a change while they are drying," he went on. But the young fellow held up a small bag he had been carrying. "I have other things, thank you," he said. "But I should be most thankful to have these dried." Mr Winthrop rejoined Daisy and her mother. "He is a gentleman, is he not, papa?" said the former eagerly. "He strikes me as more of a schoolboy than anything else. I hope he has not run away in any sort of disgrace. Still, whatever it is, one must be kind to him, poor boy. He is evidently not accustomed to roughing it, and as far as one could see through the plight he was in, he seemed well dressed. I hope he will tell me something about himself." The worst of the weather-prophets' predictions were realised. Before noon the snow came down again, this time in most sober earnest, and long before dark Mr Winthrop, becoming convinced that they "were in for it," began to take some necessary precautions. It was out of the question for the young stranger to pursue his foot-journey. His kind host insisted on his remaining where he was for the night, though somewhat embarrassed as to how to treat him. "I cannot bring a complete stranger in among our own children," he said to his wife, "and yet it seems impossible to tell him to sit with the servants." But the difficulty was solved by the young man's unfitness to leave his room. He had caught a chill, and was, besides, suffering from exhaustion, both nervous and physical. "Seems to me to have had a shock of some kind, and evidently very little food for some days past," said the doctor whom Mr Winthrop was obliged to send for the next morning. "It may go on to rheumatic fever, or he may--being young and healthy enough--fight it off. But any way, you've got him on your hands for two or three days, unless you like to get a vehicle of some kind and send him to the hospital at Clough," said the doctor, pitying the inconvenience to Mrs Winthrop. "It would be a great risk, would it not?" said the rector. "Yes, certainly it would be a risk. Still you are not obliged to give house-room to every benighted wanderer," said the doctor, smiling. But Mr Winthrop felt certain this was no common case, and his kindness was rewarded. Thanks to the care and nursing he received, the dreaded illness was warded off, and by the fourth day the young stranger was well enough to pursue his journey. "I can never thank you enough for your goodness to me, an utter stranger," he said to his host, with the tears in his eyes. "And I feel so ashamed, so--" But here he broke down altogether. "My poor boy," said the rector, "can you not give me your confidence? Why are you wandering about the world alone like this? I cannot believe you have done anything wrong--at least, seriously wrong. If you have left your friends hastily for some half-considered reason, it may not be too late to return. Can I do anything to help you? Can I write to your father so as to put things straight again?" "I have no father and no mother," said the lad. "No, I have done nothing wrong; nothing disgraceful, in the usual sense, I mean. But I have done wrong in another way. I have disappointed every hope and effort that had been made for me, and I cannot face the result I cannot tell you all, for if I did, you would probably think it your duty to interfere--it is all so complicated and confused. All I can tell you is that I am going off like Whittington," he added with a faint smile, "to seek my fortune. And if I find it, it will not be mine. I owe it to others, that is the worst of it." "And where do you think of going in the first place?" asked Mr Winthrop. "To Hexton," said the young man, naming the town he had been making for, before his misadventure, "and from there to Liverpool. I thought I would try in Liverpool to get something to do, and if I did not succeed, I thought perhaps I would go to America." "And how would you get there? Have you money?" "I have a little that I left behind me in the charge of a friend to send after me with my clothes when I get to Liverpool. I thought it better not to carry it with me; I might have been robbed, or,"--and here he smiled again the same wintry little smile that seemed so pathetic on his thin young face--"tempted to spend it, perhaps." "And have you any one to go to at Liverpool--any introductions of any kind?" "No one--none, whatever," answered the poor boy sadly. Mr Winthrop reflected a moment. "I may be able to be of a little use to you in that way; at least, I might be if I knew even a little more about you. You cannot tell me your name?" The young man coloured and looked down. "I cannot," he said. "I thought it all over, and I determined that my only chance was to tell nothing. No, sir, you cannot help me; but I thank you as much as if you had." And thus Mr Winthrop was forced to let him go. At the last moment an idea struck him. He gave the boy a few words of introduction to an old friend of his in Liverpool--a friend, though in a different rank of life--the son of a farmer in the neighbourhood, now holding a respectable position in a business house there, telling him all, or rather the exceedingly little, he knew of the stranger who had been three days his guest, and asking him if under the circumstances he could do anything to help, to do it. "At the same time," he said to the young man, "I really do not know that this will be of any service. I cannot ask Mr Simcox to take any responsibility in the matter. You have not even told me your name." "I know that," replied the youth dejectedly, "but I cannot help it. I cannot expect others to take me on trust as generously as you have done." And so saying he set off on his lonely journey, with kindly words from Daisy and her mother, the two boys accompanying him to the high-road. The snow still lay on the ground, and Tom's wish for a prolonged frost seemed likely to be fulfilled. "We shall have splendid skating in a day or two," he remarked to "the gentleman tramp," as he and Ralph had dubbed the stranger. "Our pond isn't very big, but it's very good ice generally. You should see the lake at Uncle Ingram's; _that's_ the best place, I know, for skating in England." The young man started at the name Tom mentioned. "_Where_ did you say?" he asked. "At my uncle Ingram's--Mr Morison's," said Tom. "It's a long way from here." "But your name isn't Morison. How can he be your uncle?" "Why, his wife is our aunt. He married mamma's sister. Uncles are often uncles that way," said Tom with an air of superior wisdom. "Of course," said the young man; "how stupid of me." "Well, don't be stupid about losing your way again," said the boy patronisingly. "Look here now, here's the high-road; you've nothing to do but go straight on for some hours--two or three--and when you come to a place where four roads meet, you'll see `Clough' marked on a finger-post. You can easily get there to-night." "Thank you; thank you _very_ much," said the stranger; and, as the boys turned from him, "Please thank your father and mother again for me," he called out after them. "He must be a gentleman," said Ralph. "He speaks quite like one." "Of course he is," said Tom. "But he's rather queer. He was so stupid about Uncle Ingram. I wonder what he's left his friends for." "P'raps," said Ralph sagely, "he'd got a cruel stepmother that starved and beat him, like Hop-o'-my-Thumb, you know." "Nonsense," reproved Tom. "That's all fairy story rubbish; and you know papa says it's very wrong to talk about cruel stepmothers, and that you're not to read any more fairy stories if you mix them up with real." "Or," pursued Ralph, sublimely indifferent to this elder-brotherly reproof, "it might have been a cruel uncle, like the babes in the wood's uncle. And _that's_ not a fairy story--_there_," he threw at Tom triumphantly. Many a true word is spoken in jest! Little thought the two light-hearted boys as they made their way back over the crisp, glittering snow to the happy, cheerful Rectory, how the words "uncle," "my uncle Ingram," kept ringing in the ears of the solitary traveller, but little older than they, as he pursued his weary journey. For in a sense it was truly from an uncle, or the distorted image of one, that he was fleeing. "Uncle Ingram to be _their_ uncle. How extraordinary!" he kept saying to himself. "And how near I was more than once to telling my name. If I had--supposing I had got very ill and delirious and had told it--it would all have come out. It would not have been my fault _then_. Lettice could not have reproached me, or written me any more of those dreadful letters;" and a sigh, almost a shiver, of suffering went through him as he thought of them. "If I had died, they would have had to hunt among my things, and they would have found my name. I think it would have been better. Perhaps Lettice would have been sorry; any way, it would have come to an end, and poor Nina would have been happier. Lettice could not speak to her as she has done to me. But I must not begin thinking. I must go on with it now." He had no misadventures that day, and reached the town he was bound for by the evening. There he looked about till he saw a modest little inn, where he put up for the night, remembering Mr Winthrop's advice to play no tricks with himself in such severe weather, and when still not fully recovered from his exposure to the snowstorm. It was the day but one before Christmas. Poor Arthur's eyes filled with tears as he sat trying to warm himself on a bench at some little distance from the fire in the rough room of the inn, where a motley enough company of passers-by--small farmers from the neighbourhood, some of the inferior grades of commercial travellers, one or two nondescript figures, looking like wandering showmen, and a few others, were assembled, some talking, some silent, mostly smoking, and all getting as near the fire as they could, for it was again bitterly cold. What a contrast from last Christmas! Then, ill though their mother was, she had not seemed much worse than she had been for long, and had done her utmost to be cheerful for her children's sake. Arthur recalled the pleasant little drawing-room at the Villa Martine, the bright sunshine and lovely blue sky--for the short, though often even in those climates sharp, winter had not set in till January--which almost seemed to laugh at the usual associations of Christmas. His brighter hopes, too, for he had not yet realised his distaste and unfitness for his chosen profession, and even if misgiving had now and then crossed his mind, there was his mother to confide in, should it ever take form. "I _can't_ believe mamma would have been so hard on me," he said to himself. "She might have been disappointed, but she wouldn't have thought me disgraced for life. Oh, why did she not live till this was past? She would have been sorry for me; she would not have blamed me so--but then, she did not know all about the money. To think, as Lettice says, that all my education, _everything_, has in reality been paid for by the man we can't--or won't--be even commonly civil to! It is the most miserable complication. Not that it matters now to _me_. He wouldn't be so ready to treat me as his son now that I've turned out such a fool, and worse than a fool. Lots of fools get on well enough, and nobody finds out they are fools; but _I_ must needs go and make an exhibition of myself and my folly;" and he positively writhed at the remembrance. "However, that part of it is at an end. I'll use no more of his money, and, if I live to make any of my own, the first thing I'll do will be to repay what I have used, though without the least idea of all this." Then his thoughts wandered off again to the happy family he had just left. How kind they had been to him! How gladly, had they had the slightest notion of who he was, would they have made him welcome to pass his Christmas among them! Mrs Winthrop especially, whom, as his aunt's sister, he thought of with a peculiar interest. How gentle and motherly she was, and, doubtless, his aunt was just the same. "Ah!" sighed Arthur again, "if Lettice could but have seen things differently, I would not have been where I am to-day. I might have given up the attempt in time, before I had disgraced myself. I might--" But his further reflections were cut short by a voice beside him. It came from a burly personage who had, without Arthur's noticing, so absorbed had he been in his reflections, installed himself on the bench at his side, puffing away busily and contentedly at a clay pipe. He had not hitherto spoken, but had sat still, looking about him with a pair of shrewd but not unkindly eyes. "And whur,"--with a broad accent--"may you be boun', young man?" he inquired good-naturedly. "Better bide at home, say I, by such weather, if so be as one's not forced to be on the roads." CHAPTER EIGHT. A FRIEND IN NEED. "I'm sure it's winter fairly." Burns. Arthur started. He brushed hastily away the tears that lingered in his eyes, hoping that the new-comer had not observed them. "I--I--" he began, then hesitated a little, "I'm on my way to Liverpool. I want to go to America." "Ameriky," said the old man; "that's a long way. Have ye friends there?" Arthur shook his head. He did not care about this cross-questioning, and, had he reflected a little, he would not perhaps have answered so openly. But he was inexperienced, and unaccustomed to be on his guard. He tried to think of some observation to make which would turn the conversation, but nothing came into his head except the subject which never fails--the weather. "Do you think it is going to snow again?" he said timidly, glancing up at his companion. He looked something like a farmer of the humbler class--farmers were always interested in the weather. The man raised his head quickly, as if to look up, forgetting seemingly that he was not in the open air. Then he smiled a little. "Can't say," he replied. "But I rather think we've had the worst of it for a while. And so ye're off to Ameriky, young man? You don't look so fit for it nayther." "I'm going to Liverpool first," said Arthur. "Perhaps I'll stay there. I have--" "an introduction there," he was going on to say, but the words stopped on his lips. They sounded far too important under the circumstances. Besides, and for the first time this new difficulty struck him, he dare not avail himself of Mr Winthrop's letter, which he had been so glad of! The person to whom it was addressed was pretty sure to be in some way connected, directly or indirectly, with his uncle's business, and, even if not so, when Mr Winthrop came to hear of his, Arthur's, disappearance, he might identify him with the traveller they had so kindly received, and trace him through this very introduction. And as all this went through his mind, his face fell. His companion, who was watching him, saw the change of expression. "You have, you were saying, you have friends at Liverpool?" he said. Arthur began to feel irritated at his pertinacity; he had not had much experience of the curiosity of many whose quiet uneventful lives force them into gossip as their only attainable excitement; but, looking up at the good-humoured face beside him, his annoyance disappeared, and in its place came a sudden impulse of confidence. "No," he said bluntly; "I have no friends there, nor indeed anywhere, whom I can ask for help. I have neither father nor mother. I want to earn my living, and in time, if I can, to do more than that. And I'm not proud. I'd do anything, and I'd be more grateful than I can say to any one who'd put me in the way of something." The farmer sat silent. He puffed away at his pipe, and between the puffs he took a good look now and again at his companion. The rather thin young face was flushed now; the beautiful brown eyes sparkled with excitement. It was a very attractive face. "Very genteel-looking; no doubt of that. And James and Eliza think a deal o' that," he murmured to himself. But Arthur did not catch the words. He sat without speaking. He had no idea of help coming from his present companion; he had no notion of what was passing in his mind. His thoughts were wandering far away, and he started when the farmer, with a preliminary cough to attract his attention, again spoke to him. "You're set on Liverpool, I'm thinking?" he began. Arthur did not at once understand his meaning. "I'm going to Liverpool. I intend to go there," he said. "And you're _set_ on it?" the farmer repeated. "No other place'd be to your fancy, I suppose?" "Oh," said Arthur, taking in his meaning. "No; I don't particularly care about Liverpool. Indeed, I rather think I should like anywhere else better." For he realised that through the information which might not improbably be got sooner or later from Mr Winthrop, Liverpool would be the first place in which he would be sought. "_In_deed," said the farmer. "I had no reason for choosing Liverpool," Arthur went on. "It was on the way to America; I suppose that was why I thought of it," he added innocently. "Just so," ejaculated his companion. Then, after a few more puffs at his pipe and a few more scrutinising glances at Arthur between times, he proceeded with what he had to say. He had a daughter, it appeared, married to a draper, _the_ draper of the little town of Greenwell, not many miles off. She, or her husband, or both of them, were in search of a young man to help in the shop, and they had confided their anxieties to their father, knowing that he had a journey of some days to make, and there was no saying but what he might come across the person they were looking for. "Eliza, she won't have none of the lads thereabouts," he explained. "They're roughish-like, and Eliza she thinks a deal o' genteelness, does Eliza. It strikes me, young man, you'd please her for that. And it'd be a good home, if you were honest and industrious." Here he stopped and looked at his companion. Arthur's face was still redder than before. "A shop-boy," he said to himself--"a shop-boy!" But aloud he only said quietly-- "I don't know anything whatever of the sort of work it would be. Does not your son-in-law need some one who knows something about it?" The farmer scratched his head. "You can write a good hand, I'm thinking," he said; "and you can soon learn how to make out the accounts. It's not that; it's who's to speak for you;" and he looked up again more scrutinisingly than heretofore in Arthur's face. It did not grow the less red on that account. "I have no one to speak for me," he replied haughtily; "so there's no use thinking about it. All the same," he went on, recollecting himself, I thank you very much, very much indeed. I'm very tired, and I think I'll go to bed and, rising, he held out his hand, with the gentle courtesy innate in him, to the farmer, who grasped it heartily in his horny palm, with a friendly "Good night." "I'll see ye in the mornin', mebbe," he said. "It's not the weather, nor yet the time o' year, for too early a start." "It's something to have any one to say: `Good night' to," thought Arthur, as he mounted the narrow staircase to the stuffy little bedroom he had with some difficulty secured to himself for the night, and the tears again welled up, though he tried hard to ignore them. He slept soundly for some hours, for he was thoroughly tired; but he woke early, and lay anxiously turning over things in his mind. Should he try for the situation the farmer had spoken of? True, there was the difficulty of "no references;" but Arthur's practical sense had thought of a way out of that. He had some money--very little with him--but a few pounds he had left with his clothes and other small possessions in the safe keeping of a young man, whom he knew he could depend upon to keep secret. This was a former servant in the family of Arthur's tutor; and when obliged through an accident to leave his place, some kindness young Morison had shown him had completely gained his heart. "I could write to Dawson to send my box on to Greenwell, or whatever's the name of the place," he said to himself. "Then I could give the genteel Eliza some money to keep as a sort of guaranty, to be given back to me when they were satisfied I was not a thief;" and Arthur laughed, perhaps because it was better than crying. "I believe that would do away with all difficulties. And once I am settled, it would be something to be able to write to Lettice, and tell her that, disgraced as I am, I have still found something to do, and that I _am_ earning my own livelihood already." His face flushed, though with honest pride this time. "I should have preferred her to think me in America," his thoughts went on; "but it would be wrong to leave them in anxiety so long. At least, if they still think me worth being anxious about! Any way, they will be glad to know I am alive and well." He had already since his flight written twice to his sisters, twice since the terrible day when, morally convinced of his failure, he had altogether lost heart and fainted in his place among the candidates, though the examination was but half over. He had written, confessing the whole--his nervous terror of the ordeal, his utter incapacity to face more, his thorough unfitness for the profession he had no wish to enter, and announcing, at the same time, his determination henceforth to depend on himself alone, and to work till he could repay the obligation to their uncle, of which Lettice, in her mistaken idea of keeping up his spirit, had so often reminded him. "I am not a coward," he had said in one of these letters, "though Lettice may say I am. I have only been a coward in one thing--in my fear of telling the truth, which I thought would so horribly distress her. I dreaded her reproaches, and I still dread them; but I shall no longer deserve them. I, at least, will make my own way, and some day I may be able to do something for all of you, and, in the meantime, you will all be better and happier without the brother who has disappointed you so sadly." And these letters he had sent through the same agency, that of poor Dawson, so that there was no post-mark or mark of any kind to betray his present quarters. And so his thoughts went on that dreary morning in the little stuffy bedroom. If he did not accept the chance so unexpectedly thrown in his way, what was he to do? He dared not make use of his letter to Mr Winthrop's friend; he dared hardly go to Liverpool. For he was beginning to gain experience. He saw that without references of any kind he might get into awkward predicaments, might be suspected of having run away in disgrace of some very different kind from the failure which he himself judged so severely. "And that would be _too_ horrible," thought the poor boy; "to be taken up as a suspicious character, and a scandal about it, and to have to go home and go on living on Uncle Ingram's money after all, and feel that every one connected with me was ashamed of me! No; I must see what that old fellow has to say, if he hasn't thought better of it. He's a good old chap, I'm sure." His resolution had not time to cool, for the farmer had "slept upon it" to some purpose. He greeted Arthur with friendly good nature, and, without his needing to broach the subject, started it himself again. He was on his way home, and had promised to "stop with Eliza and James over Christmas," as Greenwell was only a few hours from his own village, and he proposed to Arthur to accompany him, "to take a look at the place like, so being as he had naught better to do with hisself." "And to let them take a look at me," added Arthur, smiling. "It's very good of you indeed. It's more than good of you," he added, "to trust a perfect stranger, and one that can't tell you all about himself either. It was family troubles that have made me leave my home, but that's all I can say." "There's no lack o' troubles nowheer," said the farmer; "and there's no need o' telling what's no one's business but one's own." "But," continued Arthur, "if your son-in-law, Mr--I don't think you told me his name?" "Lamb, James Lamb," replied the old man. "If Mr Lamb engages me, I can give him a sort of a pledge for my honesty, any way. I have a little money I can send for, and I could give it into his keeping for a while." The farmer's face cleared. "That's not a bad idea," he said. "Not but what I knows an honest face when I sees one, but James--he might think me soft-like. I had a lad o' my own onst," he went on, with an unusual gentleness in his voice, "and I lost him many years ago now--Eliza she were the daughter o' my wife that is--just about thy age, my lad," relapsing into the second person singular as he grew more at ease, "seems to me he favoured thee a bit. But Eliza and James they'd mebbe laugh at me for an old fool, so I'm mighty glad about the money." "I won't write for it yet," said Arthur. "I'd better wait till we get to Greenwell, and see how things turn out I left it with my clothes and other things with a friend to send after me." "Just so," said the farmer. "Oh, as for that, it'll be time enough." An hour or two later saw Arthur, in company with his new friend, mounted in the light box-cart of the latter, and driving, though at a sober pace, for the roads were very slippery, in the direction of the little town of Greenwell. It was a long drive. They stopped towards midday at a little roadside inn for some refreshment in the shape of bread-and-cheese and beer, and then jogged on again. It was not a luxurious mode of travelling; still, it was much better than tramping through the snow, and Arthur's days of roughing it had taught him the useful lesson of being thankful for small boons. But as the early winter dusk fell it grew colder and colder, and Arthur shivered, though he had a good thick coat, and the farmer had given him a plentiful share of the rough horse-cloth, which did duty for a carriage rug. "Christmas Eve," he said, after a long silence, hardly aware that he was speaking aloud. "Ay so," said his companion, "the years they comes, and the years they goes. 'Tis many a Christmas Eve and Christmas Day as I mind. `Peace on earth, goodwill to men,' parson tells us. They've been a-tellin' it a sight o' Christmases, seems to me, but we're a long way off it still, I'm afeard." "I'm afraid so," said Arthur with a sigh. And then his thoughts wandered off again to his home. Lettice would hear those same words to-morrow morning. How would they strike her? Was she not wrong, _quite_ wrong? was the question that came over and over again for the thousandth time in his mind. Could it be showing true honour to their dead parents to persist in the course she was doing--a course setting at defiance the Divine injunction? Nay, even allowing they, or their father rather, had been injured, unfairly treated, was there not Divine command for such cases, too? "Forgive, as ye would be forgiven," "unto seventy times seven," were the words that floated about before the boy's eyes, illuminated, as it were, on the ever-darkening sky in front of him. And who was it they were refusing to forgive? One who had never injured them, one who had generously taken upon him responsibilities and risks he was in no way called upon to trouble himself with. "Ah, yes," thought Arthur sadly, "that has been his crime in her eyes-- his very goodness." And somehow he felt less unhappy and perplexed when he allowed himself to recognise this than when he strove, as he had thought himself bound to do, against his better judgment, to think Lettice right, to accept the arguments she had so plausibly brought to bear upon him. "She must be wrong," he thought. "And if I had been older and wiser, or, at least, more courageous, I might have made her care to see it. But what right have I to speak, miserable failure that I am? I can only do what I am doing--be faithful and loyal to her, even if she is mistaken, and do my utmost to lessen the burden;" and, with another sigh, Arthur shook himself out of his reverie. _How_ cold it was growing! "Are we near there?" he inquired. "Not so far now," said the old man cheerily. "'Twill be good seeing a bright fire and a bite of supper. The old woman--that's my wife, none so very old nayther--will be lookin' out for us. She were to come to Eliza's to-day like, so as we might have our Christmas together. The plum-pudding will have been ready this three weeks, I make no doubt. She's a rare housekeeper, is my Eliza, though I says it as shouldn't." And Arthur was boy enough to feel considerable satisfaction in the prospect of plum-pudding, even though served in homely guise. It was a long way better than Christmas Day on the road, or in some poor lodging in loneliness and dreariness! In a few minutes more the farmer turned off the road they had for some time been following, and shortly after this, twinkling lights began to be visible in the distance. There were not many travellers of any kind about; it was too cold for all not forced to do so to expose themselves to the open air; and when at last, after rattling over the stones of an old-fashioned street, the farmer drew up at a door, evidently the private entrance to a shuttered shop next it, Arthur really felt that he could hardly have endured a quarter of an hour more of it. The mere thought of a fire was felicity, and he did not need twice bidding to jump down and knock lustily at the door. But before it was opened a misgiving seized him. "Had I not better go somewhere else for the night?" he asked his old friend. "They're not expecting me. I dare say I can get a bed somewhere near; and then, by the morning you will have told them about me." The farmer ejaculated something, which was evidently meant as an equivalent to "nonsense." "D'ye think now, James or Eliza'd turn a dog to the door such a night as this, much less a Christian?" he replied reassuringly. "Seein', too, that it's _me_ as brings you," he added, just as the door opened. For the next minute or two there was a chatter of rather noisy welcome, questions made and asked, women's voices, and men's laughter. Then Arthur, feeling himself confused and dazed, conscious of almost nothing but the numbing cold--for he was not yet as strong as usual--found himself in a large, comfortable, though plainly furnished room, with a great old-fashioned fireplace at one end, in which a great old-fashioned fire was burning. He still heard the voices going on about him, though at a little distance, and he had an instinctive feeling that they were talking about him. He stood irresolute, uncertain whether to turn back or go forward, when a kindly voice caught his ear. "Come near the fire. I'm sure you're freezing cold. Eliza's that pleased to see her father again, she sees no one else. James, you've not shook hands with--but, to be sure, my old man's not told us your name yet." Arthur smiled. It would not have been easy for the farmer to tell his name when he had never heard it himself. He tried to collect his thoughts, but he still felt very light-headed and strange. "My name," he began, "is John--John Morris," which, so far as it went, was true. "I wish you would call me John." "Surely," replied "James," as in response to his mother-in-law's hint he shook hands, so heartily as to make him wince, with the young stranger. "You're kindly welcome, and, if so be as it suits you to stay on with us, I don't doubt but as we'll pull together." But he confided to his Eliza afterwards that, though there was no doubt as to his having a very "genteel" appearance, he was by no means sure that this young fellow whom her father had picked up would be strong enough for the place. "Nevertheless, we'll give him a good Christmas dinner, and cheer him up a bit. He looks sadly pulled down like, poor fellow!" CHAPTER NINE. A CAB AND A CARRIAGE. "Life, believe, is not a dream So dark as sages say; Oft a little morning rain Foretells a pleasant day." Charlotte Bronte. About a week before the cold evening of Arthur's drive with the old farmer in his cart to Greenwell, late one afternoon, a young lady in deep mourning might have been seen getting out of the train at a certain station in London. She was alone, and she had no luggage, except a little bag which she carried; and yet, as the train was an express one, not stopping at stations near at hand, it was clear that she had come from some distance. A porter, on the alert for embarrassed lady travellers, quickly called a cab for her, looking disappointed at no trunks being forthcoming, but needlessly so, as he received a liberal amount of coppers for the small service he had rendered. This rather unusual generosity made him give more attention than he generally had time to bestow on travellers, to the tall, slight, black-shrouded figure. The thick veil which she wore blew aside for an instant as she got into the cab, and he saw that she was very young, very pretty, and evidently in trouble, for her eyes showed traces of recent tears. "Poor thing!" said the porter to himself. "A suddint summins, no doubt--wired for--started at onst--no luggage--no time to think of nothink;" and being a rather tender-hearted porter, he could hardly refrain, as he stood with his hand on the cab door waiting for the address, from adding paternally, "Hope you won't find things so bad as you anticerpate, miss;" but before he had time to make up his mind whether he should or should not express these kindly feelings, he was startled by her saying rapidly, though in a low voice-- "Ask him to drive quickly, please, as quickly as possible;" and then she gave the address, which, rather to the porter's surprise, was in that part of London where no one but lawyers, and lawyers in their official capacity solely, are to be heard of, which circumstance gave the porter matter for reflection for fully one minute and a half, till the next train came in or went out, and he relapsed into his normal condition. Whether the cabman drove quickly or not, it did not appear so to the unhappy girl seated in his cab. It seemed hours to her, till he at last drew up, in a dingy, smoke-dried, but respectable locality, where she had never been before in her life. She jumped out of the cab, hardly replying to the driver's inquiry as to whether he was to wait--which, however, as she had not paid him, he naturally decided to do--and only stopping to read the lists of names inscribed at each side of the open doorway, leading to the staircase common to all the tenants of the house, she hurried in, and was lost to sight in its solemnly gloomy recesses. Five minutes later she was back again, extreme dejection visible in her whole bearing to any one observing her with attention, even without the sight of the pale, agitated face which her veil concealed. But the cabman was not observing her; he was tired, and inclined to be drowsy, in spite of the cold weather, and Lettice stood still for a moment or two before getting into the cab again. "Godfrey away, for a fortnight, at least. What _shall_ I do?--oh, what _shall_ I do?" she said to herself, pressing her hands together in agony. "If I only knew where he was!" But at his chambers they had refused, though quite civilly, to give her his address, contenting themselves with assuring her that any letters would be forwarded to him at once. "He may be abroad; he may be ever so far away. He _might_ have let us know he was going;" but here her conscience reproached her. How could she expect him to have done anything of the sort when she remembered how they had last parted the cold contempt with which she had received his kind and reasonable remonstrances, till at last, stung into indignation, he had declared that henceforth he would leave her to herself, merely interfering with advice and direction when he saw it absolutely necessary to do so? And that was now three or four months ago. Since then he had only written on strictly business matters--about having taken on Faxleham Cottage for six months longer, directions about Auriol's schooling, and so on. And these three or four months had been among the dreariest and most anxious Lettice had ever known. Nina was pale and drooping; Arthur's letters were rare and unsatisfactory; the autumn had been an unusually rainy and depressing season, and they had absolutely no friends. But for Miss Branksome's unfailing cheerfulness, Nina and the younger ones would, indeed, have been to be pitied, though less than Lettice herself. For, far as she was from owning herself to be the cause of all this unhappiness, her conscience was not at rest, and misgivings from time to time made themselves felt, though she stifled them by exaggerating to herself the soundness of her motives. And this very exaggeration made her write to poor Arthur the letters which, in his overstrained state, had had so disastrous a result. Towards Nina, too, she knew, at the bottom of her heart, that she had not acted fairly, though the reserve that had gradually grown up between them, had prevented her thoroughly understanding her younger sister. For what--for whom, rather--was poor Nina pining? "_Does_ she care for Godfrey?" Lettice asked herself, feeling that if Nina had learnt to do so it was thanks to _her_ influence, and no other. And as time went on, and Lettice began to own to herself that it did _not_ seem as if Godfrey were in love with Nina--"had it been so," she reflected, "he is far too resolute to have been kept back by his quarrel with _me_,"--she almost came to hope that on both sides the dream had been the creation of her own fancy--her own self-will she would not call it. Though even in this hope she found small rest for her troubled spirit. If it were not about Godfrey that Nina was fretting away, though patiently and uncomplainingly, the brightness from her pretty eyes, the roses from her young cheeks, about whom and what was it? And a certain afternoon last August, and a certain conversation with a fair-faced, honest young gentleman, who had come to plead his cause with manly straightforwardness; who had gone away looking ten years older, though with courteous and grateful words to herself on his lips, rose up before Lettice's remembrance with reproachful eyes. And all these memories--as in the so often quoted case of a drowning person--rushed through Lettice's mind in the half-minute during which she stood there in her distress and desolation, while her lips repeated the same murmur--"What shall--oh, what _shall_ I do? Every moment of time that I am losing here may be of the most vital importance." Once she turned and made a step or two towards the door again, in a half-formed resolution to inquire if Mr Auriol's clerk could give her the address of Philip Dexter. But from this she shrank with the strongest feelings of her nature. "To go to _him_--to appeal to _him_ to help me," she reflected. "It would be like begging him on again for Nina. It would be owning that it was all nonsense about Godfrey's caring for her--and for Arthur's sake, too. Why should I publish his humiliation to any but those who _must_ know it?" And again she stood irresolute and altogether wretched. And cabby, beginning to wake up and giving signs of being about to begin wondering what queer sort of a "fare, as didn't know its own mind, he had got hold of," doubled and trebled the girl's embarrassment. "I must go to some hotel for the night, I suppose," she said to herself. "And oh! the horror of sitting there all the evening doing nothing, and lying there all night doing nothing--and Arthur, my darling brother, setting sail for America, before we can stop him; or perhaps--worse and worse--tossing in some miserable place among strangers, in a brain fever, where he may die--_die_, without having forgiven me!" Nearly driven frantic by her own imaginings, she looked round her with a vague, altogether unreasonable appeal for help or guidance. "What _shall_ I do?" she ejaculated for the twentieth time, when just at that moment a carriage drew up--cabby rousing himself to move on so as to make room for it, for it was an unmistakable carriage, a small but thoroughly well-appointed brougham, quite capable of commanding his respectful deference--before the door where Lettice was standing, and a gentleman got out and came slowly over the pavement towards the house. The pavement, or the space between the houses and the real pavement, was wide there. It looked as if in far-off times there might have been a grass-plot or a flowerbed or two in front; and as the new-comer approached, Lettice had time to see him clearly. She looked at him--at the first glance a wild idea had struck her that possibly he might be Godfrey Auriol returned unexpectedly--with a sort of half-bewildered curiosity, but gradually a vague feeling came over her that he was not altogether unknown to her, that somewhere she had seen him before, or else that he resembled some one she had once known. But as he passed by, she recollected herself and turned sharply away. What was it to her what or who this stranger was? What was she made of to be standing there losing the precious moments in idle conjecture? And again the whole force of her mind became concentrated on the absorbing question-- what _was_ she to do? She was turning at last to the cab, in a desperate resolution to go _somewhere_, when a quick step behind her made her look round. To her surprise there stood facing her the gentleman who a moment before had passed her to enter the house. He raised his hat, and she, looking at him, was again struck by his strange indefinite likeness to _some one_. He was slightly above the middle height, his dark hair already a very little hazed with grey. He looked a man of about forty, though in reality he was some years younger; his expression was gentle but rather piercing. There was great power, moral and intellectual, in his well-shaped forehead. "Excuse me for addressing you," he said. "But you seemed to me to be at a loss. Perhaps you are inquiring for some one you cannot find? I know this neighbourhood well. Can I help you?" Lettice looked at him again. The gentleman's tone was so respectful as well as kind, that the most timorous of maidens could scarcely have failed to feel confidence in him. And Lettice was the reverse of timorous; she was fearless to a fault, and her inexperience suggested no misgiving. "Do you perhaps," she began, "do you happen to know any one here--in this house? I am so disappointed at finding the friend, the gentleman I came to see, on _most_ urgent business, away from home. And they won't even give me his address?" she added girlishly, the tears welling up again as she spoke. A curious look came into the kindly eyes that were regarding her, and the stranger made a very slight involuntary movement, almost as if he were going to lay his hand on her arm to console her as one would do to a troubled child. But he checked himself. "I know Mr Auriol, Mr Godfrey Auriol, whose office is in this house," he said. "That is he," exclaimed Lettice with delighted eagerness. "Oh, how fortunate that I should have met you! If you could, oh, if you could but get them to give me his address, I might telegraph to him. It would save ever so much time. Perhaps, I should tell you," she went on, "I have a right to ask for his address; he is my--our guardian. My name is Morison." There was no visible change of expression in the stranger's face, but one knowing him well would have seen a light in his eyes that was not there before. And his lips moved, though no sound was heard. "Thank God for this," were the inaudible words. "I can easily get you his address," he said. "I was just going in to ask if they had any definite news of his return. I want to see him as soon as he comes back. Will you wait here a moment? It is very cold," he added, looking round. "Is that your cab waiting?" "Yes," said Lettice. The gentleman glanced at the cab, with its ill-fitting doors and windows, and the inevitable damp and chilly straw on the floor. "I doubt if you would be much warmer there," he said with a smile. "Would you--will you do me the favour to get into my brougham while I go upstairs? There is a hot-water footstool--and rugs--for I have just taken my wife home. You don't think me very presuming?" he added. "Remember, I am a friend of Godfrey's." There was something reassuring in the simple way in which he spoke of Mr Auriol by his Christian name, even had Lettice wanted reassuring, which she did not. She looked up again in the stranger's face and said, with an abruptness that sometimes characterised her-- "Are you a doctor?" He smiled. "No, I am not. I am sorry for it if it would have given you more confidence in me. Though I hope," he added with real anxiety, "that it is not to hear of a doctor that you are here. None of you are ill? _That_ isn't the urgent business, I trust?" "No," replied Lettice, surprised at his way of speaking. "He must have heard about us from Godfrey," she decided. "At least, I hope not," she added, as her terrible picture of Arthur in a brain fever came before her eyes. "I _hope_ not. But I don't know what I think or fear. You won't be long?" she said appealingly, for by this time her new friend had handed her into the snug little carriage. "Two minutes at most," he replied. And Lettice sat there, grateful in a sort of childish way for the cushioned warmth and comfort, though till then she had thought nothing about how cold she was, gazing before her in a vague, half-dazed way, feeling almost as if she would fall asleep if she were left there long, but in some indefinite way undoubtedly many degrees less miserable and desolate than before the apparition of the brougham. Its owner was as good as his word Two minutes had barely elapsed before he was back again. "I have his present address," he said. "But he is a long way off. He is in Scotland, and is not expected back for a fortnight. He is away on professional business, but he had hoped not to have to go so far. He had hoped to be back to spend Christmas with us down in the country. Now," he continued, "what is to be done? You can telegraph to him, but I doubt if it would be _possible_ for him to come back, and it is an out-of-the-way place where he is. You said there was no time to be lost? Have you no one else, no other friend or--or relative?" Here his voice faltered as he looked anxiously into the girl's face, so pale and drawn and careworn as it had again become. She roused herself with a sort of effort. "I don't know what to do," she repeated. "Can you not, though I am a stranger, can you not make up your mind--we have been brought together so strangely--can you not tell me what is the matter?" he said, beseechingly almost. All this time he was standing with his hand on the carriage door. "If you would let me take you home--to my wife," he continued, "you would see how kind and sympathising she is. Could you tell _her_, better?" "Oh no, thank you," said Lettice. "I could tell you just as well. The trouble is about--my brother." "Your brother--Arthur? God forbid!" he exclaimed. "Is it anything very serious?" "I fear so, but I don't know," she replied, shaking her head. And at the moment it did not strike her, so impressed was she with the magnitude of her overwhelming anxiety, how curious it was that a complete stranger should be so affected by her troubles! Yet his naming her brother by name caught her attention. "You know about us. I suppose from Mr Auriol?" she said. "Yes," he replied, but in an absent way. And still Lettice sat gazing before her, as if she were half-stunned. Then suddenly, raising her eyes-- "Arthur has run away," she said. "At least, he has _gone_ away. He wrote that he would try to go to America, but we were afraid, Nina and I--we got his letter last night, and I came off by the first train this morning. Nina and Miss Branksome wanted me to wait and to telegraph first, so I came away without telling them. I could not bear waiting-- we were afraid that he might have fallen ill somewhere. He has not been well lately, and the shock of his disgrace--" "Disgrace! What disgrace?" exclaimed the gentleman. "He has failed--at least, he saw that he was going to fail--in his examination, and he would not face the rest of it," said Lettice, the crimson rising to her face. The stranger could hardly repress a smile. "But why use such terribly strong words about it? Failing in his examination a disgrace! You startled me," he said with evident and immense relief. "_He_ took it so," said Lettice, a little nettled. "And I--I used to think I would feel it so too, but I don't seem to mind now. I would mind nothing if we could find him." "Have you any trace? Can you tell me all the particulars?" "Yes," said Lettice, feeling in her pocket for Arthur's letter. But the stranger interrupted her. "Now that you have told me so much, you will not refuse to let me tell you something--make some explanations to you. You will let me send away your cab, and take you home to my wife? I think I can promise to help you, but you must give me all particulars, and in a circumstantial manner. That will take time. But first, Lettice, it is not fair to you not to tell you who I am. I am not only Godfrey Auriol's friend; I am-- do not be startled, my child--I am your uncle, Ingram Morison." He turned away after saying these words. He would not look at her face, half out of pity for her, half out of an almost childish terror of the deep disappointment to himself, should he see its expression turn into hard resentment. He walked up and down in the cold for a moment or two, then hearing, or fancying he heard, a low, half-stifled call--to his ears it took the sound of the words he had so often longed to hear, "Uncle Ingram"--he turned back again. She was looking out of the brougham window, the glass was down, her face was paler than one could almost believe it possible for a young, healthy face to be, her lips were quivering, there was a look of suffering and humiliation almost, but there was no hardness or resentment. "Lettice," he said gently. "_May_ I send away your cab?" There was great tact in the tone and manner of the simple question. Lettice's eyes filled with tears. She did not speak, but she bent her head in assent. CHAPTER TEN. NEW-FOUND RELATIONS. "Speak of me as I am: nothing extemporate." Shakespeare. The drowsy cabman was aroused from his slumbers to be, rather to his surprise, paid and dismissed, but paid so handsomely that he went off thinking himself for once in the way of good luck. Then Mr Morison said a few words to his coachman and, getting into the brougham, took his seat beside his niece. "Lettice," he said quietly, speaking at once to relieve her embarrassment, "I have told the coachman to drive round a quiet way before we go home, to give you time to tell me all you can, every detail, about Arthur, so that we may not lose an hour. Will you now give me the whole particulars?" Calmed by his quiet, almost matter-of-fact manner, Lettice did so, though the recital led her into much painful to relate. For now that, thanks to the terrible anxiety through which she was passing, the scales had fallen from her eyes, she saw in its true light, even perhaps with exaggerated harshness--for Lettice was never one to do things by halves--her own wilful blindness, her own prejudice, unreason, and self-will. And when she came to tell her uncle how she had written to Arthur, she altogether broke down. "I had better show you his letter," she said, amidst her tears; "it will make you understand him. He _has_ exaggerated, has he not?" she said, looking up wistfully. "If he had not been overstrained and morbid, he would not have taken it up so, would he?" She sat quietly waiting till Mr Morison had read the letter. His face was very grave as he handed it back to Lettice. But it was grave with anxiety not with indignation. "He was certainly in a very excited and morbid state when he wrote this," he said. "He has been overworking himself probably. No one in possession of their senses would do anything but laugh at his imagining himself disgraced for life by having failed in his first attempt at passing for Woolwich;" and Mr Morison could not help smiling. "I am afraid I helped him to think so," said Lettice; "you see, he refers to what I wrote. I could not understand his seeming so much less in earnest than he used to be, and so spiritless, and I wrote meaning to rouse him. I did _not_ know, that is my only excuse--indeed, I did _not_ know till now, what explains it all--the dislike he had taken to his intended profession," she added earnestly. "My dear child," said her uncle, kindly patting the hand she had involuntarily laid on his arm, "do not plead so piteously as if I were constituting myself a judge over you. What you say seems to me to have been the principal point--the only point--on which Arthur is really to blame. Why did he not tell you that he no longer felt any liking for the service?" "Ah," said Lettice, "I fear that was my influence again. I think he was afraid of telling it, afraid of how I should take it." "But that was cowardice, _moral_ cowardice," for he felt that Lettice winced at the strong, expression. "I am very plain-spoken, Lettice," he added, though looking at her so kindly that the words had no harshness in them. "When I see Arthur, I shall try to make him understand where he was wrong, and I think he will agree with me. But he has got false notions on other points, I see. What is all this about independence, repaying what he would never have used had he understood the whole, working in the hopes of some day doing so, etcetera?" "It was what Godfrey told us," said Lettice in a low voice, "about-- about all you had done and risked to save our money." For the first time Mr Morison's face darkened, and Lettice realised that, though gentle, he could also make his anger felt. "Auriol!" he exclaimed. "How could he have so represented, or misrepresented, things? There was no need for anything to be said about it. I, very reluctantly, gave him leave to tell you, or your mother rather, that I had done what I could at a critical time. But it was _solely_ to show her how ready, how _eager_ I was to be of use. But as to its calling forth any other feeling--" "Gratitude, at least," said Lettice timidly. "No, not gratitude even. It was nothing but natural, purely and thoroughly natural. And to think of Auriol's having stated it so as to give you any painful sense of obligation--how can he have done so?" Lettice hesitated. Her cup of self-abasement was to be drunk to the dregs, it seemed. She turned round, with a look of determination on her face. "Uncle Ingram," she began, and in the pleasure of hearing himself so addressed by her, Mr Morison's face relaxed, "I will try to explain all; I will not spare myself. It was not Mr Auriol's fault. He did tell it us just as you would have wished. He wanted to soften me, to make me reasonable. But I repelled him. I made him angry. I lost my temper, and made him, a little, I think, lose his, too,"--and Lettice was too absorbed by her own recital to see what perhaps it was as well she did not observe, a slight smile of amusement which here crossed her uncle's face--"and then he said what was true--that we owed you gratitude we could never repay. It _is_ true, Uncle Ingram, and _now_ I don't mind it. But, don't you see, that while we--I--was resisting you, refusing to count you our uncle, it _was_ a painful obligation?" "And if fate, or something better than fate," said Mr Morison, "had not brought us together to-day, it would--would it, Lettice--have remained so?" "I don't know," said Lettice in a low voice; "I can't think so _now_. But--" "But what?" "I had no idea you would be like what you are. I could not have imagined any one being so generous." Mr Morison turned his face away for a moment. When he spoke again, it was with a little effort. "Lettice," he said, "I am always considered a very practical and prosaic person. Even my wife thinks I was born with very little romance in me. But, do you know, I have had one romance, one dream in my life, and that has been to do something to make up to my brother's children for my having been put in his place." Here Lettice seemed as if she was going to speak, but he made a little sign for her to wait. "I know you are going to say it was not my fault, but I want you to understand the _feeling_, the sentiment I have always associated with it. I hardly remember my brother--that is to say, in reality I scarcely knew him. But the few times I saw him as a child made the most vivid impression on me. He was to me a perfect hero of romance. His appearance, his bright manly beauty, his charm of manners--all left a picture on my mind that I shall never forget, and the bitterest tears I ever shed as a boy were when, after glorying in the honours he had won, and dreaming of his return to us, I was told one day by my father that I was never to mention his name again. I resented it bitterly. I thought my father cruel and unjust, and later I told him so, not once, but often; first with a boy's impetuosity, afterwards, as a man, more deliberately, though more respectfully. But it was no use. It was the only disagreement we ever had, my poor father and I. Only, as you know, on his deathbed he left his blessing for your father, and it was to me he confided it. But," he went on in a different tone, "we must come back to the present. About Arthur--I will be quite frank with you--my great fear is that he may have fallen ill from the reaction, from the overstrained state he has evidently been in. I think the first thing to do is for me to see his tutor. It is only an hour from town. I know the place. I will go down there at once." "May I go with you?" said Lettice eagerly. "I see no use in your doing so," replied her uncle. "He is not _there_, that is about all we are sure of. I cannot understand Mr Downe's not having written or telegraphed to you already." "He would not send to _us_," said Lettice; "he would naturally send to Mr Auriol, and he, you know, is away." "To be sure," said Mr Morison. "That must be it. Well, any way, the first thing to do is to see Mr Downe, and get all additional particulars from him. And, in the meantime, you must keep up your spirits and rest yourself. Your aunt will do her best to cheer you." "My aunt?" repeated Lettice. "Yes, of course. Your aunt Gertrude, my wife," he said, with a smile. "I have never had an aunt before," said Lettice apologetically. "Well, you will have one now worthy of the name, though I shouldn't praise my own belongings," he said brightly. In another minute or two the carriage stopped before the door of a handsome house. Mr Morison turned to Lettice. "Will you wait here, while I go in to explain to your aunt?" he said. And Lettice, her heart beating more quickly than usual at the thought of this unknown relation, gladly consented. The explanation must have been quickly made. Before Lettice could have thought it possible, her uncle was back again. There was an orange coloured envelope in his hand. "This is from Auriol," he said, taking out its pink paper enclosure, which was as follows: "Bad news of Arthur. Impossible to get away. Beg you to see Downe at once, and decide what to do." "So, you see," continued Mr Morison, "my credentials are now _quite_ complete, are they not? Come in, my dear child. There is Gertrude at the door; she is so eager to see you." Lettice had no time to feel embarrassed before she felt herself warmly kissed by the lady in mourning, who was waiting to receive her in the hall. "My dear Lettice," she said simply, but with a ring of true cordiality, "I am _so_ happy to see you. How cold you must be! Tea is waiting. Ingram," as she led her newly found niece into the pretty drawing-room, "you have time for a cup of tea before you go?" "Hardly," he said; "I would rather not risk it. Now Lettice is in good hands, I would rather be off at once. If I am not back by eight or nine o'clock, don't expect me to-night. But in that case I shall telegraph." "Uncle Ingram," said Lettice, as he was hurrying off, "will you do one thing more? Will you telegraph to poor Nina that--that I am all right, and with you, and that you are doing all possible about Arthur?" "Certainly, I will. I know the address," he added, smiling. "And, Lettice, will you do one thing for me?" "Of course. What is it?" she said eagerly. She was standing close beside him at the moment. "Give me a kiss, as a sign of--" He hesitated. "Of gratitude to you for forgiving me," she half whispered. "Of better than that: of your accepting me from now as your uncle--your uncle who has always loved you, as your dear father's brother, who longs to supply his place to you as well as he can." "Uncle Ingram," said Lettice as she kissed him, "you are like papa. I understand now what made me look at you so when I first caught sight of you." A pleased expression came into Mr Morison's face, though he said nothing. But when he had left them Mrs Morison turned to Lettice with a smile. "You could not have said anything to please him as much;" and Lettice answered simply as she felt-- "I am so glad." It was like a dream to her. The finding herself in the comfortable house, where everything was in perfect taste, though nothing overdone, tended and caressed by the pretty aunt, of whose existence almost she had twelve hours before been in ignorance. And her uncle! Nothing had ever touched Lettice as much as his way of talking of her father. To think that he, of all men, should have cherished such tender admiration of him, went to her very heart. And her cheeks burned with wholesome shame when she recalled the way in which she had spoken of him--the absurd as well as unworthy prejudice in which she had indulged. No wonder that Godfrey Auriol had lost patience with her; no wonder he had resolved on leaving her henceforth to herself. She only felt now that she would be ashamed ever to look him in the face again. But if that were all--if her own humiliation and punishment were all, Lettice felt she could have borne it. But alas! how much more was involved! Arthur, poor Arthur, of whom she had hardly courage to think, and Nina. And as she thought of Nina again, that afternoon's conversation with Philip Dexter returned to her mind. She had meant to do right; why had she always done wrong? She had honestly thought that Godfrey would be a much more desirable husband for Nina than Philip, and she had acted accordingly, forgetting, or trying to ignore, that in such matters somebody else's "thinking" has very little to do with it, and that interference, save where urgently called for on the part of parent or guardian, is wholly unjustifiable. She had, she confessed to herself, possibly, probably even, ruined the happiness of two lives through her own prejudice and self-will. And when she came to this part of her reflections she sighed so deeply that her aunt looked at her with real anxiety. "My dear Lettice," she said, "you _must_ try to be hopeful. Your uncle or a telegram is sure to be here within an hour. Do try, dear." Lettice looked up dejectedly. "It isn't only that; it isn't only Arthur I'm thinking of, Aunt Gertrude," she said. "It is everything. I have done so many wrong things. I have made such dreadful mistakes, and I don't see--though I would do anything--_anything_--how they can ever be put right again." Mrs Morison sat down beside her and took her hand in hers. "Who knows, dear?" she said gently. "After a while, when your mind is less disturbed, and you feel more at rest, perhaps you may tell me some of these troubles, and perhaps--you may be sure I shall do my best-- perhaps I may be able to help you." And just then it flashed into Lettice's mind, what in the confusion and disturbance of the day she had forgotten, her aunt Gertrude was Philip Dexter's aunt too. And with this remembrance came a little ray of light and hope. She had need of it, for when a few minutes later, her uncle returned, he had no very good news to give. He had seen Mr Downe, Arthur's tutor, and heard all particulars. Arthur's state of health had not seemed satisfactory for some time; he was nervous and feverishly excitable, and his tutor had suggested his deferring going up for his examination for six months, but the young man would not hear of it. But even before the end of the first day he had been forced to give in, having fainted in his place among the candidates. Mr Downe had sent him home at once, but on his return later in the evening, had been much alarmed at finding him gone, and had telegraphed to Mr Auriol. That had, in fact, been all he knew, and till Mr Morison's visit he had been in hopes that the young man had gone to his own home. "He is, of course, very sorry and anxious," continued Mr Morison, "but only for fear of Arthur's having fallen ill. As for his doing anything wrong, or even reckless, he is sure we need not be uneasy. He speaks of him in the very highest terms, and he says, too, that he has plenty of good sense. But he had begun to guess the truth--that Arthur had no liking or inclination for a military life, and that, hard as he has been working, it has been altogether against the grain." Here a deep sigh from Lettice interrupted him. "And what is to be done?" asked Mrs Morison. "We have already set on foot in a quiet way fill the inquiries possible. But Mr Downe, and I agree with him, is much against employing detectives, or anything of that sort." "Oh yes," said Lettice. "Arthur would _never_ get over it." "Besides," said Mr Morison, "he promises in his letter to Lettice to write again in a day or two. I think we must wait for another letter before resorting to extreme measures. Unless, of course, no letter comes. Downe does not much believe in the America idea; he thinks Arthur will cool down before that. But we have taken measures that he need never know of to prevent his leaving Liverpool for America. That _was_ necessary. And now, my child, you must go to bed and try to sleep. To-morrow I have to ask your advice on a number of things." "_My_ advice?" said Lettice humbly. "Uncle, you are too good to me." CHAPTER ELEVEN. HOME-SICK. "Slight withal may be the things which bring Back on the heart the weight which it would fling Aside for ever: it may be a sound, A tone of music--summer's eve, or spring-- A flower--the wind--the ocean." Byron. And so things went on for a day or two. As regards Arthur, that is to say. As regarded the anxious little party at Faxleham Cottage, Mr Morison took immediate steps. He went down there the following day to give them news of Lettice, and to arrange for their all coming to spend Christmas with him and his wife. Lettice would gladly have accompanied him, but the morning had found her completely knocked up, and in her now thoroughly awakened fear of her own self-will, she gave in without a murmur to her uncle and aunt's decision that she must stay where she was. Nor was she the only one to exercise self-denial. Mr and Mrs Morison, quite against their custom, determined to stay in London for Christmas, so that they should be nearer at hand for any news of Arthur, or to take further steps, should such be necessary. Lettice was overwhelmed with gratitude. She was satisfied, too, that all that could be done was being done. She was gentle to a fault. But her punishment was of the severest. "If they--if you--reproached me," she said to Nina, weeping in her arms, the evening of their arrival, "I could, I think, better bear it. But to have nothing but kindness, nothing but constant proofs of affection that I don't deserve. Oh, Nina, it humiliates me." "But it _should_ not," said Nina. "For one thing, Lettice, do you not owe it to our uncle and aunt to try to seem a little less wretched? Is it not selfish to think of nothing but our anxiety? Are you not in danger, perhaps, of exaggerating things now the other way--blaming yourself _too_ much, and making those about you unhappy from your very sorrow for having done so in the past?" A very short time ago Nina would not have dared to speak thus to her sister, and even now she felt that Lettice shrank back a little from her, as she listened. "It may be so," she said wearily, and with a shade of bitterness in her tone. "No doubt I am bad and wrong every way. I can't think what God lets me live for." "Oh, Lettice!" said Nina with deep reproach. And the fit of petulance was over in a moment. "I know I shouldn't speak so. Forgive me again, Nina. I will try." "And you know we have some reason for cheerfulness. Think how glad we should be of that other letter of Arthur's, showing at least that he is well, and certainly not off to America as yet." For the second letter, which has been referred to, had been received from Arthur. It told them of his well-being, but gave no trace of his whereabouts--the faithful Dawson, through ways and means best known to himself, managing to post each letter sent him to forward, in a different part of London. So that for the moment, beyond putting advertisements in some of the leading papers, there seemed nothing else to do. For Arthur's sake, when he _should_ return, his uncle was determined to avoid all possible hue and cry, and so long as they knew that he was safe and well, his sisters thoroughly joined in this feeling. Still, it was weary work waiting. "I feel sure we shall have another letter this week," continued Nina. "He is certain to write to us at or about Christmas." "Yes, I think he will," agreed Lettice. "I have no doubt he will keep on writing regularly. But what good does that do? It relieves, so far, our anxiety, but so long as we cannot communicate with him, what hope have we of his returning? How can we make him understand how we long for him? That he would be in no way reproached, and would be as free as air to choose the future he best likes." "I don't know how it will come," said Nina, "but I feel sure some way will offer itself. For one thing, I think after a while he will long for news of us, and will propose some way for us to write to him. Uncle Ingram has written it all to Aunt Gertrude's brother, Mr Winthrop. He lives somewhere in the north, not so very far from Liverpool, and Uncle Ingram is sure he would go there if we like, and look about--where the docks are, you know. Arthur may be in Liverpool, and may sometimes go about them, if he has any idea of America still." "But he, Mr Winthrop, he does not even know Arthur by sight," objected Lettice. "No, but--Aunt Gertrude has an idea, she was speaking of it this evening--Philip Dexter is at the Winthrops' for Christmas. Aunt Gertrude was saying if _he_ went with Mr Winthrop." It was a good idea, though very distasteful to Lettice. She would have done anything to prevent Philip's hearing of their trouble about Arthur, for she had a fear that he would in some way blame her for it. But she checked herself. "I must bear what I have brought on myself," she reflected. "I would give anything never to see Philip again, for he can never either like or respect me. He will not believe I even meant to speak the truth. But if he cares for Nina, and she for him, I have less right than ever to interfere. There is only one comfort--Godfrey Auriol never can know anything about _that_, and I'm certainly not bound to confess to _hint_. Indeed, it would be indelicate to Nina to do so." It was a relief to her that he was still in Scotland, and not to be back for Christmas. Her pride rose rampant at the thought of seeing him again, and at the triumph over her which she imagined he would feel. But she comforted herself somewhat with the reflection that for the future she need see very little of him, much less than heretofore, as her uncle, now really in his right position as their guardian, would be the one they would naturally consult. And thus they spent Christmas Day. Some among them so thankful for the unexpected lifting of the clouds that they could not but be hopeful for the future--poor Lettice, though grateful and humble, yet feeling that it was the saddest Christmas she had ever spent. Though Christmas Eve had brought some unexpected news, which seemed to throw a little light on the matter of which all their hearts were full. This was a letter from Mr Winthrop, in answer to the one telling him of Arthur Morison's disappearance, and asking his advice or help if he saw any way of giving either. He had at once caught up the idea that "the gentleman tramp" and Arthur were one and the same, and wrote giving all details of the two or three days during which he took refuge at the rectory, of his personal appearance, what he had said and refused to say, and everything there was to tell. "When Philip comes--we expect him to-morrow," he wrote--"I will get him to go with me to Liverpool. There I shall at once see Simcox, for whom I gave Arthur, if it was he, a letter, and I have very little doubt but that we shall there hear of him. He was so _completely_ ignorant of my being in any way connected with his family, that he will have had no fear as to availing himself of my introduction." For the good rector had no knowledge of the conversation between the boys and Arthur when they accompanied him "a bit of the way" on his road. And Tom and Ralph were far too careless and unobservant to have noticed the start with which the young man had heard them speak of their "Uncle Ingram," or the questions he had put to them. And Arthur himself, for whom so many hearts were aching and anxious, how did he spend this strange Christmas far from all he cared for, in such an entirely different atmosphere from any he had ever known? Nothing could have been kinder, considering the circumstances in which he had come among them, than the way he was received and treated by the old farmer's family. Till Christmas was over he was to be a guest and nothing more. "There's a time for all things," said James, who was jovially inclined-- rather too much so sometimes for his Eliza's tastes. "Let business lay by till Christmas is over, any way, and then we'll see about it;" and he was profoundly distressed that no persuasions would make "John" drink a glass of wine, or even taste the bowl of punch with which they wound up, though in no unseemly fashion, the yearly festivities; while Eliza, on the other hand, was inclined to look upon it as a sign of his gentility. The Christmas dinner was a dinner and no mistake. It began as soon as they had all got home from church in the morning; for James was a churchwarden, and would have been greatly scandalised had any one of the family played truant. So Eliza and her mother had to smother their anxieties as to the goose and the roast beef, the plum-pudding and mince-pies, in their housewifely bosoms, and their self-control was rewarded by finding all had prospered under the care of the little maid-of-all-work, in their absence. On Christmas evening, when all the good cheer had been done justice to, and the draper and his family, with a few friends who had come in to taste the punch, were comfortably ensconced round the fire, Arthur managed to steal up to his room, to sit there quietly for a few minutes' thought. It was a small room, with a sloping roof and a dormer window, through which he could see the twinkling lights of the little town below, and the purer radiance of the innumerable stars above. For it was a most beautiful winter night. Not a cloud obscured the sky, but it was bitterly cold. Arthur got down his great-coat from the peg where it was hanging, and wrapped it round him, for he felt still colder from the contrast with the warmth of the room downstairs. And then he sat gazing out of the little window, feeling as absolutely cut off from all he had known and cared for, as if the sea already rolled between them! Some of the excitement which had led to the step he had taken had worn off. He no longer felt quite so sure that it had been the best and most unselfish thing to do, and there were times even, when he began to fancy that perhaps he, as well as Lettice, had exaggerated the consequences of his failure. But with this reflection, in his calmer state of mind, came another. Was not the present state of things, had not all his troubles been brought about by his want of moral courage? It was all very well to call it his consideration for Lettice's feelings; he was far too right-judging not to know that consideration of that kind carried too far, becomes insincerity, and foolish, wrong self-sacrifice. He knew, too, at the bottom of his heart, that for all the stress Lettice had laid on his dead father's and mother's wishes, they would have been the last to have urged upon him a profession which he had no taste for. "They might have been _disappointed_," he said to himself, "but I can't think that they would have been angry. Not at least, if I had been frank with them." And words of his father's, which he had been too young at the time fully to understand, came back to his mind. "Don't be in too great a hurry, my boy. I have suffered too much from other people deciding my course in life for me before I was old enough to know my own mind. I _hope_ you will be a soldier, but don't be in a hurry." Why had this never come back to his memory before? He remembered it now so clearly. They were standing, his father and he, by a window--where was it?--somewhere from whence a wide expanse of sky was visible, and it must have been at night. "Yes, the stars were sparkling brightly, it was cold and clear." It must have been the association of these outward circumstances as well as the direction of his thoughts, that had revived the remembrance. But Arthur sighed deeply as he went on to reflect that it was now too late, the die was cast, he must go on with what he had begun, desolate and dreary though it now looked to him. The best he could hope for was by working hard and faithfully in this situation which had so unexpectedly offered itself, to earn enough money, joined to what he had, to take him to America, where, with a good recommendation, he might, it seemed to him, have a chance of something better. But even then, how many years must pass before he could hope to do more than maintain himself? He might, probably would, be a middle-aged man before he could begin to do anything towards repaying what his uncle had done. And all these years, to have no tidings of his sisters and brother!--for he had recognised that only by cutting himself thus adrift, could he go on with what he had begun. It was too terrible to think of. And he set to work, as Nina had foreseen, to plan how he could manage to hear of them without revealing where he was. "I don't want them to write to me, for Nina and the little ones would be entreating me to come back, and I could not bear it. And, Lettice, even though it is in a sense her doing, is sure not to see it as I do. _She_ would want me to try again to pass;" and Arthur shivered at the thought. "No, I dare not ask them to write to me. What can I do? How can I hear of them?" He had not let Christmas Day pass without writing to them. It was strange to think that in a day or two they would have his letter, and know that he was safe and well, while he could hear nothing of them. The idea began to haunt him, so that at last he got up, took off his coat, and went downstairs again to the chatter and warmth of the draper's best parlour. How different to the Christmases he could remember! How different from last Christmas at Esparto! How different to the Christmas evening they would, so he imagined, be spending at Faxleham Cottage! Instead of the simple refinement, the low voices of his sisters, here were Eliza and her friends decked out in brilliant colours, laughing loudly at the jokes of their husbands and brothers, and little able to understand the new-comer's not joining in the fun. He was very "genteel," no doubt, the young ladies of the company agreed, but rather "stuck-up," they should say, "for a young man as had his way to make in the world." And Arthur, overhearing some of these remarks, wished that the fates had thrown him into the household of the old farmer and his wife rather than into that of their daughter. For, in their perfect simplicity and unpretentiousness, there was nothing to grate on him, and, as they sat rather apart from the rest, dutifully admiring all that was said and done, though perhaps wishing themselves back in their own quiet farmhouse, he felt that when they went away the next day things would seem still more uncongenial. "I wish I knew anything about farming," he said to his old friend, when he was sitting quietly by him; "I'd have asked you to take me on your farm." "And I'd have been glad to do it, my lad," said the old man, whose liking for the young stranger had steadily increased, and whose thoughts this Christmas evening were softened by the remembrance of the son whom he fancied he "favoured;" "but thou'rt not made for farming. It takes a tougher sort than thee. And, what's more, as it's making money thou'st got in thy head, don't go for to fancy as people make fortunes nowadays by farming. Better stick to James. He's a bit short-like at first; but if you get into one another's ways, you'll find him a good master." The next day the draper had a long talk with his guest. He explained to him some part of the work, and told him he would by degrees teach him the whole. "But, first," he said, "I must tell you that before I show you the whole of my business, or even as much of it as you should know, which would take some time, and give me a good deal of trouble, as, of course, it's all perfectly new to you, I should like to have some sort of security." Here Arthur interrupted him. "I can get some money," he said. "Did Mr Felshaw,"--Mr Felshaw was the old farmer--"did he not tell you? I have some money I can give you as surety for my honesty;" and his face got red as he said it. "No, no," James replied. "It's not security of that kind I mean. I'm not afraid of your honesty, somehow. I'd rather risk it. I think I know an honest face when I see one. What I was going to say was that I'd like some security that you'd stay, not be throwing it up at the end of a three months or so, and saying as how you were tired of it, or maybe,"--and here the draper hesitated a little--"it's not likely now, is it, that any of your fine friends might be coming after you, and saying as you weren't to stay? You're not of age yet by a long way, I should say." "No," said Arthur; "I'm not quite eighteen." "That's three years off still, then," said James. "But," continued Arthur, "my friends are not likely to interfere, as they don't know where I am." James raised his eyebrows. "Are they likely to try to find out?" he said. "It's not difficult to track any one nowadays. But you've no father and mother living Mr Felshaw told me." "No," said Arthur; and then he hesitated. "My friends have not tried to find me yet," he said. "But," continued James, "before you engage yourself to me, for a year say, mightn't it be best to have it all clear and straightforward, and see as no one who has any right to interfere is likely to do so? Couldn't you write and ask?" Arthur shook his head. "I don't want to give them any trouble about me," he said. "I've done nothing wrong; but I've had a great deal of trouble and difficulty, and I want to show that I can manage for myself." "Well, well," said James, "think it over, my lad. You can just go on for a while quietly, doing what you can. And then, when you have tried it a bit, and we see how we suit each other, if so be as you feel disposed to engage yourself for a year, I'll put you in the way of things. You can employ yourself this morning in measuring off these bales of merino and alpaca, and marking the lengths of each. I'll be in the front shop, and, if I want you, I'll call you, just for you to begin to get used to it like." "Thank you very much indeed," said Arthur. "I'll think it over, and give you an answer as soon as I can." For even to his inexperience it was clear that he was being treated with unusual kindness and consideration. He did not overhear what James said to his wife that evening. "You take my word for it, he'll not be with us long," he said. "He's not in his place, and he'll never take to it. He blushed up scarlet every time I called him, even though it was only old mother Green wanting grey flannel for a best jacket, or Miss Snippers' apprentice for some hooks and needles. If it had been any of the quality, I believe he'd have turned tail altogether. You'll see his friends'll be fetching him away. But if he likes to stay for a bit, he's welcome. I like a lad with a spirit of his own." "And there's no doubt he has a very genteel appearance," observed Eliza complacently. CHAPTER TWELVE. ENDING WELL. "Wondrous it is to see in diverse mindes How diversely Love doth his pageant play, And shows his power in variable kindes." Spenser. The days went on. It was nearly a fortnight past the New Year, and nothing of moment had happened. Arthur's letter, written on Christmas Day, had been duly received, but it, any more than its predecessors, gave no clue to his present quarters. But to his sisters--to Nina especially--there was a softer tone in it; it was less bitter and yet less morbid. He wrote of his intense wish to see them, of his _hope_ that he had acted rightly, of his earnest trust that some day they would, Lettice above all, learn to think of him as no longer one to be ashamed of, as a poor miserable failure. In all this there was comfort to Nina, but not to Lettice. "I am sure, I can see he is getting into a healthier state of mind," said the younger sister eagerly. "If we could but write to him and tell him all we feel, I am sure he would come back, and we should all be happy again." But Lettice shook her head. "It is I," she said. "It is always I. Don't you see, Nina? It is I that he is afraid of. But for me I dare say he would come back; but for me he would never have gone away." Godfrey Auriol had not yet returned. All this time Mr Morison was looking forward to his coming back as to a sort of goal. "He is so quick-witted and alert," he said to Nina, for to Lettice he seldom spoke of his fellow-guardian--it was easy to see that the mention of his name always was met by her with shrinking and reluctance. "He is so energetic and clever, and he knows Arthur personally. I cannot help thinking that when he returns he will suggest something. Hitherto certainly everything has lamentably failed!" For Mr Winthrop and Philip had been to Liverpool, had seen Mr Simcox, who could only assure them that no one in the least answering to the description of Arthur, or "the gentleman tramp," had applied to him, and that he had never received the letter of introduction; they had inquired, so far as they dared without transgressing Mr Morison's injunctions of privacy, in every part of the town, but without any result. There was even, after all, some amount of uncertainty as to whether the young man who had been so kindly received at the rectory _had_ been Arthur Morison; though whether he were, or were not, Mr Winthrop was equally at a loss to explain his never having made use of the introduction he had so thankfully received. "I wonder Philip has not come back to town, when he knows we are all here together," said Mrs Morison one evening. "I never knew him stay so long at the Winthrops' before." "There may be some attraction," said Mr Morison. "You forget, my dear Gertrude, that your niece Daisy is seventeen now, and she bade fair to be a very pretty girl." Nina was sitting at the piano. She had been playing, and had turned half carelessly on the stool, to join in the conversation going on. Suddenly she wheeled round and began playing again, more loudly and energetically than was her wont. Lettice, on her side, who was helping her aunt to pour out the tea, grew so pale that Mrs Morison was on the point of asking her what was the matter, when a slight warning touch of the girl's hand on her arm restrained her. "I must warn Ingram," thought Mrs Morison, some vague remembrance returning to her of having heard or been told by some one of her nephew Philip's having greatly admired one of her husband's nieces. Lettice or Nina, which was it? Oh, Nina it must have been, that time she was staying with the Curries near Philip's home. And she stole a glance of sympathy at the girl at the piano, who continued to play, more softly now and with an undertone of sadness in her touch which seemed to appeal to her aunt's kind heart. "Poor little thing," she thought. "But if there _is_ anything in it, it will not be difficult to put it right." She turned to look for Lettice, with some vague idea of seeking her confidence on the subject. Lettice was sitting quietly at a little distance, with a book open before her. Mrs Morison was crossing the room to sit down beside her, when a ring at the bell made them all start. Not that rings at the bell are so uncommon an occurrence in a London house, but it was getting late, no visitor was expected, and the ring had a decided and slightly authoritative sound. "It is like Auriol's ring," said Mr Morison; and the words were scarcely out of his mouth when the door was thrown open, and Mr Auriol was announced. Every one jumped up. For a few minutes there was a bustle of surprise and welcome, questions asked and answered, so that Lettice's quiet greeting passed among the rest, without any one specially remarking it. She was inexpressibly thankful when it was over, and in her heart grateful to Godfrey for making this first meeting under the so strangely altered circumstances pass so easily. "I have only just got back," he said when the hubbub had subsided, and Mrs Morrison had rung for fresh tea. "I came on here as soon as I had changed my clothes. I have been travelling all day. That last place where I was at is so frightfully out of the way, but I stayed a night at the Winthrops'." He spoke faster than usual, and it was not difficult for any one used to him to detect some underlying excitement Lettice, at least, did so, and sympathised in it, as for the first time it struck her that this meeting was for him, too, difficult and trying. She said nothing, but when her aunt exclaimed, "Travelling all to-day? Dear me! You must be tired," she murmured gently, "Yes, indeed;" and Godfrey caught her words, faint as they were, and looked pleased. "I was so anxious to hear if--if you had heard anything more," he said; and though he did not name Arthur, every one knew that was what he meant. "Nothing more," said Mr Morison, for the last letter, bearing date now nearly a fortnight ago, had been communicated to Mr Auriol. "I must have a long talk with you about it all, Auriol. I think it is about time to be doing something more energetic, and yet we have all agreed in feeling very reluctant to making any `to-do' that could possibly be avoided." "Oh yes," said Nina fervently, clasping her hands. Mr Auriol sat silent for a moment or two. Then he looked up and said-- "You have no idea, I suppose, who it is that posts his letters for him?" Mr Morison looked a little bewildered. "They are all posted in London, I think you told me?" added Mr Auriol. "To be sure," said Mr Morison. "Yes. I have once or twice wondered who does it, unless it is himself? No, by-the-by, he has distinctly said he is not in London. I _have_ thought of it, but not very much. I fancied it so hopeless to get any clue in that way." "But it must be some one in his confidence, some one, I should almost say, whom he had a claim on," said Godfrey. "For there is a certain amount of risk in doing it; the person might be blamed for having taken any part in it. Is there no one any of you have ever heard of who would be likely to agree to do Arthur a service of the kind?" He looked round, but his glance seemed to rest on Lettice. No one spoke. "You must all think it over," he said. "It's only a suggestion, but something may come of it." And soon after, allowing that he _was_ very tired, he said "Good night," and went away. Lettice, in the quiet of her own room, realised how kindly and considerately he had behaved. His matter-of-fact manner had been the greatest relief, and nothing that he could have said could have been so full of tact and delicacy as his saying nothing. "I do believe," thought the girl, her impulsive nature aglow again, "I do believe he hurried out here to-night as much for my sake as on account of his anxiety. He knew his coming in that sudden unlooked-for way would carry off the awkwardness. It is very generous of him." Then her thoughts reverted to what he had suggested. _Did_ she know any one standing in such a position to Arthur? She sat long thinking, asking herself the question, when suddenly, by that curious process by which it sometimes seems as if the machinery of our brain obeyed our orders unconsciously to ourselves--there dashed into her memory a name, a sentence she had heard Arthur utter. The name was "Dawson," and as she repeated it to herself, she seemed to hear her brother's voice saying thoughtfully-- "Yes, I do believe there's one person in the world who'd do anything for me. It's that fellow Dawson. I've told you about him, Lettice?" Yes, he had told her about him, though he probably had forgotten doing so, just as she, till this moment, had forgotten having heard it. Now, by slow degrees, it came back to her. Dawson had been a young servant in Mr Downe's service, and by a fall from a ladder had broken his leg. Being naturally delicate, this accident had altogether ruined his health; he was pronounced incurably lame, and Arthur had done his utmost to help and comfort the poor boy. I do not know that Lettice remembered all these details so clearly, but they were the facts, and she recalled enough to make her sure that Dawson was worth looking up. She knew he _had_ been living at the little town near to which was Mr Downe's "cramming" establishment; she felt almost sure his home was there. In any case, it was more than probable he would there be heard of; and surely, surely it was worth trying! Whatever were Lettice Morison's faults and failings, want of courage and determination were not among them. Her plans were soon made. It was but little sleep that fell to her share that night. "I must go alone," she said to herself. "If I have discovered Arthur's secret I have no right to share it with any other till I know what he himself wishes. Besides, it is I who am to blame for his having been driven away; it is I who should bring him back." She quickly made her arrangements. For the second time in the course of but a few weeks, she wrote a note for Nina to find after she should have left--a note to some extent explaining what she was about. "I think I have got a clue, dearest Nina," she said. "But I must follow it up alone. Do not be the least uneasy about me. I shall probably be back in a few hours; if not, I will telegraph in the course of the day." This was about all that Nina had to show to her uncle, when at breakfast-time that morning she rushed downstairs with the tidings of Lettice's disappearance. Mr Morison looked, and was, terribly put out. For the first time, his patience seemed about to desert him. "It is really too bad," he said. "What have I done or left undone that Lettice should meet me with so little confidence? It is all nonsense about her being the only person who could act, if indeed there is anything to act about. It is too bad!" And then, catching sight of the excessive distress in Nina's gentle face, his kind heart smote him for adding to it. "After all," he said, more cheerfully than he felt, "I do not know that there is anything to be really uneasy about I quite expect her back by luncheon. We let her off too easily the last time, eh, Nina? Poor child! What a child she is, to do things in this silly, ill-considered way!" They went in to breakfast, and Nina tried to follow her uncle's example, and to believe that there was nothing to be seriously alarmed about. But neither Mr nor Mrs Morison eat anything, and seemed eager to leave the table, in order, no doubt, to discuss what steps to take. "Dear me," thought poor Nina, her eyes filling with tears, "_what_ trouble, from first to last, we have caused them!" Just as the mockery of a breakfast was over--Miss Branksome and the younger children had had theirs earlier--and the three were rising from the table, there came, as the evening before, a short, sharp, authoritative ring at the door-bell. "That sounds like Auriol again," said Mr Morison, smiling at his own fancifulness, "though of course it can't be at this time of the morning." But he was mistaken. It _was_ Mr Auriol. In he hurried, not waiting for the footman to announce him, a bright, eager expression on his face, an opened envelope in his hand. "Good news!" he cried. "I have a letter from Arthur, giving an address to which I may write, if I have good news for _him_. I could not rest till I told you of it, so I rushed up here at once. Will you give me a cup of tea, Mrs Morison? The letter was to be private _unless_ I could guarantee _all_ of you feeling--as I know you do about it, Lettice especially. It all hangs on her, but I know she will be only too ready. Where is she--not down yet?" The three others looked at each other--for a moment forgetting their own trouble in honest reluctance to chill poor Godfrey's evident delight. Nina was the first to speak. "Oh!" she said, and the exclamation came from the very bottom of her heart, "if Lettice had but waited till breakfast-time!" He looked up in bewildered amazement. Then all had to be told, and Lettice's letter shown. Godfrey bit his lips till it made Nina nervous to watch him, as he read it. "What is the meaning of it? Is it my fault again? Have I frightened her away?" he said almost piteously. At which, of course, they all exclaimed, though he seemed hardly convinced by what they said. Then he told them about Arthur's letter. It had been drawn forth by the terrible home-sickness which had began to prey upon him, and by the necessity of his coming to a decision about binding himself to his present employer for a considerable time. He gave no particulars as to where he was, or how employed, but spoke of his misery at being without any tidings of all at home, and how at last the idea had come to him of confiding in Godfrey. "I trust you implicitly, even though you are my guardian," he said naively, "not to speak of this letter, not to endeavour to find me, unless you are assured that they all want me to come back; that they will not be, Lettice especially, ashamed of me; that Lettice will not insist on my trying again when I know I should again fail. All depends on Lettice." Then he gave the address to which Mr Auriol was to write, but entreated him not to let the person living at that address be blamed, or fall into any trouble on his account. "He has been a faithful friend," Arthur wrote; "but for him I could not have written home at all." "Who is it?" asked Mr Morison. "I have no idea," said Godfrey. "I saw no necessity for inquiring. I meant just to write, and to ask his sisters to do so," he went on. "I felt sure they, Miss Morison especially, would know how to write so as to bring him back at once. But now--there is no use writing till we know where she is, and what she is doing; and yet," he glanced at the envelope, "he will be already wondering at my silence. This letter has been following me about for more than a week." "Mr Auriol," said Nina suddenly, "do you remember what you asked us last night? To try to think of any one whom Arthur may have employed to post his letters. That may have put something in Lettice's head; she may have thought of some one. I have a vague idea of some young man, some boy, living near Mr Downe's, whom Arthur was kind to." "This may be he," said Mr Auriol. "The letter is to be sent under cover to `T. Dawson,' in a village near Fretcham, where Mr Downe's is." "I believe that is where she has gone. She must have remembered it," said Mr Morison. "What shall we do?" "I shall start at once," said Godfrey. "`T. Dawson,' whoever he is, will not be so startled by me as by any one else, as he has sent on this letter to me. And of course there will be no treachery to Arthur in his telling me if Miss Morison has been there." "Perhaps it is the best thing to do," said Mr Morison, "though I would gladly have gone myself." "And I do _so_ hope you will bring Lettice back with you," said Nina. And almost before they had realised his apparition among them, he was gone. "Another long miserable day of waiting for telegrams," said poor Nina piteously. And then determining to follow sensible Miss Branksome's advice, she went in search of her, to beg her to suggest some employment to make the time of suspense pass more quickly. "Give me some piece of hard work, please. A very difficult German translation might do, or a piece of very fine old lace to mend." And poor Miss Branksome was cudgelling her brains as to what to propose, when Mrs Morison's voice, calling Nina, interrupted them. "Nina, I want you," said her aunt. "Will you help me to write some notes and to attend to several little things I want done quickly? For I have just had a word from Philip Dexter. He has come back, and is to be here at luncheon, and I should not like to be busy the first time he comes after so long." Thus occupation was found both for Nina's fingers and thoughts. Late, very late that evening, a lady in mourning got out of the train at a junction far away in the north. "This is Merton Junction, is it not?" she said timidly. "It is here that one changes for Greenwell, is it not?" "Greenwell," said the porter questioningly; "that is on the other side of Middleham, is it not?" For Greenwell was a very little town. "I don't know," said Lettice--for Lettice of course it was--"I thought everybody would know it here. They told me in London to take my ticket to Merton, and then get another." The porter looked confused and rather bothered. He was on the point of leaving the station for the night. There were no more trains for an hour or two. He did not know what to do with this unfortunate traveller, and yet, not being of a surly nature, did not like to throw her off. It ended in the poor man's giving himself a good deal of trouble to find out that there was no train for Greenwell till four o'clock in the morning. There was nothing for it but for Lettice to spend the night in the desolate waiting-room of the station, for the junction was some distance from the small town of the name. Even had she felt able to walk there, Lettice could hardly have had a couple of hours' sleep before she would have had to come back again. It was not a cheerful prospect--four or five hours at a railway station in the middle of the night in January. The porter poked up the fire, and told her she'd no need to be "afeard;" he would speak to the night-porters, there'd be a couple of them there, and at four o'clock there'd be some one to give her her ticket. And with a friendly "good night," none the less so for the fee which Lettice gave him, he went off. She _was_ a little frightened. In vain she told herself she had no need to be so. All the horrible stories she had ever heard of in such circumstances returned to her mind. She tried to sleep on the hard horsehair sofa, and succeeded in dozing uncomfortably, to be startled awake by one of the night-porters coming in to stir up the fire. Then she dozed again, to wake shivering with cold, the fire out, the faint gaslight sufficing but to make darkness visible. She started up; there was light enough to see the time by her watch. With the greatest relief, she saw that it was half-past three! Half an hour later, she had got her ticket, and was stepping into a first-class carriage of the train, which had come in from the south, and was going on to Middleham. "Now at last," thought Lettice, "my troubles are over. In a few hours more I shall be with Arthur." As she settled herself in her place, she saw by the feeble lamp-light that there were two other persons in the carriage--two gentlemen. She glanced at them, but with no interest curiosity, and she distinguished neither of their faces. One, an elderly man, got out at the first station they stopped at. The little bustle of handing him some of his belongings brought Lettice face to face with the remaining passenger. Both started, both gave vent to an exclamation; but Lettice's was of dismay, her companion's of relief. "Mr Auriol!" "Lettice--Miss Morison, how thankful I am to have found you!" Lettice's face, cold as it was, burned. "Found me!" she repeated. "Have you been sent after me to look for me? There was no need for anything of the kind. I telegraphed yesterday to say I was coming on to--" She hesitated, not sure if she would, to _him_, say whither she was bound. But her tone was full of resentment. Godfrey gave a sigh that was half a groan, of something very like despair. "Will you _always_ misunderstand me?" he said. "What can I say? What can I do? You seem to think I have a mission in life of annoying and insulting you. What can a man do to prove that he does not deserve to be so thought of?" Lettice looked at him in amazement, not unmixed with compunction. Was this the calm, stately Mr Auriol? Did he so care for her opinion? She could hardly take it in; and then, by a quick revulsion, she remembered how only the night before she had called him, and felt that he deserved to be called, generous. "I am sorry for being so hasty," she said. "But I don't see why you or any one need have followed me. I wanted," she went on, and her eyes filled with tears--"I wanted to have done it all myself. It--it was my fault Arthur went away; I wanted to be the one to bring him back." Godfrey moved away. He could hardly help smiling, and yet he was so sorry for her. What a child she was! What a mixture of gentleness and obstinacy, of generosity and devotion and self-will! "Lettice," he said very, very gently, but very seriously nevertheless, "there are some things in which you _must_ yield to those older and more experienced than you. It is _not_ right for a young creature like you-- so--now, you must not be angry--so lovely, and so sure to be remarked, to go running about the country, however good your motive may be. You don't know, you can hardly imagine, the anxiety they--we have all been in!"--and he hesitated--"I, I do believe, the most of all." "_You_," said Lettice, and the tears in her eyes began slowly to trickle down her face. "You hate me, I know. Why should you mind what I do? It is I that have caused you all the trouble." "I hate you?" he repeated. "Lettice, are you saying that on purpose? Yes, you have caused me more trouble than any one else has ever done, because, from the first moment I ever saw you, from that first evening at Esparto, I have _loved_ you, Lettice. And everything has been against me. I am mad to tell you this; I meant never to have let it pass my lips." Lettice's face was burning, but not with anger. She herself could not have defined her own feelings. She tried to speak, but the words were all but inaudible. "You make me ashamed," she said. "I can't understand it." But at that moment the train slackened. The faint morning light was struggling in the cold wintry sky. Mr Auriol sprang from his seat. "We get out here," he said. "This is Middleham;" and, submissive at last, Lettice allowed him to help her out of the carriage. He took her at once to the best hotel of the place, and then, having ordered some breakfast, of which she was sorely in need, for she had eaten almost nothing the day before, he gave her Arthur's letter to read, and explained to her what he intended to do. _Her_ plans had been of the simplest. "I meant just to go to the address at Greenwell and ask for him," she said; and she quickly saw that Mr Auriol's intention of telegraphing to Arthur at once to come over to see him at Middleham was much better. "It will involve him in no awkwardness," he said, "nor will it lead to his blaming Dawson, poor fellow. For I," he added, with a smile, "am armed with his own credentials;" and he touched the letter as he spoke. "You don't think Arthur will be angry with Dawson," said Lettice, "or," she went on, and the idea struck Mr Auriol as very comical, "with _me_? I _made_ Dawson tell me." An hour later Mr Auriol returned to the sitting-room, where he had left Lettice, with an open telegram in his hand. "This is from Arthur," he said, "or rather from `John Morris,'" he added, with a slight smile, as he handed it to Lettice. "Thousand thanks. Will be with you by twelve," was the telegram. "I don't think there is much fear of his being angry with anybody," observed Mr Auriol. "Thanks to you. It was so much better to send for him than to go there," said Lettice impulsively. Godfrey's face flushed. He half turned away; then, taking courage, he came nearer again. "Lettice," he said, "are you not angry with _me_? I forgot myself. It is very good of you not to resent it." "Resent it!" said Lettice simply. "How _could_ I do so? I can't quite believe that you knew what you were saying. I think you must be so sorry for me, for all the trouble I have brought on myself and on other people, that--that--just that you are very sorry for me. For one thing," and her voice grew very low and her face very red, "I thought you cared for Nina." "You, too!" he exclaimed. "How extraordinary! It is a good thing I do not, not in that way, for I should have had no chance of success. I met Philip Dexter at the Winthrops', where I stayed a night; and--I think he would not mind my telling you--in talking together rather confidentially, I found out that he, too, has had that idea, and has been very unhappy. But I put it all right, and he's back in London by this time. We may hear some news on our return." "Did he tell you what gave him the idea?" asked Lettice, almost in a whisper. "Some chance words of mine at Esparto," said Godfrey. "It is very generous of him to have said so. But it was not only that," said Lettice, her eyes filling with tears. But, somehow or other, the confession she made of this new offence did not lower her in Mr Auriol's eyes as hopelessly as she had expected. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ A few days later a happily reunited family were assembled in Mr Morison's house. How easy it was for Lettice to convince Arthur of the complete change in her feelings, when she told him of the little-hoped-for reconciliation with their uncle, may be imagined! How more than ready to forgive her unfortunate influence in their affairs she found Philip and Nina! How her uncle and aunt promised to forget the anxiety she had caused them, on condition of her never again thus setting aside the judgment and experience of her natural protectors! How more than amazed was everybody when, a few weeks later, by which time Lettice had learnt to believe that Godfrey Auriol _did_ mean what he said, her engagement to him was announced! All these "hows" I must also leave to my reader's imagination. The old farmer and his family, whose honest kindliness had so fortunately intervened to save poor Arthur from taking some really foolish step, were not forgotten. And in after-days, when his wish was fulfilled, and he had replaced his uncle at the head of his firm, he would sometimes recall with a smile the days when he had measured grey flannel and wrapped up parcels of tapes and ribbons for the dames of Greenwell. There are many ways in which life's lessons are taught. Some have to go through hard and sorrowful experiences--harder, it often seems, than they merit; others, like Lettice, learn true humility and sacrifice of self-will by gentler discipline. As she often said to herself-- "How can I ever be good enough to show my gratitude? How little have I deserved such happiness--I who might have ruined not merely my own life, but those of others, by my foolish obstinacy!" And "prejudice" was a word and a sentiment which Lettice Auriol's children were never allowed to know the meaning of. 
22002	----	from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) A SIMPLE STORY BY MRS. INCHBALD WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY G. L. STRACHEY LONDON HENRY FROWDE 1908 OXFORD: HORACE HART PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY CONTENTS INTRODUCTION PREFACE VOLUME I I-CHAPTER I 5 I-CHAPTER II 8 I-CHAPTER III 13 I-CHAPTER IV 14 I-CHAPTER V 17 I-CHAPTER VI 22 I-CHAPTER VII 25 I-CHAPTER VIII 31 I-CHAPTER IX 34 I-CHAPTER X 38 I-CHAPTER XI 42 I-CHAPTER XII 47 I-CHAPTER XIII 53 I-CHAPTER XIV 57 I-CHAPTER XV 63 I-CHAPTER XVI 69 I-CHAPTER XVII 78 VOLUME II II-CHAPTER I 85 II-CHAPTER II 90 II-CHAPTER III 94 II-CHAPTER IV 102 II-CHAPTER V 112 II-CHAPTER VI 117 II-CHAPTER VII 121 II-CHAPTER VIII 131 II-CHAPTER IX 138 II-CHAPTER X 146 II-CHAPTER XI 153 II-CHAPTER XII 164 VOLUME III III-CHAPTER I 173 III-CHAPTER II 177 III-CHAPTER III 179 III-CHAPTER IV 187 III-CHAPTER V 188 III-CHAPTER VI 194 III-CHAPTER VII 201 III-CHAPTER VIII 204 III-CHAPTER IX 205 III-CHAPTER X 214 III-CHAPTER XI 218 III-CHAPTER XII 227 III-CHAPTER XIII 233 III-CHAPTER XIV 244 VOLUME IV IV-CHAPTER I 247 IV-CHAPTER II 250 IV-CHAPTER III 255 IV-CHAPTER IV 261 IV-CHAPTER V 266 IV-CHAPTER VI 270 IV-CHAPTER VII 277 IV-CHAPTER VIII 283 IV-CHAPTER IX 285 IV-CHAPTER X 288 IV-CHAPTER XI 291 IV-CHAPTER XII 293 INTRODUCTION _A Simple Story_ is one of those books which, for some reason or other, have failed to come down to us, as they deserved, along the current of time, but have drifted into a literary backwater where only the professional critic or the curious discoverer can find them out. "The iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy;" and nowhere more blindly than in the republic of letters. If we were to inquire how it has happened that the true value of Mrs. Inchbald's achievement has passed out of general recognition, perhaps the answer to our question would be found to lie in the extreme difficulty with which the mass of readers detect and appreciate mere quality in literature. Their judgment is swayed by a hundred side-considerations which have nothing to do with art, but happen easily to impress the imagination, or to fit in with the fashion of the hour. The reputation of Mrs. Inchbald's contemporary, Fanny Burney, is a case in point. Every one has heard of Fanny Burney's novels, and _Evelina_ is still widely read. Yet it is impossible to doubt that, so far as quality alone is concerned, _Evelina_ deserves to be ranked considerably below _A Simple Story._ But its writer was the familiar friend of the greatest spirits of her age; she was the author of one of the best of diaries; and her work was immediately and immensely popular. Thus it has happened that the name of Fanny Burney has maintained its place upon the roll of English novelists, while that of Mrs. Inchbald is forgotten. But the obscurity of Mrs. Inchbald's career has not, of course, been the only reason for the neglect of her work. The merits of _A Simple Story_ are of a kind peculiarly calculated to escape the notice of a generation of readers brought up on the fiction of the nineteenth century. That fiction, infinitely various as it is, possesses at least one characteristic common to the whole of it--a breadth of outlook upon life, which can be paralleled by no other body of literature in the world save that of the Elizabethans. But the comprehensiveness of view shared by Dickens and Tolstoy, by Balzac and George Eliot, finds no place in Mrs. Inchbald's work. Compared with _A Simple Story_ even the narrow canvases of Jane Austen seem spacious pictures of diversified life. Mrs. Inchbald's novel is not concerned with the world at large, or with any section of society, hardly even with the family; its subject is a group of two or three individuals whose interaction forms the whole business of the book. There is no local colour in it, no complexity of detail nor violence of contrast; the atmosphere is vague and neutral, the action passes among ill-defined sitting-rooms, and the most poignant scene in the story takes place upon a staircase which has never been described. Thus the reader of modern novels is inevitably struck, in _A Simple Story_, by a sense of emptiness and thinness, which may well blind him to high intrinsic merits. The spirit of the eighteenth century is certainly present in the book, but it is the eighteenth century of France rather than of England. Mrs. Inchbald no doubt owed much to Richardson; her view of life is the indoor sentimental view of the great author of _Clarissa_; but her treatment of it has very little in common with his method of microscopic analysis and vast accumulation. If she belongs to any school, it is among the followers of the French classical tradition that she must be placed. _A Simple Story_ is, in its small way, a descendant of the Tragedies of Racine; and Miss Milner may claim relationship with Madame de Clèves. Besides her narrowness of vision, Mrs. Inchbald possesses another quality, no less characteristic of her French predecessors, and no less rare among the novelists of England. She is essentially a stylist--a writer whose whole conception of her art is dominated by stylistic intention. Her style, it is true, is on the whole poor; it is often heavy and pompous, sometimes clumsy and indistinct; compared with the style of such a master as Thackeray it sinks at once into insignificance. But the interest of her style does not lie in its intrinsic merit so much as in the use to which she puts it. Thackeray's style is mere ornament, existing independently of what he has to say; Mrs. Inchbald's is part and parcel of her matter. The result is that when, in moments of inspiration, she rises to the height of her opportunity, when, mastering her material, she invests her expression with the whole intensity of her feeling and her thought, then she achieves effects of the rarest beauty--effects of a kind for which one may search through Thackeray in vain. The most triumphant of these passages is the scene on the staircase of Elmwood House--a passage which would be spoilt by quotation and which no one who has ever read it could forget. But the same quality is to be found throughout her work. "Oh, Miss Woodley!" exclaims Miss Milner, forced at last to confess to her friend what she feels towards Dorriforth, "I love him with all the passion of a mistress, and with all the tenderness of a wife." No young lady, even in the eighteenth century, ever gave utterance to such a sentence as that. It is the sentence, not of a speaker, but of a writer; and yet, for that very reason, it is delightful, and comes to us charged with a curious sense of emotion, which is none the less real for its elaboration. In _Nature and Art_, Mrs. Inchbald's second novel, the climax of the story is told in a series of short paragraphs, which, for bitterness and concentration of style, are almost reminiscent of Stendhal: The jury consulted for a few minutes. The verdict was "Guilty". She heard it with composure. But when William placed the fatal velvet on his head and rose to pronounce sentence, she started with a kind of convulsive motion, retreated a step or two back, and, lifting up her hands with a scream, exclaimed-- "Oh, not from _you!_" The piercing shriek which accompanied these words prevented their being heard by part of the audience; and those who heard them thought little of their meaning, more than that they expressed her fear of dying. Serene and dignified, as if no such exclamation had been uttered, William delivered the fatal speech, ending with "Dead, dead, dead". She fainted as he closed the period, and was carried back to prison in a swoon; while he adjourned the court to go to dinner. Here, no doubt, there is a touch of melodrama; but it is the melodrama of a rhetorician, and, in that fine "She heard it with composure", genius has brushed aside the forced and the obvious, to express, with supreme directness, the anguish of a soul. For, in spite of Mrs. Inchbald's artificialities, in spite of her lack of that kind of realistic description which seems to modern readers the very blood and breath of a good story, she has the power of doing what, after all, only a very few indeed of her fellow craftsmen have ever been able to do--she can bring into her pages the living pressure of a human passion, she can invest, if not with realism, with something greater than realism--with the sense of reality itself--the pains, the triumphs, and the agitations of the human heart. "The heart," to use the old-fashioned phrase--there is Mrs. Inchbald's empire, there is the sphere of her glory and her command. Outside of it, her powers are weak and fluctuating. She has no firm grasp of the masculine elements in character: she wishes to draw a rough man, Sandford, and she draws a rude one; she tries her hand at a hero, Rushbrook, and she turns out a prig. Her humour is not faulty, but it is exceedingly slight. What an immortal figure the dim Mrs. Horton would have become in the hands of Jane Austen! In _Nature and Art_, her attempts at social satire are superficial and overstrained. But weaknesses of this kind--and it would be easy to prolong the list--are what every reader of the following pages will notice without difficulty, and what no wise one will regard. "Il ne faut point juger des hommes par ce qu'ils ignorent, mais par ce qu'ils savent;" and Mrs. Inchbald's knowledge was as profound as it was limited. Her Miss Milner is an original and brilliant creation, compact of charm and life. She is a flirt, and a flirt not only adorable, but worthy of adoration. Did Mrs. Inchbald take the suggestion of a heroine with imperfections from the little masterpiece which, on more sides than one, closely touches her's--Manon Lescaut? Perhaps; and yet, if this was so, the borrowing was of the slightest, for it is only in the fact that she _is_ imperfect that Miss Milner bears to Manon any resemblance at all. In every other respect, the English heroine is the precise contrary of the French one: she is a creature of fiery will, of high bearing, of noble disposition; and her shortcomings are born, not of weakness, but of excess of strength. Mrs. Inchbald has taken this character, she has thrown it under the influence of a violent and absorbing passion, and, upon that theme, she has written her delicate, sympathetic, and artificial book. As one reads it, one cannot but feel that it is, if not directly and circumstantially, at least in essence, autobiographical. One finds oneself speculating over the author, wondering what was her history, and how much of it was Miss Milner's. Unfortunately the greater part of what we should most like to know of Mrs. Inchbald's life has vanished beyond recovery. She wrote her Memoirs, and she burnt them; and who can tell whether even there we should have found a self-revelation? Confessions are sometimes curiously discreet, and, in the case of Mrs. Inchbald, we may be sure that it is only what was indiscreet that would really be worth the hearing. Yet her life is not devoid of interest. A brief sketch of it may be welcome to her readers. Elizabeth Inchbald was born on the 15th of October, 1753, at Standingfield, near Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk;[1] one of the numerous offspring of John and Mary Simpson. The Simpsons, who were Roman Catholics, held a moderate farm in Standingfield, and ranked among the gentry of the neighbourhood. In Elizabeth's eighth year, her father died; but the family continued at the farm, the elder daughters marrying and settling in London, while Elizabeth grew up into a beautiful and charming girl. One misfortune, however, interfered with her happiness--a defect of utterance which during her early years rendered her speech so indistinct as to be unintelligible to strangers. She devoted herself to reading and to dreams of the great world. At thirteen, she declared she would rather die than live longer without seeing the world; she longed to go to London; she longed to go upon the stage. When, in 1770, one of her brothers became an actor at Norwich, she wrote secretly to his manager, Mr. Griffith, begging for an engagement. Mr. Griffith was encouraging, and, though no definite steps were taken, she was sufficiently charmed with him to write out his name at length in her diary, with the inscription "Each dear letter of thy name is harmony." Was Mr. Griffith the hero of the company as well as its manager? That, at any rate, was clearly Miss Simpson's opinion; but she soon had other distractions. In the following year she paid a visit to her married sisters in London, where she met another actor, Mr. Inchbald, who seems immediately to have fallen in love with her, and to have proposed. She remained cool. "In spite of your eloquent pen," she wrote to him, with a touch of that sharp and almost bitter sense that was always hers, "matrimony still appears to me with less charms than terrors: the bliss arising from it, I doubt not, is superior to any other--but best not to be ventured for (in my opinion), till some little time have proved the emptiness of all other; which it seldom fails to do." Nevertheless, the correspondence continued, and, early in 1772, some entries in her diary give a glimpse of her state of mind:-- _Jan. 22._ Saw Mr. Griffith's picture. _Jan. 28._ Stole it. _Jan. 29._ Rather disappointed at not receiving a letter from Mr. Inchbald. A few months later she did the great deed of her life: she stepped secretly into the Norwich coach, and went to London. The days that followed were full of hazard and adventure, but the details of them are uncertain. She was a girl of eighteen, absolutely alone, and astonishingly attractive--"tall," we are told, "slender, straight, of the purest complexion, and most beautiful features; her hair of a golden auburn, her eyes full at once of spirit and sweetness;" and it was only to be expected that, in such circumstances, romance and daring would soon give place to discomfort and alarm. She attempted in vain to obtain a theatrical engagement; she found herself, more than once, obliged to shift her lodging; and at last, after ten days of trepidation, she was reduced to apply for help to her married sisters. This put an end to her difficulties, but, in spite of her efforts to avoid notice, her beauty had already attracted attention, and she had received a letter from a stranger, with whom she immediately entered into correspondence. She had all the boldness of innocence, and, in addition, a force of character which brought her safely through the risks she ran. While she was still in her solitary lodging, a theatrical manager, named Dodd, attempted to use his position as a cover for seduction. She had several interviews with him alone, and the story goes that, in the last, she snatched up a basin of hot water and dashed it in his face. But she was not to go unprotected for long; for within two months of her arrival in London she had married Mr. Inchbald. The next twelve years of Mrs. Inchbald's life were passed amid the rough and tumble of the eighteenth-century stage. Her husband was thirty-seven when she married him, a Roman Catholic like herself, and an actor who depended for his living upon ill-paid and uncertain provincial engagements. Mrs. Inchbald conquered her infirmity of speech and threw herself into her husband's profession. She accompanied him to Bristol, to Scotland, to Liverpool, to Birmingham, appearing in a great variety of rôles, but never with any very conspicuous success. The record of these journeys throws an interesting light upon the conditions of the provincial companies of those days. Mrs. Inchbald and her companions would set out to walk from one Scotch town to another; they would think themselves lucky if they could climb on to a passing cart, to arrive at last, drenched with rain perhaps, at some wretched hostelry. But this kind of barbarism did not stand in the way of an almost childish gaiety. In Yorkshire, we find the Inchbalds, the Siddonses, and Kemble retiring to the moors, in the intervals of business, to play blindman's buff or puss in the corner. Such were the pastimes of Mrs. Siddons before the days of her fame. No doubt this kind of lightheartedness was the best antidote to the experience of being "saluted with volleys of potatoes and broken bottles", as the Siddonses were by the citizens of Liverpool, for having ventured to appear on their stage without having ever played before the King. On this occasion, the audience, according to a letter from Kemble to Mrs. Inchbald, "extinguished all the lights round the house; then jumped upon the stage; brushed every lamp out with their hats; took back their money; left the theatre, and determined themselves to repeat this till they have another company." These adventures were diversified by a journey to Paris, undertaken in the hope that Mr. Inchbald, who found himself without engagements, might pick up a livelihood as a painter of miniatures. The scheme came to nothing, and the Inchbalds eventually went to Hull, where they returned to their old profession. Here, in 1779, suddenly and somewhat mysteriously, Mr. Inchbald died. To his widow the week that followed was one of "grief, horror, and almost despair"; but soon, with her old pertinacity, she was back at her work, settling at last in London, and becoming a member of the Covent Garden company. Here, for the next five years, she earned for herself a meagre living, until, quite unexpectedly, deliverance came. In her moments of leisure she had been trying her hand upon dramatic composition; she had written some farces, and, in 1784, one of them, _A Mogul Tale_, was accepted, acted, and obtained a great success. This was the turning-point of her career. She followed up her farce with a series of plays, either original or adapted, which, almost without exception, were well received, so that she was soon able to retire from the stage with a comfortable competence. She had succeeded in life; she was happy, respected, free. Mrs. Inchbald's plays are so bad that it is difficult to believe that they brought her a fortune. But no doubt it was their faults that made them popular--their sentimentalities, their melodramatic absurdities, their strangely false and high-pitched moral tone. They are written in a jargon which resembles, if it resembles anything, an execrable prose translation from very flat French verse. "Ah, Manuel!" exclaims one of her heroines, "I am now amply punished by the Marquis for all my cruelty to Duke Cordunna--he to whom my father in my infancy betrothed me, and to whom I willingly pledged my faith, hoping to wed; till Romono, the Marquis of Romono, came from the field of glory, and with superior claims of person as of fame, seized on my heart by force, and perforce made me feel I had never loved till then." Which is the more surprising--that actors could be found to utter such speeches, or that audiences could be collected to applaud them? Perhaps, for us, the most memorable fact about Mrs. Inchbald's dramatic work is that one of her adaptations (from the German of Kotzebue) was no other than that _Lovers' Vows_ which, as every one knows, was rehearsed so brilliantly at Ecclesford, the seat of the Right Hon. Lord Ravenshaw, in Cornwall, and which, after all, was _not_ performed at Sir Thomas Bertram's. But that is an interest _sub specie aeternitatis_; and, from the temporal point of view, Mrs. Inchbald's plays must be regarded merely as means--means towards her own enfranchisement, and that condition of things which made possible _A Simple Story._ That novel had been sketched as early as 1777; but it was not completely written until 1790, and not published until the following year. A second edition was printed immediately, and several more followed; the present reprint is taken from the fourth, published in 1799--but with the addition of the characteristic preface, which, after the second edition, was dropped. The four small volumes of these early editions, with their large type, their ample spacing, their charming flavour of antiquity, delicacy, and rest--may be met with often enough in secluded corners of secondhand bookshops, or on some neglected shelf in the library of a country house. For their own generation, they represented a distinguished title to fame. Mrs. Inchbald--to use the expression of her biographer--"was ascertained to be one of the greatest ornaments of her sex." She was painted by Lawrence, she was eulogized by Miss Edgeworth, she was complimented by Madame de Stael herself. She had, indeed, won for herself a position which can hardly be paralleled among the women of the eighteenth century--a position of independence and honour, based upon talent, and upon talent alone. In 1796 she published _Nature and Art_, and ten years later appeared her last work--a series of biographical and critical notices prefixed to a large collection of acting plays. During the greater part of the intervening period she lived in lodgings in Leicester Square--or "Leicester Fields" as the place was still often called--in a house opposite that of Sir Joshua Reynolds. The oeconomy which she had learnt in her early days she continued to practise; dressing with extraordinary plainness, and often going without a fire in winter; so that she was able, through her self-sacrifice, to keep from want a large band of poor relatives and friends. The society she mixed with was various, but, for the most part, obscure. There were occasional visits from the now triumphant Mrs. Siddons; there were incessant propositions--but alas! they were equivocal--from Sir Charles Bunbury; for the rest, she passed her life among actor-managers and humble playwrights and unremembered medical men. One of her friends was William Godwin, who described her to Mrs. Shelley as a "piquante mixture between a lady and a milkmaid", and who, it is said, suggested part of the plot of _A Simple Story._ But she quarreled with him when he married Mary Wollstonecraft, after whose death she wrote to him thus--"With the most sincere sympathy in all you have suffered--with the most perfect forgiveness of all you have said to me, there must nevertheless be an end to our acquaintance _for ever._ I respect your prejudices, but I also respect my own." Far more intimate were her relations with Dr. Gisborne--a mysterious figure, with whom, in some tragic manner that we can only just discern, was enacted her final romance. His name--often in company with that of another physician, Dr. Warren, for whom, too, she had a passionate affection--occurs frequently among her papers; and her diary for December 17, 1794, has this entry:--"Dr. Gisborne drank tea here, and staid very late: he talked seriously of marrying--but not _me_." Many years later, one September, she amused herself by making out a list of all the Septembers since her marriage, with brief notes as to her state of mind during each. The list has fortunately survived, and some of the later entries are as follows:-- 1791. London; after my novel, Simple Story ... very happy. 1792. London; in Leicester Square ... cheerful, content, and sometimes rather happy.... 1794. Extremely happy, but for poor Debby's death. 1795. My brother George's death, and an intimate acquaintance with Dr. Gisborne--not happy.... 1797. After an alteration in my teeth, and the death of Dr. Warren--yet far from unhappy. 1798. Happy, but for suspicion amounting almost to certainty of a rapid appearance of age in my face.... 1802. After feeling wholly indifferent about Dr. Gisborne--very happy but for ill health, ill looks, &c. 1803. After quitting Leicester Square probably for ever--after caring scarce at all or thinking of Dr. Gisborne ... very happy.... 1806.... After the death of Dr. Gisborne, too, often very unhappy, yet mostly cheerful, and on my return to London nearly happy. The record, with all its quaintness, produces a curious impression of stoicism--of a certain grim acceptance of the facts of life. It would have been a pleasure, certainly, but an alarming pleasure, to have known Mrs. Inchbald. In the early years of the century, she gradually withdrew from London, establishing herself in suburban boarding-houses, often among sisters of charity, and devoting her days to the practice of her religion. In her early and middle life she had been an indifferent Catholic: "Sunday. Rose late, dressed, and read in the Bible about David, &c."--this is one of the very few references in her diary to anything approaching a religious observance during many years. But, in her old age, her views changed; her devotions increased with her retirement; and her retirement was at last complete. She died, in an obscure Kensington boarding-house, on August 1, 1821. She was buried in Kensington churchyard. But, if her ghost lingers anywhere, it is not in Kensington: it is in the heart of the London that she had always loved. Yet, even there, how much now would she find to recognize? Mrs. Inchbald's world has passed away from us for ever; and, as we walk there to-day amid the press of the living, it is hard to believe that she too was familiar with Leicester Square. G. L. STRACHEY. [1] The following account is based upon the _Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald, including her familiar correspondence with the most distinguished persons of her time_, edited by James Boaden, Esq.--a discursive, vague, and not unamusing book. A SIMPLE STORY, IN FOUR VOLUMES, BY MRS. INCHBALD. VOL. I. _THE FOURTH EDITION._ LONDON: Printed for G. G. and J. ROBINSON, PATERNOSTER ROW. 1799. PREFACE. It is said, _a book should be read with the same spirit with which it has been written._ In that case, fatal must be the reception of this--for the writer frankly avows, that during the time she has been writing it, she has suffered every quality and degree of weariness and lassitude, into which no other employment could have betrayed her. It has been the destiny of the writer of this Story to be occupied throughout her life, in what has the least suited either her inclination or capacity--with an invincible impediment in her speech, it was her lot for thirteen years to gain a subsistence by public speaking--and, with the utmost detestation to the fatigue of inventing, a constitution suffering under a sedentary life, and an education confined to the narrow boundaries prescribed her sex, it has been her fate to devote a tedious seven years to the unremitting labour of literary productions--whilst a taste for authors of the first rank has been an additional punishment, forbidding her one moment of those self-approving reflections, which are assuredly due to the industrious. But, alas! in the exercise of the arts, industry scarce bears the name of merit. What then is to be substituted in the place of genius? GOOD FORTUNE. And if these volumes should be attended by the good fortune that has accompanied her other writings, to that divinity, and that alone, she shall attribute their success. Yet, there is a _first cause_ still, to whom I cannot here forbear to mention my obligations. The Muses, I trust, will pardon me, that to them I do not feel myself obliged--for, in justice to their heavenly inspirations, I believe they have never yet favoured me with one visitation; but sent in their disguise NECESSITY, who, being the mother of Invention, gave me all mine--while FORTUNE kindly smiled, and was accessory to the cheat. But this important secret I long wished, and endeavoured to conceal; yet one unlucky moment candidly, though unwittingly, divulged it--I frankly owned, "That Fortune having chased away Necessity, there remained no other incitement to stimulate me to a labour I abhorred." It happened to be in the power of the person to whom I confided this secret, to send NECESSITY once more. Once more, then, bowing to its empire, I submit to the task it enjoins. This case has something similar to a theatrical anecdote told (I think) by Colly Cibber: "A performer of a very mean salary, played the Apothecary in Romeo and Juliet so exactly to the satisfaction of the audience, that this little part, independent of the other characters, drew immense houses whenever the play was performed. The manager in consequence, thought it but justice to advance the actor's salary; on which the poor man (who, like the character he represented, had been half starved before) began to live so comfortably, he became too plump for the part; and being of no importance in any thing else, the manager of course now wholly discharged him--and thus, actually reducing him to the want of a piece of bread, in a short time he became a proper figure for the part again." Welcome, then, thou all-powerful principle, NECESSITY! THOU, who art the instigator of so many bad authors and actors--THOU, who from my infancy seldom hast forsaken me, still abide with me. I will not complain of any hardship thy commands require, so thou dost not urge my pen to prostitution. In all thy rigour, oh! do not force my toil to libels--or what is equally pernicious--panegyric on the unworthy! A SIMPLE STORY. CHAPTER I. Dorriforth, bred at St. Omer's in all the scholastic rigour of that college, was, by education, and the solemn vows of his order, a Roman Catholic priest--but nicely discriminating between the philosophical and the superstitious part of that character, and adopting the former only, he possessed qualities not unworthy the first professors of Christianity. Every virtue which it was his vocation to preach, it was his care to practise; nor was he in the class of those of the religious, who, by secluding themselves from the world, fly the merit they might have in reforming mankind. He refused to shelter himself from the temptations of the layman by the walls of a cloister, but sought for, and found that shelter in the centre of London, where he dwelt, in his own prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. He was about thirty, and had lived in the metropolis near five years, when a gentleman above his own age, but with whom he had from his youth contracted a most sincere friendship, died, and left him the sole guardian of his daughter, who was then eighteen. The deceased Mr. Milner, on his approaching dissolution, perfectly sensible of his state, thus reasoned with himself before he made the nomination:--"I have formed no intimate friendship during my whole life, except one--I can be said to know the heart of no man, except the heart of Dorriforth. After knowing his, I never sought acquaintance with another--I did not wish to lessen the exalted estimation of human nature which he had inspired. In this moment of trembling apprehension for every thought which darts across my mind, and more for every action which I must soon be called to answer for; all worldly views here thrown aside, I act as if that tribunal, before which I every moment expect to appear, were now sitting in judgment upon my purpose. The care of an only child is the great charge that in this tremendous crisis I have to execute. These earthly affections that bind me to her by custom, sympathy, or what I fondly call parental love, would direct me to study her present happiness, and leave her to the care of those whom she thinks her dearest friends; but they are friends only in the sunshine of fortune; in the cold nipping frost of disappointment, sickness, or connubial strife, they will forsake the house of care, although the very house which they may have themselves built." Here the excruciating anguish of the father, overcame that of the dying man. "In the moment of desertion," continued he, "which I now picture to myself, where will my child find comfort? That heavenly aid which religion gives, and which now, amidst these agonizing tortures, cheers with humbler hope my afflicted soul; that, she will be denied." It is in this place proper to remark, that Mr. Milner was a member of the church of Rome, but on his marriage with a lady of Protestant tenets, they mutually agreed their sons should be educated in the religious opinion of their father, and their daughters in that of their mother. One child only was the result of their union, the child whose future welfare now occupied the anxious thoughts of her expiring father. From him the care of her education had been with-held, as he kept inviolate his promise to her departed mother on the article of religion, and therefore consigned his daughter to a boarding-school for Protestants, whence she returned with merely such ideas of religion as ladies of fashion at her age mostly imbibe. Her little heart employed in all the endless pursuits of personal accomplishments, had left her mind without one ornament, except such as nature gave; and even they were not wholly preserved from the ravages made by its rival, _Art._ While her father was in health he beheld, with extreme delight, his accomplished daughter, without one fault which taste or elegance could have imputed to her; nor ever enquired what might be her other failings. But, cast on a bed of sickness, and upon the point of leaving her to her fate, those failings at once rushed on his thought--and all the pride, the fond enjoyment he had taken in beholding her open the ball, or delight her hearers with her wit, escaped his remembrance; or, not escaping it, were lamented with a sigh of compassion, or a contemptuous frown, at such frivolous qualifications. "Something essential," said he to himself, "must be considered--something to prepare her for an hour like this. Can I then leave her to the charge of those who themselves never remember such an hour will come? Dorriforth is the only person I know, who, uniting the moral virtues to those of religion, and pious faith to native honour, will protect, without controlling, instruct, without tyrannizing, comfort, without flattering; and, perhaps in time, make good by choice, rather than by constraint, the dear object of his dying friend's sole care." Dorriforth, who came post from London to visit Mr. Milner in his illness, received a few moments before his death all his injunctions, and promised to fulfil them. But, in this last token of his friend's esteem, he still was restrained from all authority to direct his ward in one religious opinion, contrary to those her mother had professed, and in which she herself had been educated. "Never perplex her mind with an idea that may disturb, but cannot reform"--were his latest words; and Dorriforth's reply gave him entire satisfaction. Miss Milner was not with her father at this affecting period--some delicately nervous friend, with whom she was on a visit at Bath, thought proper to conceal from her not only the danger of his death, but even his indisposition, lest it might alarm a mind she thought too susceptible. This refined tenderness gave poor Miss Milner the almost insupportable agony of hearing that her father was no more, even before she was told he was not in health. In the bitterest anguish she flew to pay her last duty to his remains, and performed it with the truest filial love, while Dorriforth, upon important business, was obliged to return to town. CHAPTER II. Dorriforth returned to London heavily afflicted for the loss of his friend; and yet, perhaps, with his thoughts more engaged upon the trust which that friend had reposed in him. He knew the life Miss Milner had been accustomed to lead; he dreaded the repulses his admonitions might possibly meet; and feared he had undertaken a task he was too weak to execute--the protection of a young woman of fashion. Mr. Dorriforth was nearly related to one of our first Catholic Peers; his income was by no means confined, but approaching to affluence; yet such was his attention to those in poverty, and the moderation of his own desires, that he lived in all the careful plainness of oeconomy. His habitation was in the house of a Mrs. Horton, an elderly gentlewoman, who had a maiden niece residing with her, not many years younger than herself. But although Miss Woodley was thirty-five, and in person exceedingly plain, yet she possessed such an extreme cheerfulness of temper, and such an inexhaustible fund of good nature, that she escaped not only the ridicule, but even the appellation of an old maid. In this house Dorriforth had lived before the death of Mr. Horton; nor upon that event had he thought it necessary, notwithstanding his religious vow of celibacy, to fly the roof of two such innocent females as Mrs. Horton and her niece. On their part, they regarded him with all that respect and reverence which the most religious flock shews to its pastor; and his friendly society they not only esteemed a spiritual, but a temporal advantage, as the liberal stipend he allowed for his apartments and board, enabled them to continue in the large and commodious house which they had occupied during the life of Mr. Horton. Here, upon Mr. Dorriforth's return from his journey, preparations were made for the reception of his ward; her father having made it his request that she might, for a time at least, reside in the same house with her guardian, receive the same visits, and cultivate the acquaintance of his companions and friends. When the will of her father was made known to Miss Milner, she submitted, without the least reluctance, to all he had required. Her mind, at that time impressed with the most poignant sorrow for his loss, made no distinction of happiness that was to come; and the day was appointed, with her silent acquiescence, when she was to arrive in London, and there take up her abode, with all the retinue of a rich heiress. Mrs. Horton was delighted with the addition this acquisition to her family was likely to make to her annual income, and style of living. The good-natured Miss Woodley was overjoyed at the expectation of their new guest, yet she herself could not tell why--but the reason was, that her kind heart wanted a more ample field for its benevolence; and now her thoughts were all pleasingly employed how she should render, not only the lady herself, but even all her attendants, happy in their new situation. The reflections of Dorriforth were less agreeably engaged--Cares, doubts, fears, possessed his mind--and so forcibly possessed it, that upon every occasion which offered, he would inquisitively endeavour to gain intelligence of his ward's disposition before he saw her; for he was, as yet, a stranger not only to the real propensities of her mind, but even to her person; a constant round of visits having prevented his meeting her at her father's, the very few times he had been at his house, since her final return from school. The first person whose opinion he, with all proper reserve, asked concerning Miss Milner, was Lady Evans, the widow of a Baronet, who frequently visited at Mrs. Horton's. But that the reader may be interested in what Dorriforth says and does, it is necessary to give some description of his person and manners. His figure was tall and elegant, but his face, except a pair of dark bright eyes, a set of white teeth, and a graceful fall in his clerical curls of brown hair, had not one feature to excite admiration--yet such a gleam of sensibility was diffused over each, that many people mistook his face for handsome, and all were more or less attracted by it--in a word, the charm, that is here meant to be described, is a _countenance_--on _his_ you read the feelings of his heart--saw all its inmost workings--the quick pulses that beat with hope and fear, or the gentle ones that moved in a more equal course of patience and resignation. On this countenance his thoughts were pourtrayed; and as his mind was enriched with every virtue that could make it valuable, so was his face adorned with every expression of those virtues--and they not only gave a lustre to his aspect, but added a harmonious sound to all he uttered; it was persuasive, it was perfect eloquence; whilst in his looks you beheld his thoughts moving with his lips, and ever coinciding with what he said. With one of those interesting looks which revealed the anxiety of his heart, and yet with that graceful restraint of all gesticulation, for which he was remarkable, even in his most anxious concerns, he addressed Lady Evans, who had called on Mrs. Horton to hear and to request the news of the day: "Your Ladyship was at Bath last spring--you know the young lady to whom I have the honour of being appointed guardian. Pray,"-- He was earnestly intent upon asking a question, but was prevented by the person interrogated. "Dear Mr. Dorriforth, do not ask me any thing about Miss Milner--when I saw her she was very young: though indeed that is but three months ago, and she can't be much older now." "She is eighteen," answered Dorriforth, colouring with regret at the doubts which this lady had increased, but not inspired. "And she is very beautiful, that I can assure you," said Lady Evans. "Which I call no qualification," said Dorriforth, rising from his chair in evident uneasiness. "But where there is nothing else, let me tell you, beauty is something." "Much worse than nothing, in my opinion," returned Dorriforth. "But now, Mr. Dorriforth, do not from what I have said, frighten yourself, and imagine your ward worse than she really is--all I know of her, is merely, that she's young, idle, indiscreet, and giddy, with half a dozen lovers in her suite; some coxcombs, others men of gallantry, some single, and others married." Dorriforth started. "For the first time of my life," cried he with a manly sorrow, "I wish I had never known her father." "Nay," said Mrs. Horton, who expected every thing to happen just as she wished, (for neither an excellent education, the best company, or long experience had been able to cultivate or brighten this good lady's understanding,) "Nay," said she, "I am sure, Mr. Dorriforth, you will soon convert her from all her evil ways." "Dear me," returned Lady Evans, "I am sure I never meant to hint at any thing evil--and for what I have said, I will give you up my authors if you please; for they were not observations of my own; all I do is to mention them again." The good-natured Miss Woodley, who sat working at the window, an humble, but an attentive listener to this discourse, ventured here to say exactly six words: "Then don't mention them any more." "Let us change the subject," said Dorriforth. "With all my heart," cried Lady Evans; "and I am sure it will be to the young lady's advantage." "Is Miss Milner tall or short?" asked Mrs. Horton, still wishing for farther information. "Oh, tall enough of all conscience," returned she; "I tell you again that no fault can be found with her person." "But if her mind is defective"--exclaimed Dorriforth, with a sigh---- "That may be improved as well as the person," cried Miss Woodley. "No, my dear," returned Lady Evans, "I never heard of a pad to make straight an ill-shapen disposition." "Oh, yes," answered Miss Woodley, "good company, good books, experience, and the misfortunes of others, may have more power to form the mind to virtue, than"---- Miss Woodley was not permitted to proceed, for Lady Evans rising hastily from her seat, cried, "I must be gone--I have an hundred people waiting for me at home--besides, were I inclined to hear a sermon, I should desire Mr. Dorriforth to preach, and not you." Just then Mrs. Hillgrave was announced. "And here is Mrs. Hillgrave," continued she--"I believe, Mrs. Hillgrave, you know Miss Milner, don't you? The young lady who has lately lost her father." Mrs. Hillgrave was the wife of a merchant who had met with severe losses: as soon as the name of Miss Milner was uttered, she lifted up her hands, and the tears started in her eyes. "There!" cried Lady Evans, "I desire you will give your opinion of her, and I am sorry I cannot stay to hear it." Saying this, she curtsied and took her leave. When Mrs. Hillgrave had been seated a few minutes, Mrs. Horton, who loved information equally with the most inquisitive of her sex, asked the new visitor--"If she might be permitted to know, why, at the mention of Miss Milner, she had seemed so much affected?" This question exciting the fears of Dorriforth, he turned anxiously round, attentive to the reply. "Miss Milner," answered she, "has been my benefactress and the best I ever had." As she spoke, she took out her handkerchief and wiped away the tears that ran down her face. "How so?" cried Dorriforth eagerly, with his own eyes moistened with joy, nearly as much as her's were with gratitude. "My husband, at the commencement of his distresses," replied Mrs. Hillgrave, "owed a sum of money to her father, and from repeated provocations, Mr. Milner was determined to seize upon all our effects--his daughter, however, by her intercessions, procured us time, in order to discharge the debt; and when she found _that_ time was insufficient, and her father no longer to be dissuaded from his intention, she secretly sold some of her most valuable ornaments to satisfy his demand, and screen us from its consequences." Dorriforth, pleased at this recital, took Mrs. Hillgrave by the hand, and told her, "she should never want a friend." "Is Miss Milner tall, or short?" again asked Mrs. Horton, fearing, from the sudden pause which had ensued, the subject should be dropped. "I don't know," answered Mrs. Hillgrave. "Is she handsome, or ugly?" "I really can't tell." "It is very strange you should not take notice!" "I did take notice, but I cannot depend upon my own judgment--to me she appeared beautiful as an angel; but perhaps I was deceived by the beauties of her disposition." CHAPTER III. This gentlewoman's visit inspired Mr. Dorriforth with some confidence in the principles and character of his ward. The day arrived on which she was to leave her late father's seat, and fix her abode at Mrs. Horton's; and her guardian, accompanied by Miss Woodley, went in his carriage to meet her, and waited at an inn on the road for her reception. After many a sigh paid to the memory of her father, Miss Milner, upon the tenth of November, arrived at the place, half-way on her journey to town, where Dorriforth and Miss Woodley were expecting her. Besides attendants, she had with her a gentleman and lady, distant relations of her mother's, who thought it but a proper testimony of their civility to attend her part of the way, but who so much envied her guardian the trust Mr. Milner had reposed in him, that as soon as they had delivered her safe into his care, they returned. When the carriage, which brought Miss Milner, stopped at the inn gate, and her name was announced to Dorriforth, he turned pale--something like a foreboding of disaster trembled at his heart, and consequently spread a gloom over all his face. Miss Woodley was even obliged to rouse him from the dejection into which he was cast, or he would have sunk beneath it: she was obliged also to be the first to welcome his lovely charge.--Lovely beyond description. But the natural vivacity, the gaiety which report had given to Miss Milner, were softened by her recent sorrow to a meek sadness--and that haughty display of charms, imputed to her manners, was changed to a pensive demeanor. The instant Dorriforth was introduced to her by Miss Woodley as her "Guardian, and her deceased father's most beloved friend," she burst into tears, knelt down to him for a moment, and promised ever to obey him as her father. He had his handkerchief to his face at the time, or she would have beheld the agitation--the remotest sensations of his heart. This affecting introduction being over, after some minutes passed in general conversation, the carriages were again ordered; and, bidding farewell to the relations who had accompanied her, Miss Milner, her guardian, and Miss Woodley departed for town; the two ladies in Miss Milner's carriage, and Dorriforth in that in which he came. Miss Woodley, as they rode along, made no attempts to ingratiate herself with Miss Milner; though, perhaps, such an honour might constitute one of her first wishes--she behaved to her but as she constantly behaved to every other human creature--that, was sufficient to gain the esteem of a person possessed of an understanding equal to Miss Milner's--she had penetration to discover Miss Woodley's unaffected worth, and was soon induced to reward it with the warmest friendship. CHAPTER IV. After a night's rest in London, less violently impressed with the loss of her father, reconciled, if not already attached to her new acquaintance, her thoughts pleasingly occupied with the reflection that she was in that gay metropolis--a wild and rapturous picture of which her active fancy had often formed--Miss Milner waked from a peaceful and refreshing sleep, with much of that vivacity, and with all those airy charms, which for a while had yielded their transcendent power to the weaker influence of her filial sorrow. Beautiful as she had appeared to Miss Woodley and to Dorriforth on the preceding day, when she joined them this morning at breakfast, re-possessed of her lively elegance and dignified simplicity, they gazed at her, and at each other alternately, with astonishment!--and Mrs. Horton, as she sat at the head of her tea-table, felt herself but as a menial servant: such command has beauty if united with sense and virtue. In Miss Milner it was so united. Yet let not our over-scrupulous readers be misled, and extend their idea of her virtue so as to magnify it beyond that which frail mortals commonly possess; nor must they cavil, if, on a nearer view, they find it less--but let them consider, that if she had more faults than generally belong to others, she had likewise more temptations. From her infancy she had been indulged in all her wishes to the extreme of folly, and started habitually at the unpleasant voice of control. She was beautiful; she had been too frequently told the high value of that beauty, and thought every moment passed in wasteful idleness during which she was not gaining some new conquest. She had a quick sensibility, which too frequently discovered itself in the immediate resentment of injuries or neglect. She had, besides, acquired the dangerous character of a wit; but to which she had no real pretensions, although the most discerning critic, hearing her converse, might fall into this mistake. Her replies had all the effect of repartee, not because she possessed those qualities which can properly be called wit, but that what she said was delivered with an energy, an instantaneous and powerful conception of the sentiment, joined with a real or a well-counterfeited simplicity, a quick turn of the eye, and an arch smile. Her words were but the words of others, and, like those of others, put into common sentences; but the delivery made them pass for wit, as grace in an ill-proportioned figure will often make it pass for symmetry. And now--leaving description--the reader must form a judgment of her by her actions; by all the round of great or trivial circumstances that shall be related. At breakfast, which had just begun at the commencement of this chapter, the conversation was lively on the part of Miss Milner, wise on the part of Dorriforth, good on the part of Miss Woodley, and an endeavour at all three on the part of Mrs. Horton. The discourse at length drew from Mr. Dorriforth this observation: "You have a greater resemblance of your father, Miss Milner, than I imagined you had from report: I did not expect to find you so like him." "Nor did I, Mr. Dorriforth, expect to find you any thing like what you are." "No?--pray what did you expect to find me?" "I expected to find you an elderly man, and a plain man." This was spoken in an artless manner, but in a tone which obviously declared she thought her guardian young and handsome. He replied, but not without some little embarrassment, "A plain man you shall find me in all my actions." "Then your actions are to contradict your appearance." For in what she said, Miss Milner had the quality peculiar to wits, of hazarding the thought that first occurs, which thought, is generally truth. On this, he paid her a compliment in return. "You, Miss Milner, I should suppose, must be a very bad judge of what is plain, and what is not." "How so?" "Because I am sure you will readily own you do not think yourself handsome; and allowing that, you instantly want judgment." "And I would rather want judgment than beauty," she replied, "and so I give up the one for the other." With a serious face, as if proposing a very serious question, Dorriforth continued, "And you really believe you are not handsome?" "I should, if I consulted my own opinion, believe that I was not; but in some respects I am like Roman Catholics; I don't believe upon my own understanding, but from what other people tell me." "And let this convince you," replied Dorriforth, "that what we teach is truth; for you find you would be deceived did you not trust to persons who know better than yourself. But, my dear Miss Milner, we will talk upon some other topic, and never resume this again--we differ in opinion, I dare say, on one subject only, and this difference I hope will never extend itself to any other. Therefore, let not religion be named between us; for as I have resolved never to persecute you, in pity be grateful, and do not persecute me." Miss Milner looked with surprise that any thing so lightly said, should be so seriously received. The kind Miss Woodley ejaculated a short prayer to herself, that heaven would forgive her young friend the involuntary sin of religious ignorance--while Mrs. Horton, unperceived, as she imagined, made the sign of the cross upon her forehead as a guard against the infectious taint of heretical opinions. This pious ceremony Miss Milner by chance observed, and now shewed such an evident propensity to burst into a fit of laughter, that the good lady of the house could no longer contain her resentment, but exclaimed, "God forgive you," with a severity so different from the idea which the words conveyed, that the object of her anger was, on this, obliged freely to indulge that impulse which she had in vain been struggling to suppress; and no longer suffering under the agony of restraint, she gave way to her humour, and laughed with a liberty so uncontrolled, that soon left her in the room with none but the tender-hearted Miss Woodley a witness of her folly. "My dear Miss Woodley," (then cried Miss Milner, after recovering herself) "I am afraid you will not forgive me." "No, indeed I will not," returned Miss Woodley. But how unimportant, how weak, how ineffectual are _words_ in conversation--looks and manners alone express--for Miss Woodley, with her charitable face and mild accents, saying she would not forgive, implied only forgiveness--while Mrs. Horton, with her enraged voice and aspect, begging heaven to pardon the offender, palpably said, she thought her unworthy of all pardon. CHAPTER V. Six weeks have now elapsed since Miss Milner has been in London partaking with delight all its pleasures, while Dorriforth has been sighing with apprehension, attending to her with precaution, and praying with zealous fervour for her safety. Her own and her guardian's acquaintance, and, added to them, the new friendships (to use the unmeaning language of the world) which she was continually forming, crowded so perpetually to the house, that seldom had Dorriforth even a moment left him from her visits or visitors, to warn her of her danger:--yet when a moment offered, he caught it eagerly--pressed the necessity of "Time not always passed in society; of reflection; of reading; of thoughts for a future state; and of virtues acquired to make old age supportable." That forcible power of genuine feeling, which directs the tongue to eloquence, had its effect while she listened to him, and she sometimes put on the looks and gesture of assent--sometimes even spoke the language of conviction; but this the first call of dissipation would change to ill-timed raillery, or peevish remonstrance, at being limited in delights her birth and fortune entitled her to enjoy. Among the many visitors who attended at her levees, and followed her wherever she went, there was one who seemed, even when absent from her, to share her thoughts. This was Lord Frederick Lawnly, the younger son of a Duke, and the avowed favourite of all the most discerning women of taste. He was not more than twenty-three; animated, elegant, extremely handsome, and possessed of every accomplishment that would captivate a heart less susceptible of love than Miss Milner's was supposed to be. With these allurements, no wonder if she took pleasure in his company--no wonder if she took pride in having it known that he was among the number of her devoted admirers. Dorriforth beheld this growing intimacy with alternate pain and pleasure--he wished to see Miss Milner married, to see his charge in the protection of another, rather than of himself; yet under the care of a young nobleman, immersed in all the vices of the town, without one moral excellence, but such as might result eventually from the influence of the moment--under such care he trembled for her happiness--yet trembled more lest her heart should be purloined without even the authority of matrimonial views. With sentiments like these, Dorriforth could never disguise his uneasiness at the sight of Lord Frederick, nor could the latter help discerning the suspicion of the guardian, and consequently each was embarrassed in the presence of the other. Miss Milner observed, but observed with indifference, the sensations of both--there was but one passion which then held a place in her bosom, and that was vanity; vanity defined into all the species of pride, vain-glory, self-approbation--an inordinate desire of admiration, and an immoderate enjoyment of the art of pleasing, for her own individual happiness, and not for the happiness of others. Still had she a heart inclined, and oftentimes affected by tendencies less unworthy; but those approaches to what was estimable, were in their first impulse too frequently met and intercepted by some darling folly. Miss Woodley (who could easily discover a virtue, although of the most diminutive kind, and scarce through the magnifying glass of calumny could ever perceive a fault) was Miss Milner's inseparable companion at home, and her zealous advocate with Dorriforth, whenever, during her absence, she became the subject of discourse. He listened with hope to the praises of her friend, but saw with despair how little they were merited. Sometimes he struggled to subdue his anger, but oftener strove to suppress tears of pity for her hapless state. By this time all her acquaintance had given Lord Frederick to her as a lover; the servants whispered it, and some of the public prints had even fixed the day of marriage;--but as no explanation had taken place on his part, Dorriforth's uneasiness was increased, and he seriously told his ward, he thought it would be indispensably prudent in her to entreat Lord Frederick to discontinue his visits. She smiled with ridicule at the caution, but finding it repeated, and in a manner that indicated authority, she promised not only to make, but to enforce the request. The next time he came she did so, assuring him it was by her guardian's desire; "Who, from motives of delicacy, had permitted her to solicit as a favour, what he could himself make a demand." Lord Frederick reddened with anger--he loved Miss Milner; but he doubted whether, from the frequent proofs he had experienced of his own inconstancy, he should continue to love--and this interference of her guardian threatened an explanation or a dismission, before he became thoroughly acquainted with his own heart.--Alarmed, confounded, and provoked, he replied, "By heaven, I believe Mr. Dorriforth loves you himself, and it is jealousy that makes him treat me in this manner." "For shame, my Lord!" cried Miss Woodley, who was present, and who trembled with horror at the sacrilegious idea. "Nay, shame to him if he is not in love"--answered his Lordship, "for who but a savage could behold beauty like her's without owning its power?" "Habit," replied Miss Milner, "is every thing--Mr. Dorriforth sees and converses with beauty, but from habit he does not fall in love; as you, my Lord, from habit, so often do." "Then you believe that love is not in my nature?" "No more of it, my Lord, than habit could very soon extinguish." "But I would not have it extinguished--I would rather it should mount to a flame, for I think it a crime to be insensible of the divine blessings love can bestow." "Then you indulge the passion to avoid a sin?--this very motive deters Mr. Dorriforth from that indulgence." "It ought to deter him, for the sake of his oaths--but monastick vows, like those of marriage, were made to be broken--and surely when your guardian looks at you, his wishes"---- "Are never less pure," she replied eagerly, "than those which dwell in the bosom of my _celestial_ guardian." At that instant Dorriforth entered the room. The colour had mounted into Miss Milner's face from the warmth with which she had delivered her opinion, and his accidental entrance at the very moment this praise had been conferred upon him in his absence, heightened the blush to a deep glow on every feature--confusion and earnestness caused even her lips to tremble and her whole frame to shake. "What's the matter?" cried Dorriforth, looking with concern on her discomposure. "A compliment paid by herself to you, Sir," replied Lord Frederick, "has affected your ward in the manner you have seen." "As if she blushed at the untruth," said Dorriforth. "Nay, that is unkind," cried Miss Woodley; "for if you had been here"---- "--I would not have said what I did," replied Miss Milner, "but left him to vindicate himself." "Is it possible that I can want any vindication? Who would think it worth their while to slander so unimportant a person as I am?" "The man who has the charge of Miss Milner," replied Lord Frederick, "derives a consequence from her." "No ill consequence, I hope, my Lord?" said Dorriforth, with a firmness in his voice, and with an eye so fixed, that his antagonist hesitated for a moment in want of a reply--and Miss Milner softly whispering to him, as her guardian turned his head, to avoid an argument, he bowed acquiescence. And then, as if in compliment to her, he changed the subject;--with an air of ridicule he cried, "I wish, Mr. Dorriforth, you would give me absolution of all my sins, for I confess they are many, and manifold." "Hold, my Lord," exclaimed Dorriforth, "do not confess before the ladies, lest, in order to excite their compassion, you should be tempted to accuse yourself of sins you have never yet committed." At this Miss Milner laughed, seemingly so well pleased, that Lord Frederick, with a sarcastic sneer, repeated, "From Abelard it came, And Eloisa still must love the name." Whether from an inattention to the quotation, or from a consciousness it was wholly inapplicable, Dorriforth heard it without one emotion of shame or of anger--while Miss Milner seemed shocked at the implication; her pleasantry was immediately suppressed, and she threw open the sash and held her head out at the window, to conceal the embarrassment these lines had occasioned. The Earl of Elmwood was at that juncture announced--a Catholic nobleman, just come of age, and on the eve of marriage. His visit was to his cousin, Mr. Dorriforth, but as all ceremonious visits were alike received by Dorriforth, Miss Milner, and Mrs. Horton's family, in one common apartment, Lord Elmwood was ushered into this, and of course directed the conversation to a different subject. CHAPTER VI. With an anxious desire that the affection, or acquaintance, between Lord Frederick and Miss Milner might be finally dissolved, her guardian received with infinite satisfaction, overtures of marriage from Sir Edward Ashton. Sir Edward was not young or handsome; old or ugly; but immensely rich, and possessed of qualities that made him worthy of the happiness to which he aspired. He was the man whom Dorriforth would have chosen before any other for the husband of his ward, and his wishes made him sometimes hope, against his cooler judgment, that Sir Edward would not be rejected--he was resolved, at all events, to try the force of his own power in the strongest recommendation of him. Notwithstanding that dissimilarity of opinion which, in almost every instance, subsisted between Miss Milner and her guardian, there was in general the most punctilious observance of good manners from each towards the other--on the part of Dorriforth more especially; for his politeness would sometimes appear even like the result of a system which he had marked out for himself, as the only means to keep his ward restrained within the same limitations. Whenever he addressed her there was an unusual reserve upon his countenance, and more than usual gentleness in the tone of his voice; this appeared the effect of sentiments which her birth and situation inspired, joined to a studied mode of respect, best calculated to enforce the same from her. The wished-for consequence was produced--for though there was an instinctive rectitude in the understanding of Miss Milner that would have taught her, without other instruction, what manners to observe towards her deputed father; yet, from some volatile thought, or some quick sense of feeling, which she had not been accustomed to subdue, she was perpetually on the verge of treating him with levity; but he would immediately recall her recollection by a reserve too awful, and a gentleness too sacred for her to violate. The distinction which both required, was thus, by his skilful management alone, preserved. One morning he took an opportunity, before her and Miss Woodley, to introduce and press the subject of Sir Edward Ashton's hopes. He first spoke warmly in his praise, then plainly said that he believed she possessed the power of making so deserving a man happy to the summit of his wishes. A laugh of ridicule was the only answer; but a sudden frown from Dorriforth having put an end to it, he resumed his usual politeness, and said, "I wish you would shew a better taste, than thus pointedly to disapprove of Sir Edward." "How, Mr. Dorriforth, can you expect me to give proofs of a good taste, when Sir Edward, whom you consider with such high esteem, has given so bad an example of his, in approving me?" Dorriforth wished not to flatter her by a compliment she seemed to have sought for, and for a moment hesitated what answer to make. "Reply, Sir, to that question," she said. "Why then, Madam," returned he, "it is my opinion, that supposing what your humility has advanced be just, yet Sir Edward will not suffer by the suggestion; for in cases where the heart is so immediately concerned, as I believe Sir Edward's to be, taste, or rather reason, has no power to act." "You are in the right, Mr. Dorriforth; this is a proper justification of Sir Edward--and when I fall in love, I beg that you will make the same excuse for me." "Then," said he earnestly, "before your heart is in that state which I have described, exert your reason." "I shall," answered she, "and not consent to marry a man whom I could never love." "Unless your heart is already given away, Miss Milner, what can make you speak with such a degree of certainty?" He thought on Lord Frederick when he said this, and he riveted his eyes upon her as if to penetrate her sentiments, and yet trembled for what he should find there. She blushed, and her looks would have confirmed her guilty, if the unembarrassed and free tone of her voice, more than her words, had not preserved her from that sentence. "No," she replied, "my heart is not given away; and yet I can venture to declare, Sir Edward will never possess an atom of it." "I am sorry, for both your sakes, that these are your sentiments," he replied. "But as your heart is still your own," (and he seemed rejoiced to find it was) "permit me to warn you how you part with a thing so precious--the dangers, the sorrows you hazard in bestowing it, are greater than you may be aware of. The heart once gone, our thoughts, our actions, are no more our own, than that is." He seemed _forcing_ himself to utter all this, and yet broke off as if he could have said much more, if the extreme delicacy of the subject had not prevented him. When he left the room, and she heard the door shut after him, she said, with an inquisitive thoughtfulness, "What can make good people so skilled in all the weaknesses of the bad? Mr. Dorriforth, with all those prudent admonitions, appears rather like a man who has passed his life in the gay world, experienced all its dangerous allurements, all its repentant sorrows; than like one who has lived his whole time secluded in a monastery, or in his own study. Then he speaks with such exquisite sensibility on the subject of love, that he commends the very thing which he attempts to depreciate. I do not think my Lord Frederick would make the passion appear in more pleasing colours by painting its delights, than Mr. Dorriforth could in describing its sorrows--and if he talks to me frequently in this manner, I shall certainly take pity on Lord Frederick, for the sake of his adversary's eloquence." Miss Woodley, who heard the conclusion of this speech with the tenderest concern, cried, "Alas! you then think seriously of Lord Frederick!" "Suppose I do, wherefore that _alas!_ Miss Woodley?" "Because I fear you will never be happy with him." "That is plainly telling me he will not be happy with me." "I do not know--I cannot speak of marriage from experience," answered Miss Woodley, "but I think I can guess what it is." "Nor can I speak of love from experience," replied Miss Milner, "but I think I can guess what it is." "But do not fall in love, my dear," (cried Miss Woodley, with her accustomed simplicity of heart, as if she had been asking a favour that depended upon the will of the person entreated,) "pray do not fall in love without the approbation of your guardian." Her young friend smiled at the inefficacious prayer, but promised to do all she could to oblige her. CHAPTER VII. Sir Edward, not wholly discouraged by the denial with which Dorriforth had, with delicacy, acquainted him, still hoped for a kind reception, and was so often at the house of Mrs. Horton, that Lord Frederick's jealousy was excited, and the tortures he suffered in consequence, convinced him, beyond a doubt, of the sincerity of his affection. Every time he beheld the object of his passion, (for he still continued his visits, though not so frequently as heretofore) he pleaded his cause with such ardour, that Miss Woodley, who was sometimes present, and ever compassionate, could not resist wishing him success. He now unequivocally offered marriage, and entreated that he might lay his proposals before Mr. Dorriforth, but this was positively forbidden. Her reluctance he imputed, however, more to the known partiality of her guardian for the addresses of Sir Edward, than to any motive which depended upon herself; and to Mr. Dorriforth he conceived a greater dislike than ever; believing that through his interposition, in spite of his ward's attachment, he might yet be deprived of her. But Miss Milner declared both to him and to her friend, that love had, at present, gained no influence over her mind. Yet did the watchful Miss Woodley oftentimes hear a sigh escape from her unknown to herself, till she was reminded of it, and then a sudden blush would instantly overspread her face. This seeming struggle with her passion, endeared her more than ever to Miss Woodley, and she would even risk the displeasure of Dorriforth by her compliance with every new pursuit that might amuse the time, which else her friend passed in heaviness of heart. Balls, plays, incessant company, at length roused her guardian from that mildness with which he had been accustomed to treat her. Night after night his sleep had been disturbed by fears for her when abroad; morning after morning it had been broken by the clamour of her return. He therefore gravely said to her one forenoon as he met her accidentally upon the staircase, "I hope, Miss Milner, you pass this evening at home?" Unprepared for the sudden question, she blushed and replied, "Yes."--Though she knew she was engaged to a brilliant assembly, for which her milliner had been consulted a whole week. She, however, flattered herself that what she had said might be excused as a mistake, the lapse of memory, or some other trifling fault, when he should know the truth. The truth was earlier divulged than she expected--for just as dinner was removed, her footman delivered a message to her from her milliner concerning a new dress for the evening--the _present evening_ particularly marked. Her guardian looked astonished. "I thought, Miss Milner, you gave me your word that you would pass this evening at home?" "I mistook--for I had before given my word that I should pass it abroad." "Indeed!" cried he. "Yes, indeed; and I believe it is right that I should keep my first promise; is it not?" "The promise you gave me then, you do not think of any consequence?" "Yes, certainly, if you do." "I do." "And mean, perhaps, to make it of more consequence than it deserves, by being offended." "Whether or not, I _am_ offended--you shall find I am." And he looked so. She caught his piercing eyes--her's were immediately cast down; and she trembled--either with shame or with resentment. Mrs. Horton rose from her seat--moved the decanters and fruit round the table--stirred the fire--and came back to her seat again, before another word was uttered. Nor had this good woman's officious labours taken the least from the awkwardness of the silence, which, as soon as the bustle she had made was over, returned in its full force. At last, Miss Milner rising with alacrity, was preparing to go out of the room, when Dorriforth raised his voice, and in a tone of authority said, "Miss Milner, you shall not leave the house this evening." "Sir!" she exclaimed with a kind of doubt of what she had heard--a surprise, which fixed her hand on the door she had half opened, but which now she shewed herself irresolute whether to open wide in defiance, or to shut submissively. Before she could resolve, he rose from his chair, and said, with a force and warmth she had never heard him use before, "I command you to stay at home this evening." And he walked immediately out of the apartment by another door. Her hand fell motionless from that which she held--she appeared motionless herself--till Mrs. Horton, "Beseeching her not to be uneasy at the treatment she had received," made her tears flow as if her heart was breaking. Miss Woodley would have said something to comfort her, but she had caught the infection, and could not utter a word. It was not from any real cause of grief that she wept; but there was a magnetic quality in tears, which always attracted her's. Mrs. Horton secretly enjoyed this scene, though the real well meaning of her heart, and ease of her conscience, did not suffer her to think so. She, however, declared she had "long prognosticated it would come to this;" and she "only thanked heaven it was no worse." "What could be worse, Madam?" cried Miss Milner; "am not I disappointed of the ball?" "You don't mean to go then?" said Mrs. Horton; "I commend your prudence; and I dare say it is more than your guardian gives you credit for." "Do you think I would go," answered Miss Milner, with an eagerness that for a time suppressed her tears, "in contradiction to his will?" "It is not the first time, I believe, you have acted contrary to that, Miss Milner," replied Mrs. Horton, and affected a tenderness of voice, to soften the harshness of her words. "If you think so, Madam, I see nothing that should prevent me now." And she flung out of the room as if she had resolved to disobey him. This alarmed poor Miss Woodley. "My dear aunt," she cried to Mrs. Horton, "follow and prevail upon Miss Milner to give up her design; she means to be at the ball in opposition to her guardian's will." "Then," said Mrs. Horton, "I'll not be instrumental in detering her--if she does it may be for the best; it may give Mr. Dorriforth a clearer knowledge what means are proper to convert her from evil." "But, my dear Madam, she must be preserved from the evil of disobedience; and as you tempted, you will be the most likely to dissuade her. But if you will not, I must endeavour." Miss Woodley was leaving the room to perform this good work, when Mrs. Horton, in imitation of the example given her by Dorriforth, cried, "Niece, I command you not to stir out of this room this evening." Miss Woodley obediently sat down--and though her thoughts and heart were in the chamber of her friend, she never marked by one impertinent word, or by one line of her face, the restraint she suffered. At the usual hour, Mr. Dorriforth and his ward were summoned to tea:--he entered with a countenance which evinced the remains of anger; his eye gave testimony of his absent thoughts; and though he took up a pamphlet affecting to read, it was plain to discern that he scarcely knew he held it in his hand. Mrs. Horton began to make tea with a mind as intent upon something else as Dorriforth's--she longed for the event of this misunderstanding; and though she wished no ill to Miss Milner, yet with an inclination bent upon seeing something new--without the fatigue of going out of her own house--she was not over scrupulous what that novelty might be. But for fear she should have the imprudence to speak a word upon the subject which employed her thoughts, or even to look as if she thought of it at all; she pinched her lips close together, and cast her eyes on vacancy, lest their significant regards might expose her to detection. And for fear any noise should intercept even the sound of what might happen, she walked across the room more softly than usual, and more softly touched every thing she was obliged to lay her hand on. Miss Woodley thought it her duty to be mute; and now the gingle of a tea spoon was like a deep-toned bell, all was so quiet. Mrs. Horton, too, in the self-approving reflection that she was not in a quarrel or altercation of any kind, felt herself at this moment remarkably peaceful and charitable. Miss Woodley did not recollect _herself_ so, but was so in reality--in her, peace and charity were instinctive virtues, accident could not increase them. The tea had scarce been made, when a servant came with Miss Milner's compliments, and she "did not mean to have any tea." The pamphlet shook in Dorriforth's hand while this message was delivered--he believed her to be dressing for her evening's entertainment, and now studied in what manner he should prevent, or resent her disobedience to his commands. He coughed--drank his tea--endeavoured to talk, but found it difficult--sometimes read--and in this manner near two hours were passed away, when Miss Milner came into the room.--Not dressed for a ball, but as she had risen from dinner. Dorriforth read on, and seemed afraid of looking up, lest he should see what he could not have pardoned. She drew a chair and sat at the table by the side of her delighted friend. After a few minutes' pause, and some little embarrassment on the part of Mrs. Horton, at the disappointment she had to encounter from this unexpected dutiful conduct, she asked Miss Milner, "if she would now have any tea?" She replied, "No, I thank you, Ma'am," in a voice so languid, compared with her usual one, that Dorriforth lifted up his eyes from the book; and seeing her in the same dress that she had worn all the day, turned them hastily away from her again--not with a look of triumph, but of confusion. Whatever he might have suffered if he had seen her decorated, and prepared to bid defiance to his commands, yet even upon that trial, he would not have endured half the painful sensations he now for a moment felt--he felt himself to blame. He feared that he had treated her with too much severity--he admired her condescension, accused himself for having exacted it--he longed to ask her pardon--he did not know how. A cheerful reply from her, to a question of Miss Woodley's, embarrassed him still more--he wished that she had been sullen, he then would have had a temptation, or pretence, to have been sullen too. With all these sentiments crowding fast upon his heart, he still read, or seemed to read, as if he took no notice of what was passing; till a servant came into the room and asked Miss Milner at what time she should want the carriage? to which she replied, "I don't go out to-night." Dorriforth then laid the book out of his hand, and by the time the servant had left the room, thus began: "Miss Milner, I give you, I fear, some unkind proofs of my regard. It is often the ungrateful task of a friend to be troublesome--sometimes unmannerly. Forgive the duties of my office, and believe that no one is half so much concerned if it robs you of any degree of happiness, as I myself am." What he said, he looked with so much sincerity, that had she been burning with rage at his late behaviour, she must have forgiven him, for the regret which he so forcibly exprest. She was going to reply, but found she could not, without accompanying her words with tears, therefore, after the first attempt, she desisted. On this he rose from his chair, and going to her, said, "Once more shew your submission by obeying me a second time to-day. Keep your appointment, and be assured that I shall issue my commands with more circumspection for the future, as I find how strictly they are complied with." Miss Milner, the gay, the vain, the dissipated, the haughty Miss Milner, sunk underneath this kindness, and wept with a gentleness and patience, which did not give more surprise than it gave joy to Dorriforth. He was charmed to find her disposition so tractable--prophesied to himself the future success of his guardianship, and her eternal as well as temporal happiness from this specimen. CHAPTER VIII. Although Dorriforth was the good man that he has been described, there were in his nature shades of evil--there was an obstinacy which he himself, and his friends termed firmness of mind; but had not religion and some opposite virtues weighed heavily in the balance, it would frequently have degenerated into implacable stubbornness. The child of a sister once beloved, who married a young officer against her brother's consent, was at the age of three years left an orphan, destitute of all support but from his uncle's generosity: but though Dorriforth maintained, he would never see him. Miss Milner, whose heart was a receptacle for the unfortunate, no sooner was told the melancholy history of Mr. and Mrs. Rushbrook, the parents of the child, than she longed to behold the innocent inheritor of her guardian's resentment, and took Miss Woodley with her to see the boy. He was at a farm house a few miles from town; and his extreme beauty and engaging manners, wanted not the sorrows to which he had been born, to give him farther recommendation to the kindness of her, who had come to visit him. She looked at him with admiration and pity, and having endeared herself to him by the most affectionate words and caresses, on her bidding him farewell, he cried most pitiously to go along with her. Unused at any time to resist temptations, whether to reprehensible, or to laudable actions, she yielded to his supplications, and having overcome a few scruples of Miss Woodley's, determined to take young Rushbrook to town, and present him to his uncle. This idea was no sooner formed than executed. By making a present to the nurse, she readily gained her consent to part with him for a day or two, and the signs of joy denoted by the child on being put into the carriage, repaid her beforehand for every reproof she might receive from her guardian, for the liberty she had taken. "Besides," said she to Miss Woodley, who had still her fears, "do you not wish his uncle should have a warmer interest in his care than duty?--it is duty alone which induces Mr. Dorriforth to provide for him; but it is proper that affection should have some share in his benevolence--and how, hereafter, will he be so fit an object of the love which compassion excites, as he is at present?" Miss Woodley acquiesced. But before they arrived at their own door it came into Miss Milner's remembrance, that there was a grave sternness in the manners of her guardian when provoked, the recollection of which made her a little apprehensive for what she had done--her friend, who knew him better than she did, was more so. They both became silent as they approached the street where they lived--for Miss Woodley having once represented her fears, and having suppressed them in resignation to Miss Milner's better judgment, would not repeat them--and Miss Milner would not confess they were now troubling her. Just, however, as the coach stopped at the door, she had the forecast and the humility to say, "We will not tell Mr. Dorriforth the child is his nephew, unless he should appear fond, and pleased with him, and then I think we may venture without any danger." This was agreed; and when Dorriforth entered the room just before dinner, poor Harry Rushbrook was introduced as the son of a lady who frequently visited there. The deception passed--his uncle shook hands with him, and at length highly pleased with his engaging manner, and applicable replies, took him on his knee, and kissed him with affection. Miss Milner could scarce restrain the joy it gave her; but unluckily, Dorriforth said soon after to the child, "And now tell me your name." "Harry Rushbrook," replied he, with force and clearness of voice. Dorriforth was holding him fondly round the waist as he stood with his feet upon his knees; and at this reply he did not _throw_ him from him--but he removed his hands, which had supported him, so suddenly, that the child, to prevent falling on the floor, threw himself about his uncle's neck. Miss Milner and Miss Woodley turned aside to conceal their tears. "I had like to have been down," cried Harry, fearing no other danger. But his uncle took hold of each hand which had twined around him, and placed him immediately on the ground. The dinner being that instant served, he gave no greater marks of his resentment than calling for his hat, and walking instantly out of the house. Miss Milner cried for anger; yet she did not shew less kindness to the object of this vexatious circumstance: she held him in her arms while she sat at table, and repeatedly said to him, (though he had not the sense to thank her) "That she would always be his friend." The first emotions of resentment against Dorriforth being passed, she returned with her little charge to the farm house, before it was likely his uncle should come back; another instance of obedience, which Miss Woodley was impatient her guardian should know; she therefore enquired where he was, and sent him a note for the sole purpose of acquainting him with it, offering at the same time an apology for what had happened. He returned in the evening seemingly reconciled, nor was a word mentioned of the incident which had occurred in the former part of the day; yet in his countenance remained a perfect remembrance of it, without one trait of compassion for his helpless nephew. CHAPTER IX. There are few things so mortifying to a proud spirit as to suffer by immediate comparison--men can hardly bear it, but to women the punishment is intolerable; and Miss Milner now laboured under this humiliation to a degree which gave her no small inquietude. Miss Fenton, young, of exquisite beauty, elegant manners, gentle disposition, and discreet conduct, was introduced to Miss Milner's acquaintance by her guardian, and frequently, sometimes inadvertently, held up by him as a pattern for her to follow--for when he did not say this in direct terms, it was insinuated by the warmth of his panegyric on those virtues in which Miss Fenton excelled, and in which his ward was obviously deficient. Conscious of her own inferiority in these subjects of her guardian's praise, Miss Milner, instead of being inspired to emulation, was provoked to envy. Not to admire Miss Fenton was impossible--to find one fault with her person or sentiments was equally impossible--and yet to love her was unlikely. That serenity of mind which kept her features in a continual placid form, though enchanting at the first glance, upon a second or third, fatigued the sight for want of variety; and to have seen her distorted with rage, convulsed with mirth, or in deep dejection, had been to her advantage. But her superior soul appeared above those emotions, and there was more inducement to worship her as a saint than to love her as a woman. Yet Dorriforth, whose heart was not formed (at least not educated) for love, regarding her in the light of friendship only, beheld her as the most perfect model for her sex. Lord Frederick on first seeing her was struck with her beauty, and Miss Milner apprehended she had introduced a rival; but he had not seen her three times, before he called her "The most insufferable of Heaven's creatures," and vowed there was more charming variation in the plain features of Miss Woodley. Miss Milner had a heart affectionate to her own sex, even where she saw them in possession of superior charms; but whether from the spirit of contradiction, from feeling herself more than ordinarily offended by her guardian's praise of this lady, or that there was a reserve in Miss Fenton that did not accord with her own frank and ingenuous disposition, so as to engage her esteem, certain it is that she took infinite satisfaction in hearing her beauty and virtues depreciated or turned into ridicule, particularly if Mr. Dorriforth was present. This was painful to him upon many accounts; perhaps an anxiety for his ward's conduct was not among the least; and whenever the circumstance occurred, he could with difficulty restrain his anger. Miss Fenton was not only a person whose amiable qualities he admired, but she was soon to be allied to him by her marriage with his nearest relation, Lord Elmwood, a young nobleman whom he sincerely loved. Lord Elmwood had discovered all that beauty in Miss Fenton which every common observer could not but see. The charms of her mind and of her fortune had been pointed out by his tutor; and the utility of the marriage, in perfect submission to his precepts, he never permitted himself to question. This preceptor held with a magisterial power the government of his pupil's passions; nay, governed them so entirely, that no one could perceive (nor did the young Lord himself know) that he had any. This rigid monitor and friend was a Mr. Sandford, bred a Jesuit in the same college at which Dorriforth had since been educated, but before his time the order was compelled to take another name. Sandford had been the tutor of Dorriforth as well as of his cousin, Lord Elmwood, and by this double tie seemed now entailed upon the family. As a Jesuit, he was consequently a man of learning; possessed of steadiness to accomplish the end of any design once meditated, and of sagacity to direct the conduct of men more powerful, but less ingenious, than himself. The young Earl, accustomed in his infancy to fear him as his master, in his youthful manhood received every new indulgence with gratitude, and at length loved him as a father--nor had Dorriforth as yet shaken off similar sensations. Mr. Sandford perfectly knew how to influence the sentiments and sensations of all human kind, but yet he had the forbearance not to "draw all hearts towards him." There were some whose hatred he thought not unworthy of his pious labours; and in that pursuit he was more rapid in his success than even in procuring esteem. It was an enterprise in which he succeeded with Miss Milner even beyond his most sanguine wish. She had been educated at an English boarding school, and had no idea of the superior and subordinate state of characters in a foreign seminary--besides, as a woman, she was privileged to say any thing she pleased; and as a beautiful woman, she had a right to expect that whatever she pleased to say, should be admired. Sandford knew the hearts of women, as well as those of men, though he had passed little of his time in their society--he saw Miss Milner's heart at the first view of her person; and beholding in that little circumference a weight of folly that he wished to eradicate, he began to toil in the vineyard, eagerly courting her detestation of him, in the hope he could also make her abominate herself. In the mortifications of slight he was expert; and being a man of talents, whom all companies, especially her friends, respected, he did not begin by wasting that reverence so highly valued upon ineffectual remonstrances, of which he could foresee the reception, but wakened her attention by his neglect of her. He spoke of her in her presence as of an indifferent person, sometimes forgetting even to name her when the subject required it; then would ask her pardon, and say that he "Really did not recollect her," with such seeming sorrow for his fault, that she could not think the offence intended, and of course felt the affront more acutely. While, with every other person she was the principle, the cause upon whom a whole party depended for conversation, cards, musick, or dancing, with Mr. Sandford she found that she was of no importance. Sometimes she tried to consider this disregard of her as merely the effect of ill-breeding; but he was not an ill-bred man: he was a gentleman by birth, and one who had kept the best company--a man of sense and learning. "And such a man slights me without knowing it," she said--for she had not dived so deeply into the powers of simulation, as to suspect that such careless manners were the result of art. This behaviour of Mr. Sandford had its desired effect--it humbled her in her own opinion more than a thousand sermons would have done preached on the vanity of youth and beauty. She felt an inward shame at the insignificance of these qualities that she never knew before, and would have been cured of all her pride, had she not possessed a degree of spirit beyond the generality of her sex--such a degree as even Mr. Sandford, with all his penetration, did not expect. She determined to resent his treatment; and, entering the lists as his declared enemy, give to the world a reason why he did not acknowledge her sovereignty, as well as the rest of her devoted subjects. She now commenced hostilities against all his arguments, his learning, and his favourite axioms; and by a happy talent of ridicule, in want of other weapons for this warfare, she threw in the way of the holy Father as great trials of his patience, as any that his order could have substituted in penance. Many things he bore like a martyr--at others, his fortitude would forsake him, and he would call on her guardian, his former pupil, to interpose with his authority: she would then declare that she only had acted thus "to try the good man's temper, and that if he had combated with his fretfulness a few moments longer, she would have acknowledged his claim to canonization; but that having yielded to the sallies of his anger, he must now go through numerous other probations." If Miss Fenton was admired by Dorriforth, by Sandford she was adored--and, instead of placing her as an example to Miss Milner, he spoke of her as of one endowed beyond Miss Milner's power of imitation. Often, with a shake of his head and a sigh, would he say, "No; I am not so hard upon you as your guardian: I only desire you to love Miss Fenton; to resemble her, I believe, is above your ability." This was too much to bear composedly--and poor Miss Woodley, who was generally a witness of these controversies, felt a degree of sorrow at every sentence which like the foregoing chagrined and distressed her friend. Yet as she suffered too for Mr. Sandford, the joy of her friend's reply was abated by the uneasiness it gave to _him._ But Mrs. Horton felt for none but the right reverend priest; and often did she feel so violently interested in his cause, that she could not refrain giving an answer herself in his behalf--thus doing the duty of an adversary with all the zeal of an advocate. CHAPTER X. Mr. Sandford finding his friend Dorriforth frequently perplexed in the management of his ward, and he himself thinking her incorrigible, gave his counsel, that a suitable match should be immediately sought out for her, and the care of so dangerous a person given into other hands. Dorriforth acknowledged the propriety of this advice, but lamented the difficulty of pleasing his ward as to the quality of her lover; for she had refused, besides Sir Edward Ashton, many others of equal pretensions. "Depend upon it then," cried Sandford, "that her affections are engaged; and it is proper that you should know to whom." Dorriforth thought he did know, and mentioned Lord Frederick; but said that he had no farther authority for the supposition than what his observation had given him, for that every explanation both upon his and her side had been evaded. "Take her then," cried Sandford, "into the country, and if Lord Frederick should not follow, there is an end of your suspicions." "I shall not easily prevail upon Miss Milner to leave town," replied he, "while it is in the highest fashion." "You can but try," returned Sandford; "and if you should not succeed now, at least fix the time you mean to go during the autumn, and be firm to your determination." "But in the autumn," replied Dorriforth, "Lord Frederick will of course be in the country; and as his uncle's estate is near our residence, he will not then so evidently follow her, as he would if I could induce her to go now." It was agreed the attempt should be made. Instead of receiving this abrupt proposal with uneasiness, Miss Milner, to the surprise of all present, immediately consented; and gave her guardian an opportunity of saying several of the kindest and politest things upon her ready compliance. "A token of approbation from you, Mr. Dorriforth," returned she, "I always considered with high estimation--but your commendations are now become infinitely superior in value by their scarcity; for I do not believe that since Miss Fenton and Mr. Sandford came to town, I have received one testimony of your esteem." Had these words been uttered with pleasantry, they might have passed without observation; but at the conclusion of the period, resentment flew to Miss Milner's face, and she darted a piercing look at Mr. Sandford, which more pointedly expressed that she was angry with him, than if she had spoken volumes in her usual strain of raillery. Dorriforth was confused--but the concern which she had so plainly evinced for his good opinion throughout all that she had been saying, silenced any rebuke he might else have given her, for this unwarrantable charge against his friend. Mrs. Horton was shocked at the irreverent manner in which Mr. Sandford was treated--and Miss Woodley turned to him with a benevolent smile upon her face, hoping to set him an example of the manner in which he should receive the reproach. Her good wishes did not succeed--yet he was perfectly unruffled, and replied with coolness, "The air of the country has affected the lady already--but it is a comfortable thing," continued he, "that in the variety of humours to which some women are exposed, they cannot be uniform even in deceit." "Deceit!" cried Miss Milner, "in what am I deceitful? did I ever pretend that I had an esteem for you?" "That would not have been deceit, Madam, but merely good manners." "I never, Mr. Sandford, sacrificed truth to politeness." "Except when the country has been proposed, and you thought it politeness to appear satisfied." "And I _was_ satisfied, till I recollected that you might probably be of the party--then, every grove was changed into a wilderness, every rivulet into a stagnated pool, and every singing bird into a croaking raven." "A very poetical description," returned he calmly. "But, Miss Milner, you need not have had any apprehensions of _my_ company in the country, for I understand the seat to which your guardian means to go, belongs to you; and you may depend upon it, Madam, that I shall never enter a house in which you are the mistress." "Nor any house, I am certain, Mr. Sandford, but in which you are yourself the master." "What do you mean, Madam? (and for the first time he elevated his voice,) am I the master here?" "Your servants," replied she, looking at the company, "will not tell you so; but I do." "You condescend, Mr. Sandford," cried Mrs. Horton, "in talking so much to a young heedless woman; but I know you do it for her good." "Well, Miss Milner," cried Dorriforth, (and the most cutting thing he could say,) "since I find my proposal of the country has put you out of humour, I shall mention it no more." With all that quantity of resentment, anger, or rage, which sometimes boiled in the veins of Miss Milner, she was yet never wanting in that respect towards her guardian, which with-held her from ever uttering one angry sentence, directed immediately to him; and a severe word of his, instead of exasperating, was sure to subdue her. This was the case at present--his words wounded her to the heart, but she had not the asperity to reply to them as she thought they merited, and she burst into tears. Dorriforth, instead of being concerned, as he usually was at seeing her uneasy, appeared on the present occasion provoked. He thought her weeping was a new reproach to his friend Mr. Sandford, and that to suffer himself to be moved by it, would be a tacit condemnation of his friend's conduct. She understood his thoughts, and getting the better of her tears, apologised for her weakness; adding, "She could never bear with indifference an unjust accusation." "To prove that mine was unjust, Madam," replied Dorriforth; "be prepared to quit London, without any marks of regret, in a few days." She bowed assent; the necessary preparations were agreed upon; and while with apparent satisfaction she adjusted the plan of her journey, (like those who behave well, not so much to please themselves as to vex their enemies,) she secretly triumphed in the mortification she hoped that Mr. Sandford would receive from her obedient behaviour. The news of this intended journey was of course soon made public. There is a secret charm in being pitied, when the misfortune is but ideal; and Miss Milner found infinite gratification in being told, "That her's was a cruel case, and that it was unjust and barbarous to force so much beauty into concealment while London was filled with her admirers; who, like her, would languish in consequence of her solitude." These things, and a thousand such, a thousand times repeated, she still listened to with pleasure; yet preserved the constancy not to shrink from her resolution of submitting. Those involuntary sighs, however, that Miss Woodley had long ago observed, became still more frequent; and a tear half starting in her eye was an additional subject of her friend's observation. Yet though Miss Milner at those times was softened into melancholy, she by no means appeared unhappy. Her friend was acquainted with love only by name; yet she was confirmed from these increased symptoms, in what she before only suspected, that _love_ must be the foundation of her care. "Her senses have been captivated by the person and accomplishments of Lord Frederick," said Miss Woodley to herself, "but her understanding compels her to see his faults, and reproaches her passion.--And, oh!" cried she, "could her guardian and Mr. Sandford know of this conflict, how much would they have to admire; how little to condemn!" With such friendly thoughts, and with the purest intentions, Miss Woodley did not fail to give both gentlemen reason to believe, a contention of this nature was the actual state of Miss Milner's mind. Dorriforth was affected at the description, and Sandford urged more than ever the necessity of leaving town. In a few days they departed; Mrs. Horton, Miss Woodley, Miss Milner, and Mr. Dorriforth, accompanied by Miss Fenton, whom Miss Milner, knowing it to be the wish of her guardian, invited, for three months before her marriage, to her country seat. Elmwood House, or rather Castle, the seat of Lord Elmwood, was only a few miles distant from this residence, and he was expected to pass great part of the summer there, with his tutor, Mr. Sandford. In the neighbourhood was also (as it has been already said) an estate belonging to an uncle of Lord Frederick's, and most of the party suspected they should soon see him on a visit there. To that expectation they in great measure attributed Miss Milner's visible content. CHAPTER XI. With this party Miss Milner arrived at her country house, and for near six weeks, all around was the picture of tranquillity; her satisfaction was as evident as every other person's; and all severe admonition being at this time unnecessary, either to exhort her to her duty, or to warn her against her folly, she was even in perfect good humour with Miss Fenton, and added friendship to hospitality. Mr. Sandford, who came with Lord Elmwood to the neighbouring seat, about a week after the arrival of Miss Milner at her's, was so scrupulously exact in the observance of his word, "_Never to enter a house of Miss Milner's,_" that he would not even call upon his friend Dorriforth there--but in their walks, and at Lord Elmwood's, the two parties would occasionally join, and of course Sandford and she at those times met--yet so distant was the reserve on either side, that not a single word upon any occasion was ever exchanged between them. Miss Milner did not like Mr. Sandford; yet as there was no cause of inveterate rancour, admiring him too as a man who meant well, and being besides of a most forgiving temper, she frequently felt concerned that he did not speak to her, although it had been to find fault as usual--and one morning as they were all, after a long ramble, drawing towards her house, where Lord Elmwood was invited to dine, she could not restrain dropping a tear at seeing Sandford turn back and wish them a "Good day." But though she had the generosity to forgive an affront, she had not the humility to make a concession; and she foresaw that nothing less than some very humble atonement on her part would prevail upon the haughty priest to be reconciled. Dorriforth saw her concern upon this last trifling occasion with a secret pleasure, and an admiration that she had never before excited. She once insinuated to him to be a mediator between them; but before any accommodation could take place, the peace and composure of their abode were disturbed by the arrival of Sir Edward Ashton at Lord Elmwood's, where it appeared as if he had been invited in order to pursue his matrimonial plan. At a dinner given by Lord Elmwood, Sir Edward was announced as an unexpected visitor; Miss Milner did not suppose him such, and she turned pale when his name was uttered. Dorriforth fixed his eyes upon her with some tokens of compassion, while Sandford seemed to exult, and by his repeated "Welcomes" to the Baronet, gave proofs how much he was rejoiced to see him. All the declining enmity of Miss Milner was renewed at this behaviour, and suspecting Sandford as the instigator of the visit, she could not overcome her displeasure, but gave way to it in a manner she thought the most mortifying. Sir Edward, in the course of conversation, enquired "What neighbours were in the country;" and she, with an appearance of high satisfaction, named Lord Frederick Lawnly as being hourly expected at his uncle's. The colour spread over Sir Edward's face--Dorriforth was confounded--and Mr. Sandford looked enraged. "Did Lord Frederick tell _you_ he should be down?" Sandford asked of Dorriforth. To which he replied, "No." "But I hope, Mr. Sandford, you will permit _me_ to know?" said Miss Milner. For as she now meant to torment him by what she said, she no longer constrained herself to silence--and as he harboured the same kind intention towards her, he had no longer any objection to make a reply, and therefore answered, "No, madam, if it depended upon my permission, you should _not_ know." "Not _any thing_, Sir, I dare say; you would keep me in utter ignorance." "I would." "From a self-interested motive, Mr. Sandford--that I might have a greater respect for you." Some of the company laughed--Mrs. Horton coughed--Miss Woodley blushed--Lord Elmwood sneered--Dorriforth frowned--and Miss Fenton looked just as she did before. The conversation was changed as soon as possible, and early in the evening the party from Milner Lodge returned home. Miss Milner had scarce left her dressing room, where she had been taking off some part of her dress, when Dorriforth's servant came to acquaint her that his master was alone in his study, and begged to speak with her. She felt herself tremble--she immediately experienced a consciousness that she had not acted properly at Lord Elmwood's; for she felt a presentiment that her guardian was going to upbraid her, and her heart whispered that he had never yet reproached her without a cause. Miss Woodley just then entered her apartment, and she found herself so much a coward, as to propose that she should go with her, and aid her with a word or two occasionally in her excuse. "What you, my dear," returned Miss Woodley, "who not three hours ago had the courage to vindicate your own cause before a whole company, of whom many were your adversaries; do _you_ want an advocate before your guardian alone, who has ever treated you with tenderness?" "It is that very tenderness which frightens me; which intimidates, and strikes me dumb. Is it possible I can return impertinence to the language and manners which Mr. Dorriforth uses? and as I am debarred from that resource, what can I do but stand before him like a guilty creature, acknowledging my faults." She again entreated her friend to go with her; but on a positive refusal, from the impropriety of such an intrusion, she was obliged at length to go by herself. How much does the difference of exterior circumstances influence not only the manners, but even the persons of some people! Miss Milner in Lord Elmwood's drawing room, surrounded by listeners, by admirers, (for even her enemies could not look at her without admiration) animated with approbation and applause--and Miss Milner, with no giddy observer to give her actions a false éclat, destitute of all but her own understanding, (which secretly condemns her) upon the point of receiving censure from her guardian and friend, are two different beings. Though still beautiful beyond description, she does not look even in person the same. In the last-mentioned situation, she was shorter in stature than in the former--she was paler--she was thinner--and a very different contour presided over her whole air, and all her features. When she arrived at the door of the study, she opened it with a trepidation she could hardly account for, and entered to Dorriforth the altered woman she has been represented. His heart had taken the most decided part against her, and his face had assumed the most severe aspect of reproach; but her appearance gave an instantaneous change to his whole mind, and countenance. She halted, as if she feared to approach--he hesitated, as if he knew not how to speak. Instead of the anger with which he was prepared to begin, his voice involuntarily softened, and without knowing what he said, he began, "My dear Miss Milner."-- She expected he was angry, and in her confusion his gentleness was lost upon her. She imagined that what he said might be censure, and she continued to tremble, though he repeatedly assured her, that he meant only to advise, not upbraid her. "For as to all those little disputes between Mr. Sandford and you," said he, "I should be partial if I blamed you more than him--indeed, when you take the liberty to condemn him, his character makes the freedom appear in a more serious light than when he complains of you--and yet, if he provokes your retorts, he alone must answer for them; nor will I undertake to decide betwixt you. But I have a question to ask you, and to which I require a serious and unequivocal answer. Do you expect Lord Frederick in the country?" Without hesitation she replied, "I do." "One more question I have to ask, madam, and to which I expect a reply equally unreserved. Is Lord Frederick the man you approve for your husband?" Upon this close interrogation she discovered an embarrassment, beyond any she had ever yet betrayed, and faintly replied, "No, he is not." "Your words tell me one thing," answered Dorriforth, "but your looks declare another--which am I to believe?" "Which you please," was her answer, while she discovered an insulted dignity, that astonished, without convincing him. "But then why encourage him to follow you hither, Miss Milner?" "Why commit a thousand follies (she replied in tears) every hour of my life?" "You then promote the hopes of Lord Frederick without one serious intention of completing them? This is a conduct against which it is my duty to guard you, and you shall no longer deceive either him or yourself. The moment he arrives, it is my resolution that you refuse to see him, or consent to become his wife." In answer to the alternative thus offered, she appeared averse to both propositions; and yet came to no explanation why; but left her guardian at the end of the conference as much at a loss to decide upon her true sentiments, as he was before he had thus seriously requested he might be informed of them; but having stedfastly taken the resolution which he had just communicated, he found that resolution a certain relief to his mind. CHAPTER XII. Sir Edward Ashton, though not invited by Miss Milner, yet frequently did himself the honour to visit her at her house; sometimes he accompanied Lord Elmwood, at other times he came to see Dorriforth alone, who generally introduced him to the ladies. But Sir Edward was either so unwilling to give pain to the object of his love, or so intimidated by her frowns, that he seldom addressed her with a single word, except the usual compliments at entering, and retiring. This apprehension of offending, without one hope of pleasing, had the most awkward effect upon the manners of the worthy Baronet; and his endeavours to insinuate himself into the affections of the woman he loved, merely by not giving her offence either in speaking to her or looking at her, formed a character so whimsical, that it frequently forced a smile from Miss Milner, though his very name had often power to throw a gloom over her face: she looked upon him as the cause of her being hurried to the election of a lover, before her own mind could well direct her where to fix. Besides, his pursuit was troublesome, while it was no triumph to her vanity, which by the addresses of Lord Frederick, was in the highest manner gratified. His Lordship now arrives in the country, and calls one morning at Miss Milner's; her guardian sees his carriage coming up the avenue, and gives orders to the servants, to say their lady is not at home, but that Mr. Dorriforth is: Lord Frederick leaves his compliments and goes away. The ladies all observed his carriage and servants. Miss Milner flew to her glass, adjusted her dress, and in her looks expressed every sign of palpitation--but in vain she keeps her eye fixed upon the door of the apartment; no Lord Frederick appears. After some minutes of expectation, the door opens and her guardian comes in;--she was disappointed; he perceived that she was, and he looked at her with a most serious face;--she immediately called to mind the assurance he had given her, "That her acquaintance with Lord Frederick in its then improper state should not continue," and between chagrin and confusion, she was at a loss how to behave. Though the ladies were all present, Dorriforth said, without the smallest reserve, "Perhaps, Miss Milner, you may think I have taken an unwarrantable liberty, in giving orders to your servants to deny you to Lord Frederick; but until his Lordship and I have had a private conference, or you condescend to declare your sentiments more fully in regard to his visits, I think it my duty to put an end to them." "You will always perform your duty, Mr. Dorriforth, I have no doubt, whether I concur or not." "Yet believe me, madam, I should perform it more cheerfully, if I could hope that it was sanctioned by your inclinations." "I am not mistress of my inclinations, Sir, or they should conform to yours." "Place them under my direction, and I will answer for it they will." A servant came in--"Lord Frederick is returned, Sir, and says he should be glad to see you." "Shew him into the study," cried Dorriforth hastily, and rising from his chair, left the room. "I hope they won't quarrel," said Mrs. Horton, meaning, that she thought they would. "I am sorry to see you so uneasy, Miss Milner," said Miss Fenton, with perfect unconcern. As the badness of the weather had prevented their usual morning's exercise, the ladies were employed at their needles till the dinner bell called them away. "Do you think Lord Frederick is gone?" then whispered Miss Milner to Miss Woodley.--"I think not," she replied.--"Go ask of the servants, dear creature." And Miss Woodley went out of the room. She soon returned and said, apart, "He is now getting into his chariot; I saw him pass in violent haste through the hall; he seemed to fly." "Ladies, the dinner is waiting," cried Mrs. Horton, and they repaired to the dining room, where Dorriforth soon after came, and engrossed their whole attention by his disturbed looks, and unusual silence. Before dinner was over, he was, however, more himself, but still he appeared thoughtful and dissatisfied. At the time of their evening walk he excused himself from accompanying them, and they saw him in a distant field with Mr. Sandford in earnest conversation; for Sandford and he often stopped on one spot for a quarter of an hour, as if the interest of the subject had so engaged them, they stood still without knowing it. Lord Elmwood, who had joined the ladies, walked home with them; Dorriforth entered soon after, in a much less gloomy humour than when he went out, and told his relation, that he and the ladies would dine with him the next day if he was disengaged; and it was agreed they should. Still Dorriforth was in some perturbation, but the immediate cause was concealed till the day following, when, about an hour before the company's departure from the Castle, Miss Milner and Miss Woodley were desired, by a servant, to walk into a separate apartment, in which they found Mr. Dorriforth with Mr. Sandford waiting for them. Her guardian made an apology to Miss Milner for the form, the ceremony, of which he was going to make use; but he trusted, the extreme weight which oppressed his mind, lest he should mistake the real sentiments of a person whose happiness depended upon his correct knowledge of them, would plead his excuse. "I know, Miss Milner," continued he, "the world in general allows to unmarried women great latitude in disguising their mind with respect to the man they love. I too, am willing to pardon any little dissimulation that is but consistent with a modesty that becomes every woman upon the subject of marriage. But here, to what point I may limit, or you may extend, this kind of venial deceit, may so widely differ, that it is not impossible for me to remain unacquainted with your sentiments, even after you have revealed them to me. Under this consideration, I wish once more to hear your thoughts in regard to matrimony, and to hear them before one of your own sex, that I may form an opinion by her constructions." To all this serious oration, Miss Milner made no other reply than by turning to Mr. Sandford, and asking, "If he was the person of her own sex, to whose judgment her guardian was to submit his own?" "Madam," cried Sandford angrily, "you are come hither upon serious business." "Any business must be serious to me, Mr. Sandford, in which you are concerned; and if you had called it _sorrowful_, the epithet would have suited as well." "Miss Milner," said her guardian, "I did not bring you here to contend with Mr. Sandford." "Then why, Sir, bring him hither? for where he and I are, there must be contention." "I brought him hither, Madam, or I should rather say, brought you to this house, merely that he might be present on this occasion, and with his discernment relieve me from a suspicion, that my own judgment is neither able to suppress nor to confirm." "Are there any more witnesses you may wish to call in, Sir, to remove your doubts of my veracity? if there are, pray send for them before you begin your interrogations." He shook his head--she continued. "The whole world is welcome to hear what I say, and every different person is welcome to judge me differently." "Dear Miss Milner,"--cried Miss Woodley, with a tone of reproach for the vehemence with which she had spoken. "Perhaps, Miss Milner," said Dorriforth, "you will not now reply to those questions I was going to put?" "Did I ever refuse, Sir," returned she with a self-approving air, "to comply with any request that you have seriously made? Have I ever refused obedience to your commands whenever you thought proper to lay them upon me? If not, you have no right to suppose that I will do so now." He was going to reply, when Mr. Sandford sullenly interrupted him, and making towards the door, cried, "When you come to the point for which you brought me here, send for me again." "Stay now," said Dorriforth. "And Miss Milner," continued he, "I not only entreat, but command you to tell me--have you given your word, or your affections to Lord Frederick Lawnly?" The colour spread over her face, and she replied--"I thought confessions were always to be in secret; however, as I am not a member of your church, I submit to the persecution of a heretic, and I answer--Lord Frederick has neither my word, nor any share in my affections." Sandford, Dorriforth, and Miss Woodley looked at each other with a degree of surprise that for some time kept them silent. At length Dorriforth said, "And it is your firm intention never to become his wife?" To which she answered--"At present it is." "At present! do you suspect you shall change your sentiments?" "Women sometimes do." "But before that change can take place, your acquaintance will be at an end: for it is that which I shall next insist upon, and to which you can have no objection." She replied, "I had rather it should continue." "On what account?" cried Dorriforth. "Because it entertains me." "For shame, for shame!" returned he; "it endangers your character and your happiness. Yet again, do not suffer me to interfere, if the breaking with Lord Frederick can militate against your felicity." "By no means," she answered; "Lord Frederick makes part of my amusement, but could never constitute my felicity." "Miss Woodley," said Dorriforth, "do you comprehend your friend in the same literal and unequivocal sense that I do?" "Certainly I do, Sir." "And pray, Miss Woodley," said he, "were those the sentiments which you have always entertained?" Miss Woodley hesitated--he continued. "Or has this conversation altered them?" She hesitated again, then answered--"This conversation has altered them." "And yet you confide in it!" cried Sandford, looking at her with contempt. "Certainly I do," replied Miss Woodley. "Do not you then, Mr. Sandford?" asked Dorriforth. "I would advise you to act as if I did," replied Sandford. "Then, Miss Milner," said Dorriforth, "you see Lord Frederick no more--and I hope I have your permission to apprize him of this arrangement." "You have, Sir," she replied with a completely unembarrassed countenance and voice. Her friend looked at her as if to discover some lurking wish, adverse to all these protestations, but she could not discern one. Sandford too fixed his penetrating eyes upon her, as if he would look through her soul, but finding it perfectly composed, he cried out, "Why then not write his dismission herself, and save you, Mr. Dorriforth, the trouble of any farther contest with him?" "Indeed, Miss Milner," said Dorriforth, "that would oblige me; for it is with great reluctance that I meet him upon this subject--he was extremely impatient and importunate when he was last with me--he took advantage of my ecclesiastical situation to treat me with a levity and ill breeding, that I could ill have suffered upon any other consideration than a compliance with my duty." "Dictate what you please, Mr. Dorriforth, and I will write it," said she, with a warmth like the most unaffected inclination. "And while you, Sir," she continued, "are so indulgent as not to distress me with the importunities of any gentleman to whom I am averse, I think myself equally bound to rid you of the impertinence of every one to whom you may have objection." "But," answered he, "rest assured I have no material objection to my Lord Frederick, except from that dilemma, in which your acquaintance with him has involved us all; and I should conceive the same against any other man, where the same circumstance occurred. As you have now, however, freely and politely consented to the manner in which it has been proposed that you shall break with him, I will not trouble you a moment longer upon a subject on which I have so frequently explained my wishes, but conclude it by assuring you, that your ready acquiescence has given me the sincerest satisfaction." "I hope, Mr. Sandford," said she, turning to him with a smile, "I have given _you_ satisfaction likewise?" Sandford could not say yes, and was ashamed to say no; he, therefore, made answer only by his looks, which were full of suspicion. She, notwithstanding, made him a very low courtesy. Her guardian then handed her out of the apartment into her coach, which was waiting to take her, Miss Woodley, and himself, home. CHAPTER XIII. Notwithstanding the seeming readiness with which Miss Milner had resigned all farther acquaintance with Lord Frederick, during the short ride home she appeared to have lost great part of her wonted spirits; she was thoughtful, and once sighed heavily. Dorriforth began to fear that she had not only made a sacrifice of her affections, but of her veracity; yet, why she had done so, he could not comprehend. As the carriage moved slowly through a lane between Elmwood Castle and her own house, on casting her eyes out of the window, Miss Milner's countenance was brightened in an instant, and that instant Lord Frederick, on horse-back, was at the coach door, and the coachman stopped. "Oh, Miss Milner," cried he, (with a voice and manner that could give little suspicion of the truth of what he said) "I am overjoyed at the happiness of seeing you, even though it is but an accidental meeting." She was evidently glad to see _him_; but the earnestness with which he spoke, put her upon her guard not to express the like, and she said, in a cool constrained manner, she "Was glad to see his Lordship." The reserve with which she spoke, gave Lord Frederick immediate suspicion who was in the coach with her, and turning his head quickly, he met the stern eye of Dorriforth; upon which, without the smallest salutation, he turned from him again abruptly and rudely. Miss Milner was confused, and Miss Woodley in torture, at this palpable affront, to which Dorriforth alone appeared indifferent. "Go on," said Miss Milner to the footman, "desire the coachman to drive on." "No," cried Lord Frederick, "not till you have told me when I shall see you again." "I will write you word, my Lord," replied she, something alarmed. "You shall have a letter immediately after I get home." As if he guessed what its contents were to be, he cried out with warmth, "Take care, then, Madam, how you treat me in that letter--and you, Mr. Dorriforth," turning to him, "do you take care what it contains; for if it is dictated by you, to you I shall send the answer." Dorriforth, without making any reply, or casting a look at him, put his head out of the window on the opposite side, and called, in a very angry tone, to the coachman, "How dare you not drive on, when your Lady orders you?" The sound of Dorriforth's voice in anger, was to the servants so unusual, that it acted like electricity upon the man, and he drove on at the instant with such rapidity, that Lord Frederick was in a moment left many yards behind. As soon, however, as he recovered from the surprise into which this sudden command had thrown him, he rode with speed after the carriage, and followed it, till it arrived at the door of Miss Milner's house; there, giving himself up to the rage of love, or to rage against Dorriforth for the contempt he had shewn to him, he leaped from his horse when Miss Milner stepped from her carriage, and seizing her hand, entreated her "Not to desert him, in compliance with the injunctions of monkish hypocrisy." Dorriforth heard this, standing silently by, with a manly scorn upon his countenance. Miss Milner struggled to loose her hand, saying, "Excuse me from replying to you now, my Lord." In return, he lifted her hand eagerly to his lips, and began to devour it with kisses; when Dorriforth, with an instantaneous impulse, rushed forward, and struck him a violent blow in the face. Under the force of this assault, and the astonishment it excited, Lord Frederick staggered, and letting fall the hand of Miss Milner, her guardian immediately laid hold of it, and led her into the house. She was terrified beyond description; and with extreme difficulty Mr. Dorriforth conveyed her to her own chamber, without taking her in his arms. When, by the assistance of her maid, he had placed her upon a sofa--covered with shame and confusion for what he had done, he fell upon his knees before her, and earnestly "Entreated her forgiveness for the indelicacy he had been guilty of in her presence." And that he had alarmed her, and had forgot the respect which he thought sacredly her due, seemed the only circumstance which then dwelt upon his thoughts. She felt the indecorum of the posture he had condescended to take, and was shocked. To see her guardian at her feet, struck her with a sense of impropriety, as if she had seen a parent there. All agitation and emotion, she implored him to rise, and, with a thousand protestations, declared, "That she thought the rashness of the action was the highest proof of his regard for her." Miss Woodley now entered; her care being ever employed upon the unfortunate, Lord Frederick had been the object of it: she had waited by his side, and, with every good purpose, had preached patience to him, while he was smarting under the pain, but more under the shame, of his chastisement. At first, his fury threatened a retort upon the servants around him (and who refused his entrance into the house) of the punishment he had received. But, in the certainty of an _amende honorable_, which must hereafter be made, he overcame the many temptations which the moment offered, and re-mounting his horse rode away from the scene of his disgrace. No sooner had Miss Woodley entered the room, and Dorriforth had resigned to her the care of his ward, than he flew to the spot where he had left Lord Frederick, negligent of what might be the event if he still remained there. After enquiring, and being told that he was gone, Dorriforth returned to his own apartment; and with a bosom torn by more excruciating sensations than those which he had given to his adversary. The reflection that struck him first with remorse, as he shut the door upon himself, was:--"I have departed from my character--from the sacred character, and the dignity of my profession and sentiments--I have departed from myself. I am no longer the philosopher, but the ruffian--I have treated with an unpardonable insult a young nobleman, whose only offence was love, and a fond desire to insinuate himself into the favour of his mistress. I must atone for this outrage in whatever manner he may choose; and the law of honour and of justice (though in this one instance contrary to the law of religion) enjoins, that if he demands my life in satisfaction for his wounded feelings, it is his due. Alas! that I could have laid it down this morning, unsullied with a cause for which it will make but inadequate atonement." His next reproach was--"I have offended and filled with horror, a beautiful young woman, whom it was my duty to have protected from those brutal manners, to which I myself have exposed her." Again--"I have drawn upon myself the just upbraidings of my faithful preceptor and friend; of the man in whose judgment it was my delight to be approved--above all, I have drawn upon myself the stings of my conscience." "Where shall I pass this sleepless night?" cried he, walking repeatedly across his chamber; "Can I go to the ladies? I am unworthy of their society. Shall I go and repose my disturbed mind on Sandford? I am ashamed to tell him the cause of my uneasiness. Shall I go to Lord Frederick, and humbling myself before him, beg his forgiveness? He would spurn me for a coward. No"----(and he lifted up his eyes to Heaven) "Thou all great, all wise and omnipotent Being, Thou whom I have most offended, it is to Thee alone that I have recourse in this hour of tribulation, and from Thee alone I solicit comfort. And the confidence in which I now address myself to Thee, encouraged by that long intercourse which religion has effected, repays me amply in this one moment, for the many years of my past life devoted with my best, though imperfect, efforts to thy service." CHAPTER XIV. Although Miss Milner had not foreseen any fatal event resulting from the indignity offered to Lord Frederick, yet she passed a night very different from those to which she had been accustomed. No sooner was she falling into a sleep, than a thousand vague, but distressing, ideas darted across her imagination. Her heart would sometimes whisper to her when she was half asleep, "Lord Frederick is banished from you for ever." She shakes off the uneasiness this idea brings along with it--she then starts, and sees the blow still aimed at him by Dorriforth. No sooner has she driven away this painful image, than she is again awakened by beholding her guardian at her feet sueing for pardon. She sighs, she trembles, and is chilled with terror. Relieved by tears, towards the morning she sinks into a slumber, but waking, finds the same images crowding all together upon her mind: she is doubtful to which to give the preference--one, however, rushes the foremost, and continues so. She knows not the fatal consequence of ruminating, nor why she dwells upon that, more than upon all the rest, but it will give place to none. She rises languid and disordered, and at breakfast, adds fresh pain to Dorriforth by her altered appearance. He had scarce left the room, when an officer waited upon him with a challenge from Lord Frederick. To the message delivered by this gentleman, he replied, "Sir, as a clergyman, more especially of the church of Rome, I know not whether I am not exempt from answering a demand of this kind; but not having had forbearance to avoid an offence, I will not claim an exemption that would only indemnify me from making reparation." "You will then, Sir, meet Lord Frederick at the appointed hour?" said the officer. "I will, Sir; and my immediate care shall be to find a gentleman who will accompany me." The officer withdrew, and when Dorriforth was again alone, he was going once more to reflect, but he durst not. Since yesterday, reflection, for the first time, was become painful to him; and even as he rode the short way to Lord Elmwood's immediately after, he found his own thoughts were so insufferable, that he was obliged to enter into conversation with his servant. Solitude, that formerly charmed him, would, at those moments, have been worse than death. At Lord Elmwood's, he met Sandford in the hall, and the sight of him was no longer welcome--he knew how different the principles which he had just adopted were to those of that reverend friend, and without his complaining, or even suspecting what had happened, his presence was a sufficient reproach. He passed him as hastily as he could, and enquiring for Lord Elmwood, disclosed to him his errand. It was to ask him to be his second;--the young Earl started, and wished to consult his tutor, but that, his kinsman strictly forbade; and having urged his reasons with arguments, which at least _he_ could not refute, he was at length prevailed upon to promise that he would accompany him to the field, which was at the distance only of a few miles, and the parties were to be there at seven on the same evening. As soon as his business with Lord Elmwood was settled, Dorriforth returned home, to make preparations for the event which might ensue from this meeting. He wrote letters to several of his friends, and one to his ward, in writing which, he could with difficulty preserve the usual firmness of his mind. Sandford going into Lord Elmwood's library soon after his relation had left him, expressed his surprise at finding he was gone; upon which that nobleman having answered a few questions, and given a few significant hints that he was entrusted with a secret, frankly confessed, what he had promised to conceal. Sandford, as much as a holy man could be, was enraged at Dorriforth for the cause of the challenge, but was still more enraged at his wickedness in accepting it. He applauded his pupil's virtue in making the discovery, and congratulated himself that he should be the instrument of saving not only his friend's life, but of preventing the scandal of his being engaged in a duel. In the ardour of his designs, he went immediately to Miss Milner's--entered that house which he had so long refused to enter, and at a time when he was upon aggravated bad terms with its owner. He asked for Dorriforth, went hastily into his apartment, and poured upon him a torrent of rebukes. Dorriforth bore all he said with the patience of a devotee, but with the firmness of a man. He owned his fault, but no eloquence could make him recall the promise he had given to repair the injury. Unshaken by the arguments, persuasions, and menaces of Sandford, he gave an additional proof of that inflexibility for which he had been long distinguished--and after a dispute of two hours, they parted, neither of them the better for what either had advanced, but Dorriforth something the worse; his conscience gave testimony to Sandford's opinion, "that he was bound by ties more sacred than worldly honour." But while he owned, he would not yield to the duty. Sandford left him, determined, however, that Lord Elmwood should not be accessory in his guilt, and this he declared; upon which Dorriforth took the resolution of seeking another second. In passing through the house on his return home, Sandford met, by accident, Mrs. Horton, Miss Milner, and the other two ladies returning from a saunter in the garden. Surprised at the sight of Mr. Sandford in her house, Miss Milner would not express that surprise, but going up to him with all the friendly benevolence which in general played about her heart, she took hold of one of his hands, and pressed it with a kindness which told him more forcibly that he was welcome, than if she had made the most elaborate speech to convince him of it. He, however, seemed little touched with her behaviour, and as an excuse for breaking his word, cried, "I beg your pardon, madam, but I was brought hither in my anxiety to prevent murder." "Murder!" exclaimed all the ladies. "Yes," answered he, addressing himself to Miss Fenton, "your betrothed husband is a party concerned; he is going to be second to Mr. Dorriforth, who means this very evening to be killed by my Lord Frederick, or to kill him, in addition to the blow that he gave him last night." Mrs. Horton exclaimed, "if Mr. Dorriforth dies, he dies a martyr." Miss Woodley cried with fervour, "Heaven forbid!" Miss Fenton cried, "dear me!" While Miss Milner, without uttering one word, sunk speechless on the floor. They lifted her up and brought her to the door which entered into the garden. She soon recovered; for the tumult of her mind would not suffer her to remain inactive, and she was rouzed, in spite of her weakness, to endeavour to ward off the impending disaster. In vain, however, she attempted to walk to her guardian's apartment--she sunk as before, and was taken to a settee, while Miss Woodley was dispatched to bring him to her. Informed of the cause of her indisposition, he followed Miss Woodley with a tender anxiety for her health, and with grief and confusion that he had so carelessly endangered it. On his entering the room Sandford beheld the inquietude of his mind, and cried, "Here is your _Guardian_," with a cruel emphasis on the word. He was too much engaged by the sufferings of his ward to reply to Sandford. He placed himself on the settee by her, and with the utmost tenderness, reverence, and pity, entreated her not to be concerned at an accident in which he, and he alone, had been to blame; but which he had no doubt would be accommodated in the most amicable manner. "I have one favour to require of you, Mr. Dorriforth," said she, "and that is, your promise, your solemn promise, which I know is ever sacred, that you will not meet my Lord Frederick." He hesitated. "Oh, Madam," cried Sandford, "he is grown a libertine now, and I would not believe his word, if he were to give it you." "Then, Sir," returned Dorriforth angrily, "you _may_ believe my word, for I will keep that which I gave to _you._ I will give Lord Frederick all the restitution in my power. But my dear Miss Milner, let not this alarm you; we may not find it convenient to meet this many a day; and most probably some fortunate explanation may prevent our meeting at all. If not, reckon but among the many duels that are fought, how few are fatal: and even in that case, how small would be the loss to society, if----" He was proceeding. "I should ever deplore the loss!" cried Miss Milner; "on such an occasion, I could not survive the death of either." "For my part," he replied, "I look upon my life as much forfeited to my Lord Frederick, to whom I have given a high offence, as it might in other instances have been forfeited to the offended laws of the land. Honour, is the law of the polite part of the land; we know it; and when we transgress against it knowingly, we justly incur our punishment. However, Miss Milner, this affair will not be settled immediately, and I have no doubt, but that all will be as you could wish. Do you think I should appear thus easy," added he with a smile, "if I were going to be shot at by my Lord Frederick?" "Very well!" cried Sandford, with a look that evinced he was better informed. "You will stay within then, all this day?" said Miss Milner. "I am engaged to dinner," he replied; "it is unlucky--I am sorry for it--but I'll be at home early in the evening." "Stained with human blood," cried Sandford, "or yourself a corpse." The ladies lifted up their hands!--Miss Milner rose from her seat, and threw herself at her guardian's feet. "You kneeled to me last night, I now kneel to you," (she cried) "kneel, never desiring to rise again, if you persist in your intention. I am weak, I am volatile, I am indiscreet, but I have a heart from which some impressions can never--oh! never, be erased." He endeavoured to raise her, she persisted to kneel--and here the affright, the terror, the anguish, she endured, discovered to her, her own sentiments--which, till that moment, she had doubted--and she continued, "I no longer pretend to conceal my passion--I love Lord Frederick Lawnly." Her guardian started. "Yes, to my shame I love him:" (cried she, all emotion) "I meant to have struggled with the weakness, because I supposed it would be displeasing to you--but apprehension for his safety has taken away every power of restraint, and I beseech you to spare his life." "This is exactly what I thought," cried Sandford, with an air of triumph. "Good heaven!" cried Miss Woodley. "But it is very natural," said Mrs. Horton. "I own," said Dorriforth, (struck with amaze, and now taking her from his feet with a force that she could not resist) "I own, Miss Milner, I am greatly affected and wounded at this contradiction in your character."-- "But did not I say so?" cried Sandford, interrupting him. "However," continued he, "you may take my word, though you have deceived me in your's, that Lord Frederick's life is secure. For your sake, I would not endanger it for the universe. But let this be a warning to you"---- He was proceeding with the most austere looks, and pointed language, when observing the shame, and the self-reproach that agitated her mind, he divested himself in great measure of his resentment, and said, mildly, "Let this be a warning to you, how you deal in future with the friends who wish you well. You have hurried me into a mistake that might have cost me my life, or the life of the man you love; and thus exposed _you_ to misery, more bitter than death." "I am not worthy of your friendship, Mr. Dorriforth," said she, sobbing with grief, "and from this moment forsake me." "No, Madam, not in the moment you first discover to me, how I can make you happy." The conversation appearing now to become of a nature in which the rest of the company could have no share whatever, they were all, except Mr. Sandford, retiring; when Miss Milner called Miss Woodley back, saying, "Stay you with me; I was never so unfit to be left without your friendship." "Perhaps at present you can dispense with mine?" said Dorriforth. She made no answer. He then, once more assured her Lord Frederick's life was safe, and was quitting the room--but when he recollected in what humiliation he had left her, turning towards her as he opened the door, he added, "And be assured, Madam, that my esteem for you, shall be _the same as ever._" Sandford, as he followed him, bowed, and repeated the same words--"And, Madam, be assured that my esteem for you, shall be the same as ever." CHAPTER XV. This taunting reproof from Sandford made little impression upon Miss Milner, whose thoughts were all fixed on a subject of much more importance than the opinion which he entertained of her. She threw her arms about her friend the moment they were left alone, and asked, with anxiety, "What she thought of her behaviour?" Miss Woodley, who could not approve of the duplicity she had betrayed, still wished to reconcile her as much as possible to her own conduct, and replied, she "Highly commended the frankness with which she had, at last, acknowledged her sentiments." "Frankness!" cried Miss Milner, starting. "Frankness, my dear Miss Woodley! What you have just now heard me say, is all a falsehood." "How, Miss Milner!" "Oh, Miss Woodley," returned she, sobbing upon her bosom, "pity the agonies of my heart, my heart, by nature sincere, when such are the fatal propensities it cherishes, that I must submit to the grossest falsehoods rather than reveal the truth." "What can you mean?" cried Miss Woodley, with the strongest amazement in her face. "Do you suppose I love Lord Frederick? Do you suppose I _can_ love him? Oh fly, and prevent my guardian from telling him such an untruth." "What can you mean?" repeated Miss Woodley; "I protest you terrify me." For this inconsistency in the behaviour of Miss Milner, appeared as if her senses had been deranged. "Fly," she resumed, "and prevent the inevitable ill consequence which will ensue, if Lord Frederick should be told this falsehood. It will involve us all in greater disquiet than we suffer at present." "Then what has influenced you, my dear Miss Milner?" "That which impels all my actions--an unsurmountable instinct--a fatality, that will for ever render me the most miserable of human beings; and yet you, even you, my dear Miss Woodley, will not pity me." Miss Woodley pressed her closely in her arms, and vowed, "That while she was unhappy, from whatever cause, she still would pity her." "Go to Mr. Dorriforth then, and prevent him from imposing upon Lord Frederick." "But that imposition is the only means of preventing the duel," replied Miss Woodley. "The moment I have told him that your affection was but counterfeited, he will no longer refuse accepting the challenge." "Then at all events I am undone," exclaimed Miss Milner, "for the duel is horrible, even beyond every thing else." "How so?" returned Miss Woodley, "since you have declared you do not care for Lord Frederick?" "But are you so blind," returned Miss Milner with a degree of madness in her looks, "as to believe I do not care for Mr. Dorriforth? Oh! Miss Woodley! I love him with all the passion of a mistress, and with all the tenderness of a wife." Miss Woodley at this sentence sat down--it was on a chair that was close to her--her feet could not have taken her to any other. She trembled--she was white as ashes, and deprived of speech. Miss Milner, taking her by the hand, said, "I know what you feel--I know what you think of me--and how much you hate and despise me. But Heaven is witness to all my struggles--nor would I, even to myself, acknowledge the shameless prepossession, till forced by a sense of his danger"---- "Silence," cried Miss Woodley, struck with horror. "And even now," resumed Miss Milner, "have I not concealed it from all but you, by plunging myself into a new difficulty, from which I know not how I shall be extricated? And do I entertain a hope? No, Miss Woodley, nor ever will. But suffer me to own my folly to you--to entreat your soothing friendship to free me from my weakness. And, oh! give me your advice, to deliver me from the difficulties which surround me." Miss Woodley was still pale, and still silent. Education, is called second nature; in the strict (but not enlarged) education of Miss Woodley, it was more powerful than the first--and the violation of oaths, persons, or things consecrated to Heaven, was, in her opinion, if not the most enormous, yet among the most terrific in the catalogue of crimes. Miss Milner had lived so long in a family who had imbibed those opinions, that she was convinced of their existence; nay, her own reason told her that solemn vows of every kind, ought to be sacred; and the more she respected her guardian's understanding, the less did she call in question his religious tenets--in esteeming him, she esteemed all his notions; and among the rest, venerated those of his religion. Yet that passion, which had unhappily taken possession of her whole soul, would not have been inspired, had there not subsisted an early difference, in their systems of divine faith. Had she been early taught what were the sacred functions of a Roman ecclesiastic, though all her esteem, all her admiration, had been attracted by the qualities and accomplishments of her guardian, yet education, would have given such a prohibition to her love, that she would have been precluded from it, as by that barrier which divides a sister from a brother. This, unfortunately, was not the case; and Miss Milner loved Dorriforth without one conscious check to tell her she was wrong, except that which convinced her--her love would be avoided by him with detestation, and with horror. Miss Woodley, something recovered from her first surprise, and sufferings--for never did her susceptible mind suffer so exquisitely--amidst all her grief and abhorrence, felt that pity was still predominant--and reconciled to the faults of Miss Milner by her misery, she once more looked at her with friendship, and asked, "What she could do to render her less unhappy?" "Make me forget," replied Miss Milner, "every moment of my life since I first saw you--that moment was teeming with a weight of cares, under which I must labour till my death." "And even in death," replied Miss Woodley, "do not hope to shake them off. If unrepented in this world"---- She was proceeding--but the anxiety her friend endured, would not suffer her to be free from the apprehension, that, notwithstanding the positive assurance of her guardian, if he and Lord Frederick should meet, the duel might still take place; she therefore rang the bell and enquired if Mr. Dorriforth was still at home?--the answer was--"He had rode out. You remember," said Miss Woodley, "he told you he should dine from home." This did not, however, dismiss her fears, and she dispatched two servants different ways in pursuit of him, acquainting them with her suspicions, and charging them to prevent the duel. Sandford had also taken his precautions; but though he knew the time, he did not know the exact place of their appointment, for that Lord Elmwood had forgot to enquire. The excessive alarm which Miss Milner discovered upon this occasion, was imputed by the servants, and by others who were witnesses of it, to her affection for Lord Frederick; while none but Miss Woodley knew, or had the most distant suspicion of the real cause. Mrs. Horton and Miss Fenton, who were sitting together expatiating on the duplicity of their own sex in the instance just before them, had, notwithstanding the interest of the discourse, a longing desire to break it off; for they were impatient to see this poor frail being whom they were loading with their censure. They longed to see if she would have the confidence to look them in the face: them, to whom she had so often protested, that she had not the smallest attachment to Lord Frederick, but from motives of vanity. These ladies heard with infinite satisfaction that dinner had been served, but met Miss Milner at the table with a less degree of pleasure than they had expected; for her mind was so totally abstracted from any consideration of _them_, that they could not discern a single blush, or confused glance, which their presence occasioned. No, she had before them divulged nothing of which she was ashamed; she was only ashamed that what she had said was not true. In the bosom of Miss Woodley alone was that secret entrusted which could call a blush into her face, and before her, she _did_ feel confusion--before the gentle friend, to whom she had till this time communicated all her faults without embarrassment, she now cast down her eyes in shame. Soon after the dinner was removed, Lord Elmwood entered; and that gallant young nobleman declared--"Mr. Sandford had used him ill, in not permitting him to accompany his relation; for he feared that Mr. Dorriforth would now throw himself upon the sword of Lord Frederick, without a single friend near to defend him." A rebuke from the eye of Miss Woodley, which from this day had a command over Miss Milner, restrained her from expressing the affright she suffered from this intimation. Miss Fenton replied, "As to that, my Lord, I see no reason why Mr. Dorriforth and Lord Frederick should not now be friends." "Certainly," said Mrs. Horton; "for as soon as my Lord Frederick is made acquainted with Miss Milner's confession, all differences must be reconciled." "What confession?" asked Lord Elmwood. Miss Milner, to avoid hearing a repetition of that which gave her pain even to recollect, rose in order to retire into her own apartment, but was obliged to sit down again, till she received the assistance of Lord Elmwood and her friend, who led her into her dressing room. She reclined upon a sofa there, and though left alone with that friend, a silence followed of half an hour; nor when the conversation began, was the name of Dorriforth once uttered--they were grown cool and considerate since the discovery, and both were equally fearful of naming him. The vanity of the world, the folly of riches, the charms of retirement, and such topics engaged their discourse, but not their thoughts, for near two hours; and the first time the word Dorriforth was spoken, was by a servant, who with alacrity opened the dressing room door, without previously rapping, and cried, "Madam, Mr. Dorriforth." Dorriforth immediately came in, and went eagerly to Miss Milner. Miss Woodley beheld the glow of joy and of guilt upon her face, and did not rise to give him her seat, as was her custom, when she was sitting by his ward and he came to her with intelligence. He therefore stood while he repeated all that had happened in his interview with Lord Frederick. But with her gladness to see her guardian safe, she had forgot to enquire of the safety of his antagonist; of the man whom she had pretended to love so passionately--even smiles of rapture were upon her face, though Dorriforth might be returned from putting him to death. This incongruity of behaviour Miss Woodley observed, and was confounded--but Dorriforth, in whose thoughts a suspicion either of her love for him, or indifference for Lord Frederick, had no place, easily reconciled this inconsistency, and said, "You see by my countenance that all is well, and therefore you smile on me before I tell you what has passed." This brought her to the recollection of her conduct, and now with looks ill constrained, she attempted the expression of an alarm she did not feel. "Nay, I assure you Lord Frederick is safe," he resumed, "and the disgrace of his blow washed entirely away, by a few drops of blood from this arm." And he laid his hand upon his left arm, which rested in his waistcoat as a kind of sling. She cast her eyes there, and seeing where the ball had entered the coat sleeve, she gave an involuntary scream, and sunk upon the sofa. Instead of that affectionate sympathy which Miss Woodley used to exert upon her slightest illness or affliction, she now addressed her in an unpitying tone, and said, "Miss Milner, you have heard Lord Frederick is safe, you have therefore nothing to alarm you." Nor did she run to hold a smelling bottle, or to raise her head. Her guardian seeing her near fainting, and without any assistance from her friend, was going himself to give it; but on this, Miss Woodley interfered, and having taken her head upon her arm, assured him, "It was a weakness to which Miss Milner was accustomed: that she would ring for her maid, who knew how to relieve her instantly with a few drops." Satisfied with this, Dorriforth left the room; and a surgeon being come to examine his wound, he retired into his own chamber. CHAPTER XVI. The power delegated by the confidential to those entrusted with their secrets, Miss Woodley was the last person on earth to abuse--but she was also the last, who, by an accommodating complacency, would participate in the guilt of her friend--and there was no guilt, except that of murder, which she thought equal to the crime in question, if it was ever perpetrated. Adultery, reason would perhaps have informed her, was a more pernicious evil to society; but to a religious mind, what sound is so horrible as _sacrilege?_ Of vows made to God or to man, the former must weigh the heaviest. Moreover, the sin of infidelity in the married state, is not a little softened to common understandings, by its frequency; whereas, of religious vows broken by a devotee she had never heard; unless where the offence had been followed by such examples of divine vengeance, such miraculous punishments in this world, (as well as eternal punishment in the other) as served to exaggerate the wickedness. She, who could, and who did pardon Miss Milner, was the person who saw her passion in the severest light, and resolved upon every method, however harsh, to root it from her heart--nor did she fear success, resting on the certain assurance, that however deep her love might be fixed, it would never be returned. Yet this confidence did not prevent her taking every precaution, lest Dorriforth should come to the knowledge of it. She would not have his composed mind disturbed with such a thought--his steadfast principles so much as shaken by the imagination--nor overwhelm him with those self-reproaches which his fatal attraction, unpremeditated as it was, would still have drawn upon him. With this plan of concealment, in which the natural modesty of Miss Milner acquiesced, there was but one effort for which this unhappy ward was not prepared; and that was an entire separation from her guardian. She had, from the first, cherished her passion without the most remote prospect of a return--she was prepared to see Dorriforth, without ever seeing him more nearly connected to her than as her guardian and friend; but not to see him at all--for _that_, she was not prepared. But Miss Woodley reflected upon the inevitable necessity of this measure before she made the proposal; and then made it with a firmness that might have done honour to the inflexibility of Dorriforth himself. During the few days that intervened between her open confession of a passion for Lord Frederick and this proposed plan of separation, the most intricate incoherence appeared in the character of Miss Milner--and in order to evade a marriage with him, and conceal, at the same time, the shameful propensity which lurked in her breast, she was once even on the point of declaring a passion for Sir Edward Ashton. In the duel which had taken place between Lord Frederick and Dorriforth, the latter had received the fire of his antagonist, but positively refused to return it; by which he had kept his promise not to endanger his Lordship's life, and had reconciled Sandford, in great measure, to his behaviour--and Sandford now (his resolution once broken) no longer refused entering Miss Milner's house, but came whenever it was convenient, though he yet avoided the mistress of it as much as possible; or showed by every word and look, when she was present, that she was still less in his favour than she had ever been. He visited Dorriforth on the evening of his engagement with Lord Frederick, and the next morning breakfasted with him in his own chamber; nor did Miss Milner see her guardian after his first return from that engagement before the following noon. She enquired, however, of his servant how he did, and was rejoiced to hear that his wound was but slight--yet this enquiry she durst not make before Miss Woodley. When Dorriforth made his appearance the next day, it was evident that he had thrown from his heart a load of cares; and though they had left a languor upon his face, content was in his voice, in his manners, in every word and action. Far from seeming to retain any resentment against his ward, for the danger into which her imprudence had led him, he appeared rather to pity her indiscretion, and to wish to soothe the perturbation which the recollection of her own conduct had evidently raised in her mind. His endeavours were successful--she was soothed every time he spoke to her; and had not the watchful eye of Miss Woodley stood guard over her inclinations, she had plainly discovered, that she was enraptured with the joy of seeing him again himself, after the danger to which he had been exposed. These emotions, which she laboured to subdue, passed, however, the bounds of her ineffectual resistance, when at the time of retiring after dinner, he said to her in a low voice, but such as it was meant the company should hear, "Do me the favour, Miss Milner, to call at my study some time in the evening; I have to speak with you upon business." She answered, "I will, Sir." And her eyes swam with delight, in expectation of the interview. Let not the reader, nevertheless, imagine, there was in that ardent expectation, one idea which the most spotless mind, in love, might not have indulged without reproach. Sincere love (at least among the delicate of the female sex) is often gratified by that degree of enjoyment, or rather forbearance, which would be torture in the pursuit of any other passion. Real, delicate, and restrained love, such as Miss Milner's, was indulged in the sight of the object only; and having bounded her wishes by her hopes, the height of her happiness was limited to a conversation, in which no other but themselves took a part. Miss Woodley was one of those who heard the appointment, but the only one who conceived with what sensation it was received. While the ladies remained in the same room with Dorriforth, Miss Milner thought of little, except of him. As soon as they withdrew into another apartment, she remembered Miss Woodley; and turning her head suddenly, saw her friend's face imprinted with suspicion and displeasure: this at first was painful to her--but recollecting that in a couple of hours she was to meet her guardian alone--to speak to him, and hear him speak to her only--every other thought was absorbed in that one, and she considered with indifference, the uneasiness, or the anger of her friend. Miss Milner, to do justice to her heart, did not wish to beguile Dorriforth into the snares of love: could any supernatural power have endowed her with the means, and at the same time have shewn to her the ills that must arise from such an effect of her charms, she had assuredly virtue enough to have declined the conquest; but without enquiring what she proposed, she never saw him, without previously endeavouring to look more attractive, than she would have desired, before any other person. And now, without listening to the thousand exhortations that spoke in every feature of Miss Woodley, she flew to a looking-glass, to adjust her dress in a manner that she thought most enchanting. Time stole away, and the time of going to her guardian arrived. In his presence, unsupported by the presence of any other, every grace that she had practised, every look that she had borrowed to set off her charms, were annihilated; and she became a native beauty, with the artless arguments of reason only for her aid. Awed thus by his power, from every thing but what she really was, she never was perhaps half so bewitching, as in those timid, respectful, and embarrassed moments she passed alone with him. He caught at those times her respect, her diffidence, nay, even her embarrassment; and never would one word of anger pass on either side. On the present occasion, he first expressed the high satisfaction that she had given him, by at length revealing to him the real state of her mind. "And when I take every thing into consideration, Miss Milner," added he, "I rejoice that your sentiments happen to be such as you have owned. For, although my Lord Frederick is not the very man I could have wished for your perfect happiness; yet, in the state of human perfection and human happiness, you might have fixed your affections with perhaps less propriety; and still, where my unwillingness to thwart your inclinations might not have permitted me to contend with them." Not a word of reply did this demand; or if it had, not a word could she have given. "And now, Madam, the reason of my desire to speak with you--is, to know the means you think most proper to pursue, in order to acquaint Lord Frederick, that notwithstanding this late repulse, there are hopes of your partiality in his favour." "Defer the explanation," she replied eagerly. "I beg your pardon--it cannot be. Besides, how can you indulge a disposition thus unpitying? Even so ardently did I desire to render the man who loves you happy, that though he came armed against my life, had I not reflected, that previous to our engagement it would appear like fear, and the means of bartering for his forgiveness, I should have revealed your sentiments the moment I had seen him. When the engagement was over, I was too impatient to acquaint you with his safety, to think then on gratifying him. And indeed, the delicacy of the declaration, after the many denials which you have no doubt given him, should be considered. I therefore consult your opinion upon the manner in which it shall be made." "Mr. Dorriforth, can you allow nothing to the moments of surprise, and that pity, which the fate impending inspired? and which might urge me to express myself of Lord Frederick, in a manner my cooler thoughts will not warrant?" "There was nothing in your expressions, my dear Miss Milner, the least equivocal--if you were off your guard when you pleaded for Lord Frederick, as I believe you were, you said more sincerely what you thought; and no discreet, or rather indiscreet attempts to retract, can make me change these sentiments." "I am very sorry," she replied, confused and trembling. "Why sorry? Come give me commission to reveal your partiality. I'll not be too hard upon you--a hint from me will do. Hope is ever apt to interpret the slightest words to its own use, and a lover's hope is beyond all others, sanguine." "I never gave Lord Frederick hope." "But you never plunged him into despair." "His pursuit intimates that I never have, but he has no other proof." "However light and frivolous you have been upon frivolous subjects, yet I must own, Miss Milner, that I did expect when a case of this importance came seriously before you, you would have discovered a proper stability in your behaviour." "I do, Sir; and it was only when I was affected with a weakness, which arose from accident, that I have betrayed inconsistency." "You then assert again, that you have no affection for my Lord Frederick?" "Not enough to become his wife." "You are alarmed at marriage, and I do not wonder you should be so; it shews a prudent foresight which does you honour--but, my dear, are there no dangers in a single state? If I may judge, Miss Milner, there are many more to a young lady of your accomplishments, than if you were under the protection of a husband." "My father, Mr. Dorriforth, thought your protection sufficient." "But that protection was rather to direct your choice, than to be the cause of your not choosing at all. Give me leave to point out an observation which, perhaps, I have too frequently made before, but upon this occasion I must intrude it once again. Miss Fenton is its object--her fortune is inferior to your's, her personal attractions are less"---- Here the powerful glow of joy, and of gratitude, for an opinion so negligently, and yet so sincerely expressed, flew to Miss Milner's face, neck, and even to her hands and fingers; the blood mounted to every part of her skin that was visible, for not a fibre but felt the secret transport, that Dorriforth thought her more beautiful than the beautiful Miss Fenton. If he observed her blushes, he was unsuspicious of the cause, and went on. "There is, besides, in the temper of Miss Fenton, a sedateness that might with less hazard ensure her safety in an unmarried life; and yet she very properly thinks it her duty, as she does not mean to seclude herself by any vows to the contrary, to become a wife--and in obedience to the counsel of her friends, will be married within a very few weeks." "Miss Fenton may marry from obedience, I never will." "You mean to say, that love shall alone induce you." "I do." "If you would point out a subject upon which I am the least able to reason, and on which my sentiments, such as they are, are formed only from theory, (and even there, more cautioned than instructed) it is the subject of love. And yet, even that little which I know, tells me, without a doubt, that what you said yesterday, pleading for Lord Frederick's life, was the result of the most violent and tender love." "The _little you know_ then, Mr. Dorriforth, has deceived you; had you _known more_, you would have judged otherwise." "I submit to the merit of your reply; but without allowing me a judge at all, I will appeal to those who were present with me." "Are Mrs. Horton and Mr. Sandford to be the connoisseurs?" "No; I'll appeal to Miss Fenton and Miss Woodley." "And yet, I believe," replied she with a smile, "I believe theory must only be the judge even there." "Then from all you have said, Madam, on this occasion, I am to conclude that you still refuse to marry Lord Frederick?" "You are." "And you submit never to see him again?" "I do." "All you then said to me, yesterday, was false?" "I was not mistress of myself at the time." "Therefore it was truth!--for shame, for shame!" At that moment the door opened, and Mr. Sandford walked in--he started back on seeing Miss Milner, and was going away; but Dorriforth called to him to stay, and said with warmth, "Tell me, Mr. Sandford, by what power, by what persuasion, I can prevail upon Miss Milner to confide in me as her friend; to lay her heart open, and credit mine when I declare to her, that I have no view in all the advice I give to her, but her immediate welfare." "Mr. Dorriforth, you know my opinion of that lady," replied Sandford; "it has been formed ever since my first acquaintance with her, and it continues the same." "But instruct me how I am to inspire her with confidence," returned Dorriforth; "how I am to impress her with a sense of that, which is for her advantage?" "You can work no miracles," replied Sandford, "you are not holy enough." "And yet my ward," answered Dorriforth, "appears to be acquainted with that mystery; for what but the force of a miracle can induce her to contradict to-day, what before you, and several other witnesses, she positively acknowledged yesterday?" "Do you call that miraculous?" cried Sandford; "the miracle had been if she had _not_ done so--for did she not yesterday contradict what she acknowledged the day before? and will she not to-morrow disavow what she says to-day?" "I wish that she may--" replied Dorriforth mildly, for he saw the tears flowing down her face at the rough and severe manner in which Sandford had spoken, and he began to feel for her uneasiness. "I beg pardon," cried Sandford, "for speaking so rudely to the mistress of the house--I have no business here, I know; but where _you_ are, Mr. Dorriforth, unless I am turned out, I shall always think it my duty to come." Miss Milner curtsied, as much as to say, he was welcome to come. He continued, "I was to blame, that upon a nice punctilio, I left you so long without my visits, and without my counsel; in that time, you have run the hazard of being murdered, and what is worse, of being excommunicated; for had you been so rash as to have returned your opponent's fire, not all my interest at Rome would have obtained remission of the punishment." Miss Milner, through all her tears, could not now restrain her laughter. On which he resumed; "And here do I venture, like a missionary among savages--but if I can only save you from their scalping knives--from the miseries which that lady is preparing for you, I am rewarded." Sandford spoke this with great fervour, and the offence of her love never appeared to her in so tremendous a point of view, as when thus, unknowingly, alluded to by him. "_The miseries that lady is preparing for you_," hung upon her ears like the notes of a raven, and sounded equally ominous. The words "_murder_" and "_excommunication_" he had likewise uttered; all the fatal effects of sacrilegious love. Frightful superstitions struck her to the heart, and she could scarcely prevent falling down under their oppression. Dorriforth beheld the difficulty she had in sustaining herself, and with the utmost tenderness went towards her, and supporting her, said, "I beg your pardon--I invited you hither with a far different intention than your uneasiness, and be assured----" Sandford was beginning to speak, when Dorriforth resumed,--"Hold, Mr. Sandford, the lady is under my protection, and I know not whether it is not requisite that you should apologize to her, and to me, for what you have already said." "You asked my opinion, or I had not given it you--would you have me, like _her_, speak what I do not think?" "Say no more, Sir," cried Dorriforth--and leading her kindly to the door, as if to defend her from his malice, told her, "He would take another opportunity of renewing the subject." CHAPTER XVII. When Dorriforth was alone with Sandford, he explained to him what before he had only hinted; and this learned Jesuit frankly confessed, "That the mind of woman was far above, or rather beneath, his comprehension." It was so, indeed--for with all his penetration, and few even of that school had more, he had not yet penetrated into the recesses of Miss Milner's heart. Miss Woodley, to whom she repeated all that had passed between herself, her guardian, and Sandford, took this moment, in the agitation of her spirits, to alarm her still more by prophetic insinuations; and at length represented to her here, for the first time, the necessity, "That Mr. Dorriforth and she no longer should remain under the same roof." This was like the stroke of sudden death to Miss Milner, and clinging to life, she endeavoured to avert the blow by prayers, and by promises. Her friend loved her too sincerely to be prevailed upon. "But in what manner can I accomplish the separation?" cried she, "for till I marry we are obliged, by my father's request, to live in the same house." "Miss Milner," answered Miss Woodley, "much as I respect the will of a dying man, I regard your and Mr. Dorriforth's present and eternal happiness much more; and it is my resolution that you _shall part._ If _you_ will not contrive the means, that duty falls on me, and without any invention I see the measure at once." "What is it?" cried Miss Milner eagerly. "I will reveal to Mr. Dorriforth, without hesitation, the real state of your heart; which your present inconsistency of conduct will but too readily confirm." "You would not plunge me into so much shame, into so much anguish!" cried she, distractedly. "No," replied Miss Woodley, "not for the world, if you will separate from him by any mode of your own--but that you _shall_ separate is my determination; and in spite of all your sufferings, this shall be the expedient, unless you instantly agree to some other." "Good Heaven, Miss Woodley! is this your friendship?" "Yes--and the truest friendship I have to bestow. Think what a task I undertake for your sake and his, when I condemn myself to explain to him your weakness. What astonishment! what confusion! what remorse, do I foresee painted upon his face! I hear him call you by the harshest names, and behold him fly from your sight for ever, as an object of his detestation." "Oh spare the dreadful picture.--Fly from my sight for ever! Detest my name! Oh! my dear Miss Woodley, let but his friendship for me still remain, and I will consent to any thing. You may command me. I will go away from him directly--but let us part in friendship--Oh! without the friendship of Mr. Dorriforth, life would be a heavy burthen indeed." Miss Woodley immediately began to contrive schemes for their separation; and, with all her invention alive on the subject, the following was the only natural one that she could form. Miss Milner, in a letter to her distant relation at Bath, was to complain of the melancholy of a country life, which she was to say her guardian imposed upon her; and she was to entreat the lady to send a pressing invitation that she would pass a month or two at her house; this invitation was to be laid before Dorriforth for his approbation, and the two ladies were to enforce it, by expressing their earnest wishes for his consent. This plan having been properly regulated, the necessary letter was sent to Bath, and Miss Woodley waited with patience, but with a watchful guard upon the conduct of her friend, till the answer should arrive. During this interim a tender and complaining epistle from Lord Frederick was delivered to Miss Milner; to which, as he received no answer, he prevailed upon his uncle, with whom he resided, to wait upon her, and obtain a verbal reply; for he still flattered himself, that fear of her guardian's anger, or perhaps his interception of the letter which he had sent, was the sole cause of her apparent indifference. The old gentleman was introduced both to Miss Milner and to Mr. Dorriforth, but received from each an answer so explicit, that left his nephew no longer in doubt but that all farther pursuit was vain. Sir Edward Ashton about this time also submitted to a formal dismission; and had the mortification to reflect, that he was bestowing upon the object of his affections, the tenderest proof of his regard, by absenting himself entirely from her society. Upon this serious and certain conclusion to the hopes of Lord Frederick, Dorriforth was more astonished than ever at the conduct of his ward. He had once thought her behaviour in this respect was ambiguous, but since her confession of a passion for that nobleman, he had no doubt but in the end she would become his wife. He lamented to find himself mistaken, and thought it proper now to condemn her caprice, not merely in words, but in the general tenor of his behaviour. He consequently became more reserved, and more austere than he had been since his first acquaintance with her; for his manners, not from design, but imperceptibly to himself, had been softened since he became her guardian, by that tender respect which he had uniformly paid to the object of his protection. Notwithstanding the severity he now assumed, his ward, in the prospect of parting from him, grew melancholy; Miss Woodley's love to her friend rendered her little otherwise; and Dorriforth's peculiar gravity, frequently rigour, could not but make their whole party less cheerful than it had been. Lord Elmwood too, at this time was lying dangerously ill of a fever; Miss Fenton of course was as much in sorrow as her nature would permit her to be, and both Sandford and Dorriforth in extreme concern upon his Lordship's account. In this posture of affairs, the letter of invitation arrives from Lady Luneham at Bath; it was shewn to Dorriforth; and to prove to his ward that he is so much offended, as no longer to feel that excessive interest in her concerns which he once felt, he gives an opinion on the subject with indifference--he desires "Miss Milner will do what she herself thinks proper." Miss Woodley instantly accepts this permission, writes back, and appoints the day upon which her friend means to set off for the visit. Miss Milner is wounded at the heart by the cold and unkind manners of her guardian, but dares not take one step to retrieve his opinion. Alone, or to her friend, she sighs and weeps: he discovers her sorrow, and is doubtful whether the departure of Lord Frederick from that part of the country is not the cause. When the time she was to set out for Bath was only two days off, the behaviour of Dorriforth took, by degrees, its usual form, if not a greater share of polite and tender attention than ever. It was the first time he had parted from Miss Milner since he became her guardian, and he felt upon the occasion, a reluctance. He had been angry with her, he had shewn her that he was, and he now began to wish that he had not. She is not happy, (he considered within himself) every word and action declares she is not; I may have been too severe, and added perhaps to her uneasiness. "At least we will part on good terms," said he--"Indeed, my regard for her is such, I cannot part otherwise." She soon discerned his returning kindness, and it was a gentle tie that would have fastened her to that spot for ever, but for the firm resistance of Miss Woodley. "What will the absence of a few months effect?" said she, pleading her own cause; "At the end of a few months at farthest, he will expect me back, and where then will be the merit of this separation?" "In that time," replied Miss Woodley, "we may find some method to make it longer." To this she listened with a kind of despair, but uttered, she "Was resigned,"--and she prepared for her departure. Dorriforth was all anxiety that every circumstance of her journey should be commodious; he was eager she should be happy; and he was eager she should see that he entirely forgave her. He would have gone part of the way with her, but for the extreme illness of Lord Elmwood, in whose chamber he passed most of the day, and slept in Elmwood House every night. On the morning of her journey, when Dorriforth gave his hand and conducted Miss Milner to the carriage, all the way he led her she could not restrain her tears; which increased, as he parted from her, to convulsive sobs. He was affected by her grief; and though he had previously bid her farewell, he drew her gently on one side, and said, with the tenderest concern, "My dear Miss Milner, we part friends?--I hope we do?--On my side, depend upon it, that I regret nothing so much at our separation, as having ever given you a moment's pain." "I believe so," was all she could utter, for she hastened from him, lest his discerning eye should discover the cause of the weakness which thus overcame her. But her apprehensions were groundless; the rectitude of his own heart was a bar to the suspicion of her's. He once more kindly bade her adieu, and the carriage drove away. Miss Fenton and Miss Woodley accompanied her part of the journey, about thirty miles, where they were met by Sir Harry and Lady Luneham. Here was a parting nearly as affecting as that between her and her guardian. Miss Woodley, who for several weeks had treated her friend with a rigidness she herself hardly supposed was in her nature, now bewailed that she had done so; implored her forgiveness; promised to correspond with her punctually, and to omit no opportunity of giving her every consolation short of cherishing her fatal passion--but in that, and that only, was the heart of Miss Milner to be consoled. END OF THE FIRST VOLUME. A SIMPLE STORY, IN FOUR VOLUMES, BY MRS. INCHBALD. VOL. II. _THE FOURTH EDITION._ LONDON: Printed for G. G. and J. ROBINSON, PATERNOSTER ROW. 1799. A SIMPLE STORY CHAPTER I. When Miss Milner arrived at Bath, she thought it the most altered place she had ever seen--she was mistaken--it was herself that was changed. The walks were melancholy, the company insipid, the ball-room fatiguing--for, she had left behind all that could charm or please her. Though she found herself much less happy than when she was at Bath before, yet she felt, that she would not, even to enjoy all that past happiness, be again reduced to the being she was at that period. Thus does the lover consider the extinction of his passion with the same horror as the libertine looks upon annihilation; the one would rather live hereafter, though in all the tortures described as constituting his future state, than cease to exist; so, there are no tortures which a lover would not suffer, rather than cease to love. In the wide prospect of sadness before her, Miss Milner's fancy caught hold of the only comfort which presented itself; and this, faint as it was, in the total absence of every other, her imagination painted to her as excessive. The comfort was a letter from Miss Woodley--a letter, in which the subject of her love would most assuredly be mentioned, and in whatever terms, it would still be the means of delight. A letter arrived--she devoured it with her eyes. The post mark denoting from whence it came, the name of "Milner Lodge" written on the top, were all sources of pleasure--and she read slowly every line it contained, to procrastinate the pleasing expectation she enjoyed, till she should arrive at the name of Dorriforth. At last, her impatient eye caught the word, three lines beyond the place she was reading--irresistibly, she skipped over those lines, and fixed on the point to which she was attracted. Miss Woodley was cautious in her indulgence; she made the slightest mention of Dorriforth; saying only, "He was extremely concerned, and even dejected, at the little hope there was of his cousin, Lord Elmwood's, recovery." Short and trivial as this passage was, it was still more important to Miss Milner than any other in the letter--she read it again and again, considered, and reflected upon it. Dejected, thought she, what does that word exactly mean?--did I ever see Mr. Dorriforth dejected?--how, I wonder, does he look in that state? Thus did she muse, while the cause of his dejection, though a most serious one, and pathetically described by Miss Woodley, scarce arrested her attention once. She ran over with haste the account of Lord Elmwood's state of health; she certainly pitied him while she thought of him, but she did not think of him long. To die, was a hard fate for a young nobleman just in possession of his immense fortune, and on the eve of marriage with a beautiful young woman; but Miss Milner thought that an abode in Heaven might be still better than all this, and she had no doubt but his Lordship would go thither. The forlorn state of Miss Fenton ought to have been a subject for compassion, but she knew that lady had resignation to bear any lot with patience, and that a trial of her fortitude might be more flattering to her vanity than to be Countess of Elmwood: in a word, she saw no one's misfortunes equal to her own, because she saw no one so little able to bear misfortune. She replied to Miss Woodley's letter, and dwelt very long on that subject which her friend had passed over lightly; this was another indulgence; and this epistolary intercourse was now the only enjoyment she possessed. From Bath she paid several visits with Lady Luneham--all were alike tedious and melancholy. But her guardian wrote to her, and though it was on a topic of sorrow, the letter gave her joy--the sentiments it expressed were merely common-place, yet she valued them as the dearest effusions of friendship and affection; and her hands trembled, and her heart beat with rapture while she wrote the answer, though she knew it would not be received by him with one emotion like those which she experienced. In her second letter to Miss Woodley, she prayed like a person insane to be taken home from confinement, and like a lunatic protested, in sensible language, she "Had no disorder." But her friend replied, "That very declaration proves its violence." And she assured her, nothing less than placing her affections elsewhere, should induce her to believe but that she was incurable. The third letter from Milner Lodge brought the news of Lord Elmwood's death. Miss Woodley was exceedingly affected by this event, and said little else on any other subject. Miss Milner was shocked when she read the words "He is dead", and instantly thought, "How transient are all sublunary things! Within a few years _I_ shall be dead--and how happy will it then be, if I have resisted every temptation to the alluring pleasures of this life!" The happiness of a peaceful death occupied her contemplation for near an hour; but at length, every virtuous and pious sentiment this meditation inspired, served but to remind her of the many sentences she had heard from her guardian's lips upon the same subject--her thoughts were again fixed on him, and she could think of nothing besides. In a short time after this, her health became impaired from the indisposition of her mind; she languished, and was once in imminent danger. During a slight delirium of her fever, Miss Woodley's name and her guardian's were incessantly repeated; Lady Luneham sent them immediate word of this, and they both hastened to Bath, and arrived there just as the violence and danger of her disorder had ceased. As soon as she became perfectly recollected, her first care, knowing the frailty of her heart, was to enquire what she had uttered while delirious. Miss Woodley, who was by her bedside, begged her not to be alarmed on that account, and assured her she knew, from all her attendants, that she had only spoken with a friendly remembrance (as was really the case) of those persons who were dear to her. She wished to know whether her guardian was come to see her, but she had not the courage to ask before her friend; and she in her turn was afraid by the too sudden mention of his name, to discompose her. Her maid, however, after some little time, entered the chamber, and whispered Miss Woodley. Miss Milner asked inquisitively "What she said?" The maid replied softly, "Lord Elmwood, Madam, wishes to come and see you for a few moments, if you will allow him." At this reply Miss Milner stared wildly. "I thought," said she, "I thought Lord Elmwood had been dead--are my senses disordered still?" "No, my dear," answered Miss Woodley, "it is the present Lord Elmwood who wishes to see you; he whom you left ill when you came hither, _is_ dead." "And who is the present Lord Elmwood?" she asked. Miss Woodley, after a short hesitation, replied--"Your guardian." "And so he is," cried Miss Milner; "he is the next heir--I had forgot. But is it possible that he is here?" "Yes--" returned Miss Woodley with a grave voice and manner, to moderate that glow of satisfaction which for a moment sparkled even in her languid eye, and blushed over her pallid countenance. "Yes--as he heard you were ill, he thought it right to come and see you." "He is very good," she answered, and the tear started in her eyes. "Would you please to see his Lordship?" asked her maid. "Not yet, not yet," she replied; "let me recollect myself first." And she looked with a timid doubt upon her friend, to ask if it was proper. Miss Woodley could hardly support this humble reference to her judgment, from the wan face of the poor invalid, and taking her by the hand, whispered, "You shall do what you please." In a few minutes Lord Elmwood was introduced. To those who sincerely love, every change of situation or circumstances in the object beloved, appears an advantage. So, the acquisition of a title and estate was, in Miss Milner's eye, an inestimable advantage to her guardian; not on account of their real value; but that any change, instead of diminishing her passion, would have served only to increase it--even a change to the utmost poverty. When he entered--the sight of him seemed to be too much for her, and after the first glance she turned her head away. The sound of his voice encouraged her to look once more--and then she riveted her eyes upon him. "It is impossible, my dear Miss Milner," he gently whispered, "to say, what joy I feel that your disorder has subsided." But though it was impossible to say, it was possible to _look_ what he felt, and his looks expressed his feelings. In the zeal of those sensations, he laid hold of her hand, and held it between his--this he did not himself know--but she did. "You have prayed for me, my Lord, I make no doubt?" said she, and smiled, as if thanking him for those prayers. "Fervently, ardently!" returned he; and the fervency with which he had prayed spoke in every feature. "But I am a protestant, you know, and if I had died such, do you believe I should have gone to Heaven?" "Most assuredly, that would not have prevented you." "But Mr. Sandford does not think so." "He must; for he means to go there himself." To keep her guardian with her, Miss Milner seemed inclined to converse; but her solicitous friend gave Lord Elmwood a look, which implied that it might be injurious to her, and he retired. They had only one more interview before he left the place; at which Miss Milner was capable of sitting up--he was with her, however, but a very short time, some necessary concerns relative to his late kinsman's affairs, calling him in haste to London. Miss Woodley continued with her friend till she saw her entirely reinstated in her health: during which time her guardian was frequently the subject of their private conversation; and upon those occasions Miss Milner has sometimes brought Miss Woodley to acknowledge, "That could Mr. Dorriforth have possibly foreseen the early death of the last Lord Elmwood, it had been more for the honour of his religion (as that ancient title would now after him become extinct), if he had preferred marriage vows to those of celibacy." CHAPTER II. When the time for Miss Woodley's departure arrived, Miss Milner entreated earnestly to accompany her home, and made the most solemn promises that she would guard not only her behaviour, but her very thoughts, within the limitation her friend should prescribe. Miss Woodley at length yielded thus far, "That as soon as Lord Elmwood was set out on his journey to Italy, where she had heard him say that he should soon be obliged to go, she would no longer deny her the pleasure of returning; and if (after the long absence which must consequently take place between him and her) she could positively affirm the suppression of her passion was the happy result, she would then take her word, and risk the danger of seeing them once more reside together." This concession having been obtained, they parted; and as winter was now far advanced, Miss Woodley returned to her aunt's house in town, from whence Mrs. Horton was, however, preparing to remove, in order to superintend Lord Elmwood's house, (which had been occupied by the late Earl,) in Grosvenor Square; and her niece was to accompany her. If Lord Elmwood was not desirous Miss Milner should conclude her visit and return to his protection, it was partly from the multiplicity of affairs in which he was at this time engaged, and partly from having Mr. Sandford now entirely placed with him as his chaplain; for he dreaded, that living in the same house, their natural antipathy might be increased even to aversion. Upon this account, he once thought of advising Mr. Sandford to take up his abode elsewhere; but the great pleasure he took in his society, joined to the bitter mortification he knew such a proposal would be to his friend, would not suffer him to make it. Miss Milner all this time was not thinking upon those she hated, but on those she loved. Sandford never came into her thoughts, while the image of Lord Elmwood never left them. One morning, as she sat talking to Lady Luneham on various subjects, but thinking alone on him, Sir Harry Luneham, with another gentleman, a Mr. Fleetmond, came in, and the conversation turned upon the improbability, during the present Lord Elmwood's youth, that he should ever inherit the title and estate which had now fallen to him--and, said Mr. Fleetmond, "Independent of rank and fortune, it must be matter of infinite joy to Mr. Dorriforth." "No," answered Sir Harry, "independent of rank and fortune, it must be a motive of concern to him; for he must now regret, beyond measure, his folly in taking priest's orders, thus depriving himself of the hopes of an heir, so that his title, at his death, will be lost." "By no means," replied Mr. Fleetmond; "he may yet have an heir, for he will certainly marry." "Marry!" cried the Baronet. "Yes," answered the other, "it was that I meant by the joy it might probably give him, beyond the possession of his estate and title." "How he married?" said Lady Luneham, "Has he not taken a vow never to marry?" "Yes," answered Mr. Fleetmond, "but there are no _religious_ vows, from which the sovereign Pontiff at Rome cannot grant a dispensation, as those commandments which are made by the church, the church has always the power to revoke; and when it is for the general good of religion, his Holiness thinks it incumbent on him, to publish his bull, and remit all penalties for their non-observance; and certainly it is for the honour of the Catholics, that this Earldom should continue in a Catholic family. In short, I'll venture to lay a wager, my Lord Elmwood is married within a year." Miss Milner, who listened with attention, feared she was in a dream, or deceived by the pretended knowledge of Mr. Fleetmond, who might know nothing--yet all that he had said was very probable; and he was himself a Roman Catholic, so that he must be well informed on the subject upon which he spoke. If she had heard the direst news that ever sounded in the ears of the most susceptible of mortals, the agitation of her mind and person could not have been stronger--she felt, while every word was speaking, a chill through all her veins--a pleasure too exquisite, not to bear along with it the sensation of exquisite pain; of which she was so sensible, that for a few moments it made her wish that she had not heard the intelligence; though, very soon after, she would not but have heard it for the world. As soon as she had recovered from her first astonishment and joy, she wrote to Miss Woodley an exact account of what she had heard, and received this answer: "I am sorry any body should have given you this piece of information, because it was a task, in executing which, I had promised myself extreme satisfaction--but from the fear that your health was not yet strong enough to support, without some danger, the burthen of hopes which I knew would, upon this occasion, press upon you, I deferred my communication and it has been anticipated. Yet, as you seem in doubt as to the reality of what you have been told, perhaps this confirmation of it may fall very little short of the first news; especially when it is enforced by my request, that you will come to us, as soon as you can with propriety leave Lady Luneham. "Come, my dear Miss Milner, and find in your once rigid monitor a faithful confidante. I will no longer threaten to disclose a secret you have trusted me with, but leave it to the wisdom, or sensibility of _his_ heart, (who is now to penetrate into the hearts of our sex, in search of one that may beat in unison with his own) to find it out. I no longer condemn, but congratulate you on your passion; and will assist you with all my advice and my earnest wishes, that it may obtain a return." This letter was another of those excruciating pleasures, that almost reduced Miss Milner to the grave. Her appetite forsook her; and she vainly endeavoured, for several nights, to close her eyes. She thought so much upon the prospect of accomplishing her wishes, that she could admit no other idea; nor even invent one probable excuse for leaving Lady Luneham before the appointed time, which was then at the distance of two months. She wrote to Miss Woodley to beg her contrivance, to reproach her for keeping the secret so long from her, and to thank her for having revealed it in so kind a manner at last. She begged also to be acquainted how Mr. Dorriforth (for still she called him by that name) spoke and thought of this sudden change in his destiny. Miss Woodley's reply was a summons for her to town upon some pretended business, which she avoided explaining, but which entirely silenced Lady Luneham's entreaties for her stay. To her question concerning Lord Elmwood she answered, "It is a subject on which he seldom speaks--he appears just the same he ever did, nor could you by any part of his conduct, conceive that any such change had taken place." Miss Milner exclaimed to herself, "I am glad he is not altered--if his words, looks, or manners, were any thing different from what they formerly were, I should not like him so well." And just the reverse would have been the case, had Miss Woodley sent her word he was changed. The day for her leaving Bath was fixed; she expected it with rapture, but before its arrival, sunk under the care of expectation; and when it came, was so much indisposed, as to be obliged to defer her journey for a week. At length she found herself in London--in the house of her guardian--and that guardian no longer bound to a single life, but _enjoined_ to marry. He appeared in her eyes, as in Miss Woodley's, the same as ever; or perhaps more endearing than ever, as it was the first time she had beheld him with hope. Mr. Sandford did _not_ appear the same; yet he was in reality as surly and as disrespectful in his behaviour to her as usual; but she did not observe, or she did not feel his morose temper as heretofore--he seemed amiable, mild, and gentle; at least this was the happy medium through which her self-complacent mind began to see him; for good humour, like the jaundice, makes every one of its own complexion. CHAPTER III. Lord Elmwood was preparing to go abroad, for the purpose of receiving in form, the dispensation from his vows; it was, however, a subject he seemed carefully to avoid speaking upon; and when by any accident he was obliged to mention it, it was without any marks either of satisfaction or concern. Miss Milner's pride began to be alarmed. While he was Mr. Dorriforth, and confined to a single life, his indifference to her charms was rather an honourable than a reproachful trait in his character, and in reality, she admired him for the insensibility. But on the eve of being at liberty, and on the eve of making his choice, she was offended _that_ choice was not immediately fixed upon her. She had been accustomed to receive the devotion of every man who saw her, and not to obtain it of the man from whom, of all others, she most wished it, was cruelly humiliating. She complained to Miss Woodley, who advised her to have patience; but that was one of the virtues in which she was the least practised. Encouraged, nevertheless, by her friend in the commendable desire of gaining the affections of him, who possessed all her own, she, however, left no means unattempted for the conquest--but she began with too great a certainty of success, not to be sensible of the deepest mortification in the disappointment--nay, she anticipated a disappointment, as she had before anticipated her success; by turns feeling the keenest emotions from hope and from despair. As these passions alternately governed her, she was alternately in spirits or dejected; in good or in ill humour; and the vicissitudes of her prospect at length gave to her behaviour an air of caprice, which not all her follies had till now produced. This was not the way to secure the affections of Lord Elmwood; she knew it was not; and before him she was under some restriction. Sandford observed this, and without reserve, added to the list of her other failings, hypocrisy. It was plain to see that Mr. Sandford esteemed her less and less every day; and as he was the person who most influenced the opinion of her guardian, he became to her, very soon, an object not merely of dislike, but of abhorrence. These mutual sentiments were discoverable in every word and action, while they were in each other's company; but still in his absence, Miss Milner's good nature, and total freedom from malice, never suffered her to utter a sentence injurious to his interest. Sandford's charity did not extend thus far; and speaking of her with severity one evening while she was at the opera, "His meaning," as he said, "but to caution her guardian against her faults," Lord Elmwood replied, "There is one fault, however, Mr. Sandford, I cannot lay to her charge." "And what is that, my Lord?" cried Sandford, eagerly, "What is that one fault, which Miss Milner has not?" "I never," replied Lord Elmwood, "heard Miss Milner, in your absence, utter a syllable to your disadvantage." "She dares not, my Lord, because she is in fear of you and she knows you would not suffer it." "She then," answered his Lordship, "pays me a much higher compliment than you do; for you freely censure _her_, and yet imagine I _will_ suffer it." "My Lord," replied Sandford, "I am undeceived now, and shall never take that liberty again." As Lord Elmwood always treated Sandford with the utmost respect, he began to fear he had been deficient upon this occasion; and the disposition which had induced him to take his ward's part, was likely, in the end, to prove unfavourable to her; for perceiving Sandford was offended at what had passed, as the only means of retribution, he began himself to lament her volatile and captious propensities; in which lamentation, Sandford, now forgetting his affront, joined with the heartiest concurrence, adding, "You, Sir, having now other cares to employ your thoughts, ought to insist upon her marrying, or retiring into the country." She returned home just as this conversation was finished, and Sandford, the moment she entered, rang for his candle to retire. Miss Woodley, who had been at the opera with Miss Milner, cried, "Bless me, Mr. Sandford, are you not well, you are going to leave us so early?" He replied, "No, I have a pain in my head." Miss Milner, who never listened to complaints without sympathy, rose immediately from her seat, saying, "I think I never heard you, Mr. Sandford, complain of indisposition before. Will you accept of my specific for the head-ache? Indeed it is a certain relief--I'll fetch it instantly." She went hastily out of the room, and returned with a bottle, which, she assured him, "Was a present from Lady Luneham, and would certainly cure him." And she pressed it upon him with such an anxious earnestness, that with all his churlishness he could not refuse taking it. This was but a common-place civility, such as is paid by one enemy to another every day; but the _manner_ was the material part. The unaffected concern, the attention, the good will, she demonstrated in this little incident, was that which made it remarkable, and immediately took from Lord Elmwood the displeasure to which he had been just before provoked, or rather transformed it into a degree of admiration. Even Sandford was not insensible to her behaviour, and in return, when he left the room, "Wished her a good night." To her and Miss Woodley, who had not been witnesses of the preceding conversation, what she had done appeared of no merit; but to the mind of Lord Elmwood, the merit was infinite; and upon the departure of Sandford, he began to be unusually cheerful. He first pleasantly reproached the ladies for not offering him a place in their box at the opera. "Would you have gone, my Lord?" asked Miss Milner, highly delighted. "Certainly," returned he, "had you invited me." "Then from this day I give you a general invitation; nor shall any other company be admitted but those whom you approve." "I am very much obliged to you," said he. "And you," continued she, "who have been accustomed only to church-music, will be more than any one, enchanted with hearing the softer music of love." "What ravishing pleasures you are preparing for me!" returned he--"I know not whether my weak senses will be able to support them!" She had her eyes upon him when he spoke this, and she discovered in his, that were fixed upon her, a sensibility unexpected--a kind of fascination which enticed her to look on, while her eyelids fell involuntarily before its mighty force, and a thousand blushes crowded over her face. He was struck with these sudden signals; hastily recalled his former countenance, and stopped the conversation. Miss Woodley, who had been a silent observer for some time, now thought a word or two from her would be acceptable rather than troublesome. "And pray, my Lord," said she, "when do you go to France?" "To Italy you mean;--I shall not go at all," said he. "My superiors are very indulgent, for they dispense with all my duties. I ought, and I meant, to have gone abroad; but as a variety of concerns require my presence in England, every necessary ceremony has taken place here." "Then your Lordship is no longer in orders?" said Miss Woodley. "No; they have been resigned these five days." "My Lord, I give you joy," said Miss Milner. He thanked her, but added with a sigh, "If I have given up content in search of joy, I shall perhaps be a loser by the venture." Soon after this, he wished them a good night, and retired. Happy as Miss Milner found herself in his company, she saw him leave the room with infinite satisfaction, because her heart was impatient to give a loose to its hopes on the bosom of Miss Woodley. She bade Mrs. Horton immediately good night; and, in her friend's apartment, gave way to all the language of passion, warmed with the confidence of meeting its return. She described the sentiments she had read in Lord Elmwood's looks; and though Miss Woodley had beheld them too, Miss Milner's fancy heightened the expression of every glance, till her construction became, by degrees, so extremely favourable to her own wishes, that had not her friend been present, and known in what measure to estimate those symptoms, she must infallibly have thought, by the joy to which they gave birth, that he had openly avowed a passion for her. Miss Woodley, therefore, thought it her duty to allay these ecstasies, and represented to her, she might be deceived in her hopes--or even supposing his wishes inclined towards her, there were yet great obstacles between them.--"Would not Sandford, who directed his every thought and purpose, be consulted upon this? and if he was, upon what, but the most romantic affection on the part of Lord Elmwood, had Miss Milner to depend? and his Lordship was not a man to be suspected of submitting to the excess of any passion." Thus did Miss Woodley argue, lest her friend should be misled by her wishes; yet, in her own mind, she scarce harboured a doubt that any thing would thwart them. The succeeding circumstance proved she was mistaken. Another gentleman of family and fortune made overtures to Miss Milner; and her guardian, so far from having his thoughts inclined towards her on his own account, pleaded this lover's cause even with more zeal than he had pleaded for Sir Edward and Lord Frederick; thus at once destroying all those plans of happiness which poor Miss Milner had formed. In consequence, her melancholy humour was now predominant; she confined herself at home, and yet, by her own order, was denied to all her visitors. Whether this arose from pure melancholy, or the still lingering hope of making her conquest, by that sedateness of manners which she knew her guardian admired, she herself perhaps did not perfectly know. Be that as it may, Lord Elmwood could not but observe this change, and one morning thought fit to mention, and to applaud it. Miss Woodley and she were at work together when he came into the room; and after sitting several minutes, and talking upon indifferent subjects, to which his ward replied with a dejection in her voice and manner--he said, "Perhaps I am wrong, Miss Milner, but I have observed that you are lately more thoughtful than usual." She blushed, as she always did when the subject was herself. He continued, "Your health appears perfectly restored, and yet I have observed you take no delight in your former amusements." "Are you sorry for that, my Lord?" "No, I am extremely glad; and I was going to congratulate you upon the change. But give me leave to enquire, to what lucky accident we may attribute this alteration?" "Your Lordship then thinks all my commendable deeds arise from accident, and that I have no virtues of my own." "Pardon me, I think you have many." This he spoke emphatically; and her blushes increased. He resumed--"How can I doubt of a lady's virtues, when her countenance gives me such evident proofs of them? Believe me, Miss Milner, that in the midst of your gayest follies, while you thus continue to blush, I shall reverence your internal sensations." "Oh! my Lord, did you know some of them, I am afraid you would think them unpardonable." This was so much to the purpose, that Miss Woodley found herself alarmed--but without reason--Miss Milner loved too sincerely to reveal it to the object. He answered, "And did you know some of mine, you might think them _equally_ unpardonable." She turned pale, and could no longer guide her needle--in the fond transport of her heart she imagined that his love for her, was among the sensations to which he alluded. She was too much embarrassed to reply, and he continued, "We have all much to pardon in one another: and I know not whether the officious person who forces, even his good advice, is not as blameable as the obstinate one, who will not listen to it. And now, having made a preface to excuse you, should you once more refuse mine, I shall venture to give it." "My Lord, I have never yet refused to follow your advice, but where my own peace of mind was so nearly concerned, as to have made me culpable, had I complied." "Well, Madam, I submit to your determinations; and shall never again oppose your inclination to remain single." This sentence, as it excluded the idea of soliciting for himself, gave her the utmost pain; and her eye glanced at him, full of reproach. He did not observe it, but went on. "While you continue unmarried, it seems to have been your father's intention that you should continue under my immediate care; but as I mean for the future to reside chiefly in the country--answer me candidly, do you think you could be happy there, for at least three parts of the year?" After a short hesitation, she replied, "I have no objection." "I am glad to hear it," he returned eagerly, "for it is my earnest desire to have you with me--your welfare is dear to me as my own; and were we apart, continual apprehensions would prey upon my mind." The tear started in her eye, at the earnestness that accompanied these words; he saw it, and to soften her still more with the sense of his esteem for her, he increased his earnestness while he said, "If you will take the resolution to quit London for the time I mention, there shall be no means omitted to make the country all you can wish--I shall insist upon Miss Woodley's company for both our sakes; and it will not only be _my_ study to form such a society as you may approve, but I am certain it will be likewise the study of Lady Elmwood----" He was going on, but as if a poniard had thrust her to the heart, she writhed under this unexpected stroke. He saw her countenance change--he looked at her steadfastly. It was not a common change from joy to sorrow, from content to uneasiness, which Miss Milner discovered--she felt, and she expressed anguish--Lord Elmwood was alarmed and shocked. She did not weep, but she called Miss Woodley to come to her, with a voice that indicated a degree of agony. "My Lord," (cried Miss Woodley, seeing his consternation and trembling lest he should guess the secret,) "My Lord, Miss Milner has again deceived you--you must not take her from London--it is that, and that alone, which is the cause of her uneasiness." He seemed more amazed still--and still more shocked at her duplicity than at her torture. "Good Heaven!" exclaimed he, "How am I to accomplish her wishes? What am I to do? How can I judge, if she will not confide in me, but thus for ever deceive me?" She leaned, pale as death, on the shoulder of Miss Woodley, her eye fixed with apparent insensibility to all that was said, while he continued, "Heaven is my witness, if I knew--If I could conceive the means how to make her happy, I would sacrifice my own happiness to hers." "My Lord," said Miss Woodley with a smile, "perhaps I may call upon you hereafter to fulfil your word." He was totally ignorant what she meant, nor had he leisure, from the confusion of his thoughts, to reflect upon her meaning; he nevertheless replied, with warmth, "Do. You shall find I'll perform it.--Do. I will faithfully perform it." Though Miss Milner was conscious this declaration could not, in delicacy, be ever adduced against him; yet the fervent and solemn manner in which he made it, cheered her spirits; and as persons enjoy the reflection of having in their possession some valuable gem, though they are determined never to use it, so she upon this, was comforted and grew better. She now lifted up her head, and leaned it on her hand, as she sat by the side of a table--still she did not speak, but seemed overcome with sorrow. As her situation became, however, less alarming, her guardian's pity and affright began to take the colour of resentment; and though he did not say so, he was, and looked, highly offended. At this juncture Mr. Sandford entered. On beholding the present party, it required not his sagacity to see at the first view, that they were all uneasy; but instead of the sympathy this might have excited in some dispositions, Mr. Sandford, after casting a look at each of them, appeared in high spirits. "You seem unhappy, my Lord," said he, with a smile. "You do _not_--Mr. Sandford," Lord Elmwood replied. "No, my Lord, nor would I, were I in your situation. What should make a man of sense out of temper but a worthy object!" And he looked at Miss Milner. "There are no objects unworthy our care:" replied Lord Elmwood. "But there are objects on whom all care is fruitless, your Lordship will allow." "I never yet despaired of any one, Mr. Sandford." "And yet there are persons, of whom it is presumption to entertain hopes." And he looked again at Miss Milner. "Does your head ache, Miss Milner?" asked her friend, seeing her hold it with her hand. "Very much," returned she. "Mr. Sandford," said Miss Woodley, "did you use all those drops Miss Milner gave you for a pain in the head?" "Yes:" answered he, "I did." But the question at that moment somewhat embarrassed him. "And I hope you found benefit from them:" said Miss Milner, with great kindness, as she rose from her seat, and walked slowly out of the room. Though Miss Woodley followed her, so that Mr. Sandford was left alone with Lord Elmwood, and might have continued his unkind insinuations without one restraint, yet his lips were closed for the present. He looked down on the carpet--twitched himself upon his chair--and began to talk of the weather. CHAPTER IV. When the first transports of despair were past, Miss Milner suffered herself to be once more in hope. She found there were no other means to support her life; and to her comfort, her friend was much less severe on the present occasion than she expected. No engagement between mortals was, in Miss Woodley's opinion, binding like that entered into with heaven; and whatever vows Lord Elmwood had possibly made to another, she justly supposed that no woman's love for him equalled Miss Milner's--it was prior to all others too; that established her claim to contend at least for success; and in a contention, what rival would not fall before her? It was not difficult to guess who this rival was; or if they were a little time in suspence, Miss Woodley soon arrived at the certainty, by inquiring of Mr. Sandford; who, unsuspecting why she asked, readily informed her the intended Lady Elmwood was no other than Miss Fenton; and that their marriage would be solemnized as soon as the mourning for the late Lord Elmwood was over. This last intelligence made Miss Woodley shudder--she repeated it, however, to Miss Milner, word for word. "Happy! happy woman!" exclaimed Miss Milner of Miss Fenton; "she has received the first fond impulse of his heart, and has had the transcendent happiness of teaching him to love!" "By no means," returned Miss Woodley, finding no other suggestion likely to comfort her; "do not suppose that his marriage is the result of love--it is no more than a duty, a necessary arrangement, and this you may plainly see by the wife on whom he has fixed. Miss Fenton was thought a proper match for his cousin, and that same propriety has transferred her to him." It was easy to convince Miss Milner that all her friend said was truth, for she wished it so. "And oh!" she exclaimed, "could I but stimulate passion, against the cold influence of propriety;--Do you think, my dear Miss Woodley," (and she looked with such begging eyes, it was impossible not to answer as she wished,) "do you think it would be unjust to Miss Fenton, were I to inspire her destined husband with a passion which she may not have inspired, and which I believe _she_ cannot feel?" Miss Woodley paused a minute, and then answered, "No:"--but there was a hesitation in her manner of delivery--she _did_ say, "No:" but she looked as if she was afraid she ought to have said "Yes." Miss Milner, however, did not give her time to recall the word, or to alter its meaning by adding others to it, but ran on eagerly, and declared, "As that was her opinion, she would abide by it, and do all she could to supplant her rival." In order, nevertheless, to justify this determination, and satisfy the conscience of Miss Woodley, they both concluded that Miss Fenton's heart was not engaged in the intended marriage, and consequently that she was indifferent whether it ever took place or not. Since the death of the late Earl, she had not been in town; nor had the present Earl been near the place where she resided, since the week in which her lover died; of course, nothing similar to love could have been declared at so early a period; and if it had been made known at a later, it must only have been by letter, or by the deputation of Mr. Sandford, who they knew had been once in the country to visit her; but how little he was qualified to enforce a tender passion, was a comfortable reflection. Revived by these conjectures, of which some were true, and others false; the very next day a gloom overspread their bright prospects, on Mr. Sandford's saying, as he entered the breakfast-room, "Miss Fenton, ladies, desired me to present her compliments." "Is she in town?" asked Mrs. Horton. "She came yesterday morning," returned Sandford, "and is at her brother's, in Ormond-street; my Lord and I supped there last night, and that made us so late home." Lord Elmwood entered soon after, and bowing to his ward, confirmed what had been said, by telling her, that "Miss Fenton had charged him with her kindest respects." "How does poor Miss Fenton look?" Mrs. Horton asked Lord Elmwood. To which question Sandford replied, "Beautiful--she looks beautifully." "She has got over her uneasiness, I suppose then?" said Mrs. Horton--not dreaming that she was asking the questions before her new lover. "Uneasy!" replied Sandford, "uneasy at any trial this world can send? That would be highly unworthy of her." "But sometimes women do fret at such things:" replied Mrs. Horton, innocently. Lord Elmwood asked Miss Milner--"If she meant to ride, this delightful day?" While she was hesitating-- "There are different kinds of women," (said Sandford, directing his discourse to Mrs. Horton;) "there is as much difference between some women, as between good and evil spirits." Lord Elmwood asked Miss Milner again--If she took an airing? She replied, "No." "And beauty," continued Sandford, "when endowed upon spirits that are evil, is a mark of their greater, their more extreme wickedness. Lucifer was the most beautiful of all the angels in Paradise"-- "How do you know?" said Miss Milner. "But the beauty of Lucifer," (continued Sandford, in perfect neglect and contempt of her question,) "was an aggravation of his guilt; because it shewed a double share of ingratitude to the Divine Creator of that beauty." "Now you talk of angels," said Miss Milner, "I wish I had wings; and I should like to fly through the park this morning." "You would be taken for an angel in good earnest," said Lord Elmwood. Sandford was angry at this little compliment, and cried, "I should think the serpent's skin would be much more characteristic." "My Lord," cried she, "does not Mr. Sandford use me ill?" Vext with other things, she felt herself extremely hurt at this, and made the appeal almost in tears. "Indeed, I think he does." And he looked at Sandford as if he was displeased. This was a triumph so agreeable to her, that she immediately pardoned the offence; but the offender did not so easily pardon her. "Good morning, ladies," said Lord Elmwood, rising to go away. "My Lord," said Miss Woodley, "you promised Miss Milner to accompany her one evening to the opera; this is opera night." "Will you go, my Lord?" asked Miss Milner, in a voice so soft, that he seemed as if he wished, but could not resist it. "I am to dine at Mr. Fenton's to-day," he replied; "and if he and his sister will go, and you will allow them part of your box, I will promise to come." This was a condition by no means acceptable to her; but as she felt a desire to see him in company of his intended bride, (for she fancied she could perceive his secret sentiments, could she once see them together) she answered not ungraciously, "Yes, my compliments to Mr. and Miss Fenton, and I hope they will favour me with their company." "Then, Madam, if they come, you may expect me--else not." He bowed and left the room. All the day was passed in anxious expectation by Miss Milner, what would be the event of the evening: for upon her penetration that evening all her future prospects she thought depended. If she saw by his looks, by his words, or assiduities, that he loved Miss Fenton, she flattered herself she would never think of him again with hope; but if she observed him treat her with inattention or indifference, she would cherish, from that moment, the fondest expectations. Against that short evening her toilet was consulted the whole day: the alternate hope and fear which fluttered in her heart, gave a more than usual brilliancy to her eyes, and more than usual bloom to her complection. But vain was her beauty; vain all her care to decorate that beauty; vain her many looks to her box-door in hopes to see it open--Lord Elmwood never came. The music was discord--every thing she saw was disgusting--in a word, she was miserable. She longed impatiently for the curtain to drop, because she was uneasy where she was--yet she asked herself, "Shall I be less unhappy at home? Yes; at home I shall see Lord Elmwood, and that will be happiness. But he will behold me with neglect, and that will be misery! Ungrateful man! I will no longer think of him." Yet could she have thought of him, without joining in the same idea Miss Fenton, her anguish had been supportable; but while she painted them as lovers, the tortures of the rack are but a few degrees more painful than those which she endured. There are but few persons who ever felt the real passion of jealousy, because few have felt the real passion of love; but with those who have experienced them both, jealousy not only affects the mind, but every fibre of their frame; and Miss Milner's every limb felt agonizing torment, when Miss Fenton, courted and beloved by Lord Elmwood, was present to her imagination. The moment the opera was finished, she flew hastily down stairs, as if to fly from the sufferings she experienced. She did not go into the coffee-room, though repeatedly urged by Miss Woodley, but waited at the door till her carriage drew up. Piqued--heart-broken--full of resentment against the object of her uneasiness, and inattentive to all that passed, a hand gently touched her own; and the most humble and insinuating voice said, "Will you permit me to lead you to your carriage?" She was awakened from her revery, and found Lord Frederick Lawnly by her side. Her heart, just then melting with tenderness to another, was perhaps more accessible than heretofore; or bursting with resentment, thought this the moment to retaliate. Whatever passion reigned that instant, it was favourable to the desires of Lord Frederick, and she looked as if she was glad to see him: he beheld this with the rapture and the humility of a lover; and though she did not feel the least particle of love in return, she felt gratitude in proportion to the insensibility with which she had been treated by her guardian; and Lord Frederick's supposition was not very erroneous, if he mistook this gratitude for a latent spark of affection. The mistake, however, did not force from him his respect: he handed her to her carriage, bowed low, and disappeared. Miss Woodley wished to divert her thoughts from the object which could only make her wretched, and as they rode home, by many encomiums upon Lord Frederick, endeavoured to incite her to a regard for him; Miss Milner was displeased at the attempt, and exclaimed, "What! love a rake, a man of professed gallantry? impossible. To me, a common rake is as odious as a common prostitute is to a man of the nicest feelings. Where can be the joy, the pride, of inspiring a passion which fifty others can equally inspire?" "Strange," cried Miss Woodley, "that you, who possess so many follies incident to your sex, should, in the disposal of your heart, have sentiments so contrary to women in general." "My dear Miss Woodley," returned she, "put in competition the languid addresses of a libertine, with the animated affection of a sober man, and judge which has the dominion? Oh! in my calendar of love, a solemn Lord Chief Justice, or a devout archbishop, ranks before a licentious king." Miss Woodley smiled at an opinion which she knew half her sex would ridicule; but by the air of sincerity with which it was delivered, she was convinced her recent behaviour to Lord Frederick was but the mere effect of chance. Lord Elmwood's carriage drove to his door just at the time her's did; Mr. Sandford was with him, and they were both come from passing the evening at Mr. Fenton's. "So, my Lord," said Miss Woodley, as soon as they met in the apartment, "you did not come to us?" "No," answered he, "I was sorry; but I hope you did not expect me." "Not expect you, my Lord?" cried Miss Milner; "Did not you say that you would come?" "If I had, I certainly should have come," returned he, "but I only said so conditionally." "That I am a witness to," cried Sandford, "for I was present at the time, and he said it should depend upon Miss Fenton." "And she, with her gloomy disposition," said Miss Milner, "chose to sit at home." "Gloomy disposition!" repeated Sandford: "She has a great share of sprightliness--and I think I never saw her in better spirits than she was this evening, my Lord." Lord Elmwood did not speak. "Bless me, Mr. Sandford," cried Miss Milner, "I meant no reflection upon Miss Fenton's disposition; I only meant to censure her taste for staying at home." "I think," replied Mr. Sandford, "a much heavier censure should be passed upon those who prefer rambling abroad." "But I hope, ladies, my not coming," said Lord Elmwood, "was no inconvenience to you; for you had still, I see, a gentleman with you." "Oh! yes, two gentlemen:" answered the son of Lady Evans, a lad from school, whom Miss Milner had taken along with her. "What two?" asked Lord Elmwood. Neither Miss Milner nor Miss Woodley answered. "You know, Madam," said young Evans, "that handsome gentleman who handed you into your carriage, and you called my Lord." "Oh! he means Lord Frederick Lawnly:" said Miss Milner carelessly, but a blush of shame spread over her face. "And did he hand you into your coach?" asked Lord Elmwood earnestly. "By mere accident, my Lord," Miss Woodley replied, "for the crowd was so great----" "I think, my Lord," said Sandford, "it was very lucky that you were _not_ there." "Had Lord Elmwood been with us, we should not have had occasion for the assistance of any other," said Miss Milner. "Lord Elmwood has been with you, Madam," returned Sandford, "very frequently, and yet--" "Mr. Sandford," said Lord Elmwood, interrupting him, "it is near bed-time, your conversation keeps the ladies from retiring." "Your Lordship's does not," said Miss Milner, "for you say nothing." "Because, Madam, I am afraid to offend." "But do not you also hope to please? and without risking the one, it is impossible to arrive at the other." "I think, at present, the risk would be too hazardous, and so I wish you a good night." And he went out of the room somewhat abruptly. "Lord Elmwood," said Miss Milner, "is very grave--he does not look like a man who has been passing the evening with the woman he loves." "Perhaps he is melancholy at parting from her," said Miss Woodley. "More likely offended," said Sandford, "at the manner in which that lady has spoken of her." "Who, I? I protest I said nothing----" "Nothing! Did not you say that she was gloomy?" "Nothing but what I thought--I was going to add, Mr. Sandford." "When you think unjustly, you should not express your thoughts." "Then, perhaps, I should never speak." "And it were better you did not, if what you say is to give pain. Do you know, Madam, that my Lord is going to be married to Miss Fenton?" "Yes," answered Miss Milner. "Do you know that he loves her?" "No," answered Miss Milner. "How! do you suppose he does not?" "I suppose that he does, yet I don't know it." "Then if you suppose that he does, how can you have the imprudence to find fault with her before him?" "I did not. To call her gloomy, was, I knew, to commend her both to him and to you, who admire such tempers." "Whatever her temper is, _every one_ admires it; and so far from its being what you have described, she has great vivacity; vivacity which comes from the heart." "No, if it _came_ from thence, I should admire it too; but, if she has any, it rests there, and no one is the better for it." "Pshaw!" said Miss Woodley, "it is time for us to retire; you and Mr. Sandford must finish your dispute in the morning." "Dispute, Madam!" said Sandford, "I never disputed with any one beneath a doctor of divinity in my life. I was only cautioning your friend not to make light of those virtues which it would do her honour to possess. Miss Fenton is a most amiable young woman, and worthy of just such a husband as my Lord Elmwood will make her." "I am sure," said Miss Woodley, "Miss Milner thinks so--she has a high opinion of Miss Fenton--she was at present only jesting." "But, Madam, a jest is a very pernicious thing, when delivered with a malignant sneer. I have known a jest destroy a lady's reputation--I have known a jest give one person a distaste for another--I have known a jest break off a marriage." "But I suppose there is no apprehension of that in the present case?" said Miss Woodley--wishing he might answer in the affirmative. "Not that I can foresee. No, Heaven forbid," he replied, "for I look upon them to be formed for each other--their dispositions, their pursuits, their inclinations the same. Their passions for each other just the same--pure--white as snow." "And I dare say, not warmer," replied Miss Milner. He looked provoked beyond measure. "My dear," cried Miss Woodley, "how can you talk thus? I believe in my heart you are only envious, because my Lord Elmwood has not offered himself to you." "To her!" said Sandford, affecting an air of the utmost surprise; "to her! Do you think he received a dispensation from his vows, to become the husband of a coquette--a----."--He was going on. "Nay, Mr. Sandford," cried Miss Milner, "I believe, after all, my worst crime, in your eyes, is that of being a heretic." "By no means--it is the only circumstance that can apologize for your faults; and if you had not that excuse, there would be none for you." "Then, at present, there _is_ an excuse--I thank you, Mr. Sandford--this is the kindest thing you ever said to me. But I am vext to see that you are sorry you have said it." "Angry at your being a heretic!" he resumed--"Indeed I should be much more concerned to see you a disgrace to our religion." Miss Milner had not been in a good humour the whole evening--she had been provoked several times to the full extent of her patience: but this harsh sentence hurried her beyond all bounds, and she arose from her seat in the most violent agitation, exclaiming, "What have I done to be thus treated?" Though Mr. Sandford was not a man easily intimidated, he was upon this occasion evidently alarmed; and stared about him with so violent an expression of surprise, that it partook, in some degree, of fear. Miss Woodley clasped her friend in her arms, and cried with the tenderest affection and pity, "My dear Miss Milner, be composed." Miss Milner sat down, and was so for a minute; but her dead silence was almost as alarming to Sandford as her rage had been; and he did not perfectly recover himself till he saw tears pouring down her face. He then heaved a sigh of content that all had thus ended; but in his heart resolved never to forget the ridiculous affright into which he had been thrown. He stole out of the room without uttering a syllable--but as he never retired to rest before he had repeated a long form of evening prayer, when this evening he came to that part which supplicates "Grace for the wicked," he mentioned Miss Milner's name with the most fervent devotion. CHAPTER V. Of the many restless nights that Miss Milner passed, this was not one. It is true, she had a weight of care upon her heart, even heavier than usual, but the burden had overcome her strength: wearied out with hopes, with fears, and, at the end, with disappointment and rage, she sunk at once into a deep slumber. But the more forgetfulness had then prevailed, the more powerful was the force of remembrance when she awoke. At first, so sound her sleep had been, that she had a difficulty in calling to mind why she was unhappy; but that she _was_ unhappy she well recollected--when the cause came to her memory, she would have slept again--but it was impossible. Though her rest had been sound, it had not been refreshing--she was far from well, and sent word of her indisposition, as an apology for not being present at breakfast. Lord Elmwood looked concerned when the message was delivered--Mr. Sandford shook his head. "Miss Milner's health is not good!" said Mrs. Horton a few minutes after. Lord Elmwood laid down the newspaper to attend to her. "To me, there is something very extraordinary about her!" continued Mrs. Horton, finding she had caught his Lordship's attention. "So there is to me!" added Sandford, with a sarcastic sneer. "And so there is to me!" said Miss Woodley, with a serious face and a heartfelt sigh. Lord Elmwood gazed by turns at each, as each delivered their sentiments--and when they were all silent, he looked bewildered, not knowing what judgment to form from any of these sentences. Soon after breakfast, Mr. Sandford withdrew to his own apartment: Mrs. Horton, in a little time, went to hers: Lord Elmwood and Miss Woodley were left alone. He immediately rose from his seat, and said, "I think, Miss Woodley, Miss Milner was extremely to blame, though I did not chuse to tell her so before Mr. Sandford, in giving Lord Frederick an opportunity of speaking to her, unless she means that he shall renew his addresses." "That, I am certain," replied Miss Woodley, "she does _not_ mean--and I assure you, my Lord, seriously, it was by mere accident she saw him yesterday evening, or permitted his attendance upon her to her carriage." "I am glad to hear it," he returned quickly; "for although I am not of a suspicious nature, yet in regard to her affections for him, I cannot but still have my doubts." "You need have none, my Lord," replied Miss Woodley, with a smile of confidence. "And yet you must own her behaviour has warranted them--has it not been in this particular incoherent and unaccountable?" "The behaviour of a person in love, no doubt," answered Miss Woodley. "Don't I say so?" replied he warmly; "and is not that a just reason for my suspicions?" "But is there only one man in the world on whom those suspicions can fix?" said Miss Woodley, with the colour mounting into her face. "Not that I know of--not one more that I know of," he replied, with astonishment at what she had insinuated, and yet with a perfect assurance that she was in the wrong. "Perhaps I am mistaken," answered she. "Nay, that is impossible too," returned he with anxiety--"You share her confidence--you are perpetually with her; and if she did not confide in you, (which I know, and rejoice that she does) you would yet be acquainted with all her inclinations." "I believe I am _perfectly_ acquainted with them," replied Miss Woodley, with a significance in her voice and manner which convinced him there was some secret to learn. After a hesitation---- "It is far from me," replied he, "to wish to be entrusted with the private sentiments of those who desire to with-hold them from me; much less would I take any unfair means to be informed of them. To ask any more questions of you, I believe, would be unfair. Yet I cannot but lament that I am not as well informed as you are. I wish to prove my friendship to Miss Milner, but she will not suffer me--and every step that I take for her happiness, I take in the most perplexing uncertainty." Miss Woodley sighed--but she did not speak. He seemed to wait for her reply; but as she made none, he proceeded-- "If ever breach of confidence could be tolerated, I certainly know no occasion that would so justly authorise it as the present. I am not only proper from character, but from circumstances, to be relied upon--my interest is so nearly connected with the interest, and my happiness with the happiness of my ward, that those principles, as well as my honour, would protect her against every peril arising from my being trusted." "Oh! my Lord," cried Miss Woodley, with a most forcible accent, "_You_ are the last person on earth she would pardon me for entrusting." "Why so?" said he, warmly. "But that is the way--the person who is our friend we distrust--where a common interest is concerned, we are ashamed of drawing on a common danger--afraid of advice, though that advice is to save us.----Miss Woodley," said he, changing his voice with excess of earnestness, "do you not believe, that I would do anything to make Miss Milner happy?" "Any thing in honour, my Lord." "She can desire nothing farther," he replied in agitation. "Are her desires so unwarrantable, that I cannot grant them?" Miss Woodley again did not speak--and he continued---- "Great as my friendship is, there are certainly bounds to it--bounds that shall save her in spite of herself:"--and he raised his voice. "In the disposal of themselves," resumed he, with a less vehement tone, "that great, that terrific disposal in marriage, (at which I have always looked with fear and dismay) there is no accounting for the rashness of a woman's choice, or sometimes for the depravity of her taste. But in such a case, Miss Milner's election of a husband shall not direct mine. If she does not know how to estimate her own value, I do. Independent of her fortune, she has beauty to captivate the heart of any man; and with all her follies, she has a frankness in her manner, an unaffected wisdom in her thoughts, a vivacity in her conversation, and withal, a softness in her demeanour, that might alone engage the affections of a man of the nicest sentiments, and the strongest understanding. I will not see all these qualities and accomplishments debased. It is my office to protect her from the consequences of a degrading choice, and I will." "My Lord, Miss Milner's taste is not a depraved one; it is but too refined." "What can you mean by that, Miss Woodley? You talk mysteriously. Is she not afraid that I will thwart her inclinations?" "She is sure that you will, my Lord." "Then must the person be unworthy of her." Miss Woodley rose from her seat--she clasped her hands--every look and every gesture proved her alternate resolution and irresolution of proceeding. Lord Elmwood's attention was arrested before; but now it was fixed to a degree which her extraordinary manner only could occasion. "My Lord," said she, with a tremulous voice, "promise me, declare to me, nay, swear to me, that it shall ever remain a secret in your own breast, and I will reveal to you, on whom she has placed her affections." This preparation made Lord Elmwood tremble, and he ran over instantly in his mind all the persons he could recollect, in order to arrive at the knowledge by thought, quicker than by words. It was in vain he tried; and he once more turned his inquiring eyes upon Miss Woodley. He saw her silent and covered with confusion. Again he searched his own thoughts; nor ineffectually as before. At the first glance, the object was presented, and he beheld--_himself._ The rapid emotion of varying passions, which immediately darted over his features, informed Miss Woodley that her secret was discovered--she hid her face, while the tears that fell down to her bosom, confirmed the truth of his suggestion, beyond what oaths could have done. A short interval of silence followed, during which, she suffered tortures for the manner in which he would next address her--two seconds gave her this reply: "For God's sake take care what you are doing--you are destroying my prospects of futurity--you are making this world too dear to me." Her drooping head was then lifted up, and she caught the eye of Dorriforth; she saw it beam expectation, amazement, joy, ardour, and love.----Nay, there was a fire, a vehemence in the quick fascinating rays it sent forth, she never before had seen--it filled her with alarm--she wished him to love Miss Milner, but to love her with moderation. Miss Woodley was too little versed in the subject, to know, this would have been not to love at all; at least, not to the extent of breaking through engagements, and all the various obstacles that still militated against their union. Lord Elmwood was sensible of the embarrassment his presence gave Miss Woodley, and understood the reproaches which she seemed to vent upon herself in silence. To relieve her from both, he laid his hand with force upon his heart, and said, "Do you believe me?" "I do, my Lord," she answered, trembling. "I will make no unjust use of what I know," he replied with firmness. "I believe you, my Lord." "But for what my passions now dictate," continued he, "I will not answer. They are confused--they are triumphant at present. I have never yet, however, been vanquished by them; and even upon this occasion, my reason shall combat them to the last--and my reason shall fail me, before I do wrong." He was going to leave the room--she followed him, and cried, "But, my Lord, how shall I see again the unhappy object of my treachery?" "See her," replied he, "as one to whom you meant no injury, and to whom you have done none." "But she would account it an injury." "We are not judges of what belongs to ourselves," he replied--"I am transported at the tidings you have revealed, and yet, perhaps, I had better never have heard them." Miss Woodley was going to say something farther, but as if incapable of attending to her, he hastened out of the room. CHAPTER VI. Miss Woodley stood for some time to consider which way she was to go. The first person she met, would enquire why she had been weeping? and if Miss Milner was to ask the question, in what words could she tell, or in what manner deny the truth? To avoid her was her first caution, and she took the only method; she had a hackney-coach ordered, rode several miles out of town, and returned to dinner with so little remains of her swoln eyes, that complaining of the head-ache was a sufficient excuse for them. Miss Milner was enough recovered to be present at dinner, though she scarce tasted a morsel. Lord Elmwood did not dine at home, at which Miss Woodley rejoiced, but at which Mr. Sandford appeared highly disappointed. He asked the servants several times, what he said when he went out? They replied, "Nothing more than that he should not be at home to dinner." "I can't imagine where he dines?" said Sandford. "Bless me, Mr. Sandford, can't you guess?" (cried Mrs. Horton, who by this time was made acquainted with his intended marriage) "He dines with Miss Fenton to be sure." "No," replied Sandford, "he is not there; I came from thence just now, and they had not seen him all day." Poor Miss Milner, on this, ate something; for where we hope for nothing, we receive small indulgencies with joy. Notwithstanding the anxiety and trouble under which Miss Woodley had laboured all the morning, her heart for many weeks had not felt so light as it did this day at dinner. The confidence that she reposed in the promises of Lord Elmwood--the firm reliance she had upon his delicacy and his justice--the unabated kindness with which her friend received her, while she knew that no one suspicious thought had taken harbour in her bosom--and the conscious integrity of her own intentions, though she might have been misled by her judgment, all comforted her with the hope, she had done nothing she ought to wish recalled. But although she felt thus tranquil, in respect to what she had divulged, yet she was a good deal embarrassed with the dread of next seeing Lord Elmwood. Miss Milner, not having spirits to go abroad, passed the evening at home. She read part of a new opera, played upon her guitar, mused, sighed, occasionally talked with Miss Woodley, and so passed the tedious hours till near ten, when Mrs. Horton asked Mr. Sandford to play a game at piquet, and on his excusing himself, Miss Milner offered in his stead, and was gladly accepted. They had just begun to play when Lord Elmwood came into the room--Miss Milner's countenance immediately brightened, and though she was in a negligent morning dress, and looked paler than usual, she did not look less beautiful. Miss Woodley was leaning on the back of her chair to observe the game, and Mr. Sandford sat reading one of the Fathers at the other side of the fire place. Lord Elmwood, as he advanced to the table, bowed, not having seen the ladies since the morning, or Miss Milner that day: they returned the salute, and he was going up to Miss Milner, (as if to enquire of her health) when Mr. Sandford, laying down his book, said, "My Lord, where have you been all day?" "I have been very busy," replied he, and walking from the card-table, went up to him. Miss Milner played one card for another. "You have been at Mr. Fenton's this evening, I suppose?" said Sandford. "No; not at all to-day." "How came that about, my Lord?" Miss Milner played the ace of diamonds instead of the king of hearts. "I shall call to-morrow," answered Lord Elmwood; and then walking with a very ceremonious air up to Miss Milner, said, "He hoped she was perfectly recovered." Mrs. Horton begged her "To mind what she was about." She replied, "I am much better, Sir." He then returned to Sandford again; but never, during all this time, did his eye once encounter Miss Woodley's; and she, with equal care, avoided his. Some cold dishes were now brought up for supper--Miss Milner lost her deal, and the game ended. As they were arranging themselves at the supper-table, "Do, Miss Milner," said Mrs. Horton, "have something warm for your supper; a chicken boiled, or something of that kind; you have eat nothing to-day." With feelings of humanity, and apparently no other sensation--but never did he feel his philanthropy so forcible--Lord Elmwood said, "Let me beg of you, Miss Milner, to have something provided for you." The earnestness and emphasis with which these few words were pronounced, were more flattering than the finest turned compliment would have been; her gratitude was expressed in blushes, and by assuring him she was now "So well, as to sup on the dishes before her." She spoke, however, and had not made the trial; for the moment she carried a morsel to her lips, she laid it on her plate again, and turned paler, from the vain endeavour to force her appetite. Lord Elmwood had always been attentive to her; but now he watched her as he would a child; and when he saw by her struggles that she could not eat, he took her plate from her; gave her something else; and all with a care and watchfulness in his looks, as if he had been a tender-hearted boy, and she his darling bird, the loss of which would embitter all the joy of his holidays. This attention had something in it so tender, so officious, and yet so sincere, that it brought the tears into Miss Woodley's eyes, attracted the notice of Mr. Sandford, and the observation of Mrs. Horton; while the heart of Miss Milner overflowed with a gratitude, that gave place to no sentiment except her love. To relieve the anxiety which her guardian expressed, she endeavoured to appear cheerful, and that anxiety, at length, really made her so. He now pressed her to take one glass of wine with such solicitude, that he seemed to say a thousand things besides. Sandford still made his observations, and being unused to conceal his thoughts before the present company, he said bluntly, "Miss Fenton was indisposed the other night, my Lord, and you did not seem half thus anxious about her." Had Sandford laid all Lord Elmwood's estate at Miss Milner's feet, or presented her with that eternal bloom which adorns the face of a goddess, he would have done less to endear himself to her, than by this one sentence--she looked at him with a most benign countenance, and felt affliction that she had ever offended him. "Miss Fenton," Lord Elmwood replied, "has a brother with her: her health and happiness are in _his_ care--Miss Milner's are in mine." "Mr. Sandford," said Miss Milner, "I am afraid that I behaved uncivilly to you last night--will you accept of an atonement?" "No, Madam," returned he, "I accept no expiation without amendment." "Well, then," said she, smiling, "suppose I promise never to offend you again, what then?" "Why, then, you'll break your promise." "Do not promise him," said Lord Elmwood, "for he means to provoke you to it." In the like conversation the evening passed, and Miss Milner retired to rest in far better spirits than her morning's prospect had given her the least pretence to hope. Miss Woodley, too, had cause to be well pleased; but her pleasure was in great measure eclipsed by the reflection, that there was such a person as Miss Fenton--she wished she had been equally acquainted with her's as with Miss Milner's heart, and she would then have acted without injustice to either; but Miss Fenton had of late shunned their society, and even in their company was of a temper too reserved ever to discover her mind; Miss Woodley was obliged, therefore, to act to the best of her own judgment only, and leave all events to Providence. CHAPTER VII. Within a few days, in the house of Lord Elmwood, every thing, and every person, wore a new face. He, was the professed lover of Miss Milner--she, the happiest of human beings--Miss Woodley partaking in the joy--Mr. Sandford lamenting, with the deepest concern, that Miss Fenton had been supplanted; and what added poignantly to his concern was, that she had been supplanted by Miss Milner. Though a churchman, he bore his disappointment with the impatience of one of the laity: he could hardly speak to Lord Elmwood; he would not look at Miss Milner, and was displeased with every one. It was his intention, when he first became acquainted with Lord Elmwood's resolution, to quit his house; and as the Earl had, with the utmost degree of inflexibility, resisted all his good counsel upon this subject, he resolved, in quitting him, never to be his adviser again. But, in preparing to leave his friend, his pupil, his patron, and yet him, who, upon most occasions, implicitly obeyed his will, the spiritual got the better of the temporal man, and he determined to stay, lest in totally abandoning him to the pursuit of his own passions, he should make his punishment even greater than his offence. "My Lord," said he, "on the stormy sea, upon which you are embarked, though you will not shun the rocks that your faithful pilot would point out, he will, nevertheless, sail in your company, and lament over your watery grave. The more you slight my advice, the more you want it; so that, until you command me to leave your house, (as I suppose you will soon do, to oblige your Lady) I will continue along with you." Lord Elmwood liked him sincerely, and was glad that he took this resolution; yet as soon as his reason and affections had once told him that he ought to break with Miss Fenton, and marry his ward, he became so decidedly of this opinion, that Sandford's never had the most trivial weight; nor would he even flatter the supposed authority he possessed over him, by urging him to remain in his house a single day, contrary to his inclinations. Sandford observed, with grief, this firmness; but finding it vain to contend, submitted--not, however, with a good grace. Amidst all the persons affected by this change in Lord Elmwood's marriage-designs, Miss Fenton was, perhaps, affected the least--she would have been content to have married, she was content to live single. Mr. Sandford had been the first who made overtures to her on the part of Lord Elmwood, and was the first sent to ask her to dispense with the obligation.--She received both of these proposals with the same insipid smile of approbation, and the same cold indifference at the heart. It was a perfect knowledge of this disposition in his intended wife which had given to Lord Elmwood's thoughts on matrimony, the idea of dreary winter; but the sensibility of Miss Milner had now reversed that prospect into perpetual spring; or the dearer variety of spring, summer, and autumn. It was a knowledge also of this torpor in Miss Fenton's nature, from which he formed the purpose of breaking with her; for Lord Elmwood still retained enough of the sanctity of his former state to have yielded up his own happiness, and even that of his beloved ward, rather than have plunged one heart into affliction by his perfidy. This, before he offered his hand to Miss Milner, he was perfectly convinced would not be the case--even Miss Fenton herself assured him, that her thoughts were more upon the joys of Heaven than upon those of earth; and as this circumstance would, she believed, induce her to retire into a convent, she thought it a happy, rather than an unhappy, event. Her brother, on whom her fortune devolved if she took this resolution, was exactly of her opinion. Lost in the maze of happiness that surrounded her, Miss Milner oftentimes asked her heart, and her heart whispered like a flatterer, "Yes;" Are not my charms even more invincible than I ever believed them to be? Dorriforth, the grave, the pious, the anchorite Dorriforth, by their force, is animated to all the ardour of the most impassioned lover--while the proud priest, the austere guardian is humbled, if I but frown, into the veriest slave of love. She then asked, "Why did I not keep him longer in suspense? He could not have loved me more, I believe: but my power over him might have been greater still. I am the happiest of women in the affection he has proved to me, but I wonder whether it would exist under ill treatment? If it would not, he still does not love me as I wish to be loved--if it would, my triumph, my felicity, would be enhanced." These thoughts were mere phantoms of the brain, and never, by system, put into action; but, repeatedly indulged, they were practised by casual occurrences; and the dear-bought experiment of being loved in spite of her faults, (a glory proud women ever aspire to) was, at present, the ambition of Miss Milner. Unthinking woman! she did not reflect, that to the searching eye of Lord Elmwood, she had faults, with her utmost care to conceal or overcome them, sufficient to try all his love, and all his patience. But what female is not fond of experiments? To which, how few do not fall a sacrifice! Perfectly secure in the affections of the man she loved, her declining health no longer threatened her; her declining spirits returned as before; and the suspicions of her guardian being now changed to the liberal confidence of a doating lover, she again professed all her former follies, all her fashionable levities, and indulged them with less restraint than ever. For a while, blinded by his passion, Lord Elmwood encouraged and admired every new proof of her restored happiness; nor till sufferance had tempted her beyond her usual bounds, did he remonstrate. But she, who, as his ward, had been ever gentle, and (when he strenuously opposed) always obedient; became, as a mistress, sometimes haughty, and, to opposition, always insolent. He was surprised, but the novelty pleased him. And Miss Milner, whom he tenderly loved, could put on no change, or appear in no new character that did not, for the time she adopted it, seem to become her. Among the many causes of complaint which she gave him, want of oeconomy, in the disposal of her income, was one. Bills and drafts came upon him without number, while the account, on her part, of money expended, amounted chiefly to articles of dress that she sometimes never wore, toys that were out of fashion before they were paid for, and charities directed by the force of whim. Another complaint was, as usual, extreme late hours, and often company that he did not approve. She was charmed to see his love struggling with his censure--his politeness with his anxiety--and by the light, frivolous, or resentful manner in which she treated his admonitions, she triumphed in shewing to Miss Woodley, and, more especially to Mr. Sandford, how much she dared upon the strength of his affections. Everything in preparation for their marriage, which was to take place at Elmwood House during the summer months, she resolved for the short time she had to remain in London to let no occasion pass of tasting all those pleasures that were not likely ever to return; but which, though eager as she was in their pursuit, she never placed in competition with those she hoped would succeed--those more sedate and superior joys, of domestic and conjugal happiness. Often, merely to hasten on the tedious hours that intervened, she varied and diverted them, with the many recreations her intended husband could not approve. It so happened, and it was unfortunate it did, that a lawsuit concerning some possessions in the West Indies, and other intricate affairs that came with his title and estate, frequently kept Lord Elmwood from his house part of the day; sometimes the whole evening; and when at home, would often closet him for hours with his lawyers. But while he was thus off his guard, Sandford never was--and had Miss Milner been the dearest thing on earth to him, he could not have watched her more narrowly; or had she been the frailest thing on earth, he could not have been more hard upon her, in all the accounts of her conduct he gave to her guardian. Lord Elmwood knew, on the other hand, that Sandford's failing was to think ill of Miss Milner--he pitied him for it, and he pitied her for it--and in all the aggravation which his representations gave to her real follies, affection for them both, in the heart of Dorriforth, stood between that and every other impression. But facts are glaring; and he, at length, beheld those faults in their true colours, though previously pointed out by the prejudice of Mr. Sandford. As soon as Sandford perceived his friend's uneasiness, "There, my Lord!" cried he, exultingly, "did I not always say the marriage was an improper one? but you would not be ruled--you would not see." "Can you blame _me_ for not seeing," replied his Lordship, "when _you_ were blind? Had you been dispassionate, had you seen Miss Milner's virtues as well as her faults, I should have believed, and been guided by you--but you saw her failings only, and therein have been equally deceived with me, who have only beheld her perfections." "My observations, however, my Lord, would have been of most use to you; for I have seen what to avoid." "But mine have been the most gratifying," replied he; "for I have seen--what I must always love." Sandford sighed, and lifted up his hands. "Mr. Sandford," resumed Lord Elmwood, with a voice and manner such as he used to put on when not all the power of Sandford, or of any other, could change his fixed determination, "Mr. Sandford, my eyes are now open to every failing, as well as to every accomplishment; to every vice, as well as to every virtue of Miss Milner; nor will I suffer myself to be again prepossessed in her favour, by your prejudice against her--for I believe it was compassion at your unkind treatment, that first gained her my heart." "I, my Lord?" cried Sandford; "do not load me with the burthen--with the mighty burthen of your love for her." "Do not interrupt me. Whatever your meaning has been, the effect of it is what I have described. Now, I will no longer," continued he, "have an enemy, such as you have been, to heighten her charms, which are too transcendent in their native state. I will hear no more complaints against her, but I will watch her closely myself--and if I find her mind and heart (such as my suspicions have of late whispered) too frivolous for that substantial happiness I look for with an object so beloved, depend upon my word--the marriage shall yet be broken off." "I depend upon your word; it _will_ then,"--replied Sandford eagerly. "You are unjust, Sir, in saying so before the trial," replied Lord Elmwood, "and your injustice shall make me more cautious, lest I follow your example." "But, my Lord----" "My mind is made up, Mr. Sandford," returned he, interrupting him; "I am no longer engaged to Miss Milner than she shall deserve I should be--but, in my strict observations upon her conduct, I will take care not to wrong her as you have done." "My Lord, call my observations wrong, when you have reflected upon them as a man, and not as a lover--divest yourself of your passion, and meet me upon equal ground." "I will meet no one--I will consult no one--my own judgment shall be the judge, and in a few months marry, or--_banish me from her for ever_." There was something in these last words, in the tone and firmness with which they were delivered, that the heart of Sandford rested upon with content--they bore the symptoms of a menace that would be executed; and he parted from his patron with congratulations upon his wisdom, and with giving him the warmest assurances of his firm reliance on his _word._ Lord Elmwood having come to this resolution, was more composed than he had been for several days before; while the horror of domestic wrangles--a family without subordination--a house without oeconomy--in a word, a wife without discretion, had been perpetually present to his mind. Mr. Sandford, although he was a man of understanding, of learning, and a complete casuist, yet all the faults he himself committed, were entirely--for want of knowing better. He constantly reproved faults in others, and he was most assuredly too good a man not to have corrected and amended his own, had they been known to him--but they were not. He had been for so long a time the superior of all with whom he lived, had been so busied with instructing others, that he had not recollected that himself wanted instructions--and in such awe did his habitual severity keep all about him, that although he had numerous friends, not one told him of his failings--except just now Lord Elmwood, but whom, in this instance, as a man in love, he would not credit. Was there not then some reason for him to suppose he _had_ no faults? his enemies, indeed, hinted that he had, but enemies he never harkened to; and thus, with all his good sense, wanted the sense to follow the rule, _Believe what your enemies say of you, rather than what is said by your friends._ This rule attended to, would make a thousand people amiable, who are now the reverse; and would have made _him_ a perfectly upright character. For could an enemy to whom he would have listened, have whispered to Sandford as he left Lord Elmwood, "Cruel, barbarous man! you go away with your heart satisfied, nay, even elated, in the prospect that Miss Milner's hopes, on which she alone exists, those hopes which keep her from the deepest affliction, and cherish her with joy and gladness, will all be disappointed. You flatter yourself it is for the sake of your friend, Lord Elmwood, that you rejoice, and because he has escaped a danger. You wish him well; but there is another cause for your exultation which you will not seek to know--it is, that in his safety, shall dwell the punishment of his ward. For shame! for shame! forgive her faults, as this of yours requires to be forgiven." Had any one said this to Sandford, whom he would have credited, or had his own heart suggested it, he was a man of that rectitude and conscientiousness, that he would have returned immediately to Lord Elmwood, and have strengthened all his favourable opinions of his intended wife--but having no such monitor, he walked on, highly contented, and meeting Miss Woodley, said, with an air of triumph, "Where's your friend? where's Lady Elmwood?" Miss Woodley smiled, and answered--She was gone with such and such ladies to an auction. "But why give her that title already, Mr. Sandford?" "Because," answered he, "I think she will never have it." "Bless me, Mr. Sandford," said Miss Woodley, "you shock me!" "I thought I should," replied he, "and therefore I told it you." "For Heaven's sake what has happened?" "Nothing new--her indiscretions only." "I know she is imprudent," said Miss Woodley--"I can see that her conduct is often exceptionable--but then Lord Elmwood surely loves her, and love will overlook a great deal." "He _does_ love her--but he has understanding and resolution. He loved his sister too, tenderly loved her, and yet when he had taken the resolution, and passed his word that he would never see her again--even upon her death-bed he would not retract it--no entreaties could prevail upon him. And now, though he maintains, and I dare say loves, her child, yet you remember, when you brought him home, that he would not suffer him in his sight." "Poor Miss Milner!" said Miss Woodley, in the most pitying accents. "Nay," said Sandford, "Lord Elmwood has not _yet_ passed his word, that he will never see her more--he has only threatened to do it; but I know enough of him to know, that his threats are generally the same as if they were executed." "You are very good," said Miss Woodley, "to acquaint me of this in time--I may now warn Miss Milner of it, and she may observe more circumspection." "By no means," cried Sandford, hastily--"What would you warn her for? It will do her no good--besides," added he, "I don't know whether Lord Elmwood does not expect secrecy on my part; and if he does----" "But, with all deference to your opinion," said Miss Woodley, (and with all deference did she speak) "don't you think, Mr. Sandford, that secrecy upon this occasion would be wicked? For consider the anguish that it may occasion to my friend; and if, by advising her, we can save her from----" She was going on.---- "You may call it wicked, Madam, not to inform her of what I have hinted at," cried he; "but I call it a breach of confidence--if it _was_ divulged to me in confidence----" He was going to explain; but Miss Milner entered, and put an end to the discourse. She had been passing the whole morning at an auction, and had laid out near two hundred pounds in different things for which she had no one use, but bought them because they were said to be cheap--among the rest was a lot of books upon chemistry, and some Latin authors. "Why, Madam," cried Sandford, looking over the catalogue where her purchases were marked by a pencil, "do you know what you have done? You can't read a word of these books." "Can't I, Mr. Sandford? But I assure you that you will be very much pleased with them, when you see how elegantly they are bound." "My dear," said Mrs. Horton, "why have you bought china? You and my Lord Elmwood have more now, than you have places to put them in." "Very true, Mrs. Horton--I forgot that--but then you know I can give these away." Lord Elmwood was in the room at the conclusion of this conversation----he shook his head and sighed. "My Lord," said she, "I have had a very agreeable morning; but I wished for you--if you had been with me, I should have bought a great many other things; but I did not like to appear unreasonable in your absence." Sandford fixed his inquisitive eyes upon Lord Elmwood, to observe his countenance--he smiled, but appeared thoughtful. "And, oh! my Lord, I have bought you a present," said she. "I do not wish for a present, Miss Milner." "What not from me? Very well." "If you present me with yourself, it is all that I ask." Sandford moved upon his chair, as if he sat uneasy. "Why then, Miss Woodley," said Miss Milner, "_you_ shall have the present. But then it won't suit you--it is for a gentleman. I'll keep it and give it to my Lord Frederick the first time I meet with him. I saw him this morning, and he looked divinely--I longed to speak to him." Miss Woodley cast, by stealth, an eye of apprehension upon Lord Elmwood's face, and trembled at seeing it flushed with resentment. Sandford stared with both his eyes full upon him: then threw himself upright on his chair, and took a pinch of snuff upon the strength of the Earl's uneasiness. A silence ensued. After a short time--"You all appear melancholy," said Miss Milner: "I wish I had not come home yet." Miss Woodley was in agony--she saw Lord Elmwood's extreme displeasure, and dreaded lest he should express it by some words he could not recall, or she could not forgive--therefore, whispering to her she had something particular to say, she took her out of the room. The moment she was gone, Mr. Sandford rose nimbly from his seat, rubbed his hands, walked briskly across the room, then asked Lord Elmwood in a cheerful tone, "Whether he dined at home to-day?" That which had given Sandford cheerfulness, had so depressed Lord Elmwood, that he sat dejected and silent. At length he answered in a faint voice, "No, I believe I shall _not_ dine at home." "Where is your Lordship going to dine?" asked Mrs. Horton; "I thought we should have had your company to-day; Miss Milner dines at home, I believe." "I have not yet determined where I shall dine," replied he, taking no notice of the conclusion of her speech. "My Lord, if you mean to go to the hotel, I'll go with you, if you please," cried Sandford officiously. "With all my heart, Sandford--" and they both went out together, before Miss Milner returned to the apartment. CHAPTER VIII. Miss Woodley, for the first time, disobeyed the will of Mr. Sandford; and as soon as Miss Milner and she were alone, repeated all he had revealed to her; accompanying the recital, with her usual testimonies of sympathy and affection. But had the genius of Sandford presided over this discovery, it could not have influenced the mind of Miss Milner to receive the intelligence with a temper more exactly the opposite of that which it was the intention of the informer to recommend. Instead of shuddering at the menace Lord Elmwood had uttered, she said, she "Dared him to perform it." "He dares not," repeated she. "Why dares not?" said Miss Woodley. "Because he loves me too well--because his own happiness is too dear to him." "I believe he loves you," replied Miss Woodley, "and yet there is a doubt if----" "There shall be no longer a doubt," cried Miss Milner, "I'll put him to the proof." "For shame, my dear! you talk inconsiderately--what can you mean by proof?" "I mean I will do something that no prudent man _ought_ to forgive; and yet, with all his vast share of prudence, _he_ shall forgive it, and make a sacrifice of just resentment to partial affection." "But if you should be disappointed, and he should _not_ make the sacrifice?" said Miss Woodley. "Then I have only lost a man who had no regard for me." "He may have a great regard for you, notwithstanding." "But for the love I have felt, and do still feel, for my Lord Elmwood, I will have something more than a _great regard_ in return." "You have his love, I am sure." "But is it such as mine? _I_ could love _him_ if he had a thousand faults. And yet," said she, recollecting herself, "and yet, I believe his being faultless, was the first cause of my passion." Thus she talked on--sometimes in anger, sometimes apparently jesting--till her servant came to let her know the dinner was served. Upon entering the dining-room, and seeing Lord Elmwood's place at table vacant, she started back. She was disappointed of the pleasure she expected in dining with him; and his sudden absence, so immediately after the intelligence that she had received from Miss Woodley, increased her uneasiness. She drew her chair, and sat down with an indifference, that said she should not eat; and as soon as she was seated, she put her fingers sullenly to her lips, nor touched her knife and fork, nor spoke a word in reply to any thing that was said to her during the whole dinner. Miss Woodley and Mrs. Horton were both too well acquainted with the good disposition of her heart, to take offence, or appear to notice this behaviour. They dined, and said nothing either to provoke or sooth her. Just as the dinner was going to be removed, a loud rap came at the door--"Who is that?" said Mrs. Horton. One of the servants went to the window, and answered, "My Lord and Mr. Sandford, Madam." "Come back to dinner as I live," cried Mrs. Horton. Miss Milner continued her position and said nothing--but at the corners of her mouth, which her fingers did not entirely cover, there were discoverable, a thousand dimpled graces like small convulsive fibres, which a restrained smile upon Lord Elmwood's return, had sent there. Lord Elmwood and Sandford entered. "I am glad you are returned, my Lord," said Mrs. Horton, "for Miss Milner would not eat a morsel." "It was only because I had no appetite," returned she, blushing like crimson. "We should not have come back," said Sandford, "but at the place where we went to dine, all the rooms were filled with company." Lord Elmwood put the wing of a fowl on Miss Milner's plate, but without previously asking if she chose any; yet she condescended to eat--they spoke to each other too in the course of conversation, but it was with a reserve that appeared as if they had been quarrelling, and felt so to themselves, though no such circumstance had happened. Two weeks passed away in this kind of distant behaviour on both sides, without either of them venturing a direct quarrel, and without either of them expressing (except inadvertently) their strong affection for each other. During this time they were once, however, very near becoming the dearest friends in expression, as well as in sentiment. This arose from a favour that he had granted in compliance with her desire, though that desire had not been urged, but merely insinuated; and as it was a favour which he had refused to the repeated requests of many of his friends, the value of the obligation was heightened. She and Miss Woodley had taken an airing to see the poor child, young Rushbrook. Lord Elmwood inquiring of the ladies how they had passed their morning, Miss Milner frankly told him; and added, "What pain it gave her to leave the child behind, as he had again cried to come away with her." "Go for him then to-morrow," said Lord Elmwood, "and bring him home." "Home!" she repeated, with surprise. "Yes," replied he, "if you desire it, this shall be his home--you shall be a mother, and I will, henceforward, be a father to him." Sandford, who was present, looked unusually sour at this high token of regard for Miss Milner; yet, with resentment on his face, he wiped a tear of joy from his eye, for the boy's sake--his frown was the force of prejudice, his tear the force of nature. Rushbrook was brought home; and whenever Lord Elmwood wished to shew a kindness to Miss Milner, without directing it immediately to her, he took his nephew upon his knee, talked to him, and told him, he "Was glad they had become acquainted." In the various, though delicate, struggles for power between Miss Milner and her guardian, there was not one person a witness to these incidents, who did not suppose, that all would at last end in wedlock--for the most common observer perceived, that ardent love was the foundation of every discontent, as well as of every joy they experienced. One great incident, however, totally reversed the hope of all future accommodation. The fashionable Mrs. G---- gave a masked ball; tickets were presented to persons of quality and fashion; among the rest, three were sent to Miss Milner. She had never been at a masquerade, and received them with ecstasy--the more especially, as the masque being at the house of a woman of fashion, she did not conceive there could be any objection to her going. She was mistaken--the moment she mentioned it to Lord Elmwood, he desired her, somewhat sternly, "Not to think of being there." She was vexed at the prohibition, but more at the manner in which it was delivered, and boldly said, "That she should certainly go." She expected a rebuke for this, but what alarmed her much more, he said not a word; but looked with a resignation, which foreboded her sorrow greater than the severest reproaches would have done. She sat for a minute, reflecting how to rouse him from this composure--she first thought of attacking him with upbraidings; then she thought of soothing him; and at last of laughing at him. This was the most dangerous of all, and yet, this she ventured upon. "I am sure your Lordship," said she, "with all your saintliness, can have no objection to my being present at the masquerade, if I go as a Nun." He made no reply. "That is a habit," continued she, "which covers a multitude of faults--and, for that evening, I may have the chance of making a conquest even of you--nay, I question not, if under that inviting attire, even the pious Mr. Sandford would not ogle me." "Hush!" said Miss Woodley. "Why hush?" cried Miss Milner, aloud, though Miss Woodley had spoken in a whisper, "I am sure," continued she, "I am only repeating what I have read in books about nuns and their confessors." "Your conduct, Miss Milner," replied Lord Elmwood "gives evident proofs of the authors you have read; you may spare yourself the trouble of quoting them." Her pride was hurt at this, beyond bearing; and as she could not, like him, govern her anger, it flushed in her face, and almost forced her into tears. "My Lord," said Miss Woodley, (in a tone so soft and peaceful, that it should have calmed the resentment of both,) "my Lord, suppose you were to accompany Miss Milner? there are tickets for three, and you can then have no objection." Miss Milner's brow was immediately smoothed; and she fetched a sigh, in anxious expectation that he would consent. "I go, Miss Woodley?" he replied, with astonishment, "Do you imagine I would play the buffoon at a masquerade?" Miss Milner's face changed into its former state. "I have seen grave characters there, my Lord," said Miss Woodley. "Dear Miss Woodley," cried Miss Milner, "why persuade Lord Elmwood to put on a mask, just at the time he has laid it aside?" His patience was now tempted to its height, and he answered, "If you suspect me of inconsistency, Madam, you shall find me changed." Pleased that she had been able at last to irritate him, she smiled with a degree of triumph, and in that humour was going to reply; but before she could speak four words, and before she thought of it, he abruptly left the room. She was highly offended at this insult, and declared, "From that moment she banished him from her heart for ever." And to prove that she set his love and his anger at equal defiance, she immediately ordered her carriage, and said, she "Was going to some of her acquaintance, whom she knew to have tickets, and with whom she would fix upon the habit she was to appear in at the masquerade; for nothing, unless she was locked up, should alter the resolution she had formed, of being there." To remonstrate at that moment, Miss Woodley knew would be in vain--her coach came to the door, and she drove away. She did not return to dinner, nor till it was late in the evening; Lord Elmwood was at home, but he never once mentioned her name. She came home, after he had retired, in great spirits; and then, for the first time, in her whole life, appeared careless what he might think of her behaviour:--but her whole thoughts were occupied upon the business which had employed the chief of her day; and her dress engrossed all her conversation, as soon as Miss Woodley and she were alone. She told her, she had been shewn the greatest variety of beautiful and becoming dresses she had ever beheld; "and yet," said she, "I have at last fixed upon a very plain one; but one I look so well in, that you will hardly know me, when I have it on." "You are seriously then resolved to go," said Miss Woodley, "if you hear no more on the subject from your guardian?" "Whether I do hear or not, Miss Woodley, I am equally resolved to go." "But you know, my dear, he has desired you not--and you used always to obey his commands." "As my guardian, I certainly did obey him; and I could obey him as a husband; but as a lover, I will not." "Yet that is the way never to have him for a husband." "As he pleases--for if he will not submit to be my lover, I will not submit to be his wife--nor has he the affection that I require in a husband." Thus the old sentiments, repeated again and again, prevented a separation till towards morning. Miss Milner, for that night, dreamed less of her guardian than of the masquerade. On the evening of the next day it was to be--she was up early, breakfasted in her dressing room, and remained there most of the day, busied in a thousand preparations for the night; one of them was, to take every particle of powder out of her hair, and have it curled all over in falling ringlets. Her next care was, that her dress should exactly fit, and display her fine person to the best advantage--it did so. Miss Woodley entered as it was trying on, and was all astonishment at the elegance of the habit, and its beautiful effect upon her graceful person; but, most of all, she was astonished at her venturing on such a character--for though it represented the goddess of Chastity, yet from the buskins, and the petticoat festooned far above the ancle, it had, on a first glance, the appearance of a female much less virtuous. Miss Woodley admired this dress, yet objected to it; but as she admired first, her objections after had no weight. "Where is Lord Elmwood?" said Miss Milner--"he must not see me." "No, for heaven's sake," cried Miss Woodley, "I would not have him see you in such a disguise for the universe." "And yet," returned the other, with a sigh, "why am I then thus pleased with my dress? for I had rather he should admire me than all the world besides, and yet he is not to see me in it." "But he would not admire you so dressed," said Miss Woodley. "How shall I contrive to avoid him," said Miss Milner, "if in the evening he should offer to hand me into my carriage? But I believe he will not be in good humour enough for that." "You had better dress at the house of the ladies with whom you go," said Miss Woodley; and this was agreed upon. At dinner they learnt that Lord Elmwood was to go that evening to Windsor, in order to be in readiness for the king's hunt early in the morning. This intelligence having dispersed Miss Milner's fears, she concluded upon dressing at home. Lord Elmwood appeared at dinner, in an even, but not in a good temper; the subject of the masquerade was never brought up, nor indeed was it once in his thoughts; for though he was offended at his ward's behaviour on the occasion, and considered that she committed a fault in telling him, "She would go," yet he never suspected she meant to do so, not even at the time she said it, much less that she would persist, coolly and deliberately, in so direct a contradiction to his will. She, for her part, flattered herself, that his going to Windsor, was intended in order to give her an opportunity of passing the evening as she pleased, without his being obliged to know of it, and consequently to complain. Miss Woodley, who was willing to hope as she wished, began to be of the same opinion; and, without reluctance, dressed herself as a wood-nymph to accompany her friend. CHAPTER IX. At half after eleven, Miss Milner's chair, and another with Miss Woodley, took them from Lord Elmwood's, to call upon the party (wood-nymphs and huntresses) who were to accompany them, and make up the suit of Diana. They had not left the house two minutes, when a thundering rap came at the door--it was Lord Elmwood in a post chaise. Upon some occasion the next day's hunt was deferred: he had been made acquainted with it, and came from Windsor at that late hour. After he had informed Mrs. Horton and Mr. Sandford, who were sitting together, of the cause of his sudden return, and had supper ordered for him, he enquired, "What company had just left the house?" "We have been alone the whole evening, my Lord," replied Mrs. Horton. "Nay," returned he, "I saw two chairs, with several servants, come out of the door as I drove up, but what livery I could not discern." "We have had no creature here," repeated Mrs. Horton. "Nor has Miss Milner had visitors?" asked he. This brought Mrs. Horton to her recollection, and she cried, "Oh! now I know;"----and then checked herself, as if she knew too much. "What do you know, Madam?" said he, sharply. "Nothing," said Mrs. Horton, "I know nothing--" and she lifted up her hands and shook her head. "So all people say, who know a great deal," cried Sandford, "and I suspect that is at present your case." "Then I know more than I wish, I am sure, Mr. Sandford," returned she, shrugging up her shoulders. Lord Elmwood was all impatience. "Explain, Madam, explain." "Dear my Lord," said she, "if your Lordship will recollect, you may just have the same knowledge that I have." "Recollect what?" said he sternly. "The quarrel you and your ward had about the masquerade." "What of that? she is not gone there?" he cried. "I am not sure she is," returned Mrs. Horton; "but if your Lordship saw two sedan chairs going out of this house, I cannot but suspect it must be Miss Milner and my niece going to the masquerade." He made no answer, but rang the bell violently. A servant entered. "Send Miss Milner's maid hither," said he, "immediately." The man withdrew. "Nay, my Lord," cried Mrs. Horton, "any of the other servants could tell you just as well, whether Miss Milner is at home, or gone out." "Perhaps not," replied he. The maid entered. "Where is your mistress?" said Lord Elmwood. The woman had received no orders to conceal where the ladies were gone, and yet a secret influence which governs the thoughts of all waiting-women and chambermaids, whispered to her that she ought not to tell the truth. "Where is your mistress?" repeated he, in a louder voice than before. "Gone out, my Lord," she replied. "Where?" "My Lady did not tell me." "And don't you know?" "No, my Lord:" she answered, and without blushing. "Is this the night of the masquerade?" said he. "I don't know, my Lord, upon my word; but, I believe, my Lord, it is not." Sandford, as soon as Lord Elmwood had asked the last question, ran hastily to the table, at the other side of the room, took something from it, and returned to his place again--and when the maid said, "It was not the night of the masquerade," he exclaimed, "But it is, my Lord, it is--yes, it is," and shewing a newspaper in his hand, pointed to the paragraph which contained the information. "Leave the room," said Lord Elmwood to the woman, "I have done with you." She withdrew. "Yes, yes, here it is," repeated Sandford, with the paper in his hand.----He then read the paragraph: "'_The masquerade at the honorable Mrs. G----'s this evening_'--This evening, my Lord, you find--'_it is expected will be the most brilliant, of any thing of the kind for these many years past._'" "They should not put such things in the papers," said Mrs. Horton, "to tempt young women to their ruin." The word ruin grated upon Lord Elmwood's ear, and he said to the servant who came to wait on him, while he supped, "Take the supper away." He had not attempted either to eat, or even to sit down; and he now walked backwards and forwards in the room, lost in thought and care. A little time after, one of Miss Milner's footmen came in upon some occasion, and Mr. Sandford said to him, "Pray did you attend your lady to the masquerade?" "Yes, Sir," replied the man. Lord Elmwood stopped himself short in his walk, and said to the servant, "You did?" "Yes, my Lord," replied he. He walked again. "I should like to know what she was dressed in," said Mrs. Horton: and turning to the servant, "Do you know what your lady had on?" "Yes, Madam," replied the man, "she was in men's clothes." "How!" cried Lord Elmwood. "You tell a story, to be sure," said Mrs. Horton to the servant. "No," cried Sandford, "I am sure he does not; for he is an honest good young man, and would not tell a lie upon any account--would you, George?" Lord Elmwood ordered Miss Milner's woman to be again sent up. She came. "In what dress did your lady go to the masquerade?" asked he, and with a look so extremely morose, it seemed to command the answer in a single word, and that word to be truth. A mind, with a spark of sensibility more than this woman possessed, could not have equivocated with such an interrogator, but her reply was, "She went in her own dress, my Lord." "Was it a man's or a woman's?" asked he, with a look of the same command. "Ha, ha, my Lord," (half laughing and half crying) "a woman's dress, to be sure, my Lord." On which Sandford cried---- "Call the footman up, and let him confront her." He was called; but Lord Elmwood, now disgusted at the scene, withdrew to the further end of the room, and left Sandford to question them. With all the authority and consequence of a country magistrate, Sandford--his back to the fire, and the witnesses before him, began with the footman. "In what dress do you say, that you saw your lady, when you attended, and went along with her, to the masquerade?" "In men's clothes," replied the man, boldly and firmly as before. "Bless my soul, George, how can you say such a thing?" cried the woman. "What dress do _you_ say she went in?" cried Sandford to her. "In women's clothes, indeed, Sir." "This is very odd!" said Mrs. Horton. "Had she on, or had she not on, a coat?" asked Sandford. "Yes, Sir, a petticoat," replied the woman. "Do _you_ say she had on a petticoat?" said Sandford to the man. "I can't answer exactly for that," replied he, "but I know she had boots on." "They were not boots," replied the maid with vehemence--"indeed, Sir, (turning to Sandford) they were only half boots." "My girl," said Sandford kindly to her, "your own evidence convicts your mistress--What has a woman to do with _any_ boots?" Impatient at this mummery, Lord Elmwood rose, ordered the servants out of the room, and then, looking at his watch, found it was near one. "At what hour am I to expect her home?" said he. "Perhaps not till three in the morning," answered Mrs. Horton. "Three! more likely six," cried Sandford. "I can't wait with patience till that time," answered Lord Elmwood, with a most anxious sigh. "You had better go to bed, my Lord," said Mrs. Horton; "and, by sleeping, the time will pass away unperceived." "If I _could_ sleep, Madam." "Will you play a game of cards, my Lord?" said Sandford, "for I will not leave you till she comes home; and though I am not used to sit up all night----" "All night!" repeated Lord Elmwood; "she dares not stay all night." "And yet, after going," said Sandford, "in defiance to your commands, I should suppose she dared." "She is in good company, at least, my Lord," said Mrs. Horton. "She does not know herself what company she is in," replied he. "How should she," cried Sandford, "where every one hides his face?" Till five o'clock in the morning, in conversation such as this, the hours passed away. Mrs. Horton, indeed, retired to her chamber at two, and left the gentlemen to a more serious discourse; but a discourse still less advantageous to poor Miss Milner. She, during this time, was at the scene of pleasure she had painted to herself, and all the pleasure it gave her was, that she was sure she should never desire to go to a masquerade again. Its crowd and bustle fatigued her--its freedom offended her delicacy--and though she perceived that she was the first object of admiration in the place, yet there was one person still wanting to admire; and the remorse at having transgressed his injunctions for so trivial an entertainment, weighed upon her spirits, and added to its weariness. She would have come away sooner than she did, but she could not, with any degree of good manners, leave the company with whom she went; and not till half after four, were they prevailed on to return. Daylight just peeped through the shutters of the room in which Lord Elmwood and Sandford were sitting, when the sound of her carriage, and the sudden stop it made at the door, caused Lord Elmwood to start from his chair. He trembled extremely, and looked pale. Sandford was ashamed to seem to notice it, yet he could not help asking him, "To take a glass of wine." He took it--and for once, evinced he was reduced so low, as to be _glad_ of such a resource. What passion thus agitated Lord Elmwood at this crisis, it is hard to define--perhaps it was indignation at Miss Milner's imprudence, and exultation at being on the point of revenge--perhaps it was emotion arising from joy, to find that she was safe--perhaps it was perturbation at the regret he felt that he must upbraid her--perhaps it was not one alone of these sensations, but all of them combined. She, wearied out with the tedious night's dissipation, and far less joyous than melancholy, had fallen asleep as she rode home, and came half asleep out of her carriage. "Light me to my bed-chamber instantly," said she to her maid, who waited in the hall to receive her. But one of Lord Elmwood's valets went up to her, and answered, "Madam, my Lord desires to see you before you retire." "Your Lord!" she cried, "Is he not out of town?" "No, Madam, my Lord has been at home ever since you went out; and has been sitting up with Mr. Sandford, waiting for you." She was wide awake immediately. The heaviness was removed from her eyes, but fear, grief, and shame, seized upon her heart. She leaned against her maid, as if unable to support herself under those feelings, and said to Miss Woodley, "Make my excuse--I cannot see him to-night--I am unfit--indeed I cannot." Miss Woodley was alarmed at the idea of going to him by herself, and thus, perhaps, irritating him still more: she, therefore, said, "He has sent for _you_; for heaven's sake, do not disobey him a second time." "No, dear Madam, don't," cried her woman, "for he is like a lion--he has been scolding me." "Good God!" (exclaimed Miss Milner, and in a tone that seemed prophetic) "Then he is not to be my husband, after all." "Yes," cried Miss Woodley, "if you will only be humble, and appear sorry. You know your power over him, and all may yet be well." She turned her speaking eyes upon her friend, the tears starting from them, her lips trembling--"Do I not appear sorry?" she cried. The bell at that moment rang furiously, and they hastened their steps to the door of the apartment where Lord Elmwood was. "No, this shuddering is only fright," replied Miss Woodley--"Say to him you are sorry, and beg his pardon." "I cannot," said she, "if Mr. Sandford is with him." The servant opened the door, and she and Miss Woodley went in. Lord Elmwood, by this time, was composed, and received her with a slight inclination of his head--she bowed to him in return, and said, with some marks of humility, "I suppose, my Lord, I have done wrong." "You have indeed, Miss Milner," answered he; "but do not suppose, that I mean to upbraid you: I am, on the contrary, going to release you from any such apprehension _for the future._" Those last three words he delivered with a countenance so serious and so determined, with an accent so firm and so decided, they pierced through her heart. Yet she did not weep, or even sigh; but her friend, knowing what she felt, exclaimed, "Oh?" as if for her. She herself strove with her anguish, and replied, (but with a faltering voice) "I expected as much, my Lord." "Then, Madam, you perhaps expect _all_ that I intend?" "In regard to myself," she replied, "I suppose I do." "Then," said he, "you may expect that in a few days we shall part." "I am prepared for it, my Lord," she answered, and, while she said so, sunk upon a chair. "My Lord, what you have to say farther," said Miss Woodley, in tears, "defer till the morning--Miss Milner, you see, is not able to bear it now." "I have nothing to _say_ further," replied he coolly--"I have now only to act." "Lord Elmwood," cried Miss Milner, divided between grief and anger, "you think to terrify me by your menaces--but I can part with you--heaven knows I can--your late behaviour has reconciled me to a separation." On this he was going out of the room--but Miss Woodley, catching hold of him, cried, "Oh! my Lord, do not leave her in this sorrow--pity her weakness, and forgive it." She was proceeding; and he seemed as if inclined to listen, when Sandford called out in a tone of voice so harsh, "Miss Woodley, what do you mean?"--She gave a start, and desisted. Lord Elmwood then turned to Sandford, and said, "Nay, Mr. Sandford, you need entertain no doubts of me--I have judged, and have deter----" He was going to say _determined_; but Miss Milner, who dreaded the word, interrupted the period, and exclaimed, "Oh! could my poor father know the days of sorrow I have experienced since his death, how would he repent his fatal choice of a protector!" This sentence, in which his friend's memory was recalled, with an additional allusion to her long and secret love for him, affected Lord Elmwood much--he was moved, but ashamed of being so, and as soon as possible conquered the propensity to forgive. Yet, for a short interval, he did not know whether to go out of the room, or to remain in it; whether to speak, or to be silent. At length he turned towards her, and said, "Appeal to your father in some other form--in that (pointing at her dress) he will not know you. Reflect upon him, too, in your moments of dissipation, and let his idea controul your indiscretions--not merely in an hour of contradiction call peevishly upon his name, only to wound the dearest friend you have." There was a degree of truth, and a degree of passionate feeling, in the conclusion of this speech, that alarmed Sandford--he caught up one of the candles, and, laying hold of his friend's elbow, drew him out of the room, crying, "Come, my Lord, come to your bed-chamber--it is very late--it is morning--it is time to rise." And by a continual repetition of these words, in a very loud voice, drowned whatever Lord Elmwood, or any other person might have wished either to have said or to have heard. In this manner, Lord Elmwood was forced out of the apartment, and the evening's entertainment concluded. CHAPTER X. Two whole days passed in the bitterest suspense on the part of Miss Milner, while neither one word or look from Lord Elmwood, denoted the most trivial change of the sentiments he had declared, on the night of the masquerade. Still those sentiments, or intentions, were not explicitly delivered; they were more like intimations, than solemn declarations--for though he had said, "He would never reproach her _for the future_," and that "She might expect they should part," he had not positively said they should; and upon this doubtful meaning of his words, she hung with the strongest agitation of hope and of fear. Miss Woodley seeing the distress of her mind, (much as she endeavoured to conceal it) entreated, nay implored of her, to permit her to be a mediator; to suffer her to ask for a private interview with Lord Elmwood, and if she found him inflexible, to behave with a proper spirit in return; but if he appeared not absolutely averse to a reconciliation, to offer it in so cautious a manner, that it might take place without farther uneasiness on either side. But Miss Milner peremptorily forbade this, and acknowledging to her friend every weakness she felt on the occasion, yet concluded with solemnly declaring, "That after what had passed between her and Lord Elmwood, _he_ must be the first to make a concession, before she herself would condescend to be reconciled." "I believe I know Lord Elmwood's temper," replied Miss Woodley, "and I do not think he will be easily induced to beg pardon for a fault which he thinks _you_ have committed." "Then he does not love me." "Pshaw! Miss Milner, this is the old argument. He may love you too well to spoil you--consider that he is your guardian as well as your lover, he means also to become your husband; and he is a man of such nice honour, that he will not indulge you with any power before marriage, to which he does not intend to submit hereafter." "But tenderness, affection, the politeness due from a lover to his mistress demands his submission; and as I now despair of enticing, I will oblige him to it--at least I'll make the trial, and know my fate at once." "What do you mean to do?" "Invite Lord Frederick to the house, and ask my guardian's consent for our immediate union; you will then see, what effect that will have upon his pride." "But you will then make it too late for him to be humble. If you resolve on this, my dear Miss Milner, you are undone at once--you may thus hurry yourself into a marriage with a man you do not love, and the misery of your whole future life may be the result. Or, would you force Mr. Dorriforth (I mean Lord Elmwood) to another duel with my Lord Frederick?" "No, call him Dorriforth," answered she, with the tears stealing from her eyes; "I thank you for calling him so; for by that name alone, is he dear to me." "Nay, Miss Milner, with what rapture did you not receive his love, as Lord Elmwood!" "But under this title he has been barbarous; under the first, he was all friendship and tenderness." Notwithstanding Miss Milner indulged herself in all these soft bewailings to her friend--before Lord Elmwood she maintained a degree of pride and steadiness, which surprised even him, who perhaps thought less of her love for him, than any other person. She now began to fear she had gone too far in discovering her affection, and resolved to make trial of a contrary method. She determined to retrieve that haughty character which had inspired so many of her admirers with passion, and take the chance of its effect upon this only one, to whom she ever acknowledged a mutual attachment. But although she acted this character well--so well, that every one but Miss Woodley thought her in earnest--yet, with nice and attentive anxiety, she watched even the slightest circumstances that might revive her hopes, or confirm her despair. Lord Elmwood's behaviour was calculated only to produce the latter--he was cold, polite, and perfectly indifferent. Yet, whatever his manners now were, they did not remove from her recollection what they had been--she recalled, with delight, the ardour with which he had first declared his passion to her, and the thousand proofs he had since given of its reality. From the constancy of his disposition, she depended that sentiments like these were not totally eradicated; and from the extreme desire which Mr. Sandford now, more than ever, discovered of depreciating her in his patron's esteem--from the now, more than common zeal, which urged him to take Lord Elmwood from her company, whenever he had it in his power, she was led to believe, that while his friend entertained such strong fears of his relapsing into love, she had reason to indulge the strongest hopes that he would. But the reserve, and even indifference, that she had so well assumed for a few days, and which might perhaps have effected her design, she had not the patience to persevere in, without calling levity to their aid. She visited repeatedly without saying where, or with whom--kept later hours than usual--appeared in the highest spirits--sung, laughed, and never heaved a sigh--but when she was alone. Still Lord Elmwood protracted a resolution, that he was determined he would never break when taken. Miss Woodley was excessively uneasy, and with cause; she saw her friend was providing herself with a weight of cares, that she would soon find infinitely too much for her strength to bear--she would have reasoned with her, but all her arguments had long since proved unavailing. She wished to speak to Lord Elmwood upon the subject, and (unknown to her) plead her excuse; but he apprehended Miss Woodley's intention, and evidently shunned her. Mr. Sandford was now the only person to whom she could speak of Miss Milner, and the delight he took to expatiate on her faults, was more sorrow to her friend, than not to speak of her at all. She, therefore, sat a silent spectator, waiting with dread for the time when she, who now scorned her advice, would fly to her in vain for comfort. Sandford had, however, said one thing to Miss Woodley, which gave her a ray of hope. During their conversation on the subject, (not by way of consolation to her, but as a reproach to Lord Elmwood) he one day angrily exclaimed, "And yet, notwithstanding all this provocation, he has not come to the determination that he will think no more of her--he lingers and he hesitates--I never saw him so weak upon any occasion before." This was joyful hearing to Miss Woodley; still, she could not but reflect, the longer he was in coming to this determination, the more irrevocable it would be, when once taken; and every moment that passed, she trembled lest it should be the very moment, in which Lord Elmwood should resolve to banish Miss Milner from his heart. Amongst her unpardonable indiscretions, during this trial upon the temper of her guardian, was the frequent mention of many gentlemen, who had been her professed admirers, and the mention of them with partiality. Teased, if not tortured, by this, Lord Elmwood still behaved with a manly evenness of temper, and neither appeared provoked on the subject, nor insolently careless. In a single instance, however, this calmness was near deserting him. Entering the drawing-room, one evening, he started, on seeing Lord Frederick Lawnly there, in earnest conversation with Miss Milner. Mrs. Horton and Miss Woodley were both indeed present, and Lord Frederick was talking in an audible voice, upon some indifferent subjects; but with that impressive manner, in which a man never fails to speak to the woman he loves, be the subject what it may. The moment Lord Elmwood started, which was the moment he entered, Lord Frederick arose. "I beg your pardon, my Lord," said Lord Elmwood, "I protest I did not know you." "I ought to entreat your Lordship's pardon," returned Lord Frederick, "for this intrusion, which an accident alone has occasioned. Miss Milner has been almost overturned by the carelessness of a lady's coachman, in whose carriage she was, and therefore suffered me to bring her home in mine." "I hope you are not hurt," said Lord Elmwood to Miss Milner, but his voice was so much affected by what he felt that he could scarce articulate the words. Not with the apprehension that she was hurt, was he thus agitated, for the gaiety of her manners convinced him _that_ could not be the case, nor did he indeed suppose any accident, of the kind mentioned, had occurred; but the circumstance of unexpectedly seeing Lord Frederick had taken him off his guard, and being totally unprepared, he could not conceal indications of the surprise, and of the shock it had given him. Lord Frederick, who had heard nothing of his intended union with his ward, (for it was even kept a secret, at present, from every servant in the house) imputed this discomposure to the personal resentment he might bear him, in consequence of their duel; for though Lord Elmwood had assured the uncle of Lord Frederick, (who once waited upon him on the subject of Miss Milner) that all resentment was, on his part, entirely at an end; and that he was willing to consent to his ward's marriage with his nephew, if she would concur; yet Lord Frederick doubted the sincerity of this, and would still have had the delicacy not to have entered Lord Elmwood's house, had he not been encouraged by Miss Milner, and emboldened by his love. Personal resentment was therefore the construction he put upon Lord Elmwood's emotion on entering the room; but Miss Milner and Miss Woodley knew his agitation to arise from a far different cause. After his entrance, Lord Frederick did not attempt once to resume his seat, but having bowed most respectfully to all present, he took his leave; while Miss Milner followed him as far as the door, and repeated her thanks for his protection. Lord Elmwood was hurt beyond measure; but he had a second concern, which was, that he had not the power to conceal how much he was affected. He trembled--when he attempted to speak, he stammered--he perceived his face burning with confusion, and thus one confusion gave birth to another, till his state was pitiable. Miss Milner, with all her assumed gaiety and real insolence, had not, however, the insolence to seem as if she observed him; she had only the confidence to observe him by stealth. And Mrs. Horton and Miss Woodley, having opportunely begun a discourse upon some trivial occurrences, gave him time to recover himself by degrees--yet, still it was merely by degrees; for the impression which this incident had made, was deep, and not easily to be erased. The entrance of Mr. Sandford, who knew nothing of what had happened, was however, another relief; for he began a conversation with him, which they very soon retired into the library to terminate. Miss Milner, taking Miss Woodley with her, went directly to her own apartment, and there exclaimed in rapture, "He is mine--he loves me--and he is mine for ever." Miss Woodley congratulated her upon believing so, but confessed she herself "Had her fears." "What fears?" cried Miss Milner: "don't you perceive that he loves me?" "I do," said Miss Woodley, "but that I always believed; and, I think, if he loves you now, he has yet the good sense to know that he has reason to hate you." "What has good sense to do with love?" returned Miss Milner--"If a lover of mine suffers his understanding to get the better of his affection--" The same arguments were going to be repeated; but Miss Woodley interrupted her, by requiring an explanation of her conduct as to Lord Frederick, whom, at least, she was treating with cruelty, if she only made use of his affection to stimulate that of Lord Elmwood. "By no means, my dear Miss Woodley," returned she--"I have, indeed, done with my Lord Frederick from this day; and he has certainly given me the proof I wanted of Lord Elmwood's love; but then I did not engage him to this by the smallest ray of hope. No; do not suspect me of that, while my heart was another's: and I assure you, seriously, that it was from the circumstance we described he came with me home--yet, I must own, that if I had not had this design upon Lord Elmwood's jealousy in idea, I would have walked on foot through the streets, rather than have suffered his rival's civilities. But he pressed his services so violently, and my Lady Evans (in whose coach I was when the accident happened) pressed me so violently to accept them, that he cannot expect any farther meaning from this acquiescence than my own convenience." Miss Woodley was going to reply, when she resumed, "Nay, if you intend to say I have done wrong, still I am not sorry for it, when it has given me such convincing proofs of Lord Elmwood's love. Did you see him? I am afraid you did not see how he trembled? and that manly voice faltered, as mine does sometimes--his proud heart was humbled too, as mine is now and then. Oh! Miss Woodley, I have been counterfeiting indifference to _him_--I now find that all _his_ indifference to _me_ has been counterfeit, and that we not only love, but love equally." "Suppose this all as you hope--I yet think it highly necessary that your guardian should be informed, seriously informed, it was mere accident (for, at present, that plea seems but as a subterfuge) which brought Lord Frederick hither." "No, that will be destroying the work so successfully begun. I will not suffer any explanation to take place, but let my Lord Elmwood act just as his love shall dictate; and now I have no longer a doubt of its excess, instead of stooping to him, I wait in the certain expectation of his submission to me." CHAPTER XI. In vain, for three long days, did Miss Milner wait impatiently for this submission; not a sign, not a symptom appeared--nay, Lord Elmwood had, since the evening of Lord Frederick's visit, (which, at the time it happened, seemed to affect him so exceedingly) become just the same man he was before the circumstance occurred; except, indeed, that he was less thoughtful, and now and then cheerful; but without any appearance that his cheerfulness was affected. Miss Milner was vext--she was alarmed--but was ashamed to confess those humiliating sensations, even to Miss Woodley--she supported, therefore, when in company, the vivacity she had so long assumed; but gave way, when alone, to a still greater degree of melancholy than usual. She no longer applauded her scheme of bringing Lord Frederick to the house, and trembled, lest, on some pretence, he should dare to call again. But as these were feelings which her pride would not suffer her to disclose even to her friend, who would have condoled with her, their effects were doubly poignant. Sitting in her dressing-room one forenoon with Miss Woodley, and burthened with a load of grief that she blushed to acknowledge, while her companion was charged with apprehensions that she too was loath to disclose, one of Lord Elmwood's valets tapped gently at the door, and delivered a letter to Miss Milner. By the person who brought it, as well as by the address, she knew it came from Lord Elmwood, and laid it down upon her toilet, as if she was fearful to unfold it. "What is that?" said Miss Woodley. "A letter from Lord Elmwood," replied Miss Milner. "Good Heaven!" exclaimed Miss Woodley. "Nay," returned she, "it is, I have no doubt, a letter to beg my pardon." But her reluctance to open it plainly evinced she did not think so. "Do not read it yet," said Miss Woodley. "I do not intend it," replied she, trembling extremely. "Will you dine first?" said Miss Woodley. "No--for not knowing its contents, I shall not know how to conduct myself towards him." Here a silence followed. Miss Milner took up the letter--looked earnestly at the handwriting on the outside--at the seal--inspected into its folds--and seemed to wish, by some equivocal method, to guess at the contents, without having the courage to come at the certain knowledge of them. Curiosity, at length, got the better of her fears--she opened the letter, and, scarce able to hold it while she read, she read the following words:-- "MADAM, "While I considered you only as my ward, my friendship for you was unbounded--when I looked upon you as a woman formed to grace a fashionable circle, my admiration equalled my friendship--and when fate permitted me to behold you in the tender light of my betrothed wife, my soaring love left those humbler passions at a distance. "That you have still my friendship, my admiration, and even my love, I will not attempt to deceive either myself or you by disavowing; but still, with a firm assurance, I declare, that prudence outweighs them all; and I have not, from henceforward, a wish to be regarded by you, in any other respect than as one 'who wishes you well.' That you ever beheld me in the endearing quality of a destined and an affectionate husband, (such as I would have proved) was a deception upon my hopes: they acknowledge the mistake, and are humbled--but I entreat you to spare their farther trial, and for a single week do not insult me with the open preference of another. In the short space of that period I shall have taken my leave of you--_for ever._ "I shall visit Italy, and some other parts of the Continent; from whence I propose passing to the West Indies, in order to inspect my possessions there: nor shall I return to England till after a few years' absence; in which time I hope to become once more reconciled to the change of state I am enjoined--a change I now most fervently wish could be entirely dispensed with. "The occasion of my remaining here a week longer, is to settle some necessary affairs, among which the principal is, that of delivering to a friend, a man of worth and of tenderness, all those writings which have invested me with the power of my guardianship--he will, the day after my departure, (without one upbraiding word) resign them to you in my name; and even your most respected father, could he behold the resignation, would concur in its propriety. "And now, my dear Miss Milner, let not affected resentment, contempt, or levity, oppose that serenity, which, for the week to come, I wish to enjoy. By complying with this request, give me to believe, that, since you have been under my care, you think I have, at least, faithfully discharged some part of my duty. And wherever I have been inadequate to your wishes, attribute my demerits to some infirmity of mind, rather than to a negligence of your happiness. Yet, be the cause what it will, since these faults have existed, I do not attempt to disavow or extenuate them, and I beg your pardon. "However time, and a succession of objects, may eradicate more tender sentiments, I am sure _never_ to lose the liveliest anxiety for your welfare--and with all that solicitude, which cannot be described, I entreat for your own sake, for mine--when we shall be far asunder--and for the sake of your dead father's memory, that, _upon every important occasion, you will call your serious judgment to direct you._ "I am, Madam, "Your sincerest friend, "ELMWOOD." After she had read every syllable of this letter, it dropped from her hands; but she uttered not a word. There was, however, a paleness in her face, a deadness in her eye, and a kind of palsy over her frame, which Miss Woodley, who had seen her in every stage of her uneasiness, never had seen before. "I do not want to read the letter," said Miss Woodley; "your looks tell me its contents." "They will then discover to Lord Elmwood," replied she, "what I feel; but Heaven forbid--that would sink me even lower than I am." Scarce able to move, she rose, and looked in her glass, as if to arrange her features, and impose upon him: alas! it was of no avail--a serenity of mind could alone effect what she desired. "You must endeavour," said Miss Woodley, "to feel the disposition you wish to make appear." "I will," replied she, "I will feel a proper pride--and a proper scorn of this treatment." And so desirous was she to attain the appearance of these sentiments, that she made the strongest efforts to calm her thoughts, in order to acquire it. "I have but a few days to remain with him," she said to herself, "and we part for ever--during those few days it is not only my duty to obey his commands, or rather comply with his request, but it is also my wish to leave upon his mind an impression, which may not add to the ill opinion he has formed of me, but, perhaps, serve to diminish it. If, in every other instance, my conduct has been blameable, he shall, at least in this, acknowledge its merit. The fate I have drawn upon myself, he shall find I can be resigned to; and he shall be convinced, that the woman, of whose weakness he has had so many fatal proofs, is yet in possession of some fortitude--fortitude, to bid him farewell, without discovering one affected or one real pang, though her death should be the immediate consequence." Thus she resolved, and thus she acted. The severest judge could not have arraigned her conduct, from the day she received Lord Elmwood's letter, to the day of his departure. She had, indeed, involuntary weaknesses, but none with which she did not struggle, and, in general, her struggles were victorious. The first time she saw him after the receipt of his letter, was on the evening of the same day--she had a little concert of amateurs of music, and was herself singing and playing when he entered the room: the connoisseurs immediately perceived she made a false cadence--but Lord Elmwood was no connoisseur in the art, and he did not observe it. They occasionally spoke to each other through the evening, but the subjects were general--and though their manners every time they spoke, were perfectly polite, they were not marked with the smallest degree of familiarity. To describe his behaviour exactly, it was the same as his letter, polite, friendly, composed, and resolved. Some of the company staid supper, which prevented the embarrassment that must unavoidably have arisen, had the family been by themselves. The next morning each breakfasted in his separate apartments--more company dined with them--in the evening, and at supper, Lord Elmwood was from home. Thus, all passed on as peaceably as he had requested, and Miss Milner had not betrayed one particle of frailty; when, the third day at dinner, some gentlemen of his acquaintance being at table, one of them said, "And so, my Lord, you absolutely set off on Tuesday morning?" This was Friday. Sandford and he both replied at the same time, "Yes." And Sandford, but not Lord Elmwood, looked at Miss Milner when he spoke. Her knife and fork gave a sudden spring in her hand, but no other emotion witnessed what she felt. "Aye, Elmwood," cried another gentleman at table, "you'll bring home, I am afraid, a foreign wife, and that I shan't forgive." "It is his errand abroad, I make no doubt," said another visitor. Before he could return an answer, Sandford cried, "And what objection to a foreigner for a wife? do not crowned heads all marry foreigners? and who happier in the married state than some kings?" Lord Elmwood directed his eyes to the side of the table, opposite to that where Miss Milner sat. "Nay," (answered one of the guests, who was a country gentleman) "what do you say, ladies--do you think my Lord ought to go out of his own nation for a wife?" and he looked at Miss Milner for the reply. Miss Woodley, uneasy at her friend's being thus forced to give an opinion upon so delicate a subject, endeavoured to satisfy the gentleman, by answering to the question herself: "Whoever my Lord Elmwood marries, Sir," said Miss Woodley, "he, no doubt, will be happy." "But what say you, Madam?" asked the visitor, still keeping his eyes on Miss Milner. "That whoever Lord Elmwood marries, he _deserves_ to be happy:" returned she, with the utmost command of her voice and looks; for Miss Woodley, by replying first, had given her time to collect herself. The colour flew to Lord Elmwood's face, as she delivered this short sentence; and Miss Woodley persuaded herself, she saw a tear start in his eye. Miss Milner did not look that way. In an instant he found means to change the subject, but that of his journey still employed the conversation; and what horses, servants, and carriages he took with him, was minutely asked, and so accurately answered, either by himself or by Mr. Sandford, that Miss Milner, although she had known her doom before, till now had received no circumstantial account of it--and as circumstances increase or diminish all we feel, the hearing these things told, increased the bitterness of their truth. Soon after dinner the ladies retired; and from that time, though Miss Milner's behaviour continued the same, yet her looks and her voice were totally altered--for the world, she could not have looked cheerfully; for the world, she could not have spoken with a sprightly accent; she frequently began in one, but not three words could she utter, before her tones sunk into dejection. Not only her colour, but her features became changed; her eyes lost their brilliancy, her lips seemed to hang without the power of motion, her head drooped, and her dress was neglected. Conscious of this appearance, and conscious of the cause from whence it arose, it was her desire to hide herself from the only object she could have wished to have charmed. Accordingly, she sat alone, or with Miss Woodley in her own apartment as much as was consistent with that civility which her guardian had requested, and which forbade her totally absenting herself. Miss Woodley felt so acutely the torments of her friend, that had not her reason told her, that the inflexible mind of Lord Elmwood, was fixed beyond her power to shake, she had cast herself at his feet, and implored the return of his affection and tenderness, as the only means to save his once-beloved ward from an untimely death. But her understanding--her knowledge of his firm and immoveable temper; and of all his provocations--her knowledge of his word, long since given to Sandford, "That if once resolved, he would not recall his resolution"--the certainty of the various plans arranged for his travels, all convinced her, that by any interference, she would only expose Miss Milner's love and delicacy, to a contemptuous rejection. If the conversation did not every day turn upon the subject of Lord Elmwood's departure--a conversation he evidently avoided himself--yet, every day, some new preparation for his journey, struck either the ear or the eye of Miss Milner--and had she beheld a frightful spectre, she could not have shuddered with more horror, than when she unexpectedly passed his large trunks in the hall, nailed and corded, ready to be sent off to meet him at Venice. At the sight, she flew from the company that chanced to be with her, and stole to the first lonely corner of the house to conceal her tears--she reclined her head upon her hands, and bedewed them with the sudden anguish, that had overcome her. She heard a footstep advancing towards the spot where she hoped to have been concealed; she lifted up her eyes, and saw Lord Elmwood. Pride, was the first emotion his presence inspired--pride, which arose from the humility into which she was plunged. She looked at him earnestly, as if to imply, "What now, my Lord?" He only answered with a bow, which expressed; "I beg your pardon." And immediately withdrew. Thus each understood the other's language, without either having uttered a word. The just construction she put upon his looks and behaviour upon this occasion, kept up her spirits for some little time; and she blessed heaven, repeatedly, for the singular favour of shewing to her, clearly, by this accident, his negligence of her sorrows, his total indifference. The next day was the eve of that on which he was to depart--of the day on which she was to bid adieu to Dorriforth, to her guardian, to Lord Elmwood; to all her hopes at once. The moment she awoke on Monday morning, the recollection, that this was, perhaps, the last day she was ever again to see him, softened all the resentment his yesterday's conduct had raised: forgetting his austerity, and all she had once termed cruelties, she now only remembered his friendship, his tenderness, and his love. She was impatient to see him, and promised herself, for this last day, to neglect no one opportunity of being with him. For that purpose she did not breakfast in her own room, as she had done for several mornings before, but went into the breakfast-room, where all the family in general met. She was rejoiced on hearing his voice as she opened the door, yet the sound made her tremble so much, that she could scarcely totter to the table. Miss Woodley looked at her as she entered, and was never so shocked at seeing her; for never had she yet seen her look so ill. As she approached, she made an inclination of her head to Mrs. Horton, then to her guardian, as was her custom, when she first saw them in a morning--he looked in her face as he bowed in return, then fixed his eyes upon the fire-place, rubbed his forehead, and began talking with Mr. Sandford. Sandford, during breakfast, by accident cast a glance upon Miss Milner; his attention was caught by her deadly countenance, and he looked earnestly. He then turned to Lord Elmwood to see if he was observing her appearance--he was not--and so much were her thoughts engaged on him alone, that she did not once perceive Sandford gazing at her. Mrs. Horton, after a little while observed, "It was a beautiful morning." Lord Elmwood said, "He thought he heard it rain in the night." Sandford cried, "For his part he slept too well to know." And then (unasked) held a plate with biscuits to Miss Milner--it was the first civility he had ever in his life offered her; she smiled at the whimsicality of the circumstance, but she took one in return for his attention. He looked grave beyond his usual gravity, and yet not with his usual ill temper. She did not eat what she had so politely taken, but laid it down soon after. Lord Elmwood was the first who rose from breakfast, and he did not return to dinner. At dinner, Mrs. Horton said, "She hoped he would, however, favour them with his company at supper." To which Sandford replied, "No doubt, for you will hardly any of you see him in the morning; as we shall be off by six, or soon after." Sandford was not going abroad with Lord Elmwood, but was to go with him as far as Dover. These words of his--"_Not see Lord Elmwood in the morning_"--[never again to see him after this evening,] were like the knell of death to Miss Milner. She felt the symptoms of fainting, and eagerly snatched a glass of water, which the servant was holding to Sandford, who had called for it, and drank it off;--as she returned the glass to the servant, she began to apologize to Mr. Sandford for her seeming rudeness, but before she could utter what she intended, he said, good-naturedly, "Never mind--you are very welcome--I am glad you took it." She looked at him to observe, whether he had really spoken kindly, or ironically; but before his countenance could satisfy her, her thoughts were called away from that trivial matter, and again fixed upon Lord Elmwood. The moments seemed tedious till he came home to supper, and yet, when she reflected how short the remainder of the evening would be after that time, she wished to defer the hour of his return for months. At ten o'clock he arrived; and at half after ten the family, without any visitor, met at supper. Miss Milner had considered, that the period for her to counterfeit appearances, was diminished now to a most contracted one; and she rigorously enjoined herself not to shrink from the little which remained. The certain end, that would be so soon put to this painful deception, encouraged her to struggle through it with redoubled zeal; and this was but necessary, as her weakness increased. She therefore listened, she talked, and even smiled with the rest of the company, nor did _their_ vivacity seem to arise, from a much less compulsive source than her own. It was past twelve, when Lord Elmwood looked at his watch, and rising from his chair, went up to Mrs. Horton, and taking her hand, said, "Till I see you again, Madam, I sincerely wish you every happiness." Miss Milner fixed her eyes upon the table before her. "My Lord," replied Mrs. Horton, "I sincerely wish you health and happiness likewise." He then went to Miss Woodley, and taking her hand, repeated much the same, as he had said to Mrs. Horton. Miss Milner now trembled beyond all power of concealment. "My Lord," replied Miss Woodley, a good deal affected, "I sincerely hope my prayers for your happiness may be heard." She and Mrs. Horton were both standing as well as Lord Elmwood; but Miss Milner kept her seat, till his eye was turned upon her, and he moved slowly towards her; she then rose:--every one who was present, attentive to what he would now say, and how she would receive what he said, here cast their eyes upon them, and listened with impatience. They were all disappointed--he did not utter a syllable. Yet he took her hand, and held it closely between his. He then bowed most respectfully and left her. No "I wish you well;--I wish you health and happiness." No "Prayers for blessings on her." Not even the word "Farewell," escaped his lips--perhaps, to have attempted any of these, might have choaked his utterance. She had behaved with fortitude the whole evening, and she continued to do so, till the moment he turned away from her. Her eyes then overflowed with tears, and in the agony of her mind, not knowing what she did, she laid her cold hand upon the person next to her--it happened to be Sandford; but not observing it was he, she grasped his hand with violence--yet he did not snatch it away, nor look at her with his wonted severity. And thus she stood, silent and motionless, while Lord Elmwood, now at the door, bowed once more to all the company, and retired. Sandford had still Miss Milner's hand fixed upon his; and when the door was shut after Lord Elmwood, he turned his head to look in her face, and turned it with some marks of apprehension for the grief he might find there. She strove to overcome that grief, and after a heavy sigh, sat down, as if resigned to the fate to which she was decreed. Instead of following Lord Elmwood, as usual, Sandford poured out a glass of wine, and drank it. A general silence ensued for near three minutes. At last, turning himself round on his seat, towards Miss Milner, who sat like a statue of despair at his side, "Will you breakfast with us to-morrow?" said he. She made no answer. "We shan't breakfast before half after six," continued he, "I dare say; and if you can rise so early--why do." "Miss Milner," said Miss Woodley, (for she caught eagerly at the hope of her passing this night in less unhappiness than she had foreboded) "pray rise at that hour to breakfast; Mr. Sandford would not invite you, if he thought it would displease Lord Elmwood." "Not I," replied Sandford, churlishly. "Then desire her maid to call her:" said Mrs. Horton to Miss Woodley. "Nay, she will be awake, I have no doubt;" returned her niece. "No;" replied Miss Milner, "since Lord Elmwood has thought proper to take his leave of me, without even speaking a word; by my own design, never will I see him again." And her tears burst forth, as if her heart burst at the same time. "Why did not _you_ speak to _him?_" cried Sandford--"Pray did _you_ bid _him_ farewell? and I don't see why one is not as much to be blamed, in that respect, as the other." "I was too weak to say I wished him happy," cried Miss Milner; "but, Heaven is my witness, I do wish him so from my soul." "And do you imagine he does not wish you so?" cried Sandford. "You should judge him by your own heart; and what you feel for him, imagine he feels for you, my dear." Though "_my dear_" is a trivial phrase, yet from certain people, and upon certain occasions, it is a phrase of infinite comfort and assurance. Mr. Sandford seldom said "my dear" to any one; to Miss Milner never; and upon this occasion, and from him, it was an expression most precious. She turned to him with a look of gratitude; but as she only looked, and did not speak, he rose up, and soon after said, with a friendly tone he had seldom used in her presence, "I sincerely wish you a good night." As soon as he was gone, Miss Milner exclaimed, "However my fate may have been precipitated by the unkindness of Mr. Sandford, yet, for that particle of concern which he has shown for me this night, I will always be grateful to him." "Ay," cried Mrs. Horton, "good Mr. Sandford may show his kindness now, without any danger from its consequences. Now Lord Elmwood is going away for ever, he is not afraid of your seeing him once again." And she thought she praised him by this suggestion. CHAPTER XII. When Miss Milner retired to her bed-chamber, Miss Woodley went with her, nor would leave her the whole night--but in vain did she persuade her to rest--she absolutely refused; and declared she would never, from that hour, indulge repose. "The part I undertook to perform," cried she, "is over--I will now, for my whole life, appear in my own character, and give a loose to the anguish I endure." As daylight showed itself--"And yet I might see him once again," said she--"I might see him within these two hours, if I pleased, for Mr. Sandford invited me." "If you think, my dear Miss Milner," said Miss Woodley, "that a second parting from Lord Elmwood would but give you a second agony, in the name of Heaven do not see him any more--but, if you hope your mind would be easier, were you to bid each other adieu in a more direct manner than you did last night, let us go down and breakfast with him. I'll go before, and prepare him for your reception--you shall not surprise him--and I will let him know, it is by Mr. Sandford's invitation you are coming." She listened with a smile to this proposal, yet objected to the indelicacy of her wishing to see him, after he had taken his leave--but as Miss Woodley perceived that she was inclined to infringe this delicacy, of which she had so proper a sense, she easily persuaded her, it was impossible for the most suspicious person (and Lord Elmwood was far from such a character) to suppose, that the paying him a visit at that period of time, could be with the most distant idea of regaining his heart, or of altering one resolution he had taken. But though Miss Milner acquiesced in this opinion, yet she had not the courage to form the determination that she would go. Daylight now no longer peeped, but stared upon them. Miss Milner went to the looking-glass, breathed upon her hands and rubbed them on her eyes, smoothed her hair and adjusted her dress; yet said, after all, "I dare not see him again." "You may do as you please," said Miss Woodley, "but I will. I that have lived for so many years under the same roof with him, and on the most friendly terms, and he going away, perhaps for these ten years, perhaps for ever, I should think it a disrespect not to see him to the last moment of his remaining in the house." "Then do you go," said Miss Milner, eagerly; "and if he should ask for me, I will gladly come, you know; but if he does not ask for me, I will not--and pray don't deceive me." Miss Woodley promised her not to deceive her; and soon after, as they heard the servants pass about the house, and the clock had struck six, Miss Woodley went to the breakfast room. She found Lord Elmwood there in his travelling dress, standing pensively by the fire-place--and, as he did not dream of seeing her, he started when she entered, and, with an appearance of alarm, said, "Dear Miss Woodley, what's the matter?" She replied, "Nothing, my Lord; but I could not be satisfied without seeing your Lordship once again, while I had it in my power." "I thank you," he returned with a sigh--the heaviest and most intelligent sigh she ever heard him condescend to give. She imagined, alas, that he looked as if he wished to ask how Miss Milner did, but would not allow himself the indulgence. She was half inclined to mention her to him, and was debating in her mind whether she should or not, when Mr. Sandford came into the room, saying, as he entered, "For Heaven's sake, my Lord, where did you sleep last night?" "Why do you ask!" said he. "Because," replied Sandford, "I went into your bed-chamber just now, and I found your bed made. You have not slept there to-night." "I have slept no where," returned he; "I could not sleep--and having some papers to look over, and to set off early, I thought I might as well not go to bed at all." Miss Woodley was pleased at the frank manner in which he made this confession, and could not resist the strong impulse to say, "You have done just then, my Lord, like Miss Milner, for she has not been in bed the whole night." Miss Woodley spoke this in a negligent manner, and yet, Lord Elmwood echoed back the words with solicitude, "Has not Miss Milner been in bed the whole night?" "If she is up, why does not she come and take some coffee?" said Sandford, as he began to pour it out. "If she thought it would be agreeable," returned Miss Woodley, "I dare say she would." And she looked at Lord Elmwood while she spoke, though she did not absolutely address him; but he made no reply. "Agreeable!" returned Sandford, angrily--"Has she then a quarrel with any body here? or does she suppose any body here bears enmity to _her?_ Is she not in peace and charity?" "Yes," replied Miss Woodley, "that I am sure she is." "Then bring her hither," cried Sandford, "directly. Would she have the wickedness to imagine we are not all friends with her?" Miss Woodley left the room, and found Miss Milner almost in despair, lest she should hear Lord Elmwood's carriage drive off before her friend's return. "Did he send for me?" were the words she uttered as soon as she saw her. "Mr. Sandford did, in his presence," returned Miss Woodley, "and you may go with the utmost decorum, or I would not tell you so." She required no protestations of this, but readily followed her beloved adviser, whose kindness never appeared in so amiable a light as at that moment. On entering the room, through all the dead white of her present complection, she blushed to a crimson. Lord Elmwood rose from his seat, and brought a chair for her to sit down. Sandford looked at her inquisitively, sipped his tea, and said, "He never made tea to his own liking." Miss Milner took a cup, but had scarce strength to hold it. It seemed but a very short time they were at breakfast, when the carriage, that was to take Lord Elmwood away, drove to the door. Miss Milner started at the sound--so did he--but she had nearly dropped her cup and saucer; on which Sandford took them out of her hand, saying, "Perhaps you had rather have coffee?" Her lips moved, but he could not hear what she said. A servant came in, and told Lord Elmwood, "The carriage was at the door." He replied, "Very well." But though he had breakfasted, he did not attempt to move. At last, rising briskly, as if it was necessary to go in haste when he did go; he took up his hat, which he had brought with him into the room, and was turning to Miss Woodley to take his leave, when Sandford cried, "My Lord, you are in a great hurry." And then, as if he wished to give poor Miss Milner every moment he could, added, (looking about) "I don't know where I have laid my gloves." Lord Elmwood, after repeating to Miss Woodley his last night's farewell, now went up to Miss Milner, and taking one of her hands, again held it between his, but still without speaking--while she, unable to suppress her tears as heretofore, suffered them to fall in torrents. "What is all this?" cried Sandford, going up to them in anger. They neither of them replied, or changed their situation. "Separate this moment," cried Sandford, "or resolve to be separated only by--death." The commanding and awful manner in which he spoke this sentence, made them both turn to him in amazement, and as it were, petrified with the sensation his words had caused. He left them for a moment, and going to a small bookcase in one corner of the room, took out of it a book, and returning with it in his hand, said, "Lord Elmwood, do you love this woman?" "More than my life." He replied, with the most heartfelt accents. He then turned to Miss Milner--"Can you say the same by him?" She spread her hands over her eyes, and exclaimed, "Oh, Heavens!" "I believe you _can_ say so," returned Sandford; "and in the name of God, and your own happiness, since this is the state of you both, let me put it out of your power to part." Lord Elmwood gazed at him with wonder! and yet, as if enraptured by the sudden change this conduct gave to his prospects. She, sighed with a kind of trembling ecstasy; while Sandford, with all the dignity of his official character, delivered these words---- "My Lord, while I thought my counsel might save you from the worst of misfortunes, conjugal strife, I importuned you hourly, and set forth your danger in the light it appeared to me. But though old, and a priest, I can submit to think I have been in an error; and I now firmly believe, it is for the welfare of you both, to become man and wife. My Lord, take this woman's marriage vows--you can ask no fairer promises of her reform--she can give you none half so sacred, half so binding; and I see by her looks that she will mean to keep them. And my dear," continued he, addressing himself to her, "act but under the dominion of those vows, to a husband of sense and virtue, like him, and you will be all that I, himself, or even Heaven can desire. Now, then, Lord Elmwood, this moment give her up for ever, or this moment constrain her by such ties from offending you, as she shall not _dare_ to violate." Lord Elmwood struck his forehead in doubt and agitation; but, still holding her hand, he cried, "I cannot part from her." Then feeling this reply as equivocal, he fell upon his knees, and cried, "Will you pardon my hesitation? and will you, in marriage, show me that tender love you have not shown me yet? Will you, in possessing all my affections, bear with all my infirmities?" She raised him from her feet, and by the expression of her countenance, by the tears that bathed his hands, gave him confidence. He turned to Sandford--then placing her by his own side, as the form of matrimony requires, gave this for a sign to Sandford that he should begin the ceremony. On which, he opened his book, and--married them. With voice and manners so serious, so solemn and so fervent, he performed these rites, that every idea of jest, or even of lightness, was absent from the mind of all who were present. Miss Milner, covered with shame, sunk on the bosom of Miss Woodley. When the ring was wanting, Lord Elmwood supplied it with one from his own hand, but throughout all the rest of the ceremony, appeared lost in zealous devotion to Heaven. Yet, no sooner was it finished, than his thoughts descended to this world. He embraced his bride with all the transport of the fondest, happiest bridegroom, and in raptures called her by the endearing name of "wife." "But still, my Lord," cried Sandford, "you are only married by your own church and conscience, not by your wife's, or by the law of the land; and let me advise you not to defer that marriage long, lest in the time you disagree, and she should refuse to become your legal spouse." "I think there is danger," returned Lord Elmwood, "and therefore our second marriage must take place to-morrow." To this the ladies objected, and Sandford was to fix their second wedding-day, as he had done their first. He, after consideration, gave them four days. Miss Woodley then recollected (for every one else had forgot it) that the carriage was still at the door to convey Lord Elmwood far away. It was of course dismissed--and one of those great incidents of delight which Miss Milner that morning tasted, was to look out of the window, and see this very carriage drive from the door unoccupied. Never was there a more rapid change from despair to happiness--to happiness perfect and supreme--than was that, which Miss Milner and Lord Elmwood experienced in one single hour. The few days that intervened between this and their lawful marriage, were passed in the delightful care of preparing for that happy day--yet, with all its delights inferior to the first, when every unexpected joy was doubled by the once expected sorrow. Nevertheless, on that first wedding-day, that joyful day, which restored her lost lover to her hopes again; even on that _very_ day, after the sacred ceremony was over, Miss Milner--(with all the fears, the tremors, the superstition of her sex)--felt an excruciating shock; when, looking on the ring Lord Elmwood had put upon her finger, in haste, when he married her, she perceived it was a--mourning ring. A SIMPLE STORY, IN FOUR VOLUMES, BY MRS. INCHBALD. VOL. III. _THE FOURTH EDITION._ LONDON: Printed for G. G. and J. ROBINSON, PATERNOSTER ROW. 1799. A SIMPLE STORY. CHAPTER I. Not any event, throughout life, can arrest the reflection of a thoughtful mind more powerfully, or leave so lasting an impression, as that of returning to a place after a few years absence, and observing an entire alteration, in respect to all the persons who once formed the neighbourhood. To find that many, who but a few years before were left in their bloom of youth and health, are dead--to find that children left at school, are married and have children of their own--that some, who were left in riches, are reduced to poverty--that others, who were in poverty are become rich--to find, those once renowned for virtue, now detested for vice--roving husbands, grown constant--constant husbands, become rovers--the firmest friends, changed to the most implacable enemies--beauty faded. In a word, every change to demonstrate, that, "All is transitory on this side the grave." Guided by a wish, that the reflecting reader may experience the sensation, which an attention to circumstances like these, must excite; he is desired to imagine seventeen years elapsed, since he has seen or heard of any of those persons who in the foregoing volumes have been introduced to his acquaintance--and then, supposing himself at the period of those seventeen years, follow the sequel of their history. To begin with the first female object of this story. The beautiful, the beloved Miss Milner--she is no longer beautiful--no longer beloved--no longer--tremble while you read it!--no longer--virtuous. Dorriforth, the pious, the good, the tender Dorriforth, is become a hard-hearted tyrant. The compassionate, the feeling, the just Lord Elmwood, an example of implacable rigour and injustice. Miss Woodley is grown old, but less with years than grief. The boy, Rushbrook, is become a man, and the apparent heir of Lord Elmwood's fortune; while his own daughter, his only child by his once adored Miss Milner, he refuses ever to see again, in vengeance to her mother's crimes. The least wonderful change, is, the death of Mrs. Horton. Except Sandford, who remains much the same as heretofore. We left Lady Elmwood in the last volume at the summit of human happiness; a loving and beloved bride. We begin this volume, and find her upon her death-bed. At thirty-five, her "Course was run"--a course full of perils, of hopes, of fears, of joys, and at the end, of sorrows; all exquisite of their kind, for exquisite were the feelings of her susceptible heart. At the commencement of this story, her father is described in the last moments of his life, with all his cares fixed upon her, his only child--how vain these cares! how vain every precaution that was taken for her welfare! She knows, she reflects upon this; and yet, impelled by that instinctive power which actuates a parent, Lady Elmwood on _her_ dying day has no worldly thoughts, but that of the future happiness of an only child. To every other prospect in her view, "Thy will be done" is her continual exclamation; but where the misery of her daughter presents itself, the expiring penitent would there combat the will of Heaven. To detail the progression by which vice gains a predominancy in the heart, may be a useful lesson; but it is one so little to the satisfaction of most readers, that the degrees of misconduct by which Lady Elmwood fell, are not meant to be related here; but instead of picturing every occasion of her fall, to come briefly to the events that followed. There are, nevertheless, some articles under the former class, which ought not to be entirely omitted. Lord Elmwood, after four years enjoyment of the most perfect happiness that marriage could give, after becoming the father of a beautiful daughter, whom he loved with a tenderness almost equal to his love of her mother, was under the indispensable necessity of leaving them both for a time, in order to rescue from the depredation of his own steward, his very large estates in the West Indies. His voyage was tedious; his residence there, from various accidents, prolonged from time to time, till near three years had at length passed away. Lady Elmwood, at first only unhappy, became at last provoked; and giving way to that irritable disposition which she had so seldom governed, resolved, in spite of his injunctions, to divert the melancholy hours caused by his absence, by mixing in the gay circles of London. Lord Elmwood at this time, and for many months before, had been detained abroad by a severe and dangerous illness, which a too cautious fear of her uneasiness, had prompted him to conceal; and she received his frequent apologies for not returning, with a suspicion and resentment they were calculated, but not intended, to inspire. To violent anger, succeeded a degree of indifference still more fatal--Lady Elmwood's heart was not formed for such a state--there, where all the tumultuous passions harboured by turns, one among them soon found the means to occupy all vacancies: a passion, commencing innocently, but terminating in guilt. The dear object of her fondest, her truest affections, was away; and those affections, painted the time so irksome that was past; so wearisome, that, which was still to come; that she flew from the present tedious solitude, to the dangerous society of one, whose whole mind depraved by fashionable vices, could not repay her for a moment's loss of him, whose absence he supplied. Or, if the delirium gave her a moment's recompence, what were her sufferings, her remorse, when she was awakened from the fleeting joy, by the arrival of her husband? How happy, how transporting would have been that arrival a few months before! As it would then have been felicity unbounded, it was now--language affords no word that can describe Lady Elmwood's sensations, on being told her Lord was arrived, and that necessity alone had so long delayed his return. Guilty, but not hardened in her guilt, her pangs, her shame were the more excessive. She fled from the place at his approach; fled from his house, never again to return to a habitation where he was the master. She did not, however, elope with her paramour, but escaped to shelter herself in the most dreary retreat; where she partook of no one comfort from society, or from life, but the still unremitting friendship of Miss Woodley. Even her infant daughter she left behind, nor would allow herself the consolation of her innocent, though reproachful smiles--she left her in her father's house, that she might be under his protection; parted with her, as she thought, for ever, with all the agonies with which mothers part from their infant children: and yet, even a mother can scarce conceive how much more sharp those agonies were, on beholding--the child sent after her, as the perpetual outcast of its father. Lord Elmwood's love to his wife had been extravagant--the effect of his hate was the same. Beholding himself separated from her by a barrier never to be removed, he vowed in the deep torments of his revenge, never to be reminded of her by one individual object; much less, by one so near to her as her child. To bestow upon that child his affections, would be, he imagined, still, in some sort, to divide them with the mother. Firm in his resolution, the beautiful Matilda, was, at the age of six years, sent out of her father's house, and received by her mother with all the tenderness, but with all the anguish, of those parents, who behold their offspring visited by the punishment due only to their own offences. While this rigid act was executing by Lord Elmwood's agents at his command, himself was engaged in an affair of still weightier importance--that of life or death:--he determined upon his own death, or the death of the man who had wounded his honour and destroyed his happiness. A duel with his old antagonist was the result of this determination; nor was the Duke of Avon (who before the decease of his father and eldest brother, was Lord Frederick Lawnly) averse from giving him all the satisfaction he required. For it was no other than he, whose passion for Lady Elmwood had still subsisted, and whose address in gallantry left no means unattempted for the success of his designs;--no other than he, (who, next to Lord Elmwood, had been of all her lovers, the most favoured,) to whom Lady Elmwood sacrificed her own and her husband's future peace, and thus gave to his vanity a prouder triumph, than if she had never bestowed her hand in marriage on another. This triumph however was but short--a month only, after the return of Lord Elmwood, the Duke was called upon to answer for his conduct, and was left where they met, so defaced with scars, as never again to endanger the honour of a husband. As Lord Elmwood was inexorable to all accommodation, their engagement continued for a long space of time; nor could any thing but the assurance that his opponent was slain, have at last torn him from the field, though he himself was dangerously wounded. Yet even during the period of his danger, while for days he lay in the continual expectation of his own death, not all the entreaties of his dearest, most intimate, and most respected friends, could prevail upon him to pronounce forgiveness of his wife, or to suffer them to bring his daughter to him, for his last blessing. Lady Elmwood, who was made acquainted with the minutest circumstance as it passed, appeared to wait the news of her husband's decease with patience; but upon her brow, and in every lineament of her face was marked, that his death was an event she would not for a day survive: and she would have left her child an orphan, to have followed Lord Elmwood to the tomb. She was prevented the trial; he recovered; and from the ample vengeance he had obtained upon the irresistible person of the Duke, in a short time seemed to regain his usual tranquillity. He recovered, but Lady Elmwood fell sick and languished--possessed of youth to struggle with her woes, she lingered on, till ten years decline brought her to that period, with which the reader is now going to be presented. CHAPTER II. In a lonely country on the borders of Scotland, a single house by the side of a dreary heath, was the residence of the once gay, volatile Miss Milner. In a large gloomy apartment of this solitary habitation (the windows of which scarce rendered the light accessible) was laid upon her death-bed, the once lovely Lady Elmwood--pale, half suffocated with the loss of breath; yet her senses perfectly clear and collected, which served but to sharpen the anguish of dying. In one corner of the room, by the side of an old fashioned stool, kneels Miss Woodley, praying most devoutly for her still beloved friend, but in vain endeavouring to pray composedly--floods of tears pour down her furrowed cheeks, and frequent sobs of sorrow, break through each pious ejaculation. Close by her mother's side, one hand supporting her head, the other wiping from her face the cold dew of death, behold Lady Elmwood's daughter--Lord Elmwood's daughter too--yet he far away, negligent of what either suffers. Lady Elmwood turns to her often and attempts an embrace, but her feeble arms forbid, and they fall motionless. The daughter perceiving these ineffectual efforts, has her whole face convulsed with grief: kisses her mother; holds her to her bosom; and hangs upon her neck, as if she wished to cling there, not to be parted even by the grave. On the other side of the bed sits Sandford--his hair grown white--his face wrinkled with age--his heart the same as ever.--The reprover, the enemy of the vain, the idle, and the wicked; but the friend and comforter of the forlorn and miserable. Upon those features where sarcasm, reproach, and anger dwelt, to threaten and alarm the sinner; mildness, tenderness, and pity beamed, to support and console the penitent. Compassion changed his language, and softened all those harsh tones that used to denounce perdition. "In the name of God," said he to Lady Elmwood, "of that God, who suffered for you, and, suffering, knew and pitied all our weaknesses--By him, who has given his word to _take compassion on the sinner's tears_, I bid you hope for mercy. By that innocence in which you once lived, be comforted--By the sorrows you have known since your degradation, hope, that in some measure, you have atoned----By the sincerity that shone upon your youthful face when I joined your hands, and those thousand virtues you have since given proofs of, trust, that you were not born to die _the death of the wicked._" As he spoke these words of consolation, her trembling hand clasped his--her dying eyes darted a ray of brightness--but her failing voice endeavoured in vain, to articulate. At length, fixing her looks upon her daughter as their last dear object, she was just understood to utter the word "Father." "I understand you," replied Sandford, "and by all that influence I ever had over him, by my prayers, my tears," (and they flowed as he spoke) "I will implore him to own his child." She could now only smile in thanks. "And if I should fail," continued he, "yet while I live, she shall not want a friend or protector--all an old man, like me can answer for"----here his tears interrupted him. Lady Elmwood was sufficiently sensible of his words and their import, to make a sign as if she wished to embrace him: but finding her life leaving her fast, she reserved this last token of love for her daughter--with a struggle she lifted herself from her pillow, clung to her child--and died in her arms. CHAPTER III. Lord Elmwood was by nature, and more from education, of a serious, thinking, and philosophic turn of mind. His religious studies had completely taught him to consider this world but as a passage to another; to enjoy with gratitude what Heaven in its bounty should bestow, and to bear with submission, whatever in its vengeance it might inflict. In a greater degree than most people he practised this doctrine; and as soon as the shock he received from Lady Elmwood's conduct was abated, an entire calmness and resignation ensued; but still of that sensible and feeling kind, that could never suffer him to forget the happiness he had lost; and it was this sensibility, which urged him to fly from its more keen recollection as much as possible--this, he alleged as the reason why he would never permit Lady Elmwood, or even her child, to be named in his hearing. But this injunction (which all his friends, and even the servants in the house who attended his person, had received) was, by many people, suspected rather to proceed from his resentment, than his tenderness; nor did he deny, that resentment co-operated with his prudence: for prudence he called it, not to remind himself of happiness he could never taste again, and of ingratitude that might impel him to hatred: and prudence he called it, not to form another attachment near to his heart, more especially so near as a parent's which might again expose him to all the torments of ingratitude, from an object whom he affectionately loved. Upon these principles he formed the unshaken resolution, never to acknowledge Lady Matilda as his child--or acknowledging her as such--never to see, to hear of, or take one concern whatever in her fate and fortune. The death of her mother appeared a favourable time, had he been so inclined, to have recalled this declaration which he had solemnly and repeatedly made--she was now destitute of the protection of her other parent, and it became his duty, at least, to provide her a guardian, if he did not chuse to take that tender title upon himself--but to mention either the mother or child to Lord Elmwood, was an equal offence, and prohibited in the strongest terms to all his friends and household; and as he was an excellent good master, a sincere friend, and a most generous patron, not one of his acquaintance or dependants, were hardy enough to draw upon themselves his certain displeasure, which was always violent in the extreme, by even the official intelligence of Lady Elmwood's death. Sandford himself, intimidated through age, or by the austere, and morose manners which Lord Elmwood had of late years adopted; Sandford wished, if possible, that some other would undertake the dangerous task of recalling to his memory there ever was such a person as his wife. He advised Miss Woodley to write a proper letter to him on the subject; but she reminded him that such a step would be more perilous to her, than to any other person, as she was the most destitute being on earth, without the benevolence of Lord Elmwood. The death of her aunt, Mrs. Horton, had left her solely relying on the bounty of Lady Elmwood, and now her death, had left her totally dependant upon the Earl--for Lady Elmwood though she had separate effects, had long before her death declared it was not her intention to leave a sentence behind her in the form of a will. She had no will, she said, but what she would wholly submit to Lord Elmwood's; and, if it were even his will, that her child should live in poverty, as well as banishment, it should be so. But, perhaps, in this implicit submission to him, there was a distant hope, that the necessitous situation of his daughter, might plead more forcibly than his parental love; and that knowing her bereft of every support but through himself, that idea might form some little tie between them, and be at least a token of the relationship. But as Lady Elmwood anxiously wished this principle upon which she acted, should be concealed from his suspicion, she included her friend, Miss Woodley, in the same fate; and thus, the only persons dear to her, she left, but at Lord Elmwood's pleasure, to be preserved from perishing in want. Her child was too young to advise her on this subject, her friend too disinterested; and at this moment they were both without the smallest means of subsistence, except through the justice or compassion of Lord Elmwood. Sandford had indeed promised his protection to the daughter; but his liberality had no other source than from his patron, with whom he still lived as usual, except during part of the winter, when the Earl resided in town; he then mostly stole a visit to Lady Elmwood.--On this last visit he staid to see her buried. After some mature deliberations, Sandford was now preparing to go to Lord Elmwood at his house in town, and there, to deliver himself the news that must sooner or later be told; and he meant also to venture, at the same time, to keep the promise he had made to his dying Lady--but the news reached his Lordship before Sandford arrived; it was announced in the public papers, and by that means first came to his knowledge. He was breakfasting by himself, when the newspaper that first gave the intelligence of Lady Elmwood's death, was laid before him--the paragraph contained these words: "On Wednesday last died, at Dring Park, a village in Northumberland, the right honourable Countess Elmwood.--This lady, who has not been heard of for many years in the fashionable world, was a rich heiress, and of extreme beauty; but although she received overtures from many men of the first rank, she preferred her guardian, the present Lord Elmwood (then Mr. Dorriforth) to them all--and it is said, their marriage was followed by an uncommon share of felicity, till his Lordship going abroad, and remaining there some time, the consequences (to a most captivating young woman left without a protector) were such as to cause a separation on his return. Her Ladyship has left one child by the Earl, a daughter, about fifteen." Lord Elmwood had so much feeling upon reading this, as to lay down the paper, and not take it up again for several minutes--nor did he taste his chocolate during this interval, but leaned his elbow on the table and rested his head upon his hand. He then rose up--walked two or three times across the room--sat down again--took up the paper--and read as usual.--Nor let the vociferous mourner, or the perpetual weeper, here complain of his want of sensibility--but let them remember that Lord Elmwood was a man--a man of understanding--of courage--of fortitude--above all, a man of the nicest feelings--and who shall say, but that at the time he leaned his head upon his hand, and rose to walk away the sense of what he felt, he might not feel as much as Lady Elmwood did in her last moments. Be this as it may, his susceptibility on the occasion was not suspected by any one--yet he passed that day the same as usual; the next day too, and the day after. On the morning of the fourth, he sent for his steward to his study, and after talking of other business, said to him; "Is it true that Lady Elmwood is dead?" "It is, my Lord." His Lordship looked unusually grave, and at this reply, fetched an involuntary sigh. "Mr. Sandford, my lord," continued the steward, "sent me word of the news, but left it to my own discretion, whether I would make your Lordship acquainted with it or not: I let him know I declined." "Where is Sandford?" asked Lord Elmwood. "He was with my Lady," replied the steward. "When she died?" asked he. "Yes, my Lord." "I am glad of it--he will see that every thing she desired is done--Sandford is a good man, and would be a friend to every body." "He is a very good man indeed, my Lord." There was now a silence.----Mr. Giffard then bowing, said, "Has your Lordship any further commands?" "Write to Sandford," said Lord Elmwood, hesitating as he spoke, "and tell him to have every thing performed as she desired. And whoever she may have selected for the guardian of her child, has my consent to act as such.--Nor in one instance, where I myself am not concerned, shall I oppose her will." The tears rushed into his eyes as he said this, and caused them to start in the steward's--observing which, he sternly resumed, "Do not suppose from this conversation, that any of those resolutions I have long since taken, are, or will be changed--they are the same; and shall continue inflexible." "I understand you, my Lord," replied Mr. Giffard, "your express orders, to me, as well as to every other person, remain just the same as formerly, never to mention this subject to you again." "They do, Sir." "My Lord, I always obeyed you, and hope I always shall." "I hope so too," he replied in a threatening accent--"Write to Sandford," continued he, "to let him know my pleasure, and that is all you have to do." The steward bowed and withdrew. But before his letter arrived to Sandford, Sandford arrived in town; and Mr. Giffard related, word for word, what had passed between him and his Lord. Upon every occasion, and upon every topic, except that of Lady Elmwood and her child, Sandford was just as free with Lord Elmwood as he had ever been; and as usual (after his interview with the steward) went into his apartment without any previous notice. Lord Elmwood shook him by the hand, as upon all other meetings; and yet, whether his fear suggested it or not, Sandford thought he appeared more cool and reserved with him than formerly. During the whole day, the slightest mention of Lady Elmwood, or of her child, was cautiously avoided--and not till the evening, (after Sandford had risen to retire, and had wished Lord Elmwood good night) did he dare to mention the subject. He then, after taking leave, and going to the door--turned back and said, "My Lord,"-- It was easy to guess on what he was preparing to speak--his voice failed, the tears began to trickle down his cheeks, he took out his handkerchief, and could proceed no farther. "I thought," said Lord Elmwood, angrily, "I thought I had given my orders upon the subject--did not my steward write them to you?" "He did, my Lord," said Sandford, humbly, "but I was set out before they arrived." "Has he not _told_ you my mind then?" cried he, more angrily still. "He has;" replied Sandford,--"But"---- "But what, Sir?" cried Lord Elmwood. "Your Lordship," continued Sandford, "was mistaken in supposing that Lady Elmwood left a will, she left none." "No will? no will at all?" returned he, surprised. "No, my Lord," answered Sandford, "she wished every thing to be as you willed." "She left me all the trouble, then, you mean?" "No great trouble, Sir; for there are but two persons whom she has left behind her, to hope for your protection." "And who are those two?" cried he hastily. "One, my Lord, I need not name--the other is Miss Woodley." There was a delicacy and humility in the manner in which Sandford delivered this reply, that Lord Elmwood could _not_ resent, and he only returned, "Miss Woodley--is she yet living?" "She is--I left her at the house I came from." "Well then," answered he, "you must see that my steward provides for those two persons. That care I leave to you--and should there be any complaints, on you they fall." Sandford bowed and was going. "And now," resumed Lord Elmwood, in a more stern voice, "let me never hear again on this subject. You have power to act in regard to the persons you have mentioned; and upon you their situation, the care, the whole management of them depends--but be sure you never let them be named before me, from this moment." "Then," said Sandford, "as this must be the last time they are mentioned, I must now take the opportunity to disburden my mind of a charge"-- "What charge?" cried Lord Elmwood, morosely interrupting him. "Though Lady Elmwood, my Lord, left no will behind her, she left a request." "A request!" said he, starting, "If it is for me to see her daughter, I tell you now before you ask, that I will not grant it--for by heaven (and he spoke and looked most solemnly) though I have no resentment against the innocent child, and wish her happy, yet I will never see her. Never, for her mother's sake, suffer my heart again to be softened by an object I might dote upon. Therefore, Sir, if that is the request, it is already answered; my will is fixed." "The request, my Lord," replied Sandford, (and he took out a pocket-book from whence he drew several papers) "is contained in this letter; nor do I rightly know what its contents are." And he held it out to him. "Is it Lady Elmwood's writing?" asked Lord Elmwood, extremely discomposed. "It is, my Lord.--She wrote it a few days before she died, and enjoined me to deliver it to you, with my own hands." "I refuse to read it:" cried he, putting it from him--and trembling while he did so. "She desired me," said Sandford, (still presenting the letter) "to conjure you to read it, _for her father's sake._" Lord Elmwood took it instantly. But as soon as it was in his hand, he seemed distressed to know what he should do with it--in what place to go and read it--or how to fortify himself against its contents. He appeared ashamed too, that he had been so far prevailed upon, and said, by way of excuse, "For Mr. Milner's sake I would do much--nay, any thing, but that to which I have just now sworn never to consent. For his sake I have borne a great deal--for his sake alone, his daughter died my wife. You know, no other motive than respect for him, prevented my divorcing her. Pray (and he hesitated) was she buried with him?" "No, my Lord--she expressed no such desire; and as that was the case, I did not think it necessary to carry the corpse so far." At the word corpse, Lord Elmwood shrunk, and looked shocked beyond measure--but recovering himself, said, "I am sorry for it; for he loved _her_ sincerely, if she did not love him--and I wish they had been buried together." "It is not then too late," said Sandford, and was going on--but the other interrupted him. "No, no--we will have no disturbing the dead." "Read her letter then," said Sandford, "and bid her rest in peace." "If it is in my power," returned he, "to grant what she asks, I will--but if her demand is what I apprehend, I cannot, I will not, bid her rest by complying. You know my resolution, my disposition, and take care how you provoke me. You may do an injury to the very person you are seeking to befriend--the very maintenance I mean to allow her daughter I can withdraw." Poor Sandford, all alarmed at this menace, replied with energy, "My Lord, unless you begin the subject, I never shall presume to mention it again." "I take you at your word, and in consequence of that, but of that alone, we are friends. Good night, Sir." Sandford bowed with humility, and they went to their separate bedchambers. CHAPTER IV. After Lord Elmwood had retired into his chamber, it was some time before he read the letter Sandford had given him. He first walked backwards and forwards in the room--he then began to take off some part of his dress, but he did it slowly. At length, he dismissed his valet, and sitting down, took the letter from his pocket. He looked at the seal, but not at the direction; for he seemed to dread seeing Lady Elmwood's handwriting. He then laid it on the table, and began again to undress. He did not proceed, but taking up the letter quickly, (with a kind of effort in making the resolution) broke it open. These were its contents: "My Lord, "Who writes this letter I well know--I well know also to whom it is addressed--I feel with the most powerful force both our situations; nor should I dare to offer you even this humble petition, but that at the time you receive it, there will be no such person as I am, in existence. "For myself, then, all concern will be over--but there is a care that pursues me to the grave, and threatens my want of repose even there. "I leave a child--I will not call her mine: that has undone her--I will not call her yours; that will be of no avail--I present her before you as the granddaughter of Mr. Milner. Oh! do not refuse an asylum even in your own house, to the destitute offspring of your friend; the last, and only remaining branch of his family. "Receive her into your household, be her condition there ever so abject. I cannot write distinctly what I would--my senses are not impaired, but the powers of expression are. The complaint of the unfortunate child in the scriptures (a lesson I have studied) has made this wish cling so fast to my heart, that without the distant hope of its being fulfilled, death would have more terrors than my weak mind could support. "'_I will go to my father; how many servants live in my father's house, and are fed with plenty, while I starve in a foreign land?_' "I do not ask a parent's festive rejoicing at her approach--I do not even ask her father to behold her; but let her live under his protection. For her grandfather's sake do not refuse this--to the child of his child, whom he entrusted to your care, do not refuse it. "Be her host; I remit the tie of being her parent. Never see her--but let her sometimes live under the same roof with you. "It is Miss Milner, your ward, to whom you never refused a request, who supplicates you--not now for your nephew, Rushbrook, but for one so much more dear, that a denial----she dares not suffer her thoughts to glance that way.--She will hope--and in that hope, bids you farewell, with all the love she ever bore you. "Farewell Dorriforth--farewell Lord Elmwood--and before you throw this letter from you with contempt or anger, cast your imagination into the grave where I am lying. Reflect upon all the days of my past life--the anxious moments I have known, and what has been their end. Behold _me_, also--in my altered face there is no anxiety--no joy or sorrow--all is over.----My whole frame is motionless--my heart beats no more. Look at my horrid habitation, too,--and ask yourself--whether I am an object of resentment?" While Lord Elmwood read this letter, it trembled in his hand: he once or twice wiped the tears from his eyes as he read, and once laid the letter down for a few minutes. At its conclusion, the tears flowed fast down his face; but he seemed both ashamed and angry they did, and was going to throw the paper upon the fire--he however suddenly checked his hand, and putting it hastily into his pocket, went to bed. CHAPTER V. The next morning, when Lord Elmwood and Sandford met at breakfast, the latter was pale with fear for the success of Lady Elmwood's letter--the Earl was pale too, but there was besides upon his face, something which evidently marked he was displeased. Sandford observed it, and was all humbleness, both in his words and looks, in order to soften him. As soon as the breakfast was removed, Lord Elmwood drew the letter from his pocket, and holding it towards Sandford, said, "That, may be of more value to you, than it is to me, therefore I give it you." Sandford called up a look of surprise, as if he did not know the letter again. "'Tis Lady Elmwood's letter," said Lord Elmwood, "and I return it to you for two reasons." Sandford took it, and putting it up, asked fearfully, "What those two reasons were?" "First," said he, "because I think it is a relick you may like to preserve--my second reason is, that you may shew it to her daughter, and let her know why, and on what conditions, I grant her mother's request." "You _do_ then grant it?" cried Sandford joyfully; "I thank you--you are kind--you are considerate." "Be not hasty in your gratitude; you may have cause to recall it." "I know what you have said;" replied Sandford, "you have said you grant Lady Elmwood's request--you cannot recall these words, nor I my gratitude." "Do you know what her request is?" returned he. "Not exactly, my Lord--I told you before, I did not; but it is no doubt something in favour of her child." "I think not," he replied: "such as it is, however, I grant it: but in the strictest sense of the word--no farther--and one neglect of my commands, releases me from this promise totally." "We will take care, Sir, not to disobey them." "Then listen to what they are, for to you I give the charge of delivering them again. Lady Elmwood has petitioned me in the name of her father, (a name I reverence) to give his grandchild the sanction of my protection. In the literal sense, to suffer that she may reside at one of my seats; dispensing at the same time with my ever seeing her." "And you will comply?" "I will, till she encroaches on this concession, and dares to hope for a greater. I will, while she avoids my sight, or the giving me any remembrance of her. But if, whether by design or by accident, I ever see or hear from her, that moment, my compliance to her mother's supplication ceases, and I abandon her once more." Sandford sighed. Lord Elmwood continued: "I am glad her request stopped where it did. I would rather comply with her desires than not; and I rejoice they are such as I can grant with ease and honour to myself. I am seldom now at Elmwood castle; let her daughter go there; the few weeks or months I am down in the summer, she may easily in that extensive house avoid me--while she does, she lives in security--when she does not--you know my resolution." Sandford bowed--the Earl resumed: "Nor can it be a hardship to obey this command--she cannot lament the separation from a parent whom she never knew--" Sandford was going eagerly to prove the error of that assertion, but he prevented him, saying, "In a word--without farther argument--if she obeys me in this, I will provide for her as my daughter during my life, and leave her a fortune at my death--but if she dares--" Sandford interrupted the menace prepared for utterance, saying, "and you still mean, I suppose, to make Mr. Rushbrook your heir?" "Have you not heard me say so? And do you imagine I have changed my determination? I am not given to alter my resolutions, Mr. Sandford; and I thought you knew I was not; besides, will not my title be extinct, whoever I make my heir? Could any thing but a son have preserved my title?" "Then it is yet possible----" "By marrying again, you mean? No--no--I have had enough of marriage--and Henry Rushbrook I shall leave my heir. Therefore, Sir----" "My Lord, I do not presume--" "Do not, Sandford, and we may still be good friends. But I am not to be controlled as formerly; my temper is changed of late; changed to what it was originally; till your religious precepts reformed it. You may remember, how troublesome it was, to conquer my stubborn disposition in my youth; _then_, indeed, you _did_; but in my more advanced age, you will find the task too difficult." Sandford again repeated, "He should not presume--" To which Lord Elmwood again made answer, "Do not, Sandford;" and added, "for I have a sincere regard for you, and should be loath, at these years, to quarrel with you seriously." Sandford turned away his head to conceal his feelings. "Nay, if we do quarrel," resumed Lord Elmwood, "You know it must be your own fault; and as this is a theme the most likely of any, nay, the only one on which we can have a difference (such as we cannot forgive) take care never from this day to resume it; indeed that of itself, would be an offence I could not pardon. I have been clear and explicit in all I have said; there can be no fear of mistaking my meaning; therefore, all future explanation is unnecessary--nor will I permit a word, or a hint on the subject from any one, without shewing my resentment even to the hour of my death." He was going out of the room. "But before we bid adieu to the subject for ever, my Lord--there was another person whom I named to you--" "Do you mean Miss Woodley? Oh, by all means let her live at Elmwood House too. On consideration, I have no objection to see Miss Woodley at any time--I shall be glad to see her--do not let _her_ be frightened at me--to her I shall be the same, that I have always been." "She is a good woman, my Lord," cried Sandford, pleased. "You need not tell me that, Mr. Sandford; I know her worth." And he left the room. Sandford, to relieve Miss Woodley and her lovely charge from the suspence in which he had left them, prepared to set off for their habitation, in order himself to conduct them from thence to Elmwood Castle, and appoint some retired part of it for Lady Matilda, against the annual visit her father should pay there. But before he left London, Giffard, the steward, took an opportunity to wait upon him, and let him know, that his Lord had acquainted him with the consent he had given for his daughter to be admitted at Elmwood Castle, and upon what restrictions: that he had farther uttered the severest threats, should these restrictions ever be infringed. Sandford thanked Giffard for his friendly information. It served him as a second warning of the circumspection that was necessary; and having taken leave of his friend and patron, under the pretence that "He could not live in the smoke of London," he set out for the North. It is unnecessary to say with what delight Sandford was received by Miss Woodley, and the hapless daughter of Lady Elmwood, even before he told his errand. They both loved him sincerely; more especially Lady Matilda, whose forlorn state, and innocent sufferings, had ever excited his compassion and caused him to treat her with affection, tenderness, and respect. She knew, too, how much he had been her mother's friend; for that, she also loved him; and for being honoured with the friendship of her father, she looked up to him with reverence. For Matilda (with an excellent understanding, a sedateness above her years, and early accustomed to the most private converse between Lady Elmwood and Miss Woodley) was perfectly acquainted with the whole fatal history of her mother; and was, by her, taught the respect and admiration of her father's virtues which they justly merited. Notwithstanding the joy of Mr. Sandford's presence, once more to cheer their solitary dwelling; no sooner were the first kind greetings over, than the dread of what he might have to inform them of, possessed poor Matilda and Miss Woodley so powerfully, that all their gladness was changed into affright. Their apprehensions were far more forcible than their curiosity; they dared not ask a question, and even began to wish he would continue silent upon the subject on which they feared to listen. For near two hours he was so.----At length, after a short interval from speaking, (during which they waited with anxiety for what he might next say) he turned to Lady Matilda, and said, "You don't ask for your father, my dear." "I did not know it was proper:" she replied, timidly. "It is always proper," answered Sandford, "for _you_ to think of him, though he should never think on you." She burst into tears, and said that she "_Did_ think of him, but she felt an apprehension of mentioning his name"--and she wept bitterly while she spoke. "Do not think I reproved you," said Sandford; "I only told you what was right." "Nay," said Miss Woodley, "she does not weep for that--she fears her father has not complied with her mother's request. Perhaps--not even read her letter?" "Yes, he _has_ read it," returned Sandford. "Oh Heavens!" exclaimed Matilda, clasping her hands together, and the tears falling still faster. "Do not be so much alarmed, my dear," said Miss Woodley; "you know we are prepared for the worst; and you know you promised your mother, whatever your fate should be, to submit with patience." "Yes," replied Matilda, "and I am prepared for every thing, but my father's refusal to my dear mother." "Your father has not refused your mother's request," replied Sandford. She was leaping from her seat in ecstasy. "But," continued he, "do you know what her request was?" "Not entirely," replied Matilda, "and since it is granted, I am careless. But she told me her letter concerned none but me." To explain perfectly to Matilda, Lady Elmwood's letter, and that she might perfectly understand upon what terms she was admitted into Elmwood Castle, Sandford now read the letter to her; and repeated, as nearly as he could remember, the whole of the conversation that passed between Lord Elmwood and himself; not even sparing, through an erroneous delicacy, any of those threats her father had denounced, should she dare to transgress the limits he prescribed--nor did he try to soften, in one instance, a word he uttered. She listened sometimes with tears, sometimes with hope, but always with awe, and with terror, to every sentence in which her father was concerned. Once she called him cruel--then exclaimed "He was kind;" but at the end of Sandford's intelligence, concluded "that she was happy and grateful for the boon bestowed." Even her mother had not a more exalted idea of Lord Elmwood's worth than his daughter had formed; and this little bounty just obtained, would not have been greater in her mother's estimation, than it was now in hers. Miss Woodley, too, smiled at the prospect before her--she esteemed Lord Elmwood beyond any mortal living--she was proud to hear what he had said in her praise, and overjoyed at the prospect of being once again in his company; painting at the same time a thousand bright hopes, from watching every emotion of his soul, and catching every proper occasion to excite or increase his paternal sentiments. Yet she had the prudence to conceal those vague hopes from his child, lest a disappointment might prove fatal; and assuming a behaviour neither too much elated or depressed, she advised that they should hope for the best, but yet, as usual, expect and prepare for the worst.----After taking measures for quitting their melancholy abode, within the fortnight, they all departed for Elmwood Castle--Matilda, Miss Woodley, and even Sandford, first visiting Lady Elmwood's grave, and bedewing it with their tears. CHAPTER VI. It was on a dark evening in the month of March, that Lady Matilda, accompanied by Sandford and Miss Woodley, arrived at Elmwood Castle, the magnificent seat of her father. Sandford chose the evening, rather to steal into the house privately, than by any appearance of parade, to suffer Lord Elmwood to be reminded of their arrival by the public prints, or by any other accident. Nor would he give the neighbours or servants reason to suppose, the daughter of their Lord was admitted into his house, in any other situation than that, in which she really was permitted to be there. As the porter opened the gates of the avenue to the carriage that brought them, Matilda felt an awful, and yet gladsome sensation, which no terms can describe. As she entered the door of the house this sensation increased--and as she passed along the spacious hall, the splendid staircase, and many stately apartments, wonder, with a crowd of the tenderest, yet most afflicting sentiments, rushed to her heart. She gazed with astonishment!--she reflected with still more. "And is _my father_ the master of this house?" she cried--"and was my mother once the mistress of this castle?" Here tears relieved her from a part of that burthen, which was before insupportable. "Yes," replied Sandford, "and you are the mistress of it now, till your father arrives." "Good God!" exclaimed she, "and will he ever arrive? and shall I live to sleep under the same roof with my father?" "My dear," replied Miss Woodley, "have not you been told so?" "Yes," said she, "but though I heard it with extreme pleasure, yet the idea never so forcibly affected me as at this moment. I now feel, as the reality approaches, that to be admitted here, is kindness enough--I do not ask for more--I am now convinced, from what this trial makes me feel, that to see my father, would occasion emotions I could not survive." The next morning gave to Matilda, more objects of admiration and wonder, as she walked over the extensive gardens, groves, and other pleasure grounds belonging to the house. She, who had never been beyond the dreary, ruinous places which her deceased mother had made her residence, was naturally struck with amazement and delight at the grandeur of a seat, which travellers came for miles to see, nor thought their time mispent. There was one object, however, among all she saw, which attracted her attention above the rest, and she would stand for hours to look at it. This was a whole length portrait of Lord Elmwood, esteemed a very capital picture, and a perfect likeness--to this picture she would sigh and weep; though when it was first pointed out to her, she shrunk back with fear, and it was some time before she dared venture to cast her eyes completely upon it. In the features of her father she was proud to discern the exact mould in which her own appeared to have been modelled; yet Matilda's person, shape, and complexion were so extremely like what her mother's once were, that at the first glance she appeared to have a still greater resemblance of her, than of her father--but her mind and manners were all Lord Elmwood's; softened by the delicacy of her sex, the extreme tenderness of her heart, and the melancholy of her situation. She was now in her seventeenth year--of the same age, within a year and a few months, of her mother, when she became the ward of Dorriforth. She was just three years old when her father went abroad, and remembered something of bidding him farewell; but more of taking cherries from his hand, as he pulled them from the tree to give to her. Educated in the school of adversity, and inured to retirement from her infancy, she had acquired a taste for all those amusements which a recluse life affords. She was fond of walking and riding--was accomplished in the arts of music and drawing, by the most careful instructions of her mother--and as a scholar, she excelled most of her sex, from the pains which Sandford had taken with that part of her education, and the superior abilities he possessed for the task. In devoting certain hours of the day to study with him, others to music, riding, and such amusements, Matilda's time never appeared tedious at Elmwood Castle, although she received and paid no one visit--for it was soon divulged in the neighbourhood, upon what stipulation she resided at her father's, and studiously intimated, that the most prudent and friendly behaviour of her true friends, would be, to take no notice whatever that she lived among them: and as Lord Elmwood's will was a law all around, such was the consequence of that will, known, or merely supposed. Neither did Miss Woodley regret the want of visitors, but found herself far more satisfied in her present situation, than her most sanguine hopes could have formed. She had a companion whom she loved with an equal fondness, with which she had loved her deceased mother; and frequently, in this charming mansion, where she had so often beheld Lady Elmwood, her imagination represented Matilda as her friend risen from the grave, in her former youth, health, and exquisite beauty. In peace, in content, though not in happiness, the days and weeks passed away till about the middle of August, when preparations began to be made for the arrival of Lord Elmwood. The week in which he was to come was at length fixed, and some part of his retinue was arrived before him. When this was told Matilda, she started, and looked just as her mother at her age had often done, when in spite of her love, she was conscious that she had offended him, and was terrified at his approach. Sandford observing this, put out his hand, and taking hers, shook it kindly; and bade her (but it was not in a cheering tone) "not be afraid." This gave her no confidence; and she began, before her father's arrival, to seclude herself in the apartments allotted for her during the time of his stay; and in the timorous expectation of his coming, her appetite declined, and she lost all her colour. Even Miss Woodley, whose spirits had been for some time elated with the hopes she had formed, on drawing near to the test, found those hopes vanished; and though she endeavoured to conceal it, she was full of apprehensions. Sandford, had certainly fewer fears than either; yet upon the eve of the day on which his patron was to arrive, he was evidently cast down. Lady Matilda once asked him--"Are you certain, Mr. Sandford, you made no mistake in respect to what Lord Elmwood said, when he granted my mother's request? Are you sure he _did_ grant it? Was there nothing equivocal on which he may ground his displeasure should he be told that I am here? Oh do not let me hazard being once again turned out of his house! Oh! save me from provoking him perhaps to curse me." And here she clasped her hands together with the most fervent petition, in the dread of what might happen. "If you doubt my words or my senses," said Sandford, "call Giffard, and let him inform you; the same words were repeated to him as to me." Though from her reason, Matilda could not doubt of any mistake from Mr. Sandford, yet her fears suggested a thousand scruples; and this reference to the steward she received with the utmost satisfaction, (though she did not think it necessary to apply to him) as it perfectly convinced her of the folly of the suspicions she had entertained. "And yet, Mr. Sandford," said she, "if it is so, why are you less cheerful than you were? I cannot help thinking but it must be your expectation of Lord Elmwood, which has occasioned this change." "I don't know," replied Sandford, carelessly, "but I believe I am grown afraid of your father. His temper is a great deal altered from what it once was--he raises his voice, and uses harsh expressions upon the least provocation--his eyes flash lightning, and his face is distorted with anger upon the slightest motives--he turns away his old servants at a moment's warning, and no concession can make their peace. In a word, I am more at my ease when I am away from him--and I really believe," added he with a smile, but with a tear at the same time, "I really believe, I am more afraid of _him_ in my age, than he was of _me_ when he was a boy." Miss Woodley was present; she and Matilda looked at one another; and each of them saw the other turn pale at this description. The day at length came, on which Lord Elmwood was expected to dinner. It would have been a high gratification to his daughter to have gone to the topmost window of the house, and have only beheld his carriage enter the avenue; but it was a gratification which her fears, her tremor, her extreme sensibility would not permit her to enjoy. Miss Woodley and she, sat down that day to dinner in their retired apartments, which were detached from the other part of the house by a gallery; and of the door leading to the gallery, they had a key to impede any one from passing that way, without first ringing a bell; to answer which, was the sole employment of a servant, who was placed there during the Earl's residence, lest by any accident he might chance to come near that unfrequented part of the house, on which occasion the man was to give immediate notice to his Lady. Matilda and Miss Woodley sat down to dinner, but did not dine. Sandford dined as usual, with Lord Elmwood. When tea was brought, Miss Woodley asked the servant, who attended, if he had seen his Lord. The man answered, "Yes, Madam; and he looks vastly well." Matilda wept with joy to hear it. About nine in the evening, Sandford rang at the bell, and was admitted--never had he been so welcome--Matilda hung upon him, as if his recent interview with her father, had endeared him to her more than ever; and staring anxiously in his face, seemed to enquire of him something about Lord Elmwood, and something that should not alarm her. "Well--how do you find yourself?" said he to her. "How are you, Mr. Sandford?" she returned, with a sigh. "Oh! very well," replied he. "Is my Lord in a good temper?" asked Miss Woodley. "Yes; very well," replied Sandford, with indifference. "Did he seem glad to see you?" asked Matilda. "He shook me by the hand," replied Sandford. "That was a sign he was glad to see you, was it not?" said Matilda. "Yes; but he could not do less." "Nor more:" replied she. "He looks very well, our servant tells us," said Miss Woodley. "Extremely well indeed," answered Sandford: "and to tell the truth, I never saw him in better spirits." "That is well--" said Matilda, and sighed a weight of fears from her heart. "Where is he now, Mr. Sandford?" "Gone to take a walk about his grounds, and I stole here in the mean time." "What was your conversation during dinner?" asked Miss Woodley. "Horses, hay, farming, and politics." "Won't you sup with him?" "I shall see him again before I go to bed." "And again to-morrow!" cried Matilda, "what happiness!" "He has visitors to-morrow," said Sandford, "coming for a week or two." "Thank Heaven," said Miss Woodley, "he will then be diverted from thinking on us." "Do you know," returned Sandford, "it is my firm opinion, that his thinking of ye at present, is the cause of his good spirits." "Oh, Heavens!" cried Matilda, lifting up her hands with rapture. "Nay, do not mistake me," said Sandford; "I would not have you build a foundation for joy upon this surmise; for if he is in spirits that you are in this house--so near him--positively under his protection--yet he will not allow himself to think it is the cause of his content--and the sentiments he has adopted, and which are now become natural to him, will remain the same as ever; nay, perhaps with greater force, should he suspect his weakness (as he calls it) acting in opposition to them." "If he does but think of me with tenderness," cried Matilda, "I am recompensed." "And what recompense would his kind thoughts be to you," said Sandford, "were he to turn you out to beggary?" "A great deal--a great deal," she replied. "But how are you to know he has these kind thoughts, if he gives you no proof of them?" "No, Mr. Sandford; but _supposing_ we could know them without proof." "But as that is impossible," answered he, "I shall suppose, till proof appears, that I have been mistaken in my conjectures." Matilda looked deeply concerned that the argument should conclude in her disappointment; for to have believed herself thought of with tenderness by her father, would have alone constituted her happiness. When the servant came up with something by way of supper, he told Mr. Sandford that his Lord was returned from his walk and had enquired for him; Sandford immediately bade his companions good night, and left them. "How strange is this!" cried Matilda, when Miss Woodley and she were alone, "My father within a few rooms of me, and yet I am debarred from seeing him! Only by walking a few paces I could be at his feet, and perhaps receive his blessing!" "You make me shudder," cried Miss Woodley; "but some spirits less timid than mine, might perhaps advise you to the experiment." "Not for worlds!" returned Matilda, "no counsel could tempt me to such temerity--and yet to entertain the thought that it is possible I could do this, is a source of infinite comfort." This conversation lasted till bed time, and later; for they sat up beyond their usual hour to indulge it. Miss Woodley slept little, but Matilda less--she awaked repeatedly during the night, and every time sighed to herself, "I sleep in the same house with my father! Blessed spirit of my mother, look down and rejoice." CHAPTER VII. The next day the whole Castle appeared to Lady Matilda (though she was in some degree retired from it) all tumult and bustle, as was usually the case while Lord Elmwood was there. She saw from her windows, the servants running across the yards and park; horses and carriages driving with fury; all the suite of a nobleman; and it sometimes elated, at other times depressed her. These impressions however, and others of fear and anxiety, which her father's arrival had excited, by degrees wore off; and after some little time, she was in the same tranquil state that she enjoyed before he came. He had visitors, who passed a week or two with him; he paid visits himself for several days; and thus the time stole away, till it was about four weeks from the time that he had arrived; in which long period, Sandford, with all his penetration, could never clearly discover whether he had once called to mind that his daughter was living in the same house. He had not once named her (that was not extraordinary) consequently no one dared name her to him; but he had not even mentioned Miss Woodley, of whom he had so lately spoken in the kindest terms, and had said, "He should take pleasure in seeing her again." From these contradictions in Lord Elmwood's behaviour in respect to her, it was Miss Woodley's plan neither to throw herself in his way, nor avoid him. She therefore frequently walked about the house while he was in it, not indeed entirely without restraint, but at least with the show of liberty. This freedom, indulged for some time without peril, became at last less cautious; and as no ill consequences had arisen from its practice, her scruples gradually ceased. One morning, however, as she was crossing the large hall, thoughtless of danger, a footstep at a distance alarmed her almost without knowing why. She stopped for a moment, thinking to return; the steps approached quicker, and before she could retreat, she beheld Lord Elmwood at the other end of the hall, and perceived that he saw her. It was too late to hesitate what was to be done; she could not go back, and had not courage to go on; she therefore stood still. Disconcerted, and much affected at his sight, (their former intimacy coming to her mind with the many years, and many sad occurrences passed, since she last saw him) all her intentions, all her meditated plans how to conduct herself on such an occasion, gave way to a sudden shock--and to make the meeting yet more distressing, her very fright, she knew, would serve to recall more powerfully to his mind, the subject she most wished him to forget. The steward was with him, and as they came up close by her side, Giffard observing him look at her earnestly, said softly, but so as she heard him, "My Lord, it is Miss Woodley." Lord Elmwood took off his hat instantly--and, with an apparent friendly warmth, laying hold of her hand, he said, "Indeed, Miss Woodley, I did not know you--I am very glad to see you:" and while he spoke, shook her hand with a cordiality which her tender heart could not bear--and never did she feel so hard a struggle as to restrain her tears. But the thought of Matilda's fate--the idea of awakening in his mind a sentiment that might irritate him against his child, wrought more forcibly than every other effort; and though she could not reply distinctly, she replied without weeping. Whether he saw her embarrassment, and wished to release her from it, or was in haste to conceal his own, he left her almost instantly: but not till he had entreated she would dine that very day with him and Mr. Sandford, who were to dine without other company. She curtsied assent, and flew to tell Matilda what had occurred. After listening with anxiety and with joy to all she told, Matilda laid hold of that hand which she said Lord Elmwood had held, and pressed it to her lips with love and reverence. When Miss Woodley made her appearance at dinner, Sandford, (who had not seen her since the invitation, and did not know of it) looked amazed; on which Lord Elmwood said, "Do you know, Sandford, I met Miss Woodley this morning, and had it not been for Giffard, I should have passed her without knowing her--but Miss Woodley, if I am not so much altered but that you knew me, I take it unkind you did not speak first." She was unable to speak even now--he saw it, and changed the conversation; when Sandford eagerly joined in discourse, which relieved him from the pain of the former. As they advanced in their dinner, the embarrassment of Miss Woodley and of Mr. Sandford diminished; Lord Elmwood in his turn became, not embarrassed, but absent and melancholy. He now and then sighed heavily--and called for wine much oftener than he was accustomed. When Miss Woodley took her leave, he invited her to dine with him and Sandford whenever it was convenient to her; he said, besides, many things of the same kind, and all with the utmost civility, yet not with that warmth with which he had spoken in the morning--into _that_ he had been surprised--his coolness was the effect of reflection. When she came to Lady Matilda, and Sandford had joined them, they talked and deliberated on what had passed. "You acknowledge Mr. Sandford," said Miss Woodley, "that you think my presence affected Lord Elmwood, so as to make him much more thoughtful than usual; if you imagine these thoughts were upon Lady Elmwood, I will never intrude again; but if you suppose that I made him think upon his daughter, I cannot go too often." "I don't see how he can divide those two objects in his mind," replied Sandford, "therefore you must e'en visit him on, and take your chance, what reflections you may cause--but, be they what they will, time will steal away from you that power of affecting him." She concurred in the opinion, and occasionally she walked into Lord Elmwood's apartments, dined, or took her coffee with him, as the accident suited; and observed, according to Sandford's prediction, that time wore off the impression her visits first made. Lord Elmwood now became just the same before her as before others. She easily discerned, too, through all that politeness which he assumed--that he was no longer the considerate, the forbearing character he formerly was; but haughty, impatient, imperious, and more than ever, _implacable._ CHAPTER VIII. When Lord Elmwood had been at his country seat about six weeks, Mr. Rushbrook, his nephew, and his adopted child--that friendless boy whom poor Lady Elmwood first introduced into his uncle's house, and by her kindness preserved there--arrived from his travels, and was received by his uncle with all the marks of affection due to the man he thought worthy to be his heir. Rushbrook had been a beautiful boy, and was now an extremely handsome young man; he had made unusual progress in his studies, had completed the tour of Italy and Germany, and returned home with the air and address of a perfect man of fashion--there was, besides, an elegance and persuasion in his manner almost irresistible. Yet with all those accomplishments, when he was introduced to Sandford, and put forth his hand to take his, Sandford, with evident reluctance, gave it to him; and when Lord Elmwood asked him, in the young man's presence, "If he did not think his nephew greatly improved?" He looked at him from head to foot, and muttered "He could not say he observed it." The colour heightened in Mr. Rushbrook's face upon the occasion, but he was too well bred not to be in perfect good humour. Sandford saw this young man treated, in the house of Lord Elmwood, with the same respect and attention as if he had been his son; and it was but probable the old priest would make a comparison between the situation of him, and of Lady Matilda Elmwood. Before her, it was Sandford's meaning to have concealed his thoughts upon the subject, and never to have mentioned it but with composure; that was, however, impossible--unused to hide his feelings, at the name of Rushbrook, his countenance would always change, and a sarcastic sneer, sometimes a frown of resentment, would force its way in spite of his resolution. Miss Woodley, too, with all her boundless charity and good will, was, upon this occasion, induced to limit their excess; and they did not extend so far as to reach poor Rushbrook. She even, and in _reality_, did not think him handsome or engaging in his manners--she thought his gaiety frivolousness, his complaisance affectation, and his good humour impertinence. It was impossible to conceal those unfavourable sentiments entirely from Matilda; for when the subject arose, as it frequently did, Miss Woodley's undisguised heart, and Sandford's undisguised countenance, told them instantly. Matilda had the understanding to imagine, that she was, perhaps, the object who had thus deformed Mr. Rushbrook, and frequently (though he was a stranger to her, and one who had caused her many a jealous heart-ache) frequently she would speak in his vindication. "You are very good," said Sandford, one day to her; "you like him, because you know your father loves him." This was a hard sentence for the daughter of Lord Elmwood to hear, to whom her father's love would have been more precious than any other blessing.--She, however, checked the assault of envy, and kindly replied, "My mother loved him too, Mr. Sandford." "Yes," answered Sandford, "he has been a _grateful_ man to your poor mother.--She did not suppose when she took him into the house; when she intreated your father to take him; and through her caresses and officious praises of him, first gave him that power which he now possesses over his uncle; she little foresaw, at that time, his ingratitude, and its effects." "Very true," said Miss Woodley, with a heavy sigh. "What ingratitude?" asked Matilda, "do you suppose Mr. Rushbrook is the cause that my father will not see me? Oh do not pay Lord Elmwood's motive so ill a compliment." "I do not say that he is the absolute cause," returned Sandford; "but if a parent's heart is void, I would have it remain so, till its lawful owner is replaced--usurpers I detest." "No one can take Lord Elmwood's heart by force," replied his daughter, "it must, I believe, be a free gift to the possessor; and as such, whoever has it, has a right to it." In this manner she would plead the young man's excuse--perhaps but to hear what could be said in his disfavour, for secretly his name was bitter to her--and once she exclaimed in vexation, on Sandford's saying Lord Elmwood and Mr. Rushbrook were gone out shooting together, "All that pleasure is now eclipsed which I used to take in listening to the report of my father's gun, for I cannot now distinguish his, from his parasite's." Sandford, (much as he disliked Rushbrook) for this expression which comprised her father in the reflection, turned to Matilda in extreme anger--but as he saw the colour mount into her face, for what, in the strong feelings of her heart had escaped her lips, he did not say a word--and by her tears that followed, he rejoiced to see how much she reproved _herself._ Miss Woodley, vexed to the heart, and provoked every time she saw Lord Elmwood and Rushbrook together, and saw the familiar terms on which this young man lived with his benefactor, now made her visits to him very seldom. If Lord Elmwood observed this, he did not appear to observe it; and though he received her politely when she did pay him a visit, it was always very coldly; nor did she suppose if she never went, he would ever ask for her. For his daughter's sake, however, she thought it right sometimes to shew herself before him; for she knew it must be impossible that, with all his apparent indifference, he could ever see _her_ without thinking for a moment on his child; and what one fortunate thought might some time bring about, was an object much too serious for her to overlook. She therefore, after remaining confined to her apartments near three weeks, (excepting those anxious walks she and Matilda stole, while Lord Elmwood dined, or before he rose in a morning) went one forenoon into his apartments, where, as usual, she found him, with Mr. Sandford, and Mr. Rushbrook. After she had sat about half an hour, conversing with them all, though but very little with the latter, Lord Elmwood was called out of the room upon some business; presently after, Sandford; and now, by no means pleased with the companion with whom she was left, she rose, and was going likewise, when Rushbrook fixed his speaking eyes upon her, and cried, "Miss Woodley, will you pardon me what I am going to say?" "Certainly, Sir. You can, I am sure, say nothing but what I must forgive." But she made this reply with a distance and a reserve, very unlike the usual manners of Miss Woodley. He looked at her earnestly and cried, "Ah! Miss Woodley, you don't behave so kindly to me as you used to do!" "I do not understand you, Sir," she replied very gravely; "Times are changed, Mr. Rushbrook, since you were last here--you were then but a child." "Yet I love all those persons now, that I loved then," replied he; "and so I shall for ever." "But you mistake, Mr. Rushbrook; I was not even then so very much the object of your affections--there were other ladies you loved better. Perhaps you don't remember Lady Elmwood?" "Don't I," cried he, "Oh!" (clasping his hands and lifting up his eyes to heaven) "shall I ever forget her?" That moment Lord Elmwood opened the door; the conversation of course that moment ended; but confusion, at the sudden surprise, was on the face of both parties--he saw it, and looked at each of them by turns, with a sternness that made poor Miss Woodley ready to faint; while Rushbrook, with the most natural and happy laugh that ever was affected, cried, "No, don't tell my Lord, pray Miss Woodley." She was more confused than before, and Lord Elmwood turning to him, asked what the subject was. By this time he had invented one, and, continuing his laugh, said, "Miss Woodley, my Lord, will to this day protest that she saw my apparition when I was a boy; and she says it is a sign I shall die young, and is really much affected at it." Lord Elmwood turned away before this ridiculous speech was concluded; yet so well had it been acted, that he did not for an instant doubt its truth. Miss Woodley felt herself greatly relieved; and yet so little is it in the power of those we dislike to do any thing to please us, that from this very circumstance, she formed a more unfavourable opinion of Mr. Rushbrook than she had done before. She saw in this little incident the art of dissimulation, cunning, and duplicity in its most glaring shape; and detested the method by which they had each escaped Lord Elmwood's suspicion, and perhaps anger, the more, because it was so dexterously managed. Lady Matilda and Sandford were both in their turns informed of this trait in Mr. Rushbrook's character; and although Miss Woodley had the best of dispositions, and upon every occasion spoke the strictest truth, yet in relating this occurrence, she did not speak _all_ the truth; for every circumstance that would have told to the young man's advantage, _literally_ had slipped her memory. The twenty-ninth of October arrived; on which a dinner, a ball, and supper, was given by Lord Elmwood to all the neighbouring gentry--the peasants also dined in the park off a roasted bullock, several casks of ale were distributed, and the bells of the village rung. Matilda, who heard and saw some part of this festivity from her windows, inquired the cause; but even the servant who waited upon her had too much sensibility to tell her, and answered, "He did not know." Miss Woodley however, soon learned the reason, and groaning with the painful secret, informed her, "Mr. Rushbrook on that day was come of age." "_My_ birth-day was last week," replied Matilda; but not a word beside. In their retired apartments, this day passed away not only soberly, but almost silently; for to speak upon any subject that did not engage their thoughts had been difficult, and to speak upon the only one that did, had been afflicting. Just as they were sitting down to dinner their bell gently rung, and in walked Sandford. "Why are you not among the revellers, Mr. Sandford?" cried Miss Woodley, with an ironical sneer--(the first her features ever wore)--"Pray, were not you invited to dine with the company?" "Yes," replied Sandford; "but my head ached; and so I had rather come and take a bit with you." Matilda, as if she had seen his heart as he spoke, clung round his neck and sobbed on his bosom: he put her peevishly away, crying "Nonsense, nonsense--eat your dinner." But he did not eat himself. CHAPTER IX. About a week after this, Lord Elmwood went out two days for a visit; consequently Rushbrook was for that time master of the house. The first morning he went a shooting, and returning about noon, enquired of Sandford, who was sitting in the room, if he had taken up a volume of plays left upon the table. "I read no such things," replied Sandford, and quitted the room abruptly. Rushbrook then rang for his servant, and desired him to look for the book, asking him angrily, "Who had been in the apartment? for he was sure he had left it there when he went out." The servant withdrew to enquire, and presently returned with the volume in his hand, and "Miss Woodley's compliments, she begs your pardon, Sir, she did not know the book was yours, and hopes you will excuse the liberty she took." "Miss Woodley!" cried Rushbrook with surprise, "she comes so seldom into these apartments, I did not suppose it was her who had it--take it back to her instantly, with my respects, and I beg she will keep it." The man went; but returned with the book again, and laying it on the table without speaking, was going away; when Rushbrook, hurt at receiving no second message, said, "I am afraid, Sir, you did very wrong when you first took this book from Miss Woodley." "It was not from her I took it, Sir," replied the man, "it was from Lady Matilda." Since he had entered the house, Rushbrook had never before heard the name of Lady Matilda, he was shocked--confounded more than ever--and to conceal what he felt, instantly ordered the man out of the room. In the mean time, Miss Woodley and Matilda were talking over this trifling occurrence; and frivolous as it was, drew from it strong conclusions of Rushbrook's insolence and power. In spite of her pride, the daughter of Lord Elmwood even wept at the insult she had received on this insignificant occasion; for the volume being merely taken from her at Mr. Rushbrook's command, she felt an insult; and the manner in which it was done by the servant, might contribute to the offence. While Miss Woodley and she were upon this conversation, a note came from Rushbrook to Miss Woodley, wherein he entreated he might be permitted to see her. She sent a verbal answer, "She was engaged." He sent again, begging she would name her own time. But sure of a second denial, he followed the servant who took the last message, and as Miss Woodley came out of her apartment into the gallery to speak to him, Rushbrook presented himself, and told the man to retire. "Mr. Rushbrook," said Miss Woodley, "this intrusion is insupportable; and destitute as you may think me of the friendship of Lord Elmwood"---- In the ardour with which Rushbrook was waiting to express himself, he interrupted her, and caught hold of her hand. She immediately snatched it from him, and withdrew into her chamber. He followed, saying, in a low voice, "Dear Miss Woodley, hear me." At that juncture Lady Matilda, who was in an inner apartment, came out of it into Miss Woodley's. Perceiving a gentleman, she stopped short at the door. Rushbrook cast his eyes upon her, and stood motionless--his lips only moved. "Do not depart, Madam," said he, "without hearing my apology for being here." Though Matilda had never seen him since her infancy, there was no occasion to tell her who it was that addressed her--his elegant and youthful person, joined to the incident which had just occurred, convinced her it was Rushbrook: she looked at him with an air of surprise, but with still more, of dignity. "Miss Woodley is severe upon me, Madam," continued he, "she judges me unkindly; and I am afraid she will prepossess you with the same unfavourable sentiments." Still Matilda did not speak, but looked at him with the same air of dignity. "If, Lady Matilda," resumed he, "I have offended you, and must quit you without pardon, I am more unhappy than I should be with the loss of your father's protection--more forlorn, than when an orphan boy, your mother first took pity on me." At this last sentence, Matilda turned her eyes on Miss Woodley, and seemed in doubt what reply she was to give. Rushbrook immediately fell upon his knees--"Oh! Lady Matilda," cried he, "if you knew the sensations of my heart, you would not treat me with this disdain." "We can only judge of those sensations, Mr. Rushbrook," said Miss Woodley, "by the effect they have upon your conduct; and while you insult Lord and Lady Elmwood's daughter by an intrusion like this, and then ridicule her abject state by mockeries like these----" He rose from his knees instantly, and interrupted her, crying, "What can I do? What am I to say, to make you change your opinion of me? While Lord Elmwood has been at home, I have kept an awful distance; and though every moment I breathed was a wish to cast myself at his daughter's feet, yet as I feared, Miss Woodley, that you were incensed against me, by what means was I to procure an interview but by stratagem or force? This accident has given a third method, and I had not strength, I had not courage, to let it pass. Lord Elmwood will soon return, and we may both of us be hurried to town immediately--then how for a tedious winter could I endure the reflexion that I was despised, nay, perhaps considered as an object of ingratitude, by the only child of my deceased benefactress?" Matilda replied with all her father's haughtiness, "Depend upon it, Sir, if you should ever enter my thoughts, it will only be as an object of envy." "Suffer me then, Madam," said he, "as an earnest that you do not think worse of me than I merit, suffer me to be sometimes admitted into your presence--." She would scarce permit him to finish the period, before she replied, "This is the last time, Sir, we shall ever meet, depend upon it--unless, indeed, Lord Elmwood should delegate to you the controul of me--_his_ commands I never dispute." And here she burst into tears. Rushbrook walked towards the window, and did not speak for some time--then turning himself to make a reply, both Matilda and Miss Woodley were somewhat surprised to see, that he had been shedding tears himself.--Having conquered them, he said, "I will not offend you, Madam, by remaining one moment longer; and I give you my honour, that, upon no pretence whatever, will I presume to intrude here again. Professions, I find, have no weight, and only by this obedience to your orders, can I give a proof of that respect which you inspire;--and let the agitation I now feel, convince you, Lady Matilda, that, with all my seeming good fortune, I am not happier than yourself." And so much was he agitated while he delivered this, that it was with difficulty he came to the conclusion. When he did, he bowed with reverence, as if leaving the presence of a deity, and retired. Matilda immediately entered the chamber she had left, and without casting a single look at Miss Woodley by which she might guess of the opinion she had formed of Mr. Rushbrook's conduct. The next time they met they did not even mention his name; for they were ashamed to own a partiality in his favour, and were too just to bring any accusation against him. But Miss Woodley, the day following, communicated the intelligence of this visit to Mr. Sandford, who not being present, and a witness of those marks of humility and respect which were conspicuous in the deportment of Mr. Rushbrook, was highly offended at his presumption, and threatened if he ever dared to force his company there again, he would acquaint Lord Elmwood with his arrogance, whatever might be the event. Miss Woodley, however, assured him, she believed he would have no cause for such a complaint, as the young man had made the most solemn promise never to commit the like offence; and she thought it her duty to enjoin Sandford, till he did repeat it, not to mention the circumstance, even to Rushbrook himself. Matilda could not but feel a regard for her father's heir, in return for that which he had so fervently declared for her; yet the more favourable her opinion of his mind and manners, the more he became an object of her jealousy for the affections of Lord Elmwood, and he was now consequently, an object of greater sorrow to her, than when she believed him less worthy. These sentiments were reversed on his part towards her--no jealousy intervened to bar his admiration and esteem--the beauty of her person, and grandeur of her mien, not only confirmed, but improved, the exalted idea he had formed of her previous to their meeting, and which his affection to both her parents had inspired. The next time he saw his benefactor, he began to feel a new esteem and regard for him, for his daughter's sake; as he had at first an esteem for her, on the foundation of his love for Lord and Lady Elmwood. He gazed with wonder at his uncle's insensibility to his own happiness, and would gladly have led him to the jewel he cast away, though even his own expulsion should be the fatal consequence. Such was the youthful, warm, generous, grateful, but unreflecting mind of Rushbrook. CHAPTER X. After this incident, Miss Woodley left her apartments less frequently than before--she was afraid, though till now mistrust had been a stranger to her heart, she was afraid that duplicity might be concealed under the apparent friendship of Rushbrook; it did not indeed appear so from any part of his behaviour, but she was apprehensive for the fate of Matilda; she disliked him too, and therefore she suspected him. Near three weeks she had not now paid a visit to Lord Elmwood, and though to herself every visit was a pain, yet as Matilda took a delight in hearing of her father, what he said, what he did, what his attention seemed most employed on, and a thousand other circumstantial informations, in which Sandford would scorn to be half so particular, it was a deprivation to her, that Miss Woodley did not go oftener. Now too, the middle of November was come, and it was expected her father would soon quit the country. Partly therefore to indulge her hapless companion, and partly because it was a duty, Miss Woodley once again paid Lord Elmwood a morning visit, and staid dinner. Rushbrook was officiously polite, (for that was the epithet she gave his attention in relating it to Lady Matilda) yet she owned he had not that forward impertinence she had formerly discovered in him, but appeared much more grave and sedate. "But tell me of my father," said Matilda. "I was going, my dear--but don't be concerned--don't let it vex you." "What? what?" cried Matilda, frightened by the preface. "Why, on my observing that I thought Mr. Rushbrook looked paler than usual, and appeared not to be in perfect health, (which was really the case) your father expressed the greatest anxiety imaginable; he said he could not bear to see him look so ill, begged him, with all the tenderness of a parent, to take the advice of a physician, and added a thousand other affectionate things." "I detest Mr. Rushbrook," said Matilda, with her eyes flashing indignation. "Nay, for shame," returned Miss Woodley; "do you suppose I told you this, to make you hate him?" "No, there was no occasion for that," replied Matilda; "my sentiments (though I have never before avowed them) were long ago formed; he was always an object which added to my unhappiness; but since his daring intrusion into my apartments, he has been an object of my hatred." "But now, perhaps, I may tell you something to please you," cried Miss Woodley. "And what is that?" said Matilda, with indifference; for the first intelligence had hurt her spirits too much to suffer her to listen with pleasure to anything. "Mr. Rushbrook," continued Miss Woodley, "replied to your father, that his indisposition was but a slight nervous fever, and he would defer a physician's advice till he went to London"--on which Lord Elmwood said, "And when do you expect to be there?"--he replied, "Within a week or two, I suppose, my Lord." But your father answered, "I do not mean to go myself till after Christmas." "No indeed, my Lord!" said Mr. Sandford, with surprise: "you have not passed your Christmas here these many years." "No," returned your father; "but I think I feel myself more attached to this house at present, than ever I did in my life." "You imagine, then, my father thought of me, when he said this?" cried Matilda eagerly. "But I may be mistaken," replied Miss Woodley. "I leave you to judge. Though I am sure Mr. Sandford imagined he thought of you, for I saw a smile over his whole face immediately." "Did you, Miss Woodley?" "Yes; it appeared on every feature except his lips; those he kept fast closed, for fear Lord Elmwood should perceive it." Miss Woodley, with all her minute intelligence, did not however acquaint Matilda, that Rushbrook followed her to the window when the Earl was out of the room, and Sandford half asleep at the other end of it, and inquired respectfully but anxiously for _her_; adding, "It is my concern for Lady Matilda which makes me thus indisposed: I suffer more than she does; but I am not permitted to tell her so, nor can I hope, Miss Woodley, you will." She replied, "You are right, Sir." Nor did she reveal this conversation, while not a sentence that passed except that, was omitted. When Christmas arrived, Lord Elmwood had many convivial days at Elmwood House, but Matilda was never mentioned by one of his guests, and most probably was never thought of. During all those holidays, she was unusually melancholy, but sunk into the deepest dejection when she was told the day was fixed, on which her father was to return to town. On the morning of that day she wept incessantly; and all her consolation was, "She would go to the chamber window that was fronting the door through which he was to pass to his carriage, and for the first time, and most probably for the last time in her life, behold him." This design was soon forgot in another:--"She would rush boldly into the apartment where he was, and at his feet take leave of him for ever--she would lay hold of his hands, clasp his knees, provoke him to spurn her, which would be joy in comparison to this cruel indifference." In the bitterness of her grief, she once called upon her mother, and reproached her memory--but the moment she recollected this offence, (which was almost instantaneously) she became all mildness and resignation. "What have I said?" cried she; "Dear, dear saint, forgive me; and for your sake I will bear all with patience--I will not groan, I will not even sigh again--this task I set myself to atone for what I have dared to utter." While Lady Matilda laboured under this variety of sensations, Miss Woodley was occupied in bewailing and endeavouring to calm her sorrows--and Lord Elmwood, with Rushbrook, was ready to set off. The Earl, however, loitered, and did not once seem in haste to be gone. When at last he got up to depart, Sandford thought he pressed his hand, and shook it with more warmth than ever he had done in his life. Encouraged by this supposition, Sandford said, "My Lord, won't you condescend to take your leave of Miss Woodley?" "Certainly, Sandford," replied he, and seemed glad of an excuse to sit down again. Impressed with the idea of the state in which she had left his only child, Miss Woodley, when she came before Lord Elmwood to bid him farewell, was pale, trembling, and in tears. Sandford, notwithstanding his patron's apparently kind humour, was shocked at the construction he must put upon her appearance, and cried, "What, Miss Woodley, are you not recovered of your illness yet?" Lord Elmwood, however, took no notice of her looks, but after wishing her her health, walked slowly out of the house; turning back frequently and speaking to Sandford, or to some other person who was behind him, as if part of his thoughts were left behind, and he went with reluctance. When he had quitted the room where Miss Woodley was, Rushbrook, timid before her, as she had been before her benefactor, went up to her, all humility, and said, "Miss Woodley, we ought to be friends: our concern, our devotion is paid to the same objects, and one common interest should teach us to be friendly." She made no reply.--"Will you permit me to write to you when I am away?" said he; "You may wish to hear of Lord Elmwood's health, and of what changes may take place in his resolutions.--Will you permit me?" At that moment a servant came and said, "Sir, my Lord is in the carriage, and waiting for you." He hastened away, and Miss Woodley was relieved from the pain of giving him a denial. No sooner was the chaise, with all its attendants, out of sight, than Lady Matilda was conducted by Miss Woodley from her lonely retreat, into that part of the house from whence her father had just departed--and she visited every spot where he had so long resided, with a pleasing curiosity that for a while diverted her grief. In the breakfast and dining rooms, she leaned over those seats with a kind of filial piety, on which she was told he had been accustomed to sit. And, in the library, she took up with filial delight, the pen with which he had been writing; and looked with the most curious attention into those books that were laid upon his reading desk. But a hat, lying on one of the tables, gave her a sensation beyond any other she experienced on this occasion--in that trifling article of his dress, she thought she saw himself, and held it in her hand with pious reverence. In the mean time, Lord Elmwood and Rushbrook were proceeding on the road, with hearts not less heavy than those which they had left at Elmwood House; though neither of them could so well define the cause of this oppression, as Matilda could account for the weight which oppressed her's. CHAPTER XI. Young as Lady Matilda was during the life of her mother, neither her youth, nor the recluse state in which she lived, had precluded her from the notice and solicitations of a nobleman who had professed himself her lover. Viscount Margrave had an estate not far distant from the retreat Lady Elmwood had chosen; and being devoted to the sports of the country, he seldom quitted it for any of those joys which the town offered. He was a young man, of a handsome person, and was, what his neighbours called, "A man of spirit." He was an excellent fox-hunter, and as excellent a companion over his bottle at the end of the chace--he was prodigal of his fortune, where his pleasures were concerned, and as those pleasures were chiefly social, his sporting companions and his mistresses (for these were also of the plural number) partook largely of his wealth. Two months previous to Lady Elmwood's death, Miss Woodley and Lady Matilda were taking their usual walk in some fields and lanes near to their house, when chance threw Lord Margrave in their way during a thunder storm in which they were suddenly caught; and he had the satisfaction to convey his new acquaintances to their home in his coach, safe from the fury of the elements. Grateful for the service he had rendered them, Miss Woodley and her charge, permitted him to enquire occasionally after their health, and would sometimes see him. The story of Lady Elmwood was known to Lord Margrave, and as he beheld her daughter with a passion such as he had been unused to overcome, he indulged it with the probable hope, that on the death of the mother Lord Elmwood would receive his child, and perhaps accept him as his son-in-law. Wedlock was not the plan which Lord Margrave had ever proposed to himself for happiness; but the excess of his love on this new occasion, subdued all the resolutions he had formed against the married state; and not daring to hope for the consummation of his wishes by any other means, he suffered himself to look forward to that, as his only resource. No sooner was the long expected death of Lady Elmwood arrived, than he waited with impatience to hear that Lady Matilda was sent for and acknowledged by her father; for he meant to be the first to lay before Lord Elmwood his pretensions as a suitor. But those pretensions were founded on the vague hopes of a lover only; and Miss Woodley, to whom he first declared them, said every thing possible to convince him of their fallacy. As to the object of his passion, she was not only insensible, but wholly inattentive to all that was said to her on the subject. Lady Elmwood died without ever being disturbed with it; for her daughter did not even remember his proposals so as to repeat them again, and Miss Woodley thought it prudent to conceal from her friend, every new incident which might give her cause for new anxieties. When Sandford and the ladies left the north and came to Elmwood House, so much were their thoughts employed with other ideas, that Lord Margrave did not occupy a place; and during the whole time they had been at their new abode, they had never once heard of him. He had, nevertheless, his whole mind fixed upon Lady Matilda, and had placed spies in the neighbourhood to inform him of every circumstance relating to her situation. Having imbibed an aversion to matrimony, he heard with but little regret, that there was no prospect of her ever becoming her father's heir, while such an information gave him the hope of obtaining her, upon the terms of a mistress. Lord Elmwood's departure to town forwarded this hope, and flattering himself that the humiliating state in which Matilda must feel herself in the house of her father might gladly induce her to take shelter under any other protection, he boldly advanced as soon as the Earl was gone, to make such overture as his wishes and his vanity told him, could not be rejected. Inquiring for Miss Woodley, he easily gained admittance; but at the sight of so much modesty and dignity in the person of Matilda, the appearance of so much good will, and yet such circumspection in her companion; and charmed at the good sense and proper spirit which were always apparent in the manners of Sandford, he fell once more into the despondency of never becoming to Lady Matilda any thing of more importance to his reputation, than a husband. Even that humble hope was sometimes denied him, while Sandford set forth the impropriety of troubling Lord Elmwood on such a subject at present; and while the Viscount's penetration, small as it was, discovered in his fair one, more to discourage, than to favour his wishes. Plunged, however, too deep in his passion to emerge from it in haste, he meant still to visit, and wait for a change to happier circumstances, when he was peremptorily desired by Mr. Sandford to desist from ever coming again. "And why, Mr. Sandford?" cried he. "For two reasons, my Lord;--in the first place, your visits might be displeasing to Lord Elmwood; in the next place, I know they are so to his daughter." Unaccustomed to be addressed so plainly, particularly in a case where his heart was interested, he nevertheless submitted with patience; but in his own mind determined how long this patience should continue--no longer than it served as the means to prove his obedience, and by that artifice, to secure his better reception at some future period. On his return home, cheered with the huzzas of his jovial companions, he began to consult those friends, what scheme was best to be adopted for the accomplishment of his desires. Some, boldly advised application to the father in defiance to the old priest; but that was the very last method his Lordship himself approved, as marriage must inevitably have followed Lord Elmwood's consent: besides, though a Peer, Lord Margrave was unused to rank with Peers; and even the formality of an interview with one of his equals, carried along with it a terror, or at least a fatigue, to a rustic Baron. Others of his companions advised seduction; but happily the Viscount possessed no arts of this kind, to affect a heart joined with such an understanding as Matilda's. There were not wanting among his most favourite counsellors some, who painted the superior triumph and gratification of force; those assured him there was nothing to apprehend under this head, as from the behaviour of Lord Elmwood to his child, it was more than probable, he would be utterly indifferent as to any violence that might be offered her. This last advice seemed inspired by the aid of wine; and no sooner had the wine freely circulated, than this was always the expedient, which appeared by far the best. While Lord Margrave alternately cherished his hopes and his fears in the country, Rushbrook in town gave way to his fears only. Every day of his life made him more acquainted with the firm, unshaken temper of Lord Elmwood, and every day whispered more forcibly to him, that pity, gratitude, and friendship, strong and affectionate as these passions are, were weak and cold to that, which had gained the possession of his heart--he doubted, but he did not long doubt, that, which he felt was love. "And yet," said he to himself, "it is love of such a kind, as arising from causes independent of the object itself can scarce deserve that sacred name. Did I not love Lady Matilda before I beheld her?--for her mother's sake I loved her--and even for her father's. Should I have felt the same affection for her, had she been the child of other parents? No. Or should I have felt that sympathetic tenderness which now preys upon my health, had not her misfortunes excited it? No." Yet the love which is the result of gratitude and pity only, he thought had little claim to rank with his; and after the most deliberate and deep reflection, he concluded with this decisive opinion--He had loved Lady Matilda, in _whatever state_, in _whatever circumstances_; and that the tenderness he felt towards her, and the anxiety for her happiness before he knew her, extreme as they were, were yet cool and dispassionate sensations, compared to those which her person and demeanour had incited--and though he acknowledged, that by the preceding sentiments, his heart was softened, prepared, and moulded, as it were, to receive this last impression, yet the violence of his passion told him that genuine love, if not the basis on which it was founded, had been the certain consequence. With a strict scrutiny into his heart he sought this knowledge, but arrived at it with a regret that amounted to despair. To shield him from despondency, he formed in his mind a thousand visions, displaying the joys of his union with Lady Matilda; but her father's implacability confounded them all. Lord Elmwood was a man who made few resolutions--but those were the effect of deliberation; and as he was not the least capricious or inconstant in his temper, they were resolutions which no probable event could shake. Love, that produces wonders, that seduces and subdues the most determined and rigid spirits, had in two instances overcome the inflexibility of Lord Elmwood; he married Lady Elmwood contrary to his determination, because he loved; and for the sake of this beloved object, he had, contrary to his resolution, taken under his immediate care young Rushbrook; but the magic which once enchanted away this spirit of immutability was no more--Lady Elmwood was no more, and the charm was broken. As Miss Woodley was deprived of the opportunity of desiring Rushbrook not to write, when he asked her the permission, he passed one whole morning, in the gratification of forming and writing a letter to her, which he thought might possibly be shewn to Matilda. As he dared not touch upon any of those circumstances in which he was the most interested, this, joined to the respect he wished to pay the lady to whom he wrote, limited his letter to about twenty lines; yet the studious manner with which these lines were dictated, the hope that they might, and the fear that they might not, be seen and regarded by Lady Matilda, rendered the task an anxiety so pleasing, that he could have wished it might have lasted for a year; and in this tendency to magnify trifles, was discoverable, the never-failing symptom of ardent love. A reply to this formal address, was a reward he wished for with impatience, but he wished in vain; and in the midst of his chagrin at the disappointment, a sorrow, little thought of, occurred, and gave him a perturbation of mind he had never before experienced. Lord Elmwood proposed a wife to him; and in a way so assured of his acquiescence, that if Rushbrook's life had depended upon his daring to dispute his benefactor's will, he would not have had the courage to have done so. There was, however, in his reply, and his embarrassment, something which his uncle distinguished from a free concurrence; and looking stedfastly at him, he said, in that stern manner which he now almost invariably adopted, "You have no engagements, I suppose! Have made no previous promises!" "None on earth, my Lord," replied Rushbrook candidly. "Nor have you disposed of your heart?" "No, my Lord," replied he; but not candidly--nor with any appearance of candour: for though he spoke hastily, it was rather like a man frightened than assured. He hurried to tell the falsehood he thought himself obliged to tell, that the pain and shame might be over; but there he was deceived--the lie once told was as troublesome as in the conception, and added another confusion to the first. Lord Elmwood now fixed his eyes upon him with a sullen contempt, and rising from his chair, said, "Rushbrook, if you have been so inconsiderate as to give away your heart, tell me so at once, and tell me the object." Rushbrook shuddered at the thought. "I here," continued the Earl, "tolerate the first untruth you ever told me, as the false assertion of a lover; and give you an opportunity of recalling it--but after this moment, it is a lie between man and man--a lie to your friend and father, and I will not forgive it." Rushbrook stood silent, confused, alarmed, and bewildered in his thoughts. Lord Elmwood proceeded: "Name the person, if there is any, on whom you have bestowed your heart; and though I do not give you the hope that I shall not censure your folly, I will at least not reproach you for having at first denied it." To repeat these words in writing, the reader must condemn the young man that he could hesitate to own he loved, if he was even afraid to name the object of his passion; but his interrogator had made the two answers inseparable, so that all evasions of the second, Rushbrook knew would be fruitless, after having avowed the first--and how could he confess the latter? The absolute orders he received from the steward on his first return from his travels, were, "Never to mention his daughter, any more than his late wife, before Lord Elmwood." The fault of having rudely intruded into Lady Matilda's presence, rushed also upon his mind; for he did not even dare to say, by what means he had beheld her. But more than all, the threatening manner in which this rational and apparently conciliating speech was uttered, the menaces, the severity which sat upon the Earl's countenance while he delivered those moderate words, might have intimidated a man wholly independent, and less used to fear than his nephew had been. "You make no answer, Sir," said Lord Elmwood, after waiting a few moments for his reply. "I have only to say, my Lord," returned Rushbrook, "that although my heart may be totally disengaged, I may yet be disinclined to marriage." "May! May! Your heart _may_ be disengaged," repeated he. "Do you dare to reply to me equivocally, when I have asked a positive answer?" "Perhaps I am not positive myself, my Lord; but I will enquire into the state of my mind, and make you acquainted with it very soon." As the angry demeanour of his uncle affected Rushbrook with fear, so that fear, powerfully (but with proper manliness) expressed, again softened the displeasure of Lord Elmwood; and seeing and pitying his nephew's sensibility, he now changed his austere voice, and said mildly, but firmly, "I give you a week to consult with yourself; at the expiration of that time I shall talk with you again, and I command you to be then prepared to speak, not only without deceit, but without hesitation." He left the room at these words, and left Rushbrook released from a fate, which his apprehensions had beheld impending that moment. He had now a week to call his thoughts together, to weigh every circumstance, and to determine whether implicitly to submit to Lord Elmwood's recommendation of a wife, or to revolt from it, and see another, with more subserviency to his will, appointed his heir. Undetermined how to act upon this trial which was to decide his future destiny, Rushbrook suffered so poignant an uncertainty, that he became at length ill, and before the end of the week that was allotted him for his reply, he was confined to his bed in a high fever. Lord Elmwood was extremely affected at his indisposition; he gave him every care he could bestow, and even much of his personal attendance. This last favour had a claim upon the young man's gratitude, superior to every other obligation which since his infancy his benefactor had conferred; and he was at times so moved by those marks of kindness he received, that he would form the intention of tearing from his heart every trace that Lady Matilda had left there, and as soon as his health would permit him, obey, to the utmost of his views, every wish his uncle had conceived. Yet again, her pitiable situation presented itself to his compassion, and her beauteous person to his love. Divided between the claims of obligation to the father, and tender attachment to the daughter, his illness was increased by the tortures of his mind, and he once sincerely wished for that death, of which he was in danger, to free him from the dilemma in which his affections had involved him. At the time his disorder was at the height, and he lay complaining of the violence of his fever, Lord Elmwood, taking his hand, asked him, "If there was any thing he could do for him?" "Yes, yes, my Lord, a great deal:" he replied eagerly. "What is it, Harry?" "Oh! my Lord," replied he, "that is what I must not tell you." "Defer it then till you are well:" said Lord Elmwood; afraid of being surprised, or affected by the state of his health, into any promises which he might hereafter find the impropriety of granting. "And when I recover, my Lord, you give me leave to reveal to you my wishes, let them be what they will?" His uncle hesitated----but seeing an anxiety for the answer, by his raising himself upon his elbow in the bed and staring wildly, Lord Elmwood at last said, "Certainly--Yes, yes," as a child is answered for its quiet. That Lord Elmwood could have no idea what the real petition was, which Rushbrook meant to present him is certain; but it is certain he expected he had some request to make, with which it might be wrong for him to comply, and therefore he avoided hearing what it was; for great as his compassion for him was in his present state, it was not of sufficient force to urge him to give a promise he did not mean to perform. Rushbrook, on his part was pleased with the assurance he might speak when he was restored to health; but no sooner was his fever abated, and his senses perfectly recovered from the slight derangement his malady had occasioned, than the lively remembrance of what he had hinted, alarmed him, and he was even afraid to look his kind, but awful relation in the face. Lord Elmwood's cheerfulness, however, on his returning health, and his undiminished attention, soon convinced him that he had nothing to fear. But, alas! he found too, that he had nothing to hope. As his health re-established, his wishes re-established also, and with his wishes, his despair. Convinced now, that his nephew had something on his mind which he feared to reveal, the Earl no longer doubted but that some youthful attachment had armed him against any marriage he should propose; but he had so much pity for his present weak state, to delay that further inquiry which he had threatened before his illness, to a time when he should be entirely restored. It was the end of May before Rushbrook was able to partake in the usual routine of the day--the country was now prescribed him as the means of complete restoration; and as Lord Elmwood designed to leave London some time in June, he advised him to go to Elmwood House a week or two before him; this advice was received with delight, and a letter was sent to Mr. Sandford to prepare for Mr. Rushbrook's arrival. CHAPTER XII. During the illness of Rushbrook, news had been sent of his danger, from the servants in town to those at Elmwood House, and Lady Matilda expressed compassion when she was told of it--she began to conceive, the instant she thought he would soon die, that his visit to her had merit rather than impertinence in its design, and that he might possibly be a more deserving man, than she had supposed him to be. Even Sandford and Miss Woodley, began to recollect qualifications he possessed, which they never had reflected on before, and Miss Woodley in particular, reproached herself that she had been so severe and inattentive to him. Notwithstanding the prospects his death pointed out to her, it was with infinite joy she heard he was recovered; nor was Sandford less satisfied; for he had treated the young man too unkindly not to dread, lest any ill should befall him; but although he was glad to hear of his restored health, when he was informed he was coming down to Elmwood House for a few weeks in the style of its master, Sandford, with all his religious and humane principles, could not help thinking, "That if the lad had been properly preps well out of the world as in it." He was still less his friend when he saw him arrive with his usual florid complexion: had he come pale and sickly, Sandford had been kind to him; but in apparently good health and spirits, he could not form his lips to tell him he was "Glad to see him." On his arrival, Matilda, who for five months had been at large, secluded herself as she would have done upon the arrival of Lord Elmwood; but with far different sensations. Notwithstanding her restriction on the latter occasion, the residence of her father in that house had been a source of pleasure, rather than of sorrow to her; but from the abode of Rushbrook she derived punishment alone. When, from inquiries, Rushbrook found that on his approach, Matilda had retired to her own confined apartments, the thought was torture to him; it was the hope of seeing and conversing with her, of being admitted at all times to her society as the mistress of the house, that had raised his spirits, and effected his perfect cure beyond any other cause; and he was hurt to the greatest degree at this respect, or rather contempt, shown to him by her retreat. It was, nevertheless, a subject too delicate for him to touch upon in any one sense--an invitation for her company on his part, might carry the appearance of superior authority, and an affected condescension, which he justly considered as the worst of all insults. And yet, how could he support the idea that his visit had placed the daughter of his benefactor, as a dependent stranger in that house, where in reality _he_ was the dependent, and she the lawful heir? For two or three days he suffered the torment of these reflections, hoping that he should come to an explanation of all he felt, by a fortunate meeting with Miss Woodley; but when that meeting occurred, though he observed she talked to him with less reserve than she had formerly done, and even gave some proofs of the native goodness of her disposition, yet she scrupulously avoided naming Lady Matilda; and when he diffidently inquired of her health, a cold restraint overspread Miss Woodley's face, and she left him instantly. To Sandford it was still more difficult for him to apply; for though frequently together, they were never sociable; and as Sandford seldom disguised his feelings, to Rushbrook he was always extremely severe, and sometimes unmannerly. In this perplexed situation, the country air was rather of detriment than service to the invalid; and had he not, like a true lover, clung fast to hope, while he could perceive nothing but despair, he would have returned to town, rather than by his stay have placed in a subordinate state, the object of his adoration. Persisting in his hopes, he one morning met Miss Woodley in the garden, and engaging her a longer time than usual in conversation, at last obtained her promise "She would that day dine with him and Mr. Sandford." But no sooner had she parted from him, than she repented of her consent; and upon communicating it, Matilda, for the first time in her life, darted upon her kind companion, a look of the most cutting reproach and haughty resentment. Miss Woodley's own sentiments had upbraided her before; but she was not prepared to receive so pointed a mark of disapprobation from her young friend, till now duteous and humble to her as to a mother, and not less affectionate. Her heart was too susceptible to bear this disrespectful and contumelious frown, from the object of her long-devoted care and concern; the tears instantly covered her face, and she laid her hands upon her heart, as if she thought it would break. Matilda was moved, but she possessed too much of the manly resentment of her father, to discover what she felt for the first few minutes. Miss Woodley, who had given so many tears to her sorrows, but never till now, one to her anger, had a deeper sense of this indifference, than of the anger itself, and to conceal what she suffered, left the room. Matilda, who had been till this time working at her needle, seemingly composed, now let her work drop from her hand, and sat for a while in a deep reverie. At length she rose up, and followed Miss Woodley to the other apartment. She entered grave, majestic and apparently serene, while her poor heart fluttered with a thousand distressing sensations. She approached Miss Woodley (who was still in tears) with silence; and awed by her manners, the faithful friend of her deceased mother exclaimed, "Dear Lady Matilda, think no more on what I have done--do not resent it any longer, and on my knees I'll beg your pardon." Miss Woodley rose as she uttered these last words; but Matilda laid fast hold of her to prevent the posture she offered to take, and instantly assumed it herself. "Oh, let this be my atonement!" she cried with the most earnest supplication. They interchanged forgiveness; and as this reconciliation was sincere, they each, without reserve, gave their opinion upon the subject that had caused the misunderstanding; and it was agreed an apology should be sent to Mr. Rushbrook, "That Miss Woodley had been suddenly indisposed:" nor could this be said to differ from the truth, for since what had passed she was unfit to pay a visit. Rushbrook, who had been all the morning elated with the advance he supposed he had made in that lady's favour, was highly disappointed, vexed, and angry, when this apology was delivered; nor did he, nor perhaps could he, conceal what he felt, although his severe observer, Mr. Sandford, was present. "I am a very unfortunate man!" said he, as soon as the servant was gone who brought the message. Sandford cast his eyes upon him with a look of surprise and contempt. "A very unfortunate man indeed, Mr. Sandford," repeated he, "although you treat my complaint contemptuously." Sandford made no reply, and seemed above making one. They sat down to dinner;--Rushbrook eat scarce any thing, but drank frequently; Sandford took no notice of either, but had a book (which was his custom when he dined with persons whose conversation was not interesting to him) laid by the side of his plate, which he occasionally looked into, as the dishes were removing, or other opportunities served. Rushbrook, just now more hopeless than ever of forming an acquaintance with Lady Matilda, began to give way to symptoms of despondency; and they made their first attack, by urging him, to treat on the same level of familiarity that he himself was treated, Mr. Sandford, to whom he had, till now, ever behaved with the most profound tokens of respect. "Come," said he to him as soon as the dinner was removed, "lay aside your book and be good company." Sandford lifted up his eyes upon him--stared in his face--and cast them on the book again. "Pshaw," continued Rushbrook, "I want a companion; and as Miss Woodley has disappointed me, I must have your company." Sandford now laid his book down upon the table; but still holding his fingers in the pages he was reading, said, "And why are you disappointed of Miss Woodley's company? When people expect what they have no right to hope, 'tis impertinent assurance to complain they are disappointed." "I had a right to hope she would come," answered Rushbrook, "for she promised she would." "But what right had you to ask her?" "The right every one has, to make his time pass as agreeably as he can." "But not at the expence of another." "I believe, Mr. Sandford, it would be a heavy expence to you, to see me happy; I believe it would cost you even your own happiness." "That is a price I have not now to give:" replied Sandford, and began reading again. "What, you have already paid it away? No wonder that at your time of life it should be gone. But what do you think of my having already squandered mine?" "I don't think about you;" returned Sandford, without taking his eyes from the book. "Can you look me in the face and say that, Mr. Sandford? No, you cannot--for you know you _do_ think of me, and you know you hate me."--Here he drank two glasses of wine one after another; "And I can tell you why you hate me," continued he: "It is from a cause for which I often hate myself." Sandford read on. "It is on Lady Matilda's account you hate me, and use me thus." Sandford put down the book hastily, and put both his hands by his side. "Yes," resumed Rushbrook, "you think I am wronging her." "I think you insult her," exclaimed Sandford, "by this rude mention of her name; and I command you at your peril to desist." "At my peril! Mr. Sandford? Do you assume the authority of my Lord Elmwood?" "I do on this occasion; and if you dare to give your tongue a freedom"---- Rushbrook interrupted him--"Why then I boldly say, (and as her friend you ought rather to applaud than resent it) I boldly say, that my heart suffers so much for her situation, that I am regardless of my own. I love her father--I loved her mother more--but I love _her_ beyond either." "Hold your licentious tongue," cried Sandford, "or quit the room." "Licentious! Oh! the pure thoughts that dwell in her innocent mind, are not less sensual than mine towards her. Do you upbraid me with my respect, my pity for her? They are the sensations which impel me to speak thus undisguised, even to you, my open--no, even worse--my secret enemy!" "Insult _me_ as you please, Mr. Rushbrook,--but beware how you mention Lord Elmwood's daughter." "Can it be to her dishonour that I pity her? that I would quit the house this moment never to return, so that she supplied the place I with-hold from her." "Go, then;" cried Sandford. "It would be of no use to her, or I would. But come, Mr. Sandford, I will dare do as much as you. Only second me, and I will entreat Lord Elmwood to be reconciled--to see and own her." "Your vanity would be equal to your temerity--_you_ entreat? She must greatly esteem those paternal favours which _your_ entreaties gained her! Do you forget, young man, how short a time it is, since you were _entreated for?_" "I prove that I do not, while this anxiety for Lady Matilda, arises, from what I feel on that account." "Remove your anxiety, then, from her to yourself; for were I to let Lord Elmwood know what has now passed"-- "It is for your own sake, not for mine, if you do not." "You shall not dare me to it, Mr. Rushbrook." And he rose from his seat: "You shall not dare me to do you an injury. But to avoid the temptation, I will never again come into your company, unless my friend, Lord Elmwood, be present, to protect me and his child from your insults." Rushbrook rose in yet more warmth than Sandford "Have you the injustice to say that I have insulted Lady Matilda?" "To speak of her at all, is in you an insult. But you have done more--you have dared to visit her--to force into her presence and shock her with your offers of services which she scorns; and with your compassion, which she is above." "Did she complain to you?" "She or her friend did." "I rather suppose, Mr. Sandford, that you have bribed some of the servants to reveal this." "The suspicion becomes Lord Elmwood's heir." "It becomes the man, who lives in a house with you." "I thank you, Mr. Rushbrook, for what has passed this day--it has taken a weight off my mind. I thought my disinclination to you, might perhaps arise from prejudice--this conversation has relieved me from those fears, and--I thank you." Saying this he calmly walked out of the room, and left Rushbrook to reflect on what he had been doing. Heated with the wine he had drank (and which Sandford, engaged on his book, had not observed) no sooner was he alone, than he became by degrees cool and repentant. "What had he done?" was the first question to himself--"He had offended Sandford."--The man, whom reason as well as prudence had ever taught him to respect, and even to revere. He had grossly offended the firm friend of Lady Matilda, by the unreserved and wanton use of her name. All the retorts he had uttered came now to his memory; with a total forgetfulness of all that Sandford had said to provoke them. He once thought to follow him and beg his pardon; but the contempt with which he had been treated, more than all the anger, with-held him. As he sat forming plans how to retrieve the opinion, ill as it was, which Sandford formerly entertained of him, he received a letter from Lord Elmwood, kindly enquiring after his health, and saying that he should be down early in the following week. Never were the friendly expressions of his uncle half so welcome to him; for they served to sooth his imagination, racked with Sandford's wrath, and his own displeasure. CHAPTER XIII. When Sandford acted deliberately, he always acted up to his duty; it was his duty to forgive Rushbrook, and he did so--but he had declared he would never "Be again in his company unless Lord Elmwood was present;" and with all his forgiveness, he found an unforgiving gratification, in the duty, of being obliged to keep his word. The next day Rushbrook dined alone, while Sandford gave his company to the ladies. Rushbrook was too proud to seek to conciliate Sandford by abject concessions, but he endeavoured to meet him as by accident, and meant to try what, in such a case, a submissive apology might effect. For two days all the schemes he formed on that head proved fruitless; he could never procure even a sight of him. But on the evening of the third day, taking a lonely walk, he turned the corner of a grove, and saw in the very path he was going, Sandford accompanied by Miss Woodley; and, what agitated him infinitely more, Lady Matilda was with them. He knew not whether to proceed, or to quit the path and palpably shun them--to one, who seemed to put an unkind construction upon all he said and did, he knew that to do either, would be to do wrong. In spite of the propensity he felt to pass so near to Matilda, could he have known what conduct would have been deemed the most respectful, whatever painful denial it had cost him, _that_, he would have adopted. But undetermined whether to go forward, or to cross to another path, he still walked on till he came too nigh to recede: he then, with a diffidence not affected, but most powerfully felt, pulled off his hat; and without bowing, stood respectfully silent while the company passed. Sandford walked on some paces before, and took no further notice as he went by him, than just touching the fore part of his hat with his finger. Miss Woodley curtsied as she followed. But Lady Matilda made a full stop, and said, in the gentlest accents, "I hope, Mr. Rushbrook, you are perfectly recovered." It was the sweetest music he had ever listened to; and he replied with the most reverential bow, "I am better a great deal, Ma'am." Then instantly pursued his way as if he did not dare to utter another syllable. Sandford seldom found fault with Lady Matilda; not because he loved her, but because she seldom did wrong--upon this occasion, however, he was half inclined to reprimand her; but yet he did not know what to say--the subsequent humility of Rushbrook, had taken from the indiscretion of her speaking to him, and the event could by no means justify his censure. On hearing her begin to speak, Sandford had stopped; and as Rushbrook after replying, walked away, Sandford called to her crossly, "Come, come along." But at the same time he put out his elbow for her to take hold of his arm. She hastened her steps, and did so--then turning to Miss Woodley, she said, "I expected you would have spoken to Mr. Rushbrook; it might have prevented me." Miss Woodley replied, "I was at a loss what to do;--when we met formerly, he always spoke first." "And he ought now," cried Sandford angrily--and then added, with a sarcastic smile, "It is certainly proper that the _superior_, should be the first who speaks." "He did not look as if he thought himself our superior," replied Matilda. "No," returned Sandford, "some people can put on what looks they please." "Then while he looks so pale," replied Matilda, "and so dejected, I can never forbear speaking to him when we meet, whatever he may think of it." "And were he and I to meet a hundred, nay a thousand times," returned Sandford, "I don't think I should ever speak to him again." "Bless me! what for, Mr. Sandford?" cried Matilda--for Sandford, who was not a man that repeated little incidents, had never mentioned the circumstance of their quarrel. "I have taken such a resolution," answered he, "yet I bear him no enmity." As this short reply indicated that he meant to say no more, no more was asked; and the subject was dropped. In the mean time, Rushbrook, happier than he had been for months, intoxicated with joy at that voluntary mark of civility he had received from Lady Matilda, felt his heart so joyous, and so free from every particle of malice, that he resolved, in the humblest manner, to make atonement for the violation of decorum he had lately committed against Mr. Sandford. Too happy, at this time, to suffer a mortification from any indignities he might receive, he sent his servant to him into his study, as soon as he was returned home, to beg to know "If he might be permitted to wait upon him, with a message he had to deliver from Lord Elmwood." The servant returned--"Mr. Sandford desired he would send the message by him, or the house-steward." This was highly affronting; but Rushbrook was not in a humour to be offended, and he sent again, begging he would admit him; but the answer was, "He was busy." Thus wholly defeated in his hopes of reconciliation, his new transports felt an allay, and the few days that remained before Lord Elmwood came, he passed in solitary musing, and ineffectual walks and looks towards that path in which he had met Matilda--she came that way no more--indeed scarce quitted her apartment, in the practice of that confinement she was to experience on the arrival of her father. All her former agitations now returned. On the day he arrived she wept--all the night she did not sleep--and the name of Rushbrook again became hateful to her. The Earl came in extremely good health and spirits, but appeared concerned to find Rushbrook less well than when he went from town. Sandford was now under the necessity of being in Rushbrook's company, yet he would never speak to him but when he was obliged; or look at him, but when he could not help it. Lord Elmwood observed this conduct, yet he neither wondered, or was offended at it--he had perceived what little esteem Sandford showed his nephew from his first return; but he forgave, in Sandford's humour, a thousand faults he would not forgive in any other; nor did he deem this one of his greatest faults, knowing the demand upon his partiality from another object. Miss Woodley waited on Lord Elmwood as formerly; dined with him, and related, as heretofore, to the attentive Matilda, all that passed. About this time Lord Margrave, deprived by the season of all the sports of the field, felt his love for Matilda (which had been violent, even though divided with the love of hunting) now too strong to be subdued; and he resolved, though reluctantly, to apply to her father for his consent to their union; but writing to Sandford this resolution, he was once more repulsed, and charged as a man of honour, to forbear to disturb the tranquillity of the family by any application of the kind. To this, Sandford received no answer; for the peer, highly incensed at his mistress's repugnance to him, determined more firmly than ever to consult his own happiness alone; and as that depended merely upon his obtaining her, he cared not by what method it was effected. About a fortnight after Lord Elmwood came into the country, as he was riding one morning, his horse fell with him, and crushed his leg in so unfortunate a manner, as to be at first pronounced of dangerous consequence. He was brought home in a post chaise, and Matilda heard of the accident with more grief than would, perhaps, on such an occasion, appertain to the most fondled child. In consequence of the pain he suffered, his fever was one night very high; and Sandford, who seldom quitted his apartment, went frequently to his bedside, every time with the secret hope he should hear him ask to see his daughter--he was every time disappointed--yet he saw him shake, with a cordial friendship, the hand of Rushbrook, as if he delighted in seeing those he loved. The danger in which Lord Elmwood was supposed to be, was but of short duration, and his sudden recovery succeeded. Matilda, who had wept, moaned, and watched during the crisis of his illness, when she heard he was amending, exclaimed, (with a kind of surprise at the novelty of the sensation) "And this is joy that I feel! Oh! I never till now knew, what those persons felt who experienced joy." Nor did she repine, like Mr. Sandford and Miss Woodley, at her father's inattention to her during his malady, for she did not hope like them--she did not hope he would behold her, even in dying. But notwithstanding his seeming indifference, while his indisposition continued, no sooner was he recovered so as to receive the congratulations of his friends, than there was no one person he evidently showed so much satisfaction at seeing, as Miss Woodley. She waited upon him timorously, and with more than ordinary distaste at his late conduct, when he put out his hand with the utmost warmth to receive her; drew her to him; saluted her, (an honour he had never in his life conferred before) with signs of the sincerest friendship and affection. Sandford was present; and ever associating the idea of Matilda with Miss Woodley, felt his heart bound with a triumph it had not enjoyed for many a day. Matilda listened with delight to the recital Miss Woodley gave on her return, and many times while it lasted exclaimed, "She was happy." But poor Matilda's sudden transports of joy, which she termed happiness, were not made for long continuance; and if she ever found cause for gladness, she far oftener had motives for grief. As Mr. Sandford was sitting with her and Miss Woodley, one evening about a week after, a person rang at the bell and inquired for him: on being told of it by the servant, he went to the door of the apartment, and cried, "Oh! is it you? Come in." An elderly man entered, who had been for many years the head gardener at Elmwood House; a man of honesty and sobriety, and with an indigent family of aged parents, children, and other relations, who subsisted wholly on the income arising from his place. The ladies, as well as Sandford, knew him well, and they all, almost at once, asked, "What was the matter?" for his looks told them something distressful had befallen him. "Oh, Sir!" said he to Sandford, "I come to intreat your interest." "In what, Edwards?" said Sandford with a mild voice; for when his assistance was supplicated in distress, his rough tones always took a plaintive key. "My Lord has discharged me from his service!" (returned Edwards trembling, and the tears starting in his eyes) "I am undone, Mr. Sandford, unless you plead for me." "I will," said Sandford, "I will." "And yet I am almost afraid of your success," replied the man, "for my Lord has ordered me out of his house this moment; and though I knelt down to him to be heard, he had no pity." Matilda sighed from the bottom of her heart, and yet she envied this poor man, who had been kneeling to her father. "What was your offence?" cried Sandford. The man hesitated; then looking at Matilda, said, "I'll tell you, Sir, some other time." "Did you name me, before Lord Elmwood?" cried she eagerly, and terrified. "No, Madam," replied he, "but I unthinkingly spoke of my poor Lady who is dead and gone." Matilda burst into tears. "How came you to do so mad a thing?" cried Sandford; and the encouragement which his looks had once given him, now fled from his face. "It was unthinkingly," repeated Edwards; "I was showing my Lord some plans for the new walks, and told him, among other things, that her Ladyship had many years ago approved of them. 'Who?' cried he. Still I did not call to mind, but said, 'Lady Elmwood, Sir, while you were abroad.'--As soon as these words were delivered, I saw my doom in his looks, and he commanded me to quit his house and service that instant." "I am afraid," said Sandford, shaking his head, "I can do nothing for you." "Yes, Sir, you know you have more power over my Lord than any body--and perhaps you may be able to save me and all mine from misery." "I would, if I could," replied Sandford quickly. "You can but try, Sir." Matilda was all this while bathed in tears; nor was Miss Woodley much less affected--Lady Elmwood was before their eyes--Matilda beheld her in her dying moments; Miss Woodley saw her as the gay ward of Dorriforth. "Ask Mr. Rushbrook," said Sandford, "prevail on him to speak for you; he has more power than I have." "He has not enough, then," replied Edwards, "for he was in the room with my Lord when what I have told you happened." "And did he say nothing?" asked Sandford. "Yes, Sir; he offered to speak in my behalf, but my Lord interrupted him, and ordered him out of the room--he instantly went." Sandford, now observing the effect which this narration had on the two ladies, led the man to his own apartments, and there assured him he dared not undertake his cause; but that if time or chance should happily make an alteration in his Lord's disposition, he would be the first who would endeavour to replace him.--Edwards was obliged to submit; and before the next day at noon, his pleasant house by the side of the park, his garden, and his orchard, which he had occupied above twenty years, were cleared of their old inhabitant, and all his wretched family. CHAPTER XIV. This melancholy incident, perhaps affected Matilda and all the friends of the deceased Lady Elmwood, beyond any other that had occurred since her death. A few days after this circumstance, Miss Woodley, in order to divert the disconsolate mind of Lady Matilda, (and in the hope of bringing her some little anecdotes, to console her for that which had given her so much pain) waited upon Lord Elmwood in his library, and borrowed some books out of it. He was now perfectly well from his fall, and received her with his usual politeness, but, of course, not with that peculiar warmth which he had discovered when he received her just after his illness. Rushbrook was in the library at the same time; he shewed her several beautiful prints which Lord Elmwood had just received from London, and appeared anxious to entertain and give tokens of his esteem and respect for her. But what gave her pleasure beyond any other attention, was, that after she had taken (by the aid of Rushbrook) about a dozen volumes from different shelves, and had laid them together, saying she would send her servant to fetch them; Lord Elmwood went eagerly to the place where they were, and taking up each book, examined minutely what it was. One author he complained was too light, another too depressing, and put them on the shelves again: another was erroneous, and he changed it for a better: thus, he warned her against some, and selected other authors, as the most cautious preceptor culls for his pupil, or a fond father for his darling Child. She thanked him for his attention to her, but her heart thanked him for his attention to his daughter. For as she had herself never received such a proof of his care since all their long acquaintance, she reasonably supposed, Matilda's reading, and not hers, was the object of his solicitude. Having in these books store of comfort for poor Matilda, she eagerly returned with them; and in reciting every particular circumstance, made her consider the volumes, almost like presents from her father. The month of September was now arrived; and Lord Elmwood, accompanied by Rushbrook, went to a small shooting seat, near twenty miles distant from Elmwood Castle, for a week's particular sport. Matilda was once more at large; and one beautiful morning, about eleven o'clock, seeing Miss Woodley walking on the lawn before the house, she hastily took her hat to join her; and not waiting to put it on, went nimbly down the great staircase, with it hanging on her arm. When she had descended a few stairs, she heard a footstep walking slowly up; and, (from what emotion she could not tell,) she stopped short, half resolved to turn back. She hesitated a single instant whether she should or not--then went a few steps further till she came to the second landing place; when, by the sudden winding of the staircase,--Lord Elmwood was immediately before her! She had felt something like affright before she saw him; but her reason told her she had nothing to fear, as he was away. But now, the appearance of a stranger whom she had never before seen; the authority in his looks, as well as in the sound of his steps; a resemblance to the portrait she had been shown of him; a start of astonishment which he gave on beholding her; but above all--her _fears_ confirmed her that it was him. She gave a scream of terror--put out her trembling hands to catch the balustrades for support--missed them--and fell motionless into her father's arms. He caught her, as by the same impulse, he would have caught any other person falling for want of aid. Yet when he found her in his arms, he still held her there--gazed on her attentively--and once pressed her to his bosom. At length trying to escape the snare into which he had been led, he was going to leave her on the spot where she fell, when her eyes opened and she uttered, "Save me." Her voice unmanned him. His long-restrained tears now burst forth--and seeing her relapsing into the swoon, he cried out eagerly to recall her. Her name did not, however, come to his recollection--nor any name but this--"Miss Milner--Dear Miss Milner." That sound did not awaken her; and now again he wished to leave her in this senseless state, that not remembering what had passed, she might escape the punishment. But at this instant, Giffard, with another servant, passed by the foot of the stairs: on which, Lord Elmwood called to them--and into Giffard's hands delivered his apparently dead child; without one command respecting her, or one word of any kind; while his face was agitated with shame, with pity, with anger, with paternal tenderness. As Giffard stood trembling, while he relieved his Lord from this hapless burthen, her father had to unloose her hand from the side of his coat, which she had caught fast hold of as she fell, and grasped so closely, it was with difficulty released.--On attempting to take the hand away he trembled--faltered--then bade Giffard do it. "Who, I, my Lord! I separate you!" cried he. But recollecting himself, "My Lord, I will obey your commands whatever they are." And seizing her hand, pulled it with violence--it fell--and her father went away. Matilda was carried to her own apartments, laid upon the bed, and Miss Woodley hasted to attend her, after listening to the recital of what had passed. When Lady Elmwood's old and affectionate friend entered the room, and saw her youthful charge lying pale and speechless, yet no father by to comfort or sooth her, she lifted up her hands to Heaven exclaiming, with a burst of tears, "And is this the end of thee, my poor child? Is this the end of all our hopes?--of thy own fearful hopes--and of thy mother's supplications! Oh! Lord Elmwood! Lord Elmwood!" At that name Matilda started, and cried, "Where is he? Is it a dream, or have I seen him?" "It is all a dream, my dear," said Miss Woodley. "And yet I thought he held me in his arms," she replied--"I thought I felt his hands press mine.--Let me sleep and dream again." Now thinking it best to undeceive her, "It is no dream, my dear," returned Miss Woodley. "Is it not?" cried she, starting up and leaning on her elbow--"Then I suppose I must go away--go for ever away." Sandford now entered. Having been told the news, he came to condole--but at the sight of him Matilda was terrified, and cried, "Do not reproach me, do not upbraid me--I know I have done wrong--I know I had but one command from my father, and that I have disobeyed." Sandford could not reproach her, for he could not speak; he therefore only walked to the window and concealed his tears. That whole day and night was passed in sympathetic grief, in alarm at every sound, lest it should be a messenger to pronounce Matilda's destiny. Lord Elmwood did not stay upon this visit above three hours at Elmwood House; he then set off again for the seat he had left; where Rushbrook still remained, and from whence his Lordship had merely come by accident, to look over some writings which he wanted dispatched to town. During his short continuance here, Sandford cautiously avoided his presence; for he thought, in a case like this, what nature would not of herself effect, no art, no arguments of his, could accomplish: to Nature and Providence he left the whole. What these two powerful principles brought about, the reader will judge, when he peruses the following letter, received early the next morning by Miss Woodley. A SIMPLE STORY, IN FOUR VOLUMES, BY MRS. INCHBALD. VOL. IV. _THE FOURTH EDITION._ LONDON: Printed for G. G. and J. ROBINSON, PATERNOSTER ROW. 1799. A SIMPLE STORY. CHAPTER I. _A letter from Giffard, Lord Elmwood's House Steward, to Miss Woodley._ "MADAM, "My Lord, above a twelvemonth ago, acquainted me he had permitted his daughter to reside in his house; but at the same time he informed me, the grant was under a certain restriction, which, if ever broken, I was to see his then determination (of which he also acquainted me) put in execution. In consequence of Lady Matilda's indisposition, Madam, I have ventured to delay this notice till morning.--I need not say with what concern I now give it, or mention to you, I believe, what is forfeited. My Lord staid but a few hours yesterday, after the unhappy circumstance on which I write, took place; nor did I see him after, till he was in his carriage; he then sent for me to the carriage door, and told me he should be back in two days time, and added, 'Remember your duty.' That duty, I hope, Madam, you will not require me to explain in more direct terms.--As soon as my Lord returns, I have no doubt but he will ask me if it is fulfilled, and I shall be under the greatest apprehension, should his commands not be obeyed. "If there is any thing wanting for the convenience of your and Lady Matilda's departure, you have but to order it, and it is at your service--I mean likewise any cash you may have occasion for. I should presume to add my opinion where you might best take up your abode; but with such advice as you will have from Mr. Sandford, mine would be but assuming. "I would also have waited upon you, Madam, and have delivered myself the substance of this letter; but I am an old man, and the changes I have been witness to in my Lord's house since I first lived in it, has encreased my age many years; and I have not the strength to see you upon this occasion. I loved my deceased Lady--I love my Lord--and I love their child--nay, so I am sure does my Lord himself; but there is no accounting for his resolutions, or for the alteration his disposition has lately undergone. "I beg pardon, Madam, for this long intrusion, and am, and ever will be, (while you and my Lord's daughter are so) your afflicted humble servant, "ROBERT GIFFARD. "Elmwood House, "Sept. 12." When this letter was brought to Miss Woodley, she knew what it contained before she opened it, and therefore took it with an air of resignation--yet though she guessed the momentous part of its contents, she dreaded in what words it might be related; and having now no essential good to expect, hope, that will never totally expire, clung at this crisis to little circumstances, and she hoped most fervently, the terms of the letter might not be harsh, but that Lord Elmwood had delivered his commands in gentle language. The event proved he had; and lost to every important comfort, she felt grateful to him for this small one. Matilda, too, was cheered by this letter, for she expected something worse; and the last line, in which Giffard said he knew "His Lordship loved her," she thought repaid her for the purport of the other part. Sandford was not so easily resigned or comforted--he walked about the room when the letter was shewn to him--called it cruel--stifled his tears, and wished to show his resentment only--but the former burst through all his endeavours, and he sunk into grief. Nor was the fortitude of Matilda, which came to her assistance on the first onset of this trial, sufficient to arm her, when the moment came she was to quit the house--her father's house--never to see that, or him again. When word was brought that the carriage was at the door, which was to convey her from all she held so dear, and she saw before her the prospect of a long youthful and healthful life, in which misery and despair were all she could discern; that despair seized her at once, and gaining courage from it, she cried, "What have I to fear if I disobey my father's commands once more?--he cannot use me worse. I'll stay here till he returns--again throw myself in his way, and then I will not faint, but plead for mercy. Perhaps were I to kneel to him--kneel, like other children to their parents, and beg his blessing, he would not refuse it me." "You must not try:" said Sandford, mildly. "Who," cried she, "shall prevent me flying to my father? Have I another friend on earth? Have I one relation in the world but him? This is the second time I have been turned out of his house. In my infant state my cruel father turned me out; but then, he sent me to a mother--now I have none; and I will stay with him." Again the steward sent to let them know the coach was waiting. Sandford, now, with a determined countenance, went coolly up to Lady Matilda, and taking her hand, seemed resolved to lead her to the carriage. Accustomed to be awed by every serious look of his, she yet resisted this; and cried, "Would _you_ be the minister of my father's cruelty?" "Then," said Sandford solemnly to her, "farewell--from this moment you and I part. I will take my leave, and do you remain where you are--at least till you are forced away. But I'll not stay to be driven hence--for it is impossible your father will suffer any friend of yours to continue here, after this disobedience. Adieu." "I'll go this moment," said she, and rose hastily. Miss Woodley took her at her word, and hurried her immediately out of the room. Sandford followed slow behind, as if he had followed at her funeral. When she came to that spot on the stairs where she had met her father, she started back, and scarce knew how to pass it. When she had--"There he held me in his arms," said she, "and I thought I felt him press me to his heart, but I now find I was mistaken." As Sandford came forward, to hand her into the coach, "Now you behave well;" said he, "by this behaviour, you do not entirely close all prospect of reconciliation with your father." "Do you think it is not yet impossible?" cried she, clasping his hand. "Giffard says he loves me," continued she, "and do you think he might yet be brought to forgive me?" "Forgive you!" cried Sandford. "Suppose I was to write to him, and entreat his forgiveness?" "Do not write yet," said Sandford, with no cheering accent. The carriage drove off--and as it went, Matilda leaned her head from the window, to survey Elmwood House from the roof to the bottom. She cast her eyes upon the gardens too--upon the fish ponds--even the coach houses, and all the offices adjoining--which, as objects that she should never see again--she contemplated, as objects of importance. CHAPTER II. Rushbrook, who, at twenty miles distance, could have no conjecture what had passed at Elmwood House, during the short visit Lord Elmwood made there, went that way with his dogs and gun in order to meet him on his return, and accompany him in the chaise back--he did so--and getting into the carriage, told him eagerly the sport he had had during the day; laughed at an accident that had befallen one of his dogs; and for some time did not perceive but that his uncle was perfectly attentive. At length, observing he answered more negligently than usual to what he said, Rushbrook turned his eyes quickly upon him, and cried, "My Lord, are you not well?" "Yes; perfectly well, I thank you, Rushbrook," and he leaned back against the carriage. "I thought, Sir," returned Rushbrook, "you spoke languidly--I beg your pardon." "I have the head-ache a little," answered he:--then taking off his hat, brushed the powder from it, and as he put it on again, fetched a most heavy sigh; which no sooner had escaped him, than, to drown its sound, he said briskly, "And so you tell me you have had good sport to-day?" "No, my Lord, I said but indifferent." "True, so you did. Bid the man drive faster--it will be dark before we get home." "You will shoot to-morrow, my Lord?" "Certainly." "How does Mr. Sandford do, Sir?" "I did not see him." "Not see Mr. Sandford, My Lord? but he was out I suppose--for they did not expect you at Elmwood House." "No, they did not." In such conversation Rushbrook and his uncle continued to the end of their journey. Dinner was then immediately served, and Lord Elmwood appeared much in his usual spirits; at least, not suspecting any cause for their abatement, Rushbrook did not observe any alteration. Lord Elmwood went, however, earlier to bed than ordinary, or rather to his bed-chamber; for though he retired some time before his nephew, when Rushbrook passed his chamber door it was open, and he not in bed, but sitting in a musing posture, as if he had forgot to shut it. When Rushbrook's valet came to attend his master, he said to him, "I suppose, Sir, you do not know what has happened at the Castle?" "For heaven's sake what?" cried Rushbrook. "My Lord has met Lady Matilda:" replied the man. "How? Where? What's the consequence?" "We don't know yet, Sir; but all the servants suppose her Ladyship will not be suffered to remain there any longer." "They all suppose wrong," returned Rushbrook hastily--"My Lord loves her I am certain, and this event may be the happy means of his treating her as his child from this day." The servant smiled and shook his head. "Why, what more do you know?" "Nothing more than I have told you, Sir; except that his Lordship took no kind of notice of her Ladyship that appeared like love." Rushbrook was all uneasiness and anxiety to know the particulars of what had passed; and now Lord Elmwood's inquietude, which he had but slightly noticed before, came full to his observation. He was going to ask more questions; but he recollected Lady Matilda's misfortunes were too sacred, to be talked of thus familiarly by the servants of the family;--besides, it was evident this man thought, and but naturally, it might not be for his master's interest the father and the daughter should be united; and therefore would certainly give to all he said the opposite colouring. In spite of his prudence, however, and his delicacy towards Matilda, Rushbrook could not let his valet leave him till he had inquired, and learned all the circumstantial account of what had happened; except, indeed, the order received by Giffard, which being given after Lord Elmwood was in his carriage and in concise terms, the domestics who attended him (and from whom this man had gained his intelligence) were unacquainted with it. When the servant had left Rushbrook alone, the perturbation of his mind was so great, that he was, at length, undetermined whether to go to bed, or to rush into his uncle's apartment, and at his feet beg for that compassion upon his daughter, which he feared he had denied her. But then, to what peril would he not expose himself by such a step? Nay, he might perhaps even injure her whom he wished to serve; for if his uncle was at present unresolved, whether to forgive or to resent this disobedience to his commands, another's interference might enrage, and precipitate him on the latter. This consideration was so weighty, it resigned Rushbrook to the suspense he was compelled to endure till the morning; when he flattered himself, that by watching every look and motion of Lord Elmwood, his penetration would be able to discover the state of his heart, and how he meant to act. But the morning came, and he found all his prying curiosity was of no avail; Lord Elmwood did not drop one word, give one look, or use one action that was not customary. On first seeing him, Rushbrook blushed at the secret with which he was entrusted; then, as he gazed on the Earl, contemplated the joy he ought to have known in clasping in his arms a child like Matilda, whose tenderness, reverence, and duty, had deprived her of all sensation at his sight; which was in Rushbrook's mind an honour, that rendered him superior to what he was before. They were in the fields all the day as usual; Lord Elmwood now cheerful, and complaining no more of the head-ache. Yet once being separated from his nephew, Rushbrook crossed over a stile into another field, and found him sitting by the side of a bank, his gun lying by him, and himself lost in thought. He rose on seeing him, and proceeded to the sport as before. At dinner, he said he should not go to Elmwood House the next day, as he had appointed, but stay where he was, three or four days longer. From these two small occurrences, Rushbrook would fain have extracted something by which to judge the state of his mind; but upon the test, that was impossible--he had caught him so musing many a time before; and as to his prolonging his stay, that might arise from the sport--or, indeed, had any thing more material swayed him, who could penetrate whether it was the effect of the lenity, or the severity, he had dealt towards his child? whether his continuance there was to shun her, or to shun the house from whence he had banished her? The three or four days for their temporary abode being passed, they both returned together to Elmwood House. Rushbrook thought he saw his uncle's countenance change as they entered the avenue, yet he did not appear less in spirits; and when Sandford joined them at dinner, the Earl went with his usual alacrity to him, and (as was his custom after any separation) put out his hand cheerfully to take his. Sandford said, "How do you do, my Lord?" cheerfully in return; but put both his hands into his bosom, and walked to the other side of the room. Lord Elmwood did not seem to observe this affront--nor was it done as an affront--it was merely what poor Sandford felt; and he felt he could _not_ shake hands with him. Rushbrook soon learned the news that Matilda was gone, and Elmwood House was to him a desert--he saw there no real friend of her's, except poor Sandford, and to him, Rushbrook knew himself now, more displeasing than ever; and all his overtures of atonement, he, at this time, found more and more ineffectual. Matilda was exiled; and her supposed triumphant rival was, to Sandford, more odious than he had ever been. In alleviation of their banishment, Miss Woodley, with her charge, had not returned to their old retreat; but were gone to a farm house, not farther than thirty miles from Lord Elmwood's: here Sandford, with little inconvenience, visited them; nor did his patron ever take notice of his occasional absence; for as he had before given his daughter, in some measure, to his charge; so honour, delicacy, and the common ties of duty, made him approve, rather than condemn his attention to her. Though Sandford's frequent visits soothed Matilda, they could not comfort her; for he had no consolation to bestow that was suited to her mind--her father had given no one token of regret for what he had done. He had even inquired sternly of Giffard on his returning home, "If Miss Woodley had left the house?" The steward guessing the whole of his meaning, answered, "Yes, my Lord; and _all_ your commands in that respect have been obeyed." He replied, "I am satisfied." And, to the grief of the old man, appeared really so. To the farm-house, the place of Matilda's residence, there came, besides Sandford, another visitor far less welcome--Viscount Margrave. He had heard with surprise, and still greater joy, that Lord Elmwood had once more shut his doors against his daughter. In this her discarded state, he no longer burthened his lively imagination with the dull thoughts of marriage, but once more formed the idea of making her his mistress. Ignorant of a certain decorum which attended all Lord Elmwood's actions, he suspected that his child might be in want; and an acquaintance with the worst part of her sex informed him, that relief from poverty was the sure bargain for his success. With these hopes, he again paid Miss Woodley and her a visit; but the coldness of the former, and the haughtiness of the latter, still kept him at a distance, and again made him fear to give one allusion to his purpose: but he returned home resolved to write what he durst not speak--he did so--he offered his services, his purse, his house--they were rejected with contempt, and a stronger prohibition than ever given to his visits. CHAPTER III. Lord Elmwood had now allowed Rushbrook a long vacation, in respect to his answer upon the subject of marriage; and the young man vainly imagined, his intentions upon that subject were entirely given up. One morning, however, as he was attending him in the library, "Henry,"----said his uncle, with a pause at the beginning of his speech, which indicated that he was going to say something of importance, "Henry----you have not forgot the discourse I had with you a little time previous to your illness?" Henry hesitated--for he wished to have forgotten it--but it was too strongly impressed upon his memory. Lord Elmwood resumed, "What! equivocating again, Sir? Do you remember it, or do you not?" "Yes, my Lord, I do." "And are you prepared to give me an answer?" Rushbrook paused again. "In our former conversation," continued the Earl, "I gave you but a week to determine--there has, I think, elapsed since that time, half a year." "About as much, Sir." "Then surely you have now made up your mind?" "I had done that at first, my Lord--if it had met with your concurrence." "You wished to lead a bachelor's life, I think you said?" Rushbrook bowed. "Contrary to my will?" "No, my Lord, I wished to have your approbation." "And you wished for my approbation of the very opposite thing to that I proposed? But I am not surprised--such is the gratitude of the world--and such is yours." "My Lord, if you doubt my gratitude----" "Give me a proof of it, Harry, and I will doubt no longer." "Upon every other subject but this, my Lord, Heaven is my witness your happiness----" Lord Elmwood interrupted him. "I understand you--upon every other subject, but the only one, my content requires, you are ready to obey me. I thank you." "My Lord, do not torture me with this suspicion; it is so contrary to my deserts, that I cannot bear it." "Suspicion of your ingratitude!--you judge too favourably of my opinion--it amounts to certainty." "Then to convince you, Sir, I am not ungrateful, tell me who the Lady is you have chosen for me, and here I give you my word, I will sacrifice all my future prospects of happiness--all, for which I would wish to live--and become her husband as soon as you shall appoint." This was spoken with a tone so expressive of despair, that Lord Elmwood replied, "And while you obey me, you take care to let me know, it will cost you your future peace. This is, I suppose, to enhance the merit of the obligation--but I shall not accept your acquiescence on these terms." "Then in dispensing with it, I hope for your pardon." "Do you suppose, Rushbrook, I can pardon an offence, the sole foundation of which, arises from a spirit of disobedience?--for you have declared to me your affections are disengaged. In our last conversation did you not say so?" "At first I did, my Lord--but you permitted me to consult my heart more closely; and I have since found that I was mistaken." "You then own you at first told me a falsehood, and yet have all this time, kept me in suspense without confessing it." "I waited, my Lord, till you should enquire----" "You have then, Sir, waited too long;" and the fire flashed from his eyes. Rushbrook now found himself in that perilous state, that admitted of no medium of resentment, but by such dastardly conduct on his part, as would wound both his truth and courage; and thus, animated by his danger, he was resolved to plunge boldly at once into the depth of his patron's anger. "My Lord," said he, (but he did not undertake this task without sustaining the trembling and convulsion of his whole frame) "My Lord--waving for a moment the subject of my marriage--permit me to remind you, that when I was upon my sick bed, you promised, that on my recovery, you would listen to a petition I should offer to you." "Let me recollect," replied he. "Yes--I do remember something of it. But I said nothing to warrant any improper petition." "Its impropriety was not named, my Lord." "No matter--that, you must judge of, and answer for the consequences." "I would answer with my life, willingly--but I own that I shrink from your anger." "Then do not provoke it." "I have already gone too far to recede--and you would of course demand an explanation, if I attempted to stop here." "I should." "Then, my Lord, I am bound to speak--but do not interrupt me--hear me out, before you banish me from your presence for ever." "I will, Sir," replied he, prepared to hear something that would displease him, and yet determined to hear with patience to the conclusion. "Then, my Lord,"--(cried Rushbrook, in the greatest agitation of mind and body) "Your daughter"---- The resolution Lord Elmwood had taken (and on which he had given his word to his nephew not to interrupt him) immediately gave way. The colour rose in his face--his eye darted lightning--and his hand was lifted up with the emotion, that word had created. "You promised to hear me, my Lord!" cried Rushbrook, "and I claim your promise." He now suddenly overcame his violence of passion, and stood silent and resigned to hear him; but with a determined look, expressive of the vengeance that should ensue. "Lady Matilda," resumed Rushbrook, "is an object that wrests from me the enjoyment of every blessing your kindness bestows. I cannot but feel myself as her adversary--as one, who has supplanted her in your affections--who supplies her place, while she is exiled, a wanderer, and an orphan." The Earl took his eyes from Rushbrook, during this last sentence, and cast them on the floor. "If I feel gratitude towards you, my Lord," continued he, "gratitude is innate in my heart, and I must also feel it towards her, who first introduced me to your protection." Again the colour flew to Lord Elmwood's face; and again he could hardly restrain himself from uttering his indignation. "It was the mother of Lady Matilda," continued Rushbrook, "who was this friend to me; nor will I ever think of marriage, or any other joyful prospect, while you abandon the only child of my beloved patroness, and load me with rights, which belong to her." Here Rushbrook stopped--Lord Elmwood was silent too, for near half a minute; but still his countenance continued fixed, with his unvaried resolves. After this long pause, the Earl said with composure, but with firmness, "Have you finished, Mr. Rushbrook?" "All that I dare to utter, my Lord; and I fear, I have already said too much." Rushbrook now trembled more than ever, and looked pale as death; for the ardour of speaking being over, he waited his sentence, with less constancy of mind than he expected he should. "You disapprove my conduct, it seems;" said Lord Elmwood, "and in that, you are but like the rest of the world--and yet, among all my acquaintance, you are the only one who has dared to insult me with your opinion. And this you have not done inadvertently; but willingly, and deliberately. But as it has been my fate to be used ill, and severed from all those persons to whom my soul has been most attached; with less regret I can part from you, than if this were my first trial." There was a truth and a pathetic sound in the utterance of these words, that struck Rushbrook to the heart--and he beheld himself as a barbarian, who had treated his benevolent and only friend, with insufferable liberty; void of respect for those corroding sorrows which had imbittered so many years of his life, and in open violation of his most peremptory commands. He felt that he deserved all he was going to suffer, and he fell upon his knees; not so much to deprecate the doom he saw impending, as thus humbly to acknowledge, it was his due. Lord Elmwood, irritated by this posture, as a sign of the presumptuous hope that he might be forgiven, suffered now his anger to burst all bounds; and raising his voice, he exclaimed in a rage, "Leave my house, Sir. Leave my house instantly, and seek some other home." Just as these words were begun, Sandford opened the library door, was witness to them, and to the imploring situation of Rushbrook. He stood silent with amazement! Rushbrook arose, and feeling in his mind a presage, that he might never from that hour, behold his benefactor more; as he bowed in token of obedience to his commands, a shower of tears covered his face; but Lord Elmwood, unmoved, fixed his eyes upon him, which pursued him with enraged looks to the end of the room. Here he had to pass Sandford; who, for the first time in his life, took hold of him by the hand, and said to Lord Elmwood, "My Lord, what's the matter?" "That ungrateful villain," cried he, "has dared to insult me.--Leave my house this moment, Sir." Rushbrook made an effort to go, but Sandford still held his hand; and meekly said to Lord Elmwood, "He is but a boy, my Lord, and do not give him the punishment of a man." Rushbrook now snatched his hand from Sandford's, and threw it with himself upon his neck; where he indeed sobbed like a boy. "You are both in league," exclaimed Lord Elmwood. "Do you suspect me of partiality to Mr. Rushbrook?" said Sandford, advancing nearer to the Earl. Rushbrook had now gained the point of remaining in the room; but the hope that privilege inspired (while he still harboured all the just apprehensions for his fate) gave birth, perhaps, to a more exquisite sensation of pain, than despair would have done. He stood silent--confounded--hoping that he was forgiven--fearing that he was not. As Sandford approached still nearer to Lord Elmwood, he continued, "No, my Lord, I know you do not suspect me, of partiality to Mr. Rushbrook--has any part of my behaviour ever discovered it?" "You now then only interfere to provoke me." "If that were the case," returned Sandford, "there have been occasions, when I might have done it more effectually--when my own heart-strings were breaking, because I would not provoke, or add to what you suffered." "I am obliged to you, Mr. Sandford:" he returned, mildly. "And if, my Lord, I have proved any merit in a late forbearance, reward me for it now; and take this young man from the depth of despair in which I see he is sunk, and say you pardon him." Lord Elmwood made no answer--and Rushbrook, drawing strong inferences of hope from his silence, lifted up his eyes from the ground, and ventured to look in his face: he found it composed to what it had been, but still strongly marked with agitation. He cast his eyes away again, in confusion. On which his uncle said to him--"I shall postpone executing your obedience to my late orders, till you think fit once more to provoke them--and then, not even Sandford, shall dare to plead your excuse." Rushbrook bowed. "Go, leave the room, Sir." He instantly obeyed. Then Sandford, turning to Lord Elmwood, shook him by the hand, and cried, "My Lord, I thank you--I thank you very kindly, my Lord--I shall now begin to think I have some weight with you." "You might indeed think so, did you know how much I have pardoned." "What was his offence, my Lord?" "Such as I would not have forgiven you, or any earthly being besides himself--but while you were speaking in his behalf, I recollected there was a gratitude so extraordinary in the hazards he ran, that almost made him pardonable." "I guess the subject then," cried Sandford; and yet I could not have supposed"---- "It is a subject we cannot speak on, Sandford, therefore let us drop it." At these words the discourse concluded. CHAPTER IV. To the relief of Rushbrook, Lord Elmwood that day dined from home, and he had not the confusion to see him again till the evening. Previous to this, Sandford and he met at dinner; but as the attendants were present, nothing passed on either side respecting the incident in the morning. Rushbrook, from the peril which had so lately threatened him, was now in his perfectly cool, and dispassionate senses; and notwithstanding the real tenderness which he bore to the daughter of his benefactor, he was not insensible to the comfort of finding himself, once more in the possession of all those enjoyments he had forfeited, and for a moment lost. As he reflected on this, to Sandford he felt the first tie of acknowledgement--but for his compassion, he knew he should have been at that very time of their meeting at dinner, away from Elmwood House for ever; and bearing on his mind a still more painful recollection, the burthen of his kind patron's continual displeasure. Filled with these thoughts, all the time of dinner, he could scarce look at his companion, without tears of gratitude; and whenever he attempted to speak to him, gratitude choaked his utterance. Sandford, on his part, behaved just the same as ever; and to show he did not wish to remind Rushbrook of what he had done, he was just as uncivil as ever. Among other things, he said, "He did not know Lord Elmwood dined from home, for if he had, he should have dined in his own apartment." Rushbrook was still more obliged to him for all this; and the weight of obligations with which he was oppressed, made him long for an opportunity to relieve himself by expressions. As soon, therefore, as the servants were all withdrawn, he began: "Mr. Sandford, whatever has been your opinion of _me_, I take pride to myself, that in my sentiments towards _you_, I have always distinguished you for that humane, disinterested character, you have this day proved." "Humane, and disinterested," replied Sandford, "are flattering epithets indeed, for an old man going out of the world, and who can have no temptation to be otherwise." "Then suffer me to call your actions generous and compassionate, for they have saved me----" "I know, young man," cried Sandford, interrupting him, "you are glad at what I have done, and that you find a gratification in telling me you are; but it is a gratification I will not indulge you with--therefore, say another sentence on the subject, and" (rising from his seat) "I'll leave the room, and never come into your company again, whatever your uncle may say to it." Rushbrook saw by the solemnity of his countenance, he was serious, and positively assured him he would never thank him more: on which Sandford took his seat again, but he still frowned, and it was many minutes before he conquered his ill humour. As his countenance became less sour, Rushbrook fell from some general topics he had eagerly started in order to appease him, and said, "How hard is it to restrain conversation from the subject of our thoughts; and yet amidst our dearest friends, and among persons who have the same dispositions and sentiments as our own, their minds, too, fixed upon the self-same objects, is this constraint practised--and thus, society, which was meant for one of our greatest blessings, becomes insipid, nay, often more wearisome than solitude." "I think, young man," replied Sandford, "you have made pretty free with your speech to-day, and ought not to complain of the want of toleration on that score." "I do complain;" replied Rushbrook, "for if toleration was more frequent, the favour of obtaining it would be less." "And your pride, I suppose, is above receiving a favour." "Never from those I esteem; and to convince you of it, I wish this moment to request a favour of you." "I dare say I shall refuse it. However what is it?" "Permit me to speak to you upon the subject of Lady Matilda?" Sandford made no answer, consequently did not forbid him--and he proceeded. "For her sake--as I suppose Lord Elmwood may have told you--I this morning rashly threw myself into the predicament from whence you released me--for her sake, I have suffered much--for her sake I have hazarded a great deal, and am still ready to hazard more." "But for your own sake, do not," returned Sandford, drily. "You may laugh at these sentiments as romantic, Mr. Sandford, but if they are, to me they are nevertheless natural." "But of what service are they to be either to her, or to yourself?" "To me they are painful, and to her would be but impertinent, were she to know them." "I shan't inform her of them, so do not trouble yourself to caution me against it." "I was not going--you know I was not--but I was going to say, that from no one so well as from you, could she be told my sentiments, without the danger of receiving offence." "And what impression do you wish to give her, from her becoming acquainted with them?" "The impression, that she has one sincere friend: that upon every occurrence in life, there is a heart so devoted to all she feels, that she never can suffer without the sympathy of another: or can ever command him, and all his fortunes to unite for her welfare, without his ready, his immediate compliance." "And do you imagine, that any of your professions, or any of her necessities, would ever prevail upon her to put you to the trial?" "Perhaps not." "What, then, are the motives which induce you to wish her to be told of this?" Rushbrook paused. "Do you think," continued Sandford, "the intelligence will give her any satisfaction?" "Perhaps not." "Will it be of any to yourself?" "The highest in the world." "And so all you have been urging upon this occasion, is, at last, only to please yourself." "You wrong my meaning--it is her merit which inspires me with the desire of being known to her--it is her sufferings, her innocence, her beauty----" Sandford stared--Rushbrook proceeded: "It is her----" "Nay, stop where you are," cried Sandford; "you are arrived at the zenith of perfection in a woman, and to add one qualification more, would be an anti-climax." "Oh!" cried Rushbrook with warmth, "I loved her, before I ever beheld her." "Loved her!" cried Sandford, with astonishment, "You are talking of what you did not intend." "I am, indeed:" returned he in confusion, "I fell by accident on the word love." "And by the same accident stumbled on the word beauty; and thus by accident, am I come to the truth of all your professions." Rushbrook knew that he loved; and though his affection had sprung from the most laudable motives, yet was he ashamed of it, as of a vice--he rose, he walked about the room, and he did not look Sandford in the face for a quarter of an hour: Sandford, satisfied that he had judged rightly, and yet unwilling to be too hard upon a passion, which he readily believed must have had many noble virtues for its foundation, now got up and went away, without saying a word in censure, though not a word in approbation. It was in the month of October, and just dark, at the time Rushbrook was left alone, yet in the agitation of his mind, arising from the subject on which he had been talking, he found it impossible to remain in the house, and therefore walked into the fields; but there was another instigation, more powerful than the necessity of walking--it was the allurement of passing along that path where he had last seen Lady Matilda, and where, for the only time, she had condescended to speak to him divested of haughtiness; and with a gentleness that dwelt upon his memory beyond all her other endowments. Here, he retraced his own steps repeatedly, his whole imagination engrossed with her idea, till the sound of her father's carriage returning from his visit, roused him from the delusion of his trance, to the dread of the confusion and embarrassment he should endure, on next meeting him. He hoped Sandford might be present, and yet he was now, almost as much ashamed of seeing him, as his uncle, whom he had so lately offended. Loath to leave the spot where he was, as to enter the house, he remained there, till he considered it would be ill manners, in his present humiliated situation, not to show himself at the usual supper hour, which was immediately. As he laid his hand upon the door of the apartment to open it, he was sorry to hear by Lord Elmwood's voice, he was in the room before him; for there was something much more conspicuously distressing, in entering where he already was, than had his uncle come in after him. He found himself, however, re-assured, by overhearing the Earl laugh and speak in a tone expressive of the utmost good humour to Sandford, who was with him. Yet again, he felt all the awkwardness of his own situation; but making one courageous effort, opened the door and entered. Lord Elmwood had been away half the day, had dined abroad, and it was necessary to take some notice of his return; Rushbrook, therefore, bowed humbly, and what was more to his advantage, he looked humbly. His uncle made a slight return to the salutation, but continued the recital he had begun to Sandford; then sat down to the supper table--supped--and passed the whole evening without saying a syllable, or even casting a look, in remembrance of what had passed in the morning. Or if there was any token, that shewed he remembered the circumstance at all, it was the putting his glass to his nephew's, when Rushbrook called for wine, and drinking at the time he did. CHAPTER V. The repulse Lord Margrave received, did not diminish the ardour of his pursuit; for as he was no longer afraid of resentment from the Earl, whatever treatment his daughter might receive, he was determined the anger of Lady Matilda, or of her female friend, should not impede his pretensions. Having taken this resolution, he laid the plan of an open violation of all right; and determined to bear away that prize by force, which no art was likely to procure. He concerted with two of his favourite companions, but their advice was, "One struggle more of fair means." This was totally against his inclination; for, he had much rather have encountered the piercing cries of a female in the last agonies of distress, than the fatigue of her sentimental harangues, or elegant reproofs, such as he had the sense to understand, but not the capacity to answer. Stimulated, however, by his friends to one more trial, in spite of the formal dismission he had twice received, he intruded another visit on Lady Matilda at the Farm. Provoked beyond bearing at such unfeeling assurance, Matilda refused to come into the room where he was, and Miss Woodley alone received him, and expressed her surprise at the little attention he had paid to her explicit desire. "Madam," replied the nobleman, "to be plain with you, I am in love." "I do not the least doubt it, my Lord," replied Miss Woodley: "nor ought you to doubt the truth of what I advance, when I assure you, that you have not the smallest reason to hope your love will be returned; for Lady Matilda is resolved _never_ to listen to your passion." "That man," he replied, "is to blame, who can relinquish his hopes, upon the mere resolution of a lady." "And that lady would be wrong," replied Miss Woodley, "who should entrust her happiness in the care of a man, who can think thus meanly of her and of her sex." "I think highly of them all," he replied; "and to convince you in how high an estimation I hold _her_ in particular, my whole fortune is at her command." "Your entire absence from this house, my Lord, she would consider as a much greater mark of your respect." A long conversation, as uninteresting as this, ensued: the unexpected arrival of Mr. Sandford, put an end to it. He started at the sight of Lord Margrave; but the Viscount was much more affected at the sight of him. "My Lord," said Sandford boldly to him, "have you received any encouragement from Lady Matilda to authorize this visit?" "None, upon my honour, Mr. Sandford; but I hope you know how to pardon a lover!" "A rational one I do--but you, my Lord, are not of that class while you persecute the pretended object of your affection." "Do you call it persecution that I once offered her a share of my title and fortune--and even now, declare my fortune is at her disposal?" Sandford was uncertain whether he understood his meaning--but Lord Margrave, provoked at his ill reception, felt a triumph in removing his doubts, and proceeded thus: "For the discarded daughter of Lord Elmwood, cannot expect the same proposals, which I made, while she was acknowledged, and under the protection of her father." "What proposals then, my Lord?" asked Sandford hastily. "Such," replied he, "as the Duke of Avon made to her mother." Miss Woodley quitted the room that instant. But Sandford, who never felt resentment but against those in whom he saw some virtue, calmly replied, "My Lord, the Duke of Avon was a gentleman, a man of elegance and breeding; and what have you to offer in recompense for your defects in qualities like these?" "My wealth," replied he, "opposed to her indigence." Sandford smiled, and answered, "Do you suppose _that_ wealth can be esteemed, which has not been able to make you respectable? What is it makes wealth valuable? Is it the pleasures of the table? the pleasure of living in a fine house? or of wearing fine cloaths? These are pleasures, a Lord enjoys, but in common with his valet. It is the pleasure of being conspicuous, which makes riches desirable; but if we are conspicuous only for our vice and folly, had we not better remain in poverty?" "You are beneath my notice." "I trust I shall continue so--and that your Lordship will never again condescend to come where I am." "A man of rank condescends to mix with any society, when a pretty woman is the object." "My Lord, I have a book here in my pocket, which I am eager to read; it is an author who speaks sense and reason--will you pardon the impatience I feel for such company; and permit me to call your carriage?" Saying this, he went hastily and beckoned to the coachman; the carriage drove up, the door was opened, and Lord Margrave, ashamed to be exposed before his attendants, and convinced of the inutility of remaining any longer where he was, departed. Sandford was soon joined by the ladies; and the conversation falling, of course, upon the nobleman who had just taken his leave, Sandford unwarily exclaimed, "I wish Rushbrook had been here." "Who?" cried Lady Matilda. "I do believe," said Miss Woodley, "that young man has some good qualities." "A great many," returned Sandford, mutteringly. "Happy young man!" cried Matilda: "he is beloved by all those, whose affection it would be my choice to possess, beyond any other blessing this world could bestow." "And yet I question, if Rushbrook is happy," said Sandford. "He cannot be otherwise," returned Matilda, "if he is a man of understanding." "He does not want understanding neither," replied Sandford; "although he has certainly many indiscretions." "But which Lord Elmwood, I suppose," said Matilda, "looks upon with tenderness." "Not upon all his faults," answered Sandford; "for I have seen him in very dangerous circumstances with your father." "Have you indeed?" cried Matilda: "then I pity him." "And I believe," said Miss Woodley, "that from his heart, he compassionates you. Now, Mr. Sandford," continued she, "though this is the first time I ever heard you speak in his favour, (and I once thought as indifferently of Mr. Rushbrook as you can do) yet now I will venture to ask you, whether you do not think he wishes Lady Matilda much happier than she is?" "I have heard him say so," answered Sandford. "It is a subject," returned Lady Matilda, "which I did not imagine you, Mr. Sandford, would have permitted him to have mentioned lightly, in your presence." "Lightly! Do you suppose, my dear, we turned your situation into ridicule?" "No, Sir,--but there is a sort of humiliation in the grief to which I am doomed, that ought surely to be treated with the highest degree of delicacy by my friends." "I don't know on what point you fix real delicacy; but if it consists in sorrow, the young man gives a proof he possesses it, for he shed tears when I last heard him mention your name." "I have more cause to weep at the mention of his." "Perhaps so.--But let me tell you, Lady Matilda, that your father might have preferred a more unworthy object." "Still had he been to me," she cried, "an object of envy. And as I frankly confess my envy of Mr. Rushbrook, I hope you will pardon my malice, which is, you know, but a consequent crime." The subject now turned again upon Lord Margrave; and all of them being firmly persuaded, this last reception would put an end to every further intrusion from him, they treated his pretensions, and himself, with the contempt they inspired--but not with the caution that was requisite. CHAPTER VI. The next morning early, Mr. Sandford returned to Elmwood House, but with his spirits depressed, and his heart overcharged with sorrow. He had seen Lady Matilda, the object of his visit, but he had beheld her considerably altered in her looks and in her health; she was become very thin, and instead of the vivid bloom that used to adorn her cheeks, her whole complexion was of a deadly pale--her countenance no longer expressed hope or fear, but a fixed melancholy--she shed no tears, but was all sadness. He had beheld this, and he had heard her insulted by the licentious proposals of a nobleman, from whom there was no satisfaction to be demanded, because she had no friend to vindicate her honour. Rushbrook, who suspected where Sandford was gone, and imagined he would return that day, took his morning's ride, so as to meet him on the road, at the distance of a few miles from the Castle; for, since his perilous situation with Lord Elmwood, he was so fully convinced of the general philanthropy of Sandford's character, that in spite of his churlish manners, he now addressed him, free from that reserve to which his rough behaviour had formerly given birth. And Sandford, on his part, believing he had formed an illiberal opinion of Lord Elmwood's heir, though he took no pains to let him know that his opinion was changed, yet resolved to make him restitution upon every occasion that offered. Their mutual greetings when they met, were unceremonious, but cordial; and Rushbrook turned his horse and rode back with Sandford; yet, intimidated by his respect and tenderness for Lady Matilda, rather than by fear of the rebuffs of his companion, he had not the courage to name her, till the ride was just finished, and they came within a few yards of the house--incited then by the apprehension, he might not soon again enjoy so fit an opportunity, he said, "Pardon me, Mr. Sandford, if I guess where you have been, and if my curiosity forces me to inquire for Miss Woodley's and Lady Matilda's health?" He named Miss Woodley first, to prolong the time before he mentioned Matilda; for though to name her gave him extreme pleasure, yet it was a pleasure accompanied by confusion and pain. "They are both very well," replied Sandford, "at least they did not complain they were sick." "They are not in spirits, I suppose?" said Rushbrook. "No, indeed:" replied Sandford, shaking his head. "No new misfortune has happened, I hope?" cried Rushbrook; for it was plain to see Sandford's spirits were unusually cast down. "Nothing new," returned he, "except the insolence of a young nobleman." "What nobleman?" cried Rushbrook. "A lover of Lady Matilda's," replied Sandford. Rushbrook was petrified. "Who? What lover, Mr. Sandford?--explain?" They were now arrived at the house; and Sandford, without making any reply to this question, said to the servant who took his horse, "She has come a long way this morning; take care of her." This interruption was torture to Rushbrook, who kept close to his side, in order to obtain a further explanation; but Sandford, without attending to him, walked negligently into the hall, and before they advanced many steps, they were met by Lord Elmwood. All further information was put an end to for the present. "How do you do, Sandford?" said Lord Elmwood with extreme kindness; as if he thanked him for the journey which, it was likely, he suspected he had been taking. "I am indifferently well, my Lord:" replied he, with a face of deep concern, and a tear in his eye, partly in gratitude for his patron's civility, and partly in reproach for his cruelty. It was not now till the evening, that Rushbrook had an opportunity of renewing the conversation, which had been so barbarously interrupted. In the evening, no longer able to support the suspense into which he was thrown; without fear or shame, he followed Sandford into his chamber at the time of his retiring, and entreated of him, with all the anxiety he suffered, to explain his allusion when he talked of a lover, and of insolence to Lady Matilda. Sandford, seeing his emotion, was angry with himself that he had inadvertently mentioned the subject; and putting on an air of surly importance, desired,--if he had any business with him, that he would call in the morning. Exasperated at so unexpected a reception, and at the pain of his disappointment, Rushbrook replied, "He treated him cruelly, nor would he stir out of his room, till he had received a satisfactory answer to his question." "Then bring your bed," replied Sandford, "for you must pass your whole night here." He found it vain to think of obtaining any intelligence by threats, he therefore said in a timid and persuasive manner, "Did you, Mr. Sandford, hear Lady Matilda mention my name?" "Yes," replied Sandford, a little better reconciled to him. "Did you tell her what I lately declared to you?" he asked with still more diffidence. "No," replied Sandford. "It is very well, Sir," returned he, vexed to the heart--yet again wishing to sooth him-- "You certainly, Mr. Sandford, know what is for the best--yet I entreat you will give me some further account of the nobleman you named?" "I know what is for the best," replied Sandford, "and I won't." Rushbrook bowed, and immediately left the room. He went apparently submissive, but the moment he showed this submission, he took the resolution of paying a visit himself to the farm at which Lady Matilda resided; and of learning, either from Miss Woodley, the people of the house, the neighbours, or perhaps from Lady Matilda's own lips, the secret which the obstinacy of Sandford had with-held. He saw all the dangers of this undertaking, but none appeared so great as the danger of losing her he loved, by the influence of a rival--and though Sandford had named "insolence," he was in doubt whether what had appeared so to him, was so in reality, or would be so considered by her. To prevent the cause of his absence being suspected by Lord Elmwood, he immediately called his groom, ordered his horse, and giving those servants concerned, a strict charge of secrecy, with some frivolous pretence to apologize for his not being present at breakfast (resolving to be back by dinner) he set off that night, and arrived at an inn about a mile from the farm at break of day. The joy he felt when he found himself so near to the beloved object of his journey, made him thank Sandford in his heart, for the unkindness which had sent him thither. But new difficulties arose, how to accomplish the end for which he came; he learned from the people of the inn, that a Lord, with a fine equipage, had visited at the farm, but who he was, or for what purpose he went, no one could inform him. Dreading to return with his doubts unsatisfied, and yet afraid of proceeding to extremities that might be construed into presumption, he walked disconsolately (almost distractedly) about the fields, looking repeatedly at his watch, and wishing the time would stand still, till he was ready to go back with his errand compleated. Every field he passed, brought him nearer to the house on which his imagination was fixed; but how, without forfeiting every appearance of that respect which he so powerfully felt, could he attempt to enter it?--he saw the indecorum, resolved not to be guilty of it, and yet walked on till he was within but a small orchard of the door. Could he then retreat?--he wished he could; but he found that he had proceeded too far to be any longer master of himself. The time was urgent; he must either behold her, and venture her displeasure, or by diffidence during one moment, give up all his hopes perhaps for ever. With that same disregard to consequences, which actuated him when he dared to supplicate Lord Elmwood in his daughter's behalf, he at length went eagerly to the door and rapped. A servant came--he asked to "Speak with Miss Woodley, if she was quite alone." He was shown into an apartment, and Miss Woodley entered to him. She started when she beheld who it was; but as he did not see a frown upon her face, he caught hold of her hand, and said persuasively, "Do not be offended with me. If I mean to offend you, may I forfeit my life in atonement." Poor Miss Woodley, glad in her solitude to see any one from Elmwood House, forgot his visit was an offence, till he put her in mind of it; she then said, with some reserve, "Tell me the purport of your coming, Sir, and perhaps I may have no reason to complain?" "It was to see Lady Matilda," he replied, "or to hear of her health. It was to offer her my services--it was, Miss Woodley, to convince her, if possible, of my esteem." "Had you no other method, Sir?" said Miss Woodley, with the same reserve. "None;" replied he, "or with joy I should have embraced it; and if you can inform me of any other, tell me I beseech you instantly, and I will immediately be gone, and pursue your directions." Miss Woodley hesitated. "You know of no other means, Miss Woodley," he cried. "And yet I cannot commend this," said she. "Nor do I. Do not imagine because you see me here, that I approve my conduct; but reduced to this necessity, pity the motives that have urged it." Miss Woodley did pity them; but as she would not own that she did, she could think of nothing else to say. At this instant a bell rung from the chamber above. "That is Lady Matilda's bell," said Miss Woodley; "she is coming to take a short walk. Do you wish to see her?" Though it was the first wish of his heart, he paused, and said, "Will you plead my excuse?" As the flight of stairs was but short, which Matilda had to come down, she was in the room with Miss Woodley and Mr. Rushbrook, just as that sentence ended. She had stepped beyond the door of the apartment, when perceiving a visitor, she hastily withdrew. Rushbrook, animated, though trembling at her presence, cried, "Lady Matilda, do not avoid me, till you know that I deserve such a punishment." She immediately saw who it was, and returned back with a proper pride, and yet a proper politeness in her manner. "I beg your pardon, Sir," said she, "I did not know you; I was afraid I intruded upon Miss Woodley and a stranger." "You do not then consider me as a stranger, Lady Matilda? and that you do not, requires my warmest acknowledgements." She sat down, as if overcome by ill spirits and ill health. Miss Woodley now asked Rushbrook to sit--for till now she had not. "No, Madam," replied he, with confusion, "not unless Lady Matilda gives me permission." She smiled, and pointed to a chair--and all the kindness which Rushbrook during his whole life had received from Lord Elmwood, never inspired half the gratitude, which this one instance of civility from his daughter excited. He sat down, with the confession of the obligation upon every feature of his face. "I am not well, Mr. Rushbrook," said Matilda, languidly; "and you must excuse any want of etiquette at this house." "While you excuse me, Madam, what can I have to complain of?" She appeared absent while he was speaking, and turning to Miss Woodley, said, "Do you think I had better walk to-day?" "No, my dear," answered Miss Woodley; "the ground is damp, and the air cold." "You are not well, indeed, Lady Matilda," said Rushbrook, gazing upon her with the most tender respect. She shook her head; and the tears, without any effort either to impel or to restrain them, ran down her face. Rushbrook rose from his seat, and with an accent and manner the most expressive, said, "We are cousins, Lady Matilda--in our infancy we were brought up together--we were beloved by the same mother--fostered by the same father"---- "Oh!" cried she, interrupting him, with a tone which indicated the bitterest anguish. "Nay, do not let me add to your uneasiness," he resumed, "while I am attempting to alleviate it. Instruct me what I can do to show my esteem and respect, rather than permit me thus unguided, to rush upon what you may construe into insult and arrogance." Miss Woodley went to Matilda, took her hand, then wiped the tears from her eyes, while Matilda reclined against her, entirely regardless of Rushbrook's presence. "If I have been in the least instrumental to this sorrow,"--said Rushbrook, with a face as much agitated as his mind. "No," said Miss Woodley, in a low voice, "you have not--she is often thus." "Yes," said Matilda, raising her head, "I am frequently so weak that I cannot resist the smallest incitement to grief. But do not make your visit long, Mr. Rushbrook," she continued, "for I was just then thinking, that should Lord Elmwood hear of this attention you have paid me, it might be fatal to you." Here she wept again, as bitterly as before. "There is no probability of his hearing of it, Madam," Rushbrook replied; "or if there was, I am persuaded that he would not resent it; for yesterday, when I am confident he knew that Mr. Sandford had been to see you, he received him on his return, with unusual marks of kindness." "Did he?" said she--and again she lifted up her head; her eyes for a moment beaming with hope and joy. "There is something which we cannot yet define," said Rushbrook, "that Lord Elmwood struggles with; but when time shall have eradicated"---- Before he could proceed further, Matilda was once more sunk into despondency, and scarce attended to what he was saying. Miss Woodley observing this, said, "Mr. Rushbrook, let it be a token we shall be glad to see you hereafter, that I now use the freedom to beg you will put an end to your visit." "You send me away, Madam," returned he, "with the warmest thanks for the reception you have give me; and this last assurance of your kindness, is beyond any other favour you could have bestowed. Lady Matilda," added he, "suffer me to take your hand at parting, and let it be a testimony that you acknowledge me for a relation." She put out her hand--which he knelt to receive, but did not raise it to his lips--he held the boon too sacred--and looking earnestly upon it, as it lay pale and wan in his, he breathed one sigh over it, and withdrew. CHAPTER VII. Sorrowful and affecting as this interview had been, Rushbrook, as he rode home, reflected upon it with the most inordinate delight; and had he not seen decline of health, in the looks and behaviour of Lady Matilda, his felicity had been unbounded. Entranced in the happiness of her society, the thought of his rival never came once to his mind while he was with her; a want of recollection, however, he by no means regretted, as her whole appearance contradicted every suspicion he could possibly entertain, that she favoured the addresses of any man living--and had he remembered, he would not have dared to name the subject. The time ran so swiftly while he was away, that it was beyond the dinner hour at Elmwood House, when he returned. Heated, his dress and his hair disordered, he entered the dining room just as the dessert was put upon the table. He was confounded at his own appearance, and at the falsehoods he should be obliged to fabricate in his excuse: there was yet, that which engaged his attention, beyond any circumstance relating to himself--the features of Lord Elmwood--of which his daughter's, whom he had just beheld, had the most striking resemblance; though her's were softened by sorrow, while his were made austere by the self-same cause. "Where have you been?" said his uncle, with a frown. "A chace, my Lord--I beg your pardon--but a pack of dogs I unexpectedly met." For in the hacknied art of lying without injury to any one, Rushbrook, to his shame, was proficient. His excuses were received, and the subject ceased. During his absence that day, Lord Elmwood had called Sandford apart, and said to him,--that as the malevolence which he once observed between him and Rushbrook, had, he perceived, subsided, he advised him, if he was a well-wisher to the young man, to sound his heart, and counsel him not to act against the will of his nearest relation and friend. "I myself am too hasty," continued Lord Elmwood, "and, unhappily, too much determined upon what I have once (though, perhaps, rashly) said, to speak upon a topic where it is probable I shall meet with opposition. You, Sandford, can reason with moderation. For after all that I have done for my nephew, it would be a pity to forsake him at last; and yet, that is but too likely, if he provokes me." "Sir," replied Sandford, "I will speak to him." "Yet," added Lord Elmwood, sternly, "do not urge what you say for my sake, but for his--I can part from him with ease--but he may then repent, and, you know, repentance always comes too late with me." "My Lord, I will exert all the efforts in my power for his welfare. But what is the subject on which he has refused to comply with your desires?" "Matrimony--have not I told you?" "Not a word." "I wish him to marry, that I may then conclude the deeds in respect to my estate,--and the only child of Sir William Winterton (a rich heiress) was the wife I meant to propose; but from his indifference to all I have said on the occasion, I have not yet mentioned her name to him; you may." "I will, my Lord, and use all my persuasion to engage his obedience; and you shall have, at least, a faithful account of what he says." Sandford the next morning sought an opportunity of being alone with Rushbrook--he then plainly repeated to him what Lord Elmwood had said, and saw him listen to it all, and heard him answer with the most tranquil resolution, "That he would do any thing to preserve the friendship and patronage of his uncle--but marry." "What can be your reason?" asked Sandford--though he guessed. "A reason, I cannot give to Lord Elmwood." "Then do not give it to me, for I have promised to tell him every thing you say to me." "And every thing I _have_ said?" asked Rushbrook hastily. "As to what you have said, I don't know whether it has made impression enough on my memory, to enable me to repeat it." "I am glad it has not." "And my answer to your uncle, is to be simply, that you will not obey him?" "I should hope, Mr. Sandford, that you would express it in better terms." "Tell me the terms, and I will be exact." Rushbrook struck his forehead, and walked about the room. "Am I to give him any reason for your disobeying him?" "I tell you again, that I dare not name the cause." "Then why do you submit to a power you are ashamed to own?" "I am not ashamed--I glory in it.--Are you ashamed of your esteem for Lady Matilda?" "Oh! if she is the cause of your disobedience, be assured I shall not mention it, for I am forbid to name her." "And surely, as that is the case, I need not fear to speak plainly to you. I love Lady Matilda--or, perhaps, unacquainted with love, what I feel may be only pity--and if so, pity is the most pleasing passion that ever possessed a human heart, and I would not change it for all her father's estates." "Pity, then, gives rise to very different sensations--for I pity you, and that sensation I would gladly exchange for approbation." "If you really feel compassion for me, and I believe you do, contrive some means by your answers to Lord Elmwood to pacify him, without involving me in ruin. Hint at my affections being engaged, but not to whom; and add, that I have given my word, if he will allow me a short time, a year or two only, I will, during that period, try to disengage them, and use all my power to render myself worthy of the union for which he designs me." "And this is not only your solemn promise--but your fixed determination?" "Nay, why will you search my heart to the bottom, when the surface ought to content you?" "If you cannot resolve on what you have proposed, why do you ask this time of your uncle? For should he allow it you, at the expiration, your disobedience to his commands will be less pardonable than it is now." "Within a year, Mr. Sandford, who can tell what strange events may not occur, to change all our prospects? Even my passion may decline." "In that expectation, then--the failure of which yourself must answer for--I will repeat as much of this discourse as shall be proper." Here Rushbrook communicated his having been to see Lady Matilda, for which Sandford reproved him, but in less rigorous terms than he generally used in his reproofs; and Rushbrook, by his entreaties, now gained the intelligence who the nobleman was who addressed Matilda, and on what views; but was restrained to patience, by Sandford's arguments and threats. Upon the subject of this marriage, Sandford met his patron, without having determined exactly what to say, but rested on the temper in which he should find him. At the commencement of the conversation he said, "Rushbrook begged for time." "I have given him time, have I not?" cried Lord Elmwood: "What can be the meaning of his thus trifling with me?" Sandford replied, "My Lord, young men are frequently romantic in their notions of love, and think it impossible to have a sincere affection, where their own inclinations do not first point out the choice." "If he is in love," answered Lord Elmwood, "let him take the object, and leave my house and me for ever. Nor under this destiny can he have any claim to pity; for genuine love will make him happy in banishment, in poverty, or in sickness: it makes the poor man happy as the rich, the fool blest as the wise." The sincerity with which Lord Elmwood had loved, was expressed more than in words, as he said this. "Your Lordship is talking," replied Sandford, "of the passion in its most refined and predominant sense; while I may possibly be speaking of a mere phantom, that has led this young man astray." "Whatever it be," returned Lord Elmwood, "let him and his friends weigh the case well, and act for the best--so shall I." "His friends, my Lord?--What friends, or what friend has he upon earth but you?" "Then why will he not submit to my advice; or himself give me a proper reason why he cannot?" "Because there may be friendship without familiarity--and so it is between him and you." "That cannot be; for I have condescended to talk to him in the most familiar terms." "To condescend, my Lord, is _not_ to be familiar." "Then come, Sir, let us be on an equal footing through you. And now speak out _his_ thoughts freely, and hear mine in return." "Why, then, he begs a respite for a year or two." "On what pretence?" "To me, it was preference of a single life--but I suspect it is--what he imagines to be love--and for some object whom he thinks your Lordship would disapprove." "He has not, then, actually confessed this to you?" "If he has, it was drawn from him by such means, that I am not warranted to say it in direct words." "I have entered into no contract, no agreement on his account with the friends of the lady I have pointed out," said Lord Elmwood; "nothing beyond implications have passed betwixt her family and myself at present; and if the person on whom he has fixed his affections, should not be in a situation absolutely contrary to my wishes, I may, perhaps, confirm his choice." That moment Sandford's courage prompted him to name Lady Matilda, but his discretion opposed--however, in the various changes of his countenance from the conflict, it was plain to discern that he wished to say more than he dared. On which Lord Elmwood cried, "Speak on, Sandford--what are you afraid of?" "Of you, my Lord." He started. Sandford went on----"I know no tie--no bond--no innocence, that is a protection when you feel resentment." "You are right," he replied, significantly. "Then how, my Lord, can you encourage me to _speak on_, when that which I perhaps would say, might offend you to hear?" "To what, and whither are you changing our subject?" cried Lord Elmwood. "But, Sir, if you know my resentful and relentless temper, you surely know how to shun it." "Not, and speak plainly." "Then dissemble." "No, I'll not do that--but I'll be silent." "A new parade of submission. You are more tormenting to me than any one I have about me. Constantly on the verge of disobeying my commands, that you may recede, and gain my good will by your forbearance. But know, Mr. Sandford, that I will not suffer this much longer. If you chuse in every conversation we have together (though the most remote from such a subject) to think of my daughter, you must either banish your thoughts, or conceal them--nor by one sign, one item, remind me of her." "Your daughter did you call her? Can you call yourself her father?" "I do, Sir--but I was likewise the husband of her mother. And, as that husband, I solemnly swear."----He was proceeding with violence. "Oh! my Lord," cried Sandford, interrupting him, with his hands clasped in the most fervent supplication--"Oh! do not let me draw upon her one oath more of your eternal displeasure--I'll kneel to beg that you will drop the subject." The inclination he made with his knees bent towards the ground, stopped Lord Elmwood instantly. But though it broke in upon his words, it did not alter one angry look--his eyes darted, and his lips trembled with, indignation. Sandford, in order to appease him, bowed and offered to withdraw, hoping to be recalled. He wished in vain--Lord Elmwood's eyes followed him to the door, expressive of rejoicing at his absence. CHAPTER VIII. The companions and counsellors of Lord Margrave, who had so prudently advised gentle methods in the pursuit of his passion, while there was left any hope of their success; now, convinced there was none, as strenuously commended open violence;--and sheltered under the consideration, that their depredations were to be practised upon a defenceless woman, who had not one protector, except an old priest, the subject of their ridicule;--assured likewise from the influence of Lord Margrave's wealth, that all inferior consequences could be overborne, they saw no room for fears on any side, and what they wished to execute, with care and skill premeditated. When their scheme was mature for performance, three of his chosen companions, and three servants, trained in all the villainous exploits of their masters, set off for the habitation of poor Matilda, and arrived there about the twilight of the evening. Near four hours after that time (just as the family were going to bed) they came up to the doors of the house, and rapping violently, gave the alarm of fire, conjuring all the inhabitants to make their way out immediately, as they would save their lives. The family consisted of few persons, all of whom ran instantly to the doors and opened them; on which two men rushed in, and with the plea of saving Lady Matilda from the pretended flames, caught her in their arms, and carried her off; while all the deceived people of the house, running eagerly to save themselves, paid no regard to her, till looking for the cause for which they had been terrified, they perceived the stratagem, and the fatal consequences. Amidst the complaints, the sorrow, and the affright of the people of the farm, Miss Woodley's sensations wanted a name--terror and anguish give but a faint description of what she suffered--something like the approach of death stole over her senses, and she sat like one petrified with horror. She had no doubt who was the perpetrator of this wickedness; but how was she to follow? how effect a rescue? The circumstances of this event, as soon as the people had time to call up their recollection, were sent to a neighbouring magistrate; but little could be hoped from that. Who was to swear to the robber? Who, undertake to find him out! Miss Woodley thought of Rushbrook, of Sandford, of Lord Elmwood--but what could she hope from the want of power in the two former?--what from the latter, for the want of will? Now stupified, and now distracted, she walked about the house incessantly, begging for instructions how to act, or how to forget her misery. A tenant of Lord Elmwood's, who occupied a little farm near to that where Lady Matilda lived, and who was well acquainted with the whole history of her's and her mother's misfortunes, was returning from a neighbouring fair, just as this inhuman plan was put in execution. He heard the cries of a woman in distress, and followed the sound, till he arrived at a chaise in waiting, and saw Matilda placed in it, by the side of two men, who presented pistols to him, as he offered to approach and expostulate. The farmer, uncertain who this female was, yet went to the house she had been taken from (as the nearest) with the tale of what he had seen; and there, being informed it was Lady Matilda whom he had beheld, this intelligence, joined to the powerful effect her screams had on him, made him resolve to take horse immediately, and with some friends, follow the carriage till they should trace the place to which she was conveyed. The anxiety, the firmness discovered in determining on this understanding, somewhat alleviated the agony Miss Woodley endured, and she began to hope, timely assistance might yet be given to her beloved charge. The man set out, meaning at all events to attempt her release; but before he had proceeded far, the few friends that accompanied him, began to reflect on the improbability of their success, against a nobleman, surrounded by servants, with other attendants likewise, and, perhaps, even countenanced by the father of the lady, whom they presumed to take from him; or if not, while Lord Elmwood beheld the offence with indifference, that indifference gave it a sanction, they might in vain oppose. These cool reflections tending to their safety, had their weight with the companions of the farmer; they all rode back, rejoicing at their second thoughts, and left him to pursue his journey and prove his valour by himself. CHAPTER IX. It was not with Sandford, as it had lately been with Rushbrook under the displeasure of Lord Elmwood--to the latter he behaved, as soon as their dissension was past, as if it had never happened--but to Sandford it was otherwise--the resentment which he had repressed at the time of the offence, lurked in his heart, and dwelt upon his mind for several days; during which, he carefully avoided exchanging a word with him, and gave every other demonstration of his anger. Sandford, though experienced in the cruelty and ingratitude of the world, yet could not without difficulty brook this severity, this contumely, from a man, for whose welfare, ever since his infancy, he had laboured; and whose happiness was more dear to him, in spite of all his faults, than that of any other person. Even Lady Matilda was not so dear to Sandford as her father--and he loved her more that she was Lord Elmwood's child, than for any other cause. Sometimes the old Priest, incensed beyond bearing, was on the point of saying to his patron, "How, in my age, dare you thus treat the man, whom in his youth you respected and revered?" Sometimes instead of anger, he felt the tear, he was ashamed to own, steal to his eye, and even fall down his cheek. Sometimes he left the room half determined to leave the house--but these were all half determinations; for he knew him with whom he had to deal too well, not to know that he might be provoked into yet greater anger; and that should he once rashly quit his house, the doors most probably would be shut against him for ever. In this humiliating state (for even many of the domestics could not but observe their Lord's displeasure) Sandford passed three days, and was beginning the fourth, when sitting with Lord Elmwood and Rushbrook just after breakfast, a servant entered, saying, as he opened the door, to somebody who followed, "You must wait till you have my Lord's permission." This attracted their eyes to the door, and a man meanly dressed, walked in, following close to the servant. The latter turned, and seemed again to desire the person to retire, but in vain; he rushed forward regardless of his opposer, and in great agitation, cried, "My Lord, if you please, I have business with you, provided you will chuse to be alone." Lord Elmwood, struck with the intruder's earnestness, bade the servant leave the room; and then said to the stranger, "You may speak before these gentlemen." The man instantly turned pale, and trembled--then, to prolong the time before he spoke, went to the door to see if it was shut--returned--yet still trembling, seemed unwilling to say his errand. "What have you done," cried Lord Elmwood, "that you are in this terror? What have you done, man?" "Nothing, my Lord," replied he, "but I am afraid I am going to offend you." "Well, no matter;" (he answered carelessly) "only go on, and let me know your business." The man's distress increased--and he cried in a voice of grief and affright--"Your child, my Lord!"---- Rushbrook and Sandford started; and looking at Lord Elmwood, saw him turn white as death. In a tremulous voice he instantly cried, "What of her?" and rose from his seat. Encouraged by the question, and the agitation of him who asked it, the poor man gave way to his feelings, and answered with every sign of sorrow, "I saw her, my Lord, taken away by force--two ruffians seized and carried her away, while she screamed in vain to me for help, and tore her hair in distraction." "Man, what do you mean?" cried the Earl. "Lord Margrave," replied the stranger, "we have no doubt, has formed this plot--he has for some time past beset the house where she lived; and when his visits were refused, he threatened this. Besides, one of his servants attended the carriage; I saw, and knew him." Lord Elmwood listened to the last part of this account with seeming composure--then turning hastily to Rushbrook, he said, "Where are my pistols, Harry?" Sandford rose from his seat, and forgetting all the anger between them, caught hold of the Earl's hand, and cried, "Will you then prove yourself a father?" Lord Elmwood only answered, "Yes," and left the room. Rushbrook followed, and begged with all the earnestness he felt, to be permitted to accompany his uncle. While Sandford shook hands with the farmer a thousand times; and he, in his turn, rejoiced, as if he had already seen Lady Matilda restored to liberty. Rushbrook in vain entreated Lord Elmwood; he laid his commands upon him not to go a step from the Castle; while the agitation of his own mind, was too great, to observe the rigour of this sentence on his nephew. During the hasty preparations for the Earl's departure, Sandford received from Miss Woodley the sad intelligence of what had happened; but he returned an answer to recompence her for all she had suffered on the occasion. Within a few hours Lord Elmwood set off, accompanied by his guide, the farmer, and other attendants furnished with every requisite to ascertain the success of their enterprise--while poor Matilda little thought of a deliverer nigh, much less, that her deliverer should prove her father. CHAPTER X. Lord Margrave, black as this incident of his life must make him appear to the reader, still nursed in his conscience a reserve of specious virtue, to keep him in peace with himself. It was his design to plead, to argue, to implore, nay even to threaten, long before he put his threats in force; and with this and the following reflection, he reconciled--as most bad men can--what he had done, not only to the laws of humanity, but to the laws of honour. "I have stolen a woman certainly;" said he to himself, "but I will make her happier than she was in that humble state from which I have taken her. I will even," said he, "now that she is in my power, win her affections--and when, in fondness, hereafter she hangs upon me, how will she thank me for this little trial, through which I shall have conducted her to happiness!" Thus did he hush his remorse, while he waited impatiently at home, in expectation of his prize. Half expiring with her sufferings, of body as well as of mind, about twelve o'clock the next night, after she was borne away, Matilda arrived; and felt her spirits revive by the superior sufferings that awaited her--for her increasing terrors roused her from the death-like weakness, brought on by fatigue. Lord Margrave's house, to which he had gone previous to this occasion, was situated in the lonely part of a well-known forest, not more than twenty miles distant from London: this was an estate he rarely visited; and as he had but few servants here, it was a place which he supposed would be less the object of suspicion in the present case, than any other of his seats. To this, then, Lady Matilda was conveyed--a superb apartment allotted her--and one of his confidential females placed to attend upon her, with all respect, and assurances of safety. Matilda looked in this woman's face, and seeing she bore the features of her sex, while her own knowledge reached none of those worthless characters of which this person was a specimen, she imagined that none of those could look as she did, and therefore found consolation in her seeming tenderness. She was even prevailed upon (by her promises to sit by her side and watch) to throw herself on the bed, and suffer sleep for a few minutes--for sleep to her was suffering; her fears giving birth to dreams terrifying as her waking thoughts. More wearied than refreshed with her sleep, she rose at break of day, and refusing to admit of the change of an article in her dress, she persisted to sit in the torn disordered habit in which she had been dragged away; nor would she taste a morsel, of all the delicacies that were prepared for her. Her attendant, for some time observed the most reverential awe; but finding this had not the effect of gaining compliance with her advice, she varied her manners, and began by less submissive means to attempt an influence. She said her orders were to be obedient, while she herself was obeyed--at least in circumstances so material as the lady's health, of which she had the charge as a physician, and expected equal compliance from her patient--food and fresh apparel she prescribed as the only means to prevent death; and even threatened her invalid with something worse, a visit from Lord Margrave, if she continued obstinate. Now loathing her for the deception she had practised, more, than had she received her thus at first, Matilda hid her eyes from the sight of her; and when she was obliged to look, she shuddered. This female at length thought it her duty to wait upon her worthy employer, and inform him the young lady in her trust would certainly die, unless there were means employed to oblige her to take some nourishment. Lord Margrave, glad of an opportunity that might apologize for his intrusion upon Lady Matilda, went with eagerness to her apartment, and throwing himself at her feet, conjured her if she would save his life, as well as her own, to submit to be consoled. The extreme disgust and horror his presence inspired, caused Matilda for a moment to forget all her want of power, her want of health, her weakness; and rising from the place where she sat, she cried, with her voice elevated, "Leave me, my Lord, or I'll die in spite of all your care; I'll instantly expire with grief, if you do not leave me." Accustomed to the tears and reproaches of the sex--though not of those like her--he treated with contempt these menaces of anger, and seizing her hand, carried it to his lips. Enraged, and overwhelmed with sorrow at the affront, she cried, (forgetting every other friend she had,) "Oh! my dear Miss Woodley, why are you not here to protect me?" "Nay," returned Lord Margrave, stifling a fit of laughter, "I should think the old Priest would be as good a champion as the lady." The remembrance of Sandford, with all his kindness, now rushed so forcibly on Matilda's mind, that she shed a shower of tears, on thinking how much he felt, and would continue to feel, for her situation. Once she thought on Rushbrook, and thought even _he_ would be sorry for her. Of her father she did not think--she dared not--one single moment that thought intruded, but she hurried it away--it was too bitter. It was now again quite night; and near to that hour when she came first to the house. Lord Margrave, though at some distance from her, remained still in her apartment, while her female companion had stolen away. His insensibility to her lamentations--the agitated looks he sometimes cast upon her--her weak and defenceless state, all conspired to fill her mind with horror. He saw her apprehensions in her distracted face, disheveled hair, and the whole of her forlorn appearance--yet, notwithstanding his former resolutions, he could not resist the desire of fulfilling all her dreadful expectations. He once again approached her, and again was going to seize her hand; when the report of a pistol, and a confused noise of persons assembling towards the apartment prevented him. He started--but looked more surprised than alarmed--her alarm was augmented; for she supposed this tumult was some experiment to intimidate her into submission. She wrung her hands, and lifted up her eyes to Heaven, in the last agony of despair, when one of Lord Margrave's servants entered hastily and announced, "Lord Elmwood!" That moment her father entered--and with all the unrestrained fondness of a parent, folded her in his arms. Her extreme, her excess of joy on such a meeting, and from such anguish rescued, was, in part, repressed by his awful presence. The apprehensions to which she had been accustomed, kept her timid and doubtful--she feared to speak, or clasp him in return for his embrace, but falling on her knees, clung round his legs, and bathed his feet with her tears.----These were the happiest moments that she had ever known--perhaps, the happiest _he_ had ever known. Lord Margrave, on whom Lord Elmwood had not even cast a look, now left the room; but as he quitted it, called out, "My Lord Elmwood, if you have any demands on me,"-- The Earl interrupted him, "Would you make me an executioner? The law shall be your only antagonist." Matilda, quite exhausted, yet upheld by the sudden transport she had felt, was led by her father out of this wretched dwelling--more despicable than the beggar's hovel. CHAPTER XI. Overcome with the want of rest for two nights, from her distracting fears, and all those fears now hushed; Matilda, soon after she was placed in the carriage with Lord Elmwood, dropped fast asleep; and thus, insensibly surprised, leaned her head against her father in the sweetest slumber that imagination can conceive. When she awoke, instead of the usual melancholy scene before her view, she beheld her father, and heard the voice of the once dreaded Lord Elmwood tenderly saying, "We will go no further to-night, the fatigue is too much for her; order beds here directly, and some proper person to sit up and attend her." She could only turn to him with a look of love and duty; her lips could not utter a sentence. In the morning she found her father by the side of her bed. He inquired "If she was in health sufficient to pursue her journey, or if she would remain where she was?" "I _am_ able to go with you," she answered instantly. "Nay," replied he, "perhaps you ought to stay here till you are better?" "I am better," said she, "and ready to go with you."----Half afraid that he meant to send her from him. He perceived her fears, and replied, "Nay, if you stay, so shall I--and when I go, I shall take you along with me to my house." "To Elmwood House?" she asked eagerly. "No, to my house in town, where I intend to be all the winter, and where we shall live together." She turned her face on the pillow to conceal tears of joy, but her sobs revealed them. "Come," said he, "this kiss is a token you have nothing to fear." And he kissed her affectionately. "I shall send for Miss Woodley too immediately," continued he. "Oh! I shall be overjoyed to see her, my Lord--and to see Mr. Sandford--and even Mr. Rushbrook." "Do you know _him?_" said Lord Elmwood. "Yes," she replied, "I have seen him two or three times." The Earl hoping the air might be a means of re-establishing her strength and spirits, now left the room, and ordered his carriage to be prepared: while she arose, attended by one of his female servants, for whom he had sent to town, to bring such changes of apparel as were requisite. When Matilda was ready to join her father in the next room, she felt a tremor seize her, that made it almost impossible to appear before him. No other circumstance now impending to agitate her heart, she felt more forcibly its embarrassment at meeting on terms of easy intercourse, him, of whom she had never been used to think, but with that distant reverence and fear, which his severity had excited; and she knew not how she should dare to speak to, or look on him, with that freedom her affection warranted. After several efforts to conquer these nice and refined sensations, but to no purpose, she at last went to his apartment. He was reading; but as she entered, he put out his hand and drew her to him. Her tears wholly overcame her. He could have intermingled his--but assuming a grave countenance, he commanded her to desist from exhausting her spirits; and, after a few powerful struggles, she obeyed. Before the morning was over, she experienced the extreme joy of sitting by her father's side as they drove to town, and of receiving, during his conversation, a thousand proofs of his love, and tokens of her lasting happiness. It was now the middle of November; and yet, as Matilda passed along, never to her, did the sun shine so bright as upon this morning--never did her imagination comprehend, that the human heart could feel happiness true and genuine as hers! On arriving at the house, there was no abatement of her felicity: all was respect and duty on the part of the domestics--all paternal care on the part of Lord Elmwood; and she would have been at that summit of her wishes which annihilates hope, but that the prospect of seeing Miss Woodley and Mr. Sandford, still kept this passion in existence. CHAPTER XII. Rushbrook was detained at Elmwood House during all this time, more from the persuasions, nay prayers, of Sandford, than the commands of Lord Elmwood. He had, but for Sandford, followed his uncle, and exposed himself to his anger, sooner than have endured the most piercing inquietude, which he was doomed to suffer, till the news arrived of Lady Matilda's safety. He indeed had little else to fear from the known firm, courageous character of her father, and the expedition with which he undertook his journey; but lovers' fears are like those of women, obstinate, and no argument could persuade either him or Miss Woodley (who had now ventured to come to Elmwood House) but that Matilda's peace of mind might be for ever destroyed, before she was set at liberty. The summons from Lord Elmwood for their coming to town, was received by each of this party with delight; but the impatience to obey it, was in Rushbrook so violent, it was painful to himself, and extremely troublesome to Sandford; who wished, from his regard to Lady Matilda, rather to delay, than hurry their journey. "You are to blame," said he to him and Miss Woodley, "to wish by your arrival, to divide with Lord Elmwood that tender bond, which ties the good who confer obligations, to the object of their benevolence. At present there is no one with him to share in the care and protection of his daughter, and he is under the necessity of discharging that duty himself; this habit may become so powerful, that he _cannot_ throw it off, even if his former resolutions should urge him to it. While we remain here, therefore, Lady Matilda is safe with her father; but it would not surprise me, if on our arrival (especially if we are precipitate) he should place her again with Miss Woodley at a distance." To this forcible conjecture, they submitted for a few days, and then most gladly set out for town. On their arrival, they were met, even at the street-door, by Lady Matilda; and with an expression of joy, they did not suppose her features could have worn. She embraced Miss Woodley! hung upon Sandford! and to Mr. Rushbrook, who from his conscious love only bowed at an humble distance, she held out her hand with every look and gesture of the tenderest esteem. When Lord Elmwood joined them, he welcomed them all sincerely; but Sandford the most, with whom he had not spoken for many days before he left the country, for his allusion to the wretched situation of his daughter.--And Sandford (with his fellow-travellers) now saw him treat that daughter with an easy, a natural fondness, as if she had lived with him from her infancy. He appeared, however, at times, under the apprehension, that the propensity of man to jealousy, might give Rushbrook a pang at this dangerous rival in his love and fortune--for though Lord Elmwood remembered well the hazard he had once ventured to befriend Matilda, yet the present unlimited reconciliation was something so unlooked for, it might be a trial too much for his generosity, to remain wholly disinterested on the event. Slight as was this suspicion, it did Rushbrook injustice. He loved Lady Matilda too sincerely, he loved her father's happiness, and her mother's memory too faithfully, not to be rejoiced at all he witnessed; nor could the secret hope that whispered him, "Their blessings might one day be mutual," increase the pleasure he found, in beholding Matilda happy. Unexpected affairs, in which Lord Elmwood had been for some time engaged, had diverted his attention for awhile from the marriage of his nephew; nor did he at this time find his disposition sufficiently severe, to exact from the young man a compliance with his wishes, at so cruel an alternative as that of being for ever discarded. He felt his mind, by the late incident, too much softened for such harshness; he yet wished for the alliance he had proposed; for he was more consistent in his character than to suffer the tenderness his daughter's peril had awakened, to derange those plans which he had long projected. Never even now, for a moment did he indulge--for perhaps it would have been an indulgence--the idea of replacing her exactly in the rights of her birth, to the disappointment of all his nephew's expectations. Yet, milder at this crisis in his temper than he had been for years before, and knowing he could be no longer irritated upon the subject of his daughter, he once more resolved to trust himself in a conference with Rushbrook on the subject of marriage; meaning at the same time to mention Matilda as an opponent from whom he had nothing to fear. But for some time before Rushbrook was called to this private audience, he had, by his unwearied attention, endeavoured to impress upon Matilda's mind, the softest sentiments in his favour. He succeeded--but not as he wished. She loved him as her friend, her cousin, her foster-brother, but not as a lover. The idea of love never once came to her thoughts; and she would sport with Rushbrook like the most harmless child, while he, all impassioned, could with difficulty resist telling her, what she made him suffer. At the meeting between him and Lord Elmwood, to which he was called for his final answer on that subject which had once nearly proved so fatal to him; after a thousand fears, much confusion and embarrassment, he at length frankly confessed his "Heart was engaged, and had been so, long before his uncle offered to direct his choice." Lord Elmwood desired to know, "On whom he had placed his affections." "I dare not tell you, my Lord," returned he, infinitely confused; "but Mr. Sandford can witness their sincerity and how long they have been fixed." "Fixed!" cried the Earl. "Immoveably fixed, my Lord; and yet the object is as unconscious of my love to this moment, as you yourself have been; and I swear ever shall be so, without your permission." "Name the object," said Lord Elmwood, anxiously. "My Lord, I dare not.--The last time I named her to you, you threatened to abandon me for my arrogance." Lord Elmwood started.----"My daughter! Would you marry her?" "But with your approbation, my Lord; and that----" Before he could proceed a word further, his uncle left the room hastily--and left Rushbrook all terror for his approaching fate. Lord Elmwood went immediately into the apartment where Sandford, Miss Woodley, and Matilda, were sitting, and cried with an angry voice, and with his countenance disordered, "Rushbrook has offended me beyond forgiveness.--Go, Sandford, to the library, where he is, and tell him this instant to quit my house, and never dare to return." Miss Woodley lifted up her hands and sighed. Sandford rose slowly from his seat to execute the office. While Lady Matilda, who was arranging her music books upon the instrument, stopped from her employment suddenly, with her face bathed in tears. A general silence ensued, till Lord Elmwood, resuming his angry tone, cried, "Did you hear me, Mr. Sandford?" Sandford now, without a word in reply, made for the door--but there Matilda impeded him, and throwing her arms about his neck, cried, "Dear Mr. Sandford, do not." "How!" exclaimed her father. She saw the impending frown, and rushing towards him, took his hand fearfully, and knelt at his feet. "Mr. Rushbrook is my relation," she cried in a pathetic voice, "my companion, my friend--before you loved me he was anxious for my happiness, and often visited me to lament with, and console me. I cannot see him turned out of your house without feeling for _him_, what he once felt for _me._" Lord Elmwood turned aside to conceal his sensations--then raising her from the floor, he said, "Do you know what he has asked of me?" "No," answered she in the utmost ignorance, and with the utmost innocence painted on her face; "but whatever it is, my Lord, though you do not grant it, yet pardon him for asking." "Perhaps _you_ would grant him what he has requested?" said her father. "Most willingly--was it in my gift." "It is," replied he. "Go to him in the library, and hear what he has to say; for on your will his fate shall depend." Like lightning she flew out of the room; while even the grave Sandford smiled at the idea of their meeting. Rushbrook, with his fears all verified by the manner in which his uncle had left him, sat with his head reclined against a bookcase, and every limb extended with the despair that had seized him. Matilda nimbly opened the door and cried, "Mr. Rushbrook, I am come to comfort you." "That you have always done," said he, rising in rapture to receive her, even in the midst of all his sadness. "What is it you want?" said she. "What have you asked of my father that he has denied you?" "I have asked for that," replied he, "which is dearer to me than my life." "Be satisfied then," returned she, "for you shall have it." "Dear Matilda! it is not in your power to bestow." "But he has told me it _shall_ be in my power; and has desired me to give, or to refuse it you, at my own pleasure." "O Heavens!" cried Rushbrook in transport, "Has he?" "He has indeed--before Mr. Sandford and Miss Woodley. Now tell me what you petitioned for?" "I asked him," cried Rushbrook, trembling, "for a wife." Her hand, which had just then taken hold of his, in the warmth of her wish to serve him, now dropped down as with the stroke of death--her face lost its colour--and she leaned against the desk by which they were standing, without uttering a word. "What means this change?" said he; "Do you not wish me happy?" "Yes," she exclaimed: "Heaven is my witness. But it gives me concern to think we must part." "Then let us be joined," cried he, falling at her feet, "till death alone can part us." All the sensibility--the reserve--the pride, with which she was so amply possessed, returned to her that moment. She started and cried, "Could Lord Elmwood know for what he sent me?" "He did," replied Rushbrook--"I boldly told him of my presumptuous love, and he has given to you alone, the power over my happiness or misery. Oh! do not doom me to the latter." Whether the heart of Matilda, such as it has been described, _could_ sentence him to misery, the reader is left to surmise--and if he supposes that it could _not_, he has every reason to suppose that their wedded life, was--a life of happiness. He has beheld the pernicious effects of an _improper education_ in the destiny which attended the unthinking Miss Milner.--On the opposite side, what may not be hoped from that school of prudence--though of adversity--in which Matilda was bred? And Mr. Milner, Matilda's grandfather, had better have given his _fortune_ to a distant branch of his family--as Matilda's father once meant to do--so that he had given to his daughter A PROPER EDUCATION. PLAYS written by MRS. INCHBALD, and published by G. G. and J. ROBINSON, Paternoster Row. LOVER'S VOWS; A Play in five Acts, from the German of KOTZEBUE. WIVES AS THEY WERE, AND MAIDS AS THEY ARE. EVERY ONE HAS HIS FAULT. I'LL TELL YOU WHAT, Comedies in five Acts. SUCH THINGS ARE, A Play in five Acts. THE MARRIED MAN, A Comedy, Price 1s. 6d. each. THE CHILD OF NATURE. APPEARANCE IS AGAINST THEM. THE WIDOW'S VOW. THE MIDNIGHT HOUR, A Comedy. THE WEDDING DAY, Price One Shilling each. NATURE AND ART, The Second Edition, in Two Volumes, Price 7s. sewed. 
31484	----	THE WORKS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON SWANSTON EDITION VOLUME VIII _Of this SWANSTON EDITION in Twenty-five Volumes of the Works of ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON Two Thousand and Sixty Copies have been printed, of which only Two Thousand Copies are for sale._ _This is No. ........._ [Illustration: FACSIMILE OF A DRAWING BY R. L. S. WHEN HE WAS STAYING AT LE MONASTIER IN 1878] THE WORKS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON VOLUME EIGHT LONDON : PUBLISHED BY CHATTO AND WINDUS : IN ASSOCIATION WITH CASSELL AND COMPANY LIMITED : WILLIAM HEINEMANN : AND LONGMANS GREEN AND COMPANY MDCCCCXI ALL RIGHTS RESERVED CONTENTS THE BLACK ARROW PROLOGUE PAGE John Amend-all 7 BOOK I.--THE TWO LADS CHAPTER I. AT THE SIGN OF THE "SUN" IN KETTLEY 25 II. IN THE FEN 34 III. THE FEN FERRY 40 IV. A GREENWOOD COMPANY 48 V. "BLOODY AS THE HUNTER" 56 VI. TO THE DAY'S END 65 VII. THE HOODED FACE 72 BOOK II.--THE MOAT HOUSE I. DICK ASKS QUESTIONS 83 II. THE TWO OATHS 92 III. THE ROOM OVER THE CHAPEL 100 IV. THE PASSAGE 107 V. HOW DICK CHANGED SIDES 112 BOOK III.--MY LORD FOXHAM I. THE HOUSE BY THE SHORE 123 II. A SKIRMISH IN THE DARK 131 III. ST. BRIDE'S CROSS 138 IV. THE "GOOD HOPE" 142 V. THE "GOOD HOPE" (_continued_) 151 VI. THE "GOOD HOPE" (_concluded_) 157 BOOK IV.--THE DISGUISE I. THE DEN 165 II. "IN MINE ENEMIES' HOUSE" 173 III. THE DEAD SPY 183 IV. IN THE ABBEY CHURCH 191 V. EARL RISINGHAM 200 VI. ARBLASTER AGAIN 204 BOOK V.--CROOKBACK I. THE SHRILL TRUMPET 217 II. THE BATTLE OF SHOREBY 224 III. THE BATTLE OF SHOREBY (_concluded_) 231 IV. THE SACK OF SHOREBY 236 V. NIGHT IN THE WOODS: ALICIA RISINGHAM 246 VI. NIGHT IN THE WOODS (_concluded_): DICK AND JOAN 254 VII. DICK'S REVENGE 264 VIII. CONCLUSION 268 MARKHEIM 273 THE BLACK ARROW A TALE OF THE TWO ROSES _CRITIC ON THE HEARTH_ _No one but myself knows what I have suffered, nor what my books have gained, by your unsleeping watchfulness and admirable pertinacity. And now here is a volume that goes into the world and lacks your_ imprimatur: _a strange thing in our joint lives; and the reason of it stranger still! I have watched with interest, with pain, and at length with amusement, your unavailing attempts to peruse "The Black Arrow"; and I think I should lack humour indeed, if I let the occasion slip and did not place your name in the fly-leaf of the only book of mine that you have never read--and never will read._ _That others may display more constancy is still my hope. The tale was written years ago for a particular audience and (I may say) in rivalry with a particular author; I think I should do well to name him--Mr. Alfred R. Phillips. It was not without its reward at the time. I could not, indeed, displace Mr. Phillips from his well-won priority; but in the eyes of readers who thought less than nothing of "Treasure Island," "The Black Arrow" was supposed to mark a clear advance. Those who read volumes and those who read story papers belong to different worlds. The verdict on "Treasure Island" was reversed in the other court: I wonder, will it be the same with its successor?_ _R. L. S._ _Saranac Lake, April 8, 1888._ PROLOGUE JOHN AMEND-ALL THE BLACK ARROW A TALE OF THE TWO ROSES PROLOGUE JOHN AMEND-ALL On a certain afternoon, in the late spring-time, the bell upon Tunstall Moat House was heard ringing at an unaccustomed hour. Far and near, in the forest and in the fields along the river, people began to desert their labours and hurry towards the sound; and in Tunstall hamlet a group of poor country-folk stood wondering at the summons. Tunstall hamlet at that period, in the reign of old King Henry VI., wore much the same appearance as it wears to-day. A score or so of houses, heavily framed with oak, stood scattered in a long green valley ascending from the river. At the foot, the road crossed a bridge, and mounting on the other side, disappeared into the fringes of the forest on its way to the Moat House, and further forth to Holywood Abbey. Half-way up the village, the church stood among yews. On every side the slopes were crowned and the view bounded by the green elms and greening oak-trees of the forest. Hard by the bridge there was a stone cross upon a knoll, and here the group had collected--half a dozen women and one tall fellow in a russet smock--discussing what the bell betided. An express had gone through the hamlet half an hour before, and drunk a pot of ale in the saddle, not daring to dismount for the hurry of his errand; but he had been ignorant himself of what was forward, and only bore sealed letters from Sir Daniel Brackley to Sir Oliver Oates, the parson, who kept the Moat House in the master's absence. But now there was the noise of a horse; and soon, out of the edge of the wood and over the echoing bridge, there rode up young Master Richard Shelton, Sir Daniel's ward. He, at the least, would know, and they hailed him and begged him to explain. He drew bridle willingly enough--a young fellow not yet eighteen, sun-browned and grey-eyed, in a jacket of deer's leather, with a black velvet collar, a green hood upon his head, and a steel crossbow at his back. The express, it appeared, had brought great news. A battle was impending. Sir Daniel had sent for every man that could draw a bow or carry a bill to go post-haste to Kettley, under pain of his severe displeasure; but for whom they were to fight, or of where the battle was expected, Dick knew nothing. Sir Oliver would come shortly himself, and Bennet Hatch was arming at that moment, for he it was who should lead the party. "It is the ruin of this kind land," a woman said. "If the barons live at war, ploughfolk must eat roots." "Nay," said Dick; "every man that follows shall have sixpence a day, and archers twelve." "If they live," returned the woman, "that may very well be; but how if they die, my master?" "They cannot better die than for their natural lord," said Dick. "No natural lord of mine," said the man in the smock. "I followed the Walsinghams; so we all did down Brierly way, till two years ago come Candlemas. And now I must side with Brackley! It was the law that did it; call ye that natural? But now, what with Sir Daniel and what with Sir Oliver--that knows more of law than honesty--I have no natural lord but poor King Harry the Sixt, God bless him!--the poor innocent that cannot tell his right hand from his left." "Ye speak with an ill tongue, friend," answered Dick, "to miscall your good master and my lord the king in the same libel. But King Harry--praised be the saints!--has come again into his right mind, and will have all things peaceably ordained. And as for Sir Daniel, y' are very brave behind his back. But I will be no tale-bearer; and let that suffice." "I say no harm of you, Master Richard," returned the peasant. "Y' are a lad; but when ye come to a man's inches, ye will find ye have an empty pocket. I say no more: the saints help Sir Daniel's neighbours, and the Blessed Maid protect his wards!" "Clipsby," said Richard, "you speak what I cannot hear with honour. Sir Daniel is my good master, and my guardian." "Come, now, will ye read me a riddle?" returned Clipsby. "On whose side is Sir Daniel?" "I know not," said Dick, colouring a little; for his guardian had changed sides continually in the troubles of that period, and every change had brought him some increase of fortune. "Ay," returned Clipsby, "you, nor no man. For indeed, he is one that goes to bed Lancaster and gets up York." Just then the bridge rang under horse-shoe iron, and the party turned and saw Bennet Hatch come galloping--a brown-faced, grizzled fellow, heavy of hand and grim of mien, armed with sword and spear, a steel salet on his head, a leather jack upon his body. He was a great man in these parts; Sir Daniel's right hand in peace and war, and at that time, by his master's interest, bailiff of the hundred. "Clipsby," he shouted, "off to the Moat House, and send all other laggards the same gate. Bowyer will give you jack and salet. We must ride before curfew. Look to it: him that is last at the lych-gate Sir Daniel shall reward. Look to it right well! I know you for a man of naught.--Nance," he added, to one of the women, "is old Appleyard up town?" "I'll warrant you," replied the woman. "In his field, for sure." So the group dispersed, and while Clipsby walked leisurely over the bridge, Bennet and young Shelton rode up the road together, through the village and past the church. "You will see the old shrew," said Bennet. "He will waste more time grumbling and prating of Harry the Fift than would serve a man to shoe a horse. And all because he has been to the French wars!" The house to which they were bound was the last in the village, standing alone among lilacs; and beyond it, on three sides, there was open meadow rising towards the borders of the wood. Hatch dismounted, threw his rein over the fence, and walked down the field, Dick keeping close at his elbow, to where the old soldier was digging, knee-deep in his cabbages, and now and again, in a cracked voice, singing a snatch of song. He was all dressed in leather, only his hood and tippet were of black frieze, and tied with scarlet; his face was like a walnut-shell, both for colour and wrinkles; but his old grey eye was still clear enough, and his sight unabated. Perhaps he was deaf; perhaps he thought it unworthy of an old archer of Agincourt to pay any heed to such disturbances; but neither the surly notes of the alarm-bell, nor the near approach of Bennet and the lad, appeared at all to move him; and he continued obstinately digging, and piped up, very thin and shaky: "Now, dear lady, if thy will be, I pray you that you will rue on me." "Nick Appleyard," said Hatch, "Sir Oliver commends him to you, and bids that ye shall come within this hour to the Moat House, there to take command." The old fellow looked up. "Save you, my master!" he said, grinning. "And where goeth Master Hatch?" "Master Hatch is off to Kettley, with every man that we can horse," returned Bennet. "There is a fight toward, it seems, and my lord stays a reinforcement." "Ay, verily," returned Appleyard. "And what will ye leave me to garrison withal?" "I leave you six good men, and Sir Oliver to boot," answered Hatch. "It'll not hold the place," said Appleyard; "the number sufficeth not. It would take two score to make it good." "Why, it's for that we came to you, old shrew!" replied the other. "Who else is there but you that could do aught in such a house with such a garrison?" "Ay! when the pinch comes, ye remember the old shoe," returned Nick. "There is not a man of you can back a horse or hold a bill; and as for archery--St. Michael! if old Harry the Fift were back again, he would stand and let ye shoot at him for a farthing a shoot!" "Nay, Nick, there's some can draw a good bow yet," said Bennet. "Draw a good bow!" cried Appleyard. "Yes! But who'll shoot me a good shoot? It's there the eye comes in, and the head between your shoulders. Now, what might you call a long shoot, Bennet Hatch?" "Well," said Bennet, looking about him, "it would be a long shoot from here into the forest." "Ay, it would be a longish shoot," said the old fellow, turning to look over his shoulder; and then he put up his hand over his eyes, and stood staring. "Why, what are you looking at?" asked Bennet, with a chuckle. "Do you see Harry the Fift?" The veteran continued looking up the hill in silence. The sun shone broadly over the shelving meadows; a few white sheep wandered browsing; all was still but the distant jangle of the bell. "What is it, Appleyard?" asked Dick. "Why, the birds," said Appleyard. And, sure enough, over the top of the forest, where it ran down in a tongue among the meadows, and ended in a pair of goodly green elms, about a bowshot from the field where they were standing, a flight of birds was skimming to and fro, in evident disorder. "What of the birds?" said Bennet. "Ay!" returned Appleyard, "y' are a wise man to go to war, Master Bennet. Birds are a good sentry; in forest places they be the first line of battle. Look you, now, if we lay here in camp, there might be archers skulking down to get the wind of us; and here would you be, none the wiser!" "Why, old shrew," said Hatch, "there be no men nearer us than Sir Daniel's, at Kettley; y' are as safe as in London Tower; and ye raise scares upon a man for a few chaffinches and sparrows!" "Hear him!" grinned Appleyard. "How many a rogue would give his two crop ears to have a shoot at either of us! St. Michael, man! they hate us like two pole-cats!" "Well, sooth it is, they hate Sir Daniel," answered Hatch, a little sobered. "Ay, they hate Sir Daniel, and they hate every man that serves with him," said Appleyard; "and in the first order of hating, they hate Bennet Hatch and old Nicholas the bowman. See ye here: if there was a stout fellow yonder in the wood-edge, and you and I stood fair for him--as, by St. George, we stand!--which, think ye, would he choose?" "You, for a good wager," answered Hatch. "My surcoat to a leather belt, it would be you!" cried the old archer. "Ye burned Grimstone, Bennet--they'll ne'er forgive you that, my master. And as for me, I'll soon be in a good place, God grant, and out of bow-shoot--ay, and cannon-shoot--of all their malices. I am an old man, and draw fast to homeward, where the bed is ready. But for you, Bennet, y' are to remain behind here at your own peril, and if ye come to my years unhanged, the old true-blue English spirit will be dead." "Y' are the shrewishest old dolt in Tunstall Forest," returned Hatch, visibly ruffled by these threats. "Get ye to your arms before Sir Oliver come, and leave prating for one good while. An ye had talked so much with Harry the Fift, his ears would ha' been richer than his pocket." An arrow sang in the air, like a huge hornet; it struck old Appleyard between the shoulder-blades, and pierced him clean through, and he fell forward on his face among the cabbages. Hatch, with a broken cry, leapt into the air; then, stooping double, he ran for the cover of the house. And in the meanwhile Dick Shelton had dropped behind a lilac, and had his crossbow bent and shouldered, covering the point of the forest. Not a leaf stirred. The sheep were patiently browsing; the birds had settled. But there lay the old man, with a clothyard arrow standing in his back; and there were Hatch holding to the gable, and Dick crouching and ready behind the lilac bush. "D'ye see aught?" cried Hatch. "Not a twig stirs," said Dick. "I think shame to leave him lying," said Bennet, coming forward once more with hesitating steps and a very pale countenance. "Keep a good eye on the wood, Master Shelton--keep a clear eye on the wood. The saints assoil us! here was a good shoot!" Bennet raised the old archer on his knee. He was not yet dead; his face worked, and his eyes shut and opened like machinery, and he had a most horrible, ugly look of one in pain. "Can ye hear, old Nick?" asked Hatch. "Have ye a last wish before ye wend, old brother?" "Pluck out the shaft, and let me pass, a' Mary's name!" gasped Appleyard, "I be done with Old England. Pluck it out!" "Master Dick," said Bennet, "come hither, and pull me a good pull upon the arrow. He would fain pass, the poor sinner." Dick laid down his crossbow, and pulling hard upon the arrow, drew it forth. A gush of blood followed; the old archer scrambled half upon his feet, called once upon the name of God, and then fell dead. Hatch, upon his knees among the cabbages, prayed fervently for the welfare of the passing spirit. But even as he prayed, it was plain that his mind was still divided, and he kept ever an eye upon the corner of the wood from which the shot had come. When he had done, he got to his feet again, drew off one of his mailed gauntlets, and wiped his pale face, which was all wet with terror. "Ay," he said, "it'll be my turn next." "Who hath done this, Bennet?" Richard asked, still holding the arrow in his hand. "Nay, the saints know," said Hatch. "Here are a good two score Christian souls that we have hunted out of house and holding, he and I. He has paid his shot, poor shrew, nor will it be long, mayhap, ere I pay mine. Sir Daniel driveth over-hard." "This is a strange shaft," said the lad, looking at the arrow in his hand. "Ay, by my faith!" cried Bennet. "Black, and black-feathered. Here is an ill-favoured shaft, by my sooth! for black, they say, bodes burial. And here be words written. Wipe the blood away. What read ye?" "'_Appulyaird fro Jon Amend-All_,'" read Shelton. "What should this betoken?" "Nay, I like it not," returned the retainer, shaking his head. "John Amend-All! Here is a rogue's name for those that be up in the world! But why stand we here to make a mark? Take him by the knees, good Master Shelton, while I lift him by the shoulders, and let us lay him in his house. This will be a rare shog to poor Sir Oliver; he will turn paper-colour; he will pray like a windmill." They took up the old archer, and carried him between them into his house, where he had dwelt alone. And there they laid him on the floor, out of regard for the mattress, and sought, as best they might, to straighten and compose his limbs. Appleyard's house was clean and bare. There was a bed, with a blue cover, a cupboard, a great chest, a pair of joint-stools, a hinged table in the chimney-corner, and hung upon the wall the old soldier's armoury of bows and defensive armour. Hatch began to look about him curiously. "Nick had money," he said. "He may have had three score pounds put by. I would I could light upon't! When ye lose an old friend, Master Richard, the best consolation is to heir him. See, now, this chest. I would go a mighty wager there is a bushel of gold therein. He had a strong hand to get, and a hard hand to keep withal, had Appleyard the archer. Now may God rest his spirit! Near eighty year he was afoot and about, and ever getting; but now he's on the broad of his back, poor shrew, and no more lacketh; and if his chattels came to a good friend, he would be merrier, methinks, in heaven." "Come, Hatch," said Dick, "respect his stone-blind eyes. Would ye rob the man before his body? Nay, he would walk!" Hatch made several signs of the cross; but by this time his natural complexion had returned, and he was not easily to be dashed from any purpose. It would have gone hard with the chest had not the gate sounded, and presently after the door of the house opened and admitted a tall, portly, ruddy, black-eyed man of near fifty, in a surplice and black robe. "Appleyard," the newcomer was saying, as he entered, but he stopped dead. "Ave Maria!" he cried. "Saints be our shield! What cheer is this?" "Cold cheer with Appleyard, sir parson," answered Hatch, with perfect cheerfulness. "Shot at his own door, and alighteth even now at purgatory gates. Ay! there, if tales be true, he shall lack neither coal nor candle." Sir Oliver groped his way to a joint-stool, and sat down upon it, sick and white. "This is a judgment! O, a great stroke!" he sobbed, and rattled off a leash of prayers. Hatch meanwhile reverently doffed his salet and knelt down. "Ay, Bennet," said the priest, somewhat recovering, "and what may this be? What enemy hath done this?" "Here, Sir Oliver, is the arrow. See, it is written upon with words," said Dick. "Nay," cried the priest, "this is a foul hearing! John Amend-All! A right Lollardy word. And black of hue, as for an omen! Sirs, this knave arrow likes me not. But it importeth rather to take counsel. Who should this be? Bethink you, Bennet. Of so many black ill-willers, which should he be that doth so hardily outface us? Simnel? I do much question it. The Walsinghams? Nay, they are not yet so broken; they still think to have the law over us, when times change. There was Simon Malmesbury, too. How think ye, Bennet?" "What think ye, sir," returned Hatch, "of Ellis Duckworth?" "Nay, Bennet, never. Nay, not he," said the priest. "There cometh never any rising, Bennet, from below--so all judicious chroniclers concord in their opinion; but rebellion travelleth ever downward from above; and when Dick, Tom, and Harry take them to their bills, look ever narrowly to see what lord is profited thereby. Now, Sir Daniel, having once more joined him to the Queen's party, is in ill odour with the Yorkist lords. Thence, Bennet, comes the blow--by what procuring, I yet seek; but therein lies the nerve of this discomfiture." "An't please you, Sir Oliver," said Bennet, "the axles are so hot in this country that I have long been smelling fire. So did this poor sinner, Appleyard. And, by your leave, men's spirits are so foully inclined to all of us, that it needs neither York nor Lancaster to spur them on. Hear my plain thoughts: You, that are a clerk, and Sir Daniel, that sails on any wind, ye have taken many men's goods, and beaten and hanged not a few. Y' are called to count for this; in the end, I wot not how, ye have ever the uppermost at law, and ye think all patched. But give me leave, Sir Oliver: the man that ye have dispossessed and beaten is but the angrier, and some day, when the black devil is by, he will up with his bow and clout me a yard of arrow through your inwards." "Nay, Bennet, y' are in the wrong. Bennet, ye should be glad to be corrected," said Sir Oliver. "Y' are a prater, Bennet, a talker, a babbler; your mouth is wider than your two ears. Mend it, Bennet, mend it." "Nay, I say no more. Have it as ye list," said the retainer. The priest now rose from the stool, and from the writing-case that hung about his neck took forth wax and a taper, and a flint and steel. With these he sealed up the chest and the cupboard with Sir Daniel's arms, Hatch looking on disconsolate; and then the whole party proceeded, somewhat timorously, to sally from the house and get to horse. "'Tis time we were on the road, Sir Oliver," said Hatch, as he held the priest's stirrup while he mounted. "Ay; but, Bennet, things are changed," returned the parson. "There is now no Appleyard--rest his soul!--to keep the garrison. I shall keep you, Bennet. I must have a good man to rest me on in this day of black arrows. 'The arrow that flieth by day,' saith the evangel; I have no mind of the context; nay, I am a sluggard priest, I am too deep in men's affairs. Well, let us ride forth, Master Hatch. The jackmen should be at the church by now." So they rode forward down the road, with the wind after them, blowing the tails of the parson's cloak; and behind them, as they went, clouds began to arise and blot out the sinking sun. They had passed three of the scattered houses that make up Tunstall hamlet, when, coming to a turn, they saw the church before them. Ten or a dozen houses clustered immediately round it; but to the back the churchyard was next the meadows. At the lych-gate, near a score of men were gathered, some in the saddle, some standing by their horses' heads. They were variously armed and mounted; some with spears, some with bills, some with bows, and some bestriding plough-horses, still splashed with the mire of the furrow; for these were the very dregs of the country, and all the better men and the fair equipments were already with Sir Daniel in the field. "We have not done amiss, praised be the cross of Holywood! Sir Daniel will be right well content," observed the priest, inwardly numbering the troop. "Who goes? Stand! if ye be true!" shouted Bennet. A man was seen slipping through the churchyard among the yews; and at the sound of this summons he discarded all concealment, and fairly took to his heels for the forest. The men at the gate, who had been hitherto unaware of the stranger's presence, woke and scattered. Those who had dismounted began scrambling into the saddle: the rest rode in pursuit; but they had to make the circuit of the consecrated ground, and it was plain their quarry would escape them. Hatch, roaring an oath, put his horse at the hedge, to head him off; but the beast refused, and sent his rider sprawling in the dust. And though he was up again in a moment, and had caught the bridle, the time had gone by, and the fugitive had gained too great a lead for any hope of capture. The wisest of all had been Dick Shelton. Instead of starting in a vain pursuit, he had whipped his crossbow from his back, bent it, and set a quarrel to the string; and now, when the others had desisted, he turned to Bennet, and asked if he should shoot. "Shoot! shoot!" cried the priest, with sanguinary violence. "Cover him, Master Dick," said Bennet. "Bring me him down like a ripe apple." The fugitive was now within but a few leaps of safety; but this last part of the meadow ran very steeply uphill, and the man ran slower in proportion. What with the greyness of the falling night, and the uneven movements of the runner, it was no easy aim; and as Dick levelled his bow, he felt a kind of pity, and a half desire that he might miss. The quarrel sped. The man stumbled and fell, and a great cheer arose from Hatch and the pursuers. But they were counting their corn before the harvest. The man fell lightly; he was lightly afoot again, turned and waved his cap in a bravado, and was out of sight next moment in the margin of the wood. "And the plague go with him!" cried Bennet. "He has thieves' heels: he can run, by St. Banbury! But you touched him, Master Shelton; he has stolen your quarrel, may he never have good I grudge him less!" "Nay, but what made he by the church?" asked Sir Oliver. "I am shrewdly afeared there has been mischief here.--Clipsby, good fellow, get ye down from your horse, and search thoroughly among the yews." Clipsby was gone but a little while ere he returned, carrying a paper. "This writing was pinned to the church door," he said, handing it to the parson. "I found-naught else, sir parson." "Now, by the power of Mother Church," cried Sir Oliver, "but this runs hard on sacrilege! For the king's good pleasure, or the lord of the manor--well! But that every run-the-hedge in a green jerkin should fasten papers to the chancel door--nay, it runs hard on sacrilege, hard; and men have burned for matters of less weight! But what have we here? The light fails apace. Good Master Richard, y' have young eyes. Read me, I pray, this libel." Dick Shelton took the paper in his hand and read it aloud. It contained some lines of a very rugged doggerel, hardly even rhyming, written in a gross character, and most uncouthly spelt. With the spelling somewhat bettered, this is how they ran:-- "I had four blak arrows under my belt, Four for the greefs that I have felt, Four for the nomber of ill menne That have oppressid me now and then. One is gone; one is wele sped; Old Apulyaird is ded. One is for Maister Bennet Hatch, That burned Grimstone, walls and thatch. One for Sir Oliver Oates, That cut Sir Harry Shelton's throat. Sir Daniel, ye shull have the fourt; We shall think it fair sport. Ye shull each have your own part, A blak arrow in each blak heart. Get ye to your knees for to pray: Ye are ded theeves, by yea and nay! "JON AMEND-ALL of the Green Wood, And his jolly fellaweship. "Item, we have mo arrowes and goode hempen cord for otheres of your following." "Now, well-a-day for charity and the Christian graces!" cried Sir Oliver lamentably. "Sirs, this is an ill world, and groweth daily worse. I will swear upon the cross of Holywood I am as innocent of that good knight's hurt, whether in act or purpose, as the babe unchristened. Neither was his throat cut; for therein they are again in error, as there still live credible witnesses to show." "It boots not, sir parson," said Bennet. "Here is unseasonable talk." "Nay, Master Bennet, not so. Keep ye in your due place, good Bennet," answered the priest. "I shall make mine innocence appear. I will upon no consideration lose my poor life in error. I take all men to witness that I am clear of this matter. I was not even in the Moat House. I was sent of an errand before nine upon the clock----" "Sir Oliver," said Hatch, interrupting, "since it please you not to stop this sermon, I will take other means.--Goffe, sound to horse." And while the tucket was sounding, Bennet moved close to the bewildered parson, and whispered violently in his ear. Dick Shelton saw the priest's eye turned upon him for an instant in a startled glance. He had some cause for thought; for this Sir Harry Shelton was his own natural father. But he said never a word, and kept his countenance unmoved. Hatch and Sir Oliver discussed together for a while their altered situation; ten men, it was decided between them, should be reserved, not only to garrison the Moat House, but to escort the priest across the wood. In the meantime, as Bennet was to remain behind, the command of the reinforcement was given to Master Shelton. Indeed, there was no choice; the men were loutish fellows, dull and unskilled in war, while Dick was not only popular, but resolute and grave beyond his age. Although his youth had been spent in these rough country places, the lad had been well taught in letters by Sir Oliver, and Hatch himself had shown him the management of arms and the first principles of command. Bennet had always been kind and helpful; he was one of those who are cruel as the grave to those they call their enemies, but ruggedly faithful and well-willing to their friends; and now, while Sir Oliver entered the next house to write, in his swift, exquisite penmanship, a memorandum of the last occurrences to his master, Sir Daniel Brackley, Bennet came up to his pupil to wish him God-speed upon his enterprise. "Ye must go the long way about, Master Shelton," he said; "round by the bridge, for your life! Keep a sure man, fifty paces afore you, to draw shots; and go softly till y' are past the wood. If the rogues fall upon you, ride for 't; ye will do naught by standing. And keep ever forward, Master Shelton; turn me not back again, an ye love your life; there is no help in Tunstall, mind ye that. And now, since ye go to the great wars about the king, and I continue to dwell here in extreme jeopardy of my life, and the saints alone can certify if we shall meet again below, I give you my last counsels now at your riding. Keep an eye on Sir Daniel; he is unsure. Put not your trust in the jack-priest; he intendeth not amiss, but doth the will of others; it is a hand-gun for Sir Daniel! Get you good lordship where ye go; make you strong friends; look to it. And think ever a paternoster-while on Bennet Hatch. There are worse rogues afoot than Bennet. So, God-speed!" "And Heaven be with you, Bennet!" returned Dick. "Ye were a good friend to me-ward, and so I shall say ever." "And look ye, master," added Hatch, with a certain embarrassment, "if this Amend-All should get a shaft into me, ye might, mayhap, lay out a gold mark or mayhap a pound for my poor soul; for it is like to go stiff with me in purgatory." "Ye shall have your will of it, Bennet," answered Dick. "But, what cheer, man! we shall meet again, where ye shall have more need of ale than masses." "The saints so grant it, Master Dick!" returned the other. "But here comes Sir Oliver. An he were as quick with the long-bow as with the pen, he would be a brave man-at-arms." Sir Oliver gave Dick a sealed packet, with this superscription: "To my ryght worchypful master, Sir Daniel Brackley, knyght, be thys delyvered in haste." And Dick, putting it in the bosom of his jacket, gave the word and set forth westward up the village. BOOK I THE TWO LADS CHAPTER I AT THE SIGN OF THE "SUN" IN KETTLEY Sir Daniel and his men lay in and about Kettley that night, warmly quartered and well patrolled. But the Knight of Tunstall was one who never rested from money-getting; and even now, when he was on the brink of an adventure which should make or mar him, he was up an hour after midnight to squeeze poor neighbours. He was one who trafficked greatly in disputed inheritances; it was his way to buy out the most unlikely claimant, and then, by the favour he curried with great lords about the king, procure unjust decisions in his favour; or, if that was too round-about, to seize the disputed manor by force of arms, and rely on his influence and Sir Oliver's cunning in the law to hold what he had snatched. Kettley was one such place; it had come very lately into his clutches; he still met with opposition from the tenants; and it was to overawe discontent that he had led his troops that way. By two in the morning, Sir Daniel sat in the inn room, close by the fireside, for it was cold at that hour among the fens of Kettley. By his elbow stood a pottle of spiced ale. He had taken off his visored headpiece, and sat with his bald head and thin dark visage resting on one hand, wrapped warmly in a sanguine-coloured cloak. At the lower end of the room about a dozen of his men stood sentry over the door or lay asleep on benches; and, somewhat nearer hand, a young lad apparently of twelve or thirteen was stretched in a mantle on the floor. The host of the "Sun" stood before the great man. "Now, mark me, mine host," Sir Daniel said, "follow but mine orders, and I shall be your good lord ever. I must have good men for head boroughs, and I will have Adam-a-More high constable; see to it narrowly. If other men be chosen, it shall avail you nothing; rather it shall be found to your sore cost. For those that have paid rent to Walsingham I shall take good measure--you among the rest, mine host." "Good knight," said the host, "I will swear upon the cross of Holywood I did but pay to Walsingham upon compulsion. Nay, bully knight, I love not the rogue Walsinghams; they were as poor as thieves, bully knight. Give me a great lord like you. Nay; ask me among the neighbours, I am stout for Brackley." "It may be," said Sir Daniel drily. "Ye shall then pay twice." The innkeeper made a horrid grimace; but this was a piece of bad luck that might readily befall a tenant in these unruly times, and he was perhaps glad to make his peace so easily. "Bring up yon fellow, Selden!" cried the knight. And one of his retainers led up a poor, cringing old man, as pale as a candle, and all shaking with the fen fever. "Sirrah," said Sir Daniel, "your name?" "An't please your worship," replied the man, "my name is Condall--Condall of Shoreby, at your good worship's pleasure." "I have heard you ill reported on," returned the knight. "Ye deal in treason, rogue; ye trudge the country leasing; y' are heavily suspicioned of the death of severals. How, fellow, are ye so bold? But I will bring you down." "Right honourable and my reverend lord," the man cried, "here is some hodge-podge, saving your good presence. I am but a poor private man, and have hurt none." "The under-sheriff did report of you most vilely," said the knight. "'Seize me,' saith he, 'that Tyndal of Shoreby.'" "Condall, my good lord; Condall is my poor name," said the unfortunate. "Condall or Tyndal, it is all one," replied Sir Daniel coolly. "For, by my sooth, y' are here, and I do mightily suspect your honesty. If you would save your neck, write me swiftly an obligation for twenty pound." "For twenty pound, my good lord!" cried Condall. "Here is midsummer madness! My whole estate amounteth not to seventy shillings." "Condall or Tyndal," returned Sir Daniel, grinning, "I will run my peril of that loss. Write me down twenty, and when I have recovered all I may, I will be good lord to you, and pardon you the rest." "Alas! my good lord, it may not be; I have no skill to write," said Condall. "Well-a-day!" returned the knight. "Here, then, is no remedy. Yet I would fain have spared you, Tyndal, had my conscience suffered.--Selden, take me this old shrew softly to the nearest elm, and hang me him tenderly by the neck, where I may see him at my riding. Fare ye well, good Master Condall, dear Master Tyndal; y' are post-haste for Paradise; fare ye then well!" "Nay, my right pleasant lord," replied Condall, forcing an obsequious smile, "an ye be so masterful, as doth right well become you, I will even, with all my poor skill, do your good bidding." "Friend," quoth Sir Daniel, "ye will now write two score. Go to! y' are too cunning for a livelihood of seventy shillings. Selden, see him write me this in good form, and have it duly witnessed." And Sir Daniel, who was a very merry knight, none merrier in England, took a drink of his mulled ale, and lay back, smiling. Meanwhile the boy upon the floor began to stir, and presently sat up and looked about him with a scare. "Hither," said Sir Daniel; and as the other rose at his command and came slowly towards him, he leaned back and laughed outright. "By the rood!" he cried, "a sturdy boy!" The lad flashed crimson with anger, and darted a look of hate out of his dark eyes. Now that he was on his legs, it was more difficult to make certain of his age. His face looked somewhat older in expression, but it was as smooth as a young child's; and in bone and body he was unusually slender, and somewhat awkward of gait. "Ye have called me, Sir Daniel," he said. "Was it to laugh at my poor plight?" "Nay, now, let laugh," said the knight. "Good shrew, let laugh, I pray you. An ye could see yourself, I warrant ye would laugh the first." "Well," cried the lad, flushing, "ye shall answer this when ye answer for the other. Laugh while yet ye may!" "Nay, now, good cousin," replied Sir Daniel, with some earnestness, "think not that I mock at you, except in mirth, as between kinsfolk and singular friends. I will make you a marriage of a thousand pounds, go to! and cherish you exceedingly. I took you, indeed, roughly, as the time demanded; but from henceforth I shall ungrudgingly maintain and cheerfully serve you. Ye shall be Mrs. Shelton--Lady Shelton, by my troth! for the lad promiseth bravely. Tut! ye will not shy for honest laughter; it purgeth melancholy. They are no rogues who laugh, good cousin.--Good mine host, lay me a meal now for my cousin, Master John.--Sit ye down, sweetheart, and eat." "Nay," said Master John, "I will break no bread. Since ye force me to this sin, I will fast for my soul's interest.--But, good mine host, I pray you of courtesy give me a cup of fair water; I shall be much beholden to your courtesy indeed." "Ye shall have a dispensation, go to!" cried the knight. "Shalt be well shriven, by my faith! Content you, then, and eat." But the lad was obstinate, drank a cup of water, and, once more wrapping himself closely in his mantle, sat in a far corner, brooding. In an hour or two there rose a stir in the village of sentries challenging and the clatter of arms and horses; and then a troop drew up by the inn-door, and Richard Shelton, splashed with mud, presented himself upon the threshold. "Save you, Sir Daniel," he said. "How! Dickie Shelton!" cried the knight; and at the mention of Dick's name the other lad looked curiously across. "What maketh Bennet Hatch?" "Please you, sir knight, to take cognisance of this packet from Sir Oliver, wherein are all things fully stated," answered Richard, presenting the priest's letter. "And please you farther, ye were best make all speed to Risingham; for on the way hither we encountered one riding furiously with letters, and by his report, my Lord of Risingham was sore bestead, and lacked exceedingly your presence." "How say you? Sore bestead?" returned the knight. "Nay, then, we will make speed sitting down, good Richard. As the world goes in this poor realm of England, he that rides softliest rides surest. Delay, they say, begetteth peril; but it is rather this itch of doing that undoes men; mark it, Dick. But let me see, first, what cattle ye have brought.--Selden, a link here at the door!" And Sir Daniel strode forth into the village street, and, by the red glow of a torch, inspected his new troops. He was an unpopular neighbour and an unpopular master; but as a leader in war he was well beloved by those who rode behind his pennant. His dash, his proved courage, his forethought for the soldiers' comfort, even his rough gibes, were all to the taste of the bold blades in jack and salet. "Nay, by the rood!" he cried, "what poor dogs are these? Here be some as crooked as a bow, and some as lean as a spear. Friends, ye shall ride in the front of the battle; I can spare you, friends. Mark me this old villain on the piebald! A two-year mutton riding on a hog would look more soldierly! Ha! Clipsby, are ye there, old rat? Y' are a man I could lose with a good heart; ye shall go in front of all, with a bull's-eye painted on your jack, to be the better butt for archery; sirrah, ye shall show me the way." "I will show you any way, Sir Daniel, but the way to change sides," returned Clipsby sturdily. Sir Daniel laughed a guffaw. "Why, well said!" he cried. "Hast a shrewd tongue in thy mouth, go to! I will forgive you for that merry word.--Selden, see them fed, both man and brute." The knight re-entered the inn. "Now, friend Dick," he said, "fall to. Here is good ale and bacon. Eat while that I read." Sir Daniel opened the packet, and as he read his brow darkened. When he had done he sat a little, musing. Then he looked sharply at his ward. "Dick," said he, "y' have seen this penny rhyme?" The lad replied in the affirmative. "It bears your father's name," continued the knight; "and our poor shrew of a parson is, by some mad soul, accused of slaying him." "He did most eagerly deny it," answered Dick. "He did?" cried the knight, very sharply. "Heed him not. He has a loose tongue; he babbles like a jack-sparrow. Some day, when I may find the leisure, Dick, I will myself more fully inform you of these matters. There was one Duckworth shrewdly blamed for it; but the times were troubled, and there was no justice to be got." "It befell at the Moat House?" Dick ventured, with a beating at his heart. "It befell between the Moat House and Holywood," replied Sir Daniel calmly; but he shot a covert glance, black with suspicion, at Dick's face. "And now," added the knight, "speed you with your meal; ye shall return to Tunstall with a line from me." Dick's face fell sorely. "Prithee, Sir Daniel," he cried, "send one of the villains! I beseech you let me to the battle. I can strike a stroke, I promise you." "I misdoubt it not," replied Sir Daniel, sitting down to write. "But here, Dick, is no honour to be won. I lie in Kettley till I have sure tidings of the war, and then ride to join me with the conqueror. Cry not on cowardice; it is but wisdom, Dick; for this poor realm so tosseth with rebellion, and the king's name and custody so changeth hands, that no man may be certain of the morrow. Toss-pot and Shuttle-wit run in, but my Lord Good-Counsel sits o' one side, waiting." With that, Sir Daniel, turning his back to Dick, and quite at the farther end of the long table, began to write his letter, with his mouth on one side, for this business of the Black Arrow stuck sorely in his throat. Meanwhile, young Shelton was going on heartily enough with his breakfast, when he felt a touch upon his arm, and a very soft voice whispering in his ear. "Make not a sign, I do beseech you," said the voice, "but of your charity teach me the straight way to Holywood. Beseech you, now, good boy, comfort a poor soul in peril and extreme distress, and set me so far forth upon the way to my repose." "Take the path by the windmill," answered Dick, in the same tone; "it will bring you to Till Ferry; there inquire again." And without turning his head, he fell again to eating. But with the tail of his eye he caught a glimpse of the young lad called Master John stealthily creeping from the room. "Why," thought Dick, "he is as young as I. 'Good boy' doth he call me? An I had known, I should have seen the varlet hanged ere I had told him. Well, if he goes through the fen, I may come up with him and pull his ears." Half an hour later, Sir Daniel gave Dick the letter and bade him speed to the Moat House. And again, some half an hour after Dick's departure, a messenger came, in hot haste, from my Lord of Risingham. "Sir Daniel," the messenger said, "ye lose great honour, by my sooth! The fight began again this morning ere the dawn, and we have beaten their van and scattered their right wing. Only the main battle standeth fast. An we had your fresh men, we should tilt you them all into the river. What, sir knight! Will ye be the last? It stands not with your good credit." "Nay," cried the knight, "I was but now upon the march.--Selden, sound me the tucket.--Sir, I am with you on the instant. It is not two hours since the more part of my command came in, sir messenger. What would ye have? Spurring is good meat, but yet it killed the charger.--Bustle, boys!" By this time the tucket was sounding cheerily in the morning, and from all sides Sir Daniel's men poured into the main street and formed before the inn. They had slept upon their arms, with chargers saddled, and in ten minutes five score men-at-arms and archers, cleanly equipped and briskly disciplined, stood ranked and ready. The chief part were in Sir Daniel's livery, murrey and blue, which gave the greater show to their array. The best armed rode first; and away out of sight, at the tail of the column, came the sorry reinforcement of the night before. Sir Daniel looked with pride along the line. "Here be the lads to serve you in a pinch," he said. "They are pretty men, indeed," replied the messenger. "It but augments my sorrow that ye had not marched the earlier." "Well," said the knight, "what would ye? The beginning of a feast and the end of a fray, sir messenger"; and he mounted into his saddle. "Why! how now!" he cried. "John! Joanna! Nay, by the sacred rood! where is she?--Host, where is that girl?" "Girl, Sir Daniel?" cried the landlord. "Nay, sir, I saw no girl." "Boy, then, dotard!" cried the knight. "Could ye not see it was a wench? She in the murrey-coloured mantle--she that broke her fast with water, rogue--where is she?" "Nay, the saints bless us! Master John, ye called him," said the host. "Well, I thought none evil. He is gone. I saw him--her--I saw her in the stable a good hour agone; 'a was saddling a grey horse." "Now, by the rood!" cried Sir Daniel, "the wench was worth five hundred pound to me and more." "Sir knight," observed the messenger, with bitterness, "while that ye are here, roaring for five hundred pounds, the realm of England is elsewhere being lost and won." "It is well said," replied Sir Daniel.--"Selden, fall me out with six crossbowmen; hunt me her down. I care not what it cost; but, at my returning, let me find her at the Moat House. Be it upon your head.--And now, sir messenger, we march." And the troops broke into a good trot, and Selden and his six men were left behind upon the street of Kettley, with the staring villagers. CHAPTER II IN THE FEN It was near six in the May morning when Dick began to ride down into the fen upon his homeward way. The sky was all blue; the jolly wind blew loud and steady; the windmill-sails were spinning; and the willows over all the fen rippling and whitening like a field of corn. He had been all night in the saddle, but his heart was good and his body sound, and he rode right merrily. The path went down and down into the marsh, till he lost sight of all the neighbouring landmarks, but Kettley windmill on the knoll behind him, and the extreme top of Tunstall Forest far before. On either hand there were great fields of blowing reeds and willows, pools of water shaking in the wind, and treacherous bogs, as green as emerald, to tempt and to betray the traveller. The path lay almost straight through the morass. It was already very ancient; its foundation had been laid by Roman soldiery; in the lapse of ages much of it had sunk, and every here and there, for a few hundred yards, it lay submerged below the stagnant waters of the fen. About a mile from Kettley, Dick came to one such break in the plain line of causeway, where the reeds and willows grew dispersedly like little islands and confused the eye. The gap, besides, was more than usually long; it was a place where any stranger might come readily to mischief; and Dick bethought him, with something like a pang, of the lad whom he had so imperfectly directed. As for himself, one look backward to where the windmill-sails were turning black against the blue of heaven--one look forward to the high ground of Tunstall Forest, and he was sufficiently directed, and held straight on, the water washing to his horse's knees, as safe as on a highway. Half-way across, and when he had already sighted the path rising high and dry upon the farther side, he was aware of a great splashing on his right, and saw a grey horse, sunk to its belly in the mud, and still spasmodically struggling. Instantly, as though it had divined the neighbourhood of help, the poor beast began to neigh most piercingly. It rolled, meanwhile, a bloodshot eye, insane with terror; and as it sprawled wallowing in the quag, clouds of stinging insects rose and buzzed about it in the air. "Alack!" thought Dick, "can the poor lad have perished? There is his horse, for certain--a brave grey! Nay, comrade, if thou criest to me so piteously, I will do all man can to help thee. Shalt not lie there to drown by inches!" And he made ready his crossbow, and put a quarrel through the creature's head. Dick rode on after this act of rugged mercy, somewhat sobered in spirit, and looking closely about him for any sign of his less happy predecessor in the way. "I would I had dared to tell him further," he thought; "for I fear he has miscarried in the slough." And just as he was so thinking, a voice cried upon his name from the causeway side, and looking over his shoulder, he saw the lad's face peering from a clump of reeds. "Are ye there?" he said, reining in. "Ye lay so close among the reeds that I had passed you by. I saw your horse bemired, and put him from his agony! which, by my sooth! an ye had been a more merciful rider, ye had done yourself. But come forth out of your hiding. Here be none to trouble you." "Nay, good boy, I have no arms, nor skill to use them if I had," replied the other, stepping forth upon the pathway. "Why call me 'boy'?" cried Dick. "Y' are not, I trow, the elder of us twain." "Good Master Shelton," said the other, "prithee forgive me. I have none the least intention to offend. Rather I would in every way beseech your gentleness and favour, for I am now worse bestead than ever, having lost my way, my cloak, and my poor horse. To have a riding-rod and spurs, and never a horse to sit upon! And before all," he added, looking ruefully upon his clothes--"before all, to be so sorrily besmirched!" "Tut!" cried Dick. "Would ye mind a ducking? Blood of wound or dust of travel--that's a man's adornment." "Nay, then, I like him better plain," observed the lad. "But, prithee, how shall I do? Prithee, good Master Richard, help me with your good counsel. If I come not safe to Holywood, I am undone." "Nay," said Dick, dismounting, "I will give more than counsel. Take my horse, and I will run awhile, and when I am weary we shall change again, that so, riding and running, both may go the speedier." So the change was made, and they went forward as briskly as they durst on the uneven causeway, Dick with his hand upon the other's knee. "How call ye your name?" asked Dick. "Call me John Matcham," replied the lad. "And what make ye to Holywood?" Dick continued. "I seek sanctuary from a man that would oppress me," was the answer. "The good Abbot of Holywood is a strong pillar to the weak." "And how came ye with Sir Daniel, Master Matcham?" pursued Dick. "Nay," cried the other, "by the abuse of force! He hath taken me by violence from my own place; dressed me in these weeds; ridden with me till my heart was sick; gibed me till I could 'a' wept; and when certain of my friends pursued, thinking to have me back, claps me in the rear to stand their shot! I was even grazed in the right foot, and walk but lamely. Nay, there shall come a day between us; he shall smart for all!" "Would ye shoot at the moon with a hand-gun?" said Dick. "'Tis a valiant knight, and hath a hand of iron. An he guessed I had made or meddled with your flight, it would go sore with me." "Ay, poor boy," returned the other, "y' are his ward, I know it. By the same token, so am I, or so he saith; or else he hath bought my marriage--I wot not rightly which; but it is some handle to oppress me by." "Boy again!" said Dick. "Nay, then, shall I call you girl, good Richard?" asked Matcham. "Never a girl for me," returned Dick. "I do abjure the crew of them!" "Ye speak boyishly," said the other. "Ye think more of them than ye pretend." "Not I," said Dick stoutly. "They come not in my mind. A plague of them, say I! Give me to hunt and to fight and to feast, and to live with jolly foresters. I never heard of a maid yet that was for any service, save one only; and she, poor shrew, was burned for a witch and the wearing of men's clothes in spite of nature." Master Matcham crossed himself with fervour, and appeared to pray. "What make ye?" Dick inquired. "I pray for her spirit," answered the other, with a somewhat troubled voice. "For a witch's spirit?" Dick cried. "But pray for her and ye list; she was the best wench in Europe, was this Joan of Arc. Old Appleyard the archer ran from her, he said, as if she had been Mahoun. Nay, she was a brave wench." "Well, but, good Master Richard," resumed Matcham, "an ye like maids so little, y' are no true natural man; for God made them twain by intention, and brought true love into the world, to be man's hope and woman's comfort." "Faugh!" said Dick. "Y' are a milk-sopping baby, so to harp on women. An ye think I be no true man, get down upon the path, and whether at fists, backsword, or bow and arrow, I will prove my manhood on your body." "Nay, I am no fighter," replied Matcham eagerly. "I mean no tittle of offence. I meant but pleasantry. And if I talk of women, it is because I heard ye were to marry." "I to marry!" Dick exclaimed. "Well, it is the first I hear of it. And with whom was I to marry?" "One Joan Sedley," replied Matcham, colouring. "It was Sir Daniel's doing; he hath money to gain upon both sides; and, indeed, I have heard the poor wench bemoaning herself pitifully of the match. It seems she is of your mind, or else distasted to the bridegroom." "Well! marriage is like death, it comes to all," said Dick, with resignation. "And she bemoaned herself? I pray ye now, see there how shuttle-witted are these girls: to bemoan herself before that she had seen me! Do I bemoan myself? Not I. An I be to marry, I will marry dry-eyed! But if ye know her, prithee, of what favour is she? fair or foul? And is she shrewish or pleasant?" "Nay, what matters it?" said Matcham. "An y' are to marry, ye can but marry. What matters foul or fair? These be but toys. Y' are no milksop, Master Richard; ye will wed with dry eyes anyhow." "It is well said," replied Shelton. "Little I reck." "Your lady wife is like to have a pleasant lord," said Matcham. "She shall have the lord Heaven made for her," returned Dick. "I trow there be worse as well as better." "Ah, the poor wench!" cried the other. "And why so poor?" asked Dick. "To wed a man of wood," replied his companion. "O me, for a wooden husband!" "I think I be a man of wood, indeed," said Dick, "to trudge afoot the while you ride my horse; but it is good wood, I trow." "Good Dick, forgive me," cried the other. "Nay, y' are the best heart in England; I but laughed. Forgive me now, sweet Dick." "Nay, no fool words," returned Dick, a little embarrassed by his companion's warmth. "No harm is done. I am not touchy, praise the saints." And at that moment the wind, which was blowing straight behind them as they went, brought them the rough flourish of Sir Daniel's trumpeter. "Hark!" said Dick, "the tucket soundeth." "Ay," said Matcham, "they have found my flight, and now I am unhorsed!" and he became pale as death. "Nay, what cheer!" returned Dick. "Y' have a long start, and we are near the ferry. And it is I, methinks, that am unhorsed." "Alack, I shall be taken!" cried the fugitive. "Dick, kind Dick, beseech ye help me but a little!" "Why, now, what aileth thee?" said Dick. "Methinks I help you very patently. But my heart is sorry for so spiritless a fellow! And see ye here, John Matcham--sith John Matcham is your name--I, Richard Shelton, tide what betideth, come what may, will see you safe in Holywood. The saints so do to me again if I default you. Come, pick me up a good heart, Sir White-face. The way betters here; spur me the horse. Go faster! faster! Nay, mind not for me; I can run like a deer." So, with the horse trotting hard, and Dick running easily alongside, they crossed the remainder of the fen, and came out upon the banks of the river by the ferryman's hut. CHAPTER III THE FEN FERRY The river Till was a wide, sluggish, clayey water, oozing out of fens, and in this part of its course it strained among some score of willow-covered, marshy islets. It was a dingy stream; but upon this bright, spirited morning everything was become beautiful. The wind and the martens broke it up into innumerable dimples; and the reflection of the sky was scattered over all the surface in crumbs of smiling blue. A creek ran up to meet the path, and close under the bank the ferryman's hut lay snugly. It was of wattle and clay, and the grass grew green upon the roof. Dick went to the door and opened it. Within, upon a foul old russet cloak, the ferryman lay stretched and shivering; a great hulk of a man, but lean and shaken by the country fever. "Hey, Master Shelton," he said, "be ye for the ferry? Ill times, ill times! Look to yourself. There is a fellowship abroad. Ye were better turn round on your two heels and try the bridge." "Nay; time's in the saddle," answered Dick. "Time will ride, Hugh Ferryman. I am hot in haste." "A wilful man!" returned the ferryman, rising. "An ye win safe to the Moat House, y' have done lucky; but I say no more." And then catching sight of Matcham, "Who be this?" he asked, as he paused, blinking, on the threshold of his cabin. "It is my kinsman, Master Matcham," answered Dick. "Give ye good day, good ferryman," said Matcham, who had dismounted, and now came forward, leading the horse. "Launch me your boat, I prithee; we are sore in haste." The gaunt ferryman continued staring. "By the mass!" he cried at length, and laughed with open throat. Matcham coloured to his neck and winced; and Dick, with an angry countenance, put his hand on the lout's shoulder. "How now, churl!" he cried. "Fall to thy business, and leave mocking thy betters." Hugh Ferryman grumblingly undid his boat, and shoved it a little forth into the deep water. Then Dick led in the horse, and Matcham followed. "Ye be mortal small made, master," said Hugh, with a wide grin; "something o' the wrong model, belike.--Nay, Master Shelton, I am for you," he added, getting to his oars. "A cat may look at a king. I did but take a shot of the eye at Master Matcham." "Sirrah, no more words," said Dick. "Bend me your back." They were by that time at the mouth of the creek, and the view opened up and down the river. Everywhere it was enclosed with islands. Clay banks were falling in, willows nodding, reeds waving, martens dipping and piping. There was no sign of man in the labyrinth of waters. "My master," said the ferryman, keeping the boat steady with one oar, "I have a shrewd guess that John-a-Fenne is on the island. He bears me a black grudge to all Sir Daniel's. How if I turned me up stream and landed you an arrow-flight, above the path? Ye were best not meddle with John Fenne." "How, then? is he of this company?" asked Dick. "Nay, mum is the word," said Hugh. "But I would go up water, Dick. How if Master Matcham came by an arrow?" and he laughed again. "Be it so, Hugh," answered Dick. "Look ye, then," pursued Hugh. "Sith it shall so be, unsling me your crossbow--so: now make it ready--good; place me a quarrel. Ay, keep it so, and look upon me grimly." "What meaneth this?" asked Dick. "Why, my master, if I steal you across, it must be under force or fear," replied the ferryman; "for else, if John Fenne got wind of it, he were like to prove my most distressful neighbour." "Do these churls ride so roughly?" Dick inquired. "Do they command Sir Daniel's own ferry?" "Nay," whispered the ferryman, winking. "Mark me! Sir Daniel shall down. His time is out. He shall down. Mum!" And he bent over his oars. They pulled a long way up the river, turned the tail of an island, and came softly down a narrow channel next the opposite bank. Then Hugh held water in midstream. "I must land you here among the willows," he said. "Here is no path but willow swamps and quagmires," answered Dick. "Master Shelton," replied Hugh, "I dare not take ye nearer down, for your own sake now. He watcheth me the ferry, lying on his bow. All that go by and owe Sir Daniel goodwill he shooteth down like rabbits. I heard him swear it by the rood. An I had not known you of old days--ay, and from so high upward--I would 'a' let you go on; but for old days' remembrance, and because ye had this toy with you that's not fit for wounds or warfare, I did risk my two poor ears to have you over whole. Content you; I can no more, on my salvation!" Hugh was still speaking, lying on his oars, when there came a great shout from among the willows on the island, and sounds followed as of a strong man breasting roughly through the wood. "A murrain!" cried Hugh. "He was on the upper island all the while!" He pulled straight for shore. "Threat me with your bow, good Dick; threat me with it plain," he added. "I have tried to save your skins, save you mine!" The boat ran into a tough thicket of willows with a crash. Matcham, pale, but steady and alert, at a sign from Dick ran along the thwarts and leaped ashore; Dick, taking the horse by the bridle, sought to follow, but what with the animal's bulk, and what with the closeness of the thicket, both stuck fast. The horse neighed and trampled; and the boat, which was swinging in an eddy, came on and off and pitched with violence. "It may not be, Hugh; here is no landing," cried Dick; but he still struggled valiantly with the obstinate thicket and the startled animal. A tall man appeared upon the shore of the island, a longbow in his hand. Dick saw him for an instant, with the corner of his eye, bending the bow with a great effort, his face crimson with hurry. "Who goes?" he shouted. "Hugh, who goes?" "'Tis Master Shelton, John," replied the ferryman. "Stand, Dick Shelton!" bawled the man upon the island. "Ye shall have no hurt, upon the rood! Stand!--Back out, Hugh Ferryman." Dick cried a taunting answer. "Nay, then, ye shall go afoot," returned the man; and he let drive an arrow. The horse, struck by the shaft, lashed out in agony and terror; the boat capsized, and next moment all were struggling in the eddies of the river. When Dick came up he was within a yard of the bank; and before his eyes were clear, his hand had closed on something firm and strong that instantly began to drag him forward. It was the riding-rod, that Matcham, crawling forth upon an overhanging willow, had opportunely thrust into his grasp. "By the mass!" cried Dick, as he was helped ashore, "that makes a life I owe you. I swim like a cannon-ball." And he turned instantly towards the island. Midway over, Hugh Ferryman was swimming with his upturned boat, while John-a-Fenne, furious at the ill-fortune of his shot, bawled to him to hurry. "Come, Jack," said Shelton, "run for it! Ere Hugh can hale his barge across, or the pair of 'em can get it righted, we may be out of cry." And adding example to his words, he began to run, dodging among the willows, and in marshy places leaping from tussock to tussock. He had no time to look for his direction; all he could do was to turn his back upon the river, and put all his heart to running. Presently, however, the ground began to rise, which showed him he was still in the right way, and soon after they came forth upon a slope of solid turf, where elms began to mingle with the willows. But here Matcham, who had been dragging far into the rear, threw himself fairly down. "Leave me, Dick!" he cried pantingly; "I can no more." Dick turned, and came back to where his companion lay. "Nay, Jack, leave thee!" he cried. "That were a knave's trick, to be sure, when ye risked a shot and a ducking, ay, and a drowning too, to save my life. Drowning, in sooth; for why I did not pull you in along with me, the saints alone can tell!" "Nay," said Matcham, "I would 'a' saved us both, good Dick, for I can swim." "Can ye so?" cried Dick, with open eyes. It was the one manly accomplishment of which he was himself incapable. In the order of the things that he admired, next to having killed a man in single fight, came swimming. "Well," he said, "here is a lesson to despise no man. I promised to care for you as far as Holywood, and, by the rood, Jack, y' are more capable to care for me." "Well, Dick, we're friends now," said Matcham. "Nay, I never was unfriends," answered Dick. "Y' are a brave lad in your way, albeit something of a milksop too. I never met your like before this day. But, prithee, fetch back your breath, and let us on. Here is no place for chatter." "My foot hurts shrewdly," said Matcham. "Nay, I had forgot your foot," returned Dick. "Well, we must go the gentlier. I would I knew rightly where we were. I have clean lost the path; yet that may be for the better, too. An they watch the ferry, they watch the path, belike, as well. I would Sir Daniel were back with two score men; he would sweep me these rascals as the wind sweeps leaves. Come, Jack, lean ye on my shoulder, ye poor shrew. Nay, y' are not tall enough. What age are ye, for a wager?--twelve?" "Nay, I am sixteen," said Matcham. "Y' are poorly grown to height, then," answered Dick. "But take my hand. We shall go softly, never fear. I owe you a life; I am a good repayer, Jack, of good or evil." They began to go forward up the slope. "We must hit the road, early or late," continued Dick; "and then for a fresh start. By the mass! but y' have a rickety hand, Jack. If I had a hand like that I would think shame. I tell you," he went on, with a sudden chuckle, "I swear by the mass I believe Hugh Ferryman took you for a maid." "Nay, never!" cried the other, colouring high. "'A did, though, for a wager!" Dick exclaimed. "Small blame to him. Ye look liker maid than man: and I tell you more--y' are a strange-looking rogue for a boy; but for a hussy, Jack, ye would be right fair--ye would. Ye would be well-favoured for a wench." "Well," said Matcham, "ye know right well that I am none." "Nay, I know that; I do but jest," said Dick. "Ye'll be a man before your mother, Jack. What cheer, my bully? Ye shall strike shrewd strokes. Now, which, I marvel, of you or me, shall be first knighted, Jack? for knighted I shall be, or die for 't. 'Sir Richard Shelton, Knight': it soundeth bravely. But 'Sir John Matcham' soundeth not amiss." "Prithee, Dick, stop till I drink," said the other, pausing where a little clear spring welled out of the slope into a gravelled basin no bigger than a pocket. "And O, Dick, if I might come by anything to eat!--my very heart aches with hunger." "Why, fool, did ye not eat at Kettley?" asked Dick. "I had made a vow--it was a sin I had been led into," stammered Matcham; "but now, if it were but dry bread, I would eat it greedily." "Sit ye, then, and eat," said Dick, "while that I scout a little forward for the road." And he took a wallet from his girdle, wherein were bread and pieces of dry bacon, and, while Matcham fell heartily to, struck farther forth among the trees. A little beyond there was a dip in the ground, where a streamlet soaked among dead leaves; and beyond that, again, the trees were better grown and stood wider, and oak and beech began to take the place of willow and elm. The continued tossing and pouring of the wind among the leaves sufficiently concealed the sounds of his footsteps on the mast; it was for the ear what a moonless night is to the eye; but for all that Dick went cautiously, slipping from one big trunk to another, and looking sharply about him as he went. Suddenly a doe passed like a shadow through the underwood in front of him, and he paused, disgusted at the chance. This part of the wood had been certainly deserted, but now that the poor deer had run, she was like a messenger he should have sent before him to announce his coming; and instead of pushing farther, he turned him to the nearest well-grown tree, and rapidly began to climb. Luck had served him well. The oak on which he had mounted was one of the tallest in that quarter of the wood, and easily out-topped its neighbours by a fathom and a half; and when Dick had clambered into the topmost fork and clung there, swinging dizzily in the great wind, he saw behind him the whole fenny plain as far as Kettley, and the Till wandering among woody islets, and in front of him the white line of high-road winding through the forest. The boat had been righted--it was even now midway on the ferry. Beyond that there was no sign of man, nor aught moving but the wind. He was about to descend, when, taking a last view, his eye lit upon a string of moving points about the middle of the fen. Plainly a small troop was threading the causeway, and that at a good pace; and this gave him some concern as he shinned vigorously down the trunk and returned across the wood for his companion. CHAPTER IV A GREENWOOD COMPANY Matcham was well rested and revived; and the two lads, winged by what Dick had seen, hurried through the remainder of the outwood, crossed the road in safety, and began to mount into the high ground of Tunstall Forest. The trees grew more and more in groves, with heathy places in between, sandy, gorsy, and dotted with old yews. The ground became more and more uneven, full of pits and hillocks. And with every step of the ascent the wind still blew the shriller, and the trees bent before the gusts like fishing-rods. They had just entered one of the clearings, when Dick suddenly clapped down upon his face among the brambles, and began to crawl slowly backward towards the shelter of the grove. Matcham, in great bewilderment, for he could see no reason for this flight, still imitated his companion's course; and it was not until they had gained the harbour of a thicket that he turned and begged him to explain. For all reply, Dick pointed with his finger. At the far end of the clearing, a fir grew high above the neighbouring wood, and planted its black shock of foliage clear against the sky. For about fifty feet above the ground the trunk grew straight and solid like a column. At that level, it split into two massive boughs; and in the fork, like a mast-headed seaman, there stood a man in a green tabard, spying far and wide. The sun glistened upon his hair; with one hand he shaded his eyes to look abroad, and he kept slowly rolling his head from side to side, with the regularity of a machine. The lads exchanged glances. "Let us try to the left," said Dick. "We had near fallen foully, Jack." Ten minutes afterwards they struck into a beaten path. "Here is a piece of forest that I know not," Dick remarked. "Where goeth me this track?" "Let us even try," said Matcham. A few yards farther, the path came to the top of a ridge and began to go down abruptly into a cup-shaped hollow. At the foot, out of a thick wood of flowering hawthorn, two or three roofless gables, blackened as if by fire, and a single tall chimney, marked the ruins of a house. "What may this be?" whispered Matcham. "Nay, by the mass, I know not," answered Dick. "I am all at sea. Let us go warily." With beating hearts, they descended through the hawthorns. Here and there they passed signs of recent cultivation; fruit-trees and pot-herbs ran wild among the thicket; a sun-dial had fallen in the grass; it seemed they were treading what once had been a garden. Yet a little farther and they came forth before the ruins of the house. It had been a pleasant mansion and a strong. A dry ditch was dug deep about it; but it was now choked with masonry, and bridged by a fallen rafter. The two farther walls still stood, the sun shining through their empty windows; but the remainder of the building had collapsed, and now lay in a great cairn of ruin, grimed with fire. Already in the interior a few plants were springing green among the chinks. "Now I bethink me," whispered Dick, "this must be Grimstone. It was a hold of one Simon Malmesbury; Sir Daniel was his bane! 'Twas Bennet Hatch that burned it, now five years agone. In sooth, 'twas pity, for it was a fair house." Down in the hollow, where no wind blew, it was both warm and still; and Matcham, laying one hand upon Dick's arm, held up a warning finger. "Hist!" he said. Then came a strange sound, breaking on the quiet. It was twice repeated ere they recognised its nature. It was the sound of a big man clearing his throat; and just then a hoarse, untuneful voice broke into singing:-- "Then up and spake the master, the king of the outlaws: 'What make ye here, my merry men, among the greenwood shaws?' And Gamelyn made answer--he looked never adown: 'O, they must need to walk in wood that may not walk in town!'" The singer paused, a faint clink of iron followed, and then silence. The two lads stood looking at each other. Whoever he might be, their invisible neighbour was just beyond the ruin. And suddenly the colour came into Matcham's face, and next moment he had crossed the fallen rafter, and was climbing cautiously on the huge pile of lumber that filled the interior of the roofless house. Dick would have withheld him, had he been in time; as it was, he was fain to follow. Right in the corner of the ruin, two rafters had fallen crosswise, and protected a clear space no larger than a pew in church. Into this the lads silently lowered themselves. There they were perfectly concealed, and through an arrow loophole commanded a view upon the farther side. Peering through this they were struck stiff with terror at their predicament. To retreat was impossible; they scarce dared to breathe. Upon the very margin of the ditch, not thirty feet from where they crouched, an iron caldron bubbled and steamed above a glowing fire; and close by, in an attitude of listening, as though he had caught some sound of their clambering among the ruins, a tall, red-faced, battered-looking man stood poised, an iron spoon in his right hand, a horn and a formidable dagger at his belt. Plainly this was the singer; plainly he had been stirring the caldron, when some incautious step among the lumber had fallen upon his ear. A little farther off another man lay slumbering, rolled in a brown cloak, with a butterfly hovering above his face. All this was in a clearing white with daisies; and at the extreme verge a bow, a sheaf of arrows, and part of a deer's carcass, hung upon a flowering hawthorn. Presently the fellow relaxed from his attitude of attention, raised the spoon to his mouth, tasted its contents, nodded, and then fell again to stirring and singing. "'O, they must need to walk in wood that may not walk in town,'" he croaked, taking up his song where he had left it. "'O, sir, we walk not here at all an evil thing to do, But if we meet with the good king's deer to shoot a shaft into.'" Still as he sang, he took from time to time another spoonful of the broth, blew upon it, and tasted it, with all the airs of an experienced cook. At length, apparently, he judged the mess was ready, for taking the horn from his girdle, he blew three modulated calls. The other fellow awoke, rolled over, brushed away the butterfly, and looked about him. "How now, brother?" he said. "Dinner?" "Ay, sot," replied the cook, "dinner it is, and a dry dinner too, with neither ale nor bread. But there is little pleasure in the greenwood now; time was when a good fellow could live here like a mitred abbot, set aside the rain and the white frosts; he had his heart's desire both of ale and wine. But now are men's spirits dead; and this John Amend-All, save us and guard us! but a stuffed booby to scare crows withal." "Nay," returned the other, "y' are too set on meat and drinking, Lawless. Bide ye a bit; the good time cometh." "Look ye," returned the cook, "I have even waited for this good time sith that I was so high. I have been a grey friar; I have been a king's archer; I have been a shipman, and sailed the salt seas; and I have been in greenwood before this, forsooth! and shot the king's deer. What cometh of it? Naught! I were better to have bided in the cloister. John Abbot availeth more than John Amend-All.--By'r Lady! here they come." One after another, tall likely fellows began to stroll into the lawn. Each as he came produced a knife and a horn cup, helped himself from the caldron, and sat down upon the grass to eat. They were very variously equipped and armed; some in rusty smocks, and with nothing but a knife and an old bow; others in the height of forest gallantry, all in Lincoln green, both hood and jerkin, with dainty peacock arrows in their belts, a horn upon a baldrick, and a sword and dagger at their sides. They came in the silence of hunger, and scarce growled a salutation, but fell instantly to meat. There were, perhaps, a score of them already gathered, when a sound of suppressed cheering arose close by among the hawthorns, and immediately after five or six woodmen carrying a stretcher debouched upon the lawn. A tall, lusty fellow, somewhat grizzled, and as brown as a smoked ham, walked before them with an air of some authority, his bow at his back, a bright boar-spear in his hand. "Lads!" he cried, "good fellows all, and my right merry friends, y' have sung this while on a dry whistle, and lived at little ease. But what said I ever? Abide Fortune constantly; she turneth, turneth swift. And lo! here is her little firstling--even that good creature, ale!" There was a murmur of applause as the bearers set down the stretcher and displayed a goodly cask. "And now haste ye, boys," the man continued. "There is work toward. A handful of archers are but now come to the ferry; murrey and blue is their wear; they are our butts--they shall all taste arrows--no man of them shall struggle through this wood. For, lads, we are here some fifty strong, each man of us most foully wronged; for some they have lost lands, and some friends; and some they have been outlawed--all oppressed! Who, then, hath done this evil? Sir Daniel, by the rood! Shall he then profit? shall he sit snug in our houses? shall he till our fields? shall he suck the bone he robbed us of? I trow not. He getteth him strength at law; he gaineth cases; nay, there is one case he shall not gain--I have a writ here at my belt that, please the saints, shall conquer him." Lawless the cook was by this time already at his second horn of ale. He raised it, as if to pledge the speaker. "Master Ellis," he said, "y' are for vengeance--well it becometh you!--but your poor brother o' the greenwood that had never lands to lose nor friends to think upon, looketh rather, for his poor part, to the profit of the thing. He had liefer a gold noble and a pottle of canary wine than all the vengeances in purgatory." "Lawless," replied the other, "to reach the Moat House, Sir Daniel must pass the forest. We shall make that passage dearer, pardy, than any battle. Then, when he has got to earth with such ragged handful as escapeth us--all his great friends fallen and fled away, and none to give him aid--we shall beleaguer that old fox about, and great shall be the fall of him. 'Tis a fat buck; he will make a dinner for us all." "Ay," returned Lawless, "I have eaten many of these dinners beforehand; but the cooking of them is hot work, good Master Ellis. And meanwhile what do we? We make black arrows, we write rhymes, and we drink fair cold water, that discomfortable drink." "Y' are untrue, Will Lawless. Ye still smell of the Grey Friars' buttery; greed is your undoing," answered Ellis. "We took twenty pounds from Appleyard. We took seven marks from the messenger last night. A day ago we had fifty from the merchant." "And to-day," said one of the men, "I stopped a fat pardoner riding apace for Holywood. Here is his purse." Ellis counted the contents. "Five score shillings!" he grumbled. "Fool, he had more in his sandal, or stitched into his tippet. Y' are but a child, Tom Cuckow; ye have lost the fish." But, for all that, Ellis pocketed the purse with nonchalance. He stood leaning on his boar-spear, and looked round upon the rest. They, in various attitudes, took greedily of the venison pottage, and liberally washed it down with ale. This was a good day; they were in luck; but business pressed, and they were speedy in their eating. The first-comers had by this time even despatched their dinner. Some lay down upon the grass and fell instantly asleep, like boa-constrictors; others talked together, or overhauled their weapons; and one, whose humour was particularly gay, holding forth an ale-horn, began to sing: "Here is no law in good green shaw, Here is no lack of meat; 'Tis merry and quiet, with deer for our diet, In summer, when all is sweet. Come winter again, with wind and rain-- Come winter, with snow and sleet, Get home to your places, with hoods on your faces, And sit by the fire and eat." All this while the two lads had listened and lain close; only Richard had unslung his crossbow, and held ready in one hand the windac, or grappling-iron that he used to bend it. Otherwise they had not dared to stir; and this scene of forest life had gone on before their eyes like a scene upon a theatre. But now there came a strange interruption. The tall chimney which overtopped the remainder of the ruins rose right above their hiding-place. There came a whistle in the air, and then a sounding smack, and the fragments of a broken arrow fell about their ears. Some one from the upper quarters of the wood, perhaps the very sentinel they saw posted in the fir, had shot an arrow at the chimney-top. Matcham could not restrain a little cry, which he instantly stifled, and even Dick started with surprise, and dropped the windac from his fingers. But to the fellows on the lawn this shaft was an expected signal. They were all afoot together, tightening their belts, testing their bow-strings, loosening sword and dagger in the sheath. Ellis held up his hand; his face had suddenly assumed a look of savage energy; the white of his eyes shone in his sun-brown face. "Lads," he said, "ye know your places. Let not one man's soul escape you. Appleyard was a whet before a meal; but now we go to table. I have three men whom I will bitterly avenge--Harry Shelton, Simon Malmesbury, and"--striking his broad bosom--"and Ellis Duckworth, by the mass!" Another man came, red with hurry, through the thorns. "'Tis not Sir Daniel!" he panted. "They are but seven. Is the arrow gone?" "It struck but now," replied Ellis. "A murrain!" cried the messenger. "Methought I heard it whistle. And I go dinnerless!" In the space of a minute, some running, some walking sharply, according as their stations were nearer or farther away, the men of the Black Arrow had all disappeared from the neighbourhood of the ruined house; and the caldron, and the fire, which was now burning low, and the dead deer's carcass on the hawthorn, remained alone to testify they had been there. CHAPTER V "BLOODY AS THE HUNTER" The lads lay quiet till the last footstep had melted on the wind. Then they arose, and with many an ache, for they were weary with constraint, clambered through the ruins and recrossed the ditch upon the rafter. Matcham had picked up the windac and went first, Dick following stiffly, with his crossbow on his arm. "And now," said Matcham, "forth to Holywood." "To Holywood!" cried Dick, "when good fellows stand shot? Not I! I would see you hanged first, Jack!" "Ye would leave me, would ye?" Matcham asked. "Ay, by my sooth!" returned Dick. "An I be not in time to warn these lads, I will go die with them. What! would ye have me leave my own men that I have lived among? I trow not! Give me my windac." But there was nothing further from Matcham's mind. "Dick," he said, "ye sware before the saints that ye would see me safe to Holywood. Would ye be forsworn? Would you desert me--a perjurer?" "Nay, I swear for the best," returned Dick. "I meant it too; but now! But look ye, Jack, turn again with me. Let me but warn these men, and, if needs must, stand shot with them; then shall all be clear, and I will on again to Holywood and purge mine oath." "Ye but deride me," answered Matcham. "These men ye go to succour are the same that hunt me to my ruin." Dick scratched his head. "I cannot help it, Jack," he said. "Here is no remedy. What would ye? Ye run no great peril, man; and these are in the way of death. Death!" he added. "Think of it! What a murrain do ye keep me here for? Give me the windac. St. George! shall they all die?" "Richard Shelton," said Matcham, looking him squarely in the face, "would ye, then, join party with Sir Daniel? Have ye not ears? Heard ye not this Ellis, what he said? or have ye no heart for your own kindly blood and the father that men slew? 'Harry Shelton,' he said; and Sir Harry Shelton was your father, as the sun shines in heaven." "What would ye?" Dick cried again. "Would ye have me credit thieves?" "Nay, I have heard it before now," returned Matcham. "The fame goeth currently, it was Sir Daniel slew him. He slew him under oath; in his own house he shed the innocent blood. Heaven wearies for the avenging on't; and you--the man's son--ye go about to comfort and defend the murderer!" "Jack," cried the lad, "I know not. It may be; what know I? But see here: This man hath bred me up and fostered me, and his men I have hunted with and played among; and to leave them in the hour of peril--O, man, if I did that, I were stark dead to honour! Nay, Jack, ye would not ask it; ye would not wish me to be base." "But your father, Dick!" said Matcham, somewhat wavering. "Your father? and your oath to me? Ye took the saints to witness." "My father?" cried Shelton. "Nay, he would have me go! If Sir Daniel slew him, when the hour comes this hand shall slay Sir Daniel; but neither him nor his will I desert in peril. And for mine oath, good Jack, ye shall absolve me of it here. For the lives' sake of many men that hurt you not, and for mine honour, ye shall set me free." "I, Dick? Never!" returned Matcham. "An ye leave me, y' are forsworn, and so I shall declare it!" "My blood heats," said Dick. "Give me the windac! Give it me!" "I'll not," said Matcham. "I'll save you in your teeth." "Not?" cried Dick, "I'll make you!" "Try it," said the other. They stood, looking in each other's eyes, each ready for a spring. Then Dick leaped; and though Matcham turned instantly and fled, in two bounds he was overtaken, the windac was twisted from his grasp, he was thrown roughly to the ground, and Dick stood across him, flushed and menacing, with doubled fist. Matcham lay where he had fallen, with his face in the grass, not thinking of resistance. Dick bent his bow. "I'll teach you!" he cried fiercely. "Oath or no oath, ye may go hang for me!" And he turned and began to run. Matcham was on his feet at once, and began running after him. "What d'ye want?" cried Dick, stopping. "What make ye after me? Stand off!" "I will follow an I please," said Matcham. "This wood is free to me." "Stand back, by'r Lady!" returned Dick, raising his bow. "Ah, y' are a brave boy!" retorted Matcham. "Shoot!" Dick lowered his weapon in some confusion. "See here," he said. "Y' have done me ill enough. Go, then. Go your way in fair wise; or, whether I will or not, I must even drive you to it." "Well," said Matcham doggedly, "y' are the stronger. Do your worst. I shall not leave to follow thee, Dick, unless thou makest me," he added. Dick was almost beside himself. It went against his heart to beat a creature so defenceless; and, for the life of him, he knew no other way to rid himself of this unwelcome and, as he began to think, perhaps untrue companion. "Y' are mad, I think," he cried. "Fool-fellow, I am hasting to your foes; as fast as foot can carry me, go I thither." "I care not, Dick," replied the lad. "If y' are bound to die, Dick, I'll die too. I would liefer go with you to prison than to go free without you." "Well," returned the other, "I may stand no longer prating. Follow me, if ye must; but if ye play me false, it shall but little advance you, mark ye that. Shalt have a quarrel in thine inwards, boy." So saying, Dick took once more to his heels, keeping in the margin of the thicket, and looking briskly about him as he went. At a good pace he rattled out of the dell, and came again into the more open quarters of the wood. To the left a little eminence appeared, spotted with golden gorse, and crowned with a black tuft of firs. "I shall see from there," he thought, and struck for it across a heathy clearing. He had gone but a few yards, when Matcham touched him on the arm, and pointed. To the eastward of the summit there was a dip, and, as it were, a valley passing to the other side; the heath was not yet out; all the ground was rusty, like an unsecured buckler, and dotted sparingly with yews; and there, one following another, Dick saw half a score green jerkins mounting the ascent, and marching at their head, conspicuous by his boar-spear, Ellis Duckworth in person. One after another gained the top, showed for a moment against the sky, and then dipped upon the farther side, until the last was gone. Dick looked at Matcham with a kindlier eye. "So y' are to be true to me, Jack?" he asked. "I thought ye were of the other party." Matcham began to sob. "What cheer!" cried Dick. "Now the saints behold us! would ye snivel' for a word?" "Ye hurt me," sobbed Matcham. "Ye hurt me when ye threw me down. Y' are a coward to abuse your strength." "Nay, that is fool's talk," said Dick roughly. "Y' had no title to my windac, Master John. I would 'a' done right to have well basted you. If ye go with me, ye must obey me; and so, come." Matcham had half a thought to stay behind; but, seeing that Dick continued to scour full-tilt towards the eminence, and not so much as looked across his shoulder, he soon thought better of that, and began to run in turn. But the ground was very difficult and steep; Dick had already a long start, and had, at any rate, the lighter heels, and he had long since come to the summit, crawled forward through the firs, and ensconced himself in a thick tuft of gorse, before Matcham, panting like a deer, rejoined him, and lay down in silence by his side. Below, in the bottom of a considerable valley, the short cut from Tunstall hamlet wound downwards to the ferry. It was well beaten, and the eye followed it easily from point to point. Here it was bordered by open glades; there the forest closed upon it; every hundred yards it ran beside an ambush. Far down the path, the sun shone on seven steel salets, and from time to time, as the trees opened, Selden and his men could be seen riding briskly, still bent upon Sir Daniel's mission. The wind had somewhat fallen, but still tussled merrily with the trees, and, perhaps, had Appleyard been there, he would have drawn a warning from the troubled conduct of the birds. "Now, mark," Dick whispered. "They be already well advanced into the wood; their safety lieth rather in continuing forward. But see ye where this wide glade runneth down before us, and in the midst of it, these two score trees make like an island? There were their safety. An they but come sound as far as that, I will make shift to warn them. But my heart misgiveth me; they are but seven against so many, and they but carry crossbows. The long-bow, Jack, will have the uppermost ever." Meanwhile, Selden and his men still wound up the path, ignorant of their danger, and momently drew nearer hand. Once, indeed, they paused, drew into a group, and seemed to point and listen. But it was something from far away across the plain that had arrested their attention--a hollow growl of cannon that came, from time to time, upon the wind, and told of the great battle. It was worth a thought, to be sure; for if the voice of the big guns were thus become audible in Tunstall Forest, the fight must have rolled ever eastward, and the day, by consequence, gone sore against Sir Daniel and the lords of the dark rose. But presently the little troop began again to move forward, and came next to a very open, heathy portion of the way, where but a single tongue of forest ran down to join the road. They were but just abreast of this, when an arrow shone flying. One of the men threw up his arms, his horse reared, and both fell and struggled together in a mass. Even from where the boys lay they could hear the rumour of the men's voices crying out; they could see the startled horses prancing, and, presently, as the troop began to recover from their first surprise, one fellow beginning to dismount. A second arrow from somewhat farther off glanced in a wide arch; a second rider bit the dust. The man who was dismounting lost hold upon the rein, and his horse fled galloping, and dragged him by the foot along the road, bumping from stone to stone, and battered by the fleeing hoofs. The four who still kept the saddle instantly broke and scattered; one wheeled and rode, shrieking, towards the ferry; the other three, with loose rein and flying raiment, came galloping up the road from Tunstall. From every clump they passed an arrow sped. Soon a horse fell, but the rider found his feet and continued to pursue his comrades till a second shot despatched him. Another man fell; then another horse; out of the whole troop there was but one fellow left, and he on foot; only, in different directions, the noise of the galloping of three riderless horses was dying fast into the distance. All this time not one of the assailants had for a moment showed himself. Here and there along the path, horse or man rolled, undespatched, in his agony; but no merciful enemy broke cover to put them from their pain. The solitary survivor stood bewildered in the road beside his fallen charger. He had come the length of that broad glade, with the island of timber, pointed out by Dick. He was not, perhaps, five hundred yards from where the boys lay hidden; and they could see him plainly, looking to and fro in deadly expectation. But nothing came; and the man began to pluck up his courage, and suddenly unslung and bent his bow. At the same time, by something in his action, Dick recognised Selden. At this offer of resistance, from all about him in the covert of the woods there went up the sound of laughter. A score of men, at least--for this was the very thickest of the ambush--joined in this cruel and untimely mirth. Then an arrow glanced over Selden's shoulder; and he leaped and ran a little back. Another dart struck quivering at his heel. He made for the cover. A third shaft leaped out right in his face, and fell short in front of him. And then the laughter was repeated loudly, rising and re-echoing from different thickets. It was plain that his assailants were but baiting him, as men, in those days, baited the poor bull, or as the cat still trifles with the mouse. The skirmish was well over; farther down the road, a fellow in green was already calmly gathering the arrows; and now, in the evil pleasure of their hearts, they gave themselves the spectacle of their poor fellow-sinner in his torture. Selden began to understand; he uttered a roar of anger, shouldered his crossbow, and sent a quarrel at a venture into the wood. Chance favoured him, for a slight cry responded. Then, throwing down his weapon, Selden began to run before him up the glade, and almost in a straight line for Dick and Matcham. The companions of the Black Arrow now began to shoot in earnest. But they were properly served; their chance had passed; most of them had now to shoot against the sun; and Selden, as he ran, bounded from side to side to baffle and deceive their aim. Best of all, by turning up the glade he had defeated their preparations; there were no marksmen posted higher up than the one whom he had just killed or wounded; and the confusion of the foresters' counsels soon became apparent. A whistle sounded thrice, and then again twice. It was repeated from another quarter. The woods on either side became full of the sound of people bursting through the underwood; and a bewildered deer ran out into the open, stood for a second on three feet, with nose in air, and then plunged again into the thicket. Selden still ran, bounding; ever and again an arrow followed him, but still would miss. It began to appear as if he might escape. Dick had his bow armed, ready to support him; even Matcham, forgetful of his interest, took sides at heart for the poor fugitive; and both lads glowed and trembled in the ardour of their hearts. He was within fifty yards of them when an arrow struck him, and he fell. He was up again, indeed, upon the instant; but now he ran staggering, and, like a blind man, turned aside from his direction. Dick leaped to his feet and waved to him. "Here!" he cried. "This way! here is help! Nay, run, fellow--run!" But just then a second arrow struck Selden in the shoulder, between the plates of his brigandine, and, piercing through his jack, brought him, like a stone, to earth. "O the poor heart!" cried Matcham, with clasped hands. And Dick stood petrified upon the hill, a mark for archery. Ten to one he had speedily been shot--for the foresters were furious with themselves, and taken unawares by Dick's appearance in the rear of their position--but instantly out of a quarter of the wood surprisingly near to the two lads, a stentorian voice arose, the voice of Ellis Duckworth. "Hold!" it roared. "Shoot not! Take him alive! It is young Shelton--Harry's son." And immediately after a shrill whistle sounded several times, and was again taken up and repeated farther off. The whistle, it appeared, was John Amend-All's battle trumpet, by which he published his directions. "Ah, foul fortune!" cried Dick. "We are undone. Swiftly, Jack, come swiftly!" And the pair turned and ran back through the open pine clump that covered the summit of the hill. CHAPTER VI TO THE DAY'S END It was, indeed, high time for them to run. On every side the company of the Black Arrow was making for the hill. Some, being better runners, or having open ground to run upon, had far outstripped the others, and were already close upon the goal; some, following valleys, had spread out to right and left, and outflanked the lads on either side. Dick plunged into the nearest cover. It was a tall grove of oaks, firm under foot and clear of underbrush, and as it lay down hill, they made good speed. There followed next a piece of open, which Dick avoided, holding to his left. Two minutes after, and the same obstacle arising, the lads followed the same course. Thus it followed that, while the lads, bending continually to the left, drew nearer and nearer to the high-road and the river which they had crossed an hour or two before, the great bulk of their pursuers were leaning to the other hand, and running towards Tunstall. The lads paused to breathe. There was no sound of pursuit. Dick put his ear to the ground, and still there was nothing; but the wind, to be sure, still made a turmoil in the trees, and it was hard to make certain. "On again!" said Dick; and, tired as they were, and Matcham limping with his injured foot, they pulled themselves together, and once more pelted down the hill. Three minutes later they were breasting through a low thicket of evergreen. High overhead the tall trees made a continuous roof of foliage. It was a pillared grove, as high as a cathedral, and except for the hollies among which the lads were struggling, open and smoothly swarded. On the other side, pushing through the last fringe of evergreen, they blundered forth again into the open twilight of the grove. "Stand!" cried a voice. And there, between the huge stems, not fifty feet before them, they beheld a stout fellow in green, sore blown with running, who instantly drew an arrow to the head and covered them. Matcham stopped with a cry; but Dick, without a pause, ran straight upon the forester, drawing his dagger as he went. The other, whether he was startled by the daring of the onslaught, or whether he was hampered by his orders, did not shoot: he stood wavering; and before he had time to come to himself, Dick bounded at his throat, and sent him sprawling backward on the turf. The arrow went one way and the bow another with a sounding twang. The disarmed forester grappled his assailant; but the dagger shone and descended twice. Then came a couple of groans, and then Dick rose to his feet again, and the man lay motionless, stabbed to the heart. "On!" said Dick; and he once more pelted forward, Matcham trailing in the rear. To say truth, they made but poor speed of it by now, labouring dismally as they ran, and catching for their breath like fish. Matcham had a cruel stitch, and his head swam; and as for Dick, his knees were like lead. But they kept up the form of running with undiminished courage. Presently they came to the end of the grove. It stopped abruptly; and there, a few yards before them, was the high-road from Risingham to Shoreby, lying, at this point, between two even walls of forest. At the sight Dick paused; and as soon as he stopped running, he became aware of a confused noise, which rapidly grew louder. It was at first like the rush of a very high gust of wind, but it soon became more definite, and resolved itself into the galloping of horses; and then, in a flash, a whole company of men-at-arms came driving round the corner, swept before the lads, and were gone again upon the instant. They rode as for their lives, in complete disorder; some of them were wounded; riderless horses galloped at their side with bloody saddles. They were plainly fugitives from the great battle. The noise of their passage had scarce begun to die away towards Shoreby, before fresh hoofs came echoing in their wake, and another deserter clattered down the road; this time a single rider, and, by his splendid armour, a man of high degree. Close after him there followed several baggage-waggons, fleeing at an ungainly canter, the drivers flailing at the horses as if for life. These must have run early in the day; but their cowardice was not to save them. For just before they came abreast of where the lads stood wondering, a man in hacked armour, and seemingly beside himself with fury, overtook the waggons, and with the truncheon of a sword began to cut the drivers down. Some leaped from their places and plunged into the wood; the others he sabred as they sat, cursing them the while for cowards in a voice that was scarce human. All this time the noise in the distance had continued to increase; the rumble of carts, the clatter of horses, the cries of men, a great, confused rumour, came swelling on the wind; and it was plain that the rout of a whole army was pouring, like an inundation, down the road. Dick stood sombre. He had meant to follow the highway till the turn for Holywood, and now he had to change his plan. But above all, he had recognised the colours of Earl Risingham, and he knew that the battle had gone finally against the rose of Lancaster. Had Sir Daniel joined, and was he now a fugitive, and ruined? or had he deserted to the side of York, and was he forfeit to honour? It was an ugly choice. "Come," he said sternly; and, turning on his heel, he began to walk forward through the grove, with Matcham limping in his rear. For some time they continued to thread the forest in silence. It was now growing late; the sun was setting in the plain beyond Kettley; the tree-tops overhead glowed golden; but the shadows had begun to grow darker and the chill of the night to fall. "If there was anything to eat!" cried Dick suddenly, pausing as he spoke. Matcham sat down and began to weep. "Ye can weep for your own supper, but when it was to save men's lives your heart was hard enough," said Dick contemptuously. "Y' have seven deaths upon your conscience, Master John; I'll ne'er forgive you that." "Conscience!" cried Matcham, looking fiercely up. "Mine! And ye have the man's red blood upon your dagger! And wherefore did ye slay him, the poor soul? He drew his arrow, but he let not fly; he held you in his hand, and spared you! 'Tis as brave to kill a kitten as a man that not defends himself." Dick was struck dumb. "I slew him fair. I ran me in upon his bow," he cried. "It was a coward blow," returned Matcham. "Y' are but a lout and bully, Master Dick; ye but abuse advantages; let there come a stronger, we will see you truckle at his boot! Ye care not for vengeance, neither--for your father's death that goes unpaid, and his poor ghost that clamoureth for justice. But if there come but a poor creature in your hands that lacketh skill and strength, and would befriend you, down she shall go!" Dick was too furious to observe that "she." "Marry!" he cried, "and here is news! Of any two the one will still be stronger. The better man throweth the worse, and the worse is well served. Ye deserve a belting, Master Matcham, for your ill-guidance and unthankfulness to me-ward; and what ye deserve ye shall have." And Dick, who, even in his angriest temper, still preserved the appearance of composure, began to unbuckle his belt. "Here shall be your supper," he said grimly. Matcham had stopped his tears; he was as white as a sheet, but he looked Dick steadily in the face, and never moved. Dick took a step, swinging the belt. Then he paused, embarrassed by the large eyes and the thin, weary face of his companion. His courage began to subside. "Say ye were in the wrong, then," he said lamely. "Nay," said Matcham, "I was in the right. Come, cruel! I be lame; I be weary; I resist not; I ne'er did thee hurt; come, beat me, coward!" Dick raised the belt at this last provocation; but Matcham winced and drew himself together with so cruel an apprehension, that his heart failed him yet again. The strap fell by his side, and he stood irresolute, feeling like a fool. "A plague upon thee, shrew!" he said. "An ye be so feeble of hand ye should keep the closer guard upon your tongue. But I'll be hanged before I beat you!" and he put on his belt again. "Beat you I will not," he continued; "but forgive you?--never. I knew ye not; ye were my master's enemy; I lent you my horse; my dinner ye have eaten; y' have called me a man o' wood, a coward, and a bully. Nay, by the mass! the measure is filled and runneth over. 'Tis a great thing to be weak, I trow: ye can do your worst, yet shall none punish you; ye may steal a man's weapons in the hour of need, yet may the man not take his own again;--y' are weak, forsooth! Nay, then, if one cometh charging at you with a lance, and crieth he is weak, ye must let him pierce your body through! Tut! fool words!" "And yet ye beat me not," returned Matcham. "Let be," said Dick--"let be. I will instruct you. Y' have been ill-nurtured, methinks, and yet ye have the makings of some good, and, beyond all question, saved me from the river. Nay, I had forgotten it; I am as thankless as thyself. But, come, let us on. An we be for Holywood this night, ay, or to-morrow early, we had best set forward speedily." But though Dick had talked himself back into his usual good-humour, Matcham had forgiven him nothing. His violence, the recollection of the forester whom he had slain--above all, the vision of the upraised belt, were things not easily to be forgotten. "I will thank you, for the form's sake," said Matcham. "But, in sooth, good Master Shelton, I had liefer find my way alone. Here is a wide wood; prithee, let each choose his path; I owe you a dinner and a lesson. Fare ye well!" "Nay," cried Dick, "if that be your tune, so be it, and a plague be with you!" Each turned aside, and they began walking off severally, with no thought of the direction, intent solely on their quarrel. But Dick had not gone ten paces ere his name was called, and Matcham came running after. "Dick," he said, "it were unmannerly to part so coldly. Here is my hand, and my heart with it. For all that wherein you have so excellently served and helped me--not for the form, but from the heart, I thank you. Fare ye right well." "Well, lad," returned Dick, taking the hand which was offered him, "good speed to you, if speed you may. But I misdoubt it shrewdly. Y' are too disputatious." So then they separated for the second time; and presently it was Dick who was running after Matcham. "Here," he said, "take my crossbow; shalt not go unarmed." "A crossbow!" said Matcham. "Nay, boy, I have neither the strength to bend nor yet the skill to aim with it. It were no help to me, good boy. But yet I thank you." The night had now fallen, and under the trees they could no longer read each other's face. "I will go some little way with you," said Dick. "The night is dark. I would fain leave you on a path, at least. My mind misgiveth me, y' are likely to be lost." Without any more words he began to walk forward, and the other once more followed him. The blackness grew thicker and thicker; only here and there, in open places, they saw the sky, dotted with small stars. In the distance, the noise of the rout of the Lancastrian army still continued to be faintly audible; but with every step they left it farther in the rear. At the end of half an hour of silent progress they came forth upon a broad patch of heathy open. It glimmered in the light of the stars, shaggy with fern and islanded with clumps of yew. And here they paused and looked upon each other. "Y' are weary?" Dick said. "Nay, I am so weary," answered Matcham, "that methinks I could lie down and die." "I hear the chiding of a river," returned Dick. "Let us go so far forth, for I am sore athirst." The ground sloped down gently; and, sure enough, in the bottom, they found a little murmuring river, running among willows. Here they threw themselves down together by the brink; and putting their mouths to the level of a starry pool, they drank their fill. "Dick," said Matcham, "it may not be. I can no more." "I saw a pit as we came down," said Dick. "Let us lie down therein and sleep." "Nay, but with all my heart!" cried Matcham. The pit was sandy and dry; a shock of brambles hung upon one edge, and made a partial shelter; and there the two lads lay down, keeping close together for the sake of warmth, their quarrel all forgotten. And soon sleep fell upon them like a cloud, and under the dew and stars they rested peacefully. CHAPTER VII THE HOODED FACE They awoke in the grey of the morning; the birds were not yet in full song, but twittered here and there among the woods; the sun was not yet up, but the eastern sky was barred with solemn colours. Half-starved and over-weary as they were, they lay without moving, sunk in a delightful lassitude. And as they thus lay, the clang of a bell fell suddenly upon their ears. "A bell!" said Dick, sitting up. "Can we be, then, so near to Holywood?" A little after, the bell clanged again, but this time somewhat nearer hand; and from that time forth, and still drawing nearer and nearer, it continued to sound brokenly abroad in the silence of the morning. "Nay, what should this betoken?" said Dick, who was now broad awake. "It is some one walking," returned Matcham, "and the bell tolleth ever as he moves." "I see that well," said Dick. "But wherefore? What maketh he in Tunstall Woods? Jack," he added, "laugh at me an ye will, but I like not the hollow sound of it." "Nay," said Matcham, with a shiver, "it hath a doleful note. And the day were not come----" But just then the bell, quickening its pace, began to ring thick and hurried, and then it gave a signal hammering jangle, and was silent for a space. "It is as though the bearer had run for a paternoster-while, and then leaped the river," Dick observed. "And now beginneth he again to pace soberly forward," added Matcham. "Nay," returned Dick--"nay, not so soberly, Jack. 'Tis a man that walketh you right speedily. 'Tis a man in some fear of his life, or about some hurried business. See ye not how swift the beating draweth near?" "It is now close by," said Matcham. They were now on the edge of the pit; and as the pit itself was on a certain eminence, they commanded a view over the greater proportion of the clearing, up to the thick woods that closed it in. The daylight, which was very clear and grey, showed them a riband of white footpath wandering among the gorse. It passed some hundred yards from the pit, and ran the whole length of the clearing, east and west. By the line of its course, Dick judged it should lead more or less directly to the Moat House. Upon this path, stepping forth from the margin of the wood, a white figure now appeared. It paused a little, and seemed to look about; and then, at a slow pace, and bent almost double, it began to draw near across the heath. At every step the bell clanked. Face it had none; a white hood, not even pierced with eye-holes, veiled the head; and as the creature moved, it seemed to feel its way with the tapping of a stick. Fear fell upon the lads, as cold as death. "A leper!" said Dick hoarsely. "His touch is death," said Matcham. "Let us run." "Not so," returned Dick. "See ye not?--he is stone-blind. He guideth him with a staff. Let us lie still; the wind bloweth towards the path, and he will go by and hurt us not. Alas, poor soul, and we should rather pity him!" "I will pity him when he is by," replied Matcham. The blind leper was now about half-way towards them, and just then the sun rose and shone full on his veiled face. He had been a tall man before he was bowed by his disgusting sickness, and even now he walked with a vigorous step. The dismal beating of his bell, the pattering of the stick, the eyeless screen before his countenance, and the knowledge that he was not only doomed to death and suffering, but shut out for ever from the touch of his fellow-men, filled the lads' bosoms with dismay; and at every step that brought him nearer, their courage and strength seemed to desert them. As he came about level with the pit, he paused, and turned his face full upon the lads. "Mary be my shield! He sees us!" said Matcham faintly. "Hush!" whispered Dick. "He doth but hearken. He is blind, fool!" The leper looked or listened, whichever he was really doing, for some seconds. Then he began to move on again, but presently paused once more, and again turned and seemed to gaze upon the lads. Even Dick became dead-white and closed his eyes, as if by the mere sight he might become infected. But soon the bell sounded, and this time, without any further hesitation, the leper crossed the remainder of the little heath and disappeared into the covert of the woods. "He saw us," said Matcham. "I could swear it!" "Tut!" returned Dick, recovering some sparks of courage. "He but heard us. He was in fear, poor soul! An ye were blind, and walked in a perpetual night, ye would start yourself, if ever a twig rustled or a bird cried 'Peep.'" "Dick, good Dick, he saw us," repeated Matcham. "When a man hearkeneth, he doth not as this man; he doth otherwise, Dick. This was seeing; it was not hearing. He means foully. Hark, else, if his bell be not stopped!" Such was the case. The bell rang no longer. "Nay," said Dick, "I like not that. Nay," he cried again, "I like that little. What may this betoken? Let us go, by the mass!" "He hath gone east," added Matcham. "Good Dick, let us go westward straight. I shall not breathe till I have my back turned upon that leper." "Jack, y' are too cowardly," replied Dick. "We shall go fair for Holywood, or as fair, at least, as I can guide you, and that will be due north." They were afoot at once, passed the stream upon some stepping-stones, and began to mount on the other side, which was steeper, towards the margin of the wood. The ground became very uneven, full of knolls and hollows; trees grew scattered or in clumps; it became difficult to choose a path, and the lads somewhat wandered. They were weary, besides, with yesterday's exertions and the lack of food, and they moved but heavily and dragged their feet among the sand. Presently, coming to the top of a knoll, they were aware of the leper, some hundred feet in front of them, crossing the line of their march by a hollow. His bell was silent, his staff no longer tapped the ground, and he went before him with the swift and assured footsteps of a man who sees. Next moment he had disappeared into a little thicket. The lads, at the first glimpse, had crouched behind a tuft of gorse; there they lay, horror-struck. "Certain, he pursueth us," said Dick--"certain. He held the clapper of his bell in one hand, saw ye? that it should not sound. Now may the saints aid and guide us, for I have no strength to combat pestilence!" "What maketh he?" cried Matcham. "What doth he want? Who ever heard the like, that a leper, out of mere malice, should pursue unfortunates? Hath he not his bell to that very end, that people may avoid him? Dick, there is below this something deeper." "Nay, I care not," moaned Dick; "the strength is gone out of me; my legs are like water. The saints be mine assistance!" "Would ye lie there idle?" cried Matcham. "Let us back into the open. We have the better chance; he cannot steal upon us unawares." "Not I," said Dick. "My time is come; and peradventure he may pass us by." "Bend me, then, your bow!" cried the other. "What! will ye be a man?" Dick crossed himself. "Would ye have me shoot upon a leper?" he cried. "The hand would fail me. Nay, now," he added--"nay, now, let be. With sound men I will fight, but not with ghosts and lepers. Which this is, I wot not. One or other, Heaven be our protection!" "Now," said Matcham, "if this be man's courage, what a poor thing is man! But sith ye will do naught, let us lie close." Then came a single, broken jangle on the bell. "He hath missed his hold upon the clapper," whispered Matcham. "Saints! how near he is!" But Dick answered never a word; his teeth were near chattering. Soon they saw a piece of the white robe between some bushes; then the leper's head was thrust forth from behind a trunk, and he seemed narrowly to scan the neighbourhood before he once again withdrew. To their stretched senses the whole bush appeared alive with rustlings and the creak of twigs; and they heard the beating of each other's heart. Suddenly, with a cry, the leper sprang into the open close by, and ran straight upon the lads. They, shrieking aloud, separated and began to run different ways. But their horrible enemy fastened upon Matcham, ran him swiftly down, and had him almost instantly a prisoner. The lad gave one scream that echoed high and far over the forest, he had one spasm of struggling, and then all his limbs relaxed, and he fell limp into his captor's arms. Dick heard the cry and turned. He saw Matcham fall; and on the instant his spirit and his strength revived. With a cry of pity and anger, he unslung and bent his arblast. But ere he had time to shoot, the leper held up his hand. "Hold your shot, Dickon!" cried a familiar voice. "Hold your shot, mad wag! Know ye not a friend?" And then, laying down Matcham on the turf, he undid the hood from off his face, and disclosed the features of Sir Daniel Brackley. "Sir Daniel!" cried Dick. "Ay, by the mass, Sir Daniel!" returned the knight. "Would ye shoot upon your guardian, rogue? But here is this----" And there he broke off and pointing to Matcham, asked--"How call ye him, Dick?" "Nay," said Dick, "I call him Master Matcham. Know ye him not? He said ye knew him!" "Ay," replied Sir Daniel, "I know the lad"; and he chuckled. "But he has fainted; and, by my sooth, he might have had less to faint for. Hey, Dick? Did I put the fear of death upon you?" "Indeed, Sir Daniel, ye did that," said Dick, and sighed again at the mere recollection. "Nay, sir, saving your respect, I had as lief 'a' met the devil in person; and to speak truth, I am yet all a-quake. But what made ye, sir, in such a guise?" Sir Daniel's brow grew suddenly black with anger. "What made I?" he said. "Ye do well to mind me of it! What? I skulked for my poor life in my own wood of Tunstall, Dick. We were ill sped at the battle; we but got there to be swept among the rout. Where be all my good men-at-arms? Dick, by the mass, I know not! We were swept down; the shot fell thick among us; I have not seen one man in my own colours since I saw three fall. For myself, I came sound to Shoreby, and being mindful of the Black Arrow, got me this gown and bell, and came softly by the path for the Moat House. There is no disguise to be compared with it; the jingle of this bell would scare me the stoutest outlaw in the forest; they would all turn pale to hear it. At length I came by you and Matcham. I could see but evilly through this same hood, and was not sure of you, being chiefly, and for many a good cause, astonished at the finding you together. Moreover, in the open, where I had to go slowly and tap with my staff, I feared to disclose myself.--But see," he added, "this poor shrew begins a little to revive. A little good canary will comfort the heart of it." The knight, from under his long dress, produced a stout bottle, and began to rub the temples and wet the lips of the patient, who returned gradually to consciousness, and began to roll dim eyes from one to another. "What cheer, Jack?" said Dick. "It was no leper after all; it was Sir Daniel! See!" "Swallow me a good draught of this," said the knight. "This will give you manhood. Thereafter I will give you both a meal, and we shall all three on to Tunstall. For, Dick," he continued, laying forth bread and meat upon the grass, "I will avow to you, in all good conscience, it irks me sorely to be safe between four walls. Not since I backed a horse have I been pressed so hard; peril of life, jeopardy of land and livelihood, and, to sum up, all these losels in the wood to hunt me down. But I be not yet shent. Some of my lads will pick me their way home. Hatch hath ten fellows; Selden, he had six. Nay, we shall soon be strong again; and if I can but buy my peace with my right fortunate and undeserving Lord of York, why, Dick, we'll be a man again, and go a-horseback!" And so saying, the knight filled himself a horn of canary, and pledged his ward in dumb show. "Selden," Dick faltered--"Selden----" And he paused again. Sir Daniel put down the wine untasted. "How!" he cried, in a changed voice. "Selden? Speak! What of Selden?" Dick stammered forth the tale of the ambush and the massacre. The knight heard in silence; but, as he listened, his countenance became convulsed with rage and grief. "Now here," he cried, "on my right hand, I swear to avenge it! If that I fail, if that I spill not ten men's souls for each, may this hand wither from my body! I broke this Duckworth like a rush; I beggared him to his door; I burned the thatch above his head; I drove him from this country; and now, cometh he back to beard me? Nay, but, Duckworth, this time it shall go bitter hard!" He was silent for some time, his face working. "Eat!" he cried suddenly.--"And you here," he added to Matcham, "swear me an oath to follow straight to the Moat House." "I will pledge mine honour," replied Matcham. "What make I with your honour?" cried the knight. "Swear me upon your mother's welfare!" Matcham gave the required oath; and Sir Daniel readjusted the hood over his face, and prepared his bell and staff. To see him once more in that appalling travesty somewhat revived the horror of his two companions. But the knight was soon upon his feet. "Eat with despatch," he said, "and follow me yarely to mine house." And with that he set forth again into the woods; and presently after the bell began to sound, numbering his steps, and the two lads sat by their untasted meal, and heard it die slowly away up-hill into the distance. "And so ye go to Tunstall?" Dick inquired. "Yea, verily," said Matcham, "when needs must! I am braver behind Sir Daniel's back than to his face." They ate hastily, and set forth along the path through the airy upper levels of the forest, where great beeches stood apart among green lawns, and the birds and squirrels made merry on the boughs. Two hours later they began to descend upon the other side, and already, among the tree-tops, saw before them the red walls and roofs of Tunstall House. "Here," said Matcham, pausing, "ye shall take your leave of your friend Jack, whom y' are to see no more. Come, Dick, forgive him what he did amiss, as he, for his part, cheerfully and lovingly forgiveth you." "And wherefore so?" asked Dick. "An we both go to Tunstall, I shall see you yet again, I trow, and that right often." "Ye'll never again see poor Jack Matcham," replied the other, "that was so fearful and burthensome, and yet plucked you from the river; ye'll not see him more, Dick, by mine honour!" He held his arms open, and the lads embraced and kissed. "And, Dick," continued Matcham, "my spirit bodeth ill. Y' are now to see a new Sir Daniel; for heretofore hath all prospered in his hands exceedingly, and fortune followed him; but now, methinks, when his fate hath come upon him, and he runs the adventure of his life, he will prove but a foul lord to both of us. He may be brave in battle, but he hath the liar's eye; there is fear in his eye, Dick, and fear is as cruel as the wolf! We go down into that house, St. Mary guide us forth again!" And so they continued their descent in silence, and came out at last before Sir Daniel's forest stronghold, where it stood, low and shady, flanked with round towers and stained with moss and lichen, in the lilied waters of the moat. Even as they appeared, the doors were opened, the bridge lowered, and Sir Daniel himself, with Hatch and the parson at his side, stood ready to receive them. BOOK II THE MOAT HOUSE CHAPTER I DICK ASKS QUESTIONS The Moat House stood not far from the rough forest road. Externally it was a compact rectangle of red stone, flanked at each corner by a round tower, pierced for archery and battlemented at the top. Within, it enclosed a narrow court. The moat was perhaps twelve feet wide, crossed by a single drawbridge. It was supplied with water by a trench, leading to a forest pool, and commanded, through its whole length, from the battlements of the two southern towers. Except that one or two tall and thick trees had been suffered to remain within half a bowshot of the walls, the house was in a good posture for defence. In the court Dick found a part of the garrison busy with preparations for defence, and gloomily discussing the chances of a siege. Some were making arrows, some sharpening swords that had long been disused; but, even as they worked, they shook their heads. Twelve of Sir Daniel's party had escaped the battle, run the gauntlet through the wood, and come alive to the Moat House. But out of this dozen, three had been gravely wounded: two at Risingham in the disorder of the rout, one by John Amend-All's marksmen as he crossed the forest. This raised the force of the garrison, counting Hatch, Sir Daniel, and young Shelton, to twenty-two effective men. And more might be continually expected to arrive. The danger lay not, therefore, in the lack of men. It was the terror of the Black Arrow that oppressed the spirits of the garrison. For their open foes of the party of York, in these most changing times, they felt but a far-away concern. "The world," as people said in those days, "might change again" before harm came. But for their neighbours in the wood they trembled. It was not Sir Daniel alone who was a mark for hatred. His men, conscious of impunity, had carried themselves cruelly through all the country. Harsh commands had been harshly executed; and of the little band that now sat talking in the court, there was not one but had been guilty of some act of oppression or barbarity. And now, by the fortune of war, Sir Daniel had become powerless to protect his instruments; now, by the issue of some hours of battle, at which many of them had not been present, they had all become punishable traitors to the State, outside the buckler of the law, a shrunken company in a poor fortress that was hardly tenable, and exposed upon all sides to the just resentment of their victims. Nor had there been lacking grisly advertisements of what they might expect. At different periods of the evening and the night, no fewer than seven riderless horses had come neighing in terror to the gate. Two were from Selden's troop; five belonged to men who had ridden with Sir Daniel to the field. Lastly, a little before dawn, a spearman had come staggering to the moat-side, pierced by three arrows; even as they carried him in, his spirit had departed; but, by the words that he uttered in his agony, he must have been the last survivor of a considerable company of men. Hatch himself showed, under his sun-brown, the pallor of anxiety; and when he had taken Dick aside and learned the fate of Selden, he fell on a stone bench and fairly wept. The others, from where they sat on stools or doorsteps in the sunny angle of the court, looked at him with wonder and alarm, but none ventured to inquire the cause of his emotion. "Nay, Master Shelton," said Hatch at last--"nay, but what said I? We shall all go. Selden was a man of his hands; he was like a brother to me. Well, he has gone second; well, we shall all follow! For what said their knave rhyme?--'A black arrow in each black heart.' Was it not so it went? Appleyard, Selden, Smith, old Humphrey gone; and there lieth poor John Carter, crying, poor sinner, for the priest." Dick gave ear. Out of a low window, hard by where they were talking, groans and murmurs came to his ear. "Lieth he there?" he asked. "Ay, in the second porter's chamber," answered Hatch. "We could not bear him farther, soul and body were so bitterly at odds. At every step we lifted him he thought to wend. But now, methinks, it is the soul that suffereth. Ever for the priest he crieth, and Sir Oliver, I wot not why, still cometh not. 'Twill be a long shrift; but poor Appleyard and poor Selden, they had none." Dick stooped to the window and looked in. The little cell was low and dark, but he could make out the wounded soldier lying moaning on his pallet. "Carter, poor friend, how goeth it?" he asked. "Master Shelton," returned the man, in an excited whisper, "for the dear light of heaven, bring the priest. Alack, I am sped: I am brought very low down; my hurt is to the death. Ye may do me no more service; this shall be the last. Now, for my poor soul's interest, and as a loyal gentleman, bestir you; for I have that matter on my conscience that shall drag me deep." He groaned, and Dick heard the grating of his teeth, whether in pain or terror. Just then Sir Daniel appeared upon the threshold of the hall. He had a letter in one hand. "Lads," he said, "we have had a shog, we have had a tumble; wherefore, then, deny it? Rather it imputeth to get speedily again to saddle. This old Harry the Sixt has had the undermost. Wash we, then, our hands of him. I have a good friend that rideth next the duke, the Lord of Wensleydale. Well, I have writ a letter to my friend, praying his good lordship, and offering large satisfaction for the past and reasonable surety for the future. Doubt not but he will lend a favourable ear. A prayer without gifts is like a song without music: I surfeit him with promises, boys--I spare not to promise. What, then, is lacking? Nay, a great thing--wherefore should I deceive you?--a great thing and a difficult: a messenger to bear it. The woods--y' are not ignorant of that--lie thick with our ill-willers. Haste is most needful; but without sleight and caution all is naught. Which, then, of this company will take me this letter, bear it to my Lord of Wensleydale, and bring me the answer back?" One man instantly arose. "I will, an't like you," said he. "I will even risk my carcass." "Nay, Dicky Bowyer, not so," returned the knight. "It likes me not. Y' are sly indeed, but not speedy. Ye were a laggard ever." "An't be so, Sir Daniel, here am I," cried another. "The saints forfend!" said the knight. "Y' are speedy, but not sly. Ye would blunder me headforemost into John Amend-All's camp. I thank you both for your good courage; but, in sooth, it may not be." Then Hatch offered himself, and he also was refused. "I want you here, good Bennet; y' are my right hand, indeed," returned the knight; and then, several coming forward in a group, Sir Daniel at length selected one and gave him the letter. "Now," he said, "upon your good speed and better discretion we do all depend. Bring me a good answer back, and before three weeks I will have purged my forest of these vagabonds that brave us to our faces. But mark it well, Throgmorton: the matter is not easy. Ye must steal forth under night, and go like a fox; and how ye are to cross Till I know not, neither by the bridge nor ferry." "I can swim," returned Throgmorton. "I will come soundly, fear not." "Well, friend, get ye to the buttery," replied Sir Daniel. "Ye shall swim first of all in nut-brown ale." And with that he turned back into the hall. "Sir Daniel hath a wise tongue," said Hatch aside to Dick. "See, now, where many a lesser man had glossed the matter over, he speaketh it out plainly to his company. Here is a danger, 'a saith, and here difficulty; and jesteth in the very saying. Nay, by St. Barbary, he is a born captain! Not a man but he is some deal heartened up! See how they fall again to work." This praise of Sir Daniel put a thought in the lad's head. "Bennet," he said, "how came my father by his end?" "Ask me not that," replied Hatch. "I had no hand nor knowledge in it; furthermore, I will even be silent, Master Dick. For look you, in a man's own business there he may speak; but of hearsay matters and of common talk, not so. Ask me Sir Oliver--ay, or Carter, if ye will; not me." And Hatch set off to make the rounds, leaving Dick in a muse. "Wherefore would he not tell me?" thought the lad. "And wherefore named he Carter? Carter--nay, then Carter had a hand in it, perchance." He entered the house, and passing some little way along a flagged and vaulted passage, came to the door of the cell where the hurt man lay groaning. At his entrance, Carter started eagerly. "Have ye brought the priest?" he cried. "Not yet awhile," returned Dick. "Y' have a word to tell me first. How came my father, Harry Shelton, by his death?" The man's face altered instantly. "I know not," he replied doggedly. "Nay, ye know well," returned Dick. "Seek not to put me by." "I tell you I know not," repeated Carter. "Then," said Dick, "ye shall die unshriven. Here am I, and here shall stay. There shall no priest come near you, rest assured. For of what avail is penitence, an ye have no mind to right those wrongs ye had a hand in? and without penitence, confession is but mockery." "Ye say what ye mean not, Master Dick," said Carter composedly. "It is ill threatening the dying, and becometh you (to speak truth) little. And for as little as it commends you, it shall serve you less. Stay an ye please. Ye will condemn my soul--ye shall learn nothing! There is my last word to you." And the wounded man turned upon the other side. Now Dick, to say truth, had spoken hastily, and was ashamed of his threat. But he made one more effort. "Carter," he said, "mistake me not. I know ye were but an instrument in the hands of others; a churl must obey his lord; I would not bear heavily on such an one. But I begin to learn upon many sides that this great duty lieth on my youth and ignorance, to avenge my father. Prithee, then, good Carter, set aside the memory of my threatenings, and in pure good-will and honest penitence, give me a word of help." The wounded man lay silent; nor, say what Dick pleased, could he extract another word from him. "Well," said Dick, "I will go call the priest to you as ye desired; for howsoever ye be in fault to me or mine, I would not be willingly in fault to any, least of all to one upon the last change." Again the old soldier heard him without speech or motion; even his groans he had suppressed; and as Dick turned and left the room, he was filled with admiration for that rugged fortitude. "And yet," he thought, "of what use is courage without wit? Had his hands been clean, he would have spoken; his silence did confess the secret louder than words. Nay, upon all sides, proof floweth on me. Sir Daniel, he or his men, hath done this thing." Dick paused in the stone passage with a heavy heart. At that hour, in the ebb of Sir Daniel's fortune, when he was beleaguered by the archers of the Black Arrow, and proscribed by the victorious Yorkists, was Dick, also, to turn upon the man who had nourished and taught him, who had severely punished, indeed, but yet unwearyingly protected his youth? The necessity, if it should prove to be one, was cruel. "Pray Heaven he be innocent!" he said. And then steps sounded on the flagging, and Sir Oliver came gravely towards the lad. "One seeketh you earnestly," said Dick. "I am upon the way, good Richard," said the priest. "It is this poor Carter. Alack, he is beyond cure." "And yet his soul is sicker than his body," answered Dick. "Have ye seen him?" asked Sir Oliver, with a manifest start. "I do but come from him," replied Dick. "What said he--what said he?" snapped the priest, with extraordinary eagerness. "He but cried for you the more piteously, Sir Oliver. It were well done to go the faster, for his hurt is grievous," returned the lad. "I am straight for him," was the reply. "Well, we have all our sins. We must all come to our latter day, good Richard." "Ay, sir; and it were well if we all came fairly," answered Dick. The priest dropped his eyes, and with an inaudible benediction hurried on. "He too!" thought Dick--"he, that taught me in piety! Nay, then, what a world is this, if all that care for me be blood-guilty of my father's death! Vengeance! Alas! what a sore fate is mine, if I must be avenged upon my friends!" The thought put Matcham in his head. He smiled at the remembrance of his strange companion, and then wondered where he was. Ever since they had come together to the doors of the Moat House the younger lad had disappeared, and Dick began to weary for a word with him. About an hour after, mass being somewhat hastily run through by Sir Oliver, the company gathered in the hall for dinner. It was a long, low apartment, strewn with green rushes, and the walls hung with arras in a design of savage men and questing bloodhounds; here and there hung spears and bows and bucklers; a fire blazed in the big chimney; there were arras-covered benches round the wall, and in the midst the table, fairly spread, awaited the arrival of the diners. Neither Sir Daniel nor his lady made their appearance. Sir Oliver himself was absent, and here again there was no word of Matcham. Dick began to grow alarmed, to recall his companion's melancholy forebodings, and to wonder to himself if any foul play had befallen him in that house. After dinner he found Goody Hatch, who was hurrying to my lady Brackley. "Goody," he said, "where is Master Matcham, I prithee? I saw ye go in with him when we arrived." The old woman laughed aloud. "Ah, Master Dick," she said, "y' have a famous bright eye in your head, to be sure!" and laughed again. "Nay, but where is he, indeed?" persisted Dick. "Ye will never see him more," she returned; "never. It is sure." "An I do not," returned the lad, "I will know the reason why. He came not hither of his full free will; such as I am, I am his best protector, and I will see him justly used. There be too many mysteries; I do begin to weary of the game!" But, as Dick was speaking, a heavy hand fell on his shoulder. It was Bennet Hatch that had come unperceived behind him. With a jerk of his thumb, the retainer dismissed his wife. "Friend Dick," he said, as soon as they were alone, "are ye a moonstruck natural? An ye leave not certain things in peace, ye were better in the salt sea than here in Tunstall Moat House. Y' have questioned me; y' have baited Carter; y' have frighted the jack-priest with hints. Bear ye more wisely, fool; and even now, when Sir Daniel calleth you, show me a smooth face, for the love of wisdom. Y' are to be sharply questioned. Look to your answers." "Hatch," returned Dick, "in all this I smell a guilty conscience." "An ye go not the wiser, ye will soon smell blood," replied Bennet. "I do but warn you. And here cometh one to call you." And indeed, at that very moment, a messenger came across the court to summon Dick into the presence of Sir Daniel. CHAPTER II THE TWO OATHS Sir Daniel was in the hall; there he paced angrily before the fire, awaiting Dick's arrival. None was by except Sir Oliver, and he sat discreetly backward, thumbing and muttering over his breviary. "Y' have sent for me, Sir Daniel?" said young Shelton. "I have sent for you, indeed," replied the knight. "For what cometh to mine ears? Have I been to you so heavy a guardian that ye make haste to credit ill of me? Or sith that ye see me, for the nonce, some worsted, do ye think to quit my party? By the mass, your father was not so! Those he was near, those he stood by, come wind or weather. But you, Dick, y' are a fair-day friend, it seemeth, and now seek to clear yourself of your allegiance." "An't please you, Sir Daniel, not so," returned Dick firmly. "I am grateful and faithful, where gratitude and faith are due. And before more is said, I thank you, and I thank Sir Oliver; y' have great claims upon me, both--none can have more; I were a hound if I forgot them." "It is well," said Sir Daniel; and then, rising into anger: "Gratitude and faith are words, Dick Shelton," he continued; "but I look to deeds. In this hour of my peril when my name is attainted, when my lands are forfeit, when this wood is full of men that hunger and thirst for my destruction, what doth gratitude? what doth faith? I have but a little company remaining; is it grateful or faithful to poison me their hearts with your insidious whisperings? Save me from such gratitude! But come, now, what is it ye wish? Speak; we are here to answer. If ye have aught against me, stand forth and say it." "Sir," replied Dick, "my father fell when I was yet a child. It hath come to mine ears that he was foully done by. It hath come to mine ears--for I will not dissemble--that ye had a hand in his undoing. And in all verity,--I shall not be at peace in mine own mind, nor very clear to help you, till I have certain resolution of these doubts." Sir Daniel sat down in a deep settle. He took his chin in his hand and looked at Dick fixedly. "And ye think I would be guardian to the man's son that I had murdered?" he asked. "Nay," said Dick, "pardon me if I answer churlishly; but indeed ye know right well a wardship is most profitable. All these years have ye not enjoyed my revenues, and led my men? Have ye not still my marriage? I wot not what it may be worth--it is worth something. Pardon me again; but if ye were base enough to slay a man under trust, here were, perhaps, reasons enough to move you to the lesser baseness." "When I was a lad of your years," returned Sir Daniel sternly, "my mind had not so turned upon suspicions. And Sir Oliver here," he added, "why should he, a priest, be guilty of this act?" "Nay, Sir Daniel," said Dick, "but where the master biddeth there will the dog go. It is well known this priest is but your instrument. I speak very freely; the time is not for courtesies. Even as I speak, so would I be answered. And answer get I none! Ye but put more questions. I rede ye beware, Sir Daniel; for in this way ye will but nourish and not satisfy my doubts." "I will answer you fairly, Master Richard," said the knight. "Were I to pretend ye have not stirred my wrath, I were no honest man. But I will be just even in anger. Come to me with these words when y' are grown and come to man's estate, and I am no longer your guardian, and so helpless to resent them. Come to me then, and I will answer you as ye merit, with a buffet in the mouth. Till then ye have two courses: either swallow me down these insults, keep a silent tongue, and fight in the meanwhile for the man that fed and fought for your infancy; or else--the door standeth open, the woods are full of mine enemies--go." The spirit with which these words were uttered, the looks with which they were accompanied, staggered Dick; and yet he could not but observe that he had got no answer. "I desire nothing more earnestly, Sir Daniel, than to believe you," he replied. "Assure me ye are free from this." "Will ye take my word of honour, Dick?" inquired the knight. "That would I," answered the lad. "I give it you," returned Sir Daniel. "Upon my word of honour, upon the eternal welfare of my spirit, and as I shall answer for my deeds hereafter, I had no hand nor portion in your father's death." He extended his hand, and Dick took it eagerly. Neither of them observed the priest, who, at the pronunciation of that solemn and false oath, had half arisen from his seat in an agony of horror and remorse. "Ah," cried Dick, "ye must find it in your great-heartedness to pardon me! I was a churl indeed to doubt of you. But ye have my hand upon it; I will doubt no more." "Nay, Dick," replied Sir Daniel, "y' are forgiven. Ye know not the world and its calumnious nature." "I was the more to blame," added Dick, "in that the rogues pointed, not directly at yourself, but at Sir Oliver." As he spoke he turned towards the priest, and paused in the middle of the last word. This tall, ruddy, corpulent, high-stepping man had fallen, you might say, to pieces; his colour was gone, his limbs were relaxed, his lips stammered prayers; and now, when Dick's eyes were fixed upon him suddenly, he cried out aloud, like some wild animal, and buried his face in his hands. Sir Daniel was by him in two strides, and shook him fiercely by the shoulder. At the same moment Dick's suspicions re-awakened. "Nay," he said, "Sir Oliver may swear also. 'Twas him they accused." "He shall swear," said the knight. Sir Oliver speechlessly waved his arms. "Ay, by the mass! but ye shall swear," cried Sir Daniel, beside himself with fury. "Here, upon this book, ye shall swear," he continued, picking up the breviary, which had fallen to the ground. "What! Ye make me doubt you! Swear, I say; swear!" But the priest was still incapable of speech. His terror of Sir Daniel, his terror of perjury, risen to about an equal height, strangled him. And just then, through the high stained-glass window of the hall, a black arrow crashed, and struck, and stuck quivering in the midst of the long table. Sir Oliver, with a loud scream, fell fainting on the rushes; while the knight, followed by Dick, dashed into the court and up the nearest corkscrew stair to the battlements. The sentries were all on the alert. The sun shone quietly on green lawns dotted with trees, and on the wooded hills of the forest which enclosed the view. There was no sign of a besieger. "Whence came that shot?" asked the knight. "From yonder clump, Sir Daniel," returned a sentinel. The knight stood a little, musing. Then he turned to Dick. "Dick," he said, "keep me an eye upon these men; I leave you in charge here. As for the priest, he shall clear himself, or I will know the reason why. I do almost begin to share in your suspicions. He shall swear, trust me, or we shall prove him guilty." Dick answered somewhat coldly, and the knight, giving him a piercing glance, hurriedly returned to the hall. His first glance was for the arrow. It was the first of these missiles he had seen, and as he turned it to and fro, the dark hue of it touched him with some fear. Again there was some writing: one word--"Earthed." "Ay," he broke out, "they know I am home, then. Earthed! Ay, but there is not a dog among them fit to dig me out." Sir Oliver had come to himself, and now scrambled to his feet. "Alack, Sir Daniel!" he moaned, "y' have sworn a dread oath; y' are doomed to the end of time." "Ay," returned the knight, "I have sworn an oath, indeed, thou chucklehead; but thyself shalt swear a greater. It shall be on the blessed cross of Holywood. Look to it; get the words ready. It shall be sworn to-night." "Now, may Heaven lighten you!" replied the priest; "may Heaven incline your heart from this iniquity!" "Look you, my good father," said Sir Daniel, "if y' are for piety, I say no more; ye begin late, that is all. But if y' are in any sense bent upon wisdom, hear me. This lad beginneth to irk me like a wasp. I have a need for him, for I would sell his marriage. But I tell you, in all plainness, if that he continue to weary me he shall go join his father. I give orders now to change him to the chamber above the chapel. If that ye can swear your innocency with a good solid oath and an assured countenance, it is well; the lad will be at peace a little, and I will spare him. If that ye stammer or blench, or anyways boggle at the swearing, he will not believe you; and, by the mass, he shall die. There is for your thinking on." "The chamber above the chapel!" gasped the priest. "That same," replied the knight. "So if ye desire to save him, save him; and if ye desire not, prithee, go to, and let me be at peace! For an I had been a hasty man I would already have put my sword through you, for your intolerable cowardice and folly. Have ye chosen? Say!" "I have chosen," said the priest. "Heaven pardon me, I will do evil for good. I will swear for the lad's sake." "So it is best!" said Sir Daniel. "Send for him, then, speedily. Ye shall see him alone. Yet I shall have an eye on you. I shall be here in the panel room." The knight raised the arras and let it fall again behind him. There was the sound of a spring opening; then followed the creaking of trod stairs. Sir Oliver, left alone, cast a timorous glance upward at the arras-covered wall, and crossed himself with every appearance of terror and contrition. "Nay, if he is in the chapel room," the priest murmured, "were it at my soul's cost, I must save him." Three minutes later, Dick, who had been summoned by another messenger, found Sir Oliver standing by the hall table, resolute and pale. "Richard Shelton," he said, "ye have required an oath from me. I might complain, I might deny you; but my heart is moved toward you for the past, and I will even content you as ye choose. By the true cross of Holywood, I did not slay your father." "Sir Oliver," returned Dick, "when first we read John Amend-All's paper I was convinced of so much. But suffer me to put two questions. Ye did not slay him; granted. But had ye no hand in it?" "None," said Sir Oliver. And at the same time he began to contort his face, and signal with his mouth and eyebrows, like one who desired to convey a warning, yet dared not utter a sound. Dick regarded him in wonder; then he turned and looked all about him at the empty hall. "What make ye?" he inquired. "Why, naught," returned the priest, hastily smoothing his countenance. "I make naught; I do but suffer; I am sick. I--I--prithee, Dick, I must begone. On the true cross of Holywood, I am clean innocent alike of violence or treachery. Content ye, good lad. Farewell!" And he made his escape from the apartment with unusual alacrity. Dick remained rooted to the spot, his eyes wandering about the room, his face a changing picture of various emotions, wonder, doubt, suspicion, and amusement. Gradually, as his mind grew clearer, suspicion took the upper hand, and was succeeded by certainty of the worst. He raised his head, and, as he did so, violently started. High upon the wall there was the figure of a savage hunter woven in the tapestry. With one hand he held a horn to his mouth; in the other he brandished a stout spear. His face was dark, for he was meant to represent an African. Now, here was what had startled Richard Shelton. The sun had moved away from the hall windows, and at the same time the fire had blazed up high on the wide hearth, and shed a changeful glow upon the roof and hangings. In this light the figure of the black hunter had winked at him with a white eyelid. He continued staring at the eye. The light shone upon it like a gem; it was liquid, it was alive. Again the white eyelid closed upon it for a fraction of a second, and the next moment it was gone. There could be no mistake. The live eye that had been watching him through a hole in the tapestry was gone. The firelight no longer shone on a reflecting surface. And instantly Dick awoke to the terrors of his position. Hatch's warning, the mute signals of the priest, this eye that had observed him from the wall, ran together in his mind. He saw he had been put upon his trial, that he had once more betrayed his suspicions, and that, short of some miracle, he was lost. "If I cannot get me forth out of this house," he thought, "I am a dead man! And this poor Matcham, too--to what a cockatrice's nest have I not led him!" He was still so thinking, when there came one in haste, to bid him help in changing his arms, his clothing, and his two or three books, to a new chamber. "A new chamber?" he repeated. "Wherefore so? What chamber?" "'Tis one above the chapel," answered the messenger. "It hath stood long empty," said Dick, musing. "What manner of room is it?" "Nay, a brave room," returned the man. "But yet"--lowering his voice--"they call it haunted." "Haunted?" repeated Dick, with a chill. "I have not heard of it. Nay, then, and by whom?" The messenger looked about him; and then, in a low whisper, "By the sacrist of St. John's," he said. "They had him there to sleep one night, and in the morning--whew!--he was gone. The devil had taken him, they said; the more betoken, he had drunk late the night before." Dick followed the man with black forebodings. CHAPTER III THE ROOM OVER THE CHAPEL From the battlements nothing further was observed. The sun journeyed westward, and at last went down; but to the eyes of all these eager sentinels no living thing appeared in the neighbourhood of Tunstall House. When the night was at length fairly come, Throgmorton was led to a room overlooking an angle of the moat. Thence he was lowered with every precaution; the ripple of his swimming was audible for a brief period; then a black figure was observed to land by the branches of a willow and crawl away among the grass. For some half-hour Sir Daniel and Hatch stood eagerly giving ear; but all remained quiet. The messenger had got away in safety. Sir Daniel's brow grew clearer. He turned to Hatch. "Bennet," said he, "this John Amend-All is no more than a man ye see. He sleepeth. We will make a good end of him, go to!" All the afternoon and evening Dick had been ordered hither and thither, one command following another, till he was bewildered with the number and the hurry of commissions. All that time he had seen no more of Sir Oliver, and nothing of Matcham; and yet both the priest and the young lad ran continually in his mind. It was now his chief purpose to escape from Tunstall Moat House as speedily as might be; and yet before he went, he desired a word with both of these. At length, with a lamp in one hand, he mounted to his new apartment. It was large, low, and somewhat dark. The window looked upon the moat, and although it was so high up, it was heavily barred. The bed was luxurious, with one pillow of down, and one of lavender, and a red coverlet worked in a pattern of roses. All about the walls were cupboards, locked and padlocked, and concealed from view by hangings of dark-coloured arras. Dick made the round, lifting the arras, sounding the panels, seeking vainly to open the cupboards. He assured himself that the door was strong, and the bolt solid; then he set down his lamp upon a bracket, and once more looked all around. For what reason had he been given this chamber? It was larger and finer than his own. Could it conceal a snare? Was there a secret entrance? Was it indeed haunted? His blood ran a little chilly in his veins. Immediately over him the heavy foot of a sentry trod the leads. Below, he knew, was the arched roof of the chapel; and next to the chapel was the hall. Certainly there was a secret passage in the hall; the eye that had watched him from the arras gave him proof of that. Was it not more than probable that the passage extended to the chapel, and, if so, that it had an opening in his room? To sleep in such a place, he felt, would be foolhardy. He made his weapons ready, and took his position in a corner of the room behind the door. If ill was intended, he would sell his life dear. The sound of many feet, the challenge, and the pass-word sounded overhead along the battlements; the watch was being changed. And just then there came a scratching at the door of the chamber; it grew a little louder; then a whisper: "Dick, Dick, it is I!" Dick ran to the door, drew the bolt and admitted Matcham. He was very pale, and carried a lamp in one hand and a drawn dagger in the other. "Shut me the door," he whispered. "Swift, Dick! This house is full of spies; I hear their feet follow me in the corridors; I hear them breathe behind the arras." "Well, content you," returned Dick, "it is closed. We are safe for this while, if there be safety anywhere within these walls. But my heart is glad to see you. By the mass, lad, I thought ye were sped. Where hid ye?" "It matters not," returned Matcham. "Since we be met, it matters not. But, Dick, are your eyes open? Have they told you of to-morrow's doings?" "Not they," replied Dick. "What make they to-morrow?" "To-morrow, or to-night, I know not," said the other; "but one time or other, Dick, they do intend upon your life. I had the proof of it: I have heard them whisper; nay, they as good as told me." "Ay," returned Dick, "is it so? I had thought as much." And he told him the day's occurrences at length. When it was done, Matcham arose and began, in turn, to examine the apartment. "No," he said, "there is no entrance visible. Yet 'tis a pure certainty there is one. Dick, I will stay by you. An y' are to die, I will die with you. And I can help--look! I have stolen a dagger--I will do my best! And meanwhile, an ye know of any issue, any sally-port we could get opened, or any window that we might descend by, I will most joyfully face any jeopardy to flee with you." "Jack," said Dick, "by the mass, Jack, y' are the best soul, and the truest, and the bravest in all England. Give me your hand, Jack." And he grasped the other's hand in silence. "I will tell you," he resumed. "There is a window out of which the messenger descended; the rope should still be in the chamber. 'Tis a hope." "Hist!" said Matcham. Both gave ear. There was a sound below the floor; then it paused, and then began again. "Some one walketh in the room below," whispered Matcham. "Nay," returned Dick, "there is no room below; we are above the chapel. It is my murderer in the secret passage. Well, let him come: it shall go hard with him!" And he ground his teeth. "Blow me the lights out," said the other. "Perchance he will betray himself." They blew out both the lamps and lay still as death. The footfalls underneath were very soft, but they were clearly audible. Several times they came and went; and then there was a loud jar of a key turning in a lock, followed by a considerable silence. Presently the steps began again, and then, all of a sudden, a chink of light appeared in the planking of the room in a far corner. It widened; a trap-door was being opened, letting in a gush of light. They could see the strong hand pushing it up; and Dick raised his crossbow, waiting for the head to follow. But now there came an interruption. From a distant corner of the Moat House shouts began to be heard, and first one voice, and then several, crying aloud upon a name. This noise had plainly disconcerted the murderer, for the trap-door was silently lowered to its place, and the steps hurriedly returned, passed once more close below the lads, and died away in the distance. Here was a moment's respite. Dick breathed deep, and then, and not till then, he gave ear to the disturbance which had interrupted the attack, and which was now rather increasing than diminishing. All about the Moat House feet were running, doors were opening and slamming, and still the voice of Sir Daniel towered above all this bustle, shouting for "Joanna." "Joanna!" repeated Dick. "Why, who the murrain should this be? Here is no Joanna, nor ever hath been. What meaneth it?" Matcham was silent. He seemed to have drawn farther away. But only a little faint starlight entered by the window, and at the far end of the apartment where the pair were, the darkness was complete. "Jack," said Dick, "I wot not where ye were all day. Saw ye this Joanna?" "Nay," returned Matcham, "I saw her not." "Nor heard tell of her?" he pursued. The steps drew nearer. Sir Daniel was still roaring the name of Joanna from the courtyard. "Did ye hear of her?" repeated Dick. "I heard of her," said Matcham. "How your voice twitters! What aileth you?" said Dick. "'Tis a most excellent good fortune, this Joanna; it will take their minds from us." "Dick," cried Matcham, "I am lost; we are both lost! Let us flee if there be yet time. They will not rest till they have found me. Or, see! let me go forth; when they have found me, ye may flee. Let me forth, Dick; good Dick, let me away!" She was groping for the bolt, when Dick at last comprehended. "By the mass!" he cried, "y' are no Jack; y' are Joanna Sedley; y' are the maid that would not marry me!" The girl paused, and stood silent and motionless. Dick, too, was silent for a little; then he spoke again. "Joanna," he said, "y' have saved my life, and I have saved yours; and we have seen blood flow, and been friends and enemies--ay, and I took my belt to thrash you; and all that time I thought ye were a boy. But now death has me, and my time's out, and before I die I must say this: Y' are the best maid and the bravest under heaven, and, if only I could live, I would marry you blithely; and, live or die, I love you." She answered nothing. "Come," he said, "speak up, Jack. Come, be a good maid, and say ye love me!" "Why, Dick," she cried, "would I be here?" "Well, see ye here," continued Dick, "an we but escape whole, we'll marry; and an we're to die, we die, and there's an end on't. But now that I think, how found ye my chamber?" "I asked it of Dame Hatch," she answered. "Well, the dame's staunch," he answered; "she'll not tell upon you. We have time before us." And just then, as if to contradict his words, feet came down the corridor, and a fist beat roughly on the door. "Here!" cried a voice. "Open, Master Dick; open!" Dick neither moved nor answered. "It is all over," said the girl; and she put her arms about Dick's neck. One after another, men came trooping to the door. Then Sir Daniel arrived himself, and there was a sudden cessation of the noise. "Dick," cried the knight, "be not an ass. The Seven Sleepers had been awake ere now. We know she is within there. Open, then, the door, man." Dick was again silent. "Down with it," said Sir Daniel. And immediately his followers fell savagely upon the door with foot and fist. Solid as it was, and strongly bolted, it would soon have given way, but once more fortune interfered. Over the thunder-storm of blows the cry of a sentinel was heard: it was followed by another: shouts ran along the battlements, shouts answered out of the wood. In the first moment of alarm it sounded as if the foresters were carrying the Moat House by assault. And Sir Daniel and his men, desisting instantly from their attack upon Dick's chamber, hurried to defend the walls. "Now," cried Dick, "we are saved." He seized the great old bedstead with both hands, and bent himself in vain to move it. "Help me, Jack. For your life's sake, help me stoutly!" he cried. Between them, with a huge effort, they dragged the big frame of oak across the room, and thrust it endwise to the chamber door. "Ye do but make things worse," said Joanna sadly. "He will then enter by the trap." "Not so," replied Dick. "He durst not tell his secret to so many. It is by the trap that we shall flee. Hark! The attack is over. Nay, it was none!" It had, indeed, been no attack; it was the arrival of another party of stragglers from the defeat of Risingham that had disturbed Sir Daniel. They had run the gauntlet under cover of the darkness; they had been admitted by the great gate; and now, with a great stamping of hoofs and jingle of accoutrements and arms they were dismounting in the court. "He will return anon," said Dick. "To the trap!" He lighted a lamp, and they went together into the corner of the room. The open chink through which some light still glittered was easily discovered, and, taking a stout sword from his small armoury, Dick thrust it deep into the seam, and weighed strenuously on the hilt. The trap moved, gaped a little, and at length came widely open. Seizing it with their hands, the two young folk threw it back. It disclosed a few steps descending, and at the foot of them, where the would-be murderer had left it, a burning lamp. "Now," said Dick, "go first and take the lamp. I will follow to close the trap." So they descended one after the other, and as Dick lowered the trap the blows began once again to thunder on the panels of the door. CHAPTER IV THE PASSAGE The passage in which Dick and Joanna now found themselves was narrow, dirty, and short. At the other end of it, a door stood partly open; the same door, without doubt, that they had heard the man unlocking. Heavy cobwebs hung from the roof, and the paved flooring echoed hollow under the lightest tread. Beyond the door there were two branches, at right angles. Dick chose one of them at random, and the pair hurried, with echoing footsteps, along the hollow of the chapel roof. The top of the arched ceiling rose like a whale's back in the dim glimmer of the lamp. Here and there were spy-holes, concealed, on the other side, by the carving of the cornice; and looking down through one of these, Dick saw the paved floor of the chapel--the altar, with its burning tapers--and, stretched before it on the steps, the figure of Sir Oliver praying with uplifted hands. At the other end they descended a few steps. The passage grew narrower; the wall upon one hand was now of wood; the noise of people talking, and a faint flickering of lights, came through the interstices; and presently they came to a round hole about the size of a man's eye, and Dick, looking down through it, beheld the interior of the hall, and some half a dozen men sitting, in their jacks, about the table, drinking deep and demolishing a venison pie. These were certainly some of the late arrivals. "Here is no help," said Dick. "Let us try back." "Nay," said Joanna; "maybe the passage goeth farther." And she pushed on. But a few yards farther the passage ended at the top of a short flight of steps; and it became plain that, as long as the soldiers occupied the hall, escape was impossible upon that side. They retraced their steps with all imaginable speed, and set forward to explore the other branch. It was exceedingly narrow, scarce wide enough for a large man; and it led them continually up and down by little break-neck stairs, until even Dick had lost all notion of his whereabouts. At length it grew both narrower and lower; the stairs continued to descend; the walls on either hand became damp and slimy to the touch; and far in front of them they heard the squeaking and scuttling of the rats. "We must be in the dungeons," Dick remarked. "And still there is no outlet," added Joanna. "Nay, but an outlet there must be!" Dick answered. Presently, sure enough, they came to a sharp angle, and then the passage ended in a flight of steps. On the top of that there was a solid flag of stone by way of trap, and to this they both set their backs. It was immovable. "Some one holdeth it," suggested Joanna. "Not so," said Dick; "for were a man strong as ten, he must still yield a little. But this resisteth like dead rock. There is a weight upon the trap. Here is no issue; and, by my sooth, good Jack, we are here as fairly prisoners as though the gyves were on our ankle-bones. Sit ye then down, and let us talk. After a while we shall return, when perchance they shall be less carefully upon their guard; and, who knoweth? we may break out and stand a chance. But, in my poor opinion, we are as good as shent." "Dick," she cried, "alas the day that ever ye should have seen me! For like a most unhappy and unthankful maid, it is I have led you hither." "What cheer!" returned Dick. "It was all written, and that which is written, willy nilly, cometh still to pass. But tell me a little what manner of a maid ye are, and how ye came into Sir Daniel's hands; that will do better than to bemoan yourself, whether for your sake or mine." "I am an orphan, like yourself, of father and mother," said Joanna; "and for my great misfortune, Dick, and hitherto for yours, I am a rich marriage. My Lord Foxham had me to ward; yet it appears Sir Daniel bought the marriage of me from the king, and a right dear price he paid for it. So here was I, poor babe, with two great and rich men fighting which should marry me, and I still at nurse! Well, then, the world changed, and there was a new chancellor, and Sir Daniel bought the warding of me over the Lord Foxham's head. And then the world changed again, and Lord Foxham bought my marriage over Sir Daniel's; and from then to now it went on ill betwixt the two of them. But still Lord Foxham kept me in his hands, and was a good lord to me. And at last I was to be married--or sold, if ye like it better. Five hundred pounds Lord Foxham was to get for me. Hamley was the groom's name, and to-morrow, Dick, of all days in the year, was I to be betrothed. Had it not come to Sir Daniel, I had been wedded, sure--and never seen thee, Dick, dear Dick!" And here she took his hand, and kissed it, with the prettiest grace; and Dick drew her hand to him and did the like. "Well," she went on, "Sir Daniel took me unawares in the garden, and made me dress in these men's clothes, which is a deadly sin for a woman; and, besides, they fit me not. He rode with me to Kettley, as ye saw, telling me I was to marry you; but I, in my heart, made sure I would marry Hamley in his teeth." "Ay!" cried Dick, "and so ye loved this Hamley!" "Nay," replied Joanna, "not I. I did but hate Sir Daniel. And then, Dick, ye helped me, and ye were right kind, and very bold, and my heart turned towards you in mine own despite; and now, if we can in any way compass it, I would marry you with right goodwill. And if, by cruel destiny, it may not be, still ye'll be dear to me. While my heart beats, it'll be true to you." "And I," said Dick, "that never cared a straw for any manner of woman until now, I took to you when I thought ye were a boy. I had a pity to you, and knew not why. When I would have belted you, the hand failed me. But when ye owned ye were a maid, Jack--for still I will call you Jack--I made sure ye were the maid for me. Hark!" he said, breaking off--"one cometh." And indeed a heavy tread was now audible in the echoing passage, and the rats again fled in armies. Dick reconnoitred his position. The sudden turn gave him a post of vantage. He could thus shoot in safety from the cover of the wall. But it was plain the light was too near him, and, running some way forward, he set down the lamp in the middle of the passage, and then returned to watch. Presently, at the far end of the passage, Bennet hove in sight. He seemed to be alone, and he carried in his hand a burning torch, which made him the better mark. "Stand, Bennet!" cried Dick. "Another step and y' are dead." "So here ye are," returned Hatch, peering forward into the darkness. "I see you not. Aha! y' have done wisely, Dick; y' have put your lamp before you. By my sooth, but, though it was done to shoot my own knave body, I do rejoice to see ye profit of my lessons! And now, what make ye? what seek ye here? Why would ye shoot upon an old, kind friend? And have ye the young gentlewoman there?" "Nay, Bennet, it is I should question and you answer," replied Dick. "Why am I in this jeopardy of my life? Why do men come privily to slay me in my bed? Why am I now fleeing in mine own guardian's strong house, and from the friends that I have lived among and never injured?" "Master Dick, Master Dick," said Bennet, "what told I you? Y' are brave, but the most uncrafty lad that I can think upon!" "Well," returned Dick, "I see you know all, and that I am doomed indeed. It is well. Here, where I am, I stay. Let Sir Daniel get me out if he be able!" Hatch was silent for a space. "Hark ye," he began, "I return to Sir Daniel, to tell him where ye are, and how posted; for, in truth, it was to that end he sent me. But you, if ye are no fool, had best be gone ere I return." "Be gone!" repeated Dick. "I would be gone already an I wist how. I cannot move the trap." "Put me your hand into the corner, and see what ye find there," replied Bennet. "Throgmorton's rope is still in the brown chamber. Fare ye well." And Hatch, turning upon his heel, disappeared again into the windings of the passage. Dick instantly returned for his lamp, and proceeded to act upon the hint. At one corner of the trap there was a deep cavity in the wall. Pushing his arm into the aperture, Dick found an iron bar, which he thrust vigorously upwards. There followed a snapping noise, and the slab of stone instantly started in its bed. They were free of the passage. A little exercise of strength easily raised the trap; and they came forth into a vaulted chamber, opening on one hand upon the court, where one or two fellows, with bare arms, were rubbing down the horses of the last arrivals. A torch or two, each stuck in an iron ring against the wall, changefully lit up the scene. CHAPTER V HOW DICK CHANGED SIDES Dick, blowing out his lamp lest it should attract attention, led the way upstairs and along the corridor. In the brown chamber the rope had been made fast to the frame of an exceeding heavy and ancient bed. It had not been detached, and Dick, taking the coil to the window, began to lower it slowly and cautiously into the darkness of the night. Joan stood by; but as the rope lengthened, and still Dick continued to pay it out, extreme fear began to conquer her resolution. "Dick," she said, "is it so deep? I may not essay it. I should infallibly fall, good Dick." It was just at the delicate moment of the operations that she spoke. Dick started: the remainder of the coil slipped from his grasp, and the end fell with a splash into the moat. Instantly, from the battlement above, the voice of a sentinel cried, "Who goes?" "A murrain!" cried Dick. "We are paid now! Down with you--take the rope." "I cannot," she cried, recoiling. "An ye cannot, no more can I," said Shelton. "How can I swim the moat without you? Do ye desert me, then?" "Dick," she gasped, "I cannot. The strength is gone from me." "By the mass, then, we are all shent!" he shouted, stamping with his foot; and then, hearing steps, he ran to the room door and sought to close it. Before he could shoot the bolt, strong arms were thrusting it back upon him from the other side. He struggled for a second; then, feeling himself overpowered, ran back to the window. The girl had fallen against the wall in the embrasure of the window; she was more than half insensible; and when he tried to raise her in his arms, her body was limp and unresponsive. At the same moment the men who had forced the door against him laid hold upon him. The first he poniarded at a blow, and the others falling back for a second in some disorder, he profited by the chance, bestrode the window-sill, seized the cord in both hands, and let his body slip. The cord was knotted, which made it the easier to descend; but so furious was Dick's hurry, and so small his experience of such gymnastics, that he span round and round in mid-air like a criminal upon a gibbet, and now beat his head, and now bruised his hands, against the rugged stonework of the wall. The air roared in his ears; he saw the stars overhead, and the reflected stars below him in the moat, whirling like dead leaves before the tempest. And then he lost hold and fell, and soused head over ears into the icy water. When he came to the surface his hand encountered the rope, which, newly lightened of his weight, was swinging wildly to and fro. There was a red glow overhead, and looking up, he saw, by the light of several torches and a cresset full of burning coals, the battlements lined with faces. He saw the men's eyes turning hither and thither in quest of him; but he was too far below, the light reached him not, and they looked in vain. And now he perceived that the rope was considerably too long, and he began to struggle as well as he could towards the other side of the moat, still keeping his head above water. In this way he got much more than half-way over; indeed the bank was almost within reach, before the rope began to draw him back by its own weight. Taking his courage in both hands, he left go and made a leap for the trailing sprays of willow that had already, that same evening, helped Sir Daniel's messenger to land. He went down, rose again, sank a second time, and then his hand caught a branch, and with the speed of thought he had dragged himself into the thick of the tree and clung there, dripping and panting, and still half uncertain of his escape. But all this had not been done without a considerable splashing, which had so far indicated his position to the men along the battlements. Arrows and quarrels fell thick around him in the darkness, like driving hail; and suddenly a torch was thrown down--flared through the air in its swift passage--stuck for a moment on the edge of the bank, where it burned high and lit up its whole surroundings like a bonfire--and then, in a good hour for Dick, slipped off, plumped into the moat, and was instantly extinguished. It had served its purpose. The marksmen had had time to see the willow, and Dick ensconced among its boughs; and though the lad instantly sprang higher up the bank and ran for his life, he was yet not quick enough to escape a shot. An arrow struck him in the shoulder, another grazed his head. The pain of his wounds lent him wings; and he had no sooner got upon the level than he took to his heels and ran straight before him in the dark, without a thought for the direction of his flight. For a few steps missiles followed him, but these soon ceased; and when at length he came to a halt and looked behind, he was already a good way from the Moat House, though he could still see the torches moving to and fro along its battlements. He leaned against a tree, streaming with blood and water, bruised, wounded, and alone. For all that, he had saved his life for that bout; and though Joanna remained behind in the power of Sir Daniel, he neither blamed himself for an accident that it had been beyond his power to prevent, nor did he augur any fatal consequences to the girl herself. Sir Daniel was cruel, but he was not likely to be cruel to a young gentlewoman who had other protectors, willing and able to bring him to account. It was more probable he would make haste to marry her to some friend of his own. "Well," thought Dick, "between then and now I will find me the means to bring that traitor under; for I think, by the mass, that I be now absolved from any gratitude or obligation; and when war is open, there is a fair chance for all." In the meanwhile, here he was in a sore plight. For some little way farther he struggled forward through the forest; but what with the pain of his wounds, the darkness of the night, and the extreme uneasiness and confusion of his mind, he soon became equally unable to guide himself or to continue to push through the close undergrowth, and he was fain at length to sit down and lean his back against a tree. When he awoke from something betwixt sleep and swooning, the grey of the morning had begun to take the place of night. A little chilly breeze was bustling among the trees, and as he still sat staring before him, only half awake, he became aware of something dark that swung to and fro among the branches, some hundred yards in front of him. The progressive brightening of the day and the return of his own senses at last enabled him to recognise the object. It was a man hanging from the bough of a tall oak. His head had fallen forward on his breast; but at every stronger puff of wind his body span round and round, and his legs and arms tossed, like some ridiculous plaything. Dick clambered to his feet, and, staggering and leaning on the tree-trunks as he went, drew near to this grim object. The bough was perhaps twenty feet above the ground, and the poor fellow had been drawn up so high by his executioners that his boots swung clear above Dick's reach; and as his hood had been drawn over his face, it was impossible to recognise the man. Dick looked about him right and left; and at last he perceived that the other end of the cord had been made fast to the trunk of a little hawthorn which grew, thick with blossom, under the lofty arcade of the oak. With his dagger, which alone remained to him of all his arms, young Shelton severed the rope, and instantly, with a dead thump, the corpse fell in a heap upon the ground. Dick raised the hood; it was Throgmorton, Sir Daniel's messenger. He had not gone far upon his errand. A paper, which had apparently escaped the notice of the men of the Black Arrow, stuck from the bosom of his doublet, and Dick, pulling it forth, found it was Sir Daniel's letter to Lord Wensleydale. "Come," thought he, "if the world changes yet again, I may have here the wherewithal to shame Sir Daniel--nay, and perchance to bring him to the block." And he put the paper in his own bosom, said a prayer over the dead man, and set forth again through the woods. His fatigue and weakness increased; his ears sang, his steps faltered, his mind at intervals failed him, so low had he been brought by loss of blood. Doubtless he made many deviations from his true path, but at last he came out upon the high-road, not very far from Tunstall hamlet. A rough voice bid him stand. "Stand?" repeated Dick. "By the mass, but I am nearer falling." And he suited the action to the word, and fell all his length upon the road. Two men came forth out of the thicket, each in green forest jerkin, each with long-bow and quiver and short sword. "Why, Lawless," said the younger of the two, "it is young Shelton." "Ay, this will be as good as bread to John Amend-All," returned the other. "Though, faith, he hath been to the wars. Here is a tear in his scalp that must 'a' cost him many a good ounce of blood." "And here," added Greensheve, "is a hole in his shoulder that must have pricked him well. Who hath done this, think ye? If it be one of ours, he may all to prayer; Ellis will give him a short shrift and a long rope." "Up with the cub," said Lawless. "Clap him on my back." And then, when Dick had been hoisted to his shoulders, and he had taken the lad's arms about his neck, and got a firm hold of him, the ex-Grey Friar added-- "Keep ye the post, brother Greensheve. I will on with him by myself." So Greensheve returned to his ambush on the wayside, and Lawless trudged down the hill, whistling as he went, with Dick, still in a dead faint, comfortably settled on his shoulders. The sun rose as he came out of the skirts of the wood and saw Tunstall hamlet straggling up the opposite hill. All seemed quiet, but a strong post of some half a score of archers lay close by the bridge on either side of the road, and, as soon as they perceived Lawless with his burden, began to bestir themselves and set arrow to string like vigilant sentries. "Who goes?" cried the man in command. "Will Lawless, by the rood--ye know me as well as your own hand," returned the outlaw contemptuously. "Give the word, Lawless," returned the other. "Now, Heaven lighten thee, thou great fool," replied Lawless. "Did I not tell it thee myself? But ye are all mad for this playing at soldiers. When I am in the greenwood, give me greenwood ways; and my word for this tide is, 'A fig for all mock soldiery!'" "Lawless, ye but show an ill example; give us the word, fool jester," said the commander of the post. "And if I had forgotten it?" asked the other. "An ye had forgotten it--as I know y' have not--by the mass, I would clap an arrow into your big body," returned the first. "Nay, an y' are so ill a jester," said Lawless, "ye shall have your word for me. 'Duckworth and Shelton' is the word; and here, to the illustration, is Shelton on my shoulders, and to Duckworth do I carry him." "Pass, Lawless," said the sentry. "And where is John?" asked the Grey Friar. "He holdeth a court, by the mass, and taketh rents as to the manner born!" cried another of the company. So it proved. When Lawless got as far up the village as the little inn, he found Ellis Duckworth surrounded by Sir Daniel's tenants, and, by the right of his good company of archers, coolly taking rents, and giving written receipts in return for them. By the faces of the tenants, it was plain how little this proceeding pleased them; for they argued very rightly that they would simply have to pay them twice. As soon as he knew what had brought Lawless, Ellis dismissed the remainder of the tenants, and, with every mark of interest and apprehension, conducted Dick into an inner chamber of the inn. There the lad's hurts were looked to; and he was recalled, by simple remedies, to consciousness. "Dear lad," said Ellis, pressing his hand, "y' are in a friend's hands that loved your father, and loves you for his sake. Rest ye a little quietly, for ye are somewhat out of case. Then shall ye tell me your story, and betwixt the two of us we shall find a remedy for all." A little later in the day, and after Dick had awakened from a comfortable slumber to find himself still very weak, but clearer in mind and easier in body, Ellis returned, and sitting down by the bedside, begged him, in the name of his father, to relate the circumstance of his escape from Tunstall Moat House. There was something in the strength of Duckworth's frame, in the honesty of his brown face, in the clearness and shrewdness of his eyes, that moved Dick to obey him; and from first to last the lad told him the story of his two days' adventures. "Well," said Ellis, when he had done, "see what the kind saints have done for you, Dick Shelton, not alone to save your body in so numerous and deadly perils, but to bring you into my hands, that have no dearer wish than to assist your father's son. Be but true to me--and I see y' are true--and betwixt you and me we shall bring that false-heart traitor to the death." "Will ye assault the house?" asked Dick. "I were mad, indeed, to think of it," returned Ellis. "He hath too much power; his men gather to him; those that gave me the slip last night, and by the mass came in so handily for you--those have made him safe. Nay, Dick, to the contrary, thou and I and my brave bowmen, we must all slip from this forest speedily, and leave Sir Daniel free." "My mind misgiveth me for Jack," said the lad. "For Jack!" repeated Duckworth. "O, I see, for the wench! Nay, Dick! I promise you, if there come talk of any marriage we shall act at once; till then, or till the time is ripe, we shall all disappear, even like shadows at morning; Sir Daniel shall look east and west, and see none enemies; he shall think, by the mass, that he hath dreamed a while, and hath now awakened in his bed. But our four eyes, Dick, shall follow him right close, and our four hands--so help us all the army of the saints!--shall bring that traitor low!" <tb> Two days later Sir Daniel's garrison had grown to such a strength that he ventured on a sally, and at the head of some two score horsemen pushed without opposition as far as Tunstall hamlet. Not an arrow flew, not a man stirred in the thicket; the bridge was no longer guarded, but stood open to all comers; and as Sir Daniel crossed it, he saw the villagers looking timidly from their doors. Presently one of them, taking heart of grace, came forward, and with the lowliest salutations, presented a letter to the knight. His face darkened as he read the contents. It ran thus: "_To the most untrue and cruel gentylman, Sir Daniel Brackley, Knyght--These:_ "I fynde ye were untrue and unkynd fro the first. Ye have my father's blood upon your hands; let be, it will not wasshe. Some day ye shall perish by my procurement, so much I let you to wytte; and I let you to wytte farther, that if ye seek to wed to any other the gentyl-woman, Mistresse Joan Sedley, whom that I am bound upon a great oath to wed myself, the blow will be very swift. The first step therinne will be thy first step to the grave. "RIC. SHELTON." BOOK III MY LORD FOXHAM CHAPTER I THE HOUSE BY THE SHORE Months had passed away since Richard Shelton made his escape from the hands of his guardian. These months had been eventful for England. The party of Lancaster, which was then in the very article of death, had once more raised its head. The Yorkists defeated and dispersed, their leader butchered on the field, it seemed, for a very brief season in the winter following upon the events already recorded, as if the House of Lancaster had finally triumphed over its foes. The small town of Shoreby-on-the-Till was full of the Lancastrian nobles of the neighbourhood. Earl Risingham was there, with three hundred men-at-arms; Lord Shoreby, with two hundred; Sir Daniel himself, high in favour, and once more growing rich on confiscations, lay in a house of his own, on the main street, with three score men. The world had changed indeed. It was a black, bitter cold evening in the first week of January, with a hard frost, a high wind, and every likelihood of snow before the morning. In an obscure alehouse in a by-street near the harbour, three or four men sat drinking ale and eating a hasty mess of eggs. They were all likely, lusty, weather-beaten fellows, hard of hand, bold of eye; and though they wore plain tabards, like country ploughmen, even a drunken soldier might have looked twice before he sought a quarrel in such company. A little apart before the huge fire sat a younger man, almost a boy, dressed in much the same fashion, though it was easy to see by his looks that he was better born, and might have worn a sword had the time suited. "Nay," said one of the men at the table, "I like it not. Ill will come of it. This is no place for jolly fellows. A jolly fellow loveth open country, good cover, and scarce foes; but here we are shut in a town, girt about with enemies; and, for the bull's-eye of misfortune, see if it snow not ere the morning." "'Tis for Master Shelton there," said another, nodding his head towards the lad before the fire. "I will do much for Master Shelton," returned the first; "but to come to the gallows for any man--nay, brothers, not that!" The door of the inn opened, and another man entered hastily and approached the youth before the fire. "Master Shelton," he said, "Sir Daniel goeth forth with a pair of links and four archers." Dick (for this was our young friend) rose instantly to his feet. "Lawless," he said, "ye will take John Capper's watch.--Greensheve, follow with me.--Capper, lead forward. We will follow him this time, an he go to York." The next moment they were outside in the dark street, and Capper, the man who had just come, pointed to where two torches flared in the wind at a little distance. The town was already sound asleep; no one moved upon the streets, and there was nothing easier than to follow the party without observation. The two link-bearers went first; next followed a single man, whose long cloak blew about him in the wind; and the rear was brought up by the four archers, each with his bow upon his arm. They moved at a brisk walk, threading the intricate lanes and drawing nearer to the shore. "He hath gone each night in this direction?" asked Dick, in a whisper. "This is the third night running, Master Shelton," returned Capper, "and still at the same hour and with the same small following, as though his end were secret." Sir Daniel and his six men were now come to the outskirts of the country. Shoreby was an open town, and though the Lancastrian lords who lay there kept a strong guard on the main roads, it was still possible to enter or depart unseen by any of the lesser streets or across the open country. The lane which Sir Daniel had been following came to an abrupt end. Before him there was a stretch of rough down, and the noise of the sea-surf was audible upon one hand. There were no guards in the neighbourhood, nor any light in that quarter of the town. Dick and his two outlaws drew a little closer to the object of their chase, and presently, as they came forth from between the houses, and could see a little farther upon either hand, they were aware of another torch drawing near from another direction. "Hey," said Dick, "I smell treason." Meanwhile Sir Daniel had come to a full halt. The torches were stuck into the sand, and the men lay down, as if to await the arrival of the other party. This drew near at a good rate. It consisted of four men only--a pair of archers, a varlet with a link, and a cloaked gentleman walking in their midst. "Is it you, my lord?" cried Sir Daniel. "It is I, indeed; and if ever true knight gave proof I am that man," replied the leader of the second troop; "for who would rather not face giants, sorcerers, or pagans, than this pinching cold?" "My lord," returned Sir Daniel, "beauty will be the more beholden, misdoubt it not. But shall we forth? for the sooner ye have seen my merchandise, the sooner shall we both get home." "But why keep ye her here, good knight?" inquired the other. "An she be so young, and so fair, and so wealthy, why do ye not bring her forth among her mates? Ye would soon make her a good marriage, and no need to freeze your fingers and risk arrow-shots by going abroad at such untimely seasons in the dark." "I have told you, my lord," replied Sir Daniel, "the reason thereof concerneth me only. Neither do I purpose to explain it further. Suffice it, that if ye be weary of your old gossip, Daniel Brackley, publish it abroad that y' are to wed Joanna Sedley, and I give you my word ye will be quit of him right soon. Ye will find him with an arrow in his back." Meantime the two gentlemen were walking briskly forward over the down; the three torches going before them, stooping against the wind and scattering clouds of smoke and tufts of flame, and the rear brought up by the six archers. Close upon the heels of these Dick followed. He had, of course, heard no word of this conversation; but he had recognised in the second of the speakers old Lord Shoreby himself, a man of an infamous reputation, whom even Sir Daniel affected, in public, to condemn. Presently they came close down upon the beach. The air smelt salt; the noise of the surf increased; and here, in a large walled garden, there stood a small house of two stories, with stables and other offices. The foremost torch-bearer unlocked a door in the wall, and, after the whole party had passed into the garden, again closed and locked it on the other side. Dick and his men were thus excluded from any further following, unless they should scale the wall and thus put their necks in a trap. They sat down in a tuft of furze and waited. The red glow of the torches moved up and down and to and fro within the enclosure, as if the link-bearers steadily patrolled the garden. Twenty minutes passed, and then the whole party issued forth again upon the down; and Sir Daniel and the baron, after an elaborate salutation, separated and turned severally homeward, each with his own following of men and lights. As soon as the sound of their steps had been swallowed by the wind, Dick got to his feet as briskly as he was able, for he was stiff and aching with the cold. "Capper, ye will give me a back up," he said. They advanced, all three, to the wall; Capper stooped, and Dick, getting upon his shoulders, clambered on to the copestone. "Now, Greensheve," whispered Dick, "follow me up here; lie flat upon your face, that ye may be the less seen; and be ever ready to give me a hand if I fall foully on the other side." And so saying, he dropped into the garden. It was all pitch dark; there was no light in the house. The wind whistled shrill among the poor shrubs, and the surf beat upon the beach; there was no other sound. Cautiously Dick footed it forth, stumbling among bushes, and groping with his hands; and presently the crisp noise of gravel underfoot told him that he had struck upon an alley. Here he paused, and taking his crossbow from where he kept it concealed under his long tabard, he prepared it for instant action, and went forward once more with greater resolution and assurance. The path led him straight to the group of buildings. All seemed to be sorely dilapidated: the windows of the house were secured by crazy shutters; the stables were open and empty; there was no hay in the hayloft, no corn in the corn-box. Any one would have supposed the place to be deserted; but Dick had good reason to think otherwise. He continued his inspection, visiting the offices, trying all the windows. At length he came round to the sea-side of the house, and there, sure enough, there burned a pale light in one of the upper windows. He stepped back a little way, till he thought he could see the movement of a shadow on the wall of the apartment. Then he remembered that in the stable his groping hand had rested for a moment on a ladder, and he returned with all despatch to bring it. The ladder was very short, but yet, by standing on the topmost round, he could bring his hands as high as the iron bars of the window; and, seizing these, he raised his body by main force until his eyes commanded the interior of the room. Two persons were within: the first he readily knew to be Dame Hatch; the second, a tall and beautiful and grave young lady, in a long, embroidered dress--could that be Joanna Sedley? his old wood companion, Jack, whom he had thought to punish with a belt? He dropped back again to the top round of the ladder in a kind of amazement. He had never thought of his sweetheart as of so superior a being, and he was instantly taken with a feeling of diffidence. But he had little opportunity for thought. A low "Hist!" sounded from close by, and he hastened to descend the ladder. "Who goes?" he whispered. "Greensheve," came the reply, in tones similarly guarded. "What want ye?" asked Dick. "The house is watched, Master Shelton," returned the outlaw. "We are not alone to watch it; for even as I lay on my belly on the wall I saw men prowling in the dark, and heard them whistle softly one to the other." "By my sooth," said Dick, "but this is passing strange! Were they not men of Sir Daniel's?" "Nay, sir, that they were not," returned Greensheve; "for if I have eyes in my head, every man-Jack of them weareth me a white badge in his bonnet, something chequered with dark." "White, chequered with dark?" repeated Dick. "Faith, 'tis a badge I know not. It is none of this country's badges.--Well, an that be so, let us slip as quietly forth from this garden as we may; for here we are in an evil posture for defence. Beyond all question there are men of Sir Daniel's in that house, and to be taken between two shots is a beggarman's position. Take me this ladder; I must leave it where I found it." They returned the ladder to the stable, and groped their way to the place where they had entered. Capper had taken Greensheve's position on the cope, and now he leaned down his hand, and, first one and then the other, pulled them up. Cautiously and silently they dropped again upon the other side; nor did they dare to speak until they had returned to their old ambush in the gorse. "Now, John Capper," said Dick, "back with you to Shoreby, even as for your life. Bring me instantly what men ye can collect. Here shall be the rendezvous; or if the men be scattered and the day be near at hand before they muster, let the place be something farther back, and by the entering in of the town. Greensheve and I lie here to watch. Speed ye, John Capper, and the saints aid you to despatch!--And now, Greensheve," he continued, as soon as Capper had departed, "let thou and I go round about the garden in a wide circuit. I would fain see whether thine eyes betrayed thee." Keeping well outwards from the wall, and profiting by every height and hollow, they passed about two sides, beholding nothing. On the third side the garden wall was built close upon the beach, and to preserve the distance necessary to their purpose, they had to go some way down upon the sands. Although the tide was still pretty far out, the surf was so high, and the sands so flat, that at each breaker a great sheet of froth and water came careering over the expanse, and Dick and Greensheve made this part of their inspection wading, now to the ankles, and now as deep as to the knees, in the salt and icy waters of the German Ocean. Suddenly, against the comparative whiteness of the garden wall, the figure of a man was seen, like a faint Chinese shadow, violently signalling with both arms. As he dropped again to the earth, another arose a little farther on and repeated the same performance. And so, like a silent watch-word, these gesticulations made the round of the beleaguered garden. "They keep good watch," Dick whispered. "Let us back to land, good master," answered Greensheve. "We stand here too open; for, look ye, when the seas break heavy and white out there behind us, they shall see us plainly against the foam." "Ye speak sooth," returned Dick. "Ashore with us, right speedily." CHAPTER II A SKIRMISH IN THE DARK Thoroughly drenched and chilled, the two adventurers returned to their position in the gorse. "I pray Heaven that Capper make good speed!" said Dick. "I vow a candle to St. Mary of Shoreby if he come before the hour!" "Y' are in a hurry, Master Dick?" asked Greensheve. "Ay, good fellow," answered Dick; "for in that house lieth my lady, whom I love, and who should these be that lie about her secretly by night? Unfriends for sure!" "Well," returned Greensheve, "an John come speedily, we shall give a good account of them. They are not two score at the outside--I judge so by the spacing of their sentries--and, taken where they are, lying so widely, one score would scatter them like sparrows. And yet, Master Dick, an she be in Sir Daniel's power already, it will little hurt that she should change into another's. Who should these be?" "I do suspect the Lord of Shoreby," Dick replied. "When came they?" "They began to come, Master Dick," said Greensheve, "about the time ye crossed the wall. I had not lain there the space of a minute ere I marked the first of the knaves crawling round the corner." The last light had been already extinguished in the little house when they were wading in the wash of the breakers, and it was impossible to predict at what moment the lurking men about the garden wall might make their onslaught. Of two evils, Dick preferred the least. He preferred that Joanna should remain under the guardianship of Sir Daniel rather than pass into the clutches of Lord Shoreby; and his mind was made up, if the house should be assaulted, to come at once to the relief of the besieged. But the time passed, and still there was no movement. From quarter of an hour to quarter of an hour the same signal passed about the garden wall, as if the leader desired to assure himself of the vigilance of his scattered followers; but in every other particular the neighbourhood of the little house lay undisturbed. Presently Dick's reinforcements began to arrive. The night was not yet old before nearly a score of men crouched beside him in the gorse. Separating these into two bodies, he took the command of the smaller himself, and entrusted the larger to the leadership of Greensheve. "Now, Kit," said he to this last, "take me your men to the near angle of the garden wall upon the beach. Post them strongly, and wait till that ye hear me falling on upon the other side. It is those upon the sea front that I would fain make certain of, for there will be the leader. The rest will run; even let them. And now, lads, let no man draw an arrow; ye will but hurt friends. Take to the steel, and keep to the steel; and if we have the uppermost, I promise every man of you a gold noble when I come to mine estate." Out of the odd collection of broken men, thieves, murderers, and ruined peasantry, whom Duckworth had gathered together to serve the purposes of his revenge, some of the boldest and the most experienced in war had volunteered to follow Richard Shelton. The service of watching Sir Daniel's movements in the town of Shoreby had from the first been irksome to their temper, and they had of late begun to grumble loudly and threaten to disperse. The prospect of a sharp encounter and possible spoils restored them to good humour, and they joyfully prepared for battle. Their long tabards thrown aside, they appeared, some in plain green jerkins, and some in stout leathern jacks; under their hoods many wore bonnets strengthened by iron plates; and for offensive armour, swords, daggers, a few stout boar-spears, and a dozen of bright bills, put them in a posture to engage even regular feudal troops. The bows, quivers, and tabards were concealed among the gorse, and the two bands set resolutely forward. Dick, when he had reached the other side of the house, posted his six men in a line, about twenty yards from the garden wall, and took position himself a few paces in front. Then they all shouted with one voice, and closed upon the enemy. These, lying widely scattered, stiff with cold, and taken at unawares, sprang stupidly to their feet, and stood undecided. Before they had time to get their courage about them, or even to form an idea of the number and mettle of their assailants, a similar shout of onslaught sounded in their ears from the far side of the enclosure. Thereupon they gave themselves up for lost, and ran. In this way the two small troops of the men of the Black Arrow closed upon the sea front of the garden wall, and took a part of the strangers, as it were, between two fires; while the whole of the remainder ran for their lives in different directions, and were soon scattered in the darkness. For all that, the fight was but beginning. Dick's outlaws, although they had the advantage of the surprise, were still considerably outnumbered by the men they had surrounded. The tide had flowed in the meanwhile; the beach was narrowed to a strip; and on this wet field between the surf and the garden wall, there began, in the darkness, a doubtful, furious, and deadly contest. The strangers were well armed; they fell in silence upon their assailants; and the affray became a series of single combats. Dick, who had come first into the mellay, was engaged by three; the first he cut down at the first blow, but the other two coming upon him hotly he was fain to give ground before their onset. One of these two was a huge fellow, almost a giant for stature, and armed with a two-handed sword, which he brandished like a switch. Against this opponent, with his reach of arm and the length and weight of his weapon, Dick and his bill were quite defenceless; and had the other continued to join vigorously in the attack, the lad must have indubitably fallen. This second man, however, less in stature and slower in his movements, paused for a moment to peer about him in the darkness, and to give ear to the sounds of the battle. The giant still pursued his advantage, and still Dick fled before him, spying for his chance. Then the huge blade flashed and descended, and the lad, leaping on one side and running in, slashed sideways and upwards with his bill. A roar of agony responded, and before the wounded man could raise his formidable weapon, Dick, twice repeating his blow, had brought him to the ground. The next moment he was engaged upon more equal terms with his second pursuer. Here there was no great difference in size, and though the man, fighting with sword and dagger against a bill, and being wary and quick of fence, had a certain superiority of arms, Dick more than made it up by his greater agility on foot. Neither at first gained any obvious advantage; but the older man was still insensibly profiting by the ardour of the younger to lead him where he would; and presently Dick found that they had crossed the whole width of the beach, and were now fighting above the knees in the spume and bubble of the breakers. Here his own superior activity was rendered useless; he found himself more or less at the discretion of his foe; yet a little, and he had his back turned upon his own men, and saw that this adroit and skilful adversary was bent upon drawing him farther and farther away. Dick ground his teeth. He determined to decide the combat instantly; and when the wash of the next wave had ebbed and left them dry, he rushed in, caught a blow upon his bill, and leaped right at the throat of his opponent. The man went down backwards, with Dick still upon the top of him; and the next wave, speedily succeeding the last, buried him below a rush of water. While he was still submerged, Dick forced his dagger from his grasp, and rose to his feet victorious. "Yield ye!" he said. "I give you life." "I yield me," said the other, getting to his knees. "Ye fight, like a young man, ignorantly and foolhardily; but, by the array of the saints, ye fight bravely!" Dick turned to the beach. The combat was still raging doubtfully in the night; over the hoarse roar of the breakers steel clanged upon steel, and cries of pain and the shout of battle resounded. "Lead me to your captain, youth," said the conquered knight. "It is fit this butchery should cease." "Sir," replied Dick, "so far as these brave fellows have a captain, the poor gentleman who here addresses you is he." "Call off your dogs, then, and I will bid my villains hold," returned the other. There was something noble both in the voice and manner of his late opponent, and Dick instantly dismissed all fears of treachery. "Lay down your arms, men!" cried the stranger knight. "I have yielded me, upon promise of life." The tone of the stranger was one of absolute command, and almost instantly the din and confusion of the mellay ceased. "Lawless," cried Dick, "are ye safe?" "Ay," cried Lawless, "safe and hearty." "Light me the lantern," cried Dick. "Is not Sir Daniel here?" inquired the knight. "Sir Daniel?" echoed Dick. "Now, by the rood, I pray not. It would go ill with me if he were." "Ill with _you_, fair sir?" inquired the other. "Nay, then, if ye be not of Sir Daniel's party, I profess I comprehend no longer. Wherefore, then, fell ye upon mine ambush? in what quarrel, my young and very fiery friend? to what earthly purpose? and to make a clear end of questioning, to what good gentleman have I surrendered?" But before Dick could answer, a voice spoke in the darkness from close by. Dick could see the speaker's black and white badge, and the respectful salute which he addressed to his superior. "My lord," said he, "if these gentlemen be unfriends to Sir Daniel, it is a pity, indeed, we should have been at blows with them; but it were tenfold greater that either they or we should linger here. The watchers in the house--unless they be all dead or deaf--have heard our hammering this quarter-hour agone; instantly they will have signalled to the town; and unless we be the livelier in our departure, we are like to be taken, both of us, by a fresh foe." "Hawksley is in the right," added the lord. "How please ye, sir? Whither shall we march?" "Nay, my lord," said Dick, "go where you will for me. I do begin to suspect we have some ground of friendship, and if, indeed, I began our acquaintance somewhat ruggedly, I would not churlishly continue. Let us then, separate, my lord, you laying your right hand in mine; and at the hour and place that ye shall name, let us encounter and agree." "Y' are too trustful, boy," said the other; "but this time your trust is not misplaced. I will meet you at the point of day at St. Bride's Cross.--Come, lads, follow!" The strangers disappeared from the scene with a rapidity that seemed suspicious; and, while the outlaws fell to the congenial task of rifling the dead bodies, Dick made once more the circuit of the garden wall to examine the front of the house. In a little upper loophole of the roof he beheld a light set; and as it would certainly be visible in town from the back windows of Sir Daniel's mansion, he doubted not that this was the signal feared by Hawksley, and that ere long the lances of the Knight of Tunstall would arrive upon the scene. He put his ear to the ground, and it seemed to him as if he heard a jarring and hollow noise from townward. Back to the beach he went hurrying. But the work was already done; the last body was disarmed and stripped to the skin, and four fellows were already wading seaward to commit it to the mercies of the deep. A few minutes later, when there debouched out of the nearest lanes of Shoreby some two score horsemen, hastily arrayed and moving at the gallop of their steeds, the neighbourhood of the house beside the sea was entirely silent and deserted. Meanwhile Dick and his men had returned to the alehouse of the "Goat and Bagpipes" to snatch some hours of sleep before the morning tryst. CHAPTER III ST. BRIDE'S CROSS St. Bride's Cross stood a little way back from Shoreby, on the skirts of Tunstall Forest. Two roads met: one, from Holywood across the forest; one, that road from Risingham down which we saw the wrecks of a Lancastrian army fleeing in disorder. Here the two joined issue, and went on together down the hill to Shoreby; and a little back from the point of junction, the summit of a little knoll was crowned by the ancient and weather-beaten cross. Here, then, about seven in the morning, Dick arrived. It was as cold as ever; the earth was all grey and silver with the hoar-frost, and the day began to break in the east with many colours of purple and orange. Dick set him down upon the lowest step of the cross, wrapped himself well in his tabard, and looked vigilantly upon all sides. He had not long to wait. Down the road from Holywood a gentleman in very rich and bright armour, and wearing over that a surcoat of the rarest furs, came pacing on a splendid charger. Twenty yards behind him followed a clump of lancers; but these halted as soon as they came in view of the trysting-place, while the gentleman in the fur surcoat continued to advance alone. His visor was raised, and showed a countenance of great command and dignity, answerable to the richness of his attire and arms. And it was with some confusion of manner that Dick arose from the cross and stepped down the bank to meet his prisoner. "I thank you, my lord, for your exactitude," he said, louting very low. "Will it please your lordship to set foot to earth?" "Are ye here alone, young man?" inquired the other. "I was not so simple," answered Dick; "and, to be plain with your lordship, the woods upon either hand of this cross lie full of mine honest fellows lying on their weapons." "Y' have done wisely," said the lord. "It pleaseth me the rather, since last night ye fought foolhardily, and more like a salvage Saracen lunatic than any Christian warrior. But it becomes not me to complain, that had the undermost." "Ye had the undermost indeed, my lord, since ye so fell," returned Dick; "but had the waves not holpen me, it was I that should have had the worst. Ye were pleased to make me yours with several dagger-marks, which I still carry. And in fine, my lord, methinks I had all the danger, as well as all the profit, of that little blind-man's medley on the beach." "Y' are shrewd enough to make light of it, I see," returned the stranger. "Nay, my lord, not shrewd," replied Dick, "in that I shoot at no advantage to myself. But when, by the light of this new day, I see how stout a knight hath yielded, not to my arms alone, but to fortune, and the darkness, and the surf--and how easily the battle had gone otherwise, with a soldier so untried and rustic as myself--think it not strange, my lord, if I feel confounded with my victory." "Ye speak well," said the stranger. "Your name?" "My name, an't like you, is Shelton," answered Dick. "Men call me the Lord Foxham," added the other. "Then, my lord, and under your good favour, ye are guardian to the sweetest maid in England," replied Dick; "and for your ransom, and the ransom of such as were taken with you on the beach, there will be no uncertainty of terms. I pray you, my lord, of your good-will and charity, yield me the hand of my mistress, Joan Sedley; and take ye, upon the other part, your liberty, the liberty of these your followers, and (if ye will have it) my gratitude and service till I die." "But are ye not ward to Sir Daniel? Methought, if y' are Harry Shelton's son, that I had heard it so reported," said Lord Foxham. "Will it please you, my lord, to alight? I would fain tell you fully who I am, how situate, and why so bold in my demands. Beseech you, my lord, take place upon these steps, hear me to a full end, and judge me with allowance." And so saying, Dick lent a hand to Lord Foxham to dismount; led him up the knoll to the cross; installed him in the place where he had himself been sitting; and standing respectfully before his noble prisoner, related the story of his fortunes up to the events of the evening before. Lord Foxham listened gravely, and when Dick had done, "Master Shelton," he said, "ye are a most fortunate-unfortunate young gentleman; but what fortune y' have had, that ye have amply merited; and what unfortune, ye have noways deserved. Be of a good cheer; for ye have made a friend who is devoid neither of power nor favour. For yourself, although it fits not for a person of your birth to herd with outlaws, I must own ye are both brave and honourable; very dangerous in battle, right courteous in peace, a youth of excellent disposition and brave bearing. For your estates, ye will never see them till the world shall change again; so long as Lancaster hath the strong hand, so long shall Sir Daniel enjoy them for his own. For my ward, it is another matter; I had promised her before to a gentleman, a kinsman of my house, one Hamley; the promise is old----" "Ay, my lord, and now Sir Daniel hath promised her to my Lord Shoreby," interrupted Dick. "And his promise, for all it is but young, is still the likelier to be made good." "Tis the plain truth," returned his lordship. "And considering, moreover, that I am your prisoner, upon no better composition than my bare life, and over and above that, that the maiden is unhappily in other hands, I will so far consent. Aid me with your good fellows----" "My lord," cried Dick, "they are these same outlaws that ye blame me for consorting with." "Let them be what they will, they can fight," returned Lord Foxham. "Help me, then; and if between us we regain the maid, upon my knightly honour, she shall marry you!" Dick bent his knee before his prisoner; but he, leaping up lightly from the cross, caught the lad up and embraced him like a son. "Come," he said, "an y' are to marry Joan, we must be early friends." CHAPTER IV THE "GOOD HOPE" An hour thereafter, Dick was back at the "Goat and Bagpipes," breaking his fast, and receiving the report of his messengers and sentries. Duckworth was still absent from Shoreby; and this was frequently the case, for he played many parts in the world, shared many different interests, and conducted many various affairs. He had founded that fellowship of the Black Arrow, as a ruined man longing for vengeance and money; and yet among those who knew him best, he was thought to be the agent and emissary of the great King-maker of England, Richard, Earl of Warwick. In his absence, at any rate, it fell upon Richard Shelton to command affairs in Shoreby; and as he sat at meat his mind was full of care, and his face heavy with consideration. It had been determined, between him and the Lord Foxham, to make one bold stroke that evening, and, by brute force, to set Joanna free. The obstacles, however, were many; and as one after another of his scouts arrived, each brought him more discomfortable news. Sir Daniel was alarmed by the skirmish of the night before. He had increased the garrison of the house in the garden; but, not content with that, he had stationed horsemen in all the neighbouring lanes, so that he might have instant word of any movement. Meanwhile, in the court of his mansion, steeds stood saddled, and the riders, armed at every point, awaited but the signal to ride. The adventure of the night appeared more and more difficult of execution, till suddenly Dick's countenance lightened. "Lawless!" he cried, "you that were a shipman, can ye steal me a ship?" "Master Dick," replied Lawless, "if ye would back me, I would agree to steal York Minster." Presently after, these two set forth and descended to the harbour. It was a considerable basin, lying among sandhills, and surrounded with patches of down, ancient ruinous lumber, and tumble-down slums of the town. Many decked ships and many open boats either lay there at anchor, or had been drawn up on the beach. A long duration of bad weather had driven them from the high seas into the shelter of the port; and the great trooping of black clouds, and the cold squalls that followed one another, now with a sprinkling of dry snow, now in a mere swoop of wind, promised no improvement, but rather threatened a more serious storm in the immediate future. The seamen, in view of the cold and the wind, had for the most part slunk ashore, and were now roaring and singing in the shoreside taverns. Many of the ships already rode unguarded at their anchors; and as the day wore on, and the weather offered no appearance of improvement, the number was continually being augmented. It was to these deserted ships, and, above all, to those of them that lay far out, that Lawless directed his attention; while Dick, seated upon an anchor that was half embedded in the sand, and giving ear, now to the rude, potent, and boding voices of the gale, and now to the hoarse singing of the shipmen in a neighbouring tavern, soon forgot his immediate surroundings and concerns in the agreeable recollection of Lord Foxham's promise. He was disturbed by a touch upon his shoulder. It was Lawless, pointing to a small ship that lay somewhat by itself, and within but a little of the harbour mouth, where it heaved regularly and smoothly on the entering swell. A pale gleam of winter sunshine fell, at that moment, on the vessel's deck, relieving her against a bank of scowling cloud; and in this momentary glitter Dick could see a couple of men hauling the skiff alongside. "There, sir," said Lawless, "mark ye it well! There is the ship for to-night." Presently the skiff put out from the vessel's side, and the two men, keeping her head well to the wind, pulled lustily for shore. Lawless turned to a loiterer. "How call ye her?" he asked, pointing to the little vessel. "They call her the _Good Hope_, of Dartmouth," replied the loiterer. "Her captain, Arblaster by name. He pulleth the bow oar in yon skiff." This was all that Lawless wanted. Hurriedly thanking the man, he moved round the shore to a certain sandy creek, for which the skiff was heading. There he took up his position, and as soon as they were within earshot, opened fire on the sailors of the _Good Hope_. "What! Gossip Arblaster!" he cried. "Why, ye be well met; nay, gossip, ye be right well met, upon the rood! And is that the _Good Hope_? Ay, I would know her among ten thousand!--a sweet shear, a sweet boat! But marry, come up, my gossip, will ye drink? I have come into mine estate, which doubtless ye remember to have heard on. I am now rich; I have left to sail upon the sea; I do sail now, for the most part, upon spiced ale. Come, fellow; thy hand upon 't! Come, drink with an old ship-fellow!" Skipper Arblaster, a long-faced, elderly, weather-beaten man, with a knife hanging about his neck by a plaited cord, and for all the world like any modern seaman in his gait and bearing, had hung back in obvious amazement and distrust. But the name of an estate, and a certain air of tipsified simplicity and good-fellowship which Lawless very well affected, combined to conquer his suspicious jealousy; his countenance relaxed, and he at once extended his open hand and squeezed that of the outlaw in a formidable grasp. "Nay," he said, "I cannot mind you. But what o' that? I would drink with any man, gossip, and so would my man Tom.--Man Tom," he added, addressing his follower, "here is my gossip, whose name I cannot mind, but no doubt a very good seaman. Let's go drink with him and his shore friend." Lawless led the way, and they were soon seated in an alehouse, which, as it was very new, and stood in an exposed and solitary station, was less crowded than those nearer to the centre of the port. It was but a shed of timber, much like a block-house in the backwoods of to-day, and was coarsely furnished with a press or two, a number of naked benches, and boards set upon barrels to play the part of tables. In the middle, and besieged by half a hundred violent draughts, a fire of wreck-wood blazed and vomited thick smoke. "Ay, now," said Lawless, "here is a shipman's joy--a good fire and a good stiff cup ashore, with foul weather without and an off-sea gale a-snoring in the roof! Here's to the _Good Hope_! May she ride easy!" "Ay," said Skipper Arblaster, "'tis good weather to be ashore in, that is sooth--Man Tom, how say ye to that?--Gossip, ye speak well, though I can never think upon your name; but ye speak very well. May the _Good Hope_ ride easy! Amen!" "Friend Dickon," resumed Lawless, addressing his commander, "ye have certain matters on hand, unless I err? Well, prithee be about them incontinently. For here I be with the choice of all good company, two tough old shipmen; and till that ye return I will go warrant these brave fellows will bide here and drink me cup for cup. We are not like shore-men, we old tough tarry-Johns!" "It is well meant," returned the skipper. "Ye can go, boy; for I will keep your good friend and my good gossip company till curfew--ay, and by St. Mary, till the sun get up again! For, look ye, when a man hath been long enough at sea, the salt getteth me into the clay upon his bones; and let him drink a draw-well, he will never be quenched." Thus encouraged upon all hands, Dick rose, saluted his company, and going forth again into the gusty afternoon, got him as speedily as he might to the "Goat and Bagpipes." Thence he sent word to my Lord Foxham that, so soon as ever the evening closed, they would have a stout boat to keep the sea in. And then leading along with him a couple of outlaws who had some experience of the sea, he returned himself to the harbour and the little sandy creek. The skiff of the _Good Hope_ lay among many others, from which it was easily distinguished by its extreme smallness and fragility. Indeed, when Dick and his two men had taken their places, and began to put forth out of the creek into the open harbour, the little cockle dipped into the swell and staggered under every gust of wind, like a thing upon the point of sinking. The _Good Hope_, as we have said, was anchored far out, where the swell was heaviest. No other vessel lay nearer than several cables' length; those that were the nearest were themselves entirely deserted; and as the skiff approached, a thick flurry of snow and a sudden darkening of the weather further concealed the movements of the outlaws from all possible espial. In a trice they had leaped upon the heaving deck, and the skiff was dancing at the stern. The _Good Hope_ was captured. She was a good stout boat, decked in the bows and amidships, but open in the stern. She carried one mast, and was rigged between a felucca and a lugger. It would seem that Skipper Arblaster had made an excellent venture, for the hold was full of pieces of French wine; and in the little cabin, besides the Virgin Mary in the bulkhead which proved the captain's piety, there were many lockfast chests and cupboards, which showed him to be rich and careful. A dog, who was the sole occupant of the vessel, furiously barked, and bit the heels of the boarders, but he was soon kicked into the cabin, and the door shut upon his just resentment. A lamp was lit and fixed in the shrouds to mark the vessel clearly from the shore; one of the wine pieces in the hold was broached, and a cup of excellent Gascony emptied to the adventure of the evening; and then, while one of the outlaws began to get ready his bow and arrows and prepare to hold the ship against all comers, the other hauled in the skiff and got overboard, where he held on, waiting for Dick. "Well, Jack, keep me a good watch," said the young commander, preparing to follow his subordinate. "Ye will do right well." "Why," returned Jack, "I shall do excellent well indeed, so long as we lie here; but once we put the nose of this poor ship outside the harbour----. See, there she trembles! Nay, the poor shrew heard the words, and the heart misgave her in her oak-tree ribs. But look, Master Dick! how black the weather gathers!" The darkness ahead was, indeed, astonishing. Great billows heaved up out of the blackness, one after another; and one after another the _Good Hope_ buoyantly climbed, and giddily plunged upon the farther side. A thin sprinkle of snow and thin flakes of foam came flying, and powdered the deck; and the wind harped dismally among the rigging. "In sooth, it looketh evilly," said Dick. "But what cheer! 'Tis but a squall, and presently it will blow over." But, in spite of his words, he was depressingly affected by the bleak disorder of the sky and the wailing and fluting of the wind; and as he got over the side of the _Good Hope_ and made once more for the landing-creek with the best speed of oars, he crossed himself devoutly, and recommended to Heaven the lives of all who should adventure on the sea. At the landing-creek there had already gathered about a dozen of the outlaws. To these the skiff was left, and they were bidden embark without delay. A little farther up the beach Dick found Lord Foxham hurrying in quest of him, his face concealed with a dark hood, and his bright armour covered by a long russet mantle of a poor appearance. "Young Shelton," he said, "are ye for sea, then, truly?" "My lord," replied Richard, "they lie about the house with horsemen; it may not be reached from the land side without alarum; and Sir Daniel once advertised of our adventure, we can no more carry it to a good end than, saving your presence, we could ride upon the wind. Now, in going round by sea, we do run some peril by the elements; but, what much outweigheth all, we have a chance to make good our purpose and bear off the maid." "Well," returned Lord Foxham, "lead on. I will, in some sort, follow you for shame's sake; but I own I would I were in bed." "Here, then," said Dick. "Hither we go to fetch our pilot." And he led the way to the rude alehouse where he had given rendezvous to a portion of his men. Some of these he found lingering round the door outside; others had pushed more boldly in, and, choosing places as near as possible to where they saw their comrade, gathered close about Lawless and the two shipmen. These, to judge by the distempered countenance and cloudy eye, had long since gone beyond the boundaries of moderation; and as Richard entered, closely followed by Lord Foxham, they were all three tuning up an old, pitiful sea-ditty, to the chorus of the wailing of the gale. The young leader cast a rapid glance about the shed. The fire had just been replenished, and gave forth volumes of black smoke, so that it was difficult to see clearly in the farther corners. It was plain, however, that the outlaws very largely outnumbered the remainder of the guests. Satisfied upon this point, in case of any failure in the operation of his plan, Dick strode up to the table and resumed his place upon the bench. "Hey?" cried the skipper tipsily, "who are ye, hey?" "I want a word with you without, Master Arblaster," returned Dick; "and here is what we shall talk of." And he showed him a gold noble in the glimmer of the firelight. The shipman's eyes burned, although he still failed to recognise our hero. "Ay, boy," he said, "I am with you.--Gossip, I will be back anon. Drink fair, gossip"; and, taking Dick's arm to steady his uneven steps, he walked to the door of the alehouse. As soon as he was over the threshold, ten strong arms had seized and bound him; and in two minutes more, with his limbs trussed one to another, and a good gag in his mouth, he had been tumbled neck and crop into a neighbouring hay-barn. Presently, his man Tom, similarly secured, was tossed beside him, and the pair were left to their uncouth reflections for the night. And now, as the time for concealment had gone by, Lord Foxham's followers were summoned by a preconcerted signal, and the party, boldly taking possession of as many boats as their numbers required, pulled in a flotilla for the light in the rigging of the ship. Long before the last man had climbed to the deck of the _Good Hope_, the sound of furious shouting from the shore showed that a part, at least, of the seamen had discovered the loss of their skiffs. But it was now too late, whether for recovery or revenge. Out of some forty fighting men now mustered in the stolen ship, eight had been to sea, and could play the part of mariners. With the aid of these, a slice of sail was got upon her. The cable was cut. Lawless, vacillating on his feet, and still shouting the chorus of sea-ballads, took the long tiller in his hands: and the _Good Hope_ began to flit forward into the darkness of the night, and to face the great waves beyond the harbour bar. Richard took his place beside the weather rigging. Except for the ship's own lantern, and for some lights in Shoreby town, that were already fading to leeward, the whole world of air was as black as in a pit. Only from time to time, as the _Good Hope_ swooped dizzily down into the valley of the rollers, a crest would break--a great cataract of snowy foam would leap in one instant into being--and, in an instant more, would stream into the wake and vanish. Many of the men lay holding on and praying aloud; many more were sick, and had crept into the bottom, where they sprawled among the cargo. And what with the extreme violence of the motion, and the continued drunken bravado of Lawless, still shouting and singing at the helm, the stoutest heart on board may have nourished a shrewd misgiving as to the result. But Lawless, as if guided by an instinct, steered the ship across the breakers, struck the lee of a great sandbank, where they sailed for a while in smooth water, and presently after laid her alongside a rude stone pier, where she was hastily made fast, and lay ducking and grinding in the dark. CHAPTER V THE "GOOD HOPE" (_continued_) The pier was not far distant from the house in which Joanna lay; it now only remained to get the men on shore, to surround the house with a strong party, burst in the door and carry off the captive. They might then regard themselves as done with the _Good Hope_; it had placed them on the rear of their enemies; and the retreat, whether they should succeed or fail in the main enterprise, would be directed with a greater measure of hope in the direction of the forest and my Lord Foxham's reserve. To get the men on shore, however, was no easy task; many had been sick, all were pierced with cold; the promiscuity and disorder on board had shaken their discipline; the movement of the ship and the darkness of the night had cowed their spirits. They made a rush upon the pier; my lord, with his sword drawn on his own retainers, must throw himself in front; and this impulse of rabblement was not restrained without a certain clamour of voices, highly to be regretted in the case. When some degree of order had been restored, Dick, with a few chosen men, set forth in advance. The darkness on shore, by contrast with the flashing of the surf, appeared before him like a solid body; and the howling and whistling of the gale drowned any lesser noise. He had scarce reached the end of the pier, however, when there fell a lull of the wind; and in this he seemed to hear on shore the hollow footing of horses and the clash of arms. Checking his immediate followers, he passed forward a step or two alone, even setting foot upon the down; and here he made sure he could detect the shape of men and horses moving. A strong discouragement assailed him. If their enemies were really on the watch, if they had beleagured the shoreward end of the pier, he and Lord Foxham were taken in a posture of very poor defence, the sea behind, the men jostled in the dark upon a narrow causeway. He gave a cautious whistle, the signal previously agreed upon. It proved to be a signal for more than he desired. Instantly there fell, through the black night, a shower of arrows sent at a venture; and so close were the men huddled on the pier that more than one was hit, and the arrows were answered with cries of both fear and pain. In this first discharge, Lord Foxham was struck down; Hawksley had him carried on board again at once; and his men, during the brief remainder of the skirmish, fought (when they fought at all) without guidance. That was perhaps the chief cause of the disaster which made haste to follow. At the shore end of the pier, for perhaps a minute, Dick held his own with a handful; one or two were wounded upon either side; steel crossed steel; nor had there been the least signal of advantage, when in the twinkling of an eye the tide turned against the party from the ship. Some one cried out that all was lost; the men were in the very humour to lend an ear to a discomfortable counsel; the cry was taken up. "On board, lads, for your lives!" cried another. A third, with the true instinct of the coward, raised that inevitable report on all retreats: "We are betrayed!" And in a moment the whole mass of men went surging and jostling backward down the pier, turning their defenceless backs on their pursuers and piercing the night with craven outcry. One coward thrust off the ship's stern, while another still held her by the bows. The fugitives leaped, screaming, and were hauled on board, or fell back and perished in the sea. Some were cut down upon the pier by the pursuers. Many were injured on the ship's deck in the blind haste and terror of the moment, one man leaping upon another, and a third on both. At last, and whether by design or accident, the bows of the _Good Hope_ were liberated; and the ever-ready Lawless, who had maintained his place at the helm through all the hurly-burly by sheer strength of body and a liberal use of the cold steel, instantly clapped her on the proper tack. The ship began to move once more forward on the stormy sea, its scuppers running blood, its deck heaped with fallen men, sprawling and struggling in the dark. Thereupon Lawless sheathed his dagger, and, turning to his next neighbour, "I have left my mark on them, gossip," said he, "the yelping, coward hounds." Now, while they were all leaping and struggling for their lives, the men had not appeared to observe the rough shoves and cutting stabs with which Lawless had held his post in the confusion. But perhaps they had already begun to understand somewhat more clearly, perhaps another ear had overheard the helmsman's speech. Panic-stricken troops recover slowly, and men who have just disgraced themselves by cowardice, as if to wipe out the memory of their fault, will sometimes run straight into the opposite extreme of insubordination. So it was now; and the same men who had thrown away their weapons and been hauled, feet foremost, into the _Good Hope_, began to cry out upon their leaders, and demand that some one should be punished. This growing ill-feeling turned upon Lawless. In order to get a proper offing, the old outlaw had put the head of the _Good Hope_ to seaward. "What!" bawled one of the grumblers, "he carrieth us to seaward!" "'Tis sooth," cried another. "Nay, we are betrayed for sure." And they all began to cry out in chorus that they were betrayed, and in shrill tones and with abominable oaths bade Lawless go about-ship and bring them speedily ashore. Lawless, grinding his teeth, continued in silence to steer the true course, guiding the _Good Hope_ among the formidable billows. To their empty terrors, as to their dishonourable threats, between drink and dignity he scorned to make reply. The malcontents drew together a little abaft the mast, and it was plain they were like barnyard cocks, "crowing for courage." Presently they would be fit for any extremity of injustice or ingratitude. Dick began to mount by the ladder, eager to interpose; but one of the outlaws, who was also something of a seaman, got beforehand. "Lads," he began, "y' are right wooden heads, I think. For to get back, by the mass, we must have an offing, must we not? And this old Lawless--" Some one struck the speaker on the mouth, and the next moment, as a fire springs among dry straw, he was felled upon the deck, trampled under the feet, and despatched by the daggers of his cowardly companions. At this the wrath of Lawless rose and broke. "Steer yourselves," he bellowed, with a curse; and, careless of the result, he left the helm. The _Good Hope_ was, at that moment, trembling on the summit of a swell. She subsided, with sickening velocity, upon the farther side. A wave, like a great black bulwark, hove immediately in front of her; and, with a staggering blow, she plunged head foremost through that liquid hill. The green water passed right over her from stem to stern, as high as a man's knees; the sprays ran higher than the mast; and she rose again upon the other side, with an appalling, tremulous indecision, like a beast that has been deadly wounded. Six or seven of the malcontents had been carried bodily overboard; and as for the remainder, when they found their tongues again, it was to bellow to the saints and wail upon Lawless to come back and take the tiller. Nor did Lawless wait to be twice bidden. The terrible result of his fling of just resentment sobered him completely. He knew, better than any one on board, how nearly the _Good Hope_ had gone bodily down below their feet; and he could tell, by the laziness with which she met the sea, that the peril was by no means over. Dick, who had been thrown down by the concussion and half drowned, rose wading to his knees in the swamped well of the stern, and crept to the old helmsman's side. "Lawless," he said, "we do all depend on you; y' are a brave, steady man, indeed, and crafty in the management of ships; I shall put three sure men to watch upon your safety." "Bootless, my master, bootless," said the steersman, peering forward through the dark. "We come every moment somewhat clearer of these sandbanks; with every moment, then, the sea packeth upon us heavier, and for all these whimperers, they will presently be on their backs. For, my master, 'tis a right mystery, but true, there never yet was a bad man that was a good shipman. None but the honest and the bold can endure me this tossing of a ship." "Nay, Lawless," said Dick, laughing, "that is a right shipman's byword, and hath no more of sense than the whistle of the wind. But, prithee, how go we? Do we lie well? Are we in good case?" "Master Shelton," replied Lawless, "I have been a Grey Friar--I praise fortune--an archer, a thief, and a shipman. Of all these coats, I had the best fancy to die in the Grey Friars, as ye may readily conceive, and the least fancy to die in John Shipman's tarry jacket; and that for two excellent good reasons: first, that the death might take a man suddenly; and second, for the horror of that great salt smother and welter under my foot here"--and Lawless stamped with his foot. "Howbeit," he went on, "an I die not a sailor's death, and that this night, I shall owe a tall candle to our Lady." "Is it so?" asked Dick. "It is right so," replied the outlaw. "Do ye not feel how heavy and dull she moves upon the waves? Do ye not hear the water washing in her hold? She will scarce mind the rudder even now. Bide till she has settled a bit lower; and she will either go down below your boots like a stone image, or drive ashore here, under our lee, and come all to pieces like a twist of string." "Ye speak with a good courage," returned Dick. "Ye are not then appalled?" "Why, master," answered Lawless, "if ever a man had an ill crew to come to port with, it is I--a renegade friar, a thief, and all the rest on't. Well, ye may wonder, but I keep a good hope in my wallet; and if that I be to drown, I will drown with a bright eye, Master Shelton, and a steady hand." Dick returned no answer; but he was surprised to find the old vagabond of so resolute a temper, and, fearing some fresh violence or treachery, set forth upon his quest for three sure men. The great bulk of the men had now deserted the deck, which was continually wetted with the flying sprays, and where they lay exposed to the shrewdness of the winter wind. They had gathered, instead, into the hold of the merchandise, among the butts of wine, and lighted by two swinging lanterns. Here a few kept up the form of revelry, and toasted each other deep in Arblaster's Gascony wine. But as the _Good Hope_ continued to tear through the smoking waves, and toss her stem and stern alternately high in air and deep into white foam, the number of these jolly companions diminished with every moment and with every lurch. Many sat apart, tending their hurts, but the majority were already prostrated with sickness, and lay moaning in the bilge. Greensheve, Cuckow, and a young fellow of Lord Foxham's whom Dick had already remarked for his intelligence and spirit, were still, however, both fit to understand and willing to obey. These Dick set as a bodyguard about the person of the steersman, and then, with a last look at the black sky and sea, he turned and went below into the cabin, whither Lord Foxham had been carried by his servants. CHAPTER VI THE "GOOD HOPE" (_concluded_) The moans of the wounded baron blended with the wailing of the ship's dog. The poor animal, whether he was merely sick at heart to be separated from his friends, or whether he indeed recognised some peril in the labouring of the ship, raised his cries, like minute-guns, above the roar of wave and weather; and the more superstitious of the men heard, in these sounds, the knell of the _Good Hope_. Lord Foxham had been laid in a berth, upon a fur cloak. A little lamp burned dim before the Virgin in the bulkhead, and by its glimmer Dick could see the pale countenance and hollow eyes of the hurt man. "I am sore hurt," said he. "Come near to my side, young Shelton; let there be one by me who, at least, is gentle born; for after having lived nobly and richly all the days of my life, this is a sad pass that I should get my hurt in a little ferreting skirmish, and die here, in a foul, cold ship upon the sea, among broken men and churls." "Nay, my lord," said Dick, "I pray rather to the saints that ye will recover you of your hurt, and come soon and sound ashore." "How?" demanded his lordship. "Come sound ashore? There is, then, a question of it?" "The ship laboureth--the sea is grievous and contrary," replied the lad; "and by what I can learn of my fellow that steereth us, we shall do well, indeed, if we come dryshod to land." "Ha!" said the baron gloomily, "thus shall every terror attend upon the passage of my soul! Sir, pray rather to live hard, that ye may die easy, than to be fooled and fluted all through life, as to the pipe and tabor, and, in the last hour, be plunged among misfortunes! Howbeit, I have that upon my mind that must not be delayed. We have no priest aboard?" "None," replied Dick. "Here, then, to my secular interests," resumed Lord Foxham: "ye must be as good a friend to me dead, as I found you a gallant enemy when I was living. I fall in an evil hour for me, for England, and for them that trusted me. My men are being brought by Hamley--he that was your rival; they will rendezvous in the long room at Holywood; this ring from off my finger will accredit you to represent mine orders; and I shall write, besides, two words upon this paper, bidding Hamley yield to you the damsel. Will ye obey? I know not." "But, my lord, what orders?" inquired Dick. "Ay," quoth the baron, "ay--the orders"; and he looked upon Dick with hesitation. "Are ye Lancaster or York?" he asked at length. "I shame to say it," answered Dick, "I can scarce clearly answer. But so much I think is certain: since I serve with Ellis Duckworth, I serve the House of York. Well, if that be so, I declare for York." "It is well," returned the other; "it is exceeding well. For, truly, had ye said Lancaster, I wot not for the world what I had done. But sith ye are for York, follow me. I came hither but to watch these lords at Shoreby, while mine excellent young lord, Richard of Gloucester,[1] prepareth a sufficient force to fall upon and scatter them. I have made me notes of their strength, what watch they keep, and how they lie; and these I was to deliver to my young lord on Sunday, an hour before noon, at St. Bride's Cross beside the forest. This tryst I am not like to keep, but I pray you, of courtesy, to keep it in my stead; and see that not pleasure, nor pain, tempest, wound, nor pestilence withhold you from the hour and place, for the welfare of England lieth upon this cast." "I do soberly take this upon me," said Dick. "In so far as in me lieth, your purpose shall be done." "It is good," said the wounded man. "My lord duke shall order you further, and if ye obey him with spirit and goodwill, then is your fortune made. Give me the lamp a little nearer to mine eyes, till that I write these words for you." He wrote a note "to his worshipful kinsman, Sir John Hamley"; and then a second, which he left without external superscription. "This is for the duke," he said. "The word is 'England and Edward,' and the counter, 'England and York.'" "And Joanna, my lord?" asked Dick. "Nay, ye must get Joanna how ye can," replied the baron. "I have named you for my choice in both these letters; but ye must get her for yourself, boy. I have tried, as ye see here before you, and have lost my life. More could no man do." By this time the wounded man began to be very weary; and Dick, putting the precious papers in his bosom, bade him be of good cheer, and left him to repose. The day was beginning to break, cold and blue, with flying squalls of snow. Close under the lee of the _Good Hope_, the coast lay in alternate rocky headlands and sandy bays; and farther inland the wooded hill-tops of Tunstall showed along the sky. Both the wind and the sea had gone down; but the vessel wallowed deep, and scarce rose upon the waves. Lawless was still fixed at the rudder; and by this time nearly all the men had crawled on deck, and were now gazing, with blank faces, upon the inhospitable coast. "Are we going ashore?" asked Dick. "Ay," said Lawless, "unless we get first to the bottom." And just then the ship rose so languidly to meet a sea, and the water weltered so loudly in her hold, that Dick involuntarily seized the steersman by the arm. "By the mass!" cried Dick, as the bows of the _Good Hope_ re-appeared above the foam, "I thought we had foundered, indeed; my heart was at my throat." In the waist, Greensheve, Hawksley, and the better men of both companies were busy breaking up the deck to build a raft; and to these Dick joined himself, working the harder to drown the memory of his predicament. But, even as he worked, every sea that struck the poor ship, and every one of her dull lurches, as she tumbled wallowing among the waves, recalled him with a horrid pang to the immediate proximity of death. Presently, looking up from his work, he saw that they were close in below a promontory; a piece of ruinous cliff, against the base of which the sea broke white and heavy, almost overplumbed the deck; and, above that again, a house appeared, crowning a down. Inside the bay the seas ran gaily, raised the _Good Hope_ upon their foam-flecked shoulders, carried her beyond the control of the steersman, and in a moment dropped her with a great concussion on the sand, and began to break over her, half-mast high, and roll her to and fro. Another great wave followed, raised her again, and carried her yet farther in; and then a third succeeded, and left her far inshore of the more dangerous breakers, wedged upon a bank. "Now, boys," cried Lawless, "the saints have had a care of us indeed. The tide ebbs; let us but sit down and drink a cup of wine, and before half an hour ye may all march me ashore as safe as on a bridge." A barrel was broached, and sitting in what shelter they could find from the flying snow and spray, the shipwrecked company handed the cup around, and sought to warm their bodies and restore their spirits. Dick, meanwhile, returned to Lord Foxham, who lay in great perplexity and fear, the floor of his cabin washing knee-deep in water, and the lamp, which had been his only light, broken and extinguished by the violence of the blow. "My lord," said young Shelton, "fear not at all; the saints are plainly for us; the seas have cast us high upon a shoal, and as soon as the tide hath somewhat ebbed, we may walk ashore upon our feet." It was nearly an hour before the vessel was sufficiently deserted by the ebbing sea, and they could set forth for the land, which appeared dimly before them through a veil of driving snow. Upon a hillock on one side of their way a party of men lay huddled together, suspiciously observing the movements of the new arrivals. "They might draw near and offer us some comfort," Dick remarked. "Well, an they come not to us, let us even turn aside to them," said Hawksley. "The sooner we come to a good fire and a dry bed, the better for my poor lord." But they had not moved far in the direction of the hillock before the men, with one consent, rose suddenly to their feet, and poured a flight of well-directed arrows on the shipwrecked company. "Back! back!" cried his lordship. "Beware, in Heaven's name, that ye reply not!" "Nay," cried Greensheve, pulling an arrow from his leather jack. "We are in no posture to fight, it is certain, being drenching wet, dog-weary, and three-parts frozen; but, for the love of old England, what aileth them to shoot thus cruelly on their poor country people in distress?" "They take us to be French pirates," answered Lord Foxham. "In these most troublesome and degenerate days we cannot keep our own shores of England; but our old enemies, whom we once chased on sea and land, do now range at pleasure, robbing and slaughtering and burning. It is the pity and reproach of this poor land." The men upon the hillock lay, closely observing them, while they trailed upward from the beach and wound inland among desolate sandhills; for a mile or so they even hung upon the rear of the march, ready, at a sign, to pour another volley on the weary and dispirited fugitives; and it was only when, striking at length upon a firm high-road, Dick began to call his men to some more martial order, that these jealous guardians of the coast of England silently disappeared among the snow. They had done what they desired; they had protected their own homes and farms, their own families and cattle; and, their private interest being thus secured, it mattered not the weight of a straw to any one of them, although the Frenchmen should carry blood and fire to every other parish in the realm of England. FOOTNOTE: [1] At the date of this story, Richard Crookback could not have been created Duke of Gloucester; but for clearness, with the reader's leave, he shall so be called. BOOK IV THE DISGUISE CHAPTER I THE DEN The place where Dick had struck the line of a high-road was not far from Holywood, and within nine or ten miles of Shoreby-on-the-Till; and here, after making sure that they were pursued no longer, the two bodies separated. Lord Foxham's followers departed, carrying their wounded master towards the comfort and security of the great abbey; and Dick, as he saw them wind away and disappear in the thick curtain of the falling snow, was left alone with near upon a dozen outlaws, the last remainder of his troop of volunteers. Some were wounded; one and all were furious at their ill-success and long exposure; and though they were now too cold and hungry to do more, they grumbled and cast sullen looks upon their leaders. Dick emptied his purse among them, leaving himself nothing; thanked them for the courage they had displayed, though he could have found it more readily in his heart to rate them for poltroonery; and having thus somewhat softened the effect of his prolonged misfortune, despatched them to find their way, either severally or in pairs, to Shoreby and the "Goat and Bagpipes." For his own part, influenced by what he had seen on board of the _Good Hope_, he chose Lawless to be his companion on the walk. The snow was falling, without pause or variation, in one even, blinding cloud; the wind had been strangled, and now blew no longer; and the whole world was blotted out and sheeted down below that silent inundation. There was great danger of wandering by the way and perishing in drifts; and Lawless, keeping half a step in front of his companion, and holding his head forward like a hunting dog upon the scent, inquired his way of every tree, and studied out their path as though he were conning a ship among dangers. About a mile into the forest they came to a place where several ways met, under a grove of lofty and contorted oaks. Even in the narrow horizon of the falling snow, it was a spot that could not fail to be recognised; and Lawless evidently recognised it with particular delight. "Now, Master Richard," said he, "an y' are not too proud to be the guest of a man who is neither a gentleman by birth nor so much as a good Christian, I can offer you a cup of wine and a good fire to melt the marrow in your frozen bones." "Lead on, Will," answered Dick. "A cup of wine and a good fire! Nay, I would go a far way round to see them." Lawless turned aside under the bare branches of the grove, and, walking resolutely forward for some time, came to a steepish hollow or den, that had now drifted a quarter full of snow. On the verge a great beech-tree hung, precariously rooted; and here the old outlaw, pulling aside some bushy underwood, bodily disappeared into the earth. The beech had, in some violent gale, been half-uprooted, and had torn up a considerable stretch of turf; and it was under this that old Lawless had dug out his forest hiding-place. The roots served him for rafters, the turf was his thatch; for walls and floor he had his mother the earth. Rude as it was, the hearth in one corner, blackened by fire, and the presence in another of a large oaken chest well fortified with iron, showed it at one glance to be the den of a man, and not the burrow of a digging beast. Though the snow had drifted at the mouth and sifted in upon the floor of this earth-cavern, yet was the air much warmer than without; and when Lawless had struck a spark, and the dry furze bushes had begun to blaze and crackle on the hearth, the place assumed, even to the eye, an air of comfort and of home. With a sigh of great contentment Lawless spread his broad hands before the fire, and seemed to breathe the smoke. "Here, then," he said, "is this old Lawless's rabbit-hole; pray Heaven there come no terrier! Far I have rolled hither and thither, and here and about, since that I was fourteen years of mine age, and first ran away from mine abbey, with the sacrist's gold chain and a mass-book that I sold for four marks. I have been in England and France and Burgundy, and in Spain, too, on a pilgrimage for my poor soul; and upon the sea, which is no man's country. But here is my place, Master Shelton. This is my native land, this burrow in the earth. Come rain or wind--an whether it's April, and the birds all sing, and the blossoms fall about my bed, or whether it's winter, and I sit alone with my good gossip the fire, and robin-redbreast twitters in the woods--here is my church and market, my wife and child. It's here I come back to, and it's here, so please the saints, that I would like to die." "'Tis a warm corner, to be sure," replied Dick, "and a pleasant, and a well-hid." "It had need to be," returned Lawless, "for an they found it, Master Shelton, it would break my heart. But here," he added, burrowing with his stout fingers in the sandy floor, "here is my wine-cellar, and ye shall have a flask of excellent strong stingo." Sure enough, after but a little digging, he produced a big leathern bottle of about a gallon, nearly three parts full of a very heady and sweet wine; and when they had drunk to each other comradely, and the fire had been replenished and blazed up again, the pair lay at full length, thawing and steaming, and divinely warm. "Master Shelton," observed the outlaw, "y' have had two mischances this last while, and y' are like to lose the maid--do I take it aright?" "Aright!" returned Dick, nodding his head. "Well, now," continued Lawless, "hear an old fool that hath been nigh-hand everything, and seen nigh-hand all! Ye go too much on other people's errands, Master Dick. Ye go on Ellis's; but he desireth rather the death of Sir Daniel. Ye go on Lord Foxham's; well--the saints preserve him!--doubtless he meaneth well. But go ye upon your own, good Dick. Come right to the maid's side. Court her, lest that she forget you. Be ready; and when the chance shall come, off with her at the saddle-bow." "Ay, but, Lawless, beyond doubt she is now in Sir Daniel's own mansion," answered Dick. "Thither, then, go we," replied the outlaw. Dick stared at him. "Nay, I mean it," nodded Lawless. "And if y' are of so little faith, and stumble at a word, see here!" And the outlaw, taking a key from about his neck, opened the oak chest, and dipping and groping deep among its contents, produced first a friar's robe, and next a girdle of rope; and then a huge rosary of wood, heavy enough to be counted as a weapon. "Here," he said, "is for you. On with them!" And then, when Dick had clothed himself in this clerical disguise, Lawless produced some colours and a pencil, and proceeded, with the greatest cunning, to disguise his face. The eyebrows he thickened and produced; to the moustache, which was yet hardly visible, he rendered a like service; while, by a few lines around his eye, he changed the expression and increased the apparent age of this young monk. "Now," he resumed, "when I have done the like, we shall make as bonny a pair of friars as the eye could wish. Boldly to Sir Daniel's we shall go, and there be hospitably welcome for the love of Mother Church." "And how, dear Lawless," cried the lad, "shall I repay you?" "Tut, brother," replied the outlaw, "I do naught but for my pleasure. Mind not for me. I am one, by the mass, that mindeth for himself. When that I lack, I have a long tongue and a voice like the monastery bell--I do ask, my son; and where asking faileth, I do most usually take." The old rogue made a humorous grimace; and although Dick was displeased to lie under so great favours to so equivocal a personage, he was yet unable to restrain his mirth. With that Lawless returned to the big chest, and was soon similarly disguised; but below his gown Dick wondered to observe him conceal a sheaf of black arrows. "Wherefore do ye that?" asked the lad. "Wherefore arrows, when ye take no bow?" "Nay," replied Lawless lightly, "'tis like there will be heads broke--not to say backs--ere you and I win sound from where we're going to; and if any fall, I would our fellowship should come by the credit on't. A black arrow, Master Dick, is the seal of our abbey; it showeth you who writ the bill." "An ye prepare so carefully," said Dick. "I have here some papers that, for mine own sake, and the interest of those that trusted me, were better left behind than found upon my body. Where shall I conceal them, Will?" "Nay," replied Lawless, "I will go forth into the wood and whistle me three verses of a song; meanwhile do you bury them where ye please, and smooth the sand upon the place." "Never!" cried Richard. "I trust you, man. I were base indeed if I not trusted you." "Brother, y' are but a child," replied the old outlaw, pausing and turning his face upon Dick from the threshold of the den. "I am a kind old Christian, and no traitor to men's blood, and no sparer of mine own in a friend's jeopardy. But, fool child, I am a thief by trade and birth and habit. If my bottle were empty and my mouth dry, I would rob you, dear child, as sure as I love, honour, and admire your parts and person! Can it be clearer spoken? No." And he stumped forth through the bushes with a snap of his big fingers. Dick, thus left alone, after a wondering thought upon the inconsistencies of his companion's character, hastily produced, reviewed, and buried his papers. One only he reserved to carry along with him, since it in nowise compromised his friends, and yet might serve him, in a pinch, against Sir Daniel. That was the knight's own letter to Lord Wensleydale, sent by Throgmorton, on the morrow of the defeat at Risingham, and found next day by Dick upon the body of the messenger. Then, treading down the embers of the fire, Dick left the den, and rejoined the old outlaw, who stood awaiting him under the leafless oaks, and was already beginning to be powdered by the falling snow. Each looked upon the other, and each laughed, so thorough and so droll was the disguise. "Yet I would it were but summer and a clear day," grumbled the outlaw, "that I might see myself in the mirror of a pool. There be many of Sir Daniel's men that know me; and if we fell to be recognised, there might be two words for you, my brother, but as for me, in a paternoster-while, I should be kicking in a rope's-end." Thus they set forth together along the road to Shoreby, which, in this part of its course, kept near along the margin of the forest, coming forth, from time to time, in the open country, and passing beside poor folks' houses and small farms. Presently at sight of one of these Lawless pulled up. "Brother Martin," he said, in a voice capitally disguised, and suited to his monkish robe, "let us enter and seek alms from these poor sinners. _Pax vobiscum!_ Ay," he added, in his own voice, "'tis as I feared: I have somewhat lost the whine of it; and by your leave, good Master Shelton, ye must suffer me to practise in these country places, before that I risk my fat neck by entering Sir Daniel's. But look ye a little, what an excellent thing it is to be a Jack-of-all-trades! An I had not been a shipman, ye had infallibly gone down in the _Good Hope_; an I had not been a thief, I could not have painted me your face; and but that I had been a Grey Friar, and sung loud in the choir, and ate hearty at the board, I could not have carried this disguise, but the very dogs would have spied us out and barked at us for shams." He was by this time close to the window of the farm, and he rose on his tip-toes and peeped in. "Nay," he cried, "better and better. We shall here try our false faces with a vengeance, and have a merry jest on Brother Capper to boot." And so saying he opened the door and led the way into the house. Three of their own company sat at the table, greedily eating. Their daggers, stuck beside them in the board, and the black and menacing looks which they continued to shower upon the people of the house, proved that they owed their entertainment rather to force than favour. On the two monks, who now, with a sort of humble dignity, entered the kitchen of the farm, they seemed to turn with a particular resentment; and one--it was John Capper in person--who seemed to play the leading part, instantly and rudely ordered them away. "We want no beggars here!" he cried. But another--although he was as far from recognising Dick and Lawless--inclined to more moderate counsels. "Not so," he cried. "We be strong men, and take: these be weak, and crave; but in the latter end these shall be uppermost and we below.--Mind him not, my father; but come, drink of my cup, and give me a benediction." "Y' are men of a light mind, carnal and accursed," said the monk. "Now, may the saints forbid that ever I should drink with such companions! But here, for the pity I bear to sinners, here I do' leave you a blessed relic, the which, for your soul's interest, I bid you kiss and cherish." So far Lawless thundered upon them like a preaching friar; but with these words he drew from under his robe a black arrow, tossed it on the board in front of the three startled outlaws, turned in the same instant, and, taking Dick along with him, was out of the room and out of sight among the falling snow before they had time to utter a word or move a finger. "So," he said, "we have proved our false faces, Master Shelton. I will now adventure my poor carcass where ye please." "Good!" returned Richard. "It irks me to be doing. Set we on for Shoreby!" CHAPTER II "IN MINE ENEMIES' HOUSE" Sir Daniel's residence in Shoreby was a tall, commodious, plastered mansion, framed in carven oak, and covered by a low-pitched roof of thatch. To the back there stretched a garden, full of fruit-trees, alleys, and thick arbours, and over-looked from the far end by the tower of the abbey church. The house might contain, upon a pinch, the retinue of a greater person than Sir Daniel; but even now it was filled with hubbub. The court rang with arms and horse-shoe iron; the kitchen roared with cookery like a bees'-hive; minstrels, and the players of instruments, and the cries of tumblers, sounded from the hall. Sir Daniel, in his profusion, in the gaiety and gallantry of his establishment, rivalled with Lord Shoreby and eclipsed Lord Risingham. All guests were made welcome. Minstrels, tumblers, players of chess, the sellers of relics, medicines, perfumes and enchantments, and along with these every sort of priest, friar, or pilgrim, were made welcome to the lower table, and slept together in the ample lofts, or on the bare boards of the long dining-hall. On the afternoon following the wreck of the _Good Hope_, the buttery, the kitchens, the stables, the covered cart-shed that surrounded two sides of the court, were all crowded by idle people, partly belonging to Sir Daniel's establishment, and attired in his livery of murrey and blue, partly nondescript strangers attracted to the town by greed, and received by the knight through policy, and because it was the fashion of the time. The snow, which still fell without interruption, the extreme chill of the air, and the approach of night, combined to keep them under shelter. Wine, ale, and money were all plentiful; many sprawled gambling in the straw of the barn, many were still drunken from the noontide meal. To the eye of a modern it would have looked like the sack of a city; to the eye of a contemporary it was like any other rich and noble household at a festive season. Two monks--a young and an old--had arrived late, and were now warming themselves at a bonfire in a corner of the shed. A mixed crowd surrounded them--jugglers, mountebanks, and soldiers: and with these the elder of the two had soon engaged so brisk a conversation, and exchanged so many loud guffaws and country witticisms that the group momentarily increased in number. The younger companion, in whom the reader has already recognised Dick Shelton, sat from the first somewhat backward, and gradually drew himself away. He listened, indeed, closely, but he opened not his mouth; and by the grave expression of his countenance he made but little account of his companion's pleasantries. At last his eye, which travelled continually to and fro, and kept a guard upon all the entrances of the house, lit upon a little procession entering by the main gate and crossing the court in an oblique direction. Two ladies, muffled in thick furs, led the way, and were followed by a pair of waiting-women and four stout men-at-arms. The next moment they had disappeared within the house; and Dick, slipping through the crowd of loiterers in the shed, was already giving hot pursuit. "The taller of these twain was Lady Brackley," he thought; "and where Lady Brackley is, Joan will not be far." At the door of the house the four men-at-arms had ceased to follow, and the ladies were now mounting the stairway of polished oak, under no better escort than that of the two waiting-women. Dick followed close behind. It was already the dusk of the day; and in the house the darkness of the night had almost come. On the stair-landings torches flared in iron holders; down the long tapestried corridors a lamp burned by every door. And where the door stood open, Dick could look in upon arras-covered walls, and rush-bescattered floors, glowing in the light of the wood-fires. Two floors were passed, and at every landing the younger and shorter of the two ladies had looked back keenly at the monk. He, keeping his eyes lowered, and affecting the demure manners that suited his disguise, had but seen her once, and was unaware that he had attracted her attention. And now, on the third floor, the party separated, the younger lady continuing to ascend alone, the other, followed by the waiting-maids, descending the corridor to the right. Dick mounted with a swift foot, and holding to the corner, thrust forth his head and followed the three women with his eyes. Without turning or looking behind them, they continued to descend the corridor. "It is right well," thought Dick. "Let me but know my Lady Brackley's chamber, and it will go hard an I find not Dame Hatch upon an errand." And just then a hand was laid upon his shoulder, and, with a bound and a choked cry, he turned to grapple his assailant. He was somewhat abashed to find, in the person whom he had so roughly seized, the short young lady in the furs. She, on her part, was shocked and terrified beyond expression, and hung trembling in his grasp. "Madam," said Dick, releasing her, "I cry you a thousand pardons; but I have no eyes behind, and, by the mass, I could not tell ye were a maid." The girl continued to look at him, but, by this time, terror began to be succeeded by surprise, and surprise by suspicion. Dick, who could read these changes on her face, became alarmed for his own safety in that hostile house. "Fair maid," he said, affecting easiness, "suffer me to kiss your hand, in token ye forgive my roughness, and I will even go." "Y' are a strange monk, young sir," returned the young lady, looking him both boldly and shrewdly in the face; "and now that my first astonishment hath somewhat passed away, I can spy the layman in each word you utter. What do ye here? Why are ye thus sacrilegiously tricked out? Come ye in peace or war? And why spy ye after Lady Brackley like a thief?" "Madam," quoth Dick, "of one thing I pray you to be very sure: I am no thief. And even if I come here in war, as in some degree I do, I make no war upon fair maids, and I hereby entreat them to copy me so far, and to leave me be. For, indeed, fair mistress, cry out--if such be your pleasure--cry but once, and say what ye have seen, and the poor gentleman before you is merely a dead man. I cannot think ye would be cruel," added Dick; and taking the girl's hand gently in both of his, he looked at her with courteous admiration. "Are ye then a spy--a Yorkist?" asked the maid. "Madam," he replied, "I am indeed a Yorkist, and in some sort, a spy. But that which bringeth me into this house, the same which will win for me the pity and interest of your kind heart, is neither of York nor Lancaster. I will wholly put my life in your discretion. I am a lover, and my name--" But here the young lady clapped her hand suddenly upon Dick's mouth, looked hastily up and down and east and west, and, seeing the coast clear, began to drag the young man, with great strength and vehemence, upstairs. "Hush!" she said, "and come. 'Shalt talk hereafter." Somewhat bewildered, Dick suffered himself to be pulled upstairs, bustled along a corridor, and thrust suddenly into a chamber, lit, like so many of the others, by a blazing log upon the hearth. "Now," said the young lady, forcing him down upon a stool, "sit ye there and attend my sovereign good-pleasure. I have life and death over you, and I will not scruple to abuse my power. Look to yourself; y' have cruelly mauled my arm. He knew not I was a maid, quoth he! Had he known I was a maid, he had ta'en his belt to me, forsooth!" And with these words she whipped out of the room, and left Dick gaping with wonder, and not very sure if he were dreaming or awake. "Ta'en my belt to her!" he repeated. "Ta'en my belt to her!" and the recollection of that evening in the forest flowed back upon his mind, and he once more saw Matcham's wincing body and beseeching eyes. And then he was recalled to the dangers of the present. In the next room he heard a stir, as of a person moving; then followed a sigh, which sounded strangely near; and then the rustle of skirts and tap of feet once more began. As he stood hearkening, he saw the arras wave along the wall; there was the sound of a door being opened, the hangings divided, and, lamp in hand, Joanna Sedley entered the apartment. She was attired in costly stuffs of deep and warm colours, such as befit the winter and the snow. Upon her head, her hair had been gathered together and became her as a crown. And she, who had seemed so little and so awkward in the attire of Matcham, was now tall like a young willow, and swam across the floor as though she scorned the drudgery of walking. Without a start, without a tremor, she raised her lamp and looked at the young monk. "What make ye here, good brother?" she inquired. "Ye are doubtless ill-directed. Whom do ye require?" And she set her lamp upon the bracket. "Joanna," said Dick; and then his voice failed him. "Joanna," he began again, "ye said ye loved me; and the more fool I, but I believed it!" "Dick!" she cried. "Dick!" And then, to the wonder of the lad, this beautiful and tall young lady made but one step of it, and threw her arms about his neck and gave him a hundred kisses all in one. "O the fool fellow!" she cried. "O dear Dick! O, if ye could see yourself! Alack!" she added, pausing, "I have spoilt you, Dick! I have knocked some of the paint off. But that can be mended. What cannot be mended, Dick--or I much fear it cannot!--is my marriage with Lord Shoreby." "Is it decided then?" asked the lad. "To-morrow, before noon, Dick, in the abbey church," she answered, "John Matcham and Joanna Sedley both shall come to a right miserable end. There is no help in tears, or I could weep mine eyes out. I have not spared myself to pray, but Heaven frowns on my petition. And, dear Dick--good Dick--but that ye can get me forth of this house before the morning, we must even kiss and say good-bye." "Nay," said Dick, "not I; I will never say that word. 'Tis like despair; but while there's life, Joanna, there is hope. Yet will I hope. Ay, by the mass, and triumph! Look ye, now, when ye were but a name to me, did I not follow--did I not rouse good men--did I not stake my life upon the quarrel? And now that I have seen you for what ye are--the fairest maid and stateliest of England--think ye I would turn?--if the deep sea were there, I would straight through it; if the way were full of lions, I would scatter them like mice." "Ay," she said dryly, "ye make a great ado about a sky-blue robe!" "Nay, Joan," protested Dick, "'tis not alone the robe. But, lass, ye were disguised. Here am I disguised; and, to the proof, do I not cut a figure of fun--a right fool's figure?" "Ay, Dick, an' that ye do!" she answered, smiling. "Well, then!" he returned, triumphant. "So was it with you, poor Matcham, in the forest. In sooth, ye were a wench to laugh at. But now!" So they ran on, holding each other by both hands, exchanging smiles and lovely looks, and melting minutes into seconds; and so they might have continued all night long. But presently there was a noise behind them; and they were aware of the short young lady, with her finger on her lips. "Saints!" she cried, "but what a noise ye keep! Can ye not speak in compass?--And now, Joanna, my fair maid of the woods, what will ye give your gossip for bringing you your sweetheart?" Joanna ran to her, by way of answer, and embraced her fierily. "And you, sir," added the young lady, "what do ye give me?" "Madam," said Dick, "I would fain offer to pay you in the same money." "Come, then," said the lady, "it is permitted you." But Dick, blushing like a peony, only kissed her hand. "What ails ye at my face, fair sir?" she inquired, curtseying to the very ground; and then, when Dick had at length and most tepidly embraced her, "Joanna," she added, "your sweetheart is very backward under your eyes; but I warrant you, when first we met, he was more ready. I am all black and blue, wench; trust me never, if I be not black and blue! And now," she continued, "have ye said your sayings? for I must speedily dismiss the paladin." But at this they both cried out that they had said nothing, that the night was still very young, and that they would not be separated so early. "And supper?" asked the young lady. "Must we not go down to supper?" "Nay, to be sure!" cried Joan. "I had forgotten." "Hide me, then," said Dick, "put me behind the arras, shut me in a chest, or what ye will, so that I may be here on your return. Indeed, fair lady," he added, "bear this in mind, that we are sore bestead, and may never look upon each other's face from this night forward till we die." At this the young lady melted; and when, a little after, the bell summoned Sir Daniel's household to the board, Dick was planted very stiffly against the wall, at a place where a division in the tapestry permitted him to breathe the more freely, and even to see into the room. He had not been long in this position when he was somewhat strangely disturbed. The silence in that upper story of the house was only broken by the flickering of the flames and the hissing of a green log in the chimney; but presently, to Dick's strained hearing, there came the sound of some one walking with extreme precaution; and soon after the door opened, and a little black-faced, dwarfish fellow, in Lord Shoreby's colours, pushed first his head and then his crooked body into the chamber. His mouth was open, as though to hear the better; and his eyes, which were very bright, flitted restlessly and swiftly to and fro. He went round and round the room, striking here and there upon the hangings; but Dick, by a miracle, escaped his notice. Then he looked below the furniture, and examined the lamp; and at last, with an air of cruel disappointment, was preparing to go away as silently as he had come, when down he dropped upon his knees, picked up something from among the rushes on the floor, examined it, and, with every signal of delight, concealed it in the wallet at his belt. Dick's heart sank, for the object in question was a tassel from his own girdle; and it was plain to him that this dwarfish spy, who took a malign delight in his employment, would lose no time in bearing it to his master, the baron. He was half-tempted to throw aside the arras, fall upon the scoundrel, and, at the risk of his life, remove the tell-tale token. And while he was still hesitating, a new cause of concern was added. A voice, hoarse and broken by drink, began to be audible from the stair; and presently after, uneven, wandering, and heavy footsteps sounded without along the passage. "What make ye here, my merry men, among the greenwood shaws?" sang the voice. "What make ye here? Hey! sots, what make ye here?" it added, with a rattle of drunken laughter; and then once more breaking into song: "If ye should drink the clary wine, Fat Friar John, ye friend o' mine-- If I should eat, and ye should drink, Who shall sing the mass, d'ye think?" Lawless, alas! rolling drunk, was wandering the house, seeking for a corner wherein to slumber off the effect of his potations. Dick inwardly raged. The spy, at first terrified, had grown reassured as he found he had to deal with an intoxicated man, and now, with a movement of cat-like rapidity, slipped from the chamber, and was gone from Richard's eyes. What was to be done? If he lost touch of Lawless for the night he was left impotent, whether to plan or carry forth Joanna's rescue. If, on the other hand, he dared to address the drunken outlaw, the spy might still be lingering within sight, and the most fatal consequences ensue. It was, nevertheless, upon this last hazard that Dick decided. Slipping from behind the tapestry, he stood ready in the doorway of the chamber, with a warning hand upraised. Lawless, flushed crimson, with his eyes injected, vacillating on his feet, drew still unsteadily nearer. At last he hazily caught sight of his commander, and, in despite of Dick's imperious signals, hailed him instantly and loudly by his name. Dick leaped upon and shook the drunkard furiously. "Beast!" he hissed--"beast, and no man! It is worse than treachery to be so witless. We may all be shent for thy sotting." But Lawless only laughed and staggered, and tried to clap young Shelton on the back. And just then Dick's quick ear caught a rapid brushing in the arras. He leaped towards the sound, and the next moment a piece of the wall-hanging had been torn down, and Dick and the spy were sprawling together in its folds. Over and over they rolled, grappling for each other's throat, and still baffled by the arras, and still silent in their deadly fury. But Dick was by much the stronger, and soon the spy lay prostrate under his knee, and, with a single stroke of the long poniard, ceased to breathe. CHAPTER III THE DEAD SPY Throughout this furious and rapid passage, Lawless had looked on helplessly, and even when all was over, and Dick, already re-arisen to his feet, was listening with the most passionate attention to the distant bustle in the lower stories of the house, the old outlaw was still wavering on his legs like a shrub in a breeze of wind, and still stupidly staring on the face of the dead man. "It is well," said Dick at length; "they have not heard us, praise the saints! But, now, what shall I do with this poor spy? At least, I will take my tassel from his wallet." So saying, Dick opened the wallet; within he found a few pieces of money, the tassel, and a letter addressed to Lord Wensleydale, and sealed with my Lord Shoreby's seal. The name awoke Dick's recollection; and he instantly broke the wax and read the contents of the letter. It was short, but, to Dick's delight, it gave evident proof that Lord Shoreby was treacherously corresponding with the House of York. The young fellow usually carried his ink-horn and implements about him, and so now, bending a knee beside the body of the dead spy, he was able to write these words upon a corner of the paper: "My Lord of Shoreby, ye that writt the letter, wot ye why your man is ded? But let me rede you, marry not. "JON AMEND-ALL." He laid this paper on the breast of the corpse; and then Lawless, who had been looking on upon these last manoeuvres with some flickering returns of intelligence, suddenly drew a black arrow from below his robe, and therewith pinned the paper in its place. The sight of this disrespect, or, as it almost seemed, cruelty to the dead, drew a cry of horror from young Shelton; but the old outlaw only laughed. "Nay, I will have the credit for mine order," he hiccuped. "My jolly boys must have the credit on't--the credit, brother"; and then, shutting his eyes tight and opening his mouth like a precentor, he began to thunder, in a formidable voice: "If ye should drink the clary wine--" "Peace, sot!" cried Dick, and thrust him hard against the wall. "In two words--if so be that such a man can understand me who hath more wine than wit in him--in two words, and a-Mary's name, begone out of this house, where, if ye continue to abide, ye will not only hang yourself, but me also! Faith, then, up foot! be yare, or, by the mass, I may forget that I am in some sort your captain, and in some your debtor! Go!" The sham monk was now, in some degree, recovering the use of his intelligence; and the ring in Dick's voice, and the glitter in Dick's eye, stamped home the meaning of his words. "By the mass," cried Lawless, "an I be not wanted, I can go"; and he turned tipsily along the corridor and proceeded to flounder downstairs, lurching against the wall. So soon as he was out of sight, Dick returned to his hiding-place, resolutely fixed to see the matter out. Wisdom, indeed, moved him to be gone; but love and curiosity were stronger. Time passed slowly for the young man, bolt upright behind the arras. The fire in the room began to die down, and the lamp to burn low and to smoke. And still there was no word of the return of any one to these upper quarters of the house; still the faint hum and clatter of the supper-party sounded from far below; and still, under the thick fall of the snow, Shoreby town lay silent upon every side. At length, however, feet and voices began to draw near upon the stair; and presently after several of Sir Daniel's guests arrived upon the landing, and, turning down the corridor, beheld the torn arras and the body of the spy. Some ran forward and some back, and all together began to cry aloud. At the sound of their cries, guests, men-at-arms, ladies, servants, and, in a word, all the inhabitants of that great house, came flying from every direction, and began to join their voices to the tumult. Soon a way was cleared, and Sir Daniel came forth in person, followed by the bridegroom of the morrow, my Lord Shoreby. "My lord," said Sir Daniel, "have I not told you of this knave Black Arrow? To the proof, behold it! There it stands, and, by the rood, my gossip, in a man of yours, or one that stole your colours!" "In good sooth, it was a man of mine," replied Lord Shoreby, hanging back. "I would I had more such. He was as keen as a beagle and secret as a mole." "Ay, gossip, truly?" asked Sir Daniel keenly. "An what came he smelling up so many stairs in my poor mansion? But he will smell no more." "An't please you, Sir Daniel," said one, "here is a paper written upon with some matter, pinned upon his breast." "Give it me, arrow and all," said the knight. And when he had taken into his hand the shaft, he continued for some time to gaze upon it in a sullen musing. "Ay," he said, addressing Lord Shoreby, "here is a hate that followeth hard and close upon my heels. This black stick, or its just likeness, shall yet bring me down. And, gossip, suffer a plain knight to counsel you; and if these hounds begin to wind you, flee! 'Tis like a sickness--it still hangeth, hangeth upon the limbs. But let us see what they have written. It is as I thought, my lord; y' are marked like an old oak, by the woodman; to-morrow or next day, by will come the axe. But what wrote ye in a letter?" Lord Shoreby snatched the paper from the arrow, read it, crumpled it between his hands, and, overcoming the reluctance which had hitherto withheld him from approaching, threw himself on his knees beside the body and eagerly groped in the wallet. He rose to his feet with a somewhat unsettled countenance. "Gossip," he said, "I have indeed lost a letter here that much imported; and could I lay my hand upon the knave that took it, he should incontinently grace a halter. But let us, first of all, secure the issues of the house. Here is enough harm already, by St. George!" Sentinels were posted close around the house and garden; a sentinel on every landing of the stair, a whole troop in the main entrance-hall; and yet another about the bonfire in the shed. Sir Daniel's followers were supplemented by Lord Shoreby's; there was thus no lack of men or weapons to make the house secure, or to entrap a lurking enemy, should one be there. Meanwhile, the body of the spy was carried out through the falling snow and deposited in the abbey church. It was not until these dispositions had been taken, and all had returned to a decorous silence, that the two girls drew Richard Shelton from his place of concealment, and made a full report to him of what had passed. He, upon his side, recounted the visit of the spy, his dangerous discovery, and speedy end. Joanna leaned back very faint against the curtained wall. "It will avail but little," she said. "I shall be wed to-morrow in the morning, after all!" "What!" cried her friend. "And here is our paladin that driveth lions like mice. Ye have little faith, of a surety.--But come, friend lion-driver, give us some comfort; speak, and let us hear bold counsels." Dick was confounded to be thus outfaced with his own exaggerated words; but though he coloured, he still spoke stoutly. "Truly," said he, "we are in straits. Yet, could I but win out of this house for half an hour, I do honestly tell myself that all might still go well; and for the marriage, it should be prevented." "And for the lions," mimicked the girl, "they shall be driven." "I crave your excuse," said Dick. "I speak not now in any boasting humour, but rather as one inquiring after help or counsel; for if I get not forth of this house through these sentinels, I can do less than naught. Take me, I pray you, rightly." "Why said ye he was rustic, Joan?" the girl inquired. "I warrant he hath a tongue in his head; ready, soft, and bold is his speech at pleasure. What would ye more?" "Nay," sighed Joanna, with a smile, "they have changed me my friend Dick, 'tis sure enough. When I beheld him, he was rough indeed. But it matters little; there is no help for my hard case, and I must still be Lady Shoreby!" "Nay, then," said Dick, "I will even make the adventure. A friar is not much regarded; and if I found a good fairy to lead me up, I may find another belike to carry me down. How call they the name of this spy?" "Rutter," said the young lady; "and an excellent good name to call him by. But how mean ye, lion-driver? What is in your mind to do?" "To offer boldly to go forth," returned Dick; "and if any stop me, to keep an unchanged countenance, and say I go to pray for Rutter. They will be praying over his poor clay even now." "The device is somewhat simple," replied the girl, "yet it may hold." "Nay," said young Shelton, "it's no device, but mere boldness, which serveth often better in great straits." "Ye say true," she said. "Well, go, a-Mary's name, and may Heaven speed you! Ye leave here a poor maid that loves you entirely, and another that is most heartily your friend. Be wary, for their sakes, and make not shipwreck of your safety." "Ay," added Joanna, "go, Dick. Ye run no more peril, whether ye go or stay. Go; ye take my heart with you; the saints defend you!" Dick passed the first sentry with so assured a countenance that the fellow merely fidgeted and stared; but at the second landing the man carried his spear across and bade him name his business. "_Pax vobiscum_," answered Dick. "I go to pray over the body of this poor Rutter." "Like enough," returned the sentry; "but to go alone is not permitted you." He leaned over the oaken balusters and whistled shrill. "One cometh!" he cried; and then motioned Dick to pass. At the foot of the stair he found the guard afoot and awaiting his arrival; and when he had once more repeated his story, the commander of the post ordered four men to accompany him to the church. "Let him not slip, my lads," he said. "Bring him to Sir Oliver, on your lives!" The door was then opened; one of the men took Dick by either arm, another marched ahead with a link, and the fourth, with bent bow and the arrow on the string, brought up the rear. In this order they proceeded through the garden, under the thick darkness of the night and the scattering snow, and drew near to the dimly-illuminated windows of the abbey church. At the western portal a picket of archers stood, taking what shelter they could find in the hollow of the arched doorways, and all powdered with the snow; and it was not until Dick's conductors had exchanged a word with these, that they were suffered to pass forth and enter the nave of the sacred edifice. The church was doubtfully lighted by the tapers upon the great altar, and by a lamp or two that swung from the arched roof before the private chapels of illustrious families. In the midst of the choir the dead spy lay, his limbs piously composed, upon a bier. A hurried mutter of prayer sounded along the arches; cowled figures knelt in the stalls of the choir; and on the steps of the high altar a priest in pontifical vestments celebrated mass. Upon this fresh entrance, one of the cowled figures arose, and, coming down the steps which elevated the level of the choir above that of the nave, demanded from the leader of the four men what business brought him to the church. Out of respect for the service and the dead, they spoke in guarded tones; but the echoes of that huge empty building caught up their words, and hollowly repeated and repeated them along the aisles. "A monk!" returned Sir Oliver (for he it was), when he had heard the report of the archer. "My brother, I looked not for your coming," he added, turning to young Shelton. "In all civility, who are ye? and at whose instance do ye join your supplications to ours?" Dick, keeping his cowl about his face, signed to Sir Oliver to move a pace or two aside from the archers; and, so soon as the priest had done so, "I cannot hope to deceive you, sir," he said. "My life is in your hands." Sir Oliver violently started; his stout cheeks grew pale, and for a space he was silent. "Richard," he said, "what brings you here, I know not; but I much misdoubt it to be evil. Nevertheless, for the kindness that was, I would not willingly deliver you to harm. Ye shall sit all night beside me in the stalls: ye shall sit there till my Lord of Shoreby be married, and the party gone safe home; and if all goeth well, and ye have planned no evil, in the end ye shall go whither ye will. But if your purpose be bloody, it shall return upon your head. Amen!" And the priest devoutly crossed himself, and turned and louted to the altar. With that he spoke a few words more to the soldiers, and taking Dick by the hand, led him up to the choir, and placed him in the stall beside his own, where, for mere decency, the lad had instantly to kneel and appear to be busy with his devotions. His mind and his eyes, however, were continually wandering. Three of the soldiers, he observed, instead of returning to the house, had got them quietly into a point of vantage in the aisle; and he could not doubt that they had done so by Sir Oliver's command. Here, then, he was trapped. Here he must spend the night in the ghostly glimmer and shadow of the church, and looking on the pale face of him he slew; and here, in the morning, he must see his sweetheart married to another man before his eyes. But, for all that, he obtained a command upon his mind, and built himself up in patience to await the issue. CHAPTER IV IN THE ABBEY CHURCH In Shoreby Abbey Church the prayers were kept up all night without cessation, now with the singing of psalms, now with a note or two upon the bell. Rutter, the spy, was nobly waked. There he lay, meanwhile, as they had arranged him, his dead hands crossed upon his bosom, his dead eyes staring on the roof; and hard by, in the stall, the lad who had slain him waited, in sore disquietude, the coming of the morning. Once only, in the course of the hours, Sir Oliver leaned across to his captive. "Richard," he whispered, "my son, if ye mean me evil, I will certify, on my soul's welfare, ye design upon an innocent man. Sinful in the eye of Heaven I do declare myself, but sinful as against you I am not, neither have been ever." "My father," returned Dick, in the same tone of voice, "trust me, I design nothing; but as for your innocence, I may not forget that ye cleared yourself but lamely." "A man may be innocently guilty," replied the priest. "He may be set blindfolded upon a mission, ignorant of its true scope. So it was with me. I did decoy your father to his death; but as Heaven sees us in this sacred place, I knew not what I did." "It may be," returned Dick. "But see what a strange web ye have woven, that I should be, at this hour, at once your prisoner and your judge; that ye should both threaten my days and deprecate my anger. Methinks, if ye had been all your life a true man and good priest, ye would neither thus fear nor thus detest me. And now to your prayers. I do obey you, since needs must; but I will not be burthened with your company." The priest uttered a sigh so heavy that it had almost touched the lad into some sentiment of pity, and he bowed his head upon his hands like a man borne down below a weight of care. He joined no longer in the psalms; but Dick could hear the beads rattle through his fingers and the prayers a-pattering between his teeth. Yet a little, and the grey of the morning began to struggle through the painted casements of the church, and to put to shame the glimmer of the tapers. The light slowly broadened and brightened, and presently through the south-eastern clerestories a flush of rosy sunlight flickered on the walls. The storm was over; the great clouds had disburdened their snow and fled farther on, and the new day was breaking on a merry winter landscape sheathed in white. A bustle of church officers followed; the bier was carried forth to the dead-house, and the stains of blood were cleansed from off the tiles, that no such ill-omened spectacle should disgrace the marriage of Lord Shoreby. At the same time, the very ecclesiastics who had been so dismally engaged all night began to put on morning faces, to do honour to the merrier ceremony which was about to follow. And further to announce the coming of the day, the pious of the town began to assemble and fall to prayer before their favourite shrines, or wait their turn at the confessionals. Favoured by this stir, it was of course easily possible for any man to avoid the vigilance of Sir Daniel's sentries at the door; and presently Dick, looking about him wearily, caught the eye of no less a person than Will Lawless, still in his monk's habit. The outlaw, at the same moment, recognised his leader, and privily signed to him with hand and eye. Now, Dick was far from having forgiven the old rogue his most untimely drunkenness, but he had no desire to involve him in his own predicament; and he signalled back to him, as plain as he was able, to be gone. Lawless, as though he had understood, disappeared at once behind a pillar, and Dick breathed again. What, then, was his dismay to feel himself plucked by the sleeve and to find the old robber installed beside him, upon the next seat, and, to all appearance, plunged in his devotions! Instantly Sir Oliver arose from his place, and, gliding behind the stalls, made for the soldiers in the aisle. If the priest's suspicions had been so lightly wakened, the harm was already done, and Lawless a prisoner in the church. "Move not," whispered Dick. "We are in the plaguiest pass, thanks, before all things, to thy swinishness of yester-even. When ye saw me here, so strangely seated, where I have neither right nor interest, what a murrain! could ye not smell harm and get ye gone from evil?" "Nay," returned Lawless, "I thought ye had heard from Ellis, and were here on duty." "Ellis!" echoed Dick. "Is Ellis then returned?" "For sure," replied the outlaw. "He came last night, and belted me sore for being in wine--so there ye are avenged, my master. A furious man is Ellis Duckworth! He hath ridden me hot-spur from Craven to prevent this marriage; and, Master Dick, ye know the way of him--do so he will!" "Nay, then," returned Dick, with composure, "you and I, my poor brother, are dead men; for I sit here a prisoner upon suspicion, and my neck was to answer for this very marriage that he purposeth to mar. I had a fair choice, by the rood! to lose my sweetheart or else lose my life! Well, the cast is thrown--it is to be my life." "By the mass," cried Lawless, half arising, "I am gone!" But Dick had his hand at once upon his shoulder. "Friend Lawless, sit ye still," he said. "An ye have eyes, look yonder at the corner by the chancel arch; see ye not that, even upon the motion of your rising, yon armed men are up and ready to intercept you? Yield ye, friend. Ye were bold aboard ship, when ye thought to die a sea-death; be bold again, now that y' are to die presently upon the gallows." "Master Dick," gasped Lawless, "the thing hath come upon me somewhat of the suddenest. But give me a moment till I fetch my breath again; and, by the mass, I will be as stout-hearted as yourself." "Here is my bold fellow!" returned Dick. "And yet, Lawless, it goes hard against the grain with me to die; but where whining mendeth nothing, wherefore whine?" "Nay, that indeed!" chimed Lawless. "And a fig for death, at worst! It has to be done, my master, soon or late. And hanging in a good quarrel is an easy death, they say, though I could never hear of any that came back to say so." And so saying, the stout old rascal leaned back in his stall, folded his arms, and began to look about him with the greatest air of insolence and unconcern. "And for the matter of that," Dick added, "it is yet our best chance to keep quiet. We wot not yet what Duckworth purposes; and when all is said, and if the worst befall, we may yet clear our feet of it." Now that they ceased talking, they were aware of a very distant and thin strain of mirthful music which steadily grew nearer, louder and merrier. The bells in the tower began to break forth into a doubling peal, and a greater and greater concourse of people to crowd into the church, shuffling the snow from off their feet, and clapping and blowing in their hands. The western door was flung wide open, showing a glimpse of sunlit, snowy street, and admitting in a great gust the shrewd air of the morning; and in short, it became plain by every sign, that Lord Shoreby desired to be married very early in the day, and that the wedding-train was drawing near. Some of Lord Shoreby's men now cleared a passage down the middle aisle, forcing the people back with lance-stocks; and just then, outside the portal, the secular musicians could be descried drawing near over the frozen snow, the fifers and trumpeters scarlet in the face with lusty blowing, the drummers and the cymbalists beating as for a wager. These as they drew near the door of the sacred building, filed off on either side, and marking time to their own vigorous music, stood stamping in the snow. As they thus opened their ranks, the leaders of this noble bridal train appeared behind and between them; and such was the variety and gaiety of their attire, such the display of silks and velvet, fur and satin, embroidery and lace, that the procession showed forth upon the snow like a flower-bed in a path or a painted window in a wall. First came the bride, a sorry sight, as pale as winter, clinging to Sir Daniel's arm, and attended, as bridesmaid, by the short young lady who had befriended Dick the night before. Close behind, in the most radiant toilet, followed the bridegroom, halting on a gouty foot, and as he passed the threshold of the sacred building, and doffed his hat, his bald head was seen to be rosy with emotion. And now came the hour of Ellis Duckworth. Dick, who sat stunned among contrary emotions, grasping the desk in front of him, beheld a movement in the crowd, people jostling backward, and eyes and arms uplifted. Following these signs, he beheld three or four men with bent bows, leaning from the clerestory gallery. At the same instant they delivered their discharge, and before the clamour and cries of the astounded populace had time to swell fully upon the ear, they had flitted from their perch and disappeared. The nave was full of swaying heads and voices screaming; the ecclesiastics thronged in terror from their places; the music ceased, and though the bells overhead continued for some seconds to clang upon the air, some wind of the disaster seemed to find its way at last even to the chamber where the ringers were leaping on their ropes, and they also desisted from their merry labours. Right in the midst of the nave the bridegroom lay stone-dead, pierced by two black arrows. The bride had fainted. Sir Daniel stood, towering above the crowd in his surprise and anger, a clothyard shaft quivering in his left forearm, and his face streaming blood from another which had grazed his brow. Long before any search could be made for them, the authors of this tragic interruption had clattered down a turnpike stair and decamped by a postern door. But Dick and Lawless still remained in pawn; they had indeed arisen on the first alarm, and pushed manfully to gain the door; but what with the narrowness of the stalls, and the crowding of terrified priests and choristers, the attempt had been in vain, and they had stoically resumed their places. And now, pale with horror, Sir Oliver rose to his feet and called upon Sir Daniel, pointing with one hand to Dick. "Here," he cried, "is Richard Shelton--alas the hour!--blood guilty! Seize him!--bid him be seized! For all our lives' sakes, take him and bind him surely! He hath sworn our fall." Sir Daniel was blinded by anger--blinded by the hot blood that still streamed across his face. "Where?" he bellowed. "Hale him forth! By the cross of Holywood, but he shall rue this hour." The crowd fell back, and a party of archers invaded the choir, laid rough hands on Dick, dragged him headforemost from the stall, and thrust him by the shoulders down the chancel steps. Lawless, on his part, sat as still as a mouse. Sir Daniel, brushing the blood out of his eyes, stared blinkingly upon his captive. "Ay," he said, "treacherous and insolent, I have thee fast; and by all potent oaths, for every drop of blood that now trickles in mine eyes I will wring a groan out of thy carcass. Away with him!" he added. "Here is no place! Off with him to my house.--I will number every joint of thy body with a torture." But Dick, putting off his captors, uplifted his voice. "Sanctuary!" he shouted. "Sanctuary! Ho, there, my fathers! They would drag me from the church!" "From the church thou hast defiled with murder, boy," added a tall man, magnificently dressed. "On what probation?" cried Dick. "They do accuse me, indeed, of some complicity, but have not proved one tittle. I was, in truth, a suitor for this damsel's hand; and she, I will be bold to say it, repaid my suit with favour. But what then? To love a maid is no offence, I trow--nay, nor to gain her love. In all else I stand here free from guiltiness." There was a murmur of approval among the bystanders, so boldly Dick declared his innocence; but at the same time a throng of accusers arose upon the other side, crying how he had been found last night in Sir Daniel's house, how he wore a sacrilegious disguise; and in the midst of the babel, Sir Oliver indicated Lawless, both by voice and gesture, as accomplice to the fact. He, in his turn, was dragged from his seat and set beside his leader. The feelings of the crowd rose high on either side, and while some dragged the prisoners to and fro to favour their escape, others cursed and struck them with their fists. Dick's ears rang and his brain swam dizzily, like a man struggling in the eddies of a furious river. But the tall man, who had already answered Dick, by a prodigious exercise of voice restored silence and order in the mob. "Search them," he said, "for arms. We may so judge of their intentions." Upon Dick they found no weapon but his poniard, and this told in his favour, until one man officiously drew it from its sheath, and found it still uncleansed of the blood of Rutter. At this there was a great shout among Sir Daniel's followers, which the tall man suppressed by a gesture and an imperious glance. But when it came to the turn of Lawless, there was found under his gown a sheaf of arrows identical with those that had been shot. "How say ye now?" asked the tall man, frowningly, of Dick. "Sir," replied Dick, "I am here in sanctuary, is it not so? Well, sir, I see by your bearing that ye are high in station, and I read in your countenance the marks of piety and justice. To you, then, I will yield me prisoner, and that blithely, foregoing the advantage of this holy place. But rather than to be yielded into the discretion of that man--whom I do here accuse with a loud voice to be the murderer of my natural father and the unjust detainer of my lands and revenues--rather than that, I would beseech you, under favour, with your own gentle hand, to despatch me on the spot. Your own ears have heard him, how before that I was proven guilty he did threaten me with torments. It standeth not with your own honour to deliver me to my sworn enemy and old oppressor, but to try me fairly by the way of law, and, if that I be guilty indeed, to slay me mercifully." "My lord," cried Sir Daniel, "ye will not hearken to this wolf? His bloody dagger reeks him the lie into his face." "Nay, but suffer me, good knight," returned the tall stranger; "your own vehemence doth somewhat tell against yourself." And here the bride, who had come to herself some minutes past, and looked wildly on upon this scene, broke loose from those that held her, and fell upon her knees before the last speaker. "My Lord of Risingham," she cried, "hear me, in justice. I am here in this man's custody by mere force, reft from mine own people. Since that day I had never pity, countenance, nor comfort from the face of man--but from him only--Richard Shelton--whom they now accuse and labour to undo. My lord, if he was yesternight in Sir Daniel's mansion, it was I that brought him there; he came but at my prayer, and thought to do no hurt. While yet Sir Daniel was a good lord to him he fought with them of the Black Arrow loyally; but when his foul guardian sought his life by practices, and he fled by night, for his soul's sake, out of that bloody house, whither was he to turn--he, helpless and penniless? Or if he be fallen among ill company, whom should ye blame--the lad that was unjustly handled, or the guardian that did abuse his trust?" And then the short young lady fell on her knees by Joanna's side. "And I, my good lord and natural uncle," she added, "I can bear testimony, on my conscience and before the face of all, that what this maiden saith is true. It was I, unworthy, that did lead the young man in." Earl Risingham had heard in silence, and when the voices ceased he still stood silent for a space. Then he gave Joanna his hand to arise, though it was to be observed that he did not offer the like courtesy to her who had called herself his niece. "Sir Daniel," he said, "here is a right intricate affair, the which, with your good leave, it shall be mine to examine and adjust. Content ye, then; your business is in careful hands; justice shall be done you; and in the meanwhile, get ye incontinently home, and have your hurts attended. The air is shrewd, and I would not ye took cold upon these scratches." He made a sign with his hand; it was passed down the nave by obsequious servants, who waited there upon his smallest gesture. Instantly, without the church, a tucket sounded shrill, and through the open portal archers and men-at-arms, uniformly arrayed in the colours and wearing the badge of Lord Risingham, began to file into the church, took Dick and Lawless from those who still detained them, and, closing their files about the prisoners, marched forth again and disappeared. As they were passing Joanna held both her hands to Dick and cried him her farewell; and the bridesmaid, nothing downcast by her uncle's evident displeasure, blew him a kiss, with a "Keep your heart up, lion-driver!" that for the first time since the accident called up a smile to the faces of the crowd. CHAPTER V EARL RISINGHAM Earl Risingham, although by far the most important person then in Shoreby, was poorly lodged in the house of a private gentleman upon the extreme outskirts of the town. Nothing but the armed men at the doors, and the mounted messengers that kept arriving and departing, announced the temporary residence of a great lord. Thus it was that, from lack of space, Dick and Lawless were clapped into the same apartment. "Well spoken, Master Richard," said the outlaw; "it was excellently well spoken, and, for my part, I thank you cordially. Here we are in good hands; we shall be justly tried, and some time this evening decently hanged on the same tree." "Indeed, my poor friend, I do believe it," answered Dick. "Yet have we a string to our bow," returned Lawless. "Ellis Duckworth is a man out of ten thousand; he holdeth you right near his heart, both for your own and for your father's sake; and, knowing you guiltless of this fact, he will stir earth and heaven to bear you clear." "It may not be," said Dick. "What can he do? He hath but a handful. Alack, if it were but to-morrow--could I but keep a certain tryst an hour before noon to-morrow--all were, I think, otherwise. But now there is no help." "Well," concluded Lawless, "an ye will stand to it for my innocence, I will stand to it for yours, and that stoutly. It shall naught avail us; but an I be to hang, it shall not be for lack of swearing." And then, while Dick gave himself over to his reflections, the old rogue curled himself down into a corner, pulled his monkish hood about his face, and composed himself to sleep. Soon he was loudly snoring, so utterly had his long life of hardship and adventure blunted the sense of apprehension. It was long after noon, and the day was already failing, before the door was opened and Dick taken forth and led upstairs to where, in a warm cabinet, Earl Risingham sat musing over the fire. On his captive's entrance he looked up. "Sir," he said, "I knew your father, who was a man of honour, and this inclineth me to be the more lenient; but I may not hide from you that heavy charges lie against your character. Ye do consort with murderers and robbers; upon a clear probation ye have carried war against the king's peace; ye are suspected to have piratically seized upon a ship; ye are found skulking with a counterfeit presentment in your enemy's house; a man is slain that very evening----" "An it like you, my lord," Dick interposed, "I will at once avow my guilt, such as it is. I slew this fellow Rutter; and to the proof"--searching in his bosom--"here is a letter from his wallet." Lord Risingham took the letter, and opened and read it twice. "Ye have read this?" he inquired. "I have read it," answered Dick. "Are you for York or Lancaster?" the earl demanded. "My lord, it was but a little while back that I was asked that question, and knew not how to answer it," said Dick; "but, having answered once, I will not vary. My lord, I am for York." The earl nodded approvingly. "Honestly replied," he said. "But wherefore, then, deliver me this letter?" "Nay, but against traitors, my lord, are not all sides arrayed?" cried Dick. "I would they were, young gentleman," returned the earl; "and I do at least approve your saying. There is more youth than guile in you, I do perceive; and were not Sir Daniel a mighty man upon our side, I were half tempted to espouse your quarrel. For I have inquired, and it appears that you have been hardly dealt with, and have much excuse. But look ye, sir, I am, before all else, a leader in the queen's interest; and though by nature a just man, as I believe, and leaning even to the excess of mercy, yet must I order my goings for my party's interest, and, to keep Sir Daniel, I would go far about." "My lord," returned Dick, "ye will think me very bold to counsel you: but do ye count upon Sir Daniel's faith? Methought he had changed sides intolerably often." "Nay, it is the way of England. What would ye have?" the earl demanded. "But ye are unjust to the knight of Tunstall; and as faith goes, in this unfaithful generation, he hath of late been honourably true to us of Lancaster. Even in our last reverses he stood firm." "An it please you, then," said Dick, "to cast your eye upon this letter, ye might somewhat change your thought of him," and he handed to the earl Sir Daniel's letter to Lord Wensleydale. The effect upon the earl's countenance was instant; he lowered like an angry lion, and his hand, with a sudden movement, clutched at his dagger. "Ye have read this also?" he asked. "Even so," said Dick. "It is your lordship's own estate he offers to Lord Wensleydale." "It is my own estate, even as ye say!" returned the earl. "I am your bedesman for this letter. It hath shown me a fox's hole. Command me, Master Shelton; I will not be backward in gratitude, and to begin with, York or Lancaster, true man or thief, I do now set you at freedom. Go, a-Mary's name! But judge it right that I retain and hang your fellow Lawless. The crime hath been most open, and it were fitting that some open punishment should follow." "My lord, I make it my first suit to you to spare him also," pleaded Dick. "It is an old condemned rogue, thief, and vagabond, Master Shelton," said the earl. "He hath been gallows-ripe this score of years. And, whether for one thing or another, whether to-morrow or the day after, where is the great choice?" "Yet, my lord, it was through love to me that he came hither," answered Dick, "and I were churlish and thankless to desert him." "Master Shelton, ye are troublesome," replied the earl severely. "It is an evil way to prosper in this world. Howbeit, and to be quit of your importunity, I will once more humour you. Go then, together; but go warily, and get swiftly out of Shoreby town. For this Sir Daniel (whom may the saints confound!) thirsteth most greedily to have your blood." "My lord, I do now offer you in words my gratitude, trusting at some brief date to pay you some of it in service," replied Dick, as he turned from the apartment. CHAPTER VI ARBLASTER AGAIN When Dick and Lawless were suffered to steal, by a back way, out of the house where Lord Risingham held his garrison, the evening had already come. They paused in shelter of the garden wall to consult on their best course. The danger was extreme. If one of Sir Daniel's men caught sight of them and raised the view-hallo, they would be run down and butchered instantly. And not only was the town of Shoreby a mere net of peril for their lives, but to make for the open country was to run the risk of the patrols. A little way off, upon some open ground, they spied a windmill standing; and, hard by that, a very large granary with open doors. "How if we lay there until the night fall?" Dick proposed. And Lawless having no better suggestion to offer, they made a straight push for the granary at a run, and concealed themselves behind the door among some straw. The daylight rapidly departed; and presently the moon was silvering the frozen snow. Now or never was their opportunity to gain the "Goat and Bagpipes" unobserved and change their tell-tale garments. Yet even then it was advisable to go round by the outskirts, and not run the gauntlet of the market-place, where, in the concourse of people, they stood the more imminent peril to be recognised and slain. This course was a long one. It took them not far from the house by the beach, now lying dark and silent, and brought them forth at last by the margin of the harbour. Many of the ships, as they could see by the clear moonshine, had weighed anchor, and, profiting by the calm sky, proceeded for more distant parts; answerably to this, the rude alehouses along the beach (although, in defiance of the curfew law, they still shone with fire and candle) were no longer thronged with customers, and no longer echoed to the chorus of sea-songs. Hastily, half-running, with their monkish raiment kilted to the knee, they plunged through the deep snow and threaded the labyrinth of marine lumber; and they were already more than half-way round the harbour when, as they were passing close before an alehouse, the door suddenly opened and let out a gush of light upon their fleeting figures. Instantly they stopped, and made believe to be engaged in earnest conversation. Three men, one after another, came out of the alehouse, and the last closed the door behind him. All three were unsteady upon their feet, as if they had passed the day in deep potations, and they now stood wavering in the moon-light, like men who knew not what they would be after. The tallest of the three was talking in a loud, lamentable voice. "Seven pieces of as good Gascony as ever a tapster broached," he was saying, "the best ship out o' the port o' Dartmouth, a Virgin Mary parcel-gilt, thirteen pounds of good gold money----" "I have bad losses too," interrupted one of the others. "I have had losses of mine own, gossip Arblaster. I was robbed at Martinmas of five shillings and a leather wallet well worth ninepence farthing." Dick's heart smote him at what he heard. Until that moment he had not perhaps thought twice of the poor skipper who had been ruined by the loss of the _Good Hope_; so careless, in those days, were men who wore arms of the goods and interests of their inferiors. But this sudden encounter reminded him sharply of the high-handed manner and ill-ending of his enterprise; and both he and Lawless turned their heads the other way, to avoid the chance of recognition. The ship's dog had, however, made his escape from the wreck and found his way back again to Shoreby. He was now at Arblaster's heels, and, suddenly sniffing and pricking his ears, he darted forward and began to bark furiously at the two sham friars. His master unsteadily followed him. "Hey, shipmates!" he cried. "Have ye ever a penny piece for a poor old shipman, clean destroyed by pirates? I am a man that would have paid for you both o' Thursday morning; and now here I be o' Saturday night, begging for a flagon of ale! Ask my man Tom, if ye misdoubt me. Seven pieces of good Gascon wine, a ship that was mine own, and was my father's before me, a Blessed Mary of plane-tree wood and parcel-gilt, and thirteen pounds in gold and silver. Hey! what say ye? A man that fought the French too; for I have fought the French; I have cut more French throats upon the high seas than ever a man that sails out of Dartmouth. Come, a penny piece." Neither Dick nor Lawless durst answer him a word, lest he should recognise their voices; and they stood there as helpless as a ship ashore, not knowing where to turn nor what to hope. "Are ye dumb, boy?" inquired the skipper.--"Mates," he added, with a hiccup, "they be dumb. I like not this manner of discourtesy; for an a man be dumb, so be as he's courteous, he will still speak when he was spoken to, methinks." By this time the sailor, Tom, who was a man of great personal strength, seemed to have conceived some suspicion of these two speechless figures; and, being soberer than his captain, stepped suddenly before him, took Lawless roughly by the shoulder, and asked him, with an oath, what ailed him that he held his tongue. To this the outlaw, thinking all was over, made answer by a wrestling feint that stretched the sailor on the sand, and, calling upon Dick to follow him, took to his heels among the lumber. The affair passed in a second. Before Dick could run at all, Arblaster had him in his arms; Tom, crawling on his face, had caught him by one foot, and the third man had a drawn cutlass brandishing above his head. It was not so much the danger, it was not so much the annoyance that now bowed down the spirits of young Shelton; it was the profound humiliation to have escaped Sir Daniel, convinced Lord Risingham, and now fall helpless into the hands of this old drunken sailor; and not merely helpless, but, as his conscience loudly told him when it was too late, actually guilty--actually the bankrupt debtor of the man whose ship he had stolen and lost. "Bring me him back into the alehouse, till I see his face," said Arblaster. "Nay, nay," returned Tom; "but let us first unload his wallet, lest the other lads cry share." But though he was searched from head to foot not a penny was found upon him; nothing but Lord Foxham's signet, which they plucked savagely from his finger. "Turn me him to the moon," said the skipper; and taking Dick by the chin, he cruelly jerked his head into the air. "Blessed Virgin!" he cried, "it is the pirate." "Hey!" cried Tom. "By the Virgin of Bordeaux, it is the man himself!" repeated Arblaster.--"What, sea-thief, do I hold you?" he cried. "Where is my ship? Where is my wine? Hey! have I you in my hands?--Tom, give me one end of a cord here; I will so truss me this sea-thief, hand and foot together, like a basting turkey--marry, I will so bind him up--and thereafter I will so beat--so beat him!" And so he ran on, winding the cord meanwhile about Dick's limbs with the dexterity peculiar to seamen, and at every turn and cross securing it with a knot, and tightening the whole fabric with a savage pull. When he had done, the lad was a mere package in his hands--as helpless as the dead. The skipper held him at arm's-length, and laughed aloud. Then he fetched him a stunning buffet on the ear; and then turned him about, and furiously kicked and kicked him. Anger rose up in Dick's bosom like a storm; anger strangled him, and he thought to have died; but when the sailor, tired of this cruel play, dropped him all his length upon the sand and turned to consult with his companions, he instantly regained command of his temper. Here was a momentary respite; ere they began again to torture him, he might have found some method to escape from this degrading and fatal misadventure. Presently, sure enough, and while his captors were still discussing what to do with him, he took heart of grace, and, with a pretty steady voice, addressed them. "My masters," he began, "are ye gone clean foolish? Here hath Heaven put into your hands as pretty an occasion to grow rich as ever shipman had--such as ye might make thirty over-sea adventures and not find again--and, by the mass! what do ye? Beat me?--nay; so would an angry child! But for long-headed tarry-Johns, that fear not fire nor water, and that love gold as they love beef, methinks ye are not wise." "Ay," said Tom, "now y' are trussed ye would cozen us." "Cozen you!" repeated Dick. "Nay, if ye be fools, it would be easy. But if ye be shrewd fellows, as I trow ye are, ye can see plainly where your interest lies. When I took your ship from you, we were many, we were well clad and armed; but now, bethink you a little, who mustered that array? One incontestably that hath made much gold. And if he, being already rich, continueth to hunt after more even in the face of storms--bethink you once more--shall there not be a treasure somewhere hidden?" "What meaneth he?" asked one of the men. "Why, if ye have lost an old skiff and a few jugs of vinegary wine," continued Dick, "forget them, for the trash they are; and do ye rather buckle to an adventure worth the name, that shall, in twelve hours, make or mar you for ever. But take me up from where I lie, and let us go somewhere near at hand and talk across a flagon, for I am sore and frozen, and my mouth is half among the snow." "He seeks but to cozen us," said Tom contemptuously. "Cozen! cozen!" cried the third man. "I would I could see the man that could cozen me! He were a cozener indeed! Nay, I was not born yesterday. I can see a church when it hath a steeple on it; and for my part, gossip Arblaster, methinks there is some sense in this young man. Shall we go hear him, indeed? Say, shall we go hear him?" "I would look gladly on a pottle of strong ale, good Master Pirret," returned Arblaster.--"How say ye, Tom? But then the wallet is empty." "I will pay," said the other--"I will pay. I would fain see this matter out; I do believe, upon my conscience, there is gold in it." "Nay, if ye get again to drinking, all is lost!" cried Tom. "Gossip Arblaster, ye suffer your fellow to have too much liberty," returned Master Pirret. "Would ye be led by a hired man? Fy, fy!" "Peace, fellow!" said Arblaster, addressing Tom. "Will ye put your oar in? Truly a fine pass, when the crew is to correct the skipper!" "Well, then, go your way," said Tom; "I wash my hands of you." "Set him, then, upon his feet," said Master Pirret. "I know a privy place where we may drink and discourse." "If I am to walk, my friends, ye must set my feet at liberty," said Dick, when he had been once more planted upright like a post. "He saith true," laughed Pirret. "Truly, he could not walk accoutred as he is. Give it a slit--out with your knife and slit it, gossip." Even Arblaster paused at this proposal; but as his companion continued to insist, and Dick had the sense to keep the merest wooden indifference of expression, and only shrugged his shoulders over the delay, the skipper consented at last, and cut the cords which tied his prisoner's feet and legs. Not only did this enable Dick to walk; but, the whole network of his bonds being proportionately loosened, he felt the arm behind his back begin to move more freely, and could hope, with time and trouble, to entirely disengage it. So much he owed already to the owlish silliness and greed of Master Pirret. That worthy now assumed the lead, and conducted them to the very same rude alehouse where Lawless had taken Arblaster on the day of the gale. It was now quite deserted; the fire was a pile of red embers, radiating the most ardent heat; and when they had chosen their places, and the landlord had set before them a measure of mulled ale, both Pirret and Arblaster stretched forth their legs and squared their elbows like men bent upon a pleasant hour. The table at which they sat, like all the others in the alehouse, consisted of a heavy, square board, set on a pair of barrels; and each of the four curiously assorted cronies sat at one side of the square, Pirret facing Arblaster, and Dick opposite to the common sailor. "And now, young man," said Pirret, "to your tale. It doth appear, indeed, that ye have somewhat abused our gossip Arblaster; but what then? Make it up to him--show him but this chance to become wealthy--and I will go pledge he will forgive you." So far Dick had spoken pretty much at random; but it was now necessary, under the supervision of six eyes, to invent and tell some marvellous story, and, if it were possible, get back into his hands the all-important signet. To squander time was the first necessity. The longer his stay lasted, the more would his captors drink, and the surer should he be when he attempted his escape. Well, Dick was not much of an inventor, and what he told was pretty much the tale of Ali Baba, with Shoreby and Tunstall Forest substituted for the East, and the treasures of the cavern rather exaggerated than diminished. As the reader is aware, it is an excellent story, and has but one drawback--that it is not true; and so, as these three simple shipmen now heard it for the first time, their eyes stood out of their faces, and their mouths gaped like codfish at a fishmonger's. Pretty soon a second measure of mulled ale was called for; and while Dick was still artfully spinning out the incidents a third followed the second. Here was the position of the parties towards the end: Arblaster, three-parts drunk and one-half asleep, hung helpless on his stool. Even Tom had been much delighted with the tale, and his vigilance had abated in proportion. Meanwhile Dick had gradually wormed his right arm clear of its bonds, and was ready to risk all. "And so," said Pirret, "y' are one of these?" "I was made so," replied Dick, "against my will; but an I could but get a sack or two of gold coin to my share, I should be a fool indeed to continue dwelling in a filthy cave, and standing shot and buffet like a soldier. Here be we four; good! Let us, then, go forth into the forest to-morrow ere the sun be up. Could we come honestly by a donkey, it were better; but an we cannot, we have our four strong backs, and I warrant me we shall come home staggering." Pirret licked his lips. "And this magic," he said--"this password, whereby the cave is opened--how call ye it, friend?" "Nay, none know the word but the three chiefs," returned Dick; "but here is your great good fortune, that, on this very evening, I should be the bearer of a spell to open it. It is a thing not trusted twice a year beyond the captain's wallet." "A spell!" said Arblaster, half awakening, and squinting upon Dick with one eye. "Aroint thee! no spells! I be a good Christian. Ask my man, Tom, else." "Nay, but this is white magic," said Dick. "It doth naught with the devil; only the powers of numbers, herbs, and planets." "Ay, ay," said Pirret; "'tis but white magic, gossip. There is no sin therein, I do assure you. But proceed, good youth. This spell--in what should it consist?" "Nay, that I will incontinently show you," answered Dick. "Have ye there the ring ye took from my finger? Good! Now hold it forth before you by the extreme finger-ends, at the arm's length, and over against the shining of these embers. 'Tis so exactly. Thus, then, is the spell." With a haggard glance, Dick saw the coast was clear between him and the door. He put up an internal prayer. Then, whipping forth his arm, he made but one snatch of the ring, and at the same instant, levering up the table, he sent it bodily over upon the seaman Tom. He, poor soul, went down bawling under the ruins; and before Arblaster understood that anything was wrong, or Pirret could collect his dazzled wits, Dick had run to the door and escaped into the moonlit night. The moon, which now rode in the mid-heavens, and the extreme whiteness of the snow, made the open ground about the harbour bright as day; and young Shelton leaping, with kilted robe, among the lumber, was a conspicuous figure from afar. Tom and Pirret followed him with shouts; from every drinking-shop they were joined by others whom their cries aroused; and presently a whole fleet of sailors was in full pursuit. But Jack ashore was a bad runner, even in the fifteenth century, and Dick, besides, had a start, which he rapidly improved, until, as he drew near the entrance of a narrow lane, he even paused and looked laughingly behind him. Upon the white floor of snow all the shipmen of Shoreby came clustering in an inky mass, and tailing out rearward in isolated clumps. Every man was shouting or screaming; every man was gesticulating with both arms in air; some one was continually falling; and to complete the picture, when one fell, a dozen would fall upon the top of him. The confused mass of sound which they rolled up as high as to the moon was partly comical and partly terrifying to the fugitive whom they were hunting. In itself, it was impotent, for he made sure no seaman in the port could run him down. But the mere volume of noise, in so far as it must awake all the sleepers in Shoreby, and bring all the skulking sentries to the street, did really threaten him with danger in the front. So, spying a dark doorway at a corner, he whipped briskly into it, and let the uncouth hunt go by him, still shouting and gesticulating, and all red with hurry, and white with tumbles in the snow. It was a long while, indeed, before this great invasion of the town by the harbour came to an end, and it was long before silence was restored. For long, lost sailors were still to be heard pounding and shouting through the streets in all directions and in every quarter of the town. Quarrels followed, sometimes among themselves, sometimes with the men of the patrols; knives were drawn, blows given and received, and more than one dead body remained behind upon the snow. When, a full hour later, the last seaman returned grumblingly to the harbour side and his particular tavern, it may fairly be questioned if he had ever known what manner of man he was pursuing, but it was absolutely sure that he had now forgotten. By next morning there were many strange stories flying; and a little while after, the legend of the devil's nocturnal visit was an article of faith with all the lads of Shoreby. But the return of the last seaman did not, even yet, set free young Shelton from his cold imprisonment in the doorway. For some time after, there was a great activity of patrols; and special parties came forth to make the round of the place and report to one or other of the great lords, whose slumbers had been thus unusually broken. The night was already well spent before Dick ventured from his hiding-place, and came, safe and sound, but aching with cold and bruises, to the door of the "Goat and Bagpipes." As the law required, there was neither fire nor candle in the house; but he groped his way into a corner of the icy guest-room, found an end of a blanket, which he hitched around his shoulders, and creeping close to the nearest sleeper, was soon lost in slumber. BOOK V CROOKBACK CHAPTER I THE SHRILL TRUMPET Very early the next morning, before the first peep of the day, Dick arose, changed his garments, armed himself once more like a gentleman, and set forth for Lawless's den in the forest. There, it will be remembered, he had left Lord Foxham's papers; and to get these and be back in time for the tryst with the young Duke of Gloucester could only be managed by an early start, and the most vigorous walking. The frost was more rigorous than ever; the air windless and dry, and stinging to the nostril. The moon had gone down, but the stars were still bright and numerous, and the reflection from the snow was clear and cheerful. There was no need for a lamp to walk by; nor, in that still but ringing air, the least temptation to delay. Dick had crossed the greater part of the open ground between Shoreby and the forest, and had reached the bottom of the little hill, some hundred yards below the Cross of St. Bride, when, through the stillness of the black morn, there rang forth the note of a trumpet, so shrill, clear, and piercing, that he thought he had never heard the match of it for audibility. It was blown once, and then hurriedly a second time; and then the clash of steel succeeded. At this young Shelton pricked his ears, and drawing his sword, ran forward up the hill. Presently he came in sight of the cross, and was aware of a most fierce encounter raging on the road before it. There were seven or eight assailants, and but one to keep head against them; but so active and dexterous was this one, so desperately did he charge and scatter his opponents, so deftly keep his footing on the ice, that already, before Dick could intervene, he had slain one, wounded another, and kept the whole in check. Still, it was by a miracle that he continued his defence, and at any moment, any accident, the least slip of foot or error of hand, his life would be a forfeit. "Hold ye well, sir! Here is help!" cried Richard; and forgetting that he was alone, and that the cry was somewhat irregular, "To the Arrow! to the Arrow!" he shouted, as he fell upon the rear of the assailants. These were stout fellows also, for they gave not an inch at this surprise, but faced about, and fell with astonishing fury upon Dick. Four against one, the steel flashed about him in the starlight; the sparks flew fiercely; one of the men opposed to him fell--in the stir of the fight he hardly knew why; then he himself was struck across the head, and though the steel cap below his hood protected him, the blow beat him down upon one knee, with a brain whirling like a windmill-sail. Meanwhile the man whom he had come to rescue, instead of joining in the conflict, had, on the first sign of intervention, leaped aback and blown again, and yet more urgently and loudly, on that same shrill-voiced trumpet that began the alarm. Next moment, indeed, his foes were on him, and he was once more charging and fleeing, leaping, stabbing, dropping to his knee, and using indifferently sword and dagger, foot and hand, with the same unshaken courage and feverish energy and speed. But that ear-piercing summons had been heard at last. There was a muffled rushing in the snow; and in a good hour for Dick, who saw the sword-points glitter already at his throat, there poured forth out of the wood upon both sides a disorderly torrent of mounted men-at-arms, each cased in iron, and with visor lowered, each bearing his lance in rest, or his sword bared and raised, and each carrying, so to speak, a passenger, in the shape of an archer or page, who leaped one after another from their perches, and had presently doubled the array. The original assailants, seeing themselves outnumbered and surrounded, threw down their arms without a word. "Seize me these fellows!" said the hero of the trumpet; and when his order had been obeyed, he drew near to Dick and looked him in the face. Dick, returning this scrutiny, was surprised to find in one who had displayed such strength, skill, and energy, a lad no older than himself--slightly deformed, with one shoulder higher than the other, and of a pale, painful, and distorted countenance.[2] The eyes, however, were very clear and bold. "Sir," said this lad, "ye came in good time for me, and none too early." "My lord," returned Dick, with a faint sense that he was in the presence of a great personage, "ye are yourself so marvellous a good swordsman that I believe ye had managed them single-handed. Howbeit, it was certainly well for me that your men delayed no longer than they did." "How knew ye who I was?" demanded the stranger. "Even now, my lord," Dick answered, "I am ignorant of whom I speak with." "Is it so?" asked the other. "And yet ye threw yourself head first into this unequal battle." "I saw one man valiantly contending against many," replied Dick, "and I had thought myself dishonoured not to bear him aid." A singular sneer played about the young nobleman's mouth as he made answer: "These are very brave words. But to the more essential--are ye Lancaster or York?" "My lord, I make no secret; I am clear for York," Dick answered. "By the mass!" replied the other, "it is well for you." And so saying, he turned towards one of his followers. "Let me see," he continued, in the same sneering and cruel tones--"let me see a clean end of these brave gentlemen. Truss me them up." There were but five survivors of the attacking party. Archers seized them by the arms; they were hurried to the borders of the wood, and each placed below a tree of suitable dimensions; the rope was adjusted; an archer, carrying the end of it, hastily clambered overhead, and before a minute was over, and without a word passing upon either hand, the five men were swinging by the neck. "And now," cried the deformed leader, "back to your posts, and when I summon you next, be readier to attend." "My lord duke," said one man, "beseech you, tarry not here alone. Keep but a handful of lances at your hand." "Fellow," said the duke, "I have forborne to chide you for your slowness. Cross me not, therefore. I trust my hand and arm, for all that I be crooked. Ye were backward when the trumpet sounded: and ye are now too forward with your counsels. But it is ever so; last with the lance and first with the tongue. Let it be reversed." And with a gesture that was not without a sort of dangerous nobility, he waved them off. The footmen climbed again to their seats behind the men-at-arms, and the whole party moved slowly away and disappeared in twenty different directions, under the cover of the forest. The day was by this time beginning to break, and the stars to fade. The first grey glimmer of dawn shone upon the countenances of the two young men, who now turned once more to face each other. "Here," said the duke, "ye have seen my vengeance, which is, like my blade, both sharp and ready. But I would not have you, for all Christendom, suppose me thankless. You that came to my aid with a good sword and a better courage--unless that ye recoil from my mis-shapeness--come to my heart." And so saying, the young leader held out his arms for an embrace. In the bottom of his heart Dick already entertained a great terror and some hatred for the man whom he had rescued; but the invitation was so worded that it would not have been merely discourteous, but cruel, to refuse or hesitate, and he hastened to comply. "And now, my lord duke," he said, when he had regained his freedom, "do I suppose aright? Are ye my Lord Duke of Gloucester?" "I am Richard of Gloucester," returned the other. "And you--how call they you?" Dick told him his name, and presented Lord Foxham's signet, which the duke immediately recognised. "Ye come too soon," he said; "but why should I complain? Ye are like me, that was here at watch two hours before the day. But this is the first sally of mine arms; upon this adventure, Master Shelton, shall I make or mar the quality of my renown. There lie mine enemies, under two old, skilled captains, Risingham and Brackley, well posted for strength, I do believe, but yet upon two sides without retreat, enclosed betwixt the sea, the harbour, and the river. Methinks, Shelton, here were a great blow to be stricken, an we could strike it silently and suddenly." "I do think so, indeed," cried Dick, warming. "Have ye my Lord Foxham's notes?" inquired the duke. And then Dick, having explained how he was without them for the moment, made himself bold to offer information every jot as good, of his own knowledge. "And for mine own part, my lord duke," he added, "an ye had men enough, I would fall on even at this present. For, look ye, at the peep of day the watches of the night are over; but by day they keep neither watch nor ward--only scour the outskirts with horsemen. Now, then, when the night-watch is already unarmed, and the rest are at their morning cup--now were the time to break them." "How many do ye count?" asked Gloucester. "They number not two thousand," Dick replied. "I have seven hundred in the woods behind us," said the duke; "seven hundred follow from Kettley, and will be here anon; behind these, and farther, are four hundred more; and my Lord Foxham hath five hundred half a day from here, at Holywood. Shall we attend their coming or fall on?" "My lord," said Dick, "when ye hanged these five poor rogues ye did decide the question. Churls although they were, in these uneasy times they will be lacked and looked for, and the alarm be given. Therefore, my lord, if ye do count upon the advantage of a surprise, ye have not, in my poor opinion, one whole hour in front of you." "I do think so indeed," returned Crookback. "Well, before an hour ye shall be in the thick on't, winning spurs. A swift man to Holywood, carrying Lord Foxham's signet; another along the road to speed my laggards! Nay, Shelton, by the rood, it may be done!" Therewith he once more set his trumpet to his lips and blew. This time he was not long kept waiting. In a moment the open space about the cross was filled with horse and foot. Richard of Gloucester took his place upon the steps, and despatched messenger after messenger to hasten the concentration of the seven hundred men that lay hidden in the immediate neighbourhood among the woods; and before a quarter of an hour had passed, all his dispositions being taken, he put himself at their head, and began to move down the hill towards Shoreby. His plan was simple. He was to seize a quarter of the town of Shoreby lying on the right hand of the high-road, and make his position good there in the narrow lanes until his reinforcements followed. If Lord Risingham chose to retreat, Richard would follow upon his rear, and take him between two fires; or, if he preferred to hold the town, he would be shut in a trap, there to be gradually overwhelmed by force of numbers. There was but one danger, but that was imminent and great--Gloucester's seven hundred might be rolled up and cut to pieces in the first encounter, and, to avoid this, it was needful to make the surprise of their arrival as complete as possible. The footmen, therefore, were all once more taken up behind the riders, and Dick had the signal honour meted out to him of mounting behind Gloucester himself. For as far as there was any cover the troops moved slowly, and when they came near the end of the trees that lined the highway, stopped to breathe and reconnoitre. The sun was now well up, shining with a frosty brightness out of a yellow halo, and right over against the luminary, Shoreby, a field of snowy roofs and ruddy gables, was rolling up its columns of morning smoke. Gloucester turned round to Dick. "In that poor place," he said, "where people are cooking breakfast, either you shall gain your spurs and I begin a life of mighty honour and glory in the world's eye, or both of us, as I conceive it, shall fall dead and be unheard of. Two Richards are we. Well then, Richard Shelton, they shall be heard about, these two! Their swords shall not ring more loudly on men's helmets than their names shall ring in people's ears." Dick was astonished at so great a hunger after fame, expressed with so great vehemence of voice and language; and he answered very sensibly and quietly, that, for his part, he promised he would do his duty, and doubted not of victory if every one did the like. By this time the horses were well breathed, and the leader holding up his sword and giving rein, the whole troop of chargers broke into the gallop and thundered, with their double load of fighting men, down the remainder of the hill and across the snow-covered plain that still divided them from Shoreby. FOOTNOTE: [2] Richard Crookback would have been really far younger at this date. CHAPTER II THE BATTLE OF SHOREBY The whole distance to be crossed was not above a quarter of a mile. But they had no sooner debouched beyond the cover of the trees than they were aware of people fleeing and screaming in the snowy meadows upon either hand. Almost at the same moment a great rumour began to arise, and spread and grow continually louder in the town; and they were not yet half-way to the nearest house before the bells began to ring backward from the steeple. The young duke ground his teeth together. By these so early signals of alarm he feared to find his enemies prepared; and if he failed to gain a footing in the town, he knew that his small party would soon be broken and exterminated in the open. In the town, however, the Lancastrians were far from being in so good a posture. It was as Dick had said. The night-guard had already doffed their harness; the rest were still hanging--unlatched, unbraced, all unprepared for battle--about their quarters; and in the whole of Shoreby there were not, perhaps, fifty men full armed, or fifty chargers to be mounted. The beating of the bells, the terrifying summons of men who ran about the streets crying and beating upon the doors, aroused in an incredibly short space at least two score out of that half hundred. These got speedily to horse, and, the alarm still flying wild and contrary, galloped in different directions. Thus it befell that, when Richard of Gloucester reached the first house of Shoreby, he was met in the mouth of the street by a mere handful of lances, whom he swept before his onset as the storm chases the bark. A hundred paces into the town, Dick Shelton touched the duke's arm; the duke, in answer, gathered his reins, put the shrill trumpet to his mouth, and blowing a concerted point, turned to the right hand out of the direct advance. Swerving like a single rider, his whole command turned after him, and, still at the full gallop of the chargers, swept up the narrow by-street. Only the last score of riders drew rein and faced about in the entrance; the footmen, whom they carried behind them, leapt at the same instant to the earth, and began, some to bend their bows, and others to break into and secure the houses upon either hand. Surprised at this sudden change of direction, and daunted by the firm front of the rear-guard, the few Lancastrians, after a momentary consultation, turned and rode farther into town to seek for reinforcements. The quarter of the town upon which, by the advice of Dick, Richard of Gloucester had now seized, consisted of five small streets of poor and ill-inhabited houses, occupying a very gentle eminence, and lying open towards the back. The five streets being each secured by a good guard, the reserve would thus occupy the centre, out of shot, and yet ready to carry aid wherever it was needed. Such was the poorness of the neighbourhood that none of the Lancastrian lords, and but few of their retainers, had been lodged therein; and the inhabitants, with one accord, deserted their houses and fled, squalling, along the streets or over garden walls. In the centre, where the five ways all met, a somewhat ill-favoured alehouse displayed the sign of the "Chequers"; and here the Duke of Gloucester chose his headquarters for the day. To Dick he assigned the guard of one of the five streets. "Go," he said, "win your spurs. Win glory for me; one Richard for another. I tell you, if I rise, ye shall rise by the same ladder. Go," he added, shaking him by the hand. But, as soon as Dick was gone, he turned to a little shabby archer at his elbow. "Go, Dutton, and that right speedily," he added. "Follow that lad. If ye find him faithful, ye answer for his safety, a head for a head. Woe unto you if ye return without him! But if he be faithless--or, for one instant, ye misdoubt him--stab him from behind." In the meantime Dick hastened to secure his post. The street he had to guard was very narrow, and closely lined with houses, which projected and overhung the roadway; but narrow and dark as it was, since it opened upon the market-place of the town, the main issue of the battle would probably fall to be decided on that spot. The market-place was full of townspeople fleeing in disorder; but there was as yet no sign of any foeman ready to attack, and Dick judged he had some time before him to make ready his defence. The two houses at the end stood deserted, with open doors, as the inhabitants had left them in their flight, and from these he had the furniture hastily tossed forth and piled into a barrier in the entry of the lane. A hundred men were placed at his disposal, and of these he threw the more part in the houses, where they might lie in shelter and deliver their arrows from the windows. With the rest, under his own immediate eye, he lined the barricade. Meanwhile the utmost uproar and confusion had continued to prevail throughout the town; and what with the hurried clashing of bells, the sounding of trumpets, the swift movement of bodies of horse, the cries of the commanders, and the shrieks of women, the noise was almost deafening to the ear. Presently, little by little, the tumult began to subside; and soon after, files of men in armour and bodies of archers began to assemble and form in line of battle in the market-place. A large portion of this body were in murrey and blue, and in the mounted knight who ordered their array Dick recognised Sir Daniel Brackley. Then there befell a long pause, which was followed by the almost simultaneous sounding of four trumpets from four different quarters of the town. A fifth rang in answer from the market-place, and at the same moment the files began to move, and a shower of arrows rattled about the barricade, and sounded like blows upon the walls of the two flanking houses. The attack had begun, by a common signal, on all the five issues of the quarter. Gloucester was beleaguered upon every side; and Dick judged, if he would make good his post, he must rely entirely on the hundred men of his command. Seven volleys of arrows followed one upon the other, and in the very thick of the discharges Dick was touched from behind upon the arm, and found a page holding out to him a leathern jack, strengthened with bright plates of mail. "It is from my Lord of Gloucester," said the page. "He hath observed, Sir Richard, that ye went unarmed." Dick, with a glow at his heart at being so addressed, got to his feet and, with the assistance of the page, donned the defensive coat. Even as he did so, two arrows rattled harmlessly upon the plates, and a third struck down the page, mortally wounded, at his feet. Meantime the whole body of the enemy had been steadily drawing nearer across the market-place; and by this time were so close at hand that Dick gave the order to return their shot. Immediately, from behind the barrier and from the windows of the houses, a counterblast of arrows sped, carrying death. But the Lancastrians, as if they had but waited for a signal, shouted loudly in answer; and began to close at a run upon the barrier, the horsemen still hanging back, with visors lowered. Then followed an obstinate and deadly struggle, hand to hand. The assailants, wielding their falchions with one hand, strove with the other to drag down the structure of the barricade. On the other side, the parts were reversed; and the defenders exposed themselves like madmen to protect their rampart. So for some minutes the contest raged almost in silence, friend and foe falling one upon another. But it is always the easier to destroy; and when a single note upon the tucket recalled the attacking party from this desperate service, much of the barricade had been removed piecemeal, and the whole fabric had sunk to half its height, and tottered to a general fall. And now the footmen in the market-place fell back, at a run, on every side. The horsemen, who had been standing in a line two deep, wheeled suddenly, and made their flank into their front; and as swift as a striking adder, the long, steel-clad column was launched upon the ruinous barricade. Of the first two horsemen, one fell, rider and steed, and was ridden down by his companions. The second leaped clean upon the summit of the rampart, transpiercing an archer with his lance. Almost in the same instant he was dragged from the saddle and his horse despatched. And then the full weight and impetus of the charge burst upon and scattered the defenders. The men-at-arms, surmounting their fallen comrades, and carried onward by the fury of their onslaught, dashed through Dick's broken line and poured thundering up the lane beyond, as a stream bestrides and pours across a broken dam. Yet was the fight not over. Still, in the narrow jaws of the entrance, Dick and a few survivors plied their bills like woodmen; and already, across the width of the passage, there had been formed a second, a higher, and a more effectual rampart of fallen men and disembowelled horses, lashing in the agonies of death. Baffled by this fresh obstacle, the remainder of the cavalry fell back; and as, at the sight of this movement, the flight of arrows redoubled from the casements of the houses, their retreat had, for a moment, almost degenerated into flight. Almost at the same time, those who had crossed the barricade and charged farther up the street, being met before the door of the "Chequers" by the formidable hunchback and the whole reserve of the Yorkists, began to come scattering backward, in the excess of disarray and terror. Dick and his fellows faced about, fresh men poured out of the houses; a cruel blast of arrows met the fugitives full in the face, while Gloucester was already riding down their rear; in the inside of a minute and a half there was no living Lancastrian in the street. Then, and not till then, did Dick hold up his reeking blade and give the word to cheer. Meanwhile Gloucester dismounted from his horse and came forward to inspect the post. His face was as pale as linen; but his eyes shone in his head like some strange jewel, and his voice, when he spoke, was hoarse and broken with the exultation of battle and success. He looked at the rampart, which neither friend nor foe could now approach without precaution, so fiercely did the horses struggle in the throes of death, and at the sight of that great carnage he smiled upon one side. "Despatch these horses," he said; "they keep you from your vantage.--Richard Shelton," he added, "ye have pleased me. Kneel." The Lancastrians had already resumed their archery, and the shafts fell thick in the mouth of the street; but the duke, minding them not at all, deliberately drew his sword and dubbed Richard a knight upon the spot. "And now, Sir Richard," he continued, "if that ye see Lord Risingham send me an express upon the instant. Were it your last man, let me hear of it incontinently. I had rather venture the post than lose my stroke at him. For mark me, all of ye," he added, raising his voice, "if Earl Risingham fall by another hand than mine, I shall count this victory a defeat." "My lord duke," said one of his attendants, "is your grace not weary of exposing his dear life unneedfully? Why tarry we here?" "Catesby," returned the duke, "here is the battle, not elsewhere. The rest are but feigned onslaughts. Here must we vanquish. And for the exposure--if ye were an ugly hunchback, and the children gecked at you upon the street, ye would count your body cheaper, and an hour of glory worth a life. Howbeit, if ye will, let us ride on and visit the other posts. Sir Richard here, my namesake, he shall still hold this entry, where he wadeth to the ankles in hot blood. Him can we trust. But mark it, Sir Richard, ye are not yet done. The worst is yet to ward. Sleep not." He came right up to young Shelton, looking him hard in the eyes, and taking his hand in both of his, gave it so extreme a squeeze that the blood had nearly spurted. Dick quailed before his eyes. The insane excitement, the courage, and the cruelty that he read therein, filled him with dismay about the future. This young duke's was indeed a gallant spirit, to ride foremost in the ranks of war; but, after the battle, in the days of peace and in the circle of his trusted friends, that mind, it was to be dreaded, would continue to bring forth the fruits of death. CHAPTER III THE BATTLE OF SHOREBY (_concluded_) Dick, once more left to his own counsels, began to look about him. The arrow-shot had somewhat slackened. On all sides the enemy were falling back; and the greater part of the market-place was now left empty, the snow here trampled into orange mud, there splashed with gore, scattered all over with dead men and horses, and bristling thick with feathered arrows. On his own side the loss had been cruel. The jaws of the little street and the ruins of the barricade were heaped with the dead and dying; and out of the hundred men with whom he had begun the battle, there were not seventy left who could still stand to arms. At the same time the day was passing. The first reinforcements might be looked for to arrive at any moment; and the Lancastrians, already shaken by the result of their desperate but unsuccessful onslaught, were in an ill temper to support a fresh invader. There was a dial in the wall of one of the two flanking houses; and this, in the frosty, winter sunshine, indicated ten of the forenoon. Dick turned to the man who was at his elbow, a little insignificant archer, binding a cut in his arm. "It was well fought," he said, "and, by my sooth, they will not charge us twice." "Sir," said the little archer, "ye have fought right well for York, and better for yourself. Never hath man in so brief space prevailed so greatly on the duke's affections. That he should have entrusted such a post to one he knew not is a marvel. But look to your head, Sir Richard! If ye be vanquished--ay, if ye give way one foot's-breadth--axe or cord shall punish it; and I am set, if ye do aught doubtful, I will tell you honestly, here to stab you from behind." Dick looked at the little man in amaze. "You!" he cried. "And from behind!" "It is right so," returned the archer; "and because I like not the affair I tell it you. Ye must make the post good, Sir Richard, at your peril. O, our Crookback is a bold blade and a good warrior; but whether in cold blood or in hot, he will have all things done exact to his commandment. If any fail or hinder, they shall die the death." "Now, by the saints!" cried Richard, "is this so? And will men follow such a leader?" "Nay, they follow him gleefully," replied the other; "for if he be exact to punish, he is most open-handed to reward. And if he spare not the blood and sweat of others, he is ever liberal of his own, still in the first front of battle, still the last to sleep. He will go far, will Crookback Dick o' Gloucester!" The young knight, if he had before been brave and vigilant, was now all the more inclined to watchfulness and courage. His sudden favour, he began to perceive, had brought perils in its train. And he turned from the archer, and once more scanned anxiously the market-place. It lay empty as before. "I like not this quietude," he said. "Doubtless they prepare us some surprise." And, as if in answer to his remark, the archers began once more to advance against the barricade, and the arrows to fall thick. But there was something hesitating in the attack. They came not on roundly, but seemed rather to await a further signal. Dick looked uneasily about him, spying for a hidden danger. And sure enough, about half-way up the little street, a door was suddenly opened from within, and the house continued, for some seconds, and both by door and window, to disgorge a torrent of Lancastrian archers. These, as they leaped down, hurriedly stood to their ranks, bent their bows, and proceeded to pour upon Dick's rear a flight of arrows. At the same time, the assailants in the market-place redoubled their shot, and began to close in stoutly upon the barricade. Dick called down his whole command out of the houses, and facing them both ways, and encouraging their valour both by word and gesture, returned as best he could the double shower of shafts that fell about his post. Meanwhile house after house was opened in the street, and the Lancastrians continued to pour out of the doors and leap down from the windows, shouting victory, until the number of enemies upon Dick's rear was almost equal to the number in his face. It was plain that he could hold the post no longer; what was worse, even if he could have held it, it had now become useless; and the whole Yorkist army lay in a posture of helplessness upon the brink of a complete disaster. The men behind him formed the vital flaw in the general defence; and it was upon these that Dick turned, charging at the head of his men. So vigorous was the attack that the Lancastrian archers gave ground and staggered, and, at last, breaking their ranks, began to crowd back into the houses from which they had so recently and so vaingloriously sallied. Meanwhile the men from the market-place had swarmed across the undefended barricade, and fell on hotly upon the other side; and Dick must once again face about, and proceed to drive them back. Once again the spirit of his men prevailed; they cleared the street in a triumphant style, but even as they did so the others issued again out of the houses, and took them, a third time, upon the rear. The Yorkists began to be scattered; several times Dick found himself alone among his foes and plying his bright sword for life; several times he was conscious of a hurt. And meanwhile the fight swayed to and fro in the street without determinate result. Suddenly Dick was aware of a great trumpeting about the outskirts of the town. The war-cry of York began to be rolled up to heaven, as by many and triumphant voices. And at the same time the men in front of him began to give ground rapidly, streaming out of the street and back upon the market-place. Some one gave the word to fly. Trumpets were blown distractedly, some for a rally, some to charge. It was plain that a great blow had been struck, and the Lancastrians were thrown, at least for the moment, into full disorder, and some degree of panic. And then, like a theatre trick, there followed the last act of Shoreby Battle. The men in front of Richard turned tail, like a dog that has been whistled home, and fled like the wind. At the same moment there came through the market-place a storm of horsemen, fleeing and pursuing, the Lancastrians turning back to strike with the sword, the Yorkists riding them down at the point of the lance. Conspicuous in the mellay, Dick beheld the Crookback. He was already giving a foretaste of that furious valour and skill to cut his way across the ranks of war, which, years afterwards, upon the field of Bosworth, and when he was stained with crimes, almost sufficed to change the fortunes of the day and the destiny of the English throne. Evading, striking, riding down, he so forced and so manoeuvred his strong horse, so aptly defended himself, and so liberally scattered death to his opponents, that he was now far ahead of the foremost of his knights, hewing his way, with the truncheon of a bloody sword, to where Lord Risingham was rallying the bravest. A moment more and they had met; the tall, splendid, and famous warrior against the deformed and sickly boy. Yet Shelton had never a doubt of the result; and when the fight next opened for a moment, the figure of the earl had disappeared; but still, in the first of the danger, Crookback Dick was launching his big horse and plying the truncheon of his sword. Thus, by Shelton's courage in holding the mouth of the street against the first attack, and by the opportune arrival of his seven hundred reinforcements, the lad, who was afterwards to be handed down to the execration of posterity under the name of Richard III., had won his first considerable fight. CHAPTER IV THE SACK OF SHOREBY There was not a foe left within striking distance; and Dick, as he looked ruefully about him on the remainder of his gallant force, began to count the cost of victory. He was himself, now that the danger was ended, so stiff and sore, so bruised and cut and broken, and, above all, so utterly exhausted by his desperate and unremitting labours in the fight, that he seemed incapable of any fresh exertion. But this was not yet the hour for repose. Shoreby had been taken by assault; and though an open town, and not in any manner to be charged with the resistance, it was plain that these rough fighters would be not less rough now that the fight was over, and that the more horrid part of war would fall to be enacted. Richard of Gloucester was not the captain to protect the citizens from his infuriated soldiery; and, even if he had the will, it might be questioned if he had the power. It was, therefore, Dick's business to find and to protect Joanna; and with that end he looked about him at the faces of his men. The three or four who seemed likeliest to be obedient and to keep sober he drew aside; and promising them a rich reward and a special recommendation to the duke, led them across the market-place, now empty of horsemen, and into the streets upon the farther side. Every here and there small combats of from two to a dozen still raged upon the open street; here and there a house was being besieged, the defenders throwing out stools and tables on the heads of the assailants. The snow was strewn with arms and corpses; but except for these partial combats the streets were deserted, and the houses, some standing open, and some shuttered and barricaded, had for the most part ceased to give out smoke. Dick, threading the skirts of these skirmishers, led his followers briskly in the direction of the abbey church; but when he came the length of the main street a cry of horror broke from his lips. Sir Daniel's great house had been carried by assault. The gates hung in splinters from the hinges, and a double throng kept pouring in and out through the entrance, seeking and carrying booty. Meanwhile, in the upper stories, some resistance was still being offered to the pillagers; for just as Dick came within eye-shot of the building, a casement was burst open from within, and a poor wretch in murrey and blue, screaming and resisting, was forced through the embrasure and tossed into the street below. The most sickening apprehension fell upon Dick. He ran forward like one possessed, forced his way into the house among the foremost, and mounted without pause to the chamber on the third floor where he had last parted from Joanna. It was a mere wreck; the furniture had been overthrown, the cupboards broken open, and in one place a trailing corner of the arras lay smouldering on the embers of the fire. Dick, almost without thinking, trod out the incipient conflagration, and then stood bewildered. Sir Daniel, Sir Oliver, Joanna, all were gone; but whether butchered in the rout or safe escaped from Shoreby, who should say? He caught a passing archer by the tabard. "Fellow," he asked, "were ye here when this house was taken?" "Let be," said the archer. "A murrain! let be, or I strike." "Hark ye," returned Richard, "two can play at that. Stand and be plain." But the man, flushed with drink and battle, struck Dick upon the shoulder with one hand, while with the other he twitched away his garment. Thereupon the full wrath of the young leader burst from his control. He seized the fellow in his strong embrace, and crushed him on the plates of his mailed bosom like a child; then, holding him at arm's-length, he bid him speak as he valued life. "I pray you mercy!" gasped the archer. "An I had thought ye were so angry I would 'a' been charier of crossing you. I was here indeed." "Know ye Sir Daniel?" pursued Dick. "Well do I know him," returned the man. "Was he in the mansion?" "Ay, sir, he was," answered the archer; "but even as we entered by the yard gate he rode forth by the garden." "Alone?" cried Dick. "He may 'a' had a score of lances with him," said the man. "Lances! No women, then?" asked Shelton. "Troth, I saw not," said the archer. "But there were none in the house, if that be your quest." "I thank you," said Dick. "Here is a piece for your pains." But groping in his wallet, Dick found nothing. "Inquire for me to-morrow," he added--"Richard Shel----Sir Richard Shelton," he corrected, "and I will see you handsomely rewarded." And then an idea struck Dick. He hastily descended to the courtyard, ran with all his might across the garden, and came to the great door of the church. It stood wide open; within, every corner of the pavement was crowded with fugitive burghers, surrounded by their families, and laden with the most precious of their possessions, while, at the high altar, priests in full canonicals were imploring the mercy of God. Even as Dick entered, the loud chorus began to thunder in the vaulted roofs. He hurried through the groups of refugees, and came to the door of the stair that led into the steeple. And here a tall churchman stepped before him and arrested his advance. "Whither, my son?" he asked severely. "My father," answered Dick, "I am here upon an errand of expedition. Stay me not. I command here for my Lord of Gloucester." "For my Lord of Gloucester?" repeated the priest. "Hath, then, the battle gone so sore?" "The battle, father, is at an end, Lancaster clean sped, my Lord of Risingham--Heaven rest him!--left upon the field. And now, with your good leave, I follow mine affairs." And thrusting on one side the priest, who seemed stupefied at the news, Dick pushed open the door and rattled up the stairs four at a bound, and without pause or stumble, till he stepped upon the open platform at the top. Shoreby Church tower not only commanded the town, as in a map, but looked far, on both sides, over sea and land. It was now near upon noon; the day exceeding bright, the snow dazzling. And as Dick looked around him he could measure the consequences of the battle. A confused, growling uproar reached him from the streets, and now and then, but very rarely, the clash of steel. Not a ship, not so much as a skiff, remained in harbour; but the sea was dotted with sails and row-boats laden with fugitives. On shore, too, the surface of the snowy meadows was broken up with bands of horsemen, some cutting their way towards the borders of the forest, others, who were doubtless of the Yorkist side, stoutly interposing and beating them back upon the town. Over all the open ground there lay a prodigious quantity of fallen men and horses, clearly defined upon the snow. To complete the picture, those of the foot-soldiers as had not found place upon a ship still kept up an archery combat on the borders of the port, and from the cover of the shoreside taverns. In that quarter, also, one or two houses had been fired, and the smoke towered high in the frosty sunlight, and blew off to sea in voluminous folds. Already close upon the margin of the woods, and somewhat in the line of Holywood, one particular clump of fleeing horsemen riveted the attention of the young watcher on the tower. It was fairly numerous; in no other quarter of the field did so many Lancastrians still hold together; thus they had left a wide, discoloured wake upon the snow, and Dick was able to trace them step by step from where they had left the town. While Dick stood watching them, they had gained, unopposed, the first fringe of the leafless forest, and, turning a little from their direction, the sun fell for a moment full on their array, as it was relieved against the dusky wood. "Murrey and blue!" cried Dick. "I swear it--murrey and blue!" The next moment he was descending the stairway. It was now his business to seek out the Duke of Gloucester, who alone, in the disorder of the forces, might be able to supply him with a sufficiency of men. The fighting in the main town was now practically at an end; and as Dick ran hither and thither, seeking the commander, the streets were thick with wandering soldiers, some laden with more booty than they could well stagger under, others shouting drunk. None of them, when questioned, had the least notion of the duke's whereabouts; and, at last, it was by sheer good fortune that Dick found him, where he sat in the saddle, directing operations to dislodge the archers from the harbour side. "Sir Richard Shelton, ye are well found," he said. "I owe you one thing that I value little, my life; and one that I can never pay you for, this victory.--Catesby, if I had ten such captains as Sir Richard, I would march forthright on London.--But now, sir, claim your reward." "Freely, my lord," said Dick, "freely and loudly. One hath escaped to whom I owe some grudges, and taken with him one whom I owe love and service. Give me, then, fifty lances, that I may pursue; and for any obligation that your graciousness is pleased to allow, it shall be clean discharged." "How call ye him?" inquired the duke. "Sir Daniel Brackley," answered Richard. "Out upon him, double-face!" cried Gloucester. "Here is no reward, Sir Richard; here is fresh service offered, and, if that ye bring his head to me, a fresh debt upon my conscience.--Catesby, get him these lances; and you, sir, bethink ye, in the meanwhile, what pleasure, honour, or profit it shall be mine to give you." Just then the Yorkist skirmishers carried one of the shoreside taverns, swarming in upon it on three sides, and driving out or taking its defenders. Crookback Dick was pleased to cheer the exploit, and, pushing his horse a little nearer, called to see the prisoners. There were four or five of them--two men of my Lord Shoreby's and one of Lord Risingham's among the number, and last, but in Dick's eyes not least, a tall, shambling, grizzled old shipman, between drunk and sober, and with a dog whimpering and jumping at his heels. The young duke passed them for a moment under a severe review. "Good," he said. "Hang them." And he turned the other way to watch the progress of the fight. "My lord," said Dick, "so please you, I have found my reward. Grant me the life and liberty of yon old shipman." Gloucester turned and looked the speaker in the face. "Sir Richard," he said, "I make not war with peacock's feathers, but steel shafts. Those that are mine enemies I slay, and that without excuse or favour. For, bethink ye, in this realm of England, that is so torn in pieces, there is not a man of mine but hath a brother or a friend upon the other party. If, then, I did begin to grant these pardons, I might sheathe my sword." "It may be so, my lord; and yet I will be overbold, and, at the risk of your disfavour, recall your lordship's promise," replied Dick. Richard of Gloucester flushed. "Mark it right well," he said harshly. "I love not mercy, nor yet mercymongers. Ye have this day laid the foundations of high fortune. If ye oppose to me my word, which I have plighted, I will yield. But, by the glory of heaven, there your favour dies!" "Mine is the loss," said Dick. "Give him his sailor," said the duke; and wheeling his horse, he turned his back upon young Shelton. Dick was nor glad nor sorry. He had seen too much of the young duke to set great store on his affection; and the origin and growth of his own favour had been too flimsy and too rapid to inspire much confidence. One thing alone he feared--that the vindictive leader might revoke the offer of the lances. But here he did justice neither to Gloucester's honour (such as it was) nor, above all, to his decision. If he had once judged Dick to be the right man to pursue Sir Daniel, he was not one to change; and he soon proved it by shouting after Catesby to be speedy, for the paladin was waiting. In the meanwhile Dick turned to the old shipman, who had seemed equally indifferent to his condemnation and to his subsequent release. "Arblaster," said Dick, "I have done you ill; but now, by the rood, I think I have cleared the score." But the old skipper only looked upon him dully and held his peace. "Come," continued Dick, "a life is a life, old shrew, and it is more than ships or liquor. Say ye forgive me; for if your life is worth nothing to you, it hath cost me the beginnings of my fortune. Come, I have paid for it dearly; be not so churlish." "An I had had my ship," said Arblaster, "I would 'a' been forth and safe on the high seas--I and my man Tom. But ye took my ship, gossip, and I'm a beggar; and for my man Tom, a knave fellow in russet shot him down. 'Murrain!' quoth he, and spake never again. 'Murrain' was the last of his words, and the poor spirit of him passed. 'A will never sail no more will my Tom." Dick was seized with unavailing penitence and pity; he sought to take the skipper's hand, but Arblaster avoided his touch. "Nay," said he, "let be. Y' have played the devil with me, and let that content you." The words died in Richard's throat. He saw, through tears, the poor old man, bemused with liquor and sorrow, go shambling away, with bowed head, across the snow, and the unnoticed dog whimpering at his heels; and for the first time began to understand the desperate game that we play in life, and how a thing once done is not to be changed or remedied by any penitence. But there was no time left to him for vain regret. Catesby had now collected the horsemen, and riding up to Dick he dismounted, and offered him his own horse. "This morning," he said, "I was somewhat jealous of your favour; it hath not been of a long growth; and now, Sir Richard, it is with a very good heart that I offer you this horse--to ride away with." "Suffer me yet a moment," replied Dick. "This favour of mine--whereupon was it founded?" "Upon your name," answered Catesby. "It is my lord's chief superstition. Were my name Richard I should be an earl to-morrow." "Well, sir, I thank you," returned Dick; "and, since I am little likely to follow these great fortunes, I will even say farewell. I will not pretend I was displeased to think myself upon the road to fortune; but I will not pretend, neither, that I am over-sorry to be done with it. Command and riches, they are brave things, to be sure; but a word in your ear--yon duke of yours, he is a fearsome lad." Catesby laughed. "Nay," said he, "of a verity he that rides with Crooked Dick will ride deep. Well, God keep us all from evil! Speed ye well." Thereupon Dick put himself at the head of his men, and giving the word of command, rode off. He made straight across the town, following what he supposed to be the route of Sir Daniel, and spying around for any signs that might decide if he were right. The streets were strewn with the dead and the wounded, whose fate, in the bitter frost, was far the more pitiable. Gangs of the victors went from house to house, pillaging and stabbing, and sometimes singing together as they went. From different quarters, as he rode on, the sounds of violence and outrage came to young Shelton's ears; now the blows of the sledge-hammer on some barricaded door, and now the miserable shrieks of women. Dick's heart had just been awakened. He had just seen the cruel consequences of his own behaviour; and the thought of the sum of misery that was now acting in the whole of Shoreby filled him with despair. At length he reached the outskirts, and there, sure enough, he saw straight before him the same broad, beaten track across the snow that he had marked from the summit of the church. Here, then, he went the faster on; but still, as he rode, he kept a bright eye upon the fallen men and horses that lay beside the track. Many of these, he was relieved to see, wore Sir Daniel's colours, and the faces of some, who lay upon their back, he even recognised. About half-way between the town and the forest, those whom he was following had plainly been assailed by archers; for the corpses lay pretty closely scattered, each pierced by an arrow. And here Dick spied among the rest the body of a very young lad, whose face was somehow hauntingly familiar to him. He halted his troop, dismounted, and raised the lad's head. As he did so, the hood fell back, and a profusion of long brown hair unrolled itself. At the same time the eyes opened. "Ah! lion-driver!" said a feeble voice. "She is farther on. Ride--ride fast!" And then the poor young lady fainted once again. One of Dick's men carried a flask of some strong cordial, and with this Dick succeeded in reviving consciousness. Then he took Joanna's friend upon his saddle-bow, and once more pushed toward the forest. "Why do ye take me?" said the girl. "Ye but delay your speed." "Nay, Mistress Risingham," replied Dick. "Shoreby is full of blood and drunkenness and riot. Here ye are safe; content ye." "I will not be beholden to any of your faction," she cried; "set me down." "Madam, ye know not what ye say," returned Dick. "Y' are hurt----" "I am not," she said. "It was my horse was slain." "It matters not one jot," replied Richard. "Ye are here in the midst of open snow, and compassed about with enemies. Whether ye will or not, I carry you with me. Glad am I to have the occasion; for thus shall I repay some portion of our debt." For a little while she was silent. Then, very suddenly, she asked: "My uncle?" "My Lord Risingham?" returned Dick. "I would I had good news to give you, madam, but I have none. I saw him once in the battle, and once only. Let us hope the best." CHAPTER V NIGHT IN THE WOODS: ALICIA RISINGHAM It was almost certain that Sir Daniel had made for the Moat House; but, considering the heavy snow, the lateness of the hour, and the necessity under which he would lie of avoiding the few roads and striking across the wood, it was equally certain that he could not hope to reach it ere the morrow. There were two courses open to Dick: either to continue to follow in the knight's trail, and, if he were able, to fall upon him that very night in camp, or to strike out a path of his own, and seek to place himself between Sir Daniel and his destination. Either scheme was open to serious objection, and Dick, who feared to expose Joanna to the hazards of a fight, had not yet decided between them when he reached the borders of the wood. At this point Sir Daniel had turned a little to his left, and then plunged straight under a grove of very lofty timber. His party had then formed to a narrower front, in order to pass between the trees, and the track was trod proportionately deeper in the snow. The eye followed it, under the leafless tracery of the oaks, running direct and narrow; the trees stood over it, with knotty joints and the great, uplifted forest of their boughs; there was no sound, whether of man or beast--not so much as the stirring of a robin; and over the field of snow the winter sun lay golden among netted shadows. "How say ye," asked Dick of one of the men, "to follow straight on, or strike across for Tunstall?" "Sir Richard," replied the man-at-arms, "I would follow the line until they scatter." "Ye are doubtless right," returned Dick; "but we came right hastily upon the errand, even as the time commanded. Here are no houses, neither for food nor shelter, and by the morrow's dawn we shall know both cold fingers and an empty belly. How say ye, lads? Will ye stand a pinch for expedition's sake, or shall we turn by Holywood and sup with Mother Church? The case being somewhat doubtful, I will drive no man; yet if ye would suffer me to lead you, ye would choose the first." The men answered, almost with one voice, that they would follow Sir Richard where he would. And Dick, setting spur to his horse, began once more to go forward. The snow in the trail had been trodden very hard, and the pursuers had thus a great advantage over the pursued. They pushed on, indeed, at a round trot, two hundred hoofs beating alternately on the dull pavement of the snow, and the jingle of weapons and the snorting of horses raising a warlike noise along the arches of the silent wood. Presently the wide slot of the pursued came out upon the high-road from Holywood; it was there, for a moment, indistinguishable; and, where it once more plunged into the unbeaten snow upon the farther side, Dick was surprised to see it narrower and lighter trod. Plainly, profiting by the road, Sir Daniel had begun already to scatter his command. At all hazards, one chance being equal to another, Dick continued to pursue the straight trail; and that, after an hour's riding, in which it led into the very depth of the forest, suddenly split, like a bursting shell, into two dozen others, leading to every point of the compass. Dick drew bridle in despair. The short winter's day was near an end; the sun, dull red orange, shorn of rays, swam low among the leafless thickets; the shadows were a mile long upon the snow; the frost bit cruelly at the fingernails; and the breath and steam of the horses mounted in a cloud. "Well, we are outwitted," Dick confessed. "Strike we for Holywood, after all. It is still nearer us than Tunstall--or should be by the station of the sun." So they wheeled to their left, turning their backs on the red shield of sun, and made across country for the abbey. But now times were changed with them; they could no longer spank forth briskly on a path beaten firm by the passage of their foes, and for a goal to which that path itself conducted them. Now they must plough at a dull pace through the encumbering snow, continually pausing to decide their course, continually floundering in drifts. The sun soon left them; the glow of the west decayed; and presently they were wandering in a shadow of blackness, under frosty stars. Presently, indeed, the moon would clear the hill-tops, and they might resume their march. But till then, every random step might carry them wider of their march. There was nothing for it but to camp and wait. Sentries were posted; a spot of ground was cleared of snow, and after some failures a good fire blazed in the midst. The men-at-arms sat close about this forest hearth, sharing such provisions as they had, and passing about the flask; and Dick, having collected the most delicate of the rough and scanty fare, brought it to Lord Risingham's niece, where she sat apart from the soldiery against a tree. She sat upon one horse-cloth, wrapped in another, and stared straight before her at the fire-lit scene. At the offer of food she started, like one awakened from a dream, and then silently refused. "Madam," said Dick, "let me beseech you, punish me not so cruelly. Wherein I have offended you, I know not; I have, indeed, carried you away, but with a friendly violence; I have, indeed, exposed you to the inclemency of night, but the hurry that lies upon me hath for its end the preservation of another, who is no less frail and no less unfriended than yourself. At least, madam, punish not yourself; and eat, if not for hunger, then for strength." "I will eat nothing at the hands that slew my kinsman," she replied. "Dear madam," Dick cried, "I swear to you, upon the rood, I touched him not." "Swear to me that he still lives," she returned. "I will not palter with you," answered Dick. "Pity bids me to wound you. In my heart I do believe him dead." "And ye ask me to eat!" she cried. "Ay, and they call you 'sir'! Y' have won your spurs by my good kinsman's murder. And had I not been fool and traitor both, and saved you in your enemy's house, ye should have died the death, and he--he that was worth twelve of you--were living." "I did but my man's best, even as your kinsman did upon the other party," answered Dick. "Were he still living--as I vow to Heaven I wish it!--he would praise, not blame me." "Sir Daniel hath told me," she replied. "He marked you at the barricade. Upon you, he saith, their party foundered; it was you that won the battle. Well, then, it was you that killed my good Lord Risingham, as sure as though ye had strangled him. And ye would have me eat with you--and your hands not washed from killing? But Sir Daniel hath sworn your downfall. He 'tis that will avenge me!" The unfortunate Dick was plunged in gloom. Old Arblaster returned upon his mind, and he groaned aloud. "Do ye hold me so guilty?" he said; "you that defended me--you that are Joanna's friend?" "What made ye in the battle?" she retorted. "Y' are of no party; y' are but a lad--but legs and body, without government of wit or counsel! Wherefore did ye fight? For the love of hurt, pardy!" "Nay," cried Dick, "I know not. But as the realm of England goes, if that a poor gentleman fight not upon the one side, perforce he must fight upon the other. He may not stand alone; 'tis not in nature." "They that have no judgment should not draw the sword," replied the young lady. "Ye that fight but for a hazard, what are ye but a butcher? War is but noble by the cause, and y' have disgraced it." "Madam," said the miserable Dick, "I do partly see mine error. I have made too much haste; I have been busy before my time. Already I stole a ship--thinking, I do swear it, to do well--and thereby brought about the death of many innocent, and the grief and ruin of a poor old man whose face this very day hath stabbed me like a dagger. And for this morning, I did but design to do myself credit, and get fame to marry with, and, behold! I have brought about the death of your dear kinsman that was good to me. And what besides, I know not. For, alas! I may have set York upon the throne, and that may be the worser cause, and may do hurt to England. O, madam, I do see my sin. I am unfit for life. I will, for penance' sake, and to avoid worse evil, once I have finished this adventure, get me to a cloister. I will forswear Joanna and the trade of arms. I will be a friar, and pray for your good kinsman's spirit all my days." It appeared to Dick, in this extremity of his humiliation and repentance, that the young lady had laughed. Raising his countenance, he found her looking down upon him, in the fire-light, with a somewhat peculiar but not unkind expression. "Madam," he cried, thinking the laughter to have been an illusion of his hearing, but still, from her changed looks, hoping to have touched her heart--"madam, will not this content you? I give up all to undo what I have done amiss; I make heaven certain for Lord Risingham. And all this upon the very day that I have won my spurs, and thought myself the happiest young gentleman on ground." "O boy," she said--"good boy!" And then, to the extreme surprise of Dick, she first very tenderly wiped the tears away from his cheeks, and then, as if yielding to a sudden impulse, threw both her arms about his neck, drew up his face, and kissed him. A pitiful bewilderment came over simple-minded Dick. "But come," she said, with great cheerfulness, "you that are a captain, ye must eat. Why sup ye not?" "Dear Mistress Risingham," replied Dick, "I did but wait first upon my prisoner; but, to say truth, penitence will no longer suffer me to endure the sight of food. I were better to fast, dear lady, and to pray." "Call me Alicia," she said; "are we not old friends? And now, come, I will eat with you, bit for bit and sup for sup; so if ye eat not, neither will I; but if ye eat hearty, I will dine like a ploughman." So there and then she fell to; and Dick, who had an excellent stomach, proceeded to bear her company, at first with great reluctance, but gradually, as he entered into the spirit, with more and more vigour and devotion; until, at last, he forgot even to watch his model, and most heartily repaired the expenses of his day of labour and excitement. "Lion-driver," she said at length, "ye do not admire a maid in a man's jerkin?" The moon was now up; and they were only waiting to repose the wearied horses. By the moon's light, the still penitent but now well-fed Richard beheld her looking somewhat coquettishly down upon him. "Madam----" he stammered, surprised at this new turn in her manners. "Nay," she interrupted, "it skills not to deny; Joanna hath told me;--but come, Sir Lion-driver, look at me--am I so homely--come!" And she made bright eyes at him. "Ye are something smallish, indeed----" began Dick. And here again she interrupted him, this time with a ringing peal of laughter that completed his confusion and surprise. "Smallish!" she cried. "Nay, now be honest as ye are bold; I am a dwarf, or little better; but for all that--come, tell me!--for all that, passably fair to look upon; is't not so?" "Nay, madam, exceedingly fair," said the distressed knight, pitifully trying to seem easy. "And a man would be right glad to wed me?" she pursued. "O, madam, right glad!" agreed Dick. "Call me Alicia," said she. "Alicia," quoth Sir Richard. "Well, then, lion-driver," she continued, "sith that ye slew my kinsman, and left me without stay, ye owe me, in honour, every reparation; do ye not?" "I do, madam," said Dick. "Although, upon my heart, I do hold me but partially guilty of that brave knight's blood." "Would ye evade me?" she cried. "Madam, not so. I have told you; at your bidding, I will even turn me a monk," said Richard. "Then, in honour, ye belong to me?" she concluded. "In honour, madam, I suppose----" began the young man. "Go to!" she interrupted; "ye are too full of catches. In honour do ye belong to me, till ye have paid the evil?" "In honour, I do," said Dick. "Hear, then," she continued. "Ye would make but a sad friar, methinks; and since I am to dispose of you at pleasure, I will even take you for my husband. Nay, now, no words!" cried she. "They will avail you nothing. For see how just it is, that you who deprived me of one home, should supply me with another. And as for Joanna, she will be the first, believe me, to commend the change; for, after all, as we be dear friends, what matters it with which of us ye wed? Not one whit!" "Madam," said Dick, "I will go into a cloister, an ye please to bid me; but to wed with any one in this big world besides Joanna Sedley is what I will consent to neither for man's force nor yet for lady's pleasure. Pardon me if I speak my plain thoughts plainly! but where a maid is very bold, a poor man must even be the bolder." "Dick," she said, "ye sweet boy, ye must come and kiss me for that word. Nay, fear not, ye shall kiss me for Joanna, and when we meet, I shall give it back to her, and say I stole it. And as for what ye owe me, why, dear simpleton, methinks ye were not alone in that great battle; and even if York be on the throne, it was not you that set him there. But for a good, sweet, honest heart, Dick, y' are all that; and if I could find it in my soul to envy your Joanna anything, I would even envy her your love." CHAPTER VI NIGHT IN THE WOODS (_concluded_) DICK AND JOAN The horses had by this time finished the small store of provender, and fully breathed from their fatigues. At Dick's command, the fire was smothered in snow; and while his men got once more wearily to saddle, he himself, remembering, somewhat late, true woodland caution, chose a tall oak, and nimbly clambered to the topmost fork. Hence he could look far abroad on the moonlit and snow-paven forest. On the south-west, dark against the horizon, stood those upland heathy quarters where he and Joanna had met with the terrifying misadventure of the leper. And there his eye was caught by a spot of ruddy brightness no bigger than a needle's eye. He blamed himself sharply for his previous neglect. Were that, as it appeared to be, the shining of Sir Daniel's camp-fire, he should long ago have seen and marched for it; above all, he should, for no consideration, have announced his neighbourhood by lighting a fire of his own. But now he must no longer squander valuable hours. The direct way to the uplands was about two miles in length; but it was crossed by a very deep, precipitous dingle, impassable to mounted men; and for the sake of speed, it seemed to Dick advisable to desert the horses and attempt the adventure on foot. Ten men were left to guard the horses; signals were agreed upon by which they could communicate in case of need; and Dick set forth at the head of the remainder, Alicia Risingham walking stoutly by his side. The men had freed themselves of heavy armour, and left behind their lances; and they now marched with a very good spirit in the frozen snow, and under the exhilarating lustre of the moon. The descent into the dingle, where a stream strained sobbing through the snow and ice, was effected with silence and order; and on the farther side, being then within a short half-mile of where Dick had seen the glimmer of the fire, the party halted to breathe before the attack. In the vast silence of the wood, the lightest sounds were audible from far; and Alicia, who was keen of hearing, held up her finger warningly, and stooped to listen. All followed her example; but besides the groans of the choked brook in the dingle close behind, and the barking of a fox at a distance of many miles among the forest, to Dick's acutest hearkening not a breath was audible. "But yet, for sure, I heard the clash of harness," whispered Alicia. "Madam," returned Dick, who was more afraid of that young lady than of ten stout warriors, "I would not hint ye were mistaken; but it might well have come from either of the camps." "It came not thence. It came from westward," she declared. "It may be what it will," returned Dick; "and it must be as Heaven please. Reck we not a jot, but push on the livelier, and put it to the touch.--Up, friends--enough breathed." As they advanced, the snow became more and more trampled with hoof-marks, and it was plain that they were drawing near to the encampment of a considerable force of mounted men. Presently they could see the smoke pouring from among the trees, ruddily coloured on its lower edge and scattering bright sparks. And here, pursuant to Dick's orders, his men began to open out, creeping stealthily in the covert, to surround on every side the camp of their opponents. He himself, placing Alicia in the shelter of a bulky oak, stole straight forth in the direction of the fire. At last, through an opening of the wood, his eye embraced the scene of the encampment. The fire had been built upon a heathy hummock of the ground, surrounded on three sides by thicket, and it now burned very strong, roaring aloud and brandishing flames. Around it there sat not quite a dozen people, warmly cloaked; but though the neighbouring snow was trampled down as by a regiment, Dick looked in vain for any horse. He began to have a terrible misgiving that he was out-manoeuvred. At the same time, in a tall man with a steel salet, who was spreading his hands before the blaze, he recognised his old friend and still kindly enemy, Bennet Hatch; and in two others, sitting a little back, he made out, even in their male disguise, Joanna Sedley and Sir Daniel's wife. "Well," thought he to himself, "even if I lose my horses, let me get my Joanna, and why should I complain?" And then, from the farther side of the encampment, there came a little whistle, announcing that his men had joined, and the investment was complete. Bennet, at the sound, started to his feet; but ere he had time to spring upon his arms, Dick hailed him. "Bennet," he said--"Bennet, old friend, yield ye. Ye will but spill men's lives in vain if ye resist." "'Tis Master Shelton, by St. Barbary!" cried Hatch. "Yield me? Ye ask much. What force have ye?" "I tell you, Bennet, ye are both outnumbered and begirt," said Dick. "Cæsar and Charlemagne would cry for quarter. I have two score men at my whistle, and with one shoot of arrows I could answer for you all." "Master Dick," said Bennet, "it goes against my heart; but I must do my duty. The saints help you!" And therewith he raised a little tucket to his mouth and wound a rousing call. Then followed a moment of confusion; for while Dick, fearing for the ladies, still hesitated to give the word to shoot, Hatch's little band sprang to their weapons and formed back to back as for a fierce resistance. In the hurry of their change of place, Joanna sprang from her seat and ran like an arrow to her lover's side. "Here, Dick!" she cried, as she clasped his hand in hers. But Dick still stood irresolute; he was yet young to the more deplorable necessities of war, and the thought of old Lady Brackley checked the command upon his tongue. His own men became restive. Some of them cried on him by name; others, of their own accord, began to shoot; and at the first discharge poor Bennet bit the dust. Then Dick awoke. "On!" he cried. "Shoot, boys, and keep to cover. England and York!" But just then the dull beat of many horses on the snow suddenly arose in the hollow ear of the night, and, with incredible swiftness, drew nearer and swelled louder. At the same time, answering tuckets repeated and repeated Hatch's call. "Rally, rally!" cried Dick. "Rally upon me! Rally for your lives!" But his men--afoot, scattered, taken in the hour when they had counted on an easy triumph--began instead to give ground severally, and either stood wavering or dispersed into the thickets. And when the first of the horsemen came charging through the open avenues and fiercely riding their steeds into the underwood, a few stragglers were overthrown or speared among the brush, but the bulk of Dick's command had simply melted at the rumour of their coming. Dick stood for a moment, bitterly recognising the fruits of his precipitate and unwise valour. Sir Daniel had seen the fire; he had moved out with his main force, whether to attack his pursuers or to take them in the rear if they should venture the assault. His had been throughout the part of a sagacious captain; Dick's the conduct of an eager boy. And here was the young knight, his sweetheart, indeed, holding him tightly by the hand, but otherwise alone, his whole command of men and horses dispersed in the night and the wide forest, like a paper of pins in a hay barn. "The saints enlighten me!" he thought. "It is well I was knighted for this morning's matter; this doth me little honour." And thereupon, still holding Joanna, he began to run. The silence of the night was now shattered by the shouts of the men of Tunstall, as they galloped hither and thither, hunting fugitives; and Dick broke boldly through the underwood and ran straight before him like a deer. The silver clearness of the moon upon the open snow increased, by contrast, the obscurity of the thickets; and the extreme dispersion of the vanquished led the pursuers into widely divergent paths. Hence, in but a little while, Dick and Joanna paused, in a close covert, and heard the sounds of the pursuit, scattering abroad, indeed, in all directions, but yet fainting already in the distance. "An I had but kept a reserve of them together," Dick cried bitterly, "I could have turned the tables yet! Well, we live and learn; next time it shall go better, by the rood." "Nay, Dick," said Joanna, "what matters it? Here we are, together once again." He looked at her, and there she was--John Matcham, as of yore, in hose and doublet. But now he knew her; now, even in that ungainly dress, she smiled upon him, bright with love; and his heart was transported with joy. "Sweetheart," he said, "if ye forgive this blunderer, what care I? Make we direct for Holywood; there lieth your good guardian and my better friend, Lord Foxham. There shall we be wed; and whether poor or wealthy, famous or unknown, what matters it? This day, dear love, I won my spurs; I was commended by great men for my valour; I thought myself the goodliest man of war in all broad England. Then, first, I fell out of my favour with the great; and now I have been well thrashed, and clean lost my soldiers. There was a downfall for conceit! But, dear, I care not--dear, if ye still love me and will wed, I would have my knighthood done away, and mind it not a jot." "My Dick!" she cried. "And did they knight you?" "Ay, dear, ye are my lady now," he answered fondly; "or ye shall, ere noon to-morrow--will ye not?" "That will I, Dick, with a glad heart," she answered. "Ay, sir? Methought ye were to be a monk!" said a voice in their ears. "Alicia!" cried Joanna. "Even so," replied the young lady, coming forward. "Alicia, whom ye left for dead, and whom your lion-driver found, and brought to life again, and, by my sooth, made love to, if ye want to know." "I'll not believe it," cried Joanna. "Dick!" "Dick!" mimicked Alicia. "Dick, indeed!--Ay, fair sir, and ye desert poor damsels in distress," she continued, turning to the young knight. "Ye leave them planted behind oaks. But they say true--the age of chivalry is dead." "Madam," cried Dick in despair, "upon my soul I had forgotten you outright. Madam, ye must try to pardon me. Ye see, I had new found Joanna!" "I did not suppose that ye had done it o' purpose," she retorted. "But I will be cruelly avenged. I will tell a secret to my Lady Shelton--she that is to be," she added, curtseying. "Joanna," she continued, "I believe, upon my soul, your sweetheart is a bold fellow in a fight, but he is, let me tell you plainly, the softest-hearted simpleton in England. Go to--ye may do your pleasure with him! And now, fool children, first kiss me, either one of you, for luck and kindness; and then kiss each other just one minute by the glass, and not one second longer; and then let us all three set forth for Holywood as fast as we can stir; for these woods, methinks, are full of peril, and exceeding cold." "But did my Dick make love to you?" asked Joanna, clinging to her sweetheart's side. "Nay, fool girl," returned Alicia; "it was I made love to him. I offered to marry him, indeed; but he bade me go marry with my likes. These were his words. Nay, that I will say: he is more plain than pleasant. But now, children, for the sake of sense, set forward. Shall we go once more over the dingle, or push straight for Holywood?" "Why," said Dick, "I would like dearly to get upon a horse; for I have been sore mauled and beaten, one way and another, these last days, and my poor body is one bruise. But how think ye? If the men, upon the alarm of the fighting, had fled away, we should have gone about for nothing. 'Tis but some three short miles to Holywood direct; the bell hath not beat nine; the snow is pretty firm to walk upon, the moon clear; how if we went even as we are?" "Agreed!" cried Alicia; but Joanna only pressed upon Dick's arm. Forth, then, they went, through open leafless groves and down snow-clad alleys, under the white face of the winter moon; Dick and Joanna walking hand in hand and in a heaven of pleasure; and their light-minded companion, her own bereavements heartily forgotten, followed a pace or two behind, now rallying them upon their silence, and now drawing happy pictures of their future and united lives. Still, indeed, in the distance of the wood, the riders of Tunstall might be heard urging their pursuit; and from time to time cries or the clash of steel announced the shock of enemies. But in these young folk, bred among the alarms of war, and fresh from such a multiplicity of dangers, neither fear nor pity could be lightly wakened. Content to find the sounds still drawing farther and farther away, they gave up their hearts to the enjoyment of the hour, walking already, as Alicia put it, in a wedding procession; and neither the rude solitude of the forest nor the cold of the freezing night had any force to shadow or distract their happiness. At length, from a rising hill, they looked below them on the dell of Holywood. The great windows of the forest abbey shone with torch and candle; its high pinnacles and spires arose very clear and silent, and the gold rood upon the topmost summit glittered brightly in the moon. All about it, in the open glade, camp-fires were burning, and the ground was thick with huts; and across the midst of the picture the frozen river curved. "By the mass," said Richard, "there are Lord Foxham's fellows still encamped. The messenger hath certainly miscarried. Well, then, so better. We have power at hand to face Sir Daniel." But if Lord Foxham's men still lay encamped in the long holm at Holywood, it was from a different reason from the one supposed by Dick. They had marched, indeed, for Shoreby; but ere they were half-way thither, a second messenger met them, and bade them return to their morning's camp, to bar the road against Lancastrian fugitives, and to be so much nearer to the main army of York. For Richard of Gloucester, having finished the battle and stamped out his foes in that district, was already on the march to rejoin his brother; and not long after the return of my Lord Foxham's retainers, Crookback himself drew rein before the abbey door. It was in honour of this august visitor that the windows shone with lights; and at the hour of Dick's arrival with his sweetheart and her friend, the whole ducal party was being entertained in the refectory with the splendour of that powerful and luxurious monastery. Dick, not quite with his good will, was brought before them. Gloucester, sick with fatigue, sat leaning upon one hand his white and terrifying countenance; Lord Foxham, half recovered from his wound, was in a place of honour on his left. "How, sir?" asked Richard. "Have ye brought me Sir Daniel's head?" "My lord duke," replied Dick, stoutly enough, but with a qualm at heart, "I have not even the good fortune to return with my command. I have been, so please your grace, well beaten." Gloucester looked upon him with a formidable frown. "I gave you fifty lances,[3] sir," he said. "My lord duke, I had but fifty men-at-arms," replied the young knight. "How is this?" said Gloucester. "He did ask me fifty lances." "May it please your grace," replied Catesby smoothly, "for a pursuit we gave him but the horsemen." "It is well," replied Richard, adding, "Shelton, ye may go." "Stay!" said Lord Foxham. "This young man likewise had a charge from me. It may be he hath better sped.--Say, Master Shelton, have ye found the maid?" "I praise the saints, my lord," said Dick, "she is in this house." "Is it even so? Well, then, my lord the duke," resumed Lord Foxham, "with your good will, to-morrow, before the army march, I do propose a marriage. This young squire----" "Young knight," interrupted Catesby. "Say ye so, Sir William?" cried Lord Foxham. "I did myself, and for good service, dub him knight," said Gloucester. "He hath twice manfully served me. It is not valour of hands, it is a man's mind of iron, that he lacks. He will not rise, Lord Foxham. 'Tis a fellow that will fight indeed bravely in a mellay, but hath a capon's heart. Howbeit, if he is to marry, marry him in the name of Mary, and be done!" "Nay, he is a brave lad--I know it," said Lord Foxham. "Content ye, then, Sir Richard. I have compounded this affair with Master Hamley, and to-morrow ye shall wed." Whereupon Dick judged it prudent to withdraw; but he was not yet clear of the refectory, when a man, but newly alighted at the gate, came running four stairs at a bound, and brushing through the abbey servants, threw himself on one knee before the duke. "Victory, my lord," he cried. And before Dick had got to the chamber set apart for him as Lord Foxham's guest, the troops in the holm were cheering around their fires; for upon that same day, not twenty miles away, a second crushing blow had been dealt to the power of Lancaster. FOOTNOTE: [3] Technically, the term "lance" included a not quite certain number of foot-soldiers attached to the man-at-arms. CHAPTER VII DICK'S REVENGE The next morning Dick was afoot before the sun, and, having dressed himself to the best advantage, with the aid of the Lord Foxham's baggage, and got good reports of Joan, he set forth on foot to walk away his impatience. For some while he made rounds among the soldiery, who were getting to arms in the wintry twilight of the dawn and by the red glow of torches; but gradually he strolled farther afield, and at length passed clean beyond the outpost, and walked alone in the frozen forest, waiting for the sun. His thoughts were both quiet and happy. His brief favour with the duke he could not find it in his heart to mourn; with Joan to wife, and my Lord Foxham for a faithful patron, he looked most happily upon the future; and in the past he found but little to regret. As he thus strolled and pondered, the solemn light of the morning grew more clear, the east was already coloured by the sun, and a little scathing wind blew up the frozen snow. He turned to go home; but even as he turned, his eye lit upon a figure behind a tree. "Stand!" he cried. "Who goes?" The figure stepped forth and waved its hand like a dumb person. It was arrayed like a pilgrim, the hood lowered over the face, but Dick, in an instant, recognised Sir Daniel. He strode up to him, drawing his sword; and the knight, putting his hand in his bosom, as if to seize a hidden weapon, steadfastly awaited his approach. "Well, Dickon," said Sir Daniel, "how is it to be? Do ye make war upon the fallen?" "I made no war upon your life," replied the lad; "I was your true friend until ye sought for mine; but ye have sought for it greedily." "Nay--self-defence," replied the knight. "And now, boy, the news of this battle, and the presence of yon crooked devil here in mine own wood, have broken me beyond all help. I go to Holywood for sanctuary; thence over-seas, with what I can carry, and to begin life again in Burgundy or France." "Ye may not go to Holywood," said Dick. "How! May not?" asked the knight. "Look ye, Sir Daniel, this is my marriage morn," said Dick; "and yon sun that is to rise will make the brightest day that ever shone for me. Your life is forfeit--doubly forfeit, for my father's death and your own practices to meward. But I myself have done amiss; I have brought about men's deaths; and upon this glad day I will be neither judge nor hangman. An ye were the devil, I would not lay a hand on you. An ye were the devil, ye might go where ye will for me. Seek God's forgiveness; mine ye have freely. But to go on to Holywood is different. I carry arms for York, and I will suffer no spy within their lines. Hold it, then, for certain, if ye set one foot before another, I will uplift my voice and call the nearest post to seize you." "Ye mock me," said Sir Daniel. "I have no safety out of Holywood." "I care no more," returned Richard. "I let you go east, west, or south; north I will not. Holywood is shut against you. Go, and seek not to return. For, once ye are gone, I will warn every post about this army, and there will be so shrewd a watch upon all pilgrims that, once again, were ye the very devil, ye would find it ruin to make the essay." "Ye doom me," said Sir Daniel gloomily. "I doom you not," returned Richard. "If it so please you to set your valour against mine, come on; and though I fear it be disloyal to my party, I will take the challenge openly and fully, fight you with mine own single strength, and call for none to help me. So shall I avenge my father, with a perfect conscience." "Ay," said Sir Daniel, "y' have a long sword against my dagger." "I rely upon Heaven only," answered Dick, casting his sword some way behind him on the snow. "Now, if your ill-fate bids you, come; and, under the pleasure of the Almighty, I make myself bold to feed your bones to foxes." "I did but try you, Dickon," returned the knight, with an uneasy semblance of a laugh. "I would not spill your blood." "Go, then, ere it be too late," replied Shelton. "In five minutes I will call the post. I do perceive that I am too long-suffering. Had but our places been reversed, I should have been bound hand and foot some minutes past." "Well, Dickon, I will go," replied Sir Daniel. "When we next meet, it shall repent you that ye were so harsh." And with these words, the knight turned and began to move off under the trees. Dick watched him with strangely mingled feelings, as he went, swiftly and warily, and ever and again turning a wicked eye upon the lad who had spared him, and whom he still suspected. There was upon one side of where he went a thicket strongly matted with green ivy, and, even in its winter state, impervious to the eye. Herein, all of a sudden, a bow sounded like a note of music. An arrow flew, and with a great, choked cry of agony and anger, the Knight of Tunstall threw up his hands and fell forward in the snow. Dick bounded to his side and raised him. His face desperately worked; his whole body was shaken by contorting spasms. "Is the arrow black?" he gasped. "It is black," replied Dick gravely. And then, before he could add one word, a desperate seizure of pain shook the wounded man from head to foot, so that his body leaped in Dick's supporting arms, and with the extremity of that pang his spirit fled in silence. The young man laid him back gently on the snow and prayed for that unprepared and guilty spirit, and as he prayed the sun came up at a bound, and the robins began chirping in the ivy. When he rose to his feet, he found another man upon his knees but a few steps behind him, and, still with uncovered head, he waited until that prayer also should be over. It took long; the man, with his head bowed and his face covered with his hands, prayed like one in a great disorder or distress of mind; and by the bow that lay beside him, Dick judged that he was no other than the archer who had laid Sir Daniel low. At length he also rose, and showed the countenance of Ellis Duckworth. "Richard," he said, very gravely, "I heard you. Ye took the better part and pardoned; I took the worse, and there lies the clay of mine enemy. Pray for me." And he wrung him by the hand. "Sir," said Richard, "I will pray for you, indeed; though how I may prevail I wot not. But if ye have so long pursued revenge, and find it now of such a sorry flavour, bethink ye, were it not well to pardon others? Hatch--he is dead, poor shrew! I would have spared a better; and for Sir Daniel, here lies his body. But for the priest, if I might anywise prevail, I would have you let him go." A flash came into the eyes of Ellis Duckworth. "Nay," he said, "the devil is still strong within me. But be at rest; the Black Arrow flieth nevermore--the fellowship is broken. They that still live shall come to their quiet and ripe end, in Heaven's good time, for me; and for yourself, go where your better fortune calls you, and think no more of Ellis." CHAPTER VIII CONCLUSION About nine in the morning Lord Foxham was leading his ward, once more dressed as befitted her sex, and followed by Alicia Risingham, to the church of Holywood, when Richard Crookback, his brow already heavy with cares, crossed their path and paused. "Is this the maid?" he asked; and when Lord Foxham had replied in the affirmative, "Minion," he added, "hold up your face until I see its favour." He looked upon her sourly for a little. "Ye are fair," he said at last, "and, as they tell me, dowered. How if I offered you a brave marriage, as became your face and parentage?" "My lord duke," replied Joanna, "may it please your grace, I had rather wed with Sir Richard." "How so?" he asked harshly. "Marry but the man I name to you, and he shall be my lord, and you my lady, before night. For Sir Richard, let me tell you plainly, he will die Sir Richard." "I ask no more of Heaven, my lord, than but to die Sir Richard's wife," returned Joanna. "Look ye at that, my lord," said Gloucester, turning to Lord Foxham. "Here be a pair for you. The lad, when for good services I gave him his choice of my favour, chose but the grace of an old drunken shipman. I did warn him freely, but he was stout in his besottedness. 'Here dieth your favour,' said I: and he, my lord, with a most assured impertinence, 'Mine be the loss,' quoth he. It shall be so, by the rood!" "Said he so?" cried Alicia. "Then well said, lion-driver!" "Who is this?" asked the duke. "A prisoner of Sir Richard's," answered Lord Foxham; "Mistress Alicia Risingham." "See that she be married to a sure man," said the duke. "I had thought of my kinsman, Hamley, an it like your grace," returned Lord Foxham. "He hath well served the cause." "It likes me well," said Richard. "Let them be wedded speedily.--Say, fair maid, will you wed?" "My lord duke," said Alicia, "so as the man is straight--" And there, in a perfect consternation, the voice died on her tongue. "He is straight, my mistress," replied Richard calmly. "I am the only crookback of my party; we are else passably well shapen.--Ladies, and you, my lord," he added, with a sudden change to grave courtesy, "judge me not too churlish if I leave you. A captain, in the time of war, hath not the ordering of his hours." And with a very handsome salutation he passed on, followed by his officers. "Alack," cried Alicia, "I am shent!" "Ye know him not," replied Lord Foxham. "It is but a trifle; he hath already clean forgot your words." "He is, then, the very flower of knighthood," said Alicia. "Nay, but he mindeth other things," returned Lord Foxham. "Tarry we no more." In the chancel they found Dick waiting, attended by a few young men; and there were he and Joan united. When they came forth again, happy and yet serious, into the frosty air and sunlight, the long flies of the army were already winding forward up the road; already the Duke of Gloucester's banner was unfolded and began to move from before the abbey in a clump of spears; and behind it, girt by steel-clad knights, the bold, black-hearted, and ambitious hunchback moved on towards his brief kingdom and his lasting infamy. But the wedding party turned upon the other side, and sat down, with sober merriment, to breakfast. The father cellarer attended on their wants, and sat with them at table. Hamley, all jealousy forgotten, began to ply the nowise loath Alicia with courtship. And there, amid the sounding of tuckets and the clash of armoured soldiery and horses continually moving forth, Dick and Joan sat side by side, tenderly held hands, and looked, with ever growing affection, in each other's eyes. Thenceforth the dust and blood of that unruly epoch passed them by. They dwelt apart from alarms in the green forest where their love began. Two old men in the meanwhile enjoyed pensions in great prosperity and peace, and with perhaps a superfluity of ale and wine, in Tunstall hamlet. One had been all his life a shipman, and continued to the last to lament his man Tom. The other, who had been a bit of everything, turned in the end towards piety, and made a most religious death under the name of Brother Honestus in the neighbouring abbey. So Lawless had his will, and died a friar. MARKHEIM MARKHEIM "Yes," said the dealer, "our windfalls are of various kinds. Some customers are ignorant, and then I touch a dividend on my superior knowledge. Some are dishonest," and here he held up the candle, so that the light fell strongly on his visitor, "and in that case," he continued, "I profit by my virtue." Markheim had but just entered from the daylight streets, and his eyes had not yet grown familiar with the mingled shine and darkness in the shop. At these pointed words, and before the near presence of the flame, he blinked painfully and looked aside. The dealer chuckled. "You come to me on Christmas Day," he resumed, "when you know that I am alone in my house, put up my shutters, and make a point of refusing business. Well, you will have to pay for that; you will have to pay for my loss of time, when I should be balancing my books; you will have to pay, besides, for a kind of manner that I remark in you to-day very strongly. I am the essence of discretion, and ask no awkward questions; but when a customer cannot look me in the eye, he has to pay for it." The dealer once more chuckled; and then, changing to his usual business voice, though still with a note of irony, "You can give, as usual, a clear account of how you came into the possession of the object?" he continued. "Still your uncle's cabinet? A remarkable collector, sir!" And the little pale, round-shouldered dealer stood almost on tip-toe, looking over the top of his gold spectacles, and nodding his head with every mark of disbelief. Markheim returned his gaze with one of infinite pity, and a touch of horror. "This time," said he, "you are in error. I have not come to sell, but to buy. I have no curios to dispose of; my uncle's cabinet is bare to the wainscot; even were it still intact, I have done well on the Stock Exchange, and should more likely add to it than otherwise, and my errand to-day is simplicity itself. I seek a Christmas present for a lady," he continued, waxing more fluent as he struck into the speech he had prepared; "and certainly I owe you every excuse for thus disturbing you upon so small a matter. But the thing was neglected yesterday; I must produce my little compliment at dinner; and, as you very well know, a rich marriage is not a thing to be neglected." There followed a pause, during which the dealer seemed to weigh this statement incredulously. The ticking of many clocks among the curious lumber of the shop, and the faint rushing of the cabs in a near thoroughfare, filled up the interval of silence. "Well, sir," said the dealer, "be it so. You are an old customer after all; and if, as you say, you have the chance of a good marriage, far be it from me to be an obstacle.--Here is a nice thing for a lady now," he went on, "this hand-glass--fifteenth-century, warranted; comes from a good collection, too; but I reserve the name, in the interests of my customer, who was just like yourself, my dear sir, the nephew and sole heir of a remarkable collector." The dealer, while he thus ran on in his dry and biting voice, had stooped to take the object from its place; and, as he had done so, a shock had passed through Markheim, a start both of hand and foot, a sudden leap of many tumultuous passions to the face. It passed as swiftly as it came, and left no trace beyond a certain trembling of the hand that now received the glass. "A glass," he said hoarsely, and then paused, and repeated it more clearly. "A glass? For Christmas? Surely not?" "And why not?" cried the dealer. "Why not a glass?" Markheim was looking upon him with an indefinable expression. "You ask me why not?" he said. "Why, look here--look in it--look at yourself! Do you like to see it? No! nor I--nor any man." The little man had jumped back when Markheim had so suddenly confronted him with the mirror; but now, perceiving there was nothing worse on hand, he chuckled. "Your future lady, sir, must be pretty hard favoured," said he. "I ask you," said Markheim, "for a Christmas present, and you give me this--this damned reminder of years, and sins and follies--this hand-conscience. Did you mean it? Had you a thought in your mind? Tell me. It will be better for you if you do. Come, tell me about yourself. I hazard a guess now, that you are in secret a very charitable man?" The dealer looked closely at his companion. It was very odd, Markheim did not appear to be laughing; there was something in his face like an eager sparkle of hope, but nothing of mirth. "What are you driving at?" the dealer asked. "Not charitable?" returned the other gloomily. "Not charitable? not pious; not scrupulous; unloving, unbeloved; a hand to get money, a safe to keep it. Is that all? Dear God, man, is that all?" "I will tell you what it is," began the dealer, with some sharpness, and then broke off again into a chuckle. "But I see this is a love-match of yours, and you have been drinking the lady's health." "Ah!" cried Markheim, with a strange curiosity. "Ah, have you been in love? Tell me about that." "I," cried the dealer. "I in love! I never had the time, nor have I the time to-day for all this nonsense.--Will you take the glass?" "Where is the hurry?" returned Markheim. "It is very pleasant to stand here talking; and life is so short and insecure that I would not hurry away from any pleasure--no, not even from so mild a one as this. We should rather cling, cling to what little we can get, like a man at a cliff's edge. Every second is a cliff, if you think upon it--a cliff a mile high--high enough, if we fall, to dash us out of every feature of humanity. Hence it is best to talk pleasantly. Let us talk of each other: why should we wear this mask? Let us be confidential. Who knows?--we might become friends." "I have just one word to say to you," said the dealer. "Either make your purchase, or walk out of my shop!" "True, true," said Markheim. "Enough fooling. To business. Show me something else." The dealer stooped once more, this time to replace the glass upon the shelf, his thin blond hair falling over his eyes as he did so. Markheim moved a little nearer, with one hand in the pocket of his greatcoat: he drew himself up and filled his lungs; at the same time many different emotions were depicted together on his face--terror, horror, and resolve, fascination and a physical repulsion; and through a haggard lift of his upper lip his teeth looked out. "This, perhaps, may suit," observed the dealer: and then, as he began to re-arise, Markheim bounded from behind upon his victim. The long, skewer-like dagger flashed and fell. The dealer struggled like a hen, striking his temple on the shelf, and then tumbled on the floor in a heap. Time had some score of small voices in that shop, some stately and slow, as was becoming to their great age; others garrulous and hurried. All these told out the seconds in an intricate chorus of tickings. Then the passage of a lad's feet, heavily running on the pavement, broke in upon these smaller voices and startled Markheim into the consciousness of his surroundings. He looked about him awfully. The candle stood on the counter, its flame solemnly wagging in a draught; and by that inconsiderable movement the whole room was filled with noiseless bustle and kept heaving like a sea: the tall shadows nodding, the gross blots of darkness swelling and dwindling as with respiration, the faces of the portraits and the china gods changing and wavering like images in water. The inner door stood ajar, and peered into that leaguer of shadows with a long slit of daylight like a pointing finger. From these fear-stricken rovings Markheim's eyes returned to the body of his victim, where it lay both humped and sprawling, incredibly small and strangely meaner than in life. In these poor, miserly clothes, in that ungainly attitude, the dealer lay like so much sawdust. Markheim had feared to see it, and, lo! it was nothing. And yet, as he gazed, this bundle of old clothes and pool of blood began to find eloquent voices. There it must lie; there was none to work the cunning hinges or direct the miracle of locomotion--there it must lie till it was found. Found! ay, and then? Then would this dead flesh lift up a cry that would ring over England, and fill the world with the echoes of pursuit. Ay, dead or not, this was still the enemy. "Time was that when the brains were out," he thought; and the first word struck into his mind. Time, now that the deed was accomplished--time, which had closed for the victim, had become instant and momentous for the slayer. The thought was yet in his mind when, first one and then another, with every variety of pace and voice--one deep as the bell from a cathedral turret, another ringing on its treble notes the prelude of a waltz--the clocks began to strike the hour of three in the afternoon. The sudden outbreak of so many tongues in that dumb chamber staggered him. He began to bestir himself, going to and fro with the candle, beleaguered by moving shadows, and startled to the soul by chance reflections. In many rich mirrors, some of home design, some from Venice or Amsterdam, he saw his face repeated and repeated, as it were an army of spies; his own eyes met and detected him; and the sound of his own steps, lightly as they fell, vexed the surrounding quiet. And still, as he continued to fill his pockets, his mind accused him, with a sickening iteration, of the thousand faults of his design. He should have chosen a more quiet hour; he should have prepared an alibi; he should not have used a knife; he should have been more cautious, and only bound and gagged the dealer, and not killed him; he should have been more bold, and killed the servant also; he should have done all things otherwise: poignant regrets, weary, incessant toiling of the mind to change what was unchangeable, to plan what was now useless, to be the architect of the irrevocable past. Meanwhile, and behind all this activity, brute terrors, like the scurrying of rats in a deserted attic, filled the more remote chambers of his brain with riot; the hand of the constable would fall heavy on his shoulder, and his nerves would jerk like a hooked fish; or he beheld, in galloping defile, the dock, the prison, the gallows, and the black coffin. Terror of the people in the street sat down before his mind like a besieging army. It was impossible, he thought, but that some rumour of the struggle must have reached their ears and set on edge their curiosity; and now, in all the neighbouring houses, he divined them sitting motionless and with uplifted ear--solitary people, condemned to spend Christmas dwelling alone on memories of the past, and now startlingly recalled from that tender exercise; happy family parties, struck into silence round the table, the mother still with raised finger: every degree and age and humour, but all, by their own hearths, prying and hearkening and weaving the rope that was to hang him. Sometimes it seemed to him he could not move too softly; the clink of the tall Bohemian goblets rang out loudly like a bell; and alarmed by the bigness of the ticking, he was tempted to stop the clocks. And then, again, with a swift transition of his terrors, the very silence of the place appeared a source of peril, and a thing to strike and freeze the passer-by; and he would step more boldly, and bustle aloud among the contents of the shop, and imitate, with elaborate bravado, the movements of a busy man at ease in his own house. But he was now so pulled about by different alarms, that, while one portion of his mind was still alert and cunning, another trembled on the brink of lunacy. One hallucination in particular took a strong hold on his credulity. The neighbour hearkening with white face beside his window, the passer-by arrested by a horrible surmise on the pavement--these could at worst suspect, they could not know; through the brick walls and shuttered windows only sounds could penetrate. But here, within the house, was he alone? He knew he was; he had watched the servant set forth sweethearting, in her poor best, "out for the day" written on every ribbon and smile. Yes, he was alone, of course; and yet, in the bulk of empty house above him, he could surely hear a stir of delicate footing--he was surely conscious, inexplicably conscious, of some presence. Ay, surely; to every room and corner of the house his imagination followed it; and now it was a faceless thing, and yet had eyes to see with; and again it was a shadow of himself; and yet again beheld the image of the dead dealer, reinspired with cunning and hatred. At times, with a strong effort, he would glance at the open door which still seemed to repel his eyes. The house was tall, the skylight small and dirty, the day blind with fog; and the light that filtered down to the ground story was exceedingly faint, and showed dimly on the threshold of the shop. And yet, in that strip of doubtful brightness, did there not hang wavering a shadow? Suddenly, from the street outside, a very jovial gentleman began to beat with a staff on the shop-door, accompanying his blows with shouts and railleries in which the dealer was continually called upon by name. Markheim, smitten into ice, glanced at the dead man. But no! he lay quite still; he was fled away far beyond ear-shot of these blows and shoutings; he was sunk beneath seas of silence; and his name, which would once have caught his notice above the howling of a storm, had become an empty sound. And presently the jovial gentleman desisted from his knocking and departed. Here was a broad hint to hurry what remained to be done, to get forth from this accusing neighbourhood, to plunge into a bath of London multitudes, and to reach, on the other side of day, that haven of safety and apparent innocence--his bed. One visitor had come: at any moment another might follow and be more obstinate. To have done the deed, and yet not to reap the profit, would be too abhorrent a failure. The money, that was now Markheim's concern; and as a means to that, the keys. He glanced over his shoulder at the open door; where the shadow was still lingering and shivering; and with no conscious repugnance of the mind, yet with a tremor of the belly, he drew near the body of his victim. The human character had quite departed. Like a suit half-stuffed with bran, the limbs lay scattered, the trunk doubled, on the floor; and yet the thing repelled him. Although so dingy and inconsiderable to the eye, he feared it might have more significance to the touch. He took the body by the shoulders and turned it on its back. It was strangely light and supple, and the limbs, as if they had been broken, fell into the oddest postures. The face was robbed of all expression; but it was as pale as wax, and shockingly smeared with blood about one temple. That was, for Markheim, the one displeasing circumstance. It carried him back, upon the instant, to a certain fair-day in a fishers' village: a grey day, a piping wind, a crowd upon the street, a blare of brasses, the booming of drums, the nasal voice of a ballad-singer; and a boy going to and fro, buried overhead in the crowd and divided between interest and fear, until, coming out upon the chief place of concourse, he beheld a booth and a great screen with pictures, dismally designed, garishly coloured: Brownrigg with her apprentice; the Mannings with their murdered guest; Weare in the death-grip of Thurtell; and a score besides of famous crimes. The thing was as clear as an illusion; he was once again that little boy; he was looking once again, and with the same sense of physical revolt, at these vile pictures; he was still stunned by the thumping of the drums. A bar of that day's music returned upon his memory; and at that, for the first time, a qualm came over him, a breath of nausea, a sudden weakness of the joints, which he must instantly resist and conquer. He judged it more prudent to confront than to flee from these considerations; looking the more hardily in the dead face, bending his mind to realise the nature and greatness of his crime. So little a while ago that face had moved with every change of sentiment, that pale mouth had spoken, that body had been all on fire with governable energies; and now, and by his act, that piece of life had been arrested, as the horologist, with interjected finger, arrests the beating of the clock. So he reasoned in vain; he could rise to no more remorseful consciousness; the same heart which had shuddered before the painted effigies of crime looked on its reality unmoved. At best, he felt a gleam of pity for one who had been endowed in vain with all those faculties that can make the world a garden of enchantment, one who had never lived and who was now dead. But of penitence, no, not a tremor. With that, shaking himself clear of these considerations, he found the keys and advanced towards the open door of the shop. Outside, it had begun to rain smartly; and the sound of the shower upon the roof had banished silence. Like some dripping cavern, the chambers of the house were haunted by an incessant echoing, which filled the ear and mingled with the ticking of the clocks. And, as Markheim approached the door, he seemed to hear, in answer to his own cautious tread, the steps of another foot withdrawing up the stair. The shadow still palpitated loosely on the threshold. He threw a ton's weight of resolve upon his muscles, and drew back the door. The faint, foggy daylight glimmered dimly on the bare floor and stairs; on the bright suit of armour posted, halbert in hand, upon the landing: and on the dark wood-carvings, and framed pictures that hung against the yellow panels of the wainscot. So loud was the beating of the rain through all the house that, in Markheim's ears, it began to be distinguished into many different sounds. Footsteps and sighs, the tread of regiments marching in the distance, the chink of money in the counting, and the creaking of doors held stealthily ajar, appeared to mingle with the patter of the drops upon the cupola and the gushing of the water in the pipes. The sense that he was not alone grew upon him to the verge of madness. On every side he was haunted and begirt by presences. He heard them moving in the upper chambers; from the shop he heard the dead man getting to his legs; and as he began with a great effort to mount the stairs, feet fled quietly before him and followed stealthily behind. If he were but deaf, he thought, how tranquilly he would possess his soul! And then again, and hearkening with ever fresh attention, he blessed himself for that unresting sense which held the outposts and stood a trusty sentinel upon his life. His head turned continually on his neck; his eyes, which seemed starting from their orbits, scouted on every side, and on every side were half-rewarded as with the tail of something nameless vanishing. The four-and-twenty steps to the first floor were four-and-twenty agonies. On that first story, the doors stood ajar, three of them like three ambushes, shaking his nerves like the throats of cannon. He could never again, he felt, be sufficiently immured and fortified from men's observing eyes; he longed to be home, girt in by walls, buried among bed-clothes, and invisible to all but God. And at that thought he wondered a little, recollecting tales of other murderers and the fear they were said to entertain of heavenly avengers. It was not so, at least, with him. He feared the laws of nature, lest, in their callous and immutable procedure, they should preserve some damning evidence of his crime. He feared tenfold more, with a slavish, superstitious terror, some scission in the continuity of man's experience, some wilful illegality of nature. He played a game of skill, depending on the rules, calculating consequence from cause; and what if nature, as the defeated tyrant overthrew the chess-board, should break the mould of their succession? The like had befallen Napoleon (so writers said) when the winter changed the time of its appearance. The like might befall Markheim: the solid walls might become transparent and reveal his doings like those of bees in a glass hive; the stout planks might yield under his foot like quicksands and detain him in their clutch; ay, and there were soberer accidents that might destroy him: if, for instance, the house should fall and imprison him beside the body of his victim; or the house next door should fly on fire, and the firemen invade him from all sides. These things he feared; and, in a sense, these things might be called the hands of God reached forth against sin. But about God Himself he was at ease: his act was doubtless exceptional, but so were his excuses, which God knew; it was there, and not among men, that he felt sure of justice. When he had got safe into the drawing-room, and shut the door behind him, he was aware of a respite from alarms. The room was quite dismantled, uncarpeted besides, and strewn with packing-cases and incongruous furniture; several great pier-glasses, in which he beheld himself at various angles, like an actor on a stage; many pictures, framed and unframed, standing with their faces to the wall; a fine Sheraton sideboard, a cabinet of marquetry, and a great old bed, with tapestry hangings. The windows opened to the floor; but by great good fortune the lower part of the shutters had been closed, and this concealed him from the neighbours. Here, then, Markheim drew in a packing-case before the cabinet, and began to search among the keys. It was a long business, for there were many; and it was irksome besides; for, after all, there might be nothing in the cabinet, and time was on the wing. But the closeness of the occupation sobered him. With the tail of his eye he saw the door--even glanced at it from time to time directly, like a besieged commander, pleased to verify the good estate of his defences. But in truth he was at peace. The rain falling in the street sounded natural and pleasant. Presently, on the other side, the notes of a piano were wakened to the music of a hymn, and the voices of many children took up the air and words. How stately, how comfortable was the melody! How fresh the youthful voices! Markheim gave ear to it smilingly, as he sorted out the keys; and his mind was thronged with answerable ideas and images; church-going children and the pealing of the high organ; children afield, bathers by the brookside, ramblers on the brambly common, kite-flyers in the windy and cloud-navigated sky; and then, at another cadence of the hymn, back again to church, and the somnolence of summer Sundays, and the high genteel voice of the parson (which he smiled a little to recall) and the painted Jacobean tombs, and the dim lettering of the Ten Commandments in the chancel. And as he sat thus, at once busy and absent, he was startled to his feet. A flash of ice, a flash of fire, a bursting gush of blood went over him, and then he stood transfixed and thrilling. A step mounted the stair slowly and steadily, and presently a hand was laid upon the knob, and the lock clicked, and the door opened. Fear held Markheim in a vice. What to expect he knew not, whether the dead man walking, or the official ministers of human justice, or some chance witness blindly stumbling in to consign him to the gallows. But when a face was thrust into the aperture, glanced round the room, looked at him, nodded and smiled as if in friendly recognition, and then withdrew again, and the door closed behind it, his fear broke loose from his control in a hoarse cry. At the sound of this the visitant returned. "Did you call me?" he asked pleasantly, and with that he entered the room and closed the door behind him. Markheim stood and gazed at him with all his eyes. Perhaps there was a film upon his sight, but the outlines of the new-comer seemed to change and waver like those of the idols in the wavering candlelight of the shop; and at times he thought he knew him; and at times he thought he bore a likeness to himself; and always, like a lump of living terror, there lay in his bosom the conviction that this thing was not of the earth and not of God. And yet the creature had a strange air of the commonplace, as he stood looking on Markheim with a smile; and when he added: "You are looking for the money, I believe?" it was in the tones of everyday politeness. Markheim made no answer. "I should warn you," resumed the other, "that the maid has left her sweetheart earlier than usual and will soon be here. If Mr. Markheim be found in this house, I need not describe to him the consequences." "You know me?" cried the murderer. The visitor smiled. "You have long been a favourite of mine," he said; "and I have long observed and often sought to help you." "What are you?" cried Markheim, "the devil?" "What I may be," returned the other, "cannot affect the service I propose to render you." "It can," cried Markheim; "it does! Be helped by you? No, never; not by you! You do not know me yet; thank God, you do not know me!" "I know you," replied the visitant, with a sort of kind severity, or rather firmness. "I know you to the soul." "Know me!" cried Markheim. "Who can do so? My life is but a travesty and slander on myself. I have lived to belie my nature. All men do; all men are better than this disguise, that grows about and stifles them. You see each dragged away by life, like one whom bravos have seized and muffled in a cloak. If they had their own control--if you could see their faces, they would be altogether different, they would shine out for heroes and saints! I am worse than most; myself is more overlaid; my excuse is known to me and God. But, had I the time, I could disclose myself." "To me?" inquired the visitant. "To you before all," returned the murderer. "I supposed you were intelligent. I thought--since you exist--you would prove a reader of the heart. And yet you would propose to judge me by my acts! Think of it; my acts! I was born and I have lived in a land of giants; giants have dragged me by the wrists since I was born out of my mother--the giants of circumstance. And you would judge me by my acts! But can you not look within? Can you not understand that evil is hateful to me? Can you not see within me the clear writing of conscience, never blurred by any wilful sophistry, although too often disregarded? Can you not read me for a thing that surely must be common as humanity--the unwilling sinner?" "All this is very feelingly expressed," was the reply, "but it regards me not. These points of consistency are beyond my province, and I care not in the least by what compulsion you may have been dragged away, so as you are but carried in the right direction. But time flies; the servant delays, looking in the faces of the crowd and at the pictures on the hoardings, but still she keeps moving nearer; and remember, it is as if the gallows itself was striding towards you through the Christmas streets! Shall I help you; I, who know all? Shall I tell you where to find the money?" "For what price?" asked Markheim. "I offer you the service for a Christmas gift," returned the other. Markheim could not refrain from smiling with a kind of bitter triumph. "No," said he, "I will take nothing at your hands; if I were dying of thirst, and it was your hand that put the pitcher to my lips, I should find the courage to refuse. It may be credulous, but I will do nothing to commit myself to evil." "I have no objection to a death-bed repentance," observed the visitant. "Because you disbelieve their efficacy!" Markheim cried. "I do not say so," returned the other; "but I look on these things from a different side, and when the life is done my interest falls. The man has lived to serve me, to spread black looks under colour of religion, or to sow tares in the wheat-field, as you do, in a course of weak compliance with desire. Now that he draws so near to his deliverance, he can add but one act of service--to repent, to die smiling, and thus to build up in confidence and hope the more timorous of my surviving followers. I am not so hard a master. Try me. Accept my help. Please yourself in life as you have done hitherto; please yourself more amply, spread your elbows at the board; and when the night begins to fall and the curtains to be drawn, I tell you, for your greater comfort, that you will find it even easy to compound your quarrel with your conscience, and to make a truckling peace with God. I came but now from such a death-bed, and the room was full of sincere mourners, listening to the man's last words: and when I looked into that face, which had been set as a flint against mercy, I found it smiling with hope." "And do you, then, suppose me such a creature?" asked Markheim. "Do you think I have no more generous aspirations than to sin, and sin, and sin, and, at the last, sneak into heaven? My heart rises at the thought. Is this, then, your experience of mankind? or is it because you find me with red hands that you presume such baseness? and is this crime of murder indeed so impious as to dry up the very springs of good?" "Murder is to me no special category," replied the other. "All sins are murder, even as all life is war. I behold your race, like starving mariners on a raft, plucking crusts out of the hands of famine and feeding on each other's lives. I follow sins beyond the moment of their acting; I find in all that the last consequence is death; and to my eyes, the pretty maid who thwarts her mother with such taking graces on a question of a ball, drips no less visibly with human gore than such a murderer as yourself. Do I say that I follow sins? I follow virtues also; they differ not by the thickness of a nail, they are both scythes for the reaping angel of Death. Evil, for which I live, consists not in action but in character. The bad man is dear to me; not the bad act, whose fruits, if we could follow them far enough down the hurtling cataract of the ages, might yet be found more blessed than those of the rarest virtues. And it is not because you have killed a dealer, but because you are Markheim, that I offer to forward your escape." "I will lay my heart open to you," answered Markheim. "This crime on which you find me is my last. On my way to it I have learned many lessons; itself is a lesson, a momentous lesson. Hitherto I have been driven with revolt to what I would not; I was a bond-slave to poverty, driven and scourged. There are robust virtues that can stand in these temptations; mine was not so: I had a thirst of pleasure. But to-day, and out of this deed, I pluck both warning and riches--both the power and a fresh resolve to be myself. I become in all things a free actor in the world; I begin to see myself all changed, these hands the agents of good, this heart at peace. Something comes over me out of the past; something of what I have dreamed on Sabbath evenings to the sound of the church organ, of what I forecast when I shed tears over noble books, or talked, an innocent child, with my mother. There lies my life; I have wandered a few years, but now I see once more my city of destination." "You are to use this money on the Stock Exchange, I think?" remarked the visitor; "and there, if I mistake not, you have already lost some thousands." "Ah," said Markheim, "but this time I have a sure thing." "This time, again, you will lose," replied the visitor quietly. "Ah, but I will keep back the half!" cried Markheim. "That also you will lose," said the other. The sweat started upon Markheim's brow. "Well, then, what matter?" he exclaimed. "Say it be lost, say I am plunged again in poverty, shall one part of me, and that the worse, continue until the end to override the better? Evil and good run strong in me, haling me both ways. I do not love the one thing, I love all. I can conceive great deeds, renunciations, martyrdoms; and though I be fallen to such a crime as murder, pity is no stranger to my thoughts. I pity the poor; who knows their trials better than myself? I pity and help them; I prize love, I love honest laughter; there is no good thing nor true thing on earth but I love it from my heart. And are my vices only to direct my life, and my virtues to lie without effect, like some passive lumber of the mind? Not so; good, also, is the spring of acts." But the visitant raised his finger. "For six-and-thirty years that you have been in this world," said he, "through many changes of fortune and varieties of humour, I have watched you steadily fall. Fifteen years ago you would have started at a theft. Three years back you would have blenched at the name of murder. Is there any crime, is there any cruelty or meanness, from which you still recoil?--five years from now I shall detect you in the fact! Downward, downward lies your way; nor can anything but death avail to stop you." "It is true," Markheim said huskily, "I have in some degree complied with evil. But it is so with all: the very saints, in the mere exercise of living, grow less dainty, and take on the tone of their surroundings." "I will propound to you one simple question," said the other; "and as you answer, I shall read to you your moral horoscope. You have grown in many things more lax; possibly you do right to be so; and at any account, it is the same with all men. But granting that, are you in any one particular, however trifling, more difficult to please with your own conduct, or do you go in all things with a looser rein?" "In any one?" repeated Markheim, with an anguish of consideration. "No," he added, with despair, "in none! I have gone down in all." "Then," said the visitor, "content yourself with what you are, for you will never change; and the words of your part on this stage are irrevocably written down." Markheim stood for a long while silent, and indeed it was the visitor who first broke the silence. "That being so," he said, "shall I show you the money?" "And grace?" cried Markheim. "Have you not tried it?" returned the other. "Two or three years ago, did I not see you on the platform of revival meetings, and was not your voice the loudest in the hymn?" "It is true," said Markheim; "and I see clearly what remains for me by way of duty. I thank you for these lessons from my soul; my eyes are opened, and I behold myself at last for what I am." At this moment, the sharp note of the door-bell rang through the house; and the visitant, as though this were some concerted signal for which he had been waiting, changed at once in his demeanour. "The maid!" he cried. "She has returned, as I forewarned you, and there is now before you one more difficult passage. Her master, you must say, is ill; you must let her in, with an assured but rather serious countenance--no smiles, no overacting, and I promise you success! Once the girl within, and the door closed, the same dexterity that has already rid you of the dealer will relieve you of this last danger in your path. Thenceforward you have the whole evening--the whole night, if needful--to ransack the treasures of the house and to make good your safety. This is help that comes to you with the mask of danger. Up!" he cried; "up, friend; your life hangs trembling in the scales: up, and act!" Markheim steadily regarded his counsellor. "If I be condemned to evil acts," he said, "there is still one door of freedom open--I can cease from action. If my life be an ill thing, I can lay it down. Though I be, as you say truly, at the beck of every small temptation, I can yet, by one decisive gesture, place myself beyond the reach of all. My love of good is damned to barrenness; it may, and let it be! But I have still my hatred of evil; and from that, to your galling disappointment, you shall see that I can draw both energy and courage." The features of the visitor began to undergo a wonderful and lovely change: they brightened and softened with a tender triumph, and, even as they brightened, faded and dislimned. But Markheim did not pause to watch or understand the transformation. He opened the door and went downstairs very slowly, thinking to himself. His past went soberly before him; he beheld it as it was, ugly and strenuous like a dream, random as chance-medley--a scene of defeat. Life, as he thus reviewed it, tempted him no longer; but on the farther side he perceived a quiet haven for his bark. He paused in the passage, and looked into the shop, where the candle still burned by the dead body. It was strangely silent. Thoughts of the dealer swarmed into his mind, as he stood gazing. And then the bell once more broke out into impatient clamour. He confronted the maid upon the threshold with something like a smile. "You had better go for the police," said he: "I have killed your master." END OF VOL. VIII PRINTED BY CASSELL AND COMPANY, LIMITED LA BELLE SAUVAGE, LONDON, E.C. 
33400	----	THE BOOK OF SUSAN _A Novel_ BY LEE WILSON DODD [Illustration] "_Though she track the wilds, Though she breast the crags, Choosing no path-- Her kirtle tears not, Her ankles gleam, Her sandals are silver._" NEW YORK E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 681 FIFTH AVENUE COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY _All Rights Reserved_ _First printing April, 1920_ _Second printing April, 1920_ _Third printing June, 1920_ _Fourth printing June, 1920_ _Fifth printing July, 1920_ _Sixth printing July, 1920_ _Seventh printing August, 1920_ _Eighth printing August, 1920_ _Ninth printing August, 1920_ _Tenth printing August, 1920_ _Eleventh printing August, 1920_ _Twelfth printing August, 1920_ Printed in the United States of America JOSEPHI FRATRIBUS NON QUOD VOLUI SED QUOD POTUI CONTENTS PAGE THE FIRST CHAPTER 1 THE SECOND CHAPTER 24 THE THIRD CHAPTER 62 THE FOURTH CHAPTER 131 THE FIFTH CHAPTER 153 THE SIXTH CHAPTER 221 THE LAST CHAPTER 238 THE BOOK OF SUSAN THE FIRST CHAPTER I IT happens that I twice saw Susan's mother, one of those soiled rags of humanity used by careless husbands for wiping their boots; but Susan does not remember her. John Stuart Mill studied Greek at three, and there is a Russian author who recalls being weaned as the first of his many bitter experiences. Either Susan's mental life did not waken so early or the record has faded. She remembers only the consolate husband, her father; remembers him only too well. The backs of his square, angry-looking hands were covered with an unpleasant growth of reddish bristles; his nostrils were hairy, too, and seemed formed by Nature solely for the purpose of snorting with wrath. It must not be held against Susan that she never loved her father; he was not created to inspire the softer emotions. Nor am I altogether certain just why he was created at all. Nevertheless, Robert Blake was in his soberer hours--say, from Tuesdays to Fridays--an expert mechanic, thoroughly conversant with the interior lack of economy of most makes of automobiles. He had charge of the repair department of the Eureka Garage, New Haven, where my not-too-robust touring car of those primitive days spent, during the spring of 1907, many weeks of interesting and expensive invalidism. I forget how many major operations it underwent. It was not at the Eureka Garage, however, that I first met Bob Blake. Nine years before I there found him again, I had defended him in court--as it happens, successfully--on a charge of assault with intent to kill. That was almost my first case, and not far--thank heaven--from my last. Bob's defense, I remember, was assigned to me by a judge who had once borrowed fifty dollars from my father, which he never repaid; at least, not in cash. There are more convenient methods. True, my father was no longer living at the time I was appointed to defend Bob; but that is a detail. Susan was then four years old. I can't say I recall her, if I even laid eyes on her. But Mrs. Bob appeared as a witness, at my request--it was all but her final appearance, poor woman; she died of an embolism within a week--and I remember she told the court that a kinder husband and father than Bob had never existed. I remember, too, that the court pursed its lips and the gentlemen of the jury grinned approvingly, for Mrs. Bob could not easily conceal something very like the remains of a purple eye, which she attributed to hearing a suspicious noise one night down cellar, a sort of squeaking noise, and to falling over the cat on her tour of investigation--with various circumstantial _minutiæ_ of no present importance. The important thing is, that Bob went scot-free and was as nearly grateful as his temperament permitted. His assault--with an umbrella stand--had been upon a fellow reveller of no proved worth to the community, and perhaps this may have influenced the jury's unexpected verdict. Of Susan herself my first impression was gained at the Eureka Garage. Bob Blake, just then, was lying beneath my car, near which I hovered listening to his voluble but stereotyped profanity. He had lost the nut from a bolt, and, unduly constricted, sought it vainly, while his tongue followed the line of least resistance. I was marveling at the energy of his wrath and the poverty of his imagination, when I became aware of a small being beside me, in plaid calico. She had eager black eyes--terrier's eyes--in a white, whimsical little face. One very long and very thin black pigtail dangled over her left shoulder and down across her flat chest to her waist, where it was tied with a shoe string and ended lankly, without even the semblance of a curl. In her right hand she bore a full dinner pail, and with her left thumb she pointed toward the surging darkness beneath my car. "Say, mister, please," said the small being, "if I was to put this down, would you mind telling him his dinner's come?" "Not a bit," I responded. "Are you Bob's youngster?" "I'm Susan Blake," she answered; and very softly placed the dinner pail on the step of the car. "Why don't you wait and see your father?" I suggested. "He'll come up for air in a minute." "That's why I'm going now," said Susan. Whereupon she gave a single half skip--the very ghost of a skip--then walked demurely from me and out through the great door. II Bob Blake, in those days, lived in a somewhat dilapidated four-room house, off toward the wrong end of Birch Street. His family arrangements were peculiar. He had never married again; but not very long after his wife's death a dull-eyed, rather mussy young woman, with a fondness for rouge pots, had taken up her abode with him--to the scandal and fascination of the neighborhood. It was an outrage, of course! With a child in the house, too! Something ought to be done about it! Yet, oddly enough, nothing that much worried Bob ever was done about it, reckoning the various shocked-and-grieved forms of conversation as nothing. As he never tired of asserting, Bob didn't give a damn for the cackle of a lot of hens. He guessed he knew his way about; and so did Pearl. Let the damned hens cackle their heads off; he was satisfied! And so, eventually, I am forced to believe, were the hens. In the earlier days of the scandal there was much clitter-clatter of having the law on him, serving papers, and the like; but, as hen cackle sometimes will, it came to precisely naught. Nor am I certain that, as the years passed, the neighborhood did not grow a little proud of its one crimson patch of wickedness; I am reasonably certain, indeed, that more than one drab life took on a little borrowed flush of excitement from its proximity. Of course no decent, God-fearing woman would ever greet either Bob or Pearl; but every time one passed either of them without a nod or a "How's things to-day?" it gave one something to talk about, at home, or over any amicable fence. As for the men, they too were forbidden to speak; but men, most of them, are unruly creatures if at large. You can't trust them safely five minutes beyond the sound of your voice. There was even one man, old Heinze, proprietor of the Birch Street grocery store, who now and then cautiously put forth a revolutionary sentiment. "Dey lifs alvays togedder--like man unt vife--nod? Vere iss der diffurunz, Mrs. Shay?" "Shame on you for _them_ words, Mr. Heinze!" "_Aber_"--with a slow, wide smile--"vere iss der diffurunz, Mrs. Shay? I leaf id to you?" That Pearl and Bob lived always together cannot be denied, and perhaps they also lived as some men and their lawful wives are accustomed to live--off toward the wrong end of city streets; and occasionally, no doubt, toward the right end of them as well. Midweek, things wore along dully enough, but over Sunday came drink and ructions. Susan says she has never been able to understand why Sunday happens to be called a day of rest. The day of arrest, she was once guilty of naming it. Bob's neighbors, I fear, were not half so scandalized by his week-end drunkenness as by what Mrs. Perkins--three doors nearer the right end of Birch Street--invariably called his "brazen immorality." Intoxication was not a rare vice in that miscellaneous block or two of factory operatives. Nor can it be said that immorality, in the sense of Mrs. Perkins, was so much rare as it was nervously concealed. The unique quality of Bob's sin lay in its brazen element; that was what stamped him peculiarly as a social outlaw. Bob accepted this position, if sober, with a grim disregard. He had a bitter, lowering nature at best, and when not profane was taciturn. As for Pearl, social outlawry may be said to have been her native element. She had a hazy mind in a lazy body, and liked better than most things just to sit in a rocking-chair and polish her finger nails, as distinguished from cleaning them. Only the guiltless member of this family group really suffered from its low social estate, but she suffered acutely. Little Susan could not abide being a social outlaw. True, she was not always included in the general condemnation of her family by the grown-ups; but the children were ruthless. They pointed fingers, and there was much conscious giggling behind her back; while some of the daintier little girls--the very little girls whom Susan particularly longed to chum with--had been forbidden to play with "that child," and were not at all averse to telling her so, flatly, with tiny chins in air and a devastating expression of rectitude on their smug little faces. At such times Susan would fight back impending cataracts, stick her own freckled nose toward the firmament, and even, I regret to say, if persistently harassed, thrust forth a rigid pink tongue. This, Susan has since informed me, is the embryonic state of "swearing like anything." The little boys, on the whole, were better. They often said cruel things, but Susan felt that they said them in a quite different spirit from their instinctively snobbish and Grundyish sisters--said them merely by way of bravado, or just for the fun of seeing whether or not she would cry. And then they often let her join in their games, and on those happy occasions treated her quite as an equal, with an impartial and, to Susan, entirely blissful roughness. Susan early decided that she liked boys much better than girls. There was, for example, Jimmy Kane, whose widowed mother took in washing, and so never had any time to clean up her huddled flat, over Heinze's grocery store, or her family of four--two boys and two girls. No one ever saw skin, as in itself it really is, on the faces of Mrs. Kane's children, and Jimmy was always, if comparison be possible, the grimiest of the brood. For some reason Jimmy always had a perpetual slight cold, and his funny flat button of a nose wept, winter and summer alike, though never into an unnecessary handkerchief. His coat-sleeve served, even if its ministrations did not add to the tidiness of his countenance. Susan often wished she might scrub him, just to see what he really looked like; for she idolized Jimmy. Not that Jimmy ever had paid any special attention to her, except on one occasion. It was merely that he accepted her as part of the human scheme of things, which in itself would almost have been enough to win Susan's affectionate admiration. But one day, as I have hinted, he became the god of her idolatry. The incident is not precisely idyllic. A certain Joe--Giuseppe Gonfarone; _ætat._ 14--whose father peddled fruit and vegetables, had recently come into the neighborhood; a black-curled, brown-eyed little devil, already far too wise in the manifold unseemliness of this sad old planet. Joe was strong, stocky, aggressive, and soon posed as something of a bully among the younger boys along Birch Street. Within less than a month he had infected the minds of many with a new and rich vocabulary of oaths and smutty words. Joe was not of the unconsciously foul-mouthed; he relished his depravity. In fact, youngster as he was, Joe had in him the makings of that slimiest product of our cities--the street pimp, or cadet. It was one fine spring day, three years or so before I met Susan in the Eureka Garage, that Joe, with a group of Birch Street boys, was playing marbles for keeps, just at the bottom of the long incline which carries Birch Street down to the swamp land and general dump at the base of East Rock. Susan was returning home from Orange Street, after bearing her father his full dinner pail, and as she came up to the boys she halted on one foot, using the toe of her free foot meanwhile to scratch mosquito bites upward along her supporting shin. "H'lo, Susan!" called Jimmy Kane, with his perfunctory good nature. "What's bitin' you?" Then it was his turn to knuckle-down. Susan, still balanced cranelike, watched him eager-eyed, and was so delighted when he knocked a fine fat reeler of Joe's out of the ring, jumping up with a yell of triumph to pocket it, that she too gave a shrill cheer: "Oh, goody! I knew you'd win!" The note of ecstasy in her tone infuriated Joe. "Say!" he shrieked. "You getta hell outta here!" Susan's smile vanished; her white, even teeth--she had all her front ones, she tells me; she was ten--clicked audibly together. "It's no business of yours!" she retorted. "You're right; it ain't!" This from Jimmy, still in high good humor. "You stay here if you want. You're as good as him!" "Who's as good as me?" "She is!" "_Her?_" Joe's lips curled back. He turned to the other boys, who had all scrambled to their feet by this time and, instinctively scenting mischief, were standing in a sort of ring. "He says she's good as me!" Two of the smallest boys tittered, from pure excitement. Susan's nose went up. "I'm better. I'm not a dago!" Joe leaped toward Susan and thrust his dense, bull-like head forward, till his eyes were glaring into hers. "Mebbe I live lika you--eh? Mebbe I live," cried Joe, "with a dirty _whore_!" There was a gasp from the encircling boys as Susan fell back from this word, which she did not wholly comprehend, but whose vileness she felt, somehow, in her very flesh. Joe, baring gorilla teeth, burst into coarse jubilation. It was just at this point that Jimmy Kane, younger than Joe by a year or more, and far slighter, jumped on the little ruffian--alas, from behind!--and dealt him as powerful a blow on the head as he could compass; a blow whose effectiveness, I reluctantly admit, was enhanced by the half brick with which Jimmy had first of all prudently provided himself. Joe Gonfarone went to earth, inert, but bleeding profusely. There was a scuttling of frightened feet in every direction. Susan herself did not stop running until she reached the very top of the Birch Street incline. Then she looked back, her eyes lambent, her heart throbbing, not alone from the rapid ascent. Yes, there was Jimmy--_her_ Jimmy!--kneeling in the dust by the still prostrate Joe. Susan could not hear him, but she knew somehow from his attitude that he was scared to death, and that he was asking Joe if he was hurt much. She agonized with her champion, feeling none the less proud of him, and she waited for him at the top of the rise, hoping to thank him, longing to kiss his hands. But Jimmy, when he did pass her, went by without a glance, at top speed. He was bound for a doctor. So Susan never really managed to thank Jimmy at all. She merely idolized him in secret, a process which proved, however, fairly heart-warming and, in the main, satisfactory. It took three stitches to mend Joe's head--a fact famous in the junior annals of Birch Street for some years--and soon after he appeared, somewhat broken in spirit, in the street again, his parents moved him, Margharita and the sloe-eyed twins to Bridgeport--very much, be it admitted, to the relief of Jimmy Kane, who had lived for three weeks nursing a lonely fear of dark reprisals. III There was one thing about Bob Blake's four-room house--it exactly fitted his family. The floor plan was simple and economically efficient. Between the monolithic door slab--relic of a time when Bob's house had been frankly "in the country"--and the public street lay a walk formed of a single plank supported on chance-set bricks. From the door slab one stepped through the front doorway directly into the parlor. Beyond the parlor lay the kitchen, from which one could pass out through a narrow door to a patch of weed-grown back yard. A ladderlike stair led up from one side of the kitchen, opposite to the single window and the small coal range. At the top of the stair was a slit of unlighted hallway with a door near either end of it. The door toward Birch Street gave upon the bedroom occupied by Bob and Pearl; the rearward door led to Susan's sternly ascetic cubiculum. No one of these four rooms could be described as spacious, but the parlor and Bob's bedroom may have been twelve by fifteen or thereabouts. Susan's quarters were a scant ten by ten. The solider and more useful pieces of furniture in the house belonged to the régime of Susan's mother--the great black-walnut bed which almost filled the front bedroom; Susan's single iron cot frame; the parlor table with its marble top; the melodeon; the kitchen range; and the deal table in the kitchen, upon which, impartially, food was prepared and meals were served. To these respectable properties Pearl had added from time to time certain other objects of interest or art. Thus, in the parlor, there was a cane rocking-chair, gilded; and on the wall above the melodeon hung a banjo suspended from a nail by a broad sash of soiled blue ribbon. On the drumhead of the banjo someone had painted a bunch of nondescript flowers, and Pearl always claimed these as her own handiwork, wrought in happier days. This was her one eagerly contested point of pride; for Bob, when in liquor, invariably denied the possibility of her ever having painted "that there bouquet." This flat denial was always the starting point for those more violent Sunday-night quarrels, which had done so much to reduce the furniture of the house to its stouter, more imperishable elements. During the brief interval between the death of Susan's mother and the arrival of Pearl, Bob had placed his domestic affairs in the hands of an old negro-woman, who came in during the day to clean up, keep an eye on Susan and prepare Bob's dinner. Most of the hours during Bob's absence this poor old creature spent in a rocking-chair, nodding in and out of sleep; and it was rather baby Susan, sprawling about the kitchen floor, who kept an eye on her, than the reverse. Pearl's installation had changed all that. Bob naturally expected any woman he chose to support to work for her board and lodging; and it may be that at first Pearl had been too grateful for any shelter to risk jeopardizing her good luck by shirking. There seems to be no doubt that for a while she did her poor utmost to keep house--but the sloven in her was too deeply rooted not to flower. By the time Susan was six or seven the interior condition of Bob's house was too crawlingly unpleasant to bear exact description; and even Bob, though callous enough in such matters, began to have serious thoughts of giving Pearl the slip--not to mention his landlord--and of running off with Susan to some other city, where he could make a fresh start and perhaps contrive now and then to get something decent to eat set before him. It never occurred to him to give Susan the slip as well--which would have freed his hands; not because he had a soft spot somewhere for the child, nor because he felt toward her any special sense of moral obligation. Simply, it never occurred to him. Susan was his kid; and if he went she went with him, along with his pipe, his shop tools, and his set of six English razors--his dearest possession, of which he was jealously and irascibly proud. But, as it happens, Bob never acted upon this slowly forming desire to escape; the desire was quietly checked and insensibly receded; and for this Susan herself was directly responsible. Very early in life she began to supplement Pearl's feeble housewifery, but it was not until her ninth year that Susan decided to bring about a domestic revolution. Whether or no hatred of dirt be inheritable, I leave to biologists, merely thumbnailing two facts for their consideration: Susan's mother had hated dirt with an unappeasable hatred; her nightly, after-supper, insensate pursuit of imaginary cobwebs had been one of Bob's choicest grievances against her. And little Susan hated dirt, in all its forms, with an almost equal venom, but with a brain at once more active and more unreeling. She had good reason to hate it. She must either have hated it or been subdued to it. For five years, more or less, she had lived in the midst of dirt and suffered. It had seemed to her one of the inexpungable evils of existence, like mosquitoes, or her father's temper, or the smell of Pearl's cheap talcum powder when warmed by the fumes of cooking cabbage. But gradually it came upon her that dirt only accumulated in the absence of a will to removal. Once her outreaching mind had grasped--without wordily formulating--this physical and moral law, her course was plain. Since the will to removal was dormant or missing in Pearl, she must supply it. Within the scope of her childish strength, she did supply it. Susan insists that it took her two years merely to overcome the handicap of Pearl's neglect. Her self-taught technique was faulty; proper tools were lacking. There was a bucket which, when filled, she could not lift; a broom that tripped her; high corners she could not reach--corners she had to grow up to, even with the aid of a chair. But in the end she triumphed. By the time she was thirteen--she was thirteen when I first saw in the Eureka Garage--Bob's four rooms were spotless six and one-half days out of every seven. Even Pearl, in her flaccid way, approved the change. "It beats hell," she remarked affably to Bob one night, "how that ugly little monkey likes to scrub things. She's a real help to me, that child is. But no comp'ny. And she's a sight." "Well," growled Bob, "she comes by that honest. So was the old woman." They were annoyed when Susan, sitting by them, for the first time within their memory burst into flooding, uncontrollable tears. IV I should probably, in my own flaccid way, have lost all track of Susan, if it had not been for certain ugly things that befell in Bob's four-room house one breathless evening--June twentieth of the year 1907. It is a date stamped into my consciousness like a notarial seal. For one thing it happened to be my birthday--my thirty-third, which I was not precisely celebrating, since it was also the anniversary of the day my wife had left me, two years before. Nor was I entirely pleased to have become, suddenly, thirty-three. I counted it the threshold of middle-age. Now that eleven years have passed, and with them my health and the world's futile pretense at peace, I am feeling younger. This book is about Susan, but it will be simpler if you know something, too, concerning her scribe. Fortunately there is not much that it will be needful to tell. I was--in those bad, grossly comfortable old days--that least happy of Nature's experiments, a man whose inherited income permitted him to be an idler, and whose tastes urged him to write precious little essays about precious little for the more precious reviews. My half-hearted attempt to practice law I had long abandoned. I lived in a commodious, inherited mansion on Hillhouse Avenue--an avenue which in all fairness must be called aristocratic, since it has no wrong end to it. It is right at both ends, so, naturally, though broad, it is not very long. My grandfather, toward the end of a profitably ill-spent life, built this mansion of sad-colored stone in a somewhat mixed Italian style; my father filled it with expensive and unsightly movables--the spoils of a grand European tour; and I, in my turn, had emptied it of these treasures and refilled it with my own carefully chosen collection of rare furniture, rare Oriental carpets, rare first editions, and costly _objets d'art_. This collection I then anxiously believed, and do still in part believe, to be beautiful--though I am no longer haunted by an earlier fear lest the next generation should repudiate my taste and reverse my opinion. Let the auction rooms of 1960 decide. Neither in flesh nor in spirit shall I attend them. The tragi-comedy of my luckless marriage I shall not stop here to explain, but its rather mysterious ending had at first largely cut me off from my old family friends and my socially correct acquaintances. When Gertrude left me, their sympathies, or their sense of security, went with her. I can hardly blame them. There had been no glaring scandal, but the fault was inferentially mine. To speak quite brutally, I did not altogether regret their loss. Too many of them had bored me for too many years. I was glad to rely more on the companionship of certain writers and painters which my scribbling had quietly won for me, here and in France. I traveled about a good deal. When at home, I kept my guest rooms filled--often, in the horrid phrase, with "visitors of distinction." In this way I became a social problem, locally, of some magnitude. Visitors of distinction--even when of eccentric distinction--cannot easily be ignored in a university town. Thus it made it a little awkward, perhaps, that I should so often prove to be their host; a little--less, on the whole, than one would suppose. Within two years--just following Ballou's brief stay with me, on his way to introduce that now forgotten nine-days wonder, Polymorphous Prose, among initiates of the Plymouth Rock Poetry Guild, at Boston--my slight remaining ineligibility was tacitly and finally ignored. The old family friends began to hint that Gertrude, though a splendid woman, had always been a little austere. Possibly there were faults on both sides. One never knew. And it was just at this hour of social reëstablishment that my birthday swung round again, for the thirty-third time, and brought with it a change in my outer life which was to lead on to even greater changes in all my modes of thinking and feeling. Odd, that a drunken quarrel in a four-room house toward the wrong end of Birch Street could so affect the destiny of a luxurious _dilettante_, living at the very center of bonded respectability, in a mansion of sad-colored stone, on a short broad avenue which is right at both ends! V "Never in this (obviously outcast) world!" grumbled Bob Blake, bringing his malletlike fist down on the marble top of the parlor table. The blow made his half-filled glass jump and clinkle; so he emptied it slowly, then poured in four fingers more, forgetting to add water this time, and sullenly pushed the bottle across to Pearl. But Pearl was fretful. Her watery blue eyes were fixed upon the drumhead of the banjo, where it hung suspended above the melodeon. "I did so paint them flowers. And well you know it. What's the good of bein' so mean? If you wasn't heeled you'd let me have it my way. Didn't I bring that banjo with me?" "Hungh! Say you did. What does that prove?" "I guess it proves somethin', all right." "Proves you swiped it, likely." "Me! I ain't that kind, thanks." "The hell you ain't." "If you're tryin' to get gay, cut it out!" "Not me." "Well, then--quit!" This was shortly after supper. It was an unusually hot, humid evening; doors and windows stood open to no purpose; and Susan was sitting out on the monolithic door slab, fighting off mosquitoes. She found that this defensive warfare partly distracted her from the witless, interminable bickering within. Moreover, the striated effluvia of whisky, talcum powder, and perspiration had made her head feel a little queer. By comparison, the fetid breath from the exposed mud banks of the salt marsh was almost refreshing. Possibly it was because her head did feel a little queer that Susan began presently to wonder about things. Between her days at the neighboring public school and her voluntary rounds of housework, Susan had not of late years had much waking time to herself. In younger and less crowded hours, before her father had been informed by the authorities that he must either send his child to school or take the consequences, Susan had put in all her spare moments at wondering. She would see a toad in the back yard, for example, under a plantain leaf, and she would begin to wonder. She would wonder what it felt like to be a toad. And before very long something would happen to her, inside, and she would _be_ a toad. She would have toad thoughts and toad feelings.... There would stretch above her a dim, green, balancing canopy--the plantain leaf. All about her were soaring, translucent fronds--the grass. It was cool there under the plantain leaf; but she was enormously fat and ugly, her brain felt like sooty cobwebs, and nobody loved her. Still, she didn't care much. She could feel her soft gray throat, like a blown-into glove finger, pulsing slowly--which was almost as soothing a sensation as letting the swing die down. It made her feel as if Someone--some great unhappy cloudlike Being--were making up a song, a song about most everything; chanting it sleepily to himself--or was it _herself_?--somewhere; and as if she were part of this beautiful, unhappy song. But all the time she knew that if that white fluffy restlessness--that moth miller--fluttered only a little nearer among those golden-green fronds, she knew if it reached the cool rim of her plantain shade, she knew, then, that something terrible would happen to her--knew that something swift and blind, that she couldn't help, would coil deep within her like a spring and so launch her forward, open-jawed. It was awful--awful for the moth miller--but she couldn't _not_ do it. She was a toad.... And it was the same with her father. There were things he couldn't not do. She could be--sitting very still in a corner--_be_ her father, when he was angry; and she knew he couldn't help it. It was just a dark slow whirling inside, with red sparks flying swiftly out from it. And it hurt while it lasted. Being her father like that always made her sorry for him. But she wished, and she felt he must often wish, that he couldn't be at all. There were lots of live things that would be happier if they weren't live things; and _if_ they weren't, Susan felt, the great cloudlike Being would be less unhappy too. Naturally, I am giving you Susan's later interpretations of her pre-schoolday wonderings; and a number of you would gasp a little, knowing what firm, delicate imaginings all Susan Blake's later interpretations were, if I should give you her pen name as well--which I have promised myself not to do. This is not an official study of a young writer of peculiar distinction; it is merely an unpretending book about a little girl I knew and a young married woman I still know--one and the same person. It is what I have named it--that only: _The Book of Susan_. Meanwhile, this humid June night--to the sordid accompaniment of Bob and Pearl snarling at each other half-drunkenly within--Susan waits for us on the monolithic door slab; and there is a new wonder in her dizzy little head. I can't do better than let her tell you in her own words what this new wonder was like. "Ambo, dear"--my name, by the way, is Ambrose Hunt; Captain Hunt, of the American Red Cross, at the present writing, which I could date from a sleepy little village in Southern France--"Ambo, dear, it was the moon, mostly. There was a pink bud of light in the heat mist, way off beyond East Rock, and then the great wild rose of the moon opened slowly through it. Papa, inside, was sounding just like a dog when he's bullying another dog, walking up on the points of his toes, stiff legged, round him. So I tried to escape, tried to be the moon; tried to feel floaty and shining and beautiful, and--and remote. But I couldn't manage it. I never could make myself be anything not alive. I've tried to be stones, but it's no good. It won't work. I can be trees--a little. But usually I have to be animals, or men and women--and of course they're animals too. "So I began wondering why I liked the moon, why just looking at it made me feel happy. It couldn't talk to me; or love me. All it could do was to be up there, sometimes, and shine. Then I remembered about mythology. Miss Chisholm, in school, was always telling us about gods and goddesses. She said we were children, so we could recreate the gods for ourselves, because they belonged to the child age of the world. She talked like that a lot, in a faded-leaf voice, and none of us ever understood her. The truth is, Ambo, we never paid any attention to her; she smiled too much and too sadly, without meaning it; and her eyelashes were white. All the same, that night somehow I remembered Artemis, the virgin moon goddess, who slipped silently through dark woods at dusk, hunting with a silvery bow. Being a virgin seemed to mean that you didn't care much for boys. But I did always like boys better than girls, so I decided I could never be a virgin. And yet I loved the thought of Artemis from that moment. I began to think about her--oh, intensely!--always keeping off by herself; cool, and shining, and--and detached. And there was one boy she _had_ cared for; I remembered that, too, though I couldn't remember his name. A naked, brown sort of boy, who kept off by himself on blue, distant hills. So Artemis wasn't really a virgin at all. She was just--awfully particular. She liked clean, open places, and the winds, and clear, swift water. What she hated most was _stuffiness_! That's why I decided then and there, Ambo, that Artemis should be my goddess, my own pet goddess; and I made up a prayer to her. I've never forgotten it. I often say it still.... _Dearest, dearest Far-Away, Can you hear me when I pray? Can you hear me when I cry? Would you care if I should die? No, you wouldn't care at all; But I love you most of all._ "It isn't very good, Ambo, but it's the first rhyme I ever made up out of my own head. And I just talked it right off to Artemis without any trouble. But I had hardly finished it, when----" What had happened next was the crash of glassware, followed by Bob's thick voice, bellowing: "C'm ba' here! Damned slut! Tell yeh t' c'm ba' an'--an' 'pol'gize!" Susan heard a strangling screech from Pearl, the jar of a heavy piece of furniture overturned. The child's first impulse was to run out into Birch Street and scream for help. She tells me her spine knew all at once that something terrible had happened--or was going to happen. Then, in an odd flash of hallucination, she saw _Artemis_ poised the fleetingest second before her--beautiful, a little disdainful, divinely unafraid. So Susan gulped, dug her nails fiercely into her palms, and hurried back through the parlor into the kitchen, where she stumbled across the overturned table and fell, badly bruising her cheek. As she scrambled to her feet a door slammed to, above. Her father, in a grotesque crouching posture, was mounting the ladderlike stair. On the floor at the stair's foot lay the parchment head of Pearl's banjo, which he had cut from its frame. Susan distinctly caught the smudged pinks and blues of the nondescript flowers. She realized at once that her father was bound on no good errand. And Pearl was trapped. Susan called to her father, daringly, a little wildly. He slued round to her, leaning heavily on the stair rail, his face green-white, his lips held back by some evil reflex in a fixed, appalling grin. It was the face of a madman.... He raised his right hand, slowly, and a tiny prismatic gleam darted from the blade of an opened razor--one of his precious set of six. He had evidently used it to destroy the banjo head, which he would never have done in his right mind. But now he made a shocking gesture with the blade, significant of other uses; then turned, crouching once more, to continue upward. Susan tried to cry out, tried to follow him, until the room slid from its moorings into a whirlpool of humming blackness.... * * * * * That is all Susan remembers for some time. It is just as well. VI What Susan next recalls is an intense blare of light, rousing her from her nothingness, like trumpets. Her immediate confused notion was that the gates of hell had been flung wide for her; and when a tall black figure presently cut across the merciless rays and towered before her, she thought it must be the devil. But the intense blare came from the head lights of my touring car, and the tall black devil was I. A greatly puzzled and compassionate devil I was too! Maltby Phar--that exquisite anarchist--was staying with me, and we had run down to the shore for dinner, hoping to mitigate the heat by the ride, and my new sensation of frustrate middle-age by broiled live lobsters. It was past eleven. I had just dropped Maltby at the house and had run my car round to the garage where Bob worked, meaning to leave it there overnight so Bob could begin patching at it the first thing in the morning. It had been bucking its way along on three cylinders or less all day. Bob's garage lay back from the street down a narrow alley. Judge, then, of my astonishment as I nosed my car up to its shut double doors! There, on the concrete incline before the doors, lay a small crumpled figure, half-curled, like an unearthed cut-worm, about a shining dinner pail. I brought the car to a sudden dead stop. The small figure partly uncrumpled, and a white, blinded little face lifted toward me. It was Bob's youngster! What was she up to, lying there on the ribbed concrete at this time of night? And in heaven's name--why the dinner pail? I jumped down to investigate. "You're Susan Blake, aren't you?" "Yes"--with a whispered gasp--"your Royal Highness." Susan says she doesn't know just why she addressed the devil in that way, unless she was trying to flatter him and so get round him. "I'm not so awfully bad," she went on, "if you don't count thinking things too much!" The right cheek of her otherwise delicately modeled child's face was a swollen lump of purple and green. I dropped down on one knee beside her. "Why, you poor little lady! You're hurt!" Instantly she sprang to her feet, wild-eyed. "No, no! It's not me--it's Pearl! Oh, quick--please! He had a razor!" "Razor? _Who_ did?" I seized her hands. "I'm Mr. Hunt, dear. Your father often works on my car. Tell me what's wrong!" She was still half dazed. "I--I can't see why I'm down here--with papa's dinner pail. Pearl was upstairs, and I tried to stop him from going." Then she began to whimper like a whipped puppy. "It's all mixed. I'm scared." "Of course--of course you are; but it's going to be all right." I led her to the car and lifted her to the front seat. "Hold on a minute, Susan. I'll be back with you in less than no time!" I sounded my horn impatiently. After an interval, a slow-footed car washer inside the garage began trundling the doors back to admit me. I ran to him. No. Bob, he left at six, same as usual. He hadn't been round since.... His kid, eh? Mebbe the heat had turned her queer. Nuff to addle most folks, the heat was.... I saw that he knew nothing, and snapped him off with a sharp request to crank the car for me. As he did so, I jumped in beside Susan. "Where do you live, Susan? Oh, yes, of course--Birch Street. Bob told me that.... Eh? You don't want to go home?" "Never, please. Never, never! I _won't_!" Proclaiming this, she flung Bob's dinner pail from her and it bounced and clattered down the asphalt. "It's too late," she added, in a frightened whisper: "I know it is!" Then she seized my arm--thereby almost wrecking us against a fire hydrant--and clung to me, sobbing. I was puzzled and--yes--alarmed. Bob was a bad customer. The child's bruised face ... something she had said about a razor----? And instantly I made up my mind. "I'll take you to my house, Susan. Mrs. Parrot"--Mrs. Parrot was my housekeeper--"will fix you up for to-night. Then I'll go round and see Bob; see what's wrong." I felt her thin fingers dig into my arm convulsively. "Yes," I reassured her, taking a corner perilously at full speed, "that will be much better. You'll like Mrs. Parrot." Rather recklessly, I hoped this might prove to be true; for Mrs. Parrot was a little difficult at times.... It was Maltby Phar who saw me coming up the steps with a limp child in my arms, and who opened the screen door for me. "Aha!" he exclaimed. "Done it this time, eh! Always knew you would, sooner or later. You're too damned absent-minded to drive a car. You----" "Nonsense!" I struck in. "Tell Mrs. Parrot to ring up Doctor Stevens. Then send her to me." And I continued on upstairs with Susan. When Mrs. Parrot came, Susan was lying with closed eyes in the middle of a great white embroidered coverlet, upon which her shoes had smeared greasy, permanent-looking stains. "Mercy," sighed Mrs. Parrot, "if you've killed the poor creature, nobody's sorrier than I am! But why couldn't you have laid her down on the floor? She wouldn't have known." In certain respects Mrs. Parrot was invaluable to me; but then and there I suspected that Mrs. Parrot would, in the not-too-distant future, have to go. Within five minutes Doctor Stevens arrived, and, after hurried explanations, Maltby and I left him in charge--and then made twenty-five an hour to Birch Street. However, Susan's intuitions had been correct. We found Bob's four-room house quite easily. It was the house with the crowd in front of it.... We were an hour too late. "Cut her throat clean acrost; and his own after," shrilled Mrs. Perkins to us--Mrs. Perkins, who lived three doors nearer the right end of Birch Street. "But it's only what was to be looked for, and I guess it'll be a lesson to some. You can't expect no better end than that," perorated Mrs. Perkins to us and her excited neighbors, while her small gray-green eyes snapped with electric malice, "you can't expect no better end than that to sech _brazen_ immorality!" "My God," groaned Maltby, as we sped away, "How they have enjoyed it all! Why, you almost ruined the evening for them when you told them you'd found the child! They were hoping to discover her body in the cellar or down the well. Ugh! What a world! "By the way," he added, as we turned once more into the dignified breadth of Hillhouse Avenue, "what'll you do with the homely little brat? Put her in some kind of awful institution?" The bland tone of his assumption irritated me. I ground on the brakes. "Certainly not! I like her. If she returns the compliment, and her relatives don't claim her, she'll stay on here with me." "Hum. Bravo.... About two weeks," said Maltby Phar. THE SECOND CHAPTER I IT was not Susan who left me at the end of two weeks; it was Mrs. Parrot. Maltby had departed within three days, hastening perforce to editorial duties in New York. He then edited, with much furtive groaning to sympathetic friends, the _Garden Exquisite_, a monthly magazine _de luxe_, devoted chiefly to advertising matter, and to photographs taken--by request of far-seeing wives and daughters--at the country clubs and on the country estates of our minor millionaires. For a philosophical anarch, rather a quaint occupation! Yet one must live.... Maltby, however, had threatened a return as soon as possible, "to look over the piteous _débâcle_." There was no probability that Mrs. Parrot would ever return. "You cannot expect me," maintained Mrs. Parrot, "to wait on the child of a murdering suicide. Especially," she added, "when he was nothing but a common sort of man to begin with. I'm as sorry for that poor little creature as anybody in New Haven; but there are places for such." That was her ultimatum. My reply was two weeks' notice, and a considerable monetary gift to soften the blow. Hillhouse Avenue, in general, so far as I could discover, rather sympathized with Mrs. Parrot. She at once obtained an excellent post, becoming housekeeper for the Misses Carstairs, spinster sisters of incredible age, who lived only two doors from me in a respectable mansion whose portico resembled an Egyptian tomb. Wandering freshmen from the Yale campus frequently mistook it for the home office of one of the stealthier secret societies. There, silently ensconced, Mrs. Parrot burned with a hard, gemlike flame, and awaited my final downfall. So did the Misses Carstairs, who, being cousins of my wife, had remained firmly in opposition. And rumor had it that other members of neighboring families were suffering discomfort from the proximity of Susan. It was as if a tiny, almost negligible speck of coal dust had blown into the calm, watchful eye of the _genius loci_, and was gradually inflaming it--with resultant nervous irritation to all its members. Susan was happily unconscious of these things. Her gift of intuition had not yet projected itself into that ethereal region which conserves the more tenuous tone and the subtler distinction--denominate "society." For the immediate moment she was bounded in a nutshell, yet seemed to count herself a princess of infinite space--yes, in spite of bad dreams. We--Doctor Stevens and I--had put her to bed in the large, coolly distinguished corner room formerly occupied by Gertrude. This room opened directly into my own. Doctor Stevens counselled bed for a few days, and Susan seemed well content to obey his mandate. Meanwhile, I had requested Mrs. Parrot to buy various necessities for her--toothbrushes, nightdresses, day dresses, petticoats, and so on. Mrs. Parrot had supposed I should want the toilet articles inexpensive, and the clothing plain but good. "Good, by all means, Mrs. Parrot," I had corrected, "but not plain. As pretty and frilly as possible!" Mrs. Parrot had been inclined to argue the matter. "When that poor little creature goes from here," she had maintained, "flimsy, fussy things will be of no service to her. None. She'll need coarse, substantial articles that will bear usage." "Do you like to wear coarse, substantial articles, Mrs. Parrot?" I had mildly asked. "So far as I am permitted to observe----" Mrs. Parrot had resented the implication. "I hope in my outer person, Mr. Hunt, that I show a decent respect for my employers, but I've never been one to pamper myself on linjery, if I may use the word--not believing it wholesome. Nor to discuss it with gentlemen. But if I don't know what it's wisest and best to buy in this case, who," she had demanded of heaven, "does?" "Possibly," heaven not replying, had been my response, "_I_ do. At any rate, I can try." It was fun trying. I ran down on the eight o'clock to New York and strolled up and down Fifth Avenue, shopping here and there as the fancy moved me. Shopping--with a well-filled pocketbook--is not a difficult art. Women exaggerate its difficulties for their own malign purposes. In two hours of the most casual activity I had bought a great number of delightful things--for my little daughter, you know. Her age?... Oh, well--I should think about fourteen. Let's call it 'going on fourteen.' Then it's sure to be all right. It _was_ all right--essentially. By which I mean that the parties of the first and second parts--to wit, Susan and I--were entirely and blissfully satisfied. Susan liked particularly a lacy sort of nightgown all knotted over with little pink ribbony rosebuds; there was a coquettish boudoir cap to match it--suggestive somehow of the caps village maidens used to wear in old-fashioned comic operas; and a pink silk kimono embroidered with white chrysanthemums, to top off the general effect. Needless to say, Mrs. Parrot disapproved of the general effect, deeming it, no doubt with some reason, a thought flamboyant for Gertrude's coolly distinguished corner room. But Susan, propped straight up by now against pillows, wantoned in this finery. She would stroke the pink silk of the kimono with her thin, sensitive fingers, sigh deeply, happily, then close her eyes. There was nothing much wrong with her. The green-and-purple bruise on her cheek--a somber note which would not harmonize with the frivolity of the boudoir cap--was no longer painful. But, as Doctor Stevens put it, "The little monkey's all in." She was tired, tired out to the last tiny filament of her tiniest nerve.... During those first days with me she asked no awkward questions; and few of any kind. Indeed, she rarely spoke at all, except with her always-speaking black eyes. For the time being the restless-terrier-look had gone from them; they were quiet and deep, and said "_Thank you_," to Doctor Stevens, to Mrs. Parrot, to me, with a hundred modulating shades of expression. In spite of a clear-white, finely drawn face, against which the purple bruise stood out in shocking relief; in spite of entirely straight but gossamery black hair; in spite of a rather short nose and a rather wide mouth--there was a fascination about the child which no one, not even the hostile Mrs. Parrot, wholly escaped. "That poor, peeny little creature," admitted Mrs. Parrot, on the very morning she left me, "has a way of looking at you--so you can't talk to her like you'd ought to. It's somebody's duty to speak to her in a Christian spirit. She never says her prayers. Nor mentions her father. And don't seem to care what's happened to him, or why she's here, or what's to come to her. And what is to come to her," demanded Mrs. Parrot, "if she stays on in this house, without a God-fearing woman, and one you can't fool most days? Not that I could be persuaded, having made other arrangements. And if I may say a last word, the wild talk I've heard here isn't what I've been used to. Nor to be approved of. No vulgarity. None. I don't accuse. But free with matters better left to the church; or in the dark--where they belong. All I hold is, that some things are sacred, and some unmentionable; and conversation should take cognizance of such!" I had never known her so moved or so eloquent. I strove to reassure her. "You are quite right, Mrs. Parrot. I apologize for any painful moments my friends and I have given you. But don't worry too much about Susan. So far as Susan's concerned, I promise to 'take cognizance' in every possible direction." It was clear to me that I should have to expend a good deal of care upon engaging another housekeeper at once. And, of course, a governess--for lessons and things. And a maid? Yes; Susan would need a maid, if only to do her mending. Obviously, neither the housekeeper, the governess, nor I could be expected to take cognizance of that. II But I anticipate. Two weeks before Mrs. Parrot's peroration, on the very evening of the day Maltby Phar had left me, Susan and I had had our first good talk together. My memorable shopping tour had not yet come off, and Susan, having pecked birdlike at a very light supper, was resting--semi-recumbent--in bed, clothed in a suit of canary-yellow pajamas, two sizes too big for her, which I was rather shaken to discover belonged to Nora, my quiet little Irish parlor maid. I had not supposed that Nora indulged in night gear filched from musical comedy. However, Nora had meant to be kind in a good cause; though canary yellow is emphatically a color for the flushed and buxom and should never be selected for peeny, anemic little girls. It did make Susan look middling ghastly, as if quarantined from all access to Hygeia, the goddess! Perhaps that is why, when I perched beside her on the edge of Gertrude's colonial four-poster, I felt an unaccustomed prickling sensation back of my eyes. "How goes it, canary bird?" I asked, taking the thin, blue-threaded hand that lay nearest to me. Susan's fingers at once curled trustfully to mine, and there came something very like a momentary glimmer of mischief into her dark eyes. "If I was an honest-to-God canary, I could sing to you," said Susan. "I'd like to do something for you, Mr. Hunt. Something you'd like, I mean." "Well, you can, dear. You can stop calling me 'Mr. Hunt'! My first name's pretty awkward, though. It's Ambrose." For an instant Susan considered my first name, critically, then very slowly shook her head. "It's a nice name. It's _too_ nice, isn't it--for every day?" I laughed. "But it's all I have, Susan. What shall we do about it?" Then Susan laughed, too; it was the first time I had heard her laugh. "I guess your mother was feeling kind of stuck up when she called you that!" "Most mothers do feel kind of stuck up over their first babies, Susan." She considered this, and nodded assent, "But it's silly of them, anyway," she announced. "There are so many babies all the time, everywhere. There's nothing new about babies, Ambo." "Aha!" I exclaimed. "You knew from the first how to chasten my stuck-up name, didn't you? 'Ambo' is a delightful improvement." "It's more like you," said Susan, tightening her fingers briefly on mine. And presently she closed her eyes. When, after a long still interval, she opened them, they were cypress-shaded pools. "Tell me what happened, Ambo." "He's dead, Susan. Pearl's dead, too." She closed her eyes again, and two big tears slipped out from between her lids, wetting her thick eyelashes and staining her bruised and her pallid cheek. "He couldn't help it. He was made like that, inside. He was no damn good, Ambo. That's what he was always saying to Pearl--'You're no damn good.' She wasn't, either. And he wasn't, much. I guess it's better for him and Pearl to _be_ dead." This--and the two big tears--was her good-by to Bob, to Pearl, to the four-room house; her good-by to Birch Street. It shocked me at the time. I released her hand and stood up to light a cigarette--staring the while at Susan. Where had she found her precocious brains? And had she no heart? Had something of Bob's granitic harshness entered into this uncanny, this unnatural child? Should I live to regret my decision to care for her, to educate her? When I died, would she say--to whom?--"I guess it's better for him to _be_ dead. Poor Ambo! He was no damn good." But even as I shuddered, I smiled. For, after all, she was right; the child was right. She had merely uttered, truthfully, thoughts which a more conventional mind, more conventionally disciplined, would have known how to conceal--yes, to conceal even from itself. Genius was very like that. "Susan!" I suddenly demanded. "Have you any relatives who will try to claim you?" "Claim me?" "Yes. Want to take care of you?" "Mamma's sister-in-law lives in Hoboken," said Susan. "But she's a widow; and she's got seven already." "Would you like to stay here with me?" For all answer she flopped sidelong down from the pillows and hid her bruised face in the counterpane. Her slight, canary-clad shoulders were shaken with stifled weeping. "That settles it!" I affirmed. "I'll see my lawyer in the morning, and he'll get the court to appoint me your guardian. Come now! If you cry about it, I'll think you don't want me for guardian. Do you?" She turned a blubbered, wistful face toward me from the counterpane. Her eyes answered me. I leaned over, smoothed a pillow and slipped it beneath her tired head, then kissed her unbruised cheek and walked quietly back into my own room--where I rang for Mrs. Parrot. When she arrived, "Mrs. Parrot," I suggested, "please make Susan comfortable for the night, will you? And I'll appreciate it if you treat her exactly as you would my own child." It took Mrs. Parrot at least a minute to hit upon something she quite dared to leave with me. "Very well, Mr. Hunt. Not having an own child, and not knowing--you can say that. Not that it's the same thing, though you _do_ say it! But I'll make her comfortable--and time tells. In darker days, I hope you'll be able to say that poor, peeny little creature has done the same by you." "Thank you, Mrs. Parrot. Good-night." "A good night to you, Mr. Hunt," elaborated Mrs. Parrot, not without malice; "many of them, Mr. Hunt; many of them, I'm sure." III By the time Mrs. Parrot left us, housekeeper, governess, and maid had been obtained in New York through agencies of the highest respectability. Miss Goucher, the housekeeper, proved to be a tall, big-framed spinster, rising fifty; a capable, taciturn woman with a positive talent for minding her own affairs. She had bleak, light-gray eyes, a rudderlike nose, and a harsh, positive way of speech that was less disagreeable than it might have been, because she so seldom spoke at all. Having hoped for a more amiable presence, I was of two minds over keeping her; but she took charge of my house so promptly and efficiently, and effaced herself so thoroughly--a difficult feat for so definite a figure--that in the end there was nothing I could complain of; and so she stayed. Miss Disbrow on the other hand, who came as governess, was all that I had dared to wish for; a graceful, light-footed, soft-voiced girl--she was not yet thirty--with charming manners, a fluent command of the purest convent-taught French, a nice touch on the piano, and apparently some slight acquaintance with the solider branches. Merely to associate with Miss Disbrow would, I felt, do much for Susan. I was less certain about Sonia, the maid. I had asked for a middle-aged English maid. Sonia was Russian, and she was only twenty-three. But she was sent directly to me from service with Countess Dimbrovitski--formerly, as you know, Maud Hochstetter, of Omaha--and brought with her a most glowing reference for skill, honesty, and unfailing tact. Countess Dimbrovitski did not explain in the reference, dated from Newport, why she had permitted this paragon to slip from her; nor did it occur to me to investigate the point. But Sonia later explained it all, in intimate detail, to Susan--as we shall see. I had feared that Susan might be at first a little bewildered by the attentions of Sonia and of Miss Disbrow; so I explained the unusual situation to Miss Goucher and Miss Disbrow--with certain reservations--and asked them to make it clear to Sonia. Miss Goucher merely nodded, curtly enough, and said she understood. Miss Disbrow proved more curious and more voluble. "How wonderful of you, Mr. Hunt!" she exclaimed. "To take in a poor little waif and do all this for her! Personally, I count it a privilege to be allowed some share in so generous an action. Oh, but I do--I do. One likes to feel, even when forced to work for one's living, that one has some little opportunity to do good in the world. Life isn't," asked Miss Disbrow, "all money-grubbing and selfishness, is it?" And as I found no ready answer, she concluded: "But I need hardly ask that of you!" For the fleetingest second I found myself wondering whether Miss Disbrow, deep down in her hidden heart, might not be a minx. Yet her glance, the happiest mixture of frankness, timidity, and respectful admiration, disarmed me. I dismissed the unworthy suspicion as absurd. I was a little troubled, though, when Susan that same evening after dinner came to me in the library and seated herself on a low stool facing my easy-chair. "Ambo," she said, "I've been blind as blind, haven't I?" "Have you?" I responded. "For a blind girl, it's wonderful how you find your way about!" "But I'm not joking--and that's just it," said Susan. "What's wrong, dear?" I asked. "I see something is." "Yes. I am. The wrongest possible. I've just dumped myself on you, and stayed here; and--and I've no damn business here at all!" "I thought we were going to forget the damns and hells, Susan?" "We are," said Susan, coloring sharply and looking as if she wanted to cry. "But when you've heard them, and worse, every minute all your life--it's pretty hard to forget. You must scold me more!" Then with a swift movement she leaned forward and laid her cheek on my knee. "You're too good to me, Ambo. I oughtn't to be here--wearing wonderful dresses, having a maid to do my hair and--and polish me and button me and mend me. I wasn't meant to have an easy time; I wasn't born for it. First thing you know, Ambo, I'll get to thinking I was--and be mean to you somehow!" "I'll risk that, Susan." "Yes, but I oughtn't to let you. I could learn to be somebody's maid like Sonia; and if I study hard--and I'm going to!--some day I could be a governess like Miss Disbrow; only really know things, not just pretend. Or when I'm old enough, a housekeeper like Miss Goucher! That's what you should make me do--work for you! I can clean things better than Nora now; I never skip underneaths. Truly, Ambo, it's all wrong, my having people work for me--at your expense. I know it is! Miss Disbrow made it all clear as clear, right away." "What! Has Miss Disbrow been stuffing this nonsense into your head!" I was furious. "Oh, not in words!" cried Susan. "She talks just the other way. She keeps telling me how fortunate I am to have a guardian like you, and how I must be so careful never to annoy you or make you regret what you've done for me. Then she sighs and says life is very hard and unjust to many girls born with more advantages. Of course she means herself, Ambo. You see, she hates having to work at all. She's much nicer to look at and talk to, but she reminds me of Pearl. She's no damn--she's no good, Ambo dear. She's hard where she ought to be soft, and soft where she ought to be hard. She tries to get round people, so she can coax things out of them. But she'll never get round Miss Goucher, Ambo--or me." And Susan hesitated, lifting her head from my knee and looking up at me doubtfully, only to add, "I--I'm not so sure about _you_." "Indeed. You think, possibly, Miss Disbrow might get round me, eh?" "Well, she might--if I wasn't here," said Susan. "She might marry you." My explosion of laughter--I am ordinarily a quiet person--startled Susan. "Have I said something awful again?" she cried. "Dreadful!" I sputtered, wiping my eyes. "Why, you little goose! Don't you see how I need you? To plumb the depths for me--to protect me? I thought I was your guardian, Susan; but that's just my mannish complacency. I'm not your guardian at all, dear. You're mine." But I saw at once that my mirth had confused her, had hurt her feelings.... I reached out for her hands and drew her upon my knees. "Susan," I said, "Miss Disbrow couldn't marry me even if she got round me, and wanted to. You see, I have a wife already." Susan stared at me with wide, frightened eyes. "You have, Ambo? Where is she?" "She left me two years ago." "Left you?" It was evident that she did not understand. "Oh--what will she say when she comes home and finds _me_ here? She won't like it; she won't like me!" wailed Susan. "I know she won't." "Hush, dear. She's not coming home again. She made up her mind that she couldn't live with me any more." "What's her name?" "Gertrude." "Why couldn't she live with you, Ambo?" "She said I was cruel to her." "_Weren't_ you good to her, Ambo? Why? Didn't you like her?" The rapid questions were so unexpected, so searching, that I gasped. And my first impulse was to lie to Susan, to put her off with a few conventional phrases--phrases that would lead the child to suppose me a wronged, lonely, broken-hearted man. This would win me a sympathy I had not quite realized that I craved. But Susan's eyes were merciless, and I couldn't manage it. Instead, I surprised myself by blurting out: "That's about it, Susan. I didn't like her--enough. We couldn't hit it off, somehow. I'm afraid I wasn't very kind." Instantly Susan's thin arms went about my neck, and her cheek was pressed tight to mine. "Poor Ambo!" she whispered. "I'm so sorry you weren't kind. It must _hurt_ you so." Then she jumped from my knees. "Ambo!" she demanded. "Is my room--_her_ room? Is it?" "Certainly not. It isn't hers any more. She's never coming back, I tell you. She put me out of her life once for all; and God knows I've put her out of mine!" "If you can't let me have another room, Ambo--I'll have to go." "Why? Hang it all, Susan, don't be silly! Don't make difficulties where none exist! What an odd, overstrained child you are!" I was a little annoyed. "Yes," nodded Susan gravely, "I see now why Gertrude left you. But she must be awfully stupid not to know it's only your outside that's made like that!" Next morning, without a permissive word from me, Susan had Miss Goucher move all her things to a small bedroom at the back of the house, overlooking the garden. This silent flitting irritated me not a little, and that afternoon I had a frank little talk with Miss Disbrow--franker, perhaps, than I had intended. Miss Disbrow at once gave me notice, and left for New York within two hours, letting it be known that she expected her trunks to be sent after her. "Gutter-snipes are not my specialty," was her parting word. IV There proved to be little difficulty in getting myself appointed Susan's guardian. No one else wanted the child. I promised the court to do my best for her; to treat her, in fact, as I would my own flesh and blood. It might well be, I said, that before long I should legally adopt her. In any event, if this for some unforeseen reason proved inadvisable, I assured the court that Susan's future would be provided for. The court benignly replied that, as it stood, I was acting very handsomely in the matter; very handsomely; no doubt about it. But there was a dim glimmer behind the juridic spectacles that seemed to imply: "Handsomely, my dear sir, but whether wisely or no is another question, which, as the official champion of widows and orphans, I am not called upon to decide." It was with a new sense of responsibility that I opened an account in Susan's name with a local savings bank, and a week later added a short but efficient codicil to my will. In the meantime--but with alert suspicions--I interviewed several highly recommended applicants for Miss Disbrow's deserted post; only to find them wanting. Poor things! Combined, they could hardly have met all the requirements, æsthetic and intellectual, which I had now set my heart upon finding in one lone governess for Susan! It would have needed, by this, a subtly modernized Hypatia to fulfill my ideal. I might, of course, have waited for October to send Susan to a select private school in the vicinage, patronized by the little daughters of our more cautious families. It was, by neighborly consent, an excellent school, where carefully sterilized cultures--physical, moral, mental, and social--were painlessly injected into the blue blood streams of our very nicest young girls. I say that I might have done so, but this is a euphemism. On the one hand, I shrank from exposing Susan to possible snubs; on the other, a little bird whispered that Miss Garnett, principal of the school, would not care to expose her carefully sterilized cultures to an alien contagion. Bearers of contagion--whether physical, moral, mental, or social--were not sympathetic to Miss Garnett's _clientèle_. In Mrs. Parrot's iron phrase, there are places for such. Public schools, to wit! But in those long-past days--before Susan taught me that there are just two kinds of persons, big and little; those you can do nothing for, because they can do nothing for themselves, and those you can do nothing for, because they can do everything for themselves--in those days, I admit that I had my own finicky fears. Public schools were all very well for the children of men who could afford nothing better. They had, for example, given Bob Blake's daughter a pretty fair preliminary training; but they would never do for Ambrose Hunt's ward. _Noblesse_--or, at any rate, _largesse_--_oblige_. Yet here was a quandary: Public schools, in my estimation, being too vulgar for Susan; and Susan, in the estimation of Hillhouse Avenue, being too vulgar for private ones; yea, and though I still took cognizance, no subtly modernized Hypatia coming to me highly recommended for a job--how in the name of useless prosperity was I to get poor little Susan properly educated at all! It was Susan who solved this difficulty for me, as she was destined to solve most of my future difficulties, and all of her own. She soon turned the public world about her into an extra-select, super-private school. She impressed all who came into contact with her, and made of them her devoted--if often unconscious--instructors. And she began by impressing Miss Goucher and Nora and Sonia, and Philip Farmer, assistant professor of philosophy in Yale University; and Maltby Phar, anarchist editor of _The Garden Exquisite_; and--first and chiefly--me. The case of Phil Farmer was typical. Phil and I had been classmates in the dark backward and abysm, and we were still, in a manner of speaking, friends. I mean that, though we had few tastes in common, we kept on liking each other a good deal. Phil was a gentle-hearted, stiff-headed sort of man, with a conscience--formed for him and handed on by a long line of Unitarian ministers--a conscience which drove him to incredible labor at altitudes few of us attain, and where even Phil, it seemed to me, found breathing difficult. Not having been thrown with much feminine society on his chosen heights, he had remained a bachelor. The Metaphysical Mountains are said to be infested with women, but they cluster, I am told, below the snow line. Phil did not even meet them by climbing through them; he always ballooned straight up for the Unmelting; and when he occasionally dropped down, his psychic chill seldom wore entirely off before he was ready to ascend again. This protected him; for he was a tall, dark-haired fellow whose features had the clear-cut gravity of an Indian chieftain; his rare, friendly smile was a delight. So he would hardly otherwise have escaped. Perhaps once a week it was his habit to drop in after dinner and share with me three or four pipes' worth of desultory conversation. We seldom talked shop; since mine did not interest him, nor his me. Mostly we just ambled aimlessly round the outskirts of some chance neutral topic--who would win the big game, for example. It amused neither of us, but it rested us both. One night, perhaps a month after Susan had come to me, I returned late from a hot day's trip to New York--one more unsuccessful quest after Hypatia Rediviva--and found Phil and Susan sitting together on the screened terrace at the back of my house, overlooking the garden. It was not my custom to spend the muggy midsummer months in town, but this year I had been unwilling to leave until I could capture and carry off Hypatia Rediviva with me. Moreover, I did not know where to go. The cottage at Watch Hill belonged to Gertrude, and was in consequence no longer used by either of us. As a grass widower I had, in summer, just travelled about. Now, with a ward of fourteen to care for, just travelling about no longer seemed the easiest solution; yet I hated camps and summer hotels. I should have to rent a place somewhere, that was certain; but where? With the world to choose from, a choice proved difficult. I was marking time. My stuffy fruitless trip had decided me to mark time no longer. Hypatia or no Hypatia, Susan must be taken to the hills or the sea. It was this thought that simmered in my brain as I strolled out to the garden terrace and overheard Susan say to Phil: "But I think it's _much_ easier to believe in the devil than it is in God! Don't you? The devil isn't all-wise, all-good, all-everything! He's a lot more like _us_." I stopped short and shamelessly listened. "That's an interesting concept," responded Phil, with his slow, friendly gravity. "You mean, I suppose, that if we must be anthropomorphic, we ought at least to be consistent." "Wouldn't it be funny," said Susan, "if I did mean that without knowing it?" There was no flippancy, no irony in her tone. "'_An-thro-po-mor-phic_ ... '" she added, savoring its long-drawn-outness. Susan never missed a strange word; she always pounced on it at once, unerringly, and made it hers. "That's a Greek word," explained Phil. "It's a good word," said Susan, "if it has a tremendous lot packed up in it. If it hasn't, it's much too long." "I agree with you," said Phil; "but it has." "What?" asked Susan. "It would take me an hour to tell you." "Oh, I'm glad!" cried Susan. "It must be a wonderful word! Please go on till Ambo comes!" I decided to take a bath, and tiptoed softly and undetected away. V After that evening Phil began to drop in every two or three nights, and he did not hesitate to tell me that the increasing frequency of his visits was due to his progressive interest in Susan. "She's a curious child," he explained; which was true in any sense you chose to take it, and all the way back to the Latin _curiosus_, "careful, diligent, thoughtful; from _cura_, care," and so on.... "I've never seen much of children," Phil continued; "never had many chances, as it happens. My sister has three boys, but she's married to a narrow-gauge missionary, and lives--to call it that--in Ping Lung, or some such place. I've the right address somewhere, I think--in a notebook. Bertha sends me snapshots of the boys from time to time, but I can't say I've ever felt lonely because of their exile. Funny. Perhaps it's because I never liked Bertha much. Bertha has a sloppy mind--you know, with chance scraps of things floating round in it. Nothing coheres. But you take this youngster of yours, now--I call her yours----" "Do!" I interjected. "Well, there's the opposite extreme! Susan links everything up, everything she gets hold of--facts, fancies, guesses, feelings; the whole psychic menagerie. Chains them all together somehow, and seems to think they'll get on comfortably in the same tent. Of course they won't--can't--and that's the danger for her! But she's stimulating, Hunt"--Phil always called me Hunt, as if just failing whole-heartedly to accept me--"she's positively stimulating! A mind like that must be trained; thoroughly, I mean. We must do our best for her." The "we" amused me and--yes, I confess it--nettled me a little. "Don't worry about that," I said, and more dryly than I had meant to; "I'm combing the country now for a suitable governess." "Governess!" Phil snorted. "You don't want a governess for Susan. You want, for this job," he insisted, "a male intellect--a vigorous, disciplined male intellect. Music, dancing, water colors--pshaw! Deportment--how to enter a drawing-room! Fiddle-faddle! How to enter the Kingdom of God! That's more Susan's style," cried Phil, with a most unaccustomed heat. I laughed at him. "Are you willing to take her on, Phil?" I asked. "I believe it's been done; Epicurus had a female pupil or two." "I have taken her on," Phil replied, quite without resentment. "Hadn't you noticed it?" "Yes," I said; "only, it's the other way round." "I've been appropriated, is that it?" "Yes; by Susan. We all have, Phil. That vampire child is simply draining us, my dear fellow." "All right," said Phil, after a second's pause, "if she's a _spiritual_ vampire, so much the better. Only, she'll need a firm hand. We must give her suck at regular hours; draw up a plan. You can tackle the languages, if you like--æsthetics, and all that. I'll pin her down to math and logic--teach her to _think_ straight. We can safely leave her to pick up history and sociology and such things for herself. You've a middling good library, and she'll browse." "Oh, she'll browse! She's browsing now." "Poetry?" demanded Phil, suspicion in his tone, anxiety in his eyes. "If she runs amuck with poetry too soon, there's no hope for her. She'll get to taking sensations for ideas, and that's fatal. A mind like Susan's----" What further he said I missed; a distant tinkle from the front-door bell had distracted me. It was Maltby Phar. He came out to us on the garden terrace, unexpected and unannounced. "Whether you like it or not," he sighed luxuriously, "I'm here for a week. How's the great experiment--eh? Am I too late for the bust-up?" Then he nodded to Phil. "How are you, Mr. Farmer? Delighted to meet an old adversary! Shall it be swords or pistols this time? Or clubs? But I warn you, I'm no fit foe; I'm soft. Making up our mammoth Christmas Number in July always unnerves me. By the time I had looked over a dozen designs for our cover this morning and found Gaspar, Melchior, and Balthazar in every one of them, mounted on fancy camels, and heading for an exaggerated star in the right upper dark-blue corner, I succumbed to heat and profanity, turned 'em all face downward, shuffled 'em, grabbed one at random, and then fled for solace! Solace," he added, dropping into a wicker armchair, "can begin, if you like, by taking a cool, mellow, liquid form." I rang. Phil, I saw, was looking annoyed. He disliked Maltby Phar, openly disliked him; so I felt certain--I was perhaps rather hoping--that he would take this opportunity to escape. With Phil I was never then entirely at ease; but in those days I was wholly so with Maltby. Miss Goucher answered my summons in person, and I suggested a sauterne cup for my friends. Phil frowned on the suggestion, but Maltby beamed. The ayes had it, and Miss Goucher, who had remained neutral, withdrew. It was Phil's chance; yet he surprised me by settling back and refilling his pipe. "When you came, Mr. Phar," he said, his tone withdrawing toward formality, "we were discussing the education of Susan." "Then I came just in time!" cried Maltby. "For what?" I queried. "I may prevent a catastrophe. If you're really going to see this thing through, Boz"--his name for me--"for God's sake do a little clear thinking first! Don't drift. Don't flounder. Don't wallow. Scrap all your musty, inbred prejudices once for all, and see that at least one kid on this filthy old planet gets a plain, honest, unsentimentalized account of what she is and what the world is. If you can bring yourself to do that, Susan will be unique. She will be the first educated woman in America." "'What she is and what the world is,'" repeated Phil, slowly. "What is the world, may I ask? And what is Susan?" There was a felt tenseness in the moment; the hush before battle. We leaned forward a little from our easy-chairs, and no one of us noticed that Susan had slipped noiselessly to the window seat by the opened library window which gave upon the terrace. But there, as we later discovered, she was; and there, for the present silently, she remained. "The world," began Maltby Phar sententiously, "is a pigsty." "Very well," interrupted Phil; "I'll grant you that to start with. What follows?" "What we see about us," said Maltby. "And what do we see?" asked Phil. At this inopportune moment Miss Goucher reappeared, bearing a Sheffield tray, on which stood three antique Venetian goblets, and a tall pitcher of rare Bohemian glass, filled to the brim with an iced sauterne cup garnished with fresh strawberries and thin disks of pineapple. Nothing less suggestive of the conventional back-lot piggery could have been imagined. By the time a table had been placed, our goblets filled, and Miss Goucher had retired, Maltby had decided to try for a new opening. "Excellent!" he resumed, having drained and refilled his goblet. "Now, Mr. Farmer, if you really wish to know what the world is, and what Susan is, I am ready. Have with you! And by the way, Boz," he interjected, sipping his wine, "your new housekeeper is one in a thousand. Mrs. Parrot was admirable; I've been absurdly regretting her loss. But Mrs. Parrot never quite rose to _this_!" Phil's tongue clicked an impatient protest against the roof of his mouth. "I am still unenlightened, Mr. Phar." "True," said Maltby. "That's the worst of you romantic idealists. It's your permanent condition." He settled back in his chair, and fell to his old trick of slowly caressing the back of his left hand with the palm of his right. "The world, my dear Mr. Farmer," he continued, "the universe, indeed, as we have come gradually to know it, is an infinity of blindly clashing forces. They have always existed, they will always exist; they have always been blind, and they always will be. Anything may happen in such an infinity, and we--this world of men and microbes--are one of the things which has temporarily happened. It's regrettable, but it is so. And though there is nothing final we can do about it, and very little in any sense, still--this curious accident of the human intellect enables us to do something. We can at least admit the plain facts of our horrible case. Here, a self-realizing accident, we briefly are. Death will dissipate us one by one, and the world in due time. That much we know. But while we last, why must we add imaginary evils to our real ones, and torment ourselves with false hopes and ridiculous fears? "Why can't each one of us learn to say: 'I am an accident of no consequence in a world that means nothing. I might be a stone, but I happen to be a man. Hence, certain things give me pleasure, others pain. And, obviously, in an accidental, meaningless world I can owe no duty to anyone but myself. I owe it to myself to get as much pleasure and to avoid as much pain as possible. Unswerving egotism should be my law.'" He paused to sip again, with a side glance toward Phil. "Elementary, all this, I admit. I apologize for restating it to a scholar. But such are the facts as science reveals them--are they not? You have to try somehow to go beyond science to get round them. And where do you go--you romantic idealists? Where _can_ you go? Nowhere outside of yourselves, I take it. So you plunge, perforce, down below the threshold of reason into a mad chaos of instinct and desire and dream. And what _there_ do you find? Bugaboos, my dear sir, simply bugaboos: divine orders, hells, heavens, purgatories, moral sanctions--all the wild insanity, in two words, that had made our wretched lives even less worth living than they could and should be!" "_Should?_ Why _should_?" asked Phil. "Granting your universe, who gives a negligible damn for a little discomfort more or less?" "I do!" Maltby asserted. "I want all the comfort I can get; and I could get far more in a world of clear-seeing, secular egotists than I can in this mixed mess of superstitious, sentimental idealists which we choose to call civilized society! Take just one minor practical illustration: Say that some virgin has wakened my desire, and I hers. In a reasonable society we could give each other a certain amount of passing satisfaction. But do we do it? No. The virgin has been taught to believe in a mystical, mischievous something, called Purity! To follow her natural instinct would be a sin. If you sin and get caught on earth, society will punish you; and if you don't get caught here, you'll infallibly get caught hereafter--and then God will punish you. So the virgin tortures herself and tortures me--unless I'm willing to marry her, which would be certain to prove the worst of tortures for us both. And there you are." It was at this point that Susan spoke from her window. "Pearl and papa weren't married, Mr. Phar; but they didn't get much fun out of not being." I confess that I felt a nervous chill start at the base of my spine and shiver up toward my scalp. Even Phil, the man of Indian gravity, looked for an instant perturbed. "Susan!" I demanded sharply. "Have you been listening?" "Mustn't I listen?" asked Susan. "Why not? Are you cross, Ambo?" "The mischief's done," said Phil to me quietly; "better not make a point of it." "Please don't be cross, Ambo," Susan pleaded, slipping through the window to the terrace and coming straight over to me. "Mr. Phar feels just the way papa did about things; only papa couldn't talk so splendidly. He had a very poor vocabulary"--"Vocabulary!" I gasped--"except nasty words and swearing. But he meant just what Mr. Phar means, _inside_." Phil, as she ended, began to make strange choking noises and retired suddenly into his handkerchief. Maltby put down his glass and stared at Susan. "Young person," he finally said, "you ought to be spanked! Don't you know it's an unforgivable sin to spy on your elders!" "But you don't believe in sin," responded Susan calmly, without the tiniest suspicion of pertness in her tone or bearing. "You believe in doing what you want to. _I_ wanted to hear what you were saying, Mr. Phar." "Of course you did!" Phil struck in. "But next time, Susan, as a concession to good manners, you might let us know you're in the neighborhood--?" Susan bit her lower lip very hard before she managed to reply. "Yes. I will next time. I'm sorry, Phil." (_Phil!_) Then she turned to Maltby. "But I wasn't spying! I just didn't know you would any of you mind." "We don't, really," I said. "Sit down, dear. You're always welcome." I had been doing some stiff, concentrated thinking in the last three minutes, and now I had taken the plunge. "The truth is, Susan," I went on, "that most children who live in good homes, who are what is called 'well brought up,' are carefully sheltered from any facts or words or thoughts which their parents do not consider wholesome or pleasant. Parents try to give their children only what they have found to be best in life; they try to keep them in ignorance of everything else." "But they can't," said Susan. "At least, they couldn't in Birch Street." "No. Nor elsewhere. But they try. And they always make believe to themselves that they have succeeded. So it's supposed to be very shocking and dangerous for a girl of your age to listen to the free conversation of men of our age. That's the reason we all felt a little guilty, at first, when we found you'd been overhearing us." "How funny," said Susan. "Papa never cared." "Good for him!" exclaimed Maltby. "I didn't feel guilty, for one! I refuse to be convicted of so hypocritically squeamish a reaction!" "Oh!" Susan sighed, almost with rapture. "You know such a lot of words, Mr. Phar! You can say anything." "Thanks," said Maltby; "I rather flatter myself that I can." "And you _do_!" grunted Phil. "But words," he took up the dropped threads rather awkwardly, "are nothing in themselves, Susan. You are too fond of mere words. It isn't words that matter; it's ideas." "Yes, Phil," said Susan meekly, "but I love words--best of all when they're pictures." Phil frowned, without visible effect upon Susan. I saw that her mind had gone elsewhere. "Ambo?" "Yes, dear?" "You mustn't ever worry about me, Ambo. My hearing or knowing things--or saying them. I--I guess I'm different." Maltby's face was a study in suppressed amazement; Phil was still frowning. It was all too much for me, and I laughed--laughed from the lower ribs! Susan laughed with me, springing from her chair to throw her arms tightly round my neck in one big joyous suffocating hug! "Oh, Ambo!" she cried, breathless. "Isn't it going to be fun--all of us--together--now we can _talk_!" VI The following evening, after dinner, Maltby Phar, still a little ruffled by Susan's unexpected vivacities of the night before, retired to the library with pipe and book, and Susan and I sat alone together on the garden terrace. It was dusk. The heavy air of the past week had been quickened and purified by an afternoon thunderstorm. Little cool puffs came to us across a bed of glimmering white phlox, bearing with them its peculiar, loamy fragrance. Smoke from my excellent cigarette eddied now and then toward Susan. Silence had stolen upon her as the afterglow faded, revealing the first patient stars. Already I had learned to respect Susan's silences. She was not, in the usual sense of uncertain temper, of nervous irritability, a moody child; yet she had her moods--moods, if I may put it so, of extraordinary definition. There were hours, not too frequent to be disturbing, when she _withdrew_; there is no better word for it. At such times her thin, alert little frame was motionless; she would sit as if holding a pose for a portrait, her chin a trifle lifted, her eyes focusing on no visible object, her hands lying--always with the palms upward--in her lap. I supposed that now, with the veiled yet sharply scented dusk, such a mood had crept upon her. But for once I was mistaken. Susan, this time, had not withdrawn; she was intensely aware. "Ambo"--the suddenness with which she spoke startled me--"you ought to have lots of children. You ought to have a boy, anyway; not just a girl." "A boy? Why, dear? Are you lonely?" "Of course not; with you--and Phil!" "Then whatever in the world put such a crazy----" Susan interrupted; a bad habit of hers, never subsequently broken, and due, doubtless, to an instinctive impatience of foreseeable remarks. "You're so awfully rich, Ambo. You could have dozens and not feel it--except that they'd get in your way sometimes and make your outside cross. But two wouldn't be much more trouble than one. It might seem a little crowded--at first; but after while, Ambo, you'd hardly notice it." "Possibly. Still--nice boys don't grow on bushes, Susan. Not the kind of brothers I should have to insist upon for you!" "I'm not so fussy as all that," said Susan. "And it isn't fair that I should have everything. Besides, Ambo, boys are much nicer than girls. Honestly they are." "Oh, are they! I'm afraid you haven't had much experience with boys! Most of them are disgusting young savages. Really, Susan! Their hands and feet are too big for them, and their voices don't fit. They're always breaking things--irreplaceable things for choice, and raising the devil of a row. Take my word for it, dear, please. I'm an ex-boy myself; I know all about 'em! They were never created for civilized human companionship. Why, I'd rather give you a young grizzly bear and be done with it, than present you with the common-or-garden brother! But if you'd like a nice quiet little sister some day, maybe----" "I wouldn't," said Susan. She was silent again for several moments, pondering. I observed her furtively. Nothing was more distant from my desire than any addition, of any age, male or female, to my present family. Heaven, in its great and unwonted kindness, had sent me Susan; she was--to my thinking--perfect; and she was enough. Whether in art or in life I am no lover of an avoidable anticlimax. But Susan's secret purposes were not mine. "Ambo," she resumed, "I guess if you'd ever lived in Birch Street you'd feel differently about boys." "I doubt it, Susan." "I'm sure you'd feel differently about Jimmy." "Jimmy?" "Jimmy Kane, Ambo--_my_ Jimmy. Haven't I ever told you about him?" Guilefully, persuasively, she edged her chair nearer to mine. It was then that I first learned of Jimmy's battle for Susan, of the bloody but righteous downfall of Giuseppe Gonfarone, and of many another incident long treasured in the junior annals of Birch Street. Thus, little by little, though the night deepened about us, my eyes were unsealed. What a small world I had always lived in! For how long had it seemed to me that romance was--approximately--dead! My fingers tightened on Susan's, while the much-interrogated stars hung above us in their mysterious orbits and---- But no, that is the pathetic fallacy. Stars--are they not matter, merely? They could not smile. "Don't you truly think, Ambo," suggested Susan, "that Jimmy ought to have a better chance? If he doesn't get it, he'll have to work in a factory all his life. And here I am--with you!" "Yes. But consider, Susan--there are thousands of boys like Jimmy. I can't father them all, you know." "I don't want you to father them all," said Susan; "and there isn't anybody like Jimmy! You'll see." It came over me as she spoke that I was, however unwillingly, predestined to see. Maltby Phar thought otherwise. That night, after Susan had gone up to bed, I talked the thing over with him--trying for an airy, detached tone; the tone of one who discusses an indifferent matter for want of a more urgent. Maltby was not, I fear, deceived. "My dear Boz," he pleaded, "buck up! Get a fresh grip on your individuality and haul it back from the brink of destruction! If you don't, that little she-demon above-stairs will push it over into the gulf, once for all! You'll be nobody. You'll be her dupe--her slave. How can you smile, man! I'm quite serious, and I warn you. Fight the good fight! Defend the supreme rights of your ego, before it's too late!" "Why these tragic accents?" I parried. "It's not likely the washlady's kid would want to come; or his mother let him. Susan idealizes him, of course. He's probably quite commonplace and content as he is. No harm, though, if it pleases Susan, in looking him over?" Maltby took up his book again. He dismissed me. "Whom the gods destroy----" he muttered, and ostentatiously turned a page. VII My feeling that I was predestined to see, with Susan, that there wasn't anybody like Jimmy--that I was further predestined to take him into my heart and home--proved, very much to my own surprise and to the disappointment of Susan, to be unjustified. This was the first bitter defeat that Susan had been called upon to bear since leaving Birch Street. She took it quietly, but deeply, which troubled my private sense of relief, and indeed turned it into something very like regret. The simple fact was that much had happened in Birch Street since the tragedy of the four-room house; life had not stood still there; chance and change--deaths and marriages and births--had altered the circumstances of whole families. In short, that steady flux of mortality, which respects neither the dignity of the Hillhouse Avenues nor the obscurity of the Birch Streets of the world, had in its secret courses already borne Jimmy Kane--elsewhere. Precisely where, even his mother did not know; and first and last it was her entire and passionate ignorance as to Jimmy's present location which foiled us. "West" is a geographical expression certainly, but it is not an address. Jimmy's mother lived with her unwashed brood, you will remember, above old Heinze's grocery store, and on the following afternoon I ran Susan over there for a tactful reconnaissance. At Susan's request we went slowly along Birch Street from its extreme right end to its ultimate wrong, crossing the waste land and general dump at the base of East Rock--historic ground!--mounting the long incline beyond, and so passing the four-room house, which now seemed to be occupied by at least three families of that hardy, prolific race discourteously known to young America as "wops." Throughout this little tour Susan withdrew, and I respected her silence. She had not yet spoken when we stopped at Heinze's corner and descended. Here first it was that forebodings of chance and change met us upon the pavement, in the person of old Heinze himself, standing melancholy and pensive before the screened doorway of his domain. Him Susan accosted. He did not at first recognize her, but recollection returned to him as she spoke. "_Ach_, so!" he exclaimed, peering with mildest surprise above steel-rimmed spectacles. "Id iss you--nod? Leedle Susanna!" My formal introduction followed; nor was it without a glow of satisfaction that I heard old Heinze assure me that he had read certain of my occasional essays with attention and respect. "Ard for ard--yah! Dot iss your credo," he informed me, with tranquil noddings of his bumpy, oddly shaped skull. "Dot iss der credo of all arisdograds. Id iss nod mine." But Susan was in no mood for general ideas; she descended at once to particulars, and announced that we were going up to see Mrs. Kane. Then old Heinze snaggily, and I thought rather wearily, smiled. "_Aber_," he objected, lifting twisted, rheumatic hands, "dere iss no more such a vooman! Alretty, leedle Susanna, I haf peen an oldt fool like oders. I haf made her my vife." And though he continued to smile, he also sighed. Our ensuing interview with Frau Heinze, formerly the Widow Kane, fully interpreted this sigh. Prosperity, Susan later assured me, had not improved her. She greeted us, above the shop, in her small, shiny, colored lithograph of a parlor, with unveiled suspicion. Her eyes were hostile. She seemed to take it for granted, did Mrs. Heinze, that we could have no kindly purpose in intruding upon her. A dumpy, grumpy little woman, with the parboiled hands and complexion of long years at the wash-tubs, her present state of comparative freedom from bondage had not lightened her heart. Her irritability, I told Susan after our escape, was doubtless due to the fact that she could not share in old Heinze's intellectual and literary tastes. Susan laughed. "She wouldn't bother much about that; Birch Street's never lonely, and it's only a step to the State Street movies. No; I think it's corsets." Corsets? The word threw a flood of light. I saw at once that it must be a strain upon any disposition to return after a long and figureless widowhood to the steel, buckram, and rebellious curves of conventional married life. I remembered the harnesslike creaking of Mrs. Heinze's waistline, and forgave her much. There was really a good deal to forgive. It was neither Susan's fault nor mine that turned our call into a bad quarter of an hour. I had looked for a pretty scene as I mounted the stairs behind Susan. I had pictured the child, in her gay summer frock, bursting like sunshine into Mrs. Heinze's stuffy quarters--and so forth. Nothing of the kind occurred. "Who is ut?" demanded Mrs. Heinze, peering forth. "Oh, it's you--Bob Blake's girl. What do you want?" Susan explained. "Well, come in then," said Mrs. Heinze. Susan, less daunted than I by her reception, marched in and asked at once for Jimmy. At the sound of his name Mrs. Heinze's suspicions were sharply focused. If the gentleman knew anything about Jimmy, all right, let him say so! It wouldn't surprise her to hear he'd been gettin' himself into trouble! It would surprise her much more, she implied, if he had not. But if he had, she couldn't be responsible--nor Heinze either, the poor man! Jimmy was sixteen--a man grown, you might say. Let him look after himself, then; and more shame to him for the way he'd acted! But what way he had acted, and why, Susan at first found it difficult to determine. "Oh!" she at length protested, following cloudy suggestions of evil courses. "Jimmy couldn't do anything mean! You know he couldn't. It isn't in him!" "Isn't ut indeed! Me slavin' for him and the childer ever since Kane was took off sudden--and not a cint saved for the livin'--let alone the dead! Slavin' and worritin'--the way you'd think Jimmy'd 'a' jumped wid joy when Heinze offered! And an easier man not to be found--though he's got his notions. What man hasn't? If it's not one thing, it's another. 'Except his beer, he don't drink much,' I says to Jimmy; 'and that's more than I could say for your own father, rest his soul!' 'My father wasn't a Dutchman,' Jimmy says; givin' me his lip to me face. 'He didn't talk out against the Pope,' he says. 'Nor the Pris'dint,' he says. 'He wasn't a stinkin' Socialist,' he says--usin' them very words! 'No,' I says, 'he was a Demycrat--and what's ut to you? All men'll be blatherin' polytics after hours,' I says. 'Heinze manes no harm by ut, no more nor the rest. 'Tis just his talk,' I says. And after that we had more words, and I laid me palm to his head." "Oh!" cried Susan. "I'll not take lip from a son of mine, Susan Blake; nor from you, wid all your grand clothes! I've seen you too often lackin' a modest stitch to your back!" I hastened to intervene. "We'll not trouble you longer, Mrs. Heinze, if you'll only be good enough to tell me where Jimmy is now. He was very kind to Susan once, and she wants to thank him in some way. I've a proposition to make him--which might be to his advantage." "Oh--so that's ut at last! Well, Susan Blake, you've had the grand luck for the likes of you! But you're too late. Jimmy's gone." "Gone?" "'Tis the gratitude I get for raisin' him! Gone he is, wid what he'd laid by--twinty-sivin dollars--and no word to nobody. There's a son for ye!" "But--oh, Mrs. Heinze--gone _where_?" "West. That's all I know," said Mrs. Heinze. "He left a line to say he'd gone West. We've not had a scrap from him since. If he comes to a bad end----" "Jimmy won't come to a bad end!" struck in Susan sharply. "He did just right to leave you. Good-by." With that she seized my arm and swept me with her from the room. "Glory be to God! Susan Blake--the airs of her now!" followed us shrilly, satirically, down the stairs. VIII Maltby's visit came to an end, and for the first time I did not regret his departure. For some reason, which perhaps purposely I left unanalyzed, Maltby was beginning to get a trifle on my nerves. But let that pass. Once he was gone, Phil Farmer drew a long breath and plunged with characteristic thoroughness into his comprehensive scheme for the education of Susan. Her enthusiasm for this scheme was no less contagious than his own, and I soon found myself yielding to her wish to stay on in New Haven through the summer, and let in for daily lessons at regular hours--very much to my astonishment, the rôle of schoolmaster being one which I had always flattered myself I was temperamentally unfitted to sustain. I soon discovered, however, that teaching a mentally alert, whimsically unexpected, stubbornly diligent, and always grateful pupil is among the most stimulating and delightful of human occupations. My own psychic laziness, which had been long creeping upon me, vanished in this new atmosphere of competition--competition, for that is what it came to, with the unwearying Phil. It was a real renascence for me. Forsaken gods! how I studied--off hours and on the sly! My French was excellent, my Italian fair; but my small Latin and less Greek needed endless attention. Yet I rather preen myself upon my success; though Phil has always maintained that I overfed Susan with æsthetic flummery, thus dulling the edge of her appetite for his own more wholesome daily bread. In one respect, at least, I disagreed fundamentally with Phil, and here--through sheer force of conviction--I triumphed. Phil, who lived exclusively in things of the mind, would have turned this sensitive child into a bemused scholar, a female bookworm. This, simply, I would not and did not permit. If she had a soul, she had a body, too, and I was determined that it should be a vigorous, happy body before all else. For her sake solely--for I am too easily an indolent man--I took up riding again, and tennis, and even pushed myself into golf; with the result that my nervous dyspepsia vanished, and my irritability along with it; with the more excellent result that Susan filled and bloomed and ate (for her) three really astonishing meals a day. It was a busy life--a wonderful life! Hard work--hard play--fun--travel.... Ah, those years! But I am leaping ahead----! Yet I have but one incident left to record of those earliest days with Susan--an incident which had important, though delayed, results--affecting in various ways, for long unforeseen, Susan's career, and the destiny of several other persons, myself among them. Sonia, Susan's little Russian maid, was at the bottom of it all; and the first hint of the rather sordid affair came to me, all unprepared, from the lips of Miss Goucher. She sought me out in my private study, whither I had retired after dinner to write a letter or two--a most unusual proceeding on her part, and on mine--and she asked at once in her brief, hard, respectful manner for ten minutes of my time. I rose and placed a chair for her, uncomfortably certain that this could be no trivial errand; she seated herself, angularly erect, holding her feelings well in hand. "Mr. Hunt," she began, "have I your permission to discharge Sonia?" My face showed my surprise. "But Susan likes her, doesn't she, Miss Goucher? And she seems efficient?" "Yes. A little careless perhaps; but then, she's young. It isn't her service I object to." "What is the trouble?" "It is a question of character, Mr. Hunt. I have reason to think her lacking in--self-respect." "You mean--immoral?" I asked, using the word in the restricted sense which I assumed Miss Goucher, like most maiden ladies, exclusively attached to it. To my astonishment Miss Goucher insisted upon more definition. "No, I shouldn't say that. She tells a good many little fibs, but she's not at heart dishonest. And I'm by no means certain she can be held responsible for her weakness in respect to men." A slight flush just tinged Miss Goucher's prominent cheek bones; but duty was duty, and she persevered. "She has a bad inheritance, I think; and until she came here, Mr. Hunt, her environment was always--unfortunate. If it were not for Susan, I shouldn't have spoken. I should have felt it my duty to try to protect the child and---- However," added Miss Goucher, "I doubt whether much can be done for Sonia. So my first duty is certainly to Miss Susan, and to you." Susan's quiet admiration for Miss Goucher had more or less puzzled me hitherto, but now my own opinion of Miss Goucher soared heavenward. Why, the woman was remarkable--far more so than I had remotely suspected! She had a mind above her station, respectable though her station might well be held to be. "My dear Miss Goucher," I exclaimed, "it is perfectly evident to me that my interests are more than safe in your keeping. Do what you think best, by all means!" "Unfortunately, Mr. Hunt," said Miss Goucher, "that is what I cannot do." "May I ask why?" "Society would not permit me," answered Miss Goucher. "Please explain," I gasped. "Sonia will cause a great deal of suffering in the world," said Miss Goucher, the color on her cheek bones deepening, while she avoided my glance. "For herself--and others. In my opinion--which I am aware is not widely shared--she should be placed in a lethal chamber and painlessly removed. We are learning to 'swat the fly,'" continued Miss Goucher, "because it benefits no one and spreads many human ills. Some day we shall learn to swat--other things." Calmly she rose to take her leave. Excitedly eager, I sprang up to detain her. "Don't go, Miss Goucher! Your views are really most interesting--though, as you say, not widely accepted. Certainly not by me. Your plan of a lethal chamber for weak sisters and brothers strikes me as--well, drastic. Do sit down." Again Miss Goucher perched primly upright on the outer edge of the chair beside my own. "I felt bound to state my views truthfully," she said, "since you asked for them. But I never intrude them upon others. I'm not a social rebel, Mr. Hunt. I lack self-confidence for that. When I differ from the received opinion I always suspect that I am quite wrong. Probably I am in this case. But I think society would agree with me that Sonia is not a fit maid for Susan." "Beyond a shadow of doubt," I assented. "But may I ask on what grounds you suspect Sonia?" "It is certainly your right," replied Miss Goucher; "but if you insist upon an answer I shall have to give notice." "Then I shall certainly not insist." "Thank you, Mr. Hunt," said Miss Goucher, rising once more. "I appreciate this." And she walked from the room. It was the next afternoon that Susan burst into my study without knocking--a breach of manners which she had recently learned to conquer, so the irruption surprised me. But I noted instantly that Susan's agitation had carried her far beyond all thought for trifles. Never had I seen her like this. Her whole being was vibrant with emotional stress. "Ambo!" she cried, all but slamming the door behind her. "Sonia mustn't go! I won't let her go! You and Miss Goucher may think what you please--I won't, Ambo! It's wicked! You don't want Sonia to be like Tilly Jaretski, do you?" "Like Tilly Jaretski?" My astonishment was so great that I babbled the unfamiliar name merely to gain time, collect my senses. "Yes!" urged Susan, almost leaping to my side, and seizing my arm with tense fingers. "She'll be just like Tilly was, along State Street--after her baby came. Tilly wasn't a bit like Pearl, Ambo; and Sonia isn't either! But she's going to have a baby, too, Ambo, like Tilly." With a wrench of my entire nervous system I, in one agonizing second, completely dislocated the prejudices of a lifetime, and rose to the situation confronting me. O Hillhouse Avenue, right at both ends! How little you had prepared me for this precocious knowledge of life--knowledge that utterly degrades or most wonderfully saves--which these children, out toward the wrong end of the Birch Streets of the world, drink in almost with their mothers' milk! How far I, a grown man--a cultured, sophisticated man--must travel, Susan, even to begin to equal your simple acceptance of naked, ugly fact--sheer fact--seen, smelt, heard, tasted! How far--how far! "Susan," I said gravely, "does Miss Goucher know about Sonia?" "I don't know. I suppose so. I haven't seen her yet. When Sonia came to me, crying--I ran straight in here!" "And how long have _you_ known?" "Over a week. Sonia told me all about it, Ambo. Count Dimbrovitski got her in trouble. She loved him, Ambo--her way. She doesn't any more. Sonia can't love anybody long; he can't, either. That's why his wife sent Sonia off. Sonia says she knows her husband's like that, but so long as she can hush things up, she doesn't care. Sonia says she has a lover herself, and Count Dim doesn't care much either. Oh, Ambo--how _stuffy_ some people are! I don't mean Sonia. She's just pitiful--like Tilly. But those others--they're different--I can feel it! Oh, how _Artemis_ must hate them, Ambo!" Susan's tense fingers relaxed, slipping from my arm; she slid down to the floor, huddled, and leaning against the padded side of my chair buried her face in her hands. Very quietly I rose, not to disturb her, and crossing to the interphone requested Miss Goucher's presence. My thoughts raced crazily on. In advance of Miss Goucher's coming I had dramatized my interview with her in seven different and unsatisfactory ways. When she at last entered, my temple pulses were beating and my tongue was stiff and dry. Susan, except for her shaken shoulders, had not stirred. "Miss Goucher," I managed to begin, "shut the door, please.... You see this poor child----?" Miss Goucher saw. Over her harsh, positive features fell a sort of transforming veil. It seemed to me suddenly--if for that moment only--that Miss Goucher was very beautiful. "If you wouldn't mind," she suggested, "leaving her with me?" Well, I had not in advance dramatized our meeting in this way. In all the seven scenes that had flashed through me, I had stood, an unquestioned star, at the center of the stage. I had not foreseen an exit. But I most humbly and gratefully accepted one now. Precisely what took place, what words were said there, in my study, following my humble exit, I have never learned, either from Miss Goucher or from Susan. I know only that from that hour forth the bond between them became what sentimentalists fondly suppose the relationship between mother and daughter must always be--what, alas, it so rarely, but then so beautifully, is. I date from that hour Miss Goucher's abandonment of her predilection for the lethal chamber; at least, she never spoke of it again. And Sonia stayed with us. Her boy was born in my house, and there for three happy years was nourished and shamelessly spoiled; at the end of which time Sonia found a husband in the person of young Jack Palumbo, unquestionably the pick of all our Hillhouse Avenue chauffeurs. Their marriage caused a brief scandal in the neighborhood, but was soon accepted as an authentic and successful fact. Chance and change are not always villains, you observe; the temperamental Sonia has grown stout and placid, and has increased the world's legitimate population by three. Nevertheless, it is the consensus of opinion that little Ivan, her first-born, is the golden arrow in her quiver--an opinion in which Jack Palumbo delightedly, if rather surprisingly, concurs. And so much for Sonia.... Let the curtain quietly descend. When it rises again, six years will have passed; good years--and therefore unrecorded. Your scribe, Susan, is now nearing forty; and you---- Great heavens, is it possible! Can you be "going on"--twenty? Yes, dear---- You are. THE THIRD CHAPTER I IT was October; the year, 1913. Susan, Miss Goucher and I had just returned from Liverpool on the good ship "Lusitania"--there was a good ship "Lusitania" in those days--after a delightful summer spent in Italy and France. Susan and I entirely agree that the season for Italy is midsummer. Italy is not Italy until she has drunk deep of the sun; until a haze of whitest dust floats up from the slow hoofs of her white oxen along Umbrian or Tuscan roads. You will never get from her churches all they can give unless they have been to you as shadows of great rocks in a weary land. To step from reverberating glare to vast cool dimness--ah, that is to know at last the meaning of sanctuary! But to step from a North River pier into a cynical taxi, solely energized by our great American principle of "Take a chance!"--to be bumped and slithered by that energizing principle across the main traffic streams of impatient New York--that is to reawaken to all the doubt and distraction, the implacable multiplicity of a scientifically disordered world! New Haven was better; Hillhouse Avenue preserving especially--through valorous prodigies of rejection--much of its ancient, slightly disdainful, studiously inconspicuous calm. Phil Farmer was waiting for us at the doorstep. For all his inclusive greeting, his warm, welcoming smile, he looked older, did Phil, leaner somehow, more finely drawn. There was a something hungry about him--something in his eyes. But if Susan, who notices most things, noted it, she did not speak of her impression to me. She almost hugged Phil as she jumped out to greet him and dragged him with her up the steps to the door. And now, if this portion of Susan's history is to be truthfully recorded, certain facts may as well be set down at once, clearly, in due order, without shame. 1. Phil Farmer was, by this time, hopelessly in love with Susan. 2. So was Maltby Phar. 3. So was I. It should now be possible for a modest but intelligent reader to follow the approaching pages without undue fatigue. II Susan never kept a diary, she tells me, but she had, like most beginning authors, the habit of scribbling things down, which she never intended to keep, and then could seldom bring herself to destroy. To a writer all that his pen leaves behind it seems sacred; it is, I treacherously submit, a private grief to any of us to blot a line. Such is our vanity. However inept the work which we force ourselves or are prevailed upon to destroy, the unhappy doubt always lingers: "If I had only saved it? One can't be sure? Perhaps posterity----?" Susan, thank God, was not and probably is not exempt from this folly. It enables me from this time forward to present certain passages--mere scraps and jottings--from her notebooks, which she has not hesitated to turn over to me. "I don't approve, Ambo," was her comment, "but if you _will_ write nonsense about me, I can't help it. What I can help, a little, is your writing nonsense about yourself or Phil or the rest. It's only fair to let me get a word in edgeways, now and then--if only for your sake and theirs." That is not, however, my own reason for giving you occasional peeps into these notebooks of Susan's. * * * * * "I'm beginning to wish that Shelley might have had a sense of humor. 'Epipsychidion' is really too absurd. 'Sweet benediction in the eternal curse!' Imagine, under any condition of sanity, calling any woman that! Or 'Thou star above the storm!'--beautiful as the image is. 'Thou storm upon the star!' would make much worse poetry, but much better sense.... Isn't it strange that I can't feel this about Wordsworth? He was better off without humor, for all his solemn-donkey spots--and it's better for us that he didn't have it. It's probably better for us, too, that Shelley didn't have it--but it wasn't better for _him_. Diddle-diddle-dumpling--what stuff all this is! Go to bed, Susan." * * * * * "There's no use pretending things are different, Susan Blake; you might as well face them and see them through, open-eyed. What does being in love mean? "I suppose if one is really in love, head over heels, one doesn't care what it means. But I don't like pouncing, overwhelming things--things that crush and blast and scorch and blind. I don't like cyclones and earthquakes and conflagrations--at least, I've never experienced any, but I know I shouldn't like them if I did. But I don't think I'd be so terribly afraid of them--though I might. I think I'd be more--sort of--indignant--disgusted." * * * * * Editor's Note: Such English! But pungent stylist as Susan is now acknowledged to be, she is still, in the opinion of academic critics, not sufficiently attentive to formal niceties of diction. She remains too wayward, too impressionistic; in a word, too personal. I am inclined to agree, and yet--am I? * * * * * "It's all very well to stamp round declaiming that you're captain of your soul, but if an earthquake--even a tiny one--comes and shakes your house like a dice box and then scatters you and the family out of it like dice--it wouldn't sound very appropriate for your epitaph. 'I am the master of my fate' would always look silly on a tombstone. Why aren't tombstones a good test for poetry--some poetry? I've never seen anything on a tombstone that looked real--not even the names and dates. "But _does_ love have to be like an earthquake? If it does, then it's just a blind force, and I don't like blind forces. It's stupid to be blind oneself; but it's worse to have blind stupid things butting into one and pushing one about. "Hang it, I don't believe love has to be stupid and blind, and go thrashing through things! Ambo isn't thrashing through things--or Phil either. But, of course, they wouldn't. That's exactly what I mean about love; it can be tamed, civilized. No, not civilized--just tamed. _Cowed?_ Then it's still as wild as ever underneath? I'm afraid it is. Oh, dear! "Phil and Ambo really are captains of their souls though, so far as things in general let them be. _Things in general_--what a funny name for God! But isn't God just a short solemn name for things in general? There I go again. Phil says I'm always taking God's name in vain. He thinks I lack reverence. I don't, really. What I lack is--reticence. That's different--isn't it, Ambo?" * * * * * The above extracts date back a little. The following were jotted early in November, 1913, not long after our return from overseas. * * * * * "This is growing serious, Susan Blake. Phil has asked you to marry him, and says he needs you. Ditto Maltby; only he says he wants you. Which, too obviously, he does. Poor Maltby--imagine his trying to stoop so low as matrimony, even to conquer! As for Ambo--Ambo says nothing, bless him--but I think he wants and needs you most of all. Well, Susan?" * * * * * "Jimmy's back. I saw him yesterday. He didn't know me." "Sex is a miserable nuisance. It muddles things--interferes with honest human values. It's just Nature making fools of us for her own private ends. These are not pretty sentiments for a young girl, Susan Blake!" * * * * * "Speak up, Susan--clear the air! You are living here under false pretenses. If you can't manage to feel like Ambo's daughter--you oughtn't to stay." III It was perhaps when reticent Phil finally spoke to me of his love for Susan that I first fully realized my own predicament--a most unpleasant discovery; one which I determined should never interfere with Susan's peace of mind or with the possible chances of other, more eligible, men. As Susan's guardian, I could not for a moment countenance her receiving more than friendly attention from a man already married, and no longer young. A grim, confused hour in my study convinced me that I was an impossible, even an absurd, _parti_. This conviction brought with it pain so sharp, so nearly unendurable, that I wondered in my weakness how it was to be unflinchingly borne. Yet borne it must be, and without betrayal. It did not occur to me, in my mature folly, that I was already, and had for long been, self-betrayed. "Steady, you old fool!" whispered my familiar demon. "This isn't going to be child's play, you know. This is an hour-by-hour torture you've set out to grin and bear and live through. You'll never make the grade, if you don't take cognizance in advance. The road's devilishly steep and icy, and the corners are bad. What's more, there's no end to it; the crest's never in sight. Clamp your chains on and get into low.... Steady! "But, of course," whispered my familiar demon, "there's probably an easier way round. Why attempt the impossible? Think what you've done for Susan! Gratitude, my dear sir--affectionate gratitude--is a long step in the right direction ... if it is the right direction. I don't say it is; I merely suggest, _en passant_, that it may be. Suppose, for example, that Susan----" "Damn you!" I spat out, jumping from my chair. "You contemptible swine!" Congested blood whined in my ears like a faint jeering laughter. I paced the room, raging--only to sink down again, exhausted, my face and hands clammy. "What a hideous exhibition," I said, distinctly addressing a grotesque porcelain Buddha on the mantelpiece. Contrary, I believe, to my expectations, he did not reply. My familiar demon forestalled him. "If by taking a merely conventional attitude," he murmured, "you defeat the natural flowering of two lives----? Who are you to decide that the voice of Nature is not also the voice of God? Supposing, for the moment, that God is other than a poetic expression. If her eyes didn't haunt you," continued my familiar demon, "or a certain way she has of turning her head, like a poised poppy...." As he droned on within me, the mantelpiece blurred and thinned to the blue haze of a distant Tuscan hill, and the little porcelain Buddha sat upon this hill, very far off now and changed oddly to the semblance of a tiny huddled town. We were climbing along a white road toward that far hill, that tiny town. "Ambo," she was saying, "that isn't East Rock--it's Monte Senario. And this isn't Birch Street--it's the Faenzan Way. How do you do it, Ambo--you wonderful magician! Just with a wave of your wand you change the world for me; you give me--all this!" A bee droned at my ear: "Gratitude, my dear sir. Affectionate gratitude. A long step." "Damn you!" I whimpered.... But the grotesque porcelain Buddha was there again, on the mantelshelf. The creases in his little fat belly disgusted me; they were loathsome. I rose. "At least," I said to him, "I can live without _you_!" Then I seized him and shattered him against the fireplace tiles. It was an enormous relief. Followed a knock at my door that I answered calmly: "Who is it? Come in." Miss Goucher never came to me without a mission; she had one now. "Mr. Hunt," she said, "I should like to talk to you very plainly. May I? It's about Susan." I nodded. "Mr. Hunt," she continued resolutely, "Susan is in a very difficult position here. I don't say that she isn't entirely equal to meeting it; but I dread the nervous strain for her--if you understand?" "Not entirely, Miss Goucher; perhaps, not at all." "I was afraid of this," she responded unhappily. "But I must go on--for her sake." Knowing well that Miss Goucher would face death smiling for Susan's sake, her repressed agitation alarmed me. "Good heavens!" I exclaimed. "Is there anything really wrong?" "A good deal." She paused, her lips whitening as she knit them together, lest any ill-considered word should slip from her. Miss Goucher never loosed her arrows at random; she always tried for the bull's-eye, and usually with success. "I am speaking in strict confidence--to Susan's protector and legal guardian. Please try to fill in what I leave unsaid. It is very unfortunate for Susan's peace of mind that you should happen to be a married man." "For _her_ peace of mind!" "Yes." "Wait! I daren't trust myself to fill in what you leave unsaid. It's too--preposterous. Do you mean---- But you can't mean that you imagine Susan to be in love with--her grandfather?" My heart pounded, suffocating me; with fright, I think. "No," said Miss Goucher, coldly; "Susan is not in love with her grandfather. She is with you." I could manage no response but an angry one. "That's a dangerous statement, Miss Goucher! Whether true or not--it ruins everything. You have made our life here together impossible." "It is impossible," said Miss Goucher. "It became so last summer. I knew then it could not go on much longer." "But I question this! I deny that Susan feels for me more than--gratitude and affection." "Gratitude is rare," said Miss Goucher enigmatically, her eyes fixed upon the fragments of Buddha littering my hearth. "True gratitude," she added, "is a strong emotion. When it passes between a man and a woman, it is like flame." "Very interesting!" I snapped. "But hardly enough to have brought you here to me with this!" "She feels that you need her," said Miss Goucher. "I do," was my reply. "Susan doesn't need _you_," said Miss Goucher. "I don't wish to be brutal; but she doesn't. In spite of this, she can easily stand alone." "I see. And you think that would be best?" "Naturally. Don't you?" "I'm not so sure." As I muttered this my eyes, too, fixed themselves on the fragments of Buddha. Would the woman never go! I hated her; it seemed to me now that I had always hated her. What was she after all but a superior kind of servant--presuming in this way! The irritation of these thoughts swung me suddenly round to wound her, if I might, with sarcasm, with implied contempt. But it is impossible to wound the air. With her customary economy of explanation Miss Goucher had, pitilessly, left me to myself. IV The evening of this already comfortless day I now recall as one of the most exasperating of my life. Maltby Phar arrived for dinner and the week-end--an exasperation foreseen; Phil came in after dinner--another; but what I did not foresee was that Lucette Arthur would bring her malicious self and her unspeakably tedious husband for a formal call. Lucette was an old friend of Gertrude, and I always suspected that her occasional evening visits were followed by a detailed report; in fact, I rather encouraged them, and returned them promptly, hoping that they were. In my harmless way of life even Lucette's talent for snooping could find, I felt, little to feed upon, and it did not wholly displease me that Gertrude should be now and then forced to recognize this. The coming of Susan had, not unnaturally, for a time, provided Lucette with a wealth of interesting conjecture; she had even gone so far as to intimate that Gertrude felt I was making--the expression is entirely mine--an ass of myself, which neither surprised nor disturbed me, since Gertrude had always had a tendency to feel that my talents lay in that direction. But, on the whole, up to this time--barring the Sonia incident, which had afforded her a good deal of scope, but which, after all, could not be safely misinterpreted--Lucette had found at my house pretty thin pickings for scandal; and I could only wonder at the unwearying patience with which she pursued her quest. She arrived with poor Doctor Arthur in tow--Dr. Lyman Arthur, who professed Primitive Eschatology in the School of Religion: eschatology being "that branch of theology which treats of the end of the world and man's condition or state after death"--just upon the heels of Phil, who shot me a despairing glance as we rose to greet them. But Susan, I thought, welcomed them with undisguised relief. She had been surpassing herself before the fire, chatting blithely, wittily, even a little recklessly; but there are gayer evenings conceivable than one spent in the presence of three doleful men, two of whom have proposed marriage to you, and one of whom would have done so if he were not married already. Almost anything, even open espionage and covert eschatology, was better than that. Lucette--the name suggests Parisian vivacity, but she was really large and physically languid and very blonde, scented at once, I felt, a something faintly brimstoneish in the atmosphere of my model home, and forthwith prepared herself for a protracted and pleasant evening. It so happened that the Arthurs had never met Maltby, and Susan carried through the ceremony of introduction with a fine swinging rhythm which settled us as one group before the fire and for some moments at least kept the conversation animated and general. But Eschatology, brooding in the background, soon put an end to this somewhat hectic social burst. The mere unnoted presence of Dr. Lyman Arthur, peering nearsightedly in at the doorway on a children's party, has been known, I am told, to slay youngling joy and turn little tots self-conscious, so that they could no longer be induced by agonized mothers to go to Jerusalem, or clap-in clap-out. His presence now, gradually but surely, had much the same effect. Seated at Maltby's elbow, he passed into the silence and drew us, struggling but helpless, after him. For five horrible seconds nothing was heard but the impolite, ironic whispering of little flames on the hearth. Was this man's condition or state after death? Eschatology had conquered. Susan, in duty bound as hostess, broke the spell, but it cannot be said she rose to the occasion. "Is it a party in a parlor," she murmured wistfully to the flames, "all silent and all--damned?" Perceiving that Lucette supposed this to be original sin, I laughed much more loudly than cheerfully, exclaiming "Good old Wordsworth!" as I did so. Then Maltby's evil genius laid hold on him. "By the way," he snorted, "they tell me one of you academic ghouls has discovered that Wordsworth had an illegitimate daughter--whatever _that_ means! Any truth in it? I hope so. It's the humanest thing I ever heard about the old sheep!" Doctor Arthur cleared his throat, very cautiously; and it was evident that Maltby had not helped us much. Phil, in another vein, helped us little more. "I wonder," he asked, "if anyone reads Wordsworth now--except Susan?" No one, not even Susan, seemed interested in this question; and the little flames chuckled quietly once more. Something had to be done. "Doctor," I began, turning toward Eschatology, and knowing no more than my Kazak hearthrug what I was going to say, "is it true that----" "Undoubtedly," intoned Eschatology, thereby saving me from the pit I was digging for myself. My incomplete question must have chimed with Doctor Arthur's private reflections, and he seemed to suppose some controversial matter under discussion. "Undoubtedly," he repeated.... "And what is even more important is this----" But Lucette silenced him with a "Why is it, dear, that you always let your cigar burn down at one side? It does look so untidy." And she leaned to me. "What delightfully daring discussions you must all of you have here together! You're all so terribly intellectual, aren't you? But do you never talk of anything but books and art and ideas? I'm sure you must," she added, fixing me with impenetrable blue eyes. "Often," I smiled back; "even the weather has charms for us. Even food." Her inquisitive upper lip curled and dismissed me. "Why is it," she demanded, turning suddenly on Susan, "that I don't see you round more with the college boys? They're much more suitable to your age, you know, than Ambrose or Phil. I hope you don't frighten them off, my dear, by mentioning Wordsworth? Boys dislike bluestockings; and you're much too charming to wear them anyway. Oh, but you really are! I must take charge of you--get you out more where you belong, away from these dreadful old fogies!" Lucette laughed her languid, purring, dangerous laughter. "I'm serious, Miss Blake. You musn't let them monopolize you; they will if you're not careful. They're just selfish enough to want to keep you to themselves." The tone was badinage; but the remark struck home and left us speechless. Lucette shifted the tiller slightly and filled her sails. "Next thing you know, Miss Blake, they'll be asking you to marry them. Individually, of course--not collectively. And, of course--not Ambrose! At least you're safe there," she hastily added; "aren't you?" Maltby, I saw, was furious; bent on brutalities. Before I could check him, "Why?" he growled. "Why, Mrs. Arthur, do you assume that Susan is safe with Boz?" "Well," she responded with a slow shrug of her shoulders, "naturally----" "Unnaturally!" snapped Maltby. "Unless forbidden fruit has ceased to appeal to your sex. I was not aware that it had." Phil's eyes were signalling honest distress. Susan unexpectedly rose from her chair. Deep spots of color burned on her cheeks, but she spoke with dignity. "I have never disliked any conversation so much, Mrs. Arthur. Good night." She walked from the room. Phil jumped up without a word and hurried after her. Then we all rose. It seemed, however, that apologies were useless. Doctor Arthur had no need for them, since he had not perceived a slight, and was only too happy to find himself released from bondage; as for Lucette, her assumed frigidity could not conceal her flaming triumph. As a social being, for the sake of the _mores_, she must resent Susan's snub; but I saw that she would not have had things happen otherwise for a string of matched pearls. At last, at last her patience had been rewarded! I could almost have written for her the report to Gertrude--with nothing explicitly stated, and nothing overlooked. Maltby, after their departure, continued truculent, and having no one else to rough-house decided to rough-house me. The lengthening absence of Susan and Phil had much to do with his irritation, and something no doubt with mine. For men of mature years we presently developed a very pretty little gutter-snipe quarrel. "Damn it, Boz," he summed his grievances, "it comes precisely to this: You're playing dog in the manger here. By your attitude, by every kind of sneaking suggestion, you poison Susan's mind against me. Hang it, I'm not vain--but at least I'm presentable, and I've been called amusing. Other women have found me so. And to speak quite frankly, it isn't every man in my position who would offer marriage to a girl whose father----" "I'd stop there, Maltby, if I were you!" "My dear man, you and I are above such prejudices, of course! But it's only common sense to acknowledge that they exist. Susan's the most infernally seductive accident that ever happened on this middle-class planet! But all the same, there's a family history back of her that not one man in fifty would be able to forget. My point is, that with all her seduction, physical and mental, she's not in the ordinary sense marriageable. And it's the ordinary sense of such things that runs the world." "Well----" "Well--there you are! I offer her far more than she could reasonably hope for; or you for her. I'm well fixed, I know everybody worth knowing; I can give her a good time, and I can help her to a career. It strikes me that if you had Susan's good at heart, you'd occasionally suggest these thing's to her--even urge them upon her. As her guardian you must have some slight feeling of responsibility?" "None whatever." "What!" "None whatever--so far as Susan's deeper personal life is concerned. That is her affair, not mine." "Then you'd be satisfied to have her throw herself away?" "If she insisted, yes. But Susan's not likely to throw herself away." "Oh, isn't she! Let me tell you this, Boz, once for all: You're in love with the girl yourself, and though you may not know it, you've no intention of letting anyone else have a chance." "Well," I flashed, "if you were in my shoes--would _you_?" The vulgarity of our give and take did not escape me, but in my then state of rage I seemed powerless to escape vulgarity. I revelled in vulgarity. It refreshed me. I could have throttled Maltby, and I am quite certain he was itching to throttle me. We were both longing to throttle Phil. Indeed, we almost leaped at him as he stopped in the hall doorway to toss us an unnaturally gruff good night. "Where's Susan?" I demanded. "In your study," Phil mumbled, hunching into his overcoat; "she's waiting to see you." Then he seized his shapeless soft hat and--the good old phrase best describes it--made off. "She's got to see me first!" Maltby hurled at me, coarsely, savagely, as he started past. I grabbed his arm and held him. It thrilled me to realize how soft he was for all his bulk, to feel that physically I was the stronger. "Wait!" I said. "This sort of thing has gone far enough. We'll stop _grovelling_--if you don't mind! If we can't give Susan something better than this, we've been cheating her. It's a pity she ever left Birch Street." Maltby stared at me with slowly stirring comprehension. "Yes," he at length muttered, grudgingly enough; "perhaps you're right. It's been an absurd spectacle all round. But then, life is." "Wait for me here," I responded. "We'll stop butting at each other like stags, and try to talk things over like men. I'm just going to send Susan to bed." That _was_ my intention. I went to her in the study as a big brother might go, meaning good counsel. It was certainly not my intention to let her run into my arms and press her face to my shoulder. She clung to me with passion, but without joy, and her voice came through the tumult of my senses as if from a long way off. "Ambo, Ambo! You've asked nothing--and you want me most of all. I _must_ make somebody happy!" It was the voice of a child. V I could not face Maltby again that evening, as I had promised, for our good sensible man-to-man talk; a lapse in courage which reduced him to rabid speculation and restless fury. So furious was he, indeed, after a long hour alone, that he telephoned for a taxi, grabbed his suitcase, and caught a slow midnight local for New York--from which electric center he hissed back over the wires three ominous words to ruin my solitary breakfast: * * * * * "He laughs best---- M. PHAR." * * * * * While my egg solidified and the toast grew rigid I meditated a humble apologetic reply, but in the end I could not with honesty compose one; though I granted him just cause for anger. With that, for the time being, I dismissed him. There were more immediate problems, threatening, inescapable, that must presently be solved. Susan, always an early riser, usually had a bite of breakfast at seven o'clock--brought to her by the faithful Miss Goucher--and then remained in her room to work until lunch time. For about a year past I had so far caught the contagion of her example as to write in my study three hours every morning; a regularity I should formerly have despised. Dilettantism always demands a fine frenzy, but now it astounded me to discover how much respectable writing one could do without waiting for the spark from heaven; one could pass beyond the range of an occasional article and even aspire to a book. Only the final pages of my first real book--_Aristocracy and Art_, an essay in æsthetic and social criticism--remained to be written; and Susan had made me swear by the Quanglewangle's Hat, her favorite symbol, to push on with it each morning till the job was done. Well, _Aristocracy and Art_ has since been published and, I am glad to say, forgotten. Conceived in superciliousness and swaddled in preciosity, it is one of the sins I now strive hardest to expiate. But in those days it expressed clearly enough the crusted aridity of my soul. However---- I had hoped, of course, that Susan would break over this morning and breakfast with me. She did not; and from sheer habit I took to my study and found myself in the chair before my desk. It was my purpose to think things out, and perhaps that is what I supposed myself to be doing as I stared dully at an ink blob on my blotter. It looked--and I was idiotically pleased by the resemblance--rather like a shark. All it needed was some teeth and a pair of flukes for its tail. Methodically I opened my fountain pen and supplied these, thereby reducing one fragment of chaos to order; and then my eye fell upon a half-scribbled sheet, marked "Page 224." The final sentence on the sheet caught at me and annoyed me; it was ill-constructed. Presently it began to rearrange itself in whatever portion of us it is that these shapings and reshapings take place. Something in its rhythm, too, displeased me; it was mannered; it minuetted; it echoed Pater at his worst. It should be simpler, stronger. Why, naturally! I lopped at it, compressed it, pulled it about.... There! At last the naked idea got the clean expression it deserved; and it led now directly to a brief, clear paragraph of transition. I had been worrying over that transition the morning before when my pen stopped; now it came with a smooth rush, carrying me forward and on. Incredible, but for one swiftly annihilated hour I forgot all my insoluble life problems! Art, that ancient Circe, had waved her wand; I was happy--and it was enough. I forgot even Susan. Meanwhile, Susan, busy at her notebook, had all but forgotten me. * * * * * "Am I in love with Ambo, or am I just trying to be for his sake? If happiness is a test, then I can't be in love with him, for there is no happiness in me. But what has happiness to do with love? It's just as I told nice old Phil last night. To be in love is to be silly enough to suppose that some other silly can gather manna for you from the meadows of heaven. Meanwhile, the other silly is supposing much the same nonsense about you--or if he isn't, then the sun goes black. What lovers seem to value most in each other is premature softening of the brain. But surely the union of two vain hopes in a single disappointment can never mean joy? No. You might as well get it said, Susan. Love is two broken reeds trying to be a Doric column. "Still, there must be some test. Is it passion? How can it be? "When I ran to Ambo last night I was pure rhythm and flame; but this morning I'm the hour before sunrise. No; I'm the outpost star, the one the comets turn--the one that peers off into nowhere. "Perhaps if Ambo came to me now I should flame again; or perhaps I should only make believe for his sake. Is wanting to make believe for another's sake enough? Why not? I've no patience with lovers who are always rhythm and flame. Even if they exist--outside of _maisons de santé_--what good are they? Poets can rave about them, I suppose--that's something; but imagine coming to the end of life and finding that one had merely furnished good copy for Swinburne! No, thank you, Mrs. Hephæstus--you beautiful, shameless humbug! I prefer Apollo's lonely magic to yours. I'd rather be Swinburne than Iseult. If there's any singing left to be done I shall try to do part of it myself. "There, you see; already you've forgotten Ambo completely--now you'll have to turn back and hunt for him. And if he's really working on _Aristocracy and Art_ this morning, as he should be, then he has almost certainly forgotten you. Oh, dear! but he isn't--and he hasn't! Here he comes----" * * * * * Yes, I came; but not to ask for assurances of love. Man is so naïvely egotist, it takes a good deal to convince him, once the idea has been accepted, that he is not the object of an unalterable devotion. Frankly, I took it for granted now that Susan loved me, and would continue to love me till her dying hour. What I really came to say to her, under the calming and strengthening influence of two or three rather well-written pages, was that our situation had definitely become untenable. I am an emancipated talker, but I am not an emancipated man; the distinction is important; the hold of mere custom upon me is strong. I could not see myself asking Susan to defy the world with me; or if I could just see it for my own sake, I certainly couldn't for hers. Nor could I see it for Gertrude's. Gertrude, after all, was my wife; and though she chose to feel I had driven her from my society, I knew that she did not feel willing to seek divorce for herself or to grant the freedom of it to me. On this point her convictions, having a religious sanction, were permanent. Gentle manners, then, if nothing higher, forbade me to seize the freedom she denied me. Having persuaded Gertrude, in good faith, to enter into an unconditional contract with me for life, I could no more bring myself to break it than I could have forced myself to steal another's money by raising a check. My New England ancestors had distilled into my blood certain prejudices; only, where my great-grandfather, or even my grandfather, would have said that he refrained from evil because he feared God, I was content merely to feel that there are some things a gentleman doesn't stoop to. With them it was the stern daughter of the voice of God who ruled thoughts and acts; with me it was, if anything, the class obligations of culture, breeding, good form. Just as I wore correct wedding garments at a wedding, and would far rather have cut my throat with a knife than carry food on it from plate to mouth, so, in the face of any of life's moral or emotional crises, I clung to what instinct and cultivation told me were the correct sentiments. Gertrude, it is true, was not precisely fulfilling her part in our contract, but then--Gertrude was a woman; and the excusable frailties of women should always be regarded as trumpet calls to the chivalry of man. Absurdly primitive, such ideas as these! Seated with Maltby Phar in my study, I had laughed them out of court many a time; for I could talk pure Bernard Shaw--our prophet of those days--with anybody, and even go him one better. But when it came to the pinch of decisive action I had always thrown back to my sources and left the responsibility on them. I did so now. Yet it was hard to speak of anything but enchantment, witchery, fascination, when, from her desk, Susan looked round to me, faintly puzzled, faintly smiling. She was not a pretty girl, as young America--its taste superbly catered to by popular magazines--understands that phrase; nor was she beautiful by any severe classic standard--unless you are willing to accept certain early Italians as having established classic standards; not such faultless painters as Raphael or Andrea del Sarto, but three or four of the wayward lesser men whose strangely personal vision created new and unexpected types of loveliness. Not that I recall a single head by any one of them that prefigured Susan; not that I am helping you, baffled reader, to see her. Words are a dull medium for portraiture, or I am too dull a dog to catch with them even a phantasmal likeness. It is the mixture of dark and bright in Susan that eludes me; she is all soft shadow and sharpest gleams. But that is nonsense. I give it up. It was really, then, a triumph for my ancestors that I did not throw myself on my knees beside her chair--the true romantic attitude, when all's said--and draw her dark-bright face down to mine. I halted instead just within the doorway, retaining a deathlike grip on the door-knob. "Dear," I blurted, "it won't do. It's the end of the road. We can't go on." "Can we turn back?" asked Susan. I wonder the solid bronze knob did not shatter like hollow glass in my hand. "You must help me," I muttered. "Yes," said Susan, all quiet shadow now, gleamless; "I'll help you." Half an hour after I left her she telephoned and dispatched the following telegram, signed "Susan Blake," to Gertrude at her New York address: "_Either come back to him or set him free. Urgent._" VI The reply--a note from Gertrude, the ink hardly dry on it, written from the Egyptian tomb of the Misses Carstairs--came directly to me that evening; and Mrs. Parrot was the messenger. Her expression, as she mutely handed me the note, was ineffable. I read the note with sensations of suffocation; an answer was requested. "Tell Mrs. Hunt," I said firmly to Mrs. Parrot, "that it was she who left me, and I am stubbornly determined to make no advances. If she cares to see me I shall be glad to see her. She has only to walk a few yards, climb a few easy steps, and ring the bell." My courtesy was truly elaborate as I conducted Mrs. Parrot to the door. Her response was disturbing. "It's not for me to make observations," said Mrs. Parrot, "the situation being delicate, and not likely to improve. But if I was you, Mr. Hunt, I'd not be too stiff. No; I'd not be. I would not. No. Not if I valued the young lady's reputation." Like the Pope's mule, Mrs. Parrot had saved her kick many years. I can testify to its power. Thirty minutes later this superkick landed me, when I came crashing back to earth, at the door of the Egyptian tomb. "How hard it is," says Dante, "to climb another's stairs," and he might have added to ring another's bell, under certain conditions of spiritual humiliation and stress. Thank the gods--all of them--it was not Mrs. Parrot who admitted me and took my card! I waited miserably in the large, ill-lighted reception vault of the tomb, which smelt appropriately of lilies, as if the undertaker had recently done his worst. How well I remembered it, how long I had avoided it! It was here of all places, under the contemptuous eye of old Ephraim Carstairs, grim ancestral founder of this family's fortunes, that Gertrude had at last consented to be my wife. And there he still lorded it above the fireplace, unchanged, glaring down malignantly through the shadows, his stiff neck bandaged like a mummy's, his hard, high cheek bones and cavernous eyes making him the very image of bugaboo death. What an eavesdropper for the approaching reconciliation; for that was what it had come to. That was what it would have to be! It was not Gertrude who came down to me; it was Lucette. Lucette--all graciousness, all sympathetic understanding, all feline smiles! Dear Gertrude had 'phoned her on arriving, and she had rushed to her at once! Dear Gertrude had such a desperate headache! She couldn't possibly see me to-night. She was really ill, had been growing rapidly worse for an hour. Perhaps to-morrow? I was in no mood to be tricked by this stale subterfuge. "See here, Lucette," I said sternly, "I'm not going to fence with you or fool round at cross purposes. Less than an hour ago Gertrude sent over a note, asking me to call." "To which you returned an insufferable verbal reply." "A bad-tempered reply, I admit. No insult was intended. And I've come now to apologize for the temper." "Oh, dear!" sighed Lucette. "Men always do their thinking too late. I wish I could reassure you; but the mischief seems to be done. Poor Gertrude is furious." "Then the headache is--hypothetical?" "An excuse, you mean? I wish it were, for her sake!" Lucette's eyes positively caressed me, as a tiger might lick the still-warm muzzle of an antelope, its proximate meal. "If you could see her face, poor creature! She's in torment." "I'm sorry." "Isn't that--what you called her headache?" "No. I'm ashamed of my boorishness. Let me see Gertrude and tell her so." Lucette smiled, slightly shaking her head. "Impossible--till she's feeling better. And not then--unless she changes her mind. You see, Ambrose, Mrs. Parrot's version of your reply was the last straw." "No doubt she improved on the original," I muttered. "Oh, no doubt," agreed Lucette calmly. "She would. It was silly of you not to think of that." "Yes," I snapped. "Men always underestimate a woman's malice." "They have so many distractions, poor dears. Men, I mean. And we have so few. You can put that in your next article, Ambrose?" She straightened her languid curves deliberately, as if preparing to rise. "Please!" I exclaimed. "I'm not ready for dismissal yet. We'll get down to facts, if you don't mind. Why is Gertrude here at all? After years of silence? Did you send for her?" Lucette's spine slowly relaxed, her shoulders drooped once more. "I? My dear Ambrose, why on earth should I do a thing like that?" "I don't know. The point is, did you?" "You think it in character?" "Oh--be candid! I don't mean directly, of course. But is she here because of anything you may have telephoned her--after your call last night?" "Really, Ambrose! This is a little too much, even from you." "Forgive me--I insist! Is she?" "You must have a very bad conscience," replied Lucette. "I am more interested in yours." She laughed luxuriously, "Mine has never been clearer." Did the woman want me to stop her breath with bare hands? I gripped the mahogany arms of my stiff Chippendale chair. "Listen to me, Lucette! I know this is all very thrilling and amusing for you. Vivisection must have its charms, of course--for an expert. But I venture to remind you that once upon a time you were not a bad-hearted girl, and you must have some remnants of human sympathy about you somewhere. Am I wrong?" "You're hideously rude." "Granted. But I must place you. I won't accept you as an onlooker. Either you'll fight me or help me--or clear out. Is that plain?" "You're worse than rude," said Lucette; "you're a beast! I always wondered why Gertrude couldn't live with you. Now I know." "That's better," I hazarded. "We're beginning to understand each other. Now let's lay all our cards face up on the table?" Lucette stared at me a moment, her lips pursed, dubious, her impenetrable blue eyes holding mine. "I will, if you will," she said finally. "Let's." It was dangerous, I knew, to take her at her word; yet I ventured. "I've a weak hand, Lucette; but there's one honest ace of trumps in it." "There could hardly be two," smiled Lucette. "No; I count on that. In a pinch, I shall take the one trick essential, and throw the others away." I leaned to her and spoke slowly: "There is no reason, affecting her honor or rights, why Gertrude may not return to her home--if she so desires. I think you understand me?" "Perfectly. You wish to protect Miss Blake. You would try to do that in any case, wouldn't you? But I'm rather afraid you're too late. I'm afraid Miss Blake has handicapped you too heavily. If so, it was clever of her--for she must have done it on purpose. You see, Ambrose, it was she who sent for Gertrude." "Susan!" "Susan. Telegraphed her--of all things!--either to come home to you or set you free. The implication's transparent. Especially as I had thought it my duty to warn Gertrude in advance--and as Mr. Phar sent her, by messenger, a vague but very disturbing note this morning." "Maltby?" "Yes. His note was delivered not five minutes ahead of Susan's wire. Gertrude caught the next train. And there you are." Well, at least I began to see now, dimly, where Maltby was, where Susan was, where we all were--except, possibly Gertrude. Putting enormous constraint on my leaping nerves, I subdued every trace of anger. "Two more questions, Lucette. Do you believe me when I say, with all the sincerity I'm capable of, that Susan is slandered by these suspicions?" "Really," answered Lucette, with a little worried frown, as if anxiously balancing alternatives, "I'm not, am I, in a position to judge?" I swallowed hard. "All right," I managed to say coldly. "Then I have placed you. You're not an onlooker--you're an open foe." "And the second question, Ambrose?" "What, precisely, does Gertrude want from me?" "I'm not, am I, in a position to judge?" repeated Lucette. "But one supposes it depends a little on what you're expecting--from her?" "All I humbly plead for," said I, "is a chance to see Gertrude alone and talk things over." "Don't you mean talk _her_ over?" suggested Lucette. "And aren't you," she murmured, "forgetting the last straw?" VII My confusion of mind, my consternation, as I left the Egyptian tomb, was pitiable. One thing, one only, I saw with distinctness: The being I loved best was to be harried and smirched, an innocent victim of the folly and malignity of others. "Never," I muttered, "Never--never--never!" This was all very grim and virile; yet I knew that I could grit my teeth and mutter Never! from now till the moon blossomed, without in any way affecting the wretched situation. Words, emotional contortions, attitudes--would not help Susan; something sensible must be done--the sooner the better. Something sensible and decisive--but what? There were so many factors involved, human, incalculable factors; my thought staggered among them, fumbling like a drunken man for the one right door that must be found and opened with the one right key. It was no use; I should never be able to manage it alone. To whom could I appeal? Susan, for the time being, was out of the question; Maltby had maliciously betrayed a long friendship. Phil? Why of course, there was always Phil? Why hadn't I thought of him before? I turned sharply and swung into a rapid stride. With some difficulty I kept myself from running. Phil seemed to me suddenly an intellectual giant, a man of infinite heart and unclouded will. Why had I never appreciated him at his true worth? My whirling perplexities would have no terrors for him; he would at once see through them to the very thing that should at once be undertaken. Singular effect of an overwhelming desire and need! Faith is always born of desperation. We are forced by deep-lying instincts to trust something, someone, when we can no longer trust ourselves. As I hurried down York Street to his door, my sudden faith in Phil was like the faith of a broken-spirited convert in the wisdom and mercy of God. Phil's quarters were on the top floor of a rooming-house for students; he had the whole top floor to himself and had lived there simply and contentedly many years, with his books, his pipes, his papers, and his small open wood fire. Phil is not destitute of taste, but he is by no means an æsthete. His furniture is of the ordinary college-room type--Morris chair of fumed oak, and so on--picked up as he needed it at the nearest department store; but he has two or three really good framed etchings on the walls of his study; one Seymour Haden in particular--the _Erith Marshes_--which I have often tried to persuade him to part with. There is a blending of austerity and subtlety in the work of the great painter-etchers that could not but appeal to this austere yet finely organized man. His books are wonderful--not for edition or binding--he is not a bibliophile; they are wonderful because he keeps nothing he has not found it worth while to annotate. There is no volume on his shelves whose inside covers and margins are not filled with criticism or suggestive comment in his neat spiderwebby hand; and Phil's marginal notes are usually far better reading than the original text. Susan warmly maintains that she owes more to the inside covers of Phil's books than to any other source; insists, in fact, that a brief note in his copy of Santayana's _Reason in Common Sense_, at the end of the first chapter, established her belief once for all in mind as a true thing, an indestructible and creative reality, destined after infinite struggle to win its grim fight with chaos. I confess I could never myself see in this note anything to produce so amazing an affirmation; but in these matters I am a worm; I have not the philosophic _flair_. Here it is: "'We know that life is a dream, and how should thinking be more?' Because, my dear Mr. Santayana, a dream cannot propagate dreams and realize them to be such. The answer is sufficient." Well, certainly Susan, too, seemed to feel it sufficient; and perhaps I should agree if I better understood the answer.... But I have now breasted four flights to Phil and am knocking impatiently.... He opened to me and welcomed me cordially, all trace of his parting gruffness of the other evening having vanished, though he was still haggard about the eyes. He was not alone. Through the smoke haze of his study I saw a well-built youngster standing near the fireplace, pipe in hand; some college boy, of course, whom Phil was being kind to. Phil was forever permitting these raw boys to cut in upon his precious hours of privacy; yet he was at the opposite pole from certain faculty members, common to all seats of learning, who toady to the student body for a popularity which they feel to be a good business asset, or which they find the one attainable satisfaction for their tottering self-esteem. Phil, who had had to struggle for his own education, was genuinely fond of young men who cared enough for education to be willing to struggle for theirs. He had become unobtrusively, by a kind of natural affinity, the elder brother of those undergraduates who were seekers in any sense for the things of the mind. For the rest, the triumphant majority--fine, manly young fellows as they usually were, in official oratory at least--he was as blankly indifferent as they were to him. "My enthusiasm for humanity is limited, fatally limited," he would pleasantly admit. "For the human turnip, even when it's a prize specimen, I have no spontaneous affection whatever." On the other hand it was not the brilliant, exceptional boy whom he best loved. It was rather the boy whose interest in life, whose curiosity, was just stirring toward wakefulness after a long prenatal and postnatal sleep. For such boys Phil poured forth treasures of sympathetic understanding; and it was such a youth, I presume, who stood by the fireplace now, awkwardly uncertain whether my coming meant that he should take his leave. His presence annoyed me. On more than one occasion I had run into this sort of thing at Phil's rooms, had suffered from the curious inability of the undergraduate, even when he longs himself to escape, to end a visit--take his hat, say good-by simply, and go. It doesn't strike one offhand as a social accomplishment of enormous difficulty; yet it must be--it so paralyzes the social resourcefulness of the young. Phil introduced me to Mr. Kane, and Mr. Kane drooped his right shoulder--the correct attitude for this form of assault--grasped my hand, and shattered my nerves--with the dislocating squeeze which young America has perfected as the high sign of all that is virile and sincere. I sank into a chair to recover, and to my consternation Mr. Kane, too, sat down. "Jimmy's just come to us," said Phil, relighting his pipe. "He passed his entrance examinations in Detroit last spring, but he had to finish up a job he was on out there before coming East. So he has a good deal of work to make up, first and last. And it's all the harder for him, because he's dependent upon himself for support." "Oh," said Jimmy, "what I've saved'll last me through this year, I guess." "Yes," Phil agreed; "but it's a pity to touch what you've saved." He turned to me. "You see, Hunt, we're talking over all the prospects. Aren't we, Jimmy?" "Yes, sir," answered Jimmy. "Prof. Farmer thinks," he added, "that I may be making a mistake to try it here; he thinks it may be a waste of time. I'm kind of up in the air about it, myself." "Jimmy's rather a special case," struck in Phil, dropping into a Morris chair and thrusting his legs out. "He's twenty-two now; and he's already made remarkably good as an expert mechanic. He left his home here over six years ago, worked his way to Detroit, applied for a job and got it. Now there's probably no one in New Haven who knows more than this young man about gas engines, steel alloys, shop organization, and all that. The little job that detained him was the working out of some minor but important economy in the manufacture of automobiles. He suggested it by letter to the president of the company himself, readily obtained several interviews with his chief, and was given a chance to try it out. "It has proved its practical worth already, though you and I are far too ignorant to understand it. As a result, the president of the company offered him a much higher position at an excellent salary. It's open to him still, if he chooses to go back for it. But Jimmy has decided to turn it down for a college education. And I'm wondering, Hunt, whether Yale has anything to give him that will justify such a sacrifice--anything that he couldn't obtain for himself, at much less expense, without three years waste of time and opportunity. How does it strike you, old man? What would you say, offhand, without weighing the matter?" What I wanted to say was, "Damn it all! I'm not here at this time of night to interest myself in the elementary problems of Jimmy Kane!" In fact, I did say it to myself, with considerable energy--only to stop at the name, to stare at the boy before me, and to exclaim in a swift flash of connection, "Great Scott! Are you _Susan's_ Jimmy?" "'Susan's Jimmy'!" snorted Phil, with a peculiar grin. "Of course he's Susan's Jimmy! I wondered how long it would take you!" As for Susan's Jimmy, his expression was one of desolated amazement. Either his host and his host's friend, or he himself--had gone suddenly mad! The drop of his jaw was parentheses about a question mark. His blue eyes piteously stared. "I guess I'm not on, sir," he mumbled to Phil, blushing hotly. He was really a most attractive youth, considering his origins. I eyed him now shamelessly, and was forced to wonder that the wrong end of Birch Street should have produced not only Susan--who would have proved the phoenix of any environment--but this pleasant-faced, confidence-inspiring boy, whose expression so oddly mingled simplicity, energy, stubborn self-respect, and the cheerfulness of good health, an unspoiled will, and a hopeful heart. He seemed at once too mature for his years and too naïve; concentration had already modelled his forehead, but there was innocence in his eyes. Innocence--I can only call it that. His eyes looked out at the world with the happiest candor; and I found myself predicting of him what I had never yet predicted of mortal woman or man: "He's capable of anything--but sophistication; he'll get on, he'll arrive somewhere--but he will never change." Phil, meanwhile, had eased his embarrassment with a friendly laugh. "It's all right, Jimmy; we're not the lunatics we sound. Don't you remember Bob Blake's kid on Birch Street?" "Oh! Her?" "Mr. Hunt became her guardian, you know, after----" "Oh!" interrupted Jimmy, beaming on me. "You're the gentleman that----" "Yes," I responded; "I'm the unbelievably fortunate man." "She was a queer little kid," reflected Jimmy. "I haven't thought about her for a long time." "That's ungrateful of you," said Phil; "but of course you couldn't know that." Question mark and parentheses formed again. "Phil means," I explained, "that Susan has never forgotten you. It seems you did battle for her once, down at the bottom of the Birch Street incline?" "Oh, gee!" grinned Jimmy. "The time I laid out Joe Gonfarone? Maybe I wasn't scared stiff that day! Well, what d'y' think of her remembering that!" "You'll find it's a peculiarity of Susan," said Phil, "that she doesn't forget anything." "Why--she must be grown up by this time," surmised Jimmy. "It was mighty fine of you, Mr. Hunt, to do what you did! I'd kind of like to see her again some day. But maybe she'd rather not," he added quickly. "Why?" asked Phil. "Well," said Jimmy, "she had a pretty raw deal on Birch Street. Seeing me--might bring back things?" "It couldn't," I reassured him. "Susan has never let go of them. She uses all her experience, every part of it, every day." Jimmy grinned again. "It must keep her hustling! But she always was different, I guess, from the rest of us." With a vague wonder, he addressed us both: "You think a lot of her, don't you?" For some detached, ironic god this moment must have been exquisite. I envied the god his detachment. The blank that had followed his question puzzled Jimmy and turned him awkward. He fidgeted with his feet. "Well," he finally achieved, "I guess I'd better be off, professor. I'll think over all you said." "Do," counselled Phil, rising, "and come to see me to-morrow. We mustn't let you take a false step if we can avoid it." "It's certainly great of you to show so much interest," said Jimmy, hunching himself at last out of his chair. "I appreciate it a lot." He hesitated, then plunged. "It's been well worth it to me to come East again--just to meet _you_." "Nonsense!" laughed Phil, shepherding him skillfully toward the door.... When he turned back to me, it was with the evident intention of discussing further Jimmy's personal and educational problems; but I rebelled. "Phil," I said, "I know what Susan means to you, and you know--I think--what she means to me. Now, through my weakness, stupidity, or something, Susan's in danger. Sit down please, and let me talk. I'm going to give you all the facts, everything--a full confession. It's bound, for many reasons, to be painful for both of us. I'm sorry, old man--but we'll have to rise to it for Susan's sake; see this thing through together. I feel utterly imbecile and helpless alone." Half an hour later I had ended my monologue, and we both sat silent, staring at the dulled embers on the hearth.... At length Phil drew in a slow, involuntary breath. "Hunt," he said, "it's a humiliating thing for a professional philosopher to admit, but I simply can't trust myself to advise you. I don't know what you ought to do; I don't know what Susan ought to do; or what I should do. I don't even know what your wife should do; though I feel fairly certain that whatever it is, she will try something else. Frankly, I'm too much a part of it all, too heartsick, for honest thought." He smiled drearily and added, as if at random: "'Physician, heal thyself.' What an abysmal joke! How the fiends of hell must treasure it. They have only one better--'Man is a reasonable being!'" He rose, or rather he seemed to be propelled from his chair. "Hunt! Would you really like to know what all my days and nights of intense study have come to? The kind of man you've turned to for strength? My life has come to just this: I love her, and she doesn't love me! "Oh!" he cried--"Go home. For God's sake, go home! I'm ashamed...." So I departed, like Omar, through the same door wherein I went; but not before I had grasped--as it seemed to me for the first time--Phil's hand. VIII There are some verses in Susan's notebook of this period, themselves undated, and never subsequently published, which--from their position on the page--must have been written about this time and may have been during the course of the momentous evening on which I met Jimmy Kane at Phil Farmer's rooms. I give them now, not as a favorable specimen of her work, since she thought best to exclude them from her first volume, but because they throw some light at least on the complicated and rather obscure state of mind that was then hers. They have no title, and need none. If you should feel they need interpretation--"_guarda e passa_"! They are not for you. _Though she rose from the sea There were stains upon her whiteness; All earth's waters had not sleeked her clean. For no tides gave her birth, Nor the salt, glimmering middle depths; But slime spawned her, the couch of life, The sunless ooze, The green bed of Poseidon, Where with sordid Chaos he mingles obscurely. Her flanks were of veined marble; There were stains upon her._ _But she who passes, lonely, Through waste places, Through bog and forest; Who follows boar and stag Unwearied; Who sleeps, fearless, among the hills; Though she track the wilds, Though she breast the crags, Choosing no path-- Her kirtle tears not, Her ankles gleam, Her sandals are silver._ IX It was midnight when I reached my own door that night, but I was in no mood for lying in bed stark awake in the spiritual isolation of darkness. I went straight to my study, meaning to make up a fire and then hypnotize myself into some form of lethargy by letting my eyes follow the printed lines of a book. If reading in any other sense than physical habit proved beyond me, at least the narcotic monotony of habit might serve. But I found a fire, already falling to embers, and Susan before it, curled into my big wing chair, her feet beneath her, her hands lying palms upward in her lap. This picture fixed me in the doorway while my throat tightened. Susan did not stir, but she was not sleeping. She had withdrawn. Presently she spoke, absently--from Saturn's rings; or the moon. "Ambo? I've been waiting to talk to you; but now I can't or I'll lose it--the whole movement. It's like a symphony--great brasses groaning and cursing--and then violins tearing through the tumult to soar above it." Her eyes shut for a moment. When she opened them again it was to shake herself free from whatever spell had bound her. She half yawned, and smiled. "Gone, dear--all gone. It's not your fault. Words wouldn't hold it. Music might--but music doesn't come.... Oh, poor Ambo--you've had a wretched time of it! How tired you look!" I shut the door quietly and went to her, sitting on the hearth rug at her feet, my knees in my arms. "Sweetheart," I said, "it seems that in spite of myself I've done you little good and about all the harm possible." And I made a clean breast of all the facts and fears that the evening had developed. "So you see," I ended, "what my guardianship amounts to!" Susan's hand came to my shoulder and drew me back against her knees; she did not remove her hand. "Ambo," she protested gently, "I'm just a little angry with you, I think." "No wonder!" "Oh!" she exclaimed. "If I am angry it's because you can say stupid things like that! Don't you see, Ambo, the very moment things grow difficult for us you forget to believe in me--begin to act as if I were a common or garden fool? I'm not, though. Surely you must know in your heart that everything you're afraid of for me doesn't matter in the least. What harm could slander or scandal possibly do me, dear? Me, I mean? I shouldn't like it, of course, because I hate everything stodgy and _formidablement bête_. But if it happens, I shan't lose much sleep over it. You're worrying about the wrong things, Ambo; things that don't even touch our real problem. And the real problem may prove to be the real tragedy, too." "Tragedy?" I mumbled. "Oh, I hope not--I think not! It all depends on whether you care for freedom; on whether you're really passion's slave. I don't believe you are." The words wounded me. I shifted, to look up at, to question, her shadowy face. "Susan, what do you mean?" "I suppose I mean that _I'm_ not, Ambo. You're far dearer to me than anybody else on earth; your happiness, your peace, mean everything to me. If you honestly can't find life worth while without me--can't--I'll go with you anywhere; or face the music with you right here. First, though, I must be sincere with you. I can live away from you, and still make a life for myself. Except your day-by-day companionship--I'd be lonely without that, of course--I shouldn't lose anything that seems to me really worth keeping. Above all, I shouldn't really lose you." "Susan! You're planning to leave me!" "But, Ambo--it's only what you've felt to be necessary; what you've been planning for me!" "As a duty--at the bitterest possible cost! How different that is! You not only plan to leave me--I feel that you want to!" "Yes, I want to. But only if you can understand why." "I don't understand!" "Ah, wait, Ambo! You're not speaking for yourself. You're a slave now, speaking for your master. But it's _you_ I want to talk to!" I snarled at this. "Why? When you've discovered your mistake so soon!... You don't love me." She sighed, deeply unhappy; though my thin-skinned self-esteem wrung from her sigh a shade of impatience, too. "If not, dear," she said, "we had better find it out before it's too late. Perhaps you are right. Perhaps love is something I only guess at and go wrong about. If love means that I should be utterly lost in you and nothing without you--if it means that I would rather die than leave you--well, then I don't love you. But all the same, if love honestly means that to you--I can't and won't go away." She put out her hand again swiftly, and tightened her fingers on mine. "It's a test, then. Is that it?" I demanded. "You want to go because you're not sure?" "I'm sure of what I feel," she broke in; "and more than that, I doubt if I'm made so that I can ever feel more. No; that isn't why I want to go. I'll go if you can let me, because--oh, I've got to say it, Ambo!--because at heart I love freedom better than I love love--or you. And there's something else. I'm afraid of--please try to understand this, dear--I'm afraid of stuffiness for us both!" "Stuffiness?" "Sex _is_ stuffy, Ambo. The more people let it mess up their lives for them, the stuffier they grow. It's really what you've been afraid of for me--though you don't put it that way. But you hate the thought of people saying--with all the muddy little undercurrents they stir up round such things--that you and I have been passion's slaves. We haven't been--but we might be; and suppose we were. It's the truth about us--not the lies--that makes all the difference. You're you--and I'm I. It's because we're worth while to ourselves that we're worth while to each other. Isn't that true? But how long shall we be worth anything to ourselves or to each other if we accept love as slavery, and get to feeling that we can't face life, if it seems best, alone? Ambo, dear, do you see at all what I'm driving at?" Yes; I was beginning to see. Miss Goucher's desolate words came suddenly back to me: "Susan doesn't need _you_." X Next morning, while I supposed her at work in her room, Susan slipped down the back stairs and off through the garden. It was a heavy forenoon for me, perhaps the bleakest and dreariest of my life. But it was a busy forenoon for Susan. She began its activities by a brave intuitive stroke. She entered the Egyptian tomb and demanded an interview with Gertrude. What is stranger, she carried her point--as I was presently to be made aware. Miss Goucher tapped at the door, entered, and handed me a card. So Gertrude had changed her mind; Gertrude had come. I stared, foolishly blank, at the card between, my fingers, while Miss Goucher by perfect stillness effaced herself, leaving me to my lack of thought. "Well," I finally muttered, "sooner or later----" Miss Goucher, perhaps too eagerly, took this for assent. "Shall I say to Mrs. Hunt that you are coming down?" I forced a smile, fatuously enough, and rose. "When I'm down already? Surely you can see, Miss Goucher, that I've touched the bottom?" Miss Goucher did not reply. "I'll go myself at once," I added formally. "Thank you, Miss Goucher." Gertrude was waiting in the small Georgian reception room, whose detailed correctness had been due to her own; waiting without any vulgar pretense at entire composure. She was walking slowly about, her color was high, and it startled me to find her so little altered. Not a day seemed to have added itself; she looked under thirty, though I knew her to be thirty-five; she was even handsomer than I had chosen to remember. Even in her present unusual restlessness, the old distinction, the old patrician authority was hers. Her spirit imposed itself, as always; one could take Gertrude only as she wished to be taken--seriously--humbly grateful if exempted from disdain. Gertrude never spoke for herself alone; she was at all times representative--almost symbolic. Homage met in her not a personal gratitude, but the approval of a high, unbroken tradition. She accepted it graciously, without obvious egotism, not as due to her as a temporal being, but as due--under God--to that timeless entity, her class. I am not satirizing Gertrude; I am praising her. She, more than any person I have ever known, made of her perishing substance the temple of a completely realized ideal. It was, I am forced to assume, because I had failed in entire respect for and submission to this ideal that she had finally abandoned me. It was not so much incompatibility of temperament as incompatibility of worship. She had removed a hallowed shrine from a felt indifference and a possible contamination. That was all, but it was everything. And as I walked into the reception room I saw that the shrine was still beautiful, faultlessly tended, and ready for any absolute but dignified sacrifice. "Gertrude," I began, "it's splendid of you to overlook my inexcusable rudeness of yesterday! I'm very grateful." "I have not forgiven you," she replied, with casual indignation--just enough for sincerity and not a shade too much for art. "Don't imagine it's pleasant for me to be here. I should hardly have risked your misinterpreting it, if any other course had seemed possible." "You might simply have waited," I said. "It was my intention to call this evening, if only to ask after your health." "I could not have received you," said Gertrude. "You find it less difficult here?" "Less humiliating. I'm not, at least, receiving a husband who wishes to plead for reconciliation--on intolerable grounds." "May I offer you a chair? Better still--why not come to the study? We're so much less likely to be disturbed." She accepted my suggestion with a slight nod, and herself led the way. "Now, Gertrude," I resumed, when she had consented to an easy-chair and had permitted me to close the door, "whatever the situation and misunderstandings between us, can't we discuss them"--and I ventured a smile--"more informally, in a freer spirit?" She caught me up. "Freer! But I understand--less disciplined. How very like you, Ambrose. How unchanged you are." "And you, Gertrude! It's a compliment you should easily forgive." She preferred to ignore it. "Miss Blake," she announced, "has just been with me for an hour." She waited the effect of this. The effect was considerable, plunging me into dark amazement and conjecture. Not daring to make the tiniest guess as to the result of so fantastic an interview, I was left not merely tongue-tied but brain-tied. Gertrude saw at once that she had beggared me and could now at her leisure dole out the equal humiliation of alms withheld or bestowed. "Given your curious social astigmatism and her curious mixed charm--so subtle and so deeply uncivilized--I can see, of course, why she has bewitched you," said Gertrude reflectively, and paused. "And I can see," she continued, musing, as if she had adopted the stage convention of soliloquy, "why you have just failed to capture her imagination. For you have failed--but you can hardly be aware how completely." "Whether or not I'm aware," I snapped, "seems negligible! Susan feels she must leave me, and she'll probably act with her usual promptness. Is that what she called to tell you?" "Partly," acknowledged Gertrude, resuming then her soliloquy: "You've given her--as you would--a ridiculous education. She seems to have instincts, impulses, which--all things considered--might have bloomed if cultivated. As it is, you found her crude, and, in spite of all the culture you've crammed upon her, you've left her so. She's emancipated--that is, public; she's thrown away the locks and keys of her mind. I grant she has one. But apparently no one has even suggested to her that the essence of being rare, of being fine, is knowing what to omit, what to reject, what to conceal. I find my own people, Ambrose--and they're the _right_ people, the only ones worth finding--by feeling secure with them; I can trust them not to go too far. They have decorum, taste. Oh, I admit we're upholding a lost cause! You're a deserter from it--and Miss Blake doesn't even suspect its existence. Still"--with a private smile--"her crudity had certain immediate advantages this morning." Ignoring rarity, fineness, I sank to the indecorum of a frankly human grin. "In other words, Gertrude, Susan omitted so little, went so much too far, that she actually forced you for once to get down to brass tacks!" Gertrude frowned. "She stripped herself naked before a stranger--if that's what you mean." "With the result, Gertrude?" "Ah, that's why I'm here--as a duty I owe myself. I'm bound to say my suspicions were unjust--to Miss Blake, at least. I'll even go beyond that----" "Careful, Gertrude! Evil communications corrupt good manners." "Yes," she responded quickly, rising, "they do--always; that's why I'm not here to stay. But all I have left for you, Ambrose, is this: I'm convinced now that in one respect I've been quite wrong. Miss Blake convinced me this morning that her astounding telegram had at least one merit. It happened to be true. I _should_ either live with you or set you free. I've felt this myself, from time to time, but divorce, for many reasons...." She paused, then added: "However, it seems inevitable. If you wish to divorce me, you have legal grounds--desertion; I even advise it, and I shall make no defense. As for your amazing ward--make your mind quite easy about her. If any rumors should annoy you, they'll not come from me. And I shall speak to Lucette." She moved to the door, opening it slowly. "That's all, I think, Ambrose?" "It's not even a beginning," I cried. "Think of it, rather, as an ending." "Impossible! I--I'm abashed, Gertrude! What you propose is out of the question. Why not think better of returning here? The heydey's past for both of us. My dream--always a wild dream--is passing; and I can promise sincere understanding and respect." "I could not promise so easily," said Gertrude; "nor so much. No; don't come with me," she added. "I know my way perfectly well alone." Nevertheless, I went with her to the front door, as I ought, in no perfunctory spirit. It was more than a courteous habit; it was a genuine tribute of admiration. I admired her beauty, her impeccable bearing, her frock, her furs, her intellect, the ease and distinction of her triumph. She left me crushed; yet it was a privilege to have known her--to have wooed her, won her, lost her; and now to have received my _coup de grâce_ from her competent, disdainful hands. I wished her well, knowing the wish superfluous. In this, if nothing else, she resembled Susan--she did not need me; she could stand alone. It was her tragedy, in the French classic manner, that she must. Would it also in another manner, in a deeper and--I can think of no homelier word--more cosmic sense, prove to be Susan's? But my own stuffy problem drama, whether tragic or absurd, had now reached a crisis and developed its final question: How in the absence of Susan to stand at all? XI From her interview with Gertrude, Susan went straight on to Phil's rooms, not even stopping to consider the possible proprieties involved. But, five minutes before her arrival, Phil had been summoned to the Graduates Club to receive a long-distance call from his Boston publisher; and it was Jimmy Kane who answered her knock and opened the study door. He had been in conference with Phil on his private problems and Phil had asked him to await his return. All this he thought it courteous to explain to the peach of a girl before him, whose presence at the door puzzled him mightily, and whose disturbing eyes held his, he thought, rather too intimately and quizzically for a stranger's. She could hardly be some graduate student in philosophy; she was too young and too flossy for that. "Flossy," in Jimmy's economical vocabulary, was a symbol for many subtle shades of meaning: it implied, for any maiden it fitted, an elegance not too cold to be alluring; the possession of that something more than the peace of God which a friend told Emerson always entered her heart when she knew herself to be well dressed. Flossy--to generalize--Jimmy had not observed the women graduate students to be, though he bore them no ill will. To be truly flossy was, after all, a privilege reserved for a chosen few, born to a certain circle which Jimmy had never sought to penetrate. One--and a curiously entrancing specimen--of the chosen evidently stood watching him now, and he wished that her entire self-possession did not so utterly imperil his own. What was she doing alone, anyway, this society girl--in a students' rooming house--at Prof. Farmer's door? Why couldn't she tell him? And why were her eyes making fun of him--or weren't they? His fingers went instinctively to his--perhaps too hastily selected?--cravat. Then Susan really did laugh, but happily, not unkindly, and walked on in past him, shutting the door behind her as she came. "Jimmy Kane," she said, "if I weren't so gorgeously glad to see you again, I could beat you for not remembering!" "Good Lord!" he babbled. "Why--good Lord! You're Susan!" It was all too much for him; concealment was impossible--he was flabbergasted. Sparkling with sheer delight at his _gaucherie_, Susan put out both hands. Her impulsiveness instantly revived him; he seized her hands for a moment as he might have gripped a long-lost boy friend's. "You never guessed I could look so--presentable, did you?" demanded Susan. "Presentable!" The word jarred on him, it was so dully inadequate. "I have a maid," continued Susan demurely. "Everything in Ambo's house--Ambo is my guardian, you know; Mr. Hunt--well, everything in his house is a work of art. So he pays a maid to see that I am--always. I am simply clay in her hands, and it does make a difference. But I didn't have a maid on Birch Street, Jimmy." Jimmy's blue eyes capered. This was American humor--the kind he was born to and could understand. Happiness and ease returned with it. If Susan could talk like that while looking like that--well, Susan was _there_! She was all right. Within five minutes he was giving her a brief, comradely chronicle of the missing years, and when Phil got back it was to find them seated together, Susan leaning a little forward from the depths of a Morris chair to follow more attentively Jimmy's minute technical description of the nature of the steel alloys used in the manufacture of automobiles. They rose at Phil's entrance with a mingling, eager chatter of explanation. Phil later--much later--admitted to me that he had never felt till that moment how damnably he was past forty, and how fatally Susan was not. He further admitted that it was far from the most agreeable discovery of a studious life. "What do you think, Prof. Farmer," exclaimed Jimmy, "of our meeting again accidentally like this--and me not knowing Susan! You can't beat that much for a small world!" Phil sought Susan's eye, and was somewhat relieved by the quizzical though delighted gleam in it. "Well, Jimmy," he responded gravely, "truth compels me to state that I have heard of stranger encounters--less inevitable ones, at least. I really have." "But you never heard of a nicer one," said Susan. "Haven't I always told you and Ambo that Jimmy would be like this?" "Sort of foolish?" grinned Jimmy, with reawakening constraint. "I'll bet you have, too." Susan shook her head, solemn and slow; but the corners of her mouth meant mischief. "No, Jimmy, not foolish; just--natural. Just--sort of--_you_." At this point, Jimmy hastily remembered that he must beat it, pleading what Phil knew to be an imaginary recitation. But he did not escape without finding himself invited to dinner for that very evening, informally of course--Susan suspected the absence of even a dinner coat: Phil would bring him. It was really Phil who accepted for him, while Jimmy was still muddling through his thanks and toiling on to needless apologies. "If I've been too"--he almost said "fresh," but sank to--"familiar, calling you by your first name, I mean--I wouldn't like you to think--but coming all of a sudden like this, what I mean is----" "Oh, run along!" called Susan gayly. "Forget it, Jimmy! You're spoiling everything." "That's what I m-mean," stammered Jimmy, and was gone. "But he does mean well, Susan," Phil pleaded for him, after closing the door. It puzzled him to note that Susan's face instantly clouded; there was reproof in her tone. "That was patronizing, Phil. I won't have anybody patronize Jimmy. He's perfect." Phil was oddly nettled by this reproof and grew stubborn and detached. "He's a nice boy, certainly; and has the makings of a real man. I believe in him. Still--heaven knows!--he's not precisely a subtle soul." Susan's brow had cleared again. "That's what I m-mean!" she laughed, mimicking Jimmy without satire, as if for the pure pleasure of recollection. "The truth is, Phil, I'm rather fed up on subtlety--especially my own. Sometimes I think it's just a polite term for futility, with a dash of intellectual snobbishness thrown in. It must be saner, cleaner, healthier, to take life straight." "And now, Phil dear," she said, dismissing the matter, as if settling back solidly to earth after a pleasantly breathless aërial spin, "I need your advice. Can I earn my living as a writer? I'll write anything that pays, so I think I can. Fashion notes--anything! Sister and I"--"Sister" being Susan's pet name for Miss Goucher--"are running away to New York on Monday--to make our fortunes. You mustn't tell Ambo--yet; I'll tell him in my own way. And I must _make_ my own way now, Phil. I've been a lazy parasite long enough--too long! So please sit down and write me subtle letters of introduction to any publishers you know. Maltby is bound to help me, of course. You see, I'm feeling ruthless--or shameless; I shall pull every wire in sight. So I'm counting on _The Garden Exquisite_ for immediate bread and butter. I did my first article for it in an hour when I first woke up this morning--just the smarty-party piffle its readers and advertisers seem to demand. "This sort of thing, Phil: 'The poets are wrong, as usual. Wild flowers are not shy and humble, they are exclusive. How to know them is still a social problem in American life, and very few of us have attained this aristocratic distinction.' And so on! Two thousand silly salable words--and I can turn on that soda-water tap at will. Are you listening? Please tell me you don't think poor Sister--she refuses to leave me, and I wouldn't let her anyway--will have to undergo martyrdom in a cheap hall bedroom for the rest of her days?" Needless to say, Phil did not approve of Susan's plan. He agreed with her that under the given conditions she could not remain with me in New Haven; and he commended her courage, her desire for independence. But Susan would never, he felt, find her true pathway to independence, either material or spiritual, as a journalistic free-lance in New York. He admitted the insatiable public thirst for soda-water, but saw no reason why Susan should waste herself in catering to it. He was by no means certain that she could cater to it if she would. "You'll too often discover," he warned her, "that your tap is running an unmarketable beverage. The mortal taste for nectar is still undeveloped; it remains the drink of the gods." "But," Susan objected, "I can't let Ambo pay my bills from now on--I can't! And Sister and I must live decently somehow! I'd like nothing better than to be a perpetual fountain of nectar--supposing, you nice old Phil, that I've ever really had the secret of distilling a single drop of it. But you say yourself there's no market for it this side of heaven, which is where we all happen to be. What do you want me to do?" "Marry me." "It wouldn't be fair to you, dear." There was a momentary pause. "Then," said Phil earnestly, "I want you to let Hunt--or if you can't bring yourself to do that--to let _me_ loan you money enough from time to time to live on simply and comfortably for a few years, while you study and think and write in your own free way--till you've found yourself. My nectar simile was nonsense, just as your soda-water tap was. You have brains and a soul, and the combination means a shining career of some kind--even on earth. Don't fritter your genius away in makeshift activities. Mankind needs the best we have in us; the best's none too good. It's a duty--no, it's more than that--it's a true _religion_ to get that expressed somehow--whether in terms of action or thought or beauty. I know, of course, you feel this as I do, and mean to win through to it in the end. But why handicap yourself so cruelly at the start?" Phil tells me that Susan, while he urged this upon her, quietly withdrew and did not return for some little time after he had ceased to speak. He was not even certain she had fully heard him out until she suddenly leaned to him from her chair and gave his hand an affectionate, grateful squeeze. "Yes, Phil," she said, "it is a religion--it's perhaps the only religion I shall ever have. But for that very reason I must accept it in my own way. And I'm sure--it's part of my faith--that any coddling now will do me more harm than good. I must meet the struggle, Phil--the hand-to-hand fight. If the ordinary bread-and-butter conditions are too much for me, then I'm no good and must go under. I shan't be frittering anything away if I fail. I shan't fail--in our sense--unless we're both mistaken, and there isn't anything real in me. That's what I must find out first--not sheltered and in silence, but down in the scrimmage and noise of it all. If I'm too delicate for that, then I've nothing to give this world, and the sooner I'm crushed out of it the better! Believe me, Phil dear, I know I'm right; I _know_." She was pressing clenched hands almost fiercely between her girl's breasts as she ended, as if to deny or repress any natural longing for a special protection, a special graciousness and security, from our common taskmaster, life. Phil admits that he wanted to whimper like a homesick boy. XII Susan's informal dinner for Jimmy that evening was not really a success. The surface of the water sparkled from time to time, but there were grim undercurrents and icy depths. Perhaps it was not so bad as my own impression of it, for I had a sullen headache pulsing its tiresome obbligato above a dull ground base of despair. Despair, I am forced to call it. Never had life seemed to me so little worth the trouble of going on; and I fancy Phil's reasoned conviction of its eternal dignity and import had become, for the present, less of a comfort to him than a curse. Moods of this kind, however ruthlessly kept under, infect the very air about them. They exude a drab fog to deaden spontaneity and choke laughter at its source. Neither Phil nor I was guilty of deliberate sulking; whether from false pride or native virtue we did our best--but our best was abysmal. Even Susan sank under it to the flat levels of made conversation, and poor Jimmy--who had brought with him many social misgivings--was stricken at table with a muscular rigor; sat stiffly, handled his implements jerkily, and ended by oversetting a glass of claret and blushing till the dusky red of his face matched the spreading stain before him. At this crisis of gloom, luckily, Susan struggled clear of the drab fog and saved the remnant of the evening--at least for Jimmy, plunging with the happiest effect into the junior annals of Birch Street, till our heavier Hillhouse atmosphere stirred and lightened with _Don't-you-remember's_ and _Sure-I-do's_. And shortly after dinner, Phil, tactfully pleading an unprepared lecture, dragged Jimmy off with him before this bright flare-up of youthful reminiscence had even threatened to expire. Their going brought Susan at once to my side, with a stricken face of self-reproach. "It was so stupid of me, Ambo--this dinner. I've never been more ashamed. How could I have forced it on you to-night! But you were wonderful, dear--wonderful! So was Phil. I'll never forget it." There were tears in her eyes. "Oh, Ambo," she wailed, "do you think I shall ever learn to be a little like either of you? I feel--abject." Before I could prevent it, she had seized my hand in both hers and kissed it. "Homage," she smiled.... It broke me down--utterly.... You will spare me any description of the next ten minutes of childishness. Indeed, you must spare me the details of our later understanding; they are inviolable. It is enough to say that I emerged from it--for the experience had been overwhelming--with a new spirit, a clarified and serener mind. My love for Susan was unchanged--yet wholly changed. The paradox is exact. Life once more seemed to me good, since she was part of it; and my own life rich, since I now knew how truly it had become a portion of hers. She had made me feel, know, that I counted for her--unworthy as I am--in all she had grown to be and would grow to be. We had shaped and would always shape each other's lives. There for the moment it rested. She would leave me, but I was not to be alone. No; I was not to be alone. For even if she had died, or had quite changed and forsaken me, there would be memories--such as few men have been privileged to recall.... INTERLUDE On the rearward and gentler slopes of Mount Carmel, a rough, isolated little mountain, very abrupt on its southerly face, which rises six or seven miles up-country from the New Haven Green, there is an ancient farm, so long abandoned as to be completely overgrown with gray birch--the old field birch of exhausted soils--with dogwood and an aromatic tangle of humbler shrubs, high-bush huckleberry and laurel and sweet fern; while beneath these the dry elastic earth-floor is a deep couch of ghost-gray moss, shining checkerberry and graceful ground pine. The tumbledown farmstead itself lies either unseen at some distance from these abandoned fields or has wholly disappeared along with the neat stone fences that must once have marked them. Yet the boundaries of the fields are now majestically defined through the undergrowth by rows of gigantic red cedars so thickset, so tall, shapely, and dense as to resemble the secular cypresses of Italian gardens more nearly than the poor relations they ordinarily are. And at the upper edge of one steep-lying field, formerly an apple orchard--though but three or four of the original apple trees remain, hopelessly decrepit and half buried in the new growth--the older cedars of the fence line have seeded capriciously and have thrown out an almost perfect circle of younger, slenderer trees which, standing shoulder to shoulder, inclose the happiest retreat for woodland god or dreaming mortal that the most exacting faun or poet could desire. That Susan should have happened upon this lonely, this magic circle, I can never regard as a mere accident. Obviously time had slowly and lovingly formed and perfected it for some purpose; it was there waiting for her--and one day she came and possessed it, and the magic circle was complete. Susan was then seventeen and the season, as it should have been, was early May. Much of the hill country lying northward from the Connecticut coast towns is surprisingly wild, and none of it wilder or lovelier than certain tracts spread within easy reach of the few New Haveners who have not wholly capitulated to business or college politics or golf or social service or the movies, forgetting a deeper and saner lure. A later Wordsworth or Thoreau might still live in midmost New Haven and never feel shut from his heritage, for it neighbors him closely--swamp and upland, hemlock cliff and hardwood forest, precipitous brook or slow-winding meadow stream, where the red-winged blackbirds flute and flash by; the whole year's wonder awaits him; he has but to go forth--alone. Nature never did betray the heart that loved her, though she so ironically betrays most of us who merely pretend to love her, because we feel, after due instruction, that we ought. For Nature is not easily communicative, nor lightly wooed. She demands a higher devotion than an occasional picnic, and will seldom have much to say to you if she feels that you secretly prefer another society to hers. To her elect she whispers, timelessly, and Susan, in her own way, was of the elect. It was the way--the surest--of solitary communion; but it was very little, very casually, the way of science. She observed much, but without method; and catalogued not at all. She never counted her warblers and seldom named them--but she loved them, as they slipped northward through young leaves, shyly, with pure flashes of green or russet or gold. Nature for Susan, in short, was all mood, ranging from cold horror to supernal beauty; she did not sentimentalize the gradations. The cold horror was there and chilled her, but the supernal beauty was there too--and did not leave her cold. And through it all streamed an indefinable awe, a trail one could not follow, a teasing mystery--an unspoken word. It was back of--no rather it interpenetrated the horror no less than the beauty; they were but phases, hints, of that other, that suspected, eerie trail, leading one knew not where. But surely there, in that magic circle, one might press closer, draw oneself nearer, catch at the faintest hint toward a possible clue? The aromatic space within the cedars became Susan's refuge, her nook from the world, her Port-Royal, her Walden, her Lake Isle of Innisfree. Once found that spring she never spoke of it; she hoarded her treasure, slipping off to it stealthily, through slyest subterfuge or evasion, whenever she could. For was it not hers? Sometimes she rode out there, tying her horse to a tree in the lowest field back of a great thicket of old-fashioned lilac bushes run wild, where he was completely hidden from the rare passers-by of the rough up-country road or lane. But oftenest, she has since confessed, she would clear her morning or afternoon by some plausible excuse for absence, then board the Waterbury trolley express, descending from it about two miles from her nook, and walking or rather climbing up to it crosslots through neglected woodland and uncropped pasture reverting to the savage. At one point she had to pass a small swampy meadow through which a mere thread of stream worked its way, half-choked by thick-springing blades of our native wild iris; so infinitely, so capriciously delicate in form and hue. And here, if these were in bloom, she always lingered a while, poised on the harsh hummocks of bent-grass, herself slender as a reed. The pale, softly pencilled iris petals stirred in her a high wonder beyond speech. What supreme, whimsical artistry brought them to being there, in that lonely spot; and for whose joy? No human hand, cunning with enamel and platinum and treated silver, could, after a lifetime of patience, reproduce one petal of these uncounted flowers. Out of the muck they lifted, ethereal, unearthly--yet so soon to die.... Oh, she knew what the learned had to say of them!--that they were merely sexual devices; painted deceptions for attracting insects and so assuring cross-pollination and the lusty continuance of their race. So far as it went this was unquestionably true; but it went--just how far? Their color and secret manna attracted the necessary insects, which they fed; the form of their petals and perianth tubes, and the arrangement of their organs of sex were cunningly evolved, so that the insect that sought their nectar bore from one flower to the next its fertilizing golden dust---- Astonishing, certainly! But what astonished her far more was that all this ingenious mechanism should in any way affect _her_! It was obviously none of her affair; and yet to come upon these cunning mechanistic devices in this deserted field stirred her, set something ineffable free in her--gave it joy for wings. It was as if these pale blooms of wild iris had been for her, in a less mortal sense, what the unconscious insects were for them--_intermediaries_, whose more ethereal contacts cross-fertilized her very soul. But she could not define for herself or express for others what they did to her. Of one thing only she was certain: These fleeting moments of expansion, of illumination, were brief and vague--moments of pure, uncritical feeling--but they were the best moments of her life; and they were real. They vanished, but not wholly. They left lasting traces. Never to have been visited by them would have condemned her, she knew, to be less than her fullest self, narrower in sympathy, more rigid, more dogmatic, and less complete. But that first May day of her discovery, when called out to wander lonely as a cloud by the spirit of spring--the day she had happened on her magic circle,--all that rough upland world was burgeoning, and the beauty of those deserted fields hurt the heart. Susan never easily wept, but that day--safely hidden in the magic circle, then newly hers--she threw herself down on the ghost-gray moss among the spicy tufts of sweet fern and enjoyed, as she later told me, the most sensuously abandoned good cry of her life. The dogwood trees were a glory of flushed white about her, shining in on every hand through the black-green cedars, as if the stars had rushed forward toward earth and clustered more thickly in a nearer midnight sky. Life had no right to be so overwhelmingly fair--if these poignant gusts of beauty gave no sanction to all that the bruised heart of man might long for of peace and joy! If life must be accepted as an idiot's tale, signifying nothing, then it was a refinement of that torture that it could suddenly lift--as a sterile wave lifts only to break--to such dizzying, ecstatic heights.... No, no--it was impossible! It was unthinkable! It was absurd! That year we spent July, August, and early September in France, but late September found us back in New Haven for those autumnal weeks which are the golden, heady wine of our New England cycle. Praise of the New England October, for those who have experienced it, must always seem futile, and for those who have not, exaggerated and false. Summer does not decay in New England; it first smoulders and then flares out in a clear multicolored glory of flame; it does not sicken to corruption, it shouts and sings and is transfigured. I had suggested to Susan, therefore, a flight to higher hills--to the Berkshires, to be precise--where we might more spaciously watch these smoke-less frost-fires flicker up, spread, consume themselves, and at last leap from the crests, to vanish rather than die. But Susan, pleading a desire to settle down after much wandering, begged off. She did not tell me that she had a private sanctuary, too long unvisited, hidden among nearer and humbler hills. The rough fields of the old farm were now rich with crimson and gold--bright yellow gold, red gold, green and tarnished gold--or misted over with the horizon blue of wild asters, a needed softening of tone in a world else so vibrant with light, so nakedly clear. This was another and perhaps even a deeper intoxication than that of the flood tide of spring. Unbearably beautiful it grew at its climax of splendor! An unseen organist unloosed all his stops, and Susan, like a little child overpowered by that rocking clamor, was shaken by it and almost whimpered for mercy.... It was not until the following spring that chance improbably betrayed her guarded secret to me. All during the preceding fall I had wondered at times that I found it so increasingly difficult to arrange for afternoons of tennis or golf or riding with Susan; but I admonished myself that as she grew up she must inevitably find personal interests and younger friends, and it was not for me to limit or question her freedom. And though Susan never lied to me, she was clever enough, and woman enough, to let me mislead myself. "I've been taking a long walk, Ambo." "I've been riding." Well, bless her, so she had--and why shouldn't she? Though it came at last with me to a vague, comfortless feeling of shut-outness--of too often missing an undefined something that I had hoped to share. During a long winter of close companionship in study and socially unsocial life this feeling disappeared, but with the spring it gradually formed again, like a little spreading cloud in an empty sky. And one afternoon, toward middle May, I discovered myself to be unaccountably alone and wishing Susan were round--so we could "do something." The day was a day apart. Mummies that day, in dim museums, ached in their cerements. Middle-aged bank clerks behind grilles knew a sudden unrest, and one or two of them even wondered whether to be always honestly handling the false counters of life were any compensation for never having riotously lived. Little boys along Hillhouse Avenue, ordinarily well-behaved, turned freakishly truculent, delighted in combat, and pummelled each other with ineffective fists. Settled professors in classrooms were seized with irrelevant fancies and, while trying to recover some dropped thread of discourse, openly sighed--haunted by visions of the phoebe bird's nest found under the old bridge by the mill dam, or of the long-forgotten hazel eyes of some twelve-year-old sweetheart. A rebellious day--and a sentimental! [See Lord Tennyson, and the poets, _passim_.] The apple trees must be in full bloom.... Well then, confound it, why had Susan gone to a public lecture on Masefield? Or had she merely mentioned at lunch that there was a public lecture on Masefield? Oh, damn it! One can't stay indoors on such a day! Susan and I kept our saddle horses at the local riding academy, where they were well cared for and exercised on the many days when we couldn't or did not wish to take them out. As the academy was convenient and had good locker rooms and showers, we always preferred changing there instead of dressing at home and having the horses sent round. Riding is not one of my passions, and oddly enough is not one of Susan's. That intense sympathy which unites some men and women to horses, and others to dogs or cats, is either born in one or it is not. Susan felt it very strongly for both dogs and cats, and if I have failed to mention Tumps and Togo, that is a lack in myself, not in her. I don't dislike dogs or cats or, for that matter, well-broken horses, but--though I lose your last shreds of sympathy--they all, in comparison with other interests, leave me more than usual calm. Of Tumps and Togo, nevertheless, something must yet be said, though too late for their place in Susan's heart; or indeed, for their own deserving. But they are already an intrusion here. For Alma, her dainty little single footer, Susan's feeling was rather admiration than love. Just as there are poets whose songs we praise, but whose genius does not seem to knit itself into the very fabric of our being, so it was with Alma and Susan. She said and thought nothing but good of Alma, yet never felt lonely away from her--the infallible test. As for Jessica, my own modest nag, I fear she was very little more to me than an agreeably paced inducement to exercise, and I fear I was little more to her than a possible source of lump sugar and a not-too-fretful hand on the bridle reins. To-day, however, I needed her as a more poetic motor; failing Susan's companionship, I wanted to be carried far out into country byways apart from merely mechanical motors or--ditto--men. Jessica, well up to it, offered no objections to the plan, and we were soon trotting briskly along the aërial Ridge Road, from which we at length descended to the dark eastern flank of Mount Carmel. It would mean a long pull to go right round the mountain by the steep back road, and I had at first no thought of attempting it; but the swift remembrance of a vast cherry orchard bordering that road made me wonder whether its blossoms had yet fallen. When I determined finally to push on, poor Jessica's earlier fire had cooled; we climbed the rough back road as a slug moves; the cherry orchard proved disappointing; and the sun was barely two hours from the hills when we crossed the divide and turned south down a grass-grown wood road that I had never before traveled. I hoped, and no doubt Jessica hoped, it might prove a shorter cut home. What it did prove was so fresh an enchantment of young leaf and flashing wing, that I soon ceased to care where it led or how late I might be for dinner. Then a sharp dip in the road brought a new vision of delight; dogwood--cloudy masses of pink dogwood, the largest, deepest-tinted trees of it I had ever seen! It caught at my throat; and I reined in Jessica, whose æsthetic sense was less developed, and stared. But presently the spell was broken. An unseen horse squealed, evidently from behind a great lilac thicket in an old field at the left, and Jessica squealed back, instantly alert and restive. The sharp whinnying was repeated, and Jessica's dancing excitement grew intense; then there was a scuffling commotion back of the lilacs and to my final astonishment Susan's little mare, Alma, having broken her headstall and wrenched herself free of bit and bridle, came trotting amicably forth to join her old friends--which she could easily do, as the ancient cattle bars at the field-gate had long since rotted away. It was unmistakably dainty Alma with her white forehead star--but where was her mistress? A finger of ice drew slowly along my spine as I urged Jessica into the field and round the lilac thicket. Alma meekly followed us, softly breathing encouragement through pink nostrils, and my alarm quieted when I found nothing more dreadful than the broken bridle still dangling from the branch of a dead cedar. It was plain that Susan had tied Alma there to explore on foot through the higher fields; it was plain, too, that she must have preferred to ride out here alone, and had been at some pains to conceal her purpose. For a second, so piqued was I, I almost decided to ride on and leave the willful child to her own devices. But the broken bridle shamed me. I dismounted to examine it; it could be held together safely enough for the return, I saw, with a piece of stout twine, and there was certain to be a habitation with a piece of stout twine in it on down the road somewhere. Susan must have come that way and could tell me. But I must find her first.... "Susan!" I called. "_Oh-ho-o-o! Soo-san!_" No answer. I called again--vainly. Nothing for it, then, but a search! I tethered Jessica to the cedar stump, convinced that Alma wouldn't wander far from her old friend, and started off through the field past a senile apple tree bearing a few scattered blossoms, beyond which a faintly suggested path seemed to lead upward through a wonder-grove of the pink dogwood, mingled with laurel and birch and towering cedars. That path, I knew, would have tempted Susan. What there was of it soon disappeared altogether in an under-thicket of high-bush huckleberry, taller than a man's head. Through this I was pushing my way, and had stooped to win past some briers and protect my eyes--when I felt a silk scarf slip across them, muffling my face. It was swiftly knotted from behind; then my hand was taken, and Susan's voice--on a tone of blended mischief and mystery--quavered at my ear: "Hush! Profane mortal--speak not! This is holy ground." With not another word spoken she drew me after her, guiding me to freer air and supporting me when I stumbled. We continued thus for some moments, on my part clumsily enough; and then Susan halted me, and turned me solemnly round three times, while she crooned in a weird gypsy-like singsong the following incantation: _Cedar, cedar, birch and fern, Turn his wits as mine you turn._ _If he sees what now I see Welcome shall this mortal be._ _If he sees it not, I'll say Crick-crack and vanish May!_ But I must have seen! My initiation was pronounced successful. From that hour all veils were withdrawn, and I was made free of the magic circle.... It was a dip in Lethe. Dinner was forgotten--the long miles home and the broken bridle. A powerful enchantment had done its work. For me, only the poised moment of joy was real. Nothing else mattered, nothing else existed, while that poised fragile moment was mine. We talked or were silent--it was all one. And when dusk crept in, and a grateful wood-thrush praised it, we still lingered to join in that praise.... Then a whippoorwill began to call insistently, grievously, from very far off. It was the whippoorwill that shattered my poised crystal moment of perfect joy. "Those poor horses," I said. "Oh!" cried Susan, springing up, "how _could_ we let them starve! I'm starved, too, Ambo--aren't you? What sillies we are!" We got home safely, after some trifling difficulties, past ten o'clock.... _When the lamp is shattered The light in the dust lies dead----_ Only it doesn't, always--thank God! Memories.... And this was but one. Oh, no; I was not to be alone. I should never really be alone.... XIII The morning after Jimmy had dined with us, Susan, at my request, brought Miss Goucher to my study, and we had a good long talk together. And first of all the problem of Gertrude loomed before us, starting up ghostlike at a chance remark, and then barring all progress with more practical considerations, till laid. Neither Susan's telegram nor her private interview with Gertrude had been discussed between us; I had nervously shied off from both matters in my dread of seeming to question Susan's motives. But now Susan herself, to put it crudely, insisted on a show-down. "The air needed clearing, Ambo, and I sent the telegram hoping to clear it by raising a storm. But, as Sister reminded me at breakfast, storms don't always clear the air--even good hard ones; they sometimes leave it heavier than ever. I'm afraid that's what my storm has done. Has it, Ambo? What happened when Mrs. Hunt came to see you here? But perhaps I ought to tell you first what happened between us?" "No," I smiled; "Gertrude made that fairly plain, for once. And your storm did sweep off the worst of the fog! You see, Gertrude has, intensely, the virtues of her defects--a fastidious sense of honor among them. Once she felt her suspicions unjust, she was bound to acknowledge it. I can't say you won a friend, but you did--by some miracle--placate a dangerous foe." "Is she coming back to you, Ambo?" "No. She suggests divorce. But that of course is impossible!" "Why?" "Is it kind to ask?" said Miss Goucher. "And--forgive me, dear--after your decision, is it necessary for you to know?" Susan reflected anxiously. "No," she finally responded, "it isn't kind; but it is necessary. I'll tell you why, Ambo. If you had been free, I think there's no doubt I should have married you. Oh, I know, dear, it sounds cold-blooded like that! But the point is, I shouldn't then have questioned things as I do now. My feeling for you--your need of me--they wouldn't have been put to the test. Now they have been--or rather, they're being tested, every minute of every hour. Suppose I should ask you now--meaning every word of it--to divorce Mrs. Hunt so you could marry me? At least you'd know then, wouldn't you, that simply being yours meant more to me than anything else in life? Or suppose I couldn't bring myself to ask it, but couldn't face life without you? Suppose I drowned myself----" "Good God, dear!" "I'm not going to, Ambo--and what's equally important, neither are you. Why, you don't even pause over Mrs. Hunt's suggestion! You don't even wait to ask my opinion! You say at once--it's impossible! That proves something, doesn't it--about you and me? It either proves we're not half so much in love as we think we are, or else that love isn't for either of us the only good thing in life--the whole show." She paused, but added: "Why can't you consider divorcing Mrs. Hunt, Ambo? After all, she isn't honestly your wife and doesn't want to be; it would only be common fairness to yourself." Miss Goucher stirred uneasily in her chair. I stirred uneasily in mine. "There are so many reasons," I fumbled. "I suppose at bottom it comes to this--a queer feeling of responsibility, of guilt even...." "Nonsense!" cried Susan. "You never could have satisfied her, Ambo. You weren't born to be human, but somehow, in spite of everything, you just are! It's your worst fault in Mrs. Hunt's eyes. Mrs. Hunt shouldn't have married a man; she should have married a social tradition; an abstract idea." "How could she?" asked Miss Goucher. "Easily," said Susan; "she's one herself, so there must be others. It's hard to believe, but apparently abstractions like that do get themselves incarnated now and then. I never met one before--in the flesh. It gave me a creepy feeling--like shaking hands with the fourth dimension or asking the Holy Roman Empire to dinner. But I don't pretend to make her out, Ambo. Why _did_ she leave you? It seems the very thing an incarnate social tradition could never have brought herself to do!" Before I could check myself I reproved her. "You're not often merely cruel, Susan!" Then, hoping to soften it, I hurried on: "You see, dear, Gertrude isn't greatly to blame. Suppose you had been born and brought up like her, to believe beauty and brains and a certain gracious way of life a family privilege, a class distinction. Don't you see how your inbred worship of class and family would become in the end an intenser form of worshipping yourself? Gertrude was taught to live exclusively, from girlhood, in this disguised worship of her own perfections. We're all egotists of course; but most of us are the common or garden variety, and have an occasional suspicion that we're pretty selfish and intolerant and vain. Gertrude has never suspected it. How could she? A daughter of her house can do no wrong--and she is a daughter of her house." I sighed. "Unluckily, my power of unreserved admiration has bounds, and my tongue and temper sometimes haven't. So our marriage dissolved in an acid bath compounded of honest irritations and dishonest apologies. _I_ made the dishonest apologies. To do Gertrude justice, she never apologized. She knew the initial fault was mine. I shouldn't have joined a church whose creed I couldn't repeat without a sensation of moral nausea. That's just what I did when I married Gertrude. There was no deception on her side, either. I knew her gods, and I knew she assumed that mine were the same as hers, and that I was humbly entering the service of their dedicated priestess. Well, I apostatized--to her frozen amazement. Then a crisis came--insignificant enough.... Gertrude refused to call with me on the bride of an old friend of mine, because she thought it a misalliance. He had no right, she held, under her jealous gods, to bring a former trained nurse home as his wife, and thrust her upon a society that would never otherwise have received her. "I was furious, and blasphemed her gods. I insisted she should either accompany me, then and there, or I'd go myself and apologize for her--yes, these are the words I used--her 'congenital lunacy.' She left me like a statue walking, and went to her room." "And you?" asked Susan. "I made the call." "Did you make the apology?" "No; I couldn't." "Naturally not," assented Miss Goucher. "Oh, Ambo," protested Susan, "what a coward you are! Well, and then?" "I returned to a wifeless house. From that hour until yesterday morning there have been no explanations between Gertrude and me. Gertrude is superb." "I understand her less than ever," said Susan. "I understand her quite well," said Miss Goucher. "But your long silence, Mr. Hunt--that I can't understand." "I can," Susan exclaimed. "Ambo's very bones dislike her. So do mine. Do you remember how I used to shock you, Ambo, when I first came here--saying somebody or other was no damn good? Well, I can't help it; it's stronger than I am. Mrs. Hunt's no----" "Oh, _child_!" struck in Miss Goucher. "How much you have still to learn!" Then she addressed me: "I've never seen a more distinguished person than Mrs. Hunt. I know it's odd, coming from me, but somehow I sympathize with her--greatly. I've always"--hesitated Miss Goucher--"been a proud sort of nobody myself." Susan reached over and slipped her hand into Miss Goucher's. "Poor Sister! Just as we're going off together you begin to find out how horrid I can be. But I'll make a little true confession to both of you. What I've been saying about Mrs. Hunt isn't in the least what I think about her. The fact is, I'm jealous of her, in so many ways--except in the ordinary way! To make a clean breast of it, when I was with her she brought me to my knees in spite of myself. Oh, I acknowledge her power! It's uncanny. How did you ever find strength to resist it, Ambo? My outbreak was sheer Birch Street bravado--a cheap insult flung in the face of the unattainable! It was all my shortcomings throwing mud at all her disdain. Truly! Why, the least droop of her eyelids taught me that it takes more than quick wits and sensitive nerves and hard study to overcome a false start--or rather, no start at all! "Birch Street isn't even a beginning, because, so far as Mrs. Hunt's concerned, Birch Street simply doesn't exist! And even Birch Street would have to admit that she gets away with it! I'd say so, too, if I didn't go a step farther and feel that it gets away with her. That's why ridicule can't touch her. You can't laugh at a devotee, a woman possessed, the instrument of a higher power! Mrs. Hunt's a living confession of faith in the absolute rightness of the right people, and a living rebuke to the incurable wrongness of the wrong! Oh, I knew at once what you meant, Ambo, when you called her a dedicated priestess! It's the way I shall always think of her--ritually clothed, and pouring out tea to her gods from sacred vessels of colonial silver! You can smile, Ambo, but I shall; and way down in my common little Birch Street heart, I believe I shall always secretly envy her.... So there!" For the first time in my remembrance of her, Miss Goucher laughed out loud. Her laugh--in effect, not in resonance--was like cockcrow. We all laughed together, and Gertrude vanished.... But ten minutes later found us with knit brows again, locked in debate. Susan had at length seized courage to tell me that when she left my house she must, once and for all, go it completely alone. She could no longer accept my financial protection. She was to stand on her own feet, for better or worse, richer or poorer, in sickness or in health. This staggering proposal I simply could not listen to calmly, and would not yield to! It was too preposterously absurd. Yet I made no headway with my objections, until I stumbled upon the one argument that served me and led to a final compromise, "Dear," I had protested, really and deeply hurt by Susan's stubborn stand for absolute independence, "can't you feel how cruelly unkind all this is to me?" "Oh," she wailed, "unkind? Why did you say that! Surely, Ambo, you don't mean it! Unkind?" I was quick to press my advantage. "When you ask me to give up even the mere material protection of my family? You _are_ my family, Susan--all the family I shall ever have. I don't want to be maudlin about it. I don't wish to interfere with your freedom to develop your own life in your own way. But it's beyond my strength not to plead that all that's good in my life is bound up with yours. Please don't ask me to live in daily and hourly anxiety over your reasonable comfort and health. There's no common sense in it, Susan. It's fantastic! And it is unkind!" Susan could not long resist this plea, for she felt its wretched sincerity, even if she knew--as she later told me--that I was making the most of it. It was Miss Goucher who suggested our compromise. "Mr. Hunt," she said, "my own arrangement with Susan is this: We are to pool our resources, and I am to make a home for her, just as if I were her own mother. I've been able to save, during the past twenty-five years, about eight thousand dollars; it's well invested, I think, and brings me in almost five hundred a year. This is what we were to start with; and Susan feels certain she can earn at least two thousand dollars a year by her pen. I know nothing of the literary market, but I haven't counted on her being able to earn so much--for a year or so, at least. On the other hand, I feel certain Susan will finally make her way as a writer. So I'd counted on using part of my capital for a year or two if necessary. We plan to live very simply for the present, of course--but without hardship." "Still----" I would have protested, if for once Miss Goucher had not waived all deference, sailing calmly on: "As Susan has told you, she's convinced that she needs the assurance of power and self-respect to be gained by meeting life without fear or favor and making her own career in the face of whatever difficulties arise. There's a good deal to be said for that, Mr. Hunt--more than you could be expected to understand. Situated as you have always been, I mean. But naturally, as Susan's guardian, you can't be expected to stand aside if for any reason we fail in our attempt. I see that; and Susan sees it now, I'm sure. Yet I really feel I must urge you to let us try. And I promise faithfully to keep you informed as to just how we are getting on." "Please, Ambo," Susan chimed in, "let us try. If things go badly I won't be unreasonable or stubborn--indeed I won't. Please trust me for that. I'll even go a step farther than Sister. I won't let her break into her savings--not one penny. If it ever comes to that, I'll come straight to you. And for the immediate present, I have over five hundred dollars in my bank account; and"--she smiled--"I'll try to feel it's honestly mine. You've spent heaven knows how much on me, Ambo; though it's the least of all you've done for me and been to me! But now, please let me see whether I could ever have made anything of myself if I hadn't been so shamelessly lucky--if life had treated me as it treats most people.... Jimmy, for instance.... _He_ hasn't needed help, Ambo; and I simply must know whether he's a better man than I am, Gunga Dhin! Don't you see?" Yes; I flatter myself that I did, more or less mistily, begin to see. Thus our morning conference drew to its dreary, amicable close. But from the door Susan turned back to me with tragic eyes: "Ambo--I'm caring. It does--hurt." And since I could not very safely reply, she attempted a smile. "Ambo--what is to become of poor Tumps? Togo will have to come; I can't reduce him to atheism. But Tumps would die in New York; and he never has believed in God anyway! Can you make a martyr of yourself for his surly sake? Can you? Just to see, I mean, that he gets his milk every day and fish heads on Friday? Can you, dear?" I nodded and turned away.... The door closed so quietly that I first knew when the latch ticked once how fortunately I was alone. XIV Maltby Phar was responsible for Togo; he had given him--a little black fluff-ball with shoe-button eyes--to Susan, about six months after she first came to live with me. Togo is a Chow; and a Chow is biologically classified as a dog. But if a Chow is a dog, then a Russian sable muff is a dish rag. Your Chow--black, smoke blue, or red--is a creation apart. He is to dogdom what Hillhouse Avenue is to Birch Street--the wrong end, _bien entendu_. His blood is so blue that his tongue is purple; and, like Susan's conception of Gertrude, he is a living confession of faith in the rightness of the right people, a living rebuke to the wrongness of the wrong; the right people being, of course, that master god or mistress goddess whom he worships, with their immediate _entourage_. No others need apply for even cursory notice, much less respect. I am told they eat Chows in China, their native land. If they do, it must be from the motive that drove Plutarch's Athenian to vote the banishment of Aristides--ennui, to wit, kindling to rage; he had wearied to madness of hearing him always named "the Just." Back, too, in America--for I write from France--there will one day be proletarian reprisals against the Chow; for in the art of cutting one dead your Chow is supreme. He goes by you casually, on tiptoe, with the glazed eye of indifference. He sees you and does not see you--and will not. You may cluck, you may whistle, you may call; interest will not excite him, nor flattery move him; he passes; he "goes his unremembering way." But let him beware! If Americans are slow to anger, they are terrible when roused. I have frequently explained this to Togo--more for Susan's sake than his own--and been yawned at for my pains. Personally, I have no complaint to make. In Togo's eyes I am one of the right people. He has always treated me with a certain tact, though with a certain reserve. Only to Susan does he prostrate himself with an almost mystical ecstasy of devotion. Only for her does his feathered tail-arc quiver, do his ears lie back, his calm ebon lips part in an unmistakably adoring smile. But there is much else, I admit, to be said for him; he never barks his deep menacing bark without cause; and as a mere _objet d'art_, when well combed, he is superb. Ming porcelains are nothing to him; he is perhaps the greatest decorative achievement of the unapproachably decorative East.... But for Tumps, my peculiar legacy, I have nothing good to say and no apologies to offer. Like Calverley's parrot, he still lives--"he will not die." Tumps is a tomcat. And not only is he a tomcat, he is a hate-scarred noctivagant, owning but an ear and a half, and a poor third of tail. His design was botched at birth, and has since been degraded; his color is unpleasant; his expression is ferocious--and utterly sincere. He has no friends in the world but Susan and Sonia, and Sonia cannot safely keep him with her because of the children. Out of the night he came, shortly after Togo's arrival; starved for once into submission and dragging himself across the garden terrace to Susan's feet. And she accepted this devil's gift, this household scourge. I never did, nor did Togo; but we were finally subdued by fear. Those baleful eyes cursing us from dim corners--Togo, Togo, shall we ever forget them! Separately or together, we have more than once failed to enter a dusky room, toward twilight, where those double phosphors burned from your couch corner or out from beneath my easy-chair. But nothing would move Susan to give Tumps up so long as he cared to remain; and Tumps cared. Small wonder! Nursed back to health and rampageous vivacity, he soon mastered the neighborhood, peopled it with his ill-favored offspring, and wailed his obscene balladry to the moon. Hillhouse Avenue protested, _en bloc_. The Misses Carstairs, whose slumbers had more than once been postponed, and whose white Persian, Desdemona, had been debauched, threatened traps, poison and the law. Professor Emeritus Gillingwater attempted murder one night with a .22 rifle, but only succeeded in penetrating the glass roof of his neighbor's conservatory. Susan was unmoved, defending her own; she would not listen to any plea, and she mocked at reprisals. Those were the early days of her coming, when I could not force myself to harsh measures; and happily Tumps, having lost some seven or eight lives, did with the years grow more sedate, though no more amiable. But the point is, he stayed--and, I repeat, lives to this hour on my distant, grudging bounty. Such was the charge lightly laid upon me.... Oh, Susan--Susan! For once, resentment will out! May you suffer, shamed to contrition, as you read these lines! Tumps--and I say it now boldly--is "no damn good." XV I am clinging to this long chapter as if I were still clinging to Susan's hand on the wind-swept station platform, hoarding time by infinitesimally split seconds, dreading her inevitable escape. Phil--by request, I suspect--did not come down; and Susan forbade me to enter the train with her, having previously forbidden me to accompany her to town. Togo was forward, amid crude surroundings, riling the brakemen with his disgusted disdain. Miss Goucher had already said a decorous but sincerely felt good-by, and had taken her place inside. "Let's not be silly, Ambo," Susan whispered. "After all, you'll be down soon--won't you? You're always running to New York." Then, unexpectedly, she snatched her hand from mine, threw her arms tight round my neck, and for a reckless public moment sobbed and kissed me. With that she was gone.... I turned, too, at once, meaning flight from the curious late-comers pressing toward the car steps. One of them distinctly addressed me. "Good morning, Ambrose. Don't worry about your charming little ward. She'll be quite safe--away from you. I'll keep a friendly eye on her going down." It was Lucette. THE FOURTH CHAPTER I I HAD a long conference with Phil the day after Susan's departure, and we solemnly agreed that we must, within reasonable limits, give Susan a clear field; her desire to play a lone hand in the cut-throat poker game called life must be, so far as possible, respected. But we sneakingly evaded any definition of our terms. "Within reasonable limits;" "so far as possible"--the vagueness of these phrases will give you the measure of our secret duplicity. Meanwhile we lived on from mail delivery to mail delivery, and Susan proved a faithful correspondent. There is little doubt, I think, that the length and frequency of her letters constituted a deliberate sacrifice of energy and time, laid--not reluctantly, but not always lightly--on the altar of affection. It was a genuine, yet must often have been an arduous piety. To write full life-giving letters late at night, after long hours of literary labor, is no trifling effort of good will--good will, in this instance, to two of the loneliest, forlornest of men. Putting aside the mere anodyne of work we had but one other effective consolation--Jimmy; our increasing interest and joy in Jimmy. But, for me at least, this was not an immediate consolation; my taste for Jimmy's prosaic companionship was very gradually acquired. Our first word from Susan was a day letter, telephoned to me from the telegraph office, though I at once demanded the delivery of a verbatim copy by messenger. Here it is: "_At grand central safe so far new york lies roaring just beyond sister and togo tarry with the stuff near cab stand while I send. Love Mrs. Arthur snooped in vain now for it courage Susan whos afraid dont you be alonsen fan._" Phil, the scholar, interpreted the last two verbatim symbols: "_Allons, enfants!_" II SUSAN TO ME "Sister and I are at the nice old mid-Victorian Brevoort House for three or four days. Sister is calmly and courageously hunting rooms for us--or, if not rooms, a room. She hopes for the plural. We like this quarter of town. It's near enough publishers and things for walking, and it's not quite so New Yorky as some others. What Sister is trying to avoid for us is slavery to the Subway, which is awful! But we may have to fly up beyond Columbia, or even to the Bronx, before we're through. The hotel objected to Togo, but I descended to hitherto untried depths of feminine wheedle--and justified them by getting my way. Sister blushed for me--and herself--but has since felt more confident about my chances for success in this wickedly opportunist world. "Better skip this part if you read extracts to Phil; he'll brood. But perhaps you'd better begin disillusioning him at once, for I'm discovering dreadful possibilities in my nature--now the Hillhouse inhibitions seem remote. New York, one sees overnight, is no place for a romantic idealist--Maltby's phrase, not mine, bless Phil's heart!--but luckily I've never been one. Birch Street is going to stand me in good stead down here. New York _is_ Birch Street on a slightly exaggerated scale; Hillhouse Avenue is something entirely different. Finer too, perhaps; but the world's future has its roots in New Birch Street. I began to feel that yesterday during my first hunt for a paying job. "I've plunged on shop equipment, since Jimmy says, other things being equal, the factory with the best tools wins--that is, I've bought a reliable typewriter, and I tackled my first two-finger exercises last night. The results were dire--mostly interior capitals and extraneous asterisks. I shan't have patience to take proper five-finger lessons. Sister vows she's going to master the wretched thing too, so she can help with copying now and then. There's a gleam in her eye, dear--wonderful! This is to be her great adventure as well as mine. 'Susan, Sister & Co., Unlicensed Hacks--Piffle While You Wait!' Oh, we shall get on--you'll see. Still, I can't truthfully report much progress yesterday or to-day, though a shade more to-day than yesterday. I've been counting callously on Maltby, as Phil disapprovingly knows, and I brought three short manufactured-in-advance articles for the Garden Ex. down with me. So my first step was to stifle my last maidenly scruple and take them straight to Maltby; I hoped they would pay at least for the typewriter. It was a clear ice-bath of a morning, and the walk up Fifth Avenue braced me for anything. I stared at everybody and a good many unattached males stared back; sometimes I rather liked it, and sometimes not. It all depends. "But I found the right building at last, somewhere between the Waldorf and the Public Library. There's a shop on its avenue front for the sale of false pearls, and judging from the shop they must be more expensive than real ones. Togo dragged me in there at first by mistake; and as I was wearing my bestest tailor-made and your furs, and as Togo was wearing his, plus his haughtiest atmosphere, we seemed between us to be just the sort of thing the languid clerks had been waiting for. There was a hopeful stir as we entered--no, swept in! I was really sorry to disappoint them; it was horrid to feel that we couldn't live up to their expectations. "We didn't sweep out nearly so well! But we found the elevator round the corner and were taken up four or five floors, passing a designer of _de luxe_ corsets and a distiller of _de luxe_ perfumes on the way, and landed in the impressive outer office of the Garden Ex. "But how stupid of me to describe all this! You've been there twenty times, of course, and remember the apple-green art-crafty furniture and potted palms and things. Several depressed-looking persons were fidgeting about, but my engraved card--score one for Hillhouse!--soon brought Maltby puffing out to me with both hands extended. Togo didn't quite cut him dead, but almost, and he insulted an entire roomful of stenographers on his way to the great man's sanctum. My first _sanctum_, Ambo! I did get a little thrill from that, in spite of Maltby. "Stop chattering, Susan--stick to facts. Yes, Phil, please. Fact One: Maltby was surprisingly flustered at first. He was, Ambo! He jumped to the conclusion that I was down for shopping or the theaters, and assumed of course you were with me. So you were, dear--our way! But I thought Maltby asked rather gingerly after you. Why? "Fact Two: I did my best to explain things, but Maltby doesn't believe yet I'm serious--seemingly he can't believe it, because he doesn't want to. That's always true of Maltby. He still thinks this must be a sudden spasm--not of virtue; thinks I've run away for an unholy lark. It suits him to think so. If I'm out on the loose he hopes to manage the whole _Mardi gras_, and he needn't hear what I say about needing work too distinctly. That merely annoyed him. But I did finally make him promise--while he wriggled--to read my three articles and give me a decision on them to-morrow. I had to promise to lunch with him then to make even that much headway.--Oof! "Meanwhile, I fared slightly better to-day. I took your letter to Mr. Sampson. The sign, Garnett & Co., almost frightened me off, though, Ambo; and you know I'm not easily frightened. But I've read so many of their books--wonderful books! I knew great men had gone before me into those dingy offices and left their precious manuscripts to strengthen and delight the world. Who was I to follow those footsteps? Luckily an undaunted messenger boy whistled on in ahead of me--so I followed his instead! By the time I had won past all the guardians of the _sanctum sanctorum_, my sentimental fit was over. Birch Street was herself again. "And Mr. Sampson proved all you promised--rather more! The dearest odd old man, full of blunt kindness and sudden whimsy. I think he liked me. I know I liked him. But he didn't like me as I did him--at first sight. Togo's fault, of course. Why didn't you tell me Mr. Sampson has a democratic prejudice against aristocratic dogs? I must learn to leave poor Togo at home--if there ever is such a place!--when I'm looking for work; I may even have to give up your precious soul-and-body-warming furs. Between them, they belie every humble petition I utter. Sister and I may have to eat Togo yet. "Mr. Sampson only began to relent when I told him a little about Birch Street. I didn't tell him much--just enough to counteract the furs and Togo. And he forgave me everything when I told him of Sister and confessed what we were hoping to do--found a home together and earn our own right to make it a comfy one to live in. He questioned me pretty sharply, too, but not from snifty-snoops like Mrs. Arthur. "By the way, dear, she was on the train coming down, as luck would have it, in the chair just across from mine. Her questions were masterpieces, but nothing to my replies. I was just wretched enough to scratch without mercy; it relieved my feelings. But you'd better avoid her for a week or two--if you can! I didn't mind any of Mr. Sampson's questions, though I eluded some of them, being young in years but old in guile. I'm to take him my poems to-morrow afternoon, and some bits of prose things--the ones you liked. They're not much more than fragments, I'm afraid. He says he wants to get the hang of me before loading me down with bad advice. I do like him, and--the serpent having trailed its length all over this endless letter--I truly think his offhand friendship may prove far more helpful to me than Maltby's----! _You_ can fill in the blank, Ambo. My shamelessness has limits, even now, in darkest New York. "Good night, dear. Please don't think you are ever far from my me-est thoughts. Now for that ---- typewriter!" III SUSAN TO JIMMY "That's a breath-taking decision you've made, but like you; and I'm proud of you for having made it--and prouder that the idea was entirely your own. I suppose we're all bound to be more or less lopsided in a world slightly flattened at the poles and rather wobbly on its axis anyway. But the less lopsided we are the better for us, and the better for us the better for others--and that's one universal law, at least, that doesn't make me long for a universal recall and referendum. "Oh, you're right to stay on at Yale, but so much righter to have decided on a broad general course instead of a narrow technical one! _Of course_ you can carry on your technical studies by yourself! With your brain's natural twist and the practical training you've had, probably carry them much farther by yourself than under direction! And the way you've chosen will open vistas, bring the sky through the jungle to you. It was brave of you to see that and take the first difficult step. "_Il n'y a que le premier pas qui coûte_"--but no wonder you hesitated! Because at your advanced age, Jimmy, and from an efficient point of view, it's a downright silly step, wasteful of time--and time you know's money--and money you know's everything. Only, I'm afraid you _don't_ know that intensely enough ever to have a marble mansion on upper Fifth Avenue, a marble villa at Newport, a marble bungalow at Palm Beach, a marble steam yacht--but they don't make those of marble, do they! "It's so possible for you to collect all these marbles, Jimmy--reelers, every one of them!--if you'll only start now and do nothing else for the next thirty or forty years. You can be a poor boy who became infamous just as easy as pie! Simply forget the world's so full of a number of things, and grab all you can of just one. But I could hug you for wanting to be a man, not an adding-machine! For caring to know why Socrates was richer than Morgan, and why Saint Francis and Sainte-Beuve, each in his own way, have helped more to make life worth living than all the Rothschilds of Europe! Oh, I know it's a paradox for me to preach this, when here am I trying to collect a few small clay marbles--putting every ounce of concentration in me on money making, on material success! Not getting far with it, either--so far. "But what I'm doing, Jimmy, is just what you've set out to do--I'm trying not to be lopsided. You've met life as it is, already; I never have. And I'd so love to moon along pleasantly on Ambo's inherited money--read books and write verses and look at flowers and cats and stars and trees and children and cows and chickens and funny dogs and donkeys and funnier women and men! I'd so like not to adjust myself to an industrial civilization; not to worry over that sort of thing at all; above everything, not to earn my daily bread. I could cry about having to make up my mind on such bristly beasts as economic or social problems! "The class struggle bores me to tears--yet here it is, we're up against it; and I _won't_ be lopsided! What I want is pure thick cream, daintily fed to me, too, from a hand-beaten spoon. So I mustn't have it unless I can get it. And I don't know that I can--you see, it isn't all conscience that's driving me; curiosity's at work as well! But it's scrumptious to know we're both studying the same thing in a different way--the one great subject, after all: How not to be lopsided! How to be perfectly spherical, like the old man in the nonsense rhyme. Not wobbly on one's axis--not even slightly flattened at the poles!" "_Hurrah for us! Trumpets!_ "But I'm gladdest of all that you and Ambo are beginning at last to be friends. You don't either of you say so--it drifts through; and I could sing about it--if I could sing. There isn't anybody in the world like Ambo. "As for Sister and me, we're getting on, and we're not. Sister thinks I've done marvels; I know she has. Marvels of economy and taste in cozying up our room, marvels of sympathy and canny advice that doesn't sound like advice at all. As one-half of a mutual-admiration syndicate I'm a complete success! But as a professional author--hum, hum. Anyway, I'm beginning to poke my inquisitive nose into a little of everything, and you can't tell--something, some day, may come of this. As the Dickens man said--who was he?--I hope it mayn't be human gore. Meanwhile, one thing hits the most casual eye: We're still in the double-room-with-alcove boarding-house stage, and likely to stay there for some time to come." IV SUSAN TO PHIL "Your short letter answering my long one has been read and reread and read again. I know it by heart. Everything you say's true--and isn't. I'll try to explain that--for I can't bear you to be doubting me. You are, Phil. I don't blame you, but I do blame myself--for complacency. I've taken too much for granted, as I always do with you and Ambo. You see, I know so intensely that you and Ambo are pure gold--incorruptible!--that I couldn't possibly question anything you might say or do--the fineness of the motive, I mean. If you did murder and were hanged for it, and even if I'd no clue as to why you struck--I should know all the time you must have done it because, for some concealed reason, under circumstances dark to the rest of us, your clear eyes marked it as the one possible right thing to do. "Yes, I trust you like that, Phil; you and Ambo and Sister and Jimmy. Think of trusting four people like that! How rich I am! And you can't know how passionately grateful! For it isn't blind trusting at all. In each one of you I've touched a soul of goodness. There's no other name for it. It's as simple as fresh air. You're good--you four--good from the center. But, Phil dear, a little secret to comfort you--just between us and the stars: So, mostly, am I. "Truly, Phil, I'm ridiculously good at the center, and most of the way out. There are things I simply can't do, no matter how much I'd like to; and lots of oozy, opally things I simply can't like at all. I'm with you so far, at least--peacock-proud to be! But we're tremendously different, all the same. It's really this, I think: You're a Puritan, by instinct and cultivation; and I'm not. The clever ones down here, you know, spend most of their spare time swearing by turns at Puritanism and the Victorian Era. Their favorite form of exercise is patting themselves on the back, and this is one of their subtler ways of doing it. But they just rampantly rail; they don't--though they think they do--understand. They mix up every _passé_ narrowness and bigotry and hypocrisy and sentimental cant in one foul stew, and then rush from it, with held noses, screaming "Puritanism! _Faugh!_" Well, it does, Phil--their stew! So, often, for that matter--and to high heaven--do the clever ones! "But it isn't Puritanism, the real thing. You see, I know the real thing--for I know you. Ignorance, bigotry, hypocrisy, sentimentalism--such things have no part in your life. And yet you're a Puritan, and I'm not. Something divides us where we are most alike. What is it, Phil? "May I tell you? I almost dare believe I've puzzled it out. "You're a simon-Puritan, dear, because you won't trust that central goodness, your own heart; the very thing in you on whose virgin-goldness I would stake my life! You won't trust it in yourself; and when you find it in others, you don't fully trust it in them. You've purged your philosophy of Original Sin, but it still secretly poisons the marrow of your bones. You guard your soul's strength as possible weakness--something that might vanish suddenly, at a pinch. How silly of you! For it's the _you_-est you, the thing you can never change or escape. Instead of worrying over yourself or others--me?--you could safely spread yourself, Phil dear, all over the landscape, lie back in the lap of Mother Earth and twiddle your toes and smile! Walt Whitman's way! He may have overdone it now and then, posed about it; but I'm on his side, not yours. It's heartier--human-er--more fun! Yes, Master Puritan--more fun! That's a life value you've mostly missed. But it's never too late, Phil, for a genuine cosmic spree. "Now I've done scolding back at you for scolding at me.--But I loved your sermon. I hope you won't shudder over mine?" V The above too-cryptic letter badly needs authoritative annotation, which I now proceed to give you--at perilous length. But it will lead us far.... * * * * * Though it is positively not true that Phil and I, having covenanted on a hands-off policy, were independently hoping for the worst, so far as Susan's ability to cope unaided with New York was concerned; nevertheless, the ease with which she made her way there, found her feet without us and danced ahead, proved for some reason oddly disturbing to us both. Here was a child, of high talents certainly, perhaps of genius--the like, at least, of whose mental precocity we had never met with in any other daughter--much less, son--of Eve! A woman, for we so loved her, endowed as are few women; yet assuredly a child, for she had but just counted twenty years on earth. And being men of careful maturity, once Susan had left us, our lonely anxieties fastened upon this crying fact of her youth; it was her youth, her inexperience, that made her venture suddenly pathetic and dreadful to us, made us yearn to watch over her, warn her of pitfalls, guide her steps. True, she was not alone. Miss Goucher was admirable in her way; though a middle-aged spinster, after all, unused to the sharp temptations and fierce competitions of metropolitan life. It was not a house-mother Susan would need; the wolves lurked beyond the door--shrewd, soft-treading wolves, cunningly disguised. How could a child, a charming and too daring child--however gifted--be expected to deal with these creatures? The thought of these subtle, these patient ones, tracking her--tracking her--chilled us to hours-long wakefulness in the night! Then with the morning a letter would come, filled with strange men's names. We compared notes, consulted together--shaking unhappy heads. We wrote tactful letters to Heywood Sampson, begging him, but always indirectly, to keep an eye. We ran down singly for nights in town, rescued--the verb was ours--Susan and Miss Goucher from their West 10th Street boarding-house, interfered with their work or other plans, haled them--the verb, I fear, was theirs--to dinner, to the opera or theater, or perhaps to call on someone of ribbed respectability who might prove an observant friend. God knows, in spite of all resolutions, we did our poor best to mind Susan's business for her, to brood over her destiny from afar! And God knows our efforts were superfluous! The traps, stratagems, springes in her path, merely suspected by us and hence the more darkly dreaded, were clearly seen by Susan and laughed at for the ancient, pitiful frauds they were. The dull craft, the stale devices of avarice or lust were no novelties to her; she greeted them, _en passant_, with the old Birch Street terrier-look; just a half-mocking nod of recognition--an amused, half-wistful salute to her gamin past. It was her gamin past we had forgotten, Phil and I, when we agonized over Susan's inexperienced youth. Inexperienced? Bob Blake's kid! If there were things New York could yet teach Bob Blake's kid--and there were many--they were not those that had made her see in it "Birch Street--on a slightly exaggerated scale"! But, as the Greeks discovered many generations ago, it is impossible to be high-minded or clear-sighted enough to outwit a secret unreason in the total scheme of things. Else the virtuous, in the Greek sense, would be always the fortunate; and perhaps then would grow too self-regarding. Does the last and austerest beauty of the ideal not flower from this, that it can promise us nothing but itself! You can choose a clear road, yet you shall never walk there in safety: Chance--that secret unreason--lurks in the hedgerows, myriad-formed, to plot against you. "_Hélas!_" as the French heroine might say. "Diddle-diddle-dumpling!" as might say Susan.... Meaning: That strain, Ambo, was of a higher mood, doubtless; but do return to your muttons. Susan had reached New York late in November, 1913, and the letter to Phil dates from the following January. Barely two months had passed since her first calls upon Maltby and Heywood Sampson, but every day of that period had been made up of crowded hours. Of the three manufactured-in-advance articles for the Garden Ex., Maltby had accepted one, paying thirty dollars for it, half-rate--Susan's first professional earnings; but the manner of his acceptance had convinced Susan it was a mere stroke of personal diplomacy on his part. He did not wish to encourage her as a business associate, for Maltby kept his business activities rigidly separate from what he held to be his life; neither did he wish to offend her. What he wholly desired was to draw her into the immediate circles he frequented as a social being, where he could act as her patron on a scale at once more brilliant and more impressive. So far as the Garden Ex. was concerned, his attitude from the first had been one of sympathetic discouragement. Susan hit off his manner perfectly in an earlier letter: "'My dear Susan! You can write very delicate, distinctive verse, no doubt, and all that--and of course there's a fairly active market for verse nowadays, and I can put you in touch with some little magazines, _à côté_, that print such things, and even occasionally pay for them. They're your field, I'm convinced. But, frankly, I can't see you quite as one of our contributors--and I couldn't pay you a higher compliment! "'You don't suppose, do you, I sit here like an old-fashioned editor, reading voluntary contributions? No, my dear girl; I have a small, well-broken staff of writers, and I tell them what to write. If I find myself, for example, with a lot of parade interiors taken in expensive homes, I select four or five, turn 'em over to Abramovitz, and tell him to do us something on "The More Dignified Dining-Room" or "The Period Salon, a Study in Restfulness." Abramovitz knows exactly what to say, and how to point the snobbish-but-not-too-snobbish captions and feature the best names. I've no need to experiment, you see. I count on Abramovitz. Just so with other matters. Here's an article, now, on "The Flaunting Paeony." Skeat did that, of course. It's signed "Winifred Snow"--all his flower-and-sundial stuff is--and it couldn't be better! I don't even have to read it. "'Well, there you are! I'm simply a purveyor of standardized goods in standardized packages. Dull work, but it pays.' "'Exactly!' I struck in. 'It pays! That's why I'm interested. Sister and Togo and I need the money!'" As for the brilliant, intertwined circles frequented by Maltby as a social being, within which, he hoped to persuade Susan, lay true freedom, while habit slyly bound her with invisible chains--well, they are a little difficult to describe. Taken generally, we may think of them as the Artistic Smart Set. Maltby's acquaintance was wide, penetrating in many directions; but he felt most at home among those iridescent ones of earth whose money is as easy as their morals, and whose ruling passion for amusement is at least directed by æsthetic sensibilities and vivacious brains. Within Maltby's intersecting circles were to be found, then, many a piquant contrast, many an anomalous combination. There the young, emancipated society matron, of fattest purse and slenderest figure, expressed her sophisticated paganism through interpretative dancing; and there the fashionable painter of portraits, solidly arrived, exhibited her slender figure on a daring canvas--made possible by the fatness of her purse--at one of his peculiarly intimate studio teas. There the reigning _ingénue_, whose graceful _diablerie_ in imagined situations on the stage was equalled only by her roguish effrontery in more real, if hardly less public situations off, played up to the affluent _amateur_--patron of all arts that require an unblushing coöperation from pretty young women. There, in short, all were welcome who liked the game and were not hampered in playing it by dull inhibitions, material or immaterial. It was Bohemia _de luxe_--Bohemia in the same sense that Marie Antoinette's dairy-farm was Arcady. That Susan--given her doting guardian, her furs, her Chow, her shadowy-gleaming, imaginative charm, her sharp audacities of speech--would bring a new and seductive personality to this perpetual carnival was Maltby's dream; she was predestined--he had long suspected the tug of that fate upon her--to shine there by his side. He best could offer the cup, and her gratitude for its heady drafts of life would be merely his due. It was an exciting prospect; it promised much; and it only remained to intoxicate Susan with the wine of an unguessed freedom. This, Maltby fondly assured himself, would prove no difficult task. Life was life, youth was youth, joy was joy; their natural affinities were all on his side and would play into his practiced hands. Doubtless Phil and I must have agreed with him--from how differently anxious a spirit!--but all three of us would then have proved quite wrong. To intoxicate Susan, Maltby did find a difficult, in the end an impossible, task. He took her--not unwilling to enter and appraise any circle from high heaven to nether hell--to all the right, magical places, exposed her to all the heady influences of his world; and she found them enormously stimulating--to her sense of the ironic. Maltby's sensuous, quick-witted friends simply would not come true for Susan when she first moved among them; they were not serious about anything but refined sensation and she could not take their refined sensations seriously; but for a time they amused her, and she relished them much as Charles Lamb relished the belles and rakes of Restoration Drama: "They are a world of themselves almost as much as fairyland." To their intimate dinners, their intimate musical evenings, their intimate studio revels--she came on occasion with Maltby as to a play: "altogether a speculative scene of things." She could, in those early weeks, have borrowed Lamb's words for her own comedic detachment: "We are amongst a chaotic people. We are not to judge them by our usages. No reverend institutions are insulted by their proceedings--for they have none among them. No peace of families is violated--for no family ties exist among them.... No deep affections are disquieted, no holy-wedlock bands are snapped asunder--for affection's depth and wedded faith are not the growth of that soil. There is neither right nor wrong.... Of what consequence is it to Virtue or how is she at all concerned?... The whole thing is a passing pageant." It is probable that Maltby at first mistook her interest in the spectacle for the preliminary stirrings of its spell within her; but he must soon have been aware--for he had intelligence--that Susan was not precisely flinging herself among his maskers with the thrilled abandon that would betoken surrender. She was not afraid of these clever, beauty-loving maskers, some of whom bore celebrated names; it was not timidity that restrained her; she, too, loved beauty and lilting wit and could feel joyously at ease among them--for an hour or two--once in a while. But to remain permanently within those twining circles, held to a limited dream, when she was conscious of wilder, freer, more adventurous spaces without----! Why should she narrow her sympathies like that? It never occurred to her as a temptation to do so. She had drunk of a headier cup, and had known a vaster intoxication. From the magic circle of her cedar trees, in that lonely abandoned field back of Mount Carmel, the imagination of her heart had long since streamed outward beyond all such passing pageants, questing after a dream that does not pass.... No gilded nutshell could bound her now; she could become the slave of no _intersected_ ring.... Lesser incantations were powerless. So much, then, for my own broad annotation of Susan's letter to Phil! But I leave you with generalizations, when your interest is in concrete fact. Patience. In my too fumbling way I am ready for you there, as well. VI SUSAN TO JIMMY "I suppose you'd really like to know what I've lately been up to; but I hardly know myself. It's absurd, of course, but I almost think I'm having a weeny little fit of the blues to-night--not dark-blue devils exactly--say, light-blue gnomes! I hate being pushed about, and things have pushed me about, rather. It's that, I think. There's been too much--of everything--somehow---- "You see, my social life just now is divided into three parts, like all Gaul, and as my business opportunities--Midas forgive them!--have all come out of my social contacts, I'll have to begin with them. Maltby's the golden key to the first part; Mr. Heywood Sampson, the great old-school publisher and editor-author, is the iron key to the second; and chance--our settling down here on the fringes of Greenwich Village--is the skeleton key to the third. "I seem to be getting all Gaul mixed up with Bluebeard's closets and things, but I'll try to straighten my kinky metaphors out for you, Jimmy, if it takes me all night. But I assume you're more or less up to date on me, since I find you all most brazenly hand me round, and since I wrote Phil--and got severely scolded in return; deserved it, too--all about Maltby's patiently snubbing me as a starving author and impatiently rushing me as a possible member for his Emancipated Order of Æsthetic May-Flies--I call it his, for he certainly thinks of it that way. Now--Maltby and I have not precisely quarreled, but the north wind doth blow and we've already had snow enough to cool his enthusiasm. The whole thing's unpleasant; but I've learned something. Result--my occasional flutterings among the Æsthetic May-Flies grow beautifully less. They'd cease altogether if I hadn't made friends--to call them that--with a May-Fly or two. "One of them's the novelist, Clifton Young, a May-Fly at heart--but there's a strain of Honeybee in his blood somewhere. It's an unhappy combination--all the talents and few of the virtues; but I like him in spite of himself. For one thing, he doesn't pose; and he can _write_! He's a lost soul, though--thinks life is a tragic farce. Almost all the May-Flies try to think that; it's a sort of guaranty of the last sophistication; but it's genuine with Clifton, he must have been born thinking it. He doesn't ask for sympathy, either; if he did, I couldn't pity him--and get jeered at wittily for my pains! "Then there's Mona Leslie, who might have been a true Honeybee if everybody belonging to her hadn't died too soon, leaving her hopeless numbers of millions. Mona, for some reason, has taken a passing fancy to me; all her fancies pass. She sings like an angel, and might have made a career--if it had seemed worth while. It never has. Nothing has, but vivid sensation--from ascetic religion to sloppy love; and, at thirty, she's exhausted the whole show. So she spends her time now in a mad duel with boredom. Poor woman! Luckily the fairies gave her a selfishly kind heart, and there's a piece of it left, I think. It may even win the duel for her in the end. More and more she's the reckless patron of all the arts, almost smothering ennui under her benefactions. She'd smother poor me, too, if I'd let her; but I can't; I'm either not brazen enough or not Christian enough to let her patronize me for her own amusement. And that's her one new sensation for the last three years! "Still, I've one thing to thank her for, and I wish I could feel grateful. She introduced me, at one of her Arabian-Nightish _soirées musicales_, to Hadow Bury, proprietor of _Whim_, the smarty-party weekly review. In two years it's made a sky-rocketing success, by printing the harum-scarumest possible comment on all the social and æsthetic fads and freaks of the day--just the iris froth of the wave, that and that only. Hadow's a big, black, bleak man-mountain. You'd take him for an undertaker by special appointment to coal-beef-and-iron kings. You'd never suspect him of having capitalized the Frivolous. But he's found it means bagfuls of reelers for him, so he takes it seriously. He's after the _goods_. He gets and delivers the goods, no matter what they cost. He's ready to pay any price now for a new brand of cerebral champagne. "Well, I didn't know _what_ he was when Mona casually dropped me beside him, but he loomed so big and black and bleak he frightened me--till my thoughts chattered! I rattled on--like this, Jimmy--only not because I wanted to, but because having madly started I didn't know how to stop. I made a fool of myself--utter; with the result that he detected a slightly different flavor in my folly, a possibly novel _bouquet_--let's call it the 'Birch Street _bouquet_.' At any rate, he finally silenced me to ask whether I could write as I talked, and I said I hoped not; and he looked bleaker and blacker than ever and said that was the worst of it, so few amusing young women could! It seemed to be one of the more annoying laws of Nature. "The upshot was, I found out all about him and his ambitions for _Whim_; and the fantastic upshot of _that_ was, I'm now doing a nonsense column a week for him--have been for the past five--and getting fifty dollars a week for my nonsense, too! I sign the thing "Dax"--a signature invented by shutting both eyes and punching at my typewriter three times, just to see what would happen. "Dax" happened, and I'm to be allowed to burble on as him--I think Dax is a him--for ten weeks; then, if my stuff goes, catches on, gets over--I'm to have a year's contract. And farewell to double-room-and-alcove for aye! Else, farewell _Whim_! So it _must_ get over--I'm determined! I stick at nothing. I even test my burble on poor Sister every week before sending it in. If she smiles sadly, twice, I seal up the envelope and breathe again. "That's my bird in the hand, Jimmy--a sort of crazily screaming jay--but I mustn't let it escape. "There's another bird, though. A real bluebird, still in the bush--and oh, so shy! And he lures me into the second and beautifulest part of all Gaul---- "It's no use, I'm dished! Sister says no one ever wrote or read such a monstrous letter, and commands me to stop now and go to bed. There's a look in her eye--she means it. Good-night and good luck--I'll tell you about my other two parts of Gaul as soon as I can, unless you wire me--collect--'Cut it out!' Or unless you run down--you never have--and learn of them that way. Why not--_soon_?" VII Jimmy Kane took the hint, or obeyed the open request, in Susan's letter and went down to New York for the week-end; and on the following Monday Miss Goucher wrote her first considerable letter to me. It was a long letter, for her, written--recopied, I fancy--in precise script, though it would have been a mere note for Susan. _My dear Mr. Hunt:_ I promised to let you know from time to time the exact truth about our experiment. It is already a success financially. Susan is now earning from sixty to seventy dollars a week, with every prospect of earning substantially more in the near future. Her satirical paragraphs and verses in "Whim" are quoted and copied everywhere. They do not seem to me quite the Susan I love, but then, I am not a clever person; and it is undeniable that "Who is Dax?" is being asked now on every hand. If this interest continues, I am assured it can only mean fame and fortune. I am very proud of Susan, as you must be. But, Mr. Hunt, there is another side to my picture. In alluding to it I feel a sense of guilt toward Susan; I know she would not wish me to do so. Yet I feel that I must. If I may say so to you, Susan has quickened in me many starved affections, and they all center in her. In this, may I not feel without offense that we are of one mind? If I had Susan's pen I could tell you more clearly why I am troubled. I lack her gift, which is also yours, of expressing what I feel is going on secretly in another's mind. Mr. Phar and a Mr. Young, a writer, have been giving Susan some cause for annoyance lately; but that is not it. Mr. Hunt, she is deeply unhappy. She would deny it, even to you or me; but it is true. My mind is too commonplace for this task. If my attempt to explain sounds crude, please forgive it and supply what is beyond me. I can only say now that when I once told you Susan could stand alone, I was mistaken. In a sense she can. If her health does not give way, life will never beat her down. But--there are the needs of women, older than art. They tear at us, Mr. Hunt; at least while we are young. I could not say this to you, but I must manage somehow to write it. I do not refer to passion, taken by itself. I am old enough to be shocked, Mr. Hunt, to find that many brilliant women to-day have advanced beyond certain boundaries so long established. You will understand. A woman's need is greater than passion, greater even than motherhood. It is so hard for me to express it. But she can only find rest when these things are not lived separately; when, with many other elements, they build up a living whole--what we call a _home_. How badly I put it; for I feel so much more than the conventional sentiments. Will you understand me at all if I say that Susan is homesick--for a home she has never known and may never be privileged to know? With all her insight I think she doesn't realize this yet; but I once suffered acutely in this way, and it perhaps gives me the right to speak. Of course I may be quite wrong. I am more often wrong than right. I venture to inclose a copy of some lines, rescued last week from our scrap-basket. I'm not a critic, but am I wrong in thinking it would have been a pity to burn them? As they are not in free verse, which I do not appreciate as I should, they affected me very much; and I feel they will tell you, far more than my letter, why I am a little worried about Susan. Young Mr. Kane informed me, when he was here on Sunday, that you and Professor Farmer are well. He seems a nice boy, though still a little crude perhaps; nothing offensive. I am confined to the room to-day by a slight cold of no consequence; I hope I may not pass it on to Susan. Kindly give my love to Sonia, if you should see her, and to little Ivan. I trust the new housekeeper I obtained for you is reasonably efficient, and that Tumps is not proving too great a burden. I am, Respectfully yours, MALVINA GOUCHER. The inclosed "copy of some lines" affected me quite as much as they had Miss Goucher, and it was inconceivable to me that Susan, having written them, could have tossed them away. As a matter of fact she had not. Like Calais in the queen's heart, they were engraven in her own. They were too deeply hers; she had meant merely to hide them from the world; and it is even now with a curious reluctance that I give them to you here. The lines bore no title, but I have ventured, with Susan's consent, to call them _MENDICANTS_ _We who are poets beg the gods Shamelessly for immortal bliss, While the derisive years with rods Flay us; nor silvery Artemis Hearkens, nor Cypris bends, nor she,_ _The grave Athena with gray eyes. Were they not heartless would they be Deaf to the hunger of our cries?_ _We are the starving ones of clay, Famished for deathless love, no less._ _Oh, but the gods are far and fey, Shut in their azure palaces!_ _Oh, but the gods are far and fey, Blind to the rags of our distress!_ _We pine on crumbs they flick away; Brief beauty, and much weariness._ And the night I read these lines a telegram came to me from New York, signed "Lucette Arthur," announcing that Gertrude was suddenly dead.... THE FIFTH CHAPTER I I AM an essayist, if anything, trying to tell Susan's story, and telling it badly, I fear, for lack of narrative skill. So it is with no desire to prolong cheaply a possible point of suspense that I must double back now before I can go forward. My personal interest centers so entirely in Susan herself, in the special qualities of her mind and heart, that I have failed to bring in certain stiff facts--essential, alas, to all further progress. A practiced novelist, handling this purely biographic material--such a man as Clifton Young--would quietly have "planted" these facts in their due order, thus escaping my present embarrassment. But indeed I am approaching a cruel crisis in Susan's life and in the lives of those dearest to her; a period of sheer circumstantial fatality; one of those incursions of mad coincidence, of crass melodrama, which--with a brutal, ironic, improbability, as if stage-managed by an anarchistic fiend of the pit--bursts through some fine-spun, geometrical web of days, leaving chaos behind; and I am ill-equipped to deal with this chance destruction, this haphazard wantonness. Even could I merely have observed it from the outside, with æsthetic detachment, it would baffle me now; I should find it too crude for art, too arbitrary. It is not in my line. But God knows the victim of what seems an insane break in Nature is in no mood for art; he can do little more than cry out or foolishly rail! * * * * * Jimmy returned from his excursion to New York on the Sunday evening preceding Miss Goucher's letter. She must have been at work on it the next evening when Phil brought him to dine with me. It was our deliberate purpose to draw him out, track his shy impressions of Susan and of her new life in her new world. But it was hard going at first; for ten minutes or so we bagged little but the ordinary Jimmyesque _clichés_. He had had a great time, _etc._, _etc._... Matters improved with the roast. It then appeared that he had lightly explored with Susan the two-thirds of Gaul omitted from her letter. He had called with her on Heywood Sampson, and fathomed Susan's allusion to the shy bluebird. Mr. Sampson, he assured us, was a fine old boy--strong for Susan too! He'd read a lot of her poems and things and was going to bring out the poems for her right away. But the bluebird in the bush had to do with a pet scheme of his for a weekly critical review of a different stamp from Hadow Bury's _Whim_. Solider, Jimmy imagined; safe and sane--the real thing! If Mr. Sampson should decide to launch it--he was still hesitating over the business outlook--Susan was to find a place on his staff. Mr. Sampson, Jimmy opined, had the right idea about things in general. He didn't like Susan's quick stuff in _Whim_; thought it would cheapen her if she kept at it too long. And Mr. Sampson didn't approve of Susan's remaining third of Gaul, either--her Greenwich Village friends. Not much wonder, Jimmy added; Susan had trotted him round to three or four studios and places, and they were a funny job lot. Too many foreigners among them for him; they talked too much; and they pawed. But some nice young people, too. Most of them were young--and not stuck up. Friendly. Sort of alive--interested in everything--except, maybe, being respectable. Their jokes, come to think of it, were all about being respectable--kidding everyday people who weren't up to the latest ideas. There was a lot of jabber one place about the "Oedipus Complex," for example, but he didn't connect at all. He had his own idea--surely, not of the latest--that a lot of the villagers might feel differently when they began to make good and started their bank accounts. But Susan was on to them, anyway, far more than they were on to her! She liked them, though--in spite of Mr. Sampson; didn't fall for their craziest ways or notions of course, but was keen about their happy-go-lucky side--their pep! Besides, they weren't all alike, naturally. Take the pick of them, the ones that did things instead of posing round and dressing the part, and Jimmy could see they might be there. At least, they were on their way--like Susan. This was all very well, so far as it went; but we had felt, Phil and I, a dumb undercurrent struggling to press upward into speech, and after dinner before the fire, we did our best to help Jimmy free its course. Gradually it became apparent; it rather trickled than gushed forth. Jimmy was bothered, more than bothered; there was something, perhaps there were several things, on his mind. We did not press him, using subtler methods, biding our time; and little by little Jimmy oozed toward the full revelation of an uneasy spirit. "Did you see Mr. Phar?" Phil asked. "No," said Jimmy, his forehead knotting darkly; "I guess it's a good thing I didn't too!" "Why?" "Well, that letter I had from Susan--the one I showed you, Mr. Hunt--mentioned some unpleasantness with Mr. Phar; and all Saturday afternoon while she was trotting me round, I could see she'd been worrying to herself a good deal." "Worrying?" "Yes. Whenever she thought I wasn't paying attention her face would go--sort of dead tired and sad--all used up. I can't describe it. And one or two remarks she dropped didn't sound as happy as she meant them to. Then, Sunday morning, she had to get some work done, so I took Miss Goucher to church. I'm supposed to be a Catholic, you know; but I guess I'm not much of anything. I'd just as soon go to one kind of church as another, if the music's good. Anyway, it was a nice morning and Miss Goucher thought I'd like to see the Fifth Avenue parade; so we walked up to some silk-stocking church above Thirty-fourth Street, where they have a dandy choir; and back again afterwards. I stayed at the Brevoort, down near them, you know; and Miss Goucher certainly is a peach. We got along fine. And I found out from her how Mr. Phar's been acting. He's a bad actor, all right. I'm just as glad I didn't run into him. I might have done something foolish." "What, for instance?" I suggested. "Well," muttered Jimmy, "there's some things I can't stand. I might have punched his head." Phil whistled softly. "He's not what I call a white man," explained Jimmy, dogged and slow, as if to justify his vision of assault. "He's a painted pup." "Come, Jimmy!" Phil commanded. "Out with it! Hunt and I know he's been annoying Susan, but that's all we know. I supposed he might have been pressing his attentions too publicly. If it's more than that----" There was an unusual sternness in Phil's eye. Jimmy appealed from it to mine, but in vain. "Look here, Mr. Hunt," he blurted, "Susan's all right, of course--and so's Miss Goucher! They've got their eyes open. And maybe it's not up to me to say anything. But if I was in your place, I'd feel like giving two or three people down there a piece of my mind! Susan wouldn't thank me for saying so, I guess; she's modern--she likes to be let alone. Why, she laughed at me more than once for getting sort of hot! And I know I've a bunch to learn yet. But all the same," he pounded on, "I do know this: It was a dirty trick of Mr. Phar's not to stand up for Susan!" "Not stand up for her! What do you mean?" Phil almost barked. "Jimmy means, Phil," I explained, "that some rather vague rumors began not along ago to spread through Maltby's crowd in regard to Susan--as to why she found it advisable to leave New Haven. Many of his friends know me, of course--or know Gertrude; know all about us, at any rate. It's not very remarkable, then, that Susan's appearance in New York--and so far as Maltby's May-Flies know, in some sense under his wing--has set tongues wagging. I was afraid of it; but I know Maltby's set well enough to know that to-day's rumor, unless it's pretty sharply spiced, is soon forgotten. To-morrow's is so much fresher, you see. The best thing for innocent victims to do is to keep very still. And then, I confess, it seemed to me unlikely that Maltby would permit anything of the sort to go too far." I saw that Jimmy was following my exposition with the most painful surprise. Phil grunted disgustedly as I ended. "I don't pretend to much knowledge of that world," he said deliberately, "but common sense tells me Maltby Phar might think it to his advantage to fan the flame instead of stamping it out. I may be unfair to him, but I'm even capable of supposing he touched it off in the first place." "No, Phil," I objected, "he wouldn't have done that. But you seem to be right about his failing to stamp out the sparks. That's what you meant by his not standing up for Susan, isn't it, Jimmy?" The boy's face was a study in unhappy perplexity. "I guess I'm like Professor Farmer!" he exclaimed. "I'm not on to people who act like that. But, Mr. Hunt, you're dead wrong--excuse me, sir!" "Go on, Jimmy." "Well, I mean--you spoke of vague rumors, didn't you? They're not vague. I guess Susan hasn't wanted to upset you. Miss Goucher told me all about it, and she wouldn't have done it, would she, if she hadn't hoped I'd bring it straight back to you? I guess she promised Susan not to tell you, so she told me. That's the only way I can figure it," concluded Jimmy. Phil was grim now. "Give us your facts, Jimmy--all of them." "Yes, sir. There's a Mr. Young; he writes things. He's clever. They're all clever down there. Well, Mr. Young's dead gone on Susan; but then, he's the kind that's always dead gone on somebody. It's women with him, you see, sir. Susan understands. It don't seem right she should, somehow; but--well, Susan's always been different from most girls. At least, I don't know many girls----" "Never mind that," prompted Phil. "No, sir. Talking about things like this always rattles me. I can't help it. They kind of stick in my throat. Well, Mr. Young don't want to marry anybody, but he's been making love to Susan--trying to. He had the wrong idea about her, you see; and Susan saw that, too--saw he thought she was playing him for a poor fish. So--her way--out she comes with it to him, flat. And he gets sore and comes back at her with what he'd heard." Jimmy's handkerchief was pulled out at this point; he mopped his brow. "It don't feel right even to speak of lies like this about--any decent girl," he mumbled. "No," Phil agreed, "it doesn't. But there's nothing for it now. Get it said and done with!" "Yes, sir. Mr. Young told Susan he wasn't a fool; he knew she'd been--what she shouldn't be--up here." "Hunt's mistress, you mean?" snapped Phil. "Yes, sir," whispered Jimmy, his face purple with agonized shame. "And then?" "Susan's a wonder," continued Jimmy, taking heart now his Rubicon lay behind him. "Most girls would have thrown a fit. But Susan seems to feel there's a lot to Mr. Young, in spite of all that rotten side of him. She saw right away he believed that about her, and so he couldn't be blamed much for getting sore. Anyway, he must have a white streak in him, for Susan talked to him--the way she can--and he soon realized he was in all wrong. But the _reason_ he was in wrong--that's what finished things between Susan and Mr. Phar! I guess you won't blame me for wanting to punch his head." "No," I threw in; "I shouldn't blame you for wanting to punch mine!" "Give us the reason, Jimmy," insisted Phil, his grave, Indianlike face stiffened to a mask. "Mr. Young didn't get that lie from Mr. Phar," admitted Jimmy, "but he did take it straight to him, when he first heard it, thinking he ought to know." "Good God!" I cried. "Do you mean to tell me Maltby confirmed it?" "Well," Jimmy hesitated, "it seems he didn't come right out and say, 'Yes, that's so!' But he didn't deny it either. Sort of shrugged his shoulders, I guess, and did things with his eyebrows. Whatever he did or didn't, Mr. Young got it fastened in his head then and there that Susan----" But this time Jimmy simply couldn't go on; the words stuck in his throat and stayed there. Phil's eyes met mine and held them, long. "Hunt," he said quietly at last, "it's a fortunate thing for Susan--for all of us--that I have long years of self-discipline behind me. Otherwise, I should go to New York to-morrow, find Maltby Phar, and shoot him." Jimmy's blue eyes flashed toward Phil a startled but admiring glance. "What do _you_ propose to do, Hunt?" demanded Phil. "Think," I replied; "think hard--think things through. Wednesday morning I shall leave for New York." II My prophecy was correct. Wednesday, at 12.03 A. M., I left for New York, in response to the shocking telegram from Lucette. I arrived at Gertrude's address, an august apartment house on upper Park Avenue, a little before half-past two, dismissed my taxi at the door, noting as I did so a second taxi standing at the curb just ahead of my own, and was admitted to the dignified public entrance-hall with surprising promptness, considering the hour, by the mature buttons on duty. Buttons was a man nearing sixty, at a guess, of markedly Irish traits, and he was unexpectedly wide-awake. When I gave him my name, and briefly stated the reason for my untimely arrival, his deep-set eyes glittered with excited curiosity, while he drew down deep parallels about his mouth in a grimacing attempt at deepest sympathy and profoundest respect. I questioned him. Several persons had gone up to Mrs. Hunt's apartment, he solemnly informed me, during the past two hours. He believed the police were in charge. "Police?" I exclaimed, incredulous. He believed so. He would say no more. "Take me up at once!" I snapped at him. "Surely there's a mistake. There can be no reason for police interference." His eyes glittered more shrewdly, the drawn parallels deepened yet further as he shot back the elevator door.... It was unmistakably a police officer who admitted me for the first and last time to Gertrude's apartment. On hearing my name he nodded, then closed the door firmly in the face of Buttons, who had lingered. "He's been warned not to tip off the press," said the police officer, "but it's just as well to be cautious." "The press? What do you mean?" I asked, still incredulous. "Is it a New York custom for police to enter a house of mourning?" I was aware as I spoke of repressed voices murmuring in an adjoining room. "I'm Sergeant Conlon," he answered, "in charge here till the coroner comes. He should make it by seven. If you're the poor lady's husband, you'll be needed. I'll have to detain you." As he ended, the murmur ended in the adjoining room, and Lucette walked out from it. She was wearing an evening gown--blue, I think--cut very low, and a twinkling ornament of some kind in her hair. She has fine shoulders and beautiful hair. But her face had gone haggard; she had been weeping; she looked ten years older than when I had last seen her. "What is it? What is it?" I demanded of her. "I know nothing but your telegram!" "Looks like murder," said Sergeant Conlon, dry and short. "I wouldn't talk much if I was you, not till the coroner gets here. I'm bound to make notes of what you say." For the merest hundredth of a second my scalp prickled, my flesh went cold; but sheer incredulity was still strong upon me; it beat back the horror. It was simply not real, all this. "At least," I managed, "give me facts--something!" Then unreality deepened to utter nightmare, passing all bounds of reason. Lucette spoke, and life turned for me to sheer prattling madness; to a gibbering grotesque! "_Susan_ did it!" she cried, her voice going high and strident, slipping from all control. "I know it! I know she did! I know it! Wasn't she with her? _Alone_ with her? Who else could have done it! Who else! _It's in her blood!_" Well, of course, when a woman you have played tag with in her girlhood goes mad before you, raves---- How could one act or answer? Then, too, she had vanished; or had I really seen her in the flesh at all? Really heard her voice, crying out.... Sergeant Conlon's voice came next; short, dry, businesslike. It compelled belief. "I've a question or two for you, Mr. Hunt. This way; steady!" I felt his hand under my elbow. Gertrude's apartment was evidently a very large one; I had vaguely the sensation of passing down a long hall with an ell in it, and so into a small, simply furnished, but tasteful room--the sitting-room for her maids, as I later decided. Sergeant Conlon shut the door and locked it. "That's not to keep you in," he said; "it's to keep others out. Sit down, Mr. Hunt. Smoke somethin'. Let's make ourselves comfortable." The click of the shot bolt in the lock had suddenly, I found, restored my power of coördination. It had been like the sharp handclap which brings home a hypnotized subject to reason and reality. I was now, in a moment, not merely myself again, but peculiarly alert and steady of nerve, and I gave matter-of-fact assent to Sergeant Conlon's suggestions. I lit a cigarette and took possession of the most comfortable chair. Conlon remained standing. He had refused my cigarettes, but he now lighted a long, roughly rolled cigar. "I get these from a fellow over on First Avenue," he explained affably. "He makes them up himself. They're not so bad." I attempted a smile and achieved a classic reaction. "They look--efficient," I said. "And now, sergeant, what has happened here? If I've seemed dazed for the past ten minutes, it's little wonder. I hurried down in response to a telegram saying my wife.... You know we've lived apart for years?" He grunted assent.... "Saying she had died suddenly. And I walk in, unprepared, on people who seem to me to be acting parts in a crook melodrama of the crudest type. Be kind enough to tell me what it's all about!" Sergeant Conlon's gray-blue eyes fixed me as I spoke. He was a big, thickset man, nearing middle age; the bruiser build, physically; but with a solidly intelligent-looking head and trustworthy eyes. "I'll do that, Mr. Hunt," he assented. "I got Mrs. Arthur to send you that telegram; but I'll say to you first-off, now you've come, I don't suspect you of bein' mixed up in this affair. When I shot that 'It looks like murder' at you, I did it deliberate. Well--that's neither here nor there; but I always go by the way things strike me. I have to." He twirled a light chair round to face me and seated himself, leaning a little forward, his great stubby hands propped on his square knees. "Here's the facts, then--what we know are facts: It seems, Mrs. Arthur--she's been visitin' Mrs. Hunt for two weeks past--she went to the opera to-night with a Mr. Phar; she says you know him well." I nodded. "Durin' the last act of the opera they were located by somebody in the office down there and called out to the 'phone--an accident to Mrs. Hunt--see?--important." Again I nodded. "Mrs. Arthur answered the 'phone, and Doctor Askew--he lives in this house, but he's Mrs. Hunt's reg'lar doctor--well, he was on the wire. He just told her to hurry back as fast as she could--and she and Mr. Phar hopped a taxi and beat it up here. Doctor Askew met them at the door, and a couple of scared maids. The doc's a good man--big rep--one of the best. He'd taken charge and sent on the quiet for us. I got here with a couple of my men soon after Mrs. Arthur----" "But----" "I know, _I_ know!" he stopped me off. "But I want you to get it all straight. Mrs. Hunt, sir, was killed--somehow--with a long, sharp-pointed brass paper-knife--a reg'lar weapon. I've examined it. And someone drove that thing--and it must'a' took some force, believe _me_!--right through her left eye up to the handle--a full inch of metal plumb into her brain!" I tried to believe him as he said this; as, seeing my blankness, he repeated it for me in other words. For the moment it was impossible. This sort of thing must have happened in the world, of course--at other times, to other people. But not now, not to Gertrude. Certainly not to Gertrude; a woman so aloof, so exquisite, self-sheltered, class-sheltered, not merely from ugliness, from the harsh and brutal, but from everything in life even verging toward vulgarity, coarse passion, the unrestrained.... "That's the way she was killed, Mr. Hunt--no mistake. Now--who did it--and why? That's the point." At my elbow was a table with a reading-lamp on it, a desk-set, a work-basket, belonging, I suppose, to one of the maids, and some magazines. One magazine lay just before me--_The Reel World_--a by-product of the great moving-picture industry. I had been staring--unseeingly, at first--at a flamboyant advertisement on its cover that clamored for my attention, until now, with Conlon's question, it momentarily gained it. The release of a magnificent Superfeature was announced--in no quavering terms. "The Sins of the Fathers" it shrieked at me! "All the thrilling human suspense"; "virile, compelling"; "brimming over with the kind of action and adventure your audiences crave"; "it delivers the wallop!" Instantly, with a new force, Lucette's outcry swept back upon me. "Susan did it! Wasn't she with her? Alone with her? _It's in her blood!_" And at once every faculty of my spirit leaped, with an almost supernatural acuteness, to the defense of the one being on earth I wholly loved. All sense of unreality vanished. Now for it--since it must be so! Susan and I, if need be, against the world! "Go on, sergeant. What's your theory?" "Never mind my theory! I'd like to get _yours_ first--when I've given you all I know." "All right, then! But be quick about it!" "Easy, Mr. Hunt! It's not as simple as all that. Well, here it is: Somewhere round ten o'clock, a Miss Blake--a magazine-writer livin' on West 10th Street--your ward, I understand----" "Yes." "Well, she calls here, alone, and asks for Mrs. Arthur. Mrs. Hunt's personal maid--English; she's no chicken either--she lets her in and says Mrs. Arthur isn't here--see--and didn't the door boy tell her so? Yes, says Miss Blake, but she'll wait for her anyway. The maid--name of Iffley--says she thought that was queer, so she put it to Miss Blake that maybe she'd better ask Mrs. Hunt. Oh, says Miss Blake, I thought she was out, too. But it seems Mrs. Hunt was in her private sittin' room; she'd had a slight bilious attack, and she'd got her corsets off and somethin' loose on, the way women do, and was all set for a good read. So the maid didn't think she could see Miss Blake, but anyhow she took in her card--and Mrs. Hunt decided to see her. That maid Iffley's an intelligent woman; she's all broke up, but she ain't hysterical like the cook--who didn't see nothin' anyway. The parlor maid was havin' her night off, but she's back now, too, and I've got 'em all safe where they can't talk to outsiders, yet. I don't want this thing in the papers to-morrow, not if I can help it; I want to keep it dark till I know better where I'm gettin' off." "Right!" I approved. "What's the maid's story?" "Well, I've questioned her pretty close, and I think it's to be relied on. It hits me that way. Mrs. Hunt, she says, when she took in Miss Blake's card, was lyin' on her couch in a long trailin' thing--what ladies call a negligee." "Yes?" "And she was cuttin' the pages of some new book with that paper-knife I spoke of." "Yes?" "And her dog, a runty little French bull, was sleepin' on the rug beside the couch." "What does that matter?" "More'n you'd think! He's got a broken leg--provin' some kind of a struggle must'a'----" "I see. Go on!" "Well, Mrs. Hunt, the maid says, looked at Miss Blake's card a minute and didn't say anythin' special, but seemed kind of puzzled. Her only words was, 'Yes, I ought to see her.' So the maid goes for Miss Blake and shows her to the door, which she'd left ajar, and taps on it for her, and Mrs. Hunt calls to come in. So Miss Blake goes in and shuts the door after her, and the maid comes back to this room we're in now--it's round the corner of the hall from Mrs. Hunt's room--see? But she don't much more than get here--just to the door--when she hears the dog give a screech and then go on cryin' like as if he'd been hurt. The cook was in here, too, and she claims she heard a kind of jarrin' sound, like somethin' heavy fallin'; but Iffley--that's the maid, they call her Iffley--says all she noticed was the dog. Anyway she listened a second, then she started for Mrs. Hunt's room--and the cook, bein' nervous, locked herself in here and sat with her eyes tight shut and her fingers in her ears. Fact. She says she can't bear nothin' disagreeable. Too bad about her, ain't it!" "And then?" I protested, crossly. "Well, Mr. Hunt, when the Iffley woman turned the hall corner--the door of your poor wife's room opens, and Miss Blake walks out. She had the paper-knife in her right hand, and the knife and her hand was all bloody; her left hand was bloody too; and we've found blood on her clothes since. There was a queer, vacant look about her--that's what the maid says. She didn't seem to see anythin'. Naturally, the maid was scared stiff--but she got one look in at the door anyway--that was enough for her. She was too scared even to yell, she says. Paralyzed--she just flopped back against the wall half faintin'. "And then she noticed somethin' that kind of brought her to again! Mr. Hunt, that young woman, Miss Blake--she'd gone quiet as you please and curled herself down on a rug in the hallway--that bloody knife in her hand--and she was either dead or fast asleep! And then the doorbell rang, and the Iffley woman says she don't know how she got past that prostrate figger on the rug--her very words, Mr. Hunt--that prostrate figger on the rug--but she did, somehow; got to the door. And when she opened it, there was Doctor Askew and the elevator man. And then she passed out. And I must say I don't much blame her, considerin'." "Where's Miss Blake now?" I sharply demanded. "She's still fast asleep, Mr. Hunt--to call it that. The doc says it's--somethin' or other--due to shock. Same as a trance." I started up. "Where is Doctor Askew? I must see him at once!" "We've laid Miss Blake on the bed in Mrs. Arthur's room. He's observin' her." "Take me there." "I'll do that, Mr. Hunt. But I'll ask you a question first--straight. Is there any doubt in your mind that that young lady--your ward--killed Mrs. Hunt?" I met his gray-blue glance directly, pausing a moment before I spoke. "Sergeant Conlon," I replied, while a meteor-shower of speculation shot through me with the rapidity of light waves, "there is no doubt whatever in my mind: Miss Blake could not--and so did not--kill my wife." "Who did, then?" "Wait! Let me first ask you a question, sergeant: Who sent for Doctor Askew?" "That's the queerest part of it; Miss Blake did." "Ah! _How?_" "There's a 'phone in Mrs. Hunt's sittin' room. Miss Blake called the house operator, gave her name and location, and said not to waste a moment--to send up a doctor double-quick!" "Is that _all_ she said?" "No. The operator tells me she said Mrs. Hunt had had a terrible accident and was dyin'." "You're certain she said 'accident'?" "The girl who was at the switchboard--name of Joyce--she's sure of it." I smiled, grimly enough. "Then that is exactly what occurred, sergeant--a terrible accident; hideous. Your question is answered. Nobody killed Mrs. Hunt--unless you are so thoughtless or blasphemous as to call it an act of God!" "Oh, come on now!" he objected, shaking his head, but not, I felt, with entire conviction. "No," he continued stubbornly, "I been turnin' that over too. But there's no way an accident like that could 'a' happened. It's not possible!" "Fortunately," I insisted, "nothing else is possible! Are you asking me to believe that a young, sensitive girl, with an extraordinary imaginative sympathy for others--a girl of brains and character, as all her friends have reason to know--asking me to believe that she walked coolly into my wife's room this evening, rushed savagely upon her, wrested a paper knife from her hand, and then found the sheer brute strength of will and arm to thrust it through her eye deep into her brain? Are you further asking me to believe that having done this frightful thing she kept her wits about her, telephoned at once for a doctor--being careful to call her crime an accident--and so passed at once into a trance of some kind and walked from the room with the bloody knife in her hand? What possible motive could be strong enough to drive such a girl to such a deed?" "Jealousy," said Sergeant Conlon. "She wanted _you_--and your wife stood in her way. That's what I get from Mrs. Arthur." "I see. But the three or four persons who know Miss Blake and me best will tell you how absurd that is, and you'll find their reasons for thinking so are very convincing. Is Mr. Phar still about?" "He is. I've detained him." "What does he think of Mrs. Arthur's nonsensical theory?" "He's got a theory of his own," said Conlon; "and it happens to be the same as mine." "Well?" "Mr. Phar says Miss Blake's own father went mad--all of a sudden; cut some fancy woman's throat, and his own after! He thinks history's repeated itself, that's all. So do I. Only a crazy woman could 'a' done this--just this way. A strong man in his senses couldn't 'a' drove that paper-knife home like that! But when a person goes mad, sir, all rules are off. I seen too many cases. Things happen you can't account for. Take the matter of that dog now--his broken leg, eh? What are you to make of that? And take this queer state she's in. There's no doubt in my mind, Mr. Hunt--the poor girl's gone crazy, somehow. You nor me can't tell how nor why. But it's back of all this--that's sure." Throughout all this coarse nightmare, this insane break in Nature, as I have called it and must always regard it, let me at least be honest. As Conlon spoke, for the tiniest fraction of a second a desolating fear darted through me, searing every nerve with white-hot pain. Was it true? Might it not conceivably be true? But this single lightning-thrust of doubt passed as it came. No, not as it came, for it blotted all clearness, all power of voluntary thought from my mind; but it left behind it a singular intensity of vision. Even as the lightning-pang vanished, and while time yet stood still, a moving picture that amounted to hallucination began to play itself out before me. It was like _... that last Wild pageant of the accumulated past That clangs and flashes for a drowning man._ I saw Susan shutting the door of a delicately panelled Georgian room, and every detail of this room--a room I had never entered in the flesh--was distinct to me. Given time, I could have inventoried its every object. I saw Gertrude lying on--not a couch, as Conlon had called it--on a _chaise-longue_, a book with a vivid green cover in her left hand, a bronze paper knife with a thin, pointed blade in her right. She was holding it with the knuckles of her hand upward, her thumb along the handle, and the point of the blade turned to her left, across and a little in toward her body. She was wearing a very lovely _négligé_, a true creation, all in filmy tones of old gold. On a low-set tip-table at her elbow stood a reading-lamp, and a small coal-black French bull lay asleep on a superb Chinese rug--lay close in by the _chaise-longue_, just where a dropped hand might caress him. A light silky-looking coverlet of a peculiar dull blue, harmonizing with certain tones of the rug, was thrown across Gertrude's feet. As Susan shut the door, the little bull pricked up his bat-ears and started to uncurl, but Gertrude must have spoken to him, for he settled back again--not, however, to sleep. It was all a picture; I heard no sounds. Then I saw Gertrude put down her book on the table and swing her feet from the _chaise-longue_, meaning to rise and greet Susan. But, as she attempted to stand up, the light coverlet entangled her feet and tripped her; she lost her balance, tried with a violent, awkward lurch of her whole body to recover herself, and stamped rather than stepped full on the dog's forepaws. He writhed, springing up between her feet--the whole grotesque catastrophe was, in effect, a single, fatal gesture!--and Gertrude, throwing her hands instinctively before her face, fell heavily forward, the length of her body, prone. I saw Susan rush toward her---- And the psychic reel flickered out, blanked.... I needed to see no more. "Don't you agree with me, Mr. Hunt?" Conlon was asking. "No," I said bluntly. "No madwoman would have summoned a doctor. Miss Blake called it a terrible accident. It was. Her present state is due to the horror of it. When she wakes, it will all be explained. Now take me to her." Conlon's gray-blue glance fixed me once more. "All right," he grunted, "I've no objections. But I'd 'a' thought your first wish would 'a' been to see your wife." "No," I replied. "Mrs. Hunt separated from me years ago, for reasons of her own. I bore her no ill will; in a sense, I respected her, admired her. Understand me, Sergeant Conlon. There was nothing vulgar in her life, and her death in this stupid way--oh, it's indecent, damnable! A cheap outrage! I could do nothing for her living, and can do nothing now. But I prefer to remember her as she was. _She_ would prefer it, too." "Come on, then," said Conlon; pretty gruffly, I thought. He unlocked the door. III It was a singular thing, but so convincing had my vision been to me that I felt no immediate desire to verify the details of its setting by an examination of Gertrude's boudoir. It had come to me bearing its own credentials, its own satisfying accent of truth. One question did, however, fasten upon me, as I followed Conlon's bulky form, down the hall to Lucette's bedroom. Whence had this vision, this psychic reel come to me? What was its source? How could the mere fact of it--clearing, as it did, at least, all perplexities from my own mind--have occurred? For the moment I could find no answer; the mystery had happened, had worked, but remained a mystery. Like most men in this modern world I had taken a vague, mild interest in psychical research, reading more or less casually, and with customary suspension of judgment, anything of the sort that came in my way. I had a bowing acquaintance with its rapidly growing literature; little more; and until now I had had no striking psychical experiences of my own, and had never, as it happened, attended a séance of any kind, either popular or scientific. Nevertheless, I could--to put it so--speak that language. I was familiar with the described phenomena, in a general way, and with the conflicting theories of its leading investigators; but I had--honestly speaking--no pet theories of my own, though always impatient of spiritistic explanations, and rather inclined to doubt, too, the persistent claim that thought transference had been incontrovertibly established. On the whole, I suppose I was inclined to favor common-sense mechanistic explanations of such phenomena, and to regard all others with alert suspicion or wearily amused contempt. Now at last, in my life's most urgent crisis, I had had news from nowhere; now, furthermore, the being I loved and would protect, _must_ protect, had been thrown by psychic shock into that grim borderland, the Abnormal: that land of lost voices, of the fringe of consciousness, of dissociated personalities, of morbid obsession, and wild symbolic dreams. Following on Conlon's heels, then, I entered a softly illumined room--a restrained _Louis Seize_ room--a true Gertrude room, with its cool French-gray panelled walls; but entered there as into sinister darkness, as if groping for light. The comfortably accustomed, the predictable, I felt, lay all behind me; I must step warily henceforth among shifting shadows and phosphoric blurs. The issues were too terrifying, too vast, for even one little false move; Susan's future, the very health of her soul, might depend now upon the blundering clumsiness or the instinctive tact with which I attempted to pick and choose my way. It was with a secret shuddering of flesh and spirit that I entered that discreet, faultless room. Susan was lying on the low single French bed, a coverlet drawn over her; they had removed her trim tailored hat, the jacket of her dark suit, and her walking-boots, leaving them on the couch by the silk-curtained windows, where they had perhaps first placed her. She had not dressed for the evening before coming up to Gertrude's; it was evidently to have been a businesslike call. Her black weblike hair--smoky, I always called it, to tease her; it never fell lank or separated into strings--had been disordered, and a floating weft of it had drifted across her forehead and hung there. Her face was moon-white, her lips pale, the lines of cheek and chin had sharpened, her eyes were closed. It was very like death. My throat tightened and ached.... Doctor Askew stood across the bed from us, looking down at her. "Here's Mr. Hunt," said Conlon, without further introduction. "He wants to see you." Then he stepped back to the door and shut it, remaining over by it, at some distance from the bed. His silence was expressive. "Now show me!" it seemed to say. "This may be a big case for me and it may not. If not, I'm satisfied; I'm ready for anything. Go on, show me!" Doctor Askew was not, as I had expected to find him, old; nor even middle-aged; an expectation caught, I presume, from Conlon's laconic "One of the best--a big rep"; he was, I now estimated, a year or so younger than I. I had never heard of him and knew nothing about him, but I liked him at once when he glanced humorously up at Conlon's "He wants to see you," nodded to me, and said: "I've been hoping you'd come soon, Mr. Hunt. I've a mind to try something here--if you've no objection to an experiment?" He was a short man, not fat, but thickset like Conlon; only, with a higher-strung vitality, carrying with it a sense of intellectual eagerness and edge. He had a sandy, freckled complexion, bronzy, crisp-looking hair with reddish gleams in it, and an unmistakably red, aggressive mustache, close-clipped but untamed. Green-blue eyes. A man, I decided, of many intensities; a willful man; but thoughtful, too, and seldom unkind. "Why did you wait for my permission?" I asked. "I shouldn't have--much longer," he replied, his eyes returning to Susan's unchanging face. "But I've read one or two of your essays, so I know something of the feel of your mind. It occurred to me you might be useful. And besides, I badly need some information about this"--he paused briefly--"this very lovely child." Again he paused a moment, adding: "This is a singular case, Mr. Hunt--and likely to prove more singular as we see it through. I acted too impulsively in sending for Conlon; I apologize. It's not a police matter, as I at first supposed. However, I hope there's no harm done. Conlon is holding his horses and trying to be discreet. Aren't you, Conlon?" "What's the idea?" muttered Conlon, from the doorway; Conlon was not used to being treated thus, _de haut en bas_. "Even if that poor little girl's crazy, we'll have to swear out a warrant for her. It's a police matter all right." "I think _not_," said Doctor Askew, dismissing Conlon from the conversation. "Have you ever," he then asked me, "seen Miss Blake like this before?" I was about to say "No!" with emphasis, when a sudden memory returned to me--the memory of a queer, crumpled little figure lying on the concrete incline of the Eureka Garage; curled up there, like an unearthed cutworm, round a shining dinner-pail. "Yes," I replied instead; "once--I think." "You think?" I sketched the occasion for him and explained all its implications as clearly and briefly as I could; and while I talked thus across her bed Susan's eyes did not open; she did not stir. Doctor Askew heard me out, as I felt, intently, but kept his eye meanwhile--except for a keen glance or two in my direction--on Susan's face. "All right," he said, when I had concluded; "that throws more or less light. There's nothing to worry us, at least, in Miss Blake's condition. Under psychical trauma--shock--she has a tendency to pass into a trance state--amounting practically to one of the deeper stages of hypnosis. She'll come out of it sooner or later--simply wake up--if we leave her alone. Perhaps, after all, that's the wisest thing for us to do." On this conclusion he walked away from the bed, as if it ended the matter, and lit a cigarette. "Well, Conlon," he grinned, "we're making a night of it, eh? Come, let's all sit down and talk things over." He seated himself on the end of the couch as he spoke, lounging back on one elbow and crossing his knees. "I ought to tell you, Mr. Hunt," he added, "that nervous disorders are my specialty; more than that, indeed--my life! I studied under Janet in Paris, and later put in a couple of years as assistant physician in the Clinic of Psychiatry, Zurich. Did some work, too, at Vienna--with Stekel and Freud. So I needn't say a problem of this kind is simply meat and drink to me. I wouldn't have missed it for anything in the world!" I was a little chilled by his words, by an attitude that seemed to me cold-bloodedly professional; nevertheless, I joined him, drawing up a chair, and Conlon gradually worked his way toward us, though he remained standing. "What I want to know, doc," demanded Conlon, "is why you've changed your mind?" "I haven't," Doctor Askew responded. "I can't have, because I haven't yet formed an opinion. I'm just beginning to--and even that may take me some time." He turned to me. "What's your theory, Mr. Hunt?" I was prepared for this question; my mind had been busying itself foresightedly with every possible turn our conversation was likely to take. All my faculties were sharpened by strain, by my pressing sense that Susan's future, for good or evil, might somehow be linked to my lightest word. I had determined, then, in advance, not to speak in Conlon's presence of my inexplicable vision, not to mention it at all to anyone unless some unexpected turn of the wheel might make it seem expedient. I could use it to Susan's advantage, I believed, more effectively by indirection; I endeavored to do so now. "My theory?" I queried. "As to how Mrs. Hunt met her death. However painful, we've got to face that out, sooner or later." "Naturally. But I have no theory," I replied; "I have an unshakable conviction." "Ah! Which is----" "That the whole thing was accidental, of course; just as Miss Blake affirmed it to be over the telephone." "You believe that _because_ she affirmed it?" "Exactly." "That won't go down with the coroner," struck in Conlon. "How could it? I'd like to think it, well enough--but it don't with me!" "Wait, Conlon!" suggested Doctor Askew, sharply. "I'll conduct this inquiry just now, if you don't mind--and if Mr. Hunt will be good enough to answer." "Why not?" I replied. "Thank you. Conlon's point is a good one, all the same. Have you been able to form any reasonable notion of how such an accident could have occurred?" "Yes." "The hell you have!" exclaimed Conlon excitedly, not meaning, I think, to be sarcastic. "Why, you haven't even been in there"--he referred to Gertrude's boudoir--"or seen the body!" "No," I responded, "but you and Doctor Askew have, so you can easily put me right. Extraordinary as the whole thing is--the one deadly chance in perhaps a million--there's nothing impossible about it. Merely from the facts you've given me, Sergeant Conlon, I can reconstruct the whole scene--come pretty near it, at any rate. But the strength of my conviction is based on other grounds--don't lose sight of that! Miss Blake didn't kill Mrs. Hunt; she's incapable of such an action; and if she didn't, no one else did. An accident is the only alternative." "Well, then," grunted Conlon, "tell us about it! It'll take some tellin'!" "Hold on!" exclaimed Doctor Askew before I could begin. "Sorry, Mr. Hunt--but you remember, perhaps--when you first came in--I had half a mind to try something--an experiment?" I nodded. "Well, I've made up my mind. We'll try it right now, before it's too late. If it succeeds, it may yield us a few facts to go on. Your suppositions can come afterward." I felt, as he spoke, that something behind his words belied their rudeness, that their rudeness was rather for Conlon's benefit than for mine. He got up briskly and crossed to the bedside. There after a moment he turned and motioned us both to join him. As we did so, tiptoeing instinctively: "Yes--this is fortunate," he said; "she's at it again. Look." Susan still lay as I had first seen her, with shut eyes, her arms extended outside the coverlet; but she was no longer entirely motionless. Her left arm lay relaxed, the palm of her left hand upward. I had often seen her hands lie inertly thus in her lap, the palms upward, in those moments of silent withdrawal which I have more than once described. But now her right hand was turned downward, the fingers slightly contracted, as if they held a pen, and the hand was creeping slowly on the coverlet from left to right; it would creep slowly in this way for perhaps eight inches, then draw quickly back to its point of starting and repeat the manoeuvre. It was uncanny, this patient repetition--over and over--of a single restricted movement. "My God," came from Conlon in a husky whisper, "is she dyin'--or what?" "Far from it!" said Doctor Askew, his abrupt, crisp speech in almost ludicrous contrast to Conlon's sudden awe. "Get me some paper from that desk over there, Conlon. A pad, if possible." He drew out a pencil from his pocket as he spoke. Conlon hesitated an instant, then obeyed, tiptoeing ponderously, with creaking boots, over to a daintily appointed writing-table, and returning with a block of linen paper. Doctor Askew, meanwhile, holding the pencil between his teeth, had lifted Susan's unresisting shoulders--too roughly, I thought--from the bed. "Stick that other pillow under her," he ordered me, sharply enough in spite of the impeding pencil. "A little farther down--so!" Susan now lay, no less limply than before, with her trunk, shoulders, and head somewhat raised. Her right hand had ceased its slow, patient movement. "What's the idea?" Conlon was muttering. "What's the idea, doc?" Whatever it was, it was evident that Conlon didn't like it. "Got the pad?" demanded Doctor Askew. "Oh, good! Here!" He almost snatched the pad from Conlon and tore the blotter cover from it; then he slipped it beneath Susan's right palm and finally thrust his pencil between her curved fingers, its point resting on the linen block, which he steadied by holding one corner between finger and thumb. For a moment the hand remained quiet; then it began to write. I say "it" advisedly; no least trace of consciousness or purposed control could be detected in Susan's impassive face or heavily relaxed body. _Susan_ was not writing; her waking will had no part in this strange automatism; so much, at least, was plain to me and even to Conlon. "Mother of God," came his throaty whisper again, "it's not _her_ that's doin' it. Who's pushin' that hand?" "It's not _sperits_, Conlon," said Doctor Askew ironically; "you can take my say-so for that." With the words he withdrew the scribbled top sheet from the pad, glanced at it, and handed it to me. The hand journeyed on, covering a second sheet as I read. "That doesn't help us much, does it?" was Doctor Askew's comment, when I had devoured the first sheet. "No," I replied; "not directly. But I'll keep this if you don't mind." I folded the sheet and slipped it into my pocket. Doctor Askew removed the second sheet. "Same sort of stuff," he grunted, passing it over to me. "It needs direction." And he began addressing--not _Susan_, to Conlon's amazement--the _hand_! "What happened in Mrs. Hunt's room to-night?" he demanded firmly of the hand. "Tell us exactly what happened in Mrs. Hunt's room to-night! It's important. What happened in Mrs. Hunt's room to-night?" Always addressing the hand, his full attention fixed upon it as it moved, he repeated this burden over and over. "We must know exactly what happened in Mrs. Hunt's room to-night! Tell us what happened in Mrs. Hunt's room to-night.... What happened in Mrs. Hunt's room to-night?" Conlon and I both noted that Susan's breathing, hitherto barely to be detected, gradually grew more labored while Doctor Askew insisted upon and pressed home his monotonous refrain. He had so placed himself now that he could follow the slowly pencilled words. More and more deliberately the hand moved; then it paused.... "What happened in Mrs. Hunt's room to-night?" chanted Doctor Askew. "This ain't right," muttered Conlon. "It's worse'n the third degree. I don't like it." He creaked uneasily away. The hand moved again, hesitatingly, briefly. "Ah," chanted Doctor Askew--always to the hand--"it was an accident, was it? How did it happen? Tell us exactly how it happened--exactly how it happened. _We must know_.... How did the accident happen in Mrs. Hunt's room to-night?" Again the hand moved, more steadily this time, and seemingly in response to his questions. Doctor Askew glanced up at me with an encouraging smile. "We'll get it now--all of it. Don't worry. The hand's responding to control." Though sufficiently astonished and disturbed by this performance, I was not, like Conlon, wholly at sea. Sober accounts of automatic writing could be found in all modern psychologies; I had read some of these accounts--given with all the dry detachment of clinical data. They had interested me, not thrilled me. No supernatural power was involved. It was merely the comparative rarity of such phenomena in the ordinary normal course of experience that made them seem awe-inspiring. And yet, the _hand_ there, solely animate, patiently writing in entire independence of a consciously directing will----! My spine, too, like Conlon's, registered an authentic shiver of protest and atavistic fear. But, throughout, I kept my tautened wits about me, busily working; and they drove me now on a sudden inspiration to the writing-table, where I seized pen and paper and wrote down with the most collected celerity a condensed account of--for so I phrased it--"what must, from the established facts, be supposed to have taken place in Mrs. Hunt's boudoir, just after Miss Blake had entered it." I put this account deliberately as my theory of the matter, as the one solution of the problem consistent with the given facts and the known characters involved; and I had barely concluded when I was startled to my feet by Doctor Askew's voice--raised cheerily above its monotonous murmur of questions to the hand--calling my name. "What are you up to, Mr. Hunt? My little experiment's over. It's a complete success." He was walking toward me with a handful of loose scribbled sheets from the linen block. "How is she now?" I inquired anxiously, as if she had just been subjected to a dangerous operation. "All right. Deep under. I shan't try to pull her out yet. Much better for her to come out of it naturally herself. I suggest we darken the room and leave her." "That suits _me_!" I just caught from Conlon, over by the door. "She'll be quite safe alone?" "Absolutely. I want to read this thing to Conlon and Mrs. Arthur and Mr. Phar, before the coroner gets here. I rather think they'll find it convincing." "Good," I responded. "But, first of all, let me read them this. I've just jotted down my analysis of the whole situation. It's a piece of cold constructive reasoning from the admitted data, and I shall be greatly surprised if it doesn't on the whole agree with what you've been able to obtain." Doctor Askew stared at me a moment curiously. "And if it doesn't agree?" he asked. "If it don't," exclaimed Conlon, with obvious relief, "it may help us, all the same! This thing can't be settled by _that_ kind of stuff, doc." He gave a would-be contemptuous nod toward Doctor Askew's handful of scrawled pages. "That's no evidence--whatever it says. Where does it come from? Who's givin' it? It can't be sworn to on the Book, that's certain--eh? Let's get outa here and begin to talk sense!" Conlon opened the door eagerly, and creaked off through the hall. "Go with him," ordered Doctor Askew. "I'll put out the lights." Then he touched my elbow and gave me a slight nod. "I see your point of course. But I hope to God you've hit somewhere near it?" "Doctor," I replied, "this account of mine is exact. I'll tell you later how I know that." "Ah!" he grunted, with a green-blue flash of eyes. "What a lucky devil I am!... But I've felt all along this would prove a rewarding case." IV Up to this point I have been necessarily thus detailed, but I am eager now to win past the cruder melodrama of this insanely disordered night. I am eager to win back from all these damnable and distracting things to Susan. This book is hers, not mine; it is certainly not Sergeant Conlon's or Doctor Askew's. So you will forgive me, and understand, if I present little more than a summary of the immediately following hours. We found Maltby and Lucette in the drawing-room, worn out with their night-long vigil; Maltby, somnolent and savage; Lucette still keyed high, suffering from exasperated nerves which--perhaps for the first time in her life--she could not control. They were seated as far apart as the room permitted, having long since talked themselves out, and were engaged, I think, in tacitly hating one another. The situation was almost impossible; yet I knew I must dominate it somehow, and begin by dominating myself--and in the end, with Conlon's and Doctor Askew's help, I succeeded. Conlon, I confess, proved to be an unexpected ally all through. "Now, Mrs. Arthur, and you, Mr. Phar," he stated at once as we entered the drawing-room together, "I've brought Mr. Hunt in here to read you his guess at what happened last evenin'. Doctor Askew'll be with us in a minute, and _he's_ got somethin' to lay before you.... No; Miss Blake's not come round yet. The doc'll explain about her. But we'll hear from Mr. Hunt first, see? I've examined him and I'm satisfied he's straight. You've known him long enough to form your own opinions, but that's mine. Oh, here's the doc! Go on, Mr. Hunt." With this lead, I was at length able to persuade Lucette and Maltby to listen, sullenly enough, to my written analysis. My feeling toward them both, though better concealed, was quite as hostile as theirs toward me, but I saw that I caught their reluctant attention and that Maltby was somewhat impressed by what I had written, and by my interjected amplifications of the more salient points. I had been careful to introduce no facts not given me by Sergeant Conlon, and when I had finished, ignoring Lucette's instant murmur of impatience and incredulity, I turned to him and said: "Sergeant, is there anything known to you and not known to me--any one detail discovered during your examination of Mrs. Hunt's boudoir, say--which makes my deductions impossible or absurd?" He reflected a moment, then acknowledged: "Well, no, Mr. Hunt. Things might 'a' happened like that; maybe they did. But just sayin' so don't prove they did!" "May I ask you a few questions?" "Sure." "Had Mrs. Hunt's body been moved when you arrived? I mean, from the very spot where it fell?" "It had and it hadn't. The doc here found her lyin' face down on the floor, right in front of the couch. He had to roll her over on her back to examine her. That's all. The body's there now like that, covered with a sheet. Nothin' else has been disturbed." "The body was lying face down, you say?" "Yes," struck in Doctor Askew; "it was." "At full length?" "Yes." "Isn't that rather surprising?" "Unquestionably." "How do you account for the position?" "There's only one possible explanation," replied Doctor Askew, as if giving expert testimony from a witness box; "a sudden and complete loss of balance, pitching the body sharply forward, accompanied by such a binding of the legs and feet as to prevent any instinctive movement toward recovery." "Thank you. Were there any indications of such binding?" "Yes. Mrs. Hunt's trailing draperies had somehow wound themselves tightly about her legs below the knee, and I judge her feet were further impeded by a sort of coverlet which I found touselled up on the rug beneath them." "Grant all that!" growled Maltby. "It points to just the opposite of what we'd all like to think is true. If Mrs. Hunt had risen slowly to greet a caller in the usual way--well, she wouldn't have gotten herself tangled up. She was the last woman in the world to do anything awkwardly. But if she leaped to her feet in terror--what? To defend herself--or try to escape? Don't you see?" "Of course we see!" cried Lucette. "It proves everything!" "Hardly," I replied. "Try to imagine the scene, Maltby, as you seem to believe it occurred. I won't speak of the major impossibility--that Susan, a girl you've known and have asked to be your wife, could under any circumstances be the author of such a crime! We'll pass that. Simply try to picture the crime itself. Susan, showing no traces of unnatural excitement, is conducted to my wife's boudoir. She enters, shuts the door, turns, then rushes at her with so hideous an effect of insane fury that Gertrude springs up, terrified. Susan--more slightly built than Gertrude, remember!--grapples with her, tears a paper knife from her hand, and plunges it deep into her eye, penetrating the brain. Suppose, if you will, that madness lent her this force. But, obviously, for the point of the knife to enter the eye in that way, Gertrude must have been fronting Susan, her chin well raised. Obviously, the force of such a blow would have thrown her head, her whole body, backward, not forward; and if her feet were bound, as Doctor Askew says they were, she must have fallen backward or to one side, certainly not forward at full length, on her face." "You've said somethin' this time, Mr. Hunt!" exclaimed Conlon. "There's a lot to that!" Maltby was visibly impressed; but not Lucette. "As if," she said, "Susan wouldn't have arranged the body--afterward--in any way she thought to her advantage!" "There wasn't time!" Doctor Askew objected impatiently. "And," he went on, "it happens that all this is futile! I have proof here, corroborating Mr. Hunt's remarkably acute theories in the most positive way." But before reading what Susan's hand had written, he turned to Sergeant Conlon, requesting his close attention, and then gave him briefly a popular lecture on the nature of automatic writing as understood by a tough-minded neurologist with no faith in the supernatural. It was really a masterly performance in its way, for he avoided the jargon of science and cut down to essentials. "Conlon," he said, "you've often forgotten something, tried to recall it, and finally given it up. We all have. And then some day, when you least expected it and were thinking of something else, that forgotten something has popped into your mind again--eh? All right. Where was it in the meantime, when you couldn't put your finger on it? Since it eventually came back, it must have been preserved somewhere. That's plain enough, isn't it? But when you say something you've forgotten 'pops into your mind' again, you're wrong. It's never been out of your mind. What too many of us still don't know is that a man's mind has two parts to it. One part, much the smallest, is consciousness--the part we're using now, the part we're always aware of. The other part is a big dark storehouse, where pretty much everything we've forgotten is kept. We're not aware of the storehouse or the things kept in it, so the ordinary man doesn't know anything about it. You're not aware of your spleen, and wouldn't know you had one if doctors hadn't cut up a lot of people and found spleens in every one of them. You believe you've got a spleen because we doctors tell you so. Well, I'm telling you now that your mind has a big storehouse, where most of the things you've forgotten are preserved. We mind-doctors call it your Unconscious Mind. All clear so far?... Good. "Now then--when a man's hypnotized, it means his conscious mind has been put to sleep, practically, and his unconscious mind has, in a sense, waked up. When a man's hypnotized we can fish all sorts of queer things from his big storehouse, his unconscious mind; things he didn't know were there, things he'd forgotten.... And it's the same with what we call trances. A man in a trance is a man whose conscious mind is asleep and whose unconscious mind is awake. "That's exactly Miss Blake's condition now. The shock of what she saw last evening threw her into a trance; she doesn't know what's going on round her--but her unconscious mind has a record, a sort of phonograph-record of more or less everything that's ever happened to her, and if she speaks or writes in this trance state she'd simply play one of these stored-up records for us; play it just like a phonograph, automatically. Her will power's out of commission, you see; in this state she's nothing more nor less than a highly complicated instrument. And the record she plays may be of no interest to anybody; some long-forgotten incident or experience of childhood, for example. On the other hand, if we can get the right record going--eh?--we've every chance of finding out exactly what we want to know!" He paused, fixing his already attentive pupil with his peculiarly vivid green-blue glance. "Now, Conlon, _get_ this--it's important! I must ask you to believe one other thing about the Unconscious Mind--simply take it on my say-so, as a proved fact: When the conscious mind is temporarily out of business--as under hypnotism, or in trance--the unconscious mind, like the sensitive instrument it is, will often obey or respond to outside suggestions. I can't go into all this, of course. But what I ask you to believe about Miss Blake is this: In her present state of trance, at my suggestion, _she has played the right record for us_! She has automatically written down for us an account of her experiences last evening. And I assure you this account, obtained in this way, is far more reliable and far more complete than any she could give us in her normal, conscious, waking state. There's nothing marvellous or weird about it, Conlon. We have here"--and he slightly rattled the loose sheets in his hand--"simply an automatic record of stored-up impressions. Do you see?" Conlon grunted that he guessed maybe he saw; at any rate, he was willing to be shown. Then Doctor Askew read us Susan's own story of the strange, idiotically meaningless accident to Gertrude. As it corresponded in every particular with my vision, I shall not repeat it; but it produced an enormous impression on Sergeant Conlon and Maltby, and even on Lucette. Taken in connection with my independent theory of what must have occurred, they found Susan's story entirely convincing; though whether Lucette really found it so or had suddenly decided--because of certain uncomfortable accusations against herself made by Susan's hand--that the whole matter had gone quite far enough and any further publicity would be a mistake, I must leave to your later judgment. As for the coroner, when at length he arrived, he too--to my astonishment and unspeakable relief--accepted Susan's automatic story without delay or demur. Here was a stroke of sheer good luck, for a grateful change--but quite as senseless in itself, when seriously considered, as the cruel accident to Gertrude. It merely _happened_ that the coroner's sister was a professional medium, and that he and his whole family were ardent believers in spiritualism, active missionaries in that cause. He had started life as an East Side street-urchin, had the coroner, and had scrambled up somehow from bondage to influence, fighting his way single-fisted through a hard school that does not often foster illusions; but I have never met a more eagerly credulous mind. He accepted the automatic writing as evidence without a moment's cavil, assuring us at once that it undoubtedly came as a direct message from the dead. Doctor Askew's preliminary explanations he simply brushed aside. If Miss Blake in her present trance state, which he soon satisfied himself was genuine, had produced this message, then her hand had been controlled by a disembodied spirit--probably Mrs. Hunt's. There was no arguing with the man, and on my part, heaven knows, no desire to oppose him! I listened gratefully for one hour to his wonder tales of spirit revelations, and blessed him when he reluctantly left us--with the assurance that Gertrude's death would be at once reported as due to an unavoidable accident. It was so announced in the noon editions of the evening papers. Sergeant Conlon and his aids departed by the service elevator, and were soon replaced by a shocked and grieved clergyman and a competent undertaker. The funeral--to take place in New Haven--was arranged for; telegrams were sent; one among them to Phil. Even poor Miss Goucher was at last remembered and communicated with--only just in time, I fear, to save her reason. But of her more in its place. And, meanwhile, throughout all this necessary confusion, Susan slept on. Noon was past, and she still slept.... And Doctor Askew and I watched beside her, and talked together. At precisely seven minutes to three--I was bending over her at the moment, studying her face for any sign of stirring consciousness--she quietly opened her eyes. "Ambo," were her first words, "I believe in God now; a God, anyway. I believe in _Setebos_----" V In my unpracticed, disorderly way--in the hurry of my desire to get back to Susan--I have again overstepped myself and must, after all, pause to make certain necessary matters plain. There is nothing else for it. I have, on reflection, dropped too many threads--the thread of my own vision, the thread of those first two or three pages scrawled by Susan before her hand had fully responded to Doctor Askew's control; other weakly fluttering, loose-ended threads! My respect for the great narrative writers is increasing enormously, as I bungle onward. "Order is heaven's first law," and I wish to heaven it might also more instinctively be mine! Just after the coroner's departure Maltby left us, but before he left I insisted upon a brief talk with him in Lucette's presence. I was in no mood for tact. "Maltby," I said, "I can't stop now for anything but the plain statement that you've been a bad friend--to Susan and me. As for you, Lucette, it's perfectly clear now that Susan believes you responsible for spreading a slanderous lie about her. Between you, directly or indirectly, you've managed to get it believed down here that Susan has been my mistress and was forced to leave New Haven because the scandal had grown notorious. That's why Susan came here, determined to see you, Lucette; that's why Gertrude received her. Gertrude was never underhanded, never a sneak. My guess is, that she suspected you of slandering Susan, but wasn't sure; and then Susan's unexpected call on you----" Lucette flared out at this, interrupting me. "I'm not particularly interested in your guesswork, Ambrose Hunt! We've had a good deal of it, already. Besides, I've a raging headache, and I'm too utterly heartsick even to resent your insults. But I'll say this: I've very strong reasons for thinking that what you call a lying slander is a fact. Mr. Phar can tell you why--if he cares to." With that, she walked out of the room, and I did not see her again until we met in New Haven at Gertrude's funeral, on which occasion, with nicely calculated publicity, she was pleased to cut me dead. When she had gone I turned on Maltby. "Well?" I demanded. Maltby, I saw, was something more than ill-at-ease. "Now see here, Boz," he began, "can't we talk this over without quarreling? It's so stupid, I mean--between men of the world." I waited, without responding. "I'll be frank with you," he mumbled at me. "Fact is, old man, that night--the night Phil Farmer said Susan wanted to see you--was waiting for you in your study--remember? You promised to rejoin me shortly and talk things out.... But you didn't come back. Naturally, I've always supposed since then----" "You have a scoundrelly imagination!" I exclaimed. His face, green-pale from loss of sleep, slowly mottled with purplish stains. "Years of friendship," he stumbled, thick-voiced, through broken phrases. "Wouldn't take that from any one else.... Not yourself.... Question of viewpoint, really.... I'd be the last to blame either of you, if---- However----" "Maltby," I said, "you're what I never thought you--a common or garden cad. That's my deliberate opinion. I've nothing more to say to you." For an instant I supposed he was going to strike me. It is one of the major disappointments of my life that he did not. My fingers ached for his throat. Later, with the undertaker efficiently in charge of all practical arrangements, and while Susan still hid from us behind her mysterious veil, I talked things out with Doctor Askew, giving him the whole story of Susan as clearly and unreservedly as I could. My purpose in doing so was two-fold. I felt that he must know as much as possible about Susan before she woke again to what we call reality. What I feared was that this shock--which had so profoundly and so peculiarly affected her--might, even after the long and lengthening trance had passed, leave some mark upon her spirit, perhaps even some permanent cloud upon her brain. I had read enough of these matters to know that my fear was not groundless, and I could see that Doctor Askew welcomed my information--felt as keenly as I did that he might later be called upon to interpret and deal with some perplexing borderland condition of the mind. It was as well at least to be prepared. That was my major purpose. But connected with it was another, more self-regarding. My own vision, my psychic reel, greatly disturbed me. It was not orthodox. It could not be explained, for example, as something swiftly fabricated from covert memories by my unconscious mind, and forced then sharply into consciousness by some freak of circumstance, some psychic perturbation or strain. My vision of the accident itself--of the manner of its occurrence--might conceivably have been such a fabrication, subconsciously elaborated from the facts given me by Conlon; not so my vision of its setting. I had seen in vivid detail the interior of a room which I had never entered and had never heard described; and every detail thus seen was minutely accurate, for I had since examined the room and had found nothing in it unfamiliar, nothing that did not correspond with what my mind's eye had already noted and remembered. Take merely one instance--the pattern and color scheme of the Chinese rug beside the _chaise-longue_. As an amateur in such matters I could easily, in advance of physically looking at it, have catalogued that rug and have estimated its value to a collector. How then to account for this astounding clairvoyance? I could not account for it without widening my whole conception of what was psychically possible. Seated with Doctor Askew in the room where Susan lay withdrawn from us, from our normal world of limited concrete perceptions, I was oppressed as never before by the immensity and deluding vagueness of the unknown. What were we, we men and women? Eternal forces, or creatures of an hour? An echo, from days long past returned to me, Phil's quiet, firm voice demanding--of Maltby, wasn't it? Yes, yes, of course--demanding of Maltby: "_What is the world, may I ask? And what is Susan?_" Doctor Askew cross-questioned me closely as we sat there, a little off from Susan, our eyes seldom leaving her face. "You must have patience," he kept assuring me in the midst of his questioning. "It will be much better for her to come out of this thing tranquilly, by herself. We're not really wasting time." When his cross-questioning was over he sat silent for a long time, biting at his upper lip, tapping one foot--almost irritably, I thought--on the parquet floor. "I don't like it," he said finally, in his abrupt way. "I don't like it because I believe you're telling the truth. If I could only persuade myself that you are either lying or at least drawing a long bow"--he gave a little disgusted snort of laughter--"it would be a great relief to me!" "Why?" "Why? Because you're upsetting my scientific convictions. My mind was all tidied up, everything nicely in order, and now you come raging through it with this ridiculous tale of a sudden hallucinating vision--of seeing things that you'd never seen, never heard described--whose very existence you were completely unaware of! Damn it! I'd give almost anything to think you a cheerful liar--or self-deceived! But I can't." "Still, you must have met with similar cases?" "Never, as it happens, with one that I couldn't explain away to my own satisfaction. That's what irritates me now. I can't explain you away, Mr. Hunt. I believe you had that experience just as you describe it. Well, then, if you had--what follows?" He pulled for a moment or two at a stubby end of red mustache. "What does?" I suggested. "One of three things," he replied, "all equally impossible. Either your vision--to call it that--was first recorded in the mind of another living person and transferred thence to yours--or it was not. If it wasn't, then it came direct from God or the devil and was purely miraculous! With your kind permission, we'll rule that out. But if it was first recorded in the mind of another living person, then we're forced to accept telepathy--complete thought transference from a distance--accept it as a fact. I never have so accepted it, and hate like hell to do it now! And even if I could bring myself to accept it, my troubles have only begun. From whose mind was this exact vision of the accident to Mrs. Hunt transferred to yours? So far as I can see, the detailed facts of it could have been registered in the minds of only two persons--Miss Blake and your wife. Isn't that so?" I agreed. "All right. See where that leaves us! At the time you received this vision, Miss Blake is lying here in a deep trance, unconscious; and your wife is dead. Which of these incredible sources of information do you prefer? It's a matter of indifference to me. Either way my entire reasoned conception of the universe topples in ruins!" "But surely," I protested, "it might have come to me from Miss Blake, as you suggest, without our having to descend to a belief in spirit communication? Let's rule that out, too!" "As you please," smiled Doctor Askew, pretty grimly. "If you find it easier to believe your vision came from Miss Blake, do so by all means! Personally, I've no choice. I can accept the one explanation quite as readily as the other. Which means, that as a thinking being I can accept neither! Both are--absurd. So I can go no further--unless by a sheer act of faith. I'm baffled, you see--in my own field; completely baffled. That's what it comes to. And I find it all devilishly annoying and inconvenient. Don't you?" I did not reply. For a time I mused, drearily enough, turning many comfortless things over in my mind. Then I drew from my pocket the three sheets scribbled by Susan's hand, before it had responded to Doctor Askew's insistent suggestions. "Doctor," I asked, handing him the scribbled pages, "in view of all I've told you, doesn't what Miss Blake has written here strike you as significant? You see," I added, while he glanced through them, "how strongly her repressed feelings are in revolt against me--against the tyranny of my love for her. Doesn't it seem improbable, then, to say the least of it, that my vision could have come from that direction?" He was reading the pages through again, more slowly. "Jimmy?" he queried to himself. "Oh, yes--Jimmy's the boy you spoke of. I see--I see." He looked up, and I did my best to smile. "That's a bitter dose of truth for me, doctor; but thank God it came in this way--came in time!" Except for the punctuation, which I have roughly supplied, the three pages read as follows: "A net. No means of escape from it. To escape--somehow. Jimmy---- Only wretchedness for Ambo--for us both. How can he care! Insufferably self-satisfied; childishly blind. I won't--I won't--not after this. No escape from it--my net. But the inner net--Ambo's--binding him, too. Some way out. A dead hand killing things. My own father. How he killed and killed--always--more than he knew. Blind. Never felt that before as part of me--of me. Wrong way round though--it enfolds--smothers. I'm tangled there--part of it--forever and ever. Setebos--God of my father--Setebos knows. Oh, how could I dream myself free of it like others--how could I! A net--all a net--no breaking it. Poor Ambo--and his love too--a net. It shan't hold me. I'll gnaw through--mouselike. I must. Fatal for Ambo now if it holds me. Fatal--Setebos--Jimmy will----" "Hum," said Doctor Askew quietly. "That doesn't help me much," I complained. "No," he responded; "but I can't see that all this has any bearing on the possible source of your vision." "I only thought that perhaps this revelation of a repressed inner revolt against me----" "Yes, I see. But there's no reasoning about the unthinkable. I've already said I can make nothing of your vision--nothing I'm yet prepared to believe." He handed the three sheets back to me with these words: "But I'm afraid your interpretation of this thing is correct. It's a little puzzling in spots--curious, eh, the references to Setebos?--still, if I were you, Mr. Hunt, I should quietly withdraw from a lost cause. It'll mean less trouble all round in the end." He shook his head impatiently. "These sexual muddles--it's better to see 'em out frankly! They're always the devil, anyway! What silly mechanisms we are--how Nature makes puppet-fools of us! That lovely child there--she admires you and wants to love you, because you love her. Why shouldn't she? What could be a happier arrangement--now? You've had your share of marital misfortune, I should say. But Nature doesn't give a damn for happy arrangements! God knows what she's after, I don't! But just at present she seems to be loading the dice for Jimmy--for Jimmy, who perhaps isn't even interested in the game! Well, such--for our misery or amusement--is life! And my cigarettes are gone.... How about yours----?" VI It did not take Susan long to make it perfectly clear to Doctor Askew and me that she had waked from her trance to complete lucidity, showing no traces of any of the abnormal after-effects we had both been dreading. Her first rather surprising words had been spoken just as she opened her eyes and before she had quite realized anything but my familiar presence beside her. They were soon followed by an entirely natural astonishment and confusion. What had happened? Where was she? She sat up in bed and stared about her, her eyes coming to rest on Doctor Askew's eager, observant face. "Who are you?" she asked. "Doctor Askew," he replied quietly. "Don't be alarmed, Miss Blake. Mr. Hunt and I have been looking after you. Not that you've been much trouble," he smiled; "on the contrary. You've been fast asleep for more than twelve hours. We both envy you." For a long two minutes she did not reply. Then, "Oh, yes," she said. "Oh, yes." Her chin began to quiver, she visibly shuddered through her whole slight frame, and for an instant pressed her palms hard against her eyes. "Ambo," she murmured, "it was cruel--worse than anything! I got to the 'phone all right, didn't I? Yes, I remember that. I gave the message. But I knew I must go back to her. So much blood, Ambo.... I'm a coward--oh, I'm a coward! But I tried, I did try to go back! Where _did_ I go, Ambo?" "You went to sleep like a sensible little woman!" struck in Doctor Askew, briskly. "You'd done all you could, all anyone could--so you went to sleep. I wish to God more women under such circumstances would follow your example! Much better than going all to pieces and making a scene!" Susan could not respond to his encouraging smile. "To sleep!" she sighed miserably; "just as I did--once before. What a coward I am! When awful things happen, I dodge them--I run away." "Nonsense, dear. You knew Gertrude was beyond helping, didn't you?" "Yes; but if she hadn't been?" She shook her head impatiently. "You're both trying to be kind; but you won't be able to make me forgive myself--not this time. I don't rise to a crisis--I slump. Artemis wouldn't have; nor Gertrude. You know that's true, Ambo. Even if I could do nothing for her--there were others to think of. There was you. I ought to have been helping you; not you, me." She put out her hand to me. "You've done everything for me, always--and I make no return. Now, when I might have, I--I've been a quitter!" Tears of shame and self-reproach poured from her eyes. "Oh," she cried out with a sort of fierce disgust, "how I hate a coward! How I hate myself!" "Come, come!" protested Doctor Askew. "This won't do, little lady!" He laid a firm hand on her shoulder and almost roughly shook it, as if she had been a boy. "If you're equal to it, I suggest you get up and wash your face in good cold water. Do your hair, too--put yourself to rights! Things never look quite normal to a woman, you know, when her hair's tumbling!" His hand slipped from her shoulder to her upper arm; he drew the coverlet from her, and helped her to rise. "All right? Feel your pins under you?... Fine! Need a maid? No?... Splendid! Come along, Mr. Hunt, we'll wait for the little lady in the drawing-room. She'll soon pull herself together." He joined me and walked with me to the door. Susan had not moved as yet from the bedside. "Ambo," she demanded unexpectedly, "does Sister know?" "Yes, dear." "Why isn't she with me then? Is her cold worse?" "Rather, I'm afraid. I've sent a doctor to her, with instructions to keep her in bed if possible. We'll go right down when you're ready and feel up to it." "Why didn't I stay with her, Ambo? I should have. If I had, all this wouldn't have happened. It was pure selfishness, my coming here to see Mrs. Arthur. I simply wanted the cheap satisfaction of telling her--oh, no matter! I'll be ready in five minutes or less." "Ah," laughed Doctor Askew, "then we know just what to expect! I'll order my car round for you in half an hour." Phil and Jimmy arrived in town that afternoon and I met them at the Brevoort, where the three of us took rooms, with a sitting-room, for the night. I told them everything that had occurred as fully as I could, with one exception: I did not speak of those first three pages automatically scribbled by Susan's hand. Nor did I mention my impression--which was rapidly becoming a fixed idea--that my love for her had darkened her life. This was my private problem, my private desolation. It would be my private duty to free Susan's spirit from this intolerable strain. No one could help me here, not even Susan. In all that most mattered to me, my isolation must from now on be complete. All else I told them, not omitting my vision--the whole wild story. And, finally, I had now to add to my devil's list a new misfortune. We had found poor Miss Goucher's condition much more serious than I had supposed. Doctor Askew had taken us down in his car, and we were met in the nondescript lower hall of the boarding-house by his friend, Doctor Carl--the doctor whom I had sent to Miss Goucher on his advice. Miss Goucher's heavy chest cold, he at once informed us, had taken a graver turn; double pneumonia had declared itself. Her fever was high and she had lately grown delirious; he had put a trained nurse in charge. The crisis of the disease would probably be passed during the next twelve hours; he was doing everything possible; he hoped for the best. Susan, very white, motionless, had heard him out. "If Sister dies," she had said quietly when he ended, "I shall have killed her." Then she had run swiftly up the stairs and the two doctors had followed her. I had remained below and had not again seen her; but Doctor Askew had returned within ten minutes, shaking his head. "No one can say what will happen," I had finally wrested from him. "One way or the other now, it's the flip of a coin. Carl's doing his best--that is, nothing, since there's nothing to do. I've warned him to keep an eye on the little lady. I'll look in again after dinner. Good-by. Better find a room and get some sleep if you can." There was little doubt that Miss Goucher's turn for the worse had come as the result of Susan's disturbing all-night absence. Susan had made her comfortable and left her in bed, promising to be home before twelve. Miss Goucher had fallen asleep about eleven and had not waked until two. The light she had left for Susan had not been switched off, and Susan's bed, which stood beside her own, was unoccupied. Feverish from her bronchial cold, she was at once greatly alarmed, and sprang from her bed to go into the sitting-room, half hoping to find Susan there and scold her a little for remaining up so late over her work. She did not even stop to put on a dressing-gown or find her slippers. All this Susan later learned from her red-eyed landlady, Miss O'Neill, whose own bedroom, as it happened, was just beside their own. Miss O'Neill, a meritorious if tiresome spinster of no particular age, had at last been waked from heavy and well-earned sleep by persistent knocking at her door. She had found Miss Goucher standing in the unheated, draughty hall, bare-footed, in her nightgown, her cheeks flushed with mounting fever while her teeth chattered with cold. Like a sensible woman she had hurried her instantly back to bed, and would have gone at once for a hot-water bottle, if Miss Goucher had not insisted upon a hearing. Miss O'Neill was abjectly fond of Miss Goucher, who had the rare gift of listening to voluble commonplace without impatience--a form of sympathy so rare and so flattering to Miss O'Neill's so often bruised self-esteem that she would gladly--had there been any necessity--have carried Miss Goucher rent-free for the mere spiritual solace of pouring out her not very romantic troubles to her. She had taken, Susan felt, an almost voluptuous pleasure in this, her one opportunity to do something for Miss Goucher. She had telephoned Gertrude's apartment for her: "no matter if it is late! I won't have you upset like this for nobody! They've got to answer!" And she had talked with some man--"and I didn't like his tone, neither"--who had asked her some rather odd questions, and had then told her Miss Blake was O. K., not to worry about Miss Blake; she'd had a fainting-spell and been put to bed; she'd be all right in the morning; sure; well, he was the doctor, he guessed he ought to know! "Queer kind of doctor for a lady," Miss O'Neill had opined; "he sounded more like a mick!" A shrewd guess, for he was, no doubt, one of Conlon's trusties. Miss Goucher had then insisted that she was going to dress and go up at once to Susan, and had even begun her preparations in spite of every protest, when she was seized with so stabbing a pain in her chest that she could only collapse groaning on the bed and let Miss O'Neill minister to her as best she might with water bottles and a mustard plaster borrowed from Number Twelve.... By the time I had tardily remembered to telephone Miss Goucher it was almost nine A. M., and it was Miss O'Neill who had answered the call, receiving my assurances of Susan's well-being, and informing me in turn that poor Miss Goucher was good and sick and no mistake, let alone worrying, and should she send for a doctor? She was a Scientist herself, though she'd tried a mustard plaster, anyway, always liking to be on the safe side; but Miss Goucher wasn't, and so maybe she ought. At this point I had naturally taken charge. And it was at this point in my long, often interrupted relation to Phil and Jimmy that Phil took charge. "You're going to bed, Hunt--and you're going now! There's absolutely nothing further you can do this evening, and if anything turns up Jimmy or I can attend to it. You've been living on your nerves all day and you show it, too plainly. We don't want another patient to-morrow. Run out and get some veronal powders, Jimmy. Thanks. No protests, old man. You're going to bed!" I went; and, drugged with veronal, I slept--slept dreamlessly--for fourteen hours. When I woke, a little past ten, Jimmy was standing beside me. "Good morning, Mr. Hunt. You look rested up some! How about breakfast?" His greeting went through all the sounds and motions of cheerfulness, but it was counterfeit coin. There was something too obviously wrong with Jimmy's ordinarily fresh healthy-boy face; it had gone sallow and looked pincushiony round the eyes. I stared at him dully, but could not recall anything that might account for this alteration. Only very gradually a faint sense of discomfort began to pervade my consciousness. Hadn't something happened--once--something rather sad--and rather horrible? When was it? Where was I? And then the full gust of recollection came like a stiff physical blow over my heart. I sat up with a sharp gasp for breath.... "Well!" I demanded. "Miss Goucher! How is she?" "She's dead, sir," answered Jimmy, turning away. "And----" "She's wonderful!" answered Jimmy. He had not needed Susan's name. Yes, in a sense, Jimmy was right. He was not a boy to look far beneath the surface effects of life, and throughout the following weeks Susan's surface effect was indeed wonderful. Apparently she stood up to her grief and mastered it, developing an outer stillness, a quietude strangely disquieting to Phil and to me. Gentleness itself in word and deed, for the first time since we had known her she became spiritually reticent, holding from us her deeper thoughts. It was as if she had secretly determined--God knows from what pressure of lonely sorrow--to conventionalize her life, to present the world hereafter nothing but an even surface of unobtrusive conformity. This, we feared, was hereafter to be her wounded soul's protection, her Chinese Wall. It had not somehow the feel of a passing mood; it had rather the feel of a permanent decision or renunciation. And it troubled our hearts.... I spare you Gertrude's funeral, and Miss Goucher's. The latter, held in a small, depressingly official mortuary chapel, provided--at a price--by the undertaker, was attended only by Phil, Jimmy, Susan, Sonia, Miss O'Neill and me. Oh--there was also the Episcopal clergyman, whom I provided. He read the burial service professionally, but well; it is difficult to read it badly. There are a few sequences of words that really are foolproof, carrying their own atmosphere and dignity with them. Phil and I, at Susan's request, had examined Miss Goucher's effects and had made certain inquiries. She had been for many years, we found, entirely alone in the world--a phrase often, but seldom accurately, used. It is a rare thing, happily, to discover a human being who is absolutely the last member of his or her family line; in Miss Goucher's case this aloneness was complete. But so far as her nonexistent ancestors were concerned, Miss Goucher, we ascertained, had every qualification necessary for a D. A. R.; forebears of hers had lived for generations in an old homestead near Poughkeepsie, and the original Ithiel Goucher had fought as a young officer under Washington. From soldiering, the Gouchers had passed on to farming, to saving souls, to school-teaching, to patent-medicine peddling, and finally to drink and drugs and general desuetude. Miss Goucher herself had been a last flare-up of the primitive family virtues, and with her they were now extinct. All this we learned from her papers, and from an old lady in Poughkeepsie who remembered her grandfather, and so presumably her mother and father as well--though in reply to my letter of inquiry she forbore to mention them. They were mentioned several times in letters and legal documents preserved by Miss Goucher, but--except to say that they both died before she was sixteen--I shall follow the example of the old lady in Poughkeepsie. She, I feel, and the Roman poet long before her, had what Jimmy calls the "right idea."... Miss Goucher, always methodical, left a brief and characteristic will: "To Susan Blake, ward of Ambrose Hunt, Esq., of New Haven, Conn., and to her heirs and assigns forever, I leave what little personal property I possess. She has been to me more than a daughter. I desire to be cremated, believing that to be the cleanest and least troublesome method of disposing of the dead." That, with the proper legal additions, was all. Her desire was of course respected, and I had a small earthenware jar containing her ashes placed in my own family vault. On this jar Susan had had the following words inscribed: MALVINA GOUCHER A GENTLE WOMAN VII On one point Susan was from the first determined: Miss Goucher's death should make no difference in her struggle for independence; she would go on as she had begun, and fight things through to a finish alone. Neither Phil nor I could persuade her to take even a few days for a complete change of scene, a period of rest and recuperation. Simply, she would not. She settled down at once to work harder than ever, turning out quotable paragraphs for _Whim_, as daring as they were sprightly; and she resolutely kept her black hours of loneliness to herself. That she had many such hours I then suspected and now know, but on my frequent visits to New York--I had been appointed administrator of Miss Goucher's more than modest estate--she ignored them, and skillfully turned all my inquiries aside. These weeks following on Miss Goucher's death were for many reasons the unhappiest of my life. Never since I had known Susan, never until now, had our minds met otherwise than candidly and freely. Now, through no crying fault on either side--unless through a lack of imagination on mine--barriers were getting piled up between us, barriers composed of the subtlest, yet stubbornest misunderstandings. Our occasional hours together soon became a drab tissue of evasions and cross purposes and suppressed desires. Only frankness can serve me here or make plain all that was secretly at work to deform the natural development of our lives. There are plays--we have all attended them to our indignation--in which some unhappy train of events seems to have been irrationally forced upon his puppets by the author; if he would only let them speak out freely and sensibly, all their needless difficulties would vanish! Such plays infuriate the public and are never successful. "Good Lord!" we exclaim. "Why didn't she _say_ she loved him in the first place!"--or, "If he had only told her his reasons for leaving home that night!" We, the enlightened public, feel that in the shoes of either the hero or the heroine we must have acted more wisely, and we refuse our sympathy to misfortunes that need never have occurred. Our reaction is perhaps inevitable and æsthetically justified; but I am wondering--I am wondering whether two-thirds of the unhappiness of most mortals is not due to their failure clearly to read another's thoughts or clearly to reveal their own? Is not half, at least, of the misery in our hearts born of futile misunderstandings, misunderstandings with which any sane onlooker in full possession of the facts on both sides, can have little patience, since he instinctively feels they ought never to have taken place? But it is only in the theater that we find such an onlooker, the audience, miraculously in possession of the facts on both sides. In active life, we are doing pretty well if we can partly understand our own motives; we are supermen if we divine the concealed, genuine motives of another. Certainly at this period Susan, with all her insight, did not seize my motives, nor was I able to interpret hers. Hence, we could not speak out! What needed to be said between us could not be said. And the best proof that it could not is, after all, that it was not.... The conversation that ought to have taken place between us might not unreasonably have run something like this: SUSAN: Ambo dear--what _is_ the matter? Heaven knows there's enough!--but I mean between _us_? You've never been more wonderful to me than these past weeks--and never so remote. I can feel you edging farther and farther away. Why, dear? I: I've been a nuisance to you too long, Susan. Whatever I am from now on, I won't be that. SUSAN: As if you could be; or ever had been! I: Don't try to spare my feelings because you like me--because you're grateful to me and sorry for me! I've had a glimpse of fact, you see. It's the great moral antiseptic. My illusions are done for. SUSAN: What illusions? I: The illusion that you ever have really loved me. The illusion that you might some day grow to love me. The illusion that you might some day be my wife. SUSAN: Only the last is illusion, Ambo. I do love you. I'm growing more in love with you every day. But I can't be your wife, ever. If I've seemed changed and sad--apart from Sister's death, and everything else that's happened--it's _that_, dear. It's killing me by half-inches to know I can never be completely part of your life--yours! I: [But I can't even imagine what babble of sorrow and joy such words must have wrung from me! Suppose a decent interval, and a partial recovery of verbal control.] SUSAN: You shouldn't have rescued me from Birch Street, Ambo. Everything's made it plain to me, at last. But I've already ground the mud of it into your life now--in spite of myself. You'll never feel really clean again. I: What nonsense! Susan, Susan--dearest! SUSAN: It isn't nonsense. You forget; I'm a specialist in nonsense nowadays. Oh, Ambo, how can you care for me! I've been so insufferably self-satisfied; so childishly blind! My eyes are wide open now. I've had the whole story of what happened that awful night--all of it--from Doctor Askew. He thought he was psycho-analyzing me, while I pumped it out of him, drop by drop. And I've been to Maltby, too; yes, I've been to Maltby, behind your back. Ambo, he isn't really certain yet that I didn't go crazy that night and kill your wife. Neither, I'm sure, is Mrs. Arthur. They've given me the benefit of the doubt simply because they dread being dragged through a horrible scandal, that's all. But they're not convinced. Of course, Maltby didn't say so in so many words, but it was plain as plain! He was afraid of me--afraid! I could feel his fear. He thinks madness is in my blood. Well, he's right. Not just as he means it, but as _Setebos_ means it--the cruel, jealous God of this world!... No, wait, dear! Let me say it out to you, once for all. My father ended a brutal life by an insanely brutal murder, then killed himself; my own father. And I've never all these years honestly realized that as part of my life--part of _me_! But now I do. It's there, back of me. I can never escape from it. Oh, how could I have imagined myself like others--a woman like others, free to love and marry and have children and a home! How could I! I: Susan! Is that all? Is it really all that's holding you from me? Good God, dear! Why, I thought you--secretly--perhaps even unknown to yourself--loved Jimmy! SUSAN: Jimmy? You thought---- I: I think so even now. How can I help it? Look.... [And here you must suppose me to show her those first scrawled sheets, written automatically by her hand.] Perhaps I'm revealing your own heart to you, Susan--dragging to light what you've tried to keep hidden even from yourself. See, dear. "A net. No means of escape from it. To escape--somehow. Jimmy----" [And then Susan would perhaps have handed back those scrawled pages to me with a pitying and pitiful smile.] SUSAN: [_Author's Note_: This carefully written, imaginary speech has been deleted _in toto_ by Censor Susan from the page proof--at considerable expense to me--and the following authentic confession substituted for it in her own hand. But she doesn't know I am making this explanation, which will account to you for the form and manner of her confession, purposely designed to be a continuation of my own imaginary flight. In admitting this, I am risking Susan's displeasure; but conscience forbids me to let you mistake a "genuine human document"--so dear to the modern heart--for a mere effort at interpretation by an amateur psychologist. What follows, then, is veracious, is essentially that solemn thing so dear to a truth-loving generation--sheer _fact_.] Ambo dear, I can explain that, but not without a long, unhappy confession. Must I? It's a shadowy, inside-of-me story, awfully mixed and muddled; not a nice story at all. Won't it be better, all round, if I simply say again that I love _you_, not Jimmy, with all my heart? [No doubt I should then have reached for her hands, and she would have drawn away.] Ah, no, dear, please not! I've never made a clean breast of it all, even to myself. It's got to be done, though, Ambo, sooner or later, for both our sakes. Be patient with me. I'll begin at the beginning. I'm ridiculously young, Ambo; we all keep forgetting how young I am! I'm an infant prodigy, really; you and Phil--and God first, I suppose--have made me so. And the main point about infant prodigies is that experience hasn't caught up with them. They live in things they've imagined from things they've been told or read, live on intuition and second-hand ideas; and they've no means of testing their real values in a real world. And they're childishly conceited, Ambo! I am. Less now than some months ago; but I'm still pretty bad.... Well, back in Birch Street, before I came to you, when I was honestly a child, I lived all alone inside of myself. I lived chiefly on stories I made up about myself; and of course my stories were all escapes from reality--from the things that hurt or disgusted me most. There was hardly anything in my life at home that I didn't long to escape from. You can understand that, in a general way. But there's one thing you perhaps haven't thought about; it's such an ugly thing to think about. I know it isn't modern of me, but I do hate to talk about it, even to you. I must, though. You'll never understand--oh, lots of later things--unless I do. Love, Ambo, human love, as I learned of it there at home--and I saw and heard much too much of it--frightened and sickened me. It was swinish--horrible. Most of all I longed to escape from all that! I couldn't. I wonder if anyone ever has or can? We are made as we are made.... Yes, I longed to escape from it; but my very made-up story of escape was a disguised romance. Jimmy was to be the gentle Galahad who would some day rescue me. He had done battle for me once already--with Joe Gonfarone. But some day he would come in white, shining armor and take me far away from all the mud and sweat of Birch Street to blue distant hills. Artemis was all mixed up in it, too; she was to be our special goddess; our free, swift, cool-eyed protector. There was to be no heartsick shame, no stuffiness in my life any more forever! But it wasn't Jimmy who rescued me, Ambo. You did. Only, when we've lived in a dream, wholly, for months and months and months, it doesn't vanish, Ambo; it never vanishes altogether; it's part of us--part of our lives. Isn't it? Gertrude was once your dream, dear; and the dream-Gertrude has never really vanished from your life, and never will. Ah, don't I know! Well, then you rescued me; and you and Phil and Maltby and Sister and books and Hillhouse Avenue and France and Italy and England, and my Magic Circle--_everything_--crowded upon me and changed me and made me what I am; if I'm anything at all! But Birch Street had made me first; and my dreams.... Ambo, I can never make you know what you've been to me, never! Cinderella's prince was nothing beside you, and my Galahad-Jimmy a pale phantom! I shan't try. And I can never make you know what a wild confusion of storm you sent whirling through me when I first felt the difference in you--felt your man's need of me, of _me_, body and soul! You meant me not to feel that, Ambo; but I did. I was only seventeen. And my first reaction was all passionate joy, a turbulent desire to give, give, give--and damn the consequences! It was, Ambo. I loved you. But given you and me, Ambo, that couldn't last long. You're too moral--and I'm too complicated. My inner pattern's a labyrinth, full of queer magic; simple emotions soon get lost in me, lost and transformed. And please don't keep forgetting how young I was, and still am; how little I could understand of all I was conceited enough to think I understood! Well, dear, I saw you struggling to suppress your love for me as something wrong, unworthy; something that could only harm us both. And then all that first, swift, instinctive joy went out of me, and my old fear and distrust of what men call love seized me again. "Stuffiness, stuffiness everywhere--it leads to nothing but stuffiness!" I said. "I hate it. I won't let it rule my life. The great thing is to keep clear of it, clean of it, aloof and free!" The old Artemis-motive swept through me again like a hill-wind--but it came in gusts; and there were days--weeks, Ambo--when I simply wanted to be yours. And one night I threw myself into your arms.... But the next day I was afraid again. The phrase "passion's slave" got into my head and plagued me. Then you came to me and said, "It's the end of the road, dear. We can't go on." That changed everything once more, Ambo, in a flash. That was my crisis. From that moment, I was madly jealous of Gertrude; knew I always had been, from the first. My telegram to her was a challenge to battle. It was, dear--and I lost. She came back; she was wonderful, too--her way--and the old Gertrude-dream stirred in you again; just stirred, but that was enough. You said to yourself, didn't you? that perhaps after all the best solution for our wretched difficulties was for Gertrude to return to her home. At least, that would end things. But you couldn't have said that to yourself if Gertrude had been really repulsive to you. The old dream had fluttered its tired wings, once, Ambo; you know it had! And so I flopped again, dear! I was sick of love; I hated love! I said to myself, "I won't have this stupid, brutal, instinctive thing pushing and pulling me about like this! I'll rule my own life, thanks--my own thoughts and dreams! _Freedom's_ the thing--the only good thing in life. I'll be free! Ambo, too, must learn to be free. We can only share what's honestly best in both of us when at last we are free!" My Galahad-Jimmy had turned up again, too. Perhaps that had something to do with my final fiercest revolt against you. I don't know. He was all I had wanted him to be, Ambo; simple and straightforward and clean. Oh, he had his white, shining armor on, bless him! But I didn't want him to rescue me, for all that; not in the old way. I was just glad my dream-boy had come a little true; that's all. You were jealous of him, weren't you? Confess! You needn't have been. But here in New York, with Sister, things happened that made a difference.... First of all, dear, I discovered all I had lost in losing you; discovered I _couldn't_ be free. All I could do was to make some kind of a life of it; for Sister, chiefly. And I tried; oh, I did try! Then those whispered scandals about us began. But it wasn't the scandal itself that did for me; it was something added to it--by Mrs. Arthur, I suppose--something _true_, Ambo, that I'd never honestly faced. Suddenly my father rose from the dead! Suddenly I was forced to feel that never, never under any conditions, would it have been possible for me to be yours--bear you children.... Suddenly I felt, saw--as I should have seen long ago--that the strain of evil, perhaps of madness, in my father--the strain that made his life a hell of black passions--must end with me! Here's where Jimmy comes back, Ambo--and it's the worst of all I have to confess. My anxiety was all for you now: not for myself, I happened to love you that way. "Suppose," I kept thinking, "suppose something should unexpectedly make it possible for Ambo to ask me to be his wife? Suppose Gertrude should fall in love herself and insist on divorce? Or suppose she should die? Ambo would be certain to come to me. And if he did? Should I have the moral courage to send him away? As I must--I must!" Dear, from that time on a sort of demon in me kept suggesting: "Jimmy--Jimmy's the solution! He's almost in love with you now; all he needs is a little encouragement. You could manage it, Susan. You could engage yourself to Jimmy; and then you could string him along! You could make it an interminable engagement, years and years of it, and break it off when Ambo was thoroughly discouraged or cured; you're clever enough for that. And Jimmy's ingenuousness itself. You could manage Jimmy." Oh, please don't think I ever really listened to my demon, was ever tempted by him! But I hated myself for the mere fact that such thoughts could even occur to me! They did, though, more than once; and each time I had to banish them, thrust them down into their native darkness. But they didn't die there, Ambo; they lived there, a hideous secret life, lying in wait to betray me. They never will betray me, of course; I loathe them. But they can still stir in their darkness, make themselves known. That's what the references to Jimmy mean, Ambo, in those pages I scribbled in my trance; and that's _all_ they mean. For I don't love him; I love you. But I can't marry you, ever. I can't. That black strain concentrated in my father--oh, it must die out with me! Just as Sister's line ended with her.... She ran away from the one love of her life, Ambo--just as I must run away from you. You never knew that about Sister. But I knew it. Sonia told me. Sister told _her_, the week before Sonia married. Sister felt then that Sonia ought to run away from all that, as she had. But Sonia wouldn't listen to her.... "Good for Sonia!" I might then have cried out. "God bless her! Hasn't she made her husband happy? Aren't her children his pride? Why in heaven's name should she have denied herself the right to live! And for a mere possibility of evil! As if the blood of any human family on earth were wholly sound, wholly blameless! Sonia was selfish, but right, dear; and Miss Goucher was brave, but wrong! So are you wrong! Actually inherited feeble-mindedness, or insanity, or disease--that's one thing; but a dread of mere future possibilities, of mere supposed tendencies! Good Lord! The human race might as well commit suicide _en bloc_! It's you I love--_you_--just as you are. And you say you love me. Well, that settles it!" But who knows? It might have settled it and it might not--could any such imaginary conversation conceivably have taken place. It did not take place. We are dealing, worse luck, with history. VIII Perhaps six weeks after Miss Goucher's death one little conversation, just skirting these hidden matters, did take place between us; but how different was its atmosphere, and how drearily different its conclusion! You will understand it better now that--like a theater audience, or like God--you are in full possession of Susan's facts and of mine; but I fear it will interest you less. To know all may sometimes be to forgive all; but more often, alas, it is to be bored by everything.... [Firmly inserted note, by Susan: "Rubbish! It's only when we _think_ we know it all, and don't really, that we are bored."] I had taken Susan for dinner that night to a quiet hotel uptown where I knew the dining-room, mercifully lacking an orchestra and a cabaret, was not well patronized, though the cooking was exceptionally good. At this hotel, by a proper manipulation of the head waiter, it is often possible to get a table a little apart from the other diners--an advantage, if one desires to talk intimately without the annoyance of being overheard. It troubled me to find Susan's appetite practically nonexistent; I had ordered one or two special dishes to tempt her, but I saw that she took no pleasure in them, merely forcing herself to eat so as not to disquiet me. She was looking badly, too, all gleamless shadow, and fighting off a physical and mental languor by a stubborn effort which she might have concealed from another, but not from me. It was only too plain to me that her wish was to keep the conversation safely away from whatever was busying and saddening her private thoughts. In this, till the coffee was placed before us, I thought best to humor her, and we had discussed at great length the proper format for her first book of poems, which was to appear within the next month. Also, we had discussed Heywood Sampson's now rapidly maturing plans for his new critical review. "He really wants me on his staff, Ambo, and I really want to be on it--just for the pleasure of working with him. It's an absolutely unbelievable chance for me! And yet----" "And yet----? Is there any reason why you shouldn't accept?" "At least two reasons, yes. I'm afraid both of them will surprise you." "I wonder." "Won't they? If not, Ambo, you must suppose you've guessed them. What are they?" Susan rather had me here. I had not guessed them, but wasn't willing to admit even to myself that I could not if I tried. I puckered my brows, judicially. "Well," I hesitated, "you may very naturally feel that 'Dax' is too plump a bird in the hand to be sacrificed for Heywood's slim bluebird in the bush. Any new publication's a gamble, of course. On the other hand, Heywood isn't the kind to leave his associates high and dry. Even if the review should fail, he'll stand by you somehow. He has a comfy fortune, you know; he could carry on the review as a personal hobby if he cares to, even if it never cleared a penny." Susan smiled, gravely shaking her head: "Cold, dear; stone cold. I'm pretty mercenary these days, but I'm not quite so mercenary as that. Now that I've discovered I can make a living, I'm not nearly so interested in it; hardly at all. It's the stupid side of life, always; I shouldn't like it to make much difference to me now, when it comes to real decisions. I did want a nice home for Sister, though. As for me, any old room most anywhere will do. It will, Ambo; don't laugh; I'm in earnest. But what's your second guess?" she added quickly. "You've some writing you want to do--a book, maybe? You're afraid the review will interfere?" "Ah, now you're a tiny bit warmer! I am afraid it will interfere, but in a much deeper way than that; interfere with _me_." "I don't quite follow that, do I!" "Good gracious, no--since you ask. It's simple enough, though--and pretty vague. Only it feels important--here." For an instant her hand just touched her breast. "I hate so to be roped in, Ambo, have things staked out for me--spiritually, I mean. Mr. Sampson's a darling; I love him! But he's a great believer in ropes and stakes and fences--even barbed wire. I'm beginning to see that the whole idea of his review is a scheme for mending political and moral and social fences, stopping up gaps in them made by irresponsible idealists--anarchists, revolutionary socialists--people like that. People like me, really!--There! Now you do look surprised." I was; but I smiled. "You've turned _Red_, Susan? How long since? Overnight?" "Not red," answered Susan, with bravely forced gayety; "pinkish, say! I haven't fixed on my special shade till I'm sure it becomes me." "It's certain to do that, dear." She bobbed me a little bow across the cloth, much in the old happy style--alas, not quite. "But I never did like washed-out colors," she threw in for good measure. "You _are_ irresponsible, then! Suppose Phil could hear you--or Jimmy. Jimmy'd say your Greenwich Village friends were corrupting you. Perhaps they are?" "Perhaps they are," echoed Susan, "but I think not. I'm afraid it goes farther back, Ambo. It's left-over Birch Street; that's what it is. So much of me's that. All of me, I sometimes believe." "Not quite. You'll never escape Hillhouse, either, Susan. You've had both." "Yes, I've had both," she echoed again, almost on a sigh, pushing her untasted _demi-tasse_ from her. Suddenly her elbows were planted on the cloth before her, her face--shadowed and too finely drawn--dropped between her hands, her eyes sought and held mine. They dizzied me, her eyes.... "Ambo," she said earnestly, "I suppose I'm a dreadful egotist, but more and more I'm feeling the real me isn't a true child of this world! I love this world--and I hate it. I don't know whether I love it most or hate it most. I bless it and damn it every day of my life--in the same breath often. But sometimes I feel I hate it most--hate it for its cold dullness of head and heart! Why can't we care more to make it worth living in, this beautiful, frightful world! What's the matter with us? Why are we what we are? Half angels--and half pigs or goats or saber-toothed tigers or snakes! Each and every one of us, by and large! And oh, how we do distrust our three-quarters angels--while they're living, anyway! Dreamers--mad visionaries--social rebels--outcasts! Crucify them, crucify them! Time enough to worship them--ages of to-be-wasted time enough--when they're dead!" She paused, still holding my eyes, and drawing in a slow breath, a breath that caught midway and was almost a sob; then her eyes left mine. "There--that's over. Saying things like that doesn't help us a bit; it's--silly.... And half the idealists _are_ mad, no doubt, and have plenty of pig and snake in them, too. I've simply coils and coils of unregenerate serpent in me--and worse. Oh, Ambo dear--but I've a dream in me beyond all that, and a great longing to help it come true! But it doesn't--it won't. I'm afraid it never will--here. Will it _there_, Ambo? Is there a _there_?... Have we got all of Sister that clean fire couldn't take, shut up in that tiny vase?" "We can hope not, at least," I replied. "Hope isn't enough," said Susan. "Why don't you say you know we haven't! I know we haven't. I do know it. It's the only thing I--_know_!" A nervous waiter sidled up to us and softly slipped a small metal tray before me; it held my bill, carefully turned face downward. "Anything more, sir?" he murmured. "A liqueur?" I suggested to Susan. She sat upright in her chair again, with a slight impatient shake of the head. I ordered a cigar and a _fine champagne_. The waiter, still nervously fearful of having approached us at a moment when he suspected some intimate question of the heart had grown critically tense, faded from us with the slightest, discreetest cough of reassurance. He was not one, he would have us know, to obtrude material considerations when they were out of place. "No; I can't go with Mr. Sampson," Susan was saying; "and he'll be hurt--he won't be able to see why. But I'm not made to be an editor--of anything. Editors have to weigh other people's words. I can't even weigh my own. And I talk of nothing but myself. Ugh!" "You're tired out, overwrought," I stupidly began. "Don't tell me so!" cried Susan. "If I should believe you, I'd be lost." "But," I blundered on, "it's only common sense to let down a little, at such a time. If you'd only take a real rest----" "There is no such thing," said Susan. "We just struggle on and on. It's rather awful, isn't it?" And presently, very quietly, as if to herself, she said over those words, surely among the saddest and loveliest ever written by mortal man: _From too much love of living, From hope and fear set free, We thank with brief thanksgiving Whatever gods may be_ _That no life lives forever, That dead men rise up never; That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea._ "To sea," she repeated; "to sea.... As if the sea itself knew rest!--Now please pay your big fat bill from your nice fat pocketbook, Ambo; and take me home." "If I only could!" was my despairing thought; and I astounded the coat-room boy, as I tipped him, by muttering aloud, "Oh, damn Jimmy Kane!" "Yes, sir--thank you, sir--I will, sir," grinned the coat-room boy. On our way downtown in the taxi Susan withdrew until we reached her West Tenth Street door. "Good-night, Ambo," she then said; "don't come with me; and thank you for everything--always." I crossed the pavement with her to the loutish brownstone front-stoop of the boarding house; there she turned to dismiss me. "You didn't ask my second reason for not going on the review, Ambo. You must know it though, sooner or later. I can't _write_ any more--not well, I mean. Even my Dax paragraphs are falling off; Hadow Bury mentioned it yesterday. But nothing comes. I'm sterile, Ambo. I'm written out at twenty. Bless you. Good-night." "Susan," I cried, "come back here at once!" But she just turned in the doorway to smile back at me, waved her hand, and was gone. I was of two minds whether to follow her or stay. Then, "A whim," I thought; "the whim of a tired child. And I've often felt that way myself--all writers do. But she must take a vacation of some kind--she must!" She did. IX I woke up the next morning, broad awake before seven o'clock, a full hour earlier than my habit. I woke to find myself greatly troubled by Susan's parting words of the night before, and lay in bed for perhaps twenty minutes turning them over fretfully in my mind. Then I could stand it no longer and rose, bathed, dressed and ate my breakfast in self-exasperating haste, yet with no very clear idea of why I was hurrying or what was to follow. I had an appointment with my lawyer for eleven; I was to lunch with Heywood Sampson at one; after lunch--my immediate business in town being completed--I had purposed to return to New Haven. Susan would be expecting me for my daily morning call at half-past nine. That call was a fixed custom between us when I was stopping in New York. It seldom lasted over twenty minutes and was really just an opportunity to say good-morning and arrange conveniently for any further plans for the day or evening. But it was now only a few minutes past eight. No matter, Susan was both a nighthawk and a lark, retiring always too late and rising too early--though it must be said she seemed to need little sleep; and I felt that I must see her at once and try somehow to encourage her about her work and bring her back to a more reasonable and normal point of view. "Overstrain," I kept mumbling to myself, idiotically enough, as I charged rather than walked down Fifth Avenue from my hotel: "Overstrain--overstrain...." However, the brisk physical exertion of my walk gradually quieted my nerves, and as I turned west on Tenth Street I was beginning to feel a little ashamed of my unreasonable anxiety, was even beginning to poke a little fun at myself and preparing to amuse Susan if I could by a whimsical account of my morning brainstorm. I had now persuaded myself that I should find her quietly at work, as I so usually did, and quite prepared to talk things over more calmly. I meant this time to make a supreme effort, and really hoped to persuade her to do two sensible things: First, to accept Heywood Sampson's offer; second, to give up all other work for the present, and get a complete rest and change of scene until her services were needed for the review. That would not be for six or eight weeks at the very least. And I at last had a plan for her. You may or may not remember that Ashton Parker was a famous man thirty years ago; they called him "Hyena Parker" in Wall Street, and no doubt he deserved it; yet he faded gently out with consumption like any spring poet, having turned theosophist toward the end and made his peace with the Cosmic Urge. Mrs. Ashton Parker is an aunt of mine, long a widow, and a most delightful, easy-going, wide-awake, and sympathetic old lady, who has made her home in Santa Barbara ever since her husband's death there. Her Spanish villa and gardens are famous, and her always kindly eccentricities scarcely less famous than they. I could imagine no one more certain to captivate Susan or to be instantly captivated by her; and though I had not seen Aunt Belle for more than ten years, I knew I could count on her in advance to fall in with my plan. Her hospitality is notorious and would long since have beggared anyone with an income less absurd. Susan should go there at once, for a month at least; the whole thing could be arranged by telegraph. Why in heaven's name hadn't I thought of and insisted upon this plan before! Miss O'Neill, in person, opened the front door for me. "Oh, Mr. Hunt!" she wailed. "Thanks to goodness you're here early. I can't do nothing with Togo. He won't eat no breakfast, and he won't let nobody touch him. He's sitting up there like a--I don't know what, with his precious tail uncurled and his head sort of hanging down--it'll break your heart to look at him! I can't bear to myself, though I'd never no use for the beast, neither liking nor disliking! He's above his station, I say. But what with all---- And I've got to get that room cleared and redone by twelve, feelings or no feelings, and Gawd knows feelings _will_ enter in! Not half Miss Susan's class either, the new party just now applied, and right beside my own room, too, though well recommended, so I can't complain!" I broke through her dusty web of words with an impatient, "What on earth are you talking about, Miss O'Neill?" "You don't know?" she gasped. "You don't----" "I most certainly do not. Where's Miss Susan?" "Oh, Mr. Hunt! If I'd-a knowed she hadn't even spoke to you! And you with her all evening--treating to dinner and all! But thank Gawd it's a reel lady she went away with! Miss Leslie, in her big limousine, that's often been here! _That_ I can swear to you with my own eyes!" Susan was gone, and gone beyond hope of an immediate return. There is no need to labor the details of her flight. A letter, left for me with Miss O'Neill, gives all the surface facts essential. "_Dear Ambo_: Try not to be angry with me; or too hurt. When I left you last night I decided to seize an opportunity which had to be seized instantly, or not at all. Mona Leslie has been planning for a long European sojourn all winter, and for the past two weeks has been trying to persuade me to go with her as a sort of overpaid companion and private secretary. She has dangled a salary before me out of all proportion to my possible value to her, but--never feeling very sympathetic toward her sudden whims and moods--that hasn't tempted me. "Now, at the eleventh hour, literally, this chance for a complete break with my whole past and probable future has tempted me, and I've flopped. You've been urging my need for rest and change; if that's what I do need this will supply it, the change at least--with no sacrifice of my hard-fought-for financial independence. It was the abysmal prospect, as I came in, of having to go straight to my room--with no Sister waiting for me--and beat my poor typewriter and poorer brains for some sparks of wit--when I knew in advance there wasn't a spark left in me--that sent me to the telephone. "Now I'm packed--in half an hour--and waiting for Mona. The boat sails about three A.M.; I don't even know her name: we'll be on her by midnight. Poor Miss O'Neill is flabbergasted--and so I'm afraid will you be, and Phil and Jimmy. I know it isn't kind of me simply to vanish like this; but try to feel that I don't mean to be unkind. Not even to Togo, though my treachery to him is villainous. It will be a black mark against me in Peter's book forever. But I can't take him, Ambo; I just can't. Please, please--will _you_? You see, dear, I can't help being a nuisance to you always, after all. And I can't even promise you Togo will learn to love you, any more than Tumps--though I hope he may. He'll grieve himself thin at first. He knows something's in the air and he's grieving beside me now. His eyes---- If Mona doesn't come soon, I may collapse at his paws and promise him to stay. "Mona talks of a year over there, from darkest Russia to lightest France; possibly two. Her plans are characteristically indefinite. She knows heaps of people all over, of course. I'll write often. Please tell Hadow and Mr. Sampson I'm a physical wreck--or mental, if it sounds more convincing. I'm neither; but I'm tired--tired--_tired_. "If you can possibly help Phil and Jimmy to understand---- "Here's Mona now. Good-by, dear. "Your ashamed, utterly grateful "SUSAN. "P. S. I'm wearing your furs." THE SIXTH CHAPTER I SO Togo and I went home. My misery craving company, I rode with him all the way up in the baggage-car, on the self-deceptive theory that he needed an everpresent friend. It is true, however, that he did; and it gratified me and a little cheered me that he seemed really to appreciate my attentions. I sat on a trunk, lighting each cigarette from the end of the last, and he sat at my feet, leaned wearily against the calf of my right leg and permitted me to fondle his ears.... II "Spring, the sweet spring!" Then birds do sing, hey-ding-a-ding--and so on.... Sweet lovers love the spring.... Jimmy, Phil and I saw little of each other those days. Jimmy clouded his sunny brow and started in working overtime. Phil plunged headlong into what was to have proved his philosophical _magnum opus_--"The Pluralistic Fallacy; a Critical Study of Pragmatism." I also plunged headlong into a series of interpretative essays for Heywood Sampson's forthcoming review. My first essay was to be on Tolstoy; my second, on Nietzsche; my third, on Anatole France; my fourth, on Samuel Butler and Bernard Shaw; my fifth, on Thomas Hardy; and my sixth and last, on Walt Whitman. From the works of these writers it was my purpose to illustrate and clarify for the semicultured the more significant intellectual and spiritual tendencies of our enlightened and humane civilization. It is characteristic that I supposed myself well equipped for this task. But I never got beyond my detached, urbane appreciation of Nietzsche; just as I had concluded it--our enlightened and humane civilization suddenly blew to atoms with a _cliché_-shattering report and a vile stench as of too-long-imprisoned gas.... III During those first months of Susan's absence, which for more than four years were to prove the last months of almost world-wide and wholly world-deceptive peace, several things occurred of more or less importance to the present history. They marked, for one thing, the auspicious sprouting and rapid initial growth of Susan's literary reputation. Her poems appeared little more than a month after she had left us, a well-printed volume of less than a hundred pages, in a sober green cover. I had taken a lonely sort of joy in reading and rereading the proof; and if even a split letter escaped me, it has not yet been brought to my attention. These poems were issued under a quiet title and an unobtrusive pen-name, slipping into the market-place without any preliminary puffing, and I feared they were of too fine a texture to attract the notice that I felt they deserved. But in some respects, at least, Susan was born under a lucky star. An unforeseen combination of events suddenly focused public attention--just long enough to send it into a third edition--upon this inconspicuous little book. Concurrently with its publication, _The Puppet Booth_ opened its doors--its door, rather--on Macdougal Street; an artistic venture quite as marked, you would say, for early oblivion as Susan's own. The cocoon of _The Puppet Booth_ was a small stable where a few Italian venders of fruit and vegetables had kept their scarecrow horses and shabby carts and handcarts. From this drab cocoon issued a mailed and militant dragon-fly; vivid, flashing, erratic; both ugly and beautiful--and wholly alive! For there were in Greenwich Village--as there are, it would seem, in all lesser villages, from Florida to Oregon--certain mourners over and enthusiasts for the art called Drama, which they believed to be virtually extinct. Shows, it is true, hundreds of them, were each season produced on Broadway, and some of these delighted hosts of the affluent, sentimental, and child-like American _bourgeoisie_. Fortunate managers, playsmiths and actors, endowed with sympathy for the crude tastes of this _bourgeoisie_, a sympathy partly instinctive and partly developed by commercial acumen, waxed fat with a prosperity for which the Village could not wearily enough express its contempt. None of these creatures, said the Village--no, not one--was a genuine artist! The Theater, they affirmed, had been raped by the Philistines and prostituted to sophomoric merrymakers by cynical greed. The Theater! Why, it should be a temple, inviolably dedicated to its peculiar god. Since the death of religion, it was perhaps the one temple worthy of pious preservation. Only in a Theater, sincerely consecrated to the great god, Art, could the enlightened, the sophisticated, the free--unite to worship. There only, they implied, could something adumbrating a sacred ritual and a spiritual consolation be preserved. Luckily for Susan, and indeed for us all--for we have all been gainers from the spontaneous generation of "little theaters" all over America, a phenomenon at its height just previous to the war--one village enthusiast, Isidore Stalinski--by vocation an accompanist, by avocation a vorticist, by race and nature a publicist--had succeeded in mildly infecting Mona Leslie--who took everything in the air, though nothing severely--with offhand zeal for his cause. The importance of her rather casual conversion lay in the fact that her purse strings were perpetually untied. Stalinski well knew that you cannot run even a tiny temple for a handful of worshippers without vain oblations on the side to the false gods of this world, and these imply--oh, Art's desire!--a donor. And of all possible varieties of donor, that most to be desired is the absentee donor--the donor who donates as God sends rain, unseen. At precisely the right moment Stalinski whispered to Mona Leslie that _entre them_--though he didn't care to be quoted--he preferred her interpretation of Faure's _Clair de Lune_ to that of ----, the particular _diva_ he had just been accompanying through a long, rapturously advertised concert tour; and Mona Leslie, about to be off on her European flight, became the absentee donor to _The Puppet Booth_. The small stable was leased and cleansed and sufficiently reshaped to live up to its anxiously chosen name. Much of the reshaping and all of the decorating was done, after business hours, by the clever and pious hands of the villagers. Then four one-act plays were selected from among some hundreds poured forth by village genius to its rehabilitated god. The clever and pious hands flew faster than ever, busying themselves with scenery and costumes and properties and color and lighting--all blended toward the creation of a thoroughly uncommercial atmosphere. And the four plays were staged, directed, acted, and finally attended by the Village. It was a perfectly lovely party and the pleasantest of times was had by all. And it only remains to drop this tone of patronizing persiflage and admit, with humblest honesty, that the first night at _The Puppet Booth_ was that very rare thing, a complete success; what Broadway calls a "knockout." Within a fortnight seats for _The Puppet Booth_ were at a ruinous premium in all the ticket agencies on or near Times Square. I happened to be there on that ecstatic opening night. Susan, in her first letter, from Liverpool, had enjoined me to attend and report; Mona would be glad to learn from an unprejudiced outsider how the affair went off. But Susan did not mention the fact that one of the four selected plays had been written by herself. Jimmy was with me. Phil, who saw more of him than I did, thought he was going stale from overwork, so I had made a point of hunting him up and dragging him off with me for a night in town. He hadn't wanted to go; said frankly, he wasn't in the mood. I'm convinced it was the first time he had ever used the word "mood" in connection with himself or anybody else. Jimmy and moods of any kind simply didn't belong together. We had a good man's dinner at a good man's chop-house that night, and, once I got Jimmy to work on it, his normal appetite revived and he engulfed oysters and steak and a deep-dish apple pie and a mug or so of ale, with mounting gusto. We talked, of course, of Susan. Jimmy, inclined to a rosier view by comfortable repletion, now maintained that perhaps after all Susan had done the natural and sensible thing in joining Miss Leslie. He emphasized all the obvious advantages--complete change of environment, freedom from financial worry, and so on; then he paused.... "And there's another point, Mr. Hunt," he began again, doubtfully this time: "Prof. Farmer and I were talking about it only the other day. We were wondering whether we oughtn't to speak to you. But it's not the easiest thing to speak of--it's so sort of vague--kind of a feeling in the air." I knew at once what he referred to, and nodded my head. "So you and Phil have noticed it too!" "Oh, you're _on_ then? I'm glad of that, sir. You've never mentioned anything, so Prof. Farmer and I couldn't be sure. But it's got under our skins that it might make a lot of trouble and something ought to be done about it. It's hard to see what." "Very," I agreed. "Fire ahead, Jimmy. Tell me exactly what has come to you--to you, personally, I mean." "Well," said Jimmy, leaning across the table to me and lowering his voice, "it was all of three weeks ago. I went to a dance at the Lawn Club. I don't dance very well, but I figure a fellow ought to know how if he ever has to, so I've slipped in a few lessons. I can keep off my partner's feet, anyway. Well, Steve Putnam took me round that night and introduced me to some girls. I guess if they'd known my mother was living in New Haven and married to a grocer, they wouldn't have had anything to do with me. Maybe I ought to advertise the fact, but I don't--simply because I can't stand for my stepfather, and so mother won't stand for me. Mother and I never could get on, though; and it's funny, too--as a general rule I can get on with 'most everybody. I told Prof. Farmer the other night there must be something wrong with a fellow who can't get on with his own mother--but he only laughed. Of course, Mr. Hunt, I'm not exactly sailing under false pretenses, either; if any girl wanted to make real friends with me--I'd tell her all about myself first." "Of course," I murmured. "And the same with men. Steve, for instance. He knows all about me, and his father has a lot of money, but he made it in soap--and Steve's from the West, anyway, and don't care. Gee, I'm wandering--it's the ale, I guess, Mr. Hunt; I'm not used to it. The point is. Steve introduced me round, and I like girls all right, but Susan's kind of spoiled me for the way most of them gabble. I can't do that easy, quick-talk very good yet; Steve's a bear at it. Well--I sat out a dance with one of the girls, a Miss Simmons; pretty, too; but she's only a kid. It was her idea, sitting out the dance in a corner--I thought she didn't like the way I handled myself. But that wasn't it. Mr. Hunt, she wanted to pump me; went right at it, too. "'You know Mr. Hunt awfully well, don't you?' she asked; and after I'd said yes, and we'd sort of sparred round a little, she suddenly got confidential, and a kind of thrilled look came into her eyes, and then she asked me straight out: 'Have you ever heard there was something--_mysterious_--about poor Mrs. Hunt's death?' "'No,' I said. "'Haven't you!' she said, as much as to tell me she knew, all the same, I must have. 'Why, Mr. Kane, it's all over town. Nobody knows anything, but it's terribly exciting! Some people think she committed suicide, all because of that queer Miss Blake.... She must be--_you_ know! And now she's run away to Europe! I believe she was just afraid to stay over here, afraid she might be found out or arrested--or something!' "That's the way she went on, Mr. Hunt; and, well--naturally, I pooh-poohed it and steered her off, and then she lost interest in me right away. But she's right, Mr. Hunt. There's a lot of that kind of whispered stuff in the air, and I'm mighty glad Susan's off for a year or two where she can't run into it. It'll all die out before she's back again, of course." "I hope so," was my reply; "but the source of these rumors is very persistent--and very discreet. They start from Mrs. Arthur; they must. But it's impossible to trace them back to her. Jimmy, she means to make New Haven impossible for me, and I've an idea she's likely to succeed. Already, three or four old acquaintances have--well, avoided me, and the general atmosphere's cooling pretty rapidly toward zero. So far as I'm concerned, it doesn't much matter; but it does matter for Susan. She may return to find her whole future clouded by a settled impression that in some way--indirectly--or even, directly--she was responsible for my wife's sudden death." "It's a damned outrage!" exclaimed Jimmy. "I don't know Mrs. Arthur, but I'd like to wring her neck!" "So would I, Jimmy; and she knows it. That's why she's finding life these days so supremely worth living." Jimmy pondered this. "Gee, I hate to think that badly of any woman," he finally achieved; "but I guess it doesn't do to be a fool and think they're all angels--like Susan. Mother's not." "No, Jimmy, it doesn't do," I responded. "Still, the price for that kind of wisdom is always much higher than it's worth." "Women," began Jimmy---- But his aphorism somehow escaped him; he decided to light a cigarette instead.... And on this wave of cynicism I floated him off with me to _The Puppet Booth_. IV From the point of view of eccentric effectiveness and _réclame_ wonders had been wrought with the small, ancient, brick stable on Macdougal Street; but very little had been or could be done for the comfort of its guests. The flat exterior wall had been stuccoed and brilliantly frescoed to suggest the entrance to some probably questionable side-show at a French village fair; and a gay clown with a drum, an adept at amusing local patter, had been stationed before the door to emphasize the _funambulesque_ illusion. Within, this atmosphere--as of something gaudy and transitory, the mere lath-and-canvas pitch of a vagabond _banquiste_--had been cleverly carried out. The cramped little theater itself struck one as mere scenery, which was precisely the intention. There was clean sawdust on the floor, and the spectators--one hundred of them suffocatingly filled the hall--were provided only with wooden benches, painted a vivid Paris green. These benches had been thoughtfully selected, however, and were less excruciating to sit on than you would suppose. There was, naturally, no balcony; a false pitch-roof had been constructed of rough stable beams, from which hung bannerets in a crying, carefully studied dissonance of strong color, worthy of the barbaric Bakst. The proscenium arch was necessarily a toylike affair, copied, you would say, from the _Guinol_ in the Tuileries Gardens; and the curtain, for a final touch, looked authentic--had almost certainly been acquired, at some expenditure of thought and trouble, from a traveling Elks' Carnival. There was even a false set of footlights to complete the masquerade; a row of oil lamps with tin reflectors. It was all very restless and amusing--and extravagantly make-believe.... Jimmy and I arrived just in time to squeeze down the single narrow side-aisle and into our places in the fourth row. We had no opportunity to glance about us or consult our broad-sheet programs, none to acquire the proper mood of tense expectancy we later succumbed to, before the lights were lowered and the curtain was rolled up in the true antique style. "Gee!" muttered Jimmy, on my left, with involuntary dislike. "Ah!" breathed a maiden, on my right, with entirely voluntary rapture. Someone in the front row giggled, probably a cub reporter doing duty that evening as a dramatic critic; but he was silenced by a sharp hiss from the rear. The cause for these significant reactions was the _mise en scène_ of the tiny vacant stage. It consisted of three dead-black walls, a dead-black ceiling, and a dead-black floor-cloth. In the back wall there was a high, narrow crimson door with a black knob. A tall straight-legged table and one straight high-backed chair, both lacquered in crimson, were the only furniture, except for a slender crimson-lacquered perch, down right, to which was chained a yellow, green and crimson macaw. And through the crimson door presently entered--undulated, rather--a personable though poisonous young woman in a trailing robe of vivid yellow and green. The play that followed, happily a brief one, was called--as Jimmy and I learned from our programs at its conclusion--"Polly." It consisted of a monologue delivered by the poisonous young woman to the macaw, occasionally varied by _ad lib._ screams and chuckles from that evil white-eyed bird. From the staccato remarks of the poisonous young woman, we, the audience, were to deduce the erratic eroticism of an _âme damnée_. It was not particularly difficult to do so, nor was it particularly entertaining. As a little adventure in supercynicism, "Polly," in short, was not particularly successful. It needed, and had not been able to obtain, the boulevard wit of a Sacha Guitry to carry it off. But the poisonous young woman had an exquisitely proportioned figure, and her arms, bare to the slight shoulder-straps, were quite faultless. Minor effects of this kind have, even on Broadway, been known to save more than one bad quarter hour from complete collapse.... No, it was not the author's lines that carried us safely through this first fifteen minutes of diluted Strindberg-Schnitzler! And the too deliberately bizarre _mise en scène_, though for a moment it piqued curiosity, had soon proved wearisome, and we were glad--at least, Jimmy and I were--to have it veiled from our eyes. The curtain rolled down, nevertheless, to ecstatic cries and stubbornly sustained applause. Raised lights revealed an excited, chattering band of the faithful. The poisonous young woman took four curtain calls and would seemingly, from her parting gesture, have drawn us collectively to her fine bosom with those faultless, unreluctant arms. And the maiden on my right shuddered forth to her escort, "I'm thrilled, darling! Feel them--feel my hands--they're _moon-cold_! They always are, you know, when I'm thrilled!" "You can't beat this much, Mr. Hunt," whispered Jimmy, on my left. "It's bughouse." In a sense, it was; in a truer sense, it was not. A careful analysis of the audience would, I was quickly convinced, have disclosed not merely a saving remnant, but a saving majority of honest workmen in the arts--men and women too solidly endowed with brains and humor for any self-conscious posing or public exhibition of temperament. The genuine freaks among us were a scant handful; but it is the special talent and purpose of your freak to--in Whitman's phrase--"positively appear." Ten able freaks to the hundred can turn any public gathering into a side show; and the freaks of the Village, particularly the females of the species, are nothing if not able. Minna Freund, for example, who was sitting just in front of Jimmy; it would be difficult for any assembly to obliterate Minna Freund! She was, that night, exceptionally repulsive in a sort of yellow silk wrapper, with her sparrow's nest of bobbed Henner hair, and her long, bare, olive-green neck, that so obviously needed to be scrubbed! Having strung certain entirely unrelated words together and called them "Portents," she had in those days acquired a minor notoriety, and Susan--impishly enjoying my consequent embarrassment--had once introduced me to her as an admirer of her work, at an exhibition of Cubist sculpture. Minna was standing at the time, I recalled, before Pannino's "Study of a Morbid Complex," and she at once informed me that the morbid complex in question had been studied from the life. She had posed her own destiny for Pannino, so she assured me, at three separate moments of psychic crisis, and the inevitable result had been a masterpiece. "How it writhes!" she had exclaimed: but to my uninstructed eyes Pannino's Study did anything but writhe; it was stolidly passive; it looked precisely as an ostrich egg on a pedestal would look if viewed in a slightly convex mirror.... How far away all that stupid nonsense seems! And, suddenly, Jimmy leaped on the bench beside me as if punctured by a pin: "Oh, good Lord, Mr. Hunt!" he groaned. "Look here!" He had thrust his program before me and was pointing to the third play of the series with an unsteady finger. "It's the same name," he whispered hoarsely; "the one she's used for her book. Do you think----" "I'll soon find out," was my answer. "We must know what we're in for, Jimmy!" And just as the lights were lowered for the second play I rose, defying audible unpopularity, and squeezed my way out to the door. That is why I cannot describe for you the second play, a harsh little tragedy of the sweatshops--"Horrible," Jimmy affirmed, "but it kind of _got_ me!"--written by an impecunious young man with expensive tastes, who has since won the means of gratifying them along Broadway by concocting for that golden glade his innocently naughty librettos--"_Tra-la, Thérèse!_" and "_Oh, Mercy, Modestine!_" Having sought and interviewed Stalinski--I found him huddled in the tiny box-office, perspiring unpleasantly from nervousness and many soaring emotions--I was back in my seat, more unpopular than ever, in good time for Susan's--it was unquestionably Susan's--play. But most of you have read, or have seen, or have read about, Susan's play.... It was the sensation of the evening, of many subsequent evenings; and I have often wondered precisely why--for there is in it nothing sensational. Its atmosphere is delicately fantastic; remote, you would say, from the sympathies of a matter-of-fact world, particularly as its fantasy is not the highly sentimentalized make-believe of some popular fairy tale. This fantasy of Susan's is ironic and grave; simple in movement, too--just a few subtle modulations on a single poignant theme. And I ask myself wherein lies its throat-tightening quality, its irresistible appeal? And I find but one answer; an answer which I had always supposed, in my long intellectual snobbery, an undeserved compliment to the human race; a compliment no critic, who was not either dishonest or a fool, could pay mankind. But what other explanation can be given for the success of Susan's play, both here and in England, than its sheer _beauty_? Beauty of substance, of mood, of form, of quiet, heart-searching phrase! It is not called "The Magic Circle," but it might have been; for its magic is genuine, distilled from the depths of Nature, and it casts an unescapable spell--on poets and bankers, on publicans and prostitutes and priests, on all and sundry, equally and alike. It even casts its spell on those who act in it, and no truer triumph can come to an author. I have never seen it really badly played. Susan has never seen it played at all. On the first wave of this astonishing triumph, Susan's pen-name was swept into the newspapers and critical journals of America and England, and a piquant point for gossip was added by the revelation that "Dax," who for several months had so wittily enlivened the columns of _Whim_, was one and the same person. Moreover, it was soon bruited about that the author was a slip of a girl--radiantly beautiful, of course; or why romance concerning her!--and that there was something mysterious, even sinister, in her history. "A child of the underworld," said one metropolitan journal, in its review of her poems. Popular legend presently connected her, though vaguely, with the criminal classes. I have heard an overdressed woman in a theater lobby earnestly assuring another that she knew for a fact that ---- (Susan) had been born in a brothel--"one of those houses, my dear"--and brought up--like Oliver Twist, though the comparison escaped her--to be a thief. And so it was that the public eye lighted for a little hour on Susan's shy poems. Poetry was said to be looking up in those days; and influential critics in their influential, uninfluenced way suddenly boomed these, saying mostly the wrong things about them, but saying them over and over with energy and persistence. The first edition vanished overnight; a larger second edition was printed and sold out within a week or two; a still larger third edition was launched and disposed of more slowly. Then came the war.... V If I can say anything good of the war, it is this: Since seemingly it must have come anyway, sooner or later, so far as Susan is concerned it came just in time. A letter from Phil to Susan, received toward the close of July, 1914, at the château of the Comtesse de Bligny, near Brussels, will tell you why. "_Dear Susan_: If the two or three notes I've sent you previously have been brief and dull, I knew you would make the inevitable allowances and forgive me. In the first place, God didn't create me to scintillate, as you've long had reason to know; and since you left us I've been buried in a Sahara of work, living so retired a life in my desert that little news comes my way. But Jimmy breaks in on me, always welcomely, with an occasional bulletin, and last night Hunt came over and we had a long evening together. He's worried, Susan, not without great cause, I fear; he looks tired and ill; and after mulling things over, with my usual plodding caution--I've thought best to explain the situation to you. "It can be put in very few words. The deserved success of your play and the poems, following a natural law that one too helplessly wishes otherwise, has led to a crisis in the gossip--malicious in origin, certainly--which has fastened upon you and Hunt; and this gossip lately has taken a more sinister turn. More and more openly it is being said that the circumstances surrounding Mrs. Hunt's death ought to be probed--'probed' is just now the popular word in this connection. The feeling is widespread that you were in some way responsible for it. "I must use brutal phrases to lay the truth before you. You are not, seemingly, suspected of murder. You are suspected of having killed Mrs. Hunt during a sudden access of mental irresponsibility. It is whispered that Hunt, improperly, in some devious way, got the matter hushed up and the affair reported as an accident. As a result of these absurd and terrible rumors, Hunt finds himself a pariah--many of his oldest acquaintances no longer recognize him when they meet. It is a thoroughly distressing situation, and it's difficult to see how the mad injustice of it can be easily righted. "The danger is, of course, that some misguided person will get the whole matter into the newspapers; it is really a miracle that it has not already been seized on by some yellow sheet, the opportunity for a sensational story is so obviously ripe. Happily"--oh, Phil! oh, philosopher!--"the present curious tension in European politics is for the moment turning journalistic eyes far from home. But as all such diplomatic flurries do, this one will pass, leaving the flatness of the silly season upon us. This is what Hunt most fears; and when you next see him you will find him grayer and older because of this anxiety. "He dreads, for you, a sudden journalistic demand for a public investigation, and feels--though in this I can hardly agree with him--that such a demand could end only in a public trial, in view of the peculiar nature of all the circumstances involved--a veritable _cause célèbre_. "How shocking all this must be to you. The sense of the mental anguish I'm causing you is a horror to me. Nothing could have induced me to write in this way but the compulsion of my love for Hunt and you. It seems to me imperative that your names should be publicly cleared, in advance of any public outcry. "So I urge you, Susan--fully conscious of my personal responsibility in doing so--to return at once and to join with Hunt and your true friends in quashing finally and fully these damnable lies. It is my strong conviction that this is your duty to yourself, to Hunt, and to us all. If you and Hunt, together or separately, make a public statement, in view of the rumors now current, and yourselves demand the fullest public investigation of the facts, there can be but one issue. Your good names will be cleared; the truth will prevail. Dreadful as this prospect must be for you both, it now seems to me--and let me add, to Jimmy--the one wise course for you to take. But only you, if you agree with me, can persuade Hunt to such a course...." It is unnecessary to quote the remaining paragraphs of Phil's so characteristic letter. * * * * * No doubt Susan would have returned immediately if she could, but, less than a week after the receipt of Phil's letter, the diplomatic flurry in Europe had taken a German army through Luxemburg and into Belgium, and within less than two weeks Susan and Mona Leslie and the Comtesse de Bligny were in uniform, working a little less than twenty-four hours a day with the Belgian Red Cross.... It is no purpose of mine to attempt any description of Susan's war experience or service. Those first corroding weeks and months of the war have left ineffaceable scars on the consciousness of the present generation. I was not a part of them, and can add nothing to them by talking about them at second hand. It might, however, repay you to read--if you have not already done so--a small anonymous volume which has passed through some twenty or thirty editions, entitled _Stupidity Triumphant_, and containing the brief, sharply etched personal impressions of a Red Cross nurse in Flanders during the early days of Belgium's long agony. It is now an open secret that this little book was written by Susan; and among the countless documents on frightfulness this one, surely, by reason of its simplicity and restraint, its entire absence of merely hysterical outcry, is not the least damning and not--I venture to believe--the least permanent. There is one short paragraph in this book of detached pictures, marginal notes, and condensed reflections that brought home to me, personally, _war_, the veritable thing itself, as no other written lines were able to do--as nothing was able to do until I had seen the beast with my own eyes. It is not an especially striking paragraph, and just why it should have done so I am unable to say. Certain extracts from the book have been widely quoted--one even, I am told, was read out in Parliament by Arthur Henderson--but I have never seen this one quoted anywhere; so I am rather at a loss to explain its peculiar influence on me. Entirely individual reactions to the printed word are always a little mysterious. I know, for example, one usually enlightened and catholic critic who stubbornly maintains that a very commonplace distich by Lord De Tabley is the most magical moment in all English verse. But here is my paragraph--or Susan's--for what it is worth: "This Pomeranian prisoner was a blond boy-giant; pitifully shattered; it was necessary to remove his left leg to the knee. The operation was rapidly but skillfully performed. He was then placed on a pallet, close beside the cot of a wounded German officer. After coming out of the ether his fever mounted and he grew delirious. The German officer commanded him to be silent. He might just as well have commanded the sun to stand still, and he must, however muzzily, have known that. Yet he was outraged by this unconscious act of insubordination. Thrice he repeated his absurd command--then raised himself with a groan, leaned across, and struck the delirious boy in the face with a weakly clenched fist. It was not a heavy blow; the officer's strength did not equal his intention. '_Idiot!_' I cried out; and thrust him back on his cot, half-fainting from the pain of his futile effort at discipline. 'Idiot' was, after all, the one appropriate word. It was constantly, I found, the one appropriate word. The beast was a stupid beast." THE LAST CHAPTER I PHIL FARMER and Jimmy Kane stayed on in New Haven that summer of 1914; Phil to be near his precious sources in the Yale library; Jimmy to be near his new job. As soon as his examinations were over he had gone to work in a factory in a very humble capacity; but he was not destined to remain there long in any capacity, nor was it written in the stars that he was to complete his education at Yale. My own reasons for clinging to New Haven were less definite. Sheer physical inertia had something to do with it, no doubt; but chiefly I stayed because New Haven in midsummer is a social desert; and in those days my most urgent desire was to be alone. Apart from all else, the breaking out of almost world-wide war had drastically, as if by an operation for spiritual cataract, opened my inner eye, no longer a bliss in solitude, to much that was trivial and self-satisfied and ridiculous in one Ambrose Hunt, Esq. That Susan should be in the smoke of that spreading horror brought it swiftly and vividly before me. I lived the war from the first. For years, with no felt discomfort to myself, I had been a pacifist. I was a contributing member of several peace societies, and in one of my slightly better-known essays I had expounded with enthusiasm Tolstoy's doctrine--which, in spite of much passionate argument to the contrary these troublous times, was assuredly Christ's--of nonresistance to evil. I was, in fact, though in a theoretical, parlor sense a proclaimed Tolstoyan, a Christian anarchist--lacking, however, the essential groundwork for Tolstoy's doctrine: faith. Faith in God as a person, as a father, I could not confess to; but the higher anarchist vision of humanity freed from all control save that of its own sweet reasonableness, of men turned unfailingly gentle, mutually helpful, content to live simply if need be, but never with unuplifted hearts--well, I could and did confess publicly that no other vision had so strong an attraction for me! I liked to dwell in the idea of such a world, to think of it as a possibility--less remote, perhaps, than mankind in general supposed. Having lived through the Spanish War, the Boer War, and Russia's war with Japan; and in a world constantly strained to the breaking point by national rivalries, commercial expansion, and competition for markets; by class struggles everywhere apparent; by the harsh, discordant energies of its predatory desires--I, nevertheless, had been able to persuade myself that the darkest days of our dust-speck planet were done with and recorded; Earth and its graceless seed of Adam were at last, to quote Jimmy, "on their way"--well on their way, I assured myself, toward some inevitable region of abiding and beneficent light! _Pouf!_... And then? Stricken in solitude, I went down into dark places and fumbled like a starved beggar amid the detritus of my dreams. Dust and shadow.... Was there anything real there, anything worth the pain of spiritual salvage? Had I been, all my life, merely one more romanticist, one more sentimental trifler in a universe whose ways were not those of pleasantness, nor its paths those of peace? Surely, yes; for my heart convicted me at once of having wasted all my days hitherto in a fool's paradise. The rough fabric of human life was not spun from moonshine. So much at least was certain. And nothing else was left me. Hurled from my private, make-believe Eden, I must somehow begin anew. "_Brief beauty, and much weariness...._" Susan's line haunted me throughout the first desperate isolation of those hours. I saw no light. I was broken in spirit. I was afraid. Morbidity, you will say. Why, yes; why not? To be brainsick and heartsick in a cruel and unfamiliar world is to be morbid. I quite agree. Below the too-thin crust of a _dilettante's_ culture lies always that hungry morass. A world had been shaken; the too-thin crust beneath my feet had crumbled; I must slither now in slime, and either sink there finally, be swallowed up in that sucking blackness, or by some miracle of effort win beyond, set my feet on stiff granite, and so survive. It is most probable that I should never have reached solid ground unaided. It was Jimmy, of all people, who stretched forth a vigorous, impatient hand. Shortly after the First Battle of the Marne had dammed--we knew not how precariously, or how completely--the deluge pouring through Belgium and Luxemburg and Northern France, Jimmy burst in on me one evening. He had just received a brief letter from Susan. She was stationed then at Furnes; Mona Leslie was with her; but their former hostess, the young pleasure-loving Comtesse de Bligny, was dead. The cause of her death Susan did not even stop to explain. "Mona," she hurried on, "is magnificent. Only a few months ago I pitied her, almost despised her; now I could kiss her feet. How life had wasted her! She doesn't know fear or fatigue, and she has just put her entire fortune unreservedly at the service of the Belgian Government--to found field hospitals, ambulances, and so on. The king has decorated her. Not that she cares--has time to think about it, I mean. In a sense it irritated her; she spoke of it all to me as an unnecessary gesture. Oh, Jimmy, come over--we need you here! Bring all America over with you--if you can! _Setebos_ invented neutrality; I recognize his workmanship! Bring Ambo--bring Phil! Don't stop to think about it--_come_!" "I'm going of course," said Jimmy. "So's Prof. Farmer. How about you, sir?" "Phil's going?" "Sure. Just as soon as he can arrange it." "His book's finished?" "What the hell has that----" began Jimmy; then stopped dead, blushing. "Excuse me, Mr. Hunt; but books, somehow--just now--they don't seem so important as--_see_?" "Not quite, Jimmy. After all, the real struggle's always between ideas, isn't it? We can't perfect the world with guns and ambulances, Jimmy." "Maybe not," said Jimmy dryly. "It's quite possible," I insisted, "that Phil's book might accomplish more for humanity, in the long run, than anything he could do at his age in Flanders." "Susan could come home and write plays," said Jimmy; "good ones, too. But she won't. You can bet on that, sir." "I've never believed in war, Jimmy; never believed it could possibly help us onward." "Maybe it can't," interrupted Jimmy. "I've never believed in cancer, either; it's very painful and kills a lot of people. You'd better come with us, sir. You'll be sorry you didn't--if you don't." "Why? You know my ideas on nonresistance, Jimmy." "Oh, ideas!" grunted Jimmy. "I know you're a white man, Mr. Hunt. That's enough for me. I'm not worrying much about your ideas." "But whatever we do, Jimmy, there's an _idea_ behind it; there must be." "Nachur'ly," said Jimmy. "Those are the only ones that count! I can't see you letting Susan risk her life day in an' out to help people who are being wronged, while you sit over here and worry about what's going to happen in a thousand years or so--after we're all good and dead! Not much I can't! The point is, there's the rotten mess--and Susan's in it, trying to make it better--and we're not. Prof. Farmer got it all in a flash! He'll be round presently to make plans. Well--how about it, sir?" Granite! Granite at last, unshakable, beneath my feet! Then, too, Susan was over there, and Jimmy and Phil were going, without a moment's hesitation, at her behest! But I have always hoped, and I do honestly believe, that it was not entirely that. No; romanticist or not, I will not submit to the assumption that of two possible motives for any decently human action, it is always the lower motive that turns the trick. La Rochefoucauld to the contrary, self-interest is not the inevitable mainspring of man; though, sadly I admit, it seems to be an indispensable cog-wheel in his complicated works.... II And now, properly apprehensive reader--whom, in the interests of objectivity, which has never interested me, I should never openly address--are you not unhappy in the prospect of another little tour through trench and hospital, of one more harrowing account of how the Great War made a Great Man of him at last? Be comforted! One air raid I cannot spare you; but I can spare you much. To begin with, I can spare you, or all but spare you, a month or so over three whole years. You may think it incredible, but it is merely true, that I had been in Europe for more than three years--and I had not as yet seen Susan. Phil had seen her, just once; Jimmy had seen her many times; and I had run into them--singly, never together--off and on, here and there, during those slow-swift days of unremitting labor. If to labor desperately in a heartfelt cause be really to pray, the ear of Heaven has been besieged! But, in common humanity, there was always more crying to be done than mortal brains or hands or accumulated wealth could compass. Once plunged into that glorious losing struggle against the appalling hosts of Misery, one could only fight grimly on--on--on--to the last hoarded ounce of strength and determination. But the odds were hopeless, fantastic! Those Titan forces of human suffering and degradation, so half-wittedly let loose throughout Europe, grew ever vaster, more terrible in maleficent power. They have ravaged the world; they have ravaged the soul. An armistice has been signed, a peace treaty is being drafted, a League of Nations is being formed--or deformed--but those Titan forces still mock our poor efforts with calamitous laughter. They are still in fiercely, stubbornly disputed, but unquestionable possession of the field--insolent conquerors to this hour. The real war, the essential war, the war against the unconsciously self-willed annihilation of earth's tragic egoist, Man, has barely begun. Its issue is ever uncertain; and it will not be ended in our days.... Phil and Jimmy had gone over on the same boat, _via_ England, about the middle of October, 1914. At that time organized American relief-work in Europe was really nonexistent, and in order to obtain some freedom of movement on the other side, and a chance to study out possible opportunities for effective service, Phil had persuaded Heywood Sampson to appoint him continental correspondent for the new review; and Jimmy went with him, ostensibly as his private secretary. It was all the merest excuse for obtaining passports and permission to enter Belgium, if that should prove immediately advisable after reaching London. It did not. Once in London, Phil had very soon found himself up to the eyes in work. Through Mr. Page, the American Ambassador--so lately dead--he was introduced to Mr. Herbert C. Hoover, and after a scant twenty minutes of conversation was seized by Mr. Hoover and plunged, with barely a gasp for breath, into that boiling sea of troubles--the organization of the Commission for Relief in Belgium. It does not take Mr. Hoover very long to size up the worth and stability of any man; but in Phil he had found--and he knew he had found--a peculiar treasure. Phil's unfailing patience, his thoroughness and courtesy, quickly endeared him to all his colleagues and did much to make possible the successful launching of the vastest and most difficult project for relief ever undertaken by mortal men. Thus, almost overnight, Jimmy's private secretaryship became anything but a sinecure. For nearly three months their labors held them in London; then they were sent--not unadventurously--to Brussels; there to arrange certain details of distribution with Mr. Whitlock, the American Minister, and with the directors of the Belgian _Comité National_. But from Brussels their paths presently diverged. Jimmy, craving activity, threw himself into the actual work of food distribution in the stricken eastern districts; while Phil passed gravely on to Herculean labors at the shipping station of the "C. R. B." in Rotterdam. He remained in Rotterdam for upward of a year. Susan, meanwhile, had been driven with the Belgian Army from Furnes, and was now attached to the operating-room of a small field or receiving-hospital, which squatted amphibiously in a waterlogged fragment of village not far from the Yser and the flooded German lines. It was a post of danger, constantly under fire; and she was the one woman who clung to it--who insisted upon being permitted to cling to it, and carried her point; and, under conditions fit neither for man nor beast, unflinchingly carried on. Mona Leslie was no longer beside her. She had retired to Dunkirk to aid in the organization of relief for ever-increasing hordes of civilian refugees. And where, meanwhile, was one Ambrose Hunt, sometime _dilettante_ at large? It had proved impossible for me to sail with Phil and Jimmy. Just as the preliminary arrangements were being made, Aunt Belle was stricken down by apoplexy, while walking among the roses of her famous Spanish gardens in Santa Barbara, and so died, characteristically intestate, and, to my astonishment, I found that I had become the sole inheritor of her estate; all of "Hyena Parker's" tainted millions had suddenly poured their burdensome tide of responsibilities--needlessly and unwelcomely--upon me. There was nothing for it. Out to California, willy-nilly, I must go, and waste precious weeks there with lawyers and house agents and other tiresome human necessities. The one cheering thought in all this annoying pother was--and it was a thought that grew rapidly in significance to me as I journeyed westward--that fate had now made it possible for me to purify Hyena Parker's millions by putting them to work for mankind.--Well, they have since done their part, to the last dollar; they have spent themselves in the losing battle against Misery, and are no more. Nothing became their lives like the ending of them. But for all that, the world, you see, is as it is--and the battle goes on. Phil kept in touch with me from the other side, in spite of his difficulties--as did Jimmy and Susan--and he had prepared the way for me when at length I could free myself and sail. I was instructed to go to Paris, direct, and fulfill certain duties there in connection with the ever-increasing burdens and exasperations of the "C. R. B." I did so. Six months later my activities were transferred to Berne; and--not to trace in detail the evolution of my career, such as it was; for though useful, I hope, it was never, like Phil's, exceptionally brilliant--I had become, about the period of America's entry into the war, a modest captain in the Red Cross, stationed at Evian, in connection with the endless, heartbreaking task of repatriating refugees from the invaded districts. And there my job rooted me until January of that dark winter of our unspeakable depression, 1918. With the beginning of America's entry into the war Phil had gone to Petrograd for the American Red Cross, his commission being to save the lives of as many Russian babies as possible by the distribution of canned milk. Then, one evening--early in September, 1917, it must have been--he started alone for Moscow, to lay certain wider plans for disinterested relief-work before the sinister, the almost mythical Lenine. That is the last that has ever been seen of him, and no word has ever come forth directly from him out of the chaos men still call Russia. The Red Cross and the American and French Governments have done their utmost to discover his whereabouts, without avail. There are reasons for believing he is not dead, nor even a prisoner. The dictators of the soviet autocracy have been unable to find a trace of him, so they affirm; and there are reasons also for believing that this is true. As for Jimmy, you will not be surprised to learn that Jimmy had not long been content with relief-work of any kind. He was young; and he had _seen_ things--there, in the eastern districts. By midsummer of 1915 he had resigned from the "C. R. B.," had made a difficult way to Paris, via Holland and England, had enlisted in the Foreign Legion, and had succeeded in getting himself transferred to the French Flying Corps. Thus, months before we had officially abandoned our absurd neutrality, he was flying over the lines--bless him! If Jimmy never became a world-famous ace, well--there was a reason for that, too; the best of reasons. He was never assigned to a combat squadron, for no one brought home such photographs as Jimmy; taken tranquilly, methodically, at no great elevation, and often far back of the German lines. His quiet daring was the admiration of his comrades; anti-aircraft batteries had no terrors for him; his luck was proverbial, and he grew to trust it implicitly, seeming to bear a charmed life. But Susan's luck had failed her, at last. On Thanksgiving Day of 1917 she was wounded in the left thigh by a fragment of shrapnel, a painful wound whose effects were permanent. She will always walk slowly, with a slight limp, hereafter. Mona Leslie got her down as far as Paris by January 20, 1918, meaning to take her on to Mentone, where she had rented a small villa for three months of long-overdue rest and recuperation for them both. But on reaching Paris, Susan collapsed; the accumulated strain of the past years struck her down. She was taken to the comfortable little Red Cross hospital for civilians at Neuilly and put to bed. A week of dangerous exhaustion and persistent insomnia followed. I knew nothing of it directly, at the moment. I knew only that on a certain day Miss Leslie had planned to start with Susan from Dunkirk for Mentone; I was waiting eagerly for word of their safe arrival in that haven of rest and beauty; and I was scheming like a junior clerk for my first vacation, for two weeks off, perhaps even three, that I might run down to them there. But no word came. Throughout that first week in Paris, Miss Leslie in her hourly anxiety neglected to drop me a line. And then one night, as I sat vacantly on the edge of my bed in my hotel room at Evian, almost too weary to begin the tedious sequence of undressing and tumbling into it, came the second of my psychic reels, my peculiar visions; briefer, this one, than my first; but no less authentic in impression, and no less clear. III I saw, this time, the interior of a small white room, almost bare of furniture, evidently a private room in some thoroughly appointed modern hospital. The patient beneath the white coverlet of the single white-enamelled iron bed was Susan--or the wraith of Susan, so wasted was she, so still. My breath stopped: I thought it had been given me to see her at the moment of death; or already dead. Then the door of the small white room opened, and Jimmy--in his smart horizon-blue uniform with its coveted shoulder loop, the green-and-red _fouragère_ that bespoke the bravery of his entire _esquadrille_--came in, treading carefully on the balls of his feet. As he approached the bedside Susan opened her eyes--great shadows, gleamless soot-smudges in her pitifully haggard face. It seemed that she was too weak even to greet him or smile; her eyes closed again, and Jimmy bent down to her slowly and kissed her. Then Susan lifted her right hand from the coverlet--I could feel the effort it cost her--and touched Jimmy's hair. There was no strength in her to prolong the caress. The hand slipped from him to her breast.... And my vision ended. Its close found me on my knees on the tiled floor of my bedroom, as if I too had tried to go nearer, to bring myself close to her bedside, perhaps to bury my face in my hands against the white coverlet, her shroud; to weep there.... I sprang up, wildly enough now, with a harsh shudder, the terrified gasp of a brute suddenly stricken from ambush, aware only of rooted claws and a last crushing fury of deep-set fangs. Susan was dying. I knew not where. I could not reach her. But Jimmy had reached her. He had been summoned. He had not been too late. There are moments of blind anguish not to be reproduced for others. Chaos is everything--and nothing. It cannot be described. There was nothing really useful I could do that night, not even sleep. In those days, it was impossible to move anywhere on the railroads of France without the proper passes and registrations of intention with the military authorities and the local police. I could, of course, suffer--that is always a human possibility--and I could attempt, muzzily enough, to think, to make plans. Where was it most likely that Susan would be? Was the hospital room that I had seen in Dunkirk, or in Nice, or at some point between--perhaps at Paris? It could hardly, I decided, be at Dunkirk; that stricken city, whose inhabitants were forced to dive like rats into burrows at any hour of the day or night. There was nothing to suggest the atmosphere of Dunkirk in that quiet, white-enamelled room. Nice, then--or Mentone? Hardly, I again reasoned; for Jimmy could not easily have reached them there. A day's leave; a flight from the lines, so comfortlessly close to Paris--that was always possible to the air-men, who were in a sense privileged characters, being for the most part strung with taut nerves that chafed and snapped under too strict a discipline. And in Paris there must be many such quiet, white-enamelled rooms. I decided for Paris. Then I threw five or six articles and a bar of chocolate into my _musette_, a small water-proof pouch to sling over the shoulder--three years had taught me at least the needlessness of almost all Hillhouse necessities--and waited for dawn. It came, as all dawns come at last--even in January, even in France. And with it came a gulp of black coffee in the little deserted café down-stairs--and a telegram. I dared not open the telegram. It lay beside my plate while I stained the cloth before me and scalded my throat and furred my tongue. It was from Paris. So my decision was justified, and now quite worthless.... I have no memory of the interval; but I had got with it somehow back to my room--that accursed blue envelope! Well---- "Susan at Red Cross hospital for civilians, Neuilly. All in, but no cause for real worry. Is sleeping now for first time in nearly a week. I must leave by afternoon. Come up to her if you possibly can. She needs you. "JIMMY." Four hours later all my exasperatingly complicated arrangements for a two-weeks' absence were made--the requisite motions had been the purest somnambulism--and by the ample margin of fifty seconds I had caught an express--to do it that courtesy--moving with dignity, at decent intervals, toward all that I lived by and despaired of and held inviolably dear. But the irony of Jimmy's last three words went always with me, a monotonous ache blurring every impulse toward hope and joy. Susan was not dead, was not dying! "No cause for real worry." Jimmy would not have said that if he had feared the worst. It was not his way to shuffle with facts; he was by nature direct and sincere. No; Susan would recover--thank God for it! Thank--and then, under all, through all, over and over, that aching monotony: "She needs you. Jimmy. She needs you. Jimmy." "Needs me!" I groaned aloud. "_Plaît-il?_" politely murmured the harassed-looking little French captain, my vis-à-vis. "_Mille pardons, monsieur_," I murmured back. "_On a quelquefois des griefs particuliers, vous savez._" "_Ah dame, oui!_" he sighed. "_Par le temps qui court!_" "_Et ce pachyderme de train qui ne court jamais!_" I smiled. "_Ah, pour ça--ça repose!_" murmured the little French captain, and shut his eyes. "She needs you. Jimmy. She needs you. Jimmy. She needs----" Then, miraculously, for two blotted hours I slept. But I woke again, utterly unrefreshed, to the old refrain: _She needs you--needs you--needs you...._ The little French captain was still asleep, snoring now--but softly--in his corner. Ah, lucky little French captain! _Ça repose!_ IV One afternoon, five or six days later, I was seated by the white-enamelled iron bed in the small white room. Susan had had a long, quiet, normal nap, and her brisk sparrow-eyed Norman nurse, in her pretty costume of the French Red Cross, had come to me in the little reception-room of the hospital, where I had been sitting for an hour stupidly thumbing over tattered copies of ancient American magazines, and had informed me--with rather an ambiguous twinkle of those sparrow eyes--that her patient had asked to see me as soon as she had waked, was evidently feeling stronger, and that it was to be hoped _M. le Capitaine_ would be discreet and say nothing to excite or fatigue the poor little one. "_Je me sauve, m'sieu_," she had added, mischievously grave; "_on ne peut avoir l'oeil à tout, mais--je compte sur vous._" So innocently delighted had she been by her pleasant suspicions, it was impossible to let her feel how sharply her raillery had pained me. But I could not reply in kind. I had merely bowed, put down the magazine in my hand, and so left her--to inevitable reflections, I presume, upon the afflicting reticence of these otherwise so agreeable allies _d'outre mer_. Their education was evidently deplorable. One never knew when they would miss step, inconveniently, and so disarrange the entire social rhythm of a conversation. "Ambo," said Susan, putting her hand in mine, "do you know at all how terribly I've missed you?" She turned her head weakly on her pillow and looked at me. "You're older, dear. You've changed. I like your face better now than I ever did." I wrinkled my nose at her. "Is that saying much?" I grimaced. "Heaps!" She attempted to smile back at me, but her lower lip quivered. "Yours has always been my favorite face, you know, Ambo. Phil's is wiser--somehow, and stronger, too; and Jimmy's is sunnier, healthier, and--yes, handsomer, dear! Nobody could call you handsome, could they? But you're not ugly, either. Sister was adorably ugly. It was a daily miracle to see the lamp in her suddenly glow through and glorify everything. I used to wait for it. It's the only thing that has ever made me feel--humble; I never feel that way with you. I just feel satisfied, content." "Like putting on an old pair of slippers," I ventured. "That's it," sighed Susan happily, and closed her eyes. "That's it!" echoed my familiar demon, "but no one but Susan would have admitted it." As usual, I found it wiser to cut him dead. "Well, dear," I said to Susan, "there's one good thing: you'll be able to use the old pair of slippers any time you need them now. I'm to be held in Paris, I find, for a three-months' job." She opened her eyes again; disapprovingly, I felt. "You shouldn't have done that, Ambo! You're needed at Evian; I know you are. It's bad enough to be out of things myself, but I won't drag you out of them! How could you imagine that would please me?" "I hoped it would, a little," I replied, "but it hasn't any of it been my doing--Chatworth's wife's expecting a baby in a few weeks, and he wants to run home to welcome it; I'm to take on his executive work till he gets back. God knows he needs a rest!" "As if you didn't, too!" protested Susan, inconsistently enough. Her eyes fell shut again; her hands slipped from mine. "Ambo," she asked presently, in a thread of voice that I had to lean down to her to hear, "have they told you I can never have a baby now?... Wasn't it lucky if that had to happen to some woman--it happened to me?" No, they had not told me; and for the moment I could not answer her. "Jimmy's wife is going to have a baby soon," added Susan. "Jimmy's--_what_!" I shrieked. Yes, shrieked--for, to my horror, I heard my voice crack and soar, strident, incredulous. Susan was staring at me, wide-eyed, her face aquiver with excitement; two deep spots of color flaming on her thin cheeks. "Didn't you _know_?" The white door opened as she spoke, and Susan's Norman nurse hurried in, her sparrow eyes transformed to stiletto points of indignation. "_Ah, m'sieu--c'est trop fort!_ When I told you expressly to do nothing to excite the poor little one!" I rose, self-convicted, before her. "_Tais-toi, Annette!_" exclaimed Susan sharply, her eyes too gleaming with indignation. "It is not your place to speak so to m'sieu, a man old enough to be your father--and more than a father to me! For shame! His surprise was unavoidable! I have just given him a shock--unexpected news! Good news, however, I am glad to say. Now leave us!" "On the contrary," replied Nurse Annette, four feet eleven of uncompromising and awful dignity, "I am in charge here, and it is m'sieu who will leave--_tout court_! But I regret my _vivacité_, _m'sieu_!" "It is nothing, mademoiselle. You have acted as you should. It is for me to offer my regrets. But--when may I return?" "To-morrow, m'sieu," said Nurse Annette. "Naturally," said Susan. "Now sit down, please, Ambo, and listen to me." For an instant the stiletto points glinted dangerously; then Nurse Annette giggled. That is precisely what Nurse Annette did; she giggled. Then she twirled about on her toes and left us--very quietly, yet not without a certain malicious ostentation, closing the door. The French are a brave people, an intelligent and industrious people; but they exhibit at times a levity almost childlike in the descendants of so ancient and so deeply civilized a race.... "I knew nothing about it myself, Ambo," Susan was saying, "until I was beginning to feel a little stronger, after my operations at Dunkirk. Then Mona brought me letters--three from you, dear, and one long one from Jimmy. But no letter from Phil. I'd hoped, foolishly I suppose, for that. Jimmy's was the dearest, funniest letter I've ever read; it made me laugh and cry all at once. It wasn't a bit good for me, Ambo. It used me all up! And I kept wondering what you must be thinking. You see, he said in it he had written you." "I've had no letter from Jimmy for at least five or six months," I replied. "So many letters start bravely off over here," sighed Susan, "and then just vanish--like Phil. How many heartbreaks they must have caused, all those vanished letters--and men. And how silly of me to think about it! There must be some fatal connection, Ambo, between being sick and being sentimental. I suppose sentimentality's always one symptom of weakness. I've never been so disgustingly maudlin as these past weeks--never!" "So Jimmy's married," I repeated stupidly, for at least the third time. "Yes," smiled Susan, "to little Jeanne-Marie Valérie Josephine Aulard. I haven't seen her, of course, but I feel as if I knew her well. They've been married now almost a year." She paused again. "Why don't you look gladder, Ambo? Why don't you ask questions? You must be dying to know why Jimmy kept it a secret from us so long." I had not dared to ask questions, for I believed I could guess why Jimmy had kept it a secret from us so long. For the first time in his life, I thought, Jimmy had been a craven. He had been afraid to tell Susan of an event which he must know would be like a knife in her heart. "I suppose I'm foolishly hurt about it," I mumbled. How bravely she was taking it all, in spite of her physical exhaustion! Poor child, poor child! But in God's name what then was the meaning of my vision back there in the hotel room at Evian? Jimmy entering this room where I now sat, tiptoeing to this very bedside, stooping down and kissing Susan--and her hand lifted, overcoming an almost mortal weakness, to touch his hair.... "You mustn't be hurt at all," Susan gently rebuked me. "Jimmy kept his marriage a secret from us for a very Jimmyesque reason. There was nothing specially exciting or romantic about the courtship itself, though. Little Jeanne-Marie's father--he was a notary of Soissons who had made a nice, comfy little fortune for those parts--died just before the war. So the Widow Aulard retired with Jeanne-Marie to a brand-spandy-new, very ugly little country house--south of the Aisne, Ambo, not far from Soissons; the canny old notary had just completed it as a haven for his declining years when he up and died. Well then, during the first German rush, Widow Aulard--being a good extra-stubborn _bourgeoise_--refused to leave her home--refused, Jeanne-Marie told Jimmy, even to believe the Boches would ever really be permitted to come so far. That was foolish, of course--but doesn't it make you like her, and _see_ her--mustache and all? "But the deluge was too much, even for her. One morning, after a night of terror, she found herself compulsory housekeeper, and little Jeanne-Marie compulsory servant, to a kennel of Bavarian officers. Then, three weeks or so later, the orderly of one of these officers, an Alsatian, was discovered to be a spy and was shot--and the Widow Aulard was shot, too, for having unwittingly harbored him. Jeanne-Marie wasn't shot, though; the kennel liked her cooking. So, like the true daughter of a French notary, she used her wits, made herself indispensable to the comfort of the officers, preserved her dignity under incredible insults, and her virtue under conditions I needn't tell you about, Ambo--and bided her time. "It nearly killed her; but she lived through it, and finally the French returned and helped her patch up and clean up what was left of the kennel. And a month or so later Jimmy's _esquadrille_ made Jeanne-Marie's battered little house their headquarters and treated its mistress like the staunch little heroine she is. Of course, Jimmy wasn't attached to the _esquadrille_ then; it was more than a year later that he arrived on the scene; but it didn't take him long after getting there to decide on an international alliance. Bless him! he says Jeanne-Marie isn't very pretty, he guesses; she's just--wonderful! She couldn't make up her mind to the international alliance, though. She loved Jimmy, but the match didn't strike her as prudent. An orphan must consider these things. Her property had been swept away, and Jimmy admitted he had nothing. And being her father's daughter, Jeanne-Marie very wisely pointed out that he was in hourly peril of being killed or crippled for life. To marry under such circumstances would be to make her father turn in his grave. How can anything so sad be so funny, Ambo? Well, anyway, Jimmy, being Jimmy, saw the point, agreed with her completely, and seems to have felt thoroughly ashamed of himself for trying to persuade her into so crazy a match! "Then little Jeanne-Marie came down with typhoid; her life was despaired of, a priest was summoned. In the presence of death, she managed to tell the priest that it would seem less lonely and terrible to her if she could meet it as the wife 'M'sieu Jee-mee.' So the good priest managed somehow to slash through yards of official red tape in no time--you know how hard it is to get married in France, Ambo!--and the sacrament of marriage preceded the last rites; and then, dear, Jeanne-Marie faced the Valley of Shadow clinging to M'sieu Jee-mee's hand. The whole _esquadrille_ was unstrung--naturally; even their famous ace, Boisrobert. Jimmy says he absolutely refused to fly for three days." Tears were pouring from Susan's eyes. "Oh, what a fool I am!" she protested, mopping at them with a corner of the top sheet. "She didn't die, of course. She rallied at the last moment and got well--and found herself safely married after all, and quite ready to take her chances of living happily with M'sieu Jee-mee ever afterward! There--isn't that a nice story, Ambo? Don't you like pretty-pie fairy tales when they happen to be true?" That she could ask me this with her heart breaking! Again I could not trust myself to speak calmly, and I saw that she was worn out with the effort she had made to overcome her weakness, and what I believed to be a living pain in her breast. I rose. "Ambo!" she exclaimed, wide-eyed, "still you don't ask me why Jimmy didn't tell us! How stupid of you to take it all like this!" "I've stayed too long, dear," I mumbled; "far too long. I've let you talk too much. Why, it's almost dark! To-morrow----" "No, _now_," she insisted, with a little frown of displeasure. "I won't have you thinking meanly of Jimmy! It's too absurdly unfair! I'm ashamed of you, Ambo." How she idealized him! How she had always idealized that normal, likable, essentially commonplace Irish boy--pouring out, wasting for him treasures of unswerving loyalty! It was damnable. But these things were the final mysteries of life, these instinctive bonds, yielding no clue to reason. One could only accept them, bitterly, with a curse or a groan withheld. Accept them--since one must.... "Well, dear," broke from me with a touch, almost, of impatience, "I confess I'm more interested in your health than in Jimmy's psychology! But I see you won't sleep a wink if you don't tell me!" "I've never known you to be so horrid," she said faintly, all the weariness of body and soul returning upon her for a moment, till she fought it back. She did so, to my amazement, with an entirely unexpected chuckle, a true sharp, clear Birch Street gleam. "You don't deserve it, Ambo, but I'm going to make you smile a little, whether you feel like it or not! The reason Jimmy didn't tell us was because--after Jeanne-Marie got well--he spent weeks trying to persuade her that a marriage made exclusively for eternity oughtn't to be considered binding on this side! She had been entirely certain, he kept pointing out to her, that she ought not to marry him in this world, and she had only done so when she thought she was being taken from it." Susan chuckled again. "Can't you hear him, Ambo--and her? Jimmy, feeling he had won something precious through an unfair advantage and so refusing his good fortune--or trying to; and practical Jeanne-Marie simply nonplussed by his sudden lack of all common sense! Besides which, wasn't marriage a sacrament, and wasn't M'sieu Jee-mee a good Catholic? Was he going back on his faith--or asking her to trifle with hers? And, anyway, they were married--that was the end of it! And of course, Ambo, it was--really. There! I knew sooner or later you'd have to smile!" "Did he give in gracefully?" I asked. "Oh, things soon settled themselves, I imagine, when Jeanne-Marie was well enough to leave. Naturally, she had to as soon as she could. A soldier's wife can't live with him at the Front, you know--even to keep house for his _esquadrille_. She's living here now, in Paris, with a distant cousin, an old lady who runs a tiny shop near St.-Sulpice--sells pious pamphlets and pink-and-blue plaster Virgins--you know the sort of thing, Ambo. You must call on her at once in due form, dear. You must. I'm so eager to--when I can." She paused on a breath, then added slowly, her eyes closing, "The baby's expected in February--Jimmy's baby." The look on her face had puzzled me as I left her; a look of quiet happiness, I must have said--if I had not known. And my vision at Evian----? I walked back toward the barrier down endless darkening avenues of suburban Neuilly; walked by instinct, though quite unconscious of direction, straight to the Porte Maillot, through the emotional nightmare of what my old childhood nurse, Maggie, used always to call "a great state of mind." V And that night--it was, I think, the thirtieth of January, or was it the thirty-first?--fifty or sixty Boche aëroplanes came by detached squadrons over Paris and, for the first time since the Zeppelins of 1916, dropped a shower of bombs on the _agglomération Parisienne_. It was an entirely successful raid, destructive of property and life; for the German flyers in their powerful Gothas had caught Paris napping, impotently unprepared. I had dined that evening with an old acquaintance, doing six-months' time, as it amused him to put it, with the purchasing department of the Red Cross; a man who had long since turned the silver spoon he was born with to solid gold, and who could see no reason why, just because for the first time in his life he was giving something for nothing, he should deprive himself while doing so of the very high degree of creature comfort he had always enjoyed. He was stationed in Paris, and it was his invariable custom to dine sumptuously at one of the more expensive restaurants. This odd combination of service and sybaritism was not much to my liking, seeming to indicate a curious lack of imaginative sympathy with the victims of that triumphing Misery he was enlisted to combat; nevertheless, I had properly appreciated my dinner. It is impossible not to appreciate a well-ordered dinner, _chez_ Durant, where wartime limitations seemed never to weigh very heavily upon the delicately imagined good cheer. True, the cost of this good cheer was fantastic, and I shuddered a little as certain memories of refugee hordes at Evian intruded themselves between our golden mouthfuls; but the bouquet of a fine mellowed Burgundy was in my nostrils and soon proved anæsthetic to conscience. And Arthur Dalton is a good table companion; his easy flow of conversation quite as mellow often as the wine he knows so well how to select. But that night, though I did my poor best to emulate him, I fear he did not find an equal combination of the soothing and the stimulating in me. Perhaps it was because I had bored him that I was destined before we parted to catch a rather startling glimpse of a new Arthur Dalton, new at least to me; a person wholly different from the amusing man of the world I had long, but so casually, known. "Hunt," he said unexpectedly, over a final glass of old yellow Chartreuse, a liquor almost unobtainable at any price, "you've changed a lot since our days here together." We had seen something of each other once in Paris, years before, during a fine month of spring weather; it was the year after my wife had left me. "A lot," he repeated; "and I wish I could say for the better. You've aged, man, before you're old. You've let life, somehow, get on your nerves, depress you. Suffered your genial spirits to rot, as the poet says. That's foolish. It's a kind of defeat--acceptance of defeat. Now my philosophy is always to stay on top--where the cream lies. Somebody's going to get it if you and I don't, eh? Well, I'm having my share. I don't want more and I'm damned if I'll take less. Anything wrong with that point of view, old man? I'd be willing to swear it used to be yours!" "Never quite, I think," was my answer; "at least I never formulated it that way. I took things pretty easily as they came, Dalt, and didn't worry about reasons. I've never been a philosophical person, never lived up to any consciously organized plan. If I had any God in those days I suppose I named him 'Culture'; or worse still 'Good Taste.' Not much of a god for these times," I added. "Oh, I don't know," Dalton struck in; "I'm not so sure of that! I can't see that these times differ much from any others. There's a big war on, yes; but that's nothing new, is it? Looks to me pretty much like the same old planet, right now. Never was much of a planet for the great majority; never will be. A few of us get all the prizes--always have. Some of us partly deserve 'em, but most of us just happen to be lucky. I don't see anything that's likely to change that arrangement. Do you?" "They've changed it in Russia," I suggested. "Not a bit!" exclaimed Dalton. "Some different people have taken their big chance and climbed on top, that's all! I doubt if they stay there long; still, they may. That fellow Lenine, now; he has a kind of well-up-in-the-saddle feel to him. Quite a boy, I've no doubt; and if he sticks, I congratulate him! It's the one really amusing place to be." "You sound like a Junker war-lord," I smiled. "Fortunately, I know your bark, and I've never seen you bite." "My dear Hunt," said Dalton, lowering his voice, "my teeth are perfectly sound, I assure you; and I've always used 'em when I had to, believe _me_. It's the law of life, as I read it. And just here between ourselves, eh--cutting out all the nonsense we've learned to babble--do you see any difference between a Junker war-lord and a British Tory peer--or an American capitalist? Any real difference, I mean? I'm all for licking Germany if we can, because if we don't she'll control the cream supply of the world. But I can't blame her for wanting to, and if she gets away with it--which the devil forbid!--we'll all mighty soon forget all the nasty things we've been saying about her and begin trying to lick her Prussian boots instead of her armies! That's so, and you know it! Why, the most sickening thing about this war, Hunt, isn't the loss of life--that may be a benefit to us all in the end; no sir, it's the moral buncombe it's let loose! That man Wilson simply sweats the stuff day and night, drenches us with it--till we stink like a church of Easter lilies. Come now! Doesn't it all, way down in your tummy somewhere, give you a good honest griping pain?" I stared at him. Yes; the man was evidently in earnest; was even, I could see, expecting me to smile--however deprecatingly, for form's sake--and in the main agree with him, as became my situation in life; my class. I had supposed myself incapable of moral shock, but found now that the sincerity of his cynicism had unquestionably shocked me; I felt suddenly embarrassed, awkward, ashamed. "Dalt," I finally managed, pretty lamely, "it's absurd, I admit; but if I try to answer you, I shall lose my temper. I mean it. And as I've dined wonderfully at your expense, that's something I don't care to do." It was his turn to stare at me. "Do you mean to say, Hunt, you've been caught by all this sentimental parson's palaver? Brotherhood, peace on earth, all the rest of it?" My nerves snapped. "If you insist on a straight answer," I said, "you can have it: I've no use for a world that spiritually starves its poets and saints, and physically fattens its hyenas and hogs! And if that isn't sentimental enough for you, I can go farther!" "Oh, that'll do," he laughed, uncomfortably however. "I'm always forgetting you're a scribbler, of sorts. You scribblers are all alike--emotionally diseased. If you'd only stick to your real job of amusing the rest of us, it wouldn't matter. It's when you try to reform us that I draw the line; have to. I can't afford to grow brainsick--abnormal. Well," he added, pushing back his chair, "come along anyway! We've just time to get over to the Casino and have a look at the only Gaby. Been there? It's a cheap show, after Broadway, but it does well enough to pass the time." From this unalluring suggestion I begged off, justly pleading a hard day of work ahead. "And if you don't mind, Dalt, I'll walk home." "Oh, all right," he agreed; "I'll walk along with you, if you'll take it easy. I'm not much for exercise, you know. But it's a perfect night." I had hoped ardently to be rid of him, but I managed to accept his company with apparent good grace, and we strolled down the Avenue Victor Hugo toward the Triumphal Arch, bathed now in clearest moonlight, standing forth to all Paris as a cruelly ironic symbol of Hope, never relinquished, but endlessly deferred. Turning there, the Champs-Élysées, all but deserted at that hour in wartime Paris, stretched on before us down a gentle slope, half dusky, half glimmering, and wholly silent except for our lonesome-sounding footfalls and the distant faint plopping of a lame cab-horse's stumbling heels. "Not much like the old town we knew once, eh, Hunt?" asked Dalton. But conversation soon faded out between us, as we made our way through etched mysteries of black and silver under thickset leafless branches. An occasional light beckoned us from far ahead down our pavement vista; for Paris had not yet fully become that city--not of dreadful--but of majestic and beautiful night we were later to know, and to love with so changed and grave a passion. It was just after we had crossed the Rond-Point that the first seven or eight bombs in swift even succession shatteringly fell. They were not near enough to us to do more than root us to the spot with amazement. "What the _hell_?" muttered Dalton, holding my eyes.... Then, very far off, a curious thin wailing noise began, increasing rapidly, rising to an eerie scream which doubled and redoubled in volume as it was taken up in other quarters and came to us in intricately rhythmic waves. "Sirens," said Dalton. "The _pompiers_ are out. I guess they've come, damn them, eh?" "Seems so," I answered. "Yes; there go the lights. I must get to Neuilly at once--a sick friend. So long, old man." "Hold on!" he called after me. "Don't be an ass!" To my impatient annoyance, for they impeded my progress, knots of people had sprung everywhere from the darkness and were standing now in open spots, in the full moonlight, murmuring together, as they stared with backward-craned necks up into the spotless sky.... So, with crashing, sinister, unresolved chords, began the Straussian overture to the great Boche symphony, _Gott Strafe Paris_, played to its impotent conclusion throughout those bitter spring months of the year of our wonderment, 1918! Ninety-one bombs were dropped that night within the old fortifications; more than two hundred were showered on the _banlieue_. No subsequent raid was to prove equally destructive of property or life, and it was disturbingly evident that, for the time being at least, the shadowy air lanes to Paris lay broadly open to the foe. Yet, for some reason unexplained, the Gothas did not immediately or soon return. Followed a hush of rather more than a month, during which Paris worked breathlessly to improve its air defenses and protect its more precious monuments. Comically ugly little sausage-balloons--gorged caterpillars, they seemed, raw yellow with pale green articulations and loathsome, floppy appendages--were moored in the squares and public gardens; mountains of sand bags were heaped about the Triumphal Arch and before the portals of Notre Dame; spies were hunted out, proclamations issued, the entrance ways to deep cellars were placarded; and Night, that long-exiled princess, came back to us, royally, in full mourning robes. In her honor all windows were doubly curtained, all street lamps extinguished, or dimmed with paint to a heavy blue. We invoked the august amplitude of darkness and would gladly have banished the trivial prying moon, seeing her at last in true colors for the sinister corpse light of heaven which she is. No one, I think, was deceived by this lengthening interval of calm. Why the Gothas did not at once return, what restrained them from following up their easy triumph, we could not guess; but we knew they would come again, would come many times.... Meanwhile, for most of us who dwelt there, life went on as before, busily enough; but for one of us--as for how many another--this no longer mattered. Brave little Jeanne-Marie Valérie Josephine Aulard, on that night of anguish, died in giving premature birth to Jimmy's son, James Aulard Kane--as Susan later named him: for this wizened, unready morsel of man's flesh, in spite of every disadvantage attending his début and first motherless weeks on earth, clung with the characteristic tenacity of his parents to his one obvious line of duty, which was merely to keep alive in despite of fortune: a duty he somehow finally accomplished to his own entire satisfaction and to the blessed relief of Susan and of me. But I shall never forget my first pitiful introduction to James Aulard Kane. After leaving Dalton, that night, I had finally made my way to Susan's hospital on foot, which I had soon found to be the one practicable means of locomotion. It was a long walk, and it brought me in due course into the Avenue de la Grande Armée, just in time to receive the full stampeding effect of the three bombs which fell there, the nearest of them not four hundred yards distant from me. I am by no means instinctively intrepid; quite the contrary; I shy like a skittish horse in the presence of danger, and my first authentic impulse is always to cut and run. On this occasion, by the time I had mastered this impulse, I had placed a good six hundred yards between me and that ill-fated building, whose stone-faced upper floors had been riven and hurled down to the broad avenue below. Then, shamefacedly enough, I turned and forced myself back toward that smoking ruin. Our American ambulances from Neuilly were already arriving--the _pompiers_ came later--and the police lines were being drawn. A civilian spectator, even though a captain of the Red Cross, could render no real assistance; so much, after certain futile efforts on my part, was made clear to me, profanely, in a Middle Western accent, by a young stretcher-bearer whose course I had clumsily impeded. Clouds of lung-choking dust, milk-white as the moon's full rays played upon them, rolled over us--the subdued crowd that gathered slowly, oblivious of further danger. The air was full of whispered rumor--throughout Paris hundreds--thousands, said some--had already died. We were keyed to believe the wildest exaggerations, to accept the worst that excited imaginations could invent for us. Yet there was no panic; no one gave way to hysterical outcry; and the fall of more distant bombs brought only a deep common groan, compounded of growling imprecations--a groan truly of defiance and loathing, into which neither fear nor pity for the victims of this frightfulness could find room to enter. I cursed with the rest, instinctively, from the pit of my stomach, and turned raging away; my whole being ached, was congested with rage. For the first time in my life I then felt in its full hell-born fury that passion so often named, but so seldom experienced by civilized--or what we call civilized--man: the passion of _hate_. By the time I had reached the hospital the raid was over; the air was droning from the bronze vibrations of hundreds of bells, all the church-bells of Paris, full-throated, calling forth their immediate surface messages of cheer, their deeper message of courage and constancy. Though it was very late, I found a silent group of four nurses standing in the heavily shadowed street before the shut doors of this small civilian hospital; they were still staring up fixedly at the silver-bright sky. They proved to be day-nurses off duty, and among them was Mademoiselle Annette. She greeted me now as an old friend, and brushing rules and regulations aside like a true Frenchwoman took me at once to Susan. I found that Susan had risen from bed and was seated at her window, which looked out across the winter-bare hospital garden. "Ambo," she exclaimed impatiently, "why did you come here! I'm so used to all this. But Jeanne-Marie, Ambo--in her condition! I've been hoping so you would think of her--go to her!" Then what fatuous devil--was it my old familiar demon?--put it into my heart to say: "So you haven't been worrying, dear, about me?" "About you!" she cried. "Good God, no! What does it matter about you--or me! This generation's done for, Ambo. Only the children count now--the children. We must save them--all of them--somehow. It's up to them--to Jimmy's son with the rest! They've got to wipe us out, clear the slate of us and all our insanities! They've got to pass over the wreck of us and rebuild a happy, intelligible world!" She rose, seized my arm, and summoning all her strength thrust me from her toward the door.... VI It was well on toward three o'clock in the morning when at last I stood before the black, close-shuttered shop-front of the Vve. Guyot. I was desperately weary, having of necessity walked all the way. It was, as I had fully realized while almost stumbling along toward my goal, a crazy errand. I should find a dark, silent house, and I should then stumble back through dark, silent streets to my dark, silent hotel. The shop of the Widow Guyot was a very little shop on a very narrow street, a mere slit between high, ancient buildings--a slit filled now with the dense river-mist that shrouds from the experience of Parisians all the renewing wonders of clear-eyed dawn. The moon had set, or else hung too veiled and low for this pestilent alley; in spite of a thick military overcoat I shivered with cold; the flat, sour smell of ill-flushed gutters caught at my throat. To this abomination of desolation I had, with no little difficulty, found my way. Thank God I could turn now, with a good conscience, and fumble back to the warm oblivion of bed. I paused a moment, however, to draw up the collar of my overcoat to my ears and fasten it securely; and, doing so, I was aware of the scrape and clink of metal on metal; then the shop-door right before me was shaken and jarred open from within. The fluttering rays of a candle, tremulously held, surprised and for an instant blinded me; faintly luminous green and red balloons wheeled swiftly in contracting circles, then coalesced to a flickering point of light. The candle was held by an old, stout woman with a loose-jowled, bruised-looking face; a face somehow sensual and hard in spite of its bloated antiquity. A shrunken, thin-bearded man in a long black coat stood beside her, holding a black hand-bag. The two were conversing in tones deliberately muted, but broke off and stared outward as the candle-light discovered me in the narrow street. "Ah, M'sieu, one sees, is American; he has perhaps lost his way?" piped the thin-bearded man, pretty sharply. He, too, was old. "But no," I replied; "I am here precisely on behalf of my friend, Lieutenant Kane." At this name the old woman began, only to check, a half-startled squawk, lifting her candle as she did so and peering more intently at me. "At this hour, m'sieu?" she demanded huskily. "What could bring you at such an hour?" "Do I address the Widow Guyot?" I was quick to respond. "_Oui, m'sieu._" "Then, permit me to explain." As briefly as possible I told her who I was; that I had but very recently learned of the presence of Jimmy's wife in Paris, with a relative--learned that she was awaiting the birth of her first child at the house of this excellent woman. "It was my intention to call soon, madame, in any case, and make myself known--feeling there might prove to be many little services a friend would be only too happy to render. But, after this terrible raid, I found it impossible to retire with an easy mind--at least, until I had assured myself that all was well with you here." On this there came a pause, and the thin-bearded man cleared his throat diligently several times. "The truth is, m'sieu," he finally hazarded, "that your apprehension was only too just. You arrive at a house of mourning, m'sieu. You arrive, as I did, alas--too late! This poor Madame Kane you would inquire for is dead. The child, on the contrary, still lives." "Enter, m'sieu," said the Widow Guyot. "We can discuss these things more commodiously within. Doubtless, otherwise, we shall receive attentions from the police; they are nervous to-night. Naturally." She seemed, I thought--in the utter blank depression which had seized me with the doctor's words--offensively calm. Whether, had a doctor been more quickly obtainable, or a more skillful practitioner at last obtained, little Jeanne-Marie's life might have been spared, I am unable to say. I feel certain, however, that the Widow Guyot--under difficult, not to say terrifying circumstances--had kept a cool head, done her best. I exonerate her from all blame. But I add this: Never in my life have I met elsewhere a woman who seemed to me to possess such cold-blooded possibilities for evil. Yet, so far as I know to this hour, her life has always been and now continues industrious and thrifty; harmless before the law. I have absolutely "nothing on her"--nothing but an impression I shall never be rid of, which even now returns to chill me in nights of insomnia: a sense of having met in life one woman whose eyes may now and then have watered from dust or wind, but could never under any circumstances conceivably human have known tears. Other women, too many of them, have bored or exasperated me with maudlin or trivial tears; but never before or since have I met a woman who _could_ not weep. It is a fixed idea with me that the Widow Guyot could not; and the idea haunts and troubles me strangely--though why it should, I am too casual a psychologist even to guess. At her heels, I crossed a small cluttered shop, following the tremulous flame of the candle through a fantastic shadow dance; Doctor Pollain--who had given me his name with the deprecating cough of one who knows himself either unpleasantly notorious or hopelessly obscure--shuffled behind us. Madame Guyot opened an inner door. Light from the room beyond tempered a little the vagueness about me and ghostily revealed a huddle of ecclesiastical trumpery--rows of thin, pale-yellow tapers; small crucifixes of plaster or base-metal gilded; a stand of picture post-cards; a table littered with lesser gimcracks. The direct rays from Madame Guyot's candle, as she turned a moment in the doorway, wanly illuminated the blue-coiffed, vapid face of a bisque Virgin; gave for that instant a half-flicker, as of just-stirring life, to her mannered, meaningless smile. The room beyond proved to be a good-sized bedroom, its one window muffled by heavy stuff-curtains of a dull magenta red. A choking, composite odor--I detected the sick pungency of chloroform--emerged from it. I plunged to enter, and for a second instinctively held my breath. On the great walnut double-bed lay a still figure covered with a sheet; the proper candles twinkled at head and foot. But it is needless to describe these things.... It was in a smaller room beyond, a combined living-and-dining room, stodgily ugly, but comfortable enough as well, that I first made the acquaintance of James Aulard Kane. What I saw was a great roll of blankets in a deep boxlike cradle, and in the depths of a deeply dented feather pillow a tiny, wrinkled monkey-face, a miniature grotesque. The small knife-slit that served him for mouth opened and shut slowly and continuously, as if feebly gasping for difficult breath. He gave not even one faint encouraging cry. I turned to Doctor Pollain, shaking my head. "But no!" he exclaimed. "For an eight-months child, look you--he has vigor! I am sure he will live." "Then, for his father's sake," I replied, "we must take no chances! Isn't there a maternity hospital in the neighborhood where he can receive the close attention that you, madame, at your age, with your responsibilities, ought not to be expected to give? I make myself fully responsible for any and all charges involved. Understand me, madame, and you, M. le Médecin, I insist that no stone shall be left unturned!" These words produced, at once a grateful change in the atmosphere--hitherto, I had felt, ever so slightly hostile. It is unnecessary to follow our further negotiations to their entirely amicable close. Half an hour later I left the shop of the Widow Guyot, satisfied that Doctor Pollain would assist her to make all needful arrangements, and promising to get into communication as soon as it could be managed with "M. Jee-mee." I should return, I told them, certainly, before noon. But for Jimmy's sake, on leaving, I raised a corner of the sheet covering the face of Jeanne-Marie. It was a peaceful face. If she had lately suffered, death now had quietly smoothed from her all but a lasting restfulness. A good little woman, I mused, of the best type provincial France offers; sensible, yet ardent; practical, yet kind. As I looked down at her, the meaningless smile of the bisque Madonna in the shop without returned to me, simpered for a half-second before me.... The symbols men made--and sold--commercial symbols! The Mother of Sorrows, a Chinese toy! Well.... "One thing troubles me," said the Widow Guyot at my elbow, in her husky, passionless voice: "She did not receive the last rites, m'sieu. When the bad turn came, it was not possible for us to leave her. You will understand that. There was a new life, was there not? Assuredly, though, I am troubled; I regret that this should have happened to _me_. It will be a great cause for scandal, m'sieu--when you consider my connections--the nature of my little affairs. But, name of God, that will pass; one explains these things with a certain success, and my age favors me. I bear, God be praised, a good name; and in the proper quarters, m'sieu. But--the poor little one! Observe m'sieu, that she clasps a crucifix on her breast. Be so good as to remember that I placed it in her hands--an instant before she died." VII It is an artistic fault in real life that it deals so frequently in coincidence, to the casting of suspicion upon those who report it veraciously. On the very night that Jeanne-Marie died, probably within the very hour that she died, Jimmy was shot down, while taking part in a bombing expedition; the plane he was conducting was seen, by crews of the two other bombing-planes in the formation, to burst into flames after a direct hit from an anti-aircraft battery, which had been firing persistently, though necessarily at haphazard, up toward the bumble-bee hum of French motors--so betrayingly unlike the irregular guttural growl of the German machines. Throughout the following morning I had been attempting, with the indispensable aid of my old friend, Colonel ----, of the French war office, to get into telegraphic communication with the commander of Jimmy's _esquadrille_; but it was noon, or very nearly, before this unexpected word came to us. And when it came, I found myself unable to believe it. In the very spirit of Assessor Brack, "Things don't happen like that!" I kept insisting. "It's too improbable. I must wait for further verification. We shall see, colonel, there's been an error in names; some mistake." I was stubborn about it. Simply, for Susan's sake, I could not admit the possibility that Jimmy was dead. During the midday pause I hurriedly made my way to the Widow Guyot's little shop. The baby had already been taken to the Hospice de la Maternité--the old Convent of Port Royal, near the cemetery of Montparnasse. He had stood the trip well, Madame Guyot assured me, and would undoubtedly win through to a ripe old age. A priest was present. I told Madame Guyot to arrange with him for a proper funeral and interment for Jeanne-Marie, and was at once informed that the skilled assistants of a local director of _pompes funébres_ were even then at work, embalming her mortal remains. "So much, at least, m'sieu," said Madame Guyot, "I knew her husband would desire; and I relied on your suggestion that no expense need be spared. I have stipulated for a funeral of the first class"--a specific thing in France; so many carriages with black horses, so many plumes of such a quality, and so on--"it only remains to acquire a site for the poor little one's grave. This, too, M'sieu le Capitaine, you may safely leave to my discretion; but we must together fix on a day and hour for the ceremonies. Is it yet known when this poor Lieutenant Kane will arrive in Paris?" No, it was not yet known; I should be able to inform her, I hazarded, before nightfall; and I thanked her for the pains she was taking, and again assured her that the financial question was of no importance. As I said this, the priest, a dry wisp of manhood, softly drew nearer and slightly moistened his thin-set lips; but he did not speak. Possibly Madame Guyot spoke for him. "At such times, m'sieu," she replied, "one does what one can. But naturally--that is understood. One is not an only relative for nothing, m'sieu. The heart speaks. True, I have hitherto been put to certain expenses for which the poor little one had promised to reimburse me----" I hastened to assure her that she had only to present this account to me in full, and we parted with mutual though secret contempt, and with every sanctified expression of esteem. Then I returned to the cabinet of my friend, Colonel ----. By three o'clock in the afternoon a brief telegram from Jimmy's commander was brought to us; it removed every possibility of doubt, even from my obdurate mind. Jimmy had "gone West" once for all, and this time "West" was not even a geographical expression.... I sat silent for perhaps five slowly passing minutes in the presence of Colonel ----, until I was aware of a somewhat amazed scrutiny from tired, heavily pouched blue eyes. "You feel this deeply," he observed, "and I--I feel nothing, except a vague sympathy for you, _mon ami_. Accept, without phrases, I beg you, all that a sad old man has left to give." I rose, thanked him warmly for the trouble he had taken on my behalf, and left him to his endless, disheartening labors. France was in danger; he knew that France was in danger. What to him, in those days, was one young life more or less? He himself had lost three sons in the war.... But how was I to let fall this one blow more, this heaviest blow of all, upon Susan? It was that which had held me silent in my chair, inhibiting all will to rise and begin the next needful step. Yes, it was that; I was thinking of Susan, not of Jimmy. For me in those days, I fear, the world consisted of Susan, and of certain negligible phantoms--the remainder of the human race. It is not an _état d'âme_ that Susan admires, or that I much admire; but in those days it was certainly mine. And this is the worst of a lonely passion: the more one loves in secret, without fulfillment--and however unselfishly--the more one excludes. Life contracts to a vivid, hypnotizing point; all else is shadow. In the name of our common humanity, there is a good deal to be said for those who are fickle or frankly pagan, who love more lightly, and more easily forget. But enough of all this! Phil with his steady wisdom might philosophize it to some purpose; not I. In my uncertainty of mind, then, the first step that I took was an absurdly false one. There was just one thing for me to do, and I did not do it. I should have gone straight to Susan and told her about Jimmy and Jeanne-Marie; above all, about James Aulard Kane. Even if Susan, as I then supposed, loved Jimmy, and had always loved him--knowing her as I did, loving her as I did, I should have felt instinctively that this was the one wise and kind, the one possible thing to do. Yet a sudden weakness, born of innate cowardice, betrayed me. I went, instead, direct to the Hotel Crillon and sent up my card to Miss Leslie; it struck me as fortunate that I found her just returned to her rooms from a visit to Susan. It was really a calamity. I had seen her several times there, at the hospital; I liked her; and I knew that Susan had now no more devoted friend. She received me cordially, and I at once laid all the facts before her and--with an entirely sincere humbleness--asked her advice. But God, in the infinite variety of his creations, had never intended Mona Leslie to shine by reason of insight or common sense; she had other qualities! And this, too, I should easily have discerned. Why I did not, can only be explained by a sort of prostration of all my faculties, which had come upon me with the events of the night and morning just past. I was inert, body and soul; I could not think; I felt like a child in the sweep of dark forces it cannot struggle against and does not understand; in effect, I was for the time being a stricken, credulous child. Perhaps no grown man, not definitely insane, has ever touched a lower stratum of spiritual debility than I then sank to--resting there, grateful, fatuously content, as if on firm ground. In short, I was a plain and self-damned fool. It seemed to me, I remember, during our hour's talk together, that Miss Leslie was one of the two or three wisest, most understanding, and sympathetic persons I had ever met. Sympathetic, she genuinely was; very gracious and interestingly melancholy, in her Belgian nurse's costume, with King Albert's decoration pinned to her breast. It seemed to me that she divined my thoughts before I uttered them; as perhaps she did--for to call them thoughts is to dignify vague sensations with a misleading name. Miss Leslie had had always, I am now aware, an instinctive response for vague sensations; she had always vibrated to them like a harp, thus surrounding herself with an odd, whispering music. A strange woman; not without nobility and force when the appropriate vague sensations played upon her. The sufferings of war had already wrung from her a wild, æolian masterpiece, more moving perhaps than a consciously ordered symphony. And Susan, though she had never so much as guessed at Susan, was one of her passions! Susan played on us both that day: though the mawkish music we made would have disgusted her--did disgust her in its final effects, as it has finally disgusted me. What these effects were can be briefly told, but not briefly enough to comfort me. There is no second page of this record I should be so happy not to write. Miss Leslie had long suspected, she told me, that Susan--like Viola's hypothetical sister--was pining in thought for a secret, unkind lover, and she at once accepted as a certainty my suggestion that so gallant a young aviator as Jimmy had been what "glorious Jane" always calls her "object." "This must be kept from her, Mr. Hunt, at all costs--for the next few weeks, I mean! She's simply not strong enough yet, not poised enough, to bear it--with all the rest! It would be cruelty to tell her now, and might prove murderous. Oh, believe me, Mr. Hunt--I _know_!" Her cocksure intensity could not fail to impress me in my present state of deadness; I listened as if to oracles. Then we conspired together. "My lease of the villa at Mentone runs on till May," said Miss Leslie. "Susan's physically able for the journey now, I think; we must take that risk anyway. I'll get the doctors to order her down there with me, at once. She needs the change, the peace; above all--the _beauty_ of it. She's starved for beauty, poor soul! And there's the possibility of further raids, too; she mustn't in her condition be exposed to that. When she's stronger, Mr. Hunt--after she's had a few happy weeks--then I'll tell her everything, in my own way. Women can do these things, you know; they have an instinct for the right moment, the right words." "You are proving that now," I said. Every word she had spoken was balm to me. Everything could be put off--put off.... To put things off indefinitely, hide them out of sight, dodge them somehow! Why, she was voicing the one weary cry of my soul! And so, within three days, this supreme folly was accomplished. Mona Leslie and I stole across the river in secret to little Jeanne-Marie's meagerly attended "funeral of the first class," and with Madame Guyot, Doctor Pollain, and a few casual neighbors, we followed her coffin from the vast drafty dreariness of St. Sulpice to the wintry, crowded alleys of the cemetery of Montparnasse.--That very evening Susan left with Miss Leslie for Mentone. She was glad enough to go, she said, for a week or two. "But Ambo--what shall I say to Jimmy? Will he ever forgive me for not having been able to make friends, first, with Jeanne-Marie? And it's all your fault, dear; you must tell him that--say you've been downright cross with me about it. I wish now I hadn't listened to you; I feel perfectly well to-night; I've no business to be starting on a holiday. But I shan't stay long, Ambo. I'll be back in Paris before little Jimmy arrives; I promise you that. And here's a letter to post, dear; I've said so in it to Jeanne-Marie." * * * * * A dark train drew out of a dark station. With it went Hope, the shadow, silently, from my heart.... VIII The days passed. Mentone, Miss Leslie wrote me, was doing everything for Susan that we had desired. "But she is determined," she added, "to be back in Paris by the last week of February--when the baby was expected. She begins to be bothered that you write so scrappily and vaguely, and that she hears nothing directly from Lieutenant Kane or Jeanne-Marie. I shall have to tell her soon now, in any case. It seems more difficult as I come nearer to it, but I still feel sure we have done the right thing. I'm certain now that Susan will be able to face and bear it. Already she's full of plans for the future--wonderful! Possibly, if an opportunity offers, I shall tell her to-night." The next afternoon my telephone rang. When I answered it, Susan spoke to me. "Ambo," she said, "I'm at the France-et-Choiseul. Please come over at once, no matter how busy you are. You owe that much to me, I think." She had hung up the receiver before I could stammer a reply. But nothing more was necessary. I went to her as a criminal goes to confession, knowing at last how hideously in her eyes I had sinned. "You _meant_ well, Ambo," she said with a gentleness that yielded nothing--"you and Mona. Meaning well's what I feel now I can never quite forgive you. _You_, Ambo. Poor Mona doesn't count in this. But you--I thought I was safe with you. No matter." Later she said: "I've seen Madame Guyot--a horrible woman; and the baby. He's a nice baby. You did just right about him, Ambo. Thank you for that." She mused a moment. "I suppose it's absurd to think he looks like Jimmy? But to me he does. I'm going to adopt him, Ambo. You see"--her smile was wistful--"I _am_ going to have a baby of my own, after all." "I'd thought of adopting him, myself," I babbled; "but of course----" "Of course," said Susan. In so many subtle ways she had made it clear to me. I had disappointed her; revealed a blindness, a weakness, she would never be able to forget. In my hotel room that night I faced it out and accepted my punishment as just. Just--but terrible.... There is nothing in life so terrible as to know oneself utterly and finally alone. IX On the night of the eighth of March the Gothas, so long expected, returned; to be met this time by a persistent _barrage_ fire from massed 75's, which proved, however, little more than the good beginnings of a really competent defense. Many bombs fell within the fortifications, and we who dwelt there needed no other proof that the problem of the defense of Paris against air raids had not yet successfully been solved. There were thickening rumors, too, of an imminent German attack in force. Things were not going well at the Front. It was common gossip that there was division among the Allies; the British and French commands were pulling at cross purposes; Italy seemed impotent; Russia had collapsed; the Americans were unknown factors, and slow to arrive. It began to seem possible--to the disaffected or naturally pessimistic, more than possible--that the Prussian mountebank might make good his anachronistic boast to wear down and conquer the world. Even the weather seemed to fight for his pinchbeck empire; it was continuously dry, and for the season in Northern France extraordinarily clear. By its painful contrast with our common anxieties, the unseasonable beauty of those March days and nights weighted as if with lead the sense of threat, of impending calamity, that pressed upon us and chilled us and made desperate our hearts. I saw Susan daily. She did not avoid me and was never unkind, but I felt that she took little comfort or pleasure from my society. Mona Leslie, rather huffed than chastened, I fear, by Susan's quiet aloofness, had returned to her duties at Dunkirk. I was glad to have her go, to be rid of the embarrassment of her explanations and counsel--to be rid, above all, of the pointedly sympathetic and pitying pressure of her hand. Except for a slight limp, Susan now got about freely and was busily engaged with our Red Cross directors on plans for a nursing-home for the children of repatriated refugees--a home where these little victims of frightfulness and malnutrition could be built up again into happy soundness of body and mind, into the vigorous life-stuff needed for the future of France and of the world. A too-medieval château at ----, in Provence, had been offered; and plans for its immediate alteration and modernization were being drawn. The whole thing, from the first, had been Susan's idea, and she was to have charge of it all--once the required plant was ready--as became its creator. But indeed, in the interim, she had simply taken charge of our Red Cross architects and buyers and builders and engineers, and was sweeping things forward with a tactful but exceedingly high hand. She meant that the interim should be, if possible, brief. "I want results," said Susan; "we can discuss the rules we've broken afterward. The children are fading out _now_, and some of them will be dead or hopelessly withered before we can aid them. Let's get some kind of home and get it running; with a couple of good doctors, an orthopedist, a dental expert, and the right nurses--and I'll pick _them_, please!--we can make out somehow, 'most anywhere." There was no standing against her. It was presently plain to all of us in the Paris headquarters that this nursing home was to be put through, in record time, Germans or no Germans, and no matter who fell by the wayside! And, in spite of my natural anxiety, I was soon convinced that whoever fell, it would not be Susan--not, at least, till the clear flame of her spirit had burned out the oil of her energy to its last granted drop. In the rare intervals of these labors, she was arranging for the legal adoption of James Aulard Kane. No step of this kind is easily arranged in bureaucratic France. It is a difficult land to be legally born in or married in, or to die in--if one wishes to do these things, at least, with a certain decency, _en règle_. Susan complained to me of this, wittily scornful, as we left the Red Cross headquarters together on the evening of March eleventh, and started toward her hotel down the dusky colonnade of the Rue de Rivoli. "I'm worn out with them all!" she exclaimed. "All I want is to take care of Jimmy's baby, and you'd think I was plotting to upset the government. I shall, too, if some of these French officials don't presently exhibit more common sense. It _ought_ to be upset--and simplified. Oh, I wish I lived in a woman's republic, Ambo! Things would happen there, even if they were wrong! No woman has patience enough to be bureaucratic." "True," I chimed; "and you're right about men, all round. We're hopeless incompetents at statecraft and such things, at running a reasonable world--but we _can_ cook! And what you need for a change from all this is a good dinner--a real dinner! It will renew your faith in the eternal masculine--and we haven't had a bat, Susan, or talked nonsense, for years and years! Come on, dear! Let's have a perfectly shameless bat to-night and damn the consequences! What do you say?" "I say--damn the consequences, Ambo! Let's! Why, I'd forgotten there was such a thing as a bat left in the world!" "But there is! Look--there's even a taxi to begin on!" I hailed it; I even secured it; and we were presently clanking and grinding on our way--in what must have been an authentic relic from the First Battle of the Marne--toward the one restaurant in Paris. Unto each man, native or alien, who knows his Paris, God grants but one, though it is never the same. Well, I make no secret about it; my passion is deep and openly proclaimed. For me, the one restaurant in Paris is _Lapérouse_; I am long past discussing the claims of rivals. It is--simply and finally--_Lapérouse_.... We descended before an ancient, dingy building on the Quai des Grands-Augustins, passed through a cramped doorway into a tiny, ill-lit foyer, climbed a steep narrow stairs, and were presently installed in a corner of the small corner dining-room, with our backs neighborly against the wall. In this room there happened that night to be but one other diner; a small, bloated, bullet-headed civilian, with prominent staring eyes; a man of uncertain age, but nearing fifty at a guess. We paid little attention to him at first, though it soon became evident to us that he was enjoying a Pantagruelian banquet in lonely state, deliberately gorging himself with the richest and most incongruously varied food. _Comme boissons_, he had always before him two bottles, one of _Château Yquem_ and one of _Fine Champagne_; and he alternated gulps of thick yellow sweetness with drams of neat brandy. Neither seemed to produce upon him any perceptible effect, though he emitted from time to time moist porcine snufflings of fleshy satisfaction. Rather a disgusting little man, we decided; and so dismissed him.... To the ordering of our own dinner I gave a finicky care which greatly amused Susan, for whom food, I regret to say, has always remained an indifferent matter; it is the one æsthetic flaw in her otherwise so delicately organized being. In spite of every effort on my part to educate her palate, five or six nibbles at almost anything edible remains her idea of a banquet--provided the incidental talk prove sufficiently companionable or stimulating. That night, however, do what we would, our talk together was neither precisely the one nor the other. We both, rather desperately, I think, made a supreme effort to approximate the free affectionate chatter of old days; but such things never come of premeditation, and there were ghosts at the table with us. It would not work. "Oh, what's the use, Ambo!" Susan finally exclaimed, with a weary sigh. "We can't do it this way! Sister's here, and Jeanne-Marie--as close to me as if I had seen her and known her always; and maybe--Phil. But Jimmy's here most of all! There's no use pretending we're forgetting, when we're not. You and I aren't built for forgetting, Ambo. We'll never forget." "No, dear; we'll never forget." "Let's _remember_, then," said Susan; "remember all we can." For a long hour thereafter we rather mused together than conversed. Constraint slipped from us, as those we had best loved came back to us, warm and near and living in our thoughts of them. No taint of false sentiment, of sorrow willfully indulged, marred these memories. Trying to be happy we had failed; now, strangely, we came near to joy. "We haven't lost them!" exclaimed Susan. "Not any part of them; we never can." "They haven't lost us, then?" "No"--she pondered it--"they haven't lost us." "You mean it, Susan--literally? You believe they still live--_out there_?" "And you?" "I don't know." "Poor Ambo," murmured Susan; then, with a quick, dancing gleam: "But as Jimmy'd say, dear, you can just take it from _me_!" She spoke of him as if present beside her. A silence fell between us and deepened. The small, bullet-headed man had just paid his extravagant bill, distributed his largesse, and was about to depart. He was being helped into a sumptuous overcoat, with a deep collar of what I took to be genuine Russian sables. There was nothing in his officiously tended leave-taking to stir my interest; my eyes rested on him idly for a moment, that was all. The head waiter, two under-waiters, and a solemn little buttons followed him out to the stair-head, with every expression of gratitude and esteem. Passing from sight, he passed from my thoughts, leaving with me only a vague physical repulsion that barely outlasted his departure. "Do you know what I think Phil has done?" Susan was asking. "Phil?" The name had startled me back to attention. "I believe he's made himself one of them--the peasants, I mean--in some remote, dirty, half-starved Russian village." "Why? That's an odd fancy, dear. And it isn't much like him. Phil's too clear-headed, or stiff-headed, for such mysticism." "How little you really know him, then," she replied. "He's been steering since birth, I feel, toward some great final renunciation. I believe he's made it, now. You'll see, Ambo. Some day we'll hear of a new prophet, away there in the East--where all our living dreams come from! You'll see!" "'In Vishnu-land what Avatar?'" I quoted, smiling sadly enough; and Susan's smile wistfully echoed mine, even while she raised a warning finger at me. "Oh, you of little faith!" she said quite simply. X We had barely stepped out from the narrow doorway of the restaurant into a tenuous, moon-saturated mist, a low-lying diaphaneity that left the upper air-lanes openly clear, when the sirens were wailing again from every quarter of the city.... "They're coming early to-night!" I exclaimed. "Well, that ends all hope for a taxi home! We must find an _abri_." "Nonsense! We'll walk quietly back along the river. Unless"--she teased me--"you really _are_ afraid, Ambo?" I tucked her arm firmly into mine. "So you won't stumble, _Mlle. la Réformée_!" "But it is a nuisance to be lame!" she protested: "I do envy you your two good legs, _M. le Capitaine_." We made our way slowly along the embankment, passing the Pont des Arts, and two shadowy lovers paced on before us, blotted together, oblivious of the long, eerie rise and fall of the sirens; every twenty yards or so they stopped in their tracks, as by a common impulsion, and were momentarily lost to time in a passionate embrace. Neither Susan nor I spoke of these lovers, who turned aside to pass under the black arches of the Institute, into the Rue de Seine.... As we neared the Pont du Carrousel the _barrage_ began, at first distant and muffled--the outer guns; then suddenly and grimly nearer. An incessant twinkle of tiny star-white points--the bursts of high-explosive shells--drifted toward us from the north. So light was the mist, it did not obscure them; it barely dimmed the moon. "Hold on!" I said, checking Susan; "this is something new! They're firing to-night straight across Paris." The glitter of star-points seemed in a moment to fill all the northern sky; the noise of the _barrage_ trebled, trebled again. "Why, it's drum fire!" cried Susan. "Oh, how beautiful!" "Yes; but we'll get on faster, all the same! I'll help you! Come!" I put my arm firmly about her waist and almost lifted her along with me. By the time we had reached the Pont Royal, the high-explosive bursts were directly over us; the air rocked with them. I detected, too, at intervals, another more ominous sound--that deep, pulsing growl which no one having once heard it could ever mistake. "Gothas," I growled back at them, "flying low. They've ducked under the guns!" And instantly I swung Susan across the open _quai_ to the left and plunged with her up an inky defile, the Rue du Bac. "Where are you taking me?" she demanded, half breathless, dragging against my arm. "To the first available _abri_," I cried at her, under the sky's reckless tumult. "Don't stop to argue about it!" But she halted me right by the corner of the Rue de Lille. "If it's going to be a bad raid, Ambo, I must get to Jimmy's baby--I _must_!" "Impossible! It's at least two miles--and this isn't going to be a picnic, Susan! You're coming with _me_!" I tightened my arm about her; every instant now I expected the shattering climax of the bombs. Then, just as we crossed the Rue de Lille, something halted me in my turn. About a hundred yards at my right, down toward the Gare D'Orsay, and from the very middle of the black street-chasm, a keen, bladelike ray of light flashed once and again--sharp, vertical rapier-thrusts--straight up through the thin mist-veil into the treacherous sky. Followed, doubtless from a darkened upper window, a woman's frantic shriek: "_Espion--espion!_" Pistol shots next--and rough cries--and a pounding charge of feet.... Right into my arms he floundered, and I tackled him and fell with him to the cobbles and fought him there blindly, feeling for his throat. This lasted but a moment. Gendarmes tore us apart, in a brief crossing flash of electric-torches--and I caught just one glimpse of a bare bullet-head, of a bloated, discolored face, of prominent staring eyes, maddened by fear. There could be no mistake. It was our little man of the Pantagruelian banquet. We had watched him eating his last fabulous meal--his farewell to Egypt. And that is all I just then clearly remember.... I am told that nine bombs fell in a sweeping circle throughout this district; one of them, in the very courtyard of the War Office; one of them--of 300 kilos--perhaps a square from where we stood. There was a rush past of hurtling fragments--glass, chimney-tiles, chips of masonry, _que sais-je_?--and even this I report only because I have been credibly so informed. What next I experienced was pain, unlocalized at first, yet somehow damnably concentrated: pure, white-hot essence of pain. And through the stiff hell of it I was, and was not, aware of someone--some one--some _one_--murmuring love and pity and mortal anguish.... "Ambo--you wouldn't leave me--not you! Not you, Ambo--not alone...." The pain dimmed off from me in an ebbing, dull-red wave; great coils of palpable darkness swirled down upon me to smother me; I struggled to rise from beneath them--fling them off.... From an infinite distance, a woman's cry threaded through them, like a needle through mufflings of wool, and pricked me to an instant, a single instant, of clear consciousness. I opened my eyes on Susan's; I strove to answer them, tell her I understood. Susan says that I did answer them--that I even smiled. But I can feel back now only to a vast sinking away, depth under depth under depth, down--down--down--down.... XI The rest, however, I thank God, is not yet silence; though it is high time to make an end of this long and all too faulty record. They did various things to me at the hospital, from time to time; they removed hard substances from me that were distinctly out of place in my interior; they also removed certain portions of my authentic anatomy--three fingers of my left hand, among others, and my left leg to the knee. This was not in itself agreeable, and I shall always regret their loss; yet those weeks of progressive operation and tardy recuperation were, up to that period, the happiest, the most fulfilled weeks of my life. And surely egotism can go no farther! For these weeks of my triumphant happiness were altogether the darkest, saddest, cruellest weeks of the war. In a world without light, my heart sang in my breast, sang hallelujahs, and would not be cast down. Susan loved me--_me_--had always loved me! Rheims soon might fall, Amiens might fall, the channel ports, Paris, London, the Seven Seas--the World! What did it matter! Susan loved me--loved me! And even now--though Susan is ashamed for me that I can say it--though I feel that I ought to be ashamed that I can say it--though I wonder that I am not--though I try to be--well, I am _not_ ashamed! Final Note, by Susan--_insisted upon_: "But all the same, secretly, he is ashamed. For there's nobody in the world like Ambo, whether for dearness or general absurdity. Why shouldn't he have been a little happy, if he could manage it, throughout those interminable weeks of physical pain? He suffered day and night, preferring not to be kept under morphine too constantly. I won't say he was a hero; he _was_, but there's nothing to be puffed up about nowadays in that. If the war has proved anything, it is that in nearly every man, when his particular form of Zero Hour sounds for him, some kind of a self-despising hero is waiting, and ready to act or endure or be broken and cast away. We all know that now. It's the cornerstone for a possible Utopia: no, it's more than that--it's the whole foundation. But I didn't mean to say so when I started this note. "All I meant to say was that you must never take Ambo _au pied de la lettre_. I'm not in the least as he's hymned me--but that, surely, you've guessed between the lines. What is much more important is that he's not in the least as he has painted himself. But unless I were to rewrite his whole book for him--which wouldn't be tactful in an otherwise spoiled and contented wife--I could never make this clear, or do my strange, too sensitive man the full justice he deserves. He's--oh, but what's the use! There isn't anybody in the world like Ambo." XII More than a year has already passed since those dark-bright days, the spring of 1918. Down here in quiet, silvery Provence, at our nursing-home for children--I call it ours--the last of the cherry blossoms are falling now in our walled orchard close. As I write, James Aulard Kane sits--none too steadily--among a snow of petals, and sweeps them together in miniature drifts with two very grubby little hands. He is a likely infant and knows definitely what he wants from life, which is mostly food. He talks nothing but French--that is, he emits the usual baby grunts and snortings in a funny harsh accent caught from his Marseillaise nurse. Susan is far too busy to improve this accent as she would like to do: perhaps it would be simpler to say that she is far too busy. She is the queen-bee of this country hive; and I--I am a harmless enough drone. They let me dawdle about here and do this and that; but the sun grows more powerful daily, and I sleep a good deal now through the warmer hours. I am haunted by fewer mysterious twinges, here and there, when I sleep.... Meanwhile, the world-cauldron bubbles, and the bubbles keep bursting, and I read of their bursting and shake my head. When a man begins shaking his head over the news of the day, he is done for; a back number. Susan never shakes her head; and it's rather hard on her, I think, to be the wife of a back number. But she's far too thoughtful of me ever to seem to mind. Only yesterday I quoted some lines to her, from Coventry Patmore. Susan doesn't like Coventry Patmore; the mystical Unknown Eros he celebrates strikes her as--well, perhaps I had better not go into that. But the lines I quoted--they had been much in my mind lately--were these: _For want of me the world's course will not fail; When all its work is done the lie shall rot; The truth is great and shall prevail When none cares whether it prevail or not._ "Stuff! We do care!" said Susan. "And it won't prevail, either, unless we make it. Who's working harder than you to make it prevail, I should like to know!" You see how she includes me.... So this book is my poor tribute to her thoughtfulness, this Book of Susan. * * * * * But sometimes I sit and wonder. Shall we ever, I wonder, go back to my ancestral mansion on Hillhouse Avenue and quietly settle down there to the old securities, the old, slightly disdainful calm? I doubt it. Tumps, ancient valetudinarian, softened by age; Togo, rheumatic, but steeped in his deeply racial, his Oriental indifferentism--they are the inheritors of that august tradition, and they become it worthily. For them it exists and is enough; for us it is shattered. Phil, a later Waring, is lost in Russia. Jimmy is gone. But Susan will do, I know, more than one woman's part to help in creating a more livable world for his son, and I shall gain some little strength for that coming labor, spending it as I can. It will be an interesting world for those who survive; a dusk chaos just paling eastward. I shall hardly see even the beginnings of dawn. But--with Susan beside me--I shall have lived. * * * * * Farewell, then, Hillhouse Avenue!... Make way for Birch Street! (THE END) 
34537	----	Cursed by a Fortune, by George Manville Fenn. ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ CURSED BY A FORTUNE, BY GEORGE MANVILLE FENN. CHAPTER ONE. "Yes, James; this is my last dying speech and confession." "Oh, papa!" with a burst of sobbing. "Be quiet, Kitty, and don't make me so miserable. Dying is only going to sleep when a man's tired out, as I am, with the worries of the world, money-making, fighting for one's own, and disappointment. I know as well as old Jermingham that it's pretty nearly all over. I'm sorry to leave you, darling, but I'm worn out, and your dear mother has been waiting for nearly a year." "Father, dearest father!" and two white arms clung round the neck of the dying man, as their owner sank upon her knees by the bedside. "I'd stay for your sake, Kitty, but fate says no, and I'm so tired, darling, it will be like going into rest and peace. She always was an angel, Kitty, and she must be now; I feel as if I must see her afterwards. For I don't think I've been such a very bad man, Will." "The best of fellows, Bob, always," said the stout, florid, country-looking gentleman seated near the great heavily-curtained four-post bed. "Thanks, James. I don't want to play the Pharisee, but I have tried to be an honest man and a good father." "Your name stands highest in the city, and your charities--" "Bother! I made plenty of money by the bank, and I gave some away, and I wish it had done more good. Well, my shares in the bank represent a hundred and fifty thousand; those are Kitty's. There's about ten thousand pounds in India stock and consols." "Pray, pray don't talk any more, papa, dear." "Must, Kitty, while I can. That money, Will, is yours for life, and after death it is for that boy of yours, Claud. He doesn't deserve it, but perhaps he'll be a better boy some day. Then there's the lease of this house, my furniture, books, plate, pictures, and money in the private account. You will sell and realise everything; Kitty does not want a great gloomy house in Bedford Square--out of proceeds you will pay the servants' legacies, and the expenses, there will be ample; and the residue is to be given to your wife for her use. That's all. I have made you my sole executor, and I thought it better to send for you to tell you than for you to wait till the will was read. Give me a little of that stuff in some water, Kitty." His head was tenderly raised, and he drank and sank back with a sigh. "Thank you, my darling. Now, Will, I might have joined John Garstang with you as executor, but I thought it better to give you full control, you being a quiet country squire, leading your simple, honest, gentleman-farmer's life, while he is a keen speculative man." James Wilton, the banker's brother, uttered something like a sigh, muttered a few words about trying to do his duty, and listened, as the dying man went on-- "I should not have felt satisfied. You two might have disagreed over some marriage business, for there is no other that you will have to control. And I said to myself that Will would not try to play the wicked uncle over my babe. So you are sole executor, with very little to do, for I have provided for everything, I think. Her money stays in the old bank I helped to build up, and the dividends will make her a handsome income. What you have to see to is that she is not snapped up by some plausible scoundrel for the sake of her money. When she does marry--" "Oh, papa, dear, don't, don't! You are breaking my heart. I shall never marry," sobbed the girl, as she laid her sweet young face by the thin, withered countenance on the pillow. "Yes, you will, my pet. I wish it, when the right man comes, who loves you for yourself. Girls like you are too scarce to be wasted. But your uncle will watch over you, and see to that. You hear, Will?" "Yes, I will do my duty by her." "I believe you." "But, papa dear, don't talk more. The doctor said you must be kept so quiet." "I must wind up my affairs, my darling, and think of your future. I've had quite enough of the men hanging about after the rich banker's daughter. When my will is proved, the drones and wasps will come swarming round you for the money. There is no one at all, yet, is there?" he said, with a searching look. "Oh, no, papa, I never even thought of such a thing." "I know it, my darling. I've always been your sweetheart, and we've lived for one another, and I'm loth to leave you, dear." "Oh, father, dearest father, don't talk of leaving me," she sobbed. He smiled sadly, and his feeble hand played with her curls. "God disposes, my own," he said. "But there, I must talk while I can. Now, listen. These are nearly my last words, Will." His brother started and bent forward to hear his half-whispered words, and he wiped the dew from his sun-browned forehead, and shivered a little, for the chilly near approach of death troubled the hale, hearty-looking man, and gave a troubled look to his florid face. "When all is over, Will, as soon as you can, take her down to Northwood, and be a father to her. Her aunt always loved her, and she'll be happy there. Shake hands upon it, Will." The thin, white, trembling hand was placed in the fat, heavy palm extended, and rested there for some minutes before Robert Wilton spoke again. "Everything is set down clearly, Will. The money invested in the bank is hers--one hundred and fifty thousand pounds, strictly tied up. I have seen to that. There, you will do your duty by her, and see that all goes well." "Yes." "I am satisfied, brother; I exact no oaths. Kate, my child, your uncle will take my place. I leave you in his hands." Then in a low voice, heard only by her who clung to him, weeping silently, he whispered softly, "And in Thine, O God." The next morning the blinds were all down in front of Number 204, Bedford Square, which looked at its gloomiest in the wet fog, with the withered leaves falling fast from the great plane trees; and the iron shutters were half drawn up at the bank in Lothbury, for the old leather-covered chair in the director's rom was vacant, waiting for a new occupant--the chairman of the Great British and Bengalie Joint Stock Bank was dead. "As good and true a man as ever breathed," said the head clerk, shaking his grey head; "and we've all lost a friend. I wonder who will marry Miss Kate!" CHAPTER TWO. "Morning, Doctor. Hardly expected to find you at home. Thought you'd be on your rounds." The speaker was mounted on a rather restive cob, which he now checked by the gate of the pretty cottage in one of the Northwood lanes; and as he spoke he sprang down and placed his rein through the ring on the post close by the brass plate which bore the words--"Pierce Leigh, M.D., Surgeon, etc.," but he did not look at the ring, for his eyes gave a furtive glance at the windows from one to the other quickly. He was not a groom, for his horse-shoe pin was set with diamonds, and a large bunch of golden charms hung at his watch chain, but his coat, hat, drab breeches, and leggings were of the most horsey cut, and on a near approach anyone might have expected to smell stables. As it was, the odour he exhaled was Jockey Club, emanating from a white pocket handkerchief dotted with foxes' heads, hunting crops and horns, and saturated with scent. "My rounds are not very regular, Mr Wilton," said the gentleman addressed, and he looked keenly at the commonplace speaker, whose ears stood out widely from his closely-cropped hair. "You people are dreadfully healthy down here," and he held open the garden gate and drew himself up, a fairly handsome, dark, keen-eyed, gentlemanly-looking man of thirty, slightly pale as if from study, but looking wiry and strong as an athlete. "You wished to see me?" "Yes. Bit off my corn. Headache, black spots before my eyes, and that sort of thing. Thought I'd consult the Vet." "Will you step in?" "Eh? Yes. Thankye." The Doctor led the way into his flower-decked half-study, half-consulting room, where several other little adornments suggested the near presence of a woman; and the would-be patient coughed unnecessarily, and kept on tapping his leg with the hunting crop he carried, as he followed, and the door was closed, and a chair was placed for him. "Eh? Chair? Thanks," said the visitor, taking it by the back, swinging it round, and throwing one leg across as if it were a saddle, crossing his arms and resting his chin there--the while he stared rather enviously at the man before him. "Not much the matter, and you mustn't make me so that I can't get on. Got a chap staying with me, and we're going after the pheasants. I say, let me send you a brace." "You are very good," said the Doctor, smiling rather contemptuously, "but as I understand it they are not yet shot?" "Eh? Oh, no; but no fear of that. I can lick our keeper; pretty sure with a gun. Want to see my tongue and feel my pulse?" "Well, no," said the Doctor, with a slight shrug of his shoulders. "I can pretty well tell." "How?" "By your looks." "Eh? Don't look bad, do I?" "Rather." "Something nasty coming on?" said the young man nervously. "Yes; bad bilious attack, if you are not careful. You have been drinking too much beer and smoking too many strong cigars." "Not a bad guess," said the young man with a grin. "Last boxes are enough to take the top of your head off. Try one." "Thank you," was the reply, and a black-looking cigar was taken from the proffered case. "Mind, I've told you they are roofers." "I can smoke a strong cigar," said the Doctor, quietly. "You can? Well, I can't. Now then, mix up something; I want to be off." "There is no need to give you any medicine. Leave off beer and tobacco for a few days, and you will be all right." "But aren't you going to give me any physic?" "Not a drop." "Glad of it. But I say, the yokels down here won't care for it if you don't give them something." "I have found out that already. There, sir, I have given you the best advice I can." "Thankye. When am I to come again?" "Not until you are really ill. Not then," said the Doctor, smiling slightly as he rose, "for I suppose I should be sent for to you." "That's all then?" "Yes, that is all." "Well, send in your bill to the guv'nor," said the young man, renewing his grin; "he pays all mine. Nice morning, ain't it, for December? Soon have Christmas." "Yes, we shall soon have Christmas now," said the Doctor, backing his visitor toward the door. "But looks more like October, don't it?" "Yes, much more like October." "Steady, Beauty! Ah, quiet, will you!" cried the young man, as he mounted the restive cob. "She's a bit fresh. Wants some of the dance taken out of her. Morning.--Sour beggar, no wonder he don't get on," muttered the patient. "Take that and that. Coming those games when I'm mounting! How do you like that? Wanted to have me off." There was a fresh application of the spurs, brutally given, and after plunging heavily the little mare tore off as hard as she could go, while the Doctor watched till his patient turned a corner, and then resumed his walk up and down the garden--a walk interrupted by the visit. "Insolent puppy!" he muttered, frowning. "A miserable excuse." "Pierce, dear, where are you?" cried a pleasant voice, and a piquant little figure appeared at the door. "Oh, there you are. Shall I want a hat? Oh, no, it's quite mild." The owner of the voice hurried out like a beam of sunshine on the dull grey morning, and taking the Doctor's arm tried to keep step with him, after glancing up in his stern face, her own looking merry and arch with its dimples. "What is it, Jenny?" he said. "What is it, sir? Why, I want fresh air as well as you; but don't stride along like that. How can I keep step? You have such long legs." "That's better," he said, trying to accommodate himself to the little body at his side. "Rather. So you have had a patient," she said. "Yes, I've had a patient, Sis," he replied, looking down at her; and a faint colour dawned in her creamy cheeks. "And you always grumbling, sir! There, I do believe that is the beginning of a change. Who was the patient?" The Doctor's hand twitched, and he frowned, but he said, calmly enough, "That young cub from the Manor." "Mr Claud Wilton?" said the girl innocently; "Oh, I am glad. Beginning with the rich people at the Manor. Now everyone will come." "No, my dear; everyone will not come, and the sooner we pack up and go back to town the better." "What, sell the practice?" "Sell the practice," he cried contemptuously. "Sell the furniture, Sis. One man--fool, I mean--was enough to be swindled over this affair. Practice! The miserable scoundrel! Much good may the money he defrauded me of do him. No, but we shall have to go." "Don't, Pierce," said the girl, looking up at him wistfully. "Why?" he said angrily. "Because it did do me good being down here, and I like the place so much." "Any place would be better than that miserable hole at Westminster, where you were getting paler every day, but I ought to have been more businesslike. It has not done you good though; and if you like the place the more reason why we should go," he cried angrily. "Oh, Pierce, dear, what a bear you are this morning. Do be patient, and I know the patients will come." "Bah! Not a soul called upon us since we've been here, except the tradespeople, so that they might get our custom." "But we've only been here six months, dear." "It will be the same when we've been here six years, and I'm wasting time. I shall get away as soon as I can. Start the New Year afresh in town." "Pierce, oh don't walk so fast. How can I keep up with you?" "I beg your pardon." "That's better. But, Pierce, dear," she said, with an arch look; "don't talk like that. You wouldn't have the heart to go." "Indeed! But I will." "I know better, dear." "What do you mean?" "You couldn't go away now. Oh, Pierce, dear, she is sweet! I could love her so. There is something so beautiful and pathetic in her face as she sits there in church. Many a time I've felt the tears come into my eyes, and as if I could go across the little aisle and kiss her and call her sister." He turned round sharply and caught her by the arm, his eyes flashing with indignation. "Jenny," he cried, "are you mad?" "No, only in pain," she said, with her lip quivering. "You hurt me. You are so strong." "I--I did not mean it," he said, releasing her. "But you hurt me still, dear, to see you like this. Oh, Pierce, darling," she whispered, as she clung to his arm and nestled to him; "don't try and hide it from me. A woman always knows. I saw it from the first when she came down, and we first noticed her, and she came to church looking like some dear, suffering saint. My heart went out to her at once, and the more so that I saw the effect it had on you. Pierce, dear, you do love me?" "You know," he said hoarsely. "Then be open with me. What could be better?" He was silent for a few moments, and then he answered the pretty, wistful eyes, gazing so inquiringly in his. "Yes," he said. "I will be open with you, Sis, for you mean well; but you speak like the pretty child you have always been to me. Has it ever crossed your mind that I have never spoken to this lady, and that she is a rich heiress, and that I am a poor doctor who is making a failure of his life?" "What!" cried the girl proudly. "Why, if she were a princess she would not be too grand for my brave noble brother." "Hah!" he cried, with a scornful laugh; "your brave noble brother! Well, go on and still think so of me, little one. It's very pleasant, and does not hurt anyone. I hope I'm too sensible to be spoiled by my little flatterer. Only keep your love for me yet awhile," he said meaningly. "Let's leave love out of the question till we can pay our way and have something to spare, instead of having no income at all but what comes from consols." "But Pierce--" "That will do. You're a dear little goose. We must want the Queen's Crown from the Tower because it's pretty." "Now you're talking nonsense, Pierce," she said, firmly, and she held his arm tightly between her little hands. "You can't deny it, sir. You fell in love with her from the first." "Jenny, my child," he said quietly. "I promised our father I would be an honorable man and a gentleman." "And so you would have been, without promising." "I hope so. Then now listen to me; never speak to me in this way again." "I will," she cried flushing. "Answer me this; would it be acting like an honorable man to let that sweet angel of a girl marry Claud Wilton?" "What!" he cried, starting, and gazing at his sister intently. "Her own cousin? Absurd." "I've heard that it is to be so." "Nonsense!" "People say so, and where there's smoke there's fire. Cousins marry, and I don't believe they'll let a fortune like that go out of the family." "They're rich enough to laugh at it." "They're not rich; they're poor, for the Squire's in difficulties." "Petty village tattle. Rubbish, girl. Once more, no more of this. You're wrong, my dear. You mean well, but there's an ugly saying about good intentions which I will not repeat. Now listen to me. The coming down to Northwood has been a grave mistake, and when people blunder the sooner they get back to the right path the better. I have made up my mind to go back to London, and your words this morning have hastened it on. The sooner we are off the better." "No, Pierce," said the girl firmly. "Not to make you unhappy. You shall not take a step that you will repent to the last day of your life, dear. We must stay." "We must go. I have nothing to stay for here. Neither have you," he added, meaningly. "Pierce!" she cried, flushing. "Beg pardon, sir; Mr Leigh, sir." They had been too much intent upon their conversation to notice the approach of a dog-cart, or that the groom who drove it had pulled up on seeing them, and was now talking to them over the hedge. "Yes, what is it?" said Leigh, sharply. "Will you come over to the Manor directly, sir? Master's out, and Missus is in a trubble way. Our young lady, sir, Miss Wilton, took bad--fainting and nervous. You're to come at once." Jenny uttered a soft, low, long-drawn "Oh!" and, forgetful of everything he had said, Pierce Leigh rushed into the house, caught up his hat, and hurried out again, to mount into the dog-cart beside the driver. "Poor, dear old brother!" said Jenny, softly, as with her eyes half-blinded by the tears which rose, she watched the dog-cart driven away. "I don't believe he will go to town. Oh, how strangely things do come about. I wish I could have gone too." CHAPTER THREE. John Garstang stood with his back to the fire in his well furnished office in Bedford Row, tall, upright as a Life Guardsman, but slightly more prominent about what the fashionable tailor called his client's chest. He was fifty, but looked by artificial aid, forty. Scrupulously well-dressed, good-looking, and with a smile which won the confidence of clients, though his regular white teeth were false, and the high foreheaded look which some people would have called baldness was so beautifully ivory white and shiny that it helped to make him look what he was--a carefully polished man of the world. The clean japanned boxes about the room, all bearing clients' names, the many papers on the table, the waste-paper basket on the rich Turkey carpet, chock full of white fresh letters and envelopes, all told of business; and the handsome morocco-covered easy chairs suggested occupancy by moneyed clients who came there for long consultations, such as would tell up in a bill. John Garstang was a family solicitor, and he looked it; but he would have made a large fortune as a physician, for his presence and urbane manner would have done anyone good. The morning papers had been glanced at and tossed aside, and the gentleman in question, while bathing himself in the warm glow of the fire, was carefully scraping and polishing his well-kept nails, pausing from time to time to blow off tiny scraps of dust; and at last he took two steps sideways noiselessly and touched the stud of an electric bell. A spare-looking, highly respectable man answered the summons and stood waiting till his principal spoke, which was not until the right hand little finger nail, which was rather awkward to get at, had been polished, when without raising his eyes, John Garstang spoke. "Mr Harry arrived?" "No, sir." "What time did he leave yesterday?" "Not here yesterday, sir." "The day before?" "Not here the day before yesterday, sir." "What time did he leave on Monday?" "About five minutes after you left for Brighton, sir." "Thank you, Barlow; that will do. By the way--" The clerk who had nearly reached the door, turned, and there was again silence, while a few specks were blown from where they had fallen inside one of the spotless cuffs. "Send Mr Harry to me as soon as he arrives." "Yes, sir," and the man left the room; while after standing for a few moments thinking, John Garstang walked to one of the tin boxes in the rack and drew down a lid marked, "Wilton, Number 1." Taking from this a packet of papers carefully folded and tied up with green silk, he seated himself at his massive knee-hole table, and was in the act of untying the ribbon, when the door opened and a short, thick-set young man of five-and-twenty, with a good deal of French waiter in his aspect, saving his clothes, entered, passing one hand quickly over his closely-shaven face, and then taking the other to help to square the great, dark, purple-fringed, square, Joinville tie, fashionable in the early fifties. "Want to see me, father?" "Yes. Shut the baize door." "Oh, you needn't be so particular. It won't be the first time Barlow has heard you bully me." "Shut the baize door, if you please, sir," said Garstang, blandly. "Oh, very well!" cried the young man, and he unhooked and set free a crimson baize door whose spring sent it to with a thud and a snap. Then John Garstang's manner changed. An angry frown gathered on his forehead, and he placed his elbows on the table, joined the tips of his fingers to form an archway, and looked beneath it at the young man who had entered. "You are two hours late this morning." "Yes, father." "You did not come here at all yesterday." "No, father." "Nor the day before." "No, father." "Then will you have the goodness to tell me, sir, how long you expect this sort of thing to go on? You are not of the slightest use to me in my professional business." "No, and never shall be," said the young man coolly. "That's frank. Then will you tell me why I should keep and supply with money such a useless drone?" "Because you have plenty, and a lot of it ought to be mine by right." "Why so, sir? You are not my son." "No, but I'm my mother's." "Naturally," said Garstang, with a supercilious smile. "You need not sneer, sir. If you hadnt deluded my poor mother into marrying you I should have been well off." "Your mother had a right to do as she pleased, sir. Where have you been?" "Away from the office." "I know that. Where to?" "Where I liked," said the young man sulkily, "I'm not a child." "No, and this conduct has become unbearable. It is time you went away for good. What do you say to going to Australia with your passage paid and a hundred pounds to start you?" "'Tisn't good enough." "Then you had better execute your old threat and enlist in a cavalry regiment. I promise you that I will not buy you out." "Thank you, but it isn't good enough." "What are you going to do then?" "Never mind." Garstang looked up at him sharply, this time from outside the finger arch. "Don't provoke me, Harry Dasent, for your own sake. What are you going to do?" "Get married." "Indeed? Well, that's sensible. But are there not enough pauper children for the parish to keep?" "Yes, but I am not going to marry a pauper. You have my money and will not disgorge it, so I must have somebody's else." "Indeed! Then you are going to look out for a lady with money?" "No. I have already found one." "Anyone I know?" "Oh, yes." "Who is it, pray?" "Katherine Wilton." Garstang's eyes contracted, and he gazed at his stepson for some moments in silence. Then a contemptuous smile dawned upon his lip. "I was not aware that you were so ambitious, Harry. But the lady?" "Oh, that will be all right." "Indeed! May I ask when you saw her last?" "Yesterday evening at dinner." "You have been down to Northwood?" "Yes; I was there two days." "Did your Uncle Wilton invite you down?" "No, but Claud did, for a bit of shooting." "Humph!" ejaculated Garstang thoughtfully, and the young man stood gazing at him intently. Then his manner changed, and he took one of the easy chairs, drew it forward, and seated himself, to sit leaning forward, and began speaking confidentially. "Look here, step-father," he half-whispered, "I've been down there twice. I suspected it the first time; yesterday I was certain. They're playing a deep game there." "Indeed?" "Yes. I saw through it at once. They're running Claud for the stakes." "Please explain yourself, my good fellow; I do not understand racing slang." "Well, then, they mean Claud to marry Kate, and I'm not going to stand by and see that done." "By the way, I thought Claud was your confidential friend." "So he is, up to a point; but it's every man for himself in a case like this. I'm in the race myself, and I mean to marry Kate Wilton myself. It's too good a prize to let slip." "And does the lady incline to my stepson's addresses?" "Well, hardly. I've had no chance. They watched me like cats do mice, and she has been so sickly that it would be nonsense to try and talk to her." "Then your prospects are very mild indeed." "Oh, no, they're not. This is a case where a man must play trumps, high and at once. I may as well speak out, and you'll help me. There's no time shilly-shallying. If I hesitate my chance would be gone. I shall make my plans, and take her away." "With her consent, of course." "With or without," said the young man, coolly. "How?" "Oh, I'll find a means. Girls are only girls, and they'll give way to a stronger will. Once I get hold of her she'll obey me, and a marriage can soon be got through." "But suppose she refuses?" "She'll be made," said the young man, sharply. "The stakes are worth some risk." "But are you aware that the law would call this abduction?" "I don't care what the law calls it if I get the girl." "And it would mean possibly penal servitude." "Well, I'm suffering that now, situated as I am. There, father, never mind the law. Don't be squeamish; a great fortune is at stake, and it must come into our family, not into theirs." "You think they are trying that?" "Think? I'm sure. Claud owned to as much, but he's rather on somewhere else. Come, you'll help me? It would be a grand coup." "Help you? Bah! you foolish young ass! It is impossible. It is madness. You don't know what you are talking about. The girl could appeal to the first policeman, and you would be taken into custody. You and Claud Wilton must have been having a drinking bout, and the liquor is still in your head. There, go to your own room, and when you can talk sensibly come back to me." "I can talk sensibly now. Will you help me with a couple of hundred pounds to carry this through? I should want to take her for a couple of months on the Continent, and bring her back my wife." "Two hundred pounds to get you clapped in a cell at Bow Street." "No; to marry a hundred and fifty thousand pounds." "No, no, no. You are a fool, a visionary, a madman. It is impossible, and I shall feel it my duty to write to James Wilton to forbid, you the house." "Once more; will you help me?" "Once more, no. Now go, and let me get on with my affairs. Someone must work." "Then you will not?" "No." "Then listen to me: I've made up my mind to it, and do it. I will, at any cost, at any risk. She shan't marry Claud Wilton, and she shall marry me. Yes, you may smile, but if I die for it I'll have that girl and her money." "But it would cost two hundred pounds to make the venture, sir. Perhaps you had better get that first. Now please go." The young man rose and looked at him fiercely for a few minutes, and Garstang met his eyes firmly. "No," he said, "that would not do, Harry. The law fences us round against robbery and murder, just as it does women against abduction. You are not in your senses. You were drinking last night. Go back home and have a long sleep. You'll be better then." The young man glanced at him sharply and left the room. Ten minutes spent in deep thought were passed by Garstang, who then rose, replaced the papers in the tin case, and crossed and rang the bell. "Send Mr Harry here." "He went out as soon as he left your room, sir." "Thank you; that will do." Then, as the door closed upon the clerk, Garstang said softly: "So that's it; then it is quite time to act." CHAPTER FOUR. "Will that Doctor never come!" muttered plump Mrs Wilton, who had been for the past ten minutes running from her niece's bedside to one of the front casement windows of the fine old Kentish Manor House, to watch the road through the park. "He might have come from London by this time. There, it's of no use; it's fate, and fate means disappointment. She'll die; I'm sure she'll die, and all that money will go to those wretched Morrisons. Why did he go out to the farms this morning? Any other morning would have done; and Claud away, too. Was ever woman so plagued?--Yes, what is it? Oh, it's you, Eliza. How is she?" "Quite insensible, ma'am. Is the Doctor never coming?" "Don't ask me, Eliza. I sent the man over in the dog-cart, with instructions to bring him back." "Then pray, pray come and stay with me in the bedroom, ma'am." "But I can't do anything, Eliza, and it isn't as if she were my own child. I couldn't bear to see her die." "Mrs Wilton!" cried the woman, wildly. "Oh, my poor darling young mistress, whom I nursed from a babe--die!" "Here's master--here's Mr Wilton," cried the rosy-faced lady from the window, and making a dash at a glass to see that her cap was right, she hurried out of the room and down the broad oaken stairs to meet her lord at the door. "Hallo, Maria, what's the matter?" he cried, meeting her in the hall, his high boots splashed with mud, and a hunting whip in his hand. "Oh, my dear, I'm so glad you've come! Kate--fainting fits--one after the other--dying." "The devil! What have you done?" "Cold water--vinegar--burnt--" "No, no. Haven't you sent for the Doctor?" "Yes, I sent Henry with the dog-cart to fetch Mr Leigh." "Mr Leigh! Were you mad? What do you know about Mr Leigh? Bah, you always were a fool!" "Yes, my dear, but what was I to do? It would have taken three hours to get--Oh, here he is." For there was the grating of carriage wheels on the drive, the dog-cart drew up, and Pierce Leigh sprang down and entered the hall. Mrs Wilton glanced timidly at her husband, who gave her a sulky nod, and then turned to the young Doctor. "My young niece--taken bad," he said, gruffly, "You'd better go up and see her. Here, Maria, take him up." Unceremonious; but businesslike, and Leigh showed no sign of resentment, but with a peculiar novel fluttering about the region of the heart he followed the lady, who, panting the while, led the way upstairs, and breathlessly tried to explain how delicate her niece was, and how after many days of utter despondency, she had suddenly been seized with an attack of hysteria, which had been succeeded by fit after fit. The next minute they were in the handsome bedroom at the end of a long, low corridor, where, pale as death, and with her maid--erst nurse-- kneeling by her and fanning her, Kate Wilton, in her simple black, lay upon a couch, looking as if the Doctor's coming were too late. He drew a deep breath, and set his teeth as he sank on one knee by the insensible figure, which he longed with an intense longing to clasp to his breast. Then his nerves were strung once more, and he was the calm, professional man giving his orders, as he made his examination and inspired aunt and nurse with confidence, the latter uttering a sigh of relief as she opened the window, and obeyed sundry other orders, the result being that at the end of half an hour the sufferer, who twice over unclosed her eyes, and responded to her aunt's questions with a faint smile, had sunk into the heavy sleep of exhaustion. "Better leave her now, madam," said Leigh, softly. "Sleep is the great thing for her." Then, turning to the maid--"You had better stay and watch by her, though she will not wake for hours." "God bless you, sir," she whispered, with a look full of gratitude which made Leigh give her an encouraging smile, and he then followed Mrs Wilton downstairs. "Really, it's wonderful," she said. "Thank you so much, Doctor. I'm sure you couldn't have been nicer if you'd been quite an old man, and I really think that next time I'm ill I shall--Oh, my dear, she's ever so much better now." "Humph!" ejaculated Wilton; and then he gave his wife an angry look, as she pushed him in the chest. "Come in here and sit down, Mr Leigh. I want you to tell us all you think." The Doctor followed into the library, whose walls were covered with books that were never used, while, making an effort to be civil, their owner pointed to a chair and took one himself, Leigh waiting till his plump, amiable-looking hostess had subsided, and well-filled that nearest the fire. "Found her better then?" said Wilton. "No, sir," said Leigh, smiling, "but she is certainly better now." "That's what I meant. Nothing the matter, then. Vapours, whims, young girls' hysterics, and that sort of thing? What did she have for breakfast, Maria?" "Nothing at all, dear. I can't get her to eat." "Humph! Why don't you make her? Can't stand our miserable cookery, I suppose. Well, Doctor, then, it's a false alarm?" "No, sir; a very serious warning." "Eh? You don't think there's danger? Here, we'd better send for some big man from town." "That is hardly necessary, sir, though I should be happy to meet a man of experience in consultation." "My word! What airs!" said Wilton, to himself. "As far as I could I have pretty well diagnosed the case, and it is very simple. Your niece has evidently suffered deeply." "Terribly, Doctor; she has been heart-broken." "Now, my dear Maria, do pray keep your mouth shut, and let Mr Leigh talk. He doesn't want you to teach him his business." "But James, dear, I only just--" "Yes, you always will only just! Go on, please, Doctor, and you'll send her some medicine?" "It is hardly a case for medicine, sir. Your niece's trouble is almost entirely mental. Given rest and happy surroundings, cheerful female society of her own age, fresh air, moderate exercise, and the calmness and peace of a home like this, I have no doubt that her nerves will soon recover their tone." "Then they had better do it," said Wilton, gruffly. "She has everything a girl can wish for. My son and I have done all we can to amuse her." "And I'm sure I have been as loving as a mother to her," said Mrs Wilton. "Yes, but you are mistaken, sir. There must be something more. I'd better take her up to town for advice." "By all means, sir," said Leigh, coldly. "It might be wise, but I should say that she would be better here, with time to work its own cure." "Of course, I mean no disrespect to you, Mr Leigh, but you are a young man, and naturally inexperienced." "Now I don't want to hurt your feelings, James," broke in Mrs Wilton, "but it is you who are inexperienced in what young girls are. Mr Leigh has spoken very nicely, and quite understands poor Kate's case. If you had only seen the way in which he brought her round!" "I really do wish, Maria, that you would not interfere in what you don't understand," cried Wilton, irascibly. "But I'm obliged to when I find you going wrong. It's just what I've said to you over and over again. You men are so hard and unfeeling, and don't believe there are such things as nerves. Now, I'm quite sure that Mr Leigh could do her a great deal of good, if you'd only attend to your out-door affairs and leave her to me--You grasped it all at once, Mr Leigh. Poor child, she has done nothing but fret ever since she has been here, and no wonder. Within a year she has lost both father and mother." "Now, Maria, Mr Leigh does not want to hear all our family history." "And I'm not going to tell it to him, my dear; but it's just as I felt. It was only last night, when she had that fit of hysterical sobbing, I said to myself, Now if I had a dozen girls--as I should have liked to, instead of a boy, who is really a terrible trial to one, Mr Leigh--I should--" "Maria!" "Yes, my dear; but you should let me finish. If poor dear Kate had come here and found a lot of girls she would have been as happy as the day is long.--And you don't think she wants physic, Mr Leigh? No, no, don't hurry away." "I have given you my opinion, madam," said Leigh, who had risen. "Yes, and I'm sure it is right. I did give her some fluid magnesia yesterday, the same as I take for my acidity--" "Woman, will you hold your tongue!" cried Wilton. "No, James, certainly not. It is my duty, as poor Kate's aunt, to do what is best for her; and you should not speak to me like that before a stranger. I don't know what he will think. The fluid magnesia would not do her any harm, would it, Mr Leigh?" "Not the slightest, madam; and I feel sure that with a little motherly attention and such a course of change as I prescribed, Miss Wilton will soon be well." "There, James, we must have the Morrison girls to stay here with her. They are musical and--" "We shall have nothing of the kind, Maria," said her husband, with asperity. "Well, I know you don't like them, my dear, but in a case of urgency--by the way, Mr Leigh, someone told me your sister played exquisitely on the organ last Sunday because the organist was ill." "My sister does play," said Leigh, coldly. "I wish I had been at church to hear her, but my poor Claud had such a bad bilious headache I was nearly sending for you, and I had to stay at home and nurse him. I'm sure the cooking must be very bad at those cricket match dinners." "Now, my dear Maria, you are keeping Mr Leigh." "Oh, no, my dear, he was sent for to give us his advice, and I'm sure it is very valuable. By the way, Mr Leigh, why has not your sister called here?" "I--er--really--my professional duties have left me little time for etiquette, madam, but I was under the impression that the first call should be to the new-comer." "Why, of course. Do sit down, James. You are only kicking the dust out of this horrid thick Turkey carpet--they are such a job to move and get beaten, Mr Leigh. Do sit down, dear; you know how it fidgets me when you will jump up and down like a wild beast in a cage." "Waffle!" said Mr Wilton aside. "You are quite right, Mr Leigh; I ought to have called, but Claud does take up so much of my time. But I will call to-morrow, and then you two come up here the next day and dine with us, and I feel sure that our poor dear Kate will be quite pleased to know your sister. Tell her--no; I'll ask her to bring some music. She seems very nice, and young girls do always get on so well together. I know she'll do my niece a deal of good. But, of course, you will come again to-day, and keep on seeing her as much as you think necessary." "Really I--" said Leigh, hesitating, and glancing resentfully at the master of the house. "Oh, yes, come on, Mr Leigh, and put my niece right as soon as you can," he said. "But your regular medical attendant--Mr Rainsford, I believe?" "You may believe he's a pig-headed, obstinate old fool," growled Wilton. "Wanted to take off my leg when I had a fall at a hedge, and the horse rolled over it. Simple fracture, sir; and swore it would mortify. I mortified him." "Yes, Mr Leigh, and the leg's stronger now than the other," interposed Mrs Wilton. "How do you know, Maria?" said her husband gruffly. "Well, my dear, you've often said so." "Humph! Come in again and see Miss Wilton, Doctor, and I shall feel obliged," said the uncle. "Good morning. The dog-cart is waiting to drive you back. I'll send and have you fetched about--er--four?" "It would be better if it were left till seven or eight, unless, of course, there is need." "Eight o'clock, then," said Wilton; and Pierce Leigh bowed and left the room, with the peculiar sensation growing once more in his breast, and lasting till he reached home, thinking of how long it would be before eight o'clock arrived. CHAPTER FIVE. "I should very much like to know what particular sin I have committed that I should have been plagued all my life with a stupid, garrulous old woman for a wife, who cannot be left an hour without putting her foot in it some way or another." "Ah, you did not say so to me once, James," sighed Mrs Wilton. "No, a good many hundred times. It's really horrible." "But James--" "There, do hold your tongue--if you can, woman. First you get inviting that young ruffian of John Garstang's to stay when he comes down." "But, my dear, it was Claud. You know how friendly those two always have been." "Yes, to my sorrow; but you coaxed him to stay." "Really, my dear, I could not help it without being rude." "Then why weren't you rude? Do you want him here, fooling about that girl till she thinks he loves her and marries him?" "Oh, no, dear, it would be horrid. But you don't think--" "Yes, I do, fortunately," snapped Wilton. "Why don't you think?" "I do try to, my dear." "Bah! Try! Then you want to bring in those locusts of Morrisons. It's bad enough to know that the money goes there if Kate dies, without having them hanging about and wanting her to go." "I'm very, very sorry, James. I wish I was as clever as you." "So do I. Then, as soon as you are checked in that, you dodge round and invite that Doctor, who's a deuced sight too good-looking, to come again, and ask him to bring his sister." "But, my dear, it will do Kate so much good, and she really seems very nice." "Nice, indeed! I wish you were. I believe you are half mad." "Really, James, you are too bad, but I won't resent it, for I want to go up to Kate; but if someone here is mad, it is not I." "Yes, it is. Like a weak fool I spoke plainly to you about my plans." "If you had always done so we should have been better off and not had to worry about getting John Garstang's advice, with his advances and interests, and mortgages and foreclosures." "You talk about what you don't understand, woman," said Wilton, sharply. "Can't you see that it is to our interest to keep the poor girl here? Do you want to toss her amongst a flock of vulture-like relatives, who will devour her?" "Why, of course not, dear." "But you tried to." "I'm sure I didn't. You said she was so ill you were afraid she'd die and slip through our fingers." "Yes, and all her money go to the Morrisons." "Oh, yes, I forgot that. But I gave in directly about not having them here; and what harm could it do if Miss Leigh came? I'm sure it would do poor Kate a lot of good." "And Claud, too, I suppose." "Claud?" "Ugh! You stupid old woman! Isn't she young and pretty? And artful, too, I'll be bound; poor Doctor's young sisters always are." "Are they, dear?" "Of course they are; and before she'd been here five minutes she'd be making eyes at that boy, and you know he's just like gunpowder." "James, dear, you shouldn't." "I was just as bad at his age--worse perhaps;" and Mr James Wilton, the stern, sage Squire of Northwood Manor, J.P., chairman of the Quarter Sessions, and several local institutions connected with the morals of the poor, chuckled softly, and very nearly laughed. "James, dear, I'm surprised at you." "Humph! Well, boys will be boys. You know what he is." "But do you really think--" "Yes, I do really think, and I wish you would too. Kate does not take to our boy half so well as I should like to see, and nothing must occur to set her against him. It would be madness." "Well, it would be very disappointing if she married anyone else." "Disappointing? It would be ruin. So be careful." "Oh, yes, dear, I will indeed. I have tried to talk to her a little about what a dear good boy Claud is, and--why, Claud, dear, how long have you been standing there?" "Just come. Time to hear you say what a dear good boy I am. Won't father believe it?" CHAPTER SIX. Claud Wilton, aged twenty, with his thin pimply face, long narrow jaw, and closely-cropped hair, which was very suggestive of brain fever or imprisonment, stood leering at his father, his appearance in no wise supporting his mother's high encomiums as he indulged in a feeble smile, one which he smoothed off directly with his thin right hand, which lingered about his lips to pat tenderly the remains of certain decapitated pimples which redly resented the passage over them that morning of an unnecessary razor, which laid no stubble low. The Vicar of the Parish had said one word to his lady re Claud Wilton--a very short but highly expressive word that he had learned at college. It was "cad,"--and anyone who had heard it repeated would not have ventured to protest against its suitability, for his face alone suggested it, though he did all he could to emphasise the idea by adopting a horsey, collary, cuffy style of dress, every article of which was unsuited to his physique. "Has Henry Dasent gone?" "Yes, guvnor, and precious glad to go. You were awfully cool to him, I must say. He said if it wasn't for his aunt he'd never darken the doors again." "And I hope he will not, sir. He is no credit to your mother." "But I think he means well, my dear," said Mrs Wilton, plaintively. "It is not his fault. My poor dear sister did spoil him so." "Humph! And she was not alone. Look here, Claud, I will not have him here. I have reasons for it, and he, with his gambling and racing propensities, is no proper companion for you." "P'raps old Garstang says the same about me," said the young man, sulkily. "Claud, my dear, for shame," said Mrs Wilton. "You should not say such things." "I don't care what John Garstang says; I will not have his boy here. Insolent, priggish, wanting in respect to me, and--and--he was a deal too attentive to Kate." "Oh, my dear, did you think so?" cried Mrs Wilton. "Yes, madam, I did think so," said her husband with asperity, "and, what was ten times worse, you were always leaving them together in your blundering way." "Don't say such things to me, dear, before Claud." "Then don't spend your time making mistakes. Just come, have you, sir?" "Oh, yes, father, just come," said the young man, with an offensive grin. "You heard more than you said, sir," said the Squire, "so we may as well have a few words at once." "No, no, no, my dear; pray, pray don't quarrel with Claud now; I'm sure he wants to do everything that is right." "Be quiet, Maria," cried the Squire, angrily. "All right, mother; I'm not going to quarrel," said the son. "Of course not I only want Claud to understand his position. Look here, sir, you are at an age when a bo--, when a man doesn't understand the value of money." "Oh, I say, guv'nor! Come, I like that." "It's quite true, sir. You boys only look upon money as something to spend." "Right you are, this time." "But it means more, sir--power, position, the respect of your fellows-- everything." "Needn't tell me, guv'nor; I think I know a thing or two about tin." "Now, suppose we leave slang out of the matter and talk sensibly, sir, about a very important matter." "Go on ahead then, dad; I'm listening." "Sit down then, Claud." "Rather stand, guv'nor; stand and grow good, ma." "Yes, my dear, do then," said Mrs Wilton, smiling at her son fondly. "But listen now to what papa says; it really is very important." "All right, mother; but cut it short, father, my horse is waiting and I don't want him to take cold." "Of course not, my boy; always take care of your horse. I will be very brief and to the point, then. Look here, Claud, your cousin, Katherine--" "Oh! Ah, yes; I heard she was ill. What does the Doctor say?" "Never mind what the Doctor says. It is merely a fit of depression and low spirits. Now this is a serious matter. I did drop hints to you before. I must be plain now about my ideas respecting your future. You understand?" "Quite fly, dad. You want me to marry her." "Exactly. Of course in good time." "But ain't I `owre young to marry yet,' as the song says?" "Years do not count, my boy," said his father, majestically. "If you were ten years older and a weak, foolish fellow, it would be bad; but when it is a case of a young man who is bright, clever, and who has had some experience of the world, it is different." Mrs Wilton, who was listening intently to her husband's words, bowed her head, smiled approval, and looked with the pride of a mother at her unlicked cub. But Claud's face wrinkled up, and he looked inquiringly at his elder. "I say, guv'nor," he said, "does this mean chaff?" "Chaff? Certainly not, sir," said the father sternly. "Do I look like a man who would descend to--to--to chaff, as you slangly term it, my own son?" "Not a bit of it, dad; but last week you told me I was the somethingest idiot you ever set eyes on." "Claud!" "Well, he did, mother, and he used that favourite word of his before it. You know," said the youth, with a grin. "Claud, my dear, you shouldn't." "I didn't, mother; it was the dad. I never do use it except in the stables or to the dogs." "Claud, my boy, be serious. Yes, I did say so, but you had made me very angry, and--er--I spoke for your good." "Yes, I'm sure he did, my dear," said Mrs Wilton. "Oh, all right, then, so long as he didn't mean it. Well, then, to cut it short, you both want me to marry Kate?" "Exactly." "Not much of a catch. Talk about a man's wife being a clinging vine; she'll be a regular weeping willow." "Ha! ha! very good, my boy," said Wilton, senior; "but no fear of that. Poor girl, look at her losses." "But she keeps going on getting into deeper misery. Look at her." "It only shows the sweet tenderness of her disposition, Claud, my dear," said his mother. "Yes, of course," said his father, "but you'll soon make her dry her eyes." "And she really is a very sweet, lovable, and beautiful girl, my dear," said Mrs Wilton. "Tidy, mother; only her eyes always look as red as a ferret's." "Claud, my dear, you shouldn't--such comparisons are shocking." "Oh, all right, mother. Very well; as I am such a clever, man-of-the-world sort of a chap, I'll sacrifice myself for the family good. But I say, dad, she really has that hundred and fifty thou--?" "Every shilling of it, my boy, and--er--really that must not go out of the family." "Well, it would be a pity. Only you will have enough to leave me to keep up the old place." "Well--er--I--that is--I have been obliged to mortgage pretty heavily." "I say, guv'nor," cried the young man, looking aghast; "you don't mean to say you've been hit?" "Hit? No, my dear, certainly not," cried Mrs Wilton. "Oh, do be quiet, ma. Father knows what I mean." "Well, er--yes, my boy, to be perfectly frank, I have during the past few years made a--er--two or three rather unfortunate speculations, but, as John Garstang says--" "Oh, hang old Garstang! This is horrible, father; just now, too, when I wanted to bleed you rather heavily." "Claud, my darling, don't, pray don't use such dreadful language." "Will you be quiet, ma! It's enough to make a fellow swear. Are you quite up a tree, guv'nor?" "Oh, no, no, my boy, not so bad as that. Things can go oh for years just as before, and, er--in reason, you know--you can have what money you require; but I want you to understand that you must not look forward to having this place, and er--to see the necessity for thinking seriously about a wealthy marriage. You grasp the position now?" "Dad, it was a regular smeller, and you nearly knocked me out of time. I saw stars for the moment." "My dearest boy, what are you talking about?" asked Mrs Wilton, appealingly. "Oh, bother! But, I say, guv'nor, I'm glad you spoke out to me--like a man." "To a man, my boy," said the father, holding out his hand, which the son eagerly grasped. "Then now we understand each other?" "And no mistake, guv'nor." "You mustn't let her slip through your fingers, my boy." "Likely, dad!" "You must be careful; no more scandals--no more escapades--no follies of any kind." "I'll be a regular saint, dad. I say, think I ought to read for the church?" "Good gracious me, Claud, my dear, what do you mean?" "White choker, flopping felt, five o'clock tea, and tennis, mother. Kate would like that sort of thing." Wilton, senior, smiled grimly. "No, no, my boy, be the quiet English gentleman, and let her see that you really care for her and want to make her happy. Poor girl, she wants love and sympathy." "And she shall have 'em, dad, hot and strong. A hundred and fifty thou--!" "Would clear off every lien on the property, my boy, and it would be a grand thing for my poor deceased brother's child." "You do think so, don't, you, my dear?" said Mrs Wilton, mentally extending a tendril, to cling to her husband, "because I--" "Decidedly, decidedly, my dear," said the Squire, quickly. "Thank you, Claud, my boy," he continued. "I shall rely upon your strong common sense and judgment." "All right, guv'nor. You give me my head. I'll make it all right. I'll win the stakes with hands down." "I do trust you, my boy; but you must be gentle, and not too hasty." "I know," said the young man with a cunning look. "You leave me alone." "Hah! That's right, then," said the Squire, drawing a deep breath as he smiled at his son; but all the same his eyes did not look the confidence expressed by his words. CHAPTER SEVEN. "Why, there then, my precious, you are ever so much better. You look quite bright this morning." "Do I, 'Liza?" said Kate sadly, as she walked to her bedroom window and stood gazing out at the sodden park and dripping trees. "Ever so much, my dear. Mr Leigh has done you a deal of good. I do wonder at finding such a clever gentlemanly Doctor down in an out-of-the-way place like this. You like him, don't you?" The girl turned slowly and gazed at the speaker, her brow contracting a little at the inner corners of her straight eyebrows, which were drawn up, giving her face a troubled expression. "I hardly thing I do, nurse, dear; he is so stern and firm with me. He seems to talk to me as if it were all my fault that I have been so weak and ill; and he does not know--he does not know." The tears rose to her eyes, ready to brim over as she spoke. "Ah! naughty little girl!" cried the woman, with mock anger; "crying again! I will not have it. Oh! my own pet," she continued, changing her manner, as she passed her arm lovingly about the light waist and tenderly kissed her charge. "Please, please try. You are so much better. You must hold up." "Yes, yes, nurse, I will," cried the girl, making an effort, and kissing the homely face lovingly. "And what did I tell you? I'm always spoken of as your maid now--lady's maid. It must not be nurse any longer." "Ah!" said Kate, with the wistful look coming in her eyes again; "it seems as if all the happy old things are to be no more." "No, no, my dear; you must not talk so. You not twenty, and giving up so to sadness! You must try and forget." "Forget!" cried the girl, reproachfully. "No, no, not quite forget, dear; but try and bear your troubles like a woman now. Who could forget dear old master, and your poor dear mother? But would they like you to fret yourself into the grave with sorrow? Would they not say if they could come to you some night, `Never forget us, darling; but try and bear this grief as a true woman should'?" "Yes," said the girl, thoughtfully, "and I will. But I don't feel as if I could be happy here." The maid sighed. "Uncle is very kind, and my aunt is very loving in her way, but I feel as if I want to be alone somewhere--of course with you. I have lain awake at night, longing to be back home." "But that is impossible now, darling. Cook wrote to me the other day, and she told me that the house and furniture had been sold, and that the workmen were in, and--oh, what a stupid woman I am. Pretty way to try and comfort you!" "It's nothing, 'Liza. It's all gone now," said the girl, smiling piteously. "That's nice and brave of you; but I am very stupid, my dear. There, there, you will try and be more hopeful, and to think of the future?" "Yes, I will; but I'm sure I should be better and happier if I went away from here. Couldn't we have a cottage somewhere--at the seaside, perhaps, and live together?" "Well, yes, you could, my dear; but it wouldn't be nice for you, nor yet proper treatment to your uncle and aunt. Come, try and get quite well. So you don't like Doctor Leigh?" "No, I think not." "Nor yet Miss Jenny?" "Oh, yes, I like her," said Kate, with animation. "She is very sweet and girlish. Oh, nurse, dear, I wish I could be as happy, and light-hearted as she is!" "So you will be soon, my darling. I don't want to see you quite like her. You are so different; but she is a very nice girl, and by-and-by perhaps you'll see more of her. You do want more of a companion of your own age. There goes the breakfast bell! What a wet, soaking morning; but it isn't foggy down here like it used to be in the Square, and the sun shines more; and Miss Kate--" "Oh, don't speak like that, nurse!" "But I must, my dear. I have to keep my place down here." "Well, when we are alone then. What were you going to say?" "I want you to try and make me happy down here." "I? How can I?" "By letting the sunshine come back into your face. You've nearly broken my heart lately, what with seeing you crying and being so ill." "I'm going to try, nurse." "That's right. What's that? Hail?" At that moment there was a tap at the door. "Nearly ready to go down, my darling?" The door opened, and Mrs Wilton appeared. "May I come in? Ah, quite ready. Come, that's better, my pretty pet. Why, you look lovely and quite a colour coming into your face. Now, don't she look nice this morning?" "Yes, ma'am; I've been telling her so." "I thought we should bring her round. I am pleased, and you're a very good girl. Your uncle will be delighted; but come along down, and let's make the tea, or he'll be going about like a roaring lion for his food. Oh! bless me, what's that?" "That" was a sharp rattling, for the second time, on the window-pane. "Not hail, surely. Oh, you naughty boy," she continued, throwing open the casement window. "Claud, my dear, you shouldn't throw stones at the bedroom windows." "Only small shot. Morning. How's Kate? Tell her the breakfast's waiting." "We're coming, my dear, and your cousin's ever so much better. Come here, my dear." Kate coloured slightly, as she went to the open window, and Claud stood looking up, grinning. "How are you? Didn't you hear the shot I pitched up before?" "Yes, I thought it was hail," said Kate, coldly. "Only number six. But come on down; the guv'nor's been out these two hours, and gone to change his wet boots." "We're coming, my dear," cried Mrs Wilton; "and Claud, my dear, I'm sure your feet must be wet. Go in and change your boots at once." "Bother. They're all right." "Now don't be obstinate, my dear; you know how delicate your throat is, and--There, he's gone. You'll have to help me to make him more obedient, Kate, my dear. I've noticed already how much more attention he pays to what you say. But there, come along." James Wilton was already in the breakfast-room, looking at his letters, and scowling over them like the proverbial bear with the sore head. "Come, Maria," he growled, "are we never to have any--Ah, my dear, you down to breakfast! This makes up for a wet morning," and he met and kissed his niece, drew her hand under his arm, and led her to a chair on the side of the table nearest the fire. "That's your place, my dear, and it has looked very blank for the past fortnight. Very, very glad to see you fill it again. I say," he continued, chuckling and rubbing his hands, "you're quite looking yourself again." "Yes," said Mrs Wilton, "but you needn't keep all the good mornings and kisses for Kitty. Ah, it's very nice to be young and pretty, but if Uncle's going to pet you like this I shall grow quite jealous." This with a good many meaning nods and smiles at her niece, as she took her place at the table behind the hissing urn. "You've been too much petted, Maria. It makes you grow too plump and rosy." "James, my dear, you shouldn't." "Oh, yes, I should," said her husband, chuckling. "I know Kitty has noticed it. But is that boy coming in to breakfast?" "Yes, yes, yes, my dear; but don't shout so. You quite startle dear Kitty. Recollect, please, that she is an invalid." "Bah! Not she. Going to be quite well again directly, and come for rides and drives with me to the farms. Aren't you, my dear?" "I shall be very pleased to, Uncle--soon." "That's right. We'll soon have some roses among the lilies. Ha! ha! You must steal some of your aunt's. Got too many in her cheeks, hasn't she, my dear--Damask, but we want maiden blush, eh?" "Do be quiet, James. You really shouldn't." "Where is Claud? He must have heard the bell." "Oh, yes, and he, came and called Kitty. He has only gone to change his wet boots." "Wet boots! Why, he wasn't down till nine. Oh, here you are, sir. Come along." "Did you change your boots, Claud?" "No, mother," said that gentleman, seating himself opposite Kate. "But you should, my dear." Wilton gave his niece a merry look and a nod, which was intended to mean, "You attend to me." "Yes, you should, my dear," he went on, imitating his wife's manner; "and why don't you put on goloshes when you go out?" Claud stared at his father, and looked as if he thought he was a little touched mentally. "Isn't it disgusting, Kitty, my dear?" said Wilton. "She'd wrap him up in a flannel and feed him with a spoon if she had her way with the great strong hulking fellow." "Don't you take any notice of your uncle's nonsense, my dear. Claud, my love, will you take Kitty's cup to her?" "She'd make a regular molly-coddle of him. And we don't want doctoring here. Had enough of that the past fortnight. I say, you're going to throw Leigh overboard this morning. Don't want him any more, do you?" "Oh, no, I shall be quite well now." "Yes," said her uncle, with a knowing look. "Don't you have any more of it. And I say, you'll have to pay his long bill for jalap and pilly coshy. That is if you can afford it." "I do wish, my dear, you'd let the dear child have her breakfast in peace; and do sit down and let your cousin be, Claud, dear; I'm sure she will not eat bacon. It's so fidgeting to have things forced upon you." "You eat your egg, ma! Kitty and I understand each ether. She wants feeding up, and I'm going to be the feeder." "That's right, boy; she wants stamina." "But she can't eat everything on the table, James." "Who said she could? She isn't a stout elderly lady." The head of the family looked at his niece with a broad smile, as if in search of a laugh for his jest, but the smile that greeted him was very wan and wintry. "Any letters, my dear?" said Mrs Wilton, as the breakfast went on, with Kate growing weary of her cousin's attentions, all of which took the form of a hurried movement to her side of the table, and pressure brought to bear over the breakfast delicacies. The wintry look appeared to be transferred from Kate's to her uncle's face, but it was not wan; on the contrary, it was decidedly stormy. "Yes," he said, with a grunt. "Anything particular?" "Yes, very." "What is it, my dear?" "Don't both--er--letter from John Garstang." "Oh, dear me!" said Mrs Wilton, looking aghast; and her husband kicked out one foot for her special benefit, but as his leg was not eight feet long the shot was a miss. "Says he'll run down for a few days to settle that little estate business; and that it will give him an opportunity to have a few chats with Kate here. You say you like Mr Garstang, my dear?" "Oh, yes," said Kate, quietly; "he was always very nice and kind to me." "Of course, my darling; who would not be?" said Mrs Wilton. "Claud, boy, I suppose the pheasants are getting scarce." "Oh, there are a few left yet," said the young man. "You must get up a beat and try and find a few hares, too. Uncle Garstang likes a bit of shooting. Used to see much of John Garstang, my dear, when you were at home?" "No, uncle, not much. He used to come and dine with us sometimes, and he was always very kind to me from the time I was quite a little girl, but my father and he were never very intimate." "A very fine-looking man, my dear, and so handsome," said Mrs Wilton. "Yes, very," said her husband, dryly; "and handsome is as handsome does." "Yes, my dear, of course," said Mrs Wilton; and very little more was said till the end of the breakfast, when the lady of the house asked what time the guest would be down. "Asks me to send the dog-cart to meet the mid-day train. Humph! rain's over and sun coming out. Here, Claud, take your cousin round the greenhouse and the conservatory. She hasn't seen the plants." "All right, father. Don't mind me smoking, do you, Kitty?" "Of course she'll say no," said Wilton testily; "but you can surely do without your pipe for an hour or two." "Oh, very well," said Claud, ungraciously; and he offered his cousin his arm. She looked surprised at the unnecessary attention, but took it; and they went out through the French window into the broad verandah, the glass door swinging to after them. "What a sweet pair they'll make, James, dear," said Mrs Wilton, smiling fondly after her son. "How nicely she takes to our dear boy!" "Yes, like the rest of the idiots. Girl always says snap to the first coat and trousers that come near her." "Oh, James, dear! you shouldn't say that I'm sure I didn't!" "You! Well, upon my soul! How you can stand there and utter such a fib! But never mind; it's going to be easy enough, and we'll get it over as soon as we decently can, if you don't make some stupid blunder and spoil it." "James, dear!" "Be just like you. But a nice letter I've had from John Garstang about that mortgage. Never mind, though; once this is over I can snap my fingers at him. So be as civil as you can; and I suppose we must give him some of the best wine." "Yes, dear, and have out the china dinner service." "Of course. But I wish you'd put him into a damp bed." "Oh, James, dear! I couldn't do that." "Yes, you could; give him rheumatic fever and kill him. But I suppose you won't." "Indeed I will not, dear. There are many wicked things that I feel I could do, but put a Christian man into a damp bed--no!" "Humph! Well, then, don't; but I hope that boy will be careful and not scare Kitty." "What, Claud? Oh, no, my dear, don't be afraid of that. My boy is too clever; and, besides, he's beginning to love the very ground she walks on. Really, it seems to me quite a Heaven-made matter." "Always is, my dear, when the lady has over a hundred thousand pounds," said Wilton, with a grim smile; "but we shall see." CHAPTER EIGHT. "I say, don't be in such a jolly hurry. You're all right here, you know. I want to talk to you." "You really must excuse me now, Claud; I have not been well, and I'm going back to my room." "Of course you haven't been well, Kitty--I say, I shall call you Kitty, you know--you can't expect to be well moping upstairs in your room. I'll soon put you right, better than that solemn-looking Doctor. You want to be out in the woods and fields. I know the country about here splendidly. I say, you ride, don't you?" "I? No." "Then I'll teach you. Get your old maid to make you a good long skirt-- that will do for a riding-habit at first--I'll clap the side-saddle on my cob, and soon show you how to ride like a plucky girl should. I say, Kitty, I'll hold you on at first--tight." The speaker smiled at her, and the girl shrank from him, but he did not see it. "You'll soon ride, and then you and I will have the jolliest of times together. I'll make you ride so that by this time next year you'll follow the hounds, and top a hedge with the best of them." "Oh, no, I have no wish to ride, Claud." "Yes, you have. You think so now, because you're a bit down; but you wait till you're on the cob, and then you'll never want to come off. I don't. I say, you haven't seen me ride." "No, Claud; but I must go now." "You mustn't, coz. I'm going to rouse you up. I say, though, I don't want to brag, but I can ride--anything. I always get along with the first flight, and a little thing like you after I've been out with you a bit will astonish some of them. I shall keep my eye open, and the first pretty little tit I see that I think will suit you, I shall make the guv'nor buy." "I beg that you will not, Claud." "That's right, do. Go down on your poor little knees and beg, and I'll get the mount for you all the same. I know what will do you good and bring the blood into your pretty cheeks. No, no, don't be in such a hurry. I won't let you go upstairs and mope like a bird with the pip. You never handled a gun, I suppose?" "No, never," said Kate, half angrily now; "of course not." "Then you shall. You can have my double-barrel that father bought for me when I was a boy. It's light as a feather, comes up to the shoulder splendidly, and has no more kick in it than a mouse. I tell you what, if it's fine this afternoon you shall put on thick boots and a hat, and we'll walk along by the fir plantations, and you shall have your first pop at a pheasant." "I shoot at a pheasant!" cried Kate in horror. "Shoo!" exclaimed Claud playfully. "Yes, you have your first shot at a pheasant. Shuddering? That's just like a London girl. How horrid, isn't it?" "Yes, horrible for a woman." "Not a bit of it. You'll like it after the first shot. You'll be ready enough to shove in the cartridges with those little hands, and bring the birds down. I say, I'll teach you to fish, too, and throw a fly. You'll like it, and soon forget all the mopes. You've been spoiled; but after a month or two here you won't know yourself. Don't be in such a hurry, Kitty." "Don't hold my hand like that, Claud; I must really go now," said Kate, whose troubled face was clouded with wonder, vexation, and something approaching fear. "I really wish to go into the house." "No, you don't; you want to stop with me. I shan't have a chance to talk to you again, with old Garstang here. I say, I saw you come out to have this little walk up and down here. I was watching and came after you to show you the way about the grounds." "It was very kind of you, Claud. Thank you; but let me go in now." "Shan't I don't get a chance to have a walk with such a girl as you every day. I am glad you've come. It makes our house seem quite different." "Thank you for saying so--but I feel quite faint now." "More need for you to stop in the fresh air. You faint, and I'll bring you to again with a kiss. That's the sort of thing to cure a girl who faints." She looked at him in horror and disgust, as he burst into a boisterous laugh. "I suppose old Garstang isn't a bad sort but we don't much like him here. I say, what do you think of Harry Dasent?" "I--I hardly know," said Kate, who was trying her best to get back along the path by some laurels to where the conservatory door by the drawing-room stood open. "I have seen so little of him." "So much the better for you. He's not a bad sort of a fellow for men to know, but he's an awful cad with girls. Not a bit of a gentleman. You won't see much more of him, though, for the guv'nor says he won't have him here. I say, a month ago it would have made me set up on bristles, because I want him for a mate, but I don't mind now you've come. We'll be regular pals, and go out together everywhere. I'll soon show you what country life is. Oh, well, if you will go in now I won't stop you. I'll go and have the little gun cleaned up, and--I say, come round the other way; I haven't shown you the dogs." "No, no--not now, please, Claud. I really am tired out and faint." He still kept her hand tightly under his arm, in spite of her effort to withdraw it, and followed her into the conservatory, which was large and well-filled with ornamental shrubs and palms. "Well, you do look a bit tired, dear, but it becomes you. I say, I am so glad you've come. What a pretty little hand this is. You'll give me a kiss before you go?" She started from him in horror. "Nobody can't see here. Just one," he whispered, as he passed his arm round her waist; and before she could struggle free he had roughly kissed her twice. "Um-m-m," exclaimed Mrs Wilton, in a soft simmering way. "Claud, Claud, my dear, shocking, shocking! Oh, fie, fie, fie! You shouldn't, you know. Anyone would think you were an engaged couple." "Aunt, dear!" cried Kate, in an agitated voice, as she clung to that lady, but no further words would come. "Oh, there, there, my dear, don't look like that," cried Mrs Wilton. "I'm not a bit cross. Why, you're all of a flutter. I wasn't blaming you, my dear, only that naughty Claud. It was very rude of him, indeed. Really, Claud, my dear, it is not gentlemanly of you. Poor Kate is quite alarmed." "Then you shouldn't have come peeping," cried the oaf, with a boisterous laugh. "Claud! for shame! I will not allow it. It is not respectful to your mamma. Now, come in, both of you. Mr Garstang is here--with your father, Claud, my love; and I wish you to be very nice and respectful to him, for who knows what may happen? Kate, my dear, I never think anything of money, but when one has rich relatives who have no children of their own, I always say that we oughtn't to go out of our way to annoy them. Henry Dasent certainly is my sister's child, but one can't help thinking more of one's own son; and as Harry is nothing to Mr Garstang, I can't see how he can help remembering Claud very strongly in his will." "Doesn't Claud wish he may get it!" cried that youth, with a grin. "I'm not going to toady old Garstang for the sake of his coin." "Nobody wishes you to, my dear; but come in; they must be done with their business by now. Come, my darling. Why, there's a pretty bloom on your cheeks already. I felt that a little fresh air would do you good. They're in the library; come along. We can go in through the verandah. Don't whistle, Claud, dear; it's so boyish." They passed together out of the farther door of the conservatory into the verandah, and as they approached an open window, a smooth bland voice said: "I'll do the best I can, Mr Wilton; but I am only the agent. If I stave it off, though, it can only be for a short time, and then--Ah, my dear child!" John Garstang, calm, smooth, well-dressed and handsome, rose from one of the library chairs as Kate entered with her aunt, and held out both his hands: "I am very glad to see you again--very, very sorry to hear that you have been so ill. Hah!" he continued, as he scrutinised the agitated face before him in a tender fatherly way, "not quite right yet, though," and he led her to a chair near the fire. "That rosy tinge is a trifle too hectic, and the face too transparently white. You must take care of her, Maria Wilton, and see that she has plenty of this beautiful fresh air. I hope she is a good obedient patient." "Ve-ry, ve-ry, good indeed, John Garstang, only a little too much disposed to keep to her room." "Oh, well, quite natural, too," said Garstang, smiling. "What we all do when we are ailing. But there, we must not begin a discussion about ailments. I'm very glad to see you again, though, Kate, and congratulate you upon being here." "Thank you, Mr Garstang," she replied, giving him a wistful look, as a feeling of loneliness amongst these people made her heart seem to contract. "Well, Wilton, I don't think we need talk any more about business?" "Oh, we're not going to stay," cried Mrs Wilton. "Come, Kate, my child, and let these dreadful men talk." "By no means," said Garstang; "sit still, pray. We shall have plenty of time for anything more we have to say over a cigar to-night, for I've come down to throw myself upon your hospitality for a day or two." "Of course, of course," said Wilton, quickly; "Maria has a room ready for you." "Yes, your old room, John Garstang; and it's beautifully aired, and just as you like it." "Thank you, Maria. You aunt always spoils me, Kate, when I come down here. I look upon the place as quite an oasis in the desert of drudgery and business; and at last I have to drag myself away, or I should become a confirmed sybarite." "Well, why don't you?" said Claud. "Only wish I had your chance." "My dear Claud, you speak with the voice of one-and-twenty. When you are double your age you will find, as I do, that money and position and life's pleasures soon pall, and that the real enjoyment of existence is really in work." "Walker!" said Claud, contemptuously. Garstang laughed merrily, and while Wilton and his wife frowned and shook their heads at their son, he turned to Kate. "It is of no use to preach to young people," he said, "but what I say is the truth. Not that I object to a bit of pleasure, Claud, boy. I'm looking forward to a few hours with you, my lad--jolly ones, as you call them, and as I used. How about the pheasants?" "More than you'll shoot." "Sure to be. My eye is not so true as it was, Maria." "Stuff! You look quite a young man still." "Well, I feel so sometimes. What about the pike in the lake, Claud? Can we troll a bit?" "It's chock full of them. The weeds are rotten and the pike want thinning down. Will you come?" "Will I come! Indeed I will; and I'd ask your cousin to come on the lake with us to see our sport, but it would not be wise. How is the bay?" "Fit as a fiddle. Say the word and I'll have him round if you're for a ride." "After lunch, my dear, after lunch," said Mrs Wilton. "Yes, after lunch I should enjoy it," said Garstang. "Two, sharp, then," said Claud. "Yes, two, sharp," replied Garstang, consulting his watch. "Quarter to one now." "Yes, and lunch at one." "By the way," said Garstang, "Harry said he had been down here, and you gave him some good sport. I'm afraid I have made a mistake in tying him down to the law." Wilton moved uneasily in his chair and darted an angry look at his wife, who began to fidget, and looked at Kate and then at her son. Garstang did not seem to notice anything, but smiled blandly, as he leaned back in his chair. "Oh, yes, he blazed away at the pheasants," said Claud, sneeringly; "but he only wounded one, and it got away." "That's bad," said Garstang. "But then he has not had your experience, Master Claud. It's very good of you, though, James, to have him down, and of you, Maria, to make the boy so welcome. He speaks very gratefully about you." "Oh, it isn't my doing, John Garstang," said the lady, hurriedly; "but of course I am bound to make him welcome when he comes;" and she uttered a little sigh as she glanced at her lord again, as if feeling satisfied that she had exonerated herself from a serious charge. "Ah, well, we'll thank the lord of the manor, then," said Garstang, smiling at Kate. "Needn't thank me," said Wilton, gruffly. "I don't interfere with Claud's choice of companions. If you mean that I encourage him to come and neglect his work you are quite out. You must talk to Claud." "I don't want him," cried that gentleman. "But I think I understood him to say that you had asked him down again." "Not I," cried Claud. "He'd say anything." "Indeed! I'm sorry to hear this. In fact, I half expected to find him down here, and if I had I was going to ask you, James, if you thought it would be possible for you to take him as--as--well, what shall I say?--a sort of farm pupil." "I?" cried Wilton, in dismay. "What! Keep him here?" "Well--er--yes. He has such a penchant for country life, and I thought he would be extremely useful as a sort of overlooker, or bailiff, while learning to be a gentleman-farmer." "You keep him at his desk, and make a lawyer of him," said Wilton sourly. "He'll be able to get a living then, and not have to be always borrowing to make both ends meet. There's nothing to be made out of farming." "Do you hear this, Kate, my dear?" said Garstang, with a meaning smile. "It is quite proverbial how the British farmer complains." "You try farming then, and you'll see." "Why not?" said Garstang, laughingly, while his host writhed in his seat. "It always seems to me to be a delightful life in the country, with horses to ride, and hunting, shooting and fishing." "Oh, yes," growled Wilton, "and crops failing, and markets falling, and swine fever, and flukes in your sheep, and rinderpest in your cattle, and the bank refusing your checks." "Oh, come, come, not so bad as that! You have fine weather as well as foul," said Garstang, merrily. "Then Harry has not been down again, Claud?" "No, I haven't seen him since he went back the other day," said Claud, and added to himself, "and don't want to." "That's strange," said Garstang, thoughtfully. "I wonder where he has gone. I daresay he will be back at the office, though, by now. I don't like for both of us to be away together. When the cat's away the mice will play, Kate, as the old proverb says." "Then why don't you stop at the office, you jolly old sleek black tom, and not come purring down here?" said Claud to himself. "Bound to say you can spit and swear and scratch if you like." There was a dead silence just then, which affected Mrs Wilton so that she felt bound to say something, and she turned to the visitor. "Of course, John Garstang, we don't want to encourage Harry Dasent here, but if--" "Ah, here's lunch ready at last," cried Wilton, so sharply that his wife jumped and shrank from his angry glare, while the bell in the little wooden turret went on clanging away. "Oh, yes, lunch," she said hastily. "Claud, my dear, will you take your cousin in?" But Garstang had already arisen, with bland, pleasant smile, and advanced to Kate. "May I?" he said, as if unconscious of his sister-in-law's words; and at that moment a servant opened the library door as if to announce the lunch, but said instead: "Mr Harry Dasent, sir!" That gentleman entered the room. CHAPTER NINE. "Hello, Harry!" said Claud, breaking up what is generally known as an awkward pause, for the fresh arrival had been received in frigid silence. "Ah, Harry, my boy," said Garstang, with a pleasant smile, "I half expected to find you here." "Did you?" said the young man, making an effort to be at his ease. "Rather a rough morning for a walk--roads so bad. I've run down for a few hours to see how Kate Wilton was. Thought you'd give me a bit of lunch." "Of course, my dear," said Mrs Wilton, stiffly, and glancing at her husband afterwards as if to say, "Wasn't that right?" "One knife and fork more or less doesn't make much difference at my table," said Wilton, sourly. "And he does look pretty hungry," said Claud with a grin. "Glad to see you looking better, Kate," continued the young man, holding out his hand to take that which was released from his step-father's for the moment. "Thank you, yes," said Kate, quietly; "I am better." "Well, we must not keep the lunch waiting," said Garstang. "Won't you take in your aunt, Harry? And, by the way, I must ask you to get back to-night so as to be at the office in good time in the morning, for I'm afraid my business will keep me here for some days." "Oh, yes, I'll be there," replied the young man, with a meaning look at Garstang; and then offering his arm to Mrs Wilton, they filed off into the dining-room, to partake of a luncheon which would have been eaten almost in silence but for Garstang. He cleverly kept the ball rolling with his easy, fluent conversation, seeming as he did to be a master of the art of drawing everyone out in turn on his or her particular subject, and as if entirely for the benefit of the convalescent, to whom he made constant appeals for her judgment. The result was that to her own surprise the girl grew more animated, and more than once found herself looking gratefully in the eyes of the courtly man of the world, who spoke as if quite at home on every topic he started, whether it was in a discussion with the hostess on cookery and preserves, with Wilton on farming and the treatment of cattle, or with the young men on hunting, shooting, fishing and the drama. And it was all so pleasantly done that a load seemed to be lifted from the sufferer's breast, and she found herself contrasting what her life was with what it might have been had Garstang been left her guardian, and half wondered why her father, who had been one of the most refined and scrupulous of men, should have chosen her Uncle James instead of the polished courtly relative who set her so completely at her ease and listened with such paternal deference to her words. "Wish I could draw her out like he does," thought Claud.--"These old fogies! they always seem to know what to say to make a wench grin." "He'll watch me like a cat does a mouse," said Harry to himself, "but I'll have a turn at her somehow." James Wilton said little, and looked glum, principally from the pressure of money on the brain; but Mrs Wilton said a great deal, much more than she should have said, some of her speeches being particularly unfortunate, and those which followed only making matters worse. But Garstang always came to her help when Wilton's brow was clouding over; and the lady sighed to herself when the meal was at an end. "If Harry don't come with us I shall stop in," said Claud to himself; and then aloud, "Close upon two. You'd like a turn with us, Harry, fishing or shooting?" "I? No. I'm tired with my walk, and I've got to do it again this evening." "No, you haven't," said Claud, sulkily; "you know you'll be driven back." "Oh, yes," said Garstang; "your uncle will not let you walk. Better come, Harry." "Thanks, no, sir; I'll stop and talk to Aunt and Kate, here." "No, my dear; we must not tire Kate out, she'll have to go and lie down this afternoon." "Oh, very well then, Aunt; I'll stop and talk to you and Uncle." "Then you'll have to come round the farms with me if you do," growled Wilton. "Thanks, no; I've walked enough through the mud for one day." "Let him have his own way, Claud, my lad," cried Garstang. "We must be off. See you down to dinner, I hope, Kate, my child?" She smiled at him. "Yes, I hope to be well enough to come down," she replied. "That's right; and we'll see what we can get to boast about when we come back. Come along, boy." Claud was ready to hesitate, but he could not back out, and he followed Garstang, the young men's eyes meeting in a defiant gaze. But he turned as he reached the door. "Didn't say good-bye to you, Mamma. All right," he cried, kissing her boisterously. "I won't let them shoot me, and I'll mind and not tumble out of the boat. I say," he whispered, "don't let him get Kate alone." "Oh, that's your game, is it?" said Harry to himself; "treats it with contempt. All right, proud step-father; you haven't all the brains in the world." He followed the gentlemen into the hall, and then stood at the door to see them off, hearing Garstang say familiarly: "Let's show them what we can do, Harry, my lad. It's just the day for the pike. Here, try one of these; they tell me they are rather choice." "Oh, I shall light my pipe," said the young man sulkily. "Wise man, as a rule; but try one of these first, and if you don't like it you can throw it away." Claud lit the proffered cigar rather sulkily, and they went off; while Harry, after seeing Wilton go round to the stables, went back into the hall, and was about to enter the drawing-room, but a glance down at his muddy boots made him hesitate. He could hear the voice of Mrs Wilton as she talked loudly to her niece, and twice over he raised his hand to the door knob, but each time lowered it; and going back into the dining-room, he rang the bell. "Can I have my boots brushed?" he said to the footman. "Yes, sir, I'll bring you a pair of slippers." "Oh, no, I'll come to the pantry and put my feet up on a chair." The man did not look pleased at this, but he led the way to his place, fetched the blacking and brushes, and as he manipulated them he underwent a kind of cross-examination about the household affairs, answering the first question rather shortly, the rest with a fair amount of eagerness. For the visitor's hand had stolen into his pocket and come out again with half-a-crown, which he used to rasp the back of the old Windsor chair on which he rested his foot, and then, balancing it on one finger, he tapped it softly, making it give forth a pleasant jingling sound that was very grateful to the man's ear, for he brushed away most diligently, blacked, polished, breathed on the leather, and brushed again. "Keep as good hours as ever?" said Dasent, after several questions had been put. "Oh, yes, sir. Prayers at ha'-past nine, and if there's a light going anywhere with us after ten the governor's sure to see it and make a row. He's dreadful early, night and morning, too." "Yes, he is very early of a morning, I noticed. Well, it makes the days longer." "Well, sir, it do; but one has to be up pretty sharp to get his boots done and his hot water into his room by seven, for if it's five minutes past he's there before you, waiting, and looking as black as thunder. My predecessor got the sack, they say, for being quarter of an hour late two or three times, and it isn't easy to be ready in weather like this." "What, dark in the mornings?" "Oh, no, sir, I don't mean that. It's his boots. He gets them that clogged and soaked that I have to wash 'em overnight and put 'em to the kitchen fire, and if that goes out too soon it's an awful job to get 'em to shine. They don't have a hot pair of feet in 'em like these, sir. Your portmanteau coming on by the carrier?" "Oh, no, I go back to-night. And that reminds me--have they got a good dog-cart in the village?" "Dog-cart, sir?" said the man, with a laugh; "not here. The baker's got a donkey-cart, and there's plenty of farmers' carts. That's all there is near." "I thought so, but I've been here so little lately." "But you needn't mind about that, sir. Master's sure to order our trap to be round to take you to the station, and Tom Johnson'll be glad enough to drive you." "Oh, yes; of course; but I like to be independent. I daresay I shall walk back." "I wouldn't, sir, begging your pardon, for it's an awkward road in the dark. Tell you what, though, sir, if you did, there's the man at Barber's Corner, at the little pub, two miles on the road. He has a very good pony and trap. He does a bit of chicken higgling round the country. You mention my name, sir, and he'd be glad enough to drive you for a florin or half-a-crown." "Ah, well, we shall see," said Dasent, putting down his second leg. "Look a deal better for the touch-up. Get yourself a glass." "Thankye, sir. Much obliged, sir. But beg your pardon, sir, I'll just give Tom Johnson a 'int and he'll have the horse ready in the dog-cart time enough for you. He'll suppose it'll be wanted. It'll be all right, sir. I wouldn't go tramping it on a dark night, sir, and it's only doing the horse good. They pretty well eat their heads off here sometimes." "No, no, certainly not," said Dasent. "Thank you, though, er--Samuel, all the same." "Thank you, sir," said the man, and the donor of half-a-crown went back through the swing baize-covered door, and crossed the hall. "Needn't ha' been so proud; but p'raps he ain't got another half-crown. Lor', what a gent will do sooner than be under an obligation!" Even that half-crown seemed to have been thrown away, for upon the giver entering the drawing-room it was to find it empty, and after a little hesitation he returned to the hall, where he was just in time to encounter the footman with a wooden tray, on his way to clear away the lunch things. "Is your mistress going out?" he said. "There is no one in the drawing-room." "Gone upstairs to have her afternoon nap, sir," said the man, in a low tone. "I suppose Miss Wilton's gone up to her room, too?" Dasent nodded, took his hat, and went out, lit a cigar, and began walking up and down, apparently admiring the front of the old, long, low, red-brick house, with its many windows and two wings covered with wistaria and roses. One window--that at the end of the west wing--took his attention greatly, and he looked up at it a good deal before slowly making his way round to the garden, where he displayed a great deal of interest in the vineries and the walls, where a couple of men were busy with their ladders, nailing. Here he stood watching them for some minutes--the deft way in which they used shreds and nails to rearrange the thin bearing shoots of peach and plum. After this he passed through an arched doorway in the wall, and smoked in front of the trained pear-trees, before going on to the yard where the tool shed stood, and the ladders used for gathering the apples in the orchard hung beneath the eaves of the long, low mushroom house. Twice over he went back to the hall, but the drawing-room stood open, and the place was wonderfully quiet and still. "Anyone would think he was master here," said one of the men, as he saw Dasent pass by the third time. "Won't be much he don't know about the place when he's done." "Shouldn't wonder if he is," said the other. "Him and his father's lawyers, and the guv'nor don't seem none too chirpy just now. They say he is in Queer Street." "Who's they?" said his companion, speaking indistinctly, consequent upon having two nails and a shred between his lips. "Why, they. I dunno, but it's about that they've been a bit awkward with the guv'nor at Bramwich Bank." "That's nothing. Life's all ups and downs. It won't hurt us. We shall get our wages, I dessay. They're always paid." The afternoon wore on and at dusk Garstang and Claud made their appearance, followed by a labourer carrying a basket, which was too short to hold the head and tail of a twelve-pound pike, which lay on the top of half-a-dozen more. "Better have come with us, Harry," said Claud. "Had some pretty good sport. Found it dull?" "I? No," was the reply. "I say, what time do you dine to-night?" "Old hour--six." "Going to stay dinner, Harry?" said Garstang. "Oh, yes; I'm going to stay dinner," said the young man, giving him a defiant look. "Well, it will be pleasanter, but it is a very dark ride." "Yes, but I'm going to walk." "No, you aren't," said Claud, in a sulky tone of voice; "we're going to have you driven over." "There is no need." "Oh, yes, there is. I want a ride to have a cigar after dinner, and I shall come and see you off. We don't do things like that, even if we haven't asked anyone to come." Kate made her appearance again at dinner, and once more Garstang was the life and soul of the party, which would otherwise have been full of constraint. But it was not done in a boisterous, ostentatious way. Everything was in good taste, and Kate more than once grew quite animated, till she saw that both the young men were eagerly listening to her, when she withdrew into herself. Mrs Wilton got through the dinner without once making her lord frown, and she was congratulating herself upon her success, as she rose, after making a sign, when her final words evolved a tempestuous flash of his eyes. "Don't you think you had better stop till the morning, Harry Dasent?" she said. But his quick reply allayed the storm at once. "Oh, no, thank you, Aunt," he said, with a side glance at Garstang. "I must be back to look after business in the morning." "But it's so dark, my dear." "Bah! the dark won't hurt him, Maria, and I've told them to bring the dog-cart round at eight." "Oh, that's very good of you, sir," said the young man; "but I had made up my mind to walk." "I told you I should ride over with you, didn't I?" growled Claud. "Yes, but--" "I know. There, hold your row. We needn't start till half-past eight, so there'll be plenty of time for coffee and a cigar." "Then I had better say good-night to you now, Mr Dasent," said Kate, quietly, holding out her hand. "Oh, I shall see you again," he cried. "No; I am about to ask Aunt to let me go up to my room now; it has been a tiring day." "Then good-night," he said impressively, and he took and pressed her hand in a way which made her colour slightly, and Claud twitch one arm and double his list under the table. "Good-night. Good-night, Claud." She shook hands; then crossed to her uncle. "Good-night, my dear," he said, drawing her down to kiss her cheek. "Glad you are so much better." "Thank you, Uncle.--Good-night, Mr Garstang." Her lip was quivering a little, but she smiled at him gratefully as he rose and spoke in a low affectionate way. "Good-night, my dear child," he said. "Let me play doctor with a bit of good advice. Make up your mind for a long night's rest, and ask your uncle and aunt to excuse you at breakfast in the morning. You must hasten slowly to get back your strength. Good-night." "You'll have to take great care of her, James," he continued, as he returned to his seat. "Umph! Yes, I mean to," said the host. "A very, very sweet girt," said Garstang thoughtfully, and his face was perfectly calm as he met his stepson's shifty glance. Then coffee was brought in; Claud, at a hint from his lather, fetched a cigar box, and was drawn out by Garstang during the smoking to give a lull account of their sport that afternoon with the pike. "Quite bent the gaff hook," he was saying later on, when the grating of wheels was heard; and soon after the young men started, Mrs Wilton coming into the hall to see them off and advise them both to wrap up well about their chests. That night John Garstang broke his host's rules by keeping his candle burning late, while he sat thinking deeply by the bedroom fire; for he had a good deal upon his brain just then. "No," he said at last, as he rose to wind up his watch; "she would not dare. But fore-warned is fore-armed, my man. You were never meant for a diplomat. Bah! Nor for anything else." But it was a long time that night before John Garstang slept. CHAPTER TEN. "I say, guv'nor, when's old Garstang going?" "Oh, very soon, now, boy," said James Wilton testily. "But you said that a week ago, and he seems to be settling down as if the place belonged to him." The father uttered a deep, long-drawn sigh. "It's no use for you to snort, dad; that doesn't do any good. Why don't you tell him to be off?" "No, no; impossible; and mind what you are about; be civil to him." "Well, I am. Can't help it; he's so jolly smooth with a fellow, and has such good cigars--I say, guv'nor, rather different to your seventeen-and-six-penny boxes of weeds. I wouldn't mind, only he's in the way so. Puts a stop to, you know what. I never get a chance with her alone; here are you two shut up all the morning over the parchments, and she don't come down; and when she does he carries me off with him. Then at night you're all there." "Never mind! he will soon go now; we have nearly done." "I'm jolly glad of it. I've been thinking that if it's going on much longer I'd better do without the four greys." "Eh?" "Oh, you know, guv'nor; toddle off to Gretna Green, or wherever they do the business, and get it over." "No, no, no, no. There must be no nonsense, my boy," said Wilton, uneasily. "Don't do anything rash." "Oh, no, I won't do anything rash," said Claud, with an unpleasant grin; "only one must make one's hay when the sun shines, guv'nor." "There's one thing about his visit," said Wilton hurriedly; "it has done her a great deal of good; she isn't like the same girl." "No; she has come out jolly. Makes it a little more bearable." "Eh, what, sir?--bearable?" "Yes. Fellow wants the prospect of some sugar or jam afterwards, to take such a sickly dose as she promised to be." "Oh, nonsense, nonsense. But--er--mind what you're about; nothing rash." "I've got my head screwed on right, guv'nor. I can manage a girl. I say, though, she has quite taken to old Garstang; he has got such a way with him. He can be wonderfully jolly when he likes." "Yes, wonderfully," said Wilton, with a groan. "You've no idea how he can go when we're out. He's full of capital stories, and as larky when we're fishing or shooting as if he were only as old as I am. Ever seen him jump?" "What, run and jump?" "Yah! When he is mounted. He rides splendidly. Took Brown Charley over hedge after hedge yesterday like a bird. Understands a horse as well as I do. I like him, and we get on swimming together; but we don't want him here now." "Well, well, it won't be long before he has gone," said Wilton, hurrying some papers away over which he and Garstang had been busy all the morning. "Where are you going this afternoon?" "Ride. He wants to see the Cross Green farm." "Eh?" said Wilton, looking up sharply, and with an anxious gleam in his eyes. "Did he say that?" "Yes; and we're off directly after lunch. I say, though, what was that letter about?" "What letter?" said Wilton, starting nervously. "Oh, I say; don't jump as if you thought the bailiffs were coming in. I meant the one brought over from the station half-an-hour ago." "I had no letter." "Sam said one came. It must have been for old Garstang then." "Am I intruding? Business?" said Garstang, suddenly appearing at the door. "Eh? No; come in. We were only talking about ordinary things. Sit down. Lunch must be nearly due. Want to speak to me?" All this in a nervous, hurried way. "Never mind lunch," said Garstang quietly; "I want you to oblige me, my dear James, by ordering that brown horse round." Wilton uttered a sigh of relief, and his face, which had been turning ghastly, slowly resumed its natural tint. "But I understood from Claud here that you were both going out after lunch." "I've had a particular letter sent down in a packet, and I must ride over and telegraph back at some length." "We'll send Tom over for you," said Claud; and then he felt as if he would have given anything to withdraw the words. "It's very good of you," said Garstang, smiling pleasantly, "but the business is important. Oblige me by ordering the horse at once." "Oh, I'll run round. Have Brown Charley here in five minutes." "Thank you, Claud; and perhaps you'll give me a glass of sherry and a biscuit, James?" "Yes, yes, of course; but you'll be back to dinner?" "Of course. We must finish what we are about." "Yes, we must finish what we are about," said Wilton, with a dismal look; and he rang the bell, just as Claud passed the window on the way to the stables. A quarter of an hour later Garstang was cantering down the avenue, just as the lunch-bell was ringing; and Claud winked at his father as they crossed to the drawing-room, where his mother and Kate were seated, and chuckled to himself as he thought of the long afternoon he meant to have. "Oh, I say, guv'nor, it's my turn now," he cried, as Wilton crossed smiling to his niece, and offered her his arm. "All in good time, my boy; all in good time. You bring in your mother. I don't see why I'm always to be left in the background. Come along, Kate, my dear; you must have me to-day." "Why, where is John Garstang?" cried Mrs Wilton. "Off on the horse, mother," said Claud, with a grin. "Gone over to the station to wire." "Gone without saying good-bye?" "Oh, he's coming back again, mother; but we can do without him for once in the way. I say, Kate, I want you to give me this afternoon for that lesson in riding." "Riding, my dear?" "Yes, mother, riding. I'm going to give Kitty some lessons on the little mare." "No, no; not this afternoon," said the girl nervously, as they entered the dining-room. "Yes, this afternoon. You've got to make the plunge, and the sooner you do it the better." "Thank you; you're very good, but I was going to read to aunt." "Oh, never mind me, my dear; you go with Claud. It's going to be a lovely afternoon." "I should prefer not to begin yet," said Kate, decisively. "Get out," cried Claud. "What a girl you are. You'll come." "I'm sure Claud will take the greatest care of you, my darling." "Yes, aunt, I am sure he would; but the lessons must wait for a while." "All right, Kitty. Come for a drive, then. I'll take you a good round." "I should prefer to stay at home this afternoon, Claud." "Very well, then, we'll go on the big pond, and I'll teach you how to troll." She turned to speak to her uncle, to conceal her annoyance, but Claud persevered. "You will come, won't you?" he said. "Don't worry your cousin, Claud, my dear, if she would rather not," said Mrs Wilton. "Who's worrying her?" said Claud, testily. "I say, Kate, say you'll come." "I would rather not to-day," she said, quietly. "There now, you're beginning to mope again, and I mean to stop it. I tell you what; we'll have out the guns, and I'll take you along by the fir plantation." "No, no, my boy," said Wilton, interposing. "Kate isn't a boy." "Who said she was?" said the young man, gruffly. "Can't a woman pull a trigger if she likes?" "I daresay she could, my dear," said Mrs Wilton; "but I'm sure I shouldn't like to. I've often heard your papa say how badly guns kicked." "So do donkeys, mother," said Claud, sulkily; "but I shouldn't put her on one that did. You'll come, won't you, dear?" "No, Claud," said Kate, very quietly and firmly. "I could not find any pleasure in trying to destroy the life of a beautiful bird." "Ha, ha! I say, we are nice. Don't you eat any pheasant at dinner, then. There's a brace for to-night. Old Garstang shot 'em--a cruel wretch." Kate looked at him indignantly, and then began conversing with her uncle, while her cousin relapsed into sulky silence, and began to eat as if he were preparing for a famine to come, his mother shaking her head at him reproachfully every time she caught his eye. The lunch at an end, Kate took her uncle's arm and went out into the veranda with him for a few minutes as the sun was shining, and as soon as they were out of hearing Claud turned fiercely upon his mother. "What were you shaking your head at me like that for?" he cried. "You looked like some jolly old Chinese figure." "For shame, my dear. Don't talk to me like that, or I shall be very, very cross with you. And look here, Claud, you mustn't be rough with your cousin. Girls don't like it." "Oh, don't they? Deal you know about it." "And there's another thing I want to say to you. If you want to win her you must not be so attentive to that Miss Leigh." "Who's attentive to Miss Leigh?" said the young man, savagely. "You are, my dear; you quite flirted with her when she was here with her brother last night, and I heard from one of the servants that you were seen talking to her in Lower Lane on Monday." "Then it was a lie," he cried, sharply. "Tell 'em to mind their own business. Now, look here, mother, you want me to marry Katey, don't you?" "Of course, my dear." "Then you keep your tongue still and your eyes shut. The guv'nor 'll be off directly, and you'll be taking her into the drawing-room." "Yes, my dear." "Well, I'm not going out; I'm going to have it over with her this afternoon, so you slip off and leave me to my chance while there is one. I'm tired of waiting for old Garstang to be out of the way." "But I don't think I ought to, my dear." "Then I do. Look here, she knows what's coming, and that's why she wouldn't come out with me, you know. It's all gammon, to lead me on. She means it. You know what girls are. I mean to strike while the iron's hot." "But suppose--" "I shan't suppose anything of the kind. She only pretends. We understand one another with our eyes. I know what girls are; and you give me my chance this afternoon, and she's mine. She's only holding off a bit, I tell you." "Perhaps you are right, my dear; but don't hurt her feelings by being too premature." "Too gammon! You do what I say, and soon. I don't want old Garstang back before we've got it all over. Keep dark; here they come." Kate entered with her uncle as soon as he had spoken, and Claud attacked her directly. "Altered your mind?" he said. "No, Claud; you must excuse me, please," was the reply. "All right. Off, father?" "Yes, my boy. In about half an hour or so; I have two or three letters to write." "Two or three letters to write!" muttered the young man, as he went out into the veranda, to light his pipe, and keep on the watch for the coveted opportunity; "haven't you any brains in your head?" But James Wilton's half-hour proved to be an hour, and when, after seeing him off, the son returned to the hall, he heard voices in the drawing-room, and gave a vicious snarl. "Why the devil don't she go?" he muttered. There were steps the next moment, and he drew back into the dining-room to listen, the conversation telling him that his mother and cousin were going into the library to get some particular book. There, to the young man's great disgust, they stayed, and he waited for quite half an hour trying to control his temper, and devise some plan for trying to get his mother away. At last she appeared, saying loudly as she looked back, "I shall be back directly, my dear," and closed the door. Claud appeared at once, and with a meaning smile at his mother, she crossed to the stairs, while as she ascended to her room the son went straight to the library and entered. As he threw open the door he found himself face to face with his cousin, who, book in hand, was coming out of the room. "Hallo!" he cried, with a peculiar laugh; "Where's the old lady?" "She has just gone to her room, Claud," said Kate, quietly. "Here, don't be in such a hurry, little one," he cried, pushing to the door. "What's the matter?" "Nothing," she said, quietly, though her heart was throbbing heavily; "I was going to take my book into the drawing-room." "Oh, bother the old books!" he cried, snatching hers away, and catching her by the wrist; "come and sit down; I want to talk to you." "You can talk to me in the drawing-room," she said, trying hard to be firm. "No, I can't; it's better here. I say, Kitty, when shall it be?" "When shall what be?" "Our wedding. You know." "Never," she said, gravely, fixing her eyes upon his. "What?" he cried. "What nonsense! You know how I love you. I do, 'pon my soul. I never saw anyone who took my fancy so before." "Do your mother and father know that you are talking to me in this mad way?--you, my own cousin?" she said, firmly. "What do I care whether they do or no?" he said, with a laugh; "I've been weaned for a long time. I say, don't hold me off; don't play with a fellow like silly girls do. I love you ever so, and I'm always thinking about your beautiful eyes till I can't sleep of a night. It's quite right for you to hold me off for a bit, but there's been enough of it, and I know you like me." "I have tried to like you as my cousin," she said, gravely. "That'll do for a beginning," he replied, laughingly; "but let's get a little farther on now, I say. Kitty, you are beautiful, you know, and whenever I see you my heart goes pumping away tremendously. I can't talk like some fellows do, but I can love a girl with the best of them, and I want you to pitch over all shilly-shally nonsense, and let's go on now like engaged people." "You are talking at random and of what is unnatural and impossible. Please never to speak to me again like this, Claud; and now loose my wrist, and let me go." "Likely, when I've got you alone at last I say, don't hold me off like this; it's so silly." She made a brave effort to hide the alarm she felt; and with a sudden snatch she freed her wrist and darted across the room. The flight of the hunted always gives courage to the hunter, and in this case he sprang after her, and the next minute had clasped her round the waist. "Got you!" he said, laughingly; "no use to struggle; I'm twice as strong as you." "Claud! How dare you?" she cried, with her eyes flashing. "'Cause I love you, darling." "Let go. It is an insult. It is a shame to me. Do you know what you are doing?" "Yes; getting tighter hold of you, so as to kiss those pretty lips and cheeks and eyes--There, and there, and there!" "If my uncle knew that you insulted me like this--" "Call him; he isn't above two miles off." "Aunt--aunt!" cried the girl, excitedly, and with the hot, indignant tears rising to her eyes. "Gone to lie down, while I have a good long loving talk with you, darling. Ah, it's of no use to struggle. Don't be so foolish. There, you've fought long enough. All girls do the same, because it is their nature to fool it. There! now I'm master; give me a nice, pretty, long kiss, little wifie-to-be. I say, Kitty, you are a beauty. Let's be married soon. You don't know how happy I shall make you." Half mad now with indignation and fear, she wrested herself once more free, and, scorning to call for help, she ran toward the fire place. But before she could reach the bell he struck her hand on one side, caught her closely now in his arms, and covered her face once more with kisses. This time a loud cry escaped her as she struggled hard, to be conscious the next moment of some one rushing into the room, feeling herself dragged away, and as the word "Hound!" fell fiercely upon her ear there was the sound of a heavy blow, a scuffling noise, and a loud crash of breaking wood and glass. CHAPTER ELEVEN. "My poor darling child!--Lie still, you miserable hound, or I'll half strangle you." The words--tender and gentle as if it were a woman's voice, fierce and loud as from an enraged man--seemed to come out of a thick mist in which Kate felt as if she were sick unto death. Then by degrees she grew conscious that she was being held tightly to the breast of of some one who was breathing hard from exertion, and tenderly stroking and smoothing her dishevelled hair. The next moment there was a wild cry, and she recognised her aunt's voice, as, giddy and exhausted, she clung to him who held her. "What is it? What is it? Oh, Claud, my darling! Help, help, help! He's killed him--killed." "Here, what's the matter? Who called?" came from a little distance. Then from close at hand Kate heard her uncle's voice through the mist. "What's all this, Maria--John Garstang--Claud? Damn it all, can no one speak?--Kate, what is it?" "This," cried Garstang, sternly. "I came back just now, and hearing shrieks rushed in here, just in time to save this poor, weak, suffering child from the brutal insulting attack of that young ruffian." "He has killed him. James--he has killed him," shrieked Mrs Wilton. "On, my poor dear darling boy!" "Back, all of you. Be off," roared Wilton, as half a dozen servants came crowding to the door, which he slammed in their faces, and turned the key. "Now, please let's have the truth," he cried, hotly. "Here, Kate, my dear; come to me." She made no reply, but Garstang felt her cling more closely to him. "Will some one speak?" cried Wilton, again. "The Doctor--send for the Doctor; he's dead, he's dead," wailed Mrs Wilton, who was down upon her knees now, holding her son's head in her lap; while save for a slight quiver of the muscles, indicative of an effort to keep his eyes closed, Claud made no sign. "He is not dead," said Garstang, coldly; "a knockdown blow would not kill a ruffian of his calibre." "Oh," exclaimed Mrs Wilton, turning upon him now in her maternal fury; "he owns to it, he struck him down--my poor, poor boy. James, why don't you send for the police at once? The cruelty--the horror of it! Kate, Kate, my dear, come away from the wretch at once." "Then you own that you struck him down?" cried Wilton, whose face was now black with a passion which made him send prudence to the winds, as he rose in revolt against one who had long been his master. "Yes," said Garstang, quietly, and without a trace of anger, though his tone was full of contempt; "I told you why." "Yes, and by what right did you interfere? Some foolish romping connected with a boy and girl love, I suppose. How dared you interfere?" "Boy and girl love!" cried Garstang, scornfully, as he laid one hand upon Kate's head and pressed it to his shoulder, where she nestled and hid her face. "Shame upon you both; it was scandalous!" "Shame upon us? What do you mean, sir? What do you mean?--Will you come away from him, Kate?" "I mean this," said Garstang, with his arm firmly round the poor girl's waist, "that you and your wife have failed utterly in your duties towards this poor suffering child." "It isn't true," cried Mrs Wilton. "We've treated her as if she were our own daughter; and my poor boy told me how he loved her, and he had only just come to talk to her for a bit. Oh, Claud, my darling! my precious boy!" "Did I not tell you that your darling--your precious boy--was insulting her grievously? Shame upon you, woman," cried Garstang. "It needed no words of mine to explain what had taken place. Your own woman's nature ought to have revolted against such an outrage to the weak invalid placed by her poor father's will in your care." "Don't you speak to my wife like that!" cried Wilton, angrily. "I will speak to your wife like that, and to you as well. I forbore to speak before: I had no right; but do you think I have been blind to the scandal going on here? The will gives you full charge of the poor child and her fortune, and what do I find when I come down? A dastardly cruel plot to ensnare her--to force on a union with an unmannerly, brutally coarse young ruffian, that he may--that you may, for your own needs and ends, lawfully gain possession of the fortune, to scatter to the winds." "It's a lie--it's a lie!" roared Wilton. "It is the truth, sir. Your wife's words just now confirmed what I had noted over and over again, till my very gorge rose at being compelled to accept the hospitality of such people, while I writhed at my own impotence, my helplessness when I wished to interfere. You know--she knows--how I have kept silence. Not one word of warning have I uttered to her. She must have seen and felt what was being hatched, but neither she nor I could have realised that the cowardly young ruffian lying there would have dared to insult a weak gentle girl whose very aspect claimed a man's respect and protection. A lie? It is the truth, James Wilton." "Oh, my poor, poor boy!" wailed Mrs Wilton; "and I did beg and pray of you not to be too rash." "Will you hold your tongue, woman?" roared Wilton. "Yes, for heaven's sake be silent, madam," cried Garstang; "there was no need for you to indorse my words, and lower yourself more in your poor niece's eyes." "Look here," cried Wilton, who was going to and fro beyond the library table, writhing under the lash of his solicitor's tongue; "it's all a bit of nonsense; the foolish fellow snatched a kiss, I suppose." "Snatched a kiss!" cried Garstang, scornfully. "Look at her: quivering with horror and indignation." "I won't look at her. I won't be talked to like this in my own house." "Your own house!" said Garstang, contemptuously. "Yes, sir; mine till the law forces me to give it up. I won't have it. It's my house, and I won't stand here and be bullied by any man." "Oh, don't, don't, don't make things worse, James," wailed Mrs Wilton. "Send for the Doctor; his heart is beating still." "You hold your tongue, and don't you make things worse," roared her husband. "As for him--curse him!--it's all his doing." "But he's lying here insensible, and you won't send for help." "No, I won't. Do you think I want Leigh and his sister, and then the whole parish, to know what has been going on? The servants will talk enough." "But he's dying, James." "You said he was dead just now. Chuck some cold water over the idiot, and bring him to. Damn him! I should like to horsewhip him!" "You should have done it often, years ago," said Garstang, bitterly. "It is too late now." "You mind your own business," shouted Wilton, turning upon him; "I can't talk like you do, but I can say what I mean, and it's this: I'm master here yet, and I'll stand no more of it. I don't care for your deeds and documents. I won't have you here to insult me and my wife, and what's more, if you've done that boy a mischief we'll see what the law can do. You shall suffer as well as I. Now then: off with you; pack and go, and I'll show you that the law protects me as well as you. Kate, my girl, you've nothing to be frightened about. Come to me here." She clung the more tightly to her protector. "Then come to your aunt," said Wilton, fiercely. "Get up, Maria," he shouted. "Can't you see I want you here?" "Get up? Oh, James, James, I can't leave my boy." "Get up, before you put me in a rage," he yelled. "Now, then, Kate, come here; and I tell you this, John Garstang. I give you a quarter of an hour, and if you're not gone then, the men shall throw you out." "What!" cried Garstang, sternly, as he drew himself up. "Go and leave this poor girl here to your tender mercies?" "Yes, sir; go and leave `this poor girl,' as you call her, to my tender mercies." "I can not; I will not," said Garstang, firmly. "But I say you shall, Mr Lawyer. You know enough of such things to feel that you must. Curse you and your interference. Kate, my dear, I am your poor dead father's executor, and your guardian." "Yes, it is true," said Garstang, bitterly. "Poor fellow, it was the one mistake of a good, true life. He had faith in his brother." "More than he had in you," cried Wilton. "Do you hear what I say, Kate? Don't visit upon your aunt and me the stupid folly of that boy, whose sin is that he is very fond of you, and frightened you by a bit of loving play." "Loving play!" cried Garstang, scornfully. "Yes, my dear, loving play. I vouch for it, and so will his mother." "Yes, yes, yes, Kate, dear. He does love you. He told me so, and if he did wrong, poor, poor boy, see how he has been punished." "There, my dear, you hear," cried Wilton, trying hard to speak gently and winningly to her, but failing dismally. "Come to your aunt now." "Yes, Kate, darling, do, do please, and help me to try and bring him round. You don't want to see him lie a corpse at his sorrowing mother's feet?" "Come here, Kate," cried Wilton, fiercely now. "Don't you make me angry. I am your guardian, and you must obey me. Come away from that man." She shuddered, and began to sob now violently. "Ah, that's better. You're coming to your senses now, and seeing things in their proper light. Now, John Garstang, you heard what I said--go." "Yes, my child," said Garstang, taking one of Kate's hands, and raising it tenderly to his lips, "your uncle is right. I have no place here, no right to protect you, and I must go, trusting that good may come out of evil, and that what has passed, besides opening your eyes to what is a thorough conspiracy, will give you firmness to protect yourself, and teach them that such a project as theirs is an infamy." "Don't stand preaching there, man. Your time's nearly up. Go, before you are made. Come here to your aunt, Kate." "No, my dear, do nothing of the sort," said Garstang, gently, as she slowly raised her head and gazed imploringly in his face. "You are but a girl, but you must play the woman now--the firm, strong woman who has to protect herself. Go up to your room and insist upon staying there until you have a guarantee that this insolent cub, who is lying here pretending to be insensible, shall cease his pretensions or be sent away. There, go, and heaven protect you; I can do no more." Kate drew herself up erect and gazed at him mournfully for a few moments, and then said firmly: "Yes, Mr Garstang, I will do as you say. Good-bye." "Good-bye," he said, as he bent down and softly kissed her forehead. Then she walked firmly from the room. "Brave girl!" said Garstang; "she will be a match for you and your plans now, James Wilton." "Will you go, sir?" roared the other. "Yes, I will go. Then it is to be war between us, is it?" "What you like; I'm reckless now; but you can't interfere with me there." "No, and I will not trample upon a worm when it is down. I shall take no petty revenge, and you dare not persecute that poor girl. Good-bye to you both, and may this be a lesson to you and your foolish wife. As for you, you cur, if I hear that you have insulted your cousin again--a girl that any one with the slightest pretension to being a man would have looked upon as a sister--law or no law, I'll come down and thrash you within an inch of your life. I'm a strong man yet, as you know." He turned and walked proudly out of the room; and as soon as his step had ceased to ring on the oaken floor of the hall Wilton turned savagely upon his son, where he lay upon the thick Turkey carpet, and roared: "Get up!" Mrs Wilton shrieked and caught at her husband's leg, but in vain, for he delivered a tremendous kick at the prostrate youth, which brought him to his senses with a yell. "What are you doing?" he roared. "A hundred and fifty thousand pounds!" cried Wilton. "Curse you, I should like to give you a hundred and fifty thousand of those." Within half an hour the dog-cart bearing John Garstang and his portmanteau was grating over the gravel of the drive, and as he passed the further wing he looked up at an open window where Kate was standing pale and still. He raised his hat to her as he passed, but she did not stir, only said farewell to him with her eyes. But as the vehicle disappeared among the trees of the avenue she shrank away, to stand thinking of her position, of Garstang's words, and how it seemed now that her girlish life had come to an end that day. For she felt that she was alone, and that henceforth she must knit herself together to fight the battle of her life, strong in her womanly defence, for her future depended entirely upon herself. And through the rest of that unhappy afternoon and evening, as she sat there, resisting all requests to come down, and taking nothing but some slight refreshment brought up by her maid, she was trying to solve the problem constantly before her: What should she do now? CHAPTER TWELVE. Kate was not the only one at the Manor House who declined to come down to dinner. The bell had rung, and after Mrs Wilton had been up twice to her niece's room, and reported the ill success of her visits to her lord, Wilton growled out: "Well, I want my dinner. Let her stay and starve herself into her senses. But here," he cried, with a fresh burst of temper, "why the devil isn't that boy here? I'm not going to be kept waiting for him. Do you hear? Where is he?" "He was so ill, dear, he said he was obliged to go upstairs and lie down." "Bah! Rubbish! He wasn't hurt." "Oh, my dear, you don't know," sobbed Mrs Wilton. "Yah! You cry if you dare. Wipe your eyes. Think I haven't had worry enough to-day without you trying to lay the dust? Ring and tell Samuel to fetch him down." "Oh, pray don't do that, dear; the servants will talk enough as it is." "They'd better. I'll discharge the lot. I've been too easy with everybody up to now, and I'll begin to turn over a new leaf. Stand aside, woman, and let me get to that bell." "No, no, don't, pray don't ring. Let me go up and beg of him to come down." "What! Beg? Go up and tell him that if he don't come down to dinner in a brace of shakes I'll come and fetch him with a horsewhip." "James, my dear, pray, pray don't be so violent." "But I will be violent. I am in no humour to be dictated to now. I'll let some of you see that I'm master." "But poor dear Claud is so big now." "I don't care how big he is--a great stupid oaf! Go and tell him what I say. And look here, woman." "Yes, dear," said Mrs Wilton, plaintively. "I mean it. If he don't come at once, big as he is, I'll take up the horsewhip." Mrs Wilton stifled a sob, and went up to her son's room and entered, to find him lying on his bed with his boots resting on the bottom rail, a strong odour of tobacco pervading the room, and a patch or two of cigar ashes soiling the counterpane. "Claud, my dearest, you shouldn't smoke up here," she said, tenderly, as she laid her hand upon her son's forehead. "How are you now, darling?" "Damned bad." "Oh, not quite so bad as that, dearest. Dinner is quite ready." "--The dinner!" "Claud, darling, don't use such dreadful language. But please get up now, and let me brush your hair. Your father is so angry and violent because you are keeping him waiting. Pray come down at once." "Shan't!" "Claud, dearest, you shouldn't say that. Please come down." "Shan't, I tell you. Be off, and don't bother me." "I am so sorry, my dear, but I must. He sent me up, dear." "I--shan't--come--down. There!" "But Claud, my dear, he is so angry. I dare not go without you. What am I to say?" "Tell him I say he's an old beast." "Oh, Claud, I can't go and tell him that. You shouldn't--you shouldn't, indeed." "I'm too bad to eat." "Yes--yes; I know, darling, but do--do try and come down and have a glass of wine. It will do you good, and keep poor papa from being so violent." "I don't want any wine. And I shan't come. There!" "Oh, dear me! Oh, dear me!" sighed Mrs Wilton; "what am I to do?" "Go and tell him I won't come. Bad enough to be hit by that beastly old prize fighter, without him kicking me as he did. I'm not a door mat." "No, no, my dear; of course not." "An old brute! I believe he has injured my liver." "Claud, my darling, don't, pray don't say that." "Why not? The doctor ought to be fetched; I'm in horrid pain." "Yes, yes, my dear; and it did seem very hard." "Hard? I should think it was. I'm sure there's a rib broken, if not two." "Oh, my own darling boy!" cried Mrs Wilton, embracing him. "Don't, mother; you hurt. Be off, and leave me alone. Tell him I shan't come." "No, no, my dear; pray make an effort and come down." "Shan't, I tell you. Now go!" "But--but--Claud, dear, he threatened to come up with a horse whip and fetch you." "What!" cried Claud, springing up on the bed without wincing, and staring at his mother; "did he say that?" "Yes, my love," faltered the mother. "Then you go down and tell him to come, and I'll knock his old head off." "Oh, Claud, my dear boy, you shouldn't. I can not sit here and listen to such parricidical talk." "Stand up then, and now be off." "But, my darling, you will come?" "No, I won't." "For my sake?" "I won't, for my own. I'm not going to stand it. He shan't bully and knock me about I'm not a boy now. I'll show him." "But, Claud, darling, for the sake of peace and quietness; I don't want the servants to know." But dear Claud--his mother's own darling--was as obstinate now as his father, whom he condemned loudly, then condemned peace and quietness, then the servants, and swore that he would serve Kate out for causing the trouble. "I'll bring her down on her knees--I'll tame her, and make her beg for a kiss next time." "Yes, yes, my dear, you shall, but not now. You must be humble and patient." "Are you coming down, Maria?" ascended in a savage roar. "Yes, yes, my dear, directly," cried the trembling woman. "There, you hear, darling. He is in a terrible fury. Come down with me." "I won't, I tell you," cried the young man, making a snatch at the pillow, to raise it threateningly in his hands; "go, and tell him what I said." "Maria! Am I to come up?" ascended in a roar. "Yes--no--no, my dear," cried Mrs Wilton. "I'm--I'm coming down." She hurried out of the room, dabbed her eyes hastily, and descended to where the Squire was tramping up and down the hall, with Samuel, the cook, housemaid, and kitchen maid in a knot behind the swing baize door, which cut off the servants' offices, listening to every word of the social comedy. "Well," roared Wilton, "is he coming?" "N-n-not just now, my d-dear. He feels so ill and shaken that he begs you will excuse him." "Humbug, woman! My boy couldn't have made up such a message. He said he wouldn't, eh? Now then; no prevarication. That's what he said." "Y-yes, my dear," faltered the mother. "Oh, James dearest, pray--pray don't." She clung to him, but he shook her off, strode to the umbrella stand, and snatched a hunting whip from where it hung with twisted thong, and stamped up the stairs, with his trembling wife following, sobbing and imploring him not to be so violent; but all in vain, for he turned off at the top of the old oaken staircase and stamped away to the door of his son's bedroom--that at the end of the wing which matched to Kate's. Here Mrs Wilton made a last appeal in a hurried whisper. "He is so bad--says his ribs are broken from the kick." "Bah!" roared the Squire; "he has no ribs in his hind legs--Here, you, Claud; come down to dinner directly or--Here, unlock this door." He rattled the handle, and then thumped and banged in vain, while Mrs Wilton, who had been ready to shriek with horror, began to breathe more freely. "I thought you said he was lying down, too bad to get up?" "Yes, yes, dear, he is," faltered the poor woman. "Seems like it. Able to lock himself in. Here, you sir; come down." But there was no reply; not a sound in answer to his rattling and banging; and at last, in the culmination of his rage, the Squire drew back to the opposite wall to gain force so as to dash his foot through the panel if he could, but just then Eliza opened Kate's door at the far end of the long corridor, and peered out. That ended the disturbance. "Come on down to dinner, Maria," said the Squire. "Yes, my dear," she faltered, and they descended to dine alone, Mrs Wilton on water, her husband principally on wine, and hardly a word was spoken, the head of the house being very quiet and thoughtful in the calm which followed the storm. Just as the untasted pheasants were being taken away, after the second course, Wilton suddenly said to the footman: "Tell Miss Kate's maid to come here." Mrs Wilton looked at her husband wonderingly, but he sat crumbling his bread and sipping his claret till the quiet, grave, elderly servant appeared. "How is your mistress?" he said. "Very unwell, sir." "Think the doctor need be sent for?" "Well, no, sir, I hardly think that. She has been very much agitated." "Yes, of course; poor girl," said Wilton, quietly. "But I think she will be better after a good night's rest, sir." "So do I, Eliza. You will see, of course, that she has everything she wants." "Oh, yes, sir. I did take her up some dinner, but I could not prevail upon her to touch it." "Humph! I suppose not. That will do, thank you.--No, no, Maria, there is no occasion to say any more." Mrs Wilton's mouth was open to speak, but she shut it again quickly, fearing to raise another storm, and the maid left the room. But the mother would speak out as soon as they were alone. "I should like to order a tray with one of the pheasants to be sent up to Claud, dear." "I daresay you would," he replied. "Well, I shouldn't." "May I send for Doctor Leigh?" "What for? You heard what the woman said?" "I meant for Claud, dear." "Oh, I'll see to him in the morning. I shall have a pill ready for him when I'm cooled down. It won't be so strong then." "But, James, dear--" "All right, old lady, I'm getting calm now; but listen to me. I mean this: you are not to go to his room to-night." "James!" "Nor yet to Kate's, till I go with you." "My dear James!" "That's me," he said, with a faint smile, "and you're a very good, affectionate, well meaning old woman; but if ever there was one who was always getting her husband into scrapes, it is you." "Really, dear!" she cried, appealingly. "Yes, and truly. There, that will do. Done dinner?" "Yes, dear." "Don't you want any cheese or dessert?" "No, dear." "Then let's go. You'll come and sit with me in the library to-night and have your cup of tea there." "Yes, dear, but mayn't I go and just see poor Kate?" "No." The word was said quietly, but with sufficient emphasis to silence the weak woman, who sat gazing appealingly at her husband, whom she followed meekly enough to the library, where she sat working, and later on sipped her tea, while he was smoking and gazing thoughtfully at the fire, reviewing the events of the day, and, to do him justice, repenting bitterly a great deal that he had said. But as the time went on, feeling as he did the urgency of his position and the need to be able to meet the demands which would be made upon him before long, he grew minute by minute more stubbornly determined to carry out his plans with respect to his ward. "He's only a boy yet," he said to himself, "and he's good at heart. I don't suppose I was much better when I was his age, and excepting that I'm a bit arbitrary I'm not such a bad husband after all." At that moment he looked up at his wife, just in time to see her bow gently towards him. But knowing from old experience that it was not in acquiescence, he glanced at his watch and waited a few minutes, during which time Mrs Wilton nodded several times and finally dropped her work into her lap. This woke her up, and she sat up, looking very stern, and as if going to sleep with so much trouble on the way was the last thing possible. But nature was very strong, and the desire for sleep more powerful than the sorrow from which she suffered; and she was dozing off again when her husband rose suddenly to ring the bell, the servants came in, prayers were read, and at a few minutes after ten Wilton took a chamber candlestick and led the way to bed. He turned off, though, signing to Mrs Wilton to follow him, and on reaching his niece's room, tapped at the door gently. "Kate--Kate, my dear," he said, and Mrs Wilton looked at him wonderingly. "Yes, uncle." "How are you now, my child?" "Not very well, uncle." "Very sorry, my dear. Can your aunt get you anything?" "No; I thank you." "Wish you a good night, then. I am very sorry about that upset this afternoon.--Come, my dear." "Good-night, Kate, my love," said Mrs Wilton, with her ear against the panel; "I do hope you will be able to sleep." "Good-night, aunt," said the girl quietly; and they went back to their own door. "Won't you come and say `good-night' to poor Claud, dear?" whispered Mrs Wilton. "No, `poor Claud' has to come to me first.--Go in." He held open the door for his wife to enter, and then followed and locked it, and for some hours the Manor House was very still. The next morning James Wilton was out a couple of hours before breakfast, busying himself around his home farm as if nothing whatever had happened and there was no fear of a foreclosure, consequent upon any action by John Garstang. He was back ready for breakfast rather later than his usual time, just as Mrs Wilton came bustling in to unlock the tea-caddy, and he nodded, and spoke rather gruffly: "Claud not down?" he said. "No, my dear; I saw you coming across the garden just as I was going to his room to see how he was." "Oh, Samuel,"--to the man, who entered with a dish and hot plates,--"go and tell Mr Claud that we're waiting breakfast." The man went. "Let me go up, my dear. Poor boy! he must feel a bit reluctant to come down and meet you this morning." "Poor fellow! he always was afflicted with that kind of timid shrinking," said Wilton, ironically. "No, stop. How is Kate?" "I don't know, my dear; Eliza said that she had been twice to her room, but she was evidently fast asleep, and she would not disturb her." "Humph! I shall be glad when she can come regularly to her meals." "What shall you say to her this morning?" "Wait and see--Well, is he coming down?" "Beg pardon, sir," said the footman. "I've been knocking ever so long at Mr Claud's door, and I can't get any answer." Mrs Wilton's hand dropped from the tap of the tea urn, and the boiling water began to flow over the top of the pot. "Humph! Sulky," muttered Wilton--"Eh? What are you staring at?" "Beg pardon, sir, but he didn't put his boots outside last night, and he never took his hot water in." "Oh, James, James!" cried Mrs Wilton, wildly, "I knew it, I knew it. I dreamed about the black cow all last night, and there's something wrong." "Stop a minute: I'll come," said Wilton, quickly, and a startled look came into his face. "Take me--take me, too," sobbed his wife. "Oh, my poor boy! If anything has happened to him in the night. I shall never forgive myself. Samuel--Samuel!" "Yes, ma'am." "Run round to the stables and send one of the men over for Doctor Leigh at once." Wilton felt too much startled to counter-order this, but before the man had gone a dozen steps he shouted to him. "Tell the gardener to bring a mallet and cold chisel from the tool shed." "Yes, sir," and full of excitement the man ran off, while his master and mistress hurried upstairs to their son's door. But before they reached it Wilton had recovered his calmness. "What nonsense," he muttered. Then softly: "Here, you speak to him. Gently. Only overslept himself." He tapped, and signed to his wife. But her voice sounded full of agitation, as she said: "Claud, dear; it's getting very late." Then louder: "Claud! Claud, my dear, are you unwell?" Then with aery of agony, "Claud! Claud, my darling! Oh, pray, pray speak to me, or you'll break my poor heart!" "Here, stand aside," cried Wilton, who was thoroughly startled now. He seized the handle of the door, turned it, and tried to force it open, but in vain. The next moment he was about to lay his shoulder close down to the keyhole, when Kate's maid came running up to them. "Mrs Wilton! Mrs Wilton!" she cried; "pray, pray come! My dear young lady! Oh, help, help! I ought to have spoken sooner. What shall I do?" CHAPTER THIRTEEN. Wilton pere and mere had not been gone five minutes when there was a gentle tap at Kate's door, and she started and turned her fearful face in that direction, but made no reply. The tap was repeated, "Miss Kate," came in a sharp whisper; "it is only me, my dear." "Ah," sighed the girl, as if in relief; and she nearly ran to the door, turned the key, and admitted the old servant, locked the door again, and flung her arms about the woman's neck, to bury her face in her breast, and sob as if her heart would break. "There, there, there," cooed the woman, as if to the little child she had nursed long years before; and she led her gently to a couch, and drew the weeping girt down half reclining upon her breast. "Cry then, my precious; it will do you good; and then you must tell Liza all about it--what has been the matter, dear?" "Matter!" cried Kate, starting up, and gazing angrily in the woman's face. "Liza, it's horrible. Why did I ever come to this dreadful house?" "Hush, hush, my own; you will make yourself had again. We must not have you ill." "Bad--ill?" cried Kate. "Better dead and at rest. Oh, I hate him! I hate him! How dare he touch me like that! It was horrible--an outrage!" The woman's face flushed, and her eyes sparkled angrily, then her lips moved as if to question, but she closed them tightly into a thin line and waited, knowing from old experience that it would not be long before her young mistress' grief and trouble would be poured into er ear. She was quiet, and clasping the agitated girl once lore in her arms, she began to rock herself slowly to and fro. "No, no! don't," cried Kate, peevishly, and she raised her head once more, looking handsomer than ever in her anger and indignation. "I am no longer a child. Aunt and uncle have encouraged it. This hateful money is at the bottom of it all. They wish me to marry him. Pah! he makes me shudder with disgust. And how could I even think of such a horror with all this terrible trouble so new." Eliza half closed her eyes and nodded her head, while her mouth seemed almost to disappear. "It is cruel--it is horrible," Kate continued. "They have encouraged it all through. Even aunt, with her sickly worship of her wretched spoiled boy. Oh, what a poor, pitiful, weak creature she must have thought me. No one seemed to understand me but Mr Garstang." Eliza knit her brows a little at his name, but she remained silent, and by slow degrees she was put in possession of all that had taken place; and then, faint and weary, Kate let her head sink down till her forehead rested once more upon the breast where she had so often sunk to rest. "Oh, the hateful money!" she sighed, as the tears came at last. "Let him have it. What is it to me? But I cannot stop here, nurse; it is impossible. We must go at once. Uncle is my guardian, but surely he cannot force me to stay against my inclination. If I remained here it would kill me. Nurse," she cried, with a display of determination that the woman had never seen in her before, "you must pack up what is necessary, and to-morrow we will go. It would be easy to stay at some hotel till we found a place--a furnished cottage just big enough for us two; anywhere so that we could be at peace. We could be happier then-- Why don't you speak to me when I want comfort in my trouble?" "Because no words of mine could give you the comfort you need, my dear. Don't you know that my heart bleeds for you, and that always when my poor darling child has suffered I have suffered, too?" "Yes, yes, dear; I know," said Kate, raising her face to kiss the woman passionately. "I do know. Don't take any notice of what I said. All this has made me feel so wickedly angry, and as if I hated the whole world." "Don't I know my darling too well to mind a few hasty words?" said the woman, softly. "Say what you please. If it is angry I know it only comes from the lips, and there is something for me always in my darling's heart." "That does me good, nurse," said the girl, clinging to her affectionately for a few moments, and then once more sitting up, to speak firmly. "It makes me feel after all that I am not alone, and that my dear, dead mother was right when she said, `Never part from Eliza. She is not our servant; she has always been our faithful, humble, trusty friend.'" The woman's face softened now, and a couple of tears stole down her cheeks. "Now, nurse, we must talk and make our plans. I wish I could see Mr Garstang, and ask his advice." "Do you like Mr Garstang, my dear?" said the woman, gently. "Yes; he is a gentleman. He seems to me the only one who can talk to me as what I am, and without thinking I am what they call me--an heiress." "But poor dear master never trusted Mr Garstang." "Perhaps he had no need to. He always treated him as a friend, and he has proved himself one to-day by the brave way in which he defended me, and spoke out to open my eyes to all this iniquity." "But dear master did not make him his executor." "How could he when he had his brother to think of? How could my dear father suspect that Uncle James would prove so base? It was a mistake. You ought to have heard Mr Garstang speak to-day." Eliza sighed. "I don't think I should put all my trust in Mr Garstang, my dear," she said. "Is not that prejudice, nurse?" "I hope not my dear; but my heart never warmed to Mr Garstang, and it has always felt very cold toward that young man, his stepson." "Harry Dasent? Well," said Kate, with a faint smile, "perhaps mine has been as cold. But why should we trouble about this? It would be no harm if I asked Mr Garstang's advice; but if we do not like it, nurse, we can take our own. One thing we decide upon at once: we will leave here." "Can we, my dear? You have money, but--" "Oh, don't talk about the hateful thing," cried the girl, passionately. "I must, my dear. We cannot take even a cottage without. This money is in your uncle's charge; you, as a girl under age, can not touch a penny without your Uncle James' consent." "But surely he can not keep me here against my will--a prisoner?" "I don't know, my dear," said the woman, with a sigh. "Then that is where we want help and advice--that is where Mr Garstang could assist me and tell me what to do." Eliza sighed. "Well, if the worst comes to the worst, I can take a humble place where you can keep house and do needlework to help, while I go out as daily governess." "You! A daily governess?" "Well," said the girl, proudly, "I can play--brilliantly, they say--I know three languages, and--" "You have a hundred and fifty thousand pounds in your own right." "What are a hundred and fifty thousand pounds to a miserable prisoner who is being persecuted? Liberty is worth millions, and come what may, I will be free." "Yes, you shall be free, darling; but you must do nothing rash. To-day has taught me that my dear girl is a woman of firmness and spirit; and, please God, all will come right in the end. There, this is enough. You are fluttered and feverish now, and delicate as you are, you require rest. It is getting late. Let me help you to undress for a good long night's rest. Sleep on it all, my child; out of the evil good will come, and you have shown them that they have not a baby to deal with, but a true woman, so matters are not so bad as they seem. Come, my little one." "I must and will leave here, nurse," said Kate, firmly. "Sleep on it, my child, and remember that after all you have won the day. Come, let me help you." "No, Liza, go now. I must sit for a while and think." "Better sleep, and think after a long rest." "No, dear; I wish to sit here in the quiet and silence first. Look, the moon is rising over the trees, and it seems to bring light into my weary brain. I'll go to bed soon. Please do as I wish, and leave me now-- Nurse, dear, do you think those who have gone from us ever come back in spirit to help us when we are in need?" "Heaven only knows, my darling," said the woman, looking startled. "But please don't talk like this--You really wish me to go?" "Yes, leave me now. I am going to make my plans for to-morrow." "To-morrow." "No, before I lie down to rest. Good-night." "You are mistress, and I am servant, my child. Good-night, then-- good-night." "Good-night," said Kate, and a minute later she had closed and re-locked the door, to turn and stand gazing at the window, whose blind was suffused with the soft silvery light of the slowly rising moon. CHAPTER FOURTEEN. "Who's the letter from, Pierce?" "One of the medical brokers, as they call themselves--the man I wrote to;" and the young doctor tossed the missive contemptuously across the breakfast table to his sister, who caught it up eagerly and read it through. "Of course," she cried, with her downy little rounded cheeks flushing, and a bright mocking look in her eyes; "and I quite agree with him. He says you are too modest and diffident about your practice; that the very fact of its being established so many years makes it of value; that no one would take it on the terms you propose, and that you must ask at least five hundred pounds, which would be its value plus a valuation of the furniture. How much did you ask?" "Nothing at all." "What!" cried Jenny, dropping her bread and butter. "I said I was willing to transfer the place to any enterprising young practitioner who would take the house off my hands, and the furniture." "Oh, you goose--I mean gander!" "Thank you, Sissy." "Well, so you are--a dear, darling, stupid old brother," cried the girl, leaping up to go behind the young doctors chair, covered his eyes with her hands, and place her little soft white double chin on the top of his head. "There you are! Blind as a bat! Five hundred pounds! Pooh! Rubbish! Stuff! Why, it's worth thousands and thousands, and, what is more, happiness to my own old Pierce." "I thought that subject was tabooed, Sissy." "I don't care; I have broken the taboo. I have risen in rebellion, and I'll fight till I die for my principles." "Brave little baby," he said mockingly, as he took the little hands from his eyes and prisoned them. "Yes," she said, meaningly, "braver than you know." "Jenny! You have not dared to speak about such a thing?" he cried, turning upon her angrily. "Not such a little silly," she replied. "What! make her draw in her horns and retire into her shell, and begin thinking my own dear boy is a miserable money-hunter? Not I, indeed. For shame, sir, to think such a thing of me! I never even told her what a dear good fellow you are, worrying yourself to death to keep me, and bringing me to live in the country, because you thought I was pining and growing pale in nasty old Westminster and its slums." "That's right," said Pierce, with a faint sigh. "Let her find out naturally what you are; and she is finding it out, for don't you make any mistake about it, Miss Katherine Wilton is young, but she has plenty of shrewd common sense, as I soon found out, and little as I have seen of her I soon saw that she was quite awake to her position. Girls of sense who have fortunes soon smell out people's motives; and if they think they are going to marry her right off to that out-door sport, Claud, they have made a grand mistake." "But you have not dared to talk about your foolish ideas to her, Jenny?" "Not a word. Oh, timid, modest frere! I put on my best frock and my best manners when we went there to dinner, and I was as nice and ladylike as a girl could be. Reward:--Kate took to me at once, and we became friends." Leigh uttered a sigh of relief. "But if I had dared I could have told her what a coward you are, and how ashamed I am of you." "For not playing the part of a contemptible schemer, Sis?" "Who wants you to, sir? Why, money has nothing to do with it. Now, answer me this, Pierce. If she were only Miss Wilton without a penny, wouldn't you propose for her at once?" "No, Sis; I would not." "You wouldn't?" "No, I wouldn't be so contemptible as to take such a step when I am little better than a pauper." "Boo! What nonsense. You a pauper! An educated gentleman, acknowledged to be talented in his profession. But I know you'd marry her to-morrow and turn your poor little sister out of doors if you had an income. Bother incomes and money! It's all horrid, and causes all the misery there is in the world. Pierce, you shan't run away from here and leave the poor girl to be married to that wretched boy." "Jenny, dear, be serious. I really must get away from here as soon as I can." "Oh, Pierce! Don't talk about it, dear. It is only to make yourself miserable through these silly ideas of honour; and it is to make me wretched, too, just when I am so well and so happy, and all that nasty London cough gone. I declare if you take me away I'll pine away and die." "No, you shan't, Sissy. You can't, with your own clever special physician at your side," he said merrily. "Not if you could help it, I know. But Pierce, darling, don't be such a coward. It's cruel to her to run away, and leave her unprotected." "Hold your tongue!" said Leigh peremptorily. "I tell you that is all imagination on your part." "And I tell you it is a fact I've seen and heard quite enough. Old Wilton is very poor, and he wants to get the money safe in his family. Mrs Wilton is only the old puss whose paws he is using for tongs. As for Claud--Ugh! I could really enjoy existence if I might box his big ears. Now look here, big boy," cried Jenny, impulsively snatching up the agent's letter: "I am going to burn this, for you shan't go away and make a medical martyr of yourself, just because the dearest girl in the world--who likes you already for your straightforward manly conduct towards her--happens to have a fortune, and your practice beginning to improve, too." "My practice beginning to improve!" he cried, contemptuously. "Yes, sir, improve; didn't you have a broken boy to mend yesterday? and haven't you a chance of the parish practice, which is twenty pounds a year? and oh, hooray, hooray! I am so glad, there's somebody ill at the Manor again. I hope it's Clodpole Claud this time," and she wildly waltzed round the room, waving the letter over her head, before stopping by the fire, throwing the paper in, and plumping down in a chair, looking demure and solemn as a nun. For Tom Jonson, the groom from the Manor, had driven over in the dog-cart, pulled up short, and now rang sharply at the bell. Leigh turned pale, for the man's manner betokened emergency, and he could only associate this with the patient to whom he had been called before. "Will you come over at once, sir, please?" "Miss Wilton worse?" "Oh, no, sir. Something wrong with young Master." Leigh uttered a sigh of relief, and stepped back for his hat. "Mr Wilton, junior, taken ill, dear," he said. "I heard, Pierce. Do kill him, or send him into a consumption." CHAPTER FIFTEEN. Leigh hardly heard his sister's words, for he hurried out and sprang into the dog-cart, where the groom was full of the past day's trouble, and ready to pour into unwilling ears what he had heard from Samuel, who knew that Mr Garstang, the solicitor from London, knocked down young Master about money, he thought, and that he had heard Mr Claud say something about his father kicking him. "Missus wanted to send for you last night, sir, but Master wouldn't have it, and this morning they couldn't make him hear in his room. Poor chap, I expect he's very bad." The man would have gone on talking, but finding his companion silent and thoughtful, he relapsed into a one-sided conversation with the horse he drove, bidding him "come on," and "look alive," and "be steady," till he turned in at the avenue and cantered up to the hall door. Mrs Wilton was there, tearful and trembling. "Oh, do make haste, Mr Leigh," she cried. "How long you have been!" "I came at once, madam; is your son in his room?" "Yes, yes--dead by this time. Pray, come up." He sprang up the stairs in a very unprofessional way, forgetting the necessity for a medical man being perfectly calm and cool, and Wilton met him on the landing. "Oh, here you are. Haven't got the door open yet. Curse the old wood! It's like iron. Maria, go and get all the keys you can find." "Yes, dear, but while the men are doing that hadn't we better try and get poor Claud's door open?" "No, hers first," cried Wilton, and Leigh started. "I understood that it was your son who needed help," he said. "Never mind him for a bit. You must see to my niece first;" and in a few seconds Leigh was in possession of the fact that the maid had been unable to make her mistress hear; that since then they could get no response to constant calling and knocking, and the door had resisted all their efforts to get it open. On reaching the end of the corridor Leigh found the maid, white and trembling, holding her apron pressed hard to her lips, while the footman and two gardeners, after littering the floor with unnecessary tools, were now trying to make a hole with a chisel large enough to admit the point of a saw, so as to cut round the lock. "Wood's like iron, sir," said the gardener, who was operating. "But would it not be easier to put a ladder to the window, and break a pane of glass?" said Leigh, impatiently. "Oh, Lord!" cried Wilton, "who would be surrounded with such a set of fools! Come along. Of course. Here, one of you, go and fetch a ladder." The second gardener hurried off down the back stairs, while his master led the way to the front, leaving Mrs Wilton and the maid tapping at the bedroom door. "Oh, do, do speak, my darling," sobbed Mrs Wilton. "If it's only one word, to let us know you are alive." "Oh, don't, don't pray say that ma'am," sobbed the maid. "My poor dear young mistress! What shall I do--what shall I do?" Mrs Wilton made no reply, but, free from her husband's coercion now, she hurried along the corridor to the other wing, to begin knocking at her son's door, and then went down upon her knees, with her lips to the keyhole, begging him within to speak. "Such a set of blockheads," growled Wilton; "and I was just as bad, Doctor. In the hurry and excitement that never occurred to me. You see you've come in cool, and ready to grasp everything. Poor girl, she was a bit upset yesterday, and I suppose it was too much for her. Boys will be boys, and I had a quarrel with my son." This in a confidential whisper, as they crossed the hall, but Leigh hardly heard him in his anxiety, and as they passed out and along the front of the house he said, hurriedly: "I'll go on, sir. I see they have the ladder there." "What!" cried Wilton, excitedly, "they can't have got it yet, and--God bless me! what does this mean?" He broke into a run, for there, in full view now, at the end of the house, with its broad foot in a flower-bed, was one of the fruit-gathering ladders, just long enough to reach the upper windows, and resting against the sill beneath that of Kate's room. He reached the place first, clapped his hands upon the sides, and ascended a couple of rounds, but stepped back directly, with his florid face mottled with white, and his lips quivering with excitement as he spoke. "Here, you're a lighter man than I, Doctor; go up. The window's open, too." Leigh sprang up, mad now with anxiety and a horrible dread; but as he reached the window he paused and hesitated, for more than one reason, the principal being a fear of finding that which he suspected true. "In with you, man--in with you," cried Wilton; "it is no time for false delicacy now;" and as he spoke he began to ascend in turn. Leigh sprang in, and at a glance saw that the bed had not been pressed, and that there was no sign of struggle and disturbance in the daintily furnished room. No chair overset, no candlestick upon the floor, but all looking as if ready for its occupant, save that an extinguisher was upon one of the candles beside the dressing-table glass. "Gone!" cried a hoarse voice behind him, as he stood there, shrinking in the midst of the agony he felt, for it seemed to him like a sacrilege to be present. Leigh started round, to find Wilton's head at the open casement, and directly after the heavy man stepped in. "No, no," he shouted back, as the ladder began to bend again. "Not you. Stop below. No; take this ladder to the hall door, and wait." He banged to, and fastened the casement, after seizing the top of the ladder, and giving it a thrust which sent it over with a crash on to the gravel. "Don't seem like a doctor's business, sir," continued Wilton, gravely; "but you medical men have to be confidential, so keep your tongue quiet about what you have seen." Leigh bowed his head, for he could not speak. A horrible sensation, as if he were about to be attacked by a fit, assailed him, and he had to battle with it to think and try to grasp what this meant. One moment there was the fear that violence had been used; the next that it meant a willing flight; and he was fiercely struggling with the bitter thoughts which came, suggesting that his love for this delicate, gentle girl was a mockery, for she was either weak, or had long enough before bound herself to another, when he was brought back to the present by the action of the Squire, who, after a sharp glance round, stooped to pick up the door-key from where it lay on the carpet after being turned and pushed out by means of a piece of wire, in the hope, as suggested by Samuel, that it could be picked out afterwards at the bottom of the door, a plan which had completely failed. Wilton thrust in the key, turned it, and opened the door, to admit his wife and the maid. "Miss Kate, Miss Kate," cried the latter. "Call louder," said Wilton, mockingly. "There's no one here." "James, James, my dear, what does this mean?" cried Mrs Wilton excitedly. "Bed not been slept in; window open--ladder outside--can't you see?" Eliza looked at him wildly, as if she could not grasp his words; then with a cry she rushed to a wardrobe, dragged it open, and examined the hooks and pegs. "Hat--waterproof!" she cried; and then with a faint shriek--"Gone?" "Yes, gone," said Wilton brutally. "Here, Maria; this way." "Yes, yes; Claud's room. Come quickly, Doctor, pray." Pierce Leigh followed the Wiltons along the corridor, hardly knowing where he was going, in the wild turmoil which raged, in his brain. There were moments when he felt as if he were going mad; others when he was ready to think that he was suffering from some strange aberration which distorted everything he saw and heard, till he was brought back to himself by the Squire's voice which begat an intense desire to know the worst. "Here, Claud," he shouted, after thumping hard at his son's bedroom door without result. "Claud! No nonsense, sir; I want you. Something serious has happened. Answer at once if you are here." There was not a sound to be heard, and Mrs Wilton sobbed aloud. "Oh, my boy, my boy! I'm sure he is dead." "Bah!" cried Wilton, angrily. "Here, who has been trying to get in this room?" No one answered, and Wilton bent down and looked through the keyhole. "Has anyone pushed the key out to make it fall inside?" A low murmur of inquiry followed the question, but there was no reply. "Come round to the front, Doctor," said Wilton then, and Leigh followed him in silence downstairs and out to where the men were waiting with the ladder. This was placed up against the window which matched with Kate's at the other end of the house, and at a sign from Wilton, Leigh once more mounted, acting in a mechanical way, as if he were no longer master of his own acts, but completely influenced by his companion. "Window fastened?" cried Wilton. "Yes." "Break it. Mind; don't cut your hand." But as Wilton spoke there was the crash of glass, Leigh thrust in his hand, and unfastened the casement, which he flung open and stepped in, the Squire following. In this case the bed was tumbled from Claud having been lying down outside, but it was evident to his father that he had descended in the ordinary way, after locking his room and placing the key in his pocket, so as to make it seem that he was still in the room. "That will do," said Wilton, gruffly. "We can go down, and it must be by the way we came." He looked at the young doctor as if expecting him to ask some questions, but Leigh did not speak a word, merely drawing back for his companion to descend. "You'll hold your tongue about all this, Mr Leigh?" he said. "Of course, sir," said the young man coldly. "It is no affair of mine." "No, nor anybody else's but mine," cried Wilton, fiercely. Then as soon as he reached the foot of the ladder he gazed fiercely at his two men. "Take that ladder back," he said; "and mind this: if I find that any man I employ has been chattering about this business, I discharge him on the instant.--Thank you, Doctor, for coming. Of course, you will make a charge. The young lady seems to prefer fresh air." Leigh looked at him wildly, and strode rapidly away. "Disappointed at losing his patient," muttered Wilton, as he went in, to find his wife waiting for him with both her trembling hands extended. "Quick!" she cried; "tell me the worst," as she caught his arm. He passed his arm about her waist, and seemed to sweep her into the library, where he closed the door, and pushed her down into an easy chair. "There is no worst," he said, in a low voice. "Now, look here; you must keep your mouth shut, and be as surprised as I am. It's all right. She was only a bit scared yesterday. The boy knew what he was about. The cunning jade has bolted with him." "Gone--Kate?" cried Mrs Wilton. "Yes; Claud was throwing dust in our stupid old eyes. The money won't go out of the family, old girl. They're on the way to be married now, and as for John Garstang--let him do his worst." ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Pierce, darling, what has happened?" cried Jenny, as her brother entered the room and sank into a chair. "Oh," she cried wildly, as she flew to him to throw her arms about his neck and gazed in his ghastly face, "it was for Kate. Oh, Pierce, don't say she's dead!" "Yes," he said, in a voice full of agony; "dead to me." CHAPTER SIXTEEN. "Dead? Dead to you? Pierce, speak to me," cried Jenny. "What do you mean?" "What I say. They are a curious mixture of weakness and duplicity." "Who are, dear?" said Jenny, with a warm colour taking the place of the pallor which her brother's words had produced. "Why will you go on talking in riddles?" "Women. Their soft, quiet ways force you to believe in them, and then comes some sudden enlightening to prove what I say." Jenny caught him by the shoulder as he sat in his chair, looking ghastly. "Tell me what you mean," she cried excitedly. "Only the falling to pieces of your castle in the air," he said, with a mocking laugh. "The marriage you arranged between the pauper physician and the rich heiress. I can easily be strictly honorable now." "Will you tell me what you mean, Pierce?" cried the girl, angrily. "What has happened? Is someone ill at the Manor House?" "No," he said, bitterly. "Then why were you sent for?" "To see an imaginary patient." "Pierce, if you do not wish me to go into a fit of hysterical passion," cried the girl, "tell me what you mean. Why--were--you--sent--for?" "Because," replied Leigh, imitating his sister's manner of speaking, "Mise--Katherine--Wilton--and--Mr Claud--were--supposed--to--be-- lying--speechless in their rooms, and--ha-ha-ha! their doors could not be forced." "Pierce, what is the matter with you?" cried Jenny, excitedly; "do you know what you are saying?" "Perfectly," he cried, his manner changing from its mocking tone to one of fierce passion. "When I reached the place, a way was found in, and the birds were flown." "Birds--flown," cried Jenny, looking more and more as if she doubted her brother's sanity; "what birds?" "The fair Katherine, and that admirable Crichton, Claud." "Flown?" stammered Jenny, who looked now half stunned. "Well, eloped," he cried, savagely, "to Gretna Green, or a registry office. Who says that Northwood is a dull place, without events?" "Kate Wilton eloped with her cousin Claud!" "Yes, my dear," said Pierce, striving hard to speak in a careless, indifferent tone, but failing dismally, for every word sounded as if torn from his breast, his quivering lips bespeaking the agony he felt. There was silence for a few moments, and then Jenny exclaimed: "Pierce, is this some cruel jest?" "Do I look as if I were jesting?" he cried wildly, and springing up he cast aside the mask beneath which he had striven to hide the agony which racked him. "Jesting! when I am half mad with myself for my folly. Driveling pitiful idiot that I was, ready to believe in the first pretty face I see, and then, as I have said, I find how full of duplicity and folly a woman is." "Mind what you are saying, Pierce," cried his sister, who seemed to be strangely moved; "don't say words which will make you bitterly repent. Tell me again; I feel giddy and sick. I must be going to be taken ill, for I can't have heard you aright, or there must be some mistake." "Mistake!" he cried, with a savage laugh. "Don't I tell you--I have just come from there? Has not old Wilton hid me keep silence? And I came babbling it all to you." "Stop!" said Jenny thoughtfully; "Kate could not do such a thing. When was it?" "Who can tell?--late last night--early this morning. What does it matter?" "It is not true," cried Jenny, with her eyes flashing. "How dare you, who were ready to go down on your knees and worship her, utter such a cruel calumny." "Very well," he cried bitterly; "then it is not true; I have not been there this morning, and have not looked in their empty rooms. Tell me I am a fool and a madman, and you will be very near the truth." "I don't care," cried Jenny angrily; "and it's cruel--almost blasphemous of you to say such a thing about that poor sweet girl whom I had already grown to love. She elope with her cousin--run away like a silly girl in a romance! It is impossible." "Yes, impassible," he said mockingly, as he writhed in his despair and agony. "Pierce, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. There! I can only talk to you in a commonplace way, though all the time I am longing for words full of scorn and contempt with which to crush you. No, I'm not, my poor boy, because I can see how _you_ are suffering. Oh, Pierce! Pierce!" she continued, sobbing as she threw her arms about his neck; "how can you torture yourself so by thinking such a thing of her?" "Good little girl," he said tenderly, moved as he was by her display of affection. "I shall begin to respect myself again now I find that my bright, clever little sister could be as much deceived as I." "I have not been deceived in her. She is all that is beautiful, and good, and true. Of course, I believe in her, and so do you at heart, only you are half mad now, and deceived." "Yes, half mad, and deceived!" "Yes. There is something behind all this--I know," cried Jenny, wildly. "They have persecuted her so, and encouraged that wretched boy to pay her attentions, till in despair she has run away to take refuge with some other friends." "With Claud Wilton!" said Pierce, bitterly. "Silence, sir! No. Women are not such weak double-faced creatures as you think. No, it is as I say; and oh! Pierce, dear, he was out late last night, and when he got back found her going away and followed her." "Fiction--imagination," he said bitterly. "You are inventing all this to try and comfort me, little woman, but your woven basket will not hold water. It leaks at the very beginning. How could you know that he was out late last night?" Jenny's cheeks were scarlet, and she turned away her face. "There, you see, you are beaten at once, Jenny, and that I have some reason for what I have said about women; but there are exceptions to every rule, and my little sister is one of them. I did not include her among the weak ones." To his astonishment she burst into a passionate storm of sobs and tears, and in words confused and only half audible, she accused herself of being as weak and foolish as the rest, and, as he made out, quite unworthy of his trust. "Oh! Pierce, darling," she cried wildly, as she sank upon her knees in front of his chair; "I'm a wicked, wicked girl, and not deserving of all you think about me. Believe in poor Kate, and not in me, for indeed, indeed, she is all that is good and true." "A man cannot govern his feelings, Sissy," he said, half alarmed now at the violence of her grief. "I must believe in you always, as my own little girl. How could I do otherwise, when you have been everything to me for so long, ever since you were quite a little girl and I told you not to cry for I would be father and mother to you, both." "And so you have been, Pierce, dear," she sobbed, "but I don't deserve it--I don't deserve it." "I don't deserve to have such a loving little companion," he said, kissing her tenderly. "Haven't I let my fancy stray from you, and am I not being sharply punished for my weal mess?" She suddenly hung back from him and pressed her hair from her temples, as he held her by the waist. "Pierce!" she said sharply, and there was a look of anger in her eyes, "he is a horrid wretch." "People do not give him much of a character," said Leigh bitterly, "but that would be no excuse for my following him to wring his neck." "I believe he would be guilty of any wickedness. Tell me, dear; do you think it possible--such things have been done?" "What things?" he said, wondering at her excited manner. "It is to get her money, of course; for it would be his then. Do you think he has taken her away by force?" Leigh started violently now in turn, and a light seemed to flash into his understanding, but it died out directly, and he said half pityingly, as he drew her to him once again: "Poor little inventor of fiction," he said, with a harsh laugh. "But let it rest, Sissy; it will not do. These things only occur in a romance. No, I do not think anything of the kind; and what do you say to London now?" CHAPTER SEVENTEEN. "What are you going to do, James, dear?" said Mrs Wilton. "Eh?" "What are you going to do, dear? Oh, you don't know what a relief it is to me. I was going to beg you to have the pike pond dragged." James Wilton's strong desire was to do nothing, and give his son plenty of time; but there was a Mrs Grundy even at Northwood, and she had to be studied. "Do? Errum!" He cleared his throat with a long imposing, rolling sound. "Well, search must be made for them directly, and they must be brought back. It is disgraceful I did mean to sit down and do nothing, but it will not do. I am very angry and indignant with them both, for Kate is as bad as Claud. It must not be said that we connived at the-- the--the--what's the word?--escapade." "Of course not, my dear; and it is such a pity. Such a nice wedding as she might have had, and made it a regular `at home,' to pay off all the people round I'd quite made up my mind about my dress." "Oh, I'm glad of that," said Wilton, with a grim smile. "Nothing like being well prepared for the future. Have you quite made up your mind about your dress when I pop off? Crape, of course?" "James, my darling, you shouldn't. How can you say such dreadful things?" "You make me--being such a fool." "James!" "Hold your tongue, do. Yes, I must have inquiries made." "But do you feel quite sure that they have eloped like that?" "Oh, yes," he said, thoughtfully; "there's no doubt about it." "I don't know, my dear," said Mrs Wilton, plaintively. "It seems so strange, when she was so ill and in such trouble." "Bah! Sham! Like all women, kicking up a row about the first kiss, and wanting it all the time." "James, my dear, you shouldn't say such things. It was no sham. She was in dreadful trouble, I'm sure, and I cannot help thinking about the pike pond. It haunts me--it does indeed. Don't you think that in her agony she may have gone and drowned herself?" "Yes, that's it," said Wilton, with a scowl at his wife. "Oh! Horrible! I was having dreadful dreams all last night. You do think so, then?" "Yes, you've hit it now, old lady. She must have jumped down from her window on to the soft flower-bed, and then gone and fetched the ladder, and put it up there, and afterwards gone and called Claud to come down and go hand in hand with her, so as to have company." "Jumped down--the ladder--what did she want a ladder for, James, dear?" "What do people want ladders for? Why, to come down by." "But she was down, dear. I--I really don't know what you mean. You confuse me so. But, oh, James, dear, you don't mean that about Claud?" "Why not? Depend upon it, they're at the bottom of that hole where the pig was drowned, and the pike are eating bits out of them." "James!--Oh, what a shame! You're laughing at me." "Laughing at you? You'd make a horse laugh at you. Such idiocy. Be quiet if you can. Don't you see how worried and busy I am? And look here--if anyone calls out of curiosity, you don't know anything. Refer 'em to me." "Yes, my dear. But really it is very shocking of the young people. It's almost immoral. But you think they will get married directly?" "Trust Claud for that. Fancy the jade going off in that way. Ah, they're all alike." "No, James; I would sooner have died than consented to such a proceeding." "Not you. Now be quiet." "Going out, dear?" "Only round the house for a few minutes. By the way, have you examined Eliza--asked her what Kate has taken with her?" "Yes, dear. Nothing at all but her hat, scarf, and cloak. Such a shabby way of getting married." "Never mind that," said Wilton; and he went into the hall, through the porch and on to the place where the ladder had been found. There was little to find there but the deep impressions made by the heels, except that a man's footprints were plainly to be seen; and Wilton returned to his wife, rang the bell, and assuming his most judicial air waited. "Send Miss Kate's maid here," he said, sternly. "Yes, sir." "Stop. Look here, Samuel, you are my servant, and I call upon you to speak the whole truth to me about this matter, one which, on further thought, I feel it to be my duty to investigate. Now, tell me, did you know anything about this proceeding on Mr Claud's part?" "No, sir; 'strue as goodness, I didn't." "Mr Claud did not speak to you about it?" "No, sir." "Didn't you see him last night?" "No, sir; I went up to his room to fetch his boots to bring down and dry, but the door was locked, but when I knocked and asked for them he did say something then." "Yes, what did he say?" Samuel glanced at his mistress and hesitated. "Don't look at me, Samuel," said Mrs Wilton; "speak the whole truth." "Yes; what did he say?" cried Wilton, sternly. "Well, sir, he told me to go to the devil." Wilton coughed. "That will do. Go and fetch Miss Wilton's maid." Eliza came, looking red-eyed and pale, but she could give no information, only assure them that she did not understand it, but was certain something must be wrong, for Miss Kate would never have taken such a step without consulting her. And so on, and so on. A regular examination of the servants remaining followed in quite a judicial manner, and once more Kate's aunt and uncle were alone. "There," he said; "I think I have done my duty, my dear. Perhaps, though, I ought to drive over to the station and make inquiries there; but I don't see what good it would do. I could only at the most find out that they had gone to London." "Don't you think, dear, that you ought to communicate with the police?" "No; what for?" "To trace them, dear. The police are so clever; they would be sure to find them out." Wilton coughed. "Perhaps we had better wait, my dear. I fully anticipate that they will come back to-night--or to-morrow morning, full of repentance to ask our forgiveness; and er--I suppose we shall have to look over it." "Well, yes, my dear," said Mrs Wilton. "What's done can't be undone; but I'm sure I don't know what people will say." "I shall be very stern with Claud, though, for it is a most disgraceful act. I wonder at Kate." "Well, I did, my dear, till I began to think, and then I did not; for Claud has such a masterful way with him. He was always too much for me." "Yes," said Wilton dryly; "always. Well, we had better wait and see if they come back." "I am terribly disappointed, though, my dear, for we could have had such a grand wedding. To go off like that and get married, just like a footman and housemaid. Don't you remember James and Sarah?" "Bah! No, I don't remember James and Sarah," said Wilton irascibly. "Yes, you do, my dear. It's just ten years ago, and you must remember about them both wanting a holiday on the same day, and coming back at night, and Sarah saying so demurely: `Please, ma'am, we've been married.'" Wilton twisted his chair round and kicked a piece of coal on the top of the fire which required breaking. "James, my dear, you shouldn't do that," said his wife, reprovingly. "You're as bad as Claud, only he always does it with his heel. There is a poker, my dear." "I thought you always wanted it kept bright." "Well, it does look better so, dear. But I do hope going off in the night like that won't give Kate a cold." Wilton ground his teeth and was about to burst into a furious fit of anger against his wife's tongue, but matters seemed to have taken so satisfactory a turn since the previous day that the bite was wanting, and he planted his heels on the great hob, warmed himself, and started involuntarily as he saw in the future mortgages, first, second and third, paid off, and himself free from the meshes which he gave Garstang the credit of having spun round him. As for Claud, he could, he felt, mould him like wax. So long as he had some ready money to spend he would be quiet enough, and, of course, it was all for his benefit, for he would succeed to the unencumbered estates. Altogether the future looked so rosy that Wilton chuckled at the glowing fire and rubbed his hands, without noticing that the fire dogs were grinning at him like a pair of malignant brazen imps; and just then Mrs Wilton let her work fall into her lap and gave vent to a merry laugh. "What now?" said Wilton, facing round sharply. "Don't do that. Suppose one of the servants came in and saw you grinning. Just recollect that we are in great trouble and anxiety about this--this--what you may call it--escapade." "Yes, dear; I forgot. But it does seem so funny." "Didn't seem very funny last night." "No, dear, of course not; and I never could have thought our troubles would come right so soon. But only think of it; those two coming back together, and Kate not having changed her name. There won't be a thing in her linen that will want marking again." "Bah!" growled Wilton. "Yes, what is it?" he cried, as the footman appeared. "Beg pardon, sir, but Tom Jonson had to go to the village shop for some harness paste, and it's all over the place." "Oh, is it?" growled Wilton. "Of course, if Mr Tom Jonson goes out on purpose to spread it." "I don't think he said a word, sir, but they were talking about it at the shop, and young Barker saw 'em last." "Barker--Barker? Not--" "Yes, sir, him as you give a month to for stealing pheasants' eggs. That loafing chap." "He saw them last night? Here, go and tell Smith to fetch him here before me." Samuel smiled. "Do you hear, sir? Don't stand grinning there." "No, sir; certainly not, sir," said the man, "but Tom Jonson thought you'd like to see him, sir, and he collared him at once and brought him on." "Quite right. Bring him in at once. Stop a moment. Put two or three `Statutes at Large' and `Burns' Justice of the Peace' on the table." The man hurriedly gave the side-table a magisterial look with four or fire pie-crust coloured quartos and a couple of bulky manuals, while Wilton turned to his wife. "Here, Maria," he growled, in a low tone; "you'd better be off." "Oh, don't send me away, please, dear," she whispered; "it isn't one of those horrid cases you have sometimes, and I do so want to hear." "Very well; only don't speak." "No, my dear, not a word," whispered Mrs Wilton, and she half closed her eyes and pinched her lips together, but her ears twitched as she sat waiting anxiously for the return of the footman, followed by the groom, who seemed to have had no little trouble in pushing and dragging a rough-looking lout of about eighteen into the room, where he stood with his smock frock raised on each side so as to allow his hands to be thrust deeply into his trousers pockets. "Take your hat off," said Samuel, in a sharp whisper. "Sheeawn't!" said the fellow, defiantly. "I arn't done nothin'." Samuel promptly knocked the hat off on to the floor, which necessitated a hand being taken slowly from a pocket to pick it up. "Here, don't you do that ag'in," cried the lad. "Silence, sir. Stand up," cried Wilton. "Mayn't I pick up my hat? I arn't done nothin'." "Say `sir'," whispered the footman. "Sheeawn't. I arn't done nothin', I tell yer. No business to bring me here." "Silence, sir," cried Wilton, taking up a pen and shaking it at the lad, which acted upon him as if it were some terrible judicial wand which might write a document consigning him to hard labour, skilly, and bread and water in the county jail. The consequence being that he stood with his head bent forward, brow one mass of wrinkles, and mouth partly open, staring at the fierce-looking justice of the peace. "Listen to me: you are not brought here for punishment." "Well, I arn't done nothin'," said the lad. "I am glad to hear it, and I hope you will improve, Barker. Now, what you have to do is to answer a few questions, and if you do so truthfully and well, you will be rewarded." "Beer?" said the lout, with a grin. "My servant will give you some beer as you go out, but first of all I shall give you a shilling." The fellow grinned. "Shall I get the book and swear him, sir?" said Samuel, who was used to the library being turned into a court for petty cases. "There is no need," said Wilton austerely. "Now, my lad, answer me." "Yes, I sin 'em both last night." "Saw whom?" "Young Squire and his gal." "Young Squire" made Mrs Wilton smile; "his gal" seemed to set her teeth on edge. "Humph! Are you sure?" said Wilton. "Sewer? Ay, I know young Squire well enough. Hit me many a time. Haw-haw! Know young Squire--I should think I do!" "Say `sir,'" whispered Samuel again. "Sheeawn't," cried the fellow. "You mind your own business." "Attend to me, sir," cried Wilton, in his sternest bench manner. "Well, I am a-try'n' to, master, on'y he keeps on kedgin' me." "Where did you see my son and--er--the lady?" "Where did I sin 'em? Up road." "Where were you?" "Ahint the hedge." "And what were you doing behind the hedge--wiring?" "Naw. On'y got me bat-fowling nets." "But you were hiding, sir?" "Well, what o' that? 'Bliged to hide. Can't go out anywhere o' nights now wi'out summun watching yer. Can't go for a few sparrers but some on 'em says its pardridges." "What time was it?" "Hey?" "What time was it?" "I d'know; nine or ten, or 'leven. Twelve, may-be." "Well?" "Hey?" "What then?" "What then? Nothin' as I knows on. Yes, there weer; he puts his arm round her waist, and she give him a dowse in the faace." "Humph! Which way did they go then?" "Up road." "Did you follow them?" "What'd I got to follow 'em for? Shouldn't want nobody to follow me when I went out wi' a gal." Wilton frowned. "Did you see any carriage about, waiting?" "Naw." "What did you do then?" "Waited till they was out o' sight." "Yes, and what then?" "Ketched sparrers, and they arn't game." The lout looked round, grinning at all present, as if he had posed the magistrate in whose presence he was standing, till his eyes lit on Mrs Wilton, who was listening to him intently, and to her he raised his hand, passing the open palm upward past his face till it was as high as he could reach, and then descending the arc of a circle, a movement supposed in rustic schools to represent a most respectful bow. "Ah, Barker, Barker!" said the recipient, shaking her head at him; "you never come to the Sunday school now." "Grow'd too big, missus," said the lad, grinning, and then noisily using his cuff for the pocket-handkerchief he lacked. "We are never too big to learn to be good, Barker," continued Mrs Wilton, "and I'm afraid you are growing a bad boy now." "Oh, I don't know, missus; I shouldn't be a bad 'un if there was no game." "That will do, that will do," said the Squire, impatiently. "That's all you know, then, sir?" "Oh, no; I knows a lot more than that," said the lad, grinning. "Then why the deuce don't you speak?" "What say?" "Tell me what more you know about Mr Claud and the lady, and I'll give you another shilling." "Will yer?" cried the lad, eagerly. "Well, I've seed'd 'em five or six times afore going along by the copse and down the narrow lane, and I sin him put his arm round her oncet, and I was close by, lying clost to a rabbud hole; and she says, `How dare you, sir! how dare you!' just like that I dunno any more, and that makes two shillin'." "There; be off. Take him away, Samuel, and give him a horn of beer." "Yes sir--Now, then, come on." But the lad stood and grinned, first at the Squire and then at Mrs Wilton, rubbing his hands down his sides the while. "D'yer hear?" whispered the footman, as the groom opened the door. "Come on." "Sheeawn't." "Come on. Beer." "But he arn't give me the two shillings yet." "Eh? Oh, forgot," said the Squire. "Gahn. None o' your games. Couldn't ha' forgetted it so soon." "There--Take him away." Wilton held out a couple of shillings, and the fellow snatched them, bit both between his big white teeth, stuffed one in each pocket, made Mrs Wilton another bow, and turned to go; but his wardrobe had been sadly neglected, and at the first step one of the shillings trickled down the leg of his trousers, escaped the opening into his ill-laced boot, rattled on the polished oaken floor, and then ran along, after the fashion of coins, to hide itself in the darkest corner of the room. But Barker was too sharp for it, and forgetting entirely the lessons he had learned at school about ordering "himself lowly and reverently to all his betters," he shouted: "Loo, loo, loo!" pounced upon it like a cat does upon a mouse, picked it up, and thrust it where it could join its fellow, and turned to Mrs Wilton. "Hole in the pocket," he said, confidentially, and went off to get the beer. "Bah! Savage!" growled Wilton, as the door closed. "There, Maria, no doubt about it now." "No, my dear, and we can sleep in peace." But Mrs Wilton was wrong save and except the little nap she had after dinner while her husband was smoking his pipe; for that night, just before the last light was out--that last light being in the Squire's room where certain arrangements connected with hair and pieces of paper had detained Mrs Wilton nearly half an hour after her husband had announced in regular cadence that he was fast asleep--there came a long ringing at the hall door bell. It was so utterly unexpected in the silence and solitude of the country place that Mrs Wilton sprang from her seat in front of the dressing-glass, jarring the table so that a scent-bottle fell with a crash, and injuring her knees. "James--James!" she cried. "Eh, what's the matter?" came from the bed, as the Squire sat up suddenly. "Fire! Fire! Another stack burning, I'm sure." Wilton sprang out of bed, ran to the window, tore aside the blind, flung open the casement, and looked down. "Where is it?" he shouted, for he had more than once been summoned from his bed to rick fires. "Where's what?" came in a familiar voice. Wilton darted back, letting fall the blind. "Slip on your dressing gown," he said, hastily, "and pull out those confounded things from your hair. They've come back." "Oh, my dear, and me this figure!" cried the lady, and for the next ten minutes there was a hurried sound of dressing going on. "Look sharp," said Wilton. "I'll go down and let them in. You'd better rouse up Cook and Samuel; they'll want something to eat." "I won't be two minutes, my dear. Take them in the library; the wood ashes will soon glow up again. My own darlings! I am glad." Mrs Wilton was less, for by the time the heavy bolts, lock, and bar had been undone, she was out of her room, and hurried to the balustrade to look down into the hall, paying no heed to the cool puff of wind that rushed upward and nearly extinguished the candle her husband had set down upon the marble table. "My own boy!" she sighed, as she saw Claud enter, and heard his words. "Thankye," he said. "Gone to bed soon." "The usual time, my boy," said Wilton, in very different tones to those he had used at their last meeting. "But haven't you brought her?" "Brought her?" "Yes; where's Kate?" "Fast asleep in bed by now, I suppose," said the young man sulkily. "Oh, but you should have brought her. Where have you come from?" "Fast train down. London. Didn't suppose I was going to stop here, did you, to be kicked?" "Don't say any more about that, my boy. It's all over now; but why didn't you bring her down?" "Oh, Claud, my boy, you shouldn't have left her like that." "Brought her down--Kate--shouldn't have left," said the young man, excitedly. "Here, what do you both mean?" "There, nonsense; what is the use of dissimulation now, my boy," said Wilton. "Of course we know, and--there--it's of no use to cry over spilt milk. We did not like it, and you shouldn't have both tried to throw dust in our eyes." "Look here, guv'nor, have you been to a dinner anywhere to-night?" "Absurd, sir. Stop this fooling. Where did you leave Kate?" "In bed and asleep, I suppose." "But--but where have you been, then?" "London, I tell you. Shouldn't have been back now, only I couldn't find Harry Dasent. He's off somewhere, so I thought I'd better come back. I say, is she all right again?" "I knew it! I knew it!" shrieked Mrs Wilton. "I said it from the first. Oh, James, James!--The pond--the pond! She's gone--she's gone!" "Who's gone?" stammered Claud, looking from father to mother, and back again. "Kate, dear; drowned--drowned," wailed Mrs Wilton. "What!" shouted Claud. "Look here, sir," said his father, catching him by the arm in a tremendous grip, as he raised the candle to gaze searchingly in his son's face; "let's have the truth at once. You're playing some game of your own to hide this--this escapade." "Guv'nor!" cried the young man, catching his father by the arm in turn; "put down that cursed candle; you'll burn my face. You don't mean to say the little thing has cut?" CHAPTER EIGHTEEN. James Wilton stood for a few moments staring searchingly at his son. Then, in a sudden access of anger, he rushed to the library door, flung it open, came back, caught the young man by the shoulders, and began to back him in. "Here, what are you doing, guv'nor? Leave off! Don't do that. Here, why don't you answer my question?" "Hold your tongue, idiot! Do you suppose I want all the servants to hear what is said? Go in there." He gave him a final thrust, and then hurried out to hasten upstairs to where Mrs Wilton stood holding on by the heavy balustrade which crossed the hall like a gallery, and rocking herself to and fro. "Oh, James, I knew it--I knew it!" she sobbed out. "She's dead--she's dead!" "Hush! Hold your tongue!" cried her husband. "Do you want to alarm the house? You'll have all the servants here directly. Come along." He drew her arm roughly beneath his, and hurried her down the stairs into the library, thrust her into her son's arms, and then hurried to the hall table for the candle, ending by shutting himself in with them. "Oh, Claud, Claud, my darling boy!" wailed Mrs Wilton. "If you don't hold your tongue, Maria, you'll put me in a rage," growled Wilton, savagely. "Sit in that chair." "Oh, James, James, you shouldn't," sobbed the poor woman, "you shouldn't," as she was plumped down heavily; but she spoke in a whisper. "Done?" asked Claud, mockingly. "Then, now p'raps you'll answer my question. Has she bolted?" "Silence, idiot!" growled his father, so fiercely that the young man backed away from trim in alarm. "No, don't keep silence, but speak. You contemptible young hound, do you think you can impose upon me by your question--by your pretended ignorance? Do you think you can impose upon me, I say? Do you think I cannot see through your plans?" "I say, mater, what's the guv'nor talking about?" cried Claud. "She's dead--she's dead!" "Who's dead? What's dead?" "Answer me, sir," continued Wilton, backing his son till he could get no farther for the big table. "Do you think you can impose upon me?" "Who wants to impose on you, guv'nor?" "You do, sir. But I see through your miserable plan, and I tell you this. You can't get the money into your own hands to make ducks and drakes of, for I am executor and trustee and guardian, and if there's any law in the land I'll lock up every shilling so that you can't touch it. If you had played honourably with me you would have had ample, and the estate would have come to you some day, cleared of incumbrances, if you had not killed yourself first." "I don't know what you're talking about," cried Claud, angrily. "Who's imposing on you? Who's playing dishonourably? You behaved like a brute to me, and I went off to get out of it all, only I didn't want to be hard on ma, and so I came back." "Oh, my darling boy! It was very, very good of you." "Be quiet, Maria. Let the shallow-brained young idiot speak," growled Wilton. "Now, sir, answer me--have you gone through some form of marriage?" "Who with?" said the young man, with a grin. "Answer my question, sir. Have you gone through some form of marriage?" "I? No. I'm free enough, guv'nor." "You have not?" cried Wilton, aghast. "You mean to tell me that you have taken that poor girl away somewhere, and have not married her?" "No, I don't mean to tell you anything of the sort. Here, mother, is the pater going mad?" "Silence, Maria; don't answer him." "Yes, do ma. What does it all mean? Has Kitty bolted?" "She's drowned--she's drowned, my boy." "Nonsense, ma! You're always thinking someone is drowned. Then she has bolted. Oh, I say!" "No, sir; she has not bolted, as you term it in your miserable horsey slang. You've taken her away--there; don't deny it. You've got her somewhere, and you think you can set me at defiance." "Do I, guv'nor?" "Yes, sir, you do. But I've warned you and shown you how you stand. Now, look here; your only chance is to give up and do exactly as I tell you." "Oh, is it?" said the young man mockingly. "Yes, sir, it is. Now then, be frank and open with me at once, and I may be able to help you out of the miserable hole in which you have plunged us." "Go ahead, then. Have it your own way, guv'nor." "No time must be lost--that is, if you are not deceiving me and have already had the ceremony performed." "I didn't stand on ceremony," said Claud, with a laughing sneer; "I gave her a few kisses, and a nice row was the result." "Will you be serious, sir?" "Yes, I'm serious enough. Where has she gone?" "Where have you taken her?" "I haven't taken her anywhere, guv'nor." "Do you mean to tell me, sir, that you did not go up a ladder to her window?" "Hullo!" "Bring her down and take her right away?" "I say, guv'nor," cried Claud, with such startling energy that his father's last suspicion was swept away; "is it so bad as that?" "Then you didn't take her off?" "Of course I didn't. Take her off? What, after that scene? Likely. What nonsense, guv'nor! Do you think she'd have come?" "Claud, you amaze me, my boy," cried Wilton, who looked staggered, but his incredulity got the better of him directly. "No; only by your effrontery," he continued. "You are trifling with me; worse still, you are trifling with a large fortune. Come, it will pay you best to be frank. Where is she?" "At the bottom of the pike pond, for all I know--a termagant," cried Claud; "I tell you I haven't seen her since the row." "Then she is drowned--she's drowned." "Be quiet, Maria!" roared Wilton. "Now, boy, tell me the truth for once in a way; did you elope with Kate?" "No, guv'nor, I did not," cried the young man. "I never had the chance, or I'd have done it like a shot." Wilton's jaw dropped. He was quite convinced now, and he sank into a chair, staring at his son. "I--I thought you had made short work of it," said Wilton, huskily. "Then she really has gone?" said Claud in a whisper. "Yes, yes, my dear," burst out Mrs Wilton. "I knew it! I was right at first." "Where has she gone, then, mother?" "Hold your tongue, woman!" cried Wilton, angrily. "You don't know anything about it--how could she get a ladder there? Footsteps on the flower-bed, my boy. A man in it. I thought it was you." "And all that money gone," cried Claud. "No, not yet, my boy. There, I beg your pardon for suspecting you. It seemed so much like your work. But stop--you are cheating me; it was your doing." "Have it your own way, then, guv'nor." "You were seen with her last night." "Eh? What time?" cried Claud. "I don't know the time, sir, but a man saw you with her. Come, you see the risk you run of losing a fortune. Speak out." Claud spoke in, but what he said was his own affair. Then, after a minute's thought, he said; "I say, would it be old Garstang, guv'nor?" "No, sir, it would not be John Garstang," cried Wilton, with his anger rising again. "No; I have it, guv'nor," cried Claud, excitedly. "I went up, meaning to have a turn in town with Harry Dasent, but he was out. That's it; he hasn't a penny in the world, and he has been down here three times lately. I thought he'd got devilish fond of her all at once; and twice over he let out about Kitty being so good-looking. That's it; he's got her away." "No, no, my dear; she wouldn't have gone away with a man like that," sobbed Mrs Wilton. "She didn't like him." "No; absurd," cried Wilton. "But he'd have gone away with her, guv'nor." "You were seen with her last night." "Oh, was I? All right, then. If you say so I suppose I was, guv'nor, but I'm going back to London after ferreting out all I can. You're on the wrong scent, dad,--him! I never thought of that." "You're wrong, Claud; you're wrong." "Yes, mother, deucedly wrong," cried the young man fiercely. "Why didn't I think of it? I might have done the same, and now it's too late. Perhaps not. She'd hold out after he got her away, and we might get to her in time. No, I know Harry Dasent. It's too late now." "Look here, Claud, boy, I want to believe in you," said Wilton, who was once more impressed by his son's earnestness; "do you tell me you believe that Harry Dasent has taken her away by force?" "Force, or some trick. It was just the sort of time when she might listen to him. There; you may believe me, now." "Then who was the lady you were seen with last night? Come, be honest. You were seen with someone. Who was it?" "Mustn't kiss and tell, guv'nor," said Claud, with a sickly grin. "Look here," said Wilton huskily. "There are a hundred and fifty thousand pounds at stake, my boy. Was it Kate?" "No, father," cried the young man earnestly; "it wasn't, 'pon my soul." "Am I to believe you?" "Look here, guv'nor, do you think I want to fool this money away? What good should I be doing by pretending I hadn't carried her off? I told you I'd have done it like a shot if I had had the chance; and what's more, you'd have liked it, so long as I had got her to say yes. I did not carry her off, once for all. It was Harry Dasent, and if he has choused me out of that bit of coin, curse him, if I hang for it, I'll break his neck!" "Oh! Claud, Claud, my darling," wailed Mrs Wilton, "to talk like that when your cousin's lying cold and motionless at the bottom of that pond!" CHAPTER NINETEEN. For the better part of two days Pierce Leigh went about like one who had received some terrible mental shock; and Jenny's pleasant little rounded cheeks told the tale of the anxiety from which she suffered, while her eyes followed him wistfully, and she seemed never weary of trying to perform little offices for him which would distract his attention from the thoughts which were sapping his vitality. The life at the quiet little cottage home was entirely changed, for brother and sister were playing parts for which they were quite unsuited in a melancholy farce of real life, wearing masks, and trying to hide their sufferings from each other, with a miserable want of success. And all the time Leigh was longing to open his heart to the loving, affectionate little thing who had been his companion from a child, his confidante over all his hopes, and counsellor in every movement or plan. She had read and studied with him, helped him to puzzle out abstruse questions, and for years they had gone on together leading a life full of happiness, and ready to laugh lightly over money troubles connected with the disappointment over the purchase of the Northwood practice through a swindling, or grossly ignorant, agent. "Don't worry about it, Pierce dear," Jenny had said, "it is only the loss of some money, and as it's in the country we can live on less, and wear out our old clothes over again. I do wish I could cut up and turn your coats and trousers. You men laugh at us and our fashions, but we women can laugh at you and yours. Granted that our hats and dresses are flimsy, see how we can re-trim and unpick, and make them look new again, while your stupid things get worn and shiny, and then they're good for nothing. They're quite hopeless, for I daren't try to make you a new coat out of two old ones." There was many a merry laugh over such matters, Jenny's spirits rising, as the country life brought back the bloom of health that had been failing in Westminster; and existence, in spite of the want of patients, was a very happy one, till the change came. This change to a certain extent resembled that in the yard of the amateur who was bitten by the fancy for keeping and showing those great lumbering fowls--the Brahmas, so popular years ago. He had a pen of half-a-dozen cockerels, the result of the hatching of a clutch of eggs laid by a feathered princess of the blood royal; and as he watched them through their infancy it was with high hopes of winning prizes--silver cups and vases, at all the crack poultry shows. And how he tended and pampered his pets, watching them through the various stages passed by this kind of fowl--one can hardly say feathered fowl in the earlier stages of their existence, for through their early boyhood, so to speak, they run about in a raw unclad condition that is pitiful to see, for they are almost "birds of a feather" in the Dundreary idea of the singularity of plumage; and it is not until they have arrived pretty well at full growth that they assume the heavy massive plumage that makes their skeleton lanky forms look so huge. These six young Brahmas masculine grew and throve in their pen, innocent, happy, and at peace, till one morning their owner gazed upon them in pride, for they were all that a Brahma fancier could wish to see--small of comb, heavy of hackle, tail slightly developed, broad in the beam, short-legged, and without a trace of vulture hock. "First prize for one of them," said the owner, and after feeding them he went to town, and came back to find his hopes ruined, his cockerels six panting, ragged, bleeding wrecks, squatting about in the pen, half dead, too much exhausted to spur and peck again. For there had been battle royal in that pen, the young birds engaging in a furious melee. For what reason? Because, as good old Doctor Watts said, "It is their nature to." They did not know it till that morning, but there was the great passion in each one's breast, waiting to be evoked, and transform them from pacific pecking and scratching birds into perfect demons of discord. There was wire netting spread all over the top of their carefully sanded pen, and till then they had never seen others of their kind. It was their world, and as far as they knew there was neither fowl nor chicken save themselves. The memory of the mother beneath whose plumage they had nestled had passed away, for the gallinaceous brain cavity is small. That morning, a stray, pert-looking, elegantly spangled, golden Hambro' pullet appeared upon the wall, looked down for a moment on the pen of full-grown, innocent young Brahmas, uttered the monosyllables "Took, took!" and flew away. For a brief space, the long necks of the cockerels were strained in the direction where that vision of loveliness had appeared for a brief instant; the fire of jealous love blazed out, and they turned and fought almost to the death. It would have been quite, had there been strength. The owner of these six cripples did not take a prize. So at Northwood, women, save as sister or friend, had been non-existent to Pierce Leigh. Now the desire to rend his human brother was upon him strong. Jenny knew it, and for more than one reason she trembled for the time that must come when Pierce should first meet Claud Wilton, for it had rapidly dawned upon her that the long-deferred grand passion of her brother was the stronger for its sudden growth. In her anxiety, she went out during those two days a great deal for the benefit of her health, but really on the qui vive for the news that she felt must soon come of Claud's proceedings with his cousin; and twice over she had started the subject of their projected leaving, making Leigh raise his eyebrows slightly in wonder at the sudden change in his sister's ideas. But it was not till nearly evening that, during her brother's temporary absence, she heard the news for which she was waiting. One of Leigh's poor patients called to see him--one of the class suffered by most young doctors, who go through life believing they are very ill, and that it is the duty of a medical man to pay extra attention to their ailments, and lavish upon them knowledge and medicine to the fullest extent, without a thought of payment entering their heads. Betsy Bray was the lady in question, and as was her custom, Jenny saw the woman, ready to hear her last grievance, and tell her brother when he returned. Betsy was fifty-five, and possessed of the strong constitution which bears a great deal of ease; but in her own estimation she was very bad. From frequenting surgeries, she had picked up a few medical terms, and larded her discourse with them and others of a religious tendency, her attendance at church dole-giving, and other charitable distributions being of the most regular description. "Doctor at home, miss?" she said, plaintively, as she slowly and plumply subsided upon the little couch in the surgery, the said piece of furniture groaning in all its springs, for Betsy possessed weight. "No, Mrs Bray. He has gone to call on the Dudges, at West Gale." "Ah, he always is calling on somebody when I've managed to drag my weary bones all this way up from the village." "I am very sorry. What is the matter now?" said Jenny, soothingly. "Matter, miss? What's allus the matter with me? It's my chronics. Not a wink of sleep have I had all the blessed night." "Well, I must give you something." "Nay, nay, my dear; you don't understand my troubles. It's the absorption is all wrong; and you'd be giving me something out of the wrong bottles. You just give me a taste of sperrits to give me strength to get home again, and beg and pray o' the doctor to come on and see me as soon as he comes home, if you don't want me to be laid out stark and cold afore another day's done." "But I have no spirits, Mrs Bray." "Got none? Well, I dessay a glass o' wine might do. Keep me alive p'raps till I'd crawled home to die." "But we have no wine." "Dear, dear, dear, think o' that," said the woman fretfully. "The old doctor always had some, and a drop o' sperrits, too. Ah, it's a hard thing to be old and poor and in bad health, carrying your grey hairs in sorrow to the grave; and all about you rich and well and happy, rolling in money, and marrying and giving in marriage and wearing their wedding garments, one and all. You've heard about the doings up at the Manor House?" "Yes, yes, something about them, Mrs Bray; but I'll tell my brother, and he will, I know, come and see you." "Yes, you tell him; not as I believe in him much, but poor people must take what they can get--He's come back, you know?" "My brother? No; he would have come straight in here." "Your brother? Tchah, no!" cried the woman, forgetting her "chronics" in the interest she felt in the fresh subject. "You're always thinking about your brother, and if's time you began to think of a husband. I meant him at the Manor--young Claud Wilton. He's come back." "Come back?" cried Jenny excitedly. "Yes; but I hear he arn't brought his young missus with him. Nice goings on, running away, them two, to get married. But I arn't surprised; he fell out with the parson long enough ago about Sally Deal, down the village, and parson give it him well for not marrying her. Wouldn't be married here out o' spite, I suppose. Well, I must go. You're sure you haven't got a drop o' gin in the house?" "Quite sure," said Jenny quickly; "and I'll be sure and tell my brother to come." "Ay, do; and tell him I say it's a shame he lives so far out of the village. I feel sometimes that I shall die in one of the ditches before I get here, it's so far. There, don't hurry me so; I don't want to be took ill here. I know, doctors aren't above helping people out of the world when they get tired of them." "Gone!" cried Jenny at last, with a sigh of relief; and then, with the tears rising to her eyes, "Oh, what shall I do? What shall I do? If they meet--if he ever gets to know!" She hurried upstairs, put on her hat and jacket, and came down looking pale and excited, but without any very definite plans. One idea was foremost in her mind; but as she reached the door she caught sight of her brother coming with rapid strides from the direction opposite to that taken by the old woman who had just gone. "Too late!" she said, with a piteous sigh; and she ran upstairs hurriedly, and threw off her things. She had hardly re-arranged her hair when she heard her brother's voice calling her. "Yes, dear," she said, and she ran down, to find him looking ghastly. "Who was that went away from here?" he said huskily. She told him, but not of her promise to send him over. "I'll go to her at once," he said. "No, no, Pierce, dear; she is not ill. Pray stay at home; there is really no need." "Why should I stay at home?" he said, looking at her suspiciously. "I--I am not very well, dear. You have been so dull, it has upset me. I wish you would stay in with me this evening; I feel so nervous and lonely." "Yes, I will," he said; "but I must go there first." "No, no, dear; don't, please, don't go," she pleaded, as she caught his arm. "Please stay. She is not in the least ill, and I want you to stop. There, I'll make some tea directly, and we'll sit over it and have a long cosy chat, and it will do us both good, dear." "Jenny," he cried harshly, "you want to keep me at home." "Yes, dear, I told you so; but don't speak in that harsh way; you frighten me." "I'm not blind," he cried. "Don't deny it. You've heard from that old woman what I have just found out. He has come back." "Pierce!" she cried; and she shrank away from him, and covered her face with her hands. "Yes," he said wildly, and there was a look in his ghastly face which she had never seen before. "I knew it; and you are afraid that I shall meet him and wring his miserable neck." "Oh, Pierce, Pierce," she cried piteously, as she threw herself at his feet; "don't, don't, pray don't talk in this mad way." "Why not?" he said, with a mocking laugh. "It is consistent. There, get up; don't kneel there praying to a madman." She sprang up quickly and seized him by the shoulder, and then threw herself across his knees and her arms about his neck. "It is not true," she cried passionately. "You are not mad; you are only horribly angry, and I am frightened to death for fear that you should meet and be violent." "Violent! I could kill him!" he muttered, with a hard look in his eyes. "Good God, what a profanation! He marry her! She must have been mad, or there has been some cruel act of violence. Jenny, girl, I will see him and take him by the throat and make him tell me all. I have fought against it. I have told myself that she is unworthy of a second thought, but my heart tells me that it is not so. There has been some horrible trick played upon her; she would not--as you have said--she could not have gone off of her own will with that miserable little hound." "Yes, yes, that is what I think," she said, hysterically. "So wait patiently, dear, and we shall know the truth some day." "Wait!" he cried, with a mocking laugh. "Wait! With my brain feeling as if it were on fire. No, I have waited too long; I ought to have gone off after him at once, and learned the truth." "No, no, dear; you two must not meet. Now then, listen to me." "Some day, little bird," he said, lifting her from his knee, as he rose; then kissing her tenderly he extricated himself from her clinging hands as gently as he could, and rushed out. "O, Pierce, Pierce!" she cried. "Stay, stay!" But the only answer to her call as she ran to the door was the heavy beat of his feet in the gloom of the misty evening. "And if they meet he'll find out all," she wailed piteously. She paused, waiting for a few moments, and then searched in her pocket and brought out a tiny silver whistle, which she placed in the bosom of her dress, after flinging the ribbon which was in its ring over her head. A minute later, with her cloak thrown on and hood drawn over her head, she had slipped out of the cottage, and was running down the by-lane in the direction of the Manor House. CHAPTER TWENTY. The soft light of the moon attracted Kate to her bedroom window, where she drew up the blind, and after standing gazing at the silvery orb for some minutes, she unfastened and threw open the casement, drew a chair forward, to sit there letting the soft air of the late autumn night give its coolness to her aching brow. For the silence and calm seemed to bring rest, and by degrees the dull throbbing of her head grew less painful, the strange feeling of confusion which had made thinking a terrible effort began to pass away, and with her eyes fixed upon the skies she began to go over the events of the day, and to try and map out for herself the most sensible course to pursue. Go from Northwood she felt that she must, and at once; though how to combat the will of her constituted guardian was not clear. Garstang, in his encounter with Wilton, had put the case only too plainly, and there was not the vestige of a doubt in her mind as to the truth of his words. It had all been arranged in the family, and whatever might have been her cousin's inclinations at first, he showed only too plainly that he looked upon her as his future wife. She shuddered at the thought; but the weak girl passed away again, and her pale cheeks began to burn once more with indignant anger, and the throbbing of her brow returned, so that she was glad to rest her head upon her hand. By degrees the suffering grew less poignant, and as the pain and mental confusion once more died out she set herself to the task of coming to some decision as to what she should do next day, proposing to herself plan after plan, building up ideas which crumbled away before that one thought: her uncle was her guardian and trustee, and his power over her was complete. What to do?--what to do? The ever recurring question, till she felt giddy. It seemed, knowing what he did, the height of cruelty for Garstang to have gone and left her, but she was obliged to own that he could do nothing more than upbraid his relatives for their duplicity. But he had done much for her; he had thoroughly endorsed her own ideas as to her position and her uncle's intentions; and at last, with the tears suffusing her eyes, as she gazed at the moon rising slowly above the trees, she sat motionless for a time, thinking of her happy life in the past; and owning to herself that the advice given to her was right, she softly closed the casement, drew down the blind, and determined to follow out the counsel. "Yes, I must sleep on it--if I can," she said softly. "Poor Liza is right, and I am not quite alone--I am never alone, for in spirit those who loved me so well must be with me still." There were two candles burning on the dressing-table, but their light troubled her aching eyes, and she slowly extinguished both, the soft light which flooded the window being ample for her purpose. Crossing the room to the side furthest from the door, she bent down and bathed her aching forehead for a few minutes before beginning to undress, and was then about to loosen her hair when she was startled by a faint tap outside the window which sounded as if something had struck the sill. She stopped, listening for a few minutes, but all was still, and coming to the conclusion that the sound had been caused by a rat leaping down somewhere behind the wainscot of the old room, she raised her hands to her head once more, but only for them to become fixed as she stood there paralysed by terror, for a shadow suddenly appeared at the bottom of the blind--a dark shadow cast by the moon; and as she gazed at it in speechless fear, it rose higher and higher, and looked monstrous in size. She made an effort to cast off the horrible nightmare-like sense of terror, but as she realised that to reach the door she must pass the window it grew stronger. The bell! That was by the bed's head, and for the time being she felt helpless, so completely paralysed that she could not even cry for help. What could it mean? Someone had placed a ladder against the window sill and climbed up, and at the thought which now flashed through her brain the helpless feeling passed away, and the hot indignation made her strong, and gave her a courage which drove away her childish fear. How dare he! It was Claud, and she knew what he would say--that he had come there when all was still in the house and no one could know, to ask her forgiveness for the scene that day. Drawing herself up, she was walking swiftly towards the door, with the intention of going at once to Liza's chamber, when there was a fresh movement of the shadow on the blind, and the dread returned, and her heart throbbed heavily. Claud was a short-haired, smooth-faced boy--the shadow cast on the blind was the silhouette of a broad-shouldered, bearded man. It was plain enough now--burglars must be trying to effect an entry, and in another moment she would have cried aloud for help, but just then there was a light tap on one of the panes, the shadow grew smaller and darker, as if the face had been pressed close to the window, and she heard her name softly uttered twice. "Kate! Kate!" She mastered her fear once more, telling herself it must be Claud; and she went slowly to the door; laid her hand upon the bolt to turn it, but paused again, for once more came the low distinct voice-- "Kate! Kate!" She uttered a spasmodic cry, turned sharply round, and half ran to the window with every pulse throbbing with excitement, for she felt that the help she had prayed for last night had come. CHAPTER TWENTY ONE. There was no hesitation on the part of Kate Wilton. The dread was gone, and she rapidly drew up the blind and opened the casement window. "You?" she said quickly, as she held out her hands, which were caught at once and held. "Yes; who should it be, my child? Were you afraid that insolent young scoundrel would dare to do such a thing?" "At first," she faltered, and then quickly, "I hardly knew what to think; I was afraid someone was going to break in. Oh, Mr Garstang, why have you come?" He uttered a little laugh. "For the same reason, I suppose, that would make a father who knew his child was in peril act in the same way." "It is very, very kind of you; but you will be heard, and it will only cause fresh trouble." "It can cause no greater than has come to us, my child. I was half-way to London, but I could not go on; so I got out at a station ten miles away, walked into the village close by, and found a fly and a man to drive me over. I wanted to know how you were getting on. Have you seen them again?" "No. I came straight to my room, and have not left it since." "Good girl! That was very brave of you. Then you took my advice." "Of course." "And Master Claud?" He felt her start and shudder. "Don't talk about him, please. But there, I am very grateful to you for being so kind and thoughtful, and for your brave defence." "Brave nonsense, my child!" he said bluntly. "I did as any man of right feeling would have done if he found a ruffian insulting a weak, helpless girl. Kate, my dear, my blood has been boiling ever since. I could not go back and leave you in this state; I was compelled to come and see you and have a little consultation about your future. I felt that I must do it before seeing James Wilton again. Not a very reputable way, this, of coming to a man's house, even if he is a connection of mine; not respectful to you, either, my child, but I felt certain that if I came to the door and asked to see you I should have been refused entrance." "Yes, yes," said Kate, sadly. "I should not have been told of your coming, or I would have insisted upon seeing you." "You would! Brave girl! I like to hear you speak out so firmly. Well, there was nothing for it but for me, middle-aged man as I am, to play the daring gallant at the lady's window--lattice, I ought to say." "Please don't talk like this, Mr Garstang," said Kate. "It does not sound like you to be playful in your manner." "Thank you, my child, you are right; it does not I accept the reproof. Now, then, to be businesslike. You have been thinking deeply, of course, since you have been alone?" "Yes, very, very seriously about my position. Mr Garstang, it is impossible for me to stay here." "Quite impossible. The conduct to you of your aunt and uncle makes them--no matter what promises they may give you--quite unworthy of your trust. Well?" "I have pretty well decided that I shall go away to-morrow with Eliza, our old nurse and maid." "A most worthy woman, my dear. You could not do better; but--" "But what?" said Kate, nervously. "I do not wish to alarm you, but do you fully realise your position here?" "Yes, and that is why I have decided to go." "Exactly; but you do not fully grasp my meaning. What about your uncle?" "You mean that he will object?" "Exactly." "But if I am firm, and insist, he will not dare to detain me," said the girl warmly. "You think so? Well, think again, my child. He is your guardian and trustee; he will absolutely refuse, and will take any steps which he considers right to prevent your leaving. I am afraid that by the power your poor father left in his hands he will consider himself justified in keeping you quite as a prisoner until you obey his wishes." "Mr Garstang, surely he dare not proceed to such extremities!" "I am afraid that he has the power, and I grieve to say he is in such a position that he is likely to be reckless in his desire to gain his ends." Kate drew a deep breath, and gazed appealingly in the speaker's face. "As a solicitor and the husband of your aunt's late sister, James Wilton naturally came to me for help in his money affairs, and I did the best I could for him. I found that he had been gambling foolishly on the Stock Exchange, instead of keeping to his farms, and was so involved that immediate payments had to be made to save him from absolute ruin." "But my father surely did not know of this?" "Not a word. He kept his own counsel, and of course until the will was read I had no idea of what arrangements your father had made; in fact, I was somewhat taken aback, for I thought it possible that he would have made me one of your trustees. But that by the way. I helped your uncle all I could as a monetary agent, and found clients who were willing to advance him money on his estate, which is now deeply mortgaged. These moneys are now wanted, for the interest has not been fully paid for years. In short, James Wilton is in a desperate condition, and my visits here have been to try and extricate him from his monetary tangle in which he finds himself. Now do you begin to grasp what his designs are?" "Yes, I see," said Kate, sadly; "it is to get some of the money which should be mine, to pay his debts." "Exactly, and the simplest way to do so is to marry you to Claud." "No: there is a simpler way, Mr Garstang. If my uncle had come to me and told me his position I should have felt that I could not have done a more kindly deed than to help my father's brother by paying his debts." "Very kind and generous of you, my child; but he would not believe it possible, and I must say to you that, after what has passed, you would not be doing your duty to the dead by helping your uncle to this extent. Kate, my dear, since I have been talking to you it has occurred to me that there is but one way out of your difficulty." "Yes, what is it?" she cried eagerly. "Of course, you cannot marry your cousin?" "Mr Garstang!" she cried indignantly. "It is impossible, of course; and if you stay here you will have to submit to endless persecution and annoyance, such as a highly strung, sensitive girl like you are will be unable to combat." "You do not know me yet, Mr Garstang." "Indeed? I think I do, as I have known you from a child. You are mentally strong, but you have been, and under these circumstances will be, further sapped by sickness, and it would need superhuman power to win in so cruel a fight. You must not risk it, Kate, my child. You must go." "Yes, I feel that I know I must go, but how can I? You, as a lawyer, should know." "A long and costly litigation, or an appeal to the Court of Chancery might save you, and a judge make an order traversing your father's will, but I should shrink from such a course; I know too well the uncertainties of the law." "Then your idea for extricating me from my difficult position is of no value," she said, despairingly. "You have not heard it yet," he said, "because I almost shrink from proposing such a thing to your father's child." "Tell me what it is," she said firmly. "You desire me to?" "Of course." "It is this--a simple and effective way of checkmating one who has proved himself unworthy. My idea was that you should transfer the guardianship to me." "Willingly, Mr Garstang; but can it be done?" "It must and shall be done if you are willing, my child," he said firmly, "but it would necessitate a very unusual, a bold and immediate step oh your part." "What is that, Mr Garstang?" she said quietly. "You would have to place yourself under my guardianship at once." "At once?" she said, starting slightly. "Yes. Think for yourself. It could not be done slowly and legally, for at the first suspicion that I was acting against him, James Wilton would place you immediately completely out of my reach, and take ample care that I had no further communication with you." "Yes," she said quietly; "he would." "Yes," he said, repeating her words, and speaking in a slow, passionless, judicial way; "if the thing were deferred, or if he were besieged, he would redouble his pressure. Kate, my dear, that was my idea; but it must sound almost as mad to you as it does to me. Yes, it is impossible; I ought not to have proposed such a thing, and yet I can not find it in my heart to give up any chance of rescuing you from your terrible position." He was silent, and she stood there gazing straight before her for a few moments before turning her eyes upon his. "Tell me plainly what you mean, Mr Garstang." "Simply this: I did mean that you should take the opportunity of my being here and leave at once. I have the fly waiting, and I could take you to my town house and place you in the care of my housekeeper and her daughter. It would of course be checkmating your uncle, who could be brought to his knees; and then as the price of your pardon you could do something to help him out of his difficulties. Possibly a moderate payment to his creditors might free him on easy terms. But there, my child, the project is too wild and chimerical. It must almost sound to you like a romance." She stood there gazing full in his eyes as he ceased speaking; and at the end of a minute he said gently, "There, I must not keep you talking here in the cold night air. Your chest is still delicate; but strange as the visit may seem, I am after all glad I have come, if only to give you a little comfort--to show you that you are not quite alone in the world. There, say good-night, and, of course, you will not mention my visit to anyone. I must go now and catch the night mail at the station. To-morrow I will see a very learned old barrister friend, and lay the matter before him so as to get his advice. He may show me some way out of the difficulty. Keep a good heart. I must show you that you have one who will act as an uncle should. But listen to me," he said, as he took her cold hand in his, "you must brace yourself up for the encounters to come. Even if I find that I can assist you, the law moves slowly, and it may be months before you can come out of prison. So no flinching; let James Wilton and that scoundrel Claud know that they have a firm, mentally strong woman to deal with; and now God bless you, my child! Good-night!" He let her hand fall, and lowered himself a round of the ladder; but she stood as if carved in marble in the bright moonlight, without uttering a word. "Say good-night, my dear; and come, be firm." She made no reply. "You are not hurt by my proposal?" he said quietly. "No," she said at last, "I was trying to weigh it. I must have time." "Yes, you must have time. Think it over, my child; it may strike you differently to-morrow, or you may see it in a more impossible light. So may I. You know my address: Bedford Row will find me. I am well known in London. Write to me if you require help, and at any cost I will come and see you, even if I bring police to force my way. Now, good-night, my dear. Heigho! Why did not I have a daughter such as you?" "Let me think," said Kate gravely. "No; this is no time for thinking, my child. Once more, good-night." "No," said Kate firmly. "I will trust you, Mr Garstang. You must not leave me to be kept a prisoner here." "Possibly they would not dare; and I must warn you that you are taking a very unusual step." "Not in trusting you, sir," she said firmly. "Treat me as you have treated the daughter who might have been born to you, and save me at once from the position I am in. Wait while I go and waken Eliza. She must be with us." "Your maid?" he said. "Yes, I can not leave her here." "They will not keep her a prisoner," he said quietly, "and she can join us afterwards. No, my child, if you go with me now it must be alone and at once. I will not put any pressure on you. Come or stay. You still have me to work for you as far as in me lies. Which shall it be? Your hat and cloak, or good-night?" "Don't leave me, Mr Garstang. I am weak and hysterical still. I feel now, after the chance of freedom you have shown me, that I dare not face to-morrow alone." "Then you will come?" he said, in the same low passionless way. "I will." Five minutes after, John Garstang was helping her carefully to descend the ladder, guarding her every footstep so that she could not fall; and as they reached the ground, he quietly offered her his arm. "What a beautifully calm and peaceful night!" he said gravely. "Do you feel the cold?" "No; my cheeks are burning," she answered. "Ah! yes, a little excitement; but don't be alarmed. The fly is waiting about half a mile away. A sharp walk will bring back the correct circulation. Almost a shame, though, my child, to take you from the clear pure air of the country to my gloomy house in Great Ormond Street. Not very far from your old home." "Don't talk to me, please, Mr Garstang," she said painfully. "I most, my dear; and about everything that will take your attention from the step you are taking. Are your shoes pretty stout? I must not have you suffering from wet feet. By the way, my dear, you were nineteen on your last birthday. You look much older. I thought so yesterday. Dear, dear, ii my poor wife had lived, how she would have blessed me for bringing her a daughter to our quiet home! How you would have liked her, my dear! A sweet, good, clever woman--so different to Maria Wilton. Well, well, a good woman, too, in spite of her weakness for her boy." He chatted on, with Kate walking by him in silence, till the fly was reached, with the horse munching the grass at the road side, and the driver asleep on the box, but ready to start into wakefulness at a word. An hour later, Kate sat back in the corner of a first-class carriage, when her strength gave way, and she burst into a hysterical fit of sobbing. But she heard Garstang's words: "I am glad to see that, my child. Cry on; it will relieve your overburdened heart. You will be better then. You have done right; never fear. To-morrow you can rest in peace." CHAPTER TWENTY TWO. Jenny was almost breathless when she reached the park palings of the Manor House, some little distance from the gate at the end of the avenue; and here she paused for a few moments beneath an oak which grew within the park, but which, like many others, spread out three or four huge horizontal boughs right across the boundary lane, and made the way gloomy even on sunny days. She looked sharply back in the direction by which she had come, but the evening was closing in more and more gloomy, and the mist exceedingly closely related to a rain, was gathering fast and forming drops on the edges of dead leaves and twigs, beside making the grass overhanging the footpath so wet that the girl's feet and the lower parts of her skirts were drenched. No one was in sight or likely to be in that secluded spot, and having gained her breath, she started off once more, heedless of the sticky mud of the lane, and followed it on, round by the park palings, where the autumn leaves lay thick and rustled as her dress swept over them. In a few minutes she reached a stile in the fence, where a footpath--an old right of way much objected to by Squire Wilton, as the village people called him--led across the little park, passing the house close by the end of the shrubbery, and entering another lane, which curved round to join the main road right at the far end of the village, a good mile away from the Doctor's cottage. There were lights in the drawing-room and dining-room, making a dull glow on the thickening mist, as Jenny halted at the end of the shrubbery, and all was still as death, till a dog barked suddenly, and was answered by half a dozen others, pointers and retrievers, in the kennel by the stables. This lasted in a dismal, irritating chorus, which made the girl utter little ejaculations suggestive of impatience, as she waited for the noise to end. She glanced round once more, but the evergreens grew thickly just over an iron hurdle fence, and she satisfied herself that as she could only indistinctly see the shrubs three or four yards away, it was impossible for her to be seen from the house. The barking went on in a full burst for a few minutes. Then dog after dog finished its part; the sextette became a quartette, a trio, a duet; and then a deep-voiced retriever performed a powerful solo, ending it with a prolonged bay, and Jenny raised her hand to her lips, when the hill chorus burst out again, and the girl angrily stamped her foot in the wet grass. "Oh, what a cold I shall catch," she muttered. "Why will people keep these nasty dogs?" The barking went on for some minutes, just as before, breaking off by degrees into another solo; but at last all was still, the little sighs and ejaculations Jenny had kept on uttering ceased too. Then she raised her head quickly, and a shrill chirp sounded dead and dull in the misty air, followed at intervals by two more. It was not a regular whistle, but a repetition of such a call as a night bird might utter in its flight as it floated over the house. The mist seemed to stifle the call, and the girl was about to repeat it, but it was loud enough for the dogs to hear, and they set up a fierce baying, which lasted till there was a loud commotion of yelps and cries, mingled with the rattling of chains, the same deep-mouthed dog breaking out in a very different solo this time, one suggestive of suffering from the application of boot toes to its ribs. Then quiet, and Jenny with trembling hand once more raised the little silver whistle to her lips, and the shrill chirps rang out in their former smothered way. "Oh," sighed Jenny. "It will be a sore throat--I'm sure it will. I must go back; I dare not stay any longer. Ugh! How I do hate the little wretch. I could kill him!" The girl's pretty little white teeth grated together, and once more she stamped her foot, following up this display of irritation by stamping the other. "Cold as frogs," she muttered, "and the water's oozy in my boots. Wretch!" "Ullo!" came in a harsh whisper, followed by the cachination which often accompanies a grin. "You've come, then!" There was a rustle of the bushes before her, and the dimly seen figure of Claud climbed over the iron hurdle, made a snatch at the girl's arm with his right and a trial to fling his left about her waist, but she eluded him. "Keep off," she said sharply; "how dare you!" "Because I love you so, little dicky-bird," he whispered. "I thought you didn't mean to come." "No, you didn't, pet. I heard you first time, but I had to go out and kick the dogs. They heard it, too, and thought it was poachers. Only one, though--come after me!" "You!" she said, contemptuously. "You, sir! Who would come after you?" "Why, you would." "Such vanity!" "Then what did you come for?" "To bring you back this rubbishing little whistle." "Nonsense; you'd better keep that." "I tell you I don't want it. Take it, sir." "No, I shan't take it. Keep it." "There it is, then," she cried; and she threw it at him. "Gone in among the hollies," he said. "Well, I'm not going to prick myself hunting for it in the dark. What a little spit-fire it is! What's the matter with you to-night?" "Matter enough. I've come to tell you never to make signals for me to come out again." "Why? I say, what a temper you are in to-night. Here, let me help you over, and we'll go round to the arbor. You'll get your feet wet standing there." "They are wet, and I shall catch a cold and die, I hope." "Oh, I say, Jenny!" "Silence, sir! How dare you speak to me like that!" "Come over, then, into the arbor." "I have told you again and again that I never would!" "You are a little tartar," he whispered. "You get prettier every day, and peck and say nastier things to me. But there, I don't mind; it only makes me love you more and more." "It isn't true," she cried furiously. "You're a wicked story-teller, and you know it." "Am I?" "Yes; that's the same miserable sickly tale you have told to half-a-dozen of the silly girls in the village. I know you thoroughly now. How dare you follow me and speak to me? If I were to tell my brother he'd nearly kill you." "Quite, p'raps, with a drop out of one of his bottles." "I can never forgive myself for having listened to the silly, contemptible flattery of the cast-off lover of a labourer's daughter." "Oh, I like that, Jenny; what's the good of bringing all that up? That's been over ever so long. It was only sowing wild oats." "The only sort that you are ever likely to have to sow. I know all now--everything; so go to her, and never dare to speak to me again." "What? Go back to Sally? Well, you are a jealous little thing." "I, jealous--of you?" she said, with contempt in her tone and manner. "Yes, that's what's the matter with you, little one. But go on; I like it. Shows me you love me." "I? Ha, ha, ha!" laughed Jenny derisively. "Do you think I don't know everything?" "I daresay you do. You're such a clever little vixen." "Do you suppose it has not reached my ears about your elopement with your cousin?" "I don't care what you've heard; it ain't true. But I say, don't hold me off like this, Jenny; you know I love you like--like anything." "Yes, anything," she retorted angrily; "any thing--your dogs, your horses, your fishing-rods and gun." "Oh, I say." "You miserable, deceitful trickster, I ought not to have lowered myself to even speak to you, or to come out again to-night, but I wanted to tell you what I thought about you, and it's of no use to treat such thick-skinned creatures as you with contempt." "Well, you are wild to-night, little one. Don't want me to show my teeth, too, and go, do you?" "Yes, and the sooner the better, sir; go back to your wife." "Go back to my wife!" he cried, in tones which carried conviction to her ears. "Oh, I say; you've got hold of that cock-and-bull story, have you?" "Yes, sir, I have got hold of the miserable cock-and-bull story, as you so elegantly turn it." "Oh, I don't go in for elegance, Jenny; it ain't my way; but as for that flam, it ain't true." "You dare to tell me that, when the whole place is ringing with it, sir!" she cried, angrily. "The whole place rings with the noise when that muddle-headed lot got pulling the bells in changes. But it's only sound." "Don't, pray don't try to be witty, Claud Wilton; you only fail." "All right; go on." "Do you dare to tell me that you did not elope with your cousin the other night?" "Say slope, little one; elope is so old-fashioned." "And I suppose you've married her for the sake of her money." "Do you?" he said, sulkily; "then you suppose jolly well wrong. It's all a lie." "Then you haven't married her?" "No, I haven't married her, and I didn't slope with her; so now then." "Do you dare to tell me that you did not go up to London?" "No, I don't, because I did." "With her, in a most disgraceful, clandestine manner?" "No; I went alone with a very jolly good-tempered chap, whom everybody bullies and calls a liar." "A nice companion; and pray, who was that?" "This chap--your sweetheart; and I came back with him too." "Then where is your cousin?" "How should I know?" "She did go away, then, the same night?" "Yes. Bolted after a row we had." "Is this true?" "Every blessed word of it; and I haven't seen her since. Now, tell me, you're very sorry for all you've said." "Tell me this; has she gone away with some one else?" "What do you want to know for?" "I want to find out that you are not such a wicked story-teller as I thought." "Well, I have told you that." "Who can believe you?" "You can. Come, I say; I thought you were going to be really a bit loving to me at last when I heard the whistle. It's been like courting a female porcupine up to now." "You know whom your cousin has gone with?" "Pretty sure," he said, sulkily. "Who is it?" "Oh, well, if you must know, Harry Dasent." "That cousin I saw here?" "Yes, bless him! Only wait till we meet." "Oh!" ejaculated Jenny, and then she turned to go; but Claud caught her arm. "No, no; you might say something kind now you've found out you're wrong." "Very well then, I will, Claud Wilton. First of all, I never cared a bit for you, and--" "Don't believe you. Go on," he said, laughing. "Secondly, take my advice and go away at once, for if my brother should meet you there will be a terrible scene. He believes horrible things of you, and I know he'll kill you." "Phew!" whistled Claud. "Then he has found out?" "Take my advice and go. He is terrible when he is roused, and I don't know what he'd do." "I say, this ain't gammon, is it?" "It is the solemn truth. Now loose my arm; you hurt me." "Well, it's all right, then, and perhaps it's for the best I am going off to-night to hunt out Harry Dasent. I should have gone before, but I had to be about with the guv'nor, making inquiries." "Then loose my arm at once, and go before it is too late." "It is too late," thundered a voice out of the gloom. "Jenny--sister-- is this you?" CHAPTER TWENTY THREE. Jenny uttered a faint cry, and staggered against the iron hurdle, bringing down a shower of drops upon her head. Leigh, after his words, uttered first in menace, then in a bitterly reproachful tone, paid no more heed to her, but turned fiercely upon Claud. "Now, sir," he cried; "have the goodness to--You scoundrel! You dog!" He began after the fashion taught by education, but nature was too strong. He broke off and tried to seize Claud by the throat; but, active as the animal mentioned, the young fellow avoided the onslaught, placed one hand upon the hurdle, and sprang over among the shrubs. Leigh followed him in time to receive blow after blow, as the branches through which Claud dashed sprang back, cutting him in the face and drenching him with water. Guided, though, by the sounds, he followed as quickly as he could, till all at once the rustling and crackling of branches ceased, and he drew up short on the soft turf of a lawn, listening for the next movement of his quarry, but listening in vain. A minute later the dogs began barking violently, and Leigh's thoughts turned to his sister. Then to Claud again, and he hesitated as to whether he should go to the house and insist upon seeing him. But his reason told him that he could not leave Jenny there in the wet and darkness, and with his teeth set hard in his anger and despair, he tried to find his way back to the place where he had come over into the garden, missing it, and coming to the conclusion that his sister had fled, for though he peered in all directions on crossing the hurdles, he could see no sign of her in the misty darkness. As it happened he was not above a dozen yards from where she stood clinging to the dripping iron rail; and when with an angry exclamation he turned to make for the pathway, her plaintive voice arose: "Please take me with you, Claud," she said. "I am so faint and cold!" He turned upon her with a suppressed roar, caught her by the arm, dragged it under his, and set off through the dripping grass with great strides, but without uttering a word. She kept up with him as long as she could, weeping bitterly the while, and blinding herself with her tears so that she could not see which way they went. Twice over she stumbled and would have fallen, had not his hold been so tight upon her arm, and at last, totally unable to keep up with him, she was about to utter a piteous appeal, when he stopped short, for they had reached the wet and muddy stile. Here he loosed her arm, and sprang over into the road. "Give me your hands," he cried, and she obeyed, and then as he reached over, she climbed the stile, stepping on to the top rail at last. "Jump," he said, sharply; and she obeyed, but slipped as she alighted, one foot gliding over the muddy surface, and in spite of his strong grasp upon her hands, she fell sideways, and uttered a sharp cry. "No hysterical nonsense, now, girl," he cried. "Get up!" "I--I can't, Pierce. Oh, pray, don't be so cruel to me, please." "Get up!" he cried, more sternly. "My ankle's twisted under me," she said, faintly. "I--I--!" A piteous sigh ended her speech, and she sank nerveless nearly to the level, but a sudden snatch on his part saved her from falling prone. Then bending down, he raised her, quite insensible, in his arms, drew her arm over his shoulders, and strode on again, the passionate rage and indignation in his breast nerving him so that she seemed to possess no weight at all. For another agony had come upon him, just when life seemed to have suddenly become unbearable, and there were moments when it appeared to be impossible that the bright girl who had for years past been to him as his own child could have behaved in so treacherous, so weak and disgraceful a way as to have listened to the addresses of the young scoundrel who seemed to have blasted his life. "And she always professed to hold him in such contempt," he said to himself. "Great heavens! Are all women alike in their weakness and folly?" He reached the cottage at last, where all was now dark; but the door yielded to his touch, and he bore her in, and laid her, still insensible, upon the sofa. Upon striking a light, and holding a candle toward her face, he uttered a deep sigh, for she was ghastly pale, her hair was wet and clinging to her temples, and he could see that she was covered with the sticky, yellowish clay of the field and lane. But he steeled his breast against her. It was her punishment, he felt; and treating her as if she were some patient and a stranger, he took off her wet cloak and hood, threw them aside, and proceeded to examine for the injury. But little examination was necessary, and his brow grew more deeply lined as he quickly took out a knife, slit her wet boot from ankle to toe, and set her foot at liberty. Then lighting another candle, he walked sharply into his surgery, and returned with splints and bandages, to find her eyes open, and that she was gazing at him wildly. "Where am I? What is the matter?" she cried, hysterically. "This dreadful pain and sickness!" "At home. Lie still," he said, coldly. "Your ankle is badly hart." "Oh!" she sighed, and the tears began to flow, accompanied by a piteous sobbing, for the meaning of it all came back. He went out again, and returned with a glass containing some fluid, then passing his hand beneath her head, he raised her a little. "Drink this," he said. "No, no, I can not bear it. You hurt me horribly." "I can not help it. Drink!" He pressed the glass to her lips, and she drank the vile ammoniacal mixture. "Now, lie still. I will not hurt you more than I can help, but I must see if the bone is broken, and set it." "No, no, not yet Pierce," she sobbed; "I could not bear it while I am in this state. Let me tell you--let me explain to you first." "Be silent!" he cried, angrily. "I do not want to hear a word I must see to your ankle before it swells up and the work is impossible." "Never mind that, dear. I must tell you," she cried, piteously. "I know all I want to know," he said, bitterly; "that the sister I have trusted and believed in has been cruelly deceiving me--that one I trusted to be sweet and true and innocent has been acting a part that would disgrace one of the village wenches, for to be seen even talking to that young scoundrel under such circumstances would rob her of her character. And this is my sister! Now, lie still. I must bandage this hurt." "Oh, Pierce, dear Pierce! You are hurting me more than I can bear," she sobbed; for he had gone down on one knee as he spoke, and began manipulating the injured joint. "I can not help it; you must bear it. I shall not be long." "I--I don't mean that, dear; I can bear that," she moaned. "It is your cruel words that hurt me so. How can you say such things to me?" "Be silent, I tell you. I can only attend to this. If it is neglected, you may be lame for life." "Very well," she said, with a passionate cry; "let me be lame for life-- let me die of it if you like, but you must, you shall listen to me, dear." "I will not listen to you now--I will not at any time. You have killed my faith in you, and I can never believe or trust in you again." "But you shall listen to me," she cried; and with an effort that gave her the most acute pain, she drew herself up and embraced her knees. "You shall not touch me again until you listen to me. There!" "Don't behave like a madwoman," he said, sternly. "Lie back in your place; you are injuring yourself more by your folly." "It is not folly," she cried; "I will not be misjudged like this by my own brother. Pierce, Pierce, I am not the wicked girl you think." "I am glad of it," he said, coldly; "even if you are lost to shame." "Shame upon you, to say such words to me." "Perhaps I was deceived in thinking I found you there to-night with your lover." "My lover!" she cried, hysterically. "Now, will you lie down quietly, and let me bandage your ankle, or must I stupefy you with chloroform?" "You shall do nothing until you have listened to me," she cried, wildly. "He is not my lover. I never had a lover, Pierce. I went there to-night to tell him to go away, for I was afraid for you to meet him. I shivered with dread, you were so wild and strange." "Were you afraid I should kill him," he said, with an angry glare in his eyes. "Yes, or that he might kill you. Pierce, dear, if I have deceived you, it was because I loved you, and I was fighting your fight." Indeed! he said, bitterly. "He has been watching for me, and coming here constantly ever since we came to the house. I couldn't go down the village, or for a walk without his meeting me. He has made my life hateful to me." "And you could not appeal to your brother for help and protection?" "I was going to, dear, but matters happened so that I determined to be silent. No, no, don't touch me till you have heard all. I found how you loved poor Kate." "Will you be silent!" he raged out. "No, not if I die for it. I found out how you loved Kate, and I soon knew that they meant her for that--that dreadful boy, while all the time he was trying to pay his addresses to me. Then I made up my mind to give him just a little encouragement--to draw him on, so as to be able to let Kate see how utterly contemptible and unworthy he was, for I could lead him on until she surprised us together some day, when all would have been over at once, for she would never have listened to him. Do you hear me, Pierce? I tried to fool him, but he has fooled me instead, and robbed me of my own brother's love." "What do you mean by fooling you?" he cried, with his attention arrested at last. "We have been all wrong, dear; I found it out to-night. He did not take Kate away." "What! Why, they were seen together by that poaching vagabond, Barker, the fellow the keeper shot at and I attended. He watched them." "No, dear; it was not Kate with him then: it was I. Kate is gone, and he is in a rage about it." "Gone? With whom?" "With--with--oh! Pierce, Pierce! say some kind word to me; tell me you love and believe me, dear. I am hot the wicked creature you think, and--and--am I dying? Is this death?" He laid her back quickly, and hurriedly began to bathe her temples, but ceased directly. "Better so," he muttered; and then with trembling hands, which rapidly grew firmer, he examined the injury, acting with such skill that when a low sigh announced that the poor girl was recovering her senses, he was just laying the injured limb in an easy position, before rising to take her hand in his. CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR. Kate Wilton needed all her strength of mind to bear up against the depression consequent upon her self-inflicted position. As she sat back in a corner of the carriage, dimly lit by a lamp in which a quantity of thick oil was floating to and fro, she could see that Garstang in the corner diagonal to hers was either asleep or assuming to be so, and for the moment this relieved her, for she felt that it was from kindness and consideration on his part. But the next minute she was in agony, reproaching herself bitterly for what now presented the aspect of a rashly foolish action on her part. Then, with her mental suffering increasing, she tried to combat this idea, telling herself that she had acted wisely, for it would have been madness to have stayed at Northwood and exposed herself to the risk of further insult from her cousin, now that she knew for certain what were her uncle's designs. For she knew that appeal to her aunt would be useless, that lady being a slave to the caprices of her son and the stern wishes of her husband, and quite ready to believe that everything they said or did was right. And so on during the slow night journey toward London, her brain growing more and more confused by the strangeness of her position, and the absence of her natural rest, till the swaying to and fro of her thoughts seemed to be somewhat bound up with that of the thick oil in the great glass bubble of a lamp and with the stopping of the train and the roll and clang of the great milk tins taken up at various stations. At last her fevered waking dream, as it seemed to her, was brought to an end by Garstang suddenly starting up as if from sleep to rub his condensed breath off the window-pane and look out. "London lights," he said.--"Asleep, my dear?" "No, Mr Garstang. I have been awake thinking all the while." "Of course you would be. What an absurd, malapropos question. There, you see what it is to be a middle-aged, unfeeling man. I'm afraid we do get very selfish. Instead of trying to comfort you, and chatting pleasantly, I curl up like a great black cat and go to sleep." She made no reply. The words would not come. "Cold, my dear?" "No. I feel hot and feverish." "Nervous anxiety, of course. But try and master it. We shall soon be home, and you can have a good cup of tea and go to bed. A good long sleep will set you right, and you will not be thinking of what a terrible deed you have committed in coming away in this nocturnal clandestine manner. That sounds grand, doesn't it, for a very calm, sensible move on life's chess-board--one which effectually checks James Wilton and that pleasant young pawn his son. There, there, don't fidget about it, pray. I have been thinking, too, and asking myself whether I have done my duty by Robert Wilton's child in bringing you away, and I can find but one answer--yes; while conscience says that I should have been an utter brute to you if I had left you to be exposed to such a scandalous persecution." "Thank you, Mr Garstang," said Kate, frankly, as she held out her hand to him. "I could not help feeling terribly agitated and ready to reproach myself for taking such a step. You do assure me that I have done right?" "What, in coming with me, my dear?" he said, after just pressing her hand and dropping it again. "Of course I do. I was a little in doubt about it at first, but my head feels clearer after my nap, and I tell you, as an experienced man, that you have done the only thing you could do under the circumstances. This night journey excites and upsets you a bit, but I'm very much afraid that some of them at Northwood will be far worse, and serve them right." "Poor 'Liza will be horror-stricken," said Kate. "I wish I had begged harder for you to bring her too." "Ah, poor woman! I am sorry for her," said Garstang, thoughtfully; "servants of that devoted nature are very rare. It is an insult to call them servants; they are very dear and valuable friends. But just think a moment, my dear. To have roused her from sleep and told her to dress and come with you--to join you in your flight would have seemed to her then so mad a proceeding that it would have resulted in her alarming the house, or at least in upsetting our project. She would never have let you come." "I am afraid you are right," said Kate, with a sigh. "I am sure of it, my child; but you must communicate with her at once. She must not be kept in suspense an hour longer than we can help. Let me see, I must contrive some way of getting a letter to her.--Ah, here we are." For the train had slowed while they were talking, and was now gliding gently along by the platform of the great dimly lighted station. A porter sprang on to the footboard as he let down the window. "Luggage, sir?" "No. Is the refreshment room open?" "Yes, sir." "That will do, then," said Garstang, and he slipped a coin into the man's hand. "Now, then, my dear, we'll go and have a hot cup of tea at once." "I really could not touch any now, Mr Garstang," said Kate. "That's what I daresay you said about your medicine when you were a little girl; but I must be doctor, and tell you that it is necessary to take away that nervous shivering and agitation; and besides, have a little pity on me." She smiled faintly as he handed her out of the carriage, and suffered herself to be led to where the cheerless refreshment room was in charge of a couple of girls, who looked particularly sleepy and irritable, but who had been comforting themselves with that very rare railway beverage, a cup of freshly made tea. "There, I am sure you feel better for that," said Garstang, as he drew his companion's arm through his and led her out of the station, ignoring the offers of cabman after cabman. "A nice, little, quick walk will circulate your blood, and then we'll take a cab and go home." She acquiesced, and he took her along at a brisk pace through the gas-lit streets, passing few people but an occasional policeman who looked at them keenly, and the men busy in gangs sweeping the city streets; but at the end of a quarter of an hour he raised his hand to the sleepy looking driver of a four-wheeler, handed his companion in, gave the man his instructions, and then followed, to sit opposite to her, and drew up the window, when the wretched vehicle went off with the glass jangling and jarring so that conversation became difficult. "There!" said Garstang, merrily; "now, my dear, I am going to confess to a great deal of artfulness and cunning." She looked at him nervously. "This is a miserable cab, and I could have obtained a far better one in the station, but now you have come away it's to find peace, quiet, and happiness, eh?" "I hope so, Mr Garstang." "Yes, and you shall have those three necessities to a young girl's life, or John Garstang will know the reason why. So to begin with I was not going to have James Wilton and his unlicked cub coming up to town some time this morning, enlisting the services of a clever officer, who would question the porters at the terminus till he found the man who asked me about luggage, and then gather from that man that he called cab number nine millions and something to drive us away. Then, as they keep a record of the cabs which take up and where they are going, for the benefit of that stupid class of passengers who are always leaving their umbrellas and bags on seats, that record would be examined, number nine millions and something found, questioned, and ready to endorse the entry as to where we were going; and the next thing would have been Uncle James and Cousin Claud calling at my house, insisting upon seeing you, and consequently a desperate row, which would upset you and make me say things again which would cause me to repent. Now do you see?" "Yes," she said, gravely; "they will not follow us now." "I hope not, but it is of no use to be sure. I am taking every precaution I can; and I shall finish by getting out where I told the man--Russell Square; and we will walk the rest of the way." Kate did not speak, for a vague terror was beginning to oppress her, which her companion's bright cheery way had hard work to disperse. "It is of no use to be sure about anything, but if they do find out that you have come with me, these proceedings will throw them off the scent. Your uncle does not know that I have a house in Great Ormond Street. Of course he knows of my offices in Bedford Row, and of my place at Chislehurst, where Harry Dasent lives with me--when he condescends to be at home. Come, you seem brighter and more cheerful now, but you will not be right till you have had a good long sleep." Very little was said for the rest of the journey, the cab drawing up at the end of the narrow passage close to Southampton Row, where there was no thoroughfare for horses; and after the man was paid, Garstang led his companion along the pavement as if about to enter one of the houses, going slowly till the cab was driven off. Then, increasing his pace, he led the way into the great square, along one side, making for the east, and finally stopped suddenly in front of a grim-looking red-brick mansion in Great Ormond Street--a house which in the gloomy morning, just before dawn, had a prison-like aspect which made the girl shiver. "Strange how cold it is just before day," said Garstang, leading the way up the steps, glancing sharply to right and left the while. The next moment a latch-key had opened the ponderous door, and they stood in a great hall dimly seen to be full of shadow, till Garstang struck a match, applied it beneath a glass globe, and revealed the proportions of the place, which were ample and set off by rich rugs, and old oak presses full of blue china, while here and there were pictures which looked old and good. "Welcome home, my child," said Garstang, with tender respect. "It looks gloomy now, but you are tired, faint, and oppressed with trouble. This way." He led the girl to a door at the foot of a broad staircase, opened it, entered the room, and once more struck a match, to apply it to a couple of great globes held up by bronze figures on the great carved oak mantelpiece, and as the handsome, old-fashioned room lit up, he stopped and applied a match to the paper of a well-laid fire, which began to burn briskly, and added the warmth and glow of its flames and the cheery crackle of the wood to the light shed by the globes. "There," he continued, drawing forward a great leather-covered easy chair to the front of the fire, "take off your hat, but keep your cloak on till the room gets warmer. It will soon be right." She obeyed, trying to be firm, but her hands trembled a little as she glanced at her strange surroundings the while, to see that the room was heavily but richly furnished, much of the panelled oak wall being taken up by great carved cabinets, full of curious china, while plates and vases were ranged abundantly on brackets, or suspended by hooks wherever space allowed. These relieved the heaviness of the thick hangings about a stained-glass window and over the doors, lying in folds upon the thick Persian carpet, while as the fire burned up a thousand little reflections came from the glaze of china, and wood polished as bright as hands could make it. "You did not know I was quite a collector of these things, my dear. I hope you will take an interest in them by-and-by. But to begin with, let me say this--that I hope you will consider this calm old house your sanctuary as well as home, that you are its mistress as long as you please, and give your orders to the servants for anything that seems to be wanting." "You are very good to me, Mr Garstang," faltered Kate, who felt that the vague terror from which she had suffered was dying away. "Good? Absurd! Now, then, you will not mind being left alone for a few minutes? I am going to awaken my housekeeper and her daughter. Rather an early call." As he spoke a great clock over the mantelpiece began to chime musically, and was followed by the hour in deep, rich, vibrating tones. "It's a long time since I was up at five in the morning," said Garstang, cheerily. "Hah! a capital fire soon. Becky is very clever at laying fires. You will find her and her mother rather quaint, but they are devoted to me. Excellent servants. I never see anyone else's house so clean. There, I shall not be long." He smiled at her pleasantly, and left the room, while, as the door closed, and the heavy folds of the portiere dropped down, Kate sank back in her chair, and the tears which had been gathering for hours fell fast. Then she drew herself up with a sigh, and hastily wiped her eyes, as if relieved and prepared to meet this new change of fate. Garstang's few minutes proved to be nearly a quarter of an hour, during which, after a glance or two round the room, Kate sat thinking, with her ideas setting first in one direction, then ebbing in the other, the feeling that she had done wrong predominating; but her new guardian's reappearance changed their course again, and she could feel nothing but gratitude to one whose every thought seemed to be to make her position bearable. "I could not be cross with them," he said, as he entered; "but it is an astonishing thing how people who have neither worry nor trouble in the world can sleep. Now those two have nothing on their minds but the care of this house, which came to me through an old client, and in which I very seldom live! and I believe they pass half their time drowsing through existence. If the truth were known, they were in bed by nine o'clock last night, and they were so soundly asleep that the place might have been burned down without their waking." "It seems a shame to disturb them," said Kate, with a faint smile. "What? Not at all, my child. Do them good; they want rousing out of their lethargy. I have told them to prepare a bedroom for you, and I should advise you to retire as soon as they say it is ready. There is no fear of damp, for the rooms are constantly having fires in them, and Sarah Plant is most trustworthy. Go and have a good long sleep, and some time in the afternoon we will have a discussion on ways and means. You will have to go shopping, and I shall have to play guardian and carry the parcels. By the way, you will want some money. Have you any?" "I have a few pounds, Mr Garstang." "Perhaps that will do for the present; if not, please bear in mind that you have unlimited credit with your banker. I am that banker till you can declare yourself independent, so have no compunction whatever about asking for what you need Is there anything more that I can do for you?" "No, Mr Garstang; only to contrive a way of getting Eliza here." "Oh, yes, of course, I will not forget that; but we must be careful. We don't want any more quarrelling. It is bad for you, and it upsets me. Ah, they're ready." For at that moment there was a soft tapping at the door. "Your bedroom is the one over this, and I hope you will find it comfortable. No trees to look out upon; no flowers; no bright full moon; plenty of bricks, mortar, and chimney-pots; but there are rest and peace for you, my child; so go, and believe that I am ready to fight your battles and to make you happy here. I can if you will only help." "I shall try, Mr Garstang," she said, with a faint smile. "Then _c'est un fait accompli_," he replied, holding out his hand. "Good-night--I mean, good morning. Sarah is waiting to show you to your room." She placed her hand in his for a few moments, and then with heart too full for words she hurried to the door and passed through into the hall, to find a strange-looking, dry, elderly woman standing on the skin mat at the foot of the stairs, holding a massive silver bedroom candlestick in her hand, and peering at her curiously, but ready to lower her eyes directly. "This way, please, miss," she said, in a lachrymose tone of voice; and she began to ascend the low, wide, thickly-carpeted stairs, holding the candle before her, and showing her gaunt, angular body against a faint halo of light. Kate followed, wondering, and feeling as if she were in a dream, while Garstang was slowly walking up and down among his cabinets, rubbing his hands softly, and smiling in a peculiar way. "Promises well," he said softly; "promises well, but I have my work cut out, and I have not reckoned with Harry Dasent yet." He stopped short, thinking, and then involuntarily raised his eyes, to find that he was exactly opposite a curious old Venetian mirror, which reflected clearly the upper portion of his form. He started slightly, and then stood watching the clearly seen image of his face, ending by smiling at it in a peculiar way. "Not so very old yet," he said softly; "a woman is a woman, and it only depends upon how you play your cards." "But there is Harry. Ah, I must not reckon without him." CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE. Kate's conductress had stopped at a door on the first floor, above which an old portrait hung, so that when the woman held the candle which she carried above the level of her head, the bodily and mentally weary girl felt that two people were peering cautiously at her, and she gladly entered the old-fashioned, handsomely-furnished room, and stood by the newly-lit fire, which, with the candles lit on the chimney-piece and dressing-table, gave it a cheerful welcoming aspect. She could not have explained why, but the aspect of the woman would suggest dead leaves, and the saddened plaintive tone of her voice brought up the sighing of the wind in the windows of the old house at Northwood. "I took some of the knobs of coal off, miss, for Becky always will put on too much," said the woman plaintively, as she took her former attitude, holding the candle on high, and gazed at the new-comer. "I always say to her that when she gets married and pays for coals herself she'll know what they cost, though I don't know who'd marry her, I'm sure. I'll put 'em back if you like." "There will be plenty of fire--none was needed," said Kate, wearily. "I only want to rest." "Of course you do, miss," said the woman, still watching her, with face wrinkled and eyes half closed. "And you needn't be afraid of the bed. Everything's as dry as a bone. Becky and me slep' in it two nights ago. We sleep in a different bed every night so as to keep 'em all aired, as master's very particular about the damp." "Thank you; I am sure you have done what is necessary," said Kate, who in her low nervous state was troubled by the woman's persistent inquiring stare. "Is there anything I can do for you, miss?" "Thank you, no. I am very tired, and will try and sleep." "Because I can soon get you a cup of tea, miss." "Not now, thank you. In the morning. I will not trouble you now." "It's to-morrow morning a'ready, my dear, and nothing's a trouble to me," said the woman, despondently, "'cept Becky." "Thank you very much, but please leave me now." "Yes, miss, of course. There's the bells: one rings upstairs and the other down, so it will be safest to ring 'em both, for it's a big house--yes," she continued, thoughtfully, "a very big house, and there's no knowing where Becky and me may be." "Ah," sighed Kate, as at last she was relieved from the pertinacious curious stare, for the door had closed; but as she sank wearily in a lounge chair the housekeeper seemed photographed upon her brain, and one moment she was staring at her with candle held above her head, the next it was the face of the handsome woman above the door, peering inquiringly down as if wondering to see her there. The candles burned brightly and the fire crackled and blazed, and then there was a peculiar roaring sound as of the train rushing along through the black night; the room grew darker, and shrank in its proportions till it was the gloomy first-class carriage, with the oil washing to and fro in the thick glass bubble lamp, while John Garstang sat back in the corner, and Kate started up, to shake her head and stare about her wonderingly, as she mentally asked herself where she was, and shivered as she recognised the fire, and the candles upon the mantelpiece. She glanced round at the turned-down bed, looking inviting beneath the thick dark hangings, and felt that it would be better to lie down and rest, but thought that she would first fasten the door. She rose, after waiting for a few moments to let her head get clearer, and walked on over the soft carpet toward the dark door, which kept on receding as she went, while the power seemed to be given her to see through it as if it were some strange transparency. Away beyond it was John Garstang, waving her on towards him, always keeping the same distance off, till it grew darker and darker, and then lighter, for the fire was blazing up and the wood was crackling, as there was the sound of a poker being placed back in the fender; and there, as she opened her eyes widely, stood the woman with the chamber candlestick held high above her head, gazing at her in the former inquiring way. "It is a part of a nightmare-like dream," said Kate to herself; "my head is confused with trouble and want of rest;" and as in a troubled way she lay back in the chair, she fully expected to see the face of the woman give place to that over the door, and then to John Garstang moving slowly on and on and beckoning her to come away from Northwood Manor House, where her aunt and uncle were trying to hurry her off to the church, where Claud was waiting, and Doctor Leigh and his sister stood in deep mourning, gazing at her with reproachful eyes. As her thoughts ran in that way she mentally pictured everything with a vividness that was most strange, and she was rapidly gliding back into insensibility when the woman spoke, and she started back, with her head quite clear, while a strange feeling of irritability and anger made her features contract. "Awake, miss?" said the woman, plaintively. "Yes, yes; why did you come back? I will ring when I want you--both bells." "There was the fire, miss; I couldn't let that go out I was obliged to come every hour, and I left it too long now, and had to start it with a bundle of wood." Kate sat up and stared back at her, then round the room, to see that the candles were burning--four--on mantelpiece and dressing-table. "Didn't hear me set the fresh ones up, miss, did you?" said the woman, noticing the direction of her eyes. "T'others only burned till twelve." "Burned till twelve--come every hour? Why, what time is it?" "Just struck three, miss. Breakfast will be ready as soon as you are; but you'd ha' been a deal better if you'd gone to bed. I did put you a clean night-dress, and it was beautifully aired. Becky held it before the kitchen fire ever so long, for it only wanted poking together and burned up well." "I--I don't understand," faltered Kate. "Three o'clock?" "Yes, miss; and as black as pitch outside. Reg'lar London fog, but master's gone out in it all the same. He said he'd be back to dinner, and you wasn't to be disturbed on no account, for all you wanted was plenty of sleep." "Then I have been thoroughly asleep?" "Yes, miss; about ten hours I should say; but you'd have been a deal better if you'd gone to bed. It do rest the spine of your back so." Kate rose to her feet, staggered slightly, and caught at the chair back, but the giddy sensation passed off, and she walked to the window. "Can't see nothing out at the back, miss," said the woman, shaking her head, sadly. "Old master hated the tiles and chimney-pots, and had double windows made inside--all of painted glass, but you couldn't see nothing if they weren't there. It's black as night, and the fog comes creeping in at every crack. What would you like me to do for you, miss?" "Nothing, thank you." "Then I'll go and see about the breakfast, miss. I s'pose you won't be long?" Kate drew a deep breath of relief once more, and trying to fight off the terrible sensation of depression and strangeness which troubled her, she hurried to the toilet table, which was well furnished, and in about half-an-hour went out on to the broad staircase, which was lit with gas, and glanced round at the pictures, cabinets, and statues with which it was furnished. Then, turning to descend, she was conscious of the fact that she was not alone, for, dimly seen, there was a strange, ghastly-looking head, tied up with a broad white handkerchief, peering round the doorway of another room, but as soon as its owner found that she had attracted attention she drew back out of sight, and Kate shuddered slightly, for the face was wild and strange in the half-light. The staircase looked broader and better as she descended to the room into which she had been taken on her arrival, and found that it was well lit, and a cheerful fire blazing; but she had hardly had time to glance round when the woman appeared at the door. "Breakfast's quite ready, miss," she said. "Will you please to come this way?" She led the way across the hall, but paused and turned back to a door, and pushed it a little way open. "Big lib'ry, miss. Little lib'ry's upstairs at the back-two rooms. There's a good fire here. Like to see it now?" "No, not now." "This way then, miss," and the woman threw open a door on the other side. "Dining-room, miss. There ain't no drawing-room; but master said this morning that if you wished he'd have the big front room turned into one. I put your breakfast close to the fire, for it's a bit chilly to-day." Kate thought she might as well have said "to-night," as she glanced round the formal but richly furnished room, with its bright brass fireplace, and breakfast spread on a small table, and looking attractive and good. "I made you tea, miss, because I thought you'd like it better; but I'll soon have some coffee ready if you prefer it. Best tea, master's wonderfully particular about having things good." "I prefer tea," said Kate, quietly, as she took her place, feeling more and more how strange and unreal everything appeared. And now the magnitude of the step she had taken began to obtrude itself, mingled with a wearying iteration of thoughts of Northwood, and what must have been going on since the morning when her flight was first discovered. Her uncle's anger would, she knew, be terrible! Then her cousin! She could not help picturing his rage when he found that she had escaped him. What would her aunt and the servants think of her conduct? And then it was that there was a burning sensation in her cheeks, as her thoughts turned to Leigh and his sister, the only people that during her stay at Northwood she had learned to esteem. And somehow the burning in her cheeks increased till the tears rose to her eyes, when, as if the heat was quenched, she turned pale with misery and despair, for she felt how strongly that she had left behind in Jenny Leigh one for whom she had almost unknowingly conceived a genuine sisterly affection. From that moment the struggle she had been having to seem calm, and at home, intensified, and she pushed away cup and saucer and rose from the table, just as the housekeeper, who had been in and out several times, reentered. "But you haven't done, miss?" she said, plaintively. "Yes, thank you; I am not very well this morning," said Kate, hastily. "As anyone could see, miss, with half an eye; but there's something wrong, of course." "Something--wrong?" faltered Kate. "Yes, miss," said the woman in an ill-used tone. "The tea wasn't strong enough, or the sole wasn't done to your liking." "Don't think that, Mrs--Mrs--" "Plant's my name, miss--Sarah Plant, and Becky's Becky. Don't call me Mrs., please; I'm only the servant." "Well, do not think that, Sarah Plant. Everything has been particularly nice, only I have no appetite this morning--I mean, to-day." "You do mean that, miss?" "Of course I do." "Thank you kindly, miss. I did try very hard, for master was so very particular about it. He always is particular, almost as Mr Jenour was; but this morning he was extra, and poor, dear, old master was never anything like it. Then if you please, miss, I'll send Becky to clear away, and perhaps you'd like to go round and see your new house. I hope you will find everything to your satisfaction." "My new house?" "Yes, miss; master said it was yours, and that we were to look upon you as mistress and do everything you wished, just as if you were his daughter come to keep house for him. This way please, miss." Kate was ready to say that she wished to sit down and write, for her heart was full of self-reproach, and she longed to pour out her feelings to her old confidential maid; but the thought that it would be better perhaps to fall in with Garstang's wishes and assume the position he had arranged for her to occupy, made her acquiesce and follow the housekeeper out of the room. The woman touched a bell-handle in the hall, and then drew back a little, with a show of respect, as her eyes, still eagerly, and full of compassion, scanned the new mistress she had been told to obey. "Will you go first, ma'am?" "No: be good enough to show me what it is necessary for me to see." "Oh, master said I was to show you everything you liked, miss--I mean, ma'am. It's a dreadfully dark day to show you, but I've got the gas lit everywhere, and it does warm the house nicely and keep out the damp." Kate longed to ask the woman a few questions, but she shrank from speaking, and followed her pretty well all over the place until she stopped on the first floor landing before a heavy curtain which apparently veiled a window. "I hope you find everything to your satisfaction, ma'am--that the house has been properly kept." "Everything I have seen shows the greatest care," said Kate. "Thank you, ma'am," said the woman, and her next words aroused her companion's attention at once, for the desire within her was strong to know more of her new guardian's private life, though it would have been, she felt, impossible to question. "You see, master is here so very seldom that there is no encouragement for one to spend much time in cleaning and dusting, and oh, the times it has come to me like a wicked temptation to leave things till to-morrow; but I resisted, for I knew that if I did once, Becky would be sure to twice. You see, master is mostly at his other house when he isn't at his offices, where he just has snacks and lunches brought in on trays; but it's all going to be different now, he tells me, and the house is to be kept up properly, and very glad I am, for it has been like wilful waste for such a beautiful place never hardly to be used, and never a lady in it in my time." "Then Mrs Garstang did not reside here?" "Oh, no, ma'am! nor old master's lady neither--not in my time." "Mr Garstang's father?" "Oh, no, ma'am: Mr Jenour, who had it before master, and--and died here--I mean there," said the woman, in a whisper, and she jerked her head toward the heavy curtain. "It was Mr Jenour's place, and he collected all the books and china and foreign curiosities. I'll tell you all about it some day, ma'am." "Thank you," said Kate, quietly. "I will go down to the library now; I wish to write." "There's pen, ink and paper in there, ma'am," said the woman, jerking her head sideways; "and you can see the little lib'ry at the same time." "I would rather leave that till another time." "Hah!" came in a deep low sigh, as if of relief, and Kate turned quickly round in surprise, just catching sight of the face with the handkerchief bound round it that she had seen before. It was drawn back into one of the rooms instantly, and Kate turned her questioning eyes directly upon the housekeeper. "It's only Becky, ma'am--my gal. She's been following us about to peep at you all the time. I did keep shaking my head at her, but she would come." "Is she unwell--face-ache?" asked Kate. "Well, no, ma'am, not now. She did have it very bad a year ago, but it got better, and she will keep tied up still for fear it should come back. She says it would drive her mad if it did; and if I make her leave off she does nothing but mope and cry, so I let her keep on. She's a poor nervous sort of girl, and she has never been right since she lost the milkman." "Lost the milkman?" said Kate, wonderingly. "He went and married someone else, ma am, as had money to set him up in business. Females has a deal to put up with in this life, as well I know. Then you won't go and see the little lib'ry to-day, ma'am?" "No, not to-day," said Kate, with an involuntary shiver which made the woman look at her curiously, and the deep sigh of relief came again from the neighbouring room. "Cold, ma'am?" "Yes--no. A little nervous and upset with travelling," said Kate; and she went down at once to the library, took a chair at the old-fashioned morocco-covered table, glanced round at the well-filled bookcases, and the solid rich air of comfort, with the glowing fire and softened gaslight brightening the place, and taking paper stamped with the address she began to write rapidly, explaining everything to her old maid, pleading the urgency of her position for excuse in leaving as she had, and begging that "dear old nurse" would join her at once. She paused from time to time to look round, for the silence of the place oppressed her; and in her nervous anxious state, suffering as she was from the feeling that she had done wrong, there were moments when she could hardly refrain from tears. But she finished her long, affectionate letter and directed it, turning round to sit gazing into the fire for a few minutes, hesitating as to whether she should do something that was in her mind. There seemed to be no reason why she should not write to Jennie Leigh, but at the same time there was a something undefined and strange which held her back from communication; but at last decision had its way, and feeling firmer, she turned to the table once more and began to write another letter. "Why should I have hesitated?" she said, softly; "I'm sure she likes me very much, and she will think it so very strange if I do not write." But somehow there was a slight deepening of tint in her cheeks, and a faint sensation of glow as she wrote on, her letter being unconsciously couched in very affectionate terms; while when she had concluded and read it over she found that she had been far more explanatory than she had intended, entering fully into her feelings, and the horror and shame she had felt on discovering the way in which her cousin had been thrown with her, detailing his behaviour; and finally, in full, the scene in which Mr Garstang had protected her and spoken out, to the unveiling of the family plans. "Pray don't think that I have acted foolishly, dear Jenny," she said in a postscript. "It may seem unmaidenly and strange, but I was driven to act as I did. I dared not stay; and beside being in some way a relative, Mr Garstang is so fatherly and kind that I have felt quite safe and at rest. Pray write to me soon. I shall be so glad to hear, for I fear that I shall be rather lonely; and tell your brother how grateful I am to him for his attention to me. I am much better and stronger now, thanks to him." The glow in her cheeks was a little deeper here, and she paused with the intention of re-writing the letter and omitting all allusion to Doctor Leigh, but she felt that it would seem ungrateful to one to whose skill she owed so much; and in spite of a sensation of nervous shrinking, the desire to let him see she was grateful was very strong. So the letter was finished and directed. But still she hesitated, and twice over her hand was stretched out to take and destroy the missive, while her brain grew troubled and confused. "I can't think," she said to herself at last with a sigh; "my brain seems weary and confused;" and then she started from her chair in alarm, for Garstang was standing in the room, the thick curtains and soft carpet having deadened his approach; and in fact, he had been there just within the heavy portiere watching her for some minutes. CHAPTER TWENTY SIX. Pages 172 and 173, the first two pages of Chapter XXVI, are missing from the scan. We will continue to try to find what was upon them. the best way, but it was the best way that offered, was it not?" "Of course; yes," she said eagerly. "Yes, decidedly it was," he said, still speaking in the same quiet, thoughtful way. "You set me thinking, too, my dear, whether I have done right by you in bringing you here. Yes," he said, turning upon her sharply, "I am sure I have, if I treat it as a temporary asylum. Yes, it is right, my child: but perhaps we ought to set to at once--if you feel equal to it, and now that we have time and no fear of interruption--and go over what distant relations or what friends you have, and invite the most suitable, that is to say, the one you would prefer--always supposing this individual possesses the firmness to protect you. Then he or she shall be sent for, and you shall go there." "I do not wish to be ungrateful to you, Mr Garstang." "You ungrateful! It isn't in your nature, my dear. But what do you think of my suggestion?" "I think it is right, and what I should do," she replied. "Very well then, you shall do it, my dear child; but you cannot, of course, do it to-night. It is a very important step, and you must choose deliberately, and after due and careful thought. In the meantime, Great Ormond Street is your temporary resting-place, where you are quite safe, and can make your plans in peace. As for me, I am your elderly relative, and we, I mean Mrs Plant and I, are delighted to have the monotony of the place relieved by your coming. Now, is this right?--does it set your little fluttering heart at rest?" "Yes, thank you, Mr Garstang. I--I am greatly relieved." "Very well then, let us set all `the cares that infest the day,' as the poet has it, aside, and have a calm, restful evening. You need it, and I must confess that I do not feel in my customary fettle, as the country folk call it. Why, you look better already. I see how it is. Your mind is more at ease." She smiled. "That's right; and by the way, man-like I did not think of it till I reached my office to see some letters. I did tell Mrs Plant to try and make everything right for you here, but it never occurred to me that a lady is not like a man." She looked at him wonderingly. "I mean that a man can get along with a clean collar, a tooth-brush, and a pocket-comb, while a lady--" He stopped and smiled. "Now, look here, my child," he said, "I will leave you for a few minutes while you ring and have up Mrs Plant. You can give her what instructions you like about immediate necessities, and they can be fetched while we are at dinner. Other things you can obtain at leisure yourself." "Thank you, Mr Garstang," said Kate, with the look of confidence in her eyes increasing, as she rose from her seat and laid her hands in his. "No, no, please don't," he said, with a pleasant smile, as he gently returned the pressure of her hands, and then dropped them. "Let's see, dinner in half an hour." He looked at his watch. "Don't think me a gourmet, please, because I think a good deal of my dinner; for I work very hard, and I find that I must eat. There, I'll leave you for a bit." He laid his book on the table, nodded and smiled, and walked out of the room, while with the tears rising to her eyes Kate stood gazing after him, feeling that the cloud hanging over her was lightening, and that she was going to find rest. She rang, and Sarah Plant appeared with her head on one side, looking more withered than ever, and to her was explained the needs of the moment. "Yes, ma'am," said the woman, plaintively; "of course I'll go, only there's the dinner, and if I wait till afterwards the shops will be shut up. I don't think you or master would like Becky to wait table with her face tied up, and if I make her take the handkerchief off she'll go into shrieking hysterics, and that will be worse. And then--would you mind looking out, ma'am?" She walked slowly across to the window, and drew aside one of the heavy curtains. Kate followed her, looked, and turned to the woman. "Draw up the blind," she said. There was a feeble smile, and a shake of the head. "It is up, ma'am, and it's been like that all day--black as pitch. Plagues of Ejup couldn't have been worse." "Oh, it is impossible for you to go," said Kate, quickly. "What am I to do?" "Well, ma'am, if you wouldn't mind, I think I could tell you. You see, master come to this place when Mr Jenour died, and there hasn't been a thing taken away since. It's just as it used to be when Mrs Jenour was alive, years before. There's drawers and drawers and wardrobes full of everything a lady can want; and there's never a week goes by that I don't spend hours in going over and folding and airing, and I spend shillings and shillings every year in lavender. So if you wouldn't mind--" Sarah Plant did not finish her sentence, but stood looking appealingly at the visitor. "It is impossible for you to go out, Mrs Plant." "Sarah, if you wouldn't mind, ma'am, and it's very good of you to say so." "Well, then, Sarah," said Kate, smiling, and feeling more at ease, "you shall help me to get over the difficulty. Now go and see to your duties. I do not wish Mr Garstang to be troubled by my visit." "Troubled, my dear young lady! I'm sure he'd be pleased to do anything. I'm not given to chatter and gossip, and, as I've often told Becky, if she'd been more obedient to me, and not been so foolish as to talk to milkmen, she'd have been a happier girl. But I can't help telling you what I heard master say this morning to himself, after he'd been giving me my orders: `Ah,' he says, quite soft like, `if I had had a child like that!' and of course, miss, he meant you." Speaking dramatically, this formed Sarah Plant's exit, but Kate called her back. "Would you mind and see that these two letters are posted? Have you any stamps?" "There's lots, ma'am, in that little stand," said the woman, pointing to the table; and a couple being affixed the woman took the letters out with her. About half an hour later Garstang entered, smiling pleasantly, and offering his arm. "Dinner is waiting," he said, and he led his guest into the dining-room, where over a well-served meal, with everything in the best of taste, he laid himself out to increase the feeling of confidence he saw growing in Kate's eyes. His conversation was clever, if not brilliant; he showed that he had an amply stored mind, and his bearing was full of chivalrous respect; while feeling more at rest, Kate felt drawn to him, and the magnitude of her step grew less in her troubled eyes. The dinner was at an end, and they were seated over the dessert, Garstang sipping most temperately at his one glass of claret from time to time, and for some minutes there had been silence, during which he had been gazing thoughtfully at the girl. "The most pleasant meal I have had for years," he said suddenly, "and I feel loath to break the charm, but it is time for the lady of the house to rise. Will you make the curiosity place the drawing-room, and when the tea has been brought up, send for me? I shall be longing to come, for I enjoy so little of the simple domestic." Sarah Plant's words came to Kate's mind, "Ah, if I had had a child like that!" and the feeling of rest and confidence still grew, as Garstang rose and crossed the room to open the door for her. "By the way, there is one little thing, my dear child," he said gravely. Kate started, and her hand went to her breast. "Don't be alarmed," he said, smiling, "a mere trifle in your interest. You are rapidly getting over the shock caused by the troubles of the past twenty-four hours or so, but you are not in a condition to bear more." "My uncle!" cried Kate, excitedly. "Exactly," said Garstang firmly. "You see, the very mention of trouble sends the blood rushing to your heart. Those letters that were lying on the hall table ready for posting: is it wise to send them and bring him here post haste, with his gentlemanly son? Yes, I know neither is to him, but he would know where you were as soon as he saw your letter in the bag." "Mr Garstang, you do not think he would dare to open a letter addressed to my maid?" "Yes," said Garstang, quietly; "unfortunately I do." CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN. Claud Wilton took to the search for his cousin with the greater eagerness that he found it much more pleasant to be where he was not likely to come in contact with Pierce Leigh, for there was something about that gentleman's manner which he did not like. He knew of his ability in mending bones, for he had become aware of what was done when one labourer fell off a haystack, and when another went to sleep when riding on the shafts of a wagon, dived under the wheels, and had both his legs broken; but all this was suggestive of his ability to break bones as well, and recalling a horse-whipping, received in the hunting field, from the brother of a young lady to whom he had been too polite, he scrupulously avoided running further risks. Consequently, after the unpleasant interruption of his meeting with Jenny Leigh, he lost no time in getting up to town, being pretty well supplied with money by his father, who was to follow next day. "I'm short of cash, my boy," said Wilton; "but this is a case in which we must not spare expense." "Go to Scotland Yard, and set the detectives to work?" "In heaven's name no, boy! We must be our own detectives, and hunt them out. Curse the young scoundrel. I might have known he would be after no good. An infernal poacher on our preserves, boy." "Yes, guv'nor; and he has got clear off with the game." "Then you must run him down, and when you have found out where he is, communicate with me; I must be there at the meeting." "What? Lose time like that! No, guv'nor; I'll half kill him--hang me if I don't." "No, no! I know you feel ready to--a villain--but that won't do. You'll only frighten the poor girl more, and she'll cling to him instead of coming away with you." "But, guv'nor--" "Don't hesitate, boy; I tell you I'm right. Let's get Kate away from him, and then you may break every bone in his skin if you like." "But I want to give him a lesson at once." "Yes, of course you do--but Kate and her fortune, my boy. Once you're on the scent, telegraph to me. I'll come and stay at Day's, in Surrey Street." "Suppose they're gone abroad, guv'nor?" "Well, follow them--all round the world if it's necessary. By the way, you've always been very thick with Harry; now, between men of the world, has there ever been any affair going on? You know what I mean." "Lots, dad." "Ah!--Ever married either of them?" "Not he." "That's a pity," said Wilton, "because it would have made matters so easy. Well, there, be off. The dog-cart's at the door." Claud slapped his pocket, started for the station, and went up to stay at a bigger hotel than the quiet little place affected by his father; and about twelve o'clock the next day he presented himself at Garstang's office, where Barlow, the old clerk, was busy answering letters for his employer to sign. "Morning, Barlow," said Claud, "Mr Harry in his room?" "Mr Harry, sir? No, sir. I thought he was down with you, shooting and hunting." "Eh? Did he say that he was going down to Northwood?" "Well, dear me! Really, Mr Claud Wilton, sir, I can't be sure. I think I did hear him say something about Northwood; but whether it was that he was going there or had come back from there I really am not sure. Many pheasants this season?" "Oh, never mind the pheasants," cried Claud, impatiently. "When was that?" "Dear me now," said the man, thoughtfully; "now when was that--Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday--?" "Thursday, Friday, Saturday," cried Claud, impatiently. "What a dawdling old buffer you are! Come, when was it: you must know?" "Really, sir, I can't be sure." "Was it this week?" "I shouldn't like to say, sir." "Well, last week then?" "It might have been, sir." "Yah!" growled Claud. "Think he's down at Chislehurst?" "He may be, sir." "Yes, and he may be at Jericho." "Yes, sir; but you'll excuse me, there was a knock." The clerk shuffled off his stool, and went to the door to admit a fresh visitor in the person of Wilton pere. "Ah, Claud, my boy! You here?" "Yes, father, I'm here; just come," said the young man, sulkily. "Well, found them?" "Do I look as if I had found them, dad? No." "Tut-tut-tut!" ejaculated Wilton, who looked pale and worn with anxiety. "Mr Garstang in, Mr Barlow?" "Yes, sir," said the clerk; "shall I say you are here?" "Ye-es," said Wilton. "Take in my card, and say that I shall be obliged if he will give me an interview." The old clerk bowed, and left the outer office for the inner, while Wilton turned to his son, to say hastily, "You may as well come in with me as you are here." "Thanks, no; much obliged. What made you come here? You don't think he's likely to know?" "Yes, I do," said Wilton, in a low voice. "I believe young Harry's carried her off, and that he's backing him up. You must come in with me: we must work together." "Mr Garstang will see you, gentlemen," said the old clerk, entering. "Gentlemen!" muttered Claud angrily, to his father. "Yes, don't leave me in the lurch, my boy," whispered Wilton; and Claud noted a tremor in his father's voice, and saw that he looked nervous and troubled. Wilton made way for his son to pass in first, the young man drew back for his father, and matters were compromised by their entering together, Garstang, who looked perfectly calm, rising to motion them to seats, which they took; and then there was silence for a few moments, during which Claud sat tapping his teeth with the ivory handle of the stick he carried, keeping his eyes fixed the while upon his father, who seemed in doubt how to begin. "May I ask why I am favoured with this visit, gentlemen?" said Garstang, at last. This started Wilton, who coughed, pulled himself together, and looking the speaker fully in the face, said sharply, "We came, Mr John Garstang, because we supposed that we should be expected." "Expected?" said Garstang, turning a little more round from his table, and passing one shapely leg over the other, so that he could grasp his ankle with both hands. "Well, I will be frank with you, James Wilton; there were moments when I did think it possible that you might come; I will not say to apologise, but to consult with me about that poor girl's future. How is she?" Father and son exchanged glances, the former being evidently taken a little aback. "Well," said Garstang, without pausing for an answer to this question; "I am glad you have come in a friendly spirit; I shall be pleased to meet you in the same way, so pray speak out. Let us have no fencing. Tell me what you propose to do." Wilton coughed again, and looked at his son. "You must see," said Garstang firmly, "that a fresh arrangement ought to be made at once. Under the circumstances she cannot stay at Northwood, and I will own that I am not prepared to suggest any relative of her father who seems suitable for the purpose. The large fortune which the poor child will inherit naturally acts as a bait, and there must be no risk of the poor girl being exposed to the pertinacious advances of every thoughtless boy who wishes to handle her money." "I say, look here," cried Claud, "if you want to pick a quarrel, say so, and I'll go." "I have no wish to pick a quarrel, young man," replied Garstang, sternly; "and I should not have spoken like this if you had not sought me out. Perhaps you had better stay, sir, and hear what your father has to propose, unless he has already taken you into his confidence." "Well, he hasn't," said Claud, sulkily. "Go on, guv'nor, and get it over." "Yes, James Wilton, go on, please, as your son suggests, and get it over. My time is valuable, and in such a case as this, between relatives, I shall be unable to make a charge for legal services. Now then, once more, what do you propose?" "About what?" said Wilton, bluntly. "About the future home of your niece?" "Ah, that's what I've come about," said Wilton, gazing at the other sternly. "Where is she?" Garstang looked at him blankly for a few moments. "Where is she?" he said at last. "What do you mean?" "What I say: where is Kate Wilton?" "Where is she?" cried Garstang, changing his manner, and speaking now with a display of eagerness very different from his calm dignified way of a few minutes before. "Why, you don't mean to say that she has gone?" "Yes, I do mean to say that she has gone." "Bravo!" cried Garstang, putting down the leg he had been nursing, and giving it a hearty slap. "The brave little thing! I should not have thought that she had it in her." "That won't do, John Garstang," said Wilton, sourly; "and it's of no use to act. The law's your profession--not acting. Now then, I want to know where she is." "How should I know, man? She was not placed in my charge." "You know, sir, because it was in your interest to know. This isn't the first time I've known you play your cards, but you're not playing them well: so you had better throw up your hand." "Look here, James Wilton," said Garstang, looking at him curiously; "have you come here to insult me with your suspicions? If this young lady has left your roof, do you suppose I have had anything to do with it?" "Yes, I do, and a great deal," cried Wilton, angrily. "You can't hoodwink me, even if you can net me and fleece me. Do you think I am blind?" "In some things, very," said Garstang, contemptuously-- "Then I'm not in this. I see through your plans clearly enough, but you are checked. Where is that boy of yours?" "I have no boy," said Garstang, contemptuously. "Well, then, where is your stepson?" "I do not know, James Wilton. Harry Dasent has long enough ago taken, as your son here would say, the bit in his teeth. I have not seen him since he came down to your place. But surely," he cried, springing up excitedly, "you do not think--" "Yes, I do think, sir," cried Wilton, rising too; "I am sure that young scoundrel has carried her off. He has been hanging about my place all he could since she has been there, and paying all the court he could to her, and you know it as well as I do, the scoundrel has persuaded her that she was ill-used, and lured her away." "By Jove!" said Garstang, softly, as he stood looking thoughtfully at the carpet, and apparently hardly hearing a word in his stupefaction at this announcement, "Do you hear what I say, sir?" cried Wilton, fiercely, for he was now thoroughly angry; "do you hear me?" "Yes, yes, of course," cried Garstang, making an effort as if to rouse himself. "Well, and if it is as you suspect, what then? Reckless as he is, Harry Dasent would make her as good a husband as Claud Wilton, and a better, for he is not related to her by blood." "You dare to tell me that!" thundered Wilton. "Yes, of course," said Garstang, coolly. "Why not?" "Then you do know of it; you are at the bottom of it all; you have helped him to carry her off." "I swear I have not," said Garstang, quietly. "I would not have done such a thing, for the poor girl's sake. It may be possible, just as likely as for your boy here, to try and win the girl and her fortune, but I swear solemnly that I have not helped him in any way." "Then you tell me as a man--as a gentleman, that you did not know he had got her away?" "I tell you as a man, as a gentleman, that I did not know he had got her away. What is more, I tell you I do not believe it. Tell me more. How and when did she leave? When did you miss her?" "Night before last--no, no, I mean the next morning after you had left. She had gone in the night." Garstang's hand shot out, and he caught Wilton by the shoulder with a fierce grip, while his lip quivered and his face twitched, as he gazed at him with a face full of horror. "James Wilton," he said, in a husky voice, "you jump at this conclusion, but did anyone see them go?" "No: no one." "You don't think--" "Think what, man? What has come to you?" "She was in terrible trouble, suffering and hysterical, when she went up to her room," continued Garstang, with his voice sinking almost to a whisper, and with as fine a piece of acting as could have been seen off the stage. "Is it possible that, in her trouble and despair, she left the house, and--" He ceased speaking, and stood with his lips apart, staring at his visitor, who changed colour and rapidly calmed down. "No, no," he said, and stopped to dear his voice. "Impossible! Absurd! I know what you mean; but no, no. A young girl wouldn't go and do that just because her cousin kissed her." "But she has been ill, and she was very weak and sensitive." "Oh, yes, and the doctor put her right. No, no. She wouldn't do that," said Wilton, hastily. "It's as I say. Come, Claud, my lad, we can do no good here, it seems. Let's be moving. Morning, John Garstang; I am going to get help. I mean to run her down." "You should know her best, James Wilton, and perhaps my judgment has been too hasty. Yes, I think I agree with you: so sweet, pure-minded, and well-balanced a girl would never seek refuge in so horrible a way. We may learn that she is with some distant relative after all." "Perhaps so," said Wilton hastily. "Come, Claud, my lad," and he walked straight out, without glancing to right or left, and remained silent till they were crossing Russell Square. "I say, guv'nor," said Claud, who passed his tongue over his lips before speaking, as if they were dry, "you don't think that, do you? It's what the mater said." "No, no, impossible. Of course not. She couldn't. I think, though, we may as well get back," and for the moment he forgot all about the ladder planted against the sill. And as they walked on they were profoundly unconscious of the fact that Garstang's grave elderly clerk was following them at a little distance, and looking in every other direction, his employer having hurried him out with the words: "See where they go." John Garstang then seated himself before the good fire in his private room, and began to think of the interview he had just had, while as he thought he smiled. CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT. Kate gave way most unwillingly, but felt obliged to yield to what she felt was a common-sense view of the question. "If you write now we shall be having endless trouble," said Garstang. "Your uncle will come here, and I shall be compelled to give you up." "But I would refuse to go," said Kate, with spirit. Garstang smiled, and shrugged his shoulders. "Will you give me credit, as an old lawyer, my dear child, for knowing a little of the law?" "Of course," she cried. "Well, let me tell you that if James Wilton finds out where you are, I foresee endless troubles. You know his projects?" Kate nodded quickly. "To compass those plans, he will stop at nothing, even force. But supposing I defeat him in that, for I tell you frankly I should make every effort, he would set the law to work. If I get the best counsel I can, we shall have a long, wearisome lawsuit, and probably your late father's estate will be thrown into Chancery. You will become a ward of the Lord Chancellor, and the inroads made upon your fortune will be frightful." "I don't think I should care," said Kate, looking at him wistfully, "so long as I could be at peace." "Have you thought out any relative or friend whom you feel that you can trust, and to whom you would like to go?" "No; not yet," said Kate, wearily; "and I have tried very hard." "Then don't try, my child," he said, with a smile, "and then perhaps the idea will come. I ought to say, though," he added, playfully, "do try hard, so as not to succeed, for I do not want you to go. It is as if a change had come over my life, and like the man in one of the old plays, I had discovered a long-lost child." "Pray don't treat it lightly, Mr Garstang," said Kate. "All this troubles me terribly. I feel so helpless." "Believe me that if I talk lightly, I think very, very seriously of your position," said Garstang, quickly. "I know how painful it must be for you to neglect your friends, those to whom you would write, but really I am obliged to advocate reticence for the present. I will have your letters posted if you desire me to, but I am bound to show you the consequences which must follow." Kate sighed, and looked more and more troubled. "To put it more plainly," continued Garstang, "my position is that I have an extensive practice, with many clients to see, and consequently I must be a great deal away. Now suppose one morning, when I am out, James Wilton and his son present themselves. What will you do?" Kate shivered, and gazed at him helplessly. "I shall not feel best pleased to come back home to dinner, and find you gone." "My position is terrible," said Kate. "I almost wish I were penniless." "Come, come, not so terrible; it is only that of a prisoner who has her cell door barred inside, so that she can open it when she pleases. May I try and advise you a little?" "Yes, pray, pray do, Mr Garstang." "Well, my advice is this--even if it causes your poor old nurse great anxiety. She will be content later on, when she learns that it was for your benefit. My advice is for you to try and settle down here for a while, so as to see how matters shape themselves, or till you have decided where it would be better for you to go." She looked at him wistfully. "Could I not take apartments somewhere, and have Eliza up to keep house for me?" "Well--yes," he said, thoughtfully. "It would be risky, for every movement of your old servant will be jealously watched just now. It would be better later on. What do you think?" "That I do not wish to seem ungrateful for your kindness, neither do I feel justified in putting you to great trouble and expense." "Pooh, pooh," he said, merrily, "I am not so poor that I can not afford myself a few pleasures. But proper pride is a fine thing. There, you shall be independent, and pay me back everything when you come of age." He glanced at his watch, for breakfast had been over some time, and they had sat talking. "I am keeping you, Mr Garstang," she said. "Well, I like to be kept, but I have several appointments to-day. Have a good quiet think while I am gone, and we will talk it over again to-night." "No," said Kate, quietly, "you will be tired then. I will take your advice, Mr Garstang." "Yes?" he said, raising his eyebrows a little. "I will stay here for a time, where, as you say, I can be at rest and safe from intrusion. We will see what time brings forth." "Spoken like a thoughtful, wise little woman," said Garstang, without the slightest display of elation. "By the way, you find plenty of books to read?" "Oh, yes, and I have been studying the old china." "A very interesting subject; but music--you are fond of music. We must see about that." He nodded and smiled, and then she saw that he became very calm and thoughtful, as if immersed in his business affairs. Once more she was quite alone, thinking that she had been a whole week in the solemn old house, and a few minutes later the housekeeper entered to clear away the breakfast things. "Is there anything I can do for you, ma'am?" said the woman sadly, when she had finished her task, Kate noticing the while that there was an occasional whisper outside the door, as the various articles were handed out. "No, I think not, this morning, Sarah," said Kate, with a smile which proved infectious, for the woman stood staring at her for a few moments as if in wonder, and then her own countenance relaxed stiffly, as if she had not smiled in years, till her face looked nearly cheerful. "You are handsome, ma'am," she said; "I haven't seen you look like that before since you've been here." "Why does not Becky come in to help you to clear away?" said Kate, to change the conversation, and Sarah Plant's face grew stern and withered again, as she shook her head. "She's such a sight, ma'am, with that handkercher round her head." "I should not mind that; I have not fairly seen her since I came." "No, ma'am, and you won't if she can help it. You mayn't mind, but she do. She always hides herself when anybody's about. Poor girl, she's been in trouble almost ever since she was born. There's sure to be something in this life. Not as I complains of master. It was just the same with old master, and when he died it made Becky ever so much worse. You see, ma'am, old master's wife was ill for a long time, and that made the house dull and quiet; and then she died, and old master was never the same again. He spent scores o' thousands o' pounds on furniture, and books, and china, and did everything he could to make the place nice, but he never held up his head again. And then somehow his money went wrong, and new master used to come to help him out of his troubles, but it was no use; old master never had the blinds pulled up again; and that made Becky and me different to most folk, for it used to be like being shut up in a cupboard, and we never hardly went out. Becky ain't been out of the house for years, and years, and years." "We must make the house more cheerful now, Sarah." The woman looked at her in astonishment, and then shook her head. "Well, ma'am, I will say that it has seemed different since you came; but no--it's beautifully furnished, and I never see a better kitchen in my life--but make it cheerful? No, ma'am, it ain't to be done." "We shall see," said Kate, smiling, and the woman's face relaxed once more as she gazed at the fair, intellectual countenance before her as if it were some beautiful object which gave her real pleasure; but as Kate's smile died away her own features looked cloudy, and she shook her head. "No, ma'am, it's my belief as this was meant to be a dull house before the big trouble came. Me and Becky used to say to one another it was just as if the sun had gone out, but we never expected what came at last, or I believe we should have run away." The moment before Kate had been thinking of dismissing the housekeeper to her work, but this hint at something which had happened enchained her attention, and the woman went on. "You see, old master kept on getting from bad to worse, spite of Mr Garstang's coming and seeing to his affairs; and one day the doctor says to me: `It's of no use, Mrs Plant, I can do nothing for a man who shuts himself up and sets all the laws of nature at defiance.' Those were his very words, ma'am; I recollected them because I never quite knew what they meant; but the doctor evidently thought master had done something wrong, though I don't think he ever did, for he was such a good man. Then came that morning, ma'am. I may as well tell you now. Becky used to sleep with me then, same as she does now, but that was before she had face-ache and fits. I remember it as well as can be. It was just at daylight in autumn time, when the men brings round the ropes of onions, and I nudged her, and I says, `Time to get up, Becky,' and she yawned and got up and went down, for she always dressed quicker than I could. And there I was, dressing, and thinking that master had told me that Mr Garstang was coming at ten o'clock, and I was to send him into the library at once, and breakfast was to be ready there. "I'd just put on my cap, ma'am, and was going down, when I heard the horridest shriek as ever was, and sank down in a chair trembling, for I felt as sure as sure that burglars were in the house, and they were murdering my poor Becky. I was that frightened I got up and tottered to the door, and locked and bolted it, for I said they shouldn't murder me. But, oh, dear; what I did suffer! `Pretty sort of a mother you are,' I says to myself, `taking care of yourself, and letting poor Becky be cut to pieces p'raps to hide their crime.' "That went to my heart like a knife, ma'am, and I unfastened the door again and went out and listened, and all was still as still. You know how quiet it can be in this house, ma'am, don't you?" Kate nodded. "So I stood trembling there at the very top of the house, for we used to sleep up there, then, before Becky took to wanting to be downstairs, where she wasn't so likely to be seen; and though I listened and I listened, there wasn't a sound, and I give it to myself again. `Why,' I says, `a cat would scratch if you tried to take away its kitten to drown it'--as well I know, ma'am, for I've tried--`and you stand there doing nothing about your own poor girl.' That roused me, ma'am, and I went down, with the staircase all gloomy, with the light coming only from the sooty skylight in the roof; and there were the china cupboards and the statues in the dark corners all seeming to look down at something on the first floor. I was ready to drop a dozen times over, but I felt that I must go, even if I died for it; and down I went, step by step, peeping before me, and ready to shriek for help directly I saw what it was. "But there was nothing that I could see, and I stopped on the first floor, looking over the banisters and trying to make out whether the hall door was open; but no, I couldn't see anything, and I went along sideways, looking down still, till I saw that the dining-room door was open, and it seemed to me that the shrieking must have come from there. I was just opposite to the door leading into the two little lib'ries-- you know, ma'am, where the big curtain is--and I was taking another step sideways, meaning to look a little more over and then go and call up master, who didn't seem to have heard, when I caught my foot on something, and cried out and fell. And then I found it was poor Becky, who had just crawled out of the doorway on her hands and knees. "For just a minute I couldn't say a word, but when I did, and asked her what was the matter, she only knelt there, clinging to my gownd, and staring up at me with a face that was horrible to behold. "`What is it--what is it?' I kept on saying, but she couldn't speak, only kneel there, staring at me till I took her by the shoulders and shook her well. `Why don't you speak?' I says. `What is it?' "She only said `Oh'--a regular groan it was, and she turned her head slowly round to look back at the little lib'ry passage, and then she turned back and hid her face in my petticoats. "`Tell me what it is, Becky,' I says, more gently, for it didn't seem that any harm was coming to us, but she couldn't speak, only point behind her toward the little lib'ry door, and this made me shiver, for I knew there must be something dreadful there. At last, though, for fear she should think I was a coward, I tried to get away from her, but she clung to me that tight that I couldn't get my gownd clear for ever so long. But at last I did, and I went into the little lobby through the door; but there was nothing there, and the lib'ry door was shut close; and I was coming back when I felt Becky seize me by the arm and point again, and then I saw what I hadn't seen before; there were footmarks on the carpet fresh made, and I saw that Becky must have made 'em when she had gone to the lib'ry door; and there was the reason for it, just seen by the light which came from the little skylight--there it was, stealing slowly under the bottom of the mat." CHAPTER TWENTY NINE. Kate Wilton looked at the woman in horror. "Yes, ma'am," Sarah continued, "there it was, and when I opened the door I could only get it a little way, for something was just inside, and as I stood there trembling, there came out a nasty wet smell of gunpowder, just as if water had been upset on the hob. "I didn't want any telling, ma'am; I knew, and poor Becky knew, that master had shot himself with something and was lying there. "I waited for just about a minute, ma'am, for my senses seemed to be quite gone, and I was as bad as poor Becky; but I got to be a little sensible soon, and began to feel that I must do something. I called to Becky to come and help me, but it was no use; she was just as if she was stunned, and could only stare at me, shivering all the while. So I felt that I must do what there was to do myself, and I went back to the door, and pushed and pushed till I could just squeeze myself through the narrow slit I made; and then I dursen't look round, but stood with my back to it for ever so long before I could feel that he might be alive, and that I ought to go for the doctor. "I looked round then, feeling as I turned that I should be obliged to shriek out, but I didn't. Poor master, he was lying on his side, with his hand under his head, just quiet and calm, as if he had only gone to sleep. It made me wonder what I had been frightened at, and I went down on one knee and took the hand which was by his side, touching a pistol." "Yes?" said Kate, breathlessly, for the woman paused. "Yes, ma'am, it was quite cold. He must have shot himself early in the night, and I knew it was no good to go to fetch a doctor then. Leastwise I think that's what I felt, for I didn't _go_, but crept out very softly and shut the door; and then I took hold of poor Becky's arm and led her down to the kitchen, where she went off into a dead faint, and came to, and fainted over again--fit after fit, so that I was busy for hours and didn't know how time went, till all at once there was a double knock at the door, which I knew was Mr Garstang come. "I went up and let him in, and he looked at me so strange. "`What is it?' he said; `your master?' "`Yes, sir,' I says, `and I was to show you in as soon as you came.' "He nodded, and went up at once, neither of us saying another word. Then he went in through the door gently, and came out again, looking horribly shocked. "`When did you find him?' he says; and I told him. `Poor fellow!' he says, `I am not surprised. Sarah Plant, you must go and tell the police;' and I did, and there was an inquest, and at last the poor old master was to be buried, with only Mr Garstang to follow him, for he had no relations or friends. "I sat in my bit of noo black, and Becky just opposite me, waiting while they'd gone to the cemetery, for no one asked me to go, and I sat there looking at Becky, who began crying as she heard them carrying the coffin downstairs and never stopped all that time. And I thought to myself, `We two will have to go out into the world, and nobody won't take us with poor Becky like that;' and my heart was so full, miss--ma'am, that I began to cry, too; but I'm afraid it was for myself, not for poor master. Last of all, the carriage came back, and I let Mr Garstang in, looking terribly cut up. "`Bring me a little tea, Sarah,' he says, and I went and got it, and had a cup, too, wanting it as I did badly, and by-and-by he rung for me to fetch the tray. "I got to the door with it, when he calls me back. "`Sarah,' he says, `your poor master has no relations left, and by the papers I hold, everything comes to me.' "`Yes, sir; so I s'posed,' I says to him, `and you want me and Becky to go at once.' "He looked at me with that nice soft smile of his, and he says, `Why should you think that? No,' he says, `I want everything to stay just as it is; I won't have a thing moved, and I should be very glad if you and Becky would stay and keep the house for me.' "I couldn't answer him, ma'am, for I was crying bitterly; but I knew him, what a good man he was, and that me and Becky had found a friend. Seven years ago, ma'am, and never an unkind word from him when he came, which wasn't often. He only told me not to gossip about the place, and I said I wouldn't, and never did till I talked to you, ma'am, and as for poor Becky, she never speaks to no one. Perhaps, ma'am, you'd like to come upstairs, and see the marks." "See the marks?" stammered Kate. "Yes, ma'am, where old master lay. You've never been in the little lib'ry, but if you like I'll show you now. There's only a little rug to move, and there it is, quite plain." "No, no, I do not wish to see," said Kate, shuddering. "So there has been a terrible tragedy here?" "Yes, ma'am, and that's what makes the place so dull and still. I often fancy I can see poor old master gliding about the staircase and passages; but it's all fancy, of course." "All fancy, of course," said Kate, softly. "But it is very terrible for such a thing to have happened here." "Yes, ma'am, that's what I often think; and there's been times when I'm low-spirited; and you know there are times when one does get like that Becky's enough to make anyone dumpy, at the best of times, 'specially towards night, when she's sitting there with her face tied up and her eyes staring and looking toward the door, as if she fancied she was going to see master come in; for she will believe in ghosts, and it's no use to try to stop her. Ah, she's a great trial, ma'am." "Poor girl!" said Kate. "Thankye, ma'am. It's very good of you to say so," sighed the woman; "and it is nice to have a lady here to talk to. It's quite altered the place. There have been times, and many of them, when I felt that I must take poor Becky away and get another situation, but it would be ungrateful to new master, who's a dear good man, and never an unkind word since with him I've been. It isn't everyone who'd keep a servant with a girl like Becky about the house. But he never seems to mind, being a busy man, and I s'pose he must see that the only way in which Becky's happy is in cleaning and polishing things. I believe if she woke up in the middle of the night and remembered that she hadn't dusted something she'd want to get up and do it; and she would, too, if she dared. But go about the house in the middle of the night without me, ma'am? No; wild horses wouldn't drag her." Sarah Plant ceased speaking, for she suddenly woke to the fact that Kate was gazing at the fire, with her thoughts evidently far away; and the woman stole softly from the room. But as the door clicked faintly Kate started and looked about her, half disposed to call her back, for the narrative she had heard made her position seem terribly lonely. She restrained herself, though, and sat trying to think and turn the current of her thoughts, telling herself that she had no cause for anxiety save on Eliza's account. For Garstang could not have been more fatherly and considerate to her. His words, too, were wise and right. To let her uncle know where she was must result in scenes that would be stormy and violent; and she determined at last to let herself be guided entirely by her self-constituted guardian. "Yes, he is right. He is all that is kind and fatherly in his way, and I, too, should be ungrateful if I murmured against my position. It will not be for long. In less than two years I shall be of age, and fully my own mistress." She paused to think, for a doubt arose. Would she be her own mistress? She had heard her father's will read, but it was at a time when she was distracted with grief, and save that she grasped that she was heiress to a large fortune, which was to remain invested in her father's old bank, she knew comparatively nothing as to the control her uncle possessed. Yes; she recalled that he was sole executor and guardian until she married. "And I shall never marry," she sighed; but as the words were breathed, scenes at the old Manor came back; the pleasant little intimacy with Jenny Leigh, her praise of her brother, and that brother's manly, kindly attentions to his patient, his skill having achieved so much in bringing her back to health. Yes, he had always been the attentive, courteous physician, and neither word nor look had intimated that he was anything else; but these things are a mystery beyond human control, and as Kate Wilton sat and thought, it was with Pierce Leigh present with her in spirit, and she felt startled; for the tell-tale blood was mantling her cheeks, and she hurriedly rose to do something to change the current of her thoughts. "Poor Mr Garstang," she said, softly; "he shall not find me ungrateful. He, too, has suffered. If he had had a daughter like this!" She recalled his words, evidently not intended for her ears. Wifeless-- childless--wealthy, and yet solitary. Her heart warmed towards him, and she was ready to call herself selfish for intruding her wishes upon one whose sole thought seemed to be to protect her and make her life peaceful. "He shall not find me selfish," she said to herself, "and I will be guided by him and do what he thinks right." She went out into the solemn-looking hall and began to ascend the great staircase, taking a fresh interest in the place, which seemed now as if it would be her home perhaps for months. The pictures and statues interested her, and she paused before a cabinet of curious old china, partly to try and admire, partly to think of how ignorant she was of all these matters, and a few minutes after, found herself close to the heavy curtain, beyond which was the door leading into the little library. A strange thrill ran through her, and she turned to hurry into her own room, with her cheeks growing pale. But the blood flowed back, and with a feeling of self-contempt she walked straight to the curtain, drew it aside, passed through an archway, and turned the handle of a door. This opened upon a passage, whose walls were covered with venerable looking books, a dim skylight above showing the faded leather and worn gilding upon their backs. There was another door at the end, and as the woman's narrative forced itself back to her attention there was a fresh thrill which chilled her; but she went on firmly, opened the door, and passed through to find herself in the first of two rooms connected by a broad opening dimly lit by a stained-glass window, and completely covered with books, all old and evidently treasures of a collector. Once more she shuddered, for she was standing upon one of several small Persian rugs dotted about the dark polished floor, and from the woman's description she knew that she must be where the former owner of the house had lain dead. But the sensation of dread was momentary, and the warm flush of life came back to her cheeks as she said softly: "What is there to fear?" and then found herself repeating: "`There is no Death! What seems so is transition; This life of mortal breath Is but a suburb of the life elysian Whose portal we call Death.' "Oh, father--father!" she moaned softly; "but I am so lonely without you;" and she sank into a chair, to weep bitterly. The tears brought relief and firmness, and drying her eyes, she went slowly from room to room, thinking of him who had once trod those boards--a sad and solitary man. Somehow her thoughts brought her back to Garstang, who seemed so noble and chivalrous in his conduct to her, and how that he, too, was a sad and solitary man, for she had heard in the past that his marriage had proved unhappy. A few minutes later, when she let the curtain drop behind her, and stood once more on the staircase, a change had come over her, and in spite of the slight redness and moisture remaining in her eyes, she looked brighter and more at rest, till she caught a glimpse of a strangely wild pair of staring eyes gazing at her from one of the dark doorways in horror and wonder, till their owner grasped the fact that she was observed, and fled. "Poor Becky!" thought Kate, as she smiled sadly? "I must try and make friends with her now." CHAPTER THIRTY. The days passed calmly enough with Kate Wilton, and no more was said on either side about communicating with anyone. Garstang was there at breakfast, and left till dinner time, when he returned punctually. Kate read and worked, and waited for him to speak, striving the while by her manner to let her guardian see that she was trying to show her gratitude to him for all that he had done. And so a fortnight glided by, and then, unable to bear it longer, she determined to question him. That evening Garstang came in looking weary and careworn. There was evidently some trouble on the way, and as she rose to meet him she felt that she must not speak that night, for her new guardian had cares enough of his own to deal with. But he began at once as he took her hands, smiling gravely as he looked in her eyes. "Well, my poor little prisoner," he said, half-banteringly, "aren't you utterly worn out, and longing, little bird, to begin beating your breast against the bars of your cage?" "No," she said, gently; "I am getting used to it now." "Brave little bird!" he said, raising both her hands to his lips and kissing them, before letting them fall; "then I shall come back some evening and hear you warbling once again. I have not heard you sing since the last evening I spent in Bedford Square long months ago." He saw her countenance change, and he went on hastily: "By the way, has Sarah Plant bought everything for you that you require?" "Oh, yes," she said; "far more." "That's right. I am so ignorant about such matters. Pray do not hesitate to give her orders. Do you know," he continued, as he sat down and began to warm his hands, gazing the while with wrinkled brow at the fire, "I have been doing something to-day in fear and trembling." "Indeed?" she said, anxiously. "Yes," he said, thoughtfully, as he took up the poker and began to softly tap pieces of unburned coal into glowing holes. "My conscience has been smiting me horribly about you, my child. I come back after fidgeting all day about your being so lonely and dull, with nothing but those serious books about you--by the way, did they send in that parcel from the library?" "Yes. Thank you for being so thoughtful about me, Mr Garstang." "Oh, nonsense! But I think, my child, we could get rid of that formal Mr Garstang. Do you think you could call me guardian, little maid?" "Yes, guardian," she said, smiling at him, as he turned to look at her anxiously. "Hah! Come, that's better," he cried; and he set down the poker and rubbed his hands softly, as he gazed once more thoughtfully at the fire. "That sounds more as if you felt at home, and I shall dare to tell you what I have done. You see, I have been obliged to beg of you not to go out for a bit without me, and I have not liked to propose taking you of an evening to any place of entertainment--not a theatre, of course yet awhile, but a concert, say." "Oh no, Mr Garstang!" she said, hastily, with the tears coming to her eyes. He coughed, and looked at her in a perplexed way. "Oh no, guardian," she said, smiling sadly. "Hah! that's better. Of course not; of course not. Forgive me for even referring to it. But er--you will not feel hurt at what I have done?" She looked at him anxiously. "Yes," he said, speaking as if he had been suddenly damped. "I ought not to have done it yet. It will seem as if I were making it appear that you will have to stop some time." "What have you done?" asked Kate, gravely. "Well, my child, I know how musical you used to be, and as I was passing the maker's to-day the thought struck me that you would like a piano. `It would make the place less dull for her,' I said, and--don't be hurt, my dear--I--I told him to send a good one in." "Mr Garstang!--guardian!" she said, starting up, with the tears now beginning to fall. "There, there, fought to have known better," he cried, catching up the poker, and beginning to use it hurriedly. "Men are so stupid. Don't take any notice, my dear. I'll counter-order it." "No, no," she said gently, as she advanced to him and held out her hand "I am not hurt; I am pleased and grateful." "You are--really?" he cried, letting the poker drop, and catching her hand in his. "Of course I am," she said, simply. "How could I be otherwise? Don't think me so thoughtless, and that I do not feel deeply all your kindness." "Kindness, nonsense!" he said, dropping her hand again, and turning away. "But will it help to make the time pass better?" "Yes, I shall be very glad to have it." "And, er--you'll sing and play to me sometimes when I come back here?" "Yes," she said, smiling through her tears; "and I would to-night, now that you have come back tired and careworn, if it were here." "Tired and careworn? Who is?" "You are. Do you think I could not see?" He looked at her with his eyes full of admiration, and then turned to the fire again. "I am most grateful, guardian," she said. "But shall I have to be a prisoner long?" "Hah!" he said with a sigh, and as if not hearing her question, "you are right, my child. I have had a very, very worrying day." "I thought so," said Kate, resuming her seat, and looking at him in a commiserating way. "I hope it is nothing very serious." "Serious?" he said, turning to her, sharply. "Well, yes it is, but I ought not to worry you about it." "They say that sometimes relief comes in speaking of our troubles." "But suppose one gets relief, and the other pain?" he said, looking at her quickly. "Then it is something about me?" He turned and looked at the fire again. "Please tell me, guardian," she said. "Only make you unhappy, my dear, just when you are getting back to your old self." She looked at him in a troubled way for some moments, and then with a sudden outburst: "You have seen Uncle James?" He did not answer for a while, but sat gazing at the fire. "Yes," he said, at last; "I have seen your Uncle James." "And he knows I am here," she cried, clasping her hands, and looking at him in horror. He turned slowly and met her eyes. "Then you don't repent the step you have taken, and want to go back to Northwood?" he said. "How could I when you have protected me as you have, and saved me from so much suffering and insult?" "Hah!" he said, with a sigh of relief, "thank you, my child. I was afraid that you would be ready to return to him." "Mr Garstang!" she cried. "Guardian." "Then, guardian, how could you think it? If I have seemed dull and unhappy, surely it was not strange, considering my position." "Of course not; but I was flattering myself with the belief that you were really getting reconciled to your fate." "I am reconciled," said Kate, warmly; "but I can not help longing to take my old nurse by the hand again, and to see my friends." "Friends?" he said, looking at her curiously. "Yes; I made two friends down there whose society was pleasant to me, and whom I have missed." "Indeed! I did not know." "But tell me, is uncle coming? Does he know I am here?" cried Kate, excitedly. "No, he is not coming, my child, and he does not know you are here," said Garstang, watching her searchingly. "Ah!" ejaculated the girl, with a sigh of relief. "I could not--I dare not meet him." "That is what I felt. You can not meet him for some time to come, but there are unpleasant complications, my dear, which trouble me a great deal." "Yes?" said Kate, excitedly. "Such as will, I fear, make it necessary for you to remain still secluded." "But, Mr Garstang, suppose that he should come to see you one day when you were out, and he were shown in to me." "Ah, yes," he said, dryly, watching her troubled face narrowly, "what I once said: that would be awkward." "Oh, it would be horrible," cried Kate, springing to her feet. "I could not go back with him. And he has a right to claim me, and he would insist." She began to pace the room excitedly, with her hands clasped before her. "Yes, my child, it would be horrible," said Garstang, gently, "and that is why, in spite of its giving you pain, I have been so particular lest by any letter of yours he should learn where you were." "But he might come as I said--to see you, in your absence," she cried. "No, my dear," he said, reaching out one hand as she was passing the back of his chair; and she stopped at once, and placed hers trustingly within. "Don't be alarmed. I am an old man of the world, and for years past I have had to set my wits to work to battle with other people's. Uncle James does not know that you are here, and unless you tell him he is not likely to know, for the simple reason that he is not aware that I have such a place." Kate uttered a sigh of relief, and let her hand rest in his. "Poor fellow, he is horribly disappointed, and he is leaving no stone unturned to trace you, and his hopeful son is helping him and watching me." "Oh!" ejaculated Kate, excitedly. "Yes, but they do not know of this place, and are keeping an eye upon my offices in Bedford Row and my house down in Kent. I little thought when my poor old friend and client died and this place fell to me that it would one day prove so useful. So there, try and stop this fluttering of the pulses, little maid; so long as we are careful, and you wish it, you can remain in sanctuary. Now let's dismiss the tiresome business altogether. I am glad, though, that you are pleased about the piano." "No, no; don't dismiss it yet," cried Kate, eagerly. "Tell me what he said." "Humph!" said Garstang, frowning; "shall I? No; better not." "Yes, please; I can not help wanting to know." "But I'm afraid of upsetting you, my dear." "It will not now; I am growing firmer, Mr Garstang, my guardian," she said. "Better tell me than leave me to think, and perhaps lie awake to-night imagining things that may not be true." "Well, yes--that would be bad," he said, nodding his head. "There, sit down then, and draw your chair to the fender. Your face is burning, but your hands are cold. That's better," he continued, as he took up the poker again, and sat forward, gazing at the fire, and once more tapping the pieces of coal into the glowing caverns. "You see, he has been to me three times." "And I did not know!" cried Kate. "No, you did not know, my dear, because I did not want to upset you. What do you think he says?" "That I fled to you, and placed myself under your protection?" "Wrong," said Garstang, looking round and smiling in the beautiful face across the hearth, as he played the part of an amiable fatherly individual to perfection. "Shall I say guess again?" "No, no, pray don't trifle with me, guardian." "Trifle with you?" he cried, growing stern of aspect. "No. There, it must come out. He did not say that, and he did not accuse me of fetching you away, for he and Master Claud are upon a wrong scent." "Yes--yes," said Kate, eagerly. "They say that Harry Dasent made an excuse of his friendship with Claud to go down to Northwood with another object in view." "Yes--what?" she said, looking at him wonderingly. "You, my child." "Me?" she cried, aghast. "Well, to speak more correctly, your money, my dear; and that, despairing of winning you in a straightforward way, he either came and caught you in the humour for being persuaded to leave with him, having on his other visits paved the way by making love to you--" "Oh!" ejaculated Kate; "I never noticed anything particular in his manner to me--yes, I did, once or twice he was very, very attentive." "Indeed," said Garstang, frowning. "But you said `either,'" cried Kate, anxiously. "Yes; either that he had persuaded you to elope with him, or he had climbed to your window and by some means forced you to come away." "What madness!" cried Kate. "Yes, and there's more behind; they accuse me of conniving at it, and say they are sure you are married, and that I know where you are." "Mr Dasent!" exclaimed Kate, gazing at Garstang wonderingly. "Yes, Harry Dasent," he said, drawing himself up. "He is my poor dead wife's son, my dear, and it so happens that he is giving colour to the idea by his absence from home on one of his reckless, ne'er-do-weel expeditions; but between ourselves, my child, I'd rather see you married to Claud Wilton, your cousin, than to him; and," he added warmly, "I think I would sooner follow you to your grave than--Yes--what is it?" "I beg pardon, sir," said the housekeeper, "but the dinner's spoiling, and I've been waiting half an hour and more for you to ring." "Then bring it up directly, Mrs Plant, for we are terribly ready." "Yes, sir." "At least I am, my dear; I was faint for want of it when I came in. Shall we shelve the unpleasant business now?" "It is so dreadful," said Kate. "Well, yes, it is; so it used to be with the poor folks who were besieged by the enemy. You are besieged, but you have a strong castle in which to defend yourself, and you can laugh your enemies to scorn. Really, Kate, my child, this is something like being cursed by a fortune." She nodded her head quickly. "Money is useful, of course, and I once had a very eager longing to possess it; but, like a great many other things, when once it is possessed it is--well, only so much hard cash, after all. It won't buy the love and esteem of your fellow-creatures. Do you know, my dear, if it were not for something I should be ready to say to you--`Let Uncle James have your paltry fortune and pay off his debts.' That's what he wants, not you. As for Claud, he'd break your heart in a month." "Could I deliver the money over to him?" said Kate, looking anxiously in her new guardian's face. "Oh, yes, my dear, that would be easy enough. And then--I tell you what: I have plenty, and I'm tired of the worry and care of a solicitor's life. Why shouldn't I take a few years' holiday and go on the Continent with my adopted daughter and her old maid? Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Switzerland, Italy, Egypt--what would you say to that? It would be delightful." "Yes," said Kate, eagerly, "and then I could be at rest. No," she said, suddenly, with the colour once more rising in her cheeks, "that would be impossible." "Yes," said Garstang, watching her narrowly, as she averted her face, to gaze now in the fire. "Castles in the air, my dear." "Yes," she said, dreamily, "castles in the air;" but she was seeing golden castles in the glowing fire, and her face grew hotter as, in spite of herself, she peopled one of those golden castles in a peculiar way which made her pulses begin to flutter, and she felt that she dared not gaze in her companion's face. "Yes, castles in the air, my child," said Garstang again. "For that fortune was amassed by your father for the benefit of his child and her husband, and she must not lightly throw it away to benefit a foolish, grasping, impecunious relative." "The dinner is served, sir," said Mrs Plant. Garstang rose and offered his arm, which Kate took at once. "We may dismiss the unpleasant business now," he said, with a smile. "Yes, yes, of course," she said. "But tell me, you do feel satisfied and safe--at rest?" "Quite," she said, looking smilingly in his face. "Then now for dinner," he said, leading her to the door. That evening John Garstang sat over his modest glass of wine alone, fitting together the pieces of his plans, and as he did so he smiled and seemed content. "No," he said, softly, "you will not pocket brother Robert's money, friend James, for I hold the winning trump. What beautiful soft wax it is to mould! Only patience--patience! The fruit is not quite ripe yet. A hundred and fifty thou--a hundred and fifty thou!" CHAPTER THIRTY ONE. "If I could only get poor Pierce to believe in me again!" sighed Jenny, as she lay back in an easy chair at the cottage, after a month of illness; for in addition to the violent sprain from which she had suffered, the exposure had brought on a violent rheumatic cold and fever, from which she was slowly recovering. "But he doesn't believe in me a bit now, even after all I've suffered. Oh, how I should like to punish that wretched boy before I go!" She was sitting close to the window, where she could look down the road toward the village, her eyes dull, her face listless, thinking over the past--her favourite way of making herself miserable, as she had no heart attachment, or disappointment, as a mental "piece de resistance" to feast upon during her illness. Everything had gone so differently from the way she had planned. Pierce was to marry Kate Wilton, and be rich and happy ever afterwards; she intended to be what she called a nice, little, old maiden aunt, to pet and tend all her brother's children, for, of course, Kate and Pierce would have her to live with them; but it was all over--Kate had gone, no one knew where; Pierce, who had always loved her so tenderly, scarcely ever spoke to her as he used. He was quiet, grave, and civil, but never walked up and down the garden with his arm round her waist, laughing and joking with her, and talking about the prince who was to come some day to carry her off to his palace. It was all misery and wretchedness. "I'm sure nobody could have been so ill and suffered so much before," she said, "and I'm growing so white, and thin, and ugly, and old looking, and I'm sure I shall have to go about with a crutch; and it's so lonely with Pierce always going out to see old women and old men who are not half so bad as I am; and I wish I was dead! Oh, dear, oh, oh, dear, I wonder whether it hurts much to die. If it does, I'll ask Pierce to give me some laudanum to put me out of my misery, and--Oh, who's that?" A carriage had drawn up at the gate, and she leaned forward to see. "Mrs Wilton's carriage," she said, quickly growing interested, "and poor Pierce out. Oh, dear, how vexatious it is, when he wants patients so badly! I wonder who's ill now. It can't be that little wretch, because I saw him ride by an hour ago, and stare at the place; and it can't be Mr Wilton, because he always goes over to Dixter market on Fridays. It must be Mrs Wilton herself." "If you please, miss, here's Missus Wilton," said the tall, gawky girl, just emancipated from the village schools to be Jenny's maid-of-all-work and nurse, and the lady in question entered with her village basket upon her arm. "Ah! my dear child!" she cried, bustling across the room, putting her basket on the table, and then bobbing down to kiss Jenny, who sat up, frowning and stiff. "No, no, don't get up." "I was not going to, Mrs Wilton," said Jenny, coldly; "I can't." "Think of that, now," cried the visitor, drawing a chair forward, and carefully spreading her silks and furs as she sat down; "and I've been so dreadfully unneighbourly in not coming to see you, though I did not know you had been so bad as this. You see, I've had such troubles of my own to attend to that I couldn't think of anything else; but it all came to me to-day that I had neglected you shamefully, and so I said to myself, I'd come over at once, as Mr Wilton and my son were both out, and bring you a bit of chicken, and a bottle of wine, and the very last bunch of grapes before it got too mouldy in the vinery, and here I am." "Yes, Mrs Wilton," said Jenny, stiffly; "but if you please, I am not one of the poor people of the parish." "Why, no, my dear, of course not; but whatever put that in your head?" "The wine, Mrs Wilton." "But it's the best port, my dear--not what I give to the poor." "And the bit of chicken, Mrs Wilton," said Jenny, viciously. "But it isn't a bit, my dear; it's a whole one," said the lady, looking troubled. "A cold one, left over from last night's dinner," said Jenny, half hysterically. "Indeed, no, my dear," cried the visitor, appealingly; "it isn't a cooked one at all, but a nice, young Dorking cockerel from the farm." "And a bunch of mouldy grapes," cried Jenny, passionately, bursting into a fit of sobbing, "just as if I were widow Gee!" "Why, my dear child, I--oh, I see, I see; you're only just getting better, and you're lonely and low, and it makes you feel fractious and cross, and I know. There, there, there, my poor darling! I ought to have come before and seen you, for I always did like to see your pretty, little, merry face, and there, there, there!" she continued, as she knelt by the chair, and in a gentle, motherly way, drew the little, thin invalid to her expansive breast, kissing and fondling and cooing over her, as she rocked her to and fro, using her own scented handkerchief to dry the tears. "That's right. Have a good cry, my dear. It will relieve you, and you'll feel better then. I know myself how peevish it makes one to be ill, with no one to tend and talk to you; but you won't be angry with me now for bringing you the fruit and wine, for indeed, indeed, they are the best to be had, and do you think I'd be so purse-proud and insulting as to treat you as one of the poor people? No, indeed, my dear, for I don't mind telling you that I'm only going to be a poor woman myself, for things are to be very sadly altered, and when I come to see you, if I'm to stay here instead of going to the workhouse, there'll be no carriage, but I shall have to walk." "I--I--beg your pardon, Mrs Wilton," sobbed Jenny. "I say cross things since I have been so ill." "Of course you do, my precious, and quite natural. We women understand it. I wish the gentlemen did; but dear, dear me, they think no one has a right to be cross but them, and they are, too, sometimes. You can't think what I have to put up with from Mr Wilton and my son, though he is a dear, good boy at heart, only spoiled. But you're getting better, my dear, and you'll soon be well." "Yes, Mrs Wilton," said Jenny, piteously, "if I don't die first." "Oh, tut, tut, tut! die, at your age. Why, even at mine I never think of such a thing. But, oh, my dear child, I want you to try and pity and comfort me. You know, of course, what trouble we have been in." "Yes," said Jenny. "I have heard, and I'm better now, Mrs Wilton. Won't you sit down?" "To be sure I will, my dear. There: that's better. And now we can have a cozy chat, just as we used when you came to the Manor. Oh, dear, no visitors now, my child. It's all debt and misery and ruin. The place isn't the same. Poor, poor Kate!" "Have you heard where she is, Mrs Wilton?" "No, my dear," said the visitor, tightening her lips and shaking her head, "and never shall. Poor dear angel! I am right. I'm sure it's as I said." Jenny looked at her curiously, while every nerve thrilled with the desire to know more. "I felt it at the first," continued Mrs Wilton. "No sooner did they tell me that she was gone than I knew that in her misery and despair she had gone and thrown herself into the lake; and though I was laughed at and pooh-poohed, there she lies, poor child. I'm as sure of it as I sit here." "Mrs Wilton!" cried Jenny, in horrified tones. "Oh, pray, pray, don't say that!" and she burst into a hysterical lit of weeping. "I'm obliged to, my dear," said the visitor, taking a trembling hand in hers, and kissing it; "but don't you cry and fret, though it's very good of you, and I know you loved the sweet, gentle darling. Ah, it was all a terrible mistake, and I've often lain awake, crying without a sound, so as not to wake Mr Wilton and make him cross. Of course you know Mr Wilton settled that Claud was to marry her, and when he says a thing is to be, it's no use for me to say a word. He's master. It's `love, honour, and obey,' my dear, when you're a married lady, as you'll find out some day." "No, Mrs Wilton, I shall never marry." "Ah, that's what we all say, my child, but the time comes when we think differently. But as I was telling you, I thought it was all a mistake, but I had to do what Mr Wilton wished, though I felt that they weren't suited a bit, and I know Claud did not care for her. I'd a deal rather have seen him engaged to a nice little girl like you." "Mrs Wilton!" said Jenny, indignantly. "Oh, dear me, what have I said?" cried the lady, smiling. "He's wilful and foolish and idle, and fond of sport; but my boy Claud isn't at all a bad lad--well, not so very--and he'll get better; and I'm sure you used to like to have a talk with him when you came to the Manor." "Indeed I did not!" cried Jenny, flushing warmly. "Oh, very well then, I'm a silly old woman, and I was mistaken, that's all. But there, there, we don't want to talk about such things, with that poor child lying at the bottom of the lake; and they won't have it dragged." "But surely she would not have done such a thing, Mrs Wilton," cried Jenny, wildly. "I don't know, my dear. They say I'm very stupid, but I can't help, thinking it, for she was very weak and low and wretched, and she quite hated poor Claud for the way he treated her. But I never will believe that she eloped with that young Mr Dasent." "Neither will I," cried Jenny, indignantly. "She would not do such a thing." "That she would not, my dear; and I say it's a shame to say it, but my husband will have it that he has carried her off for the sake of her money. And as I said to my husband, `You thought the same about poor Claud, when the darling boy was as innocent as a dove.' There, I'm right, I'm sure I'm right. She's lying asleep at the bottom of the lake." Jenny's face contracted with horror, and her visitor caught her in her arms again. "There, there, don't look like that, my dear. She's nothing to you, and I'm a very silly old woman, and I dare say I'm wrong. I came here to be like a good neighbour, and try and comfort you, and I'm only making you worse. That's just like me, my dear. But now look here. You mustn't go about with that white face. You want change, and you shall come over to the Manor and stay for a month. It will do you good." "No," said Jenny, quietly. "I can not come, thank you, Mrs Wilton. My brother would not permit it." "But he must, for your sake. Oh, these men, these men!" "It is impossible," said Jenny, holding out her hand, "for we are going away." "Going away! Well, I am sorry. Ah, me! It's a sad world, and maybe I shall be gone away, too, before long. But you might come for a week. Why not to-morrow?" Jenny shook her head, and the visitor parted from her so affectionately that no further opposition was made to the basket's contents. CHAPTER THIRTY TWO. Jenny had not been seated alone many minutes after the carriage had driven off, dwelling excitedly upon her visitor's words respecting Kate's disappearance, when the front door was opened softly, and there was a tap on the panel of the room where she sat. "Who's there? Come in." "Only me," said a familiar voice, and, hunting whip in hand, Claud Wilton stood smiling in the doorway. "You!" cried Jenny, with flaming cheeks. "How dare you come here?" "Because I wanted to see you," he said. "Just met the mater, and she told me how bad you'd been, and that you talked about dying. I say, you know, none of that nonsense." "What is that to you, sir, if I did?" "Oh, lots," he said, twirling the lash of his whip as he stood looking at her. "If you were to pop off I should go and hang myself in the stable." "Go away from here directly. How dare you come?" cried Jenny, indignantly. "Because I love you. You made me, and you can't deny that." "Oh!" ejaculated the girl, as her cheeks flamed more hotly. "I can't help it now. I've been ever so miserable ever since I knew you were so bad; and when the old girl said what she did it regularly turned me over, and I was obliged to come. I say, I do love you, you know." "It is not love," she cried hotly; "it is an insult. Go away. My brother will be here directly." "I don't care for your brother," said the young man, sulkily. "I'm as good as he is. I wanted to see how bad you were." "Well, you've seen. I've been nearly dead with fever and pain, and it was all through you that night." "Yes, it was all through me, dear." "Silence, sir; how dare you!" "Because I love you, and 'pon my soul, I'd have been ten times as bad sooner than you should." "It is all false--a pack of cruel, wicked lies." "No, it ain't. I know I've told lots of lies to girls, but then they were only fools, and I've been a regular beast, Jenny, but I'm going to be all square now; am, 'pon my word. I didn't use to know what a real girl was in those days, but I've woke up now, and I'd do anything to please you. There, I feel sometimes as if I wish I were your dog." "Pah! Go and find your rich cousin, and tell her that." "--My rich cousin," he cried, hotly. "She's gone, and jolly go with her. I know I made up to her--the guv'nor wanted me to, for the sake of her tin--but I'm sick of the whole business, and I wouldn't marry her if she'd got a hundred and fifty millions instead of a hundred and fifty thousand." "And do you think I'm so weak and silly as to believe all this?" she cried. "I d'know," he said, quietly. "I think you will. Clever girl like you can tell when a fellow's speaking the truth." "Go away at once, before my brother comes." "Shan't I wouldn't go now for a hundred brothers." "Oh," panted Jenny. "Can't you see that you will get me in fresh trouble with him, and make me more miserable still?" "I don't want to," he said, softly, "and I'd go directly if I thought it would do that, but I wouldn't go because of being afraid. I say, ain't you precious hard on a fellow? I know I've been a brute, but I think I've got some good stuff in me, and if I could make you care for me I shouldn't turn out a bad fellow." "I will not listen to you. Go away." "I say, you know," he continued, as he stood still in the doorway, "why won't you listen to me and be soft and nice, same as you were at first?" "Silence, sir; don't talk about it. It was all a mistake." "No, it wasn't. You began to fish for me, and you caught me. I've got the hook in me tight, and I couldn't get away if I tried. I say, Jenny, please listen to me. I am in earnest, and I'll try so hard to be all that is square and right. 'Pon my soul I will." "Where is your cousin?" "I don't know--and don't want to," he added. "Yes you do, you took her away." "Well, it's no use to swear to a thing with a girl; if you won't believe me when I say I don't know, you won't believe me with an oath. What do I want with her? She hated me, and I hated her. There is only one nice girl in the world, and that's you." "Pah!" cried Jenny, who was more flushed than ever. "Look at me." "Well, I am looking at you," he said, smiling, "and it does a fellow good." "Can't you see that I've grown thin, and yellow, and ugly?" "No; and I'll punch any fellow's head who says you are." "Don't you know that I injured my ankle, and that I'm going to walk with crutches?" "Eh?" he cried, starting. "I say, it ain't so bad as that, is it?" "Yes; I can't put my foot to the ground." "Phew!" he whistled, with a look of pity and dismay in his countenance; "poor little foot." "I tell you I shall be a miserable cripple, I'm sure; but I'm going away, and you'll never see me again." "Oh, won't I?" he said, smiling. "You just go away, and I'll follow you like a shadow. You won't get away from me." "But don't I tell you I shall be a miserable cripple?" "Well," he said, thoughtfully; "it is a bad job, and perhaps it'll get better. If it don't I can carry you anywhere; I'm as strong as a horse. Look here, it's no use to deny it, you made me love you, and you must have me now--I mean some day." "Never!" cried Jenny, fiercely. "Ah, that's a long time to wait; but I'll wait. Look here, little one," he cried, passionate in his earnestness now, "I love you, and I'm sorry for all that's gone by; but I'm getting squarer every day." "But I tell you it is impossible. I'm going away; it was all a mistake. I can't listen to you, and I tell you once more I'm going to be a miserable, peevish cripple all my life." "No, you're not," said the lad, drawing himself up and tightening his lips. "You're not going to be miserable, because I'd make you happy; and I like a girl to be sharp with a fellow like you can; it does one good. And as to being a cripple, why, Jenny, my dear, I love you so that I'd marry you to-morrow, if you had no legs at all." Jenny looked at him in horror, as he still stood framed in the doorway; but averted her eyes, turning them to the window, as she found how eagerly he was watching her, while her heart began to beat rapidly, as she felt now fully how dangerous a game was that upon which she had so lightly entered. Rough as his manner was, she could not help feeling that it was genuine in its respect for her, though all the same she felt alarmed; but directly after, the dread passed away in a feeling of relief, and a look of malicious glee made her eyes flash, as she saw her brother coming along the road. But the flash died out, and in repentance for her wish that Pierce might pounce suddenly upon the intruder, she said, quickly: "Mr Wilton, don't stop here; go--go, please, directly. Here's my brother coming." She blushed, and felt annoyed directly after, angry with herself and angry at her lame words, the more so upon Claud bursting out laughing. "Not he," cried the lad. "You said that to frighten me." "No, indeed; pray go. He will be so angry," she cried. "I don't care, so long as you are not." "But I am," she cried, "horribly angry." "You don't look it. I never saw you seem so pretty before." "But he is close here, and--and, and I am so ill--it will make me worse. Pray, pray, go." "I say, do you mean that?" he said, eagerly. "If I thought you really did, I'd--" "You insolent dog! How dare you?" roared Pierce, catching him by the collar and forcing him into the room. "You dare to come here and insult my sister like this!" "Who has insulted her?" cried Claud, hotly. "You, sir. It is insufferable. How dare you come here?" "Gently, doctor," said Claud, coolly; "mind what you are saying." "Why are you here, sir?" "Come to see how your sister was." "What is it to you, puppy? Leave the house," cried, Pierce, snatching the hunting whip from the young man's hand, "or I'll flog you as you deserve." "No, you won't," said Claud, looking him full in the eyes, with his lips tightening together. "You can't be such a coward before her, and upset her more. Ask her if I've insulted her." "No, no, indeed, Pierce; Mr Wilton has been most kind and gentlemanly-- more so than I could have expected," stammered Jenny, in fear. "Gentlemanly," cried Pierce scornfully. "Then it is by your invitation he is here. Oh, shame upon you." "No, it isn't," cried Claud stoutly. "She didn't know I was coming, and when I did come she ordered me off--so now then." "Then leave this house." "No, I won't, till I've said what I've got to say; so put down that whip before you hurt somebody, more, perhaps, than you will me. You're not her father." "I stand in the place of her father, sir, and I order you to go." "Look here, Doctor, don't forget that you are a gentleman, please, and that I'm one, too." "A gentleman!" cried Pierce angrily, "and dare to come here in my absence and insult my sister!" "It isn't insulting her to come and tell her how sorry I am she has been ill." "A paltry lie and subterfuge!" cried Pierce. "No, it isn't either of them, but the truth, and I don't care whether you're at home, Doctor, or whether you're out I came here to tell her outright, like a man, that I love her; and I don't care what you say or do, I shall go on loving her, in spite of you or a dozen brothers.--Now give me my whip." His brave outspoken way took Pierce completely aback, and the whip was snatched from his hand, Claud standing quietly swishing it round and round till he held the point in his fingers, looking hard at Jenny the while. "There," he said, "I don't mean to quarrel; I'm going now. Good-bye, Jenny; I mean it all, every word, and I hope you'll soon be better. There," he said, facing round to Leigh. "I shan't offer to shake hands, because I know that you won't but when you like I will. You hate me now, like some of your own poisons, because you think I'm after Cousin Kate, but you needn't. There, you needn't flinch; I'm not blind. I smelt that rat precious soon. She never cared for me, and I never cared for her, and you may marry her and have her fortune if you can find her, for anything I'll ever do to stop it--so there." He nodded sharply, stuck his hat defiantly on his head, and marched out, leaving Pierce Leigh half stunned by his words; and the next minute they heard him striding down the road, leaving brother and sister gazing at each other with flashing eyes. CHAPTER THIRTY THREE. For some moments neither spoke. "Was this your doing?" cried Leigh, at last, and he turned upon his sister angrily. At that moment Jenny was lying back, trembling and agitated, with her eyes half closed, but her brother's words stung her into action. "You heard what Mr Claud Wilton said," she retorted, angrily. "How dare you speak to me like this, Pierce, knowing what you do?" He uttered an impatient ejaculation. "Yes, that is how you treat me now," she said, piteously; "your troubles have made you doubting and suspicious. Have I not suffered enough without you turning cruel to me again?" "How can you expect me to behave differently when I find you encouraging that cad here? It is all the result of the way in which you forgot your self-respect and what was due to me." "That's cruel again, Pierce. You know why I acted as I did." "Pah!" he exclaimed; "and now I find you encouraging the fellow." "I was as much taken by surprise as you were, dear," she said. "And to use the fellow's words, do you think I am blind? It was plain enough to see that you were pleased that he came." "I was not," she cried, angrily now. "I tell you I was quite taken by surprise. I was horrified and frightened, and I was glad when I saw you coming, for I wanted you to punish him for daring to come." Leigh looked at his sister in anger and disgust. "If I can read a woman's countenance," he said, mockingly, "you were gratified by every word he said to me." "I don't know--I can't tell how it was," she faltered with her pale cheeks beginning to flame again, "but I'm afraid I was pleased, dear." "I thought so," he cried, mockingly. "I couldn't help liking the manly, brave way in which he spoke up. It sounded so true." "Yes, very. Brave words such as he has said in a dozen silly girls' ears. And he told you before I came that he loved you?" "Yes, dear." "And you told him that his ardent passion was returned," he sneered. "I did not. I could have told him I hated him, but I could not help feeling sorry, for I have behaved very badly, flirting with him as I did." "And pity is near akin to love, Jenny," cried Leigh, with a harsh laugh, "and very soon I may have the opportunity of welcoming this uncouth oaf for a brother-in-law, I suppose. Oh, what weak, pitiful creatures women are! People cannot write worse of them than they prove." Jenny was silent, but she looked her brother bravely in the face till his brows knit with anger and self-reproach. "What do you mean by that?" he cried, angrily. "I was only thinking of the reason why you speak so bitterly, Pierce." "Pish!" he exclaimed; and there was another silence. "Mrs Wilton came this afternoon and brought me a chicken and some wine and grapes," said Jenny, at last. "Like her insolence. Send them back." "No. She was very kind and nice, Pierce. She was full of self-reproach for the way in which poor Kate Wilton was treated." "Bah! What is that to us?" "A great deal, dear. She is half broken-hearted about it, and says it was all the Squire's doing, and that she was obliged. He wished his son to marry Kate." "The old villain!" "And she says that poor Kate is lying drowned in the lake." Leigh started violently, and his eyes looked wild with horror, but it was a mere flash. "Pish!" he ejaculated, "a silly woman's fancy. The ladder at the window contradicted that. It was an elopement and that scoundrel who was here just now was somehow at the bottom of it. He helped." "No," said Jenny, quietly, "he was not, I am sure. There is some mystery there that you ought to probe to the bottom." "That will do," he said, sharply, and she noticed that there was a peculiar startled look in her brother's eyes. "Now listen to me. You will pack up your things. Begin to-night. Everything must be ready by mid-day to-morrow." "Yes, dear," she said, meekly. "Are you going to send me away?" "No, I am going to take you away. I cannot bear this life any longer." "Then we leave here?" "Yes, at once." "Have you sold the place?" "Bah! Who could buy it?" "But your patients, Pierce?" "There is another man within two miles. There, don't talk to me." "Won't you confide in me, Pierce?" said Jenny, quickly. "I can't believe that we are going because of what has just happened. You must have heard some news." He frowned, and was silent. "Very well, dear," she said, meekly. "I am glad we are going, for I believe you will try and trace out poor Kate." "A fly will be here at mid-day," he said, without appearing to hear her words, and her eyes flashed, for all told her that she was right and that the sudden departure was not due to the encounter with Claud. But that meeting had sealed his lips in anger, just when he had reached home full of eagerness to confide in his sister that he had at last obtained a slight clew to Kate's whereabouts. For he had been summoned to the village inn to attend a fly-driver, who had been kicked by his horse. The man was a stranger, and the injury was so slight that he was able to drive himself back to his place, miles away. But in the course of conversation, while his leg was being dressed, he had told the Doctor that he once had a curious fare in that village, and he detailed Garstang's proceedings, ending by asking Leigh if he knew who the lady was. CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR. "Here! Hi! Hold hard!" Pierce Leigh paid no heed to the hails which reached his ears as he was crossing Bedford Square one morning; but he stopped short and turned angrily when a hand was laid heavily upon his shoulder, to find himself face to face with Claud Wilton, who stood holding out his hand. "I saw you staring up at Uncle Robert's old house, but it's of no use to look there." "What do you mean, sir?" said Leigh sternly. "Get out! You know. Well, aren't you going to shake hands?" There was something so frank and open in the young man's look and manner that Leigh involuntarily raised his hand, and before a flash of recollection could telegraph his second intent it was seized and wrung, vigorously. "That's better, Doctor," cried Claud. "How are you?" "Oh, very well," said Pierce shortly. "Well, you don't look it. No, no, don't give a fellow the cold shoulder like that. I say, I came ever so long ago and called on the new people here, for I thought perhaps she might have been to her old home, but it was only a fancy. No go; she hadn't been there." "You will excuse me, Mr Wilton," said Pierce, coldly; "I am busy this morning--a patient. I wish you good day." "No, you don't. I've had trouble enough to find you, so no cold shoulder, please. It's no good, for I won't lose sight of you now. I say: it was mean to cut away from Northwood like you did." "Will you have the goodness to point out which road you mean to take, Mr Wilton," said Leigh, wrathfully, "and then I can choose another?" "No need, Doctor; your road's my road, and I'll stick to you like a `tec'." Leigh's eyes literally flashed. "There, it's of no use for you to be waxy, Doctor, because it won't do a bit of good. I've got a scent like one of my retrievers; and I've run you down at last." "Am I to understand then, sir, that you intend to watch me?" said Leigh, sternly. "That's it. Of course I do. I've been at it ever since you left the old place. When I make up my mind to a thing I keep to it--stubborn as pollard oak." "Indeed," said Leigh, sarcastically; "and now you have found me, pray what do you want?" "Jenny!" said Claud, with the pollard oak simile in voice and look. "Confound your insolence, sir!" cried Leigh, fiercely. "How dare you speak of my sister like that?" "'Cause I love her, Doctor, like a man," and there was a slight quiver in the speaker's voice; but his face was hard and set, and when he spoke next his words sounded firm and stubborn enough. "I told her so, and I told you so; and whether she'll have me some day, or whether she won't, it's all the same, I'll never give her up. She's got me fast." In spite of his anger, Leigh could not help feeling amused, and Claud saw the slight softening in his features, and said quickly: "I say, tell me how she is." "My sister's health is nothing to you, sir, and I wish you good morning." He strode on, but Claud took step for step with him, in spite of his anger. "It's of no use, Doctor, and you can't assault me here in London. I shall find out where you live, so you may just as well be civil. Tell me how she is." Leigh made no reply, but walked faster. "Her health nothing to me," said Claud, in a low, quick way. "You don't know; and I shan't tell you, because you wouldn't believe, and would laugh at me. I say, how would you like it if someone treated you like this about Kate?" "Silence, sir! How dare you!" thundered Leigh, facing round sharply and stopping short. "Don't shout, Doctor; it will make people think we're rowing, and collect a crowd. But I say, that was a good shot; had you there. Haven't found her yet, then?" "My good fellow, will you go your way, and let me go mine?" "In plain English, Doctor, no, I won't; and if you knock me down I'll get up again, put my hands in my pockets, and follow you wherever you go. I shan't hit out again, though I am in better training and can use my fists quicker than, you can, and I've got the pluck, too, as I could show you. Do just what you like, call me names or hit me, but I shan't never forget you're Jenny's brother. Now, I say, don't be a brute to a poor fellow. It ain't so much of a sin to love the prettiest, dearest, little girl that ever breathed." "Will you be silent?" "Oh, yes, if you'll talk to a fellow. You might be a bit more feeling, seeing you're in the same boat." "You insufferable cad!" cried Leigh, furiously. "Yes, that's it. Quite right--cad; that's what I am, but I'm trying to polish it off, Doctor. I say, tell me how she is. She was so bad." "My sister has quite recovered." "Hooray!" cried Claud, excitedly. "But, I say--the ankle. How is it?" "Look here, my good fellow, you must go. I will not answer your questions. Are you mad or an idiot?" "Both," said Claud, coolly. "I say, you know, about that ankle. I believe you were so savage that night that you kicked it and broke it." "What!" cried Leigh, excitedly. "My good fellow, what do you take me for?" "Her brother, with an awful temper. Her father would not treat me like you do, if he was alive. It was a cowardly, cruel act for a man to do." "You are quite mistaken, sir," said Leigh, coldly, as he wondered to himself that he should be drawn out like this. "My sister was unfortunate enough to sprain her ankle." "Glad of it," said Claud, bluntly. "I was afraid it was your doing, and whenever I see you it sets my monkey up and makes me want to kick you. Well, you've told me how she is, and that's some pay for all my hunting about in town. I say, there's another chap down at Northwood stepped into your shoes already. The mater has had him in for the guv'nor's gout. He caught a cold up here with the hunting for Kate. It turned to gout, and I've had all the hunting to do. Now you and I will join hands and run her down." Leigh made an angry gesture, which was easy enough to interpret--"How am I to get rid of this insolent cad?" Claud laughed. "You can't do it," he said. "I say, Doctor, sink the pride, and all that sort of thing. It's of no use to refuse help from a fellow you don't like, if he's in earnest and means well. Now, just look here. 'Pon my soul, it's the truth. Kate Wilton has got a hundred and fifty thou., and your sister hasn't got a penny. I'm not such a fool as you think, for I can read you like a book. You were gone on Cousin Kate long before you were asked to our house, and you'd give your life to find her; and, mind, I don't believe it's for the sake of her money. Well, I'm doing all I can to find her, and have been ever since you came away. Why? I'll tell you. Because it will please little Jenny, who about worships you, though you don't deserve it. And I tell you this, Doctor: if I had found her I'd have come and told you straight--if I could have found you, for Jenny's sake." Leigh looked at him fixedly, trying hard to read the young man's face, but there was no flinching, no quivering of eyelid, or twitch about the lips. Claud gazed at him with a straightforward, dogged look which carried with it conviction. "Look here," sud Claud, "I haven't found out where she is." "Indeed?" said Leigh, guardedly. "But I've found out one thing." With all the young doctor's mastery of self, he could not help an inquiring glance. Claud saw it, and smiled. "She did not go off with Harry Dasent I found out that." Leigh remained silent. "Ara now look here. I've gone over it all scores of times, trying to think out where she can be, and that there's some relation or friend she bolted off to so as to get away from us, but I can't fix it on anyone, and go where I will, from our cousins the Morrisons down to old Garstang--who's got the guv'nor under has thumb, and could sell us up to-morrow if he liked--I can't get at it. But the scent seems to be most toward old Garstang, and I mean to try back there. The guv'nor said it was his doing, to help Harry Dasent, but that's all wrong. Those two hate one another like poison, and I can't make out any reason which would set Garstang to work to get her away. He'd do it like a shot to get her money, but he can't touch that, for I've read the will again. Nobody but her husband can get hold of that bit of booty, and I wish you may get it. I do, 'pon my soul. Still, I'm growing to think more and more that foxy Garstang's the man." They had been walking steadily along side by side while this conversation was going on, and at last, fully convinced that Claud would not be shaken off, and even if he were would still watch him, Leigh walked straight on to his new home, and stopped short at a door whereon was a new brass plate, while the customary red bull's-eyes were in the lamp like danger signals to avert death and disease--the accidents of life's great railway. "Now, Mr Wilton," he said, shortly, "you have achieved your purpose and tracked me home." "And no thanks to you," said Claud, with one of his broad grins. "Won't ask me in, I suppose?" "No, sir, I shall not." "All right I didn't expect you would. Of course I should have found you out some time from the directories." "My name is not in them, sir." "Oh, but it soon would be, Doctor. I say, shall you tell her you have seen me?" "For cool impudence, Mr Claud Wilton," said Leigh, by way of answer, "I have never seen your equal." "'Tisn't impudence, Doctor," said Claud, earnestly; "it's pluck and bull-dog. I haven't been much account, and I don't come up to what you think a fellow should be." "You certainly do not," said Leigh, unable to repress a smile. "I know that, but I've got some stuff in me, after all, and when I take hold I don't let go." He gave Leigh a quick nod, and thrusting his hands into his pockets, walked right on, without looking back, Leigh watching him till he turned a corner, before taking out a latch-key and letting himself into the house. "The devil does not seem so black as he is painted, after all," he said, as he wiped his feet, and at the sound Jenny, quite without crutches, came hurrying down the stairs. "Oh, Pierce, dear, have you been to those people in Bedford Street? They've been again twice, and I told them you'd gone." "Ugh!" ejaculated Leigh. "What a head I have! Someone met me on the way, and diverted my thoughts. I'll go at once." And he hurried out. CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE. It was a splendid grand piano whose tones rang, through the house, and brought poor Becky, with her pale, anaemic, tied-up face, from the lower regions, to stand peering round corners and listening till the final chords of some sonata rang out, when she would dart back into hiding, but only to steal up again as slowly and cautiously as a serpent, and thrust out her head from the gloom which hung forever upon the kitchen stairs, when Kate's low, sweet voice was heard singing some sad old ballad, a favourite of her father's, one which brought up the happy past, and ended often enough in the tears dropping silently upon the ivory keys. Such a song will sometimes draw tears from many a listener; the melody, the words, recollections evoked, the expression given by the singer, all have their effect; and perhaps it was a memory of the baker (or milkman) which floated into poor, timid, shrinking Becky, for almost invariably she melted into tears. "She says it's like being in heaven, ma'am," said Sarah Plant, giving voice upstairs to her child's strained ideas of happiness. "And really the place don't seem like the same, for, God bless you! you have made us all so happy here." Kate sighed, for she did not share the happy feeling. There were times when her lot seemed too hard to bear. Garstang was kindness itself; he seemed to be constantly striving to make her content. Books, music, papers, fruit, and flowers--violets constantly as soon as he saw the brightening of her eyes whenever he brought her a bunch. Almost every expressed wish was gratified. But there was that intense longing for communion with others. If she could only have written to poor, amiable, faithful Eliza or to Jenny Leigh, she would have borne her imprisonment better; but she had religiously studied her new guardian's wishes upon that point, yielding to his advice whenever he reiterated the dangers which would beset their path if James Wilton discovered where she was. "As it is, my dear child," he would say again and again, "it is sanctuary; and I'm on thorns whenever I am absent, for fear you should be tempted by the bright sunshine out of the gloom of this dull house, be seen by one or other of James Wilton's emissaries, and I return to find the cage I have tried so hard to gild, empty--the bird taken away to another kind of captivity, one which surely would not be so easy to bear." "No, no, no; I could not bear it!" she cried, wildly. "I do not murmur. I will not complain, guardian; but there are times when I would give anything to be out somewhere in the bright open air, with the beautiful blue sky overhead, the soft grass beneath my feet, and the birds singing in my ears." "Yes, yes, I know, my poor dear child," he said, tenderly. "It is cruelly hard upon you, but what can I do? I am waiting and hoping that James Wilton on finding his helplessness will become more open to making some kind of reasonable terms. I am sure you would be willing to meet him." "To meet him again? Oh, no, I could not. The thought is horrible," she cried. "He seems to have broken faith so, after all his promises to my dying father." "He has," said Garstang, solemnly; "but you misunderstand me; I did not mean personally meet him, but in terms, which would be paying so much money--in other words, buying your freedom." "Oh, yes, yes," she cried, wildly, "at any cost. It is as you said one evening, guardian; I am cursed by a fortune." "Cursed indeed, my dear. But there, try and be hopeful and patient, and we will have more walks of an evening. Only to think of it, our having to steal out at night like two thieves, for a dark walk in Russell Square sometimes. I don't wonder that the police used to watch us." "If I could only write a few letters, guardian!" "Yes, my dear, if you only could. I cannot say to you, do not, only lay the case before you once again." "Yes, yes, yes," she said, hastily wiping away a few tears. "I am very, very foolish and ungrateful; but now that's all over, and I am going to be patient, and wait for freedom. I am far better off than many who are chained to a sick bed." "No," he said, gently, shaking his head at her; "far worse off. Sickness brings a dull lassitude and indifference to external things. The calm rest of the bedroom is welcome, and the chamber itself the patient's little world. You, my dear, are in the full tide of life and youth, with all its aspirations, and must suffer there, more. But there; I am working like a slave to settle a lot of business going through the courts; and as soon as I can get it over we will take flight somewhere abroad, away from the gilded cage, out to the mountains and forests, where you can tire me out with your desires to be in the open air." "I--I don't think I wish to leave England," she said, hesitatingly, and with the earnest far-off look in her eyes that he had seen before. "Well, well, we will find some secluded place by the lakes, where we are not likely to be found out, and where the birds will sing to you. And, here's a happy thought, Kate, my child--you shall have some fellow prisoners." "Companions?" she said, eagerly. "Yes, companions," he replied, with a smile; "but I meant birds-- canaries, larks--what do you say to doves? They make charming pets." "No, no," she said, hastily; "don't do that, Mr Garstang. One prisoner is enough." He bowed his head. "You have only to express your wishes, my child," he said.--"Then you are going to try and drive away the clouds?" "Oh, yes, I am going to be quite patient," she said, smiling at him; and she placed her hands in his. "Thank you," he said, gently; and for the first time he drew her nearer to him, and bent down to kiss her forehead--the slightest touch--and then dropped her hands, to turn away with a sigh. And the days wore on, with the prisoner fighting hard with self, to be contented with her lot. She practiced hard at the piano, and studied up the crabbed Gothic letters of the German works in one of the cases. Now and then, too, she sang about the great, gloomy house, but mostly to stop hurriedly on finding that she had listeners, attracted from the lower regions. But try how she would to occupy her thoughts, she could not master those which would bring a faint colour to her cheeks. For ever and again the calm, firm countenance of Pierce Leigh would intrude itself, and the colour grew deeper, as she felt that there was something strange in all this, especially when he of whom she thought had never, by word or look, given her cause to think that he cared for her. And yet, in her secret heart, she felt that he did. And what would he think of her? He could not know anything of her proceedings, but little of her reasons for fleeing from her uncle's care. CHAPTER THIRTY SIX. The memories of her slight friendship with the Leighs--slight in the rareness of their meetings--grew and grew as the days passed on, till Kate Wilton found herself constantly thinking of the brother and sister she had left at Northwood. Jenny's bright face was always obtruding itself, seeming to laugh from the pages of the dull old German book over which she pored; and it became a habit in her solitary life to sit and dream and think over it, as it slowly seemed to change; the merry eyes grew calm and grave, the broad forehead broader, till, though the similarity was there, it was the face of the brother, and she would close the book with a startled feeling of annoyance, feeling ready to upbraid herself for her want of modesty--so she put it--in thinking so much of one of whom she knew so little. At such times she began to suffer from peculiar little nervous fits of irritation, which were followed by long dreamy thoughts which troubled her more than ever, respecting what the Leighs would think of her flight. Music, long talks with Sarah Plant, efforts to try and draw out poor Becky, everything she could think of to take her attention and employ her mind, were tried vainly. The faces of the brother and sister would obtrude more and more, as her nervous fretfulness increased, and rapidly now the natural struggle against her long imprisonment increased. She tried hard to conceal it from Garstang, and believed that he did not notice it, but it was too plain. Her efforts to appear cheerful and bright at breakfast time and when he came back at night, grew forced and painful; and under his calm smiling demeanour and pleasant chatty way of talking to her about current events, he was bracing himself for the encounter which he knew might have to take place at any moment. It was longer than he anticipated, but was suddenly sprung upon him one evening after an agonising day, when again and again Kate had had to fight hard to master the fierce desire to get away from the terrible solitude which seemed to crush her down. She knew that she was unwell from the pressure of her solitary life upon her nerves; the thoughts which troubled her magnified themselves; and now with terrible force came the insistent feeling that she had behaved like a weak child in not bravely maintaining her position at her uncle's house, and forcing him to fulfill his duty of protector to his brother's child. "Is it too late? Am I behaving like a child now?" she asked herself, and at last with a wild outburst of excitement she determined that her present life must end. She had calmed down a little just before Garstang returned that evening, and the recollection of his chivalrous treatment and fatherly attention to her lightest wants made her shrink from declaring that in spite of everything she must have some change; for, as she had told herself in her fit of excitement that afternoon, if she did not she would go mad. She was very quiet during dinner, and he carefully avoided interrupting the fits of thoughtfulness in which from time to time she was plunged, but an hour later, when he came after her to the library from his glass of wine, he saw that her brows were knit and that the expected moment had come. "Tired, my dear?" he said, as he subsided into his easy chair. "Very, Mr Garstang," she said, quickly; and the excited look in her eyes intensified. "Well, I don't like parting from you, my child," he said; "I have grown so used to your bright conversation of an evening, and it is so restful to me, but I must not be selfish. Go to bed when you feel so disposed. It is the weather, I think. The glass is very low." "No," said Kate quickly, "it is not that; it is this miserable suspense which is preying upon me. Oh, guardian, guardian, when is all this dreadful life of concealment to come to an end?" "Soon, my child, soon. But try and be calm; you have been so brave and good up to now; don't let us run risks when we are so near success." "You have spoken to me like that so often, and--and I can bear it no longer. I must, at any risk now, have it put an end to." "Ah!" he sighed, with a sad look; "I am not surprised to hear you talk so. You have done wonders. I would rather have urged you to be patient a little longer, my dear, but I agree with you; it is more than a bright young girl can be expected to bear. I have noticed it, though you have made such efforts to conceal it; the long imprisonment is telling upon your health, and makes you fretful and impatient." "And I have tried so hard not to be," she cried, full of repentance now. "My poor little girl, yes, you have," he said, reaching forward to take and pat her hand. "Well, give me a few hours to think what will be best to do, and then we will decide whether to declare war against James Wilton and cover ourselves with the shield of the law, or go right away for a change. You will give me a few hours, my dear, say till this time to-morrow?" "Oh, yes," she said, with a sigh of relief. "Pray forgive me; I cannot help all this." "I know, I know," he said, smiling. "By the way, to-morrow is my birthday; you must try and celebrate it a little for me." She looked at him wonderingly. "I mean, make Sarah Plant prepare an extra dinner, and I will bring home plenty of fruit and flowers; and after dinner we will discuss our plans and strike for freedom. Ah, my dear, it will be a great relief to me, for I have been growing very, very anxious about you. Too tired to give me a little music?" "No, indeed, no," she said eagerly. "Your words have given me more relief than I can tell." "That's right," he said, "but to be correct, I ought to ask you to read to me, to be in accord with the poem. But no, let it be one of my favourite songs, and in that way, "`The night shall be filled with music, And the cares which infest the day Shall fold their tents like the Arabs, And as silently steal away.'" "Longer than I expected," said Garstang, as she left him that night for her own room. "Now let us see." In accordance with his wish, Kate tried to quell the excitement within her breast by entering eagerly into the preparations for the evening's repast, but the next day passed terribly slowly, and she uttered a sigh of relief when the hands of the clock pointed to Garstang's hour of returning. He came in, smiling and content, laden with flowers and fruit, part of the former taking the shape of a beautiful bouquet of lilies, which he handed to her with a smile. "There," he cried; "aren't they sweet? I believe, after all, that Covent Garden is the best garden in the world. I'm as pleased as a child over my birthday. Here, Mrs Plant, take this fruit, and let us have it for dessert." The housekeeper came at his call, and smiled as she took the basket he had brought in his cab, shaking her head sadly as she went down again. "Hah!" ejaculated Garstang; "and I must have an extra glass of wine in honour of the occasion. It is all right, my dear," he whispered, with a great show of mystery. "Plans made, cut and dried. We'll have them over with the dessert." Kate gave him a grateful look, and took up and pressed her bouquet to her lips, while Garstang went to a table drawer and took out a key. "You have never seen the wine cellar, my dear. Come down with me. It is capitally stored, but rather wasted upon me." He went into the hall and lit a chamber candle, returning directly. "Ready?" he said, as she followed him down the dark stairs to the basement, Becky being seen for a moment flitting before them into the gloom, just as Garstang stopped at a great iron-studded door, and picked up a small basket from a table on the other side of the passage. The door was unlocked, and opened with a groan, and Garstang handed his companion the candlestick. "Don't you come in," he said; "the sawdust is damp, and young ladies don't take much interest in bottles of wine. But they are interesting to middle-aged men, my dear," he continued as he walked in, his voice sounding smothered and dull. Then came the chink of a bottle, which he placed in the wine basket, and he went on to a bin farther in. "Don't come," he cried; "I can see. That's right. Our party to-night is small," and he came out with the two bottles he had fetched, stamped the sawdust off his feet, re-locked the door, and led the way upstairs, conveying the wine into the dining-room. Ten minutes later they were seated at the table, and Garstang opened the bottle of champagne he had fetched himself. "There, my dear," he said; "you must drink my health on this my birthday," and in spite of her declining, he insisted. "Oh, you must not refuse," he said. "And, as people say, it will do you good, for you really are low and in need of a stimulus." The result was that she did sip a little of the sparkling wine, with the customary compliments, and the dinner passed off pleasantly enough. At last she rose to go. "I will not keep you long, my dear," he said. "Just my customary glass of claret, and by that time my thoughts will be in order, and I can give you my full news." Kate went into the library, growing moment by moment more excited, and trying hard to control her longing to hear Garstang's plans, which were to end the terrible life of care. It seemed as if he would never come, and he did not until some time after the housekeeper had brought in the tea things and urn. "At last," she said, drawing a deep breath full of relief, for there was a step in the hall, the dining-room door was heard to close, and directly after Garstang entered, and she involuntarily rose from her seat, feeling startled by her new guardian's manner, though she could not have explained the cause. "I have been growing so impatient," she said hastily, as he came to where she stood. "Not more so than I," he said; and she fancied for the moment that there was a strange light in his eyes. But she drove away the thought as absurd. "Now," she cried; "I am weary with waiting. You have devised a way of ending this terrible suspense?" "I have," he said, taking her hands in his; and she resigned them without hesitation. "Pray tell me then, at once. What will you do?" "Make you my darling little wife," he whispered passionately; and he clasped her tightly in his arms. CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN. For a few moments Kate Wilton was passive in Garstang's arms. The suddenness of the act--the surprise, stunned her, and his words seemed so impossible that she could not believe her hearing. Then horror and revulsion came; she knew it was the truth, and like a flash it dawned upon her that all that had gone before, the chivalrous behaviour, the benevolence and paternal tenderness, were the clever acting of an unscrupulous man--the outcome of plans and schemes, and for what? To obtain possession of the great fortune by which she felt more than ever that she was cursed. With a faint cry of horror she thrust him back with both hands upon his breast, and struggled wildly to escape from his embrace. But the effort was vain; he clasped her tightly once again, in spite of her efforts, and covered her face, her neck, her hair, with his kisses. "Silly, timid little bird!" he whispered, as he held her there, horrified and panting; "what ails you? The first kisses, of course. There, don't be so foolish, my darling child; they are the kisses of him who loves you, and who is going to make you his wife. Come, have I not been tender and patient, and all that you could wish, and is not this an easy solution of the difficulties by which you are surrounded?" "Mr Garstang, loose me, I insist!" she cried. "How dare you treat me so!" "I have told you, my beautiful darling. Come, come, be sensible; surely the love of one who has worshipped you from the first time he met you is not a thing to horrify you. Am I so old and repulsive, that you should go on like this? Only a few hours ago you were pressing my hands, holding your face to mine for my kisses; while now that I declare myself you begin struggling like a newly-captured bird. Why, Kate, my darling, I am talking to you like a poetic lover in a sentimental play. Really, dry lawyer as I am, I did not know that I could rise to such a flow of eloquence. Yes, pet, and you are acting too. There, that is enough for appearances, and there is no one to see, so let's behave like two sensible matter-of-fact people. Come and sit down here." "I wish to go--at once," she cried, striving hard to be firm, feeling as she did that everything, in her hopeless state, depended upon herself. "We'll talk about that quietly, when you have seated yourself. No--you will not?" he cried playfully. "Then you force me to show you that you must," and raising her in his arms, he bore her quickly to the couch, and sat beside her, pinioning her firmly in his grasp. "There," he said, "man is the stronger in muscles, and woman must obey; but woman is stronger in the silken bonds with which she can hold man, and then he obeys." She sat there panting heavily, ceasing her struggles, as she tried to think out her course of action, for she shrank from shrieking aloud for help, and exposing her position to the two women in the house. "That's better," he said; "now you are behaving sensibly. Don't pretend to be afraid of me. Now listen--There, sit still; you cannot get away. If you cry out not a sound could reach the servants, for I have sent them to bed; and if a dozen men stood here and shouted together their voices could not be heard through curtains, shutters, and double windows. There, I am not telling you this to frighten you, only to show you your position." She turned and gazed at him wildly, and then dragged her eyes away in despair as he said, caressingly. "How beautiful you are, Kate! That warm colour makes you more attractive than ever, and tells me that all this is but a timid girl's natural holding back from the embraces of the man whom she has enslaved. There is no ghastly pallor, your lips are not white, and you do not turn faint, but are strong and brave in your resistance; so now let's talk sense, little wifie. You fancy I have been drinking; well, I have had a glass or two more than usual, but I am not as you think, only calm and quiet and ready to talk to you about what you wished." "Another time--to-morrow. Mr Garstang, I beg of you; pray let me go to my own room now." "To try the front door on the way, and seek to do some foolish thing? There, you see I can read your thoughts, my darling. So far from having exceeded, I am too sensible for mat; but you could not get out of the house, for the door is locked, and I have the key here. There; to begin; you would like to leave here to-night?" "Yes, yes, Mr Garstang; pray let me go." "Where? You would wander about the streets, a prey to the first ruffian who meets you. To appeal to the police, who would not believe your story; and even if they did, where would you go? To-morrow back to Northwood, to be robbed of your fortune; to go straight to that noble cousin's arms. No, no, that would not do, dear. Now, let's look the position in the face. I am double your age, my child. Well, granted; but surely I am not such a repellent monster that you need look at me like that I love you, my pretty one, and I am going to marry you at once. As my wife, you will be free from all persecution by your uncle. He will try to make difficulties, and refuse to sign papers, and do plenty of absurd things; but I have him completely under my thumb, and once you are my wife I can force him to give up all control of you and yours." "To-morrow--to-morrow," she said, pleadingly, as she felt how hopeless it was to struggle. "I am sick and faint, Mr Garstang; pray, pray let me go to my room now." "Not yet," he said playfully, and without relaxing his grasp; "there is a deal more to say. You have to make me plenty of promises, that you will act sensibly; and I want these promises, not from fear, but because you love me, dear. Silent? Well, I must tell you a little more. I made up my mind to this, my child, when I came to you that night. `I'll marry her,' I said; `it will solve all the difficulties and make her the happiest life.'" "No, no, it is impossible, Mr Garstang," she cried. "There, you have said enough now. You must--you shall let me go. Is this your conduct towards the helpless girl who trusted you?" "Yes," he said laughingly, "it is my conduct towards the helpless girl who trusted me; and it is the right treatment of one who cannot help herself." "No," she cried desperately; "and so I trusted to you, believing you to be worthy of that trust." "And so I am, dear; more than worthy. Kate, dearest, do you know that I am going to make you a happy woman, that I give you the devotion of my life? Every hour shall be spent in devising some new pleasure for you, in making you one of the most envied of your sex. I am older, but what of that? Perhaps your young fancy has strayed toward some hero whom your imagination has pictured; but you are not a foolish girl. You have so much common sense that you must see that your position renders it compulsory that you should have a protector." "A protector!" she cried bitterly. "Yes; I must be plain with you, unless you throw off all this foolish resistance. Come, be sensible. To-morrow, or the next day, we will be married, and then we can set the whole world at defiance." "Mr Garstang, you are mad!" she cried, with such a look of repugnance in her eyes that she stung him into sudden rage. "Mad for loving you?" he cried. "For loving me!" she said scornfully. "No, it is the miserable love of the wretched fortune. Well, take it; only loose me now; let me go. You are a lawyer, sir, and I suppose you know what to do. There are pens and paper. Loose me, and go and sit down and write; I promise you I will not try to leave the room; lock the door, if you like, till you have done writing." "It is already locked," he said mockingly; and he smiled as he saw her turn pale. "Very well," she said calmly; "then I cannot escape. Go and write, and I will sign it without a murmur. I give everything to you; only let me go. It is impossible that we can ever meet again." "Indeed!" he said, laughing. "Foolish child, how little you know of these things! Suppose I do want your money; do you think that anything I could write, or you could sign, would give it me without this little hand? Besides, I don't want it without its mistress--my mistress--the beautiful little girl who during her stay here has taught me that there is something worth living for. There, there, we are wasting breath. What is the use of fighting against the inevitable? Love me as your husband, Kate. I am the same man whom you loved as your guardian. There, I want to be gentle and tender with you. Why don't you give up quietly and say that you will come with me like a sensible little girl, and be my wife?" "Because I would sooner die," she said, firmly. "As young ladies say in old-fashioned romances," he cried mockingly. "There, you force me to speak very plainly to you. I must; and you are wise enough to see that every word is true. Now listen. You have not many friends; I may say I, your lover, am the only one; but when you took that step with me one night, eloping from your bedroom window, placing yourself under my protection, and living here secluded with me in this old house for all these months, what would they say? Little enough, perhaps nothing; but there is a significant shrug of the shoulders which people give, and which means much, my child, respecting a woman's character. You see now that you must marry me." "No," she said calmly; "I trusted myself to the guardianship of a man almost old enough to be my grandfather. He professed to be my father's friend, and I fled to him to save myself from insult. Will the world blame me for that, Mr Garstang?" "Yes, the world will, and will not believe." "Then what is the opinion of the world, as you term it, worth? Now, sir, I insist upon your letting me go to my room." As she spoke, she struggled violently, and throwing herself back over the head of the couch made a snatch at the bell-pull, with such success that the smothered tones of a violent peal reached where they were. Garstang started up angrily, and taking advantage of her momentary freedom, Kate sprang to the door and turned the key, but before she could open it he was at her side. "You foolish child!" he said, in a low angry voice; "how can you act--" Half mad with fear, she struck at him, the back of her hand catching him sharply on the lips, and before he could recover from his surprise, she had passed through the door and fled to her room, where she locked and bolted herself in, and then sank panting and sobbing violently upon her knees beside her bed. CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT. "Yes; what is it?" Kate Wilton raised her head from where it rested against the bed as she crouched upon the floor, and gazed round wonderingly, conscious that someone had called her by name, but with everything else a blank. There was a tapping at the door. "Yes, yes," said Kate; and she hurried across the room. "If you please, ma'am, breakfast is waiting, and master's compliments, and will you come down?" "Yes; I'll be down directly," she cried; and then she pressed her hands to her head and tried to think, but for some moments all was strange and confused, and she wondered why she should have been sleeping there upon the floor, dressed as she was on the previous night, the flowers she had worn still at her breast. The flowers crushed and bruised! They acted as the key to the closed mental door, which sprang open, and in one flash of the light which flooded her brain she saw all that had passed before she fled there, and then knelt by the bedside, praying for help, and striving to evolve some means of escape, till, utterly exhausted, nature would bear no more, and she fell asleep, to be awakened by the coming of the housekeeper. And she had told her that she would be down directly. What should she do? Hurrying to the bell, she rang, and then waited with beating heart for the woman's footsteps, which seemed an age in coming; but at last there was a tap at the door. "Did you ring, ma'am?" "Yes; I am unwell I am not coming down." "Can I do anything for you, ma'am?" "No." Kate stood thinking for a few moments with her hands to her throbbing brows, for her head was growing confused again, and mental darkness seemed to be closing in; but once more the light came, and she tore the crushed flowers from her breast, put on her bonnet and mantle, and then, hurriedly, her gloves. She felt that she must get away from that house at once; she could not determine then where she would go; that would come afterwards; she could not even think then of anything but escape. Her preparations took but a few minutes, and then she went to the door and listened. All was still in the house as far as she could make out, and timidly unfastening the door, she softly opened it, to look out on the great landing, but started back, for in the darkest corner there was a figure. Only one of the statues, the one just beyond the great curtain over the archway leading to the little library; and gaining courage and determination, she stepped out, and cautiously looked down into the sombre hall. Everything was still there, and she could just see that the dining-room door was shut, a sign that Garstang was within, at his solitary breakfast. Her breath came and went as if she had been running, and she pressed her hand upon her side to try and subdue the heavy throbbing of her heart. If she could only reach the front door unheard, and steal out! She drew back, for there was a faint rattling sound, as of a cover upon a dish; then footsteps, and as she drew back she could see the housekeeper cross the hall with a small tray, enter the dining-room, whose door closed behind her, and the next minute come out, empty-handed, re-cross the hall, and disappear. Then her voice rose to where Kate stood, as she called to her daughter. Garstang must be in the dining-room, at his breakfast; and, desperate now in her dread, Kate drew a deep breath, walked silently over the soft carpet to the head of the stairs, and with her dress rustling lightly, descended, reached the hall, seeing that the door appeared to be in its customary state, and the next moment she would have been there, trying to let herself out, when she was arrested by a faint sound, half-ejaculation, half-sigh, and turning quickly, there, upon the staircase, straining over the balustrade to watch her, was Becky, with the sunlight from a stained-glass window full upon her bandaged face. Making an angry gesture to her to go back, Kate was in the act of turning once more when a firm hand grasped her wrist, an arm was passed about her waist, and with a sudden drag she was drawn into the library and the door closed, Garstang standing there, stern and angry, between her and freedom. "Where are you going?" he cried. "Away from here," she said, meeting his eyes bravely. "This is no place for me, Mr Garstang. Let me pass, sir." "That is no answer, my child," he said. "Where are you going? What are your plans?" She made no answer, but stepped forward to try and pass him; but he took her firmly and gently, and forced her to sit down. "As I expected, you have no idea--you have no plans--you have nowhere to go; and yet in a fit of mad folly you would fly from here, the only place where you could take refuge; and why?" "Because I have found that the man I believed in was not worthy of that trust." "No; because in a maddening moment, when my love for you had broken bounds, I spoke out, prematurely perhaps, but I obeyed the dictates of my breast. But there, I am not going to deliver speeches; I only wish to make you understand fully what is your position and mine. I said a great deal last night, enough to have taught you much; above all, that our marriage is a necessity, for your sake as much as mine. No, no; sit still and be calm. We must both be so, and you must talk reasonably. Now, my dear, take off that bonnet and mantle." She made no reply. "Well, I will not trouble about that now. You will see the necessity after a few minutes. First of all, let me impress upon you the simple facts of your position here. In the first place, you are kept here by the way in which you have compromised yourself. Yes, you have; and if you drove me to it I should openly proclaim that you have been my mistress, and were striving to break our ties in consequence of a quarrel." She made no reply, but her eyes seemed to blaze. "Yes," he said, with a smile; "I understand your looks. I am a traitor, and a coward, and a villain; that is, I suppose, the interpretation from your point of view; but let me tell you there are thousands of men who would be ten times the traitor, coward and villain that you mentally call me, to win you and your smiles, as I shall." He stood looking down at her with a proud look of power, and she involuntarily shrank back in her seat and trembled. "In the second place," he continued, "I take it from your manner that you mean for a few days to be defiant, and that you will try to escape. Well, try if you like, and find how vain it is. I have you here, and in spite of everything I shall keep you safely. I will be plain and frank. For your fortune and for yourself I love you with a middle-aged man's strong love for a beautiful girl who has awakened in him passions that he thought were dead. You will try and escape? No, you will not; for now, for the first time, I shall really cage the lovely little bird I have entrapped. You will keep to your room, a prisoner, till you place your hands in mine, and tell me that you are mine whenever I wish. You will appeal to my servants? Well, appeal to them. You will try and escape by your window? Well, try. You must know by now that it opens over a narrow yard, and an attempt to descend from that means death; but there are ways of fastening such a window as that, and this will be done, for I want to live and love, and your death would mean mine." He paused and looked down at her in calm triumph, but her firm gaze never left his, and her lips were tightly drawn together. "I could appeal to your pity, but I will not now. I could tell you of my former loveless marriage, and my weary life with the wretched woman who entrapped me; but you will find all that out in time, and try to recompense me for the early miseries of my life, and for your cruel coldness now. There, I have nearly done. I have gambled over this, my child, and I have won, so far as obtaining my prize. To obtain its full enjoyment, I have treated you as I have since you have been here, during which time I have taught you to love me as a friend and father. I am going to teach you to love me now as a husband--a far easier task." "No!" she cried, angrily. "I would sooner die." "Spare your breath, my dear, and try and school yourself to the acceptance of your fate. Claud Wilton is in town, hunting for you, and do you think I will let that young scoundrel drag you into what really would be a degrading marriage? I would sooner kill him. Come, come, be sensible," he cried, speaking perfectly calmly, and never once attempting to lessen the distance between them. "I startled you last night. See how gentle and tender I am with you to-day. I love you too well to blame you in any way. I love you, I tell you; and I know quite well that the passion is still latent in your breast; but I know, too, that it will bud and blossom, and that some day you will wonder at your conduct toward one who has proved his love for you. I cannot blame myself, even if I have been driven to win you by a coup. Who would not have done the same, I say again? You have charmed me by your beauty, and by the beauties of your intellect; and once more I tell you gently and lovingly that you must now accept your fate, and look upon me as a friend, father, lover, husband, all in one. Kate, dearest, you shall not repent it, so be as gentle and kind to me as I am to you." He ceased, and she sat there gazing at him fixedly still. "Now," he said, changing his manner and tone, "we must have no more clouds between us. You need not shrink and begin beating your wings, little bird. I will be patient, and we will go on, if you wish it, where we left off last evening when you came here from the dining-room. I am guardian again until you have thought all this over, and are ready to accept the inevitable. We must not have you ill, and wanting the doctor." A thrill ran through her, and as if it were natural to turn to him who came when she was once before sorely in need of help, she recalled the firm, calm face of Pierce Leigh; but a faint flush coloured her cheek, as if in shame for her thought. Garstang saw the brightening of her face, and interpreted it wrongly. "A means of escape from me?" he said. "What a foolish, childish thought! Too romantic for a woman of your strength of mind, Kate. No, I shall not let you leave me like that. There, you must be faint and hungry; so am I. Take off your things, and come and face your guardian at the table, in the old fashion. No? You prefer to go back to your room this morning? Well, let it be so. Only try and be sensible. It is so childish to let the servants be witnesses to such a little trouble as this. There, your head is bad, of course; and you altered your mind about going for a walk." He opened the door for her to pass out, and then rang the bell. "Mrs Plant answered the bell last night," he said, meaningly. "Poor woman, she had gone to bed, and came here in alarm; so she knows that you were taken ill and went to your room. I would not let her come and disturb you, as you were so agitated.--Ah, Mrs Plant, your mistress does not feel equal to staying down to breakfast. Go and get a tray ready, and take it up to her in her room." The woman hurried to carry out Garstang's wishes, and Kate rose to her feet, while he drew back to let her pass. "The front door is fastened," he said, with a quiet smile, "and there is no window that you can open to call for help. Even if you could, and people came to inquire what was the matter, a few words respecting the sick and delirious young lady upstairs would send them away. It is curious what a wholesome dread ordinary folk have of an illness being infectious. Will you come down to dinner, or sooner, dearest?" he said, sinking his voice to a whisper, full of tenderness. "I shall be here, and only too glad to welcome you when you come, sweet dove, with the olive branch of peace between us, and take it as the symbol of love." A prisoner, indeed, and the chains seemed to fetter and weigh her down as, without a word, her eyes fixed and gazing straight before her, she walked by him into the hall, mastered the wild agonising desire to fling herself at the door and call for help, and went slowly to the stairs, catching sight of the pale bandaged face peering over the balustrade and then drawn back to disappear. But as Kate saw it a gleam of hope shot through the darkness. Poor Becky--letters--appeals for help to Jenny Leigh. Could she not get a message sent by the hand of the strange-looking, shrinking girl? She went on steadily up towards her room, without once turning her head, feeling conscious that Garstang was standing below watching her; but by the time she reached the first landing there was the sound of a faint cough and steps crossing to the dining-room, and she breathed more freely, and glanced downward as she turned to ascend the second flight. The hall was vacant, and looking toward the doorway through which Becky had glided, she called to her in a low, excited whisper: "Becky! Becky!" But there was no reply, and hurrying up the rest of the way she followed the girl, entered the room into which she had passed, and found her standing in the attitude of one listening intently. "Becky, I want to speak to you," she whispered; but the girl darted to a door at the other end, and was gliding through into the dressing-room, through which she could reach the staircase. This time Kate was too quick for her, and caught her by the dress, the girl uttering a low moan, full of despair, and hanging away with all her might, keeping her face averted the while. "Don't, don't do that," whispered Kate, excitedly. "Why are you afraid of me?" "Let me go; oh! please let me go." "Yes, directly," whispered Kate, still holding her tightly; "but please, Becky, I want you to help me. I am in great trouble, dear--great trouble." "Eh?" said the girl, faintly, "you?" "Yes, and I do so want help. Will you do something for me?" "No, I can't," whispered the girl. "I'm no use; I oughtn't to be here; don't look at me, please; and pray, pray let me go." "Yes, I will, dear; but you will help me. Come to my room when your mother has been." The girl turned her white grotesque face, and stared at her with dilated eyes. "You will, won't you?" Becky shook her head. "Not to help a poor sister in distress?" said Kate, appealingly. "You ain't my sister, and I must go. If he knew I'd talked to you he'd be so cross." With a sudden snatch the girl released her dress and fled, leaving Kate striving hard to keep back her tears, as she went on to the broad landing and reached her room, thinking of the little library and the account she had heard of the former occupant, who found life too weary for him, and had sought rest. Her first impulse was to lock her door, but feeling that she had nothing immediate to fear, and that perhaps a display of acquiescence in Garstang's plans might help her to escape, she sat down to think, or rather try to think, for her brain was in a whirl, and thought crowded out thought before she had time to grasp one. But she had hardly commenced her fight when there was a tap at the door, and Sarah Plant entered with a breakfast tray, looking smiling and animated. "I'm so sorry, ma'am; but I've made you a very strong cup of tea, and your breakfast will do you good. There. Now let me help you off with your things." "No, no, never mind now. Mrs Plant, will you do something to help me?" "Of course, I will, ma'am. There isn't anything I wouldn't do for you." "Why are you smiling at me in that way?" "Me smiling, ma'am? Was I? Oh, nothing." "I insist upon your telling me. Ah, you know what has taken place." "Well, well, ma'am, please don't be angry with me for it. You did give the bell such a peal last night, you quite startled me." "Then you do know everything?" "Well, yes, ma'am; you see, I couldn't help it. Me and poor Becky always knew that you were to be the new missis here from the day you came." "No, it is impossible. I must go away from here at once." "Lor', my dear, don't you take it like that! Why, what is there to mind? Master is one of the dearest and best of men; and think what a chance it is for you, and what a home." "Oh, silence; don't talk like that! I tell you it is impossible." "Ah, that's because you're thinking about Master being a bit older than you are. But what of that? My poor dear man was twice as old as me, and he never had but one fault--he would die too soon." "I tell you it is impossible, my good woman," cried Kate, imperiously. "I have been entrapped and deceived, and I call upon you, as a woman, to help me." "Yes, ma'am, of course I'll help you." "Ah! then wait here while I write a few lines to one of my father's old friends." "A letter? Yes, ma'am; but if you please, Master said that all letters were to be taken to him." "As they were before?" said Kate, with a light flashing in upon her clouded brain. "Yes, ma'am; he said so a week or two before you came." "Planned, planned, planned!" muttered Kate, despairingly. "Yes, ma'am, and of course I must take them to him. You see, he is my master, and I will say this of him--a better and kinder master never lived. Oh, my dear, don't be so young and foolish. You couldn't do better than what he wishes, and make him happy, and yourself, too." "Will you help me, woman, to get away from here? I will pay you enough to make you rich if you will," said Kate, desperately. "I will do anything I can for you, ma'am, that isn't going against Master; of that you may be sure." "Then will you post a couple of letters for me?" cried Kate, desperately. "No, ma'am, please, I mustn't do that." "Go away," cried Kate, fiercely now. "Leave me to myself." "Oh, my dear, don't, pray, go on like that I know you're young, and the idea frightens you; but it isn't such a very dreadful thing to be married to a real good man." Kate darted to the door, flung it open, and stood with flashing eyes, pointing outward. "Oh, yes, ma'am, of course I'll go; but do, pray, take my advice. You see, you're bound to marry him now, and--" The door was closed upon her, and Kate began to pace up and down, like some timid creature freshly awakened to the fact of its being caged, and grown desperate at the thought. "Helpless, and a prisoner!" she groaned to herself. "What shall I do? Is there no way of escape?" And once more the thought of Jenny Leigh and her brother came to her mind, and the feeling grew stronger that she might find help there. But it seemed impossible unless she could write and stamp a letter and throw it from the window, trusting to some one to pick it up and post it. No; the idea seemed weak and vain, and she cast it from her, as she paced up and down, with her hands clasped and pressed to her throbbing breast. "There is no help--no help!" she moaned, and then uttered a faint cry of alarm, for the door behind her was softly opened, and the idea that it was Garstang flashed through her brain as she looked wildly round. Becky's white tied-up face was just thrust in, and the door held tightly to, as if about to act as a perpendicular guillotine and shave through her neck. CHAPTER THIRTY NINE. Kate uttered a gasp of relief on finding her fear needless, and darted towards the door, when, to her despair, the grotesque head was snatched back. "Becky! Becky!" she cried piteously, as the door was closing; and she stood still, not daring to approach. Her action had its effect, for the door was slowly pressed open again, and the bow of the washed-out cotton handkerchief which bandaged the woman's face gradually appeared, the ends, which stuck up like a small pair of horns, trembling visibly. Then by very small degrees the woman's forehead and the rest of the face appeared, with the eyes showing the white all round, as their owner gazed at the prisoner with her usual scared look intensified. "Pray come in, Becky," said Kate, softly; and she drew back towards a chair, so as to try and inspire a little confidence. The head was slowly shaken, and the door drawn once more tightly against the woman's long thin neck. "Whatcher want?" she said, faintly. "I want you to come in and talk to me," said Kate in a low, appealing tone. "I want you to help me." "Dursn't." "Yes, yes, you dare. Pray, pray don't say that I have no one to ask but you. Oh, Becky, Becky, I am so unhappy. If you have a woman's heart within your breast, have pity on me!" "Gug!" A spasm contracted the pallid face as a violent sob escaped from her lips, and the tears began to flow from the dilated eyes, and were accompanied by unpleasant sniffs. "Don't make me cr-cr-cry, miss, please." "No, no, don't cry, Becky dear, pray," whispered Kate, anxiously. "You make me, miss--going on like that; and d-don't call me dear, please. I ain't dear to nobody; I'm a miserable wretch." "I always pitied you, Becky, but you never would let me be kind to you." "N-no, miss. It don't do no good. On'y makes me mis'rable." "But I must be; I will be kind to you, Becky, and try and make you happy," whispered Kate. "Tain't to be done, miss, till I die," said the woman, sadly; and then there was a triumphant light in her eyes, and her face lit up as she said more firmly, "but I'm going to be happy then." "Yes, yes, and I'll try to make you happy while you live; but you will help me, dear?" The poor creature shook her head. "Yes, you will--I'm sure you will," pleaded Kate. "But pray come in." "Dursn't, miss." "But I am in such trouble, Becky." "Yes, I know; he wants to marry you, and he's going to keep you locked up till he does. I know." "Yes, yes; and I want to get away." "But you can't," whispered the woman, and she withdrew her head, and Kate in her despair thought she had gone. But the head reappeared slowly. "Nobody watching," she whispered. "I must go away, and you must help me, Becky," whispered Kate. "It's no good. He won't let you, miss. But don't you marry him." "Never!" cried Kate. "Hush, or they'll hear you; and mother's siding with him, and going to help him. She says he's an angel, but he's all smooth smiles, and talks to you like a saint, but he's a horrid wretch." "Yes, yes. But now listen to me." "Yes, I'm a-listening, miss. It's all because you're so pretty and handsome, and got lots o' money, aintcher?" "Yes, unhappily," sighed Kate. "That's what he wants. He got all poor old master's money, and the house and furniture out of him." "He did?" whispered Kate, excitedly. "Yes, miss; I know. Mother says it's all nonsense, and that we ought to love him, because he's such a good man. But I know better. Poor old master used to tell me when I took him up his letters: `Ah, Becky, my poor girl, you are disappointed and unhappy,' he says, `but I'm more unhappy still. That man won't be satisfied till he has ground the last farthing out of me, and there's nothing left but my corpse.' I didn't believe him, and I said, `Don't let him have it, sir.' `Ah, Becky,' he says, `I'm obliged; signed papers are stronger than iron chains,' he says, `and he's always dragging at the end. But he shall have it all, and heavy pounds o' flesh at the end, and the bones too.' I didn't know what he meant, miss; and I didn't believe as anyone could be as unlucky as me. But I believed him at last, when I went to his room and found him dead on the floor; and then I knew he must be worse than I was, for I couldn't have done what he did." "Becky," whispered Kate, fixing the trembling woman with her eyes, "I can understand how people who are very unhappy seek for rest in death. Do you wish to come here some morning, and find me lying dead?" "Oh, miss!" cried the woman, excitedly, pushing the door more open; "don't, please don't you go and do a thing like that. You're too young and beautiful, and--oh, oh, oh! Please don't talk so; I can't abear it--pray!" "Then help me, Becky, for I tell you I would sooner die." "What, than marry him?" "Yes, than marry this dreadful man." "Then--then," whispered the woman, after withdrawing her head to gaze back, "I feel that I dursn't, and p'raps he'll kill me for it--not as I seem to mind much, and mother would soon get over it, for I ain't o' no use--but I think I will try and help you. You want to get away?" In her wild feeling of joy and excitement, Kate sprang toward the door, and she would have flung her arms round the unhappy woman's neck. But before she could reach her the head was snatched back, and the fastening gave a loud snap, while when she opened it, Becky had disappeared and her mother was coming up the stairs to fetch the breakfast tray. "And not touched a bit, my dear," said the housekeeper, with a reproachful shake of the head. "Now you must, you know; you must, indeed. And do let me advise you, my dear. Mr Garstang is such a good man, and so indulgent, and it's really naughty of you to be so foolish as to oppose his wishes." Kate turned upon her with a look that astounded the woman, who stood with parted lips, breathless, while a piece of bread was broken from the loaf on the tray, and a cup of tea poured out and placed aside. "Take away that tray," said Kate, imperiously; "and remember your place. Never presume to speak to me again like that." "No, ma'am--certainly not, ma'am," said the woman, hastily. "I beg your pardon, ma'am, I am sure." "Leave the room, and do not come again until I ring." "My!" ejaculated the woman, as soon as she was on the landing, "to think of such a gentle-looking little thing being able to talk like that! P'raps master's caught a tartar now." There was a gleam of hope, then, after all. Poor Becky was not the vacant idiot she had always appeared. Kate felt that she had made one friend, and trembling with eagerness she went to the writing-table and wrote quickly a few lines to Jenny Leigh, briefly explaining her position, and begging her to lay the matter before her brother and ask his help and advice. This she inclosed and directed, and then sat gazing before her, conjuring the scene to follow at the cottage, and the indignation of Leigh. And as she thought, the warm blood tinged her pale cheeks once more, and she covered her face with her hands, to sit there sobbing for a few minutes before slowly tearing up the letter till the fragments were too small ever to be found and read by one curious to know their contents. Gladly as she would have seen Pierce Leigh appear and insist upon her taking refuge with his sister, she felt that she could not send such an appeal to those who were comparative strangers; and though she would not own to it even to herself, she felt that there were other reasons why she could not write. An hour of intense mental agony and dread passed, and she had to strive hard to keep down the terrible feeling of panic which nearly mastered her, and tempted her to rush down the stairs to try once more to escape, or to go to one of the front windows, throw it open, and shriek for help. "It would be an act of madness," she sighed, as she recalled Garstang's words respecting the sick lady. "And they would believe him!" she cried, while the feeling of helplessness grew and grew as she felt how thoroughly she was in Garstang's power. Then came the thought of her aunt and uncle, her natural protectors, and she determined to write to them. James Wilton would fetch her away at once, for he was her guardian; and surely now, she told herself, she was woman enough to insist upon proper respect being paid to her wishes. She could set at defiance any of her cousin's advances; and her conduct in leaving showed itself up in its strongest colours, as being cowardly--the act of a child. With a fresh display of energy she wrote to her aunt, detailing everything, and bidding her--not begging--to tell her uncle to come to her rescue at once. But no sooner was the letter written than she felt that her aunt would behave in some weak, foolish way, and there would be delay. She tore up that letter slowly, and after hiding the pieces, she sat there thinking again, with her brow wrinkled, and the look of agony in her face intensifying. "I have right on my side. He is my guardian, and he dare not act otherwise than justly by me. I am no longer the weak child now." And once more she took paper, and wrote this time to James Wilton himself, telling him that Garstang had lured her away by the promise of protection, but had shown himself in the vilest colours at last. "He must--he shall protect me," she said, exultantly, and she hastily directed the letter. But as she sat there with the letter in her hand, she shrank and trembled. For in vivid colours her imagination painted before her the trouble and persecution to which she would expose herself. She knew well enough what were James Wilton's aims, and that situated as he was, he would stand at nothing to gain them. It was in vain she told herself that anything would be preferable to staying there at John Garstang's mercy, the horror of rushing headlong back to her guardian, and the thoughts of his triumphant looks as he held her tightly once again, proved too much for her, and this letter was slowly torn up and the pieces hidden. As she sat there, with every nerve on the rack, a strange feeling of faintness came over her, and she started up in horror at the idea of losing her senses, and being at this man's mercy. And as she walked hurriedly to and fro, trembling as she felt the faintness increasing, some relief came, for she grasped the fact that her faintness was due to want of food, and it was past mid-day. There was the bread close at hand, though, and turning to it she began to crumble up the pieces and to eat, though it was only with the greatest difficulty that she accomplished her task. But it had the required effect--the sensation of sinking passed off. And now she set herself the task of trying to think of some one among the very few friends she had known before her father's death to whom she could send for help; but there did not occur to her mind one to whom she could apply in such a strait. There were the people at the bank, and the doctor who had attended her father in his last illness, but they were comparatively such strangers that she shrank from writing to them; and at last, unnerved, and with her mind seeming to refuse to act, she sat there feeling that there was not a soul in the world whom she could trust but the Leighs. She could send to Jenny, who would, she knew, be up in arms at once; but there was her brother. She could not, she dared not, ask him; and it would be, she felt, asking him. It would be so interpreted if she wrote. And then came the question which sent a shiver through her frame--what must he think of her, and would he come to her help as he would have done before she committed so rash an act? Kate's weary ponderings were interrupted by a tap at the door, which produced a fit of trembling, and she glided to it to slip the bolt, which had hardly passed into its socket before the housekeeper's voice was heard. "I beg your pardon, ma'am, but lunch is ready, and master would be glad to know if you are well enough to come down." A stern negative was the reply, and for about a quarter of an hour she was undisturbed. Then came another tap, and the rattling of china and glass. "If you please, ma'am, I've brought your lunch." She hesitated for a few moments. The desire was strong to refuse to take anything, but she felt that if she was to keep setting Garstang at defiance till she could escape, she must have energy and strength. So, unwillingly enough, she unfastened the door, the housekeeper entered with a tray, and set it down upon the table. "Can I bring you up anything more, ma'am, and would you like any wine?" "No," was the abrupt answer, in tones that would bear no reply, and the woman went away, the door being fastened after her. The lunch tray looked dainty enough, but it remained untouched for a time. A desperate resolve had come upon the prisoner, and once more seating herself, she wrote a piteous letter to Jenny, imploring help, directed it, and placed it ready for giving to poor Becky when she came again. Stamps she had none, but she had a little money, and doubtless the girl would dispatch her note in safety. The desperate step taken, she felt more at ease, and feeling that her state of siege must last for a couple of days longer, she sat down and once more forced herself to eat, but she shrank from touching the water in the carafe, looking at it suspiciously, and preferring to partake of some that was in the room. The tray was fetched in due time, and the housekeeper smiled her satisfaction; but she went off without a word, and Kate felt that she would go straight to Garstang and report that the lunch had been eaten. She winced at this a little, but felt that it was inevitable, and feeling in better nerve she went to the door, which she had fastened, opened it a little, and stood there to watch for the coming of Becky. But the hours glided by, and with a creeping sense of horror she saw the wintry evening coming rapidly on, and thought of the night. Whenever a footstep was heard she was on the qui vive, but each time it was the mother. The daughter, who had before this seemed to be always gliding ghost-like about the place, was now invisible, and as Kate watched she saw the housekeeper light the hall jets and then descend to the kitchen region. Twice over she shrank back and secured the door, for she heard Garstang cough slightly, and saw him cross the hall from library to dining-room, and in each case she let some minutes elapse before she dared open and peer out again. The last time it was to be aware of the fact that the dinner hour had come once more, and soon after the woman began to ascend the stairs, Kate retiring within and slipping the bolt, to stand and listen for the message she knew would be delivered. "Master's compliments, and are you well enough to come down, ma'am?" The brief negative sent the messenger down again, and the prisoner was left undisturbed for a few minutes, when there was the sound of a tray being brought to the door, but this time it was refused entrance. Kate watched again eagerly now, feeling that in all probability Becky would try to see her while her mother was occupied in the dining-room, but the time passed on and there was no sign of her, and thoughts of desperate venturing to try and reach the front door attacked the listener, but only to be dismissed. "It would only be to expose myself to insult," she said, and growing more and more despondent, she once more closed and secured the door, expecting that there would be a fresh message sent up. In due time there was another tap at the door, but no request for her to come down. "I have brought you up some tea, ma'am." Kate hesitated about admitting the woman, for the memory of the scene at the same hour on the previous night flashed across her, but instinctively feeling that the messenger was alone, she unfastened the door and let her in. "Master's compliments, ma'am, and he hopes that your quiet day's rest will have done you good. He says he will not trouble you to see him to-night, but he hopes you will be yourself again in the morning. Good-night, ma'am; I won't disturb you again. The things can be left on the side-table. Is there anything else I can do?" "No, I thank you," said Kate, coldly. "Very good, ma'am." The woman went back to the door, and Kate's last hope of her turning a friend to help her died out, for she heard her sigh and say softly, evidently to be heard: "Poor dear master; it's very sad." "Good-night!" said Kate, involuntarily repeating the woman's words. "God help me and protect me through the long night watches, and inspire me with the thought that shall bring me help. How can I dare to sleep?" The answer came from Nature--imperative, and who knew no denial; for once more the prisoner awoke, wondering to find that it was morning and that she must have slept for many hours in a chair. CHAPTER FORTY. In the hope that an opportunity would soon come, and to be ready at any moment, one of Kate's first acts that morning was to write plainly a few words on a sheet of paper, begging Becky to post her letter, and inclosing it with the note in another envelope, which she directed to the woman herself. This she placed in the fold of her dress, where she could draw it out directly, and waited. The housekeeper was not long before she made her appearance with the breakfast tray, and was respectful in the extreme. "Master thought, ma'am, that perhaps you might like your breakfast alone this morning, but he hopes to see you at lunch. He is so unwell that he is not going out this morning." "Staying to watch for fear I should escape," thought Kate, and a nervous shiver ran through her; but rest seemed to have given her mental strength, and after breakfast she felt disposed to ridicule the idea of her being kept there against her will. "It must be possible to get away," she thought. It only wanted nerve and determination, for there was but the wall of the house between her and safety. Soon after breakfast the housekeeper appeared again, to remove the breakfast things. "Would you mind me coming to tidy up your room, ma'am, while you are here, or would you prefer my waiting till you go down?" "Do it now," said Kate, quietly; and to avoid being spoken to, she took up a book and held it as if she were reading. But all the time she was noting everything, with her senses on the alert, and the next minute her heart began to throb wildly, for she saw the woman go to the door, pass out the tray, and it was evident that some order was given. Becky was there, and Kate sat trembling, her excitement increasing when the next minute there was a light tap at the door, and Becky was admitted to assist in rearranging the room. This went on for about a quarter of an hour, with Becky carefully minding not to glance at the prisoner, who, with head bent, watched her every movement, on the hope of her being left alone for a few minutes. But as the mother was always near at hand, the opportunity did not come; and at last, with the envelope doubled in her hand, Kate began to feel that she might give up this time, and would have to wait till she could see the woman passing her room. The disappointment was terrible, and Kate's heart sank in her despair as the housekeeper suddenly said: "There, that will do--get on downstairs." She stood back for her daughter to pass her, and then followed to the door, where a whispered conversation ensued. "What? Left the brush?" "Yes; other side of the room." "Be quick, then. Fetch it out." The housekeeper was passing through the door as she spoke, and Becky reappeared, to cross the room hurriedly, with her face lighting up as she gave the prisoner a meaning look, drew something from her bosom, and thrust it into Kate's hand, and took the note offered to her. "Now, Becky!" came from outside. The woman darted to the door. "Well?" "Can't find it. Tain't there." The door closed, and Kate was once more alone, to eagerly examine the tiny packet handed to her. It was square, about an inch across, roughly tied up with black worsted, and proved to be a sheet of note paper, doubled up small, and containing the words, written in an execrable hand: "You run away. Come down at twelve o'clock, and I'll let you out threw the airy." Letter rarely contained such hope as this, and the receiver, as she sat there, with her pulses bounding in her excitement, saw no further difficulty. Her lonely position in London, the want of friends to whom she could flee, the awkward hour of the night--these all seemed to be trifles compared to the great gain, for in a few hours she would be free. She carefully destroyed the note, burning it in the fireplace, and then sat thinking, after opening and gazing out of the window, to realise how true Garstang's words had been. But they were of no consequence now, for the way of escape was open, and she repented bitterly that she had dispatched her letter to Jenny. Then once more a feeling akin to shame made her flush, as she thought of Leigh and what he would feel on hearing the letter read by his sister. The day passed slowly on. A message came, asking if she would come down to lunch, and she refused. Later on came another message, almost a command, that she would be in her usual place at dinner, and to this she made no reply, for none seemed needed; but she determined that she would not stir from her room. Then more and more slowly the time glided on, till it was as if night would never come. But she made her preparations, so as to be ready when midnight did arrive. They were simple enough, and consisted in placing, bonnet, mantle, and the fewest necessaries. Her plans were far more difficult: where to go? She sat and thought of every friend in turn, but there was a difficulty in the way in each case; and in spite of trying hard to avoid it, as the last resource, she seemed to be driven to take refuge with Jenny Leigh; and in deciding finally upon this step she forced herself to ignore the thought of her brother, while feeling exhilarated by the thought that the course pursued would be the one most likely to throw Garstang off her track, for Northwood would be the last place he would credit her with fleeing to. Her head grew clearer now, as her hope of escape brightened, and the plans appeared easier and easier, and the way more clear. For it was so simple. Garstang and the housekeeper would by that time be asleep, and all she would have to do would be to steal silently down in the darkness to where Becky would be waiting for her. She would take her into the basement, and she would be free. If she could persuade her, she would take the poor creature with her. She would be a companion and protection, and rob her night journey of its strange appearance. The rest seemed to be mere trifles. She would walk for some distance, and then take a cab to the railway terminus at London Bridge, and wait till the earliest morning train started. The officials might think it strange, but she could take refuge in the waiting room. And now, feeling satisfied that her ideas were correct, she thought of her letter to Jenny. This would only be received just before her arrival, but it would have prepared her, and all would be well. The only dread that she had now was that she might encounter anyone from the Manor House at the station. On the way, the station fly would hide her from the curious gaze, but the thought made her carefully place a veil ready for use. Then came a kind of reaction; was it not madness to go to Northwood? Her uncle would soon know, and as soon as he did, he would insist upon her going back, and then-- Kate reached no farther into the future, for there was a knock at the door, and the housekeeper appeared, smiling at her, and handed her a note. She saw at a glance that it was in Garstang's handwriting, and she refused to take it, whereupon the woman placed it upon the table, close to her elbow, and left the room. For quite half an hour, Kate sat there determined not to open the letter, and trying hard not even to look at it; but human nature is weak, and unable to control the desire to know its contents, and excusing herself on the plea that perhaps it might have some bearing upon her plans for that night--a bearing which would force her to alter them--she took it up, opened it, and then sat gazing at it in despair. It was a large envelope, and the first thing which fell from it was her letter to Jenny, apparently unopened, but crumpled and soiled as if it had been held in a hot and dirty hand; while the other portion of the contents of the envelope was a letter from Garstang, calling her foolish and childish and asking her if she thought his threats so vain and empty that he had not taken precautions against her trying such a feeble plan as that. "I can not be angry with you," he concluded, "I love you too well; but I do implore you, for your sake as well as my own, to act sensibly, and cease forcing me to carry on a course which degrades us both. Come, dearest, be wise; act like a woman should under the circumstances. You know well how I worship you. Show me in return some little pity, and let me have its first fruits in your presence at the dinner-table this evening. I promise you that you shall have no cause to regret coming down. My treatment shall be full of the most chivalrous respect, and I will wait as long as you wish, if only you will give me your word to be my wife." Was there any other way of sending the letter? Could she cast it from the window, in the hope of its being picked up and posted? She feared not, and passed the weary minutes thinking that she must give it up. But she roused herself after a time. The mother had evidently taken the letter from Becky, and handed it to Garstang; but the flight was Becky's own proposal, and now, after getting into trouble as she would have done over the letter, she would be the more likely to join in the flight. Dinner was announced, but she refused to go down, and after partaking of what was sent up, she waited and waited till bed-time was approaching, giving the housekeeper cause to think from her actions that she was going to bed, and fastening her door loudly as the woman left the room after saying good-night. And now came the most crucial time. She knew from old experience what Garstang's habits were. He would read for about half an hour after the housekeeper had locked and barred the front door; and then go up to his room, which was in the front, upon the second floor; and she stood by the door, listening through the long leaden minutes for the sharp sound of the bolts and the rattle of bar and chain. Her brow was throbbing, and her hands felt damp in the palms with the dread she felt of some fresh development of Garstang's persecution, and she would have given anything to have unbolted and opened her door, so as to stand in the darkness and watch, but shivered with fear at the very thought. At last, plainly heard, came the familiar sounds, and now she pictured what would follow--the extinguishing of the staircase and hall lights, as the housekeeper and her child went up to bed in the attic, and the place left in darkness, save where a faint bar of rays came from beneath the library door. Half an hour later that door would be opened, and Garstang would pass up. Then there would be nearly an hour to wait before she dared to steal away. The agony and suspense now became so unbearable that Kate felt that she must do something or she would go mad; and at last she softly threw back the bolt, opened the door, and looked out. All was dark, and after listening intently, she glided out inch by inch till she reached the balustrade and peered down into the hall. Exactly as she had pictured, there were a few faint rays from the library door, and just heard there was the smothered sound of a cough. She stole back to listen, but first closed and bolted the door hastily, put on bonnet, veil, and mantle, and then put out the candles burning upon her dressing-table. This done, she crept back to the door and stood there, waiting to hear some sound, or to see the gleam of a candle when Garstang went up, but she waited in vain. The half-hour must have long passed, and she was fain to confess that since her coming she had never once heard him go up to bed. The thick carpets, the position of her door, would dull sound and hide the light passing along the landing, and when another half-hour had passed she mustered up sufficient courage to once more slip the bolt. It glided back silently, but the hinges gave a faint crack as she opened them, and she then stood fast, with her heart beating violently, ready to fling the door to and fasten it again. But all was still, and at last once more, inch by inch, she crept out silently till she was able to gaze down into the hall. The breath she drew came more freely now, for the faint bar of light from the library was no longer there, and in the utter silence of the place she knew that the door must be wide open, and the fire nearly extinct, for all at once there was the faint tinkling sound of dying cinders falling together. He must have gone up to bed. For a few moments Kate Wilton felt ready to hurry down the stairs, but she checked the desire. It was not the appointed time, and she stole back, closed the door, and forced herself to sit down and wait Becky had said twelve o'clock, and it would be folly to go down earlier. Never had the place seemed so silent before. The distant roll of a cab sounded faint in the extreme, and it was as if the great city was for the time being dead. And now her heart sank again at the thought of her venture. She was going to plunge into the silence and darkness of the streets, so it seemed to her then; and the idea was so fraught with fear that she felt she must resign herself to her fate, for she dared not. The faint striking of a clock sent a thrill through her, and once more she felt inspired with the courage to make the attempt. Becky would have stolen down, and be waiting, and perhaps after the trouble of the letter business be quite ready to go with her. "Yes, she must go," she said; and now, with every nerve drawn to its highest pitch of tension, she opened the door, and stood for a few moments listening. All was perfectly still, and hesitating no longer, she walked silently and swiftly to the staircase, caught at the hand-rail, and began to descend, her dress making a faint rustling as it passed over the thick carpet. Her goal was the door leading to the kitchen stairs, and the only dread she had now was that she might in the darkness touch one of the hall chairs, and make it scrape on the polished floor; but she recalled where each stood, and after a momentary pause, feeling convinced that she could make straight for the spot, she went on down into the darkness, reached the mat, and then found that there was a faint, dawn-like gleam coming from the fan-light over the door. Then her heart seemed to stand still, for just before her there was something shadowy and dark. "One of the statues," she thought for the moment, and then turned to flee, but stopped. "Becky," she whispered, and a hand touched her arm. CHAPTER FORTY ONE. A wild, despairing cry escaped Kate Wilton's lips, as the firm grasp of a man's hand closed upon and prisoned her wrist. "Hush, you foolish girl," was whispered, angrily, and she was caught by a strong arm thrown round her, the wrist released, and a hand was clapped upon her lips. "Do you want to alarm the house?" Her only reply was to struggle violently and try to tear the hand from her mouth, but she was helpless, and the arm round her felt like iron. "It is of no use to struggle, little bird," was whispered. "Are you not ashamed to drive me to watch you like this, and prevent you from perpetrating such a folly? What madness! Try to leave the house at midnight, by the help of that wretched idiotic girl, and trust yourself alone in the street. Truly, Kate, you need a watchful guardian. Now, as you prefer the darkness, come and sit down with me; I want a quiet talk with you. Kate, my dear, you force me to all this, and you must listen to reason now. There, it is of no use to struggle. Come with me quietly and sensibly, or I swear that I will carry you." Her answer was another frantic struggle, while, wrenching her head round, she freed herself from the pressure of his hand, and uttered another piercing scream. "Silence!" he cried, fiercely; and he was in the act of raising her from the floor, when she writhed herself nearly free, and in his effort to recover his grasp, he caught his foot on the mat and nearly fell. It was Kate's opportunity. With one hand she thrust at him, with the other struck at him madly, ran to the stairs, and bounded up, just reaching her room as a light gleamed from above and showed Garstang a dozen steps below, too late to overtake her before her door was dashed to and fastened. Then, as she stood there, panting and ready to faint with horror, she heard Garstang's angry voice and the whining replies of the housekeeper, while, though she could not grasp a word, she could tell by the tones that the woman was being abused for coming down, and was trying to make some excuse. How that night passed Kate Wilton hardly knew, save that it was one great struggle to master a weak feeling of pitiful helplessness which prompted her to say, "I can do no more." At times, from utter mental exhaustion, she sank into a kind of stupor, more than sleep, from which she invariably started with a faint cry of horror and despair, feeling that she was in some great peril, and that the darkness was peopled with something against which she must struggle in spite of her weakness. It was a nightmare-like experience, constantly repeated, and the grey morning found her feverish and weak, but in body only. Despair had driven her to bay, and there was a light in her eyes, a firmness in her words, which impressed the housekeeper when she came at breakfast time. "Master's compliments, ma'am, and he is waiting breakfast," she said; "and I beg your pardon, ma'am, but I thought I ought to tell you he is very angry. I never saw him like it before; and if you would be ruled by me, I'd go down and see him. You have been very hard to him, I know; and you can't, I'm sure, wish to hurt the feelings of one who is the best of men." Kate sat looking away from her in silence, and this encouraged the woman to proceed. "He was very cross when he found out that you had been persuading poor Becky to post a letter for you. He suspected her, and had her into the lib'ry and made her confess; and then he took the letter away from her. But that was nothing to what he was when he found that instead of going to bed Becky had come down again and was waiting to try and let you out I thought he would have turned her into the street at once. But oh, my dear, he is such a good man, he wouldn't do that. But he said it was disgracefully treacherous of her. And between ourselves, my dear, it was quite impossible. Master has, I know, taken all kinds of precautions to keep you from going away. He told me that it was only a silly fit of yours, and that you didn't mean it; and, oh, my dear, do pray, pray be sensible. Think what a good chance it is for you to marry one of the noblest and best of--" Sarah Plant ceased speaking, and stood with her lips apart, gazing blankly at the prisoner, who had slowly turned her head and fixed her with her indignant eyes. "Silence, you wretched creature!" she said, in a low, angry whisper. "How dare you address me like this! Go down to your master, and tell him that I will see him when he has done his breakfast." "Oh, please come now, ma'am." "Tell him to send me word when he is at liberty, and I will come." Kate pointed to the door, and the woman hurried out. She returned in a few minutes, though, with a breakfast tray, which she set down without a word, and once more Kate was alone; but she started at a sound she heard at the door, and darted silently to it to slip the bolt; but before her hand could reach it there was a faint click, and she knew that the key had been taken out and replaced upon the other side. She was for the first time locked in, and a whispering told her that Garstang was there. The struggle with her weakness had not been without its result. An unnatural calmness--the calmness of despair--had worked a change in her, and she was no longer the frightened, trembling girl, but the woman, ready to fight for all that was dear in life. She knew that she was weak and exhausted in body, and sat down with a strange calmness to the breakfast that had been brought up, eating and drinking mechanically, but thinking deeply the while of the challenge which she felt that she had sent down to Garstang, and collecting her forces for the encounter. Quite an hour had passed before she heard a sound; and then the key was turned in the lock, and the housekeeper appeared. "Master is in the library, ma'am," she said, "and will be glad to see you now." This was said with a meaning smile, which said a great deal; but Kate did not even glance at her. She walked calmly out of her room, descended the staircase, and went straight into the library, where Garstang met her with extended hands. "My dearest child," he began. She waved him aside, and walked straight to her usual place, and sat down. "Ah!" said Garstang, as if to himself; "more beautiful than ever, in her anger. How can she wonder that she has made me half mad?" "Will you be good enough to sit down, Mr Garstang?" she said, gazing firmly at him. "May I not rather kneel?" he said, imploringly. "Will you be good enough to understand, Mr Garstang," she continued, with cutting contempt in her tones, "that you are speaking to a woman whose faith in you is completely destroyed, and not to a weak, timid girl." "I can only think one thing," he whispered, earnestly, "that I am in the presence of the woman I worship, one who will forgive me everything, and become my wife." "Your wife, sir? I have come here this morning, repellent as the task is, to tell you what you refuse to see--that your proposals are impossible, and to demand that you at once restore me to the care of my guardian." "To be forced to marry that wretched boy?" he cried, passionately; "never!" "May I ask you not to waste time by acting, Mr Garstang?" she said, with cutting irony. "You call me `My dear child!' You are a man of sufficient common sense to know that I am not the foolish child you wish me to be, and that your words and manner no longer impose upon me." "Ah, so cruel still!" he cried; but she met his eyes with such scathing contempt in her own that his lips tightened, and the anger he felt betrayed itself in the twitching at the corners of his temples. "You have unmasked yourself completely now, sir, and by this time you must understand your position as fully as I do mine. You have been guilty of a disgraceful outrage." "My love--I swear it was my love," he cried. "Of gold?" she said, contemptuously. "Is it possible that a man supposed to be a gentleman can stoop to such pitiful language as this? Let us understand each other at once. Your attempts to replace the fallen mask are pitiful. Come, sir, let us treat this as having to do with your scheme. You wish to marry me?" "Yes; I adore you." She rose, with her brow wrinkling, her eyes half closed, and the look of contempt intensifying. "Perhaps I had better defer what I wished to say till to-morrow, sir?" He turned from her as if her words had lashed him, but he wrenched himself back and forced himself to meet her gaze. "In God's name, no!" he cried, passionately; "say what you have to say at once, and bring this folly to an end." She resumed her seat. "Very well; let us bring this folly to an end. I am ready to treat with you, Mr Garstang." "Hah!" he cried, with a mocking laugh. "An unconditional surrender?" "Yes, sir; an unconditional surrender," she said calmly. "You have been playing like a gamester for the sake of my fortune." "And your beautiful self," he whispered. "For my miserable fortune; and you have won." "Yes," he said, "I have won. I am the conqueror; but Kate, dearest--" She rose slowly from her seat. "Will you go on speaking without the mask, Mr Garstang?" she said, coldly; and she heard his teeth grit together, as he literally scowled at her now, with a look full of threats for the future. "I am your slave, I suppose," he said, bitterly; but she remained standing. "I wish to continue talking to Mr Garstang, the lawyer," she said, coldly. "If this is to continue it is a waste of words." He threw himself back in his chair, and she resumed hers. "Now, sir, you are a solicitor, and learned in these matters; can you draw up some paper which will mean the full surrender of my fortune to you? and this I will sign if you set me at liberty." "No," he said, quietly, "I can not draw up such a paper." "Why?" "Because it would be utterly without value." "Very well, then, there must be some way by which I can buy my liberty. The money will be mine when I come of age." "Yes, there is one way," he said, gazing at her intently. "What is that, sir?" "By signing the marriage register." "That I shall never do," she said, rising slowly. "Once more, Mr Garstang, I tell you that this money is valueless to me, and that I am ready to give it to you for my liberty." "And I tell you the simple truth--that you talk like the foolish child you are. You cannot give away that which you do not possess. It is in the keeping of your uncle, and the law would not allow you to give it away like that." "Does the law allow you to force me to be your wife, that you may, as my husband, seize upon it?" "The law will let you consent to be my wife," he said, wincing slightly at her words. "I have told you my decision," she said, coldly. "Temporary decision," he said, smiling. "And," she continued, "I shall wait until your reason has shown you that we are not living in the days of romance. Your treatment would be horrible in its baseness if it were not ridiculous. I own that I was frightened at first, but a night's calm thought has taught me how I stand, has given me strength of mind, and I shall wait." "And so shall I," he said, gazing at her angrily as he leaned forward; but she did not shrink from his eyes, meeting them with calm contemptuous indifference; and he sprang up at last with an angry oath. "Once more, Kate," he said, "understand this: you must and shall be my wife. You may try and set me at defiance, shut yourself up in your room, and keep on making efforts to escape, but all is in vain. I weighed all this well before I put my plans in execution. You hear me?" "Every word," she said, coldly. "Now hear me, Mr Garstang. I shall never consent to be your wife." "We shall see that," he cried. "I shall not shut myself up in my room, and I shall make no further attempt to leave this house. It would be too ridiculous. Sooner or later my uncle will trace me, and call you to account. I shall keep nothing back, and if he thinks proper to prosecute you for what you have done I shall be his willing witness." "Then you would go back to Northwood?" he said, with a laugh. "Yes; if my uncle were here I should return with him at once. I was an impressionable, weak girl when I listened to you that night I had faith in you then. Events since have made me a woman." She rose again, and took a step or two to cross the room, and he sprang up to open the door. "We shall see," he said, with an angry laugh. "Thank you," she said, calmly. "I was not going upstairs." And to his utter amazement she passed beyond him to one of the bookshelves, took down the volume she had been studying, and returned to her seat. He stood gazing at her, utterly confounded; but she calmly opened the book, and, utterly ignoring his presence, sat reading and turning over the leaves. There was a profound silence in the room for a few minutes, save that the clock on the chimney-piece kept on its monotonous tick; and then Garstang strode angrily to the door, went out, and closed it heavily behind him, while Kate uttered a low, deep sigh, and with her face ghastly and eyes closing, sank back in her chair. The tension had been agonising, and she felt as if something in her brain was giving way. CHAPTER FORTY TWO. "Still obstinate?" Kate turned her head and looked gravely at Garstang, but made no reply. A week had passed since the scene in the library, and during that period she had calmly resumed her old position in the house, meeting her enemy at the morning and evening meals; and while completely crushing every advance by her manner, shown him that she was waiting in full confidence for the hour of her release. She never once showed her weakness, or let him see traces of the misery or despair which rendered her nights, sleeping or waking, an agony; she answered him quietly enough whenever he spoke on ordinary subjects, but at the slightest approach to familiarity, or if he showed a disposition to argue about the folly, as he called it, of her conduct, she rose and left the room, and somehow her manner impressed him so, that he dared not try to detain her. He felt, as she had told him, that it was no longer the weak girl with whom he was contending, but the firm, imperious woman; while her confidence in her own power increased as she, on more than one occasion, realised the fact that she had completely mastered. But the position remained the same, and as soon as she was alone the battle with another enemy commenced. Despair was always making its insidious approaches, sapping her very life, and teaching her that her triumph was but temporary; and she shuddered often as she thought of the hour when her strength and determination would fail. Another week commenced, and she noted that there was a marked change in Garstang. Consummate actor as he was, he had returned to his former treatment, save that he no longer played the amiable guardian, but the chivalrous gentleman, full of deference and respect for her slightest wish. He made no approaches. There was nothing in his behaviour to which the most scrupulous could have objected; but knowing full well now that he had only covered his face with a fresh mask, she was more than ever on her guard, never relaxing her watchfulness of self for a moment. She could only feel that he was waiting his time, that it was a siege which would be long, but undertaken by him in the full belief that sooner or later she would surrender. That he left the house sometimes she felt convinced; but how or when she never knew, and the greater part of his time was passed in the library, where he evidently worked hard over what seemed to be legal business. Japanned tin boxes had made their appearance, and she had more than once seen the table littered with papers and parchments; but all these disappeared into the boxes at night, and the evenings were spent much as of old, though the conversation was distant and brief. At last, about a fortnight after the setting in of the fresh regime, she was descending the stairs one afternoon, when she had proof of Garstang's having been away, for a latch-key rattled in the door, he entered, and stood with it open, while a cabman brought in a large deed box, set it down in the hall, and the door was closed and locked. After this, Garstang lifted the box to bear it into the library, when he caught sight of Kate descending to enter the inner room, the one into which he had ushered her on the morning of her coming, and in which he now passed a great deal of his time. As their eyes met she saw that he looked pale and haggard, and it struck her at the moment that something had occurred to disturb him. Her heart leaped, for naturally enough she felt that it must be something relating to her, and in the momentary fit of exultation she felt that help was coming, and hurried into the room to hide the agitation from which she was suffering. And now for the first time since her attempt to escape, she caught sight of Becky, passing down from the upper part of the staircase, but the glance was only momentary. As soon as she saw that she was observed, the pale-faced woman drew back. There she stood, panting heavily as if suffering from some severe exertion. For she felt that Garstang would follow her in, that there would be a scene; but the minutes went by, and all was quite still, and by degrees her firmness was restored; but instinctively she felt that something was about to happen, and the dread of this, whatever it might be, set her longing to escape. And now once more the idea came that it was absurd for her to be in prison there, when it seemed as if she had only to open the door and step out, or else descend to the basement, wait till one of the tradesmen came down the area, and then seize that opportunity to go. But she had tried it and failed. The doors were always locked, save when tradesmen or postmen came; and then there was the area gate. No one ever came down. The dinner time came, and she calmly took her place. Garstang was quietly cordial, though a little more silent than customary to her; but it was plain enough that he was suffering from some unusual excitement, when he addressed the housekeeper. For he found fault with nearly everything, and finally dismissed her in a fit of anger. "Servants are so thoughtless," he said, with an apologetic smile. "That woman knows perfectly well what I like, and yet if I do not go into a fit of anger with her now and then, she grows dilatory and careless. But there, I beg your pardon; I ought to have waited until we were alone." Kate rose soon after and went into the library, where, as she sat reading, she was dimly conscious of voices in the passage; and assuming that the housekeeper was again being taken to task, she forced herself to think only of her book, and soon after silence and the closing of the dining-room door told her that Garstang had gone back to his wine. His stay after dinner had grown longer now, and it was quite half-past nine before he joined her, sometimes partaking of a cup of tea, but more often declining it, and sitting in silence gazing at the fire. Upon this occasion she sat until the housekeeper brought in the tea tray, placed it upon its table, while a low, hissing sound outside told her that the urn was waiting; and Kate found herself thinking that Becky must be there until her mother fetched it, and she wondered whether it would be possible to get a few words with the woman again, and if she would be too frightened to try and post another letter. Kate looked up suddenly and found that the housekeeper was watching her in a peculiar manner, but turned hurriedly away in confusion, and fetched the tea-caddy to place beside the tray. And again Kate found that she was watching her, and it seemed to her that it was with a pitying look in her eyes. This idea soon gave place to another. The woman wanted to talk to her, and her theme would be Garstang. "That will do, Mrs Plant," she said; when the woman darted another peculiar look at her, and Kate saw the woman's lips move, but she said nothing aloud, and left the room, leaving its occupant thoughtful and repentant. For it struck her that the woman's eyes had a pitying sympathetic aspect, and that perhaps a few words of appeal to her better feelings would be of no avail, and that help might come through her after all. Should she ring and try? A few minutes' thought, and the idea grew less and less vivid, till it died away. "She dare not, even if she would," thought Kate; and calmly and methodically she proceeded to make the tea, just casually noticing that the screw which held in its place the ornamental knob on the lid of the silver tea-pot had been off and was secured in its place again with what appeared to be resin. It was a trifle which seemed to be of no importance then, as she turned on the hot water from the urn, rinsed out the pot made the tea and sat thinking while she gave it time to draw. Her thoughts were upon the old theme, the way of escape, or to find a way of sending letters to both Jenny and her uncle. She started from her reverie, poured out a cupful, took up her book again, grew immersed in it, and sat back sipping her tea from time to time, till about half the cup was finished, before she noticed that it had a peculiar flavour, but concluded that it was fresh tea, and she had made it a little too strong. The old German book was interesting, and she still read on and sipped her tea till she had finished the cup, and then sat frowning, for the last spoonful or two had the peculiar flavour intensified. It was very strange. The tea was very different. She smelt the dregs in her cup, and the odour was strongly herbaceous. She tasted it again, and it was stronger, while the flavour was now clinging to her palate. She sat thinking for a few moments, laid her book aside, and let a little water from the urn flow into the spare cup, and examined it. Pure and tasteless, just boiled water; there was nothing there; so she drew the pot to her side, opened the lid and smelt it. The odour was plain enough. A dull, vapid, flat scent, which seemed familiar, but she could not give it a name. "What strange tea!" she thought; and then the mystery was out, for she caught sight of the fastening of the lid handle. It was as it usually appeared; but the screw was loose, and it turned and rattled in her fingers. The dark, resinous patch which had held it firmly had gone, melted by the heat and steam, and hence the peculiar flavour of the tea. "How stupid!" she exclaimed; and rising from her seat, she rang the bell. The housekeeper was longer than usual in answering, and Kate was about to ring again, when the woman appeared, looking nervous and scared. "Did you ring, ma'am?" she asked; and her voice sounded weak and husky. "Yes; look at that tea-pot, Mrs Plant; smell the tea." "Is--is anything the matter with it, ma'am?" faltered the woman. "Matter? Yes! How could you be so foolish! I noticed that something had been used to fasten the knob on the lid." "Yes--yes, ma'am; it has worn loose. The screw has got old." "What did you use to fasten it with--resin?" "I--I did not do anything to it, ma'am," faltered the woman, whose face was now ghastly. "Someone did, and it melted down into the tea. It tastes horrible. Take the pot, and wash it out I must make some fresh." "Yes, ma'am," said the woman eagerly, glancing from the tea-pot to her and back again. "You had better make some fresh, of course." She uttered a sigh, as if relieved, but Kate saw that her hands trembled as she took up the pot. "There, be quick. I shall not complain to Mr Garstang, and get you another scolding." "Thank you, ma'am--no ma'am," said the woman faintly, and she glanced behind her toward the door, and then caught at the table to support herself. "What is the matter? Are you unwell?" asked Kate. "N-no, ma'am--a little faint and giddy, that's all," she faltered. "I-- am gettin' better now--it's going off." "You are ill?" said Kate kindly. "Never mind the tea. I will go to the cellaret and get you a little brandy. There, sit down for a few moments. Yes, sit down; your face is covered with cold perspiration. Are you in the habit of turning like this?" The woman did not answer, but sat back in the chair into which she had been pressed, moaning slightly, and wringing her hands. "No-no," she whispered wildly; "don't go. He's there. I dursen't. I shall be better directly. Miss Wilton, I couldn't help it, dear; he--he did it. Don't say you've drunk any of that tea!" It was Kate's turn to snatch at something to support her, as the horrible truth flashed upon her; and she stood there with her face ghastly and her eyes wild and staring at the woman, who had now struggled to her feet. For some moments she could not stir, but at last the reaction came, and she caught the housekeeper tightly by the arm, and placed her lips to her ear. "You are a woman--a mother; for God's sake, help me! Quick, while there is time. Take me with you now." "I can't--I can't," came back faintly; "I daren't; it's impossible." Kate thrust the woman from her, and with a sudden movement clapped her hands to her head to try and collect herself, for a strange singing had come in her ears, and objects in the room seemed a long distance off. The sensation was momentary and was succeeded by a feeling of wild exhilaration and strength, but almost instantaneously this too passed off; and she reeled, and saved herself from falling by catching at one of the easy chairs, into which she sank, and sat staring helplessly at the woman, who was now speaking to someone--she could not see whom--but the words spoken rang in her ears above the strange metallic singing which filled them. "Oh, sir, pray--pray, only think! For God's sake, sir!" "Curse you, hold your tongue, and go! Dare to say another word, and--do you hear me?--go!" Kate was sensible of a thin cold hand clutching at hers for a moment; then a wave of misty light which she could not penetrate passed softly before her eyes, and this gradually deepened; the voices grew more and more distant and then everything seemed to have passed away. CHAPTER FORTY THREE. "Curse you! Do you hear what I say?" roared Garstang, furiously; "leave the room!" "No, sir, I won't!" cried the housekeeper, as she stood sobbing and wringing her hands by Kate's side. "It's horrible; it's shameful!" "Silence!" "No, I won't be silenced now," cried the woman. "You're my master, and I've done everything you told me up to now, for I thought she was only holding back, and that at last she'd consent and be happy with you; but you're not the good man I thought you were, and the poor dear knew you better than I did; and I wouldn't leave her now, not if I died for it-- so there!" "Come, come," said Garstang, hurriedly; "don't be absurd, Sarah. You are excited, and don't know what you are saying." "I never knew better what I was saying, sir," cried the woman, passionately. "Absurd! Oh, God forgive you--you wicked wretch! And forgive me too for listening to you to-day. You took me by surprise, you did, and I didn't see the full meaning of it all. Oh, it's shameful!--it's horrible! And I believe you've killed her; and we shall all be hung, and serve us right, only I hope poor Becky, who is innocent as a lamb, will get off." "Look here, Sarah, my good woman; you are frightened, and without cause." "Without cause? Oh, look at her--look at her! She's dying--she's dying!" "Hush, you silly woman! There, I won't be cross with you; you're startled and hysterical. Run into the dining-room and fetch the brandy from the cellaret." "No. If you want brandy, sir, fetch it yourself. I don't stir from here till this poor dear has come to, or lies stiff and cold." Garstang ground his teeth, and rushed upon the woman savagely, but she did not shrink; and he mastered himself and took a turn or two up and down the room before facing her again, and beginning to temporise. "Look here, Sarah," he said, in a low, husky voice; "I've been a good friend to you." "Yes, sir, always," said the woman, with a sob. "And I've made a home here for your idiot child." "Which she ain't an idiot at all, sir, but she ain't everybody's money; and grateful I've always been for your kindness, and you know how I've tried to show it. Haven't I backed you up in this? Of course, you wanted to marry such a dear, sweet, young creature; but for it to come to that! Oh! shame upon you, shame!" Garstang made a fierce gesture, but he controlled himself and stopped by her again. "Now just try and listen to me, and let me talk to you, not as my old servant, but as my old friend, whom I have trusted in this delicate affair, and whom I want to go on trusting to help me." "No, sir, no. You've broken all that, and I'll never leave the poor dear--there!" "Will you hear me speak first?" said Garstang, making a tremendous effort to keep down his rage. "Yes, sir, I'll listen," said the woman; "but I'll stop here." "Now, let me tell you, then--as a friend, mind--how I am situated. It is vital to me that we should be married at once, and you must see as a woman, that for her reputation's sake, after being here with me so long, she ought to give up all opposition. Now, you see that--" "I'd have said `Yes' to it yesterday, sir," said the woman, firmly; "but I can't say it to-night." "Nonsense! I tell you it is for her benefit. I only want her to feel that further resistance is useless. There, now, I have spoken out to you. You see it is for the best. To-morrow or next day we shall be married by special license. I have made all the arrangements." "Then, now go and make all the arrangements for the poor dear's funeral, you bad, wicked wretch!" cried the woman passionately, as she sank on her knees and clasped Kate about the waist. "Oh, my poor dear, my poor dear, he has murdered you!" "Silence, idiot!" cried Garstang, in a fierce whisper. "Can't you see that she is only asleep?" "Asleep? Do you call this sleep? Look at her poor staring eyes. Feel her hands.--No, no, keep back. You shan't touch her." She turned upon him with so savage and cat-like a gesture that he stopped short with his brows rugged and his hands clenched. There was a few moments' pause, but the woman did not wince; and Garstang felt more than ever that he must temporise again. He burst into a mocking laugh. "Oh, you silly woman," he said. "All this nonsense about a girl's holding off for a time. You've often heard her say how she liked me. You know she came here of her own free will. And I know you feel that I mean to marry her as soon as I can persuade her to come to the church. What a storm you are making about nothing! She has taken something. Well, you consented to its being given her; and you are going as frantic as if I had poisoned her." "I know, I know," cried the woman, "and I was a vile wretch to consent to help you." "Stuff and nonsense, Sarah, old friend. Now look here; suppose instead of its being a harmless sleeping draught, it had been the effect of her drinking an extra glass or two of champagne. Would you have gone on then like this?" "It's of no use for you to talk; I know what a smooth winning tongue you've got, as would bring a bird down out of a tree; but I know you thoroughly now; and Becky was right; you're a base man, and you did worry and worry poor dear Mr Jenour till he shot himself. You robbed him till you'd got everything that was his, and now you've murdered this poor darling girl." "That will do," cried Garstang, stung now to the quick. "If you will be a fool you must suffer for it. Now, listen to me, woman; this is my house, and this is my wife. She came to me, and she is mine. I have told you that I will take her to the church. Now, go up to your room--I am desperate now--and if you dare to make a sound or to leave it till to-morrow morning, I'll shoot you and your girl too." The woman stared at him, her lips parted, and with dilated eyes. "You know what this place is. Not a sound can reach the outside. You have not a soul who would come to inquire after you, and the world would never know what had become of you. Now go." She stood up, trembling like a leaf, fascinated by his fierce eyes, and began to walk slowly round to the other side of the table, sidewise, so as to keep as far from him as she could. "Hah!" he said, through his set teeth, "you understand me then at last. Upstairs with you at once," and as he spoke he stepped quickly to Kate's side, dropped on one knee, and took hold of her icy hand. But he sprang to his feet, half stunned, the next moment, for with a wild cry, the woman threw open the door as if to escape from him, but tore out the key. "Becky! Becky!" she shrieked. "Yes, mother!" came from where the tied-up face was stretched over the balustrade on the first floor. "Lock yourself in master's room, open the window, and shriek murder until the police come." "Damnation!" roared Garstang; and he rushed at and seized the woman, who clung to one of the bookshelves, bringing it down with a crash, and a shriek came from the upper floor. "Stop her," roared Garstang. "There, I give in. Here, Becky, your mother will speak to you." "Lock yourself in the room, but don't scream till I tell you, or he comes," cried the woman. "That will do," said Garstang, savagely, and he loosed his hold, with the result that the woman ran back to the insensible girl, and once more clasped her in her arms. Garstang began to pace up and down the room, but paused at the door, to reach out and see Becky's white face and eyes displaying the white rings round them, peering down from above. At the sight of him she rushed to his bedroom, and stood half inside, ready to lock herself in if he attempted to ascend. A wild cry from Sarah Plant took Garstang back to her side. "I knew it--I knew it!" she cried, bursting into a passionate fit of sobbing; "you've killed her. Look at her, sir, look. Oh, my poor dear, my poor dear! God forgive me! What shall I do?" A chill of horror ran through Garstang, and he bent down over his victim, trembling violently now, as he raised one eyelid with his finger, then the other, bent lower so that his cheek was close to her lips, and then caught her hand, and tried to feel her pulse. "No, no; she is only sleeping," he said, hoarsely. "Sleeping!" moaned the woman, hysterically; "do you call that sleep?" Garstang drew a deep breath, and his horror increased. "Help me to lay her on the couch," he said, huskily. "No, no, I'm strong enough," groaned the woman. "Oh, my poor dear--my poor dear! he has murdered you." She rose quickly, and in her nervous exaltation, passed her arms round the helpless figure, and lifted it like a child, to bear it to the couch, and lay it helplessly down. "Oh, help, help!" she groaned, in a piteous wail. "A doctor--fetch a doctor at once." "No, no, go for brandy--for cold water to bathe her face." "I don't leave her again," cried the woman, passionately; "I'd sooner die." Garstang gazed down at them wildly for a few moments, and then rushed across into the dining-room, obtained the brandy, a glass, and a carafe of water, and returned, to begin bathing Kate's temples and hands, but without the slightest result, save that her breathing became fainter, and the ghastly symptoms of collapse slowly increased. "She's going--she's going!" moaned the shuddering woman, who knelt by the couch, holding Kate tightly as if to keep her there. "We've poisoned her! we've poisoned her!" The panic which had seized upon Garstang increased, as he gazed wildly at his work. Strong man as he was, and accustomed to control himself, he began now to lose his head; and at last, thoroughly aghast, he caught the housekeeper by the shoulder and shook her. "Don't leave her," he said, in a husky whisper. "I'm going out." "What!" cried the woman, turning and catching his arm; "going to try and escape, and leave me here?" "No, no," he whispered; "a doctor--to fetch a doctor." "Yes, yes," moaned the woman; "a doctor--fetch a doctor; but it is too late--it is too late!" Garstang hardly heard her words, as he bent down and took a hurried look at Kate's face. Then hurrying to the door, he caught sight of Becky still watching. "Go down and help your mother," he cried, excitedly; and unfastening the door, he rushed out. CHAPTER FORTY FOUR. Pierce Leigh returned home after a long weary day of watching. From careful thought and balancing of the matter, he had long come to the conclusion that Claud Wilton's ideas were right, and that John Garstang knew where his cousin was. But suspicion was not certainty, and though he told himself that he had no right or reason in his conduct, he could not refrain from spending all the time he could spare from his professional work in town--work that was growing rapidly--in trying to get some news of the missing girl. He was more amenable now, and ready to discuss the matter with his sister, who remained Kate's champion and declared that she was sure there was some foul play in the matter; but he would not give way, and laughed bitterly whenever Jenny aired her optimism, and said she was sure that all would end happily after all. "Silly child!" he said bitterly. "If Miss Wilton was the victim of foul play--which I do not believe--she could have found some means of communicating with her friends." "But she had no friends, Pierce," cried Jenny. "She told me so more than once." "She had you." "Oh, I don't count, dear; I was only an acquaintance, and it had not had time to ripen into affection on her side. I soon began to love her, but I don't think she cared much for me." "Ah, it was a great mistake," sighed Leigh. "What was?" cried Jenny sharply. "Our going down to Northwood. I lost a thousand pounds by the transaction." "And gained the dearest girl in the world to love." "Don't talk absurdly, child," said Leigh, firmly. "I beg that you will not speak to me in that tone about Miss Wilton. Has Claud been again?" "I beg that you will not speak to me in that tone about Mr Wilton," said Jenny, with a mischievous look at her brother, who glanced at her sharply. "Claud Wilton is not such a bad fellow after all, I begin to think. All that horsey caddishness will, I daresay, wear off." "I am sorry for the poor woman who has to rub it off," said Jenny. "You did not tell me if he had called." "Yes, he did call." "Jenny!" "I didn't ask him to call, and he did not come to see me," said the girl demurely. "He wanted you, and left his card. I put it in the surgery. I think he said he had some news of his cousin." "Indeed?" said Leigh, starting. "When was this?" "Yesterday evening. But Pierce, dear, surely it is nothing to you. Don't go interfering, and perhaps make two poor people unhappy." Leigh turned upon her angrily. "What a good little girl you would be, Jenny, if you had been born without a tongue." "Yes," she said, "but I should not have been half a woman, Pierce, dear." "Did he say when he would come again?" "No." "Did he say more particularly what his news was?" "No, dear, and I did not ask him, knowing how particular you are about my being at all intimate with him." He gave her an angry glance, but she ignored it. "Anyone else been?" "Yes; there was a message from Mrs Smithers, saying she hoped you would drop in after dinner and see her. Her daughter came--the freckly one. The buzzing in her mother's head had begun again, and Miss Smithers says she is sure it is the port wine, for it always comes after her mother has been drinking port wine for a month." "Of course. She eats and drinks twice as much as is good for her.--Did young Wilton say anything about Northwood?" "Yes," said Jenny, carelessly. "The new doctor has got the parish work, but he isn't worked to death. Oh, by the way, there's a letter on the chimney-piece." Leigh rose and took it eagerly, frowning as he read it. "Bad news, Pierce, dear?" "Eh? Bad? Oh, dear no; I have to meet Dr Clifton in consultation at three to-morrow, at Sir Montague Russell's." "Oh! I say, Pierce dear, how rapidly you are picking up a practice!" "Yes," he said, with a sigh; and then with an effort to be cheerful, "How long will dinner be?" "Half an hour," said Jenny, after a glance at the clock, "and then I hope they will let you have a quiet evening. You have not been at home once this week." "Ah, yes, a quiet evening would be pleasant." "Thinking, Pierce dear?" said Jenny, after a pause. "Yes," he said dreamily, as he sat back with his eyes closed. "I can't make it all fit. He rarely goes to the office, I have found that out; and from what I can learn he must be living in the country. The house I saw him go to has all the front blinds drawn down, and last time I rode by I saw a woman at the gate, but I could not stop to question her--I have no right." "No, dear, you have no right," said Jenny, gravely. "That was only a fancy of yours. But how strangely things do come to pass!" Leigh started, and gazed at his sister wonderingly. "What do you mean?" he said. "I was only replying to your remarks, dear, about your suspicions of this Mr Garstang." "I? My remarks?" he said, looking at her strangely. "I said nothing." "Why, Pierce dear, you did just now." "No, not a word. I was asleep when you spoke." "Asleep?" "Yes. What is there strange in that? A man must have rest, and I have been out for the last three nights with anxious cases. Was I talking?" "Yes, dear," said Jenny, rising, to go behind the chair and lay her soft little hands upon her brother's head. "Talking about that shut-up house, and this Mr Garstang. I thought it was not possible, and that it was very wild of you to take a house in this street so as to be near and watch him, but nothing could have been better. You are getting as busy as you used to be in Westminster. But Pierce, dear," she whispered softly, "don't you think we should be happier if we were in full confidence with one another--as we were once?" "No," he said, gloomily, "I shall never be happy again." "You will, dear, when some day we meet Kate, and all this mystery about her is at an end." "Meet Miss Wilton and her husband," he said, bitterly. "No, dear; if I know anything of women you will never meet Kate Wilton's husband. Pierce, dear, I am your sister, and I have been so lonely lately, ever since we came to London. You have never quite forgiven me all that unhappy business. Don't you think you could if you tried?" He sat perfectly silent for a few moments, and then reached round, took her in his arms, and kissed her long and lovingly. In an instant she was clinging to his neck, sobbing wildly, and he had hard work trying to soothe her. But she changed again just as quickly, and laughed at him through her tears. "There," she cried, "now I feel ten years younger. Five minutes ago I was quite an old woman. But, Pierce, you will confide in me now, and make me quite as we used to be?" "Yes," he said. She wound her arms tightly round his neck, and laid her face to his. "Then confess to me, dear," she whispered. "You do dearly love Kate Wilton?" He was silent for some moments, and then slowly and dreamily his words were breathed close to her ear. "Yes; and I shall never love again." Jenny turned up her face and kissed him, but hid it, burning, directly after in his breast. "Pierce dear," she whispered, "I have no one else to talk to like this. May I confess something now to you?" "Why not?" he said, gently. "Confidence for confidence." She was silent in turn for some time. Then she spoke almost in a whisper. "Will you be very angry, Pierce, if I tell you that I think I am beginning to like Claud Wilton very much?" "Like--him?" he cried, scornfully. "I mean love him, Pierce," she said, quietly. "Jenny! Impossible!" "That's what I used to think, dear, but it is not." "You foolish baby, what is there in the fellow that any woman could love?" "Something I've found out, dear." "In Heaven's name, what?" "He loves me with all his heart." "He has no heart." "You don't know him as I do, Pierce. He has, and a very warm one." "Has he dared to make proposals to you again?" "No, not a word. But he isn't like the same. It was all through you, Pierce. I made him love me, and now he looks up to me as if I were something he ought to worship, and--and I can't help liking him for it." "Oh, you must not think of it," cried Leigh. "That's what I've told myself hundreds of times, dear, but it will come, and--and, Pierce, dear, it's very dreadful, but we can't help it when the love comes. Do you think we can?" She slipped from him, and dashed the tears from her eyes, for her quick senses detected a step, and the next moment a quiet-looking maid-servant announced the dinner. No more was said, but the manner of sister and brother was warmer than it had been for months; and though he made no allusions, there was a half-reproachful, half-mocking smile on Leigh's lips when his eyes met Jenny's. The dinner ended, he went into their little plainly-furnished drawing-room to steal half-an-hour's rest before hurrying off to make the call as requested; and he had not left the house ten minutes when there was a hurried ring at the bell. Jenny clapped her hands, and burst into a merry laugh. "I am glad," she cried. "No; I ought to be sorry for the poor people. But how they are finding out what a dear, clever, old fellow Pierce is! I wonder who this can be?" She was not kept long in doubt, for the servant came up. "If you please, ma'am, there's that gentleman again who called to see master." "What gentleman?" said Jenny, suddenly turning nervous--"Mr Wilton?" "Yes, ma'am." "Did you tell him your master was out?" "Yes, ma'am, and he said would you see him just a moment?" "I'll come down," said Jenny, turning very hard and stiff; and it seemed to be a different personage who descended to Leigh's consulting room, where Claud was walking up and down with his hat on. "Ah, Miss Leigh!" he cried, excitedly, as he half ran to her, with his hands extended. But Jenny did not seem to see them; only standing pokeresque, and gazing at the young fellow's hat. "Eh? What's the matter? Oh, I beg your pardon," he cried, catching it off confusedly; "I'm so excited, I forgot. But I can't stop; I'll come in again by and by and see your brother. Only tell him I've found her." "Found Kate Wilton?" cried Jenny, dropping her formal manner and catching him by the arm, his hand dropping upon hers directly. "Yes, I'm as sure as sure. I've been on the scent for some time, and I never could be sure; but I'm about certain now, and I want your brother to come and help me, for he has a better right than I have to be there." "My brother, Mr Wilton?" said Jenny, in a freezing tone. "Oh, I say, please don't," he whispered earnestly; "I am trying so hard to show you that I'm not such a cad as you used to think, and when you speak to me in that way it makes me feel as if there's nothing, left to do but enlist, and get sent off to India, or the Crimea, or somewhere, to be killed out of the way." "Tell me quickly, where is she?" "I can't yet. I'm not quite sure." "Pah!" "Ah, you wait a bit, and you'll see; and if I do find her I shall bring her here." "Here?" cried Jenny, excitedly. "Yes, why not? she likes you better than anybody in the world; he likes, her, and--. Here, I can't stop. Good-bye; tell him I'll be back again as soon as I can, for find her I will to-night." "But Mr Wilton--Claud!" "Ah!" he cried excitedly, turning to her. "Tell me one thing." "Everything," he cried, wildly, "if you'll speak to me like that. Someone I thought had got her; I'm about sure now, but--I'd give anything to stop--but I can't." He rushed out into the street, and Jenny returned to her room and work, trembling with a double excitement, one moment blaming herself for being too free with her visitor, the next forgetting everything in the news. "Oh, Pierce, dear Pierce! if it is only true," she muttered, as her work dropped from her hands, and she sat hour after hour longing for her brother's return. This was not till ten, when she was trembling with excitement, and in momentary expectation of seeing Claud Wilton return first. CHAPTER FORTY FIVE. Jenny was standing at the window, watching the people go by, when a cab drew up and Leigh sprang out, to let himself in with his latch-key; and she was half-way down to meet him as he was coming up. "Pierce," she whispered excitedly. "Claud Wilton has been. He has, he is sure, found Kate; and he is coming again to fetch you to where she is." Leigh staggered, and caught at the balustrade to save himself from falling. "Where is she?" he panted. "I--don't know; he was not quite sure, but he is coming again. He says no one but you has a right to be there when she is found; and Pierce-- Pierce--he is going to bring her here!" Leigh stood gazing straight before him, feeling as if he could hardly breathe, and he followed his sister into the drawing-room, but had hardly sunk into a chair when there was a tremendous peal at the bell. "Here he is!" cried Jenny; and Leigh sprang from his seat to hurry down, but restrained himself, and to his sister's despair, stood waiting. "Pierce, dear," she whispered, "pray go." "I have no right," he said huskily; and Jenny wrung her hands and tried vainly for what she deemed the correct words to say. The painful silence was broken by the appearance of the maid. "A gentleman to see you, sir; very important." "Mr Wilton?" cried Jenny. "No, ma'am, a strange gentleman," said the girl. "Someone very bad." Leigh exhaled his pent-up breath with a sigh of relief, and went quickly down to where his visitor was waiting, looking wild and ghastly. Garstang!--the man he had been watching for months without result, but who looked at him as one whom he had never met before. "Will you come with me directly?" he cried. "My house--only in the next street. I'd better tell you at once, so that you may bring some antidote with you. I need not explain--a young lady--my wife--a foolish quarrel--a little jealousy--and she has taken some of that new sedative, Xyrania--a poisonous dose, I fear." "A young lady--my wife," rang in Leigh's ears like the death knell of all hopes. Then he was right: this man had carried her off with her consent, and it had come to this. "Do you not hear me, sir?" cried Garstang; "Mr--I don't know your name; I came to the first red lamp. You are a doctor?" "Yes, yes, of course," cried Leigh, hastily. "Then, for God's sake, come on before it is too late!" Leigh was the calm, cold, collected physician once again, and he spoke in a strange tone that he did not know as his own. "Xyrania," he said; and he went to a case of bottles and jars, took down one of the former, poured a small quantity into a phial, corked it, and said solemnly-- "Lead the way, sir--quick; but I must tell you that an overdose of that drug means sleep from which there is no awaking." Garstang uttered a low, harsh sound, and motioned towards the door, leading the way; while Leigh followed him, with his brain feeling, in addition to the terrific crushing weight of depression as if all the world were nothing now, confused and strange, as he wondered that the man did not recognise him; and too much stunned to grasp the fact that he who had filled so large a measure of his thoughts for months had never met him face to face--probably had never heard of him, save as some doctor in practice at Northwood. Then, as they hurried along the pavement, and at the end of another hundred yards turned into Great Ormond Street, Leigh felt oppressed by another thought--that after all, Kate, if it were she he was being taken to see, must have been for months past in the house he had so often gazed at in passing, with an intense desire to enter, but had always crushed down that desire, telling himself that it was insane. Meanwhile Garstang was talking to him in a hurried excited tone, uttering words that hardly reached his companion's understanding; but he caught fragments about "unhappy temper--insomnia--indulgence in the potent drug--his agony and despair"--and then he cried wildly, as he paused at the door of the familiar house with its overhanging eaves, and inserted the latch-key: "Doctor--any fee you like to demand, but you must save my wife's life." "Must save his wife's life!" groaned Leigh, mentally, as his heart gave what seemed to be one heavy throb. Then he stepped into the great gloomy hall. CHAPTER FORTY SIX. "His wife!" The words kept repeating themselves in Pierce Leigh's brain like the beating of some artery charged to bursting, and the agony seemed greater than he could bear; while the revelation which had been so briefly made told of misery and a terrible despair which had driven the woman he loved to this desperate act. But for one thought he would have rushed madly away to try and forget everything by a similar act, for the means were at home, ready to his hand, his suffering being more than he could bear. But there was that thought; she was in peril of her life, and the husband had flown unconsciously to him for help. He might be able to save her--make her owe that life to him--and this thought fought against his weakness, and for the time being made him strong enough to follow Garstang to the library door, just as poor Becky darted away and disappeared through the doorway leading to the basement. As Leigh entered and saw Kate lying motionless upon the sofa, with the housekeeper kneeling by her side, a pang shot through him which seemed to cleave his heart; then as it passed away he was the calm stern physician once more. "You had better go, sir," he said sharply, "and leave me with the nurse." "No: do your work," said Garstang harshly; "I stay here." Leigh made no answer, but took the housekeeper's place, to examine the sufferer's dilated pupils and test the pulsation, and then he turned quickly to Garstang. "Where are the bottle and glass?" he said sharply. "What bottle--what glass?" replied Garstang, taken by surprise. "The symptoms seem to accord with what you say, but I want to make perfectly sure. Where is the drug she took?" "Oh, it was in the tea, sir, there," cried the housekeeper. Garstang turned upon her with a savage gesture, and Leigh saw it. His suspicions were raised. "Here, sir," said the woman, pointing to the pot. "Oh yes," said Garstang hurriedly: "she took it in her tea." "She did not, sir!" cried the woman desperately. "Hold your tongue!" roared Garstang. "I won't, doctor, if I die for it," cried the woman. "He drugged her, poor dear. I was obliged to do as he said." "The woman's mad," cried Garstang. "Go on with your work." A savage instinct seemed to drive Leigh, on hearing this, to bound at Garstang, seize him by the throat and strangle him; but a glance at Kate checked it, and the physician regained the ascendancy. He poured a little of the tea into a clean cup, smelt, tasted, and spat it out. "Quite right," he said firmly. "Don't let that tea-pot be touched again." Garstang winced, for the words were to him charged with death, a trial for murder, and the silent evidence of the crime. "Here, you help me," said Leigh, quickly; and he rinsed out the cup with water from the urn, poured a couple of teaspoonfuls from a bottle into the cup, and kneeling by the couch while the housekeeper held the insensible girl's head, tried to insert the spoon between the closely set teeth. The effort was vain, and he was forced to trickle the antidote he tried to administer through the teeth, but there was no effort made to swallow; the insensibility was too deep. "Better?" said Garstang, after watching the doctor's efforts to revive his patient for quite half an hour. "Better?" he said, fiercely. "Can you not see, man, that she is steadily passing away?" "No, no, she seems calmer, and more like one asleep. Oh, persevere, doctor!" "I want help here--the counsel and advice of the best man you can get. Send instantly for Sir Edward Lacey, Harley Street." "No," said Garstang, frowning darkly. "You seem an able practitioner. It is a matter of time for the effects of the potent drug to die out, is it not?" "Yes, of course; but I fear the worst." "Go on with what you are doing, doctor; I have faith in you." At that moment Leigh felt that nothing more could be done--that nature was the great physician; and he once more knelt down by the side of the couch for a time, while a terrible silence seemed to have fallen on the place, even the housekeeper looking now as if she were turned to stone, and dared not move her lips as she intently watched the calm white face upon the pillow. "I can do no more," said Leigh at last, in a hoarse whisper. "God help me! How weak and helpless one feels at a time like this!" The words came involuntarily from his lips, for at that moment he seemed to be alone with the sufferer, his patient once again, whose life he would have given his own to save. "Oh, come, come, doctor!" said Garstang, breaking in harshly upon the terrible stillness, and there was a forced gaiety in his tone. "It was a little sleeping draught; surely the effects will soon pass off. You are taking too serious a view of the case." "I take the view of it, sir," said Leigh, gravely, as he bent lower over the marble face before him, fighting hard to control the wild desire to press his lips to the temple where an artery throbbed, "I take the view given to us by experience. You had better send for further help at once." "No, no. It is only making an expose, where none is necessary. I will not believe that she is so bad. You medical men are so prone to magnify symptoms." "Indeed?" said Leigh, who dared not look at the speaker, but bent once more over his patient. "You came and told me that your wife was dying." "His wife, sir?" cried the housekeeper, indignantly. "It's a wicked lie!" Garstang turned savagely upon the woman, but he had to face Leigh, who sprang to his feet with a wild exaltation making every pulse throb and thrill. "Not his wife!" he cried fiercely. "No, sir, and never would be." "Curse you!" roared Garstang, making at her; but Leigh thrust him back. "Then there has been foul play here." "How dare you?" cried Garstang. "I called you in to--But go on with your work, sir. Can you not see that the woman drinks?--she is mad drunk now. Hysterical, and does not know what she is saying. The lady is my wife, and I insist upon your attending to your professional duties or leaving the house. Is this the conduct of a physician?" "It is the conduct of a man, sir, who finds himself face to face with a scoundrel." "You insolent hound!" "John Garstang--" "John Garstang!" "Yes, John Garstang; you see I know you! It is true then that you have abducted this lady, or lured her into this place, where you have kept her secluded from her friends. There is no need to ask the reason. I can guess that." "You--you--" cried Garstang, ghastly now in his surprise. "Who are you that you dare to speak to me like this?" "I, sir, am the physician you called in to see his old patient, dying, I fear, from the effects of the drug you have administered," said Leigh, with unnatural calmness; "the man whose instinct tempts him to try and crush out your wretched life as he would that of some noxious beast. But we have laws, and whatever the result is here, my duty is to hand you over to the police." "Oh, doctor! doctor!" cried the woman wildly, from behind the couch. "Quick, quick! Look! Oh, my poor, poor child!" Leigh sprang back to the couch and fell upon his knees, for a violent twitching had convulsed the girl's motionless form. Garstang, his face wild with fear, stood gazing down over the doctor's shoulder, and then strode quickly to the back of the library, bent over a table, and took something from a drawer, before striding back, to stand looking on, trembling violently now, as he witnessed the strange convulsions, which gradually died out, and a low gasping sound escaped the sufferer's lips. Garstang drew a long, deep breath, turned quickly, and made for the door; but as he reached it Leigh's hand was upon his collar, and he was swung violently round and back into the room. He nearly fell, but recovered himself, and stood with his hand in his breast. "Stand away from that door," he cried. "To let you escape?" said Leigh, firmly. "No; whether that convulsion means death or life to your victim, sir, you are my prisoner till the police are here. You--woman, go to the door, and send for or fetch the police." The housekeeper started forward, but with one heavy swing of the arm Garstang sent her staggering back, and then approached Leigh slowly, with a half-crouching movement, like some beast about to spring. "Stand away from that door, and let me pass," he said, huskily. "Go back and sit down in that chair," said Leigh sternly; and he now stepped slowly and watchfully toward him. "Stand away from that door," said Garstang again. "Hah!" ejaculated Leigh, as he caught a glimpse of something in the man's hand; and he sprang at him to dash it aside, when there was a flash, a loud report, and as a puff of smoke was driven in his face, Leigh spun round suddenly, and fell half across the farther table with a heavy thud. At the same moment, Garstang thrust a pistol into his breast, darted to and flung open the door, to run right into the hall, where he was seized by a man, and a tremendous struggle ensued, Garstang striving fiercely to escape, his adversary to force him back toward the staircase; chairs were driven here and there, one of the marble statues fell with a crash, and twice over Garstang nearly shook his opponent off. But he was wrestling with a younger man, who was tough, wiry, and in good training, while, in spite of the desperate strength given for the moment by fear, Garstang was portly, and his breath came and went in gasps. "Here, you girl, open the door; call help--can't hold him!" came in gasps. A low wailing sound was the only response, and poor Becky, who was by the front door, with her face tied up, covered it entirely with her hands, and seemed ready to faint. The struggle went on here and there, and once more there was the gleam of a pistol and a voice rang out: "Ah! coward, fight fair." As utterance was given to these words the speaker made a desperate spring to try and catch the pistol, his weight driving Garstang back, whose heels caught against a heavy fragment of the broken piece of statuary, and its owner went down with the back of his head striking violently against another piece of the marble. The next moment, fainting and exhausted, his adversary was seated on the fallen man's chest, wresting the pistol from his grasp. "Thought he'd done me. Here, you're a pretty sort of a one, you are! Why didn't you call the police?" "Oh, I dursen't! I dursen't!" sobbed Becky. "You dursen't, you dursen't!" grumbled the speaker. "Hi! help, somebody! Hi, Kate! are you in there? What, Doctor! Then you've got here, after all. I did go to your house." For Pierce Leigh suddenly appeared at the library door, where he stood, supporting himself by the side. CHAPTER FORTY SEVEN. "I say, he didn't shoot you, did he?" "Yes--through the arm," said Leigh faintly. "Better directly. Can you keep him down, Wilton?" "Oh yes, I'll keep the beggar down," said Claud, cocking the pistol. "Do you hear, you sir? You move a hand and as sure as I've got you here, I'll fire. Send for a doctor someone." "No, no," cried Leigh, a little more firmly; "not yet;" and he drew a handkerchief from his pocket and folded it with one hand. "Tie this tightly round my arm." "You take the pistol then--that's it--and let the brute have it if he stirs. I won't get off him. Kneel down." Leigh obeyed after taking the pistol, and Claud bound the handkerchief tightly round his arm. "Hurt you?" "Yes; but the sickness is going off. Tighter: it will stop the bleeding." "All right; but I say, we had better have in a doctor," said Claud excitedly. "Not yet. We don't want an expose," said Leigh anxiously. "Shall I go for one, sir?" said the housekeeper. "No. How is she now?" said Leigh anxiously. "Just the same, sir," said the woman, stifling her sobs. "I'll come in a moment or two. Go back; there is nothing to fear now." A burst of hysterical sobbing came from the front door, where Becky was crouching down, with her face buried in her hands. "Take her with you," said Leigh hastily; and he stood before Garstang while Becky walked into the library, shivering with dread. "Here, you hold up, what's your name," cried Claud. "You behaved like a trump. It's all right; he can't hurt you now." "No," said Leigh, in a harsh whisper, as the two women passed in and the door swung to; "nor anyone else. Look." "Eh?" said Claud wonderingly. "What at?" "Don't you see?" said Leigh, bending down and turning Garstang's head a little on one side. "Ugh!" ejaculated Claud. "Blood! I didn't mean that. Why, he must have hit his head on that bit of marble." "Yes," answered Leigh, after a brief examination, "the skull is fractured. We must get him away from here." "Not dangerous, is it, doctor?" said Claud, aghast. Leigh made no answer, but rose to his feet and sat down on one of the hall chairs. "What is it--faint?" said Claud. "Yes--get me--something--he cannot move." "She seems to be more like sleeping now, sir," said the housekeeper, appearing at the door. "Oh, no, no; don't let him get up!" "It's all right, old lady. Here, got any brandy? The doctor's hurt, and faint." "Yes, sir; yes, sir," said the woman, glancing in a horrified way, at the two injured men, as she passed into the dining-room, from which she returned directly with a decanter and glass. "It's port wine, sir," she said in a trembling voice; and she poured out a glass. Leigh drained it, and rose to his feet. "I will come back directly," he said. "That's right. I say, I don't quite like his looks." Leigh bent over the prostrate man, but said nothing, and passed into the library, where he spent five minutes in attendance upon Kate; and at the end of that time he rose with a sigh of relief. "Will she come to, sir?" whispered the housekeeper, with her voice trembling. "Yes, I think the worst is over. The medicine I gave her is counteracting the effects of the drug." "Oh, oh, oh!" burst out Becky; and she flumped down on the carpet and caught one of Kate's hands, to lay it against her cheek and hold it there, as she rocked herself to and fro. "Becky! Becky! you mustn't," whispered her mother. "Let her alone; she will do no harm," said Leigh, quietly. "Are--are you going to send for the police, sir?" faltered the woman. "No, certainly not yet," replied Leigh; and he went back into the hall. "I say," said Claud, in a voice full of awe, "I'm jolly glad you've come. He ain't dying, is he?" For answer Leigh went down on one knee, and made a fresh examination. "No," he said at last; "but he is very bad. I cannot help carry him, but he must be got into one of the rooms." "Fetch that old girl out, and we'll carry him," said Claud; and after a moment or two's thought Leigh went to the library, stood for a while examining his patient there, and then signed to Becky and her mother to follow him. Under his directions a blanket was brought, passed under the injured man, and then each took a corner, and he was borne into the dining-room and laid upon a couch. "I don't like to call in police, or a strange surgeon," Leigh whispered to Claud. "We do not want this affair to become public." "By George, no!" said Claud, hastily. "Then you must help me. I can do what is necessary; and these women can nurse him." "But I can't help you," protested the young man. "If it was a horse I could do something. Don't understand men." "I do, to some extent," said Leigh, smiling faintly. Then, to the woman, "You can go back now. Call me at once if there is any change." The two trembling women went out, and after another feeble protest Claud manfully took off his coat, and acting under Leigh's instructions, properly bandaged the painful wound made by Garstang's bullet, which had struck high up in Leigh's arm, and passed right through, a very short distance beneath the skin. "A mere nothing," said Leigh, coolly, as the wound was plugged and bandaged, the table napkins coming in handy. "Why, Wilton, you'd make a capital dresser." "Ugh!" ejaculated the young man, with a shudder. "I should like to be down on one. Sick as a cat." "Take a glass of wine, man," said Leigh, smiling. "I just will," said Claud, gulping one down. "Thank you, since you are so pressing, I think I will take another. Hah! that puts Dutch courage in a fellow," he sighed, after a second goodly sip. "It's good port, Garstang. Here's bad health to you--you beast." He drank the rest of his wine. "I say, doctor, you don't expect me to help timber his head, do you?" Leigh nodded, as he drew his shirt-sleeve down over his bandages. "But the brute would have shot me, too." "Yes, but he's hors de combat, my lad, and you don't want to jump on a fallen enemy." "Don't know so much about that, doctor," said the young man, dryly, "but you ought." "Perhaps so," replied Leigh, "but I am what you would call crotchety, and I must treat him as I would a man who never did me harm. Come, your wine has strung you up. Let's get to work." "Must I? Hadn't you better put the beggar out of his misery? He isn't a bit of good in the world, and has done a lot of harm to everyone he knows." "Bad fracture," said Leigh, gravely, as he passed his hand round the insensible man's head, "but not complicated. He must have fallen with tremendous violence." "Of course he did," said Claud. "He had my weight on him, as well as his own. Can he hear what we say?" "No, and will not for some time to come. Now, take the scissors out of my pocket-book, and cut away all the hair round the back. There, cut close: don't be afraid." "Afraid! Not I," said Claud, with a laugh, "I'll take it all off, and make him look like a--what I hope he will be--a convict." He began snipping away industriously, talking flippantly the while, to keep down the feeling of faintness which still troubled him. "Fancy me coming to be old Garstang's barber! I say, doctor, you'd like to keep a lock of the beggar's hair, wouldn't you? I mean to have one." "Mind what you are doing," said Leigh, quietly; and as Claud went on cutting he prepared bandages with one hand and his teeth, from another of the fine damask napkins; and in spite of the pain he suffered, bandaged the injury, and at last sank exhausted in a chair, but rose directly to go across to the library. "How is she?" said Claud, anxiously, upon his return. "The effects are passing off, and in two or three hours I hope she will come to." "Then look here," said Claud, anxiously, "ought I to--I mean, ought you to send over to somebody and tell her how things are going on? She'll be horribly anxious." Leigh frowned slightly. "You mean my sister, of course," he said. "No; she is aware that I was called in to a case of emergency, but she does not know that it is here." "Doesn't she know? I say, though, I'm a bit puzzled how you came here." "This man fetched me." "Fetched you? How came he to do that?" "In ignorance of who I was, of course. But how came you here so opportunely?" "Oh, I've been watching and tracking for long enough, till I ran him to earth; and I've been trying for days to get at him. Got hold of that woman with the tied-up head at last--only this evening--and was going to bribe her, but she let out everything to me, and after telling me everything, said she'd let me in. So I went for you, and as you were out I was obliged to try and get Kate away at once. You know the rest I say, this is what you call a climax, isn't it?" Leigh sat gazing at him sternly, but Claud did not avoid his eyes, and went on. "Now look here; of course he got her for the sake of her money, and she can't stop here. But she must be taken away as soon as she can be moved." "Of course." "Yes, of course," said Claud, firmly. "It isn't a time for stickling about ourselves; we've got to think about her, poor lass. Damn him! I feel as if I could go and tear all his bandages off--a beast!" "What do you propose, then?" said Leigh, calmly. "Well, for the present we'd better take her to your house. She must be in a horrid state, and the best thing for her is to find herself along with some one she loves. It will do her no end of good to find Jenny's--I beg your pardon, Miss Leigh's arms around her." "Yes, you are quite right; and I could go to an hotel." "Humph! Yes, I suppose you ought to, but I've been thinking of something else, if you don't mind. The guv'nor's shut up with his gout, so I think I ought to go home and fetch the mater. She talks a deal, but she's a jolly motherly sort, and was fond of Kate. There's no harm in her, only that she's a bit soft about her beautiful boy--me, you know," he said, with one of his old grins. Leigh winced a little, and Claud's face grew solemn directly. "I say," he said hastily, "it was queer that he should have come and fetched you, wasn't it?" "Yes," said Leigh, "a curious stroke of fate, or whatever you may call it; and yet simple enough. It was in a case of panic; he was seeking a doctor, and my red lamp was the first he saw. But after all, it was the same when we were boys; if we had strong reasons, through some escapade, for wishing to avoid a certain person, he was the very first whom we met." "Yes, Mr Wilton; what you propose is the best course that can be pursued, and I think it is our duty towards your cousin; we can arrange later on what ought to be done about this man. You and your relatives may or may not think it right to prosecute him, but you may rest assured that his injury will keep him a close prisoner for a long while to come." "Yes, I suppose that fall was a regular crippler, but you have to think about prosecuting too. The law does not allow people to use pistols." "We can discuss that by-and-by. Now, please, I shall be greatly obliged if you will go to my sister, and tell her as much as you think is necessary. If she has gone to bed she must be roused. Ask her to be ready to receive Miss Wilton, and then I think you ought to go down to Northwood and fetch Mrs Wilton." "All right--like a shot," said Claud, eagerly. "I mean directly," he cried, colouring a little. "But, er--you mean this?" "Of course," said Leigh, smiling; "why should I not? Let me be frank with you, if I can with a sensation of having a hole bored through my arm with a red-hot bar. A short time back I felt that if there was a man living with whom I could never be on friendly terms, you were that man; but you have taught me that it is dangerous to judge any one from a shallow knowledge of what he is at heart. I know you better now; I hope to know you better in the future. Will you shake hands?" "Oh!" ejaculated Claud, seizing the hand violently, and dropping it the next instant as if it were red-hot. For Leigh's face contracted, and he turned faint from the agony caused by the jar. "What a thoughtless brute I am! Here, have another glass of that beast's wine." "No, no, I'm better now. There, quick! It must be very late, and I don't want my sister to have gone to bed. I dare say she would sit up for me some time, though." "Yes, I'm off," cried Claud, excitedly; "but let me say--no, no, I can't say it now; you must mean it, though, or you wouldn't have spoken like that." He had reached the door, when Leigh stopped him. "I'll go in first and see how your cousin is; Jenny would like the last report." "Better, certainly," he said on his return; and Claud hurried out of the house. "He said `Jenny,'" he muttered, as he ran towards Leigh's new home. "`Jenny,' not `my sister,' or `Miss Leigh.' Oh, what a lucky brute I am! But I do wish I wasn't such a cad!" CHAPTER FORTY EIGHT. Before morning Kate was sufficiently recovered to be removed to Leigh's house; but it was days before her senses had fully returned, and her brain was thoroughly awake to the present and the past, to find herself lovingly attended by her aunt and Jenny Leigh, who was her companion down to Northwood, while Claud kept the doctor company in town and accompanied him as assistant every time he visited Great Ormond Street. For Leigh, in spite of his own injuries, continued to attend Garstang till he was thoroughly out of danger, though it was months before he was able to go to his office. It was time he went there, for the place, and his country house in Kent, were in charge of his creditors' representatives, it having come like a crash on the monetary world that Garstang, the money-lender and speculator, had failed for a very heavy sum. Poetic justice or not, John Garstang found himself bankrupt in health and pocket; his bold attempt to save his position by making Kate his wife being the gambler's last stroke. As a matter of course, James Wilton was involved; led on by Garstang, he had mortgaged his property deeply, and the money was now called in, and ruin stared him in the face just at a time when he was prostrate with illness. "It's jolly hard on the old man," said Claud one day when he had come up to town and called on Leigh, "for the guv'nor has lorded it down at Northwood all these years, and could have been doing it fine now if it hadn't been for old Garstang. He gammoned the guv'nor into speculating, and then gammoned him when he lost to go on with the double or quits game, and a nice thing Johnny must have made out of it. If it had been sheep or turnips, of course the old man would have been all there; but it was a fat turkey playing cards with a fox, and I suppose everything comes to the hammer." "Very bad for your mother," said Leigh. "Oh, I don't know. I say, may I light my pipe?" "Oh, yes; smoke away while you have any brains left." "Better smoke one's brains away than catch some infection in your doctor's shop. How do I know that some one with the epidemics hasn't been sitting in this chair?--ah! that's better. I say, it's a pity you don't smoke, Leigh." "Is it? Very well, then, I'll have a cigar with you to help keep off the infection. I did have a rheumatic patient in that chair this morning." "Eh? Did you? Oh, well, I'll risk that. Ah, now you look more sociable, and as if you hadn't got your back up because I called." "I couldn't have had, because I was very glad to see you." "Were you? Well, you didn't look it. You were saying about being bad for the mater. I don't believe she'll mind, if the guv'nor don't worry. She's about the most contented old girl that ever lived, if things will only go smooth. The crash comes hardest on poor me. It's Othello's occupation, gone, and no mistake, with yours truly. I say, don't you think I could turn surgeon? I have lots of friends in the Mid-West Pack, and if they knew I was in the profession I could get all the accidents." "No," said Leigh, smiling; "you are not cut out for a doctor." "I don't think I am cut out for anything, Leigh, and things look very black. I can farm, and of course if the guv'nor hadn't smashed I could have gone on all right. But it's heart-breaking, Leigh; it is, upon my soul. I haven't been home for weeks. Been along with an old aunt." "Why, you oughtn't to leave a sinking ship, my lad." "Well, I know that," said Claud, savagely; "and that's why I've come here." "Why you've come here?" said Leigh, staring. "Yes; don't pretend that you can't understand." "There is no pretence. Explain yourself." Claud Wilton had only just lit his pipe, but he tapped it empty on the bars, and sat gazing straight before him. "I want to do the square thing," he said; "but I'm such an impulsive beggar, and I can't trust myself. I want you to send for your sister home; Kate's all right again; mother told me so in a letter; and she has got her lawyer down there, and is transacting business. Look here, Leigh: it isn't right for me to be down there when your sister's at the Manor. I can't see a shilling ahead now, and it isn't fair to her." Leigh looked at him keenly. "I shall have to marry Kate after all," continued Claud, with a bitter laugh. "Do you hear, hated rival? We can't afford to let the chance go. Oh, I say, Leigh, I wish you'd give me a dose, and put me out of my misery, for I'm about the most unhappy beggar that ever lived." "Things do look bad for you, certainly," said Leigh. "How would it be if you tried for a stewardship to some country gentleman--you understand?" "Oh, yes, I understand stock and farming generally; but who'd have me? Hanged if I couldn't go and enlist in some cavalry regiment; that's about all I'm fit for." "Don't talk nonsense, my lad. Where are you staying?" "Nowhere--just come up. I shall have to get a cheap room somewhere." "Nonsense! You can have a bed here. We'll go and have a bit of dinner somewhere, and chat matters over afterwards. I may perhaps be able to help you." "With something out of the tintry-cum-fuldicum bottle?" "I have a good many friends; but there's no hurry. We shall see?" Claud reached over, and gripped Leigh's hand. "Thankye, old chap," he said. "It's very good of you, but I'm not going to quarter myself on you. If you have any interest, though, and could get me something to go to abroad, I should be glad. Busy now, I suppose?" "Yes, I have patients to see. Be with me at six, and we'll go somewhere. Only mind, you will sleep here while you are in town. I want to help you, and to be able to put my hand on you at once." The result was that Claud stayed three days with his friend; and on the third Leigh had a letter at breakfast from his sister, enclosing one from Mrs Wilton to her son, whose address she did not know, but thought perhaps he might have called upon Leigh. "Eh? News from home?" said Claud, taking the note, and glancing eagerly at Leigh's letter the while. "I say, how is she?" "My sister? Quite well," said Leigh, dryly. Claud sighed, and opened his own letter. "Poor old mater! she's such a dear old goose; she's about worrying herself to death about me, and--what!--oh, I say. Here, Leigh! Hurrah! There is life in a mussel after all." "What do you mean?" "Why, hark here. You know I told you that Kate had got her lawyer down there?" "Yes," said Leigh, frowning slightly. "Well, God bless her for the dearest and best girl that ever breathed! She has arranged to clear off every one of the guv'nor's present liabilities by taking over the mortgages, or whatever they are. The mater don't understand, but she says it's a family arrangement; and what do you think she says?" Leigh shook his head. "That she is sure that her father would not have seen his brother come to want God bless her. What a girl. Leigh, it's all over with you now. Intense admiration for her noble cousin, Claud, and--confound it, old fellow, don't look at me! I feel as if I should choke." He went hurriedly to the window, and stood looking out for some minutes, before coming back to where Leigh sat gravely smoking his cigar. Claud Wilton's eyes had a peculiarly weak look in them as he stood by Jenny's brother, and his voice sounded strange. "I'm going down by the next train," he said. "This means the work at home going on as usual, and I shan't be a beggar now, Leigh. I say, old man, I am going to act the true man by hier. I may speak right out to her now?" "Whatever had happened I should not have objected, for sooner or later I know you would have made her a home." Claud nodded. "And look here," he cried, "why not come down with me? Kate would be delighted to see you. Only you wouldn't bring Jenny back?" "Take my loving message to my sister," said Leigh, ignoring his companion's other remark, "that I beg she will come home now at once." "Because I'm going down?" pleaded Claud. "Yes," said Leigh, gravely, "because you are going down." ------------------------------------------------------------------------ A year and a half glided by, and Kate Wilton had become full mistress of her property, and other matters remained, as the lawyers say, "in statu quo," save that Jenny was back with her brother. James Wilton was very much broken, and his son was beginning to be talked of as a rising agriculturist. John Garstang was at Boulogne, and his stepson had married a wealthy Australian widow in Sydney. Jenny had again and again tried to urge her brother to propose to Kate, but in vain. "It is so stupid of you, dear," she said. "I know she'd say yes to you, directly. Of course any girl would if you asked her." "Yes, I'm a noble specimen of humanity," said Leigh, dryly. "I believe you're the proudest and most sensitive man that ever lived," cried Jenny, angrily. "One of them, sis." "And next time I shall advise her to propose to you. You couldn't refuse." "You are too late, dear," he said, gravely, as he recalled a letter he had received a month before, in which he had been reproached for ignoring the writer's existence, and forcing her to humble herself and write. There were words in that letter which seemed burned into his brain and he had a bitter fight to hold himself aloof. For in simple, heart-appealing language she had said: "Am I never to see you and tell you how I pray nightly for him who twice saved my life, and enabled me to live and say I am still worthy of being called his friend?" Pride--honourable feeling--true manhood--whatever it was--he fought and won, for in his unworldly way he told himself that in his early struggles for a position he could not ask a rich heiress to be his wife. "I know," Jenny often said, "that she wishes she had hardly a penny in the world." It does not fall to many of us to have our fondest wishes fulfilled, but Kate Wilton had hers, though in a way which brought misery to thousands, though safety to more who have lived since. For the great commercial crisis burst upon London. One of the great banks collapsed, and dragged others, like falling card houses, in its wake. Among others, Wilton's Joint Stock Bank came to the ground, and in its ruin the two-thirds left of Kate's money went out like so much burning paper, leaving only a few tiny sparks to scintillate in the tinder, and disappear. "Oh, how horrible!" cried Jenny, when the news reached the Leighs. "What a horrid shame! I must go and see her now she is in such trouble." "No," said Leigh, drawing himself up with a sigh of relief, "let me go first." "Pierce!" cried Jenny, excitedly, as she sprang to her brother's breast, her face glowing from the result of shockingly selfish thoughts connected with Claud Wilton and matrimony, "and you mean to ask her that?" He nodded, kissed her lovingly, and hurried to Kate Wilton's side. The interview was strictly private, as a matter of course, but the consequences were not long in following, and among other things James Wilton made his will--the will of a straightforward, honest man. There were people who said that the passing of the Limited Liability Act was mainly due to the way in which Kate Wilton's fortune was swept away. That undoubtedly was a piece of fiction, but out of evil came much good. THE END. 
43989	----	THE TRAIL OF THE BADGER [Illustration: "DICK PUSHED HIS RIFLE-BARREL THROUGH A CREVICE IN THE ROCKS."] The Trail of The Badger _A STORY OF THE COLORADO BORDER THIRTY YEARS AGO_ BY SIDFORD F. HAMP _Author of "Dale and Fraser, Sheepmen," "The Boys of Crawford's Basin," etc._ ILLUSTRATED BY CHASE EMERSON [Illustration: logo] W. A. WILDE COMPANY BOSTON CHICAGO _Copyrighted, 1908_ BY W. A. WILDE COMPANY _All rights reserved_ THE TRAIL OF THE BADGER PREFACE In writing the adventures of the boys who followed "The Trail of the Badger" down into that part of Colorado where the fringes of two discordant civilizations overlapped each other--the strenuous Anglo-Saxon and the easygoing Mexican--the author has endeavored to show how two healthy, enterprising young fellows were able to do their little part in that great work of Desert Reclamation whose importance is now as well understood by the general public as it always has been by those whose lot has been cast to the west of meridian one hundred and five. To some it may appear that the boys are ahead of their time, but to the author, whose introduction to "the arid region" dates back thirty years and more, remembering the conditions then prevailing, it seems no more than natural that they should recognize the unusual opportunity presented to them of making a career for themselves, and even that they should be dimly conscious of the fact that if they "could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before" they would be deserving well of the infant community of which they formed a part. That in making this attempt they would meet with adventures--in fact, that they could hardly avoid them--the author, recalling his own experiences in that country at that time, feels well assured. CONTENTS I. DICK STANLEY 11 II. SHEEP AND CINNAMON 32 III. THE MESCALERO VALLEY 51 IV. RACING THE STORM 68 V. HOW DICK BROUGHT THE NEWS 87 VI. THE PROFESSOR'S STORY 102 VII. DICK'S DIPLOMACY 116 VIII. THE START 129 IX. ANTONIO MARTINEZ 147 X. THE PADRON 165 XI. THE SPANISH TRAIL 179 XII. THE BADGER 191 XIII. THE KING PHILIP MINE 203 XIV. A CHANGE OF PLAN 221 XV. DICK'S SNAP SHOT 241 XVI. THE OLD PUEBLO HEAD-GATE 259 XVII. THE BRIDGE 276 XVIII. THE BIG FLUME 294 XIX. PEDRO'S BOLD STROKE 313 XX. THE MEMORABLE TWENTY-NINTH 333 ILLUSTRATIONS "Dick pushed his rifle-barrel through a crevice in the rocks" (_Frontispiece_) 42 "It was a splendid chance; nobody could ask for a better target" 57 "Passing on our way through the town of Mosby" 137 "Behind him, stood the squat figure of Pedro Sanchez" 213 "I could not think what he was doing it for" 286 The Trail of the Badger CHAPTER I DICK STANLEY "Look out! Look out! Behind you, man! Behind you! Jump quick, or he'll get you!" It was a boy, a tall, spare, wiry young fellow of sixteen, who shouted this warning, his voice, in its frantic urgency, rising almost to a shriek at the end; and it was another boy, also tall, spare and wiry, to whom the warning was shouted. The latter turned to look behind him, and for one brief instant his whole body stiffened with fear--his very hair stood on end. Nor is this a mere figure of speech: the boy's hair did actually stand on end: he could feel it "creep" against the crown of his hat. _I know_--for I was the boy! That I had good reason to be "scared stiff" I think any other boy will admit, for, not thirty feet below me, coming quickly and silently up the rocks, his little gleaming eyes fixed intently upon me, was a grim old cinnamon bear, an animal which, though less dangerous than his big cousin, the grizzly, is quite dangerous enough when he is thoroughly in earnest. But for my companion's warning shout the bear would surely have caught me, and my story would have come to an end at the very beginning of the first chapter. It was certainly an awkward situation, about as awkward, I should think, as any boy ever got himself into; and how I, Frank Preston, lately a schoolboy in St. Louis, happened to find myself on a spur of Mescalero Mountain, in Colorado, with a cinnamon bear charging up the rocks within a few feet of me, needs a word of explanation. I will therefore go back a few steps in order to give myself space for a preliminary run before jumping head-first into my story, and will tell not only how I came to be there, but will relate also the curious incident which first brought me into contact with my future friend, Dick Stanley; an incident which, while it served as an introduction, at the same time gave me some idea of the resourcefulness and promptness of action with which his very peculiar training had endowed him. It was in the last week of October, 1877, that I was seated one evening in my room in St. Louis, very busy preparing my studies for next day, when the door opened suddenly and in walked my Uncle Tom. When, at the age of seven, I had been left an orphan, Uncle Tom, my mother's brother, though himself a bachelor, had taken charge of me, and with him I had lived ever since. He and I, I am glad to say, were the best of friends--regular chums--for, though twenty years my senior, he seemed in some respects to be as young as myself, and our relations were more like those of elder and younger brother than of uncle and nephew. Uncle Tom was rather short and rather fat, and he was moreover one of the jolliest of men, being blessed with a disposition which prompted him always to see the bright side of things, no matter how dark and threatening they might look. Having at a very early age been pitched out into the world to "fend for himself," and having by square dealing and hard work done remarkably well, he had imbibed the idea that book-learning as a means of getting on in the world was somewhat overrated; an idea which, right or wrong--and I think myself that Uncle Tom carried it rather too far--was to have a decided effect in shaping my own career. As it was against the rule, laid down by Uncle Tom himself, for any one to disturb me at my studies, I naturally looked up from my books to ascertain the cause of the intrusion, when, with a cigar in his mouth and his hands in his pockets, he came bulging in, half filling the little room. That there was something unusual in the wind I felt sure, and my guardian's first act went far to confirm my suspicion, for, removing one hand from his pocket, he quietly reached forward and with his finger tilted my book shut. "Put 'em away," said he. "You won't need them for a month or more." As the fall term of school was then in full swing, this declaration was a good deal of a surprise to me, as any one will suppose, and doubtless I showed as much in my face. "I have a scheme in my head, Frank," said he, with a knowing wag of that member, in reply to my look of inquiry. "I know _that_," I replied, laughing; for there never was a moment when Uncle Tom had not a scheme in his head of one sort or another. "You spider-legged young reptile!" cried he, with perfect good humor, but at the same time shaking a threatening finger at me. "Don't you dare to laugh at my schemes; especially this one. For this is a brand-new idea, and a very important one--to you. I'm leaving to-morrow night for Colorado." "Are you?" I cried, a good deal surprised by this sudden announcement. "When did you decide upon that?" "To-day. I got a letter this afternoon from my friend, Sam Warren, the assayer, written from Mosby--if you know where that is." I shook my head. "I didn't suppose you did," remarked Uncle Tom. "It is a new mining camp on one of the spurs of Mescalero Mountain in Colorado, and in the opinion of Sam Warren--my old schoolmate, you know--it has a great future before it. So he has written me that if I have the time to spare I had better come out and take a look at it." Uncle Tom's business was that of a mining promoter, the middle man between the prospector and the capitalist, a business in which his ability and his honorable methods had gained for him an enviable reputation. "So you have decided to go out, have you?" said I. "Yes," he replied. "I leave to-morrow evening--and you are coming with me." As may be imagined, I opened my eyes pretty widely at this unfolding of the "brand-new idea." "What do you mean?" I asked. "Look here, Frank, old chap," said he, seating himself on the edge of the table and becoming confidential. "You've stuck to your books very well--if anything, too well. Now, I've had my eye on you ever since the hot weather last summer, and it strikes me you need a change--you are too pale and altogether too thin." Being fat and "comfortable" himself, Uncle Tom was disposed to regard with pity any one, like myself, whose framework showed through its covering. "But----" I began; when Uncle Tom headed me off. "Now you be quiet," said he, "and let me finish. I've had some such idea brewing in my head for some time; it isn't a sudden freak, as you imagine. I've considered the matter carefully, and I've come to the conclusion that you'll lose nothing by the move. In fact, what you will lose by missing a month or so of schooling will be more than made up to you by the eye-opener you will get in making this expedition." "How so?" I asked. "You will make the acquaintance of a young State just learning to walk alone--for, as you know, it was only last year that Colorado came into the Union; you will see a new mining camp, and rub up against the men, good, bad and indifferent, who go to make up the community of a frontier town; and more than that, you will get at first hand, what you never could get by sitting here and reading about it, a correct idea of the country traversed by the explorers--Pike, Frémont and the rest of them. "I am honestly of opinion, Frank," he went on, seriously, "that this is an opportunity not to be neglected. At the same time, old fellow, as it is your education and not mine that is under discussion, I consider that you have a right to a voice in the matter; so I'll leave you to think it over, and to-morrow at breakfast you can tell me whether you are coming or not." With that, Uncle Tom slipped down from the table, walked out and shut the door behind him. That was his way: he was always as sudden as a clap of thunder. Anybody will guess that my books did not receive much more attention that evening. For an hour I paced up and down the room, considering Uncle Tom's proposition. It was true that I did feel pulled down by the effects of the hot weather, combined with a pretty close application to my books, and I had no doubt that the expedition proposed would do me a world of good; though whether my education would be benefited in like manner I was not so sure as Uncle Tom seemed to be. But though I did my best honestly to consider the question in all its aspects, there can be little doubt that my inclinations--whether I was aware of it or not--colored my judgment, so that my final decision was just what might have been expected in any active boy of sixteen. As the clock struck ten I ran down-stairs and informed Uncle Tom that I was going with him. It is not necessary to go into all the details of our journey, though to me, who had never before been a hundred miles from home, everything was new and everything was interesting. It is enough to say that, leaving the train at the foot of the mountains--for the railroad then went no further--we engaged places in the mail-carrier's open buckboard, and after a very rough and very tiring drive of a day and a half we at last reached our destination and were set down at the door of a house outside which hung a "shingle" bearing the legend, "Samuel Warren, Assayer and U. S. Dep. Min. Surveyor." It will be remembered that one of Uncle Tom's reasons for breaking into my school term was that I should rub up against the citizens comprising a frontier settlement. He could hardly have contemplated, however, that I should come in contact with quite so many of them quite so early in the day as I did. We had hardly sat down to the refreshments spread before us by our host--a big, bearded man, clad in a suit of brown canvas--when we, in common with the rest of the community, were startled by the sudden shriek of a woman in distress. To rush to the door was the work of a moment, when, the first thing we caught sight of was a man, clad only in his nightshirt, running like a madman up the street, while far behind him, and losing ground at every step, ran a woman, calling out with all the breath she had to spare--which was not much--"Stop him! Stop him!" "It's Tim Donovan!" shouted the assayer. "He's sick with the mountain-fever! He's crazy! Head him off! Head him off! The poor chap will die of exposure!" Warren's house was near the upper end of the street, and just as we three jumped down the porch steps, the demented fugitive passed the door, going like the wind. At once we set off in pursuit, while behind us came all the rest of the population and most of the dogs, by this time roused to action by the cries of the sick man's wife. Nobody knows until he has tried it how hard it is to run up-hill at an elevation of nine thousand feet, especially to one unaccustomed to such altitudes. Uncle Tom, who was not built for such exercise, fell out in the first fifty yards, while, of the others, the short-winded barroom loafers--of whom, as is always the case in a new camp, there were more than enough--gave out even more quickly, their habits of life being a fatal handicap in a foot-race. One by one, nearly all the rest came down to a walk, until presently the only ones left with any run in them were Jake Peters and Oscar Swansen, both timber-cutters from the hills, Aleck Smith, a wiry little teamster, and myself. As for me, having the advantage of a good start over everybody else, being only sixteen years old, and having a reputation at school as a long-distance runner, it seemed as though I ought to be able to catch the unfortunate fugitive, who, having run a quarter of a mile already, should by this time be out of breath. Indeed, I believe I should have caught him at the first dash had he not resorted to tactics which made me chary of coming near him. Not more than thirty yards separated us and I was gaining steadily, when he, barefooted himself and making no noise, hearing the clatter of my shoes behind him, suddenly stopped, picked up a stone and hurled it at me. It would have taken me square in the chest had I not jumped aside; when, finding that the man was really dangerous, and knowing very well that I should have no chance whatever in a personal struggle with him--for he was a stout young Irish miner with a fore-arm like a leg of mutton--I contented myself with trotting behind and keeping him in sight; trusting to the able-bodied men following me to do the tackling when the opportunity should arise. The town of Mosby consisted of one steep street about half a mile long and two houses thick; for it was situated in a valley, or, rather, in a gorge, so narrow that there was no room for it to spread except at the two ends. In truth, there was no room for it to grow except southward, for at the upper, or northern, end the mountains came together, forming an inaccessible cañon through which rushed the little stream of ice-cold water coming down from Mescalero. From the lower end of this cañon the stream fell perpendicularly into a great hole in the rocks--a sort of natural chimney, or well, about sixty feet deep. The down-stream side of this "chimney" was split from top to bottom, and through the narrow crack, only four or five feet wide, the water leaped foaming down in a series of miniature cascades. The only way of getting into this deep pit was by taking to the water, scrambling up the steep, step-like bed of the stream and passing through the crack, when, once inside, a man might defy the world to come and get him out. This was exactly what Tim Donovan did. Seeing that he could follow the stream no further, I was wondering whether he would take to the mountain on the right or the one on the left, when he suddenly jumped into the water, ran up the smooth, wet "steps," and disappeared from sight through the crevice. In ten seconds, however, he showed himself again. He had found in the driftwood a ragged branch of a pine tree about three feet long, and with this in one hand and a ten-pound stone in the other he stood at bay, regardless of the icy water which poured over his feet, or of the spray from the fall behind him, which in half a minute had wet his thin single garment through and through. It was an impregnable stronghold. No one could get in from the rear, and the place could not be rushed from the front--the ascent was too steep and slippery and the entrance too narrow. If Tim were determined to stay there and perish with cold, it appeared to me that nobody could do anything to prevent him. One by one the pursuers joined me before the entrance, when Mrs. Donovan, who was among the last to arrive, advanced as near as she could without getting into the water, and besought her errant husband to come down. But Tim was deaf to entreaty; all the blandishments of his anxious wife were without effect, and if she could not get him to come down it appeared as though nobody could. Tim, though, was a popular young fellow, and it was not in the nature of a Colorado miner, or of an Irishman either--for they hold together like burrs in a horse's tail--to desert a comrade in distress. So, Mrs. Donovan having failed, there stepped to the front a short, thick-set, red-haired man, Mike O'Brien by name, Tim's partner and particular crony, who, talking pleasantly and naturally to him, as though his friend were quite sane and rational, stepped into the water and waded carefully up the steep slope. "How are ye, Tim, me boy?" said he, with off-hand cordiality. "It's glad I am to see ye out again. It's me birthday to-day, Tim; I'm having a bit of a supper at home an' I come up to ask ye----" Whack! came the stone from Tim's hand, breaking to pieces against the rocky wall within an inch of Mike's head. The invitation was declined. Mike himself, in his effort to dodge the missile, missed his footing, fell on his back, and in a series of dislocating bumps was swept down the "steps" to the starting place, wet, as he declared, right through to his bones. Up to this time the demented man had kept silence, but on seeing Mike go tumbling down-stream, he shook his fist after him and cried out: "Come back and try again, ye devouring baste! Come on, the whole pack of yez! Don't stand there howling, ye cowardly curs; come up and get me out--if ye dare!" "I believe he thinks we are a pack of wolves," said Mr. Warren. "That's it, Mr. Warren, sir," exclaimed Mrs. Donovan, turning to the assayer. "That's it, entirely. He heard a wolf howl last night, and it was hard wor-rk I had to kape him from jumping out of his bed and running off right thin. He thinks it's a pack of them that's hunting him." "Poor fellow! No wonder he refuses to come down. What are we going to do? We _must_ get him out." Then ensued an eager debate, in which everybody took a share except Uncle Tom and myself, who, standing a little apart from the rest on the sloping bank of the stream, were listening and looking on, when some one touched me on my arm, and a boyish voice said: "What's the matter? What's it all about?" Turning round, I saw before me a tall young fellow about my own age, with reddish hair, very keen gray eyes and a much-freckled face, carrying in one hand an old-fashioned, muzzle-loading rifle, nearly as long as himself, and in the other three grouse which he appeared to have shot. Wondering who the boy might be, I explained the situation, when he cried: "What! Tim Donovan! Why he'll die if he's left in there. Poor chap! We must get him out." "Yes," said Uncle Tom. "That's just it. But how? The man won't be persuaded to come out, and no one can get in to drag him out--so what's to be done?" The young fellow stood for a minute thinking, and then, suddenly lifting his head, he exclaimed, with a half laugh: "I know! I know what we can do! He can't be persuaded out or dragged out, but he can be driven out." "How?" asked Uncle Tom. "If you'll come with me," replied the boy, "I'll show you in two minutes." So saying, he jumped across the creek and set off straight up the almost perpendicular side of the mountain, we two following. Uncle Tom, however, finding the climb too steep for him, very soon turned back again, so we two boys went on alone. About three hundred feet up my companion stopped, and it was well for me he did, for I could hardly have gone another step, so desperately out of breath was I. "Not used to it, are you?" said the boy, who himself seemed to be quite unaffected. "Well, we don't have to go any higher, fortunately. Look over there. Do you see that stubby pine tree growing out of the rocks and overhanging the waterfall?" "Yes, I see it," I replied. "And what's that big round thing hanging to it?" "A wasps' nest." "A wasps' nest?" "A wasps' nest," repeated my new acquaintance with peculiar emphasis and with a twinkle in his eye. "Ah!" I exclaimed, suddenly enlightened. "I see your little game. Good! You propose to knock down the wasps' nest into the 'well,' and then poor Tim will just have to vacate." "That's my idea." "Great idea, too. But, look here! Are the wasps alive at this time of year?" "They are this year. We've had such a wonderfully warm season that they are just as brisk as ever." "Well, but there's another thing: how are you going to do it? You can't get at it: the rocks are too straight-up-and-down; and you can't come near enough to knock it off with a stone. How are you going to do it?" The young fellow smiled and patted the stock of his gun. "Shoot it down!" I exclaimed. "Do you think you can? It won't be any use plugging it full of holes, you know; you'll have to nip off the little twig it hangs on. Can you do that?" "I think I can." "All right, then, fire away and let's see." I must confess I felt doubtful. The boy did not look nor talk like a braggart, but nevertheless, to cut with a bullet the slim little branch, no bigger than a lead-pencil, upon which the nest hung suspended looked to me like a pretty ticklish shot. My companion, however, seemed confident. Cocking his gun, he kneeled down, and using a big rock as a rest he took careful aim and fired. It was a perfect shot. The big ball of gray "paper" dropped like a plumb, struck the rim of the "well," burst open, and emptied upon the head of the unfortunate Tim about a bucketful of venomous little yellow-jackets, each and every one of them quivering with rage, and each and every one bent on taking vengeance on somebody. The people below were still debating how to get the sick man out of his fortress, when the sound of the rifle-shot caused them all to look up; but only for an instant, for the echoes had not yet died away, when, with a startling yell, out came Tim, frantically waving his club above his head, seemingly more crazy than ever. Supposing that he was making a dash for liberty, half a dozen of his particular friends flung themselves upon him, and down they all went in a heap together. But this arrangement was of the briefest. In another moment, with shrieks and yells and whirling arms, the whole population went charging down the street, Uncle Tom in the lead, running--breath or no breath--as he had never run before. Never was there a more complete victory: besiegers and besieged flying in one general rout before the assaults of the new enemy. And never did I laugh so extravagantly as I did then, to see the enraged yellow-jackets "take it out" on an unoffending community, while the real culprits were all the time sitting safely perched on the mountainside looking down on the rumpus. "Well, we got him out all right," remarked my companion, as he calmly reloaded his rifle. "I thought we could. You're a newcomer, aren't you? My name's Dick Stanley; I live up-stream, just at the head of the cañon. Are you expecting to make a long stay?" "Two or three weeks, I think," I replied. "My uncle, Mr. Tom Allen, is here to inspect the mines, and he brought me with him. We come from St. Louis. My name's Frank Preston. We're staying at Mr. Warren's house." "Well, come up to our house some day. It is in a little clearing just at the head of the cañon--you can't miss it--and we'll go off for a day's grouse-shooting up into the mountains if you like." "All right, I will. That would just suit me. To-morrow?" "Yes, come up to-morrow, if you like. I'll be on the lookout for you. I suppose you are going home now," he continued, as we rose to our feet. "If I were you, I'd keep up here on the side of the mountain--the street will be full of yellow-jackets--and then, when you come opposite the assayer's house, make a bolt for his back door, or some of them may get you yet." "That's a good idea. I'll do it. Well, good-bye. I'll come up to-morrow then, if I can." CHAPTER II SHEEP AND CINNAMON "That was the funniest thing I ever saw," exclaimed Uncle Tom, laughing in spite of himself, while at the same time, with a comically rueful twist of his countenance, he rubbed the back of his neck where one of the wasps had "got" him. "The way poor Tim bolted out of his stronghold after defying the whole population to come and get him out, was the very funniest thing I ever did see. That was a smart trick of that young rascal; though I wish he had given me notice beforehand of what he intended to do. I'd have started to run a good five minutes earlier if I'd known what was coming. Who is the boy, Warren?" "Well, that is not easy to say," replied our host, "for, as a matter of fact, he does not know himself. His history, what there is of it, is a peculiar one. He lives up here at the head of the cañon with an old German named Bergen--commonly known as the Professor--and his Mexican servant, a man of forty whom the professor brought up with him from Albuquerque, I believe. If Frank's object in coming here was to rub up against all sorts and conditions of men, he could hardly have chosen a better place. Certainly he cannot expect to find a more remarkable character than the professor. "The old fellow is regarded by the people here as a harmless lunatic--which, in a community like this, where muscle is at a premium and scientific attainments at a discount, is not to be wondered at--for it is incomprehensible to them that any man in his right mind should spend his life as the professor spends his. "The old gentleman is an enthusiastic naturalist. He is making a collection of the butterflies, beetles and such things, of the Rocky Mountain region, and with true German thoroughness he has spent years in the pursuit. Choosing some promising spot, he builds a log cabin, and there he stays one year--or two if necessary--until that district is 'fished out,' as you may say, when he packs up and moves somewhere else, to do the same thing over again." "Well, that is certainly a queer character to come across," was Uncle Tom's comment. "But how about the boy, Sam? How does he happen to be in such company?" "Why, about twelve or thirteen years ago, old Bergen was 'doing' the country somewhere northwest of Santa Fé, when he made a very strange discovery. It was a bad piece of country for snowslides, which were frequent and dangerous in the spring, and one day, being anxious to get to a particular point quickly, the professor was crossing the tail of a new slide--a risky thing to do--as being the shortest cut, when his attention was attracted by some strange object lodged half way up the great bank of snow. Climbing up to it, he found to his astonishment that the strange object was a wagon-bed, while, to his infinitely greater astonishment, inside it on a mattress, fast asleep, was a three-year-old boy--young Dick!" "That was an astonisher, sure enough!" exclaimed I, who had been an eager listener. "And was that all the professor found?" "That was all. The running-gear of the wagon had vanished; the horses had vanished; and the boy's parents or guardians had vanished--all buried, undoubtedly, under the snow." "And what did the professor do?" "The only thing he could do: took the boy with him--and a fortunate thing it was for young Dick that the old gentleman happened to find him. But though he inquired of everybody he came across--they were not many, for white folks were scarce in those parts then--the professor could learn nothing of the party; so, not knowing what else to do, he just carried off the youngster with him, and with him Dick has been ever since." "That's a queer history, sure enough," remarked Uncle Tom. "And was there nothing at all by which to identify the boy?" "Just one thing. I forgot to say that in the wagon-bed was a single volume of Shakespeare--one of a set: volume two--on the fly-leaf of which was written the name, 'Richard Livingstone Stanley, from Anna,' and as the boy was old enough to tell his own name--Dick Stanley--the professor concluded that the owner of the book was his father. Moreover, as the boy made no mention of his mother, though he now and then spoke of his 'Daddy' and his 'Uncle David,' the old gentleman formed the theory that the mother was dead and that the father and uncle, bringing the boy with them, had come west to seek their fortunes, and being very likely tenderfeet, unacquainted with the dangerous nature of those great snow-masses in spring time, they had been caught in a slide and killed." "Poor little chap," said Uncle Tom. "And he has been wandering about with the old gentleman ever since, has he? He must be a sort of Wild Man of the West in miniature." "Not a bit of it. The professor is a man of learning, and he has not neglected his duty. Dick has a highly respectable education, including some items rather out of the common for a boy: he speaks German and Spanish; he has a pretty intimate knowledge of the wild animals of the Rocky Mountains; and he is one of the best woodsmen and quite the best shot of anybody in these immediate parts." "Well, they are an odd pair, certainly. I should like to go up and see the professor--that is, if he ever receives visitors." "Oh, yes. He's a sociable old fellow. He and I are very good friends. I'll take you up there and introduce you some day. He is well worth knowing. If there is any information you desire concerning the Rocky Mountain country from here southward to the border, Herr Bergen can give it you. You are to be congratulated, Frank, on making Dick's acquaintance so early: he will be a fine companion for you while you stay here. You propose to go grouse-shooting to-morrow, do you? Well, you can take my shotgun--it hangs up there on the wall--and make a day of it; for your uncle and I are proposing to ride up to inspect a mine on Cape Horn, which will take us pretty well all afternoon." I thanked our host for his offer, and next morning, gun in hand, I set off immediately after breakfast for Dick's dwelling. Passing the "well" where Tim Donovan had taken refuge the day before, I ascended by a clearly-marked trail to the edge of the cañon, and following along it through the woods for about a mile, I presently came in sight of a little clearing, in which stood a neat log cabin of two or three rooms. Outside was a Mexican, chopping wood, while in the doorway stood Dick, evidently looking out for me, for, the moment I appeared, he ran forward to meet me. "How are you?" he cried. "Glad you came early: I have a new plan for the day, if it suits you. I've been spying around with a field-glass and I've just seen a band of sheep up on that big middle spur of Mescalero; they are working their way up from their feeding-ground, and I propose that we go after them instead of hunting grouse. What do you say?" "All right; that will suit me." "Come on, then. Just come into the house for a minute first and see the professor, and then we'll dig out at once." From the fact that Mr. Warren had so frequently spoken of the professor as "the old gentleman," I was prepared to see a bent old man, with a white beard and big round spectacles--the typical "German professor," of my imagination. I was a good deal surprised, then, to find a small, active man of sixty, perhaps, a little gray, certainly, but with a clear blue eye and a wide-awake manner I was far from anticipating. He was in the inner room when I entered--evidently the sanctum where he prepared and stored his specimens--but the moment he heard our steps he came briskly out, and, on Dick's introducing me, shook hands with me very heartily. "And how's poor Tim this morning?" he asked, as soon as the formalities, if they can be called so, were over. "He is all right, sir," I replied. "I went down there before breakfast this morning at Mr. Warren's request to inquire. In fact, Tim was so much better apparently that Mrs. Donovan declares that if he ever gets the fever again she intends to apply iced water to his feet and wasp-stings to the rest of his anatomy, as being a sure cure. She is immensely grateful to Dick for having discovered and applied a remedy that has worked so well." "Then if Tim is wise," remarked the professor, laughing, "he won't get the fever again, for I should think the cure would be worse than the disease. But you want to be off, don't you? Do you understand the working of a Winchester repeater? Well," as I shook my head, "then you had better take the Sharp's and Dick the Winchester. And, Dick, you'd better have an eye on the weather. Romero says there is a change coming, and he is generally pretty reliable. So, now, off you go; and good luck to you." Leaving the cabin, we went straight on up the narrow valley for about three miles--the pine-clad mountains rising half a mile high on either side of us--going as quickly as we could, or, to be more exact, going as quickly as I could. For the elevation, beginning at nine thousand feet, increased, of course, at every step, and I, being unused to such altitudes, found myself much distressed for breath--a fact which was rather a surprise to me, considering that in our track-meets at school the mile run was my strong point. I did not understand then that to get enough oxygen out of that thin mountain air it was necessary to take two breaths where one would suffice at sea-level. We had ascended about a thousand feet, I think, when, at the base of the bare ridge for which we had been making, we slackened our pace, and my companion, who knew the country, taking the lead, we went scrambling up over the rocks and snow for an hour or more. The quantity of snow we found up there was a surprise to me, for, from below the amount seemed trifling. There had been a heavy fall up in the range a month before, and this snow, drifting into the gullies, had settled into compact masses, the surface of which, on this, the southern face of the mountain, being every day slightly softened by the heat of the sun, and every night frozen solid again, made the footing exceedingly treacherous. Whenever, therefore, we found it necessary to cross one of these steep-tilted snow-beds we did so with the greatest caution. We had been climbing, as I have said, for more than an hour, and were nearing the top of the ridge, when Dick stopped and silently beckoned to me to come up to where he lay, crouching under shelter of a little ledge. "Smell anything?" he whispered. I gave a sniff and raised my eyebrows inquiringly. "Sheep?" said I, softly. My companion nodded. "They must be somewhere close by," said he, in a voice hardly audible. "Go very carefully and keep your eyes wide open. If you see anything, stop instantly." We were lying side by side upon the rocks, Dick considerately waiting a moment while I got my breath again, and were just about to crawl forward, when there came the sound of a sudden rush of hoofs and a clatter of stones from some invisible point ahead of us, and then dead silence again. "They've winded us and gone off," whispered Dick. But the next moment he added eagerly, "There they are! Look! There they are! Up there! See? My! What a chance!" Immediately on our left was a deep gorge, so narrow and precipitous that we could not see the bottom of it from where we lay. The sheep, having seemingly got wind of us, with that agility which is always so astonishing in such heavy animals, had rushed down one side of the precipitous gorge and up the other, and now, there they were, all standing in a row--eleven of them--on the opposite summit, looking down, not at us, but at something immediately below them. "What do you suppose it is, Dick?" I whispered. "Don't know," my companion replied. "Mountain-lion, perhaps: they are very partial to mutton. Anyhow," he continued, "if we want to get a shot we must shoot from here: we can't move without the sheep seeing us, and they'd be off like a flash if they did. You take a shot, Frank. Take the nearest one. Sight for two hundred yards." "No," I replied. "You shoot. I shall miss: I'm too unsteady for want of breath." "All right." Raising himself a fraction of an inch at a time until he had come to a kneeling position, Dick pushed his rifle-barrel through a crevice in the rocks, took aim and fired. The nearest sheep, a fine fellow with a handsome pair of horns, pitched forward, fell headlong from the ledge upon which he had been standing and vanished from our sight among the broken rocks below; while the others turned tail and fled up the mountain, disappearing also in a minute or less. "Come on!" cried Dick, springing to his feet. "Let's go across and get him. Round this way. Don't trust to that slope of ice: you may slip and break your neck." "But the mountain-lion, Dick," I protested. "Suppose there's a mountain-lion down there." "Oh, never mind him!" Dick exclaimed. "If there was one, he's gone by this time. And even if he should be there yet, he'd skip the moment he saw us. We needn't mind him. Come on!" Away we went, therefore, Dick in the lead, and scrambling quickly though carefully down the rocky wall, we made our way up the bed of the ravine until we found ourselves opposite the ledge upon which the sheep had been standing. Here we discovered that the wall of the gorge was split from top to bottom by a narrow cleft--previously invisible to us--filled with hard snow, and whether the sheep had been standing on the right side or the left of this crevice, and therefore on which side the big ram had fallen, we could not tell; for the wall of the gorge, besides being exceedingly rough, was littered with great masses of rock against any of which the body of the sheep might have lodged. "I'll tell you what, Frank," said my companion. "It might take us an hour or two to search all the cracks and crannies here. The best plan will be to climb straight up to the ledge where the sheep stood and look down. Then, if he is lodged against the upper side of any of these rocks, we shall be able to see him. But as we can't tell whether he was standing on the right or the left of this crevice, suppose you climb up one side while I go up the other." "All right," said I. "You take the one on the left and I'll go up on this side." It was a laborious climb for both of us--and how those sheep got up there so quickly is a wonder to me still--but as my side of the crevice happened to be easier of ascent than Dick's I got so far ahead of him that I presently found myself about fifty yards in the lead. At this point, however, I met with an obstruction which at first seemed likely to stop me altogether. The fallen rocks were so big, and piled so high, that I could not get over them, and for a moment I thought I should be forced to go back and try another passage. Before resorting to this measure, though, I thought I would attempt to get round the barrier by taking to the snow-bank, supporting myself by holding on to the rocks. To do this I should need the use of both my hands, so, as my rifle had no strap by which to hang it over my shoulder, I took out my handkerchief, tied one end to the trigger-guard, took the other end in my teeth, and slinging the weapon behind me, I seized the rock with both hands and set one foot on the snow. It was at this moment that Dick, down below me on the other side of the crevice, while in the act of crawling up over a big rock, caught a glimpse of something moving over on my side, and the next instant, out from between two great fragments of granite rushed a cinnamon bear and went charging up the slope after me. The bear--as we discovered afterward--had found our sheep, and was agreeably engaged in tearing it to pieces, when he caught a whiff of me. He was an old bear, and had very likely been chased and shot at more than once in the past few years--since the white men had begun to invade his domain--and having conceived a strong antipathy for those interfering bipeds which walked on their hind legs and carried "thunder-sticks" in their fore paws, he decided instantly that, before finishing his dinner, he would just dash out and finish me. And very near he came to doing it. It was only Dick's quick sight and his equally quick shout that saved me. My companion's warning cry to jump could have but one meaning: there was nowhere to jump except out upon the snow-bank; and recovering from my first momentary panic, I let go my rifle and sprang out from the rocks. My hope was that I should be able to keep my footing long enough to scramble across to the rocks on the other side; but in this I was disappointed. The snow-bed lay at an angle as steep as a church roof, and while its surface was slightly softened by the sun, just beneath it was as hard and as slippery as glass. Consequently, the moment my feet struck it they slipped from under me, down I went on my face, and in spite of all my frantic clawing and scratching I began to slide briskly and steadily down-hill. The bear--most fortunately for me--seemed to be less cunning than most of his fellows. Had he paused for a moment to reason it out, he would have seen that by waiting five seconds he might leap upon my back as I went by. Luckily, however, he did not reason it out, but the instant he saw me jump he jumped too, and he, too, began sliding down the icy slope ahead of me; for being, as I said, an old bear, his blunted claws could get no hold. It was an odd situation, and "to a man up a tree," as the saying is, it might have been entertaining. Here was the pursuer retreating backward from the pursued, while the pursued, albeit with extreme reluctance, was pursuing the pursuer--also backward. It was like a nightmare--and a real, live, untamed broncho of a nightmare at that--but luckily it did not last long. Finding that no efforts of mine would arrest my downward progress, and knowing that the bear, reaching the bottom first, need only stand there with his mouth wide open and wait for me to fall into it, I whirled myself over and over sideways, until presently my hand struck the rocks, my finger-tips caught upon a little projection, and there I hung on for dear life, not daring to move a muscle for fear my hold should slip. But from this uncomfortable predicament I was promptly relieved. I had not hung there five seconds ere the sharp report of a rifle rang out, and then another, and next came Dick's voice hailing me: "All right, Frank! I've got him! Hold on: I'm coming up!" Half a minute later, as I lay there face downward on the ice, I heard footsteps just above me, a firm hand grasped my wrist, and a cheerful voice said: "Come on up, old chap. I can steady you." "But the bear, Dick! The bear!" I cried, as I rose to my knees. "Dead as a door-nail," he replied, calmly. "Look." I glanced over my shoulder down the slope. There, on his back among the rocks, lay the cinnamon, his great arms spread out and his head hanging over, motionless. As the snarling beast had slid past him, not ten feet away, Dick, with his Winchester repeater, had shot him once through the heart and once in the base of the skull, so that the bear was stone dead ere he fell from the little two-foot ice-cliff at the bottom of the slope. As for myself, I had had such a scare and was so completely exhausted by my vehement struggles during the past couple of minutes, that for a quarter of an hour I lay on the rocks panting and gasping ere I could get my lungs and my muscles back into working order again. As soon as I could do so, however, I sat up, and holding out my hand to my companion, I said: "Thanks, old chap. I'm mighty glad you were on hand, or, I'm afraid, it would have been all up with me." "It was a pretty close shave," replied Dick; "rather too close for comfort. He meant mischief, sure enough. Well, he's out of mischief now, all right. Let's go down and look at him." "I suppose," said I, "it was the bear that the sheep were looking down at when they stood up there on the ledge all in a row." "Yes, that was it. If I'd known it was a bear they were staring at I'd have left them alone. A mountain-lion I'm not afraid of: he'll run ninety-nine times out of a hundred. But a cinnamon bear is quite another thing: the less you have to do with them, the better." "Well, as far as I'm concerned," said I, "the less I have to do with them, the better it will suit me. If this fellow is a sample of his tribe I'm very willing to forego their further acquaintance: my first interview came too unpleasantly near to being my last. Come on; let's go down." CHAPTER III THE MESCALERO VALLEY It had been our intention to take off the bear's hide and carry it home with us, but we found that he was such a shabby old specimen that the skin was not worth the carriage, so, after cutting out his claws as trophies, we went on to inspect our sheep. Here again we found that "the game was not worth the candle," as the saying is, for the bear had torn the carcass so badly as to render it useless, while the horns, which at a distance and seen against the sky-line, had looked so imposing, proved to be too much chipped and broken to be any good. My rifle we found lying beside the bear, it also having slid down the ice-slope when I dropped it. "Well, Frank," remarked my companion, "our hunt so far doesn't seem to have had much result--unless you count the experience as something." "Which I most decidedly do," I interjected. "You are right enough there," replied Dick; "there's no gainsaying that. Well, what I was going to say was that the day is early yet, and if you like there is still time for us to go off and have a try for a deer. I should like to take home something to show for our day's work." "Very well," said I. "Which way should we take? There are no deer up here among the rocks, I suppose." "Why, I propose that we go up over this ridge here and try the country to the southwest. I've never been down there myself, having always up to the present hunted to the north and east of camp; but I've often thought of trying it: it is a likely-looking country, quite different from that on the Mosby side of the divide: high mesa land cut up by deep cañons. What do you say?" "Anything you like," I answered. "It is all new to me, and one direction is as good as another." "Very well, then, let us get up over the ridge at once and make a start." Having discovered a place easier of ascent than those by which we had first tried to climb up, we soon found ourselves on top of the ridge, whence we could look out over the country we were intending to explore. It was plain at a glance that the two sides of the divide were very different. Behind us, to the north, rose Mescalero Mountain, bare, rugged and seamed with strips of snow. From this mountain, as from a center, there radiated in all directions great spurs, like fingers spread out, on one of which we were then standing. Looking southward, we could see that our spur continued for many miles in the form of a chain of round-topped mountains, well covered with timber, the elevation of which diminished pretty regularly the further they receded from the parent stem. On the left hand side of this chain--the eastern, or Mosby side--the country was very rough and broken: from where we stood we could see nothing but the tops of mountains, some sharp and rugged, some round and tree-covered, seemingly massed together without order or regularity. But to the south and southwest it was very different. Here the land lying embraced between two of the spurs was spread out like a great fan-shaped park, which, though it sloped away pretty sharply, was fairly smooth, except where several dark lines indicated the presence of cañons of unknown depth. The whole stretch, as far as we could distinguish, was pretty well covered with timber, though occasional open spaces showed here and there, some of two or three acres and some of two or three square miles in extent. "Just the country for black-tail," said Dick, "especially at this time of year--the beginning of winter. For, you see, it lies very much lower on the average than the Mosby side, and the snow consequently will not come so early nor stay so late. It ought to be a great hunting-ground." "It is a curious thing to find an open stretch like that in the midst of the mountains," said I. "What is it called?" "The Mescalero valley. The professor says it was once an arm of the sea--and it looks like it, doesn't it? Over on the Mosby side the rocks are all granite and porphyry, tilted up at all sorts of angles; but down there it is sandstone and limestone, lying flat--a sure sign that it was once the bottom of a sea." "Is the valley inhabited?" I asked. "Down at the southern end, about fifty miles away, there is a Mexican settlement, at the foot of those twin peaks you see down there standing all alone in the midst of the valley--the Dos Hermanos: Two Brothers, they are called--but up at this end there are no inhabitants, I believe." "Well, there will be some day, I expect," said I. "It ought to be a fine situation for a saw-mill, for instance." "I don't know about that. There would be no way of getting your product to market. Old Jeff Andrews, the founder of Mosby, told me about it once--he's been across it two or three times--and he says that the country is so slashed with cañons that a wheeled vehicle couldn't travel across it, and consequently the expense of road-making would amount to about as much as the value of the timber." "I see. And, of course, the streams are much too shallow to float out the logs. Well, let us get along down." "All right. By the way, before we start, there was one thing I wanted to say:--If we should happen to get separated, all you have to do is to turn your face eastward, climb up over the Mosby Ridge, and you'll find yourself on our own creek, either above or below the town. It's very plain; you can hardly lose yourself--by daylight at any rate. So, now, let's be off." The climb down on this side we found to be very much steeper than the climb up on the other had been. We dropped, by Dick's guess, about three thousand feet in the three miles we traversed ere we found ourselves in the midst of the thick timber, walking on comparatively level ground. Keeping along the eastern side of the valley, in the neighborhood of the Mosby Ridge, we made our way forward, steering by the sun--for the trees were so thick we could see but a short distance ahead--when we came upon one of the little open spaces I have mentioned. We were just about to walk out from among the trees, when my companion, with a sudden, "Pst!" stepped behind a tree-trunk and went down on one knee. Without knowing the reason for this move, I did the same, and on my making a motion with my eyebrows, as much as to say, "What's up?" Dick whispered: "Do you see that white patch on the other side of the clearing? An antelope with its back to us. I'll try to draw him over here, so that you may get a shot." So saying, Dick took out a red cotton handkerchief, poked the corner of it into the muzzle of his rifle, and standing erect behind his tree, held out his flag at right angles. At first the antelope took no notice, but presently, catching a glimpse of the strange object out of the corner of his eye, he whirled round and stood for a moment facing us with his head held high. A slight puff of wind fluttered the handkerchief; the antelope started as though to run; but finding himself unhurt, his curiosity got the better of his fears, and he came trotting straight across the clearing in order to get a closer view. At about a hundred yards distance he stopped, his body turned broadside to us, all ready to bolt at the shortest notice, when Dick whispered to me to shoot. [Illustration: "IT WAS A SPLENDID CHANCE; NOBODY COULD ASK FOR A BETTER TARGET."] It was a splendid chance; nobody could ask for a better target; but do you think I could hold that rifle steady? Not a bit of it! Instead of one sight, I could see half a dozen; and finding that the longer I aimed the more I trembled, I at length pulled the trigger and chanced it. Where the bullet went I know not: somewhere southward; and so did the antelope, and at much the same pace, if I am any judge of speed. "Never mind, old chap," said Dick, laughing. "That is liable to happen to anybody. Most people get a touch of the buck-fever the first time they try to shoot a wild animal. You'll probably find yourself all right the next chance you get." "I'm afraid there's not likely to be a 'next chance,' is there?" I asked. "Won't that shot scare all the deer out of the country?" "I hardly think so: the deer are almost never disturbed down here; it isn't like the Mosby side, where the prospectors are tramping over the hills all the time." "Don't they ever come down here, then?" "No, never. There is a common saying, as you know, perhaps, that 'gold is where you find it'; meaning that it may be anywhere--one place is as likely as another. But, all the same, the prospectors seem to think the chances are better among the granite and porphyry rocks on the other side, where the formation has been cracked and broken and heaved up on end by volcanic force. They never trouble to come down here, where any one can see at a glance that the deposits have never been disturbed since they were first laid down at the bottom of a great inlet of the ocean." "I see what you mean: and as nobody ever comes down here the deer are not fidgety and suspicious as they would be if they were always being disturbed." "That's it, exactly. They are so unused to the presence of human beings that I doubt if they would take any notice of your shot except to cock their ears and sniff at the breeze for a minute or two. Anyhow, we'll go ahead and find out. Let us go across this clearing and see if there isn't a spring on the other side. That antelope was drinking when we first saw him, if I'm not mistaken." Sure enough, just before we entered the trees again, we came upon a pool of water around the softened rim of which were many tracks of animals. "Hallo!" cried Dick. "Just look here! See the wolf tracks--any number of them. It must be a great wolf country as well as a great deer country--in fact, because it is a great deer country. I shouldn't like to be caught here in the winter with so many wolves about; they are unpleasant neighbors when food is scarce." "Are they dangerous to a man with a gun?" I asked. "Yes, they are. One wolf--or even two--doesn't matter much to a man with a breach-loading rifle; but when a dozen or twenty get after you, you'll do well to go up a tree and stay there. A pack of hungry wolves is no trifle, I can tell you." "Have you ever had any experience with them yourself?" "I did once, and a mighty distressing one it was, though it didn't hurt me, personally. I was out hunting with my dog, Blucher, a little short-legged, long-bodied fellow of no particular breed, and was up among the tall timber east of the house, going along suspecting nothing, when Blucher, all of a sudden, began to whine and crowd against my legs. I looked back, and there I saw six big timber-wolves slipping down a hill about a quarter of a mile behind me. They stopped when I stopped, but as soon as I moved, on they came again--it was very uncomfortable, especially when two of them vanished among the trees, and I couldn't tell whether they might not be running to get round the other side of me. I went on up the next rise, the wolves keeping about the same distance behind me, and as soon as we were out of their sight, Blucher and I ran for it. But it was no use: the wolves had taken the same opportunity, and when I looked back again, there they were, all six of them, not a hundred yards behind this time. "It began to look serious; for though it was possible that they were after Blucher, and not after me at all, I couldn't be sure of that. So, first picking out a tree to go up in case of necessity, I knelt down and fired into the bunch, getting one. I had hoped that the others would turn and run, but the shot seemed to have a directly opposite effect: the remaining five wolves came charging straight at me. "I gave the dog one kick and yelled at him to 'Go home!'--it was all I could do--dropped my rifle, jumped for a branch, and was out of reach when the wolves rushed past in pursuit of Blucher. "Poor little beast! Though he was a mongrel with no pretence at a pedigree, he was a good hunting dog and a faithful friend. But what chance had he in a race with five long-legged, half-starved timber-wolves? It happened out of my sight, I am glad to say; all I heard was one yelp, followed by an angry snarling, and then all was silent again." Dick paused for a moment, his face looking very grim for a boy, and then continued: "I've hated the sight and the sound of wolves ever since. Of course, I know they were only following their nature, but--I can't help it--I hate a wolf, and that's all there is to it." "I don't wonder," said I. "Any one----" "Hark!" cried Dick, clapping his hand on my arm. "Did you hear that? Listen!" We stood silent for a moment, and then, far off in the direction from which we had come, I heard a curious whimpering sound, the nature of which I could not understand. "What is it?" I whispered, involuntarily sinking my voice. "Wolves--hunting." "Hunting what?" "I don't know; but we'll move away from here, anyhow. Come on." Dick's manner, more than his words, made me feel a little uneasy and I followed him very willingly as he set off at a smart walk through the timber. "You don't suppose they are hunting us, Dick, do you?" I asked, as we strode along side by side. "I can't tell yet. It seems hardly likely--in daylight, and at this time of year. I could understand it if it were winter. If they are hunting us, it is probably because they, like the deer, are unacquainted with men, and never having been shot at, they don't know what danger they are running into. Still, I feel a little suspicious that it is our trail they are following. They are coming down right on the line we took, at any rate. We shall be able to decide, though, in a minute or two. Look ahead. Do you see how the trees are thinning out? We are coming to another open space, a big one, I think; I noticed it when we were up on the ridge just now." "What good will that do us?" I asked. "We shall be able to get a sight of them. Come on. I'll show you." True enough, we presently stepped out from among the trees again and found ourselves on the edge of another open, grassy space, very much larger than the last one. It was about three hundred yards across to the other side, and a mile in length from east to west. We had struck it about midway of its east-and-west length. Out into the open Dick walked some twenty yards, and there stopped once more to listen. We had not long to wait. The eager whimper came again, much nearer, and now and then a quavering howl. I did not like the sound at all. I looked at Dick, who was standing "facing the music" and frowning thoughtfully. "Well, Dick!" I exclaimed, getting impatient. "I think they are after us," said he. "And what do you mean to do? Not stay out here in the open, I suppose." "Not we; at least, not for more than five minutes. Look here, Frank," he went on, speaking quickly. "I'll tell you what I propose to do. We'll keep out here in the open, about this distance from the trees, and make straight eastward for the Mosby Ridge; it is only half a mile or so to the woods at that end of the clearing and we can make it in five minutes. Then, if the wolves are truly hunting us, they will follow our trail out into the open, when we shall get a sight of them and be able to count them. If they are only three or four we can handle them all right, but if there is a big pack of them we shall have to take to a tree. Give me your rifle to carry--my breathing machinery is better used to it than yours--and we'll make a run for it." It was only a short half-mile we had to run--quite enough for me, though--and under the first tree we came to, Dick stopped. "This will do," said he, handing back my rifle. "We'll wait here now and watch. Hark! They're getting pretty close. Hallo! Hallo! Why, look there, Frank!" That Dick should thus exclaim was not to be wondered at, for out from the trees, scarce a hundred paces from us, there came, not the wolves, but a man! And such an odd-looking man, riding on such an odd-looking steed! "What is he riding on, Dick?" I asked. "A mule?" "No; a burro--a jack--a donkey; a big one, too; and it need be, for he is a tremendous fellow. Did you ever see such a chest?" "Is he an Indian?" "No; a Mexican. An Indian wouldn't deign to ride a burro. I understand it all now. The wolves are not hunting us at all: they are after the donkey. And the man is aware of it, too: see how he keeps looking behind. What is that thing he is carrying in his left hand? A bow?" "Yes; a bow. And a quiver of arrows over his shoulder." "So he has! He doesn't seem to be in much of a hurry, does he? Evidently he is not much afraid of the wolves. Why, he's stopping to wait for them! He's a plucky fellow. Why, Frank, just look! Did you ever see such a queer-looking specimen?" This exclamation was drawn from my companion involuntarily when the Mexican, checking his donkey, sprang to the ground. He certainly was a queer-looking specimen. If he had looked like a giant on donkey-back, he looked like a dwarf on foot; for, though his head was big and his body huge, his legs were so short that he appeared to be scarce five feet high; while his muscular arms were of such length that he could touch his knees without stooping. To add to his strange appearance, the man was clad in a long, sleeveless coat made of deer-skin, with the hairy side out. We had hardly had time to take in all these peculiarities when Dick once more exclaimed: "Ah! Here they come! One, two, three--only five of them after all." As he spoke, the wolves came loping out from among the trees; but the moment they struck our cross-trail the suspicious, wary creatures all stopped with one accord, puzzled by coming upon a scent they had not expected. This was the Mexican's opportunity. Raising his long left arm, he drew an arrow to its head and let fly. I thought he had missed, for I saw the arrow strike the ground and knock up a little puff of dust. But I was mistaken. One of the wolves gave a yelp, ran back a few steps, fell down, got up again and ran another few steps, fell again, and this time lay motionless. The arrow had gone right through him! Almost at the same instant Dick raised his rifle and fired. The shot was electrical. One of the wolves fell, when the remaining three instantly turned tail and ran. But not only did the wolves run: the Mexican, casting one glance in our direction, sprang upon his donkey and away he went, at a pace that was surprising considering the respective sizes of man and beast. It was in vain that Dick ran out from under our tree and shouted after him something in Spanish. I could distinguish the word, _amigos_, two or three times repeated, but the man took no notice. Perhaps he did not believe in friendships so suddenly declared. At any rate, he neither looked back nor slackened his pace, and in a minute or less he and his faithful steed vanished into the timber on the south side of the clearing. The whole incident had not occupied five minutes; but for the presence of the two dead wolves one would have been tempted to believe it had never happened at all--solitude and silence reigned once more. "Well, wasn't that a queer thing!" cried Dick. "It certainly was," I replied. "I wonder who the man is. Anyhow, he's not coming back, so let's go and pick up his arrow." CHAPTER IV RACING THE STORM Walking over to where the two wolves lay, we soon found the arrow, its head buried out of sight in the hard ground, showing with what force it had come from the bow. It was carefully made of a bit of some hard wood, scraped down to the proper diameter, and fitted with three feathers--eagle feathers, Dick said--one-third as long as the shaft, very neatly bound on with some kind of fine sinew. "Looks like a Ute arrow," remarked my companion, as he stooped to pick it up; "yet the man was a Mexican, I am sure. I suppose he must have got it from the Indians." "Do the Utes use copper arrow-heads?" I asked. "No, they don't. They use iron or steel nowadays. Why do you ask?" "Because this arrow-head is copper," I replied. "Why, so it is!" cried Dick, rubbing the soil from the point on his trouser-leg. "That's very odd. I never saw one before. I feel pretty sure the Indians never use copper: it is too soft. This bit seems to take an edge pretty well, though. See, the point doesn't seem to have been damaged by sticking into the ground; and it has been filed pretty sharp, too; or, what is more likely, rubbed sharp on a stone. It has evidently been made by hand from a piece of native copper." "I wonder why the man should choose to use copper," said I. "Though when you come to think of it, Dick," I added, "I don't see why it shouldn't make a pretty good arrow-head. It is soft metal, of course, but it is only soft by comparison with other metals. This wedge of copper weighs two or three ounces, and it is quite hard enough to go through the hide of an animal at twenty or thirty yards' distance when 'fired' with the force that this one was." "That's true. And I expect the explanation is simple enough why the man uses copper. It is probably from necessity and not from choice. Like nearly all Mexicans of the peon class, he probably never has a cent of money in his possession. Consequently, as he can't buy a gun, he uses a bow; and for the same reason, being unable to procure iron for arrow-heads, he uses copper. I expect he comes from the settlement at the foot of the valley, for copper is a very common metal down there." "Why should it be more common there than elsewhere?" I asked. "Well, that's the question--and a very interesting question, too. The professor and I were down in that neighborhood about a year ago, and on going into the village we were a good deal surprised to find that every household seemed to possess a bowl or a pot or a cup or a dipper or all four, perhaps, hammered out of native copper--all of them having the appearance of great age. There were dozens of them altogether." "How do they get them?" I asked. "That's the question again--and the Mexicans themselves don't seem to know. They say, if you ask them, that they've always had them. And the professor did ask them. He went into one house after another and questioned the people, especially the old people, as to where the copper came from; but none of them could give him any information. I wondered why he should be so persevering in the matter--though when there is anything he desires to learn, no trouble is too much for him--but after we had left the place he explained it all to me, and then I ceased to wonder." "What was his explanation, then?" "He told me that when he was in Santa Fé about fifteen years before, he made the acquaintance of a Spanish gentleman of the remarkable name of Blake----" "Blake!" I interrupted. "That's a queer name for a Spaniard." "Yes," replied Dick. "The professor says he was a descendant of one of those Irishmen who fled to the continent in the time of William III, of England, most of them going into the service of the king of France and others to other countries--Austria and Spain in particular." "Well, go ahead. Excuse me for interrupting." "Well, this gentleman was engaged in hunting through the old Spanish records kept there in Santa Fé, looking up something about the title to a land-grant, I believe, and he told the professor that in the course of his search he had frequently come across copies of reports to the Spanish government of shipments of copper from a mine called the King Philip mine. That it was a mine of importance was evident from the frequency and regularity of the 'returns,' which were kept up for a number of years, until somewhere about the year 1720, if I remember rightly, they began to become irregular and then suddenly ceased altogether." "Why?" "There was no definite statement as to why; but from the reports it appeared that the miners were much harried by the Indians, sometimes the Navajos and sometimes the Utes, while the loss, partial or total, of two or three trains with their escorts, seemed to bring matters to a climax. Shipments ceased and the mine was abandoned." "That's interesting," said I. "And where was this King Philip mine?" "The gentleman could not say. There seemed to be no map or description of any kind among the records; but from casual statements, such as notes of the trains being delayed by floods in this or that creek, or by snow blockades on certain passes, he concluded that the mine was somewhere up in this direction." "Well, that is certainly very interesting. And the professor, I suppose, concludes that the Mexicans down there at---- What's the name of the place?" "Hermanos--called so after the two peaks, at the foot of which it stands." "The professor concludes, I suppose, that the Mexicans' unusual supply of copper pots and pans came originally from the King Philip mine." "Yes; and I've no doubt they did; though the Mexicans themselves had never heard of such a mine. Yet--and it shows how names will stick long after people have forgotten their origin--yet, just outside the village there stands a big, square adobe building, showing four blank walls to the outside, with a single gateway cut through one of them, flat-roofed and battlemented--a regular fortress--and it is called to this day the _Casa del Rey_:--the King's House. Now, why should it be called the King's House? The Mexicans have no idea; but to me it seems plain enough. The King Philip mine was probably a royal mine, and the residence of the king's representative, the storage-place for the product of the mine, the headquarters of the soldier escort, would naturally be called the King's House." "It seems likely, doesn't it? Is that the professor's opinion?" "Yes. He feels sure that the King Philip mine is not far from the village; possibly--in fact, probably--in the Dos Hermanos mountains." "And did he ever make any attempt to find it?" "Not he. Prospecting is altogether out of his line. It was only the historical side of the matter that interested him. All he did was to write to the Señor Blake at Cadiz, in Spain, telling him about it; though whether the letter ever reached its destination he has never heard." "And who lives in the King's House now?" I asked. "Anybody?" "Yes. It is occupied by a man named Galvez, the 'padron' of the village, who owns, or claims, all the country down there for five miles square--the Hermanos Grant. We did not see him when we were there, but from what we heard of him, he seems to regard himself as lord of creation in those parts, owning not only the land, but the village and the villagers, too." "How so? How can he own the villagers?" "Why, it is not an uncommon state of affairs in these remote Mexican settlements. The padron provides the people with the clothes or the tools or the seed they require on credit, taking security on next year's crop, and so manages matters as to get them into debt and keep them there; for they are an improvident lot. In this way they fall into a state of chronic indebtedness, working their land practically for the benefit of the padron and becoming in effect little better than slaves." "I see. A pretty miserable condition for the poor people, isn't it? And doesn't this man, Galvez, with his superior intelligence--presumably--know anything of the King Philip mine?" "Apparently not." "My word, Dick!" I exclaimed. "What fun it would be to go and hunt for it ourselves, wouldn't it?" "Wouldn't it! I've often thought of it before, but I know the professor would never consent. He would consider it a waste of time. It's an idea worth keeping in mind, though, at any rate. There's never any telling what may turn up. We might get the chance somehow; though I confess I don't see how. But we must be moving, Frank," said he, suddenly changing the subject. "It's getting latish. Hallo!" "What's the matter?" I asked, looking wonderingly at my companion, who, with his hand held up to protect his eyes from the glare, was standing, staring at the sun. "Why, the matter is, Frank, that the professor will say that I've neglected my duty, I'm afraid. You remember he told me to look out for a change of weather? I'd forgotten all about it." "Well," said I, "I don't see that that matters. There's no sign of a change, is there?" "Yes, there is. Look up there. Do you see a number of tiny specks all hurrying across the face of the sun from north to south?" "Yes. What is it?" "Snow." "Snow!" I cried, incredulously. "How can it be snow, when there isn't a scrap of cloud visible anywhere?" "It is snow, all the same," said Dick; "old snow blown from the other side of Mescalero." "But how can that be, Dick? All the snow we found up there was packed like ice." "Ah, but we were on the south side. On the north side, where the sun has no effect, it is still as loose and as powdery as it was when it fell." "Of course. I hadn't thought of that. There must be a pretty stiff breeze blowing overhead to keep it hung up in the sky like that and not allow a speck of it to fall down here." "Yes, it's blowing great guns up there, all right, and I am afraid we shall be getting it ourselves before long. We must dig out of here hot foot, Frank. I hope we haven't stayed too long as it is." It was hard to believe that there was anything to fear from the weather, with the unclouded sun shining down upon us with such power as to be almost uncomfortably hot; but Dick, I could see, felt uneasy, and as I could not presume to set up my judgment against his larger experience, I did not wait to ask any more questions, but set off side by side with him when he started eastward at a pace which required the saving of all my breath to keep up with him. We had been walking through the woods for about half an hour and were expecting to begin the ascent of the Mosby Ridge in a few minutes, when we were brought to a standstill by coming suddenly upon the edge of a deep cleft in the earth, cutting across our course at right angles. It was one of the many cañons for which the Mescalero valley was notorious. Looking across the cañon, we could see that the opposite wall was composed of a thick bed of limestone overlying another of sandstone, the latter, being the softer, so scooped out that the limestone cap projected several feet beyond it. It appeared to be quite unscalable, and on our side it was doubtless the same, for, on cautiously approaching the edge as near as we dared, we could see that the cliff fell sheer for three hundred feet or more. "No getting down here!" cried Dick. "Up stream, Frank! The cañon will shallow in that direction." Away we went again along the edge of the gorge, and presently were rejoiced to find a place where the cliff had broken away, enabling us, with care, to climb down to the bottom. The other side, however, presented no possible chance of getting out, so on we went, following up the dry bed of the arroyo, looking out sharply for some break by which we might climb up, when, on rounding a slight bend, Dick stopped so suddenly that I, who was close on his heels, bumped up against him. "What's the matter, Dick?" I asked. "What are you stopping for?" "Look up there at Mescalero," said he. It was the first glimpse of the mountain we had had since entering the woods at the head of the valley, and the change in its appearance was alarming. The only part of it we could see was the summit, standing out clear and sharp against the sky; all the rest of it, and of the whole range as well, was shrouded by a heavy gray cloud, which, creeping round either side of the peak, was rolling down our side of the range, slowly and steadily filling up and blotting out each gully and ravine as it came to it. There was a stealthy, vindictive look about it I did not at all like. "Snow, Dick?" I asked. "Yes, and lots of it, I'm afraid. See how the cloud comes creeping down--like cold molasses. I expect it is so heavy with snow that it can't float in the thin air up there, and the north wind is just shouldering it up over the range from behind. We've got to get out of here, Frank, as fast as we can and make the top of the Mosby Ridge, if possible, before that cloud catches us. Once on the other side, we're pretty safe: I know the country; but on this side I don't. So, let us waste no more time--we have none to waste, I can tell you." Nor did we waste any, for neither of us had any inclination to linger, but pushing forward once more along the bottom of the cañon, we presently espied a place where we thought we might climb out. Scrambling up the steep slope of shaly detritus, we had come almost to the top, when to our disappointment we found our further progress barred by a little cliff, not more than eight feet high, but slightly overhanging, and so smooth that there was no hold for either feet or fingers. "Up on my shoulders, Frank!" cried my companion, laying down his rifle and leaning his arms against the rock and his head against his arms. In two seconds I was standing on his shoulders, but even then I could not get any hold for my hands on the smooth, curved, shaly bank which capped the limestone. Only a foot out of my reach, however, there grew a little pine tree, about three inches thick, and whipping off my belt I lashed at the tree trunk with it. The end of the belt flew round; I caught it; and having now both ends in my hands I quickly relieved my companion of his burden and crawled up out of the ravine. Then, buckling the belt to the tree, I took the loose end in one hand, and lying down flat I received and laid aside the two rifles which Dick handed up to me, one at a time. Dick himself, though, was out of reach, perceiving which, I pulled off my coat, firmly grasped the collar and let down the other end to him, lying, myself, face downward upon the stones, with the end of the belt held tight in the other hand. "All set?" cried Dick; and, "All set!" I shouted in reply. There was a violent jerk upon the coat, and the next thing, there was Dick himself kneeling beside me. "Well done, old chap!" cried he. "That was a great idea. Now, then, let's be off. I'll carry the two rifles. It's plain sailing now. Straight up the Ridge for those two great rocks that stand up there like a gateway to the pass. I know the place. Only a couple of thousand feet to climb and then we begin to go down-hill. We shall make it now. Come on!" The trees were thin just here, and as we started to ascend the pass we obtained one more glimpse of Mescalero--the last one we were to get that day. The bank of cloud had advanced about half a mile since we first caught sight of it, while it had become so much thicker as the wind rolled it up from the other side of the range, that now only the very tip of the mountain showed above it. Even as we watched it, a great fold of the cloud passed over the summit, hiding it altogether. "See that, Dick?" said I. "Yes," he replied. "A very big snow, I expect. Hark! Do you hear that faint humming? The wind in the pines. We shall be getting it soon. Come on, now; stick close to my heels; if I go too fast, call out." Away we went up the pass, pressing forward at the utmost speed I could stand, desperately anxious to get as far ahead as possible before the storm should overtake us. The ascent, though very steep on this side, presented no other special difficulty, and at the end of an hour we had come close to the two great rocks for which we had been making. All this time the sun continued to shine down upon us, though with diminishing power as the hurrying snowflakes passing above our heads became thicker and thicker; while, as to the storm-cloud itself, we could not see how near it had come, for the pine-clad mountain, rising high on our left hand, obstructed our view in that direction. That it was not far off, though, we were pretty sure, for the humming of the wind in the woods--the only thing by which we could judge--though faint at first, had by this time increased to a roar. The storm was, in fact, much nearer than we imagined, and just as we passed between the "gateway" rocks it burst upon us with a fury and a suddenness that, to me at least, were appalling. Almost as though a door had been slammed in our faces, the light of the sun was cut off, leaving us in twilight gloom, and with a roar like a stampede of cattle across a wooden bridge, a swirling, blinding smother of snow, driven by a furious wind, rushed through the "gateway," taking us full in the face, with such violence that Dick was thrown back against me, nearly knocking us both from our feet. Instinctively, we crouched for shelter behind the rock, and there we waited a minute or two to recover breath and collect our senses. "Pretty bad," said Dick. "But it might have been worse: it isn't very cold--not yet; we have only about two miles to go, and I know the lay of the land. We'll start again as soon as you are ready. I'll go first and you follow close behind. Whatever you do, don't lose sight of me for an instant: it won't do to get lost. Hark! Did you hear that?" There was a rending crash, as some big tree gave way before the storm. It was a new danger, one I had not thought of before. I looked apprehensively at my companion. "Suppose one of them should fall on us, Dick," said I. "Suppose it shouldn't," replied Dick. "That is just as easy to suppose, and a good deal healthier." I confess I had been feeling somewhat scared. The sudden gloom, the astonishing fury of the wind, the confusing whirl and rush of the snow, and then from some point unknown the sharp breaking of a tree, sounding in the midst of the universal roar like the crack of a whip--all this, coming all together and so suddenly, was quite enough, I think, to "rattle" a town-bred boy. But if panic is catching, so is courage. Dick's prompt and sensible remark acted like a tonic. Springing to my feet, I cried: "You are right, old chap! Come on. Let's step right out at once. I'm ready." It was most fortunate that Dick knew where he was, for the light was so dim and the snow so thick that we could see but a few paces ahead; while the wind, though beating in general against our left cheeks, was itself useless as a guide, for, being deflected by the ridges and ravines of the mountain, it would every now and then strike us square in the face, stopping us dead, and the next moment leap upon us from behind, sending me stumbling forward against my leader. In spite of its vindictive and ceaseless assaults, though, Dick kept straight on, his head bent and his cap pulled down over his ears; while I, following three feet behind, kept him steadily in view. Presently he stopped with a joyful shout. "Hurrah, Frank!" he cried. "Look here! Now we are all right. Here's a thread to hold on by: as good as a rope to a drowning man." The "thread" was a little stream of water, appearing suddenly from I know not where, and running off in the direction we were going. "This will take us home, Frank!" my companion shouted in my ear. "It runs down and joins our own creek about a quarter of a mile above the house. With this for a guide we are all safe; we mustn't lose it, that's all. And we won't do that: we'll get into it and walk in the water if we have to. Best foot foremost, now! All down-hill! Hurrah, for us!" Dick's cheerful view of the situation was very encouraging, though, as a matter of fact, it was a pretty desperate struggle we had to get down the mountain, with the darkness increasing and the snow becoming deeper every minute. Indeed it was becoming a serious question with me whether I could keep going much longer, when at the end of the most perilous hour I ever went through, we at last came down to the junction of the creeks, and turning to our right presently caught sight of a lighted window. Five minutes later we were safe inside the professor's house--and high time too, for I could not have stood much more of it: I had just about reached the end of my tether. But the warmth and rest and above all the assurance of safety quickly had their effect, and very soon I found myself seated before the fire consuming with infinite gusto a great bowl of strong, hot soup which Romero had made all ready for us; thus comfortably winding up the most eventful day of my existence--up to that moment. CHAPTER V HOW DICK BROUGHT THE NEWS "You ran it rather too close, Dick," said the professor, with a shake of his head, when we had told him the story of our race with the storm. "I was beginning to be afraid; not so much for you as for your companion: it was too big an undertaking for him, considering that it was his first day in the mountains; even leaving out the risk of the snow-storm." "I'm afraid I was thoughtless," replied Dick, penitently; "especially in not looking out for a change of weather. It did run us too close, as you say--a great deal too close. But there is one thing I can do, anyhow, to repair that error to some extent, and I'll be off at once and do it." So saying, Dick, who by this time had finished his supper, jumped out of his chair and began putting on his overcoat. "Where are you off to, Dick?" I exclaimed. "Not going out again to-night?" "Only a little way," replied Dick. "Down to the town to let your uncle know that you are all safe. He'll be pretty anxious, I expect." I had thought of that, but I could see no way of getting over it. I could not go myself, for even if I had dared to venture I had not the strength for it, and of course I could not expect any one else to do it for me. My first thought, therefore, when Dick announced that he was going, was one of satisfaction; though my next thought, following very quickly upon the first one, was to protest against his doing any such thing. "No, no, Dick," I cried, "it's too risky--you mustn't! Uncle Tom will be worried, I know, but he will conclude that I am staying the night with you. And though I should be glad to have his mind relieved, I don't consider--and he would say the same, I'm pretty sure--that that is a good enough reason for you to take such a risk." "Thanks, old chap," replied Dick; "but it isn't so much of a risk as you think. Going down wind to the town is a very different matter from coming down that rough mountain with the storm beating on us from every side. I've been over the trail a thousand times, and I believe I could follow it with my eyes shut; and, anyhow, to lose your way is pretty near impossible, you know, with the cañon on your right hand and the mountain on your left. So, don't you worry yourself, Frank: I'll be under cover again in an hour or less." Seeing that the professor nodded approval, I protested no more, though I still had my doubts about letting him go. "Well, Dick," said I, "it's mighty good of you. I wish I could go, too, but that is out of the question, I'm afraid: I should only hamper you if I tried. I can tell you one thing, anyhow: Uncle Tom will appreciate it--you may be sure of that." In this I was right, though I little suspected at the moment in what form his appreciation was to show itself. As a matter of fact, Dick's action in braving the storm a second time that evening was to be a turning-point in his fortune and mine. "Good-night, Frank," said he. "I'll be back again in the morning, I expect. Hope you'll sleep as well in my bed as I intend to do in yours. Good-night." So saying, Dick, this time overcoated, gloved and ear-capped, opened the door and stepped out. Watching him from the window, I saw him striding off down wind, to be lost to sight in ten seconds in the maze of driving snow. "Are you sure it's all right, Professor?" said I, anxiously. "There's time yet to call him back." "It is all right," replied my host, reassuringly. "You need not fear. Dick has been out in many a storm before, and he knows very well how to take care of himself. You may be sure I would not let him go if I thought it were not all right. And now, I think, it would be well if you took possession of Dick's bed. You have had a very hard day and need a good long rest." To this I made no objection, and early though it was, I was asleep in five minutes, too tired to be disturbed even by the insistent banging and howling of the storm outside. Meanwhile, Uncle Tom, down in the town, was, as I had suspected, fretting and fuming and worrying himself in his uncertainty as to whether I was safe under cover or not. The storm had taken the town by surprise, for the morning had opened gloriously, clear and sharp and still, as it had done every day for a month past, and most people naturally supposed there was to be another day as fine as those which had gone before; little suspecting that the north wind, up there among the icebound peaks and gorges of the mother range, was at that moment marshaling its forces for a mad rush down into the valley. And how should they suspect? Of the three hundred people comprising the population, not one, not even old Jeff Andrews himself, the patriarch of the district, had spent more than two winters in the camp. In the year of its founding there were about a dozen men and no women who had braved the hardships of the first winter, but as the fame of the new camp extended to the outer world, other people began to come in, slowly at first and then in larger numbers, so that by this time the population numbered, as I said, about three hundred souls, including twenty-one women and two babies; while at a rough guess I should say there was about two-thirds of a dog to each citizen, counting in the twelve children of school age and the two babies as well. These dogs, by the way, were the chief source of entertainment in the town, for during the hours of daylight there was always a fight going on somewhere, while at night most of them, especially the younger ones, used to sit out in the middle of the street barking defiance at the coyotes, which, from the hills all round, howled back at them in unceasing chorus. This part of the programme was changed, however, later in the winter, for one half-cloudy night the blacksmith's long-legged shepherd pup, seated in front of the forge door, was barking himself hoarse at the moon when a big timber-wolf came slipping down out of the woods and finished the puppy's song and his existence with one snap. After this the other dogs were more careful about the hours they kept. But to return to the human part of the population. Considering how few of them had spent a winter in this high valley; remembering that every one of the grown-up citizens had been born in some other State, and that the very great majority were newcomers in Colorado, it is not to be wondered at that the storm should have caught them unawares. For, in Colorado, if there is one thing almost impossible to forecast it is the weather, especially in the mountains where it is made, where the snow-storms and the thunder-storms, brewing in secret behind the peaks, bounce out on you before you know it. So, on this sunshiny morning, most people went about their usual occupations unsuspicious of evil; it was only the few old-timers who divined what was coming, and their little precautions, such as shutting their doors and windows before leaving the house, merely excited a smile or a word of chaff from the "plum-sure" newcomers. For it is always the new arrival who thinks he can predict the weather; the old-stager, having had experience enough to be aware that he knows nothing about it for certain, can seldom be persuaded to venture a decided opinion. Tied to a hitching-post outside the assayer's door that afternoon were two ponies, and about two o'clock Mr. Warren, himself, and Uncle Tom, issued from the house, prepared for their ride up on Cape Horn--a big, bare mountain lying southeast of town. As they stepped down from the porch, however, Warren happened to notice old Jeff Andrews walking up the street, carrying over his shoulder a great buffalo-skin overcoat, which, considering the warmth of the day, seemed rather out of place. "Hallo, Jeff!" the assayer called out. "What are you carrying that thing for? Are we going to have a change?" Jeff, a gray-bearded, round-shouldered man of sixty, with a face burnt all of one color by years of life in the open, paused for a moment before replying, and then, knowing that the assayer was not one of those "guying tenderfeet," for whom, as he expressed it, "he had no manner of use," he answered genially: "Well, gents, I ain't no weather prophet--I'll leave that business to the latest arrival--but I have my suspicions. Just look up overhead." The old man had detected the hurrying snowflakes passing across the face of the sun, and though to Uncle Tom there was nothing unusual to be seen, the assayer understood the signs. "Wind, Jeff?" said he. "And snow," replied the old prospector. "Was you going to ride up on Cape Horn this evening, Mr. Warren? Well, if I was you, I wouldn't. Cape Horn lies south o' here, and if a storm from the north catches you up there on that bare mountain you may not be able to work your way back again. If I was you, I'd put the ponies back in the stable and lay low for a spell." "Thank you, Jeff," responded the assayer. "I believe that's a good idea. I think we shall do well, Tom, to postpone our trip. No use running the risk of being caught out in a blizzard: it's a bit too dangerous to suit me." The ponies, therefore, were taken back to the stable and the two men, returning to the house, sat down on the sunny porch to await developments. The snow-cloud was already half way down the range and it was not long ere the murmur of the wind among the distant trees began to make itself heard, giving warning of what was coming to a few of the more observant people. "It looks pretty threatening, Sam," said Uncle Tom. "I don't like the way that cloud comes creeping down. I hope those boys will notice it in time." "I don't think you need worry about them," replied the assayer. "Young Dick is well able to take care of himself. He knows the signs as well as anybody." "Well, I hope he'll notice them in time. Going indoors, are you?" "Yes; if you don't mind, I'll leave you for the present. I have some work I want to finish up. Let me know when it comes pretty close so that I may get my windows shut. It will come with a 'whoop' when it does come." As the assayer rose to his feet, he observed across the street the proprietor of the corner grocery standing in his doorway with his hands in his pockets. "Hallo, Jackson!" he called out. "You'd better take in those loose boxes from the sidewalk if you want to save them: there's a big blow coming pretty soon." "Oh, I guess not," replied the grocer, a fat-faced, self-satisfied man, one of those "dead-sure weather prophets" for whom old Jeff felt such supreme contempt. "I reckon I'll chance it." He cast a glance skyward, and deceived by the sparkling brilliancy of the sun, he added under his breath, "Big blow! As if any one couldn't see with half an eye that there isn't a sign of wind in the sky." "All right, Jackson, suit yourself," replied Warren; adding on his part, as an aside to Uncle Tom, "He'll change his mind in about half an hour, if I'm not mistaken." For about that length of time Uncle Tom continued to sit on the porch watching the approaching cloud and listening to the increasing murmur of the wind, when, on the crown of a high ridge about a mile above town he saw all the pine trees with one accord suddenly bend their heads toward him, as though making him a stately obeisance. Springing out of his chair, Uncle Tom bolted into the house, slamming the door behind him and calling out: "Here it comes, Sam! Here it comes!" It did. The roar of its approach was now plainly audible; there was a hurrying and scurrying of men and women, a banging of doors and a slamming down of windows; even the incredulous grocer, convinced at last, made a dive for his loose boxes--but just too late. With a shriek, as of triumph at catching them all unprepared, the wind came raging down the street, making a clean sweep of everything. A young mining camp is not as a rule over-particular about the amount of rubbish that encumbers its streets, and Mosby was no exception to the rule, but in five minutes it was swept as clean as though the twenty-one housewives had been at work on it for a week with broom and scrubbing-brush. Heralded by a cloud of mingled dust and snow, a whole covey of paper scraps, loose straw and a few hats, went whirling down the street, followed by a dozen or two of empty tin cans, while behind them, with infinite clatter, came three lengths of stove-pipe from the bakery chimney, closely pursued by an immense barrel which had once contained crockery. As though enjoying the fun, this barrel came bounding down the roadway, making astonishing leaps, until, at the grocery corner, it encountered the only one of the empty boxes which had not already gone south, and glancing off at an angle, went bang through the show window! It was as though My Lord, the North Wind, aware of Mr. Jackson's incredulity, had sent an emissary to convince him that he _did_ intend to blow that day. From that moment the wind and the snow had it all their own way; not a citizen dared to show his nose outside. It was an uneasy day for Uncle Tom. Knowing full well the extreme danger of being caught on the mountain in such a storm, he could not help feeling anxious for our safety, and though his host tried to reassure him by repeating his confidence in Dick Stanley's good sense and experience, he grew more and more fidgety as the day wore on and darkness began to settle down upon the town. In fact, by sunset, Uncle Tom had worked himself up to a high state of nervousness. He kept pacing up and down the room like a caged beast, unconsciously puffing at a cigar which had gone out half an hour before; then striding to the window to look out--a disheartening prospect, for not even the corner grocery was visible now. Then back he would come, plump himself into his chair before the fire, only to jump up again in fifteen seconds to go through the same performance once more. At length he flung his cigar-stump into the fire, and turning to his friend, exclaimed: "Sam, I can't stand this uncertainty any longer. I'm going out to see if I can't find somebody who will undertake to go up to the professor's house and back for twenty dollars, just to make sure those boys have got safe home. I'd go myself, only I know I should never get there." The assayer shook his head. "No use, Tom," said he. "You couldn't get one to go; at least, not for money. If it were to dig a friend out of the snow you could raise a hundred men in a minute; but for money--no. I don't believe you could get any of them to face this storm for twenty dollars--or fifty, either. They would say, 'What's the use? If the boys are in, they're in; if they're not----'" "Well, if they're not---- What? I know what you mean. You chill me all through, Sam, with your 'ifs.' Look here, old man, isn't there _anybody_ who would go? Think, man, think!" "We might try little Aleck Smith, the teamster," said the assayer, thoughtfully. "He's as tough as a bit of bailing-wire and plum full of grit. We'll try him anyhow. Come on. I'll go with you. It's only six houses down. Jump into your overcoat, old man!" The two men turned to get their coats, when, at that moment, there came a thump upon the porch outside, as though somebody had jumped up the two steps at a bound, the door burst open and in the midst of a whirl of snow there was blown into the room the muffled, snow-coated figure of a boy, who, slamming the door behind him, leaned back against it, gasping for breath. The men stared in astonishment, until the boy, pulling off his cap, revealed the face, scarlet from exposure, of Dick Stanley. "Why, Dick!" cried the assayer. "What's the matter? Where's young Frank?" "All safe, sir! Safe in our house, and in bed and asleep by this time." "And did you come down through this howling storm to tell me?" cried Uncle Tom. "Yes, sir. But that wasn't anything so very much, you know: it was down-hill and downwind, too." "Well, you may think what you like about it--but so may I, too; and my opinion is that there isn't another boy in the country would have done it. I shan't forget your service, Dick. You may count on that. I shan't forget it!" Nor did he--as you will see. CHAPTER VI THE PROFESSOR'S STORY What a change had come over the landscape when, at sunrise next morning, I jumped out of bed and went to the door to look out. Though the sky was as clear and as blue as ever, though Mescalero, swept bare by the wind, looked much as usual, all the lower parts of the range, except the crowns of the ridges, were buried under the snow. The woods were full of it; every hollow was leveled off so that one could hardly tell where it used to be; while the narrow valley itself was ridged and furrowed by great drifts piled up by freaks of the wind. It was cold, too, for with the falling of the wind and the clearing of the sky the temperature had dropped to zero. As so often happens in these parts, winter had arrived with a bang. Closing the door, I hopped back to the jolly, roaring fire of logs which Romero had started an hour before, and there finished my dressing. While I was thus engaged, the professor came out of the back room, where it was his custom to sleep--a queer choice--with a couple of thousand dead insects for company. "Well, Frank," said he, cheerily. "Here's King Winter in all his glory. Rather a rough-and-tumble monarch, isn't he? When his majesty makes his royal progress, we, his humble subjects, do well to get out of his way and leave the course clear for him." "That's true, sir," said I, laughing; and falling into the professor's humor, I added: "I never met a king before, and if King Winter is an example of the race I think we Americans were wise to get rid of them when we did." "Oh," replied the professor, "you must not judge a whole order by one specimen: there are kings and kings, and some of them are very fine fellows. King Winter, though, is rather too boisterous and inconsiderate; and to tell you the truth, Frank, you had rather a narrow escape from him yesterday. I did not like to make too much of it before Dick; I did not want him to think I blamed him for what was, after all, merely an oversight; but as a matter of fact you ran a pretty big risk, as you may easily understand when you see the amount of snow that fell in about twelve hours; for the storm ceased and the sky cleared again about three o'clock this morning." "It was nip and tuck for us, sure enough," said I; "but if our getting caught in the storm was any fault of Dick's, there is one thing certain, sir: he got us out of it in great style. I wouldn't ask for a better guide. I was pretty badly scared myself, I don't mind owning"--the professor nodded, as much as to say, "I don't wonder,"--"but Dick," I continued, "did not seem to be flustered for a moment; he knew just what to do and pitched right in and did it. It seems to me, sir--though of course I don't set up to be a judge--that the most experienced mountaineer couldn't have done any better." "Dick is a good boy," said the professor, evidently pleased at my standing up for his young friend; "and he seems to have a faculty for keeping his wits about him in an emergency. It has always been so, ever since he was a little boy. I suppose he has never told you, has he, how he once saved his donkey from a mountain-lion?" "No, sir," I replied. "How was it?" "He was about nine years old at the time, and as his little legs were too short to enable him to keep up with me, I had given him a young burro to ride. We were camped one night on the Trinchera, not far from Fort Garland, when we were awakened by a great squealing on the part of the donkey, which was tethered a few feet away, and sitting up in our beds, which were on the ground under the open sky, we were just in time to see some big, cat-like animal spring upon the poor little beast and knock it over. Instead of crying and crawling under the blankets, as he might well have been excused for doing, little Dick sprang out of his bed--as did I also. But the youngster was twice as quick as I was, and without an instant's hesitation he seized a burning stick from the fire, ran right up to the mountain-lion--for that was what it was--and as the snarling creature raised its head, the plucky little chap thrust the hot end of his stick into its mouth, when, with a yell of pain and astonishment, the beast let go its hold and fled like a yellow streak into the woods again." "Bully for Dick!" I cried. "That was pretty good, wasn't it? And was the donkey killed?" "No; rather badly scratched; but Dick's promptness and courage saved it from anything more serious." "Well, that was certainly pretty good for such a youngster," said I. "By the way, sir," I continued, "there is one thing I should like to ask you, if you don't mind, about your life in the mountains, especially back in the 'sixties' and earlier, and that is, how you managed to escape being killed and scalped by the Indians." My host laughed, and I could see by his face that he was thinking backward, as he slowly stirred his coffee round and round; for we were seated at our breakfast, Romero serving us. "That _was_ a serious question at first," he replied presently, "but I solved it very early in my wanderings; and now I--and Dick, too--may go among any of the tribes with impunity." "Will you tell me about it, sir?" I asked, full of curiosity to know how he had worked such a seeming miracle. The professor leaned back in his chair, stretched out his feet and folded his hands on the edge of the table. "I will, with pleasure," he replied; "for it is rather a curious incident, I have always thought. "Before I took up the profession of 'bug-hunting,' as the pursuit of entomology is irreverently termed by the people here, I had graduated as a physician--very fortunately for me, as it turned out, for my knowledge of medicine was the basis of my reputation among the Indians. I was down in Arizona at one time, when, on coming to a little Mexican village, I found the poor people suffering from an epidemic of smallpox. Several had died, and the survivors, scared out of their wits, had given themselves up for lost. After my arrival, however, there were no more deaths, I am glad to say, and by the end of about a month I had succeeded in putting all my patients on the highroad to recovery. "There was a little adobe ranch-house about a quarter of a mile up-stream from the village, the owner of which had died before my arrival, and this building I had utilized as a pest-house. I was on my way out to it one morning, with my little case of medicines in my hand, when I heard behind me a great crying out among the villagers, and looking back I saw them all scuttling for shelter, at the same time shouting and screaming, according to their age and sex, 'Apache! Apache!' "The next moment, right through the middle of the village, riding like a whirlwind, came ten horsemen, who, paying no attention to the frightened Mexicans, made straight for me. Doubtless they had been hiding in the creek-bed among the willows since daylight, awaiting their opportunity to dash out and capture me--for, as I found later, it was I whom they were after. "To run was useless, to fight impossible, as I was unarmed, so, there being nothing else to do, I just stood still and waited for them. In a moment I was surrounded, when one of the Indians sprang from his horse and advanced upon me. He had, as I very well remember, his nose painted a bright green--a fearsome object. This apparition came striding toward me, and I supposed I was to be killed and scalped forthwith; but instead, my friend of the green nose, in halting Spanish, and with a deference which was as welcome as it was unexpected, explained to me that the fame of the great white medicine-man had extended far and wide; that the smallpox was ravaging their village; and that they had come to beg me to return with them and drive out the enemy. "Greatly relieved to find that their mission was peaceful, I replied at once that I would come with pleasure, provided I were treated with the respect due to my quality, but that I must first visit the pest-house and leave directions for the care of my two remaining patients. To this--rather to my surprise--they readily consented, relying implicitly upon my promise to accompany them; an instance of trustfulness from which I could only infer, I regret to say, that they had had but little intercourse with white men. "The Indians had brought a horse for me, and after a long two-days' ride into the mountains, we reached the camp, consisting of about twenty lodges, where I found matters in pretty bad condition. I went to work vigorously, however, and again had the good fortune to rout the enemy without the loss of a patient; thereby, as you may suppose, gaining the lasting good will of every member of the tribe--with one exception. "This exception--rather an important one--was the local medicine-man, who, having vainly endeavored to drive out the plague by the application of bad smells and worse noises, was not unnaturally consumed with jealousy of my superior success, and with the desire to discover what charms and spells I used to that end. "On our way up from the Mexican settlement I had several times stopped to note the direction with a little pocket-compass I always carried about with me, on each of which occasions I had observed that the medicine-man, who was one of the party, had eyed the little instrument with a sort of fearful curiosity. Later, when my patients were all getting well, I had several times gone out to a distance from the camp and with the compass taken the bearings of the many mountain peaks visible in all directions, making a little map of the country. Every time I did this, the medicine-man was sure to come stalking by, watching my motions out of the corner of his eye. On one such occasion I called him to me, anxious to be on friendly terms, and showing him the instrument, tried to explain its use. But the Indian, seeing through the glass the unaccountable motion of the needle, was afraid to touch it, and my explanation, I fear, had rather the effect of misleading him, for his knowledge of Spanish was very small, while my knowledge of Apache was smaller, and eventually he went off with the idea that the compass, which I had tried to make him understand was my 'guide,' 'director' and so forth, was in fact nothing more nor less than the familiar spirit through whose aid I had ousted the evil spirit of the smallpox. "With this conviction in his mind, and supposing that the possession of the compass would confer upon him similar powers, he screwed up his courage to steal it--and a very courageous act it was, too, I consider, remembering how greatly he stood in fear of it. "It was on the eve of my departure that I discovered my loss, and going straight to my friend with the green nose I informed him of the fact, at the same time stating my conviction that the medicine-man was the thief. He was very wroth that his guest should have been so treated after having rendered such good service to the community, but feeling some diffidence about seizing and searching his medicine-man, of whom he was rather afraid, he suggested that I concoct a spell which should induce the thief to disgorge his plunder of his own accord; a course which would doubtless be a simple matter to a high-class magician like myself. "This was rather embarrassing. I did not at all like to trust to the tricks of the charlatan, but being unable to devise any other plan by which to recover my compass, an instrument indispensable to me, and impossible to replace, in that wild country, I determined to employ a device I had once read of as having been adopted by an officer in the East India Company's service to detect a thieving Sepoy soldier. Even then I should not have resorted to such a measure had I not felt convinced that the medicine-man was the thief, and that his superstitious dread of my powers would cause him to fall into my trap. "I therefore desired Green Nose to summon all the men of the village, which being done, I addressed them through him as interpreter. I told them that one of their number was a thief, and that I was about to find out which one it was--a statement which I could see had an impressive effect. "Taking two straws of wild rye, I cut them to exactly equal lengths, and then, holding them up so that all might see, I announced that the men were to come forward, one at a time, take one of the straws, step inside my lodge for a few seconds, and then bring back the straw to me. To those who were innocent nothing would happen, 'but,' said I, with menacing fore-finger, 'when the _thief_ brings back the straw it will be found to have _grown one inch_!' "I waited a minute to allow this announcement to have its full effect, and then requested that, in deference to his exalted position, my honored brother, the medicine-man, should be the first to test the potency of my magic. "I could see that he was very reluctant to do any such thing, but to decline would be to draw suspicion on himself, so, stepping from the line, he received the straw and retired with it to my lodge. "There was a minute of breathless suspense, when back he came and handed over his straw to me. My own straw, together with the hand which held it, I had covered with a large, spotted silk handkerchief, in such a manner that it was concealed from view, and slipping the medicine-man's straw into the same hand, I perceived at once that the thief had betrayed himself, just as I had hoped and expected he would. "Casting a glance along the line of silent Indians, and noting that they were all attention, I withdrew the handkerchief and held up the two straws. One of them was an inch longer than the other! "In spite of their habitual stoicism, there was a murmur and a stir along the line; but the greatest effect was naturally upon the poor medicine-man. Thrusting his hand into his bosom, he drew out the compass from under his shirt, handed it to me, and then, pulling his blanket over his head, he crept away without a word and shut himself up in his lodge." "But how did you do it?" I interrupted. "How did his straw come out longer than the other? Did you break off a piece from your own?" "No," replied the professor, smiling; "it was the medicine-man who broke off a piece from his. Knowing himself to be the thief, and fully believing that the straw would grow in his hand, he no sooner got into the shelter of my lodge than he bit off an inch from his straw, thus making sure, as he supposed, that its supernatural growth would bring it back to its original length. It was just what I had expected him to do. Nobody but myself, of course, could tell which straw was which, and when I held them up to view, one longer than the other, the whole assembly never doubted for an instant that the shorter one was mine and that it was the thief's straw that had grown--least of all the medicine-man, himself. "He, poor fellow, conscious of guilt, and being himself a dealer in charms and incantations, was more than anybody in a proper frame of mind to put faith in my magic, and when he saw, as he supposed, that his straw, in spite of his precautions, had grown the promised inch, he collapsed at once; and thinking, very likely, that it was the compass itself that had betrayed him, he handed it back to me very willingly, glad to be rid of so pernicious a little imp." "And was that the end of the matter?" I asked. "Yes, that was the end of it. Being all ready to go, I went, leaving behind me a reputation which was to be of great service to me on many a subsequent occasion; a reputation due, I am sorry to say, very much more to the clap-trap trick played upon the poor medicine-man than upon my really meritorious service in dealing with the smallpox epidemic. My fame gradually extended among all the mountain tribes, and since then I have been free to go anywhere with the assurance not only of safety but of welcome from any of the Indians, Apache, Ute or Navajo--a condition of affairs which, as you will readily understand has been of infinite service to me during my twenty years of wandering. "Ah!" casting a glance out of the window as he rose from the table. "Here comes Dick, and somebody with him; a stranger to me--your uncle, I presume." CHAPTER VII DICK'S DIPLOMACY Running to the door, I saw Dick striding down toward the cabin, while behind him on a stout pony rode Uncle Tom. Just as I stepped out, the pair approached one of the drifts of snow which ridged the valley, and into this Dick plunged at once. Though it was up to his waist, he pretty soon forced his way through, when it was Uncle Tom's turn. Evidently it was not the first time the pony had tackled a snow-drift, for he showed no disposition to shirk the task, but wading in up to his knees, he did the rest of the passage in a series of short leaps, very like buck-jumping; a mode of progression extremely discomforting to his plump, short-legged rider. "Oh! Ah!" gasped Uncle Tom at each jump. "Heavens! What a country! Dick, you imp of darkness, I thought you said it was an easy trail." At this I could not help laughing, when Uncle Tom, who had not perceived me before, transferred his attention to me. "You young scamp, Frank!" cried he, shaking his fist at me as I ran forward to meet him. "This is a nice way to treat your respected uncle--first scare him half to death and then laugh at him. Lucky for me there's only one of you: if you had been born twins I should have been worn to a rag long ago. How are you, old fellow?" he went on, reaching down to shake hands with me. "Any the worse for your adventure?" "Not a bit," I replied. "Sound as a bell, thank you." "Thank Dick, you mean. I'll tell you what, Frank," he continued, leaning down and whispering; Dick having walked on toward the house: "that's an uncommonly fine young fellow, in my opinion. His coming down in the storm last night to tell me that you were all safe was a thing that few boys of his age would have done and fewer still would have thought of doing. Ah! This is the professor, I suppose. Why, I've seen him before!" So saying, Uncle Tom jumped to the ground, and hastening forward, held out his hand, exclaiming: "How are you, Herr Bergen? I'm glad to meet you again. We are old acquaintances, though I had forgotten your name, if I ever heard it." "I believe you are right, Mr. Allen," responded the professor. "Your face seems familiar, though I am ashamed to say I cannot recall when or where we met." "I can remind you," said Uncle Tom. "It was at Fort Garland, six or seven years ago. I was on my way to investigate an alleged gold discovery in the Taos mountains, when you rode into the fort to ask the cavalry vet to give you something to dress the wounds of a burro which had been clawed by a mountain-lion. I got into conversation with you, and learning that you also wanted some cartridges for a little Ballard rifle, I gave you a box of fifty. Do you remember?" "I remember very well," replied the professor. "The cartridges were for Dick: he learned to shoot with a Ballard. Well, this is a great pleasure to meet an old acquaintance like this. Come in out of the cold. Romero will take your pony." Soon we were all seated before the fire, Uncle Tom puffing away his aches and pains with the smoke of the inevitable cigar, when the professor, turning to him, asked: "And how long do you intend to stay in camp, Mr. Allen? Will this snow drive you out?" "Not at all," replied Uncle Tom. "I expect to be here a couple of weeks, in spite of the snow. The drifts will settle in a day or two, and the miners will break trails to their claims, and then I shall be able to get about--there won't be any difficulty. Though if it were going to be as hard work as it was coming up here this morning I might as well go home again at once--it took us an hour to make the one mile from town." "You came to inspect the mines, I understand. Do you confine yourself to silver mines, or do you deal in mines of all sorts?" "Silver and gold," replied Uncle Tom. "Though, as it happens, I am on the lookout this time for a copper mine as well. Before I left St. Louis I notified a Boston firm, with whom I have frequent dealings, of my intention to come here, and received from them in reply a telegram, saying, 'Find us a good copper mine. Price no object.' There was no explanation, and I am rather puzzled to understand why they should suddenly branch out into 'coppers' in this way." "I expect the explanation is simple enough," remarked the professor. "What is it, then?" asked Uncle Tom. "To any one watching the progress of science," replied the professor, puffing away at his big porcelain pipe, "even to me, here on the ragged edge of civilization, it is obvious that a new era is close at hand; a new force rapidly coming to the front." "Electricity?" asked Uncle Tom. "Yes, electricity. The science is still in the egg, as you may say, but to those who have ears to hear, the shell is beginning to crack. I am convinced that before long we shall be lighting our streets with electricity and using it in a thousand ways as a mechanical power. The consequence will be an immense increase in the demand for copper; and that, I have no doubt, is why you have been asked to look out for a copper mine: they want to be ready when the time comes. What is this, Dick?" At the first mention of the words, "copper mine," the thoughts of Dick and myself had, of course, instantly reverted to the King Philip mine, and I was on the point of introducing the subject, when Dick, catching my eye, signed to me to keep quiet. Rising from his chair, he stepped softly to the rack where the rifles hung and took down the Mexican's arrow, which he had put there the evening before. It happened that we had not mentioned the episode of the wolves and the Mexican when describing to the professor our struggle homeward through the snow-storm, and consequently, when my companion laid the arrow on the table close to his elbow, it was only natural that the old gentleman should exclaim, "What is this, Dick?" Very briefly, Dick related how he had come by it, merely stating that we had seen a Mexican shoot a wolf; that the Mexican had run away when we hailed him; and that we had gone and picked up his arrow. I wondered rather why he did not call attention to the copper arrow-head; but Dick knew what he was about, as I very soon saw: he intended to let the professor discover it for himself, which a man of his habits of close observation was certain to do. In fact, the old gentleman had no sooner taken the arrow into his hands than he exclaimed: "Why, this arrow-head is made of copper! A Mexican, you say? Then he probably came from Hermanos. You remember, Dick, how all the people down there---- Why, Mr. Allen, here's the very thing! You want a copper mine? Well, here is a copper mine all ready to your hand! All you have to do is----" "To find it," interjected Dick, laughing. "That is true," the professor assented, laughing himself. "I had forgotten that little particular for the moment, Dick. I'm afraid it is not quite so ready to your hand as I was leading you to suppose, Mr. Allen; but that it is there, somewhere in the Dos Hermanos mountains, I feel sure." Thereupon the professor proceeded to tell the story that Dick had already told me, giving some further details of the information he had derived from the Spanish gentleman, Don Blake. "It appears to have been a mine of some consequence," said the professor. "The records covered a period of fifteen years, and during the last five years of the time the shipments were constant and large. It is fairly sure, I think, that the product was native copper----" "Sure to be," interrupted Uncle Tom. "It would never have paid to ship any waste product so far. In fact, I am surprised that they should ship even native copper such a long distance." "Yes; but as they did so, I think the inference is that the metal was plentiful and easy to mine." "That is a reasonable assumption," said Uncle Tom, thoughtfully nodding his head. "What beats me, though," he went on, "is that the memory of the spot should have been so totally lost. Considering that the mine was producing for fifteen years, there must be many traces of the work done, such as the waste dump, the old road or trail, and so forth: you can't run a mine for that length of time and leave no marks. It is a wonder to me that the place has never been rediscovered." "I don't think there is anything surprising in that," replied the professor. "The villagers of Hermanos, agricultural people, seldom go five miles from home; it is only old Galvez' _vaqueros_, his cow-men, who would be likely to come across the traces of mining, and if they did, those peons are such incurious, unenterprising people they would pay no attention. Besides which, I gathered that even the cow-men never went up into the Dos Hermanos mountains: it is not a good cattle country--rough granite and limestone, little water and scant pasturage. Consequently, the cattle range southward toward the Santa Claras, instead of westward to the Dos Hermanos, and the Twin Peaks, therefore, remain in their solitary glory, untouched by the foot of man; and probably they have so remained ever since the King Philip mine was abandoned, a hundred and fifty years ago." For a full minute Uncle Tom remained silent, thoughtfully blowing out long spirals of cigar smoke, but presently he roused up again and said: "There is one thing more I should like to ask you, Professor, and that is, why you conclude that the King Philip mine is in the Dos Hermanos mountains?" "For this reason," replied our friend: "In the first place, many of the reports were dated from the _Casa del Rey_. Of course, it is likely enough that there are other _Casas del Rey_ in other parts of the country, but besides the frequent mention of the King's House, there was also mention of Indian fights at different places: 'at the crossing of the Perdita,' for instance, and 'near the spring by Picture Buttes'; then there was the record of a snow-blockade on the Mosca Pass, in the Santa Claras; another of a terrible dust-storm on the Little Cactus Desert, 'with the loss of one man and three mules'; and so forth. Now, a line running through these and other places mentioned would bring you into the Mescalero valley at its southern end, and there is no doubt in my mind that the _Casa del Rey_ named in the reports is the King's House down there at Hermanos." "It does seem so, doesn't it?" responded Uncle Tom. "Look here, professor," he went on, suddenly jumping out of his chair and casting his cigar stump into the fire, "I must make an attempt to find that copper mine. It does, as you say, seem all ready to my hand. But how to do it, is the question. I can't go myself--can't spare the time--so the only way, I suppose, is to hire some prospector, if I can." "I don't think you can get one," said the professor, shaking his head; "at least, not here in Mosby. They are all too intent on hunting for silver, and I doubt if you could persuade one of them to waste a season in searching for a metal so commonplace as copper, the value of which is rather prospective than immediate. I doubt very much if you could get one to go." "I suppose not," replied Uncle Tom. "And you can hardly blame them, either, when you consider that by the expenditure of the same amount of labor a man may come across a rich vein of silver, every ounce of which he knows to be worth a dollar and twenty cents." "Just so," the professor assented. "What am I to do, then?" asked Uncle Tom. "Give it up? Seems a pity, doesn't it, when, more than likely, the old workings are lying there plain to view, only waiting for some one with his eyes open to pass that way. Still, if I can't get a man----" "Take a boy," suggested Dick, cutting in unexpectedly. Uncle Tom whirled round on his heels and stared at him; the professor removed his long pipe from his mouth and stared at him too; while Dick himself sat bolt upright in his chair, a broad and genial grin overspreading his countenance. For some seconds they all maintained these attitudes in silence, when Uncle Tom suddenly broke into a hearty laugh. "You young scamp!" cried he, shaking his forefinger at Dick. "I believe that's what you've been aiming at all the time." "That's just what we have, Mr. Allen," replied my companion. "Frank and I were talking about it yesterday, saying what fun it would be to go and hunt for the old mine; though we never expected to get the chance. But when you began to talk about copper mines, we cocked our ears, of course, thinking that here, perhaps, _was_ a chance after all--and--and if you _can't_ get a man, Mr. Allen, why not send a boy? Would you let me go, Professor?" Our two elders looked at each other, and very anxiously we looked at our two elders. Not a word did either of them say, until the professor, rising from his chair and knocking out the ashes of his pipe upon the hearthstone, remarked quietly: "Go out and chop some wood, boys. I want to talk to Mr. Allen." Regarding this order as a hopeful sign, out we went, and for a long half-hour we feverishly hacked at the heap of poles outside, making a rather indifferent job of it, I suspect, until a tapping at the window attracted our attention and we saw Uncle Tom beckoning us to come in. How anxiously we scanned their countenances this time, any one will guess. Both men were standing with their backs to the fire, Uncle Tom smoking a fresh cigar and the professor puffing away again at his pipe, both of them looking so solemn that I thought to myself, "It's no go," and my spirits fell accordingly; but looking again at Uncle Tom I detected a twitching at the corner of his mouth which sent them up again with a bound. "Well, Uncle Tom!" I cried. "What's it to be?" "It is a serious matter," replied my guardian, with all the solemnity of a judge passing sentence. "The professor and I have discussed it very earnestly, and we have decided--that you shall go!" CHAPTER VIII THE START The delight with which this announcement was received by us two boys may be imagined, for though we had hoped for such a decision we had not dared to expect it. I, for my part, had feared that the matter of my interrupted education alone would form an insurmountable barrier; and indeed it was that subject which had proved the chief obstacle, as Uncle Tom presently informed me. All the other objections were minor ones and we discreetly refrained from asking for their recapitulation lest, in going over them again, something not thought of before should crop up to interfere. We were quite content to accept the decision without knowing how it had been arrived at. As to my interrupted schooling, though, that was a serious matter, as Uncle Tom, in spite of his original ideas about education, clearly understood. "The main question with me, you see, Frank," said he, "was whether you would benefit or otherwise by missing so much schooling, and though I believe pretty strongly in the value of learning by practice and experience, I should have felt obliged to decide against this expedition if the professor had not come to the rescue. It is to him you owe our decision to let you boys go." I looked gratefully at Herr Bergen, who serenely waved the stem of his pipe in our direction, though whether to intimate that the obligation was nothing to speak of, or as a sign to Uncle Tom to go on, I could not decide. "I find," continued the latter, "that the winter is Dick's school-time; and the professor has offered to take you in, Frank, and let you share in Dick's work, undertaking to bring you on in your mathematics in particular--which is your weak spot, you know. In the spring, when the snow clears off, you are to start for the Dos Hermanos and make a thorough search for this old copper mine; and as you will be doing it on my account, I shall bear all expenses. There, that is all, except--well, it is not necessary to mention that--but I was going to say that I rely on you, old fellow, to make the most of your opportunity and in your own person to prove the correctness of my theory that a boy may sometimes learn more out of school than in it." "I believe you may count on me, Uncle Tom," said I. "I'll do my level best. And I'm tremendously obliged to you, Herr Bergen----" "Not at all," interrupted the professor, "not at all. The fact is, I am very glad to have a companion for Dick; and as to the schooling, the obligation is not all on one side by any means, for to me it is one of the greatest pleasures possible to teach a boy who really desires to learn. I anticipate a most pleasant winter." Thus was this odd arrangement made by which I, who by right should have been attending a public school in St. Louis, became the private pupil of an eminent German professor, pursuing my studies in a little log cabin tucked away in a snow-encumbered valley of the Rocky Mountains--about as queer a piece of topsyturviness, to my notion, as ever happened to a boy, and one very unlikely to happen to any other boy, unless he chanced to be endowed with an Uncle Tom cut out on the same pattern as mine. "There's one thing, Frank," said my guardian, as we made our way down to camp later in the day, "there's one thing I didn't mention in Dick's presence, and that is that the professor laid great stress on the pleasure and advantage it would be to Dick to have a companion of his own age for once, and it was that which turned the balance with me--after the educational question had been got out of the way. For I owe Dick a good turn if I can do him one without hurting anybody else; I told him I wouldn't forget his service in coming down through the storm yesterday, and I haven't forgotten. I'm uncommonly glad to think that in consenting to your taking part in this expedition--which I believe will be a great thing for you, mentally as well as bodily--we shall be doing a service to Dick and to the old professor at the same time." "Well, Uncle Tom," said I, "you may be sure I am glad enough to stay, and I hope it will not only prove a good thing for Dick and me, but for you as well." "I hope so, too. And it will, if you can locate that old copper mine, and if it should prove to be anywhere near as good as it sounds." As things turned out, I was destined to begin my winter's schooling somewhat earlier than we had expected, for, five days after the storm, Uncle Tom received from his Boston employers a telegram, forwarded by mail from the end of the line, saying, "Come here at once. Important," when, without demur, he forthwith packed up his things and away he went; while I, taking leave of our kind host, the assayer, moved up to Herr Bergen's house. I need not go into the details of our daily life on Mosby Creek; it is enough to say that the winter was one of the pleasantest I had ever spent. Time flew by, as was only natural, for there was not an idle moment for either of us. Herr Bergen proved to be a most able instructor, not only in the matter of scholarship but in general training as well. He had served in the German army in his younger days, and the habits of orderliness, precision and promptness remained with him. We boys were made to toe the mark, and no mistake; there was a time for work and a time for play, and whether for duty or pleasure, we had to be on hand to the minute. I do not wish to imply that the professor was harsh, or anything of the sort; very far from it: he was most considerate of our shortcomings, which were doubtless plentiful enough, and with infinite patience would go over the ground again and again whenever Dick or I got ourselves tangled up; a condition of things which happened on the average about once a day to each of us. Then, every marked advance we made in any of our studies was so obviously gratifying to the kindly old gentleman that that fact alone was enough to spur a fellow on to doing his extra-best. As a consequence, I, for my part, made very notable progress, and it was with great pleasure, as you may suppose, that I was able later on to write to Uncle Tom my conviction that I had gained rather than lost by my winter's work. One thing, at least, which I should not have acquired in school, I gained by my association with the professor's household: I learned to speak Spanish. Herr Bergen made a great point of it that I should do so, as it would be pretty sure to come in useful during the ensuing summer. He and Dick--and Romero, of course--all spoke it very well, so that my opportunity for picking it up was excellent, and I made rapid progress; my knowledge of Latin, which, though very far from profound, was up to the average of a schoolboy of my age, being an immense help. All this time we did not lack exercise--the professor was just as particular about that as he was about our work--and Dick and I had many a jolly outing on our snow-shoes, the management of which was another thing I learned. I should not omit to mention also that I spent a good deal of time and a liberal number of cartridges practising with a rifle, thereby becoming a very fair shot; though, of course, I could not compete with Dick, who, having learned as a mere child, seemed, almost, to shoot straight by nature. The weather on the average was splendid that winter, and there were but few days when we could not get out. Four or five times, perhaps, during the months I spent in the valley a snow-storm came raging down on us, shutting us up for a day or two, after which the jovial sun would turn up smiling again just as though nothing had happened. It was toward the end of April that Dick and I began to get ready to leave. The increasing power of the sun had cleared off all the snow below eleven thousand feet, the green grass was beginning to show in many places, and it was fair to suppose that by the time we reached the Dos Hermanos we should find pasturage enough for our animals--two ponies and a mule. Dick already had his own pony, while the mule, a tough little beast by name Uncle Fritz, was provided by the professor, both animals having passed the winter on a ranch about a couple of thousand feet lower down. Before he left, Uncle Tom had suggested hiring them for the season, but the professor would not consent to his paying anything, saying that the animals might just as well be put to some use as to waste their time doing nothing all summer. Consequently, about the only expense to which my guardian was put, besides furnishing provisions and tools for the expedition, was the purchase of a pony and a rifle for me. This was a very moderate outlay, and I was glad to think that Uncle Tom would get off so cheaply, if our search should turn out a failure; and no one was more ready to recognize that possibility--probability, I should rather say, perhaps--than Uncle Tom himself, to whom the many stories in general circulation of lost Spanish mines of fabulous richness were familiar, and who knew very well how little foundation there was for most of them. The present case, though, was different from the generality, in that there existed documentary evidence that there had been such a mine; a fact which altered the conditions entirely. For it is safe to say that without such documentary evidence Uncle Tom would never have consented to our undertaking such an enterprise, and Dick and I, in consequence, would never have run into the series of adventures which were destined to befall us before we were many weeks older. It was on the first day of May that we at last took leave of our good friend, Herr Bergen, and rode off down the valley, passing on our way through the town of Mosby, where our appearance on horseback, driving our pack-mule before us, excited among the citizens much speculation as to our destination; a matter concerning which we had said not a word to anybody. That it was a prospecting expedition any one could see, for the pick and shovel could not very well be concealed, but where we were bound for nobody knew, Uncle Tom having cautioned us that if we let a word escape about an old Spanish mine we should have a hundred men at our heels in no time; the very idea of such a thing having an irresistible fascination for some people, especially for the inexperienced newcomer. [Illustration: "PASSING ON OUR WAY THROUGH THE TOWN OF MOSBY."] Our reason for taking our way through town rather than crossing the Mosby Ridge, back of the professor's house, and going down the Mescalero valley, was that the latter course, cut up by many deep cañons, would be much the more difficult of the two; for by following down the eastern side of the ridge, as we proposed to do, we should presently come to a point where that barrier, which up near Mescalero began as a mountain range, became first a line of round-topped hills, and then, about forty miles below town, came to an end altogether in a little conical eminence known as The Foolscap. We could therefore pass round its southern end without difficulty, when we should find ourselves in the Mescalero valley at its wide part, and by heading southwestward should arrive in about another twenty miles in the neighborhood of the village of Hermanos--a route somewhat longer, but very much easier for the animals, than the other one. About five miles below town we abandoned the road, which there turned off to the left to join the main stage-road, and continuing our southward course up and down hill over the spurs of the Mosby Ridge we made camp early in the afternoon; for our animals being as yet in rather poor condition, we thought it advisable to give them an easy day for the first one. Selecting a sheltered nook among the pine trees, we unpacked the mule and unsaddled the ponies, and then, while Dick cooked our supper, I busied myself cutting pine boughs for our beds and chopping fire-wood. Soon after sunset we rolled ourselves in our blankets, and in spite of the novelty of the situation--for I had never before gone to bed with no roof overhead nearer than the sky--I slept soundly until Dick's voice aroused me, crying, "Roll out, old chap! Roll out! The sun will catch you in bed in a minute," when I sprang up, fresh as a daisy and hungry as a shark, as one always seems to do after sleeping out under the stars in the keen, pine-scented air of the mountains. Continuing our journey, we presently rounded the end of the Mosby Ridge, and turning to the right saw before us the twin peaks of the Dos Hermanos, standing there, as it seemed to me, like two faithful sentinels guarding the secret of the King Philip mine. "Now, Frank," said my companion, as we sat at supper on the little hill with which the Ridge terminated, "we have a tough day of it before us to-morrow. The valley down at this end, you see, is just a sage-brush plain; there are no cañons down here like there are at the upper end; and there is no water either, unfortunately--this side of the mountains, I mean. The streams which come down from Mescalero and the Ridge take a westerly turn and go off through a deep gorge to the north of the peaks--you can see the black shadow of it from here." "What do the people at Hermanos do for water, then?" I asked. "There is a little stream which comes down from the saddle between the Dos Hermanos peaks and runs eastward through the village. But it sinks into the soil soon afterward, for the country down that way becomes very sandy; it is the beginning of the Little Cactus Desert, across which the pack-trains and the soldier escort used to travel, you remember, headed for the Mosca Pass--that low place in the Santa Claras that you see down there, due south from here." "I see. So the nearest water is the stream running through the village. Do you propose, then, to make for Hermanos?" "No, I don't," replied Dick. "We want to avoid the village, if possible: it is no use exciting the curiosity of old Galvez, if he happens to be there. What I propose is that we make straight from here to the north side of the peaks, leaving the village three or four miles on our left; find a good camping-place, and make it a base for our preliminary operations." "That's all right," I assented. "But how much of a day's ride will it be to the north side of the peaks? Further than to Hermanos, I suppose, and that is over twenty miles." "Yes," replied Dick, "twenty-five miles certainly and perhaps thirty--a long stretch without water. But we can do it all right. I propose that we get off by four in the morning, which ought to bring us to the foothills of the Dos Hermanos by two or three o'clock in the afternoon." "That's a good idea," I responded. "And if, by bad luck, we should find that we can't make it, we can always turn off and head for the village if we have to." "Yes. So let us get to bed early. It will be a hard day at best, and we may as well get all the sleep we can." As my companion had predicted, the morrow did turn out to be a tough day, and it began early, too. It was about half-past three in the morning that I was awakened by the crackling of the fire, and sitting up in my blankets, I saw Dick squatted on his heels, frying bacon over some of the hot embers. "Time to turn out, Frank," said he. "Breakfast will be ready in two minutes; feeling pretty hungry this morning?" By way of reply, I opened my mouth with a yawn so prodigious that Dick laughingly continued: "Hungry as all that, eh? Well, old man, if the size of your mouth is an indication of the size of your appetite, I'll slice up another half-pound of bacon!" At this I laughed too, and jumping up, I ran to the creek, where I soused my head and face in the cold water, which wakened me up effectually. By four o'clock we were under way, steering by compass; for, though the stars were shining and the waning moon, then near its setting, furnished some light, there was not enough to enable us to distinguish objects at any distance. Our progress at first was pretty slow, for horses and mules do not like traveling by night, but presently there came a change, the sky behind us took on a rosy hue, and pretty soon there appeared on the western horizon two glowing points, like a pair of triangular red lamps hung up in the sky for our guidance--the summits of the Dos Hermanos caught by the rising sun. It was an inspiring sight! The very animals, seeming to feel its influence, brisked up at once and stepped out gaily, while Dick and I, who had been "mouching" along in silence, straightened up in our saddles and fell to talking. "I've been thinking, Dick," said I, "about what our first move should be after we have found a good camping-place. My idea is that we should ride down to the neighborhood of Hermanos and see if there is any sign of an old trail leading from the village to the mountains." "That's a good idea," Dick responded. "It is pretty certain that the copper was brought down from the mine on the backs of burros, and the supplies carried up in the same way, and if that was kept up for several years there must have been a well-defined trail worn in this soft soil, which may be visible yet." "On the other hand," was my comment, "as the travel ceased so long ago, isn't it probable that the trail will have been blown full of sand and covered up?" "That is likely enough--in many places, at least," replied my companion, "though it is very possible, I think, that there may be some traces left, for it is surprising how long such marks on the ground continue to show. At any rate, we'll try it. Here's the sun; it's going to be pretty hot, I expect." Slowly we plodded along, hour after hour, until presently we had come opposite the village, the mud-colored buildings of which, though not more than three miles away, were barely distinguishable against the gray-tinted plain upon which they stood. The green fields and gardens surrounding the houses we could not see, they being below the general level, but that they were there, and that the Mexicans were at that moment engaged in irrigating them, we felt very sure. A light wind was blowing from the south, and Dick declared that he could "smell the wet"; but though I sniffed and sniffed, I could not conscientiously say that I could detect it myself. Our animals, however, very evidently smelt it, for they evinced a decided inclination to bear to the left, and we had a good deal of difficulty in keeping their heads straight--the slightest inattention on our part, and they were off the line in a moment. As is so often the case, they had not cared to drink in the cool of the morning before we started, and consequently, what with the heat of the sun and the alkali dust they kicked up, they had become eager for water and would have made a straight shoot for Hermanos if we had let them. But we were nearing the mountains, an hour or two more and we should reach water, probably, so, though it was painful to deny the poor beasts, we kept right on, until about four in the afternoon--for it had taken us longer than we had anticipated--when all three of them suddenly lifted their heads, pricked their ears and wanted to run forward. They smelt water ahead of them. Pressing on at an increased pace, we were presently brought to a halt by coming upon the brink of a cliff, at the base of which was a large pool of clear water. The pool lay in a little grass-covered valley about half a mile long, encompassed on all sides by the precipitous wall of rock. We could not see that there was any way of getting down. In order to get a better view, Dick and I dismounted and walked to the edge, when the first thing we saw was a little bunch of half-a-dozen scrawny Mexican cattle down near the pool. "Then there is a way down," cried Dick. "Whoop!" he yelled, clapping his mouth with his hand. The cattle looked up, and seeing two horseless human beings on the sky-line above them, away they went up the valley, vanished for an instant among the fallen rocks at the foot of the cliff, and in another moment appeared again on our level, going off southward with their tails in the air, wild as deer. "Come on!" cried Dick, jumping upon his horse. "Where they came up we can get down." Riding forward, we presently found the cow-trail, when, dismounting once more, for it was too steep to ride without risk of breaking one's neck, we led our horses down. Within another half-hour Dick and I, comfortably seated in the shade of the rock, were enjoying a much-needed dinner, while the three animals, their waist-lines enormously distended with the gallons of water they had swallowed, were eagerly snapping up the young green grass with which the valley was covered--all the troubles of the day completely forgotten. CHAPTER IX ANTONIO MARTINEZ As we wished to give the animals a good rest, we decided to stay where we were for the remainder of that day and on the morrow move to the foot of the mountain and look out for a good camping-place from which to make our preliminary explorations. The spot where we were then encamped would not serve, for we were yet at least three miles from the lowest spurs of the twin mountains. The stream beside which we were seated issued from the northernmost of the two peaks, and after running out into the plain for some distance made a great bend and went back almost to the point of departure, when, turning to the northward, it poured its waters into the deep cañon cut by the streams which came down from Mescalero and the Ridge. It was just at the bend that we had struck it. "What we want, Frank," said my companion, "is a good place in the foothills, and when we have found one, I propose that we take our ponies, skirt along the base of the mountains from north to south, and see if we can't cut across that old trail we were talking about this morning. It is extremely important that we should do so; it might save us weeks of useless searching." "Yes," I assented, "it would be a great help, of course; though all we can hope to find is some mark in the soil which will point us generally in one direction or another." "Yes; and that's just it. If we can find any indication of the direction the trains used to take when they started from the King's House, it will lighten our task tremendously. Look here," taking a pointed stick and drawing a rough plat of the country in the sand. "Here are the two peaks, lying north and south of each other; here, between them, the creek comes down which runs two or three miles out on to the plain to the village here. Now, when the trains used to start out from the _Casa del Rey_ they took to the right of that stream or they took to the left of it, one or the other, and if we can do no more than find out which it was it will be a great help." "Of course," I responded. "I see that. It would show us whether it was the north mountain or the south mountain that we had to explore." "That's it, exactly. And if you stop for a moment to consider, you will see that that would be a pretty big item all by itself. The two mountains cover a space about fifteen miles long by, perhaps, ten miles wide--a hundred and fifty square miles--a pretty big piece of country, old man, for you and me to scramble over; but if we can find a trail which will show us which of the two mountains is the right one, that hundred and fifty miles will be chopped in half at one blow--and if that isn't a pretty big item all by itself, I should like to know what is." With that, Dick, who was sitting cross-legged on the ground, stuck his stick point downward into the middle of his map, planted his hands on either knee, and with a defiant jerk of his head, challenged me to deny his conclusion. I could not help laughing at his emphatic manner, but I could not help, either, admitting that his point was a good one. "It certainly would make an immense difference," said I, "and it will pay us to find that old trail if it takes us a week to do it. So, let us dig out first thing to-morrow, Dick, and find a good camping-place as a base." Accordingly we broke camp again early next morning, and following along the rim of the cañon we presently drew near the foothills. As we approached the mountain we were able to distinguish with more clearness the details of its form, and the more clearly we could distinguish them the more were we impressed with the difficulty and the magnitude of the task we had undertaken. It was not going to be the simple, straightforward matter I had at first imagined. Seen from a distance the north peak looked smooth and symmetrical, but when you came close to it you found that it was broken up into cliffs and cañons, some of them of great height and depth. On its northern face, a thousand feet or so below the summit, our attention was drawn to a great semicircular precipice which looked very like the upper half of an old volcanic crater, the lower half, presumably, having broken away and fallen down the mountain. "A pretty tough piece of country, Frank," said my companion, "and a pretty large stretch of it, too, for us to tramp over; for, by the look of it from here, our horses won't be much use to us--at least, when we get up above the lower spurs. Let us try this gully to the left: there's probably water up there; I see the tops of two or three cottonwoods." Turning in that direction, therefore, we presently came upon a diminutive stream which ran down and fell into the cañon, and passing between two high rocks, which looked as though they had been split apart with a wedge to let the water out, we found ourselves in a little park-like valley, flanked on either side by high ridges. "This ought to do, Dick," said I, "at any rate for the present; plenty of grass, plenty of wood and plenty of water. Just the place." "Yes, this is all right; couldn't be better. Let's unsaddle at once, make our camp, and after dinner we'll ride down in the direction of Hermanos and do a little prospecting." Having chosen a good spot, we arranged a comfortable camp, and after a hasty dinner we started out; first picketing Uncle Fritz to keep him from coming trailing after us. Immediately to the south of our camping-place, forming one of the boundaries of the little ravine, in fact, there stretched down from the mountain a great, bare rib of granite, almost devoid of vegetation, which projected a long way out into the valley, and as it lay square across our course we decided, instead of going round the end of it, to ride up to the top in order to get a good lookout over the country we proposed to examine. From the summit of this ridge, at a point about four hundred feet above the plain, we were able to get a very good view of all the wide stretch of comparatively level ground below us, including the village of Hermanos and the green irrigated fields around it, which from this elevation were distinctly visible. Except for this tiny oasis, the whole plain, bounded on the east by the Mosby Ridge, and on the south by the Santa Clara mountains, appeared to be one uniform, level stretch of sage-brush desert--dull, gray and uninviting. "What a pity," remarked Dick, "that there is no water here. If only one could get water upon it, this sage-brush plain could be turned into a wheat-field big enough to supply the whole State with bread, besides furnishing labor and subsistence for a good-sized population of farmers." "It would be fine, wouldn't it?" I assented. "And I don't see why it has never been done: there must be many streams coming down from these mountains." "Yes, no doubt; but the difficulty is that all the streams of any consequence have cut cañons for themselves and are too far below the general level to be of any use. To get water out upon the surface of this valley one would have to go high up on the mountain, find some good-sized stream, head it off--building a dam for the purpose, perhaps--and then conduct the water down here by a ditch several miles long possibly. Far too big an undertaking, you see, for these penniless, unenterprising Mexicans." "I see. It would take a great deal of work and a great deal of money, probably, but it would be a fine thing to do, all the same." "Yes, it would; and some day it will be done. It won't be so very many years before all the 'easy water' in the State will have been appropriated, and then people will begin to look out for a supply in the more out-of-the-way places, building reservoirs to catch the rainfall which now runs to waste after every thunder-storm, and carrying the water long distances to sell it to the ranchman. The professor says that some day the business of catching and distributing irrigation water will be the most important industry in the State, and that a good ever-flowing stream will be more valuable than any silver mine." "I can understand that," I replied. "The best mine will some day come to an end, for when the silver is once dug out it is gone--you can't plant more; whereas, a good stream of water applied on the soil will go on producing forever and ever." "That's it, exactly. And some day that is what will happen here. This fine stretch of level land, which now grows only grass enough to support about three cows and a burro, won't always lie idle. Some enterprising fellow will come along, climb up into this mountain, catch one of those streams which now go running off through the cañons, turn it down here, and a couple of years later this worthless desert will be converted into farms and orchards." "A fine undertaking, too!" I exclaimed. "I should like to have a try at it myself." "So should I. But our object in life just now is 'copper,' so come on, old chap, and let us ride down to the point of this ridge. What is that black speck down there toward the village? Man on horseback? Ah! He has disappeared again. Well, come on now, Frank. Let's get started." Getting down upon the plain again, we turned southward, skirting the base of the mountain, winding our way through the sage-brush, which was large and very thick, when, after riding barely a quarter of a mile in that direction, Dick suddenly pulled up. "Frank!" he exclaimed. "Look here! Doesn't it seem to you that there is a depression in the soil going off to the right and the left? Look away a hundred yards and you will see what I mean. It seems to lead straight up into the mountain one way, and straight out upon the plain the other way." At first I could not detect anything of the sort, but on Dick's pointing it out more particularly it did appear to me that there was a depression going off in both directions. "Let us turn to the left, Dick," said I, "and follow it--if we can--out into the valley and see what becomes of it." "All right," responded my companion. "Let's do so." The mark on the ground was by no means easy to follow, it was so overgrown with sage-brush, and in many places altogether obliterated by drifting sand, but, though we frequently lost it, by looking far ahead we always caught the line again. Presently we found that it went curving off to the right in the direction of Hermanos, and our hopes rose. "Dick!" I cried. "This is no accidental mark in the soil! It is a trail, as sure as you live!" "It does begin to look like it," replied my more cautious friend. "I believe it---- Hallo! Who's this coming?" As he spoke, I saw about half a mile away a horseman coming toward us at an easy lope from the direction of the village. He was riding a handsome gray horse, very superior to the little bronchos we ourselves bestrode. "He rides well," said I. "I wonder how he got so close to us on this flat country without our seeing him." "The country is probably not quite so flat as it looks," replied my companion. "I expect the man has been keeping in the hollows so that he might slip up on us unobserved. It is probably old Galvez coming to find out what we are doing prowling around his domain. He must be the horseman I saw just now, and I've no doubt he saw us, too, cocked up on that bare ridge--for all these Mexicans have eyes like hawks." Meanwhile the rider continued to approach, and as he came nearer we observed, rather to our relief, that it could not be the padron, for the stranger was a well-dressed young Mexican, only three or four years older than ourselves, a handsome, intelligent-looking young fellow, too, with a trim little black moustache and bright black eyes--evidently one of a class superior to the ordinary cow-man or farm-hand. Watching him closely as he came up, wondering what sort of a reception we should get from him, it appeared to me that he, too, looked both surprised and relieved when he perceived that instead of the two rough and sturdy prospectors he had probably expected to meet, it was only a couple of boys, younger than himself, with whom he had to deal. And it is likely that he did feel relieved, for at that time the white men--or, at least, very many of them--dwelling on what was then the outer edge of civilization, were apt to look down upon all Mexicans as people of an inferior race, frequently treating them in consequence in a rough, overbearing manner by no means calculated to promote friendly feeling. The young Mexican doubtless "sized us up" favorably; at any rate, no sooner had he come near enough to see what we were like than he rode straight up to us, and addressing us politely in Spanish, said: "Good-day, sirs. Are you going down to Hermanos? I shall be glad to ride with you if you are." It happened that I was the one to whom he addressed this salutation, Dick being a little further back. Now, though I had acquired enough of the language to understand and speak it fairly well, the Spanish I had learned was good Castilian, whereas the young Mexican spoke a kind of _patois_, such as is commonly used among all the natives of these outlying settlements. The unexpected difference of pronunciation, though slight, caused me to hesitate an instant in making reply--I have no doubt, too, my face looked rather blank--whereupon the young fellow instantly jumped to the conclusion that we did not speak Spanish at all, and he therefore repeated his remark in English. It was without any thought of misleading him that I replied, very naturally, in the tongue which came easiest to me, and as the stranger spoke English quite as well as I did, it was very natural again that the conversation should be continued in that tongue. Thus it happened that we accidentally deceived him--or, rather, he deceived himself--into the belief that we did not understand any language but our own, and as no opportunity cropped up during our talk for setting him right, he continued in this mistaken idea; a fact which, a little later, caused us considerable satisfaction--not on our own account, but on his. Replying to his question therefore in English, I said: "No, we were not bound for Hermanos in particular. We have come down here to do a little prospecting, and were just riding around a bit to take a look at the country. Do you live here?" "No," he replied, "I live in Santa Fé. My name is Antonio Martinez. I am on a visit here to my uncle, Señor Galvez, the padron of Hermanos. He is my mother's brother, and as she had not seen him for many years, and as he has always declined to come to us, she sent me here to make his acquaintance. For myself, I had never even seen him until I arrived here two weeks ago, and----" He checked himself suddenly, looking a little confused; I had an idea that what he was going to say was that he did not much care if he never saw him again. "And are you expecting to stay here?" asked Dick. "No, I go back in a day or two. Where do you, yourselves hail from, if I may ask? From Mosby?" "Yes, from Mosby," replied Dick. "We came down, as my friend said, to do some prospecting up in one or other of these two peaks--we don't know which one yet. How is the country up there? Pretty accessible? You've been up, I suppose." "No, I haven't," replied the young Mexican. "You think that rather strange, don't you? And naturally enough. Here have I been for two weeks hanging around this village with absolutely nothing to do; I should have been glad enough to make an expedition up into the mountains--in fact, I had a very particular reason for wishing to do so--but when I suggested the idea to the padron, explaining to him why I was so anxious to go, he not only refused emphatically for himself, but declined to let me go either." "Why, that seems queer!" cried Dick. "It does, doesn't it? And his reason for refusing will appear to you queerer still--he's afraid!" "Afraid!" we both exclaimed. "Afraid of what?" "Afraid of The Badger," replied the young fellow, breaking into a laugh as he noted the mystified look which came over both our faces. "What do you mean?" I asked. "Why should he--or anybody--be afraid of a badger?" "I said _The_ Badger," replied our friend. "You have never heard of him, evidently--El Tejon, The Badger." We both shook our heads. "What is he?" I asked. "A man?" "Yes--or a wild beast. It is hard to say which. He is a Mexican who once lived in the village here, I believe. For some reason which I cannot understand--for my uncle won't talk about it, though I have asked him several times--for some reason The Badger conceived a violent hatred for the padron; whether he went crazy or not, I don't know, but anyhow he committed a murderous assault upon him, hurting him badly--knocked out all his front teeth with a stone, for one thing--and then escaped into the mountains. That was twelve years ago, and as far as any one knows he is there yet, if he is still alive." "And wasn't any attempt ever made to capture him?" asked Dick. "Once," replied Antonio. "According to the padron's story, he went out with six of his cow-men to try to run The Badger to earth; but the attempt was a failure, as was only to be expected, for the cow-men were very unwilling to go. They trembled at the very name of El Tejon, who was a man of immense strength and a great hunter, and they feared that instead of catching him, he would catch one of them. And the event showed that they had reason. They had been out several days, had ridden all over the lower part of the north mountain without seeing a sign of their man, and were coming back, single file, down a narrow gully, when the padron's horse suddenly, and seemingly without cause, fell down, stone dead. The rider, of course, fell too, and striking his head against a stone he lay for a moment stunned. No one could think what had happened to the horse, until presently one of the men noticed blood upon the rocks, and turning the animal over they were all scared out of their wits by seeing the head of an arrow sticking out between his ribs." "An arrow!" we both cried. "Yes, an arrow," continued the narrator, not noticing the glance Dick and I exchanged. "They knew well enough where it came from, for The Badger had always hunted with a bow and arrow, with which he was extraordinarily expert. The instant the cow-men saw what had happened they stuck spurs into their horses and away they all went, helter-skelter, leaving their leader lying on the ground." "That was a pretty shabby desertion," said I. "How did the padron escape?" "That is one of the things I can't understand," replied Antonio. "Why the man, having him so entirely in his power, didn't kill him at once is a puzzle to me. As it was, when the padron recovered his senses, he found El Tejon calmly seated on the carcase of the horse, waiting for him to wake up. He quite expected, he says, to be murdered forthwith, but instead, the man merely held up the arrow, which he had drawn out of the horse's body, and said: 'For you--next time'; and with that he arose and walked off. The padron is no coward, but he knows when to let well enough alone: he has never been up on the mountain since." "That's a curious story," said Dick. "What sort of a looking man is this El Tejon?" "I've never seen him myself, of course," replied our friend, "but the padron describes him as a very remarkable man to look at: less than five feet high, with an immense body, very short legs and very long arms." Dick and I exchanged glances again. "Whether the man is yet alive," continued the young fellow, "nobody knows. It is nearly twelve years ago that this happened, and since then he has never been seen nor heard of. The chances are, I expect, that he has been long dead." "On that point," remarked Dick, "we can give _you_ a little information. He is not dead--at least he wasn't last fall." CHAPTER X THE PADRON "What do you mean?" cried Antonio. "How do you know? I thought you said you had never heard of him." "We hadn't," replied Dick, "until you mentioned his name, but from your description we have no doubt we saw him some months ago up here at the head of the valley." With this by way of preface, my companion related to our new acquaintance the particulars of our "interview" with the "little giant," as he called him. "It must be the same man," said Antonio. "I wonder what he was doing so far away from his own mountain. You say he shot the wolf with a copper-headed arrow? That's something I should like to investigate, if only the padron were not so dead set against my going up into the mountain. Where does he get his copper? In fact----" He paused to consider, and then went on: "Yes; I don't see why I shouldn't tell you--my uncle won't go himself, and he won't let me go, so I may as well tell _you_. The truth is that the reason why I was so anxious to make an excursion up there was just that--to find out where El Tejon gets his copper. And not only he, but the villagers down here. Every house in Hermanos has its copper bowl and dipper. They are hammered out of lumps of native copper; some of them must weigh five or six pounds. Where did they come from? Lumps of copper of that size were not washed down the streams--they were dug up. But by whom, and where?" I felt a great inclination to tell him. He had been so friendly and communicative that I began to feel rather uncomfortable at the thought that we were drawing all this information from him under what might be regarded as false pretences. I was pretty sure that Dick would be feeling much the same--for among boys, as I have many a time noticed, there is nothing more catching than open-heartedness--and I was right; for, glancing at him to see what he thought, I caught his eye, when he immediately raised his eyebrows a trifle, as much as to say, "Shall I tell him?" "Yes," said I, aloud. "I think so. Though we must remember, Dick, that it isn't altogether our secret." Dick nodded, and turning to the young Mexican, who was gazing at us open-eyed, wondering what we were talking about, he said: "Senor Antonio, my friend and I agree that it isn't quite fair to you to let you go on telling us these things without our telling you something in return. As Frank says, it is not altogether our own secret, but at the same time we don't think it is quite a square deal to get all these particulars from you and to keep you in the dark about ourselves. I can tell you this much, anyhow: that our object in coming down here was to find out where those same lumps of copper did come from." "Why, how did _you_ know anything about them?" cried Antonio, opening his eyes wider still. "I passed through Hermanos about eighteen months ago," replied Dick, "in company with a German naturalist, Herr Bergen, when we noticed the great number of copper bowls and things, and the sight of them reminded the professor of a story he had heard of an old copper mine, abandoned more than a hundred years ago, supposed to be somewhere down in this country. The story the professor told us is the story which we think we have no business to repeat, but I can tell you this much, at least, that it seemed to indicate the Dos Hermanos as the site of the old mine; and so we got leave to come down here to see if we couldn't trail it up." "Is that so? What fun you will have. I wish I could go with you. But that, I know, is out of the question: the padron would not consent, and I could not go against his will. But if I can help you I shall be very glad. Does the story you refer to indicate which of the two peaks is the right one?" "No, it doesn't," replied Dick. "We suppose that the copper used to be brought down to the _Casa_ on pack-burros, and we thought there might be the remains of a trail down here in the valley. That is what we were doing when you rode up:--looking for the trail; and we thought perhaps we had found it when we discovered this indentation in the soil that we have been following." "And I believe you have!" cried Antonio. "That's just what you have! It goes on straight southward from here, very plain, to within half a mile of the _Casa_ and then seems to die out for some reason. But, that it is the old trail I feel certain. Your copper mine is up there on the north peak as sure as----" He stopped short, his enthusiasm suddenly died out, and pulling a long face, he gazed at us rather blankly. "Well?" asked Dick. "I was forgetting. There's something else up there on the north peak." "What's that?" "The Badger!" "That's so!" cried Dick. "I'd forgotten him, too. Do you suppose he would interfere with us?" "That's more than I can say. From what the padron has told me, I imagine it is only to him that El Tejon objects, and perhaps also to me as one of the family; but I'm not sure about that. Look here! I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll just ride home and ask him what he thinks. You stay here. I'll be back in half an hour." "You are very kind," said my partner. "But why should we trouble you to come back here? We'll ride down with you." To our surprise the young fellow flushed and looked embarrassed, but recovering in a moment, he said: "Come on, then. But before we go, let me tell you something. The reason I hesitated was that I feared you might not receive a very hearty welcome from the padron. The truth of the matter is--to put it plainly, once for all--he hates strangers, and above all he hates the Americans. I am sorry it should be so, but so it is. The feeling is not uncommon among the older Mexicans: those who went through the war of '46; and if you stop to think of it, it isn't altogether unreasonable. According to the padron's view of the matter, his native country was invaded without cause or justice; he, himself, fought against the invader; his own brother and many of his friends were killed; and finally, he saw the land where he was born torn away from its old moorings and attached to the country of the enemy." This defence of his fellow-countryman, which the young Mexican delivered with much earnestness and feeling, was a revelation to me. Hitherto I had only considered the war with Mexico from our side, glorying in our success and admiring--very rightly--the bravery of our soldiers. That the Mexicans, themselves, might have a point of view of their own had never occurred to me, until this young fellow thus held up their side of the picture for me to see. "That's a matter I never thought of before," said I; "but when you do stop to think of it, it is _not_ surprising that the older generation of Mexicans should have no liking for us." "No," Dick chimed in; "and I don't think you can blame them, either." "I'm glad you see it that way," said Antonio. "It makes things all comfortable for me. So, now, let us get along. And if the padron doesn't seem best pleased to see you, you will know why." Following along the line of the supposed trail, which continued in general to be pretty plain, we presently passed alongside of a high bank of earth to which our guide called our attention. "Just ride up here a minute," said he. "Now, do you see how this earth-bank forms a perfect square, measuring about two hundred yards each way? What do you make of that?" "It was evidently built up," said I; "it can't be a natural formation. But what the earth was piled up for, I can't see." "I think I can," remarked Dick. "If I'm not mistaken, this is the site of an old pueblo." "Just what I think," responded Antonio. "An old pueblo which probably stood here before ever the Spaniards came to the country, and has been melted down to this shapeless bank by the rains of centuries. This valley must have supported a good-sized population once--very much larger than at present." "It looks like it," Dick assented. "I wonder where they got their water from--for I suppose they lived mostly by agriculture, as the Pueblos do still. Hasn't the padron ever tried to find the old source of supply?" The young Mexican shook his head. "No," said he. "The source of supply, wherever it was, was up in the mountains somewhere, and in spite of the fact that if he could find it, it would increase the value of the grant a thousand times, he daren't go to look for it." "My! What a chance there is here"--Dick began, when he suddenly checked himself. "Here's some one coming," said he. "Is this the padron?" "Yes; he must be coming to see who you are. I hope he won't make himself unpleasant." As Antonio spoke, there came riding toward us a square-set, gray-haired Mexican, at whom, as he approached, we gazed with much interest. He was a man of fifty, or thereabouts, harsh-featured and forbidding, who scowled at us in a manner which made me, at least, rather wish I had not come. To put it shortly and plainly, the Señor Galvez had, in fact, the most truculent countenance I had ever seen; and his first remark to his nephew, as the latter advanced to meet him, was on a par with his appearance. "What are you bringing these American pigs here for, Antonio?" he growled, in Spanish. "You know I will have nothing to do with them." Poor Antonio flushed painfully under his brown skin. He half raised his hand with a deprecatory gesture, as though to beg the speaker to be more moderate, while he glanced uneasily at us out of the corner of his eye to see if we had understood. It was then that Dick and I congratulated ourselves on having accidentally deceived our friend into the belief that we did not speak Spanish. Suppressing our natural desire to bandy a few compliments with the churlish padron, we put on an expression of countenance as stolid and vacant as if we had been indeed the American pigs aforesaid--immensely to the comfort of the younger man, as it was easy to see. "Do not be harsh, señor," said he. "They are only boys, and they are doing no harm here. Moreover," he went on, "they have brought you a piece of information which you will be glad to have:--El Tejon is still alive." The elder man started; his weather-beaten face paled a little. "How do they know that?" he asked, suspiciously. Antonio briefly told him our story. "Hm!" grunted the padron, glowering at us from under his bushy eyebrows. "But what are these boys skulking around here for? They don't pretend, I suppose, that they have come all the way down from Mosby just to tell me they have seen El Tejon." "Not at all," replied Antonio, with considerable spirit. "They are gentlemen, and they don't pretend anything. That bigger one of the two, the freckled one with the hook-nose and red hair"--it was Dick he meant, and intense was my desire to wink at him and laugh--"that one passed through here before; he noticed how every house contained its copper bowl and dipper--just as I did--and he has come down here with his friend--just as I wanted to do--to try to find out where the copper came from. We have had a long talk about it, and we have concluded that it probably came from somewhere up on the north peak. What I brought them down here for was to ask you whether you thought The Badger would let them alone if they went up there--that's all." "That's all, is it? Well, perhaps it is. But I'm suspicious of strangers, Antonio, especially since----" He paused, seemingly considering whether he should or should not mention the subject he had in mind, but at length--evidently supposing that we could not understand what he was saying--he went on: "I had not intended to say anything to you about it, but three days ago--the day you rode over to Zapatero to spend the night--something occurred here which makes me rather uneasy. I had been away all day myself that day and on my return I found a young man in the village who had come, he said, from Santa Fé. For a young man to come to this out-of-the-way place, all alone, from Santa Fé, or from anywhere else, for that matter, was a strange thing: it made me suspicious that he was after no good. And I became more than suspicious when I found that he had spent the day going from one house to another inquiring after El Tejon!" "Inquiring after El Tejon!" repeated Antonio. "That was strange; especially considering that El Tejon has been practically dead for a dozen years. Did he offer any explanation?" "No. To tell the truth, I did not give him the opportunity. When I found out what he was doing, how he had slipped into the village during my absence and had gone prying about among these ignorant peons, asking questions concerning my enemy, I was so enraged that I threatened to shoot him if he did not depart at once. I made a mistake there, I admit; if I had curbed my anger, I might have found out what his object was. But I did not, so there is no more to be said." "That was unfortunate," said Antonio; "but, as you say, it can't be helped now. So the stranger went off, did he? Did he return to----" "No, he didn't," Galvez interrupted, "or, at any rate, not immediately. I'll tell you how I know. I was so distrustful of him that I followed his trail next morning--it was dark when he left, and I couldn't do it then. It was an easy trail to follow, for his horse was shod, and ours, of course, are not. It led eastward for a mile and then turned back, circled round the village and went up into the north mountain. I have not seen him, nor a trace of him since." "It is a strange thing," said Antonio, thoughtfully. "What was the young man like? How old? Was he a Mexican or an American?" "I don't know. He looked like an American, though he spoke Spanish perfectly. He might be twenty years old. It is an odd thing, Antonio--and it is that, perhaps, which made me speak so sharply when I first saw these new friends of yours--but the young man was something like the bigger one of these two boys: the same hook-nose and light-gray eyes, though his hair was black instead of red." "A strange thing altogether," said Antonio, reflectively. "I don't wonder you feel a little uneasy." "As to these boys here," the padron went on, jerking his head in our direction, "you may tell them that they need not fear The Badger. It is only I who have cause to fear him, and perhaps you, as my nephew. These boys may go where they like without danger. The chances are they won't see El Tejon--they certainly won't if he doesn't want to be seen. And, Antonio, just thank them for bringing me their information, and then send them off." So saying, old Galvez turned his unmannerly back on us and rode away. The interview, if it can be called such--for the padron had not addressed a single word to us--being plainly at an end, we shook hands with our friend, Antonio, and having thanked him very heartily for his service, we set off for camp, riding fast, in our hurry to get back before darkness should overtake us. CHAPTER XI THE SPANISH TRAIL "Dick," said I, as we sat together that evening beside our camp-fire, "what do you make of it? That was a queer thing, that young fellow coming inquiring for El Tejon. I confess, for my part, I can't make head or tail of it." "I can't either," replied Dick; "at least, as far as this stranger is concerned. I'm quite in the dark on that point. As to the padron and The Badger, though, that seems to me simple enough. It is some old feud between the two which concerns nobody but themselves." "That is how it strikes me. You don't think, then, that there is any danger to us?" "No, I don't. In fact, I feel sure of it. It is just a personal quarrel of long standing between those two--that's all. I have no more fear of El Tejon than I have of any other Mexican. All the same, old chap, if you have any doubt about it, I'm ready to quit and go home again." "No," I replied, emphatically. "I vote we go on. And I'll tell you why, Dick. For one thing, I always did hate to give up." My partner nodded appreciation. "For another thing, I have gathered the notion that this Badger is not a bad fellow; not at all the kind that would murder a man in his sleep or shoot him from behind a rock. The fact that he let old Galvez go that time when he had him helpless, seems to me pretty good evidence that he is a man of some generosity and above-boardness." "That's a fact," Dick assented; "it was rather a fine action, as it seems to me. And unless I'm vastly mistaken, Frank," he went on, "if the cases had been reversed, and the padron had caught The Badger as The Badger caught the padron, it would have been all up with El Tejon. I never saw a harder-looking specimen in my life than old Galvez. I know, if he were my enemy, I should be mighty sorry to fall into his hands." "So should I; and the less we have to do with him the better, to my notion. I think we shall do well to steer clear of him." "Yes; and there won't be any temptation to go near him, anyhow, especially as Antonio won't be there to act as a buffer. So, we decide to go on, do we?" Dick concluded, as he arose to put two big logs on the fire for the night. "All right. Then we'll get out to-morrow morning. We'll take the line of the old trail and follow it up into the mountain as far as it goes--or as far as we can, perhaps I should say." "Very well," I agreed. "And we may as well abandon this camp, take old Fritz and all our belongings with us, and find another place more suitable higher up the mountain." "Yes; so now to bed." We were up betimes next morning, and having packed our traps away we went, Dick in the lead, Fritz following, and I bringing up the rear. Climbing over the big ridge from whose crest we had surveyed the valley the day before, we rode down its other side to the line of the old trail, and there, turning to the right, we followed it as it gradually ascended, until presently at the head of the ravine the trail, greatly to our perplexity, came to an end altogether. The ravine itself had become so narrow and its sides so precipitous that there appeared to be no way of climbing out of it, and we began to have our doubts as to whether it could really be an old trail that we had been following after all, when Dick, spying about, discovered a much-washed-out crevice on the right-hand side, so grown up with trees and brush as to be hardly distinguishable. "Frank," said he, "they must have come down here--there's no other way that I can see. Wait a moment till I get up there and see if the trail isn't visible again up on top." It was a pretty stiff scramble to get up, but as soon as he had reached the top my partner shouted down to me to come up--he had found the trail once more. If it had been a stiff climb for Dick's horse, it was stiffer still for old Fritz with his bulky pack. But Fritz was a first-rate animal for mountain work, having had lots of practice, and being allowed to choose his own course and take his own time he made the ascent without damaging himself or his burden. As soon as I had rejoined him, Dick pointed out to me the line of the trail, which, bearing away northward now, was much more distinct than it had been down below. For one thing, the ground here was a great deal harder; and for another, being well sheltered by the pine woods, the trail had not drifted full of sand as it had out on the unprotected valley. There were, it is true, frequent places where the rains of many years had washed the soil down the hillsides and covered it up, but in general it was easily distinguishable as it went winding along the base of the mountain proper, at the point where the steeper slopes merged into the great spurs which projected out into the valley. The distinctness of the old trail was, indeed, a surprise to me, its line was so much easier to follow than I had expected. If it continued to be as plain as this, we should have no trouble in keeping it; and so I remarked to my companion. "That's true," Dick assented, adding: "I'll tell you what, Frank: this must surely have been a government enterprise. Just see how much work has been expended on this trail--and needlessly, I should say--no private individual or corporation would have taken the trouble to make a carefully graded road like this--for that is what it really was apparently. It must have been some manager handling government funds and not worrying himself much about the amount he spent." "I shouldn't wonder," said I. "Just notice," Dick continued, pointing out the places with his finger. "See what useless expenditure they made. Whenever they came to a dip, big or little, instead of going down one side and up the other, as any ordinary human being would do, they carried their road round the end of the gully--just as though a loaded burro would object to coming up a little hill like this one, for instance, here in front of us." "It does seem rather ridiculous," I assented. "And they must have laid out their line with care, too, for, if you notice, Dick, it goes on climbing up the mountain with a grade which seems to be perfectly uniform as far as we can see it. It is more like a railroad grade than a trail. It isn't possible, is it, Dick," I asked, as the thought suddenly occurred to me, "it isn't possible that they can have used wheeled vehicles?" "Hm!" replied my companion, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. "No, I think not. It would be extremely improbable, to say the least. No, I think it is more likely to be as I said: some lordly government official, spending government funds, and not troubling himself whether the income would warrant the expenditure or not." "I suppose that was probably it," said I. "There's one thing sure, Dick," I added: "if the income did warrant the expenditure, that old copper mine must have been a staver and no mistake." "That's a fact. Well, come on; let us go ahead and see where the trail takes us." This following of the trail was a perfectly simple matter; the animals themselves, in fact, took to it and kept to it as naturally as though even they recognized it as a road. So, on we went, climbing gradually higher at every step, when, on rounding the shoulder of a big spur, we were brought to a sudden and most unexpected halt by coming plump upon the edge of a deep and very narrow cañon. Right up to the very brink of this great chasm the trail led us, and there, of necessity, it abruptly ended. This gorge, which was perhaps a thousand feet deep, and, as I have said, extremely narrow--not more than thirty feet wide at the point where we had struck it--came down from the north face of the mountain, and, as we could see from where we stood, ran out eastward into the plain. It was undoubtedly the stream upon which we had camped when we had come across the valley two days before. Looking the other way--to the left, that is: up stream--our view was limited, but from what we could see of it, the country in that direction bade fair to be inaccessible, for horses, at least; while as to the cañon itself, it curved first to the left and then to the right in such a manner that we could not see to the bottom. Moreover a large rock, rising from the edge of the gorge, and in fact overhanging it a little, cut off our view up stream. On the opposite side of the chasm the ground rose high and rocky, an exceedingly rough piece of country; for though it was in general well clothed with trees, we could see in a score of places great bare-topped ridges and pinnacles of rock projecting high above the somber woods. "Dick," said I, "this looks rather like the end of things. What are we to do now?" "The end of things!" cried Dick. "Not a bit of it! Don't you see, on the other side of the cañon, exactly opposite, that little ravine which goes winding up the mountain until it loses itself among the trees? Well, that is the continuation of the trail. Come down here to the edge and I'll show you." Dismounting from our horses, we advanced as near the rim of the chasm as we dared, when Dick, pointing across to the other side, said: "Look there, Frank, about a foot below the top. Do you see those two square niches cut in the face of the rock? This place was spanned by a bridge once, and those two niches are where the ends of the big stringers rested." "It does look like it!" I exclaimed. "If there are other similar niches on this side, that would settle it. Take hold of my feet, will you, while I stick my head over the edge and see?" With Dick firmly clasping my ankle by way of precaution, I crept to the rim and craned my neck out over the precipice as far as I dared venture. As we had expected, there were the two corresponding niches, while about ten feet below them were two others, the existence of which puzzled me. Squirming carefully back again, I rose to my feet and told Dick what I had seen. "Two others, eh?" said he. "That's easily explained. Look across again and you will see that there are two in the face of the opposite cliff to match them. Those people not only laid two big stringers across the cañon, but they supported them from below with four stays set in those lower holes." "That must be it!" I exclaimed. "They did things well, didn't they--it is on a par with the work they expended on the trail. The trail itself, of course, went on up that little ravine and has since been washed out by the rains." "Yes; and the bridge has rotted and fallen into the stream; unless they destroyed it purposely when they abandoned the mine." "Well, Dick," said I. "It seems fairly sure that the mine was over there, somewhere in the rough country on the other side of the cañon. The question is, how are _we_ to get over there?" "Yes, that's the question all right. We can't get down here. That is plain enough. We shall have to find some other way. And that there is another way is pretty certain. See here! This cañon comes down from the north side of the mountain, runs out into the valley to the point where we struck it day before yesterday, doubles back, and joins the streams coming down from Mescalero, as well as those others which flow down from the north side of the peak." "Well?" "Well, this piece of country before us is therefore a sort of island, surrounded, or nearly surrounded, by cañons." I nodded. "Yes," said I. "Or more like a fortress with a thousand-foot moat all round it." "Well," continued my partner, "the original discoverers of the mine, whether Indians or Spaniards, did not cross here by a bridge, of course; they climbed up from the bottom of one of these cañons somewhere, and at first, probably, brought out the copper the same way, until, finding how much easier it would be to come across here, they built a bridge and made this road for the purpose." "That sounds reasonable," I assented. "So if we want to find the place where they used to get up, we must climb down into the bottom of the cañon ourselves and hunt for it." "Yes," replied Dick. "And from the look of it, I shouldn't wonder if we don't have to go all the way back to our old camping-place in order to get down!" "Hm!" said I, puckering up my lips and rubbing my chin. "I hope we don't have to go that far; but if we must, we must. Anyhow, Dick, before we go all the way down to the bottom of the mountain again, let us climb up above this big rock here and take a look up stream. It is just possible there may be a way down in that direction." "Very well," replied my partner. "I don't suppose there is, but we'll try it anyhow." Leaving our horses standing, we went back a little way along the trail, and climbing upward, presently reached a point level with the top of the big rock which rose above the edge of the gorge. There we found several little gullies leading down to the ravine, and Dick taking one of them and I another, we thus became separated for a few minutes. Only for a few minutes, however, for very soon I heard my partner hailing me to come back. From the tone of his voice I felt sure he had discovered something. "What is it, Dick?" I asked. "Found a way down?" "That's what I have, Frank, I'm pretty sure. Come here and look!" CHAPTER XII THE BADGER A short distance down Dick's gully was a great slab of stone standing on edge, which, leaning over until its upper end touched the opposite wall, formed a natural arch about as high as a church door. Through this vaulted passage Dick led the way. In about twenty steps we came out again upon the brink of the chasm, and then it was that my partner, with some natural exultation, pointed out to me the remarkable discovery he had made. In the face of the cliff was a sort of ledge, varying in width from ten feet to about double as much, which, with a pretty steep, though pretty regular pitch, continued downward until it disappeared around the bend in the gorge. Unless the ledge should narrow very considerably we should have no trouble in getting down, for there was room in plenty not only for ourselves but for our animals also--even for old Fritz, pack and all. "Why, Dick!" I cried. "We can easily get down here! I wonder if this wasn't the original road taken by the pack-trains." "It was," replied Dick; "at least, I feel pretty sure it was--and it was used for a long time, too." "Why do you think so?" I asked. "You speak as though you felt pretty certain, Dick, but for my part I don't see why." "Don't you? Why, it's very plain. Look here! Do you see, close to the outer edge of the shelf, a sort of trough worn in the rock? Do you know what that is? If I'm not very much mistaken, it is the trail of the pack-burros. There must have been a good many of them, and they must have gone up and down for a good many years to wear such a trail; though, of course, it has been enlarged since by the rain-water running down it." "Well, Dick," said I, "I still don't see why you should conclude that this is the trail of a pack-train. It seems to me much more likely to be due to water only. In the first place, though there is room enough and to spare on the ledge, your supposed trail is on the very outer edge, where a false step would send the burro head-first into the cañon; and in the next place, it keeps to the very edge, no matter whether the ledge is wide or narrow." "That's exactly the point," explained Dick. "It is just that very thing which makes me feel so sure that this is the trail of a pack-train. You've never seen pack-burros at work in the mountains, have you? Well, I have lots of times: they are frequently used to carry ore down from the mines. If you had seen them, you could not have helped noticing the habit they have of walking on the outside of a ledge like this, where there is a precipice on one side and a cliff on the other. A burro may be a 'donkey,' but he understands his own business. He knows that if he touches his pack against the rock he will be knocked over the precipice, and he has learned his lesson so well that it makes no difference how wide the ledge may be--he will keep as far away from the rock as he can. As to a false step, that doesn't enter into his calculations: a burro doesn't make a false step--there is no surer-footed beast in existence, I should think, excepting, possibly, the mountain-sheep." "I never thought of all that," said I. "Then I expect you are right, Dick, and this is an old trail after all. What is your idea? To follow it down, I suppose." "Yes, certainly. Our animals won't make any bones about going down a wide path like this. They are all used to the mountains. So let us get them at once and start down." Dick was right. Our horses, each led by the bridle, followed us without hesitation, while old Fritz, half a burro himself, took at once to the trail which one of his ancestors, perhaps, had helped to make. Without trouble or mishap, we descended the steeply-pitching ledge down to the margin of the creek, crossed over to the other side, and continued on our way up stream over the slope of decomposed rock fallen from the towering cliff which rose at least a thousand feet above us--the cliff being now on our right hand and the stream on our left. This sloping bank was scantily covered with trees, and among them we threaded our way, still following the trail, which, however, down here had lost any resemblance to a made road, and had become a mere thread, more like a disused cow-path than anything else. Presently, we found that the cañon began to widen, and soon afterward the cliff along whose base we had been skirting, suddenly fell away to the right in a great sweeping curve, forming an immense natural amphitheatre, enclosing a good-sized stretch of grass-land, with willows and cottonwoods fringing the nearer bank of the stream. As we sat on our horses surveying the scene, we found ourselves confronting at last the imposing north face of the mountain. Up toward its summit we could see the great semi-circular cliff which we supposed to be the upper half of an old crater, while the country below it, bare, rocky and much broken up, was exceedingly rough and precipitous. Starting, apparently, from the neighborhood of this crater, there came down the mountain a second very narrow and very deep gorge, whose waters, when there were any, emptied into the stream we had been following; the two cañons being separated by a high, narrow rib of rock--a mere wedge. Curiously enough, however, this second cañon did not carry a stream, though we could see the shimmer of two or three pools as they caught the reflection of the sky down there in the bottom of its gloomy depths. "Well, Dick," said I, "I don't see any sign yet of a pathway up to the top of this 'island' of yours. This basin is merely an enlargement of the cañon; the walls are just as high and just as straight-up-and-down as ever." "Yes, I see that plainly enough," replied Dick. "Yet there must be a way up somewhere. Those pack-trains didn't come down here for nothing. We shall find a break in the wall presently--up in that gorge, there, it must be, too. So let us go on. Hark! What's that?" We sat still and listened. The whole atmosphere seemed to vibrate with a low hum, the cause of which we could not understand. It kept on for five minutes, perhaps, and then died out again. "What was it, Dick?" said I. "Wind?" "I suppose it must have been," replied my companion; "though there isn't a breath stirring down here. If the sky had not been so perfectly clear all morning I should have said it was a flood coming. It must have been wind, though, I suppose." Satisfied that this was the cause, we thought no more of it, but, taking up the trail once more, we followed it down to the mouth of the second cañon, and there at the edge of the watercourse all trace of it ceased. "That seems to settle it," remarked Dick. "You see, Frank, the walls of this cañon are so steep and its bed is so filled with great boulders that even a burro could get no further. The copper must have been carried down to this point on men's backs, and if so, it was not carried any great distance probably. The mine must be somewhere pretty near now; we shan't have to search much further, I think, for a way up this right-hand cliff. Let us unsaddle here, where the horses can get plenty of grass, and go on up on foot." The ascent of the chasm was no easy task, we found, but, weaving our way between the boulders which strewed its bed, up we went, until presently we came to a place where some time or another a great slice of the wall, about an eighth of a mile in length, falling down, had blocked it completely, forming an immense dam nearly a hundred feet high. It must have been many years since it fell, for its surface was well grown up with trees, though none of them were of any great size. It seemed probable, too, that the base of the dam must be composed of large fragments of rock, for, though there was no stream in the bed of the gorge, it was very plain that water did sometimes run down it. If so, however, it was equally plain that it must squeeze its way through the crevices between the foundation rocks, for there was no sign at all that it had ever run over the top. Scrambling up this mass of earth and rocks, we went on, keeping a sharp lookout for some sign of a pathway up the cliff on our right, but still seeing nothing of the sort, when presently we reached the upper face of the dam, and there for a moment we stopped. Beneath us lay a stretch of the ravine, forming a basin about two hundred yards long, in the bottom of which were three or four pools of clear water. At the upper end of this basin was a perpendicular cliff, barring all further advance in that direction, over which, in some seasons of the year, the water evidently poured--sometimes in considerable volume apparently, judging from the manner in which the sides of the basin had been undermined. The sides themselves continued to be just as unscalable as ever; in spite of Dick's assurance that we should find a way up, it was apparent at a glance that there was neither crack nor crevice by which one could ascend. "Well!" cried my partner, in a tone of desperation. "This does beat me! I felt certain that the trail would lead us to some pathway up the cliff; but, as it does not, what does it come down here for at all?" "There is only one reason that I can think of," I replied, "and that is that they must have come down here for water--there is probably none to be found up on top of the 'island.'" "That must be it, Frank. Yes, I expect you've struck it. And in that case the pathway we have been hunting for must be down stream from the site of the old bridge after all." "Yes. So we may as well go back to-morrow morning, I suppose, and start downward. It is rather late to go back now--and besides, there is no water up there: we had better camp here for to-night, at any rate." "That's true. Well, as we have some hours of daylight yet--if you can call this daylight down here in this narrow crack--let us climb down the face of the dam and examine the basin before we give up and go back, so as to make quite sure that there is no way up the side." Accordingly, having clambered down, we walked up the middle of the basin, our eyes carefully scanning the wall on our right, when, having traversed about three-quarters of its length, we suddenly heard again that humming noise which we had taken for a wind-storm among the pines. With one accord we both stopped dead and listened. The noise was decidedly louder than it had been before, and moreover it appeared to be increasing in volume every second. "Frank!" exclaimed my companion. "I don't like the sound of it! It seems to me suspiciously like water! Let us get out of here! This is no place to be caught by a flood!" We turned to run, but before we had gone five steps we heard a roar behind us, and casting a glance backward, we saw to our horror an immense wall of water, ten feet high, leap from the ledge at the end of the basin and fall to the bottom with a prodigious splash. In one second the whole floor of the basin was awash. In another second our feet were knocked from under us, when, without the power of helping ourselves, we were tumbled about and swept hither and thither at the caprice of the rapidly deepening flood. Happily for myself, for I was no swimmer, I was carried right down to the dam, where, by desperate exertions, I was able to scramble up out of reach of the water. Dick, however, less fortunate than I, was carried off to one side, and when I caught sight of him again he was being swept rapidly along under the right-hand wall--looking up stream--in whose smooth surface there was no chance of finding a hold. As I watched him, my heart in my mouth, he was carried back close to the fall, where the violence of the water, now several feet deep, tossed him about like a straw. Half paralyzed with fear lest my companion should be drowned before my eyes, I stood there on the rocks, powerless to go to his aid, hoping only that he might be swept down near enough to enable me to catch hold of him, when, of a sudden, there occurred an event so astounding that for a moment I could hardly tell whether I ought to believe my own eyes or not. Out from the wall on the left, up near the fall, there shot a great dark body, which, with a noiseless splash, disappeared under the water. The next moment a man's head bobbed up, a big, shaggy, bearded head, the owner of which with vigorous strokes swam toward Dick and seized him by the collar. Then, swimming with the power of a steam-tug, he bore down upon the dam, clutched a projecting rock, drew himself up, and with a strength I had never before seen in a human being, he lifted Dick out of the water with one hand--his left--and set him up on the bank. Running to the spot, I seized hold of my partner, who, almost played out, staggered and swayed about, and helped him further up out of reach of the water. Then, turning round, I was advancing to thank his rescuer, when, for the first time, I saw that the man was almost a dwarf--in height, at least--though his astonishing strength was indicated in his magnificent chest and arms. "The Badger!" I cried, involuntarily. At the sound of that name the man turned short round, and without a word leaped into the water again. Sweeping back under the right-hand wall, he presently turned across the pool and struck out for the opposite side. Ten seconds later he had disappeared, having seemingly swum through the very face of the cliff itself! CHAPTER XIII THE KING PHILIP MINE I think it is safe to say that Dick and I were at that moment the two most astonished boys in the State of Colorado. Where had the man sprung from? And how had he disappeared again? There must be, of course, some opening in the rock which we had failed to notice; a circumstance easily explained by the fact that we had not gone far enough up the basin, and by the added fact that our attention had been fixed upon the opposite wall. Then, again, though the identity of the man could hardly be doubted, why should he take offence, as he seemed to do, at being addressed as "The Badger"? This was a question to which we could not find an answer; and, indeed, for the moment we postponed any attempt to do so, for our attention was too much taken up by the action of the water, which, continuing to rise with great rapidity, forced us to retreat higher and higher up the dam. For about half an hour it thus continued to rise, until there must have been at least fifteen feet of it in the basin, by the end of which time we noticed a sudden diminution in the amount coming over the fall. A few minutes later the flow had ceased altogether, when the water in the pool at once began to subside again, though far less rapidly than it had risen. Our first impulse after our narrow escape from drowning had been to run to the other end of the dam and get back forthwith to our horses, but this we had found to be rather too risky an undertaking to attempt, for the water, coming out from under the dam, was rushing down the bed of the cañon, seething and foaming between the obstructing boulders in such a fashion that we decided that discretion would be a good deal the better part of valor--that it would be an act of wisdom to wait a bit. Moreover, when the flood, leaping from the cliff, had bowled us over in such unceremonious style, we had had our rifles in our hands, and as those indispensable weapons were at that moment lying under fifteen feet of water, there was nothing for it but to wait till the pool drained off if we wished to recover them. As there was no telling how long we might have to wait, and as we were both wet through and very cold--Dick being besides still shaky from his recent buffeting--I collected a lot of dead wood and started a roaring fire, before whose cheerful blaze our clothes soon dried out and our spirits rose again to their normal level. It was then that I first fully appreciated the value of my partner's habit of carrying matches in a water-tight box--a habit I strongly recommend to anybody camping out in these mountains. For three hours we waited, by which time as we guessed there remained not more than a foot of water in the pool. I had gone down to measure it with a stick, and was leaning with my hand against the smooth, wet wall on my right, when I heard sounds as of a human voice speaking very faintly and indistinctly. The sounds seemed to come from the rock where my hand rested, and putting my ear against it, I plainly heard a strange voice say, "Hallo, boys!" "Hallo!" I called out, at the top of my voice, startled into an explosive shout. "Who are you? Where are you?" "Who's that you're talking to?" cried Dick, springing to his feet and looking all about. "I don't know," I replied. "Come here and put your ear to the rock." Dick instantly joined me, when we both very clearly heard the voice say: "You needn't shout. I can hear you. Do you hear me?" "Yes," said I; and repeating my question, I asked: "Who are you, and where are you?" "Before I tell you that," replied the voice, "I want to ask _you_ a question, if you please. Are you Americans?" "Yes," I replied. "Two American boys." "Thank you. One more question, please: Did old Galvez send you up here?" "No!" I replied, with considerable emphasis. "We never saw old Galvez till yesterday." "Good! Then I'll come down if you'll wait a minute." It was less than a minute that we had to wait, when from behind a slight bulge in the left-hand wall, up near the head of the basin, there appeared the figure of a young fellow, seemingly about twenty years old, who, with his trousers tucked up, carrying a rifle in one hand and his boots in the other, came wading down to us. With what interest we watched his approach will be imagined. Neither of us doubted that it was the young fellow whom Galvez had mentioned as having visited Hermanos during his absence, and as soon as he had come near enough for us to distinguish his features, I, for one, was sure of it, for, with his hook nose and his gray eyes, he did indeed bear a curious resemblance to my partner. Standing on the bank at the edge of the water, we waited for him to come near, when, having advanced to within six feet of us he stopped and eyed us critically. He was a good-looking young fellow, not very big, but with a bright, intelligent face which at once took our fancy. Apparently his judgment of our looks was also favorable, for, smiling pleasantly, he said: "Good-evening, boys. Which of you is Dick?" "I am," replied the owner of that name. "I just wanted to congratulate you, that's all, on your escape just now. It might have gone hard with you if it hadn't been for my good friend, Sanchez." "Sanchez?" I repeated, inquiringly. "Is that The Badger's proper name?" "Yes," replied the stranger. "Pedro Sanchez. The name of El Tejon was bestowed upon him by old Galvez, and consequently he objects to it. Your use of that name just now made him suspicious that you might be emissaries of the padron, and it was that which caused him to jump back into the water so suddenly." "I see. I'll take care in future. Here! Give me your hand"--seeing that he was about to come up the bank. "Thank you," replied the stranger, reaching out his hand to me and giving mine a shake before he let go--a greeting he repeated with Dick. "I'm very glad to find you are a couple of American boys and not a pair of Mexican cut-throats, as we rather suspected you might be. Let us go up to your fire there and sit down. The water will take another half-hour yet to drain off completely." Accordingly, we walked up to the fire, where the stranger dried his feet and pulled on his boots again. "Why did you suspect us of being Mexican cut-throats?" asked Dick. "Did you think that old Galvez had sent us up here on a hunt for you or for El--for Sanchez, I mean?" "Yes, that was it. We've been watching you for two days past. We saw you go down to Hermanos yesterday and start up the trail this morning. From the fact of your having gone down to the village, Pedro was inclined to believe you were hunting him or me; but, for my part, I rather inferred from your actions that you were hunting the old copper mine." "The old copper mine!" we both cried. "Yes. Did I make a mistake? Weren't you?" "No, you didn't make any mistake," replied Dick. "What surprised us was that you should know anything about it." The young fellow laughed. "Do you suppose, then," said he, "that you are the only ones to notice the pots and pans down there at Hermanos?" "No, of course not," replied Dick. "The professor was right, you see, Frank," he continued, turning to me, "when he said that the first white man who came along would notice those copper utensils and go hunting for the mine." "Yes," said I; and addressing the stranger again, I added: "So it was the copper mine you were seeking after all, was it? Old Galvez thought you came up here looking for Sanchez." Thereupon I related to him what the padron had said on the subject, when the young fellow, smiling rather grimly, remarked, with a touch of sarcasm in his voice: "Nice old gentleman, the Señor Galvez. So he professed not to know my name, did he? He's a bad lot, if ever there was one. He was right, though, in supposing that I came up here to look for Pedro. That was my main object, though I intended at the same time to keep an eye open for the old mine." "And have you seen any indication of it?--if we may ask." "Oh, yes," he replied, with unaccountable indifference. "There was no trouble about that. Pedro discovered it years ago and he took me straight to it." At this unlooked-for blow to all our hopes and plans, Dick and I gazed at each other aghast. At one stroke apparently, our expedition was deprived of its object. We might just as well turn round and go home again, as far as the King Philip mine was concerned. Our hopes had been so high; and here they were all toppled over in an instant. Intense was our disappointment. For half a minute we sat there speechless, when our new acquaintance, observing our crestfallen looks, remarked: "I'm afraid that is a good deal of a disappointment to you, isn't it? But, perhaps you will be less disappointed when I tell you that the old mine is valueless to me or you or anybody else." "How's that?" exclaimed Dick. "Why, it's---- But come and see for yourselves," he cried, springing to his feet. "That's the best way. You'll understand the why and the wherefore in five minutes." "What! Is it near here, then?" asked my partner. "Yes, close by. Behind the bulge in the wall on the left here." "On _that_ side!" cried Dick. "Not on the right, then, after all? Well, that is a puzzler!" "Why is it a puzzler?" asked the stranger. "I don't understand you." "Why, if the mine is on the _left_ of the creek, what was that bridge for up above here, crossing over to the _right_?" "Bridge! What bridge? What do you mean?" Upon this we told him of the niches in the rock up above, which we supposed to have been receptacles for bridge-stringers. "That's queer," remarked our friend. "I had not heard of those before. I wonder if Pedro knows anything about it. It is a puzzler, as you say." "Yes, I can't make it out," continued Dick; and after standing for a minute thinking, he repeated, with a shake of his head: "No, I can't make it out. I can't see what that bridge was for. Well, never mind that for the present; let's go and see the old mine." "Come on, then. But before we go, I'll just speak to Pedro, or he may be going off and hiding himself somewhere up in the old workings. Do you notice," he asked, "how smoothly the swirl of the water has scoured out a sort of half-arch at the base of the cañon-wall all the way from the end of the dam here, under the waterfall, round to the bulge on the other side? It forms a perfect 'whispering gallery.' Hallo, Pedro!" he called out, putting his face close to the rock. "It is all right. We are coming up now." Descending to the bed of the pool, whence all the water except three or four permanent puddles had now drained away, we first searched for our rifles, and having recovered them, followed our guide around the bulge in the wall, and there found ourselves confronting the old mine-entrance. About ten feet above the floor of the pool was a big hole in the rock, evidently made by hand--for it was square--leading up to which were several roughly-hewn steps, more or less rounded off and worn away by the water. On top of the steps, framed in the blackness of the opening behind him, stood the squat figure of Pedro Sanchez--in his rough shirt of deer-skin representing very well, I thought, the badger in the mouth of his hole. [Illustration: "BEHIND HIM, STOOD THE SQUAT FIGURE OF PEDRO SANCHEZ."] "Pedro," said our new friend, "these gentlemen were seeking the old mine, as I thought. You have nothing to fear from them." "On the contrary," cried Dick, bounding up the steps and holding out his hand, "we have to thank you for your good service just now!" Stretching out his long arm, the little giant smiled genially, showing a row of big white teeth. "It is nothing," said he; adding, with a twinkle in his eye: "The señores will remember that I owed to them some return for their assistance against the wolves." "That's a fact!" cried Dick. "I'd forgotten that. So you remember us, do you? I wonder at that--you didn't stay long to look at us." "No, señor," replied Pedro, laughing. "I was out of my own country and was distrustful of strangers." Turning to our new friend, who was wondering what all this was about, Dick explained the circumstances of our former meeting with Pedro, adding: "So, you see, we are old acquaintances after all. In fact, if we had not met Pedro before we should not be here now, for it was his copper-headed arrow which brought us down, oddly enough." "That was odd, certainly. Well, Pedro, get the torch and show your old friends over the mine. We must be quick, or it will be getting dark before we can get back to our camp." Pedro disappeared into the darkness somewhere, while we ourselves climbed up into the mouth of the tunnel. It was very wet in there: we could hear the _drip_, _drip_ of water in all directions. "Were you in here when the flood came down?" asked Dick. "How is it you weren't drowned--for I see the water stood five feet deep in the tunnel?" "Oh," replied the other, "there was no fear of drowning. There are plenty of places in here out of reach of the water. Wait a moment and you'll see." True enough, we soon heard the striking of a match, and next we saw the Mexican standing with a torch in his hand in a recess about ten feet above us. "That is where we took refuge," said our friend. "Far out of reach of the water, you see. Come on, now, and I'll show you how this old mine was worked, and why it was abandoned." Leading the way, torch in hand, he presently stopped, and said: "The place where we came in was the mouth of the main working-tunnel. It follows the vein into the rock for about a thousand feet, which would bring it, as I calculate, pretty near to the other cañon--for the rock between the two cañons is nothing more than a spit, as you will remember. Above the tunnel they have followed the vein upward, gouging out all the native copper and wastefully throwing away all the less valuable ore, until there was none left. If you look, you can see the empty crevice extending upward out of sight." "I see," said Dick, shading his eyes from the glare of the torch. "It seems to have been pretty primitive mining." "It was--that part of it, at least. But having exhausted all the copper above, they next began the more difficult process of mining downward. Come along this way and I'll show you." Walking along the tunnel some distance, our guide pointed out to us a square pool in the floor, measuring about eight feet each way. "This," said he, "was a shaft. There is another further along. How deep they are, I don't know." "But, look here!" cried Dick. "How could they venture to sink shafts, when at any moment a flood might rush in and drown them all?" "Ah! That's just the point," said our friend. "Come outside again and you'll understand." Returning once more to the bed of the pool, we faced the hole in the wall, when our guide continued: "Now, you see, the floor of the tunnel is about ten feet above the creek-bed, and before the cliff fell down, forming the dam, the water ran freely past its mouth. But some time after the miners had got out all the copper overhead and had begun sinking shafts, this cliff came down, blocked the channel, and caused the water to back up into the workings. As you remarked just now, it filled the tunnel five feet deep, and, as a matter of course, filled the shafts up to the top." "I see," said Dick. "You think, then, that the cliff fell in comparatively recent times. I believe you are right, too. That would account for there being no trees of any great size upon the dam." "Yes. And as a consequence the mine was abandoned; for it would have taken years to dig away this dam, and as long as it existed it would be impossible to go on with the work with the water coming down and filling up the tunnel once every three days, or thereabouts." "Every three days!" we both exclaimed. "Is this a regular thing, then, this flood?" "Why, yes. I'd forgotten you didn't know that. Yes, it's a pretty regular thing, and a very curious one, too. Pedro says that up in that old crater near the top of the mountain there is a great intermittent spring which every now and then rises up and spills out a great mass of water. The water comes racing down this gorge, and half an hour later leaps over the fall here, fills up the pool and the mine, and gradually drains off again under the dam." "That certainly is a curious thing," Dick responded. "And it also furnishes a reason good enough to satisfy anybody for abandoning the mine. Well, Frank," he went on, "this looks like the end of our expedition. We've done what we set out to do:--found the King Philip mine; and now, I suppose, there's nothing left but to turn round and go home again." "I suppose so," I assented, regretfully. "I hate to go back; but I'm afraid we have no excuse for remaining." "You think you must go back, do you?" asked our friend. "I'm sorry you should have to do so, but if you must, why shouldn't we travel the first stage together? I start back to Santa Fé to-morrow, and from there home to Washington." "You live in Washington, do you?" said Dick. "Then, why do you go round by way of Santa Fé? It would be much shorter to go to Mosby--and then we could ride all the way together." "I wish I could, but I have to go the other way. I left my baggage there, for one thing; and besides that I have some inquiries to make there which my mother asked me to undertake." Dick nodded. "And then you go straight back to Washington?" he asked. "Yes. Then I must get straight back home as fast as I can and report to my father. I had two commissions to perform for him:--one was to look into the matter of this old mine; the other concerned the present condition of the Hermanos Grant. The first one I consider settled, but the other, I find, is a matter for the lawyers: it is too complicated a subject for me, a stranger in the land and a foreigner." "A foreigner!" I cried. "Why, we supposed you were an American." "No," said he. "I am a Spaniard." "A Spaniard!" we both exclaimed this time. "Yes," laughing at our astonishment. "A Scotch-Irish-Spaniard--which seems a queer mixture, doesn't it? Though I was born in Spain, my forefathers were Irish, my mother is Scotch, and I have lived for several years first in Edinburgh and then in London; and now my father, who is in the Spanish diplomatic service, is stationed in Washington." "And what----?" I began, and then stopped, with some embarrassment, as it occurred to me that it was not exactly my business. "And what am I doing out here? you were going to say. I'll tell you. My father was out in this part of the world a good many years ago, having business in Santa Fé, where he got track of this old copper mine; but his idea of its whereabouts was very vague until, about a year ago, a gentleman whom he had met when he was out here wrote him a letter telling him of the number of copper utensils to be found down there at Hermanos---- What's the matter?" That he should thus exclaim was not to be wondered at if the look of surprise on my face was anything like the look on Dick's. "Well, of all the queer things!" exclaimed the latter; and then, advancing a step and addressing our friend, he said, smiling: "I think we can guess your name." "You do!" cried the young fellow. "That seems hardly likely. What is it?" "Blake!" replied Dick. CHAPTER XIV A CHANGE OF PLAN If the young Spaniard had provided us with two or three surprises during the day, I think we got even with him in that line when Dick thus disclosed to him the fact that we knew his name. For a moment he stood gazing blankly at us, and then exclaimed: "How in the world did you guess that?" "I don't wonder you are puzzled," replied Dick, "but the explanation is very simple. The Professor Bergen who wrote to your father--that's the right name, isn't it?" Young Blake nodded. "That was the name signed to the letter," said he. "'Otto Bergen.'" "Well, this Professor Bergen is my best and oldest friend; I have lived with him for thirteen or fourteen years. We left his house to come down here less than a week ago. It was he who told us of his meeting with a Spaniard of the remarkable name of Blake, who, while hunting through the records in Santa Fé, had come across mention of this old mine. And when he and I passed through Hermanos last year and saw all those old copper vessels there, the professor wrote at once to your father to tell him about them. I mailed the letter myself." "Well, this is certainly a most remarkable meeting!" cried our new acquaintance. "Why, I feel as if I had fallen in with two old friends!" "Well, you have, if you like!" cried Dick, laughing; whereupon we shook hands all over again with the greatest heartiness. "My first name," said young Blake, "is Arturo--Arthur in this country--the name of the original Irish ancestor who fled to Spain in the year 1691, and after whom each of the eldest sons of our family has been named ever since. But not being gifted with your genius for guessing names," he continued, with a smile, "I haven't yet found out what yours are." "That's a fact!" cried Dick. "What thoughtless chaps we are! My friend here, is Frank Preston of St. Louis; my own name is----" "Señores," said Pedro, cutting in at this moment, "with your pardon, we must be getting out of this cañon: it will be black night down here in another ten minutes." "That's true!" our friend assented. "So come along. We camp together, of course. How are you off for provisions? We have the hind-quarter of a deer which Pedro shot three days ago; pretty lean and stringy, but if you are as hungry as I am we can make it do." "Hungry!" cried Dick. "I'm ravenous. We've had nothing to eat since six o'clock this morning. How is it with you, Frank?" "I'll show you," I replied, snapping my teeth together, "as soon as I get the chance." With a laugh, we set off over the dam, and half an hour later were all busy round the fire toasting strips of deer-meat on sticks and eating them as fast as they were cooked, with an appetite which illustrated--if it needed illustration--the truth of the old saying, that the best of all sauces is hunger. Our supper finished, we made ourselves comfortable round the fire, and far into the night--long after Pedro had rolled himself in his blanket and had gone to sleep--we sat there talking. The reasons for our own presence in these parts were briefly and easily explained, when our new friend, Arthur--with whom, by the way, we very soon felt ourselves sufficiently familiar to address by his first name--Arthur related to us the motives which had brought him so far from home. "It was not only to hunt up this old mine," said he; "in fact, that was quite a secondary object. My chief reason for coming out was to look into the condition of the Hermanos Grant, and to find out why it was we had been unable for the past twelve years to get any reports from there." "Why _you_ hadn't been able to get reports!" exclaimed Dick. "What have _you_ got to do with the Hermanos Grant, then?" "It belongs to my father," replied Arthur, smiling. We stared at him with raised eyebrows. "But what about old Galvez, then?" asked my partner. "We supposed it belonged to him. In fact, his nephew told us as much, and he evidently spoke in good faith, too." "I dare say he did," replied Arthur. "All the same, the grant belongs, and for about a century and a half has belonged, to our family. It was my ancestor, Arthur the First, who 'bossed' the King Philip mine and who built the _Casa del Rey_. Old Galvez is just a usurper. I did not even know of his existence till I reached the village three days ago. It is a long and rather complicated story, but if you are not too sleepy I'll try to explain it before we go to bed." It was a long story; and as our frequent questions and interruptions made it a good deal longer, I think it will be wise to relate it, or some of it, at least, in my own words, to save time. The original Arthur Blake having rendered notable service in the great battle of Almanza, the king of Spain rewarded the gallant Irishman by making him "Governor" of the King Philip mine, at the same time, in true kingly fashion, bestowing upon him a large tract of land, comprising the village of Hermanos with the inhabitants thereof, as well as the desert surrounding it for five miles each way. The mine having ceased to be workable, for the reason we had seen, Arthur the First was preparing to return to his adopted country, when he died out there, alone, in that far-off land of exile. In course of time the existence of the King Philip mine passed entirely out of everybody's recollection, as would probably have been the case with the Hermanos Grant itself, had not the agent or factor, or, as he was locally called, the _mayordomo_, placed in charge by the old Irishman, continued from year to year to send over to the representative of the family in Spain certain small sums of money collected in the way of rents. They were an honest family, these factors, the son succeeding the father from generation to generation, and faithfully they continued to send over the trifling annual remittances, until the year 1865, when the payments suddenly and unaccountably ceased. It was two or three years before this that Señor Blake, having the opportunity to do so, had come out to Southern Colorado to take a look at the old grant, which, since the discovery of gold in the territory, might have some value after all. As a part of this trip he visited Santa Fé, with the object of searching through the records for some copy of the original royal patent; for what had become of that document nobody knew. It was possible that it had been destroyed when the French burnt the family mansion during the Peninsular war; again it was possible that old Arthur the First had brought it with him to America for the purpose of submitting it to the inspection of the Mexican authorities--for that part of Colorado was in those days under the rule of the viceroy of Mexico. In the limited time at his disposal, however, Señor Blake had found no trace of it; a circumstance he much regretted, for though hitherto there had never been any question as to the title, should the tract some day prove of value, such question might very well arise, when the Blake family might have difficulty in proving ownership. For about three years after his visit things continued to jog along in the old way, until, as I said, in the year 1865 the annual remittances suddenly ceased and all communication with Hermanos appeared to be cut off--for reasons unknown and undiscoverable. Such was the state of affairs when the elder Blake took up his residence in Washington, when Arthur, having solicited permission from his father, came west to find out if possible what was the matter. "When I got to Hermanos," said Arthur, continuing his story, "I found the people in such a down-trodden, spiritless condition that I had great difficulty in getting any information out of them--they were afraid to say anything lest evil should befall. By degrees, however, I gained their confidence, when I found that the Sanchez family, by whom, for generations past, the office of _mayordomo_ had been held, was extinct, except for a certain Pedro, a member of a distant branch, and that the present owner of the grant was one, Galvez, who, seemingly, had come into possession about twelve years ago. "As I could not understand how this could be, and as nobody seemed able to enlighten me, I decided, of course, to wait till Galvez came home in order to question him. "Meanwhile, I inquired about this man, Pedro Sanchez, who, I was told, was the only one likely to be able to explain, meeting with no difficulty in ascertaining where he was to be found; for, though Galvez himself did not know whether Pedro was alive or dead, every other inhabitant of the village knew perfectly well, and always had known, not only that he was alive but where to find him. "Presently, about dusk, Galvez came riding in, when I at once made myself known to him. At the mention of my name he appeared for a moment to be rendered speechless, either with fear or surprise, and then, to my great astonishment, with a burst of execration, he snatched a revolver out of its holster. Luckily for me, he did it in such haste that the weapon, striking the pommel of the saddle, flew out of his hand and fell upon the ground; whereupon I ran for it, jumped upon my horse and rode away. "After riding a short distance, I bethought me of Pedro, so, circling round the village, I came up here, and following the directions of the peons, I easily found him next morning. Through Pedro, as soon as I had succeeded in convincing him of my identity, I quickly got at the rights of the case." "Wait a minute," said Dick, who, together with myself, had been an attentive listener. "Let me put some more logs on the fire. There!" as he seated himself once more. "That will last for some time. Now, go ahead." Leaning back against a tree-trunk and stretching out his feet to the fire, Arthur began again: "Did you ever hear of the Espinosas?" he asked. "No!" I exclaimed, surprised by the apparently unconnected question; but Dick replied, "Yes, I have. Mexican bandits, or something of the sort, weren't they?" "Yes," said our friend. "They were a pair of Mexicans who, in the year '65, terrorized certain parts of Colorado by committing many murders of white people. This man, Galvez, who then lived in Taos, hated the Americans with a very thorough and absorbing hatred, and the exploits of the Espinosas being just suited to his taste, he decided to join them. But he was a little too late; the two brigands were killed, and he himself, with a bullet through his shoulder, would assuredly have been captured had he not had the good fortune to fall in with Pedro Sanchez. "Pedro had been a soldier, too, and coming thus upon a comrade in distress he packed him on his burro, and by trails known only to himself brought him down to Hermanos, entering the village secretly by night. "The occupant of the _Casa_ at that time was another Pedro Sanchez, a forty-second cousin or thereabouts of our Pedro. He was a very old man, the last of his immediate family, a good, honest, simple-minded old fellow, who for thirty years or more had been factor for us. With him Pedro sought asylum for his comrade--a favor the old man readily granted to his namesake and relative. "It was pretty sure that there would be a hue and cry after Galvez, so, to avoid suspicion as much as possible, they arranged to give out that it was Pedro who lay sick at the _Casa_, while Pedro himself went off again that same night up into the mountain to hide till Galvez thought it safe to move. He had done everything he could think of for his friend, and how do you suppose his friend requited him? It will show you the sort of man this Galvez is. "For six weeks the latter lay hidden, when in some roundabout way he got word that his description was placarded on the walls of Taos and a reward offered for his capture. This cut him off from returning home and he was in a quandary what to do, when one day his host, who, as I said, was a very old man, had a fall from his horse and two days later died. "Then did Galvez resolve upon a bold stroke. He came out of his hiding-place, and without offering reasons or explanations calmly announced that he had become proprietor of the Hermanos Grant, and that in future the villagers were to look to him for orders! The very impudence of the move carried the day. The ignorant peons, accustomed for generations to obey, accepted the situation without question; and thus did Galvez install himself as padron of Hermanos, and padron he has remained for twelve years, there being nobody within five thousand miles to enter protest or dispute his title." "Well!" exclaimed Dick. "That was about the most bare-faced piece of rascality I ever did hear of. And your father, of course, over there in Cadiz or London or wherever you were then, was helpless to find out what was going on in this remote corner." "That's it exactly; and at that time, too, this corner was far more remote even than it is now--there were no railroads anywhere near then, you see." "That's true. Well, go on. What about his treatment of Pedro?" "Why, Galvez, as padron of Hermanos--a place almost completely cut off from the rest of the world--felt pretty sure that he would never be identified as Galvez of Taos, the man wanted for brigandage; for the villagers had no suspicion of the fact. The only danger lay in Pedro." "I see. Pedro being the one person who did know the facts." "Exactly. Well, Galvez was not one to stick at trifles, and understanding that the simplest way to secure his own safety would be to get rid of this witness, he came riding up into the mountain one day, found Pedro, and while talking with him in friendly fashion, pulled out a big flint-lock horse-pistol, jammed it against his benefactor's chest and pulled the trigger. Luckily the weapon missed fire; Pedro jumped away, picked up a big stone and hurled it at his faithless friend, taking him in the mouth and knocking out all his front teeth. Then he, himself, fled up into his mountain; and that was their last meeting, except on the occasion when Galvez came up to hunt for him and Pedro shot his horse with the copper-headed arrow. "There!" Arthur concluded. "Now you have it all. That's the whole story!" "And a mighty curious and interesting story it is, too!" exclaimed Dick; adding, after a thoughtful pause: "That man, Galvez, is certainly a remarkable specimen; and a dangerous one. He is not an ordinary, every-day, primitive ruffian. That move of his in declaring himself padron of Hermanos was a stroke of genius in its way. It won't be a simple matter to get him out of there, if that is what you are after." "That is what I am after," replied Arthur. "But, as I said, the question of how to do it is too complicated for me. I know nothing of American law, but it strikes me that, in spite of the fact that he plainly has no right there, we may have considerable difficulty in getting him out, for, as we can show neither the original patent nor a copy of it, we have only our word for it that such a thing ever existed." "That's true," said I. "And Galvez being in possession, it may be that he would not have to prove _his_ rights: it would rest with you to prove _yours._" "I should think that was very likely," remarked Dick. "It is a complicated matter, as you say. What do you suppose your father will do? Have you any idea?" "Yes, I have," replied Arthur, very emphatically. "I know exactly what he will do. When I tell him how the grant has been 'annexed' by this man--and such a man, too--he will never rest until he has got him out. It may be that the old brigandage business may serve as a lever--that, I don't know--but whatever is necessary to be done he will do, however long it may take and however much it may cost." "As to the cost," said I, "that is likely, I should think, to be pretty big. Is the grant worth it? Suppose, on investigation, your father should find that the expense of getting Galvez out would be greater than the value of the property--what then?" Arthur laughed. "You don't know my father," said he. "The value of the grant--which, in truth, is nothing, or nearly nothing--makes no difference whatever. It's the principle of the thing. To permit a robber like Galvez to remain quietly in possession would be impossible to my father. He will regard it as his duty to society to right the wrong, and he will do it, if it takes ten years, without considering for a moment whether the grant is worth it or not." "Good for him!" cried Dick, thumping his knee with his fist. "The law in this new West is weak--naturally--and here in this out-of-the-way corner there is none at all, but a few such men as your father would soon stiffen its backbone. I hope he'll succeed; the only thing I'm sorry for is that the grant has so little value." "That is unfortunate," replied Arthur; "though, as it happens, that particular concerns my father less than it does me." "Is that so? How is that?" "It is an old custom in the family to bestow the Hermanos Grant on the eldest son on his coming of age. I am the eldest son, and I come of age next August, when, according to the custom, I shall become the owner of this valueless patch of desert--if Galvez will be graciously pleased to allow me." "What are the limits of the grant?" asked Dick. "North, south and east," replied Arthur, "it extends five miles from Hermanos, but on the west it stops at the foot of the mountains." "So the only part of it which produces anything is that little patch of cultivated ground surrounding the village." "Yes; and as the water-supply is very limited the place can never grow any larger. In fact, it produces little more than enough to feed the villagers; and even as it is, the boys as they grow up have to go off and get work elsewhere as sheep-herders and cowmen, there being no room for them at home. It is the padron's custom, I was told, to hire them out, their wages being paid to him, in which case you may be sure it is precious little of their earnings they ever get themselves." "He's a bad one, sure enough," remarked Dick. "But to go back to that water-supply. Isn't there any way of increasing it?" "I'm afraid not," replied Arthur. "I wish there were: a plentiful supply of water would make the place really valuable. There is land enough, and excellent land, too; all that is needed is water. But that, I'm afraid, is not to be had. I've talked to Pedro about it; he knows every stream on these two mountains, but he says that they all run in cañons from five hundred to two thousand feet deep, and there is no possible way of getting any of them out upon the surface of the valley. What are you thinking about, Dick?" My partner, who had been sitting with his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands, frowning severely at the fire, started from his revery, and turning toward his questioner, he replied, speaking slowly and thoughtfully: "If any one ought to know, it's Pedro; but, all the same, I believe Pedro is wrong. I believe there _is_ a way of turning one of these streams somewhere and bringing it down to Hermanos--if only one could find the right stream." "Why do you think so?" asked Arthur. "I know it looks ridiculous for me to be setting up my opinion against Pedro's," replied my partner, "but I can't help thinking that there is such a stream. Look here!" he cried, jumping up, walking to and fro between us and the fire once or twice, and then stopping and shaking his finger at us as though he were delivering a lecture to two inattentive pupils. "Where did those old Pueblos get their water from, I should like to know? Up in these mountains somewhere, didn't they? Of course they did: there's no other place. There was a big irrigation system down there once, enough to support a population of three or four thousand people probably. Well! What has become of that supply? That's what I want to know. They had it once--where is it now?" For some seconds Dick stood in front of Arthur, pointing his finger straight at him, while Arthur sat there in silence gazing steadfastly at Dick. Suddenly, the young Spaniard jumped up, stepped forward, and slapping my partner on his chest with the back of his hand, exclaimed: "Look here, old man! I believe you are right. I believe there is a stream somewhere which those old Pueblos used for irrigating their farms. It has somehow been switched off and lost. It ought to be found and brought back. Now, look here! I can't stay here to hunt for it myself: I _must_ get home right away. But I'll make a bargain with you:--You find that stream and provide a way of getting the water back to Hermanos, and I'll give you a half-interest in the grant--when I get it. There, now! There's a chance for you!" "Do you mean that?" cried my partner. "I certainly do," replied Arthur. "The grant is without value as it stands: if you can get water on to it and give it a value, it would be only just that you should have a share in the profits. Yes, I mean what I say, all right. If you'll supply the water, I'll supply the land. There! What do you say? Is it a bargain?" For a moment Dick stood staring thoughtfully at our friend, and then, turning to me, he exclaimed sharply: "Frank! Let's do it! Here we are, out for the summer. It's true we came out to hunt for a copper mine, but that scheme being 'busted' at the very start, let us turn to and hunt for water instead. What do you think?" "I'm agreed!" I cried. "Good! Then we'll do it! And the very first move----" "The very first move," interrupted Arthur, laughing, "the very first move is--to bed! It's after eleven!" "Phew!" Dick whistled. "I'd no idea it was so late. To bed, then; and to-morrow we'll work out a plan of action. This has been a pretty long day, and a pretty eventful one, too. So let's get to bed at once, and to-morrow we'll start fair." In spite of the long day and the lateness of the hour, however, I could not get to sleep at once. Dick, too, seemed to be wakeful. I heard him stir, and opening my eyes, I saw him sitting up in bed with his arms clasped around his blanketed knees, gazing at the fire. Suddenly, he gave his leg a mighty slap with his open hand, and I heard him chuckle to himself. "What's the matter, Dick?" I whispered. "Got a flea?" "No," he replied, laughing softly. "I've got an idea. Go to sleep, old chap. I'll tell you in the morning." CHAPTER XV DICK'S SNAP SHOT The sun rose late down in that deep crevice, and for that reason, added to the lateness of the hour at which we had gone to bed, we did not wake up next morning till after six o'clock. We found, however, that Pedro had been up a couple of hours at least, for he had a good fire going, had made everything ready to start breakfast, and moreover he had been up on the mountain and had brought down Arthur's horse and his own burro from the little valley where they had been left at pasture. When I, myself, awoke, I found that Dick was ahead of me. He was standing by the fire, warming himself--for the mornings were still cold--and talking to Pedro, who, I guessed, was explaining something, for he was waving his long arms energetically, first in one direction and then in another. "Well, Dick," said I, as we sat cross-legged on the ground, eating our breakfast, "what is this idea of yours? Does it still look as favorable as it seemed to do last night?" "Better," replied Dick, with his mouth full of bacon. "A great deal better. I felt pretty confident last night that I was on the way to earn that half-interest in the Hermanos Grant, and this morning, since talking with Pedro, I feel more confident still." "Is that so?" cried Arthur. "I hope you're right. What is it you think you have discovered?" "In the first place," replied Dick, "I have discovered that we are a lot of wiseacres: we have been going around with our eyes shut." "How?" we both asked. "If we hadn't had our heads so full of the old copper mine, and if we hadn't been so bent on finding the trail to it, we should never have made the mistake we did." "What mistake?" I asked. "Hurry up, Dick! Don't take so long about it. What are you driving at?" "Why, this!" replied my partner, suddenly sitting up straight and wagging his finger at us. "This trail we have been following, all the way from Hermanos up to the edge of the cañon, was not a trail at all--it was a ditch!" "A ditch!" we both exclaimed. "Yes, a ditch. A ditch dug by those old Pueblo Indians to carry water down to that wide, level stretch of ground at the back of the _Casa_. I'm sure of it. If you give up the idea of a trail and consider it as a ditch, all its peculiarities will be explained at once. It will account for its uniform grade, for its unexpected distinctness, and more than everything else, it will account for the fact that the 'trail' never once dipped down a hill or climbed one either, but always--invariably--went round the head of every gully, deep or shallow, that came in its way." "Upon my word, Dick!" cried Arthur. "I believe you _have_ made a discovery! I believe that it is the line of an old ditch, after all; though the pack-trains doubtless used it as a convenient road as far as the top of the cañon and then switched off down here by that shelf in the wall." "That's my idea," said Dick, nodding his head. "But, look here, Dick," Arthur went on, after a moment's thoughtful pause. "Suppose it is an old ditch--where did the water come from? That's the question. A ditch without water isn't much use." Dick laughed. "No," said he. "I understand that well enough. The water came from this 'island,' up here above our heads, and was carried across the cañon in a flume!" "Ah!" I cried. "I see! What we at first supposed to have been a bridge up there, built for the accommodation of the pack-trains, was in reality a flume for carrying water." "That's what I believe," replied Dick. "Well, but see here, Dick," remarked Arthur again. "Suppose that there was a flume there for carrying water--where's the water now? That's the point. That's what I want to know." "Ah!" replied my partner. "And that was what I wanted to know, too. That was the very question that bothered me until I talked to Pedro about it just now. I asked him if he had ever seen or heard of a stream of water coming down from the top of this high land, and I can tell you he eased my mind of a load when he told me he had. He says there is a good big waterfall which jumps off the cliff on the north side of the 'island' and falls into this stream we are camped upon now, but about twelve or thirteen miles below this point, following the bends of the creek." "Is that so? Then the chances are that that is the stream from which the Pueblos used to get their water. Did you ask Pedro if he knew of any way of getting up there?" "Yes, I did, and I'm sorry to say he doesn't know of any. He says that this 'island' is really an island, being compassed about on all sides by cañons of varying depths; that it includes a large tract of country, part mountain and part plain; and that to the best of his knowledge, no man has ever set foot on it. In that, though, I'm pretty sure he's mistaken. In fact, it is as certain as anything can be that there is a way up somewhere, or else, how did the Pueblos get over there in the first place? They didn't fly across this gorge; and yet they must have worked from both sides at once when they built their flume." "That's true. Well, Dick, it does look as though you had made a genuine discovery, and one likely to be of great value. What's your idea, then? You and Frank will stay here and hunt for the old Pueblo ditch-head, I suppose, while I dig out for home by myself. I wish I could stay and hunt with you, but there's no knowing how long it may take, and meanwhile my father and mother will be worrying themselves to know what has become of me. I've been here now a good bit longer than I intended. I must get back at once and----" "Look here, Arthur," Dick interrupted. "Excuse me for cutting in, but I'd like to make a suggestion. There is just a possibility--I don't expect it, I own, but there is a possibility--that if Galvez were informed that you know how he came to be padron of Hermanos, and also of his connection with the Espinosas, he might get scared and skip out of his own accord--which would simplify matters for you very much. Now, here's what I propose--if you really are bound to leave at once." "Yes," Arthur interjected. "I mustn't stay a minute longer than I can help." "Well, then, I propose that before you go--it will only make a difference of a couple of hours--before you go, Frank and I will ride down to Hermanos, see old Galvez, tell him what you have told us, and recommend him to take his departure. Perhaps he'll be scared and skip out; but if he won't, why, then you'll know where you stand. How does that strike you?" "Hm!" muttered Arthur, doubtfully. "I don't much like the idea of running you into danger. Galvez is such a treacherous fellow, there's no knowing what he might do to you." "That's true enough," said Dick; "though I don't think he would attempt anything on two of us at once, and in broad daylight, too. It might be to his advantage to get rid of you or Pedro or both, but he would surely have sense enough to see that he wouldn't gain anything by hurting either of us." "That's a fact. Well, suppose you go, then. But be careful." "We'll be careful," replied my partner. "You needn't worry yourself on that account." By this time we were ready to start, and accordingly we all rode together up the ledge until we came out again at the point where the old flume used to be--where we pointed out to Arthur the sockets in the rock--and thence, continuing to the foot of the mountain, Dick and I, leaving the others to wait for us, galloped off toward Hermanos. By good fortune, as we approached the village, we saw Galvez himself down near the creek, where he was directing three of his _vaqueros_ who were engaged in cutting out cows from a bunch of wild Mexican cattle. Further down stream, only a short distance from the houses, we noticed half-a-dozen Mexican children, very busy making mud pies, quite unconcerned, apparently, at the proximity of the herd of cattle. It happened, however, that just as we came riding up to where Galvez sat on his horse, shouting orders to his men, a gaunt, wild-eyed, long-horned steer broke out of the bunch on the down-stream side. One of the cowmen dashed forward to turn it, when, to his astonishment, the steer, instead of running back into the bunch or attempting to dodge him, charged the rider and knocked him and his little broncho over and over. Then, wildly tossing its head, the beast made straight for the group of unsuspecting and defenceless children. "Loco! Loco!" shouted Galvez. "Rope him, one of you!" The two other men galloped forward, swinging their lariats, but the locoed steer, going like a scared antelope, had such a start that it looked as though it would surely reach the children before the men could catch it. Seeing this, Galvez pulled out his revolver and fired six shots at it in quick succession. Whether he hit the steer or not, I cannot say, but even if he did the range was too great for a revolver to be effective--unless by a lucky chance. The children, hearing the shots, looked up, saw the steer coming, and scattered like a flock of sparrows--all but one of them, that is to say. He, a brown-bodied little three-year-old, without a scrap of clothing upon him except a piece of string tied round his middle, stood stock still, with his little hands full of mud, seemingly too frightened to move, and straight down upon this little bronze statue the crazy beast went charging. It looked as though a tragedy were imminent! It was at this moment that my partner and I came riding up behind Galvez, who, sitting on his horse with his back to us, his body interposed between us and the steer, had not seen us yet. It was no time for ceremony. Without wasting words in greetings or explanations, Dick jammed his heels into his pony's ribs; the pony sprang forward; Dick pulled him up short, leaped to the ground, threw up his rifle and fired a snap shot. Down went the steer, heels over head, gave one kick and lay dead--shot through the heart! It was a grand shot! The three _vaqueros_, two on their horses and one on foot, carried away by their enthusiasm, forgot for once their habitual dread of the padron, and waving their hats above their heads joined me in a shout of applause; while as for Galvez, himself, he sat on his horse with his empty revolver in his hand, gazing open-mouthed first at Dick and then at the dead steer, seemingly rendered speechless for the moment. At length he turned to me, who had come up close beside him, and said: "Can he always do that?" "Just about," I replied, with a nod. "He is one of the best shots in the State." "Hm!" remarked the padron, sticking out his lower lip and thoughtfully scratching his chin with his thumb-nail; and though that was all he did say, the muttered exclamation conveyed to me as much meaning as if he had talked for five minutes. That Dick's remarkable shot had made a great impression on him I felt certain, and it was a matter of much satisfaction to me to think that it had; for if at any time he should entertain the idea of resorting to violence against any of us, the recollection of how that steer had pitched heels over head would probably cause him to think again. The whole episode had not occupied more than two minutes, at the end of which time Galvez, recovering himself, turned to us and said, in his usual gracious manner: "Well, you two, what have you come back here for?" "We have come down to speak to you," replied Dick, as he slipped another cartridge into his Sharp's rifle. "We have just parted with Señor Blake and El Tejon." The padron scowled at the mention of the two names. "Oh, you have, eh? Well, what then?" he asked. "Señor Blake," my partner continued, "wished us to say that he has learned how you came to be padron of Hermanos. Pedro has told him the whole story--everything--the Espinosa business and all." "Oh! And is that all?" "That's all," said Dick. The padron, I have no doubt, had been expecting some such communication and had made up his mind beforehand what to say, for, after sitting for a few seconds looking at Dick without a word, he smiled an unpleasant, toothless smile, and said: "That's all, is it? Well, you go back to your Señor Blake and tell him that here I am and here I stay, and if he thinks that three beardless boys and a shiftless, half-crazy peon can make me move, why, he's welcome to try. There! That's all on my side." He started to ride off, but after a few steps stopped again to add: "Except this:--I recommend you two boys to get along back home as fast as you can and leave this young Blake--if that is really his name--to manage his own affairs. You may find it dangerous to be mixed up with them." He said this in an aggressive, menacing tone; but I noticed, all the same, that his eye wandered involuntarily toward the dead steer, and I congratulated myself again on the lucky chance that had given Dick the opportunity to show his skill with a rifle. Galvez, I was convinced, would be exceedingly careful how he provoked a quarrel with any one who could shoot like that. "Very well, señor," said Dick. "We will deliver your message. That is all we came for." And with that we turned round and rode away again. In the course of an hour we were back at the foot of the mountain, where we found Arthur sitting on the ground waiting for us. "Well, what luck?" he cried. "What did Galvez have to say?" We told him all about our interview with the padron, not forgetting the episode of the wild steer, at hearing which Arthur expressed much gratification. "That was a very fortunate chance," said he. "Galvez may profess to despise three beardless boys, but after seeing one of them shoot a running steer at three hundred yards, I expect he will think twice before he stirs up a fuss with them. It is just the sort of thing--and the only sort of thing, too--to make an impression on a man like that. What is your idea, Dick? Do you think he intends to stick it out, or was he only 'bluffing'?" "I don't know," replied my partner. "I'm afraid he means to hold on. But though at present he puts on 'a brag countenance,' as the saying is, when he has had time to reconsider he might change his mind and skip. My impression is, though, that he means to hold on." "I think so, too," said I. "What is Pedro's opinion?" "Ah! Yes. Let us ask Pedro." "Señores," said the Mexican, when Arthur had explained the whole matter to him in Spanish, "the padron is a pig, a mule. He will not move." "Then that settles it!" cried Arthur, jumping up, walking away a few paces and coming back again. "I never really expected that Galvez would move, though it was worth trying. So now I'll be off at once. As for that old ditch-head, though I should have liked very much to stay and help hunt for it, you three can, as a matter of fact, make the search just as well without me. And whether you find it or whether you don't, makes no difference in one way--the business of getting Galvez out of Hermanos will have to proceed regardless of that or any other consideration. We have two things to do, you see:--To turn out Galvez and to find that ditch-head. The first is my business; the second is yours; and the sooner I get about mine the better, if I am to give you a clear title to your half-interest when you are ready to claim it." "As to that," remarked Dick, "I don't think we ought to hold you to that bargain. It was made more or less in joke, anyhow." "No, no, it wasn't!" cried Arthur, emphatically. "Not a bit of it! I meant it then and I mean it still. I'm quite content. You provide the water and I'll provide the land, as I said. It's a fair bargain. I don't want to be let off. But before I can perform my part of it I must prove my own title, and as I can't do it at this end of the line I'll waste no more time here, but get right back home as fast as I can and report the conditions to my father." "Well," said Dick, after a moment's thoughtful silence, "I believe you are right. I believe that is the best way after all, unless----" "Unless what?" "Unless we abandon the whole thing." "Abandon----!" cried Arthur; but he got no further, for Dick, holding up his hand, said, laughingly: "All right, old man! All right! You needn't say any more. I only suggested it just to see what you would say. So you are determined to go through with this thing, are you? Very well, then, you may count on us to do our part if it's doable. Eh, Frank?" I nodded. "We'll find that ditch-head," said I, "if we have to stay here till snow flies." "Good!" cried Arthur. "Then that does settle it. I'll be off this minute. Bring my horse, Pedro: I'm going to start at once." "Look here, Arthur," remarked Dick. "I think it would be a good plan if Frank and I were to escort you to the other side of Hermanos. Galvez, I expect, guessed what you were after when you first told him your name, and now he'll be sure of it, and it might be pretty dangerous for you if you should meet him alone; so we'll just ride part way with you and see you safely started." "Thanks," replied Arthur. "I shall be glad of your company. Well, let us get off, then. Good-bye, Pedro. I expect you'll see me back here before very long. _Adios!_" Thus taking leave of the burly Mexican, Arthur started off, Dick and I riding on either side of him. Keeping about a mile to the north of Hermanos, we circled round that village, and were making our way southeastward toward the Cactus Desert, when we saw off to our right a great cloud of dust, and in the midst of it a bunch of cattle accompanied by three men. At first we were suspicious that Galvez might be one of them, but pretty soon we discovered that they were the three _vaqueros_ we had seen that morning. They, on their part, quickly detected us, when one of them immediately turned his horse and came riding toward us. As soon as he had come pretty close I saw that it was the one whose horse had been knocked over by the locoed steer. This man, advancing to Dick, pulled off his hat, and speaking with considerable feeling, said: "I wish to thank the señor who shoots so straight. It was my little boy who was in danger." "Was it?" cried Dick. "I'm very glad, then, that I happened to make such a good shot. The steer was locoed, of course." "_Si, señor_," replied the man. "It happens sometimes. This one was very bad. It should have been killed long ago, but the padron would not. I am grateful to the señor, and if I can serve him at any time I shall be glad." "Thank you," said Dick. "What is your name?" "José Santanna," replied the man. "Well, José," continued Dick, "I'm much obliged to you for your offer, and if I need your help at any time I'll come and ask you." "_Gracias, señor_," replied the man; and with that he turned and galloped after his companions. "That's a good thing for us," remarked Arthur. "We may find it very handy to have an ally in the enemy's camp. And now, you fellows," he continued, "you may as well turn back. I'm safe enough now, and there is no need for you to come any further. I hope it won't be long before you see me back again. Meanwhile you'll search for that ditch-head, and if there is anything you can do toward getting the water down, you'll go ahead and do it. That's the plan, eh?" "That's the plan," repeated my partner. "Very well. Then, good-bye, and good luck to you!" CHAPTER XVI THE OLD PUEBLO HEAD-GATE It was about two in the afternoon that we parted with our friend, and wishing him the best of success, we watched him ride away until the shimmering haze drawn by the heat of the sun from the surface of the valley, finally obscured him from our view altogether. Then, turning our ponies, we rode back up the mountain and once more descended to our camp, where we found Pedro waiting for us. As it was then too late to begin any fresh enterprise, especially one so difficult as the attempt to climb the cañon-wall was likely to be, we determined to postpone the expedition until next morning. In order, too, that we might be in good fettle for the adventure, we went to bed that night as soon as it got dark; no more late hours for us; late hours at night not being conducive to clear heads in the morning--and it was more than likely that clear heads might be very essential to the success of the task in hand. About an hour after sunrise we set off on foot down the left bank of the stream, making our way along the steep slope of stone scraps, big and little, which bordered its edge, and after a pretty rough scramble we reached a spot about a mile below camp where Pedro had told us he thought there was a possible way up--a narrow cleft in the rocky wall, none too wide to admit the passage of the Mexican's big body--and following the sturdy hunter, who acted as guide, we began the ascent. There was no great difficulty about it at first, for the crevice, though still very narrow, was not particularly steep. After climbing up about three hundred feet, however, the ascent became much more abrupt, and presently we came to a place where the bed of the dry watercourse was blocked entirely by a smooth, water-worn mass of rock, twenty feet high, filling the whole width of the crevice, and overhanging in such a manner that even a lizard would have had difficulty in climbing up it. We were looking about for some means of surmounting this obstacle, when Pedro, who had stepped back a little to survey it, called our attention to what appeared to be a number of steps, or, rather, foot-holes in the rock about ten feet up, just above the bulge. "Hallo!" cried Dick. "This looks promising. Those holes were made with a purpose. I believe we've struck the original Pueblo highway after all." "It does look like it," I agreed. "But how are we going to get up there?" "Señor," said Pedro to Dick, "if you will stand on my shoulders, I think you can reach those holes." "All right," replied Dick. "Let's try." It was simple enough. Dick easily reached the lower steps, which, it was hardly to be doubted, had been cut for the purpose, and scrambled up to the top. Then, letting down the rope we had brought for such an emergency, he called to me to come up. With a boost from Pedro, and with the rope to hold on by, I was quickly standing beside my partner, when up came Pedro himself, hand over hand. If this was really the road by which the Pueblos originally came up--and from those nicks in the rock we felt pretty sure it was--it was the roughest and by long odds the most upended road we had ever traveled over. It was, in fact, a climb rather than a walk: we had to use our hands nearly all the time. We had come within a hundred feet of the top, when, looking upward, I was startled to see on an overhanging ledge a large, tawny, cat-like animal calmly sitting there looking down at us. "Look there, Dick!" I cried. "What's that?" "A mountain-lion!" exclaimed my partner. "My! What a shot!" It happened, however, that we were at a point where it was necessary to hold on with our hands to prevent ourselves from slipping back; it was impossible to shoot. The "lion" therefore continued to stare at us and we at him, until Dick shouted at him, when the beast leisurely walked off and disappeared round a corner. "Well!" remarked my companion. "I never saw a mountain-lion so calm and unconcerned before. As a rule they are the shyest of animals." "All the animals up here are like that," remarked Pedro. "Many times since I have lived on the mountain I have seen them come down to the edge of the cañon to look at me--deer and even mountain-sheep and wolves; yes, many times wolves. They have no fear of man." "That's queer," said I. "I wonder why not." "Señor," replied Pedro, looking rather surprised at my lack of intelligence, "it is simple: since the days of the Pueblos there has been no man up here." "Why, I suppose there hasn't!" cried Dick. "That didn't occur to me before, either. It will be interesting to see how the wild animals behave, Frank. It will be like Robinson Crusoe on his island." He spoke in Spanish, as we always did when Pedro was in company, not wishing him to feel that he was left out. It was Pedro who replied. "I know not," said he, "the honorable gentleman, Señor Don Crusoe, of whom you speak, but for ourselves we must have care." "Why, Pedro. What do you mean?" "The wolves up here are many, and they will surely smell us out." "Well, suppose they do, Pedro. What then?" asked Dick, jokingly. "You are not afraid of wolves, are you?" This seemed a reasonable question, remembering how boldly he had faced them that time at the head of the Mescalero valley. "Most times I have no fear," replied Pedro, simply, "but up here it is different. These wolves know not what a man is; they will smell us out, and they will think only, 'Here is something to eat;' they do not know enough to be afraid." "I suppose that is likely," Dick assented. "You are quite right, Pedro: we must take care. I don't suppose there will be anything to fear from them during daylight, but we'll keep a sharp lookout, all the same. Come on, let us get forward." In another ten minutes we had reached the top, when, turning up-stream, we presently came to the dry gully which led down to where the old flume once stood. Thence, turning "inland," as one might say, we followed up the bed of this gully, finding that it had its head in a little grassy basin which looked as though it had once been a small lake. In crossing this basin we stirred up from among the bushes a band of blacktail deer, which ran off about fifty yards and then stood still to look at us; these usually shy animals being evidently consumed with curiosity at the sight of three strange beasts walking on their hind legs. Undoubtedly, we were the first human beings they had ever encountered. We did not molest them, but pursuing our course across the little basin, we were about to proceed up a narrow, stony draw at its further end, when a sudden scurry of feet behind us caused us to look back. The band of deer had vanished, and in their stead were four wolves, which, when we turned round, drew up in line and stood staring at us! As Dick had said, the wild animals up here were making themselves decidedly "interesting." Pedro had an arrow fitted to his bow in an instant, while Dick and I simultaneously cocked our rifles and stood ready. The wolves, however, remained stationary; it was evidently curiosity and not hunger that inspired them. Seeing this, I picked up a pebble and threw it at them, just to see what they would think of it. The stone struck the ground close under their noses, making them all start, passed between two of them and went hopping along the ground, when, to our great amusement, the whole row of them turned, ran after the stone, sniffed at it, one after the other, and then came back to the old position. It looked so comical that Dick and I burst out laughing; whereupon the wolves, who had doubtless never heard such a sound before, retreated a few paces, where they once more turned round to stare at us. "Well, Pedro!" cried Dick. "They don't seem to be very dangerous. If all the wolves up here are like that we needn't be afraid of them." "They are not hungry just now," replied Pedro, so significantly that our merriment was checked; "and you see for yourselves," he added, "that a man is a new animal to them. They know not what to make of us. It is that which makes me uneasy. A big pack of hungry wolves would be very dangerous, for the reason that they have never learned that we are dangerous, too. For me, I am afraid of them." Such an admission, coming from such a man, one who, we knew, was not lacking in courage, was impressive; so, in order that he should not regard us as merely a pair of careless, light-headed boys, Dick assured him in all earnestness that we had no intention of treating the matter lightly; that we fully understood and agreed with his view of the matter. "You are quite right, Pedro," said he. "We can't afford to be careless. A pack of wolves is dangerous enough when you know what to expect of them, but when you don't----! It will pay us to be careful, all right; there's no doubt about that. Come on, now. Let us get ahead. Those beasts back there have gone off--to tell the others, perhaps." Proceeding up the stony draw for about half a mile, we presently came upon a most unexpected sight:--a little lake, covering perhaps a space of twenty acres, its surface, smooth as a mirror, reflecting the trees and rocks surrounding it, and dotted all over with hundreds of wild ducks and geese. "Here's the head of the ditch!" cried Dick, exultingly. "Here's where the Pueblos got their water! They drew from this lake down the gully we have just come up. The mouth of the draw has been blocked by the caving of the sides, you see, but it will be an easy job to dig a narrow trench through the dam, and then the pitch is so great that the water will soon scour a channel for itself. Don't you think so, Pedro? The water must have run down here, filled the grassy basin where the deer were, flowed out at its lower end down the gully to the flume, and then by the ditch over the foothills to the valley. Wasn't that the way of it, Pedro?" It was natural that Dick should address his question to the Mexican rather than to me, for Pedro, one of a race that had followed irrigation for centuries, knew far more of its practical possibilities than I did, and his opinion was infinitely more valuable than mine was likely to be. In reply, he nodded his big head and said, gravely: "That is it. It is not possible to doubt. The Pueblos drew their water from the lake at this point. That is very sure. But----" "But what?" asked Dick. "This lake is small, and I see nowhere any stream coming into it," replied Pedro. "That's a fact," Dick assented. "Perhaps it is fed by underground springs. Let us walk round the lake and see where the water runs out and how much of a stream there is. That is what concerns us. Where it comes from doesn't matter particularly--it's how much of it there is." Our walk round the little lake, however, resulted in a disappointment which staggered us for the moment. There was no outlet. The lake was land-locked; the one insignificant rivulet we found running into it being evidently no more than enough to counterbalance the daily evaporation. "Well," remarked Dick, after a long pause, "there is one thing sure: the Pueblos never built a flume and dug that big, long ditch to carry this trifling amount of water. This lake, after all, was not the source of supply, as we were supposing. It was a reservoir, perhaps, but nothing more. The real source was somewhere higher up." If Dick was right--and there could be hardly a doubt that he was--the most promising direction in which to continue our search would be on the west side of the lake, whence the little rivulet came down. An examination of the ravine in which the stream ran showed evidence that it had at one time carried much more water than at present, so, with hopes renewed, we set off at once along its steep, stony bed. The country on that side was very rough and precipitous, and the ravine itself, reasonably wide at first, became narrower and narrower, and its sides more and more lofty, until presently it became so contracted that we might have imagined ourselves to be walking up a very narrow lane with rows of ten-story houses on either side. The sky above us was a mere ribbon of blue. After climbing upward for about half a mile, we began to catch occasional glimpses ahead of us of a frowning cliff which bade fair to bar our further progress altogether, and we were beginning to wonder whether we had not chosen the wrong ravine after all, when suddenly, with one accord, we all stopped short and cocked our ears. There was a sound of running water somewhere close by! There was a bend in the gorge just here, and we could not see ahead, but the instant we detected the sound of water, Dick, with a shout, sprang forward, and with me close on his heels and the short-legged Pedro some distance in the rear, dashed up the bed of the ravine and round the corner. What a wonderful sight met our gaze! Out of the great cliff I mentioned just now there came roaring down a magnificent stream, which, falling into a deep pool it had worn for itself in the rocks, went boiling and foaming off through a second ravine to the right--a fine thing to see! But what was finer, and infinitely more interesting, was the original Pueblo head-gate, so set in the narrow gorge in which we stood that the water, which, if left to itself, would have flowed down our ravine, was forced to run off through the other channel. It was a remarkable piece of work for such a primitive people to have performed, considering especially the very inferior tools they had to do it with. The walls of the gorge came together at this point in such a manner that they were not more than five feet apart and were so straight-up-and-down that they looked as though they had been trimmed by hand--as possibly they had been to some extent. Taking advantage of this narrow gap, the Pueblos had cut a deep groove in the rocks on either side of the ravine, and in these grooves they had set up on end a great flat stone about five feet high and three inches thick--it must have weighed a thousand pounds or more. Against this stone head-gate, on its inner side, the water stood four feet deep, and it was obvious that when the gate was raised the flood would go raging down the gorge we had just ascended into the little lake below, leaving the bed in which it now ran high and dry. Undoubtedly, it was this stone door with which the Pueblos used to regulate their water-supply, prying it up and holding it in position, perhaps, with blocks of wood, which, after the Indians deserted the valley, had in time rotted away, allowing the gate to fall, thus shutting off the water entirely. However that may have been, one thing at any rate was certain:--Whenever our flume and our ditch were ready, here was water enough for thousands of acres only waiting to be let loose. For a long time Dick and I stood with our hands resting on the top of the head-gate and our chins resting on our hands, watching the water as it went foaming and splashing down the other ravine, and as we stood there, there came over us by degrees a sense of the real importance to us of this discovery. We were only boys, after all, and we had gone into this enterprise more or less in the spirit of adventure, but now it gradually dawned upon us that we had in reality arrived at a point where the roads forked:--Here, ready to our hands, was work for a lifetime, and we had to decide whether we were going into it heart and soul or whether we were not. Every boy arrives at this fork in the roads sooner or later, and when he does, he is apt to feel pretty serious. I know we did. With us, however, the question seemed to settle itself, for Dick, presently straightening up and turning to me, said: "Frank! What will your Uncle Tom say? Will he be willing that you should stay out in this country and take to wheat-raising and ditch-building and so forth?" "If I know Uncle Tom," I replied, "he'll be not only willing but delighted. If we make a success of this thing--as we will if hard work will do it--just imagine how proudly he will point to us as proofs of his theory that a fellow may sometimes learn more out of school than in it. In fact, if I'm not much mistaken, he will be eager to help; and if we need money for the work, as we certainly shall, I shan't hesitate to ask him for it. I shall inherit a little when I come of age, and I'm pretty sure Uncle Tom will advance me some if I need it. But how about the professor, Dick? How will he fancy the idea of your settling down in this valley? For if we _do_ go into this thing in earnest, that is what it means." "I know it does," replied my companion, seriously. "And I'm glad of it. I'll let you into a little secret, Frank. For some time past the professor has been worrying himself as to what was to become of me: what business or occupation I was fit for with my peculiar bringing-up--for there is no getting over the fact that it has been peculiar--and the professor, considering himself responsible for it, has been pretty anxious about the result. Now, here is an occupation all laid out for me, and nobody will be so pleased to hear of it as the professor. It will take a burden off his mind; and I'm mighty glad to think it will." "I see," said I. "I should think you would be: such a fine old fellow as he is. So, then, Dick, it is settled, is it, that we go ahead? What's the first move, then?" "Why, the first move of all, I think, is to get back to the lake and eat our lunch, and while we are doing so we can consult as to what work to start upon and how to set about it. What time is it, Pedro?" "Midday and ten minutes," promptly replied the Mexican, casting an eye at the sun; while I, pulling out my watch, saw that he had hit it exactly, as he always did, I found later. "Then let us get back to the lake," said Dick. "Hark! What was that? The water makes so much noise that I can't be sure, but it sounded to me like wolves howling." Pedro nodded his big head. "It will be well to go down to where there are some trees," said he. "This arroyo, with its high walls, is not a good place." As we walked down the ravine and got further away from the water, we could hear more distinctly the cry of the wolves. Pedro stopped short and listened intently. "There is a good many of them," said he. "I think they come hunting us. Let us get up on this rock here and wait a little." In the middle of the ravine lay a great flat-topped stone, about six feet high, and to the top of this we soon scrambled--there was plenty of room--and there for a minute or two we waited. The cry of the hunting wolves grew louder and louder, and presently, around a bend a short distance below, loping along with their noses to the ground, there came a band of sixteen of them. At sight of us they stopped short, and then--showing plainly that they knew of no danger to themselves--with a yell of delight at having run down their prey, as they supposed, they came charging up the ravine! CHAPTER XVII THE BRIDGE As the pack came racing up the gulch, we waited an instant until a narrow place crowded them into a bunch, when Dick called out, "Now!" and we all fired together into the midst of them. Three of the wolves fell, two dead--I could see the feather of Pedro's arrow sticking out of the ribs of one of them--and one with its back broken. I had hoped that the strange thunder of the rifles would send them flying--but no. They all stopped again for a moment, and then, maddened seemingly at the sight of the broken-backed wolf dragging itself about and screeching with pain--poor beast--they all fell upon the unfortunate creature and worried it to death. Then, with yells of rage, on they came again. The pause had given us time to re-load. Dick and Pedro, quicker than I, fired a second shot, and once more two wolves fell writhing among the stones. The next moment we were surrounded, and for a minute or two after that I was too much engaged myself to note what the others were doing. A gaunt, long-legged wolf sprang up on the rock within three feet of me. I fired my rifle into his chest. Another, close beside him, was within an ace of scrambling up when I hit him across the side of his head a fearful crack with the empty rifle-barrel and knocked him off again. Then, seeing a third with his feet on top of the rock, his head thrown back in his straining efforts to get up, I sprang to that side, kicked the beast under his chin and knocked him down. Meanwhile my companions had been similarly engaged and similarly successful. Pedro in particular, having dropped his bow and taken in one hand the short-handled ax he always carried with him, while in the other he held his big sheath-knife, had laid about him to such effect that he had put four of the enemy out of the fight--two of them permanently. Dick was the only one who had received any damage, and that was to his clothes and not to himself. His rifle being empty, he had used it to push back the wolves as they jumped up. In doing so he had stepped too near the edge of the rock, and one of the watchful beasts, springing up at that moment, had caught the leg of his trousers with its teeth, tearing it from end to end and coming dangerously near to pulling my partner down. Pedro, however, quick as a flash, had delivered a back-handed "swipe" with his ax at the wolf's neck, nearly cutting off its head, and Dick was saved. It was an unpleasantly close thing, though. It was a short, sharp tussle, and at the end of it nine of the sixteen wolves lay scattered about the bed of the ravine, dead or helpless. This seemed to take the fight out of the remaining seven--as well it might--who retreated down the arroyo, turning at the corner and looking back at us with their lips drawn up and their teeth showing, seeming to convey a threat, as though they would say, "Your turn this time--but just you wait a bit." Such unexpected fierceness and such determination on the part of the wolves--by daylight, too--scared me rather; Dick also, I noted, looked pretty sober, as, turning to the Mexican, he said: "You were right, Pedro: these wolves _are_ dangerous--a good deal more so than I had supposed. Our chances would have been pretty slim if we hadn't had this rock so handy. If this sort of thing is going to happen at any time, day or night, it will add very much to the difficulty of the work up here. We shall have to be continuously on the lookout; it won't do to separate; and wherever we are at work, we shall have to prepare a place of refuge near at hand. I don't like it. I've seen wolves by the hundred, but I never saw any before so savage and so persistent as these. I tell you, I don't half like it." "And I don't either," said I, glad to find that I was not the only one to feel uneasy. "Did you notice, Dick, how thin they all were? I've often heard the expression, 'gaunt as a wolf,' and now I know what it means. They seemed half-starved." "That is it, senor," remarked Pedro. "The wolves up here are very many--too many for the space they have. Here they are, the cañons all round them, they cannot get away. All the time they are half-starved, all the time they hunt for food, all the time they are dangerous. Often in winter they eat each other. It is well if we move away from here. Pretty soon there will come another pack to eat up these dead ones." "Let us get out, then!" I cried. "I've had enough of them for one day!" The others were quite ready to move, so, jumping down from our fortress we started along the ravine again, this time keeping our ears wide open for suspicious sounds, and feeling a good deal relieved when, on the edge of the lake, we sat down to our lunch with an old low-branching pine tree close by, up which we could go in a jiffy if need be. But though the presence of so many wolves on the "island" was something we had not anticipated, something, moreover, which was likely to add very much to the difficulty of our undertaking, we did not for a moment contemplate its abandonment. It meant the use of great caution in going about the work, but as to backing out, I do not think the idea so much as occurred to either of us. As soon as we had sat down to our lunch, therefore, we began the discussion of the best method of procedure. "It is a big undertaking, Dick," said I, "a very big undertaking; but it looks like a straightforward piece of work; and it seems to me that what has been done once can certainly be done again, especially as we have our line already laid out for us. Don't you think so?" "Yes, I certainly think so," replied my partner. "What those Pueblos accomplished with their poor implements, we can surely do again with our superior tools. And some of it, at least, we can do ourselves, I believe--with our own hands, I mean. When it comes to digging out the ditch on the other side of the cañon, it will pay us to hire Mexicans; but the preliminary work of bringing the water down to the cañon, and, perhaps, the building of the flume, I believe we can do ourselves." "The building of the flume," said I, "is likely to be a pretty big job by itself. We can undoubtedly get the water down that far--that is simple--but the building of the flume is quite another thing. A small flume won't do; it has to be a big, strong, solid structure, and it strikes me that the very first thing to be done--the laying of the two big stringers across the cañon--is going to take us all we know, and a trifle over. In fact, I don't see myself how we are to do it." "I think I do," rejoined my partner; "but we shall need tools for the purpose. We can't build a big, solid flume with one pick, one shovel and two axes." "No, we certainly can't," I replied. "We shall need, too, a large amount of lumber," continued Dick, "heavy pieces, besides boards for floor and sides--two inch planks, at least--three inch would be better. We shall need several thousand feet altogether." "Well?" "Well, there is no lumber to be had nearer than Mosby, and to bring it from Mosby is out of the question. In the first place it would cost too much; and in the second place it is too far to pack it on mule-back." I nodded. "You mean we shall have to cut it out ourselves, here on the spot." "Yes; and to do that we shall need a long, two-handled rip-saw, and a saw-pit to work in. Besides this, the other tools we shall require, as far as I can think of them on the spur of the moment, are two or three pulley-blocks for placing the big timbers, hammers, nails, cross-cut saws and a big auger; for I propose that we pin the heavy parts together with wooden pins: it will save the carriage on spikes, and be just as good, if not better. Don't you think so, Pedro?" Pedro approved of the idea, and we were about to continue the discussion, when there broke out a great yelling and snarling of wolves up the arroyo. Dick and I sprang to our feet, and instinctively cast an eye up into the adjacent tree in search of a convenient limb; but Pedro, unconcernedly continuing his meal, remarked: "It is only that they eat the dead ones." "Well, they're a deal too close to be pleasant," said Dick. "I vote we move on down to the cañon and get a little further away from them." As I was heartily of the same opinion, we moved down accordingly, and there on the brink of the gorge surveyed the scene of our future labors. "Look here," said Dick. "Here's where we shall have to cut our timbers--on this side. See what a splendid supply there is right at hand." He pointed to a scar on the mountain close by where a landslide had brought down scores of trees of all sizes. "When did that come down, Pedro?" he asked. "Only last spring, señor," replied the Mexican. "And the trees are sound and good." "Mighty lucky for us," continued my partner; "for, you see, on the other side trees are scarce and they average rather small. But on this side, there are not only seasoned trees of all sizes in abundance, but it will be a down-hill pull to get them into place--a big item by itself. Besides that, just back here on this little level spot we can dig our saw-pit very conveniently. The only question to my mind is, whether we should not move our camp over to this side. If it were not for the wolves I should certainly say, 'Yes'; but as it is, I feel rather doubtful. The nearest water is up there at the lake, and if we did move over to this side that is where we should have to make our camp." "It's a long way up to the lake, Dick," said I, "and it might be dangerous going to and from our work--especially going back in the evening. In fact, it might easily happen that we couldn't get back at all." "That's what I was thinking of," replied my partner. "On the other hand," I continued, "if we keep our present camp, it will be very inconvenient, and will waste a great deal of time, to come to our work every day by way of those stone steps we climbed this morning." "Yes, that's it. But there's yet another way which, I think, would get us over both difficulties; one which would combine all the advantages and at the same time do away with the danger--or, to say the least, the inconvenience--of being harried by the wolves, and that is to build a bridge here. Then, if we move our camp to that little 'park' just below here, where we found that spring yesterday, it would only take us five minutes in the morning to come up here, cross the bridge and go to work. How does that strike you? What do you think, Pedro?" "It is good," replied Pedro. "First thing of everything a bridge; and that is easy. We make it to-day before the sun set." "We do, do we?" cried Dick, laughing. "That will be pretty expeditious; but if you think you know how, Pedro, go ahead and we'll follow." Pedro's eye twinkled. "The señor means it?" he asked. "Certainly," replied Dick. "_Bueno_," said Pedro, briefly. There was a little pine tree growing just on the brink of the chasm, and without another word the Mexican drew his ax from his belt, stepped up to the tree and cut it off about four feet from the ground, allowing the top to fall from the precipice into the stream below. "What's that for, Pedro?" I asked, in surprise. Pedro grinned. "I show you pretty quick," said he. "Come, now. We go back to the other side." Though we could not fathom his plan, having voluntarily made him captain for the time being we could not do less than obey orders; so away we went at a brisk walk back to the crack in the wall, down the steps in the rock, along the bank of the creek to camp--where we picked up our own ax--then up the ledge to the point opposite the one we had just left--a two-mile walk to accomplish thirty feet. Here, the first thing Pedro did was to take his lariat, a beautifully-made rawhide rope strong enough to hold a thousand-pound steer, tie a stone to one end and throw the stone across the cañon. I could not think what he was doing it for, until I saw that he was measuring the width. We made it about twenty-seven feet, its remarkable narrowness being accounted for by the great overhang of the cliff on our side. [Illustration: "I COULD NOT THINK WHAT HE WAS DOING IT FOR."] "Now," said Pedro, "we go up the mountain here a little way and cut some poles. It is just close by up here." We soon found the place, and there we cut off three poles about thirty feet long and eight inches thick at the small end. These we trimmed down to about the same thickness at the butt, and having roughly squared them, we dragged them down to the edge of the gorge. So far it had been a simple proceeding, but what puzzled me was how Pedro proposed to lay these sticks across the cañon. This, too, as it turned out, proved to be a simple matter, but its first step was one to make your hair stand on end to look at, nevertheless. It was now we found out why Pedro had cut off the little tree on the other side. Taking his lariat, he swung the loop above his head a time or two and cast it across the gorge. The loop settled over the tree-stump, when the Mexican pulled it tight and then proceeded with great care to tie the other end of the rope to a tree which stood very convenient on our side. What was he up to? Dick and I stood watching him in silence, when he stepped to the edge of the cliff, took hold of the rope with both hands, and swung himself off into space! My! It gave me cold shivers all down my back to see him hanging there with nothing but that thread of a rope to prevent his falling on the rocks a thousand feet below! Motionless and breathless, Dick and I watched him as he went swinging across, hand over hand--the rope sagging in the middle in an alarming manner--and profound was our relief when he drew himself up and stepped safely upon the opposite wall. But though this tight-rope performance had given us palpitation of the heart, Pedro himself appeared to be absolutely unaffected. With perfect calmness and unconcern, he turned round and said in the most matter-of-fact tone: "Now undo the rope and tie it to the end of one of those poles." As Pedro evidently regarded his feat of gymnastics as nothing out of the common, we affected to look upon it in the same light, so, following his directions, we tied the rope to one of the poles, when the Mexican began pulling it toward him, we pushing at the other end. Presently the pole was so far over the edge that it began to teeter, when Pedro called to us to go slowly. Then, while we pried it forward inch by inch, Pedro retreated backward up the gully until the end of the pole bumped against the wall on his side, when he came forward, keeping the rope taut all the time, lifted the pole and set its end on the rocks. The first beam of our bridge was laid. The other two poles we sent across by the same process, and then, scraping a bed for them in the sand and gravel, we laid them side by side, two with their butt-ends on our side, the other--the middle one--reversed. Pedro then took from his pocket a long strip of deer-hide with which he bound the three poles together, when we, at his request, having once more tied the rope to the tree, he laid his hand upon it, using it as a hand-rail, and walked across to our side, where with a second buckskin thong he bound the poles together at that end. Next he walked back to the middle of the bridge, and holding the rope with both hands, jumped up and down upon the poles, to make sure of their solidity, and finding them all right, he went to the far end, loosened the loop from the tree-stump, threw it across to us, and then, without any hand-rail this time, walked back across the flimsy-looking bridge to our side! What a head the man must have had! The bridge at its widest did not measure thirty inches, and yet the Mexican--barefooted, to be sure--walked erect across that fearful chasm without a thought of turning dizzy. I suppose he was born without nerves, and had never cultivated any, as we more civilized people do by our habits of life. For years he had lived out-of-doors, always at exercise, used to climbing in all sorts of dangerous places, and what perhaps may have counted for as much as anything else, he was one of the few Mexicans I have known who abjured that habit so common among his people--the habit of smoking cigarettes. I know very well that I, though I did not smoke cigarettes either, and though I thought myself pretty clear-headed, would never have dared such a thing, unless under pressure of great and imminent danger. "What did you untie the rope for, Pedro?" I asked. "Why not leave it for a hand-rail?" "Because the wolves will eat it," replied Pedro. "We will bring one of your hempen ropes and tie there: the wolves will not trouble that." "By the way, Pedro!" cried Dick. "How about those wolves? Won't they come across the bridge?" "I think not," the Mexican answered. "They are wary and suspicious--it is the nature of a wolf--and I think they will fear to venture." At that moment the sun set behind the peak, and as though its setting had been a signal, there arose in three or four different directions the howls of wolves. They were coming out for their nightly hunt. "Señores," said Pedro, "we will see very soon if the wolves will cross the bridge. It will not be long before they find our trail and then they will come down here. Let us hide us and watch. Up here, behind these rocks, is a good place." A little way up the bank, only a few steps back from the edge of the gorge, we lay down and waited. Presently, from the direction of the lake, there suddenly arose a joyous chorus of yelps, which proclaimed that our trail had been discovered. And not to us only was the "find" proclaimed. A second pack, hearing the call, hastened to join the hunt, hoping for a share in the spoil; we caught a glimpse of them as they came racing down one of the slopes which bordered the gully. The swelling clamor drew nearer and nearer, and pretty soon, with a rush of pattering feet, the wolves appeared; there must have been thirty of them. Down to the edge of the cañon they came, and there they drew up. One of them, a big, gray old fellow, the leader of one of the packs, probably, advanced to the end of the bridge, sniffed at it and drew hastily back. One after another, other wolves came forward, sniffed and withdrew. It was evident that Pedro had guessed right: they dared not cross. At this balking of their hopes they set up a howl of disappointment. Poor things! I felt quite sorry for them. They were _so_ hungry; and yet they dared not cross. Nevertheless, though I might feel sorry for them, I was more than glad that they feared to venture, for against such a pack as that our chances would have been small indeed. "Señores," whispered Pedro, "I try them yet a little more. It is quite safe. Stay you here and watch." With that, taking his ax in his hand, he rose up in full view of the pack and walked down to the end of the bridge. Such an uproar as broke forth I never heard. Many of the wolves ran up the banks on either side of the gully in order to get a sight of Pedro, and every one of them, those in front, those behind and those on the sides, lifted their heads and yelled at the man calmly standing there, scarce ten steps away. But they dared not cross. One of them, indeed, crowded forward against his will by those behind, was pushed out on to the bridge a little way, when, striving to get back, his hind feet slipped off. I thought he was gone, but by desperate scratching he succeeded in saving himself, when, rendered crazy by fright and rage he attacked the nearest wolves, fought his way through to the rear and fled straight away up the gully. This seemed to settle the matter. The whole pack, as though struck with panic, turned and pursued him. In ten seconds not one of them was to be seen. As Dick and I rose up from our hiding-place, Pedro came back to us. "You see," said he, "we are quite safe." "Yes," replied Dick. "It is evident we have nothing to fear from them on this side--and I'm mighty glad of it. Well, let us get down to camp. I think we've done a pretty good day's work, taking it all round, and I shall be glad of a good supper and a good rest." "So shall I," was my response. "And as to our day's work, Dick, I'm much mistaken if it isn't by long odds the most important one to us that either you or I ever put in." CHAPTER XVIII THE BIG FLUME As the first step in restoring the old Pueblo irrigation system, we moved camp next morning as arranged. Packing our scanty belongings upon old Fritz, we rode up the ledge, past the site of the proposed flume, and down the mountain a short distance to a point between two of the big claw-like spurs, where, two days before, in riding down to speak to Galvez, we had come across a little spring which would furnish water enough for ourselves and our animals. Thence, walking back to the bridge, taking with us, besides our rifles, the two axes and one of our long picket-ropes, Pedro first tied the latter to the tree on our side, and then, taking the other end in his hand, he walked across and fastened it to the stump on the far side. It was now our turn to cross, and very little did either of us relish the idea. Dick, who had volunteered to go first, took hold of the rope, set one foot on the bridge, and then--he could not resist it--did just what he ought not to have done:--looked down. The inevitable consequence was that he took his foot off again and retreated a few steps. "My word, Frank!" said he. "You may laugh if you like, but I'll be shot if I'm going to walk across that place. Crawling's good enough for me." So saying, he again approached the bridge, and going down on his hands and knees, crawled carefully over. For myself, I found it equally impossible to screw up my courage far enough to attempt the passage on foot. In fact, even crawling seemed too risky, so I just sat myself astride of the three poles and "humped" myself along with my hands to the other side, where the grinning Pedro gave me a hand to help me to my feet again. It was ignominious, perhaps, to be thus outdone by an ignorant, semi-savage Mexican; but, as Dick said, "You may laugh if you like": I was not going to break my neck just to prove that I was not afraid--when I was. At that hour in the morning the wolves, I suppose, were all asleep. At any rate we heard nothing of them. But knowing very well that they might turn up again at any moment, we wasted no time in starting our first piece of work, namely, preparing a place of refuge against them. Choosing a spot on the level near the point where we expected to dig our saw-pit, we cut a number of good, heavy logs, with which, after carefully notching and fitting them, we erected a pen, seven feet high and about ten feet square inside. It was the plainest kind of a structure: merely four walls, without even a doorway; but as it was not chinked it would be a simple matter for us to clamber up and get inside; whereas, for a wolf to do the same--with safety--would be far from simple with us waiting in there to crack him on the head with an ax as soon as he showed it above the top log. It may be that we were unnecessarily cautious in providing this refuge. If the wolves should molest us--a contingency pretty sure to occur some time or other--it was probable that we should hear them coming in time to retreat by the bridge, which was not more than a hundred yards distant. But on the other hand, if they should not give us timely notice of their approach, it might be very awkward, not to say dangerous--for Dick and me, at least. "For Pedro it might be all right," was my partner's comment, "but for us--no, thank you. I have no desire to be hustled across that bridge in a hurry. Just imagine how it would paralyze you to try to crawl across those poles, knowing that there was a wolf standing at the far end trying to make up his mind to follow you. No, thank you; not for me. We'll have a refuge here on 'dry land.'" It was a long day's work, the building of this pen, for we were careful to make it strong and solid; indeed, we had not yet quite finished it, when, about four in the afternoon, we heard the first faint whimperings of the wolves, a long way off somewhere. So, fearing they might come down upon us before we were quite ready for them, we postponed the completion of the job until the morrow, and re-crossing the bridge in the same order and the same manner as before, we went back to camp, where we spent the remaining hours of daylight in making things comfortable for a lengthened stay. To this end we built a little three-sided shelter of logs about four feet high, the side to the east, facing down the mountain, being left open. This we roofed with a wagon-sheet we had brought with us in place of a tent, dug a trench all round it to drain off the rain-water, covered the floor with a thick mat of pine-boughs, and there we were, prepared for a residence of six months or more, if necessary. "Now, Frank," said my partner, as we sat by the fire that evening, "we have about got to a point where we have to have tools. One of us has got to go to Mosby to get them, while the other stays here with Pedro. The question is, which shall go. Take your choice. I'll stay or go, just as you like." "Then I think you had better go, Dick," I replied. "You know better than I do what tools we shall need; you are far more handy at packing a mule than I am; and besides all that, it will give you an opportunity to see the professor." "Thanks, old chap," said Dick, heartily. "That is a consideration. Yes, I shall be glad to go, if you don't mind staying here with Pedro." "Not a bit," I replied. "He's an interesting companion; and if one needed a protector it would be hard to find a better one. No; I'll stay. I don't at all mind it." "Very well," said Dick. "Then I think I'll dig out the first thing in the morning. It will take me, I expect, about six days: two days each way and perhaps two days in Mosby. It depends on whether I can get the tools there that I want." "I should think you could," said I, "unless it is the big rip-saw." "I don't think there'll be any trouble about that," replied my partner. "Before the saw-mill came in, two or three of the mines used to cut their own big timbers by hand, and I've no doubt the old saws are lying around somewhere still. If they are, I'm pretty sure I can get one for next-to-nothing, for, of course, they are never used now." "There's one thing, Dick," said I, after a thoughtful pause, "which makes me feel a little doubtful about your going alone, and that is lest Galvez should interfere with you. If he caught sight of you, either going or returning, he might make trouble." "He might," replied Dick. "Though I don't much think he is likely to trouble you or me. Anyhow, when I leave to-morrow, you can take the glass and just keep watch on the village for an hour or so to see that he doesn't make any attempt to cut me off. If he should, you can raise a big smoke here to warn me and ride down to help." "All right. I will. But how about when you come back?" "Why, I'll arrange to leave The Foolscap, as we did before, at four o'clock in the morning, which would bring me about half way across the valley by sunrise. On the sixth morning, and every morning after till I turn up, you can take the field-glass and look out for me. From this elevation you would be able to see me long before Galvez could, and then you might ride down to meet me." "That's a good idea. Yes; I'll do that." Our camp was so placed that we could not only see the whole stretch of the valley between us and The Foolscap, but also the village and the country beyond it for many miles, and for about two hours after Dick's departure I sat there with the glass in my hand watching his retreating figure, and more especially watching the village. For, though in reality I had little fear that Galvez would attempt to play any tricks on him, particularly after Dick's exhibition of rifle-shooting, I was not going to take any avoidable chances. At the end of that time, however, I rose up, put away the glass, and in company with Pedro went over to the other side of the cañon, where we first finished up the building of the pen, and then, picking out a big, straight tree suitable for a stringer, I went to work upon it, trimming off the branches, while Pedro with the shovel began the task of digging out the saw-pit. That evening, and each succeeding evening, just before the sun set, we stopped work and retreated across the bridge in order to avoid any trouble with the wolves, which, as a rule, did not come out in force until about that hour. Once only during the time that Pedro and I were at work there by ourselves did any of them venture on an attack. It was a pack of about a dozen which came down on us one evening just before quitting-time, but as we heard them coming, we retired into the pen, whence I shot one of them before they had found out where we were; whereupon the rest bolted. I think the survivors of the fight in Wolf Arroyo--as we had named the ravine where we had had our battle--must have imparted to all the others the intelligence that we were dangerous creatures to deal with, for the wolves in general were certainly much less venturesome than they had been that first day. At night, though, they came out in droves, and continuous were the howlings, especially when the wind was south and they could smell us and our animals only a hundred yards away on the other side of the cañon. At sunrise on the sixth day, and again on the seventh, I searched the valley with the glass to see if Dick was within sight, but it was not until the morning of the eighth day that I saw him and old Fritz coming along, not more than five miles away. He must have made a very early start. Jumping on my pony, I rode to meet him, while Pedro remained behind to watch the village. I was very glad to see my partner safely back again, and especially pleased to hear the news he brought. The professor, he told me, was delighted with the turn of events which bade fair to provide Dick with a settled occupation, and one so well suited to his tastes and training; while as to Uncle Tom, Dick had written to him an account of the present condition of the King Philip mine, and had given him a full description of the undertaking upon which we proposed to enter. In reply, my genial guardian had sent to me a characteristic telegram, delivered the very morning Dick left Mosby. It read thus: "Go ahead. Money when wanted. How about book-learning now?" "How's that, Dick?" said I, handing it over to my companion to read. Dick laughed. "You made a pretty good guess, didn't you?" he replied. It was a matter of intense satisfaction to both of us to find our guardians so heartily in favor of the prosecution of our design, and it was with high spirits and a firm determination to "do or die" that we carried over the bridge the assortment of tools with which old Fritz was laden, and that very afternoon went systematically to work. It was not until we really went about it in earnest that we fully realized the magnitude of the task we had set ourselves when we undertook to build that flume. We were determined that if we did it at all we would do it thoroughly well, and in consequence the timbers we selected for the stringers were of such size and weight that we should have been beaten at the word "go" if we had not had for an assistant a man like Pedro, who combined in his own person the strength of five ordinary men. It was a pleasure to see him when he put forth all his powers. Give him a lever, and let him take his own time, and the most obstinate log was made to travel sulkily down hill when Pedro took it in hand. After measuring with particular accuracy the space between the sockets on either side of the gorge, we sawed off one big timber to the right length, and getting it into position over the saw-pit we squared its two ends and then sawed it flat on one side, leaving the other sides untouched. I had always understood that working in a saw-pit was a disagreeable job, but not till I had practical experience of it did I discover how correct my understanding had been. I discovered also why the expression, "top sawyer," was meant to indicate an enviable position. It fell to Pedro to be top sawyer, for the harder part of the work is the continuous lifting of the saw; but for all that, the man below has the worst of it, for if he looks up he gets a stream of sawdust into his eyes, and if he looks down he gets it in the back of his neck. There is no escape, as Dick and I found--for we took it in turns to go below and pull at the saw-handle. However, we were not going to shirk the task just because it happened to be unpleasant, and being fairly in for it, we made the best of it. Our first big timber being at length prepared, we got it down to the edge of the cañon, and then were ready for the next move--the most important move of all--getting it across the gorge. This could not be done by main strength, as had been the case with our bridge-timbers, for this stick, twenty-nine feet long and sixteen inches square, though pretty well seasoned, was an immense weight. But what could not be done by force might be accomplished by contrivance. The most bulky part of old Fritz's load had been composed of ropes and pulley-blocks, and it was with these that we intended to coax our big stick across the gap. Going over to the other side, we set up a framework of stout poles--a derrick, we called it--to the top of which we attached a big pulley. Threading a strong rope through this pulley, we carried it back and fastened it to a windlass which Dick built; he having seen dozens of them at work among the mines, having observed, fortunately, how they were made, and being himself a very handy fellow with tools. The windlass was securely anchored to two trees, when, the other end of the rope having been carried over and tied to our big log, we were ready to try the experiment of placing it athwart the chasm. With this object, Dick and Pedro turned the windlass, while I, crossing the bridge once more, pried the log forward from behind. It was a slow and laborious operation, but inch by inch the great log went grating and grinding forward, until at length its end overlapped the further edge of the gorge. Soon, with a sullen thump, my end fell into its socket, when Dick lowered his end into the socket opposite, and our first big stringer was successfully laid. It was a good start and greatly heartened us up to tackle the rest of the work. Our second big stringer we prepared and laid in the same manner--flat side up--and then came the most ticklish job of all--the placing of the two supports beneath each stringer. Without Pedro, with his steady nerves and his cat-like agility, we could not have done it. Tying a rope to the stringer, Pedro descended the face of the cliff and set the butt-end of the supporting beam in its socket--the other end being temporarily tied in place--repeating the same process on the other side. These beams we had measured and prepared with great care, so that when their bases were set, the beveled smaller ends, by persistent pounding, could be tightly jammed into the notch previously cut for their reception in the under side of the big stringer. It was a good piece of work, and very thankful I was when it was safely accomplished; for though to one with a clear head it might not be very dangerous, it looked so, and I was, as I say, greatly relieved when it was done. It might seem that we made these stringers unnecessarily strong, and perhaps we did. But we intended to be on the safe side if we could. Our flume was designed to be eight feet wide and five feet deep, and though the pitch was considerable and the water in consequence would run fast, if it should by chance ever fill to the top there would be by our calculation thirty-three or thirty-four tons of water in it. Having now our foundation laid, the rest of the work was plain, straightforward building, in which there was no special mechanical difficulty. One part of our task, however--the sawing of the lumber--we soon found to be so slow that we decided, if we could get them, to procure the assistance of two or three Mexicans from Hermanos, and with that object in view we sought an interview with our friend, José Santanna. To do this we supposed we should have to go down to Hermanos, but on consulting Pedro, we found that there was another and a much easier way. I had often wondered if Pedro, during all the years he had lived on the mountain, had subsisted exclusively on meat, or whether he had some means of obtaining other supplies, and now I found out. I found that he had a regular system of exchange with the villagers, by which he traded deer-meat and bear-meat for other provisions, and that by an arranged code of signals, familiar to everybody in the village, with the single exception of Galvez himself, he was accustomed to let it be known when he desired to communicate with the inhabitants. Accordingly, Pedro that day at noon went down to a certain spot on one of the spurs, and there built a fire, and piling on it a number of green boughs he soon had a column of smoke rising skyward. This was the signal, and that same evening he and we two boys, going down to the same spot, sat down there and waited, until about an hour after dark, we heard the sound of a horse's hoofs, and presently a man rode into sight. It proved to be Santanna himself, much to our satisfaction. He, as soon as he learned what we wanted, engaged to send us up three stout young Mexicans, an engagement he duly fulfilled--to the rage and bewilderment of Galvez, as we afterward heard, who could not for the life of him make out what had become of them. With this accession of strength we needed a second saw, and Dick went off to Mosby to get one. In a few days he returned with two saws instead of one, and with a load of dried apples, sugar and coffee with which to feed our hungry Mexicans. Flour--of a kind--we could get from the village, and deer-meat, though poor and tough at that season of the year, we could always procure. Dick also brought back with him that commodity so necessary in all business undertakings--some money. The professor had insisted on advancing him some, while Uncle Tom had enclosed fifty dollars in a registered letter to me. Thus armed, we procured two more Mexicans, and setting Pedro and his five compatriots to work with the three saws, while Dick and I did the carpenter work, we very soon began to make a showing. As it was obviously too dangerous to attempt to work on the bare stringers, we first laid a solid temporary floor of three-inch planks, and having then a good platform we could proceed in safety to set our big cross-pieces--upon which the permanent floor was afterward laid--and to go ahead with the rest of the building. There being no stint of timber, we could afford to make our flume immensely strong--and we did. The framework was composed mostly of ten-by-ten pieces, while the planks for the floor and sides were three inches thick. The wings at each end of the flume were extended up stream and down stream eight feet in either direction; and to prevent the water from getting around these ends we built rough stone walls on the edge of the gorge and filled in the spaces with well-tamped clay, of which we were fortunate enough to find a great supply close at hand. I do not intend to go into all the many details of the work, or to relate our mistakes or the accidents--all of them slight, fortunately--which now and then befell us. There was one little item of construction, however, which seemed to me so ingenious and withal so simple and so effective that I think it is worth special mention. When we came to lay our floor and build the sides, the question of leakage cropped up, when Dick suggested a plan which he said he had heard of as being adopted by sheepmen on the plains in building dipping-troughs. Each three-inch plank, before being spiked in place, was set up on edge, and along the middle of its whole length we hammered a dent about half an inch wide and half an inch deep. Then, taking the jack-plane, we planed off the projecting edges to the same level. The consequence was that when the plank became water-soaked, this dented line swelled up and completely closed any crack between itself and the plank above or beside it. It was an ingenious trick, and proved so successful that it was well worth the time and trouble it took. In fact, by the expenditure of time and trouble, in addition to a very modest sum of money, we did at length put together a flume which, I think I may say, was a very creditable piece of work. It was strenuous and unceasing labor, and at first it was pretty hard on me, but as my muscles became used to the strain I enjoyed it more and more, especially as every evening showed a forward step--a small one, perhaps, but still a forward step--toward the accomplishment of our object. Week after week we kept at it, steadily and perseveringly pegging away, and at last, one day near the end of July, summoning our six Mexicans to witness the ceremony, Dick and I, in alternate "licks" drove the last spike, and the flume was finished! CHAPTER XIX PEDRO'S BOLD STROKE All this time the wolves had let us alone. Frequently, toward evening, we would detect them standing on the hillsides watching us, but they were afraid to come near: the hammering and sawing, the stir and bustle checked them and they kept aloof--by daylight. Every night, though, they came down to the edge of the cañon to howl at us, and as the flume neared completion there was danger that they might summon courage to cross by it--the old bridge we had long ago tumbled into the stream. To prevent this, we at first set up every night a temporary gate across it, but later, we adopted a safer and better plan. We set two doors in our flume, one in the down-stream end, the other in the side, about the middle, so that by closing the former and opening the latter, all the water could be made to fall into the stream below. Our supply could thus be regulated at the flume instead of going all the way up to the old head-gate for the purpose. These gates being set, Pedro and another Mexican went up and opened connection between the lake and the low place where we had stirred up the deer the first day we were up there, and very soon there was a second little lake formed. Then, the flume being ready, we two and Pedro went up and raised the stone head-gate three inches. The rush with which the water came out was astonishing, and before the day was over it had come on down to the flume and was pouring through the side gate into the gorge--making a perfect defence against the wolves. During the two months, or thereabouts, that we had been engaged in this work, Dick had made altogether three trips to Mosby, on which occasions he had written to Arthur, detailing our progress. Arthur, on his part, had written to us--or, rather, somewhat to our surprise, he had written to the professor instead of directly to Dick--once from Santa Fé and once from the City of Mexico, whither he had been sent to institute a search of the records there. His last letter stated that up to that time no trace of the old patent had been found, but that, in spite of that drawback, his father was vigorously stirring things up at his end of the line, and that we might expect to see "something doing" in the enemy's camp at any time. He stated also that he had hopes of rejoining us some time early in July. In consequence, we had been constantly on the watch for him for nearly a month, but here was the end of July approaching and no Arthur had appeared. As we were very anxious to know when to expect him, and as we were also in need of new supplies, the moment the flume was finished Dick set off once more for Mosby, while Pedro and I, transferring all our tools from the far side of the gorge, picked out a new working-ground on our side. There was nothing further to be done on the "island," but though the flume was finished and ready for use, we still had need of a large amount of lumber in the construction of our ditch, for at the head of every draw it would be necessary to build a short flume, or, in some places, a culvert, to allow a passage for the rain-water which otherwise during the summer thunder-storm season would wash our ditch full of earth and rubbish. As it would be too inconvenient, unfortunately, to cut lumber in the old place and carry it across the flume, we moved all the tools, as I said, over to our side, and following along the line of the ditch for about half a mile, we selected a spot above it on the mountain and there set our Mexicans to work felling trees and digging new saw-pits. From the place selected we could see out over the plain in all directions; a fact which had been one of our reasons for choosing that particular spot. Indeed it had become a matter of great importance that we should be able to keep a watch on the valley, for we believed we had more than ever reason to fear some act of hostility on the part of the padron. Dick had no more than gone that day, when we were surprised by receiving a daylight visit from our friend, José Santanna, who informed us that Galvez of late had been showing unwonted signs of unrest; that he was growing more and more suspicious, irritable and evil-tempered. That the evening before a man had ridden into the village and had handed Galvez a paper--some legal notice, I guessed--upon receipt of which the padron had at first broken into a towering rage; had then gone about for half a day in a mood so morose and snappish that no one dared go near him; and that finally he had ordered his horse and ridden away, saying that he was going to Taos. "To Taos!" I exclaimed. "What has he gone to Taos for?" José shrugged his shoulders and spread out his hands, palms upward, as much as to say, "Who knows?" "Have we scared him out after all, I wonder," said I. "Did he say anything about coming back, José?" "He said he would return in four days," replied the Mexican. "And is that all you know about it?" "_Si, señor_, that is all. I know no more." From this conversation it was plain to me that the law was beginning to work, and that Galvez was becoming uneasy. Knowing his character, I, too, became uneasy, for, should he be rendered desperate, there was no telling what tactics he might resort to. It was this consideration that made me so anxious for the safe return of my two partners. From my vantage-point on the mountain I kept up a pretty constant watch for the next few days; no one could come across the valley from any direction without my seeing them--during daylight, that is--and unless Galvez had slipped into Hermanos after dark I was sure he had not returned, when, about three o'clock on the afternoon of the fourth day I espied Dick, a long way off, coming back from Mosby. It was twelve hours earlier than I had expected him, and wondering if he had any special reason for making such a quick trip, I got my pony and hurried off to meet him. I had a feeling that Dick was bringing news of some sort, and his first words after shaking hands proved the correctness of my impression. "Well, old chap!" he exclaimed. "I've got news for you this time that will make you 'sit up and take notice':--Arthur may be here any day; and he has at last got track of that patent." "Got a letter from him, then, did you?" I asked. "Yes; written from Cadiz, in Spain, more than three weeks ago." "From Cadiz!" I cried. "What's he doing there?" "His father sent him over to go through a chest of old papers they have in their house there. Arthur says--I'll give you his letter to read as soon as we get to camp--he says that he spent a fortnight reading all sorts of musty documents, without success, when at last he came upon an old note-book with the name of Arthur the First on its fly-leaf, and in that he found a single line referring to the patent--the only mention that has turned up anywhere." "And what does that say?" "It says---- Here, wait a minute; hold my rifle. I'll show you what it says." So saying, Dick took the letter out of his pocket, and finding the right place, handed it to me. The passage read: "It was an old memorandum-book in which my very great-grandfather used to note down all the particulars of the copper shipments and other matters dealing with the K. P. mine; but on the last fly-leaf was this entry, written in English: 'Mem. In case of accident to myself: The King's patent and the King's commission are in a hole in the wall above the door of the strong-room.' Where the strong-room may have been," Arthur went on, "I don't know, unless it is in the _Casa_. Ask Pedro." "What do you think of that?" asked Dick. "I think---- Well, I think we'll do as Arthur says: ask Pedro." In the course of an hour we had reached camp, when Dick, as soon as he had greeted the faithful Mexican, at once propounded the important question. "Pedro," said he, without any preface, "did you ever hear of the 'strong-room'?" "Surely," replied Pedro, with an air of surprise at being asked such a question. "Everybody knows the strong-room. It is a little room on the east side of the _Casa_; it has a door and no window; it is where one time the copper was stored, waiting for the pack-trains to come and take it away." "It is, is it!" cried Dick. "Then, Frank, I shouldn't be a bit surprised if those deeds were in there now. How are we to find out?" "Go and look!" I exclaimed, springing to my feet. "Now's our chance! Galvez is away--gone to Taos. Let us make a try for it at once. He's due to be back to-day, and then it will be too late. Come on! Let's get out! We haven't a minute to lose! Will you come with us, Pedro?" To my surprise, and, I must confess, to my disappointment also, Pedro shook his head. I supposed he was afraid to leave his mountain, and for a moment my opinion of his courage suffered a relapse. But I was doing him an injustice, as I heartily owned to myself, when, pointing out over the valley, he said, quietly: "It is too late already, señor. Look there!" Half a mile the other side of Hermanos, riding toward the village, were three horsemen, one of whom we recognized as Galvez. Who the others might be, and why the padron should be bringing them to Hermanos, we could not guess. We were destined, however, to learn all about them later in the day. As a matter of course, the sole subject of our thoughts and our conversation was the King's patent, and whether or not it was still in its hiding-place above the door of the strong-room. The only way to find out was to get in there and search for it, but how to do that was the question. Many plans did we discuss and discard, and we were still discussing as we sat round the fire that night--our Mexican workmen being encamped some distance away--when Pedro suddenly jumped up, and signaling to us to keep quiet, stood for a moment with his head bent forward, listening intently. His sharp ears had detected some sound inaudible to our less practised hearing. Making a quick backward motion with his hand, he whispered sharply: "Get away! Get away back from the light of the fire while I go see!" We speedily retreated up the hill a little way and hid ourselves among the trees, while Pedro, with the stealth of a wild animal, slipped silently off into the darkness. So quick and so noiseless were the movements of the clumsy-looking Mexican that I thought to myself I had rather be hunted by wolves than by that skilful woodsman, with his keen senses, his giant strength and his deadly, silent bow and arrow. I did not wonder any more that Galvez kept himself aloof. For two or three minutes silence prevailed, when we saw Pedro step back into the circle of light, and with him another man. It was our friend, José Santanna, again. "Well, José!" cried Dick. "What can we do for you?" "Señor," replied the Mexican, "I came up to tell you something--to warn you. The padron is come back. He has been to Taos and he has brought back with him two men. They are bad--like himself. I go up to the _Casa_ this evening while they are at supper and I hear them talking and laughing together through the door which is open. They say they like now to see three boys and a stupid peon"--he nodded toward Pedro--"get them out. They say if they catch Pedro they hang him, and if they catch 'that young Blake' they shoot him. They are dangerous, señor." "We shall have to keep our eyes wide open," said Dick. "Do you think they'll venture up here, José?" "I think not," replied the Mexican. "One of the men say, 'Let us go up on the mountain and catch them,' but the padron, he say very quick, 'No, no. I do not go up on the mountain. While they are there they do no harm, but if they come down here, then----!'" "I see," said Dick. "They mean to hold the fort against all comers. It is pretty evident, I think, that Galvez has been back to his old haunts, hunted out a couple of his old-time cronies, and brought them back to garrison the _Casa_, meaning to defy the law to get him out." "That's it, I expect," said I. "And our chances of getting into the strong-room are a good deal slimmer than ever." It certainly did look so; yet, as it happened, I never made a greater mistake. Who would have guessed how soon we were to get that chance? And who would have guessed that the man who was to provide the opportunity--and that by a plan so bold that I am astonished at it yet--was the man whom I had that day mentally accused of cowardice? How I did apologize to him in my thoughts! "José," said Pedro, "does the padron still go to bed every night at ten o'clock, as he used to do?" "_Si_," replied the cowman. "Does he always come out to the well to get a drink of cold water just before he goes to bed, as he used to do?" "_Si_," replied the cowman once more. "Those two men, are they to sleep in that room next the padron's?" "_Si_," replied the cowman for the third time. "Good!" exclaimed Pedro. "What time is it, señor?" turning suddenly to Dick. "Half past eight," replied my partner, looking at his watch. "Good!" exclaimed Pedro once more. For a minute he sat silent, his lower lip stuck out, frowning at the fire, while we sat watching him, wondering what he was thinking about, when, with an angry grunt he muttered to himself, "Stupid peon, eh! Humph! We'll see!" Then, jumping up, he said briskly: "Señores, get your horses. We will search the strong-room to-night." Still wondering what scheme he had in his head, we saddled up and followed him as he rode down the mountain and out upon the plain, too much engaged for the moment in picking our way to find an opportunity to ask questions. It seemed to me that our guide must have something of the wild animal in him, for, though it was very dark, he never hesitated for a moment, but went jogging along, threading his way through the sage-brush without a pause or a stumble. Either he or his burro must have had the cat-like gift of being able to see in the dark. In about an hour we saw dimly the walls of the _Casa_ looming up near us, and passing by it, we went on down to the creek where we dismounted and tied up our horses to the trees. Then, following down the creek for a short distance, we presently came opposite the front gate of the _Casa_, about a hundred yards distant. The village on the other side of the stream was dark and silent, but in one of the rooms in the _Casa_, facing the gateway, we could see a light burning. "That is the padron's room," whispered José. "He has not gone to bed yet." Against the light of the open door we could see between us and the house the long, black arm of the well-sweep, and advancing toward it, we had come within about thirty steps of it when Pedro requested us to stop there and lie down, while he himself went on and crouched behind the curbing of the well. We could not see him; in fact we could see nothing but the lights in the window and doorway, the well-sweep, and, very dimly, the outline of the building. There we lay in dead silence for a quarter of an hour, wondering what Pedro expected to do, when we heard voices, and the next moment the figures of two men showed themselves in the lighted doorway. One of them carried a candle, and the pair of them went into the next room--all the rooms opened into the courtyard--and shut the door. For five minutes the light showed through the little window and then went out. The padron's friends had gone to bed. For another five minutes we waited, and then the padron himself appeared. We could hear the jingle of his spurs as he came leisurely down to the well to get his nightly drink of cold water. We lay still, hardly daring to breathe. Presently, we heard the squeak of the well-sweep and saw it come round, dip down and rise again. Then we heard the clink of a cup: Galvez was taking his drink. He never finished it! At that moment Pedro's burly form rose up from behind the curbing; he took two steps forward, and with his great right hand he seized Galvez by the neck from behind, giving it such a squeeze that the unfortunate man could not utter a sound. We heard the cup fall to the ground with a clatter. Then, grasping the helpless padron by the back of his trousers, the little giant swung him off his feet and hoisting him high above his head, stepped to the rim of the curbing. The next moment there was a muffled splash--Galvez had been dropped into the well! He had been dropped in feet foremost, however, and as the well was only twelve feet deep with four feet of water in it, his life was not endangered. At this point we all jumped up and ran forward, reaching the well just as Galvez recovered his feet, as we could tell by the coughing and spluttering noises which came up from below. As we approached, Pedro leaned over the coping and said in a low voice: "Good-evening, Padron. This is Pedro Sanchez. If you make any noise I drop the bucket of water on your head." This gentle hint was not lost upon Galvez, who contented himself with muttered growlings of an uncomplimentary nature, when Pedro, turning to Dick, whispered sharply: "Run quick now to the strong-room. I stay here to guard the padron." In company with the barefooted José, we ran into the courtyard, where the Mexican pointed out to us the door of the strong-room, the first on the right, and while Dick and I pulled it open, taking great care to make no noise, José himself ran on to the padron's room, whence he quickly returned with a candle in his hand. While Dick stood guard outside, in case the padron's two friends should come out, I slipped into the little room, where, finding an empty barrel, I placed it in front of the doorway, jumped upon it, and taking my sheath-knife, I stabbed at the adobe wall just above the lintel of the door. The second or third stroke produced a hollow sound and brought down a shower of dried mud, when, vigorously attacking the spot, I soon uncovered a little board which had been let into the wall and plastered over with adobe. In a few seconds I had pried this out, when I found that the space behind it was hollow, and thrusting in my hand I brought out a brass box shaped like a magnified cigar-case. "Dick!" I whispered, eagerly. "I've found something! Come in here!" My partner quickly joined me, when we pried open the box, finding that it contained a parcel wrapped up in a piece of cloth. Imagine our excitement when on tearing off the wrapping we found that the contents of the package consisted of two parchment documents, written in Spanish! We had no time to examine them thoroughly, but a hasty glance convincing us that we had indeed found what we sought, and there being nothing else in the hole, I crammed the parchments back into the box, shoved the box into my pocket, buttoned my coat, and away we went back to the well. "Find it?" whispered Pedro. I replied by patting my pocket. Pedro nodded; and then, having first lowered the bucket into the well again, he leaned over the coping and said softly: "Padron, you may come out now as soon as you like." With that, leaving Galvez to climb out if he could, or to remain where he was if he couldn't, we all turned and ran for it. Having recovered our horses, José bolted for home, while we went off as fast as we dared in the darkness for camp. There, by the light of the fire, we examined our capture. One of the parchments was the commission of old Arthur the First to the "Governorship" of the King Philip mine; the other was the original "Grant" of the Hermanos tract from Philip V, King of Spain, the Indies and a dozen other countries, to his trusty and well-beloved subject, Arturo Blake. "This _is_ great!" cried Dick. "This will settle the title without any chance of dispute. Galvez may as well pack up and go now. I wonder what he'll do?" "I don't know what Galvez will do," said I; "but I can tell you what _we_ must do, Dick. We must cut and run. This patent must be put away in a safe place--and it isn't safe here by any means. Galvez will be about crazy with rage at having been dropped into the well; and for another thing, he'll see that hole above the door, and he'll know that whatever it was we took out of the hole, it must be something of importance to have induced us to come raiding his premises like that." "That's true," said Dick, nodding his head. "And I shouldn't be a bit surprised," I continued, "now that he has two other unscrupulous rascals to back him, if he were to come raiding us in return. What do you think, Pedro?" "I think it is likely," replied the Mexican. "I think it is well that you go, and stop the Señor Blake from coming here. Those men are dangerous. For me, I have no fear: I can take care of myself." "Then we'll skip," said Dick. "It's safest; and it's only for a time, anyhow, for, of course, Galvez's legal ejection is certain, sooner or later, now that we have the patent in our hands. So we'll get out, Frank, the very first thing to-morrow." It was the night of July 28th that we came to this resolution; though, as a matter of fact, we were not aware of it at the time, for we had lost track of the days of the month. It was the astounding event of the day following that impressed the date so indelibly on our memories. Men plot and plan and calculate and contrive, thinking themselves very clever; but how feeble they are when Dame Nature steps in and takes a hand, and how easily she can upset all their calculations, we were to learn, once for all, that coming day. CHAPTER XX THE MEMORABLE TWENTY-NINTH Though we had intended to get off about sunrise we failed to do so, for we found that Galvez was on the lookout for us. No sooner had we started than we saw the three men ride out from the _Casa_ with the evident intention of cutting us off, so, not wishing to get into a fight if it could be avoided, we turned back again. Thereupon, the enemy also turned back; but, watching their movements, we saw that soon after they had entered the house, the figure of one of them appeared again on the roof, and there remained--a sentinel. Plainly, they were not going to let us get away if they could help it. At midday, however, we saw the sentinel go down, presumably to get his dinner, when we thought we would try again. Pedro therefore went off to get our horses for us, but he had hardly been gone a minute when we were startled to see him coming back with them, running as fast as his short legs would permit. "What's the matter, Pedro?" cried Dick. "What's wrong?" "I see the Señor Arturo coming!" shouted the Mexican. "What!" cried Dick, and, "Where?" cried I, both turning to look out over the plain. That man, Pedro, must have had eyes like telescopes to pretend to distinguish any one at such a distance, but on examining the little black speck through the glass I made out that it was a horseman, and after watching him for a few seconds I concluded that it was indeed our friend, Arthur, returning. "Frank!" cried my partner. "We must ride out to meet him at once! Pedro, you stay here and watch the _Casa_. If those three men come out, make a big smoke here so that we may know whether we have to hurry or not." "It is good," replied the Mexican; and seeing that he might be relied upon to give us timely warning--for he at once began to collect materials for his fire--away we went. Riding briskly, though without haste, we had left the mountain and were crossing a wide depression in the plain, when, on its further edge, there suddenly appeared the solitary horseman, riding toward us at a hard gallop. Dick turned in his saddle and cast a glance behind him. "The smoke!" he cried; and without another word we clapped our heels into our ponies' ribs and dashed forward. As Arthur approached--for we could now clearly see that it was he--we observed that he kept looking back over his left shoulder, and just as we arrived within hailing distance three other horsemen came in sight over the southern rim of the depression, riding at a furious pace, their bodies bent forward over their horses' necks. Each of the three carried a rifle, we noticed, and one of the three was Galvez. At sight of us, the pursuers, seemingly taken aback at finding themselves confronted by three of us, when they had expected to find only one, abruptly pulled up. This brief pause gave time to Arthur to join us, when Dick, slipping down from his horse, advanced a few steps toward the enemy, kneeled down, and ostentatiously cocked his rifle. Whether the padron's quick ears caught the sound of the cocking of the rifle--which seemed hardly likely, though in that clear, still atmosphere the sharp _click-click_ would carry a surprisingly long distance--I do not know; but whatever the cause, the result was as unexpected as it was satisfactory. Galvez uttered a sharp exclamation, whirled his horse round, and away they all went again as fast as they had come. "See that!" cried Arthur. "What did I tell you, Dick? We have to thank that locoed steer for that." "I expect we have," replied Dick. "Not a doubt of it," said I. "I was sure that Galvez was much impressed by the way that steer went over, and now I'm surer. Lucky he was, too, for those three fellows meant mischief, if I'm not mistaken." "That's pretty certain, I think," responded Arthur. "And it was another piece of good fortune that you turned up just when you did. How did it happen?" We explained the circumstances, but we had no more than done so, when Arthur exclaimed: "Why, here comes old Pedro now! At a gallop, too! Everybody seems to be riding at a gallop this morning." Looking toward the mountain, we saw the Mexican on his burro coming down at a great pace, but we had hardly caught sight of him when he suddenly stopped. He was on a little elevation, from which, evidently, he could see Galvez and his friends careering homeward, and observing that the affair was over and that his assistance was not needed, he forthwith halted, and, with a mercifulness not too common among Mexicans, jumped to the ground in order to ease his steed of his weight. There he stood, nearly two miles away, with his hand on the burro's shoulders, watching the retreating enemy, while we three rode toward him at a leisurely pace. As will be readily imagined, there was great rejoicing among us over the safe return of our friend and partner, and a great shaking of hands all round, when, hardly giving him time to get his breath again, Dick and I plunged head-first into the relation of all we had done since we saw him last: the finding of the head-gate and the building of the flume; triumphantly concluding our story with the recovery of the patent the night before. "Well, that was a great stroke, sure enough!" exclaimed Arthur. "That will settle the business. The 'stupid peon' got ahead of the padron that time, all right. But before we talk about anything else, Dick," he went on, "I have something I want to tell you about, something in my opinion--and the professor thinks so too--even more important--to you--than the title to the Hermanos Grant." "What's that?" cried my partner, alarmed by his serious manner. "Nothing wrong, is there?" "No, there's nothing wrong, I'm glad to say. Quite the contrary, in fact. I'm half afraid to mention it, old man, for fear I should be mistaken after all, and should stir you up all for nothing, but--why didn't you tell me, Dick, that your name was Stanley?" "Why, I did!" cried Dick. "No, you didn't, old fellow. If you remember, you were going to do so that first day we met, down there in the cañon by the opening of the King Philip mine, when Pedro interrupted you by remarking that the darkness would catch us if we stayed there any longer." "I remember. Yes, that's so. Ah! I see. That was why you addressed your letters to the professor instead of to me." "Yes, that was the reason. It didn't occur to me till I came to write to you that I didn't know your name." "That was rather funny, wasn't it?" said Dick, laughing. "But I don't see that it made much difference in the end: I got your letters all right." My partner spoke rather lightly, but Arthur on the other hand looked so serious, not to say solemn, that Dick's levity died out. "What is it, old man?" he asked. "What difference does it make whether my name is Stanley or anything else?" "It makes a great difference, Dick," replied Arthur. "I believe"--he paused, hesitating, and then went on, "I'm half afraid to tell you, for fear there might be some mistake after all, but--well--I believe, Dick, that I've found out who you are and where you came from!" It was Dick's turn to look serious. His face turned a little pale under its sunburn. "Go on," said he, briefly. "You remember, perhaps," Arthur continued, "how I told you that one reason why I had to go back by way of Santa Fé was because I had some inquiries to make on behalf of my mother. Well, as it turned out, Santa Fé was the wrong place. The place for me to go to was Mosby, and the man for me to ask was--the professor! "When I reached Mosby yesterday," he continued, "I rode straight on up to his house, when the kindly old gentleman, as soon as I had explained who I was, made me more than welcome. We were sitting last evening talking, when I happened to cast my eye on the professor's book shelf, and there I saw something which brought me out of my chair like a shot. It was a volume of Shakespeare, one of a set, volume two--that book which the professor found in the wagon-bed when he found you. I knew the book in a moment--for we have the rest of the set at home, Dick!" Dick stopped his horse and sat silent for a moment, staring at Arthur. Then, "Go on," said he once more. "I pulled the book down from the shelf," Arthur went on, "and looked at the fly-leaf. There was an inscription there--I knew there would be--'Richard Livingstone Stanley, from Anna.'" "Well," said Dick. His voice was husky and his face was pale enough now. "Dick," replied Arthur, reaching out and grasping my partner's arm, "my mother's name was Anna Stanley, and she gave that set of Shakespeare to her brother, Richard, on his twenty-first birthday!" For a time Dick sat there without a word, not at first comprehending, apparently, the significance of these facts--that he and Arthur must be first cousins--while the latter quickly related to us the rest of the story. Dick's mother having died, his father determined to leave Scotland and seek his fortune in the new territory of Colorado, whose fame was then making some stir in the world. In company, then, with a friend, David Scott--the "Uncle" David whom Dick faintly remembered--he set out, taking the boy with him. From the little town of Pueblo, on the Arkansas, Richard Stanley had written that he intended going down to Santa Fé, and that was the last ever heard of him. At that time--the year '64--everything westward from the foot of the mountains was practically wilderness. Into this wilderness Richard Stanley had plunged, and there, it was supposed, he and his son and his friend had perished. As for Dick, he seemed to be dazed--and no wonder. For a boy who had never had any relatives that he knew of to be told suddenly that the young fellow sitting there with his hand on his arm was his own cousin, was naturally a good deal of a shock. If it needed a counter-shock to jolt his faculties back into place, he had it, and it was I who provided it. In order to give the pair an opportunity to get used to their new relationship, I was about to ride forward to join Pedro, when I saw the Mexican suddenly commence cutting up all sorts of queer antics, jumping about and waving his arms in a frantic manner. "What's the matter with Pedro?" I called out. "Look there, you fellows! What's the matter with Pedro?" "Something wrong!" cried Dick. "Get up!" Away we went at a gallop, keeping a sharp lookout in all directions lest those three men should bob up again from somewhere, while the Mexican himself, jumping upon his burro, rode down to meet us. "What's up, Pedro?" Dick shouted, as soon as we had come within hearing. "Anything the matter?" "Señores," cried Pedro, speaking with eager rapidity, "those men come hunting us. I watch them ride back almost to the _Casa_, and then of a sudden they change their minds and turn up into the mountain. They think to catch us, but"--he stretched out his great hand and shut it tight, his black eyes gleaming with excitement--"if the señores will give me leave, we will catch them!" If his surmise was right, if those men were indeed coming after us as he believed, there was no question that if any of us could beat them at that game, Pedro was the one. Dick was a fine woodsman, but Pedro was a finer--my partner himself would have been the first to acknowledge it--and it was Dick in fact who promptly replied: "Go ahead, Pedro! You're captain to-day! Take the lead; we'll follow!" "_'Sta bueno!_" cried the Mexican, greatly pleased. "Come, then!" Turning his burro, he rode quickly back to camp, and there, at his direction, having unsaddled and turned loose our horses, we followed him to the flume, taking with us nothing but our rifles. There had been a little thunder-storm the day before, and the soil near the flume was muddy. Through this mud, by Pedro's direction, we tramped; crossed the flume on the gangway we had laid for the purpose, leaving muddy tracks as we went; jumped down at the other end and set off hot-foot up the gully to the little new-made lake and thence on up to the old lake; in several soft places purposely leaving footmarks which could not escape notice. "What's all this for, Pedro?" asked Dick. "What's your scheme?" "The padron will see our tracks crossing the flume," replied Pedro. "He will think you take Señor Arturo up to show him all the work you have done, and he will follow. If he does so, we have him! When he is safe across, we slip back, and then I hide me among the rocks on the other side and guard the flume. Without my leave they cannot cross back again. Thus I hold them on the wrong side, while you ride away at your ease to Mosby. Now, come quick with me!" So saying, Pedro turned at right angles to the line of the ditch, climbed a short distance up the hillside, and then, under cover of the trees, started back at a run, until presently he brought us to a point whence we could look down upon the flume, its approaches at both ends, and the line of the ditch up to the head of the little lake. Hitherto it had been all bustle and activity, but now we were called upon to exercise a new virtue, one always difficult to fellows of our age--patience. It must have been nearly an hour that we had lain there, sometimes talking together in whispers, but more often keeping silence, when Dick, pulling out his watch, said in a low voice: "If those fellows are coming, I wish they'd come. It's twenty minutes past two; and we're in for a thunder-storm, I'm afraid. Do you notice how dark it's getting?" "Yes," whispered Arthur. "And such a queer darkness. I'm afraid it's a forest fire and not a thunder-storm that is making it." "I believe you're right," replied Dick. "It _is_ a queer-colored light, isn't it?" We could not see the sun on account of a high cliff at the foot of which we were lying, and if we had had any thought of getting up to look at it, we were stopped by Pedro, who at this moment whispered sharply to us to keep quiet. His quick eyes had detected a movement on the far side of the cañon. Intently we watched, and presently the figure of a man stepped out from among the trees. Advancing cautiously to the end of the flume, he examined the tracks in the mud, climbed up to the gang-plank, inspected the tracks again, and turning, made a sign with his hand; whereupon two other men stepped out from among the trees. The three then crossed the flume, jumped down, and set off up the gully. We watched them as they followed the ditch up to the new lake, and thence to the draw which led up to the old lake. At the mouth of the draw they paused for some time, hesitating, doubtless, whether they should trust themselves in that deep, narrow crevice--a veritable trap, for all they knew. Presumably, however, they made up their minds to risk it, for on they went, and a few minutes later were lost to sight. By this time the darkness had so increased that the men were hardly distinguishable, though they, themselves, seemed to take no notice of it. The sun was behind them, and so intent were they in following our tracks and keeping watch ahead, that they never thought to cast a glance upward to see what was coming. "Pedro," whispered Dick, as soon as the men had vanished, "let us get out of here. Either the woods are on fire or there'll be a tremendous storm down on us directly." Pedro, however, requested us to wait another five minutes, when, jumping to his feet, he cried: "Come, then! Let us get back! We have them safe now!" Down we ran, but no sooner had we got clear of the trees than Pedro stopped short. In a frightened voice--the first and only time I ever knew him to show fear--he ejaculated: "Look there! Look there!" Following his pointing finger, we looked up. The uncanny darkness was accounted for:--a great semi-circular piece seemed to have been bitten out of the sun! "The eclipse!" cried Arthur. "I'd forgotten all about it. This is the twenty-ninth of July. The newspapers were full of it, but I'd forgotten all about it!" "A total eclipse, isn't it?" asked Dick, quickly. "Yes, total." "Then it will be a great deal darker presently. We'd better get out of this, and cross the flume while we can see." In fact, it was already so dark that the small birds, thinking it was night, were busily going to bed; the night-hawks had come out, the curious whir of their wings sounding above our heads; and then--a sound which made us all start--there came the long-drawn howl of a wolf! "Run!" shouted Dick. "They'll be after us directly!" Undoubtedly, the wolves, too, were deceived into the belief that night was approaching, for even as Dick spoke we heard in three or four different directions the hunting-cry of the packs. Wasting no time, as will be imagined, away we went, scrambled up on the gang-plank of the flume, and there stopped to listen. "I hope those men"--Dick began; when, from the direction of the draw above there arose a fearful clamor of howling. There was a shot! Another and another, in quick succession! And then, piercing through and rising above all other sounds, there went up a cry so dreadful that it turned us sick to hear it. What had happened? The hour that followed was the worst I ever endured, as we crouched there in the darkness and the silence, not knowing what had occurred up above. At length the shadow moved across the face of the sun, it was brilliant day once more, when, the moment we thought it safe to venture, down we jumped and set off up the line of the ditch. We had not gone a quarter-mile when we saw two men coming down, running frantically. In a few seconds they had reached the spot where we stood waiting for them, not knowing exactly what we were to expect of them. Never have I seen such panic terror as these men exhibited; they were white and trembling and speechless. For two or three minutes we could get nothing out of them, but at length one of them recovered himself enough to tell us what had happened. The wolves had caught them in that narrow, precipitous arroyo, coming from both ends at once. The two men, themselves, had succeeded in scrambling up to a safe place, but Galvez, attempting to do the same, had lost his hold and fallen back. Before he could recover his feet the wolves were upon him, and then----! Well--no wonder those men were sick and pale and trembling! That the padron's designs against us had been evil there could be no doubt--in fact, his shivering henchmen admitted as much--but, quite unsuspicious of the coming of the midday darkness, and knowing nothing of the fierce nature of these "island" wolves, he had run himself into that fatal trap. It was truly a dreadful ending. Does any one wonder now that the date of the eclipse of '78 should be so indelibly stamped on our memories? There being now nothing to interfere with us, we went down to Hermanos and took possession of the _Casa_, and from that time forward the work on our irrigation system moved along without let or hindrance from anything but the seasons. But though it was now plain sailing, and though we eventually got together a force of twenty Mexicans to do the digging, the amount of work was so great that we had not nearly finished that part of the ditch which wound over the foothills when frost came and stopped us. We at once moved everything down to the village and began again at that end, keeping hard at it until frost stopped us once more, and finally for that year. In fact, it was not until the spring of '80 that we at last turned in the water--a moderate amount at first--but since then the quantity has been increased year by year, until now we are supplying at an easy rental a great number of small farms, many of them cultivated by Mexicans, but the majority by Americans. The largest of the farms is that run by the two cousins and myself, and its management, together with the supervision and maintenance of the water-supply keeps us all three on the jump. As for old Pedro, he stuck to his mountain until just lately, when we persuaded him to come down and take up his residence on the ranch; though even now, every fall he goes off for a three-months' hunt and we see nothing of him till the first snow sends him down again. He is a privileged character, allowed to go and come as he pleases; for we do not forget his great services in turning this worthless desert into a flourishing community of busy wheat-farmers and fruit-growers; nor do we forget that it was really he who started the whole business. As to that, though, we are not likely to forget it, for we have on hand a constant reminder. Above the fireplace in our house there hangs, plain to be seen, a relic with which we would not part at any price--the "indicator" which pointed the way for us when we first set out on this enterprise--the original copper-headed arrow! THE END 
41574	----	Transcriber's note: Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_). Text enclosed by equal signs is in bold face (=bold=). Small capitals were replaced with ALL CAPITALS. A MAN'S MAN by IAN HAY * * * * * =By Ian Hay= A SAFETY MATCH. With frontispiece. A MAN'S MAN. With frontispiece. THE RIGHT STUFF. With frontispiece. HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY BOSTON AND NEW YORK * * * * * A MAN'S MAN [Illustration: "O, HUGHIE, DID YOU?" (p. 376)] A MAN'S MAN by IAN HAY Author of "The Right Stuff" With Frontispiece by James Montgomery Flagg [Illustration] Boston and New York Houghton Mifflin Company The Riverside Press Cambridge Copyright, 1909, by William Blackwood and Sons Copyright, 1910, by Houghton Mifflin Company All Rights Reserved Published September 1910 TO T. B. _Partner_ (_after several collisions_). I should think you were more at home in a boat than a ballroom, Mr. Rudderford! _Little Bobbie Rudderford_ (_the famous Oxbridge coxswain_). Yes; and by Jove, I'd sooner steer eight men than one woman, any day!--_Punch._ CONTENTS BOOK ONE DEALS WITH A STUFF THAT WILL NOT ENDURE I. NAVAL MANOEUVRES 3 II. INTRODUCES THE HEROINE OF THIS NARRATIVE 22 III. JIMMY MARRABLE 28 IV. AN UNDERSTUDY 49 V. THE JOY OF BATTLE 61 BOOK TWO _FORTITER IN RE_ VI. KNIGHT-ERRANTRY _À LA MODE_ 81 VII. THE ALTERNATIVE ROUTE 112 VIII. A BENEFIT PERFORMANCE 130 IX. _LITERA SCRIPTA MANET_ 146 X. THE END OF AN ODYSSEY 157 BOOK THREE _SUAVITER IN MODO_ XI. SEALED ORDERS 179 XII. A CHANGE OF ATMOSPHERE 195 XIII. _VARIUM ET MUTABILE_ 223 XIV. BUSINESS ONLY 247 BOOK FOUR THE UNJUST STEWARD XV. DEPUTATIONS--WITH A DIFFERENCE 263 XVI. IN WHICH CHARITY SUFFERETH LONG, AND JOAN MISSES HER CUE 292 XVII. IN WHICH CHARITY BEGINS AT HOME, AND HUGHIE MISSES HIS TRAIN 320 XVIII. _EX MACHINA_ 339 XIX. IN WHICH LOVE FLIES OUT OF THE WINDOW 354 XX. SINFUL WASTE OF A PENNY STAMP 372 BOOK ONE DEALS WITH A STUFF THAT WILL NOT ENDURE A MAN'S MAN CHAPTER I NAVAL MANOEUVRES A University college varies its facial expression about as frequently as The Sphinx and about as violently as a treacle-well. This remark specially applies between the hours of breakfast and luncheon. The courts, with their monastic cloisters and inviolable grassplots, lie basking in a sunny obliviousness to the world outside. Their stately exclusiveness is accentuated rather than diminished by the glimpse of an occasional flying figure in a cap and gown, or the spectacle of a middle-aged female of a discreet and chastened appearance, who glides respectfully from one archway to another, carrying a broom and a tin pail, or--alas for the goings-on that a cloistered cell may conceal behind its art-muslin curtains!--a tankard containing some gentleman's morning ale. In one corner, close to the Buttery door, you may behold one of the college cats, which appears to be combining a searching morning toilet with a course of practical calisthenics; and inside the massive arch of the gateway stands a majestic figure in a tall hat, whom appreciative Americans usually mistake for the Master, but who in reality occupies the far more onerous and responsible post of Head Porter. Perhaps the greatest variation from the normal is to be observed on a Saturday morning. Then the scene is brightened by the vision of an occasional washerwoman, who totters bravely at one end of a heavy basket, what time her lord and master (who has temporarily abandoned his favourite street-corner and donned Sabbath attire for this, his weekly contribution to the work of the world) sulkily supports the other. Undergraduates, too, are more in evidence than on other days. On most mornings they either stay indoors, to work or sleep, or else go outside the college altogether. "Loitering" in the courts is not encouraged by the authorities. Not that the undergraduate minds that; but it will probably cost him half-a-crown every time he does so, not because he loiters but because he smokes. The Old Court of St. Benedict's College--it is hardly necessary to say that we are in Cambridge and not in Oxford: otherwise we should have said "Quad"--presents to us on the present occasion a very fair sample of a Saturday morning crowd. The observant eye of the Dean, looking down (like Jezebel) from an upper chamber, can discern-- 1. Three washerwomen, with the appurtenances thereof. 2. One small boy delivering _The Granta_. 3. A solitary spectacled gentleman, of the type described by the University Calendar in stately periphrasis as "A Native of Asia, not of European Parentage" (but more tersely classified by the rest of the community as "a nigger"), hurrying in cap and gown to secure a good place at the feet of some out-of-college Gamaliel. 4. A kitchen-man in white jacket and apron, bearing upon his head a tray containing a salmon mayonnaise, cutlets in aspic, and a special Cambridge dainty known as "Grassy Corner Pudding"--a fearsome compound of whipped cream and pistachio nuts. 5. A Buttery boy, walking close behind, with a basket containing bottles. Evidently some young gentleman is about to entertain angels--unawares so far as his bill-paying papa is concerned. 6. Four young men converging to a group in the centre of the court. Of these, two are attired in the undergraduate mode of the moment--tweed jackets with leather buttons, waistcoats of the Urim and Thummim variety, grey flannel trousers well turned up, clamorous silk socks, and heavy Highland shooting brogues. The third wears what the College Regulations describe rather ingenuously as "Athletic Dress." Pheidippides himself would have found it difficult to perform feats of prowess in a costume composed of split pumps, white duck trousers, and a blazer admirably qualified to serve as a model of the Solar Spectrum. It may be mentioned in passing that, to the College Regulations, "Athletic Dress" is not in itself a costume in which it is possible to perform athletic feats, but one whose colour-scheme clashes with the _sub-fusc_ standard which obtains in all college courts until one P.M.; such, in fact, as would tend to distract the eye and sap the diligence of those who traverse the courts on their way to lectures. In consequence, he who would be matutinally athletic must either keep his warpaint somewhere out of college, or drape himself like a stage conspirator as he flits from his rooms to the river or Fenner's. The fourth gentleman of the party was dressed, if not gorgeously, sufficiently respectably to warrant the assumption that he was not a member of the University. All four were smoking. The Dean, glancing in the direction of the gateway, and observing with sardonic satisfaction that the watchful Cerberus there was taking a note of the delinquency, returned to his work. Regardless of the prospective loss of half-a-crown apiece, the undergraduates exchanged cheerful greetings. "Hallo, Dishy-Washy!" "Hallo, Gussie!" "Hallo, Towzer!" There ensued an awkward pause, while Messrs. Gussie and Towzer, nervously conscious of the presence of a stranger to whom they were about to be presented, looked intently at their boots and waited for the introduction to take place. The gentleman previously addressed as Dishy-Washy, a diminutive youth with wizened features,--his name was Dishart-Watson,--cleared his throat. "Introduce my brother," he said huskily. "Mr. Poltimore--Mr. Angus!" The gentlemen indicated shook hands with the visitor, and Mr. Angus, after a mental effort, inquired:-- "Come to see us go Head?" He giggled deprecatingly, to show that he did not really mean this. "Hope so," said Dishy-Washy's brother politely. "I hear you've got a pretty hot crew," he added. "First chop," said Mr. Poltimore. "You just arrived?" "Yes; down from town this morning." "Oh! live there?" "Er--yes." "Oxford man," interpolated Dishy-Washy swiftly. "Sent down," he added in extenuation. The other two nodded sympathetically, and the conversation proceeded more briskly. "_Are_ you going to catch those chaps to-night, Dishy?" inquired Mr. Angus earnestly. "Don't know," replied Dishy-Washy, who as coxswain of the St. Benedict's boat enjoyed a position of authority and esteem in inverse ratio to his inches. "Duncombe's a good enough little oar, but you can't expect a man who weighs nine stone ten to stroke the boat and pull it along too. Of course, if we had anything we could call a Six! As for old Puffin--" "Fourteen stone of tripe!" interpolated Mr. Angus, the gentleman in Athletic Dress. "Lord help the boat!" he added bitterly. It may be mentioned in passing that Mr. Angus's athletic achievements were rather overstated by his costume. His blazer was that of a college club of twelve members, admission to which was strictly limited to gentlemen who could absorb a gallon of beer at a draught, and whose first rule stated that any member who committed the _bêtise_ of taking a degree, however humble, should pay to the club a fine of five pounds. "Still," said Towzer hopefully, "there's always Marrable." Everybody--even the gentleman who had been sent down from Oxford--cheered up at this reflection. "By gum!" said the coxswain with sudden enthusiasm, "he's a wonder! You should have seen him in the boat yesterday. He was rowing a blade that simply lifted the whole of bow side along by itself; and besides that he was coaching Stroke all the time--telling him when to swing out and when to quicken, and bucking him up generally; and on the top of all that he found time every now and then to turn round and curse old Six. I tell you, he's a wonder. Did you hear about him last night?" "I did hear some yarn," said Angus. "Went and smashed up The Owls, didn't he?" "Smashed up?" Dishy's saturnine features expanded into a smile that was almost benevolent. "My lad, _have_ you seen Muggeridge's alabaster brow this morning?" Mr. Muggeridge was the president of "The Owls" Wine Club. "No." "Well, last night I was going round about half-past ten to see that all the crew were in their beds. When I came to H, New Court, I found a devil of a row going on in Muggeridge's rooms--directly under Duncombe's, you know." "Yes. Go on," said all, much interested. "There was a meeting of The Owls on," continued Dishy, "and they'd had the nerve to hold it on a staircase where there were actually two men of the crew--Duncombe and Eversley--trying to get to sleep." "What did you do?" inquired Poltimore. "Went in and reminded them. I thought they might have forgotten." "What did they say?" "They told me to go to--" "Good Lord!" said the audience, genuinely horrified at the employment of such language by a non-athletic to an athletic man. The Owls were a collection of rather dissipated young nobodies, while Dishy wore a Leander tie, which in a rowing college entitles a man to something like reverence. "I soon found it was a put-up job," continued the coxswain. "They had some grudge against Duncombe, and wanted to score him off. I could hear him hammering on his bedroom floor above to make them dry up." "What did you do then?" "I explained to them exactly what I thought of them," replied the coxswain simply. "What did you say, exactly?" Dishy told them. They smacked their lips appreciatively, and the next question followed pat. "And what did _they_ do?" "Well, they were a bit far gone--" "Drunken sweeps!" remarked the virtuous Gussie, who belonged to a rival institution. "Yes. They were a bit far gone," repeated the coxswain, with the air of one endeavouring to explain an otherwise unaccountable circumstance, "and they--well, they hove me out, in fact. There were nine of them," he added, in the manner of one who is not quite sure if his excuse will be accepted. "And then?" "Then I went straight off to old Hughie's rooms"--there was a respectful intaking of breath by the company: most of the College were wont to refer to the gentleman in question as Marrable--"and knocked him up. He had just gone to bed." "What did he do?" came the question, in lively anticipation of the recital to come. "Put on a few things over his pyjamas, and came along with me." The audience sighed ecstatically. "What happened?" said Poltimore. "Well, things were getting a bit lively by the time we arrived. Just as we got to the foot of the stair we were greeted by Muggeridge's oak, which some playful fellow had taken off its hinges and thrown over the banisters. However, we dodged that and raced up to the first floor. "You could have heard a pin drop when we walked into the room. One or two of them looked a bit green, though, when they saw what a towering passion Hughie was in. Still, Muggeridge was sober enough, and tried to talk it off. He stood up, and said, 'Hallo, Marrable! This is splendid! You are just in time to drink to the success of the crew to-morrow. We're all sportsmen here. Come on, you chaps--no heeltaps!' "He stood waving his glass, but anybody could see that he was in a putrid funk. "Hughie shut the door behind him and leaned against it, and said:-- "'Muggeridge, I don't know you very intimately, but I know this, that you always were a worm and a bounder. You can't altogether help that, and personally I don't particularly mind, although you give the College away a bit. Still, I think the College can bear that. You are quite at liberty to get full and amuse yourself in any way you please, so long as you and your pals don't interfere with other people. But when it comes to disturbing my crew, who have to fight the battles of the College on behalf of warriors like you and these gentlemen here, whose favourite field-sport is probably billiards--well, that's just what I call a bit _too_ thick!' "All this time Muggeridge was looking pretty averagely uncomfortable. The other chaps were gazing at him, evidently waiting for a lead. But you could see he was pretty well up a stump as to what to do next. However, next time old Hughie paused for breath, he said:-- "'Oh, get out!' "It was a rotten thing to say. Hughie smiled at him. "'All right,' he said, 'but I must put you to bed before I go.' "Before anybody could do anything he was across the room and had a grip of Muggeridge by the back of the neck and one wrist, which he twisted round behind somehow. Then he turned him round, and kicked him all the way across the room into his bedroom. He used Muggeridge's head as a sort of battering-ram to open the door with. Oh, it was the most gorgeous spectacle!" There was a little sigh of rapture all round the group. Muggeridge was a prominent member of that class of society which undergraduates and other healthy and outspoken Philistines designate simply and comprehensively as "Tishbites" or "Tishes." "He shut him in and locked the door," continued the coxswain, "and then he turned on the other eight. They were a pretty average lot of worms--you know them?" There was a murmur of assent, and Mr. Poltimore, with rather belated presence of mind, hurriedly explained to the Oxford gentleman that the band of heroes under discussion were not in any sense representative of the rank and file of the College. "--And they just sat round the table looking perfectly paralytic. (As a matter of fact most of them were.) Hughie laid hold of the biggest of them--Skeffington--and said:-- "'This meeting is adjourned, gentlemen. Just to show you that I'm speaking the truth, I'll heave the senior member present downstairs!'" "Did he?" asked everybody. "No. He'd have killed him if he had. He picked Skeff up by the collar and the seat of his bags and said to me, 'Watch 'em, Dishy!' Then he carried Skeff downstairs, and slugged him into the middle of the grass plot outside." "Good egg!" murmured Mr. Angus. "Didn't the others try to bolt?" inquired Towzer. "The idea _was_ mooted," replied the coxswain loftily, "but I told them to sit still or they'd get their silly heads knocked together." "Did he cart them all downstairs?" "No; it would have been too tame a job with such a set of mangy squirts. He simply came back and said:-- "'Now, you miserable little snipes, I give you fifteen seconds to quit these premises. The last man out will be personally assisted downstairs by me. I'm sorry I've only got slippers on.' Still, he landed the Honourable Hopton-Hattersley a very healthy root for all that," concluded Dishy, with a seraphic smile. "After that the porter arrived with the Dean's compliments, and it was past the hour for music, gentlemen; but Hughie slapped him on the back and told him that he had arrived too late for the fair. Then he went home to bed as cool as a cucumber. Oh, he's--Hallo, there he is! I must catch him. So long, you men! See you at lunch, Reggie." And Mr. Dishart-Watson, swelling with importance, hurried off to overtake a figure which had swung out of a distant staircase in the southwest corner of the court and was striding towards the gateway. There was no undergraduate slouchiness discernible either in the dress or in the appearance of the Captain of the St. Benedict's boat. He was a strong-limbed, clean-run young man of about twenty-one; perhaps a trifle too muscular to be a quick mover, but, with his broad back and sinewy loins, an ideally built rowing-man. He was a youth of rather grave countenance, with shrewd blue eyes which had a habit of disappearing into his head when he laughed, and a mouth in which, during these same periods of exhilaration, his friends confidently asserted that you could post a letter. He was a born leader of men, and, as the discerning reader will have gathered from Mr. Dishart-Watson's narrative, was still strongly imbued with what may be called public-school principles of justice. He entirely refused to suffer fools gladly or even resignedly, but had a kindly nod for timorous freshmen, a friendly salute for those Dons who regarded undergraduates as an integral part of the scheme of college life and not merely as a necessary evil, and a courtly good-day for fluttered and appreciative bedmakers. He never forgot the faces or names of any of those over him or under him--Dons and college servants, that is; and further, in his own walk of life (a society in which you may recognise the existence of no man, even though he daily passes you the salt or gathers you under his arm in the familiarity of a Rugby scrummage, until you have been formally introduced to him), he never pretended to do so. While Mr. Dishy-Washy's short legs are endeavouring to bring him alongside the striding Olympian in front, it will perhaps be well to explain why it was so absolutely essential to the welfare of St. Benedict's College that eight young men should enjoy a night's rest untrammelled by revels on the floors below. For the benefit of those who have never made a study of that refinement of torture known as a "bumping" race, it may be mentioned that at Oxford and Cambridge the various College crews, owing to the narrowness of their rivers, race not abreast but in a long string, each boat being separated from its pursuer and pursued by an equal space. Every crew which succeeds in rowing over the course without being caught (or "bumped") by the boat behind it is said to have "kept its place," and starts in the same position for the next day's racing. But if it contrives to touch the boat in front, it is said to have made a "bump," and both bumper and bumped get under the bank with all speed and allow the rest of the procession to race past. Next day bumper and bumped change places, and the victors of the day before endeavour to repeat their performance at the expense of the next boat in front of them. The crew at "the head of the river" have, of course, nothing to catch, and can accordingly devote their attention to keeping away from Number Two, which is usually in close attendance owing to the pressing attention of Number Three. And so on. The racing takes place during four successive evenings in the May Week, so called for the somewhat inadequate reason that it occurs in June. It was now Saturday, the last day of the races, and the men of St. Benedict's knew that an enormous effort must be made that evening. So far they had made two bumps, comparatively easily. Starting from fourth place they were now second on the river, and only the All Saints boat stood between them and the haven where they would be. They had tried last night to bring their foe down, but had failed; they were going to try again to-night, but All Saints were a terribly strong crew. They had been Head for five years, and there were four Blues in the boat. Public opinion admitted that St. Benedict's were about the fastest crew on the river that year, but considered that a seasoned lot like All Saints could keep on spurting away long enough to last out the course. "Unless, of course," people said, "unless Marrable does something extra special." It was wonderful what a lot the world in general seemed to expect of Marrable. Character counts for something even among the very young; and there is no more youthful member of society than the undergraduate. The sixth-form boy is a Nestor compared with him. Meanwhile our diminutive friend Dishy, the coxswain, had succeeded in overtaking his captain, just as that great man stepped into a hansom in Trinity Street. "Where are you off to, Hughie?" he panted. "Station." "People?" "Yes." "Well, I'm coming with you. I'll cut away before you meet her." Dishy was one of the few who dared to address Marrable in this strain. The two installed themselves in the hansom, and while the experienced animal between the shafts proceeded down Trinity Street, butting its way through sauntering pedestrians, pushing past country-parsonical governess carts, taking dogs in its stride, and shrinking apprehensively from motor-bicycles ridden by hatless youths in bedroom slippers, they discussed affairs of state. "There's only one way to do it, Dishy," said Marrable. "I'm going stroke." Dishy nodded approvingly. "It's the only thing to do," he said. "But who is going to row seven--Stroke?" "Yes." "Bow-side will go to pieces," said Dishy with conviction. "Perhaps. But as things are at present stroke side will." "That's true," admitted the coxswain. "Let's see now: there'll be you stroke, Duncombe seven, Puffin six--it's worth trying anyhow. We're bound to keep away from the James' people, so we might as well have a shot." "Clear out now," said Marrable, "and go round and tell the men to be at the boathouse by four, and we'll have a ten minutes' outing in the new order. Then, when you've done that, cut down to the boathouse and tell Jerry to alter my stretcher and Duncombe's." These commands involved a full hour's excessive activity in a hot sun on the part of Mr. Dishart-Watson; but Marrable was not the man to spare himself or his subordinates when occasion demanded. The coxswain descended to the step of the hansom and clung to the splash-board as he received his last instructions. "And tell Jerry," added Marrable, "to get down a new stroke-side oar, with a good six-inch blade. Duncombe's has been shaved down to a tooth-pick." Dishy nodded cheerfully and dropped off into the traffic. "The old man means business. We shall go Head now," he murmured to himself with simple confidence. "All right, sir, my fault entirely. Don't apologise!" And leaving an inverted motor-cyclist, who had run into him from behind, to congest the traffic and endure laceration from his own still faithfully revolving pedals, the coxswain of the St. Benedict's boat proceeded at a brisk pace back to his College, there to inform a sorely tried troupe of seven that, owing to an eleventh-hour change in the cast, a full-dress rehearsal of their evening's performance had been called for four o'clock sharp. CHAPTER II INTRODUCES THE HEROINE OF THIS NARRATIVE It has been said by those who ought to know that, if the most painful quarter of an hour in a man's life comes when he is screwing himself up to proposing-point, the corresponding period in a woman's is that immediately preceding her first dinner-party in her own house. Granting the unpleasantness of both these chastening but necessary experiences, a mere male may be excused for inquiring why the second should be ear-marked as the exclusive prerogative of the opposite sex. There is no more morbidly apprehensive creature under the sun than the undergraduate about to give a state luncheon-party which is to be graced by the presence of his beloved. Hughie Marrable sat back in his hansom with knitted brow, and checked some hieroglyphics on the back of an envelope. "Let's see," he murmured to himself, "_Dressed crab_. Can't go wrong there. Told the cook to be sure to send it up in the silver scallops with the College crest on. After all, it's the trimmings that really appeal to a woman. Not the food, but the way you serve it up. Rum creatures!" he added parenthetically. "_Prawns in aspic_. That always looks nice, anyway, though not very filling at the price. I remember last year Kitty Devenish said it looked simply--" Hughie checked his soliloquy rather suddenly, and, if any one else had been present in the hansom, would probably have blushed a little. Miss Kitty Devenish was what cycle-dealers term "a last year's model," and at the present moment Hughie was driving to meet some one else. He continued:-- "_Cutlets à la reform_. Quite the best thing the kitchens turn out, but not so showy as they might be. Still, with old Huish's Crown Derby plates--it was decent of the old man to lend them; I hope to goodness Mrs. Gunn won't do anything rash with them--they ought to do. _Grassy corner pudding_. That always creates excitement, though it tastes rotten. _Fruit salad_; _crême brûlé_. That's safe enough. _Macaroni au gratin_. She won't touch it, but it'll please Uncle Jimmy and Jack Ames. Wish I could have some myself! Never mind; only about six hours more!" Hughie smacked his lips. It is hard to sit among the flesh-pots and not partake thereof. His fare at this feast would be cold beef and dry toast. He turned over the envelope. "H'm--drink. Don't suppose she'll have anything, but I can't take that for granted. There's a bottle of Berncastler Doctor and some Beaune. I wonder if it would be best to have them open before I ask her what she'll drink, or ask her what she'll drink before I open them. I'll have 'em open, I think. She might refuse if she saw the corks weren't drawn. Anyhow Mrs. Ames will probably take some. But, great Scott! I must ask Mrs. Ames first, mustn't I? That's settled anyway. She'll probably take whatever Mrs. Ames takes. "Then there are the table decorations. I wish to goodness I could remember whether it _was_ wall-flower she said. I think it must have been, because I remember making some putrid joke to her once about like attracting unlike. Anyhow, it's too late to change it now. I've plumped for wall-flower, and the room simply stinks of it. "Then the seats. Me at the head, with Mrs. Ames on one hand and her on the other. Uncle Jimmy at the end, with Ames on his left and Dicky Lunn between Mrs. Ames and Uncle Jimmy. Yes, Ames _must_ sit there. Lord knows, Dicky Lunn should be safe enough, but you never know what sort of man a girl won't take a fancy to. And after all, Ames is married," added the infatuated youth. "Then Mrs. Gunn. I think I've told her everything." He feverishly ticked off his admonitions on his fingers. "Let me see,-- "_One_: not to put used plates on the floor. "_Two_: not to join in the conversation. "_Three_: not to let that wobbly affair in her bonnet dip into the food. "_Four_: not to breathe on things or polish them with her apron, except out of sight. "_Five_: not to attempt on any account to hand round the drink. "_Six_: to go away directly after lunch and not trot in and out of the gyp-room munching remains. "The tea-hamper should be all right. Trust the kitchens for that! I must remember to stick in a box of chocolates, though. And I don't think I need bother about dinner, as they are going to send in Richards to wait. Anyhow, I shall have the boat off my chest by that time. That will be something, especially _if_--" Hughie lapsed into silence, and for a moment a vision of love requited gave place in his imagination to the spectacle of the Benedictine crew going Head of the river. His reflections were interrupted by the arrival of his equipage at that combined masterpiece of imposing architecture and convenient arrangement, Cambridge railway station. The platform was crowded with young men, most of them in "athletic dress," waiting for the London train. The brows of all were seamed with care, partaking in all probability of the domestic and amorous variety which obsessed poor Hughie. The train as usual dashed into the station with a haughty can't-stop-at-a-hole-like-this expression, only to clank across some points and grind itself to an ignominious and asthmatic standstill at a distant point beside the solitary and interminable platform which, together with a ticket-office and a bookstall, prevents Cambridge railway station from being mistaken for a rather out-of-date dock-shed. Presently Hughie, running rapidly, observed his guests descending from a carriage. First came a pleasant-faced lady of between thirty and forty, followed by a stout and easy-going husband. Next, an oldish gentleman with a white moustache and a choleric blue eye. And finally--pretty, fresh, and disturbing--appeared the _fons et origo_ of the entire expedition, on whose account the disposition and incidents of Hughie's luncheon-party had been so cunningly planned and so laboriously rehearsed--Miss Mildred Freshwater. The party greeted their host characteristically. His uncle, even as he shook hands, let drop a few fervent anticipatory remarks on the subject of lunch; Mr. Ames, who was an old college boat captain, coupled his greeting with an anxious inquiry as to the club's prospects of success that evening; Mrs. Ames' eyes plainly said, "Well, I've _brought_ her, my boy; now wire in!" and Miss Freshwater, when it came to her turn, shook hands with an unaffected pleasure and _camaraderie_ which would have suited Hughie better if there had been discernible upon her face what Yum-Yum once pithily summed up as "a trace of diffidence or shyness." Still, Hughie was so enraptured with the vision before him that he failed to observe a small and shrinking figure which had coyly emerged from the train, and was hanging back, as if doubtful about its reception, behind Mrs. Ames' skirts. Presently it detached itself and stood before Hughie in the form of a small girl with coppery brown hair and wide grey-blue eyes. "Joey!" shouted Hughie. "She would come!" explained his uncle, in the resigned tones of a strong man who knows his limits. The lady indicated advanced to Hughie's side, and, taking his hand, rubbed herself ingratiatingly against him in the inarticulate but eloquent manner peculiar to dumb animals and young children. CHAPTER III JIMMY MARRABLE Luncheon on the whole was a success, though Mrs. Gunn's behaviour exceeded anything that Hughie had feared. She began by keeping the ladies adjusting their hair in Hughie's bedroom for something like ten minutes, while she recited to them a detailed and revolting description of her most recent complaint. Later, she initiated an impromptu and unseemly campaign--beginning with a skirmish of whispers in the doorway, swelling uproariously to what sounded like a duet between a cockatoo and a bloodhound on the landing outside, and dying away to an irregular fire of personal innuendoes, which dropped over the banisters one by one, like the gentle dew of heaven, on to the head of the retreating foe beneath--with a kitchen-man over a thumb-mark on a pudding-plate. But fortunately for Hughie the company tacitly agreed to regard her as a form of comic relief; and when she kept back the salad-dressing for the express purpose--frustrated at the very last moment--of pouring it over the sweets; yea, even when she suddenly plucked a hairpin from her head with which to spear a wasp in the grassy corner pudding, the ladies agreed that she was "an old pet." When Mrs. Ames went so far as to follow her into the gyp-room after lunch and thank her for her trouble in waiting upon them, Mrs. Gunn, divided between extreme gratification and a desire to lose no time, unlimbered her batteries at once; and Hughie's tingling ears, as he handed round the coffee, overheard the portentous and mysterious fragment: "Well, mum, I put 'im straight to bed, and laid a hot flannel on his--," just as the door of the gyp-room swung to with a merciful bang. It was now after two, and Hughie, in response to a generally expressed desire, laid before his guests a detailed programme for the afternoon. He proposed, first of all, to show them round the College. After that the party would proceed to Ditton Paddock in charge of Mr. Richard Lunn--who, it will be remembered, had been selected by Hughie as cavalier on account of his exceptional qualifications for the post--in company with a substantial tea-basket, the contents of which he hoped would keep them fortified in body and spirit until the races began with the Second Division, about five-thirty. "How are you going to get us down to Ditton, Hughie?" inquired his uncle. "Well, there's a fly which will hold five of you, and I thought"--Hughie cleared his throat--"I could take the other one down in a canoe." There was a brief pause, while the company, glancing at one another with varying expressions of solemnity, worked out mental problems in Permutations and Combinations. Presently the tactless Ames inquired:-- "Which one are you going to take in the canoe?" "Oh, anybody," said Hughie, in a voice which said as plainly as possible: "Silly old ass!" However, realising that it is no use to continue skirmishing after your cover has been destroyed, he directed a gaze of invitation upon Miss Freshwater, who was sitting beside him on the seat. She turned to him before he could speak. "Hughie," she said softly, "take that child. Just look at her!" Hughie obediently swallowed something, and turned to the wide-eyed and wistful picture on the sofa. "Will you come, Joey?" he inquired. The lady addressed signified, by a shudder of ecstasy, that the answer to the invitation was in the affirmative. "Meanwhile," said Mr. Marrable, "I am going to smoke a cigar before I stir out of this room. And if you people will spare Hughie for ten minutes, I'll keep him here and have a short talk with him. I must go back to-night." The accommodating Mr. Lunn suggested that this interval should be bridged by a personally conducted expedition to his rooms downstairs, where he would have great pleasure in exhibiting to the company a "rather decent" collection of door-knockers and bell-handles, the acquisition of which articles of _vertu_ (he being a youth of strong wrist and fleet foot) was a special hobby of his. Hughie was left alone with his uncle--the only relation he possessed in the world, and the man who had been to him both father and mother for nearly eighteen years. Hughie had been born in India. His recollections of his parents were vague in the extreme, but if he shut both eyes and pressed hard upon them with his hands he could summon up various pictures of a beautiful lady, whose arms were decked with glittering playthings that jingled musically when she carved the chicken for Hughie's nursery dinner. He particularly remembered these arms, for their owner had a pleasant habit of coming up to kiss him good-night after his ayah had put him to bed. On these occasions they were always bare; and Hughie remembered quite distinctly how much more comfortable they were then than next morning at tiffin, when they were enclosed in sleeves which sometimes scratched. Of his father he remembered less, except that he was a very large person who wore gorgeous raiment of scarlet. Also things on his heels which clicked. He had a big voice, too, this man, and he used to amuse himself by training Hughie to stand stiffly erect whenever he cried, "'Shun!" Hughie also remembered a voyage on a big ship, where the passengers made much of him, and a fascinating person in a blue jersey (which unfortunately scratched) presented him with numerous string balls, which smelt most gloriously of tar but always fell into the Indian Ocean or some other inaccessible place. Then he remembered arriving with his parents at a big bungalow in a compound full of grassplots and flower-beds, where a person whom he afterwards learned to call Uncle Jimmy greeted him gravely and asked him to accept his hospitality for a time. After that--quite soon--he remembered saying good-bye to his parents, or rather, his parents saying good-bye to him. The big man shook him long and solemnly by the hand, which hurt a good deal but impressed Hughie deeply, and the beautiful lady's arms--with thick sleeves on, too!--clung round Hughie's neck till he thought he would choke. But he stood stiffly at "'shun" all the time, because his parents seemed thoroughly unhappy about something, and he desired to please them. He had never had a woman's arms round his neck since. After his parents had gone, he settled down happily enough in the big compound, which he soon learned to call "the garding." The name of the bungalow he gathered from most of the people with whom he came in contact was "The 'All," though there were some who called it "Manors," and Uncle Jimmy, who, too, apparently possessed more than one name, was invariably referred to by Hughie's friends in the village as "Ole Peppery." Very shortly after his parents' departure Hughie overheard a conversation between his uncle and Mrs. Capper, the lady who managed the household, which puzzled him a good deal. "Understand, Capper, I won't have it," said his uncle. "Think what people will say, sir," urged Mrs. Capper respectfully but insistently. "I don't care a"--Capper coughed discreetly here--"what people say. The boy is not going to be decked out in crape and hearse-plumes to please you or any other old woman." "Hearse-plumes would not be essential, sir," said the literal Capper. "But I think the child should have a little black suit." "The child will run about in his usual rags," replied Old Peppery, in a voice of thunder; "and if I catch you or any one else stuffing him up with yarns about canker-worms or hell-fire, or any trimmings of that description, I tell you straight that there will be the father and mother of a row." "Yes, sir," said Capper meekly. "And I desire, sir," she added in the same even tone, "to give warning." Thereupon Uncle Jimmy had stamped his way downstairs to the hall, and Hughie was left wondering what the warning could have been which Mrs. Capper desired to utter. It must have been a weighty one, for she continued to deliver it at intervals during the next ten years, long indeed after Hughie's growing intelligence had discovered its meaning. But her utterances received about as much attention from her employer as Cassandra's from hers. However, the immediate result of the conversation recorded above was that Mrs. Capper made no attempt to deck Hughie in crape or hearse-plumes; and later on, when he was old enough to understand the meaning of death, his uncle told him how his parents had gone to their God together--"the happiest fate, old man, that can fall on husband and wife"--one stormy night in the Bay of Biscay, in company with every other soul on board the troop-ship Helianthus, and that henceforth Hughie must be prepared to regard the broken-down old buffer before him as his father and mother. Hughie had gravely accepted this arrangement, and for more than seventeen years he and his uncle had treated one another as father and son. Jimmy Marrable was a little eccentric,--but so are most old bachelors,--and like a good many eccentric men he rather prided himself on his peculiarities. If anything, he rather cultivated them. One of his most startling characteristics was a habit of thinking aloud. He would emerge unexpectedly from a brown study, to comment to himself with stunning suddenness and absolute candour on the appearance and manners of those around him. It was credibly reported that he had once taken a rather intense and voluble lady in to dinner, and after regarding her for some time with a fixity of attention which had deluded the good soul into the belief that he was hanging on her lips, had remarked to himself, with appalling distinctness, during a lull in the conversation: "Guinea set--misfit at the top--gutta-percha fixings--wonder they don't drop into her soup!" and continued his meal without any apparent consciousness of having said anything unusual. He was eccentric, too, about other matters. Once Hughie, returning from school for his holidays, discovered that there had been an addition to the family in his absence. Mrs. Capper's very face in the hall told him that something was wrong. Its owner informed Hughie that though one should be prepared to take life as one found it, and live and let live had been her motto from infancy, her equilibrium ever since the thing had happened had lain at the mercy of the first aggressively disposed feather that came along, and what people in the neighbourhood would say she dared not think. She ran on. Hughie waited patiently, and presently unearthed the facts. A few weeks ago the master had returned from a protracted visit to London, bringing with him two children. He had announced that the pair were henceforth to be regarded as permanent inmates of the establishment. Beyond the fact that one brat was fair and a boy and the other darkish and a girl, and that Mrs. Capper had given warning on sight, Hughie could elicit nothing, and waited composedly for his uncle to come home from shooting. Jimmy Marrable, when he arrived, was not communicative. He merely stated that the little devils were the children of an old friend of his, called Gaymer, who had died suddenly and left them to be brought up by him as guardian. "And Hughie, my son," he concluded, "if you don't want your head bitten off you will refrain in this case from indulging in your propensity for asking why and getting to the bottom of things. I'm not best pleased at finding them on my hands, but here they are and there's an end of it. The girl is five--ten years younger than you--and the boy's eight. She is called Joan, and his idiotic name is Lancelot Wellesley. I wonder they didn't christen him Galahad Napoleon! Come upstairs and see them." All this had occurred seven years ago. During that time Lancelot Wellesley Gaymer had grown up sufficiently to go to a public school, and consequently Miss Joan Gaymer had been left very much in the company of the curious old gentleman whom she had soon learned to call Unker Zimmy. Of their relations it will be sufficient at present to mention that a more curiously assorted and more thoroughly devoted couple it would be difficult to find. Jimmy Marrable reclined on the window seat and smoked his cigar. His nephew, enviously eyeing the blue smoke, sprawled in an arm-chair. "Hughie," said the elder man suddenly, "how old are you? Twenty-one, isn't it?" "Yes." "And are you going down for good next week?" "Yes." Hughie sighed. "Got a degree?" "Tell you on Tuesday." "Tell me now." "Well--yes, I should think." "What in?" "Mechanical Stinks--Engineering. Second Class, if I'm lucky." "Um. Got any vices?" "Not specially." "Drink?" "No." "Not a teetotaller?" said Jimmy Marrable in some concern. "No." "That's good. Ever been drunk?" "Yes." "Badly, I mean. I'm not talking about bump-supper exhilaration." "Only once." "When?" "My first term." "What for?" "To see what it was like." "Perfectly sound proceeding," commented Jimmy Marrable. "What were your impressions of the experiment?" "I haven't got any," said Hughie frankly. "I only woke up next morning in bed with my boots on." "Who put you there?" "Seven other devils." "And you have not repeated the experiment?" "No. There's no need. I know my capacity to a glass now." "Then you know something really worth knowing," remarked Jimmy Marrable with sincerity. "Now, what are you going to do with yourself? Why not go and see the world a bit? You have always wanted to. And do it thoroughly while you are about it. Take five years over it; ten if you like. You _will_ like, you know. It's in the blood. That's why I think you are wise not to want to enter the Service. You can always scrape in somewhere if there _is_ a war, and barrack-life in time of peace would corrode your very heart out. It nearly killed your dad at five-and-twenty. That was why he exchanged and took to the Frontier, and ended his days in command of a Goorkha regiment. Life at first hand; that's what we Marrables thrive on! I never set foot in this country myself between the ages of twenty and thirty-three. I would come with you again if it wasn't for Anno Domini--and the nippers. But you'll find a good many old friends of mine dotted about the world. They're not all folk I could give you letters of introduction to--some of 'em don't speak English and others can't read and write; but they'll show you the ropes better than any courier. You take my advice, and go. England is no place for a young man with money and no particular profession, until he's over thirty and ready to marry. Will you go, Hughie?" Hughie's expression showed that he was considering the point rather reluctantly. His uncle continued:-- "Money all right, I suppose? You have eight hundred a-year now you are of age. Got any debts, eh? I'll help you." "None to speak of. Thanks all the same." "Well; why not go?" "I should like to go more than anything," said Hughie slowly, "but--" "Well?" "I don't know--that is--" "I _do_," said Jimmy Marrable with characteristic frankness. "You are struggling between an instinct which tells you to do the sensible thing and an overpowering desire to do a dashed silly one." Hughie grew very red. His uncle continued:-- "You want to marry that girl." Hughie blazed up. "I do," he said, rather defiantly. The cigar glowed undisturbedly. "You think that life has no greater happiness to offer you?" "I am sure of it," said Hughie, with an air of one stating a simple truth. "And you are twenty-one?" "Ye--es," with less fire. Jimmy Marrable smoked reflectively for a few minutes. "I am an old bachelor," he said at last, "and old bachelors are supposed to know nothing about love-affairs. The truth of course is that they know far more than any one else." Hughie was accustomed to these _obiter dicta_. "Why?" he asked dutifully. "Well, for the same reason that a broken swashbuckler knows a deal more about soldiering than a duly enrolled private of the line. He has had a more varied experience. The longer a man remains a bachelor the more he learns about women; and the more he learns about women the better able he will be to make his way in the world. Therefore, if he marries young he reduces his chances of success in life to a minimum. The sad part about it all is that, provided he gets the girl he wants, he doesn't care. That, by the way, is the reason why nearly all the most famous men in history have either been unhappily married or not married at all. Happiness has no history. Happily married men are never ambitious. They don't go toiling and panting after--" "They have no need to," said Hughie. "A man doesn't go on running after a tram-car after he has caught it." "That begs the question, Hughie. It presumes that all the available happiness in the world is contained in one particular tram-car. Besides, the tram-cars you mean are intended for men over thirty. The young ought to walk." Hughie realised that the conversation was growing rather too subtle for him, and reverted to plain cut and thrust. "Then you think no man should marry before thirty?" he said. "Nothing of the kind! It depends on the man. If he is a steady, decent, average sort of fellow, who regards a ledger as a Bible and an office-stool as a stepping-stone to the summit of the universe, and possesses no particular aptitude for the rough-and-tumble of life, the sooner he marries and settles down as a contented old pram-pusher the better for him and the nation. Do you fancy yourself in that line, Hughie?" "No-o-o," said Hughie reluctantly. "But I might learn," he added hopefully. "I'm a pretty adaptable bloke." Jimmy Marrable threw his cigar-end out of the window, and sat up. "Listen, Hughie," he said, "and I'll tell you what you _really_ are. You are the son of a mother who climbed out of her bedroom window (and let herself down a rain-pipe that I wouldn't have trusted a monkey on) in order to elope with the man she loved. Your father was the commander of as tough a native regiment as I have ever known. Your grandfather was an explorer. I've been a bit of a rolling-stone myself. About one relation of yours in three dies in his bed. You come of a stock which prefers to go and see things for itself rather than read about them in the newspaper, and which has acquired a considerable knowledge of the art of handling men in the process. Those are rather rare assets. If you take a woman in tow at the tender age of twenty-one, there will be a disaster. Either you will sit at home and eat your heart out, or you will go abroad and leave her to eat out hers. Am I talking sense?" Hughie sighed like a furnace. "Yes, confound you!" he said. "Will you promise not to rush into matrimony, then?" "Perhaps she'll wait for me," mused Hughie. "How old is she?" "Twenty-one, like me." "H'm," remarked Jimmy Marrable drily. "That means that she is for all practical purposes ten years your senior. However, perhaps she will. Pigs might fly. But will you promise me to think the matter over very carefully before deciding not to go abroad?" "Yes," said Hughie. "That being the case," continued his uncle briskly, "I want to tell you one or two things. If you do go, I may never see you again." "I say," said Hughie in alarm, "there's nothing wrong with your health, is there, old man?" "Bless you, no! But once a Marrable takes to the wilds Methuselah himself couldn't reckon on living long enough to see him again. So I am going to talk to you while I've got you. I am taking this opportunity of being near town to see my solicitor and make my will. I am fit enough, but I am fifty this year; and at that age a man ought to make some disposition of his property. I may as well tell you that I have left you nothing. Annoyed?" "Not in the least." "And I have left nothing to Master Lance." Hughie looked a little surprised at this. "I mean to start him on his own legs before my demise," explained Jimmy Marrable. "Immediately, in fact. That is partly what I am going up to town for. I am investing a sum for him which ought to bring him in about two hundred a year for the rest of his life. He's nearly sixteen now, and he'll have to administer his income himself--pay his own school-bills and everything. Just as I made you do. Nothing like accustoming a boy to handling money when he's young. Then he doesn't go a mucker when he suddenly comes into a lot of it. I shan't give him more, because it would prevent him from working. Two hundred won't. A slug would perhaps live contentedly enough on it, but Lancelot Wellesley Gaymer is a pretentious young sweep, and he'll work in order to gain the means for making a splash. The two hundred will keep him going till he finds his feet." Jimmy Marrable paused, and surveyed his nephew rather irritably. "Well," he inquired at length, "haven't you any contribution to make to this conversation?" "Can't say I have had much chance so far," replied the disrespectful Hughie. "Don't you want to know what I'm going to do with the rest of my money? That's a question that a good many people are worrying themselves about. Don't you want to join in the inquisition?" "Can't say I do. No business of mine." His uncle surveyed him curiously. "You're infernally like your father, Hughie," he said. "Well, I'm going to leave it to Joey." "Good scheme," said Hughie. "You think so?" "Rather!" "There's a lot of it," continued his uncle reflectively. "Some of it is tied up rather queerly, too. My executors will have a bit of a job." He surveyed the impassive Hughie again. "Don't you want to know who my executors are?" he inquired quite angrily. "No," said Hughie, who was deep in other thoughts at the moment. "Not my business," he repeated. "Hughie," said Jimmy Marrable, "you are poor Arthur over again. He was a cursedly irritating chap at times," he added explosively. A babble of cheerful voices on the staircase announced the return of the safe-looking Mr. Lunn and party. They flowed in, entranced with that gentleman's door-knockers (the countenances of which, by the way, were usually compared by undergraduate critics, not at all unfavourably, with that of their owner), and declared themselves quite ready now to be properly impressed by whatever features of the College Hughie should be pleased to exhibit to them. One tour round a College is very like another; and we need not therefore follow our friends up and down winding staircases, or in and out of chapels and libraries, while they gaze down on the resting-places of the illustrious dead or gape up at the ephemeral abodes of the undistinguished living. The expedition was chiefly remarkable (to the observant eye of Mrs. Ames) for the efforts made by its conductor to get lost in suitable company--an enterprise which was invariably frustrated by the resolute conduct of that small but determined hero-worshipper, Miss Joan Gaymer. On one occasion, however, Hughie and Miss Freshwater were left together for a moment. The party had finished surveying the prospect from the roof of the College Chapel, and were painfully groping their way in single file down a spiral staircase. Only Hughie, Miss Freshwater, and the ubiquitous Miss Gaymer were left at the top. "You go next, Joey," said Hughie; "then Miss Freshwater, then me." The lady addressed plunged obediently into the gloomy chasm at her feet. She observed with frank jealousy that the other two did not immediately follow her, and accordingly waited for them in the belfry half-way down. Presently she heard their footsteps descending; and Miss Freshwater's voice said:-- "I wanted to tell you about it first of anybody, Hughie, because you and I have always been such friends. Nobody else knows yet." There was a silence, broken only by Hughie's footsteps, evidently negotiating a difficult turn. Then Miss Freshwater's voice continued, a little wistfully:-- "Aren't you going to congratulate me?" And Hughie's voice, sounding strangely sepulchral in the echoing darkness, replied:-- "Rather! I--I--hope you'll be very happy. Mind that step." Miss Gaymer wondered what it was all about. Hughie found an opportunity before the day was over of holding another brief conversation with his uncle, in the course of which he expressed an opinion on the advantages of immediate and extensive foreign travel which sent that opponent of early marriages back to town in a thoroughly satisfied frame of mind. "There ought to be a statue," said Jimmy Marrable to his cigar, as he leaned back reflectively in his railway carriage, "set up in the capital of every British Colony, representing a female figure in an attitude of aloofness, and inscribed: _Erected by a grateful Colony to its Principal Emigration Agent--The Girl at Home Who Married Somebody Else_." Then he sighed to himself--rather forlornly, a woman would have said. CHAPTER IV AN UNDERSTUDY "_The indulgence of the audience is asked on behalf of Miss Joan Gaymer, who, owing to the sudden indisposition of Miss Mildred Freshwater, has taken up that lady's part at very short notice._" A couple of hours later Hughie, roaring very gently for so great a lion, was engaged in paddling a Canadian canoe down to Ditton Corner. The canoe contained one passenger, who, with feminine indifference to the inflexible laws of science, was endeavouring to assist its progress by paddling in the wrong direction. Her small person, propped by convenient cushions, was wedged into the bow of the vessel, and her white frock and attenuated black legs were protected from the results of her own efforts at navigation by a spare blazer of Hughie's. Her hat lay on the floor of the canoe, half-full of cherries, and her long hair rippled and glimmered in the afternoon sun. Miss Joan Gaymer would be a beauty some day, but for the present all knowledge of that fact was being tactfully withheld from her. To do her justice, the prospect would have interested her but little. Like most small girls of eleven, she desired nothing so much at present as to resemble a small boy as closely as possible. She would rather have captured one bird's-nest than twenty hearts, and appearances she counted as dross provided she could hold her own in a catherine-wheel competition. They were rather a silent couple. Joan was filled with that contentment which is beyond words. She was wearing a new frock; she had escaped under an escort almost exclusively male--if we except the benevolent despotism of Mrs. Ames--from home, nurse, and governess, to attend a series of purely grown-up functions; and to crown all, she was alone in the canoe, a light-blue blazer spread over her knees, with one who represented to her small experience the head and summit of all that a man should--nay, could--be. "I expect," she remarked, in a sudden burst of exultation, as the canoe slid past two gorgeously arrayed young persons who were seated by the water's edge, "that those two are pretty sorry they're not in this canoe with us." The ladies referred to arose and walked inland with some deliberation. Hughie did not answer. His brow was knitted and his manner somewhat absent. "Hughie," announced Miss Gaymer reproachfully, "you are looking very cross at me." She had a curiously gruff and hoarse little voice, and suffered in addition from inability to pronounce those elusive consonants _r_ and _l_. So she did not say "very cross," but "ve'y c'oss," in a deep bass. Hughie roused himself. "Sorry, Joey!" he said; "I was thinking." "Sec'ets?" inquired Miss Gaymer, all agog with femininity at once. "No." "Oh,"--rather disappointedly. "About your old boat, then?" "Yes," said Hughie untruthfully. "Do you quite understand how we race?" "I _think_ so," said the child. "Your boat is second, and it wants to bump into the boat in f'ont--is that it?" "Yes." "Well, do it just when you pass us, will you?" "I'll try," said Hughie, beginning to brighten up. "But it may take longer than that. About the Railway Bridge, I should think." "And after the race will _you_ take me home again?" inquired the lady anxiously. "Can't be done, I'm afraid. The race finishes miles from Ditton, where you will be; and I shouldn't be able to get back in time. You had better drive home with the others." "When shall I see you again, then?" demanded Miss Gaymer, who was not of an age to be reticent about the trend of her virgin affections. "About seven. You are all coming to dine in my rooms." "Ooh!" exclaimed his companion in a flutter of excitement. "How long can I sit up?" "Ask Mrs. Ames," replied the diplomatic Hughie. "Till _ten_?" hazarded Joey, with the air of one initiating a Dutch auction. "Don't ask _me_, old lady." "Supposing," suggested Miss Gaymer craftily, "that you was to say you wanted me to sit up and keep you company?" Hughie laughed. "Afraid that wouldn't work. I have to go out about nine to a Bump Supper." "What's that?" "A College supper, in honour of the men who have been rowing." "I like suppers," said Miss Gaymer tentatively. Hughie smiled. "I don't think you'd like this one, Joey," he said. "Why? Don't they have any sixpences or thimbles in the t'ifle?" said Miss Gaymer, in whose infant mind the word supper merely conjured up a vision of sticky children, wearing paper caps out of crackers, distending themselves under adult supervision. "I don't think they _have_ any trifle." "Perfectly p'eposte'ous!" commented Miss Gaymer with heat. (I think it has already been mentioned that she spent a good deal of her time in the company of Jimmy Marrable.) "Ices?" "Let me see. Yes--sometimes." "Ah!" crooned Joey, with a happy little sigh. "_Can't_ I come?" "Afraid not, madam. Bump Suppers are for gentlemen only." "I should like that," said madam frankly. "And they are rather noisy. You might get frightened." "Not if I was sitting alongside of you," was the tender reply. Joey's anxiety for his company renewed Hughie's depression of spirits. Admiration and confidence are very desirable tributes to receive; but when they come from every quarter save the right one the desirability of that quarter is only intensified. Poor human nature! Hughie sighed again in a manner which caused the entire canoe to vibrate. Miss Gaymer suddenly turned the conversation. "What was that person talking to you about, Hughie?" she inquired. "Who?" "That person that came with us in the t'ain. Miss--" Joey's mouth twisted itself into a hopeless tangle. "Freshwater?" said Hughie, reddening. "Yes. When you were taking us round the Co'ege after lunch you and her stayed behind on the top of the Chapel, while the rest of us were coming down. When I was waiting for you, I heard her say: 'You're the first to hear of it, Hughie.' To hear of what?" Hughie looked genuinely disturbed. "I don't know whether she wants it known yet, Joey," he said. Miss Gaymer assumed an expression before which she knew that most gentlemen of her acquaintance, from Uncle Jimmy down to the coachman at home, were powerless. "Hughie dear, you'll tell _me_, won't you?" she said. Hughie, making a virtue of necessity, agreed. "Well, promise you won't tell anybody," he said. "All right," agreed Miss Gaymer, pleasantly intrigued. "She's going to be married," said Hughie, in a voice which he endeavoured to make as matter-of-fact as possible. It was not a very successful effort. At twenty-one these things hurt quite as much, if not so lastingly, as in later life. "I'm ve'y g'ad to hear it," remarked Miss Gaymer with composure. Hughie looked at the small flushed face before him rather curiously. "Why, Joey?" he asked. "Never mind!" replied Miss Gaymer primly. After that the conversation languished, for they were approaching the race-course, and boats of every size and rig were thronging round them. There was the stately family gig, with an academic and myopic paterfamilias at the helm and his numerous progeny at the oars, sweeping the deep of surrounding craft like Van Tromp's broom. There was the typical May Week argosy, consisting of a rowing-man's mother and sisters, left in the care of two or three amorous but unnautical cricketers, what time their relative performed prodigies of valour in the Second Division. There was also a particularly noisome home-made motor-boat,--known up and down the river from Grantchester to Ely as "The Stinkpot,"--about the size of a coffin, at present occupied (in the fullest sense of the word) by its designer, builder, and owner; who, packed securely into his craft, with his feet in a pile of small coal, the end of the boiler in the pit of his stomach, and the engines working at fever heat between his legs, was combining the duties of stoker, engineer, helmsman, and finally (with conspicuous success) director of ramming operations. Through these various obstacles Hughie, despite the assistance of his passenger, directed his canoe with unerring precision, and finally brought up with all standing beside the piles at Ditton. He experienced no difficulty in making arrangements for the return journey of the canoe, for a gentleman of his acquaintance begged to be allowed the privilege of navigating it home, pleading internal pressure in his own craft as the reason. Hughie granted the boon with alacrity, merely wondering in his heart which of the three languishing damsels planted round his friend's tea-urn he had to thank for the deliverance. They found the fly in a good position close to the water, with the rest of the party drinking tea, and meekly wondering when the heroes who dotted the landscape in various attitudes of nervousness would disencumber themselves of their gorgeous trappings and get to business. Hughie deposited Joan beside a mountain of buns and a fountain of tea, and, after expressing a hope that every one was getting on all right, announced that the Second Division might be expected to paddle down at any moment now. This statement involved a chorus of questions regarding the technicalities of rowing, which that model of utility, Mr. Lunn, had confessed himself unable to answer, and which had accordingly been held over till Hughie's arrival. Hughie's rather diffident impersonation of Sir Oracle, and his intricate explanation of the exact difference between bucketing and tubbing (listened to with respectful interest by surrounding tea-parties), was suddenly interrupted by a small but insistent voice, which besought him to turn the tap off and look pretty for a moment. There was a shout of laughter, and Hughie turned round, to find that one of those privileged and all too inveterate attendants upon the modern athlete, a photographer, was (with the assistance of a megaphone) maintaining a reputation for humorous offensiveness, at his expense, on the towpath opposite. After this the Second Division paddled down to the start, arrayed in colours which would have relegated such competitors as King Solomon and the lilies of the field to that euphemistic but humiliating category indicated by the formula "Highly Commended." Presently they returned, unclothed to an alarming and increasing extent, and rowing forty to the minute. One crew brought off a "gallery" bump right at Ditton Corner, to the joy of the galaxy of beauty and fashion thereon assembled. The bumped crew made the best of an inglorious situation by running into the piles and doubling up the nose of the boat, which suddenly buckled and assumed a sentry-box attitude over the head of the apoplectic gentleman who was rowing bow. The good ship herself incontinently sank, all hands going down with her like an octette of Casabiancas. Whereupon applause for the victors was turned into cries of compassion for the vanquished. However, as all concerned shook themselves clear of the wreck without difficulty and paddled contentedly to the bank, the panic subsided, and the rest of the procession raced past without further incident. As the last boat, remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow, accompanied by a coloured gentleman ringing a dinner-bell and a spectacled don who trotted alongside chanting, "Well rowed, Non-Collegiate Students!" creaked dismally past, Hughie arose and shook himself. "Our turn now," he said. "So long, everybody!" "Good luck, Hughie!" said Mrs. Ames. "Your health!" She waved her cup and then took a sip of tea. There was a chorus of good wishes from the party, and one or two neighbouring enthusiasts raised a cry of "Benedict's!" which swelled to a roar as Hughie, flushing red, elbowed his way out of the paddock and steered a course for a ferry-boat a hundred yards down the Long Reach. Popular feeling, which likes a peg upon which to hang its predilections, was running high in favour of Hughie and his practically single-handed endeavour to humble the pride of the All Saints men, with their four Blues and five years' Headship. Still, though many a man's--especially a young man's--heart would have swelled excusably enough at such homage, Hughie cared very little for these things. The notoriety of the sporting paper and the picture-postcard attracted him not at all. He was doggedly determined to take his boat to the Head of the river, not for the glory the achievement would bring him, but for the very simple and sufficient reason that he had made up his mind, four Blues notwithstanding, to leave it there before he went down. A Cambridge man's pride in his College is a very real thing. An Oxford man will tell you that he is an Oxford man. A Cambridge man will say: "I was at such-and-such a College, Cambridge." Which sentiment is the nobler need not be decided here, but the fact remains. However, there was a fly in the ointment. Amid the expressions of goodwill that emanated from Hughie's own party one voice had been silent. The omission was quite unintentional, for Miss Mildred Freshwater's head had been buried in a hamper in search of spoons at the moment of Hughie's departure. But to poor Hughie, who for all his strength was no more reasonable where his affections were concerned than other and weaker brethren, the circumstance bereft the ovation of the one mitigating feature it might otherwise have possessed for him. As he strode along the bank to where the ferry-boat was waiting, he heard a pattering of feet behind. A small, hot, and rather grubby hand was thrust into his, and Miss Gaymer remarked:-- "I'm coming as far as that boat with you, Hughie. Can I?" "All right, Joey," he replied. They had only a few yards farther to go. Miss Gaymer looked up into her idol's troubled countenance. "What's the matter, Hughie!" she inquired. "Joey, I've got the hump." Miss Gaymer squeezed his arm affectionately. "Never mind, I'll marry you when I'm grown up," she announced rather breathlessly. Hughie felt a little awed, as a man must always when he realises that a woman, however old or young, loves him. He smiled down on the slim figure beside him. "You're a good sort, Joey," he said. "One of the best!" Miss Gaymer returned contentedly to her tea, utterly and absolutely rewarded for the effort involved by the sacrifice of this, her maidenly reserve. CHAPTER V THE JOY OF BATTLE Hughie stepped out of the ferry-boat on to the towpath, which was crowded with young men hastening to the places where the boats were moored and young women who would have been much better employed on the opposite bank. The punctilious Hughie was looking about for a friendly hedge or other protection behind which he might decorously slip off the white flannel trousers which during the afternoon had been veiling the extreme brevity of his rowing-shorts, when he was tapped on the shoulder. He turned and found himself faced by a stout clean-shaven man, with eyes that twinkled cheerfully behind round spectacles. He looked like what he was, a country parson of the best type, burly, humorous, and shrewd, with unmistakable traces of the schoolmaster about him. "I beg your pardon, sir," he said, with a rather old-fashioned bow, "but are you Mr. Marrable?" Hughie admitted the fact. "Well, I just want to say that I hope you are going Head to-night. You are to row stroke yourself, I hear." "Yes." "Quite right, quite right! It's a desperate thing to change your crew about between races, but it's our only chance. You could never have caught them with the man you had last night. He's plucky, but he can't pick a crew up and take them with him. Have you been out in the new order?" "Yes. We had a short spin a couple of hours ago." "Satisfactory?" "Yes, very fair." "That's excellent. Now we shall see a race!" The speaker turned and walked beside Hughie in the direction of the Railway Bridge. Hughie wondered who he could be. "I suppose you are an old member of the College, sir," he said. "Yes. Haven't been able to come up for fifteen years, though." "In the crew, perhaps?" continued Hughie, observing his companion's mighty chest--it had slipped down a little in fifteen years--and shoulders. "Yes,"--rather diffidently. "I thought so. About what year?" The stranger told him. Hughie grew interested. "You must have been in D'Arcy's crew," he said,--"the great D'Arcy. My father knew him well. _Were_ you?" "Er--yes." "My word!" Hughie's eyes blazed at the mention of the name, which, uttered anywhere along the waterside between Putney Bridge and Henley, still rouses young oarsmen to respectful dreams of distant emulation and middle-aged coaches to floods of unreliable reminiscence. "He must have been a wonder in his time. Did you know him well? What sort of chap was he?" "Well--you see--I _am_ D'Arcy," replied the stranger apologetically. After that he gave Hughie advice about the coming race. "I have watched the All Saints crew for three nights now," he said. "They are a fine lot, and beautifully together; but it is my opinion that they can't last." "They're a bit too sure of themselves," said Hughie. "Too many Blues in the boat." "How many?" "Four. Seven, Six, Five, and Bow." "Good! They are probably labouring under the delusion that a boat with four Blues in it is four times as good as a boat with one Blue in it. Consequently they haven't trained very hard, especially those two fat men in the middle of the boat. What about their Stroke?" "Pretty enough, but a rotter when it comes to the pinch." "Good again! Well, these fellows have not once been extended during the races, for you gave them no sort of a run last night. You went to bits at the start and never quite recovered. However, that will give All Saints some false confidence, which is just what we want. Now what do you propose to do to-night? Jump on to their tails at the start?" "No good," said Hughie. "They are too old birds for that game. Besides, my crew want very carefully working up to a fast stroke. I can't trust Six at anything above thirty-four. He'll go on rowing that all day; but if I quicken up to thirty-six or seven he gets flustered, and forty sends him clean off his nut after about a minute. No, we must just wear them down." "Quite right," said D'Arcy. "If you are within a length at the Railway Bridge you ought just to do it." "The difficulty is," said Hughie ruefully, "that the crew are only good for about one spurt. It's a good spurt, I must say, but if it fails we are done. They can never slow down to a steady stroke again--especially Six. So it simply has to be made at the right moment. The difficulty is to know when." "Have you got a reliable cox?" "First-class." "Can't he tell you?" "Too much row going on," said Hughie. "The whole College will be on the towpath to-night." The Reverend Montague D'Arcy plunged his hand into the tail-pocket of his clerical frock-coat, and produced therefrom a large-pattern service revolver. "Look here," he said. "You would be able to hear this lethal weapon on the Day of Judgment itself. Will you consent to take your time from me?" "Rather! Thank you, sir." There was no doubting the sincerity of Hughie's gratitude. "Well," continued the clergyman briskly, "I shall wait by the Railway Bridge, on the Barnwell side, away from the towpath. If you have made your bump before that you won't want me. Well and good. But I don't think you _will_ have made it, and I don't advise you to try. For the first half of the course those All Saints men will match you stroke for stroke, and if you hustle your heavy man at Six he will probably lose his head. As you pass under the Railway Bridge quicken slightly--not more than two strokes a minute, though. I have six shots in this revolver. When you hear two of them, that will mean that you are getting within jumping distance and must be ready for the spurt. When you hear the remaining four in quick succession you must simply swing out and put the very last ounce of your blood and bones and bodies and souls into it. And if you catch 'em," concluded the reverend gentleman, "by gad! I'll dance the Cachuca on the bank!" By this time they had reached the spot where their racing-shell--sixty-two feet of flimsy cedar wood--was lying waiting for them. The rest of the crew, already assembled, were standing about in the attitudes of profound dejection or forced hilarity which appear to be the only alternatives of deportment open to men who are suffering from what is expressively termed "the needle." Some were whistling, others were yawning, and all were wondering why on earth men took up rowing as a pastime. Hughie gathered his Argonauts into a knot, and at his request the Reverend Montague D'Arcy outlined to them the plan of campaign. Then the crew embarked, and the stout clergyman assisted the grizzled College boatman--the only person present whose nerves appeared unaffected by the prevailing tension--to push their craft clear of the bank, and set them going on a half-minute dash as a preliminary to their long paddle down the course to the starting point of the race. In accordance with a picturesque but peculiar custom they wore in their straw hats bunches of marigolds and corn-flowers--the College colours--as an intimation that they had achieved bumps during the preceding nights; and so bedecked they paddled majestically down the Long Reach, feeling extremely valorous and looking slightly ridiculous, to challenge a comparison (in which they were hopelessly outclassed from the start) with the headgear of the assembled fair in Ditton Paddock. The method of sending off a bumping race is the refinement of cruelty. As each boat reaches its starting-post the crews disembark and stand dismally about, listening to the last exhortations of coaches or nervously eyeing the crew behind them. Presently an objectionably loud piece of artillery, situated half-way down the long line of boats, goes off with a roar. This is called "first gun," and means chiefly that there will be another in three minutes. The crew mournfully denude themselves of a few more articles of their already scanty wardrobe, which they pile upon the shoulders of the perspiring menial whose duty it is to convey the same to the finishing-post, and crawl one by one into their places in the boat. Finally, the coxswain coils himself into his seat and takes both rudder-lines in his left hand, leaving the right free to grasp the end of the boat's last link with _terra firma_, her starting-chain. Then the second gun goes, and the crew shudder and know that in sixty seconds precisely they must start. The ritual observed during the final minute is complicated in the extreme, and varies directly with the nervous system of the coach, who dances upon the bank with a stop-watch in his hand, to time the ministrations of the College boatman, who stands by with a long boat-hook ready to prod the vessel into midstream. "Fifteen seconds gone," says the coach. "Push her out, Ben." Ben complies, with a maddening but wise deliberation. If the boat is pushed out too promptly the starting-chain will grow taut and tug the stern of the boat inwards towards the bank, just when her nose should be pointing straight upstream. But this elementary truth does not occur to the frenzied octette in the boat. The gun will go, and bow-side will find their oar-blades still resting on the towpath. They _know_ it. "Thirty seconds gone," says the coach. "Paddle on gently, Bow and Two." His object is to get the full advantage of the length of the chain, but Bow and Two know better. They are convinced that he merely desires that they shall be caught at a disadvantage when the gun fires. However, they paddle on as requested, with a palsied stealthiness that suggests musical chairs. "Fifteen seconds left," says the coach. "Are you straight, Cox? Ten more sec--" Ah! As usual the chain has drawn tight, and the stern of the boat is being dragged inwards again. "Paddle on, Two!" yells the coxswain. Two gives a couple of frenzied digs; the Dervish with the watch, accompanied by a ragged and inaccurate chorus all down the bank, chants "Five, four, three, two--"; there is a terrific roar from the gun; the coxswain drops the chain; the boatman slips the point of his boat-hook (which, between ourselves, has been doing the lion's share in keeping the ship's head straight) from Five's rigger; and they are off. The Benedictine crew got under way very unostentatiously. Their coach was actually rowing in the All Saints boat,--and it would be difficult to select a more glowing testimonial to the sterling sportsmanship of English rowing,--so the starting operations were wisely left to the College boatman, who had performed the office for something like half a century. The flight of time was recorded by Hughie himself, from the watch which hung on his stretcher beside his right foot. The experienced Mr. Dishart-Watson kept those too-often fatally intimate acquaintances, the rudder-lines and starting-chain, tactfully apart, and the St. Benedict's boat got off the mark with a start that brought her within a length of All Saints during the first half-minute. After that their opponents drew away. As D'Arcy had said, they were a seasoned crew, and nothing short of sheer superiority would wear them down. The two boats swung round Grassy Corner and entered the Plough Reach about their distance apart. All Saints were rowing the faster stroke. Hughie, who was keeping to a steady thirty-two, felt with satisfaction that the men behind him were well together. Number Seven, small but plucky, was setting bow-side a beautiful example in steady swing and smart finish. Six--Mr. Puffin--was rowing a great blade. To look at him now, you would ask why he had not been included in the University Crew. If you saw him trying to row forty to the minute, you would marvel that he should be included in any crew at all. Five was not looking happy. He was lying back too far and tugging at the finish. To him the boat seemed heavier than usual, for he was just beginning to realise the difference between seconding the efforts of Hughie Marrable and those of Mr. Duncombe. Still, he was plugging gamely. Four, a painstaking person, was encouraging himself in a fashion entirely his own. After every stroke, as he sat up and swung forward, he gasped out some little _sotto voce_ remark to himself, such as, "Oh, well _rowed_, Four!--Stick to it, Four!--Use your _legs_, old man!--That's better!--That's a _beauty_!--Oh, well _rowed_, Four!" And so on. Where he got the necessary breath for these exercises nobody knew; but some folk possess these little peculiarities, and row none the worse for them. Bow was another instance. He was a chirpy but eccentric individual, and used to sing to himself some little ditty of the moment--or possibly a hymn--all through a race, beginning with the first stroke and ending exactly, if possible, with the last. He had been known, when stroking a boat, to quicken up to a perfectly incredible rate simply because he feared that the song would end before he completed the course, a contingency which he regarded as unlucky in the extreme. On the other hand, he would become quite depressed if he had to stop in the middle of a verse, and he was quite capable of rowing _rallentando_ if he desired to synchronise his two conclusions. But few people have the time or inclination for these diversions while oscillating upon a sixteen-inch slide, and the rest of the crew were swinging at and plugging in grim silence. The two boats swept into the roaring medley of Ditton Corner. They flashed past the row of piles and tethered punts amid a hurricane of shouts and waving handkerchiefs. Hughie, wrongfully exercising his privilege as Stroke, allowed his eyes to slide to the right for a moment. He had a fleeting glimpse of the crimson and excited countenance of Miss Gaymer, as some man held her aloft in the crowd. Then the boat gave a slight lurch, and Joey was swallowed up again. Hughie felt guiltily responsible for the lurch, and recalling his gaze into the proper channel--straight over the coxswain's right shoulder--swung out again long and steadily. "Are we straight yet?" he gasped to Dishy. "Yes--just." "Tell 'em to reach out a bit." Mr. Watson complied, in tones that rose high above the tumult on the bank and penetrated even into the harmonious soul of Bow, who was grappling with a difficult cadenza at the moment. "Six good ones!" said Hughie, next time his face swung up towards the coxswain's. "Now, you men, six good ones!" echoed Dishy. "_One! Two!_ Five, you're late! _Three! Four! Five!_ Bow, get hold of it! _Six!_ Oh, well rowed!" There was a delighted roar from the bank. The Benedictine crew were together again after the unsteadiness round Ditton. "How far?" signalled Hughie's lips. "Length--and--a--half," replied Cox. "Less," he added, peering ahead. They were half-way up the Long Reach now. In another minute or two they would be at the Railway Bridge, beyond which hard-pressed boats are popularly supposed to be safe. "Tell 'em--going--quicken," gurgled Hughie, "if can." Cox nodded, rather doubtfully, and Hughie ground his teeth. If only this accursed noise on the bank would cease, even for five seconds, Dishy would get a chance to make the crew hear. As it was, the ever-increasing crowd, rolling up fresh adherents like a snowball, made that feat almost an impossibility. But the coxswain was a man of experience and resource. Just as the boat passed under the Railway Bridge itself there was a momentary silence, for the crew were shut off from their supporters by some intervening balks of timber. Dishy seized the opportunity. "Be ready to quicken," he yelled. "Now! Oh, well done!" The crew had heard him, and what was more, they had obeyed him. Stroke in the All Saints boat suddenly realised that the oncoming foe had quickened to thirty-five or six, and that the interval between the two boats had shrunk to something under a length. He spurted in his turn, and his men spurted with him, but their length of stroke grew proportionately shorter, and the pace of the boat did not increase. St. Benedict's were holding their advantage. "Half a length," said Dishy, in response to an agonised interrogation from Hughie's right eyebrow. Suddenly above the tumult there rang out two reverberating revolver-shots. A stout clergyman, whooping like a Choctaw, was tearing along the right bank of the river, which was practically clear of spectators, with his weapon smoking in his hand. Dishy's voice rose to a scream. "Look out--be ready! _Only_ six feet!" And now the musical gentleman who was rowing bow felt the boat lift unsteadily under him. A wave rolled across the canvas decking behind him, and he felt a splash of water on his back. "Washing us off!" was his comment. "Glory, glory! Another verse'll do it. Now then, all together,-- "_What though the spicy breezes Blow soft, o'er Ceylon's--_" Bang! bang! bang! bang! The great service revolver rang out. The nose of the Benedictine boat, half submerged in a boiling flood, suddenly sprang to within three feet of the All Saints rudder. "_Now_, you men!" Mr. Dishart-Watson's wizened and saturnine countenance shrank suddenly and alarmingly to a mere rim surrounding his mouth. "Just _ten_ more! _One--two--_" Like St. Francis of Assisi, "Of all his body he made a tongue." He counted the strokes in tones that overtopped all the roars of encouragement and apprehension arising from the now hopelessly mixed-up mob of Benedictine and All Saints men that raged alongside. Hughie Marrable quickened and quickened, and his crew responded sturdily. Faster and faster grew the stroke, and more and more pertinaciously did the nose of the Benedictine boat plough its way through the turbid waves emitted by the twitching rudder in front. Never had they travelled like this. Six was rowing like a man possessed. Four had ceased to encourage himself, and was plugging automatically with his chest open and his eyes shut. Bow may or may not have been singing: he was certainly rowing. There was a world of rolling and splashing, for the All Saints coxswain was manipulating his rudder very skilfully, and ever and again the aggressive nose of the Benedictine boat was sent staggering back by a rolling buffeting wave. But there was no stopping the Benedictines. Suddenly Dishy gave vent to a final cataclysmic bellow. "You're overlapping!" They were almost at Charon's Grind. The coxswain's lank body stiffened in its little seat, and Hughie saw him lean hard over and haul on to the right-hand rudder-line. "Last three strokes! Now, you devils! _Plug! plug! pl_--Aa--a--ee--ooh--ee--easy all! Oh, well rowed, well rowed, well rowed!" There was a lurch and a bump. "Done it!--'_Bows down to wood and stone_,'" gasped Bow. The eight men let go their oars and tumbled forward on to their stretchers, and listened, with their heads and hearts bursting, to the din that raged on the bank. It was a fine confused moment. In the boat itself Cox was vainly endeavouring to shake hands with Stroke, who lay doubled up over his oar, with his head right down on the bottom of the boat, oblivious to everything save the blessed fact that he need not row any more. Consciousness that he had taken his crew to the Head of the River was yet to come. At the other end Bow, with his head clasped between his knees, was croaking half-hysterically to himself, "Two bars too soon, Hughie! Oh, my aunt, we've gone Head! Two bars too soon!" On the towpath every one was shouting and shaking hands with indiscriminate _bonhomie_,--this was one of those occasions upon which even the ranks of Tuscany could scarce forbear to cheer,--and everybody, with one exception, seemed to be ringing a bell or blowing a trumpet. The exception was supplied by a trio of young gentlemen, two of whom held an enormous Chinese gong suspended between them, while a third smote the same unceasingly with a mallet, and cried aloud the name of Marrable. It must be recorded here, to his honour, that the smiter bore upon his forehead an enormous and highly coloured bruise, suggestive of sudden contact with, say, a bedroom-door. On the opposite bank of the river, a stout, middle-aged, and apparently demented Clerk in Holy Orders was dancing the Cachuca. BOOK TWO _FORTITER IN RE_ CHAPTER VI KNIGHT-ERRANTRY _À LA MODE_ If all good Americans go to Paris when they die, it may safely be predicted that all the bad ones will be booked through to Coney Island. So much may be inferred from the regularity and zeal with which the Toughs, Hoboes, Bowery Boys, and other fearful wildfowl of the New York proletariat, accompanied by the corresponding females of the species, betake themselves every Sabbath by trolley-car or steamer to this haunt of ancient peace (which, by the way, is not to all appearances an island and harbours no conies). Take Margate and Douglas and Blackpool, and pile them into an untidy heap; throw in a dozen Fun-Cities from Olympia and half a score of World's Fairs from the Agricultural Hall; add some of the less reputable features of Earl's Court and Neuilly Fair; include a race-course of the baser sort; case the whole in wood, and people it with sallow gentlemen in striped jerseys and ladies answering exclusively to such names as Hattie, Sadie, and Mamie, reared up apparently upon an exclusive diet of peanuts and clam-chowder; keep the whole multitude duly controlled and disciplined by a police force which, if appearances go for anything, has been recruited entirely from the criminal classes; and you will be able faintly to realise what Coney Island can do when it tries on a fine Sunday in summer. So thought Hughie Marrable. He had been wandering round the world for nine years now; but not even a previous acquaintance with the Devil Dancers of Ceylon, the unhallowed revels of Port Said, or the refinements of a Central African Witch-Hunt (with full tom-tom accompaniment), had quite prepared him for this. Still, it was part and parcel of Life, and Life was what he had left England to see. He had arrived in New York from San Francisco two days ago. But let it not be imagined that he had been conveyed thither by any Grand-Trunk-Ocean-to-Ocean-Limited, or other refinement of an effete modernity. His transcontinental journey had occupied just three years. Since the day on which he steamed through the Golden Gate on a tramp-freighter from Yokohama he had been working his way eastward by easy stages, acquiring experience (as Jimmy Marrable had directed) of the manner in which the other half of the world lives. Incidentally he had mixed cocktails behind a Nevada bar; learned to fire a revolver without taking it out of his pocket; accompanied a freight train over the Rockies in the capacity of assistant brakeman--his duties being chiefly confined to standing by with a coupling-pin, to discourage the enterprise of those gentlemen of the road who proposed to travel without tickets; and once, in a Southern State, he had been privileged to be present at that ennobling spectacle to which the brightest nation on earth occasionally treats the representatives of an older civilisation--the lynching of a negro. In a few days Hughie would sail for England, on board the mighty Apulia. It was not often that he travelled in such ostentatious luxury: the primitive man in him leaned towards something damp and precarious on board a sailing-ship or a collier; but he happened to know that the Apulia intended going for the ocean record this trip; and since the third engineer happened to be a friend of his, Hughie had decided that four-and-a-half days and nights down among the humming turbines and the spirits that controlled them would be cheap at the price of an expensively upholstered state-room many decks above, in which he would leave his baggage and occasionally sleep. For all that he had cast a regretful eye only that very morning on a battered little tramp-steamer which was loading up with cargo alongside a wharf at Hoboken--due to sail for Europe, so a stevedore told him, in about two days' time. To-morrow he was to be taken yachting in New York harbour by an old P. and O. acquaintance, whom he had faithfully "looked up," in accordance with a two-year-old promise, at his city office that morning. In the evening, at the invitation of an American actor to whom he had once been of service in Calcutta, he was to dine at the Lambs' Club,--the New York equivalent of the Garrick and Green Room, with a dash of the Eccentric thrown in,--and the next day he was to pay a flying visit to Atlantic City. Meanwhile he was putting in a few off-hours at Coney Island. He had watched the islanders bathing, had witnessed a display of highly--not to say epileptically--Animated Pictures, had spent half-an-hour in an open _café-chantant_, where a bevy of tired-looking girls in short skirts pranced about with mechanical abandon at the back of the small stage, shouting the chorus of a ditty which a wheezy lady (who looked like the mother of all chorus-girls) was singing at the front; and had declined a pressing invitation from the keeper of an Anatomical Museum to step inside and "have a dollar's worth for a dime." Finally he drifted into a small theatre, where a melodrama of distinctly British flavour (seasoned to the Coney Island palate by a few distinctly local interpolations) was unfolding itself to a closely packed and hard-breathing audience. To judge from the state of the atmosphere the entertainment had been in progress for some time. As Hughie took his seat the curtain rose on a moonlit military scene. Figures wrapped in great-coats sat round a camp-fire on the audience's right hand, the only plainly recognisable character being the Heroine, who, attired as a hospital nurse and positively starred with red crosses, was sewing aloofly upon an erection which looked like a sarcophagus, but was marked in plain figures "Ambulence." A sentry, who from his gait Hughie took (rightly) to be the Comic Man, was pacing up and down at the back. Presently the guard was changed, with much saluting of a pattern unknown at any War Office, and the Comic Man, released from duty, was called upon to sing "that dear ole song you useter sing at 'ome." The cold light of the moon having been temporarily replaced by broad daylight in order to give the singer's facial expression full play, he obliged; though why any one who had heard him sing the song before should have asked him to sing it again passed Hughie's comprehension. Next a drummer-boy (female) was called upon by the company, and after a great exhibition of reluctance,--fully justified by her subsequent performance,--gave vent to a patriotic ditty, in which the only distinguishable rhymes were "Black Watch" and "Scotch." These revels brought the Hero on to the stage. He was attired in clerical dress and a cavalry helmet; and, sitting down beside the Heroine upon the sarcophagus, he proceeded, oblivious of the presence of the entire guard, who were huddled round the fire not more than five feet away, to make her a proposal of marriage; quoting Scripture to some purpose, and extorting a demure affirmative from the lady just before the Comic Man, who had obviously been lamenting that the success of the piece should be imperilled by such stuff as this, upset the soup-kettle, and so gave a fresh turn to the proceedings. All this time Hughie had been conscious of an increasing feeling of curiosity as to the identity of the only member of the glee-party round the fire who so far had made no contribution to the entertainment. He darkly suspected him of being the Villain, though what the Villain should be doing unrecognised at such a period of the play--it was about the third act--was hard to understand. However, the mystery was now cleared up by a French _vivandière_--by this time it was plain that the scene was laid in the Crimea--who called upon the mysterious one, in the accents of Stratford-atte-Bowe, for a song and dance. No reply being forthcoming, the entire company (precipitately, but quite correctly, as it happened) rose up and denounced the stranger as a Russian and a spy. They had only themselves to blame for his presence, for apparently he had strolled up and joined the party quite promiscuously; and no one had thought, so far, of asking him who he was or even of addressing him. The audience now sat up expectantly. But instead of taking the spy prisoner and shooting him on sight, the guard hurried off R.U.E.--possibly to bring up their big guns or find a policeman. These deplorable tactics did not meet with the reward they deserved, for the Villain, instead of bolting off L. as fast as he could, lingered upon the stage to tell the audience that he had come back to have one more go at the Hero. (Goodness knows how many he had had!) The Hero obligingly appeared at that moment, and a section (whose numbers appeared to increase as the play proceeded) of the audience shouted to the Villain to cut in and do it _now_. But portentous trampings "off" announced the return of the glee-party, and the Villain, finding that he could not execute his perfectly justifiable design without considerable danger to his own person, and was in fact in a particularly tight place himself, suddenly appealed (with considerable "nerve," it seemed to Hughie) to the Hero, as a Cleric, to save him. The Hero (who was evidently a fool as well as a bore) immediately complied. "You must take upon you my identity," he remarked. In a twinkling they had exchanged great-coats, and the Villain was now by all the laws of Melodrama completely disguised as the Hero. He dashed off L., just as a perfect avalanche of people, who had been faithfully and increasingly marking time in the wings, poured on to the stage R., and endeavoured almost to poke their rifles into the Hero's breast. But just as a nervous female in the audience, apprehensive about the sudden discharge of firearms, convulsively gripped Hughie's left elbow, the Heroine dashed on from nowhere, and taking her stand before the Hero--apparently she was the only person upon the stage who recognised him--uttered these thrilling but mysterious words: "You kennot far erpon ther Red Kerawss!" Curtain, amid thunders of applause. After a commendably short interval the curtain rose upon the next act. The Hero was now discovered asleep (under what must have struck any thoughtful member of the audience as highly compromising circumstances for a clergyman) in the cottage of a stout lady in a very short skirt and fur-topped boots; whom, from the fact that her opening soliloquy commenced with the words, "Har, vell!" the audience rightly adjudged to be a Russian. This lady, it was soon plain, was consumed by a secret passion for the Hero. In fact she proclaimed it in such strident tones that it was surprising that its object did not wake up. This scene soon resolved itself into a series of determined efforts on the part of the Villain to terminate the existence of the Hero--an enterprise in which he by this time commanded the whole-hearted support of the greater part of the audience. His first attempt was foiled by the Comic Man, who entered singing "Keep the baby warm, Mother!" just as he had crawled within striking distance of the unwakeable Hero. Muttering curses, the unfortunate man announced his intention of retiring "to the woods," pending another opportunity. But he had no luck. Just as the Comic Man performed a humorous exit through the window, the stout lady--most of the other characters, by the way, addressed her as "Tinker": possibly her name was Katinka--came in through the door, filled with the forebodings of what she called "loove." Her subsequent course of action could certainly only have been condoned on the plea of emotional insanity. She unceremoniously bundled the Hero out of bed--fortunately he had gone there in his boots--and sent him off on a transparent wild-goose chase to the "trenches." Then she got into bed herself, and when the Villain came crawling back from "the woods," brandishing his knife in the limelight, the audience were treated to a sort of up-to-date rendering of "Little Red Riding Hood," the part of the Wolf being sustained by Katinka, and that of Red Riding Hood by the now hopelessly demoralised Villain, who was once more chased back to his arboreal lurking-place with the muzzle of a revolver in the small of his back. In the next and final act the Villain made a supreme effort. He began by slaying the drummer-boy,--presumably to keep his hand in,--but on going through his victim's pockets in search of certain "despatches" which that youthful hero had undertaken to carry through the Russian lines,--where to, heaven knows!--the unfortunate man discovered a locket, which instantly revealed to him the surprising, but none the less distressing, intelligence that he had slain his own son. His anguish was pitiful to behold, and when the Hero came on and began to rub it in by further excerpts from the Scriptures, the audience to a man decided that if the Villain brought it off this time no jury would convict, but that he would be bound over at the most. He certainly set about the business with more gumption than usual. Waiting until the Hero was well launched into "Secondly," with the limelight full in his eyes, he once more produced the glittering knife. Suddenly the ubiquitous Katinka dashed on, and in the most unsportsmanlike manner shot the Villain in the small of the back, at a range of about eighteen inches. He dropped dead across the body of his son (which must have hurt that infant prodigy very much). All the other characters sidled on from the wings and formed a grand concluding tableau, the Hero, egregious to the last and entwined in a stained-glass attitude with the Hospital Nurse, pronouncing a sort of benediction as the curtain fell. "Doesn't this remind you of the Drama as it used to be dished up to the undergraduates in the old Barn at Cambridge?" remarked a voice. Hughie turned to the speaker. He found beside him a man of about thirty, with a fair moustache, which half hid a weak but amiable mouth and a receding chin. He was dressed in the thick blue shore-going garments of the seaman, but he looked too slight for an A.B. and too clean for a fireman. "Deck-hand," said Hughie to himself. "Gentleman once--no, still!" "Hallo!" he replied. "You seem to know me. Forgive me if I ought to know you, but I can't fix you at present. Odd thing, too, because I don't often forget a face." "I was up at Cambridge in your time," said the man. "Not Benedict's?" "No--Trinity. I was sent down ultimately. But I knew you well by sight. Often saw you in the boat, and so on. You're Marrable, aren't you?" "Yes. Were you a rowing man?" "No. I hunted with the Drag and rode at Cottenham--in those days." He glanced philosophically at his present attire. "Come and have something," said Hughie. The man interested him. He might, of course, be a mere long-shore shark on the make, or he might be what he looked--a good-hearted, well-born waster--an incorrigible but contented failure. Anyhow, five minutes over a friendly glass would probably settle the question. "I wonder if it's possible to obtain a decent British drink in this clam-ridden hole," Hughie continued. "The nearest thing to a product of the British Empire that you'll get here," said the man, "is Canadian whisky; and personally I would rather drink nitric acid. We had better stick to lager. Come along: I know the ropes." Presently they found themselves in a German beer saloon, where a stertorous Teuton supplied their needs. "By the way," said the man, "I have the advantage of you. My name is Allerton. Sorry I forgot!" "Thanks," said Hughie, rather lamely. "Are you--living out here just now?" "No," said Allerton simply. "I'm a deck-hand on a tramp-steamer." He spoke easily and freely, as one gentleman to another. He had realised at a glance that he was not about to be made the victim of offensive curiosity or misplaced charity. "She's lying at Hoboken, due out on Tuesday, for Bordeaux." "French boat?" "No. American owned, under the British flag, by a fairly competent rascal, too. This trip we are carrying a cargo of Californian wine of sorts. We took it last week from a sailing barque that had brought it round the Horn. She wanted to start back at once, so turned it over to us cheap." "And you're going to Bordeaux? What does your astute owner want to take coals to Newcastle for?" "Because everything that comes _out_ of Newcastle is labelled coal whether it is coal or not. In other words, this poison will be carried by us to Bordeaux, bottled and sealed, and shipped to England as fine vintage Burgundy. John Bull will drink it and feel none the worse. I'm told it's a paying trade." "I wish I were going in your boat," said Hughie, rather regretfully. "I'm booked by the Apulia." "Well, look out for the Orinoco on your second day out." "The Orinoco? I remember seeing her at Hoboken to-day, and wishing I could make the trip on her." "I doubt if you'd be of the same opinion after trying conclusions with Mr. James Gates, our first 'greaser,'" replied Allerton. "Still, I don't know," he continued, regarding Hughie's brawny form reflectively. "I don't believe he could put the fear of death into you the way he does into most of us. You've knocked about a bit in your time, I dare say, only with more success than I. Perhaps you weren't born with holes in _all_ your pockets." "I say," said Hughie rather diffidently,--it is difficult to confer a favour upon a man who is down without offending him,--"will you dine with me? Or sup, as it's getting late?" "I shall be charmed," said the deck-hand. "Shall I show you a place? I know quite a comfortable establishment close by here." Hughie said "Righto!" and presently they found themselves in the place of entertainment selected by Allerton. Most of the room was occupied by small tables, at which various couples were eating and drinking. At one end was a platform, upon which an intermittent sort of variety entertainment was in progress. On the floor at the foot of the platform was a piano. At the piano sat a girl, who accompanied the performers and bridged over the gaps in the programme by selections from the less restrained works of American Masters of Music. Not far from the stage an unhealthy-looking youth was presiding over a bar. The atmosphere was something between that of a smoking-concert, and Baker Street Station in the days of the old Underground. Allerton's lazy nonchalance lasted until the first course was set before him by a smiling blackamoor, and then, with a half-apologetic aside to his host on the subject of his last meal, he fell upon the fare in a manner which brought very vividly home to Hughie's intelligence the difference between an amateur casual like himself, with money enough in his pocket to make it possible to knock off when he tired of the game, and the genuine article. He was not hungry, having in fact dined a couple of hours before; but he did his best by tactful pecking to conceal the fact from his guest. Still, even after he had ordered some wine and duly inspected the cork, he had a good deal of time to look about him. Presently his attention began to concentrate itself upon the girl at the piano. She was sitting quite near him, and Hughie, always respectfully appreciative where a pretty face was concerned,--his wanderings, though they had made him more than ever a master of men, had done little to eradicate his innate attitude of quiet, determined, and occasionally quite undeserved reverence towards women,--had time to notice the un-American freshness of her colouring, the regularity of her profile, and the prettiness of her hair. He also observed that the foot which rested upon the pedal of the piano was small and shapely. She was quietly dressed, in a dark-blue serge skirt and a white silk blouse--or "shirtwaist," to employ the mysterious local designation--with short sleeves. She had round arms and good hands. Hughie wondered what she was doing in a place like this, and, young-man-like, felt vaguely unhappy on her behalf; but experienced a truly British feeling of relief (mingled with slight disappointment) on observing that she wore a wedding-ring. He waxed sentimental. Who was her husband? he wondered. He hoped it was not the proprietor of the establishment,--a greasy individual of Semitic appearance, who occasionally found leisure, in the intervals between announcing the "turns" and calling the attention of patrons to the exceptional resources of the bar, to walk across the room and paw the girl affectionately on the shoulder while giving her some direction as to the music,--nor yet the scorbutic young man behind the bar. His meditations were interrupted by Allerton. "Marrable, eyes front! And fill up your glass. Hang it, drink fair!" Hughie turned and regarded his guest. The greater part of a magnum of vitriolic champagne had disappeared down that gentleman's throat. His eye had brightened, and now twinkled facetiously as he surveyed first Hughie and then the girl at the piano. "_Une petite pièce de tout droit_--eh, what?" he remarked. Hughie, beginning to understand why his companion was now swabbing decks instead of ruling ancestral acres, nodded shortly. Allerton noticed his host's momentary distance of manner, and leaned across the table with an air of contrition. "I'm afraid," he said apologetically, "that I'm getting most infernally full. You see how it is with me, don't you? I'm that sort of bloke. Always have been, from a nipper. Thash--That's why I'm here. It's a pity. And the worst of it is," he added, in a sudden burst of candour, "that I'm going to get much fuller. It's a long time since I tasted this." He touched his glass. "It isn't served out on the Orinoco. Do you--er--mind?" Hughie, with a queer feeling of compassion, smiled reassuringly, and ordered another bottle. If Allerton was about to get drunk, he should get drunk like a gentleman for once in a way. Then his attention reverted to the piano. There had been a development. The girl was mechanically playing one of the compositions of that delicate weaver of subtle harmonies, Mr. John Philip Sousa; but she was not reading her music. Her eyelids were resolutely lowered, as if she wished to avoid seeing something. The reason resolved itself into a gentleman who was leaning over the front of the piano, gazing amorously down upon the musician, and endeavouring, with surprising success, to make himself heard above one of the composer's most characteristic efforts. Hughie looked him up and down. He was a big man, powerfully built, with little pig's eyes set close together, and a ponderous and vicious-looking lower jaw. Was _he_ her husband? wondered the deeply interested Hughie. No: he was too obviously endeavouring to make himself agreeable. "Marrable, my son," suddenly interpolated the convivial but observant Allerton, "you're cut out! No use bidding against that customer. Do you know who he is?" "No. Who?" "That," replied the deck-hand with an air of almost proprietary pride, "is Noddy Kinahan." "Oh! And who may he be?" "Gee! (Sorry! One picks up these rotten Yankee expressions somehow.) I mean, I am surprised you haven't heard of him. He's rather a big man here. In fact, to be explish--explicit,"--Mr. Allerton was fast arriving at that stage of intoxication which cannot let well alone, but must tempt Providence by dragging in unnecessarily hard words,--"he is my employer." "Anything else." "Political boss of sorts. _Inter alia_--that's good! I'm glad I remembered that. _Inter alia_ rhymes with Australia, doesn't it? We'll make up a Limerick on it some time--let me see, where was I? Oh, yesh--yes, I mean--_inter alia_, he owns the Orinoco and about a dozen more mouldy old coffins; and very well he does out of them, too! Buys them cheap, and--but excuse further details at present, ole man. To tell you the truth I'm getting so screwed that I'm afraid of saying something that in my calmer moments I shall subsequently regret. A cigar? I thank you. You're a white man, Marrable. Chin chin!" After this burst of discretion Mr. Allerton returned to the joint worship of Bacchus and Vesta, the difficulty which he experienced in keeping the lighted end of the cigar out of his mouth increasing as the evening advanced, but leaving his cheerfulness unimpaired. His condition was due not so much to the depths of his potations as to the shallowness of his accommodation for the same; and strong-headed Hughie, as he surveyed the weak chin and receding forehead on the other side of the table, mused not altogether without envy upon the strange inequality of that law of nature which decrees that what is a toothful for one man shall be a skinful for another and an anæsthetic for a third. He was recalled from these musings by the remembrance of the girl at the piano, and turned to see what was happening now. Mr. Noddy Kinahan was returning from an expedition to the bar, carrying a bottle of champagne and a long tumbler. These accessories to conviviality he placed on the top of the piano, and departed on a second trip, returning shortly with a wine-glassful of brandy. The girl, though she probably observed more of his movements than her low-drooping lashes would seem to allow, made no sign, but continued to play the ragtime tune with a mechanical precision which caused the tumbler on the top of the piano to tread a lively and self-accompanied measure round its more stolid and heavily weighted companion. Mr. Kinahan next proceeded to pour himself out a tumblerful of champagne, liberally lacing the foaming liquid with brandy. Then, with an ingratiating gesture toward the shrinking girl, he proceeded to swallow the mixture with every appearance of enjoyment. "King's peg!" commented Hughie to himself. "Wonder how much of _that_ he can stand? I'd back him against friend Allerton, though, if it came--Hallo! The hound! This must stop!" He half rose to his feet. Mr. Kinahan, having satisfied his present needs, had refilled the tumbler with champagne, added the rest of the brandy, and was now proffering the potion, in the self-same vessel which he had just honoured with his own august lips, to the girl at the piano. The girl turned crimson and shook her head, but kept on playing. Noddy Kinahan was not accustomed to bestow favours in vain. He walked round behind the piano, and, taking the girl firmly by the shoulders with his left arm, held the sizzling tumbler to her lips. She uttered a strangled cry, left off playing, and struggled frantically to seize the glass with her hands. Now Hughie Marrable had a healthy prejudice in favour of minding his own business. He had witnessed scenes of this description before, and he knew that, place and company considered, the girl at the piano was probably not unaccustomed to accept refreshment at the hands of gentlemen, even when the gentleman was half-drunk, the hands dirty, and the refreshment (after allowing a generous discount for spillings) sufficiently potent to deprive any ordinary woman, within ten minutes, of any sort of control over her own actions or behaviour. Moreover, Hughie had a truly British horror of a scene. _But_-- He was surprised to feel himself leap from his chair and bound toward the piano. His surprise, however, was nothing to that experienced a moment later by Mr. Noddy Kinahan, who, having succeeded in pinning the desperately resisting girl's arms to her sides, was now endeavouring to prise her lips open with the edge of the tumbler. But there are slips even after the cup has reached the lip. Just as success appeared to be about to crown Mr. Kinahan's hospitable efforts, a large and sinewy hand shot over his right shoulder and snatched away the glass, which it threw under the piano. Simultaneously an unseen force in the rear shook him till his teeth rattled, and then, depressing his head to the level of the keyboard, began to play a lively if staccato tune thereon with the point of Mr. Kinahan's rubicund and fleshy nose. These operations were more or less screened from the public view by the body of the piano, which was an "upright" of the cottage variety. But the sudden cessation of "The Washington Post" in favour of what sounded like "The Cat's Polka" played by a baby with its feet, brought the proprietor of the establishment hurrying across the room. He arrived just in time to be present at the conclusion of a florid chromatic scale of about four octaves, executed under the guidance of Hughie Marrable's heavy hand by Mr. Kinahan's somewhat abraded nasal organ. The instrumental part of the entertainment now terminated in favour of a vocal interlude. Hughie released his grip of Mr. Noddy Kinahan's collar, and stood back a pace waiting for a rush. He was confident that, given a clear floor and no interference, he could offer his burly opponent a lesson in manners which he would never forget. But Mr. Kinahan, being a mover in high political altitudes, was not in the habit of doing his own dirty work. He reviled his opponent, it is true, in terms which an expert could not but have admitted were masterly, but it was obvious to the unruffled Hughie that he was doing so chiefly to keep his courage up and "save his face." There was a cunning, calculating look in his piggy eyes which did not quite fit in with the unrestrained _abandon_ of his utterances, and Hughie began to realise that there are deeper schemes of retaliation than mere assault and battery. Once or twice Mr. Kinahan, in pausing for breath, turned and looked over his shoulder toward the curious crowd which was gathering behind him. Presently Hughie noticed a couple of "toughs" of the most uncompromisingly villainous appearance advancing in a leisurely fashion from a corner by the door, where they had been supping. They kept their eyes on Kinahan, as if for an order. Evidently that great man never took his walks abroad without his jackals. Things were beginning to look serious. The Hebraic proprietor, half crazy with fright at the gratuitous advertisement which the fracas was conferring upon his establishment,--an advertisement which was receiving a gratifying response from an influx of curious sightseers,--was frantically begging people to go away. The girl, the source (as ever!) of all the trouble, was still sitting on the music-stool, trembling like a fluttered bird, with Hughie, feeling slightly self-conscious, standing over her. In the middle distance, Mr. Allerton, gloriously oblivious to the ephemeral and irrelevant disturbance around him, sat contentedly before two empty bottles, endeavouring with erratic fingers to adorn the lapel of his blue pea-jacket with a silver-plated fork (the property of the establishment), upon which he had impaled a nodding banana of pantomimic proportions. Suddenly Hughie heard himself addressed in casual tones by some one standing close behind him. "Say, Johnny Bull, you'd best get out of here, right now. Skip! Those two toughs of Noddy's won't touch you till they get the word, but when they do you'll be sorry. Get out this way, by the side of the stage. It leads around to the back door." Having delivered himself of this undoubtedly sound piece of advice, the unhealthy-looking young gentleman from behind the bar picked up the champagne bottle and broken glass, and lounged back to his base of operations. Hughie, realising the wisdom of his words, and making a hasty note that one should never judge even a mottle-faced bar-tender by his appearance, reluctantly abandoned his half-projected scheme of hurling Noddy Kinahan into the arms of his two sinister supporters and then knocking their collective heads together, and turned to the small door behind him. Suddenly he caught sight of the piano-girl. He paused and surveyed her thoughtfully. "You'd better come with me," he said. Without a word, the girl rose and preceded him to the door. Hughie opened it for her, and they both passed through and hurried down a narrow passage, which gave direct into the alley at the back of the establishment. Once outside, Hughie took the girl's arm and fairly ran, never pausing till they reached the brightly lighted sea-front. He had an idea that a cheerful and crowded thoroughfare would prove more salubrious than deserted and ill-lit byways. Once clear of their late surroundings the two slackened pace, and Hughie surveyed his charge with comical perplexity. "Now what am I to do with _you_?" he inquired. "Take me home," said the girl, sobbing. Her pluck and fortitude, having brought her dry-eyed through the worst of the conflict, had now taken their usual leave of absence, and she was indulging very properly in a few reactionary and comforting tears. "Where do you live?" asked Hughie. "Brooklyn." "That's a matter for a trolley-car. Come along." He took her arm again, rather diffidently this time,--his old masculine self-consciousness was returning,--and hurried off to what the Coney Islanders call a "deepo." Here they ensconced themselves in the corner of a fairly empty car, and started on their twenty-mile run, _viâ_ Sheepshead Bay and other delectable spots, to Brooklyn Bridge. As soon as the car started, Hughie turned to his companion. "Look here," he said bluntly. "I know a lady when I meet one. What were you doing in that place at all? You are English, too." "Yes. I can't blame you for wondering. I'll tell you. I come from London. My father was a small schoolmaster in Sydenham. He--he was unfortunate, and died three years ago, and I was left alone in the world, with hardly two sixpences to rub together. Just as things were looking none too promising for me, I met and married"--she flushed proudly--"one of the best men that ever stepped--Dennis Maclear. He is an electrical engineer. We came out here together to make our fortunes, and settled in New York. We were beginning to do fairly well after a long struggle, when one day Dennis crushed his left arm and leg in a cog-wheel arrangement of some kind, and for three months he has not been able even to get out of bed without help. Bad luck, wasn't it? He is getting better slowly, and some day, the doctor says, he will be able to get about again. But--well, savings don't last for ever, you know; so I--" "I see," said Hughie; "the upkeep of the establishment has devolved on you in the meanwhile?" "Yes. Piano-playing is about the only accomplishment I possess. A girl friend of mine told me she was giving up her billet at old Bercotti's, and asked if I would like it. She wouldn't recommend it to most girls, she said, but perhaps it would suit me all right, being married. I took it; but as you saw, my being married wasn't sufficient protection after all." She shuddered, for she was very young, and badly shaken; but presently she smiled bravely. "What did you get?" asked Hughie. "Dollar a night." "It's not much." "It's better than starvation," said practical little Mrs. Maclear. "And what are you going to do next?" "I'm not going back to old Bercotti's again--that's flat." "Can you get another berth?" "Well, if there happens to be anybody in this simple and confiding country who is willing to take on as accompanist or teacher a young woman of shabby-genteel appearance, who is unable to mention a single soul as a reference, and has no character to show from her former employer--it ought to be easy!" said the girl. Hughie regarded her reflectively. "You take it well. I admire your pluck," he said. "A married woman with a husband to keep has no time to worry about pluck," replied Mrs. Maclear; "she just _has_ to do things. Besides, all the pluck in the world can't save a woman when Noddy Kinahan is about. If it hadn't been for you--by the way, would you mind telling me your name? You know mine." Hughie told her. Presently they left the trolley-car--_anglicè_, electric-tram--and struck off down a street in Brooklyn. The girl turned in at a doorway, and paused at the foot of a stair. "Won't you come up and see my husband, Mr. Marrable?" she said. "It's ten flights up, and we don't run to an elevator; but I know Dennis would like to thank you himself." Hughie had intended to refuse,--he hated being thanked as much as most matter-of-fact people,--but, a flash of unusual insight revealing to him the fact that the true object of the invitation was not to exhibit him to the husband, but to enable this proud little lady to exhibit her husband to him, he felt reassured, and allowed himself to be borne aloft to the Maclear eyrie. Here a gigantic and impulsive son of Kerry, gaunt and hollow-eyed through long bed-keeping, wrung his hand in a manner which made him feel glad he was not a refractory terminal, what time Mrs. Maclear, in a sort of up-to-date version of the song of Miriam, described Hughie's glorious triumph over Noddy Kinahan, laying special stress upon the ecstatic period during which Mr. Kinahan, at the instance of Hughie, had enacted the part of a human pianola. He left them at last, wondering in his heart, as he tramped home under the stars to his hotel in West Forty-Second Street, what the plucky couple were going to live on during the next two or three months. The man was still practically a cripple,--he must have been badly mangled,--and it is hard work fighting for time in a country whose motto, as regards human as well as other machinery, is: "Never repair! Scrap, and replace!" Hughie had solved the problem to his satisfaction by the time he crossed Brooklyn Bridge. For the rest of the way home he thought of other things. A bachelor, however ungregarious, is at heart a sentimental animal, and during his walk Hughie was contemplating with his mind's eye the picture that he had left behind him as he said good-night,--the picture of "a snug little kingdom up ten pair of stairs," tenanted by a little community of two, self-contained and self-sufficient, dauntless in the face of grim want and utter friendlessness,--and, despite his own health and wealth, he experienced a sudden feeling of envy for the crippled and impecunious Dennis Maclear. "I suppose," he mused to himself, "it doesn't really matter _how_ rotten a time you have in this world so long as you have it in the right company." Then he added, apparently as a sort of corollary: "By gad, when I get home next week, I'll _stay_ there!" But, however carefully (or carelessly) we handle the tiller on life's voyage, it is the little casual currents and unexpected side winds that really set our course for us. As Hughie rolled into bed that night he reflected, rather regretfully, that the incident of that evening was closed for ever. He had definitely cut himself off from the Maclears, at any rate, for the very simple reason that he had just posted to them a hundred one-dollar notes, as a temporary loan until their "ship came in," carefully omitting to mention that his own was due to go out in twenty-four hours, and giving no address for purposes of repayment. But for all that, the incident had definitely altered his course for him, or at any rate was destined to send him round by an alternative route. CHAPTER VII THE ALTERNATIVE ROUTE Her most ardent admirers--and they had never been very numerous--could hardly have described the Orinoco as a rapid or up-to-date vessel. She could average a fair eight knots in ordinary weather (except when the Chief Engineer was not sober; and then she had been known to do as much as eleven), and she had faced with tolerable credit seven strenuous years of North Atlantic weather, winter and summer alike. But she was no flier. She had not always ploughed the ocean at the behests of Mr. Noddy Kinahan, her present owner. As a matter of fact, she dated back to the early sixties. She had been built on the Clyde, in days when people were not in such a hurry as they are now, for steady and reliable cross-channel service between Scotland and Ireland; and the crinolined young lady who had blushingly performed the christening ceremony as the brand-new steamer slipped down the ways had named her the Gareloch. After fifteen years of honest buffeting between the Kish and the Cloch the little Gareloch had been pronounced too slow, and sold to the proprietor of a line of coasting steamers which plied between Cardiff and London. In this capacity, with a different-coloured funnel and a slightly decayed interior, she had served for nine years as the Annie S. Holmes. After that an officious gentleman from the Board of Trade happened to notice the state of her boilers, and unhesitatingly declined to renew her certificate until various things were done which her present owner was not in the habit of doing. Consequently she had lain rusting in Southampton Water for six months, until an astute Scot, who ran a sort of Dr. Barnardo's home for steamers which had been abandoned by their original owners, stepped in and bought her, at the rate of about a pound per ton; and having refitted her with some convenient boilers which he had picked up at a sale, and checked her fuel-consumption by reducing her grate-area, set her going again in a humble but remunerative way as a pig-boat between Limerick and Glasgow. During this period of her career she was known as the Blush Rose--and probably smelt as sweet. The maritime Dr. Barnardo sold her three years later (at a profit) to a gentleman who required a ship for some shady and mysterious operations amid certain islands in the Southern Pacific. The nature of the poor Blush Rose's occupation may be gathered from the fact that in the space of three months she made those already tropical regions too hot to hold her; and, with her name painted out, a repaired shot-hole in her counter, and a few pearl oyster-shells sticking out here and there in the murky recesses of her hold, was knocked down for a song at Buenos Ayres to a Spanish-American who desired her for the fulfilment of some rather private contracts, into which he had entered with a Central American State, for a consignment of small arms and ammunition delivered immediately--terms, C. O. D. and no questions asked. Her captain on this occasion was a Lowland Scot of disreputable character but inherent piety, who endeavoured to confer a rather spurious sanctity upon a nefarious enterprise by christening his nameless vessel the Jedburgh Abbey. But, alas! the Jedburgh Abbey was confiscated a year later by the United States government, and having disgorged a most uncanonical cargo, was knocked down by Dutch auction, without benefit of clergy, to the highest bidder. Competition for her possession was not keen, and she ultimately became the property of Mr. Noddy Kinahan, who at that time was beginning to pile up a considerable fortune by purchasing old steamers on their way to the scrap-heap and running them as tramp-freighters until they sank. The Jedburgh Abbey, with a new propeller,--she had gone short of a blade for years,--her rusty carcase tinkered into something like sea-worthiness, and her engines secured a little more firmly to their bed-plates, had re-established her social status by creeping once more into Lloyd's list--the Red Book of the Mercantile Marine--and, disguised as the Orinoco, of the "River" Line of freight-carrying steamships, had served Mr. Noddy Kinahan well for seven years. This grey morning, with Sandy Hook well down below the western horizon, she clambered wearily but perseveringly over the Atlantic rollers, like a disillusioned and world-weary old cab-horse which, having begun life between the shafts of a gentleman's brougham, is now concluding a depressing existence by dragging a funereal "growler" up and down the undulations of a London suburb. Her redeeming feature was a certain purity of outline and symmetry of form. She boasted a flush deck, unbroken by any unsightly waist amid-ships; and not even her unscraped masts, her scarred sides, and her flaked and salt-whitened funnel could altogether take away from her her pride of race,--the right to boast, in common with many a human derelict of the same sex and a very similar history, that she had "been a lady once." She had now been at sea for well over twenty-four hours, and her crew, who had to a man been brought on board in what a sympathetic eyewitness on a similar occasion once described as "a state of beastly but enviable intoxication," were once more beginning to sit up and take notice. Their efforts in this direction owed much to the kind assistance of Messrs. Gates and Dingle, the first and second mates, who with cold douche and unrelenting boot were sparing no pains to rouse to a sense of duty those of their flock who had not yet found or recovered their sea-legs. The crew consisted of two Englishmen and a Californian, together with a handful of Scandinavians, Portuguese, and Germans, divided by sea-law (which, like its big brother, _non curat de minimis_) into "Dagoes" and "Dutchmen" respectively, representatives of the Romance races being grouped under the former and of the Anglo-Saxon under the latter designations. With one exception none of them had sailed on the ship before, and in all probability would never do so again. They had been purveyed to Captain Kingdom by a Tenderloin boarding-house keeper, and had signed a contract for the voyage to Bordeaux and back, wages for both trips to be paid at the end of the second. If sufficiently knocked about, they would in all probability desert at Bordeaux, preferring to forego their pay rather than stand a second dose of the home comforts of the Orinoco. This was one of the ways in which Captain Kingdom saved his employer money and in which Mr. Noddy Kinahan made the "River" Line a profitable concern. There were also others, which shall be set forth in due course. Captain Kingdom had just appeared on the bridge. He was a furtive and sinister-looking individual, resembling rather a pawnbroker's assistant than one who occupied his business in great waters. But he was a useful servant to Noddy Kinahan. "Got all the hands to work, Mr. Gates?" he called down to the mate. "Aye, aye, sir!" replied Mr. Gates, knocking the heel of his boot on the deck to ease his aching toes. The captain ran his eye over the crew, who were huddling together forward of the bridge. He cleared his throat. "Now, you scum," he began genially, "attend to me, while I tell you what you've got to do on board this ship." The scum, stagnant and unresponsive, listened stolidly to his harangue, the substance of which did not differ materially, _mutatis mutandis_, from one of Mr. Squeers's inaugural addresses to his pupils on the first morning of term at Dotheboys Hall. Captain Kingdom's peroration laid particular stress upon the fact that Messrs. Gates and Dingle had been requested by him as a particular favour to adopt the policy of the thick stick and the big boot in the case of those members of the crew who refrained from looking slick in executing their orders. The crew received his remarks with sheepish grins or sullen scowls; and the orator concluded: "Pick watches, Mr. Gates, and then we'll pipe down to dinner. Are all hands on deck?" "Aye, aye, sir," replied Mr. Gates, looking over his list. "I saw _somebody_ down below a few minutes ago," drawled a voice, proceeding from a figure seated upon a bollard. It was Mr. Allerton, who, with characteristic contentment with (or indifference to) his lot, had performed the unprecedented feat of signing on for a second voyage in the Orinoco. He wore his usual air of humorous tolerance of the cares of this world, and spoke in the composed and unruffled fashion which stamps the high-caste Englishman all over the globe. His lot on board the Orinoco had been lighter than that of most, for his companions, finding him apparently impervious to ill-usage and philosophically genial under all circumstances, had agreed to regard him as a species of heavily decayed and slightly demented "dude," and had half-affectionately christened him "Percy,"--a term which sums up the typical Englishman for the New Yorker almost as vividly as "Rosbif" and "Godam" perform that office for the Parisian. The captain descended from the bridge, walked across the deck, and dispassionately kicked Mr. Allerton off the bollard. "Stand up, you swine, when you speak to me!" he shouted. "Where did you see anybody?" Mr. Allerton rose slowly and painfully from the scuppers. There are moments when the _rôle_ of a Democritus is difficult to sustain. "I'm sorry you did that, captain," he remarked, "because I know you didn't mean it personally. You had to make some sort of demonstration, of course, to put the fear of death into these new hands, but I regret that you should have singled me out as the _corpus vile_,--you don't know what that means, I daresay: never mind!--because you have shaken up my wits so much, besides nearly breaking my hip-bone, that I shall have to pause and consider a minute before I remember where I _did_ see the gentleman." If the captain had been Mr. Gates he would probably have felled Allerton to the deck a second time. As it was, he shuffled his feet uncomfortably and glared. The broken man before him, when all was said and done, was his superior; and the captain, who was of sufficiently refined clay to be sensitive to social distinctions, was angrily conscious of that sense of sheepish uneasiness which obsesses the cad, however exalted, in the presence of a gentleman, however degraded. Allerton continued:-- "I remember now, captain. The man was lying in the alley-way leading to the companion. I'll go and see how he is getting on. Keep your seats, gentlemen." He dived down the fore-hatchway, just in time to escape the itching boot of the unimpressionable Mr. Gates, and proceeded between decks toward the stern. Presently he came to the alley-way in question. The man was still there, but had slightly shifted his position since Allerton had last seen him. He was now reclining across the passage, with his head sunk on his chest. His feet were bare, and he was attired in a blue jumper and a pair of trousers which had once belonged to a suit of orange-and-red pyjamas. His appearance was not impressive. Allerton stirred him gently with his foot. "Wake up, old man," he remarked, "or there'll be hell--Well, I'm damned!" For the man had drowsily lifted his heavy head and displayed the features of Hughie Marrable. They gazed at each other for a full minute. Then Allerton said feebly:-- "You've preferred the Orinoco to the Apulia after all, then?" Hughie did not reply. He was running his tongue round his cracked and blackened lips, and tentatively sucking his palate. "I know that taste," he remarked. "It reminds me of a night I once spent in Canton. I have it--opium!" Then he tenderly fingered the back of his head, and nodded with the interested air of one who is acquiring a new item of experience. "I've been filled up with opium before," he said, "but this is the first time I've been sand-bagged. I suppose I was sand-bagged first and hocussed afterwards. Yes, that's it." He looked almost pleased. He was a man who liked to get to the bottom of things. Presently he continued:-- "Could you get me a drink of water? I've got a tongue like a stick of glue." Allerton departed as bidden, presently to return with a pannikin. Hughie was standing up in the alley-way, swaying unsteadily and regarding his attire. "I say," he said, after gulping the water, "would you mind telling me--you see, I'm a little bit wuzzy in the head at present--where the devil I am, and whether I came on board in this kit or my own clothes?" "Steamship Orinoco," replied Allerton precisely, "out of New York, for Bordeaux." "Let me think," said Hughie,--"Orinoco? Ah! now I'm beginning to see daylight. What's the name of the owner, our friend from Coney Island?" Allerton told him. "But he's more than your friend now," he added; "he's your employer." Hughie whistled long and low. "I see," he said. "Shanghaied--eh? Well, I must say he owed me one: I fairly barked his nose for him that night. But now that he has had me knocked on the head and shipped on board this old ark, I think he has overpaid me. I owe him one again; and, with any luck, he shall have it." "Do you remember being slugged?" said Allerton. "Can't say I do precisely. Let me see. I recollect coming along Forty-second Street on my way to the Manhattan. I'd been dining at the Lambs, and I stopped a minute on the sidewalk under an L railway-track to light my pipe, when--yes, it must have happened then." "I expect you had been shadowed all day," said Allerton. "But I'm forgetting my duties. You are wanted on deck." "Who wants me? Noddy Kinahan?" "Not much! He doesn't travel by his own ships. It's the captain. I understand that you are to be presented to the company as a little stowaway, and great surprise and pain will be officially manifested at your appearance on board." "All right. Come along and introduce me." Captain Kingdom's method of dealing with stowaways--natural and artificial--was simple and unvarying. On presentation, he first of all abused them with all the resources of an almost Esperantic vocabulary, and then handed them over to Mr. Gates to be kicked into shape. On Hughie Marrable's appearance on deck, the captain proceeded with gusto to Part One of his syllabus. Hard words break no bones, and Hughie, who was breathing in great draughts of sea-air and feeling less dizzy and more collected each minute, set no particular store by the oratorical display to which he was being treated. In fact, he was almost guilty of the discourtesy of allowing his attention to wander. He set the crown upon his offence by interrupting the captain's peroration. "Look here, skipper," he said, brusquely breaking in upon a period, "you can drop that. My name is Marrable. I am not a stowaway, and I have been dumped on board this ship by order of--" "Your name," said Captain Kingdom with relish, "is anything I choose to call you; and as you stowed yourself away on board--" "Look here," said Hughie, "I want a word with you--in your own cabin for choice. All right," he continued with rising voice, as the captain broke out again, "I'll have it here instead. First of all, what is Mr. Noddy Kinahan paying you for this job?" The captain turned to the mate. "Sock him, Mr. Gates!" he roared. Mr. Gates, whose curiosity--together with that of the rest of the crew--had been roused, as Hughie meant it to be, by the latter's reference to Mr. Noddy Kinahan's share in the present situation, moved forward to his task with less alacrity than usual, and paused readily enough when Hughie continued:-- "If you'll put back, captain, and land me anywhere within a hundred miles of New York, I'll give you double what Kinahan is paying you for this job." "You _look_ like a man with money, I must say!" replied Kingdom. "Now then, Mr. Gates!" "It's to be no deal, then?" said Hughie composedly. "Very well. The next question is, if I am coming with you, how am I going to be treated? Cabin or steer--" "I'll show you," roared the incensed skipper. "Knock him silly, Mr. Gates!" Mr. Gates came on with a rush. But Hughie, who all this time had been taking his bearings, leapt back lightly in his bare feet and snatched a capstan-bar from the rack behind him. "Keep your distance for a moment, Mr. Gates," he commanded, "if you don't want your head cracked. I haven't finished interviewing this captain of yours yet. Happy to oblige _you_ later, for any period you care to specify." "'Nother Percy!" commented Mr. Dingle dejectedly, expectorating over the side. He was a plain man, was Mr. Dingle, and loved straight hitting and words of one syllable. Mr. Gates paused, and Hughie, leaning back against the bulwarks and toying with the capstan-bar, continued to address the fulminating mariner on the bridge. "Now, captain, I'm going to be brief with you--brief and business-like. You've been paid by Kinahan to shanghai me and take me for a long sea-voyage. Very good. I'm not kicking. I wanted to get to Europe anyhow, and I rather like long sea-voyages, especially before the mast. In fact, I'd rather sail before the mast on board this ship than in the cuddy. (Keep still, Mr. Gates!) As I'm here, I've no particular objection to working my passage, always reserving to myself the right to make things hot for your employer when I get ashore. I'll work as an A.B. or deck-hand if you like, though personally I would rather do something in the engine-room. I'm pretty well qualified in that direction. But I must be decently treated, and there must be no more sand-bagging or knockabout variety business. Is it a deal?" Captain Kingdom surveyed the sinewy stowaway before him thoughtfully. He saw that until Hughie gave up the capstan-bar Mr. Gates would have little chance of enforcing discipline. He must temporise. "I can give you a job in the engine-room," he said, in what he imagined was a more conciliatory tone. "Second engineer's down with something this morning. You can take his watch. Drop that capstan-bar of yours, and go and see Mr. Angus, the chief." "That should suit me," replied Hughie. "But as a guarantee of good faith, and to avoid disappointing the assembled company, I'm quite willing to stand up and have a turn with Mr. Gates here, or that gentleman over by the funnel-stay, or any one else you may appoint. But I should _prefer_ Mr. Gates," he added, almost affectionately. "I'm not in first-class form at present, as my head has got a dint in it behind; but I'll do my best. Are you game, Mr. Gates?" "Go on, Mr. Gates, learn him!" commanded the highly gratified skipper. "Drop that bar," shouted the genial Mr. Gates, "and I'll kill you!" "Half a minute, please," said Hughie, as unruffled as if he were putting on the gloves for a ten-minute spar in a gymnasium. "I'm not going to fight a man in sea-boots in my bare feet. Can any gentleman oblige me with--Thank you, sir! You are a white man." A pair of oily canvas tennis shoes, with list soles, pattered down on the deck beside him. Their donor, the "white man,"--a coal-black individual attired chiefly in cotton-waste,--was smiling affably from the engine-room hatchway. "They'll dae ye fine," he observed unexpectedly, and disappeared below. In a moment Hughie had slipped on the shoes. Then, casting away the bar, he hurled himself straight at the head of Mr. Gates. In the brief but exhilarating exhibition which followed Mr. Gates realised that a first mate on the defensive is a very different being from a first mate on the rampage. He had become so accustomed to breaking in unresisting dock-rats and bemused foreigners, taking his own time and using his boots where necessary, that a high-pressure combat with a man who seemed to be everywhere except at the end of his fist--to his honour he never once thought of employing his foot--was an entire novelty to him. He fought sullenly but ponderously, wasting his enormous strength on murderous blows which never reached their mark, and stolidly enduring a storm of smacks, bangs, and punches that would have knocked a man of less enduring material into a pulp. But there is one blow which no member of the human family can stand up to, glutton for punishment though he be. Hughie made a sudden feint with his left at his opponent's body, just below the heart. Gates dropped his guard, momentarily throwing forward his head as he did so. Instantaneously a terrific upper-cut from Hughie's right took him squarely under the chin. Mr. Gates described a graceful parabola, and landed heavily on his back on deck, striking his head against a ring-bolt as he fell. The whole fight had lasted less than four minutes. Hughie was about to assist his fallen opponent to rise, when he heard a warning cry from half-a-dozen voices. He swung round, to find the captain making for him, open-mouthed, with the capstan-bar. He sprang lightly aside--a further blessing on those list shoes!--and his opponent charged past him, bringing down the bar with a flail-like sweep upon the drum of a steam windlass. Next moment Hughie, grasping the foremast shrouds, leaped on the bulwarks and pulled himself up to the level of the bridge, which was unoccupied save by the man at the wheel, who had been an enthusiastic spectator of the scene below. Having climbed upon the bridge, and so secured the upper ground in case of any further attack, Hughie leaned over the rails and parleyed. In his hand he held a pair of heavy binoculars, which he had taken out of a box clamped to the back of the wind-screen. "The first man who attempts to follow me up here," he announced, when he had got his breath back, "will get this pair of glasses in the eye. Captain, I don't think you are a great success as an employer of labour. You haven't got the knack of conciliating your men. Can't we come to terms? Mine are very simple. I want some clothes--my own, for choice. If you haven't got them, anything quiet and unobtrusive will do. But I decline to go about in orange-and-red pyjama trousers in mid-Atlantic to please you or anybody else. For one thing they're not warm, and for another they're not usual. If you will oblige me in this matter, I am quite willing to live at peace with you. I don't see that you can really suppress me except by killing me, and that is a thing which I don't think you have either the authority or the pluck to do. Why not give me a billet in the engine-room and cry quits?" Captain Kingdom looked up at the obstreperous mutineer on the bridge, and down at the recumbent Mr. Gates on the deck, and ground his teeth. Then he looked up to the bridge again. "All right," he growled. "Come down!" CHAPTER VIII A BENEFIT PERFORMANCE Hughie, having been relieved to a slight extent from sartorial humiliation, entered upon his engine-room duties forthwith. The society in which he found himself consisted of Mr. Angus, the chief,--engineers, like gardeners, editors, and Cabinet Ministers, are practically all Scotsmen,--Mr. Goble, the acting-second (_vice_ Mr. Walsh, sick), and a motley gang of undersized, half-mutinous, wholly vile sweepings of humanity in the form of firemen. Mr. Walsh was suffering from an intermittent form of malaria contracted years ago in an up-river trip to the pestilential regions round Saigon. Mr. Angus, a hoary-headed and bottle-nosed Dundonian, who could have charmed a scrap-heap into activity, received Hughie with native politeness, and paid him the compliment of working him uncommonly hard. He explained (with perfect truth) that the only reason why he was not at that moment driving a Cunarder was a habit of his, viewed by certain owners with regrettable narrowness of vision, of "takin' a drap, whiles." The concluding adverb Hughie correctly estimated to mean "whenever I can get anything to drink." "I canna see what for they should be sae partic'lar aboot it," mused Mr. Angus in recounting the circumstance, "for I haundle her jist as weel drunk as sober. However, here I am, and there's an end o't. Aiblins it's jist as weel. I could rin the engines o' ony Cunarder afloat, but I ken fine there's not hauf-a-dozen men in their hale fleet could knock eight knots oot o' the auld Orinoco. There's a kin' o' divinity aboot it, I doot. A man's pit whaur he's maist wantit." John Alexander Goble, the acting-second, proved to be a man of greater depth and more surprises than his superior. He it was who had thrown the list shoes to Hughie before the battle with Mr. Gates, which showed that he was at heart a Sportsman; he had taken the first opportunity of asking for the return of the same, which showed that he was a Scotsman; but he had found Hughie a better pair of shoes in their stead, together with some garments more suitable than the blue jumper and the orange-and-red pyjama trousers, which showed that he was a good Samaritan: and a man who is a Sportsman and a Scot and a good Samaritan all rolled into one is an addition to the society of any engine-room. His face wore an expression of chastened gloom; and if washed and set ashore in his native Caledonia, he would probably have received a unanimous invitation to come and glower over the plate in the doorway of the nearest Wee Free conventicle. His speech was slow and unctuous: one could imagine him under happier circumstances conducting family worship, and pausing to elucidate in approved fashion some specially obvious passage in the evening's "portion," thus: "From the expression, 'a michty man o' valour,' we may gather that the subject of this reference was a person of considerable stature and undoubted physical courage." He was habitually and painfully sober, for reasons which Hughie learned from him at a period when they had more leisure to study each other's characters. He was ignorant of the first principles of mechanics, but could be trusted to keep the Orinoco's propeller-shaft revolving at a steady seventy-two to the minute; and he had a gentle compelling way with refractory firemen which made for sweet reasonableness and general harmony below stairs, what time Mr. Angus was recovering from one of those sudden and regrettable attacks of indisposition which usually coincided with the forgetfulness of the steward to lock up the cabin whisky-bottle. Hughie berthed in the foc'sle, and was regarded by the Dagoes, Dutchmen, _et hoc genus omne_, with mingled admiration for the manner in which he had settled Mr. Gates, and mystified surprise that a man capable of such a feat should be content to live on his own rations and sleep in his allotted bunk, without desiring to make researches into the respective succulence and comfort of his neighbours'. On the whole Hughie found his life tolerable enough, as the Orinoco butted and grunted her way across the Newfoundland Banks; and he experienced no pang when the Apulia, spouting smoke from her four funnels and carrying his luggage in one of her state-rooms, swept past them on the rim of the southern horizon on their third day out. He was accustomed to rough quarters, and any new experience of things as they are was of interest to him. Moreover, he possessed the priceless possession of a cast-iron digestion; and a man so blessed can afford to snap his fingers at most of the sundry and manifold changes of this world. Captain Kingdom and Mr. Gates for the time being held him severely aloof. The taciturn Mr. Dingle conveyed to him, by means of a surprisingly ingenious code of grunts and expectorations, that provided he, Hughie,--or Brown, as he was usually called,--was content to go his way without hunting for trouble, he, Mr. Dingle, was content to go his without endeavouring to supply it. Altogether there seemed to be no reason for doubting that the Orinoco, provided she did not open up and sink like a basket _en route_, would ultimately reach the port of Bordeaux, bringing her sheaves, in the form of Hughie and some unspeakable claret, with her. But there is more than one way of making money out of the shipping trade. One night Hughie was leaning over the taffrail behind the wheel-house at the stern. It was two o'clock, and the darkness was intensified by a heavy mist. There was almost no wind, and the Orinoco, like a draught-horse which feels the wheels of its equipage upon a tram-line, slid gratefully up and down the lazy rollers with the nearest approach to comfort that she had experienced that voyage. Hughie was idly watching the phosphorescent wake of the propeller, wondering whether Captain Kingdom had orders to land him in France in his shirt and trousers or throw him overboard before they got there, when a figure rose up out of the darkness beside him. It was the easy-going Mr. Allerton. "Hallo, Percy!" said Hughie. He had soon dropped into the nomenclature of the foc'sle. "Look here," said Allerton, in a more purposeful voice than usual; "come along and look at this boat." The largest of the three boats carried by the Orinoco lay close by them. She was swung inboard and rested on deck-chocks below the davits. A canvas cover, one end of which fluttered intermittently in the breeze, roofed her over. Allerton lifted this flap and inserted his hand. Presently there was a splutter and a glimmer, and it became plain that he was holding a lighted match under the canvas. "Look!" he whispered. Hughie peered under the flap. He saw water-barrels, a spirit-keg, and various bags and boxes. Then the match went out, and Allerton withdrew his hand. The pair retired once more to their shelter behind the wheel-house. "You saw that?" said Allerton. "I did. Do they usually keep the boats provisioned on this ship? If so, I don't blame them." "Not they. Somebody is going for a water-picnic shortly--that's all." Hughie mused. "Am _I_ the man, do you think?" he said at length. "No, I don't think so. There's too much grub for one. Besides the other boats are provisioned too. It looks as if the ship were to be abandoned." "But why? There's no reason why she should drop to bits for a long time yet. Rust is very binding, you know. Probably they keep her provisioned just in case--" Allerton wagged his head sagaciously. "There's more in this than meets the eye," he said. "It is my pleasure and privilege, as you know, to act as steward at present during the regretted retirement of the regular holder of that office, owing to eczema of the hands. (Even Mr. Gates shies at eczema sea-pie!) Now there's some mischief brewing in the cuddy, and they're all in it--Kingdom, Gates, and Angus. I'm not quite sure about Dingle, because he berths forward; but I think he is too. What's more: it's something they can't afford to have given away. Kingdom, who usually keeps Angus very short of drink at sea, now lets him have it whenever he wants it, and generally speaking is going out of his way to keep him sweet. That shows he can't afford to quarrel with him. And when a captain can't afford to quarrel with a chief engineer whom he hates, it usually means that he and the engineer are in together over some hanky-panky which has its roots in the engine-room. You mark my words, one of these fine nights that hoary-headed old Caledonian will open a sea-cock or two and rush up on deck and say the ship is sinking. It'll be a case of all hands to the boats; the Orinoco will go to her long-overdue and thoroughly deserved rest at the bottom, and the insurance people will pay up and look pleasant." "H'm," said Hughie; "there seems to be something in what you say. I wish I could keep an eye on the old sinner in the engine-room; but since Walsh came back to duty I've no excuse for going there at all now. It might almost be worth while to warn Goble. He's a decent chap." "Who is on duty in the engine-room now?" "Walsh, I should think. Angus usually makes way for him about eight bells. But I'm not sure. Hark! Do you notice anything about the beat of the engines?" "Not being an expert, can't say I do. They sound a trifle more asthmatic than usual, perhaps. What's up?" "Somebody has got the donkey-pump at work," said Hughie. "It may be Angus, after all, monkeying with the water-ballast. Hallo!" He leaned over the stern-rail and peered down. "Do you notice anything unusual about the propeller?" "It seems to be kicking up a bit of a dust," said Allerton. "Is it going round faster, or getting nearer the surface?" "It's half out of the water," said Hughie. "That means that the old man has pumped out the after double-bottom tank. Look, we're all down by the head!" The two stepped out from behind the wheelhouse and gazed forward. The flush deck of the Orinoco was undoubtedly running downhill towards the bows. "What's the game?" inquired Allerton excitedly. Hughie was thinking. Presently he said:-- "I'm not sure, but his next move should tell us. Either he is trying to drive her nose under and sink her by manipulating the water-ballast, which seems a hopeless job in a flat calm like this, and suicidal if it comes off; or else he is working up for a scare of some kind, which will frighten the crew into--Hallo? what's that?" There was a warning cry from Mr. Dingle, who was standing right forward in the bows. "Something right ahead, sir! Looks like--" There was an answering shout from the bridge, where the captain was standing by the wheel, followed by a jangling of telegraph-bells. Next moment the Orinoco gave a jar and a stagger, and Hughie and Allerton pitched forward on to their noses. There were shouts and cries all over the ship, and men came tumbling up the hatchways. "We've struck something," gasped Allerton. "Struck your grandmother!" grunted Hughie, who was sitting up rubbing his nose tenderly. "That jar came from directly underneath us. It was caused by Angus reversing his engines without giving the ship time to slow down. I daresay he never even shut off steam. Likely enough he's lifted the engines off their beds. Well, perhaps he had finished with them anyway. Come along forward." By this time a frightened crowd had assembled on the deck of the Orinoco, which, lying motionless on the silent sea, artistically tilted up by the stern,--Hughie began to grasp the inwardness of Mr. Angus's manoeuvres with the water-ballast,--presented a sufficiently alarming appearance even on that calm night. Mr. Dingle and the captain, the one hanging over the bows and the other standing in an attitude of alertness on the bridge, were sustaining between them a conversation which vaguely suggested to Hughie a carefully rehearsed "cross-talk" duologue between two knockabout artistes of the Variety firmament--say the Brothers Bimbo in one of their renowned impromptu "patter scenes." The resemblance was enhanced by the fact that the "patter" was delivered _fortissimo_ by both performers, and each repeated the other's most telling phrases in tones which made it impossible for the audience to avoid hearing them. "What was it?" shouted Bimbo Senior (as represented by Captain Kingdom). "Lump of wreckage!" roared Bimbo Junior, from a prolonged scrutiny of the ship's forefoot. "Lump of wreckage?" bellowed Bimbo Senior. "Lump of wreckage!" corroborated Bimbo Junior. "Of course it _might_ have been ice," suggested Number One, at the top of his voice. "Might have been ice," replied the conscientious echo. "Pairsonally I'm inclined tae believe it was jist a wee bit coral island," interpolated a third voice, with painful and stunning distinctness. The Chief Engineer had suddenly made his appearance on the bridge. The captain was obviously much put out. In the first place, coral islands are not plentiful in the North Atlantic, and there are limits even to the gullibility of an audience composed of foreign deck-hands and half-civilised firemen. Secondly, the axiom that two is company and three none applies even to cross-talk duologues. Thirdly, Mr. Angus was excessively drunk, and consequently the laboriously planned comedietta at present in progress might, owing to his inartistic and uncalled-for intrusion upon the scene, take a totally unrehearsed turn at any moment. The captain lost no time. "What report have you from the engine-room, Mr. Angus?" he inquired loudly and pointedly. Mr. Angus, suddenly recognising his cue, and realising almost with tears that he had been imperilling the success of the entire piece by unseemly "gagging," pulled himself together, returned to his text, and announced that the ship was badly down by the head and the stokehold awash. "There's nothing else for it," yelled the captain resignedly, "but to leave her. Clear away the boats, Mr. Gates!" Having thus established a good working explanation of the disaster, and incidentally enlisted the entire audience--those members of it, that is, who were not already doing service in the _claque_--as unbiassed witnesses for the defence in case the insurance company turned nasty, the intrepid commander descended from the bridge to his cabin, to collect a few necessaries pending the abandonment of his beloved vessel. Hughie and Allerton surveyed each other. "Which boat are you going in?" inquired Allerton. "None," said Hughie. "Going to stay on board?" Hughie nodded. "But she'll sink under our feet." "I don't believe she's as badly damaged as all that. There's some game on here." "I don't suppose she's damaged at all," said Allerton, "but you can be sure they won't be such blamed fools as to leave the ship floating about to be picked up. Old Angus will let water into her before he leaves, if he hasn't started the process already." "Well, I'm not going in any of those boats," said Hughie. "If the Orinoco sinks, I'll float to Europe on a hen-coop." "May I have half of it?" said Allerton. "You may," said Hughie. And so the S. S. Orinoco Salvage Company, Limited, was floated, and the Board of Directors entered upon their new duties at once. By this time the boats had been swung outboard and their provisioning completed. They were now lowered from the davits, and the men began to take their places. There was no panic, for the night was calm, and the Orinoco showed no signs of settling deeper. Messrs. Gates and Dingle were already at their respective tillers. Captain Kingdom and Mr. Angus were standing by the davits to which the whale-boat was still shackled. Mr. Goble, apparently in no hurry, was leaning over the bulwarks in the darkness not far from Hughie and Allerton, dispassionately regarding the crew's preparations for departure. He approached nearer. "There's a wheen fowk in thae boats," he observed. "I doot we'd be safer on board." Hughie turned to him and nodded comprehendingly. "That's my opinion too," he said, "and Percy's. We're thinking of staying here." Mr. Goble regarded him reflectively. "Is that a fact?" he said. "Weel, I'll bide too." And so a third member was co-opted on to the Board of Directors. "We'd better get out of sight," said Hughie. "They won't like leaving us behind. I think I know a good place to wait. Come along." The trio slipped round behind the chart-house, passed along a deserted stretch of the deck, and disappeared down the engine-room hatchway. The engine-room was illuminated by a couple of swinging lanterns. A black and greasy flood of water glistened on the iron floor below, filling the crank-pits and covering the propeller-shaft. The doors leading to the stokehold were standing open, and they could see that the floors there too were flooded, though the water had not reached the level of the fire-bars. Owing to the immobility of the ship, its oily surface was almost unruffled, and the engine-room itself was curiously quiet after the turmoil on deck. The fires were burning low, but occasionally a glowing clinker slipped from between the bars into the blood-red flood beneath, with a sizzling splash. The steam was hissing discontentedly in the gauges. The Salvage Board stood knee-deep in the water of the engine-room. Hughie picked up a smoky inspection-lamp,--a teapot-like affair with a wick in the spout,--lit it, and peered about. "Now look here," he said, "I don't quite know where this water came from, and it doesn't much matter, as no more is coming in at present. If the old man means to sink the ship he will have to come down here to do it. He has probably got some dodge arranged by which he can just turn a wheel and open a valve and send her to the bottom. Isn't that the idea, Goble? (I'll explain to you afterwards, Allerton.) My impression is that he'll pop down and turn the valve on just before he leaves. In that case one of us must stand by and turn it off again. You two go through into the stokehold. He's not likely to come in there. If he does, you must use your own discretion. I'll wait here, on the far side of the cylinders, up against the condenser. He's not likely to see me, but I shall be able to watch him and see which valve-wheel he turns on." The other two obeyed, and Hughie, scrambling across the bed-plates of the engines, ensconced himself behind a convenient cross-head, with his feet in a flooded crank-pit and his body squeezed back as far as possible into the shadow of the condenser. He had not long to wait. Presently cautious feet were heard descending the iron ladder, and Mr. Angus, comparatively sober, stepped heavily into the flood on the floor. His first proceeding was to wade to the stokehold end of the engine-room,--Hughie thought at first that he was going right through into the arms of Allerton and Goble, and wondered what they would do with him,--where he began to manipulate the great valve-wheel which kept the steam imprisoned in the boilers; and presently Hughie could hear the roar of the escape far above his head. This was a purely precautionary measure, and could do no harm to any one. Then Mr. Angus splashed his way to the corner by the donkey-pump, where the machinery for controlling the bilge and water-ballast valves was situated, and began to twist over another wheel. Presently there was a gurgling bubbling sound in the bowels of the ship, followed by a slight hissing and whispering on the surface of the water on the engine-room floor. The valve was open. Mr. Angus turned and lurched heavily through the rising flood to the iron ladder. Thirty seconds later a glistening figure crawled out of the crank-pit and vigorously turned the wheel in the opposite direction. The gurgling and hissing ceased. The valve was closed. CHAPTER IX _LITERA SCRIPTA MANET_ "Mr. Marrable, did ever ye see a drookit craw?" "No." "Well, see me!" announced Mr. Goble complacently. He crawled out of the engine-room companionway and sat down on the deck. Excessive spruceness had never been a foible of his, but now he was an unrecognisable mass of coal-dust, oil, and rust. He was dripping wet, for he had spent the last hour in an exhaustive examination of the Orinoco's waterlogged internal economy. The morning sun was warm, and he steamed comfortably as he detailed the result of his investigations to Hughie, who in some imperceptible but inevitable manner had taken command of the tiny ship's company. Shorn of technicalities and irrelevant excursions into the regions of pawky philosophy, Mr. Goble's report came to this. Mr. Angus had pumped out the after ballast-tank during the night, allowing the water, by means of a specially rigged return-pipe, to flow into the bilges of the ship instead of escaping overboard. By this device he had altered the Orinoco's centre of gravity in such a manner as to produce the afore-mentioned down-hill slant of her decks--a corroborative detail, as Pooh-Bah would have observed, which gave a little much-needed artistic verisimilitude to the Bimbo Brothers' bald and unconvincing narrative of disaster. Incidentally he had flooded the forehold and engine-room with sufficient water to give those members of the ship's company who were not in their employer's confidence the impression that she was sinking, and to furnish those who were with a _prima facie_ argument for deserting her. But these thoughtful precautions, though sufficient to procure the abandonment of the Orinoco, were by no means sufficient to send her to the bottom, a consummation to be achieved at any cost; for to leave your ship lying about in mid-ocean, to be picked up by the first chance-comer, while you go hurrying home to extract a cheque from the insurance company, savours of slipshod business methods; and Mr. Noddy Kinahan was nothing if not thorough. Now every steamer which plies under Lloyds' ægis is fitted, below the water-line, with a set of what are called bilge-valves. Through these it is possible to expel any water which may have found its way into the body of the vessel. As it is even more desirable to prevent the entrance of water into your ship than to assist its exit, these valves are of a strictly "non-return" variety, and no amount of pressure from the outside should ever prevail upon them to play the part of Facing-Both-Ways. The very life of the ship depends upon them; and the enterprising individual who tampers with their mechanism in such a manner as to convert what is meant to be an Emergency Exit into a sort of Early Door for the rolling deep, does so at the risk of coming into immediate and painful collision with the criminal laws of his country. Mr. Angus, it appeared, had been employing some of his spare time during the voyage in reversing one of these bilge-valves, with such skill and _finesse_ that, as we have seen, one had only to give a turn to a worm-and-wheel gear in the engine-room to admit the Atlantic Ocean in large quantities. "Oh, he has a heid on him, has Angus!" commented Mr. Goble with professional appreciation, "even when he's fou'. He made a rare job o't. But how he managed to contrive that imitation o' a collision, merely through some jookery-packery wi' the reverse-gear and throttle, wi'oot tearin' the guts oot o' her, I div not ken. Man, it was a fair conjurin' trick! By rights the link motion should be twisted intil a watch-chain and the cross-heids jammit in the guides. But they're no. It's jist Providence, I doot," he added rather apologetically, with the air of one who should have thought of this sooner. Then he uprose from his seat on an inverted bucket. "Before I gang ben, sir," he concluded, "tae change ma feet and ma breeks, I'll tak' the liberty tae inquire of you what you propose tae dae next. Maircy me! Yon's Walsh." Two figures had appeared round the corner of the chart-house, their presence on the far side thereof having been advertised for some time by the clanking of the deck-pumps. (Mr. Angus's precaution of blowing off steam before leaving had put mechanical assistance in getting rid of the water out of the question for the time being.) "Yes, it's me," said Walsh, who, it will be remembered, was the second engineer, to whom Hughie had recently been acting as deputy. "I should have come on duty at eight bells to relieve Angus, but I slept right through everything till Mr. Marrable found me in my bunk an hour or two ago. I expect they put something in my grog last night." "It's quite a hobby of theirs," said Allerton drily. "Mr. Marrable, I have found something that may be useful to us." He handed his superior officer a damp but undamaged little packet of papers. "Where did you find them?" asked Hughie. "I thought I had gone through Kingdom's kit pretty thoroughly." "They were sticking in the falls of the davits belonging to the boat Kingdom went off in," replied Allerton. "I saw him hurrying along the deck from his cabin just before his departure, carrying the log-book and some papers and instruments. I expect he dropped these as he went over the side." "Sit down, everybody," said the commander, "we'll see this through. It may concern us all." The packet contained two letters, together with some invoices and bills of lading referring chiefly to the Orinoco's cargo of astringent claret. Hughie glanced through the letters. Then he re-read them with some deliberation. Then he whistled low and expressively. Then he sat up and sighed, gently and contentedly. "Mr. Noddy Kinahan," he said, "is shortly going to wish, with all his benevolent and philanthropic little heart, that he had never been born. And we are the people that are going to make him wish. Listen!" He read the two letters aloud. They were brief, but explicit. One contained Kinahan's orders to Kingdom as to the disposal of the Orinoco. The other was a sort of invoice, or consignment note, relating to the person of one Marrable, who had apparently been shipped on board the night before the ship sailed. Each of these documents, it may be added, contained sufficient matter to ensure penal servitude for their author. Hughie stopped reading, and there was a long and appreciative silence. Then Allerton said:-- "What beats me is to understand how Kinahan could have been such a mug as to commit these schemes to paper, and how Kingdom should have been such a fool as to want to keep them. _I'd_ have let them go down in the Orinoco." "I expect one explanation covers both cases," said Hughie. "Kingdom probably demanded his orders in black and white, as a guarantee that he would get his money when he had done his job. Otherwise he had no claim on Kinahan for a penny, beyond his ordinary wage as skipper. Kinahan probably agreed, stipulating that the letters should be handed back to him when they squared accounts. It was a risky thing to do, but when two thieves can't trust each other, and go dropping about documentary evidence to that effect--well, that's where poor but deserving people like ourselves come in. No, I shouldn't think Kingdom _would_ want to leave these behind; and I opine that he's a pretty sick man by this time if he has missed them." He folded the letters up, and put them away carefully. "Now, gentlemen," he said briskly, "I propose that we go below and see if there is sufficient steam on the Orinoco to pump the rest of the water out of her and get the propeller revolving again. We'll have to damp down most of the fires, because we can't run too many firemen, but I think we ought to knock four or five knots out of her in ordinary weather. Luckily, seventy-five _per cent_ of the ship's company are competent engineers. After that we'll have some breakfast, and after that we'll make tracks for home. We'll work"--he smacked his lips cheerily, like an energetic pedagogue on the first morning of term--"in shifts of three. Two men will run the engine-room and stokehold, and the third will take the wheel. The fourth can sleep. That will give us each eighteen hours on and six hours off. I don't know where we are, and I have no means of finding out, as Captain Kingdom has walked off with the chart and most of the proper instruments. But we must be near land, or they would not have taken to the boats yet. If we keep steaming steadily east (with a little north in it), at about a hundred miles a day,--which I fancy is about our limit,--we should knock up against something sooner or later. And when we do, we'll get hold of the proper authorities, and I venture to think that with the help of these two letters and that doctored bilge-valve down below we shall be able to prepare a welcome for those three boat-loads of shipwrecked mariners, when they arrive, that will surprise them. Also, I fancy there will be pickings for you in the way of salvage. What a game!" Hughie stood up, and inhaled a great breath. This was real life! "Are you _on_, boys?" he cried suddenly. "Is the old Orinoco going to the bottom this journey?" The crew rose at him and gave three cheers. * * * * * Later that afternoon, as the Orinoco pounded along at a strictly processional pace through the ruffling waters,--the glass was falling and a breeze getting up,--Deputy-Quartermaster Lionel Hinchcliffe Welford-Welford Allerton, late scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge, sometime Assistant Deck-Hand in the mercantile marine, descried from his post on the bridge a small moving object upon the starboard bow. It was the Orinoco's whale-boat, which was proceeding under two lugsails on a course parallel with the steamer's. Allerton, who in the excitement of salving the Orinoco had almost forgotten the existence of the gang of buccaneers who had scuttled her, excitedly rang the telegraph bell and summoned the rest of the ship's company to his side. The emotions, however, aroused in the Orinoco by the sight of the whale-boat were mild in comparison with those excited in the undutiful whale-boat by the spectacle of her resuscitated parent. Mr. Angus, on beholding the steamer, kept discreetly silent. He had given himself away by seeing things which were not there once or twice in his life before. But Captain Kingdom turned a delicate apple-green. "Look there!" he gasped, pointing. "Yon bit cloud, ye mean?" said the cautious Angus. "No, no, man--the Orinoco!" cried the frantic skipper. "Oh--the shup! Aye, aye!" replied Mr. Angus, rather pleased than otherwise. "There's a crew on board her," continued Kingdom shakily. "And she's got steam on her, too!" "Aye," said Mr. Angus. "I doot somebody will have closed yon sea-cock again." "Who can it be?" demanded the captain feverishly. "Surely we left no one on board. I told Dingle to take that fellow Marrable in his boat." "Perhaps," suggested Mr. Angus, "yin of the other boats cam' back." Kingdom pointed impatiently to two small specks upon the horizon. "They're there," he said. "Maybe some liner has come across her and left a bit crew on board her," continued the fertile Mr. Angus. "If so, we'd have seen the liner," replied Kingdom irritably. He took up his binoculars and began to scrutinise the Orinoco, which had altered her course a few points in their direction. Mr. Angus had a fresh inspiration. "Did ye mind tae wauken Walsh?" he whispered. "If not, ye ken he micht weel--" The captain lowered his glasses, and nodded. "He might be one," he agreed; "but there are four men on deck." He raised his binoculars again. "Yes, there they are. Well, whoever they are and whatever the game is, we must get on board again and do the job properly this time.--Hallo, one of them is running below!--Here he is again!--He's carrying something--flags, I reckon. They're going to signal us." He was right. Up to the topmost summit of the Orinoco's grimy foremast travelled a signal--a banner with a strange device indeed, but conveying a perfectly intelligible message for all that. It consisted of the nether or unmentionable portion of a ragged suit of orange-and-red striped pyjamas. Having reached its destination, it inflated itself in the freshening breeze and streamed out, defiant and derisive, in the rays of the setting sun; flinging to the fermenting couple in the whale-boat the simple but comprehensive intimation--"Sold!" Then, with one single joyous toot from her siren, the Orinoco altered her course a couple of points and wallowed off in a north-easterly direction, leaving the crew of the whale-boat to listen in admiring silence to a sulphurous antistrophe in two dialects proceeding from the stern-sheets. CHAPTER X THE END OF AN ODYSSEY Hughie reckoned that they might have to steam eastward for quite three or four days before they sighted land. This was an underestimate. The history of the Orinoco's last voyage will never be written. In the first place, those who took part in it were none of them men who were addicted to the composition of travellers' tales; and in the second, their recollections of the course of events when all was over, were hopelessly and rather mercifully blurred. Not that they minded. One derives no pleasure or profit from reconstructing a nightmare--especially when it has lasted for sixteen days and nights. Some events, of course, were focussed more sharply in their memories than others. There was that eternity of thirty-six hours during which the Orinoco, with every vulnerable orifice sealed up or battened down, her asthmatic engines pulsing just vigorously enough to keep her head before the wind, rode out a north-easterly gale which blew her many miles out of her reckoning. ("Not that that matters much," said her philosophic commander. "We don't know where we are now, it's true; but then we didn't know where we were before, so what's the odds? We'll keep on steering away about north-east, and as we are aiming at a target eight hundred miles wide we ought to hit it somewhere.") Then there was a palpitating night when the faithful engines, having wheezily but unceasingly performed their allotted task for a period long enough to lull all who depended upon them into an optimistic frame of mind, broke down utterly and absolutely; and the fires had to be banked and the Orinoco allowed to wallow unrestrainedly in the trough of the sea while the entire ship's company, with cracking muscles and heart-breaking gasps, released a jammed crosshead from the guides and took down a leaky cylinder. They were evidently out of the ordinary sea-lanes, for they sighted only one steamer in ten days, and her they allowed to go by. "None of us understand proper signalling," said Hughie, "so we can't attract her attention without doing something absurdly theatrical, like running up the ensign upside down; and I'm hanged if we'll do that--yet. After all, we only want to know where we _are_. We may be just off the coast of Ireland for all I can say, and it does seem feeble to bring a liner out of her course to ask her footling questions. It would be like stopping the Flying Scotsman to get a light for one's pipe." "Or asking a policeman in Piccadilly Circus the nearest way to the Criterion bar," added Allerton. "I'm with you all the time, captain." And so these four mendicants allowed a potential Good Samaritan to pass by and sink behind the horizon. It was an action typical of their race: they had no particular objection to death, but they drew the line at being smiled at. Still, there were moments during the next ten days when they rather regretted their diffidence. But events like these were mere excrescences in a plane of dead monotony. The day's work was made up of endless hours in a Gehenna-like stokehold, where with aching backs and bleeding hands they laboured to feed the insatiable fires, or crawled along tunnel-like bunkers in search of the gradually receding coal; spells at the wheel--sometimes lashed to it--in biting wind or blinding fog; the whole sustained on a diet of ship's biscuit, salt pork, and lukewarm coffee, tempered by brief but merciful intervals of the slumber of utter exhaustion. Still, one can get used to anything. They even enjoyed themselves after a fashion. High endeavour counts for something, whether you have a wife and family dependent upon you, like Walsh, or can extract _la joie de vivre_ out of an eighteen-hour day and a workhouse diet, like Hughie. And they got to know each other, thoroughly,--a privilege denied to most in these days of restless activity and multifarious acquaintance. It was a lasting wonder to Hughie how Allerton could ever have fallen to his present estate; for he displayed an amount of energy, endurance, and initiative during this manhood-testing voyage that was amazing. He himself ascribed his virtue to want of opportunity to practise anything else, but this was obviously too modest an explanation. Perhaps blood always tells. At any rate, Allerton took unquestioned rank as second in command over the heads of two men whose technical knowledge and physical strength far exceeded his own. But in his hours of ease--few enough now--he was as easy-going and flippant and casual as ever. Walsh in a sense was the weakest of the quartet. He was a capable engineer and an honest man, but he lacked the devil-may-care nonchalance of the other three; for he had a wife and eight children waiting for him in distant Limehouse, and a fact like that gives a man a distaste for adventure. He was a disappointed man, too. He had held a chief engineer's "ticket" for seven years, but he had never held a chief engineer's billet. He could never afford to knock off work and wait until the right berth should come his way: he must always take the first that offered, for fear that the tale of boots and bread in Limehouse should diminish. As a crowning stroke of ill-luck, he had been paid off from his last job because his ship had collided with a New York lighter and been compelled to go into dry dock for three months; and by shipping in the Orinoco he was barely doing more than work his passage home. His ten-year-old dream of delivering Mrs. Walsh from her wash-tub for all time, and exalting her from the _res angustæ_ of Teak Street, Limehouse, to a social environment reserved exclusively for the wives of chief engineers, seemed as far from fulfilment as ever. Still, he maintained a stiff upper lip and kept his watch like a man, which is more than most of us would have done under the circumstances. But it was Goble who interested Hughie most. In the long night-watches, as they swung the heavy fire-shovels in the stokehold, or heaved the ever-accumulating clinkers over the side, or took turn and turn about to gulp tepid water out of a sooty bucket, or met over a collation of coffee and ship's biscuit--the supper of one and the breakfast of the other--in the galley, Goble would let fall dry pawky reflections on life in general, with autobiographical illustrations, which enabled Hughie to piece together a fairly comprehensive idea of his companion's previous existence. John Alexander Goble had played many parts in his time, like most vagrants. He had been born a gamekeeper's son in Renfrewshire, and had lost his father early, that devoted upholder of proprietary rights having been shot through the head in a poaching affray. After this catastrophe the widow, who had openly pined for her native Glasgow during the whole of her husband's lifetime, had returned to that municipal paradise; and the ripening youth of John Alexander Goble had been passed in a delectable locality, known as "The Coocaddens," to which he could never refer without a gleam of tender reminiscence in his eyes. Why John Alexander had ever deserted this Eden Hughie could never rightly ascertain. His references to that particular epoch in his career were invariably obscure; but since he darkly observed on one occasion that "weemen can mak' a gowk o' the best man leevin'," Hughie gathered that Mr. Goble's present course of life owed its origin to a tender but unsatisfactory episode in the dim and distant days of his hot youth. "After that," John would continue elliptically, "I went tae Motherwell. D'ye ken Motherwell? A grand place! Miles and miles of blast-furnaces, and the sky lit up day and nicht, like the Last Judgment. I did a wheen odd jobs there. Whiles I would hurl a trolley wi' coke, whiles I would sort coal wi' some lassies, and at last I got a job as a moulder." "What's that?" inquired the ever-receptive Hughie. "What else but a body that makes moulds?" "Yes, but how does he do it?" "Weel, there's a sort o' sandy place at the fit o' each smelting-furnace--like a bit sea-shore, ye'll understand--and every four-and-twenty hours they cast the furnace. They let oot the melted ore, that is, and it rins doon intil moulds that hae been made in the sand. (Ye dae it by just buryin' baulks o' timber in rows and then pickin' them oot again, and the stuff rins intil the hollows that have been left. When it's cauld they ca' it pig-iron.) Well, I stuck tae that job for a matter o' sax months. But it was drouthy work, besides bein' haird on the feet,--you go scratch-scratching in the sand wi' your bare soles makin' the moulds,--and presently I gave it up and took tae daen' odd jobs among the trucks and engines in the yairds. I liked that fine, for machinery is the yin thing that really excites me. First I was a coupler, then I was a fireman, then I got tae drivin' a wee shunting engine, dunting trucks about the yaird. And at last I was set in charge o' a winding-engine at a pit-heid. That was a grand job; but it didna last long. I was drinkin' haird by this time--I'd stairtit after I left the Coocaddens--and yin' day I was that fou' I let the cage gang doon wi' a run tae the bottom o' the shaft." "Was there anybody in the cage?" inquired Hughie, as Goble paused, as if to contemplate some mental picture. "There was not, thank God! But there _was_ a bit laddie doon ablow in the pit, that was sittin' on his hutch--his truck, that is--at the fit o' the shaft, waitin' on the cage. He wasna expectin' the thing tae fall doon like a daud o' putty, so he was no' sittin' quite clear; and the cage cam' doon and took off baith his feet. Man, I hae never forgotten his mither's face when they brought him up. I lost ma job, and I hae never touched a drop since. For seven-and-twenty years have I been on the teetotal--seven-and-twenty years! It'll shorten ma life, I doot," he added gloomily; "but I'll bide by it!" "What became of the boy?" inquired Hughie. "He's gotten twa wooden feet the noo," replied Goble more cheerfully, "and he's been minding the lamp-room this twenty year. I've heard frae him noo and again, and we've always been freens; but his auld mither has never forgiven me. She's ower seventy the day, but Jeems tells me she aye lets a curse every time he mentions ma name." A further instalment of Mr. Goble's adventures explained how he took to the sea. "After I cleared oot o' Motherwell I went to the Clydeside. I was a fair enough mechanic by this time, but I had tak'n a sort o' skunner at machinery--no wi'oot some reason--and I tried for to get taken on as a dock-hand. I had no luck there, and I was fair starvin' when yin day I met a freend o' min' on the Dumbarton Road, and he asked me would I like tae wash dishes and peel potaties on a passenger steamer. I would hae been pleased tae soop the lums o' muckle Hell by that time, gin it was for a wage, I was that thrawn wi' hunger; so I jist said, ''Deed ay!' "For a hale summer I sat peelin' potaties and washin' dishes on board the Electra, her that has done a trip doon the watter, roond about Arran and Bute, and hame by Skelmorlie ilka day o' the summer season for twenty-twa years. When the winter cam' on I dooted I would be oot o' a job again; but bein' nowadays permanently on the teetotal, and varra dependable, I was shifted tae the auld Stornoway, o' the same line, carryin' goods, cattle, and passengers tae the West Highlands--Coll, Tiree, Barra, Uist, Ullapool, and a wheen places in and oot o' sea-lochs up and doon that coast. She loused frae the Broomielaw every Thursday at three o'clock in the afternoon, and she was back there, week in week out, summer and winter, by eleven in the forenoon o' the following Wednesday. The folk along by Largs, where her cap'n lived, used tae set their watches by her. She was a fine auld boat, the Stornoway: she piled herself up on the rocks below the Scuir of Eig, where she had no call tae be, in a snowstorm seven winters syne. I was a cabin steward nowadays, ye'll unnerstand; and once we were roond the Mull and the passengers had thrawn up what they'd had tae their tea off Gourock and tak'n a dander ashore at Oban, appetites was big and I was busy. It was the first time I had seen the gentry at their meals, and it improved my mainners considerable. Never since then have I skailed ma tea intil ma saucer: I jist gie a bit blow on it noo. Yon's Mr. Allerton roarin' for to be relieved at the wheel." On another occasion Goble explained how he came to forsake the fleshpots of the Stornoway and take to the high seas. "I was aye hankerin', hankerin' after the machinery," he explained. "A body canna serve tables all his life. So after twa years on the Stornoway I shippit as a fireman on a passenger steamer outward bound frae Glasgow tae Bilbao. There I left her, tae be second engineer on a wee tramp carrying iron-ore tae the Mediterranean. That was nigh twenty years ago, and I've never set fit in Scotland since. Weel, weel! Aha! Mphm!" (_Ad lib._ and _da capo_.) So he would discourse, in a manner which passed many a weary hour for both, and added considerably to Hughie's stock of human knowledge. The days wore on. The work and long hours were beginning to tell their tale, but the entire crew kept grimly to it. Their nerves were in good order too. Even when, on the morning of the sixteenth day, as they groped their way through a streaming wet fog, a great ghostly monster of a liner suddenly loomed out of the wrack, and, as she shouldered her way past them, actually scraped the starboard counter with her stern, while the look-out on her forward deck yelled frantically, and a frightened man up aloft on the bridge flung his wheel over with great rattling of steam steering-gear to avoid a collision, the sole occupant of the Orinoco's deck--it was Goble: he was steering while Hughie and Walsh took their turn in the stokehold and Allerton slept--did not deem the occasion sufficiently important to merit a report until he was relieved from duty two hours later. But this encounter provided that pawky philosopher with a valuable clue as to their whereabouts. "She was a Ben liner," he intimated to Hughie in describing the event. "I saw the twa bit stripes roond her funnel, and her name, Ben Cruachan, on her stern. They're Glasgow boats, and sail every other Thursday tae Buenos Ayres, calling at Moville on Lough Foyle tae tak' up Irish passengers. It's no' near Cape Clear we are, anyway. We're somewhere off the north coast o' Ireland, sir. I kenned fine we were near land: this is a ground swell that's throwin' us aboot noo. Aiblins we'll be gettin' a dunt against the Giant's Causeway if we're no' canny." There was something in Goble's conclusions, for after they had steamed dead slow all night the rising sun licked up the fog; and there, ten miles to the south of them, lay a long green seacoast; and straight before them uprose what looked like a rocky island, with a homely-looking white lighthouse perched half-way up its rugged face. "If that land to the right is Ireland," said Hughie, "we can't be very far from Scotland. I wonder what that great rock ahead of us can be. Lucky we didn't reach it a couple of hours ago!" "Don't you think," suggested Allerton, putting his head out of the engine-room hatchway, "that as we have a _pukka_ Scot on board, we had better rouse him up and see if he can identify his native land?" It was Goble's turn for sleep, but Allerton's suggestion was adopted, and he was haled on deck. "Do you happen to recognise that island straight ahead, Mr. Goble?" inquired Hughie. Goble surveyed the rock and the lighthouse, and though his countenance remained unmoved, his eye lit up with proprietary pride. "Island? Yon's no' an island," he replied. "'Tis Scotland hersel'. Sir, 'tis the Mull o' Kintyre! It rins straight awa' back tae Argyllshire. We're at the varra mouth o' the Clyde. We micht hae been drawed there across the Atlantic by a bit string! God presairve us, it's a miracle!" "The Clyde?" shouted Hughie. It seemed too utterly good to be true. "Are you sure, Goble? Is that really the Mull?" "Sure?" Goble's expression was a mixture of pity and resentment. "Man, I'm tellin' ye I sailed roond it twice a week for the best pairt o' twa years. I was awfu' sick the first time. The second--" All this time the Mull of Kintyre was growing nearer. "What's the course?" queried Walsh, leaning over the bridge. "Do I turn up New Cut, Mr. Goble, or keep straight along the Blackfr'ars Road?" Everybody's spirits were soaring marvellously at the sight of the blessed green land. Walsh's wife was within twenty-four hours of him. "Keep yon heap o' stanes on your left hand, ma mannie," replied the greatly inflated Goble, facetiously indicating the towering headland before them, "and then straight on Ailsa Craig. You're daen' fine. Mr. Marrable, will you rin her up tae the Tail o' the Bank, off Greenock, or gi'e a cry in at Campbeltown Bay? It's jist roond the corner." "Hang it! we'll take her all the way, now we have got so far," said Hughie. "We're _home_! I _was_ reckoning on bringing up in Plymouth Sound; but that's a detail. Come on, Allerton, let's go below and fire up for the last time. We'll bring her in in style!" And so it came about that not many hours later the Orinoco, a rotting hulk, clogged with weed, corroded with rust, caked with salt, feebly churning up the water with her debilitated propeller, steamed painfully but grandly past the Cloch Light and into the mouth of the Clyde. A sorry object she may have seemed to the butterfly host of natty paddle-steamers which was pouring down the river under the forced draught of triple competition, carrying the Glasgow man, released from office, to Dunoon and Rothesay and other summer repositories for wife and family. But to those who _knew_, she was no uncleanly tramp, but a battle-scarred veteran,--a ship that had deserved well of the Republic of the high seas,--another little Golden Hind, though laden with nothing nearer to Spanish ingots than bottles of imitation French claret. Every scar on her sides was an honourable wound; every groan and creak that rose from her starting timbers a pæan; every cough and wheeze that proceeded from her leaky cylinders a prayer of joyful thanks. The Orinoco had graduated high in the nameless but glorious band of those who have illustrated, not altogether without profit and pride, the homely truth that Life ain't holdin' good cards; It's playin' a poor hand _well_! And so she turned the last corner of her long and painful Odyssey, and came home to lay up her bones by the Clyde, which had given them birth. And by a happy chance the unconscious Hughie, instead of navigating her to the Tail of the Bank as he had intended, changed his mind, put over his helm, and conned her up to the head of that beautiful Gareloch which, many many years ago, had given the little ship her maiden name. There, swinging at her rusty cable, with the clear green water laving her weary forefoot, and the hills above Roseneath and Shandon smiling reassuringly down upon her in the glow of the evening sun, we will leave her. _Molliter ossa cubent!_ * * * * * The law's delays are proverbial, and the task of getting even with Mr. Noddy Kinahan involved Hughie in endless encounters with those in high places, several appearances (with suite) in the abodes of the Law, and another trip to New York--by Cunarder this time. However, grim determination will accomplish most things; and when some months later Hughie finally sailed from New York for his native land, the labour of love had been completed, and Mr. Noddy Kinahan was duly regretting, for a term of years, the fact that he had ever been born. This consummation was followed by another, depressing but inevitable. The Orinoco Salvage Company, having served its purpose, paid Nature's debt and ceased to exist. The circumstances connected with its demise, together with the respective fates of Hughie's little band of Argonauts, will best be gathered from the following epistolary excerpts:-- No. I (N. B. _Spelling corrected_) c/o MISTRESS HOWIESON, 17 CANDLISH STREET, GREENOCK. To H. MARRABLE, Esq.:-- SIR,--I thank you for cheque, and have disposed of same. I also thank you for offer to find a job for me. But I would prefer to bide by you, as I feel I will not get a better job than that. I would like fine to be your servant. You will be needing some one to redd up your quarters and keep your clothes sorted, now you are ashore. (Women is no' to be trusted.) Of course I would not want a big wage: the siller from the Orinoco will do grandly for a long time. I ken fine the way to wait at table and clean silver, having been steward, as I once telled you, on the old Stornoway, where they had a cuddy full of gentry every trip.--Your servant (I am hoping), JNO. ALEX. GOBLE. No. II (_Extracts. No date or address, but obviously written in a public-house_) ... So you must take the money back. It is no use to me: all I should get out of it would be a d----d bad headache. Also, it might give me ideas above my station, which is bad for the lower orders at any time. Give it to Walsh; but don't let on, of course, that it comes from me: let him believe that it is part of his natural share of the salvage. I have kept back enough to pay for a new suit (which I am now wearing) and one big bust before I sail next week as deck steward on an Aberdeen liner. ... Well, it was a great trip. We have all got something out of it. You have got an adventure and incidentally done a big thing, and I have spent a month of absolute happiness in the society of men who regarded me neither as an object of pity nor as a monster of depravity, but were content to let me go my own way as a man who prefers to live his own life and be asked no questions.... Your offer to set me on my legs again and make me a respectable member of society is friendly and, I suppose, natural; but it threatens a happy episode with a sad ending. I'm not cut out for conventionality, and (_pace_ your kind references to my "sterling merit and latent force of character") I am not of the stuff that successful men are made of. I have only done two big things in my life. One was getting elected to Pop at Eton, the other was helping you to bring the old Orinoco home. I think I'll rest on my laurels now. I suppose I was born a rotter, and if you were to endeavour to raise me to your giddy heights I should only fall down again, and the bump at the bottom might hurt. I am safer where I am: the beauty of lying on the floor is that you can't fall off. ... Well, chin, chin! If I may be permitted to gush for a moment, I should like to tell you that you are a good sort.--Yours ever, LIONEL ALLERTON. No. III No. 4 TEAK ST., LIMEHOUSE. DEAR SIR,--I beg to acknowledge with thanks your cheque for share of salvage. It was far more than I expected, and the Adm'ty C'ts have certainly done well by us. At the best, I had hoped for suffic'nt to rig out the nippers with boots and duds for the winter and give the missis a week or two off the laundry work. We have all been fair barmy the last few days. Square meals and a big fire, and you can't hear yours'lf talk for the squeaking of the new boots. We are settling down a bit now, and I have put the rest of the money in the bank and told the old woman she is to burn her wash-tubs. Catch her: I d'n't think! With my new clothes I have obt'd a berth as Chief on board s.s. Batavia, of the Imperial Line, and sail on 21st inst. Her engines are (_several lines of hopeless technicalities omitted_). It was a lucky day for me when I struck the Orinoco, and luckier when Angus doctored my grog. On returning from voyage will take the lib'ty of calling on you in London at the address you gave.--Yrs. respect'fly, JAS. WALSH (Chief Engineer s.s. Batavia). Postscript (_In a larger and less educated hand_) MR. MARRABLE, DEAR SIR,--The children and me begs to thank you for all your kindness to father. Father he is very greatful himself, but would rather leave it to me to tell you, as he don't like. Mr. Marrable, sir, if you could only see the diff'nce in the children, espec'y little Albert, what was always sickly, since they got good boots and food inside them you would feel well paid for your kindness. I know the money did not come from you, but it was through you we got it. God bless you, sir.--Yours resp'fly, MRS. MARTHA WALSH. _P. S._--Our ninth, which has just come, we are taking the liberty to call by your name. BOOK THREE _SUAVITER IN MODO_ CHAPTER XI SEALED ORDERS On a bright morning in April Hughie emerged from the offices of Messrs. Slocum, Spink, and Slocum, Solicitors, in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and made for the Strand. Like most men who have been abroad for a long time, he trod the streets of London with an oddly mingled sensation of familiarity and strangeness. At one moment he felt that he had been living in London for years, at another he felt that he was exploring a new city. The Strand itself, save for the old congested stretch in the neighbourhood of Charing Cross, was almost unrecognisable. Gone for ever were the various landmarks of his youth, such as the Old Gaiety and the Lowther Arcade. Holywell Street and Wych Street, with their delectable environs, had vanished like a bad but interesting dream, leaving room for a broad and stately thoroughfare, in the midst of which the churches of St. Mary and St. Clement Danes split the traffic like boulders in a Highland spate, and the Law Courts acquired an unfamiliar prominence. A new fairway of uncanny width and straightness clove its course to Holborn, blocked at its mouth by a dismal patch of excavated territory resembling nothing so much as what Scotsmen term a "free toom," and proclaiming to all and sundry, by means of a gigantic notice-board, that This Site was To Let as a Whole. The traffic had developed too. There were countless motor-buses, which shook the earth and smelt to heaven; and taxicabs, which skipped like rams and quacked like ducks. But after all, though landmarks change their bearings and banks be washed away, the stream flows on unchanged. The people were the same, and Hughie felt comforted. The smell of asphalt was the same, and he felt uplifted. And when he beheld the torrents of traffic that converge on the Wellington Street crossing arrest their courses _seriatim_ and pile themselves up in a manner that would have done credit to the waters of Jordan, all at the bidding of an imperturbable figure in a blue uniform, he felt that he was indeed home once more. Presently he hailed a taxicab, and whizzed along, exulting like a child with a new toy, to a railway station, where John Alexander Goble, having previously superintended the placing of his master's luggage in the train (with a maximum of precaution on his part and a minimum of profit on the porter's), was waiting to see him off. Hughie dismissed his retainer to take charge of his newly acquired flat until his return, and having secured his seat, followed his invariable custom and went forward to view the engine. He noted with interest that compound locomotives seemed to have made little or no progress in the country's favour, but that the prejudice against high-pitched boilers and six-coupled wheels had disappeared. He then made his way to the refreshment room,--where alone, he noted, Time's devastating hand appeared to have stood still,--and having lunched frugally off something from under a glass dome which the divinity behind the counter, in response to a respectful inquiry, brusquely described as "fourpence," together with as much bitter beer as remained after the same damosel had slapped its containing vessel playfully down on the fingers of a pimply but humorous youth who was endeavouring to tempt the appetites of two wizened sardines, exposed for sale on a piece of toast, with a hard-boiled egg from a neighbouring plate, returned to his seat in the train; where he was duly locked in by a porter, who displayed an amount of cheerful gratitude for sixpence that an American baggage-man would have considered excessive at a dollar. Here, with a rug, a pipe, and a quantity of illustrated papers, most of which had come to birth since he had left England, and all of which appeared to depend for their livelihood on the exploitation of the lighter lyric drama, Hughie settled himself for a comfortable run along the Thames Valley. This done, he took two letters from his pocket. One had been opened already. It was an obviously feminine production, and said:-- "MANORS, _Monday_. "DEAR HUGHIE,--We are all thrilled to hear that you are home at last. You must come down here _at once_ and be our guest until you have looked round, and then you can renew all our acquaintances at one go. There are lots of nice people with us just now, so come! You will be feeling lonely, poor thing, landing in this country after so many years, and of course you will miss poor Mr. Marrable sadly. I suppose you have heard all about his death from the lawyers by this time, or perhaps you saw it in the papers two years ago. "Mr. D'Arcy is here; also Joan, of course. My husband, too, wants to have the pleasure of entertaining you--that is, if you are prepared not to shoot him on sight! I don't _think_, though, that I shall be able to command your regretful affections any more. One look at me will be sufficient for you. Alas, I have two chins and three babies! "However, come down on Saturday, and you can size us all up. I suppose you know that Mr. Marrable asked us to take Manors and look after Joan until you or he came home again; so you won't play the heavy landlord and evict us on the spot, will you?--Yours ever, "MILDRED LEROY." Hughie put this epistle away with a slightly sentimental sigh. It did not seem so very long since he had been organising May Week festivities in Miss Mildred Freshwater's honour. Now--two chins and three babies! _Eheu, fugaces!_ The other letter had not yet been opened, and Hughie broke the seal. The envelope looked blue and legal, and its contents consisted of several pages of Jimmy Marrable's stiff upright handwriting. The date was nearly three years old. "I am leaving England again"--it began--"next week, and I doubt very much if I shall ever come back. It is not in the breed to die in bed of something stuffy. The only tie that keeps me here is Joey, and she is too much occupied at present in collecting scalps to pay much attention to the old ruin who brought her up. In about four years' time she may be fit to live with again: at present she is not; and I refuse point-blank for the time being to play second fiddle to any young cub who ever wore magenta socks and a pleated shirt. I think it quite time that you came home and took her in hand. Indeed, if you don't appear on the scene within two years, I have given instructions that you are to be ferreted out and asked to do so. When you do return you will receive this letter, in which I am going to set down the manner in which I wish my estate to be administered on Joey's behalf if I don't come back. "In the first place, I must tell you that Manors goes to you by entail, but that all the rest is Joey's, and you will be her sole trustee and guardian. Lance is of age, and independent, and I have disposed of things in such a way that he can't possibly interfere with the management of Joey's affairs. Secondly, I want to tell you something about the children themselves. "I am not their father, though I very nearly was, and though every old shrew in the neighbourhood thinks I am. Their mother was the most beautiful and lovable girl I have ever known, and the only woman in the world I ever cared a rap for. Ours was a boy-and-girl idyll, though I was ten years her senior. I had known her ever since I could carry her on my back, and it was always a sort of understood thing between us that we were to marry each other when the time came. "Till she was nineteen and I twenty-nine, I suppose we were the happiest couple under the broad heaven. Then she let down her skirt and put up her hair and made her _début_. (I should say that she lived alone with her old father, a retired East Indian of the time of John Company.) To her own surprise and my great pride--at first--she caused quite a sensation, for besides her face she had the prettiest manners possible. If you want to know what she was like you will find a miniature of her among my papers. Or perhaps it would be simpler to look at Joey. "But now the trouble began. Irene--that was her name--soon discovered an immense appetite for admiration, which was quite natural and excusable. (One can't blame a girl for making all the runs she can while her innings lasts; God knows, it is short enough!) But presently she could not do without it. She was always 'asking for it,' as they say nowadays. Sometimes she made herself rather conspicuous, and people began to smile at her. I ground my teeth, and, finally, at the least suitable moment, I put my oar in. I expostulated. No, I _didn't_ expostulate: I simply _ordered_ her to mend her ways, and generally acted the Grand Turk and proud proprietor rolled into one. My word, Hughie, she was furious! There had never been any definite engagement between us, and she opened her defence by saying so, pat. It happened at a ball, where she had been making herself rather noticeable with a seedy ruffian--half actor, half poet--called Gaymer, against whom I had been fool enough to warn her. She informed me that she was her own mistress, and that I was an officious busybody. If I had had the sense to tell her there and then that I loved her more than all the world, and that I was jealous of the very ground she walked on,--let alone the people she spoke to,--she would have melted at once, I swear; for she was as impulsive and generous as a child, and she loved me, too, I _know_. If I had even lost my temper and called her a brazen hussy, she would have forgiven me in time: a woman regards a remark like that as a sort of compliment. _But_--I smiled indulgently, shrugged my shoulders, and said that she would look at these things differently when she was older. "That did it. Apparently there is only one crime in this world more heinous than telling an old woman that she is old, and that is to tell a young woman that she is young. Irene got straight up and left me sitting, and went home without ever looking in my direction again that night. "Next day I called at her father's house to make my peace. I was prepared to admit that I had been an irritating young cub, and eat humble pie generally. But I was too late. She was gone! She had bolted, in some wild fit of pique or sentimentalism, with that long-haired exponent of Byronism-and-water, Lance Gaymer, and had married him at a Registry Office that very morning. Probably she had fallen in with his proposals at the ball--after her interview with me. "Well, Hughie, I would rather pass over the next few years. I cut her out of my scheme of things as completely as I could, and went on my way. Fortunately you began to engage my attention about that time, and I rubbed along somehow, and finally developed into the fine old crusted fogey that you know me to be. "Ten years later I heard from her. She sent for me. I had never known where she was, nor tried to find out. But I did not expect to find her where I did. She was in a miserable dingy house in Bloomsbury--dying, Hughie! Her ruffianly husband had left her after her second baby was born,--our Joey, that is,--and her old father had been dead eight years. She had not a friend in the world, and yet she would not turn to me till it was too late. Pride, pride, pride! For some years she had been struggling on with a little money her father had left her, and which her husband had not been able to get hold of, and she had also taken in lodgers. _Lodgers_, Hughie! It was only when she realised that she was going out for good that the thought of the kiddies' future began to frighten her, and she sent for me--at last! "I was with her during most of the remaining three months of her life, to the scandalisation of virtuous Bloomsbury. I wanted to bring her to Manors, which she had often visited in her childhood, but she said she preferred to die in London; and as she was obviously going to die somewhere pretty soon, I did not press the point. During that time we lived a life of almost perfect happiness; and when she finally slipped away, quite peacefully,--poor child! she was barely thirty-two,--and I took the youngsters home with me, the long waste of years behind us seemed almost as though it never had been, so completely had the recollection of it been wiped out by the intervening three months. Love can work marvels, Hughie, even though it come to a man at the very last. "I may add that during the closing weeks of her life I had the supreme satisfaction of marrying her, as we received undeniable proof that her accursed husband had died in South America. This gives me a sort of additional hold over Joey, though I have never mentioned it to her; nor do I think it necessary, for I had rather that her attachment to me remained a purely sentimental one, for the present at any rate. "And now, as regards the future. As I said at the beginning of this letter, I don't know whether I shall ever come back from this trip. If I don't, well and good: Joey can take my money. If I do, I am afraid I must request the use of it for myself for a little while longer. However, you will naturally want me to fix some sort of time-limit, and the question has been occupying my attention a good deal. My original idea was to make a kind of provisional will, leaving all my property to Joey, and entitling her to come into possession automatically in the event of my not returning within five years; but the lawyers tell me this arrangement won't work, as I have to be _pukka_ dead before they can shell out. So I have fixed it this way. For the present Joey will want nothing but her daily bread and her fallals and a roof to sleep under, as her so-called education is now completed. I have therefore let Manors to the Leroys, on the understanding that the child is to live there with them for the present. (Not that they required much persuasion.) She is eighteen at the time of writing this letter. "Further, I have realised practically all my personal estate, and placed the cash to your credit (on Joey's behalf) at the Law Courts Branch of the Home Counties Bank. When you come home, which I hope will be soon, I want you to take this money and administer it for her benefit. The rest of my property--nothing to speak of in comparison--is set down and duly disposed of in my will (which I have left in the hands of Slocum, Spink, and Slocum, Lincoln's Inn Fields), and cannot be touched until my death is authenticated. I have made you Joey's sole trustee and guardian, and you will enter upon your duties as soon as you get home. She is not to come of age, financially speaking, until she is twenty-four. "That's all, I think. "Good luck to you in life, Hughie! I can't, I fear, take my stand on the pinnacle of a successful career and shout down advice to you on your way up; neither will I presume to counsel you as to your future. My only piece of advice to you is not to expect much in this world, and then you won't be disappointed. Roughly speaking, there are only three things in life that matter--health, money, and friends. A woman once told me that the recipe for perfect happiness is a million pounds and a good digestion. The last, I admit, is indispensable. Well, you have it: the Marrable interior is dyspepsia-proof. The million pounds you have not got, and don't want. Wealth, after all, is a purely relative affair. You can measure it either by the greatness of what you have or the smallness of what you want. All that a man needs is enough of the first to ensure his getting the second, and I am inclined to think that in your case this should not be a matter of much difficulty. "Besides, it is in the _small_ needs of life that money really counts. The yacht, the house in town, the grouse moor--who wants 'em? But the cab home in the rain; the occasional bottle of Pommery; the couple of stalls when an old friend looks you up, or the furtive and sympathetic fiver when his widow does,--these are the things that make money really worth having. Besides, the greatest joys are those you have to save up for, so a millionaire can never know them. "As for friends--well, there are two classes, men and women. Men I need not trouble you about. If you haven't acquired the knack of handling them during the last ten years you never will, and are no Marrable. Women? I give it up! You can't standardise them. Men are fairly normal as a class. If you deal straight with a man he will realise and appreciate the fact, and though he may not respond by dealing straight with you, he will at any rate recognise you for what you are--a white man. But you can't depend on a woman to do that. They are far stronger in their likes and dislikes than we are, and are hopelessly capricious into the bargain. My general experience--and it has been wider than you might think--has been that, once a woman takes a fancy to you, you may run counter to every canon of honesty, sobriety, and common decency, and she will cleave to you--probably, I fancy, because you arouse all the protective maternal instinct in her. On the other hand, once you get into her bad books,--it may be because you deserve it, but as often as not it is because you have hot hands or once trod on her skirt in a waltz,--nothing that you can do will prevent her shuddering at the very mention of your name. Perhaps, from the point of view of the greatest good of the greatest number, a woman's method of sizing up the male sex is the best possible, but it comes hard on well-meaning but heavy-handed men like us. "We Marrables have always been men's men, although we have the profoundest reverence for women. (Perhaps that is the reason: a woman never wants you to reverence women; she wants you to reverence _her_.) What sticks in our throats is the enormous amount of make-believe and shilly-shallying that has to go on between the sexes before any definite business can be accomplished. Whenever I see a Marrable in a drawing-room, sitting on the edge of a chair and balancing a teacup, I always know exactly what he is there for, and I also know that he is dumbly resisting man's primitive instinct to pick up the right girl and _run_. When that feat, or its equivalent, has been accomplished, all is well: I have never known a Marrable who was not a complete success as a husband. But they are bad starters. "Your father was an exception. He had the good luck to meet a girl who knew a man when she saw one, and was willing to accept the will for the deed when she found him unable to express articulately what she would have loved to hear. By a further stroke of good luck her parents objected to him, so he had a comparative walk-over. "And therefore, Hughie, I counsel you to escape all future unhappiness by marrying Joey as soon as you get home--a consummation to which, as you will probably have gathered by this time, the whole of these laboured and transparent testamentary dispositions of mine are directed. I have left the child entirely in your hands. Marry her as quickly as you can, and then I shall know for certain, whatever my state of existence at the time, that the two people whom I care for most on earth are both booked for a life of perfect happiness. I could not wish a man a sweeter wife or a woman a better husband. "Forgive my clumsy methods, but you know I mean well.--Yours, "JAMES MARRABLE." Hughie folded up this characteristic document and put it carefully back in his pocket. Then he lit his pipe and reflected. He did not altogether agree with the tone of his uncle's letter, but he knew in his heart that it contained a good deal of truth. He was ready to marry and settle down, but like most of his race he contemplated the preliminary reconnoitring, the manoeuvring for position, and the elaborate enveloping movements which seem inseparable from a modern matrimonial engagement, with something akin to terror. At the same time, it seemed a tame thing to come home and marry a bread-and-butter miss out of the schoolroom to gratify the shade of a departed relative. The train slowed down. They were approaching Midfield Junction, where he must change. Hughie took his feet down from the opposite cushions and knocked the ashes out of his pipe. "We'll see," he said. "I must have a look at Joey first. Pretty children so often grow up plain. Perhaps it would be simplest to marry her, but there's no hurry. I'm home for a rest, and I'm not going to bother myself. I have roughed it for nine years. Now I'm going to settle down and have an easy time of it." He was never more mistaken in his life. CHAPTER XII A CHANGE OF ATMOSPHERE Miss Joan Gaymer sat in a Windsor chair on the landing outside the bathroom door at Manors. It was half-past eight in the morning--an hour when traffic outside bathroom doors is apt to be congested. Miss Gaymer was wrapped in a bluish-grey kimono, which, whether by accident or design,--I fear there is very little doubt about it, really,--exactly matched the colour of her eyes. At the same time it failed to conceal the fact--_horresco referens_--that she was still attired in what American haberdashers call "slumber-wear." Her slim bare feet were encased in red slippers, one of which dangled precariously from her right big toe, and her hair hung down her back in two tightly screwed but not unbecoming pigtails. At present she was engaged in a heated altercation with two gentlemen for right of entry into the bathroom. The only excuse that I can offer for her conduct is that, although she was nearly twenty-one, in her present setting she looked about fourteen. The gentlemen, who wore large hairy dressing-gowns, with towels swathed round their necks and mighty sponges in their hands, did not, it must be confessed, show to such advantage as their opponent. They were distinctly tousled and gummy in appearance, and their wits, as is usual with the male sex early in the morning, were in no condition for rapier work. They had both been patiently awaiting their turn for the bath when Joan arrived, and they were now listening in helpless indignation to a peremptory order to return to their rooms and stay there till sent for, and not to molest an unprotected female on her way to her ablutions. "But look here, Joey," said one,--he was a pleasant-faced youth of about nineteen,--"we were _both_ here before you; and you know we arranged last night that you were to come at twenty past--" "Binks," commanded the offender in the Windsor chair, "go straight back to your bedroom and don't argue with me. If you are good I'll give your door a tap on my way back." But Binks was in no mood for compromise, and furthermore wanted his breakfast. "It's not playing the game," he grumbled; "I was here first, Cherub was second--" "_Who_ isn't playing the game?" flashed out Miss Gaymer. "Have you _shaved_, Binks?" Binks, taken in flank, admitted the impeachment,--which, it may be mentioned, was self-evident. "You haven't, either," was the best retort he could make. "No, but I've brushed my teeth," said the ever-ready Miss Gaymer. "Well," pursued Binks desperately, "you haven't done your hair." "My lad," replied his opponent frankly, "if you were a woman and had to put things on over your head, you wouldn't have done your hair either." Binks, utterly demoralised, fell out of the fighting line. "Joey, _I've_ shaved," murmured the second gentleman in a deprecating voice. Miss Gaymer turned a surprised eye upon him. "_Why_, Cherub, dear?" she inquired. "Cherub," who was still of an age to be exceedingly sensitive on the subject of his manly growth, blushed deeply and subsided. But his companion was made of sterner stuff. "Come along, Cherub!" he said. "Let's run her into her bedroom and lock her in until we've bathed. Hang it! It's the third time she's done it this week." "Lay one finger on me, children," proclaimed Miss Gaymer, "and I'll never speak to either of you again!" She made ready for battle by twining her feet in and out of the legs of the Windsor chair, and sat brandishing a loofah, the picture of outraged propriety. Her heartless opponents advanced to the attack, and seizing the arms of the chair bore it swiftly, occupant and all, down the passage. Joan, utterly unprepared for these tactics, was at first too taken aback to do anything but shriek and wield the loofah; but shortly recovering her presence of mind, she slipped off the seat, and, doubling round her bearers, who were hampered by the chair, scampered back towards the bathroom--only to run heavily into the arms of an unyielding, sunburned, and highly embarrassed gentleman, who had been standing nervously on the other side of the door of that apartment for the last five minutes, awaiting an opportunity to escape, and had suddenly emerged therefrom on a dash to his bedroom, under the perfectly correct impression that it was a case of now or never. "Oh, I _beg_ your--Why, it's Hughie!" cried Joan. "Yes, it _really_ is!" They recoiled, and stood surveying each other. It was their first meeting. Hughie, owing to a breakdown on the branch line, had arrived late the night before, after the ladies had gone to bed. Joan and he had not set eyes on each other for nine years. Miss Gaymer recovered her equanimity first. "You're not a bit changed, Hughie," she observed with a disarming smile. "A little browner--that's all. Am I?" Hughie did not answer for a moment. He was genuinely astonished at what he had just seen, and not a little shocked. Where young girls are concerned, there is no greater stickler for propriety than your man of the world; and this sudden instance of the latter-day _camaraderie_ of young men and maidens had rather taken Hughie's breath away. He felt almost as fluttered as an early Victorian matron. Suddenly he realised that he had been asked a question. "Changed?" he said haltingly. "Well, it's rather hard to say, until--until--" "Until I've got my hair up and more clothes on?" suggested Miss Gaymer. "Perhaps you're right. Still, I look rather nice, don't you think?" she added modestly, preening herself in the kimono. "However, you'll see me at breakfast. Meanwhile I want you to hold those two boys back while I get into the bathroom. Ta-ta, dears!" And with an airy wave of her hand to the unwashed and discomfited firm of Dicky and Cherub, who stood grinning sheepishly in the background, Hughie's ward slipped under her guardian's arm and disappeared into the bathroom, with a swish of cærulean drapery and a triumphant banging of the door. Half an hour later Hughie descended to breakfast, there to be greeted by his host, Jack Leroy, a retired warrior of thirty-eight, of comfortable exterior and incurable laziness, and his wife, the one-time render of Hughie's heart-strings in the person of Miss Mildred Freshwater. Another old friend was the Reverend Montague D'Arcy, whom we last saw dancing the Cachuca by the waters of the Cam. Here he was, a trifle more rotund and wearing Archidiaconal gaiters, but still the twinkling-eyed D'Arcy of old. One or two other guests were seated at the table, but as yet there was no sign of Joey. When she did appear, it was in a riding-habit; and after a hearty meal, in no way accelerated by urgent and outspoken messages from the front door, where her swains were smoking the pipe of patience, she dashed off in a manner which caused most of those who were over-eating themselves round the table to refer enviously to the digestive equipment of the young, and left Hughie to be entertained by his host and hostess. "You'll find her a queer handful, Hughie," said Mrs. Leroy, as she sat placidly embroidering an infantine garment in the morning sun on the verandah,--in the corner of which the current issues of the "Spectator" and "Sporting Life," fully unfurled, together with two pairs of perpendicular boot-soles and a cloud of cigar-smoke, proclaimed the fact that the Army and the Church were taking their ease together,--"but I want you to remember all the time that she is _sound_. You'll be tempted to disbelieve that over and over again, but don't! She has been utterly spoiled by everybody, and you must give her time to find her level again. Left to herself, she would be as good as gold. I don't say she wouldn't do something rather _outré_ now and then from sheer animal spirits, but that doesn't count. She's young, of course, so she can't--she can't be expected to--you know what I mean?" "Stand corn," remarked a voice from behind the "Sporting Life." "Thank you, dear: that's just it. You see, Hughie, men egg her on,--they're all alike: Jack and Mr. D'Arcy are as bad as any,--and she gets excited and carried away, and occasionally she does something stupid and conspicuous. Five minutes later she is bitterly ashamed, and comes and cries her heart out to me. People know nothing about _that_, of course: all they do know is that she did the stupid thing, and they call her a forward little cat and a detestable imp. Don't you believe them, Hughie! "Then you'll find her absurdly impulsive and generous: you could have the clothes off her back if you wanted them. The other day she came home in floods of tears because of a story which a beggar-woman with a baby had told her. It was the usual sort of story, but it was quite enough for Joey. She had carried the baby herself for about two miles, and given the mother all the money she had, and made her promise faithfully to come and see me next day. Of course the woman never turned up, and Joey's blouse had to be burned,--_oh_, that baby!--but that sort of thing doesn't alter her faith in human nature. And she stands the _great_ test, Hughie. She hasn't got one set of manners when men are about and another when they are not. But she's a kittle creature. You must be tender with her, and--" "Run her on the snaffle, old man--what?" corroborated the "Sporting Life." Hughie blew through his pipe meditatively. "Seems to me, Mrs. Leroy," he said at length, "that I'm in for a pretty thick time. Do you think she's at all likely to take to my present methods, or must I learn some new tricks? Afraid I'm not much of a lady's man. Still, Joey and I used to be great friends, once. Won't that count for something?" "I'm not sure," said Mrs. Leroy. "You know how the young loathe being thought young, or reminded of their youth? Joey is just in that frame of mind at present. Because you were a boy of twenty-one when she was a child of twelve, she may darkly suspect you of desiring to continue on the footing of those days. Don't do that, for mercy's sake! For all practical purposes you are much nearer to each other in age than you were--" A chuckle reverberated through the peaceful verandah, and the "Spectator" and "Sporting Life" converged for a moment as if to share a confidence. "Jack," inquired Mrs. Leroy sternly, "what were you saying to Mr. D'Arcy just now?" "Nothin', dear," said a meek voice. "Mr. D'Arcy, what was he saying to you?" Mr. D'Arcy took in a reef in the "Spectator" and replied suavely,-- "He made use of a sporting expression, dear lady, with regard to your plans for our friend Marrable's future, which I was happily unable to understand." "Jack," said Mrs. Leroy in warning tones, "people who put their oar in uninvited get taken out for afternoon calls--in the brougham, with both windows up!" The "Sporting Life" was promptly expanded to its full extent, and silence reigned again. Presently Mrs. Leroy observed cheerfully,-- "By the way, Hughie, you are home just in time for a dance--the Hunt Ball." Hollow groans burst from behind the newspapers. "Oh, look here!" said Hughie frankly. "I mean--not really?" "Yes: I promised Nina Fludyer to back her up and bring a 'bus-load of people. Why don't you want to come?" "Well, for one thing I have only danced twice since I went down from Cambridge. One time was at a Viceregal reception in Calcutta, and the other was in Montmartre--under less formal conditions. I'll tell you what--you and your house-party go to the ball and enjoy yourselves, and your husband and I will keep each other company here--eh?" Captain Leroy put down his paper and said, "Good scheme!" in the loyal but mournful tones of one who realizes that it is a forlorn hope, but that one might as well have a shot for it. "In fact, dear," he continued desperately, "I was thinkin' of takin' Marrable out that very night to lie out for poachers. Old Gannet was tellin' me that the North Wood--that is--" He observed his wife's withering eye, and became suddenly interested in the advertisements on the back page of his periodical. "Jack," said Mrs. Leroy in a tone of finality, "on Tuesday night you put on your best bib and tucker and come with us--that's flat." "All right, m' dear," replied her husband in a voice which said to Hughie, "I was afraid it wouldn't work, old man!" "And why don't _you_ want to come, Hughie?" continued Mrs. Leroy, suddenly turning on her guest. "Well, I am not cut out for balls," said Hughie. "Prefer the open air, somehow." "If open air is all you want," remarked Mrs. Leroy grimly, "the Town Hall at Midfield is the draughtiest building in the county." "Balls are dull affairs," urged the faithful but misguided Leroy, "compared with the excitement and--er--suspense--" "If you want excitement and suspense," replied the inexorable Mrs. Leroy, "dance the Lancers with Lady Fludyer--fifteen stone of imperfectly balanced _blanc-mange_!" "And just a spice of risk--" "Risk? My dear boy, try the Ball Committee's champagne!" Captain Leroy, defeated at all points, once more subsided; but D'Arcy took up the argument. "Joking apart, Mrs. Leroy," he said, "it's an awful thing to be a supernumerary man at a dance in the country. You crawl in at the tail of your party, and shake hands with the governess, under the impression that she is your hostess. You are introduced to a girl, and book a dance. You don't catch her name, so you write down 'Red hair and bird of paradise' on your programme, and leave her. Of course you know nobody; so, after booking a few more wallflowers, you still find a good deal of time at your disposal. You can always tell a male wallflower. Women can usually brazen it out: they put on an air which implies that they have refused countless offers, and are sitting on a hard bench because they like it." "They can't deceive the other women, though," said Mrs. Leroy. "Still," agreed Hughie, "they impose on men all right. But, as D'Arcy says, a male wallflower is hopeless. He looks miserable, and either mopes in a corner like a new boy at school, or else reads away at his programme and peers about for a partner who isn't on it." "Why not try the smoking-room?" "The smokin'-room," interpolated Leroy, "is all right for the regular Philistine. But if _I_ go there, I find it in possession of a bilious octogenarian and a retired major-general. They are sittin' in front of the fire with a cigar apiece. They glare at me when I come in, and then go on buckin' to each other. Presently they stop, and one says: 'I suppose you are not a dancin' man, sir,' in a way which implies that he doesn't know what the devil young men are comin' to nowadays. And by this time I'm so ashamed of myself that I simply bolt out of the room, with some yarn about a brief rest between two dances, and go and sit among the hats and coats in the cloak-room until it is time to go and hunt up the next freak on my programme. Rotten job, I call it!" Mrs. Leroy surveyed the three orators with an air of serene amusement. "I _have_ roused a storm," she said. "But you are coming on Tuesday--all three! Now, Hughie, I know Jack is dying to take you round the stables and plantations. When you have smacked all the horses' backs and taken the pheasants' temperatures, come in. I want to introduce you to my offspring. You are fond of children, I know." "I know I shall be fond of yours, Mildred," said Hughie. "Thank you--that's nicely put. But they really are rather pets, though I say it who shouldn't." "Rum little beggars," mused the male parent. "Bite your head off if they see you havin' a sherry and bitters before dinner. Got a sort of religious maniac of a nurse," he explained. "Been saved, and all that. Save _you_ for tuppence, Marrable!" "She's a queer old thing," said Mrs. Leroy, "but such a good nurse that her weaknesses don't matter much. The children are never sick or sorry--wait till I tap wood! your head will do, Jack--and simply love her." "I was pleased to learn from their own lips," remarked D'Arcy, "that they have been enthusiastic teetotalers from birth, and are both ardent supporters of Foreign Missions." "And the baby?" inquired Hughie. "Too young," replied Leroy; "but that doesn't excuse the poor little sinner from havin' to wear a blue ribbon." "How does the nurse regard you, Leroy?" asked D'Arcy. "Lost sheep--hard case--bad egg generally," replied that gentleman resignedly. "She's given me up, I'm glad to say; but she'll be on Hughie's track in no time. Come along." In the joy of roaming round the familiar plantations and stables Hughie allowed the existence of Mildred Leroy's offspring to fade from his memory; and it was not until the party gathered for luncheon that he was reminded of the introduction in store for him. The assembled company consisted of the host and hostess, D'Arcy, Hughie, Joan, and the young gentleman previously referred to as "Cherub." The others had departed on a sailing expedition. Joan had declined to go, alleging that she must stay at home and entertain her "keeper," as she had now christened Hughie; and Cherub had speciously pleaded a tendency to _mal de mer_, and remained at home to steal a march on his rivals. The party was completed by two chubby infants of seven and five, in large pinafores and short white socks, who were presented to Brevet-Uncle Hughie as Theodora and Hildegard, though Hughie discovered, after a brief experience of their society, that they answered without resentment and much more spontaneity to the appellations of "Duckles" and "Stodger" respectively. They were deposited--it seems the right word--in the dining-room by an austere and elderly female, who groaned heavily at the sight of Captain Leroy, and eyed Hughie with unconcealed distrust before withdrawing. The small girls took their places one on each side of their mother, and sat, like two well-bred little owlets, taking stock of their new uncle. Presently their vigilance relaxed. It is a truism that teetotalers are hearty eaters, and the consumption of what was placed before them soon occupied the attention of Mesdames Duckles and Stodger to the exclusion of all else, the latter exhibiting a particularly praiseworthy attention to duty. Their sole contribution to the conversation was offered when Leroy passed the claret to Hughie. "Wine," remarked Duckles severely, "is a mocker!" "Stwong dwink," corroborated Stodger, turning up the whites of her eyes, "is raging!" The two ladies then groaned heavily in concert, and, having thus contributed their mite to the redemption of a sinner, resumed their repast. At the end of the meal the numbers of the company were augmented by the arrival of John Marrable Leroy, aged two years--an infant whose apoplectic countenance sadly belied the small piece of blue ribbon inserted in his bib. Having taken his seat in his mother's lap, he proceeded, after the manner of babies, to give his celebrated entertainment. For the benefit of the company he obligingly identified various articles upon the table, and then proceeded to give an exposition (assisted by manual contortions) of the exact whereabouts of the Church, the Steeple, the Door, and the People. After this, without warning or apology, he deposited a nude foot in his mother's plate, having in some mysterious manner got rid of his shoe and sock under the table; and was proceeding to enumerate the respective marketing experiences of a family of little pigs, when his mother, deciding that it was high time this _séance_ came to an end, called upon him to say grace on behalf of the company. John Marrable Leroy reluctantly ceased fingering his toes, and twisted himself into a state of devotional rigidity. He then closed his eyes, folded his hands, and breathed stertorously. All waited with devoutly bowed heads for his benediction. "T'ank God--" began Master Leroy at length. There was another tense pause. "T'ank God--" repeated the infant despondently. Another hiatus. "'_For_'--dearest," prompted his mother. A smile of intense relief illuminated the supplicant's troubled countenance. "--Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten!" he gabbled cheerfully; and the meeting broke up in unseemly confusion. * * * * * It was a hot afternoon, and Hughie, who as yet was far from getting tired of doing nothing, was well content to sprawl in a basket-chair under a great copper-beech, and watch the others play croquet. Presently Joan, swinging a mallet, came and sat on the grass beside him. "Well, Hughie?" she began, regarding her comptroller rather quizzically. "Well, Joey?" Then they both laughed, or rather chuckled. The curious part about it was that while Hughie laughed "Ha, ha!" deep down, Joey did the same. Tee-heeing and high-pitched feminine shrieking were beyond her compass. She was the Joey of old, with the same gruff voice, though she had got over her difficulty with the _r_'s and _l_'s. "It seems rummy," observed Miss Gaymer reflectively, "my being put in your charge like the guard of a train. Do you expect me to obey you?" "Yes," said Hughie. He felt he was missing an opportunity of saying something bright and striking, but "Yes" was the only word he could think of besides "No." "Oh!" replied Miss Gaymer enigmatically. "Don't you intend to?" inquired Hughie. "Well, it depends on what you tell me to do. If it was anything that didn't matter much I might do it, sometimes, just to save your face. But as a rule I shouldn't." "Oh!" said Hughie, in his turn. "I may as well tell you at once," continued the lady, "the things that it's no use scolding me about. First of all, I always choose my own friends, and never take recommendations or warnings from anybody. Then you mustn't interfere with my dancing or sailing or riding, because I love them better than anything in the world. Then, you mustn't try to prevent my reading books and seeing plays that you think are bad for me, because that sort of thing is simply not _done_ nowadays. And of course you mustn't call me extravagant if I dress nicely. Also, you mustn't expect me to go in for good works, because I hate curates. And don't give me advice, because I loathe it. On the other hand, it may comfort you to know--it does _most_ men, for some reason--that I don't want a vote and I don't smoke cigarettes. Oh, the poor little mite!" She was on her feet and across the lawn in a flash, to where the obese Stodger, prostrate upon a half-buried tree-root, was proclaiming to the heavens the sorrow of a sudden transition from the perpendicular to the horizontal. She comforted the child with whole-hearted tenderness, and after taking her turn in the game of croquet, returned to Hughie and sat down beside him again. "Well--what do you think of me?" she inquired suddenly. Hughie regarded her intently. "I don't know yet," he said. "I want to see a little more of you." "Most people," said Miss Gaymer with dignity, "make up their minds about me at once." "I won't do that," said Hughie. "It wouldn't be quite fair." Joan pondered this retort and finally flushed like a child. "That means that you have taken a dislike to me," she said. "I didn't mean it that way," said Hughie, much distressed,--"really!" "Anyhow, it means that you haven't made up your mind about me," persisted Joan. "That is true," admitted Hughie, who was no hand at fencing. "Well, do it soon," said Miss Gaymer. "I'm not accustomed to being put on trial. I may mention to you," she added complacently, "that I am considered a great success. Do you know what Jacky Penn told me?" "No; what?" inquired Hughie perfunctorily. He was beginning to understand the inwardness of Mildred Leroy's warning that the girl beside him had not yet found her feet. "He told me," said Joan, with an unaffected sigh of pleasure, "that the men here all call me 'The Toast.' What do you say to that?" "A Toast," said Hughie rather heavily, "is usually 'an excuse for a glass.' I shouldn't like to think of you merely as that, Joey." Miss Gaymer eyed her guardian with undisguised exasperation. "Hughie, you have got fearfully old-maidish in the last nine years," she said. "Where have you been? In any decent society?" "Sometimes; but not often. Not what _you_ would call decent society, Joey." "Well," remarked Miss Gaymer, turning her opponent's flank with characteristic readiness, "whatever it was, it wasn't very particular about clothes. Hughie, your get-up is perfectly _tragic_. If you are going to be my keeper you will have to begin by dressing decently. I don't know who your tailor is, but--Che-e-erub!" "What ho!" came from the croquet-lawn. "Come here, at once." Cherub obediently put down his mallet and approached. Having arrived, he halted and stood to attention. "Cherub," commanded Miss Gaymer, "turn round and round till I tell you to stop, and let Mr. Marrable see your clothes." Much flattered, Cherub rotated serenely on his axis for the benefit of the untutored Marrable, while Miss Gaymer ran over his points. "Must I have a waist?" inquired Hughie meekly. "Yes--if you've _got_ one," replied Joan, surveying her guardian's amorphous shooting-jacket doubtfully. "And purple socks?" "Green will do, old man," remarked the _mannequin_ unexpectedly. "Cherub, keep quiet!" said the _coutumière_. "You have absolutely nothing whatever to recommend you but your clothes, so don't spoil it by babbling. There, Hughie! That is the sort of thing. You must go up to town next week and order some. Run away, Cherub! Now, another thing, Hughie. Look at your hands. They're like a coal-heaver's, except that they're clean. Can't you get them attended to?" Hughie surveyed his hands in a reminiscent fashion. They were serviceable members, and had pulled their owner through many rough places. At present the palms bore the mark of the Orinoco's coal-shovels, and there was a great scar on one wrist where Hughie had incautiously touched a hot bearing. There was also an incision in the middle knuckle of the right hand, caused by the impact of Mr. Gates's front teeth on an historic occasion. There were other and older marks, and most of them had some interesting story attached to them. But of course Joan did not know this. To her they were large, unsightly, un-manicured hands--only that and nothing more. Hughie sighed. All his old assets seemed to have become liabilities, somehow. "Aren't they a scandal, Hughie?" Joan repeated. "I suppose they are, Joey," said Hughie, coming out of his reverie. "Right O! I'll get them seen to. I don't suppose they're ever likely to be much use to me again," he added in a depressed tone, "so they might as well be made ornamental. I'll go and consult Sophy Fullgarney about them when I get back to town." "Who's she?" said Joey quickly. "Manicurist--before your time," said Hughie briefly, pleased to feel that he could give points to his ward in knowledge of something. "Any more requirements, Joey?" "Let me see. Oh, yes. Can you dance?" "Used to waltz," said Hughie cautiously. "Decently?" "I can get round a room." "Can you reverse properly?" "If a man reversed in my young days," said Hughie, "we used to regard him as a bounder. Do they do it now?" "Yes, always. Can you do anything else?" "The usual things--Lancers and polka. Danced a reel once in Scotland." "Nobody dances the polka now, and I hate the Lancers. Can you two-step?" "Never even heard of it." Miss Gaymer sighed. "Never heard of the Boston, I suppose?" she said resignedly. "Never in my life," said Hughie. "Look here," he added, inspired by a sudden hope, "perhaps it would be as well if I stayed at home on Tuesday night--eh?" "_Quite_ as well," said Miss Gaymer candidly. "But I don't suppose Mildred will let you off. You'll be wanted by the wallflowers." "But not by Joey, apparently." "I don't dance with rotters," said Miss Gaymer elegantly. "I am practically booked up already, too. However, if you apply at once I might give you _one_." She thought for a moment. "I'll try you with number eight." "We had better not settle at present," said Hughie. "I should like to have a look round the ballroom before I tie myself down in any way. But I'll bear your application in mind." Miss Joan Gaymer turned and regarded her companion with unfeigned astonishment. He was still sprawling, but his indolent pose of lazy contentment was gone, and for a moment challenge peeped out of his steely eyes. She rose deliberately from the grass, and walked with great stateliness back to the croquet-lawn. Hughie sat on, feeling slightly breathless. He had just realised that he possessed a temper. Presently Mrs. Leroy completed a sequence of five hoops and retired, followed by the applause of an incompetent partner, to the copper-beech. She sat down opposite Hughie, and surveyed him expectantly. "Well, Hughie?" she said. "Well, Mildred?" "_Well_, Hughie?" "I think," said Hughie, answering the unspoken question, "that she wants--_slapping_!" Mildred Leroy nodded her head sagely. "Ah!" she remarked. "I thought you would say that. Well, I hope you'll do it." * * * * * Hughie reviewed the events of the day, _more suo_, at three o'clock next morning, sitting with his feet on the sill of his open bedroom window,--the bedroom of his boyhood, with the old school and 'Varsity groups upon the walls,--as he smoked a final pipe before retiring to rest. It was almost dawn. The velvety darkness was growing lighter in texture; and occasionally an early-rising and energetic young bird would utter a tentative chirrup--only to subside, on meeting with no encouragement from the other members of the orchestra (probably trades unionists), until a more seasonable hour. Hughie had sat on with D'Arcy and Leroy in the billiard-room long after the other men--Joey's _clientèle_--had emptied their glasses and gone to bed. There had been a "ladies' night," accompanied by fearsome games (of a character detrimental to the table) between sides captained by Joey and another damsel; and even after Mildred Leroy had swept her charges upstairs there had been bear-fighting and much shrieking in the passages and up the staircase. Then the younger gentlemen had returned, rumpled but victorious, to quench their thirst and listen with respectful deference to any tale that the great Marrable might care to unfold. (The story of the Orinoco had gone round, though it had mercifully escaped the notice of the halfpenny papers.) But Hughie had not been communicative, though he had proved an eager and appreciative listener to 'Varsity gossip and athletic "shop." So the young men, having talked themselves to a standstill, had gradually faded away, highly gratified to find the great man not only willing but eager to listen to their meticulous chronicles; and Hughie and D'Arcy and Leroy, their symposium reduced to companionable limits, had compared notes and "swapped lies," as the Americans say, far into the night. Hughie's impressions of the day were slightly blurred and confused--at the which let no man wonder. He was accustomed to fresh faces and new environments, but the plunge from yesterday into to-day had been a trifle sudden. Last night he had driven up to the door of Manors a masterless man, a superior vagabond, an irresponsible free-lance, with hundreds of acquaintances and never a friend. In twenty-four hours this sense of irresponsible detachment had gone for ever, and the spell of English home-life had sunk deep into his being. He felt for the first time that he was more than a mere unit in the Universe. He had turned from something into somebody. He realised that he had a stake in the country--the county--the little estate of Manors itself; and a great desire was upon him to settle down and surround himself with everything that is conveyed to an Englishman here and abroad--especially abroad--by the word Home. Then there were the people with whom he had come in contact that day. They were nearly all old friends, but they were old friends with new faces. There was Mildred Leroy, for instance. He had half expected his relations with that young matron, the past considered, to be of a slightly tender and sentimental nature. Far from it. Her attitude to him was simply maternal--as, indeed, it had been, had he realised the fact, from the very beginning of their friendship. A woman always feels motherly towards a man of her own age, and rightly, for she is much older than he is. Occasionally she mistakes this motherly feeling for something else, and marries him--but not often. Obviously Mildred Leroy now regarded Hughie as nothing more than an eligible young _débutant_, the chaperon's natural prey, to be rounded up and paired off with all possible despatch. Then there was Joey. Twenty-four hours ago he had had no particular views on the subject of his ward, beyond-- (1) The reflection that he would probably find her "rather a bore"; (2) An idle speculation as to whether, if expediency should demand it, he would be able to bring himself to marry her. Well, twenty-four hours is a long time. He saw now quite clearly that whatever Miss Gaymer's shortcomings might be, a tendency to bore her companions was not one of them; and that if ever the other question should arise, the difficulty would lie, not in bringing himself to marry Joey, but in bringing Joey to marry him. Like a sensible man, he decided to let things work themselves out in their own way, and went to bed. There he dreamed that Joey, attired in a blue kimono and red slippers, was teaching him to dance the two-step to a tune played by the engines of the Orinoco. CHAPTER XIII _VARIUM ET MUTABILE_ Hughie continued during the next few weeks to study the character of the female sex as exemplified by his ward Miss Joan Gaymer, and some facts in natural history were brought to his notice which had not hitherto occurred to him. In her relations with her male belongings a woman does not expect much. Certainly not justice, nor reason, nor common sense. That which she chiefly desires--so those who know inform us--is admiration, and, if possible, kindness, though the latter is not essential. The one thing she cannot brook is neglect. Attention of some kind she must have. Satisfy her soul with this, and she will remain all you desire her to remain,--_toute femme_,--something for lonely mankind to thank God for. Stint her, and there is a danger that she will drift into the ranks of that rather pathetic third sex, born of higher education and feminine superfluity, which to-day stands apart from its fellow-creatures and loudly proclaims its loathing for the masculinity of man and its contempt for the effeminacy of woman, but which seems so far only to have cast away the rapier of the one without being able to lift or handle the bludgeon of the other. Not that Miss Joan Gaymer ran any such risk. She was indeed _toute femme_, and stood secure from the prospect of being cut off from her natural provender. Her chief danger was that of a surfeit. She possessed a more than usually healthy appetite for admiration, and there was never wanting a supply of persons--chiefly of her own sex, be it said--to proclaim the fact that in her case the line between appetite and gluttony was very finely drawn indeed. There was some truth, it is to be feared, in the accusation, for Joan was undoubtedly exhibiting symptoms at this time of a species of mental indigestion--what the French call _tête montée_ and the Americans "swelled head"--induced by an undiluted diet of worship and homage. Appetite for this sort of thing grows with eating, and Joan, like her mother before her, was beginning to think too much of those who supplied her with the meat her soul loved and too little of those who did not. And as those who did not were chiefly those who had her welfare most nearly at heart, she was deprived for the time being of a good deal of the solid sustenance of real friendship. She was a curious mixture of worldly wisdom and naïveté, and was frankly interested in herself. She was undisguisedly anxious to know what people thought of her, and made no attempt to conceal her pleasure when she found herself "a success." On the other hand, she presumed a great deal too much on the patience and loyalty of her following. She was always captious, frequently inconsiderate, and, like most young persons who have been respectably brought up, was desperately anxious to be considered rather wicked. These facts the slow-moving brain of Hughie Marrable absorbed one by one, and he felt vaguely unhappy on the girl's account, though he could not find it in his heart to blame her. Joey, he felt, was merely making full use of her opportunities. Within her small kingdom, and for her brief term, she held authority as absolute as that, say, of a secretary of state, nor was she fettered by any pedantic scruples, such as might have hampered the official in question, about exercising the same; and Hughie, who was something of an autocrat himself, could not but admit that his ward was acting very much, _mutatis mutandis_, as he would have done under similar circumstances. But as time went on and his sense of perspective adjusted itself, he began to discover signs that beneath all her airs and graces and foam and froth, the old Joey endured. She was a creature of impulse, and her vagaries were more frequently due to the influence of the moment than any desire to pose. She would disappoint a young man of a long-promised _tête-à-tête_ on the river, to go and play at shop in a plantation with the under-keeper's children. She would shed tears over harrowing but unconvincing narratives of destitution at the back door. She was kind to plain girls,--which attractive girls sometimes are not,--and servants adored her, which is a good sign of anybody. She was lavishly generous; indeed, it was never safe for her girl friends to express admiration, however discreet, for anything belonging to her, for she had an embarrassing habit of tearing off articles of attire or adornment and saying, "I'll give it to you!" with the eagerness and sincerity of a child. And her code of honour was as strict as a schoolboy's--than which no more can be said. A secret was safe with her. She had once promptly and permanently renounced the friendship of a particular crony of her own, who boasted to her, giving names and details, of a proposal of marriage which she had recently refused. In short, Miss Joan Gaymer strongly resembled the young lady who in times long past was a certain poetical gentleman's Only Joy. She was sometimes forward, sometimes coy,--sometimes, be it added, detestable,--but she never failed to please--or rather, to attract, which is better still. Mrs. Jack Leroy spared neither age nor sex on the night of the Hunt Ball. Her husband, Hughie, and the Reverend Montague D'Arcy--all suffering from that peculiar feeling of languid depression which invariably attacks the male sex about 9.30 P.M. when dancing is in prospect--were hounded into pumps and white gloves, and packed into the omnibus, which, after a drive of seven miles, during which the gentlemen slept furtively and the tongues of Joan and her girl friends wagged unceasingly, deposited the entire party of twelve on the steps of the Town Hall at Midfield. Their numbers had been completed by some overnight arrivals. The first two were Mr. and Mrs. Lance Gaymer. Joan's only brother had taken upon him the responsibility of matrimony at the early age of twenty-two, and the rather appalling young person who preceded him into the drawing-room, and greeted Joan as "Jowey," was the accessory to the fact. Why or where Lance had married her no one knew. He had sprung her one day, half proudly, half defiantly, upon a family circle at Manors which was for the moment too horror-struck to do anything but gape. Fortunately Uncle Jimmy was not present,--he had departed on his voyage by this time,--and it was left to Joan to welcome the latest addition to the house of Gaymer. This she did very sensibly and prettily, though she wept unrestrainedly upon the sympathetic bosom of Mildred Leroy afterwards. For Lance's sake Mrs. Gaymer was accepted without demur. Whatever she was or had been,--whether she had manipulated a beer-engine or gesticulated in musical comedy,--there she was, and had to be assimilated. No questions were asked, but she was religiously invited to Manors at intervals, and Joan and Mrs. Leroy, when they went up to town in the season, paid occasional state calls upon Mrs. Lance at her residence in Maida Vale, where they drank tea in company with the _alumnæ_ of the variety stage and the jug-and-bottle department. Lance himself was understood to be making a living out of journalism. He looked considerably more than twenty-three. The third arrival was a Mr. Guy Haliburton, proposed for admission by Mr. Lance Gaymer, seconded by Mrs. Lance Gaymer. He was full of deference, and apologised with graceful humility for his presence. He felt himself a horrible intruder, he said, but he had been assured so earnestly by "old Lance" that Mrs. Leroy was in want of another dancing man, that he had ventured to accept his vicarious invitation and come to Manors. He was made welcome. Mr. Haliburton, on further acquaintance, described himself as an actor, but Hughie, whose judgments of men--as opposed to women--were seldom wrong, put him down unhesitatingly as a gentleman who lived, actor or no, by his wits. He was a striking-looking personage of about thirty. He had curly black hair and dark eyes, with dangerous eyelashes. He was well dressed,--too well dressed for the country,--and one felt instinctively that he was a good card-player, and probably objected to cold baths and early rising. The Manors party were greeted in the vestibule of the Town Hall by Lady Fludyer, self-appointed Mistress of the Revels. At present she more nearly resembled a well-nourished Niobe. "My dear," she cried, falling limply upon Mrs. Leroy and kissing her feverishly, "what _do_ you think has happened?" "Band not come?" hazarded Mrs. Leroy. "Worse! Not a man--not a subaltern--not a drummerboy can get away from Ipsleigh to-night!" (Ipsleigh was a neighbouring military _depôt_, and a fountain-head of eligibility in a barren land.) "They have all been called out to some absurd inspection, or route-march, or manoeuvres, or something, at twenty-four hours' notice. And they were coming here in _swarms_! There won't be nearly enough men to go round now. Half the girls will be against the wall all night! Oh, my _dear_, when I get hold of the General--" Lady Fludyer's voice rose to a shriek, and she plunged wailing into a dark doorway, like a train entering a tunnel. Mrs. Leroy turned to her shrinking cavaliers, with satisfaction in her eye. "It's as well I brought the lot of you," she said. "Now get to work. Jack, the first waltz with you, if you please." The ball was soon in full swing, though it was only too plain that men were somewhat scarce. Hughie, much to his alarm, found his programme full in ten minutes, and presently, bitterly regretting the stokehold of the Orinoco, put forth into the fray with Mrs. Lance Gaymer, having decided to do his duty by that lady as soon as possible, and get it over. She addressed him as "dear boy," and waltzed in a manner which reminded him of the Covent Garden balls of his youth, thereby causing the highest and haughtiest of the county to inquire of their partners who she might be. The word soon passed round that she was the wife of young Gaymer. ("You remember, don't you? Rather an unfortunate marriage, and all that. Barmaid, or something. However, the family have decided to make the best of her. They'll have their hands full--eh?") Whereupon fair women elevated their discreetly powdered noses a little higher, while unregenerate men hurried up, like the Four Young Oysters, all eager for the treat, and furtively petitioned Lance Gaymer to introduce them to his wife. On entering the ballroom Joan Gaymer, serenely conscious of a perfectly-fitting new frock and her very best tinge of colour, took up her stand at her recognised "pitch" beside the end pillar on the left under the musicians' gallery, and proceeded to fill up the vacancies caused in her programme by the defection of the dancing warriors from Ipsleigh. Among the first applicants for the favour of a waltz was Mr. Guy Haliburton. "All right--number two," said Joan. Haliburton wrote it down, and asked for another. "I'll see how you waltz first," said Miss Gaymer frankly. "Then--perhaps! I am rather particular." The music had risen to her brain like wine, and she was in what her admirers would have called her most regal, and her detractors her most objectionable, mood. Mr. Haliburton, however, merely bowed reverentially, and made way for an avalanche of Binkses and Cherubs, with whom Joan, babbling at the top of her voice and enjoying every moment of her triumph, booked a list of fixtures that stretched away far into to-morrow morning. The waltz with the fascinating Haliburton proved so satisfactory,--in point of fact, he was easily the best dancer in the room,--that Joan immediately granted him two more. It was characteristic of her that she declined to take the floor again until the unfortunate gentlemen at whose expense Haliburton was being honoured had been found, brought to her, and apprised of their fate. They protested feebly, but Joan swept them aside in a fashion with which they were only too familiar. "Run way, chicks," she said maternally, "and get fresh partners. There are heaps of nice girls to spare to-night. Look at that little thing over there, with the blue eyes, and forget-me-nots in her hair. Get introduced to her--she's perfectly _lovely_. Worth six of me, any day. Trot!" But the two young men, refusing to be comforted, growled sulkily and elbowed their way outside, to console each other for the fragility of petticoat promises, and fortify themselves against any further slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune of a similar nature, in the refreshment room. Still, the girl to whom Joan had directed their attention was well worth notice. She stood near the door, a slim, graceful, and somehow rather appealing little figure. Her hair was the colour of ripe corn, her eyes, wide and wondering, were as blue as the forget-me-nots in her hair, and her lips, to quote King Solomon upon a very different type of female, were like a thread of scarlet. She wore a simple white frock, and carried in her hand the bouquet of the _débutante_. Joan swung past her in the embrace of the ever-faithful Binks. "That child is a perfect dream," she said to herself, "but her mouth is trembling at the corners. I wonder if some man has forgotten to ask her to dance. I should think--" At this point in her reflections she was whirled heavily into the orbit of a reversing couple, and the ensuing collision, together with the enjoyment of exacting a grovelling apology from the hapless Binks (who was in no way responsible for the accident), drove further cogitations on the subject of the girl with the forget-me-nots out of her head. About midnight Joan slipped upstairs to what her last partner--a mechanically-minded young gentleman from Woolwich--described as the repairing shop, to make good the ravages effected by the Lancers as danced in high society in the present year of grace. The music for the next waltz was just beginning when she returned to her pillar. No eager partner awaited her, which was unusual; and Joan glanced at her programme. She bit her lip. "Number eight," she said to herself. "Joey, my child, he has scored you off--and you deserve it!" This cryptic utterance had reference to Mr. Hugh Marrable, to whom it may be remembered this particular dance had been offered, much as a bone is thrown to a dog, on the lawn at Manors three days before. Hughie's subsequent demeanour had piqued his ward's curiosity. He had made no further reference to number eight, neither had he made any attempt during this evening to come up and confirm the fixture. In fact, he had not asked Joan for a dance at all, with the consequence that Miss Gaymer, who, serenely confident that her guardian would come and eat humble pie at the last moment, had kept number eight free, now found herself occupying the rather unusual _rôle_ of wallflower. What was more, she knew she would be unable to pick up a partner, for every available man was being worked to the last ounce, and pretty girls still sat here and there about the room, chatting with chaperons and maintaining a brave appearance of enjoyment and _insouciance_. "I'm not going to let Hughie see me propping a wall _this_ dance," said Joan to herself with decision. "He would think I had been keeping it for him. What shall I do? Go back to the cloakroom? No; it is always full of girls without partners pretending they've just dropped in to get sewn up. I'll go to the Mayor's parlour and sit there. It's never used at these dances." Making a mental entry on the debit side of her missing partner's ledger, Miss Gaymer retired unostentatiously from the ballroom, and turned down an unlighted passage, which was blocked by a heavy screen marked "Private," and encumbered with rolls of carpet and superfluous furniture. The darkened passage was comfortably cool and peaceful after the blaze and turmoil of the field of action, and apparently had not been discovered by couples in search of seclusion. Joan was approaching the end, where she knew the door of the Mayor's parlour was situated, when she became aware of a certain subdued sound quite near her. It was a sound well calculated to catch the ear of one so tender-hearted as herself. Some one was sobbing, very wretchedly, in the darkness within a few feet of her. Joan stopped short, a little frightened, and peered about her. Her eyes were growing accustomed to the gloom, and presently she beheld a glimmer of white almost at her knee. The glimmer outlined itself into the form of a filmy ball-dress. Joan tackled the situation with her usual promptitude. "I say," she said, "what's the matter? Let me help you." The sobbing ceased, and the white figure sat up with a start. "If you don't mind," continued Joan, "I'm going to turn up this electric light." There was a click, and the rays of a single and rather dusty incandescent lamp illuminated the scene, and with it the slender figure, seated forlornly on a roll of red carpet, of the little lady of the forget-me-nots. Her face was flushed with sudden shame, for her shoulders were still heaving, and her cheeks glistened with tears, the which she dabbed confusedly with a totally inadequate scrap of pocket handkerchief. Joan, regardless of her new frock, was down upon the dusty roll of carpet in a moment. She put her arm round the girl. "My dear," she said authoritatively, "what is it? Tell me." The girl told her. It was a simple story, and not altogether a novel one, but it contained the elements of tragedy for all that. This was her coming-out ball. She pointed to her discarded bouquet lying on the grimy floor. Her father had put it into her hand, and hung a little enamel pendant round her neck, and given her a kiss,--she told her story with all a child's fidelity to detail,--and had despatched her in her brother's charge, with admonitions not to break too many hearts, on the long fourteen-mile drive to Midfield,--a period occupied in ecstatic anticipations of the event to which she had been looking forward ever since she had put her hair up. Her brother, on their arrival, had booked one dance with her,--subsequently cancelled with many apologies on the ground that he had just met a girl whom he simply _must_ dance with,--and introduced her to two young men whose programmes were already full; after which he had plunged into the crowd, comfortably conscious that his duty had been done, leaving his sister to stand, smiling bravely, with tingling feet and her heart in her throat, from half-past nine until a quarter-past twelve. The music was pulsing in her ears, youth and laughter were swinging easily past her--even brushing her skirt; and she was utterly and absolutely alone. She was just eighteen; she was the prettiest girl (with the possible exception of Joan Gaymer) in the room; it was her first ball--and not a man had asked her to dance. A small matter, perhaps, compared with some, but men have blown out their brains for less. Long before she had sobbed out all her pitiful little narrative her head was on Joan's shoulder, and that mercurial young person, oblivious of everything save the fact that here was a sister in distress, was handling the situation as if she were twenty years her companion's senior instead of two. "I stood it for nearly three hours," said the girl apologetically, "and then I--I came here." "Well, my dear," said Joan with decision, "you aren't going to stay here any longer. You are coming straight back to the ballroom with me." "I can't," replied the girl,--"I couldn't _bear_ it!" "You are coming back to the ballroom with me," repeated Miss Gaymer firmly. "There are sixteen dances to go yet, and you are going to dance the soles of your slippers through, my child!" "You are awfully kind," said the girl wistfully, "but you won't be able to find me a partner now." "I can find you sixteen," said Joan. The child turned wondering eyes on her, and asked a question. "Me? Oh, I shall have a rest: I want one," replied Miss Gaymer, _splendide mendax_. "In fact, it will be a charity on your part to take them. They're all stupid, and they can't dance." But the girl shook her head. "You're a dear to suggest it," she said, "but it wouldn't do. Think how angry they would be, having booked a dance with Miss Gaymer, and only getting--" "Do you know me?" asked Joan in surprise. "Everybody knows you," said the girl. Joan flushed rosily. It was a compliment after her own heart. "I say, what's _your_ name?" she asked. "Sylvia Tarrant." Joan nodded. "I know now," she said. "You live near Gainford." The Tarrants were new-comers. Sylvia's father was a retired sailor and a widower, and had but lately settled in the district, which would account for his daughter's want of acquaintance. "Yes," said Sylvia. "But really, I could not take your partners. They'd be furious at getting me instead of you." Miss Gaymer turned and scrutinised the face and figure beside her. "All you want, my child," she said, "is a _start_. After to-night you'll never be left alone for two seconds at any ball you care to go to. In fact, I don't see how I shall ever be able to get any partners at all," she added plaintively. At this idea the girl laughed and looked happier, which was just exactly what Joan meant her to do. Her spirit was returning. Joan rose briskly. "Now, Sylvia," she said, "I'm going to leave you for two minutes, because I want to find a man to send round and tell all my partners that you've agreed to take them on. Then I'll come back and get you started. Just put yourself straight. There's a loose end of hair here: I'll roll it up. There! Your eyes are getting better every minute. Give your skirt a shake out, and have a look at yourself in that mirror, and you'll be simply perfect. So long!" "There's somebody coming," said Sylvia, turning from her toilet and looking over her shoulder. A masculine form filled the passage. It was Hughie, who, deprived of a partner through Joan's absence,--the result of standing on his dignity in the matter of number eight,--was prowling about in search of a quiet spot where he might indulge in the luxury of a pipe. Joan, who had forgotten all about number eight, received him with unfeigned pleasure, and hurried him back whence he came. On the way she breathlessly explained the situation to him. "Hughie, that poor child has come here not knowing a soul, and has stood against the wall for three hours. There isn't a partner to be had for love or money at this hour, so she must just have mine. Take my programme--wait a minute, I'll fill in some of these initials--and go round to all the men whose names are on it, and tell them I'm very sorry but I've got a headache and can't dance any more to-night, but they're to come to me at once at my pillar and be introduced to a substitute I've provided for them." "Do you think they'll exactly--_jump_ at the idea of a substitute?" suggested Hughie mildly. "Their business," said Miss Gaymer with a sudden return to her usual manner, "is to do what I tell them! Run, Hughie. Don't say a word about the poor kid not having been able to get partners, will you? Say she came late--anything! You understand?" Hughie nodded. "I understand," he said. "She came late, and you have a headache. Those are the two essential facts of the case--eh?" "Yes. Hurry!" said Joan, giving her guardian a push. "Joey," said Hughie, "you're a brick!" * * * * * Half an hour later the members of the Midfield Hunt Ball were electrified to behold Miss Joan Gaymer sitting between two comatose and famished chaperons, watching the dancers with indulgent eye, and generally presenting the appearance of one whose time for these follies is overpast. Then heads began to turn in another direction. People were asking one another who the little thing with the forget-me-nots might be, who danced like a fairy, and appeared to have made a "corner" in all Miss Gaymer's usual admirers. Had her appearance anything to do with Miss Gaymer's retirement? A case of pique--eh? Heads wagged sagely, and eyebrows were elevated. Poor Joan! Like all the great ones of the earth, she had her detractors. Sylvia herself was lost in the clouds by this time. When not engaged in obeying Joan's mandate to dance the soles of her slippers through, she was granting interviews to obsequious young men, who surged round in respectful platoons and hoped that, though disappointed on this occasion, they might have the pleasure at the County Bachelors' on Thursday fortnight. Never was there such a triumph. The girl, radiant and fluttering, smiled and blushed and wrote down hopeless hieroglyphics on the back of her programme, while Miss Joan Gaymer, the deposed, the eclipsed, sat contentedly by and realised to the full the truth of her own dictum that all Sylvia Tarrant wanted was a start. Later in the evening the watchful eye of Hughie Marrable detected the fact that Joan had disappeared from amid the concourse of matrons, and he speculated as to where she might be. He himself was enjoying a brief period of freedom, his partner for the moment having pleaded urgent private repairs and vanished to the regions above, and the idea had struck him that Joan might be going supperless. A brief scrutiny informed him that she was neither in the ballroom nor the supper-room. Then an inspiration seized him. Waiting for a comparatively quiet moment, he paid a hasty visit to the latter apartment, and having levied a contribution upon the side-table, slipped furtively round the big screen and down the dark passage. His instincts had not failed him. Miss Joan Gaymer was sitting peacefully upon the roll of red carpet. Her head was lying back against the wall, and the rays of the dusty electric light glinted upon her coppery hair. Her eyes were closed, but she opened them at Hughie's approach, blinking like a sleepy Dryad. "Hallo, Hughie!" she observed. "You nearly won a pair of gloves that time. Long evening, this!" Hughie began to deposit articles on the floor. "Supper," he observed briefly. He laid out a plate of mayonnaise, another of trifle, a bottle about half-full of champagne, and a tumbler. "Hughie," said Joan, "you're the only real friend I have in the world! I was nearly _crying_ for something to eat. That, and seeing other people dance and not me. Hughie, it was simply awful! I had no idea: if I had sat there much longer I should have burst into tears. I'd forgotten, too, that by giving away all my partners I was giving away my supper. If I'd remembered I would have kept just one--a little one. But never mind, now: the plague is stayed. I owe you one for this. How did you manage to carry all those things?" "Large hands," said Hughie. "Half a minute!" He produced from his tail-pocket two forks, a napkin, and a bottle of soda-water. "I remembered you liked your drink diluted," he said, pouring out both bottles at once. "I noticed it at dinner, the other night." "Hughie, you're a dear!" said Joan impulsively. "Say when!" remarked Hughie unsteadily. * * * * * It was five o'clock in the morning. The band had played "Whisper and I shall hear," followed by "John Peel," followed by "God save the King," followed by "John Peel," once more, followed by "God save the King" again, and the musicians were now putting away their instruments with an air of finality which intimated that in their humble opinion the Midfield Hunt Ball had had its money's worth. The Manors party, all twelve of them, were being scientifically packed into an omnibus constructed to seat ten uncomfortably, and Joan was waiting her turn in the portico. At this moment Sylvia Tarrant, followed by a slightly sheepish brother, came down the steps. Her cheeks were excessively pink and her eyes blazed. She saw Joan, and stopped. "I was afraid I was going to miss you," she said. "Good-night!" "Good-night!" said Joan. The little girl--she was a head shorter than Joan--placed her hands upon her new friend's shoulders, and stood on tiptoe. "I should like to kiss you," she said shyly. "Oh, my dear!" said Joan, quite flustered. "Of course--if you like. There!" She was unusually silent all the way home, and when they reached Manors said good-night to Mrs. Leroy and flitted upstairs to her room. The rest of the party dispersed ten minutes later, and Hughie was left alone with his host and hostess. "I have never known that child have a headache before," said Mrs. Leroy rather anxiously, as Hughie lighted her candle. "I hope there's nothing wrong." "She's as right as rain," said Hughie. "She gave up all her partners--every man Jack of them--I mean--I'm sorry! I don't think she meant me to tell--" "You may as well finish now," said Mrs. Leroy composedly. Hughie did so. Mrs. Leroy nodded. "It was like her," she said softly, "especially telling you to keep quiet about it. A good many women might have given up their dances, but very few could have resisted the temptation to make capital out of their generosity. Never tell me again, miserable creature," she continued, turning suddenly upon her comatose spouse, "that a woman is incapable of doing a good turn to another woman!" "Cert'nly, m'dear," replied Captain Leroy, making a desperate effort to close his mouth and open his eyes. "But of course," broke in Hughie unexpectedly, "there are precious few women like Joey." Then he bit his lip, and turned a dusky red. Mrs. Leroy, being a woman, took no outward notice, but her husband, who was a plain creature, turned and regarded his guest with undisguised interest. "What _ho_!" he remarked, wagging his sleepy head. "Good-night, old man!" said Hughie hurriedly. CHAPTER XIV BUSINESS ONLY Next morning Hughie made Miss Joan Gaymer a proposal of marriage. It was not an impressive effort--very few proposals are. But a performance of this kind may miss the mark as a spectacle and yet, by the indulgence of the principal spectator, achieve its end. Even thus Hughie failed, and for various reasons. In the first place, he proposed directly after breakfast, which, as Joey pathetically observed to Mrs. Leroy long afterwards, was just the sort of brutal thing he would do. A woman, especially if she be young, likes to be won, or at any rate wooed, in a certain style. A secluded spot, subdued light, mayhap a moon; if possible, distant music--all these things tell. If Hughie had paid a little more attention to stage-effects of this kind he might have found his ward more amenable. Being a Marrable, he brushed aside these trappings and came straight to what he fondly imagined was the point, little knowing that to a young girl romance and courtship make up one great and glorious vista, filling the eye and occupying the entire landscape, while marriage is a small black cloud on the distant horizon. His actual method of procedure was to sit heavily down beside his ward as she enjoyed the morning sun in a corner of the lawn, and say,-- "Joey, I want to talk to you--on business." "All right, warder," replied Miss Gaymer meekly; "fire away!" "I suppose you know," said Hughie, a little dashed, "that all your affairs have been left in my hands?" "I do, worse luck!" said Miss Gaymer frankly. "And that reminds me, Hughie dear, I should like a trifle on account. You won't refuse poor Joey, will you?" She squeezed her guardian's arm in a manner which a Frenchman would have described as _très câline_. "I think I had better put you on an allowance," said Hughie. Joan's eyes danced. "Oh, you _ripper_! How much?" "Can't say," replied Hughie, "until I've been up to town and seen the bankers." "When are you going?" "To-morrow: that's why I wanted to talk to you to-day. You see, your money is in two parts, so to speak. One lot is tied up in such a way that it can't be touched until poor Uncle Jimmy's death is actually proved." Joan's blue-grey eyes were troubled. "Hughie," she said, "is there _any_ hope? I still like to think so." Hughie shook his head. "Not much," he said. "In fact, none. It is known that he went with that crack-brained expedition of Hymack's up the Congo,--to study the Rubber Question on the spot,--and the last letter he sent home said that he was suffering from black-water fever, and it is also known that the expedition came back without him. And--all that was two years ago, Joey." Joan nodded her head submissively. "Poor Uncle Jimmy!" she said softly. "Still," continued Hughie stoutly, "you never know. I have sent a man out to make inquiries, and if he fails, perhaps I shall go myself. But until we learn something definite the will can't be proved. However, he left me very full instructions what to do in case he did not come back, so I must carry them out. There is plenty for you to go on with. I shall run up to town to-morrow, and when I come back I'll let you know how much it is, and how much a year I can allow you." Miss Gaymer clasped her hands and sighed happily. "We _will_ have a time, Hughie!" she said. "I'll stand treat." "Thank you," said Hughie gravely. There was a long silence. Hughie, suddenly ill at ease,--he had arrived at Part Two of his morning's syllabus,--made fatuous attempts to roll a cigarette. His ward sat with a rapt expression in her widely-opened eyes, mentally visualising a series of charitable enterprises (ranging from a turquoise pendant for Mildred Leroy to a new cap for the cook) made feasible by the sudden prospect of wealth. Presently Hughie cleared his throat in a heart-rending manner, and said, in what he afterwards admitted to himself was entirely the wrong sort of voice,-- "Joey, I think you and I had better marry one another." Miss Gaymer, who was more used to this sort of thing than her companion, turned and eyed him calmly. "And why?" she asked. There was only one possible answer to this question, and Hughie should have given it with the full strength of his heart and soul and body. But--well, reserve is a curious and paralysing thing. All he said was,-- "I think it would be very suitable; don't you?" "For you or for me?" inquired Miss Gaymer. "For both of us," replied Hughie. "No--for me!" he added, his habitual modesty getting the better of him. "In what way?" continued Miss Gaymer, with unnatural calm. "Well--Uncle Jimmy was very keen about it," said Hughie desperately. "You're a dutiful nephew, Hughie," observed Joan approvingly. "And then," continued the suitor, "as I have been made your guardian, and all that, I think I am in a position to take care of you, and look after your money, and so on." "You mean it would make it easier for you to manage my affairs?" said Miss Gaymer helpfully. "Yes," said Hughie, feeling that he was getting on. "Any more reasons?" inquired Miss Gaymer, with a docile appearance of intelligent interest. Hughie made an immense effort, and grasped his chair until the veins stood out on his hands. _Parturiunt montes_--at last. "Well, Joey," he said at last, "we have always been pals, and all that. I mean, we have known each other for a long time now, haven't we? You even offered to marry me once,"--he laughed nervously,--"when you were a kiddie. Do you remember? It seems to me we should get on first-rate together--eh? What's your opinion?" _Ridiculus mus!_ Miss Gaymer sat up in her chair, and turned upon the unfortunate young man beside her. "And you _dare_," she said, "to come to a girl like me with a proposal like that! You sit there and tell me that you have taken me over from Uncle Jimmy like a--like a parcel from a porter, and that you have been saddled with my money and affairs, so perhaps it would be simplest and save trouble if you married me! _Me!_" she repeated, "who have to keep men off with a stick!" The last sentence was a mistake. It was an inartistic and egotistical climax to a perfectly justifiable tirade. Joan realised the fact the moment she had uttered the words, but poor Hughie was too much occupied in retiring into his shell to notice anything. He had laid bare his heart, in his own fashion, for the first time in his life, and this was the result. Never again! He burned inwardly, like a child who has been laughed at by grown-ups. "I'm sorry," he said stiffly. "My mistake! Shan't occur again." Joey's ear was caught by the tone of his voice, and conscience gave her a twinge. She patted Hughie's arm in a friendly way. "Old boy," she said, suddenly contrite, "I've made you angry, and I've hurt you. I'm sowwy--sorry, I mean! (I'm a bit upset, you see)," she said, smiling disarmingly. "But I _can't_ marry you, really. I couldn't _bear_ to be married at all at present. It seems so--so unnecessary. I don't see what I should get out of it. That's a selfish thing to say, I suppose, but I'll try to explain a girl's point of view to you. You're a terrible child in some respects, so I'll do it quite simply." She stroked his sleeve in a motherly fashion, and continued:-- "Years ago, my dear, the only way a girl could get her freedom or any male society was by marrying. Now, she gets as much of both as she wants, and if she marries she loses all the freedom and most of the male society. So why should she marry at all?" Hughie kept silence before this poser. He felt incapable of plunging into the depths of an argument: one has to keep to the surface in discussing these matters with a maiden of twenty. "So I shan't marry for years, if at all," continued Miss Gaymer, with the air of one propounding an entirely new theory. "Not until I'm getting _passée_ at any rate, and only then if I could find a man whom it wouldn't give me the creeps to think of spending the rest of my life with. Besides, the moment one gets engaged all the other men drop off,--all the nice ones, at any rate,--and that would never do. Don't you think my system is a sensible one?" "It comes hard on the men," said Hughie. "Yes, poor dears!" said Miss Gaymer sympathetically. "Still, one man is so tiresome and a lot is so nice!" With which concise and not unmasterly summary of the marriage question, as viewed through the eyes of the modern maiden, Miss Gaymer turned the conversation into other channels, and the idyll terminated. Half an hour later they were called into the house, to make ready for a boating expedition. Joan, with her usual frankness, reverted for a moment before they left the seclusion of the trees to the topic that was uppermost in their minds. "Hughie," she said softly, "does it hurt much?" "I don't quite know yet," said Hughie. "I mean, are you sad or angry--which? It usually takes a man one way or the other," observed this experienced damsel. "I don't know that I'm either," said Hughie meditatively; "the only feeling that I have just now is that I'm desperately sorry. But I'm not kicking." "It is my belief," remarked Miss Gaymer with sudden and pardonable asperity, "that you don't care for me in the least. Do you, now?" They were a very honest and sincere couple, these. For a full minute they looked each other in the face, without speaking. Then Hughie said,-- "Joey, I simply don't know! I thought I did half an hour ago, and I'd have sworn it last night, when--" He checked himself. "When what?" asked Joan swiftly. "Nothing," said Hughie. "That's rather beside the point now, isn't it?" Joan, curiosity struggling with honesty, nodded reluctantly. "Anyhow," continued Hughie, "I thought I did then, but I'm blessed if I know now. In fact," he added in a sudden burst of confidence, "sometimes I can't stand you at any price, Joey dear!" "Ah!" said Miss Gaymer, nodding a wise head, "I see you don't know your own mind yet. But you _will_--one way or another--as soon as you get away from me." * * * * * A week later another interview took place between the pair, on the same spot. "Business only this time, Joey!" said Hughie, with rather laborious cheerfulness. "All right. Did you have a good time in town?" inquired Miss Gaymer, in the inevitable manner of women and Orientals, who dislike coming to the point in matters of business without a few decent preliminaries. "Yes, thanks. I have been picking up old friends again, and generally settling down," said Hughie. "Got a flat, and a comic man-servant--Scotchman--introduce you some day. He--" He plunged into a rather rambling description of John Alexander Goble. He was evidently no more anxious to get to business than Joan. At last Miss Gaymer inquired,-- "Well, Hughie, have you fixed up my affairs?" "Yes," said Hughie slowly. "Do you want details?" "Mercy, no! I don't know anything about business, and I don't believe you do either, Hughie. _Do_ you?" "Not much," confessed the trustee. "However, I must tell you at once, Joey, that your income won't be nearly as large as I expected--" "Right O!" replied Joan cheerfully. "When do I start for the workhouse?" "It's not quite so bad as that," said Hughie, "but--" "What am I worth?" inquired the practical Miss Gaymer. "I can't quite tell you," said Hughie in a hesitating fashion. "You see"--he appeared to be choosing his words rather carefully--"the nominal value of investments, and their actual cash equivalent--" Joan put her fingers in her ears. "Stop!" she cried, "or I shall scream! I don't know an asset from a liability, except that in the arithmetic book brokerage is one-eighth, and--Never mind! I should never understand. How much am I to have a year? Tell me that." "Supposing it should be a mere trifle," said Hughie slowly, "what would you do?" Miss Gaymer puckered her brow thoughtfully. "You mean, if I hadn't enough to live on?" Hughie nodded. "Well, I shouldn't be a governess, I don't think. I love children, but children are always perfectly diabolical to their governess, and I shouldn't be able to stand their mothers, either. No: governesses are off! I shouldn't mind being a typewriter, though, or a secretary,--not that I can typewrite, or even spell,--provided it was to a really nice man. An author, you know, or a Cabinet Minister. He could walk about the room, rumpling up his hair and getting the stuff off his chest, and I would sit there like a little mouse, in a neat black skirt and a white silk blouse,--_perhaps_ one or two carnations pinned on,--looking very sweet and taking it all down." "It's a pretty picture," said Hughie drily. "Yes, isn't it?" said Miss Gaymer, with genuine enthusiasm. "I think," she continued, soaring to still greater heights, "that I should like to go on the stage best of all. Of course, it wouldn't be the slightest good my going on the proper stage--learning parts, and all that; but a piece like 'The Merry Widow,' with different frocks for each act and just a few choruses to sing in, would be top-hole! _Say_ I'm a pauper, Hughie!" "You're not--thank God!" was Hughie's brutal but earnest response. "All right, then! Don't bite my head off!" said Miss Gaymer, with unimpaired good temper. "Let us resume. How much are you going to give me?" "How much can you live on?" "Well, I was talking about it to Ursula Harbord--you know her, don't you?" "I do," said Hughie, making a wry face. "Very well, don't abuse her. She's the cleverest girl I know," said Joan warmly. "She is on the staff of 'The New Woman,' and can put a man in his place in about two minutes." "So I discovered," said Hughie resignedly. "Popular type of girl. However, you were saying--?" "I was asking Ursula," continued Joan, "about the cost of living in town, and so on, and we agreed to share a flat. She said I could get along on three hundred a-year." Joan paused expectantly, and waited for an answer to her unspoken question. "That," said Hughie, after hesitating a moment as if to work out a sum in mental arithmetic, "is just what I can give you." * * * * * A pair of Archdiaconal shoe-buckles, the glimmer of a lady's white evening wrap, and a glowing cigar-end were discernible in the half-light of the verandah outside the drawing-room window after dinner. Two Olympians, to whom human hearts were as an open book, were discussing mortal affairs. "Is there no way of bringing it off?" inquired one voice. "Lots," replied the other. "But they have so bungled things between them that we shall have to go slow for a bit. Why, oh, why do men whom you could trust to do almost _anything_ in the ordinary way always make such a mess of their love-affairs? Why aren't _you_ married, for instance, Mr. D'Arcy?" "To return to the point," said the reverend gentleman evasively, "what ought Hughie to do? Take her by the shoulders and shake her? I have known such a method prove most efficacious," he added, rather incautiously. "N-no," said Mrs. Leroy, "I don't think so--not in Joey's case. It would bring some women to reason--most women, in fact--in no time. But the child is too high-spirited. Her pride would never forgive such treatment. A better way would be for him to make love to some one else." "Being Hughie, that is out of the question. He could only make love to some one else if he meant it; and that would rather defeat your object, Mrs. Leroy." "_My_ object?" "Well, ours, then. But is there no other way?" "Yes. He must get into trouble of some kind. At present he is too popular: everybody likes him. If they turned against him she would come round fast enough. Yes, he must get into _trouble_." "Well, perhaps he will," said the Venerable the Archdeacon hopefully. BOOK FOUR THE UNJUST STEWARD CHAPTER XV DEPUTATIONS--WITH A DIFFERENCE Hughie let himself into his chambers in Jermyn Street, and rang the bell of his sitting-room. It was a comfortable bachelor apartment, with sporting trophies on the walls, cavernous arm-chairs round the fireplace, and plenty of pipes dotted about the mantelpiece. It was eleven o'clock on a fine morning in March, and Hughie had been to Putney to stroke a scratch eight against the Cambridge crew, who had rowed a full trial on the early flood and required a little pacing between bridges. Presently the sitting-room door opened, and John Alexander Goble presented himself upon the threshold. Since his unregenerate days on board the Orinoco a new and awful respectability had descended upon him, and in his sober menial attire he looked more like a Calvinistic divine than ever. He regarded his employer with some displeasure. "Your breakfast has been sitting in the fender these twa hours," he observed bitterly. "Sorry, John. Afraid I forgot to countermand it. I had some at Putney." "At what hour?" inquired the inexorable Mr. Goble. "Half-past seven, about, with the crew." "It's eleven the noo. You'll be able for some mair, I doot. Forbye it's a pity to waste good food. Bide you, while I'll get it." Hughie, who was as wax in the hands of his retainer, presently found himself partaking of a lukewarm collation and opening his letters. He glanced through the first. "John!" he called. Mr. Goble appeared from the bedroom. "Were you cryin' on me?" he inquired. "Yes. Did two gentlemen call here at ten?" "Aye." "Who were they?" "Yon felly Gaymer, and anither." "Who was he?" "I couldna say." "What was he like?" Mr. Goble cast about him for a suitable comparison. "He was just a long drink o' watter," he announced at last, with an air of finality. "Did he look--like an actor?" inquired Hughie, with a flash of intuition. "Worse than that," replied Goble. "Um--I think I know him. Thank you, that will do. By the way, I'm expecting some friends to lunch. Captain and Mrs. Leroy--and Mr. D'Arcy. You know him, don't you?" "D'Arcy? Aye, I mind him fine. A fat yin, wi' a lum hat tied up wi' string. A popish-lookin' body," commented Mr. Goble sorrowfully. He retired downstairs, to ponder upon the dubiety of the company into which his employer appeared to be drifting, and Hughie returned to his letters. The sight of the next caused him to glow suddenly, for on the back of the envelope he observed the address of Joan's flat. But he cooled when he turned it round and read the superscription. It was in the handwriting of the lady with whom Joan shared the flat. "DEAR MR. MARRABLE [it said],-- "Joan and I are coming to call on you to-morrow about twelve--" "They'd better stay to lunch." Hughie touched the bell and continued,-- "Dear Joan is very young in some ways, and she has no idea of the value of money; but since talking the matter over with _me_ recently, she would like to have a few words with you about her financial position. "How delightful to see the leaves coming out again!--Believe me, yours sincerely, "URSULA HARBORD." "'Dear Joan would like'--_would_ she?" commented Hughie. "I'm afraid it's Ursula Harbord I'm going to have the few words with, though. Hades!" He rose and crossed the room to the fireplace, where he kicked the coals with unnecessary violence. Then he sighed heavily, and picked up a photograph which stood upon the mantelpiece. Joan had spoken nothing but the truth when she told Hughie that he would discover his true feelings as soon as he found himself away from her. For six or eight months he had gone about his day's work with the thoroughness and determination of his nature. He had administered the little estate of Manors, was beginning to dabble in politics, had taken up rowing again, and was trying to interest himself generally in the course of life to which he had looked forward so eagerly on his travels. He had even tried conclusions with a few _débutantes_ who had been introduced to his notice by business-like Mammas. But whatever his course of life, his thoughts and desires persisted in centring round a single object,--a very disturbing and elusive object,--and try as he would, he failed to derive either pleasure or profit from his present existence. In other words, he had made a mess of a love-affair. Most men--and most women too, for that matter--undergo this experience at least once in their lives, and no two ever endure it in the same way. One rants, another mopes, a third forgets, a fourth bides his time, a fifth seeks consolation elsewhere, a sixth buries himself in work or dissipation. Hughie, who cherished a theory that everything ultimately comes right in this world provided you hold on long enough, and that when in doubt a man should "stand by the Day's Work and await instructions," like Kipling's Bridge-Builders, had gone steadily on, because it was his nature so to do. It was uphill work at present,--a mechanical perfunctory business, with no reward or alleviation in sight,--but he was determined to go on doing his duty by Joan to the best of his ability, and combine so far as he was able the incompatible _rôles_ of stern guardian, undesired suitor, and--to him most paradoxical of all--familiar friend. For there was no doubt that Joan liked him. She trusted him, consulted him,--yea, obeyed him, even when he contradicted her most preposterous utterances and put down a heavy foot on her most cherished enterprises. For this he did without flinching. The fact that he was a failure as a lover seemed to be no reason why he should fail as a guardian. Not that Joan submitted readily to his _régime_. To Hughie's essentially masculine mind her changes of attitude were a complete mystery. They seemed to have no logical sequence or connection. She would avoid him or seek him out with equal unexpectedness. She might be hopelessly obstinate or disarmingly docile. One day she would behave like a spoilt child; on another she would be a very grandmother to him. Sometimes she would blaze up and rail against her much-enduring guardian for a tyrant and a monster; at others she would take him under a most maternal wing, and steer him through a garden-party or a reception in a manner which made him feel like a lost child in the hands of a benevolent policeman. On one occasion, which he particularly remembered, she had rounded on him and scolded him for a full half-hour for his stolid immobility and lack of _finesse_; the self-same afternoon he had overheard her hotly defending him against a charge of dulness brought by two frivolous damsels over the tea-table. All this was very perplexing to a man who hated subtlety and liked his friends and foes marked in plain figures. It unsettled his own opinions, too. Joey's variegated behaviour prevented him from deciding in his own mind whether he really liked her or not. At present all he was certain of was that he loved her. Meanwhile she was coming to see him--about her financial position. That did not promise romance. And Ursula Harbord was coming too. Help! Certainly life was a rotten business at present. And it had been so full and glorious before he had forsaken the wide world and taken to this sort of thing. It might have been so different too, if only-- Poor Hughie replaced Joan's photograph, sighed again--and coughed confusedly. A funereal image appeared over his shoulder in the chimney-glass. "Were you ringin'?" inquired a sepulchral voice. "Yes, John. Miss Gaymer and a friend of hers are coming to see me this morning. They'll probably stay to lunch. You can clear away that food over there." He returned to his letters. Only one remained unopened, and proved to be from a man with whom he had arranged to shoot in the autumn. "This seems to promise a little relief from the present cheery state of affairs," he mused. "Four men on a nice bleak moor, with no women about! Thank God! A hundred pounds a share. Well, Lord knows, trusteeing is an unprofitable business, but I think I can just do it. I'll accept at once." He began to write a telegram. Bachelors have a habit of conducting their correspondence in this manner. "Here's they twa whigmalearies," announced Mr. Goble dispassionately. He ushered in Lance Gaymer and the histrionic Mr. Haliburton. "After compliments," as they say in official circles, Lance came to the point. "Marrable," he said, after an almost imperceptible exchange of glances with Haliburton, "aren't you keeping my sister rather short of money?" Hughie turned and stared at him in blank astonishment. Mr. Haliburton, exuding gentlemanly tact at every pore, rose instantly. "You two fellows would like to be alone, no doubt," he said. "I must not intrude into family matters. I'll call for you in half an hour, Lance." Hughie had risen too. "You need not trouble, Mr. Haliburton," he said. "Lance is coming with you." Mr. Gaymer was obviously unprepared for such prompt measures as these. "But look here--I say--what the devil do you mean?" he spluttered. "I mean," replied Hughie deliberately,--he had realised, almost exultantly, that here once more was a situation which need not be handled with kid gloves,--"that I am your sister's sole trustee and guardian, and that you have nothing whatever to do with the disposition of her property, and--" "I think you forget," said Lance truculently, "that I am her brother." "I do not forget it," said Hughie. "Neither did Jimmy Marrable. It was no oversight on his part which left Joan's inheritance and yours locked up in separate compartments, so to speak. He gave you an independent income long ago, Lance, because he was particularly anxious to give you no opportunity of interfering with Joan's affairs when the time came. For some reason he had chosen me for the job, and he preferred that I should have a free hand. Therefore I am not going to allow you to cut into my department. I am sorry to have to put it so brutally, but, really, you have been infernally officious of late. This is the fourth reference which you have made to the subject during the past six weeks. I don't know whether your enterprise is inspired by brotherly love or the desire to make a bit, but whichever it is I don't think you'll get much change out of me. I also object to your latest move--bringing in Mr. Haliburton, presumably as an accomplice, or a witness, or whatever you like to call him." "Really, Mr. Marrable!" Mr. Haliburton's voice quivered with gentlemanly indignation. Hughie rang the bell. "Look here, Marrable," burst out Lance furiously, "you are getting yourself in a hole, I can tell you! We--I happen to know that Jimmy Marrable left thirty or forty thousand pounds at least for Joey's immediate use; and I am pretty certain he left something for mine too. Now--" "I'm sorry I can't ask you to stay to lunch," said Hughie, "but I have some friends coming. Show these gentlemen out, John." The deputation was ruthlessly shepherded downstairs by the impassive Mr. Goble, and Hughie was left to his own reflections. He filled a pipe meditatively. "I wonder," he said, lighting a spill and puffing, "where young Lance got his figures from. I also wonder what the game is. He was obviously a bit worked up, and I should say he had been fortifying himself for the interview before he arrived. I knew, of course, that he had never forgiven me for being put in charge of Joey's affairs: he has always made things as difficult for me as possible. Perhaps he wants a trifle for himself: his closing remarks rather pointed that way. But what on earth is friend Haliburton doing in that galley? I fancy he has been at the back of things all along. What interest has _he_ in the amount of Joey's fortune? I don't know much about him, but I wouldn't trust him a yard. Perhaps Lance owes him money. Have they gone, John?" "Aye," replied Mr. Goble. "They went quite quietly," he added regretfully. He began to lay the table for luncheon. "I say, John," began Hughie awkwardly. "Aye?" "There's a thing I want to speak to you about. I have been losing money lately, and I have to give up some luxuries I can't afford. I--I am afraid you are one of them. I have always regarded a man-servant as an extravagance," he went on with a rush, "and I must ask you to look about for another place. Take your time, of course, and don't leave me till you are suited. I shall be glad to give you a character, and all that. You understand?" There was a silence, while Mr. Goble folded a napkin. Then he replied: "Fine!" Then he added, after a pause, "So you've been lossin' your money? Aye! Aha! Mphm!" "Yes. I'm desperately sorry," said Hughie penitently. "I don't want to lose you. Perhaps it will only be tempor--" "You'll no be daen' that yet a while," remarked Mr. Goble morosely. "I'm an ill body tae move." "But, John, you don't understand. I can't afford to keep you for more than--" "There a cab!" observed Mr. Goble. Hughie looked down out of the window. "So it is," he said hastily. "I'll show them up, John. You go on with your work." He was across and out of the room in three strides, and could be heard descending the stairs kangaroo fashion. Mr. John Goble breathed heavily into a spoon and rubbed it with the point of his elbow. "I wunner wha his visitors is," he mused caustically. "Of course he always opens the door himsel' tae all his visitors! Of course I dinna ken wha she is! Oh, no!" He wagged his head in a broken-hearted manner, and gave vent to a depressing sound which a brother Scot would have recognised as a chuckle of intense amusement. To him entered Miss Ursula Harbord. She wore _pince-nez_ and a sage-green costume of some art fabric--one of the numerous crimes committed in the name of Liberty. She was Joan Gaymer's latest fad; and under her persuasive tutelage Joan was beginning to learn that the men who all her life had served her slightest whim were at once monsters of duplicity and brainless idiots; and that, given a few more fervid and ungrammatical articles in "The New Woman," women would shortly come to their own and march in the van of civilisation, and that people like Ursula Harbord would march in the van of the women. Pending this glorious destiny, Miss Harbord acted as unsettler-in-general of Joan's domestic instincts, and worried Hughie considerably. She was followed into the room by Joan; very much the Joan of last summer, if we make allowances for the distressing appearance presented by a young woman of considerable personal attractions who is compelled by Fashion's decree, for this season at any rate, to obscure her features under a hat which looks like an unsuccessful compromise between a waste-paper basket and a dish-cover. "Well, John," she inquired in her friendly fashion, "have you quite settled down in London?" "Aye, mem." "Not missing Scotland?" continued Joan, peeling off her white gloves and sitting down in an arm-chair. "Naething to speak of," said John. "I thought," continued Miss Gaymer, surveying Mr. Goble's Cimmerian features, "that you had perhaps left your heart there." "Ma hairt? What for would I dae a thing like that?" enquired the literal Mr. Goble. "A hairt is no a thing a body can dae wi'oot," he explained. "It's no like a rib. Ye jist get the ane, so ye canna afford tae get leavin' it ony place." Miss Gaymer smilingly abandoned the topic, and in all probability the ghost of Sydney Smith chuckled. "When are you going to pay us another visit at Manors?" was Joan's next question. "I'm no sure," said Mr. Goble. "Mr. Marrable has jist given me notice." "Oh, John!" said Joan, "what have you been doing? Breaking his china?" "Drinking his wine?" suggested Miss Harbord, turning from a scornful inspection of Hughie's stock of current literature. "I doot I'm no givin' satisfaction," said John. "But, John, I am _sure_ you are!" said Joan. "Was that the reason he gave?" "He said he was givin' up keepin' a man-servant." Miss Harbord, who had been craning her neck to see something in the street, turned round sharply. "Why? Has he been losing money?" "I couldna say, mem," said Mr. Goble woodenly. He shared his master's antipathy to Miss Harbord. That lady shook her head resignedly. "I thought so!" she said. "Joan, dear--" At this moment Hughie entered, and Miss Harbord's fire was diverted. "Mr. Marrable, have you got rid of that cabman?" she enquired with truculence. "Rather!" said Hughie. "He went like a lamb." "He was intoxicated," remarked Miss Harbord freezingly. "I didn't notice it," said Hughie. "He was quite tractable. Apparently you engaged him at Hyde Park Terrace and stopped at two shops on the way." "That is correct." "And you gave him one and threepence for a drive of over two miles and a stop of about ten minutes." "His legal fare. We employed him for exactly half an hour." "But did you tell him that you were engaging him by the hour?" "Of course not! They simply _crawl_ if you do. You might have known that, Mr. Marrable." "Well, it's all right now," interposed Joan cheerfully. "Mr. Marrable," persisted Miss Harbord, "I fear you were weak with him. How much did you give him?" "Nothing out of the way," said Hughie uneasily. "You'll stay to lunch, won't you? I am expecting the Leroys and D'Arcy. We can all go on to a _matinée_ afterwards." Miss Harbord assumed the expression of one who is not to be won over by fair words, and endeavoured to catch Miss Gaymer's eye--an enterprise which failed signally, as the latter lady rose from her seat and strolled to the window. "Mr. Marrable," began Miss Harbord, taking up her parable single-handed, "Joan wishes to have a chat with you about money-matters." "No I don't, Hughie," said Miss Gaymer promptly, over her shoulder. "Well then, dear," said Miss Harbord calmly, "you ought to. Women leave these things to men far too much as it is. Joan has an old-fashioned notion," she added to Hughie, "that it is not quite nice for girls to know anything about money-matters: hence her reluctance. However, I will conduct her case for her." Miss Harbord crossed her legs, threw herself back in her chair in a manner which demonstrated most conclusively her contempt for appearances and feminine ideas of decorum, and began: "Tell me, Mr. Marrable, what interest does Joan get on her money?" Hughie gaped feebly. Half an hour ago he had put Mr. Lance Gaymer to the door for an almost precisely similar question. But Lance Gaymer was a man, and Miss Harbord, conceal the fact as she might, was a woman; and Hughie's old helplessness paralysed him once more. "The usual rate of interest," he said lamely, "is about four per cent." Ursula Harbord nodded her head, as who should say, "I expected that!" and produced a crumpled newspaper from her muff. "That," she said almost indulgently, "reveals your ignorance of the world, Mr. Marrable. If you mixed a little more in affairs, and followed some regular occupation, you would have more opportunities of discovering things for yourself, and so be spared the indignity--I suppose you consider it an indignity?--of having to be advised by a woman." The afflicted Hughie murmured something about it being a pleasure. "Now here," continued Miss Harbord, slapping the newspaper as an East-End butcher slaps the last beef-steak at his Saturday night auction, "I have the report of the half-yearly meeting of the International Trading Company, Limited, where a dividend of seven per cent was declared, making a dividend on the whole year of fourteen per cent. _Now_ do you see what I--what Joan wants?" "Hughie," said Joan, who was making a tour of inspection of the room, "where did you get this lovely leopard-skin? Have I seen it before?" "Shot it, Joey. I beg your pardon, Miss Harbord?" "Do you see what Joan wants you to do?" repeated that financial Amazon. "Afraid I don't, quite. I'll get on to it in a minute, though," replied the docile Hughie. "Surely, the whole thing is quite clear! You must take Joan's capital out of whatever it is in and buy shares in The International Trading Company with it. And be sure you order _preference_ shares, Mr. Marrable. They are the best sort to get. That is all; but I ought not to have to point these things out to you." Hughie surveyed his preceptress in an undecided fashion. Was it worth while endeavouring to explain to her a few of the first principles of finance, or would it be simpler to grin and bear it? He decided on the latter alternative. "The shares," continued Miss Harbord, having evidently decided to follow up her whips with a few selected scorpions, "should be bought as cheap as possible. They go up and down, you know, like--a--" "Monkey on a stick?" suggested Hughie, with the air of one anxious to help. Miss Harbord smiled indulgently. "No, no! Like a--a barometer, let us say; and you have to watch your opportunity. There is a thing called 'par' which they go to,--anybody will tell you what it is,--and that is a very good time to buy them." Hughie, fighting for breath, rose and joined Joan in the window recess, while Miss Harbord, with much ostentatious crackling, folded up the newspaper and put it away. "Hughie," said Joan, under cover of the noise, "you are angry." "Not at all," replied Hughie, wiping his eyes furtively. "A bit flummoxed--that's all. No idea your friend was so up in these things." "She _is_ clever, isn't she?" said Joan, with unaffected sincerity. "But, Hughie dear, don't bother about it if it worries you. My affairs must be a fearful nuisance to you, but Ursula was so keen that I should come--" "I'm glad you did, Joey. It was worth it," said Hughie simply. "Of course," continued the unlearned Miss Gaymer, "to people like Ursula these things are as easy as falling off a log, but for you and me, who know nothing about business, they're pretty stiff to tackle, aren't they?" "Quite so," agreed Hughie meekly. "But look here, Joey," he continued, "are you really in want of money?" "Of course she is!" said Miss Harbord, overhearing and resuming the offensive. "I _could_ do with a few more frocks, Hughie," said Miss Gaymer wistfully, "if it wouldn't be a bother to change those investments about a bit, as Ursula advises. Still, if it can't be done, we'll say no more about it." "Will another hundred a-year be any use to you?" said Hughie suddenly. "Oh, Hughie, I should _think_ so! Can it be managed without a fearful upset?" cried Miss Gaymer, her eyes already brightening over a vista of blouse-lengths and double-widths. "Yes," said Hughie shortly. "I'll--I'll make the necessary changes and see that the cash is paid into your banking account." "You dear!" said Miss Gaymer, with sincerity. "A hundred pounds? It might be more!" observed the daughter of the horse-leech on the sofa. Fourteen per cent still rankled in her Napoleonic brain. Hughie crossed to the writing-table and tore up a telegraph-form. "Capt'n Leroy!" announced Mr. Goble's voice in the doorway. That easy-going paladin entered the room, and intimated that his wife had sent him along to say that she would arrive in ten minutes. "That means twenty," said Joan. "Ursula, we have just time to run round and see that hat we thought we'd better not decide about until we had heard from Hughie about the thing we came to see him about. Now I can try it on with a clear conscience. Back directly, Hughie!" She flitted out, the prospective hundred pounds obviously burning a hole in her pocket (or wherever woman in the present era of fashion keeps her money), followed by Miss Harbord. Hughie turned to Leroy. "Take a cigarette, old man," he said, "and sit down with a glass of sherry while I do myself up for lunch. Been down at Putney." Leroy obeyed. When Hughie returned from his bedroom a quarter of an hour later, he found that Mrs. Leroy had arrived. She and her husband were engaged in a low-toned conversation, which they broke off rather abruptly on their host's entrance. Hughie shook hands, and sweeping some newspapers off the sofa, offered his latest-arrived guest a seat. "No, thanks, Hughie," said Mrs. Leroy; "I prefer to look out of the window." She walked across the room and began to gaze down into the street with her back to Hughie. Her husband, evidently struck with the suitability of this attitude, rose and joined her. "The fact is, Hughie," began Mrs. Leroy, staring resolutely at the house opposite, "Jack and I want to talk to you like a father and mother, and I can do it more easily if I look the other way." "Same here," corroborated Leroy gruffly. Hughie started, and surveyed the guilty-looking pair of backs before him with an uneasy suspicion. Surely he was not going to be treated to a third variation on the same theme! "Go on, Jack!" was Mrs. Leroy's next remark. "Can't be done, m'dear," replied the gentleman, after an obvious effort. "Well, Hughie," continued Mrs. Leroy briskly, "as this coward has failed me, I must say it myself. I want to tell you that people are talking." "Ursula Harbord, for instance," said Hughie drily. "Yes. How did you know?" "She delivered a lecture to me this morning. Gave me to understand that she darkly suspects me of being a knave, and made no attempt to conceal her conviction that I am a fool." "Well, of course that's all nonsense," said Mrs. Leroy to a fly on the window-pane; "but really, Hughie, with all the money that her Uncle Jimmy left her, you ought to be able to give Joey more than you do, _shouldn't_ you? The child has to live in quite a small way--not really poor, you know, but hardly as an heiress ought to live. You give her surprisingly small interest on her money, Jack says--didn't you, Jack?" Captain Leroy made no reply, but the deep shade of carmine on the back of his neck said "Sneak!" as plainly as possible. "And you know he would be the last to say anything against you--wouldn't you, Jack?" "Rather!" said Leroy, in a voice of thunder. "Hughie," said Mrs. Leroy, turning impulsively, "won't you confide in me?" Hughie kicked a coal in the grate in his usual fashion, and sighed. "I can't, _really_," he said. "Fact is, old man," broke in Leroy, in response to his wife's appealing glances, "we didn't want to say anything at all, but the missis thought it best--considerin' the way people are talkin', and all that. Can _I_ be of any use? Been speculatin', or anything?" "No, Jack, I haven't," said Hughie shortly. Mrs. Leroy gave a helpless look at her husband, and said desperately: "But, Hughie, we can't leave things like this! You simply don't _know_ what stories are going about. It is ruining your chances with Joey, too. She thinks you are a noodle." "I know it," said Hughie. "Well, look here," said Leroy, "can't you give us some sort of explanation--some yarn we could put about the place to account for this state of things--" "What state of things?" said Hughie doggedly. He was in an unpleasant temper. "Well, Hughie," said Mrs. Leroy, keeping hers, "here is Joan, known to have been left a lot of money for her immediate use,--she admits it herself,--living quite humbly and cheaply, and obviously not well off. People are asking why. There are two explanations given. One, the more popular, is that you have embezzled or speculated the money all away. The other, which prevails among the _élite_--" "The people who are really in the know, you know," explained Leroy. "Yes: _they_ say," continued his wife, "that Joan won't marry you, so you have retaliated by--by--" "By cutting off supplies," suggested Hughie. "Yes, until--" "Until she is starved into submission--eh?" "That's about the size of it, old son," said Leroy. There was a long pause. Finally Hughie said:-- "Well, it's a pretty story; but, honestly, I'm not in a position to contradict it at present." Mrs. Leroy desisted from plaiting the window-cord, swung round, walked deliberately to the fireplace, and laid a hand on Hughie's arm. "Hughie," she said, in tones which her husband subsequently affirmed would have drawn ducks off a pond, "what have you done? Tell _us_!" Leroy followed his wife across the room. "Get it off your chest, old man," he said, with the air of a father confessor. Hughie smiled gratefully. He took Mrs. Leroy's two hands into one of his own, and laid the other on Jack Leroy's shoulder. "Jack and Milly," he said earnestly, "my two pals!--I would rather tell you than anybody else; but--I simply _can't_! It's not my secret! You'll probably find out all about it some day. At present I must ask you to accept my assurance that I'm not so black as I'm painted." "Hughie," said Mrs. Leroy, "you are simply stupid! We have not come to you out of idle curiosity--" "I know that," said Hughie heartily. "And I think you might give us some sort of an inkling--a sort of favourable bulletin--that I could pass on to Joey, at any rate--" "Joey!" said Hughie involuntarily; "Lord forbid!" Mrs. Leroy, startled by the vehemence of his tone, paused; and her husband added dejectedly,-- "All right, old man! Let's drop it! Sorry you couldn't see your way to confide in us. Wouldn't have gone any further. Rather sick about the whole business--eh? No wonder! Money is the devil, anyway." Somehow Leroy's words hit Hughie harder than anything that had been said yet. He wavered. After all,-- "We've bought the hat, and I'm perfectly _ravenous_," announced Joan, appearing in the doorway. "And we've brought Mr. D'Arcy. Hughie, are those plover's eggs? Ooh!" This was no atmosphere for the breathing of confidential secrets. The party resumed its usual demeanour of off-hand British _insouciance_, and began to gather round the luncheon-table. Only Mr. D'Arcy's right eyebrow asked a question of Mrs. Leroy, which was answered by a slight but regretful shrug of the shoulders. Hughie's apartment was L-shaped, and the feast was spread in the smaller arm, out of the way of draughts and doorways. Consequently any one entering the room would fail to see the luncheon table unless he turned to his left and walked round a corner. Hughie was helping the plover's eggs,--it is to be feared that Miss Gaymer received a Benjamin's portion of the same,--when Mr. Goble suddenly appeared at his elbow and whispered in his ear,-- "Him again!" Muttering an apology, Hughie left the table and walked round the corner to the other arm of the room. Lance Gaymer had just entered. His face was flushed and his eyes glittered, and Hughie's half-uttered invitation to him to come in and have some lunch died away upon his lips. "Hallo, Lance!" he said lamely. Mr. Gaymer replied, in the deliberate and portentously solemn tones of a man who is three parts drunk,-- "I understand you have got a party on here." "Yes," said Hughie, endeavouring to edge his visitor through the doorway. "What I want to say," continued Mr. Gaymer in rising tones, "is that I accuse you of embezzling my sister's property, and I'm going to make things damned hot for you. Yes--_you_! Go and tell that to your luncheon-party round the corner!" he concluded with a snort. "And--glug--glug-glug!" By this time he had been judiciously backed into the passage, almost out of ear-shot of those in the room. Simultaneously Mr. Goble's large hand closed upon his mouth from behind, and having thus acquired a good purchase, turned its owner deftly round and conducted him downstairs. Death-like silence reigned at the luncheon-table. Hughie wondered how much they had heard. Not that it mattered greatly, for Master Lance's accusations, making allowances for alcoholic directness, partook very largely of the nature of those already levelled at Hughie by more conventional deputations. Before returning to his seat, Hughie crossed to the window and looked down into the street. Mr. Lance Gaymer was being assisted into a waiting hansom by the kindly hands of Mr. Guy Haliburton. Hughie, having seen all he expected to see, returned with faltering steps to his duties as a host. It was a delicate moment, calling for the exercise of much tact. Even Mildred Leroy hesitated. Joan had flushed red, whether with shame, or anger, or sympathy, it was hard to say. Mr. D'Arcy regarded her curiously. But heavy-footed husbands sometimes rush in, with success, where the most wary and diplomatic wives fear to tread. Jack Leroy cleared his throat. "Now, Hughie, my son," he observed, "when you've _quite_ done interviewin' all your pals on the door-mat, perhaps you'll give your guests a chance. With so many old friends collected round your table like this, we want to drink your health, young-fellow-my-lad! Fill up your glass, Miss Harbord! No heel-taps, Milly!" There was an irrelevant _bonhomie_ about this whole speech which struck exactly the right note. Mrs. Leroy glanced gratefully at her husband, and lifted her glass. The others did the same. But it was Joan who spoke first. "Hughie!" she cried, with glowing eyes. "Hughie!" cried every one. "Good health!" In the times of our prosperity our friends are always critical, frequently unjust, generally a nuisance, and sometimes utterly detestable. But there is no blinking the fact that they are a very present help in trouble. Hughie suddenly felt himself unable to speak. He bowed his head dumbly, and made a furious onslaught upon a plover's egg. CHAPTER XVI IN WHICH CHARITY SUFFERETH LONG, AND JOAN MISSES HER CUE Hughie spent the next few months chiefly in wondering. He wondered what Mr. Haliburton's game might be. What was he doing behind Lance Gaymer? That the latter might consider himself justified in poking his nose into his only sister's affairs was understandable enough--but why drag in Haliburton? Was that picturesque ruffian a genuine friend of Lance's, enlisted in a brotherly endeavour to readjust Jimmy Marrable's exceedingly unsymmetrical disposition of his property, or was he merely a member of that far-reaching and conspicuously able fraternity (known in sporting circles as "The Nuts"), to whom all mankind is fair game, and whose one article of faith is a trite proverb on the subject of a fool and his money, pursuing his ordinary avocation of "making a bit"? In other words, was Lance Gaymer pulling Haliburton, or was Haliburton pushing Lance Gaymer? Hughie also wondered about a good many other things, notably-- (_a_) Joan. (_b_) More Joan; coupled with dim speculations as to how it was all going to end. (_c_) More Joan still; together with a growing desire to go off again to the ends of the earth and lose himself. But for the present life followed an uneventful course. Since Lance's display of fireworks at Hughie's luncheon-party, Hughie's friends had studiously avoided the mention of the word money in their late host's presence; and Master Lance himself, evidently realizing that, however excellent his intentions or pure his motives, he had made an unmitigated ass of himself, avoided Hughie's society entirely. Of Joan Hughie saw little until the beginning of October, when he arrived at Manors to shoot pheasants. He was greeted, almost with tears of affection, by John Alexander Goble, who had been retained by Jack Leroy as butler when Hughie relinquished his services; and found the house packed with young men and maidens, the billiard-room strewn with many-hued garments, and the atmosphere charged with the electricity of some great enterprise in the making. "Theatricals!" explained Mrs. Leroy resignedly, as she handed him his tea. "Tableaux, rather. At least, it is a sort of variety entertainment," she concluded desperately, "in the Parish Hall. In aid of some charity or other, but that doesn't matter." "Joey's latest, I suppose?" "Yes; the child is wild about it. What, sweet one?" (This to the infant Hildegard, in an attitude of supplication at her side.) "Cake? certainly not! You are going out to tea at the Rectory in half an hour. Do you remember what happened the last time you had two teas?" Stodger reflected, and remembered; but pleaded, in extenuation,-- "But I did it _all_ at the Rectory, mummy." "She was sick," explained her sister, turning politely to Hughie. "Twice!" corroborated Stodger, not without pride. "Yes; in a decent basin provided by the parish," continued Duckles hazily. She had recently begun to attend church, and her reading during the sermon had opened to her a new and fertile field for quotation. "Tell me more about the tableaux, Jack," said Hughie hastily, as Mrs. Leroy accelerated her ritualistic progeny's departure upstairs. "They're spendin' lashings of money on them. Won't make a farthing profit, I don't suppose; but the show should be all right. They're getting a 'pro.' down to stage-manage 'em." "My word, they are going it! Hallo, Joey!" Miss Gaymer's entrance brought theatrical conversation up to fever heat; and for the rest of the meal, and indeed for the next few days, Hughie lived and breathed in a world composed of rickety scenery, refractory pulleys, and hot size, inhabited by people who were always talking, usually cross, and most intermittent in their feeding-times. One afternoon Joan took him down to the Hall, ostensibly as a companion, in reality to shift some large flats of scenery, too wide for feminine arms to span. Captain Leroy had already offered himself in that capacity, but his services had been brutally declined, on the ground that the scenery was not concave. "The programmes are being printed to-day. We are going to have the tableaux in the first half," Joan rattled on, as they walked through the plantations. "Well-known pictures, you know. Some of them are perfectly lovely. I am in three," she added, rather naïvely. Hughie asked for details. "Well, the first one is to be The Mirror of Venus--a lot of girls looking into a pool." "Are you in that?" "Not much! _That_ is for all the riff-raff who have crowded in without being invited--the Mellishes, and the Crumfords, and the Joblings. (You know the lot!) There's another tableau for their men: _such_ horrors, my dear! But that disposes of them for Part One: they don't have to appear again until the waxworks. Then there's a perfectly sweet one--The Gambler's Wife." "Who is she to be?" "Sylvia Tarrant. She sits under a tree in an old garden, looking sad," gabbled Joan without pausing, "while her husband gambles with some other men on the lawn behind. You'll cry! I come after that--Two Strings to her Bow. A girl walking arm-in-arm with two men. She looks quite pleased with herself: the men have both got camelious hump." "Who are they?" "It's not quite settled yet. I told them they could fight it out among themselves. I expect it will be Binks and Cherub, though. But they must decide soon, because time is getting on, and Mr. Haliburton says--" "Who?" "Mr. Haliburton." "Haliburton?" said Hughie, stopping short. "Yes. Didn't you know? He is stage-managing us. He came down this morning." "Is he staying in the house?" was Hughie's next question. "No: we couldn't get him in. He's putting up at The Bull, in the village," said Joan. "I wish we could have found room for him," she added, with intention. She knew that most men neither loved Mr. Haliburton nor approved of their girl friends becoming intimate with him; and this alone was quite sufficient to predispose her in that misjudged hero's favour. In her heart of hearts Miss Gaymer was just a little _éprise_ with Mr. Haliburton, and, as becomes one who is above such things, just a little ashamed of the fact. She had found something rather compelling in his dark eyes and silky ways, but, being anything but a susceptible young person, rather resented her own weakness. Still, the fact remained. She had seen a good deal of Mr. Haliburton in London--how, she could hardly explain, though possibly Mr. Haliburton could have done so--and had listened, not altogether unmoved, to tales of a patrimony renounced for Art's sake, of an ancestral home barred by a hot-headed but lovable "old pater"; and to various reflections, half-humorous, half-pathetic, on the subject of what might have been if this world were only a juster place. Joan, who did not know that Mr. Haliburton's ancestral home had been situated over a tobacconist's shop somewhere between the back of Oxford Street and Soho Square, and that his "old pater" had but lately retired from the post of head waiter at a theatrical restaurant in Maiden Lane, in order to devote his undivided attention to the more perfect colouring of an already carnelian proboscis, felt distinctly sorry for her romantic friend. When a young girl begins to feel sorry for a man, the position is full of possibilities; and when heavy-handed and purblind authority steps in and forbids the banns, so to speak, the possibilities become probabilities, and, in extreme cases, certainties. Joan glanced obliquely at Hughie. That impassive young man was advancing with measured strides, frowning ferociously. She continued, not altogether displeased:-- "The next tableau is Flora Macdonald's Farewell--very Scotch. A man in a kilt stands in the centre--" She babbled on, but Hughie's attention wandered. Haliburton again! He did not like the idea. Consequently it was not altogether surprising if, when Joan paused to enquire whether he regarded Queen Elizabeth or a suffragette as the most suitable vehicle for one of Mrs. Jarley's most cherished "wheezes," Hughie should have replied:-- "Joan, how did that chap come here? Was he engaged by you, or did he offer himself?" "He offered himself--very kindly!" said Joan stiffly. "I suppose he is being paid?" "Yes, of course--a guinea or two. It's his profession," said Joan impatiently. "Do you object?" The occasion called for considerable tact, and poor heavy-handed Hughie sighed in anticipation. Joan heard him. "What _is_ the trouble?" she asked, more amused than angry. "Out with it, old Conscientiousness?" "Joey," said Hughie, "I don't like the idea of your taking up with that chap." On the whole, it could not have been put worse. "It seems to me," said Miss Gaymer scornfully, "that it's not women who are spiteful, but men. I wonder why every male I know is so down on poor Mr. Haliburton. Silly children like Binks and Cherub I can understand, but _you_, Hughie--you ought to be above that sort of thing. What's the matter with the man, that you all abuse him so? Tell me!" Hughie's reply to this tirade was lame and unconvincing. The modern maiden is so amazingly worldly-wise on various matters on the subject of which she can have had no other informant than her own intuitions, that she is apt to scout the suggestion that there are certain phases of life of which happily she as yet knows nothing; and any attempt to hint the same to her is scornfully greeted as a piece of masculine superiority. Consequently Joey thought she knew all about Mr. Haliburton; wherein she was manifestly wrong, but not altogether to be blamed; for when your knowledge of human nature, so far as it goes, is well-nigh perfect, it is difficult for you to believe that it does not go all the way. It was a most unsatisfactory conversation. All Hughie did was to reiterate his opinion of Mr. Haliburton without being able (or willing) to furnish any fresh facts in support of it; and the only apparent result was to prejudice Joan rather more violently in Haliburton's favour than before, and to make Hughie feel like a backbiter and a busybody. It was a relief when Joan abruptly changed the conversation, and said:-- "Hughie, have you seen anything of Lance lately?" No, Hughie had not. "Why?" "I'm bothered about him," said Joan, descending from her high horse and slipping into what may be called her confidential mood. "He used to write to me pretty regularly, even after he married that freak, and we were always fond of one another, even though we quarrelled sometimes. But he seems to have dropped out of things altogether lately. Do you know what he is doing?" "Can't say, I'm sure," said Hughie. "Could you find out for me?" "Of course I will," said Hughie, quite forgetting the present awkwardness of his relations with Lance in the light of the joyous fact that Lance's sister had just asked him to do her a service. "I'll go and look him up. He may be ill, or short of cash. But can't you get news of him from--from--" He stopped suddenly. He had been about to ask a question which had just struck him as rather ungenerous. "You mean from Mr. Haliburton?" said Joan, with her usual directness. "I did ask him, but he says he has seen nothing of Lance for quite a long time; so I'm afraid I must bother you, Hughie. I don't like to, because I know you won't want to go out of your way on his account, after--" "Never mind that!" said Hughie hastily. "I'll go and look him up." Joan turned to him gratefully. "You're a good sort, Hughie," she said. "I don't know what I should do without you." Hughie glowed foolishly. Her words did not mean anything, of course; still, they warmed him for the time being. He never thought of making capital out of Joan's impulsive outbursts of affection. He regarded them as a sort of consolation prize--nothing more. He had never attempted to make love to her since his first rebuff. The memory of that undignified squabble still made him tingle, and in any case it would never have occurred to him to renew the attack. Man-like, he had taken for granted the rather large proposition that a woman invariably means what she says. To pester Joan with further attentions, especially in his exceptional position, savoured to him of meanness. For all that, the girl and he seemed of late to have adjusted their relations with one another. Joan never played with him now, encouraging him one moment and flouting him the next, as in the case of most of her faithful band. Her attitude was that of a good comrade. She was content to sit silent in his company, which is a sound test of friendship; she brought to him her little troubles, and occasionally ministered to his; and in every way she showed him that she liked and trusted him. A vainer or cleverer man would have taken heart of grace at these signs. Hughie did not. He was Joan's guardian, and as such entitled to her confidence; also her very good friend, and as such entitled to her affection. That was all. It was rotten luck, of course, that she was not sufficiently fond of him to marry him, but then rotten luck is a thing one must be prepared for in this world. He would get accustomed to the situation in time: meanwhile there must be no more castles in the air. "I'll tell you what," he continued presently. "I shall be in town on Wednesday. I'll go and look Lance up then." "But, Hughie," cried Joan in dismay, "Wednesday is the day of the entertainment. You _must_ come to that. What is your engagement, if it's not indiscreet to inquire?" "Dentist," said Hughie lugubriously. "Dentist?" Joan laughed, or rather crowed, in her characteristically childlike way. "Hughie at the dentist's! It seems so funny," she explained apologetically. "It will be the reverse of funny," said Hughie severely, "when he gets hold of me. Do you know how long it is since I sat in a dentist's chair? Eight years, no less!" "You'll catch it!" said Miss Gaymer confidently. "But you simply must not go on that day. I want you at the show. Can't you change the date?" "The assassin gave me to understand," said Hughie, "that it was a most extraordinary piece of luck for me that he should be able to take me at all; and he rather suggested that if I broke the appointment I need not expect another on this side of the grave. Besides, next Wednesday is about our one off-day from shooting. I also--" Miss Gaymer fixed a cold and accusing eye on him. "Confess, miserable shuffler!" she said. "You arranged that date with the dentist on purpose, so as to escape the theatricals." "Guilty, my lord!" replied the criminal resignedly. "Well, you are let off with a caution," said Joan graciously, "but you'll have to come, all the same. You _will_, won't you, Hughie?" "Will my presence make so much difference?" said Hughie, rather boldly for him. He was inviting a heavy snub, and he knew it. Joan raised her eyes to his for a moment. "Yes," she said, rather unexpectedly, "it will." "Then I'll come," said Hughie, with vigour. "I go to the dentist at ten. I'll get that over, ask Lance to lunch, and come down by the afternoon train. What time does the show begin?" "Eight." "The train gets in at seven-fifty. I'll come straight to the Parish Hall--" "You'll get no dinner," said Joan in warning tones. "Never mind!" said Hughie heroically. "There's to be a supper afterwards, isn't there?" "Yes." "I'll last out, then. By the way, does it matter if I'm not in evening kit?" "Not a bit, if you don't mind yourself. Of course the front rows will be full of people with their glad rags on," said Joan. "But if you feel shy, come round behind the scenes. Then you'll be able to keep an eye on me--and Mr. Haliburton!" she added, with a provocative little glance. * * * * * Hughie duly departed to town, promising faithfully to come back for the theatricals, and wondering vaguely why Joan had insisted so strongly on his doing so. Joan felt rather inclined to wonder herself. She was a little perplexed by her own impulses at present. But her mind was occupied by some dim instinct of self-preservation, and she felt somehow distinctly happier when Hughie promised to come. However, there was little time for introspection. Rehearsals--"with the accent on the hearse," as Mr. Binks remarked during one protracted specimen--were dragging their slow length along to a conclusion; tickets were selling like hot cakes; and presently the great day came. Amateur theatricals are a weariness to the flesh, but viewed in the right spirit they are by no means destitute of entertainment. The drama's laws, as interpreted by the amateur, differ materially from those observed by the professional branch--the members of which, it must be remembered, have to please to live--in several important particulars; and with these the intending playgoer should at once make himself conversant. Here is a _précis_:-- (1) Remember that the performance has been got up entirely for the benefit of the performers, and that you and the rest of the audience have merely been brought in to make the thing worth while. (2) Abandon all hope of punctuality at the start or reasonability in the length of the intervals. Amateur scene-shifters and musicians do not relish having their "turns" curtailed any more than the more conspicuous members of the cast. (3) Bear in mind the fact that the play is _not_ the thing, but the players. The most thrilling Third Act is as dross compared with the excitement and suspense of watching to see whether Johnny Blank will _really_ kiss Connie Dash in the proposal scene, or whether the fact (known to at least two-thirds of the audience) that they have not been on speaking terms for the past six months will result in the usual amateur _ne plus ultra_--a sort of frustrated peck, falling short by about six inches. Again, the joy of hearing the hero falter in a stirring apostrophe to the gallery is enhanced by the knowledge that he is reading it from inside the crown of his hat, and has lost the place: while the realistic and convincing air of deference with which the butler addresses the duchess is the more readily recognized and appreciated by an audience who are well aware that he happens in private life to be that lady's husband. The entertainment to which we must now draw the reader's unwilling attention was to consist of three parts. First, the Tableaux Vivants--thirty seconds of tableaux to about ten minutes of outer darkness and orchestral selection; then a comedietta; and finally, Mrs. Jarley's Waxworks. The largest room behind the scenes had been reserved for the lady _artistes_; a draughty passage, furnished chiefly with flaring candles and soda-water syphons, being apportioned to the gentlemen. The _loge des dames_ was a bare and cheerless apartment, but tables and mirrors had been placed round the walls; and here some fifteen or twenty maidens manoeuvred with freezing politeness or unrestrained elbowings (according to their shade of social standing) for positions favourable to self-contemplation. Joan and Sylvia Tarrant foregathered in the middle of the floor. "I think we'd better dress here, dear," said Joan cheerfully, "and leave the nobility and gentry to fight for the dressing-tables. After all," she added complacently, "you and I need the least doing up of any of them." The tableaux on the whole were a success, though it was some time before the audience were permitted to inspect them. The musical director, a nervous individual with a _penchant_ for applied science, had spent the greatest part of two days in fixing up an electric bell of heroic proportions controlled from the conductor's desk, and ringing into the ear of the gentleman in charge of the lighting arrangements. A carefully type-written document (another by-product of the musician's versatility) apprised this overwrought official that one ring signified "stage-lights up," and two rings "stage-lights down." Just before the curtain rose for the first tableau the conductor pressed his button once. After an interval of about two seconds, since the stage-lights showed no inclination to go up,--as a matter of fact the controller of illuminants was tenderly nursing a hopelessly perforated eardrum,--the agitated musician, convinced that the bell had not rung, rang it again. Consequently, just as the curtain rose, every single lamp on the stage, from the footlights to the overhead battens, was hastily extinguished. Confusion reigned supreme. The conductor pressed his button frantically and continuously; the electrician lost his head completely, and began to turn off switches which controlled the lights in the dressing-rooms and the hall itself; while the faithful orchestra, suddenly bereft of both light and leadership, endeavoured with heroic but misguided enthusiasm to keep the flag flying by strident improvisations of the most varied and individual character. The audience, who had come prepared for anything, sat unmoved; but dolorous cries were heard from the dressing-rooms and vestibule. Above all rose the voice of the conductor, calling aloud for the blood of the electrician and refusing to be comforted. The first _tableau vivant_ partook of the nature of an "extra turn," and was not foreshadowed in the programme. It took place in the middle of the stage, and depicted two overheated gentlemen (one carrying a _bâton_ and the other _en déshabille_) explaining (_fortissimo_) the purport of a type-written document to a third (who caressed his right ear all the time) by the light of a single wax vesta. After this gratuitous contribution to the gaiety of the proceedings the official programme came into force, and various attractive and romantic visions were unfolded to the audience. Certainly the tableaux were well mounted. The success of A Gambler's Wife and Two Strings to her Bow was beyond question. Haliburton, too, made a striking appearance in Orchardson's Hard Hit--the famous gambling picture with the countless packs of cards strewn upon the floor--wherein the broken gamester turns with his hand on the door-handle to take a last look at the three men who have mastered him. There were minor blemishes, of course. The composure of the beauteous band who were discovered--when the conductor had been hounded back to his stool and the bemused electrician replaced by a man of more enduring fibre--contemplating their own charms in The Mirror of Venus was utterly wrecked--yea, transformed into helpless giggles--by a totally unexpected ejaculation of "Good old Gertie!" proceeding from a young man in the front row--evidently a brother--chiefly remarkable for a made-up tie and a red silk handkerchief, and directed apparently (if one may judge by consequences) at a massively-built young woman kneeling third from the end on the prompt side. During another tableau, as Prince Charles stood rigid in the embrace of Flora Macdonald, the audience sat spellbound for thirty breathless seconds, what time the unhappy prince's tartan stockings slipped inch by inch from the neighbourhood of his knees, past the boundary line where artificial brown left off and natural white began, right down to his ankles--a _contretemps_ which, as Mr. D'Arcy remarked to Mrs. Leroy, added a touch of animation to what would otherwise have been a somewhat lifeless representation. The comedietta was not an unqualified success. It was one of those characteristic products of what may be called the Back-Drawing-Room School, in which complications begin shortly after the rise of the curtain with the delivery and perusal of a certain letter, and are automatically adjusted at the end of about thirty-five minutes by the introduction of another, which explains everything, settles differences, precipitates engagements, and brings the curtain down upon all the characters standing in a row in carefully assorted couples. This somewhat trite and conventional plot was agreeably varied by the vagaries of the talented gentleman who played the footman responsible for the delivery of the letters. He brought on the second letter first, with the result that the heroine found herself exclaiming: "How foolish I have been! Gerald had been true to me through all! I must go to him at once! We can be married to-morrow!" after the drama had been in progress some three minutes,--a catastrophe only tided over by some perfectly Napoleonic "gagging" by the comic man and an entirely unrehearsed entrance (with obvious assistance from the rear) of the footman, with the right letter. Fortunately these divergences from the drama's normal course were lost upon the majority of the audience; for the actors, whether from nervousness or frank boredom, were inaudible beyond the first three rows of seats. Even here the feat of following the drift of the dialogue was rendered almost impossible by the persistent and frantic applause of two obvious "deadheads" in the front row,--poor relations of the gentleman who played the footman,--who, since they occupied free seats, evidently considered it their bounden duty to applaud every entrance and exit of their munificent relative, even when he came on with the wrong letter or was elbowed off to fetch the right one. The only member of the company who performed his duties with anything like thoroughness was the prompter, a retired major with lungs of brass. He had evidently decided, with the true instinct of a strong man, that if you want a thing well done you must do it yourself. Consequently his voice re-echoed through the hall in an unceasing monologue which, while it lacked the variety inseparable from the deliverances of a whole company, did much to keep the occupants of the back benches _au fait_ with the intricacies of the plot. The best laugh of the evening, however, was aroused by the temerity of one of the actors, who suddenly interrupted the prompter to remark mildly but distinctly: "All right, old man, I know this bit!" Then came Mrs. Jarley's Waxworks. The curtain rose upon the usual group of historical and topical characters, seated round the stage in a semicircle, most of them twitching with incipient hysteria, and all resolutely avoiding the eye of the audience. Presently Mrs. Jarley (Binks), accompanied by Master Jarley (Cherub, in a sailor suit and white socks), made her appearance, and plunged into a slightly laboured monologue, what time her offspring walked round the stage, and, by dint of dusting, oiling, and other operations, stimulated any of the figures which could possibly have been mistaken for waxworks into a fitting display of life and activity. One "Mrs. Jarley" is very like another, and the audience, who were beginning to suffer from a slight attack of theatrical indigestion, were a little slow in responding to Binks's hoary "wheezes" and unfathomable topical allusions. It was not until a bench at the back of the stage, occupied by Oliver Cromwell, General Booth, Dorando, and a Suffragette, suddenly toppled over backwards, and discharged its tenants, with four alarming thuds, into the chasm which yawned between the back of the staging and the wall, that the entertainment could be said to have received a proper fillip. After the first sensation of surprise and resentment at finding themselves reposing upon the backs of their necks in the dust, the four gentlemen affected (who, it is to be feared, had been priming themselves for this, their first appearance on any stage, in the customary manner) accepted the situation with heroic resignation. Remembering that they were waxworks, and for that if for no other reason incapable of getting up, they continued in their present posture, invisible to the naked eye except for their legs, which stuck straight up into the air. The flagging audience, imagining that the entire disaster was part of the performance, applauded uproariously, and Mrs. Jarley seized the opportunity to deliver a pithy _extempore_ lecture upon character as read from the soles of the feet. The performance concluded with a song and chorus, specially composed for the occasion, and sung by Mrs. Jarley and her exhibits in spasmodic antistrophe. Mrs. Jarley began,-- "Some ladies have one figure--one, home grown! But I have quite a lot, like Madam Tussaud. And whatever sort of one you'd like to own, Just order me to make it, and I'll do so. I can make you waxen figures that can walk, Or wave their arms, or turn and look behind 'em--" Here, in attempting to suit the action to the word, the singer tripped heavily over her own train, and was only saved from complete _bouleversement_ by the miraculously animated and suddenly outstretched arm of Henry the Eighth, who was sitting close behind. Binks continued, quite undisturbed,-- "And some of them (the female ones!) can talk, And it's wonderful how useful people find them. "So send for Mrs. Jarley on the spot! And she'll reproduce each feature that you've got. It will save a deal of trouble If you have a waxen double, Which will do your work when you would rather not!" "Now then, waxworks! All together! Give them a lead, Sousa!" Mr. Sousa (second from the end, o. p. side) obediently began to agitate his _bâton_, partially scalping Sunny Jim in the process, and the waxworks sang out, _fortissimo_, with a distinct but unevenly distributed _accelerando_ toward the end,-- "Then send for Mrs. Jarley on the spot! And she'll reproduce each feature that you've got. All your business she will see to, Black your boots, and make your tea, too, If you'll only put a penny in the slot!" The tune was good, and the chorus went with a swing. But now a difficulty arose. The second verse should have been sung by one of the late occupants of the back bench--Dorando, to be precise; and Mrs. Jarley, realizing the circumstance, was on the point of beginning it herself, when a muffled voice, proceeding apparently from the infernal regions, struck into the opening lines. Dorando, faint yet pursuing, was evidently determined to fulfil his contract, even if he had to do it on his head. For various reasons (chiefly dust and incipient apoplexy), his articulation was not all that could be desired, and the verse, which told of the ingenious device of one Tommy Sparkes, who, faced by the prospect of corporal punishment, "Sent for Mrs. Jarley on the spot, And explained that he was going to get it hot"-- whereupon that resourceful lady "Made a figure, small and ruddy, To be Tommy's understudy; And the figure got--what Tommy should have got!" was lost upon the audience. But every one took up the chorus with a will, and the third verse entered upon its career under the happiest auspices. On this occasion the lines were distributed among the figures themselves. "Now Mrs. Bumble-Doodle gave a ball"-- began Queen Elizabeth; "But twenty-seven men all wired to say"-- continued Peter Pan; "That they very much regretted, after all"-- carolled Sunny Jim; "To find they simply _couldn't_ get away!"-- bellowed a voice (Oliver Cromwell's) from under the platform. "Said Mrs. Bumble-Doodle, in despair"-- resumed Master Jarley, after a yell of laughter had subsided; "The ball will be a failure--not a doubt of it!" announced a Pierrette, with finality. "The girls won't find a single partner there"-- wailed a waxwork in a kilt (possibly Rob Roy or Harry Lauder)-- There was a break. The piano paused expectantly, and all the waxworks turned their heads (most unprofessionally) to see what had happened to Cherry Ripe, whose turn it was to sing the next verse. Apparently that lady had permitted her attention to wander, for she was scrutinising the audience, to the neglect of her cue. The sudden silence--or possibly the attentions of Master Jarley, who bustled up and assiduously oiled her mouth and ears--seemed to recall her errant wits. "Sorry!" she remarked calmly, and sang in a clear voice,-- "Oh, what a mess! How are we to get out of it?" "She sent for Mrs. Jarley on the spot!" declaimed that lady triumphantly, --"And the girls were quite content with what they got. True, a dummy cannot flirt; But he does not tear your skirt, Or say that he can dance when he can not!" "Now, then, _all_ together!" Mrs. Jarley, waxworks, and audience swung into the final chorus. Even the four inverted Casabiancas at the back assisted by swinging their legs. "She sent for Mrs. Jarley on the spot! And the girls were quite content with what they got. They were spared that youth entrancing, Who says: 'I don't much care for dancing, But I don't mind sitting out with you--eh, what?'" But Cherry Ripe was not singing. She was saying to herself,-- "Not in the hall, and not behind the scenes! I wonder where he can have got to! He _may_ have missed his train, of course; but then he could have wired, hours ago. Well, Hughie, _mon ami_, if that's the way you treat invitations--" But the curtain had fallen, and all the waxworks were scuffling off their high chairs and trooping to the dressing-rooms. Cherry Ripe, following their example, put an arm round Pierrette, and said:-- "Come along, Sylvia! Home, supper, and a dance! That's the programme now." On reaching Manors, Joan enquired of Mr. Goble,-- "Is Mr. Hughie back, John?" "'Deed, no, mem." "Any telegram, or anything?" asked Joan carelessly. "Naething whatever! He'll no be back till the morn, I doot," said Mr. Goble. Two hours later, when supper was over and the dancing at its height, Mr. Haliburton approached Joan. "Our dance, I think, Cherry Ripe?" he said. Cherry Ripe concurred. "Will you come and sit in the conservatory?" continued Haliburton. "I want to say something particular to you." Joan regarded him covertly for a moment. "All right!" she said. CHAPTER XVII IN WHICH CHARITY BEGINS AT HOME, AND HUGHIE MISSES HIS TRAIN The dentist laid aside his excavating pick with a regretful sigh, and began to fit what looked like a miniature circular saw into the end of the electric drill. Hughie, recumbent in the chair, telling himself resolutely that, appearances to the contrary, the man was doing this because it was really necessary, and not from mere voluptuousness, cautiously inserted his tongue into the hole, and calculated that the final clearance would be a three minutes' job at the shortest. "It seems hard to believe," said the dentist morosely, setting the machinery of the drill in motion with his foot, "that your teeth have not been attended to for eight years. A little wider, please!" Hughie realised that he was being called a liar as unmistakably as a man can be; but at this moment the drill came into full operation, and he merely gripped the arms of the chair. "A man," continued the dentist, removing the drill and suddenly syringing the cavity with ice-cold water,--"empty, please!--should make a point of having his teeth inspected once every six months; a woman, once every three." "A man," replied Hughie (who believed that the operations with the drill were completed), "must have his teeth inspected when he can. That is," he added rapidly,--the dentist was deliberately fitting a fresh tool into the drill,--"I have been abroad for the last eight or nine years." "Away from civilisation, perhaps," said the dentist compassionately, getting good leverage for his operating hand by using Hughie's lower jaw as a fulcrum. "Quite!" gurgled Hughie, whose head at the moment was clasped tight to his inquisitor's waistcoat buttons. "In that case," said the dentist in distinctly mollified tones, "we must not be too hard on you. Tongue down, please!" He completed his excavating and inundating operations, and, regretfully pushing away the arm of the drilling-machine, began to line his victim's mouth with some material which tasted like decomposing sponge-bags. "Your teeth have preserved their soundness in quite an unaccountable way," he continued, with the air of a just man conscientiously endeavouring to minimise a grievance. "There is one other small hole here,"--he ran a pointed instrument well into it to prove his statement,--"but beyond that there is nothing further to find fault with." He began to pound up a mysterious mixture in a small mortar, and ran on:-- "You must have been very careful in your diet." "No sweets," said Hughie laconically. "And I used very often to eat my meat right off the bone. That keeps teeth white, doesn't it?" The dentist put down the mortar with some deliberation, and glared. Anything in the shape of levity emanating from occupants of the rack jars upon a Chief Tormentor's sense of what is professionally proper. But Hughie was lying back in the chair with his mouth open and eyes shut, exhibiting no sign of humorous intention. Still, this must not occur again. The dentist looked round for a gag. He produced from somewhere a long snaky india-rubber arrangement, terminating in a hooked nozzle. This he hung over Hughie's lower [Greek: erkos odontôn], effectually stifling his utterance and reducing his share in the conversation to a sort of Morse Code of single gurgles and long-drawn sizzles suggestive of the emptying of a bath. Then, taking up his mortar, he proceeded, with the air of one who is using a giant's strength magnanimously,-- "You have visited the Antipodes, perhaps?" "Gug-gug-guggle!" proceeded from the india-rubber-lined orifice before him. "Ah! that must have been very interesting," continued the dentist. "Had you many opportunities of discussing the question of Colonial Preference with the leading men out there?" "Glug!" came the reply. "That was unfortunate. But perhaps you were able to form some idea of the general Australian attitude towards the question?" "G-r-r-r-r-r! Guggle, guggle! Ch'k, ch'k!" observed Hughie. "Personally," continued the dentist, rolling the pulverised substance in the mortar between his finger and thumb, and lighting a spirit-lamp, "I am an ardent upholder of the principles of that truly great man, the immortal Richard Cobden. Are you?" Hughie, thoughtlessly lifting the gag for a moment, replied--with fatal distinctness. It was a mad act. The dentist simply took up a humorous-looking bulb-shaped appliance, and having filled it with red-hot air at the spirit-lamp, discharged its contents, in one torrid blast, into the excavated tooth. * * * * * Twenty minutes later Hughie was ushered into the street, and stood poising himself doubtfully on the doorstep. He did not know what to do. Strictly speaking, his next engagement should have been to entertain Mr. Lance Gaymer at luncheon. But that exposer of fraudulent trustees had not replied to Hughie's written invitation. Hence Hughie's stork-like attitude outside the dentist's premises. Personally he had not the slightest desire to entertain Lance Gaymer at luncheon or any other meal. On the other hand, he had promised Joan to seek out her brother and ascertain if all was well with him. Ergo, since the Mountain declined to come to Mohammed, or even answer his letters, Mohammed must put his pride in his pocket and go to the Mountain. The prophet accordingly hailed a hansom, and was directing the cabman to drive to the Mountain's residence in Maida Vale,--a paradoxical address for a Mountain, by the way,--when a strange thing happened. Nay, it was a providential thing; for if Hughie had not resolutely summoned up his courage and told the dentist to go in and finish off the small hole in the last tooth,--a treat which that sated epicure was inclined to postpone until another occasion,--he would have hailed this hansom twenty minutes sooner and so missed his just reward. Mrs. Lance Gaymer suddenly came round a corner of the quiet square, and crossed the road directly in front of Hughie's hansom. Hughie dismounted, and greeted her. "Why," cried Mrs. Lance, "I do declare, it's Mr. Marrable!" She smiled upon Hughie in a manner so intoxicating that the cabman coughed discreetly to the horse. That intelligent animal made no comment, but turned round and looked at the cabman. "Fancy meeting you!" she continued archly. "Did your husband get a letter from me yesterday, Mrs. Gaymer, do you know?" asked Hughie. No, Mrs. Gaymer was sure he had not. The poor boy had took to his bed a week ago, with the "flu"; so Mrs. Lance had been conducting his correspondence for him, and could therefore vouch for the non-arrival of Hughie's letter. She hazarded the suggestion that possibly Hughie had written to Maida Vale. Yes. Hughie had. "That's it, then!" said Mrs. Lance. "We moved from there six weeks ago. We live in Balham now." Hughie was not sufficiently conversant with suburban caste distinctions to feel sure whether this was a step up or down in the social scale, so he merely expressed a hope that Lance was getting well again. "I want to come and see him, if I may," he said. "I asked him to come and lunch with me, but I suppose that is out of the question at present." "You're right there," said Mrs. Lance in distinctly guarded tones. "He ain't what you'd call spry. He's not seeing anybody." "I shouldn't stay long," urged Hughie. "Is it business?" enquired Mrs. Gaymer with a touch of hostility. "Yes," said Hughie. Mrs. Gaymer surveyed him curiously. To most people she would have said flatly and untruthfully that her husband was unfit to see any one, for she had her own reasons for discouraging visitors to Balham just now. But she had always cherished a weakness for Hugh Marrable. He treated her exactly as he treated all women--with a scrupulous courtesy which, while it slightly bored frivolous damsels of his acquaintance, was appreciated at its true value by a lady whose social status was more than a little equivocal. It is only when one has secret doubts about being a real lady that one appreciates being treated as such. "Could you come to-morrow?" she said at last. "I have to get back to Manors to-night," said Hughie. "Might I come out to Balham this afternoon? Or, better still, will you come and lunch with me somewhere now, and we can drive out there afterwards? Or must you get back to the invalid?" he added, with just a suspicion of hopefulness. Mrs. Lance, however, expressed her willingness to come and lunch, but insisted on being allowed to precede Hughie to Balham by at least one hour. The house was _that_ untidy! she explained. Accordingly Hughie, having decided in his mind upon an establishment where he would not be likely to encounter any of his own friends, and which would yet conform with Mrs. Gaymer's notions of what was sufficiently "classy," conveyed his fair charge thither in a hansom; and presently found himself engaged in that traditional _ne plus ultra_ of dissipation--the entertainment of another man's wife to a meal in a public restaurant. Mrs. Lance, after she desisted from her efforts to impress upon her host the fact that she was quite accustomed to this sort of thing, was amusing enough. She addressed the waiter--an inarticulate Teuton--as "Johnny," and made a point of saying a few words to the manager when he passed their table. She smoked a cigarette after lunch, and was good enough to commend Hughie's taste in champagne--a brand which he had hazily recognised in the wine-list as being the sweetest and stickiest beverage ever distilled from gooseberries. (It was the sort of champagne which goes well with chocolate creams: "Chorus Girls' Entire," he remembered they used to call it.) At any rate it met with Mrs. Lance's undivided approval, and Hughie realised for the first time that a University education can after all be useful to one in after-life. Suddenly Mrs. Lance enquired:-- "Do you know any theatrical managers, my dear boy?" Yes, Hughie had come across one or two. "Why?" "Well," said Mrs. Lance expansively, "you've always treated me like flesh and blood, which is more than what some of your relations have done; so I'll tell you. After all, I've got me feelings, same as--" "What about the theatrical managers?" inquired Hughie tactfully. "Oh, yes. Do you think you could ask one of 'em to give me a shop? The chorus would do. I was in it before," said Mrs. Gaymer candidly. "Why do you want to go back there?" "I--I've got a fancy for it--that's all," replied Mrs. Gaymer in a thoroughly unconvincing tone. Hughie wondered if Lance and his wife were beginning to tire of one another. "I do know one or two men," he said, "who are interested in some of the musical-comedy syndicates. Shall I try them?" "Will you reelly? You'll be a duck if you do," said Mrs. Gaymer. After the deliverance of this unsolicited testimonial Hughie's guest observed that she must be getting home, and Hughie, having put her into a cab and paid the driver, retired to his club, clogged with viscous champagne and feeling excessively unwell, to wait until it should be time for him to follow her. To look at the double row of eligible residences which composed Talbot Street, Balham, you would hardly have suspected that any of them would support what the Inland Revenue Schedule calls a "male servant." And yet, when Hughie rang the bell of Number Nineteen, the door was opened by such an appanage of prosperity. He was an elderly gentleman with a rheumy but humorous eye, and a nose which suggested the earlier stages of elephantiasis. He wore a dress-coat of distinctly fashionable cut (which, needless to say, did not fit him) and the regulation white shirt and collar, the latter quite two sizes too small; but his boots and trousers apparently belonged to a totally different class of society. "Name of Marrable?" he enquired, smiling benevolently upon Hughie. "Yes." "Step in. We've been expectin' of you for 'alf-an-hour. Don't wipe your boots on that mat. It's worth one-and-eight." After this somewhat remarkable confidence, the Gaymers' major-domo conducted the visitor upstairs. Here he threw open a door with truly theatrical grandeur, and announced,-- "'Ere's the young toff for you, my de--" "Thank you, James: that will do," interposed Mrs. Lance Gaymer, with a very fair imitation of the manner of a musical-comedy duchess. "How do you do, Mr. Marrable?" She was attired in the faded glories of a tea-gown, of a material more pretentious than durable; and in the half-light of the drawing-room--the blinds were partially lowered--looked extremely handsome in a tawdry way. She apologised for her retainer's familiarity. Mr. Marrable would doubtless know what old servants was. Still, James must certainly be spoke to about it. "You'll drink a cup of tea with me," she continued, "and then we'll pop up and see Lance, pore boy! Ring the bell, please." Hughie did so, and a rather laborious quarter-of-an-hour followed. He ploughed his way through a morass of unlikely topics, while Mrs. Lance, who was obviously perturbed at the non-appearance of tea, replied in _distrait_ monosyllables. Hughie was conscious about half-way through the conversation of a faint crash in the lower regions, and wondered dimly whether calamity had overtaken the afternoon meal. If so, he had no doubt as to which of the domestic staff of Number Nineteen was responsible. At last the door opened, and the inestimable James appeared. "You done it this time!" he remarked severely. "The 'andle of that tea-pot 'as came right away in me 'and. It must have been that way this long while. You won't get no tea now. Wot's more, that tea-pot will 'ave to come off the invent--" By this time Mrs. Lance Gaymer, with dumb but frenzied signallings, was herding her censorious hireling through the door, and his concluding remarks were lost in the passage outside. Presently she returned, smiling bravely. Hughie experienced a sudden pang of pity and admiration. Lance's wife was the right sort of girl after all. "I _reelly_ must apologise--" she began. But Hughie interrupted her. He rose, and looked her frankly in the face. "Mrs. Gaymer," he said, "please don't bother about keeping up appearances with me. I never cared a hang about them, and never shall. Tell me, what are you doing with a bailiff in the house?" Mrs. Lance broke down and cried,--more from relief than anything else,--and presently Hughie, much to his surprise, found himself sitting beside her, patting her large but shapely hand, and uttering words of comfort and encouragement into her ear. * * * * * Half an hour later he concluded an interview with Mr. Albert Mould, broker's man,--late James, the butler,--in the dingy dining-room downstairs. The latter gentleman, the more gorgeous items of his apparel now replaced by garments of equal social standing with his boots and trousers, was laboriously writing a receipt with Hughie's fountain-pen, following the movements of the nib with the end of a protruding tongue. Presently he finished. "There you are, sir," he said, breathing heavily upon the paper to dry the ink. "Twenty-seven, fifteen, eight--and thank you! What beats me," he added reflectively, "is 'ow you spotted me. What was it give me away? Seems to me I _looked_ all right. I was wearin' the young feller's evenin' coat and one of 'is shirts, and I thought I was lookin' a treat all the time. Was it me trousis?" To avoid wounding his guest's feelings, Hughie agreed that it _was_ his trousis. "It's a queer trade, this of yours," he said. "You got to earn a livin' some'ow," said Mr. Mould apologetically, "same as any other yewman bean. It's not a bad job, as jobs go. They carry on a lot, o' course, when you're first put in, and usually the wife cries; but they soon finds out as you won't do 'em no 'arm. You makes your inventory and settles down in the kitching, with a pint o' somethink in your 'and an' a pipe in your face, and in less than 'alf a tick you're one o' the family, a'most. Why, I've 'elped wash the baby afore now." "Don't you ever get thrown out?" asked Hughie. "I _'ave_ bin," replied Mr. Mould, in a tone which gently reproved the tactlessness of the question, "but not often. After all, I only come _in_ agin; and it's a matter of seven days for assault, p'raps, on top o' the distraint. Most of 'em 'as the sense to remember that, so they humours me, as it were. They speak me fair, and give me jobs to do about the house. Still, it were a bit of a surprise when 'er ladyship comes 'ome to-day about two o'clock and asks me would 'arf-a-crown be any good to me, and, if so, would I mind playin' at bein' a butler for a hour or two. I felt a fool, like, dressed up that way, but I always was one to oblige a bit o' skirt. Been weak with women," he added autobiographically, "from a boy. This fer me?" as Hughie opened the street-door and sped the parting guest in a particularly acceptable manner. "Thank you, Captain! _Good_ day!" He shuffled down the steps and along the street, obviously on his way to liquidate Hughie's half-crown, and the donor of that gratuity returned to the dining-room, where he took Mr. Mould's laboriously indited receipt from the table. Then he went upstairs, feeling desperately sorry for Mr. and Mrs. Lance. He had done what he could for them, in his eminently practical fashion, and set them on their feet again; but--for how long? Debts! Millstones! Poor things! On the landing above he encountered Mrs. Gaymer, wide-eyed and incredulous. "Lance would like to see you now," she said. "In here!" She opened a door. "And--and--I say," she added, half in a whisper, "surely you don't mean to say he's been and _gawn_!" For answer Hughie awkwardly handed her the stamped receipt, and passed into the bedroom. His interview with Lance lasted an hour and a half. Much passed between them during that period, and by the time Hughie rose and said he must be going, each man had entirely revised his opinion of the other. Most of us have the right stuff concealed in us somewhere, however heavily it may be overlaid by folly or vanity or desire to make a show. There are few men who do not improve on acquaintance, once you get right through the veneer. Poor Lance, struggling in deep waters, suddenly discovered in the dour and undemonstrative Hughie a cheerful helper and--most precious of all to a proud nature--an entirely uncritical confidant. Hughie on his part discovered what he had rather doubted before, namely, that Lance was a man. Moreover, he presently laid bare a truly human and rather sad tale of genuine ability and secret ambition, heavily handicapped by youthful cocksureness and want of ballast. They discussed many things in that dingy bedroom: Lance's past; Uncle Jimmy's little allowance, mortgaged many years in advance; the creditors to whom, together with the law of the land, he was indebted for the presence beneath his roof of the versatile Mr. Mould; his future; the journalistic work which was promised him as soon as he should be fit again; Mrs. Lance; and also Mr. Haliburton. Joan's name was barely mentioned. Lance exhibited a newborn delicacy in the matter. His officious solicitude on his sister's behalf was dead; he knew now that no woman need ever regret having trusted Hugh Marrable; and he was content to leave it at that. "Well, I must be moving," said Hughie at last. "Buck up, and get fit! It's good to hear that there's work waiting for you when you get about again. Grand tonic, that! So long!" He shook Lance's hand, and the two parted undemonstratively. Lance made no set speech: he appreciated Hughie's desire that there should be no returning of thanks or contrite expressions of gratitude. All he said was:-- "Hughie, you are a sportsman!" Then he settled down on his pillow with a happy sigh. He had paid Hughie the highest compliment it was in his power to bestow--and that costs an Englishman an effort. So they parted. But Mrs. Lance did not let Hughie off so easily. As she accompanied him downstairs to open the door for him, she suddenly seized his hand and kissed it. Tears were running down her cheeks. Hughie grew red. "I say, Mrs. Lance," he said in clumsy expostulation, "it's all right, you know! He'll soon be quite well again." "Let me cry," said Mrs. Lance comfortably. "It does me good." They stood together in the obscurity of the shabby little hall, and Hughie, surveying the flamboyant but homely figure before him, wondered what the future might hold in store for this little household. It all depended, of course, on-- "Mrs. Lance," he said suddenly, "tell me--do you--love him?" "I do!" replied Mrs. Lance, in a voice which for the moment relegated her patchouli and dyed eyebrows to nothingness. "And does he--love you?" "He _does_--thank God!" "You are both all right, then," said Hughie, nodding a wise head. "Nothing matters much--except that!" "That's true," said Mrs. Gaymer. "But--I wonder how _you_ knew!" she added curiously. "Good-bye!" said Hughie. * * * * * As Hughie stood in the darkening street a church clock began to chime. He looked at his watch. It was six o'clock, and he had promised faithfully to be at Joey's entertainment at eight! He had good reason for his absence, it is true, but a reason is not always accepted as an excuse. "I've fairly torn it, this time!" he reflected morosely. He was right. Early next morning he arrived at the village station by the newspaper train, and made his way on foot to Manors. A sleepy housemaid was sweeping out the hall, which was strewn with _confetti_,--some cotillion figures had been included in last night's festivities,--and as Hughie made his way to his dressing-room, intent upon a bath and shave before breakfast, he reflected not without satisfaction that, despite Joey's prospective fulminations, he had escaped something by missing his train. On his dressing-table he found a note, addressed to him in Joan's handwriting. It said:-- DEAR HUGHIE,--To-night at the dance Mr. Haliburton asked me to marry him. Being a dutiful ward above all things, I have referred him to you. He is coming to see you to-morrow afternoon--that is, if you are back. I hope you had a good time in town. J. CHAPTER XVIII _EX MACHINA_ Miss Joan Gaymer, pleasantly fatigued after last night's dissipation, reclined in a canvas chair on the lawn at Manors. She had just finished reading a letter which had arrived by the afternoon post. It was from her brother Lance, and conveyed, probably a good deal more fully than Hughie himself would have done, the reasons for Hughie's absence on the previous evening. Joan's brow was puckered thoughtfully, and she surveyed the tips of her small shoes, which were cocked at an unladylike altitude upon a stool in front of her, with a profundity of maiden meditation which was perhaps explained by the fact that she had received a proposal of marriage the evening before, and was expecting the proposer to come and second his own motion at any moment. To her entered suddenly Jno. Alex. Goble. "Yon felly!" he intimated austerely. "Mr. Haliburton, do you mean, John?" inquired Miss Gaymer, hastily letting down her feet. "Aye. Wull I loose him in here?" "Yes, please. No--I mean--" But Cupid's messenger was gone. Presently he returned, and, with the air of one introducing the Coroner to the foreman of the jury, announced Mr. Haliburton. That ardent suitor advanced gallantly across the lawn, and taking Joan's hand with an air of respectful rapture, endeavoured to draw its owner into the shade of the copper beech. Joan forestalled his intentions by saying at once,-- "Come along into the library, Mr. Haliburton, and we'll see what my guardian has to say to you." Mr. Haliburton hinted that there was no hurry, and made a pointed reference to Amaryllis and the shade; but his unsentimental nymph marched him briskly across the lawn, round the corner of the house, and in at the front door. They crossed the cool, dark hall, and Joan tapped at the oaken door of the library. "Come in," said a voice. The lovers entered. "I have brought Mr. Haliburton to see you, Hughie," remarked Miss Gaymer, much as one might announce the arrival of a person to inspect the gas meter. Mr. Haliburton, who was not the man to show embarrassment, whether he felt it or not, advanced easily into the room. Joan surveyed his straight back and square shoulders as he passed her, and the corners of her mouth twitched, ever so little. Then she looked at Hughie. It was her first meeting with him since his return home that morning. He had answered her note by another, saying that he would be in the library at five o'clock. There was no twitching about his mouth. It was closed like a steel trap; and he stood with his back to the wood-fire which glowed in the grate--it was getting on in September, and cold out of the sun--with absolute stolidity. Joan saw at a glance that, whatever the difficulties of the position, her guardian's line of action was now staked out and his mind made up--one way or the other. She dropped into an arm-chair. "Now, you two," she remarked encouragingly, "get to work! I want to hear what each of you has got to say about my future. It will be quite exciting--like going to a palmist!" The two men turned and regarded her in unfeigned surprise. They had not expected this. Haliburton began swiftly to calculate whether Joan's presence would be a help to him or not. But Hughie said at once:-- "You must leave us alone, Joan, please! I can't possibly allow you to remain." Joan lay back in her chair and smiled up at him, frankly mutinous. She had never yet failed, when she so desired, to "manage" a man. Hughie was regarding her stonily; but two minutes, she calculated, would make him sufficiently pliable. She was wrong. At the end of this period Hughie was still rigidly waiting for her to leave the room. Joan, a little surprised at his obstinacy, remarked:-- "If you are going to object to--to Mr. Haliburton's suggestions, Hughie, I think I ought to hear what the objections are." "Before you go," said Hughie in even tones, "I will tell you one thing--and that should be sufficient. It is this. There is not the slightest prospect of this--this engagement coming off. My reasons for saying so I am prepared to give to Mr. Haliburton, and if he thinks proper he can communicate them to you afterwards. But I don't think he will. Now will you leave us, please?" Joan was genuinely astonished. But she controlled herself. She was determined to see the matter out now. All the woman in her--and she was all woman--answered to the challenge contained in Hughie's dictatorial attitude. Besides, she was horribly curious. She heaved a sad little sigh, and made certain shameless play with her eyes which she knew stirred poor Hughie to the point of desperation, and surveyed the result through drooping lashes with some satisfaction. Hughie's mouth was fast shut, and he was breathing through his nose; and Joan could see a little pulse beating in his right temple. (Both of them, for the moment, had forgotten the ardent suitor by the window.) She would win through in a moment now. But alas! she had forgotten a masculine weapon against which all the Votes for Women in the world will avail nothing, when it comes to a pinch. Hughie suddenly relaxed his attitude, and strode across to the door, which he held open for her. "At _once_, please!" he said in a voice which Joan had never heard before, though many men had. Without quite knowing why, Miss Gaymer rose meekly from her chair and walked out of the room. The door closed behind her. * * * * * When Joan found herself on the lawn again she gasped a little. "Ooh!" she said breathlessly. "I--I feel just as if I'd been hit in the face by a big wave! This game is not turning out quite as you expected, Joey, my child: the man Hughie is one up! Still, I'll take it out of him another time. But--heavens!"--She was staring, like Red Riding-Hood on a historic occasion, at a recumbent figure in her canvas chair beneath the copper beech--"Who on _earth_ is that in my chair? It's--it's--oh! Joey Gaymer, you've got hysterics! It's--it's--Uncle Jimmy! _Uncle Jimmy!... My Uncle--Jimmy!_" Next moment she was reposing comfortably, a distracted bundle of tears and laughter, in the arms of Jimmy Marrable. "A bit sudden--eh, young lady?" enquired that gentleman at last. "I ought to have written, I suppose. But I quite forgot you would all think I was dead. Never mind--I'm not!" He blew his nose resonantly to substantiate his statement. Joan, satisfied at last that he was real, and greatly relieved to find that she was not suffering from hysterical delusions arising from Hughie's brutal treatment of her, enquired severely of the truant where he had been for the last five years. Jimmy Marrable told her. It was a long story, and the shadow of the copper beech had perceptibly lengthened by the time the narrator had embarked at Zanzibar for the port of Leith. They had the garden to themselves, for the Leroys were out. "I don't want to hear any more adventures, because I'm simply bursting with questions," said Miss Gaymer frankly. "First of all, why did you go away? You rushed off in such a hurry that you had no time to explain. I was barely eighteen then." "It was the old failing--the Marrable wandering tendency," replied her uncle. "I had kept it at bay quite easily for close on fifteen years, but it came back very hard and suddenly about that time." "Why?" "Partly, I think, because the only thing that had kept me at home all those years seemed to be slipping away from me." "I _wasn't_!" declared Miss Gaymer stoutly. Then she reflected. "Do you mean--all those silly boys? Was it them?" "It was," said Jimmy Marrable. "They not only put my nose out of joint but they bored me to tears." "You were always worth the whole lot of them put together, dear," said Miss Gaymer affectionately. "I knew that," replied Jimmy Marrable modestly, "but I wasn't quite sure if you did. I saw that for the next two or three years you would be healthily and innocently employed in making fools of young men, and so could well afford to do without your old wreck of an uncle. The serious part would not come until you grew up to be of a marriageable age. So I decided in the meanwhile to treat myself to just one last potter round the globe, and then, in a couple of years or so, come home and assume the onerous duties of chucker-out." "Then why did you stay away so long?" demanded Miss Gaymer. "Because I heard Hughie had come home," said Jimmy Marrable simply. Joan started guiltily, and her hand, which was resting in one of the old gentleman's, relaxed its hold for a moment. Jimmy Marrable noticed nothing, and proceeded:-- "I got news of him from a man in Cape Town. His name was Allerton. He seemed a bit of a rolling stone, but had lately married the proprietress of a little public-house, Wynberg way, and was living in great contentment and affluence. His wife regarded his capture as the crowning achievement of her life, and altogether they were a most devoted couple. On hearing that my name was Marrable, he said he was sure I must be Hughie's uncle, as Hughie had told him I was the only relation he had. He was a gentleman, of sorts, and seemed to regard friend Hughie as a kind of cross between Providence and the Rock of Gibraltar. They had been through some rather tough times together--on board the Orinoco. I expect Hughie has often told you all about that?" Joan shook her head. "No? Well, it was like him not to. However, Allerton told me for a fact that Hughie was now home for good; so I knew then that my plans had worked out right after all, and that I need not hurry back. My little girl was safe." He sighed contentedly, and patted Joan's hand. "I'm a happy old fossil, Joey," he said. "I've always schemed in a clumsy way to bring this about, and now it has happened. 'There's a divinity that shapes our ends,' you know. And now, I suppose, you are mistress of this old house. How long have you been married?" "We're not," said Joan in a very small voice. "Not what?" "Married." She held up a ringless hand in corroboration. Jimmy Marrable inspected it. "Where's your engagement ring?" he demanded. Joan felt that there was a bad time coming--especially for Uncle Jimmy. "We--we're not engaged," she faltered. Then she continued swiftly, for there was a look on Jimmy Marrable's brown and wrinkled face that frightened her, and she wanted to get explanations over: "Hughie and I didn't quite care for one another--in that way. No, I'm a liar. _I_ didn't care for Hughie in that way." "He asked you, then?" "Yes." "And you--wouldn't--?" Joan nodded. She suddenly felt unreasonably mean and despicable. She had declined to marry Hughie in all good faith, as she had a perfect right to do, for the very sufficient reason that she did not like him--or his way of putting things--well enough; and she had felt no particular compunction at the time in dealing the blow. But none of these reasons seemed any excuse for hurting Uncle Jimmy. Since then, too, her feelings towards Hughie himself had altered to an extent which she was just beginning to realise. Of late she had found herself taking a quite peculiar interest in Hughie's movements. Why, she hardly knew. He paid her few attentions; he was habitually uncompromising in what he considered the execution of his duty; and he had made a shocking mess of her affairs. But--he was in trouble; people were down on him; and he had been her friend ever since she could remember. Now Joan Gaymer, if she was nothing else, was loyal; and loyalty in a woman rather thrives on adversity than otherwise. And a woman's loyalty to a man who is her friend, if you endeavour to overstrain it or drive it into a corner, in nine cases out of ten will protect itself, Proteus-like, by turning into something entirely different, a something which is quite impervious to outward attack and can only be strained to breaking-point by one person--the man himself; and not always then, as countless undeserving husbands know. Joan's loyalty to Hughie was in some such process of transition. She thought about him a good deal, but she had never once faced the question of her ultimate relations with him. The modern maiden is not given to candid analysis of her own feelings towards members of the opposite sex,--she considers these exercises "Early Victorian," or "sentimental," or "effeminate"; and consequently Joan had never frankly asked herself what she really thought about Hughie Marrable. At times, say when she heard people speak ill of her deputy-guardian behind his back, she had been conscious that she was hot and angry; at others, when something occurred to bring home to her with special force the tribulations that Hughie was enduring, she had been conscious of a large and dim determination to "make it up to him," in some manner as yet undefined and at some time as yet unspecified. In short, like many a daughter of Eve before her, she had not known her own mind. She knew it now. Her heart smote her. Suddenly Jimmy Marrable's voice broke in with the rather unexpected but not altogether unreasonable question:-- "Then if you aren't either engaged or married to Hughie, may I ask what the deuce you are doing in his house?" "It isn't his house," replied Joan, recalling her wandering attention to the rather irascible figure by her side. "He has let it to the Leroys, and he and I are both staying here as guests just now." "What on earth did the boy want to let the place for? Why couldn't you and the Leroys come and stay here as _his_ guests?" "I think," said Miss Gaymer delicately, "that Hughie is--rather hard up." "Hard up? Stuff! He has eight hundred a year, and enough coming in from the estate to make it pay its own way without any expense to him. How much more does he want?" "I don't think Hughie is a very good business man," said Joan. She made the remark in sincere defence of Hughie, just as a mother might say, "Ah, but he always _had_ a weak chest!" when her offspring comes in last in the half-mile handicap. But Jimmy Marrable, being a man, took the suggestion as a reproach. "Nonsense!" he said testily. "Hughie has as hard a head as any man I know. What do you mean by running him down? Have you any complaint to make of the way he has managed _your_ affairs--eh?" "None whatever," said Joan promptly. "But--bless my soul!" cried Jimmy Marrable; "I forgot! You haven't _got_--" He paused, and appeared to be working out some abstruse problem in his head. "Look here, Joey," he continued presently, "if you aren't married to Hughie, what are you living on?" Joan stared at him in astonishment. "On the money you left behind for me," she said. "What else?" The old gentleman regarded her intently for a moment, and then said:-- "Of course: I forgot. I suppose Hughie pays it to you quarterly." "Yes--into my bank account," replied Miss Gaymer with a touch of pride. "How much?" "Is it _quite_ fair to tell?" inquired Joan, instinctively protecting her fraudulent trustee. "Of course. It was my money in the first instance. Go on--how much?" "Four hundred a year," said Joan. "It was three hundred at first. Hughie told me you hadn't left as much as he expected, and that I should have to be careful. But Ursula Harbord--she is the girl I share a flat with: she is frightfully clever about money and business--told me to ask Hughie what interest I was getting on my capital, or something. I found out for her--four per cent, I think it was--and she said it wasn't _nearly_ enough. There were things called preference shares, or something, that pay ten or twelve per cent; and Hughie must sell out at once, and buy these instead. What's the matter?" Jimmy Marrable had suddenly choked. "Nothing! Nothing!" he said, in some confusion. "A smart girl, this friend of yours! Takes a large size in boots and gloves, I should say, and acts as honorary treasurer to various charitable organisations! Twelve per cent! Aha!" He slapped himself feebly. "And what did Master Hughie say to _that_?" "I could see he didn't half like it," continued Joan; "but Ursula had declared that if I wouldn't allow her to speak to him, she would consult some responsible person; as she was _sure_ Hughie was mismanaging things disgracefully. So to keep her quiet I let her. I think Hughie saw there was something in what she said, though; because he immediately agreed to give me four hundred a year in future instead of three. _Is_ it enough, Uncle Jimmy, or has poor Hughie really made a mess of things, as people say? _Say_ it's enough, Uncle Jimmy! I _know_ he did his best, and I'd rather go without--" "Enough?" Jimmy Marrable turned and scrutinised his ward closely, as if appraising her exact value. Certainly she was very lovely. He whistled softly, and nodded his head in an enigmatical manner. "I'd have done it myself," he murmured darkly. "Enough?" he repeated aloud. "My little girl, do you know how much capital an income of four hundred a year represents?" Joan shook her head. Her experience of finance was limited to signing a cheque in the proper corner. "Well, about ten thousand pounds." "Hoo!" said Miss Gaymer, pleasantly fluttered. "Have I got all that?" "No." "Oh! How much, then?" Jimmy Marrable told her. CHAPTER XIX IN WHICH LOVE FLIES OUT OF THE WINDOW Hughie closed the door on Joan, and breathed a gentle sigh of relief. He was spoiling for a fight, and he had just got his hands free, so to speak. Brief but perfect satisfaction lay before him. He resumed his position in front of the fire. Mr. Haliburton sat on an oak table and swung his legs. "Now, Marrable--" began the latter briskly. Hughie interrupted him. "Mr. Haliburton," he said, "you heard my intimation to Miss Gaymer just now?" "I did," said Mr. Haliburton. "Well, I should like to repeat it to you. The marriage which has been arranged--by you--will not take place. That's all." "That," replied Mr. Haliburton easily, "is a matter for Joan and myself--" "We will refer to my ward as Miss Gaymer for the rest of this interview," said Hughie stiffly. "Certainly. To resume. You see, Marrable, although you were appointed Miss Gaymer's guardian by the eccentric old gentleman who bears the same name as yourself, your authority does not last for ever. I understand that the lady will shortly become her own mistress." "She will." "In which case she will have the control of her own property." "That is so." "Well,"--Mr. Haliburton paused, and flicked the ash off his cigarette,--"don't you think that this display of authority on your part, considering that it is subject to a time-limit, is rather ridiculous?" "I have only one observation to make on that point," said Hughie coolly, "and that is, that I have made no display of authority of any kind." "My dear sir," said Mr. Haliburton, raising his histrionic eyebrows, "aren't you forbidding the banns?" "I have never forbidden anything. I have merely stated that the match will not come off." "Don't let us quibble, man!" said Haliburton impatiently. He got off the table. "Look here, Marrable, there is no need for you and me to be mealy-mouthed in this matter. Let's be frank. You want this girl: so do I. She can't marry both of us, so she must pick one. She has picked me: I have her word for it. She says she cares for me more than any man in the world, and would tramp the roads with me. And I with her! Why, man--" As he uttered these noble words Mr. Haliburton struck an attitude which many young women in the front row of the pit would have considered highly dramatic, but which merely struck the prejudiced and unsympathetic male before him as theatrical in the extreme. "Drop it!" said Hughie. "You make me quite sick." He spoke the truth. He did not know whether Haliburton's rhapsody rested on any assured foundation or not. But in any case Joan's fresh and innocent youth was a very sacred thing, and even the suggestion that she could have anything in common with this glorified super made him feel physically unwell. Mr. Haliburton broke off, and smiled. "Marrable," he said, almost genially, "we understand each other! I see you want plain English. I said just now that we were both fond of the girl. So we are. But I fancy we are both a bit fonder of her little bit of stuff--eh? Now, you have been handling the dibs for a matter of eighteen months, I understand. You have feathered your nest pretty comfortably, from all I hear. Don't be a dog in the manger! Let your friends into a good thing too!" The mask was off with a vengeance. Hughie swallowed something and thanked God that, if his wanderings among mankind had taught him nothing else, they had taught him to hold himself in till the time came. He said:-- "Haliburton, I have told you several times that I do not forbid this engagement; because, as you have very acutely pointed out, my _veto_ does not last for ever; but the match is not coming off, for all that. Before you go I will explain what I mean. I don't want to, because the consequences may be serious, both for Miss Gaymer and myself; but it will show you how absolutely determined I am to make a clean sweep of you. "I should like to say in the first place that I should never have stood between Miss Gaymer and _any_ man, so long as I honestly thought he could make her happy--not even a man whom I personally would regard as an ass or an outsider. But there are limits to everything, and you strike me as being the limit in this case. I have been making inquiries about you, and I now know your antecedents fairly well. You apparently are an actor of sorts, though all the actors of my acquaintance look distinctly unwell when your name is mentioned. However, whatever you are, I should be sorry to see any woman in whom I take an interest compelled to spend even half an hour in your company. In fact, if you had not originally come down here as a friend of Lance Gaymer's,--over whom, by the way, I find you once had some hold,--I should have asked Captain Leroy's permission to kick you out of the place some time ago!" Mr. Haliburton looked a little uncomfortable. He held a good hand, but Hughie was obviously not bluffing. He had an uneasy feeling that there must be an unsuspected card out somewhere. "To come to the main point," continued Hughie, "I want this engagement to be declared off by _you_, not by me. What is your price?" Mr. Haliburton breathed again. Bribery? Was that all? He replied briskly:-- "How much have you got?" "Is a thousand pounds any use?" asked Hughie. "Twenty might be," replied the lover. "My limit," said Hughie, who was not a man to haggle about what Mr. Mantalini once described as "demnition coppers," "is five thousand pounds." "Talk sense!" said Mr. Haliburton briefly. "The offer," continued Hughie steadily, "is open for five minutes. If you accept it I will write you a cheque now, and you will sit down and write a letter formally breaking off, on your own initiative, any engagement or understanding you may have entered into with Miss Gaymer, and undertaking never to come near her again; and I will see she gets it. If not--well, you'll be sorry, for you'll never make such a good bargain by any other means." Haliburton eyed him curiously. "Is this your own money you are offering me?" he said. "It is," said Hughie, looking at his watch. "Three minutes left." "Won't it make rather a hole in your capital account?" "It will. In fact, hole won't be the word for it! But it will be worth it." Intelligence dawned upon Mr. Haliburton. "I see," he said slowly. "You expect to recoup yourself later, when--when the marriage settlements are drawn up, eh? Or perhaps," he added sarcastically, "eighteen months of careful trusteeship have put you in a position to afford this extravagance!" Hughie was surprised at his own self-control. Only the little pulse which Joan had noticed beat assiduously in his right temple. "Fifteen seconds!" he said. "Do you take this offer, Mr. Haliburton?" "No." "Right!" Hughie put his watch back into his pocket and regarded the misguided blackmailer before him rather in the manner of a benevolent policeman standing over a small boy with a cigarette. "Your last few remarks," he said, "have been so offensive that I know you would not have had the pluck to make them unless you thought you had me absolutely under your thumb. But I may as well proceed to my final move, and terminate this interview. I am very averse to taking this particular step, because its results may be awkward, as I said, for Miss Gaymer. That is why I offered you practically all the available money I have to call the deal off. But I see I can't help myself. Now, Haliburton,--by the way, I forgot to mention that your real name is Spratt: you seem to have become a big fish since you took to fortune-hunting,--I am going to make you break off your engagement. I am going to pay you a high compliment. I am going to give you a piece of information, known only to myself and Miss Gaymer's banker, for which you will ultimately be very grateful, and the knowledge of which will cause you, when you get outside (which will be very soon now), to kick yourself for a blamed fool because you did not accept my first offer." Mr. Haliburton-Spratt shuffled his feet a trifle uneasily, and Hughie continued:-- "You seem to be suffering from an aggravated attack of the prevailing impression that Miss Gaymer is an heiress. Her fortune has been variously estimated by tea-table experts at anything from forty to a hundred thousand pounds. I will now tell you what it really is. Get off the table: I want to open that dispatch-box." Mr. Haliburton, conscious of a slight sinking sensation just below the second button of his waistcoat, moved as requested, and Hughie took out of the box a bank-book and a bulky letter. "When I came home from abroad," he said, "I found this letter awaiting me. It is from my uncle. The following passage will interest you: '... I have realised practically all my personal estate, and have placed the cash to your credit on Joey's behalf'--Joey is the name," he explained punctiliously, "by which Miss Gaymer is known to her intimate friends--'at the Law Courts Branch of the Home Counties Bank.... The rest of my property is set down and duly disposed of in my will, and cannot be touched until my death is authenticated.'" "I hope there was a respectable sum in the bank," said Mr. Haliburton, his spirits rising again. Hughie opened the pass-book. "When I went to the bank in question," he said, "and asked to be allowed to see the amount of my balance, I was handed this pass-book. From it you will gather the exact value of Miss Gaymer's fortune at the moment when I took over the management of her affairs." He handed the book to Mr. Haliburton. That devout lover glanced eagerly at the sum indicated on the balance-line--and turned a delicate green. "You see?" said Hughie calmly, taking the book back. "One hundred pounds sterling! A poor exchange for five thousand, Mr. Haliburton!" "Where is the money?" said Haliburton thickly. "That I can't tell you. But you will see by the book and this duly endorsed cheque,"--he picked a pink slip out of the dispatch-box,--"that the sum of thirty-nine thousand, nine hundred pounds--the amount he had put in a few days before, less one hundred--was drawn out of the bank, in a lump, by my uncle himself the day before he sailed. Why he did it, I can't imagine. He must have changed his plans suddenly. All I know is that he has put me in a very tight place as a trustee, and you in a much tighter one as a suitor, Mr. Haliburton!" He took the cheque from the hands of the demoralized Haliburton, and closed the dispatch-box. There was a long silence. At length Hughie said:-- "I presume I may take it that you now desire to withdraw from this engagement?" "You may!" said Mr. Haliburton emphatically. He was too deeply chagrined to play his part any longer. Hughie surveyed him critically. "You're a direct rascal, Spratt," he said; "you are no more hypocritical than you need be. But you're a rascal for all that. Well, I won't keep you. Good afternoon!" But Mr. Haliburton's quick-moving brain had been taking in the altered situation, with its strong and weak points so far as he himself was concerned. He had not lived by his wits twenty years for nothing. "I suppose," he observed, reseating himself on the corner of the writing-table, "it would be indiscreet to inquire from what source the young lady, with a capital of one hundred pounds sterling, is at present deriving an income of apparently three or four hundred a year?" "Not only indiscreet, but positively unhealthy," said Hughie, turning a dusky red. His fingers were curling and uncurling. Mr. Haliburton directed upon him what can only be described as a depredatory eye. "Don't you think, Mr. Marrable," he said, "that it would be a good thing to--_square_ me? I could do with that five thousand. This is a censorious world, you know; and scandalous little yarns are apt to get about when a young lady accepts--_Hrrrumph!_" It was the last straw. Hughie's iron restraint snapped at last. Both his and Mr. Haliburton's impressions of the next few moments were distinctly blurred, but at the end of that period Hughie, breathing heavily and feeling as if he had just won a valuable prize in a consolation race, found himself facing Jimmy Marrable, who had entered the door just as Love (as represented by Mr. Haliburton) flew out of the window. "Hallo, Hughie!" "Hallo, Uncle Jimmy! Half a mo'!" Mr. Haliburton, seated dizzily in a rose-bed in the garden, heard Hughie's step returning to the French window above his head. A walking-stick suddenly speared itself in the soil beside him, and a pair of gloves and a Homburg hat pattered delicately down upon his upturned countenance; while Hughie's voice intimated that there was a swift and well-cushioned train back to town at six-twenty. Then, closing the window and leaving Mr. Haliburton to extract himself tenderly from his bed of roses, cursing feebly the while and ruminating bitterly upon the unreliability of proverbial expressions, Hughie turned to the room again. It had just occurred to him that in the heat of the moment he had been a trifle cavalier in his reception of a relative whom he had not seen for ten years, and who he imagined had been dead for four. Half an hour later Jimmy Marrable enquired:-- "Would it be too much to ask whom you were throwing out of the window when I came in?" "Friend of Joey's," said Hughie briefly. "And now, Uncle Jimmy," he added, with clouding brow,--the joy of battle was overpast, and the horizon was dark with the wings of all kinds of chickens coming home to roost,--"I should like to inform you that you and your financial methods have put me in a devil of a hole. I want an explanation." "Right. Fire away!" "Well, when I took on the job bequeathed to me by you of administering Joan's affairs, I discovered that instead of being an heiress, the child was practically penniless. For some idiotic reason best known to yourself, you no sooner put money into the bank for her than you dragged it all out again. Consequently I discovered that I was booked to manage the affairs of a girl whom everybody thought to be the possessor of pots of money, but whose entire capital"--he picked up the pass-book--"amounted in reality to one hundred pounds sterling." "Correct!" said Jimmy Marrable. "Proceed!" "If," continued Hughie in an even and businesslike tone, "Joan had been prepared to marry me, the money wouldn't have mattered, as she could have had mine. Unfortunately that event did not occur." "Did she know she hadn't any money when you asked her to marry you?" enquired Jimmy Marrable. "No." "And did she go on refusing you after you had informed her she was a pauper?" Hughie had seen this question coming from afar. He turned a delicate carmine. His uncle surveyed him, and nodded comprehendingly. "Quite so!" he said. "Quite so! You never told her." "No," said Hughie, "I hadn't the heart. It seemed like--like trying to coerce her into marrying me. No, I just let her imagine that she had a tidy little fortune invested, and that she could live on the interest--three hundred a year. I--I found that sum for her, and she took it all right. After all, she was a woman, and women will swallow almost anything you tell them about money matters. If they jib at all, all you have to do is to surround yourself with a cloud of technicalities, and they cave in at once. I think Joey was a _little_ surprised at not getting more, for she had thought herself a bit of an heiress; but she never said a word. In fact, she was so kind about it that I saw she was convinced I had made a mess of things somewhere, and must be protected accordingly. She put it all down to my usual incompetence, I suppose,--as far as I can see, she considers me a born fool,--and accepted the situation loyally." "She would do that," said Jimmy Marrable. "Well," continued Hughie, "Joan was all right, but everybody else was the devil. An awful girl friend of hers, called Harbord--" "I know--twelve per cent!" gurgled Jimmy Marrable. "Yes. Well, she came and gave me beans to begin with. Then young Lance began to suspect me,--he never could stand me at any price,--and he came and raised Cain one day at a luncheon party I was giving--but, by the way, that's all right now; Lance has come round completely. Even the Leroys couldn't conceal their conviction that I had made a bungle somewhere--an honest bungle, of course, but a bungle. And finally an unutterable sweep called Haliburton came along. I knew something of him--so much, in fact, that it never occurred to me that there was anything to fear from him. But he got the master-grip on me when every one else had failed. Joey--our Joey--fell in love with him and promised to marry him!" "I have heard nothing of this. What sort of fellow is he?" enquired Jimmy Marrable. "Much the same type, I should say, as the late lamented Gaymer, senior." "Are you sure--about her falling in love?" continued Jimmy Marrable, in a puzzled voice. "Looks like it," said Hughie. "I was away yesterday, and got back early this morning. I found a note from Joey on my dressing-table, saying that Haliburton had proposed to her, and that she was sending him along to me to ask for my consent. She wouldn't have gone as far as that if she didn't--if she didn't"--His voice shook. "It was a pill for me, Uncle Jimmy!" "What did you do?" said Jimmy Marrable. "I did this. I knew quite well that if Joey--loved him"--the words came from between his clenched teeth--"she would stick to him, blackguard or not. She's that sort." "She is. Well?" "I came to the conclusion that if there was to be a rupture of the engagement it must come from him." "You made him break it off?" "Yes." "How? By throwing him out of the window?" "No. That would have been no good if he was really after her money. I simply told him the truth--the whole truth--about her bank balance, and so on. That did it. He backed out all right." Jimmy Marrable rubbed his hands. "And then?" "And then ideas began to occur to him--" "Exactly. He began to ask questions--to make innuendoes--" "Yes. I then threw him out of the window. It was some consolation. That is the story." Hughie turned away, and gazed dejectedly into the fender. Presently Jimmy Marrable remarked:-- "And meanwhile the fat is in the fire?" "It is," said Hughie bitterly. "Uncle Jimmy, what _will_ she think? Everything is bound to come out now,--that fellow will run about telling everybody,--and when she hears of the cruel position I've placed her in she'll never speak to me again. We shan't even be ordinary good friends now. Poor little girl! I've done her the worst turn a man can do a woman; and I would have _died_ for her--cheerfully!" Hughie leaned against the tall mantelpiece and dropped his head upon his arms. "Joey! Joey!" he murmured to himself, very softly. Jimmy Marrable retired to a remote corner of the room, where he spent some time selecting a cigar from Jack Leroy's private locker. Presently he returned. Observing that his nephew was apparently not quite ready to resume the conversation, he spent some time in lighting the cigar, bridging over the silence with a rumbling soliloquy. "It is a blessing to be back on dry land again," he observed, "where cigars will keep in decent condition. No more green weeds for me! What I like is a good crisp Havana that splits open if you squeeze the end, instead of--" Hughie once more stood erect on the hearthrug. The fit had passed. Jimmy Marrable eyed him curiously. "Hughie, boy," he said, "it was a mad, mad scheme. Why did you do it?" Hughie turned upon him, and blazed out suddenly. "Why?" he cried. "Because there was nothing else to do! Do you think I would let our Joey--no, damn it! _my_ Joey--go out as a governess or a chorus-girl--yes, she actually suggested _that_!--when I could keep her happy and comfortable by telling one little white lie? It may have been a mad thing to do; but it was a choice of evils, and I'd do it again! So stuff that up your cigar and smoke it!" "Silly young owl!" remarked Jimmy Marrable. He lit his cigar with fastidious care, and continued:-- "I suppose you want an explanation from _me_ now?" "Yes." "Well, the withdrawal of that money was an eleventh-hour notion. It suddenly occurred to me that you, with your imbecile ideas about honour and filthy lucre, and so forth, might feel squeamish about making love to a girl with a fat bank balance. So just before I sailed I drew the money out, imagining that by so doing I should be removing the only obstacle to a happy union between you and Joey. The entire affair was intended to be a walk-over for you. Between us, we seem to have made a bonny mess of things. Hughie, we Marrables are not cut out for feminine fancywork." "What is to be done now?" said Hughie gloomily. "I have thought of that," said Jimmy Marrable. "When a man gets in a hopeless tangle of any kind, his best plan is to ask a woman to help him out. That is what we shall have to do. Wait here a few minutes." He turned towards the door. "Mildred Leroy won't be in for half an hour yet," called Hughie after him, "so it's no good looking for her." "All right!" replied Jimmy Marrable's voice far up the stairs. CHAPTER XX SINFUL WASTE OF A PENNY STAMP Ten minutes passed. Hughie, leaning heavily against the frame of the French window, gazed listlessly out at a squirrel which was inviting him to a game of hide-and-seek from the far side of a tree-trunk. "One thing," he mused,--"I shall be able to go abroad again now. No more of this--" There was the faintest perceptible rustle behind him. Joan must have come in very quietly, for the door was shut and she was sitting on the corner of the writing-table,--exactly where the recently-departed Haliburton had been posing,--swinging her feet and surveying her late guardian's back. In her hand she held a pink slip of paper. Hughie never forgot the picture that she presented at that moment. She was dressed in white--something workmanlike and unencumbering--with a silver filigree belt around her waist. She wore a battered Panama hat--the sort of headgear affected by "coons" of the music-hall persuasion--with a wisp of pale blue silk twisted round it. The evening sun, streaming through the most westerly of the windows, glinted on her hair, her belt, and the silver buckles on her shoes. Hughie caught his breath. Joan spoke first. "Here's something for you, Hughie," she said. Hughie took the proffered slip of paper. It was a cheque, made out to himself and signed by Jimmy Marrable. "I think that covers all the expense to which you have been put on my account while Uncle Jimmy has been away," said Joan. Her voice sounded gruff and businesslike. Hughie examined the cheque. "Yes," he said, "it does." "It was very good of you," said Joan formally, "to advance me so much money. I had no idea you were doing it. Apparently you might never have got it back again." Hughie gazed at her curiously. He began to grasp the situation. He was to be whitewashed: the compromising past was to be decently buried, and "Temporary Loan" was to be its epitaph. "Never mind that," he said awkwardly. "All in the day's work, you know! Afraid I was a rotten trustee." Suddenly Joan's demeanour changed. "And now, my man," she said briskly, "will you be good enough to explain what you mean by compromising a lady in this way?" Hughie looked at her for a moment in dismay. Then he saw that her eyes were twinkling, and he heaved a sudden sigh of incredulous relief. He was forgiven! "Joey!" he said,--"Joey, you mean to say you're not angry?" "Furious!" replied Miss Gaymer, smiling in her old friendly fashion. "Thank God!" said Hughie. Miss Gaymer changed the subject, rather hurriedly. "There's something else I want to ask you," she said. "Will you kindly inform me what has become of my--ahem!--young man?" "Who?" said Hughie. "Oh, _that_ chap? He is gone." "Gone? Where?" "London, I should think." "Why?" "In the first place, because I told him about your--I mean--I wouldn't advise you to ask me, Joey. You see--I should hate--" "You would hate," said Miss Gaymer, coming to his rescue, "to say 'I told you so!' I know, Hughie. It's like you, and I love you for it." Hughie winced. These colloquial terms of endearment are sometimes rather tantalising. Still, he must not mind that. The girl, too, had had her disappointment, and was bearing herself bravely. At least-- "Joey," he said suddenly, "did you _really_ care for that bloke?" The lady on the table stiffened suddenly. "What--that poisonous bounder?" She rolled up her eyes. "My che-ild!" "But you let him make love to you." "_Did_ I? I suppose you were there," observed Miss Gaymer witheringly, "disguised as a Chinese lantern!" "Well, what _did_ you do, then?" "He asked me to be his blushing bride," said the unfeeling Miss Gaymer, "and tried to grab my hand. I squinted down my nose, and looked very prim and sweet, and thought we had better be getting back to the ballroom, and he could talk to Mr. Marrable in the morning. If that's your idea of allowing people to make _love_, dear friend--" "But you--you--promised to marry him!" said poor Hughie. Joan stared at him. "Do you mean to tell me, Hughie," she said slowly, "that he told you _that_?" "Yes--with one or two corroborative details. That was why I had to tell him--everything, you know. It was the only way, I thought, to choke him off." "O--o--oh!" Miss Gaymer wriggled indignantly. "The creature! And when he heard I had no money, he cried off?" Hughie bowed his head. Joan gave a low gurgling laugh. "There's no getting over it, Hughie!" she said. "He scored. A nasty slap for little me! But I deserved it, for trying to trifle with his young affections. Well, you have given me one reason for his departure. What was the other?" Hughie eyed her in some embarrassment. Then he said,-- "He began to talk about you, Joey, in a way I didn't like, so I--" His eye slid round towards the window, and then downward in the direction of his right foot. A smile crept over his troubled face, and he glanced at Joan. "Oh, Hughie, _did_ you?" she exclaimed rapturously. "Yes. He landed in that rose-bed. Look!" Joey shuffled off the table and joined him by the window. A few feet below them, on the rose-bed, lay the unmistakable traces of the impact of a body falling from rest with an acceleration due to something more than the force of gravity. Joan cooed softly, evidently well pleased. Hughie turned and regarded her with a puzzled expression. No man ever yet fathomed the workings of the feminine mind, but he never quite gives up trying to do so. "Are you glad that he got thrown out?" he asked. Joan pondered. "It's not exactly that," she said. "I'm not glad he was thrown out: it must have hurt him, poor dear! But I'm glad you threw him out, if you understand the difference." Hughie was not at all sure that he did, but he nodded his head in a comprehending manner. Then he continued:-- "Tell me, Joey, if you didn't care for him, why did you send him to me, instead of giving him the knock direct?" Joey surveyed her retired "warder" with eyes half-closed. "Well," she said reflectively, "there were heaps of reasons, but you are a man and wouldn't understand any of them. But, roughly speaking, it was because I wanted to see how you would handle him. I knew you wouldn't let him marry me, of course, but I wanted to see how you would play your cards. (You simply don't _know_ how fascinating these things are to watch.) Besides, I thought it would be good for him to come face to face with--a _man_," she added, almost below her breath. "I only got the best of him," said Hughie humbly, "by laying all my cards on the table. There's not much _finesse_ required for a game like that." "Still, you won," said Joan. Hughie sighed. "Haliburton lost, if you like," he said; "I don't quite see what _I_--" "No--you _won_!" said a very small but very insistent voice by his side. Hughie turned sharply. Miss Gaymer was breathing expansively upon the glass of the window, and assiduously scribbling a pattern thereon with her finger--an infantile and unladylike habit of which her nurse thought she had cured her at the age of eight. Also, her cheeks were aglow, and that with a richness of colouring which sufficed to convey some glimmerings of intelligence even into the brain of the obtuse young man beside her. Hughie suddenly felt something inside his head begin to buzz. His gigantic right hand (which still contained Jimmy Marrable's cheque tucked in between two fingers) closed cautiously but comprehensively upon Joan's left, which was resting on the window-frame, much as a youthful entomologist's net descends upon an unwary butterfly. "Joey," he said unsteadily,--"Joey, what do you mean?" Miss Gaymer sighed, in the resigned but persevering fashion of a patient Sunday-school teacher. Then she slipped her hand from under Hughie's, extracting as she did so the folded cheque from between his fingers. Hughie watched her dumbly. Joan unfolded the cheque, and perused it in a valedictory sort of manner. Then she kissed it softly. Then she tore it up very slowly into small pieces. She sighed again pensively, and said:-- "There goes my ransom! It's a wicked waste--of a cheque-stamp! Now," she added cheerfully, "I am compromised worse than ever. Hughie, dear, I _really_ think, after this, that you'll have to--Ough! Hughie! _Hughie!_" For blind, groping Hughie's eyes were open at last. With an exultant whole-hearted roar he initiated a sudden enveloping movement; and then, turning away from the fierce light that beats upon actions performed at a window, strode majestically (if rather top-heavily) towards a great leather sofa in a secluded corner beyond the fireplace. The scandalised Miss Gaymer, owing to circumstances over which she had no control, accompanied him. * * * * * Transcriber's note: Throughout the document the oe ligature was replaced with "oe". Throughout the dialogues there were words used to mimic accents of the speakers. Those words were retained as-is. On page 27, a quotation mark was added after "And are you going down for good next week?". On page 121, the period after "after gulping the water" was replaced with a comma. On page 151, "it may he" was replaced with "it may be". On page 172, the "care of" symbol was replaced with "c/o". On page 252, the closing parenthesis was moved from the end of "smiling disarmingly." to the end of "you see". On page 256, the "He" in "He appeared to be choosing" was changed to "He". On page 270, "Mr Gaymer" was replaced with "Mr. Gaymer". On page 315, "sitsing" was replaced with "sitting". 
17800	----	Susan Warner, 1819-1885 & Anna Warner 1824-1915, Wych Hazel (1876), Putnam's edition 1888 _Wych Hazel_ seen by _The Atlantic monthly_, Volume 38, Issue 227, September 1876, pp. 368-369 "It may well be questioned whether the authors of the _Wide, Wide World_ have added to their fame by this new novel. In the first place, the story it tells is one of no marked merit or originality, and the way in which it is told is in the highest degree crabbed and unintelligible. There is such an air of pertness about every one of the speakers, and the story is told almost entirely by means of conversations, that the reader gets the impression that all the characters are referring to jests known only to themselves, as if he were overhearing private conversations. As may be imagined, this scrappy way of writing soon becomes very tiresome from the difficulty the reader has in detecting the hidden meaning of these curt sentences. The book tells the love of Rollo for Wych Hazel, and indulges in gentle satire against parties, round dances, etc. The love-story is made obscure, Rollo's manners are called Spanish, and he is in many ways a peculiar young man. We seem to be dealing much more with notes for a novel than with the completed product." WORKS BY SUSAN AND ANNA WARNER. WYCH HAZEL. Large 12mo, cloth extra $1 75 "If more books of this order were produced, it would elevate the tastes and increase the desire for obtaining a higher order of literature." --_The Critic_. "We can promise every lover of fine fiction a wholesome feast in the book." --_Boston Traveller_. THE GOLD OF CHICKAREE. Large 12mo, cloth extra $1 75 "It would be impossible for these two sisters to write anything the public would not care to read." --_Boston Transcript_. "The plot is fresh, and the dialogue delightfully vivacious." --_Detroit Free Press_. DIANA. 12mo, cloth $1 75 "For charming landscape pictures, and the varied influences of nature, for analysis of character, and motives of action, we have of late seen nothing like it." --_The Christian Register_. " 'Diana' will be eagerly read by the author's large circle of admirers, who will rise from its perusal with the feeling that it is in every prospect worthy of her reputation." --_Boston Traveller_. WYCH HAZEL BY SUSAN AND ANNA WARNER AUTHORS OF "WIDE, WIDE WORLD," "DIANA," "THE GOLD OF CHICKAREE," ETC. NEW YORK & LONDON G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS The Knickerbocker Press 1888 COPYRIGHT BY G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 1876 CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. MR. FALKIRK CHAPTER II. BEGINNING A FAIRY TALE CHAPTER III. CORNER OF A STAGE-COACH CHAPTER IV. FELLOW-TRAVELLERS CHAPTER V. IN THE FOG CHAPTER VI. THE RED SQUIRREL CHAPTER VII. SMOKE CHAPTER VIII. THE MILL FLOOR CHAPTER IX. CATS CHAPTER X. CHICKAREE CHAPTER XI. VIXEN CHAPTER XII. AT DR. MARYLAND'S CHAPTER XIII. THE GREY COB CHAPTER XIV. HOLDING COURT CHAPTER XV. TO MOSCHELOO CHAPTER XVI. FISHING CHAPTER XVII. ENCHANTED GROUND CHAPTER XVIII. COURT IN THE WOODS CHAPTER XIX. SELF-CONTROL CHAPTER XX. BOUQUETS CHAPTER XXI. MOONSHINE CHAPTER XXII. A REPORT CHAPTER XXIII. KITTY FISHER CHAPTER XXIV. THE LOSS OF ALL THINGS CHAPTER XXV. IN THE GERMAN CHAPTER XXVI. IN THE ROCKAWAY CHAPTER XXVII. THE GERMAN AT OAK HILL CHAPTER XXVIII. BREAKFAST FOR THREE CHAPTER XXIX. JEANNIE DEANS CHAPTER XXX. THE WILL CHAPTER XXXI. WHOSE WILL? CHAPTER XXXII. CAPTAIN LANCASTER'S TEAM CHAPTER XXXIII. HITS AT CROQUET CHAPTER XXXIV. FRIENDLY TONGUES CHAPTER XXXV. FIGURES AND FAVOURS CHAPTER XXXVI. THE RUNAWAY CHAPTER XXXVII. IN A FOG CHAPTER XXXVIII. DODGING CHAPTER XXXIX. A COTTON MILL CHAPTER XL. SOMETHING NEW CHAPTER XLI. A LESSON CHAPTER XLII. STUDY CHAPTER I. MR. FALKIRK. "We may shut our eyes, but we cannot help knowing That skies are clear and grass is growing." When one has in charge a treasure which one values greatly, and which, if once made known one is pretty sure to lose, I suppose the impulse of most men would be towards a hiding- place. So, at any rate, felt one of the men in this history. Schools had done their secluding work for a time; tutors and governors had come and gone under an almost Carthusian vow of silence, except as to their lessons; and now with seventeen years of inexperience on his hands, Mr. Falkirk's sensations were those of the man out West, who wanted to move off whenever another man came within twenty miles of him. Thus, in the forlorn hope of a retreat which yet he knew must prove useless, Mr. Falkirk let the first March winds blow him out of town; and at this present time was snugly hid away in a remote village which nobody ever heard of, and where nobody ever came. So far so good: Mr. Falkirk rested and took breath. Nevertheless the spring came, even there; and following close in her train, the irrepressible conflict. Whoever succeeded in running away from his duties--or his difficulties? There was a flutter of young life within doors as without, and Mr. Falkirk knew it: there were a hundred rills of music, a thousand nameless flowers to which he could not close his senses. There was a soft, indefinable stir and sweetness, that told of the breaking of Winter bonds and the coming of Summer glories; and he could not stay the progress of things in the one case more than in the other. Mr. Falkirk had always taken care of this girl--the few years before his guardianship were too dim to look back to much. From the day when she, a suddenly orphaned child, stood frightened and alone among strangers, and he came in and took her on his knee, and bade her "be a woman, and be brave." That was his ideal of womanhood,--to that combination of strength and weakness he had tried to bring Wych Hazel. Yet though she had grown up in Mr. Falkirk's company, she never thoroughly understood him: nature and circumstances had made him a reserved man,--and her eyes were young. Of a piece with his reserve was the peculiar fence of separation which he built up between all his own concerns and those of his ward. He was poor--she had a more than ample fortune; yet no persuading would make him live with her. Had he been rich, perhaps she might have lived with him; but as it was, unless when lodgings were the rule, they lived in separate houses; only his was always close at hand. Even when his ward was a little child, living at Chickaree with her nurses and housekeeper, Mr. Falkirk never spent a night in the house. He formally bought and paid for a tiny cottage on the premises, and there he lived: nothing done without his knowledge, nothing undone without his notice. Not a creature came or went unperceived by Mr. Falkirk. And yet this supervision was generally pleasant. As he wrought, nothing had the air of espionage--merely of care; and so I think, Wych Hazel liked it, and felt all the more free for all sorts of undertakings, secured against consequences. Sometimes, indeed, his quick insight was so astonishing to the young mischief-maker, that she was ready to cry out treachery!--and the suspected person in this case was always Gotham. Yet when she charged upon Gotham some untimely frost which had nipped her budding plans, Gotham always replied-- 'No, Miss 'Azel. I trust my 'onor is sufficient in his respect.' She and Gotham had a singular sort of league,--defensive of Mr. Falkirk, offensive towards each other. She teased him, and Gotham bore it mastiff-wise; shaking his head, and wincing, and when he could bear it no longer going off. Wych Hazel?-- yes, she was that. And how did she win her name? Well, in the first place, "the nut-browne mayd" and she were near of kin. But whether her parents, as they looked into the baby's clear dark eyes, saw there anything weird or elfish,--or whether the name 'grew,'--of that there remains no record. She had been a pretty quiet witch hitherto; but now-- "Once git a scent o' musk into a drawer, And it clings hold, like precerdents in law!" --not Mr. Falkirk could get it out. CHAPTER II. BEGINNING A FAIRY TALE. 'Mr. Falkirk, I _must_ go and seek my fortune!' Wych Hazel made this little remark, sitting on a low seat by the fire, her arms crossed over her lap. 'Wherefore?' said her guardian. 'Because I want to, sir. I have no other than a woman's reason.' 'The most potent of reasons!' said Mr. Falkirk. 'The rather, because while professing to have no root, it hath yet a dozen. How long ago did Jack show his lantern, my dear?' 'Lantern!' said the girl, rather piqued,--adding, under her breath, 'I'm going to follow--Jack or no Jack! Why, Mr. Falkirk, I never got interested a bit in a fairy tale, till I came to--"And so they set out to seek their fortune." It's my belief that I belong in a fairy tale somewhere.' 'Like enough,' said her guardian shortly. 'So you see it all fits,' said Wych Hazel, studying her future fortunes in the fire. 'What fits?' 'My going to seek what I am sure to find.' 'That will ensure your missing what is coming to find you.' 'People in fairy tales never wait to see what will come, sir.' 'But, my dear, there is a difficulty in this case. Your fortune is made already.' 'Provokingly true, sir. But after all, Mr. Falkirk, I was not thinking of money.' 'A settlement, eh?' said Mr. Falkirk. 'My dear, when the prince is ready, the fairy will bring him.' 'Now, Mr. Falkirk,' said the girl, with her cheeks aglow, 'you know perfectly well I was not thinking of _that_.' 'Will you please to specify of what you were thinking, Miss Hazel?' Miss Hazel leaned her head on her hand and reflected. 'I don't believe I can, sir. It was a kind of indefinite fortune,--a whole windfall of queer adventures and people and things.' Mr. Falkirk at this turned round from his papers and looked at the girl. It was a pretty vision that he saw, and he regarded it somewhat steadily; with a little break of the line of the lips that yet was not merriment. 'My dear,' he said gravely, 'such birds seldom fly alone in a high wind.' 'Well, sir, never mind. Could you be ready by Thursday, Mr. Falkirk?' 'For what, Miss Hazel?' 'Dear me!' said the girl with a soft breath of impatience. 'To set out, sir. I think I shall go then, and I wanted to know if I am to have the pleasure of your company.' 'Do _I_ look like a fairy tale?' said Mr. Falkirk. He certainly did not! A keen eye for practical realities, a sober good sense that never lost its foothold of common ground, were further unaccompanied by the graces and charms wherewith fairy tales delight to deck their favourites. Besides which, Mr. Falkirk probably knew what his fortune was already, for the grey was abundantly mingled with the brown in his eyebrows and hair. However, to do Miss Hazel's guardian justice, if his face was not gracious, it was at least in some respects fine. A man always to be respected, easily to be loved, sat there at the table, at his papers. As for the little 'nut-browne mayd' who studied destiny in the fire, she merely glanced up at him in answer to this appeal; and with a shake of the head as if fairy tales and he were indeed hopelessly disconnected, returned to her musings. Then suddenly burst forth-- 'I am so puzzled about the colour of my new travelling dress! "Contrasts," and "harmonies," and all that stuff, belong to the pink and white people. But pink and brown--Mr. Falkirk, do you suppose I can find anything browner than myself, that will set me off, and do?--I can't travel in gold colour.' 'You want to have as much as possible the effect of a picture in a frame?' 'Not at all, sir. That is just what I want to avoid. The dress should be a part of the picture.' 'I don't doubt it will be!' said Mr. Falkirk sighing. 'Before you set out, my dear, had you not better invest your property? so that you could live upon the gathered interest if the capital should fail.' 'I thought it was invested?' said the girl, looking up. 'Only a part of it,' replied Mr. Falkirk. 'Nothing but your money.' 'Nothing but!' said Wych Hazel. 'Why what more have I, Mr. Falkirk?' 'A young life,' said her guardian,--'a young and warm heart,-- good looks, an excellent constitution, a head and hands that might do much. To which I might add,--an imagination.' 'My dear Mr. Falkirk,' said the girl laughing, 'I shall want them all to pay my travelling expenses. All but the last--and that is invested already, to judge by the interest.' He smiled, a shaded smile, such as he often wore when she danced away from his grave suggestions. He never pursued her. But when she added, 'After all, sir, investments are your affair,'-- 'My dear,' he said, 'a woman's jewels are in her own keeping-- unless indeed God keep them. Yet let her remember that they are not hers to have and to hold, but to have and to use; a mere life interest--nor always that.' And then for a while silence fell. 'Will you think me _very_ extravagant if I get a new travelling dress, sir?' the girl began again. 'I have not usually been the guardian of your wardrobe, Miss Hazel.' 'No, sir, of course; but I wanted your opinion. You gave one about my jewels. And by the way, Mr. Falkirk, won't you just tell me the list over again?' Mr. Falkirk turned round and bent his brows upon Wych Hazel now, but without speaking. 'Well, sir?' she repeated, looking up at him, 'what are they, if you please?' 'Two brilliants of the first water,' replied Mr. Falkirk looking down into her eyes. 'To which some people add, two fine bits of sardius.' 'And which some people say are set in bronze,'--said the young lady, but with a pretty little laugh and flush. 'Where do you propose the search should begin?' said the gentleman, disregarding this display. 'At Chickaree, sir. I should go down there at once, and so start from home in proper style.' 'And your plan of operations?' pursued Mr. Falkirk. 'Perfectly simple, sir. Of two roads I should always take the most difficult, and so on--ad infinitum.' 'Perfectly simple, indeed,' said Mr. Falkirk. 'Yet it might lead to a complication. I'm afraid it would prove a Western line of travel, my dear--end in a squirrel track, and run up a tree.' 'What a lookout we shall have!' said Wych Hazel. 'But about the dress, Mr. Falkirk--you know my last one is quite new--and I do so want another!' 'Then get it,' he said with a smile. 'Though I am afraid, my dear, it is hardly in keeping. Quickear began the search in rags, and Cincerella in ashes, and the "Fair one with the golden locks" had, I think, no other adornment. Puss in boots was indeed new rigged--but Puss was only a deputy. What do you say to sending me forth in boots, to seek a fortune for you?' An irrepressible laugh rippled forth--sweet and sound, and, oh, so heartwhole! 'Let me see,' she said; 'To-day is Monday. To-morrow I will get the dress and distract my dressmaker. And next Monday we will set out, and take Chickaree for our first stage. My dear Mr. Falkirk--most potent, grave, and reverend sir,--if you sally forth as Puss in boots, of course I shall at once turn into the Marquis of Carrabas, which would not suit your notions at all--confess!' she added, locking both hands round his arm, and flashing the brilliants before his eyes. 'Next Monday we will take the first stage for Chickaree,' said Mr. Falkirk in an unmoved manner. 'How many servants in your train, Miss Hazel?' 'None, sir. Mrs. Bywank is there already, and Mrs. Saddler can "forward" me "with care." I'll pick up a new maid by the way.' 'Will you pick up a page too? or does Dingee keep his place?' 'If he can be said to have one. O, Dingee, of course.' 'Wych Hazel,' said Mr. Falkirk from under his brows, 'what is your plan?--if you are capable of such a thing.' 'My plan is to unfold my capabilities, sir,--for your express benefit, Mr. Falkirk. We will beat the bush in every direction, and run down any game that offers.' Mr. Falkirk turned his chair half away, and looked into the fire. Then slowly, but with every effect of expression, he repeated,-- 'A creature bounced from the bush, Which made them all to laugh, "My lord," he cried, "A hare! a hare!" But it proved an Essex calf.' 'Yes,' said Wych Hazel with excellent coolness,--'men do make such little mistakes, occasionally. But this time I shall be along. Good night, sir.' CHAPTER III. CORNER OF A STAGE COACH 'Miss Hazel!--Dear Miss Hazel!--Dear _me_, Miss Hazel!--here's the morning, ma'am,--and Gotham, and Mr. Falkirk!' So far the young eyes unclosed as to see that they could see nothing--unless the flame of a wind-tossed candle,--then with a disapproving frown they closed again. 'But Miss Hazel?' remonstrated Mrs. Saddler. 'Well?' said Wych Hazel with closed eyes. 'Mr. Falkirk's dressed, ma'am.' 'What is it to me if Mr. Falkirk chooses to get up over night?' 'But the stage, ma'am!' 'The stage can wait.' 'The stage won't, Miss Hazel,' said Mrs. Saddler, earnestly. 'And Gotham says it's only a question of time whether we can catch it now.' Something in these last words had an arousing power, for the girl laughed out. 'Mrs. Saddler, how _can_ one wake up, with the certainty of seeing a tallow candle?' 'Dear me,' said Mrs. Saddler hurrying to light two tall sperms, 'if _that's_ all, Miss Hazel--' 'That's not all. What's the matter with Mr. Falkirk this morning?' 'Why nothing, ma'am. Only he said you wanted to take the first stage to Chickaree.' 'Which I didn't, and don't.' 'And Gotham says,' pursued Mrs. Saddler, 'that if it is the first, ma'am, we'll save a day to get to Chickaree on Thursday.' Whereupon, Wych Hazel sprung at once into a state of physical and mental action which nearly blew Mrs. Saddler away. 'Look,' she said, tossing the curls over her comb,--'there's my new travelling dress on the chair.' 'Another new travelling dress!' said Mrs. Saddler with upraised hands. 'And the hat ribbands match,' said Wych Hazel, 'and the gloves. And the veil is a shade lighter. Everything matches everything, and everything matches me. You never saw my match before, did you Mrs. Saddler?' 'Dear me! Miss Hazel,' said the good woman again. 'You do talk so wonderful!' It was splendid to see her look of dismay, and amusement, and admiration, all in one, and to catch a glimpse of the other face--fun and mischief and beauty, all in one too! To put on the new dress, to fit on the new gloves,--Wych Hazel went down to Mr. Falkirk in admirable spirits. Mr. Falkirk looked gloomy. As indeed anything might, in that hall; with the front door standing open, and one lamp burning till day should come; and the chill air streaming in. Mr. Falkirk paced up and down with the air of a man prepared for the worst. He shook Wych Hazel grimly by the hand, and she laughed out, 'How charming it is, sir? But where's breakfast?' 'Breakfast, Miss Hazel,' said her guardian solemnly, 'is never, so far as I can learn, taken by people setting out to seek their fortune. It is generally supposed that such people rarely have breakfast at all.' 'Very well, sir,--I am ready,'--and in another minute they were on their way, passing through the street of the little village, and then out on the open road, until after a half- hour's drive they entered another small settlement and drew up before its chief inn. Bustle enough here,--lamps in the hall and on the steps; lamps in the parlours; lamps running up and down the yards and road and dimly disclosing the outlines of a thorough bred stage coach and four horses, with the various figures pertaining thereto. Steadily the dawn came creeping up; the morning air--raw and damp--floated off the horses' tails, and flickered the lights, and even handled Wych Hazel's new veil. I think nothing but the new travelling dress kept her from shivering, as they went up the inn steps. People seeking their fortunes may at least _want_ their breakfast. But Mr. Falkirk was perverse. As they entered the hall, a waiter threw open the door into the long breakfast room-- delicious with its fire and lights and coffee--(neither did the voices sound ill), but Mr. Falkirk stopped short. 'Is that the only fire you've got? I want breakfast in a private room.' Now Mr. Falkirk's tone was sometimes one that nobody would think of answering in words,--of course, the waiter could do nothing but wheel about and open another door next to the first. 'Ah!' Mr. Falkirk said with immense satisfaction, as they stepped in. 'Ah!'--repeated his ward rather mockingly. 'Mr. Falkirk, this room is cold.' Mr. Falkirk took the poker and gave the fire such a punch that it must have blazed uninterruptedly for half a day after. 'Cold, my dear?' he said beamingly--'no one can be cold long before such a fire as that. And breakfast will be here in a moment. If it comes before I get back, don't wait for me. How well your dress looks!' 'And I?--Mr. Falkirk,' said Wych Hazel. 'Why that's a matter of taste, my dear, of course. Some people you know are partial to black eyes--which yours are not. Others again--Ah, here is breakfast,--Now my dear, eat as much as you can,--you know we may not have any breakfast to-morrow. On a search after fortune, you never can tell.' And helping her to an extraordinary quantity of everything on the tray, Mr. Falkirk at once went off and left her to dispose of it all alone. And of course he went straight into the next room. Didn't she know he would?--and didn't she hear the duo that greeted him?--'What, Mr. Falkirk!'--'Sir, your most obedient!'--and her guardian's double reply--'Back again, eh?'-- and 'Your most obedient, Mr. Kingsland.' Wych Hazel felt provoked enough not to eat another mouthful. Then up came the stage, rumbling along to the front door; and as it came, in rushed Mr. Falkirk, poured out a cup of scalding coffee and swallowed it without a moment's hesitation. 'Coach, sir!' said the waiter opening the door. 'Coach, my dear?' repeated her guardian, taking her arm and whisking her down the hall and into the stage, before the passengers in the long room could have laid down their knives. 'What is the use of being in such a hurry, Mr. Falkirk?' she said at last; much tried at being tossed gently into the stage like a brown parcel--(which to be sure she was, but that made no difference). 'My dear,' said Mr. Falkirk, solemnly, "there is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.' " And with that he drew off his glove, leaned back, and passed his hand over his brow with the air of a man who had in some shape achieved success. By this time the stream of passengers began to pour forth; and the coach creaked and swung to and fro, as trunk after trunk and man after man found their way up to the roof. Then the door was flung open, and other passengers tumbled in, the lantern flashing dimly upon their faces and coats. Three and three more,--and another, but his progress was stayed. 'Not in here, sir,' said Mr. Falkirk politely, 'I have paid for three seats.' 'There ain't another seat,' says the driver,--'and he ain't a big man, sir--guess maybe you'll let him have a corner--we'll make it all right, sir.' He had a corner,--and so did our heroine! The new dress! Never mind; the sooner this went the sooner she would get another. And they rolled off, sweetly and silently, upon the country road. The morning was lovely. Light scarfs of fog floated about the mountain tops, light veils of cloud just mystified the sky; the tree-tops glittered with dew, the birds flew in and out; and through an open corner of her leathern curtain Wych Hazel peered out, gazing at the new world wherein she was going to seek her fortune. 'Spend the Summer at Chickaree, Mr. Falkirk?' said a voice from the further end of the coach. Wych Hazel drew in her head and her attention, and sat back to listen. 'I did not say I was going there,' said her guardian dryly. 'Two and two make four, my good sir. There's not even a sign of a place of entertainment between Stone Bridge and Crocus, and Stone Bridge you have confessed to.' 'You consider places of entertainment among the essentials then?' 'Why, in some cases,' said the gentleman, with a suspicious glance at Wych Hazel's brown veil. 'How long is it since you were there, Mr. Falkirk?' inquired Mr. Kingsland's next neighbour. The speaker was a younger man than Mr. Kingsland, and whereas that gentleman was a dandy, this one's dress was just one remove from that, and therefore faultless. About his face, so far off as the other end of the stage, there seemed nothing remarkable; it was grave, rather concise in its indications; but the voice prepared you for what a smile declared,--a nature joyous and unembittered; a spirit pure and honest and keen. Even Wych Hazel's guardian softened at his look. 'Pray, Mr. Falkirk?' said the other stranger, 'what is supposed to be the origin of the word "veil"?' 'I never heard,' said Mr. Falkirk dryly. 'Lost in the early records of civilization.' 'My dear sir!--of Barbarism!' 'Civilization has never entirely got rid of barbarism, I believe,' said Mr. Falkirk between his teeth; then out, 'By what road are you going, Rollo?' 'I should be happy to act as guide, sir. I leave the direct route.' 'Mr. Falkirk,' said Wych Hazel, 'just put your head a little this way, and see the veil of mist thrown over the top of that hill.' Mr. Falkirk looked hastily, and resumed: 'You have lately returned, I hear, from your long foreign stay?' 'It was time.' 'Mr. Falkirk,' said his ward, 'do you consider _that_ a remnant of the dark ages?' 'It keeps its place too gracefully for that,' said her guardian dropping his voice, as he looked across Wych Hazel out of the coach window. 'Mr. Falkirk' (sotto voce), 'you are charming!--Between ourselves, this is a hard place to keep gracefully. Please take out your watch, sir.' Which Mr. Falkirk did, and silently showed it. Forth to meet his came a little gold hunting watch from behind the brown veil. 'You are a minute slow, sir--as usual.' Then very softly,--'Mr. Falkirk, what with being pressed and repressed, I am dying by quarter inches! Just introduce me for your grandmother, will you, and I will matronize the party.' A request Mr. Falkirk complied with by entering forthwith into a long business discussion with another occupant of the stage coach, also known to him; in which stocks, commercial regulations, political enterprises, and the relative bearings of the same, precluded all reference to anything else whatever. Nobody's grandmother could have had less (visible) attention than Miss Hazel, up to the time when the coach rolled up to the door of a wayside inn, and the party got out to a luncheon or early dinner, as some of them would have called it. Then indeed she had enough. Mr. Falkirk handed her out and handed her in; straight to the gay carpeted "Ladies' room;" shut the door carefully, and asked her what she would have. No other lady was there to dispute possession. 'Only a broiled chicken, sir--and a soufflé--and potatoes à la crême au gratin,' said Miss Hazel, throwing off her bonnet and curling herself down on the arm of the sofa. 'Mr. Falkirk, all my previous acquaintance with cushions was superficial!--And could you just open the window, sir, and throw back the blinds? last November is in this room, apples and all.' Mr. Falkirk obeyed directions, remarking that people who travel in search of their fortune must expect to meet with November in unexpected places; and then went off into the general eating-room, and by and by, from there or some other insalubrious region came a servant, with half of an imperfectly broiled fowl and muddy dish of coffee, flanked by a watery pickled cucumbers. Mr. Falkirk himself presently returned. 'How does it go?' he said. 'What, Mr. Falkirk?' the young lady was curled down in one corner of the sofa, much like a kitten; a small specimen of which animal purred complacently on her shoulder. 'Could you eat, Miss Hazel?' 'Truly, sir, I could. Mr. Falkirk--what a lovely kitten! Do you remark her length of tail?' Mr. Falkirk thought he had heard of "puss in boots" before, but never had the full realization thereof till now. 'You have tasted nothing,' he said. 'What shall I get you? We shall be off in a few minutes, and you will not have another chance till we reach Hadyn's Dam.' 'Thank you, sir. A few minutes of undisturbed repose--with the removal of those cucumbers--and the restoration of that chicken to its other and I hope better half, is all that I require.' 'You will have rest at Hadyn's Dam,' said Mr. Falkirk with a face more expressive than his words.--'The bridge there is broken.' 'Queer place to rest, sir! Mr. Falkirk--there is Mr. Kingsland wondering why you keep me here.' 'He's eating his dinner.' 'Is he? I am afraid there will be crumbs in the piazza,' said Wych Hazel, closing her eyes. 'He says he don't wonder you are kept.' 'What shall I get you, Wych? You cannot go from here to the next stopping place without anything,' Mr. Falkirk said kindly. 'If you could find me, sir, a basket that would just hold this kitten'-- Mr. Falkirk wasted no more words, but went off, and came back with a glass of milk and a plate of doubtful 'chunks' of cake. The room was empty. Bonnet and veil were gone, and even the kitten had disappeared. Meanwhile the stage coach rattled and swung up to the piazza steps, where were presently gathered the various travellers, one by one. 'Mr. Falkirk,' said Mr. Kingsland, as that gentleman came out rather hastily to see if his charge might be there, too, 'you are not surely--agoing on alone?' Back went Mr. Falkirk into the house again to look for his missing ward, who had plainly been foraging. On the table was a paper of crackers; two blue-eyed and blue-aproned youngsters stood watching every motion as she swallowed the glass of milk, and in her hand was a suspicious looking basket. Wych Hazel set down her empty tumbler. 'My dear Mr. Falkirk, I was beginning to be concerned about you!' 'What are you going to do with that basket, Miss Hazel?' 'Take it along, sir.' 'On your lap, I suppose!' 'Mr. Falkirk, the accuracy of your judgment is unparalleled. Is that our coach at the door?' 'My dear, you will find plenty of cats at Chickaree,' said her guardian, looking annoyed. 'Yes, sir--' said the young lady meekly, dropping her veil and fitting on her gloves. 'All right, sir,' said the landlord appearing at the door. 'Roughish road, Mr. Falkirk--and t'other gents not enough patience to divide among 'em and go half round--' How much patience Mr. Falkirk carried to the general stock does not appear. But presently, lifting one corner of her basket lid, Wych Hazel drew forth a radiant spray of roses, and laid them penitently upon the averted line of her guardian's coatsleeve. 'Where did you get that?' he said. 'You had better put it in the basket, my dear; it will stand a better chance to keep fresh.' 'Do you prefer pinks, sir?--or here are bachelor's buttons--' 'They seem rather common things to me,' said Mr. Falkirk slowly, yet with a somewhat pacified brow. There was no kitten in the basket! 'I hadn't the heart to bring puss, as we are going to Catskill,' whispered Miss Hazel. 'We!' ejaculated Mr. Falkirk. 'Nominative case, first person plural, sir.' 'And what's the definition of an adverb?' 'Something which qualifies your suffering--_n'est-ce pas_, Mr. Falkirk?' 'Certainly, by its primary action upon your doing, Miss Hazel. We are going to Chickaree.' To which statement Miss Hazel for the present made no reply. She retreated to the depths of her own corner and the brown veil; fingering her roses now and then, and (apparently) making endless mental 'studies' of the wayside. The coach jogged lumberingly on: there was no relief to the tiresomeness of the way. It was a long morning. Dusty and weary, the coach- load was set down at last at another country inn; by the side of a little river which had well filled its banks. The travellers were not, it must be noted, upon any of the great highways of passage, but had taken a cut across country, over some of the spurs of the Catskill; where a railroad was not. Mr. Falkirk brought his charge into the 'Ladies' parlour,' and spoke in a tone of irritated business. 'This is Hadyn's Dam. You can have rest and dinner now.' CHAPTER IV. FELLOW TRAVELLERS. 'Dinner--and the rest of it,' translated Miss Hazel. 'Will it be needful to make a grand toilette, sir? or shall I go to the table as I am? If one may judge of the selectness of the company by their conversation'-- 'You'll see no more of the company,' said Mr. Falkirk; 'they are going another way, and we have to wait here. The bridge will be repaired to-morrow, I suppose.' 'Yes, sir. We don't dine upon the bridge, I presume?' Mr. Falkirk went off, making sure that the door latched behind him. In a quarter of an hour he came back, with an attendant bearing a tray. 'At present fortune gives us nothing more remarkable than fried ham,' he said,--'and that not of the most eatable, I fear. She is a jade. But we'll get away to-morrow. I hope so.' 'My dear sir,' said Wych Hazel with a radiant face, 'we will get away to-night. I find that the bridge is not on our road, after all. So I said it was not worth while to get a room ready for me,--and the baggage might be just transferred.' 'To what?' 'To the other stage, sir. Or indeed I believe it is some sort of a baggage wagon--as the roads are heavy--not to speak of the passengers. It has gone on up the mountain.' 'What has?' exclaimed Mr. Falkirk, whose face was a study. 'The wagon,' said Miss Hazel, seating herself by the table. 'More particularly, your one trunk and my six, sir.' 'Where has it gone?' 'Up the mountain, sir. They were afraid of making the stage top heavy--the weight of intellect inside being small.' 'Do you mean, to Catskill?' 'Yes, sir. Poor little puss!--Does the vegetation hereabouts support nothing but pigs?' said Miss Hazel, with a despairing glance from the dish of ham to a yellow haired lassie in a blue gown, who just then brought in a pitcher of water. Mr. Falkirk waited till the damsel had withdrawn, and went to the window and came back again before he spoke. 'You should have consulted me, Miss Hazel. You are bewildered. It is not a good time to go up the mountain now.' 'Bewildered? I!' was Miss Hazel's only answer. 'Yes, you don't know what is good for you. I shall send for those trunks, Wych.' 'Quite useless, sir. There is nothing else going up to the Mountain House till we go ourselves. We will go for them--there is nothing like doing your own business.' 'You will find that out one day,' muttered her guardian. 'Seeking my fortune, and wait for the mending of a bridge!' Hazel went on. 'And then I said I was going to Catskill,--and then you're the best guardian in the world, Mr. Falkirk, so it's no use looking as if you were somebody else.' 'I shall be somebody else directly,' said Mr. Falkirk in a cynical manner. 'But eat your dinner, Miss Hazel; you will not have much time.' A meal for which he did not seem to care himself, for there was no perceivable time when he took it. The stage coach into which the party presently stowed themselves, held now but those four--Mr. Falkirk and his ward, and two gentlemen who had declared themselves on the way to the mountain. The former established themselves somewhat taciturnly in the several corners of the back seat, and so made the journey; that is to say, as much as possible, for Mr. Falkirk being known to the other could not avoid now and then being drawn into communication with them. One, indeed, Mr. Kingsland, made many and divers overtures to that effect. His elegance of person and costume was advantageously displayed in an opposite corner, from whence he distributed civilities as occasion offered. His book and his magazine were placed at the brown veil's disposal; he stopped the coach to buy cherries from a wayside farm, which cherries were in like manner laid at Wych Hazel's feet; and his observations on the topics that were available, demonstrated all his stores of wit and wisdom equally at hand and ready for use. But brown veil would none of them all. The daintiest of hands took two cherries and signed away the rest; the sweetest of girl voices declined the magazine or gave it over to Mr. Falkirk. If the eyes burned brown lights (instead of blue) in their seclusion, if the voice just didn't break with fun, perhaps only Mr. Falkirk found it out, and he by virtue of previous knowledge. But in fact, Miss Hazel gave the keenest attention to everybody and everything. A contrast to Mr. Kingsland was their other fellow-traveller. Mr. Rollo occupying the place in front of Mr. Falkirk, made himself as much as possible at ease on the middle seat, with his back upon the persons who engaged Mr. Kingsland's attention; but he did not thereby escape theirs. When a society is so small, the members of it almost of necessity take note of one another. The little brown-veiled figure could not help noticing what a master he was in the art of making himself comfortable; how skilfully shawls were disposed; how easily hand and foot, back and head, took the best position for jolting up the hill. It amused her as something new; for Mr. Falkirk belonged to that type of manhood which rather delights in being uncomfortable whenever circumstances permit; and other men she had seen few. Mr. Rollo had a book too, which he did not offer to lend; and he gave his lazy attention to nothing else--unless when a bright glance of eye went over to Mr. Kingsland. He was as patient as any of the party; as truly he had good reason, being by several degrees the most comfortable. But Mr. Falkirk moved now and then unrestingly, and the back seat was hot and cramped,--and Wych found the jolts and heavings of the coach springs a thing to be borne. And that swinging and swaying middle seat, with its one occupant came so close upon her premises, that she dared not adventure the least thing, even to Mr. Falkirk. If the momentary relief of turning that grey travelling shawl into a pincushion, occurred to her, nothing came of it; the thick folds were untouched by one of her little fingers. She put her face as nearly out of the coach as she could, and perhaps enjoyed the scenery, if anyone did. Mr. Falkirk gave no sign of enjoyment, mental or physical, and Mr. Kingsland would certainly have been asleep, but for losing sight of the brown veil--and of possible something it might do. Yet now and then there were fine reaches for the eye, beautiful knolly indications of a change of surface, which gave picturesque lights and shades on their soft green. Or a lonely valley, with smooth fields and labourers at work, tufty clumps of vegetation, and a line of soft willows by a watercourse, varied the picture. Then the ascent began in good earnest, and trees shut it in, and there was everywhere the wild leafy smell of the woods. Night began to shut it in too, for the sun was early hidden from the travellers; the gloom, or the fatigue of the way, gathered inside the coach as well, on all except the occupant of the middle seat. Some time before this his ease-seeking had displayed itself in a new way; and letting himself out of the coach door he had kept up a progress of his own by the side of the vehicle, which quite distanced its slow and toilsome method of advance. For Rollo was not only getting on with a light step up the road, but making acquaintance with every foot of it; gathering flowers, pocketing stones, and finding time to fling others, which rebounded with a racketty hop, skip and jump, down the side of the deep ravine on the edge of which the way was coasting. Then making up for his delay by a mode of locomotion which seemed to speak him kindred to the squirrels, he swung himself over difficult places by the help of hanging branches of trees, and bounded from rock to rock, till he was again far ahead of the horses, and of the road too, lost out of sight in another direction. Now and then a few rich notes of a German air came down, or up, to the coach tantalizingly. Certainly Mr. Rollo was enjoying himself; and it was made more indubitably certain to the poor plodders along inside the coach, by the faint fumes of an excellent cigar which 'whiles' made themselves perceptible. Now to say the truth, it was all tantalizing to Wych Hazel. In the first place she was, as she had said, 'cramped to death,' physically and mentally,--both parts of her composition just spoiling for a fight; and whereas she had hitherto kept her face well out of the window, now she drew it resolutely within, for with somebody to look at, it did not suit Miss Hazel's ideas to be looking. She could not tease Mr. Falkirk, who had gone to sleep; Mr. Kingsland was absolutely beyond reach, except of rather thorny wishes; and when at length the dilettante cigar perfumes began to assert themselves, Wych Hazel flung the rest of her patience straight out of the window, and looked after it. The coach was stopping just then by another wayside inn, to exchange mail-bags and water the horses, and favoured by the gathering dusk, a sharp business transaction at once went into effect between the young lady within and some one without; wherof nothing at first transpired. Mr. Kingsland knew only that on one side the tones might rival a mountain brook for their soft impetuosity. There was 'a show of hands' too, and then the coach jolted on and Mr. Falkirk woke up; but not till the tired horses had gone down one pitch and up another, did he hear a faint 'mew' which raised its voice at his elbow. 'What have you got there?' he said hastily. 'A pair of whiskers, sir.' 'Where did you get that thing?' was the next demand, made with considerable disgust. 'Really, sir--whiskers not being contraband--' Mr. Falkirk was a patient man; at least Wych Hazel generally found him so; and at present he merely fell back into his corner, without making his thoughts any further apparent than the gesture made them. He offered no remark, not even when the dismayed condition of the whiskers aforesaid suggested sundry earnest and energetic efforts at escape, with demonstrations that called up Miss Hazel from the quietude of her corner to be earnest and active in her turn. Frightened, not sure of the kind attentions of the little hands that kept such firm hold,-- the kitten struggled and growled, and at last sent forth its feelings in a series of mews, sostenuto and alto to an alarming degree. Mr. Kingsland smiled--then coughed,--and Wych Hazel's laugh broke forth in a low but very defined 'Ha! ha!' 'Mr. Falkirk,' she said, 'please open your heart and give me a biscuit.' 'Mr. Falkirk,' cried a cheerful voice, rather low, from the other side of the road, 'what have you got on board?' If Mr. Falkirk's inward reply had been spoken aloud and in a past age, it might have cost poor Miss Hazel her life; as it was, he only said, 'Can you cut a broom-stick, Rollo?' The answer perhaps went into action, for the young man disappeared. Turning its wee head from side to side, as it munched the biscuit, soothed by the soft touch of soft hands, the kitten so far forgot herself as to break now and then into a loud irregular purr; but her little mistress was absolutely silent and still, though the light fingers never ceased their caressing, until puss had finished the biscuit and purred herself to sleep. By this time the coach jogged along in absolute darkness, except for what help the stars gave. The plashing of a stream over its rough bed far down below, gave token sometimes that the wheels of the coach were near an abyss; the flutter of leaves told that the forest was all around them always. The irregular traveller had re-entered the coach and sat among his shawls as still as the rest of the party; who perhaps were all slumbering as well as the kitten. It appeared so; for when that small individual started to consciousness and consequent alarm again, and was making an excursion among the feet of the gentlemen on the coach floor, its aroused mistress was only aroused in time to hear a consolatory whisper from one of her companions--'Poor little Kathleen Mavourneen, by what misfortune did you get in here? There--be still and go to sleep.' And as no more was heard, on either side, it seemed probable the advice had been followed. At any rate no more was seen of the kitten, not even when the stage coach swept round the level on which the house stands, and drew up at the door, where the light of lamps gave opportunity for observation. Wych Hazel only saw that her neighbour flung a shawl demurely enough over one shoulder and arm, where the cat might have been, and letting himself out, proceeded to do the same office with full dexterity though with one hand for the little cat's mistress. Ensconcing herself even closer than ever in mantle and veil, Wych Hazel passed on through the gay groups to the foot of the stairs, there paused. 'Mr. Falkirk,' she said softly, 'I want my tea up stairs, please,'--and passed on after the maid. 'So,' said one of the loiterers in the hall approaching Mr. Falkirk, 'so my dear sir, you've brought Miss Kennedy! At last!--Now for candidates. If the face match the hand and foot, the supply will be heavy.' CHAPTER V. IN THE FOG. There was mist everywhere. On the winding bed of the river, lying piled like a gray eider-down coverlet; folding itself over the forest trees; floating up to the Mountain House, and hanging about the rocks. But overhead the sky looked bright, and Sirius waved his torch which the vapour had filled with coloured lights. As yet sunrise was not. In front of the house, where a grey rock started from the very edge of the bank, spreading a platform above the precipice, sat Wych Hazel; her feet so nearly over the rock that they seemed resting on the mist itself; her white scarf falling back from her head like a wreath of lighted coloured vapour. Perhaps there were no other strangers to the Mountain House within its walls; perhaps the morning was too chill; perhaps all of the 'candidates' were on the other side; for she sat alone. Until the flaming torch of Sirius paled, until the dawn began to shimmer and gleam among the fleeces of mist,--until they parted here and there before the arrows of light, showing spires and houses and a bit of the river in the far distance. So fair, unfeatured, misty and sparkling at once, lay life before the young gazer. Mr. Falkirk might have moralized thus, standing close behind her as he was, still and silent; but it is not likely he did; useless moralizing was never in Mr. Falkirk's way. 'How do you like your fortune, Miss Hazel, as you find it at present?' he said. 'Very undefined, sir. Good morning, Mr. Falkirk--what made you get up?' 'My knowledge of your character.' 'So attractive, sir?' She glanced up at him, then looked away over the mist, with her arms crossed over her bosom and a grave look of thought settling down upon her young face; as if womanhood were dawning upon her, with its mysterious opalescent light. 'Evangeline saw her way all clear when she reached the mountain-top,' she said musingly; 'but mine looks misty enough. Mr. Falkirk, will this fog clear away before sunset?' 'Or settle down into rain.' But while he spoke, the sun mounting higher, shot through the very heart of the mist; and the broken clouds began to roll away in golden vapour, or were furled and drawn up with bands of light. And now came voices from the piazza. 'You knew it last night, Mr. Kingsland? and never told me!' said an oldish lady. 'And there is the sweet creature this minute, on the rock!' Wych Hazel sprang to her feet. 'Mr. Falkirk,' she said, 'you are inquired for;'--and darting past him she vanished round the house. Mr. Falkirk, as in duty bound, followed, but when a needful point of view was attained, his charge was nowhere within sight, and he returned to the house to be in readiness to meet her when the bell should ring for breakfast. But a couple of hours later, when the bell rang, Miss Hazel was not forthcoming. The guests gathered to the breakfast- room. Mr. Falkirk remained in the empty hall, pacing up and down from door to door, then went to see if Wych Hazel were by chance in her room. Mrs. Saddler was in consternation, having heard nothing of her. Mr. Falkirk returned to his walk in the hall, chaffing a little now with something that was not patience. Presently Rollo came down the stairs. 'Good morning.' 'Good morning.' 'Exercise before breakfast?--Or after?' 'Not after,' said Mr. Falkirk; 'but you are late as it is.' 'Better late, if you can't be early. You have a better chance. I will wait with you, if you are waiting.' 'Don't wait for me,' said Mr. Falkirk, shortly. 'I have no idea when I shall be ready.' 'I had no idea, a little while ago, when I should. By the way, I hope Miss Kennedy is well, this morning?' 'I hope so.' 'She is not down yet?' 'She has been down, and I have not heard of her going up again.' 'In the breakfast-room, perhaps,' said the young man. And passing on, he made his way thither, while Mr. Falkirk stood at the hall door. No, Miss Kennedy was not in the breakfast- room; and instead of sitting down Mr. Rollo went out by another way, picking up a roll from the table as he passed, and wrapping it in a napkin. He took a straight course to the woods, over the grass, where no uninstructed eye could see that the dew had been brushed away by a lighter foot than his. But if lighter, hardly so swift as the springy stride and leap which carried him over yards of the rough way at a bound, and cleared obstacles that would have hindered, at least slightly, most other people. The mountain was quickly won in this style, and Rollo gained a high ledge where the ground lay more level. He went deliberately here, and used a pair of eyes as quick as might match the feet, though not to notice how the dew sparkled on the moss or how the colours changed in the valley. He was far above the Mountain House, on the wild hillside. The sun had scattered the fog from the lower country, which lay a wide dreamland to tempt the eye, and nearer by the lesser charms of rock and tree, moss and lichen, light and shadow, played with each other in wildering combinations. But Rollo did not look at valley of hill; his eyes were seeking a gleam of colour which they had seen that morning once before; and seeking it with the spy of an eagle. No grass here gave sign of a footstep. Soft lichen and unbending ferns kept the secret, if they had one; the evergreens were noisy with birds, but otherwise mute; the fog still settled down in the ravines and hid whatever they held. Thither Mr. Rollo at last took his way, after a moment's observation: down the woody, craggy sides of a wild dell; the thick vapour into which he plunged sufficiently bewildering even to his practised eyes. Partridges whirred away from before him, squirrels chattered over his head, but his particular quarry Mr. Rollo could nowhere find. Through that ravine and up the next ledge, with the sun rising hotter and hotter, and breakfast long over at the Mountain House. He found her at last so suddenly that he stopped short. She was tired probably, for she had dropped herself down on the moss, her cheek on her hands, and had dropped her eyelids too, in something very like slumber; the clear brown cheek bearing it usual pink tinges but faintly. The figure curled down upon the moss was rather tall, of a slight build; the features were not just regular; the hair of invisible brown lay in very wayward silky curls; and the eyes, as soon could be seen, were to match, both as to colour and waywardness. The mouth was a very woman's mouth, though the girlish arch lines had hardly yet learned their own powers whether of feeling or persuasion. Very womanish, too, was the sweep of the arm outline, and the hand and foot were dainty in the extreme. Neither hand or foot stirred for other feet approaching, the pretty gypsy having probably tired herself into something like unconsciousness; and the first sound of which she was thoroughly sensible was her own name. The speaker was standing near her when she looked up, with his hat in his hand, and an air of grave deference. He expressed a fear that she was fatigued. She had half-dreamily opened her eyes and looked up at first, but there was nothing 'fatigued' in the way the eyes went down again, nor in the quick skill with which the scarf was caught up and flung round her, fold after fold, until she was muffled and turbaned like an Egyptian. Then she rose demurely to her feet. 'I thank you, sir, for arousing me. Is Mr. Falkirk here?' 'No--I am alone. But you are at a distance from home. Can you go back without some refreshment?' The words and the speaker were quiet enough, but Wych Hazel's colour stirred uneasily. 'Yes. Don't let me detain you, sir,' she said, putting herself in quick motion across the moss. He met her on the other side of a big boulder and stayed her, though with the quietest manner of interference. 'I beg your pardon--but if you wish to go home--' 'Yes,' she answered, with a half laugh, glancing up at the sun; 'I know. I am only going round this way.' He stayed her still. 'I can guide you this way,' he said; 'but--it is not the way to the House.' Another glance at the sun. 'Which is the way?' 'I will show it to you. Do you care most for speed or smooth going? You are tired?' Wych Hazel knit her brows into the most abortive attempt at a frown. What right had he to suppose that she was tired! 'If you will just show me the way, sir--the shortest; I mean, point out the direction.' He was standing and waiting her pleasure with contented gravity. 'The direction is not to be followed in a straight line,' said he. 'I can only show you by going before. Is that your meaning?' 'I should like to get home the shortest way,' said she hesitating. He went on without more words, and maintaining the polished gravity of his first address; but Wych Hazel had reason to remember her walk of that morning. It was a shorter way than he had come, that by which her conductor took her, and in parts easy enough; but in other parts requiring his skill as well as hers to get her over them. He said not a word further; he served her in silence: the vexatious thing was, that he was able to serve her so much. Many a time she had to accept his hand to get past a rude place; often both hands were needed to swing her over a watercourse or leap her down from a rock. She was agile and light of foot; she did what woman could; it was only by sheer necessity that she yielded the mortifying tacit confession to man's superior strength, and gave so often opportunity to a pair of good eyes to see what she was like near at hand. Wych Hazel's own eyes made few discoveries. She could _feel_ every now and then that her conductor's hand and foot were as firm and reliable as the mountain itself. This course of travelling brought them, however, soon to the level of the Mountain House and to plain going. There Mr. Rollo fell behind, allowing the young lady to take her own pace in crossing the lawn and the hall, only attending her like her shadow to the foot of the stairs. With the first reaching of level ground, he had had a full look and gesture of acknowledgment; what became of him afterwards Miss Hazel seemed not to know. _He_ knew that she ran up the first flight of stairs, and that once out of sight her steps drooped instantly. 'So!' said Mr. Kingsland, advancing. 'Really! Rollo my dear fellow, how are we to understand this?' 'Give us an introduction after lunch, will you?' said another. 'But, Mr. Rollo, how extraordinary!' said one of the dowagers. 'Madame!' said Mr. Rollo, waiting upon the last speaker, hat in hand. 'Let him alone, my dear lady!' said Mr. Kingsland; 'he's got to prepare for coffee and pistols with Mr. Falkirk. And coffee I fancy he's ready for--eh, Dane? Go get your breakfast, and I'll break matters gently to the guardian.' 'Will you do that, my dear fellow?' 'Can you doubt me?' 'I wish you would, for I am hungry,' said Dane, drawing his hand over his face. 'Mr. Falkirk is going off toward the cataract--just run after him and tell him that his ward is come home;--has he had breakfast?' 'Run, I guess I--won't' said Mr. Kingsland. 'But to be the first bearer of _welcome_ news'--And Mr. Falkirk roaming among trees and rocks was presently accosted by two gentlemen. 'Allow me, my dear sir, to congratulate you,' said the foremost. 'Miss Kennedy is safe. Our friend Rollo has with his usual sagacity gone straight to the mark, and without a moment's thought of his own breakfast or strength has found the young lady and followed her home.' 'She is at home, then?' said Mr. Falkirk. 'She is at home, sir; the Mountain House is made radiant by her presence. And now, permit me--Dr. Maryland,--son of your friend at Chickaree. Only your neighbour upon Christian principles here, sir, but bona fide neighbour at Chickaree, and most anxious to be acquainted with the fair owner thereof.' Too honest-hearted to feel the inuendo of Mr. Kingsland's last words, their undeniable truth flushed Dr. Maryland somewhat as he shook hands with Mr. Falkirk. He was a well looking young man, with a clear blue eye which said the world's sophistications would find no Parley the porter to admit them; and Mr. Falkirk would certainly have begun to like his young neighbour on the spot, if he had not been on a sudden summoned to the house. Miss Hazel, speeding up-stairs in the manner before related, reached her room safely; but there proceeding to answer or evade Mrs. Saddler's questions, also to indulge herself in sundry musings, did not indeed forget to despatch a peremptory order for breakfast; but as that refreshment was somewhat delayed, the young lady in an impatient fit of time-saving began to change her dress, and fainted away charmingly during the process. At which moment the maid and breakfast entered the room, and the former promptly set down her tray, and ran off to summon the only doctor then at the Mountain House. Little did Dr. Maryland guess the meaning of those mysterious words--'a lady wants you!' Still less, what lady. And as by the time he reached the room, Miss Hazel opened her eyes for his express benefit, the doctor stopped short in the middle of the room, his ideas more unsettled than ever. But Mr. Falkirk, who had accompanied the doctor, though not expecting to find their paths all the way identical, pressed forward with a face of great concern. 'Miss Hazel!--is it you? What is the matter?' 'Do I look like somebody else, sir?' Like nobody else! thought Dr. Maryland; while, learning the whole of Mrs. Saddler's explanations from the first five words, he went on to apply such remedies as were strongest and nearest at hand. In a medical point of view it was not perhaps needful that he should hold the coffee-cup himself all the time, but if this were not really his 'first case,' it bid fair to be so marked in his memory. Perhaps he forgot the coffee-cup, till Mr. Falkirk gently relieved him of it with a word of dismission, and the doctor modestly withdrew; then sending Mrs. Saddler for some bottled ale, Mr. Falkirk went on, 'Wych, where have you been?' 'Following the steps of my great predecessor, King Alfred, sir.' 'In what line?' 'Retiring from the enemy, sir, and being obliged to meet the Dane'--said Miss Hazel, innocently closing her eyes. 'Where?' said Mr. Falkirk, shortly. 'I don't know, sir. In some of the wild places favoured by such outlaws. Don't you know, he has just come over the sea?' There was a pause of some seconds. 'Wych,' said her guardian kindly, 'do you know it is not nice for little girls to make themselves so conspicuous as your morning walk has made you to-day?' Some feeling of her own brought the blood to her cheek and brow, vividly. 'I don't know what you call conspicuous, sir; only one person found me. And if you think I lost myself in the fog on purpose, Mr. Falkirk, you think me a much smaller girl than I am!' Mr. Falkirk smiled--a little, passing his hand very lightly over the brow which did look certainly as if it had belonged to a little girl not very long ago; but he said no more, except to advise the young lady to eat a good breakfast. Not to be conspicuous, however, from this day was beyond little Miss Hazel's power, to whatever degree it might have been within her wish. The house was at this time not yet filled; but of all its indwellers, old and young, male and female, higher and lower in the scale of society, every eye and tongue was at her service; so far as being occupied with her made it so. Every hand was at her service more literally. Did not the very serving-men at table watch her eye? Was not he the best fellow who could recommend the hottest omelet and bring the freshest cakes to her hand? The young heiress, the young mistress of fabulous acres, and 'such a beautiful old place;' the new beauty, who bid fair to bewitch all the world with hand and foot and gypsy eyes,--nay, the current all set one way. Even old dowagers looked to praise, and even their daughters to admire; while of the men, all were at her feet. Attentions, civil, kind, and recommendatory, showered on Miss Hazel from all sides. Would that little head stand it, with its wayward curls and some slight indication of waywardness within? How would it keep its position over such a crowd of servants self-made in her honour? Some of them were very devoted servants indeed, and seemed willing to proclaim their devotion. Among these was Mr. Kingsland, who constituted himself her right-hand man in general; but Dr. Maryland was not far off, if less presuming. Miss Hazel could not walk or ride or come into a room without some sort of homage from one or all of these. 'Dear little thing! pretty little thing!' exclaimed a lady, an old acquaintance of Mr. Falkirk's, one evening. 'Charming little creature! How will she bear it?' Mr. Falkirk was standing near by. 'She wants a better guardian,' the lady went on whispering. 'I wish she had a mother,' he said. 'Or a husband!' Mr. Falkirk was silent; then he said, 'It is too soon for that.' 'Yes--too soon,' said the lady meditatively as she looked at Wych Hazel's curls,--'but what will she do? Somebody will deceive her into thinking he is the right man, while it is _too_ soon.' 'Nobody shall deceive her,' said Mr. Falkirk between his teeth. It must be mentioned that an exception, in some sort, to all this adulation, was furnished by the friend of Miss Hazel's morning walk. Mr. Rollo, if the truth must be told, seemed to live more for his own pleasure than anybody else's. Why he had taken that morning's scramble unless on motives of unwonted benevolence, remained known only to himself. Since then he had not exerted himself in her or anybody's service. Pleasant and gay he was when anybody saw him; but nobody's servant. By day Mr. Rollo roamed the woods, for he was said to be a great hunter--or he lay on the grass in the shade with a book--or he found out for himself some delectable place or pleasure unknown previously to others, though as soon as known sure to be approved and adopted; and at evening the rich scents of his cigar floated in the air where the moonlight lay brightest or shadows played daintiest. But he did not seem to share the universal attraction towards the daintiest thing of all at the Mountain. He saw her, certainly; he was sometimes seen looking at her; but then he would leave the place where her presence held everybody, and the perfume of his cigar would come as aforesaid; or the distant notes of a song said that Mr. Rollo and the rocks were congenial society. If he met the little Queen of the company indeed anywhere, he would lift his hat and stand by to let her pass with the most courtier-like deference; he would lift his hat to her shadow; but he never testified any inclination to follow it. The more notable this was, because Rollo was a pet of the world himself; one of those whom every society welcomes, and who for that very reason perhaps are a little nonchalant towards society. It was a proof now gayly and sweetly she took the popular vote, that she bore so easily his defalcation. Vanity was not one of her pet follies; and besides, that morning's work had brought on Miss Hazel an unwonted fit of grave propriety; she was a little inclined to keep herself in the background. Amuse her the admiration did, however. It was funny to see Mr. Kingsland forsake billiards and come to quote Tennyson to her; Dr. Maryland's shy, distant homage was more comical yet; and the tender little mouth began to find out its lines and dimples and power of concealment. But the young heart had a good share of timidity, and that stirred very often; making the colour flit to and fro 'like the rosy light upon the sky'-- Mr. Kingsland originally observed; while Dr. Maryland looked at the evening star and was silent. Compliments!--how they rained down upon her; how gayly she shook them off. And as to Mr. Rollo, if there was anything Miss Hazel disliked it was to submit to guidance; and she had been obliged to follow him out of the woods: and if he had presumed to admire her in the same style in which he had guided her, she felt quite sure there would have been a sparring match. Besides--but 'besides' is a feminine postscript; it would be a breach of confidence to translate it. CHAPTER VI. THE RED SQUIRREL One brilliant night, Mr. Falkirk pacing up and down the piazza, Wych Hazel came and joined him; clasping both hands on his arm. 'Mr. Falkirk,' she said softly, 'when are we going to Chickaree?' 'I have no information, Miss Hazel.' 'Then I can tell you, sir. We take the "owl" stage day after to-morrow morning,--and we tell _nobody_ of our intention.' And Wych Hazel's finger made an impressive little dent in Mr. Falkirk's arm. 'Why that precaution?' he inquired. 'Pity to break up the party, sir,--they seem to be enjoying themselves,'--And a soft laugh of mischief and fun rang out into the moonlight. 'Is this arrangement expected to be carried into effect?' 'Certainly, sir. If my guardian approves,' said Miss Hazel, submissively. 'What's become of her other guardian?' said an old lady, possessing herself of Mr. Falkirk's left arm. 'My other guardian!' said the young lady, expressively. 'She has no other,' said Mr. Falkirk, very distinctly. 'Have you broken the will?' 'No madam,' said Mr. Falkirk. 'As it often happens in this world, something has reached your ears in a mistaken form.' 'What something was it?' said Wych Hazel. 'A false report, my dear,' Mr. Falkirk says. Which did not quite satisfy the questioner at the time, but was soon forgotten in the rush of other things. The next day was devoted to a musical pic-nic at the Falls. It was musical, in as much as a band had been fetched up to play on the rocks, while the company filled the house and balcony, and an occasional song or duet, which ladies asked for 'just to see how they would sound there,' kept up the delusion. By what rule it was a pic-nic it might be difficult to discover, except that it had been so styled. Eatables and drinkables were, to be sure, a prominent portion of the entertainment, and they were discussed with more informality and a good deal less convenience than if in their regular place. But, however, the rocks and the wildness lent them a charm, perhaps of novelty, and the whole affair seemed to be voted a success. Success fell so largely to Miss Hazel's share, that she by times was a little weary of it, or of its consequences; and this day finding herself in a most inevitable crowd, do what she could, she fairly ran away for a breath of air with no musk in it. Making one or two the honoured confidants of her intention, that she might secure their staying where they were and keeping others, and promising to return soon, she slipped away down the stairs by the Fall. All the party had been there that morning, as in duty bound, and had gone where it was the rule to go. Now Wych Hazel sprang along by herself, to take the wildness and the beauty in silence and at her own pleasure. At the upper basin of the Fall she turned off, and coasted the narrow path under the rock, around the basin. At the other side, where the company had been contented to turn about, Wych Hazel passed on; till she found herself a seat on a projecting rock, from which a wild, wooded ravine of the hills stretched out before her eyes. The sides were so bold, the sweep of them so extended, the woods so luxuriantly rich, the scene so desolate in its loneliness and wildness, that she sat down to dream in a trance of enjoyment. Not a sound now but the plash of the water, the scream of a wild bird, and the rustle of leaves. Not a human creature in sight, or the trace of one. Wych might imagine the times when red Indians roved among those hillsides--the place looked like them; but rare were the white hunters that broke their solitudes. It was delicious. The very air that fanned her face had come straight from a wilderness, a wilderness where it blew only over sweet things. It refreshed her, after those people up on the balcony. She had promised to be back soon: but now a rosy flower, or spike of flowers, of tempting elegance, caught her eye. It was down below her, a little way, not far; a very rough and steep way, but no matter, she must have the flower, and deftly and daintily she clambered down: the flower looked lovelier the nearer she got to it, and very rare and exquisite she found it to be, as soon as she had it in her hands. It was not till she had examined and rejoiced over it, that addressing herself to go back, Wych Hazel found her retreat cut off. Not by any sudden avalanche or obstacle, animate or inanimate; as peacefully as before the wind waved the ferns on the great stepping stones of cliff and boulder by which she had come; but--the agility by which with help of vines and twigs she had let herself down these declivities, was not the strength that would mount them again. It was impossible. Wych Hazel saw that it was impossible, and certainly she would never have yielded the conviction but to dire necessity. She stood considering one particular jump down which she had made,--nothing but desperation could have taken her back again. Desperate, however, Wych Hazel did not feel. There was nothing to do at present but to wait till her friends should find her; for to go further down would but add to her trouble and lessen her chance of being soon set free, and indeed, from her present position even to go down (voluntarily) was no trifle. So Wych Hazel sat down to wait, amusing herself with thoughts of the sensation on the cliff, and wondering what sort of scaling ladders could be improvised in a hurry. They would be sure to come after her presently. Some one would find her. And it was a lovely place to wait. How it happened must remain like other mysteries, unexplained till the mystery is over, that the person who did find her again happened to be Mr. Rollo. Yet she had hardly seen him all day before that. Wych Hazel had half forgotten her situation in enjoying its beauties and musing in accordance with them; and then suddenly looking up to the great piece of rock nearest her, she saw him standing there, looking down at her with the calm face and handsome gray eyes which she had noticed before. The girl had been singing half to herself a wild little Scottish ballad, chiming it in with water and wind and bird music, taking first one part and then another; looping together a long chain of pine needles the while,--then throwing back her sleeve, and laying the frail work across her arm, above the tiny hair chain, the broad band of gems and the string of acorns, which banded it; in short, disporting herself generally. But not the "lullaby, baby, and all," of the old rhyme, ever had a more sudden and complete downfall. The first line of "O wha wad buy a silken goun Wi' a puir broken heart?" was left as a mere abstract proposition; and Wych Hazel would assuredly have 'slipped from her moorings,' but for the certain fear of tearing her dress, or spraining her ankle, or doing some other bad thing which should call for immediate assistance. So she sat still and gazed at the prospect. Her discoverer presently dropped down by her side and stood there uncovered, as usual, but this time he did not withdraw his eyes from her face. And when he spoke it was in a new tone, very pleasant, though laying aside a certain distance and form with which he had hitherto addressed her. 'Do you know,' he said, 'I begin to think I have known you in a former state of existence?' 'What sort of a person were you in a former state, Mr. Rollo?' 'I see the knowledge was not mutual. I am sorry.--This is a pleasant place!' 'This identical grey rock?' 'Don't you think so?'--in a tone which assumed the proposition. 'Very,' said Wych Hazel with a demure face;--'I do not know which abound most--the pleasures of Hope, Memory, or Imagination. But I thought perhaps you meant the mountain.' 'The pleasures of the Present, then, you do not perceive?' said Mr. Rollo, peering about very busily among the trees and rocks in his vicinity. 'Poor Hope and Imagination!' said Miss Hazel,--'must they be banished to the "former state?" Memory does hold a sort of middle ground.' 'There isn't much of that sort of ground here,' said Mr. Rollo; 'we are on a pretty steep pitch of the hill. Don't you like this wilderness? You want a gun though--or a pencil--to give you the sense that you have something to do in the wilderness.' 'Yes!' said Miss Hazel--'so Englishmen say: "What a nice day it is!--let's go out and kill something." ' There was a good deal of amusement and keenness in his sideway glance, as he demurely asked her 'if she didn't know how to shoot?' But Wych Hazel, with a slight gesture of her silky curls, merely remarked that she had pencils in her pocket--if he wanted one. 'Thank you--have you paper too?' 'Plenty.' 'That I may not seem intolerably rude,' said he, extending his hand for the paper,--'will you make one sketch while I make another? We will limit the time, as they did at the London Sketch Club.' 'O, I shall not think it even tolerably rude. But all my paper is in this book.' 'To secure the conditions, I must tear a leaf out.--How will that do?' 'Very well,' she said with a wee flitting of colour,--'if you will secure my conditions too.' 'What are they?' As he spoke he tore the leaf out and proceeded to accommodate himself with a pamphlet for a drawing board. 'You had no right to the leaf till you heard them!' she cried jumping up. 'I shall take care how I bargain with you again, Mr. Rollo.' 'Not safe?' said he smiling. 'But you are, this time, for I accepted the conditions, you know. And besides--you have the pencils yet.' There was a certain gay simplicity about his manner that was disarming. 'Did you?' said Hazel looking down at him. 'Then you are injudicious to accept them unheard. One of them is very hard. The first is easy--you are to restore the leaf when the sketch is done.' 'It is the decree of the strongest! And the other?' 'You are to confess my sketch to be the best. Now what is the subject to be?' 'Stop a bit!' said he, turning over the book which Wych Hazel had given him wrong side first--'I should like to see what I am to swear to, before we begin.' And the bits of her drawing which were found there received a short but keen consideration. 'The subject?--is this grey rock where we are-- with what is on and around it.' 'You are lawless. And your subject is--unmanageable!' 'Do you think so?' 'You want what is "around" this grey rock,' she said with a light twirl on the tips of her toes. 'If your views on most subjects are as comprehensive!'-- 'They can be met, nevertheless,' said he, laughing, 'if you take one part of the subject and I the other--and if you'll give me a pencil! We must be done in a quarter of an hour.' 'There it is,' said Wych Hazel,--'then you can take half of the rock'--and she walked away to a position as far behind Mr. Rollo as sweetbriars and sumach would permit. That gentleman turned about and faced her gravely; also withdrew a step, looked at his match, and throwing on his hat which had lain till now on the moss, went to work. It was work in earnest, for minutes were limited. 'Mr. Rollo?' said Wych Hazel, 'I cannot draw a thing if you sit there watching me. Just take your first position, please.' 'I should lose my point of view--you would not ask me to do that? Besides, you are safe--I am wholly occupied with myself.' 'No doubt! But if you presume to put _me_ in your sketch I'll turn you into a red squirrel'--with which fierce threat Miss Hazel drooped her head till her 'point of view' must have been at least merged in the brim of her flat hat, and went at her drawing. That she had merged herself as well in the interest of the game, was soon plain,--shyness and everything else went to the winds: only when (according to habit) some scrap of a song broke from her lips, then did she rebuke herself with an impatient gesture or exclamation, while the hat drooped lower than ever. It was pretty to see and to hear her,--those very outbreaks were so free and girlish and wayward, and at the same time so sweet. Several minutes of the prescribed time slipped away. 'How soon do you go to Chickaree?' said the gentleman, in a pre-engaged tone, very busy with his pencil. 'How soon?' repeated the lady, surveying her own sketch--'why-- not too soon for anybody that wants me away, I suppose. Ask Mr. Falkirk.' 'Is it long since you have seen the place?' 'I can hardly be said to have "seen" it at all. I think my landscape eyes were not open at that remote period of which you speak.' 'I was a red squirrel then, in the "former state" to which I referred a while ago. So you see your late threat has no terrors for me. Is it in process of execution?' 'O were you?' said Miss Hazel, absorbed in her drawing. 'Yes-- but the expression is very difficult!--Did you think you knew me as a field mouse?' He laughed a little. 'Then, I suppose you have not the pleasure of knowing your neighbours, the Marylands?--except the specimen lately on hand?' 'No, I have heard an account of them,' said Miss Kennedy. 'For shame, Mr. Rollo, Dr. Maryland isn't a "specimen." He's good. I like him.' The gentleman made no remark upon this, but confined his attention to his work for a few minutes; then looked at his watch. 'Is that sketch ready to show?--Time's up.' 'And the squirrel is down. But not much else.' Not much!--the squirrel sat contemplatively gazing into Mr. Rollo's hat, which lay on the rock before him, quite undisturbed by a remarkable looking witch who rose up at the other end. The gentleman surveyed them attentively. 'Do you consider these true portraits?' 'I do not think the hat would be a tight fit,' said she, smothering a laugh. 'Well!' said he comically, 'it is said that no man knows himself--how it may be with women I can't say!' And he made over the sketch in his hand and went to his former work; which had been cutting a stick. There was more in this second sketch. The handling was effective as it had been swift. Considering that fifteen minutes and a lead pencil were all, there had been a great deal done, in a style that proved use and cultivation as well as talent. The rocks, upper and lower, were truly given; the artist had chosen a different state of light from the actual hour of the day, and had thus thrown a great mass into fine relief. Round it the ferns and mosses and creepers with a light hand were beautifully indicated. But in the nook where Wych Hazel had stationed herself, there was no pretty little figure with her book on her lap; in its place, sharply and accurately given, was a scraggy, irregular shaped bush, with a few large leaves and knobby excrescences which looked like acorns, but an oak it was not, still less a tree. The topmost branch was crowned with Miss Kennedy's nodding hat, and upon another branch lay her open drawing book. Miss Kennedy shook her head. 'I cannot deny the relationship!--Your style of handling is perhaps a trifle dry. That is not what you call an "ideal woman," is it, Mr. Rollo?' 'I might fairly retort upon that. What do you say to our moving from this ground, before the band up there gets into Minor?' Retaking of a sudden her demureness, slipping away to her first position on the rock, with hands busy about the pink flowers, Wych Hazel answered, as once before-- 'Do not let me detain you--do not wait for me, Mr. Rollo.' 'Shall I consider myself dismissed? and send some more fortunate friend to help you out of your difficulty?' 'I am not in any difficulty, thank you.' 'Only you don't know your way,' he said, with perhaps a little amusement, though it hardly appeared. 'Is it true that you will not give me the honour of guiding you?' 'In the first place,' said Miss Hazel, wreathing her pink flowers with quick fingers, 'I know the way by which I came, perfectly. In the second place, I never submit voluntarily to anybody's guidance.' 'Will you excuse me for correcting myself. I meant, in "not knowing your way," merely the way in which you are to _go_.' 'Do you know it?' 'If you suffer my guidance--undoubtedly.' 'Ah!--if. In that case so do I. But I "suffered" so much on the last occasion--and Dr. Maryland has left the Mountain.' 'I would not for the world be importunate! Perhaps you will direct me if I shall inform any one of your hiding place--or do you desire to have it remain such?' 'Thank you,' said Miss Hazel, framing the landscape in her pink wreath and gazing at it intently, 'I suppose there is not much danger. But if you see Mr. Falkirk you may reveal to him my distressed condition. He needs stimulus occasionally.' Rollo lifted his hat with his usual Spanish courtesy; then disappeared, but not indeed by the way he had come. He threw himself upon an outstanding oak branch, from which, lightly and lithely, as if he had been the red squirrel himself, he dropped to some place out of sight. One or two bounds, rustling amid leaves and branches, and he had gone from hearing as well as from view. Wych Hazel had time to meditate. Doubtless she once more scanned the rocks by which inexplicably she had let herself down to her present position; but in vain, no strength or agility of hers, unaided, could avail to get up them again. Indeed it was not easy to see how aid could mend the matter. Miss Hazel left considering the question. It was a wild place she was in, and wild things suited it; the very birds, unaccustomed to disturbance, hopped near her and eyed her out of their bright eyes. If they could have given somewhat of their practical sageness to the human creature they were watching! Wych Hazel had very little of it, and just then, in truth, would have chosen their wings instead. She did not, even now, in their innocent, busy manners, read how much else they had that she lacked; though she looked at them and at all the other wild things. The tree branches that stretched as they listed, no axe coming ever upon their freedom; the moss and lichens that flourished in luxuriant beds and pastures, not breathed on by even a naturalist's breath; the rocks that they had clothed for ages, no one disturbing. The very cloud shadows that now and then swept over the ravine and the hillside, meeting nothing less free than themselves, scarce anything less noiseless, seemed to assert the whole scene as Nature's own. Since the days of the red men nothing but cloud shadows had travelled there; the nineteenth century had made no entrance, no wood-cutter had lifted his axe in the forest; the mountain streams, that you might hear soft rushing in the distance, did not work but their own in their citadel of the hills. Wych Hazel had time to consider it all, and to watch more than one shadow walk slowly from end to end of the long stretch of the mountain valley, before she heard anything else than the wild noise of leaf and water and bird. At last there came something more definite, in the sounds of leaves and branches over her head; and then with certainly a little difficulty, Mr. Falkirk let himself down to her standing place. To say that Mr. Falkirk looked in a gratified state of mind would be to strain the truth; though his thick eyebrows were unruffled. 'How did you get here, Wych?' was his undoubtedly serious inquiry. 'Oh!' she said, jumping up, and checking her own wild murmurs of song,--'My dear Mr. Falkirk, how did you? What is the last news from civilization?' She looked wild wood enough, with the pink wreath round her hat and her curls twisted round the wind's fingers. 'But what did you come here for?' 'It's a pleasant place, sir--Mr. Rollo says. I was going to propose that you and I should have a joint summer house here, with strawberries and cream. Mr. Falkirk, haven't you a bun in your pocket?' At this moment, and in the most matter-of-fact manner, presented himself her red squirrel friend, arriving from nobody knew where; and bringing not only himself but a little basket in which appeared--precisely--biscuits and strawberries. Silently all this presented itself. Wych Hazel's cheeks rivalled the strawberries for about a minute, but whether from stirred vanity or vexation it was hard to tell. 'Mr. Falkirk!' she cried, 'are all the rest of the staff coming? Here is the Commissary--is the Quarter-master behind, in the bushes?' 'I have no doubt we shall find him,' said Mr. Falkirk, dryly. 'How did you get into this bird's nest, child?' 'She was drawn here, sir,--by a red squirrel.' 'I was not drawn!--Mr. Falkirk, what are they about up there, besides lamenting my absence.' Mr. Falkirk seemed uneasy. He only looked at the little speaker, busy with her strawberries, and spoke not, but Rollo answered instead. 'They are looking over the rocks and endeavouring to compute the depth to the bottom, with a reference to your probable safety.' There was a shimmer of light in the speaker's eye. 'If they are taking mathematical views of the subject, they are in a dangerous way! Mr. Falkirk, it is imperatively necessary that I should at once rejoin the rest of society,-- will you let yourself be torn from this rock, like a sea anemone?' Mr. Falkirk had been for a few minutes taking a minute and business-like survey of the place. 'I see no way of getting you out, Wych,' he said despondingly, 'without a rope. I must go back for one, I believe, and you and society must wait.' 'How will _you_ get out, sir?' 'I don't know. If I cannot, I'll send Rollo.' 'Pray send him, sir,--by all means.' 'I can get you out without a rope,' said that gentleman, very dispassionately. 'Pray do, then,' said the other. 'There is a step or two here of roughness, but it is practicable; and with your help we can reach smooth going in a very few minutes. A little below there is a path. Let me see you safe down first, Mr. Falkirk. Can you manage that oak branch?--stop when you get to the bottom--Stand there, now.' With the aid of his younger friend's hand and eyes Mr. Falkirk made an abrupt descent to the place indicated--a ledge not very far but very sheer below them. From a position which looked like a squirrel's, mid way on the rock with one foot on the oak, Rollo then stretched out his hand to Wych Hazel. 'Am I to stop when I get to the bottom?--most people like to do it before,' she said. 'You must. Come a little lower down, if you please. Take Mr. Falkirk's hand as soon as you reach footing.' It was no place for ceremony, neither could she help it. As she spoke, he took the young lady in both hands as if she had been a parcel, and swung her lightly and firmly, though it must have been with the exercise of great strength, down to a rocky cleft which her feet could reach and from which Mr. Falkirk's hand could reach her. Only then did Mr. Rollo's hand release her; and then he bounded down himself like a cat. Once more, very nearly the same operation had to be gone through; then a few plunging and scrambling steps placed them in a clear path, and the sound of the waters of the fall told them which way to take. With that, Rollo lifted his hat again gravely and fell back behind the others. Wrapping herself in her mood as if it had been a veil, Wych Hazel likewise bent her head--it might have been to both gentlemen; but then she sped forward at a rate which she knew one could not and the other would not follow, and disappeared among the leaves like a frightened partridge. What was she like when they reached the party on the height? With no token of her adventures but the pink wreath round her hat and the pink flush under it, Miss Hazel sat there _à la reine_; Mr. Kingsland at her feet, a circle of standing admirers on all sides; her own immediate attention concentrated on a thorn in one of her wee fingers. Less speedily Mr. Falkirk had followed her and now stood at the back of the group, silent and undemonstrative. Rollo had gone another way and was not any longer of the party. CHAPTER VII. SMOKE. To Chickaree by the stage was a two-days' journey. The first day presented nothing remarkable. Rollo was their only fellow traveller whom they knew; and he did nothing to lighten the tedium of the way, beyond the ordinary courtesies. And after the first few hours the scenery had little to attract. The country became an ordinary farming district, with no distinctive features. Not that there be not sweet things to interest in such a landscape, for a mind free enough and eyes unspoiled. There are tints of colouring in a flat pasture field, to feed the eye that can find them; there are forms and shadows in a rolling arable country, sweet and changing and satisfying. There are effects in tufts of spared woodland, and colours in wild vegetation, and in the upturned brown and umber of fields of ploughed earth, and in the grey lichened rocks and the clear tints of their broken edges. There are the associations and indications of human life, too; tokens of thrift and of poverty, of weary toil and of well-to-do activity. Where the ploughs go, and the ploughmen; where the cattle are driven afield; where the farmyards tell how they are housed and kept; where the women sit with their milking pails or make journeys to the spring; where flowers trim the house-fronts, or where the little yard-gate says that everything, like itself, hangs by one hinge. A good deal of life stories may be read by the way in a stage coach; but not until life has unfolded to us, perhaps, its characters; and so Wych Hazel did not read much and thought the ride tedious and long. When she turned to her companions, Mr. Falkirk was thoughtful and silent, Mr. Rollo silent and seemingly self- absorbed, and if she looked at the other occupants of the coach--Wych Hazel immediately looked out again. The second day began under new auspices. None of their former fellow travellers remained with them; save only Rollo and the servants; and the empty places were taken by a couple of country women, one young and rustic, the other elderly and ditto. That was all that Wych Hazel saw of them. The fact that one of the women presently fell to eating gingerbread and the other molasses candy, effectually turned all Miss Kennedy's attention out of doors. The cleared country was left behind; and the coach entered a region of undisturbed forest, through which it had many miles to travel before reaching civilization again. The view was shut in. The trees waved overhead and stretched along the road endlessly, too thick for the eye to penetrate far. The coach rumbled on monotonously. The smell of pines and other green things came sweet and odorous, but the day was hot, and everything was dry; the dust rose and the sunbeams poured down. Wych Hazel languished for a change. Only a red squirrel now and then reminded her what a lively life she led a day or two ago. And Mr. Falkirk seemed too indifferent to mind the weather, and Rollo seemed to like it! She was very weary. Taking off her hat and leaning one hand on her guardian's shoulder, she rested her head there, too--looking out with a sort of fascinated intentness into the hazy atmosphere, which grew every moment thicker and bluer and more intensely hazy. It almost seemed to take shape, to her eye, and to curl and wave like some animated thing among the still pines. The countrywomen were dozing now; Mr. Rollo and Mr. Falkirk mused, or possibly dozed too; it made her restless only to look at them. Softly moving off to her own corner, Wych Hazel leaned out of the window. Dark and still and blue--veiled as ever, the pines rose up in endless succession by the roadside; a yellow carpet of dead leaves at their feet, the woodpeckers busy, the squirrels at play over their work. How free they all were!-- with what a sweet freedom. No danger that the brown rabbit darting away from his form, would ever transgress pretty limits!--no fear that vanity or folly or ill-humour would ever touch the grace of those grey squirrels. As for the red ones!-- Miss Hazel brought her attention to the inside of the coach for a minute, but the sight gave only colour and no check to her musings. How strange of that particular red squirrel to follow her steps as he had done the other day--to follow her steps now, as she more than half suspected. What did he mean? And what did she mean by her own deportment? Nothing, she declared to herself:--but that red squirrels will bite occasionally. There swept over her, sighing from among the pine trees, the breath of a vague sorrow. In all the emergencies that might come, in all that future progress, also dim with its own blue haze, what was she to do? Mr. Falkirk could take care of her property,--who could take care of _her?_ Deep was the look of her brown eyes, close and controlling the pressure of her lips: the wrist where the three bracelets lay felt the light grasp of her other hand. The coach rolled on, through thickening air and darkening sky, air thick also with a smell of smoke which it was odd no one took note of; until the horses trotted round a sudden turn of the road into the very cause of it all. The blue was spotted now with faint red fire; with dull streaks as of beds of coals, and little sharp points of flame. On both sides of the road, creeping among the pines and leaping up into them, the fire was raging. A low sound from Wych Hazel, a sound rather of horror than fear, yet curiously pitiful and heart-stirring, roused both her friends in an instant. Almost at the same instant the coach came to a standstill, and Rollo jumped out. 'What's the matter, Rollo?' 'Fire in the woods, sir. We must turn about; that's all.' The elder of the two women, who had just waked up, asked with a terrified face, 'if there was any danger?' but nobody answered her. Rollo took his seat again; at the same time the horses' heads came about. 'What are you going to do?' she demanded. 'We are going back a little way. There is fire along the road ahead of us; and the horses might set their feet upon some hot ashes, which wouldn't be good for them.' 'But we're goin' back'ards!--where we come from! Calry, we're goin' back hum!' 'We shall turn again presently,' said Rollo. 'Have patience a few minutes.' He spoke so calmly, the women were quieted. Mr. Falkirk, however, leaned back no more. He watched the hazy smoke by the roadside; he watched generally; and now and then his eye furtively turned to Wych Hazel. For some little time they travelled back hopefully on their way, though the smoky atmosphere was too thick to let any one forget the obstacle which had turned them. It grew stifling, breathed so long, and it did not clear away; but though every one noticed this, no one spoke of it to his neighbour. Then at last it began to weigh down more heavily upon the forest, and visible puffs and curls in the dense blue suggested that its substance was becoming more palpable. 'Rollo--', said Mr. Falkirk in an undertone. 'Yes!' said the other, just as the coach again came to a sudden stop and a volley of exclamations, smothered and not smothered, sounded from the coach box. Both gentlemen sprang out. 'Good patience!' said the older of the two women, 'it's the fire again! it's all round us! O I wisht I hadn't a'come! I wisht I was to hum!'--and she showed the earnestness of the wish by beginning to cry. Her companion sat still and turned very pale. Paler yet, but with every nerve braced, Wych Hazel stood in the road to see for herself. The gentlemen were consulting. The fire had closed in upon the road they had passed over an hour or two before. There it was, smoking, and breathing along, gathering strength every minute; while a low, murmuring roar told of its out-of-sight progress. What was to be done? The driver declared, on being pressed, that a branch road, the Lupin road it was called, was to his knowledge but a little distance before them; a quarter of an hour would reach it. 'Drive on, then,'--said Rollo, turning to put Wych Hazel into the coach. The man mumbled, that he did not know whether his horses would go through the fire. '_I_ know. They will. We will go straight on. You are not afraid,' he said, meeting Hazel's eyes for a moment. It was not more than half a second, but nature's telegraph works well at such instants. Wych Hazel saw an eye steady and clear, which seemed to brave danger and not know confusion. He saw a wistful face, with the society mask thrown by, and only the girl's own childish self remaining. 'Afraid to go on? no,' she said; and then felt a scarcely defined smile that warmed his eyes and brow as he answered, 'There is no need'--and put her into the coach. In both touch and tone there lay a promise; but she had no time to think of it. The coach was moving on again; the women were very frightened, and cried and moaned by way of relieving their feelings at the expense of other people's. Mrs. Saddler, who has hitherto used only her eyes, now clasped her fingers together and fell to the muttering of short prayers over and over under her breath, the urgency of which redoubled when the coach had gone a little further and the fire and smoke began to wreathe thicker on both sides of the road. 'There is no occasion, Mrs. Saddler,' said Mr. Falkirk somewhat sternly. 'Be quiet, and try to show an example of sense to your neighbours.' 'Did you never say your prayers before?' said Rollo turning towards her; they sat on the same seat. He spoke half kindly, half amused, but with that mingled--though ever so slightly--an expression of meaning more pungent; all together overcame Mrs. Saddler. She burst into a fit of tears, which nervousness made uncontrollable. 'What have I done?' said the young man as the weeping became general at his end of the coach. 'It is dangerous to meddle with edge tools! Come, cheer up! we shall leave all this smoke behind us in a few minutes. You'll see clear directly.' His tone was so calm the women took courage from it, and ventured to use their eyes again. The stage-coach had left the burning road; they were going across the woods in another direction; the air was soon visibly more free of smoke. The driver was hopeful, and sending his horses along at a good pace. The shower withinside dried up; and Rollo throwing himself back upon the seat gazed steadfastly out of the window. Wych Hazel had gazed at him while he spoke to the others, with a sort of examining curiosity in her brown eyes that was even amused; but now she became as intent as himself on affairs outside of the coach. For a while all was quiet. Mrs. Saddler sat in brown stupefaction after having received such rebukes, and no more apples were brought forward on the front seat. The women whispered together and watched their fellow-travellers--Rollo especially. But at length it became evident to the keener observers of the party that the air was thickening again; the smell of burning woods which filled the air was growing more pungent, the air more warm; those visible waves of the blue atmosphere began to appear again. Once Mr. Falkirk leaned forward as if to address Rollo; he thought better of it and fell back without speaking. And on they went. The smell of burning and the thick stifling smoke became very oppressive. 'There is a large tract on fire, Rollo,' Mr. Falkirk remarked at length. 'Probably.' In another minute the coach halted. Rollo put his head out of the window to speak to the coachman, and the cool tone in which he asked, 'What is it?' Wych Hazel felt at the time and remembered afterwards. The driver's answer was unheard by all but one. Rollo threw himself out. 'Stay where you are,' he said to Mr. Falkirk as he shut the door. 'You keep order and I'll make order.' He went forward. The coach stood still, with that fearful wreathing of the blue vapour thicker and nearer around it. The smell became so strong that the thought forced itself upon every one, they must have come upon the fire again. The woman wanted to get out. Mr. Falkirk dissuaded them. Wych Hazel kept absolutely still. In a moment or two Rollo appeared at Mr. Falkirk's side of the coach, and spoke rather low. 'I am going to make explorations. Keep all as you are.' Mr. Falkirk spoke lower still. 'Is the fire ahead?' The answer was not in English or French. Looking from her window as far as she could, Wych Hazel now saw Rollo cross the road and make for a tall pine which stood at a little distance. She saw him throw his coat and hat on the ground; then catching one of the long lithe branches he was in a moment off the ground and in the tree; yes, and making determinately for the top of it. The 'red squirrel' had not learnt climbing for nothing; agile, steady, quick, he mounted and mounted. She grew dizzy with looking. Mr. Falkirk had not the same view. 'What's he doing? what are we waiting for? Can you see?' he asked impatiently. 'Yes--they are trying to find out which way to go, sir.' Mr. Falkirk made a movement as if to get out himself; then checked it, seeing the helpless bevy of women who were dependent on him and now in the utmost perturbation. Standing still tried their nerves. To keep order withinside the coach was as much as he could attend to. Cries and moans and questions of involved incoherency, poured upon him. Would they ever get home? would the fire catch the coach? would it frighten the horses? what were they stopping for?--were some of the simplest inquiries that Mr. Falkirk had to hear and answer; in the midst of which one of the ladies assured herself and him that if 'Isaiah had come along with them they would never have got into such a fix.' Mrs. Saddler Mr. Falkirk peremptorily silenced; the others he soothed as best he might; and all the while Wych Hazel watched the signs without, and followed the climber in the pine tree, following him in his venturesome ascent and descent, which were both made with no lack of daring. He was on the ground at last, swinging himself from the end of a pine branch which he had compelled into his service; he came straight to Mr. Falkirk, heated, but mentally as cool as ever. 'I see our way,' he said, 'I am going on the box myself. Don't be concerned. I have driven a post-coach in England.' He looked across to Wych Hazel, as he spoke, and his eye carried the promise again. Wych Hazel met his look, though with no answer in her own; fear, or self-control, or something back of both, made the very lines of her face still; only a sort of shiver of feeling passed over them as he said, 'Don't be concerned.' All this passes in a second; then Rollo is on the box with the stage driver and the stage is in motion again. But it is motion straight on to where Wych Hazel has seen that the smoke is thickest. The horses go fast; they know that another hand has the reins; the ground is swiftly travelled over. Now the puffs of smoke roll out round and defined from the burning woodland; and then, above the rattle of wheels and tread of hoofs, is heard another sound,--a spiteful snapping and crackling, faint but increasing. Can the air be borne?--it is hard to breathe; and flame, yes, flame is leaping from the dried leaves and curling out here and there from a tree. Mrs. Saddler put her head out of the coach. 'Oh, sir!' she shrieked, 'he is taking us right into it! O stop him! we'll be burned, sure! it's all fire--it's all fire!' The chorus of shrieks became now almost a worse storm within than the tempest of fire which was raging without. The women were wild. It was an awful moment for everybody. The fire had full possession on both sides of the road, viciously sparkling and crackling and throwing out jets of flames and volumes of smoke, threatening to dispute the way with the stage coach; yet through it lay the only way to safety. It could not be borne long; the horses, urged by a hand that knew how to apply all means of stimulus and spared none, drew the coach along at a furious speed. The speed alone was distracting to the poor women, who had never known the like; the coach seemed to them, doubtless, hastening to destruction. Their shrieks were uncontrollable; and indeed no topics of comfort could be urged, when manifestly they were fleeing for their lives from the fire, and the fire on every side, before and behind them was threatening with fearful assertion of power that they should not escape. How swiftly thoughts careered through the mind of the one silent member of the company--thoughts like those quick flashed of flame, those dark curls of smoke. The questions she had been debating two hours before--were they all to have one short, sharp answer?--And what would become of her then? Were such days as the one before yesterday forever ended? How would it feel to be caught and wreathed about like one of those pines--how would Mr. Rollo feel to see it--and what if all the rest should be dead, there in the fire, and she only half dead; together with a strange impatience to know the worst and endure the worst. She had drawn back a little from the window, driven in by the scorching air, but looked out still with both hands up to shield her eyes. She did not know into what pitiful lines her mouth had shaped itself, nor what faintness and sickness were creeping over her with every breath of that smoke. The time was, after all, not long; but in the thickest of the fire, when the smoke literally choked up the way before the horses' eyes, the animals suddenly stopped; from a furious speed, the coach came to a blank stand-still. A voice was heard from the coach-box cheering the horses--but the dead pause continued. And now when the rattle of the wheels ceased, the sweep of the fiery storm could be heard and felt. A wind had risen, or more likely was created by the great draught of the fire; and its rush through the woods, driving the flames before it, and catching up the clouds of smoke to pile them upon the faces and throats of the travellers was with a hiss and a fury and a blinding which came like the malice of a spiteful thing. It was almost impossible to breathe; and yet the coach stood still! A half- minute seemed the growth of a year. The women became frantic; Mr. Falkirk kept them in the coach by the sheer exertion of force. Wych Hazel in vain strained her eyes to see through the smoke what the detaining cause was. The horses had been scared at last by the fire crackling and snapping in their faces, and confounded by the clouds of smoke. Bewildered, they had stopped short; and voice and whip were powerless against fear. That was a moment never to be forgotten, at least by those withinside the stage-coach, who could do nothing but wait and scream. 'Hush! the horses are frightened: that is all,' said Mr. Falkirk. 'He's----what's he doing, Wych?--yes, he's blinding the leaders; that's it. There!' The intense anxiety which was smothered in every one of these words, Wych Hazel long remembered. They saw, as he spoke, they could see Rollo at the horses' heads, going from one to the other; they saw him dimly through the smoke; they caught the light of something white in his hand. Mr. Falkirk had guessed right. Then they saw Rollo throw himself postillion-wise upon one of the leaders. In another moment the coach moved, doubtfully; then amid the rush and roar they could hear the cheer of their charioteer's voice, and the frightened animals plunged on again. Presently, encouraged perhaps by a little opening in the smoke, they dashed forward as heartily as ever, and--yes--the smoke was less thick and the air less dark, and momentarily brightening. The worst was over. Surely the worst was over, but the travellers drew breath if freer yet fearfully, till the lessening cloud and disappearing fire and stillness in the woods, said that had left the danger behind. Black charred stems and branches began to show what had been where they now were; little puffs of grey smoke from half consumed tufts of moss and old stumps of great trees were all that was left of the army of fire that had marched that way. The horses were brought back to a moderate going. A quieting of the storm within accompanied the passing away of the storm without. Fairly overcome now, dizzy besides with the almost flaming current which had blown full against her in that last charge through the fire, Wych Hazel drooped her head lower and lower till it rested on the sill of the window; but no one marked just then. The women were drying their eyes and uttering little jets of excited or thankful exclamation. Mr. Falkirk watched from his window what was to be done next. 'We'll have to put up, if it be onconvenient,' said the driver. 'Can't ask a team to do _more'n_ that at a time, sir. 'Tain't no tavern, neither--but there's Siah Sullivan's; he's got fodder, and food, allays, for a friend in need.' 'How far is Lupin?' called out Mr. Falkirk. 'Aren't we on the Lupin road?' 'Na--it's a good bit 'tother side o' that 'ere flamin' pandemony, sir, Lupin's.' 'No it isn't! I mean Lupin, where Braddock's mill used to be-- old John Braddock's.' ' 'Taint called Lupin now,' observed the driver,--'that ere's West Lupinus. Wal--John Braddock's there now; it's four or five mile straight ahead.' 'We can go there,' said Rollo. 'That will give us the best chance.' Gently they took those three or four miles. The open country to which they soon came, getting out of the woods, looked very lovely and peaceful to them; the fire had not been there, and quiet sunshine lay along the fields. In the last mile or two the fields gave place again to broken country; a brawling stream was heard and seen by intervals, black and chafing over a rocky bed. Then the road descended sharply, among thick leafage, fresh and fair, not pine needles; and finally at the bottom of the descent the stage stopped. CHAPTER VIII. THE MILL FLOOR. The place was a dell in the woods, the bottom filled with a dark, clear little lake. At the lower end of it stood the mill; picturesque enough under the trees, with its great doors opening upon the lake. On the floor within could be seen the bags of flour and grain piled about, and the miller passing to and fro. It was deeply still; the light came cool and green through the oaks and maples and ashes; the trickling of water was heard. Dark slept the little lake, overshadowed by the leafy banks which shut it in; the only chief spot of light was the miller's open door, where the sunbeams lit up his bags and him; the mill-stream brawled away somewhere below, and beyond the mill the road curled away out of sight to mount the hill again. This was Braddock's mill. Mr. Falkirk got out, and then Mr. Rollo helped out the women and Mrs. Saddler, who was confused out of all her proprieties, for she pushed before her young lady; finally Wych Hazel. 'How do you do?' said he, scanning her. Apparently the dizziness had not gone off, for she raised her head and came out of the coach in the slowest and most mechanical way, lifting her hand and pushing back her hair with a weary sort of gesture as he spoke. So weary her face was, so utterly subdued, it might have touched anybody to see it. It never seemed to occur to her that the question needed an answer. 'Your best chance is the mill,' said he; 'I think you can rest there. At any rate, it is your chance.' He put her hand upon his arm and led her down the few steps of rocky way to the mill door. Mr. Falkirk followed. The women had paired off to seek the miller's house, out of sight above on the bank. Only Mrs. Saddler came after Mr. Falkirk. The mill floor was large, cool and clean; that is, in the shade, and with the exception of the dust of flour on everything. Mr. Falkirk entered into explanations with the miller; while Rollo, after a brief word of leave-asking, proceeded to arrange a pile of grain bags so as to form an extempore divan. Harder might be; and over it he spread the gentlemen's linen dusters and all the travelling shawls of the party; and upon it then softly placed Wych Hazel. Poor child! she was used to cushions, and in need of them, from the way she dropped down among these. She had thrown off her hat, and Mr. Falkirk stopped and unfastened her mantle, and softly began to pull off one of her gloves; the miller's daughter, a fair, plump, yellow-haired damsel, coming out from among the grain bins, began upon the other. 'What's happened here?' said she, pityingly. 'Have you anything this lady could eat?' was the counter- question. 'She is exhausted; fire in the woods drove us out of the way.' 'Do tell! I heard say the woods was all afire. Why there's enough in the house, but it ain't here. We live up the hill a ways. I'll start and fetch something--only say what. O here's this, if she's fainted.'--And producing a very amulet-looking bottle of salts, suspended round her neck by a blue ribband, she at once administered a pretty powerful whiff. With great suddenness Wych Hazel laid hold of the little smelling bottle, opening her brown eyes to their fullest extent and exclaiming: 'What in the world are you all about!' 'Ah!' said Mr. Falkirk. 'Get what you can my good girl; only don't stand about it. Can you give her a glass of milk? or a cup of tea?' The girl left them and sprang away up the path at a rate that showed her good will, followed by Rollo. Arrived at the miller's house, which proved a poor little affair, the cup of tea was hastily brewed; and Rollo having contrived to find out pretty well the resources of the family in that as well as in other lines of accommodation, and having despatched along with the tea whatever he thought might stand least chance of being refused, left the miller's daughter to convey it, and betook himself to his own amusements. The meal was not much. But when it was over Wych Hazel found a better refreshment and one even more needed just then. Mrs. Saddler at a little distance nodded and dreamed; Mr. Falkirk also had moved off and at least made believe rest. Then did his ward take the comfort, a rare one to her, of pouring out a mindful to somebody of her own sex and age. It was only to the little miller's daughter; yet the true honest face and rapt attention made amends for all want of conventionalities. 'What did you get that salts for?' she began. 'He said you was faint.' 'Who is "he"?' 'The gentleman--I mean the young one.' 'Ah--Well, but I was holding you down by the blue ribband for ever so long.' 'Yes--because--I had promised not to take it off,' said the girl, blushing. 'What a promise?' 'O, but you know, ma'am--I mean, it was give to me, and so I promised. When folks give you things they always expect you never to take 'em off.' 'Do they?' said Wych Hazel. But then she launched forth into the account of all the day's distress, electrifying her listener with some of the fear and excitement so long pent up. Yet the mill girl's comment was peculiar. 'It does make a person feel very solemn to be so near to death.' 'Solemn!' cried Wych Hazel. 'Is _that_ all you would feel, Phoebe?' 'I'm not much afraid of pain, you know, ma'am--and if the fire took it couldn't last long.' 'But Phoebe;--' she sat straight up on her floury cushions, looking at the girl's quiet face. 'What do you mean, Phoebe?'-- She could not have told what checked the expression of her growing wonder. 'O lie down, ma'am, please! Why I only mean,' said Phoebe speaking with perfect simplicity--'You know God calls us all to die somehow--and if he called me to die so, it wouldn't make much difference. I shouldn't think of it when I'd got to heaven.' Again some undefined feeling sealed Wych Hazel's lips. She lay down as she was desired, and with her hand over her eyes thought, and wondered, and fell asleep. For some hours thereafter the sunbeams were hardly quieter than the party they lighted on the miller's floor. Wych Hazel slept; Mrs. Saddler was even more profoundly wrapped in forgetfulness; Mr. Falkirk sat by keeping guard. The miller's daughter had run up the hill to her home for a space. As to Rollo, he had not been seen. His gun was his companion, and with that it was usual for him to be in the woods much of the time. He came back from his wanderings however as the day began to fall, and now sat on a stone outside the mill door, very busy. The little lake at his feet still and dark, with the side of the woody glen doubled in its mirror, and the sunlight in the tops of the trees reflected in golden glitter from the middle of the pool, was a picture to tempt the eye: but Rollo's eye, if it glanced, came back again. He was picking the feathers from a bird he had shot, and doing it deftly. Sauntering leisurely up the miller approached him. 'Now that's what I like,' he remarked; 'up to anything, eh? You don't seem so much used up as the rest on 'em. Even the little one talked herself to sleep at last!' 'Have you got a match, Mr. Miller?' 'No--I haven't,' said the man of flour--'I always light my pipe with a burning glass. Won't that serve your turn? So there she sits, asleep, and my Phoebe sits and looks at her.' 'I've something else that will serve my turn,' said the hunter applying to his gun. 'But stay--I do not care to see any more fire to-day than is necessary.'--And drawing his work off to a safe place, he went on to kindle tinder and make a nice little fire.--'Haven't you learned how to make bread yet, Mr. Miller?' 'Not a bit!' said he laughing. 'And when you've got a wife and four daughters you won't do much fancy cookig neither, I guess. But there's Phoebe--' 'A mistake, Mr. Miller,' said the fancy cook. 'Best always to be independent of your wife--and of everything else.' And impaling his bird on a sharp splinter he stuck it up before the fire, to the great interest and amusement of the miller. Another spectator also wandered out there, and she was presently sent back to the mill. 'Miss Hazel,' said Mrs. Saddler, coming to the 'divan' where the young lady and her guardian were both sitting,--'Mr. Rollo says, ma'am, are you ready for him to come in?' 'I am awake, if that is what he means.' 'What do you mean, Mrs. Saddler?' 'If you please, sir, I am sure I don't know what I mean,--but that's a very strange gentleman, Miss Kennedy. There he's gone and shot a robin--at least, I suppose it was him for I don't know who else should have done it-- and his gun's standing by-- and then he's gone and picked it ma'am--picked the feathers off, and they 're lyin' all round; and then he washed it in the lake, and he was hard to suit, for he walked a good way up the lake before he found a place where he _would_ wash it; and now he's made a fire and stuck up the bird and roasted it; and why he didn't get me or Miss Miller to do it I don't comprehend. And he's got plates and things, ma'am, and salt, ma'am, and bread; and that's what _he_ means, sir; and he want's to know if you're ready. The bird's all done.' Wych Hazel looked anything but ready. She was very young in the world's ways, very new to her own popularity, and somehow Mrs. Saddler's story touched her sensitiveness. The shy, shrinking colour and look told of what at six years old would have made her hide her face under her mother's apron. No such refuge being at hand, however, and she obliged to face the world for herself, as soon as she had despatched a very dignified message to Mr. Rollo, the young lady's feeling sought relief in irritation. 'I suppose _I_ am not to blame this time, for making myself conspicuous, sir! Have you given me up as a bad bargain, Mr. Falkirk?' 'It can't be helped, my dear,'--said her guardian somewhat dryly, and soberly too. 'I think however it is rather somebody else who is making himself conspicuous at this time.' He became conspicuous to their vision a minute after, appearing in the mill door-way with a little dish in his hand and attended by Phoebe with other appliances; but nothing mortal could less justify Wych Hazel's sensation of shyness. With the coolness of a traveller, the readiness of a hunter, and the business attention of a cook or a courier, both which offices he had been filling, he went about his arrangements. The single chair that was in the mill was taken from Mr. Falkirk and brought up to do duty as a table, with a board laid upon it. On this board was set the bird, hot and savoury, on its blue-edged dish; another plate with bread and salt, and a glass of water; together with a very original knife and fork, that were probably introduced soon after the savages 'left.' Mrs. Saddler's eyes grew big as she looked; but Rollo and the miller's girl understood each other perfectly and wanted none of her help. Well---- 'Girls blush sometimes because they are alive'--but seeing it could not be helped, as Mr. Falkirk had said, Wych Hazel rallied whatever of her was grown up, and tried to do justice to both the cooking and the compliment. The extreme gravity and propriety of her demeanour were a little suspicious to one who knew her well, and there could be no sort of question as to the prettiest possible curl which now and then betrayed itself at the corners of her mouth; but Miss Kennedy had herself remarkably in hand, and talked as demurely from behind the breast-bone of her robin as if it had been a small mountain ridge. Mr. Falkirk looked on. 'Where did you find that, Rollo?' 'Somewhere within a mile of circuit, sir,' said Rollo, who had taken a position of ease in the mill doorway, half lying on the floor, and looking out on the lake. 'You are a good provider.' 'Might have had fish--if my tackle had not been out of reach. I did manage to pick up a second course, though----Miss Phoebe, I think it is time for the second course----' His action, at least, Phoebe understood, if not his words; for as he sprang up and cleared the board of the relics of the robin, the miller's daughter, looking as if the whole thing was a play, brought out from some crib a large platter of wild strawberries bordered with vine leaves; along with some bowls of very good looking milk. 'Upon my word, Rollo!'--said the other gentleman. 'Ah, that touches you, Mr. Falkirk! You don't deserve it--but you may have some. And I will be generous--Mr. Falkirk, here is a wing of the robin.' 'No, thank you,' said the other, laughing. 'Why these are fine!' 'Is the air fine out of doors, Mr. Rollo?' asked the young lady. 'Nothing can be finer.' 'What you call "strong," sir?' 'Strong as a rose--or as a lark's whistle--or as June sunlight; strong in a gentle way; I don't admire things that are _too_ strong.' 'Things that you think ought to be weak. But I was trying to find out whether your private collation of air could have taken away your appetite.' 'I think not--I haven't inquired after it, but now that you speak of the matter, I think it must have been bread and cheese.' 'And I suppose you tried the strawberries--just to see if they were ripe.' 'No, I didn't, but I will now.' And coming to Wych Hazel's side he proceeded to help her carefully and to put a bowl of milk in suggestive proximity to her right hand; then taking a handful himself he stood up and went on talking to Mr. Falkirk. 'What is your plan of proceeding, sir?' 'I don't know,' said Mr. Falkirk. 'I am puzzled. The coach goes back to-morrow morning to the foot of the mountain; there is no object in our making such a circuit, if we could get on from here,--besides the fact that none of us want to go over the ground again; but to get on from here seems out of the question. 'It seems to me, to stay here is out of the question,' observed Rollo. 'I don't see how to help it--for one night. The only sole vehicle here is Mr. Miller's little wagon, and that will hold but two.' 'So I understand.--Those strawberries are not bad,' he said, appealing to Wych Hazel. 'A very mild form of praise, Mr. Rollo. Harmless and inoffensive--to berries. What will you do, then, Mr. Falkirk? seeing there are five of us.' 'I am in a strait. Could you spend the night here in any tolerable comfort, Wych, do you suppose?' 'I am at a loss to understand your system of arithmetic,' observed Rollo. 'Simple addition. I suppose, sir, I could spend the night here where other human creatures can. And as I shall take Phoebe with me when I go, will you please arrange with her father? I told her she could have what wages she liked.' 'What shall I arrange with her father, Miss Hazel?' 'Why--anything he wants arranged, sir. What the wages shall be.' 'Your scheme of travel may be continued to any extent, Miss Hazel, if you continue to do business on an equally logical plan.' She laughed, a good, honest, merry little laugh, but further direct reply made none. 'That puff of displeasure blows me fairly away!' she said, jumping up and floating off to the mill door like any thistle down, on the tips of her toes. 'Is it possible to make any comfortable arrangement for her at the miller's house?' Mr. Falkirk asked in a low tone. 'Not if she be "true princess," ' said Rollo with a smile. 'There would be more than a few vegetables between Miss Kennedy and comfort.'----He hesitated, and then suddenly asked Wych if she were tired? Certainly her face told of some fatigue, but the busy spirit was unconquered, and she said, 'No--not very much.' 'I am going on to Dr. Maryland's myself--with the miller's horse and wagon, which I engaged provisionally. If Miss Kennedy will trust herself to me--perhaps it would be less wearisome than to stay here; and it would make a jubilee at Dr. Maryland's as you know, sir. I will send the wagon back for you to-morrow, in that case.' 'It is for her to say!' Mr. Falkirk answered, rather gloomily. 'It is a day of adventures, Wych--will you go to meet them, or will you wait for them? There's no escape either way.' He smiled a little at his ward as he spoke. But her eyes spoke back only amazement. 'I shall stay with you, sir, of course.' Clearly Miss Kennedy thought her guardian had taken leave of his senses. 'What if you take the wagon to Dr. Maryland's then, sir; Miss Kennedy can hardly spend the night here. Even a twenty-five mile drive is better.' But Mr. Falkirk had reasons of his own for negativing that plan, and negatived it accordingly. 'Go with me, then,' said Rollo, turning to Wych Hazel. 'I will take care of you!' And he said it with something of the warm smile which had met her before, power and promise together. 'Why, I'm not afraid,' she said, half laughing, yet half shyly too; thinking with herself how strange the day had been. Since until yesterday Mr. Rollo had scarcely paid her ordinary attention; since until then Mr. Falkirk had always been the one to care for her so carefully. She felt oddly alone, standing there by them both, looking out with her great brown eyes steadily into the setting sunshine; and a wistful air of thought-taking replaced the smile. Rollo remarked that there was but one unoccupied bed in the miller's house, and that one, he knew, was laid upon butternuts. Mr. Falkirk had been watching his ward. He drew near, and put her hand upon his arm, looking and speaking with grave tenderness. 'You shall do as you list, my dear; I cannot advise you, for I do not know which would be worse, the fatigue of going or the fatigue of staying. You must judge. Dr. Maryland will receive you as his own child, if you go;--and I will keep you as my own child if you stay,' he added after a second's hesitation. 'Yes, sir--I know--I think I shall stay. I don't think I can go, Mr. Rollo; and as for the butternuts,' she added, recovering her spirits the moment the decision was made, 'any one who likes to sleep on them may! I shall play mouse among the meal bags.' 'Then I will do what I can to get you out of your difficulties to-morrow. I hope the play will not include sleeplessness, which is my idea of a mouse.' He offered his hand, clasped hers, lifted his hat, and was gone. CHAPTER IX. CATS. With the departure of the more stirring member of the company, Miss Wych had subsided; and in that state could feel that she was tired. She sat in the doorway of the mill. It was after sundown; still, bright, sweet, and fair, as after sundown in June can be. The sky all aglow still with cooler lights; in the depth of the hollow the morsel of a lake had a dark shining of its own, like a black diamond, or a green jasper, with the light off. Mrs. Saddler was gone up the hill with Phoebe, to get her share of hospitality. Mr. Falkirk had supped on the remains of the strawberries and milk, and would have nothing more. Guardian and ward were alone. The stillness of Summer air floated down from the tree-tops, and did not stir the lake. 'Wych, how do you like seeking your fortune? I am curious to be informed?' 'Thank you, sir. The finding to-day has gone so far beyond my expectations, that I am willing to rest the pursuit till to- morrow.' 'Fortune and you clasp hands rather roughly at first setting out! But what do you think of the train she has brought with her in these seven days?' 'What train, sir?' 'I asked you what you thought of it. Answer straight like a good child.' 'It's a wonderful train, if it has made a good child of me,' she answered, with a half laugh. 'Do you mean of people, or events, sir?' 'The events are left behind, child; the people follow.' 'Will they?' said Wych Hazel. 'Dr. Maryland and all? Mr. Kingsland might stay behind. Nobody will ever want him.' 'All the rest have your good leave!' said Mr. Falkirk, with an expression--Wych could not tell what sort of an expression, it was so complicated. 'Do you think it is an easy office I have to fill?' he went on. 'Maybe not, sir. I thought you seemed very ready to give it up. I have felt like stray baggage to-day.' 'How do you suppose I am to guard you from so many enemies?' 'Ready to send me round the country, with the first knight- errant that starts up?' said the girl, in an aggrieved voice. 'And if _I_ had proposed such a thing!' 'My dear,' said Mr. Falkirk, 'you would have been perfectly safe at Dr. Maryland's. And much better off than in this old mill. I am not sure but I ought to have made you go.' 'What do you mean by "enemies," just now, Mr. Falkirk?' 'There's an old proverb,' said Mr. Falkirk with a quirl of his lips, 'that "a cat may look at a king." And no doubt it is a queen's liability. But how am I to guard you from the teeth and the claws?' 'My dear sir, very few cats are dangerous. I am not much afraid of being scratched.' 'Have you any idea how many of your grimalkins are coming to Chickaree this Summer?' 'No, sir. The more the better; for then they will have full occupation for their claws without me.' 'Ah, my dear,' said Mr. Falkirk, 'don't you know that the cat gets within springing distance before the claws are shown?' 'Yes, sir; but you are presupposing a stationary mouse. Pray, how many fierce, soft-pawed, sharp-clawed monsters preside over your ideas at present?' 'Six or seven,' said Mr. Falkirk with the utmost gravity. 'Fortune has come upon you suddenly, Wych.' It was very pretty, the way she laughed and flushed. 'They are not all troubled with whiskers, sir--my kind medical friend, for instance.' 'You think so! Pray, in your judgment, what is he, then?' 'Not a cat, sir, and yet no lion. Mr. Rollo calls him a "specimen." ' 'Of what?' (dryly enough.) 'I rebuked him for the expression, sir, but did not inquire its meaning.' 'Do you suppose that the English traveller, Mr. Shenstone, will come to Chickaree this Summer for the purpose of inspecting the Morton manufactories?' 'Let us 'ope not, sir. Mr. Morton will, for his home is just there. He told me so.' 'And young Nightingale has it in his mind to spend a good deal of the Summer at his aunt's, Mrs. Lasalle's; for he told me so. I saw him in town.' 'Mr. Falkirk, you are not a bit like yourself to-day. Are all men cats, sir?' (very gravely.) 'My dear,' said Mr. Falkirk, 'most men are, when they see a Chickaree mouse in their path!' 'Poor little me!' said Wych Hazel, laughing. She was silent a minute, then went cheerfully on. 'I know, Mr. Falkirk, I shall depend upon you! We're in a fairy tale, you remember, sir, and you must be the three dogs.' 'Will you trust me, Wych, when I take such a shape to your eyes?' 'Do you remember?' said she, not heeding. 'The first one with eyes like saucers, looking--so! And the next with eyes like mill wheels--so! And the next, with eyes like the full moon!--' At which point Miss Hazel's own eyes were worth looking at. 'You do not answer me, I observe. Never mind. A woman's understanding, I have frequently observed, develops like a prophecy.' The night in the mill was better, on the whole, than it promised. No sound awoke Wych Hazel, till little messengers of light came stealing through every crack and knot hole of the mill, and a many-toed Dorking near by had six times proclaimed himself the first cock in creation, let the other be who he would! To open her eyes was to be awake, with Wych Hazel; and softly she stepped along the floor and out on the dewy path to the lake side; and there stood splashing her hands in the water and the water over her face, with intense satisfaction. The lake was perfectly still, disturbed only by the dip of a king- fisher or the spring of a trout. She stood there musing over the last day and the last week, starting various profound questions, but not stopping to run them down,--then went meandering back to the mill again. On her way she came to a spot in the grass where there was a sprinkling of robin's feathers. Wych Hazel stopped short looking at them, smiling to herself, then suddenly stopped and chose out three or four; and went back with quick steps to the mill. Bread and tea were had in the open air, with the seasoning of the June morning. The stage coach rumbled off by the road it had come, bearing with it the two countrywomen, and leaving a pile of baggage for Chickaree. The miller came down and set his mill agoing, excusing himself to his guests by saying that there was a good lot of corn to be ground and the people would be along for it. So the mill became no longer a place of rest, and Miss Hazel and her guardian were driven out into the woods by the rumble and dust and jar of machinery. Do what they would, it was a long morning to twelve o'clock; when the mill ceased its rumble and the miller went home to his dinner, and the weary and warm loiterers came back to the shade of the mill floor. Then the sound of wheels was heard at last; the first that had broken the solitude that day; and presently at the mill door Rollo presented himself, looking as if sunshine agreed with him. He shook hands with Mr. Falkirk, but gave Wych Hazel his old stately salutation. 'I could not come sooner,' he said. 'I did my best; but it is thirty miles instead of twenty-five. How was the night?' 'Sadly oblivious and uneventful!' 'Mine wasn't! for I was getting dinner for you in my dreams all night long. Being dependent on other people's resources, you see--However, I had a good little friend to help me!' 'What carriage have you brought for us, Rollo?' 'Dr. Maryland's rockaway, sir; and the miller's wagon for the trunks. To get anything else would have made much more delay. Is my friend Phoebe here?' 'She will be soon. It is dinner-time in the mill. What do you want, Mr. Rollo?' 'Three words and a little assistance.' He went off, and in a little while was back again, accompanied by Phoebe and plates and glasses; and the two went on to set forth the dinner, which he drew from a great basket that had come in the rockaway. All this was done, and order given at the same time to other matters, with the light-handed promptitude and readiness of the bird-roasting of yesterday; Rollo assuring Wych Hazel between whiles that travelling was a very good thing, if you took enough of it. 'Thirty miles this morning, and thirty last night; and how many yesterday morning?--A hundred, I should say, by my measurement.' 'Rollo!--What a dinner you have brought us!' said Mr. Falkirk, who maintained a quiet and passive behaviour. 'You cannot set off for some hours yet, sir--the horses must have rest. I believe--but am not sure--that somebody got up very early this morning to make that pie. I told them I had left some friends in distress; and Primrose and I--did what we could. I realized this morning what must be the position of a Commissary General on a rapid march.' The provision on the board called for no excuses. Rollo served everybody, even Mrs. Saddler, and afterwards dispensed strawberries of much larger growth than those of the day before. He was the impersonation of gay activity as long as there was anything to do; and then he subsided into ease- taking. The smoke of a cigar did not indeed offend Miss Kennedy's mill-door; but in a luxurious position under a tree at some distance the sometime smoker settled himself with his sketch-book, and seemed to be comfortably busy at play, till it was time for moving. Wych Hazel had been in an altogether quiet mood since the arrival of the rockaway. In that mood she had watched the unpacking of the basket, in that mood she had eaten her dinner. It was strange, even to herself, the sort of quietus Mr. Rollo was to her. Not feeling free to play with him, by no means disposed to play before him, she had ventured to offer her services no further than by asking him what he wanted; then left him to himself; oddly conscious all the while, that if it had been any other one of her new feline friends, she would have put her little hand into the business and the basket with pleasant effect. So she sat still and watched him,--giving a bit of a smile now and then indeed to his direct remarks, but as often only a fuller look of the brown eyes. Since the gentleman had been under the tree she had been idly busy with her own thoughts, having sketched herself tired in the morning. "Prim" she recognized at once--Dr. Maryland's sister,--she had heard him speak of her. Would she be a friend? any one to whom these many thoughts might come out? So Wych Hazel sat, gazing out upon the lengthening shadows, leaning her head somewhat wearily in her hand, wishing the journey over and herself on her own vantage ground at Chickaree. It would be such a help to be mistress of the house!--for these last two days she had been nothing but a brown parcel, marked "fragile"--"with care." CHAPTER X. CHICKAREE. Rollo had driven the rockaway down and was going to drive back. He put Wych Hazel into the carriage, recommending to her to lean back in the corner and go to sleep. Phoebe was given the place beside her; Mr. Falkirk mounted to the front seat; and off they drove. It was about four o'clock of a fine June day, and the air was good to breathe; but the way was nothing extraordinary. A pleasant country, nothing more; easy roads for an hour, then heavier travelling. The afternoon wore on; the miles were plodded over; as the sun was dipping towards the western horizon they came into scenery of a new quality. At once more wild and more dressed; the ground bolder and more rocky in parts, but between filled with gentler indications. The rockaway drew up. The driver looked back into the carriage, while the other gentleman got down. 'Miss Kennedy, if you will change places with Mr. Falkirk now you will be rewarded. I have something here a great deal better than that book.' 'I have not been reading--I have been watching for landmarks for some time,' she said, as she made the change; 'but I think I can never have gone to Chickaree by this road.' The change was great. However fair it had looked from withinside, as soon as she got out on the front seat Wych Hazel found that a flood of bright, slant sunbeams were searching out all the beauty there was in the land, and winning it into view. It was one of those illuminated hours, that are to the common day as an old painted and jewelled missal to an ordinary black letter. 'Is it better than your book?' said the charioteer, whose reins were clearly only play to him, and who was much more occupied with his companion. She glanced round at him, with the very June evening in her eyes, dews and sunbeams and all. 'Better than most of the books that ever were written, I suppose. But the book was not bad, Mr. Rollo.' 'What book was it? to be mentioned in the connection.' ' "I Promessi Sposi." ' 'Unknown to me. Give me an idea of it--while we are getting up this hill--there'll be something else to talk of afterwards.' 'Two people are betrothed, and proceed to get into all manner of difficulties. That is the principal idea so far. I haven't come to the turn of the story, which takes the thread out of its tangle.' 'A very stupid idea! Yet you said the book was not a bad book?' he said, looking gravely round upon her. 'No, indeed. And the idea is not stupid, in the book I mean, because the people could not help themselves, and so you get interested for them.' 'Do you get interested in people who cannot help themselves?' 'Yes, I think so--always,--people who _cannot_ in the impossible sense. Not those who don't know or wont try. But my words did not mean just that. I should have said, help _it_--help being in difficulties.' 'I believe people can get out of difficulties,' said Rollo. 'What was the matter with these?' 'O the difficulties were piled on their heads by other people. Lucia was a peasant, but she was "si bella" that one of the grandees wanted to get her away from Renzo.' 'I don't see the difficulties yet. What next?' 'No, of course you don't!' said Wych, warming in defense of her book. 'But if some Don Rodrigo forbade somebody to marry _you_--and then sent a party to run away with your bride--so that she had to go into a convent and you wander round the world in ill humour--I daresay your clearness of vision would improve.' 'I dare say it would,' said Rollo, passing a hand over his eyes,--'I think it would have to grow worse before all those events could happen! But on the highest round of that ladder of impossibilities, I think I should see my way into the convent,--and escape the ill humour.' 'But Lucia would not be shut up from you, but from the grandee. It would only make matters worse to bring her out.' 'Not for me,' said Rollo. 'It might for the book, because, as you say, then the interest would be gone. Do you think the people in a book are real people?--while you are reading it?' 'Not quite--they might have been real. I don't feel just as if I should if I knew they were.' 'In that case the interest would be less?' he said, with a laughing look. 'Yes--or at least different. There are so many things to qualify your interest in real living people.' 'Yes. For instance in real life the people who cannot help being in difficulties never interest me as much as the people who get out of them; and so I think most novels are stupid, because the men and women are all real to me. There!' he said, pulling up as they reached the top of an ascent, 'there are no difficulties in your way here. What do you think of that?' The hill-top gave a wide view over a rich, cultivated, inhabited country; its beauty was in the wide, generous eye- view and the painter's colours that decked it; for which, broken ground in front and distant low hills gave play to the slant sunbeams. Warm, rich, inviting, looked every inch of those wide-spread square miles. 'Do you know where you are?' said he in an enjoying tone. 'I suppose near home,--but it's not familiar yet.' 'No, you are some miles from home. Over there to the west, lies Dr. Maryland's--but you can't see it in this light. It's two miles away. Do you see, further to the north, standing high on a hill, a white house-front that catches the sun?' 'Yes.' 'Mme. Lasalle's, Moscheloo. It's a pretty place--nothing like Chickaree. When we reach the next turning you will catch a glimpse of Crocus in the other direction--do you know what Crocus is?' 'O yes, the village. Our house was brown, I remember that,--and as you go up the hill Mr. Falkirk's cottage is just by the roadside. Did you tell them to leave Mrs. Saddler there?' 'She will tell them herself, I fancy. Crocus is the place where you will be expected to buy sugar and spice. It is some four miles from Chickaree on that side, and we are about five miles from it on this;' and as he spoke he set the horses in motion. 'I sent on a rescript to Mrs. Bywank, bidding her on her peril to be in order to receive you this evening. Mrs. Bywank and I are old acquaintances,' he said, looking at Wych Hazel. 'Dear Mrs. Bywank! how good she used to be. I haven't seen her but once since I left home. I'm sure you have a great many worse acquaintances, Mr. Rollo.' 'I am at a loss to understand how you can be sure of that. But I have some better.--Miss Kennedy, I want you to give me a boon. Say you will do it.' 'I'll hear it first.' 'Will you? that's fair, I suppose; but if we were better friends, I should not be satisfied without a blank check put into my hands for me to fill up. However,--as I am not to have that honour on the present occasion I will explain. Let me be the one to introduce you, some day, to one of your neighbours, whom you do not remember, because she came here since you went away. Will you?' 'Why yes, of course, if you wish it--only I will not be responsible for any accidental introduction that may take place first.' 'I will,' said Rollo. 'Then it is a bargain? I shall ask half a day's excursion for it.' 'That is as much of a supplement as a woman's postscript, Mr. Rollo. However, I suppose it is safe to let you ask what you like.' 'You give it to me?' 'Maybe.' 'Then it is a bargain,' said he, smiling. 'Here is my hand upon it.' She laughed, looked round at him rather wonderingly, but gave her hand, remarking: 'But you know I have the right to change my mind three times.' There is a curious language in the touch of hands, saying often inexplicably what the coarser medium of words would be powerless to say; revealing things not meant to be discovered; and also conveying sweeter, finer, more intimate touches of feeling and mood than tongue could tell if it tried. Wych Hazel remembered this clasp of her hand, and felt it as often as she remembered it. There was nothing sentimental; it was only a frank clasp, in which her hand for a moment was not her own; and though the clasp did not linger, for that second's continuance it gave her an indescribable impression, she could hardly have told of what. It was not merely the gentleness; she could not separate from that the notion of possession, and of both as being in the mind, to which the hand was an index. But such a thought passes as it comes. Something else in those five minutes brought the colour flitting about her face, coming and going as if ashamed of itself; but with it all she was intensely amused; _she_ was not sentimental, nor even serious, and the girlish light heart danced a _pas seul_ to such a medley of tunes that it was a wonder how she could keep step with them all. 'What do you expect to see at Chickaree?' 'Birds, trees, and horses, and--Mr. Falkirk, didn't you say there would be cats?' 'Let him alone--he is deep in your book,' said Rollo, as Mr. Falkirk made some astonished response. "I meant, what do you remember of the place? we are almost at the gate.' 'I'll tell you--nothing yet. Ah!'-- Through some lapse in the dense woodland there gleamed upon them as they swept on, the top of an old tower where the sunbeams lay at rest; and from the top, its white staff glittering with light, floated the heavy folds of a deep blue flag, not at rest there, but curling and waving and shaking out their white device, which was however too far off to be distinguished. She had said she would tell him, but she never spoke; after that one little cry, so full of tears and laughter, he heard nothing but one or two sobs, low and choked down. Now the lodge, nestling like an acorn under a great oak tree, came in sight first, then the massive piers of the gate. The gate was wide open, but while the little undergrowth of children started up and took possession of window and door and roadside, the gate was held by the head of the house, a sturdy, middle aged American. Wych Hazel had leaned out, watching the children; but as the carriage turned through the gateway, and she saw this man, standing there uncovered, caught the working of his brown weatherbeaten face, she bowed her head indeed, in answer to his low salutation, but then dropped her face in her hands in a perfect passion of weeping. It came and went like a Summer storm, and again she was looking intently. Now past Mr. Falkirk's white domicile, where her glittering eyes flashed round upon him the "welcome home" which her lips spoke but unsteadily,--then on, on, up the hill, the thick trees hiding the sunset and brushing the carriage with leafy hands,--it seemed to Mr. Rollo that still as the very fingers of his companion were, he could almost feel the bound of her spirit. Then out on a little platform of the road--and there, he did not know why she leaned forward so eagerly, till he saw across the dell the shining of white marble. He watched her, but drove on without making the least call upon her attention. The views opened and softened as they drew near the house; the trees here had been more thinned out, and were by consequence larger; the carriage passed from one great shadow to another, with the thrushes ringing out their clear music and the wild roses breathing upon the evening air. From out the forest came wafts of dark dewy coolness, overhead the clouds revelled in splendour. Up still the horses went, ever ascending, but slowly, for the ascent was steep. The delay, the length of the drive tired her,--she sat up again--she had been quietly leaning back; once or twice her hand went up with a quick movement to drive back the feeling that was passing limits; then gaining level ground once more, the horses sprang forward, and in the failing twilight they swept round before the house. Except the tower, it was but two stories high, the front stretching along, with wide low steps running from end to end. In unmatched glee Dingee stood on the carriage way showing his teeth,--on the steps, striving in vain to clear her eyes so that she might see, was Mrs. Bywank; her kindly figure, which each succeeding year had gently developed, robed in her state dress of black silk. Taking advantage of her outside position,--regardless of steps as of wheels,--Wych Hazel vanished from the carriage, it was hard to say how. As difficult as it would have been to guess by what witchcraft a person or Mr. Bywank's proportions could be spirited through the doorway--out of sight--in a twinkling of time; yet it was done, and the steps were empty. The hill at Chickaree was steepest on the side towards the west, and down that slope an opening had been cut through the trees--a sort of pathway for the sunbeams. The direct rays were gone, and only the warm sky glow brightened the hall door, when the young mistress of the place once more appeared. She stood still a moment and went back again; and then came Dingee. 'Miss Hazel say, sar, room's ready and supper won't be long. Whar Mass Rollo?' 'I suppose he'll be here directly.' Mr. Falkirk did not go into the house immediately; he stood with folded arms waiting, or watching the fading red glow of the western sky. In about ten minutes the tramp of a horse's feet heralded the coming of Mr. Rollo, who appeared from the corner or the house, mounted on an old grey cob, who switched his tail and moved his ears as if he thought going out at that time of day a peculiar proceeding. Dingee staid the rider with the delivery of his young lady's message. 'I am afraid supper's more than ready somewhere else. I can't stay, my friend--my thanks to the lady.' And letting fall on the little dark figure who stood at his stirrup, a gold piece and a smile, Rollo passed him, bent a moment to speak to Mr. Falkirk, and brought the grey cob's ideas to a head by stepping him off at a good pace. The room was large, opening by glass doors upon a wilderness of grass, trees and flowers. At every corner glass cupboards showed a stock of rare old china; a long sideboard was brilliant and splendid with old silver. Dark cabinet ware furnished but not encumbered the room; in the centre a table looked all of hospitality and welcome that a table can. There was a great store of old fashioned elegance and comfort in Wych Hazel's home; no doubt of it; of old-fashioned state too, and old-time respectability; to which numberless old-time witnesses stood testifying on every hand, from the teapot, the fashion of which was a hundred years ancient, to the uncouth brass andirons in the fireplace. Mr. Falkirk came in as one to whom it was all very wonted and well known. The candles were not lit; a soft, ruddy light from the west reddened the great mirror over the fireplace and gave back the silver sideboard in it. Not till the clear notes of a bugle, the Chickaree tea- bell, had wound about the old house awakening sweet echoes, did Wych Hazel make her appearance. 'Supper mos' as good hot as de weather,' remarked Dingee. 'Mas Rollo, he say he break his heart dat his profess'nal duties tears him 'way.' 'Dingee, go down stairs,' said Miss Hazel turning upon him,-- 'and when you tell stories about Mr. Rollo tell them to himself, and not to me. Will you come to tea, sir?' CHAPTER XI. VIXEN. The birds were taken by surprise next morning. Long before Mr. Falkirk was up, before the house was fairly astir with servants, there was a new voice in their concert; one almost as busy and musical as their own. Reo Hartshorne--the sturdy gardener and lodge-keeper--thought so, listening with wonder to hear what a change it made. Wych Hazel had found him out planting flowers for her, and with his hand taken in both hers had finished the half-begun recognition of last night. Now she stood watching him as he plied his spade, refreshing his labour with a very streamlet of talk, flitting round him and plucking flowers like a humming-bird supplied with fingers. The servants passing to and fro about their work smiled to each other; Mrs. Bywank came by turns to the door to catch a look or a word; Reo himself lifted his brown hand and made believe it was to brush away the perspiration. Another observer who had come upon the scene, observed it very passively--a girl, a small girl, in the dress of the poor, and with the dull eyes of observance which often mark the children of the poor. They expressed nothing, but that they looked. 'Good morning, child,' said Miss Hazel. 'Do you want me to give you a bunch of flowers?' 'No.' 'What then?' 'Mammy sent me to see if the lady was come.' 'Who is mammy? and what does _she_ want?' said Wych Hazel, cutting more rosebuds and dropping them into her apron. 'Mammy wants to see the lady.' 'Well, is she coming to see me?' 'She can't come.' 'Why not?'--a quick shower of laughter and dew-drops, called down by a fruitless spring after a spray of white roses. 'She lays abed,' said the child, after the shower was over. 'O, is she sick?' with a sudden gravity. 'Then I will come and see her. Where does she live?' The child went away as soon as sure arrangements were made for the fulfilment of the promise. Wych Hazel's first visitor! one of the two classes sure to find her out with no delay. And Miss Kennedy was about as well versed in the one as in the other. The summons came to her to attend the breakfast room. Mr. Falkirk was there, fixed in an easy chair and pamphlet; the morning stir had not reached him. 'How long do we remain at Chickaree?' he asked, as he buttered his muffin. 'Why, dear Mr. Falkirk, you might as well ask me how long gentlemen will wear their present becoming style of head- dress! I don't know.' 'I gather that it would not be safe to order post-horses for departure. The question remains: would it be safe to order other horses for the stable at home? One or the other thing it is absolutely necessary to do.' 'The other horses, sir, by all means. And especially my pony carriage.' 'I shall have to have one built to order,' remarked Mr. Falkirk, after the pause of half an egg. 'And have it lined with blue--to set me off.' 'With a dickey behind--to set me on.' 'No, indeed! I'll have Dingee for an outrider, and then we'll be a complete set of Brownies. You must order quick-footed horses for me, Mr. Falkirk--I may be reduced to the fate of the Calmuck girls.' A single dark flash was in Mr. Falkirk's glance; but he only said: 'Who is to have the first race, my dear?' 'Mr. Falkirk, you should rather be anxious as to who will have the last. But get me a fast horse, sir, and let me practise'-- and flitting away from the table and about the room Miss Hazel sang-- ' "The lady stude on the castle wa', "Beheld baith date and down; "Then she was ware of a host of men "Came ryding towards the town. "O see ye not, my merry men a', "O see ye not what I see? "Methinks I see a host of men: "I marvel wha' they be." ' And thereupon, finding she had suddenly come rather close to the subject, Miss Hazel dashed out of the room. The day proved warm. The air, losing its morning dew and freshness, moved listlessly about among the leaves; the sky looked glassy; the cattle stood panting in the shade, or mused, ankle deep, in the brooks; only the birds were stirring. With thought and action as elastic as theirs, the young mistress of Chickaree prepared for her visit to the poor woman; afraid neither of the hot sunbeams nor of certain white undulations of cloud that just broke the line of the western horizon. Mr. Falkirk had walked down to his cottage; there was no one to counsel or hinder. And over the horses there was small consultation needed; the only two nags found being a young vixen of a black colt, and an intensely sedate horse of no particular colour which Mrs. Bywank was accustomed to drive to church. Relinquishing this respectable creature to Dingee, Wych Hazel perched herself upon Vixen and set forth; walking the colt now to keep by her little guide, but promising herself a good trot on the way home. The child had come to show her the way, and went in a shuffling amble by the side of the colt's black legs. For a good while they kept the road which had been travelled yesterday; at last turned off to another which presently became pleasantly shady. Woods closed it in, made it rather lonely in fact, but nobody thought now of anything but the grateful change. There were clouds which might hide the sun by and by, but just now he was powerful and they were only lifting their white heads stealthily in the west. At a rough stile, beyond which a foot track led deeper into the wood, the girl stopped. 'It's in here,' she said. It was very clear that Vixen could not cross the stile. So her young rider dismounted and looping up the heavy folds of her riding skirt as best she might, disappeared from the eyes of Dingee among the trees. Her dress was a pretty enough dress after all, for though the skirts were dark and heavy, the white dimity jacket was all airiness and ruffles; and once fairly in the shade of the trees, Wych Hazel let her riding hat fall back and rest on her shoulders in very childish fashion indeed. Her little guide trotted on before her; till they saw the house they had come for. It was a place of shiftless poverty; of need, no doubt, but not of industry; Wych Hazel was humbly begged to supply deficiencies which ought not to have been. Inexperienced as she was, she scarcely understood it. Nevertheless she was glad when the visit was over and she could step out of the door again. The clouds had not hid the sun yet, and she went lightly on through the trees, singing to herself according to custom, till she was near the stile; then she was 'ware' of somebody approaching and the singing ceased. The glance which showed her a stranger revealed also what made her glance again as they drew nearer; it was a person of uncommonly good exterior and fine bearing. A third glance would not have been given, but that, as they came close, Wych Hazel received the homage of a very profound and courteous salutation, and the gentleman, presenting a branch of white roses, said with sufficient deference, 'Earth, must offer tribute!--and cannot, without hands--' And then passed swiftly on. Amused, startled, Wych Hazel also quickened her step; wondering to herself what sort of country she had fallen upon. It was ridiculously like a fairy tale, this whole afternoon's work. The little barefooted guide, the sick woman with her 'young goodness' and 'your ladyship,' now this upstarting knight. There were the roses in her hand, too, as much like the famed spray gathered by the merchant in 'Beauty and the Beast,' as mortal roses could be! But the adventure was not over. As she reached the stile she heard the same voice beside her again. The stranger held her riding whip, which Wych Hazel had left behind her at the cottage; the little girl had met him, bringing it, he said. And then he went on--'It is impossible not to know that I am speaking to Miss Kennedy. I am a stranger in the country, but my aunt, Mme. Lasalle, is well known to Mr. Falkirk. Will Miss Kennedy allow me to assist her in remounting?' It was gracefully said, with quietly modulated tones that belong only to a high grade of society, and the speaker had a handsome face and good presence. Nevertheless, Wych Hazel had no mind to be 'remounted' by any one, and was very near saying as much; for in her, 'temperament' retarded the progress of conventionalism sadly. As it was, she gave him a hesitating assent, and received his proffered assistance. Then lifting his hat, he stood while she passed on. It was time to ride, for the sky was dark with clouds, the air breathless, and sharp growls of thunder spoke in the distance, at every one of which Vixen made an uneasy motion of ears and head, to show what she would do when they came nearer. 'We must ride for it, Dingee,'--Miss Hazel said to her dark attendant. 'Reckon we'll get it, too, Miss Hazel,' was Dingee's reply, and a heavy drop or two said 'yes, it is coming.' Wych Hazel laughed at him, cantering along on her black pony like a brown sprite, the rising wind making free with her hair and hat ribbands, the rose spray made fast for her buttonhole. But as she dashed out of the woods upon a tract of open country, the distance before her was one sheet of grey rain and mist, and a near peal of thunder that almost took Vixen off her feet, showed what it would be to face such a storm, so mounted. And now the raindrops began to patter near at hand. But where to go? She had passed no place of refuge in the woodland, and before her the storm hid every thing from sight. So, after a second's thought, Wych Hazel turned and flew down a side road a half a mile to the very door of a low stone house, the first she had seen, sprang off her frightened pony, and darted into the open hall door, leaving Dingee to find shelter for himself and his charge. Then she began to wonder where she was, and what the people would say to her; at first she had been only glad to get off Vixen's back, the pony had jumped and reared at such a rate for the last five minutes. In the hall, which at a glance she saw was square and wide, and felt was flagged with stone, stood a large packing case; and about it and so busy with it that for a second they did not observe her, were a girl and young man, the latter knocking off boards and drawing out nails with his hammer, while the other hovered over the work and watched it absorbedly. In a moment more they both looked up. The hammer went down and with a face of illumination Rollo came forward. 'Why here she is!' he exclaimed gayly, 'dropped into our hands! and as wet as if she had fallen from the clouds literally. Here Rosy, carry off this lady to your domains. This is Primrose Maryland, Miss Kennedy.' A primrose she evidently was, sweet and good and fresh like one, with something of a flower's gravity, too. That could be seen at a glance; also that she was rather a little person, though full and plump in figure, and hardly pretty, at least in contrast with her brilliant neighbour. Wych Hazel's first words were of unbounded surprise. 'From what possible part of the clouds did you fall, Mr. Rollo!'--then with a blush and a look of apology to Miss Maryland, 'I ought to excuse myself; I didn't know where I was coming. And my horse quite refused to stand upon more than two feet at once, I found the storm uncomfortable--and so jumped off and ran in. It's the fault of your door for being open, Miss Maryland!' 'I am very glad,' said Primrose simply. 'The door stood open because it was so hot. We were going to see you this afternoon but the storm hindered us. Now, will you come up-stairs and get on something dry?' CHAPTER XII. AT DR. MARYLAND'S. They went up a low staircase and along a gallery to Primrose's room. Large and low, as nice as wax, and as plain. How unlike any room at Chickaree, Wych Hazel could not help feeling, while its little mistress was opening cupboards and drawers, and getting out the neatest and whitest of cambric jackets and ruffles and petticoats, and bringing forth all accommodations of combs and brushes. Meanwhile Wych Hazel could not help seeing some of the tokens about the place that told what kind of life was lived there. Its spotlessly neat and orderly condition was one token; but there were signs of business. Work-baskets, with what seemed fulness of work, were about the room; books, not in great numbers, but lying in little business piles, with business covers and the marks of use. Papers were on one table by the window, with pen and ink and pencil and cards. And everywhere a simplicity that showed no atom of needless expenditure. Very unlike Chickaree? Primrose the while was neat-handedly helping to array her guest in fresh apparel. She had pretty little hands, and they were quick and skilful; and as she stooped to try on a slipper or manage a fastening, Wych Hazel had a view of a beautiful head of fair brown hair, in quiet arrangement that did not show all its beauty; and when from time to time the eyes were lifted, she saw that they were very good eyes; as reposeful as a mountain tarn, and as deep too, where lay thought shadows as well as sunshine. They were shining eyes now, with secret admiration and pleasure and good will and eager interest. 'Are you come to stay a good while at Chickaree? I hope you will.' 'Maybe--perhaps. O my boots are not wet, Miss Maryland,--and I don't think I caught enough raindrops to hurt. How kind you are!--And how well your brother describes you.' 'Arthur?--I wish he would not describe me. Chickaree is such a beautiful place, I should think one might like to stay there. I have been hoping about it, ever since I heard you were coming. Father knows Mr. Falkirk, and used to know your father and mother, so well, that I have almost felt as if I knew you,--till I saw you.' 'And you don't feel so now?' with a shade of disappointment. 'No,' said Primrose laughing. 'But I am sure I shall very soon, if you will let me. I have wished for it so much! There, won't that do? It is lucky I had some of Prue's things here-- mine are too short. Prue is my sister. It looks very nice, I think.' 'O yes,' her guest answered, taking up her bunch of roses, fresh with the rain. 'Thank you very much! But why do you say that about your brother?' 'Arthur?--O--descriptions never tell the truth.' 'I am sure he did,' said Wych Hazel. 'And I know I would give anything to have anybody to talk so about me.' Primrose returned a somewhat earnest and wondering look at her new friend; then took her hand to lead her down stairs. In the hall they found Mr. Rollo; not by his packing case exactly, for he had taken that to pieces, and the contents stood fair to view; a very handsome new sewing machine. Surrounded with bits of board and litter, he stood examining the works and removing dust and bits of paper and string. Over the litter sprang to his side Primrose and laid her hand silently in his, and with downcast eyes stood still looking at the machine. The bright eyes under their lids spoke as much joy as Rosy's face often showed; yet she was perfectly still. 'Well?' said Rollo, squeezing the little hand and looking laughingly down at her. 'You are so good!' 'You don't think it,' said he. 'You know better; and as you always speak perfect truth, I am surprised to hear you.' 'You are good to me,' said Primrose in a low tone. 'I should be a pleasant fellow if I wasn't,' said he stooping to kiss her, at which the flush of pleasure on Rosy's cheek deepened; 'but in the meantime it is proper we should look after the comfort of our prisoner.' Then stepping across the litter to where Wych Hazel stood, he went on--'You know, of course, that you stand in that relation to us, Miss Kennedy? Primrose is turnkey, and I am governor. Would you like to see the inside of the jail?' The 'prisoner' had stood still in grave wonderment at people and things generally; especially at the footing Mr. Rollo seemed to have in this house. 'Governor to a steam engine is an easier post,' she said, throwing off her thoughts. 'I have been that'--he said, as he led her into a room on the right of the hall. This room took in the whole depth of the house, having windows on three sides; low, deep windows, looking green, for the blinds were drawn together. The ceiling was low, too; and from floor to ceiling, everywhere except where a door or window broke the space, the walls were lined with books. There was here no more than up stairs evidence of needless money outlay; the furniture was chintz covered, the table-covers were plain. But easy chairs were plenty; the tables bore writing-materials and drawing-materials and sewing-materials; and books lay about, open from late handling; and a portfolio of engravings stood in a corner. Rollo put his charge in an easy chair, and then went from window to window throwing open the blinds. The windows opened upon green things, trees and flowers and vines; the air came in fresher; the rain was softly falling fast and thick, and yet the pale light cheered up the whole place wonderfully. 'Your windows are all shut, Rosy!' said Rollo as he went from one to the other--'is that the way you live? You must keep them open now I am come home!' 'It was so hot,'--said the voice of Rosy from the hall. 'Hot? that is the very reason. What are you about? Rosy!--' He went to the door, and then from where she sat Wych Hazel could see the prompt handling which Rosy's endeavours to put away the disorder received. She was taken off from picking up nails, and dismissed into the library; while Rollo himself set diligently about gathering together his boards and rubbish. Primrose came in smiling. 'It is better with the windows open,' she said; 'but I was so busy this morning I believe I forgot. And father never comes into this room till evening. How it rains! I am so glad!' And taking a piece of work from a basket, she placed herself near Wych Hazel and began to sew. It was a pretty home picture, such as Wych Hazel--in her school life and ward life-- had seen few. Just why it made her feel quiet she could not have told. Yet the brown eyes went somewhat gravely from Primrose at her work to the hall where Rollo felt so much at home--then round the room and towards the window, watching the rain. 'Won't you give me some work?' she asked suddenly. 'O talk!' said Primrose, looking up. 'Don't work.' 'It takes more than work to stop my mouth,' said Wych Hazel, 'Ah, I can work, though you don't believe it, Miss Rosy; do please give me that ruffle--or a handkerchief,--don't you want some marked? I can embroider like any German.' Primrose doubted her powers of sewing and talking both at once; but finally supplied her with an immense white cravat to hem, destined for the comfort of Dr. Maryland's throat; and working and chatting did go on very steadily for some time thereafter, both girls being intent on each other at least, if not on the hemming, till Rollo came back. He interrupted the course of things. 'Now,' said Rollo, 'I am going to ask you first, Primrose--are you setting about to make Miss Kennedy as busy as yourself?' 'I wish I could, you know,' said Primrose, half smiling, half wistfully. 'And I want to know from you, Miss Kennedy, where Mr. Falkirk is this afternoon?' 'In the depths of a nap, I suppose. Is the rain slackening, Mr. Rollo?' 'What do you think?'--as with a fresher puff of wind the rush of the raindrops to the earth seemed to be more hurried and furious. Wych Hazel listened, but did not speak her thoughts. Rollo considered her a little, and then drew up the portfolio stand and began to undo the fastenings of the portfolio. 'Do you like this sort of thing?' 'Very much. O I don't care a great deal about them as engravings, I suppose; but I like to study the faces and puzzle over the lives.' 'This collection is nothing remarkable as a collection--but it may serve your purpose, perhaps.' He set up a large, rather coarse print of Fortitude, by Sir Joshua Reynolds. The figure stands erect, armed with a helmet and plume, one hand on her hip, the other touching just the tip of one finger to a broken column by her side. At her feet a couchant lion. 'Looking at that, not as an engraving, which wouldn't be profitable, what do you see?' 'I was trying to think whether she was Mr. Falkirk's ideal,' said Wych Hazel, after a somewhat prolonged study of the engraving. 'She is not mine.' 'Why not?' 'Yes, she isn't mine,' said Primrose. 'Why not, Miss Kennedy?' 'Mr. Falkirk always says, "My dear, be a woman and be brave!"-- But I think she fails on both points.' 'I don't understand,' said Primrose, while Rollo's smile grew amused. 'I don't quite understand you, Miss Kennedy. She looks brave to me.' 'No, she don't,' said Wych Hazel decidedly; 'anybody can stick on a helmet. What is that half asleep lion for, Mr. Rollo?' 'He isn't half asleep!' said Primrose. 'He looks very grimly enduring. But I agree with Miss Kennedy, that Fortitude should not wear a helmet, with a plume in it, too! She is quite as apt to be found under a sun-bonnet, I think.' 'Bravo, Prim!' said Rollo. 'And she ought to have her hands crossed.' 'Crossed?' said Wych Hazel. 'Yes, I think so.' 'This fashion?' said the girl folding her tiny hands across her breast. 'They would not stay there two seconds, if _I_ was enduring anything.' Rosy crossed her own hands after another fashion, and was silent. 'How do you generally hold your hands when you are enduring anything?' Rollo asked the other speaker demurely. 'Ah, now you are laughing at me!' she said. 'But I don't think I quite understand passive, inactive fortitude. I like Niobe's arms, all wrapped about her child,--do you remember?' 'I remember. But you don't call _that_ fortitude, do you?' 'Yes,' said Wych Hazel. 'She was dying by inches,--and yet her arms look, so strong! I am sure she didn't know whether they were crossed or uncrossed.' 'Do you think that lion there in the corner looks like Mr. Falkirk?' 'No, indeed! Mr. Falkirk would take a good deal more notice of me, if _I_ was balancing myself on one finger,' said Wych Hazel. 'What _is_ that one finger for?' said Primrose. 'Do you ask that, Rosy? To show that she has nothing earthly to lean upon. She just touches the pillar, as much as to say it is broken and of no use to her. Perhaps her confidence is in that slumbering lion,--Is that another representation of fortitude?' He had hid Sir Joshua's picture with an engraving of Delaroche's Marie Antoinette leaving the Tribunal. 'She knew what it meant, I should think, if anybody did. But most fortitude--real fortitude--be always unhappy?' said Hazel looking perplexedly at the picture. Rollo turned back to the Reynolds. 'You were both wrong about this,' said he; 'at least I think so. Real fortitude _does_ figuratively, go helmeted and plumed. She endures so perfectly that she does not seem to endure. In this representation the lion shows you the mental condition which lies hid behind that fair, stern front. Now is Marie Antoinette like that?' He turned the pictures again. 'I cannot tell!' said Wych Hazel. 'One minute her fortitude looks just like pride,--and then when you remember all she had to bear, it's not strange if she called up pride to help her. But it is not my ideal yet.' 'I think it _is_ pride,' said Rollo. 'So it looks to me. Pride and grief facing down death and humiliation. Marie Theresa's daughter and Louis Capet's queen acknowledging no degradation before her enemies--giving them no triumph that she could help. But that is not my ideal either.' He brought out another print. 'I always like that,' said Primrose. 'I do not know it,' said Wych Hazel. 'Don't you? it is very common. It is the eve of St. Bartholomew. This Catholic girl wants to tie a white favour round he lover's arm, to save him from the massacre soon to begin. She has had the misfortune to love a Huguenot. White favours, you remember, were the mark by which the Catholics were to know each other in the confusion.' 'And he will not let her. Was it a misfortune, I wonder?' 'What?' said Primrose. 'To love somebody so much nobler than herself. How gentle he is in his earnestness!' 'Don't be hard upon her,' said Rollo. 'Are you sure you wouldn't do so in her place?' 'No,--' she said, looking gravely up at him. 'She knew it was death to go without that white handkerchief.' 'But,' said Primrose softly, 'wouldn't you rather have him die true, than live dishonoured?' 'I think I should have tried,' said Wych Hazel,--'knowing I should fail. And then I should have thrown away my own favour, and gone with him wherever he went.' 'He wouldn't have let you do that either,' said Rollo. 'Then he would not have loved me as I loved him,' said the girl, very decidedly. 'He'd have been a pretty fellow!' said Rollo, as he turned the next print. It was a contrast to the St. Bartholomew; a Madonna and child, from Fra Bartholomeo, at which they were all content to look silently. Rollo began to talk, then, instead of asking questions, and made himself very interesting. So much he knew of art matters, so many a story and legend he could tell about the masters, and so well he could help the less initiated to enjoy and understand the work. So letting himself out in a sort of play-fashion, the portfolio proved the nucleus of a delightful hour's entertainment. At the end of that time a turn was given to things by the coming in of an old black woman with a very high, coloured turban on her head and a teakettle and a chafing dish of coals in her hands. Rollo shut up his portfolio. 'What is your view, practically, of things at present, Miss Kennedy?' 'Mr. Falkirk says I never took a practical view of things in my life, Mr. Rollo. The impracticable view seems to be, that it is tea time and I ought to go home.' 'What do you think of the plan of letting Mr. Falkirk know where you are?' 'Yes, I ought to do that,' said his ward, 'Where is Dingee?--I will send him right off.' 'Will you write, or shall I?' said Rollo, drawing out paper and pen ready on one of the tables. She glanced at him as if in momentary wonder that he should offer to write her despatch, then ran off the most summary little note, twisted it into a knot of complications, and again asked for Dingee. Rollo gently but saucily put his own fingers upon the twisted note and bore it away. The business of the tea-making and preparing was going on; and both Primrose and her old assistant bustled about the tea table, getting things ready and Dr. Maryland's chair in its right place. A quiet bustle, very pleasant in the eyes of Wych Hazel, with all its homely and sweet meanings. The light had softened a little, and still came through a grey veil of rain; odours of rose and sweet-briar and evening primroses floated in on the warm, moist air, and mingled with the steam of the tea-kettle and the fume in the chafing-dish; and the patter, patter of rain drops, and the dash of wet leaves against each other, were a foil to the tea-kettle's song. Wych Hazel looked on, musingly, till Rollo came back and took her round the room looking at books. Then offering her his arm, he somewhat suddenly brought her face to face with some one just entering by the door. An old gentleman; Wych Hazel knew at once who it must be. Middle-sized, stout, with rather thin locks of white hair, and a face not otherwise remarkable than for its look of habitual high thought and pure goodness. It took but a moment to see so much of him. She stopped short, and then came close up to him. 'Is this your charge, Dane? Is this little Wych Hazel?' he went on more tenderly, and folding her in his arms. 'My dear,' he said, kissing her brow, 'I hope you will be as good a woman as your mother was! I am very glad to see you!--very glad indeed!' She did not answer at first, looking up into his face with a wistful, searching look that was a little eager; standing quite still, as if the enclosing arms were very pleasant to her. 'Yes sir,' she said, 'I am Wych Hazel. But why are you glad to see me?' 'My dear, I knew your mother and father; and I have a great interest in you. I am told you will be queen of a large court up yonder at Chickaree.' She laughed a little, and coloured, looking down, then back into his face again. 'Will you like me, sir, all you can?' 'All you will give me a chance for. So you must let us see you a great deal; for affection must grow, you know; it cannot be commanded. Sit down, my dear, sit down; Primrose is ready for us.' It was a right pleasant meal! There was no servant waiting; the little informalities of helping themselves suited well with the quiet home ease and the song of the tea-kettle. Primrose made toast for her father, and Rollo blew the coals to a red heat to hasten the operation. Dr. Maryland sometimes talked and sometimes was silent; and his talk was of an absolute simplicity that neither knew in his own nor imagined in other people's minds any reserves of dark corners. Primrose talked little, but was lovingly watchful not only of her father, but of Wych Hazel, and Rollo too; who on his part was watchful enough over everybody. 'And my dear,' said Dr. Maryland, 'why did you not bring Mr. Falkirk with you?' 'Well, sir, to begin--I did not know I was coming myself! I was out riding, and the rain came--and I jumped off into the first open door I could see. And then Miss Maryland let me stay.' 'But Mr. Falkirk, my dear--where's he?' 'Safe at home, sir. We have been seeking our fortune together, but to-night we got separated.' 'Mr. Falkirk went back and left you?' said Dr. Maryland, looking surprised. 'No, sir, I went ahead and left him. That is,' she added, smothering a laugh, 'he did not set out at all.' 'I thought--I thought, you said you were together?' 'Only in a general way, sir. On all special occasions we divide.' 'What did you say you were doing? seeking your fortune?' 'I set out to seek mine,' said Wych Hazel, 'and of course poor Mr. Falkirk has to go along to look on. He doesn't help me one bit.' 'To seek your fortune, my dear?' said Dr. Maryland, looking benignly curious; 'What sort of a fortune are you looking for?' 'Why I don't know, sir. If I knew,--it would be half found already, wouldn't it?' said the girl. 'But my dear--did Mr. Falkirk never tell you that fortunes are never found ready made?' 'He objected, because he said mine was ready made--but that made no difference from my point of view. And then he said he thought our road would "end in a squirrel track, and run up a tree." And do you know, sir,' said Wych Hazel, the hidden merriment flashing out all over her face, 'that was what it really did!' 'Did what, my dear?' 'I beg your pardon, sir,' she said, trying to steady her voice and bring out words instead of a burst of laughter,--'but--that is a wild Western expression, which Mr. Falkirk used to signify that we should get into difficulties.' 'Why did Mr. Falkirk think you would get into difficulties?'-- Dr. Maryland had not found the scent yet. 'I don't think he has much opinion of my prudence, sir,--and believes firmly that every one who goes off the highway finds rough ground. Now I like a jolt now and then--it wakes one up.' 'Do you want to find rough ground, my dear?' 'I don't mean really rough, sir, in one sense, but uneven-- varied, and stirring, and uncommonplace. It seems to me that I have a whole set of energies that never come into play upon ordinary occasions. I should weary to death of the lives some people lead--three meals a day, and a cigar, and a newspaper. I think I should fast once a week, for variety--and smoke my cigar wrong end first--if there are two ends to it.' 'I heard a lady say the other day, that there was no end to them,'--observed Rollo. Dr. Maryland looked at her on his part, smiling, and quite awake now to the matter in hand. Yet he was silent a minute before speaking. 'Have you laid your plan, my dear? I should very much like to know what it is!' 'No, sir,' she said, shaking her head with a deprecatory little laugh. 'Of course I have not! People in fairy tales never do.' 'Life is not a fairy tale, Hazel,' said Dr. Maryland, shaking his head a little. 'My dear, you are a real woman. Did you ever think what you would try to do in the world?--what you would try to do with your life, I mean?' 'Do with it?' the girl repeated, her brown eyes on the Doctor's face as if looking for his meaning. 'I think, I should like to enjoy it, if I could. And it has been very commonplace, lately, sir. Mr. Falkirk don't pet me and play with me as he used to--and he won't let me play with him; not much.' The smile which quivered on Dr. Maryland's face changed and passed into a sort of sweet gravity. 'There is one capital way to get out of commonplace,' he said; 'but it isn't play, my dear. If you set about doing what God would have you to do with yourself, there will be no dullness in your life, and no lack of enjoyment, either.' She looked at him again--then down; but made no answer. 'Somebody has written an essay, that I read lately,' Dr. Maryland went on--'an essay on the monotony of piety. Poor man! he did not know what he was talking about. The glorious liberty of the children of God!--that was something beyond his experience;--and the joy of their service. It is what redeems everything else from monotony. It glorifies what is insignificant, and dignifies what is mean, and lifts what is low, and turns the poor little business steps of every day into rounds of Heaven's golden ladder. I verily think I could have hanged myself long ago, for the very monotony of all things else, if it had not been for the life and glory of religion!' 'Why papa!' said Primrose. 'I would, my dear, I do think.' He was silent a moment; then subsiding from the excited fire with which he had spoken, he turned to Wych Hazel and went on gently,-- 'What else do you want to do, my dear, that is not to be done in that track? you want adventures?' 'Yes, sir,' she answered, without looking up, half hesitating, a little grave. 'I think I do. And more people about,--people to love me, and that I can love. Of course I love Mr. Falkirk,' she added, correcting herself, 'very much; but that is different. And there's nobody else but the servants.' 'O do come here!' cried Primrose; 'and love us.' 'I do not wonder Mr. Falkirk gives no help,' said Rollo, a little quizzically. 'Will you try Primrose's expedient, my dear?' said Dr. Maryland, very benignly. 'Half your requisition you will certainly find. Whether you can love us, I don't know; but there's no knowing without trying.' She gave one of her sweet childish looks of answer to both the first and last speaker; but Mr. Rollo was favoured with a small reproof. 'You must not speak so of Mr. Falkirk,' she said. 'He has been the kindest possible friend to me. And I think he loves me wonderfully, considering how I have tried his patience. Just think what it is for a grave, quiet, grown-up, sensible man, to have the plague of a girl like me! Very few men would stand it at all, Mr. Roll; but Mr. Falkirk never said a rough word to me in his life.' She was so grave, so innocent, so ignorant in it all, the effect was indescribably funny. 'I should think very few men would stand it,' said Rollo, composedly; but Primrose and her father smiled. 'Mr. Falkirk is an admirable man,' said Dr. Maryland. 'You are a good witness for him, Hazel.' 'If I would only do all he wants me to!' she said with a slight shake of the head. 'But I cannot, and he says I don't know what I want. But Dr. Maryland--all the nice, proper people I have ever seen, live on such a dead level--it would kill me. They think dancing is wrong, and Italian a loss of time, and "it's a pity to waste my young years upon German." And they can't talk of a book, but some life of a missionary who was eaten by cannibals,--I was very sorry he went there, to be sure, but that didn't make me want to hear about it, nor to go myself. They are just like peach trees trimmed up and nailed to a wall, and I'd rather be wild Wych Hazel in the woods, though it's of no sort of use, and nobody cares for it!' Dr. Maryland might guess from this frank out-pouring, how seldom it was that the stream of young thoughts found such an exit, how complete was the trust which called it forth. She had quite forgotten her tea. And the doctor forgot his; and bent his gray head towards her brown one. 'But suppose, my dear,' (how different this from Mr. Falkirk's 'my dear,')--'suppose the bush were a conscious thing; and suppose that while it remained in the woods and remained entirely itself, it could yet by being submitted to some sweet influence be made so fragrant that its influence should be known all through the forest; and its nuts, instead of being wild, useless things, should every one of them bring a gift of healing or of life to the hands that should gather them? I would rather it should stay in the woods;--and I never think anything trained against a wall is as good as that which has the sun all round it.' Wych Hazel looked at him with no sort of doubt in her eyes that he had been "submitted to some sweet influence." And perhaps it was the image he had drawn, that brought a little tremour round her lips, as she answered: 'I do not want to be a wild, bitter, useless thing,--maybe that is what Mr. Falkirk is afraid of, too.' 'I believe,' said Dr. Maryland, 'that He who made all the varieties in the world, and made men as various, never meant that one should take the form or place of another. If it fills its own, and fills it perfectly, it glorifies Him; and does just what it was meant to do.' 'Not to mention the fact,' said Rollo, 'that Wych Hazel could not conveniently personate a pine tree or Primrose a blackthorn.' But at the entrance of this gentleman as Privy Counsellor, Wych Hazel withdrew her affairs from public notice; however much inclined to vindicate her power of personating what she liked, especially pine trees. She dropped the subject and took up her bread and butter. And so did Dr. Maryland, for a while; but he eat thoughtfully. There was a pause, during which Primrose was affectionately solicitous over Wych Hazel's cup of tea, and Rollo piled strawberries upon her plate. Tea had been rather neglected. 'And what have you been doing, Hazel, all these past twelve years?' said the doctor, breaking out afresh. 'Twelve years!-- it is twelve years. What have you done with them, my dear?' 'I was at school, you know, sir, for a while, and then I had no end of tutors and teachers at home.' She drew a long breath. 'And what are you going to do with the next twelve years?--if you should live so long. What are you going to try to do with them, I mean?' 'I want to try to have a good time, sir.' 'And you will be a queen, and hold your court at Chickaree?' She laughed--her pretty, free laugh of pleasure. 'So Mr. Falkirk says. Only he does not call me a queen--he calls me a mouse!' Dr. Maryland laughed too, at her or with her, a rare thing for him, but returned to his grave tenderness of look and tone. 'Ah, little Hazel,' he said, 'you are in a dangerous place, my child, with your court up there. Do you know, that when you and the world you want to see, come together,--either you will change it, or it will change you?--that is why I asked you what you were going to do with the next twelve years. That was a great word of Paul, when his years were almost over,--"I have fought a good fight; I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge shall give me at that day!" ' He was silent, but so grave, so sweet, so rapt, had been the tone of the last words, that they all kept silence likewise. Dr. Maryland's head fell, he seemed to be seeing something not before him; presently he went on speaking to himself. ' "And not to me only,--but to all them that love his appearing."--My dear,' suddenly to Wych Hazel,--'will you love his appearing, when it comes?' She?--how could she tell? to whom not only the question but almost the very thought were new. He did not pursue that subject. Presently he left the table and stood up, or walked up and down behind it; while under the sense of his talk and his thought and his presence, they were all quiet; finishing their supper as docilely as so many children. And a reflection from him was on all their faces, making each one more pure and bright than its own wont. He stayed with the young people after tea, instead of going to his study; and the evening was full of grave interest, which also no one wished less grave. He talked much, sometimes with Wych Hazel, sometimes with Rollo; and Rollo was very amusing and interesting in meeting his inquiries and remarks about German universities and university life. The talk flowed on to other people and things abroad, where Rollo had for some years lately been. The doctor grew animated and drew him out, and every now and then drew Wych Hazel in, giving her much of his attention and perhaps scrutiny also, though that was veiled. The talk kept them up late. As they were about separating for the night Rollo asked Wych Hazel if she had found any cats at Chickaree? 'What do you mean?' she said quickly. 'O--I remember'--and the light danced over her face. 'I haven't had much time to find anything. What did you do with my poor kitten up on the mountain, Mr. Rollo?' 'I was going to ask you whether you would like to see an old friend.' 'Yes, to be sure. You do not mean that my little pussy is here?' 'You shall have her to-morrow.' CHAPTER XIII. THE GREY COB. Morning has come, and the Queen of Chickaree must return to hold her court. Little guesses the Queen what a court is gathering for her. While she is quietly eating her breakfast at Dr. Maryland's, Mme. Lasalle is ordering her horses, to make a call upon her in the course of the morning, and Mr. Kingsland is thinking in what cravat he shall adorn himself when he goes to do the same thing in the afternoon. For Mr. Kingsland has arrived at home, where he and his old father keep a bachelor sort of household in a decayed old house at one extremity of Crocus. They have a respectable name, folks say, but not wealth to set it off; and the household is small. The same little boy who rubs down Mr. Kingsland's horse waits upon table, and there is nobody else but a housekeeper. But Mr. Morton is thinking he will call too; and Mr. Morton is a man of means; he owns a large part of Mill Hollow, called also Morton Hollow. He occupies a great old brick house in the neighbourhood of the Hollow, and keeps it in excellent repair, and the grass of the lawn is well shaven. Mr. Morton is well off and has servants enough, but he has years enough too; Mr. Morton must be forty. Nevertheless he thinks he will call. Then there is Mrs. ex-Governor Powder also; she lives in a very good house, and in an irreproachable manner, at a fine place called Valley Garden, ten miles off. Mrs. Powder is an excellent woman, a stately lady, knows what is what, and has been a beauty, and held a court of her own. Indeed she is of a proud old family, and married a little beneath her when she married the man who afterwards became Governor Powder. But what would you have? Women must be married. Mrs. Powder will come to see Miss Kennedy; she is thinking about it; but probably she will not come till to-morrow or the day after; she is not in a hurry. Mme. Lasalle is; and so is the gentleman of the roses, her nephew. Meanwhile Miss Kennedy knows nothing of all this, nor how furthermore the Lawyer's wife and the Doctor's mother (for there is another doctor at Crocus) are meditating how soon they may ask Miss Kennedy to dinner or to supper, and how soon it will do to go and ask her. They are afraid of seeming in a hurry. Meanwhile Miss Kennedy eats her breakfast. Breakfast is had in the stone hall, with the doors open front and rear and the Summer day looking in at them. It is very pleasant, and the old black woman, Portia, comes and goes without interfering with the talk at table. The sewing machine stands at one side of the hall still. 'What new affair have you got there, my daughter?' says the doctor. 'It's a sewing machine, papa, which Duke has brought me.' 'A sewing machine! What are you going to do with it?' 'Put her work in her pocket, I hope, sir. I am tired of seeing it in her hand.' 'It is very good of you, Duke; but can she manage it?' 'Not yet, sir. Neither of us can. We are going to find out.' 'Well, what's the advantage of it?' 'I brought it up, sir, in the hope and persuasion that it would undertake the clothing of all the poor people at Crocus, and give Rosy time to read philosophy.' 'Why papa,' said Rosy, 'it will do fifteen hundred stitches a minute!' 'You don't want to do more than that in a day, do you, my dear?' said the doctor, with an expression of such innocent amazement, not without some dismay, that they all burst out laughing; and Dr. Maryland but half enlightened, went off to his study. Much before Primrose wished it, the horses came to the door. Rollo had had his own saddle put upon Vixen, and the grey cob stood charged with the paraphernalia which should accompany the mistress of Chickaree. She had gone up to prepare for her ride, and now came to the front in habit and gauntlets and whip, the rose branch at her button-hole. 'O,' she said in tones so like a bird that the groom might have been pardoned for looking up into the maple boughs over his head to find her; 'you have made a mistake! The other horse is the one I ride. Will you change the saddles, please?-- I am sorry to give you the trouble!' The groom would have been in great bewilderment, but that luckily his master stood there too. The man's look of appeal was comical, going from one to another. Rollo was looking at girths and buckles, and did not seem to hear. Wych Hazel waited--a slight growing doubt on the subject of his deafness not increasing the pliability of her mood. Then he came towards her, and asked if she was ready? 'I am--but my horse is not.' 'What is the matter with him?' 'I am very sorry to make any delay, Mr. Rollo, but the saddles will have to be changed. I can't ride that grey horse!' And she slipped her hat back and sat down on the doorstep, to await the process. 'There is no mistake,' said Rollo. 'The horses were saddled by my order. I told him to give you the grey. You will forgive me, I hope!' 'Without asking me!' she said, giving him a rather wide-open look of her eyes, and then in a tone as cool as his own-- 'I shall ride Vixen, Mr. Rollo, if I ride at all.' 'I hope you will reconsider that.' 'Mr. Rollo,' she said in her gravest manner, 'you and I seem fated to see something of each other--so it will save trouble for you to know at once, that when I say a thing seriously, I mean it.' He lifted his hat with the old stately air. But then he smiled at her. 'Allow me to believe that you have said nothing seriously this morning?' Now if Wych Hazel's mood was not pliable, his was the sort of look to make it so. A calmly good-humoured brow, with a clear keen eye, and in both all that character of firm strength to which a woman's temper is apt to give way. If it had been a question of temper in the ordinary sense. But the lady of Chickaree had nothing of the sort belonging to her that was not as sweet as a rose. 'Allow me!' she said, just a little bit mockingly. 'Well--it's not true, if you do believe it. I shall ride Vixen, or walk.' 'That would be very serious,' said Rollo, 'for it is going to be very hot. What is the matter with the grey cob?' 'I don't like him--and I do like Vixen.' 'Have you ever ridden him?' 'No. And nothing in his appearance predicts that I ever shall.' 'I do not think that Vixen is fit for you to mount. I am going to find out. If she is you shall have her.' 'You can study her as much as you please, with me on her. Why, what nonsense!--as if I didn't ride her all yesterday afternoon!' 'And gave us, if you recollect, afterwards,' said Rollo, looking amused, 'the synopsis of her character.' 'And now you think I am giving you the synopsis of mine,' said Wych Hazel. 'Well, Mr. Rollo, of course your groom will not mind me--will you order the saddles changed? or must I walk?' 'I shall not order the saddles changed. I am afraid. That is no reason why you should be. Fear may be commendable in a man, when it is not desirable in a woman.' 'But I cannot be bothered with anybody's fear but my own!' He faced her with the same bright, grave face he had worn all along. 'I owe it to Mr. Falkirk to carry you back safe and sound.' She laughed--her pretty mouth in a curl of fun. 'Ah,' she said, 'before you deal extensively with self-willed women, you need to study the subject! I see the case is hopeless. If you had presented it right end first, Mr. Rollo, I cannot tell what I might have said, but as it is, I can only walk.' She turned quick about towards Primrose, pulling her hat back into its place; which hat, being ill disposed, first caught on her comb, and then, disengaged, carried the comb with it, and down came Miss Hazel's hair about her shoulders. Not in 'wavy tresses,' or 'rippling masses,' but in good, honest, wayward curls, and plenty of them, and all her own. The hat had to come off now, and gloves as well, for both hands had as much as they could manage. Rollo took the gloves, and held the hat, and waited upon her with grave punctiliousness, while Primrose looked anxious and annoyed. When hair and hat were in order again and he had delivered the gloves, Rollo requested to be told by the peremptory little owner of them, 'what was the matter with the right end of the subject, now she had got it?' 'I have not got it. The subject has only been gradually turning round as I pushed, like a turnstile. Mr. Rollo, I think it would do you a great deal of good to be thoroughly thwarted and vexed two or three times--then you would learn how to do things.' 'But, dear Miss Kennedy,' said Primrose's distressed voice, 'you are not going to try to walk through this heat?' Wych Hazel turned and wrapped her arms about Primrose. 'Yes, I am--but I don't think it's hot. And please don't call me "Miss Kennedy"--your father does not.' 'But it's four or five miles.' 'I've walked more than that, often. Good-bye--will you let--' Primrose kissed her for answer, but then gave her a troubled whisper: 'I wish you wouldn't walk. Duke is so sure to be right about the horses.' 'Sure to be right, is he?' said Miss Kennedy. 'Well, I am at least as sure to be wrong. Good-bye!' Primrose stood looking, doubtful and uncomfortable, and afraid to say any more. Rollo smiled at her as he was leaving the house, looked himself the reverse of uncomfortable, ordered Byron to lead the horses, and set out by the side of Wych Hazel. He was not just in the genial mood of last night and the morning, but cool and gay, as it was his fashion to be; though gravely and punctiliously attentive to his charge. Cool, that is to say, as the day permitted; for the sun was fervent, and pouring down his beams with an overwhelming lavishness of bestowment. On her part Wych Hazel went quietly on, not with the undue energy which shows some hidden excitement but with a steady step and thoughts most abstractedly busy. She made no sort of remark, unless in answer to her companion, and then with very quiet look and voice. Her changeful face had settled into a depth of soberness. Perhaps it was because of noticing this that his manner grew more gently careful of her; in trifles shown, to be sure, but the touch of a hand and the tone of a word will tell all that as well as much greater things. Evidently he read her and was not angry with her; not even though the way was long and hot, happily it was not dusty--the shower had laid the dust. With undimmed faces and unsoiled foot-gear they paced on, rood after rood, and Vixen, drooping her head, followed at their heels. The groom had been sent back with the cob, and Rollo walked with the bridle of Vixen in his hands. Chickaree was reached at last. 'What do you expect to find here?' said he, as they entered the gate and were going up the ascent. 'Mr. Falkirk.' 'There is much more awaiting you, then, than you expect. Take care of that acacia branch! See, you must send Dingee, or somebody--who is your factotum?--down here with pruning tools. If I didn't know what to expect, I would try hard for a saw and do it myself this morning. You have scratched your hand!' 'Never mind--yes, I should have kept on gloves, but it was so warm. What do you expect, Mr. Rollo, besides luncheon? You will stay for that, won't you?' she said shyly, yet with a pretty enacting of the hostess. The touch of her own ground made her feel better. 'I should have to stay for so many other things,' he said, looking on the ground as he walked. She glanced at him, not quite sure whether his words covered a negative, and not choosing to ask. 'All this while you don't know that there is company at Chickaree.' 'Company?--how do you know?' 'I know by the signs. You will find, I think, Mme. Lasalle up there, and probably a few of her family.' 'Mme. Lasalle!' By what connection did not appear, but Miss Hazel's fingers were immediately very busy disengaging the rose branch from the button of her habit, where it had hung during the walk. 'I think that is the prospect. But I do not know that I am under any obligation to meet her, so I think I shall prefer the company of your vixenish little mare. Not to speak of the chance of encountering Mr. Falkirk,' said Rollo, lifting his eyebrows. 'I shouldn't like to stand Mr. Falkirk's shot this morning!' 'It will hit nobody but me,' she said, rather soberly. 'Is he a good marksman?' 'Depends a little on what he aims at,' said the girl. 'It is easier, sometimes--as, perhaps, you know--to hit people than things.' 'Take care!' said Rollo, again, as another obstacle in the path presented itself; 'I don't mean anything shall hit you while I have the care of you.' Putting his hands for an instant on the girl's shoulders, he removed her lightly from one side of the walk to the other, and then attacked a sweeping dogwood branch, which, very lovely but very persevering, hung just too low. It cost a little trouble to dispose of it. They were not on the great carriage road, but following one of the embowered paths which led through the woods. It went winding up, under trees of great beauty, thickset, and now for long default of mastership, overbearing and encroaching in their growth. A wild beauty they made, now becoming fast disorderly and in places rough. The road wound about so much that their progress was slow. 'Chickaree has had no guardian for a good while,' said Rollo, as they went on. 'Look at that elm! and the ashes beyond it. But don't cut too much, when you cut here; nor let Mr. Falkirk.' 'He shall not cut a branch, and I love the thickets too well to meddle with them. Unless they actually come in my face.' 'Then you do not love the thickets well enough. Come here,' said he, drawing her gently to one side,--'stand a little this way--do you see how that white oak is crowding upon those two ashes? They are suffering already; and in another year it would be in the way of that beautiful spruce fir. And the white oak itself is not worth all that.' 'But if you cut it down there will be a great blank space. The crowding is much prettier than that!' 'The blank space in two years' time will be filled again.' 'So soon?' she said doubtfully. Then with one of her half laughs,--'You see I do not believe pruning and thinning out and reducing to order agrees with everything; and naturally enough my sympathies are the other way. I like to see the stiff leaves and the soft leaves all mixed up together; they show best so. Not standing off in open space--like Mr. Falkirk and me.' He took her up in the same tone; and for a little more of the way there was a delicious bit of talk. Delicious, because Wych Hazel had eyes and capacities; and her companion's eyes and capacities were trained and accomplished. He was at home in the subject; he brought forward his reading and his seeing for her behoof; recommended Ruskin, and gave her some disquisitions of his own that Ruskin need not have been ashamed of. For those ten or fifteen minutes he was a different man from what Wych Hazel had ever seen him. Then the house came in sight, and a new subject claimed their attention. For the mare, whether scenting her stable or finding her spirits raised by getting nearer home, abandoned her quiet manner of going, and after a little dancing and pulling her bridle, testified her disapprobation of all sorts of restraint by flinging her heels into the air, and being obliged to follow her leader, she repeated the amusement continuously. 'Do your drawing-room windows look on the front?' said Rollo. 'Some of them. Why?' 'Then, by your leave, as I do not care to act the Merry Andrew for half a dozen pair of eyes, I will go to the rear to mount.' But instead of his more stately salutation, he held out his hand to Wych Hazel with a smile. 'Good bye,' she said. 'I am sorry you have had such a hot walk. But why don't you mount here?' 'I like to choose my audience when I exhibit.' He clasped Wych Hazel's hand after the fashion of the other day; then disappeared one way as she went the other. Passing swiftly on, holding up her long riding skirt so that it seemed no encumbrance, musing to herself on past events and present expectations; and not without a certain flutter of pleasure and amusement and timidity at the part she had to fill, Wych Hazel reached the low, broad steps and went in. A slender little person, as airy and independent as the bush she was named for; one of those figures that never by any chance fall into any attitude or take any pose that is not lovely. Hair--as to arrangement--decidedly the worse for the walk; cheeks a little warmed up with the sun, and perhaps other things; grave eyes, where the woman was but beginning to supplant the child; a mouth as sweet as it could be, in all its changes; and a hand and foot that were fabulous. So the mistress of Chickaree went in to receive her first instalment of visitors. CHAPTER XIV. HOLDING COURT. She was scarcely within the door when Mr. Falkirk met her, put her arm within his and led her into the drawing-room. For a few minutes there the impression was merely of a flutter of gauzes, a shifting scene of French bonnets, a show of delicately gloved hands, and a general breeze of compliments and gratulations, in those soft and indeterminate tones that stir nothing. Mme. Lasalle it was, with a bevy of ladies, older and younger, among whom it was impossible at first to distinguish one from the other. So similar was in every case the display of French flowers, gloves and embroidery; so accordant the make of every dress and the modulation of every tone. Mme. Lasalle herself was, however, prominent, having a pair of black eyes which once fairly seen were for ever after easily recognizable. Fine eyes, too; bright and merry, which made themselves quite at home in your face in half a minute. She was overflowing with graciousness. Her nephew, the gentleman of the roses, the only cavalier of the party, kept himself in a modest background. 'I have been longing to see you at home, my dear,' said Mme. Lasalle. 'All in good time; but I always am impatient for what I want. And then we have all wanted you; the places of social comfort in the neighbourhood are so few that we cannot afford to have Chickaree shut up. This beautiful old house! I am so delighted to be in it again. But I hope you have met with no accident this morning? You have not?' 'Accident?--O no!' 'You have surely not been thrown,' said another lady. 'No, ma'am.' The demure face was getting all alight with secret fun. 'But how was it?' pursued Mme. Lasalle, with an air of interest. 'We saw you walk up to the door--what had become of your horse?' 'He walked to another door.' 'And you have really been taking foot exercise this morning,' said the lady, in whose eyes and the lines of her face might be seen a slight shadow. Miss Kennedy then had been on foot of choice, and so accompanied! And Wych Hazel was too inexperienced to notice--but her guardian was not--that Mr. Nightingale, to whom he had been talking, paused in his attention and turned to catch the answer. 'I have been finding out that my woods need attention,' said Miss Kennedy, who never chose to be catechised if she could help it. 'It is astonishing that they can have grown so much in these years when I have grown so little!' 'You have got to make acquaintance with a great many other things here besides your trees. Do you know any of your neighbours? or is it all unbroken ground?' 'I do not even know how much there is to break.' 'How delicious!' remarked a languid lady. 'Think of coming into a region where all is new! Things get so tiresome when you know them too well.' 'People and all!' said Mr. Falkirk. 'Well, yes--don't you think they do? When there is nothing more to be found out about them.' 'I don't agree with you,' said another lady. 'I think it's so tiresome to find them out. When you once know them, then you give up being disappointed.' 'My dear Clara!' said Mme. Lasalle, 'what a misanthropical sentiment! Miss Kennedy, I know by her face, will never agree with you. Were you ever disappointed, my dear, in your life? There! I know you were not.' 'Not often, I think.' What were they talking about,--these people who looked so gay and spoke so languidly? Miss Kennedy rang for refreshments, hoping to revive them a little. 'But, my dear, how far have you walked in this hot sun? You see, you quite dismay us country people. Do tell us! How far have you walked?' 'The miles are as unknown to me as the inhabitants,' she said gayly. 'But we brown people are never afraid of the sun.' 'Miles!' said Mme. Lasalle looking round her. 'Imagine it!' Then as the lady took a piece of cake, she remarked casually: 'I think I saw an old acquaintance of mine with you--Dane Rollo, was it not?' 'Mr. Rollo? Yes.' 'He has not been to see me since he came home--I shall quarrel with him. I wonder if he has been to Mrs. Powder's. Mr. Falkirk, don't you think Dane had a great penchant for one of Mrs. Powder's beautiful daughters before he went abroad?' 'I am not in the confidence of either party, madam,' replied Mr. Falkirk. 'If he had he would have taken her with him,' said another of the party. 'O that don't follow, you know. Maybe her mother thought she was too young--or _he_, perhaps. She is a beautiful girl.' 'Not my style of beauty,' said the languid lady with an air of repulsion. 'What has he been doing in Europe all this time?' pursued Mme. Lasalle. 'Been to Norway, hasn't he?' 'I believe he went there.' 'He has relations there, Dr. Maryland told me.' 'Dr. Maryland knows,' said Mr. Falkirk. 'Perhaps he will settle in Norway.' 'Perhaps he will.' 'But how dreadful for his wife! Mrs. Powder would not like that. He's a great favourite of mine, Dane is; but I am afraid he has rather a reputation for breaking ladies' hearts. What do you think, Mr. Falkirk? He is welcome everywhere. Maybe it's Norwegian fashion; but I think Dr. Maryland is very imprudent to let him come into his house again--if he does. Do you know the Marylands, my dear?' turning to Wych Hazel again. 'They knew me, long ago,' she said. 'I have been here but two days now.' 'The daughter--this daughter--is a singular girl, is she not?' 'I do not know--I like her,' said Wych Hazel. 'Oh she's very queer,' said another young lady. 'I have no doubt she is _good_,' Mme. Lasalle went on; 'no doubt at all. But I have heard she lives in a strange way--among children and poor people--going about preaching and making clothes. A little of that is all very well; I suppose we might all do more of it, and not hurt ourselves; but is not Miss Maryland quite an enthusiast?' Wych Hazel was getting very much amused. 'She was not enthusiastic over me,' she said, 'and I have not seen her tried with anything else. Where does she preach?' 'You will find her out. Wait till you know her a little better. She will preach to you, I have no doubt. Prudentia, Mrs. Coles, is very different. She is really a charming woman. But my dear Miss Kennedy, we have been here a length of time that it will not do to talk about. We have had no mercy upon Mr. Falkirk, for we were determined to see you. Now you must come and spend the day with me to-morrow, and I'll tell you everything. We are going on a fishing expedition up the Arrow; and we want you. And you must come early; for we must take the cool of the morning to go and the cool of the afternoon to come back. I'll see you home safe. Come! say yes.' 'I will if Mr. Falkirk does, ma'am, very gladly.' 'Let her go!' whispered another member of the party, who had been using her eyes more than her tongue. 'Give her a loose rein now, Mr. Falkirk, and hold her in when Kitty Fisher comes.' 'Pshaw! she isn't under guardianship at that rate,' said Mme. Lasalle. 'Mr. Falkirk, isn't this lady free yet?' 'I am afraid she never will be, madam.' 'What do you mean by that? But does she have to ask your leave for everything she does?' 'No one acquainted with the wisdom of Miss Kennedy's general proceedings would do me so much honour as to think the wisdom all came from me!' said Mr. Falkirk dryly. 'Well, you'll let her come to Moscheloo?' 'Certainly.' The lady looked at Wych Hazel. The laughing eyes had grown suddenly quiet. It was with a very dignified bend of the head that she repeated Mr. Falkirk's assent. 'I shall not ask _you_,' said the lady to Miss Kennedy's guardian; 'it is a young party entirely, and must mot have too much wisdom, you understand. I'll bring her home.' 'I am no sportsman, madam,' said Mr. Falkirk with a smile; 'and my wisdom will probably be busy to-morrow in Miss Kennedy's plantations.' With that, the train of ladies swept away, with renewed soft words of pleasure and hope and congratulation. They rustled softly through the hall, gently spoke ecstasies at the hall door, mounted upon their horses and got into their carriages, and departed. Mr. Falkirk came back to his ward in the hall. 'Now that to-morrow is provided for,' he said, 'I should be glad to hear, Miss Hazel, the history of yesterday. It is quite impossible to know a story from Dingee's telling of it. And do you think you could give me some luncheon?' 'Certainly, sir.' She was just disposing of hat and whip upon a particular pair of chamois horns on the wall. They hung a little high for her, and she was springing to reach them like any airiest creature that ever made a spring. 'Perhaps you will be so kind as to be seated, Mr. Falkirk?--in the dining room--for a moment. Dingee!'--her voice rang softly out clear as an oriole. 'Luncheon at once--do you hear, Dingee? Don't keep Mr. Falkirk waiting.' Mr. Falkirk stood still looking at all this, and waiting with an unmoved face. 'Will you excuse my habit, sir? as you are in haste. And am I to give you the "history" here, all standing?' 'Go! but come,' said Mr. Falkirk. 'We have met only one division of the enemy yet, my dear.' She glanced at him, and went off, and was back; all fresh and dainty and fragrant with the sweet briar at her belt. Then silently made herself busy with the luncheon; creamed Mr. Falkirk's chocolate; then suddenly exclaimed: 'Could you make nothing of _my_ version, sir?' 'Not much. Where were you going?' 'I was coming home.' 'From Dr. Maryland's?' 'Not at all, sir. I should have said, I was on my way home,-- and the storm began, and I took a cross road to expedite matters--and then I grew desperate, and ran into an unknown, open door, and so found myself at Dr. Maryland's.' 'Very intelligible. My question looked to the beginning of your expedition.' 'Well, sir--I would rather--but it does not signify. There came a small Bohemian here in the morning to get help for her sick mother; and I went. That is all.' 'Who is the mother, Miss Hazel? Where does she live?' 'I don't know her name. And her habitation only when I see it. All places are alike to me here yet, you know.' 'My dear,' said Mr. Falkirk gravely, 'you must see that, being so ignorant of people and things in this region, you had better not make sudden expeditions without taking me into your confidence. Dingee said you rode the little black mare?' 'True, sir.' 'You did not like her well enough to ride her home?' 'Quite well enough, sir.' 'You did not do it?' 'No,' said Wych Hazel--'that Norwegian pirate took her for his own use, and I walked.' 'Wouldn't let you ride her, eh?' and a curious gleam came into Mr. Falkirk's eyes. ' "Wanted to try her first"--and was "bound to be afraid, though I was not"--and "couldn't answer it to you"--and so forth and so forth. A man can generally find words enough.' 'Depend upon it, my dear, he generally borrows them of a woman.' Mr. Falkirk's face relaxed slightly, and he took a turn across the room; then stood still. 'Why didn't you ride the cob home?--he is there still, isn't he?' 'I did not choose, sir. I should, if I had been asked properly.' 'Were you not asked?' 'No, except by having my saddle put on that horse and then not taking it off.' 'You made the demand?' 'Of course. That is, I told the groom to do it.' Mr. Falkirk smiled and then laughed, or came as near to laughing as he often did. 'So you wouldn't ask him into the house? But did you see anybody else in your yesterday's expedition, my dear?' She glanced up at him, evidently growing restive under this cross-questioning. 'I saw Mr. Nightingale.' 'Nightingale!' echoed Mr. Falkirk. 'Where did you see Mr. Nightingale, Miss Kennedy?' 'In the woods.' 'And what the----. My dear, what were you doing in the woods?' 'Won't you finish your first sentence first, sir? I like to take things in order.' Mr. Falkirk's brows drew together; he looked down and then looked up, awaiting his answer. 'I was doing nothing in the woods, sir, but finding my way home.' 'How came _he_ to be there? Did he speak to you?' 'Yes, sir, he spoke to me.' 'What did he say?' said Mr. Falkirk, looking very gravely intent. 'Before we go any further, Mr. Falkirk,' said the girl, steadily, though she coloured a good deal, 'is it to be your pleasure in future to know every word that may be said to me? Because in that case, it will be needful to engage a reporter. You must see, sir, that I should never be equal to it.' 'My dear,' said Mr. Falkirk slowly, 'we are embarked on a search after fortune;--which always embraced on my part an earnest purpose to avoid misfortune.' 'You sit there,' she went on, scarce heeding him, 'and ask me "where I was" and "where I was going" and "what I said"--as if I would forget myself among strange people in this strange place!--And then you take for granted that I would be rude to one person whom I do know, just because he had vexed me! I _did_ ask him in, and he wouldn't come. I am unpractised--wild, maybe--but am I so unwomanly, Mr. Falkirk? Do you think I am?' It was almost pitiful, the way the young eyes scanned his face. If Mr. Falkirk had not been a guardian! But he was steel. Yet even steel will give forth flashes, and one of those flashes came from under Mr. Falkirk's brows now. His answer was very quiet. 'My dear, I think you no more unwomanly than I think a rose unlovely--but the rose has thorns which sometimes prick the hands that would train it out of harm's way. And it might occur even to your inexperience that when a gentleman who does not know you presumes to address you, he can have nothing to say which it would not be on several accounts proper for me to hear.' Again the colour bloomed up. 'You would know, if you were a woman, Mr. Falkirk, how it feels to have a man sit and question you with such an air. Ah,' she said, dashing off the tears which had gathered in her eyes, 'if you really think I can take no better care of myself than that, you should not have said I might go with those people to-morrow!--A rose's thorns are for _protection_, sir!'-- And away she went, out of the room and up the stairs; and Mr. Falkirk heard no more till Dingee entered with fruit and biscuits. 'Missee Hazel hope you'll enjoy yours, sar,--she take her's upstairs.' Mr. Falkirk put on his hat and walked down to his house. It was a slight fiction on the part of Dingee, to say that Miss Hazel was taking her fruit upstairs; indeed the whole message was freely translated from her-- 'Dingee, attend to Mr. Falkirk's lunch, I don't want any.' Presently now came Dingee to her with another message. 'Massa Morton--he 'most dyin' to see Miss Hazel--but he wait till she done had her lunch.' And she flashed down upon Mr. Morton's eyes, like a prism- caught-sunbeam. By this time there were two pairs of eyes to be dazzled. Mr. Dell had made his appearance on the stage. Mr. Dell was a clergyman, of a different denomination, who like Mr. Maryland had a church to take care of at Crocus. Mr. Dell's was a little church at the opposite corner of the village and society. He himself was a good-hearted, plain man, with no savour of elegance about him, though with more than the usual modicum of sense and shrewdness. Appearance conformable to character. Mr. Morton was not very far from Mr. Falkirk's range of years, though making more attempts to conceal the fact. Rich, well educated, well mannered, a little heavy, he had married very young; and now a widower of twenty years standing, the sight of Wych Hazel had suggested to him what a nice thing it would be to be married again. The estates too suited each other, even touched at one point. With this gentleman Wych Hazel had some slight acquaintance, and he introduced Mr. Dell; thinking privately to himself how absurd it was for such men to come visiting such women. 'I see with pleasure that you have quite recovered from the fatigues of your journey, Miss Kennedy. A day's rest will often do wonders.' 'Yes, sir. Especially if you spend a good piece of it on horseback, as I did.' 'On horseback!' said Mr. Morton, looking doubtful--(he hoped she was not going to turn out one of those riding damsels, who went rough shod over all his ideas of propriety.) 'Did you go out so soon to explore the country?' 'No, sir. I went out on business.' 'Ah!'--(how admirable in so young a person.) 'There is business enough in city or country,' said straightforward Mr. Dell--'if you are disposed to take hold of it. Even our little Crocus will give you plenty.' 'All the year round, sir?--or does Crocus go to sleep in the winter like most other bulbs?' 'It is another species from any that you are acquainted with, I am afraid,' said the clergyman, looking at her with mingled curiosity and admiration. 'Bulbs when they go to sleep require no attention, I believe; but our Crocus wants most of all in the cold season. We want lady gardeners too,' said Mr. Dell, following the figure. 'It is a most healthful exercise,' said Mr. Morton, 'and the slight disadvantages of dress, etc., rather form a pleasant foil, I think, to the perfection of attire at other times. Are you fond of gardening, Miss Kennedy?' 'Very fond!' said Miss Kennedy, demurely. 'But that is one of the times when I like to be particularly perfect in my attire, Mr. Norton. Why, Mr. Dell, the bulbs must be kept from freezing, you know, if they _are_ asleep. Isn't Miss Maryland one of your successful gardeners?' 'Miss Maryland does all she can, madam,' said Mr. Dell, earnestly. 'She has been the good angel of the village for five years past.' 'That is just what she looks like,' said Wych, with a glow of pleasure. 'And I'm going to help her all I can.' 'But do you not think,' said Mr. Morton, with the dubious look again--'you are talking, I imagine, of Miss Maryland's visits among the lower classes,--do not you think they make a young lady too prominent--too public--Mr. Dell? They bring her among very rough people, Miss Kennedy, I assure you.' 'But, sir, one would not lose the chance of being a good angel for the fear of being prominent.' 'Or for the fear of anything else,' said Mr. Dell. 'Truly not,' said Mr. Morton. 'But we gentlemen think, Miss Kennedy, that ladies of a certain stamp can scarcely fail of so desirable a position.' 'Ah, but I want a pair of bona fide wings!' said Wych Hazel, and she looked so comically innocent and witch-like that Mr. Morton forgot all else in admiration; and Mr. Dell looked at her with all his eyes as he remarked,-- 'Not to fly away from the poor and needy--as many of Mr. Morton's angels do.' 'Do they?' said Wych Hazel,--'where do they fly to? Mr. Morton, what becomes of your angels?' 'My angels,' said Mr. Morton with some emphasis on the pronoun, 'would never be in the majority. When I said "ladies of a certain stamp," I by no means intended to say that the class was a large one.' 'No, sir, of course not. If the class were large, I should suppose the stamp would become very uncertain. Mr. Dell, what does Crocus want most, just now?' 'I should say--angels,' said Mr. Dell. He spoke with a smile, but with a shrewd and sensible eye withal. He was not a beauty, but he had mettle in him. 'That's a bad want in the present state of the case, as set forth by Mr. Morton. Are gold angels good for anything as a substitute?' 'Good for very little. When I said angels, I spoke of what the world most wants, as well as Crocus; angels in human form, I mean, or rather, in their human state of initiation. There is no substitute. Gold will do something; but nothing of what a good man or a good woman will do--anywhere.' 'Miss Kennedy,' said Mr. Morton, rising, 'I regret much that a business appointment calls me away. But if you will indulge me, I will call again the day after to-morrow, in the afternoon, and perhaps I may hope for your company on a drive. You must make acquaintance with this fine region.' 'Thank you'--Wych Hazel hesitated, looking for some retreat, finally took shelter behind her guardian. 'Thank you, sir, I will ask Mr. Falkirk.' 'Miss Kennedy,' said Mr. Morton, extending his hand, 'you must allow me to express my admiration! I wish other young ladies were so thoughtful and prudent. But if they were, it would not make your conduct less remarkable.' And Mr. Morton departed, while Wych Hazel, turning a sharp pirouette on one toe, dropped into her chair like a thistle down. But all that appeared to the eyes of Mr. Dell was a somewhat extensive flutter of muslin. He had no time to remark upon it nor upon anything else, as there immediately succeeded a flutter of muslin in another direction, just entering in by the door; which secondary flutter was furnished by the furbelows of Mrs. Fellows, the lawyer's wife, and the scarf of Mrs. Dell, the mother of the clergyman himself. There was no more question about angels. CHAPTER XV. TO MOSCHELOO. The next morning Mr. Falkirk appeared in the breakfast-room, as was his very frequent, though not invariable wont. 'I want your orders, Miss Hazel, about horses.' Hazel--deep in a great wicker tray of flowers--looked up to consider the question. 'Well, sir,--we want carriage horses of course,--and saddle horses. And I want a pony carriage.' 'I don't think you need two carriages at present. The pony carriage would have to have a pony.' 'Yes, sir. Pony carriages, I believe, generally do. I am not well enough known in the neighbourhood yet to expect other means of setting my wheels in motion. But if I have nothing _but_ that, Mr. Falkirk, then you and I can never go together.' 'And if you do _not_ have that, then you could not go alone.' 'Precisely, sir. Mr. Falkirk, don't you want a rose--what shall I say! --to--do something to your meditations?' And before Mr. Falkirk had time to breathe, she was down on her knees at his side, and fastening an exquisite "Duchess of Thuringia" in his buttonhole. 'Yes, I look like it,' said he grimly, but suffering her fingers to do their will nevertheless. 'Miss Hazel, if the princess goes about in a pony carriage, I shall be in daily expectation of its turning into a pumpkin, and leaving her on the ground somewhere.' 'No, sir. Not the least fear of your turning into an amiable godmother,--and you know that was essential.' 'Ponies are ugly things,' said Mr. Falkirk ruefully. 'However, I'll ask Rollo; and if he can find one, that suits him----' 'Then do let him keep it!' interposed Miss Hazel, facing round. 'What possible concern of Mr. Rollo's are my horses?' 'Simply that I am going to ask him to choose them. He knows more about such things than any one else, and I dare say he will give me his help. I wanted to know your fancy, though very likely it can't be met, about the other horses; colour and so forth.' 'Not white--and not black,' said Wych Hazel. 'And not sorrel-- nor cream.' 'That is lucid. You said saddle horses--Ah! what's this?' It was a little combination of brisk sounds in the hall, followed by the entrance of Rollo himself in a gray fisherman's dress. Unless he was very hard to suit he might have enjoyed the picture now opened before him. The pretty room, with its garden outlook; the breakfast table, bright and quaint together, with its old-time furnishings; and flowers everywhere, arranged and un-arranged. As he came in, Wych Hazel had just (quite surreptitiously) hung a garland of pansies on the high carved peak of Mr. Falkirk's chair, and then dropped into her own place; with a De Rohan rose in the belt of her gray dress. Not in the least like Roll's gray, but white with the edge taken off, like a pale cloud. 'So!' she said, looking up at him as he stood beside her,-- 'have you come to confess?' 'Not this time. I have come to ask if I may catch some of your trout--if I can.' '_Not_ this time! If you wait for another the score will be heavier.' 'May I have your trout?' 'Really, if they give their consent I will. Good morning, Mr. Rollo!--will you sit down and let me give you some coffee?' 'As I came for that too, I will, thank you. Will you lend me Vixen to-day?' 'Why yes--as I am going fishing myself, and so cannot use her,' said Miss Hazel, giving critical attention to cream and sugar. 'But it is very good of me--after the way you have behaved.' 'It is very good of you. Is that thing all you have got to ride, except the respectable cob?' 'Half broken, isn't she?' asked Mr. Falkirk. 'Half--hardly. She shies wickedly.' 'I am glad Hazel hears you. I hope she will not mount her again after that.' Rollo's eyes came over to Wych Hazel's with an expression she could not quite read. It was not petitioning; it might be a little inquisitive. But she chose rather to answer Mr. Falkirk. 'I needed no help to find out that she shied, sir. Then I have a little sympathy with that particular species of what Mr. Rollo is pleased to call "wickedness." ' 'It is very unfair, of course,' said Rollo, 'to speak of an action from its results--but we all do it. Now a horse's shying may break your neck. It is true a lady's shying may break your heart; but that don't count.' 'We are just talking about horses, Rollo. I want your help.' 'I will give it with promptness--if Miss Kennedy command me.' 'Mr. Rollo's innocent way of talking about commands would deceive anybody but me,' said Wych Hazel. 'But I am learning to know him by slow and painful degrees.' The only answer to this was a mischievous smile, which did not embolden further charges. But whether boldly or not, Hazel went on with a fair show at least of bravery. 'What was that I was told so impressively yesterday?' she said. ' "There are circumstances where fear is highly commendable in a woman, when it is yet not desirable in a man." And after all that, did you not speed away like a very poltroon, and leave me to face everything by myself? Confess, Mr. Rollo!' The demure eyes were brimming with fun. 'How much did you have to face?' asked the gentleman taking another roll. 'Ten people and two catechisms. And if Madame Lasalle says true--Have you a sketching club here? and is she its president?' 'We have no such club--and it has no such president--and whether Madame Lasalle says true is a matter entirely unknown to me. Do you say you are going fishing to-day, Miss Kennedy?' 'Mr. Falkirk told Madame Lasalle I might. And she is to "tell me everything,"--fill up her sketches, I suppose; so the sport may be extensive. Yesterday her pencil marks were delightfully indistinct, and made the most charming confusion between cats and dogs and canary birds. Miss Maryland was a preacher, her father the personification of imprudence, and you--' She had run on in a sort of gleeful play, not at all guessing what the pencil marks really meant, and stopped short now only for fear her play might chafe. 'What was I?' said Rollo, with a quietness that was evidently careless. 'You,' said Wych Hazel impressively, 'were (in a general way) a Norwegian, a Dane,--making your way everywhere and laying waste the country.' Something in Mr. Falkirk's face as she finished these words made her instinct take alarm. The colour mounted suddenly. 'O, please do not speak to me again--anybody!' she said, looking down. 'I was all alone yesterday afternoon, and had to descend into the depths of Morton Hollow--and I believe I am a little wild at getting back. And Mr. Morton, sir--O, you have not asked what he said to me!' She checked her self again, too late! Whatever should she do with her tongue to keep it still. The Camille de Rohan at her belt was hardly deeper dyed than she. 'What about Mr. Morton?' said Rollo. 'Forgive somebody for speaking--but it was impossible to ask without!' 'O--nothing--only a compliment for Mr. Falkirk,' said the girl, trying to rally. 'And Mr. Falkirk had said--And I have lived so long alone with Mr. Falkirk that I have got into a very bad habit of forgetting that anybody else can be present!' It did not exactly help on the progress of self-control, that at this point Dingee came in, bearing in both hands a lovely basket of hot-house grapes and nectarines, themselves specimens of perfection, with a long wreathing stem of wonderful white orchids laid across its other treasures. Dingee evidently enjoyed his share in the business, for his white teeth were in a glitter. 'Mass' Morton, Miss Hazel. He done send 'em to my young mistiss, wid his greatest 'spects. He say he done percolate de Hollow and couldn't find nuffin more gorgeous, or he's send _him_.' 'Dingee!' said his young mistress, flashing round upon him, 'do you venture to bring me a made-up message? Take the basket to Mr. Falkirk!' But she shrank back then, as they saw, with extreme shyness. The little fingers trembled, trying to busy themselves among spoons and cups; and one pitiful glance towards Mr. Falkirk besought him to take the affair into his own hands, and send whatever return message might be needful. O to be a child, and put her head down under the table! And instead of that she must keep her place--and she did, with the most ladylike quietness. Mr. Falkirk had reason to be content with her for once. 'Nobody waiting, is there, Dingee?' said Mr. Falkirk. 'Ye' sir.' 'Take him this, and send him off politely; but no message, Dingee, if you want to wag your tongue in _this_ house!' 'Ye' sir. Got to be one somehow, sure!' said Dingee. ' 'Bout sumfin Mass' Morton done say to Miss Hazel. Real stupid feller he is dat come--can't make out what he says, nohow.' 'About a drive,' said Wych Hazel, looking over once more at her guardian. 'I expect you to say no, sir.' 'What did _you_ say, my dear?' 'I said I would ask you, sir--the shortest way to a negative.' Her lips were getting in a curl again. Mr. Falkirk went out to speak to Mr. Morton's messenger, and coming back again stood looking down at the basket of fruit with the wreath of white orchids lying across it. 'I hope you are grateful to fortune, my dear,' he remarked rather grimly. 'I hope you are, sir,--_I_ have nothing to do with that concern,' said Wych Hazel with prompt decision. 'You don't know,' said Mr. Falkirk. 'It's an enchanted basket, Miss Hazel. Looks innocent enough; but I know there are several little shapes lurking in its depths--ants or flies or what not--which a little conjuration from you would turn into carriage horses, pony and all.' 'They are safe to eat grapes in the shape of ants and flies for the term of their natural lives,' said Rollo contentedly. He did not care for Mr. Morton. Indeed he looked as if it would be difficult to disturb him, more than superficially, about anything. And that, not for want of elements of disturbance, but because of other elements of character, which in their strength slumbered, and perhaps were scarcely self- conscious. The last words moreover were a shield over Wych Hazel's possible shyness. However it was, Mr. Falkirk looked across from the orchids to him, and considered him somewhat fixedly. 'If we are not to get them out of the basket--but that would be very like a fairy tale--will you see to the matter of the horses, Rollo?' 'If Miss Kennedy commands me,' he said, with a smile. But Miss Kennedy was in a mood to keep her distance. 'I have told Mr. Falkirk,' she said. And now came up the question of her engagement at Moscheloo; if she was going, she ought to be off, and it appeared that there was no vehicle on the place in fit order to take her. Mr. Falkirk proposed to send to Crocus. 'Too far,' said Rollo. 'Suppose you put yourself in the saddle, and let me convoy you over to Moscheloo? It's good for a ride, this morning.' 'I thought you wanted Vixen?' said the girl, turning towards him. '_You_ don't.' 'Do you know what I do want, as well as what I do not, Mr. Rollo?' 'The trouble is, it is not to be had to-day. But there is the grey cob. Always take the best there is to be had. Put on your habit, and I'll give you a very decent canter across the country to Moscheloo. Come!' he said, with a look compounded of sweetness and raillery. But raillery from Rollo's eyes was a little keen. She laughed with a pretty acknowledgment of the raillery, but a first did not answer. It was a great temptation! The breakfast had left her excited and restless, and to get away from it all--to have a canter in the fresh wind! Then, she hated the very name of the grey cob!--She looked over to Mr. Falkirk. He was looking at her earnestly, but he did not speak. 'Shall I do that, sir?' 'If you go, you cannot do better,' he said, in a tone which certainly signified a want of satisfaction at something; but that was not unprecedented in their discussions. 'But my habit!--O well, I can manage that. Then will you be ready very soon, Mr. Rollo?' Dane was ready, there was no doubt of that; but Mr. Falkirk was on the verandah also, when the little mistress of Chickaree come forth to be mounted; and for the occasion the red squirrel went back to the old grave punctilio of manner he could assume when he pleased. That was all the surrounding pairs of eyes could see; a grave deference, a skilful care in performance of his duties as Wych Hazel's squire. But to her, out of ken of all but herself, there was an expression of somewhat else; in every touch and movement and look, an indescribable something, which even to her inexperience said: 'Every bit of your little person, and everything that concerns it, is precious to me.' Not one man in many could have so shewn it to her, and hidden it from the bystanders. It was a bit of cool generalship. Then he threw himself on his own horse, like the red squirrel he was, and they moved off slowly together. Well, she was not a vain girl, having quite too much of a tide in her fancies, notions and purposes to be stopping to think of herself all the while. So, though Rollo's manner did make her shy, it stirred up no self-consciousness. For understanding may sleep, while instincts are awake. It was very pleasant to be liked, and if she wondered a little why he should like her--for Miss Kennedy was certainly not blind to some of her own wayward imperfections--still, perhaps the wonder made it all the pleasanter. She was not in the least inclined to take people's attentions in any but the simplest way (if only they were not flung at her by the basketful); and in short had no loose tinder, as yet, lying round to catch fire. Perhaps that says the whole. So she was about as grave and as gay, as timid and as bold, by turns, as if she had been seven years old. 'I promised you a canter,' said her companion, taking hold of her bridle to draw the grey aside from a bad place in the road. 'Next time you shall have a gallop--so soon as I can find what will do for you. Never mind for to-day.' 'You think this most respectable horse could so far forget himself as to canter?' 'Try.' And away they went, with that elastic, flying spring through the air which bids spirits bound as well, and leaves care nowhere. For the old grey had paces, if his jollity was somewhat abated; and Vixen went provokingly, minding her business like one who thought she had better. Nevertheless it was a good canter. 'You will be a good rider,' said Rollo, when at length they subsided to a trot, stretching out his hand again and drawing Wych Hazel's reins a little further through her fingers. 'There, that is quite enough for him, steady as he is. Do you keep so free a rein in the household as you do in the saddle?' 'There has been no household--and no bridle, except for me.' 'Is Mr. Falkirk partial to a short rein?' 'What is "short?" ' she said with a laugh. 'That is an utterly unsettled point. Are women never appointed guardians, Mr. Rollo?' 'Certainly,' said Rollo, gravely. 'Always, when they marry.' She glanced at him, doubting whether he might be laughing at her. 'But I mean as Mr. Falkirk was.' 'Not often; but it occasionally happens. I congratulate you that your case was not such.' 'Ah, you do not know!' she said quickly, with a sort of outbreak of impatience. 'You don't know either,' said he. 'Yes I do. Not much about women to be sure--I have known very few. But I do know Mr. Falkirk, and love him dearly, and think a great deal more of him than you possibly can, Mr. Rollo.' 'I have thought a great deal about him,' said Rollo, in a sort of dry, innocent manner. 'But I will tell you--a man's guardianship leaves you a moral agent; a woman's changes you into a hunted badger; and if you were of some sorts of nature it would be a hunted fox. You know I have been under guardianship too?' 'Yes, but I thought it was Dr. Maryland's?' she said looking at him with astonished eyes. 'And you speak--Ah, you do not know, as I said, after all. You never wanted anything that a man could not give you.' He laughed a little, his eye brightening and changing as he looked at her with a very winning expression. 'I had all that a man could give me. Dr. Maryland was father and mother in one, gentle and strong. But I have been in wardship under a woman too, partially, and it was as I tell you. Dr. Maryland would say: "Dane, don't go there," or "let that alone," and I _did_, except when a very wicked fit got hold of me. But _she_ would stick a cushion with pins, to keep me out of it, and if she wanted to keep a cup from my lips she rubbed gall where my lips would find it.' '_Two_ guardians!' said Wych Hazel; 'so that queer woman at Catskill thought _I_ had. But it is a great deal harder to have a man find fault with you, nevertheless.' 'Why?' said Rollo, laughingly and seriously too. 'They are so quick in their judgments,' said the girl; 'so sure about the evidence. The jury agree without retiring, and sentence is passed before you are summoned to attend your own trial. You are out of play; you suddenly find yourself convicted of manslaughter in the fourth degree--or the fiftieth; it makes no difference.' The words came out with her usual quick emphasis, and then Miss Hazel remembered that one or two of her words were suggestive. She flushed very much, drooping her head. 'Coroner's inquest?' said Rollo, with a mixture of gentleness and fun. But she made no answer, unless by the soft laugh which hardly let itself be heard. He stretched out his hand again, laying it this time lightly upon hers, altering its bearing. 'Curb him in a little more,' said he, 'a little--so. Now touch him gently on the shoulder. What is it you think you miss so much in a man's guardianship?' She looked round at him then--one of her girlish, searching looks, resolving perhaps how far it was safe to be confidential. 'A good many things, Mr. Rollo,' she answered, slowly. 'I do not believe you could understand. But I would rather have fourteen lectures from Mrs. Bywank than just to hear one of Mr. Falkirk's stiff "Miss Hazels." ' 'I cannot remember any lectures from Mrs. Bywank,' said Rollo, looking as if his recollections in that quarter were pleasant-- 'which were not as soft as swansdown. But here we are coming to Moscheloo. How much do you know about fishing?' 'Rather less than I do about anything else. O, I remember Mrs. Bywank said she used to know you.' 'Mrs. Bywank is an old friend. In the times when I had, practically, two guardians--though only Dr. Maryland held the position officially--when there was nobody at Chickaree, I used to go nutting in your woods and fishing in the same brook which will, I hope, give me some trout to-day; and when I was thoroughly wetted with a souse in the water, or had torn my clothes half off my back in climbing to the tops of the trees, I used to carry my fish ad my difficulties to Mrs. Bywank. She cooked the one and she mended the other; we eat the fish in company, and parted with the promise to meet again. Seems to me I ought to have had lectures, but I didn't get them from her.' 'Well, that is just it,' said Hazel, with her earnest face. 'She understood.' 'Understood what?' said Rollo, smiling. 'Things,' said Hazel, 'and you.' 'There's a great deal in that. Now do you want another canter?' There was a mile of smooth way between them and the grounds of Moscheloo; a level road bordered with Lollard poplars. The grey went well, spite of his age and steadiness, and Vixen behaved her prettiest; but she was not much of a steed after all, and just now was shewing the transforming power of a good rider. And the rider was good company. They came to the open gate of Moscheloo, and began to ascend more slowly the terraced road of the grand entrance. The house stood high; to reach it the avenue made turn after turn, zig-zagging up the hill between and under fine old trees that overshadowed its course. 'Here we are, said Rollo, looking up toward the yet distant house. 'How many people do you suppose there will be here that know anything about fish!' 'Why, it is a fishing party!' said Wych Hazel. 'I suppose I am the only one who does _not_ know.' 'I will tell you beforehand what to expect. There will be a great deal of walking, a good deal of luncheon, a vast deal of talk, and a number of fishing rods. I shouldn't be surprised if you caught the first fish. The rest will be dinner.' 'And you will reverse that,' said Wych Hazel,--'little dinner and much fish.' 'Depends,' said Rollo. 'I am going to look after Mr. Falkirk, if he is in my neighbourhood.' 'Look after him!--Let him learn how it feels?' she said, with a laugh. 'Not just in that sense,' said Rollo, smiling. 'Only keep him from getting lost in the woods.' 'He has nothing to do in the woods till I come,' said Wych Hazel. 'And I thought you said you were off for a day's fishing?' 'I'll combine two pleasures--if I can.' 'What is the other?' she said, looking at him. 'Woodcraft.' A tinge came up in her cheeks that might have been only surprise. She looked away, and as it were tossed off the first words that came. Then with very sedate deliberation: 'Mr. Rollo, I do not allow _anybody_ to practice woodcraft among my trees without my special oversight. Not even Mr. Falkirk.' 'Suppose Mr. Falkirk takes a different view,' said Rollo, also sedately, 'am I answerable? Because, if that is your meaning, I will tell him he undergoes my challenge.' 'He is not to cut a tree nor a branch till I come home.' 'Suppose we arrange, then, for a time when you will come out and give a day to the business. Shall we say to-morrow?' 'O yes, I agree to that.' 'There shall not be a tree cut, then, till to-morrow. And to- morrow you shall have a lesson. Now here we are.' CHAPTER XVI. FISHING. Several people were on the steps before the door, watching and waiting for them. The house shewed large and stately; the flight of steps imposing. Hot-house plants stood around in boxes; the turf was well shaven; the gravelled road in order; the overhanging trees magnificent. Moscheloo was a fine place. As the riders approached the door, Mme. Lasalle came forward, pouring forth welcomes, and invitations to Rollo. But after dismounting Wych Hazel, and so disappointing the gentleman who wanted to do it, Rollo excused himself and set off down the hill again. Mme. Lasalle turned to Wych Hazel, and led her, with flying introductions by the way, to the stairs and up to a dressing-room. 'It is quite charming to see you, and to think that Chickaree is inhabited and has a mistress--it makes Moscheloo, I assure you, several degrees brighter. Now, my dear, what will you have?--is it nothing but to take off this habit-skirt?--let me undo it. What an odd mortal that is, that came with you!' But to that Wych Hazel answered nothing. The light riding skirt and jacket taken off, left her in green from head to foot. A daring colour for a brunette. But her own tint was so clear and the mossy shade of her dress was so well chosen, that the effect was extremely good. She looked like a wood nymph. 'Charming!--vraie Française'--said Madame, softly. 'That is a coquettish colour, my dear--are you of that character!' 'I am not sure that I know my own character yet,' Hazel said, laughing a little. 'Ah! that's dangerous. You don't know your own character?--then do you read other people's? Rollo--do you know him well?' Mme. Lasalle was somewhat officiously but with great attention stroking into order one or two of Wych Hazel's curls which the riding had tossed. 'O, I dare say I shall make new discoveries, Mme. Lasalle.' 'He's the best creature in the world, everybody likes him; but--Oh dear! well I suppose all young men are so; they all like power. Did you notice that Miss Powder down stairs, that I introduced to you?' 'Hardly.' 'You had no time. She's a sweet creature. Oh, no, you hadn't time; but I want you to see her do-day. I have a little plan in my head.' And Mme. Lasalle left the curls and whispered with a serious face. '_She's_ the young lady Rollo paid so much devotion to before he went abroad. Everybody knew that; and I know he liked her; but then, you see, he went off, and nothing came of it; but it's a pity, for Mrs. Powder would have been much pleased, I know, with her large family of daughters--to be sure, she has married two of them now;--but what is worse,' (in a lower whisper) 'Annabella would have been pleased too; and she hasn't been pleased since. Now isn't it a shame?' Wych Hazel considered the matter. With a curious feeling of disbelief in her mind, which (without in the least knowing where it came from) found its way to her face. 'I wonder she would tell of it!' 'My dear, she didn't; only one sees, one can't help it. One sees a great many disagreeable things, but it's no use to think about it. It was nothing very bad in Rollo, you know; he has that way with him, of seeming to like people; but it don't mean anything, _except_ that he does like them. O, I know that he liked her--and I am going to make you accomplice in a little plot of mine. I won't tell you now--by and by, when you have seen Annabella a little more. I would have asked Dane to join our party to-day, but I didn't dare--I was afraid he would guess what I was at. Now, my dear, I won't keep you up here any longer. Pardon me, you are charming! If Dane sees much of you, I am afraid my fine scheming will do Annabella no good!' And shaking her head gaily, the lady ran down stairs followed by Wych Hazel. There was a great muster then of fishing-rods and baskets; and everybody being provided, the company was marshalled forth, each lady being under the care of a gentleman, who carried her basket and rod. Wych Hazel found herself without knowing how or why, leading the march with Mr. Lasalle. He proved rather a sober companion. A sensible man, but thoroughly devoted to business, his French extraction seemed to have brought him no inheritance of grace or liveliness--unless Mme. Lasalle had acted as an absorbent and usurped it at all. He was polite, and gave good host-like attention to his fair little companion; but it was as well for her that the walk presently sufficed of itself for her entertainment. They went first across several fields, where the sun beat down freely on all their heads, and divers fences gave play to the active and useful qualities of the gentlemen. Suddenly from the last field they went down a grassy descent--and found themselves at the side of a brook. Well, it was a good-sized brook, overhung with a fine bordering of trees that shaded and sheltered it. The ladies cried 'lovely!'--and so it was, after the sunshiny fields on a warm June morning. But this was not the fishing ground. The brook must be followed up to the woods whence it came. And soon the banks became higher and broken, the ascent steeper, the trees closer; no longer a mere fringe or veil to the fostering waters. Fields were forgotten; the brook grew wild and lively, and following its course became a matter of some difficulty. Sometimes there was no edge of footing beside the stream; they must take to the stones and rocks which broke its way, or cross it by fallen trees, and recross again. The woods made a thicket of wilderness and stillness and green beauty and shady sweetness, invaded just now by an inroad of fashion and society. Like a sprite Wych Hazel led the van, making her way over rocks and through vine tangles and across the water, after a fashion attainable by no other feet. Mr. Lasalle had no trouble but to follow; had not even the task of hearing exclamations or being entertained; for Wych Hazel had by no means acquired that amiable habit of society which is full dress upon all occasions. To-day she was like a child out of school in her gleeful enjoyment, only very quiet. So she flitted on through the mazes of the wood and the brook, making deep remarks to herself over its dark pools, perching herself on a rock for a backward look at Miss Powder, and then darting on. The party in the rear, struggling after, eyed her in the distance with various feelings. 'The flower she trod on dipped and rose, 'And turned to look at her!--' So quoted Metastasio Simms, who played the part of cavalier to Mme. Lasalle, and of poet and troubadour in general. 'There steals over me, Madame,' said another cavalier, 'the fairy tale remembrance of a marvellous bird with green plumage--which flitting along before the traveller did thereby allure him to his captivity. Are you pledge for Miss Kennedy's good faith?' 'I am pledged for nothing. I advise you to take care of yourself, Mr. May--I have no doubt she is dangerous. Haven't we come far enough? Do run down the line, and tell them all to stop where they are; we must not be too close upon one another. And when you come back I will reward you with another commission.' While Mr. Simms was gone down the brook, however, Mme. Lasalle permitted the pair next below to pass her and go up to stop Mr. Lasalle and Wych Hazel from proceeding any further. So it came to pass that the highest group on the stream was composed of four instead of two; and the additional two were Stuart Nightingale and Miss Annabella Powder. Now the fishing rods were put into the ladies' hands; now the cavaliers attentively supplied their hooks with what was supposed to be bait, and performing afterwards the same office for their own, the brook presently had the appearance, or would to a bird's-eye view, of a brook in toils. 'What do we expect to catch, sir?' asked Miss Kennedy of Mr. Lasalle, as she watched his motions and dropped her own line in imitation. 'If I were a member of the firm, I should say, "all hearts," mademoiselle, without doubt.' 'For shame, Mr. Lasalle!' cried Miss Powder. 'Fish are made to be caught, mademoiselle,' said Mr. Lasalle, throwing his own line again. 'For shame, Mr. Lasalle! How many hearts do you think one lady wishes to catch?' 'No limit that I know'--said the gentleman serenely. 'Well, but--are there no other fish in this brook?' said Wych Hazel. 'Miss Kennedy makes small account of the first kind,' said Stuart, laughing. 'That sport is old already. There must be difficulty to give interest, Lasalle, you know.' 'You gentlemen are complimentary,' said Miss Powder. 'Upon my word, I said what I thought,' replied the first gentleman. 'Miss Kennedy,' called Stuart out from his post down the brook; 'should compliments be true or false, to be compliments? Miss Powder is too indignant to be judge in the case.' 'I do not see how false ones can compliment,' said the lady in green, much intent upon her line. 'There!--Mr. Lasalle--is that what you call a bite?' It was no bite. 'But people need not know they are false?' pursued Stuart. 'Well,' said Wych Hazel, looking down at him, 'you were talking of what things _are_--not what they seem.' 'You may observe,' said Mr. Lasalle, 'that most people find it amusing to get bites--if only they don't know there's no fish at the end of them.' Mr. Lasalle spoke feelingly, for he had just hooked and drawn up what proved to be a bunch of weeds. 'But where there is,' said Wych hazel. 'There! Mr. Lasalle, I have got your fish!' and swung up a glittering trophy high over the gentleman's head. 'The first fish caught, I'll wager!' cried Stuart; and he looked at his watch. 'Twenty-seven minutes past twelve. Was that skill or fortune, Miss Kennedy?' 'Neither, sir,' observed Mr. Simms, who had wandered that way in search of a hook. 'There was no hope of Miss Kennedy's descending to the bed of the brook--what could the fish do but come to her? Happy trout!' 'I am afraid he feels very much like a fish out of water, nevertheless,' said Wych Hazel, eyeing her prize and her line with a demure face. Alas! it was the beginning and ending of their good fortune for some time. Mr. Simms went back to his place; Mr. Lasalle disengaged the fish and rearranged the bait; and all four fell to work, or to watching, with renewed animation; but in vain. The rods kept their angle of suspension, unless when a tired arm moved up or down; the fishers' eyes gazed at the lines; the water went running by with a dance and a laugh; the fish laughed too, perhaps; the anglers did not. There were spicy wood smells, soft wood flutter and flap of leaves, stealing and playing sunbeams among the leaves and the tree stems; but there was too much Society around the brook, and nobody heeded all these things. 'Well, what success?' said Mme. Lasalle coming up after a while. 'What have you caught? One little fish! Poor little thing! Is that all? Well, it's luncheon time. Lasalle, I wish you'd go and see that everybody is happy at the lower end of the line; and I'll do your fishing meanwhile. Oh, Simms has almost killed me! Stuart! do take charge of that basket, will you?' Mr. Nightingale receiving the basket from the hands of a servant, inquired of his aunt what he was to do with it. 'Mercy! open it and give us all something--I am as hungry as I can be. What have you all been doing that you haven't caught more fish? My dear,' (to Wych Hazel), 'that is all you will get till we go home; we came out to work to-day.' And Stuart coming up, relieved her of her fishing rod, found a pleasant seat on a mossy stone, and opened his basket. 'As the fish won't bite--Miss Kennedy, will you?' 'If you please,' she said, taking a new view from her new position. 'How beautiful everything is to-day! Certainly I have learned something about brooks.' 'And something about fishing?' 'Not much.' 'The best thing about fishing,' said Stuart, after serving the other ladies and coming back to her, 'is that it gives one an appetite.' 'Oh, then you have not studied the brook.' 'Certainly not,' said he, laughing, 'or only as one studies a dictionary--to see what one can get out of it. Please tell me, what did you?' 'New thoughts,' she said. 'And new fancies. And shadows, and colours. I forgot all about the fish sometimes.' 'You are a philosopher?' said Stuart, inquisitively. 'Probably. Don't I look like one?' He laughed again, with an unequivocal compliment in his bright eyes. He was a handsome fellow, and a gentleman from head to foot. So far at least as manners can make it. 'I do not judge from appearances. Do you care to know what I judge from?' 'Your judgment cannot have been worth much just now,' said Wych Hazel, shaking her head. 'But I am willing to hear what led it astray.' 'What led it,--not astray,--was your calm declining of all but true words of service.' 'O, had you gone back _there?_' she said. 'I think it takes very little philosophy to decline what one does not want.' 'Evidently. But how came you not to want what everybody else wants? There is the philosophy, you see. If you bring all things down to bare truth, you will be Diogenes in his tub presently.' ' "Bare truth!" '--said the girl. 'How people say that, as if truth were only a lay figure!' 'But think how disagreeable truth would often be, if it were not draped! Could you stand it? I beg pardon! I mean, not you, but other people!' 'I _have_ stood it pretty often,' said the girl with a grave gesture of her head. 'Impossible! But did you believe that it was truth?' 'Too self-evident to be doubted!' Stuart laughed, again with a very unfeigned tribute of pleasure or admiration in his face. 'It is a disagreeable truth,' said he, 'that that is not a good sandwich. Permit me to supply its place with something else. Here is cake, and nothing beside that I can see; will you have a piece of cake? It is said to be a feminine taste.' 'No, not any cake,' said Wych Hazel, her eyes searching the brook shadows. 'But I will have another sandwich, Mr. Nightingale--if there is one. At least, if there is more than one!' 'Ah,' said Stuart, 'you shall have it, and you shall not know the state of the basket. Those two people have so much to talk about, they have no time to eat!' And he took another sandwich himself. 'Is that old woman in the cottage a friend of yours?' 'I never saw her before the other day.' 'She lost no time! A little garrulous, isn't she? I made acquaintance there one day when I went in to light a cigar. I have a mind to ask you to give me the distinction I am ready to claim, of being your oldest acquaintance in these parts. I think I shall claim it yet. Let me look at the state of your hook.' They dropped their lines in the brook again, but no fish were caught, and fish might cleverly have run away with their bait several times without being found out. The conversation was lively for some time. Stuart had sense and was amusing, and had roamed about the world enough to have a great deal to say. The pair were not agreeably interrupted after half an hour by Mme. Lasalle, who discovered that Wych Hazel was fishing where she could get nothing, and brought her down the brook to the close neighbourhood of Miss Powder, where Stuart's attentions had to be divided. But so the two girls had a chance to see something of each other; a chance which Miss Powder improved with manifest satisfaction. She was a wax-Madonna sort of beauty, with a sweet face, fair, pure, placid, but either somewhat impassive or quite self-contained in its character. Her figure was good, her few words showed her not wanting in sense or breeding. Wych Hazel was by this time far enough out of the reserve of first meetings to let the exhilarating June air and sunshine do their work, and her voice, never raised beyond a pretty note, was ready with laugh and word and repartee. Now studying her hook, now questioning Miss Powder, now answering Mr. Nightingale, and then seriously devoted to her fishing,--she shewed the absolute sport of her young joyous nature, a thing charming in itself, even without so piquant a setting. It was no great wonder that a gentleman now and then took ground on the opposite side of the brook, and directed his eyes as if the fish would only come from that point of the shore where Miss Kennedy sat. This happened more and more, as by degrees the line of fishers was broken and the unskilled or unsuccessful, tired of watching the water, gave it up, and strolled up the brook to see who had better luck. And so few fish were the result of the day's sport, so many of the company had nothing better to do than to look at what somebody else was doing, that by degrees nearly the whole party were gathered around that spot where Wych Hazel had caught the first fish. They were relieved, perhaps, that the effort was over; perhaps the prospect of going home to dinner was encouraging; certainly the spirits of all the party were greatly enlivened by something. Mme. Lasalle's ears heard the pleasant sound of voices in full chorus of speech and laughter all the way home. It was rather late before Madame's carriage could be ordered to take Miss Kennedy home. Mme. Lasalle herself attended her, and would suffer the attendance of no one else. A young moon was shedding a delicious light on the Lollard poplars past which Wych Hazel had cantered in the morning. It was an hour to be still an enjoy, and think; but did Mme. Lasalle ever think? She ceased not to talk. And Wych Hazel, after her day of caressing and petting and admiration, how was she? She had caught the first fish; she had been queen of the feast; she had given the first toast, she had received the first honours of every eye and ear in the company. Her host and hostess had lavished all kindness on her; ladies had smiled; and gentlemen, yes, six gentlemen had come down the steps to put her into the carriage. But if she wanted to think, Mme. Lasalle gave her no chance. 'Where shall you go to church on Sunday, my dear?' she asked on the way. 'Dr. Maryland's, of course, ma'am.' 'O, that's where we all go, of course; delightful creature that he is. And yet he rebukes every single individual thing that one does. Dear Dr. Maryland, he's so good, he don't see what is going in his own family. Do you know, it makes me unhappy when I think of it. But, my dear, that's the very thing I wanted to talk to you about,--Miss Powder, you've seen her, aren't you pleased with her?' 'She was very pleasant to me.' 'She is that to everybody, and her mother is a very fine woman. Now, my dear, you will be at your pleasure, seeing your friends at Chickaree--couldn't you contrive to bring Dane and Annabella together again?' 'I?' said Wych Hazel, surprised. 'Why, I do not know how to contrive things for myself.' 'O! I do not mean anything complicated--that never does well; but you could quite naturally, you know, give them opportunities of seeing each other pleasantly. I think if he saw her he might come round again and take up his old fancy; and you being a stranger, you know, might do it without the least difficulty or gaucherie; they would meet quite on neutral ground, for nobody would suspect that you were _au fait_ of our country complications. I dare not stir, you see; that was the reason I could not invite Dane to our fishing to-day. I knew it wouldn't do. This was my plot for you, that I told you about--what do you think? It would be doing a kind thing, and hurting nobody, at any rate.' It did come to Miss Kennedy's mind that Mr. Rollo was quite capable of 'contriving' his own situations; but she answered only, 'Would it, ma'am?' 'It couldn't do any harm, you know. And you are the very person to do it. And then, if your plan should succeed, it would have another good effect, to put Primrose Maryland in safety.' If it had been daylight instead of moonlight, Mme. Lasalle might have seen the young face at her side knit itself into a very perplexed state indeed at these words; and the more Hazel thought the deeper she got. 'It would be quite natural, you know,' Mme. Lasalle went on after a pause, 'that a girl like her should be fascinated, and Rollo, without meaning to do any harm, would give her cause enough. He _is_ fascinating you know, but he is too cool by half. Dr. Maryland, of course, never would see or understand what was going on; and Primrose is so sweet and inexperienced. I know her sister was very uneasy about it before Rollo went away--so long ago. I fancy his going was partly thanks to her care.' Closer and closer came the dark brows together, until by degrees her extremely fancy-free thoughts took a turn. 'What a fuss! what was Mme. Lasalle talking about? "Fascinating," forsooth!--she should like to see anybody that could fascinate her.' And so the whole thing grew ludicrous, and she laughed, her soft ringing, girlish laugh. 'What a pirate he must be, Mme. Lasalle. A true Dane! Do many of that sort live on shore?' 'Take care!' said the lady in a different tone--'dangers that are slighted are the first to be run into.' The carriage stopped at that moment, so Wych Hazel had no need to reply. She watched Mme. Lasalle drive off, took a comprehensive view of the moon for a minute, and then pirouetting round on the tips of her toes she flashed into the sitting room and favoured Mr. Falkirk with a courtesy profound enough for her grandmother. CHAPTER XVII. ENCHANTED GROUND. Mr. Falkirk was sitting with the paper in the tea-room at Chickaree. A good lamplight gave him every temptation to lose himself in its manifold pages, but somehow the temptation failed. Mr. Falkirk had been walking the floor for part of the evening; going then to one of the long windows and throwing it open--there were no mosquitoes at Chickaree--to look out at the moonlight, or perhaps to listen for the sound of wheels; but the Summer stillness was only marked by the song of insects and the light stir of leaves, and Mr. Falkirk went back to his musings. His hand caressed his chin sometimes, in slow and moody deliberation. No doubt the change was a serious one, from the quiet, unquestioned care of a schoolgirl, to the guardianship of a bright, full-winged butterfly of humanity. That does not half express it. For to the airy uncertainty of butterfly motions, his ward certainly added the intense activities of a humming bird, and the jealous temper, without the useful proclivities, of a honey bee. I think Mr. Falkirk likened her to all these in his meditations; and his brows knit themselves into a persistent frown as he walked. For all that, when the wheels of Mme. Lasalle's carriage grated on the gravel sweep, Mr. Falkirk sat down to the table and the newspaper, and as Wych Hazel opened the door and walked in, Mr. Falkirk looked up sedately. Then his face unbent, a very little, but he waited for her to speak. 'Good evening, my dear Mr. Falkirk!' Mr. Falkirk was not morose, but he made little answer beyond a smile. 'I perceive you have been pining for my return, sir,' said Miss Hazel advancing airily; 'but why you do not revive when I come, _that_ puzzles my small wits. Are you overjoyed to see me safe home, Mr. Falkirk?' 'I wait to be certified of the fact, Miss Hazel.' She came to a low seat before him, silently crossing her arms on her lap. 'What are the developments of fortune, to-day, Miss Hazel?' said her guardian with a relaxing face. 'A number of gentlemen, sir, and one fish. Which I caught. There were some ladies, too, but they came less in my way.' 'Um! So I understand you catch all that come in your way?' 'Only the fish, sir. But you should have heard the people thereupon! One cried, "Happy fish!"--and another, "Happy Miss Kennedy!"--And yet I suppose we had both of us known more ecstatic moments.' 'And what is your impression of fishing parties, judging from this specimen?' 'O, I was amused, of course. But the brook was delicious. You know, it was all new to me, Mr. Falkirk.' 'Like the fairy-tale you wanted?' said her guardian smiling. She smiled, too, but her answer was only a sweet, 'Are you glad to see me here, sir?' 'I am glad if you are glad, Miss Hazel. I did not suspect that any genie or enchanter had got hold of you yet.' 'Only "if," ' she said to herself. 'I wonder how it feels to have anybody care for one very much!' But no word of that came out. 'Are _you_ glad to get home, Miss Hazel?' 'Yes, sir. The drive was rather stupid.' 'Did you come alone?' 'I had Madame in person, and with her all the unquiet ghosts of the neighbourhood, I should judge,'--added Miss Hazel thoughtfully slipping her bracelets up and down. 'Scandal, eh?' said Mr. Falkirk. 'And yet the drive was stupid!' 'Incredible, sir, is it not? But you see, I had been ever so long face to face with the brook!--' 'I do not know that I am fond of scandal,' said Mr. Falkirk; 'and yet I should like to know what particular variety of that favourite dish Madame chose to serve you with. And in the mean time, to relieve the dryness of the subject, Miss Hazel, will you give me a cup of tea?' She sprang up, and began to busy herself at once with her home duties, but did not immediately answer his question. Until she came round to his side, bringing the fragrant and steaming cup of tea, and then apparently thoughts were too much for her, and she broke forth: 'Why don't people marry each other if they want to, Mr. Falkirk?' she said, standing still to put the question. 'And if they _don't_ want to, why do not other people let them alone?' Mr. Falkirk shot one of his glances at the questioner from under his dark brows, and sipped his tea. 'There might be a variety of answers given to your first query, Miss Hazel. People that want to marry each other are proverbially subject to hindrances--from the days of fairy tales down to our own.' 'They always do it in fairy tales, however.' 'They very often do it in real life,' said Mr. Falkirk gravely. 'Well, sir?--then why cannot they be left to take care of themselves, either way? It is such fudge!' she said, walking back to her place and energetically dropping sugar in her own cup. 'Who is Mme. Lasalle trying to take care of?' 'Me, last, sir. Warning me that things laughed at become dangerous. In which case I shall lead a tolerably risky life.' 'Who is Mme. Lasalle warning you against?' demanded Mr. Falkirk hastily. 'My dear sir, how excited you are over poor Mme. Lasalle! I presumed to laugh at some of her fancy sketches, and then of course she rapped me over the knuckles. Or meant it!' said Miss Hazel, slightly lifting her eyebrows. 'But I observe you do not answer me, my dear.' 'No, sir,--if you will allow me to use my own judgment, I think I had better not. Let me have your cup, Mr. Falkirk please, and I'll put more sugar in this time.' Mr. Falkirk finished his tea and made no more observations. He was silent and thoughtful,--moody, his ward might have fancied him,--while the tea-things were cleared away, and afterwards pored over the newspaper and did not read it. At last, when silence had reigned some time, he lifted his head up and turned round to where Wych Hazel sat. 'I have been considering a difficulty, Miss Hazel; will you help me out?' 'Gladly, sir, if I can.' She had been sitting in musing idleness, going over the day perhaps, for now and then her lips curled and parted, with various expressions. 'We have come, you are aware, Miss Hazel, in the course of our progress, to the Enchanted Region;--where things are not what they seem; jewels lie hid in the soil for the finding, and treasures are at the top of the hill; but the conditions of success may be the stopping of the ears, you know; and lovely ladies by the way may turn out to be deadly enchantresses. How, in this time of dangers and possibilities, can my wisdom avail for your inexperience? that is my question. Can you tell me?' 'Truly sir,' she answered with laugh, 'to get yourself out of a difficulty, you get me in! My inexperience is totally in the dark as to what your wisdom means.' 'Precisely,' said Mr. Falkirk; 'so how shall we do? How shall I take care of you?' 'You have always known how, sir,' she answered with a grateful flash of her brown eyes. 'When I had only a little Wych Hazel to take care of, and the care depended on myself,' Mr. Falkirk said, with just an indication of a sigh stifled somewhere. 'Now I can't get along without your coöperation, my dear.' 'Am I so much harder to manage than of old, sir? That speaks ill for me.' 'My dear, I believe I remarked that we are upon Enchanted ground. It does not speak ill for you, that you may not know a bewitched pumpkin from a good honest piece of carriage maker's work.' 'No, sir. Is it the pumpkin variety for which Mr. Rollo is to find mice?' 'I have taken care of your affairs at least,' said Mr. Falkirk gravely. 'There is nothing about _them_ that is not sound. I wish other people did not know it so well!' he muttered. 'It is only poor little me,' said Wych Hazel. 'Never mind, sir,--in fairy tales one always comes out somehow. But I am sure I ought to be "sound" too, if care would do it.' 'Will you help me, Hazel?' said Mr. Falkirk, bending towards her and speaking her name as in the old childish days. 'Gladly, sir,--if you will shew me how. And if it is not too hard,' she said with a pretty look, well answering to her words. 'I wish you had a mother!' said Mr. Falkirk abruptly. And he turned back to the table, and for a little while that was all the answer he made; while Wych Hazel sat waiting. But then he began again. 'As I remarked before, Miss Hazel, we are come upon bewitched ground in our search after fortune. You spoke of two classes of people a while ago, if you remember--people that want to marry each other and people that _don't_.' 'Yes sir. Which are the most of?' '_Being_ upon bewitched ground, it might happen to you as to others--mind, not this year, perhaps, nor next; but it might happen--that you should find yourself in one of these two, as you intimate, large classes. Suppose it; could you, having no mother, put confidence in an old guardian?' Very grave, very gentle Mr. Falkirk's manner and tone were; considerate of her, and very humble concerning himself. 'Why, Sir!'--she looked at him, the roses waking up in her cheeks as she caught his meaning more fully. Then her eyes fell again, and she said softly--'How do you mean, Mr. Falkirk? There is nobody in the world whom I trust as I do you.' 'I have never a doubt of that, my dear. But to make the trust avail you or me, practically, could you let me know the state of affairs?' She moved restlessly in her chair, drawing a long breath or two. 'You say such strange things, sir. I do assure you, Mr. Falkirk, I am ensconced in the very middle of one of those classes. And that not the dangerous one,' she added with a laugh, though the flushes came very frankly. 'If _that_ is what you are afraid of.' 'You are in about as dangerous a class as any I know,' said Mr. Falkirk, dryly; 'the class of people that everybody wants to marry. Miss Hazel, you are known to be the possessor of a very large propriety.' 'Am I, sir? And is that what makes me so attractive? I thought that there must be some explanation of so sweeping a compliment from your lips.' A provoked little smile came upon Mr. Falkirk's lips, but they grew grave again. 'So, Miss Hazel, how are you to know the false magician from the true knight?' 'He must be a poor knight who would leave the trouble on my hands,' said the girl, with her young ideas strong upon her. 'If he does not prove himself, Mr. Falkirk, "I'll none of him!" ' 'How shall a man prove to you that he does not want Chickaree and your money, my dear?' 'Instead of me. I think--I should know,' she answered slowly, so much absorbed in the question that she almost forgot its personal bearing. 'Mr. Falkirk, false and true cannot be just alike?' 'Remember that in both cases so much is true. The desire to win your favour, and therefore the effort to please, are undoubted.' 'Mr. Falkirk, you must be the assayer! Suppose you tell me now about all these people here, to begin with. I have not seen much that reminded me of magic _yet_,' she said with a curl of her lips. 'What people?' said Mr. Falkirk, hastily. 'What people? Oh, I forgot--you were not at Mme. Lasalle's to- day. But I thought you knew everybody here before we came.' 'I shall not be with you everywhere,' Mr. Falkirk went on; 'that would suit neither me nor you. The safe plan, Miss Hazel, would be, when you think anybody is seeking your good graces, to ask me whether he has gained mine. I will conclude nothing of _your_ views in the matter from any such confidence. But I will ask you to trust me thus far,--and afterwards.' 'You mean, sir, whether--he has gained mine or not?' Mr. Falkirk answered this with one of his rare smiles, shrewd and sweet, benignant, and yet with a play of something like mirth in the dark, overhung eyes. It was a look which recognized all the difficulty of the situation and the subject, for both parties. 'I am afraid the thing is unmanageable, my dear,' he said at last. 'You will rush up the hill without stopping your ears, after some fancied "golden water" at the top; and I shall come after and find you turned into some stone or other. And then you will object very much to being picked up and put in my pocket. I see it all before me.' She laughed a little, but shyly; not quite at ease upon the subject even with him. Then rose up, gathering on her arm the light wraps she had thrown down when she came in. 'I must have been always a great deal of trouble!' she said. 'But I do not want to give you more. Mr. Falkirk, wont you kiss me and say good night to me, as you used to do in old times? That is better than any number of fastenings to your pocket, to keep me from jumping out.' Once it had been his habit, as she said; now long disused. He did not at once answer; he, too, was gathering up a paper or two and a book from the table. But then he came where she stood, and taking her hand stooped and kissed her forehead. He did not then say good night; he kissed her and went. And the barring and bolting and locking up for the night were done with a more hurried step than usual. CHAPTER XVIII. COURT IN THE WOODS. 'Miss Wych--my dear--all in brown?' said Mrs. Bywank doubtfully, as her young charge was arraying herself one morning for the woodcraft. Some rain and some matters of business had delayed the occasion, and it was a good week since the fishing party. 'Harmonious, isn't it?' said Hazel. 'But, my dear--it looks--so sombre!' said Mrs. Bywank. 'Sombre?' said the girl, facing round upon her with such tinges of cheek and sparkles of eye that Mrs. Bywank laughed, too, and gave in. 'If it puts Mr. Falkirk to sleep, I can wake him up,' said Wych Hazel, busy with her loopings. 'And as for Mr. Rollo'-- 'Mr. Rollo!--is he to be of the party?' said the housekeeper. 'I suppose,--really,--he is _the_ party,' said Wych Hazel. 'Mr. Falkirk and I scarcely deserve so festive a name by ourselves.' 'And what were you going to say to Mr. Rollo?' 'O nothing much. He may go to sleep if he chooses--and can,' added Miss Wych, for the moment looking her name. But the old housekeeper looked troubled. 'My dear,' she began--'I wouldn't play off any of my pranks upon Mr. Rollo, if I were you.' 'What is the matter with Mr. Rollo, that his life must be insured?' said Wych, gravely confronting her old friend with such a face that Mrs. Bywank was again betrayed into an unwilling laugh. But she returned to the charge. 'I wouldn't, Miss Wych! Gentlemen don't understand such things.' 'I do not think Mr. Rollo seems dull,' said the girl, with a face of grave reflection. 'Now, Byo--what are you afraid I shall do?' she went on, suddenly changing her tone, and laying both hands on her old friend's shoulders. 'Why, nothing, Miss Wych, dear!--I mean,'--Mrs. Bywank hesitated. 'You mean a great deal, I see,' said Wych Hazel. 'But do not you see, Byo, I cannot hang out false colours? There is no sort of use in my pretending not to be wild, because I _am_.' Mrs. Bywank looked up in the young face,--loving and anxious. 'Miss Wych,' she said, 'what men of sense disapprove, young ladies in general had better not do.' 'O, I cannot follow you there,' said Wych Hazel. 'Suppose, for instance, Mr. Rollo (I presume you mean him by "men of sense") took a kink against my brown dress?' Not very likely, Mrs. Bywank thought, as she looked at the figure before her. If Hazel had been a wood nymph a week ago she was surely the loveliest of brown fairies to-day. But still the old housekeeper sighed. 'My dear, I know the world,' she began. 'And I don't,' said Hazel. 'I am so glad! Never fear, Byo, for to-day at least I have got Mr. Falkirk between me and mischief. And there he is this minute, wanting his breakfast.' But to judge by the housekeeper's face as she looked after her young mistress down the stairs, that barrier was not quite all that could be wished. However, if impenetrability were enough for a barrier, Mr. Falkirk could have met any inquisitions that morning. He came to breakfast as usual; but this morning breakfast simply meant business. He ate his toast and read his newspaper. With the ending of breakfast came Rollo. And the party presently issued forth into the woods which were to be the scene of the day's work. The woods of Chickaree were old and fine. For many years undressed and neglected, they had come at last to a rather rampant state of anarchy and misrule. Feebler, though perhaps not less promising members were oppressed by the overtopping growth of the stronger; there was an upstart crowd of young wood; and the best intentioned trees were hurting each other's efforts, because of want of room. It was a lovely wilderness into which the party plunged, and the June morning sat in the tops of the trees and laughed down at them. Human nature could hardly help laughing back in return, so utterly joyous were sun and sky, birds and insects and trees altogether. They went first to the wilderness through which Rollo and Wych Hazel had made their way on foot one morning; lying near to the house and in the immediate region of its owner's going and coming. Herein were great white oaks lifting their heads into greater silver pines. Here were superb hemlocks threatened by a usurping growth of young deciduous trees. There were dogwoods throwing themselves across everything; and groups of maples and beeches struggling with each other. As yet the wild growth was in many instances beautiful; the damage it was doing was beyond the reach of any but an experienced eye. Here and there a cross in white chalk upon the trunk of a tree was to be seen. The three walked slowly down through this leafy wild till they were lost in it. 'Now,' said Rollo to the little lady in brown, 'what do you think ought to be done here?' 'I should like to make ways through al this, if I could. True wildwood ways, I mean,--that one must look for and hardly find; with here and there a great clearance that should seem to have made itself. What sort of a track would a hurricane make here, for instance?' 'A hurricane!' said Mr. Falkirk, facing round upon his ward. 'Rather indiscriminate in its action,' observed Rollo. 'The clearance a hurricane makes in a forest,' Mr. Falkirk went on, 'is generally in the tree tops. The ground is left a wreck.' 'Any system of clearing that I know, brings the trees to the ground,' said Wych Hazel. 'But I mean--I like the woods dearly as they are, Mr. Falkirk; but _if_ I meddled with them, then I would have something to shew for it. I would have thoughts instead of the trees, and vistas full of visions. If anything is cut here, it ought to be in a broad hurricane track right down to the West, where "The wind shall seek them vainly, and the sun Gaze on the vacant space for centuries." I do not like fussing with such woods.' 'What thought is expressed by a wide system of devastation?' asked Rollo, facing her. 'Power. Do not you like power, Mr. Rollo?' she said with a demure arch of her eyebrows. Rollo bit his lips furtively but vigorously, and then demanded to know if Napoleon was her favourite character in history. 'No,' said Wych Hazel--'he did not know what to do with his power when he had it. A very common mistake, Mr. Rollo, you will find.' 'Don't make it,' said he, smiling. 'What are you talking about?' said Mr. Falkirk, turning round upon them. 'Miss Hazel, we are here in obedience to your wishes. What do you propose to do, now we are here? Do you know what needs doing?' 'What does, Mr. Falkirk?--in your opinion?' She came close to him, linking her hands upon his arm. 'Tell me first, and then I will tell you.' 'There must be a great many trees cut, Miss Hazel; they have grown up to crowd upon each other very mischievously. And a large quantity of saplings and underbrush must be cleared away. You see where I have begun to mark trees for the axe.' 'Truly, sir, I do! Mr. Falkirk, that bent oak is a beauty.' 'It will never make a fine tree. And the oak beside it will.' 'Well--it is to be congratulated,' said Miss Hazel, pensively. 'But what is to become of my poor woods, at that rate? There is an elm with a branch too many on one side; and a birch keeping house lovingly with a hemlock. If "woodcraft" means only such line-and-rule decimation, Mr. Falkirk--' 'I don't know what _you_ mean by woodcraft, my dear. I mean, taking care of the woods.' 'And _that_ means,' added Rollo, 'an intimate knowledge of their natures, and an affectionate care for their interests; a sympathetic, loving, watchful insight and forecast.' Wych Hazel gave him a little nod of approval. 'Don't you see, sir?' she went on eagerly. 'You _must_ have a bent tree now and then, because it is twice as interesting as the straight ones. And if you cut down all the bushes, Mr. Falkirk, you will clear _me_ out,' she added, laughing up in his face. 'You might grant her so much, Mr. Falkirk,' said the other gentleman. 'A bent tree now and then; and all her namesakes. Certainly they ought to stand.' M. Falkirk's answer was to take a few steps to a large white pine tree, and make a huge dash of white chalk upon its broad bole. Then he stepped back to look again. Action was more in his way than discussion to-day. Rollo began to get into the spirit of the thing; and suggested and pointed out here and there what ought to come down and what ought to be left, and the reasons, with a quick, clear insight and decision to which Mr. Falkirk invariably assented, and almost invariably in silence. Deeper and deeper into the wood they worked their way; where the shade lay dark upon the ferns and the air was cool and spicy with fragrance, and then where the sunlight came down and played at the trees' foot. For a while Wych Hazel kept pace with their steps; advising, countermanding, putting in her word generally. But by degrees she quitted the marking work, and began to flit about by herself; plunging her little fingers deep into moss beds, mimicking the squirrels, and--after her old fashion--breaking out from time to time into scraps of song. Now Mr. Falkirk's ears were delighted with the ringing chorus: 'Wooed and married and a'-- 'Wooed and married and a'; 'Wasna she vera weel aff 'That was wooed, and married, and a'? Then a complete hush seemed to betoken sudden recollection on the singer's part; that was quite too private and confidential a matter to be trilled out at the top of one's voice. Presently again, slow and clear like the tinkle of a streamlet down the rocks, came the words of Aileen Asthore: 'Even the way winds 'Come to my cave and sigh; they often bring 'Rose leaves upon their wing, 'To strew 'Over my earth, and leaves of violet blue; 'In sooth, leaves of all kinds.' It was a very sweet kind of telegraphing; but the two gentlemen, deep in the merits of a burly red oak, took no notice how suddenly the song broke off, nor that none other came after it. And when at last they bethought themselves of the young lady truant, and stopped to listen where she might be, they heard a murmur of tongues very different indeed from the silvery tones of Wych Hazel. And somewhat hastily retracing their steps, came presently into distant view if an undoubted little court, holden easily in the woods. Miss Kennedy, uplifted on a grey rock, was the centre thereof, and around her some six or eight gentlemen paid their devoirs in most courtier-like fashion. On the moss at her feet lay Mr. Kingsland, with no less a companion than Mr. Simms--black whiskers, white Venetian collar and all. Three or four others, whom Mr. Falkirk did not know, were lounging and laughing and paying attentions of unmistakable reality; while Stuart Nightingale, who had come up on horseback, stood nearest of all, leaning against the rock, his hat off, his horse's bridle upon his arm. The consequence of this revelation was a temporary suspension of woodcraft, properly so called; another sort of craft, it may possibly have occurred to the actors therein, coming into requisition. Mr. Falkirk at once went forward and joined the group around the rock. More slowly Rollo's movements also in time brought him there. They could see, as they came nearer, a fine example of the power of feminine adaptation. Was this the girl to whom Mr. Falkirk had discoursed the other night? How swiftly and easily she was taking her place! And though a little downcast and blushing now and then, beneath the subtle power of eyes and tongue, yet evidently all the while gathering up the reins and learning to drive her four in hand. Over the two at her feet she was openingly queening it already; over the others--what did Wych Hazel see concerning them, that curled her lips in their soft lines of mischief? Some exquisite hot-house flowers lay in her lap, and a delicate little basket by her side held strawberries--red, white and black--such as the neglected Chickaree gardens had never seen. 'Why, there is your venerable guardian, Miss Kennedy!' drawled out Mr. Kingsland, as Mr. Falkirk came in sight. 'How charming! Patriarchal. And who is that beyond?--Dane Rollo!--as I am a Christian!' 'Evidently then, somebody else,' said Mr. May. 'Who is it, Nightingale?' But Mr. Nightingale knew his business better than to reply; and Dane presently spoke for himself. It was the Dane of the Mountain House, courteous and careless; no fellow of these gentlemen, nor yet at all like Mr. Falkirk, a guard upon them. Mr. Falkirk's brows had unmistakeably drawn together at sight of the new comers; Rollo stood on the edge of the group, indifferent and at ease, after his wonted fashion in general society. 'You are making almost your first acquaintance with these beautiful woods?' Stuart remarked, to the little mistress of them, breaking the lull that Mr. Falkirk's arrival had produced. 'How old is your own, sir?' said Mr. Falkirk. 'I--really, I don't know--I have shot here a little; before you came, you know; when it was all waste ground.' 'I remember getting lost in them once, when I was a child,' said Wych Hazel,--'I think that was my first acquaintance. It was just before we went away. And Mr. Falkirk found me and carried me home. Do you remember, sir?' But Mr. Falkirk was oblivious of such passages of memory in the present company. He gave no token of hearing. Instead, he cruelly asked Mr. Kingsland how farming got on this summer? And Mr. Kingsland, by way of returning good for evil, gave Mr. Falkirk a shower of reports and statistics which might have been true--they were so unhesitating. Through which rain of facts Mr. Falkirk could just catch the sound of words from Mr. May, the sense of which fell upon Miss Kennedy's ear alone. Until Rollo at her side broke the course of things. 'I beg your pardon! Miss Kennedy,' (in an aside) 'I see Primrose and her father coming. Shall I stop them?' 'Why, of course!' she said, springing to her feet, 'What a question!' The two recumbent gentlemen rose at once. 'Do you always wear wildwood tints, Miss Kennedy?' asked Mr. Simms, looking up admiringly at the slim figure. 'I thought the other day that green was matchless, but to-day--' 'Yes,' said Wych Hazel, 'but if you would just please stand out of my way, and let me jump down. I want to see Dr. Maryland.' The gentleman laughed and retreated, and disregarding the half dozen offered hands, Hazel sprang from her rock and stood out a step or two, shading her eyes and looking down the woodland, where Rollo had disappeared to meet the approaching carriage. The thicket was so close just here that the carriage road though not far off was invisible. Down below Rollo had caught a glimpse of the well known little green buggy creeping up the hill; and in another few minutes its occupants appeared coming through the trees. Wych Hazel had hold of their hands almost before they had sight of her. 'I thought you had given me up, Dr. Maryland,' she said, 'and were never coming to see me at all!' 'Two days,' said the Doctor benignly, 'two fair days my dear, since we took breakfast together. I have not been very delinquent. Though it seems I am not the first here. Good morning, Mr. Kingsland!--how do you do, Mr. Burr?--how do you do, Mr. Sutphen?--Mr. May? Are you holding an assembly here, my dear?' And by that time Dr. Maryland had worked round to Mr. Falkirk; and the hands of the two gentlemen closed in an earnest prolonged clasp; after the approved method gentlemen have of expressing their estimation of each other. 'Miss Kennedy is pretty sure to "hold" whoever comes near her, sir,' said Mr. Burr. 'I can certify that the "assembly" is quite powerless, Doctor-- if it will be any relief to your mind,' said Mr. Kingsland. While Hazel, with Prim's hand in hers, was eagerly speaking her pleasure. 'What are you doing?' said Primrose under her breath and looking in some astonishment at the gathering. 'O, nothing--talking,--they wanted to know how I got home,' said Wych, an amused look betraying itself. Then quitting Primrose, she went forward a little to receive the farewell addresses of several gentlemen who preferred to see Miss Kennedy alone. The group began to clear away. Prim's eye watched her, in her graceful, pretty self-possession, as she met and returned the parting salutation; and then went over by some instinct to where another eye was watching her too, with a contented sparkle in its intentness. That was only a second, though. Rollo had no mind to have all the world know what he was thinking about; and even as her glance found him, his turned away. The strangers being at last disposed of, those remaining began a slow procession towards the house. But a parting word of Mr. Nightingale's must be noted. 'Any chance for a ride to the wood to-morrow?' he said, with tones so modulated that he thought his words safe. And she answered: 'O, my horses have not come. There will be little riding for me yet a while.' 'And these are the Chickaree woods?' said Dr. Maryland, as they walked on. 'How beautiful they are! Are you very happy, Hazel, in the hope of being the mistress of all this?' 'Why I thought--I call myself the mistress now, sir. Is it an uncertainty dependent on my good behaviour?' she said with a laugh. 'You know you are not of age, my dear; but I suppose Mr. Falkirk gives you the essentials of dominion. Do you feel at home yet?' 'Very much! You know, sir, I have just a little remembrance of the old time--when mamma was here--to begin with. But how heedless I am!' she said, abruptly putting the little basket which had been swinging from her hand into the hands of Dr. Maryland. 'There, sir,--will you take some refreshment by the way?' Then turning to Primrose, Miss Kennedy laid the fragrant weight of hot-house flowers upon her. 'Are these from your garden?' said Primrose, somewhat bewildered. While Dr. Maryland, putting his fingers without scruple in among the black and white strawberries, asked in an approving tone of voice: 'Have you been picking these yourself, my dear?' 'I--picked them up, sir,' said Hazel with the laugh in her voice. 'Not off the vines, however. They are hothouse flowers,' she answered to Primrose. 'When my houses are in order you shall have them every day.' 'They are very good,' said Dr. Maryland gravely, eating away. 'Where did you get them, my dear?' 'Mr. May brought them, sir,' said the girl, looking down now, and walking straight on. 'Mr. May!' echoed Dr. Maryland. 'How comes Mr. May to be bringing you strawberries? And those flowers too?' glancing over at Primrose's full hands. 'No, sir, Mr. Burr brought the flowers.' 'You are a fearful man for asking questions, sir,' said Rollo, with a flash of fun in his face. 'Questions?' said the doctor, picking out the black strawberries abstractedly,--'I've a right to ask her questions. The strawberries are good!--but I wish Mr. May had not brought them.' 'So would he, if he knew you were eating them, sir.' 'I've eaten enough of them,' said Dr. Maryland, seeming to recollect himself. 'They are very good; they are the finest strawberries I have seen.' And he handed the basket to Mr. Falkirk, who immediately passed it over to Rollo. Rollo balanced the basket on his fingers and carried it so, but put never a finger inside. 'I am afraid your head will be turned, Hazel, my dear,' said Dr. Maryland, 'if the adulation has begun so soon. What will you do when you are a little better known?' 'Ah!' said Hazel, with an indescribable intonation, 'ask Mr. Falkirk that, Dr. Maryland. Poor Mr. Falkirk! he is learning every day of his life what it is to know me "a little better!" ' 'I can imagine that,' said Dr. Maryland, quite gravely. 'My dear, what a beautiful old house you have!' The June day, however, was so alluring that they could not make up their minds to go inside. On the basket chairs in the low verandah they sat down, and looked and talked. Primrose did not talk much--she was quiet; nor Mr. Falkirk--he was taciturn; the burden of talk was chiefly borne by Wych Hazel and the Doctor. In a genial, enjoying, sympathising mood, Dr. Maryland came out in a way uncommon for him! asked questions about the woods, the property, the old house; and delighted himself in the beauty that was abroad in earth and sky. 'My dear,' he said at last to Wych Hazel, 'you have all that this world can give you. What are you going to do with it?' 'Have I?' she said, rather wistfully. 'I thought I was looking for something more. What could I do with it, sir? You know Mr. Falkirk manages everything as well as can be, now.' 'Are you looking for something more?' said Dr. Maryland, tenderly. 'What more are you looking for, Hazel?' 'Suppose I should tell you I do not quite know, myself, sir?' 'I should say, my dear, the best thing would be to find out.' 'I shall know when I find it,' said the girl. 'If I find it.' ' "To him that hath shall be given!" One of the best ways, Hazel, to find more is to make the best use of what we have.' The girl left her seat, and kneeling down by Dr. Maryland, laid her hand on his shoulder. 'I mean,' she said, dropping her voice so that only the doctor could hear, 'not more of what people call much; but something, where I have nothing. To belong to somebody--to have somebody belong to me.' 'Ah, my dear,' said the doctor, wistfully, 'I am afraid Primrose wouldn't do.' 'I have wanted her ever since she took me in out of the rain, and did not wonder how I got wet,' said Hazel laughing but dropping her voice again. 'If you had her, my dear, you would then want something or somebody else.' 'Maybe you do not understand me, sir,' she said, a little eager to be understood, and pouring out confidences in a way as rare with her as it was complimentary to her hearer. 'I am not complaining of anybody. I know Mr. Falkirk is very fond of me--but he likes to keep me off at a respectful distance. Only a few nights ago, I was feeling particularly good, for me, and rather lonely, and I just asked him to kiss me for good night-- and it made him so glum that he has hardly opened his lips to me ever since!' said Wych Hazel in an aggrieved voice. 'Perhaps Mr. Falkirk has something upon his mind, my dear!' said Dr. Maryland, with raised eyebrows and an uncommon expression of _fun_ playing about the lines of his mouth. 'It is not always safe to conclude that coincident facts have a relation of cause and effect.' 'No--' said the girl, 'I suppose not. But I stood there all by myself and heard him turn the keys and rattle the bolts--and then I ran upstairs to find Mrs. Bywank,--and of course she couldn't speak for a toothache. And then I felt as if there was nobody in all the world--in all my world--but me!' Dr. Maryland looked tenderly upon the young girl beside him, yet uncomprehendingly. Probably his peculiar masculine nature furnished him with no clue to her essentially feminine views of things. 'I dare say, my dear,' he said,--'I dare say! The best cure for such a state of feeling hat I know, would be to begin living for other people. You will find the world grow populous very soon. And one other cure,'--he added, his eye going away from Wych Hazel into an abstracted gaze towards the outer world;-- 'when you can say, "Whom have I in heaven but Thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside Thee." ' The little hand upon his shoulder stirred,--was lifted, and laid down again. Somehow she comprehended him better than he did her. Then with a sudden motion Hazel took off a luminous bracelet--one of the three she always wore, and laid it across Dr. Maryland's hand. 'Did mamma ever shew you that, sir?' she said. 'She had it made just for me. And then my wrist was so small that it would go twice round.' It was a string of twelve stones, all different, all cut and set alike; each long parallelogram fitting rather closely to the next on either side; the hues--opaque, translucent, clouded--flashed and gleamed with every imaginable variation of colour and shade. The doctor looked at it in silence. Then spoke. 'What did she mean by it, Hazel, my dear? I do not catch the interpretation.' She turned it a little in his hand, until the light fell on the gold framing beneath the gems, and Dr. Maryland could read the fine graven tracery:--"The first, a jasper." 'Ah!' he exclaimed with new interest, 'I see.' And he took up the chain of stones and turned it over and over, rather passed it through his fingers like a rosary, studying the stones and murmuring the names of them. ' "The wall of the city had twelve foundations," ' he said at last, giving the chain back, with a look of light and love combined; ' "and in the wall were twelve gates, and each several gate was one pearl; and the streets were gold, like unto transparent glass, and nothing that defileth shall by any means enter there, but those that are washed in the blood of the Lamb." I like that, my dear.' His look made all the application his words did not. Presently he rose up and asked Wych Hazel if he might go into her library? A book was there, he thought, that he wanted to look at. Hazel guided him in, but then he dismissed her and she went back to Primrose on the verandah. Slowly back,--softly fingering her bright stones, soberly thinking to herself the motto upon the clasp:--"In hope of eternal life." 'What were you talking to papa about?' said Primrose, putting a loving hand into Wych Hazel's. The two other gentlemen were speaking together at a little distance. 'I thought you looked troubled; but I could not hear, for Duke was talking to me.' 'Dr. Maryland should have been the troubled one, part of the time,' said Hazel, bringing her other hand upon Prim's, 'for I asked him to give you to me.' 'What would become of him and Duke?' said Primrose smiling. 'Really, Mr. Rollo did not enter into my calculations!' said Wych Hazel, coming back with a rebound into her everyday self. 'Does he require much time and care bestowed upon him?' 'Don't you think all men do?' 'I do not know all men,' said Wych Hazel. 'Mr. Falkirk does not get it. But does Mr. Rollo _live_ at your house?' 'Why of course, when he's here. He always did, you know. And O, Duke helps me. It is twice as easy to take care of papa, when I have him in the house, too. But Hazel, I am going to get _you_ to help me,--in another way--if I can.' 'What way?' said Hazel. 'Then if Mr. Rollo is so helpful, he might take care of Dr. Maryland altogether, and you could come to take care of me.' Primrose laughed. 'O men cannot get along as women can--don't you know that?' she said. 'No, I want you for my Sunday school. What's the matter?'" These last words were caused by a diversion of the speaker's thoughts. For she had noticed, while speaking, that a man had come in haste to the place where the two gentlemen were standing; and that after a very few words Mr. Falkirk had thrown on his hat and gone down the grassy slope with the messenger; while Rollo had turned as suddenly and was coming towards them. CHAPTER XIX. SELF-CONTROL. Rollo came up with the grave, business look of one who has serious matters on hand. 'A messenger has come,' he said, speaking to Wych Hazel, 'to say that one of the men has met with an accident.' He could see how the shock struck her, but she made no exclamation, only her hands met in a tight clasp as they had done in the woods' fire. She faced him silently, waiting more words. 'I don't know yet how bad it is. I am going to see; and I will come back to you by and by.' 'Where?--and who?' she asked. 'In the wood-cutting. It is Reo.' He spoke as a man who speaks unwillingly. Hazel gave a little cry at that, and turning suddenly flew into the house. The next thing was the flutter of her light foot outside among the trees. But, overtaken the next minute, she was stopped by a hand on her arm and held fast. However Dane spoke very gently. 'Miss Hazel!--you had better not go yourself.' 'I am going,' she said, struggling to disengage herself. 'Mr. Rollo!--' 'Stop,' he said gently and steadily. 'Miss Hazel--I shall not let you go.' In her excitement she hardly took in more than the mere fact of his words, and dropping everything she had in her hand, Hazel took hold of his fingers and began to loosen them with her own, which had a good deal of will in them, of they were small. The immediate effect was to secure the imprisonment of both her hands in a clasp that was stronger than her's. I hardly think Rollo disliked it, for he smiled a little as he spoke: 'Listen,' he said,--'Miss Hazel, I shall not let you go down yonder. I will bring you news as soon as I can--but you must stay here with Rosy. Don't you see?' he added very gently, as he turned about and walked toward the house with her, putting one little hand on his arm while other hand still held it fast,--'don't you see, you could do nothing just yet? And I take this upon myself--I shall not let you go. You must stay here and take care of Rosy, till I can come back to you.' 'I will not,' she said, stopping short again. 'I will go! It is my right! Where should a woman be? And--Oh!' she cried with a change of tone, 'it is Reo!--And he will want things--and he will want me!' 'Not yet,' said Rollo; 'it is not time for either yet. He shall want nothing, I promise you, that he ought to have. But you must be good and stay with Rosy.' He spoke as a brother might speak to a little sister of whom he was very fond, or--brothers do not often take just that tone. Primrose, looking on, knew very well what it meant. Wych Hazel was in far too much commotion of mind to discern anything. She had yielded to superior strength,--which indeed she could not gracefully resist; and then there came over her heart such a flood of grief, that for the last few steps she was quite passive; though giving no sign but the quiver that touched her mouth, and went and came again. But at Rollo's last words she drew herself up defiantly. 'Do you expect to stand here and hold me all day?' she said. 'No?' he said gravely, now meeting her look,--'I expect you to have self-control and womanly patience, and to let me go and do my part, until it is time for you to do yours. Will you?' 'I shall do what I think best. The question is none of yours, Mr. Rollo. Self-control!--I have a little!' she said under her breath. 'Do you mean to keep me here,' he said gravely and quietly, 'when I may be so much wanted elsewhere? You would be in the way there, but I am needed. Still, you are my first care. Must I stay here to take care of you? or will you promise me to be good and wait quietly with Primrose, until I bring you word?' His eye went to Primrose as he ended, in a mute appeal for help. And Prim came near and laid her hand softly on Wych Hazel's shoulder. 'Do, dear Hazel!' she said. 'Duke knows; you may trust him.' It was indescribable the way she freed herself from them both, as if to be touched, now, was beyond the bounds of endurance. Prim's words Hazel utterly ignored, but something in the other's claimed attention. 'Go! Go!'--she said hurriedly. 'Go and do your part!--If you had been content with doing that at first, we should have had no trouble.' She wrapped her arms round one of the light verandah pillars, and leaning her head against it gave look nor word more. Rollo staid for none, but dashed away down the slope and was lost in the woods. Primrose stood near Wych Hazel, very much at a loss indeed; but too troubled to be still. 'Dear Hazel!' she ventured, in a very soft voice--'don't feel so! What is the matter?' 'Did you not hear?' 'Yes; but Hazel dear, you know hardly anything yet; there may be very little to be troubled about. The accident may be very slight, for all you know. I always think it is best to wait and see; and then have your strength ready to work with.' 'My strength has been extremely useful to-day.' 'What to you mean, dear?' said Primrose, softly endeavouring to coax the hands and arms away from the verandah pillar. 'Look here--look up and be yourself again. Maybe there is very little the matter. Wait and see.' 'Wait!'--Hazel repeated. 'People talk as if waiting was such easy work!' 'I never said it was easy,' said Primrose gently. 'But some people have to wait all their lives.' There was the very essence of patience in the intonation. 'I should think their lives would be short.' Primrose sighed a little and was silent. Perhaps she thought that those who had little occasion to practise the grace were unreasonable. But I think she only remembered that the one near her was very unpractised. 'Forgive me--I do not mean to--be--' the girl faltered out, the tremor coming back to her voice. 'But Reo!--' And with that, pain and disappointment and chagrin joined forces; and quitting her pillar, Hazel dropped down by one of the great wicker chairs, and laying her head there burst into a passion of weeping that almost made Primrose wish for the hard-edged calm again. So she stood passively by until the storm was spent; and Dr. Maryland having satisfied his book quest, came out again, awakening to the fact that it was time he and Primrose were jogging homeward. Primrose took him aside and explained the situation of affairs, after which Dr. Maryland, too, forthwith betook himself down the slope in the direction where Mr. Falkirk and Rollo had disappeared. After a little interval of further suspense he was seen coming back again. He reported that Reo was not much hurt; had been a good deal bruised, and the accident had threatened to be serious; but after all no great harm was done. Primrose nevertheless begged that her father would go home without her; she could come with Duke, she said. Dr. Maryland's wagon had not been brought round, however, when a very different vehicle appeared, climbing the steep; and Primrose proclaimed that Mrs. Powder was at hand. The carriage drew up before the verandah, and from it descended the ex- Governor's lady, and two young ones--Miss Annabella and another. Mrs. Powder was a stately lady, large and dignified;-- those two things do not always go together, but they did in her case. She was extremely gracious to all the members of the little group she found gathered to receive her. Then, as Dr. Maryland was going, she sat down to talk to him about some business which engaged her. So the two older persons were a little removed from the rest. Miss Annabella did nothing but look handsome and calm, after her wont; but her younger sister was of different mettle. 'And so this is Chickaree?' she said, gazing up and down and about, at the old house and its surroundings. 'What a delightful old place! And are you the mistress of it, really-- without being married, you know? How splendid! I always think that's the worst of being married--you lose your liberty, you know, and there's always somebody to bother you; but to have a grand place, and house, and all that, and to be mistress, and _have no master!_--I declare,' Miss Josephine cried, throwing up hands and eyes, 'it's as good as a fairy tale. And much better, for it don't all vanish in smoke in a minute. Oh, don't you feel like a fairy princess in the midst of all your magnificence? You look like it, too!' added the young lady, surveying the person of her hostess. 'Ain't you proud?' Hazel's spent and past excitement had left her rather pale and grave, so that she was doing the honours with an extra touch of stateliness. Self-control was trying its best now, for she had not the least mind that anybody should know it had ever been shaken. So she ordered lunch to be served out there on the verandah, and made Dr. Maryland wait for it, and talked to Miss Annabella; and now gave Miss Josephine a cool 'Proud! Is that what you call it?' which left nothing to be desired. 'I thought they said she was so brilliant?' remarked Miss Annabella, in an aside to Primrose. 'But I suppose _that_ is with gentlemen.' 'What do _you_ call it?' the younger Miss Powder went on. '_I_ should be proud--awfully--if I had such a house and all. I'd take my time about being married. Wouldn't you? Don't you think it is best to put off being married as long as you can?-- not till it's _too_ late, you know. The fun's all over then-- don't you think so?--except the house, and carriage, and establishment, and giving entertainments, and all that. And you have got it all already. Oh, I should think you would make the men dance round?' Wych Hazel had followed this rush of new ideas with a degree of amazement, which, before she knew, culminated in a merry laugh. But she was grave again immediately. 'Should you?' she said. 'How do you do it?' '_Don't you know how?_' said the other girl, with an expression of insinuation, fun and daring which it is difficult to give on paper. She was a pretty, bright girl, too. The question would have been impudent if it had not been comical. 'I know you do!' she went on. 'You've a good battery. I'd like to see you do it. I always do. It's such fun! All men are good for,' she exclaimed next, with a curl on her lip, 'except to carry one's parasol and things. Do you know Kitty Fisher?' 'Not even by name,' said Miss Kennedy, studying her guest as an entirely new species. 'She's a splendid girl. She's coming to Moscheloo next week; there'll be goings on then. People are so stupid here in the country, they want somebody to wake them up. Kitty's awfully jolly. Oh, what a lovely old house! Take me in and let me see it, won't you? Oh, what a lovely hall! What a place for a German! Oh, you'll give a German, won't you?' 'I do not know what I shall give, yet, Miss Powder.' 'I'm not Miss Powder! Annabella wouldn't thank you. She'd like me to be Miss Powder, though. Tell me; don't you think people could get along just as well if they weren't married? Now there's my mother wants to marry us off as quick as she can; and every other girl's mother is just the same. What do they do it for? Oh, you've got a dreadful old guardian, haven't you? Does he want you to get married? Ain't it hateful to have a guardian? I should think it would be awfully poky.' 'Did you ever see Mr. Falkirk?' said Hazel gravely. Somehow this girl's talk made her extremely reticent. But that made little difference to Miss "Phinny." The next question was: 'Do you know Stephen Kingsland?' 'Yes.' 'Don't you admire him? Ain't he a catch, for somebody! But you know Stuart Nightingale, don't you?' Again Miss Kennedy said yes. 'Like him?' 'Do you?' said Hazel. 'I think he's splendid! He's so amusing; and he's a _splendid_ dancer. It's fun to dance with Stuart Nightingale. I don't very often get him, though. But you didn't answer me--do you like him?' 'I am not much in the habit of answering people,' said Hazel frankly. 'You will find that out if you see enough of me.' 'Ain't you? Why?' asked the young lady ingenuously. 'Because I do not like to be questioned. You perceive no fault can be found with my reasons,' she added with a smile. 'Then you do like him, I know. People are never afraid to tell their dislikes. Why!--is that'-- A broken-off inquiry here was never finished, the answer to it in fact being furnished by the coming near of Rollo whose distant appearance had first suggested it. He came up on the verandah, shook hands with Mrs. Powder, but gave the other ladies one of what Wych Hazel used to know, as his Spanish greetings; courteous and distant equally. Dr. Maryland had before this finished his colloquy with the ex-Governor's lady and departed. Rollo now took his place and talked to Mrs. Powder, while for a few minutes Annabella used her eyes, as much as she could, and Miss Phinny ceased to use her tongue. Wych Hazel never knew by what instinct she worked her way through that first bit of time. Eager for more tidings, sure that her eagerness must not appear, she held her breath for one minute--then rose up cool and quiet, the young mistress of Chickaree. 'Yes,' she said, answering Phinny's half spoken words, 'it is Mr. Rollo. And of course he has had no luncheon.' She summoned Dingee with a blast of her silver whistle (there were few bells at Chickaree), ordered up hot chocolate and fresh tea and relays of fruit and cream; and herself stepped forward to see them served. 'There are croquettes, Mr. Rollo,' she said,--'and Dingee will bring you cold beef. And with what may I fill your cup?' Primrose, through her scattering talk with Annabella, watched, as she could, these two people who were so strange to her simplicity. Here was Wych Hazel, a little while ago on the floor in a passion of tears; now, calm, self-possessed, and graceful. Primrose had been very uncertain how she would meet Rollo the next time; with a kind of wonder she heard her friendly offer of chocolate and observed Rollo's perfectly cool and matter-of-course acceptance of it from her hands. It was something beyond Primrose. She waited to see how it would be when Mrs. Powder went away. But a great many thoughts went in among the sugar that Primrose never guessed. Wych Hazel was anxiously waiting to have the good report about Reo confirmed, and would not shew her anxiety. But what did Prim mean by people's waiting all their lives? What did they wait for? Well, these two people needn't wait any longer for a meeting--that was one thing. _That_ affair was well off her hands. Why hadn't Mr. Falkirk returned too?--Staying with Reo, perhaps, until she came, and she could not go, and could not ask. And now, of course, the Powders would just stay on, supplementing their lunch to bear Mr. Rollo company. Perhaps, though, it was just as well they were here when he came. Because she knew she ought to be furiously angry with him, and somehow that was never a _rôle_ she could play. Before excitement reached that point, she always got hurt, or troubled, or timid--and just now she was too tired. If he told her to sit there and count her fingers, she should hardly have spirit to resist. How ever had he dared to take hold of said fingers as he had done!--and with that came a sudden rush to Miss Kennedy's cheeks which made her wish she could go for hot chocolate instead of Dingee. He had hindered her by sheer force. Gentle force,--and gentlemanlike,--but none the less true to its name. There was one of the peculiar advantages of being a woman! Or a girl. She should be stronger in full womanhood. But oh, she was woman enough to take care of Reo!--and if Reo were dying, and Mr. Rollo did not want to have her go, he would sit calmly there and want more chocolate!--She glanced at him from under the long eyelashes, and another flush (of impatience this time) tinged her cheeks. But she did not stint him in sugar, nor make any mistakes with the cream. Then her eyes went away over the long slope, where birds and sunshine held their revels. Wait?--what did people wait for, 'all their lives?' And why did Mr. Maryland's last words come up to her again? And why did the aforesaid eyelashes grow wet? She was all shaken out of herself by the morning's work. She would send Dingee to inquire!--and not wait. But then if this strange man should order _him_ back--and Dingee could not be relied on to go silently. No, she could not have a scene before all these people. And a wee bit of a sigh, well kept in hand, went to the compounding of Miss Phinny's third cup. 'Womanly patience?'--how was hers to be grown, yet? And what did he know about it, any way? She should like to see him thoroughly thwarted, for once, and see how much manly patience he had on hand. And another swift glance went his way; but with anxiety rousing up again, the glance lingered, and was more inquiring than she meant it should be. Luncheon was really over at last. The Governor's lady said some gracious words of welcome to her young hostess, invited her to a dinner-party a few days off, and having ordered up her carriage, swept away with her daughters. What will be now? thought Primrose. Rollo had put the ladies into their carriage, and stood long enough to let them get out of observation behind the woods; then he came up on the verandah and going round the table sat down beside Wych Hazel. Primrose saw--did the other?--the easy motion which was universal with him, the fine figure, the frank, bright face. Primrose did not mean to watch, but she saw it all, and the look with which he sat down. It was not that of a man about to make an apology, neither had it any smile of attempted ingratiation. It was rather a sweet, confidential look of inquiry, which, however, went down through the depths of the brown eyes he was looking into, and rifled them of all their secrets. It was a sort of look before which a woman's eyes fall. 'Reo is not seriously hurt,' he said softly, when this point had been reached. She bowed her head. 'So Dr. Maryland brought word. At last the _hope_.' 'He is only a good deal bruised. No bones broken, nor any other harm done. It might have been worse; and so the messenger who first came did not alarm us for nothing. One of the woodcutters had felled a large tree without giving due warning, or Reo had not heeded the warning; he was caught under the tree. But he escaped very well. He is at his own house, where he will have to keep his bed some days, I fancy.' Another mute gesture. Perhaps the girl was not sure of herself after all the morning's work, and had no mind to risk another admonition about self-control. 'I am very glad,' she said gravely, after a minute. 'I am very glad. Mr. Falkirk has sprained his ankle,' he went on a little lower. 'Mr. Falkirk!'-- Hazel sprang up,--then as instantly sat down again. There should be no more strength used about her that day! 'Helping Reo?' she said. 'Not directly. He made a misstep, I think, among the confusion of branches cut and uncut with which the ground was encumbered; slipped off one of them, perhaps; somehow gave his foot a twist,--and there he is. That was the cause of my long delay.' He spoke, watching the little lady all the while. 'Why did he not come here?--it was nearer,' she said with some accent of impatience. 'No,'--very gently--'we were nearer his cottage. I proposed bringing him,--where I was sure you would wish for him,--here, at once; but Mr. Falkirk laid his commands on me and on all concerned so absolutely that there was no choice. We carried him to his cottage; for he could not walk.' 'Just like Mr. Falkirk!'--then the impatience died away in a soft tone of pity. 'Not able to walk!'-- 'He will be a prisoner for some time, I am afraid.' Hazel made no answer to that; thoughts were crowding in thick and fast. What was she going to do, with Mr. Falkirk laid up? Would she be a prisoner too? Was she to live here in this great old house alone, by day as well as by night? They were rather sober thoughts that came. 'That's very bad for Hazel,' said Primrose, coming near and joining the group. Hazel held out her hand and got fast hold of Prim's. She was ready for the sympathy this time. 'Does he suffer very much, Mr. Rollo?' 'I don't think he minds that part of it; no, I left him in comparative comfort. I think his trouble is about you. And he ought to have come here!--but people don't always know what they ought to do. I am going down there again presently to look after him and make sure that Gotham understands bandages. 'Gotham _thinks_ he understands everything.' 'I'll just make sure on that point. Have you any commands before I go?' 'No, thank you,' she said, with just the lightest shade of hesitation, 'I think not.' 'Reconsider that, and give me my orders.' 'No--truly!' Hazel answered, looking up at him. How busy the thoughts were. 'I am going to Reo's first. Have you any commands there?' But she shook her head. 'No, Mr. Rollo, not any.' He went off; and there was an interval somewhat quiet and untalkative between the two girls. Later, Rollo came back, reported both patients doing well, and carried Prim home with him. 'Did you think I was all ungrateful?' Hazel said, wrapping her arms round Prim. 'Well, I was _not_.' CHAPTER XX. BOUQUETS. Wych Hazel stood alone on her broad steps, watching the others out of sight, and feeling alone, too. It must be nice to belong to somebody,--to have brothers and friends! Just for the moment, she forgot her now unwatched independence. But then she came back to business, and flew off up stairs. The brown dress could not stay on another minute,--was not the whole morning tucked away in its folds? That was the first thing. And the second thing was, that Miss Kennedy, in a cloud of fresh muslin and laces, came out again upon the steps, and, calling Dingee to follow her, began to speed away through the old trees at a sort of flying pace. It was late afternoon now; with lovely slant sunbeams and shadows falling across the slope, and a tossing breeze, and the birds at their evening concert. Fresh air, and action soon brought the girl up to concert pitch herself; and she went on like a very sprite, along a side wood path, avoiding the main approach, and so gained the lodge by a side door; and in a minute more stood by the bedside of her faithful old retainer. Hazel never knew at what cost to himself Reo managed to put out one hand far enough to receive her dainty fingers. 'My little lady!' he said fondly, 'I knew she would come.' 'O Reo--O Reo!--I am so sorry!' she said, her eyes growing wet. 'No need Miss Wych, dear,' said Reo, smiling at her, though his own eyes moistened to see hers. 'And it was just cutting those trees that I did not want cut!' 'Aye,--but they do want cutting though, Miss Wych,' said Reo. 'Mr. Falkirk is right. And Mr. Rollo.' How that name came up at every turn. 'Those trees are so big!' said Hazel with a shiver. 'I do not see how you ever got out again, Reo.' 'Never should, my little lady,' said Reo, 'only that there was somewhat between me and the tree.' 'Between you and the tree?' said Hazel. 'Do you mean another tree, that kept it off?' 'No, little lady,' said Reo, 'I mean the Lord's hand. You see He's quicker than we are, and before I could jump or turn, His hand was there over me. And caught the tree, and let it touch me but just so much.' Hazel stood looking at him. 'Suppose he had not put his hand there, Reo?' she said. 'Then it would have been under me, Miss Wych--that's all the difference,' said Reo, quietly. 'Only I should never have seen my little lady again in this life.' 'Well, you have got to see her a great many times,' said the girl, speaking fast because it was not easy to speak at all. 'I am coming to sing to you, and read to you, and to do all sorts of things.' And with a smile like a stray sunbeam she left the room, and after a minute with Mrs. Reo which straightway made her over, 'as good as two,' Hazel flitted away up the hill again, as far as to Mr. Falkirk's cottage; walking in through the Summer-open doors upon his tea and toast, without the slightest warning. There she was all right. It was delightful to get the whip hand for once! And so, privately enjoying Gotham's dismay at her unannounced entrance, Wych Hazel stood by her guardian's side with a face of grave reprehension. 'Mr. Falkirk, I am really very much surprised at you!' 'H'm!--Not more than I am at myself, Miss Hazel. You are not ahead of me there.' 'Considering how much there is to do, sir; considering the unsettled state of the neighbourhood, and my extremely unprotected condition; that you should go dancing round among loose branches without a partner, passes all my small wits.' Mr. Falkirk glanced up at her, a glance of momentary fun and recognition, though he was by no means in a sportive mood; that was easy to see. 'Will you sit down, Miss Hazel? You must play guardian now. Can your wits accomplish that?' 'Yes, sir, I thank you. Will you order me a cup and saucer, Mr. Falkirk? I have had no dinner, and could eat no lunch. And I know Gotham would see me starve before I had even a crust without your permission.' 'I'm sure, Miss 'Azel!--Mr. Falkirk knows'--began Gotham. 'What have you got, Gotham?--anything in the house? Be off, and get all there is--and be quick about it.' 'O, I do not want much, sir--just a slight supplement to the pleasure of seeing you,' said Hazel, with her gay laugh. 'Mr. Falkirk, don't you think it would be very nice to have Mrs. Saddler dust up that little bit of a brown corner room for me? And then I could stay here with you all the time, and we would take splendid care of each other.' 'There's nothing there _but_ a little brown room, my dear.' 'I do not care, sir. Mrs. Saddler must have a spare blanker among her stores. And I would leave word up yonder that I had unexpectedly gone away for a time.--And it would be fun,' said Miss Hazel, decidedly. 'Besides the other advantages.' 'What will happen to all the princes who are coming after the princess?' 'They will learn--self-control,' said Miss Hazel. 'I have been told lately that it is a good thing.' 'Not formerly?' 'The last time made the most impression, sir. As last times are apt to do.' 'Miss Hazel, I have a request to make to you,' Mr. Falkirk said, after allowing a minute or two of silence to succeed the last remark. 'What, sir? That I will not sing so loud in the little brown room as to disturb your repose? I can promise _that_.' 'You have not got your horses yet.' 'No, sir. I am sure I ought to know so much,' said the girl with a sigh. 'Rollo will see to it. You forget, my dear, we have been but a few days here. Miss Hazel, do you remember the story of the enchanted horse in the Arabian Nights?' 'With great clearness, sir. In everything but his appearance it was just the horse I should like.' 'Just the horse I am afraid of. The cavalier turned a screw and the lady was gone. I request that you will mount nobody's steed, not even your own, without consulting me first that I may make sure all is safe. It is still more true than it was the other night that I require your co-operation to discharge my trust.' 'Why, of course I should consult you, sir!' she said, with some surprise. 'That is all, Miss Hazel. Rollo will give his oversight to the woods. Only don't engage yourself to anybody for a ride till you _have_ consulted me. Do you agree to that form of precaution-taking?' 'Certainly, sir. I am sure I referred Mr. Morton to you at once,' said Miss Hazel, drinking her tea. And Mr. Falkirk, in a silence that was meditative if not gloomy, lay and watched her. It was a little book room where they were, perhaps the largest on that floor, however; a man's room. The walls all books and maps, with deer horns, a small telescope and pistols for a few of its varieties. Yet it was cheerful too, and in perfect order; and Mr. Falkirk was lying on a comfortable chintz couch. Papers and writing materials and books had been displaced from one end of the table for Hazel's tea. That over, the young lady brought a foot-cushion to the side of Mr. Falkirk's couch and established herself there, much refreshed. 'It is great fun to come to tea with you, sir! Now, may I go on with business? or are you too tired?' 'Suppose I say I am too tired?' growled Mr. Falkirk, 'what will you do?' Hazel glanced up at him from under her eyelashes. 'Wait, sir. I am learning to wait, beautifully!' she answered with great demureness. 'Then suppose I go and tell Mrs. Saddler about my room?' 'Go along,' said Mr. Falkirk. 'Give your orders. You had better send up to the house for some furniture. You'll make Mrs. Saddler happy at any rate. I am not so sure about Gotham. But Gotham has too easy a life in general.' They had a lively time of it in the other part of the house for the next half day. And so had Mr. Falkirk in his, for that matter: the sweet voice and laugh and song, somehow, penetrated to his study as grosser sounds might have failed to do. It was towards tea-time again when Wych Hazel presented herself in the study on the tips of her toes, and subsiding once more to her cushion glanced up as before at Mr. Falkirk. 'Has the fatigue of yesterday gone off, sir?' 'No; but I see the business has come. Can you be comfortable in your mousehole? Let us have the business, my dear. If it is knotty perhaps it will make me forget my ankle.' 'Ah!' she said remorsefully, 'I was talking of fatigue, sir-- not of pain. Is the pain very bad?' 'No, my dear; but I was always inclined to the epicurian side of philosophy, and partial to anodynes; or even counter- irritants.' 'Whose bandage have you got on?' she said curiously. 'Whose? My own.' 'Dear sir, I do not mean as to the linen! Mr. Rollo was coming down to teach Gotham, and I wondered which of them took a lesson. That is all.' 'H'm! Ask Gotham,' said Mr. Falkirk. 'I wish I had been here to see,' said Wych Hazel. 'Never mind, I will next time. By the way, sir, did you leave any orders for me yesterday morning with anybody?' 'What do you mean, my dear?' said her guardian, rather opening his eyes. It is to be noted that though he growled and frowned as much as ever, there had come into Mr. Falkirk's mien an undoubted softening of expression since yesterday. 'I merely asked, sir. But now for business. Mrs. Powder is to have a grand explosion in the way of a dinner party next week. And she wants me to come and help touch off the fireworks. May I go?' 'What did you tell her?' 'That I would if you would, sir.' 'Is this the business?' 'Item the first, sir.' 'Well, my dear. Anything conditional upon my movements for some time to come will probably have to be vetoed. But you will have offers of a substitute.' 'The Marylands are going, sir.' 'Of course.' 'Well, Mr. Falkirk, suppose substitutes do offer,--what then?' 'Then you will follow your pleasure, Miss Hazel.' 'Thank you, sir. The next item seems to be a mild form of this: a little evening party at Mrs. Gen. Merrick's. And Mrs. Merrick hearing of your accident, sent a note to say that Miss Bird would convey me to Merricksdale, safe and in good order.' 'Who is Miss Bird?' 'Don't you remember, sir? She came to see me the same morning the Lasalle party came.' 'There are a great many Birds,' said Mr. Falkirk, grumpily, 'and they are not all pigeons.' 'But, my dear Mr. Falkirk, however important such natural history facts may be, they do not exactly meet the case in hand.' 'I don't know whether they meet it or no. Can't you go with Miss Maryland?' 'Not invited, sir.' 'How would you get back?' 'Mrs. Merrick takes charge of that.' 'And didn't think it necessary to inform you how or when?' 'It is only a small party, sir. I should expect to be back early.' 'That needs to be made certain, Miss Hazel, and stipulated for.' 'Well, sir, you shall name the hour.' 'Name it yourself; but be home by half-past eleven. Miss Hazel, I wish, till you have your own horses, you would not go to such places.' There was a shade of disappointment in her face, but she answered steadily-- 'I will not go, sir, if that is really your wish.' 'My dear, we must meet the enemy. In the progress of ladies seeking their fortune that is always understood. What next?' She hesitated a moment, carefully dressing the petals of a carnation in her hand. 'The third item, sir, is--that if to-morrow afternoon I--will consent to put--my little foot,' said Miss Hazel, evidently mastering a laugh, 'inside the right phaeton--Mr. May will consent to drive.' 'Mr. May! Confound his impudence!' was the by no means doubtful utterance of Miss Hazel's guardian. Hazel bit her lips and sat demurely waiting further developments. 'Chickaree is in a very exposed situation, Miss Hazel!' Mr. Falkirk remarked, with something a little like a sigh. While, as if to give effect to his words, two well-mounted horsemen at that moment went up the hill, exchanging greetings with the occupants of a landau that was just then making the descent. Wych Hazel looked and laughed. 'It is very comical!' she said. But her guardian was silent. He knew the Enchanted ground had to be met and passed. Perhaps he wished it were well over; but I think the present feeling of discontent relieved itself not even so far. 'And on the whole your three answers are, sir?--' said Hazel, after a pause. 'In your head,' Mr. Falkirk growled. 'You know what they are.' 'My dear sir! one would think they were in your foot!' But then she was silent, and then she began to sing. One thing and another, after her own fitful fashion, in the twilight; and business did not come up again. Only as she went to sleep that night, Miss Kennedy indulged in one profound reflection. 'No,' she said to herself, 'Dr. Maryland was right: Primrose would never do. Get her in a corner, and the most she can say is, "Duke knows." ' So drew on the night of Mrs. Merrick's party; and meantime a rainy day or two saved Mr. Falkirk some trouble, and left the cottage in comparative quiet. But as the night drew near, the clouds cleared away and the sun shone out, and fairer weather could not have been wished for, or wished away. There had been a running fire of errands and messages between the cottage and the house on the hill, all day. Miss Kennedy was constantly finding out something more that she wanted for the evening, and Dingee went back and forth with notes to Mrs. Bywank and waterproof-covered baskets in return, till Gotham at least lost patience. 'More duds for Miss 'Azel!' he said in displeasure, as Dingee appeared just at nightfall with a final basket. 'It's clean ridikerlous! One dress at a time ought to content any young lady.' 'Now I jes' tell you what, Mas' Gotham,' said Dingee, 'you ain't up to de situation. Pears like de whole countryside after my young mistis!' Gotham gave a grunt in unsuccessful imitation of his master's growl. 'H'after'er,' he said. 'Looks more as if she was h'after them-- wanting fourteen dresses at once.' Dingee shewed his teeth from ear to ear. 'You bery wise man, Mas' Gotham!' he said. ' 'Spect now you can tell a feller all about dese yere.' And Dingee threw off the white paper which covered what he carried this time, and displayed to Gotham's astonished eyes a basket full of bouquets. ' 'Spect now dese yere growed in Missee Hazel's own greenhouse,' he said, tauntingly, 'seein' she ain't got none! Shouldn't wonder if dey started up spontanous like, arter de shower. How you tink, Mas' Gotham, hey?' But Gotham was virtuously indignant. 'Miss 'Azel'll get her head worse turned than it h'is now,' he said. 'Heads does turn, fact,' said Dingee, shaking his own. 'Jes' you watch 'em when de horseback gen'lemen dey goes by, Mas' Gotham, and you'll see de heads turn!' But Gotham had watched enough already to know there was no mistake about that. 'Well,' he said, 'since h'it's 'ere, h'it's 'ere, and 'll 'ave to stay, no doubt. I'll take it to the library.' 'Cotch him first!' said Dingee, moving a little out of reach. 'Where Missee Hazel?' 'Prinking 'erself h'up,' answered Gotham severely. 'Gotham telling fibs!' said the young lady in question, coming up behind him with her light tread. 'Perhaps he had better take _himself_ to the library, and report to Mr. Falkirk. What do you want of me, Dingee? I thought everything was here.' Dingee had adroitly covered his basket again, but now he drew near and displayed his treasure, adding messages of a somewhat adorned nature, while Wych Hazel read the cards attached to the bouquets. Gotham, standing a little off, looked on indignant as before, and frowned at the flowers and the flushing cheeks drooped over them, as if he had been Mr. Falkirk himself. But when Hazel caught up the basket and ran off to her little corner room, then Gotham did betake himself to the library, though without quite the report suggested. 'Beg pardon, sir,' he said; 'Miss 'Azel 'ave just received a bushel of flowers, sir,--if you choose to be h'aware, sir.' 'A _what_, Gotham?' said the astonished Mr. Falkirk. 'No person of discretion to detain them at the 'ouse, sir, and so of course they followed Miss 'Azel down 'ere, sir. Boukets enough to last a h'ordinary person all summer, sir. And cards. And ribbands,'--concluded Gotham, beginning to clear the table for tea. 'Look here, Gotham,'--said Mr. Falkirk, from his sofa, whence his eyes followed his serving-man about. 'Yes, sir!' said Gotham, erect and motionless. 'Do you dare to speak of Miss Hazel as an ordinary person?' 'Why, no sir! By no means! Very h'extraordinary, I thought I said, sir--or h'indicated,' replied Gotham, going back to his leisurely motions about the table. 'Have the goodness to remember that it is proper her flowers should be extraordinary.' 'O, you are clearing the table,' Hazel said, flitting in; 'just what I wanted--tea early.' 'Tea never h'is late, Miss 'Azel!' said Gotham in an aggrieved voice. 'I didn't know but it might be to-night,' said the girl provokingly. 'But dear Mr. Falkirk, do you really like to have your books disturbed so often, just for me?' 'My dear,' said Mr. Falkirk rather lazily, brushing one hand over his forehead, 'you have done that for my life generally.' 'My dear Mr. Falkirk!--evidently I have just come in time to receive a shot meant for somebody else. I wonder you allow yourself to fire at random, sir, in that way.' 'Who has been sending you flowers, Miss Hazel?' her guardian asked, without change of tone. She laughed. 'Shall I leave you the cards, sir--just to pass away the time while I am gone?' 'I'll take them now, Miss Hazel, if you please.' Mr. Falkirk stretched out his hand. 'They are not so precious as to be carried in my pocket, sir. Do you want them before tea?' 'If you please, Miss Hazel!' 'I don't please a bit, sir. I am in a great hurry to go to my dressing. And you know, Mr. Falkirk, you seldom try for "the soul of wit" on such occasions.' 'Does that mean, you refuse me the sight of them?' 'No, sir!--"By no means!"--to quote Gotham,' said Wych Hazel, jumping up. She came back and laid the cards in his hand--quite a packet of them. Mr. Falkirk found names that he knew and names that he did not. He turned them over, speaking some of the names in an inexpressive sotto voce; and then began doubling them up, one after the other, and letting them fall on the floor beside him. 'Have you got a copy of the Arabian Nights in your library, my dear?' he asked. 'I wish you would send for it. I am not posted. I have an indistinct impression of a fight between two rival powers, in which, after a variety of transformations, the one of them in the shape of a kernel of corn was swallowed by the other in some appropriate shape. I should like to study the tactics, watch my opportunity, and make an end of these gentry.' Mr. Falkirk dropped the last card as he spoke. 'Ha! ha!' laughed Wych Hazel in her soft notes. 'You will feel better, sir, when you have had a cup of tea.' And she began preparing it at once. Whether or not Mr. Falkirk felt better he did not say. The girl went off to her dressing. And just before the hour when Miss Bird must arrive she came silently in again and stood before her guardian. If Mr. Falkirk thought of humming- birds then, it could only have been of the tropical species. A dark dress, that shimmered and glittered and fell into shadows with every motion, first caught his eye; but then Mr. Falkirk saw that it was looped with bouquets. Now either Miss Hazel's admirers had differing tastes, or a different image of her, or else each sent what he could get; for the bouquets were extremely diverse. A bunch of heath and myrtle held up the dress here, a cluster of crimson roses held it back there; another cluster of gold and buff, a trailing handful of glowing fuchsias--there is no need to go through the list. But she had arranged them with great skill to set each other off; tied together by their own ribbands, catching up the shimmer of her dress. Mr. Falkirk looked, and the fact that his face expressed nothing at all was rather significant. One glance at the girl's face he gave, and turned away. 'Take care, my dear,' he said. 'Of what, sir?' 'How do _you_ know but those flowers are bewitched? You would not be the first woman who had put on her own chains.' She smiled--rather to herself than him--throwing her little white cloak over her shoulders; and then, girl-like, went down on one knee and kissed her guardian's hand. 'Good-night, sir,' she said. The carriage came, and she was gone. CHAPTER XXI. MOONSHINE. After the day of rain, and the afternoon of clearing wind and clouds, the evening of Mrs. Merrick's party passed into one of those strange, unearthly nights when the whole world seems resolved into moonlight and a midsummer night's dream. So while gas and hot-house flowers had it all their own way in the house at Merricksdale, over the rest of the outside world the wondrous moonlight reigned supreme. Not white and silvery, but as it were gilded and mellowed with the summer warmth. Step by step it invaded the opening ranks of forest trees; and dark shadows wound noiselessly away from the close pursuit. Not a wind whispered; not a moving thing was in sight along the open road. Except indeed Mr. Rollo, who--not invited to Mrs. Merrick's, and just returned from a short journey--was getting over the ground that lay between the railway station and home on foot. And his way took him along the highway that stretched from Crocus to the gates of Chickaree. Now moonlight is a very bewildering thing--and thoughts do sometimes play the very will-o'-the-wisp with one. And when somebody you know is at a party, there is a funny inclination to go through the motions at least, and be up as late as anybody else. So it was with a somewhat sudden recollection that Mr. Rollo bethought him of what his watch might say. Just then he was in a belt of shadow, where trees crowded out the moon; but the next sharp turn of the road was all open and flooded with the yellow light. It would be quite too much to suppose that the gentleman in question was particularly open to impressions--and it is certain that his thoughts at that minute were well wrapped up in their own affairs; and yet as he went round the turn, passing out of the line of shadow into absolute moonshine again, there came upon him a strange sense of some presence there besides his own. But what the evidence was, whether it had smote upon his eye or upon his ear, of that Mr. Rollo was profoundly ignorant. Yet it is safe to say that he came out of his musings and looked about him. Only a midsummer night's dream still: the open road for a mile ahead in full view, the dark line of trees on each side as motionless as if asleep. But the utter hush was perhaps more suggestive than the stir of a breezy night: it seemed as if everything was listening and held its breath to hear. The gentleman in question, however, was not one to let slip such a suggestion to his nerves--or his senses. His nerves were of the coolest and steadiest kind; he could depend on _them_ for getting up no shams to puzzle him; and his senses had had capital training. Eye and ear were keen almost as those of some of the wild creatures whose dependence they are; and Rollo had the craft and skill of a practised hunter. So instead of dismissing the fancy that had struck him, as most men would, he fell noiselessly into the shadow again, with eyes and ears alive on the instant to take evidence that might be relied on. But nothing stirred. Nothing shewed. Except as before, the yellow moonlight and the dark trees. Rollo was a hunter, and patient. He stood still. The shadowy edges of the stream of light changed slowly, slightly, and still the evidence he looked for did not come. Nothing seemed to change but those dark fringes; only now some wave of the branches as the wind began to rise, let in the moonlight for a moment upon a small white speck across the road. He thought so: something whiter than a wet stone or a bleached stick,--or it might be fancy. Noiselessly and almost invisibly, for Dane could move like an Indian, and with such quickness, he was over the road and at the spot. There was no mistaking the token--it was a little glove of Wych Hazel's. Evidently dropped in haste; for one of her well-known jewelled fastenings lay glittering in his hand. But--Mrs. Gen. Merrick lived quite in another quarter of the world; and in no case did the direct road from Merricksdale lead by here. If Rollo's senses had been alive before, which was but their ordinary and normal condition, he was now in the frame of mind of a Sioux on the war-path, and in corresponding alertness and acuteness of every faculty. The little glove was swiftly put where it would furnish a spot of light to no one else; and in breathless readiness for action, though that is rhetorical, for Rollo's breath was as regular and as calm as cool nerves could make it, he subsided again into the utter inaction which is all eye and ear. And then in a few minutes, from across the road again, and near where he was at first, came these soft words: 'Mr. Rollo--will you give quarter if I surrender at discretion? Just to save you trouble--and let me get home the quicker.' In the next instant the gentleman stood by the lady's side. Well for him that he was a hunter, and that habit is a great thing; for he made no exclamations and showed no disturbance, though Wych Hazel in the woods at that time of night, was a thing to try most people's command of words at least. Only in the spring which brought him across the road he had spoken the one word "Hazel!" louder than an Indian would have done. Then he stood beside her. Wych Hazel herself--bareheaded, without gloves, her little white evening cloak not around her shoulders, but rolled up into the smallest possible compass, and held down by her side. She had been standing in the deepest depth of shadow under a low drooping hemlock, and now came out to meet him. But she seemed to have no more words to give. That something had happened, was very clear. Rollo's first move was to take the girl's hand, and the second to inquire in a low voice how she came there. The hand-touch was not in compliment, but such a taking-possession clasp as Hazel had felt from it before; one that carried, as a hand-clasp can, its guaranty of protection, guidance, defence. Hazel did not answer at first--only there went a shiver over her from head to foot; and her hand was as cold as ice. 'I am very glad to find you, Mr. Rollo,' she said in a sort of measured voice; he could not tell what was in it.--'Will you walk home with me?' Rollo's answer was not in a hurry. He first took from Wych Hazel her little bundle of the opera cloak, shook it out, and put it around her shoulders, drawing the fastening button at the throat; then taking the little cold hand in his clasp again, and with the other arm lingering lightly round her shoulders, he asked her "what had happened?" People are different, as has been remarked. There was nobody in the world that could have put the question to Wych Hazel as he put it, and afterwards she could recognize that. Mr. Falkirk's words would have been more anxious; Dr. Maryland's would have been more astonished; and any one of Miss Hazel's admirers would have made speeches of surprise and sympathy and offered service. Rollo's was a business question, albeit in its somewhat curt accentuation there lurked a certain readiness for action; and there was besides, though indefinably expressed, the assumption of a right to know and a very intimate personal concern in the answer. How his eyes were looking at her the moonlight did not serve to shew; they were in shadow; yet even that was not quite hid from the object of them; and the arm that was round her was there, not in freedom-taking, but with the unmistakeable expression of shelter. So he stood and asked her what had happened. 'Thank you,' she said in the same measured tone. 'I am not cold--I think. But it is safe now. Will you walk home very fast, please? I promised Mr. Falkirk that I would be home by eleven!'--There was an accent of real distress then. 'Do you know what o'clock it is now?' said Rollo, drawing out his watch. 'I hoped--a while ago--it was near morning.' He did not say what time it was. He put the little hand on his arm, guided Hazel into the road, and began his walk homeward, but with a measured quiet pace, not 'very fast.' 'Why did you wish it was morning?' he asked in the same way in which he had spoken before. No haste in it; calm business and self-possession; along with the other indications above mentioned. It was cool, but it was the coolness of a man intensely alive to the work in hand; the intonation towards Wych Hazel very gentle. 'I thought I had to walk home alone,' she said simply. 'And I wanted the time to come.' 'Please tell me the meaning of all this. You went to Merricksdale this evening--last evening?' 'Yes.' Words did not come readily. Rollo added no more questions then. He went steadily on, keeping a gentle pace that Wych Hazel could easily bear, until they came to the long grey stone house where she had once run in from the storm. At the gate Rollo paused and opened it, leading his companion up to the door. 'I am going to take you in here for a little while,' he said. 'We will disturb nobody--don't fear; I have a key.' 'In here?' she said, rousing up then. 'O no!--I _must_ go home, Mr. Rollo. Did you bring me _this_ way--I did not notice.' 'You shall go home just as soon as possible,' he said; 'but come in here and I will tell you my reasons for stopping.' The door opened noiselessly. The moonlight showed the way, shining in through the fanlights, and Rollo pushed open the door of the library and brought his charge in there. The next thing was to strike a match and light two candles. The room looked very peaceful, just as it had been deserted by the family a few hours before; Rosy's work basket with the work overflowing it, the books and papers on the table where the gentleman had been sitting; the chairs standing where they had been last used. Past the chairs Rollo brought Wych Hazel to the chintz sofa and seated her there with a cushion at her back; drew up a foot cushion, and unfastened her opera cloak. All this was done with quiet movements and in silence. He left her then for a few minutes. Coming back, presented her on a little tray a glass of milk and a plate of rusks. 'I could get nothing else,' said he, 'without rousing the people up to give me keys. But I know the way to Prim's dairy-- and I know which are the right pans to go to. Miss Prudentia always objected to that in me.' 'But I cannot see anybody--nor speak to anybody--nor do anything--till I have seen Mr. Falkirk,' said Hazel, looking up at him with her tired eyes. 'Indeed I am not hungry.' He stood before her and bade her 'drink a little milk--it was good.' Her brows drew together slightly, but--if that was the quickest way she would take that--and so half emptied the tumbler and set it down again. 'Now let us go.' He at down before her then. 'Is there anything in what has happened to-night which makes you wish to keep it from the rest of the world? except of course Mr. Falkirk and me?' If his object was to rouse her from the mechanical way in which she had hitherto moved and spoken, success is rarely more perfect. Crimson and scarlet and all shades of colour went over her face and neck at the possible implications in his words; but she drew herself up with a world of girlish dignity, and then the brown eyes looked straight into his. 'It is nobody's business,' she answered. 'So far.--No further.' He smiled. 'You mistake me,' he said, very pleasantly. 'That is my awkwardness. It _is_ nobody's business--except Mr. Falkirk's and mine. But you know very well that fact is no bar to people's tongues. And sometimes one does not choose to give them the material--and sometimes one does not care. My question meant only, do you care in this instance? and was a practical question.' 'What do _you_ mean?' she said, quickly. 'Say out all that is in your mind. How can I judge of it by inches.' 'You have not enlightened me,' he said, 'and _I_ can judge of nothing. Do you wish to get home without letting anybody know you have been out? or may I call Primrose down and give you into her hands to be taken care of? Surely you know my other question referred not to anything but the impertinence of the world generally.' 'O! I will go home!' she said, rising up. 'I cannot see anybody. And Mr. Falkirk!--He might send for me!' 'Mr. Falkirk is fast asleep,' said Rollo. 'He will have concluded that you were kept at Mrs. Merrick's. Sit down again, and rest,' he said, gently putting her back on the cushions, (he had risen when she rose)--'we are not ready to go quite yet. You must take breath first. And we must not rouse up Chickaree at this hour. If you were known to have staid with Miss Maryland--would not that be the best way?' 'How is one to know the best, where all are bad?'--Hazel rested her head in her hands and sat thinking. 'No,' said he quietly--'we'll try and not have that true. If you could trust me with the story of the evening, I might be able to judge and act better for you.' 'Did you bring me here that I might not get home at such an hour?' she said suddenly, looking up. 'I promised to tell you my reasons. Yes, that was one of them. The people at Chickaree must not know of your coming home in the middle of the night, on foot. If I take you home at a fair hour in the morning, it will be all right. Not on foot,' said he, smiling. He was so composed and collected, that his manner had everything in it to soothe and reassure her. Not the composure of one who does not care, but of one who will take care. 'And Mr. Falkirk would say the same,'--she spoke as if reasoning the matter out with herself. 'Then I must wait. But do not call anybody. Mayn't I sit here just quietly by myself?' 'Suppose you take possession of one of Prim's spare rooms, and astonish the family at breakfast? All you need say is that you came after they were all gone to their rooms. Dr. Maryland will never seek for a reason. And Prim will never ask for one. But if you prefer it, I will take you home before they are up.' 'Just as you please,' she answered wearily: indeed weariness was fast getting the upper hand. '_You_ must want rest, I should think. What were you doing there?' she asked with her former suddenness. 'Were you looking for me? Did you know where I was--not?' 'No,' he said, smiling again, 'I had been to Troy to look at some horses, about which I had been in correspondence; and wishing to be here to-morrow--that is, to-day!--it pleased me to take a night train which set me down at Henderson; no nearer; I was walking across country to get home. And I feel as if I never should be "tired" again. Come--you can have some time of rest at least; and I will carry you home before or after breakfast, just as you please.' Upstairs with noiseless footfalls--and Rollo reminding Wych Hazel which was Primrose's room, indicated another close by, within which he said he believed she would find what she wanted. That room was always kept in order for strangers; and no strangers were in the house now. 'Primrose will come to you in the morning,' he said, 'unless you wish to go before that?' Wych Hazel turned and held out her hand. 'Thank you!' she said. Then in answer to his last words--'I shall be ready for either.' Wherein, however, Miss Kennedy made a mistake. For having once put herself down on the fresh white bed, sleep took undisputed possession and held it straight on. Neither rousing bell nor breakfast bell roused her; nor opening door--if any opened; nor steps--if any came. Sleep so profound that she never turned nor stirred nor raised her cheek from the hand where first she laid it down. And the sun was getting a new view of the western slopes of the Chickaree woods, before the young mistress thereof sat up in her strange room and looked about her. 'Well, you are awake at last!' cried Prim, bending to kiss her. 'I _am_ glad! though I was glad to have you sleep, too. How tired you were!' Wych Hazel passed her hands over her face; but the newt move was to put her arms round Prim's neck and for a moment her head on Prim's shoulder. Then she sprang up and hurriedly shook her dress into some sort of order. 'O! I have slept a great deal too long,' she said. 'Why? No, you have slept just enough. Now you would like to change your dress. There is a valise full of things from home for you. And when you are ready you shall have some breakfast, or dinner, or tea, just which you like to call it.' Primrose could not read the look and flush that greeted the valise; and indeed she needed an entire new dictionary for her friend this day. When Hazel made her appearance down stairs, hat in hand, she had more things in her face than Prim had ever met, even in dreams. Dr. Maryland was not there; the table was spread in the library, where the afternoon light poured in through its green veil of branches and leaves; and Prim gave her guest a new greeting, as glad as if she had given her none before. 'I'm sure of having you hungry, now, Hazel,' she exclaimed. 'I didn't know what was best to give you; but Duke said coffee would be sure to be right.' 'I wonder if you ever suggest anything which he does not think is "sure to be right"?' said Wych Hazel. 'I wonder if anybody down here ever makes a mistake of any sort?' 'Mistakes? oh! plenty,' said Primrose. 'I do; and I suppose Duke does. I don't know about papa. Now, dear Hazel, sit down. Duke will be here directly.' And Primrose cut bread and poured out coffee and supplied her guest, in a sort of passion of hospitality. To say that the guest was as hungry as she should have been after such a fast, would be perhaps too much; last night was still too fresh for that; but seventeen has great restorative powers at command, and Prim's coffee was undeniably good. Hazel grew more like herself as the meal went on, though her eyes kept their tired look, and her manner was a trifle abstracted. But Prim asked no questions; only hovered about her with all sorts of affectionate words and ways, till Rollo came in. He sat down and began to make himself generally useful, in his wonted manner. 'Duke,' said Primrose, 'Miss Kennedy has been asking me if we ever make mistakes in this house!' 'What did you tell her?' 'Why you know what I told her. I am not sure about papa; but the rest of us don't boast of infallible wisdom.' 'Do you mean that he does?' said Duke, drily. At which Primrose laughed. 'Have you been asleep, Miss Hazel?' 'Beyond reach of all earthly things. Have you?' Rollo remarked that he never got so far as that. 'No,' said Primrose, 'I never saw such a sleeper. He'll be sound asleep, sound and fast; not dreaming nor stirring; and if there comes the least little sound that there _oughtn't_ to be, he's up and broad awake and in possession of all his senses in a minute.' 'How do you know?' said the subject of this description. 'I know,' said Primrose. 'Thunder wouldn't waken him; and the turning of a key in a lock would--suppose it was a time or place when the lock ought not to be turned.' 'Very interesting details!' said Rollo. 'They may be useful in the study of psychology--or physiology. Which is your favourite study, Miss Hazel?' 'Whichever will throw the most light upon this; Prim, can he also detect "the least little sound that oughtn't to be,' when there is none at all?' said Hazel thinking of last night. 'No, he can't,' said Rollo, shaking his head. 'That's a physiological question. But here is one in psychology: Can a person be sensible of an unknown _presence_ when yet there is none?' 'Ah!' she said, drawing a long breath and growing grave all at once, 'I wish one might! It would have been a comfort.' 'Well,' said he, 'I think I can resolve that question.' 'Duke, what are you talking of? You have got out of philosophy into metaphysics,' said Prim. '_She_ is the philosopher of the family,' said Rollo, by way of explanation to Hazel. 'But she has made a mistake. As she confesses she does make them, I may remark that.' 'Why, you are talking of perceiving what does not exist!' cried Prim. 'Is that what you call metaphysics? I should call it nonsense.' 'I never supposed you were talking nonsense, Duke.' 'No,' said Duke. 'That _would_ be a mistake. No, I was speaking, Prim, of the detection, by no visible or intelligible means, of what we are not aware has existence.' 'By no intelligible means,' said Prim. 'You mean, knowing a person is coming, that you have not heard is coming--and such things?' 'And knowing a person is near, who you had thought was very far off.' 'Yes,' said Prim thoughtfully; 'I know. It is very curious.' 'Witches, for instance?' said Hazel, with perfect gravity. 'No,' said Prim earnestly, 'I don't mean out-of-the-way people at all; though it is something "uncanny"--as it seems;--queer; I have heard of instances.' 'I have felt them,' said Rollo. Primrose went into a brown study over the question. 'But do you think,' Rollo went on gravely addressing Wych Hazel, 'that this sort of mental action can take place except where there are strong sympathetic--or other--relations between the parties?' 'So that the magnet finds out the iron, when it would pass by the lead?--is that what you mean?' A significant, quick, keen look; and then Rollo said, very gravely, 'But it strikes me we have got the thing reversed. Is it not rather the iron that finds the magnet?' 'The magnet must be conscious too,' said Hazel. 'And I think it moves--where the iron is in sufficient quantity.' 'It would be a poor rule that wouldn't work both ways,' said Rollo, with dry simplicity. 'What are you talking about?' said Primrose. 'Do give Hazel some more raspberries. I am inclined to think this, Duke--' 'Well?' 'I am inclined to think that in those cases you have been speaking of, there is testimony of the person's presence, only it is in some such little slight things as were insufficient to draw attention to themselves, and only, by natural association of ideas, suggested the person.' 'What do you think, Miss Hazel?' But she shook her head. 'If you go off to people--I should say, sometimes, that could not be.' 'So should I,' said Rollo. 'Why?' said Primrose. 'I cannot find in my consciousness, or memory, any corroboration of your theory.' 'I think I can in mine. Sometimes, at least.' 'Those are not my times,' said Rollo. 'And I don't know but you are right, too,' said Primrose, musing. 'I remember, that day you were coming home, I had not the least reason to think so, and yet you were in my mind all day.' 'What is your explanation then?' said he, smiling at her. Prim was not ready with it; and before she was ready to speak again, Wych Hazel was informed that her escort was at her service. Dr. Maryland's little old chaise was at the door. Rollo put Miss Kennedy in it and took the reins. It was late in the sweet Summer afternoon; the door and the road and the fields looked exceedingly unlike the same things seen in shadow and moonlight last night. Rollo never referred to that, however; he was just as usual; took care that Wych Hazel was comfortably seated, and made careless little remarks, in his wonted manner. Various people passed them; many were the greetings, answered for the most part very sedately by the young lady of Chickaree. But just as they entered the outskirts of her own domain, Rollo felt his companion shrink towards him with a sudden start. Then instantly she sat upright in her place. Two or three horsemen were in sight, at different distances; one, the nearest, was a stranger to Rollo. A remarkably handsome man, splendidly mounted, faultlessly dressed; riding his grey with the easy grace of a true cavalier. He uncovered before he was near enough to do more, and then bent even to his saddle-bow before Miss Kennedy. And to him, turning full upon him, did Miss Kennedy administer the most complete, cool, effectual cut that Mr. Rollo had ever seen bestowed. The rider's face turned crimson as he passed on. Rollo made no sort of remark; drove gently, let the old horse come to a walk; and at last, throwing himself back into the corner of the chaise, so as to have a better look at his companion, he said: 'Does daylight and rest make a difference, and are you inclined to trust me with the explanation of what happened last night? I should be grateful.' He could see now with what extreme effort she had done her work of execution--lip and chin were in a tremor. 'It was no want of trust, Mr. Rollo--I meant you should know. But--I could not tell you first,' she said rather timidly. 'I thought, perhaps, you would take the trouble to come in and hear me tell Mr. Falkirk.' 'Thank you,' he said, 'I _am_ grateful.' And no more passed on the subject until the chaise reached the cottage. CHAPTER XXII. A REPORT. Just glancing round at her companion to make sure that he followed, taking off her hat as she went, Hazel passed swiftly into the cottage and into Mr. Falkirk's study, to the foot of his couch--and there stood still. Very unlike the figure of last evening,--in the simplest pale Summer dress, with no adornment but her brown hair, and yet as Mr. Falkirk looked, he thought he has never seen her look so lovely. She was surely changing fast; the old girlish graces were taking to themselves the richer and stronger graces of womanhood; and like those evening flowers that open and unfold and gather sweetness if you but turn aside for a moment, so she seemed to have altered, even since her guardian's last look. The broad gipsy hanging from her hand, her long eyelashes drooped,--so she stood. Mr. Falkirk looked and took the effect of all this in a glance two seconds long, during which, something held his tongue. Then as his eye caught the figure that entered following her, it darted towards him a look of sudden surprise and suspicion. Than changed, however, almost as soon, and his eyes came back to his ward. But there is no doubt Mr. Falkirk scowled. 'So, Miss Hazel,' he began, in his usual manner, 'you found you could not manage other people's carriages last night?' 'Not the right ones, sir. Will you ask Mr. Rollo to sit down, Mr. Falkirk? It is due to me that he should hear all I have to say.' 'It is not due to anybody that you should say it standing,' said Rollo, wheeling up into convenient position the easiest chair that the room contained. She made him a slight sign of acknowledgement, but yielded only so far as to lay her hand on the chair back. Probably it was pleasant to touch something. Rollo stepped back to the mantlepiece and stood there, but not touching it or anything. 'It appears to me, Miss Hazel,' said the recumbent master of the house, 'that the invitation must come from you.' 'I have not been invited myself, sir, yet.' 'I do not recollect inviting you to be seated yesterday, my dear; is to-day different from yesterday?' 'Unless I have forgotten the frown which welcomed me then, sir. I suppose you have but a faint idea of the looming up of your brows just now.' 'What?' said Mr. Falkirk. 'Don't you know, Miss Hazel, a man's brows are not within his range of vision? and I deny that he is responsible for them. Am I frowning now?' 'Not quite so portentously, sir.' 'Then you need not stand so particularly, need you? I wonder, if I looked so fierce, how Rollo dared to offer you the civility of a chair in my presence; but people are different.' 'But I cannot sit there,' she said, with a glance towards the bringer of the chair, as she passed by its reposeful depths. 'Not now. If Mr. Rollo will make himself comfortable in his own way, I will in mine.' And Hazel brought a foot cushion to the couch and sat down there; a little turned away from the third member of the party; who however did not change his position. 'Is there business?' said Mr. Falkirk glancing from one to the other. The girl gave him a swift glance of wonder. 'You used to think it was business, sir, to know what had become of me. Did you sleep well last night, Mr. Falkirk?' 'Why should I, any more than you?' said Mr. Falkirk in his old fashion of growling. 'Day is the proper time for sleeping, in the fashionable world.' It made her restless--this keeping off the subject of which her thoughts were full. Didn't he mean to ask any questions? 'Why should not I have slept, sir?--if you come to that. The fashionable world was not to hold me beyond eleven.' 'So I understood, and endeavoured to stipulate,' said Mr. Falkirk, 'but I am told you were so late in returning that you would not come home, and preferred, somewhat inexplicably, disturbing Miss Maryland to disturbing me.' 'Is that what you think?' she answered, simply. 'That I broke my word? Mr. Falkirk, I began returning as you say, at a quarter past eleven.' 'I never expected you to get off before that, my dear. Then what was the matter?' The girl hesitated a moment, and then one of her witch looks flashed through in spite of everything. 'I fell into Charybdis, sir, that was all.' 'I do not remember any such place between here and Merricksdale,' said Mr. Falkirk. 'Was it enchantment, my dear?' But his face was less careless than his words. Hers grew grave again at once; and, wasting no more time, Miss Kennedy addressed herself to business. 'I had arranged it all with Miss Bird,' she said, 'on the way there. She had a headache and was glad of an excuse to get away early. It was "a small party," I found, when you were in the house and the rest were out of doors, but otherwise everybody was there--and nearly everybody else. The trees were all lights and flowers; and supper tables stood ready from the first; and you know what the moon was. So altogether,' said Miss Hazel, 'it was hard to remember anything about time, and especially to find out. I fancied that Mrs. Merrick had told about my going early,--watches seemed so very uncertain, and so many of them had stopped at nine o'clock. It was only by a chance overhearing that I knew when it was half-past ten. I lost just a few minutes then, manoeuvring,--for I did not want "everybody" to see me to the carriage; but when I had vanished into the house, and found Mrs. Merrick, Miss Bird was not there. She had gone home an hour before, her head being worse, they said.' Mr. Falkirk said nothing, but his thick brows grew together again. 'Mrs. Merrick said it was not the least matter; her coachman unfortunately was sick, but fifty people would be only too happy. I said everybody but me wished to stay late,--O, no, not at all!--here was Mr. May, going in five minutes, with his sister. They would be "delighted". I could not well tell her, sir,' said Wych Hazel, with a look at her guardian, 'all that occurred to me in the connection, but I suppose I negatived Mr. May in my face, for Mrs. Merrick went on. "Mr. Morton, then,--the most luxurious coach in the county." He too was going at once--if I did. Or, if I did not mind the walk, her brother-in-law would take charge of me at any moment with pleasure.' Certainly Mr. Falkirk outdid himself in scowling, at this point. 'Well--I must get home somehow,' she said with another glance,-- 'and the coach would never do, and the phaeton was tabooed. But I knew Mrs. Merrick's sister was Mrs. Blake; and so, thinking of the old doctor, I said at once that I would walk, and ran upstairs for my cloak. And then I found out,' said Wych Hazel slowly, 'that the are two sorts of brothers-in- law.' Nobody interrupted her, nor spoke when she paused. The little room was very still, except from the movements the girl made herself. 'This was the wrong one. No old doctor Blake at all, but a younger brother of Gen. Merrick. What could I do?' she said, with a half appealing look that went for a second further than her guardian. 'Already my promise was in peril; and there was Mr. Morton beseeching me into his coach--and I could not get up a fuss.' It was very pretty and characteristic, the unconscious way in which she brought in--and left out--the third one in the room. Sometimes forgetting everybody but her guardian, and giving him details that were plainly meant for his ears alone; then, with a sudden blush and stop, remembering that there was another listener standing by. On such occasions she would generally turn her face a little more away and out of sight, and then begin again, in a tone that meant to keep clear of all further special confidences in that direction. The third member of the party stood perfectly still and made no remark whatever. 'Well?' said Mr. Falkirk, with rather a short breath, as the girl paused. 'There was nothing left for me but the walk--unless a fuss, and a half dozen more standing round. Then Mr. Morton said he should walk, too, at least as far as the cross-road, and let the carriage follow at a foot pace in case I should turn weary. If he had been half as anxious about my weariness as he professed,' said the girl, with a curl of her lips, 'he would have tried how fast his horses could go for once, with him behind them. But I could not tell him that any plainer than I did.' 'You tried to make him drive and leave you?' said Mr. Falkirk. 'I tried to make him let me alone, sir,' said the girl flushing. 'As to the way, I made no suggestions. So we walked on, and Mr. Morton made himself exceedingly--disagreeable.' 'Too officious? Or too presumptuous? He's an ass!' said Mr. Falkirk, who was plainly getting restive. 'Which, Hazel?' 'Unbearable I called it, sir. I was in no mood for nice definitions. And I couldn't have been tired _then_ if we had walked through the moonlight straight on to the moon! But--I had been lectured so much about self-control' (an invisible glance went here) 'that, somehow, he seemed to keep his patience the better, the more I lost mine. I never remember your telling me, sir, that my wilful moods were particularly becoming, but I began to think it must be so; and actually thought of trying a little complaisance.' Whereat, Miss Hazel brought herself to a sudden stop. 'My dear!' said Mr. Falkirk. 'What was the other man about?' 'He was walking on the other side,' said Hazel, her voice changing. 'But he left me to Mr. Morton, in effect, and scarcely said three words all this time. I trusted his thoughts were too busy with Miss Powder, to notice what went on near by.' 'This is what comes of what you erroneously term dancing on the branches of trees!' said Mr. Falkirk, in a great state of disgust. 'But I have no idea I should have gone to that woman's if I had been free. More comes of it than I reckoned upon, or than six weeks will see me through. Well, you got rid of him at last, I suppose; and walked all the way to Dr. Maryland's in your slippers!' 'My dear Mr. Falkirk!--slippers at an out-door party! Yes, I "got rid of him," as you say, when we reached the turning to Morton Hollow,' Hazel went on, rather slowly, the shadow coming into her tone again. 'And then, after that, I found out why my other companion had been so silent.' 'Found out! He had not been taking too much?' 'I told you the supper tables stood ready all the evening,' said the girl, sinking her voice; 'and--it was plain--now--what he had found there.' The silence now, rather than any words, bade her go on. She caught her breath a little, mastering her excitement. 'I knew, presently, what I must do. And when. You have told me, sir, sometimes, that I was too hasty to resolve and to do,--I had to be both now.' 'What did you do?' said her guardian. 'I must get away. And on the instant. For, just beyond, the woods ceased, and there was a long stretch of open road. I thought, in that second, that my cloak might be caught. So, with my free hand I unfastened it--I don't know how I ever did it!' said the girl, excitedly, 'unless, as Byo says, mamma's prayers were round me!--but I slipped the cloak from my shoulders and tore away my other hand, and sprang into the woods.' They could almost hear her heart beat, as she sat there. 'Into the woods alone!' cried Mr. Falkirk. 'Then--Go on, my dear,' he said, his voice falling into great gentleness. 'Things came so fast upon me then!' she said with a shiver. 'I had said, in that moment, "I can but try,"--and now I felt that if you try--some things--you must succeed. To fail, then, would be just a game of hide-and-seek. That was the first thought. I must keep ahead, if it killed me. And then--instantly--I knew that to do that I must not run!'-- 'What _did_ you do?' said Mr. Falkirk. 'I might not be the fastest; and, if I ran, I should maybe not know just where--he--was,--nor when the pursuit was given up. I must pass from shadow to shadow; moving only when he moved; keeping close watch; until he got tired and went back.' Hazel leaned her head on her hands, as if the mere recollection were all she could bear. 'My dear!--exclaimed Mr. Falkirk. 'Did you keep up the game long?' 'I do not know, sir,' she said, wearily; 'it seemed--' she stopped short,--then went on: 'I knew my dress was dark enough to pass notice; and as softly as I could I rolled up my white cloak and took off my gloves, lest any chance light might fall on them. My steps were steady--the others not: so far I had the advantage. Several times I heard my name--I think the surprise must have sobered him a little, for he called to me that that was not the road. But how long it went on, I cannot tell.' 'Till he gave it up?' 'Yes. At last, I saw him go back to the road, and heard his tread there, turning back the way we had come. Past me. And again I had to wait. Only I crept to the edge of the trees, where I could see far down the moonlight, and watch the one moving shadow there, that it did not turn off again among the shadows where I stood. And then I began to think I could not go on towards home along that open stretch before me,--for at least a mile there were only fields and fences on either hand. I had noticed it when we drove along in the evening. I could not go back towards Mrs. Merrick's. Then I remembered, in my ride upon Vixen, finding a short cut from this road to one from Dr. Maryland's. And I thought if I could once get to that, I should find unbroken woodland, where I could pass along unseen. For that, however, I must cross the road--in the full, clear light. And what that was!--' 'But I went safe,' she began again, 'and reached the shadows on the other side before there came sounds upon the road once more, and the full stream of late people began to come rattling down from Merricksdale.' 'Yes!'--Mr. Falkirk's word was rather breathless. 'At first, when I saw the first carriage, I thought I would speak and claim protection. But that held only men. And then came others on foot--and some that I knew. And it seemed to me, that instead of speaking I almost shrank into a shadow myself. And when there came a little interval, so that I dared move, I sprang away again, and went through the woods as fast as I could go, and go softly. The belt is not broad there, I suppose,' she said after another pause; 'and I reached the other road and went on while in the darkness, along the edge. But I think by this time I must have been tired, I grew so suddenly trembling and unsteady. And the night was so still, and yet I seemed to hear steps everywhere. I could not bear it any longer; and I thought I would just be quiet and wait for the day. Only--so far my wits served me yet--I must once more cross the road; for the moon was sinking westward now, and the level rays came in about my feet.' 'I thought I could not do it at first,' she said, with a voice that told more than the words,--'go out into that stream of light; but then I did; and hid myself in the branches of a great hemlock, and waited there.' 'And then I found Mr. Rollo,--and I knew that I might trust him.' With which most unconscious full-sized compliment, the girl crossed her arms upon her lap, and laid her face down upon them, and was still. 'How did she found you?' demanded Mr. Falkirk with unceremonious energy. The answer was in an undertone: 'I found her.' Mr. Falkirk was silent again. 'No,' said Wych Hazel, without raising her head, and again not stopping to measure her words. 'You would have stood there till this time, if I had not spoken!' 'Would I?' said Rollo. 'And how came you to be there at all at that time of night?' said Mr. Falkirk. 'On my way from the cars.' 'Cars, where?' 'Henderson.' 'Walk from Henderson!' said Mr. Falkirk. 'Save time. I wanted to be here to-day.' The answers were all short and grave, as a man speaks who has no words that he wants to say. 'And Mr. Rollo thought', said Hazel, looking up, 'that it was better for me to come home from Dr. Maryland's than from the woods. And--when he spoke of it--I supposed you would say that too, Mr. Falkirk.' But Mr. Falkirk vouchsafed no corroboration of this opinion. 'Did I do well, sir?' she said a little eagerly, but meaning now the whole night's work. 'Did I do ill? Was I a bit like your old ideal--"a woman" and "brave"? Or was I only a girl, and very foolish?' They were so silent, these men!--it tried her. Did they, in their worldly wisdom, see any better way out of her hard places, than her seventeen years' inexperience had found, at such a cost? The brown eyes looked searchingly at Mr. Falkirk, and again for an instant went beyond him to Mr. Rollo. 'Answer, Mr. Falkirk!' said the younger man. 'My dear,' said Wych Hazel's guardian, 'if I had been a quarter as much a man as you have proved yourself a woman, your bravery never would have been so tried.' 'And the bravery was as much as the womanliness!' said the other, in the short, terse way of all his words this afternoon; no air of compliment whatever hanging about the words. She answered with only a deep flush of pleasure, and eyes that went down now, and a smile just playing round the corners of her mouth--the first that had been there that afternoon. It may be remarked that there was no pleasure in either of the other faces. 'Who knows about this?' said Mr. Falkirk, suddenly. 'Nobody,' said Rollo. 'Not Miss Maryland?' 'I could answer for her; but she knows nothing.' Wych Hazel looked up, listening. It was interesting to hear somebody else talk now. Talk was stayed, however. Both men were thinking; their thoughts did not run easily into spoken words. Or not while she was present; for after a sudden excursion up stairs to see what notes and messages might need attention, on returning she found the two deep in talk; Rollo seated near the head of Mr. Falkirk's couch, and bending towards him. He sprang up as Wych hazel came in and took leave; shaking Mr. Falkirk's hand cordially and then clasping Wych Hazel's. For the first time then a gleam of his usual gay humour broke on his lips and in his eye, as he said softly: 'I should have made you speak before that!' CHAPTER XXIII. KITTY FISHER. Nothing but the most superb propriety was to be expected at Mrs. Powder's; nevertheless Wych Hazel went escorted by Prim and Rollo in Dr; Maryland's rockaway. Dr. Maryland himself had been persuaded to the dinner, and it was on his arm Miss Kennedy made her entrance upon the company. Something unlike anything the doctor had ever taken charge of before,--in a dress of tea-rose colour this time, and with only tea-roses for trimming. It was not a large company assembled for dinner, though everybody was expected in the evening. This was a different affair from Merricksdale; on old proud family name in the mistress of the mansion; old fashioned respectability and modern fashion commingled in the house and entertainment; the dinner party very strictly chosen. Beyond that fact, it was not perhaps remarkable. After dinner Dr. Maryland went home; and gayer and younger began to pour in. Following close upon Mrs. Merrick's entertainment, this evening too had the adornment of the full moon; and as this party also was an out- door one, as much as people chose to have it so, the adornment was material. A large pleasure ground around the house, half garden, half shrubbery, was open to promenaders; and at certain points there were lights and seats and music and refreshments; the last two not necessarily together. On this pleasure ground opened the windows of the drawing room and to this led the steps of the piazza; and so it came to pass in the course of the evening that the house was pretty well deserted of all but the elderly part of the guests. In this state of things, said elderly portion of the company might as well be at home for all the care they are able to bestow on the younger. Wandering in shadow and light, in and out through the winding walks, blending in groups and scattered in couples, the young friends of Mrs. Powder did pretty much as they pleased. But one thing Wych Hazel had cause to suspect as the evening wore on, that though her guardian proper was fast at-home, she had an active actual guardian much nearer to her, and in fact never very far off for long at a time. Indeed he paraded no attentions, either before Wych Hazel's eyes or the eyes of the public; but if she wanted anything, Rollo found it out; if she needed anything, he was at hand to give it. His care did not burden her, nor make itself at all conspicuous to other people; nevertheless she surely could not but be conscious of it. This by the way. Dr. Maryland had not been gone long; the new arrivals were just pouring in; when a seat beside Wych Hazel was taken by Mr. Nightingale. 'You were at Merricksdale the other night?' he said after the first compliments. 'Yes, for a while.' 'I knew you would be. I was in despair that I could not get there;--but engagements--contretemps--held us fast. I see now how much I lost.' 'Then you are released from imaginary evils,--that must be a comfort.' 'Do you know,' said Stuart, 'I think the toilet is a fine art?' She did not answer, looking at two or three somewhat remarkable specimens of the art that just then swept by. 'Who is Miss Fisher, Mr. Nightingale?' she asked suddenly. 'O don't you know Kitty? To be sure, she has just come.' 'No, I do not know her. May I know who she is?' 'Not to know her, argues--Well, it isn't so extreme a case as that. Miss Fisher, for character, is the most amiable of persons; for accomplishments, she can do everything; for connections, (do you always want to know people's connections?) she is a niece, I believe, of Dr. Maryland's.' 'Of Dr. Maryland's!--O that is good,' said Wych Hazel. 'Is she like Primrose?' 'She is more--like--a purple snap dragon,' said Stuart, reflectively. 'Do you read characters in flowers? and then look out for their moral prototypes in the social world?' 'I do not believe I ever had the credit of "looking out" for anything!--Good evening, Mr. Simms.' ' "It was the witching hour of night!" '--quoted Mr. Simms with a deprecating gesture. 'Really, Miss Kennedy, I do not see why the story books make it out such a misfortune for a man to be turned to stone. I think, in some circumstances, it is surely the best thing that can happen to him. There is Nightingale, now--he would feel no end better for a slight infusion of silica!'--and with another profound reverence, Mr. Simms moved off. 'I should like to see the philosopher that would make an infusion of silica!' muttered Stuart. '_He's_ never drunk it. What is the use of poets in the world, Miss Kennedy?' 'To furnish people with quotations--as a general thing,' said Wych Hazel. 'Precisely my idea. And that's stupid, for people don't want them. It looks bright out among Mrs. Powder's bushes--shall we go and try how it feels?' It was pretty, and pleasant. Moonlight and lamps do make a witching world of it; and under the various lights flitted such a multitude of gay creatures that Mr. Falkirk's favourite allusion to Enchanted ground would have been more than usually appropriate. All the colours in the rainbow, gleaming by turns in all possible alternations and degrees of light and shadow; a moving kaleidoscope of humanity; the eye at least was entertained. And Stuart endeavoured to find entertainment for the ear of his companion. They wandered up and down, in and out; not meeting many people; in the changing lights it was easy to miss anybody at pleasure. In the course of the walk Stuart begged for a ride with Miss Kennedy, again negatived on the plea that Miss Kennedy's horses were not yet come. Stuart immediately besought to be allowed to supply that want for the occasion. His aunt had a nice little Canadian pony. 'I cannot tell,' said Wych Hazel, gaily. 'You know I must ask Mr. Falkirk.' 'You do not mean that?' said Stuart. 'Why of course I mean it.' 'Is it possible you are in such bondage? But by the way, there is going to be some singing presently, which I think you will like. I have been counting upon it for you.' 'Is there?' she said,--'where? You are right in the fact, Mr. Nightingale, but quite wrong as to terms. I mean, the terms give a false impression of the fact. Where is the music to be, Mr. Rollo?' For Rollo, prowling about in the shrubbery, had at the moment joined them. He answered rather absently, that he believed it was to be in the garden. 'Do you understand, Mr. Nightingale?'--Wych Hazel resumed, turning to her other companion--'that is a mistake.' 'Can you prove it? But apropos, I am right in supposing that you are fond of music? That is true, isn't it?' 'Very true!'--But she was thinking.--'Mr. Rollo, how can you always say what you mean, without saying what you do not mean?' she asked suddenly. 'Choose your audience,' said Rollo. 'I like to say what I mean to anybody!' 'It is a great luxury. But the corresponding luxury of being understood, is not always at command. Have you been puzzling Mr. Nightingale?' he asked in an amused voice. 'Only presenting my ideas wrong end first, as usual. Is Miss Fisher here to-night?--and do you like her, Mr. Rollo?' 'Miss Fisher?--Kitty?--I have not seen her since I came home from Europe. But there is Prim. I must go and take care of her.' He disappeared. The walk and talk of the two others was prolonged, until faint sweet notes of wind instruments from afar called them to join the rest of the world. There was quite a little company gathered at this point, a small clearing in the shrubbery around one side of which seats were placed. Here the music lovers (and some others) were ranged, in a tiny semi-circle, half in shadow, half in light, as the lamps and moonbeams served. The light came clear upon half the little spot of greensward; glittering on leaves and branches beyond, glanced on the tops of trees higher up. A lively chitter-chatter was going on, after the fashion of such companies, when Wych Hazel came up, but a moment after the first notes of the music struck their ears, and all was as hushed as the moonlight itself. Only the notes of the harmony floated in and out through the trees; nothing else moved. Mrs. Powder had managed to secure some good musical talent, for the performance was of excellent quality. Perhaps summer air and moonbeams helped the effect. At any rate, the first performance, a duet between a flute and a violin, was undoubtedly listened to; and that is saying much. The performers were out of sight. Then a fine soprano voice followed, in a favourite opera air. Wych Hazel was seated near one end of the semi-circle, with Primrose just behind her; both of them in shadow. Rollo had been standing in the full light just before them; but during the singing he was beckoned away and the spot was clear. In two minutes more Stuart Nightingale had brought a camp chair to Wych Hazel's side. He was quiet till the song was over and the little gratified buzz of voices began. Under this cover he spoke low-- 'Have you _two_ guardians, Miss Kennedy?' 'One has answered all my purposes hitherto,' she answered with a laugh. 'Do I seem to need another?' 'Seem to _have_ another. Pardon me. Do you like to be taken care of?' He spoke in her own tone. 'By myself--best! If I must speak the truth.' 'Ah, I thought so! who else can do it so well? A fine woman needs no other control than her own. Am I to be disappointed of that ride?' He was speaking very softly. 'Well, I will prefer my request,' said Hazel. 'I wish I could say yes, at once. But how shall I let you now?' Prim's hand touched her shoulder at this instant, for delicious notes of two voices stole upon the air from the hiding place of Mrs. Powder's troup. The lady's voice they had heard before; it was one of great power and training, and it came now mingling with a sweet full bass voice. There was no more talking until the music ended. It was a fine bit from a German opera. 'How do you like that?' Stuart asked. Hazel drew a deep breath. 'Can you tell how you like things?' she said. 'Yes!' said Stuart. 'After we get that ride I am talking of, I'll tell you how I liked it. By the way, I will do myself the honour to be the receiver of your answer concerning it. But _this_ pleasure--no,--yes, I _do_ know why I enjoy it; but it is not because the voices are fine or the music expressive. Can you guess?' '_Not_ for the music, and _not_ for the voices!' said the girl looking at him. 'A puzzle, isn't it?' said Stuart. 'No; the music expresses nothing to me--this sort of music; and voices are voices--but--I care only for voices that I know.' Another little word of warning from Prim behind her,--'O Hazel, listen!'--prevented any reply; and Stuart's 'Yes, this is something, now,'--made it unnecessary. And the singing would have made it impossible. A man's voice alone; the same rich, full, sweet bass; in the ballad of the "Three Fishers." Whether Mr. Nightingale had divined that somebody was near who knew Wych Hazel, or merely acted on general prudential motives, he left his seat and stood a little apart while the ballad was sung. 'Do you like that?' Primrose whispered. 'The voice--not the ballad.' 'Nor I either,' said Prim. 'I don't see what he sings it for.' There was but a moment's interval, and then the same voice began another strain, so noble, so deep, so thrilling, that every breath was held till it had done. The power of the voice came out in this strain; the notes were wild, pleading, agonizing, yet with slow, sweet human melody. The air thrilled with them; they seemed to float off and lose themselves through the woods; sadly, grandly, the song breathed and fell and ceased. Wych Hazel did not speak nor stir, nor look, except on the ground, even when the last notes had died away. Only her little hands held each other very close, her cheeks resting on them. 'Yes, I know,' said Primrose softly. 'That is Handel.' Stuart Nightingale presently slid back to his seat; and now there came a stir; the music was discontinued. In a few minutes Rollo came bringing refreshments; Mr. Nightingale bestirred himself in the same cause; and presently they were all eating ices and fruits. At which juncture Miss Josephine joined herself to the party, with one or two of her sort, while several gentlemen began to "fall in," behind Miss Kennedy. 'Did you have a good time at Merricksdale?' Josephine asked. 'Not better than usual,' Hazel answered. 'Danced, didn't you? I wanted mamma to have dancing to-night, and she wouldn't. She's so awfully slow! O Mr. Rollo, do you like dancing?' 'On anything but my own feet,' said Rollo. 'Anything but your own feet? How _can_ you dance on anything but your own feet?' 'My horse's feet? Or what do you think of a good yacht and a good breeze?' 'Horrid! I never want to be in one. And _don't_ you like dancing? O why? Don't you, Miss Kennedy? don't you, Mr. Nightingale?' 'Depends on the dance,' said Stuart. 'And on my partner.' 'O it don't signify what partner you have. In fact, you dance with everybody, you know. That is the best fun. Don't you like the German, Miss Kennedy?' 'Not with everybody,' said Miss Kennedy, thinking of possible partners. 'O but you must, you know, in the German--and that's the fun. I don't think anything else _is_ fun. Of course the people are all proper. Don't you like the German, Mr. Rollo?' 'I do not dance it.' '_Not?_ Don't you? O why? You do dance, I know, for I've seen you; you waltz like a German, a man, I mean. Why don't you dance the German?' 'How does a German--a man, I mean--waltz, Miss Phinney? as distinguished from other nationalities?' Stuart asked. 'O, different.' 'Wont you tell us in what way? This is interesting.' 'It wont help you,' said Josephine; 'and you dance well, besides. A German waltzes slow and elegantly.' 'And other people?'-- 'You may laugh, but it's true; I've noticed it. An Englishman sways and a Frenchman spins, but a German floats. O it's just delicious! Why dont you dance the German, Dane Rollo? You're not pious.' Rollo did not join in the general smile. He answered composedly-- 'What I would not let my sister do, Miss Josephine, I am bound not to ask of another lady.' 'Why wouldn't you let your sister? You haven't got one, and don't know. But that's being awfully strict. I had no idea you were so strict. I thought you were jolly.' 'Could you hinder your sister?' Stuart asked with a slight laugh. The answer was, however, unhesitating. 'Why would you hinder her?' repeated Josephine. 'Ask Kitty Fisher.' 'Kitty? Does _she_ know? And why shouldn't you tell us as well as her?' Rollo took Miss Kennedy's plate at the instant and went off with it. 'That's all bosh,' said Josephine. 'I like people that are jolly. The German is real jolly. Last week we danced it with candles--it was splendid fun.' 'Not here?' said one of the gentlemen. 'Here? No. You bet. My mother is my mother, and nobody ever charged her with being jolly, I suppose.' 'How could you dance with candles?' said Primrose's astonished voice. 'Yes. Six of us had great long wax candles, lighted; and we stood up on a chair.' 'Six of you on a chair!' 'The old question of the schoolmen!'--cried Nightingale, bursting into a laugh. 'Of course on six chairs, I mean. Of course. Six of us on a chair!'-- 'But what did you get on chairs for?' 'Why!--then the gentlemen danced round us, and at the signal-- the leader gave the signal--the gentlemen jumped up as high as they could and tried to blow out our lights; and they had to keep step and jump; and if any gentleman could blow out the candle nearest him he could dance with that lady. Didn't we make them jump, though! We held our candles up so high, you know, they could not get at them. Unless we liked somebody and wanted him for a partner. O we had a royal time!' 'Did the gentlemen dance--and blow--indiscriminately?' inquired Miss Kennedy with a curl of her lips. 'No, no!--how you do tell things, Josephine!' said Miss Burr. 'Two gentlemen for each chair,--and whichever of the two put the candle out, he danced with the lady.' 'Kitty had four or five round her chair'--said Josephine. 'And couldn't the lady help herself?' inquired Primrose, in a tone of voice which called forth a universal burst of laughter. 'Why we _did_,' said Josephine. 'If you don't like a man, you hold the candle up out of his reach.' 'You couldn't baffle everybody so,' remarked Mr. Kingsland. Several gentlemen had come up during the talk, closing in round Miss Kennedy. 'Mr. Rollo is right about one thing,' said Miss Burr; 'nobody has seen the German who has not seen it led by Kitty Fisher. You should see her dance it, Miss Kennedy.' 'Yes, you should,' echoed Mr. May, 'I had rather look on than be in it, for my part.' 'What do you think she did at Catskill the other day?' said Miss Burr. 'She took a piece of ice between her teeth, and went round the piazza asking all the gentlemen to take a bite.' 'Clever Kitty! She'll work that up into a new figure--see if she dont,'--said Mr. Kingsland. 'To be called the _noli me tangere!_' said Mr. May. 'Partners secured at the melting point.' The other gentlemen laughed. 'I see you and Kitty are at swords' points yet,' said Miss Burr. 'No,' put in Rollo--'she likes a foil better than a rapier.' 'Certainly it does not sound as if she was like you, Primrose,' observed Wych Hazel. 'Like Miss Maryland!--Hardly,' said Mr. May. 'Nor like any one your thoughts could even imagine,' he added softly. It was growing late now, and the moon gradually passing along behind the trees, found a clear space at this point, and looked down full at the little party to see what they were about. Just then, from the distance, came a stir and a murmur and sound of laughing voices. 'She's coming this minute!' said Mr. Kingsland. ' "Talk about angels"!--Your curiosity will soon be fed, Miss Kennedy,--and may, perchance, like other things, grow by what it feeds on. Here comes the redoubtable Kitty herself!--Miss Fisher!--my poor eyes have seen nothing since they last beheld you!' 'Don't see much in ordinary,' said a gay voice; and a young lady,--too young, alas, for the part she was playing!--swept into the circle. A very handsome girl, with a coronet of fair hair, from which strayed braids and curls and crinkles and puffs and bands and flowers and ribbands; her dress in the extremest extremity of the fashion, very long, very low; with puffs and poufs innumerable; the whole borne up by the highest and minutest pair of heels that ever a beguiling shoemaker sent forth. She nodded, laughing, and held out her hands right and left. 'How d'ye do, Stephen?--Mr. Richard May!'--with a profound reverence. 'And if there isn't our Norwegian back again! Glad to see you, Mr. Rollo. Have you leaned how to spell your name yet?' But to this lady Rollo gave one of his Spanish salutations; while Phinny Powder jumped up and exclaimed with pleasure, and Primrose uttered from behind them her quiet 'how d'ye do Kitty?' Wych Hazel on her part had risen too--drawing a little back from the front, in the sudden desire for a distant view first. 'I see,' Miss Fisher went on, speaking to Rollo.--'The e in the middle as usual, and the i and the g to keep it there. Why, Prim, my dear child!--you here? Among all these black coats of unclerical order?--How do you do?'--with an embrace. 'And how is my uncle?--But where is Miss Kennedy? I am dying to see Miss Kennedy!--and they told me she was here.' 'The time to die is--_after_ you have seen Miss Kennedy,' said Mr. Kingsland. 'To my face!' said Kitty. 'Well!--That is she, I know, behind Mr. May. Introduce us Richard, please.' Mr. May stepped aside, and with extreme formality presented Miss Fisher to the lady of Chickaree. Kitty touched hands,--and paused, forgetting to take her own away. The young 'unwonted' face was certainly a novelty to her. And a surprise. 'We shall all be jealous of her for her little mouth,' was her first remark. 'Don't everybody generally kiss you, child, that comes near enough?' Wych Hazel withdrew her hand, stepping back again in her astonishment, and surveying Miss Fisher. 'People do not--generally--come near enough,' she said, as well as it could be said. There was a little round of applause from the gentlemen at that. Kitty Fisher nodded, not at all displeased. 'She'll do,' she said. 'I was afraid she was nothing but a milksop,--all strawberries and cream. I vow she's handsome!' 'Handsome is that handsome does,' said Rollo. 'Miss Kitty, will you sit down and take things calmly?'--offering a chair. 'Yes, I'll take the chair; and Miss Kennedy and I'll divide the civil speech between us,' said Kitty Fisher, placing herself close by Hazel. 'It's awfully nice here. What are you all about?' 'Just unable to get on for want of Miss Fisher,' said Stuart. 'Calling for you, in fact.' 'Echo answering "Where?" and all that,' said Kitty. 'Not at all. Echo said you were coming.' 'No dancing to-night?--awfully slow, isn't it? Beg pardon, Phinny; but you think just so yourself. Go off and start up the band into a waltz, and we'll have it out before the old lady gets the idea into her head. Come?' Phinny started off on the instant with such energy and goodwill to her errand, that in a few minutes the burst of a waltz air in the immediate neighbourhood of the parties requiring it, said that Miss Josephine had been successful. And she said it herself. 'There!' she exclaimed; 'we've got it. Mamma'll never care, if she hears, nor know, if she sees. Come! Here are enough of us.' One and another couple sailed off from the group. Stuart offered his hand to Wych Hazel. 'You waltz?' he said. She gave hers readily. The music had put her on tiptoe. And presently the little green was full of flying footsteps and fluttering draperies. As many as there was room for took the ground; but there was good room, and the waltz was spirited. Some stood and looked on; some beat time with their feet. In a shadow of the corner where they had been talking, stood Prim and Rollo; _not_ beating time. Prim put her hand on his arm, but neither spoke a word. 'Shall we take a tangent,--and finish our stroll?' whispered Stuart, when they had whirled round the circle several times. 'If you like,--one is ready for anything in such a night,' said Hazel gleefully. She had gone round much like a thistledown, with a child's face and movement of pleasure. So, suddenly and silently, as they were passing one of the alleys that led out from the little green, Stuart and his partner disappeared from the eyes of the spectators. It was certainly a pleasant night for a stroll. The light made such new combinations of old things, took and gave such new views; the pleasure of looking for them and finding them was ensnaring. Then the air was very sweet and soft, and--so was Stuart's conversation. Gliding on from one thing to another, even as their footsteps went,--mingling fun and fancy and common-place and flattery in a very agreeable sort of _pot-pourri_,--so they followed down one alley of the shrubbery and up another; winding about and about, but keeping at a distance from other people. Until, much too soon for Stuart's intent, they were suddenly and quietly joined at a fork of the paths by Rollo, with Miss Fisher on his arm. As the waltz ceased, Rollo had secured without difficulty the companionship of Miss Fisher for a walk; and Miss Fisher never knew how peculiar a walk it was, nor imagined that her cavalier was following a very fixed and definite purpose of his own. Nothing seemed less purposeful than the course they took; it was no course; from one path diverging into another, changing from one direction to another; a hunted hare would scarce make more doublings, or anything else, except the dog in chase of the hare. Kitty only knew that she was very well amused; her companion never left that doubtful, nor allowed her much leisure to make inconvenient observations; and, in short, Kitty did not care where they went!--and Rollo did care. So it fell out, that quite suddenly, and as much to his companion's surprise as anybody's, quite easily and naturally they stepped out of one walk into another just as Wych Hazel and her attendant came to the same spot. 'Your old proverbs are all stuff,' Kitty was saying to her companion. 'I do think she's the prettiest thing I ever saw. Only she don't know her tools. Just wait till I've had her in training a while!' 'Miss Kennedy,' said Rollo, 'how would you like to be in training?' They had somehow joined company with Stuart and Wych Hazel, not by the former's good will, but he could not manage to help it. 'I may as well reserve my views on that subject for somebody who wants to try,' said the girl, with a laugh. She had not heard Kitty Fisher. 'On what point just now do you think you need it?' 'I am in an extremely contented state of mind "just now," thank you, Mr. Rollo.' 'Miss Fisher would not think that proves anything.' 'Does Miss Kitty offer her services as trainer?' asked Stuart. 'Now just wait, both of you,' said Kitty Fisher, 'and let Miss Kennedy get used to me a little. She's awfully shocked, to begin with; and you're trying to make believe she'll never get over it.' A slight gesture of Miss Kennedy's head, unseen by Miss Kitty, seemed to say that was extremely probable. 'You should let her get accustomed to you by degrees,' said Stuart. 'Hover about in the middle distance, suppose, without getting out of the range of vision--so that you may make your approaches to her heart through her eyes. That is an excellent way.' 'Is it?' said Kitty. 'You've tried all ways, I presume. But I notice that just now you seem to prefer the ear as a medium. Wouldn't she be splendid in the "Thread of Destiny," Stuart?' 'I should think so, if I were at the end of the thread!' 'You would not suppose it, Miss Kennedy,' said Rollo; 'but the "Thread of Destiny" is a silk ribband. The destiny is not therefore always silken.' 'Much you know about it!' said Kitty. 'I just wish I could see you thoroughly wound up for once, with Bell Powder and two or three other people.' 'Wych Hazel was growing rather weary of the talk. 'Who were the singers to-night, Mr. Nightingale?' she said, pitching her voice for his benefit alone. 'Really,' said he, in an answering tone, 'I am not musical enough to be certain about it. Voices in common speech I can understand and appreciate; but in this kind of manifestation-- Mrs. Powder knows her business. She had secured the right sort of thing. The principal singer is a lady who has studied abroad; they are all visitors or dwellers in the neighbourhood. Did you like the performance?' 'Some of it; but the singing above all. You cannot understand that?' 'If you and Miss Kennedy want to whisper,' said Kitty Fisher, 'fall back a little, can't you, Mr. Nightingale? or turn down another path. It disturbs my own train of thought, this trying to hear what other people say.' 'Nobody would suspect Miss Fisher,' said Rollo, dryly, 'of being unwilling that anybody should hear what _she_ has to say.' 'Do you know,' said Kitty, turning upon him with an emphasizing pressure of the arm she held, 'what my thoughts really _are_ at work upon?' 'Yes.' 'Let's hear. Tell me, and I'll tell you.' 'I do not think,' said Rollo, slowly,--'it would be expedient.' 'Fudge! You know you couldn't. I have been trying to find out what so extremely sedate a person was after when he undertook to walk me round in the moonlight!' And in defiance of everything, Wych Hazel's soft 'Ha! ha!' responded,--a little as if the question had perplexed her too. 'Have you had a good time?' said Rollo coolly. 'Very!--which makes it the more puzzling. Did Mr. Rollo ever walk with you in the moonlight, Miss Kennedy?' 'Yes.' 'Have a good time?' said Kitty. The girl hesitated; but among her accomplishments the art of pretty fibs had not been included. The truth had to come out in some shape. 'So far as Mr. Rollo could make it,'--she said at last. O how Kitty Fisher laughed! and the gentlemen both smiled. 'Why, that is capital!' she cried. 'I couldn't have done better myself!' Wych Hazel blushed painfully; but Rollo's answer was extremely unconcerned. 'I don't always give people a good time,' he said. 'You are fortunate, Miss Kitty. I am impelled to ask, in this connection, how long Mrs. Powder expects us to make our good times this evening?' Upon comparing watches in the moonlight, it was found that the night was well on its way. There was nothing more to do but to go home. On the way home, a little bit of talk occurred in the rockaway, which may be reported. Going along quietly in the bright moonlit road, Rollo driving, Primrose suddenly asked a question-- 'Didn't you use to be a great waltzer, Duke?' 'A waltzer?--yes.' 'Then what made you not waltz to-night?' Rollo leaned back against one side of the rockaway, and answered, while the old horse walked leisurely on--, 'I have looked at the subject from a new point of view, Prim.' 'Have you?--From what point of view, Duke?' said Primrose, much interested. 'I have made up my mind,' said Rollo slowly, 'I shall waltz no more,--except with the lady who will be my wife. And when I waltz with her,--she will waltz with nobody else!' Prim sat back in her corner, and spoke not a word more. CHAPTER XXIV. THE LOSS OF ALL THINGS. 'And how do you like your new neighbour, Prim?' said the young Dr. Maryland the first night of his return home. He had talked all tea-time to the collective family without once mentioning Miss Kennedy's name, and now put the question to his sister as they sat alone together in the twilight. 'O Arthur, _very_ much.' 'You see a good deal of her?' was the next question, asked after a pause. 'Y--es,' said Primrose, doubtfully, 'At least, when I am with her I think I do; when I am away from her it seems little.' 'I must ride over there and call, to-morrow,' said Dr. Arthur. 'Will you go too?' And so it fell out that Dingee was summoned to the door next day to usher in the party. 'Yes'm, Miss Ma'land--Miss Hazel, she in, sure!--singin' to herself in de red room,'-- and Dingee led the way. It was a new room to most of the guests. A room that seemed two sides woodland and one side sunshine. Walls with deep crimson hangings, and carpets of the same hue; and quaint old carved oak chairs and tables, and a bookcase or two, and oaken shelves and brackets against the crimson of the walls. The morning had been cool enough, there at Chickaree, for a wood fire, though only the embers remained now; and in front of where the fire had been, sat the young mistress of the house half hid in a great arm-chair. Soft white folds fell all around her, and two small blue velvet slippers took their ease upon a footstool; with white laces giving their cobweb finish here, there and everywhere. A book was in her hand, and on her shoulder the grey kitten purred secure, in spite of the silky curls which now and then made puss into a pillow. Now and then. For while Miss Kennedy sometimes made believe to read, an sometimes really sang--pouring out scraps of song like a wild bird--yet in truth her attention was oftenest given to the great picture which hung in one recess. And then her head went down upon the grey kitten. Just now, when the visitors came in, she was searching for the notes of that last song at Mrs. Powder's; trying apparently, to catch it and bring it back; her girl's voice endeavouring to represent that which her girl's heart had never known. The picture--I may describe it here--was that of a young man bound to a tree and pierced with arrows. No human witnesses in sight, except in the extreme distance; and over sky and earth no sunlight, but instead the deepening shadows of night. But the presence of the one was not noticed, nor the presence of the other missed. Away from earth, and lifted above suffering, the martyr's eyes looked to the opening clouds above his head, where were light, and heavenly messengers, and the palm- branch, and the crown. Something in the calm clear face checked Miss Kennedy's bursts of song as often as she turned that way--the high look so beyond her reach. 'What are you doing, Hazel?' said Prim's sweet voice. 'Puzzling,'--said Hazel, jumping up, and lifting one hand to support the kitten. 'Dr. Maryland, I am very glad to see you! O Prim, how happy you must be!' 'You didn't look in the least like a person in a puzzle,' said Primrose, after the first compliments were passed. 'What could you be puzzling about, dear?' 'That picture. It always puzzles me. And so when I get befogged over other things, I often come here and add this to the number.' 'You are hardly far enough on in your studies yet, Miss Kennedy, to understand that picture,' said Dr. Arthur, who was considering it very intently himself. 'My studies! Painting, do you mean? Or what do you mean?' said Wych Hazel. 'What does the picture say to you, Miss Kennedy?' 'That is just what I cannot find out,' said Hazel, jumping up again and coming to stand at his side. 'I cannot read it a bit.' 'You have not learned the characters in which it is written, yet,' said Dr. Arthur, with a glance at her. 'She had not learned much,' said Primrose, smiling. 'Can _you_ read it?' said Hazel, facing round. 'Why yes, Hazel.' 'Well,' said the girl, half impatiently, 'then how come I to be such an ignoramus?' 'There are some things,' said Dr. Arthur, with another swift look at his companion, 'which everybody can learn at once. But there are others, Miss Kennedy, which sometimes must wait until the Lord himself sets the lesson. I think this is one of those.' 'I shall ask your father,' said Hazel, decidedly. 'He always thinks I ought to know _everything_ at once.' 'Oh, Hazel, my dear, how can you say so?' cried Prim. 'Indeed, papa is never so unreasonable. And there he is this minute, and you can ask him.' The long windows of the room looked upon a stretch of greensward spotted with trees. Coming across this bit of the grounds, Dr. Maryland and Rollo saw one of the windows open, and caught sight also of the party within. Even as Dr. Maryland's daughter spoke, they stepped upon the piazza and came into the room. 'That is a picture of the loss of all things,' Dr. Arthur was saying. 'How would you be able to understand?' But then he stepped back, and left the explanation in other hands. ' "The loss of all things!" ' Hazel repeated, bewildered. 'How do you do, Mr. Rollo?--Dr. Maryland, there is always some special reason why I am especially glad to see you!' 'What is the reason now, my dear?' said the doctor, with a very benign look on his face. 'These two people,' said Wych Hazel, with an airy gesture of her head towards her other guests, 'find me in a puzzle and push me further in. And I want to be pulled out.' 'In what direction shall I pull?' asked the doctor. 'Well, sir,--O Mr. Rollo, don't you want the cat?--I know you like cats,' said Hazel, 'and she is in my way.--It is only about my old picture here, Dr. Maryland, which they pretend to understand. Dr. Arthur says it means "the loss of all things,"--and that does not clear up my ideas in the least. Why must I "wait" to know what it means?' she added, linking her hands on the Doctor's arm, and raising her eager, vivid face to his. 'Prim says I "don't know much"--but I do not see why that should hinder my learning more.' How strong the contrast with the martyr's face! how high and still and calm the look of him who had overcome! How tender, how open to sorrow, how susceptible of loss, that of the girl on whom as yet the rough winds had not blown! Dr. Arthur's eyes went soberly from one to the other. Rollo had taken the little cat from its position on its mistress's shoulder, and now stood with it established on his own, quietly and somewhat gravely attending to what was going on. 'What do you want to learn, my dear?' said Dr. Maryland, on his part gazing at the picture now. 'That picture always perplexes me,' said Hazel. 'What does it mean? And why do I love it so much, not knowing what it means?' Standing and looking at the picture, Dr. Maryland answered in the words of Paul: ' "What mean ye to weep and to break mine heart? for I am ready not to be bound only, but also to die at Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus." ' 'But papa,' said Primrose, 'that doesn't tell her what it means. Didn't Arthur say right--"The loss of all things"?' 'It means,' said Dr. Maryland,--'Human weakness and God's strength. Human emptiness and God's fulness. Earthly defeat and heavenly victory. How should you understand it, my dear, who have not begun the fight yet?' 'But then, papa, why does she love it so much?' Dr. Maryland hesitated, and it was Rollo who answered: 'Because the fight is _in her_.' 'That's a queer way of putting it,' said Dr. Maryland; 'but perhaps it's true. I hope it is.' The girl gave a swift look over her shoulder which it is to be hoped Mr. Rollo liked, as it was meant for him. So sparkling with the joy of being understood, so stirred with that sudden new life and purpose which appreciation wakes up in some natures. It was but an instant--then her eyes came back to Dr. Maryland, and were all quiet again. _He_ did not think so, evidently. Which was right? Of what did he doubt her capable? 'Weakness,' 'emptiness,' 'defeat,' she said, recalling his words. 'Is _that_ what I am to find?' 'You do not think it possible,' said Dr. Maryland. 'How should she, papa?' said Primrose. 'Well, my dear, it is not possible she should. And yet, Hazel, these are the only way to find strength, fulness, and victory. It is a problem to you, my dear; only to be worked out.' 'Does _every one_ work it out, papa?' 'No, my dear; two thirds of men never do. And so they go on forever saying, "Who will shew us any good?" ' '_He_ did not find defeat,' said Hazel, looking at the martyr's face, and somehow forgetting the arrows and the cords. 'The story is,' said Dr. Maryland, 'that he was an officer, high in trust and command, in the service of the Emperor (Diocletian.). For owning himself a Christian, he was stripped of power and place, delivered into the will of his enemies, to be bound to a tree and shot to death with arrows. There is the human defeat, my dear Hazel. What you see in the face there, is the mental victory;--some of the struggle, too.' ' "Mental victory" '--she said half to herself, considering the words. 'I ought to be equal to that. Did you mean "defeat," Dr. Arthur, by "the loss of all things?" ' 'No,' said Dr. Arthur, 'I meant anything but that. I meant nothing worse than the exchange of a handful of soiled paper for both the hands full of solid gold.' 'Ah you all talk such riddles!' said the girl, knitting her brows. 'What would it be to me, I mean? That I should lose Chickaree?--but that is impossible.' 'It was said,' Dr. Maryland answered,--'and the Lord said it-- "Whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot by my disciple." ' 'Yes, sir, but--' she said quickly,--then checked herself. 'Well, my dear? My words will come best in answer to your questions, for then they can meet the very point of your difficulty.' 'You will not think me disrespectful, sir?--I was going to say, _you_ do not do that'--said Hazel, hesitating over her words. 'None of you. You have Prim and Dr. Arthur,--and Dr. Arthur comes home, and then Prim has her brother. And there is the pretty house, and books, and engravings. I don't know anything about Mr. Rollo, of course,' she said, correcting herself, 'but I mean the rest of you.' 'May we sit down?' said Dr. Maryland, 'Dane and I have walked up from Mr. Falkirk's. Unless Dane likes to stand to accommodate the cat!' said the doctor with a humourous glance at the shoulder where pussy sat with shut eyes, purring contentedly. 'It's a fair question, Hazel; and an easy mistake. But my dear, so far as I know, Prim and Arthur and I have not kept anything. For myself,' said Dr. Maryland, lifting up a bright face, 'all that I have is my Master's. I am not the owner even of myself. So long as his service bids me use the things entrusted to me in the way I am doing, I will use them so. And whenever his honour, or his work, calls me to give up anything or everything of all these--my home, my children, or my own life--I am ready; it is the Lord's now; he shall do with them all what he will. Do you understand?' 'And Arthur and I would say the same,' added Primrose. Her brother answered in the words so long age written, so many times lived out. ' "Not a myself--but Christ; not a my will--but Christ. Not a mine ease, or my profit, or my pleasure, but Christ." ' The girl looked from one to the other, as each spoke, with a flash of sympathy; even as thoughts stir and kindle at the sound of a bugle call, while yet they know not what it says. But then she turned suddenly round and looked at Rollo. An expectant look, that waited for him to speak,--that gathered--or he fancied so--a shade of disappointment as it turned away again to the face on the wall. She sat silent, leaning her chin upon her hands. His look had been perfectly grave, thoughtful and quiet; but otherwise did not reveal itself. There was a general silence. Then Dr. Maryland said, 'Do you understand the paradox, my dear?' 'I think I must be the paradox myself,' Hazel answered with a half laugh. 'I could do that--I could bear the arrows: I think I could. But you never saw anybody, sir, that liked giving up-- anything--less than I do.' 'You would rather bear the arrows than the cords,' said Dr. Arthur Maryland. 'It is easier.' 'Depends on the people,' said Primrose. ' "As having nothing, and yet possessing all things," ' Dr. Maryland added rather dreamily. 'I suppose,' said Rollo, with a moment's deep look into Wych Hazel's eyes, 'the free spirit is beyond bonds.' 'That is it, my boy!' exclaimed Dr. Maryland. 'Think--when Paul and Silas were in the dungeon at Philippi--a dreary place, most likely; and they, beaten and bleeding and sore, stretched and confined in the wooden frame which I suppose left them not one moment's ease,--at midnight it was, they fell to such singing and praising that the other prisoners waked up and listened to hear the song.' Hazel crossed her slender wrists and sat looking at them, imagining the bonds. 'Do you think it is all _in me?_' she said, with another sudden appeal to Rollo. Rollo was not a man fond of wearing his heart upon his sleeve. Another momentary glance went through her eyes, as it were, and was withdrawn, before he gave a short, grave 'yes.' Hazel went back to her musings without another word, and only the least bit of a triumphant curl about the corners of her mouth. 'I wonder how it would feel?' she said, crossing and uncrossing her hands. 'What?' said Primrose. 'Bonds--and chains,' said the girl, clasping her wrist tight. 'To have my hands tied!' 'You are not called upon to find out, my dear,' said Dr. Maryland; 'that is not required of you. But remember, Hazel, no bonds are heavy but love wears.' 'Depends upon how they get on, sir,' she said, quickly. 'What?' said the doctor, with a somewhat comic twinkle coming into his eye. 'How is that?' 'I hate bonds, Dr. Maryland!--from the very bottom of my heart.' 'You have never worn the sort I spoke of, my dear,' he said, smiling. 'I never heard anybody complain of them.' 'What sort?' said Hazel. 'Bonds are bonds.' 'But love likes her bonds,' said the doctor. The girl shook her head. 'She likes her way, sir! in my case. When Mr. Falkirk forbids me to--well, no matter what,--to do something,' she said, dropping her eyes, 'I do suppose I obey better than if I didn't love him. But I hate it all the same. It makes me feel--like my name,' she added with a laugh. 'Love likes her bonds,' the doctor repeated, shaking his head. 'And the arrow that is weighted flies freest against the wind,' Rollo remarked. 'What do you mean by that?' said Primrose. 'Duke, you look very funny with that cat upon your shoulder.' 'Pussy likes it,' said Rollo. 'Dane, have you finished your business with Hazel?' said Dr. Maryland. 'I must be going presently.' 'Well, sir,--if Prim and Arthur will excuse me.' He brought himself, pussy cat and all, to a chair by Wych Hazel's side. The others drew off a little. 'I am going away,' he said. 'Business takes me to New York for a week or two. Possibly to Chicago; but I hope not. I hope to bring your horses back with me. Do you want to give me any directions respecting them?' 'Directions?--I think not. O yes!' said Hazel, touching her fingers to the cat's head and instantly withdrawing them,--'I want my pony to be very fast. Because----' but there she stopped. 'Well?' said he. 'That is all.' 'It is unfinished.' 'Cannot you do anything without knowing why?' 'Unbusinesslike. But I'll do my best.' 'Well,'--said Hazel, 'I told Mr. Falkirk.--Of course I like to go fast, for its own sake,--and then if I ever had to ride for my life!'-- It was spoken so demurely that only her cheeks betrayed her. Over their treason the girl grew impatient. 'I just want a fast horse. Don't you know what that means, without explanation?' 'Why no,' said he, probably enjoying his advantage though he held it after his usual undemonstrative fashion. Excepting that his eyes took a further advantage which none others ever did. No flattery in them, nor conventional deference, and nothing like Dr. Maryland's benign regard, or Mr. Falkirk's watchful one. Those eyes went down into hers with a sort of grave taking possession, or holding it; something more than benignity, and coming much nearer than watchfulness. Rollo's manner had often an indefinable tinge of the same expression. 'There are so many sorts of fast horses,' he went on. 'Do you want to run for your life? or canter? or trot?' 'Trot in ordinary--run upon occasion.' 'Is trotting your favourite gait?' 'It is more like the wind,' said Wych Hazel. 'I remember one good canter--but all the rest made one think of the snail that went forward three feet and back two.' 'You must have had an experience! I'll try and secure both for you; but I may not be able, just at first. Don't you want to take pussy in safe keeping again? I am afraid she would not approve of my further companionship.' 'Well--give her to me then,' she said, holding out her hands. He smiled a little at that, dislodged pussy and placed her in them, then rose up and offered his own. A party of gentlemen came up the steps as Dr. Maryland and his companions went down. Clearly, the thoughtful time of the morning was at an end. CHAPTER XXV. IN THE GERMAN. There come, sometimes, in certain lives, certain days and weeks which seem to be all adrift and beyond legislation. The people who might exercise control cannot; and the people will not who can; and so the hours sweep on in a rushing stream of events and consequences, which every now and then flings somebody upon the rocks. Or it may be, in very happy cases, only some _thing;_ but until this is made sure the lookers-on feel anxious. So felt Mr. Falkirk, a prisoner still with his lame ankle; so felt (probably) Mr. Rollo, called suddenly away by business a hundred miles off. So certainly felt Mrs. Bywank, watching her young lady with motherly eyes. But the young lady herself felt quite at ease, and as she had said, 'content.' Why not? With flowers by day and serenade by night; with game from every bag and trout from every hook; with cavaliers starting up out of greensward and woodland whenever she went out; with carriages and horsemen always at the door when she was at home. The serenades indeed were shared impartially with Mr. Falkirk and Gotham; for Wych Hazel still kept her room in the cottage, and was there by night. But the days were often spent in the house on the hill; and the distance between the two was often--to say the least--not made alone. The new saddle-horses had not yet arrived, and no others were countenanced by Mr. Falkirk; but such walks had their facilities, even without the possible indoor extensions which sometimes took place. And for evening purposes an equipage had been arranged which relieved Miss Kennedy of all dependence on her neighbours. Mr. Falkirk's prostrate condition prevented her giving any entertainments as yet; but she went everywhere, with Gotham--grim and trusty--upon the box; and more and more the days, as they went on, brought everybody to her feet. It was excellent fun! For it is really delightful to be liked; and admiring looks you cannot quite meet have yet their fascination, and the words you scarce hear have their charm. Altogether there was a strong flavour of enchantment abroad; and it seemed probable that the prince was somewhere. The princess had not seen him yet, that she knew of; but undoubtedly she was learning that some day she might. Yet Hazel took the knowledge in a pretty way. Too innately true to flirt, too warm-hearted to trifle, too real a woman to follow in the steps of Kitty Fisher; and, it may be said, thinking far too much of herself to descend from her vantage ground of feminine reserve. Perhaps there was no one thing which caught and _held_ her admirers like this: the real girlish dignity which made them keep their proper distance. The most unscrupulous of them all would as soon have dared anything as to venture (to her) an unauthorized touch, or a word that savoured of freedom. So far, she went safe through the fire. If she could have known, poor child, what sort of a fire it was; if her thoughts had even dimly imagined what men old in the world may be; no kid glove nor silken tissue would have been deemed thick enough to fend off the contact. But she knew nothing of all that, except by the instinct which now and then gave her a sudden sheer. As it was, she was intensely amused, and half out of her wits with fun and frolic and utter light heartedness; seeing no harm, imagining no evil; quite regardless of Mrs. Bywank's wise maxim that what men of sense disapprove, a woman--as a rule--had better not do. And for a while there were not men of sense at hand to give her counsel. Mr. Falkirk looked on from too great a distance to point his strictures; Gotham's grumbles over the serenades and the cavaliers only helped the excitement. And since Mr. Falkirk would not let her fling her written thanks out of the window, the _spoken_ thanks followed, as a matter of course, and effected quite as much. And yet, you will say, no harm came, and everything was as it should be. Well, there are some who plunge through the mud ankle-deep; and there are others that got but over shoe; and here and there one that crosses on tiptoe; but you would rather that they all chose a better road. And intoxication is not a good thing, whatever may be the means thereto; and the sweet, fresh years of which Dr. Maryland had spoken, were quite too precious to be spun off to the music of Strauss, or wilted down by late hours, or given up wholly to hearing that Miss Kennedy was the one of all the world. Not so do natures enlarge and characters develop to their fairest proportions; not so do souls grow strong and noble for the coming work of life. Kitty Fisher was not exactly jealous of all this--or had too much sense to shew it; but deep in her heart she did wish she could dismount Wych Hazel from her pedestal, that comparisons might be made on level ground. Kitty would not have been timid, for the world; and yet the shy blushes which came as freely as ever to Miss Kennedy's cheeks did somehow give her a pang. And while nothing could have bought off her daring speech and behaviour, she yet knew it _was_ a pretty thing to have the deference which always approached the young lady of Chickaree. 'I must get that out of her,' she said to herself. 'She's bound to give it up. Wait till I get her fairly into the German!' And so far she succeeded. Miss Kennedy did get 'fairly in,'-- but as yet the rest of the plan had failed. Hazel danced, and led, and followed, in the wildest gaiety, within certain limits; beyond them she would not go; meeting all Kitty Fisher's proposals with a look of incredulous disgust and surprise that generally cut short the business for that time. And gentlemen who stood by laughed and applauded; and if Hazel had known just _why_ they clapped hands, and just what she was avoiding, she would have wanted to stand no longer in their neighbourhood just then. Balls followed dinners, and one German came close on the heels of another, with pic-nics, boating parties, croquet parties, and open-air breakfasts; and everywhere the young queen held her court; with beauty, and grace, and money, and a faultless toilet. Now in the selfishness of this self-seeking world, our interest in a thing, our judgment of it, does very much depend upon its connection with ourselves. Have we any shares in the field for sale?--if not, why, manage it as you will, sunshine and clouds are alike to us. But if we have, the interest of the matter changes at once, and we are blind no more. Following upon sundry other festivities came a brilliant German at Mme. Lasalle's. Thither came everybody, in proper time; thither, rather late, and fresh-returned from his journey, came Mr. Rollo; and making his way easily along, through rooms ablaze with light and almost faint with flowers, he reached a point where 'The Thread of Destiny' was in full progress, tangling itself up about Wych Hazel. It was impossible not to make her the centre of the group, though six ladies stood there together; and about them all, one end of a long white ribband in his hand, danced Mr. Nightingale--not saying, exactly-- 'I wind, I wind, Hoping my true love to find'-- but perhaps thinking it in his heart; for when coil after coil had gone round the blooming prisoners, and the white sheen came suddenly to an end at Wych Hazel, it was with very evident satisfaction that Mr. Nightingale took her hand and led her out--his partner by the thread of destiny. Nothing could be prettier than she was through it all; neither giggling nor smirking, nor making remarks like Miss Powder and the rest; her lovely shoulders veiled beyond all reach of criticism, her eyes intent upon the ribband, her thoughts intent upon the game. So that when all came to a climax at her, she laughed right out--the merriest laugh of glee and satisfaction. Very pretty!--was it anything more? Do you (apart from dancing) give your daintiest possessions into common hands? Why, you will not let a servant even dust the china shepherdess on your mantel-piece!--but any hands that you know-- and any that you don't know--may touch and clasp and support the young daughters and sisters of your love, and whirl them about the room, as you would not have your shepherdess treated for all the world. Cajolements did not avail that evening to induce Mr. Rollo to dance; and they were tried. He was in what Wych Hazel might have called a very Spanish mood. Not to her; indeed he never approached her nor sought to interrupt the pretensions of those who crowded round her, courting her favour and worshipping her pleasure, and craving to be made ministers of the same. She was in a throng, and he did not try to penetrate it. Why he stayed so long was a mystery; for what is a German if you do not dance? He was not a mere idle spectator, nor idle at all, it is true; he made himself busy enough, taking elderly ladies to supper and serving younger ones with beef- tea; but those are not engrossing amusements. Mme. Lasalle declared he was very useful; and watched to see what it meant; but beyond that he could not be seen to look at anybody in particular, she could resolve herself of nothing. Certainly he took leave a little before Wych Hazel left the room; they were not together, the lady was sure. CHAPTER XXVI. IN THE ROCKAWAY. When, however, a little later, that young lady came forth to her carriage, attended as usual by a retinue of servitors, a single figure was standing by her carriage door. He stood aside to let the devotees put Wych Hazel into the little rockaway which was her sole present equipage; but when the last words had been said and the last man stepped back, Rollo stood at the door before Dingee had time to shut it. 'Will you give me a seat as far as Mr. Falkirk's?' he said, looking in. Now when you have not seen a person for six weeks or so, a request for a seat in your carriage is not generally the opening remark, and Wych Hazel paused in a sort of astonishment. Then another thing made her hesitate. 'If you will answer it to Mr. Falkirk,' she said. 'You know I am forbidden to give any one a seat in my carriage. Have you a special permit, Mr. Rollo?' 'I never ask for what I cannot have,' he said, jumping in. And then he offered her his hand. 'How do you do?' 'Very well. I should think that must make you an adept in Prim's beloved art of waiting,' said Wych Haze. 'If the lesson must be learnt, I would rather wait before asking. After that, I believe I do not know how to practise it. How do you feel about waiting for your horses?' 'Feeling is dead, and impatience is all tired out with hard work and want of sympathy. So it is pretty quiet just now.' 'Want of sympathy?' he said, inquiringly. 'Yes. I used to fume about it a little, but Mr. Falkirk only said "My dear," and a few other things of a cooing nature.' 'I believe I have brought you what you will like.' 'O, have you?' said the girl, with her musical intonations, and a degree of eagerness which spoke impatience in fair condition. 'You are very good to take so much trouble, Mr. Rollo! But I am more glad than you can imagine.' 'Then I am very glad,' said he. 'Will you trust me to drive you the rest of the way, if I displace Mr. Gotham? I share your infirmity of impatience sometimes.' 'An infirmity, you call it?--Well, displace anybody you like, but me,' said Wych Hazel, arranging herself in a small luxury of fatigue against the not too luxurious back of the rockaway. Her companion was silent a few minutes until the carriage passed out from the Moscheloo grounds and had gone a few rods; then he tapped Mr. Falkirk's factotum on the shoulder. 'Mr. Gotham,' said he, in tones of pleasant authority, 'I can't stand anybody's driving but my own to-night. Stop, if you please. You and Dingee may take a place with my man; my trap is just behind. Tell him to keep close and follow.' 'Sorry to do h'anything that looks un'ansome, sir,' said Gotham, swallowing his surprise with the adroitness of long practice, 'but I 'ave Miss 'Azel in charge, sir.' 'You _had_, my friend. I will relieve you. Come, jump out, and don't keep your young lady waiting.' The voice was of calm authority which most people understand and obey. And Wych Hazel laughed. 'I'm sure I can't say what Mr. Falkirk will think, sir!' said Gotham, in a displeased voice. ' 'Owever--I will h'assume it's h'all right, sir.--Though why he couldn't drive his h'own team, if he'd such an 'ankering for the ribbands,' he muttered to Dingee as he got down, 'I'm sure is a perplexity.' 'Wanted to drive Missee Hazel,' said Dingee, climbing like a cat into the other conveyance, and proceeding to drive Mr. Rollo's man nearly out of his wits. 'You never does sound de gen'lman, Mas' Gotham. Telled you so long ago.' Having got his wish, Mr. Rollo drove regularly enough for a mile or two; till all carriages going their way had passed before or dropped behind or turned off, and they had the road entirely to themselves. The moon was riding high, and though an old moon, gave enough light to make driving a thing of no difficulty. Thus far Rollo had driven in comparative silence, with only a word or two occasionally to Wych Hazel. He had not removed himself by any means out of her companionship, but throwing himself sideways on the front seat of the carriage, looked sometimes out and sometimes in. Now, when the road was their own, and the old horse could find his way along with very little guiding, and the moonlight seemed to illuminate nothing so much as the stillness, Rollo turned his head and spoke. 'Miss Kennedy, do you like to have people come suing to you with petitions?' 'I think I might--if I could answer them myself,' she said, thinking of some that had been preferred that night. 'But when my yes or no depends on somebody else, it is rather stupid. One tires of a perpetual referee at one's back.' 'This depends on nobody but you. But I am rushing into the middle of things,' said Rollo, giving the old steed an intimation that he need not absolutely fall back upon walking. 'Miss Kennedy, I am coming to you with a great petition to- night--and I am too impatient to wait for it.' 'Mr. Rollo with a petition!' said Wych Hazel. 'And impatient! Well--then why _does_ he wait?' His voice told well enough why he waited, at least in part; the earnestness of it was so blended with not a little anxiety and not a little tenderness. He spoke slowly. 'Miss Hazel,' he said, 'you have neither father nor mother nor brother nor sister. I am almost as much alone in the world. May I speak to you as one who knows what it means?' ' "It?"--being alone?' she said. 'Just that. Having no one near enough to care or dear enough to dare, what would be for your happiness. As it is so with you, and I know it, may I for once step into the gap, without being too severely punished by you for my venturing?' 'Why I thought you always ventured,--everything!' she said, stirring up now in her surprise. 'Then shall I make my petition? I never dared so much in my life as I am daring now.' 'Of course you may make it,' said Wych Hazel. 'As fast as you like. I shall begin to be impatient too.' 'If you choose to question me for my reasons, I will have the honour to give them. Or if you ask what right I have to move in the matter, I will answer that, too.' 'Beforehand?' 'Certainly. If you wish.' 'No matter,' she said, with a slight laugh which was yet a little disturbed. What was looming up behind this barricade of preliminaries? 'I thought you based your right just now-- But never mind. Go on, please.' He was silent nevertheless a minute, while the old horse came to an unchallenged slow walk. Then Rollo ungloved his right hand and held it out. 'I cannot see your face,' said he. 'Give me your hand, so that I may know, while I hold it, that you are not displeased.' 'Why, Mr. Rollo?' said Hazel, with the same half laugh, 'you are very--extraordinary! It strikes me your one petition covers a good many. Must I take the glove off?--if you are to be indulged.' 'There!' said he, taking her hand in the same warm firm grasp she had known before. 'I am going to ask you to promise me something--that it will not be pleasant to promise. Miss Hazel'--speaking low and slowly--'do not dance round dances any more!' The tone was low, also it was very earnest and very grave. 'What?' she said, in a sort of but half comprehending way. 'Why not? what is the matter with them? I am hardly the least bit tired.' 'You don't know!' he said, with a slight pressure of the hand he held. 'You don't know. This is why not, Miss Hazel--that I would not see my sister in them. Do you understand?' 'O yes,' she answered. 'I have seen people before who did not like dancing,--two or three, perhaps. But there is always somebody to dislike everything, I think. You do not enjoy it yourself, Mr. Rollo,--and so you do not know.' 'I have danced twenty dances where you have danced one. I know what they are made of. You only know how they look.' 'Hardly that,' said Wych Hazel. 'I know a little how they feel. I have never had an outside view, I believe.' 'Can you do me the great honour to take my view,--and my word for it?' 'If you liked flying to music as well as I do, you would take mine,' she said. 'Air is better than earth, when you can get it.' 'Do you think I would wish to interfere with your pleasure, or presume to interfere with your actions, without reasons so strong that I can hardly express their significance? Believe me, if you knew these round dances as well as I know them, you would never be mixed up in one of them any more.' 'Mixed up?' said Wych Hazel. 'Do you suppose I do all the wild things some people do, Mr. Rollo?' 'No,' he said; but he left his plea standing. 'Well then what is the matter? If ever you hear of my "exchanging hospitalities," I will give you leave for a lecture a mile long.' 'Your eyes are innocent eyes and do not see. Can you not trust me far enough to act upon my knowledge, and distrust yours?' 'But trusting you does not make me distrust myself,' she said. 'And even Prim confessed to me once that you do occasionally make mistakes.' 'I do not in this,' said he, very gravely. 'Yet there is no particular reason why you should believe me. Miss Kennedy--you cannot continue this pastime, and keep yourself.' 'What do you mean?' she said quickly. 'You cannot remain just what you are.' 'Mr. Falkirk thinks there is room for improvement,' said Wych Hazel, with some coldness; 'but your words seem to point the other way. Perhaps you will be kind enough to tell me at once all that you think it needful I should hear in the connexion.' 'You need not take that tone,' he said; 'but perhaps I _must_ displease you. Miss Kennedy, I have always thought of you as one who would never permit a liberty to be taken with her.' 'I am happy that we agree for once,' she said, with a lift of the eyebrows and a voice to match. 'It is precisely the way in which I have always thought of myself.' 'Follow that out!' said he half laughing, and at the same time clasping a little closer the hand he held. 'Well--I have followed it out all my life. I never do, Mr. Rollo.' 'Not knowingly. But-- How shall I tell you!' said he, in a sort of despair. And the old horse found it was necessary for him to move on. 'It must be said!' he broke out again, 'and there is no one but me to do it. Miss Hazel, you allowed liberties to be taken with you to-night.' The little hand he was holding shrank perceptibly. Not twitching itself away, but as it were withdrawing itself into itself, and away from him. Otherwise she sat absolutely still. 'Unconsciously,' he went on. 'You did not know it. The pleasure of the play kept you from knowing what it implied.' '_Allowed_, did you say?' 'Look back and think,' said he, calmly. 'As if they could, without my knowing it!' she exclaimed. 'As if they would!'-- 'Look back and think,' he said. 'Well,' said Wych Hazel, 'look back and think! And I find the most extreme deference, and--nothing else that touches the question.' He drew a sort of short, impatient sigh, and waited a moment. Then leaned over towards her again and spoke slowly. 'Six weeks ago,' he said, 'two little hands would not come near enough to my shoulder to take the kitten from it. And I loved them for the distance they kept.' The girl drew suddenly back, freeing her hand now with a swiftness that told of a deep hurt somewhere. For a moment she did not speak--then only a breathless-- 'Well?' 'Is that displeasure?' he said. 'When have I shortened the distance?' But the words were defiant with pain, not anger. And Rollo on his part remained perfectly still and perfectly silent, not even seeming to know how the old horse was going to please himself. Nothing could have been more still, outwardly, than the white- robed figure in the corner,--and nothing need be more inwardly tumultuous. 'If it was an open wagon,' she thought to herself, 'I should jump out--over the back or somewhere!' O this having men talk to one! And what was he talking about? and what had she done?-- she who had done nothing! Except--'dance better than ever anybody danced before!' 'For the distance they kept'--and when did not her hands keep their distance from every one! How many times that very evening had she been voted 'cruel,' for refusing some favour which other girls granted freely? Mr. Rollo, too!--who had praised her 'womanliness'--But with that the womanish element prevailed, and there came a quiver of lip, and for an instant her hands were folded across her eyes. Then down again, to hold each other in order. And yet her hand had been on twenty shoulders that evening, and twenty arms had encircled her! There was an interval of some length. 'Miss Hazel,' said Rollo at length, and his voice was clear and manly, 'have I offended you?' 'No,'--under her breath. 'I--suppose not.' 'Do you want me to give, if I can, some justification of myself?' 'There is none. Except that you did not mean to say what you said.' 'I meant no justification of my words,' said he, gently but steadily. 'If you want _that_, it is, that they were spoken to save you from harm.' 'Ah!' she said with a half cry,--then checked herself. 'What else does Mr. Rollo wish to justify?' 'Only my right to speak them;--if you did, as you might,-- question it.' He paused a little, and went on. 'I can give you only half of my plea, but half will do. It is, that your father and mother dearly loved mine.' It was all Hazel could do to bear her mother's name just then. Her hands took a sudden grip of each other, but no answer came. Not for some time: then words low and softly spoken-- 'I think I asked for no plea, Mr. Rollo.' 'Then if you are content with it,' said he, in a lighter tone, 'give me your hand once more, only for a moment this time.' She hesitated--then held it out. He bent down and gave it a swift, earnest kiss; after which he turned his attention to his driving duties, for some time neglected, till Mr. Falkirk's cottage was gained. As he took Wych Hazel out of the carriage, he said, 'It's so late, if you don't forbid me, I am going up to my old friend, Mrs. Bywank, to ask her to give me lodging to-night.' Hazel bowed her head in token that he might do as he pleased, giving no other reply. But it is safe to say that, by this time, ideas and thoughts and feelings and pain, and--'other things,' as she would have phrased it, were so inextricably mixed up in the girl's head, that she hardly knew which was which and which was not. She walked steadily in,--then gave about two springs to her brown corner room, and locked the door. CHAPTER XXVII. THE GERMAN AT OAK HILL. Mr. Falkirk was not disturbed that night with being told anything. But when the sun had risen fair and clear over the green world of Chickaree, and Gotham moved silently about the breakfast-table, Mr. Falkirk might notice from his sofa that but one cup and saucer stood on the tray, and but one plate near to bear it company. If Mr. Falkirk's nerves were not in order, they might have been tried; for Gotham certainly seemed to have borrowed the cat's shoes for the occasion. 'Why don't you set the table as usual?' came pretty peremptorily from the sofa. 'Miss 'Azel 'ave sent word she was h'asleep, sir,' said Gotham, with extra dignity. 'Then why don't you wait till she is awake, slowhead? as usual. It is not eight o'clock yet.' 'H'also that she 'as no h'intentions of h'ever waking h'up, sir.' So Mr. Falkirk took his breakfast with a dissatisfied mind. For it is safe to say, he was so accustomed by this time to his gay little ward's company and ministrations, that coffee was not coffee without her. Gotham did his duty in a more than usually taciturn fashion, and Mr. Falkirk's breakfast was at an end before the factotum unburdened his mind. 'Beg pardon, sir,' he said, drawing himself up behind his master; 'but 'ow are your h'orders concerning Miss 'Azel to be h'understood, sir?' 'Orders?' said Mr. Falkirk. 'You distinctly said and h'indicated, sir, that I was to drive Mis 'Azel to and from, sir,--if my mind serves me,' said Gotham. 'And if my mind serves me, you have driven her forty times.' 'Quite correct, sir,--and more,' said Gotham. 'The point h'is, Mr. Falkirk, what's to be done when young gents come taking the h'orders h'out of my very 'ands, sir?' 'Knock 'em down.' 'The first natural h'impulse, sir. But put a case that they're in the knockin' down style too?--then I'm left in the road, and Miss 'Azel without a protector.' 'Who's been knocking you down now, Gotham?' 'No one, sir;--I 'ope I know my business better,' said Gotham. 'I speak of the h'inevitable. And Mr. Rollo would drive Miss 'Azel 'ome last night, and she gave me no better h'assistance than one of her laughs, sir.' Clearly it rang in his ears yet. 'You had better not meddle with what don't belong to you, my friend. If Miss Hazel had desired _your_ assistance, it would have been time enough to give it to her.' 'Very good, sir,--h'all settled, sir,'--and Gotham carried off the tray with a face of mixed perplexity and wisdom that was funny to see. But the sunshine crept on through the little study, and it was well-nigh time to set the table again, before the door opened softly and Wych hazel came in: two exquisite roses in her cheeks, in her hand--by way of excuse--a basket of wonderful hot-house grapes. How glad she had been to take them from Dingee at the door. 'Well, my dear!' said Mr. Falkirk, with an accent of unmistakeable pleasure, and something behind it, 'you have slept long to-day. Were you home so late?' 'I suppose it was late, sir. I lost no time, and so took no note. How do you do to-day, Mr. Falkirk?' 'Able to move, I think. I shall get about in a day or two more.' 'Here are some grapes, sir, to hasten the cure.' She put the basket in his hand, and passed on to a low seat at the head of the sofa. Mr. Falkirk looked at them, and his tone changed to the accustomed growl. 'Where are these from?' 'Major Seaton, I believe, is responsible,' said the girl carelessly. 'How many several people are after you at this present, Miss Hazel?' 'Difficult to say, sir, without more extensive inquiries than I have made. Your words do not put an attractive face upon the matter.' 'Is there any such thing in the lot?' asked Mr. Falkirk, discontentedly. 'As an attractive face? O yes, sir, several. Quite a number, I should say,' replied Miss Hazel, with a critical air. 'And all of them at Moscheloo?' 'All what, sir? Your English is hardly so pointed as usual--if you will excuse me for saying it.' 'You were speaking of attractive faces, my dear. I should say that your syntax wanted attention.' 'I did not know but you referred to "the lot," ' said Wych Hazel. 'There was the usual mingling, I think, of attractive and unattractive.' Mr. Falkirk was silent till dinner was served, and then attended to that. 'Mr. Falkirk,' Hazel began suddenly, when Gotham had retired, '_I_ believe you could move now. Come!--go with me to Oak Hill to-night,--will you, sir?' 'Oak Hill,' said her guardian. 'Mrs. Seaton's. What is to be done there?' 'A promenade concert--nominally.' 'That sounds something to me like a dancing dinner. What does it mean, my dear?' 'Just what I said, in the first place, sir. If Kitty Fisher and the Powders are there, it may turn into something else.' 'And what does a promenade concert turn into, when it is enchanted?' said Mr. Falkirk. 'A succession of dances--it might.' 'Well, my dear--what should I do in a succession of dances?' She laughed,--just a little. Laughs were not ready to-night. 'Sit still, sir, and watch me.' 'It strikes me I do enough of that as it is, without going to Oak Hill. Do you want more than you will have to watch you?' The word jarred. She was silent a minute. Then earnestly-- 'I wish you would, Mr. Falkirk.' A new expression on Mr. Falkirk's face shewed that a new idea had occurred to him. 'What does this mean?' he asked gently, bending on his ward one of his keen looks from under the thick eyebrows. She answered without looking at him, 'It means what is says, sir.' 'What is the matter, my dear?' came more sympathizingly than Mr. Falkirk's wont. It was even a little low and tender. 'Why, Mr. Falkirk--it is such an unreasonable request, that you should be so keen after reasons?' 'I do not know that it is unreasonable, but you know that it is unwonted. You have not been apt to wish for more guarding than you have had, Miss Hazel. Cannot you tell me what makes you desire it now?' Mr. Falkirk did not growl now, nor draw his brows together; he was in patient earnest, seeing cause. 'I did not say to guard me, sir. Sometimes,' said Hazel, choosing her words, 'sometimes it might be pleasant to have somebody in the room to whom I was supposed to belong--just a little bit. How do you like Major Seaton's grapes, Mr. Falkirk?' Mr. Falkirk drew his brows together now, and spite of his weak ankle got up and paced across the floor thoughtfully. Then came to a sudden stop in front of Wych Hazel. 'Has anybody annoyed you?' he asked. 'By "annoyed" you mean?--' 'Made you feel the want of a protector; or of somebody, as you say, that you belong to.' Mr. Falkirk's brows were drawing very thick together indeed. 'No, I think not,' she answered. 'Not intentionally. People are very good to me; very respectful, I believe. But I must go and see that my dress is in order. I shall wear blue to-night, Mr. Falkirk--and you like blue.' She made him a profound little courtesy, and danced off out of the room. Mr. Falkirk's cogitations, to judge by his eyebrows, were also profound, when his ward had left him alone. They did not issue in any resolve to re-enter the gay world, however, which had never been Mr. Falkirk's sphere; and Miss Kennedy went to Oak Hill alone. Had she been made to 'feel her want of a protector?'--On the contrary!--Or 'annoyed' in any other sense?-- that was far too soft a word. And so she stepped from her carriage in company with many thoughts, and came out upon the assembled light and colour as stately as if she had been the only right line in the universe. A bevy of her friends were round her directly. 'Hazel,' said Phinny Powder, 'we are going to run this concern into a German as soon as it has run long enough in its own name. I am so glad you are here; and in blue. Keep near me, won't you, because it'll just set me off, and some dresses kill me.' 'How can she keep near you, you giddy creature?' said Mme. Lasalle. 'Hazel' (whispering), 'Stuart bade me engage you to lead the German with him. May I tell him you will?' 'O Hazel,' cried Josephine again, 'we are going to have such fun. Kitty is going to let us into some new figures, and they are considerably jolly, I tell you!' 'Are they?' said Hazel. 'But the music comes first, Mme. Lasalle, and I may not stay for the German. And I have promised the first walk to Mr. May.' 'Not stay for the German!'--'_Not_ stay for the German?' was echoed in so many various tones of despair that it had to be answered again. 'I only said I might not,' said Wych Hazel. 'Good evening, Mr. May.'--And Miss Kennedy swept off, to the opening burst of music from the band. Now there are other sounds besides music at a promenade concert, and many things not strictly harmonious are said and done under cover of its trombones and violins. Wych Hazel indeed walked unremittingly,--it suited her mood that night; but many sat and talked, very regardless of the music, and not too mindful of other ears. And so after a while a group gathered round Kitty Fisher, to discuss the coming German and pick up a few hints touching the promised new figures. Wych Hazel had just passed, escorted on either hand: her dark-blue robe and white laces setting her off to perfection. For a minute eyes alone were busy. 'That girl provokes me to death with her high dresses!' said Kitty Fisher. 'Such ridiculous nonsense!' 'I'm not so sure as to that,' said Miss May. 'Dick raves about it.' 'Dick raves about her altogether,' said Kitty,--'so of course he has to include her dress.' 'Well, George said that other shoulders might as well retire if her's ever came fairly out,' said little Molly Seaton, who was taking her first sips of society, and looked up to Miss Kennedy as the eighth and ninth wonder of the world combined. 'I don't care,' said Kitty Fisher, 'I'll have 'em out! I vow I will. It's a fraud on society.' 'Society can afford to be a loser now and then,' said Mr. Kingsland, softly insinuating himself among the ladies;--'it gets so much more than its due between whiles!' 'It's prudish,' said Phinny, disregarding this sentiment,-- 'that's what it is. Do you suppose it's that old wretch of a guardian keeps her in leading strings? Now she talks of not staying to the German.' 'The Sorceress is in one of her moods to-night,' said Mr. Kingsland. 'Murky. Flashes coming so thick and fast, that I declare I've been winking all the evening.' 'Stephen,' said Miss Kitty, 'if you'll help get up the "Handkerchief" by and by, and get her into the thick of it before she knows where she's going, I'll give you the first pair of blue gloves I can spare.' 'Great offer,' said Mr. Kingsland; 'but to-night the Sorceress prefers walking.' 'Stuff!--who cares what she prefers?' 'Some nine-tenths--and a fraction--of all the men here,--myself included,' said Mr. Kingsland. 'You are the fraction, or you'd manage it,' retorted Kitty. 'It's doubtful if she _would_ dance with _you_.' 'She will not dance with anybody this night,' said Mr. Kingsland. 'How do you know?' 'Said so. And what Miss Kennedy has said, she does.' 'Why, she _couldn't_ dance in that long train,' said Molly Seaton. 'Little goose!' said Kitty Fisher, 'she would hang _that_ over her partner's arm.' 'Would she!' said Mr. Kingsland, with a slight whistle. 'I asked her to do it once: I think I shall not again.' 'She'd rather talk to six men than dance with one, I suppose,' said Miss Fisher, eyeing the girl who stood now leaning against a tree in the distance. 'And the post of the seventh looks so inviting!' said Mr. Kingsland, rising and strolling off. 'Isn't it too much!' said Kitty Fisher. 'See here, girls and boys, listen,'--and heads and voices too went down below recognition. A little later in the evening, Gotham from his seclusion in the servants' quarters was summoned to speak to a lady. He found awaiting him, not his mistress, but a wonderful pyramid of white tarletan from which issued a voice. 'Miss Hazel is going to spend the night with Mrs. Seaton, and she sends you word that you may go home and come back for her at eight o'clock in the morning.' 'Ain't that clever?' said Phinny to the cavalier on whose arm she leaned, as they retraced their way towards the lighted portion of the grounds. 'Now I have disposed of one trouble.' All unconscious of this machination Wych Hazel kept on her walk--the only thing she could decide to do to-night. In fact the girl hardly knew her own mood. Of course the strictures that had been made were all unfounded, as touching her; but the words had given such pain at the time, that the very idea of dancing made her wince as if she heard them again. That would wear off, of course, but for the present she would walk; and had, as Molly guessed, put on her long train as a token. But when the concert began to tend towards the German, another fancy seized her: to stay and look on, and get that outside view which was almost unknown. And so when the first set was forming she released Major Seaton for his partner, and again took Mr. May's arm and walked towards the dancers. 'My dear,' said Mme. Lasalle, coming up on the other side, 'are you not dancing?' 'As you see, Madame!' said Hazel, with a slight bend and laugh. '_You_ not dancing! What's the matter?' 'Well--you will find it is a freak, or I tired myself last night, or I want to make a sensation--according to whom you ask,' said Wych Hazel. 'You are not forbidden?' whispered the lady, in a lower tone. 'No, Madame.' 'You seem to have so many guardians,' the lady went on,--'and guardians are selfish, my dear; horribly selfish. For that, I think all men are, whether guardians or not.' 'Just now,' said Wych Hazel, 'I am the selfish one,--keeping Mr. May from dancing.' Which supposed view of the case Mr. May, like a wise man, did not try to answer--just then. The German began. One or two ordinary figures first, but watched by Wych Hazel with eager eyes. 'Yes, of course!' she said to herself, as Kitty Fisher went round with her head on her partner's shoulder,--'if he thought I did that.' _Could_ he think it?--the little white glove tips so nearly withdrew themselves from the black coat-sleeve they were touching, that Mr. May turned to ask if she was tired and wished to sit down. But motions that were pretty to look at followed: each couple in turn passing through an avenue of little coloured flags, which held out by the motionless couples on either side, met and crossed over the heads of the dancers. Down came Stuart Nightingale and Miss Fisher, and Mr. Burr and Phinny Powder, and Major Seaton and Miss May,--Wych Hazel looked on, smiling, and with a stir of her little right foot. How often she had come down just so! Then began a figure that she did not know: they were going to 'practise,' Kitty Fisher called out, recommending her to come. 'You won't know how next time.' 'Thank you, I can learn by looking on.' And so she stood still and watched. Watched to see the ladies, armed with long reins and a whip, driving their partners cheerfully from point to point, with appropriate gestures and sounds and frolic. The little bells tinkled gleefully, the many-coloured leading-strings mingled in a kaleidoscope pattern. 'Symbolical,' Mr. Kingsland remarked, standing near. 'This is the "Bridle" figure, Miss Kennedy.' 'Unbridled' would be a better name, Miss Kennedy thought, but she said not a word; only her lips curled disdainfully. But, 'driving men is easy work,' as Phinney Powder said, and so this 'practice' soon gave way to another still more striking. The ladies ranged themselves, standing well apart from each other, and among the gentlemen was a general flutter of white handkerchiefs. What were they going to do? 'Bonds' was the word that occurred to Hazel this time, as she stood leaning a little forward in interested expectation. And so it proved,-- but not just as she had expected. To be tied by the hand would be bad enough, but by the foot!--and yet,--yes, certainly Major Seaton's handkerchief was round Kitty Fisher's pretty ankle--to the discomfiture of several other handkerchiefs of like intentions,--and Miss Powder had Stuart Nightingale at her feet,--and Phinny-- But who did it for whom, Wych Hazel scarcely thought until afterwards. She looked on for a minute at the scuffling, laughing, romping; then drew back with a deep flush. 'Did they think they could do that with _me!_' she said, under her breath. And what could her companion do but feel ashamed of every man he had ever seen do 'that' for any woman? The course of things was changed after a time by Mr. Nightingale's coming up and asking her to walk. He had made over the 'practice' to somebody else, professing that he knew the figures already. Perhaps somewhat in his companion's manner struck him, for he remarked, quite philosophically, as they moved into the shadow of the shrubbery, that 'society is a problem!' 'Is it?' said Hazel, to whom problems (out of books) were as yet in a happy distance. 'What needs solution, Mr. Nightingale?' 'Is it possible you do not see?' 'Not a bit. I did not know society was deep enough to be called a problem.' ' "Glissez, mortels; n'appuyez pas." ' 'Well, people do not,' said Wych Hazel. 'And had best not. Nothing is more graceful than the state of bold and brave innocence.' Hazel mused a little at that, half unconsciously getting up a problem of her own. Was he talking of _her_ 'innocence?' did he, too, see things which she did not? And was this another warning? Yet no one more forward to draw her into round dances than Stuart Nightingale. He began again in another tone. 'You are determined not to dance to-night?' 'Yes. Am I part of the problem?' He laughed a little. 'You would not be a true woman if you were not.' 'You may as well give up trying to understand _me_,' said Wych Hazel, gaily. 'Mr. Falkirk and I have been at it for years, and the puzzle is a puzzle yet.' 'Confess, you like to be a puzzle.' 'One may as well make the best of one's natural advantages,' said Hazel with a laugh. 'I suppose if I were what people call "limpid," and "transparent," I might like that too.' But the clear girlish purity of the depths referred to was as transparent as the Summer blue. 'Have you ever been told,' said Stuart, lowering his voice a little, 'of your very remarkable resemblance to one of the greatest puzzles of history?' 'No,' said Hazel. 'And you do not know me well enough to tell what I resemble.' 'Pardon me--pardon me! Do you think I could not have told, after that one first meeting in the wood?' 'If you could,' said Wych Hazel, with a lift of her eyebrows, 'I cannot imagine how society can be a problem to you, Mr. Nightingale.' 'There never was but one woman, of those whose pictures have come down to us, whose mouth could be at once so mischievous and so sweet. You are aware the mouth is the index to the character?' Hazel answered with some reserve (direct compliments always gave her a check) 'No--Yes. I have heard people say so.' 'And you know the woman I mean?' 'She is bound to be a witch!--but further than that--' 'The likeness is really remarkable,' said Stuart, seriously; 'you have the Mary Stuart brow exactly, and the mouth, as I said; and I think, as far as difference of colour admits similarity of effect, the eyes have the same trick of power. I suppose you like power?' 'I suppose I should! Mr. Falkirk ties up all my power, and labels it "Edge tools," ' said Wych Hazel. 'I suppose it cuts its way out, and so justifies him. Don't you have your own way generally?' 'Well, between taking it, and coaxing it out, and refusing to take any other, I do have it sometimes,' said Wych Hazel. 'Is Mr. Falkirk much of an ogre? I do not know him. Difficult to manage?' 'He thinks I am,' said Wych Hazel. 'No, he is not an ogre at all, except officially.' 'Does he pretend to exercise much supervision over your doings?' 'Pretend?' she repeated. 'He has the right, Mr. Nightingale. And did ever a man have a right and not give it an airing now and then?' Stuart laughed, and laughed again. 'Don't be hard on us!' he pleaded. 'Truth is not slander.' 'But are not women as fond of power, and wont to exercise it as ruthlessly, as ever men are?' 'It is not a strong power, if they do.' 'Take care,' said Stuart. 'Honour bright!--while Mr. Falkirk thinks things go according to his will, don't they really go by yours?' 'No,' said Wych Hazel, 'when he _thinks_ they do, they _do_,--when they do not, he knows it.' 'Then you are _not_ free. That is hard!--hard upon you. A mother's authority is one thing; a guardian's, I should think, is something very different. Does he interfere with your dancing?' 'No.'--Hazel herself hardly knew why words suddenly became scarce. 'I thought you were very fond of it.' 'O, I am!' 'Then why will you not honour me and please yourself to- night?' ' "Why" is safe, while "why" keeps hid. All women know that,' said Wych Hazel. 'You best of all,' said Stuart. 'I dare say it is just to make us miserable. But now I am coming to you with a more serious request. Will you help us in some private theatricals?' 'I?--O, I could not. I know nothing about the matter. Never went to a theatre in my life, to begin with.' 'So much the better. I know you will do it to perfection. In the first place you are not vain; and in the second place you are independent; and an actor should be free in both respects. And of positive qualifications you are full. Say you will try!' 'I am the worst person to make believe that ever you saw,' said Wych Hazel. 'I doubt if I could counterfeit anybody else for ten minutes.' 'Precisely!' said Stuart in a contented tone. 'You would not counterfeit. Good acting is not counterfeiting--it is nature. You will help us? Say you will!' 'O, if I can--certainly.' Before Wych Hazel's lips had fairly got the words out, the two found themselves suddenly flush with Mr. Rollo, standing by the side of the way under a laburnum tree, which was hung with lights instead of its natural gold pendants. Swiftly as only thoughts can, they rushed through the girl's mind on the instant. Then he was here! And of course he knew she was not dancing,--and _of course_ he must think--There was another figure beginning--she might go and join that. No!--not with him to look on, making mental comments: that would be simply unendurable. Then she must tell him it was not for what he had said. And she could not tell him that, because it was!-- Only in a different way. And how was she to talk to him of 'ways,' or of anything else, after last night? The result of all which lucubrations was, that she bent her head gravely--and it may be said somewhat lower than usual--in silent acknowledgment of Mr. Rollo's presence. She was desperately afraid of him to-night. But though he stepped up and spoke to her, it was in the indifferent tone of ordinary business. 'On my way here I got something that I think I ought to give to you. By and by, when you are at leisure, will you command my presence?' 'I can take it now.' 'No,' said he carelessly, 'I will not interrupt you. I should have to explain. I will be on the lawn in front of the concert-saloon when you want me.' He bowed and fell back from them. 'Have you _two_ guardians?' said Stuart slyly. 'No.' 'Just a little more assurance than necessary, in his communication.' 'What do you consider the proper amount?' said Wych Hazel, retreating to carelessness in her turn. 'I should not dare offer any,' said Stuart. 'It is with nothing of the kind that I venture to ask if you will ride with me to-morrow.' 'Ah, I would if I could!' said the girl longingly. 'I would give almost anything to be on horseback again. But my horses have not come, and till then I must wait.' 'Let me offer one of my aunt's horses!' said Stuart eagerly. But Hazel shook her head. 'I cannot take it--Mr. Falkirk will let me mount none but my own.' 'Is it reasonable to yield obedience so far, and with so little ground?' 'It is comfortable,' said Hazel with a laugh. 'O yes, I suppose it is reasonable, too.' The walk went on and the talk; each in its way wandering along through moonlight and among flowers, and then Hazel bethought her that what she had to do must be done before she went home. So mustering up her courage, she seated herself on one of the broad stone steps at the side door, and despatched her escort to the front for Mr. Rollo. Presently he came, and sat down beside her. 'At what hour did you order your carriage?' he asked in a low tone. 'Gotham was to wait.' 'He has gone home. I met him as I came.' 'Gone home? O he is only driving around to keep his horse awake. It is not a fiery turnout, by any means.' 'He has gone home,' Rollo repeated smiling, 'and I did not know enough to order him about again. But I sent word to Mr. Falkirk that I would take care of you.' The girl's brows lifted, then drew slightly together. 'Thank you--,' she said, with rather stately hesitation,--'but as Mr. Falkirk will send Gotham straight back, I had better wait.' 'After my message, Mr. Falkirk will not do that,' said Rollo, looking at his watch. 'It is half-past twelve o'clock.' Hazel leaned her chin in her hand and looked off into the moonshine. She did not feel like being 'taken care of,' a bit, to-night. 'I am afraid circumstances are affecting Mr. Falkirk's mind,' she said at last, with a tone just a trifle provoked; for half-past twelve was a stubborn fact to deal with. 'Well, Mr. Rollo--if I can by no means save you the trouble, at what hour will it please you to take it?' 'As there are evidently plots against you, suppose you come to the other side-door, and let us go off without speaking to anybody?' And so it came to pass that in a few minutes more they were comfortably driving homewards, without supervision, the silent groom behind them not counting one. They were in a light phaeton, with a new horse in it which could go; the old moon was just rising over the trees; the road free, the pace good. The gentleman's tone when he spoke was rather indicative of enjoyment. 'Who is plotting against you?' 'Plotting!--' 'And now disappointed?' 'O, it is just some of Gotham's stupidity,' said Wych Hazel, with a voice not yet at rest: she had been oddly conscious of wishing that no one should hear her whispered good-night to Mrs. Seaton and follow to see with whom she went home. 'He and I are always at cross purposes.' 'A lady in a white dress brought him the message, he says. But to change the subject--What is your favourite pleasure?' 'Riding the wind.' 'Do you remember once--a great while ago--promising to give me an afternoon some time?' 'Did I? it must have been a great while,' said Wych Hazel. 'O yes, I do remember. Well?' 'Will you put to-morrow afternoon at my disposal?' 'If the thing to be done is within walking distance. Mr. Falkirk will not let me ride.' 'I have brought home, I think, a nice little saddle horse, which I should like to have you try,' Rollo went on, not heeding this. 'Oh!' she said, with unmistakeable longing. 'But he has made me refuse at least five-and-forty just such horses this summer.' 'He will be amenable to reason to-morrow,' said Rollo comfortably. 'Shall I tell you what I want to do with you after I have got you on horseback?' 'Let me run--I hope,' said Wych Hazel. 'I am going to take you where you have never been yet; through Morton Hollow and the mills, to see my old nurse, who lives a little way beyond them.' 'I am not going through Morton Hollow,' said Hazel, decidedly. 'Why not?' 'You never heard of seven _women_ who could "render a reason," did you?' said the girl, with a laugh in her voice. 'My old nurse is a character,' Rollo went on. 'She is a Norse woman. My mother, I must tell you, was also a Norse woman. My father's business at one time kept him much in Denmark and at St. Petersburg; and at Copenhagen he met my mother, who had been sent there to school. And when my mother forsook her country, the old nurse, not old then, left all to go with her. She was my nurse in my earliest years, and remained our most faithful friend while we were a family. She made afterwards a not very happy marriage; and when her husband died just before I went to Europe, she was left alone and poor. I arranged a small house for her in the neighbourhood of the Hollow; and there she lives--a kind of mysterious oracle to the people about. And her greatest earthly pleasure, I suppose, is to have me come and see her. Gyda Boërresen is her name.' 'I like to see people enjoy their greatest earthly happiness,' said Hazel thoughtfully. 'I never did many times. Or at least not many people.' 'I want you to know Gyda. I am not superstitious, like some of the ignorant people who visit her; but yet'--he paused. 'If ever you were in need of womanly counsel--if ever you wanted sympathizing and wise help--to find your way out of perplexities--I should say, go to Gyda. If any one could give that sort of help, she would. And it is almost like going to a pythoness', added Rollo thoughtfully; 'she is so cut off from the world and its people.' They were almost at Mr. Falkirk's cottage. Rollo was silent a moment, then said, 'May I ask Mrs. Bywank to shew me hospitality again to-night? I don't want to go home.' 'Mrs. Bywank will be only too glad,' said Wych Hazel. 'The little tower room always goes by your name, Mr. Rollo.' 'She did not put me there the last time,' said he, laughing, 'I was lodged in state and splendour! Well, good night. I wish you were coming to breakfast.' She stood silent a minute, looking down. Could she? Might she? Would it do? Run away from Mr. Falkirk for a private frolic on the hill? It was a great temptation! And only doing the honours of her own house, when all was said. Would it be strange? Would he think it strange? That is, not Mr. Falkirk, but Mr. Rollo. Was he a man of sense, she wondered, who always disapproved of everything? And with that a child's look of search and exploration sought his face. There was a grave sparkle in the eyes she met looking down at her. 'I see a question in your face,' said he. 'And I answer,--yes!' 'Very unsafe to answer anything in my face,' said the girl, hastily withdrawing her eyes. 'There were _two_ questions in my mind. Good night, Mr. Rollo, and thank you.' 'Think better of it!'--said Rollo, as he got into the carriage again. CHAPTER XXVIII. BREAKFAST FOR THREE. Mrs. Bywank, inspecting her breakfast table from time to time, certainly had Mr. Rollo's wish in her heart, even though it got no further. And setting on orange marmalade for him, she pleased herself with also setting on honey for _her;_ even though the portrait of a little child was all the sign of her young lady the room could boast. But long habit had made it second nature to watch that face, no matter what else she was about. Mrs. Bywank looked and smiled and sighed, and bent down to see if the honey was perfect. It was late in the morning now: Mr. Rollo's slumbers had been allowed to extend themselves somewhat indefinitely in the direction which most men approve; and still breakfast waited, down stairs; and Mrs. Bywank at the tower window gazed down the slope and over the trees towards Wych Hazel's present abiding place. Not expecting to see her, but watching over her in her heart. So standing, she was hailed by a cheery 'good morning' behind her. 'I suppose people who turn day into night have no right to expect the day will keep its promises to them; but you are better than my deserts, Mrs. Bywank. I see a breakfast table!' 'Always ready for you, Mr. Rollo! And you must be very ready too, by this time,' she said, sounding her whistle down the stairs. 'Was Miss Wych at Oak Hill last night, sir?' 'I had the pleasure of bringing her home.' 'O, did you, sir?' said Mrs. Bywank, with a quick look. 'She told me she meant to go,--but her mind comes about wonderfully sudden sometimes. Here is breakfast, Mr. Rollo. Will you take your old seat?' 'I think it will always come about in the right place at last,' said Rollo, as he complied with the invitation. The old housekeeper drew a sigh, looking up at the little picture. 'My pretty one!' she said. Then applied herself to filling Mr. Rollo's cup. 'Yes, sir, you're right,' she went on after a pause. 'And she never would stop in a wrong one, not a minute, but for just a few things.' 'Mrs. Bywank,' said the young man, 'those few things are all around her.' 'You'd think so if you could hear the serenades I hear,' said the housekeeper, 'and see the flowers--and hear the compliments. She tells them to me sometimes, making fun. But the trouble is with Miss Wych, she never will see the world with any eyes but her own,--and who's to make her?' A problem which Rollo considered in silence, and probably swallowed instead of his coffee. 'Does she speak freely to you of her impressions, and of what she is doing or going to do?' 'Free as a child, Mr. Rollo! Always tells me what dress she'll wear--and then afterwards how people liked it. And what she does, and what they want her to do. And why her head is not turned,' said Mrs. Bywank, in conclusion, 'puzzles _my_ head, I'm sure. Mere handling so many hearts might do it.' Mr. Rollo pursued his breakfast rather thoughtfully and nonchalantly for a time. 'Mrs. Bywank, Mrs. Coles is returned.' 'Surely!' said Mrs. Bywank, with a slight start. 'Then she'll make mischief,--or it'll be the first chance she ever missed.' 'And--the world around her is not so simple as your young lady believes.' 'No, no!' said Mrs. Bywank, earnestly. 'Well I know that! But just there comes in another trouble I spoke of,--you can't make her believe it, sir,--and so I'm not sure it's always wise to try.' She paused, in a sort of hesitating way; glancing from her teaspoon to her guest. 'It's not wise to try at all,' said he, smiling--a sort of warm genial smile, which went over the table to his old friend. 'At the same time,'--and his face grew sternly grave,--'it may be desirable to have some other wisdom come in to her help. I wish,--if you are in any doubt or perplexity about anything you hear, and it may be only a little thing that may give you the impression,--I wish you would call me in.' 'Well sir,--that just touches my thought,' said Mrs. Bywank. 'Or my thought that. For I couldn't do it, Mr. Rollo, unless,'--and an unmistakeable look of anxious inquiry came across the table. 'Unless, you know, sir,' she went on, looking away again,--'unless--excuse my freedom--the conditions of the will are to be carried out.' And the old housekeeper called for hot waffles, and otherwise apologized for touching the subject, by quitting it at once. As soon as all this bustle was disposed of, her guest met her eye again with a frank, bright smile. 'The conditions of the will are to be carried out, my friend.' Mrs. Bywank brought her hands together with a sense of relief and gladness that somehow went to her eyes too, and she was silent a little. 'I did hope it, sir!--And I would far rather apply to you than to Mr. Falkirk. _He_ frets me sometimes,' added the old housekeeper: 'I may say that to you, sir. Now, she's been wild to ride all summer,--and a dozen wild to have her; and Mr. Falkirk has never let her go once. And so long as he _does_ let her go and dance with the same people, I don't for my part see why.' 'Perhaps he does,' said Rollo, rather dryly. 'But I have made the requisite declarations in presence of Mr. Falkirk and Dr. Maryland, and am legally qualified to act, Mrs. Bywank. _She_ does not know anything of this; and it is not best she should-- for the present.' 'No sir--by no means,' said Mrs. Bywank, earnestly. 'For if there is anything miss Wych does hate, it is to have a gentleman speak to her about her doings. When that happens she thinks she's supposed to have done something dreadful; and it hurts her more than you would guess, sir. Little child as she was then, she would cry her eyes out over a word from Mr. Kennedy, but her mother might say anything. And it has always been just so with Mr. Falkirk. Only Miss Wych never cries for _him_. At least nobody ever sees her.' Now, instead of Mr. Rollo's being alarmed at this, as another man might, it was answered by a certain humourous play of face; a slight significance of lip and air, quite difficult to characterize. It was not arrogant, nor arbitrary; I do not know how to call it masterful; and yet certainly it expressed no dismay and no apprehension. Perhaps it expressed that he intended to be in a different category from other men. Perhaps he thought Mrs. Bywank meant to read him a cautionary lesson. 'She is in rather a hard position,' he said, gravely. 'I am glad she has got a good friend in you, Mrs. Bywank. And I am glad _I_ have, too.' 'Yes, it is hard,' said the old housekeeper, with a glance at him; 'though it is not to be expected, sir, that you should quite understand it. But Miss Wych is the lovingest little creature that ever lived, I believe, and as true as the sky. Why, she could cheat Mr. Falkirk day in and day out if she chose!--but if ever those young men _should_ get her to ride, against his orders, she would go and tell him of it, the first minute after she got home.' Rollo did not ask whether they could do this, or had done it. He went on quietly with his breakfast, only glancing up at Mrs. Bywank to let her see that he was attending to her. 'So that's a great safeguard,' she began again, with a sigh. 'But I wish Mrs. Coles was back in Chicago! Miss Fisher was bad enough. And what the two will do between them--' 'What does Miss Fisher do?' 'It is plain to me,' said Mrs. Bywank, 'that she wants to pull my young lady down to her way of dress and behaviour; though Miss Wych don't guess it a bit. _That_ she can never do, of course. But it is just like Miss Fisher to push where she can't pull. Do you understand me, sir?' 'Quite.' 'So that makes me anxious, sir. And there are hands enough to help.' Leaning somewhat towards her young guest, breakfast rather forgotten on both sides, so they sat; when the door opened softly and Wych Hazel came in. But if the first minute inside the door could have been instantly exchanged for the last one outside, it is probable that the young lady of Chickaree would have disturbed no cabinet council over her that day. For with the first sight of the very people she expected to find, there rushed over her a horrible fear that Mr. Rollo would think she had come to see _him!_--and that Mrs. Bywank would think so--and (worst of all) that she thought so herself! But there was no retreating now. So passing swiftly to the old housekeeper's chair, and laying both hands on her shoulders to keep her in it, Hazel stooped down to kiss her; and then straightening herself up like a young arrow, she gave from behind Mrs. Bywank a demure good-morning to Mr. Rollo. That gentleman had not been so much engrossed with the conversation as to have at all the air of being 'surprised,' or he was too good a man of the world to shew it. He had sprung up instantly as Wych Hazel came in, and now he came round to where she stood to shake hands, looking very bright, but as if her appearance was the simplest thing in the world. 'You have not had breakfast?' he said. 'I have had the opportunity. But you look altogether too comfortable here, you and Mrs. Bywank!--As for me, I have been breakfasting with two bears, and had nearly forgotten how civilization acts.' 'My dear!' said Mrs. Bywank.--'Not "breakfasting"--when you were coming here, Miss Wych?' 'Not much, Byo, to say the truth. I gave Mr. Falkirk _his_ coffee--hot and hot.' 'He didn't give you waffles,' said Rollo, making room for her plate and cup upon the table. 'Mrs. Bywank, we must take care of her. I shall never grumble at sending answers to invitations after this.' He was rendering little services and making himself variously useful, with the air of a person more at home than she was: drawing down a blind to keep the sun from her face, and opening another window to let in the air and the view. 'Take care of me!' said Wych Hazel, with a look at the table instead of at him, and then beginning to touch and mend things generally to suit her fancy. 'It is very plain what _I_ have to do! There is the jar of marmalade quite pushed out of reach. And if you do not empty it, Mr. Rollo, Mrs. Bywank will think you have not fulfilled the sweet promise of your earlier years.' 'My dear!' remonstrated Mrs. Bywank, uneasily. 'I have satisfied her,' said Rollo, dryly. 'But there is a little left for you. There wouldn't have been if the two bears had known where it was.' 'Mr. Falkirk was fearfully growly this morning,' said Wych Hazel. 'And every time he growled Gotham grumbled. So I had a fusillade. Where is your fruit, Byo?' 'There was none brought in yesterday, Miss Wych, I'm sorry to say.' 'None at all in the house?' 'There's a basket in your room, my dear; but of course'-- 'Not "of course" at all,' said the girl, jumping up to go for it. 'You know that is a sort of fruit I never eat.' Which might have left it doubtful what sort she _did_ eat,--the basket contained so many, in such splendid variety. Hazel sat down in her place and began to pile up the beauties in a majolica dish. 'Aren't you going to give me some?' said Rollo, looking on. The answer tarried while Hazel's little fingers dived down after peaches and plums of extra size with which to crown her dish; but so doing, they suddenly brought up a white note, suspiciously sealed with red wax. The girl dropped it, as if it had been a wasp; and hastily setting the basket down on the floor, pushed the unfinished dish to a position before Mr. Rollo. 'There!' she said, 'will that do?' 'Do you mean that you give me all these?' 'Every bit.' 'Mrs. Bywank, might I make interest with you for a finger- glass?' Which being supplied, the gentleman proceeded to a leisurely ablution of his fingers, and then looked at the dish of fruit before him with grave consideration. 'Which is the best?' said he. 'They all look about alike, to me,' said Wych Hazel, raising her eyebrows. 'I shall be happy to hear, when you have found out.' Exercising a great deal of deliberation, Rollo finally chose out a bunch of Frontignac grapes and two Moorpark apricots, and set them before Wych Hazel. 'Will you accept these from me?' he said, coolly. 'They are my own property, and are offered to you. Taste and see if they are as good as they ought to be.' She looked up, and down, laughing. 'That is the way you come round people! Will you take the responsibility? Suppose I am asked, some day, whether they-- were--what they ought to be?' 'You can puzzle him just as well after knowing the fact, as before,' Rollo said, with perfect gravity. 'Well,' said Hazel, pulling a grape from the bunch. 'Perhaps my misleading powers may be equal to that. This one is quite good--and not at all sour,' she added, with a flash of her eyes--which, however, went to Mrs. Bywank. 'What do you want, Dingee?' Dingee advanced and laid a card on the table. 'Say I am at breakfast. I cannot be expected to keep awake all night and all day too.' 'Permit me to inquire,' said Rollo, as he also attacked the grapes, but not looking at them, 'whether you did your share of growling this morning? I am sure no one had more cause.' 'No,' said the girl, laughing. 'I feel that I have a great reserve in store for somebody. Well, Dingee?' A card with a written message this time. Hazel looked at it, drew her brows together, and, seizing a pencil, wrote a vigorous 'No,' across the lines. 'For somebody,' Rollo repeated. 'I am not sure that we got hold of the right delinquent. After all, peaches are the best thing after waffles and coffee. Try that.' And he placed a fine one alongside of Wych Hazel's plate. 'The thing is,' said Hazel, 'that unless you can growl with authority, nobody marks you.' 'General Merrick and Major Seaton, Missee Hazel, ma'am,' said her dark retainer, coming back. 'I thought I told you I was at breakfast?' said Hazel, in a tone of displeasure. 'Yes'm--but the Major he bound to know 'bout sumfin Missee Hazel left onsartin last night. 'Spect he'd like a keep-sake, too,' said Dingee, laying down another card. 'Mas' May put _his_ away mighty safe.' If ever his little mistress was near being furious, I think it was then. Eyes and cheeks were in a flame. 'I left nothing uncertain last night!' she said, turning upon him. 'Major Seaton knows that, if he will take the trouble to remember. And Dingee, if you bring me another message--of any sort--before I whistle for you, I will put you out of service for a month. Now go!' 'Is that the way you punish unlucky servitors?' said Rollo, looking much amused. She had come back to her grapes, giving them the closest attention, feeling shy and nervous and disturbed to any point; but now fun got the upper hand. So first she bit her lips, and then--the laugh must come! Clear and ringing and mirthsome, as if there was never a growl in all the world. 'That is one way,' she said. 'Sounds peaceable,' said Rollo demurely, though smiling; 'but I don't know! I am afraid it might prove very severe. What is the appeal from one of your sentences?' 'There is none. I am a Mede and a Persian combined. Byo, why don't you give Mr. Rollo some cream with his peaches, and postpone me till another time?' 'She'll have to postpone me, too,' said Rollo. 'I must go. Shall I come for you at four o'clock? It will be too hot, I am afraid, before; and we have a good way to go.' CHAPTER XXIX. JEANNIE DEANS. It wanted some time of four o'clock yet, when Miss Kennedy came quietly into Mr. Falkirk's study and sat down by the window. 'Are you at leisure, sir?' she said, intertwining her fingers in a careless sort of way among the vines that hung there. 'My dear, I have been at leisure so long that I wish I could say I was busy. But I am not busy. What is it, Miss Hazel?' 'Only a few business questions, sir,' she said, attending to the vines. 'Will you let me ride with Major Seaton on Thursday?' 'Would you like to go with him?' 'I always like to ride, sir.' 'You have not a horse yet, my dear; that is a difficulty. I do not know this Major Seaton's horses--nor himself.' 'Quite reliable, sir--according to him. Will you let me ride with Mr. Rollo this afternoon?' 'I suppose there is no good reason to be assigned against that,' said Mr. Falkirk, rather growingly, and after a pause. It sounded a little as if he would have liked it if the fact had been otherwise. 'You consider Wednesday a more safe day than Thursday, sir?' 'I am not superstitious, Miss Hazel. The only thing I ever was in fear of is enchantment!' 'Well sir,--you have doubtless studied the case enough to know which is the more "enchanting" of the two,' said Miss Hazel, daringly. 'Shall I give Mr. May a ride on Friday?' 'Will you have a horse on Friday?' 'My horse seems to be a slow one, by the time it takes him to come,' said Wych Hazel. 'Will he be here this afternoon, Mr. Falkirk?' 'I suppose Rollo will see to that,' said Mr. Falkirk, beginning to turn about some papers that were on the table. 'Yes, sir,' said his ward, with her small fingers still playing among the vines; 'I suppose he will. It is rather Mr. Rollo's style. But that makes it slightly awkward for me, Mr. Falkirk.' 'In what respect, Miss Hazel?' 'Most of these other gentlemen think themselves qualified to "see to" so small a consignment as myself; and not being posted as to your scale of enchantment and danger, may feel it the reverse of a compliment to meet me riding with Mr. Rollo, on his horse.' 'Well, my dear, what do you wish me to do in the matter? You are not obliged to go with Rollo, that I know of. Do you wish to compliment these other small fry?' 'I want to ride, Mr. Falkirk, I believe I should go with Mr. Simms--if he were the only chance; and that is saying a good deal. However, I can throw all the responsibility on you, sir; that is one comfort.' 'It won't break me,' said Mr. Falkirk; 'that is another. Why do they all come for you so, this hot weather!' But she laughed at that, and went off out of the room. When she came down to the side entrance of Chickaree some hour or two later, she found her side-saddle going on an Arab- looking brown mare, and Rollo playing hostler. His own horse standing by was clearly also a new comer; a light bay, nervous and fidgety, for he did not keep still one minute; ears, hoofs, eyes and head were constantly and restlessly shifting. The brown mare stood still, only lifting her pretty head and looking as Wych Hazel came out. She ran down the steps. 'I got leave!' she said, gleefully,--'did you?'--then stopped, surveying operations. 'But was there nobody about the place to do that but Mr. Rollo? The quiet negative which answered this covered more ground than the question. Rollo finished his work carefully, with one or two looking on; mounted the little lady, and went to his own horse. Before mounting, here, he seemed to hold some conversation with the creature; caressed him; stood in front and spoke to him, patting and stroking his head; then in another moment was on his back. There is a great difference in people's riding, as there is in people's walking; and once in a while, among plenty of good average walkers and riders, there is one whom it is a pleasure to see. This man was such a one. He was a perfectly well-made man, and had the ease and grace in all his movements which such a build goes far to ensure; when on horseback it seemed as if he had communicated these qualities to his horse, and the two moved as one embodiment of ease and grace, with power superadded. Stuart Nightingale on horseback was a fine gentleman, perfectly got up, and riding well, but yet a fine gentleman in the saddle. Major Seaton rode ruggedly, if I may say so. Mr. May was more at home in his phaeton; others were more or less stiff and uncertain. But the attitude and action of Rollo were utter unconscious ease, whatever form of action his horse might take. So it was now. For a few minutes his restless animal moved in all sorts of eccentric ways; but where most men would have been a little awkward and many very miserable, his rider was simply unconcerned and seemed to be taking his pleasure. To see such a rider is to be filled with a great sense of harmony. What a ride they had then, when the hill was descended and the gates of Chickaree left behind! The road for some miles was known to Wych Hazel; then they branched off into another where all was new. The qualities of the brown mare had been coming to her rider's knowledge by degrees; a beautiful mouth, excellent paces, thorough training; knowing her business and doing it. As they entered upon a long smooth stretch of road without anybody in sight, Rollo proposed a run; and they had it; and it was upon drawing bridle after this that he asked a question. 'How do you like her?' Now Miss Kennedy, in defiance of all-known laws, had never been so smitten with the regulation beaver upon a man's head, as to place it on her own. So instead of its stiff proportions she wore a little round straw hat; utterly comfortable, utterly graceful, and drooping down over her eyes à la Marie Stuart, so as to keep those wayward things in deep seclusion when she chose. Just now, however, she turned them full on her companion, answering: 'O _very_ much!--I suspect she has only one fault.' 'What in the world is that? Have you discovered already what I have sought for in vain? 'It is the reverse of my speciality,' said Wych Hazel--'so perhaps that makes me sharpsighted. I am afraid she always behaves well.' 'She knows her business,' said Rollo. 'I think what you want her to do, she will do. Pardon me; do you wish her--it is rather paradoxical--to _thwart_ you wishes!' 'No,' said the girl, laughing a little,--'I put it somewhat differently: perhaps I might like, just occasionally, to thwart hers!' 'She'll be an extraordinary animal if she does not some time or other give you a chance. Now do you know what you are coming to?' The scenery was changing, had changed. The level, open road they had been clearing on the gallop, had gradually drawn within high banks, which as they went on grew higher and broken, till the country assumed the character of a glen or deep valley. Opening a little here and there, this valley shewed ahead of them now a succession of high, long, dingy buildings; and a large, rapid stream of water was seen to run under the opposite bank. It had not been visible until now; so it probably turned off near this point into an easier channel than the course of their road would have afforded. The scene was extremely picturesque; sunshine and shadow mingling on the sides of the dell and on the roofs and gables of the buildings in the bottom. These were both large and small; it was quite a settlement; cottages, small and mean and dingy, standing all along on the higher banks, as well as lower down near the stream. Gradually the dell spread into a smooth, narrow valley. 'The mills, I suppose? I have not been this way before. It makes me half wild to get out again! So if I do any wild things----How lovely the dell is!' 'This is Morton Hollow,' said Rollo, looking at her. 'Can I help you do any wild things?' 'The houses are like him,' said Hazel, turning away, and her colour deepening under the look. 'Such a place!' She might say 'such a place.' As they went on the character of it became visible more and more. There were dark, high, close factories, whence the hum of machinery issued; poor, mean dwellings, small and large, clustered here and there in the intermediate spaces, from which if any sounds came, they were less pleasant than the buzz of machines. Scarce any humanity was abroad; what there was deepened the impression of the dreariness of the place. 'Mr. Rollo,' said Hazel, at last. 'I hope your friend does not live down here?' 'I don't think I have any friend here,' he answered, rather thoughtfully. He had been riding slowly for the last few minutes, looking intently at what he was passing. Now, at a sudden turn of the road, where the valley made a sharp angle, they came upon an open carriage standing still. Two ladies were in it. Rollo lifted his hat, but the lady nearest them leaned out and cried 'Stop, stop!' A gentleman must obey such a behest. Rollo wheeled and stood still. 'Where are you going?' said the lady. Probably Rollo did not hear, for he looked at her calmly without answering. 'Is that the little lady?' said the speaker, stretching her head out a little further to catch better sight of Wych Hazel. 'Aren't you going to introduce me, Dane? I must know her, you know.' It is quite impossible to describe on paper the flourish with which Rollo's horse responded. Like a voluntary before the piece begins, like the elegant and marvellous sweep of lines with which a scribe surrounds his signature, the bay curvetted and wheeled and danced before the proposed introduction. Very elegant in its way, and to any one not in the secret impossible to divine whether it was the beast or his rider at play. Finally brought up on the other side of Wych Hazel, when Rollo spoke. 'Miss Kennedy, I have the honour to present Mrs. Coles, who wishes to be known to you.' As Miss Kennedy bent her head, she had one glimpse of a long pale face, surrounded with bandeaux of fair hair, which looked towards her eagerly. Before she had well lifted her head again her horse was moving, and the next instant dashing along at full speed; the bay close alongside. The mills were almost passed; a very few minutes brought them quite away from the settlement, and they began to mount to higher ground by a steep hilly path. 'Well!'--said Hazel, looking at her companion. 'Well?' said Rollo, innocently. She laughed. 'As if I did not know better than that!' 'I wish I did,' said Rollo. 'Now, do you know what you are coming to?' 'No, not a bit. I said I wouldn't come through that place--but when you are in a strange land--and in charge of a--strange!-- cavalier--' 'You are coming to the house of my old nurse in the hills a quarter of a mile further on. I did not understand you to mean that you would not go through _that_ place.' 'Does the man keep another Hollow for himself?' said Wych Hazel. 'I am glad we are going to the hills, if only to help me forget the valley. How can people live so! And oh! how can people let them!' 'This is a concomitant of great civilization. I saw no such place when I was in Norway,' Dane observed. 'And was--what is her name?--living there when you came home?' 'Gyda? Down in the Hollow! O no. I had established her up here in comfort before I left her.' More and more lovely, wild and lonely, the scenery grew; the road getting deeper among the hills and winding higher and higher with the head of the valley. Then they came to the cottage, the only one in sight; a low house of grey stone, set with its back against the woods which covered the hill. A little cleared and cultivated ground close to it, and in front the road. Rollo dismounted, fastened his horse, and took Wych Hazel down. 'Do you like to come to such places?' he asked as he was tying the brown mare to the fence. 'I know very little about them,' she said. '_This_ looks like a place to come to.' 'It is unique,' said Rollo, as he led the way in. He opened the door softly. An utterance of joy Wych Hazel heard, before she could see the person from whom it came. Rollo turned and presented Miss Kennedy then. It was that. He did not present old Gyda to _her_. And then Wych Hazel was established in the best chair, and could look at her leisure, for at first she was not the one attended to. She saw a little person, with a brown face, much shrivelled; which yet possessed two sparkling keen black eyes. There was not a pretty feature in the old woman's face, for the eyes were not beautiful now, in any sensuous meaning of beauty. And yet, as Wych Hazel looked, presently the word 'lovely' was the word that came up to her. That was of course due only to the pervading expression; which was pure, loving and refined far beyond what the young lady had often seen. She was dressed in a short jacket of dark cloth, braided with bright braid, and fastened at the throat with a large silver brooch. Her petticoat was of the same cloth, drawn up plain over the bosom in an ungraceful manner; her head was covered with a coloured handkerchief, tied so that the ends hung down the back. After seeing Wych Hazel seated, she for the moment paid her no further attention. Rollo had sat down too; and the old woman came close in front of him and stood looking silently, her head reaching then only a little above his shoulders. She was old, undeniably; however, it was an entirely vigorous and hearty age. Her hand presently came to Rollo's face, pushing back the thick and somewhat curly locks from his temples, and then taking his head in both hands she kissed first one cheek and then the other. 'Don't be partial, Gyda!' said he, smiling at her. And if there was beauty of only one kind in the little black eyes that looked at him, there was much of both kinds in the young man's face. Gyda left him and went over to her other visitor. And as far as minuteness of examination went, certainly she was not 'partial.' It would have been a bit trying from anybody else--the still, intent, searching look of the old woman upon the young face. But the look was one of such utter sweetness, so thoroughly loving and simple and kind, if it was also keen, that there was after all in it more to soothe nerves than to excite them. Her hand presently came to Wych Hazel's face too, drawing down over the soft cheek and handling the wavy ringlets, and tracing the delicate chin's outline. Slowly and considerately. 'Is she good?' was the first word that Gyda spoke in this connection, as naïvely as possible. It was rather directed to Rollo. The girl's colour had stirred and mounted under the scrutiny, until interest nearly put shyness out of sight; and the winsome brown eyes now looked at Gyda more wistful than afraid. They followed her question with a swift glance, but then Miss Kennedy hastily took the matter into her own hands. 'Not generally!' she answered, the lips parting and curling in sweet mirthful lines that at least did not speak of very deep wrong-doing. Most gentlemen probably would have uttered a protest, but Rollo was absolutely silent. Gyda looked from one to the other. 'Why are ye no good?' she asked, with her hand on Wych Hazel's shoulder. The expression of the words is very difficult to describe. It was an inquiry, put with the simplest accent of wondering and regretful desire. Hazel looked at her, studying the question rather in the face than in the words. 'I suppose,' she said slowly, 'because I do not like it.' 'You must know, Gyda,' said Rollo, smiling, 'that Miss Hazel's notion of goodness is, giving up her own will to somebody else's.' 'And that's just what it is, Dane Olaf,' said the old woman, looking round at him. 'Ye could not have expressed it better. But that is not hard, nor uncomfortable, when ye love somebody?' she added, her sweet eyes going back to Wych Hazel. The girl shook her head. 'I never loved anybody, then. Unless mamma,' she answered. 'Lady, do ye know those words in your Bible--"He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty?" Giving up yourself to God will put ye just there! And then--"He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under His wings shalt thou trust." ' It is one thing to hear these words sonorously read in church, or to run one's eye over them in a perfunctory manner. To see Gyda speak them, with the accent and air of one undeniably proving the truth of them, that was another thing. 'There may be yet a difficulty, Gyda,' said Rollo. 'What is't?' 'One may not know just how to get there, even after you have shewed the way.' Rollo was not speaking lightly; but Gyda as she went back to her seat only answered, 'Ye can always ask.' 'Whom would you bid me ask, Gyda? I would about as lieve come to you as anybody, if I wanted counsel.' 'Give yourself to God, lad, and ye'll know there's but One to ask of. And there's but One before that, if ye want real help.' There was a minute's pause; and then Rollo asked what Gyda had for him to do. 'Not yet,' she answered; and with that left the room. Rollo brought his chair to Wych Hazel's side. 'She is going to get you some supper,' he said, with a smile. 'No, it will be all for you,--and you will give me part of it. I should think you would come here very often, Mr. Rollo.' 'Do you?' said he, looking pleased. 'That shews I did right to bring you here. Now you'll have a Norse supper--the first you ever had. Gyda is Norse herself, I told you; she is a Tellemarken woman. If we were in Norway now, there would be in the further end of this room two huge cribs, which would be the sleeping place for the whole family. Overhead would be fishing nets hanging from the rafters, and a rack with a dozen or more rifles and fowling-pieces. On the walls you would see collars for reindeer, powder-horns and daggers. Gyda's spinning-wheel _is_ here, you see; and her stove, besides the fireplace for cooking. Her dairy is a separate building, after Norway fashion, and so is her summer kitchen, where I know she is this minute, making porridge. Can you eat porridge?' 'Truly I cannot say, Mr. Rollo. But I do not often "thwart" myself--as you may have observed. Does the absence of Norse blood make the fact doubtful?' 'Norse habit, say rather,' said Rollo, shaking his head; 'Norse habit, induced by Norse necessity. In many a Norwegian homestead you would get little besides porridge, often. But Gyda likes it, and so do I. At any rate, it is invariable for a Norse meal, in this house. It is one of the things which can be transplanted. Gyda would have enjoyed a row of reindeer's horns bristling along the eaves of her cottage; but I told her the boys of the Hollow would not leave them long if I set them there.' 'But you are half Danish,' said Wych Hazel. 'And was it for love of Denmark that you got your name?' 'Which name? If you please?' 'You know,' said Wych Hazel, with a shy blush, as if it were a sort of freedom for her to know and speak it, 'they call you, "Dane Rollo." ' 'That's not my name, though,' said he, smiling. 'I am no further a Dane than being born in Copenhagen makes me so. I am half Norse, and a quarter German; Denmark has given me a nickname,--that's all.' 'Then, if we were in Norway and this a considerable farmhouse, we should have passed through an ante-room filled with all sorts of things. Meal chests, and tools, and thongs of leather, skins of animals and wild birds, snow shoes and casks and little sledges. Do you know,' he went on, 'if this were not the land of my father, I could find it in my heart to go and live in the land of my mother. It is a noble land, and it is a fine people. Feudal law never obtained footing there; every landholder held under no superior; and so there is a manly, genial independence in all the country-side, not found everywhere else.' He went on for some little time to give Wych Hazel pictures of the scenery, unlike all she had ever known. He knew and loved it well, and his sketches were given graphically. In the midst of this Gyda came in again; and Rollo broke off, and asked her, laughingly, if she had any 'fladbrod.' 'Fresh,' she said. 'Olaf, can't you get her some peaches?' Rollo went off; and the old woman began to set her table with bowls and plates and spoons; an oddly carved little tub of butter, and a pile of thin brown cakes. Having done this, and Rollo not returning, on the contrary seeming to have found more than peach trees to detain him, for the sound of hammer was heard at intervals, the old woman came and stood by Wych Hazel again. The straw hat was off; and she eyed in a tender kind of way, wistful too, the fair young face. 'Dear,' she said, in that same wistful way, laying her hand on the girl's shoulder, 'does he love you?' Hazel started in extreme surprise; looking up with wide-open eyes; and more pale than red in her first astonishment. 'He? me?--No!' she said, as the blood came surging back. But then recollections came too, and possibilities--and eyes and head both drooped. And with the inevitable instinct of truth the girl added, under her breath-- 'Perhaps--how do I know? I cannot tell!' By that time head and hands too were on the back of her chair, and she had turned from Gyda, and her face was out of sight. With a tender little smile, which she could not see, the old Norse woman stood beside her, and with tender fingers which she did feel, smoothed and stroked the hair on each side of her head. For a few minutes. 'And, dear,' she said presently, in the same soft way, 'do you love him?' There are questions, confusing enough when merely propounded by ourselves, in the solitude of our hearts; but which when coming first from the lips of another, before they have been fairly recognized as questions, become simply unbearable. Hazel shrank away from the words, gentle as they were, with one of her quick gestures. 'I do not know,' she cried. 'I have never thought! I have no business to know!' And lifting her head for a moment, with eyes all grave and troubled and almost tearful, she looked into the face of the old Norwegian, mutely beseeching her to be merciful, and not push her advantage any further. 'I know!' said Gyda, softly. 'But it's only me.' And as if recognizing a bond which Wych Hazel did not, she lifted one little white hand in her two brown ones and kissed it. 'Everybody shews me their hearts,' she went on; 'but it's all here,' touching her breast, and meaning probably that it went no further. 'May I love my lad's lady a little bit?' A strangely humble, wistful, sweet look she bent on Hazel as she spoke, to which the girl herself, too dumbfounded and shaken off her feet to quite know where she was, could find no better answer than a full rush of bright drops to her eyes, coming she knew not whence; and then a deep suffusion of throat and cheeks and brow, but was much better recognized and said it meant to stay. Her head went down again. 'Now, it's only me,' said the old woman, quietly again. But Rollo's voice was heard from somewhere speaking her name, and she hurried out. There was a little interval, and then she came back bearing dishes to set on the table. Back and forth she went several times, and very likely had found more things to take up Rollo's attention; for he came not until she had her board all ready and summoned him. It was a well spread board when all was done. Shallow dishes of porridge, piles of fladbrod, bowls of cream, peaches, and coffee. And when Gyda with due care had made a cup for Wych Hazel and brought it to her hand, the little lady was obliged to confess that it was better than even Chickaree manufacture. And the porridge was no brown farinaceous mass in a rough and crude state, but came to table in thin, gelatinous cakes, sweet and excellent when broken into the cream. But if Wych Hazel had been afterwards put in the witness-box to tell what she had been eating, I think she would have refused to be sworn. The sheer necessity of the case had made her hold up her head--cool her cheeks she could not; but she took what was given her, and talked of it and praised it almost as steadily as if she had known what it was. Only, as extreme timidity is with some people an unnerving thing, there were moments when, do what she would, her lips must be screened behind the cup, and words that she said which were almost hoarse from the extreme difficulty with which they were spoken. As for a laugh, she tried it once. She was served and tended with, it is hard to say whether most care or most pleasure, by both her companions. Midway of the meal came a help to her shyness. The door slowly opened and a girl stepped in. She might have been fourteen or fifteen; she was tall enough for that; but the little figure was like a rail. So slight, so thin, so little relieved by any sufficiency of drapery in her poor costume. But the face was above all thin, pale, worn; with eyes that looked large and glassy from want and weariness. She came in, but then stood still, looking at the party where she had expected to find only the old Norwegian woman. 'Who is this?' said Rollo to Gyda. 'It is Trüdchen, of the Hollow. What is wanting, my child?' said Gyda. 'Come seeking medicine for the mind or body?' said Rollo. But after a second glance he rose up, went to the girl and offered a chair. She looked at him without seeming to know his meaning. 'Speak Deutsch, Olaf,' said Gyda; 'and ye'll get better hearing. She can't speak yon.' A few words in German made a change. The wan face waked up a little and looked astonished at the speaker. Rollo seated her; then poured out himself a cup of Gyda's coffee, creamed and sugared it duly, and offered it to the girl with the observance he would have given to a lady. Then he moved her chair nearer to the table, and supplied porridge and then peaches; talking and talking to her all the while. The answers began to come at last; the girl's colour changed with the coffee, and her eyes brightened with every spoonful of the cream and porridge; and at last came a smile--what was it like?--like the wintriest gleam of a cold sky upon a cold world. Rollo got better than that, however, before he was done. He had come back to Wych Hazel and left the girl to finish her supper in peace; when suddenly his attention was attracted by some question addressed by the latter to Gyda. He looked up and himself answered. The girl started from her seat with a degree of animation she had given no symptom of till then, said a few words very eagerly and hurriedly, and darted from the door like a sprite. 'What now?' said Hazel, looking after the girl. 'What has Mr. Rollo done?' 'Cut short somebody's supper, I'm afraid. But she finished her porridge, didn't she? And has taken one peach with her! Do they all look that, Gyda?' Gyda answered that they were 'very bad;' she meant in their way of life and their thriving on it. 'And how otherwise?' There seemed to be not much to say 'otherwise.' They were very good to her, Gyda remarked. Wych Hazel listened, but she risked no more questions. The supper lingered a while longer; Gyda and Rollo talking of various things and drawing in Wych Hazel when they could; then Gyda fetched a book and opened it and laid before Rollo. He left the table and came to Wych Hazel's side. 'Gyda always, when she can, has prayers with her visitors,' he said, 'and she makes them read for her. She, and I, would like it if you do the reading to-night. Will you?' How easily she started to-night!--Hazel answered without looking up-- 'She would rather have you.' 'No, she wouldn't. Excuse me! She asked me to ask you.' The girl had not found her feet yet, nor got clear of her bewilderment. And so, before she more than half knew what she was about she had taken the book and was reading--absolutely reading aloud to those two!--the ninety-first Psalm. Aloud, it was; but only because the voice was so wonderfully clear and sweet-toned could they have heard a word. As it was, neither listener lost one. They knelt then, and Gyda uttered a prayer sweet enough to follow the Psalm. A little louder than Wych Hazel's low key, but not less quiet in tone. It was not long; she took those two, as it were, in the arms of her love, and presented them as candidates for all the blessing of the Psalm; making her plea for the two, somehow, a compound and homogeneous one. The sun was down: it was time to get to horse--for the riders. Gyda's farewells were very affectionate in feeling, though also very quiet in manner. 'Will you come to see me again?' she asked of Wych Hazel, while Rollo was gone out to see to the horses. 'Will you let me? I should like to come.' 'Then you'll come,' said Gyda. She had shaken hands with Rollo before. But now when he came in for Wych Hazel he went up to where Gyda was standing, bent down and kissed her. 'Miss Kennedy, have you said "Tak för maden?" ' 'I? No. How should I?' said Wych Hazel; 'is it a spell?' 'Come here,' said he, laughing. 'You must shake hands with Gyda and say, "Tak för maden;" that is, "Thanks for the meat." That is Norwegian good manners, and you are in a Norwegian house. Come and say it.' She came shyly, trying to laugh too, and again held out her hand; stammering a little over the unaccustomed syllables, but rather because they were prescribed than because they were difficult. Certainly if there was a spell in the air that night Wych Hazel thought it had got hold of her. 'That's proper,' said Rollo, 'and now we'll go. It ought to have been said when we rose from table; but better late than never. That's your first lesson in Norse.' Rollo had been in a sort of quiet, gay mood all the afternoon. Out of the house and in the saddle this mood seemed to be exchanged for a different one. He was silent, attending to his business with only a word here and there, alert and grave. The words to the ear, however, were free and pleasant as ever. At the bottom of the hill, in the meadow, he came close to Wych Hazel's side. 'Don't canter here,' said he. 'Trot. Not very fast, for the people are out from their work now, many of them. But we'll go as fast as we can.' 'Fast as you like,' she answered. 'I will follow your pace.' 'No,' said he, smiling; 'we might run over somebody.' The people were out from their work, and many of them stood in groups and parties along the sides of the street. It was an irregular roadway, with here a mill and there a mill, on one side and on the other, and cottages scattered all along between and behind. It had been an empty way when they came; it was populous now. Men and women were there, sometimes in separate groups; and a fringe of children, boys and girls, on both sides of the road. The general mill population seemed to be abroad. They appeared to be doing nothing, all standing gazing at the riders. The light was fading now, and the wretchedness of their looks was not so plainly to be seen in detail; and yet, somehow, the aggregate effect was quite in keeping with that of Trüdchen's appearance alone at the house above. Through this scattering of humanity the riders went at a gentle, even trot; the horses pacing almost in step, the stirrups as near together as they could be. As they came to the thickest of this crowd of spectators, Rollo courteously raised his hat to them. There was at first no answer, then a murmur, then two or three old hats were waved in the air. Again Rollo saluted them, and in two minutes more the mills were passed. The road lay empty and quiet between the high banks, on which the soft twilight was beginning to settle down. 'I like that,' said Wych Hazel, impulsively, forgetting her shyness--she, too, had bowed as they rode by. 'Mr. Rollo, is it a secret, what you said to that child? It looks to me as if she had brought the people out to look at you.' 'Will you ride?' said he. 'Let us have a canter first.' It was a pretty swift canter, and the two had flown over a good deal of ground before Rollo drew bridle again on coming out into the main road. 'Now,' he said, 'we can talk. There is no secret about anything. The girl asked, at Gyda's, how soon we were going away? I answered, in half an hour. Whereupon she begged very urgently that we would delay and not get to the mills till _she_ had been there; and darted away as you saw.' 'Impressive power of peaches!' said Hazel, with a laugh. 'Commend my penetration. I wish all our waste baskets of fruit could be emptied out in that Hollow, and so be of some use. It would be fun to send Mr. Morton's own grapes'--but there she stopped. 'I am afraid you are mistaken,' said Rollo, gravely. 'The manner and accent of the girl made me apprehend danger of some annoyance--which I think she went to prevent. The road being a _cul de sac_, she knew, and they knew, we must come back that way. Gyda will find out all about it; but she said it meant mischief.' 'Mischief? To us?' 'Yes. They are very degraded, and I suppose embittered, by their way of life; and do not like to see people taking their pleasure as we are doing.' '_That_ was what they were out for! Mr. Falkirk may well say my eyes are ignorant,' said the girl, thoughtfully. 'But Mr. Rollo--is this the only way to---- What do ordinary people call your friend?' 'Gyda? The name is Boërresen--contracted by vulgar usage to Borsen.' 'Well, is this the only way you can get to her cottage?' 'The only way; except by a scramble over the hills and fields where no way is. I fancy you are mistaken again, however, in your conclusions from what you have seen this evening. I do not think they were out to do us mischief. Their attitude did not strike me as like that. I think Trüdchen had been beforehand with them.' 'And does Mrs. Boërresen like to have you come and go through the Hollow, knowing the people?' 'I never heard of the least annoyance to any one there before. I can only surmise that the sight of a lady, where no lady ever comes, excited the spite of some children perhaps. And they might have expressed their spite by throwing a few stones. _That_ I half expected.' 'What would you have done then?' said Wych Hazel, with sudden curiosity. 'Dodge the stones, of course!' Rollo answered quietly. Hazel gleamed up at him from under her hat, her lips in a curl. 'That is only what you would have _tried_ to do,' she said. But then Miss Wych subsided and fell back into the closest rapt attention to the beauties of the landscape and the evening sky. 'The only time,' Rollo went on, 'when the least annoyance would be possible, is after work hours, or just at noon when they are out for dinner. At all other times the whole population is shut up in the mills, and the street is empty.' 'Was it your peaches then after all?' said the girl suddenly. 'Or did she pray us through?' Rollo gave her one of the bright, sweet smiles he sometimes gave to his old nurse. 'How do I know?' he said. 'I think--peaches were sweet. And I don't believe Gyda ever prays in vain.' Of course, such an afternoon, everybody had been out; happily the hour was so late that few were left on the road; but Wych could not escape all encounters. 'Your days are numbered, Dane Rollo!' called out Mr. Kingsland as he went by. 'Coffee and pistols at four to-morrow morning!-- And if my shot fails, there are ten more to follow. The strong probability is that Miss Kennedy beholds us both for the last time!' Which melancholy statement was honoured with a soft irrepressible laugh that it was a pity Mr. Kingsland would not wait to hear. Then before Wych Hazel had brought her face into order, a sharp racking trot came down a cross-road, and Kitty Fisher reined up at her side. 'I vow!' she said,--'you look jolly here! The Viking must have been exerting himself. So! you are the girl that never flirts!' 'What of it?' said Wych Hazel, with cool gravity. 'O nothing,--nothing in the world!' said Miss Fisher. 'I've come to get a lesson, that's all. For real instruction in the art, commend me to your cream-faced people who never do it.' 'Nobody ever saw cream the colour of _my_ face,' said Wych Hazel good-humouredly. 'It is yours, Kitty, that always deserves the comparison.' Here Rollo, who had been sheering about for a minute on his springy bay, suddenly came up between the two girls and kept the brown mare too far to the left to permit another flank movement to out-general him. 'I should like somebody to explain to me,' he said, addressing Kitty, 'what flirting is. I have never been able to come to a clear understanding of what is meant by the term.' 'Very likely,' said Kitty, 'seeing it's a muddled-up thing. Never did it yourself, I suppose?' 'That depends upon what "it" is,' insisted Rollo. 'Does it?' said Kitty. 'Well, if ever you try it with me, you'll burn your fingers and find out.' Again in spite of everything Wych Hazel laughed,--ever so softly, but undeniably. 'Tell me what it is,--and I will promise never to try it with you.' Kitty's handsome face darkened. 'Can you reason back from particular cases to general principles?' she said. 'You always want a great many cases to form an induction,' said Rollo, 'I thought you would shirk the question.' 'Shirk? not I?' said Miss Fisher. 'I was just going to give you an instance. That girl, who has played coy all summer, and wouldn't ride with a man here because she must have her own horse, forsooth; suddenly waives her scruples in favour of another man, and finds she can ride _his_ horse, without difficulty.' Wych Hazel drew up her graceful figure to its full height, but she said not a word. Riding at ease, as usual, Rollo spoke in a voice as clear as it was cold. 'Only a coward, Miss Fisher, strikes a man--or a woman--whose hands are bound. Good evening.' Lifting his hat with his most curt salutation, Rollo seized the bridle of the brown mare and made her understand what was expected of her, his own bay at the instant springing forward with a bound. Miss Kitty was left in the distance. Neither was she mounted well enough to follow if she had had the inclination. The run this time was in good earnest, till they drew rein again near the gate of Chickaree. 'I knew I could trust you to keep your seat,' said Rollo then lightly to his companion, 'even if I was unceremonious.' 'And I--' That sentence was never finished. This last run had rather shaken the colour out of cheeks than into them. But Hazel had a good deal of real bravery about her; and in a minute more she turned again to her companion. 'Thank you, Mr. Rollo,' she said, gravely. 'I think you are a true knight.' 'You might as well talk reason to Vixen as to Kitty Fisher,' muttered Rollo. But in another minute he changed his tone. 'Are you tired?' 'I hardly know. Which should prove that I am not.' 'I am afraid it don't prove that at all.' He was silent till they came to the door where they had mounted in the afternoon. Dismounting then, and coming to Wych Hazel's side to do the same service for her, Mr. Rollo lingered a little about the preliminaries; as if he liked them. 'Mrs. Bywank tells me,' he said, 'that you have been eager all summer for the riding you could not have. You must forgive her,--she cannot help talking of you. Will you do me the honour to let Jeannie Deans stand in your stable for the present, and ride her with whomsoever you please to honour in that way.' There was a little inarticulate cry of joy at that,--then timidly, 'But, Mr. Rollo----' 'Well?' said he, softly. 'You might want her. And--if I rode with other people, they might take me where you would not like her to go. Will you let me ride her sometimes just by myself?' she said, glancing at him and instantly away again. 'That is for your pleasure to say,' he returned lightly, lifting her down. And then, detaining her slightly for just half a second, he added, laughing, 'Please don't take Jeannie anywhere that I would not like her to go!' CHAPTER XXX. THE WILL. That night, and the next morning, Miss Kennedy had a fight with herself, trying hard to regain her footing, which was constantly swept away again by some new incoming tide of thoughts. It looks an easy matter enough, to climb out once more upon the ice through which you have broken; but when piece after piece comes off in your hands, sousing you deeper down than before, the thing begins to look serious. And in this case the young lady began to get impatient. 'Such unmitigated nonsense!' she declared to herself, with her cheeks on fire. But nevertheless said nonsense lifted its head very cleverly from under all the negations she could pile upon it; and indeed looked rather refreshed than otherwise by the operation. How Mr. Falkirk had dimly hinted at such things, long ago,--and how she had laughed at them! Was _this_ what he had suggested her confiding to him?--Whereupon Miss Kennedy brought herself up short. 'I should like to know what I have to confide!' she said. 'I hope I am not quite a fool.' And with that she beat a retreat, and rushed down-stairs, and gave Mr. Falkirk an extravaganza of extra length and brilliancy for his breakfast; which, however, it may be noted, did not include any particulars of her ride. But when breakfast was over, Miss Kennedy for a moment descended to business. 'By the way, sir, I should tell you, Mr. Rollo proposes to leave one of his horses here, for me to use till my own come,-- if that extraordinary day ever arrives. Are you agreeable--or otherwise--Mr. Falkirk?' 'I have never made any professions of being agreeable, Miss Hazel; and it never was charges to me, that I know.' 'No, sir, certainly,--not when rides are in question. But may I use this horse, which has the misfortune to belong to somebody else?' 'I suppose he wouldn't give it to you if it was not fit for you to use,' said Mr. Falkirk, rather growlingly it must be confessed. 'Does he expect you to ride it with anybody but him, my dear?' 'As he made no mention of expecting me to ride with him, sir, the question presents itself somewhat differently to my mind,' said Miss Kennedy, with some heightening of colour. It had not been a 'pale' morning, altogether. 'Having a horse, Mr. Falkirk, may I ride with whom I like?' 'If the giver of the horse has no objections, Miss Hazel, I make none.' 'I am afraid, sir, your long seclusion has slightly unsettled your mind,' said Wych Hazel, looking at him with grave consideration, 'There is no "giver" of the horse in the first place; and in the second, you know perfectly well that with his first "objection" to my escorts, the horse would go back. And you used to be so exact, Mr. Falkirk!' she added, in a melancholy tone. 'Yes, my dear,' said her guardian, passing his hand over his face; 'no doubt my mind is in the condition you suggest. I am probably enchanted; which does not help me to guard you from falling into the same awkward condition. But, Miss Hazel, I have engaged a new groom for you. I desire that you will take him with you instead of Dingee. Dingee is no more than a monkey.' It fell out, however, that Miss Kennedy in the next few days refused several 'escorts,' on her own responsibility; saying nothing about Jeannie Deans. Instead whereof, she went off in the early morning hours and had delightful long trots by herself, with only the new groom; who, she did not happen to remark, developed a remarkable familiarity with the new horse. Threading her way among the beautiful woods of Chickaree, wherever a bridle-path offered, and sure to be at home long before Mr. Falkirk's arrival to breakfast, so that he knew nothing whatever about the matter. Just why this course of action was in favour, perhaps the young lady herself could scarcely have told, had she tried; but she did not try. Whether other associations would break the harmony of some already well established; whether she feared people's questions about her horse; whether she liked the wild, irregular roaming through the forest ' 'ith no one nigh to hender'-- as Lowell has it. This last was undeniably true. Meantime Mr. Rollo himself was away again--gone for a few days at first, and then by business kept on and on; and it suddenly flashed into Wych Hazel's mind one day, that now, before he got home, was the very time to go and have a good long talk with Primrose and her father. Nobody there to come in even at dinner time but Dr. Arthur; and him Wych Hazel liked so much and minded so little, that Dr. Arthur was in some danger of minding it a good deal. She would go early and ride Jeannie Deans, and get home before the crowd of loungers got out for their afternoon's play. At most it was but a little way from Dr. Maryland's to the edge of her own woods; not more than three miles perhaps; four to the gate. Primrose was overjoyed to see her. 'What does make your visits so few and far between?' she cried as her hand came to lift off Wych Hazel's hat. 'Well,--what does make yours?' said Hazel, gaily. 'I am come for a little talk with you, and a lecture from Dr. Maryland, and any other nice thing I can find.' 'Then we shall keep you to dinner, and I'll have your horse put up. I do not see so much of you, Hazel, as I hoped I should when you came. You are such a gay lady.' It was difficult to deny this. However, the talk ran on to other pleasanter topics, and was enjoyed by both parties for about half an hour. Then came a hindrance in the shape of a lady wearing the very face that had bowed to Wych Hazel so impressively from the carriage in Morton Hollow. The very same! the long pale features, the bandeaux of lustreless pale hair enclosing them, and two of those lustreless eyes which look as if they had not depth enough to be blue; eyes which give, and often appropriately, the feeling of shallowness in the character. But now and then a shallow lake of water has a pit of awful depth somewhere. Prim's face did not welcome the interruption. 'This is my sister, Prudentia--Mrs. Coles,' she said. 'It is Miss Kennedy, Prudentia.' A most gracious, not to say ingratiating, bend and smile of Mrs. Coles answered this. She was a tall, thin figure, dressed in black. It threw out the pale face and flaxen bandeaux and light grey eyes into the more relief. 'I am delighted to see Miss Kennedy,' she said. 'It is quite a hoped-for pleasure. But I have seen her before--just seen her.' Wych Hazel bowed--remembering with some amusement Mr. Rollo's caracole on the former occasion all about Mrs. Coles. Privately she wished she had not promised to stay to dinner. 'I was frightened to death at your riding'--the lady went on. 'Did your horse start at anything?' 'My horse starts very often when I am on him,' said Wych Hazel laughing. 'Does he! And do you think that is quite safe?' 'Why not?--if I start too. The chief danger in such cases is in being left behind.' Wych Hazel was getting her witch mood on fast. Mrs. Coles looked a trifle puzzled. 'But my dear!' she said, 'the danger of _that_, I should think, would be if the other horse started.' 'O no, ma'am,' said Hazel gravely. 'My escorts never even so much as think of running away from me.' At that point Primrose's gravity gave way, and she burst into a laugh. Mrs. Coles changed the subject. 'I have been very impatient to see one I have heard so much of,' she began again. 'In fact I have heard of you always. I should have called at Chickaree, but I couldn't get any one to take me. Arthur, he was busy--and Dr. Maryland never goes anywhere but to visit his people--Prim goes everywhere, but it is not where I want to go, for pleasure; and Dane I asked, and he wouldn't.' 'He did not say he wouldn't, Prudentia,' remarked her sister. 'He didn't say he would,' returned Mrs. Coles, with a peculiar laugh; 'and I knew what that meant. O, I should have got there some time. I will yet.' Miss Kennedy bowed--she believed the fault must be hers. But she had not quite understood--or had confused things--in her press of engagements. Mrs. Coles graciously assumed that there had been no failure in that quarter. And Dr. Maryland came in, and the dinner. A nice little square party they were, for Dr. Arthur was not at home; and yet somehow the conversation flowed in more barren channels than was ever the wont at that table in Wych Hazel's experience. A great deal of talk was about what people were doing; a little about what they were wearing; an enormous amount about what they were saying. Part of this seemed to be religious talk too, and yet what was the matter with it? Or was it with Wych Hazel that something was the matter? Primrose and Dr. Maryland then shared the trouble, for whatever they said was in attempted diversion or correction or emendation. Certainly among them all the talk did not languish. There came a pause for a short space after dinner, when Dr. Maryland had gone back to his study. Then there was a demand for Primrose; one of her Sunday school children wanted her. Wych Hazel and Mrs. Coles were left alone. Mrs. Coles changed her seat for one nearer the young lady. 'I have been really anxious to see you, my dear Miss Kennedy,' she began, benignly. 'Some one of my escapades has reached her ears!' thought the young lady to herself; 'now if I can give her a good, harmless, mental shock,--just to bear it out!--I certainly will.--That sounds very kind,' she said aloud. 'Yes,--you know I heard so much about you when you were a child, and your connection with this house, and all;--and your whole romantic story; and now when I learned that you were grown up and here again, I really wanted to see you and see how you looked. I must, you know,' she added, with her peculiar smile. There was so much in these words that was incomprehensible, that Wych Hazel for the moment was at a loss for any answer at all; and waited for what would come next, with eyes rather larger than usual. Mrs. Coles went on, scanning her carefully as she spoke, that same smile, half flattering, half assuming, wreathing her lips. 'I did want very much to see you--I was curious, and I am. Do tell me--how does it feel to have two guardians? I should think, you know, that one would be enough for comfort; and the other is sure to be a jealous guardian. Perhaps you don't mind it,' added Mrs. Coles, with a face so amiable, that if Wych Hazel had been a cat it would have certainly provoked a spring. The first thing that struck the girl in this speech, was a certain sinister something, which by sheer instinct of self- defence threw her into position at once. The outward expression of it this time, seemed to be just one of the poor jokes about Mr. Rollo. 'Have you two guardians?' Mr. Nightingale had said. 'O sometimes I mind one, and sometimes I do not!' she answered, with a laugh. 'Ah, but _which_ one do you mind?' said Mrs. Coles shrewdly. 'Or do they both pull together? To be sure, that is to be hoped, for your sake. It is a very peculiar position! And, I should think, trying. It would be to me.' 'People say there are a good many trying situations in life,' said Wych Hazel meekly, watching her antagonist. Why did the lady seem to her such? 'Yes!' said Mrs. Coles with half a sigh. 'And to be young and rich and gifted with beauty and loaded with admiration, isn't the worst; if it _is_ trying to enjoy it all between two guardians. Do they keep you very close, my dear?' ('I think she is a little crazy,' thought the girl. 'No wonder--with such eyes.'--) 'A dozen could hardly do that, ma'am, thank you. Makes a more difficult fence to leap, of course--but when you are used to the exercise--' Mrs. Coles laughed, a thin peculiar sort of laugh, not enjoyable to the hearer, though seeming to be enjoyed by the person from whom it proceeded. She had the air of being amused. 'Well,' she said, 'I should like to see you leap over fences of Dane's making. He used to do that for mine sometimes; it would serve him right. Does he know you do it?' Unmistakeably, by degrees, Hazel felt her pulses quickening. There was more in this than mere banter; it was too connected and full of purpose for insanity. What was it? what dread was softly creeping towards her; and she could hear only a breaking twig or a rushing leaf? She must be very wary! 'I have been riding in other directions,' she answered carelessly. 'And not leaping much at all.' The laugh just appeared again. 'Of course I do not know, but I fancy, his fences would not be easy to get over; Dane's, I mean. He was a very difficult boy to manage. Indeed I cannot say that I ever did manage him. He would have his own way, and my father always take sides with him. So everybody. So Primrose. O, Prim won't hear me say a word against him. And I am not saying a word against him; only I was very curious to know how he would fill his new office, and how well you would like it, and how it would all work. It is quite a romance, really.' 'And it is quite easy to make out a romance where none exists,' said Miss Kennedy, in a frigid tone. 'My dear! you wouldn't say that your case is not a romance?' said Mrs. Coles. 'I never knew one equal to it, out of books; and in them one always thinks the situation is made up. And to be sure, so is this; only Mr. Kennedy and Dane's father made it up between them. Don't you call your case a romance?' 'What part of my own case?' said the girl defiantly. If people had come to this, it was high time to stop them. 'Perhaps if you will be kind enough to speak more in detail, I may be able to put you right on several points.' 'My dear!' said Mrs. Coles, again with a surprised and protecting air, through which the amusement nevertheless shone. 'Don't you call the terms of the will romantic?' 'What will? and what terms?'--The defiance was in her eyes now. 'I cannot correct details if you keep to generals.' 'Your father's will, my dear; your father's and mother's I should say, for she added her signature and confirmation. And I'm sure _that_ was one remarkable thing. It is so uncertain how boys will grow up.' 'And the romance?' said Wych Hazel. 'Will you tell me what version of it you have heard?' 'Why, my dear, you know Dane is your guardian, don't you?' The girl's heart gave a bound--but that could wait; just now there was other business on hand. 'Well,' she said, 'is that the opening chapter? What comes next? I cannot review in part.' 'But didn't you know that, my dear? Did they keep it from you?' Wych Hazel laughed,--Mrs. Coles was too much a stranger to her to know how,--and took out her watch. 'I must go in ten minutes,' she said,--'and I do want to hear this "romance," first. One's private affairs get such fresh little touches from strange hands! Just see what a heading for your next chapter, Mrs. Coles,--"_N.B._ The heroine did not know herself." Will it take you more than ten minutes?' she added, persuasively. 'If you didn't know, Primrose will be very angry with me,' said the lady, not seeming terrified, by the way,--'and Dane will be fit to take my head off. I had better go away before he comes.' 'Why, he is not your guardian too, is he?' said the girl, mockingly. 'That would prove him a man of more unbounded resources than even I had reason to suppose.' 'No,' said Prudentia, 'it was the other way. I was his once, practically. Not legally of course. That was my father. But do tell me--_have_ I done something dreadful in telling you this?' 'I'll tell you things when you have told me,' said Wych Hazel. 'No cross-examination can go on from both sides at once. But I have only nine minutes now; so your part of the fun, Mrs. Coles, will be cut short, I foresee.'--Certainly Mrs. Coles might well be puzzled. But Wych Hazel had met with her match. 'My dear,' the lady returned, 'what do you want me to say? If you know about the will--that is what I was thinking of, I don't want to say anything I should not say. I didn't know but you knew.' 'And I didn't know but you _didn't_ know,' said Miss Kennedy, feeling as nearly wild as anybody well could. 'If you do not, and I do, it is just as well, I daresay.' And she rose up and crossed the room to an open window from which she could speak to her groom, Lewis, in the distance, ordering up her horse. Mrs. Coles had a good view of her as she went and returned, steady, erect, and swift. 'My dear,' said the lady with that same little laugh, 'I know all about it, and did twelve years ago. You have nothing to tell me--except how the plan works. About that, I confess, I was curious.' 'O I shall not tell you that, Mrs. Coles, unless I hear exactly what you suppose the plan to be. Exactness is very important in such cases. And, by-the-by, you must be the lady of whom Mr. Rollo has spoken to me several times,' said Wych Hazel, with a sudden look. 'Has he? What did he say?' 'Several things. But my horse is coming. Do you think Mr. Rollo would really object to our discussing the "romance" together?' Was it cunning or instinct in Wych Hazel? Mrs. Coles answered with a significant chuckle, but added--'My dear, you know he has money enough of his own.' 'Has he?' said Hazel, seeming to feel the lava crack under her feet, and expecting every moment a hot sulphur bath. 'So of course he is not to be supposed to want any more. Didn't you know he was rich?' 'Never thought about it, if I did.' 'No, I suppose not. But if you never thought about it, nor about him,--I declare! it _is_ hard that he should have the disposal of you and all you've got. Rich! his father was rich, and his money has been growing and growing all these years. I daresay he'll not be a bad master,--but yet, it's rather a hard case, _if_ you never thought of him.' Wych Hazel was silent a moment, as if thinking. 'What was the exact wording of the will, Mrs. Coles? Do you remember?' 'Wording? I don't know about wording, the lawyers curl their words round so, and plait them together; but the sense I know well enough; the terms of the will. It made a great impression upon me; and then seeing Dane for so many years, and knowing all about it, I couldn't forget it. This was the way of it. You know your father, and your mother, and Dane's father were immense friends?' She paused, but Wych Hazel gave her no help. 'So they struck up this plan between them, when Mr. Kennedy knew he was ill and wouldn't ever be well again, and that his wife would not long outlive him. You were put under that old gentleman's guardianship,--I forget his name at this minute, but you know it well enough,--Mr. Falkirk! that was it. You were to be under Mr. Falkirk's guardianship, and Dane was to be the ward of my father; and so it was, you know. But when he arrived at the age of twenty-five, upon making certain declarations formally, before the proper persons, Dane, the will appointed, should be joint guardian with Mr. Falkirk, and look after you himself.' Mrs. Coles paused and surveyed her auditor; indeed she had been doing that all along. And perhaps people of her sort are moved from first to last by a feeling akin to that which possessed the old Roman world, when men were put to painful deaths at public and private shows to gratify a critical curiosity which observed how they conquered pain or succumbed under it. Mrs. Coles paused. 'But I haven't told you,' she went on with a look as sharp as a needle, 'I haven't told you yet the substance of the declaration Dane was to make, to enable him to take his position. He was to declare, that it was his wish and purpose to make you his wife. Upon that understanding, with the approbation of Mr. Falkirk and my father, the thing was all to be fixed, as I told you. Then you would be between two guardians. And if you, up to the age of twenty-five, married any one else, against their joint consent, your lands and properties were to pass away from you to him, except a certain provision settled upon you for life. And,' said Mrs. Coles, with another chuckle, 'I wanted to know how it feels.' Had an arrow or a bullet gone through her? or was it only the hot iron burning in those words? Hazel did not know. The one coherent thought in the girl's mind, was that a dying standard-bearer will sometimes bring away his colours. She brought off hers. 'I see but two mistakes,' she said, forcing herself to speak slowly, clearly. 'But I daresay either Mr. Rollo or Mr. Falkirk can point them out, any time. I must go. Good afternoon.' She was gone--Mrs. Coles hardly knew by which way. The next minute Dr. Maryland's study door that looked on the garden swung back, and Wych Hazel stood by his side. Outside were Lewis and Jeannie Deans. Her eyes were in a glitter,--the Doctor could see nothing else. 'Sir,' she said, laying her hand on his book in her eagerness,--'excuse me,--Is this story that Mrs. Coles tells, true?' In utter astonishment, gentle, wondering, benignant, the Doctor looked up at her. 'Hazel? What is the matter? Sit down, my dear, if you want to speak to me.' She moved a few steps off, as if afraid of being held. 'Is this true, Dr. Maryland, that she says about me----and----Mr. Rollo?' The words half choked her, but she got them out. 'The will?--don't you know?--you must know! Is it true?' 'What are you talking of, Hazel? Sit down, my dear. Prudentia? What has she been talking to you about? I hope--' 'My father's will,--does she know?' Hazel repeated. 'Your father's will?--Prudentia?--Has she been talking to you of that! My dear, that was not necessary. It was not needful that you should hear anything about it; not now. I am sorry. Prudentia must have forgotten herself!' Dr. Maryland looked seriously disturbed. 'You do not tell me!' cried the girl. 'Dr. Maryland, is it true, what she says?' 'I do not know what she has said, my dear. But you need not be troubled about it. It was a kind will, and I think on the whole a wise one,--guarded on every side. What has Prudentia said to you, Hazel?' The Doctor spoke with grave authority now. To which Miss Kennedy replied characteristically. She had caught up the words as he went on,--'not needful she should know,'--'she need not be troubled,'--then it was true! Everybody knew it except herself; everybody was doubtless also wondering how it felt! For a second she looked straight into her old friend's face, trying vainly to find a negative there, and then without a word she was off. And if Lewis had been called upon to bear witness, he might have said that his young mistress flew into the saddle, and then flew home. CHAPTER XXXI. WHOSE WILL? A great new sorrow is a many-cornered thing; having its sharp points that sting, and its jagged points that wound; with others so dull and heavy and immoveable that one is ready to wish they could pierce through and make an end. And it is quite impossible to tell beforehand on which of them we may happen to strike first. Wych Hazel tried them all on her way home; but when that last one came, it stayed; and through all the sharpness of the others--through anger and mortification and the keen sense of injury, and the fiery rebellion against control--the moveless weight upon her breast was worse than all. What was it? What laid it there? Not much to look at. A poor little plant, cut down and fallen--that was all. Nobody knew when it started, and no one could say that it would ever bloom: it had been doubtful and shy of its own existence, and she herself had never guessed it was there, till suddenly its fragrance was all around. And even now, wilted and under foot, it was sweeter than everything else; sweeter than even its own self had ever been before. Yes; of all the bitter truths she had heard that day, this that she said to herself was the one supreme: Gyda's words of expectation would never be made good. 'Never,' she repeated. 'Never, never!'--and it seemed to Hazel that in all her lonely life she had never before known what it was to feel alone. _This_ then explained all his wonderful care of her,--of course; it was part of his legal duty. She should learn to hate him now, she knew. Very likely he found it amusing as well! It must be rather spicy work to a man loving power, to manage a wild girl and her estate together--and with that Miss Kennedy's resolution took a vehement turn. And _this_ was why Mr. Falkirk had been so easy--and why--and why-- At which point thoughts and breath got in an utter tangle, and she had to begin all over again. He could not wait to be guardian till she gave him permission.--'Well for him!' said Miss Hazel, with a gesture of her head. And then if she married anybody else without his leave--and she would have to ask his leave!--Would she?--not quite, the girl thought to herself. Neither in great things nor in small would he be troubled _much_ in that way. Very generous of him to declare his purpose--of--of-- And here suddenly thoughts flew off to Gyda's soft-spoken title for her,--words that bore yet their freight of shame and pleasure, for Hazel's head went down. She brought herself back sharply. _Very_ nice of him to tell other people what he meant to do!--of course _her_ purposes in that line were of small moment, if she had any. Things would run in this style now, she supposed: 'Thank you, Mr. May,--I will ask Mr. Falkirk; and if he approves I will ask Mr. Rollo--if I can find him, for he is generally away. And if _he_ says yes, I can go.' No visitors saw her that day;--and Mr. Falkirk had his breakfast alone, watched over by Mrs. Bywank. 'Miss Wych had a headache,'--which was extremely likely, as she had cried all night. But after that the world of Chickaree went on as usual, to all outward appearance. Some weeks had passed over since the ride to Morton Hollow, when one afternoon Rollo's bay again walked up to the side entrance of the Chickaree house. The few days of his intended absence had been lengthened out by the wearisome delays of business, so that that morning had seen the young gentleman but just home. In the course of a private interview with Dr. Maryland he had received some disagreeable information. 'By the way, Dane,' said Dr. Maryland relunctantly, 'I have bad news for you.' 'What is it, sir?' 'At least it is not good. How bad it may be I can't tell. Hazel has heard all about--what she shouldn't have heard!--the terms of the will and the whole story.' A flash of very disagreeable surprise crossed the young man's face. He was silent. 'It seems Prudentia told her,' Dr. Maryland went on, uneasily. 'I don't understand how she could be so thoughtless; but so it is. Hazel was very much excited by what she heard.' 'Naturally! You saw her?' 'For a minute. She came to me to know if it was true; but she did not stay after that.' No remark from the opposite party. 'I'm very sorry about it,' continued the old gentleman. 'I'm afraid--I was afraid, it might make you trouble, Dane. Prudentia is much to blame.' Dane answered nothing. He wrung his late guardian's hand by way of acknowledging his sympathy, and left the study. 'I had almost caught my bird!' was his thought, pretty bitterly realized,--'and this woman has broken my snares. It isn't the first time!' He saw, he thought he saw, the whole character and extent of the mischief that had been done. He knew Wych Hazel; he could guess at the bound of revulsion her spirit would make at several points in the narrative that had been told her. He knew Prudentia; he could fancy that the details lost nothing in the giving. But the steadiness, not of feeling, but of nerves and judgment, which was characteristic of him, kept his eyesight clear even now. He did not fall into Wych Hazel's confusion of thoughts and notions; nor did his hunter's instincts fail him. His game was removed to a distance; _that_ he saw; it might be a long distance,--and how much patient skill might be called for before it would be within his grasp again it was impossible to guess. There were odds of another hunter catching up the coveted quarry; other snares might be set, of a less legitimate nature; other weapons called into play than his own. There are some natures who do not know how to fail, and who never do fail in what they set themselves to accomplish. In spite of disadvantages, Rollo had very much in his favour; and this peculiar constitution of mind, among other things. He would go up to Chickaree that same day. Before presenting himself there, he and the bay horse travelled, I am afraid to say how many miles in two hours. But nerves and senses were in their usual condition of excellent soundness, and his temper in its usual poise, when he turned in at the gate of Chickaree, and mounted the hill. Before he quite reached the house, however, Mr. Rollo, being quick of eye, caught a signal from among the trees down towards the garden: a woman's hand raised in the fashion of a Sunday school scholar asking leave to speak. Drawing bridle, to make sure that he saw right, or to find what this strange sign might mean, he presently saw little Phoebe of the mill, who, leaving her basket of muslins on the grass, now came running towards him. Phoebe's regard for Mr. Rollo, it may be said, was second only to her devotion to her mistress. 'I hope I'm not taking too much of a liberty, sir,' she began, all out of breath with eagerness and running, 'but I said to myself maybe Mr. Rollo would know what to do. For I'm sure Miss Hazel must be very sick,--and nobody takes a bit of notice.' The inner pang with which this advice was received did not at all appear. Rider and horse were motionless, and the answer was a grave-- 'Why do you think so, Phoebe?' 'May I tell you all about it, sir?' said the girl, earnestly. Then without waiting for permission--'I never have told a living soul, Mr. Rollo; for Mrs. Bywank she shuts me up with: "Do your work Phoebe, and don't talk;" and so I have, sir, always. It was one day after a ride--for she's had the beautifullest horse, sir!--since you've been away, I guess; and she'd ride every morning before breakfast, and come home looking--Well I can't begin to tell!' said Phoebe, enthusiastically. 'But Reo said it was the flush of the morning going through his gate.' The bay lifted up one foot and struck it impatiently on the ground. His rider sat still, waiting upon Phoebe's words. The reins were on the horse's neck, but the creature probably had made up his mind that any volunteer extra steps were unnecessary under his new master, for he stood like a rock, that one foot excepted. 'So,' said Phoebe, taking up her broken thread, 'of course Jeannie Deans (that's the horse, Mr. Rollo) began to love her, might and main, right off--as everybody does; but even Mr. Lewis allowed he never saw a horse learn so quick. And it isn't often he allows anything,' said Phoebe, with the slightest toss of her head. 'It wasn't for sugar,--sometimes Miss Hazel would give her a lump, but generally not; only she'd pat her and talk to her, and look in her face, and then Jeannie'd look right at her, and begin to follow round if Miss Hazel just held out her hand. Some days she'd come all the way up from the lodge just so,--not holding the bridle nor nothing,--the prettiest sight you ever saw, sir! She didn't call her Jeannie, either,--it was some short, queer name that I never did quite hear, she'd say it so softly. Most like a bird's talk, of anything.' Phoebe paused, smiling at the remembrance. It was well her hearer's nerves were in training. He waited, knowing that he should best get the whole by allowing the yarn to reel off unbroken; so now he only gave utterance to an attentive 'But what next, Phoebe?' 'O, sir,' said the girl, suddenly sober again, 'one day--I didn't know where she'd been, Miss Hazel, I mean,--but it was afternoon, and she was coming home. And I was out under the trees like to-day, taking in. And Miss Hazel stopped and sent Lewis back, and came on alone to the steps, sir,--came like the wind!--and jumped off. And then she off with her glove--and you know what Miss Hazel's hand is, sir,--and the little white thing began to fondle Jeannie Deans. Patting her neck, and stroking her face, and combing out her mane, and fingering her ears; and Jeannie she held her head down, and sideways, as if she meant to give all the help _she_ could. And I was looking on, just among the bushes like, when all in a minute Miss Hazel put both her arms right round the horse's neck and laid her head close down--and there she stood.'--Phoebe paused to take breath. 'Not ill _then_, Phoebe?' said her hearer, in a very low tone. 'O, I don't know, sir!' answered Phoebe, her honest eyes all in a flush. 'I don't know! For just as I ran up to see, Mr. Lewis he came back; and the minute Miss Hazel heard, she was off and away up the steps and into he house, and didn't even wait to see if Lewis had found her handkerchief. But, Mr. Rollo, she's never been to ride since that day; not once. And sometimes when she looks round sudden, her eyes'll shine till they frighten you!' And Phoebe wiped her own eyes with the corner of her apron, and looked up for aid and comfort. 'But Phoebe,'-- and Collingwood here made an impatient movement rather suddenly and had to be brought back to his business-- 'what is the evidence of the _illness_ you speak about?' 'Nothing else ever kept her from riding, Mr. Rollo. And she don't eat--not three bits, sometimes,--only she 'lucinates Mr. Falkirk so that he don't know. And when there's lots and lots of grand company just gone, Miss Hazel will come walking up stairs 'most like one step at a time. There's no flying up and down in the house now, sir. And if you could only once see her eyes, Mr. Rollo! And you know how she used to sing every five minutes?--well, she don't do _that_,' said Phoebe, with closing emphasis. 'Thank you, Phoebe,' said the gentleman at last, 'I am very much obliged to you. I will see what is best to be done.' And with a kind nod to the girl he left her. But Collingwood walked every step of the way from there to the door of the house. Dingee answered the first summons, also showing his teeth with pleasure at sight of Mr. Rollo; and ushering him in, darted away on his errand. But Dingee presently returned, more thoroughly taken aback than often befel him. 'Can't make it out, 'xactly, sir,' he said, hesitating. 'Fact is, it's drefful hard work to 'member messages,--sight easier made 'em up! But Missee Hazel say, Mas Rollo--_thought_ she say-- please 'scuse her dis afternoon. 'Pears like dat ar' headache done come back,' said Dingee, in his bewilderment. 'He been on hand, powerful!' 'I daresay you delivered the message quite right, Dingee,' said the gentleman, not at all surprised at its tenor; and giving the boy something to justify the showing of his ivories again, he went away And the bay walked every step of the road down the hill through the woods to the gates of Chickaree; but from there he went in a long straight gallop home. CHAPTER XXXII. CAPTAIN LANCASTER'S TEAM. It was between eight and nine o'clock one evening, two or three days later, when Mr. Rollo was informed that some one wanted to speak to him. It was Reo Hartshorne. 'Very glad to see you home, sir,' said Reo earnestly; he was a man of few words. 'I beg pardon--but are you going to the Governor's to-night, Mr. Rollo?' 'Powder? No.' 'I have just come from taking Miss Wych,' said Reo, 'and met Lewis, and heard you were home. Mr. Rollo,--do you know that a four-in-hand party goes from Governor Powder's to-night at ten o'clock?' 'I have but lately got home, Reo, and so have not heard quite all the news. But I have nothing to do with the four-in-hand club.' 'Miss Wych bade me come for her at eleven,' said Reo, going straight to his point. 'And as she went in, Mr. Nightingale's man laughed and said I'd better not lose my time. Eleven to- morrow would be bearer the mark. And I might have told Mr. Falkirk, sir,--but you were nearer by, and--a trifle quicker. So I came. They're to stop at Greenbush for supper. And if some of those young men come out as fit to drive as they went in, it'll be something they never did before.' 'You came back this way,--with the carriage?' 'Yes, Mr. Rollo.' 'How do the horses go?' 'First-rate, sir. Want nothing but using.' 'Who is with you? Dingee or Lewis?' 'Lewis.' 'You are not fit to be up all night, Reo. I will take Lewis, and drop you at Chickaree as we pass.' 'Fit to do anything for my little lady, Mr. Rollo. And I know the horses.' 'Very well. Go into the kitchen and get some refreshment. Tell Lewis Miss Maryland and I are going out in the carriage, and we will leave him at Chickaree. I will be ready in fifteen minutes.' And in fifteen minutes Primrose had been apprized of the service required of her, was ready, and the party set out. To Greenbush, round by Chickaree, was a drive of twenty miles or more; from Valley Garden it was something less. The road was quiet enough at that hour, winding through a level part of the country, lying white and still in the unclouded moonlight; and Greenbush was reached in due time. The place was little more now than one of those old taverns to be found on any stage route, with its settlement of out-buildings; but the present keeper of the house was an adept, and his suppers were famous. The tavern, however, unlike most of its class, stood in a patch of rather thick woodland, and boasted a high surrounding fence and great gates at either entrance, having been once a grand mansion. House and gateways were all alight now, and the winding approach through the trees was hung with swinging lamps. But the entrances were guarded. 'No carriage admitted till the four-in-hands come in!' said the men on duty. On foot, however, privately and humbly, the gentleman and lady were allowed entrance. Rollo secured a comfortable room, with some difficulty, and also ordered and obtained supper, not without scruples and grumbles, all the strength of the house being enlisted in the interests of the coming guests; nevertheless money will do everything; and coffee, cold chicken and bread and butter were served in tolerable style. It availed only for outward circumstances of comfort, for poor Rosy was extremely nervous and troubled in mind; very anxious for Rollo, very discomfited on account of Wych Hazel, very doubtful of the part she herself was to play. Rollo himself was--the red squirrel. Leaving Rosy with a kind admonition not to worry herself, and to take some bread and chicken, he went out again to see that the carriage was drawn up properly out of the way and Reo's refreshment cared for; and then he took post himself in the shadow of a clump of firs to wait for the expected revellers. 'Pity the lady hadn't stayed too, sir,' said one of the men. 'They'll be along just now. There's more of 'em down than common, this year, they tell me, and it'll be a show.' Other people thought so too, evidently, for vehicles of various sorts, and people to match, began to gather along the road, till all the space about the entrance-way was well lined. An expectant, rather noisy, crowd, a good deal in the interests of horseflesh but with a certain portion also of interest in gay men and women. 'There they come!'--cried a boy high up in one of the trees; but at first it was only a quiet coach with two horses, Governor Powder's own, and at once admitted. Then there was another pause--and at last down came the four-in-hands, with flashing lamps, and harness that glittered all over in the moonlight, and the fine in-time harmony of the horses' hoof- beats. There was singing too, from some of the turn-outs,-- glees and choruses came in a faint wild mingling that rose and fell and changed with the changes of the road. 'Captain Lancaster's ahead!' said one of the men. 'No--it's Richard May.' 'See for yourself, then,' said the other, as the first superb four-in-hand came up; the horses shining almost like their own harness, the drag in the newest style of finish, and with every seat full. A young officer in undress uniform was on the box, and by his side sat Wych Hazel. There was time for but a look as the drag swept round the turn--just time to see who it was, and that she wore no bonnet, but instead a sort of Spanish drapery of black lace, and that his horses gave Captain Lancaster so little concern that Miss Kennedy had nearly all his attention,--then the vision was gone. Not singing, these two, but the spectators heard her sweet laugh. Flashing past, followed by another and another though not all of equal style. The looker-on in the shade of the fir trees just noticed that Kitty Fisher drove the second,--just caught other familiar voices as they flew by. There is no doubt but Miss Kennedy's younger guardian felt there was a hard task upon him that night. Out of all the glamour and glitter, the brilliance and beauty of such an entertainment, he must be the one to take her, and substitute an ignominious quiet progress home in her own carriage for the fascination and excitement of Captain Lancaster's driving, and Captain Lancaster's--and many others'--homage. And, worse yet, the authority which he guessed well enough the little lady rebelled against more than against any other point in the arrangement that had displeased her, must here find in its exercise. However, well as he knew the bad move it was for his own game, Mr. Rollo was not a man to shirk difficult tasks. Neither was he so unpractised a hunter as to conclude that any move that _must_ be made, is a bad move. He knew better. So, though he looked grave certainly as he walked back to the house, he walked alertly, like a man ready for business. He was not in a hurry. He gave time to the first confusion to subside, and for people to get quiet in their places; in so far, that is, as comparative quiet might be predicated of any point of that gay evening. Evening indeed! The moon was riding high in the zenith; it was between twelve and one o'clock. Rollo walked the floor, and Primrose, miserable and anxious, looked at him, and dared not say one word. Would Hazel break friendship with her forever? and kindness with Rollo? And how could Dane dare as he dared! When supper was just about to be served, one of the attendants entered the room where the party was gathered, asking if Miss Kennedy was there. A lady and gentleman wanted to see Miss Kennedy. The message in due course of time worked round to the young lady. 'Have you got any friends in these parts?' said Josephine Powder laughing. It was the way of the entertainment; nothing was said without laughing. 'Must you go?' said Stuart Nightingale. 'Another trick of Kitty Fisher's,' said Wych Hazel. 'That mysterious "lady and gentleman" again! You know they sent my carriage away once. O yes, I will go and see what mischief is on foot, and be back in a minute.' The room where Rollo and Prim were waiting was down at one end of the hall; and, dimly lighted as it was, in comparison with the rest of the house, it seemed almost dark. They could see her come down the hall, three or four gentlemen following; and she sending them back with laughing words and glances thrown over her shoulder. 'Now stop just where you are,' she said, turning round. 'I go into the darkness alone, or the charm will be broken.' And on she came with her airy tread, and was well in the room before she saw anybody, and a servant had shut the door. Then the change on her face was pitiful to see. In the excitement of the drive and other things that night, she had evidently forgotten for the time her new trouble. It came back now on the instant, and for one quick moment she put up her hand to her forehead as if with sudden pain. Then crossed both hands upon her breast, and looked down, and stood still. Rollo quitted the room. Primrose came to Wych Hazel's side and threw her arms around her. 'It's only I, dear Hazel,' she said in tones of mingled trouble and tenderness. Miss Kennedy disengaged herself, not roughly but decidedly, holding Primrose off, and looking at her. 'What is the matter?' she said. 'Is Mr. Falkirk ill?' 'No, dear.' 'Who then?' said Wych Hazel. 'Prim, never kill people by degrees.' 'Nobody's ill--nobody! There is nothing the matter with anybody, Hazel--except you. I've come to take care of you, dear.' 'Did you?' said the girl. 'I think you want some one to take care of you, by your looks. But I am rather too busy just now to read essays on sentiment,--that can wait.' She moved towards the door; but Primrose made a spring and caught her. 'Wait!--Hazel, you haven't heard what I wanted to say to you. Don't be angry with me! O dear Hazel, do you know what sort of times these four-in-hand people make down here?' 'I intend to find out.' 'But they are not fit for you, Hazel, indeed: it is not a fit place for you to be. Hazel, they are often tipsy when they drive home. Papa wouldn't let me be in such a place and ride with them, for anything. How come you to be here?' Hazel freed herself again with impatient haste. 'Let go of me!' she said. 'The man who drives _me_ home will be sober. I will not hear any more.' 'Listen, Hazel, listen!' cried Prim, clinging to her. 'O do not be angry with me! But you ought not be here; and Duke will not let you stay, dear. We have brought the carriage to take you home.' Prim never could tell afterwards what sort of a look or what sort of a sound answered that; what she did know was that Wych Hazel was at the door and had it open in her hand. Prim's gentleness, however, on this occasion was no bar to energetic action; with another spring _she_ was at the door and had taken it from Wych Hazel's hand, had shut it, and set her back against it; all too suddenly and determinately to leave chance for prevention. 'Hazel, dear, listen to me. You ought not be here, and Duke will not let you. He has come to take you home, and he brought me with him because he thought it would be nicer for you. And he thought you would rather see me than him; but if you won't listen to me, I must call him. He will not let you stay, Hazel, and Duke always is right. But he thought you would like better to go quietly off with me than to have any fuss made, and all these people knowing about it and everybody talking. Wouldn't it be nicer to go quietly without any one knowing why you go?' It was indescribable the way in which Miss Kennedy repeated the word 'nice!' Then she spoke collectedly. 'Prim, I do not want to call in any of my friends--but I declare I will, if you do not move away!' 'Must I call Duke?' said Prim, despairingly keeping her place. 'If you want him'--said Miss Kennedy, turning now towards the bell. As the young lady faced about again, after pulling the bell rope, she was confronted by her unwelcome guardian, just before her. It is almost proverbially known that the meeting of contrasts is apt to have a powerful influence on one side or the other; unless indeed the opposing forces are, what rarely happens, of equal weight. What met Wych Hazel as she looked at him was power--not of physical strength; the power of high breeding, which is imposing as well as graceful; and also the power of a perfectly unmoved self-possession. While there was at the same time a winsome, gentle look, that she could hardly see in her agitation, the spirit of which she could partly feel in the voice that spoke to her. Neither cloud nor frown nor discomposure of any sort was in it. He bowed, and then held out his hand. 'Are you angry with me?' he said. 'With me, if anybody. Not Prim.' In the vagaries of human nature all things are possible. And it is undoubted that in the first flash of eyes which greeted Mr. Rollo there was mingled a certain gleam of fun. Whether the prospect of a tilt had its excitements--whether she was curious to see how he would carry his new office,--there it was. But then the eye shadows grew deep and dark. She drew back a little, not giving her hand; making instead a somewhat formal courtesy. 'I was called here, it seems, to await your commands, Mr. Rollo. May I have them, if they are ready?' 'They are not ready,' he answered, in a very low tone. 'Let Miss Wych Hazel give commands to herself,--and be loyal and true in her obedience to them.' 'I have given myself a good many since I have been in this room,' said the girl, proudly. 'If I had not I should not be here now.' 'Will you sit down?' 'Thank you--no. Unless we are to spend the rest of the night in quiet conversation.' 'Then we will make the conversation short. Miss Hazel, the company and the occasion you came to grace to-night are unworthy of the honour.' He paused for a reply, but, as none came, he went on: 'You do not know it now, but in the mean time I know it; and I must act upon my knowledge. I have come to take you home. Cannot you trust me, that I would not--for much--do anything so displeasing to you, without good reason?' 'You men are so fond of being "trusted!" ' she said--quietly, though there was some bitterness in the tone--'it is almost a wonder it never occurs to you that a woman might like it too! I know every one of the carriage party with whom I came. And that I did not ask Mr. Falkirk's leave before I left home was only because I did not know that I should need it.' But with that came a quick painful blush, as suddenly remembering other leave that must now be asked. 'I believe you may be trusted thoroughly, so far as your knowledge goes,' he answered, gravely. Then waited a moment and went on. 'You have had no supper. Will you take some refreshment before we set out upon our return journey?' She stood, leaning against the wall, not looking at anything but the floor--and not seeing that;--as still as if she had not heard him. Thinking--what was she thinking?--Then suddenly stood up and answered. 'I can but obey. May I ask you to wait five minutes?--Stand away, Prim, and let me pass.' But he stayed her. 'It is better not to set people's tongues at work. I have sent a message to the Miss Powders, to the effect that Miss Kennedy had been suddenly summoned home, and making your excuses. As from yourself. No name but yours appeared.' If there was any one thing he had done which tried her almost unbearably, it was that! There was a sort of quiet despair in the way she turned from him and the door together, and took the chair she had refused, and sat waiting. Rollo brought her silently a cup of coffee and a plate with something to eat, but both were refused. 'Are you ready, Prim?' Primrose nervously put on her bonnet, which she had with nervous unrest taken off; and Rollo offered his arm to Wych Hazel. 'Let me go by myself,' she said--again not roughly, but as if she could not help it. 'I am not going to run away.' 'In that case it is certainly not the arm of a jailor,' said he, stooping down by her and smiling. But the words, or the look, or something about them, very nearly got the better of Wych Hazel's defences, and her eyes flushed with tears. 'No--no,' she said under her breath. 'I will follow. Go on.' 'Certainly not _me_,' he answered. 'Go you with Prim, and I will follow.' One before and one behind!--thought the girl to herself, comparing the manner of her entrance. She went on, not with Prim, but swiftly ahead of her, and put herself in the carriage, as she had brought herself out of the house. Prim followed. Rollo mounted the box and took the reins, and, having fresh horses from the inn, they drove off at a smart pace. And Hazel, laying one hand on the sill of the open window, leaned her head against the frame, and so, wrapped in her black lace, sat looking out, with eyes that never seemed to waver. Into the white moonshine,--which soon would give way before the twilight 'which should be dawn and a to-morrow.' For a long time Primrose bore this, thinking hard too on her part. For she had much to think of, in connection with both her companions. She was hurt for Rollo; she was grieved for Wych Hazel; was there anything personal and private to herself in her vexation at the needlessness of the trouble which was affecting them? If there were, Primrose did not look at it much. But it seemed very strange in her eyes that any one should rebel against what was, to her, the honey sweetness of Dane's authority. Strange that anything he disliked, should be liked by anybody that had the happiness of his care. And strange beyond strangeness, that this girl should slight such words and looks as he bestowed upon her. Primrose knew how deep the meaning of them was; she knew how great the grace of them was; could it be possible Wych Hazel did not know? One such word and look would have made her happy for days; upon a few of them she could have lived a year. So it seemed to her. She did not wish that they were hers; she did not repine that they were another's; she only thought these things. But there were other thoughts that came up, as a sigh dismissed the foregoing. 'Hazel!--' she ventured gently, when half of the way was done. Hazel's thoughts had been so far away that she started. 'What?' she said hastily. 'May I talk to you, just a little bit?' 'O yes,--certainly. Anybody may do anything to me.' But she kept her position unchanged. 'I am listening, Prim.' 'Hazel, dear, are you quite sure you are doing right?' 'About what?' 'About-- Please don't take it ill of me, but it troubles me, Hazel. About this sort of life you are leading.' 'This sort of life?' Hazel repeated, thinking over some of the days last past. 'Much you know about it!' 'I do not suppose I do. I cannot know much about it,' said Primrose meekly. 'All _my_ way of life has been so different. But do you think, Hazel, really, that there is not something better to do with one's self than what all these gay people do?' 'I think you are a great deal better than I am--if that will content you.' 'Why should it content me?' said Primrose, laughing a little. 'I do not see anything pleasant in it, even supposing it were true.' 'There is some use in training you,' Hazel went on; 'but no amount of pruning would ever bring me into shape.' And with that, somehow, there came up the thought of a little sketch, wherein her hat swung gayly from the top of a rough hazel bush; and with the thought a pain so keen, that for the moment her head went down upon her hands on the window-sill. Primrose was silent a few moments, not knowing just how to speak. 'But Hazel,' she began, slowly--'all these gay people you are so much with, they live just for the pleasure of the minute; and when the pleasure of the minute is over, what remains? I cannot bear to have you forget that, and become like them.' 'Like them?' said Hazel. 'Am I growing like Kitty Fisher?' 'No, no, no!' cried Primrose. 'You are not a bit like her, not a bit. I do not mean that; but I mean, dear,--aren't you just living for the moment's pleasure, and forgetting something better?' 'Forgetting a good many things, you think.' 'Aren't you, Hazel? And I cannot bear to have you.' 'What am I to remember?' said the girl in a sort of dreamy tone, with her thoughts on the wing. 'Remember that you have something to do with your life and with yourself, Hazel; something truly noble and happy and worth while. I am sure dancing-parties are not enough to live on. Are they?' 'No.' Perhaps Primrose thought she had said enough; perhaps she did not know how to choose further words to hit the girl's mood. She was patiently silent. Suddenly Hazel sat up and turned towards her. 'You poor little Prim!' she said, laying gentle hands on her shoulders and a kiss on each cheek,--'whirled off from your green leaves on a midnight chase after witches! This was one of Mr. Rollo's few mistakes: he should have come alone.' 'Should he?' said Primrose, wondering. 'But it wouldn't have been so good for you, dear, would it?' 'Prim'--somewhat irrelevantly--'did you ever have a thorn in your finger?' 'What do you mean?' Primrose answered in just bewilderment. 'Well I have two in mine.' And Miss Kennedy went back to the window and her world of moonlight. She did not wonder that the Indians reckoned their time by 'moons;' she was beginning to check off her own existence in the same way. In one moon she had walked home from Merricksdale, in another driven back from Mrs. Seaton's; and now in this--But then her head went down upon the window-sill once more, nor was lifted again until the carriage was before the steps of Chickaree. 'Dane,' said Primrose, as the two were parting in the dusky hall at home, 'she will never get over this. Never, never, never!' He kissed her, laughing, and giving her hand a warm grasp. 'You are mistaken,' he said. 'She is a more sensible woman than you giver her credit for.' CHAPTER XXXIII. HITS AT CROQUET. The second day after the four-in-hand club affair, the following note was brought to Miss Hazel: 'Will you ride with me this afternoon? 'M. O. R.' And perhaps five words have seldom taken longer to write than these which he received by return messenger: 'Not to-day. Please excuse me. 'Wych Hazel.' It happened that invitations were out for a croquet party at Chickaree; and the day of the party was appointed the third succeeding these events. Thither of course al the best of the neighbourhood were invited. The house at Chickaree stood high on a hill; nevertheless immediately about the house there was lawn-room enough and smooth greensward for the purposes of the play. The very fine old trees which bordered and overshadowed it lent beauty and dignity to the little green; and the long, low, grey house, with some of its windows open to the verandah, and the verandah itself extending the whole length of the building, with cane garden-chairs and Indian settees hospitably planted, made a cheery, comfortable background. September was yet young, and the weather abundantly warm; the sort of weather when everybody wants to be out of doors. No house in the country could show a prettier croquet-green than Chickaree that afternoon. Mr. Falkirk had mounted the hill in advance of other comers, and stood surveying the prospect generally from the verandah. 'Who is to be here, Miss Hazel? I am like a bear newly come out of his winter-quarters--only that my seclusion has been in the other season of the year.' 'Pray let the resemblance go no further, sir! Who is to be here?' said Miss Kennedy, drawing on her dainty gloves,--'all the available people, I suppose. Unless they change their minds.' 'Have the goodness to enlighten me. _Available people_--available for what?' 'Croquet--and flirting.' 'If you please-- I understand, I believe, the first term; it means, to stand on the green and roll balls about among each other's feet; but what is comprehended in "flirting"?' 'Standing in the air and rolling balls there,' said Miss Kennedy. 'Ah! Don't people get hit occasionally?' 'Very likely. But they do not tell.' 'Ah! My dear, has anybody hit you?' 'Thank you, sir,--I generally keep on the ground.' Mr. Falkirk suspended his questions for the space of five minutes. 'I have not heard of your taking any rides lately,' he began again. 'No, sir.' 'How comes that?' 'It comes by my refusing to go.' 'Why, my dear?' said her guardian, looking her innocently in the face. 'Aren't you glad, sir?--How do you do, Mr. Kingsland? Will you be kind enough to explain to Mr. Falkirk the last code of flirtation? while I go and give an order?' 'It is the only thing in which Miss Kennedy is not unsurpassed,--to make my definition short,' said the gentleman, taking a chair. 'I think she will never learn.' Primrose Maryland was the immediate next arrival; and she sat down on the other side of Mr. Falkirk, looking as innocent as her name. Mr. Falkirk had always a particular favour for Primrose. 'Did you come alone, my dear?' he incautiously asked; for Mr. Kingsland was at his other elbow. And Prim knew no better than to answer according to fact. 'Where is Rollo?' 'I don't know, sir. I suppose he is at home.' 'Doubtless thinking one guardian may suffice--as it is a mere croquet party,' said Mr. Kingsland smoothly, but with a covert glance of his eye at Mr. Falkirk. Both Primrose and Mr. Falkirk glanced at him in return, but his words got no other recognition, for people began to come upon the scene. And the scene speedily became gay; everybody arriving by the side entrance and passing through the broad hall to the front of the house. Wych Hazel, returned from her errand, came now slowly through the hall herself with the last arrival. 'I feared you were ill with fatigue,' said a pleasant man's voice. 'Three times I have called to inquire, and three times gone away in despair.' 'I was very tired.' 'But what was the matter?' said the gentleman, pausing in the doorway. 'Some call of sudden illness? a demand upon your sympathies?' 'Nothing of the kind.' 'How then?' said Captain Lancaster, with an appearance of great interest. 'One does not lose a pleasure--and such a pleasure--without at least begging to know why. If it is permitted. We began to think that the witches must have got hold of you in that dark room.' 'One did,' said the girl, so gravely that Captain Lancaster was posed. She knew perfectly well what ears were listening; but there was something in her nature which always disdained to creep out of a difficulty; so she stood still, and answered as he had spoken, aloud. 'O, Miss Kennedy,' cried Molly Seaton, 'that's a fib. Not a real witch?' 'Pretty genuine, I think,' said Hazel, with her half laugh. Now there is no way in the world to puzzle people like telling them the truth. The gentleman and the lady were puzzled. Stuart Nightingale and half a dozen more came up at the instant; and the question of the game to be played, for the time scattered all other questions. For a while now the little green at Chickaree was a pretty sight. Dotted with a moving crowd of figures, in gay-coloured dresses, moving in graceful lines or standing in pretty attitudes; the play, the shifting of places, the cries and the laughter, all made a flashing, changing picture, full of life and full of picturesque prettiness. The interests of the game were at first absorbing. When a long match had been played, however, and there was a pause for refreshments, there was also a chance for rolling balls in the more airy manner Wych Hazel had indicated. 'What was the matter the other night?' Stuart Nightingale demanded softly, as he brought the little lady of the house an ice. 'I could not stay.' 'Summoned home by no disaster?'-- 'It was a sort of disaster to me to be obliged to go,' said Wych Hazel, 'but I found neither earthquake nor volcano at home.' 'Who came for you, Hazel?' said Phinny Powder, pushing into the group which was forming. 'I said it was downright wicked to let you go off so. How did we know but that something dreadful had got hold of you? I thought they ought all of them to go in a body and knock the doors down and find out. But after your message they wouldn't. Who _did_ come for you, Hazel?' 'Who did?' said Hazel. 'Do you think it could have been the same parties who once sent away my carriage when I wanted it?' 'No,' said Phinny; 'I know it wasn't. But who _did_ come for you, Hazel? Nobody knew where you were. And what made you go, if there was no earthquake at home, as you said?' 'Were you _made_ to go, really?' asked Mme. Lasalle, slyly. 'Has Josephine hit the mark with a stray arrow?' 'O, of course I was made to go,--or I shouldn't have gone,' said Wych Hazel lightly. 'My own carriage came for me, Josephine, and I came home in it. Do you feel any better?' 'No, I don't!' said that young lady boldly, while others who were silent used their eyes. '_You_ didn't order it, and I just want to know who did. O, Hazel, I want to ask you--' But she lowered her voice and glanced round her suspiciously. 'Is it safe? Where is that old Mr.----? do you see him anywhere? He has eyes, and I suppose he has ears. Hush! I guess it's safe. Hazel, my dear, _have_ you got two guardians, you poor creature?' 'Have you only just found that out?' said Hazel, drawing a little back from the whisper and answering aloud. 'Prim, what will you have? Mr. May, please bring another ice for Miss Maryland.' 'Well, I've guessed it all summer,' said Kitty Fisher, putting her word in now. 'I always knew that when Miss Kennedy turned round, the Duke turned too, to see what she was looking at.' If truth be no slander, it is sometimes full as hard to bear. Wych Hazel eat her own ice for the next two minutes and wondered what it was. 'Hazel, my dear, you had need to be a saint!' Mme. Lasalle whispered. 'It is--absolutely--outrageous; something not to be borne!' 'But the fun of it is,' broke in Kitty again, 'that we all took it for granted it was mere lover-like devotion! And now, behold, c'est tout au contraire!' Since the day of the ride it had been war to the knife with Kitty Fisher. 'Kitty! Kitty!' said Mr. Kingsland in soft deprecation. 'My dear,' Mme. Lasalle went on mockingly, 'perhaps he would not approve of your eating so much ice. Hadn't you better take care?' 'Must we ask him about everything now, before we can have you?' cried Josephine, in great indignation, quite unfeigned, though possibly springing from a double root. 'O, was it _he_ came for you to Greenbush?' But with that Hazel roused herself. 'You had better ask him anything you want answered,' she said. 'I think he has quite a genius that way.' 'What way? O, you know, friends, perhaps, _she likes it_. What way, Hazel?' 'Does he speak soft when he gives his orders?' said Kitty Fisher. 'Or does he use his ordinary tone?' 'And oh, Miss Kennedy,' said little Molly Seaton, 'isn't it _awfully_ nice to have such a handsome man tell you what to do?' Now Hazel had been at her wits' end, feeling as if there was a trap for her, whatever she said or did not say. Pain and nervousness and almost fright had kept her still. But Molly's question brought things to such a climax, that she burst into an uncontrollable little laugh, and so answered everybody at once in the best manner possible. The sound of her laugh brought back the gentlemen too,--roaming off after their own ices,--and that would make a diversion. But it came up again and again. It was to some too tempting a subject of fun; for others it had a deeper interest; it could not be suffered to lie still. Wych Hazel's ears could hardly get out of the sound of raillery, in all sorts of forms; from the soft insinuation of mischief in a mosquito's song, to the downright attacks of Kitty Fisher's teeth and Phinny Powder's claws. The air was full of it at last, to Wych Hazel's fancy; even the gentlemen, when they dared not speak openly, seemed in manner or tone to be commiserating or laughing at her. 'The diplomacy of truth!' said Mr. Kingsland to Mr. Falkirk, as Hazel passed near them with Mme. Lasalle. 'I must believe in it as a fixed fact,--where it exists! I should judge, by rough estimate, that Miss Kennedy had been asked about fifty- five trying questions this day; and in not one case, to my knowledge, has her answer even clipped the truth. She is a ninth wonder,--and from that on to the twenty-ninth! With all her innocence and ignorance--which would not comprehend nine- tenths of what might be said to her, I do not know the man who would dare say one word which she should not hear!'--With which somewhat unusual expression of his feelings Mr. Kingsland took himself away, leaving Prim and Mr. Falkirk alone on the verandah. But it was a rather weary-faced young hostess that wrapped Prim up, after that, and the lips that kissed her were hot. Mr. Falkirk went down to his cottage and came back to breakfast the next morning, without having broached to his ward several subjects which stirred his thoughts. Finding himself in the fresh light of the new day, and in the security of the early morning, seated opposite Miss Hazel at the breakfast table, with the croquet confusion a thing of the past, he opened his mind. 'You had no wine yesterday, my dear, I observed.' 'No, sir. As I intended.' 'That is not according to custom--of other people.' 'It is my custom--henceforth,' said Wych Hazel. 'Are the reasons too abstruse for my comprehension?' The girl looked up at him, her eyes kindling. 'Mr. Falkirk,' she said, 'if ever again a man gets a glass of wine from my hand, or in my house, I shall deserve to live that July night all over!' Mr. Falkirk did not at all attempt to combat this conclusion. He ate his toast with an extremely thoughtful face for some minute or two.' 'Suppose, by and by, there should be two words to that bargain?' 'Then there will be several more, sir,--that is all,' she said steadily, though her face glowed. 'You mean that you will fight for your position?' 'Inch by inch. Fight for it, and keep it.' Mr. Falkirk's lips gave way a little, though with what expression it was impossible to determine. 'To remark that your position will be remarked upon as peculiar is, I am aware, to make a fruitless expenditure of words in your hearing, Miss Hazel. But it will not make much difference what you do, my dear. They will find the article, in its varieties, at every other house that is open to them.' Mr. Falkirk was thinking probably of young men. 'Well, sir--I, at least, will have no part in making any man unfit to speak to a woman.' Mr. Falkirk ruminated again, and then broke out: 'Why did not Rollo come with Miss Maryland yesterday?' 'I presume, because he did not want to come,--but perhaps you had better ask him,' said Miss Hazel. 'Why should I ask him?' returned her guardian, looking up at her. 'Has Mr. Rollo offended you, Miss Hazel?' 'I merely thought you wanted to know, sir. No,' she answered, to his last question. 'He was invited--if that is what you mean.' 'I fancied,' said Mr. Falkirk, looking puzzled, 'that in the general buzz of tongues yesterday--which is fit to confuse anything with more brains than a mosquito--I heard various buzzings which seemed to have reference to him. Perhaps I was wrong. I did not mean to listen, but if a fly gets into your ear it is difficult not to know it. Was I right, or was I wrong?' 'Right, I fancy, sir. Mr. Rollo's name is very often upon people's tongues.' 'What did they mean? What was it about?' She hesitated a little. 'I daresay your opinion was correct, Mr. Falkirk, as to the meaning as well as the buzz. It is hardly worth bringing up again.' If Mr. Falkirk had any roughness in his manner or in his composition, he had also and certainly a very gentle side of it for his ward. He looked at her again and dropped the subject. But he had got another. He waited a little before bringing it up. 'Another thing I heard confused my ideas, Miss Hazel. You must not wonder at me; you know, a bear _just_ out of winter quarters might well be astonished at coming into a garden full of crickets, and a little unable to distinguish one song from another. But it seemed to me that I heard something said--or alluded to--about your being unwillingly obliged to go home from somewhere. Can you give me any explanation?' The pause was longer this time, the colour unsteady. Then she put both hands up to her forehead, pushing back the dark rings of hair with an impatient touch, and began, speaking low and rapidly, but straight to the point. 'I was invited to a garden party at Mrs. Powder's, and after I got there, found out that the invitation included a four-in- hand drive to Greenbush. And I went. And Mr. Rollo heard of my going, and followed me there with Primrose and Reo and the carriage, and made me come back.'--She had gone on, throwing in details, as if to prevent their being called for. Now the scarlet flush with which the last words were spoken faded away, and she was silent and rather pale. I suppose Mr. Falkirk had done his breakfast. If not, he lost the last part of it. For as Wych Hazel stopped speaking he rose from the table and began to take turns up and down the room; scowling, it must be confessed, as if he would have rather liked an excuse to 'pitch into' his co-guardian. He said nothing for some minutes, and it was not necessary; his eyebrows were eloquent. 'A four-in-hand party!' he said at last. 'Who got it up?' 'Some of the four-in-hand club.' 'Who are they, Miss Hazel?' 'Mr. May, Captain Lancaster, Dr. Singleton,'--Hazel named over sundry names that were unknown to Mr. Falkirk. 'He's a bold man!' said Mr. Falkirk, probably not referring to any member of the club aforesaid. 'I wonder at his impudence. But, my dear!--a four-in-hand party, and Greenbush at night,-- that was no sort of place for you to be! Do you know how these parties come home, who go out so bravely?' 'I knew pretty well, sir, how my party would,' said his ward. 'No you didn't. How should you know anything about it? The young mouse in the fable thought the cat was a very fine gentleman. Con--found him!' said Mr. Falkirk, stopping short, 'how did he know? Was he at the garden party at the Governor's?' 'No, sir.' 'Then how did he know where you were?' 'Mr. Rollo seems to be a man who gives close attention to his duties,'--rather dryly. 'I was the proper person to be applied to,' muttered Mr. Falkirk. 'I should like to be informed how this came about?' But Miss Hazel not giving--as indeed she was in no position to give--any light on this point, Mr. Falkirk walked a little more, and then brought up with: 'Don't go again, my dear.' 'I am not likely to go often anywhere, at such a risk!' said Wych Hazel, the tide beginning to overflow again.--'Poor little me!' she broke out, in a tone that was sorrowful as well as impatient,--'always in charge of two policemen! Why, you could almost keep a convict in order with that!' Then in a moment she sprang up, and coming to her guardian's side laid her hand on his arm. 'I beg your pardon, Mr. Falkirk! I did not mean it in any way to hurt you.' 'No, my dear,' said her guardian, gently, laying his hand on hers. 'I am not hurt. I understand, as I ought, having seen you twitch yourself out of leading-strings ever since you were old enough to go. It is rather hard upon you. But how came it to your knowledge, Hazel?' And Mr. Falkirk looked grave. 'It came--through somebody telling Mrs. Coles what was none of her business,' said the girl, with more energy than exactness of wording. 'Who did that?' 'I am sure I don't know, sir. She talks as if she had known it always.' 'Like enough. And she told you! The whole story, my dear?' added Mr. Falkirk, gently and softly. 'I hope there is nothing more!' said Hazel, again donning her scarlet in hot taste. 'Enough and too much!' muttered Mr. Falkirk. 'Poor child! So the old guardian is better than the young one, my dear?' 'It used to be supposed,' said the girl, dancing off out of the room, 'that twice one is two. But I am inclined to think that twice one is six!'--Which was all the satisfaction Mr. Falkirk got. CHAPTER XXXIV. FRIENDLY TONGUES. Yes, it was very hard for her; much harder than any one knew but herself. The joke was too striking to be passed by, even in the case of an ordinary person; but when it was Miss Kennedy,--heiress, beauty, and queen of favour,--all tongues took it up. She could go nowhere, wear nothing, do nothing, without meeting that one subject face to face. Many things brought it forward. Kitty Fisher of course had exasperation in her heart; but there were other (supposably) gentle breasts where even less lovely feelings, of shorter names, found lodgment. Hazel was condoled with, laughed at, twitted, by turns; until even Mr. Rollo's name in the distance made her shrink. Mrs. Coles had not (apparently) made known the conditions upon which he had assumed his office; but Wych Hazel was in daily terror lest she would; and as people often graze the truth which yet they do not know, so hardest of all to bear just now, were Kitty Fisher's two new names for her: 'the Duchess,' and 'Your Grace.' Most people indeed did not know their point, ignorant of Prim's pet name for Mr. Rollo; but Wych Hazel needed no telling; and her face was sometimes a thing to see. That was the worst of it!--it _was_ a thing to see. And so, while now and then one of her special gentlemen friends would interpose, and draw the strokes upon himself; yet her delicate, womanly fencing was so pretty, so novel; it was such sport to watch the little hands turn off and parry Kitty Fisher's rude thrusts; that few masculine hearts were unselfish enough to forego it. There were actual wagers out as to how long 'the Duchess' could carry it on without losing her temper or clipping the truth; and how soon 'the Fisher' would get tired and give it up. And as for the tokens in Miss Kennedy's face sometimes, who that had once seen them did not watch to see them again? Other people began to take up the new titles; and Mme. Lasalle made courtesies to 'the Duchess,' and Stuart Nightingale and Mr. May bowed low before 'her Grace,' entreating her hand for the quadrille or the promenade. 'And some night he will be standing by and hear them say it!' thought Wych Hazel to herself. What should she do? Where should she go? Since the talk on the drive home from Mme. Lasalle's, the girl had never set foot in one the round dances. Not that she gave in to Mr. Rollo's strictures,--how could _she_ be mistaken?--but because the talk had left an unbearable association about everything that looked like a round dance. There was the constant remembrance of the words he had spoken,--there was the constant fear that he might stand by and think those thoughts again. Then she had been extremely disgusted with Kitty Fisher's new figures; and so, on the whole, in the face of persuasions and charges of affectation, Miss Kennedy could be had for nothing but reels, country dances, and quadrilles. Miss Fisher and her set were furious, of course; for all the gentlemen liked what Miss Kennedy liked: there was no use talking about it. If anybody had asked the girl in those weeks before the fancy ball what she was doing--and why she wanted to do it,--she would have found it hard to tell. Braving out people's tongues, was one thing; and plunging into all sorts of escapades because any day they might be forbidden, was another. A sort of wild resolving that her young guardian should _not_ feel his power; and endeavour to prove to him that anybody aspiring to that office without her leave asked and obtained, was likely to serve a short term. 'Is it only till you marry, my dear?--or is it for life?' Mme. Lasalle said, meaningly. And Hazel laughed off an answer, and set her little foot down (mentally) with tremendous force. Wouldn't she marry whom she liked--_if_ she liked? 'He proposes to make you his wife'--Mrs. Coles had said. She would like to know what his 'proposing' had to do with it?-- except, perhaps, as an initiatory step. It was a new version of _Katharine and Petruchio_,--sneered Kitty Fisher. It was a striking instance of disinterested benevolence--in so young a man! chimed in Mrs. Seaton,--until at last Hazel rushed into anything that would put a black coat or whirl of white muslin between her and her tormentors. If she was in truth running away from herself as well, the confusion was too great for her to know it just then. The very idea of stopping to think what he meant and what she meant, frightened her; and then she ran faster than ever. Of all this Rollo was but slightly aware. Yet he did guess at part of it. He had seen too much of both men and women not to know in a measure what must be the natural effect of circumstances. And he would have saved Miss Kennedy the worst of it,--only he could not. He was sometimes at the entertainments where she met so much exasperation, and saw from a distance as it were the wild whirl of her gaiety. Perhaps he guessed at the meaning of that too. But he was only a man, and he could not be sure. He never asked her to dance himself, and never joined a quadrille or reel when she was one of the set. And that is nearly tantamount to saying he did not dance at all. For reels and quadrilles were very much out of favour, and rarely adopted except just for Miss Kennedy. And in truth Mr. Rollo in this state of affairs chose to be only now and then seen at evening entertainments. When there he was rather Spanish in his manners, after the old Catskill fashion. Very Spanish indeed Mrs. Coles found him at home; his lofty courtesy kept her at the extreme distance permitted in the grace of good manners. Meanwhile, no _tête-à-tête_ conversation had been practicable with Wych Hazel. He had sought it; but she refused his invitations to ride, and while she was in that mood he did not choose either to risk being turned away again from the Chickaree door, or to encounter her in a drawing-room full of company. However, when a good many days had come and gone in this state of estrangement, Rollo began to feel that it was getting unbearable. So he rode up to Chickaree one day just at luncheon time. Miss Kennedy was not at home. Not at home in the honest sense of the words. Mr. Rollo asked for Mrs. Bywank, and marched straight to the housekeeper's room. And Mrs. Bywank's greeting made him feel that, for some reason, he had come at the right time. She begged him to sit down, and ordered luncheon; asking if he was in haste, or if they might wait a little for Miss Wych? 'She walked down to Mr. Falkirk's a long time ago,' said the housekeeper, 'but I am looking for her every minute. Unless you cannot wait, Mr. Rollo?' He would wait; and desired to have Mrs. Bywank's report touching the health of her young mistress. Mrs. Bywank looked perplexed. 'She's not herself, sir,' she answered slowly. 'And yet it would be hard to explain that. I've been wanting to see you, Mr. Rollo, more than I can say; and now you are here I hardly know how to tell why.' 'That makes me wish very much you would find out.' 'Phoebe will have it she is sick,' said the housekeeper, pondering,--'and sometimes I think so myself. I know she goes out too much. And stays up too late. Why, the last time she came from Governor Powder's I was frightened half to death.' 'That was two weeks ago?' 'Yes, Mr. Rollo. I expected her early, and then Lewis brought word it would be late,--and so it was. Near morning, in fact.' 'Yes. Well?--She did not suffer from being out too late?' 'I'm sure I don't know, sir, what it was. She walked into the hall just as strong and straight as ever, and then she dropped right down on the first stair, and put her hands and face against the balustrade, and I couldn't get one word from her-- nor one look,--any more than if she'd been part of the staircase. 'For how long?' asked the gentleman after a short pause, and in a lowered tone. 'It seemed a week to me,' said Mrs. Bywank,--'but I only know nothing stirred her till she heard the servants begin to move about the house. And then she got up, in a sort of slow way, so that I thought she would fall. And I put my arm around her, and she laid her head on my shoulder, and so we went upstairs. But she only said she was "very, very tired," and didn't want any breakfast. I couldn't get another word but that.' 'And since then?'--said her hearer, after another pause in which he seemed to have forgotten himself. 'Since then,' said Mrs. Bywank, 'there have been balls and picnics and dinners enough to take one's breath away. But it don't seem to me she can enjoy them much--she comes home so often with a sort of troubled look that I can't understand. And when I ask if she's not well, she says, "Yes, very well." So what is one to to?' 'I don't think you can do anything, Mrs. Bywank. Perhaps I can. Is that all you have to tell me?' 'Not quite, sir,'--but the old housekeeper hesitated. 'I am not sure about saying all I wanted to say.' 'Why?' said Rollo, smiling. 'It is a nice matter for one woman to talk about another woman,' said Mrs. Bywank; and again she paused, evidently considering where care ended and treason began. 'I am a little uneasy, sir,--more than a little,--about some of these young men that come here so often.' 'On what account?' said Rollo shortly and gravely, with a tone that meant to get to the bottom of _that_ at least. 'Why,' said Mrs. Bywank, glancing at him, 'chiefly because I think Miss Wych does not know in the least how often they come. Which, if she thought twice about any one of them, she would. And if I just hint it to her, she looks at me, and says--"Often?--when was he here before? I don't remember." All the same, _they_ don't understand that.' 'Well?' said Rollo. 'They are quite equal to taking care of themselves. Tell me of any danger to _her_.' 'It lies just there, sir. That she might be drawn on--in her innocence--to grant favours covering she knows not what. And sometimes that works trouble. Not caring two snaps for the men, it might never occur to her that they were favours--till the cobwebs were all round her feet. You know that, sir?' Her hearer's brows contracted a little, and the grey eyes snapped; but he was silent. 'Now here's this fancy ball at Moscheloo,' said Mrs. Bywank,-- 'with all sorts of charades that nobody ought to be in.' 'What is that? I have not heard of it.' 'I opine they have kept it rather close,' said the housekeeper,--'the day after to-morrow it comes off; and not a soul let in without a ticket. I hoped you might have one, Mr. Rollo.' 'What about the charades?' 'I don't like them,' said Mrs. Bywank decidedly,--'and they want Miss Wych in every one. So she's been getting her dresses ready, with my help, and telling me the whole story. It's "Mr. May and I are to do this,"--and "While I stand so, Captain Lancaster stands so." The last of all is a wedding.' 'A wedding!' Rollo repeated. 'Is she to be in that too?' 'Of course,' said Mrs. Bywank. 'And she said she tried ever so hard to get a ticket for me--that I might see her dressed up. But Madame would not. So said I, "Miss Wych, I would rather not see you in _that_ dress, till it's the real thing." ' "O--take what you can get," she said, running the needle into her finger and making a great fuss about it. ' "My dear," I said, "marriage is much too sacred a thing, in _my_ judgment, to be turned into a frolic." ' "Well I didn't want to do it," she said, a little sober; "but Madame would not let me off." ' 'Well?--' said Rollo, with a short breath, as the old lady again paused. ' "But Miss Wych," I said, "are you to act that with Captain Lancaster?" 'So she flamed out at that, and asked me if I thought she would? ' "Well," said I, "for my part, I don't understand how any young lady who expects to be married"--but she put her hand right over my mouth. ' "Now Byo, stop!" she said. "You know you are talking of _me_-- not of other young ladies." ' "Who is to be the happy man in this case?" said I, when she would let me speak. And she just looked at me, and wouldn't answer a word. So I went on. "I suppose I may talk about men, Miss Wych,--and I say I don't think the right sort of man, who meant some day to marry the right sort of woman, would ever want to go through the motions with everybody else."--She was silent a while,--then she looked up. ' "I wish I had heard all this before, Byo,--but it's too late now, for I've promised. And of course I never thought it all out so. You know I've never even seen a wedding. But is only Mr. Lasalle, in this case; and you know he has 'been though the motions' "--Mr. Lasalle, truly!' Mrs. Bywank repeated in great scorn. 'A likely thing!' 'Going through the motions!' Rollo repeated. 'Do you mean that the wedding ceremony is to be performed?' 'It sounds so, to me,' said Mrs. Bywank. ' "Well, my dear," said I,--"then I say this. No man who has been through the motions in earnest with one woman, ought to go them over in play with another." 'She looked up again,--one of her pretty, grave looks; and said slowly, as if she was thinking out her words: "Maybe you are right, Byo. I never thought about it. And of course _that_ sort of man never could." ' "What sort?" I said. "Then you _have_ thought about it, Miss Wych?"--Well, she was like a little fury at that,' said Mrs. Bywank, smiling at the recollection,--'as near as she can ever come to it. And she caught up her hat and went off; and called back to me that she meant to go through motions enough of some sort, to be ready for her lunch when she got home.--But I wish she was out of it, Mr. Rollo.' Her hearer sat silent for a minute. 'Mrs. Bywank, can you find Miss Hazel's ticket for this ball?' 'I daresay, sir. Would you like to see it?--she shewed it to me.' 'I would like to see it very much.' The housekeeper went off, and presently brought back the little perfumed card, with scrolls and signatures, and 'Admit-- --' and 'Not transferable.' 'She puts her own name in this place before she gives it in,' said Mrs. Bywank. The gentleman looked at the ticket attentively--then bestowed it safely in his vest pocket; as if that subject was disposed of. 'But Mr. Rollo!'--said the housekeeper in some consternation. 'What, Mrs. Bywank?' he returned innocently. 'Miss Wych will never forgive me, sir!' 'What?' 'Why--for stealing her ticket and giving it to you, sir.' 'You have not stolen it. And you never meant to give it to me. And she is not to know anything about it.' 'It feels like high treason!' said Mrs. Bywank. 'And she is certain to get another. But I'm sure I'd be glad there was some one there to look after things; for if she once got into that, and found young Nightingale or some of the rest with her, she'd be fit to fly. And there she comes, this minute.' As they looked, Wych Hazel came out from the deep shadow of the trees that clothed this end of the garden approach; faultlessly dressed as usual, and with her apron gathered up full of flowers; and herself not alone. A young 'undress uniform' was by her side. 'Captain Lancaster,'--said Mrs. Bywank. They came slowly on, talking; then stopped where the road to the main entrance branched off,--the young officer cap in hand, extremely deferential. They could see his face now; handsome, soldierly, and sunburnt; with a pleasant laugh which came readily at her words. Her face they could not see, beneath the broad garden-hat. The gentleman touched his ungloved hand to Wych Hazel's little buff gauntlet; then apparently preferred some request which was not immediately granted; so gestures seemed to say. Finally he held out his hand again; and she took from her apron a flower and placed in it; and it looked as if fingers and flower were taken together for a second. It was a pretty scene; and yet Mrs. Bywank sighed. Then with a profound reverence the young officer moved away, and Wych Hazel entered the side door. She came on along the passage singing; trilling out the gay little lullaby by virtue of which Mrs. Bywank had long ago earned her name. 'Byo, bye! baby bye! Byo, bye, little baby! Byo, byo, byo, byo'-- 'Where are you, Byo dear?' she said, opening the door. Then stopped short in undoubted surprise. 'Mr. Rollo!--You two!' she said, looking from one to the other; adding mentally, 'And you have been talking about me!' It was not just a pleased flush that came; and it was with a little needless straightening of herself up that Wych Hazel crossed the floor, and untying her apron of flowers laid it down on Mrs. Bywank's sofa. Then she was the lady of Chickaree again, graceful and composed. She came back and held out her hand. 'I hope your luncheon is ready, Byo?' she said; 'and that you have something very good to reward Mr. Rollo for his long waiting. I had no idea I was delaying any one but you, or I should have made more haste. Mrs. Bywank spoils me, Mr. Rollo, by giving me just the same welcome whether I come early or late. But I am very sorry if I have hindered you.' 'You have not hindered me,' he said smiling, and giving her hand the old sort of clasp,--'except from everything I have tried to do, for some time past.' But that idea Miss Wych did not see fit to take up. 'What have I done,' he went on audaciously, 'to be ignored in this fashion?' 'Ignored!' she said, opening her eyes at him. 'Will you substitute another word?' said he, looking for it in the orbs so revealed. Wych Hazel turned off. 'Will you come to luncheon, sir?' she said; so exactly as if she were speaking to Mr. Falkirk, that Mrs. Bywank looked up in mute amazement. But lunch was not to have much attention, nevertheless. Dingee began a raid on the housekeeper's room. It was: 'Mas' Nightingale, Missee Hazel.' 'Mas' May and--Miss May, ma'am.--' 'Mrs. Powder, Missee Hazel--and all de rest!' added Dingee. ' 'Spect dere ain't a livin' soul _won't_ be there, time I get back. Miss Fisher, she done ask for Mas' Rollo. But I'se learnin' to tell the truf fustrate.' 'What is the truth about me, Dingee?' asked that gentleman. 'I should be glad to hear it.' 'Well, sir,' said Dingee, standing attention, 'she 'quire 'bout you. So I say, "Mas' Rollo, he done come dis mornin', sure,--but my young mistiss she out. So he done gone straight away from de door, ma'am." Mighty glad she never ask which way!' added Dingee with a chuckle. Wych Hazel held down her head, laughing the sweet laugh which would come now and then, in the worst of times. 'Run away,' she said, 'and say I am coming. I must go, Byo--if Mr. Rollo will excuse me. And as he came to see you, I suppose he will!' But Mr. Rollo went away without his luncheon, after all. CHAPTER XXXV. FIGURES AND FAVOURS. The very night after this affair of the ticket, came a 'German,' pure and simple, at one of the far-off houses of the neighbourhood. The daughters here were of Miss Fisher's persuasion; and among them they had arranged the whole affair. This should be a 'German,' and nothing else. Kitty Fisher was to lead, and neither quadrille nor country dance would be tolerated for a moment. Miss Kennedy found on her arrival that, for this night at least, round dances were paramount: it was such, or none. Well, she thought she could stand it, at first,--there were enough people always ready to promenade. But this was not an outdoor party, the night was too cool to make it even partially such; and to walk the whole evening in the moonlight is one thing, and in the gaslight quite another. Then Kitty Fisher was in a merciless mood,--and Hazel could not head her off with flat denials; because, though not really under orders, she well knew how much Mr. Rollo had to do with what they termed 'her new kink about dancing.' And even worse than the open charge that she was afraid to disobey, were the covert insinuations that she was anxious to please. Then (to tell the whole truth) she did very much long for another flight among the gay flags and ribbands which made the German so lively,--she could not see the harm! Only she could never have done it with those grey eyes looking on and drawing their own false conclusions about everybody and everything. But to-night he was not on hand: the guests had all arrived long ago, and no guardian in any shape among them. And so, over persuaded by circumstances, and especially by Mr. Nightingale, who made himself rather more than a circumstance, Wych hazel gave him her hand and went forward to take her place. Under pledge, however, that if any one of the new figures came up she had leave to retire. A burst of applause and congratulation hailed her appearance; and in a very few minutes she had forgotten all but the music and the whirl of intoxication. Even partners sank into insignificance, and became only so many facilities for so much delight. Not so easily could her partners forget her,--the girlish face, sometimes grave with its own enjoyment, and then--'bright as a constellation!'--declared Mr. Simms; the grace of manner which kept its distance well; the diaphonous dress which floated around her like a golden haze; the scarlet flowers in her hair. Never had she danced, never looked, more thoroughly herself. There are times when we get a lesson from without,--there are others when it must come from within; and Mr. Rollo, who had given the first, was now to see his work finished by the second. Wych Hazel was wrong, he was there; but he had come late, and if any of the dancers saw him they kept it hush; so that he looked on at his ward without her knowledge. But it must be noted as an instance of the perversity of Mr. Rollo's mind, that the more thoroughly he perceived the difference between Wych Hazel and her companions, the less he liked to have her among them; and every point in the dance where she escaped without even a touch upon her modest bearing, as if truly no one dared take liberties with her, made him half wild to get her out of it altogether. Thus thinking and watching, Mr. Rollo saw two strange things take place. First came this: A new figure was called, and the partners were to be sorted by means of long streamers of different-coloured ribbands. Wych Hazel, having already received hers, a green, stood drawing it through her fingers and chatting with Josephine Powder, whose ribband was blue. Suddenly Miss Kennedy caught away the blue ribband and began to compare its length with that of her own; measuring and re-measuring, tangling the long ends up together; until as the gentlemen came up to match colours and claim their partners, Wych Hazel hurriedly put the green streamer in Josephine's hand, and went off with Captain Lancaster. The green and blue were such convertible colours in the gaslight that no one took any notice. But Rollo saw that Wych Hazel drew a long breath as she moved away, and looked down, and did not say much for several minutes. That figure passed off with nothing unusual. Then followed another, during which the couples were arranged in a sort of haphazard way; the ladies and gentlemen drawing up in two long opposite lines, each then to take his _vis-à- vis_. But where a lady was in great demand, the gentleman _not_ strictly opposite would sometimes press down and forward, trying to catch her eye, and prove himself her partner by mere right of possession. The line of men stood with their backs towards Mr. Rollo, so that he did not at first see who it was that started forward so eagerly, taking a fair diagonal towards Miss Kennedy. But he saw her change colour, with a sort of frightened look, and then--most unlike her usual shy bearing,--saw her turn the other way, and herself take a diagonal towards what proved in this instance to be Mr. May. With a great flush of crimson at first, and then growing and remaining very pale, and dancing very languidly. And then, at the foot of the room, her eyes met those of her young guardian,--which about finished up the evening. For twice that night Wych Hazel had been within a hair's breadth of having her hand taken by the very man from whose presence she had escaped that night in July. To get rid of him she had put herself off on somebody else, and Mr. Rollo had seen it all! 'Put Molly Seaton in my place, Josephine,' she whispered, 'Mr. May is going to excuse me.' But they crowded round her and insisted upon 'just one more.' She should not finish this figure if she disliked it,--they would stop it short: anything to keep Miss Kennedy on the floor! Would she dance 'Le Verre de Vin'? 'Never!'--with sudden energy. 'My gracious me!--how spiteful we are!' said Kitty Fisher. '_You_ wouldn't have to drink it. Well, then, "La Poursuite"?' Miss Kennedy hated 'La Poursuite.' 'And--for Miss Kennedy--it is such breathless work,' said Mr. Kingsland. 'And--for Mr. Kingsland--etcetera, etcetera--' said Kitty mockingly. 'Stephen, when there is an opportunity for remarks, I'll let you know. "La Poursuite" is just the thing. You see, Hazel,' she whispered, 'the Viking can rush in and reclaim his prize, and reconciliations take place in the final tour.' 'I shall not dance it, Kitty,' said Wych Hazel steadily, though her cheeks glowed. 'No?' said Miss Fisher. 'Not to the tune of "The king shall enjoy his own again"? Well--what of "Les Mains Mystérieuses"?' '_I_ protest, now,' said Captain Lancaster. 'There cannot be even a pretence of mystery about Miss Kennedy's hand. It is the merest farce.' 'O, you'd like "Le Coussin," and a chance to go down on your knees!' said Miss Fisher, slightly provoked. 'Pardon me!' said Captain Lancaster. 'When I go down on my knees to Miss Kennedy, I shall want no cushion.' 'Good!' said Miss Burr. 'I vow,' said Kitty Fisher, 'you're a lover worth having. But the pretty dear'll get spoiled among you. Come--what will she choose? "Le Miroir!" Nothing to do but look at her own sweet self. Run away, Duchess, and take your seat.' 'Rather stupid, I think,' said Wych Hazel, as she went unwillingly forward,--but she was getting wild, standing there! 'I think I shall take the first one that comes, and save trouble.' She sat down in front of the long mirror, in which she could see the whole room behind her: everybody in it, and every motion of everybody. But she really saw but one person, and he was motionless. Others, gazing in, had a marvellous pretty picture of golden gauze and scarlet flowers, and a fair young face from which the gaiety had suddenly died out. The breast of her dress was covered with 'favours;' basket and ring, bell and bouquet, a flag, a rosette, a pair of gloves,--Rollo could not identify all the details of the harlequin crew; but it looked as if Miss Kennedy had been chosen by everybody, every time! She sat still enough now. 'Look up, child!' cried Miss Fisher. 'How do you expect to know who's behind you, if you sit studying your pretty feet upon the floor? You may flirt away an angel, and welcome some gentleman in black who was not invited.' There was a laugh at this sally; and as several gentlemen sprang eagerly forward, Kitty began to hum--' "This is the maiden all forlorn," '--but for once Hazel did not listen. 'Flirt somebody away!' she was thinking,--'I should like to see myself doing it! I shall take the very first that comes.' But alas for good intentions in a bad place! The room was long, and some people were further off, and others close at hand, and the very first that looked over her chair was Mr. Morton! Hazel gave a toss of her handkerchief that half blew him away. And the next--yes, the very next, was the man whom she had been eluding all the evening. This time the hand moved more languidly, and her eyes never looked up, and her cheeks rivalled the scarlet flowers. 'She'll learn,--O, she'll learn!' cried Kitty Fisher. 'Never saw it better done in my life. Such a discriminating touch!' 'Is there anybody else to escape?' thought poor Hazel, her breath coming quick. And then she was so delighted to see Captain Lancaster's pleasant face, that she shewed it in her own; and the gentleman took an amount of encouragement therefrom which by no means belonged to him. He waited upon Miss Kennedy for the rest of that evening with a devotion which everybody saw except herself. No such trifles as a man's devotion got even a passing notice from her. For the girl was feeling desperate. How many times that night had she been betrayed into what she disliked and despised and had said she never would do? If Rollo had not been there, perhaps she would have felt only shame,--as it was, for the time it made her reckless. 'Le miroir' gave place to other figures, and still Miss Kennedy shewed no second wish to retire and join the lookers-on. But every time the demands of the dance made _her_ choose a partner--when it was her woman's right to be chosen!-- every time she was passed rapidly from hand to hand without even the poor power of choice, Wych Hazel avenged it on herself by the sharpest silent comments; while to her partners, she was proud, and reserved, and brilliant, and generally 'touch-me-not;' until they too were desperate--with admiration. If Rollo was half wild in secret he had the power to keep it to himself. His demeanour was composed, and _not_ abstracted; his attentions to others, when occasion was, for he did not seek it, as gracefully rendered as usual; he even talked; though through it all it is safe to say he lost nothing of what Wych Hazel was doing. Nobody would have guessed, not in the secret, that he had any particular attention in that room, or indeed anywhere! He did not approach Wych Hazel to oblige her to notice him; he would not give her the additional annoyance or himself the useless pain. Yet, though severely tried that night, he was not unreasonably discouraged. He partly read Wych Hazel; or he surmised what was at the bottom of her wild gaiety; and he had great tenderness for her. A tenderness that made him grave at heart and somewhat grave outwardly; but he did not despair, and he bided his time. He was not irritated that she had broken the bonds of his words, amidst all his profound vexation. He had heard enough of people's tongues, and also knew enough of her, to understand pretty well how it was. He would not even look another remonstrance that night; only, he resolved to stay out the evening and at least see the girl safe in her carriage to go home. He would not go with her either this time. 'Hazel,' whispered Miss Fisher, in one of the figure pauses, 'slip out quietly at the side door when the break-up begins, and we'll have a lark. Stuart says he'll drive me home, if I'll coax you to go along. You can stay with me to-night. We'll go a little before everybody, you know,' she added persuasively, for Hazel hesitated. 'And the Duke need never know.' Still Hazel was silent, balancing alternatives. Could she bear a _tête-à-tête_ drive home with him? Could she escape it in any other way?--She gave Kitty Fisher a little nod, and whirled off in the hands of Mr. May. But 'Duke' was nearer than they know, and specially observant of Kitty Fisher's doings. He was not near enough to catch the import of the question or proposal; but his quick hears heard 'side door'--and his eyes saw that Hazel's sign was of assent; and his wits guessed at the meaning of both. A moment's reflection made him certain of his conclusion. Dane bit his lip at the first flash of this conclusion. He saw before him again a task which he would have given a great deal to be spared. Both from tenderness and from policy he was exceeding unwilling to thwart Wych Hazel now, most of all in this company, thereby subjecting her to renewed annoyance, inevitable and galling. Yet he never hesitated; and his old hunter's instinct abode with him, that no step which _must_ be taken is on the whole a bad step. He left the room before the dance was finished, and was in the lobby when the party he waited for came down the broad staircase, ready for their drive. He did not present himself, but when Wych Hazel had followed Kitty Fisher out of the side door, before which Stuart's equipage stood ready, she heard a very low voice at her side, which low as it was she knew very well. 'Miss Hazel, your carriage is at the other door.' But Kitty Fisher saw, if she did not hear. 'No room for you,' she said. 'Much as ever to get me in. Good night, Sir Duke, and pleasant dreams. The pleasant realities are all bespoke.' 'Miss Kennedy--' low at Wych Hazel's side. 'One of the aforesaid pleasant realities,' said Kitty, with her hand on Wych Hazel's shoulder. 'Come, Duchess!' Hazel's words had been all ready, but at this speech they died away. It seemed to her as if her cheeks must light up the darkness! 'Your carriage is in waiting,' Rollo went on, in a calm low tone, which ignored Kitty and everybody else. Still no word. 'Now come!' said Miss Fisher--'don't you play tyrant yet awhile. She's going home with me. Poor little Duchess!-- daresn't say her soul's her own! What's the matter--didn't she ask you pretty?' There was no answer to this. Rollo did not honour her with any attention. Hazel freed her shoulder from Miss Fisher's hand, and turned short about. 'There is no use contesting things,' she said, speaking with an effort which made the words sound hard-edged and abrupt. 'I shall drive home by myself to Chickaree. Good-night.' And without a look right or left, she went up the steps and across the hall into the carriage at the other door. Rollo saw her in without a word, and turned away. And Miss Kennedy,--as if her spite against something or somebody was not yet appeased,--began deliberately, one by one, to take the 'favours' off her dress and drop them through the open carriage window upon the road. But, let me say, she was not (like Quickear) laying a clue for herself, by which to find her way back to the 'German.' Never again. CHAPTER XXXVI. THE RUNAWAY. The fancy ball at Moscheloo was a brilliant affair. More brilliant perhaps than in the crush and mixed confusion of city society could have been achieved. It is a great thing to have room for display. There were people enough, not too many; and almost all of them knew their business. So there was good dressing and capital acting. The evening would have been a success, even without the charades on which Mme. Lasalle laid so much stress. Dominoes were worn for the greater amusement; and of course curiosity was busy; but more than curiosity. In the incongruous fashion common to such entertainments, a handsome Turkish janissary drew up to a figure draped in dark serge and with her whole person enveloped in a shapeless mantle of the same, which was drawn over her head and face. 'I have been puzzling myself for the last quarter of an hour,' said he, 'to find out--not who--but _what_ you are.' 'Been successful?' said the witch. 'I confess, no. Of course you will not tell me _who_ you are; but I beg, who do you pretend to be?' 'O, pretend!' said the witch. 'I am "a woman that hath a familiar spirit!" ' 'Where did you pick up your attendant?' 'Came at my call. I suppose you have heard of Endor?' 'Have I? En--dor? Where _have_ I heard that name? It is no place about here. 'Pon my honour, I forget.' 'In the East?' suggested the witch. 'Stupid!--I know; you are the very person I want to see. But first I wish you would resolve an old puzzle of mine--Did you bring up Samuel, honestly?--or was it all smoke?' 'Smoke proves fire.' 'Samuel would not have been in the fire.' 'He would if it was necessary,' said the witch. 'Whom do you want brought up, Mr. Nightingale?' 'Ha!' said the janissary. 'How do you know that? But perhaps you are "familiar" with everybody. Bring up Miss Kennedy?' 'Very well,' said the witch, beginning to walk slowly round him. 'But as it is not certain that Saul saw Samuel, I suppose it will not matter whether you see her?' 'It matters the whole of it! I want to see her of course. There is nobody else, in fact, whom I want to see; nor anybody else worth seeing after her. The rarest, brightest, most distracting vision that has ever been seen west of your place.' 'If there is nobody worth seeing after, you had better see everybody else first,' said the witch, pausing in her round. 'You have a familiar spirit. Tell me what she thinks about me; will you?' The witch threw up a handful of sweet pungent dust into the air, and made another slow round about the janissary. 'Neither black nor white,'--she said oracularly, 'neither yellow nor blue; neither pea-green nor delicate mouse grey.' 'I?' said Stuart. 'Or what?' 'Either. Both.' The janissary laughed somewhat uneasily. Just then a knight, extremely well got up in the habiliments of the 13th century, stepped near and accosted the witch in a confidential tone. 'Everybody here, I suppose, is known to you. Pray who is that very handsome, very _décolletée_, lady from the court of Charles the Second? Upon my word! she does it well.' 'That is Miss Fisher.' 'Well, if women knew!'--said the knight slowly. It was evident he thought himself speaking to safe ears, probably not handsome enough to be displayed. 'If they knew!' he repeated. 'Does she not do it well?' 'Does she?' said the witch. 'I was not in England just then.' 'Don't you wish you had been! It's a very fair show,'-- continued the knight as he looked. 'We ought to be much obliged to the lady. Really, she leaves--nothing--to be desired! If you please, merely as a subject of curiosity, from what part of the world and time does yonder figure come? the broad- brimmed hat?' The figure was a very fine one, by the way. His dress was a quaintly-cut suit of dark blue cloth, the edges bound with crimson, and fastened with silver buttons. White fine thread stockings were tied at the knee with crimson riband, and silver buckles were in his shoes. 'You must know,' said the witch, 'that there are several parts of the world from which I have been banished.' 'In an aesthetic point of view, I should say the edict was justified,' returned the knight, surveying the bale of brown serge before him. He passed on, and the man in the blue cloth presently took his place. 'They tell me you are a witch,' said he, speaking in rather a low tone; 'and as you see, I am a countryman. Will you have the goodness to explain to me--I suppose you understand it--what all the these people are?' 'They are people who for the present find their happiness in being other people,' said the witch, with a grave voice, in which however a laugh was somewhat imperfectly muffled. 'Like yourself, sir.' 'Like me? Quite the contrary. I was never more myself, I assure you. For that very reason I find myself not at home. Excuse my curiosity. Why, if you please, do they seek their happiness out of themselves, as it were, in this way?' 'Well,' said the witch confidentially, 'to tell you the truth, I don't know. You see I am in your predicament, and was never more myself.' 'But I thought you had a familiar spirit? I have read so much as that.' 'At your service'--said the witch. 'Then be so good as to enlighten me. I see a moving kaleidoscope view of figures--it's very pretty--but why are they all here?' 'Some because they were invited,' said the witch critically. 'And doubtless some because others were. And a good many for fun--and a few for mischief.' 'Is it the custom in this country to make mischief one of the pleasures of society?' 'Yes!' said the witch with some emphasis. 'And to tell you the truth again, that is just one of the points in which society might be improved.' 'But how do fun and mischief go along together?' 'Well, that depends,' said the witch. 'The wrong sort of mischief spoils the right sort of fun.' 'And does that often happen, among such well-dressed people as these?' 'O, where if her Grace?'--cried a gay voice in the distance. 'I've sworn to find her.' The witch was silent a moment, then answered slowly, 'It happens--quite often.' 'Can people find nothing pleasanter to do with their time,' said the countryman, 'than to spend it in mischief? or in fun which the mischief spoils? These things you tell me sound very strange in my ears.' 'The right sort of mischief _is_ fun,--and the right sort of fun is -not- mischief,' she said impatiently. 'And what people find in the wrong sorts, I don't know!' 'By the way,' said the countryman, 'how come _you_ to be here? How did you escape, when Saul killed all the rest of the witches?' 'It is queer, isn't it?' she said. 'Wouldn't you have supposed I should be the first one to fall?' 'And in this country, are you using your experience to make or to mend mischief?' 'Make all I can! Are there any Sauls on hand, do you think?' 'Pray, what sort of man would you characterize by that name?' 'Well,' said she of Endor with again the hidden laugh in her voice, 'some men have a hidden weakness for witches which conflicts with their duty,--and some men don't!' 'I hope I am not a Saul, then,' said the countryman laughing, though softly; 'but in any case you are safe to take my arm for a walk round the rooms. I should like to see all that is to be seen; and perhaps you could help me to understand.' It was not a more incongruous pair than were to be seen in many parts of the assembly. The beauty of Charles the Second's court was flirting with Rob Roy; a lady in the wonderful ruff of Elizabeth's time talked with a Roman toga; a Franciscan monk with bare feet gesticulated in front of a Swiss maiden; as the Witch of Endor sauntered through the rooms on the arm of nobody knew exactly what countryman. 'Your prejudices must be very often shocked here,' said the countryman with a smothered tone of laughter again. 'Or, I beg pardon!--has a witch any prejudices, seeing she can have no gravity?' 'What does prejudice mean in your country?' 'Much the same, I am afraid, that it does elsewhere. What are we coming to?' Passing slowly through the rooms, they had arrived at the great saloon, at one end of which large folding doors opened into another and smaller apartment. This smaller room was hung with green baize; candelabra shed gentle light upon it from within the doors, so placed as not to be seen from the principal room; and over the folding doors was hung a hick red curtain; rolled up now. 'What is all this?' 'O, if you wait a while,' said the witch, 'you will see further transformations--that is all.' 'And what is _this_ for?' said the countryman, pointing to the rolled-up rend curtain. 'To hide the transformed, till they are ready to be seen.' 'But it does not hide anything,' said the countryman obtusely. 'How do they get it down?' He went examining about the door-posts, with undoubted curiosity, till he found the mechanism attached to the curtain and touched the spring. Down fell the red folds in an instant. The man drew it up again, and let it fall again, and again drew it up. 'Very good,' he said approvingly. 'Very good. We have no such clever curtains in my country. That will do very well.' As he spoke, a bell sounded through the house. Immediately the witch escaped by a side door. Two or three others followed her; and then the rest of the company began to pour in and fill the saloon before the red curtain. 'Well, I never _was_ so stupid in all my life!' said the court beauty. 'I might have _known_ no other girl would come as a roll of serge!' 'And I might have known, that if I failed to recognize Miss Kennedy's hand, it could be only because it was out of sight,' said Mr. Kingsland, who by special favour wore only his own face and dress. 'You'll get a mitten from her hand--and a slap in it, if you don't look out,' said the lady. 'Better a mitten from that hand than a glove from any other,' replied Mr. Kingsland with resignation. 'Easier for you to get,' the beauty retorted. 'But did you hear of the fun we had the other night?--the best joke! We all put Seaton up to it, and he carried it off well. Dick wouldn't. Before the dancing began, he went up to Miss Kennedy and asked her with his gravest face whether she felt guardian's orders to be binding? And she coloured all up, like a child as she is, and inquired who wanted to know? So Seaton bowed down to the ground almost, and said he-- ' "I had the honour of asking Mr. Rollo this afternoon, concerning the drive we spoke of; and he gave me an emphatic no. And now I am come to you to reverse the decision." 'Well, you should have seen her face!--and "_What_ did he say, Major Seaton?" she asked. "As near as I can remember," said Seaton with another bow, "he said, Sir I cannot possibly allow Miss Kennedy to take any such drive as you propose!" ' 'Well?--' said Mr. Kingsland,--'I have heavy wagers out on Miss Kennedy's dignity.' 'I don't know what you call dignity,' said the beauty,--'I didn't know at first but she would knock him down for his information,--she did, with her eyes. And then my lady Duchess drew herself up as grand as could be, and answered just as if she didn't care a snap,--"Did Mr. Rollo say that, Major Seaton? Then I certainly shall not go." ' Mr. Kingsland clapped his hands softly. 'Safe yet,' he said. 'But where did Kitty pick up that name for her?' he added, turning to his next neighbour. 'You are in the way of such titles.' 'Kitty won't tell,' the lady answered, an elaborate Queen Elizabeth. 'Not at present. She found out nobody understood, but Miss Kennedy does, so now she holds it over Miss Kennedy's head that she _will_ tell. That is the way she got her before the glass the other night.' 'The tenderness these gentle creatures have for each other!' said Mr. Kingsland. Meantime a bustling crowd had been pouring in and filling the saloon, and there began to be a cry for silence. The curtain was down; by whom dropped no one knew; but now it was raised again by the proper attendants, and the sight of the cool green little stage brought people to their good behaviour. The silence of expectancy spread through the assembly. Behind the scenes there was a trifle of delay. 'My dear child,' Mme. Lasalle whispered to the _ci-devant_ witch of Endor, 'Mr. Lasalle is in no condition to act with you as he promised. Ill; really ill, you know. We must take some one else. Standing about with bare feet don't agree with his constitution. It won't matter.' 'It matters very much!' said Wych Hazel. 'O, well--just leave that charade out. There are enough more.' 'Indeed there are not!' exclaimed her hostess. 'We cannot spare this. Indeed I doubt if any other will be worth presenting after it. My dear, it makes no difference! and you are ready, and Stuart is ready, and the people are waiting. You must not fail me at the pinch, Hazel. Go on and do your prettiest, for my sake.' 'Not with Mr. Nightingale. I will have little Jemmy Seaton, then. He is tall enough.' 'He couldn't do it. Nonsense, my dear! you don't mean that there is anything _serious_ in it? It is only a play, and a short one too; and Stuart will be, privately, a great improvement on Mr. Lasalle, who wouldn't have done it with spirit enough; as why should he? Come, go on! Stuart is not worse to play with than another, is he? Come! there's Mr. Brandevin waiting for you. He's capital!' There was no time to debate the matter; no time to make further changes; everybody was waiting; Miss Kennedy had to yield. The first act was on this fashion. An old man in the blouse of a Normandy peasant sat smoking his pipe. Enter to him his daughter, a lovely peasant girl; Wych Hazel to wit. The father spoke in French; the daughter mingled French and English in her talk very prettily. There was some dumb show of serving him; and then the old man got up to go out, charging his daughter in the severest manner to admit no company in his absence. Scarcely is he gone, when enter on the other side a smart young man in the same peasant dress. Words here were not audible. In dumb show the young man made protestations of devotion, begged for his mistress's hand and kissed it with great fervour; and appeared to be carrying on a lively suit to the damsel. Now nothing could have been prettier than the picture and the pantomime. Stuart kept his face away from the audience; Wych Hazel was revealed, and in the coy, blushing maidenly dignity and confusion which suited the character and occasion, was a tableau worth looking at. Well looked at, and in deep silence of the company; till suddenly the growling old French father is heard coming back again. The peasant starts to his feet, the girl sits down in terror. 'What shall I do?' he cries, and she echoes,--'What shall he do? What shall he do?' Then came confused answers from the spectators:--'Bolt, old fellow!'--'Escape!'--'Fly!'--'Run!'--and the last word being taken up and re-echoed, 'Run! run!'--he _did_ run; ran out and then ran in and across the stage again; finally out of sight; and drop the curtain. The burst of applause was tremendous. 'You'll have to go on, you know, if that keeps up,' said Stuart behind the scenes; 'and I don't wonder. Here, Mr. Brandevin, go in and stop them!' The next scene was also very well done. The old French gentleman was alone, and had it all to perform by himself. He began with calling his daughter, in various discordant keys, and with such a variety of impatient and exasperated intonation, that the whole room was full of laughter. His daughter not appearing nor answering, he next instituted a make-believe search for her, feigning to go into the kitchen, the buttery, her bedroom. Not finding her, and making a great deal of amusement for the spectators by the way, he at last comes back and asks in a deploring tone, 'Where is she?' Cries of 'Off!'--'Gone!'--'Sloped!'--'Away!' were such a medley that nobody professed to be able yet to make out the word. The curtain fell again. 'You are very stupid,' said Mme. Lasalle. 'It is as plain as possible.' 'It will be, when we see the rest,' said somebody. 'No, I don't think it is, either.' For as he spoke, the curtain rose upon an old clergyman, busy with his books at a table with a lamp. He had a wig, and looked very venerable indeed. Presently to him comes, after a knock, his servant woman. 'Please, sir, here's a young couple wantin' to see ye. It's the old story, I expect.' 'Let them come, Sarah--let them come in!' says the old clergyman; 'the old story is the newest of all! Let them come,--but first help me on with my gown. So!--now you may open the door.' Enter the old peasant's daughter and her lover. The latter confers with the old clergyman, who wheezes and puffs and is quite fussy; finally bids them stand before him in the proper position. The proper position, of course, brings the two people to face the audience, while the old clergyman's back was a little turned to them, and no loss. Now the dislike with which Miss Kennedy had received the change of companions in this charade by no means lessened as the play went on. The first scene had annoyed her, the minute she had time to think it over during the solo of the second; and now finding herself face to face with ideas as well as people,--ideas that were not among her familiars,--was very disagreeable; all the more that Mr. Nightingale had contrived to infuse rather more spirit into his part of the performance than was absolutely needful. Wych Hazel looked unmistakeably disturbed, and her eyes never quitted the ground. The audience, quite failing to catch her mood, only applauded. 'Capital!' said General Merrick. 'Positively capital! If it was a real case, and she in momentary expectation of her father, she might look just so.' 'Or if she had accidentally escaped with the wrong person,' said Captain Lancaster, who would have rather preferred to be in Mr. Nightingale's position himself. 'No,' said one of the ladies, 'she is not afraid,--what is she?' 'She is Wych Hazel,' said Mr. Kingsland. 'Do you see what a breath came then? Not complimentary to Nightingale--but he can find somebody else to turn his head.' Meanwhile, they all standing so, the old clergyman began his office. 'Wilt thou have this woman to be thy wedded wife?' he demanded audibly enough. And Stuart's reply came clear-- 'I will.' 'Wilt thou have this man to be thy wedded husband?' He had turned towards the pretty peasant girl who stood there with her eyes cast down, and expectation was a-tiptoe. Before the eyes were lifted, and before an answer could be returned, another actor came upon the scene. The countryman who wore the dark blue cloth bound with crimson, stepped into the group from his place at the side of the curtain. He wore his broad- brimmed hat, but removed his domino as he came upon the stage. Yet he stood so that the audience were not in position to see his face. They heard his voice. 'There is a mistake here,' he said with and excellent French accent on his English. 'This lady is a--what you call--she has no power to dispose of herself.' The clergyman looked somewhat doubtful and astonished; he had not been prepared for this turn of the play; but it was all in keeping, the interruption came naturally, quietly; he had to meet it accordingly. Stuart's face darkened; he knew better; nevertheless for him too there was but one thing possible, to go on and play the play. His face was all in keeping, too. The anger of the one and the doubt of the other actor were all proper to the action and only helped the effect. 'Diable! what do you want here?' the young peasant exclaimed. 'What is all this, sir? what is this?' said the old minister. 'What do you here, sir?' 'I come for the lady.' 'The lady don't want to see you, you fool!' exclaimed Stuart. 'You needn't think it.' 'What authority have you here, sir, to interfere with my office?' demanded the clergyman. 'Monsieur'--said the countryman hesitating, 'Monsieur knows. This young girl is young--I represent the guardians of her. She is minor; she has no property, nor no power to marry herself; she had nothing at all. She has run away. Monsieur sees. Come, you runaway!' he went on, advancing lightly to where the young girl stood. 'Come with me! She has run away; there is no marriage to-day, sir,' he added with a touch of his hat to the old clergyman. And then, taking Wych Hazel's hand and putting it on his arm he walked her out of the room. It was not as it was few evenings ago; her hand was taken in earnest now and held, and she was obliged to go as she was led. In the little apartment which served as a green-room there were one or two attendants. Rollo walked past them with a steady, swift step which never stayed nor allowed his companion to stop, until he reached the ladies' dressing-room. It was entirely empty now. The very servants had gathered where they could see the play. Here Rollo released his charge. The first thing she did was to seat herself on the nearest chair and look at him. Her first words were peculiar. 'If I could give you the least idea, Mr. Rollo, how exceedingly disagreeable it is to have my hand taken in that way, it is possible--I am not sure--but it is _possible_, you would not do it. Your hands are so strong!' she said, looking down at the little soft things in her lap. 'And my strength is not practised.' He looked grave, but spoke very gently, bending towards her as if also considering the little hands. 'Did I act so well?' said he. 'You see that was because there was so much earnest in it.' 'What made you do it?--is everything forbidden unless I ask leave?' 'Do you want to know why I did it?' 'I did not like the play, either,' she said,--'and I did not expect--part of it. But I had promised, and straight through was the quickest way out. It would have done--everybody--too much honour to make a fuss.' 'I did nobody any honour, and I made no fuss,' said Rollo, in his old quaint fashion. 'And my way was the very quickest way out for you.' She jumped up, with a queer little inarticulate answer, that covered all his statements. 'There will be a fuss, if I do not find a quick way back among those people,' she said, passing round him to the door. Then paused with her hand on the knob, considering something. 'Why did you do it, Mr. Rollo?' 'I will try to explain, as soon as I get an opportunity. One word,' he added, detaining her,--'Laugh it off as far as you can, down stairs, as part of the play.' 'Easy to do,' said the girl with some emphasis. 'Unfortunately I do not feel at all like laughing. If you had done _me_ a little honour, sir, it would have been needless.' She went first to the small dressing-room down stairs, catching up her serge and muffling herself in it once more, so that not a thread of her peasant's dress appeared; then went silently in among the crowd, a very sober witch indeed. It was a little while before she was molested. By and by, while another charade was engaging people's interest, Mme. Lasalle worked round to the muffled figure. 'My dear,' she whispered, 'who was that?' 'One of your dominoes, Madame. Acted with a good deal of spirit, didn't you think so?' 'Magnifique! But that was none of _my_ dominoes. My dear, you will never know how lovely your representation was. But, that interruption was no part of our play, as we had planned it. How came it? Who was it? Somebody who made play to suit himself? How came it, Hazel?' 'Just what I have been trying to find out,' said the girl. 'I shall not rest till I do.' But she moved off then, and kept moving, and was soon too well taken possession of for many questions to reach her. All of her audience but two or three, took the interruption for part of the play, and were loud in their praises. Hearing and not hearing, muffled in thoughts yet more than in serge, as an actor or spectator the Witch of Endor saw the charades through, and played with her supper, and finally went out to her carriage and the dark world of night. For there was no moon this time, and stars are uncertain things. As Stuart Nightingale came back from putting her into the carriage, he encountered his aunt. 'Well!' he said in an impatient voice, smothered as it was, 'that job's all smoke.' 'Who was it?' 'That infernal meddler, of course.' 'Rollo?' 'Who else would have dared?' 'How did he get in?' 'That you ought to know better than I. It was no fault of mine.' 'Rollo!' said Mme. Lasalle. 'And I thought I had cleverly kept him out. The tickets were not transferable. Did she let him in?' 'Not she. No doing of hers, nor liking, I promise you. I think he has settled his own business, by the way. But we can't try this on a second time, Aunt Victorine. Confound him!' CHAPTER XXXVII. IN A FOG. Hazel was accompanied to her carriage of course, as usual. But when she was shut in, she heard an unwelcome voice saying to the coachman, 'Drive slowly, Reo; the night is very dark;' and immediately the carriage door was opened again, and the speaker took his seat beside her; without asking leave this time. A passing glare from the lamps of another carriage shewed her head and hands down on the window-sill, in the way she had come from Greenbush. Neither head nor hands stirred now. Her companion was silent and let her be still, until the carriage had moved out of the Moscheloo grounds and was quietly making its way along the dark high road. Lamps flung some light right and left from the coach box; but within the darkness was deep. The reflection from trees and bushes, the gleam of fence rails, the travelling spots of illumination in the road, did not much help matters there. 'Miss Hazel,' said Rollo,--and he spoke, though very quietly, with a sort of breath of patient impatience,--'I have come with you to-night because I could not let you drive home alone such a dark night, and because I have something to say to you which will not bear to wait a half-hour longer. Can you listen to me?' 'I am listening, sir,' she said, again in a sort of dull passiveness. 'May I keep this position? I think I must be tired.' 'Are you very angry with me?' he asked gently. 'No,' she said in the same tone. 'I believe not. I wish I could be angry with people. It is the easiest way.' 'If you are not angry, give me your hand once more.' 'Are we to execute any further gyrations?' 'Give it to me, and we will see.' Rather hesitatingly, one white glove came from the window- sill, within his reach. 'You are a queer person!' she said. 'You will neither give orders nor make me execute them, without having hold of my hand! Are you keeping watch of my pulse, so as to stop in time?' He made no answer to that, nor spoke at all immediately. His hand closed upon the little white glove, and keeping it so, he presently said gravely, 'You and I ought to be good friends, Hazel, on several accounts;--because your father and mother were good friends of mine,--and because I love you very dearly.' A slight motion of her part,--he could not tell whether she started, or what it was,--changed instantly to a breathless stillness. Only a timid stir of the hand, as if it meant to slip away unnoticed. But it was held too firmly for that. 'I don't know whether you know yet,' he went on after a slight pause, 'what it is to love anybody very dearly. I remember you told Gyda one day that you had never loved any one so since your mother. Certainly I have never had a right to flatter myself that _I_ had been able to teach you what it means. If I am mistaken,--tell me.' 'Easy work!'--she might have answered again,--to tell him what she had never told herself. And particularly nice of him to choose such a place for his inquiries, where there was no possible way of exit (for her) but the coach window. What had he never tried to teach her, except to mind? And of course she never knew anything about--anything! But there Hazel shifted her ground, and felt herself growing frightened, and certainly wished her new guardian a hundred miles away. What did he mean?--was he only sounding her, as Mr. Falkirk did sometimes? If so, he might just find out for himself!--With which clear view of the case, Wych Hazel set her foot (mentally) on all troublesome possibilities, and sat listening to hear her hear beat; and wondered how many statements of fact Mr. Rollo was going to make, and at what point in the list truth would oblige her to start up and confront him? He had paused a little, to give room for the answer he did not expect. Seeing it came not, with a slight hastily drawn breath he went on again. 'In the mean time you have heard what you never ought to have heard,--or not for a long time; and through the same good agency other people have heard it too; and you are placed in a position almost to hate the sight of me, and shrink from the sound of my name; and you are looking upon your father's will as binding you to a sort of slavery. I am not going to stand this a minute longer. 'Hazel--unless you can love me dearly, my privileges as guardian would be of no use to me. I would not take advantage of them if I could. I would not have you on any other terms. And I certainly am not going to be a clog upon your happiness. I have made up my mind to keep my office, nominally, for one year; practically I mean to leave you very much to Mr. Falkirk. I will keep it for a year. At the end of the year, you shall tell me whether I shall give it up or keep it longer. But if longer, it will be for ever. And I warn you, if you give it to me then, it will be a closer and sweeter guardianship than you have had yet, Hazel. I will keep what I love, so dearly and absolutely as I love her. But I shall not speak to you again on this subject until the year's end. You need not be afraid. I mean to see you and to let you see me; but you will hear no more about this till the time comes.' No answer, even then, only the trembling of the little hand. Dark as it was, she turned her head yet more away, laying her other cheek upon the window. 'Are we friends now?' he said somewhat lower. 'Mr. Rollo'--she began. But the tremor had found its way to the girl's voice, and she broke off short. 'Well?' said he. 'That is one of the parties. I meant, Mr. Rollo and Hazel.' 'Be quiet!' she said impatiently,--'and let me speak.' But what Hazel wanted to say, did not immediately appear. He answered by a clasp of her hand, and waited. 'I am quiet,'--he suggested at length. The girl made a desperate effort, and lifted up her head, and sat back in her place, to answer; but managing her voice very much like spun glass, which might give way in the using; and evidently choosing her words with great care, every now and then just missing the wrong one. 'You go on making statements,' she said, catching her breath, 'and I--have taken up none of them, because I cannot,--because if,--I mean, I have let them _all_ pass, Mr. Rollo.'--If truth demanded a greater sacrifice just then, it could not be because this one was small. 'I know,' he answered. 'Will you do better now? What mistake has your silence led me into, or left me in?' 'I said nothing about mistakes. And I always do as well as I can at first,' said Hazel, with a touch of the same impatience. 'My statements did not call for an answer. But I am going to say some other things to which I do want an answer. Shall I go on?' 'You know what they are,' she said. 'I want you,' he went on, speaking slowly and deliberately, 'to give me your promise that you will not waltz any more until the year is out that I spoke of.' She answered presently, speaking in a measured sort of way, 'That is one thing. The other?' 'I want your promise to the first.' 'Suppose I am not ready to give it?' 'I ask for it, all the same.' Again she sorted her words. 'Well then--I am not ready,--I mean, not willing. And do not you see--at least, I mean, you do not see--how--unreasoning a request it is?' The adjective gave her some trouble. 'Not unreasonable?' 'I said nothing about reasonable.' 'No. But I must have your promise. If you knew the world better, it would not be necessary for me to make the request; I know that; but the fact that you are--simple as a wild lily,-- does not make me willing to see the wild lily lose any of its charm. Neither will I, Hazel, as long as I have the care of it. So long as you are even in idea mine, no man shall--touch you, again, as I saw it last night! You are precious to me beyond such a possibility. Give me your promise.' 'You shall not talk to me so!' she cried, shrinking off in the old fashion. 'I will not let you! You have done it before. And I tell you that I never--touch anybody--except with the tip end of my glove!' 'No more than the wild lily does. But, Hazel, no one shall _touch the lily_, while I have care of it!' He spoke in the low tone of determination. Hazel did not answer. 'Promise me!' he said again, when he found that she was silent. 'By your own shewing it is hardly needed,' she said. 'I suppose obedience will do as well.' 'Let it be a matter of grace, not of obligation.' 'There is some grace in obedience. Why do you want a promise?' 'To make the matter certain. Else you may be tempted, or cajoled, into what--if you knew better--you would never do. You will know better by and by. Meanwhile I stand in the way. Come! give me the promise!' There was a little bit of laugh at that, saying various things. 'I shall not be cajoled,' she said. 'But I will not make promises.' 'How then will you make me secure that what I do not wish shall not be done?' 'It is not a matter about which I am anxious, sir,' said Miss Wych coolly. 'I am not anxious,' he said very quietly, 'because one way or another I will be secure. Do you think I can hold you in my heart as I do, and suffer other men to approach you as I saw it last night? Never again, Hazel!' Dead silence on the lady's part; this 'mixed-up' style of remark being, as she found, extremely hard to answer. 'What shall I do?' he said gently. 'About what, sir?' 'Making myself secure?' 'I do not know,' said Wych Hazel. 'No suggestion occurs to me that would be worth your consideration.' 'I spoke to you once, some time ago, on the abstract grounds of the question we have under discussion. These, being only a wild lily, you did not comprehend. You do not love me, or you would give me my promise fast enough on other grounds. You leave me a very difficult way. You leave me no way but to take measures to remove you from temptation. Is not that less pleasant, Hazel, than to give me the promise?' She was silent for several minutes; not pondering the question, but fighting the pain. To be _forced_ into anything,-- to have _him_ take that tone with her!-- 'How will you do it?' she said. He hesitated and then answered gently, 'You need not ask me that. You will not make it necessary.' 'Not ask?' said Wych Hazel rousing up. 'Of course I ask! Do you expect to frighten me off my feet with a mere impersonal "it"?'--Then with a laugh which somehow told merely of pain, she added: 'You might cut short my allowance, and stint me in slippers,--only that unfortunately the allowance is a fixed fact.' 'I did not mean to threaten,' he said in a voice that certainly spoke of pain on his own part. 'Is it so much to promise, Hazel?' 'You did do it, however,' said the girl,--'but we will pass that. Everything is "much" to promise. And why I refuse, Mr. Rollo, is not the question. But it seems to me, that while my father might command me, on my allegiance, to give such a promise, no delegated authority of his can reach so far. I may find myself mistaken.' 'Do me justice,' he said. 'I did not command a promise; I sued for it. The protection the promise was to throw around you, I will secure in other ways if I must. But do not forget, Hazel, why I do it.' 'I do not believe you know,' said the girl excitedly. ' "Wild lilies?"--why, even wild elephants are not usually required to tie their own knots. What comes next? I should like to have the whole, if possible, before I get home--which seems likely to be about breakfast time.' 'Reo is driving as fast as he ought to drive, such a night. What do you mean by "what comes next"?' 'You said, I thought, you had several things to speak of.' 'I remember. I was going to ask you to go to see Gyda sometimes.' 'That is already disposed of--if I am to be allowed to go nowhere,' said Hazel, with a rush of pain which very nearly got into her voice. 'The next, Mr. Rollo?' 'I think, nothing next. You know,' he went on, speaking half lightly, and yet with a thread of tender persuasion in his voice, 'you know that next year you can dispose of me. Seeing that in the mean while you cannot help yourself, would it not be better to give me the assurance that for this year you will forego the waltz? and let things go on as they are? Field mice always make the best of circumstances.' 'All summer,' she answered, 'you have not even taken the trouble to forbid me! And now, forbidding will not do, but you must use threats. They might at least wait until I had disobeyed.' 'That is a very distant view of me indeed!' said Rollo. 'Details are lost. I will get you a lorgnette the next time I go anywhere.' 'You had better,' said Hazel, not stopping to weigh her words this time, 'for such distance does not lend enchantment.'-- After which the silence on her part became rather profound. 'No,' said Rollo dryly, 'I see it does not. What will you do by and by, when you are sorry for having treated me so this evening?' 'I daresay I shall find out when the time comes.'-- She leaned her head back against the carriage, wanting dreadfully to get home, and put it down, and think. She could not think with her hand held fast in that fashion,--and she could not get it away, without making a fuss and so drawing attention to the fact that it was not in her own keeping. One or two slight efforts in that direction had been singularly fruitless. So she sat still, puzzling over questions which have perplexed older heads than hers. As, how you can have a thing given you, and yet not seem to possess it,--and why people cannot say words to give you pleasure, without at once adding others to give you pain. What had she done? Mr. Falkirk would have thought her a miracle of obedience these last two nights; she even wondered at herself. How she had enjoyed her home this summer! --it seemed to her that she loved every leaf upon every tree. What could he mean by 'remove'? And here a long, deep sigh so nearly escaped her lips, that she sat up again in sudden haste, erect as before; but feeling unmistakably lonely, and just a little bit forlorn. Perhaps her companion's thoughts had come on one point near to hers; for he gently put the little white glove back upon her lap and left it there. His words went back to her last ones, though after a minute's interval. 'It will come,' he said confidently. 'All the field mice of my acquaintance are true and tender. _When_ it comes, Hazel, will you do me justice?' She stirred uneasily, and once or twice essayed to speak, and did not make it out. This way of taking things for granted, and on such made ground laying out railroads and running trains, was very confusing. Hazel felt as if the air were full of mistakes, and none of them within her reach. When at last she did speak, plainly she had laid hold of the easiest. The words came out abruptly, but in one of her sweet bird-like tones. 'Mr. Rollo--I am not the least imaginable bit like a field mouse!' 'In what respect?' 'These nice, tender people that you know'--she went on. 'I believe I am true.' It might have been some pressure of the latter fact, that made her go on after a moments pause; catching her breath a little, as if to go on was very disagreeable, speaking quick and low; correcting herself here and there. 'I wish you would stop saying--all sorts of things, Mr. Rollo. Because they are not true. Some of them. And--I do not understand you. Sometimes. And I do not know what you mean by my doing you justice. Because--I always did--I think,--and I have not "treated you," at all, to-night.' With which Hazel leaned head and hands down upon the window again, and looked out into the dark night. Would they ever get home?--But it was impossible to drive faster. A thick fog filled the air, and it was intensely dark. 'I have been telling you that I love you. That you do not quite understand. I am bound not to speak on the subject again for a whole year. But supposing that in the meantime you should come to the understanding of it,--and suppose you find out that I have given field mice a just character;--will you do me the justice to let me find it out? And in the meantime,--we shall be at Chickaree presently,--perhaps you will give me, in a day or two, the assurance I have begged of you, and not drive me to extremities.' 'Very well!' she said, raising her head again,--'if you will have it in that shape! But the worth of an insignificant thing depends a little upon the setting, and the setting of my refusal was much better than the setting of my compliance. There is no grace whatever about this. And take notice, sir, that if you had gone to "extremities," you would have driven yourself. I always have obeyed, and always should. But I give the promise!'--and her head went down again, and her eyes looked straight out into the fog. He said 'Thank you!' earnestly, and he said no more. There is no doubt but he felt relieved; at the same time there is no doubt but Mr. Rollo was a mystified man. That her compliance had no grace about it was indeed manifest enough; the grace of her refusal was further to seek. He deposited the little lady of Chickaree at her own door with no more words than a 'good- night;' and went the rest of his way in the fog alone. And if Wych Hazel had suffered some annoyance that evening, her young guardian was not without his share of pain. It was rather sharp for a time, after he parted from her. Had the work of these weeks, and of his revealed guardianship, and of his exercise of office, driven her from him entirely? He looked into the question, as he drove home through the fog. CHAPTER XXXVIII. DODGING. It was no new thing for the young lady of Chickaree to come home late, and dismiss her attendants, and put herself to bed; neither was it uncommon for her to sleep over breakfast time in such cases, and take her coffee afterwards in Mrs. Bywank's room alone. But when the fog had cleared away, the morning after Mme. Lasalle's ball, and the sun was riding high, and still no signs of Miss Wych, then Mrs. Bywank went to her room. And the good housekeeper was much taken aback to find peasant dress and grey serge curled down together in a heap on the floor, and Miss Wych among them, asleep with her head in a chair. Perhaps that in itself was not so much; but the long eyelashes lay wet and heavy upon her cheek,--and Mrs. Bywank knew that token of old. I am afraid some hard thoughts about Mr. Rollo disturbed her mind, as she stood there looking. What use had he made of his ticket to distress her darling?--she such a mere child, and he with his mature twenty-five years? But Mrs. Bywank did not dare to ask, even when the girl stirred and woke and rose up; though the ready flush, and the unready eyes, and the grave mouth, went to her very heart. She noted, too, that her young lady went into no graphic descriptions of the ball, as was her wont; but merely bade Phoebe take away the two fancy dresses, and ensconced herself in a maze of soft white folds, and then went and knelt down by the open window; leaning her elbows there, and her chin on her hands. Mrs. Bywank waited. 'Miss Wych,' she began after a while,--'my dear, you have had no breakfast.' 'I want none.' 'But you will have some lunch?' 'No.' 'My dear,--you must,' said Mrs. Bywank. 'You will be sick, Miss Wych.' 'Don't _you_ say "must" to me, Byo!' said the girl impetuously. But then she started up and flung her arms round Mrs. Bywank and kissed her, and said, 'Come, let's have some lunch, then!'--giving half-a-dozen orders to Phoebe as she went along. But the minute lunch was over, Wych Hazel stepped into her carriage and drove away. Not the landau this time, through the September day was fair and soft; neither was the young lady arrayed in any wise for paying visits; her white cloud of morning muslin and lace, her broad gipsy hat, and gauntlets caught up and carried in her hand, not put on,--so she bestowed herself in the close carriage which generally she used only by night. And the low-spoken orders to Reo were, to take her a road she had never been, and drive till she told him to stop. Then she threw herself back against the cushions, and buried her face in hands, and tried to think. If _that_ was to leave her 'practically to Mr. Falkirk,' her knowledge of English was somewhat deficient. And if belonging to somebody merely 'in idea' had such results!--but she was shy of the 'idea,' blushing over it there all by herself as she pushed it away. She was disappointed, there was no doubt about that. Foiled of her plan, over which she had pleased herself; for she had intended to give a 'no' instead of a 'yes' at the right place in the charade, to the discomfiture of all parties;--curbed by a strong hand, which she never could bear; hurt and sorrowful that nobody would trust her with even the care of her own womanhood. 'I wonder what there is about me?' she cried to herself, with two or three indignant tears rushing up unbidden. 'As if I had not had a sharper lesson the other night than any _he_ could give!'--No, quite that; the sharpest dated further back; but this would have been enough of itself. And what else was she to do or not do?--she took down her hands, and crossed them, and looked at them as she had done before the picture of the 'loss of all things.' These bonds did not feel like those; she did not like them, none the less;--and--she wondered what was his idea of _close_ guardianship? And had he made any misstatements?--Reo drove on and on, till his practised eye saw that to get home by tea-time was all that was left, and then stopped and got permission to turn round. But driving seemed to have become a sudden passion with Miss Wych. She kept herself out, somewhere, somehow, day after day; denied of course to all visitors, and of small avail to Mr. Falkirk, except to pour out his coffee. Miss Kennedy was in danger of creating a new excitement; being always out and yet never visible; for one entertainment after another went by, and brought only her excuses. Either the driving fever cooled, however, or Wych Hazel found out at last that even thoughts may be troublesome company; for she began suddenly to surround herself with invited guests; and one or two to breakfast, and three to dinner, and six to tea, became the new order of things for Mr. Falkirk's delectation. Some favoured young ladies even stayed over night sometimes, and then they all went driving together. Mr. Falkirk frowned, and Mrs. Bywank smiled; and cards accumulated to a fearful extent in the hall basket at Chickaree. Rollo among others had been discomfited, by finding the young lady invisible, or, what was the same thing for his purpose, visible to too many at once. This state of things lasted some time, but in the nature of things could not last for ever. There came a morning, when Mr. Falkirk was the only visitor at the Chickaree breakfast table, and just as Mr. Falkirk's coffee was poured out, Dingee announced his co-guardian. Well--she knew it had to come; but she could have found in her heart to execute summary justice on Dingee for the announcement, nevertheless. Nobody saw her eyes,--and nobody could help seeing her cheeks; but all else that transpired was a very reserved: 'Good morning, Mr. Rollo. You are just in time to enliven Mr. Falkirk's breakfast, over which he ran some risk of going to sleep.' Perhaps Mr. Rollo had a flashing question cross his mind, whether he had not missed something through lack of a hunter's patience the other night; but he was too much of a hunter to do anything but make the best of circumstances. He shook hands in precisely his usual manner; remarking that Mr. Falkirk had not had a ride of four miles; took his breakfast like a man who had; and only towards the close of breakfast suddenly turned to his hostess and asked, 'How does Jeannie Deans behave?' Apparently Hazel's thoughts had not been held fast by the politics under discussion, for she had gone into a deep grave meditation. 'Jeannie Deans?' she said, with her face flushing all up again. 'Why--very well. The last time I rode her.' 'When was that?' 'Monday, I think, was the day of the week; but I suppose she would have behaved just as well if it had been Tuesday.' 'Then probably she would have no objection to Wednesday?' 'Other things being comfortable,' said Wych Hazel, still keeping her eyes to herself. 'Do you mean, that you and she are in such sympathy, that if she does not behave well you know the reason?' 'I never sympathize with anybody's ill-behaviour but my own,' said Hazel, 'if that is what you mean.' 'I meant,' said Rollo with perfect gravity, 'that perhaps she sympathized with _yours?_' 'It occurs to me in this connection--talking of behaviour,'-- said Miss Kennedy, 'that I had a question to ask of you two gentlemen, which it may save time--and trouble-- to state while you are both together. Are you attending to me, sir?' she asked, looking straight over at her other guardian now,--'or has your mind gone off to: "Grand Vizier certainly strangled"?' 'My mind never goes off when you begin to state questions, Miss Hazel; knowing that it will probably have work enough at home.' 'This one is extremely simple, sir. Why, when you both agreed that I should have neither saddle-horse nor pony for my own individual use, did you not tell me so at once? Instead of keeping me all summer in a state of hope deferred and disappointment in hand?' 'Shall I take the burden of explanation on myself, sir?' asked Rollo. 'If you like. It lies on you properly,' said Mr. Falkirk, in anything but an amiable voice. 'Then may I order up Jeannie for you?' Rollo went on with a smile, to Wych Hazel; 'and I will explain as we go along.' 'That is to say, there is no explanation, but just the one I had made out for myself. Mr. Falkirk, did I ever practise any underhand dealings with you?' she said. 'Don't begin to do it with me,' said Rollo. 'Suppose you put on your habit, and in half an hour we'll have it all out on the road.' 'Your respective ancestors must have been invaluable in the old Salem times,' said the young lady, arching her brows a little. 'In these days I think truth should win truth.' With which expression of opinion Miss Wych whistled for a fresh glass of water and dismissed the subject. Not without a smothered sigh, however. 'I did not understand,' said Rollo, 'that expression of respect for our ancestors.' 'Naturally. As I expressed none. But I remember--you belong across the sea; where witchcraft probably is unknown, and so is never dealt with.' 'What would you give as the best manner of dealing with it?' Rollo inquired with admirable command of countenance. 'I suppose I should let them go their way. But then, being one of the guild, I of course fail to see the danger; and cannot appreciate the mild form of fear which has shadowed Mr. Falkirk for ten years past, nor the sharper attack which has suddenly seized Mr. Rollo.' She could keep her face too, looking carelessly down and poising her teaspoon. 'What becomes of your kitten, when you are suddenly made aware that there are strange dogs about?' said Rollo again, eyeing her. 'My kitten, indeed!'--said Hazel, with just so much stir of her composure as recognized the look which yet she did not see. 'Did you ever hear of a dog's cajoling a cat, Mr. Rollo?' 'Did _you_ never hear of puss in a corner?' 'Yes,' she said. 'You would not think it, but I am very good at that.' 'You are very good at something else,' said he smiling. 'Will you permit me to remind you, that I have not yet had the honour of an answer to my inquiry whether your witchship will ride this morning?' If Mr. Falkirk had been away, it is not sure what she would have answered; but Hazel had no mind to draw out even silent comments from him. So she gave a hesitating answer that yet granted the appeal. Then wished the next moment she had not given it. Would she need most courage to take it back, or to go on? 'If you will excuse me, then, I will go and see to the horses. I leave you, Mr. Falkirk, to defend yourself! I have been unable to decoy the enemy.' With which he went off. Mr. Falkirk's brows were drawn pretty close. 'Miss Hazel, I should like to be told, now that we are alone, in what way I have failed to meet "truth with truth"?' 'My dear sir, how you do scowl at me!' said Miss Hazel, retaking her easy manner, now that _her_ enemy was away. 'I only used the word in a popular sense. If I never misled _you_, then you had no right to mislead _me_.' 'How were you misled, Miss Hazel?' 'I supposed, being somewhat simple-minded, that the reason horse, pony, and basket wagon did not appear, was that they could not be found, sir. It shews how ignorant I am of the world still, I must acknowledge.' 'I have no opinion of ponies and basket wagons,' said her guardian. 'And I do not know how well you can drive. And you are too young, Miss Hazel, and too--well, you are too young to be allowed to drive round the world by yourself. When Cinderella, no, when Quickear, sets off to seek her fortune, she goes fast enough in all nature without a pony.' 'There are just two little faults in your statement, sir, considered as an answer. I never was fast'--said Miss Hazel,-- 'but trying to hoodwink me is not likely to make me slow,'--and she went off to don her habit and gather herself up for the ride. CHAPTER XXXIX. A COTTON MILL. As she came to the side door, she saw Rollo just dismounting from Jeannie Deans, and immediately preparing to remove his saddle and substitute the side-saddle; which he did with the care used on a former occasion. But Jeannie had raised her head and given a whinny of undoubted pleasure. 'Let her go, Mr. Rollo,' whispered Lewis. And so released, the little brown steed set off at once, walking straight to the verandah steps, pausing there and looking up to watch Hazel, renewing her greeting in lower tones, as if _this_ were private and confidential. Hazel ran down the steps, and made her fingers busy with bridle and mane, giving furtive caresses. Only when she was mounted, and Rollo had turned, his ear caught the sound of one or two little soft whispers that were meant for Jeannie's ears alone. Perhaps the gentleman wanted to give Wych Hazel's thoughts a convenient diversion; perhaps he wished to get upon some safe common ground of interest and intercourse; perhaps he purposed to wear off any awkwardness that might embarrass their mutual good understanding; for he prefaced the ride with a series of instructions in horsemanship. Mr. Falkirk had never let his ward practise leaping; Rollo knew that; but now, and with Mr. Falkirk looking on, he ordered up the two grooms with a bar, and gave Wych Hazel a lively time for half an hour. A good solid riding lesson, too; and probably for that space of time at least attained all his ends. But when he himself was mounted, and they had set off upon a quiet descent of the Chickaree hill, out of sight of Mr. Falkirk, all Wych Hazel's shyness came back again; hiding itself behind reserve. Rollo was in rather a gay mood. 'It is good practice,' he said. 'Did you ever go through a cotton mill?' 'Never.' 'How would you like to go through one to-day?' 'Why--I do not know. Very well, I daresay.' So with this slight and doubtful encouragement, Rollo again took the way to Morton Hollow. It was early October now; the maples and hickories showing red and yellow; the air a wonderful compound of spicy sweetness and strength; the heaven over their heads mottled with filmy stretches of cloud, which seemed to float in the high ether quite at rest. A day for all sorts of things; good for exertion, and equally inviting one to be still and think. 'How happens it you have let Jeannie stand still so long?' Rollo asked presently. 'I have not wanted to ride her,--that is all.' 'Would you like her better if she were your own?' he said quite gently, though with a keen eye directed at Wych Hazel's face. 'No. Not now.' The 'now' slipped out by mistake, and might mean either of two things. Rollo did not feel sure what it meant. 'Did you ever notice,' he said after a few minutes again, 'how different the clouds of this season are from those of other times of the year? Look at those high bands of vapour lying along towards the south; they seem absolutely poised and still. Clouds in spring and summer are drifting, or flying, or dispersing, or gathering: earnest and purposeful; with work to do, and hurrying to do it. Look at those yonder; they are at rest, as if all the work of the year were done up. I think they say it is.' The fair grave face was lifted, shewing uncertainty through the light veil; and she looked up intently at the sky, almost wondering to herself if there _had_ been clouds in the spring and early summer. She hardly seemed to remember them. 'Is that what they say to you?' she said dreamily. 'They look to me as if they were just waiting,--waiting to see where the wind will rise.' 'But the wind does not rise in October. They will lie there, on the blessed blue, half the day. It looks to me like the rest after work.' She glanced at him. 'I do not know much about work,' she said. 'What I suppose you would call work. It has not come into my hands.' 'It has not come into mine,' said Rollo. 'But can there be rest without work going before it?' 'Such stillness?' she said, looking up at the white flecks again. 'But according to that, we do not either of us know rest.' 'Well,' said he smiling, 'I do not. Do you?' 'I used to think I did. What do you mean by rest, Mr. Rollo?' 'Look at those lines of cloud. They tell. The repose of satisfied exertion; the happy looking back upon work done, after the call for work is over.' She looked up, and kept looking up; but she did not speak. Somehow the new combinations of these last weeks had made her sober; she did not get used to them. The little wayward scraps of song had been silent, and the quick speeches did not come. 'But then,' Rollo went on again presently, 'then comes up another question. What is work? I mean, what is work for such people as you and I?' 'I suppose,' said Hazel, 'whatever we find to do.' 'I have not found anything. Have you? Those clouds somehow seem to speak reproach to me. May be that is their business.' 'I have not been looking,' said Hazel. 'You know I have been shut up until this summer. But I should think you might have found plenty,--going among people as you do.' 'What sort?' 'Different sorts, I suppose. At least if you are as good at making work for yourself in some cases as you are in others,' she said with a queer little recollective gleam in her face. 'Did it never occur to you that you might set the world straight--and persuade its orbit into being regular?' 'No,' said Rollo carelessly, 'I never undertake more than I can manage. Here is a good place for a run.' They had come into the long level lane which led to Morton Hollow; and giving their horses the rein they swept through the October air in a flight which scorned the ground. When the banks of the lane began to grow higher and to close in upon the narrowing roadway, which also became crooked and irregular, they drew bridle again and returned to the earth. 'Don't you feel set straight now?' said Rollo. 'Thank you--no.' 'I am afraid you will give me some work to do, yet,' said he audaciously, and putting his hand out upon Wych Hazel's. 'Do not carry quite so loose a rein. Jeannie is sure, I believe, and you are fearless; but you should always let her know you are there.' 'Mr. Rollo--' said the girl hastily. Then she stopped. 'What?' said Rollo innocently, riding close alongside and looking her hard in the face. 'I am here.' 'Nothing.' Then he changed his tone and said gently, 'What was it, Miss Hazel?' 'Something better unsaid.' He was silent a minute, and went on gravely-- 'You wanted to know why I interfered the other night as I did; and I promised, I believe, to explain it to you when I had an opportunity. I will, if you bid me; but I may do the people injustice, and I would rather you took the view of an unprejudiced person--Mr. Falkirk, for instance. But if you wish it, I will tell you myself.' 'No,' she said; 'I do not wish it.' Rollo was quite as willing to let the matter drop; and in a few minutes more they were at the mill he had proposed to visit. There they dismounted, the horses were sent on to the bend in the valley, beyond the mills; and presenting a pass, Rollo and Wych Hazel were admitted into the building, where strangers rarely came. One of the men in authority was known to Mr. Rollo; he presented himself now, and with much civility ushered them through the works. They made a slow progress of it; full of interest, because full of intelligent appreciation. Perhaps, in the abstract, one would not expect to find a gay young man of the world versed in the intricacies of a cotton mill; but however it were, Rollo had studied the subject, and was now bent on making Wych hazel understand all the beautiful details of the machinery and the curiosities of the manufacture. This was a new view of him to his companion. He took endless pains to make her familiar with the philosophy of the subject, as well as its history. Patient and gentle and evidently not in the least thinking of himself, his grey eyes were ever searching in Wych Hazel's face to see whether she comprehended and how she enjoyed what he was giving her. As to the relations between them, his manner all the while, as well as during the ride, was very much what it had been before the disclosure made by Mrs. Coles had sent Wych Hazel off on a tangent of alienation from him. Nothing could exceed the watch kept over her, or the care taken of her; and neither could make less demonstration. There was also the same quiet assumption of her, which had been in his manner for so long; that also was never officiously displayed, though never wanting when there was occasion. And now, in the mill, all these went along with that courtier-like deference of style, which paid her all the honour that manner could; yet it was the deference of one very near and not of one far off. Wych Hazel for her part shewed abundant power of interest and of understanding, in their progress through the mill; quick to catch explanations, quick to see the beauty of some fine bit of machinery; but very quiet. Her eyes hardly ever rose to the level of his; her questions were a little more free to the conductor than to him. Even her words and smiles to the mill people seemed to wait for times when his back was turned, as if she were shy of in any wise displaying herself before him. Their progress through the mill was delayed further by Rollo's interest in the operatives. A rather sad interest this had need to be. The men, and the women, employed as hands in the works, were lank and pale and haggard, or dark and coarse. Their faces were reserved and gloomy; eyes would not light up, even when spoken to; and Rollo tried the expedient pretty often. Yet the children were the worst. Little things, and others older, but all worn-looking, sadly pale, very hopeless, going back and forth at their work like so many parts of the inexorable machinery. Here Rollo now and then got a smile, that gleamed out as a rare thing in that atmosphere. On the whole, the outer air seemed strange and sweet to the two when they came out into it, and not more sweet than strange. Where they had been, surely the beauty, and the freedom, and the promise, of the pure oxygen and the blue heaven, were all shut out and denied and forgotten. 'There is work for somebody to do,' said Rollo thoughtfully, when the mill door was shut behind them. The girl looked at him gravely, then away. 'Do all mill people look so?' she said. 'Or is it just Morton Hollow?' 'They do not all look so. At least I am told this is a very uncommon case for this country. Yet no doubt there are others, and it is not--"just Morton Hollow." Suppose, for the sake of argument, that all mill people look so; what deduction would you draw?' 'Well, that I should like to have the mills,' said Wych Hazel. They walked slowly on through the Hollow. The place was still and empty; all the hands being in the mills; the buzz of machinery within, as they passed one, was almost the only sound abroad. The cottages were forlorn looking places; set anywhere, without reference to the consideration whether space for a garden ground was to be had. No such thing as a real garden could be seen. No flowers bloomed anywhere; no token of life's comfort or pleasure hung about the poor dwellings. Poverty and dirt and barrenness; those three facts struck the visitor's eye and heart. A certain degree of neatness and order indeed was enforced about the road and the outside of the houses; nothing to give the feeling of the sweet reality within. The only person they saw to speak to was a woman sitting at an open door crying. It would not have occurred to most people that she was one 'to speak to'; however, Rollo stepped a little out of the road to open communication with her. His companion followed, but the words were German. 'What is the matter?' she asked as they turned to go on their way. 'Do you remember the girl that came to Gyda's that day you were there? this is her mother. Trüdchen, she says, has been sick for two weeks; very ill; she has just begun to sit up; and her father has driven her to mill work again this morning. The mother says she knows the girl will die.' 'Driven her to work!' said Hazel. 'What for?' 'Money. For her wages.' 'What nonsense!' said Hazel, knitting her brows. 'Why, I can pay that! Tell her so, please, will you? And tell her to send Trüdchen down to Chickaree for Mrs. Bywank and me to cure her up. She will never get well here.' Rollo gave a swift bright look at his companion, and then made three leaps up the bank to the cottage door. He came down again smiling, but there was a suspicious veiling of his sharp eyes. 'She will cry no more to-day,' he remarked to Wych Hazel. 'And now you have done some work.' 'Have I?'--with a half laugh. 'But instead of wanting to rest, I feel like doing some more. So you have made a mistake somewhere, Mr. Rollo.' There came as she spoke, a buzz of other voices, issuing from another mill just before them; voices trained in the higher notes, and knowing little of the minor key. And forth from the opening door came a gay knot of people,--feathers and flowers and colours, with a black coat here and there; one of which made a short way to Miss Kennedy's side. 'Where have you been?' said Captain Lancaster, after a courteous recognition of Mr. Rollo. 'You have been driving us all to despair?' 'People that are driven to despair never go,' said Wych Hazel; 'so you are all safe.' 'And you are all yourself. That is plain. Why were you not at Fox Hill? But you are coming to Valley Garden to-morrow?' 'I think not. At least, I am sure not.' 'Then to the ball at Crocus?' 'No.' 'My dear Hazel!' and 'My dear Miss Kennedy!' now sounded from so many female voices in different keys of surprise and triumph, that for a minute or two the hum was indistinguishable. Questions came on the heels of one another incongruously. Then as the gentlemen fell together in a knot to discuss their horses, the tongues of the women had a little more liberty than was good for them. 'You have been riding, Hazel; where are your horses?' 'Where have you been?' 'O, you've been going over a mill! A _cotton_ mill? Horrid! What is the fun of a cotton mill? what did you go there for?' 'What sort of a mill have you been over?' said Hazel. 'O, the silk mill. Such lovely colours, and cunning little silk-winders,--it's so funny! But where have you been all this age, Hazel? you have been nowhere.' 'I know what has happened,' said Josephine Powder, looking half vexed and half curious,--'you needn't tell _me_ anything. When a lady sees almost nobody and goes riding with the rest, we know what _that_ means. It's transparent.' 'I wouldn't conclude upon it, Hazel,' said another lady. 'A man that had got a habit of command by being one's guardian, you know, wouldn't leave it off easy. Would he, Mrs. Powder?' 'Are we to congratulate you, my dear?' asked the ex-Governor's lady, with a civil smile, and an eye to the answer. 'Really, ma'am, I see no present occasion?' said Hazel, with more truth than coolness. 'She sees no occasion!' cried Josephine. 'Well, I shouldn't either in her place.' (Which was a clear statement that grapes were sour.) 'Poor child! Are you chained up for good, Hazel?' 'Hush, Josephine?' said her mother, who was a well-bred woman; such women _can_ have such daughters now-a-days. And she went on to invite Hazel to join a party that were going in the afternoon to visit a famous look-out height, called Beacon Hill. She begged Hazel to come for luncheon, and the excursion afterwards. 'Do say yes, please!' said Captain Lancaster, turning from the other group. 'You have said nothing but no for the last month.' 'Well, if being a negative means that one is not also a positive--' Hazel began. 'And then, oh Miss Kennedy,' broke in Molly Seaton, 'there's this new Englishman!--' 'A new Englishman!--' 'Yes,' said Molly, unconscious why the rest laughed, 'and he's seen you at church. And he has vowed he will not go home till he has seen you in the German.' 'Has he?' said Hazel. 'I hope he likes America.' They gathered round her at that, in a breeze of laughter and entreaty, till her shy gravity gave way, and Mr. Rollo's ears were saluted by such a musical laugh as he had not heard for many a day. 'He'll be here presently,' said Molly. 'He's up in the mill with Kitty Fisher. So you can ask him yourself, Miss Kennedy.' Rollo heard, and purposely held himself a little back, and continued a conversation he did not attend to; he would not be more of a spoil-sport then he could help. 'You'll come, won't you, Hazel?' said Josephine. 'I will be very good if you will come.' Hazel balanced probabilities for one swift second. 'That is too large a promise, Phinny--I would not make it. But I will come, thank you, Mrs. Powder. Only not to luncheon. I will drive over this afternoon, and meet you at the hill.' 'Why, here is our dear Duchess!' cried Kitty Fisher, rushing up. 'And where is the--ahem!--Mr. Rollo, I am delighted to see you. Miss Kennedy, allow me to present Sir Henry Crafton.' Wych Hazel bowed, and turning towards Mr. Rollo, remarked that if she was to come back, she must go. Rollo was also invited to Beacon Hill, but excused himself; and he and Wych Hazel left the others, to go forward to find their horses. On the ride home he made himself particularly pleasant; talking about matters which he contrived to present in very entertaining fashion; ignoring the people and the insinuations they had left behind them in the Hollow, and drawing Wych Hazel, so far as he could, into a free meeting of him on neutral ground. They had another run through the lane; a good trot over the highway; and when they had entered the gate of Chickaree and were slowly mounting the hill, he spoke in another tone. 'Miss Hazel, don't you think you have done enough for to-day?' 'Made a good beginning.' 'Twenty-four miles on horseback--and a cotton mill! That is enough for one day, isn't it, for you?' 'Twenty-four, is it?' she said carelessly. 'Call it four, and my feeling will not contradict you.' 'Very well. I want your feeling to remain in the same healthy condition.' 'It always does.' 'Beacon Hill will not run away. Leave that for another time. It is a good day's work for you, that alone. Suppose we go there to-morrow?' said Rollo coolly, looking at his companion. 'Well--if I like it well enough to-day.' Dane was silent, probably feeling that his duty as Miss Kennedy's guardian was in the way of doing him very frequent disservice. However he was not a man to be swayed by that consideration. He came close alongside of Jeannie Deans and looked hard in Wych Hazel's face as he spoke, 'Do you think Mr. Falkirk would be willing to have you go to- day?' 'Why, of course!' 'I think he would not. And I think he ought not.' 'Mr. Falkirk never interferes with my strength or my fatigue!--' 'I shall not ask him. I take the matter on my own responsibility.' She had thrown her veil back for a minute, and leaving the bridle on Jeannie's neck, both little hands were busy with some wind-disturbed rings of hair. She put them down now and looked round at him,--a look of great beauty; the girlish questioning eyes too busy with him, for the moment, to be afraid. Could he mean that? was he really trying to head her off in every direction? 'Are you in earnest?' she said slowly. His eyes went very deep into hers when they got the chance, carrying their own message too. He answered with a half smile, 'Thorough earnest.' She drew back instantly, eyes and all; letting fall her veil and taking up her bridle. Except so, and by the sudden colour, giving no reply. She was learning her lesson fast, she thought, a little bitterly. Nevertheless, if people knew the exquisite grace there can be in submission, whether to authority or to circumstances it may be they would practise it oftener. Not another word said Rollo. What was the use? She would understand him some day;--or she would not! in any case, words would not make it clear. Only when he took her down from her horse he asked, and that was with a smile too, and a good inquisition of the grey eyes, 'if he should come to take her to Beacon Hill to-morrow?' 'No,' she said quietly. 'I think not.' 'When will you have another riding lesson?' 'I do not know,' she said, with a tone that left the matter very doubtful. 'Well,' said he, 'you may go to Beacon Hill without me. But you must not try leaping. Remember that.' He did not go in. He remounted and rode away. CHAPTER XL. SOMETHING NEW. So Jeannie Deans went back into the stable, and carried her light burden no more for some time. But Hazel did not go to Beacon Hill, in any fashion nor on any day; and it is to be hoped Jeannie Deans was less restless than she. 'Miss Wych--my dear!' said Mrs. Bywank in remonstrance; 'if you cannot sit still, why don't you go out? You are just wearing yourself pale in the house; and why, I do not see.' 'Nobody sees--' said the girl with a long breath. 'My wings are clipped, Byo,--that is all.' 'My dear!' Mrs. Bywank said again. 'I think you shouldn't talk so, Miss Wych.' 'Very likely not,' said Hazel. But if ever I am a real runaway, Byo, it will be for the sake of choosing my own ruler. So you can remember.' 'Miss Wych--' Mrs. Bywank began, gravely. Hazel came and flung herself down on the floor, and laid her head on the old housekeeper's lap. 'O, I know!' she said. 'Why did they ever call me so, Byo? I think it hangs over me like a fate. Could they find no other name for their little brown baby but that? I can no more help being a witch, than I can help breathing.' The old housekeeper stroked the young head tenderly, softly parting and smoothing down the hair. 'They liked the name, my dear,' she said. 'And so would you, if you could remember the tone in which Mrs. Kennedy used to say: "My Wych!"--"My little Wych!"--' Hazel sprang away as if the words had been a flight of arrows. And so the fall went on; and since Miss Kennedy would stay at home, perforce the world must come to see her there; and the old house at least sounded gay enough. And then society began slowly to steal away to winter quarters. The two young officers went back to their posts, without even a hope (it was said) that might make them ever return again to the neighbourhood of Chickaree. And Mr. May sailed for Europe, having a gentle dismissal from the little hands for which he cared so much; and the Powders departed to ex-official duties; and Mme. Lasalle to town. The leaves fell, having done their sweet summer duty far better than these rational creatures; and then Wych Hazel took to long early and late walks by herself, threading the leafless woods, and keeping out of roads and choosing by-paths; wandering and thinking--both--more than was good for her; and enjoying just one thing, the being alone. Rollo all this while had kept the promise he made when he told her that he would see her and meant she should see him. He came very frequently; he rode with her if she would ride, and talked with her when she would talk; or he talked to Mr. Falkirk in her hearing. He sometimes gave her riding lessons. Whatever her mood, he was just himself; free, pleasant and watchful of her; sometimes a little Spanish in his treatment of her. Her clouds did not seem to put him in shadow. And she would not always refuse a lesson, or a ride, or a talk,--it was not in her nature to be ungraceful or rough in any way; only it could not be said that she took pleasure in them, as a certain thing. They broke up the intolerable loneliness of her life just then, but otherwise were not always a success. Constantly now expecting to be drawn back, or ordered back, as she phrased it; expecting forbidden things at every turn; she did not want to be alone with Mr. Rollo, nor to go with other people where he might come. In fact, she did not quite understand herself; and she grew more and more restless and eager to get away. 'Why should we not go on Monday?' she asked Mr. Falkirk. 'Go?' echoed her guardian. 'Are we to take up our travels again, my dear?' 'Did you suppose yourself settled for the winter, sir? I expect to go to town, like other people.' 'What are we to do when we get there?' 'Keep house, sir. You can take one-half the bricks, and I the other. Or any proportions that may suit your views,' said Miss Hazel compliantly. Now Mr. Falkirk did not, it is true, understand the course things had taken for the last few weeks; he was only a man; and though Wych Hazel's guardian for many years might be supposed to hold a clue to her moods, this was what Mr. Falkirk failed to do in the present instance. But using his wits as well as he was able, he had come to the conclusion, not without some secret gratification, that Miss Hazel preferred the society of her old guardian to that of her new one. Certainly he was in no mind to cross her wish to go to the city, if she had such a wish. However, mindful of his duty, he mentioned her desire to Rollo, and asked if he had any objection to it. Rollo was silent a minute, and then gave a frank 'No.' And Mr. Falkirk wrote to make arrangements, and even went himself to perfect them. And he lost no time; by the end of October the change was made, and Wych Hazel established in a snug little house in one of the best streets on Murray Hill. If Mr. Falkirk was misled before, his mind was not likely to clear up as the weeks went on. Whatever had come over his ward, she was unmistakably changed from her old self; as now, living in the house with her again, Mr. Falkirk could not fail to perceive. Quiet steps, a gentle voice that quite ignored its old bursts of singing; brown eyes that looked softly through things and people at something else; with a mood docile because it did not care: but _that_ he did not know. Apparently she had not come to town for stir,--her going out was of the quietest kind. Sometimes a specially fine concert would tempt her; once in a while she made one of her radiant toilettes and went to a state dinner party, now and then to a lunch or a kettle-drum; but balls and evening parties of every sort were invariably declined. Instead, she plunged into study,--went at German as if her life depended on it, took up her Italian again, and began to perfect herself in French. Read history, knit her brows over science, and sat and drew by the hour. Of course society could not quite be baffled so: mornings brought carriage after carriage, and evenings a run upon the door. Mr. Falkirk had little peace of his life, unless it were a reposeful thing for him to sit by and see the play. Between whiles this winter, Hazel did a great deal of thinking: even German could not crowd it out. She knew, the minute she had said she would come to town, that she wished something could step in and keep her at Chickaree; or at least she knew that she was leaving more there than she had counted upon; and the knowledge chafed her. It was all very well to like--somebody--(name of course unknown)--to a certain degree; but when the liking made itself into bonds and ties and hindrances, then Miss Wych rebelled. She brought up all sorts of questions in the most unattractive shape, to find them suited with answers that could find no reply. It was simply unbearable, she urged upon herself, this being held in and watched and restricted,--very unbearable! Only, somehow, the person who did it all, was _not_. And the doubt whether life would be worth having, in such guardianship, started a more difficult point: what would it be worth without? And the mental efforts to shake herself into clear order, just seemed, as sometimes happens, to tie three knots where there was one before. 'It will go after a while,' she said, twisting herself about under the new form of loneliness and unrest which possessed her when she got to town. And it did: deeper in. Mr. Falkirk, blind bat that he was (for a sharp-sighted man), was not discontented with his winter. He had Wych Hazel to himself, and she gave him no more trouble than he liked by the force of old associations. He watched the play in which she was so prominent and so pretty a figure, and found it amusing. It seemed safe play, so far; the fort that he was set to keep seemed quite secure from any attacks that presently threatened; and Mr. Falkirk had no suspicion that its safety was owing to a garrison within the walls. The outside he knew he watched well. It was a very quiet winter, indeed, except at such times as Miss Kennedy's doors were open to all comers; but Mr. Falkirk did not find fault with that. He had never been garrulous in his ward's company or in any other. Certainly he liked to hear _her_ talk; and he knew that she talked far less than usual, when they were alone; but he argued with himself that Wych Hazel was growing older, was seriously engaging herself in study, after other than a school-girl's fashion; and that all this winter's development was but the sweet maturing of the fruit which in growing mature was losing somewhat of its liveliness of flavour. They were alone one evening, rather past the middle of the winter. It was not one of Miss Kennedy's at-home nights; and in a snug little drawing-room the two were seated on opposite sides of the tea service. A fire of soft coal burning luxuriously; thick curtains drawn; warm-coloured paperhangings on the walls; silver bright in the gaslight, and Mr. Falkirk's evening papers ready at his hand. To-night Mr. Falkirk rather neglected them, and seemed to be in a meditative mood. 'Whereabouts are we in pursuit of our fortune, Miss Hazel?' he asked as he tasted his cup of hot tea. 'Rather deep down in Schiller and Dante, Sir.' '_Il Paradiso?_' asked Mr. Falkirk meaningly. 'Pray do you call that "deep down"?' demanded Miss Hazel. 'I am merely inquiring where you are, my dear. I have heard of people's being over head and ears.' 'Only hearsay evidence, sir?' said Miss Hazel recklessly. But then she was not going to stand up and be shot at! 'I should like to know, merely as a satisfaction to my own mind, whether the quest is ended, Miss Hazel? Has Cinderella's glass slipper been fitted on? or has Quickear seized the singing bird and the golden water?' 'Princes are scarce!' said the girl derisively, but not without a rising blush. 'The true one not found yet, my dear?' said Mr. Falkirk with an amused glance across the table. 'What is to be our next move in search of him?' 'That is one way of putting it,' said Wych Hazel. 'I should think, sir, you had taken lessons of your devotee, Miss Fisher.' 'I am glad _you_ don't,' said Mr. Falkirk earnestly. 'Miss Hazel, I should prefer that when _such_ princesses are in the parlour, Cinderella should keep to her kitchen. It is the court end in such a case.' Kitty Fisher's name brought up visions. Hazel was silent. 'Do you ever hear from Chickaree?' her guardian asked presently. 'No one to write, sir, but Mrs. Bywank,--and she, you know, is not a scribe. I understand that the kitten is well.' 'That is important,' said Mr. Falkirk. 'She hasn't told you lately anything about your friend Rollo?' 'No, sir. Have you given up your share in his friendship?' inquired Miss Hazel. Mr. Falkirk made no answer to this query, and seemed to have forgotten it presently in his musings. Hazel glanced at him furtively, choosing her form of attack; for Mr. Falkirk's manner seemed to say that he _had_ heard. 'You always played into each other's hands so delightfully, sir,' she began, with a very _dégagé_ air,--'it is of course natural that he should keep you posted as to his own important proceedings. And a little ungrateful in you, Mr. Falkirk, I must say, to fling him off in this fashion.' 'I've nothing on my conscience respecting him,' said Mr. Falkirk, eating his toast with a contented air. 'I'm not _his_ guardian, nor ever was.' 'What a pity!' said Wych Hazel. 'Both of us together might have made your life more lively than my unassisted efforts could do.' Mr. Falkirk grunted, and went on with his tea; and sent his cup to be refilled. Hazel pondered. 'You seem depressed, Mr. Falkirk,' she said. 'Shall I give you an additional lump of sugar?' Now Mr. Falkirk in truth seemed anything but depressed; and he raised his head to look at his questioner. 'I am quite satisfied with things as they are, Miss Hazel.' 'Are you, sir? I am delighted!' said Hazel. 'But I never even supposed such a thing possible. How are "things"--if I may be allowed to inquire?' Some things are new,' returned her guardian. 'And I should not be satisfied with them, if they concerned me. Which I take for granted they do not. I saw Dr. Arthur down town to-day; and he told me some odd news about Rollo.' Mr. Falkirk was finishing his tea in a leisurely way, evidently _not_ thinking that the news, whatever it was, concerned either of them seriously. 'Why did you not bring Dr. Arthur home to tea?' inquired his ward. 'I did not think of it, Miss Hazel. But he volunteered a visit in the course of the evening.' 'That will be delightful,--I like Dr. Arthur,' said Hazel, feeling that somehow or other she must get a glimpse of his news before he came. 'Well, if what he said gave you so much pleasure, why don't you repeat it to me, Mr. Falkirk,' she ventured. 'I do not remember that I said anything gave me pleasure,' returned her guardian. 'This don't. By what he says, Rollo has lost his wits. I thought him a shrewd man of business; and he was that, when your affairs were in his hand last summer; but if what Dr. Arthur tells me is true, and it must be, he has done a very strange thing with his own fortune.' 'Dear me! I hope he did not hurt himself looking after mine!' said Wych Hazel innocently. 'Are fortune and wits both in peril, Mr. Falkirk?' 'Not yours, I hope,' said her guardian. 'I should be very uneasy if I thought that. _I_ should have no power to interfere. The will gives him absolute control, supposing that he had control at all.' Perhaps it was just as well that at this moment Dr. Arthur was announced. Alas, not only Dr. Arthur, but Mrs. Coles! And Hazel, giving greetings to one and welcome to the other; insisting that they should come to the tea table, late as it was; went on all the while looking after her own wits and picking up her energies with all speed. She had need; for the harmless-seeming eyes of Mrs. Coles were always to her neighbours' interests. Very graciously now they watched Wych Hazel. There was a great deal to talk about, in Miss Kennedy's house and winter and engagements; and in Dr. Maryland's house, and Primrose, and her school. An endless succession of points of talk, that ought to have been very interesting, to judge by the spirit with which they were discussed. All the while, Wych Hazel was watching for something else; and Prudentia, was she keeping the best for the last? She was extremely affable; she enjoyed her tea; she took off her bonnet and displayed the pale bandeaux of hair which were inevitably associated in Miss Kennedy's mind with one particular day and conversation; she admired the furniture; she discoursed on the advantages of city life. Dr. Maryland was, perforce, rather silent. 'Well, Arthur dear,' she said at last, taking her bonnet, 'we must be going presently. What do you think of Dane, Mr. Falkirk?' Mr. Falkirk did not answer intelligibly, though the lady's face was turned full upon him; he uttered an inexplicable sort of grunt, and knotted his eyebrows. He didn't like Prudentia. 'I never saw anybody so changed in all my life,' pursued the lady. 'Such sudden changes are doubtful things, I always think;--come probably from some sudden cause, and may not last. But it is very surprising while it _does_ last.' 'I am sorry to contradict you, Prudens,' said Dr. Arthur here; 'but Dane was never more himself. He only happens to stand facing due north instead of north by east.' 'He was "north" enough before,' said his sister, a little, just a little bitterly; 'a trifle more of southern direction wouldn't have hurt him. But _I_ think, he's out of his head. Men are, sometimes, you know,' she went on, looking full at Wych Hazel now. 'I shall let Miss Kennedy be judge. Do you know what Dane has been doing, Miss Kennedy?' 'Not waltzing?' said Hazel, opening her brown eyes with an expression of mild dismay which was very nearly too much for Dr. Arthur. 'Waltzing?' said Prudentia, mystified. 'I did not say anything about waltzing. Why shouldn't he waltz? I think he used. Why yes; he was a famous waltzer. Don't you waltz, Miss Kennedy?' 'But I was always known to be out of my head,' said Hazel. 'In what other possible way could Mr. Rollo shew the state of his?' 'I don't know what you mean,' said Prudentia, handling her bonnet. 'Then you haven't heard my story already. You know that old Mr. Morton has failed; did you hear of that?' 'Not the first time, is it?' said Miss Kennedy coolly. Dr. Arthur bit his lips. 'Yes, my dear! it's the first and only time; he was always supposed to be a very rich man. Well, Dane has taken his fortune and thrown it into those mills!' 'I was afraid you were going to say the mill stream,' said Wych Hazel, who was getting so nervous she didn't know what to do with herself; 'but the mills seem a safe place.' 'I don't know but he's better done that of the two,' said Prudentia. 'A safe place? Why, my dear, just think! he has bought all of Mr. Morton's right and title there; with Mr. Morton's three mills. Of course, it _must_ have taken very nearly his whole fortune; it _must_.' 'I fancy there's a trifle left over,' said Mr. Falkirk. 'But I can't conceive what possessed him. What does Rollo know of the mill business?' 'Nothing at all, of course,' said Prudentia. 'Nor of any other business. And he has shewed his ignorance--did Arthur tell you, sir, how he has shewed it?' 'In buying three mills to begin with,' said Mr. Falkirk. 'A modest man would have begun with one.' 'But my dear sir, _that_ isn't all. What _do_ you suppose, Miss Kennedy, was his first move?' 'One is prepared for almost anything.' 'He will learn the business, before long,' said Dr. Arthur, 'if close attention can do it.' 'What should he learn the business for?' said his sister. 'He has already all that the mill business could give him, without any trouble. _I_ think he's troubled in his wits; I do indeed. He was always a wild boy, and now he's a wilder man.' 'Troubled in his wits!' said Dr. Arthur, with such supreme derision, that Wych Hazel laughed. To her own great relief, be it said. 'But what is this that he has done?' Mr. Falkirk inquired, his brows looking very much disgusted. 'My dear sir! Fancy it. Fancy it, Miss Kennedy. The first thing he did was to _raise the wages of his hands!_' Just one person caught the gleam from under Hazel's down-cast eyes,--perhaps something made his own quick-sighted. Dr. Arthur answered for her. 'They were not half paid before, Mr. Falkirk. That explains it.' 'Weren't they paid as other mill hands are paid, Dr. Arthur?' 'The more need for a change, then,' said the young man, who was a trifle Quixotic himself. 'But if the change is made by one man alone, he effects nothing but his own ruin.' 'That is what Dane is about, I am firmly persuaded,' said Mrs. Coles. 'No man ever yet went to ruin by doing right,' said Dr. Maryland. 'Many a one!' said Mr. Falkirk,--'by doing what he _thought_ right; from John Brown up to John Huss, and from John Huss back to the time when history is lost in a fog bank.' 'They'll get their reward, I suppose, in the other world,' said Prudentia comfortably. 'How will his ruin affect the poor mill people?' said Wych Hazel, so seriously, that perhaps only Mr. Falkirk--knowing her-- knew what she was about. 'Why, my dear, it ruins them too in the end; that's it. When he fails, of course his improvements fail, and everything goes back where it was before. Only worse.' 'Precisely,' said Mr. Falkirk. 'You cannot lift the world out of the grooves it runs in, by mere force; and he who tries, will put his shoulder out of joint.' 'Then my picture of "the loss of all things," is the portrait of a ruined man!' said Wych Hazel, with an expressive glance at Dr. Maryland. He smiled. 'It partly depends, you know, Miss Kennedy, upon where the race is supposed to end. But our friend is running well at present, for both worlds.' 'Arthur, he is not!' said his sister emphatically. 'Paul and John Charteris, the other mill-owners, hate him as hard as they can hate him; and if they can ruin him, they will; that you may depend upon.' 'And his own people love him as hard as they can,--so that, even if you allow one rich mill-owner to be worth a hundred poor employés, Dane can still strike a fair balance.'--Rather more than that, Dr. Arthur thought, as his quick eye took notice of the little screening hand that came suddenly up about Wych Hazel's mouth and chin. 'That's all nonsense, Arthur; business is business, and not sentiment. I never heard of a cotton mill yet that was run upon sentiment; nor did you. And I tell you, it won't pay. I am speaking of business _as_ business. Paul and John Charteris will ruin Dane, if they can.' 'They probably can,' said Mr. Falkirk. 'They will make a combination with other mill-owners and undersell him; and paying less wages they can afford to do it, for a time. And a certain time will settle Rollo's business.' 'I think he has lost his wits,' Prudentia repeated, for the third or fourth utterance. 'Then another thing he has done--But really, Arthur, my dear, we must go.' 'O tell us some more!' said Miss Kennedy. 'We have not heard of any wits lost in this way, all winter; and it is quite exciting. What next, Mrs. Coles?' Prudentia laughed. 'How comes it he don't tell you himself? I thought you used to be such friends--riding about everywhere. But indeed _we_ don't see much of Dane now; he lives at his old nurse's ever so much of the time; and comes scouring over the country on that bay horse of his, to consult papa about something;--but _I_ never see him, except through the window. Sometimes he rides your brown horse, I think, Miss Kennedy. I suppose he is keeping it in order for you.' 'Well, that certainly does sound erratic!' said Miss Kennedy, drawing a long breath. 'I hope he will confine all new-fangled notions to the bay.' 'He has taught that creature to stand still,' said Mrs. Coles, looking at her. 'That must afford him immense satisfaction! Rather hard upon the bay, though.' 'He stands as still as a mountain,' Prudentia went on, carrying on meanwhile privately a mental speculation about Wych Hazel;--'he stands like a glossy statue, without being held, too; and comes when Dane snaps his fingers to him.' 'It only shews what unexpected docility exists in some natures,' said Miss Kennedy with an unreadable face. 'Come, Prudens--tell your story and have done!' said Dr. Arthur, speaking now. 'I have an appointment.' 'I am quite ready,' said Mrs. Coles starting up. 'Dear me! we have stayed an unconscionable time, but Miss Kennedy will forgive us, being country people and going back to the country to-morrow. Prim says Dane is coming down before long.' 'Tell your story!' 'Miss Kennedy won't care for it, and it will ruin Dane with Mr. Falkirk. He has introduced something like English penny readings at Morton Hollow,' said Prudentia, putting on her bonnet and turning towards Wych Hazel's guardian. 'What are penny readings?' said Mr. Falkirk. 'They had their origin in England, I believe; somebody set them on foot for the benefice of the poorer classes, or work people; and Dane has imported them. He receives the employés of the mills,' said Prudentia, chuckling,--'whoever will come and pay a penny; his own workmen and the others. The levee is held on Saturday nights; and Dane lays himself out to amuse them with reading to them and singing. Fancy it! Fancy Dane reading all sorts of things to those audiences! and the evenings are so interesting, I am told, that they do not disperse till eleven o'clock. I believe he has it in contemplation to add the more material refreshment of sandwiches and coffee as soon as he gets his arrangements perfected. And he is going to build, as soon as the spring opens, O, I don't know what!' 'Fools build houses, and other people live in them,' said Mr. Falkirk. 'O, it's not houses to live in--though I have a notion he is going to do that too. He lives with old Gyda pretty much of the time.' 'Well,' said Dr. Arthur, looking at Mr. Falkirk but speaking to Wych Hazel, 'I need only add, that my father thoroughly approves of all Rollo's work.' 'Work?--does he call it "work"?' said Wych Hazel, looking up. 'It is not exactly play, Miss Kennedy!'-- But the soft laugh that answered that, no one could define. 'He won't find it play by the by,' said Mr. Falkirk. CHAPTER XLI. A LESSON. This visit and talk gave Hazel a great deal to ponder. The work, and--the doer of it; and--did he ever think of her, she questioned, in the doing? And did he expect to make _her_ 'stand, as he had the bay'? and come, if he but 'snapped his fingers'? On the whole, Miss Wych did not feel as if _she_ were developing any hidden stores of docility at present!--not at present; and one or two new questions, or old ones in a new shape, began to fill her mind; inserting themselves between the leaves of her Schiller, peeping cunningly out from behind 'reason' and 'instinct' and 'the wings of birds'; dancing and glimmering and hiding in the firelight. Mr. Falkirk might have noticed, about this time, that Miss Wych was never ready to have the gas lit. The gas was lit, however, and the tea-tray just brought in, when one evening a few nights after the visit last recorded, Rollo himself was announced. Notwithstanding all Mrs. Coles had prognosticated, he seemed very much like himself both in face and manner; he came in and talked and took his place at the table, just as he had been used to do at Chickaree. Not even more grave than he had often been there. It was not the first time Wych Hazel had confessed to herself that tea trays are a great institution; nor the first time she had found shelter behind her occupation. Very demurely she poured out the tea, and listened sedately to the talk between the gentlemen; but it was with extra gravity that she at last put her fingers in. She never could guess afterwards how she had dared. 'Do you think he looks _much_ like a ruined man, Mr. Falkirk?' she said, in one of the pauses of their talk. A flash of lightning quickness and brightness came to her from Rollo's eyes. Mr. Falkirk lifted his dumbly, not knowing how to take the girl. He had not, so far in the talk, touched the subject of Mrs. Coles' communications, though no doubt they had not been out of his mind for one instant. But somehow, Mr. Falkirk had lacked inclination to call his younger coadjutor to account, and probably was hopeless of effecting any supposable good by so doing. Now he stared wonderingly up at Wych Hazel. She was looking straight at him, awaiting an answer; but fully alive to the situation, and a little bit frightened thereat, and with the fun and the confusion both getting into her face in an irresistible way. Mr. Falkirk's face went down again with a grunt, or a growl; it was rather dubious in intent. Rollo's eyes did not waver from their inquisition of Wych Hazel's face. It was getting to be hot work!--Hazel touched her hand bell, and turned away to give orders, and came back to her business; sending Mr. Falkirk a cup of tea that was simply scalding. Her bravery was done for that time. 'What have you been doing this winter?' Mr. Falkirk finally concluded to ask. 'Investing in new stock,' Rollo answered carelessly. 'Don't pay, does it?' 'I think it will. Money is worth what you can get out of it, you know.' 'Pray, if I may ask, what do you expect to get out of it in this way?' 'Large returns'--said Rollo very calmly. 'I don't see it,' said Mr. Falkirk. 'I hope you do; but I can't.' 'You have not the elements to make a perfect calculation.' Rollo, it was plain, understood himself, and was in no confusion on the subject. Mr. Falkirk, either in uncertainty or in disgust, declined to pursue it. He finished his tea, and then, perhaps, feeling that he had no right to keep watch over his brother guardian, much to Wych Hazel's discomfiture, he took up his book and marched away. Rollo left the table and came round then to a seat by her side. 'What have _you_ been doing this winter?' he asked, putting the question with his eyes as well as with his words. 'Making old stock pay,'--said the girl, looking down at her folded hands; she was not of the calm sisterhood who hide themselves in crochet. 'Perhaps you will be so good as to enlarge upon that.' Hazel sent back the first answer that came to her tongue, and the next: it was no part of her plan to have herself in the foreground. 'This is a fair average specimen of our tea-drinkings,' she said. 'And the mornings are hardly more eventful. Just lately, Mr. Falkirk has been a good deal disturbed about you. Or else he was easy about you, and disturbed about your doings,--he has such a confused way of putting things. But we heard you had copied my "hurricane track," ' said Miss Wych, folding her hands in a new position. 'And were you disturbed about my doings?' 'I? O no. I am never disturbed with what you do to anybody but me.' Rollo did not choose to pursue that subject. He plunged into another. 'I should like to explain to you some of my doings; and I must go a roundabout way to do it. Miss Hazel, do you read the Bible much?' 'Much?' she said with a sudden look up. 'What do you call "much?" ' He smiled at her. 'Are you in the habit of studying it?' 'As I study other things I do not know?--Not often. Sometimes,' said Wych Hazel, thinking how often she had gone over that same ninety-first Psalm. 'What is your notion of religion?--as to what it means?' She glanced up at him again, almost wondering for a moment if his wits were 'touched.' Then seeing his eyes were undoubtedly sane and grave, set her own wits to work. 'It means,' she answered slowly after a pause, 'to me, different things in different people. All sorts of contradictions, I believe!--In mamma, as they tell of her, it meant everything beautiful, and loving, and loveable, and tender. And it puts Dr. Maryland away off--up in the sky, I think. And it just blinds Prim, so that she cannot comprehend common mortals. And it seems to open Gyda's eyes, so that she _does_ understand--like mamma. And--I do not know what it means in you, Mr. Rollo!' 'You never saw it in me.' 'No.' 'Let me give you a lesson to study,' said he. 'Something I have been studying lately a good deal. I must take this minute before we are interrupted. Have you got a Bible here?' She sprang up and brought her own from the next room, with a certain quick way as if she were excited; Rollo took it and turned over the leaves, then placed it before her open. 'I have heard you read the Bible once. Read now those two verses.' "For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead: and that he died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him which died for them, and rose again."--2 Cor. v. 14, 15. Wych Hazel read the words slowly, softly,--then look[ed] up at him again. 'Is _that_ what it means in you?' she said. 'What do the words imply, for anybody?' he said, with his eyes going down into hers as they did sometimes, like as if they would get at the yet unspoken thoughts. But hers fell again to the book. 'I suppose, they should mean--what they say,' she answered in the same slow fashion. 'But what that is,--or at least would be,--I do not very well know.' 'If One died for me,--if it is because of his love and death for me that I live at all,--to whom do I properly belong? myself, or him?' 'Well, and then?' she said, passing the question as answered. '_Then_ a good many things,' he said, smiling again. 'Suppose that he, to whom I belong, has work that he wants done,-- suppose there are people he wants taken care of and helped,--if I love him and if I belong to him, what shall I like to do?' 'What you are doing, I suppose,' said Hazel, with a little undefined twinge that came much nearer jealousy than she guessed. 'That is very plain, and perfectly simple, isn't it?' 'It sounds so.'--And glancing furtively at the bright, clear face, she added to herself Dr. Maryland's old words: 'Love likes her bonds!'--That was plain too. 'Then another question. If I belong to this One whom I love, does not all that I have belong to him too?' 'But it was not _I_ who said you were ruining yourself,' said the girl in her quick way. 'I liked it.' 'Did you?' said he, with one of his flashes of eye. 'But I am giving you a lesson to study. I am not justifying myself. Answer my question. Does not all I have belong to that One, who loves me and whom I love?' She bowed her head in assent. Somehow the words hurt her. 'So that, whatever I do, I cannot be said to _give_ him anything? It is all his already. I am asking you a business question. I want you to answer just as it appears to you.' 'How can it appear but in one way?' said Hazel. 'That must be true, of course.' 'Very well. That is clear. Now suppose further that my Lord has left me special directions about what he wants done to these people I spoke of--am I not to take the directions exactly as they stand, without clipping?' 'Yes.' He put his hand upon the book which lay before her, and turned back the leaves to the third chapter of Luke; there indicated a verse and bade her read again. ' "He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none." ' 'What does that mean?' asked Rollo. 'What it says--if it means anything, I suppose.' Again Rollo put his hand upon the leaves, turning further back still till he reached the book of Isaiah. And then he gave Wych Hazel these words to read: 'Is not this the fast that I have chosen? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every joke? Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thine house? when thou seest the naked, that thou cover him; and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh?' 'How are the commands to be met?' Rollo asked gravely when she had done. 'Why, you have found out!' said Hazel. 'I knew you would go off on a crusade after that October sky, Mr. Rollo.' He seemed half to forget his subject, or to merge it, in a deep, thoughtful gaze at her for a few moments, over which a smile gradually broke. 'To come back to our lesson,' he said,--'are not these commands to be taken _au pied de la lettre?_' 'They can hardly be the one exception among commands, I should think,'--with a little arch of her eyebrows. 'Then I am bound, am I not, to undo every heavy burden that I can reach? to loose every bond of wickedness, and to break every yoke, and to remove oppression, in so far as it lies with me to do it? Do you not think so?' 'Why, yes!' said Wych Hazel. 'Does anybody _like_ oppression?' 'Does anybody practise it?' 'I do not know, Mr. Rollo. O yes, of course, in some parts of the world. But I mean here. Yes,--those people used to look as if something kept them down,--and I used to think Mr. Morton might help it, I remember.' 'You are not to suppose that oppression is liked for its own sake. That is rarely the case, even in this world. It is for the sake of what it will bring, like other wrong things. But a question more. Can I do _all_ I can, without giving and using all I have for it?' 'That is self-evident.' 'Then it only remains, how to use what I have to the best advantage.' 'Well, even Mr. Falkirk admits you are a good business man,' said Hazel, laughing a little. 'How are you for a business woman?' 'Nobody has ever found out. Of course I consider myself capable of anything. But then business never does come into my hands, you know.' 'This business does.' 'Does it? the business of caring for other people?--Last summer Dr. Maryland read a terrible text about the "tears of the oppressed, and they had no comforter." It haunted me for a while. But I could do nothing. No,--one must have more right of way than I have--yet.' 'I do not mean the business simply of caring for other people. I mean the whole course of action, beginning from those first words you read.' 'You know,' she said quietly, 'I have never tried.' 'Will you study the lesson I have set you?' 'The one you have been learning?' 'Yes. The one contained in these verses you have read. Shall I do harm if I mark this book?' 'No.'--The word came quick, under breath. He turned to the different places where she had been reading, and carefully marked the passages; then sought out and likewise marked several others. 'Will you study the lesson out?' he asked as he was busy with the last marking. 'I will try--I think,' she answered slowly. 'As well as I know how.' 'Do not fancy,' he said, smiling as he shut the book, 'that the care of the needy, in any shape, is religion; nor think that He who loves us will take _anything_ as a substitute for our whole-hearted love to him. If we give him that, he will let us know in what way we may shew it.' She made no answer except by another swift look. This was Chaldee to her! He let the silence last a little while. 'Now I have asked you so many questions,' he said, 'I should like it if you would ask me a few.' 'What about?' 'All subjects are open to you!' 'How did you contrive to make the bay "stand"?' The flash of Rollo's eye came first. 'How do you know I did?' he said laughing. 'But that is no answer. Let me see. I believe, first I made him know that he must mind me; and secondly, I persuaded him into loving me. All that remained, was to let him understand that I wanted him to be immovable when I was not on his back.' 'O, but!--' said Hazel hastily,--the sentence ending in crimson cheeks, and the shyest veil of reserve dropped over her face. 'I might question here,' said Rollo in an amused tone, and eyeing her inquisitively; 'but I have done it so often,--I leave the ground to you. What next?' 'What next' seemed to have flown away. 'Does Collingwood engross all the thoughts that go back to Chickaree?' A sidelong glance of the brown eyes was all that Mr. Rollo got by that venture. How is Trüdchen?' she asked gravely. 'Flourishing. Asks after you whenever she gets a chance.' 'Mrs. Boërresen of course is well, as she has had you to look after?' 'Gyda is happy. It is a comfort to her to have to make fladbrod for two.' 'It must be a comfort to you to eat it!--How is poor Mr. Morton? I felt for him when I heard you had turned his world upside down.' 'What did you feel for him?' said Rollo quite innocently. 'You have asked all your questions. I think it would be proper now,' said Wych Hazel, folding her hands and controlling the curling lips, 'that you should go on and tell me all there is to be told, and save me the trouble of asking any more.' 'I do not wish to save you the trouble.' 'It is good practice occasionally to do what you do not wish. Instructive. And full of suggestion.' 'Suggestion of what?' 'Try, and you will know. I doubt if you ever did try,' said Wych Hazel. 'I tried it last night and yesterday morning, when I was turned away from your door with the announcement that you were out.' 'But you did not leave your name!' said Hazel, looking up. 'I found it "suggestive" too,' Rollo went on. 'I do not know whether you would like me to tell you all the things which it suggested.' 'How is everybody else at home?' said Hazel, changing her ground. 'I heard Miss May had been sick.' The answer tarried, for Mr. Falkirk came in, and perhaps Rollo forgot it, or knew that Wych Hazel had; for it was never given. He entered into talk with Mr. Falkirk; and did his part well through the rest of the evening. Then, Mr. Falkirk expressing the surmise, it was hardly put in the form of a hope, that they would see him to breakfast or dinner, Rollo averred that he was going immediately home. He had done his work in town, and could not tarry. No remark from the lady of the house met that. Indeed she had been sitting in the silentest of moods, letting the gentlemen talk; having enough to think of and observe. For absence does change, even an intimate friend, and both lifts and drops a veil. Old characteristics stand out with new clearness; old graces of mind or manner strike one afresh; but the old familiarity which once in a sort took possession of all this, is now withdrawn a little,--we stand off and look. And so, secretly, modestly, shyly, Wych Hazel studied her young guardian that night. But when he had risen to go, the faintest little touch from one of her finger tips drew him a step aside. 'I said I would study that,' she began. 'But it seems to me you explained it all as you went along. What is there left to study?' The grave penetrating eyes she met and had to meet once, gave all the needed force to his answer.--'_Your part_, Miss Hazel.' He stood looking at her a minute; and then he went away. If when Rollo had entered he room where she was, that evening, the instant feeling had been that he must come often: perhaps the after feeling was that he could not stand much of this doubtful and neutral intercourse. For he did as he had promised; left her, practically, to Mr. Falkirk, and came not to town again during all the rest of that winter. CHAPTER XLII. STUDY. It seemed to Hazel, that in these days there was no end to the thinking she had to do; and if Mr. Rollo had only known, she remarked to herself, he need not have been at the trouble to point out new lines of study. The mere sight of him for two hours had put her head in a tangle that it would take her a month to clear away. Some of the questions indeed had started up under the conversation of Mrs. Coles; but with them now came others, all wrapped round and twisted in; and instead of dreamily watching the fire in her twilight musings, she began now to spend them with her cheek on her book, or her head dropped on her hands, an impatient little sigh now and then bearing witness to the depth of the difficulties in which she was plunged. What was foremost among the subjects of her musings?--perhaps this strange new talk of Mr. Rollo's, with the whole new world of work and interest and consecration which had opened before him. It made her sober,--it brought back the old lonely feelings which of late (since she knew herself to belong to somebody 'in idea') had somewhat passed out of sight. He was beginning a new, glad life; growing wiser and better than she; making himself a blessing, whereas she was only a care. What could she do for him any more?--would he even want her any more? given up now to these new ways of which she knew nothing, and in which somebody else might suit him better--say Primrose? But at that, Miss Wych started up and stirred the fire energetically, and then came back to her musings. What did she care, anyhow? She passed that question, turned it round, and took it up in another shape. How would she bear to be all her life under orders? in 'closer' guardianship?--and there the word 'sweeter' flashed in, confusingly. But that was not business. Did she--that is, could she--like him well enough to like to give up her own way? Answer, a prompt negative. Never!--Not if she liked him ten times more than--but it is awkward dealing with unknown quantities: Hazel sheered off. Suppose she _didn't_ like it--could she do it? do it so that he would never find out what it cost her? do it to give him pleasure? do it because it was his right? Waiving her own pleasure, pushing aside her own will? Could she do it?--Well, there was not the least hope that she would wish to do it. She should always like her own best: no doubt of that. Then could she (perhaps) learn such trust in his judgment, as would turn her own will round?--As hopeless as the other. Sometimes, of course, he might be right,--by a great stretch of leniency Miss Wych allowed so far,--sometimes, it was certain, she would. Well: could she give his judgment as well as his will the right of way? For unless she could, Wych hazel felt quite sure of one thing: she should never be happy a minute in such guardianship. She had not dared to give herself a possible reason for liking it in the old times,--could she do it, now that she dared? Was she willing to give up, sometimes or always, to just that one person in all the world?--turning her bonds into bracelets, and wearing them royally? And there her thoughts went down to the real bracelet on her arm, and its motto, so suddenly become his: 'In hope of eternal life.'--Would he care for her any more? O how thoughts tired themselves, toiling round these points! and slowly uprising from them came yet another, which filled the air. What was she to say at the year's end?--or, if _this_ were the year's end, what would she say now?--supposing Mr. Rollo still cared what she said. But that last question must be studied by and by. Mr. Rollo would have been amused, may be, and may be a little touched, if he had known the ogre-like shapes in which the girl conjured him up, just to see if she could endure him _so:_ putting herself to superhuman tests. But her imagination played tricks, after all; for every Afrite came up with a face and voice before which she yielded, perforce; and even her favourite scene of standing still as the bay and having him snap his fingers for her, ended one day in a laugh, as she thought what she would say if he ever _did_. Then finding she had got very far beyond limits, Hazel coloured furiously and ran away from her thoughts. But they hindered her new study, and interrupted it; and the study brought up the new pain; only slowly through it all, one thing gradually grew clear, helped on by her pain perhaps as much as anything: she would rather belong to somebody than not--if somebody wanted her! And there was only one somebody in the world, of whom that was true. Whereupon, with characteristic waywardness, Miss Wych at once gave up her recluse life; accepted invitations, and pulled Mr. Falkirk into a round of outdoor gaiety that nearly turned his head. Trying, perhaps, to test her discoveries, or to get rid of her thoughts; or to prove to herself conclusively that she did not wish for any more visits from Chickaree. And so Wych Hazel knew her own secret. Typographical errors silently corrected : Contents : =favors= silently corrected as =favours= Chapter 3 : =This is Haydn's Dam= silently corrected as =This is Hadyn's Dam= Chapter 4 : =in to, for the sun= silently corrected as =in too, for the sun= Chapter 4 : =Sometime before= silently corrected as =Some time before= Chapter 5 : =has made you to day= silently corrected as =has made you to-day= Chapter 5 : =then he said. 'It is too= silently corrected as =then he said, 'It is too= Chapter 6 : =said Mr Falkirk= silently corrected as =said Mr. Falkirk= Chapter 6 : =Mr Kingsland at her feet= silently corrected as =Mr. Kingsland at her feet= Chapter 7 : =folly or ill-humor= silently corrected as =folly or ill-humour= Chapter 7 : =Rollo at the horse's heads= silently corrected as =Rollo at the horses' heads= Chapter 8 : =lady could eat;= silently corrected as =lady could eat?= Chapter 12 : =that whitehandkerchief= silently corrected as =that white handkerchief= Chapter 13 : =just a litle bit= silently corrected as =just a little bit= Chapter 14 : =translated from her.= silently corrected as =translated from her--= Chapter 15 : =then you, and I can= silently corrected as =then you and I can= Chapter 15 : =What did you say, my dear.= silently corrected as =What did you say, my dear?= Chapter 16 : =his post down the brook;= silently corrected as =his post down the brook,= Chapter 16 : ='contriving;' his own= silently corrected as ='contriving' his own= Chapter 17 : =It is the pumpkin= silently corrected as =Is it the pumpkin= Chapter 18 : =brown fairies to day= silently corrected as =brown fairies to-day= Chapter 18 : =when I was a child;= silently corrected as =when I was a child,= Chapter 18 : =Two fair days= silently corrected as =two fair days= Chapter 18 : =of several gentleman= silently corrected as =of several gentlemen= Chapter 19 : =until I bring you word.= silently corrected as =until I bring you word?= Chapter 19 : =softly endeavoring= silently corrected as =softly endeavouring= Chapter 19 : =Chickaree) ordered up= silently corrected as =Chickaree), ordered up= Chapter 19 : =However had he dared= silently corrected as =How ever had he dared= Chapter 20 : =Miss' Azel'll get= silently corrected as =Miss 'Azel'll get= Chapter 20 : =h'it's 'ere, h'it's'ere= silently corrected as =h'it's 'ere, h'it's 'ere== Chapter 22 : =disturbing Mrs. Maryland= silently corrected as =disturbing Miss Maryland= Chapter 22 : =disagreeable,= silently corrected as d=isagreeable.= Chapter 22 : =the other man about.= silently corrected as =the other man about?= Chapter 23 : =He said after= silently corrected as =he said after= Chapter 23 : =favorite opera air= silently corrected as =favourite opera air= Chapter 23 : =we had a royal time?= silently corrected as =we had a royal time!= Chapter 23 : =they last beheld you?= silently corrected as =they last beheld you!= Chapter 26 : a=nd her voice was clear= silently corrected as =and his voice was clear= Chapter 27 : =I shall wear blue to night= silently corrected as =I shall wear blue to-night= Chapter 27 : =What's the matter!= silently corrected as W=hat's the matter?= Chapter 27 : =hospitality again to night= silently corrected as =hospitality again to-night= Chapter 28 : =you know that is a sort= silently corrected as =You know that is a sort= Chapter 28 : =till another time.= silently corrected as =till another time?= Chapter 29 : C=hickaree left behind.= silently corrected as =Chickaree left behind!= Chapter 29 : =näively= silently corrected as =naïvely= Chapter 29 : =Rollo siezed= silently corrected as =Rollo seized= Chapter 30 : =grave consideration,= silently corrected as =grave consideration.= Chapter 30 : =added Mrs. Cole= silently corrected as =added Mrs. Coles= Chapter 30 : =for insanity;= silently corrected as =for insanity.= Chapter 32 : =must must here= silently corrected as =must here= Chapter 32 : =lady and gentlemen= silently corrected as =lady and gentleman= Chapter 33 : =best of the neighborhood= silently corrected as =best of the neighbourhood= Chapter 34 : =the worst of is= silently corrected as =the worst of it= Chapter 34 : =The gentlemen looked= silently corrected as =The gentleman looked= Chapter 35 : =vis-a-vis= silently corrected as =vis-à-vis= Chapter 35 : =hair'sbreadth= silently corrected as =hair's breadth= Chapter 35 : =mysterieuses= silently corrected as =mystérieuses= Chapter 36 : =decolletée= silently corrected as =décolletée= Chapter 36 : =clergymen's back= silently corrected as =clergyman's back= Chapter 37 : =better by and by,= silently corrected as =better by and by.= Chapter 38 : =But Hazel= silently corrected as =but Hazel= Chapter 39 : =in the the abstract= silently corrected as =in the abstract= Chapter 39 : =laid head= silently corrected as =laid her head= Chapter 40 : =neighborhood of Chickaree= silently corrected as =neighbourhood of Chickaree= Chapter 40 : =No, Sir= silently corrected as =No, sir= Chapter 40 : =degagé air= silently corrected as =dégagé air= Chapter 41 : =plunged into another,= silently corrected as =plunged into another.= Chapter 41 : =quick way as she= silently corrected as =quick way as if she= Chapter 42 : =became his= silently corrected as =become his= 
36157	----	COLLECTION OF BRITISH AUTHORS. VOL. CCLXIII. DAISY BURNS BY JULIA KAVANAGH. IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I. TAUCHNITZ EDITION By the same Author, NATHALIE 2 vols. GRACE LEE 2 vols. RACHEL GRAY 1 vol. ADELE 2 vols. A SUMMER AND WINTER IN THE TWO SICILES 2 vols. SEVEN YEARS AND OTHER TALES 2 vols. FRENCH WOMEN OF LETTERS 1 vol. ENGLISH WOMEN OF LETTERS 1 vol. QUEEN MAB 2 vols. BEATRICE 2 vols. SYBIL'S SECOND LOVE DORA 2 vols. SILVIA 2 vols. BESSIE 2 vols. JOHN DORRIEN 2 vols. DAISY BURNS; A TALE BY JULIA KAVANAGH, AUTHOR OF "NATHALIE." _COPYRIGHT EDITION_. IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I. LEIPZIG BERNHARDT TAUCHNITZ 1853. JULIA KAVANAGH DAISY BURNS. CHAPTER I. As I sat alone this evening beneath the porch, the autumn wind rose and passed amongst the garden trees, then died away in the distance with a low murmuring. A strange thrill ran through me; the present with its aspects vanished; I saw no more the narrow though dearly loved limits which bound my home; the little garden, so calm and grey in the dewy twilight, was a wide and heaving sea; the low rustling of the leaves seemed the sound of the receding tide; the dim horizon became a circular line of light dividing wastes of waters from the solemn depths of vast skies, and I, no longer a woman sitting in my home within reach of a great city, but an idle, dreaming child, lay in the grassy nook at the end of our garden, whence I watched the ships on their distant path, or sent a wandering glance along the winding beach of sand and rock below. A moment effaced years, and my childhood, with its home, its joys, and its sorrows, passed before me like a thing of yesterday. Rock Cottage, as my father had called it, rose on a lonely cliff that looked forth to the sea. It was but a plain abode, with whitewashed walls, green shutters, and low roof, standing in the centre of a wild and neglected garden, overlooked by no other dwelling, and apparently far removed from every habitation. In front, a road, coming down from the low hills of Ryde, wound away to Leigh; behind, at the foot of a cliff, stretched the sea. The people of Leigh wondered "how Doctor Burns could live in a place so bleak and so lonely," and they knew not that to him its charms lay in that very solitude with its boundless horizon; in the murmurs of the wind that ever swept around his dwelling; in the aspect of that sublime sea which daily spread beneath his view, serene or terrible, but ever beautiful. This was not however the sole recommendation of Rock Cottage; it stood conveniently between the two villages of Ryde and Leigh, of which my father was the only physician. There was indeed a surgeon at Ryde, but he never passed the threshold of the aristocratic mansions to which Doctor Burns was frequently summoned, and whence he derived the larger portion of his income. That income, never very considerable, proved however sufficient to the few wants of the lonely home where my father, a widower, lived with me, his only child. Of my mother I had no remembrance; my father seldom mentioned her name; but there was a small miniature of her over our parlour mantle-piece, and often in the evening, sitting by our quiet fireside, he would look long and earnestly on the mild and somewhat mournful face before him, then give me a silent caress, as I sat on my stool at his knee, watching him with the ever-attentive look of childhood. I was sickly and delicate, and he indulged me to excess. "Study," he said, "would only injure me, for I was a great deal too clever and precocious for a child;" so he taught me himself the little I knew, and put off from month to month his long contemplated and still cherished project of sending me to some first-rate school. I believe that in his heart he felt loath to part from me, and was secretly glad to find some excuse that should keep me at home. He never left me in the morning without a caress, and often, when he returned late from visiting some distant patient, his first impulse, as well as his first act, was to enter my room and kiss me softly as I slept. I loved him passionately and exclusively, and years have not effaced either his memory or his aspect from my heart. I remember him still, a man of thirty-five or so, tall, pale, and gentlemanly, with wavy hair of a deep golden brown, and dark grey eyes of singular light and beauty. How he seemed to others I know not: to me he was all that was good and great. I felt happy to live thus alone with him; I never wished for the companionship of other children; I asked not to move beyond the limits of our home. Silence, repose, and solitude, things so antipathetic to childhood, were the chief pleasures of mine; partly on account of my bad health, and partly, too, because I had inherited from my father a jealous sort of exclusiveness and reserve, by no means held to be the general characteristic of his countrymen. My happiest moments were those spent in that grassy nook at the end of our garden, to which I have already alluded. A group of dark pine-trees, growing on the very edge of the cliff, sheltered it from the strength of the breeze; close by began a steep path, winding away to the shore, and to which a wooden gate, never locked, gave access. But more blest than ever was Eve in her garden,--for in mine grew no forbidden fruit,--I could spend there an entire day, and forget that only this easy barrier stood between me and liberty. My father, seeing how much I liked this spot, had caused a low wooden bench to be placed for me beneath the pine- trees. In the fine weather my delight was to lie there, and to read and dream away whole hours, or to gaze on the clear prospect of the beach below, and, beyond it, on that solemn vastness of sea and sky which, in its sublimity and infinitude, so far surpasses the sights of earth. It was thus, I remember, that I spent one mild and hazy autumn afternoon, reading, for the twentieth time, the touching story of Pracovia Loupouloff--not the Elizabeth of Madame Cottin, but the real and far more pathetic heroine,--and for the twentieth time, too, thinking with a sort of jealousy and regret, that I was sure I could do quite as much for my father if he were only an exile, when he came and sat down by me. He was going out, and, as usual, would not leave home without giving me a kiss. As he took me on his knee, he saw the book lying open on the bench; he looked at me wistfully, and said with a sigh-- "I wish you would not read so much, my darling. You are always at the books. I have just found my History of Medicine open: what could you want with that?" "I was reading about the circulation of the blood." "Well, who discovered it?" "William Harvey--I wish he had not." "Why so?" asked my father, looking surprised. "Because _you_ would," I replied, passing my arms around his neck, and laying my cheek close to his. He smiled, kissed my forehead, rose to go, took a few steps, came back, and, stooping over me as I lay on the bench, he pressed his lips to mine with lingering tenderness, then left me. I saw him enter the house. I heard him depart, and I even caught a glimpse of him and his grey mare as he rode up the steep path leading to Ryde. I looked and listened long after he had vanished and the tramp of the horse had ceased. Then turning once more towards the sea, I idly watched a fisherman's boat slowly fading away in the grey horizon, and thought all the time what a great man my father might hare been, if William Harvey had not unfortunately discovered the circulation of the blood two hundred years before. I lay there, dreaming the whole noon away, until Sarah came down the garden path in quest of me, and, in her mournful voice, observed-- "Miss Margaret, _will_ you come in to tea?" "No," I said coolly, "I won't yet." Sarah turned up her eyes. I certainly was a spoiled child, and I dare say not over-civil; but I did not quite make a martyr of her, as she chose to imagine and liked to say. "God forgive you and change your heart!" she said piously. I did not answer. Most children are aristocratic, and I had a certain intuitive scorn of servants; besides, Sarah had only been a few days with us. "Will you come in to tea?" she again asked. I took up my book, as if she had not spoken. "Miss," she said solemnly, "there'll be a judgment on you yet." With this warning she left me. I went in when it pleased me to do so. On entering the parlour, I perceived two cups on the tea-tray. "Is Papa come back?" I asked, without looking at Sarah. "Miss," she said indignantly, "servants aint dogs, nor cats either. I am ashamed of you, Miss." "Is Papa come back?" I asked again, with all the insolence of conscious security. If Sarah had dared, I should then have got a sound slap or box on the ear, but I knew well enough she would not dare: her predecessor had been dismissed for presuming to threaten me with personal chastisement, so she swallowed down her resentment to reply, rather sharply, "No, Miss, the Doctor is not come back, Miss." I looked at the two tea-cups, and said haughtily, "I'll have my tea alone." Sarah became as crimson as the ribbons in her cap, gave me a spiteful look, laughed shortly, and vindictively replied. "No, Miss, you'll not have tea alone, Miss. Mr. O'Reilly is come, and as he is not an unfort'nate servant, perhaps you won't mind taking tea with him, Miss." I sulked on hearing the news. Cornelius O'Reilly was the friend and countryman of my father, who had known him from his boyhood, and helped to rear and educate him. He came down every autumn to spend ten days or a fortnight at Rock Cottage. He never failed to bring me a present; but this did not render his visits more welcome to me. Whilst he was in the house, I was less petted, less indulged, and, above all, less noticed by my father. It was this I could not forgive the young man. On noticing the unamiable look with which I heard the news of his arrival, Sarah indignantly exclaimed, "You ought to blush, Miss, you ought, for being so jealous of your poor Pa! Do you think he is to look at nobody but you? Suppose he were to marry again?" "He won't, you know he won't," I interrupted, almost passionately; "and you know he said you were not to say it." This was true; for Sarah, once feeling more than usually "aggravated" with me, had chosen to inform me "that if my Pa went every day to see Miss Murray, it was not all because she was poorly, but because he was going to marry that lady; and that I and her nephew William were to be got rid of by being sent to school as soon as the wedding was over." She spoke positively. I believed her, and took the matter so much to heart that my father perceived it, learned the cause, and, after relieving me with the assurance that he was quite determined never to marry a second time, and that I was to be his only pet and darling, called in Sarah, and in my presence administered to her a short and severe reprimand, which she resentfully remembered as one of my many offences. Being now beaten on this point, she sharply observed, "Well, Miss, is it a reason, because our Pa won't marry again, that we are to be rude to our Pa's friend?" I did not answer. "I am sure he is kind," she continued, "it's in his face." No reply. "I never saw a better-tempered looking gentleman." I was obstinately silent. "Nor a handsomer one," persisted Sarah, on whom the young Irishman's appearance seemed to have produced a strong impression; "there is not one like him from Ryde to Leigh." She spoke pointedly. I felt myself redden. "He is not half so handsome as Papa," I replied indignantly. "Right, Margaret," observed a good-humoured voice behind us; and Cornelius O'Reilly, who had overheard the latter part of our discourse, entered the parlour as he spoke. Sarah uttered a little scream, then hung down her head in maidenly distress; to recover from her confusion, and perhaps to linger in the room, she began to shift and rattle the tea-things, whilst Cornelius, sitting down by the table, signed me to approach. I did do so,--not very graciously, I am afraid. He took both my hands in one of his, and resting the other on my head, looked down at me with a smile. I had often seen him before, yet when I look back into the past, I find that from this autumn noon, as I stood before him with my hands in his, dates my first clear and distinct recollection of Cornelius O'Reilly. He was then about twenty, tall, decided in manner and bearing, and strikingly handsome, with heavy masses of dark wavy hair, which he often shook back by a hasty and impatient motion. His face was characteristic, frank, and proud, with a broad brow, ardent hazel eyes, full and brilliant as those of the hawk, and arched features, which, though neither Greek nor Roman, impressed themselves on the memory as vividly as any ancient type. His look was both kind and keen; his smile pleasant and perplexing. Every one liked it, but few understood it rightly: it was so ready for raillery, so indulgent, and withal so provokingly careless. Like the face, it expressed a mobile temper, ingenuous in its very changes; a mind that yielded to every impression, and was mastered by none. Such was then Cornelius O'Reilly; not that he seemed so to me, but the gaze of childhood is as observant as it is unreflecting, and I unconsciously noted signs of which I knew not how to read the meaning. "Well, Margaret, how are you?" asked Cornelius, after a sufficiently long silence. "Very well, thank you," I replied in a low tone, and making a useless effort to disengage my hands from his grasp. Without seeming to notice this, he continued, nodding at a brown-paper parcel on the table-- "There is a cake, which my sister Kate sends you, with her very kind love." I saw Sarah turning up her eyes in admiration, and this induced me to make a reply which I am ashamed to record, it was so ungracious: "I never eat cake," I said. "Miss!" began Sarah. "And I have brought you this," interrupted the young man, drawing forth a book from his pocket. He held it before my eyes; it had a bright cover, with a gilt title; the temptation was strong, but not stronger than my stubborn pride. "Papa gives me books," I replied. "Oh! very well," smilingly answered Cornelius; "I shall give him this to give to you." His good-humoured forbearance began to make me feel penitent, when again Sarah interfered with an unlucky "For shame, Miss!" "She is only shy," kindly said Cornelius. "Oh! Sir, it is sly we are," replied Sarah with a prim smile; "if we durst, we'd scamper away through that open door; ay, that we would!" she added, emphatically nodding her head at me. "We are very unkind, Sir." "Not at all," observed Cornelius, taking my part; "Margaret is very fond of me, only she does not like to say so. Are you not, my dear?" he added with provoking confidence. "No," was my reply, more frank than civil. "Indeed you are, and the proof of it is that of your own accord you are going to give me a kiss." I was astounded at the audacious idea. I never kissed any one but my father. Alas! I fear I thought myself and my childish caresses very precious things indeed. Cornelius laughed, and stooped; but as he gently released my hands at the same time, I eluded the caress, and darted through the open door up the dark staircase. Sarah wanted to rush after me. Cornelius interfered, and again said I was shy. "Shy, Sir! shy!" echoed Sarah with a short, indignant laugh, "bless you, Sir, it is pride: she is as proud as Lucifer, and as obstinate, too. I could beat that child to death, Sir, and not make her kiss me. No one knows how she has tried my feelings. I am naturally fond of children, and I have been in families where young ladies used to doat on me, and scarcely care for their Mas, much less for their Pas; but with Miss Margaret it is just the reverse. You may wait on her, scold, praise, coax; it is all one: she cares for no one but for her Pa--of whom she is as jealous as can be, Sir; and if she doesn't like you, Sir, why she won't like you, and there's an end of it." He laughed, as she paused, out of breath at the volubility with which she had spoken. I waited not to hear more, but softly stole up to my room. I feared neither darkness nor solitude; besides the moon had risen, and her pale, mild light fell on the floor. So I sat down by my bed, laid my head on the pillow, and, as I thus faced the window, I looked at the open sky beyond it, and watched a whole flock of soft white clouds slowly journeying towards the west. I thought to remain thus until I should hear the well-known tramp of my father's horse coming down the stony road, but unconsciously my eyes closed and I fell fast asleep. How long I slept I cannot tell. I know that I had a fearful dream, which I have never been able to remember, and that I woke with the cold dews on my brow and an awful dread at my heart. I looked up trembling with terror; a large dark cloud was passing over the moon; in my room there was the gloom of midnight, but not its silence. Unusual tumult filled our quiet home; I listened and heard the voices of strange men, and above them that of Sarah, rising loud in lamentation, and exclaiming, "Oh! my poor master!" My next remembrance is, that standing on the steps of the staircase, I looked down at something passing below; that a sharp current of cold air came from the open front door, beyond which I caught sight of a starry sky; that on the threshold of the parlour stood, with their backs to me, three men in coarse jackets; and that, looking beyond them in the room, I saw Sarah weeping bitterly, and holding a flickering light, whilst Cornelius O'Reilly bent over my father, who sat in his chair motionless and deadly pale. He said something; Cornelius looked at Sarah; she laid down the light, came out, shut the door, and all vanished like a vision lost in sudden obscurity. And a vision I might have thought it, but for the subdued speech that followed. Sarah was sobbing in the dark passage. "Come, girl, don't take on so," said a man's voice, speaking low, "where's the use? Any one can see it is all over with the poor doctor." "Oh! don't," incoherently exclaimed Sarah, "don't." "He said so himself, and he ought to know. 'It is all over with me, Dick,' says he, when we picked him up from where that cursed horse had thrown him; 'take me home to die,' says he, 'take me home to die.'" Sarah moaned; the other two men said nothing; had they but uttered a word, I should have remembered it, for I still seem to hear distinctly, as if but just fallen from the lips of the speaker, not merely the words, but the very intonations of that voice to which, standing on the dark staircase, I then listened in all the stupor of grief. Scarcely had it ceased, when the parlour door opened; Cornelius, looking very sad and pale, appeared on the threshold, and, raising his voice, called out, "Margaret!" I sprang down at once; in a second I was by my father, with my arms round his neck, my cheek to his. He bore no sign of external injury; but his brow was ashy pale; his look was dim; his lips were white. He recognized me, for he looked from me to Cornelius, with a glance that lit suddenly. The young man laid his hand on my shoulder; tears ran down his face, and his lips trembled as he said, "May God forsake me when I forsake your child!" My father made an effort; he raised himself on one elbow. "Tell Kate--" he began; but the words that should have followed died away in a mere incoherent murmur: he sank back; there was a sound of heavy breathing; then followed a deep stillness. I felt the hand of Cornelius leaning more heavily upon my shoulder. "Sarah!" he said, looking towards the door, and speaking in a whisper. She came forward, took my hand, and led me away. She wept bitterly; I looked at her, and shed not one tear. I know not what I felt then; it was dread, it was agony, stupor, and grief. Alas! I learned in that hour how bitter a chalice even a poor little child may be called upon to drink; how early all may learn to feel the weight of that hand which, heavy as it seems, chastens not in its wrath, but in its tenderness. CHAPTER II. My father was dead. He who had kissed me a few hours before,--whose return--God help me, unhappy child!--I had expected, but whose caresses had ceased for ever, for whose coming I might listen in vain,--my father, who loved me so very dearly, was dead. Of what had befallen me, of the change in my destinies, this was all I clearly understood, and this, alas! I understood but too well. When Cornelius came to me, as I sat alone in the back parlour, where Sarah had taken and left me, when he said, "Margaret, you must go with Sarah!" I neither refused nor resisted. I asked not even why or where I was going. I had been a proud and obstinate child, I was now humble and submissive. I felt, in a manner I cannot define, it was so acute and deep, that my power was over. He who knew not how to deny aught to my entreaties or tears was lying in the next room, cold and inanimate: nor voice, nor embrace of his child would move him now. Sarah took me to the imaginary step-mother with whom she had once terrified me. Miss Murray was a pale, fair-haired, invalid lady of thirty, who resided in a neat hive-looking little place, called Honeysuckle Cottage; there she dwelt like a solitary bee, sitting in her chair and working the whole day long, with slow industry, or conning over her ailments in a faint, murmuring voice, that reminded one of the hum of a distant hive. She disliked sound, motion, and light; and kept her floors soft, and her windows shrouded and dim. Pets were her horror,-- they made a noise and moved about; flowers she tolerated,--they were quiet and silent. She neither went out nor received visits, but lived in a hushed, dreamy, twilight way, suited to her health, mind, and temper. We found Miss Murray already apprised of my father's death. She sat in her parlour, with a soft cambric handkerchief to her eyes; near her stood her servant Abby, suggesting consolation. A lamp with a dark green shade, burned dimly on the table. "I cannot survive it, Abby, I cannot," faintly sighed Miss Murray; "a friend--" "The best friends must part, Ma'am." "A friend, Abby, who understood my constitution so well. Abby, who is that?" "Please, Ma'am," said Sarah, leading me in, "Mr. O'Reilly will take it so kind if you--" "You need not mention it, Sarah, I understand; the subject is a painful one. You may leave the dear child to me. I am sure she will forbear to distress me, in my weak state, by unavailing regrets. No one can have more cause than I have, to regret the invaluable friend to whom I owe years of existence." "She doesn't cry!" said Abby, looking at me. "She never cries," emphatically observed Sarah; "that child is dreadful proud, Ma'am." "She is quite right," gravely remarked Miss Murray; "tears are most injurious to the system. Come here, my dear, and sit by me." She pointed to a low stool near her chair. I did not move. Sarah had to lead me to it; as I sat down apathetically, she made a mysterious sign to the lady. "Not insane, surely?" exclaimed Miss Murray, wheeling off her chair with sudden alarm and velocity. "Oh dear no, Ma'am! rather idiotic; always thought so from her dreadful stubbornness." "Sad," sighed Miss Murray, "but quiet at least. Good evening, Sarah. Abby, pray keep a look-out for that dreadful boy: my nerves are unusually weak." The two servants left on tiptoe, and softly closed the door. I remained alone with Miss Murray. "My dear," she began, "I hope you are not going to fret; it would be so unchristian. I have lost a kind father, an invaluable mother, an affectionate aunt, the dearest of brothers--" The list was interrupted by the door which opened very gently, to admit a lad of eleven or twelve, tall, strong, fair-headed, rather handsome, but looking as rough and rude as a young bear. This was her nephew William. His father had died some six months before bequeathing him to the guardianship of his aunt, who immediately committed him to school for bad behaviour, and to whom his periodical visits, during the holidays, were a source of acute distress. On seeing him enter, Miss Murray turned up her eyes like one prepared for anything, and faintly observed, "William, have you seen Abby?" "Yes," was his sulky reply. "Then let me beseech you," she pathetically rejoined, "to respect my feelings and those of this dear child." He looked at me, but never answered. She continued, "Don't behave like a young savage,--if you can help it," she kindly added. William scowled at his aunt, and thrust his hands into his pockets by way of reply. "You have passed through the same trial," pursued Miss Murray, "and, though I cannot say that your language has always been sufficiently respectful towards the memory of my lamented brother--" "Why did he leave me to petticoat government?" angrily interrupted William; "you don't think I am going to be trodden down by a lot of women. I come in singing, not knowing anything, and Abby calls me a laughing hyena; and I am scarcely in the room before you set me down as a savage! I won't--there!" This must have meant something, for Miss Murray bewailed her unhappy fate, whilst William doggedly sat down by the table, across which he darted surly glances at me. "I do not mean to reproach the memory of my dearest brother," feelingly began Miss Murray, "but really if he had had any consideration for me, and my weak state, he ought to have taken more care of himself, and tried to live longer. William, what do you mean by those atrocious grimaces?" "I wish she wouldn't;" said William, whose features worked in a very extraordinary manner; "I wish she wouldn't." Miss Murray followed the direction of his glance, and looked round to where I sat a little behind her. "I declare the unfortunate child is crying," she exclaimed, in a tone of distress,--"sobbing too! William, ring the bell,--call Abby. My dear, how can you? Oh! Abby, Abby," she added, as the door opened, and Abby entered, "look--is there no way of stopping that?" "Doesn't she cry though?" observed Abby, astonished. I had bowed my head on my knees, and I wept and sobbed passionately. Miss Murray, after vainly asking for the means "of stopping that," declared I should go to bed. I made no resistance; Abby took my hand to lead me away; when William, exclaiming, "It's a burning shame, that's what it is," flew at her and attempted a rescue. A scuffle followed, short but decisive. William was ignominiously conquered; he retreated behind the table, his hair in great disorder, his face crimson with shame. "Oh! the young tiger!" cried Abby, still out of breath with her victory; "that boy will end badly, Ma'am!" William gave her a look of scorn. Miss Murray, who had wheeled back her chair, from the commencement of the conflict, observed, with feeling reproach, "William, you shall go back to school to-morrow. Abby, put that child to bed; allow me to suggest the passage for your next battle." Abby slammed the door indignantly, and muttering she would not fight in a passage for any one, she took me to her room, undressed me, and put me to bed. My weeping had not ceased. "Come, Miss," she said, a little roughly, "crying is no use, you know." She stooped to give me a kiss; I turned away with passionate sorrow. What was to me the caress of a stranger on the night that had deprived me for ever of my father's embrace? "Proud little hussy!" she exclaimed, half angrily. With this she left me. Ere long she returned, and lay down by my side; she was soon breathing hard and loud. I silently cried myself to sleep. I awoke the next morning, subdued by grief into a mute apathy that delighted Miss Murray when I went down to breakfast, and made her hold me up as a model to her nephew. He replied with great disgust, "He was not going to make a girl of himself, to please her and Abby." "But you could respect the child's feelings by remaining silent," remonstrated his aunt, gently sipping her tea. "Why don't you eat?" asked William, addressing me. "I am not hungry." "All children are not voracious, like you, William," said Miss Murray. "Have you got an aunt?" he inquired, ignoring her remark. "No!" I answered laconically, for his questions wearied me. "Lucky!" he replied, with a look and sigh of envy. "Dreadful!" murmured Miss Murray, putting down her cup,--"not twelve yet; dreadful!" "Who is to take care of you?" continued William. Miss Murray was one of the many good-natured persons who dislike uncomfortable facts and questions. She nervously exclaimed, "Do not mind him, my dear!" "Don't you like them?" pursued William. I gave him no reply. "Quite right," approvingly observed Miss Murray; "take example of that child, William." "She is a sulky little monkey!" he indignantly exclaimed, and, until his departure, which took place in the course of the day, he spoke no more to me. A week passed; the only incident it produced was that I was clad in mourning from head to foot. I continued to charm Miss Murray by a listless apathy, which increased every day. I either sat in the parlour looking at her sewing, or in a little back garden, on a low wooden bench near the door. Once there, I moved no more until called in by Abby. Thus she and Sarah found me late one afternoon, at the close of the week. I took no notice of their approach. They looked at me, and sagaciously nodded their heads at one another. A mysterious dialogue followed. "Eh?" inquiringly said Sarah. "Yes!" emphatically replied Abby. "Never!" exclaimed Sarah. "Oh dear, no!" was the decisive answer. Sarah sighed, sat down by me, asked me how I was; if I knew her; and other questions of the sort. I neither looked at her nor replied. She rose, held herself up as a warning to Abby "not to place her affections on Master William;" to which Abby indignantly replied "there was no fear;" then solemnly forgave me my ingratitude. As they re-entered the house, I thought I heard the voice of Cornelius O'Reilly in the passage. My apathy vanished as if by magic. I was roused and rebellious. Cornelius O'Reilly had not come near me since my father's death: at once I guessed his errand was to take me away with him. I looked around me: a back door afforded means of escape; I opened it, slipped out unperceived, then glided along a lonely lane. In a few minutes I had reached Rock Cottage, unseen and unmissed. The home is an instinct of the heart, and as the wounded bird flies to its nest, I fled for refuge to the dwelling which had sheltered me so long. The garden-gate stood open, but the front door and windows were shut. I went round to the back of the house; my heart sank to find that there too all was closed and silent. I sat down on the last of the stone steps, vaguely hoping that some one would open and let me in. I listened for the coming of a foot, for the tones of a voice; but sounds of life there were none. Above me bent a lowering sky, sullen and dark; the wind had risen; the pine-trees at the end of the garden bent before the blast, then rose again, seeming to send forth a low and wild lament; the tide was coming in, and the broken dash of the waves against the base of the cliff was followed by their receding murmur, full and deep. An unutterable sense of woe, of my desolate condition, of all that had been mine and never could be mine again, came over me; my heart, bursting with a grief that had remained silent, could bear no more. I gave one dreary look around me, then clasping my arms above my head, and lying across the stone steps, I wept passionately on the threshold of my lost home. At length a kind voice roused me. "Margaret, what are you doing here?" asked Cornelius. I neither moved nor replied. He sat down by me and raised me gently. I gazed at him vacantly. His handsome face saddened. "Poor little thing!" he said, "poor little thing!" He took my cold hands in his, and drew me closer to him. Subdued by grief, I yielded. I had refused his presents, shunned his caresses, been jealous, proud, and insolent, hated the very thought of his presence in my father's house, and now he came to seek me on the threshold of that house, to take me--a miserable outcast child--in his embrace. The thrill of a strange and rapid emotion ran through me. I disengaged my hands from those of Cornelius, and, with a sudden impulse, threw my arms around his neck. My cheek lay near his; his lips touched mine; I mutely returned the caress. I was conquered. I was a child, how could I but feel with a child's feelings, entirely? I kept back nothing; I knew not how or why, but I gave him my whole heart from that hour. CHAPTER III. Cornelius O'Reilly had too much tact not to perceive at once the ascendency he had obtained over the proud and shy child, who, after rejecting his kindness for years, had yielded herself up in a moment. He looked down at me with a thoughtful, amused smile, which I understood, but which did not make me even change my attitude. I felt so happy thus, from the very sense of a submission which implied on my part dependence-- that blessed trust of the child; on his, protection--that truest pleasure of strength; on both, affection, without which dependence becomes slavish and protection a burden. The temper of Cornelius was open and direct; he claimed his authority at once, and found me more docile than I had ever been rebellious: it was no more in my nature to yield half obedience than to give divided love. "We must go, Margaret," he said, in a tone which, though kind, did not admit of objection. I rose and took his hand without a murmur. We returned to Honeysuckle Cottage, where we found Miss Murray calmly wondering to Abby "what could have become of the dear child." Cornelius inquired at what hour the stage-coach passed through Ryde. "Half-past nine, Sir," replied Abby. "Margaret, get ready," said Cornelius, looking at his watch, a present of my father's. I went upstairs with Abby, who dressed and brought me down again in stately silence. "It shall be attended to, Mr. O'Reilly," gravely observed Miss Murray to Cornelius, as we entered the parlour. He heard me, and, without turning round, said quietly, "Margaret, go and bid Miss Murray good-bye, and thank her for all her kindness." "Will you not also give me a kiss?" gently asked Miss Murray, as, going up to her, I did as I was bid, and no more. I looked at Cornelius; the meaning of his glance was plain. I kissed Miss Murray. She drew out her handkerchief, wished for a niece instead of a nephew, then shook hands with Cornelius, and, sinking back after a faint effort to rise, she rang the bell. Abby let us out. Cornelius quietly slipped something in her hand, then looked at me expressively. "Good-bye, Abby," I said; and I kissed her as I had kissed her mistress. "Well, to be sure!" she exclaimed; but Cornelius only smiled, took my hand, and led me away. For a while we followed the road that led to Ryde, and passed by Rock Cottage; but suddenly leaving to our right my old home and the sea, we turned down a lonely lane on our left. Dusk had set in, and our way lay through solitary fields, fenced in by hedges and dark spectral trees, behind which shone the full moon, looking large and red in the thick haze of evening mists. We met no one; and of cottage, farm, or homestead, howsoever lonely, token there seemed none. A sombre indefinite line, like the summit of some ancient forest, rose against the dark sky, and bounded the horizon before us. I looked in vain for the hills of Ryde. I turned to Cornelius to question him; but he seemed so abstracted that I did not dare to speak. We walked on silently. A quarter of an hour brought us to the end of the lane, which terminated in a high brick wall, overshadowed by tall trees for a considerable distance. Through a massive iron gate, guarded by a dilapidated-looking lodge, we caught a glimpse of a long avenue, at the end of which burned a solitary light. Cornelius rang a bell; a surly-looking porter came out of the lodge, opened the gate, locked it when we were within, pointed to the right, then re-entered the lodge,--the whole without uttering a word. The avenue which we now followed, extended through a dreary-looking park, and ended with two old iron lamp-posts, one extinguished, broken, and lying on the ground half hidden by rank weeds, the other still standing and bearing its lantern of tarnished glass, in which the flame burned dimly. The two had once formed an entrance to a square court, with a ruined stone fountain in the centre, and beyond it an old brick Elizabethan mansion, on which the pale moonlight now fell. Heavy, brown with age, dark with ivy, it rested with a wearied air on a low and massive arcade. It faced the avenue, and was sheltered behind by a grove of yews and cypresses that rose solemn and motionless, giving it an aspect both sombre and funereal. No light came from the closed windows; the whole place looked as dark and silent as any ruin. We crossed the court, and Cornelius knocked at the front door, which projected slightly from both house and arcade. "Do you live here?" I asked. "No, child; surely you know I live in London with my sister Kate!" As he spoke, a small slipshod servant-girl unbarred and partly opened the door. She held a tallow-candle in one hand; the other kept the door ajar. Through the opening she showed us the half of a round and astonished face. "Mr. Thornton--" began Cornelius. "He won't see you," she interrupted, and attempted to shut the door, but this Cornelius prevented by interposing his hand. "I am come on business," he said. "Where's the letter?" asked the little servant, stretching out her hand to receive it. "Letter! I have no letter, but here is my card." She shook her head, would not take the card, and, in a tone of deep conviction, declared, "it was not a bit of use." "I tell you I am come on business!" impatiently observed Cornelius. "Well, then, where's the letter?" There was so evident a connection in her mind between business and a letter, that, annoyed as he was, Cornelius could not help laughing. "I wish I had a letter, since your heart is set upon one," he replied, good-humouredly; "however, I come not to deliver a letter, but to speak to Mr. Thornton on very important business." "Can't you give the letter, then?" she urged, in a tone of indignant remonstrance at his obstinacy. Cornelius searched in his pockets; no letter came forth. "On my word," he gravely observed, "I have not got one; no, not even an old envelope." "You can't come in, then!" she said, looking at him from behind the door, as sharp and as snappish as a young pup learning to keep watch. "I beg your pardon, I will go in," replied Cornelius with cool civility. "If you don't take that there hand of yours away," cried the girl with startling shrillness, "I shall set the light at it." "Indeed! I am not going to have my poor fingers singed!" said Cornelius, very decisively; so saying, he stooped and suddenly blew out the light. She screamed, dropped the candlestick, and let go the door: we entered; the girl ran away along the passage lit with a faint glimmering light proceeding from the staircase above. "Do you take me for a housebreaker?" asked Cornelius; "I tell you I want to speak to Mr. Thornton on business." She stopped short, looked at him with sullen suspicion, and doggedly replied, "Master won't see you; he won't see none but the gentleman from London." "I am from London," quietly said Cornelius. She stared for awhile like one bewildered, then opened a side-door whence issued a stream of ruddy light, and muttering something in which the word "London" was alone distinguishable, she showed us in and closed the door upon us. We found ourselves in a large room, scant of chairs and tables, but so amply stocked with books, globes, maps, stuffed animals, cases of insects, geological specimens, and odd-looking machines and instruments, that we could scarcely find room to stand. A bright fire burned on the wide hearth, yet the whole place had a mouldy air and odour, and looked like a magician's chamber. A lamp suspended from the ceiling, and burning rather dimly, gave a spectral effect. Its circle of light was shed over a square table covered with papers, and by which sat a singular-looking man--one of the numberless magicians of modern times, clad, it is true, in every-day attire, but whose characteristic features, swarthy complexion, and white hair and beard, needed not the flowing robe or mystic belt to seem impressive. He was too intent on examining some important beetle through a magnifying glass to notice our insignificant approach, more than by a certain waving motion of the hand, implying the absolute necessity of silence on our part, and on his the utter impossibility of attending to us. At length he looked up, and fastening a pair of piercing black eyes on Cornelius, he addressed him with the abrupt observation: "Sir, I am intensely busy, but you are welcome; pray be seated." Cornelius looked round: there was but one chair free, he gave it to me, remained standing himself, and, turning to Mr. Thornton, observed, "I am come, Sir, on the matter I mentioned in my letter of Wednesday last, and which you have not, I dare say, had leisure to answer." Mr. Thornton did not reply; he sat back in his chair looking at Cornelius from head to foot. "Sir!" he said, in a tone of incredulous surprise, "you are young--very. I don't know you." Cornelius reddened, and stiffly handed his card, which Mr. Thornton negligently dropped. "I cannot say I have ever heard of Cornelius O'Reilly," he remarked; "but I have been years away. You may be famous for all I know; but, I repeat it, you are very young, Sir." He spoke with an air of strong and settled conviction. "I claim no celebrity," drily replied Cornelius, "and my age has nothing to do with my errand. I am come to--" here he stopped short, on perceiving that Mr. Thornton, after casting several longing looks at his beetle, had gradually, like a needle attracted by a potent magnet, been raising the magnifying glass to the level of his right eye, which it no sooner reached, than he made a sudden dart down at the table; but, when the voice of Cornelius ceased, he started, looked up, and said, with a sigh of regret, "You came to have some difficult point settled? Well, Sir, though I have only been three days in England, I do not complain; but you see this fascinating specimen; I beseech you to be brief." He laid down the magnifying glass, and wheeled away his chair from the reach of temptation. "I am come to give, not to seek, information," quietly answered Cornelius. "You bring me a specimen," interrupted Mr. Thornton, his small black eyes kindling. "A Melolo--!" "A specimen of humanity," interrupted Cornelius,--"a child." "A child!" echoed Mr. Thornton, whose look for the first time fell on me; "and a little girl, too!" he added, throwing himself back in his chair with mingled disgust and wonder. "She is ten,--an orphan; and I have brought her to you as to her natural protector," composedly observed Cornelius. Mr. Thornton looked unconvinced. "She may be ten,--an orphan; but I don't see why you bring her to me." "You do not know?" "No, Sir; I am said to be a learned man, but in this point I confess my ignorance." Without heeding his impatience, Cornelius calmly replied, "I have brought her to you, Sir, because she is your grand-daughter." Mr. Thornton gave a jump that nearly upset the table; but promptly recovering, and feeling irritated, perhaps, in proportion to his momentary emotion, he observed, in an irascible tone, "I am amazed at you, Sir! Not satisfied with introducing yourself to me as a scientific man from London,--a fact directly contradicted by your juvenile appearance,--you want to palm off your little girls upon me! My grand- daughter!--Sir, I have no grand-daughter." The look of Cornelius kindled; but he controlled his temper, to say, quietly, "If you had taken, Sir, the trouble to read a letter which I regret to see lying on your table with the seal unbroken, you would have learned that this is the child of Mr. Thornton's daughter, who has been dead some years, and of Dr. Edward Burns, who died the other day, killed by a fall from his horse." Mr. Thornton did not answer; he took a letter lying on a pile of books, broke the seal, read it through; then laid it down, and looked thoughtful. "Well, Sir!" he observed, after a pause; and speaking now in the tone of a man of the world, "I acknowledge my mistake, and beg your pardon. But I never read business letters, for one of which I took yours." He spoke very civilly, but said not a word concerning the subject of the letter; of which, quite as civilly, Cornelius reminded him. "The statements made in that letter require some proof," he observed, "and--" "Your word suffices," interrupted Mr. Thornton, very politely. "I am satisfied." Cornelius bowed, but persisted. "I have not the honour of being personally known to you, Sir; I would rather--" "Sir, one gentleman is quick to recognize another gentleman," again interrupted Mr. Thornton; "I am quite satisfied." He bowed a little ironically; and again Cornelius bent his head in acknowledgment, observing, with a smile beneath which lurked not ungraceful raillery,-- "I am delighted to think you are satisfied, Sir, as there remains for me but to ask a plain question;--there is nothing like plain, direct dealing between gentlemen. I am on my way to town, and somewhat pressed for time. I have called to know whether George Thornton, of Thornton House, will or will not receive his little grand-daughter." There was no evading a question so distinctly stated. Mr. Thornton looked at me with a darkening brow. "Sir," he morosely replied, "George Thornton had once a daughter of his own, whom he liked after his own way. He took a liking, too, to a young Irish physician, who settled in these parts, and who, I can't help saying it was a very clever fellow, and had, for his years, a wonderful knowledge of chemistry. 'I'll give Margaret to that man,' thought George Thornton; and, whilst he was thinking about it, the Irish physician quietly stole his daughter one evening. George Thornton made no outcry; he simply said he would never forgive either one or the other, and he never did." "Your daughter's child is innocent," pleaded Cornelius. "She is her father's child,--and his image, too; but no matter! I believe you are on your way to town, Sir?" "Yes, Sir, I am." "And you called--?" "To leave the child: such was my errand." "Your errand is fulfilled, Sir; you may leave the child; I shall provide for her." "The late Doctor Burns has left some property--" "I will have nothing to do with the property of the late Doctor Burns." Mr. Thornton was anything but gracious, now; but, without heeding this. Cornelius turned to me; he laid his hand on my head: "Good bye! child," he said in a moved tone, "God bless you!" He turned away; but I clung to him. "Take me with you!" I exclaimed; "take me with you!" "I cannot, Margaret," gently replied Cornelius, striving to disengage his hand from mine. "I won't stay here," I cried indignantly. "You must," he quietly answered. I dropped his hand, and burst into tears. He looked pained; but his resolve did not alter. "It cannot be helped," he said. "Good bye! I shall come and see you." He held out his hand to me; but I felt forsaken and betrayed, and turned away resentfully. He bent over me. "Will you not bid me good-bye?" he asked. I flung my arms round his neck; and, sobbing bitterly, I exclaimed, "Oh! why then won't you take me with you?" He did not answer, gave me a quiet kiss, untwined my arms from around his neck, exchanged a formal adieu with my grandfather, and left me as unconcernedly as if, little more than an hour before, he had not taken me in his arms, and cherished me in that lonely garden, where I, so foolishly mistaking pity for fondness, had given him an affection he evidently did not prize, and which, as I now began to feel, had no home save the grave of the dead. CHAPTER IV. When I heard the door close on Cornelius, my tears ceased; they had not moved him; they were useless; it was all over; my fate was fixed. I sat on a chair, drearily looking across the table, at my brown-faced, white- bearded grandfather, who raised his voice and called out impatiently, "Polly, Molly. Mary, Thing--where are you?" The little servant-girl answered this indiscriminate appeal by showing her full round face at the door. Mr. Thornton, resting both his hands on the table, slightly bent forward to say impressively, "That young man is never to be let in again,--do you understand?" She assented by nodding her head several times in rapid succession, then closed the door. "But I will see Mr. O'Reilly," I exclaimed indignantly; for though he had forsaken me, I still looked up to him as to my protector and friend. Mr. Thornton raised his eyebrows, and gave an ironical grunt. At the same moment the door again opened, and a lady, young, elegantly attired, and beautiful as the princess of a fairy tale, entered the room. "Uncle," she began, but, on seeing me, she stopped short; then with evident wonder asked briefly. "Who is it?" "Her name is Burns," was the short reply. The young lady looked at me, and nodded significantly. Mr. Thornton resumed, "I shall provide for her; in the meanwhile tell Mrs. Marks to take care of her, and keep her out of my way, until I have settled how she is to be disposed of." I felt very like a bale of useless goods. "Then you will have the charity not to keep her here," observed the young lady with impatient bitterness. "I shall have the charity not to let her become a fine lady like you, Edith," he sarcastically answered. "Do you mean to make a governess of your grand-daughter, as you would of your niece if you could?" "My dear, you forget my niece could not be a governess; and neither governess nor fine lady shall be this child, whom you are pleased to call my grand-daughter. A common-place education, some decent occupation,-- such is to be her destiny. And now be so good as to leave me." "To your beetles!" she indignantly replied; "you don't care for anything but your beetles. I am sick of my life. I wish I were dead--I wish I had never seen this dreadful old hole." "Pity you flirted with the intended of your cousin, my dear, and got packed off. Suppose you try and get married; I intend leaving England again, and it will be rather dull for you to stay here alone with Mrs. Marks." "I'll run away sooner." "That's just what I mean. Elope, my dear, elope!" "I won't eat any more!" she exclaimed, crimson with vexation and shame; "I know you don't believe it, but I won't." "Then you'll die; I'll embalm you, and you'll make a lovely young mummy." His little black eyes sparkled as if he rather relished the idea; but it was more than the beautiful Edith could stand, for she burst into tears, and calling her uncle "a barbarous tyrant," was flying out of the room in a rage, when he coolly summoned her back to say, "Edith, take it with you!" By "it" he meant me. She took my hand and obeyed; her beautiful blue eyes flashing resentfully, her bosom still heaving with indignant grief. But Mr. Thornton, heedless of her anger and sorrow, had resumed his magnifying glass, and was again intent on the beetle. When we both stood on the threshold of the door, Edith turned round to confront him, and said vindictively, "I wish there may never be another beetle,--there!" With this she slammed the door, dropped my hand, turned to her left, and went up an old oak staircase, dimly lit by an iron lamp riveted to the wall. She once looked back to see that I followed her, but took no other notice of me. As she reached a wide landing, she met, coming down, a tall and thin old lady in black. "Mrs. Marks," she said briefly, "you are to attend to this child." Without another word or look she continued her ascent. Mrs. Marks looked down at me from the landing, as I stood on the staircase a few steps below her; then up at the light figure of Edith ascending the next flight, and indignantly muttering "that she had never"--the rest did not reach me--she majestically signed me to approach. I obeyed. She eyed me from head to foot, but did not seem much enlightened by the survey. "That is the way up," she said at length, pointing with a long fore-finger to the staircase. The explanation seemed to me a very needless one, but I followed her upstairs silently. We went up until I thought we should never stop, though the ceiling becoming lower with every flight we ascended, indicated that we were approaching the highest regions of the house. I felt tired, but Mrs. Marks went on steadily, as if the tower of Babel would not have daunted her. At length she came to a pause. We had reached a low irregular corridor, that seemed to run round the whole house, and was garnished with numerous doors. Before one of these Mrs. Marks made a dead stop. She unlocked it, held it open by main force, as far as its rusty hinges would allow, then looking round at me, said, emphatically-- "That is the way in." I hesitated, then slid in; Mrs. Marks slid in after me, then let go the door, which of its own accord closed with a snap, locking us in a small, snug room, with thick curtains, closely drawn, a warm carpet on the floor, a bright fire burning in the grate, a kettle singing on the hob, a cat purring on the hearth rug, a chair of inviting depth awaiting its tenant by the fireside, and near it a small table with tray and tea- things. "Sit down," said Mrs. Marks, pointing to a chair. I obeyed. She went to the fireplace, and planting herself on the rug, with her hands gathering her skirts in front, and her back to the fire, she thence surveyed me with an attentive stare. Passed from Miss Murray to Cornelius,--from him to Mr. Thornton,--from Mr. Thornton to his niece,--and from her to Mrs. Marks, I felt more apathetic than ever; but Mrs. Marks stood exactly opposite me; I could not help seeing her. She was a gaunt, tall woman, with a pale face and fixed eyes, that made her look like her own portrait. They were eclipsed by a pair of bright black pins, which projected from her cap on either side, and held some mysterious connection with her front. She wore a robe of rusty black, that fitted tight to the figure, and was not over-ample in the skirt. After a long contemplation, she uttered a solemn "I shall see," then left the room. The door snapped after her; I remained alone with the cat, which, like every creature in that house, seemed to care nothing for me, but went on purring with half-shut eyes. Its mistress soon returned, settled herself in her arm-chair, and thence seemed inclined to survey me again; but the contemplation was disturbed by a tap at the door. "Come in, Mrs. Digby; don't be afraid of the door," encouragingly said Mrs. Marks. Mrs. Digby was probably nervous, for she made several feeble attempts to introduce her person,--as suddenly darting back again,--before she gathered sufficient courage to accomplish the delicate operation. "Gracious! I never saw such a door!" she then observed; "I wonder you can keep such a creature, Mrs. Marks." "It has its good points," philosophically replied Mrs. Marks; "it is safer than a lock, and, like a dog, won't bite unless you are afraid of it. But if you dally with it, Mrs. Digby, why it may give you a snap!" "Gracious!" exclaimed Mrs. Digby, looking horrified; "how can you live up here, Mrs. Marks?" "The rooms below are gloomy, and have no prospect; whereas here I sit by the window, look over the whole grounds, and, if I see anything wrong, I just touch this string,--then a bell rings,--and Richard at the lodge is warned." "Well," dismally observed Mrs. Digby, "I dare say that is very pleasant; but I have enough of old castles, Mrs. Marks." "This is not a castle." "They read like such dear horrid old places, that I was quite delighted when Miss Grainger said to me the other day, 'Digby, we are going to uncle Thornton's!' I did not know they smelt more mouldy than any cheese, and that there was no sleeping with the rats." "Yes, the little things will trot about, spite of the cat; but then one must live and let live, Mrs. Digby." "Don't say one must let rats live, Mrs. Marks, don't! they are almost as bad as Mr. Thornton's horrid things,--only they are stuffed." "Mr. Thornton is a learned man," sententiously replied Mrs. Marks; "but I do think he gives so much attention to natural history and entomology. Mr. Marks thought nothing of entomology, he was all for chemistry; that's the science, Mrs. Digby!" "Didn't it blow him up?" "Blow him up! Was Mr. Marks a gunpowder-mill, Mrs. Digby? He perished in making a scientific experiment; you will, I trust, soon learn the difference. A man of Mr. Thornton's immense mind cannot but sicken of entomology, and return to chemistry. You will not see much, but you will hear reports--" "Gracious!" interrupted Mrs. Digby, with an alarmed air, "I wish I were out of the place." "Then help your handsome young lady to get a husband," sneered Mrs. Marks from the depths of her arm-chair. "If Miss Grainger had my spirit," loftily replied Mrs. Digby, "she would now be a countess of the realm, Mrs. Marks; and if she had been guided by me, she would at least be the wife of the handsomest gentleman I ever saw." "Edward Thornton! the heir-at-law! Pooh! Mrs. Digby! he has not a penny, and Mr. Thornton won't die just yet." "He is very handsome," spiritedly returned Mrs. Digby; "but, as I said, if Miss Grainger will put herself in the hands of Mrs. Brand, why she must bear with the consequences, Mrs. Marks." So saying, Mrs. Digby for the first time turned towards me. She was a thin, fair, faded woman, attired in a light blue dress, which, like its wearer, was rather _pass?e_. She sat by the table, with the tip of her elbow resting on the edge; drooping in a graceful willow-like attitude, she raised a tortoise-shell eye-glass to her eyes, examined me through it, then dropping it with lady-like grace, sighed forth-- "How do you feel, darling?" I was proud, more proud than shy; I resented being left to the subordinates of my grandfather's household, and did not choose to answer. Mrs. Marks spared me the trouble. "You might as well talk to the cat, Mrs. Digby. Children," she added, giving me an impressive look of her dull eyes, "are, up to a certain age, little animal creatures: they have speech, sensation, but neither thought nor feeling. Mr. Marks and I would never have anything to do with them." "Oh! Mrs. Marks! a baby?" "Have you ever had one?" Mrs. Digby reddened, and asked for an explanation. Mrs. Marks asked to know if there had not been a Mr. Digby? No. But there might have been a Mr. Wilkinson, two Messrs. Jones--Mr. Thompson was coming on, and Mr. John Smith was looming in the distance, when Mrs. Marks interrupted the series by pouring out the tea. I sat between the two ladies, but I ate nothing. "That child won't live," observed Mrs. Marks at the close of her own hearty meal; "she is a puny thing for her age; besides it is not natural in such an essentially physical creature as a child not to eat; why don't you eat, Anna?" I looked at her and spoke for the first time: "My name is not Anna." "What is your name, then?--your Christian name, by which I am to call you?" I did not relish the prospect of being called by my Christian name, for, as I have already said, I was a proud child, so I did not reply. "Unable to answer a plain question!" observed Mrs. Marks, bespeaking the attention of Mrs. Digby with her raised forefinger; "does not know its own name!" "My name is Miss Burns," I said indignantly. "Does not know the difference between a surname and a Christian name!" continued Mrs. Marks, commenting on my obtuseness. "Come," she charitably added, to aid the efforts of my infant mind, "are we to call you Jane, Louisa, Mary Lucy, Alice?" I remained silent. "This looks like obstinacy," remarked Mrs. Marks, in a tone of discovery. "Let us reason like rational beings," she added, forgetting I was only a little animal: "if I don't know your Christian name, how am I to call you?" "Sarah never called me by my Christian name," I bluntly replied. "Miss Burns," solemnly inquired Mrs. Marks, "do you mean to establish a parallel? May I know who and what you take me for?" "You are the housekeeper," I answered. Alas! why has the plain truth the power of offending so many people besides Mrs. Marks, and who, like her, too, scorn to attribute their wrath to its true cause? "You have been asked for your Christian name," she said, irefully; "with unparalleled obstinacy you have refused to tell it; you shall be called Burns, and go to bed at once." The sentence was immediately carried into effect; I was taken to the next room, undressed, and hoisted up into the tall four-posted bedstead which nightly received Mrs Marks, and left there to darkness and my reflections. But no punishment from those I did not love ever had affected me. I was soon fast asleep. Memory is a succession of vivid pictures and sudden blanks. I remember my first evening at Thornton House more distinctly than the incidents of last week, but the days that followed it are wrapt in a dim mist. But much that then seemed mysterious on account of my ignorance, I have since learned to understand. My grandfather was a country gentleman of good family, but of eccentric character. He had from a youth devoted himself to science, and renounced the world. I believe he knew and studied everything, but his learning led to no result, save that of diminishing a fortune which had never been very ample, and of burdening still more heavily his encumbered estate. I have often thought what a dull life my poor mother must have led with him in that gloomy old house, and I can scarcely wonder that, when a man, young, amiable, and rather good-looking than plain, was imprudently thrown in her way, she knew not how to resist the temptation of love and liberty. Mr. Thornton never forgave them. Soon after the elopement of his daughter he went abroad on some scientific errand, leaving his property to the care of lawyers, and his house to Mrs. Marks, the widow of a scientific man, whom he had taken for his housekeeper. He returned to Leigh about the time of my father's death, unaltered in temper or feelings. Wrapt in his books and studies, he went nowhere and saw no one. Fate having chosen to burden him with two feminine guests--his niece and myself--he did his best to elude the penalty, by keeping away from us both. Miss Grainger's sojourn at Thornton House was caused by an indiscretion, in which beautiful young ladies will sometimes indulge. She had chosen to divert from the plain daughter of an aunt, with whom she resided, the affections of her betrothed; who was also my grandfather's heir. Edward Thornton lost his intended and her ten thousand pounds, and the beautiful Edith exchanged a luxurious abode and fashionable life for Thornton House and the society of her uncle. A rose and an owl would have been as well matched. Mr. Thornton shunned his niece with all his might; and, not being able to forgive her the sin of her birth, he saw still less of his grand-daughter. A room near that of Mrs. Marks was fitted up for me. There I spent my days, occasionally enlivened by the sound of her alarum-bell; my old books and playthings my only company. Even childish errors win their retribution. I had been an exclusive, unsociable child, caring but for one being, and contemning every other affection and companionship; no one now cared for me. Miss Murray sent me my things, and troubled herself about nothing else; my grandfather I never saw; his niece came not near me; Mrs. Digby imitated her mistress. I was left to Mrs. Marks; she might have been negligent and tyrannical with utter impunity; but though she still considered me in the light of a little animal, and persisted in calling me "Burns," she did her duty by me. My wants were attended to; but that was all; I was left to myself, to solitude and liberty. I was again sickly and languid. To go up and down stairs, to play in the court, wander in the grounds, or walk in the wild and neglected garden behind the house, were exertions beyond my strength. I remained in my room, a voluntary captive, satisfied with looking out of the window. It commanded the grounds below, a green and wild desert, with a bright stream gliding through, and looked beyond them over a soft and fertile tract of country bounded by a waving line of low hills, which opened to afford, as in a vision, a sudden view of some glorious world,-- a glimpse of blending sea and heaven, limited, yet giving that sense of the infinite, for which the mind ever longs and which the eye ever seeks. I sat at that window for hours daily, and grew not wearied of gazing. The sea, glittering as glass in sunshine, of the deepest blue in shadow, dark and sullen, or white with foam in tempest; the mellow and pastoral look of the distant country; the varied beauty of the park, with its ancient trees, woodland aspect, and bounding deer; the high grass below, suddenly swept down by the strong wind, and ever rising again; the slow and stately clouds that passed on in the blue air above me, with a sense, motion, and in a region of their own, were not, however, the objects that attracted me so irresistibly. The avenue stretching beneath my gaze, with its dark and stately trees, under which cool shadows ever lingered, and the grass-grown path lit up by gliding sunbeams, had my first and last look. Untaught by disappointment, I kept watching for Cornelius O'Reilly. My plans were laid, and I one day tested their practicability. Deceived by a strong resemblance in height and figure, I slipped down, unlocked a side-door which nobody minded, and thus admitted into Thornton House a handsome fashionable-looking man, who seemed surprised, and asked for Miss Grainger. I stole away without answering. The same evening Mrs. Marks called me to her presence. She sat down, and made me stand before her. "Burns," she said, "was it you who let in young Mr. Thornton by the side- door?" "Yes," I replied, unhesitatingly. "Who told you to do so?" "No one; I did it out of my own head." "You did it on purpose?" "Yes, I saw him coming, and went down." Mrs. Marks looked astounded. "Burns! what could be your motive?" I remained mute, though the question was put under every variety of shape. "Unfortunate little creature!" observed Mrs. Marks, whose dull eyes beamed compassion on me, "it does not know the nature of its own blind impulses." Thanks to this charitable conclusion, I escaped punishment; but on the following day I found the side-door secured by a high bolt beyond my reach. I did not, however, give up the point. A wicket-gate opened from the garden on the grounds, and commanded a side view of the avenue; there, every fine day, I took my post, still vainly hoping for the coming of Cornelius. It was thus I sometimes saw my cousin Edith. Her great loveliness and rich attire impressed me strongly. Her room was below mine. I daily heard her, like a fair lady in her bower, playing on her lute, or warbling sweet songs; she was the beauty and enchanted princess of all my fairy tales; yet, when we met, the only notice she took of me was a cold and gentle "How are you, dear?" the reply to which she never stopped to hear. She generally walked with Mrs. Digby, who, drawing her attention to my evident admiration, never failed to observe as they passed by me, "The child can't take her eyes off you, Ma'am." "Hush! Digby," invariably replied the fair Edith, in a tone implying that she disapproved of the liberty, although the sweetness of her disposition induced her to forgive it. Mrs. Digby, however, persisted in repeating her offence, even when I was not looking, and was always checked with the same gentleness. One day, when I came down, I found Miss Grainger no longer in the company of Mrs. Digby, but sitting in an arbour with a fair and fashionable lady of thirty, or so, whom she called Bertha, and who, after eyeing me through her gold eye-glass, impressively observed, as, without noticing them, I took my usual place: "Edith, such are the consequences of love- matches! Mr. Langton--" "But he is so old, Bertha," interrupted Edith, pouting. "So I thought of Mr. Brand, when I married him; but it is not generous to be always thinking of age. Ah! love is very selfish, Edith." Miss Grainger raised her handkerchief to her eyes. "My dearest girl," said the lady, "be generous; be unselfish. Mr. Langton will be so kind--he has the means, you know,--and poor Edward--poor in every sense--can only--Edward, what brought you here?" She addressed the same young man whom I had admitted, and who had now suddenly stepped from behind the arbour where the two ladies sat. He gave the speaker an angry look, and taking the hand of my cousin, he hastily led her away down one of the garden paths, talking earnestly. The lady bit her lip, followed them with a provoked glance, and stood waiting their return. She had to wait some time. At length young Mr. Thornton appeared; he looked pale, desperate, strode past the lady, opened the gate by which I stood, entered the grounds, leaped over a fence, and vanished. Edith came up more slowly. She was crying, and looked frightened. The lady went up to her. "Well!" she said, eagerly. "Edward says he'll kill himself!" sobbed Edith. "My dear," sighed her friend, "Arthur said so too when we parted. He is alive still. I am Edward's sister, and yet, you see, I am quite easy. Do not fret, dear. You must come with me to the Mitfords this evening." "I can't, Bertha." "My dearest girl, you must. It is extremely selfish to brood over sorrow." With this she kissed her, and they entered the house together. "Burns, come in to dinner," said the voice of Mrs. Marks, addressing me from the arched doorway. I obeyed, and, for some unexplained reason, was consigned to my room during the rest of the day, which I spent by the window, still watching for my friend with a patient persistent hope that would not be conquered. I was so absorbed that I never heard Mrs. Marks enter, until she said, close behind me, "Burns, what are you always looking out of that window for?" Before I could reply, a sharp voice inquired from the corridor: "Mrs. Marks, who is it I have twice this day heard you addressing by the extraordinary name of Burns?" We both looked round. Mrs. Marks had left my door open; exactly opposite it stood a ladder leading to a trap-door in the roof of the house, through which Mr. Thornton, who had gone to survey the progress of an observatory he was causing to be erected there, now appeared descending. "That child won't tell her other name, Sir," replied Mrs. Marks, reddening. "Do you know it?" "She won't tell it, Sir." My grandfather fastened his keen black eyes full on me, and signed me to approach. He stood on the last step of the ladder. I went up to him; he gave my head a quick survey, then suddenly fixed the tip of his forefinger somewhere towards the summit, and exclaimed, in a tone that showed he had settled the bump and the question: "Firmness large; secretiveness too; but good moral and intellectual development. What is your name?" "Margaret," I replied, unhesitatingly. Margaret had been my mother's name. Mr. Thornton turned away at once. "Margaret, go back to your room," shortly said Mrs. Marks. Mr. Thornton was descending the staircase. He stopped to turn round, and observed, with great emphasis, "Miss Margaret, will you please to go back to your room?" He went down without uttering another word. Mrs. Marks became scarlet; and, declaring that she was not going to Miss Margaret any one, she retired to her own apartment in high dudgeon. I thought to spend this autumn evening, as usual, in the companionship of lamp, fire, books, and toys; but scarcely had Mrs. Marks brought me my light, and retired again, when Miss Grainger entered. Was it tardy pity? Had my grandfather spoken to her? or had she come, like the fairy godmother of poor forlorn Cinderella, to visit me in all her splendour, and fill my room with a fleeting vision of elegance and beauty? Her tears had ceased, her sorrow was over; she was evidently going out for the evening: and she looked triumphant, like a long-captive princess emerging from her enchanted tower. Her dark ringlets fell on shoulders of ivory; her bright blue eyes sparkled with joy; the sweetest of smiles played on her enchanting face. A robe of rose-coloured silk fell to her feet in rustling folds; strings of pearls were wreathed in her hair, encircled her neck, and clasped her white arms. I gazed on her, mute with wonder and admiration. She looked gracious; but I ventured to touch her! She drew back with extreme alarm, glanced at her robe, and gently extending her hands before her person, to keep me at a safe distance, she smiled sweetly at me, with--"Yes, I know; good night, dear." With this she vanished. Why did she leave me far more chill and lonely than she had found me? Why did I remember the tender caresses of my dead father, and the embrace of Cornelius in the garden, and feel very dreary and desolate? Providence often answers our feelings and our thoughts in a manner that is both touching and strange. Ere long the door again opened; I looked up, and saw--Cornelius O'Reilly. CHAPTER V. What between surprise and joy, I could neither move nor speak. When the young man closed the door, came up to me, sat down by me, and, with a kiss, asked cheerfully, "Well, Margaret, how are you?" I hid my face on his shoulder, and began to cry. But he made me look up, and said with concern, "How pale and thin you are, child!--are you ill?" "No," I answered, astonished. Cornelius looked around him, at the fire with the guard, at the table with my books and playthings, at me; then observed, "Why are you alone?" "I am always alone." "Does no one come near you?" "No one." "Does your grandfather never send for you?" "Oh no!" "Who takes care of you?" "Mrs. Marks, the housekeeper." "Do you never leave this room?" "I can go down if I like; but it tires me." "Poor little thing! how do you spend your time?" "In the daytime I look out of the window; in the evening I play by myself." "Have you no children to play with?" "No, none." "And what do you learn?" "Nothing." "Nothing!" he echoed. "Yes, nothing." "Have you no lessons?" "No; Mrs. Marks says, that, as I can read well, and write a little, it is enough." "Enough!" indignantly exclaimed Cornelius; but he checked himself to observe, "Mrs. Marks knows nothing about it; a good education is the least Mr. Thornton can give his grand-daughter." He was not questioning me; but I looked at him, and said, bluntly, "I am to get a common-place education; I am not to be a lady." "Who says so?" indignantly asked Cornelius. "Mr. Thornton." "How do you know?" "He said it, before me, to Miss Grainger. He said I was to be neither a governess nor a lady; and that a common-place education, and some decent occupation, were to be my destiny." The words had stung me to the quick at the time, and had never been forgotten. As I repeated them, the blood rushed up to the face of Cornelius O'Reilly; his look lit; his lip trembled with all the quickness of emotion of his race. "But you shall be a lady," he exclaimed, with rapid warmth. "Your father, who was an Irish gentleman born and bred, gave me the education of a gentleman; and I will give you the education of a lady,--so help me God!" He drew and pressed me to him. I looked up at him, and said, "I should not take up much room." He seemed surprised at the observation. I continued--"And Mrs. Marks says I eat so little." Cornelius looked perplexed. "Will you take me with you?" I asked earnestly. Cornelius drew in a long breath. "You are an odd child!" he said. I passed my arms around his neck, and asked again, "Will you take me with you?" "Why do you want me to take you?" I hung down my head, and did not answer. The strange unconquerable shyness of childhood was on me, and rendered me tongue-tied. Cornelius gently raised my face, so that it met his look, and smiled at seeing it grow hot and flushed beneath his gaze. "Do you really want me to take you?" he asked, after a pause. I looked up quickly; I said nothing; but if childhood has no words to render its feelings, it has eloquent looks easily read. Cornelius was at no loss to understand the meaning of mine. "Indeed, then, if I can I will," he replied earnestly. "Oh! we can get out by the back-door," I said, quickly. "My dear," answered Cornelius, gravely, "never leave a house by the back- door, unless in case of fire; besides, it would look like an elopement. We must speak to Mr. Thornton." I could not see the necessity of this; but I submitted to his decision, and, taking his hand, I accompanied him downstairs. No stray domestic was visible, not even the little servant appeared. Cornelius looked around him, then resolutely knocked at the door of my grandfather's study. A sharp "Come in!" authorized us to enter. This time Mr. Thornton had exchanged the magnifying glass and the beetle for a pair of compasses and an immense map which covered the whole table. He looked up; and, on perceiving Cornelius, exclaimed, with a ludicrous expression of dismay, "Sir, have you brought me another little girl?" "No, Sir," replied Cornelius smiling; "this is the same." "Oh! the same, is it?" "No; not quite the same," resumed Cornelius; "the child, whom I left here a month ago, is strangely altered; question her yourself, Sir, and ascertain the manner in which, without your wish or knowledge, I feel assured, your grand-daughter has been treated in your house." My grandfather gave the young man a sharp look, and his brown face darkened in meaning if not in hue. "Come here," he said, addressing me; "and remember, that, though you have large secretiveness, I must have the truth." I looked at Cornelius; he nodded; I went up to Mr. Thornton, who looked keenly at my face, and, as if something there suggested the question, abruptly asked, "Do you get enough to eat?" "Yes, Sir." "Why don't you eat, then?" "But I do eat." "Why does Mrs. Marks strike you?" "She never strikes me," I replied indignantly. "But why does she ill-use you?" "She does not ill-use me; she dare not." Mr. Thornton looked at Cornelius with ironical triumph. The young man seemed disgusted, and said warmly, "I never meant, sir, that Margaret Burns was a starved, ill-used child. Heaven forbid! But I meant to say that she is left to solitude, idleness, and disgraceful ignorance." "Upon my word, Mr. O'Reilly," observed Mr. Thornton, pushing away his map, as if to survey Cornelius better,--"upon my word, you meddle in my family arrangements with praiseworthy coolness." "Mr. Thornton," replied Cornelius, not a whit disconcerted, and looking at him very calmly, "I brought the child to you; this gives me a right to interfere, which you have yourself acknowledged by not checking me at once." Mr. Thornton gave him an odd look, then grunted a sort of assent, looked at his map, and said impatiently-- "Granted; but not that the child is not treated as she ought to be. Still, within reasonable bounds, she shall be judge in her own case. Do you hear?" he added, turning towards me, "if you want for anything, say so, and you shall get it." "I want to go away," I said at once. "Very well; I shall send you to school." "But I want to go with Mr. O'Reilly." "Mr. O'Reilly is welcome to you," sarcastically replied my grandfather; "he may take you, drop you on the way, do what he likes with you--if he chooses to have you!" I ran to Cornelius. "Shall I get ready?" I asked eagerly. "My dear," he gently replied, "Mr. Thornton means to send you to school, where you will learn many things." "She will not be troubled with much learning," drily observed Mr. Thornton. "Surely, Sir," remonstrated Cornelius, "the poor child is to be educated?" "Sir, she is not to be a fine lady." "Allow me to observe--" "Sir, I will allow you to take her away and do what you like with her; but not to observe." "I take you at your word," warmly replied Cornelius, on whom Mr. Thornton bestowed an astonished look; "take her I will, and educate her too. It would be strange if I could not do for her father's child what that father did for me! I thank you, Sir, for that which brought me here, but which I scarcely knew how to ask for." My grandfather looked at me, and made an odd grimace, as if not considering me a particularly valuable present. Still, and though taken at his word, he seemed scarcely pleased. "Well," he said at length, "be it so. I certainly do not care much about the child myself, not being able to forget where that face of hers came from--you do; you want to make a penniless lady of her; she wants to go with you: have both your wish. If she should prove troublesome or in the way, send her back to me, or, in my absence, to Mrs. Marks. You distinctly understand that I am willing to provide for her; though, I suppose," he added, looking at Cornelius, "I must not propose--" "No, Sir," gravely interrupted the young man. "Very well; provide for her too, since such is your fancy. Take her; you are welcome to her." And thus it was decided; and in less than a quarter of an hour we had not only left Thornton House, but the surly porter at the lodge had closed his iron gates upon us, and we were on our way to Ryde, whence Cornelius wished to proceed to London, straight on, that same evening. After walking on for awhile in utter silence, Cornelius said to me-- "Are you tired. Margaret?" "Oh no!" I answered eagerly. Indeed the question seemed to take away my sense of fatigue. For some time, the fear of being left behind lent me fictitious strength; but at length my sore and weary feet could carry me no further; in the wildest and most desolate part of the road I was obliged to stop short. "What is the matter?" asked Cornelius. "I can't go on," I replied, despondingly. "Can't you, indeed?" "No," I said, sitting down on a milestone, and feeling ready to cry, "I can't at all." "Well, then, if you can't at all," coolly observed Cornelius, "I must carry you." "I am very heavy!" I objected, astonished at the suggestion. He laughed, and attempted to lift me up, but I resisted. "Oh! it will fatigue you so!" I said. "No, nature has given me such extraordinary strength that I can bear without fatigue burdens--like you, for instance--beneath which other men would sink." He raised me with an ease that justified his assertion. I clasped my arms around his neck, rested my head on his shoulder, and feeling how firm and secure was his hold, I yielded with a pleasurable sensation to a mode of conveyance which I found both novel and luxurious. I could not however help asking once, with lingering uneasiness, "If he did not feel tired?" "No; strange to say, and heavy as you are, I do not: but why do you shiver? Are you cold?" "No, thank you," I replied, but my teeth chattered as I spoke. "I hope it is nothing worse than cold," uneasily observed Cornelius, stopping short; "undo the clasp of my cloak, and bring it around you." I obeyed; he helped to wrap me up in the warm and ample folds, and we resumed our journey, a moment interrupted. He walked fast; we soon reached Ryde; but he would not let me come to light until we were safely housed. I heard a staid voice observing-- "Your carpet-bag. I presume, Sir. It will be quite safe here." "It is not a carpet-bag," replied Cornelius, unwrapping me, and depositing me in a small ill-lit back parlour, with a grim landlady looking on. "Your carpet-bag will be quite safe here," she resumed. "I have none." She looked aghast. A little girl, and no carpet-bag! "Yours, Sir, I presume?" she steadily observed. "Mine!" echoed Cornelius, reddening, "no." "Your sister, I presume, Sir?" persisted the landlady. "She is no relative," he shortly answered; then, without heeding her, he felt my forehead, took my hand, said both were burning; looked at his watch, pondered, and finally startled the landlady--who had remained in the room taciturn and suspicious--with the abrupt query-- "Is there a medical man about here, Ma'am?" "There is Mr. Wood." "Be so kind as to send for him; I fear this child is ill." She looked mistrustful, but complied with the request, and in about ten minutes returned with a sleek little man in black, who bowed himself into the room, peeped at my tongue, held my wrist delicately suspended between his thumb and forefinger, then for the space of a minute looked intently at the ceiling, with his right eye firmly shut, and his tongue shrewdly screwed in the left corner of his mouth. At length he dropped my hand, opened his eye, put in his tongue, and gravely said: "The young lady is only a little feverish." "You are quite sure it is nothing worse?" observed Cornelius, seeming much relieved. "Quite sure," decisively replied Mr. Wood; "but concerning the young lady--not your daughter, Sir?" "No!" was the indignant answer. "Concerning this young lady," placidly resumed Mr. Wood, "I wish to observe that she is of an excitable temperament, requiring--Not your sister?" he added, again breaking off into an inquiry. "No, Sir," impatiently replied Cornelius. "Of an excitable temperament, requiring gentle exercise, indulgence, little study, and none of those violent emotions," (here he held up his forefinger in solemn warning,) "none of those violent emotions which sap the springs of life in the youthful being. Not your ward?" he observed, with another negative inquiry. "No!--Yes!" hesitatingly said Cornelius. "In the youthful being--" again began Mr. Wood. "Excuse me, Sir," impatiently interrupted Cornelius, "but the coach will soon pass by; is there anything that can be done for the child?" "Yes, Sir," drily answered Mr. Wood, "there are several things to be done for the young lady; the first is to put her to bed directly." "To bed?" uneasily said Cornelius. "Directly. The second, to administer a sedative draught, that will make her spend the night in a state of deep repose." "Then we must actually sleep here?" "Of deep repose. The third is not to attempt moving her for the next twelve hours." "Remember, Sir, you said it was only feverishness." "It is nothing more _now_," replied the inexorable Mr. Wood, in a tone threatening anything from scarlatina to typhus if his directions were disregarded. Cornelius sighed, submitted, asked for the sedative draught, and consigned me to the care of the grim landlady. I allowed her to undress me and put me to bed in a dull little room upstairs; but when she attempted to make me take the sedative, duly sent round by Mr. Wood, I buried my face in the pillow. Though she said "Miss!" in a most threatening accent, she could not conquer my mute obstinacy. She departed in great indignation. Soon after she had left, the door opened, and Cornelius entered. He looked grave. I prepared for a lecture, but he only sat down by me and said very gently, "Margaret, why will you not drink the sedative?" I did not answer. He tasted the beverage, then said earnestly, "It is not unpleasant; try." He wanted to approach the cup to my lips, but I turned away, and said with some emotion, "I don't want to sleep." "Why so, child?" "Because I shall not wake up in time; you will go away and leave me." "Margaret, why should I leave you?" "Because you don't like me as Papa did; you do not care about me," I replied, a little excitedly; for I was now quite conscious that the affection was all on my side. He looked surprised at the reproach and all it implied, and to my mortification he also looked amused. I turned my face to the wall; he bent over me and saw that my eyes were full of tears. "Crying!" he said chidingly. "You laugh at me," I replied indignantly. "Which is a shame," he answered, vainly striving to repress a smile; "but whether or not, Margaret, you must oblige me by drinking this." He spoke authoritatively. I yielded, and took the cup from him; but in so doing I gave him a look which must have been rather appealing, for he said with some warmth, "On my word, child, I shall not leave you behind. Why, I would as soon give up a pet lamb to the butcher as let you go back to Thornton House,--or turn out a poor unfledged bird from the nest as forsake a helpless little creature like you." I drank at once. To reward my obedience, Cornelius said he would stay with me until I had fallen asleep. I tried to delay the moment as long as I could, but, conquered by a power mightier than my will, I was gradually compelled to yield. I remember the amused smile of the young man at my unavailing efforts to keep my eyes open and fixed on his face; then follows a sudden blank and darkness, into which even he has vanished. I awoke the next morning cool, well, and free from fever. The landlady dressed me in surly silence, then led me down to the little parlour, where I found Cornelius reading the newspaper by the breakfast table. He seemed much pleased to find that the fever had left me, and observed with a smile, "Well, Margaret, did I run away?" I hung down my head ashamed. "Why, my poor child," he added, drawing me towards him, "I should be a perfect savage to dream of such a thing; besides, how ungallant to go and desert a lady in distress! Never more could Cornelius O'Reilly--a disgrace to his name and country--show his face after so dark a deed." He was laughing at me again; I did not mind it now; but as the grim landlady, who had lingered by, looked mystified, Cornelius amused himself by treating me with the most attentive and fastidious politeness during the whole of breakfast-time. To complete her satisfaction, and to make up for the missing carpet-bag, she was edified by the arrival of Miss Burns's luggage from Thornton House. We left early. We rode outside the stage-coach. It was a fine autumn day, and the journey was pleasant until evening came on; Cornelius then drew me closer to him, and shared with me the folds of his ample cloak. The unusual warmth and motion soon sent me to sleep. Once or twice I woke to the momentary consciousness of a starlight night, and trees and houses rapidly passing before me; but after this all was darkness; the cloak had shrouded me completely. I merely opened my eyes to close them again and fall asleep, with my head resting against Cornelius, and his arm passed around me to save me from falling. I have a vague remembrance of reaching a large and noisy city, of leaving the stage-coach to enter a cab, where I again fell fast to sleep, and at length of awaking with a start, as Cornelius said, "Margaret, we are at home." The cab had stopped; Cornelius had got out; he lifted me down even as he spoke, and the cab rolled away along the lonely lane in which we stood. CHAPTER VI. I felt a little bewildered. The night and the spot were both dark; all I could see was a low garden-wall, half lost in the shadow of a few tall trees, and a narrow wooden door. The gleam of light that appeared through the chinks, and the sound of a quick step on the gravel within, spared Cornelius the trouble of ringing. The door opened of its own accord, and on the threshold appeared a lady in black, holding a low lamp in her right hand. We entered; she closed the door upon us, and, almost immediately, flung the arm that was free around the neck of Cornelius. "God bless you!" she exclaimed eagerly, and speaking in a warm ardent tone, that sounded like a gentle echo of his; "God bless you! I have been so wretched!" "Did you not get my letter?" "Yes, but I had such a dream!" "A dream! Oh Kate!" he spoke with jesting reproach, but pausing in the path, he stooped and kissed his sister several times, each time more tenderly. "How is the child? Where is she?" asked Miss O'Reilly. "She is here, and well. By the bye, I have left her little property outside." "Deborah shall fetch it. Take her in." We were entering the house, which stood at the end of the garden. "This way, Margaret," said Cornelius, leading me into a small, but comfortable and elegant-looking parlour, which took my fancy at once. The furniture, though simple, was both good and handsome; the walls were adorned with a few pictures and engravings in gilt frames; a well-filled book-case faced the rosewood piano; a large table, covered with books, occupied the centre of the room, and a stand of splendid flowers stood in the deep bow-window. "Well!" carelessly said Miss O'Reilly, who had followed us in almost immediately, "where is that little Sassenach girl?" "Here she is, Kate," replied Cornelius, leading me to his sister; he stood behind me, his hand lightly resting on my shoulder, and looking at her, I felt sure, for, in the stoic sadness of her gaze, there was something of a glance returned. She lowered the light, gave me a cursory look, put by the lamp, and sat down on a low chair by the fire, on which she kept her eyes intently fixed. Miss O'Reilly was very like her brother, and almost as good-looking, though at least ten or twelve years older. She was fresh as a rose, and had the dark hair, finely arched eyebrows, clear hazel eyes, and handsome features of Cornelius; but the expression of countenance was different. It was as decided, but more calm; as kind, but scarcely as good-humoured. She was very simply attired in black; her glossy and luxuriant hair was braided, and fastened at the back of her head with jet pins; jet bracelets clasped her wrists. As she sat leaning back in her chair, her hands clasped on her knees, even that simple attire and careless attitude could not disguise the elegant symmetry of her figure; her hands were small and perfect. "Well!" said Cornelius in a low tone. "Well!" replied his sister, smiling at the fire with sorrowful triumph in her clear eyes; "she is like her father; she has his eyes; pity she has not his hair, instead of those pale and sickly flaxen locks. Come here, little thing," she added, looking up at me, and holding out her hand. I hesitated. "She is very shy, Kate," said Cornelius. "I shall cure her of her shyness. Come here, Midge." I obeyed, and took her extended hand. She had the open, direct manner of which children are quick to feel the power; her likeness to her brother made me more communicative than I usually was with strangers. "My name is not Midge," I said to her. "Then it ought to have been, you mite of a thing!" "My name is Margaret; it was Mamma's name." Miss O'Reilly dropped my hand, and rose somewhat abruptly. Then she took my hand again and said calmly-- "Come, child, you look dusty and tired, after your journey." She led me upstairs to a cheerful-looking bed-room, where she unpacked my wardrobe, and changed my whole attire, with a prompt dexterity that seemed natural to her. When we returned to the parlour we found Cornelius lying at full length on a sofa drawn before the hearth; a dark cushion pillowed his handsome head; the flickering fire-light played on his face. His sister went up to him at once; she passed her white hand in his dark hair, and bending over him, said tenderly, as if speaking to a child-- "Poor boy! you are tired." He shook his head, and laughed up in her face. "Not a bit, Kate. Where is she?" He half raised his head to look for me; signed me to approach, and made room for me on the sofa. I sat down and looked at him and his sister, who stood lingering there, smiling silently over him, and still passing her slender fingers in his luxuriant hair. The light fell on their two faces, almost equally handsome, and to which their striking resemblance gave a charm beyond that of mere contrast. To trace in both the same symmetrical outlines of form and feature, was to recognize the loveliness of nature's gifts, received and perpetuated for generations in the same race; and to look at them thus in their familiar tenderness, was to feel the beauty and holiness of kindred blood. Child as I was, I was moved with the tender sweetness of Miss O'Reilly's smile; it preceded however a question more kind than romantic. "What will you have with your tea? Ham?" "Nothing, Kate; we dined on the road." "Will she?" "You mean--" "Yes," she interrupted impatiently. He looked at his sister, who went up to the table, then put the question to me. I wished for nothing; so Miss O'Reilly simply rang the bell; a demure-looking servant brought in the tray. When the tea was made and poured out, Miss O'Reilly said to me, in her short way-- "Child, Thing, give that cup to Cornelius." "But my name is Margaret," I objected, a little nettled at being called "Thing." "I know it is," she replied in a low tone. "Margaret," musingly repeated Cornelius, taking the cup I was handing to him, "diminutives, Meg, Peg, and by way of variety Peggy; which do you prefer, child?" "I don't like any of them," I frankly replied. "Mar-ga-ret! three syllables! I could not afford the time; Katherine has come down to Kate.--you must be Meg." I sat at the table taking my tea. I laid down the cup with dismay. "I don't like Meg," I said. "Well then, Peg." "I don't like Peg, either." "Well then, Peggy." "I hate Peggy!" I indignantly exclaimed. "Let the child alone!" said Miss O'Reilly. "Meg, my dear, a little more milk, if you please," calmly observed Cornelius. Though ready to cry with mortification, I acknowledged the name by complying with his request. "Thank you, Meg," he said, returning the milk-jug. "Let the child alone," again put in his sister. "She is my property, and I shall call her as I choose," quietly replied Cornelius. "I don't like the name of Mar-ga-ret." "Papa said there was not a prettier name," I objected. "That is a matter of taste," almost sharply replied Cornelius; "I think Katherine is a much prettier name." He reddened as he spoke, whilst his sister pushed back her untasted tea. "He said Margaret was the name of a flower," I persisted,--"of the China- aster." "Which you do not resemble a bit," inexorably replied Cornelius; "the garden has shorter and prettier names; Rose, Lily, Violet, etc." "I like my own name best." "Meg! No; well then Peg. What!--not Peg! which then?" "I don't care which," I replied despondingly. He saw that my eyes were full of tears, and yet that I submitted. "Poor little thing!" he observed with a touch of pity. "I must think of something else.--Let me see.--Eureka! Kate, what do you say to Daisy, the botanical diminutive of Margaret?" "Anything you like, Cornelius," she replied sadly, "but don't teaze the poor child." "She shall decide." He called me to him, and left the matter to me. I was glad to escape from Meg and Peg; and Daisy I was called from that hour. "You already have it quite your own way with that child," observed Miss O'Reilly, looking at her brother; "and yet she looks a little wilful!" "That is just what makes it pleasant having one's way with her," he replied, smiling down at me, as if amused at his triumph over my obstinacy, and gently pulling my hair by way of caress. "News from the city?" he added after a while. "There came a message yesterday and two to-day." Cornelius shook his head impatiently, in a manner habitual to him, and which was ever displaying the heavy masses of his dark hair, but, catching the eye of his sister, he smoothed his brow, and said, smiling-- "I am glad I am so precious." "It was Mr. Trim who came this evening." "Very kind of him to call on my handsome sister when I am out of the way." "He says it is a pity you do not give more of your mind to business." "I give ninety pounds' worth a year," disdainfully replied Cornelius, "the exact amount of my salary." "He has got his long-promised government office, with a salary of five hundred a year," continued Miss O'Reilly. Cornelius half started up on one elbow, to exclaim gaily-- "Kate! has he made you an offer?" "Nonsense," she replied impatiently, "who is to take the place Trim is leaving vacant?" "And to do his work," answered Cornelius, indolently sinking back into his previous attitude; "Faith! I don't know, Kate." "Trim leaves next month," said Miss O'Reilly, looking at her brother. "Let him, Kate." "Will you allow that Briggs to step in?" "Why not, poor fellow?" Miss O'Reilly's brown eyes sparkled. She gave the fire a vigorous and indignant poke. "Will you let that Briggs walk upon you?" she asked vehemently. "Yes," answered Cornelius, yawning slightly, "I will, Kate." "You have no spirit!" "None." He spoke with irritating carelessness. From reproach she changed to argument. "It would make a great difference in the salary, Cornelius!" "And in the work, Kate. I shudder to think of the dull letters that unfortunate Briggs will have to write. The tedious additions, subtractions, and divisions he must go through, make my head ache for him." "Do you fear work, Cornelius?" "I hate it, Kate." Again she poked the fire; then looked up at her brother, and said decisively-- "I don't believe it." He laughed. "You idle? Nonsense! I don't believe it." "Then you ought; nothing but the direct necessity daily hunts me to the city." "I hate the city!" "Why so, poor thing? It is only a little smoky, dingy, noisy, and foggy, after all." "I wish," hotly observed Miss O'Reilly, "that instead of pulling that unfortunate child's hair as if it were the ear of a spaniel, you would talk sense. Come here, Primrose," she added, impatiently, addressing me. Instead of going I looked at Cornelius. I sat by him on the edge of the sofa, and he was in the act of mechanically unrolling a stray lock of my hair. "Well!" said Miss O'Reilly He smiled; but his look said I was to obey his sister; I went up to her a little reluctantly. She made me sit down on a low cushion at her feet, then resumed-- "Cornelius, will you talk sense?" "Kate, I will." "Do you, or do you not, like the life you have chosen?" He did not answer. "I always thought a stool in an office unworthy of your talents and education. If you do not like it, leave it; if you do like it, seek at least to rise." "Viz.: Get up on a higher stool, do more work, earn more money, and end the year as I began it--a poor devil of a clerk." "Why be a clerk at all?" "Because, though I am idle, I must work to live. Ask me no more, Kate; I have no more to tell you." He threw himself back on the sofa in a manner that implied a sufficient degree of obstinacy. "Will you have any supper?" asked his sister, as composedly as if nothing had passed between them. "Yes, Kate, my dear," he answered pleasantly. She rose and left the room. As the door closed on her, Cornelius half rose and bent forward; from careless his face became serious; from indifferent, thoughtful and attentive, like that of one engaged in close argument; then he looked up and shook his head with a triumphant smile; but chancing to catch my eye, as I sat facing him on the low stool where Miss O'Reilly had left me, he started slightly, and exclaimed, with a touch of impatience-- "Don't look so like a fairy, child! take a book." And bending forward he took from the table a volume of engravings, which he handed to me, informing me I should find it more entertaining than his face. I never looked up from the volume until Deborah brought in the supper. When the frugal meal was over, Miss O'Reilly took my hand, and led me to her brother. He was standing on the hearth; he looked down at me, laid his hand on my head, and quietly bade me good-night. His sister offered him her cheek. "Are you not coming down again?" he asked. "No. I feel sleepy." He looked deep into her eyes. "Nonsense!" she said impatiently, "no such a thing." He passed his arm around her and smiled. "How handsome you are, Kate!" he observed, with jesting flattery; "woe to my peace of mind when I meet--" "Not a bit!" she interrupted with a blush and a sigh; "no dark-haired woman will ever endanger your peace. Give me a kiss and let me go." He embraced her with a lingering tenderness that seemed to have a meaning, for she looked another way, and appeared moved. But at length he released her; she took my hand, led me up to her room, and undressed me in silence. She then looked at me, and said pointedly-- "Well!" I thought she meant I was to kiss her. I offered to do so, but she put me away, and observed more emphatically than before-- "Well!" I looked at her thoroughly puzzled. "Bless me!" she said, in her warm way, "is the child a heathen! Midge, Daisy, whatever your name may be, don't you know that you must say your prayers before going to bed!" "I always said my prayers to Papa," I replied, rather offended. "Then kneel down and say them to me." She sat on the edge of the bed; I knelt at her feet; she took my hands in hers, and fastening on me her clear brown eyes, she heard me to the end. Then she put me to bed, closed the curtains, and told me to sleep. I obeyed. I know not how long I had slept, when low moans awoke me. The light was still burning; I sat up softly, and looked through the opening of the curtains. The handsome sister of Cornelius was kneeling before a small table, on which stood a low lamp; its white circle of light fell on an open volume, but she was not reading; thrown back somewhat in the attitude of the penitent Magdalene, with her hands clasped, and her head sunk in her bosom, she was weeping bitterly. She whom I had seen but a few hours before fresh as a flower, cheerful, gay, was now pale as death, and seemed bowed down with grief. Tears ran down her check like rain, but the only words that passed her lips were those uttered by Christ in his agony on the Mount--"Thy will, not mine, be done!" And this she repeated over and over, as if vainly thirsting for the resignation she thus expressed. I looked at her with wonder. At length she rose; I softly sank back into my place; scarcely had I done so, when Miss O'Reilly came up to the bed and opened the curtains. I closed my eyes almost without knowing why. She bent over me, I felt her breath soft and warm on my face; then a light though lingering kiss was pressed on my cheek. I did not dare to stir until I felt her lying down by my side; when I then looked, I found the room quite dark. Miss O'Reilly remained very still; for awhile I staid awake, wondering at what I had seen, but at length I fell fast asleep. CHAPTER VII. I awoke late on the following morning, dazzled by the sunshine which filled the room. I was alone, but on the staircase outside I heard Miss O'Reilly's voice, exclaiming-- "Deborah, will you never clean those door-steps?" With this, she opened the door and came in. I looked at her; her cheek was fresh, her eyes were bright and clear. With a smile, she asked how I felt, said I did not look amiss, and helped me to rise and dress, chatting cheerfully all the time. A lonely breakfast awaited me in the back parlour; I looked in vain for Cornelius. "He is gone to the City, and will not be back till five," said Miss O'Reilly. "What, already done! Why, child, how little you eat!" she added with concern; "go into the garden, and run about for awhile." She opened a glass door, through which came a green and sunny glimpse of a pleasant-looking garden beyond. Without being small, it had the look of a bower, and a very charming bower it was, fragrant and wild. In the centre of a grass-plat rose an old sun-dial of grey stone, with many a green mossy tint. Around wound a circular path, between which and the wall extended a broad space filled with lilac-trees, laburnums, thickets of gorse and broom, and where, though half wild and neglected, also grew, according to their season, cool blue hyacinths, yellow crocuses with their glowing hearts, gay daffodils, pale primroses, snowdrops, shy hare- bells, fair lilies of the valley, tall foxgloves of many a rich dark hue, summer roses laden with perfume, stately holly-hocks, bright China- asters, and bending chrysanthemums--"a wilderness of sweets." The wall itself, when it could be seen, was not without some charm and verdure. It was old and crumbling, but bristling with bright snap-dragons, yellow with stonecrop above, and green below with dark ivy that trailed and crept along the ground. From a few rusty nails hung, torn and wild, banners of tangled honeysuckle and jasmine, haunted by the bees of a neighbouring hive. Two tall and noble poplars, growing on either side the wooden door by which Cornelius and I had entered, cast their narrow line of waving shadow over the whole place, which they filled with a low rustling murmur. The lane behind was silent; beyond it, and everywhere around, extended gardens, wide or small, where quiet dwellings rose in the shade and shelter of embowering trees; still further on, spread a rising horizon, bounded by lines of low hills, where grey clouds lay lazily sleeping all the day long. On this autumn morning, Miss O'Reilly's garden was little more than warm, green, and sunny. The poplars had strewn it with sere and yellow leaves, and of the flowers none remained save a few late roses, China-asters, and chrysanthemums. I walked around it, then sat down on the flag at the foot of the sun-dial, and amused myself with looking at the house. It was one of those low-roofed, red-tiled, and antiquated abodes, which can still be seen on the outskirts of London, daily removed, it is true, to make room for the modern cottage and villa. It stood between a quiet street and a lonely lane, a plain brick building, with many-paned windows, half hid by clustering ivy, which shadowed its projecting porch, and gave it a gloom both soft and deep. A screen of ivy sloping down to the garden-wall partly separated it from a larger house, to which, in point of fact, it belonged; both had originally formed one abode, but, for the purpose of letting, had thus been subdivided by Miss O'Reilly, whose property they had recently become. On either side, the double building was sheltered by young trees. It looked secluded, lone, and ancient: an abode where generations had lived and loved. From contemplating it, I turned to watching a spider's web, one of my favourite occupations in our garden at Rock Cottage. "Well!" said the frank voice of Miss O'Reilly. I looked up; the sun fell full on the house, and on the three worn stone steps that led down to the garden, but she stood above them, beneath the ivied porch, where she looked fresh and cool, like a bright flower in the shade. She gazed at me with her head a little pensively inclined towards her right shoulder; then said gently-- "Why do you sit, instead of running about?" "It tires me so." "Poor little thing! but you must move. Come in; go about the house; walk up and down stairs; open the cupboards, look, do something." "Yes, Ma'am," I replied, astonished however at her singular behests. "You must call me Kate; say Kate." I did so; for, like her brother, it was not easy to say her nay. With a kind smile, she sent me on my voyage of discovery. The only apartment that interested me was a room lying at the top of the house, and which I considered to be the lumber-room. It was filled with plaster casts and old dusty pictures without frames; the greater part were turned to the wall; a few that were exposed looked dull in the warm sun-light pouring in on them through the open window; before it stood a deal table, on which, after examining the pictures. I got up. "Daisy, what are you doing there?" exclaimed Miss O'Reilly, entering the room; "come down." I obeyed, but said in a tone of chagrin-- "I cannot see the sea!" "I should think not. Why did you turn those pictures?" "I found them so, Kate." She frowned slightly; turned them back, every one, then said gravely-- "You must not come here any more; it is the study of Cornelius. He reads and writes here." "Did he paint them?" I asked, with sudden interest. "No," was the short answer; "they are by my father, who has been dead some years." "Why does he not paint pictures too?" "Bless the child!" exclaimed Miss O'Reilly, turning on me a flushed and annoyed face; but she checked herself to observe, "He is at a bank, and has neither time nor inclination for painting." With this we left the room, and went down to the front parlour, where she worked, and I amused myself with a book until the clock struck five. I then looked up at Miss O'Reilly. "Yes," she said, smiling, "he will soon be here." But there was a delay of ten or fifteen minutes: she saw me restless with expectation, and good-naturedly told me I might go and look out for him at the back-door. I jumped up with an eagerness that again made her smile, and having promised not to pass the threshold of the garden, I ran out to watch for Cornelius, as I had formerly so often watched for my father. The lane was green, silent, and lonely, with high hawthorn hedges, a few overshadowing trees, and a narrow path ever encroached on by grass, weeds, and low trailing plants. Ere long I saw Cornelius appear in the distance; he walked with his eyes on the ground, and never saw me until he had reached the door. He entered, and in passing by me carelessly stroked my hair by way of greeting. To his sister, who stood waiting for him on the last step of the house, he gave the embrace without which they never met or parted. The tea was made and waiting. Miss O'Reilly poured it out, and called me from where I sat apart, feeling shy and unnoticed, to hand his cup to her brother, who was again lying on the sofa. He asked how I had behaved. "Too well; she is too quiet." "Shall we send her to school!" said Cornelius. I turned round from the table, to give him an entreating look, which he did not heed. "She is too weak; we must teach her ourselves," replied his sister. I heard the decision with great relief. A school was my horror. When the meal was over, I made my way to Cornelius, and half whispered-- "Will _you_ teach me?" "Perhaps so; well, don't look disappointed--I will." "What do you know?" "Grammar, history, geography--" "I can vouch for the geography," interrupted Miss O'Reilly. "We shall see." He examined me; I did my best to answer well, and waited for his verdict with a beating heart. "What do you think of her?" asked his sister, who now re-entered the room, which she had left for awhile. "She won't fit in it!" replied Cornelius, giving me a perplexed look. "What?" "Ah! I forgot to tell you. I bought her a cot, or crib--what do you call it?--I fear she won't fit in it! Can't we shorten her?" "You have bought her a bed!" exclaimed Miss O'Reilly, looking confounded, and laying down her work. "Yes; come here, Daisy." He measured me with his eye, then added triumphantly, "She will fit in it; it is just her size, Kate! see if it is not, when it arrives! just her size." "Just her size! bless the boy! does he not mean the poor child to grow?" "Faith!" exclaimed Cornelius, looking astonished, "I never thought of that, never!--and yet," he added thoughtfully, "I think I can remember her shorter than she is now." "You are the most foolish lad in all Ireland!" hotly observed Miss O'Reilly, with whom, though she had left it many years, her native country was ever present. She gave him a scolding, which he bore with perfect good-humour. A little mollified by this, she changed the subject by asking-- "Well, how did the child answer?" "Oh,--hem! Oh, very well, of course." He had already forgotten all about it, as I felt, with some mortification. Quite unconscious of this, he rose, opened the piano, and turning to his sister, said-- "What shall I sing you, Kate?" "Anything you like,--one of the Melodies." She sat back to listen, with her hand across her eyes, whilst, in a rich harmonious voice, her brother sang one of those wild and beautiful Irish melodies,--plaintive as the songs of their own land which the captives of Sion sang by the rivers of Babylon. I listened, entranced, until he closed the piano, and read aloud to his sister from a book of travels, which sent me fast asleep. Happy are the bereaved children whom Providence leads to the harbour of such a home as I had found! Cornelius and his sister lived in a retired way; their tastes were simple; their means moderate; but their home, though quiet, was pleasant like a shady bower, where the waving trees let in ever-new glimpses of the blue sky, with gliding sun beams and many a wandering breeze. There was a genial light and vivacity about them; an endless variety of moods, never degenerating into ill-temper; a pleasant union of shrewdness, simplicity, and originality, which lent a great charm to their daily intercourse. To be with them was to breathe an atmosphere of cheerful, living peace, far removed from the fatal and enervating calmness which makes a pain of repose. I knew them at the least troubled period of their lives. They were the children, by different mothers, of an ambitious and disappointed artist, who had left Ireland ardent with hope, and after vainly struggling against obscurity for a few years, had died in London, poor, miserable, and broken-hearted. For some years his daughter supported herself and her young brother by teaching; then my father, who had long known them, came to her aid, and insisted on defraying the expenses of the education of Cornelius. She struggled on alone, until, about a year before I saw her, an old relative, who had never assisted her in her poverty, died, leaving her a moderate income, and the house in which we now resided. Towards the same time Cornelius, who had completed his studies, instead of entering one of the learned professions, as his sister urged him to do, accepted of a situation in the City. This was one of the few subjects on which they differed; but it was seldom alluded to, and never allowed to disturb the harmony of their home. On most points they agreed; on none more entirely than in taking every care of their adopted child. Cornelius had a memory tenacious of benefits and injuries. He thought himself bound to watch over the orphan daughter of his benefactor and friend. He took me, indeed, to my grandfather--my natural protector; but, on learning from Miss Murray the footing on which I was said to be treated in Mr. Thornton's house, he at once set off to obtain possession of me, "if possible," not being quite prepared for the ease with which his object was accomplished. I rejoiced in the change, as might a plant removed from deadly shade to living sunshine. My health improved; I became more cheerful. Every day I walked out with Kate in the neighbourhood. It was then one of the prettiest suburbs about London. We lived in a street called the "Grove," and which deserved its name, for it was planted with old trees, and passed like a broad walk through the gardens on either side, where, like brown nests in a green hedge, appeared a few ancient houses irregularly built, and still more irregularly scattered. But its lanes were the great attraction of this vicinity. If we opened the garden door we entered a verdant wilderness of paths crossing one another; and each was (and there lay the charm) in itself a solitude. Country lanes may break the grand lines of a landscape; but, in the neighbourhood of a great and crowded city, every glimpse of nature is pleasant and lovely. I remember the sense of serene happiness I felt in walking out with Kate in the early morning, along a quiet path; now, alas! crowded with villas, but then called "Nightingale lane," and sheltered on one side by a cheerful orchard, with its white and fragrant blossoms in Spring, or its bending fruit in Autumn, glittering in the rising sun; and, on the other, screened by a row of elms, whose ancient roots grasped earth in the tenacious hold of ages, and whose broad base young green shoots veiled with a tender grace. The horizon on our left was bounded by an old park, a stately, motionless grove of beech-trees, above which, bending to every breeze, rose a few tall and graceful poplars; to our right, hidden in its garden, lay our humble home. Kate, reading her favourite Thomas ? Kempis, walked on, her eyes bent on the page; I followed more slowly, reading, child though I was, from the Divine book man cannot improve, and vainly tries to mar. Between the path and the hedge which enclosed the orchard, lay a broad ditch. There grew green grasses, that bent to the breeze like forests, and beneath which flowed a faint thread of water, the river of that small world, peopled with nations of insects, and which to me possessed both attraction and beauty. For there the ground-ivy trailed along the earth, its delicate blue flowers hidden by fresh leaves; there rose the purple bugle, the stately dead-nettle, with its broad leaves and white whorls, and grew the cheerful celandine, bright buttercups, the sunny dandelion, the diminutive shepherd's purse, the starry blossoms of the chickweed, the dark bitter-sweet with its poisonous red berries, the frail and transparent flowers of the bindweed, sheltered in the prickly hedge like shy or captive beauties, with every other common weed and plant which man despises, and God disdained not to fashion. My communion with nature, though restricted, was very sweet. I was debarred from her wildness and grandeur, but I became all the more familiar with those aspects which she takes around human homes. And is there not a great charm in the very way in which man and nature meet? The narrow garden, its flowers and shrubs so tenderly protected and cared for, the ivy that clings around the porch, the grass that half disputes the little beaten path, have a half wild, half domestic grace, I have often felt as deeply, as the romantic beauty of ancient glens, where mountain torrents make a way through pathless solitudes. My world might seem narrow, but I never found it so whilst the deep skies, with all their changes, spread above to tell of infinity, and the sweet and mysterious song of free birds, under distant cover, allured thought away to many a green and shady bower. Not less pleasant to me were the autumn evenings. They still stand forth on the background of memory, as vivid and minutely distinct as the home scenes, by light of lamp or fire-flame, which the old masters like to paint. Cornelius loved music and poetry, those two glorious gifts of God to man. He played and sang with taste, and read well. When the piano was closed, he took down some favourite volume from the bookcase, and gave us a few scenes from Shakspeare, a grand passage from Milton, a calm meditative page from Wordsworth. Sometimes he opened AEschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides, and, translating freely, transported us into a world gone by, but beautiful and human in its passions and sorrows. Miss O'Reilly listened attentively; then, after hearing some fine fragment from the Bound Prometheus, some stirring description from the Seven against Thebes, she would look up from her work and say, with mingled wonder and admiration-- "That is grand, Cornelius!" "Is it not?" he would reply, with kindling glance, for they both had the same strong admiration for the heroic and great. I should have been very happy, but for one drawback. It was natural, perhaps, that having been reared by my father, and never having known my mother, I should attach myself to Cornelius in preference to his sister. But in vain I strove to win his attention and favour; in vain I ran, not merely on his bidding, but on a word and on a look; gave him his hat and gloves in the morning; watched for him every fine evening at the garden gate; followed him about the house like his shadow, sat when he sat, happy if I could but catch his eye; in vain I showed him how devotedly fond I was of him; he treated me with the most tantalizing mixture of kindness, carelessness, and indifference. Half the time, he did not seem to see me about the house; when he became conscious that I existed, he gave me a careless nod and smile. If I did anything for him he thanked me, and stroked my hair; yet if I looked unwell, he was quick to notice it. He occasionally made me small presents of books and toys, and every evening he devoted several hours to the task of teaching me. I worked hard to give him satisfaction, but he only took this as a matter of course; called me a good child, and, as I was quiet and silent, generally allowed me to sit somewhere near him for the rest of the evening, and this was all: he seldom caressed, he never kissed me. With his sister Cornelius was very different, and I felt the contrast keenly. He loved her tenderly; he was proud of her beauty; he liked to call her his handsome Kate, to talk and jest with her, and often, too, to sit by her and caress her with a fondness more filial than brotherly; whilst I looked on, not merely unheeded, but wholly forgotten. Of course I was still less thought of, when, as happened occasionally, evening visitors dropped in. I remember a dark-eyed Miss Hart, who kept up a gay quarrel with Cornelius, and of whom I was miserably jealous, until, to my great satisfaction, she got married and went into the country; also a bald and learned Mr. Mountford, whom I disliked heartily for keeping Cornelius to himself, but who, in a lucky hour, having made an offer to Kate and being rejected, came no more; likewise Mr. Leopold Trim, whom I detested on the score of his own merits. As I entered the front parlour on a mild autumn afternoon which I had spent in the garden, I found Miss O'Reilly entertaining him and another gentleman. Mr. Trim sat by the fire in his usual attitude: that is to say, with his hands benevolently resting on his knees, his little eyes peering about the room, and his capacious mouth good-naturedly open. "Eh! little Daisy!" he said, in his warm husky voice, "and how are you, little Daisy, eh?" He stretched out an arm--long, for so short a man--and attempted to seize on me for the kind purpose of bestowing a kiss; but I eluded his grasp, and took refuge behind Miss O'Reilly's chair, whence I looked at him rather ungraciously. Mr. Trim took this as an excellent joke, threw himself back in his chair, shut his little eyes, opened his mouth wider, and gave utterance to a boisterous "Ha! ha!" that ended all at once in a strange sort of squeak. Miss O'Reilly frowned; she never heard that laugh with patience. "Daisy," she said, "go and shake hands with Mr. Smalley, an old friend of Cornelius." I was shy, but that name had a spell; I obeyed it at once. Morton Smalley was a pale, slender, and good-looking young clergyman, with a stoop, and a long neck; he seemed amiable, and might be said to look meekly into the world through a pair of gold spectacles and over an immaculate white neckcloth. He sat on the edge of his chair, nervously holding his hat; yet when I went up to him, he held out his hand with a smile so kind, and looked at me so benignantly through his glasses, that my shyness vanished at once. "That Smalley always was a lucky fellow with the ladies," ejaculated Mr. Trim, once more peering round the room with his hands on his knees. Mr. Smalley blushed rosy red at the imputation. "A very wild fellow he used to be, I assure you, Ma'am,--ha! ha!" "My dear Trim," nervously began Mr. Smalley. "Now, don't Smalley," deprecatingly interrupted Leopold Trim,--"don't be severe; you always are so confoundedly severe." "Not in an unchristian manner, I hope," observed Mr. Smalley, looking uncomfortable. "As if _I_ meant any harm!" continued Mr. Trim, looking low-spirited; "as if any one minded the jokes of a good-natured fellow like _me!_" Mr. Smalley looked remorseful. "Don't be afraid of me, my dear," he said to me, "I am very fond of little girls." "Oh! I am not afraid," I replied, confidently; for he did not look as if he could hurt a fly. Mr. Smalley brightened, and began questioning me; I answered readily. He looked surprised and said-- "You are really very well informed, my dear." "It is Cornelius who teaches me," I replied proudly. "Then my wonder ceases. We were all proud of your brother, Ma'am," observed Mr. Smalley, addressing Kate, "and grateful--" "For fighting all your battles--eh, Smalley?" kindly interrupted Mr. Trim. Mr. Smalley coloured, but subdued the carnal man, to answer meekly-- "I objected on principle to the unchristian encounters which take place amongst boys, and I certainly owed much to the superior physical strength of our valued friend." "Lord, Smalley! how touchy you are!" exclaimed Mr. Trim, with mournful surprise. "Not in this case, surely," Mr. Smalley anxiously replied; "how could I take your remarks unkindly, when you know it was actually with you our dear friend had that first little affair--" "It is very well for you, who looked on, to call it a little affair," rather sharply interrupted Mr. Trim, "but I never got such a drubbing." Kate laughed gaily. Mr. Smalley, finding he had unconsciously been sarcastic, looked confounded, and tried to get out of it by suddenly finding out that when Miss O'Reilly laughed she was very like her brother. But Mr. Trim was on him directly. He, as every one knew, was as blind as a bat; but how did it happen that Smalley, who wore glasses, and pretended to have weak eyes, could yet see well enough to discover likenesses? He put the question with an air of injured candour. Mr. Smalley protested that his eyes were weak; but Mr. Trim proved to him so clearly that he was physically and mentally as sharp-eyed as a lynx, that his friend gave in, a convicted impostor, and took refuge in the Dorsetshire curacy to which he was proceeding, and of which he gave an account that might have answered for a bishopric. But thither too, Mr. Trim pursued him, and broadly hinted at the selfishness of some people, who could think of nothing but that which concerned them. Upon which Mr. Smalley, looking at Kate, declared in self-defence that it was not through indifference, but from a sense of discretion, he had not inquired in what branch of literature, science, or art, her brother was now distinguishing himself. Miss O'Reilly reddened, and looked indignantly at Mr. Trim, who, with his eyes shut and his hands on his knees, had suddenly dropped into a doze by the fire-side. Then she drew up her slender figure, and said stiffly-- "My brother is a clerk, Sir." Mr. Smalley looked at her with mute and incredulous surprise. "Don't you remember I told you?" observed Mr. Trim, wakening up: "we were turning the corner of Oxford-street." Mr. Smalley remembered turning the corner of Oxford-street, but no more. "Yes, yes," confidently resumed Mr. Trim, "we were turning the corner of Oxford-street, when I said to you, 'Is it not a shame a scholar, a genius like O'Reilly, should be perched up on a high stool in a dirty hole of an office--'" "It was his own choice," interrupted Kate, and she began speaking of the weather. Five struck; I stole out of the room, went to the garden, and opening the door, stood on the threshold to watch for Cornelius. I soon saw him, and ran out to meet him. "Mr. Trim is come," I said. "Is he?" was the careless reply. "And Mr. Smalley, too." Cornelius uttered a joyful exclamation, and hastened in, leaving me the door to close. The greeting of the two friends was not over when I entered the parlour. They stood in a proximity that rendered more apparent Mr. Smalley's feminine slenderness as contrasted with the erect and decided bearing of Cornelius, who, although much younger, had, as if by the intuitive remembrance of their old relation of protector and protected, laid his hand on the shoulder of his former school-fellow, looking down at him with a pleased smile. "Don't you think he's grown?" asked Mr. Trim. "More than you," was the short reply. "How much _you_ are altered!" said Mr. Smalley, surveying his friend with evident admiration. "And so are you," replied Cornelius, glancing at his clerical attire: "I congratulate you." The Reverend Morton Smalley coloured a little, and, with a proud and happy smile, replied, gently squeezing the hand of Cornelius-- "Thank you, my dear friend; I have indeed obtained the privilege of entering our beloved Church--" "Yes, yes," interrupted Mr. Trim, peering around, "Smalley always liked the ladies,--ha! ha!" Mr. Smalley reddened and looked hurt, like a lover who hears his mistress slighted. Cornelius, who still stood with his hand on the shoulder of his friend, slowly turned towards Mr. Trim, to say, in a tone of ice-- "Did you speak, Trim?" Mr. Trim opened his eyes with an alarmed start, as if he rather expected a sort of sequel to "the little affair" of their early days. "Why, it is only a joke," he hastily replied; "I like a joke, you know; but who minds _me?_" Before Cornelius could answer, Miss O'Reilly closed the discussion by ringing for tea. Mr. Trim, who now seemed gathered up into himself, like a snail in his shell, drank six cups in profound silence, then went back to the fireside, where, shutting his eyes, he indulged in a nap. Miss O'Reilly was as silent as a hostess could well be. I sat near her, unnoticed, but attentive. Both during and after the meal the conversation was left to Cornelius and his friend. They spoke of Mr. Smalley's prospects; of the Dorsetshire curacy, on which he again dwelt _con amore;_ they talked of old times, laughed over old jokes, and exchanged information concerning old companions and school-fellows, now scattered far and wide. "What has become of Smith?" asked Cornelius. "He is in the army." "And Griffiths in the navy. You know that Blake is a physician, at Manchester?" "Yes, and Reed has turned gentleman-farmer--is going to marry--" "And lead a pastoral life. I am glad they are all doing well." "Smalley!" observed Mr. Trim, wakening up, "tell O'Reilly you think it a shame for a fine fellow like him to poke in an office." "_Et tu Brute!_" exclaimed Cornelius, turning round to Mr. Smalley, who replied, a little embarrassed-- "I confess I was surprised--" "What did you expect from me?" "Well, remembering your argumentative powers and flow of speech--" "The law! Smalley, do you, a clergyman, advise me to set unfortunate people by the ears?" Mr. Smalley looked startled, and took refuge in the healing art. "The medical profession affords opportunities of benevolence--" "And of being called up at two in the morning, to the relief of apoplectic gentlemen and ladies in distress." "Shall I then suggest the army?" "Would you advise me to make fighting a profession?" "I fear the navy is open to the same objection," gently observed Mr. Smalley; but he suddenly brightened, laid one hand on the arm of Cornelius, and, raising the forefinger of the other, to impress on him the importance of the discovery, he said earnestly, "My dear friend, how odd it is that you should have forgotten the wide world of science, literature, and art, for which you are so wonderfully gifted!" "Am I?" carelessly replied Cornelius. He sat on the hearth, facing the fire; he stooped, took up the poker, and began to drive in the coals, much in his sister's way. "Why, you are a first-rate scholar." "Learning is worthless now. Besides, cannot I enjoy my old authors without driving bargains out of them?" "But science?" "I have no patience for it; then it is hard work, and I am indolent." "And literature?" "Bid me become one of the builders of the Tower of Babel," hastily interrupted Cornelius. "No, Smalley, the office, with its paltry salary, moderate labour, and, heaven be praised for it, its absence from care, is the thing for me." He laid down the poker, and reclined back in his chair with careless indolence. Mr. Smalley slowly rubbed his forehead with his forefinger, and looked at Cornelius through his glasses and over his neckcloth, with a gently puzzled air. Then he turned to Miss O'Reilly, and said simply-- "Your brother's philosophy puts me to shame, Ma'am: yet I used to think him ambitious, and I remember that once--I mean no reflection--one of the older boys having doubted his ability to--to do something or other--our dear friend being somewhat hasty, pushed him so that he fell." "Say I knocked him down," replied Cornelius, reddening and trying to laugh. "Well, those days are gone, and with them the knocking-down propensity, as well as the ambition: I have become as meek and lowly as a lamb." He threw back his head with the clear keen look of a hawk, and a curl of the lip implying no great degree of meekness. "Yes," quietly said Kate from her corner, "the child is not always father of the man." Cornelius bit his lip; Mr. Trim, who was again napping, woke up with a Ha! ha! Then, standing up to look at the clock on the mantelpiece, asked Mr. Smalley "if he called this Christian conduct." "You know," he added with feeling reproach, "that we have that appointment at seven with Jameson, that I am half blind, the most unfortunate fellow for dozing and forgetting, whilst you always have your wits about you, and are quite a telescope for seeing. Oh! Smalley!" He shook his head at him, peering around the room with eyes that looked smaller than ever. Mr. Smalley attempted a justification on the score of not remembering that the appointment had been made; but Leopold Trim hinted that it was too much to expect him to believe that; though, having been always more or less victimized and imposed upon by Smalley, he was getting used to it. Mr. Smalley expressed his penitence by rising at once, and this brought their visit to an abrupt close. The door was scarcely shut on them, when Miss O'Reilly, poking the fire with great vigour and vivacity, looked up at Cornelius and said-- "I don't believe in Trim; I don't believe in his voice; in his bark and whistle laugh: in his eyes or in his dozing: I don't believe in him at all." "But Smalley?" "He is a good young man," she replied impressively. "Cornelius is a great deal better," I put in, quickly; "he fought for Mr. Smalley, who never fought for him." "Did you ever hear such a conclusion!" exclaimed Miss O'Reilly, laying down the poker; "fighting made the test of excellence! You naughty girl! don't you see Mr. Smalley was a Christian lad, and Cornelius a young heathen?" "I like the heathens," was my reply, more prompt than orthodox: "they were always brave; Achilles was, and so was Hector," I added, with a shy look at Cornelius, whom I had secretly identified with the Trojan hero. Hector laughed, and told me to bring the books for the lessons. I remember that I answered him particularly well,--so well, that his sister asked if I was not progressing. "Very much," he carelessly replied. "Kate, what has become of that 'Go where Glory waits thee'?" "I really don't know. Child, what are you about?" I was on my knees, hunting through the music, ardent and eager to find the piece he wanted. He allowed me to search, and sat down by his sister. "Cornelius, here it is," I said, standing before him with the piece of music in my hand. "Thank you, put it there. Kate, Smalley is smitten with you!" "Nonsense, boy, go and sing your song." He laughed; rose and kissed her blooming cheek. He had never so much as looked at me. Whilst he sang, I sat at the end of the piano as usual; when he closed the instrument and went to the sofa, I followed him and drew my stool at the foot of the couch. There he indolently lay for awhile; then suddenly started up, and walked, or rather lounged about the room, looking at the books on the table, at the flowers in the stand, and talking to his sister. I rose, and, unperceived as I thought, I followed him quietly; walking when he walked, stopping when he stopped, and waiting for the favourable moment to catch a look and obtain, perhaps, a negligent caress. "It is most extraordinary," exclaimed Miss O'Reilly, who had been watching me. "What is extraordinary, Kate?" "How that child persists in sneaking after you, as if she were a little spaniel and you were her master!" "Is she not gone to bed yet?" asked Cornelius, turning round to give me a surprised look. "She is going," replied Miss O'Reilly, rising and taking my hand: "early to bed and early to rise. By the bye, Cornelius, do try and get up earlier. It is too bad to keep breakfast as you do until near nine every morning, with the tea not worth drinking, and the ham getting cold with waiting." She spoke with some solemnity. He laughed, and promised to amend, throwing the whole fault on "that dreadful indolence of his." But he did not amend; for though the next morning was bright and sunny as an autumn morning can be, eight struck, and yet Cornelius did not come down, to the infinite detriment of tea and ham. This was but the repetition of a long-standing offence, until then patiently endured; but Miss O'Reilly now put by patience; she looked at the clock, gave the fire a good poke, and, knitting her smooth brow, exclaimed-- "I should like to know why it is that Cornelius will persist in getting up late!" She was not addressing me; it was rather one of her peculiarities--and she had many--to soliloquize, and I was accustomed to it; but I now raised my eyes from the grammar I was studying, and, looking at her, I listened. She detected this. "Did you ever see anything like it?" she emphatically observed, questioning that unknown individual with whom she often held a sort of interrogative discourse; "why, if that child were fast asleep, and you only whispered my brother's name, she would wake up directly. Oh! Midge, Midge!" She shook her head as though scarcely approving a feeling so exclusive, and gave the fire a slow meditative thrust. The clock, by striking half-past eight, roused her from her abstraction. "Daisy," she said very seriously, "go and knock at the door of Cornelius, and tell him the hour." I obeyed; that is to say, I went upstairs; but I found the door standing wide open, and the room vacant, so I proceeded to the little study, thinking Cornelius might perhaps be there. I knocked at the door and received no answer; I knocked again with the same result. Then I perceived that the door was not quite shut, but stood ajar; I gently pushed it open and looked in. The little table was not in its usual place; it stood so as to receive the most favourable degree of light; before it sat Cornelius in a bending attitude, and, as I saw at a glance, drawing from one of the plaster casts. CHAPTER VIII So intent was Cornelius on his occupation that he never heard or saw me, until I observed, somewhat timidly, "Cornelius, Kate sent me up to tell you that it is half-past eight o'clock." He looked up with a sudden start that nearly upset the table, and sharply exclaimed, "Why did you come in without knocking?" "I knocked twice, Cornelius, but you did not answer." "If you had knocked ten times, you had no right to open that door and enter this room." "Cornelius, the door was open," I said very earnestly, for he looked quite vexed, with his face flushed, and his brow knit. "Oh, was it?" he replied, smoothing down. He looked hastily at the drawing on the table, then gave me a quick glance, read in my face that I had seen it, and, taking a sudden resolve, he said, "Come in, and shut the door." I obeyed. When I stood by his side, Cornelius laid his hand on my head, and gazing very earnestly in my eyes, he said, "You look as if you could keep a secret. Do you know what a secret is?" "Yes, Cornelius, I do." "Then keep mine for me. You see I am drawing. I rise every morning with dawn, to draw; but I do not want Kate to know it just yet,--not until I have done something worth showing. This is the secret you will have to keep; do you understand?" "Oh yes," I confidently answered. "How will you manage?" "I shall not tell her," was my prompt reply. "Why, of course," he said, smiling; "but not to tell is only the first step in keeping a secret. The next, and far more difficult, is not to let it appear that there is a secret. This shall be the test of your discretion." He removed every trace of his late occupation, and accompanied me downstairs. Miss O'Reilly was not in the parlour; but when she came in she gave her brother a good scolding, which he bore patiently. When he rose to go I handed him his hat as usual; as he took it from my hand, he stooped, and whispered, "Remember!" He was no sooner gone than Kate, turning to me, said, with a puzzled smile, "Daisy! what was it Cornelius whispered so mysteriously?" I hung down my head. "Did you hear me?" "Yes, Kate." "Then answer, child." Again I was mute. Kate laid down her work and beckoned me to her. "Is it a secret?" she asked, gravely. "I don't say it is, Kate," I replied eagerly. "Then answer." I was obstinately silent. "Will you tell me?" she asked, much incensed. "No," I resolutely replied. She rose in great wrath, and consigned me to the back-parlour for the rest of the day. Never did punishment sit so lightly on me. Towards dusk Miss O'Reilly opened the door, that I might not feel quite alone. Cornelius came home much later than usual; I sat in the dark, but I could see him; he had thrown himself down on the sofa; the light of the lamp fell full on his face; his look wandered around the room in search of me. "She has been naughty," gravely said his sister; and she proceeded to relate my offence. "She would not tell you?" he observed. "No, indeed! I tried her again in the afternoon; but she stood before me, white with stubbornness, her lips quite closed, hanging down her head, and as mute as a stone." "She is a peculiar child," quietly said Cornelius, and I could see his gaze seeking to pierce the gloom in which I had lingered. "Peculiar! you had better call it originality." Cornelius laughed; and half raising himself up on one elbow, summoned me in with a "Come here, Daisy!" that quickly brought me to his side. He pushed back the hair from my forehead, looked into my face, and said, gravely, "She looks stubborn; I see it in her eyes, and yet what wonderfully fine eyes they are, Kate!" "Eyes, indeed!" was her indignant rejoinder. "Daisy, go back to your room." I turned away to obey, but Cornelius called me back. "Let me try my power," he said to his sister; then to me, "Daisy, tell Kate what I whispered to you." "Remember!" was my ready reply. "How can you call her stubborn?" asked Cornelius. "Remember--what?" inquired Kate; "there, do you see how she won't answer?" "You obstinate child!" said Cornelius, smiling, "don't you see I mean you to speak? Say all; tell Kate why I bade you remember." "I was not to tell you that I had found him drawing," I said, turning to Miss O'Reilly. Her work dropped on her knees; she turned very pale; her look, keen and troubled, at once sought the calm face of her brother, who had again sunk into his indolent attitude, with his hand carelessly smoothing my hair. Miss O'Reilly tried to look composed, and observed, in a voice which all her efforts could not prevent from being tremulous and low, "Oh! you were drawing, Cornelius, were you?" "Yes," he carelessly replied, "it amuses me in the morning." "Oh, it amuses you very much, Cornelius?" "Why, yes." She took up her work; laid it down, rose, went up to her brother, and standing before him said, resolutely, "Cornelius, tell me the truth." He sat up, and making her sit down by him, he calmly observed, "Why do you look so frightened, Kate?" "The truth!" she exclaimed, almost passionately, "the truth!" "You have had it." "What does that morning drawing mean?" "You know it." "You mean to become an artist?" "I am an artist," he replied, drawing himself up slightly. She rocked herself to and fro, looking at her brother drearily. He laid his hand on her shoulder, and said, with earnest tone and look-- "Kate, I know all you dread; there are obstacles; I see them, and I will conquer them. Obstacles! why if there were none, would anything in this world be worth the winning?" He had begun calmly; he ended with strange warmth and vehemence, throwing back his head with the presumptuous but not ungraceful confidence of youth. His look was daring, his smile full of trust; to both his sister responded by a mournful glance dimmed with tears. "You had promised--" she began. "Not to give it up for ever, Kate," he interrupted; "I have kept my promise, I have tried not to draw; I might as well try not to breathe." "I know now why you took that paltry situation; you did not mean to stop there." "No, indeed, Kate." "I always knew you were ambitious." "So I am." "A nice mistress Fame will make you, my poor brother! Oh yes, very!" "I won't make a mistress of her, Kate; she is too much used to that; she shall be my hand-maiden." "First catch her!" shortly replied his sister. He laughed good-humouredly; she gave a deep, impatient sigh. "I know I must seem harsh," she said, "but our father's death--of a broken heart--is always before me. You are very like him in person and temper; for God's sake be not like him in destiny! I know painting; once it has taken hold of a man's mind, soul and being, he must either win or perish. Love is nothing to it. I would rather see you in love with ten girls." "At a time?" interrupted Cornelius, looking shocked. "Am I a Turk?" "You foolish boy, is a Turk ever in love? I mean I would rather see you wasting, in successive follies, the best years of your youth, than see you a painter. There comes a time, when, of his own accord, a man gives up passion; but when does the unlucky wight who has once begun to write poetry or paint pictures give them up?" "Never, unless he never loved them," replied Cornelius, with a triumphant smile; "poetry or painting, which I hold to be far higher, becomes part of a man's being, and follows him to the grave. But it is a desecration to speak of it as a human passion. I am not hard-hearted; but if Venus in all her charms, or, to use a stronger figure of speech, if one of Raffaelle's divine women were to become flesh and blood for my sake, and implore me to return her passion--" "Why you would of course; don't make yourself out more flinty than you are; it would not take one of Raffaelle's women to do that either." "Hear me out: if to win this lovely creature I should give up painting, not for ever, not for ten years, nor yet five, but just for one year,-- Kate, she might walk back to her canvas." "Conceited fellow!" indignantly said Kate, divided between vexation at his predilection for Art, and the slight thrown on her sex. "It is not conceit, Kate; it is the superior attraction of Art over passion. How is it you do not see there is and can be nothing like painting pictures?" Kate groaned. "It beats all else hollow,--poetry, music, ambition, war, and love, which is held master of all. Alexander, unhappy man! wept because he had no more worlds to win. Did Apelles ever weep for having no more pictures to paint? Paris carried off Helen to Troy, which was taken after a ten years' siege. Imagine Paris an artist; he paints Helen under a variety of attitudes: Menelaus benevolently looking on; little Hermione plays near her mamma; Troy stands in the distance, with Priam on the walls; everything peace and harmony.--Moral: if fine gentlemen would take the portraits, and not the persons of fair ladies, we should not hear so much of invaded hearths and affairs of honour." "Will you talk seriously?" impatiently said Kate. "As seriously as you can wish," he replied gravely. "What do you fear for me? It is late to begin, but I have been working hard these two years. What about our poor father? many a great painter has been the son of a disappointed artist. What even about the difficulty of winning fame? I am ambitious, not so much to be famous, as to do great things. There is the aim of a life; there is the glorious victory to win." His handsome face had never looked half so handsome: it expressed daring, power, hope, ardour, all that subdues the future to a man's will. "I tell you," he resumed, with a short triumphant laugh, "that I shall succeed. I feel the power within me; I shall give fame to the name of O'Reilly, stuff your pockets with money, charm your eyes with fair forms; in short I shall conquer Art." He passed his arm around his sister's neck, and gave her a warm kiss. She half smiled. "That always was the way," she said, with a sigh: "I argued; you talked me out of my better knowledge, and then you would put your arm around my neck, and--" "There was no resisting that, Kate; but then I looked up, and now I look down." "Yes, you are a man now," she replied, looking at him with an admiring smile, "and the O'Reillys have always been fine men." "And the women lovely, gifted, admired--" "And minded as much as the whistling of the wind. Don't look vexed, my poor boy. I know I am not fair to you; that many a son is not so good and dutiful to his mother as you are to me; but, you see, it is as if you had been marrying a girl I hated; I can't get over it, even though I feel you have a right to please yourself. The best course will be not to talk of it: we should not agree; and where's the use of disagreeing?" "If wives were as sensible as you are--" "Nonsense!" she interrupted, smiling; "no woman of spirit would give in to her husband; but to her boy! oh, that's very different. Please yourself; paint your pictures, my darling, only--only--if the public don't like them, don't break your heart." She now stood by him, with her hand resting lightly on his fine dark hair, and her eyes seeking his with wistful fondness. He laughed at her last words, laughed and knit his brow as he said-- "The public may break its heart about me, Kate--not that I wish it such a fate, poor thing!--but against the reverse I protest. And now have mercy on your brother, who has heard something about Daisy, and a good deal about painting, but nothing about tea." "Are you hungry?" "Starving." "Poor fellow! I had no idea of it,--I shall see to it myself." She left the room. Her brother remained sitting in the same attitude, a little bent forward, abstractedly gazing at the fire. Then all at once he saw and noticed me, as I sat apart quiet and silent. He beckoned; I approached. "What shall I give you?" "Nothing," was my laconic reply. "But I want to give you something." I hated the idea of my being paid for my secrecy and my punishment. I felt myself reddening as I answered-- "But I don't want anything, Cornelius." "Don't you?" he replied, smiling, and before I knew what he was about, I found myself on the knee and in the arms of Cornelius, who was kissing me merrily. He had never done half as much since I was with him and his sister. My face burned with surprise and delight; he laughed, kissed me again, and said, with the secure smile of conscious power, "Well, what am I to give you?" I was completely subdued; I replied, submissively, "Anything you like, Cornelius." "No, it must be anything you like, and in my power to give. A book, a plaything, a doll, etc." "Anything! may I really ask for anything?" I exclaimed, with sudden animation. "Yes, you may." "Do you really mean it?" "I always mean what I say. Why, child, what can it be? Your eyes sparkle and your cheeks flush. What is it? Speak out." "Let me be with you in the morning when you are drawing." "Is that it?" he said, looking annoyed and surprised. "Yes, Cornelius." "You will have to stay very quiet." "I don't mind that, Cornelius." "You must not speak." "I don't mind that either." "Have something else: a book with pictures." I did not answer. "And I will let you come in now and then." I remained mute. Cornelius saw that what I had asked for, and nothing else, I would have. Again he warned me. "Daisy, you will find it very dull to sit without speaking or moving. I pity you, my poor child." I was shrewd enough to see through his pity. I looked up into his face, and said demurely-- "I shall not mind it, Cornelius." "You will mind nothing to have your way--obstinate little thing!--but I warn you: you must come in without knocking, without saying good morning; you must not move, speak, or go in and out; if you break the agreement once, you lose the privilege for ever." "I shall not break the agreement, Cornelius." "Of course you won't," he said, looking both provoked and amused, "catch me again passing my word to you, Miss Bums." I half feared he was vexed, but he was not, for when Deborah brought in the tea-tray, with the addition of fried ham and eggs, Cornelius, instead of putting me away, kept me on his knee. "The O'Reillys always had good appetites," observed Miss O'Reilly, who stood looking on, enjoying the vigour with which her brother attacked her good-cheer. "Daisy, what are you perched up there for? Come down directly." "Stay, Daisy," said Cornelius, "you are not in my way." And indeed, from the fashion in which everything vanished before him, I do not think I was. But Miss O'Reilly was of a different opinion, for she resumed impatiently-- "Now, Cornelius, you need not feed that child from your plate; she left half her own tea, and she drinks yours, because it is yours." Cornelius was holding his cup to my lips. He smiled, and kissed me. "Yes, pet her now," said Kate, "after getting her unjustly punished." "It was thoughtless of me--I beg her pardon." "I don't want you to beg my pardon," I replied, looking a little indignantly at his sister. "I think if he were to beat you, you would enjoy it," was her short answer. His meal was over; he had removed from the table to the sofa; but he had not put me away. Miss O'Reilly looked at us from her place, and evidently could not make it out. "Are there to be no lessons?" she asked at length. "No, this is a holiday." "Shall there be no singing?" "I am tired." He was not too tired to talk to me, and make me talk, to an extent that induced Miss O'Reilly to exclaim-- "I thought the child was a mouse, and she turns out to be a magpie." She spoke shortly, but he kept me still. "Decidedly," said Kate, after vainly waiting for me to be put away, "decidedly, if one were to meet you in China or Japan, that little pale face would be somewhere about you." He said it was a little pale face, but that it had fine eyes, and he caressed her who owned it, very kindly. "Nonsense!" observed his sister, frowning. "She is so shy," he pleaded. "Pretty shyness, indeed!" replied Kate, as she saw me, with the sudden familiarity of childhood, pass my arm around the neck of her brother, and rest my head on his shoulder. "Daisy, it is bed-time." She rose, but I could not bear to leave Cornelius on the first evening of his kindness. I clasped my two hands around his neck, and looked beseechingly in his face. "Another quarter of an hour, Kate," he said. "Not another minute," she replied, taking my hand, for I lingered in his embrace like our mother Eve in Eden. "If you are good." she added, to comfort me, "you shall stay up half an hour longer as the days increase." "But they are shortening now," I said, mournfully. "Let her stay up for this one evening," entreated Cornelius, "to make up for her dull day in the back-parlour." Miss O'Reilly allowed herself to be mollified; but as she returned to her place and sat down, she said emphatically, looking at the fire-- "He will spoil that child, you'll see he will." Cornelius only smiled; he did not attempt to contradict the prophecy by putting me away; as long as I liked, he allowed me to remain thus--once more an indulged and very happy child. From that evening Cornelius liked me. By making him all to me, I had succeeded in becoming something to him; for there is this mysterious beauty in love, that it wins love; unlike other prodigals, it is in the very excess of its bounty that it finds a return. CHAPTER IX. Early the next morning I stole up to the study. I did not knock; I entered on tiptoe; I closed the door softly; I did not bid Cornelius good morning; but I brought forward a high stool, placed it so that it commanded a good view of him and of his drawing, and, with some trouble, I clambered up to its summit: once there, I moved no more, but watched him with intense interest. He neither moved nor looked up; his task absorbed every faculty of his being; he looked breathless; every feature expressed the concentration of his mind and senses towards one point. For an hour he never stirred; at length he pushed away his drawing, threw himself back in his chair, and, having been up since dawn, indulged in a very unromantic yawn. I sat rather behind him; it was some time before he remembered me; he then suddenly turned round, and looked at me in profound silence. I was too much on my guard to infringe the agreement by either moving or opening my lips. "You have a good eye for a position," he said. I did not answer. "Are you comfortable, perched up there?" he continued. "I don't mind it, Cornelius." "You can come down now." I obeyed with great alacrity. "May I speak now?" I asked with a questioning look. "You may ease yourself a little," was his charitable reply. "Cornelius, is not that Juno?" "The wife of Jupiter and the mamma of Vulcan--precisely." I was standing by him. There were other drawings on the table; I raised the corner of one and glanced at Cornelius; he smiled assent. I drew it forth; it represented an Italian boy sitting on sunlit stone steps. "That is the boy to whom Kate gave the piece of bread the other morning," I exclaimed eagerly, "is it not, Cornelius?" I looked up into his face; he seemed charmed: first praise is like early dew, very fresh and very sweet. He drew forth another drawing, and asked whose face it was. Breathless with astonishment, I recognized myself; then Kate, Deborah, Miss Hart, and even Mr. Trim, passed before me in graphic sketches. I felt excited; I now knew the power of Cornelius: he had actually, if not created, yet drawn from obscurity, those forms and faces by the mere force of his will. "Why, how flushed and animated you look!" said Cornelius, with an amused smile, as he put away the drawings. "Cornelius," I said eagerly. "Daisy." "Don't you think that if you like--" I paused: he was not attending to me. "I hear you," he observed, stooping to pick up a stray drawing,--"don't I think that if I like--" "Don't you think that if you like you may become as great a painter as Raffaelle or Michael Angelo?" I spoke seriously and waited for his reply, as if it were to decide the question. Cornelius looked at me with his drawing in his hand; he tried to laugh, but only reddened violently. "You ambitious little thing!" he said, "what has put Raffaelle or Michael Angelo into your head?" "Papa told me they were the two greatest painters, but I don't see why you should not be as great as either of them." "One can be great and yet be unlike them;--ay, and be famous too!" "Will you be famous?" "Who was it never bade me good morning?" asked Cornelius, kissing me. But in the very midst of the caress, as his lips touched my cheek, I repeated my question, with the unconquerable persistency of children: "Will you be famous?" "Would you like it?" he asked, smiling. "Oh! so much!" I exclaimed, with my whole heart. "Then, on my word, my dear, I shall do my best to please you; and now let us go down to breakfast." He was unusually late, but his sister did not complain. She received him with pleasant cheerfulness; yet several times, in the course of that day, I overheard her sighing to herself very sadly. I have since then wondered at the secretiveness of Cornelius; but though he was religious, he never spoke of religion; he rarely alluded to his country, for which he could do nothing, whose wrongs he resented too proudly to lament, and yet which he carried in his heart; and, perhaps because he loved it so ardently, he had never made painting the subject of daily speech. When it became the avowed occupation of his life--a task instead of a feeling--this reserve lessened; something of it remained with his sister; little, I might almost say nothing, with me. I was a child, but I gave him sympathy, a food which the strongest hearts have needed. I loved him, I admired him, I believed in him; he soon liked to have me in his study, or studio, as by a convenient change of the vowels it was now called. He could talk to me, amuse himself with my criticisms, then with a look consign me to silence. Perhaps it was thus he became so fond of me,--too fond, his sister said; all I know is, he was very kind and the winter a very happy time. The spring that followed it was lovely. One day I remember especially for its joyous brightness. The garden was green and blooming; Kate sat sewing on the bench by the house; I stood at the door looking down the lane. The hawthorn hedge that faced the west was ready to break out in blossom; the sun was warm; the air clear; the south-western wind was gently blowing; the newly leaved trees seemed rejoicing in a second birth; afar, through the stillness of this quiet place, the cuckoo's voice was faintly heard. I know not why I record these things, save that there is a portion of our hearts to which the aspects of this lovely world ever cling, and that, as I stood there looking, Cornelius came up the lane. He had gathered the ripest hawthorn bough; he gave it to me smiling; entered and sat down on the bench by his sister: I sat on a step at their feet. For awhile they talked of indifferent things, then he said-- "Kate, will you sit to me?" "What for?" she asked, looking rather startled. "A little oil painting: subject, Mother and child. You we to be the mamma, Daisy the child." "Where will you send it?" "To the Academy, of course. Can you give me early sittings?" "I can; but can Daisy?" I saw his face express keen disappointment, and I said eagerly-- "I shall get up early, Cornelius; with dawn; I shall not mind a bit." "Nonsense, you shall get up at your usual hour--and there's an end of it." "Cornelius, may I speak to you?" "No:" he started up, walked across the garden, came back and threw himself down, exclaiming-- "It will never be finished, never!" "Cornelius," I said again, "let me speak to you _now_." "Speak, and have done with it," he said, impatiently. "If I go to bed early, may I not get up early? Early to bed and early to rise, you know." He bent on me a face that lit with sudden gladness. "And will you really do that for me?" he asked eagerly. "Will you, who hate going to bed early, do that for my sake?" "Oh yes, Cornelius, and be so glad to help you a little!" "God bless you, my good little girl!" cried Cornelius, as he caught me up in his arms, and accompanied the benediction with a warm kiss, "I shall never forget that, never!" He looked touched and delighted. He who had heaped so many kindnesses on me, was as quick to feel this little proof of my grateful affection, as though he had done nothing to call it forth. "Now, is not that good of her?" he said to Kate, "to offer to go to bed early just as she is beginning to stay up that half-hour later? Is it not good of her?" "She shall be put to the test this very evening," replied Kate, smiling. I stood the test with a heroism only to be equalled by my patience as a sitter on the following morning. I was as submissive as Kate was rebellious. "Kate," once remonstrated her brother, "will you do nothing for Art,--not even to sit quietly?" "Nonsense!" she impatiently replied. "Nonsense!" he mournfully echoed, "she calls Art nonsense! Art, that is to win her brother so much honour, ay; and with this very picture!" Kate sighed deeply. "How very odd," said Cornelius, pausing in his work to look at her--"how very odd you do not see what is so clear to me, that I must succeed! I am surprised you do not see it, Kate." There was not the shadow of a doubt on his clear brow; not a sign of fear in his secure and ardent look. "Our poor father used to say just the same, Cornelius, only if one doubted, he would fly out." "Then I do not; there is the difference." "He was not bad-tempered; but disappointment--" "Kate, your manner of supporting Daisy is getting less and less maternal; pray do not forget that you are very miserable about your darling. Daisy, my pet, your doll was put there to show you are too ill to enjoy it, not to look at." The sitting was long; our attitudes were rather fatiguing: Kate lost patience. "You will be late," she said, "and Daisy is tired." "I am not tired," I observed. "Don't you know, Kate," said her brother, smiling, "that if I were to ask her to jump out of that window, she would?" "Nonsense!" shortly replied Miss O'Reilly. "There," she added, as I reddened indignantly at what I considered an imputation on my devotedness,--"there, did you see the look the little minx gave me?" "I see that, as my attitudes are spoiled, I [must] release you. Ah, Daisy is the best sitter of the two," he added, as his sister jumped up with great alacrity; and he thanked me with a caress so kind, that Kate said, in a displeased tone-- "You may make that child too fond of you, Cornelius." "And if I do, Kate, have I not the antidote? Am I not getting very fond of her myself?" He was, and I knew it; and daily rejoiced in the blessed consciousness. Spring yielded to summer; summer passed; the picture progressed; Cornelius devoted to it his brief holiday in the autumn. "You look pale and ill," said Kate; "you want rest." "I feel in perfect health; work is my holiday," was his invariable reply. And to work he fell--harder than ever. "Yes, yes," she sadly said, "the fever is on you." The fever was indeed on him; that strange, engrossing fever to which passion is nothing; which to the strong is life, but death to the weak. He revelled in it as in a new, free, delightful existence. Pale and thin he was, but his brow had never been more serene, his glance more hopeful, his whole bearing more living and energetic. But as autumn waned, as days grew short, as leisure to work lessened, the serenity of Cornelius vanished. He rose long before dawn and paced his little studio up and down, impatiently watching the east: with the first streak of daylight he was at work, and day after day it became more difficult to tear him from his task. When he came home at dusk, his first act was to run up to his picture. I often followed him unnoticed, and found him standing before it, fastening on his unfinished labour a concentrated look that seemed as if it would struggle against fate and annihilate the laws of time. When he turned away, it was with an impatient sigh unmixed with the least atom of resignation. We were sitting dull enough in the parlour, one evening just before Christmas, when Kate said to him, in her sudden way-- "The days will get long in January." "And I shall then be a free man," he replied, with a smile. "You have been discharged!" she exclaimed, dismayed. "I have discharged myself. Now, Kate, don't look so startled! The picture shall be finished in time." "I dare say it will, Cornelius," she replied, ruefully. "Well, then, what do you fear?" "Suppose," she hesitatingly suggested, "that it cannot get exhibited!" "I do not see how that can be," composedly replied Cornelius. "Bless the boy! do they never reject pictures?" I sat by Cornelius, whose hand played idly with my hair; he stopped short to give his sister an astonished glance, then he shook his handsome head, and laughed gaily. "Reject _that_ picture, Kate!" "He is his father all over," she sighed. He smiled at her blindness, and turning to me, said-- "What do you say, Daisy?" "They shan't reject it; they dare not," was my ready reply. "It is too absurd to suppose such a thing, is it not?" he added, to teaze his sister, who disappointed him by unexpectedly veering round. "Cornelius," she said, decisively, "your energy and decision in this matter give me more hope than your enthusiasm. I like a man to act for himself; but you must go on as you have begun, and give yourself up entirely. Will you be a student at the Royal Academy? Will you study under some great master? Will you travel? Speak, I have money." "Thank you, Kate; I am glad you think I have acted rightly; but I have begun alone, and alone I must go on, with experience for my sole teacher. I must keep my originality." Kate remonstrated, but Cornelius, once in the fortification of his originality, was not to be ejected thence. "Just like his poor father!" sighed Kate; "he was always for his originality." Cornelius also resembled his poor father in the possession of a will of his own. Kate knew it, and wisely gave up the point. In a few days more Cornelius was free. His tread about the house had another sound; his eyes overflowed with gladness and burned with the hope of coming triumphs. He exulted in the endless sittings we gave him, and amused himself like a child with day-dreams and air-castles. His favourite one--the fame and fortune were both settled--was a skylight. "Yes, Kate," he once said, looking up at the ceiling, "to keep your brother under your roof, you must knock it down and give him a skylight. Some artists prefer studios in town; but I, domestic man, stick to the household gods: with a skylight you may keep me for ever." "Conceited fellow!" "Conceited! now is not this a nice bit of painting?" he drew her to his side and made her face the easel. "Indeed it is," she replied admiringly: "where will you send it?" "To the Academy, Kate, the first place or none." "Oh!" she hastened to answer, "I only fear they may not hang it as well as it deserves. Jealousy, you know, or even want of room." "There is always room for the really good pictures," replied Cornelius. This was in February, but his sister evidently felt some uneasiness on the subject, for she recurred to it several times, and when nothing led to the remark, observed to Cornelius with a wistful look-- "I hope it may be well hung, Cornelius." "I hope so," he quietly replied. At length came the day on which this interesting fact was to be ascertained. A bright May day it was; Cornelius wished to go alone, "there always was such a crowd on the first day," and had his wish. We stayed at home trying to seem very careless, very indifferent, but Miss O'Reilly could not work and I could not study. We began sudden conversations on common-place themes, that broke off as they had commenced, at once and without cause. Of the real subject that occupied our thoughts we never spoke. I went up and down the house with unusual restlessness, ever coming back to the window that overlooked the Grove. "I should like to know what you mean by it?" suddenly asked Miss O'Reilly. "Why do you look out of that window?" "Cornelius told me he would come by the Grove." "And why do you fidget about his coming back on this particular day? Just get out of my light, if you please." I obeyed; but the next thing Kate did herself was to open the window and look down the Grove. The day was waning; Cornelius did not return; she could not keep in, but said anxiously-- "I am afraid it is not well hung, after all." "I am afraid it is not," I replied, for I too began to feel very uncomfortable. "No, decidedly it is not well hung," she continued, "but I don't see why that should prevent him from coming back;" and no longer caring to hide her impatience, she took her seat at the window, which she left no more. "There is Cornelius!" I said, with a start, as a ring was heard at the garden-door. "Hold your tongue!" indignantly exclaimed Kate. "Why should he slink in by the back way? Daisy, I forbid you to open; it is a run-away ring: Cornelius indeed!" I obeyed reluctantly; I was sure it was Cornelius, and as I had not been forbidden to look, I went to the back-parlour window. I reached it as Deborah opened the door. It was Cornelius, with his hat pulled down over his brow, and what could be seen of his face, of a dull leaden white. He passed by the girl without uttering a word, entered the house, and went upstairs at once. I heard him locking himself up in his room, then all was still. I returned to the front parlour. Miss O'Reilly was pacing it up and down in great agitation, wringing her hands and uttering many broken ejaculations of mingled grief and anger. "My poor boy! my poor boy!" she exclaimed, with a strange mixture of pathos and tenderness in her voice, like a mother lamenting over her child; then stopping short, she added, her brown eyes kindling with sudden and rapid wrath--"What a bad set they are! a bad envious set! They thought they would not let him get up and eclipse them all. Oh no!--not they--they knew better than that--crush him at once--don't give him time--crush him at once!" She laughed sarcastically, then resumed, in a tone of indignant and dignified wonder, "I am astonished at Cornelius. What else could he expect? Has he not genius, and is he not an Irishman? Why did he not put Samuel Smith or John Jenkins or Leopold Trim at the bottom of his picture?--it would have got in at once; but with such a name as Cornelius O'Reilly, it was ludicrous to expect it." "Don't they take in the pictures of Irish artists?" I asked. "Hold your tongue!" was the short reply I got. "Please, Ma'am," said Deborah, opening the door, "don't you want the tea?" "And why should we not want the tea?" asked Miss O'Reilly, giving her a suspicious look,--"can you tell me why, Deborah? Can you give me any reason?--I should like to know why?" Deborah opened her mouth in mute wonder. "Bring up the tea-tray," continued her mistress, "and henceforth don't be uppish and make remarks, for you see it won't go down with me." Deborah endured the reproof with a perplexed air, retired, and returned with the tray. Miss O'Reilly made the tea with a deep sigh. We had eaten little at dinner; but had Cornelius dined at all? He gave us no sign of existence, and Kate did not seem inclined to go near him. When the tea was poured out, she turned to me and said, in a low tone-- "Go and tell Cornelius tea is ready." I obeyed in silence. CHAPTER X. I knocked at the door of Cornelius; he opened it; the landing was dark, I could not see him distinctly. I delivered my message; he did not reply, but quietly followed me downstairs. As he entered the parlour, the look of Kate became riveted on his face; it was pale but perfectly collected. He sat down and drank his tea in total silence. No sooner was the tray removed, than Miss O'Reilly entered abruptly on the subject, by saying-- "What mean jealousy there is, Cornelius!" "Yes, Kate, very mean jealousy." "In this case especially." "It was not jealousy," he replied, looking annoyed. "The name then! I said so: a Smith, a Jones, a Jenkins would have got in, but an O'Reilly--" "Kate," interrupted her brother, reddening, "it was not the name." "What then?" she asked, with a wistful look. His lip trembled, but he made an effort, and replied firmly-- "The picture." "The picture!" echoed Kate, looking disheartened. "Yes, the picture," resumed Cornelius, inexorable to himself, to his youthful ambition, to his long-cherished dreams; "it is not its being rejected that troubles me, but its having deserved the rejection. Kate, I have committed a bitter mistake, and I found it out, not to-day, but weeks ago. So long as Art was unattempted, faith was in me as a living stream; it has ebbed away, and left the bed where it once flowed, barren and dry." He sat by the table, his brow resting on his hand, the light of the lamp falling on his pale face, where will vainly sought to control the keen disappointment of a life-long aim. There was a pause, then his sister said-- "What will you do?" "Seek for some other situation; anything will do." "The City again! Why not try for work as an artist?" "And do as a drudge the work I so long hoped to do as a master," replied Cornelius, colouring to the very temples. "No, Kate, that indeed would be degradation!" "Then you give up painting?" "Utterly." She started from her seat, went up to him, laid her hand on his arm, and said warmly-- "Leave the City to drudges, and painting to enthusiasts. You have youth, talent, energy; choose the career of a gentleman, work, and make your way as you can, if you will--I shall find the means." "I cannot," replied Cornelius, after a pause. "Then you mean to return to painting," vehemently exclaimed his sister. "If I cannot paint good pictures, Kate, I will not paint bad ones." "What will you do?" "The City--" "The City! the dirty, smoky City for an Irish gentleman, of pure Milesian blood, without Scotch or Saxon stain, and who calls himself O'Reilly too! Cornelius, return to painting rather." "Kate," he replied, with an expression of pain and weariness, "this is not a matter of will; I cannot paint now; my faith is dead. You may lock up the studio; the easel may stand against the wall; pencil or palette your brother will never handle again." "Nor shall my brother be a clerk," she said resolutely. Cornelius knit his brow and looked obstinate. "But why?" she exclaimed, impatiently; "will you just tell me why?" "You ask!" he replied, tossing on the couch, where he had again thrown himself with listless indolence. "Ay, and I want to know, too, Cornelius," she said, quietly returning to her chair. "Kate, when James could not marry his cousin, a plain, silly girl, why did he go to London Bridge and jump over?" Miss O'Reilly jumped on her chair. "Nonsense!" she cried, reddening, "you are not going to take that leap because you cannot paint pictures!" "No, but I'll do like James. I cannot have the girl I like--I'll have no other. I cannot marry painting, a maid as fair as May, as rosy as June, fresh as an eternal spring: and you think, Kate," he added, quite indignantly, "you actually think I would wed surly law, ill-favoured medicine, or any of those old ladies whom men woo for their money--no, 'faith!" He spoke resolutely, and sank back in his old attitude with great decision. "James was a fool!" hastily said Kate. "He was; and though there is no girl can compare with painting; though the love about which so much has been sung is cold and tame compared to the passion which fills a true painter's heart, I am not going to drown myself because the glorious gift has been denied me, and I cannot be that man." He laughed rather drearily as he said it. "Yes, but you will do nothing else," replied Kate. "I can put my heart to nothing else. Daisy, why do you not bring the books as usual?" I obeyed, but I could not give my attention to the lessons. "Child," impatiently said Cornelius, "what can you be thinking of?" I was thinking that he was not to be an artist; that he had given up painting, fame, and fortune; and, as he put the question, I burst into tears. "I understand," quietly said Cornelius: "you do not know your lessons." He closed the book, went to the piano, and sang as usual. It was plain Cornelius rejected sympathy. He showed no pity to himself, and would accept none from others. If he suffered, the jealous pride of youth would not let him confess it, yet we could see that he was not happy. He set about looking for another situation, with the dogged sort of satisfaction a man may find in choosing the rope with which he is to hang himself. His pleasant face contracted a bitter expression; his good- humoured smile became ironical and sarcastic; he had fits of the most dreary merriment; of pity he was so resentfully suspicious that we scarcely dared to look at him. Three weeks had thus elapsed, when, as I sat with Kate and Cornelius in the garden, I ventured, thinking him in a better mood than usual, to say, in my most insinuating accents-- "Cornelius, what will be the subject of your next picture?" He turned round and gave me a look so stern that I drew back half frightened. "How dare you be so presuming?" said Kate, indignantly. I did not reply, but after a while I left them. I re-entered the house, and stole up to the studio, there to brood in peace over what it was now an offence to remember. The easel stood against the wall; the papers and portfolios were covered with dust; a sketch of a group of trees--the last thing on which I had seen Cornelius engaged--lay on the table unfinished, but soiled with lying about. I opened one of the portfolios: it contained the drawings he most valued. I took them out, and, kneeling on the floor, spread them around me. Absorbed in looking at them, I never heard Cornelius enter, until his voice said close to me-- "What are you doing here?" "I was looking at these," I replied in some confusion. "Then you were taking a great liberty." I silently began to restore the drawings to the portfolio; he said shortly-- "They will do on the floor." And he walked across them to the window. "Cornelius," I observed, timidly, "you are standing on the head of the poor Italian boy, and you are going to tread on the flower-girl." "They are only fit to burn," was his misanthropic reply. "Let me take them away," I urged. He seemed disposed to answer angrily, but he restrained himself and stepped aside. I removed the drawings, carefully replaced them in the portfolio, gently slipped in a few more, then stole up a glance at Cornelius: he was looking down at me with a displeased face. "Lay down that portfolio," he said. "Pray don't burn them!" I exclaimed, tearfully. "Leave the room," he said, impatiently. I obeyed, but as I reached the door I saw Cornelius go to the fire-place and take down the match-box. It might be to light a cigar, or make a bonfire of the drawings. "Don't, pray don't," I entreated. "Don't what?" he asked, lighting the match. "Don't burn your beautiful drawings, Cornelius, pray don't." "Daisy! did I or did I not tell you to leave the room?" I stood near the door: I opened and closed it again, but unable to resist the temptation of ascertaining to what fate the drawings were reserved, I was stooping to look through the keyhole, when the door suddenly opened, and Cornelius appeared on the threshold. "Go down at once," he said, angrily. I obeyed, and, crying with vexation and grief. I entered the parlour where Kate sat sewing. "Oh, Kate!" I exclaimed through my tears, "Cornelius is burning his drawings!" "Is he?" was her calm reply. "He turned me out, pray go and prevent him." "Is there a great quantity of them?" she asked. "Three large portfolios and a little one." "That must make quite a heap." "You might save a few by going now, Kate." "He will be some time about it," she musingly observed; "better delay the tea a little." "Kate, they will be all burned if you don't go." "I hope he will be careful," said Miss O'Reilly, a little uneasy; "I hope he will not set the chimney on fire." It was plain she would not take a step to save the drawings. I sat down in the darkest corner of the room and grieved silently over this miserable end to so many bright day-dreams. It was a long time before Cornelius came down; he apologized for having delayed the tea. "Never mind!" said Kate, sighing. "Daisy, where are you? That child does nothing but mope and fret of late." "I am here, Kate," I replied, rising. "Hand Cornelius his cup." "What is the matter with her?" he asked. "She is a foolish child," replied Miss O'Reilly. As I handed his cup to Cornelius, I saw his sister give him a look of gentle pity. He smiled cheerfully; she sighed; he kindly asked what was the matter. "There are hard things to be gone through," was her ambiguous reply. "Why, yes, Kate, there are." "They require a brave spirit," she continued. He looked puzzled. "But it is quite right to cut the matter short." "Kate, what has happened?" "Well, it is not an event; but I admire your courage." "My courage! in what?" "Why, in burning your drawings, of course." He bit his lip, reddened, and said gravely-- "I have not been burning them, Kate." "Not burning them!" she exclaimed, with a sharp look at me. "Daisy is not to blame," quickly observed Cornelius. "Not burning them!" resumed Miss O'Reilly; "and I who kept tea waiting until it was spoiled in order not to disturb you!" "Thank you all the same, Kate." "Not burning them!" she said, giving him a very suspicious look, "and what were you doing up there. Cornelius?" "Finishing a little thing which I will show you to-morrow." "He's going to flirt with painting again!" desperately said Miss O'Reilly, rocking herself to and fro. "I hope to go beyond flirtation, Kate." "My poor boy, don't trust her,--she is a heartless coquette." "No, Kate, she is merely coy,--a charming feminine defect that only makes her more irresistibly alluring." "You have tried her once." "And failed; I must try again: faint heart never won fair lady." He spoke so gaily, he looked once more so happy, so confident, that the cloud left his sister's handsome face. She checked a sigh, to say with a smile-- "I was a fool to trust to the vows of a man in love; that is all." "Yes," he said, resolutely, "I know I vowed to give her up a few weeks ago; but now, Kate, I vow I cannot--I cannot; no man can divide himself from his nature." "What will you do?" she asked. "Anything, Kate," he replied, his eyes kindling with hope and ardour; "no drudgery will seem drudgery, no work too hard." I could keep in no longer. At the imminent risk of upsetting his cup, I threw my arms around the neck of Cornelius, and, crying for joy, I exclaimed-- "Oh! I am so glad that you are to be a great artist after all--and that you did not burn the Italian boy nor the poor flower-girl!" "Am I an inquisitor?" asked Cornelius, smiling. "She is as mad as he is," said Kate, shaking her head; "indeed I rather think she is worse." He laughed, and, drawing me on his knee, petted me even to my craving heart's content. I had not been well of late; the joyous excitement with which I had learned his return to Art once over, I became listless and languid. Cornelius had to remind me of the lessons; I know not how I answered him, but in the very middle of them he pushed away the books, said that would do, and made me sit by him on the sofa. Kate looked at me a little uneasily. Cornelius was always kind, but I had never known him so kind as on this evening. He read to me, sang and played, then returned to the couch on which I lay, and, with a tender fondness I shall ever remember, he pressed me to tell him if there was anything I should like. "Nothing, thank you," I replied, languidly. "A book?" he persisted; "no! well then a rosewood workbox--a desk? I have some money, child; look." He drew out his purse and showed it to me, but I thanked him and refused. "Is there nothing you would like?" he asked. "I should like to know the subject of your next picture." "As if I should paint but one," he replied, gaily; and he proceeded to describe to me, in a few graphic words, a magnificent collection of Holy Families, grand historical battles, tragic stories, dewy landscapes, exquisite domestic scenes, until, charmed by their variety, but rather startled by their number, I exclaimed-- "Cornelius, it will take a gallery to hold them all." "Let us build one then," he replied, striving to repress a smile, "and whenever you feel dull, as you did this evening, we will take a walk in it. Look at her, Kate," he added, addressing his sister, "don't you think she seems better?" "I think," answered Kate, rather astonished, "that I never saw you lay yourself out for a girl or woman, as you did this evening for that little pale face. My opinion is, that the foolish way in which she goes on about your pictures has won your heart." "Since you have found it out, Kate, it is useless to deny it. I am waiting for Daisy. Am I not?" he added, turning to me with a smile. "No," I replied, half indignantly. "She won't have me," he said, feigning deep dejection; "ungrateful girl! is it for this I have so often brought you home apples, gingerbread and nuts, not harder than your heart?" Unmoved by this pathetic appeal, I persisted in rejecting Cornelius, whom, even in jest, I could not consider otherwise than as my dear adopted father. Miss O'Reilly settled the point by saying it was quite ridiculous for little girls not yet twelve to be sitting up so late. As she rose and took me by the hand, I bade Cornelius good-night. He kissed me, not once, but two or three times, and so much more tenderly than usual, that Kate said, smiling-- "Cornelius, you are very fond of that child." "Yes, Kate, I am. Next to you, there is nothing I like half so well in this world, and, somehow or other, I do not think I have ever felt fonder of her than this evening." My cheek lay close to his, his heavy hair brushed my face, his eyes looked into mine with something sad in their fondness. I felt how much, how truly, how purely the good young man loved the child he had adopted, and returning his tender embrace, I was happy even to a sense of pain. I believe in the presentiments of the heart, and I believe that on this evening, and at that moment, Cornelius and I unconsciously had each ours, and each, though different from the other, was destined to be fulfilled. The next day Cornelius knew why he had felt so fond of me: I was dangerously ill, and for days and weeks my life was despaired of. CHAPTER XI. That time is still to me a blank, on the vague back-ground of which stand forth two vivid and distinct images. One is that of Cornelius, sitting by me and holding my hand in his: the other, that of a tall, pale, and fair- haired lady, who stood at the foot of my bed, clad in white, calm and beautiful as a vision. I had never seen her before, and I remember still how vainly I tormented my poor feverish brain to make out who she was. I have a vague recollection that I one day framed the question, "Who are you?" "Miriam," she replied, in a voice as sweet and as cold as a silver bell, and she laid her fingers on her lips, to enjoin silence. The name told me nothing, but my wandering mind was too much confused to follow out any train of thought. I accustomed myself to her presence, without striving to know more. Another day, I remember her better still. She was standing at the foot of the bed, half hidden by the white curtain. A little further on, Cornelius talked to a grave-looking man, in tones which, though low, awoke me from my dreamy unconsciousness. "I can give you no hope," said the physician, for such even then I knew him to be: "it will end in a decline." "Oh! doctor," entreated Cornelius, "she is so young, scarcely twelve." "My dear Sir, we do not work miracles, and those excitable children--" "But my poor little Daisy is so quiet," interrupted Cornelius; "you never knew such a quiet child; she will sit still for hours whilst I am drawing or painting. Indeed, Sir," he added, giving the doctor an appealing look, "she is the quietest little creature breathing." "Well, Sir," replied the physician, "I will not say that she cannot outlive this, but she is too slight, too delicate for me to hold out much hope for the future." He left. When he was gone Cornelius bent over me. "My poor little Daisy," he said, in a low, sad tone,--"my poor little Daisy, I did not think you would wither so very early." Two hot tears fell on my face. "Mr. O'Reilly," said a sweet voice behind him, "the child will live, you love her too much, she cannot die." I looked languidly through my half-closed eyes. Miriam stood by Cornelius; she had placed her hand on his shoulder; he sat half turned round gazing at her with astonishment. She smiled and continued-- "My child was given up three times; but I loved her; I would not let her go; she stayed with me; your child too shall stay." "May God bless you at least for the prediction!" he replied in a low tone, and, stooping, he laid his lips on her band; she coloured, and I saw Kate, then in the act of coming in, stand still with wonder on the threshold of the open door. The same day a favourable crisis took place, and when the physician called again, he pronounced me out of danger. Only Kate and Cornelius were present, and I shall never forget their joy; I do not think that if I had been their own child they could have felt a purer and deeper gladness. The happy face of Cornelius, as he bent over me and gave me a kiss, was alone something to remember. I recovered rapidly; one of my first requests was to be carried up to the studio, and, every precaution being taken that I should not get cold, it was complied with on a pleasant July morning. I looked at the picture Cornelius had begun during my illness, then I asked him to place me near the open window. It overlooked our garden and that of our tenant, Miss Russell, an old maiden lady, of whom I had never caught more than a few distant glimpses. I was accustomed to see her garden as quiet and lonely as ours, which it resembled; to my surprise I now perceived a strange group. In the honeysuckle bower sat two ladies; one read aloud to an old blind woman, who after a while said-- "That'll do for to-day, my blessed young lady." "Would you like to go in, nurse?" asked the lady very sweetly. "I think I should. You need not mind, Miss Ducky," she said, addressing the other lady, "my dear young lady will do it." The lady who had read now helped the old woman to rise, and led her in with great care. She soon returned alone, resumed her place, and read to herself from a smaller volume. She was attired in white, and with her head slightly bent, and her book on her lap, she looked as calm and still as a garden statue. The other lady was very young, a mere girl, short, pretty, fresh as a rose, and with glossy dark ringlets. She had been very restless during the reading, and had indulged in two or three little yawns. She now seemed joyous and happy at the release, and hovered around the bower light and merry as a bee. There was an airy grace about her little person that rendered motion as becoming to her as was repose to the other lady. She skipped and started about with restless vivacity; now she plucked a flower; now she stripped a shrub of its leaves; then suddenly turning round, she addressed her companion in the tones of a spoiled child: "Miriam, leave off reading! you won't?--take that!" She gathered a rose and threw it at her. Miriam raised her beautiful face, calm as the surface of unstirred waters, and said, in a voice that rose sweetly on the air-- "Child, what is it?" "Don't read." Miriam closed her book. "And come here." Miriam rose and went up to her. "How can you read so to stupid old nurse?" resumed the young girl; "I don't like Baxter." "She likes it, my darling, and she is blind, and cannot read for herself." "But if I were as jealous of you as you are of me," continued she whom the old woman had called Ducky, "_I_ should not like it." She laid her curled head on the shoulder of the beautiful Miriam, who stooped and gave her a long embrace. Then they walked up and down the garden, arm in arm, talking in lower tones. I turned to ask Cornelius who were the ladies, and I found that he stood behind me, looking down intently. "Cornelius," I said, "did not the lady they call Miriam, come and see me when I was ill?" "Yes, child," he replied, without looking at me, and returning to his easel as he spoke. "Who is she?" "Miss Russell, the niece of our tenant." "Who is the other one?" "Her sister." "Have they been here long, Cornelius?" "They came the week you were taken ill." "Did Miss Russell come and see me often?" "Every day; one night she sat up with you." "She has not come of late, Cornelius?" "No," he replied, still without looking at me; "she came one day unsought, and left off coming as soon as you were out of danger." "How good she seems to her nurse!" "She is all goodness." "And how fond of her sister!" "She is wrapt up in her." "And yet she is much more beautiful, is she not, Cornelius?" I added, again looking down into the garden, where the sisters now sat in the bower. Cornelius left his easel to come and look too. "Nonsense, child!" he replied, smiling, "the little one is much the prettier of the two. Ask Kate," he added, as the door opened, and his sister entered. "Humph," said Miss O'Reilly, on being appealed to, "your eyes are better than mine, Cornelius, to see the difference at this distance; but I think Miss Ducky a pretty little roly-poly thing, and her sister a fine woman, though rather icy." "Roly-poly!" indignantly echoed Cornelius, "why, Kate, she is exquisitely pretty!" "Don't you fear the child may take cold?" said Miss O'Reilly, coming up to the window, which she closed with a mistrustful look, that seemed to say to it--"I wish _you_ were not there." I spent about an hour more with Cornelius, who did his best to entertain me, by talking of the gallery, then took me back to my room, where Kate kept me company. I questioned her concerning Miss Russell, but learned little. She supposed it was very kind of her to come, though to be sure I did not want her; and cool people were often peculiar; and other things which I did not understand. I asked if any one else had come. "Mr. Smalley, who has been disappointed of the Dorsetshire curacy after all, and Mr. Trim came several times." "I hope Mr. Trim did not kiss me," I said, uneasily, for this amiable individual still persisted in being affectionate to me. "Nonsense, child, I promise you they were more taken up in looking at Miss Russell, than in thinking of you. Sleep, for they are to come this evening, and I know Cornelius would like to take you down for an hour." I did my best to gratify her, and soon succeeded, and the same evening I was dressed and wrapped up, or rather swathed like a mummy, said Cornelius, as he carried me down in his arms. He had scarcely laid me on the couch in the parlour, when Deborah announced "Miss Russell." A pretty head, with drooping ringlets, peeped in, and as suddenly vanished. "Pray come in, Miss Russell," said Kate, rising. "You are engaged," lisped a soft voice behind the door. "Not at all, pray come in." "You--you are at tea, then." "We shall not have tea for an hour, pray come in." "I would rather come some other time," said the little voice, still speaking from the door, but rather more faintly. "Surely my brother does not frighten you?" "Oh no," faltered the timid speaker, in a tone that said, "Oh dear yes, precisely." Kate rose and walked to the door. We heard a giggle, a little suppressed denial, and finally saw Miss O'Reilly re-enter the parlour and lead in the bashful creature. Miss Ducky was in a state of bewitching confusion and under-her-breath modesty. "She came to know how the little girl was-- so glad she was well again. Sit down! Oh no, she would rather be excused." She spoke with girlish fluency of easy speech, with many a gentle toss of the glossy curls, and glancing of the bright dark eyes that looked everywhere save in the direction of Cornelius. Kate was vainly pressing her to sit down, when the fair creature was further alarmed by the entrance of Mr. Smalley and Mr. Trim. In her confusion she flew to the bow window instead of the door--"was astonished at the mistake--so absurd--quite stupid, you know," and stood there blushing most charmingly, when Kate at length persuaded her to sit down. By this time I had received the congratulations of Mr. Smalley and Mr. Trim, both of whom looked with some interest and curiosity at Miss Ducky. There never was such a little flirt. The introduction was scarcely over when she attacked Mr. Trim with a look, Mr. Smalley with a smile, and Cornelius with look, smile, and speech, and having thus hooked them, she went on with the three to her own evident enjoyment and delight. Mr. Trim, whom the ladies had not accustomed to such favours, seemed exulting, and indulged in the most unbounded admiration. After warning Miss Ducky that she need not mind him, he edged his chair nearer to hers, and peering in her face, asked to know the number of hearts she had broken. "I broke a cornelian heart the other day," she replied, demurely; "I was so sorry." "Could it not be mended?" innocently asked Mr. Smalley. "I don't know," she answered, childishly, "I did not try; I used to wear it round my neck--it is in a drawer now." "Poor heart!" compassionately said Cornelius. She laughed, and gaily shook her curls, but suddenly became as mute as a mouse, and, with the frightened glance of a child taken at fault, she looked at the door, on the threshold of which her sister now stood unannounced. Miriam entered quietly, passing by Cornelius and me without giving either a look, and apologized to Kate for her intrusion; but Miss Ducky had, it seemed, been suddenly missed, to the great alarm of her relatives, whom the sound of her voice next door had alone relieved from their painful apprehensions. Miss Ducky heard all this with downcast eyes and a penitent face, and stood ready to follow her sister, who had pertinaciously refused to take a seat. Mr. Trim seemed rather anxious to detain them, and, bending forward with his hands on his knees to catch a look of Miriam's beautiful face, he said-- "Your sister, Ma'am, was telling us of the hearts--" "I only spoke of the cornelian," interrupted Ducky, looking alarmed. Miriam looked through Mr. Trim with her calm blue eyes, bade Miss O'Reilly good evening, smiled at Mr. Smalley, who coloured, then leading away her sister, she again passed by Cornelius and me with a chilling bend of the head. "Pretty girl!" said Mr. Trim, shutting his eyes as the door closed upon them. "Has she not very classical features?" observed Mr. Smalley, seeming surprised. "Oh, you mean the fair one," sneered Mr. Trim. "It is very well for you, Smalley, a clergyman, to admire a girl who is as proud as Lucifer, just because she has a Greek nose--" "I admire Miss Russell," interrupted Mr Smalley, reddening, "because the first time I saw her she was fulfilling that precept of our Divine Lord, which enjoins that the sick shall be visited and the afflicted comforted." "Every man to his taste," replied Mr. Trim. "I like that pretty little thing best, and so would Cornelius, if he were not such a confirmed woman-hater. Ha! ha!" "I hope not," said Mr. Smalley, looking with mild surprise at Cornelius, who did not repel the accusation, but seemed absorbed in my request of being taken upstairs again. I was still weak, and the talking made my head ache. I bade our two visitors good-night, and again had to resist Mr. Trim's attempt to embrace me. I believe he knew how much I disliked his ugly face, and would have found a malicious pleasure--I now acquit him of caring for the kiss--in compelling mine to endure its proximity. As I saw it bend towards me, grinning, I screamed, and took refuge in the arms of Cornelius, who said, a little impatiently-- "Do let that child alone, Trim." Mr. Trim went back to his chair, saying, mournfully, "he never had luck with the ladies, whereas Cornelius, being a handsome, dashing young fellow, and Smalley rather wild--a thing women always liked--" I lost the rest, for Cornelius, who was carrying me out of the room, shut the door, muttering something in which "Trim" and "insolence" were all I could hear distinctly. Two days after this, I was well enough to be carried down to the garden in the arms of Cornelius, who sacrificed an hour of daylight to sitting by me on the bench. It was a warm and pleasant noon, and I was enjoying the delightful sense of existence which recovery from illness yields, when Miriam Russell suddenly appeared before us. She always had a noiseless step and had come down the steps from the porch so quietly that we had never heard her. I saw the blood rush to the brow of Cornelius, and felt the hand which mine clasped, tremble slightly. Miss Russell looked very calm; she asked me how I was; I replied. "Very well," and thanked her, in a low tone. Her statue-like beauty repelled the very idea of familiarity; her white chiselled features had the purity and coldness of sculptured marble; her face was faultless in outline, but it was too colourless, and her eyes, though fine and clear, were of a blue too pale. She gave me a careless look, then said to Cornelius, after refusing to be seated-- "You have kept your child." "She is still very weak." "Never mind, she will grow like my child yet." Cornelius liked me too well not to be partial. "Yes, she would be pretty if she were not so pale," he replied. "You spoil her, do you not?" asked Miriam. "Kate says so. Do I spoil you, Daisy?" I said "Yes," and half hid my face on his shoulder, whence I looked at Miriam, who smiled, as if the fondness of Cornelius for me, and mine for him, gave her pleasure to see. "She spoils me, but she won't let me have my way," said a soft lisping voice from the porch. We looked, and saw Miss Ducky's pretty curled head bending forward and looking at us. Her sister's whole face underwent a change on seeing her. "But then she's so jealous," continued Ducky, pouting, "I hope you are not jealous of Daisy." "Foolish child!" said Miriam, striving to smile. "But then she's very fond of me," resumed Ducky, smiling; "when Doctor Johnson, stupid man, said I could not live, she was nearly distracted. Silly of her, was it not, Mr. O'Reilly?" Her look so pertinaciously sought his that he could scarcely have avoided looking at her. She was very pretty thus in the gloom of the porch, and he smiled at her fresh young beauty. I saw Miriam glance uneasily from one to the other, then a cloud gathered on her brow. She bade us a sudden adieu, went up to her sister, and led her away, spite of her evident reluctance. Cornelius continued to look like one entranced on the spot where Miriam had lately stood; I was but a child, yet I knew he was now listening to the sweet and delusive voice of passion, unheeded during the earlier years of his youth, and enchanting him at last. I was watching his face attentively: he looked down, met my glance, and said quietly-- "Confess Miss Ducky is much prettier than her sister." If he wanted me to contradict, he was disappointed. "Yes, Cornelius," I replied, "she is." "I thought you admired Miriam most," he said a little shortly. "I did not know then she had green eyes." This was true: the hue of Miriam's eyes, of a blue verging on green, was the fault of her face; I had been quick to detect it; Cornelius reddened and never broached the subject again. Miriam came no more near us, and kept such good watch on her young sister, that we never had the opportunity of again comparing them together. Strange and sad to say, as autumn opened, the young girl sickened and in a few weeks died in the arms of her sister, childish and unconscious to the last. Miss O'Reilly and I watched the funeral leaving the house; as I saw it pass by, I felt as if Death, baulked of one prey and unwilling to leave our dwelling unsated, had seized on her, and I startled Kate by observing-- "Kate, don't you think poor Miss Ducky died instead of me?" "Bless the child!" exclaimed Kate, turning pale; "never say that again." But the fancy had taken hold of me, and, unless I am much deceived, of another too. Weeks elapsed before we saw anything of the bereaved sister. We heard that, wrapt in her grief, she remained for days locked in her room, and there brooded over her loss, rejecting consolation with scorn, and indulging in passionate mourning. Kate blamed this excessive sorrow; her brother never uttered one word of praise or blame. Though my health was much improved, I was still delicate and subject to attacks of languor. One evening, Kate, seeing me scarcely able to sit up, wanted me to go to bed; but Cornelius had been out all day, I wished to await his return, so I went to the back-parlour, reclined on a couch, and there fell asleep. I was partly awakened by the sound of voices talking earnestly in the next room, of which the door stood half open. I listened, still half asleep: one of the voices was that of Cornelius, passionately entreating; the other that of Miriam, coldly denying and accusing him of infidelity to the dead, whilst with ardent warmth he protested that she alone had been mistress of his thoughts. I sat up on the couch amazed and confounded. My room was dark, they could not see me, but I could see them. Miriam sat by the table, clad in deep mourning; Cornelius by her, with his face averted from me; he held her hand in his, still entreating; she said nothing, but she no longer denied. He raised her hand to his lips unreproved; whilst a bright rosy hue, that seemed too ardent for a blush, passed over her face, late so pale with grief. I sank back on my couch, frightened at having heard and seen what had never been meant for my ear or sight; but I could not help it; I could not leave the room where I was, without breaking in upon them; twice I rose to do so, but each time my courage failed me. So I kept quiet, and stopping my ears with my fingers, did my best not to hear. I could not however help catching words now and then, and once I heard Miriam saying-- "Do you know why I, who never thought of you before this last hour, now wish to love you?--Because you are so unlike me." What Cornelius replied I know not. Soon after this Miss Russell left. Cornelius had followed her to the door. He returned to the parlour, and throwing himself on the sofa, he there fell into a smiling reverie. I softly left my couch, entered the parlour, and quietly sat down on a cushion at his feet. Cornelius looked as if he could not believe his eyes, then slowly sat up, and bent on me a face that darkened as he looked. CHAPTER XII. "Where do you come from?" he asked. "From the next room." "Have you been there long?" "The whole evening." "I thought you were upstairs sleeping?" "No, Cornelius, I was lying on the couch." "And you have just awakened, I suppose?" he carelessly observed, but with his look bent keenly on my face. I answered in a faltering tone-- "I have been awake some time." "Before Miss Russell left?" "Yes, Cornelius." The blood rushed up to his brow. "You listened?" he exclaimed, with a wrathful glance. "I heard, Cornelius," I replied, unwilling to lose the distinction, "and heard as little as I could." "Heard!" he indignantly echoed. "Upon my word! and why did you hear? Why did you not leave the room?" "Twice I rose to do so; I made a noise on purpose; but you did not hear me, and I did not dare to disturb you." Cornelius did not say which of the two evils--being disturbed or overheard by me--he would have preferred. I sat at his feet, wistfully looking up into his face. It was always expressive, and now told very plainly his annoyance and vexation. It would scarcely have been in the nature of mortal man, not to resent the presence of a witness on so interesting and delicate an occasion. "I never heard anything like it," he exclaimed, indignantly. "I am fond of you, Daisy, but you do not imagine I ever contemplated taking you--a little girl too--into my confidence, as twice I have been compelled to do. What do you mean by it?" he added, with a perplexed and provoked air, that to a looker-on might have been amusing. "I mean nothing, Cornelius." "Foolish child," he continued, impatiently, "not to stay on your couch, and let me fancy you had slept through it!" "But that would have been a great shame," I replied very earnestly; "I came out on purpose that you might know." "Thank you!" he said drily. "I shall not tell," I observed, in a low tone. "It is to be no secret," he shortly answered. I had no more to say. Cornelius rose impatiently, walked about the room, came back to his place, and still looked unable to get over the irritating consciousness of having been overheard. I rose to go; he suddenly detained me. "Stay," he said, with a profound sigh, "it is most provoking--the more especially as there is no dipping you into Lethe--but '_Hon[n]i soit qui mal y pense_.' I did not say one word of which I need be ashamed, and as to its being a little ridiculous--why, it is very odd if a man cannot afford to be ridiculous now and then--eh, Daisy?" He gave me an odd look, half shy, half amused. He could not help enjoying a joke, even though it might be at his own expense. "Then you are not vexed with me, Cornelius?" I asked, looking up. "Not a bit," he replied, smiling with perfect good-humour; "I acquit you of wilful indiscretion, my poor child; I should have shut the door--but one cannot think of everything." He had laid his hand on my shoulder. I turned round and pressed my lips to it, for the first time, scarce knowing why I gave him the token of love and homage he had yielded to Miriam. It is thus in life; we are perpetually bestowing on those who give back again, but rarely to us. Every trace of vexation passed away from the face of Cornelius; he made room for me by his side, and as I sat there in my familiar attitude, he shook back his hair, and observed, with philosophic coolness-- "After all, she would have known it to-morrow; only," he added, a little uneasily, "I think there is no necessity to let Miriam suspect anything of all this: you understand, Daisy?" "Yes, Cornelius," I replied submissively. He smiled. "What a docile tone! Do you know, my pet, it is almost a pity there is not some romantic mystery in this matter; how discreet you would be! how you would carry letters or convey messages! but your good offices will never be needed." He spoke gaily; I tried to smile, but he little knew how my heart was aching. "I suppose, Cornelius, you will marry Miss Russell," I observed after awhile. He smiled again. "Soon, Cornelius?" He sighed and shook his head. "Will you still live in this house?" "Provided Miriam does not think it too small," he replied with a perplexed air, "but by uniting it to the next-door house, it would be quite large enough. Then I could have the upper part of both houses with a sky-light,--much better than a place in town; besides, I shall want her to sit to me--eh, Daisy?" He turned to me; my face was partly averted from his gaze, or he must have read there the sharp and jealous torment every word he uttered awakened within me. Who was this stranger, that had stepped in between Cornelius and me, whose thought absorbed all his thoughts, whose image effaced every other image, who already made her supposed wishes his law, already snatched from me my most delightful and exclusive privileges? He seemed waiting for a reply; I compelled myself to answer-- "Yes, Cornelius." "For our gallery, you know," he continued. I did not reply; I felt sick and faint. He stooped and looked into my face with utter unconsciousness in his. "How pale you look, my little girl!" he said, with concern; "and you are feverish too. Go up to your room." He bade me good-night, and kissed me two or three times with unusual warmth and tenderness. Jealousy is all quickness of spirit and of sense. I reluctantly endured caresses which I knew not to be mine; if I dared, I would have repelled those overflowings of a heart in whose joy and delight I had not the faintest part. Sweeter, dearer to me was the quiet, careless kiss I was accustomed to get, than all this tenderness springing from love to another. I was glad when Cornelius released me from his embrace; glad to leave him; glad to go upstairs and be wretched in liberty. Never since Sarah had told me that my father was going to marry Miss Murray, had I felt as I now felt. The grief I had passed through after his death was more mighty, but it did not, like this, attack the existence of love and sting it in its very heart. Cornelius married to Miriam Russell, parted from us in the sweet communion of daily life, living with her in another home, painting his pictures for her and with her sitting to him or looking on,--alas! where should I be then?--was a thought so bitter, so tormenting, that it worked me into a fever, which fed eagerly on the jealousy that had given it birth. Gone was the time when I stood next to Kate in his heart, and my loss was the gain of her whom I had heard him making the aim of his future, the hope and joy of his life. His love for her might not exclude calmer affections, but it cast them beneath at an immeasurable distance. I could not bear this. I was jealous by temper and by long habit. My father had accustomed me to the dangerous sweetness of being loved ardently and without a rival; and though I had not expected so much from Cornelius, yet slowly, patiently, by loving him to an excess, I had made him love me too; and now it was all labour lost: she had reached at once the heart towards which I had toiled so long, and won without effort the exclusive affection it was hard not to win, but utter misery to see bestowed on another. The manner of Kate on the following morning showed me she knew nothing; breakfast was scarcely over when she rather solemnly said to her brother-- "Cornelius, what did you do to that child whilst I was out yesterday?" He stood by the fire-place, looking down at the glowing embers and smiling at his own thoughts; he woke from his reverie, shook his head, opened his eyes, and looked up astonished. "I have done nothing to her, Kate," he replied, simply. "She has been crying herself to sleep, though!" I had, and I heard her with dismay; he gave me a keen look. "Her nerves are weak," he suggested. "Nonsense! did you ever know a fair-haired, dark-eyebrowed man or woman to have weak nerves?" "I know dark eyebrows are a rare charm for a blonde." "Nonsense! charm!--I tell you it is an indication of character--of energy and wilfulness. It is all very well for the fair, meek hair to say, 'Oh! I'm so quiet;' I say the dark, passionate brow tells me another story, and as Daisy never cries without a reason, I should like to know what she has been crying about." "Her health affects her spirits, that is all," hastily replied Cornelius; "come up with me, Daisy, it will cheer you." I obeyed reluctantly. It was some time however before Cornelius took any notice of me. He stood looking at a study for a larger picture begun during my illness. It represented poor children playing on a common, and was to be called "The Happy Time." "And don't they look happy?" observed Cornelius, turning to me with a smile. He was perhaps struck with the fact that the child he addressed did not look a very happy one, for, with the abruptness of a thing suddenly remembered, he said-- "By the bye, what did you cry for, Daisy?" I hung down my head and did not reply. "Did you hear me?" "Yes, Cornelius." "Then answer, child." I did not; he looked astonished. "Answer," he said again. I felt myself turning red and pale, but to tell him I was jealous of Miriam Russell! no, I could not; the confession was too bitter, too humiliating. "Daisy," he said, "I shall get angry." I stood by him obstinately mute. I looked up at him with a dreary, sorrowful gaze; he frowned and bit his lip. I summoned all my courage to bear his coming wrath; to my dismay he chucked my chin, and said with careless good humour-- "As if I should not be fond of you all the same, you jealous little thing!" And with the smile which he no longer repressed he turned away whistling "Love's young dream." Vexed and mortified to the quick, I burst into tears; Cornelius turned round and showed me an astonished face. "Nonsense!" he exclaimed, laughing incredulously, "you never can be crying, Daisy!" The laugh, the gay, careless tone exasperated me. I turned to the door to fly somewhere out of his sight; he caught me back and lifted me up. In vain I resisted; with scarcely an effort he mastered me and laughed again at my unavailing efforts to escape. Breathless with my recent resistance, irritated by my subjection, I lay in his arms mute and sullen. He bent his amused face over mine. "You are an odd little girl," he said, with the most provoking good- humour, looking with his merry brown eyes into mine, that were still heavy with tears, and speaking gaily, as if my jealousy, anger, and weeping were but a jest; "I suppose you object to my marrying--well, that's a pity--but it is all your fault! You know I wanted to wait for you, only you would not hear of it, so I naturally got desperate and looked out elsewhere." With this, and as if to humble and mortify me to the last, he stooped to embrace me. In vain, burning and indignant, I averted my face; he only laughed and kissed me two or three times more. To be thus gently ridiculed, laughed at, and kissed, was more than I could bear. I submitted, but with a bursting heart, that betrayed itself by ill- repressed sobs and tears. Cornelius saw this was more than childish pettishness: "Daisy!" he exclaimed, with concern, and he put me down at once. There was a little couch close by; I threw myself upon it, and hid in the pillow my shame and my grief. He said and did all he could to pacify me; but when I looked up a little soothed, it stung me to read in his eyes the smile his lips repressed. The folly of a child of my age in presuming to be jealous of his beautiful Miriam, was evidently irresistibly amusing. My tears and my sobs ceased at once. I locked in the poignant feelings which could win no sympathy even from him who caused them. I listened with downcast eyes to his consolations, and apathetically submitted to his caresses. But Cornelius, satisfied that it was all right, chid me gently for having made him lose "ten precious minutes," gave me a last kiss, and returned to his easel. At once I rose and said-- "May I go downstairs?" "Of course," he replied; but he looked surprised at the unusual request. I remained below all day. When after tea I brought out my books as usual, Cornelius very coolly said-- "My dear, Kate will hear you this evening." He took his hat and left us. As the door closed upon him, Miss O'Reilly shook her head and poked the fire pensively. I saw she knew all. Once or twice she sighed rather deeply, but subduing this she observed with forced cheerfulness-- "Well. Daisy, let us go through those lessons." We did go through them, but with strange inattentiveness on either side. "Nonsense, child!" impatiently exclaimed Kate; "why do you keep stopping and listening so, it is only Cornelius singing next door; what about it?" What about it? nothing, of course; and yet you too, Kate, stopped often in your questioning to catch the tones of your brother's gay and harmonious voice; you, too, guessed that the time when he could feel happy to stay at home and sing to you was for ever gone by; you, too, when the lessons were over, sadly looked at his vacant place, and felt how far now was he whose song and whose laughter resounded from the next house. Oh, Love! invader of the heart, pitiless destroyer of its sweetest ties, for two hearts whom thou makest blest in delightful union, how many dost thou wound and divide asunder! We had thought to spend the evening alone, but a strange chance, not without sad significance, brought us an unexpected visitor; the Reverend Morton Smalley called, for once unaccompanied by Mr. Trim. He was more gentle and charming than ever. He expressed himself very sorry not to see Cornelius, whom he evidently thought absent on some laborious errand, for looking at Kate in his benignant way over his spotless neckcloth and through his bright gold spectacles, he earnestly begged "she would not allow her brother to work so very hard." She shook her head and smiled a little sadly. "I fear Art absorbs him completely," gravely said Mr. Smalley. "Oh dear no!" sighed Kate. "We were never intended to lead a purely intellectual life," continued our guest, bending slightly forward, and raising his fore-finger with mild conviction, "and I fear your brother, Ma'am, is too much given to what I may venture to term the abstract portion of life: life has very lovely and tender realities." Kate poked the fire impatiently. "And then he works too hard," pensively continued Mr. Smalley, returning to his old idea that Cornelius was engaged on some arduous task: "why not give himself one evening's relaxation?" I sat apart on a low stool, unheeded and silent; I know not what impulse made me look up in the face of our guest and say earnestly-- "Cornelius is gone to see Miss Miriam." Mr. Smalley started like a man who has received an electric shock. He looked at me, at Kate; her face gave sorrowful confirmation of all he could suspect and dread. He said not a word, but turned very pale. "Mr. Smalley," said Kate, "have a glass of wine." He did not answer, he had not heard her; like one in a troubled dream, he passed his handkerchief across his moist brow and trembling lips. He made an effort to look more composed, as Kate handed him the glass of wine which she had poured out. He took it from her, smiled a faint ghastly smile, and said-- "I wish our friend every happiness." But he could not drink his own pledge. He raised the glass to his lips, laid it down as if it were poison, rose, pressed the hand of Miss O'Reilly, and left us abruptly. "Daisy," severely said Kate, "go up to your room." I obeyed, to spend another wretched night, not sleepless, but feverish dreams and sudden wakenings. I did not go near Cornelius on the following day. Of this he took no notice, and again went out in the evening. I saw him depart with a sharp jealous pang. Ere long we heard him laughing next door. "Just listen to him!" said Kate, smiling, "is he not enjoying himself! God bless him! that boy always had a gay laugh. Ah! many's the time, when, though I scarcely knew how to provide for the morrow, that laugh has made my heart light and hopeful--God bless him!" On the next evening Miriam called. She entered the room quietly, sat down on the sofa, took a book from the table, looked listlessly over it, and spoke calmly as if nothing had occurred. Both she and Kate were more civil than cordial. Cornelius sat by Miss Russell. There was still a place vacant by him; it had always been mine; I took it and gently laid my head on his shoulder. As I did so, I met the glance of Miriam. She had not seen me until then: she started, turned pale, and, as if she resented that I, the weak sickly child, should still live, whilst her fair young sister lay cold in the grave, she said-- "How unwell that child looks!--but perhaps it is only because she is so sallow." Childhood is fatally quick in catching the spirit of contest. I reddened, looked at her, and suddenly pressed my lips to the cheek of Cornelius, conscious this was more than she dare do. "Be quiet, child!" he said a little impatiently. I gave him a look of keen reproach; he did not heed it; his eyes were again bent on Miriam; he was again absorbed in her. The child whom he had petted and caressed evening after evening, for two years, was now forgotten as if she had never existed. "Daisy," said Kate, "come and help me to wind this skein." She saw my misery, and did this to give me a pretence to leave them; but I would not yield. As soon as the skein was wound, I returned to my place by Cornelius; for two hours I persisted in staying there, vainly striving to win a caress, a word, a look. Alas! he did not even know I was by him. He was talking to Miriam of a new piece of music, and said-- "I shall tell Daisy to look it out for you to-morrow." "Daisy is here," replied Miss Russell, "by you." He turned round astonished, and exclaimed-- "Why, so she is!" To be so near him and yet so far apart, was too great a torment. My heart swelled as if it would burst. Stung at his cruel indifference, I rose, and without looking back I went up to Kate, sat down on the lowly cushion at her feet, and thus silently relinquished the place which had been mine so long. Miriam Russell was now acknowledged as the betrothed of Cornelius. She was twenty-six, and independent both in her means and in her actions. Her aunt declared "that she had made a very bad match, and that she was throwing herself away on a handsome, penniless Irishman, whose artful sister was at the bottom of it all." This speech was repeated to Miss O'Reilly, and brought on a great coolness between her and her tenant. Kate resented especially the reflection on her brother. Without letting him know what suggested the remark, she observed to him in my presence--and it was the only comment on his engagement I ever heard her make-- "Cornelius, Miss Russell has some property, but I trust you will not think of marriage before you have won a position." "No, indeed," he replied, reddening, and throwing back his head half indignantly. I now never went near Cornelius unless when sent by Kate. At first I had hoped he would miss me, but sufficient companionship to him was the charmed presence which haunts the lover's solitude; he asked not why I staid away, and pride forbade me to return. Passion had seized on him, and she absorbed all his faculties save one: he remained faithful to Art. He was a most enamoured lover, but not even for his mistress did he leave his easel, or lose an hour of daylight. She did not put him to a test, of which it was plain that, of his own accord, he would never dream. Every moment he could spare he gave to her; evening after evening he handed over my lessons to Kate, and left us to go next- door: he was still kind, but somehow or other the charm had departed from his kindness. Several weeks had thus elapsed, when Miriam was suddenly summoned to the sick bed of an aged relative, who dwelt in a retired village twenty miles away. Cornelius seemed to feel this first separation very much. He sighed deeply when the hour struck that usually led him to his beloved, opened his cigar-case, and smoked what, if he had used a pipe, might have been termed the calumet of sorrow. But he was not one of those inveterate smokers who, from the clouds they raise around them, can look down on the tribulations of this world with Olympic serenity. When his cigar was out, he brought forth no other, and half sat on the sofa with a most _ennuy?_ aspect. Kate had gone up to her room, complaining of a bad headache. I sat reading by her vacant chair, in that place which had become the type of my altered destiny. "Daisy!" all at once said Cornelius. I looked up. "Come here," he continued. I rose and obeyed, and, standing before him, waited to hear what he had to say to me. He said nothing, but stretched out his arm and drew me on his knee, smiling as he met my startled look, and felt my heart beating against the arm that encircled me. "Are you afraid?" he asked. "Oh no, Cornelius," I replied, but I felt astonished and happy at this unexpected return of kindness; so happy that, ashamed of it, I hid my face on his shoulder. He laughed because I would not look up, kissed my averted cheek, and finally compelled my burning face and overflowing eyes to meet his gaze. "How perverse you have been!" he said, chidingly; "I don't know what tempted me to take any notice of you again; I am too fond of you, you jealous, sulky little creature." His old affection seemed to have returned in all its warmth; his look had the old meaning, his voice the old familiar accent, his manner more than the old tenderness. When I saw myself again so near him, again petted, caressed, loved, how could I but forget Miriam, the past and the future, to yield to the irresistible charm of the moment? Oh! why was he so imprudently kind? Why, when I was growing almost accustomed to his indifference, almost resigned, did he unconsciously destroy the slow labour of weeks, and sow for us both the seed of future torment? But I thought not of that then, nor did he. If I was glad to be once more near him, I saw in his face--and it was that undid me--that he was glad to have back again the child of whom he had for more than two years been so fond. He caressed me as after a long separation, and smoothing my hair, asked the question he had often put to me during my lingering illness-- "What shall we talk about?" "The Gallery," was my prompt reply. "Will you never tire of it, my darling?" "Never, Cornelius." "Well, I have been making an addition to it lately: a Gipsy couple in a green lane--the husband lying idly on the grass--his dark-eyed wife cooking." "And the child?" "There is none; for I speak of a real Gipsy couple who are to come to sit to me to-morrow, but who have no child." "Could not I do, Cornelius?" "Do you, with your fair hair, look like a little Gipsy?" "I might be a stolen child, Cornelius." "So you might!" cried Cornelius, his whole face lighting up at the idea; "why, it is an excellent, an admirable subject! What a tender and pathetic contrast!--they the type of rude animal enjoyment and power, you, like divine Una among the Satyrs, a meek and intellectual captive. A sketch! I shall make a picture of it--a fine picture--a great picture, please God." He rose, and walked about the room quite excited; his eyes had kindled and burned with inward light; his face glowed with triumph. Once he paused, and with his fore-finger rapidly traced on the air lines which had already struck his fancy for the arrangement of the group; then he came back to me and gravely said-- "I see it, Daisy; it is painted, finished, and hung in the great room; in the meanwhile let us discuss the particulars." We discussed them, or rather Cornelius spoke, and I approved unconditionally every word he uttered, until, to our common astonishment, the clock struck eleven. As he bade me good-night, Cornelius laid his hand on my head, and said, admiringly-- "You clever little thing to have thought of it! no wonder I am fond of you; but do you know you will have to dress in rags, like a poor little drudge?" "As if I minded it, Cornelius!" I quickly replied. He smiled and kissed me very kindly. I went up to my room, to be as restless and wakeful with joy as I had not so long ago been with bitter grief. Early the next morning I stole up to the studio. Cornelius was already at work; he never looked round as I entered, but observed, with a smile-- "So you have at length found your way up here?" I did not answer. "What kept you away so long?" he continued. "I thought you did not want me." "Did I ever want you?" "No, that is true." "Then why do you come now?" "Shall I go away, Cornelius?" He turned round smiling. "Look at them," he said, nodding towards an open portfolio, "you have not seen them yet." He alluded to several sketches of a child in various attitudes, intended for the "Happy Time." "I have seen them, Cornelius," I replied. "And when, if you please?" "I came up the other day when you were out. Pray do not be vexed, but I could not bear any longer not to see what you were doing." Vexed! oh, he did not look vexed at all with this proof of my constant admiration. Flattery is so sweet, so subtle, so intoxicating. All he said was-- "Well, which do you prefer?" I luckily hit on the very sketch he himself approved. "That child has a great deal of judgment," he observed, with thoughtful satisfaction: "I could trust to her opinion as to my own: it is the best, of course it is. There, put them all away; you have always kept my things in order for me until lately; see the mess in which they now are." So they were, in a most artistic confusion, which I remedied with great alacrity. When we went down to breakfast, Kate, who had seen with pleasure that I had not of late been so much with her brother, asked, with some asperity, "if I was again going to settle myself upstairs." "Precisely," replied Cornelius, and with great ardour and enthusiasm he told her of his intended picture. "Such an admirable subject,--not at all so commonplace as the 'Happy Time.'" Miss O'Reilly was horrified at the prospect of Gipsy sitters, and prophesied the utter ruin of her household. Cornelius laughed at her fears, and promised to keep such strict watch that no disaster could possibly occur. The Gipsy couple came the same day--a wild, restless- looking pair, who tried to the utmost the patience of Cornelius, and gave me many an odd, shy look as they saw me take my attitude, in the costume, more picturesque than attractive, of an old brown skirt, torn and made ragged for the purpose; a shabby bodice; my hair loose and tangled, and my neck, arms, and feet bare. They were very wilful, too, and had on the subject of attitudes ideas which differed materially from those of Cornelius. At length the group was formed, and in this first sitting he could take a rapid sketch of it, "just to fix the idea of it in his mind," he observed to Kate at tea-time; "they were a little restless for the first time, but I have no doubt we shall get on very well, though you looked rather afraid of that swarthy fellow, Daisy." "I did not like his eyes--nor those of his wife either, Cornelius." "Why, there is a tea-spoon missing," hastily observed Kate, who had been holding a conference at the door with Deborah; "you had not one in the studio, had you, Cornelius?" He rose precipitately, left the room, and in a few minutes, came down with a melancholy face. "There was one and there is not one," he said, sadly,--"the perfidious wretches!" "I shall send the police after them," warmly cried Kate. "Will the police make them sit to me again?" impatiently asked Cornelius. "Indeed I hope not," indignantly replied his sister. "To leave me in such a predicament for the sake of a miserable tea- spoon!" he observed, feelingly. "A miserable tea-spoon! one of the dozen that has been fifty years in the family, with our crest, a hawk's head, upon it too! I am astonished at you, Cornelius; a miserable tea-spoon! you speak as if you had been born with a silver spoon in your mouth!" Cornelius sighed profoundly by way of reply; but even so tender a disappointment could not weigh long on his cheerful temper. "After all," he philosophically observed, "they left me my idea." "I wish the tea-spoon had been an idea," shortly said Kate. "Well, I wish it had," placidly replied her brother; "but I have at least the consolation of having hit on the very characters I wanted--arrant thieves." "Indeed you did, Cornelius." "I remember their features quite well, and shall without scruple consider and paint them too as the real abductors of Daisy; for it stands to reason that she would not be here now if they had only found some decent opportunity of abstracting her." "Or if she had only been a tea-spoon!" sighed Kate. "This incident will be of the greatest use to me," gravely continued Cornelius; "it will enable me to enter thoroughly into the spirit of the picture story." This was rather too much for Kate. But Cornelius bore her reproaches with great serenity, and found another motive of consolation in the fact that I, the principal figure, being always under his hand, it really was not so bad after all. Happy were the three weeks that followed. Cornelius had acquired great facility and worked hard; I sat to him nearly all the day long; we rested together, and he then put by his own fatigue to cheer and amuse me. It was to me as if Miriam had never existed. Cornelius by no means forgot her, but even a man in love may think of other things besides his mistress, and a new picture on the easel was the most dangerous rival Miriam could dread in the heart of her betrothed. They wrote to one another daily; every morning Cornelius consecrated a quarter of an hour to love, then devoted himself heart and soul to his task; and I--as sharing in that task--occupied, I believe, a greater share of his thoughts and feelings than even his beautiful mistress. One morning indeed, when the postman did not bring him his usual letter, he looked quite mournful, and began his labour with the declaration "that it was no use--he could not work," but after a quarter of an hour his brow had cleared and he was wholly absorbed in his task. He worked until we were both tired, he with painting, I with sitting; he then threw himself on the low couch, and wanted me to sit by him and talk as usual, but I said he looked drowsy. "So I am, you little witch." "Then pray sleep awhile." "No, I should sleep too long." "Shall I awaken you?" "You could not." "Indeed I could, Cornelius." "Promise not to mind my entreaties." "I shall not mind them, Cornelius." "Then take my watch, your poor father's present, Daisy, and wake me in a quarter of an hour." He closed his eyes, and, having the happy faculty of sleeping when he liked, he was soon in deep slumber. I sat by him, the watch in one hand, the other resting on the cushion which pillowed his head; I neither moved nor spoke until the quarter of an hour was over, then, without a second's grace, I called him up. "Five minutes more," he drowsily entreated. "Not five seconds. I wish you would wake up, Cornelius, or I shall have to pinch you or pull your hair." "Pull and pinch, so you only let me sleep." Of course I did not pinch; but I pulled one of his raven locks with sufficient force. "Little barbarian!" he exclaimed, "what do you mean by such usage?" "I mean to waken you, Cornelius." "And why so?" he asked, to obtain that second's delay which is so delightful to the sleeper. "Oh, Cornelius! how can you ask? Must you not work to become a great artist, paint fine pictures, and become famous?" "Very true!" he exclaimed, starting up; "thank you, Daisy, you are a faithful friend." And in rising, he passed his arm around my neck and kissed me. But even as he did so, I saw his glance light suddenly; I turned round, Miriam was standing on the threshold of the open door looking at us. I sighed: my three weeks' happiness was over. CHAPTER XIII. Cornelius received Miriam with a flushed brow and eager look that betrayed the joy of his heart. And yet with what indolent calmness she let him clasp her hand in his, and stood in the centre of the room, looking at him with an abstracted smile! In answer to his eager inquiries she composedly answered-- "Yes, my aunt is better and I am quite well. Just arrived? no--I came back this morning." "And I never knew it!" "And never guessed it from not receiving the letter! I am come up to scold you. Your sister says you take no rest." "I had been sleeping when you came in." "I saw you were being awakened very gently." "Gently! she used me as Minerva Achilles, but I do not complain; I wanted to work: look!" He took her arm within his and led her to his easel. "Have you done all that since I left?" she asked. "Indeed I have, Miriam." "That accounts for your letters being so short." He reddened; she calmly resumed-- "Why are those two figures mere outlines?" "Thereby hangs a tale, or rather a tea-spoon. They are to be Gipsies: the child is stolen." "And a miserable little creature it looks." "I see I have not caught the likeness," said Cornelius, looking mortified: "it is Daisy." "Why, so it is!" exclaimed Miss Russell, seeming astonished; "how could I recognize the child in such unbecoming attire?" "Unbecoming! Do you know, Miriam, I rather admire Daisy in her rags: her attitudes are so graceful and picturesque; and is she not wonderfully fair?" he added, taking up one of my arms and seeming to call on Miss Russell for confirmation. "You have made quite a drudge of her," she said, looking at the picture. "Not a degraded one, I hope," rather quickly replied Cornelius: "Marie Antoinette looked a queen, even when she swept the floor of her prison; if I have not made Daisy look superior and intellectual in her rags, the fault is mine, Miriam." He looked at her, she did not reply; he continued--"I am taking great pains with that stolen child; as a contrast to the coarse enjoyment of the two Gipsies, and a type of unworthy degradation borne patiently and with unconscious dignity. I mean it to be the principal figure of the group: you understand?" "I should not have guessed it," was her discouraging reply. He looked mortified; she smiled, and added, "I know nothing of Art. I have nearer seen an artist at work. Let me look at you and learn." Cornelius looked delighted, and giving her a somewhat proud smile, set to work at once. She stood by the easel in an attitude of simple and attentive grace; she had taken off her black beaver bonnet, and the wintry light by which the artist painted, fell with a pale subdued ray on her fair head, and defined her perfect profile on the sombre background of the room. But his picture and his sitter absorbed Cornelius; his glance never wandered once to the spot where his beautiful mistress stood in such dangerous proximity. I saw her look at him with wonder, almost with pity, then with something like displeasure. Cornelius was more than usually intent. From his face I knew he was obstinately striving against some difficulty. He frowned; he bit his lip; his very manner of holding palette and pencil was annoyed and irritated. At length he threw both down with an impetuous and indignant exclamation-- "I cannot--do what I will--I cannot!" I was accustomed to such little outbreaks, but Miriam drew back, and said in a tone of ice-- "Mr. O'Reilly, you will break your palette." "I beg your pardon," replied Cornelius, with a start that showed he had forgotten her presence, "but Daisy and the palette are used to it, and there are things would provoke Saint Luke himself, saint and painter though he was. Would you believe it? I cannot render the thoughtful look of that child's eyes otherwise than by a stare!" He spoke quite mournfully: Miriam laughed; her lover looked astonished. "What about it?" she said. "Why, that I am painting a bad picture." "What matter?" "And the disappointment! the shame!" "Be more philosophic," she coolly replied: "success is but a chance." "Begging your pardon, Miriam, it is a chance that falls to the good pictures, consequently it is worth any toil, any sacrifice." "Yes," she replied, with reproach in the very carelessness of her tone, "you are, like all men, absorbed in your ambition." "Would you have me sit down in idleness?" "I would have you not set your heart on a picture and on fame." "I must work, Miriam, and the workman cannot separate himself from his work, nor be careless of his wages." He spoke very warmly; she coldly smiled. "I can do so," she replied; "I can tell you: paint good or bad pictures-- what matter? you are still the same man." "Ay, but there is a bit of difference between a good and bad painter," answered Cornelius, looking half vexed, "and Cornelius O'Reilly hopes to paint good pictures before he dies! But for one or two things this would not be amiss. Daisy, come and look at it." "You appeal to her?" "She sometimes hits the right nail on the head. Are the eyes better, Daisy?" "No, Cornelius," I frankly replied. "No!" he echoed, giving my neck a provoked pinch, "and why so, pray?" "I don't like them much; they look in." "You silly child, that is just what I want," he replied, smiling and chucking my chin: "I don't know what I should do without that little girl," he added, turning to Miriam, "she is a wonderful sitter, not a bad critic--" "Are you not afraid she will take cold?" interrupted Miriam; "that dress looks thin." "I trust not," answered Cornelius; "the room is kept warm; she says she is quite warm, but she is so anxious to be of use to me that I can scarcely trust her. Oh, Daisy! I hope you have not been deceiving me." He made me lie down on the couch, drew it by the fire, threw over me a shawl that was kept in the studio for that purpose, and wrapped me in its folds. I smiled at his anxiety; Miriam looked on with surprise, as if she had forgotten that Cornelius was fond of me. "I am so thankful to you for mentioning it," he said, turning towards her, "I am forgetful of these things; but if anything were to happen to Daisy, even for the sake of the best picture man ever painted, I should never forgive myself. How do you think she looks?" "Sallow, as usual," she replied, in passing by me to leave us. "You are not going yet," he said, going up to her, "you know I want to convert you to Art." "Not to-day," she replied coldly, and, disengaging her hand from his, she left the studio. Cornelius came back to the fireplace and looked pensive. I attempted to rise. "No," he said quickly, "you must not sit any more to-day." "Oh! Cornelius," I entreated, "pray let me; I do so want to see the picture finished." Cornelius sighed; he looked down at me rather wistfully, and said, involuntarily perhaps-- "Yes, _you_ like both the workman and his work." I had felt, after the death of her young sister, that Miriam never would like me; from the very day she came back to the Grove, I felt she disliked me. Her return, without making Cornelius less kind, brought its own torment. She now daily came up to the studio, and from the moment her calm and beautiful face appeared in the half-open door, I felt as if a baleful shadow suddenly filled the room. She did not banish me from the only spot she had left me, but she followed me to it and mercilessly embittered all my happiness. Never once did she leave without having stung me by slights and covert sneers which Cornelius was too frank and good to perceive; which I dared not resent openly, but over which I silently brooded, until jealousy became a rooted aversion. She had been back about ten days when I again fell ill. Cornelius thought at first I had taken cold in sitting to him, and was miserable about it; but the doctor on being called in declared I had the small-pox, and though Cornelius averred he had gone through this dangerous disease, Miss O'Reilly was morally convinced of the contrary, and banished him from my room. Nothing could exceed her own devotedness to me during this short though severe illness, and my slow recovery. She seldom left me, and never for more than a few minutes. One evening however, as I woke from a light sleep, I missed Kate from her usual place, and to my dismay I saw, by the light of a low lamp burning on the table, her brother, who stood at the foot of my bed, looking at me rather sadly. "Oh! Cornelius, go, pray go," I exclaimed, in great alarm. "There is no danger for me, child," he replied gently; "how are you?" "Almost well, Cornelius, but pray go; pray do." Without answering he hastily drew back and stepped within the shadow of the bed-curtain as the door opened, and admitted, not Kate, but Miriam. She did not see Cornelius, for the room was almost dark; she probably thought I slept; she at least approached my bed very softly, moving across the carpeted floor as dark and noiseless as a shadow. When she reached the head of my bed she stood still a moment, then taking the lamp lowered it so that its dim light fell on my face. Our eyes met; I looked at her with a wonder she did not seem to heed; I had never seen her calm look so eager. With a smile she laid down the lamp. "Oh, Miriam, Miriam!" exclaimed the reproachful voice of Cornelius, who came forward as he spoke, "you have broken your word to me." She started slightly. "What brought you here?" she asked. "I wanted to see my poor child." He took her hand to lead her to the door; but she did not move, and said in a peculiar tone-- "Have you seen her?" "Not well." "Look at her then." She handed the lamp to him; he took it reluctantly, just allowed its ray to fall upon me, then laid it down with a sigh. "Poor little thing!" he observed, sadly. "But it might have been much worse," said Miriam, gently. "Much worse," he echoed. I could not imagine what they were talking of. "I am almost well again, Cornelius," I said. "I am glad of it," he replied, cheerfully; then turning to Miriam, he again entreated her to go. "With you," was her brief reply. He complied: as they went out together, I heard him chiding her for her imprudent kindness. She did not answer, but smiled silently as the door closed upon them. On learning the visit Cornelius had paid me, Kate was very angry. To our mutual relief he did not suffer from it, and even repeated it in a few days, in order to take me down to the parlour, where I had begged hard to take tea with him and Kate. As he lifted me up in the heavy shawl which wrapped me, Cornelius sighed. "My poor little Daisy," he said, "how light, how very light you are getting!" "Oh! but," I replied, a little nettled, "I am to improve so much, you know--at least Miss Russell said so--you remember?" He gave me a rueful look, and, without replying, took me downstairs. Miss Russell sat by the table looking over a volume of prints; she just raised her eyes to say quietly-- "I am glad you are well again, Daisy," but took no other notice of me. Cornelius laid me down on the couch, and sitting on the edge, asked me how I felt. "Very well, Cornelius," I replied, and half rising, I passed my arms around his neck and kissed him. He returned the caress, and at the same time gently tried to make me lie down again. I detected the uneasy look he cast at the mirror over the mantle-piece which we both faced; I wanted to look too; he held me down tenderly, but firmly. "Not yet, my pet," he said with some emotion, "you must promise not to look at yourself until I tell you." The truth flashed on me: I was disfigured; I know not how it had never occurred to me before. I burst into tears, and hid my face in the pillow of the sofa. Cornelius vainly tried to comfort me: I would not even look up at him; to be told by him, and before her, of my disgrace, was too bitter, too galling. "Shall we love you less?" asked Cornelius. "Besides, what is beauty?" inquired Kate. Miriam said nothing. I did not regret beauty, which had never been mine to lose, but I lamented the woful change from plainness to downright ugliness. "I know I am like Mr. Trim," I despairingly exclaimed,--"without eyebrows or eyelashes." "Indeed," replied Cornelius, "your eyelashes are as long, and, like your eyebrows, as beautifully dark as ever. Let that comfort you." I thought it poor comfort--there are so many things in a face besides eyebrows and eyelashes; but drawing the shawl over mine, I checked my tears, and asked Cornelius to take me back to my room. He complied silently, and, as he laid me down on my bed, said gently-- "Have I your word that you will not look at yourself?" "Yes, Cornelius," I replied, scarcely able to speak. "Oh! Kate," I added, as the door closed on him, "am I so very ugly?" "Never mind, child," she answered cheerfully, "bear it bravely." I bore it bravely enough in appearance, but in my heart I repined bitterly. Kate and Cornelius were both deceived, and praised me for my seeming fortitude. I did not leave my room for some time, and had no difficulty in keeping my promise; I never felt tempted to break it; I sickened at the thought of meeting in a glass my own scarred and disfigured face. My only comfort was, that as Miriam came not near me, I was spared the look I should have found it most hard to bear in my humiliation. But I could not delay this moment for ever. One evening, when I knew Miss Russell to be below, Kate, in spite of my entreaties and my tears, insisted on making me go down. I entered the room like a criminal, and without once looking up or around me. I was going straight to the stool by Kate's chair, when Cornelius, who sat on the sofa with Miriam, said, making room for me-- "Daisy, come here." I felt my unhappy face burn with mortification and shame, as I obeyed and sat down by him. He kissed and caressed me very kindly, but though Miriam never turned towards me her face so pale and calm, nor inflicted the look I dreaded, the thought of her secret triumph rendered me dull and joyless. "You don't seem very merry," said Cornelius, stooping to look into my face. "The silly thing is afraid of the looking-glass," pitilessly observed Kate. "Have you really not yet looked at yourself?" asked Cornelius, in a tone of surprise. "No, Cornelius," I replied, in a low voice, "I had promised, you know." "So you had, and you kept your word like a good little girl. Well, I release you--you may look now." I felt in no hurry to avail myself of the permission. "Why don't you look?" he asked, very coolly. "I would rather not," I faltered. "But you must look at yourself some day; better have it over," was his philosophic advice. "Indeed I would much rather not." "Pshaw!" he said, impatiently, "I thought you had more sense." "So did I," observed Kate. I thought it was very easy for them, who were both handsome, to talk of sense to a poor plain girl. "Is it possible," composedly continued Cornelius, "that you mind it? Now, if you find your nose a little damaged, for instance, will it affect you?" "Indeed. Cornelius, I should not like it," was my dismayed reply. "Would you not?" "No, indeed; is there anything the matter with my nose?" "Just give one good, courageous look, and see." He took my hand, made me rise, and led me to the glass. In vain I turned away--he compelled me to look, and I saw my face--the same as ever; not handsomer, certainly, but not in the least disfigured. I turned to Cornelius, flushed and breathless with pleasure: he seemed to be enjoying my surprise. "Ah! how uselessly we have frightened you!" he said, smiling, "but your face looked bad at first, and that wise doctor said it would remain thus. Kate and I have watched the change with great interest, but seeing how well you bore it, we resolved not to speak until you were once more metamorphosed into your former self. Confess the pleasure was worth the fright." I glanced at the mirror, then at Cornelius, who stood with me on the hearth-rug, and with an odd, fluttering feeling, I observed-- "I don't think I am disfigured, Cornelius." "Not a bit," he replied, gaily: "oh! you will grow up into a beauty yet." He was holding my head in both his hands, and looking down at me very kindly. I earnestly gazed in his face, and said-- "Did I look very bad on that evening when you brought me down, Cornelius? Was I quite a fright?" "Almost," he replied, frankly. "Well, what is it?" he added, as he saw my eyes filling with tears: "you do not mind that now, do you, child?" "No. Cornelius, but I remember you kissed me." He smiled, without answering, and went back to Miriam. I quietly resumed by him the place to which he had summoned me, and which I had so reluctantly taken. He paid me no attention, and pertinaciously looked at his betrothed; yet when my hand silently sought his, its pressure returned told me that he was not unconscious of my presence. I felt too happy to be jealous, and for once sitting thus by Cornelius, unnoticed, but with his hand in mine, I could be satisfied with that humble degree of affection which a plain, homely child may receive in the presence of a beautiful and beloved woman. Kate, pleased to see me recovered and happy, was smiling at me from her low chair, when she suddenly frowned and started, as a low, timid knock was heard at the street-door. "That's Trim!" she exclaimed astonished, for, like Mr. Smalley, he had not come near us since the engagement of Cornelius and Miriam; "I know him by his slinking knock, which always seems to say, 'Don't mind me-- nobody minds me, you know.'" Miriam smiled scornfully; the parlour door opened, and Mr. Trim's head appeared nodding benevolently at us all. He entered with his usual slouch, shuffled his way to Kate, and holding her hand in both his, kindly hoped, "she was quite well." "Quite," was her prompt reply. Mr. Trim was so happy to hear it that he forgot to release her hand, until that of Cornelius, laid on his shoulder, made him turn round. Mr. Trim's eyes seemed to overflow with emotion. "God bless you, my dear fellow, God bless you!" he said, shaking both the hands of his friend up and down several times with great fervour, "it does me good to see you; I wanted Smalley to come, and thought it would do him good too, but he declined. He returns your Byron with thanks and his love, and hopes Byron was a Christian, but he would not come. Ah! my dear fellow, clergymen are men." "What else did you think they were?" shortly asked Kate--"birds?" Mr. Trim's fancy was much tickled at the idea. He shut his little eyes and laughed immoderately. When he recovered, he went up to Miriam, who sat indifferent and calm, like one taking no share in what was passing. Mr. Trim hoped she was quite well; she replied quite, with the most scornful civility. He hoped she had been quite well since he last saw her. She had been quite well. He hoped she would continue to be quite well. She hoped so too, and took up a book. Undeterred by this, Mr. Trim drew a chair near the angle of the sofa in which she sat, and spite of her astonished look, there he remained. Cornelius had resumed his place between Miriam and me, and I had the honour of next attracting Mr. Trim's attention. "I am quite well now," I replied, in answer to his inquiries, "but I have had the small-pox." "Had the small-pox, eh? Let me see; I am half blind, you know." He raised the lamp, surveyed me through his half-shut eyes, then said admiringly-- "A very fair escape. Don't you think the little thing's complexion is improved, Ma'am?" He addressed Miriam, who acquiesced by a silent bend of her queen-like head. "Altogether," continued Mr. Trim, "she looks better. Now do you know, Ma'am, that at sixteen Daisy will be quite a pretty girl." Miriam smiled ironically. Cornelius looked at me, and complacently observed-- "Three years may make a great difference." "Is Daisy thirteen?" suddenly asked Miriam. "Not yet; her birthday is in May." "You told Dr. Mixton she was ten." "Twelve, Miriam; she was ten when I brought her home." She did not reply. "How goes on the Happy Time?" asked Mr. Trim, bending forward with his hands on his knees. "It is finished, and I am engaged on another picture." Mr. Trim shut his eyes and nodded to Miriam, as much as to say, "I know all about it;" then asked how she liked sitting. "I do not sit to Mr. O'Reilly," she replied in a tone of ice. "Now, Ma'am, I call that cruel, to deprive our friend--" "Mr. O'Reilly has never asked me to sit to him." "But you know I mean to do so when I have finished my Stolen Child," said Cornelius, whose look vainly sought hers. "Allow me to suggest a subject," rather eagerly said Mr. Trim: "if it won't do, you need not mind, you know. Did you ever read 'The Corsair,' Ma'am?" "Yes," impatiently replied Miss Russell. "Then what do you say to Medora?" "Medora, my favourite heroine!" exclaimed Cornelius; "that is not a bad idea, Trim." He looked at his betrothed; she was looking at Mr. Trim, who, as usual, was in a state of blindness. "Medora in her bower," he resumed, "or parting from Conrad, or watching for his return--do you object, Ma'am?" "Not if you will sit for Conrad," she replied, her eyes beaming scorn on his ungainly person. "But Mr Trim is not like the print of Conrad," I put in pertly, "and Cornelius is, is he not, Kate?" Mr. Trim laughed; Kate gave me a severe look and rang for tea. Our guest rose; Miss O'Reilly civilly asked him to stay; but he declined, he had an engagement, he said. Scarcely had the street door closed upon him, when he knocked again. Deborah opened, and his head soon appeared at the parlour door. "Dreadful memory!" he said, chuckling, "quite forgot Byron; Smalley was rather shocked at some passages, and says you are to read his notes on Manfred." "Daisy, go and take that book from Mr. Trim," said Kate. I rose, went up to him, and held out my hand for the volume. He stretched out his arm, caught me, lifted me up, and attempted to kiss me. As I saw his face bending towards mine, I slapped it with all my might, and cried out, "Cornelius!" "Put that child down," said his somewhat stern voice behind us. Mr. Trim put me down as if he had been shot. I ran to Cornelius, who looked dark and displeased, and clung to him for protection. "Like him best--eh, Daisy?" said Mr. Trim, trying to laugh it off, "he is Conrad, eh? but I have no Medora. You foolish thing! why it is only a joke--who minds me?" "Do not be alarmed, Daisy," observed Cornelius, addressing me, but giving Mr. Trim an expressive look; "Mr. Trim will never do it again." "Catch me at it!" rather sulkily answered our visitor, rubbing his cheek as he spoke, "I have enough of such valiant damsels. Well, well," he added, relapsing into his usual manner, "no malice; good night, I am glad to see you so happy and comfortable. God bless you all!" He cast a sullen look around the room, and vanished. Cornelius said nothing; but there was a frown on his brow, and he bit his nether lip like one who chafed inwardly. He led me back to my place on the sofa, and, sitting down by me, did his best to soothe me. "Why, Daisy," merrily said Kate, "I did not know you had half so much spirit." I hid my burning face on the shoulder of her brother. "Never mind, child." she resumed, "he won't begin again." "I should like to see him." observed Cornelius. I looked up to say aloud-- "Cornelius won't let him, will you, Cornelius?" He smoothed my ruffled hair and vowed no Trim ever should kiss me against my will. "Come, come," put in Kate, "she is only a child." "Child or not, he shan't kiss her," muttered Cornelius. "Nonsense!" "Nonsense! I tell you, Kate, that the child does not like it, nor I either." He spoke sharply. "You do not look as if you did," said the chilling voice of Miriam. She had beheld all that had passed with her usual indifference, and now sat leaning back in the angle of the sofa, looking at us with calm attention. Cornelius turned round and replied quietly-- "You are quite right. Miriam, I do not like it." The entrance of Deborah interrupted the conversation. After tea Cornelius played and sang. Miriam left early. CHAPTER XIV. On the following morning, Kate sent me up my breakfast as usual, and accompanied it with a message that I was not to think of rising before twelve. But I felt strong again; besides I was eager to surprise Cornelius; I hastily donned the ragged attire of the Stolen Child and ran up to the studio. I entered abruptly, then stood still. In the centre of the room stood Miriam, clad in strange attire. A white robe fell to her feet; a blue cashmere scarf was wrapped around her fine person; her fair hair was braided back from her face; her arms, as beautiful as those of an antique statue, were as bare. Cornelius stood looking at her with eager delight, and never noticed my entrance. "I am not sure," he said, "that the costume is correct, but I know I never saw even you look so beautiful!" She smiled, and sank down on the low couch, with negligent grace. One arm fell loosely by her side, the other supported her cheek. "Do not stir," eagerly cried Cornelius: "that is the very attitude! Oh! Miriam, what a glorious picture it will make!" and walking round her, he surveyed her keenly. "You think of nothing but your pictures," she said, impatiently. "Why do you tempt me? Just allow me to move your left arm." With chilling indifference, she passively allowed him to move her beautiful arms at his pleasure. "There!" he said, drawing back, "it is perfect now." "Outstretched! theatrical!" she replied ironically. "Can you mend it?" asked Cornelius, looking piqued. She did not answer, but by just drawing in a little, and bending more forward, she threw into her face, into her look, attitude, and bearing, a strange intensity of eager watchfulness, that made her fixed gaze seem as if piercing the depths of an invisible horizon. Cornelius looked at her with wonder and admiration. "That is indeed Medora," he frankly said at length: "Oh! Miriam, never tell me, after this, you do not care for Art! and now be merciful, let me sketch you thus." "And the stolen child, who is waiting?" she said, glancing at me. "What, Daisy!" he exclaimed, seeing me for the first time. Miriam attempted to rise; he eagerly turned back to her, and entreated her so ardently to remain thus, that she yielded. When he had prevailed, he turned to me. "Daisy," he said gaily, "you are a good little girl, but you may take off your picturesque attire." Alas! so I might: the sorceress had conquered me in my last stronghold! At first Miss Russell would not hear of sitting for anything more finished and elaborate than a sketch in crayons, but from the sketch to a water-colour drawing, and from this again to an oil painting, the progression was rapid: at length the Stolen Child was wholly set aside and replaced on the easel by Medora. I had before lost Cornelius in the evening, in his moments of leisure and liberty, I now lost him at his labour; the intruder stepped in between him and me on the very spot where I thought myself most secure, and I had to look on and see it, for Miriam objected, it seems, to sitting to Cornelius alone; Kate had something else to do than to keep them company: the task was left to me. That Miriam should sit to Cornelius instead of me, was the least part of my grief; I had never expected that he would always paint little girls: the sitting in itself was nothing, but it led to much that it was acute misery for a jealous child like me to witness. I was not accustomed to be much noticed by Cornelius in the studio, but if he had a look to spare from his picture, a word to utter in a pause of his work, he gave both look and word to the child who sat to him, or silently watched him painting, and now this was taken from me! I was to my face robbed and impoverished, that another might be enriched with all I lost. For two years I had reigned in that studio, of which not even Kate shared the empire; for two years Cornelius had there spoken to me of his art, of his future, of everything that was linked with this proud aim and darling ambition of his life; and now another listened to his aspirations; another heard every passing thought and feeling which, though a child, it had once been mine to hear, and I had to look on and see it all. But it was not all. I did not merely see Miriam enjoying whatever I had once enjoyed; I saw her loved as I had never been loved, possessed of a thousand things which had never been mine to lose. Miriam was a woman, an intellectual, educated woman; she could do more than listen to Cornelius, she could converse with him; she did do so, and constantly she showed me the immense superiority which her knowledge and her years gave her over a mere child like me. She had also become converted to Art, and if not so fervent a disciple as I had been, she was certainly a far more discriminating critic. Her sense of the beautiful was keen and peculiar. She seldom admired it under its daily external aspects, but she could detect it where it seemed invisible to others, and was by them unsought for. She never agreed with Cornelius about what he considered the merits of his pictures; but then, by showing him other real merits of which he had remained unconscious, she charmed more than she ever provoked him. With his fair mistress to sit to him, to look at and talk to--what could Cornelius want with me? It was natural that involuntary and unconscious carelessness should creep into his kindest words and caresses; that, exclusively absorbed in Miriam, he should often forget my presence; that his look, perpetually fastened on her, should seldom fall on me; that every word he uttered should be directed to her: it was natural; but to see, feel, know this, not once in a time, but daily, not for an hour in the day, but all day long, was a torment that acted on me as a slow fever. But it was not all. Though Cornelius had been, was still, very fond of me, he had never of course been in love with me. He was in love with Miriam, and if he had enough self-control and self-respect not to show more of the feeling than it was becoming for a child like me to see, he loved too ardently not to be for ever betraying himself to jealous and watchful eyes like mine. His look rested on her with a tenderness and a passion, his voice addressed her in lingering accents, of which he was himself unconscious. His very tones changed in uttering her name, just as the meaning of his face became different when he looked at her. If I had known the frail and fleeting nature of human feelings, I might not have trusted these first signs of a first passion; but all I knew of love was what the fairy tales had told me, and in them I had never read but of loves that had no ending, and were not less ardent than enduring. That Cornelius might one day be less absorbed in Miriam, less oblivious of me, was a thought I never knew nor cherished. The future, when I could forget the present enough to think of the future, had but one image--Cornelius eternally loving Miriam, eternally forgetting me. But even this was not all. Miriam was in all the beauty of womanhood; Cornelius in all the fervour of man's young love. She was with him almost all the day long, not alone, but with the check of a constant presence that irritated the fever liberty and untroubled solitude might have soothed to satiety; and this, or I am much deceived, she knew well. He had to repress himself perpetually, in a way which must have been wearying and painfully irksome. His temper was too generous to wreak itself upon me, but I became conscious of a most galling and yet most inevitable truth: in that studio where I had won my place by so much perseverance; where I had shown to Cornelius a faith so entire and unshaken; where I, a child, and restless as all children are more or less, had been the patient slave of his art; where Cornelius had always welcomed me with a greeting so sincere and so cordial in its very homeliness; yes, there, even there, I was no longer welcome. Daily, hourly, I read in his face, in his eyes, in his voice, that my presence was burdensome, my absence a release. I knew it, and I had to endure it; I had to be ever drinking this last sickening drop of a cup that was never drained. I was jealous: and the word sums up all my miseries. I was also what is called a precocious child, and perhaps I felt more acutely than many; I say _perhaps_, for jealousy is an instinct,--is not the dog jealous of its master?--assuredly it is not a feeling that waits for years or knowledge. It is the very shadow of love; and who yet watched the birth of love in a human heart? I loved Cornelius as an ardent and jealous daughter loves her father, and I was miserable because he bestowed on another that which I neither could wish for, nor even imagine the wish to claim. As was my love, so was my jealousy, filial and childlike: a jealousy of the heart, in which not the faintest trace of any other feeling blended. It was sinful, but it was pure. I did not suffer because Cornelius was in love with Miriam, but because he loved her. If, at twelve, I could have understood and separated feelings that blend so strangely in the heart, I know that I would not have envied Miriam one spark of the passion, but I know that I would still, as I did bitterly, have grudged her every atom of the tenderness. If I did not feel jealousy in that mysterious intensity which has stung so many hearts to madness. I felt it in its calmer bitterness and more patient sorrow. The peculiar agony of this tormenting passion seems to me to lie in the blending of two most opposite feelings: love, from which it springs, and hatred, which it engenders; it has thus the warmth of one and the fierceness of the other, and there also lies the evil and the danger. I loved Cornelius, I detested Miriam. My only salvation from what might have been the utter ruin of my soul, heart, mind, and whole nature, was that I loved him infinitely more than I hated her; woe to me had it been otherwise! But even as it was, I suffered--and justly--from my sin as well as from my sorrow; and most unhappily I brooded over both unsuspected. Cornelius had detected my jealousy, treated it as a jest, and forgotten it; Kate had, I believe, vaguely conjectured its existence, but I was little with her and on my guard; the only one who really knew what I suffered and why I suffered, was the one who had first inflicted and who now daily embittered the wound. Yes, Miriam knew it: I saw it in her look, in her speech, in her manner; and, if anything could render me more unhappy, it was the consciousness that my miserable weakness lay bare for her to triumph over. Thus, and more than thus, I felt. Our true life lies in our heart; from within it, according as we feel with force or weakness, we rule the outward world in which we are cast. Strange and dramatic incidents make not the eventful life: it borrows its charm or tragic power from the ebb and flow of feelings. There never was a child who led a more sheltered existence in a more sheltered home; whose life was less varied by adventure beyond the routine of daily joys and sorrows; and yet to all that I felt then I may trace the whole of my future destiny. When I look back on the past, I feel that but for that which preceded, the plain incidents that are to follow would seem, even to me, tame and trifling; but the stakes make the game, and when happiness has to be lost or won the heart will leap at each throw of the dice, and beat fast or slowly with the faintest alternations of hope and despair. I remember well one day at the close of winter. They both felt tired, and sat on the low couch where I had so often sat by him or watched him sleeping; he now exerted himself to amuse her as he had once done for me; I sat at a table by the window; a book lay open before me, but I could not read; I seemed all eyes, all ears, all sense for them. "You must sit to me some day for a Mary Magdalene," said Cornelius. "You spoke of a Juliet the other day," she replied, with a careless smile; "what am I not to be?" "Say, what should I not be if Cornelius O'Reilly had the power?" "And why should not Cornelius O'Reilly have the power?" Her tone was scarcely above indifference, and yet hard to witness and to know; Cornelius had never looked half so delighted when I boldly assigned him a rank among the princes and masters of his art, as he now seemed with these few ambiguous words of his mistress. He started up to work like one who has received a fresh stimulus to exertion. "I am still tired," coldly said Miriam. "I do not want you yet." "Why work then?" "Oh! Miriam, must not my beautiful Medora progress?" "Your beautiful Medora!" she echoed, with something like scorn passing across her face, and as if she thought that Medora interfered with the rights of Miriam. Cornelius was standing before the easel; I saw him smile at the image it bore. "She is beautiful," he said in a low tone, "though I say it that should not, and though I know you will never grant me that she is." She smiled a little ironically as he turned round to her. "I will grant you anything," she replied; "Medora is not my portrait, but an ideal woman for whom you have borrowed my form and face." "What will not an artist attempt to idealize?" asked Cornelius with a touch of embarrassment. "Oh!" she observed very sweetly, "I do not mean to imply it was not required. Only if this were a portrait, I should object to having Daisy's eyes and brow given to me." Cornelius became crimson, and felt that the artist had made the lover commit a blunder. He tried to pass it off carelessly. "Ah!" he said, "you think that because I gave too dark a tint to the eyebrows, and in attempting to make the eyes look deep, rendered them rather grey--" She smiled and rose. "You are not going?" he asked with surprise. "Why not, since you do not want me." "No, do not; pray do not!" he entreated; he looked quite uneasy, and in his earnestness took both her hands in his. She withdrew them with an astonished and displeased air, and a look that fell on me. "Daisy," impatiently said Cornelius, "have you nothing to do below? no lessons to learn?" He could not have said "You are in the way" more plainly; I did not answer, but rose and left them. "What brings you down here?" asked Kate, as I entered the parlour, where she sat alone sewing. "Cornelius said I was to learn my lessons." "Then take your books upstairs." I objected to this; but Miss O'Reilly was peremptory. "I am sure Cornelius wanted to get me out of the way," I said at length, to explain a refusal that naturally surprised her. "Oh, he did!" indignantly exclaimed Kate. "Indeed he did, Kate." "I don't care a pin about that," was her decisive rejoinder, "but I am determined that he shall not lose his days as he loses his evenings: go up directly." I obeyed with deep reluctance; even when I reached the door of the studio, I paused ere I opened it, then stood still and looked. They had not heard me; how could they? Miriam, no longer intent on going, had resumed her place; Cornelius sat at her feet, one elbow resting on the edge of the couch, his eyes intently fixed on her face. She bent over him; her cheeks were flushed, her lips slightly parted; one of her hands was buried in her own fair hair which fell loosened on her neck, the other slowly unravelled the dark locks of Cornelius. "It is not at me, but at Medora, you are looking," she said impatiently. "Are you jealous of her?" "Jealous! when I begin it shall be with Daisy." "Jealous of Daisy! as if you could be!" And he smiled. I entered; Miriam looked up, saw me, and smiled too; Cornelius turned round and, reddening like a girl--she had not blushed-- he rose hastily. I came forward, closed the door, and, as if I had seen, had heard nothing, I sat down and opened my books; but the words of Cornelius, "Jealous of Daisy!" seemed printed on every page; the smile, with which he had uttered and she had heard them, was ever before me. He cared so little for me that I could not be, it seems, an object of jealousy. Miriam staid for about two hours more, then left; scarcely had the door closed on her, when I rose to go: but as I passed by Cornelius, he laid his hand on my shoulder, and arrested me with a reproachful-- "Are you, too, deserting me?" I stood before him with my books in my hand; I looked up into his face; there were no tears either in my eyes or on my cheek, but he must have seen something there, for, looking surprised-- "Why, child," he asked, "what is the matter?" He did not even know it! "Does your head ache?" he continued, with the most irritating unconsciousness. "No, Cornelius," I replied in a low tone. "Are you feverish, then?" and he felt my pulse. This time I did not answer. "Lie down for awhile," he said kindly. He made me sit down on the couch; placed a pillow under my head; told me to sleep, and returned to his easel. Alas! it was not the sleep of the body that I wanted, but the calm peace which is to the mind what slumber is to the senses. His kindness irritated more than it soothed me. I watched him painting; I saw that the eyes of Medora were going to change their hue, and I remembered the time when Cornelius would not have given a stroke of the pencil, more or less, to please mortal creature. I tossed about restlessly; he heard me, and thinking me unwell, he came to me. "Poor little thing!" he said compassionately, and stooping, he left a kiss on my forehead; but this pledge of old affection had lost its charm; I felt betrayed, and involuntarily turned away. Cornelius smiled with astonishment. "Why, what have I done?" he asked, gaily. His unfeigned ignorance humbled me to the heart. Without answering, I started up, and ran away to my room, where I could at least cry in liberty. If Cornelius guessed by this what was the matter with me, he certainly did not show it. He treated me exactly as usual; he did not appear to notice that I now never returned his morning or evening caress, nor even that, as soon as he was obliged to put by Medora for the more profitable, though less interesting occupation of copying bad drawings, I scarcely went to the studio. This was perhaps good-humoured forbearance, but I took it as a proof of carelessness and indifference, which strengthened me in my jealous resentment, more felt, however, than expressed. This had lasted about a week, when Cornelius, one evening, came down to tea, looking so pale and ill that his sister asked at once what ailed him. He sat by the table, his brow resting on the palm of his hand; he replied that his head ached. "Do you go out this evening?" inquired Kate after awhile. "No," he answered, without moving. Kate looked surprised, but made no comment. I sat by her, as usual, but, being lower down, I could see his face better than she did; it was rigid, and ashy pale; he neither moved nor spoke. I rose, went to the table, and tried to catch his eye; but his glance fell on me, and saw me not. I asked if the lamp annoyed him; he made a sign of denial. I stood before him, and looked at him silently. "Sit down, child," impatiently said Kate. I obeyed by pushing my stool near Cornelius, and sitting down at his feet; then seeing that this did not appear to displease him. I softly laid my head on his knee. "You obstinate little thing," observed Kate, "why do you annoy Cornelius?" "She does not annoy me," he said, and his hand mechanically sought my head, and rested there, in memory of an old habit, of late, like many another, laid aside and forgotten. After awhile Kate sent me up to her room for a book; whilst looking for it, I heard the door of Cornelius open and close again; his headache had compelled him to retire several hours earlier than usual. It was worse on the following day, for he did not come down; once I fancied I heard him stirring, and I said so to Kate. "Not he, child; he will remain in bed all day, so you need not start and listen every second." But her back was no sooner turned than I slipped upstairs. I had not been mistaken; Cornelius was up, and in his studio, but not at work; he stood before his easel, gazing on Medora, and looking so pale and ill that I felt quite dismayed. "What do you want?" he asked, coldly but not unkindly. "Nothing, Cornelius; am I in the way?" "You may stay." I sat down by the table; he began to pace the narrow room up and down; once he stopped short to say-- "There is no fire; the room must be cold; you had better go down." "I am not cold; pray let me stay." He did not insist; resumed his promenade, then threw himself down on the couch, with an impatient sigh and a moody face. I rose, stepped across the room, and sat down by him. Encouraged by his silence, I passed my arm around his neck. I had meant to say something, to tell him I was grieved for his pain or trouble, whichever it might be, but when it came to the point, all I could do was to kiss his cheek. Cornelius made a motion to put me away impatiently; but when his eyes, looking into mine, saw them filled with tears, he checked the movement. "Poor little thing!" he said, with a sad smile; "you put by your childish anger the moment you think me in pain." "Oh! Cornelius," I exclaimed, with much emotion, "though you should like another ever so much, and me ever so little, I shall never be so naughty again. Ah! if you knew how miserable I felt last night when I saw you looking so ill!" "And came and laid your head on my knee like a faithful spaniel--yes, child, I know _you_ like me." He said it with some bitterness. I replied warmly-- "Indeed I do, Cornelius, and always shall, even though you should not care for me at all." "Would you?" he answered, his thoughts evidently elsewhere. "Why, how could I help it?" I asked, astonished at the question. He started like one whose secret thought has received some sudden sting. "Ay," he said, "one cannot help it; to wish to leave off, and wish in vain; there is the torment, there is the misery." "But I don't wish to leave off," I exclaimed, almost indignantly, and clinging to him, I added, a little passionately perhaps, "I could not if I would, and if I could I would not, Cornelius." There was a pause; as I looked at him, something like a question debated and solved seemed to pass across his face. Then he pressed me to his heart with some emotion, as he said, rather feverishly-- "Daisy, you are wiser than those who sit down and write books or preach sermons on self-subjection, as if it were not the very hardest thing in this world. Let them!" he added, a little defiantly, "the very children rebuke them and know better." If children reflect little and imperfectly, their faculty for observation is marvellous. It suddenly occurred to me that I had been unconsciously pleading for one whom I had little cause to love; the thought was both sweet and bitter. I looked at Medora, then at Cornelius, and said in a low tone-- "Why did she vex you, Cornelius?" He gave mc a distrustful look, and putting me away-- "The room is cold," he observed, "go down, child." I would rather have stayed and learned more; but his tone, though kind, exacted obedience. When Cornelius came down to tea, his sister asked how his head felt; he said first, "Much worse," then immediately added, "Much better." His movements, like his words, were irresolute; he rose, he sat down; he stood by the table; he went to the hearth; suddenly he went to the door. "And your headache!" observed Kate, seeing he was going out. "Never mind the headache, Kate!" he replied impetuously: he was gone, slamming the door behind him. Kate laid down her work with an astonished air. He came in as I was going up to bed. I stood on the first steps of the staircase and turned round to look at him: his face was flushed; his eyes sparkled; he looked excited--more excited, I thought, than joyous or happy. In passing by me he took me so suddenly in his arms that he nearly made me fall, then begged my pardon, and finally kissed me two or three times so tenderly that Kate, who saw us from the parlour, looked quite jealous, and uttered an emphatic "Nonsense!" "Can't a man kiss his own child?" asked Cornelius, putting me down with a gay short laugh. "Cornelius," said Kate, "your headache was a quarrel with Miriam--confess it." He reddened and looked disconcerted. "I knew it," she observed triumphantly. "No, Kate," he replied quietly, "you did not know it; you mistook; I can give you my word that I have never had the slightest difference with Miriam; by the bye, she sends her love to you." With this he entered the parlour and closed the door. I thought it odd, and yet I knew not how to disbelieve Cornelius. At the end of the same week Miriam again came to sit for Medora. If there was a change in his manner to her, it was that he seemed to be more enamoured than ever. Cornelius had not attached sufficient importance to our tacit quarrel to alter in the least after our tacit reconciliation. A young man of twenty- two, passionately in love with a beautiful woman of twenty-six, was not likely to care much whether a little girl of twelve sulked and would not kiss him. I liked to think the contrary--that he had been angry with me, and that I should show my penitence. This proved a most unfortunate mistake. Since she had wholly superseded me, Miriam had allowed me to remain in peace; but when I endeavoured to render myself useful or agreeable to Cornelius, she resented it as an insolent attempt to divert even a fragment of his attention from herself. She was sitting to him as usual one afternoon, when he suddenly exclaimed-- "How provoking! I cannot find it; I can scarcely get on without it." "It will give you time to rest," quietly said Miriam. A little reluctantly he sat down by her, but said he must return to his work at three. It was a sketch, which he wanted for the foreground of Medora, that Cornelius could not find. We had vainly looked for it the whole morning. I thought I would have another search. A deep shelf, well stored with art-rubbish, ran round the room. Unperceived by Cornelius, I got up on the table, reached down an old portfolio, opened it, and found at once the missing sketch. Overjoyed at my success, I stepped down too hastily; my foot slipped, I fell; in no time Cornelius had picked me up. "Are you hurt?" he cried, in great alarm. I was too much stunned to reply at first; when I could speak, my first words were-- "Here it is, Cornelius!" I picked up the sketch from where it had fallen, showed it to him, and enjoyed his surprise. "Oh! you naughty child!" he said, with kind reproof. He sat down again on the couch, made me sit by him, and tenderly pressed his lips on my brow. "I should suggest brown paper and vinegar for a bruise," observed the chilling voice of Miriam. "Are you bruised, my darling?" anxiously asked Cornelius. I laughed, and kissed him. He turned towards Miriam, smiled, and with the generous and imprudent candour of his character, he said-- "I am very fond of that little girl, Miriam." And lest she should doubt it, again he caressed me. She sat at the other angle of the couch with drooping eyelids; I know not if she looked at us, but as the church clock struck three, she said, sweetly-- "Yes, I consider your affection for that child a touching trait in your character, Cornelius." She had never in my presence called him by his name; as she ottered it, I saw his hand seeking hers, which she drew not away. "Cornelius," I said quietly, "it is three o'clock." "I had forgotten all about it," he cried, starting up, and relinquishing the hand of Miriam, who darted at me a covert irritated glance of her green eyes. He went back to his easel; I returned to my books. "Daisy," he said, "you must not study after such a fall." "Let me finish my lessons," I replied eagerly; "you know you have half promised to examine me this evening." "Poor little thing!" kindly said Miriam, "I dare say it is too much study has lately made her look so much more sallow than usual." I felt my face glow. I was sallow; but was I to be ever reminded of it? "Or perhaps it is biliousness," she continued: "her face and hair are almost of the same hue; true that is light, nearly straw-coloured. Be careful, Mr. O'Reilly, do not let her work so much." "Daisy, put by your books," anxiously said Cornelius. "Not to-day," I replied imploringly. "She is so industrious," he said admiringly. "Like all children who cannot rely on the quickness of their perceptions." "Oh! Daisy is very quick," he answered rather hastily; "she has answers that often surprise me." "I should like to be surprised. Do you mind answering a few questions of mine, Daisy?" I did mind. I mistrusted her; I did not want to acknowledge her as an authority, still less to be exposed by her to Cornelius. "Thank you," I replied, "Cornelius is to examine me this evening." "I like to judge for myself," she answered smilingly. I did not reply. "Daisy, did you hear?" said Cornelius. "Yes, Cornelius." "Then why not answer? Do you object to being examined now?" "Not by you." "But, my dear, it is Miss Russell who wishes to question you." I remained mute; he gave me a severe look. No more was said on the subject. With waning daylight Miriam left us. I expected a lecture or a scolding, but Cornelius never opened his lips to me. I had a presentiment that this silence boded me no good, and indeed it did not. After tea, I brought out my books for examination; Cornelius looked at me coldly. "I am astonished at your confidence," he said. He rose, took his hat, and walked out. For a week I had looked up to this evening, worked hard for it, and thought with pride of the progress of which I could not but be conscious, and which Cornelius could not but perceive. As the door closed on him, I burst into tears. "What is all that about?" asked Kate, astonished. I threw my arms around her neck and told her, weeping all the time. She reproved and yet comforted me. "It was wrong," she said, "wrong and foolish to be rude to Miss Russell; but do not fret, child, though Cornelius may be vexed, he is fond of you in his heart." "Not as much as he once was, Kate." She did not contradict the bitter truth. "It will never be the same thing again," I continued. "As if I did not know it!" she exclaimed, involuntarily perhaps. I looked up into her face. She too had seen and felt that Cornelius was not to us what he once had been. She smiled sorrowfully as our looks met, pressed me to her heart and kissed me. Woman-grown though she was, and child though I might be, there was between us the bond of the same secret pain and sorrow. CHAPTER XV. Thus began the short and bitter contest between Miriam and me. I apologized to her, humbly enough, on the following day; but in domestic life, reconciliations seem only to lead to fresh quarrels; to make it up is nothing; whilst the spirit remains unchanged, strife cannot cease. I continued to be jealous of Miriam; she continued to resent every poor attempt I made to secure the love and attention of him whose every thought and feeling she wished to engross. I loved him too ardently, and I was too rash and proud, to bear this passively. My persistency cost me dear: I was daily wounded in the most tender and sensitive point--the affection and the regard of Cornelius. I had faults, no doubt, but Cornelius never seemed to have perceived them as he now perceived them: how could he? before, they slumbered in peace, lulled by the love I felt for him and that which he felt for me, whereas now they were--not pointed out to him, she had too much tact for that--but awakened and drawn forth under his gaze, daily, nay hourly. I felt this; I resolved to be good if it were only to provoke my enemy, but I never could keep to the determination. She knew so well how to make me defiant as I had never been, or silent and sullen as Cornelius never had known me; above all, how to rouse me to a pitch of obstinacy which not even he could subdue. He saw the change with wonder and regret. He felt, rather late, that the jealousy of a child was not a matter to be slighted; he tried to reason me out of it; he was kind, severe, and indulgent by turns--uselessly. The mischief was, I could not help loving him more than ever, and, loving him thus, it was impossible I should not be jealous. Once this excessive affection had pleased him, and he had encouraged it injudiciously; it now wearied him--and no wonder; it had become the source of a daily annoyance, paltry yet most irritating. I remember well one morning. Oh! how those childish incidents have burned themselves into my brain! She had as usual been provoking me by allusions to my pale and sickly aspect, and then by questions so insidiously framed to make me break forth into impertinence or ill-temper, that I would answer her no more. This availed me little. "Pray let her alone, Miriam," said Cornelius, greatly disgusted, "she is a sulky little thing, unworthy of your notice." "The poor child would not be so if she were not so unhealthy," kindly observed Miriam. This was one of the speeches with which she used to sting me; she knew, and I knew too, how much Cornelius admired health, with its fresh aspect and its joyous feelings, in both of which I failed so lamentably. "You are too good to be always framing excuses for her," replied Cornelius, with a severe look at me. "Excuses!" I thought; "yes, it was easy to frame such excuses." But I never replied; I never looked up from my books. I sat at the table by the window, as if I had heard nothing; for this took place in the studio, where Miriam still daily sat for Medora. Towards noon she rose to go. "Give a look at our little garden first," said Cornelius; then turning to me, he added--"Put on your bonnet and cape--the sun is warm, and the air will do you good." It was one of the mildest days of early spring. Our garden boasted but few flowers. Cornelius gathered the freshest and fairest for his mistress; but some snowdrops which she admired especially, he did not gather. "These I cannot give you," he said, "they are Daisy's; the others are Kate's, and consequently mine." She took the flowers he was handing her, with a smile of thanks, and sat down on the wooden bench by the house. He was soon by her side--soon wholly wrapped in her. The sun shone bright and warm in the blue sky; the breeze was very pleasant; the old house had many a brown, rich tint; the ivy on the porch was green and glossy; the garden had begun to wear the first fresh blossoms and light verdure of spring; a bird had perched on the highest bough of the tallest poplar, and thence broke forth into many a snatch of gay song. It was a morn for happy lovers to sit thus side by side, looking out on heaven and earth, but still lingering within the shelter of a warm home. I looked at them, and I keenly felt the words of Cornelius. Those snowdrops were mine. I had set them myself, and daily watched them growing up and unfolding their shy beauty; but I had never attached to them an idea of selfish enjoyment. To place them some morning in the studio of Cornelius, enjoy his surprise, his pleasure, and his thanks, was all I had dreamed of; but if it pleased him better to bestow them on her in whom he now most delighted, what mattered it to me? I felt bitterly that she had taken from me his affection, his thoughts, his looks, his kindness, his very caresses, and that she might as well have the flowers with the rest. I gathered them, and silently placed them on her lap. Miriam looked at me and coloured slightly. Cornelius seemed charmed, and passed his arm around my neck with a sudden return of kindness. "Ah!" said Miriam to him, "those flowers are given to you, and not to me, and it is you must give the thanks." By the "thanks" she evidently meant a kiss, but Cornelius had perhaps a fancy for caressing me when he chose, for he did not take the hint. Miriam placed the snowdrops amongst the other flowers, and inhaled their mingled fragrance with a dreamy look and smile. Cornelius looked at her and exclaimed-- "Ah! you are Moore's Namouna now,--the eastern enchantress who lives on the perfume of flowers." "How can you be so cruel?" she replied, glancing up, and her green eyes sparkling in the sun with perfidious light. "Cruel?" "Yes, that poor child is still waiting for her kiss." Those were her very words. They made my blood boil then, and as I write, I still feel within me something of that old resentment over which years have passed in vain. Who, what was she, that she should speak thus? I had been kissed and caressed by Cornelius, I had lain in his arms and slept on his bosom, before he had ever seen her fair and fatal face,--whilst he was still unconscious of her very existence. He might love her more than he loved me, but he had loved me first: even how, changed as he was, I knew I was still dear to him. She had taken much from me; did she mean to take all? Was he to caress me but at her bidding and pleasure? Were his lips to touch my cheek but when she permitted it? Was she to mete out to me even that paltry drop which she had left in my cup, once so full? I felt this, not in these words, but far more intensely, for it passed through me during the brief seconds which Cornelius took to smile at her words, and then turn to me to comply with her behest. I abruptly averted my face from his: if he would embrace me but on such conditions, never more might he do so! Cornelius looked surprised, then indignant. As I walked away from them, I heard the sweet voice of Miriam saying, sadly-- "How unfortunate I am to make mischief when I meant a kindness!" "Do not mention it," replied Cornelius, in a tone of sincere distress, "it is inexpressibly bitter to me to trace such feelings in Daisy." I stood by the sun-dial, with my back turned to them, and still trembling from head to foot with the intensity of those feelings which Cornelius deplored, but which--I felt he might have known that--sprang from the sincerity of my love for him. But it was destined that she should ever be in the right, and I in the wrong. I attempted no useless justification, and heard them going in, without so much as looking round. Domestic quarrels are an endless progeny: each has a distinct existence; but as it dies it gives birth to a successor, and so on for ever. Even for this day, this was not enough. When Miriam returned in the afternoon, she had scarcely sat an hour to Cornelius before she said to me-- "Daisy, I never thanked you for your beautiful snowdrops; you must forgive me the omission." "Forgive!" echoed Cornelius, who was now sitting by her for a few minutes, and who probably thought this much too condescending. "Why not? It is the very least I can do to thank the poor child for her flowers; I also want to give her something: what would please you, my dear?" She was again addressing me, and she spoke very sweetly: she always did speak so to me. There was the misery and the snare: she knew well enough I could never speak so to her; that, though I dare not say much on account of Cornelius, my very voice changed when I had to address or answer her. I now felt what a mockery it was for her, who had robbed me of everything I cared for, to talk of making me a present, yet I compelled myself to reply-- "Anything you like, thank you." "Anything means nothing, my dear," she said, very gently. I did not answer; she resumed-- "Would you like a book? you are fond of reading." "Yes. I like books, thank you." "Or a new frock; you do not dislike dress?" "Oh no, I do not dislike it, thank you." "But I want to know what you prefer," she insisted. "I prefer nothing, thank you." Cornelius knit his brow. "Daisy," he said sharply, "tell Miss Russell directly what you would like." Tell her what I should like! be indebted to her for a pleasure! no, not even his authority could make me do that. Cornelius insisted, I remained obstinate; he became angry, I did not yield; I was getting hardened; all I would say was that I preferred nothing; and so far as her gifts were concerned this was true, they all seemed equally hateful. "Disobedient, obstinate girl!" began Cornelius, in great wrath. "Daisy shall not be scolded on my account," interrupted Miriam, laying her beautiful fingers on his lips, "and she shall have her present too; we must subdue her by kindness," she added in a whisper that reached me. Cornelius looked at her with mingled love and admiration, and then at me with sorrowful reproach. I had my present, too, the very next morning; it came in with Miss Russell's kind love: a beautiful green silk frock, that made me look as yellow as saffron. It exasperated me to try it on, but Cornelius, who admired it greatly, insisted that I should do so. I was obliged to comply. I just looked at the glass and saw that the benevolent intention of the donor was fulfilled. "How kind of Miriam!" said Cornelius, as I stood before him. "It is very pretty. Kate, is it not?" "An odd colour for Daisy," she replied, drily. "Saint Patrick's Day was last week," he answered, smiling. "And Daisy's dress is green in honour of Saint Patrick, of course," rather ironically said Kate; "well, it is a great deal too 'fine for everyday wear, so just come up-stairs and take it off, child." "Oh, Kate!" I began, as soon as we were alone. "No," she interrupted, "that is quite an idea of yours, Daisy." She seemed so positive that what I had not said must be "quite an idea of mine," that I abstained from saying it. She helped me to take off the dress, then looked at it a little scornfully, said it was pretty, but that she fancied me a great deal better with my old everyday merino, which did not make me look quite so much like a bunch of primroses in its leaves. I made no such picturesque comment, but I resolved that though I had not been able to refuse this dress, nothing save force should make me wear it. But my troubles with regard to this unlucky present were not over. When Miriam came in, Cornelius thanked her very warmly; was grateful for her kindness, and praised her taste. I sat by the table apparently absorbed in my books, and secretly hoping it might pass off thus; but it did not. "Daisy," said Cornelius. I looked up; there was no mistaking his gentle, admonishing glance, but as I did not seem to have understood it, he added-- "You have not thanked Miss Russell." If the dress had been a becoming one, if I could have fancied that there was anything like kindness in the gift, I might have subdued my pride so far as to comply. But to thank Miriam for that which I had refused and which she had forced upon me; to thank her for that which I believed destined to make me look plainer than nature had made me, in the sight of Cornelius, and which, as I knew but too well, accomplished the desired object, was more than I could do. "You have not thanked Miss Russell," again said Cornelius. I did not answer; I hung down my head and locked myself up in mute obstinacy. Several times Cornelius said to me, in a voice that boded rising anger-- "Daisy, will you thank Miss Russell?" I did not say I would not, but then I did not do it; and yet I felt sick and faint at the thought of his coming wrath and indignation. Well I might! Cornelius had the fiery blood of his race; but his temper was so easy and pleasant, that you could spend weeks with him and never suspect--save perhaps for too sudden a light in his eyes--that he could be roused to violent passion. Provoked beyond endurance by my obstinacy, he now turned pale with anger; he left by his work to stride up to me; I quailed before his look and shrank back. Miriam rose, swiftly stepped in between us, and placed me behind her, as if for protection. "Mr. O'Reilly!" she exclaimed, "command yourself." She spoke with a look of reproof and authority. Cornelius gazed at her with wonder, then coloured to the very temples. "Oh! Miriam," he said, drawing back from her with a glance of the keenest reproach, "how could you imagine such a thing?" He looked as if he could not even name it; then perceiving me as I still stood behind Miriam, he took me by the hand, and, sitting down on the sofa, he held me from him, looking me intently in the face as he slowly said-- "And did you too think I meant, I will not say to hurt, but so much as touch you?" I looked at him; I thought of all his past kindness,--my heart swelled, the tears which had not flowed at his anger, gushed forth with the question; I threw my arms around his neck. "Oh no, no!" I cried, "I never did think that, Cornelius, and I never could." "Never?" he echoed; "are you sure, Daisy?" "Never," I replied almost passionately, "never, Cornelius; if I angered you ever so much; if I saw your very hand raised against me, I should not fear one moment--for I know it never would come down." His lips trembled slightly, the only sign of emotion he betrayed. He looked at me; our eyes met, and I felt that there was in his something which answered to all the love and faith of my heart. "You have been very perverse," he said, at length; "you have provoked me, so that I have lost all my self-control; but for the sake of those words, it shall not only be all forgiven to you, but if ever we quarrel again, remember that, whatever you may have done, you need only remind me of this day, for peace to be once more between us." He pressed me to his heart and kissed me repeatedly, then put me away, rose and went up to Miriam. She stood where he had left her, pale and almost defiant-looking, as if she already repelled the expected reproaches of Cornelius. "I beg your pardon," he said very gravely. "My pardon?" she replied, looking up at him with a cold doubt in her eyes. "Your pardon," he repeated precisely in the same tone. "When I stepped up to Daisy, it was to take her by the hand and lead her out of the room, a little indignity which I thought her obstinacy merited; but how utterly I must have lost my temper, how much I must have forgotten myself, for you to misunderstand me so cruelly?" She did not appear to perceive the reproach that lingered in this apology. "You looked provoked enough for anything," she quietly answered, "but it was that unhappy child who made you lose all patience." "I have enough power over myself to promise you that, no matter what Daisy may do, I shall never again allow it to betray me into passion," said Cornelius very calmly; "I shall try the effect of forbearance; with regard to what passed this morning, I forgive her freely; may I trust that you also forgive her." "Indeed I do, poor thing!" sighed Miriam, as if she pitied my evil nature too much to resent any of its peculiar workings. No more was said on the subject; but Cornelius was as much pleased with my trust in him, as he was secretly hurt with the suspicion of Miriam. If in his manner to her I could see no difference, there was no mistaking the sudden increase of tenderness and affection with which he treated me. Had I only been wise, I might have availed myself of this opportunity to regain almost all I had lost; but who is wise in this world? I was foolish enough to fall into the first snare Miriam placed before me; again I showed myself an obstinate, sullen, jealous child. Cornelius however kept to his word; he bit his lip, curbed down his anger, and did not allow his voice to rise above the tones of a calm remonstrance. But better, far better for me that Cornelius should have given way to hasty speech, punished me, and the next hour forgiven me, than that he should have thus checked himself every time I transgressed. The resentment he daily repressed rankled in his mind; I irritated him constantly, and yet I compelled him to incessant self-control: I became a secret thorn in his side, the source of an unacknowledged pain, a warning that met him at every turn: if Miriam had designed it all in order to render my presence insupportable to him, she could scarcely have succeeded better. How changed was our once happy and peaceful home! a spirit of strife, of unquiet jealousy had entered it and poisoned all its joys; a sense of trouble and unhappiness hung over it like the sword over the head of Damocles, and robbed everything of its pleasure and its charm. Kate was grave, Cornelius irritable; I was wretched; she alone who had caused it all remained unalterably serene. Such a state of things could not last: we all vaguely felt it. The close of April brought the change. Breakfast, which had passed off as usual, was over when Cornelius told me to go up with him to his little studio. I obeyed with pleased alacrity; Medora was again lying by, and Miriam was not therefore to come; he had not shown of late much inclination for my society; I hailed this as a symptom of returning favour. As I found myself once more alone with him in the little room I knew so well, I exclaimed joyfully-- "How kind it is of you, Cornelius, to have asked me to come up!" "Is it?" he replied, without looking at me. "Yes, I did so want to come up yesterday; but Kate would not let me. May I come to-morrow?" "To-morrow? no." "After to-morrow then?" I said persistingly. "Be quiet, child, and let me work." I obeyed and looked at him, as he continued the task on which he had for the last week been engaged--copying a little Dutch painting for a picture-dealer. After awhile I said-- "When you are a great artist you won't copy pictures, will you, Cornelius?" "Did I not tell you to let me work?" "I shall speak no more." But to make up for speaking, I got up on the table and attempted to take down some of the portfolios from the shelf. He heard me, turned round, and uttered an imperative-- "Come down!" As I obeyed with regret, I exclaimed-- "Oh! if you only would, Cornelius!" "Would what?" "Let me have the portfolios, look at the drawings, and arrange them,--I am sure they are in a great mess. By beginning to-day I might have them all sorted before the end of the week. May I have one to begin with?" "No; must I for a third time tell you to let me work?" I promised to interrupt him no more, and taking a chair, I sat for awhile both quiet and silent: but the spirit of speech must have possessed me, for I forgot my promise and spoke again. "Cornelius," I said suddenly, "do you think your Happy Time will be accepted?" for Cornelius had sent in his picture to the Academy; but though Kate and I felt some anxiety on the subject, he professed total indifference. "I neither know nor care," he replied negligently; "I set no value on it, and shall not think the better of it for its being accepted." "It makes my heart beat to think of it. I am sure it is a beautiful picture." "How can you tell?" "Surely, Cornelius," I replied, "I know?" "I know," he interrupted, "that I never knew you in such a chattering humour. What possesses you, child, on this morning above all others?" He had sat down to rest, and, leaning back in his chair, he looked round at me; I stood behind him; passing my arm around his neck, I replied, "It is that I am glad to be again up here." "Have you never been here before?" "Not much of late,--I mean when you are alone; not this whole week; I thought you were vexed with me, and when you said 'Come up' this morning, just in the old way, I felt so glad that, if Kate had not been looking, I should have jumped up and kissed you." But Kate was not there now to restrain me--for the most innocent affection is shy and shuns the eye of a gazer--so I kissed her brother as I loved him--with my whole heart. "That will never do," exclaimed Cornelius, looking very uncomfortable; "listen to me, child, I have something to say to you." "I am listening, Cornelius," I replied, without changing my attitude. "I cannot speak in that sideways fashion." I walked round and sat down on his knee. "I shall be quite opposite you so," I said. Cornelius looked disconcerted, and observed gravely, "My dear, you are getting too old for all this; you must be near thirteen." "My birthday is in two months' time; yours in five." "True. Well, as I was observing, there are things natural in the child which might seem foolish in the young girl." I rose submissively. "I shall not do it again, Cornelius," I said, as I stood before him; "are there other things I do, and which you think foolish?" "I did not say so." "Because if there are," I continued, earnestly, "and I should do them in company, for instance, you will only have to say, 'Daisy!' in that way, I shall be sure to understand." "Nonsense!" he interrupted, reddening. "Indeed, Cornelius, it is no nonsense: I could understand even a look; I am so accustomed to your face. Have I not been with you nearly three years?" "That will never do, never!" exclaimed Cornelius, seeming more and more uncomfortable, and stroking his chin with half puzzled, half sorrowful air; "but there is no help for it," he added more firmly; "come here, child." He drew me on his knee as he spoke. "But you said it was foolish!" I said, surprised. "As a habit; not for once." I yielded; he passed both his arms around me, looked down into my face and said abruptly-- "You know, Daisy, I am fond of you. I think I have shown it; I hope you believe it." I said I did; but I could scarcely speak, my heart beat so. Why did he tell me of his affection? "You have not been happy of late," he continued; "at times I have noticed, with pain, an expression of perfect misery on your face: I do not mean that it was justified, but it was there, and, even whilst I blamed you, it grieved me to think you should be unhappy in our home." "Do not mind it, I don't," I exclaimed eagerly; "I do not mind being unhappy now and then--I would much rather be miserable here with you and Kate, than ever so happy elsewhere." "Perhaps you would," he replied, "for if you have great faults, no one can say that want of affection is amongst them. You can love, too much perhaps; but that is not the question; on your own confession you are not happy, and to that there is but one remedy. I see in your face that you have guessed it--separation." Yes, I had guessed it, but not the less acutely did I feel the blow; I did not answer; he continued-- "We must part. You do not know, perhaps you could not understand, how much it pains me to say so; and yet it must be. You are not happy yourself, and there is in the house a sense of unquietness, of strife, that cannot last any longer. But my chief reason for taking this determination concerns you wholly. You are not aware, my poor child, that the feeling you have been indulging is fast spoiling your originally good and generous nature. You are morally ill. I have done what I could to eradicate the disease, but it passed my power. There is but one cure-- absence. And now one last remark: you cannot change my resolve; spare me the pain of refusing that which I cannot and must not grant." I did spare him that pain. I lay in his arms mute and inanimate with grief. The blow had been inflicted by the hand I had trusted, and had reached me where I had always sought for refuge and consolation. I had been jealous, perverse; I had provoked and tormented him, but I had never thought he could have the heart to banish me. I believe Cornelius had expected not merely entreaties, but lamentations and tears; seeing me so quiet, he wondered. "Did you understand?" he asked. "Yes, Cornelius." "But what have you understood, child?" "That you will send me away somewhere." "Where?" "I don't care where, Cornelius." "I shall send you to school," he said. "To Miss Wood's?" I asked, naming a day-school close by. "To a boarding-school," he replied gravely. I felt that too, but all I said was-- "Then I shall only come home every Sunday." "My dear," he answered with evident embarrassment, "Kate and I should like it greatly; but would it be accomplishing the object in view?" So it was to be a complete, a total exile! I looked at him; I did not want to move him, to appeal to his compassion, but my glance wanted to ask his if this could be true. That silent questioning look appeared to trouble him involuntarily. "Shall Kate come and see me?" I asked after awhile. "Certainly." "And may I write to you, Cornelius?" "No doubt you may. What makes you ask?" "Because of course _you_ will not come." "Why not?" asked Cornelius, looking both surprised and hurt; "am I sending you away in anger? I am not, Daisy. I mean it as a cure,--painful perhaps, but short. I am to marry Miss Russell this summer. We will live next-door; you will be here with Kate. I trust that by that time good sense will have prevailed over exaggerated feelings; that you will learn to love and respect Miriam as my wife and the companion of my existence. This is the true reason of what you perhaps consider a very harsh measure--that your embittered feelings may have time and opportunity to soothe down in peace." I understood him. This was but the beginning of a life-long separation. Cornelius married, was lost to me. I felt it, but resistance was useless; I heard him apathetically. Thinking perhaps to rouse and interest me, he said-- "You do not ask to what school you are going?" "I do not care, Cornelius." "It is not, properly speaking, a school. The Misses Clapperton are amiable and accomplished women, who eke out a somewhat narrow income by receiving a limited number of pupils. At present they have only two; they can therefore devote all their attention to them and to you. It has always been my ambition that you should be well educated." I could not help looking at him. Well educated, and his ambition! Ay, I had had a master once, loved, preferred, honoured beyond any other teacher, who taught me every evening, often on his knee, with looks of kindness and caresses of love. Him I had long lost; but then why tell me of others hired to impart the teaching he had grown weary of giving? "When am I to go?" I asked after awhile. "To-morrow morning; you can stay longer if you wish." "No, thank you." "Is there anything you wish for? Tell me freely." "I should like to see all your drawings again and to arrange them; they want it, I know." He put me down, rose, brought me the portfolios, and emptied their contents for me. I began my task; I had the spirit of order in details which most women possess; I had often before been of use to Cornelius in such matters, and I found a sorrowful pleasure in being of use to him again, in leaving him this last token of my presence. I could not cease loving him because he chose to banish me; the less I received and the more I gave; it seemed as if what he withdrew, I should make up, that the sum of love between us might never grow less. Whilst I was busy with my task, Cornelius worked. Every now and then I ventured to disturb him: either it was a drawing I wanted him to look at, or I begged of him to notice the system of my arrangement. "Because, you know," I once observed, "I shall not be here to tell you." "Very true," he replied, rather ruefully. I believe he was not prepared for so entire and resigned a submission. He forgot that it was only in the presence of Miriam he could not master me. My docility seemed to affect him more than might have done my tears, had I shed any. His kind face became quite sorrowful; once he left by his work to come and look over my task, and seeing a little drawing in which he had represented himself at his easel with me looking on, and which we had christened "The Artist's Studio," he told me to leave it out, for that he should hang it up. "Will you indeed?" I said. I was kneeling on the floor, with the drawings scattered around me; he sat half behind me; I turned round and looked up into his face, smiling with mingled pleasure and sadness. He took my head in both his hands, and looked at me intently; there seemed a charm that kept my eyes on his. "Ah!" he said at length, "if I dare! but I should only repent it the next five minutes--so it must not be." With this he rose, and came not again near me. My task occupied me for the whole of that day; it served to divert me. I did not however grieve so very much; there was a sort of incredulousness in my heart which I could not conquer. Kate and Cornelius were much sadder than I was; they knew that it was to be, and I felt as if it were, though decreed, impossible. But when I came down to breakfast on the following morning, when I saw the sorrowful face of Kate, and met the troubled glance of Cornelius, I suddenly awoke to the dread reality. I sat down to table as usual, but I could not eat. Cornelius pressed me, uselessly; even to please him I could touch nothing. It was a beautiful Spring morning, and I was not to go for another hour. "Shall I give you a walk in the lanes?" suddenly asked Cornelius, turning to me. "Thank you," I replied, in a low tone, "I prefer the garden." He took me by the hand and led me out; I liked that little garden, where I had spent so many happy hours, and from which I was now going to part. I looked at the shrubs, trees, and flowers, at the very grass and earth on which I trod, with lingering love and tenderness; but I said nothing. Cornelius looked down at me, laid his hand on my shoulder, and said abruptly-- "Daisy, will you promise not to be jealous?" An eager and joyful "Yes" rose to my lips--a most bitter thought checked it. "I cannot," I exclaimed, desperately, "I cannot, Cornelius." "You will not promise?" he said. "I cannot." He looked at me very fixedly, but uttered not a word of praise or blame. "Daisy," called the sad voice of Kate from the house, "come and get ready, child." I was obeying; Cornelius detained me to observe-- "Ask me for something before we part." "I have nothing to ask for, Cornelius." But he insisted--I yielded: "If when the time comes you will write to tell me whether your picture is exhibited or not, I shall like it, Cornelius." "Have you nothing else to ask for?" "Nothing else," I replied, looking up at him. Love is proud: he was banishing me--what could I want with his gifts? He said nothing, and allowed me to go in. At length came the moment of our separation. I was ready and in the parlour again; the cab was waiting in the lane. Miss O'Reilly, who was to take me, said abruptly-- "Go and bid Cornelius good-bye." I went up to him trembling from head to foot. He sat by the table reading the newspaper: he laid it down, looked at me, then took me in his arms. All my fortitude forsook me on finding myself once more clasped in the embrace from which I should so soon be severed. I wept and sobbed passionately on his shoulder. I felt as if I could and would not go--as if it were impossible; a thing to be spoken of, never carried into effect. Cornelius pressed me to his heart, and tried to hush away my grief, but ineffectually. At length he said, very ruefully-- "Oh, Daisy!" Looking up, I saw that his eyes were dim. I grew silent at once, ashamed to have moved him so much. "Well!" said Kate. "Yes," replied her brother. He gave me a kiss, put me down; Kate hurried me away, and it was over. We passed through the garden and entered the cab, which rolled down the lane. I remembered how tenderly Cornelius had once cared for me during the whole of a long journey; how he had carried me when I could not walk, and brought me, wrapped up in his cloak and sleeping in his arms, to the home whence he now banished me. And remembering these things, I cried as if my heart would break. CHAPTER XVI. "Nonsense," said Kate, "I am not going to stand that, you know." She spoke in the oddest of her many odd ways. I looked up--her bright eyes were glittering--she passed her arm around me, made me lay my head on her shoulder, and kissed me with unusual tenderness. "Poor little thing!" she said, gently, "your troubles begin early, and yet, take my word for it, they will not last nor seem so severe after a time. When those two are married, you and I shall live together and be quite happy." "When are they to marry?" I asked. "In a month or two. A foolish business, Midge: I thought Cornelius would have had more sense; but he is to have plenty of work from a Mr. Redmond, and on the strength of such prospects he is going to marry. He is but a boy, and he does not know better: but she does, and it is a shame of her to take him in." "I thought Miss Russell had money." "So she has; but I know Cornelius; he won't live on his wife's money; he will do paltry work to support himself, lose all his time in copying bad pictures, and ruin his prospects as an artist,--all that because he could not wait a year or two. Ah well! I hope he may not repent it; I hope he may always love her as much as he does now. Don't fret, child; he never deserved such a good little girl as you have been to him." "Oh, Kate, it is not for that I fret, but is it possible Cornelius can think of giving up painting? it cuts me to think of it." "He does not think of it, foolish fellow! He does not see that he is tying himself down; just as he does not see that it is to please her he is sending you away. He thinks it is all his idea, whereas I know very well that of his own accord Cornelius O'Reilly would never have dreamed of parting from the child of Edward Burns. To be sure, I might have insisted on keeping you, for the house is mine, but for your own sake I would not make an annoyance of you to him. One must always let men have their way, and find out their own mistake; he will regret you yet, Daisy." Thus she talked and strove to comfort me, until, after a long drive, we stopped at the door of the Misses Clapperton. They resided in a detached villa, very Moorish-looking, with windows small enough to satisfy even the jealousy of a Turk, a flat roof admirably calculated for taking cold on, and a turret that threateningly overlooked a classic villa opposite, and gave the whole building a fortified, chivalric, arabesque air, confirmed by its euphonious name-- Alhambra Lodge. I knew the Alhambra through the medium of Geoffrey Crayon, and devoutly hoped it did not resemble this. On the left of the Alhambra arose an imitation old English cottage, with tiny gable-ends and transversal beams artistically painted on the walls; on the right a Swiss chalet told a whole story of pastoral innocence, and made one transform into an English _Ranz des Vaches_ the cry of "milk from the cow" coming up the street; further on arose a Gothic mansion--but peace be to the domestic architecture of England! We were received in a comfortable- looking parlour--not in the least Moorish--by Miss Mary Clapperton. She was short, deformed, grotesquely plain, but had a happy, good-natured face, and intelligent black eyes, of bird-like liveliness. She spoke volubly, called me "a dear," and laughed and chatted at an amazing rate. We had scarcely sat down, when her sister, Ann Clapperton, entered the room. She proved to be the very counterpart of Mary. There never was such a perfect likeness, even to their voice and their very expressions. As they dressed alike they puzzled every one. All the time I was with them, I never could know which was which; to this day I remember them as a compound individual, answering to the name of Mary-Ann Clapperton. Everything had been settled beforehand, so Kate only had to bid me good- bye. It was a quiet parting; she promised to come and see me soon, and, in return, made me promise not to fret. So far as tears went, I kept my word. I was not much given to weeping, and pride alone would have checked outward grief in the presence of strangers. I sat looking at the Misses Clapperton, who looked at me very kindly, and conversed about me as much as two persons who never had a separate thought could be said to converse. The only difference I found between them was that one, I believe it was Mary, suggested ideas which the other immediately converted into facts, as in the following whispered dialogue-- "Ann, she looks delicate." "She is delicate, Mary." "I fancy she is intelligent." "I am sure she is." I did not hear the rest of the conference; it was brief, and ended by one of the Misses Clapperton---I think it was Mary, but I am not quite sure, for in turning about they had, as it were, mingled--asking me if I should not like to become acquainted with my future companions; on my replying "Yes," she took me by the hand, and led me out into a green garden, all lawn and gravel path, where I was formally introduced to, and left alone with, the two Misses Brook. Jane and Fanny Brook were orphan sisters of fourteen and fifteen; fine, fresh, romping girls, with crisp black hair, cheeks like roses, and ivory teeth. They looked as demure as nuns whilst Miss Clapperton was by, but no sooner was her back turned than they began to whisper and giggle. Then suddenly addressing me as I stood by them, feeling silent and lonely, Jane said-- "Will you run?" "I never run; I cannot." "Try," observed Fanny. They caught me between them and whirled me off, but they were soon obliged to pause. I had stopped short, all out of breath. "I told you I could not run," I said, a little offended at their free manner. "Poor little thing!" compassionately exclaimed Jane. "Will you race?" asked her sister. "I don't mind if I do." A laburnum, at the end of the lawn, was fixed as the goal. They made me arbiter. I sat down on a wooden bench to look; they started off at once, reached the tree at the same moment, knocked one another down in their eagerness--then rose all tumbled and disordered, and ran back to me. "I was first, was I not?" cried Jane. "Indeed you were not. It was I, was it not?" "Indeed," I replied, "I don't know which it was. I think you both reached it at once." This impartial decision displeased them both. They said I was ill-natured and sly, got reconciled at my expense, and began a gentle sport of their own invention, called "the hunt." It consisted in one of the Misses Brook running the other down, which she did most successfully, and then submitted to being run down in her turn. My arrival had converted this into a holiday; so when the hunt was over, Fanny amused herself with a bow and quivers, whilst Jane swung herself to and fro from the laburnum. I looked on with wonder, and thought I had never seen such odd girls. The strangeness of everything made the day seem doubly long. So sudden and violent a separation from all I knew and loved was more irritated than soothed by the new objects and new faces to which I was compelled to give my attention, but which could not absorb my thoughts. I welcomed evening with a sense of relief, and a hope that it would bring me silence and comparative solitude. I shared a large, cheerful, airy bedroom with the two sisters, who slept together. At first they were very quiet, but after a while I heard a low rustling sound of paper that seemed to proceed from under their bedclothes; then one whispered the other-- "Do you think she is asleep?" "Try," was the laconic reply. "What a beautiful moonlight!" observed the voice of Jane aloud. "Oh, very!" emphatically answered Fanny. "Do you like the moonlight?" asked Jane, seeming to address me. "Yes, I like it." I replied; I could scarcely utter the words, my heart was so full of the lost home, with its quaint garden, sun-dial, and old trees, on which the same moon that chequered the drawn window-blind shone at this hour. On hearing my reply, the two sisters held a whispered consultation, which ended in Fanny saying in a subdued tone-- "Will you have some sweetstuff?" "Thank you," I replied, rather astonished, "I never eat sweets; I do not like them." This answer appeared to produce a very unfavourable impression. The sisters seemed to think me a traitor and a spy, and to repent their imprudent confidence. Of this, though I could not see them, I was intuitively conscious. "You need not be afraid that I should tell," I observed, somewhat indignantly. They both said in a breath "they were sure I would not," and very kindly pressed me to share their dainties. "Don't be afraid," encouragingly remarked Jane, "there is plenty of it." "A whole bagful," added Fanny, whose mouth seemed to be as full as her bag. "Oh, Fanny, you greedy thing!" exclaimed Jane, "you promised not to begin until I was ready: I am sure you have taken all the candy." I am afraid that thus it must have proved on examination, for I suddenly heard a sound slap, accompanied with a recommendation of "Take that," which, if it alluded to the slap, was wholly unnecessary, it being not merely received, but returned, with "Take that too," that proved the beginning of a regular battle. I felt greatly disgusted; the idea of fighting in bed was essentially repugnant to my sense of decorum; but an end was soon put to the contest, by the sound of an approaching step: on hearing it the combatants stopped as if by magic. "Say as we say," hastily whispered Jane. I felt something alight on my bed; the door opened, and Miss Clapperton-- I think it was Mary--appeared with a light in her hand, and her ugly good-humoured face wearing an expression of solemn reproof. "Young ladies," she observed, addressing the Misses Brook, "are you not ashamed of yourselves?" "We were only laughing," glibly said Jane, "weren't we, dear?" "Yes, dear," replied Fanny. "We could not help it," continued Jane; "she has some sweetstuff in bed with her, and she said she would give us some, and I said I would have all the candy, and Fanny said _she_ would: didn't you, dear?" "Yes, dear." I was amazed at the readiness of their invention, but I could not understand why Miss Clapperton looked at me so gravely. At length it came out: the perfidious Jane, knowing she would not have time to conceal the bag of sweetstuff, had tossed it on my bed, where it lay--a convincing proof of my guilt. Miss Clapperton reproved me very gently. "She did not allow sweets," she informed me, "but of course I did not know that, although she must say that eating them thus in the dark did not look quite like unconsciousness. Still she would not be severe on the first day. The confiscation of what she could assure me was most pernicious stuff, should be my only punishment." With this she retired. I had not contradicted the story of Jane, but I was none the less indignant, and I meant to tell her a bit of my mind, when, to my astonishment, she chose to accuse me. "How could you be such a ninny," she coolly asked, "as to let her carry off the bag? It will all go to that odious Polly. You could have coaxed her out of it, if you liked; a new pupil always can coax her out of anything--she is so soft." Fanny chimed in with her sister, and both agreed in calling me a "muff," a mysterious expression that puzzled and annoyed me extremely, but which they refused to explain, saying I knew very well what it meant. At length they fell fast asleep, and left me in peace. School reminiscences do not possess for me the universal charm ascribed to them. I was a child in years, but I had outgrown the feelings of a child: this was the torment and the happiness of my youth. A few days reconciled me however to the rough ways of Jane and Fanny Brook. They were, on the whole, kind-hearted, merry, romping girls; but I was years beyond them in everything save physical strength; I had feelings and ideas of which they entertained not the faintest conception, and, after spending nearly three years in the delightful and intellectual companionship of Cornelius and Kate, I could not care much for their childish amusements and still more childish talk. They pitied me for being so weak, and liked me because, though I could not share in their boisterous pleasures, I was of some use to them in their studies, and because, whenever I could do so, I helped them through the difficulties into which their indolence daily brought them. So much for my companions. The Misses Clapperton proved, as might have been expected from their appearance, kind-hearted, zealous teachers. I had entered Alhambra Lodge on the Tuesday; Kate had not said that she would come on the Sunday, but I fully expected her, and when, at an early hour, I was summoned down to see a visitor, my heart beat with more joy than surprise. I entered the parlour, and I saw, not Kate, but Cornelius. I was so glad, so happy, that I could not speak. As he kissed me, he saw that my eyes were full of tears, and he chid me gaily. My first words were-- "Is it exhibited, Cornelius?" "What are you talking of?" "The Happy Time; I know the Academy opened yesterday, I thought of it all the day long." "Of course you did," he replied, smoothing my hair, "I was sure of it." "Oh, Cornelius, do tell me." "Can't you guess?" His smiling face could hear but one interpretation. Overjoyed I threw my arms around his neck; he laughed, and said I looked quite wild. I know not how I looked, but I know I felt delighted. "Is it well hung?" was my next question. "Better than it deserves. Oh, Daisy, I have done nothing yet, but I knew you would like to know; so I came this morning to see you and to tell you." "How glad Kate and Miss Russell must have been!" I sighed. "Yes, but they are not crazy about my pictures like you, you foolish child. And now talk of something else. How are you? I find you pale." "I am quite well, Cornelius." "How do you like the Misses Clapperton?" "They are kind; I like them." "They give you a very good character; but one of them said something about sweetstuff which I could not make out." "I shall tell you all about it, if you will promise not to tell again." He gave me his word that he would not; and I related to him the whole story, by which he seemed very much amused. "I saw them as I came in," he said, "a pair of tall, strong girls, each of whom would make a pair of you; but on the whole, how do you like them?" "Oh! very well." "You speak quite coolly." "They are so childish." "Yet they look older than you." "So they are; but, would you believe it? they have never heard of Michael Angelo or Raffaelle." "Poor things!" laughed Cornelius, "how do they manage to exist?" "Indeed I don't know. When I talk to them of painting, Jane says she should like to paint fire-screens, and Fanny says she should not care." "They are both young Vandals," said Cornelius, "so don't waste your high ideas of Art upon them; they cannot understand anything of the sort, you know. The fact is, there are not many little girls like mine. Oh, Daisy! I don't want to reproach, but how is it that you, who are so good in everything else, have on one point been so perverse?" I did not answer: if he did not know that my only sin was loving him too much, where was the use to tell him? I asked after Kate; he said she was well, and would come in the afternoon: then we spoke for a few minutes of other things, and he rose to leave me, promising that on his next visit he would give me a long walk. I thought my heart would fail me at the parting, but his look checked me, and I bore this as I was learning to bear so many things--with the silent endurance that is not always resignation. The afternoon brought me Kate's promised visit. Almost her first words were-- "So Cornelius has been here! he never told me where he was going off so early. Say he does not care for you, Midge!" "I don't say so, Kate." "I believe not. He nearly got into disgrace on your account." "Into disgrace, Kate? how so?" "Why, he was to take a walk with some one, and he was late; so he had to excuse himself I don't know how often, and, like a foolish fellow as he is, he threw it all on his visit to you, and never saw that this was the very head and front of his offending. The fact is," she added, with a profound sigh, "I never knew one who is less apt to suspect a mean, ungenerous feeling than my poor brother. He is a child, quite a child, Midge." I heard her with a vague presentiment that this generous confidence of Cornelius would be my bane, and so it proved. Spite of his first friendly visit, he came no more near me. Miss O'Reilly called every Sunday, no matter what the weather might be. She saw that I fretted at the absence of her brother, and did her best to comfort me. "He can scarcely help himself." she once said to me, "he means to come oftener, but every Sunday brings something new to prevent him. He is very fond of you though, often talks of you, praises you, and has hung up in his studio a little drawing of himself and you, which some one uselessly tried to make him take down." "Yes," I replied, sighing, "he likes me, Kate, but he does not come near me; and though he promised to take me out walking with him some day, he has never done so yet." "Then it is to come," was her philosophic reply. But, seeing this did not comfort me, she added-- "I have a great mind to tell you something; but no, I will not on reflection, it would make you conceited." "Then I know what it is, Kate; he said I was clever, or that I would grow up to be good-looking, or something of the kind, which I care very little about; whereas I should care a great deal about his coming to see me." "No," replied Kate, smiling, "it was nothing like that; but the other evening, when I certainly did not imagine he was thinking of you, he said all of a sudden--'I wish I had that tiresome little girl back again.' I replied, carelessly, 'Do you?' just to draw him out. 'Yes,' he answered, 'I never knew how fond of her I was until she was gone.' So there is something for you." Affection is full of wiles. I followed the precept of drawing out just laid down by Miss O'Reilly, and said quietly-- "Is that all, Kate?" "All!" she replied indignantly; "why, what more would you have? You ignorant little thing, don't you know that the human heart is made up of separate curious niches, and that in the heart of Cornelius you have quite a niche of your own. He loves me more than he loves you; and, alas! he loves Miriam more than us two put together; but for all that I am much deceived if he does not feel more of what is called friendship for you than for either of us; and let me tell you that friendship which is not exacted as the love of kindred, not interested like passion, is a very lovely thing. It is odd that a little girl like you should now be to him what is called a 'friend,' and yet it is so; but whether because of some secret sympathy invisible to me, or on account of your liking his pictures and painting so well, is more than I can tell." She spoke positively: memory confirmed all she said; the words of Cornelius repeated by her gave additional proof,--for to be missed is one of the tokens love most prizes, and on which it relies most securely. The blood rushed to my heart; I looked up at Kate with mute gladness. "Bless the child!" she exclaimed, "Daisy, what is the matter?" And she looked confounded. "Nothing," I replied. "Then do not look beside yourself. Oh, Midge, Midge! how will it end?" She pushed back my hair to look into my face with a rueful glance; but my heart swam in a joy she could not check. Cornelius missed me, loved me, and loved me as his friend! "Oh! Kate," I said, "how kind of you to tell me all this!" "Then make much of it, for it is all you shall hear from me. No; it is no use kissing me, and looking pitiful. You are quite fond enough of him as it is." More I could not get out of her, either then or subsequently. For some time the consciousness that Cornelius had missed me, sufficed me; but the heart is craving; mine asked for more, and not obtaining what it asked for, grew faint and weary. It sickened for the sight of his face, for the sound of his voice, for his greeting in the morning, for his kiss at night, for all it had lost and missed daily. It missed home too, the home I had loved so much, with its cheerful rooms, its ivied porch, its green garden and old trees, its sense, so sweet and pleasant, of happy liberty; its studio, where I loved to linger. Another now enjoyed the shelter and pleasantness of that home; the garden flowers yielded her their sweetest fragrance, the trees their shade; she might sit with him in the studio, alone and undisturbed, all the day long. I was ever haunted by these thoughts; the cure of absence was but a slow one for me. Three months passed away; the wedding was put off from week to week and day to day, to the great vexation of Kate. "It is not that I am in a hurry for it," she said to me, when I questioned her on the subject, "but I do not like to see my poor brother made a fool of. I am sure Miriam plays with him, as a cat with a mouse. He can think of nothing else. He was not half so bad in the beginning; but she has irritated him into a perfect fever. Ah well! I wish it may not cool too much after marriage, that is all." "I wish they were married," I said, sadly, "for then I might at least be with you, and see him now and then." Kate took both my hands in her own, and looked at me very earnestly. "Midge," she said, "you are now thirteen; you are old enough to hear sense, and to make up your mind as I have made up mine; think that when Cornelius is married, he is, in one sense, lost to you as well as to me; do not imagine that he will or can be the same again; do not come home with an idea that old times can return; one who has proved it can tell you, that there is no beginning over again old affections." I looked at her wistfully, loath to believe in so hard a sentence. "It is so," she resumed, sighing: "think of Cornelius as of a very dear friend; love, respect him as much as you will, but expect nothing from him; wean your heart; you must, for his sake, as much as for your own." "Kate," I replied, "I shall try and not be jealous of his wife." "My poor child, you do not understand me; indeed it is very difficult; but wives do not like their husbands to care for those who cannot be included in the circle of home; they want to have them for themselves and their children." "I shall be very fond of his children, if he has any," I answered; "indeed I shall, Kate; I shall love them as I love him--with my whole heart." "You foolish girl, that is just the mischief." And she proceeded to explain the feeling I was to have for Cornelius: it was so cool, so distant, that it chilled me to hear her. "Kate," I said, "I think I could sooner hate Cornelius--and I am sure I never could do that--than like him in that strange way; and I am very sure," I added, after a pause, "that is not at all the way in which you like him." She smiled, and kissed me, and told me to like him my own way; that God would see to the future, and not let sorrow come out of true affection. I did not understand her then, nor did she intend I should. Since that time, I have divined that she looked with uneasiness to coming years, and wished to subdue in time a feeling that might prove far more fatal to my own peace than to that of her brother. She meant well, but she had the wisdom not to insist; it was not in her power to make me love him less; it was in the power of none, not even in his own. If for that purpose he had exiled me; if to cool my affection he came so seldom near me, and gave me not his long-promised walk, he failed. I felt the banishment, the visit ever deferred, the promise never kept; but I still loved him with my whole heart. At length, one morning in the week, and towards the middle of June, I was told by Miss Mary Clapperton that Mr. O'Reilly and another gentleman wanted to speak to me. I went down wondering if Mr. Smalley or Mr. Trim had taken a fancy to pay me a visit. On entering the parlour, I saw Cornelius, who stood facing the door; the other gentleman sat with his back to it, and his clasped hands resting on the head of his cane. He looked up as I came in, and showed me the brown face, white beard, and keen black eyes of my grandfather. I went up to Cornelius, who gave me a quiet kiss, and standing by him, I looked at Mr. Thornton. "Come here!" he said. I obeyed, and went up to him. "Do you know me?" he growled, knitting his dark brow. "Yes, Sir." "Who am I?" "Mr. Thornton." "Humph! Do you know why I have come?" "No, Sir." "To rid Mr. O'Reilly of you." I did not reply. I knew I had become a burden and a thing to be got rid of. "I am going abroad," continued Mr. Thornton, "so I just want to settle that before I go; you understand?" "Yes, Sir." "Well, what have you to say to that?" "Nothing, Sir." Mr. Thornton turned to Cornelius, and said impatiently-- "Has the child grown an idiot? Why, there was twice as much spirit in her formerly." I saw Cornelius redden; but he did not reply. My grandfather again turned to me, and said-- "Why are you here?" "To learn, Sir." "Was that what you were sent here for?" I hung down my head without replying. "I thought so," he muttered; "it seems, Mr. O'Reilly," he added, addressing Cornelius, "that though you were in such a precious hurry to get that child, you could not manage to keep her." "I thought it for her good to be here, Sir," rather haughtily replied Cornelius. "It was not his fault," I said, eagerly, "indeed it was not." "Whose then?" sharply asked Mr. Thornton. "Mine," I replied in a low tone, "I was naughty." "And were sent to school by way of punishment. Do you like being here?" "Not much. I am alone now; these are the holidays." "And whilst the other children are at home, you spend yours here." I did not reply; Mr. Thornton looked at Cornelius, and still leaning his two hands on the head of his cane, he said, with some severity-- "Sir, when nearly three years ago you called to take away that child, you chose to express pretty frankly your opinion of the way in which she was treated in my house. I shall be every bit as frank with you. I tell you plainly, Sir, that I do not approve of your conduct. You had of your own accord assumed a duty no one sought to impose upon you; you should either have fulfilled or relinquished it. I told you, if the child proved troublesome or in the way, to send her back to me. I can afford, Sir, to put her in a school and pay for her, without burdening you with her support. I do not say you were not justified in getting rid of an inconvenience; I simply say you had no right not to get rid of it altogether." Cornelius bit his lip, as if to check the temptation to reply. Mr. Thornton, laying his hand on my shoulder, resumed-- "You are old enough to understand all this: Mr. O'Reilly finding you in the way--" "Sir," began Cornelius. . "Sir," interrupted Mr. Thornton, "if she is not in the way, why is she here? Mr. O'Reilly," he added, turning to me, "finding you in the way, placed you in this house, which you don't much like, and where, nevertheless, you cost him a good deal of money. Now the question is, shall I put you in another place like this? And as I can better afford it than Mr. O'Reilly--" "Sir," interrupted Cornelius. "Sir," also interrupted Mr. Thornton, "I do not say I am a better man than you are; but I say I have more money;" and addressing me, he resumed--"Shall I therefore put you in another place like this, here in town, and pay for you? Yes or no?" I knew that Cornelius was poor, that he could ill afford the money he spent upon me, and though my heart failed me, I faltered-- "Yes, Sir." I looked up at Cornelius as I spoke: he seemed hurt to the quick. "Daisy," he said, giving me a reproachful look, "remember, _I_ did not give you up." He spoke fast, like one who wishes to keep his feelings under; and seizing his hat, hurried out of the room without once looking behind. I sprang forward to overtake him: a hand of iron held me back-- "You little fool," sarcastically said my grandfather, "don't you see he does not care a rush for you! Come, no sniffling; what day will you go?" "Any day, Sir." "Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday," he rapidly enumerated on his fingers. "Wednesday, Sir," I replied, flurried at his abrupt manner. "That is to-day. Stay here whilst I settle with the ladies of the house." He rose and left me as he spoke. CHAPTER XVII. I remained alone a few minutes, at the end of which Mr. Thornton, whose voice I heard in the next room, returned with the two Misses Clapperton. They had brought my bonnet and cloak, put them on, bade me good-bye, and kissed me kindly; then Mr. Thornton, who looked on with evident impatience, took my hand, and hurried me off. A carriage stood waiting at the door of Alhambra Lodge; my grandfather lifted me in, and closed the door on me. The carriage drove rapidly away. I sat in it alone, mute, and still amazed. After passing through roads, streets, and along terraces unknown to me, the carriage entered a secluded-looking square, and drew up before a plain house. A demure-looking servant answered the coachman's knock, and was followed by a middle-aged widow lady, who helped me down with a smile, saying cheerfully-- "This way, dear." I entered with her, and at once looked round for Mr. Thornton. He was nowhere to be seen. "Please, Ma'am," I said, "is Mr. Thornton come?" "I am so glad," she replied, seeming much relieved, "I felt afraid he was not coming. No, my dear, he is not come yet, and to tell you the truth, seeing you so suddenly, I could not understand it; but of course he'll explain all. This way, dear; upstairs, dear; mind the turning of the staircase, dear." She took my hand and led me up carefully, as if I were a baby. She had a very soft hand, and its touch was gentle and timid. When we had reached the second-floor landing, she paused, and opened a door that led into a front bed-room, large and airy, and overlooking the dull square below. "Don't you think, dear?" suggested the lady, with hesitating kindness,-- "don't you think you had better let me take off your things?" "I can take them off, Ma'am, thank you." "Can you? Very well, dear; is there anything I can do for you?" "Nothing, Ma'am, thank you." "Very well. You will not look out of the window, will you? you might fall out, you know, and be killed." I promised not to look out; she called me a dear child, and left me. In a few minutes I joined her below. I found her sitting alone in a dull and sombre English-looking parlour. She seemed flurried on seeing me, and spoke as if she had intended to go and fetch me, for fear, I suppose, of any accident on the way; but satisfied that all was right, she subsided into what appeared to be her habitual placidity. She had a kind face, that had been pretty, and was still pleasant, though it wore a somewhat uneasy expression, as if its owner were too much troubled with conscientious scruples and misgivings. "Do you know, Ma'am, if Mr. Thornton will soon come?" I asked, after vainly waiting for my grandfather to make his appearance. "He is gone, my dear," she replied, calmly. "I said you were taking off your things, and he said he had nothing to say to you; but you may be quite easy; it is all settled." "Am I to stay with you, Ma'am?" "Yes, my dear; I am to take care of you and educate you. My name is Mrs. Gray. I live in this house. It is very airy; very salubrious. Mr. Thornton was particular about that, and I am sure I would not have deceived him for anything. Then there is the square, where we have of course the privilege of walking when we like. Besides, I have received a very good education myself, so that I am fit to teach you. I think we shall be very happy together, dear," she added, with a smile, to which neither in word nor in look my heavy heart could give response. Mrs. Gray saw this, and looked discouraged at once. She hoped we should be happy together; she trusted we should; she thought she might say it should not be her fault if we were not. She was evidently getting very uncomfortable, when I diverted her by a question. "If you please, Ma'am, was it on account of what I said, that Mr. Thornton took me away from the Misses Clapperton?" "Ah, the Misses Clapperton. I really don't know, dear. Who are the Misses Clapperton?" "They receive a few private pupils; they live at Alhambra Lodge." "Alhambra Lodge, and they receive private pupils, dear me!" "Do you know, Ma'am, why I was not left there?" "I dare say, my dear, it was because Mr. Thornton did not approve of their method of teaching; there is a great deal in method." "Do you know, Ma'am, if Miss O'Reilly will call next Sunday?" "Miss O'Reilly? that is an Irish name, is it not?" "Yes, Ma'am, she is Irish, and so is her brother. They were born at a place called Bally Bunion." "Bally Birmingham--how odd! One would think Birmingham could have done without the Bally. Were you too born at Bally Birmingham, my dear?" "No, Ma'am, I was born in England." "Don't you feel much more comfortable to know that?" "I don't know, Ma'am; but can you tell me if Miss O'Reilly will call next Sunday?" Mrs. Gray looked perplexed. "Really," she replied, "I don't know, but I am sure if she does call, I shall be very happy to see her, and to offer her a cup of tea. I always have tea at five exactly." She spoke earnestly, as if she feared her hospitable feelings might be doubted. I saw she knew nothing, and questioned her no more. Mrs. Gray was one of those quiet Englishwomen who seem to enjoy dullness for its own sake. She lived in a dull neighbourhood, in a dull square, in a dull house, and, as I soon found, she led as dull a life as she could devise. We rose early, breakfasted together in the gloomy parlour, then went to the lessons, which lasted until our two o'clock dinner. She was an intelligent educated woman, but a nervous, timid teacher; and what with her sensitiveness and her fear that she was not doing her duty by me, she managed from the first day to render both herself and her pupil somewhat uncomfortable. After dinner we took a short walk in the square, or in a neighbouring walk planted with dusty elms, and called the Mall. We took tea at five exactly; I sat up until bed-time, preparing my lessons for the next day, whilst Mrs. Gray worked, or slyly read novels. At first she was as secretive about it as if she were still a school- girl, and I a stern schoolmistress; but when she saw that I was not ignorant of the nature of the brown circulating-library volumes that now and then peeped out of her work-basket, she gave up the concealment part of the business, and informed me that though she did not approve of novels generally, she thought herself justified in making exceptions. Her taste for fiction was shared by Miss Taylor and Mrs. Jones, the only friends she saw constantly. Once a week they came to tea with us, and twice Mrs. Gray took tea with them. They were very quiet, inoffensive women, with the organ of wonder large. I could see that they considered me from the first as a sort of living novel, a "Margaret the Orphan," a "Child of Mystery," etc. I entered Mrs. Gray's house on a Wednesday; the same evening they took tea with her, and I detected both the looks and signs they exchanged, and overheard whispered remarks of "How strange!" "Most mysterious!" "You don't say so!" and the like. If Jane and Fanny Brook had overpowered me with their boisterous ways, the slow and quiet life I led with Mrs. Gray depressed me even to a sense of pain. I felt it much during the first few days, and waited impatiently for the Sunday. It came, but brought not Kate. I sat by the window the whole day long, eagerly watching for her through the iron railings that fenced in our abode, but she came not. As dusk closed around the dull square and brooded heavily over its melancholy trees, my last hope vanished. At first I thought she was offended with me and would not come, then it occurred to me that she might not know where I was. "My dear," earnestly said Mrs. Gray, "pray leave that window; you will take cold. Miss O'Reilly, I dare say, will call to-morrow." "Had I not better write to her, Mrs. Gray, and tell her I am with you?" "No, my dear," replied Mrs. Gray, looking fidgety, "you must not do that, if you please. I dare say she will call tomorrow; pray leave the window." I obeyed the gentle injunction, but I had no faith in the hope held forth; I did not think Kate would come, and indeed she did not, nor on the following Sunday either. I again asked Mrs. Gray if I could not write to Miss O'Reilly, who, I felt sure, did not know where I was. "My dear," nervously said Mrs. Gray, "I fear that if Miss O'Reilly does not know it, it must be because Mr. Thornton did not wish her to know it. I should be very happy to see her, and I dare say she is a very charming person; but I must go by Mr. Thornton's wishes." All my entreaties could not induce her to alter her resolve. If I could have disobeyed her injunction I would, but open means I saw not, and hidden ones I had not the wit to devise; so I availed myself of the only permission she gave me--that of writing to Mr. Thornton, asking his leave to see my friends. Mrs. Gray sent the letter to his solicitors, but either it did not reach him, or he did not think it worthy his attention, for he never answered it. I saw how foolish I had been to place myself under his control, and the thought that I had myself done it, and was perhaps severed for ever from Cornelius and Kate, ended by affecting my health. In my grief I had said that if I only knew how they were, I should not mind so much not seeing them. Mrs. Gray eagerly caught at this, and offered to ascertain the matter. I gave her the names of the chief tradespeople with whom Miss O'Reilly dealt, and she set off one afternoon on her errand. She stayed away two hours, and returned with a cheerful face. "Well," she said, sitting down and smiling at my eager look, "I have learned everything. I called in at Parkins the baker, and asked Mrs. Parkins if she knew an Irish family of the name of MacMahon (that was not a story, you know, dear, because there are Irish MacMahons; indeed I knew three myself, though I cannot say they lived in the Grove), to which Mrs. Parkins replied, she did not know any MacMahons, and the only Irish family who dealt with her were a Mr. and Miss O'Reilly; Mrs. O'Reilly that was to be, would, she hoped, also give her her custom in time; I asked what sort of a person she was. Fair and handsome, and Mr. O'Reilly and his sister dark, but also very handsome. I said I did not think they could be the MacMahons, who were all red-haired; and thanking Mrs. Parkins, I came back. I hope, my dear, you will not fret after such good tidings; for if Mr. O'Reilly is going to get married, he cannot be very poorly nor his sister either; and I am sure you are too sensible to care about the bride-cake; so it is all right, you see." Alas! yes, it was all right, and I felt how little I must now be missed in the home where I had once been petted and indulged so tenderly. They were going to marry; there was nothing to fear or hope now. Mrs. Gray, unaware of the jealousy that had been the source of all my misery, continued to descant on this agreeable state of things, and altogether derived some innocent enjoyment from the part she had acted, and the spice of adventure it had thrown in her monotonous life. It was a sort of comfort to know that Kate and Cornelius were well, but it passed with time; and at length my ardent entreaties and solemn promises not to betray my presence by word, sign, or look, wrung from Mrs. Gray the favour of being taken one evening to the Grove, so that, in passing by the house, I might perhaps catch a glimpse of the faces I loved. Chance, or rather the kind power that disdains not to indulge our human weakness, favoured me. The evening was grey and mild, as it often is in the English summer. The Grove was lonely. Mrs. Gray and I kept in the shadow of the trees, on the side of the street facing Kate's house; and walked up and down two or three times. The front parlour was not lit; I could see nothing of what passed within, but in the stillness of that quiet evening I once or twice caught the tones of the voice of Cornelius. I started to hear them. "My dear," nervously said Mrs. Gray, "had we not better go?" "Not yet, Ma'am," I entreated; "Deborah will soon bring up the lamp, the window will remain open awhile, and then I shall be able to see them, whilst they, you know, cannot see me." All happened as I had said; Deborah brought up the lamp, laid it down on the table and left the window open. Now I could see. The lamp burned with a clear and steady flame, that illumined the whole room; the pictures stood forth on the red paper of the walls, and on that sombre yet clear back-ground appeared, vivid and distinct, the figures of Cornelius, Kate, and Miriam. She sat reclining back in her chair, and looking up at him as he stood behind her, laughing and talking pleasantly. I saw less of Kate, who sat a little in the back-ground, bent over her work. They seemed both cheerful and happy, for whilst I stood looking at them, half blinded by tears, Cornelius suddenly turned away from Miriam, went up to the piano, opened it, and sat down to sing the 'Exile of Erin.' What with hearing his voice again, and with standing there listening to him, myself an exile from his home, and, alas! from his heart, I wept. As the song closed with its mournful cadence, Kate rose, shut the window, and drew down the blind, thus excluding me from both sight and sound. "Don't you think, dear, we had better go now?" whispered Mrs. Gray, gently leading me away from the spot where I still stood looking and listening, though there was no more to see or hear. I yielded apathetically, and my companion hurried me away, nervously looking behind every now and then, and declaring, "She had never gone through anything to equal this, never!" Indeed by her two friends it was considered quite an adventure, and served to enhance the mystery with which it pleased their imagination to surround me. I had longed passionately for the favour Mrs. Gray had granted, but to have obtained it only added to my secret torment. I had now been six weeks with the kind lady, but what with the dull monotonous life I led in that dull house and the grief of being severed from those I loved so dearly, I again became languid, if not ill. Mrs. Gray's instructions were to let me want for nothing; she at once called in a physician, who gave me plenty of bitter physic to drink, and ordered me to take more exercise. We lived within half an hour's walk of Kensington Gardens, and every fine day Mrs. Gray conscientiously took me there to spend the interval between dinner and tea. She sat down on one of the benches and read, whilst I wandered away at will. Those gardens are very beautiful. They have verdure, water, rare fowl, singing birds, flowers wild and cultivated, warm sunshine, deep shade, and brooding over all that solemn charm which lingers around ancient trees and woodland places. I was then studying botany, and my chief pleasure was to look out for wild flowers or linger in some solitary spot. I remember one well,--a solemn grove of elms and beeches, sombre and quiet as a cloister. I often sought its gloom, led by that instinct which makes the stricken deer fly to the shade. When I sat down at the moss-covered base of those venerable trees, something of the soothing calmness of pure nature seemed to fall on my spirit, with their vast shadow. Above me sang the thrush and blackbird, whom I had so often heard in the lanes around my old home. They were happy; to me their song sounded neither gay nor joyful, but wild, sweet, and mournful as that of the enchanted bird heard by bonny Kilmeny in the glen. One day, in my search for botanical specimens, I wandered further than usual. At length I came to a circular hollow enclosed by fine old trees, of which one lay extended on the earth, uprooted in a recent storm. Its vast boughs were beginning to wither, and its huge roots rose brown and bare, for the first time beholding light; but of these signs, though I noted them as we will note things even when our very hearts are stirred within us. I thought not then; for at once I had seen and recognized Cornelius, who sat on the trunk of the tree sketching. Absorbed in his task he did not see me, and I stood mute within a few paces of him, looking at him with my flowers in my hand. Through the trees behind me the sun streamed in a few bright rays, that sent my lengthened shadow on the grass. Cornelius saw it and looked up; the pencil dropped from his hand and he turned very pale. Had he moved, or had I? I know not, but the next moment I was locked in his embrace. What I said or did, I cannot tell; he kissed me again and again with many an endearing epithet. For some time neither spoke. "Oh, my poor lost lamb!" he said, as I lay clasped in his arms too happy for speech, "where have you been all this time?" "I have been at Mrs. Gray's; how is Kate?" "She is well, but unhappy about you. Who is Mrs. Gray? Where does she live? Is she kind? Why are you so pale?" "I am not well; I take physic every morning; Mrs. Gray is very kind; she lives in Auckland Square, number three." "I know the place; but why, you naughty child, did you not write to let us know where you were?" "Mrs. Gray would not let me. I wrote to Mr. Thornton, and he never answered; but Mrs. Gray was very kind; once she went to Parkins, and found out that you and Kate were quite well, and another time she took me to the Grove, and I saw you both through the open window; it was in the evening; you sang the 'Exile of Erin;' I stood with Mrs. Gray listening on the other side of the street." "And you never even came to the door?" "Mrs. Gray would not have allowed it; besides--" "Well, what is it?" "You know," I replied, shunning his look, "what you said to me before I went to Miss Clapperton's." He did not answer, but when I again looked at him, the glow my words had called up had not left his face. "You are not here alone?" he observed after an embarrassed pause. "Oh no! Mrs. Gray is sitting on one of the benches there beyond. Do you want to speak to her?" "Of course I do," he replied, chucking my chin in his old way. He took my hand, picked up his sketch-book and drawing materials, and walked with me to where Mrs. Gray sat. She was absorbed in the catastrophe of a third volume, which she nearly dropped, as she saw me appear before her, holding the hand of Cornelius. At first she was quite agitated, but the free and easy manner of the young man soon restored her composure. He did his best to render himself agreeable, and carefully shunned every allusion that could alarm her. I had seen him give her two or three keen looks as if to read her character, before he entered into conversation, after which he went on like one master of his subject. He talked pleasantly for about half an hour, then left us: as I kissed him, my lips opened to ask when we should meet again, but his look checked me. I saw him take the direction that led to the Grove, and my eyes followed him until he was out of sight. "A very agreeable young man, very," observed Mrs. Gray, giving me shy looks I could not understand; "don't you think so, dear?" "I don't know, Ma'am. I have known--" "Yes, yes," she interrupted, "you have known others quite as agreeable; why, so have I. Once I remember, as a girl, that my sister and I often met in our walks a pleasant old gentleman, whom we called--not knowing his name--Dr. Johnson. Suppose we call this young landscape-painter Claude Lorraine." "Oh, Ma'am! his name is--" "My dear," impatiently interrupted Mrs. Gray, "how should you know his name? did you ask it, or did he tell you?" "Oh no, Ma'am!" "Very well, then, how can you know it?" I saw that Mrs. Gray wanted to keep on the safe side of truth, and, of course, I was glad enough to indulge her. She perceived that I had at length taken the hint, and talked freely of Claude Lorraine, who appeared to have produced a very favourable impression. For the remaining part of the day, and on the whole of the following night, I was restless with joy and hope. Something too appeared to be the matter with Mrs. Gray; for we dined half an hour earlier than usual, and went out the very minute the meal was over. "Where are we going to-day, Ma'am?" I asked. "I think we had better go to the Gardens," she replied carelessly. To the Gardens we at once proceeded. Mrs. Gray sat down on her usual bench, drew forth her book, and told me she thought it would do me good to walk about. I eagerly availed myself of the permission, and ran at once to the fallen tree. Yes, there he sat, and with him, as I had expected, was Kate. She did not say much, but as she took me in her arms and kissed me, I hid my face in her kind bosom, feeling too happy for aught save tears. "Oh, you naughty child!" she said, giving me two or three reproachful kisses; "how could you do it?" "Kate, it was Mrs. Gray--" "Yes, I know; Cornelius has told me all, but I don't care about Mrs. Gray, you are to come with me this very minute." "But Mrs. Gray--" "Nonsense! Mrs. Gray won't break her heart about you; and you don't look well at all." "That is she, coming up to us, Kate." And so it was. Mrs. Gray had got impatient, or perhaps alarmed, and fancied that Claude had carried me off. She was thrown into another flurry on seeing Miss O'Reilly; but Cornelius undertook to bring her round, and succeeded so well that ere long she sat down by Kate, with whom she chatted pleasantly, whilst I and Cornelius walked about. It seemed to me that but a few minutes had thus passed, when came the parting moment, and Mrs. Gray summoned me with a "My dear, is it not time to go?" The following day was Sunday, and on that day we never walked in the Gardens. With many kisses, caresses, and many a pang of secret regret, and many a look behind, I parted from my two friends. They were scarcely out of sight when Mrs. Gray exclaimed-- "There are very strange things in life--very. Now I should no more have expected to meet in Kensington Gardens an old friend--than--than--really --than anything!" "An old friend, Mrs. Gray!" "Why, of course; the lady to whom I spoke." "Miss O'Reilly!" I exclaimed; then immediately felt dismayed at my own imprudence. But Mrs. Gray was getting bold, and replied, very calmly-- "Yes, I believe her name is O'Reilly; but I do not see anything wonderful in that; as I believe O'Reilly is a very common Irish name." "And you know her, Mrs. Gray?" I said, eagerly. "I may safely say I have known her years. For it is now twenty years since I met her at an evening party; I had forgotten her name, but not her face, and being greatly pleased to see her again, I asked her to come and take tea with me to-morrow evening." "Did you meet her brother at that party, Ma'am?" I asked eagerly. "Has she got a brother, my dear?" calmly inquired Mrs. Gray. "Yes, Ma'am, the gentleman who was with her." "Ah, indeed! the artist we saw yesterday--peculiar! No, my dear, I cannot say I met him." I saw with some disappointment that Cornelius was not included in the invitation; but I tried to look to the morrow without ungrateful repining; it came, and brought Kate alone, but not the less welcome. I have often wondered at Mrs. Gray's motives for acting thus; but her character was an odd mixture of sincerity and craft, of daring and timidity. She was kind-hearted enough to like obliging me and woman enough to cherish a feminine pique against Mr. Thornton for not being more frank and explicit with her; besides her life was so dull that a little gentle excitement and mystery were not things to be rejected lightly; and then, as she was in independent circumstances, and had taken me more for society than for profit, she was naturally less apt to regard the consequences of her conduct. Kate now came to see me freely, and yet I was not happy. Her brother, who had seemed so pleased, so glad when he met me in the Gardens, came not. "Oh, Kate!" I said, very sadly, "he does not care for me after all." "Nonsense, child! I tell you he was miserable when he found that Mr. Thornton had taken you no one knew where; why, he got thin with hunting up and down for you; he had no peace himself and gave none to others. Whereas, on the day he met you, he came in looking as gay as a lark, and exclaiming the first thing, 'I have got her, Kate!'" "Yes, but he does not come." "Men are so. He is fond of you, and he neglects you, that is their way, child." This gave me little comfort, but at length one morning when I least expected him, Cornelius suddenly called to see me, and to give me, with the consent of Mrs. Gray, my long-promised walk. He kissed me carelessly; his face looked worn; his way of speaking was short and dissatisfied. As we left Mrs. Gray's house and turned round the square, he asked where I wished to go, in a way that implied that, on taking me out for this walk, he rather thought to get rid of it than to please either himself or me. I replied timidly, that I did not care where we went. "Are you getting shy with me?" he asked, giving me a keen and surprised look. I answered "No," with a consciousness that I should have said yes. Cornelius looked at me again, but did not speak until we had for some time walked on in silence. He then observed abruptly-- "How do you like being at Mrs. Gray's?" "Pretty well." "Viz. not much." "I do not complain, Cornelius, she is very kind." "And she gives you a very good character, and I have assured her she told me nothing new." He had laid his hand on my shoulder, and he looked into my face with all the kindness of old times. I replied in a low tone-- "It was very kind of you, Cornelius, to say so." "I only said what I thought; you need not thank me for it." He spoke impatiently; I did not reply, and there was another long pause. "Are you tired?" at length asked Cornelius, who was leading me through streets and bye places of which I knew nothing. "A little." "And there is not even a shop where I could make you rest; why did not you say so sooner?" "I did not like to delay you." "The next thing will be, that you will call me Mr. O'Reilly. Well, it is your own fault, and you will have to walk further before you rest, for I am taking you into the country." We walked on until the houses grew thinner and began to skirt green fields. The sun was hot, and I found it pleasant to enter a cool and shady lane. There was a bank on which I could have rested, but Cornelius seemed to have forgotten my fatigue; he walked on, looking so abstracted that I did not dare to address him. At length we reached the corner of the lane, and turned into one so exactly like that leading to our old home, that I stopped short. "Come on," coolly said Cornelius. I did go on; every step showed me I had not been deceived; I recognized the hedges, the trees, with a beating heart. At length we came to the door I knew so well. Cornelius opened it with a latch-key, and without giving me a look, led me in. We crossed the garden, passed by the sun- dial, stept in beneath the ivied porch, and entered the front parlour, where, by the window, in the cool shade of green Venetian blinds, Kate sat sewing. CHAPTER XVIII. I felt like one in a dream. Cornelius had dropped my hand; I stood at the door silent, motionless, not knowing whether I was to come forward or not, when Kate laid down her work and looked up. "God bless me!" she exclaimed with a start, and she seemed so much astonished that I saw this was as great a matter of surprise to her as to me. "Yes," Cornelius carelessly said, throwing himself down on the sofa, "I had long promised Daisy a walk, and not knowing where to take her, I brought her here." By this I had found my way to Kate, who kissed me with her eyes glistening. I think she was as much pleased as myself; and yet with what an odd mixture of feelings I gazed on my lost home! how strange, how familiar seemed everything! As Kate took off my bonnet she said, decisively-- "You shall stay the whole day, Daisy." "Then you must answer for it to Mrs. Gray," observed Cornelius. "To be sure. Are you hungry, Midge?--No? What do you want, then?-- Nothing?" "I am tired; I should like to sit down." "Sit down by all means, child," she replied gaily. I drew my old stool by her chair, and laid my head on her lap. She smiled and smoothed back my hair from my hot face: her other hand lay near it: I kissed it with trembling lips. It was kind of Cornelius--if he could no longer afford to be kind himself--to bring me back at least to her whose kindness, less tender and delightful, but more constant than his, had never failed me. Kate, who had put by her work, sat looking at me with a cheerful happy face. "Nonsense!" she exclaimed, and perceiving that my eyes fast filled with tears, "you are not crying, Daisy?" "And if I do cry," I hastily replied, "it is only because I am so happy to see you again." She laughed and said-- "Why, child, this is Tuesday, and I saw you on Sunday." "Well, I did not see you on Monday, did I?" "Little flatterer!" she answered, yet she looked pleased, for love is to us all the sweetest thing on earth. We remained thus for awhile; then Kate rose to attend to some domestic concerns. I wanted to follow her, but she told me to remain with Cornelius. I obeyed reluctantly; to be with him and not feel between us the friendly familiarity of old times, was no enjoyment, but a painful pleasure. I did not go near him, I did not speak; I sat on the chair Kate had left, and looked out of the window. He never addressed me; after awhile I heard him rise and leave the room. At once I slipped down to Kate, whom I found in the kitchen deep in pastry. "Now child, what brings you here?" she asked, turning round, and all covered with flour. "I want to be with you, Kate." "I am making a pie." "Then let me look at you." "Why did you leave Cornelius?" "It was he who left the parlour." She wanted me to go up to the garden; but I begged so hard to remain with her, that she at length consented. I left her but once during the whole of that day, and then it was to knock at the door of the studio and tell Cornelius dinner was ready. When we sat down to the meal, I drew my chair close to hers; my old place was by Cornelius, but unless he told me to sit there again, which he did not, I did not feel as if I dare do so. He scarcely took any notice of me, and immediately after dinner again went up to his labour. "Go after him," suggested Kate. "I would rather stay here," I replied, startled at the idea. "Stay then." We sat together in the parlour until tea-time. Alas! how swiftly seemed to come round the hour that was to close this happy day; for, sitting below with Kate, conscious that Cornelius was upstairs working, reminded of old times by everything I saw, I did feel very happy. As we sat at tea, Kate suddenly exclaimed, "Why, it is raining hard!" "Yes, it is," carelessly replied Cornelius. "Then the child must spend the night here." "I suppose so." I threw my arm around the neck of Kate, and kissed her as I joyfully exclaimed, "I shall sleep in my room again!" "Which is no reason for spilling my tea, you foolish little thing." After tea I quite expected that Cornelius would go out or Miriam come in; but he sat reading, and Miss Russell never appeared; her name was not even mentioned. I had taken my place by Kate, and, in the joy of my heart, I could not refrain from indulging in a few caresses. She endured me for some time, but, though kind, she was not exactly affectionate, and she at length said good-humouredly but decisively-- "Daisy, my good child, don't hang about me so. I like you, but I might say something sharp; so just take that kiss, and do with it." She said this so pleasantly, and kissed me so kindly as she said it, that there was no taking it amiss, nor was there any disobeying it; so I sighed, drew back, and kept in my feelings. To Cornelius I never ventured to speak, unless to hid him good-night. I woke the next morning with the consciousness that my brief happiness was over. The day was bright with sunshine; the blue sky had not a sign of coming cloud; there was not the faintest hope of a drop of rain to delay my departure. I came down with a somewhat heavy heart. Kate was the first to broach the subject; breakfast was over, her brother was rising from the table; he sat down again as she said, "Cornelius, who is to take the child back?" He looked at her, at me, hesitated a little, then said, "I know all you can object, Kate, all you can say beforehand, yet do not wonder when I tell you that I have come to the resolve of keeping Daisy at home." "Here!" exclaimed Kate. "Yes, here. I went to fetch her yesterday for that purpose. I have written to Mr. Thornton; it is all settled. Daisy is to stay here if she wishes." "Cornelius," gravely said Kate, "have you reflected on what you are doing?" "Very seriously; not that it required much reflection." "Indeed but it did," interrupted his sister. "Excuse me, Kate, it did not. When I thought it best for Daisy to leave us, it was because I also thought that my marriage would take place this summer; it is now postponed for at least a year or two. I never contemplated banishing Daisy from home for anything like that length of time. When I went for her yesterday, I was confirmed in my resolve by learning from Mrs. Gray that her health is still very uncertain. I found her myself pale and thin. Strangers cannot be supposed to care for her as you and I do, Kate. She is still very weak and delicate; her only place is home; for," he added, giving me a look of reproach, "_I_ have never ceased to consider this as her home." Kate gave him no direct answer, but, looking at him fixedly, she said, "Does Miss Russell know this?" "No," he replied, looking pained, "she does not, Kate. I see by the question that your old suspicion still survives. On my word Miriam had nothing to do with making me send away Daisy; she even raised several objections to it; she will be truly pleased to learn that the child is come back." Miss O'Reilly looked incredulous, but, glancing out at the window, she said, "Here is your letter, Cornelius." He started up; the postman gave that knock which has moved to joy or sorrow so many hearts; a letter was brought in; Cornelius snatched it from Deborah, and eagerly broke the seal; it looked long; he was soon absorbed. Kate repressed a sigh to turn to me, and say in her most cheerful accents, "What do you say to all this?" I was standing by her chair; I laid my cheek to hers as I replied, "The week will be made up of Sundays." "Were the Sundays so pleasant?" "As pleasant as the Saturdays seemed long." "Well, they need be neither short nor long now; only, child, don't you remember?" "What, Kate?" "If you hang about me I shall scold." "Then let me deserve the scolding," I replied, covering her brow and hair with kisses, and half laughing, half crying for joy. She looked at me wistfully, for once letting me do as I liked, and saying "she did not feel as if she could scold me to-day." "Because you are too good," I answered, in a low, moved tone. "Oh, Kate, shall I ever forget how you never forgot me; how constantly you came to see me Sunday after Sunday!" Here I stopped short, for I caught the look of Cornelius, who had laid down his letter, and was evidently listening. "What else had I to do?" asked Kate, cheerfully. She rose to go downstairs. I wanted to go with her, but she gaily told me she no more fancied being followed than being hung about, so I had to remain behind, but with the blessed consciousness, it is true, that there was to be no second parting. Joy made me restless. I knew not what to do with myself. I went to the window; I looked at the flowers, at the books, and finally at Cornelius, who, to read his letter more comfortably, was sitting on the sofa. I saw that when he had done he began it over again. It was a lady's hand; there was no difficulty in guessing from whom it came. When the second perusal was over he looked up; as our eyes met I came forward rather hesitatingly, and standing before him, I said-- "May I speak to you, Cornelius?" "Certainly, but do not be too long about it?" "It will not take long. I only want to thank you for having brought me home to Kate." "You thank me for that?" "Yes, Cornelius, it has made me so happy." "I am glad to hear it, though I did not mean it." "Did you not?" I replied, rather mortified. "No," he continued, in an indifferent tone, "not at all. It is true there was once a little girl who used not to be shy and distant with me"--I drew a little nearer--"who would not speak to me standing, but sitting by my side"--I sat down by him--"and whom I used to call my child," continued Cornelius without looking at me; "and it is also true," he added in the same way, "that feeling rather dull, I thought one morning I would go and bring her home; but if there was any kindness in this, I cannot say I meant it all for her or for Kate." He turned round, smiling as he spoke. I threw my arms around his neck and kissed him eagerly. I felt so happy; he laughed. "Poor Kate!" he said, gaily, "well may she object to being hung on after this fashion; but I am used to it." "If you had not spoken so, you know I should not," I replied, half offended. "No, you sulky little thing," he said almost indignantly, "I know you would not: what between obstinacy and pride, you would never give in. But you mistook, Daisy, if you thought you could make me fancy you preferred Kate to me." "As if I was not sure you knew better!" I answered, with the frank ingratitude of my years. "Thank you, Daisy," said the somewhat sorrowful voice of Kate. I looked up. She was standing behind us; she had evidently overheard our last words. I felt myself crimsoning with shame, and hid my face on the shoulder of Cornelius. "Don't hide your face, child," quietly observed Kate, "I do not prefer you: why should you prefer me? Besides, loving him more is not loving me less, and I was not so foolish as not to know it was thus: so look up." "Yes, look up," said Cornelius, raising my face. "Kate is not vexed with you." "But Kate is vexed with you, Cornelius," she remarked, very gravely: "do you mean to spoil that child, to--" "Yes," interrupted Cornelius. "Oh! you may make light of it," she continued very seriously; "I am not so blind as not to guess that you brought her home a little for her sake, and a good deal for your own." "'Faith, then, you only guess the truth, Kate," said Cornelius, impatiently; "it is odd you never seem to understand what, heaven knows, I never seek to hide, nor dream to deny. I am fond of the child, very fond of her. I cared little for her when she came first to us, but she chose to take a fancy to me, and, though it would puzzle me to say how it came to pass, I found out in time that I had taken to her what must have been a very real fancy, for since she left I have never felt as if the house were the same without her. So after a week's hesitation and delay I went off and fetched her yesterday--and I don't repent it, Kate. She has provoked and tormented me--she will do so again, I have no doubt, perverse little creature! and yet I cannot help being glad at having her once more." He laid his hand on my head and looked me kindly in the face as he said it. "After that," resignedly replied Kate, "meddling of mine is worse than useless; but what did Mr. Thornton say?" "Mr. Thornton has had the impertinence to say that if Margaret Burns is such a fool as to wish to stay with me, she is welcome." Kate smiled, and said, "If I wished to go down with her I might." "Daisy is not going down, but up," replied Cornelius, taking me by the hand and leading me to the studio; as we entered it he said-- "Daisy, you knocked at the door yesterday, and stood on the threshold: I won't have that again." "Very well, Cornelius; shall I arrange the portfolios?" "If you like." I looked over them for awhile, then could not help observing-- "Cornelius, they look just as I left them." "Perhaps they are: one cannot be always looking at those old things." I put by the portfolio and looked around me. In a corner I perceived Medora; I knew enough of painting to see at a glance that it had scarcely been touched since I had left home. Cornelius was very apt to begin pictures, and leave them by for some other fancy: Medora had thus replaced the Stolen Child, but I looked in vain for the successor of Medora. "Where is it, Cornelius?" I asked at length. "Where is what, child?" he replied, turning round. "The other picture." "What other picture?" "The one for which you put by Medora." I was looking at him very earnestly: I saw him redden. "There is no other picture," he answered; "I have been obliged to work for money; to do such things as this," he added, pointing with a sigh to the painting which he was copying. "Have you earned much money?" I asked seriously. "A little," he replied smiling. "Do you think you will sell the Happy Time?" "I have hopes of it: why do you ask, child?" "Because by putting all your money together, you will be able to begin it." "Begin what?" "The picture." "But, child, there is no picture," he answered impatiently. I looked at him with astonishment that seemed to embarrass him. I knew from Kate that the Happy Time had been received with perfect indifference by the public and critics, and that, under such circumstances, Cornelius should neither be painting a picture nor yet contemplating one, seemed incredible. What ailed his mind, once so full of projects? What had become of our gallery? I could not understand it. For some hours I sat watching him at his copy, until at length he put it by, saying-- "Thank heaven, it is finished!" "Are you going to begin another?" I inquired. "Not to-day; I hope to get some work to-morrow though." "You hope? do you like it, Cornelius?" "You know well enough I hate it," he answered with evident irritation; "ah! Daisy, when shall I be a free man?" He looked depressed, but for a moment only; the next he turned to me saying-- "Perhaps you would like to go down to Kate?" "No, Cornelius, I would rather stay and look on at you painting." "You are very obstinate. I have told you over and over that I am not going to paint. Paint! what could I paint?" "Medora." "I want Miss Russell, who is at Hastings with her aunt; even if she were here, it is ten to one whether she could give me a sitting, the smell of the paint gave her such dreadful headaches, that it is a mercy they did not end in neuralgia. And now, child, go downstairs or stay here just as you like, but do not disturb me any more; I have a letter to write." He opened his desk and began writing. Once or twice I ventured to speak, but he told me so shortly that he could not attend to me, and it was so plain that painting was nothing to letter-writing, that I at length remained silent. This lasted until dinner-time. After dinner Cornelius went to post his letter--an office he never entrusted to profane hands; I remained alone with Kate; I could not help speaking to her. "Does not Cornelius paint any more pictures?" I asked, looking up at her. "Ah! you have found it out, have you?" she replied, a little bitterly; "why, child, he has been losing his time in the most miserable fashion. Not that he did not work, poor fellow; he worked himself to death, all to get married to her; but she changed her mind; suddenly discovered he was too young, that it must be deferred, and, leaving him to enjoy his disappointment, went off to Hastings a fortnight ago. He was quite cut up for the first week; but he is coming round now, only I fancy he is getting rather sick of slop-work, that leads to nothing, not even to marriage. As for her, poor thing, if she is gone with the belief that Cornelius is the man to sit down and make a woman the aim of his life, she will find herself wofully mistaken, I can tell her." More than this Miss O'Reilly did not say, but everything confirmed her words. When Cornelius came in, he said it was a beautiful afternoon, and that, if I liked, he would take me for a stroll in the lanes. I felt myself reddening for joy; this was, I knew, a great favour, and showed that Cornelius must be quite in the mood for petting and indulging me. He liked me, but he was not fond of walking out with me; his walks were almost always solitary, and extended for miles into the country. I therefore replied with a most eager "Yes," and got ready so promptly, that in less than ten minutes Cornelius and I were again wandering in the lanes hand in hand. When I felt tired we sat down on a fallen tree. I enjoyed the blue sky with its light vapoury clouds; the warm, ardent sunshine; the sharply defined, though ever-waving shadow of the tall tree under whose shelter we rested; the vivid green of the opposite hedge, through whose verdure shone the cool white flowers of the bind-weed; the rich luxuriant grass that rose from the ditch all straight and still in the burning heat of the day; the breeze that now and then passed over and through all this little wilderness; the low hum of insects; the song of birds from distant parks and gardens; everything charmed--enchanted me, but nothing half so much as sitting thus again near Cornelius. "Daisy," he exclaimed, suddenly perceiving that which had until then escaped his attention, "what on earth are you carrying?" "Your sketch-book, Cornelius; you had forgotten it." He looked at me as if he attributed to me some secret motive, of which I was certainly innocent. I had never known Cornelius to go out without his sketch-book, and I dreamt of nothing beyond my words and their simplest meaning. "Did you not want it?" I asked, surprised at his fixed glance. "No," was the short reply. "But there is no harm in having brought it; is there, Cornelius?" "None, save that you have burdened yourself uselessly: give it to me." "May I not look at it?" "You may, but you will find nothing new." This was not strictly correct; I at once detected and pointed out to Cornelius several sketches new to me, and, though he at first denied it, the dates proved me to be in the right. "You have a good memory," he said, smiling. "As if it were likely I should forget any of your drawings or sketches! But why is not that last one of the two boys finished? it looks so pretty." "It would have been a nice little thing," he replied, looking at it with regret, "and I had bribed them into sitting so quietly, but Miriam said they were tired, and insisted on my releasing them. I had lured them into the garden. She opened the door, and they scampered off." "What a shame!" I exclaimed, with a degree of indignation that amused Cornelius; but for all that he shut up the sketch-book, which was no more opened that day. Our walk over, we came home; the evening, warm and summer-like, was pleasantly spent in the garden. Early on the following morning Cornelius went out to look for the promised work. The first thing he did on coming home was to read the letter that lay waiting for him on the breakfast-table; when that was done he condescended to sit down and eat. Kate asked if he had succeeded in accomplishing his errand. "No, indeed," he replied, with evident irritation. "Mr. Redmond was not even at home. I shall have the pleasure of another journey. Oh! Kate, I am sick of it!" He sighed profoundly, then took up his letter, and went upstairs. "Yes, yes, go and write," muttered Kate as the door closed upon him, "lose your time, waste your days, that is just what she wants. Midge, will you never leave off that habit of looking and listening? go upstairs, only do not talk to Cornelius whilst he is writing, or he will fly out: I warn you." I obeyed. I went up to the studio, entered softly, and closed the door very gently: yet Cornelius heard me, for he looked up at once from his writing. "My dear," he said, "there will be neither painting nor drawing to-day." "Am I in the way, Cornelius?" "No, but you will have to stay quiet, and when I have done writing I shall go to town again." I accepted the conditions, and obeyed them so scrupulously that I did not once open my lips until Cornelius, turning round and looking at me as I lay on the couch, asked if I did not feel tired. I replied, I did not mind, and was his letter finished? "I have only a few lines more to add," he answered. The few lines must have been pages, they took so long to indite. The little studio was burning hot; Cornelius was too much absorbed to be conscious of this, but I felt faint and drowsy. I drew myself up on the couch, laid my head on the cushion, looked at him as he bent with unwearied ardour over his desk, then closed my eyes and fell asleep to the sound of his pen still zealously running along the paper. I know not how long I slept; I was partly awakened by a sound of whispering voices. "The dinner will be ruined," said Kate. "What is a dinner in comparison with a drawing?" "I don't know--and don't care; a cook has no feelings." "Another hour." "Do you want to make yourself and the child ill?" "I never know what hunger is whilst I am at work; and how can Daisy feel the fasting whilst she sleeps? As soon as she wakens, I leave off." "Leave off now and finish to-morrow." "Oh, Kate! is it possible you do not see how very charming that attitude is? I should never have hit on anything half so graceful or so picturesque. The least movement on her part might spoil it." "I fancy I saw her stir." "I hope not," he replied hastily. I heard him approach; he bent over me, for I felt his breath on my face, but I kept my eyes closed, and never moved. Cornelius turned away, and whispering to his sister that there never had been a deeper slumber, he begged of her to leave him. She yielded, and I heard him securing himself against further intrusion by locking the door, before he returned to his interrupted task. It was well for me that I had so long been accustomed to sitting, or I could not have borne the hour that followed. Even as it was, I felt as if Cornelius would never have done. At length he came up to me, took my hand, and called me. I opened my eyes, and saw him standing by the couch, and smiling down at me. "Why," he said gaily, "you are as bad as the sleeping beauty." I did not reply, but rose--he little guessed with how much pleasure. He showed me the sketch he had been taking of me, and asked what I thought of it. I could not answer; I felt so giddy and faint. "You are still half asleep," he observed, impatiently, "or you would see at once I have not done anything half so good this long time." He held it out at arm's length, looked at it admiringly, then laid it by, and went downstairs. I followed, but kept somewhat in the rear. I feared both the keen eyes and the direct questions of Kate. Her first indignant words, as we sat down to dinner, were-- "I am astonished, Cornelius, at your cruelty; the poor child is pale with fasting." "Indeed, Kate, I had to waken her." "Nonsense!" "Yes, it is peculiar," he quietly replied; "I hope it is not a bad symptom." "A symptom indeed, as if I could believe in it! Why, she has been imposing on you; look at her--guilty little thing!" Cornelius laid down his knife and fork to give me an astonished look. "Deceitful girl!" exclaimed Kate, quite sharply; "how dare you do such a thing--to go and impose on Cornelius!--for shame!" She lectured me on the text with some severity. Cornelius never said to me one word of blame or approbation. "I hope," gravely observed his sister, when the meal was over, "you will not let that pass, Cornelius. She must not be encouraged in deceit." "Certainly not; and I have already devised a punishment. Come here, Daisy." I rose and obeyed. "Do you know," he said, as I stood before him, "that you have been guilty of a very impertinent action--imposed upon me, as Kate says?" "Don't be too strict, Cornelius," put in Kate, "she meant well." "I have nothing to do with that: it was an impertinence; consequently, instead of the week's holiday I meant to give her, she shall resume her studies this very evening, and, lest you should prove too lenient, Kate, I shall take care to examine her myself." I looked at him eagerly; he was smiling. I understood what the punishment meant, and drawing nearer, I stooped to embrace him. "There never was such a girl!" he said, pretending to avert his face; "she knows how vexed I am with her, and yet--you see it--she insists on kissing me." "Foolish fellow, foolish fellow!" muttered Kate. I liked study, and I loved my dear master. I went and fetched a heap of books, which I brought to him, breathlessly asking what I was to learn: he had only to speak, I was ready; I was in a mood not to be frightened at the severe face of Algebra herself. He replied, that we should first see where I had left off with him, and how I had got on since then. The examination was tedious, but Cornelius warmly declared that it did me great credit, and that few girls of my age knew so well what they did know. He appointed my tasks for the next day, then rose to go and smoke a cigar in the garden, which, seen through the back-parlour window, looked cool and grey in evening dusk. "Did you post your letter?" suddenly asked Kate. Cornelius looked startled and dismayed; it was plain he had forgotten all about it. "What will she think?" he exclaimed, reddening: "it was the drawing did it. How provoking!" He took two or three turns around the room, then observed cheerfully-- "She will understand and excuse it when I explain the case--eh, Kate?" "Humph!" was her doubtful reply. "Yes she will," he confidently rejoined, and went out to smoke his cigar. I suppose the letter was duly posted on the following day. Cornelius went out early and did not return until evening. He had been disappointed in obtaining the work he hoped for; he had lost his day in looking for it, and came home in all the heat of his indignation. "I give it up!" he exclaimed a little passionately, after relating his disappointment to Kate; "and Mr. Redmond too, the Laban father of an unsightly Leah, without even the prospect of a Rachel after the seven years' bondage. Better live on bread and water than on the money which costs so dear. There is no sweetness in that labour--I hate it--and Miriam may say what she likes, there is no life like an artist's!" "What does she say?" asked Kate, laying down her work, and looking up at him. "Not much, but I can see she thinks like you. I do not blame her or you. What have I done to justify confidence? Only a foolish little thing, like Daisy, could take me at my word, and have any faith in me." "What other profession does she wish you to follow?" inquired Kate. "None; but she thinks me too enthusiastic." "A man can't be too enthusiastic about his profession," warmly responded Kate. "Indeed then you never said a truer thing." "If you think it is your vocation to paint pictures, paint pictures with all your might." "Won't I, that's all?" he replied, throwing back his head, and looking as if, in vulgar parlance, he longed to be at it. "Ay, but the means?" emphatically said Kate. "Have I not got money?" "Which was to set up Hymen: well, no matter, it is not much, and cannot last for ever. What will you do when it is out?" "Borrow from you, Kitty," he replied, laying his hand on her shoulder with a smile; "won't you lend to me?" "Not a shilling," she answered, looking him full in the face, "unless you give me your word of honour not to go back to Laban and Leah." "'Faith, she is not such a beauty that I cannot keep the vow of inconstancy to her," he said, rather saucily, "you have my word, Kate. Well, what do you look so grave about?" "I am thinking, Cornelius, that I am meddling as I never meant to meddle; that I am perhaps aiding to delay your marriage." Her look was bent attentively on his face. "Not a bit," he promptly replied; "I consider every picture I paint as a step taken to the altar. Besides," he philosophically added, "I was only twenty-three the other day. There is no time lost." "They are all alike," indignantly said Kate: "two weeks ago you were half mad because your marriage was delayed, now you talk of there being no time lost." "Since I am to wait," coolly replied Cornelius, "I confess the more or less does not make so great a difference. I was rather indignant at first, but since then I have thanked Miriam." "You have?" said Kate. "Indeed I have. It would have spoiled my prospects, and though she did not say so, that I am sure was her reason for disappointing me. She shall not again complain of my unreasonable impatience. I am quite resolved not to think of Hymen until, love apart, a woman may take some pride in me." "They are all alike, all alike," again said Kate; "love for a bit, ambition for life." Cornelius laughed. "Miriam would despise me," he observed, "if I could sit down in idleness. Besides, love is a feeling, not a task: it may pervade a lifetime; I defy it to fill an entire day without something of weariness creeping in. There is nothing like work in this world,--nothing, Kate." "When do you mean to begin?" "To-morrow, of course." "What becomes of your letter?" "I shall write it this evening. And now, Daisy," he added, turning to me, "let us see how you have studied." I brought my books, and the lessons filled--how pleasantly for me!--the greater part of the evening, which Cornelius closed, as he said, by writing his letter. I was scarcely dressed on the following morning, when his voice summoned me from above. I ran up hastily; he was standing on the landing, at the door of the studio, evidently waiting for me, and evidently too in one of his impatient fits. "Loiterer!" was his greeting, "after such a sleep as you had yesterday, could you not get up earlier?--two hours of broad daylight actually gone!" "Did I know you wanted me, Cornelius?" "Did I know it myself? Now come in--look here--give me your opinion, your candid opinion." When Cornelius asked for an opinion it was all very well, but when he asked for a candid opinion he would never tolerate any save that which he himself favoured. He was now in one of his most positive moods, so I prepared for submission--an easy task, for I always thought him in the right, and whatever my original opinion might have been, I invariably came back to his in the end, as to the only true one. He led me to his easel, on which I saw the long neglected Stolen Child. "I had forgotten all about it," said Cornelius, "but finding this morning that I could not get on with Medora in the absence of Miriam, I looked amongst the old things, whence I fished out this. Now, admitting that it will not do for a picture, I think it will at least make an excellent study--eh?" "Yes, Cornelius, a very good study indeed." "Why not a picture?" he asked, frowning. "It is not good enough," I replied, confidently. "You silly little thing, you must have forgotten all about pictures and painting, to say so," rather hotly answered Cornelius. "Why a baby could tell you I never began anything that promised better. Oh, Daisy! what am I to think of your judgment? At all events," he added, softening down, "if you are not yet a first-rate critic, you are a first-rate sitter. So get ready. You need not mind about your Gipsy attire; all I want is the face and attitude." I looked at the picture, drew back a few steps, and placed myself in the old position. "The very thing," cried Cornelius, delighted. "Oh, Daisy, you are invaluable to me." He began at once, and worked hard until breakfast, during which he could speak of nothing but his Stolen Child. "A much better subject than Medora," he said, decisively; "there has been too much of Byron's heroines." "Do you mean to throw it of one side?" asked Kate. "Oh no, I hope to have both pictures ready for next year's Academy; pressed for time, I shall work all the harder and the better, Kate." "Which will you finish first?" "The Stolen Child." "Well," said Kate, very quietly, "I have a fancy that it will be Medora." "How can it? Miriam is away for two months, you know." "Yes, but I have a fancy the sea-air will not agree with her," continued Kate, in the same quiet way. Cornelius looked at his sister with a somewhat perplexed air. "I don't know anything about that," he said, at length; "but I can go on with the Stolen Child, and I hope to go on quickly too, Daisy sits so well, you know." "I know she is as bad as you are; look at her swallowing down her tea as fast as she can, to be in time." "She is a good little thing," he replied, patting my neck, "though I cannot say she yet thoroughly knows what constitutes a good picture. Don't hurry, Daisy; there is plenty of time." "But I am quite ready," I replied eagerly. "So am I; let us see who shall be upstairs first." "Cornelius, how can you be such a boy?" began Kate; I lost the rest, I had started up, and was hastening upstairs all out of breath. Cornelius, who could have outstripped me with ease, followed with pretended eagerness, and laughed at my triumph. "I was first," I cried from the landing, and flushed and breathless I looked round at him, as he stood on the staircase a few steps below me: he gave me a pleased and surprised look. "Why, that child would be quite pretty if she had a colour," he observed to himself; "poor little thing!" he added as he came up and stood by me, "I wish I could keep that bloom on your little pale face: but it is already going--the more's the pity!" "Indeed," I replied, "it is no pity at all, for the pale face is much the best for the picture." This disinterested sentiment did not in the least surprise Cornelius, who was too much devoted to his painting to think anything too good for it, or any sacrifice too great. He confessed the pale face would make the picture more pathetic, and was not astonished at my preferring it on that account. We remained in the studio nearly the whole day. Kate, who did not seem much pleased at this return to our old habits, significantly inquired in the evening how much I had learned. "Nothing." replied Cornelius; "but to make up for it, I will help her; we shall study together, so she will learn her lessons and repeat them at the same time." "That will be tedious, Cornelius." "She gives me her days; I may well give her my evenings." "And your letter?" "I shall sit up." "Poor fellow!" compassionately said Kate, "what between painting, teaching, and love, your hands are full." CHAPTER XIX. For three months and more, Cornelius had neglected painting; he now returned to it with tenfold ardour. I have often, since then, wondered at the strange mistake Miriam committed in leaving him, and thinking she had weaned him from his art; his passion for it was a part of his nature, and not to be taken up or laid down at will. She was as much deceived with regard to me. Cornelius was too fond of me in his heart, to give me up so readily as she had imagined. He liked me, but besides this I think he also felt unwilling to lose my deep and ardent love for himself. He knew better than any one its force and sincerity, and it is dangerously sweet to tenderness, pride, and self- love, to be master of another creature's heart, as he was of mine. It was when I had least chance of winning him back, when I was removed from his sight, when he appeared to neglect me, when he might be supposed to have forgotten me, and he seemed no longer called upon to trouble himself with me, that he humbled his pride before my grandfather, to obtain again the child he had slighted. I doubt if anything ever cost him more; I know that this proof of faithful affection effaced every past unkindness. It was thus, when Miriam no doubt thought my day over, that unexpectedly, and as the most natural tiling, he fetched and brought me home. His temper, though yielding and easy in appearance, was in reality most obstinate and pertinacious. He seemed to give in, but he ever came back to his old feeling or opinion, and that too with an unconsciousness of his offence which must have been most irritating. In spite of the hints of Kate, I am sure he had not the faintest suspicion that, in devoting himself to painting or in bringing me home, he had done that which could annoy Miriam. Her letters, of course, expressed nothing but approbation of the changes that had taken place in her absence. In order, I suppose, to breed in me a kindly feeling towards his mistress, Cornelius took care to read to me every passage in which I was mentioned as "the dear child," and all such sentiments as "I am charmed to think dear little Daisy is again with you," etc. In one sense, this was useless; in the other it was unnecessary. It was useless, because my feelings towards Miss Russell could not change on account of a few kind words in which I had no faith. It was unnecessary, because not hatred, but jealousy, was what I felt against her; nothing could and did mollify me so much as her absence. So long as she stayed away, I did not envy her in the least the acknowledged preference of Cornelius. Every evening when he sat down to write, I brought him of my own accord pen, ink, and paper, and in the morning I ran unbidden to fetch him his letter. I could even, when I saw him read it with evident delight, participate in his pleasure, little as I loved her from whom it came. My love was very ardent, but it was very pure; from my dawning youth it caught perhaps something of passion, but it also kept all the innocence of my childhood, scarcely left behind. Cornelius, I believe, felt this, and as there is nothing more delightful than to inspire or feel a pure affection, I can now understand why he found a charm which Kate could not feel, in yielding to this. Often in our moments of relaxation when I sat by him on the couch, he would turn to me with a smile, and, stooping, leave on my brow a kiss as innocent as it was light, feeling, perhaps,--what I never felt, for I never thought of it--that he was now receiving the purest affection he could ever hope to inspire, and feeling the most disinterested tenderness he ever could hope to feel for child or maiden not of his blood. I was growing older, more able to understand him, more fit to be his companion, and this might be the reason that he now became more kind and friendly than ever he had been. Nothing could exceed his care of me: absorbed in his picture though he might seem, he was quick to detect in me the least sign of weariness, and imperative in exacting the rest I was loath to take. For the sate of the air he made me go down to the garden and often accompanied me. I remember well one August afternoon, warm and breezy, when sitting together on the bench that stood by the porch, we looked from within the cool shadow of the house and through the air quivering with heat, on the ardent sunshine that seemed to vivify every object on which it touched. The garden flowers around us had that vivid brilliancy of hue of which the shade deprives them, to lend them, it is true, a more pensive grace; even the old sun-dial wore a gay look, and seemed to mark the hour as if it cared not for the passing of time. Every glittering leaf of the two poplars lightly trembled and appeared instinct with being; the garden- door stood open, and gave a bright though narrow glimpse of the lane, with its yellow path, its low green hedge, and beyond it a blue line of horizon. There was no scenery, no landscape, scarcely even that picturesque grace which every-day objects sometimes wear, but with that warm sunshine, that dazzling light and air so transparently clear, none could look and say that there was not beauty. For if Summer possesses not the green hope of Spring, the brown, meditative loveliness of Autumn, it has a glow, a fullness, a superabundance of life quite its own. Earth is truly living and animate then; she and the sun have it all their way, and seem to rejoice--he in his power and strength--she in her life and beauty. "'Faith, this is pleasant!" observed Cornelius, throwing himself back on the bench, "a summer's day never can be too hot or too long--eh, Daisy?" "I suppose not, Cornelius, but I hope it is not for me you are staying here, because I am quite rested." "So you want me to go up and work." "You know, Cornelius, you often say there is nothing like painting pictures." "No more there is; and you must learn and paint pictures too. Well, you do not look transported." Nor was I. My few attempts at drawing had convinced me that Nature had not intended me to shine in Art. "What do I want to paint pictures for?" I asked. "You do; that is enough." "But to be my pupil?" "Yes, that would be pleasant." "To work in the same studio; have an easel--" "Near yours. Yes, Cornelius, I should like that." "Yes," said a very sweet, but very cold voice, "the artist is loved better than his art." We both looked up to the back-parlour window above us, whence the voice proceeded. Miriam was standing there in the half-shadow of the room; her fair head was bare; her cashmere scarf fell back from her graceful shoulders; one hand held the light lace bonnet which she had taken off, the other, ungloved and as transparently fair as alabaster, rested on the dark iron bar of the balcony. She looked down at us, smiling from above, calm, like a beautiful image in her frame. Cornelius looked up, gave a short joyous laugh, and lightly bounding over the three stone steps, he vanished under the ivied porch, and was by her side in a minute. "Oh!" he exclaimed, and the very sound of his voice betrayed his delight, "I did not expect you for weeks yet." "My aunt is still at Hastings; but I was obliged to leave, the air made me so unwell." "And you never told me." "Why alarm you?" I waited to hear no more I had seen Cornelius leading her away from the window into the back part of the room, and Miriam with a half-smile yielding. I had no wish to be a check upon them, so I rose and slipped upstairs to the studio. I sat down on the couch, trembling with emotion. She was come back, and with her, alas! as the evil train of some dark sorceress, came back all my old feelings. The very sound of her voice had roused them every one. I heard them and listened with terror, for, taught by bitter experience, I knew that, evil in themselves, they could work me nothing but evil. I remembered with a sickening heart all the bitterness which had been raised between Cornelius and me,--his angry looks, his chiding, our separation. I remembered also his goodness in bringing me back, his generosity in asking me for no promise of amendment, but in trusting to my good feeling and good sense, and throwing myself on God, as on Him who alone could assist me in this extremity of human weakness, I felt rather than uttered a passionate prayer for aid,--a cry for strength to resist temptation. I had not long been in the studio, when the door opened and the lovers entered. I believe Cornelius was a little apprehensive as to how I might behave to Miriam, for rather hurriedly leading her to the easel, "See how hard I have been working," he said: "in the absence of Medora, I took to the Gipsy Family." "You mean to the Stolen Child: where is she?" "Here I am, Miss Russell." I replied in a low tone. I was now standing by her, and as I spoke I slipped my hand into hers. She started as if some noxious insect had touched her; but as Cornelius had seen this action of mine, she smiled and said-- "Do you really give me your hand? The next thing will be a kiss, I suppose." I thought she was asking me to kiss her. I conquered my repugnance, and raised my face; she hesitated, then stooped, but her lips never touched my cheek. "Daisy and I are quite friends now, you see," she observed, turning to Cornelius. "Yes, I see," he replied, looking charmed. "I always told you these childish feelings would pass away," she continued, laying her hand on my head. He smiled in her face, a happy, admiring smile. "Resume your work," she said, sitting down; "Miss O'Reilly has asked me to spend the day." "But not here, Miriam; think of the smell of the paint." "I do not feel it yet, so pray go on with that Stolen Child. What wonderful sweetness and pathos you have put in her face!" "Do you think so? I mean, do you really think so?" cried Cornelius quite delighted; "well, Daisy has a very sweet face, I mean in expression, and to tell you the truth," he added in the simplicity of his heart, "I have done my best to improve it; I am glad you noticed that." "Then resume your work; you know I like to look on." He said, "Not yet," and as he sat down by her with the evident intention of lingering away a few hours, I left them. I was neither detained nor recalled. I behaved with sufficient fortitude. Unbidden, I gave up to Miriam my place at table, and in the evening, of my own accord, I went to Kate for my lessons, whilst Cornelius and his betrothed walked up and down in the garden. I saw him once more engrossed with her, and, whatever I felt, I betrayed no sign of pettish jealousy. When she left us, I was the first to bid her good-night. Cornelius, without knowing how much these trifles cost me, looked pleased and approving. He also looked--but with this I had nothing to do--very happy. Miriam had left us, and previous to going to bed we sat all three in the parlour by the open window, through which fell on the floor a soft streak of pale moonlight; I had silently resumed my place by Cornelius, who had laid his hand caressingly on my head, when Kate suddenly observed-- "You see the sea-air did not agree with Miss Russell." "True, and yet she looks so well; more beautiful than ever." "I suppose you will be able to get on with Medora." "Not if the paint continues to affect Miriam." "Perhaps it will not," quietly answered Kate; "it did not give her those dreadful nervous headaches before Daisy went to Miss Clapperton's; she does not seem to have suffered today; ay, ay, Medora will soon be on the easel." "I don't want her to be," rather hastily replied Cornelius, "I want to go on with my Stolen Child. I was looking at Medora the other day, and, spite of all the labour it cost me, I found something unnatural about it." "Well, I cannot agree with you there," replied Kate; "I think the way in which Medora's look seems to pierce the horizon for the faintest sign of her lover's ship, is painfully natural." Cornelius did not answer. There was a change in his face--of what nature no one perhaps could have told; but he suddenly turned to me and said-- "Why did you not bring your books to me this evening? Mind, I will not have more infidelities of that nature." He laughed, but the jest was forced; the laugh was not real. He looked like one who vainly seeks to brave the sting of some secret pain, and as I sat by him he bent on me a dreary, vacant look, that saw me not; but in a few minutes, almost a few seconds, he was himself again. "No," he observed in his usual tone, "the other picture is much the best, and with it I must now go on." In that opinion and decision Miriam fully concurred. Every day she came up to the studio for awhile, and she never left without having admired the Stolen Child, and, though very gently, depreciated Medora. One day in the week that followed her return, as she stood behind Cornelius looking at him painting, she was more than usually eloquent. "There is so much thought, sadness, and poetry about that figure," she said,--"it expresses so well civilized intelligence captive amongst those half-savage Gipsies, that I never look at it without a new feeling of admiration." I detected the ill-repressed smile of proud pleasure which lit up the whole countenance of Cornelius, but he carelessly replied-- "I am glad you think so." Miriam continued. "The difference between this and Medora is even to me quite astonishing." Cornelius reddened; she resumed-- "One is as earnest as the other is indifferent." "Indifferent!" he interrupted; "well, you know I do not think so highly of Medora as of this; yet Kate, who is no partial judge, confesses that there is earnestness in the look and attitude of the figure." "Yes, but rather cold, that is to say, calm," quietly replied Miriam; "do you not yourself think so?" He said, "Yes," and smiled a somewhat forced abstracted smile, continued his work for some time without speaking, then suddenly leaving it by, he went and fetched Medora. "Come, where is that great difference?" he asked resolutely. "I feel it," was her quiet answer. He looked at her, and, without insisting, put away the painting. The matter seemed dismissed from his mind, but the next morning, when I went up to the studio a little after breakfast, I found Medora on the easel and Cornelius looking at it intently. Without turning to me, he called me to his side. "Now Daisy," he said, laying his hand on my shoulder, "tell me frankly, candidly, if you think Medora so very inferior to the other one." "No, indeed, Cornelius," I replied eagerly. "She is always abusing it." he continued in an annoyed tone; "yesterday evening in the garden she hoped I would not think of finishing and exhibiting it." "What a shame!" I exclaimed indignantly. "No, my dear; Miriam does well to give me her candid opinion; I hope it is what you will always do." "But, Cornelius," I ventured to object, "do you think Miss Russell knows much about painting?" "To tell you the truth," confidently answered Cornelius, "I do not think she does. She has natural taste, but no experience. Now you," he added, turning to me with a smile, "you, my pet, though such a child, know of painting about ten times as much as she does, and, although it would not do to say so to her, I could trust to your opinion ten times sooner than to hers." I was foolish enough to be pleased with this. "I hope," continued Cornelius, "to be able to improve her taste; in the meanwhile, I think, like you, Daisy, that Medora is almost equal to the Stolen Child." I had never said anything of the kind, but Cornelius was evidently convinced I had, and I knew not how to set him right. "Yes," he resumed, looking at the picture, "it improves as you look at it. That little bit of rock-work in the foreground is not amiss, is it, Daisy?" "It is just like the rocks at Leigh," I replied. "Is it though?" exclaimed Cornelius, chucking my chin, a sign of great pleasure, "I am glad of it; not that I care about the rocks, not a pin; but it is always satisfactory to know that one is true to nature, even in minor points. And so there were some like them at Leigh! Well, no matter; I gave of course my chief attention to the figure, and that I think is pretty well." He looked me in the face with the simplicity of a child; listened to my enthusiastic praise with evident gratification, and, with great _na?vet?_, confessed "that was just his own opinion." We were interrupted by the unexpected entrance of Miriam, who came earlier than usual. "There!" triumphantly exclaimed Cornelius, "the case is decided against you; I have appealed to Daisy, and like me she does not see so very great a difference between Medora and the Stolen Child." "Does she not?" carelessly replied Miriam, as she sat down without looking at the picture. "I see what it is," he said in a piqued tone, "you think I have not done you justice." "Nothing of the kind," she answered smiling. "Ah! if I did not fear to injure your health," reproachfully continued Cornelius, "I would soon show you that Medora could be made not quite unworthy of Miriam." "But really," she replied in her indolent way, "I only said it was a little calm." "Cold, Miriam. Ah! if you would only give me as a sitting the hour you spend here daily, how soon I could improve that cold Medora." She flatly refused; she could not think of letting him lay by his Stolen Child, that promised so well for so inferior a production as Medora. It was only after half an hours hard begging and praying, that Cornelius at length obtained her consent. He set to work that very instant,--she sat not one hour, but two; I looked on with the vague presentiment that Cornelius and I were very simple. Of course, though not at once, the Stolen Child was again laid aside for Medora. Cornelius said it made no difference, since he could finish the two pictures with ease for the ensuing year's Exhibition. Kate made no comment, but quietly asked if the smell of the paint had ceased to affect Miss Russell. "Oh dear, yes, quite," replied her brother with great candour. Cornelius was both good and great enough to afford a few unheroic weaknesses, such as paternal fondness for his pictures, and too generous a trust in the woman he loved, for him to suspect her of seeking to influence him by unworthy arts. I believe it was this simple and ingenuous disposition that made him be so much loved, and rendered those who loved him so lenient to his faults. He had his share of human frailties, but he yielded to them so naturally, that he never seemed degraded as are the would-be angels in their fall. Even then, and though youth is prompt and severe to judge those whom it sees imposed upon, I never could respect Cornelius less, for knowing him to be deceived. My old life now began anew in many of its trials, though not perhaps in all its bitterness. Miriam tried to deprive me of the teaching of Cornelius, and he, without even suspecting her intention, resisted it with the most provoking simplicity and unconsciousness. In vain she came in evening after evening as we sat down to the lessons, spoke to him, or disturbed me with her fixed look; the studies were not interrupted. One evening, as we sat by the open window of the front parlour, engaged as usual, Miriam, who had sat listening to us with great patience, observed, a little after Kate had left the room-- "How good and kind of you, Cornelius, to teach that child so devotedly! Many men would disdain the task, you know." "Think it foolish, perhaps?" he suggested. "I fear they would." "What fools they must be, Miriam!" he replied, smiling in her face. "You are wise to put yourself above their opinion." "As if I thought of their opinion!" he answered gaily. "Come, Daisy, parse me this: 'A certain great, unknown artist, once had a little girl. He was not ashamed to unbend his mighty mind by teaching her every evening. On one occasion, it is said, he actually disgraced himself so far as to kiss her.'" I was listening with upraised face. I got the kiss before I knew what he meant. But I was not going to be discomposed by such a trifle, and I parsed as if nothing had occurred. "Isn't she cool?" he said, turning to Miriam. "She improves wonderfully," replied his betrothed. "Does she not?" exclaimed Cornelius, who took a very innocent vanity in my progress; "I am quite proud of my pupil; and I have a system of my own--did you notice?" "Oh yes, in the parsing." "I don't mean that," he answered, reddening a little; "I mean a general system, a method,--the want of all education, you know." "Yes, very true." "Well," continued Cornelius, looking at me thoughtfully, and laying his hand on my head as he spoke; "I think that, thanks to this method, I shall, four or five years hence, be able to boast that I have helped to form the mind and character of an intellectual, sensible, and accomplished girl." "Four or five years hence!" sighed Miriam. Cornelius perhaps remembered the threat of death suspended over my whole youth, for he observed uneasily-- "Yes--I trust--I hope--Daisy, you must not learn so much!" He drew me nearer to him with a look and motion kinder than a caress, then said to Miriam-- "She looks pale." "It is only excitement; she is so anxious to please you. When she is near committing a mistake, she is quite agitated, poor child!" Miriam had struck the right chord at last. There was some truth in what she said. My desire to please Cornelius did agitate me a little, and this he knew. "She must go back to Kate," he hastily observed; "I won't have her so pale as that; and she must not study so much," he added, with increased anxiety, "she can always make up for lost time." In vain I endeavoured to keep my teacher, he was resolute; it was some comfort that the change sprang from no unkindness, and had been effected only by working on his affection for me. But even that change, such as it was, did not last for more than a week. One evening, after listening to Kate and me with evident impatience, Cornelius swept away the books from before her, sat down between us, and, informing his sister that her method was no good, he announced his intention of taking me once more under his own exclusive care. "My method is as good as any," tartly replied Kate, "but the pupil who frets for her first teacher cannot make much progress under the second." "Have you been fretting, Daisy?" asked Cornelius. I could not deny it; he smiled and caressed me. "If it were any use remonstrating," said Kate, who looked half pleased, half dissatisfied, "I should tell you, Cornelius, that you are very foolish; not to lose time, I simply say this--you have taken Daisy from me a second time, you may keep her." "I mean it," he answered gaily. At once he resumed his office. We had scarcely begun when Miriam entered. She came almost every evening, for as her aunt was still at Hastings, Cornelius never visited her. From the door I saw her look at us, as we sat at the table, his arm on the back of my chair, his bent face close to mine, with a mute, expressive glance. "Yes," said Cornelius, smiling, as he smoothed my hair, "I have got my pupil back again. The remedy was found worse than the disease." Miriam smiled too. She gave up the point and attempted no more to deprive me of my teacher, but I had to pay dear in the daytime for what I received in the evening. Whilst she sat for Medora, I studied or sewed. She said little to me, but every word bore its sting. Cornelius never detected the irony that lurked beneath the seeming praise and apparent kindness. She tormented me with impunity. There were so many points in which she could irritate my secret wound; for I was still intensely jealous of her, and though Cornelius and Kate thought me cured, she knew better. But suffering gives premature wisdom. I had entered my fourteenth year--I was no longer quite a child. When she made me feel, as she did almost daily, that I was plain, sallow, and sickly, my vanity smarted, but I reflected that Cornelius liked me in spite of these disadvantages, and I bore the insult silently; when however she made me see that Cornelius was devoted to her, that my place in his heart was as far removed from hers, as she was above me in years, beauty, and many gifts, I could scarcely bear it. That it should be so was bad enough, but to be taunted with it by the intruder who had come between him and me, wakened within me every emotion of anger and jealous grief; yet I had sufficient power over myself to control the outward manifestations of these feelings. Taught by the past, I mistrusted her. Weeks elapsed, and she could not make me fall into my old errors, or betray me into any outbreak of temper. But alas! even whilst I governed myself externally, I sought not to rule my heart, which daily grew more embittered against her. To this, and this only, I recognize it--I owed what happened. But before proceeding further, I cannot help recording a little incident which surprised me then, and which, when I look back on those times, still gives me food for thought. The blind nurse of Miriam had returned with her from Hastings. I believe Miss Russell never moved without this old woman, to whom she was devotedly kind: she humoured her as she would have humoured a child, and, amongst other things, indulged her in the homely fashion of sitting at the front door of the house, in the narrow strip of garden that divided it from the Grove. It had been a favourite habit of hers to sit thus years back at the door of her cottage home; sightless though she was, she liked to sit so still; in the absence of old Miss Russell she did so freely. We too had a little front garden, divided from that of our neighbours by a low trellis. I was seldom in it, unless to water the few flowers it contained. I was thus engaged one calm evening, when the old woman sat alone at her door. She was wrinkled and aged; yet she had a happy, childish face, as if in feelings as well as in years she had gently returned to a second infancy. I noticed that as I moved about she bent her head and listened attentively. "Do you want anything?" I asked, going up to the partition near which she sat. Her face brightened; she stretched out her hand, felt me, and smiled. "You are the little girl," she said eagerly. "Yes," I replied, "I am." "Is my blessed young lady with you?" "Miss Russell is in our garden with Cornelius." "I shall never see him," she sighed, "but I like his voice; he is very handsome, isn't he?" "Kate says so, but I don't know anything about it." "Is he kind to you?" "He is very good to me and every one." "That's right;" she said eagerly; "better goodness than gold any day." "Cornelius will have gold too," I observed, piqued that he should be thought poor; "he will earn a great deal of money and will be quite rich." The old woman looked delighted and astonished. "I always said my blessed young lady would make a grand match," she said; "and so he is to be rich! God bless the good young gentleman!" "He will be quite a great man," I resumed, "a Knight perhaps, or a Baronet." She raised her hands. "Ah well!" she sighed, after brooding for a few moments over my words, "he will have a blessed young lady for his wife, as good as she's handsome; and," she added, turning towards me her sightless eyes and gently laying her hand on my head, "and happy's the little girl that'll be with my dear young lady." CHAPTER XX. Matters had gone on thus for about a month, when Cornelius sold his Happy Time. Kate made him promise not to be extravagant; the only act of folly of which he rendered himself guilty was not a very expensive one. One morning, when Miriam came to the studio, to sit as usual, Cornelius produced a pair of morocco cases; each contained a silver filagree bracelet: he asked her to choose one, and accept it. She was sitting in the attire and attitude of Medora; he stood by her, his present in his hand. "Must I really choose?" she said. "What will Miss O'Reilly say?" "Oh! the other is not for Kate, but for Daisy," he quietly answered. I saw a scarcely perceptible change on her face, but she abstained from comment, gave an indifferent look to the two bracelets, and chose one, saying briefly-- "That one." Cornelius placed the rejected bracelet on the table before me, with a careless-- "There, my dear, that is for you." Then, without heeding my thanks, he devoted all his attention to the delightful task of fastening on the beautiful wrist of his mistress the bracelet she had accepted. He was a long time about it. The clasp, he said, was not good: she allowed him to do and undo it as often as he pleased. When he had at length succeeded, she looked down at her arm and said, indolently, "How very pretty it is!" "The hand, or the bracelet?" he asked, smiling. "The bracelet, of course." "Do you really think so?" he exclaimed, looking much pleased; "I was afraid you did not like it: it is of little value, you know." "It is very pretty," she said again. "Do you like jewelry?" he inquired, eagerly. "In a general way, no." He looked disappointed. "Why don't you like diamonds, pearls, and rubies?" he observed, with smiling reproach, "that I might have the pleasure of thinking--cannot give them to her now, but I shall earn them for her some day." "Yes, it is a pity," she replied, with gentle irony, "but I have a quarrel with you: why have you forgotten your sister?" "Forgotten Kate! she never wears jewels, Miriam." She did not reply. He remained by her awhile longer, then set to work. It was very kind of Cornelius to have made me this present, and yet it only irritated the secret jealousy it was meant to soothe. He had given the two bracelets so differently. They were of equal value, perhaps of equal beauty; but she had had the choice of the two; the rejected one had been for me. He had scarcely placed mine before me, and fastened hers on himself with lingering tenderness. He had carelessly heard or heeded my murmured thanks; she had not thanked him, yet he had looked charmed because she negligently approved his gift. In short, in the very thing which he had intended to please me, Cornelius had unconsciously betrayed the strong and natural preference that was my sole, my only true torment. His gift had lost its grace. I put on the bracelet, looked at it on my arm, then put it away again in its case, and read whilst she sat and he painted. Towards noon she left us for an hour. Cornelius followed her out on the landing; he had left the door ajar, and, involuntarily. I overheard the close of their whispered conference. It referred to me. Cornelius was asking if I did not look very pale. I had been rather poorly of late, and he was kindly anxious about me. "To me she looks the same as usual," quietly answered Miriam: "she always is sallow, and being so plain makes her look ill." "Why, that is true," replied Cornelius, seemingly comforted by this reasoning. What more they said I heard not; my blood flowed like fire. I was plain, I knew it well enough, but was he, of all others, to be told of it daily, until at length I heard it, an acknowledged fact falling from his lips? Was it something so unusual to be plain? Was I the first plain girl there had ever been? Should I leave none of the race after me? I felt the more exasperated that the tone of Miriam's voice told me she had not meant to be overheard by me. She had not spoken to taunt me: she had simply stated a fact that could not, it seemed, be disputed. Such reflections are pleasant at no age, but in youth, with its want of independence, of self- reliance, with its sensitive and fastidious self-love, they are insupportable. Cornelius, unconscious of the storm that was brooding within me, had re- entered the studio and resumed his work. He seemed in a mood as pleased and happy as mine was bitter and discontented. He worked for some time in total silence, then suddenly called me to his side. I left the table, went up to him and stood by him with my book in my hand, waiting for what he had to say. He laid his hand on my shoulder, and, with his eyes intently fixed on Medora, "How is it getting on?" he asked. "It will soon be finished, Cornelius," I replied, and I wanted to go back to my place, but he detained me. "You need not be in such a hurry. Look at that face--is it not beautiful?" He could not have put a more unfortunate question. He looked at the picture, but I knew he thought of the woman. I did not answer. He turned round, surprised at my silence. "Don't you think it beautiful?" he asked incredulously. "No, Cornelius, I do not," I answered, going back to my place as I spoke. I only spoke as I thought; I had long ceased to think Miss Russell handsome. Cornelius became scarlet, and said, rather indignantly, "It would be more frank to say you dislike her, Daisy." "I never said I liked her," I answered, stung at this reproach of insincerity, when my great fault was being too sincere. I said this, though I fully expected it would make him very angry, but he only looked down at me with a smile of pity. "So you are still jealous," he observed quietly; "poor child! if you knew how foolish, how ridiculous such jealousy seems to those who see it!" I would rather Cornelius had struck me than that he had said this; I could not bear it, and burying my face in my hands, I burst into tears. He composedly resumed his work, and said in his calmest tones-- "If I were you, Daisy, I would not cry in that pettish way, but I would give up a foolish feeling, and try and mend. Think of it, my poor child; it is an awful thing to hate." My tears ceased; I looked up, and for once I turned round and retaliated the accusation. "Cornelius," I said, "I do not hate Miss Russell half as much as she hates me." "She hate you!" he exclaimed, with indignant pity, "poor child!" "And if she does not hate me," I cried, giving free vent to the gathered resentment of weeks and months,--"if she does not hate me, Cornelius, why was she so glad when she thought me disfigured with the small-pox, that she should come up to look at me? Why did she give me a dress in which I looked so ill, that you know Kate has never allowed me to wear it? Why did she make you send me to school? Why did she come back from Hastings and make you leave by the Stolen Child? Why did she want you to discontinue teaching me? Why is there never a day but she reminds you that I am sickly, plain, and sallow?" I rose as I enumerated my wrongs; Cornelius looked at me like one utterly confounded. "You say I am jealous of her," I continued, gazing at him through gathering tears; "I am, Cornelius, but I am not half so jealous as she is, and yet I love you twice as well as she does. For your sake I would not vex her, and she does all she can to make mc wretched. I could bear your liking her much and me a little; but if she could she would not let you like me at all. If you say a kind word to me or kiss me, she looks as if it made her sick; she hates me, Cornelius, she hates me with her whole heart." Tears choked my utterance. Cornelius sighed profoundly. "Poor child," he said, with a look of great pity, "how can you labour under such strange delusions?" I looked at him; he did not seem angry, very far from it. Alas! it was but too plain; every word I had uttered had passed for the ravings of an insane jealousy. Cornelius sat down and called me to his side. "Come here," he said kindly, "and let us reason together." "If you knew." he continued taking both my hands in his, "how thoroughly blind you are, you would regret speaking thus. How can you imagine that Miriam, who is so good, so kind, should--hate you? Promise me that you will dismiss the idea." "I cannot--I know better--there is not a day but she torments me." "Poor child! you are your own tormentor. She torment you! look at that beautiful face, and ask yourself, is it possible?" "Beautiful!" I echoed, "I don't think she is beautiful, Cornelius." "Yes, I know," he composedly replied, "but that is because you don't like her." "No more I do," I exclaimed passionately, "nor anything of or about her: no--not even your picture, Cornelius!" He dropped my hands; rose and looked down at me, flushed and angry. "You need not tell me that," he said indignantly, "the look of aversion and hate you have just cast at that picture, shows sufficiently that though the power to do the original some evil and injury may be wanting, the will is not." He turned away from me, then came back. "But remember this," he said severely, and laying his hand on my shoulder as he spoke, "that though you have presumed to reveal to me a feeling of which you should blush to acknowledge the existence, I will not allow that feeling to betray itself in any manner, however slight. Do you hear?" "Yes, Cornelius," I replied, stung at the unmerited accusation and uncalled-for prohibition; "but if I am so wicked, can you prevent me from showing it?" I did not mean that I would show it; but he took my words in their worst sense, for his eyes lit as he answered-- "I shall see if I cannot prevent it." I was too proud and too much hurt to enter on a justification. I left the room; at the door I met Miriam, who gave me a covert look as she entered the studio. I went to my room and remained there until dinner-time. Cornelius took no notice of me; Miriam, who often dined with us, was, on the other hand, very kind and attentive. I saw she had got it all out from him. Kate behaved like one who knew and suspected nothing; admired the bracelets, and seeing that I wanted to linger with her in the parlour after the two had left it, she gaily told me to be off, for that she wanted none of my company, as she was going out. I obeyed so far as leaving the parlour went, but I did not enter the studio. I took refuge in my own room, there to lament my sin and imprudence. I knew well enough how wrong were the feelings I had expressed to Cornelius, and better still how a few passionate words had undone a month's patience and silent endurance. I stayed in my room until dusk; as daylight waned, I heard Miriam leave and go down. I waited for awhile, then softly stole up to the studio. I entered it with a beating heart, thinking to make my peace with Cornelius. The room was vacant. I sat down by the table, hoping he might return, but he did not. I lingered there, that if he called me down to tea, he might thus give me an opportunity of speaking to him. He did call me, but from the first floor. "What are you doing in the studio?" he asked, rather sharply when I went down. "I went up to speak to you, Cornelius." "And you therefore looked for me in a place where I never am at this hour! Say you went up there to indulge in a fit of sulkiness, and do not equivocate." I could not answer, I was too much hurt by his unkind tone and manner. Of course I ventured no attempt at reconciliation. It was Miriam who made the tea. The meal was silent and soon over. The lovers went out in the garden. I remained alone. Ere long Deborah looked in. "I am going out, Miss," she said, "is there anything wanted?" I replied that she had better ask her master. The back-parlour door and window stood open. I heard her question and his answer, "Nothing;" then she left, and I saw her go down the Grove. It was getting quite dark, yet Cornelius and Miriam lingered out together. I fancied they were taking a walk in the lanes; but on going to the back-parlour window, I saw them both standing by the sun-dial. The moon shone full upon them, on her especially; and even I, seeing her thus, was bitterly obliged to confess the beauty I had vainly denied in the morning. She still wore the white robe of Medora, and, standing by the sun-dial with her magnificent bare arm resting upon it, she looked like a beautiful statue of repose and silence. Cornelius stood by her, holding her other hand clasped in his, but silent too. "You have lost it again," he said at length. "Look for it," was her careless reply. He stooped, picked up something from the grass; she held out her arm to him with indolent grace. I suppose it was the bracelet he fastened on. In the act, he raised unchecked, that fair arm to his lips. I had not come there to watch them; besides, my heart was swelling fast within me. I turned away and again went to the front parlour. I sat by the windows. Ere long I heard some one in the passage; then the front door was opened; I saw Miriam pass slowly through the front garden, gather a rose, open the gate, and turn to her own door. Now at length I could speak to Cornelius. I ran out eagerly to the garden; he was not there. I called him; he did not answer. I went up-stairs and knocked at his room door; not there either was he; I sought the studio and peeped in with the same result. It was plain too he was gone out, and that I was alone in the house. I was not afraid, but felt the disappointment, and I sat down at the head of the staircase in a dreary, desolate mood. I had not been there more than a few minutes, when I heard a step coming up which I recognized as that of Cornelius. "Is that you, Daisy?" he asked, stopping short and speaking sharply. "Yes, Cornelius." "What are you doing here?" "I thought you were here, Cornelius." "You knew I was out." "No, Cornelius, I did not." "It is very odd; Miriam heard you answering me when I asked you from the garden if Deborah was come back." "Miss Russell must have been mistaken, Cornelius. I did not hear you, and I did not answer. I came here to look for you; indeed I did." "Very well," he replied, carelessly, "let me pass; I want to go up." I rose, but as I did so, I said again, "It was to look for you I came up here, Cornelius." I hoped he would ask me what I wanted with him, but he only replied, very coldly, "I never said the contrary," and he passed by me to enter the studio, where he began seeking for something. "What have you done with the matchbox?" he at length asked impatiently. "I never touched it. Cornelius: but if you want anything, you know I can find it for you without a light." He did not answer, but continued searching up and down. I pressed my services. "Let me look for it, Cornelius, I do not want a light, you know." "Thank you," he drily replied, "I have what I want now; but I must request you no longer to meddle with my books. I have just found on the floor the volume I left on the table. It puzzles me to understand what you can want in the studio at this hour." Thus speaking, he shut the door, locked it, and, putting the key in his pocket, he went downstairs without addressing another word to me. I felt so disconcerted, that every wish for explanation vanished; but even had it remained, the opportunity was not mine. When I followed him downstairs, I found him in the parlour with Kate, who was wondering "where Deborah could be?" "How is it you said Deborah was in?" asked Cornelius, turning to me. "I never said so, Cornelius." "Miss Russell heard you." "She cannot have heard me," I replied, indignantly; "I don't know why you will not believe me as well as her." Cornelius gave me a severe look. "You were not accused," he said, "and need not have justified yourself in that tone." Kate gave us a quick glance, and said abruptly-- "I am astonished at Deborah; you might have wanted to go out." "I did go out," replied Cornelius, "thinking she was in; but I only stayed out a few minutes." "Did Daisy remain alone?" "I suppose so, for as I went out by the back door, Miriam left by the front; but the neighbourhood is safe, and Daisy is surely not so silly as to be afraid." "She looks very pale," observed Kate: "what have you been doing to her?" "What has she been doing to me?" he coldly answered. Kate sighed, and laying her hand on my shoulder, she looked down at me compassionately. "Go to bed, child," she said kindly. I did not ask better. She kissed me, and again said I was very pale; her brother never raised his eyes from his book. I thought him unkind and myself ill-used. I was proud, even with him; I left the room without bidding him good-night, and went to bed without seeking a reconciliation. I awoke the next morning in a miserable, unhappy mood. Kate noticed my downcast looks and sullen replies at breakfast, and said, rather sharply-- "I should like to know what is the matter with you, child." I did not answer, but looked sulkily down at my cup; when I chanced to raise my eyes, they met the gaze of Cornelius fastened intently on my face. I felt my colour come and go. With a sense of pain I averted my look from his. Immediately after breakfast, and without asking me to accompany him, he went up to his studio; he had not been there long, and I was still listening to the lecture of Kate, who reproved me for being so ill-tempered, when we heard the voice of her brother, calling out from above in a tone that sounded strange-- "Daisy!" I obeyed the summons. Cornelius stood on the landing waiting for me. He made me enter the studio, then followed me in and closed the door. I looked at him and stood still; his brow was pale and contracted; his brown eyes, so pleasant and good-humoured, burned with a lurid light; his lips were white and thin, and quivered slightly. Never had I seen him so. He took me by the hand--he led me to his easel. "Look!" he said, in a low tone. But I could not take my eyes from his face. "Look!" he said again. I obeyed mechanically, and started back with dismay. Where the fair, intent face of Medora had once looked towards the blue horizon, now appeared an unsightly blotch. I looked incredulously at first; at length I said-- "How did it happen, Cornelius?" "You mean, who did it?" he replied. "Did any one do it, then?" I asked, looking up in his face. He folded his arms across his breast, and looked down at me. "You ask if any one did it!" he exclaimed. "Yes, Cornelius, for who could do it, when you know there was no one in the house but ourselves?" "Very true, no one but ourselves," he answered, with a smile of which I did not understand the full meaning. "It could not be Kate, for she was out?" "And so was Deborah," I quickly suggested. "Ay, and Miss Russell left at the same time with me." "And I am quite sure no one entered the studio whilst you were out, Cornelius, for I was sitting at the head of the staircase." "And I am quite as sure no one entered it at night, for I had the key in my pocket." "Then you see that no one did it," I replied, looking up at him. "I see," he said, laying his hand on my shoulder, and bending his look on mine,--"I see no such thing, Daisy. I see that only two persons can have done the deed--you or I--I'll leave you to guess which it was." "And did you really do it, Cornelius?" I exclaimed, quite bewildered. The eyes of Cornelius kindled, his lip trembled, but turning away from me as if in scorn of wrath-- "Leave the room," he said almost calmly. I looked at him--the truth flashed across me--Cornelius accused me of having done it. I felt stunned, far more with wonder than with indignation. "Did you hear me?" he asked, with the same dead calmness in his tone. "Leave the room!" and his extended hand pointed to the door. But I did not move. "Cornelius," I said, "do you mean that I did it?" "Leave the room," was his only answer, and he turned from me. "Cornelius," I repeated, following him, "do you mean that I did it?" "Leave the room," he said, without looking at me. "Cornelius, did you say I did it?" I asked a third time, and I placed myself before him, so as to make him stop short. I was not angry--I was scarcely moved--I spoke quietly, but I felt that were he to kill me the next minute, I should and would compel a reply, and I did compel one. "Yes," he answered, with a sort of astonished wrath at my hardihood; "yes, I do say you did it." I drew back a step or two from him, so that my upraised look met his. "Cornelius," I said, very earnestly, "I did not do it." "Ah! you did not," he exclaimed. "Oh no," I replied, and I shook my head and smiled at so strange a mistake. "Ah!" echoed Cornelius in the same tone, "you did not--who did, then?" "I do not know, Cornelius, how should I?" "How should you? Was it not proved awhile back only two persons could have done it, you or I, and since it so chances that I am not the person, does it not follow that you are?" I looked at him incredulously: it seemed to me that I had but to deny to be acquitted. I fancied he had not understood me. "Cornelius," I objected, "did you not hear me say it was not I?" "I heard you--what about it?" "Why that it cannot be me." "Who else?" "I do not know." "Was not the picture safe when I left it here?" "Yes, Cornelius, for I was here after you left, and I saw it." "You confess it?" "Why not, Cornelius?" "You confess that you were up here after I went down with Miriam, and that you remained here until tea-time, when I called you down myself." "Yes, Cornelius, I was up here." "Did you not remain alone in the house when every one else was out of the way?" "Yes, Cornelius, I did." "When I came back did I not find you at the door of this room?" "Yes, Cornelius; sitting at the head of the staircase." "Did you not endeavour to prevent me from getting a light?" "I said, Cornelius, I could find what you were looking for, without one." "And you said so twice--twice." "I believe I did, twice, as you say." "I did, scarce knowing why, an unusual thing--I locked the door, I took the key. Do you grant that whatever was done must have been done before then?" "Yes, Cornelius." I spoke and felt like one in a dream. Each answer fell mechanically from my lips; and yet I knew that with every word of assent, the net of evidence I could not so much as attempt to disprove, drew closer around me. "Well," said Cornelius, in the voice of a judge sitting over a criminal, "what have you to say against facts proved by your own confession?" "Nothing, save that I did not do it." I spoke faintly; for my head swam and I felt so giddy that I was obliged to take hold of the back of a chair not to fall. Cornelius saw this; he turned away abruptly--he walked up and down the room--he hesitated; at length he stopped before me, took my unresisting hand in his, made me sit down on the couch, and sat down by me. "Come," he said in a much milder tone, "I see what it is, I have terrified you--you are afraid to confess--that is it--is it not?" "No, Cornelius." "What is it then? dread of punishment?" I shook my head. "Shame?" he said in a low tone. "No? what then?" "It is that I did not do it, Cornelius." He dropped my hand. "Take care!" he said in a low voice, menacing spite of its seeming gentleness; "take care! I have been patient, but I can be provoked. I may forgive an act of passion, of jealousy, of envy even, but I cannot forgive a lie." I loved him, but my blood rose at this. "Am I a liar?" I asked, looking full in his face; "have I ever been one?" "Never," he replied, with some emotion, "and I will not consider this an act of deception, but as the result of fear, obstinacy, or mistaken pride. I will even add that I consider you incapable of deceit, for yesterday you betrayed your feelings concerning this picture and the original with singular imprudence, and both last night and this morning you have carried in your face the consciousness of your guilt. And now listen to me. You have defaced the work I prized, the image of her whom I loved; you have irritated, tormented, injured me, and yet I forgive you. Nay more; neither Kate nor Miriam shall know what has happened. I will spare one whom, spite of so many faults, I cannot help loving, this humiliation, and all on one condition--an easy one--confess." "I cannot," I exclaimed passionately, "how can I?" He interrupted me. "Take care!" he said again, "do not persist. I speak calmly, but I am still very angry, Daisy. Do not presume--do not deny." Oh yes! he was still very angry. His contracted brow--his restless look, that burned with ill-repressed fire--his lip, which he gnawed impatiently, told me that his wrath was only sleeping beneath seeming calmness. He would not let me deny, I could not confess; a strange sort of despair and recklessness seized me. I drew nearer to him. I flung my arms around his neck and laid my head on his bosom, feeling that if his wrath were to fall on me, it should at least strike me there. He did not put me away--very far from it--he drew me closer to him. "Oh yes!" he said, looking down at me, "I am very fond of you, Daisy. Yes, I love you very much--you need not come here to tell me so--I know it, and never know it better than when you vex me: if you were to die to- morrow, I should grieve for days, weeks, and months, but for all that I am very angry, and you will do well not to provoke me." Why did I find so strange a charm in his very wrath, that I could not resist the impulse which made me press my lips to his cheek? "Yes," he observed, quietly, "you may kiss me too; but do not trust to that--not even if I kiss you--I am very angry." "But you love me, Cornelius, you know you do; be as angry as you will, you cannot make me fear." "Yes, I love you--you perverse child!" he replied, with a strange look; "but for all that, know what you have to expect. Confess, and I forgive you freely. Deny, and you will find me as pitiless in my resentment, as I am now free in my forgiveness. I will keep you in my home, it is true, but I will banish you from my arms and from my heart. I can, Daisy! Yes, as surely as your arms are now around my neck and your cheek now lies to mine, as surely as I now give you this kiss, will I abide by what I say." He kissed me as he spoke, and very kindly too; yet his pale, determined face gave me not the faintest hope that I could move him. I looked at him, and he smiled, as with the consciousness of an unalterable resolve. This, then, was my fate--never more to be loved, cherished, or caressed by Cornelius. It rose before me in all its desolateness and gloom. One moment I felt tempted to yield, but conscience rose indignant, and pride spurned at the thought. I looked at Cornelius through gathering tears. I called him cruel, severe, and implacable in my heart, and yet I do not think I had ever loved him half so well; perhaps because the conviction on which he condemned me was so sincere, and, spite of his belief in my guilt, his love still so fervent. "Well!" he said impatiently; for I was lingering, reluctant to leave that embrace which it seemed was to be my last. I drew my arms closer around his neck,--I kissed his brow, his cheek, his hand. "God bless you for all your kindness!" I said, weeping bitterly; "God bless you, Cornelius!" "What do you mean, child?" he asked. "And God bless Kate, too," I continued, "though I have never loved her so well as you." "Daisy!" "I have but one thing to ask of you, Cornelius--kiss me once again." "Not once but ten times when you confess, Daisy." "Yes, but kiss me now." "What for?" he inquired mistrustfully. "Because I ask you." He yielded to my request; he kissed me several times, mingling the caresses with broken speech. "I am sure you are going to confess," he said, "quite sure: you know how hard it would be for me to leave off being fond of you--I am sure you will." I looked at him blinded by tears; then I rose, untwined my arms from around his neck, and left him--I had accepted my destiny. Cornelius rose too, pale with anger. "Do you mean to brave me?" he asked indignantly. I did not answer. "Daisy," he said again, "I hear a step--I give you another chance-- confess before Kate or Miriam enters--a word will suffice." But my lips remained closed and mute. "Just as you like," he exclaimed, turning away angrily. The door opened and Miriam entered, pale and calm, in her white robes. "I am come early, you see," she said in her low voice, so sweet and clear. "Well, what is the matter?" she added, looking at us both with sedate surprise. "Look and see, Miriam! look and see!" replied Cornelius, with bitterness and emotion in his voice. Miriam slowly came forward. She looked at the picture, then at me. "Well," she said, "it is a pity certainly, a great pity, but it is only a picture after all." "Only a picture!" echoed Cornelius. "Yes," she answered, "only a picture. I will sit to you again and you will do better." "Oh, Miriam, Miriam!" he exclaimed, a little passionately, "it is not merely the loss of the picture that troubles me." "What then?" she inquired, looking up at him. "You ask?" he said, returning her glance; "ay, Miriam, you do not know, no one knows what that child has been to me! I have watched at night by her sick bed, and felt, that if she died, something would be gone nothing could replace for me. Child as she was and is still, I have made her my companion and my friend; she, more than any other living creature, has known the thoughts, wishes, and aspirations that are within me. I have taught her, and found pleasure in the teaching. I have cared for her, cherished her for years, and only loved her the more that I was free not to love her. She has been dear to me as my own flesh and blood, or rather all the dearer because she was not mine; for whilst she was as sacred to me as if the closest ties of kindred bound us, I found a pleasure and a charm in the thought that she was a stranger. Even now, much as she has injured me, guilty as she is, I feel what a bitter struggle it will be for me to tear her from my heart." "Forgive her," gently said Miriam. "Forgive her! she rejects forgiveness. Proud and obstinate in her guilt, she denies it; and I, who, when I called her up here this morning, incensed against her as I was, could yet, I thought, have staked my honour on her truth--I knew she was jealous, resentful and passionate, but not even in thought would I have accused her of a lie." "Then you did not take her in the act?" thoughtfully asked Miriam. "No, this was evidently done last night." "How do you know it was she did it?" "There was no one else to do it." "What proof is that? She is not bound to prove her innocence. It is you who are bound to prove her guilt. There is a doubt--give her the benefit of it." "A doubt!" he exclaimed almost indignantly,--"a doubt! why, if I could feel a doubt, Miriam, I would not in word, deed, look, or thought, so much as hint an accusation against her. A doubt! would to God I could doubt! But it is impossible: everything condemns her." He briefly recapitulated the proofs he had already brought forward against me. "After this," he added, "what am I to think?" "That you have some secret enemy," calmly replied Miriam. "Is he a magician?" asked Cornelius; "could he drop from the skies to work my ruin? But absurd as is the supposition that one so unknown could have such a foe, it is contradicted by a simple fact--the chair which I myself placed against the window is there still. Oh no, Miriam, my enemy came not from without; my enemy is one whom I brought home one evening in my arms, wrapped in my cloak; who has eaten my bread and often drunk from my cup; who has many a time fallen asleep on my heart; whom I have loved, cherished, and caressed for three years." This was more than my bursting heart could bear. I had stood apart, listening with bowed head and clasped hands, apathetic and resigned. I now came forward; I placed myself before him; I looked up at him; my tears fell like rain and blinded me, but through both sobs and tears broke forth the passionate cry, "Cornelius, Cornelius, I did not do it." And I sank on my knees before him; but to protest my innocence, not to implore pardon. "You hear her," he said to Miriam, and he looked down at me--moved indeed, but, alas! his face told it plainly--unconvinced. For awhile we remained thus. I could not take my eyes from his; words had failed, but I felt as if spirit should speak to spirit, heart to heart, and breaking the bonds of flesh, should bear the silent truth from my soul to his, and stamp it there in all its burning reality. He stooped and raised me without a word. A chair was near him: he sat down, he took me in his arms; he pressed me to his heart, and never had his embrace been more warm and tender; he looked down at me, and never had his look been more endearing; he spoke--not in words of condemnation or menace, but with all the ardour of his feelings and the fervour of his heart. I wept for joy; I thought myself acquitted, alas! he soon undeceived me, I was only forgiven. "Yes," he said, "I break my resolve, and here you are again, still loved and still caressed; for though _you_ have not reminded me of it, Daisy, _I_ remember I once declared there was nothing I would not forgive you, for the sake of the faith you one day here expressed in me. And I do forgive you; as I am a Christian, as I am a gentleman, on my honour, on my truth, I forgive you. Confess or do not confess, it matters not. I appeal not to fear of punishment, to gratitude for the past, to dread of the future, to conscience, or to love; I forgive you, and leave you free for silence or for speech." I understood him but too well. Cornelius would no longer extort a confession; his own soul was great and magnanimous; he understood high feelings, and by this unconditional forgiveness he now appealed to me through the highest and most noble feeling of a human heart--generosity. Hitherto, he had only thought me perverse and obstinate; with a silent pang of despair I felt I was now condemned to appear mean and low before him. For he looked at me with such generous confidence; with such trust and faith in his aspect; with something in his eyes that seemed to say with the triumph of a noble heart, "You have wronged me, you have deceived me, but I defy you to resist this!" He waited, it was plain, for a confession that came not. At length he understood that it would not come. He put me away without the least trace of anger, and said, in a voice of which the reproachful gentleness pierced my heart-- "You cannot prevent me from forgiving you, Daisy." With this he turned from me, and removing Medora from the easel, he began looking out for another canvas of the same size. Miriam had looked on, seated on the couch with motionless composure, her calm, statue-like head supported by her hand. She turned round to say-- "What is that for, Cornelius?" "To begin again, if you do not object. I have already thought of some changes in the attitude." She looked at him keenly, and not without wonder. "You soon get over it," she said. "Why not?" he asked quietly; "do not look astonished, Miriam; I can no more linger over regret than over anger. For me to feel that a thing is utterly lost, is to cease to lament for it. The work of days and months is utterly ruined; be it so, I have but to begin anew." Miriam rose and went up to him as he stood before his easel, somewhat pale, but as collected as if nothing had happened. "Forgive her," she whispered, "for my sake," and she took his hand in her own. "I have forgiven her, Miriam," he replied, giving her a candid and surprised glance: "did you not hear me say so?" "From your heart?" "From my heart," he answered frankly. "But with an implied condition of confession, acknowledgment, or something of the sort?" "No, I left her free to speak or be silent. She would not confess--not for that shall I retract what I granted unconditionally; but pray do not let us speak of it." Miriam however persisted. "It is true," she said, "that Daisy did not confess, but then she did not deny." The look of Cornelius lit: it was plain he caught at this eagerly. "Very true," he replied; "very true, Miriam, she did not deny." He looked at me as he said it. I stood where he had left me, by his vacant chair. I looked at him too, and at Miriam, as she stood by him with one hand clasped in his, and the other resting on his shoulder, and I never uttered one word. In his longing desire to reinstate me in his esteem and efface the stain on my tarnished honour, Cornelius, seeing me still silent, could not help saying-- "It is so, Daisy, is it not?--you do not deny it." I had been quiet until then; quiet and forbearing. I had not protested my innocence in loud or vehement speech, but in the very simplest words of denial. Accused, judged, sentenced unheard, I had not resented this; I had blessed my accuser and kissed the hand of my judge. I had not wearied him with tears, entreaties, or protestations. I had no proof to give him save my word, and if that was doubted, I felt I had but to be silent. Four times indeed I had stood before him and told him--what more could I tell him?--that I had not done it. He had not believed me, and I had borne with it, borne with that forgiveness which to me could be but a bitter insult; but even from him I could bear no more; even to him no longer would I protest my innocence. I had laid my pride at his feet, in all the lowliness and humility of love; it now rose indignant within me, and bade me scorn further justification. "No, Cornelius," I replied, without so much as looking at him, "I do not deny it." I stood near the door; I opened it, and left the room. CHAPTER XXI. My temples throbbed; my blood flowed with feverish heat; I felt as if carried away by a burning stream down to some deep, fiery region, where angry voices ever raised a strange clamour, that perpetually drowned my unavailing cry--"I did not do it." I know not how I reached my room; quietly and simply, I suppose; for when I recovered from this transport of indignant passion, I was lying on my bed and I was alone. I did not weep, I did not moan, I scarcely thought, but I drank deep of the cup of grief which had so suddenly risen to my lips. In youth we do not love sorrow, but when it comes to us we welcome it with strange avidity; there is a luxury, a dreary charm in the first excess of woe. True, we quickly sicken of the bitter draught; I had lain down with the feeling--"There, I am now as miserable as I can be, and yet I care not!" but, alas! how soon I grew faint and weary! how soon from the depths of my wrung heart I cried for relief to Him who knew my innocence, who had never wronged me, who, were I ever so guilty, would have never condemned me unheard! What was it to me that Cornelius left me his love and his kindness, when I knew and felt, with a keener bitterness than words can convey, that I had for ever lost his esteem? Did I, could I, care for an affection from which the very life had departed? No; child as I was in years, something within me revolted from the mere thought of his tenderness and endearments. If he believed me guilty, then let him hate and detest me: sweeter would be his aversion than such fondness as he could bestow on one whom, the more he forgave her, the more he must despise. This resentful feeling--better to be hated than weakly loved--bore with it no consolation. I still groaned under the intolerable load of so much misery. Spirit and flesh both revolted against it, and said it was beyond endurance; that, anything save that, I would bear cheerfully, but that I could not bear; that sickness would be pleasant, and death itself would be sweet in comparison. And as I thought thus, I remembered the time when I was near dying, when Cornelius wept over me, and I should have carried in my grave his regard as well as his tears, and I passionately questioned the Providence that rules our fate. I asked why I had been spared for this? why I was thought guilty when I was innocent? why Cornelius disbelieved me? why there was no hope that I should ever be acquitted by him? why the only being for whose good opinion I would have given all it was mine to give, had been the very one to condemn me? Had I looked into my heart, I might there have found the stern reply--"By his idol let the idolater perish." But I did not. I only dwelt on the galling fact, that though guiltless, there was no hope for me, and I sank into as violent a fit of despair as if this were a new discovery. I wept passionately at first, then slowly, unconsciously. My head ached; my heavy eyes closed; I did not sleep, but I sank into the apathy of subdued grief. I know not how long I had been thus when the door opened, and Kate--I knew her step--entered. She came up to my bed, bent over me, and seeing my eyes closed, whispered-- "Are you asleep, Daisy?" A slight motion of my head implied the denial I could not speak. She took my hand, said it felt cold, went into the next room, whence she brought some heavy garment, with which she covered me. I felt rather than saw her lingering by me; then I heard her leaving the room softly. My heart swelled as the door closed on her. Not one word of faith or doubt had she uttered, and yet her voice was both compassionate and kind. It was plain that she too thought me guilty, pitied, and forgave me. "Be it so!" I thought, with sullen and bitter grief: "let every one accuse me, I acquit myself; let no one believe in me, I keep faith in my own truth. I shall learn how to do without their approbation and their belief." I remained in this mood, until, after the lapse of some hours, Kate once more came near me. Again she bent over me and asked if I slept. I opened my heavy eyes, but, dazzled by the light, I soon closed them again. "Come down to dinner," she said gently. "I am not hungry." There was a pause; I fancied her gone, and looked; she was standing at the foot of my bed, gazing at me with a very sorrowful face. "Daisy," she said, in her most persuasive accents, "have you nothing to say to me?" I looked at her; her glance told me she asked for a confession, not for justification, so I replied-- "Nothing, Kate," and again closed my eyes. She left me, but soon returned, carrying a small tray with a plate, on which there was some fowl and a glass of wine. She wanted me to eat. I assured her I was not hungry. "Try," she urged; "I promised Cornelius not to leave you without seeing you take something." To please her I tried, but she saw that the attempt sickened me; she pressed me to take the wine. "Cornelius poured it out in his own glass," she said, "and tasted it before sending it up; so you must have some." Wine seldom appeared on our frugal table; it had been forbidden to me as injurious; but Cornelius always left me some in his glass, which he made me drink slyly, whilst his sister pretended to look another way. I knew why he had now sent me this; it was a token of old affection living still, spite of what happened. I would not refuse the pledge: I sat up, and taking the glass from Kate, I raised it to my lips; but as I did so, the thought of the past thus evoked made my heart swell; a sensation of choking came upon me; I felt I could not swallow one drop, and laid down the glass untasted. Kate sighed, but she saw it was useless to insist, so, hoping I would try again in her absence, she left me. I did not try: why should I? food sufficient to me were my tears and my grief renewed in all its bitterness by this incident. Why had Cornelius sent me this token of a communion from which the trust and the faith had for ever vanished? Why should I drink from his glass, whilst he thought me a liar? I ought not, and I resolved that I would not, until he had acknowledged my truth. I pushed away the tray from me; in doing so I saw that the covering Kate had thrown over me was an old cloak of her brother's. I recognized it at once: it was the very same he wore when he came to see me at Mr. Thornton's; the same in the folds of which he had wrapped and carried me, a weak and sickly child. I cast it away in a transport of despair and grief; he might care for me and cherish me again, but never more could he be to me what he once had been. After awhile I became more calm, or rather I sank into the apathy which is not calmness. Lying on my bed I looked through the window which faced it, at the grey and cloudy sky. The preceding day had been clear and sunshiny; this was dark and overcast, one of those September days that bear something so dull, chill, and wintry in their mien. I watched my room grow dim, and felt it becoming more cold and comfortless as evening drew on; but it seemed not so dreary, and felt not so cold, as my desolate heart. A well-known step on the stairs partly roused me. I listened; there was a. low tap at my door; I gave no answer; it was renewed, and still I was silent. Cornelius, for it was he, waited awhile and finally entered. Like his sister he came up to my bed and bent over me, but the room had grown dark; he drew back the curtain; I shaded my eyes with my hand; he moved it away. "You are not asleep," he said, "look at me, Daisy." I obeyed; he stood gazing at me with my baud in his; there was sadness on his face, and pity still deeper than his sadness. I dare say I looked a pitiable object enough. He glanced at the food untouched, at the wine untasted. "You have taken nothing," he said, "not even a drop of the wine I sent you; why so?" "I could not." "Try again." He wanted to raise the glass to my lips; but I pushed it away so abruptly, that half its contents were spilled. He made no remark; but feeling the dead-like dullness of my hand, he attempted to cover me with his cloak; I half rose to put it away; Cornelius took no notice of this either. "Come down and have some tea," he said quietly; "this room is cold, but below there is a fire." Mechanically I obeyed. I sat up, put back my loosened hair from my face, and slipped down on the floor. I followed him out, and I felt weak and giddy; I had to cling to him for support until we entered the parlour. It looked as I had so often seen it look on many a happy evening. The fire burned brightly; the lamp shed its mild, mellow radiance; the kettle sang on the fire; the white china cups and saucers stood on the little table ready for use, and Kate sat working as usual; but familiar as everything seemed, it was as if I had not entered that room for years. As we came in, Kate looked up and sighed, then made the tea in deep silence. Cornelius made me sit by the fire, and sat down by me; he handed me my cup himself; but I could not drink, still less eat. He pressed me in vain. If I could, I would have gratified him, for my abstinence proceeded not from either stubbornness or pride; I knew I should eat again, and to do it early or late could not humble or exalt me. Cornelius ceased to urge the point. The meal, always a short one with us, was over, the room was silent; I sat in an angle of the couch, my hand shading my weary eyes; perhaps my long fasting contributed to render me partly insensible to what passed around me, for Cornelius had to speak twice before he could draw my attention. When I at length looked up, I perceived that Kate had left the room; we were alone. "Daisy," said Cornelius, very earnestly, "are you fretting?" "Yes, Cornelius, I am." "Do you then think me still angry with you?" "No," I replied, rather surprised, "I know you are not." "How do you know?" he asked, bending a keen look on me. "You have said so, Cornelius, how then can I but believe you?" I looked up in his face as I spoke, and if my eyes told him but half the feelings of my heart, he must have read in their gaze--"Doubt me if you like; I keep inviolate and true my faith in you." He looked as if the words had smote him dumb. For awhile he did not attempt to answer; then he observed rather abruptly-- "Well, what are you fretting about?" I would not reply at first; he repeated his question. "Because you will not believe me," I answered in a low tone. He gave me a quick, troubled gaze, full of fear and--for the first time-- of doubt. He caught my hands in his; he stooped eagerly as if to read my very soul in my eyes: heavy and dim with weeping they might be, but their look shrank not from his. "Daisy," he cried agitatedly, "I put it to you--to your honour--I shall take your word now--did you or did you not do it?" I disengaged my hands from his, and clasped them around his neck, and thus, with my face open to his gaze like a book, I looked up at him sadly and calmly. "Cornelius," I replied, "I put it to you: Did Daisy Burns do it?" He looked down at me with an anxious and tormenting doubt that vanished before a sudden and irresistible conviction. Yes, I read it in his face: he who had so pertinaciously accused, judged, and condemned me, was now, as with a two-edged sword, pierced with the double conviction of my innocence and his own injustice. For a moment he looked stunned, then he withdrew from my clasp, rose, and walked away without a word, and sat down by the table with his back turned to me. The heart has instincts beyond all the written knowledge of the wise. I rose and ran to him; he averted his face and put me away. "Cornelius," I entreated, "Cornelius, look at me." Without answering, he turned his face to me. Never shall I forget its mingled remorse and grief. He rose and paced the room up and down, with agitated steps. I did not dare to follow or address him; of his own accord he stopped short and, confronting me, took my two hands in his and looked down at me with a sorrowful face. "If I had but wronged a man," he said, "one who could give me back insult for insult and wrong for wrong, I should regret it, but I could forgive myself; but you!" he added, looking at me from head to foot, "a girl, a mere child, dependent on me too, helpless and without one to protect or defend you against wrong--oh, Daisy! it is more than I can bear to think of!" It did seem too galling for thought, for tears wrung forth by wounded pride rose to his eyes and ran down his burning cheek. "Can you forgive me?" he added, after a short pause. This was more than I could bear. Forgive him! forgive him to whom I owed everything the error of one day! I could not, and I passionately said I never would. But Cornelius was peremptory, and, though burning with shame at so strange a reversion of our mutual positions, I yielded. I felt however as if I could never again look him in the face. But Cornelius had a faculty granted to few: he could feel deeply, ardently, without sentimental exaggeration. His mind was manly in its very tenderness. He had expressed his grief, his remorse, his shame; he did not brood over them or distress me with puerile because unavailing regrets over a past he could not recall. As he made me return to my seat and again sat by me, there was indeed in his look, in the way in which he drew me nearer to him, in the tone with which he said once or twice, "My poor child! my poor little Daisy!" something which told me beyond the power of language, how keenly he felt his injustice, how deeply he lamented my day of sorrow; but otherwise, his conscience acquitting him of intentional wrong, he accepted my forgiveness as frankly as he had asked for it. Thus my troubled heart could at length rest in peace. Languid and wearied with so many emotions, I could yield myself up to the strange luxury and sweetness of being once more, not merely near him--that was little--but of feeling, of knowing, of reading in his face, so kindly turned to mine, that he believed in me. As I sat by him, his hand clasped in both mine, restored to what I prized even higher than his affection--his esteem, it seemed like a dream, too blissful to be true, and of which my eyes ever kept seeking in his the reality and the confirmation. "Oh, Cornelius," I said once, "are you sure you do not think I did it?" He looked pained at being reminded that he had thought me guilty. "Have some wine," he observed, hurriedly, "I am sure you can now." He went to the back parlour and brought out a glassfull. He took some himself, and made me drink the rest. It revived me. I felt I could eat, and I took some biscuits from the plateful he handed me. He watched me with a pleased and attentive smile, and in putting by both glass and plate, he sighed like one much relieved. "When I was a boy." he said, sitting down again by me, "I caught a wild bird, and caged it, thinking it would sing; but it would not eat; it hung its head and pined away. I was half afraid this evening you were going to do like my poor bird." "I hope I know better than a bird," I replied, rather piqued at the comparison, "and that was a very foolish bird not to take to the cage where you had put it--so kind of you." "Very; yet, strange to say, it liked its cage and its captor as little as you on the contrary seem to fancy yours." "Yes, but it is scarcely worth while putting or keeping me in a cage, Cornelius; I am very useless; I can't even sing--not a bit." "Never mind," he replied, smiling, "I could better dispense with all the birds of the air than with you, my pet." I thought it was very kind of Cornelius to say so, and to prefer me to nightingales, larks, black-birds, thrushes, and the whole sweet-singing race. I felt cheerful, happy, almost merry, and we were talking together gaily enough when the door opened, and Kate entered. She had left me plunged in apathetic despondency; on seeing me chatting with her brother in as free and friendly a fashion as if nothing had happened, she looked bewildered. She came forward in total silence, and behind her came Miriam, who closed the door and looked at us calmly through all her evident wonder. "It's a very wet night," observed Kate, sitting down opposite us and looking at me very hard. "Is it?" said Cornelius, rising to give Miriam a chair, then returning to me. "Very," rejoined his sister, who could not take her eyes from me, as, with the secure familiarity of an indulged child, I untwined one of his dark locks to its full extent, observing-- "It is too long; let me cut it off with Kate's scissors." "No, 'faith," he replied, hastily, and shaking back his head with an alarmed air, as if he already felt the cold steel, "do not dream of such a thing. Cut it off indeed!" and he slowly passed his fingers through his raven hair, in the glossy and luxuriant beauty of which he took a certain complacency. "Well!" said Kate, leaning back in her chair, folding her hands on her knees, and drawing in a long breath. "Well, what?" coolly asked Cornelius. "I never did see such a rainy night--never." "How kind of you to come!" observed Cornelius, bending forward to look at Miriam. She sat by the table, her arms crossed upon it, her eyes bent on us; she smiled without answering. "You look pale and fatigued," he said, with some concern. There was indeed on her face a strange expression of languor, weariness, and _ennui_. "Yes," she replied abstractedly, "I am weary." "I am not going to stand that, you know!" exclaimed Kate, whose attention was not diverted from me. "Will you just tell me, Daisy, or rather you, Cornelius, what has passed between you and Daisy since I left the room." Cornelius raised on his sister a sad look, which from her fell on me. "I have found out a great mistake," he said, reddening as he spoke, "and Daisy has been good enough to forgive me." "I wish you would not speak so," I observed, feeling ready to cry. "My dear, Kate might blame me." "No one has any right to blame you," I interrupted. "If I am your child, as you say sometimes, can't you do with me as you think fit?" I looked a little indignantly at Kate, who did not heed me. Her eyes sparkled; her cheeks were flushed. "A mistake!" she exclaimed eagerly, "that's right; I can't say I thought it was a mistake, but I always felt as if it were one. I never felt as if poor Daisy could be such a little traitor. How did he do it, Cornelius?" "_He?_ really, Kate, I don't know how _he_ did it, for I don't know who _he_ is." "Some jealous, envious, mean, paltry little fellow of a bad artist," hotly answered Kate. "I can tell you exactly what he's like: he squints, he limps, he wears his hat over his eyes, and is always looking round to see that no one is watching him--I see him--you need not laugh, Cornelius, I can tell you sow he did it; he came in by Deborah's window, and escaped across the leads. He is an artist decidedly, and he was mixed up with the rejection of your Sick Child; can't you trace the connection?" Cornelius did not look as if he could. "Never mind," continued Kate, "I shall find him out, but you must give me the links." "What links, Kate?" "Why, how you found it out, of course?" "Found out what, Kate?" "Don't be foolish, boy: why, that it was not Daisy." Cornelius stroked his chin, and looked at his sister with a perplexed air, then said-- "I don't think you will find it much of a link, Kate." "Nonsense! a hint is enough for me, you know." "Well, but if there is no hint at all?" objected Cornelius, making a curious face. "No hint at all?" echoed his sister, rather bewildered. "Kate," resolutely said Cornelius, "think me foolish, mad, if you like: the truth is, that I have found out the innocence of Daisy, as I ought to have found it out at once--by believing her." "But where are the proofs?" asked Kate. "I tell you there are no proofs," he replied with impatient warmth; "proofs made me condemn Daisy; I am now a wiser man, and acquit her on trust." "No proofs!" said Kate, looking confounded. "No, Kate, none, and I don't want any either." "But you had proofs this morning, you said." "You could not give me a better reason for having none this evening. Proofs are cheats, I shall trust no more." Kate sighed profoundly and said in a rueful tone-- "Heaven knows how much I wish to believe Daisy innocent, but my opinion cannot turn about so quickly as yours." "She did not do it, Kate," exclaimed her brother, a little vehemently, "she did not." "You need not fly out: I never accused her." "But I did: do not wonder that I defend her all the more warmly." "But I do wonder," pursued Kate, with a keen look at me; "there is something in it; the sly little thing got round you whilst you were alone together. Oh, Cornelius, Cornelius! that child has made her way to your very heart. You would rather be deceived than think she did wrong." "I am not deceived," he indignantly replied. Kate did not answer, but kept looking at me in a way that made me feel very uncomfortable. "Daisy is guiltless," continued her brother; "how I ever thought her otherwise is a mystery to me. Who has ever been more devoted to my painting than the poor child?" Kate opened her lips, then closed them again without speaking. Cornelius detected this. "Well," he said quickly, "what have you got to say, Kate?" "Nothing!" she drily answered, with another look at me so searching and so keen that I involuntarily clung closer to Cornelius. "Kate," he said again, looking from me to her, "what have you to say?" There was a pause; Kate hesitated, then resolutely replied-- "The truth--which always insists on making itself known, no doubt because it is good that it should be known. I think, Cornelius, that you acquit Daisy as you condemned her--too hastily; but that is a part of your character: you detest to suspect--a generous, imprudent feeling. You make too much or too little of proofs. Now it so chances that I have got one which escaped you this morning, when you would have held it conclusive; which I kept quiet, but never meant to suppress. I shall make no comments upon it, but simply lay it before you." Her looks, her words, the gravity with which they were uttered, alarmed me. In the morning I had trusted implicitly to my innocence for justification: then I could not understand how facts should condemn me, when conscience held me guiltless; but now I knew better. I looked at Cornelius; perhaps he was only astonished; I fancied he seemed to doubt. All composure, all presence of mind forsook me. I threw myself in his arms, as in my only place of hope and refuge. "Cornelius," I cried in my terror, "don't believe it; I don't know what it is, but don't believe it--pray don't." He looked moved, and said to his sister-- "Not now, Kate, not now." "Nonsense!" she replied, "it is too late to go back." "I think it is," assented Cornelius, looking down at me. But I threw my arms around his neck, and looking up at his face with all the passionate entreaty of my heart-- "You won't believe it, Cornelius, will you?" I asked; "it's against me, I am sure; but you won't believe it?" "No, indeed," he replied, with some emotion, "I will believe nothing against you, my poor child." The assurance somewhat pacified me. Kate, whom my alarm seemed to impress very unfavourably, observed drily-- "It is not a matter to make so much of, and I never said you could not explain it, Daisy; at all events here it is." With this she drew forth from her pocket, and laid on the table, the filagree bracelet. "Is that all?" asked Cornelius, seeming much relieved. "I think it quite enough, considering where it was found," shortly said Kate. "In the studio! What about it: was it not in the studio I gave it to her?" "That is all very well, but I should like to know how it has got stained with the very same ochre that was used to daub the face of poor Medora." "Even that is nothing, Kate; you know well enough that everything Daisy wears bears traces of the place where she spends her days." Miriam had remained indifferent and calm, whilst all this was going on in her presence; she had not changed her attitude, scarcely had she raised her eyes, or cast a look around her. She now stretched forth her hand, took up the bracelet from the table where it lay, looked at it, laid it down again, and said very quietly-- "It is mine." "Yours!" cried Cornelius. "Yes, I know it by the clasp. I put it on this morning, and dropped it, I suppose, in the studio." "There, Kate," triumphantly exclaimed Cornelius, "so much for circumstantial evidence!" Kate looked utterly confounded. "Yours," she said to Miriam, "yours? are you quite sure it is really yours?" "Quite sure," was the composed reply. Miss O'Reilly turned to me, and asked shortly-- "Why did you not say it was not yours?" "I did not know it was not mine, Kate. I knew I had left mine in the studio." "Then it is really yours!" said Kate, again turning to Miriam, who replied with an impatient "Yes," and an ill-suppressed yawn of mingled indifference. "Truth is strong," rather sadly said Kate; "the bracelet which you put on this morning, Miss Russell, was picked op by me last night at the door of the studio." Miriam gave a sudden spring on her chair; if a look could have struck Kate to the heart, her look would have done it then. But Kate only shook her handsome head, and smiled, fearless and disdainful. "Yes," she said again, "I picked it up there last night, thought it was Daisy's, and, to give her a lesson of carefulness, I said nothing about it. This morning I suppressed it from another motive. Do you claim it still, Miss Russell?" Everything like emotion had already passed from the face of Miriam. She had sunk hack on her seat; her look had again become indifferent and abstracted; her countenance again wore the expression of fatigue and _ennui_ it had worn the whole evening. As Kate addressed her, she looked up, and very calmly said-- "Why not?" I looked at Cornelius; his brow, his cheek, his lip, had the pallor of marble or of death: he did not speak, he did not move; he looked like one whose very last stronghold the enemy has reached, and who beholds his own ruin with more of silent stupor than of grief. At length he put me away; he rose; he went up to the table which divided him from Miriam; he laid both his hands upon it, and looking at her across, he bent slightly forward, and said, in a voice that seemed to come from the depths of his heart-- "Miriam, tell me you did not do it; Miriam!" She did not reply. "Tell me you did not do it--I will believe you." Miriam looked at him; as she saw the doubt and misery painted on his face, something like pity passed on hers. "Would you?" she said, with some surprise. "No, Cornelius, you could not, and even if you could, I would not prolong this. I might deny or give some explanation at which you would grasp eagerly; but where is the use?--I am weary." She passed her hand across her brow, as if to put by someheavy sense of fatigue, and looked round at us with an expression of dreary languor in her gaze which I have never forgotten. "I am weary," she said again; "for days and weeks this sense of fatigue has been creeping over me. The struggle to win that I never should have prized when won, is ended. I regret it not--still less should you." "Miriam," passionately said Cornelius, "it is false, and you must, you shall deny it." "I will not," Miriam replied firmly, and not without a certain cool dignity which she preserved to the last. "I tell you I am weary, and that if this did not part us, something else should." A chair stood near Cornelius; he sat down, and gave Miriam a long, searching glance, that seemed to ask, in its dismay and indignant grief-- "Are you the woman whom I have loved?" "You never understood me," she said, impatiently. "You might have guessed that I had, from youth upwards, lived in the fever of passion inspired or felt; you might have known that I should master or be mastered. I warned you that though I could promise nothing, I should exact much, and you defied me to exact too much. Yet when it came to the test--what did you give me? a feeling weak as water, cold as ice! Why, you would not so much as have given up what you call Art for my sake!" "Nor for that of mortal woman," indignantly replied Cornelius. "Give up painting! Do you forget I told you I would love you as a man should love?" "That is, I suppose, a little more than Daisy, and something less than your pictures. I have been accustomed to other love." Cornelius reddened. "An unworthy passion," he said, "stops at nothing to secure its gratification; a noble one is bound by honour." "I leave you to such passions," calmly answered Miriam; "to painting, which you love so much; to the domestic affections in which you weakly thought to include me. I have tried to make you feel what I call passion, I have failed; it is well that we should part; let us do so quietly, and without recrimination." Cornelius looked at her like one confounded. She spoke composedly, as if she neither cared for nor felt that, on her own confession, she was guilty. Of excuse or justification she evidently thought not. "You think of Daisy," she continued; "think of my conduct to her what you choose. I will only say this, though she, poor child, has hated me, as she loved you, with her whole heart, you have been, are still, and will remain, her greatest enemy." "I!" indignantly exclaimed Cornelius. "Yes: and you must be blind not to see that, by seeking to sever from you a child whom a few years will make a woman, I was her best friend; and so she will know some day, when you break her heart, and tell her you never meant it." "May God forsake me when I place not her happiness before mine!" replied Cornelius, in a low tone, and giving me a troubled look. "You are generous," answered Miriam, with an ironical, but not unmusical laugh, and looking at me over her shoulder with all the scorn of conscious beauty; "you think so now; but I know, and have always known, better. And yet, spite of that knowledge, and though with foolish insolence she ever placed herself in my way, I have felt sorry for her at times. Of course you will not believe this: with the exaggeration of your character, you will at once set me down as one delighting in evil; whereas what you call evil is to me only a different form of good, justifiable according to the end in view. If I had succeeded in inspiring you with an exclusive, all-engrossing passion--even though the cost had been a few pictures less, and the loss of Daisy's heart--know that I would have conferred on you the greatest blessing one human being can bestow on another." Her eyes shone with inward fire; her cheeks glowed; her parted lips trembled. I do not think we had ever seen her half so beautiful. Cornelius looked at her, and smiled bitterly. "I pity you," she said, with some scorn; "I pity you, to deride a feeling you cannot feel: know that I at least speak not without the knowledge." "Oh, I know it," he exclaimed, involuntarily. "You know it?" "Yes," he replied, more slowly, "and I have known it long. One, whose pride you had stung, found means to procure letters written by you some years ago, and which proved to rue how ardently you had been attached to another--now dead, it is true. For a whole day I thought to give you up; but I was weak, I burned the letters, and said nothing. I loved you well enough to forgive you the tacit deceit; too well to think of humbling you by confessing that I knew it, and too jealously perhaps not to be glad to annihilate every token of a previous affection." "Humbling me!" said Miriam, rising; "know that it is my pride. I felt not like you, Cornelius; I would have made myself the slave of him whom I loved, had he wished it." She folded her hands on her bosom, like one who gloried in her subjection, and continued-- "Proud and wilful as I am, _he_ could bend me to his will. I mistook your energy for power, and thought you could do so too. I mistook my own heart, and thought I could feel again as I once had felt. Since I discovered the twofold mistake, there has been nothing save weariness and vexation of spirit to me. I knew it should end--do not wonder I am now glad and relieved that it is ended." She spoke in the tone with which she had said "I am weary;" the lustre had left her eyes, the colour her cheek; her mien was again languid and careless. She cast an indifferent look around her, drew the silk scarf which she wore, closer over her shoulders, turned away, and left the room without once looking back. A deep silence, that seemed as if it never could end, followed her departure. Kate sat in her usual place, her look sadly fixed on her brother. His face was supported and partly shaded by his hand. He neither moved nor spoke. At length his sister rose and went up to him. She laid her hand on his shoulder, and stooping, said gently-- "Cornelius!" He looked up at her wistfully, and said, in a low tone-- "Kate, I thought her little less than an angel; what a poor dupe I have been!" "But you will bear it," she said earnestly, "I know you will." "Yes," he answered, though his lip trembled a little as he said it; "it is hard, but it is not more than a man can bear." He rose as he spoke. "Where are you going?" asked Kate, detaining him. "Out; do not be uneasy about me, Kate." "But it is pouring fast." "Never mind." His lips touched her brow--he left the room--we heard the street-door close upon him, and in the silence which followed, the low, rushing sound of the rain. "Poor fellow! poor fellow!" sadly said Kate, and, looking at one another, we began to cry. END OF VOL. I. 
36158	----	COLLECTION OF BRITISH AUTHORS. VOL. CCLXIV. DAISY BURNS BY JULIA KAVANAGH. IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. II. TAUCHNITZ EDITION By the same Author, NATHALIE 2 vols. GRACE LEE 2 vols. RACHEL GRAY 1 vol. ADELE 2 vols. A SUMMER AND WINTER IN THE TOW SICILES 2 vols. SEVEN YEARS AND OTHER TALES 2 vols. FRENCH WOMEN OF LETTERS 1 vol. ENGLISH WOMEN OF LETTERS 1 vol. QUEEN MAB 2 vols. BEATRICE 2 vols. SYBIL'S SECOND LOVE DORA 2 vols. SILVIA 2 vols. BESSIE 2 vols. JOHN DORRIEN 2 vols. DAISY BURNS; A TALE BY JULIA KAVANAGH, AUTHOR OF "NATHALIE." _COPYRIGHT EDITION_. IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. II. LEIPZIG BERNHARDT TAUCHNITZ 1853. JULIA KAVANAGH DAISY BURNS. CHAPTER I. It has chanced that for a week or more this narrative has been laid aside. This evening I thought I would resume it, and, before doing so, I looked back on what I had written. Alas, how long it takes us to forget the angry and evil feelings of our childhood! How I traced, in this record of the past, a lingering animosity against the enemy of my youth, which years, it seems, had failed to efface from my heart! How sad and humbling a lesson has this been to me, of passion warping judgment and holy charity forgotten! I have represented Miriam without one redeeming trait, and conscience tells me that she was not thus. I now remember many touches of human feeling and human kindness, which, I feel it remorsefully, need not have been omitted, when all that was evil was so faithfully registered. She had many high qualities. In worldly affairs she was generous and disinterested. Her word was inviolable; she gave it rarely, and never broke it. She was devoted to her blind old nurse, and patient with her infirm aunt. Her temper was calm and enduring; she had in her something of the spirit which makes martyrs, and could have borne persecution with unshaken fortitude. She never spoke of religion, and I doubt if she had any religious feeling; but she was charitable to the poor; she had sympathy for their misery and compassion too for bodily suffering: I remember that once, when I cut my hand rather severely, she showed a concern which even I felt to be sincere. Had I been wholly in her power, and provoked her to the utmost, I knew she would neither have ill-used me herself, nor allowed me to be neglected by others. Her hatred was pitiless; yet in one sense it was not mean, for it disdained to inflict useless pangs. She had an object in tormenting me, but to do so gave her no pleasure. I know that had I not been so tenacious of the affection of Cornelius, so obstinate and proud, she would never have sought my ruin; but she was not one to brook the rivalry or opposition even of a child; I chose to place myself in her path, and she treated me as an obstacle to be removed, or, if that failed, to be conquered, and, if needful, crushed. She was one of those outwardly calm persons whose real nature can never be known, unless when drawn forth by something or some one. I do not think that one action to be concealed had marked her life until we met. We were antagonistic principles, and, from our conflict, the worst points of each were displayed. But for her Cornelius would never have suspected my jealous nature; but for that jealousy he would never have known the real character of his betrothed. Even Kate, though she had never liked her, was, as I afterwards learned, taken by surprise, and declared, "Cornelius had had a most fortunate escape from marrying such a cruel, treacherous woman." Was Miriam such? I do not think so. True, she had little principle, and was not stopped by falsehood when she held it necessary: but she was never cruel, never treacherous without a purpose. She might have been good but for one mistaken idea--that good and evil are indifferent in themselves; and great but for one sin--self-idolatry. She lacked that centre of all hearts--God. He who made us, made us so that in Him alone we shall find peace. We may make idols of honour, duty, love, art; of human ideas and human beings; but even this is not to fall utterly. The sense of honour and duty are His gifts; He gave us hearts to love with, souls to know the beautiful, minds to conceive, feelings to spend and bestow. So long therefore as its action is outward, even our grossest idolatry will be pervaded with the sanctity of adoration and the majesty of God. But self-worship is the sin of Satan: we were never meant to be our own centre, our own hope, our own aim and divinity; there never has been a drearier prison than that which can be to itself a human heart; the other circles of hell are broad and free, compared to this narrowest of dungeons--self locked in self. It was this that, whilst outwardly she seemed so calm and cool, made Miriam internally so restless and unquiet. There was a healthy serenity in the ardour of Cornelius; but hers was agitated like an ever-troubled sea. She sought not in love its divine oblivion of self, but, on the contrary, a consciousness of existence, rendered more intense by the very tumult of passion. To love, for her, was not to be merged in some other being, but to absorb that other being in herself. All I know of her first lover was, that he was a captain in the navy, and that he perished with his ship four or five years before she met Cornelius. Her affection may have been outwardly devoted, but must have been selfish at heart. To have lovud again would have been no crime; but to wish to do so showed that the man had been nothing in comparison with the feeling. Even thus with her sister. Whilst she existed, Miriam seemed wrapped in her; once the young girl was in her grave, her name was never mentioned; everything that could recall her was studiously set aside as too painful; a new object, a new passion were eagerly grasped at; she had been, and she was no more. To those who love truly, there may be separation, but there is no death: their heart, like a hospitable lord, keeps sacred for ever the place of the guests he has once received and cherished. With Miriam it was not thus. Once the being in whom she had delighted could no longer minister to her delight, it ceased to occupy her. I never saw her after her parting from Cornelius, yet I can scarcely think that he, to win whose exclusive affection she had done so much, gave her one sad thought; she had not loved, but he had, and to him she left all the sorrow. How did he bear it? This was a question neither his sister nor I could have answered. He had gone out on the night of the discovery, sent forth by that impulse which in great grief urges us to seek spots no eye can haunt, and the calm silence, so soothing to the troubled senses and wounded heart, of our mother nature. He came in the next morning, looking worn and weary, like one who had wandered far, vainly seeking peace. His sister looked at him sadly, and said, in her gentlest tones-- "It is hard. Cornelius." He looked up in her face and replied calmly, "It is, Kate; but there is no sorrow that cannot be crushed and conquered." Pride, stung at having been so deceived, made him shun sympathy, and forbade him to complain. He struggled against his bitter grief in manful spirit. He quietly called me up one morning to the studio, there to resume the sittings for the Stolen Child; in the course of the same week he procured two Gipsy sitters, and gave to work his whole mind, heart, and energies. Yet there were moments when his hand flagged, when his look became drearily vacant, when it was plain that not even all the might of will could compel attention any longer. There were other signs too which I heeded. A mile down the lane rose a homely little house of God, consecrated to the worship of that faith which, like their country, was only the more dear to Cornelius and Kate for the insults daily heaped upon it. There, Sunday after Sunday, with a brief interruption, I had for three years sat and knelt by the side of Cornelius, and taken a childish pleasure in reading from the same book. But now--and I was quick to notice it--though his hand still held the volume, his eyes no longer perused the page with mine; in his abstracted face I read a worship far more intense, inward, and sorrowful than the quiet attention of old times. Once, as we walked home together, he asked me what the sermon had been about. But nothing endures in this world. The grief of Cornelius was not of a nature to be brooded over for ever: we never knew exactly when he recovered his inward serenity, but that he recovered it, an event which occurred in the course of the winter proved beyond doubt. One afternoon, when both Kate and her brother were out, Mr. Smalley called. He had obtained a living somewhere in the North, and was come to bid us adieu. He expressed much regret that his friend and Miss O'Reilly should not be at home, and inquired after them with his usual benignant gentleness. "They are both quite well; and are you too quite well, Mr. Smalley?" I asked, for as he sat before me, his slender frame slightly bent, I could not but be struck with the pallor and thinness of his face. "I am very well indeed," he replied with a smile, "and in a very happy-- though not, I hope, too elated--frame of mind, which is natural enough considering my recent good fortune. Rugby--have you ever heard of Rugby, my dear?" "No, Sir, I don't think I have." "Well, it is rather odd, but really nobody seems to hare heard of Rugby, and Trim will have it that it is an imaginary place altogether; but I tell him this is a point on which I must differ from him, as I have actually seen Rugby Well, Rugby, as I was saying, is an extremely picturesque village, almost too picturesque, rising on the brow of a steep hill, with an old church and very quaint parsonage; then there's a splendid torrent, that inundates the place twice a year, but the people are used to it and don't mind it, so it makes no difference, you know." "But is it not rather unpleasant, Sir?" "Well, perhaps it is," quietly replied Morton Smalley; then added with a sigh, "but life has greater trials; every one has his or her trial, my dear." "Yes," I answered, "Miss O'Reilly can't let her house; it is such a pity, is it not?" "Have her tenants left?" asked Mr. Smalley, a little troubled. "Miss Russell has given notice; the bill is up, did you not see it?" "I did not look," he replied in a low tone; then he again said-- "Has Miss Russell left?" "Her furniture is still there; but she is always at Hastings." There was a pause; but Mr. Smalley made an effort and asked-- "Is her niece with her?" "I don't know, Sir." "Don't you?" "Oh no! we don't know anything more about Miss Miriam, since she is not to marry Cornelius." Mr. Smalley turned pale and red, and pale again; but he never put a question to me. He constrained himself to talk of the weather, of what a fine day it was (the rain was drizzling), of how happy it made him to hear Cornelius was so successful (we had never said a word about his success); then he left off at once, rose and bade me good-bye, to my infinite relief, for I was conscious of having committed an indiscretion, and not the first either. Within the course of the same month, as we sat at breakfast, Kate, who was reading the newspaper, suddenly uttered an exclamation which she as hastily checked. Cornelius took the paper from her hand, glanced over it, and read aloud very calmly-- "On the twelfth instant, at St. George's, Hanover Square, the Rev. Morton Smalley, of Rugby, to Miriam Russell, eldest daughter of the late Thomas Russell, Esq., of Southwell, Norfolk." "Smalley deserved a better wife," said Cornelius; and he handed back the paper to Kate, without betraying the least sign of emotion. It was thus we learned how utterly dead Miriam was in his heart. What sort of a wife did she make to Morton Smalley, in his wild northern home? I know not, no more than I know what, unless the thirst of agitation and change, could induce a spirit so feverish and unquiet to unite itself to that pure and calm nature. Did she find peace in his devoted love, and in fulfilling the duties that fall to the lot of a clergyman's wife? Perhaps she did, and perhaps too he drew forth whatever her nature held of good and true. A year after her marriage she died in giving birth to a child, who still lives, and whom her father persists in calling the image of his dear departed saint, though his eyes alone can trace in her the faintest resemblance to her dead mother. I was not with Cornelius when this event occurred, and how he felt on learning the death of the woman with whom he had thought to spend his life, is more than I have ever known. Cornelius had, as I said, recovered his serenity, but he was not what he once had been. A boyish lightness of temper had deserted him--his early faith was shaken, and he looked on life a sadder and a wiser man. To his sister he was the same as before; to me far kinder. He loved me all the more for having been to him the cause of so much trouble: a less generous mind and heart could not have forgiven me the mistakes into which I had made him fall, and the disadvantageous position in which I had placed him; both rendered me more dear to Cornelius. The only allusion he made to the past, was to say to me one wintry evening, as, the lessons over, we sat together by the fire-side-- "I think you are happy now, Daisy." "Yes, Cornelius," I replied, a little moved, "very happy." "That's right," he said, and rose. "You are going out," observed Kate, anxiously. "Yes; shall be in at nine." "Come back by the Grove." "Why so?" "The lanes are not safe." He laughed, said there was no fear, and left us. I saw him go with a sinking heart. The road by which he meant to return was lonely and had witnessed several recent cases of highway robbery. The evening passed quietly; but nine struck and Cornelius came not back. I gave Kate a terrified look. "Nonsense!" she said indignantly, "how dare you think of such a thing? Go to bed directly." In vain I begged hard to be allowed to sit up until his return; she said she would have no more such looks, and again bade me go to bed. I felt too wretched to scruple at disobeying her. I left the parlour indeed, but instead of going up-stairs to my room, I softly stole out of the house, crossed the garden, and unlocking the back-door I left it ajar, and stepped out to look in the direction along which Cornelius was to come. The night was dark; a keen wind swept down the lonely lane; I drew the skirt of my frock over my head and crouched within the shelter of the neighbouring hedge. There, with my ear bent to catch every sound, I remained for what seemed an age. Once my heart leaped as I heard a distant tread, and fell again when it drew nearer, and I was conscious of a stranger, who, unaware of my presence, passed by me whistling carelessly. Dismal visions of Cornelius lying bleeding and inanimate in some dreary spot, haunted me until I felt nearly wild with terror and grief; but at once a sudden joy pervaded my being; I heard his quick, light step coming up the lane--I was sure it was he; he was safe--the dark vision fled like an evil spirit put to flight by a good angel. I could have laughed for gladness, I felt so happy. Joy however did not make me forget my disobedience and its probable consequences; I thought to slip in and go up to my room unperceived, but to my dismay I found that the door had closed on me--I was shut out. There was no remedy for it; so I waited until Cornelius came up and rang, then I made a slight noise in the hedge. "What's that?" he asked sharply. "Don't be afraid, Cornelius," I replied in a low voice, "it is only me." "Daisy! What brings you here, child?" "I felt so miserable at your not returning that I came out here to watch for you. The door shut, so I could not get in when I heard you--don't let Kate scold me, Cornelius." Before he could reply, the door was opened by Kate herself, a proof that she was not without secret uneasiness. In her haste she had brought no light. "Is that you?" she said quickly. "Of course it is, Kate." "Thank God! I was so uneasy; and there's that foolish Midge, whom I sent to bed an hour ago, and who, I am sure, is still lying awake, listening, poor child! I felt angry with her for being so nervous, and I am as bad myself." She closed the door as she spoke. I had slipped in unperceived, and I might have escaped detection, for Cornelius did not seem inclined to betray me, when, as we were going up the steps leading to the porch, Deborah suddenly appeared bringing a light; she stared at me as I slunk behind Cornelius; Kate turned round, saw me, and uttered an exclamation of astonishment. "It is very wrong of her," hastily said Cornelius, "but you must forgive her, Kate. I found her outside the door waiting for me. I suppose she had worked herself into a terror of my being waylaid and assassinated, and scarcely knew what she was about." "Ah!" replied Kate, and she said no more. We entered the parlour. Cornelius sat down, made me sit down by him, and chafed my cold hands in his. He chid me rather severely, forbade me ever to do such a thing again, said he was very angry, and ended by taking me in his arms and kissing me. Kate had never uttered one word of reproof, but she looked unusually grave. As I sat by her brother, indulged and caressed, spite of my foolish disobedience, I had an unpleasant consciousness of her look being fastened on us both, and shunned it by keeping mine pertinaciously fixed on the kind face which, as if to efface all memory of the past, now seemed unable to look down at me with anger or displeasure. "Cornelius!" at length said Kate. "Well!" he replied, looking from me to her. "Do you remember the story of Goethe's Mignon?" Cornelius reddened, turned pale, reddened again, and looked both irritated and ashamed. "What about it, Kate?" he asked at length. "Nothing." she quietly replied, "only I think of it now and then." Cornelius did not reply; but he slowly turned towards me, and as I sat by his side, my two hands clasped on his shoulder and my head resting on them, I saw him give me a look so troubled and so strange, that I could not help asking-- "What is it, Cornelius?" "Nothing," he replied hastily, "but don't you think you had better go to bed?" "Well then, good-night, Cornelius;" I attempted to bend his face to mine; he looked annoyed, and averted it impatiently. "I knew you were vexed with me for having waited for you outside," I observed, feeling ready to cry; "I am sure of it now; that is why you won't kiss me." Cornelius bit his lip, and, giving my forehead an impatient kiss, said, shortly-- "There, child, are you satisfied?" "Well, but am I not to kiss you?" I asked in the same tearful tone. "Please yourself," he replied, resignedly allowing me to embrace him. "I am sure you are still vexed with me," I said, lingering over the caress as children will, "you speak so sharply, and look so cross." He smiled; his brow smoothed; he looked from me to his sister. "Oh! Kate," he said, "she is such a mere child," and with a sudden return of kindness he again made me sit down by him. "Indeed, I am not such a child!" I said, rather piqued, "and you need not make me out such a little girl either, Cornelius, for you are only ten years older than I am." "Only ten years! Why, my dear, the Roman Lustrum consisted of five years, and the Greek Olympiad of four. So that, if I were a grave Roman, I should twice have offered solemn sacrifices to the Gods, or if I were a sprightly young Greek I should twice, and a little bit over, have distinguished myself in the Olympic Games by chariot-driving, racing, leaping, throwing, wrestling, boxing, and other gentlemanly pastimes,-- and all this, Midge, whilst you were still in your cradle! Why, you are a mere baby to me." "Papa was ten years older than Mamma," I persisted: "was she a mere baby to him?" "My dear, she was grown up." "Well then, when I am grown up I shall not be a mere baby to you!" I replied triumphantly. "You obstinate little thing!" observed Kate, who had listened with evident impatience; "don't you see this is a very different matter? you are as good as the adopted child of Cornelius." "Precisely," he hastened to observe, "and as I mean to be very paternal, I expressly desire you to be very filial." "You want to make quite a little girl of me!" I said ruefully. "Did your father do so?" "Well, but he was my real father, and you are not, and could not be." Kate declared there never had been such an obstinate child in all Ireland. Cornelius looked very grave, and said, as I did not value the privilege of being his adopted daughter, he should not press the point. I protested so warmly against this reproach, that he at length looked convinced, said it was all right, and again bade me good-night. I demurred, he insisted. "Ah!" I said reproachfully, "you are not as fond of me as Papa was?" "Why so, child?" "If I had asked him to stay up awhile, he would not have said 'No:' he would have said, 'Yes, Margaret, my dear, it is only ten; you may stay up another quarter of an hour.'" "Well then, stay," replied Cornelius, unable to repress a smile, "but you will make a nice exacting daughter." "A spoiled one," said Kate. "Let her," he replied; then laying his hand on my head, he kindly added, "Kate, this child is the only boast and good deed of my life. She makes me feel venerable and paternal, and, like a good Papa, I'll work hard to give her a marriage portion some day." "I don't want to marry," I observed pettishly; "I don't want to leave you, Cornelius." "Nonsense!" drily said Kate, "you'd do like your Mamma, run away, if one attempted to keep you." I denied it indignantly; she insisted. I was beginning to utter a most vehement protest against the mere idea of ever forsaking Cornelius, when he interfered, and informed me that his paternal pride and feelings would be wounded to the quick at the idea of my remaining an old maid. He appealed to my sense of filial duty; I generously sacrificed myself, but not without making some preliminary conditions. "He must be an Irishman," I said. "Ah!" observed Cornelius, stroking his chin, "he must be an Irishman!" "Yes, and an artist." Cornelius looked uncomfortable, but he merely echoed-- "An artist!" "Yes, and his name must be Cornelius." Cornelius looked disconcerted. "Nonsense!" sharply said Kate, "what are you talking of? an Irishman--an artist--name Cornelius? nonsense!" "Then I won't have him at all," I replied, rather provoked: "I did not want him, Kate, and you know it too. I want to stay with Cornelius." "Mrs. O'Reilly may have a word or two to say to that," very quietly observed Kate. I felt Cornelius start like one who receives the sting of a sudden pain, but he did not contradict his sister. Mrs. O'Reilly! the mere name was hateful to me. I did not reply; Kate continued-- "You look quite charmed at the idea of your Papa marrying." "No girl ever liked a stepmother yet," I answered, reddening. "Then you will be an exception, I am sure," very gravely said Cornelius. I was not at all sure of that; but I did not dare to say so. He saw very well that I was anything but cured of my old jealousy; and though I believe nothing was then further from his thoughts than marriage, he insisted on this point, to warn me, I suppose, of the necessity of self- subjection. "You must be the governess of the children," he said. "Yes, of course she must," decisively said Kate. I turned on her triumphantly: "Then don't you see," I said, "that if I am the governess I shall always stay with him?" Cornelius looked both annoyed and amused. "There is a wonderful degree of obstinacy in that child," he observed; "she always comes back to her idea of staying with me." "Because there is nothing she likes half so well," I said, looking up into his face. "Ah! Mignon! Mignon!" sighed Kate. "Who is Mignon?" I asked, struck with the name which I heard for the second time. "It is more than a quarter past ten," was the reply Miss O'Reilly gave me. I looked at Cornelius, but he showed no wish to detain me; so I submitted and left them. From that day there was a very marked change in his manner towards me. He was as kind, but by no means so familiar, as he once had been. He was always calling me his little daughter, yet I no sooner availed myself of this imaginary relationship to claim more freedom and tenderness, than he seemed bent on repelling me by the most pertinacious coldness. He received my caresses with chilling indifference, often with an annoyance he could not conceal; he seldom returned them, and when he did so, it was not with the friendliness and warmth to which he had accustomed me for years. When I felt this, and became dispirited and unhappy, Cornelius looked distressed, and, in his anxiety to restore me to cheerfulness, returned to his free and kind manner, in which he persevered until some remark of his sister, or some action of mine too fond and endearing, again rendered him cool and guarded. I could not imagine then the reason of all this. I could not imagine why, when I showed Cornelius how much I loved him, he looked so wretched; I could not understand why, when Kate once said to him, in her most ominous tones, "Cornelius, that child won't always be a child," he started up and began to walk up and down the room like one distracted. Still less could I make out how, when he seemed more attached to me than ever he had been, more anxious for my welfare, more bent on improving me by every means in his power, he was so provokingly cool and reserved. At length I could stand it no longer. "You don't like me," I once said to him, a little angrily,--"you know you don't; you never kiss me now--you know you never do." And I began to cry. Cornelius looked almost ludicrously perplexed. He hit his lip; his upraised eyes sought the ceiling; he tapped his foot; he sighed profoundly, then hung down his head, and looked melancholy. "I wish you would always remain a little girl of thirteen or so," he said ruefully, "it would be a great deal more convenient and comfortable." I was piqued with the wish, and checked my tears to inform Cornelius I hoped I should not remain a little girl; indeed I was sure of it, and that though he did not care about me at all, he should not prevent me from caring about him. He smiled, but not cheerfully; then he made an effort, and said,-- "Never mind, Daisy, you shall be happy, let it cost what it may; only don't tell Kate." "What must I not tell her, Cornelius?" "Never mind; but don't tell her." "But, Cornelius, I must know in order not to tell." "You are very inquisitive," was his short answer. I did not know what to make of him. He looked as oddly as he spoke, and I had not the faintest idea of the generous sacrifice he resolutely contemplated, at an age when most men are dead to all, save the gratification of their own vehement passions. Since then I have understood both what Cornelius feared and what he intended to do. I have admired his generosity and wondered at his rashness in forgetting what was not merely likely to happen, but what really did happen; namely, that he was to love again. This imprudent resolve had however the result of giving him momentary peace, and, perhaps because its realization was still so distant, of banishing from his mind all thought of the future. CHAPTER II. Of course Cornelius had gone on painting all this time. He finished his Stolen Child, painted two other smaller and more simple pictures, and he sent in the three to the Academy. "1 don't see why you should always send your pictures to the Academy," said Kate; "I don't think it is fair to the other Exhibitions." Cornelius confessed that the argument had its weight. "But then you see, Kitty," he added, "I cannot do less; they behaved so well to me last year about that trashy Happy Time: it really was a poor thing, and yet see how well they hung it--they did not think much of it, but they saw that it promised something for the future. Yes, they really behaved very well--so well that though I am certain they will reject the two minor pictures and only take in the Stolen Child, I feel I cannot do less than give them the chance of the three." "You are too generous," sighed Kate; "you will never get on in the world with those disinterested notions, my poor brother--never; besides, I put it to your sense of justice, now, is it fair to the other Exhibitions?" Cornelius said perhaps it was not, but added that he really could not do less, and persisted in his original intention. I remember, when the pictures were sent off, that he said to me,-- "My little girl, let this be a lesson to you! Always do that which you feel to be right, even though you should be a loser by it: depend upon it, it is much better to feel generous than mean." But when was generosity appreciated in this world? The Hanging Committee accepted the two inferior pictures and rejected the Stolen Child. Cornelius was stung to the quick. "If they had rejected the three pictures," he said, "I really could have borne it; I should have attributed it to want of room, or found some excuse for them. But to go and take the two inferior paintings, and reject the good one; to let it be thought--as it will be thought--by public and critics, that this is all the progress I have made since last year, it really is not fair." "Not fair!" sarcastically replied Miss O'Reilly; "not fair, Cornelius! It is all of a piece with their behaviour to you from the beginning. I always thought you had an enemy there, Cornelius." "But the Happy Time was accepted, Kate." "Of course it was, just as the two little things have been accepted, to delude you and the public also with a show of impartiality of which you at least, Cornelius, are not the dupe, I trust. It is all jealousy, mean jealousy." "It at least looks like it," replied Cornelius, sighing profoundly. "Hanging Committee, indeed!" pursued Kate, whom never before had I seen so bitter and so ironical, "they deserve their name! Oh yes, hanging! Are their own pictures well hung? Oh dear no!--not at all--so impartial-- very! Suppose they were hung instead of their pictures--in a row--not to hurt them, they are not worth it--but just to let us have a look at them!" In short, Miss O'Reilly was in a great rage; and if ever this unfortunate and much-abused body got it, it was on this day, for having rejected "The Stolen Child" of Cornelius O'Reilly, Esq. The two accepted pictures fetched ten pounds a-piece; the Stolen Child was sold to a picture-dealer for forty pounds. "Go," indignantly said Cornelius to his favourite picture as they parted,--"go, you are nothing now, but he who painted you will give you a name yet!" Four years had now elapsed since Cornelius had set forth on the conquest of Art with all the ardent courage of youth; and Art, alas! was still unconquered, and the triumph of victory was still a thing to come. He had anticipated difficulties, sharp and brief contests, but not this disheartening slowness, this powerlessness to emerge from the long night of obscurity. It irritated his impatient temper even more than the rejection of his picture. He did not complain, for there was nothing resembling querulousness in his nature; but he brooded over his disappointment, and resentfully too, as appeared from what he once said to me-- "If they think they'll prevent me from painting pictures, they'll find themselves wonderfully deceived!" I am not sure that "they" meant the Hanging Committee; I rather think it represented that vague enemy at whom disappointed ambition grasps so tenaciously. Whatever it signified, Cornelius kept his word: he painted, and harder than ever; but fortune was ungracious. Two charming cottage scenes which he sent in on the following year were accepted, it is true, but did little or nothing for his fame. One critic said "they were really very nicely painted;" another "advised Mr. O'Reilly not to be quite so slovenly;" a third found out that as in one of the cottages there was a fiddle, it was a gross plagiarism of Wilkie's "Blind Fiddler," artfully disguised indeed by the fiddle not being played upon, and of course none of the characters listening to its music, but not the less evident to lynx-eyed criticism; a fourth declared that Mr. O'Reilly was a promising young artist, who, in a dozen years or so, could not fail to hold a very respectable place in Art; and a fifth--one of those venal characters who disgrace every profession--sent in his card and terms. Kate wanted her brother to give him a cutting reply; he said there was nothing more cutting than silence, and lit his cigar with Mr. --'s edifying letter.* [* A fact.] "He does not complain," said Kate to me, "but I can see in his face there's something brewing." I thought so too, and resolved to find it out. It was some time before I succeeded; but I did succeed, and one day, when Kate said with a sigh-- "I wish I knew what's the matter with that boy!" I composedly replied-- "Cornelius wants to go to Rome." "Nonsense!" she said, jumping in her chair, "what has put that into your head? Did he tell you?" "No; but I am sure of it." I spoke confidently; she affected to doubt me; but the same evening proved the truth of my conjecture. It was not in Miss O'Reilly's nature to turn round a thing, so, as we were all throe walking in the garden, enjoying the cool [air], she suddenly confronted her brother, and said bluntly-- "Cornelius, is it true that you want to go to Rome?" He reddened, looked astonished, and never answered. "Then it is true," she exclaimed with a sigh. "Yes, Kate, it is, but how do you know it?" "Midge told me." "Daisy!" he turned round and gave me a piercing look. "Why, I never hinted anything of the sort to her." "No, but she found it out; and what do you want to go to Rome for, Cornelius?" "To study, Kate. I have been too homely, too simple, and that is why I am slighted; I should like to go, to study, to try the historic style: but where is the use to talk of all this?" He sighed profoundly. "The historic style," cried Miss O'Reilly, kindling; "Cornelius, you have hit the true thing at last: depend upon it you have. Of course you have been too humble! give them something bold and dashing, and let us see what they'll say to that! Go to Rome, Cornelius, go to Rome." "The means, Kate, the means!" "Bless the boy! As if I had not money." "Oh! Kate! you have done more than enough for me as it is," he replied, crimsoning; "it makes my blood boil to think that I shall soon be twenty- five--" "Nonsense!" she interrupted hastily, "will you go to Rome, study the great masters, see all that painting has achieved of most glorious, become a great painter yourself--or stay at home and plod on?" His varying countenance told how strong was the temptation: his look lit, his colour came and went like that of a girl. "Yes or no?" decisively said Kate. "Well, then,--yes," he replied desperately; "I know it is mean, but I cannot help it, the thought of it has for weeks kept me awake at night, and haunted me day after day." "And you never told me," reproachfully interrupted his sister, "and never would if Midge had not found it out!" He eluded the reproach by asking me how I had found it out. I could not satisfy him; instinct had guided me more than knowledge; the word Rome, uttered with stifled sigh; an impatient declaration that there was nothing to be done here; a long lingering over old engravings of which the originals were in Italy, were the signs which, often repeated and united to my intimate acquaintance with every change of his face, had showed me the secret thought of his heart. "You must go at once," resolutely said Kate; "can you be ready next week?" "I could be ready to-morrow," replied Cornelius, with eyes that lit. There was a pang which he saw not on his sister's face; my heart fell to see how eager he was to go from us. Unconscious of this he continued-- "The sooner I go the better, is it not, Kate? for then, you know, I shall return the sooner, too." "Very true," she sighed; and his departure was fixed for the following week. He was in a fever for the whole of that week. For the first time, he was going to taste liberty: he was young, ardent, restless by nature, quiet by force of circumstances; no wonder the prospect enchanted him. I was in one sense happy to see him happy, but I felt acutely that he was going away from us. He was gay and cheerful, I did not want to sadden him with the sight of a grief I could not help feeling, and I shunned rather than sought his company. Thus, two days before the day fixed for his departure, instead of remaining with him and Kate in the back parlour where they sat talking by the open window, I went out into the garden to indulge in a good fit of crying. In the stillness of the evening I could hear every word of their discourse. Either they did not know this or they forgot it, for after dwelling enthusiastically on his prospects, Cornelius added suddenly-- "How unwell Daisy looks!" "She is fretting about you. The poor child is fonder of you than ever, Cornelius." "Do you think so?" he earnestly replied. "Of course I do. She frets, tries to hide it, and cannot; and you know, Cornelius, it is only beauty looks lovely in tears." "She is not a beauty, but she has fine eyes." "Spite of which you cannot call her pretty, Cornelius." He sighed and did not contradict it. "I know you did not think so," continued Kate. "Oh! Kate!" he interrupted with another sigh, "why, any one can see the poor child is only getting plainer as she grows up!" "Never mind," cheerfully said Kate. "But she may mind, and she will mind too. If the women slight and the men neglect her, how can she but mind it?" "The plain have a happiness of their own," quietly replied Kate. "God looks kindly on them and they learn to despise the rude harshness of the world." With this she began talking to Cornelius of his journey. I was then near fifteen. I remember myself well,--a thin, slim girl, awkward, miserably shy and nervous, with sunken eyes, a face more sallow than ever, and hair scarcely darker in hue than when Miriam Russell had aptly called it straw-coloured. I knew my own disadvantages quiet well, I was accustomed to them, and though I quailed a little when I heard Cornelius and Kate thus settle the delicate question of my looks, it was only for awhile. It is true that the taunts of Miriam had formerly exasperated me, because it was by her beauty that she had conquered and replaced me in the heart of Cornelius; but with her power vanished the sting of my plainness. The little emotion I felt was over when Cornelius stepped out into the garden to indulge in a cigar. On seeing me, he looked much disconcerted. I daresay he thought I must be cut to the quick by what I had heard; for though he did not allude to it, he sat down on the wooden bench, made me sit by him, and was so unusually kind that I could not help being a little amused. I allowed myself to be petted for awhile, then I looked up at him and said, smiling-- "As if I minded it, Cornelius! As if I did not know that though I should grow ever so plain, you would still like me! As if I could think it would make any difference to you!" He muttered, "Oh! of course not!" I continued-- "Kate says you are handsome, and I dare say you are; but if you had lost one eye, or had a great ugly scar across your face, or were disfigured in some dreadful way, it would make no difference to me, Cornelius." He smiled, without replying: I resumed-- "Therefore, Cornelius, that does not trouble me much, but something else which Kate said does trouble me." I paused, and looked at him; he seemed a little disturbed. "What are you talking of, child?" he said; "what do you mean?" "Kate said I was fonder of you than ever, Cornelius; it is true, very true, I love you more as I grow up, because I know your goodness better; but then something which you might conclude from that, Cornelius, is not true." I looked up at him very earnestly. "Child!" he said, astonished; "what are you talking and thinking of?" "I am thinking, Cornelius, of a thing I have thought of for a year and more. I often wanted to tell you, but I never dared; I should like to tell you now, Cornelius, only I don't know how." Cornelius looked perplexed. "I would gladly help you," he observed, "if I only knew what it was about." I could not help reddening. "Suppose," he said hastily, "you write it to me when I am in Italy--eh, Daisy?" "I would rather say it than write it, Cornelius." "Then say it, child." "Well, then, Cornelius," I replied, a little desperately, "I will never be jealous of you again--there!" "There!" he echoed, smiling, "is that the mighty secret?" "Yes, Cornelius, that is it," I replied, with a beating heart. "My good little girl," he said kindly, "I am glad you have such good resolves; but I must set you right. You talk of not being jealous any more, as you would talk of taking off a dress and never putting it on again." "And should I, Cornelius, if it were old and worn out?" "But is this one worn out?" "I hope so. I think so." "I hope so too." But I could see he did not think it. I was anxious to convince him, and resumed-- "Cornelius, do you remember how insolent I was when papa lived?--how rude I showed myself to you when you came to see him?--how over-bearing to the servants?" "You were a spoiled child, certainly; but you have got over that." "I think I have, Cornelius. When I came here, I was rude to Deborah, who was good enough to bear with it for a long time; but one day Kate heard me, and she told me she thought it very mean and ungenerous to be rude to servants. She said she would not enjoin on me to apologize to Deborah; but she hoped that, for my own sake, I would do so. The next day I went down into the kitchen, and asked Deborah to forgive me." "How did you like that?" asked Cornelius giving me a curious look. "Not at all. It mortified me so much I could scarcely do it; but I was never rude to Deborah again." "How is it I never heard of this story before?" "I begged of Kate not to tell you. I could not bear that you should think me ungenerous and mean." "And the moral of all that, Daisy?" "That it is very mean to be jealous, Cornelius; very mean and ungenerous; and that I hope never to be so again. Do you still think I shall?" I added, glancing up at his face. "I think," he replied, looking down into mine, "that there is a strange spark of austere ambition in you, strange in one so young: and that what it will lead to is more than I can tell." "Cornelius, I don't feel ambitious; but I long to be good, and I hope God will help me." "If that is not ambitious, I don't know anything about it," replied Cornelius; "but it is a very fine ambition, Daisy; and I am glad you have it; ay, and I respect you for it, too!" I looked up at him, to make sure he did not speak in jest; but he seemed quite grave and in earnest. I felt much relieved; this matter had lain on my heart a year and more, yet I never could have spoken to him, had he not been going away. The passionate wish of making him give me a little more of his regard and esteem had, alone, loosened my tongue, that wish was now more than gratified by his words. "Oh! Cornelius," I exclaimed, "how good of you not to laugh at me!" "Poor child, did you expect I should?" "I feared it." He was gently reproving me for the fear, when Kate beckoned him in, and held a whispered conversation with him in the passage. Some mystery seemed afloat. I felt uneasy. When I bade Cornelius good-night that evening, he kissed me with a lingering tenderness that troubled me. Was not this, perhaps, a parting embrace? I fancied I detected unusual sadness in his gaze, and heard him suppress a sigh. I said nothing; but I resolved not to sleep that night, sooner than run the risk of losing the adieu of Cornelius. Soon after I had retired to my room, I heard him and his sister come up too. It was scarcely ten; this unusually early hour confirmed me in my suspicion. I sat up in the dark. I heard twelve,--then one,--then two; and my power of keeping vigil failed me. Sleep is a pitiless tyrant in youth. I felt my eyes involuntarily closing. I took a resolve that was not without some meaning. I softly stole out of my room, sat down on the mat at the door of Cornelius, and, secure that he could not leave without my knowledge, I soon fell fast asleep. What might have been foreseen, happened: Cornelius, on leaving his room, stumbled over me. I woke; he stooped and picked me up, with a mingled exclamation of wonder and dismay. "Daisy!" he cried, "are you hurt? What brought you here?" "I wanted to bid you good-bye. I guessed you were going." His room door stood half-open, and so did the window beyond it; the morning stirred the white muslin curtains, and early dawn was blushing in the grey sky. Cornelius drew me to that dim light, and gazed at me silently. "How long have you been there?" he asked. "Since two; I felt too sleepy to sit up in my own room, and I was so afraid you might go whilst I slept." "Since two--and it is four! You foolish child! If I wanted to go quietly, it was only to spare your little heart some grief, and your poor eyes some tears." "Cornelius, I shall not cry now. I shall wait until you are gone for that." Attracted by the sound of our voices, Kate now opened her room door. "Daisy?" she exclaimed. "Yes," replied her brother, "Daisy, who has been sleeping at my door like a faithful watcher. Oh! Kate, you'll take care of her whilst I am away?" "Yes, yes, of course; but don't stand losing your time there. Come down." We went downstairs. Cornelius took a hasty meal; then a cab stopped at the door; his luggage was removed to it, and he stood ready to depart. His sister was to go with him to the station. They thought it better for me to stay behind, and I submitted. I kept my word--I did not cry--I went through the parting courageously. Cornelius seemed much moved. He took me in his arms, and repeatedly he embraced me, repeatedly he pressed me to his heart. He exhorted me to persevere in my studies, to be good and dutiful to Kate. Then he promised to write to me, called me his child, his dear adopted daughter, gave me another kiss, put me away, and departed. I saw him go, I heard the cab rolling down the street, not without sorrow, but without bitterness. To be separated from him was hard, no doubt, but to part with the consciousness of so much affection on his side, with the prospect of a happy re-union, with the conviction that his absence was to open to him a career of fortune and renown, was not a thing that could not be borne. I wept heartily, but I was not unhappy. In two hours Kate returned; she entered the parlour, sat down, took off her bonnet, and began to cry. "Well," she said, "he has his wish--he is gone--and how glad, how eager he was to go! Poor boy, he has had a dull, imprisoned life, and liberty is sweet. Besides, it is in their nature; they like to rove, every one of them; they like to rove, and once they are off, mother, sister, or wife may wait." She cried again, but there never was a more firm, more cheerful nature. She soon checked her tears, to say, with a sigh,-- "Now Midge, you must help me, for there is a wonderful deal to do. Well, child, don't open your eyes. I forgot I had not told you--we are going to leave." "To leave!" "Yes, my child, we must. I had money by me, to be sure; but not enough, and I was not going to let Cornelius travel otherwise than as an Irish gentleman, so I borrowed at interest. He will want for nothing, that is one comfort; but we must pinch, Daisy, and to begin I have let the house furnished to a single gentleman, who comes in next Saturday. He has agreed to keep Deborah, who is now too expensive a servant for me. That is why we must leave." "Very well," I said, resolutely; "we shall take a little room somewhere, and I'll be your housemaid, Kate." She smiled, and kissed me. "Nonsense, child, we are not driven to that yet. You know your father left some property,--very little, it is true, but you will find it safe when you grow up. The house in which he died was his, and is yours now; it has not proved a very valuable possession, for nobody will live in it on account of its being so lone and bleak. Leigh is a cheap place, and you and I, Daisy, are going to Rock Cottage after to-morrow." "To live in it, Kate?" "Yes, to live in it. There is nothing to keep me here, once he is gone. I did not tell him this, as you may imagine, so there is no time to lose in packing up. That was what I meant by saying you should help me." With the courage of a true heart, she rose at once and set to work. I aided her willingly; we made such good despatch, that three days after the departure of Cornelius we had left the Grove and reached Leigh. Miss Murray, with whom Cornelius and Kate had always kept up an occasional correspondence, had, through the medium of Abby, kindly provided our future home with the first necessaries of beds, chairs, and tables; the rest, Kate said, would come in time. The village through which we passed looked the same quiet place I had left it five years before. Few changes had occurred; the only strangeness was that men and women whose faces I had not forgotten, stared at us, and knew me not. "How very odd!" I said to Kate, "I am sure that was Mr. Jenning, who keeps the dancing academy. He ought to know me, ought he not, Kate? I was one of his pupils. Papa said I should know how to dance, for that it gave a graceful carriage. I believe he used to dance himself when he was quite a young man, but I never saw him. Do you feel uuwell, Kate?" She made a sign of denial. I continued-- "Do you see that path, Kate? Well, it leads to my grandfather's house. I wonder if he still lives in it with Mrs. Marks and my cousin Edith! I will show you to-morrow the place where I felt tired, and Cornelius carried me to Ryde. Why, Kate, we need not go on; this is Rock Cottage; I forgot you did not know it." "Yes, there it stood, the same isolated white-washed, low-roofed dwelling in its lone garden. My tears rushed forth as I saw again the home where I had been reared, and where my father had died. Kate opened the door, but as she crossed the threshold she turned deadly pale, and sank rather than sat in the nearest chair. "Kate!" I cried, quite alarmed, "what is the matter with you?" I passed my arm around her neck; she gave me a most sorrowful look, then laid her head on my shoulder, and cried as if her heart would break. "Oh, Kate!" I said, much distressed, "he has promised to be back in two years, and indeed he will keep his word." She did not seem to heed me. "It was here," she murmured, "yes, it was here he died." This time I looked at her silent and astonished. "Oh, Daisy!" she cried, clasping her hands and looking up too, "is it possible that you neither know nor guess that I was to have been your father's wife, and that you ought to have been my child?" Her passionate tone went through my very heart. "You, Kate!" I said; "you!" "Yes," she replied, weeping more slowly; "it was to have been--it was not--he died here alone, I was far away." Miss O'Reilly made me feel very strangely. I had never known my mother. I drew closer to her, and after a while I said-- "Why did you not marry him?" "He was poor, and I had the child to rear; I could not bear to bring two burdens upon him; it was pride, he thought it was mistrust, and married another; I had no right to complain, nor did I; but it was then I took to being so fond of the boy, just I suppose because he had cost me so dear." "But why did you not marry Papa after Mamma died?" I inquired. "He never asked me, child," and she bowed her head with sad and humble resignation; "I thought he would, and I should have been glad to have had him, but perhaps he could not quite forgive my having once preferred my little brother to my grown-up lover; perhaps he thought me altered, and no longer the pretty girl he had courted: whatever it was, he did not ask me; and yet how good and friendly it was of him to help me as he did to rear the boy for whom I had given him up! I sometimes think he liked me in his heart, for Cornelius has often told me how my name was the last he uttered; and I cannot help fancying he meant I was to have the care of you. Oh! Midge, Midge," she added, looking me in the face very wistfully, "I have loved you very dearly, because you were his child, but I have often remembered that you ought also to have been mine." "If you had been Papa's wife, I mean his first wife," I said very earnestly, "I should have been the niece of Cornelius, should I not, Kate?" "You would have been my child." "And his niece too, Kate." "Do not be always thinking of Cornelius, Daisy." "Oh! Kate, Uncle Cornelius has such a pleasant sound!" She caressed me sadly; then we rose, went over the house together, and finally surveyed the garden. All trace of man's art had vanished from the spot, on which nature had bestowed a beauty and wild grace its culture had never known. The hedge of gorse now enclosed but a green wilderness of high waving grass, weeds, and wild flowers. Other flowers there were none, and the tender shrubs uncared for, had perished, blighted by the keen sea-breeze; the pine trees alone still stood and looked the same as I had left them, over their changed domain. For awhile we looked down from the stone steps where Cornelius had found me lying so desolate, then Kate descended, and said to me-- "Daisy, we will not change much. We will spoil as little as we can the freshness of the place. I like that green grass, those weeds that hide the brown earth so well, those long trailing creepers and wild flowers. We will just clear the path, add a few of the plants we like, give the whole a look of home, and leave what is beautiful as we found it." "Kate," I exclaimed, hastening down to the pine-trees, "here is the sea. You have not yet had a good view of it, do come and look. Do you remember how I got up on the table in the studio to get a sight of it? Oh! is it not a grand thing?" She smiled at my enthusiasm, and sat down on the wooden bench, which still stood in its old place. My heart swelled as I remembered that there I had received my father's embrace, but I would not sadden her by recalling it; I shaded my eyes with my hand to hide my tears, and whilst they flowed I looked long and silently on that eternal ocean on which, for nearly five years, I had not gazed. It still rolled its heavy waters with majestic calmness; they now looked dark as molten lead, a white line of surf marking where they broke on the beach. The day had been grey and cloudy, and the sun was setting veiled and without splendour. For awhile the heavy clouds resting on the low, sea-bound horizon, still wore a reddish tint, like the smouldering ashes of a spent fire. Like them too they suddenly grew pale. Light mists, advancing from the sea, shrouded the coast below, distinctness faded away from every object, and the penetrating chillness of evening began to spread upon the air. Kate rose; we went in; as we ascended the steps she turned hack, she looked on the wild garden, on the pine-trees whose dark and spreading branches now moved to the evening breeze with a low rustling sound, at that broad sky crossed by swift clouds and hanging over the sea, and with a sigh she said-- "It was just like him, to come and live here,--he always liked wild places." We entered the house, there to spend a quiet subdued evening, talking of him who had scarcely left us, and to whose return I already looked forward. In a week we were settled at Rock Cottage. A little black-eyed girl, answering to the name of Jane, was our only servant. We led a humble, yet happy, homely life, to which the thought of the absent one lent something of the charm we once had found in his presence. Household matters occupied Kate, and the garden was her relaxation. It is a spot which, ever since the days of Eve, has, in one sense, been the paradise of woman. The curse of banishment that fell on both her and Adam touched her more nearly. After his fall Eden itself could no more have been the limit of his hopes and desires, but Eve, if allowed to do so, could have lingered in the happy place for ever. Her daughters still love what she loved, and wherever they dwell, in wild or in the city, there too are the flowers which Eve first tended in happy Eden. I shared the tasks and the pleasures of Kate, but whereas the absence of Cornelius, though deeply felt, had changed little or nothing in her habits or external life, it opened to me a new existence. Hitherto my life and my feelings had slept in the shadow of the life and feelings of Cornelius. He influenced me completely, when least seeking to do so. I loved his sister, but she had not that power over me, and when I was parted from my friend, I seemed to have remained alone and to fall back perforce on myself. But when one evil, one teaching fail, God sends the needful. He now gave me nature in those aspects, both sublime and beautiful, which she wore around the home of my childhood. From winds and waves, from aspects of sea and winning shore, from green solitudes and spots of wild beauty, 1 learned, though all unconsciously, pure and daily lessons. CHAPTER III. I know not whether my native air did me good, or whether, had I even remained in the Grove, a crisis in my health would have taken place, but I know that to Kate's great joy I grew so strong and well, that she declared the change all but miraculous. I felt an altered being. My love of silence and repose vanished; I now rejoiced in motion and out-door exercise with all the unquiet delight of youth, and thirsted, with ever new longing, for air and liberty. Scarce passed a day but I went down the path that led from our garden to the sands, and I wandered away along the rock-bound coast. This part of the country was both safe and retired; few met or noticed me in my solitary haunts, and I feared harm from none. It was often dusk when I returned to the white cottage, whose light burned like a solitary star on the heights above. I loved these lonely wanderings. I loved that barrier of steep and fantastic rock which ran along the coast, and fenced it in from the outer world; that long line of winding shore, fading in faint mists, until it rested, like a low cloud, on the distant horizon; that sea, whose waves broke at my feet, and yet seemed to extend beyond the power of mortal ken to follow, whilst the hollow sky, bent down from above and enclosing all, gave a sense of limit in the very midst of infinite. Leigh does not by any means belong to the most romantic and picturesque part of the western coast; but on whatever shore the sea-waves break, there always is a great and dreary beauty. To sit on a lonely rock, to watch the fishing boats as they slowly sailed along the coast, or the ships on their distant track, to feel the solemn vastness of all around me, to note the rapid and almost infinite changes of light ever passing over rock, sea, and sky, to listen to the sounds which varied from the loudest roar of the swelling tide breaking at my feet, down to its lowest receding murmur, but that never ceased to echo, rise, and die away amongst those lonely cliffs, was to me a delight beyond all else. There were pleasant walks about Leigh, but I soon wearied of them, and ever returned to my barren and much-loved coast. There I learned to know the sea under all her aspects. I saw her in sunshine, spreading peacefully beneath cloudless heavens, like them, an image of serenity and repose, and idly speeding on the light crafts that pursued their way with indolent and careless grace. I saw her in storm, darkness brooding over her heaving waters, her vast, white-crested billows rearing like angry serpents against the lowering sky, her hovering flocks of pale sea-birds rising and sinking to every motion of the waves like evil spirits rejoicing in the tempest, whilst some bold ship, with mainmast broken, with torn sails fluttering like banners on a battle day, sped past amidst the turmoil of wind and wave, riding the waters with a triumphant power that banished fear, and made you feel she would yet reach the port, and weather many another storm. I also found in the ocean other aspects less definite, but to me not less impressive,--the desolate and the bleak, when the wide waters of a dull green hue rolled sluggishly along or heavily beat the sandy beach, whilst fleecy clouds slowly passed over a misty sky where grey melted into paler grey, giving that sense of vague and melancholy infinite which can only be felt on the wild northern shores. I delighted in this wild and lonely life, and seldom felt the utter solitude of my daily haunts. Sometimes indeed, when I chanced to meet in the sand the mark of my own footprints, which no other steps had crossed since I had passed there, which the wind alone would efface or the tide wash away, a sense of sudden sadness came over me. It seemed as if a friend, whom I never could meet or overtake, had made and left that track for me to see. I felt vaguely that she who had passed there was not quite the same who passed now. Only a few days perhaps had gone by: but of those few days, unseen and unfelt as they speed on, is made up not only the sum, but also the ceaseless change of this our earthly life. Dearly as I have loved solitude, I hold it no unmixed good. Woe to the communion with nature that is only a brooding over self, and not a mingling of the soul with the Almighty Creator of all we behold; that seeks in her loveliness none save the images of voluptuous indulgence, and leaves by unread her purer teaching! Rightly even in innocent things have we been warned to guard our senses and our hearts. For this I hold ye dangerous, ye sheltered valleys, with quiet rivers gliding through, with green woods and lovely paths leading we know not where, with peaceful dwellings embosomed in the shade, and looking like so many abodes of love and happiness. What though we know that the golden age was all a fable and pastoral bliss the dream of poets, that innocence and peace dwell not here, though here passion and satiety can penetrate as surely as in the crowded city? Yet who, on beholding you, has not for a moment wished to live and die on your quiet bosom? Who has not felt that the thoughts you waken melt and subdue the heart, and haunt it vaguely for many a day, and enervate it with longing dreams and desires that savour too much of earth. Not these the feelings which thou awakenest, thou austere sea,--austere in thy very beauty, in thy calmest and most unruffled moods. More true and honest are thy promises, which thou at least keepest faithfully,--the long, arduous strife against wind and storm, the tardy return of weatherbeaten mariners,--ay, and often too the wreck,--the wreck which may appal the weak, but never yet dismayed a brave heart;--these are the hopes thou holdest forth--these the promises which life, whom thou imagest, will fulfil, until her waves, calm or troubled, rough or smooth, lead us into that mysterious sea which man has named Eternity. Our home existence was as quiet and secluded as my outward life. On settling at Leigh, Miss O'Reilly had come to a resolve which she thus imparted to me one evening:--"Daisy, you were too young when you left Leigh to know that because it is a small place it must have the inconvenience of all small places, in which life is a round of back- biting, quarrelling, envying, scandal, and gossip. Now we can't help being backbitten or talked about, but we can help doing it to others: the way, child, is to keep to ourselves and to see no one. We shall be hated, as a matter of course; thought proud, or still worse in England, poor. Never mind, child, those are not the things one cannot endure." "Papa was thought proud," I said. "And so he was, child; he had a mind above the paltriness of such a place as this,--of course he had: he never would have been a popular man anywhere, never. Well, as I was saying, child, we must bear with being thought proud and poor, for we shall make no acquaintances. A decent, civil intercourse we must certainly keep up with Miss Murray--she won't trouble us much, poor thing!--but beyond this we do not go. Now, you must not misunderstand me. I do not mean to keep you locked up, and if you can get acquainted with pleasant young people, I do not object. There is a dancing academy, it seems, and since your father wished you to learn how to dance, you must learn it, of course. If you meet there sensible girls whom you would like to see, see them here in liberty; but as to visiting their mammas, or being visited by them, I decline the honour." Thus it was settled. We lived in our retired way; we were thought proud and poor; we saw Miss Murray every now and then in her own house, for to come near us was an exertion not to be thought of; I went to the academy, and learned how to dance, but I found all the young ladies so little to my taste, that with not one of them did I form an intimate acquaintance, and two years passed away in this quiet, monotonous life, varied by the letters of Cornelius. Only a few were addressed to "his dear adopted child," but they were so kind, they breathed an affection so true, an interest so heartfelt, that to this day, and spite of all that has passed since then, I cannot look over them without emotion. In all his letters, Cornelius spoke of course of his art and his prospects. He was enchanted with Rome, and ardent with hope; but he did not think it worth while to send home anything before his return. He thought he might just as well wait until he was coming back, and take the public by storm. Miss O'Reilly thought so too, and we accordingly expected her brother in the spring of the second year following his departure. A somewhat enigmatic letter, in which he expressed his great wish of seeing us both again, confirmed this impression. "Depend upon it, Daisy," said Miss O'Reilly to me, "he means to take us, like the public, by surprise." The mere thought took away my breath. "Oh, Kate!" I exclaimed, laying down my work, "if he were to enter the room now, what should I do?" "I am sure I don't know," replied Kate, looking up from her letter, "you look wild enough for anything. Go and take a walk, child, and calm yourself down with the fresh seabreeze. We are in March, I don't expect him for a fortnight or three weeks yet. Go out, I say; he must find you fresh and healthy." "You don't think he will come whilst I am out, Kate?" "Bless the child! no; I tell you not to expect him for three weeks." I sighed; three weeks seemed an age, and, spite of her assurances, I had a nervous apprehension that Cornelius would arrive precisely whilst I was away; yet I yielded to her behest of going out. I wanted to see William Murray, and tell him the happy tidings; so I just put on my bonnet and cloak, and hastened down to the sands. It was a mild afternoon; the sky was clear, earth was silent, the cliffs rose grey and lonely, the flat beach was yet wet with the retreating tide that had left many a wide shallow pool behind, the far sea lay calm and still, and over sky, earth, cliffs, beach and sea, the setting sun shed a pale, golden glow. I walked fast, looking out for William, whom I at length saw coming towards me. And this reminds me I have neglected to mention how my acquaintance with him was renewed, after so long an interruption. We had not parted very good friends. He had called me "a sulky little monkey," and if I had not retaliated, I had nevertheless internally considered him a young bear then and ever since. When, shortly after our return to Leigh, I met him at his aunt's house, William, who was nearly two years my senior, was in all the charming roughness of his sex in the teens. He had not yet got over being left to petticoat government, as he termed the rule of his gentle aunt, and accordingly vented the indignation of his injured manliness on her female friends. On seeing us enter the room in which Miss Murray sat in her usual shady state, her amiable nephew thrust his hands into his pockets, and began whistling with all his might. Miss O'Reilly took no notice of this, but in the course of conversation she quietly observed to Miss Murray-- "What a fine boy your nephew is, Ma'am?" "Ah! if he were only a good boy!" sighed Miss Murray. William was then turned seventeen; but he looked about fourteen; the observation of Kate was therefore doubly insulting. I know not whether it was to show his resentment, that at tea he shuffled and kicked his feet under the table to such a degree, that his aunt, laying down her cup, solemnly inquired, "If he intended to break her heart, as he was ruining her furniture and endangering the shins of her guests?" To which delicate question, the only reply William deigned to give was a scowl over his tea-cup, and a sarcastic intimation at the close of the meal, that "tea was the greatest slop and most womanish stuff _he_ had ever tasted." "Milk and water is decidedly more wholesome for children," mischievously said Kate. William turned scarlet, stabbed her with a look, rose and left the room, slamming the door after him. Miss Murray produced her handkerchief, and looked pitiful. "I appeal to you, Ma'am, is not mine a dreadful, a lamentable case! That boy, Ma'am, is the misery of my life; twice he has run away, and has had to be pursued and caught; each time offering the most desperate resistance." "He is but a boy," good-humouredly observed Kate, "he will grow out of all this." Miss Murray however, for a reason very different from that of Rachel, would not be comforted, and lamented the length of the holidays. Kate herself changed her opinion when she discovered on the following morning the manner in which the shoes of William had used her light grey silk. She called him a little wretch; and, in her indignation, wondered what could tempt his aunt to have him pursued and brought back, when by absconding he had offered her so easy a method of getting rid of him altogether. I almost concurred in this opinion, and altogether looked upon William as a sort of young Christian savage. So far as I could see, the gracious youth did not trouble his aunt much with his company. I seldom or ever went down to the sands without meeting him with his dog 'Dash,' a shaggy-coated creature, as rough-looking as his master, who went whistling past me with superb indifference. I had met them thus one day, the youth climbing the cliffs, and the dog bounding on before him, and now and then turning round to utter a short joyous bark at his master, when, on returning homewards, I saw them again under altered circumstances. William sat on a rock at the base of the cliff, his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands, and at his feet Dash lay dead. He had fallen from above, and been killed at once; his young master looked at him silently, and, as I approached, dashed away a furtive tear. I stood, unwilling to go on without having expressed sympathy or attempted consolation, and not knowing how to do either, I knelt on the sands and, caressing the poor dead dog, I hesitatingly observed-- "He was a very good dog, was he not?" "There never was a better," replied William in a subdued voice. "He seemed very clever." "I could make him do anything. He'd dash in the roughest sea at a look, and if I only said 'Dash!' he'd look into my face, prick his ears, and be ready to fly off. Poor old Dash! he'll never do the bidding of his master again." And he stooped over him to hide his tears. "Was he old?" I asked. "Just turned five; the prime age, you know; at four they are too young, and at six they are aging: five is the age for a dog. That was why he was such a beauty; see what a coat he had, what a deep broad chest, and such a back! I'll take a bet with any one, you can hear that dog's bark for miles along the coast; that is to say, one could have heard it, for Dash's barking is all ended and over now." Thus poor William sat lamenting over his lost favourite, recording his virtues and some of his many exploits, when I said-- "I suppose you will bury him in Miss Murray's garden?" "No, that I shan't," he replied indignantly, "he shall be buried where he fell, as they bury soldiers after battle." So saying, he drew forth his knife, and began digging a deep and narrow grave at the base of the sea-washed cliff; he lined it softly with his handkerchief, saying as he did so-- "Won't Abby have a precious hunt for it?" Then he took Dash, gave him a last caress, gently laid him in his grave, covered him over with sand and earth, and marked the spot with a fragment of rock, on which he carved the day of the month and year. "Won't you put his name?" I asked. "No. Dash answered and obeyed no one but me; his name is nothing to any one else, and I don't want to know it." We walked on. As a projecting rock was going to hide the spot from our view, William turned round to give it one last glance, then he looked at me wishfully, and said, "I had him from a pup, and I taught him all his tricks." From that day William and I were friends. We met to talk of Dash at first, and afterwards of other things, for even the best of dogs must expect to be forgotten. William generously forgave me my sex, and confided to me his troubles. His aunt, it seems, kindly intended him as a present to the Church, but William vowed no mortal power should induce him to turn a parson, and boldly declared for the sea, in a midshipman's berth, against which his aunt, whose ideas of nautical life were summed up in grog and biscuit, entered a solemn protest. As we very seldom visited Miss Murray, and as she never visited us, I only saw William when I met him out, and that was often, for we loved the same solitary haunts and wild scenes. In parting we told one another what places we were to visit on the morrow, and William no more knew he had asked me for a meeting, than I knew I had granted him one. We followed the retreating tide to gather shells and sea-weeds, or ran hand in hand along the sands, laughing, because the keen breeze took away our breath, and the waves came dashing to our feet, covering us with spray. We climbed together the steepest cliffs for the mere love of danger, and risked our necks, ten times for one, by running down the same perilous path. When we felt tired, we sat down on some rock to rest, and William, drawing forth from his pocket 'The Dangers of the Deep,' made me low- spirited with dismal stories of lost or shipwrecked mariners. Friendships grow rapidly in youth, and by the close of William's holidays we were as free and intimate as if we had been in familiar intercourse for years. I had told Miss O'Reilly of Dash's death and burial, and was beginning to state that William Murray was not quite so bad as he had appeared on our first interview, when she interrupted me with-- "Nonsense, child, the boy may have liked his dog; but what about it?" Later, when I imparted to her the grievances of my friend, she treated them in the same careless, slighting way. "Pooh! pooh!" she said, "does the little fellow think he knows his own mind? A midshipman! why the first breeze would whip him off the deck. He'll do a great deal better in the pulpit, so far as physical strength goes, but what sort of a preacher he will make is more than I can tell." I was too much mortified by her tone and manner to renew the subject; but at the same time, and with the spirit of opposition of my years, I liked William all the better for being rather persecuted. Indeed, the aversion Kate had taken to my friend proved somewhat unfortunate, for, without intending any mystery, I forbore to mention his name to her; consequently she knew little or nothing of an intimacy which I have reason to believe she would have opposed from many motives, and to which her opposition would in the beginning have been a sufficient bar. In spite of the ridicule with which Miss O'Reilly treated his pretensions to the sea, William Murray conquered his aunt's opposition, and, in the course of the ensuing spring, went forth on his first voyage. He remained a year away, and came back about a week before we received the letter which led us to expect the return of Cornelius. Our joy on seeing one another again was great; absence had not cooled our friendship; not a day passed but we met on the sands, and took long walks down the coast. I thought nothing of this until Miss O'Reilly said to me-- "William Murray is come back." "Yes, I know," I replied, feeling that I turned crimson. "And how do you know?" she asked, giving me an attentive look. "I met him on the sands." She did not ask me why I had not mentioned it to her sooner, but said quietly-- "That boy has grown very much." The word "boy" relieved me greatly. Since William was only a boy, there could be no sort of harm or indiscretion in being so much with him, nor was there either any absolute necessity to mention the matter to Miss O'Reilly. So when, to quiet my anticipations, she sent me out for a walk, I did not inform her that one of my motives for complying with her request was to impart the tidings to William Murray. As I saw him advancing towards me, I eagerly ran to meet him. "Oh, William," I cried joyfully, "I am so glad, so happy." "Then Mr. O'Reilly is come back?" he said, stopping short to look at me. "No; but he is coming soon, quite soon. Is it not delightful?" "Indeed it is," he replied cordially; "tell me all about it, Daisy." We sat down on a ledge of rock facing the sea, and I told him all there was to tell. He heard me with a pleased smile on his kind, handsome face, which he kept turned towards mine, as he sat there in a listening attitude. William was then between eighteen and nineteen. He was slight in figure, but above the middle height, and of a spirited bearing. His complexion, once too fair, had become embrowned by constant exposure, and spite of his light hair and blue eyes he looked sufficiently manly; his midshipman's attire became him well, and the consciousness of having entered active life had freed his manner from much of its ungracious roughness. Of these changes I was conscious, but other change I saw not: William was to me what he had been since we had become friends--frank, ingenuous, and boyish in his kindness. I had often spoken to him of Cornelius, and I now closed my brief recital with the remark-- "Oh, William! I am so happy that I scarcely know what to do with myself." He looked at me silently, began tracing figures in the sand with a slender wand which he held, then suddenly looked up again, and said, very earnestly-- "He is quite like a father to you, Daisy." "More than a father," I replied, ardently, "for a father is bound to do for his child what, of his own free-will, Cornelius did for me. And then so kind! always giving me new playthings, or books, or things I liked." "And you were quite like a daughter to him." "I was, and am. Look, here is his last letter, beginning with 'my dear child,' and signed, 'your old friend, Cornelius;' but I have another at home, in which he actually calls me 'his dear, adopted daughter.' I am quite proud of it, for he is to be very celebrated, you know, and it is a great honour." William again traced figures in the sand, but he did not speak. "Well," I said, bending down to look at him, "what are you thinking of?" "That I should like you to be proud of being my friend," he replied, with an earnest look. "I am proud of it, so you have your wish." "Yes, but I should like you to have cause, and also, Daisy, I should like to do something to please you. I wish I could." "And so do I," 1 answered, laughing, "for you would bring him back at once." "Indeed I would: in the first place, because your heart is set upon it; in the second, because I very much wish to know Mr. O'Reilly. I like him for your sake, and all he has done for you; and then, from what you tell me, I am sure he is a thoroughly good man." I could not help laying my hand on the arm of William, and replying earnestly-- "Indeed, William, he is a good man, and when you see and know him, you will find that you were not mistaken, though good is not, I dare say, the word most people would apply to Cornelius O'Reilly." William took this as a compliment to his penetration, and was rather gratified. The sun had set, grey evening was closing in; we rose, and walking together along the silent beach, we talked of Cornelius, and laid down plans of pleasant excursions up the coast, and far down the inland valleys, to be undertaken after his return. But, to our mutual mortification, William's leave of absence expired, nay the Academy opened, and Cornelius came not back to take us and the public by surprise. In her indignation, Miss O'Reilly declared that there could be but one interpretation given to such extraordinary conduct--"Cornelius has got entangled." "How so, Kate?" I asked. "Why, he is either married or going to be married to some Italian lady; that is it." "Do you think so?" I asked quietly. "Bless the child, how coolly she takes it!" exclaimed Kate, half angrily. "I have no right to take it otherwise, Kate; besides, provided Cornelius comes back to us, what matter?" "What matter! suppose he has been married all this time, and has a family about him!" "I don't think Cornelius would marry as if he were ashamed of himself," I replied, rather indignantly; "then how can he have a family in two years? and even if he had--" "Nonsense, child!" interrupted Kate, impatiently, "I don't speak of it as a fact, and there you go, coolly dissecting every hasty word I utter, as if I were giving evidence before judge and jury!" "Well, Kate, all I mean to say is this--if Cornelius has a wife and children, where is the harm, provided he does not settle in Italy?" Miss O'Reilly was of a very different opinion, and, as she seemed inclined to be vexed with me for disagreeing with her, I dropped the subject and proposed a walk. She shortly replied that with an Italian sister-in-law in prospect she did not feel disposed for walking; but that, as the matter did not touch me, I was quite right in not taking it to heart. I did not answer; I did not wish to add to her annoyance by letting her see how bitter was my disappointment at the prolonged absence of Cornelius, and the voluntary obscurity under which he lingered. The thought kept me awake in bed beyond my usual hour; but at length I slept. I awoke with a sudden start, I myself knew not why; I thought I had heard something in my sleep, what I could not tell. I sat up and listened; yes, there was a sound of voices below in the parlour. I rose and opened my door softly. One of the voices was that of Kate: the other--unheard for two years, but not forgotten?-was that so well known and so dear, of her brother. I did not give myself time for joy; I dressed hurriedly and slipped down. The parlour door stood ajar; I looked in; he sat by Kate, bending over her and embracing her with a fondness which, as I felt, a little jealously, she had not called me down to share. He sat with his back turned to me, and saw me not; the floor was carpeted, my step was always light; I stood by his side ere he was conscious of my presence. I wished to speak, but the words died unuttered on my lips; I remained standing there, mute, motionless, and trembling from head to foot. "Daisy!" he exclaimed, starting up. His arms were around me--I was gathered to his heart. "Well!" he said, "what is the matter with you? You do not even give me a kiss. Have I grown strange?" I did not answer; a singular feeling was coming over me; a mist fell on my eyes; the room seemed, with all it contained, to swim before my sight, then suddenly vanished in utter darkness. I had fainted for the first time in my life. When I recovered I was lying on the sofa. Cornelius was bending over me, and helping his sister, armed with a formidable bottle, to rub my face and hands with vinegar. "I am so glad," I cried, starting up. "Why, there, she is all alive again!" exclaimed Miss O'Reilly. "I am so glad," I continued, joyfully, "I thought I had dreamt it." I sat up, and twining my arms around the neck of Cornelius, I kissed him, whilst my tears flowed fast. He sat down by me, and anxiously asked how I felt. "Why, very well," I replied, laughing, in the gladness of my heart. "Ay, ay," said Kate, smiling, "we may cork up the bottle, and lock it up, may we not, Daisy?" "Are you sure you are quite well?" urged Cornelius; "you fainted, you know." "Did I?" I had scarcely heeded the remark. Seated by him, with my arm locked in his, his hand clasping mine, I looked at him eagerly, delighting every sense with the consciousness of his dear presence. He asked me if the room did not feel too close, if I did not want air, and I could give him no answer, so charmed was I to listen to his voice again. "Let her alone," said Kate, gaily; "she is well enough now; she fainted because she was glad to see you, and she got well at once for the same reason precisely. All she wants is to look at your face." He turned it towards me; it was as kind and handsome as ever, not in the least altered. I could not take my eyes from it, and in the overflowing joy of my heart I exclaimed-- "Oh, Kate! Kate! I shall be too happy now, shall I not?" "You see the poor child is as mad as ever," said Kate. "I hope she has been a good girl in my absence," he observed, rather gravely. "Of course she has." "Learnt her lessons well?" "Bless the boy!" exclaimed Kate, "does he think she is still a little girl? Don't you find her altered?" "Oh yes, she has grown." "Grown! grown!" impatiently said his sister, "of course she has! do you not think she has improved?" "She seems much stronger." Miss O'Reilly looked disappointed. Cornelius questioned me concerning my studies; I answered to his satisfaction; he stroked my hair and called me a good child. "It is very odd you will persist in calling Daisy a child," drily said Miss O'Reilly. "Well, am I not his child?" I asked. "Nonsense!" she replied, looking provoked. "Indeed, I am his adopted daughter," I said eagerly. "I never yet heard that a man of twenty-six or so had a daughter near seventeen," was her ironical reply. Cornelius smiled; but I warmly vindicated our relationship. "I am very glad he is so young," I observed. "Most girls have old fathers; mine is not old; he will live the longer." Cornelius laughed; his sister said "Pish!" and Jane, by bringing in the supper-tray, closed the conversation. Indeed our discourse was of the most desultory kind. Although Cornelius protested that he was not in the least fatigued, having rested in London before coming to us, Kate would not hear of our sitting up. She made me leave him just as I was beginning to talk to him of his painting. To comfort me she confidently informed me as we went upstairs, that a large wooden case in the back parlour contained his pictures; to this intelligence she added, with a significant look-- "He has not got entangled after all." CHAPTER IV. We were not prepared for the sudden return of Cornelius; his room was neither aired nor ready; Miss O'Reilly accordingly gave him up her own apartment, and slept with me. She complained of my restlessness; well she might! tossed on a sea of unquiet joy, I scarcely slept. I woke and rose early. The morning was bright and gay, and my little room overflowed with sunshine. "Now, Daisy," said Kate, in a tone of remonstrance, "you need not be in such a hurry: he is not awake yet, child!" I was opening the window as she spoke. I drew back quickly, for it looked on the garden; I was but half-dressed, and, though I saw no one, the fresh breeze brought me the scent of a cigar. My heart leaped with joy, and something seemed to say within me, "Yes, yes, he is come back." "Not awake!" I exclaimed aloud, "why he is already in the garden! Oh! Kate, do help me to fasten on my dress." "Not that dingy, everyday grey thing!" decisively said Miss O'Reilly, "he hates dull colours." She went to my drawers, and drew forth a light blue muslin. "But it has short sleeves!" I observed, a little uneasily, "and it looks so dressy!" "Never mind the short sleeves or the dressiness either--the chief thing is, not to annoy him with an ugly colour he cannot endure." I yielded against my own wish and judgment; partly to gratify her, and still more to lose no time. I gained nothing by the ready compliance. Miss O'Reilly dressed me as she had never dressed me before; she suggested or rejected improvements with unusual and irritating fastidiousness. Now a snow-white habit-shirt "would look so nice, or if my hair were braided, instead of being in plain bands, it would become me so much better." I could not help crying. "Oh, Kate, if you would only let me go! What will Cornelius care about all this?" "But I care," replied Miss O'Reilly. "I thought Cornelius would find you so much improved; but all he noticed was that you had grown." "Because that is all!" I said, laughing. "It is not. But last night you were pale and wild-looking; besides, you had that ugly grey thing on; but now, Midge, let me tell you there is a difference." She was holding me out at arm's length, with a satisfied look and smile. "There!" she said, dropping my hand, and releasing me, "you may go now." I waited for no second bidding. I ran down the stairs, then up the gravel path that led to the pine-trees. The scent of the cigar had not deceived me: he stood leaning against the trunk of the farthest pine, looking at the fresh sparkling sea that spread beneath, and went far away to meet a white line of horizon arched over by a sky of brightest blue. He turned round as I reached him all out of breath, and welcomed me with a smile. I stood by him, looking at him with the delighted eyes with which we gaze at those we love. He laid his hand on my shoulder, and looked at me too, silently at first, then all at once he said-- "God bless your pleasant face!" and stooping, kissed my brow. My heart beat a little; I could not help being glad. There was nothing in me beyond what there is in every girl from fifteen to twenty; but then this is the golden age of woman, when the youthful grace of the outlines makes the gazer forget their irregularity, and seeing the cheek so fresh and clear, he asks not whether it be dark or fair--when he is charmed by the sense of a being who has not dwelt on earth too long, and gives pleasant welcome to this late arrived guest. Our first greeting over, Cornelius and I sat down on the wooden bench. The wind came from the west. It blew fresh in our faces, and bowed over us the pine-trees and their rustling branches, through which the slanting rays of the sun behind came warm and pleasant. Our glance rested on a sweep of winding shore, half veiled in light sparkling mists; on that sea which looked so serene, and yet seemed so living and so free in its very repose. Our ear was greeted by the low dash of waves on the beach below, by the murmurs of a breeze that died away far inland amongst low hills and lonely places, and looking up at one another with a smile, we both said what a lovely morning it was. I passed my arm within that of Cornelius, and clasping both my hands over it, I looked up into his face and began a series of questions. "Tell me all about your pictures and your painting." A light cloud passed over his brow, as he replied-- "Never mind about the pictures just now, Daisy." "Well, then," I said, though a little disappointed, "tell me all about Italy." "All about it--there's a modest request!" "Well, then, tell me something. Are the Italian women so handsome?" "Some are, some are not." His tone and manner were abstracted. I could not but notice that he was surveying me from head to foot. "What else?" I asked, a little impatiently. "What else?" he echoed, still looking at me. "Yes, what else?" "Nothing else; save that I am thinking of something else just now." "I knew you would notice it," I exclaimed, feeling myself reddening; "I told Kate so." "Indeed?" "Yes; it was her doing, not mine. She said you hated grey, and made me put on this blue muslin, though it looks so gay for the morning." "Well," replied Cornelius, with a smile, "blue is as charming a colour as grey is cold and dull to the eye. But to tell you the truth, I was not thinking about your dress." "Ah!" I said, rather abashed. "No,--I was thinking of the change two years have wrought, and wondering I never noticed it last night. The other one was a pale, sickly little thing, a poor wee Daisy, coming up weak and stunted on the outskirts of the town; this one is fresh and fair as any wild flower that grows. Why, where did she, once so wan and sallow, get that clear, rosy freshness? What kind fairy has changed the pale yellow hair I still remember, into those heavy tresses of rich brown, tinged with gold--a hue both exquisite and rare, which I shall assuredly transfer to my next picture. As for the eyes, she could not improve them,--so she left them what they still are-- the finest I have ever seen." I opened them a little on hearing him speak so. He quietly took out my comb; my hair rolled down in waves below my waist; he surveyed it admiringly, with a glance in which blended the fondness of a father for his pet child and the ever-observant eye of the artist. "A pretty little effect, so," he added, "especially with your startled look, reminding one of Cervantes' Dorothea." "So she does!" said Miss O'Reilly, coming up from behind. She kissed her brother, and looking at me as I rose to do up my hair, "It is like her father's," she added with a subdued sigh, "but not quite so bright." "Why did you never write to me that Daisy was so much improved?" asked Cornelius, perhaps to divert her thoughts. "Because I knew you had eyes of your own to find it out," answered his sister smiling. "And now don't sit looking at the girl, as if she were a beauty; she has grown tall and has good health, that is all." "All! is not that a great deal?" "Of course it is; but I came to tell you breakfast is waiting, and not to talk about Daisy's looks." We went in to breakfast; I sat opposite Cornelius and could scarcely take my eyes off his face; he could not help smiling now and then, but Miss O'Reilly chose to be in a pet about it. "Don't be foolish, Midge! I wish, Cornelius, you would mind what I say, instead of paying so much attention to that silly girl. When do you mean to have that case opened?" "In a day or two." "Nonsense! you don't think I am going to wait a day or two to see your pictures? After breakfast you mean?" She carried the point as usual, and after breakfast it accordingly was. As Cornelius drew back the last covering which stood between us and his picture, I felt my heart beat with expectation; as for Kate, from the moment it became visible, she was lost in wonder and admiration. The picture, though not very large, was an elaborate historical performance; it represented the death of Mary Stuart, with mourning ladies-in-waiting, knights, pages, executioner and all. "How beautiful, how very beautiful!" exclaimed Kate with tears in her eyes; "what a subject, and how you treated it! But what a pity, what a mortal pity it was not finished in time for the academy, Cornelius!" There was a pause, he stooped and brushed away some dust from Mary Stuart's face, but never answered. His sister resumed-- "Who is that dark-looking fellow in front?" "The Earl of Salisbury." "Ah! I remember, I knew he could not be good; it is in his face, I assure you. And who is that girl in the corner?" "A looker-on." "I knew it!" triumphantly exclaimed Miss O'Reilly, "I knew it by her unconcerned air. Cornelius, there is wonderful character in it all." He did not reply: he was untying the strings of a large portfolio, and looking over the sketches and drawings it contained. His sister called him to her side with an air of concern. "Was he sure Mary Stuart had a velvet robe on? She hoped it was not a mistake. Critics are such harpies, you know," she added with a sigh, "they would pounce on a mistake directly." He laid his hand on her shoulder, and, with a kind smile, looked down at her upraised face. "Make your mind easy, Kate; Mary Stuart died in a velvet robe, which, poor thing, she kept for solemn occasions." Miss O'Reilly's face brightened. "Indeed I am glad to hear it; the imitation is perfect; real velvet could not have more depth and softness. How much pains you must have taken with it!" "Yes, it gave me some trouble." "But how sorry I am, the other pictures are sold!" "It could not be helped! I wanted the money." "Yes, but it has kept you in the shade all this time. What a pity Mary Stuart was not finished for this year's Academy!" She looked at him so earnestly that he reddened. "Cornelius," she continued rather seriously, "why was it not finished for this year's Academy?" Jane spared him the trouble of answering, by looking in, and conveying the intimation that more luggage had come, and that there was a bill of one pound ten and elevenpence halfpenny to pay. "I wish they may get it!" hotly said Miss O'Reilly; "it is perfectly shameful; let me manage them, Cornelius, only just come to see whether they have not changed your luggage for that of some one else. My opinion is," she added, raising her voice, "that people who charge one pound ten shillings and elevenpence halfpenny for carriage are capable of anything." He smiled; they went out together, closed the door, and left me alone with Mary Stuart and my bitter disappointment. I could not understand it; it was strange, incredible, and yet it was so, I looked and did not admire. I could have cried with vexation to feel that this stately Mary Stuart did not touch me; that her sorrowful beauty, the grief of her weeping women, the insolent scorn of the English nobles, the impassiveness of the headsman, the commonplace pity of the lookers-on, actually left me cold and unmoved. And yet thus it was, and the longer I looked, the worse it grew; so I gave it up in despair, and turned to the portfolio. Sketch after sketch I turned over with a pleasure that gradually grew into delight. All Italy, in her sunshine and beauty, seemed to pass before me. Here a dark-eyed girl danced the Tarantella; there swarthy boys with eager faces played at the morra; beggars held out their hand for alms with the look and mien of princes; and village women, of a beauty as calm and pure as that of the image above them, knelt and prayed before the shrine of some lowly Madonna. Nor was I less charmed by the glimpses of landscape and out-door life. I felt the warmth of that blue sky which looked as if the very heavens were opening; the sunshine on the steps of the white church dazzled me with its brightness; there were depths of coolness in the dark shade of those old trees beneath which the women sat reposing; there was life and dewy freshness in the waters of the stone fountain by which the children played. Charmed and absorbed, I never heard Cornelius enter, and knew not he was by me until he said in a careless tone behind me-- "Oh! you are looking at these odds and ends." "I like them so much," I replied, carefully abstaining from looking towards Mary Stuart. "Do you?" "Indeed I do; they are beautiful, and then they remind me of our Gallery--you remember our Gallery, Cornelius?" "Yes, I think I remember something of the kind,--you were an odd little girl, Daisy." "I wish you would explain these sketches to me." He sat down by me; leaned one arm on the back of my chair, and, with the hand that was free, turned over the sketches, giving a few words of brief but graphic explanation to each. He allowed me to admire them, but made no comment of his own. At length the pleasant task was ended; Cornelius rose and put away the portfolio; I was thinking with inward self- gratulation that he had forgotten all about the picture, when to my dismay he said very quietly-- "Daisy, you have not told me what you think of my Mary Stuart." "Have I not?" "No, indeed. Whilst Kate was here you looked at it, but never opened your lips; when I came back, I found you sitting with your back to it, intent over these sketches, mere foolish trifles, Daisy, with which I relaxed my mind from graver labours; so pray forget them, look at Mary Stuart, and give me, without flattery of course, your candid opinion." Here was a predicament! I came out with-- "A picture of yours cannot but be good, Cornelius." "Thank you, Daisy, but that is stating a fact, not giving me your opinion." "I dare not give an opinion." "Very modest; but you know whether you like a thing or not; _ergo_, do you or do you not like Mary Stuart?" Oh for a good genius to suggest some reply that might please him and not violate truth! All I could find was a foolish "Of course not," which prolonged, but did not elude the difficulty. "Do you like it or not?" he repeated. I did not reply. "A plain yes or no, Daisy." "Well, then,--no," I exclaimed, desperately. Cornelius whistled. "She is grown up," he said; "not like my picture! decidedly she is grown up! Why, the other one would have admired any daub I painted!" Tears of vexation rose to my eyes; he stooped, and smiled in my face. "Why should you be annoyed when I am not?" he asked, very kindly. "I am mortified at my bad taste, Cornelius." "Then since you are conscious of bad taste, why don't you like Mary Stuart?" "I can't help it; I am afraid I have no feeling, for when I look at Mary Stuart I feel as if I did not care whether they put her to death or not." "How hard-hearted you must be! but go on; what else?" "Nothing else, Cornelius, save that I fear I don't care about Mary Stuart at all." I looked at him rather shyly; he was laughing. "You are as odd a girl as you were an odd child," he said, with his look bent on my face; "why, Daisy, that is just my case; I did not care about Mary Stuart whilst I painted her, and, poor thing! I don't care much about her now." "Don't you, Cornelius?" I asked, astonished. "No, history may be a fine, grand thing, but give me lowly beings and quiet feelings. Oh! Daisy, I wonder now that disappointed ambition ever made me bend the knee to the false goddess, success, who moreover always leaves me in the lurch; but our life is made up of mistakes; we stumble at every step, and the last thing we learn is to be true to ourselves." "Were your other pictures like this, Cornelius?" "Oh, Daisy, they were such charming things." he replied, sighing; "but Count Morsikoff wanted them, I wanted his rubles; but, never mind, I shall repeat them, and show Kate that my journey to Italy has not been quite lost." "Why did you let her admire Mary Stuart?" "How could I undeceive her? I had brought the unfortunate thing as a proof of my industry, not to encumber the walls of the Academy, or for her to admire; but when she looked at it with tears of admiration, what was I to do?" "To show her the sketches." "She won't care about them, Daisy." "Try her." I opened the door, and called her in eagerly. But the event proved the correctness of her brother's conjecture. Miss O'Reilly thought the sketches very pretty things, but she hoped Cornelius had not lost too much time with them. It would be such a pity, considering how admirably fitted he was for historical compositions. He winced, but did not contradict. She proceeded-- "I have been thinking of such a series of subjects: what do you say to the battle of Clontarf, or to Bannockburn? something to make one feel as if that grand lyric of Burns were being sung in the distance." Cornelius stroked his chin and looked puzzled. She resumed: "Perhaps you would like a subject more pathetic,--The Children in the Tower, eh, Cornelius?" "I have been thinking of something more domestic." Kate's face expressed the deepest disappointment. "History is a grand thing, Cornelius." "And Home is lovely." She said he knew best, but that he would never surpass Mary Stuart. Cornelius did not reply, and put away the portfolio with a smile at me. Then we all three went out into the garden, where we lingered until the noon-day heat sent us in: that is to say, Kate and I, for Cornelius, accustomed to an Italian sun, remained out, walking up and down the gravel path, and every now and then making long pauses of rest by the back parlour window, near which we sat sewing. Once Kate, called away by some domestic concern, left us; he stood on the side facing me, his elbow resting on the low window; he looked long, then smiled. "Well!" I said. "Well," he replied, "it would make a pretty picture; you sitting there sewing by the window, with the cool shady back-ground of the room, a glimpse of the bright sunny garden beyond." "And you standing there looking in, leaning on the window-sill, and the warm sunshine upon you, Cornelius." "Yes," said the pleasant voice of Kate, now coming in, "that would complete the picture." Then she suddenly added, "Cornelius, are you not tired?" "Not at all; I rested in London, you know." "Go and take a walk then." "What for, Kate?" "Go out sketching." "I feel very comfortable here." "Go, I tell you; Daisy will show you the way; she knows Leigh by heart, and, for England, it is pretty enough." Cornelius looked at me and I looked at Kate. She smoothed my hair and answered the look: "No, child, I can't go; bless you, my hands are full of domestic concerns, so make haste and get ready. Stay, I shall go with you." She accompanied me to my room, opened my drawers and drew forth a white muslin frock. "Put that on," she said; "do not open your eyes, but do as I bid you." "If we walk in the grass--" I began. "You will soil it,--what matter?" "But why put it on? it is my best." "Bless the child! don't you see that I tell you to put it on because it is your best, or rather because you look best in it? Don't be dull, Midge, I want Cornelius to like you and your looks too." There was no resisting an argument so plainly stated. Still when Kate went down on some mysterious errand into the kitchen, and I hastened to the parlour with my scarf on my arm and my bonnet in my hand, in order not to keep Cornelius waiting, I was under a nervous apprehension that he would think me very vain and fond of dress. He did look at me, and very fixedly too. I exclaimed, deprecatingly-- "I knew you would think it odd to go and put on a white dress for a walk in the country, but Kate would have it so." He laughed, and gave me an amused look. "What a strange girl you are, Daisy! I never noticed your dress. I was studying the effect of that bright sunlight on your hair, and thinking how it made it look more rich and deep than the hues Titian loved to paint." It was my turn to laugh. "How like an artist, to be always thinking of effects!" "Now don't stand giggling and chatting there," said Miss O'Reilly, appearing with an ample provision of sandwiches neatly packed up, "but go out whilst the day is still pleasant. Cornelius, take these; you are to stay out the whole day. Daisy, why don't you take his arm? you are tall enough for that now." He held out his arm for me with a smile, and as I took it and looked up into his face, I felt a proud and happy girl. The time had been when the hand of Cornelius was as much as I could claim, and I longed in vain for the present privilege and honour. We left Rock Cottage by the garden gate. As we walked arm in arm down the path that led to the beach, I saw Miss O'Reilly stand on the door-step, and, shading her eyes with her hand, look after us, until the winding of the path concealed us from her sight. CHAPTER V. We went down to the beach. A deep line of shade still extended at the foot of the cliffs; the sky had not a cloud; the sea lay calm beneath; it looked one of Nature's happy days. I said so to Cornelius, adding, in the fulness of my joy, "How kind of Kate to tell you to take me!" "Yes," he replied, wilfully misunderstanding me, "she always was a good sister." "Now, Cornelius, you know very well she did it to please me." He smiled without looking at me. "One to please you, Daisy, and a great deal more to please me. You will ascertain it thus: state that D is to C in K's estimation, what 1 is to _x_ in figures: then multiply by C (that's me) and divide by D (that's you), and you will know all about it." "I don't want to multiply by you and to divide by myself, to know why Kate told you to take me." "She's as obstinate as the other one," said Cornelius, stopping short to look at me. I replied, "Is she?" and we went on, until a promontory of steep rock barred our passage. "We must cross that," I said. "Humph! Can you manage it, Daisy?" "Can you, Cornelius?" He told me I was very saucy. I laughed and ran up the rocks so fast, he could scarcely overtake me. When we reached the highest peak, we stood still, and thence looked down on a wild narrow spot below, shut in between cliff and wave. Long ridges of sharp rocks, stretching out far into the sea, and impassable when the tide was full, enclosed it on either side. The cliffs at the back stood steep and perpendicular within a few yards of the breaking surf, but the strata of earth that ran through them in slant and undulating lines, gave them a distant and receding aspect, which, like the glamour of enchantment, vanished with a closer view; then they suddenly rose on the eye, near, stern, and threatening. Undermined by the high spring tides, rocks had fallen from above, and now lay thickly strewn about the beach, as if tossed there by the sea in angry or sportive mood. From the deep gap thus made in the cliff descended a narrow stream, which spread on a flat advancing ledge of rock, fell again a wide and clear stream of sparkling water, into a basin which itself had made, and thence glided away with a low splash and faint murmur, through worn-out old stones green with slime, until it lost itself for ever in the great rush of the wide waters. We descended silently; when we stood within the enclosed space, Cornelius said-- "Of all wild and barren spots this is the gem." "It is sterile, Cornelius, and that is its beauty." It was indeed a desolate place. Shell-fish in serried ranks, and weeds in dark and slippery masses, clung to the sea-washed rocks. A few crabs and shrimps had remained captive in the shallow pools of water, where they waited the returning tide. Long algae, all wet and tangled, and light feathery sprigs, delicate enough to be wreathed in the green hair of pale mermaids, were strewn on the beach, but other tokens of life and vegetation there were none. The sea breeze, which moaned along that wall of rock and cliff, fanned and stirred not one blade of yellowish grass on its way. Here ceased the freshness and verdure of earth; here began a nature other than that of the poets, yet not without its own beauty, contrasts, and harmonies. "It is grand, but wonderfully dreary," said Cornelius, "let us go back, Daisy." "Not yet. Do you see that hollow nook perched up there between earth and sky, close by the fountain?" "Well, what about it?" "There is a very fine prospect from it." "How do you know?" "I often go there." "You!" he exclaimed, with an astonished look that amused me, "and pray how do you get there?" "Look!" I sprang up a steep path in the rock; every step of it was familiar to me; I had reached the hollow, and was laughing down at Cornelius, before he recovered from his amazement. He followed me lightly, but chid me all the way. "What could tempt you to do such a mad thing and to come to such an eyrie as this?" he asked as he stood by me in the wide hollow and under the broad shelter of an overhanging rock. "Look at that glorious prospect, Cornelius," I replied, sitting down and making him sit down by me. I remember well both the day and the spot. The blue sky, the sea of a blue still more deep, the yellow beach, the brown wall of rock, gave back the same ardent glow; the place seemed enchanted into the quietness of noon, save when some solitary raven suddenly left a cleft in the rock and, descending with a swoop, hovered a black speck over the beach in search of prey. We sat pleasantly within reach of the cool spray of the spring; a breeze from above brought us the sweet scent of unseen fields of gorse in bloom; below us the sea boiled in white and angry surf amongst the rocks, and thence spread away in seemingly unbroken smoothness, until it met and mingled with the distant horizon. "What do you think of my eyrie, Cornelius?" I said, after a long pause. "So you come here often?" was his reply. "Yes, very often." "What can attract you to such a wild spot?" "Its wildness." He looked me in the face and smiled. I resumed-- "I was born by the sea, Cornelius, and I love it, ay, very dearly; this barren spot seems pleasanter to me than any sunny landscape. I could listen for hours to the wind sweeping down the coast and the dash of the heaving waves. Could not you?" "No," he answered, frankly, "sea-side is to me the grand historic style of nature. I like the calm, homely woodlands and quiet valleys." "Yes, but you are going to sketch that little fall of water?" "Am I?" "For what else did I bring you to see it? Let me go down first, and take my hand." I held it out to him; he tossed it back to me with a laugh. "Do you imagine I want it?" he asked, looking piqued; "I have gone sketching in mountain-passes where there were paths more steep than in any English Leigh, let me tell you." He insisted on preceding me. It amazed me to see how he kept looking back, looking to my steps. He reached the bottom first, and stood still to receive me. Spite of his remonstrative "Daisy!" I ran down the rest of the way. I paused on reaching the last ledge, and standing a little above him, I uttered a triumphant "There!" then lightly stepped down to where he stood. "Yes," he replied admiringly, "I see: your head is steady, your foot as light and sure as that of any mountain maid. Ah! if I had but had you for a companion, when I was sketching alone in the Alps!" "Will you have me now, and though these are not the Alps, sketch." He sat down on one of the fallen rocks, opened his sketch-book, and began to draw the little fountain and the stern crags around. I sat by him to watch his progress; he made little; he was ever looking round at me, and breaking off into speech that had nothing to do with sketching. "How old are you?" he once asked. "Seventeen; ten years younger than you are." He resumed his task, but his pencil was soon idle again; his eyes once more sought my face. "Am I too near?" said I, "shall I sit behind?" "No, indeed." "What are you thinking of?" "I am thinking that it is getting very hot." His look sought the downs above. I said, I knew green nooks such as he would like. So we wound our way up the heights, and were soon in the open country. The scenery around Leigh was soft, woodland, pastoral, and no more. Yet Cornelius seemed to like those green slopes, fertile fields, and wide pastures; those shallow valleys, white homesteads, and fragrant orchards looking down from above, with now and then, in the open space between the dark outskirt of low woodland, and the golden green of sunlit scope opposite, a glimpse of azure hills melting soft and indistinct on the far horizon. But though he confessed it was very pretty, he found nothing to sketch. "Let me take you to an old ruin further on," I said, zealously, "it is so picturesque!" "How much further on, Daisy?" "Only three or four miles." "A mere trifle! but suppose we stay here?" We stood in a hollow, sheltered by a few stunted trees. "There is nothing to sketch here," I said. "So much the better; I want rest." "Then I know of a better resting-place close by." He submitted to my guidance, and I led him into an open plain, exposed to all the heat of a burning sun. "Why, Daisy," said Cornelius, looking round, "what made you come here? There is not a hedge: no, not so much as a poor little bush. Let us go back." I pointed to a group of trees, partly hidden by a rising of the ground. "It is there," I said. He gave a look of regret to the shady hollow we were leaving behind us, and followed me over the scorching plain. At length the group of trees was reached. I entered it first; then, as he followed, I turned round and looked to enjoy his surprise, for we now stood on the grassy banks of the clear little stream which passed through Leigh; trees flung their shadow above; waters flowed beneath; silence and freshness filled the whole place. "Well!" I said triumphantly. "Well," he replied, "it is a pleasant place, that is true enough." And he threw himself down on the grass with evident delight. It was a pleasant place. Many a day has passed since I beheld it; yet if I but close my eyes with my hand over them, I seem to see it again as I saw it then on that summer noon, when I went out walking with Cornelius. It had the first charm which such a spot need have--perfect solitude. You might sit or linger for hours, unheeded and undisturbed in that green nook, shut in between the dark mass of trees which separated it from the open country, and the stream on which their heavy shadow ever fell. Beyond extended a wide and ancient park, a wild-looking desert of dark heath and high green fern, with sombre groups of trees that seemed the vanguards of aged forests, and paths deepening down like Alpine dells and ravines. I took off my bonnet and scarf, and fastening them to the bending branch of an old, hoary willow, I sat down by Cornelius. The sandwiches were produced, and done full justice to; but when the repast was over, Cornelius exclaimed-- "Kate might as well have given us a stone or osier bottle of some sort. We have nothing to drink." "Nothing! why there is a whole river." "Water!" he replied with a slight grimace; "but how are we to get at even that?" I did not answer, but clasping the trunk of the willow with one arm, I bent over the stream to dip my other hand into it. With a start of alarm Cornelius held me back. "That river, as you call it, is deep and swift, Daisy. How can you be so imprudent?" "There is no danger where there is no fear. Unless that willow-tree breaks I am safe." He persisted however in holding me fast with his arm passed around me, as I stooped again, and brought forth my hand full of water, as clear and sparkling as crystal. "Look!" I said, "and tell me if you ever saw such water, even in Italy?" "The true test lies in the taste." He raised my hand to his lips, drank the little it contained, then said with a smile-- "Rather a shallow cup, Daisy." "Well, but did you ever taste such water?" "Never--it is as exquisite--" "I told you so." "As exquisite as water can be, which is not saying much." Necessity however compelled him to have more of it; he brought it up himself, for he positively refused to let me try again. Our meal being now fairly over, I wanted him to indulge in a siesta, a habit which he acknowledged having taken during the hot noons of Italy; but he would not. "I do not feel in the least inclined for it, Daisy; pleasant though it may be to sleep away here an hour or two, I fancy it must be more pleasant still to lie awake and dream." It was indeed the very place for day-dreams. It lay in a gentle curve of the stream, and far as the eye might look it could see above nothing but the overhanging branches of old and majestic trees, with sudden glimpses of bright blue sky, and below the same trees and sky ever imaged again in glassy depths. The reflection was so distinct and vivid that the water almost seemed to flow between two forest solitudes, one above the other beneath the wave, but both beautiful, wild, and lonely, and yielding the same delightful sense of coolness which shade and water always give. In the park beyond the sun shone with burning heat, and even the blue sky had caught a golden glow; but here the breeze was pleasantly chill, the trees sheltered us from its strength, and left us all its vivifying freshness. It came every now and then, sending through my veins a thrill of vague delight, for earth has many sounds and murmuring voices which are to me a part of her beauty, and it woke them every one. The rustling of leaves in the trees above blended with the faint ripple of the flowing waters below; birds broke forth into snatches of song, or flew away with flapping of wings; then there were strange undefined sounds of short twittering, low monotonous hum, and sudden splash mingling into nothing continuous, ever interrupted and ever renewed, faint, indistinct, but soft and soothing as a dream. And as I sat at the foot of the old willow, half bending forward and looking at the stream which flowed almost beneath me, so steep was the bank, and so near the edge did I sit, I felt as if its scarcely audible murmur, as if its scarcely visible flow, were slowly wrapping me in a dream of bliss. I was steeped in happiness; it was sweet, it was delightful to know that Cornelius was come back, that he was sitting there by me. I did not look at him; there was no need. Besides, strangely enough, it seemed more pleasant by far to feel his presence in my heart, than to gaze on him for hours with my eyes. He had been two long years away--severed by the sea, by Alps, by strange skies, strange lands, strange languages, and now, if I wished, I had but to put forth my hand to touch him as he sat by me beneath the same shade, gazing on the same clear brook. How he felt I know not; but I know that gradually my reverie deepened, until at length external objects seemed to fade away, and I remained sitting there gazing at the dark water, and fully conscious but of two things--the presence of Cornelius, and the low gliding of the stream. Happy day!--happy moments! I felt as if I could have sat there, even as the waters flowed--for ever. The sound of a tramp, swift and light, on the heath of the park, made me look up; a herd of deer, with heads erect and startled looks, were floating past like a vision. They vanished down a beaten track leading to some favourite haunt. I looked at Cornelius, and smiled; but he had heard, he had seen nothing. He sat by me on the grassy bank, half-leaning on one elbow; his brow rested on the palm of his hand; his dark and heavy hair partly shaded his face. I followed the direction of his glance; it was fixed on the stream, not with abstracted or dreamy gaze, but as if beholding something there that charmed attention irresistibly. I looked down rather curiously, and saw nothing, save my own face reflected in the placid wave, and seeming, Oread-like to bend forth from a background of dark foliage. He detected my change of attitude, for he looked up immediately. I laughed, and said-- "I know what you were doing, Cornelius." He did not answer. "You were studying 'effects' again." "Precisely," he replied, smiling; "effects of light and shadow." "Are you always studying effects, Cornelius?" "Whenever I can get them. To look is the delight, ay, the very life, of an artist." The words awoke within me a train of thoughts that made my heart beat and my blood flow with a warmer glow. I could not keep silent. I looked up and said-- "Oh! Cornelius, what a great painter you will yet be! How much fame and honour await you! Well, why do you smile so?" I added, somewhat annoyed: "is it not true?" "Because, as you speak, your cheeks flush, and your eyes kindle. You look like a young sybil just now, Daisy." "A sybil in white muslin!" I replied, laughing in his face; but remembering how disrespectful this was, I became suddenly grave again. He seemed anything but offended, and listened like one whose ear has caught a pleasant sound. "Do you know," he said, "I think this is the first time I ever heard you laugh outright. I remember your smile, but not your laugh. Oh, Daisy, are you sure you are the same? When I hear your voice, I think of my pale, sickly child. When I look, I am perplexed to see a tall, slender girl-- fair as a lily, fresh as a rose, demure as a young Quakeress, yet who looks kindly at me, like an old acquaintance. Speak!--say something that will throw a sort of bridge from the past to the present." "The only bridge I can give you is, that you have been two years away; that I am now always well, instead of being always ill; and that, as I began at the wrong end, by being dull as a child, I now mean to make up for the lost time by being as merry and as mad as I can." "How old are you?" "You have already asked me. Subtract ten years from your own age and you will know." "What is ten years?" "A mere trifle, like the walk awhile ago." "Then in another year you will be eighteen." "And you twenty-eight." "You are very tenacious of that ten years' difference," he said a little impatiently. "What is age--any one's age? I don't care about yours; all I care about," he said smiling, "is to find you so changed from what you were." "In one or two things I certainly am changed, as you will perceive, if you close your eyes and promise not to look." "Why so?" I would not tell him, so he complied, looking rather curious. I rose so softly that he could not hear me; the stream was neither wide nor deep; besides at this spot it suddenly grew narrower; I lightly sprang over; as I alighted safely I said-- "You may look now." He turned pale on seeing me on the other bank. "Daisy," he cried, "how could you do such a thing!" "Could you not do it, Cornelius? it really is not so difficult. Try." He refused, and said he was very angry. I laughed. "No, Cornelius," I said, "I see in your face you are only surprised. I mean to astonish you still more; you said you had never heard me laugh, I am at least certain that you never heard me sing. Pray open your ears, for I mean to sing you a song." I sat down in the high ferns, so high that they almost hid me, and I sang him the song of her who loved the lad at the sign of the Blue Bell. He heard me, his chin in his hand, his look on my face; seeing me so fearless, his own uneasiness had vanished. "Well!" I said. "Well," he replied, smiling, "it is as wild and sweet a ditty and as pleasant a voice as one need wish to hear on a summer noon. Sing me something else." "No, it is your turn now." He lay down at the foot of the willow, and in his clear rich voice, he sang me that pleasant song of Burns--it had always been a favourite of his--of which the burden is 'Bonnie lassie, will ye go to the birks of Aberfeldy?' I listened, thinking how delightful it was to hear that voice again. When its last tones had died away, I thanked him, and said-- "This is not Aberfeldy, but we have the birks." "And the bonnie lassie too." "To be sure; but will you just move a bit?" "Why so?" "I want to get back again, and the spot where you are lying is the only convenient one." "Thank you for the information. I was wondering what sort of punishment I could devise for you: it is now settled; you shall stay there." "And be taken up for trespassing?" "Why not?" "Or for poaching?" "Why not?" At length he relented, but said I was to sing him another song; then another, and so on, until I had sung him every song and ballad I knew. The intervals of rest were filled up with talking, laughing, and jesting at one another across the stream. I had never felt so merry, seldom so happy; yet once I could not help observing remorsefully-- "And Kate, who is alone at home, and thinks you are so busy sketching!" "Why did she make me take you with me?" "Do I prevent you from sketching, Cornelius?" "Of course you do; but for you I should have travelled for miles, and come home at night groaning beneath the load of crags, lonely fountains, cottages, farm-houses, snug little woods, ruins, etc. Instead of which, here I am lying on my back, looking up at trees and sky, and losing all my precious time in listening to 'Auld Robin Gray,' 'The Exile of Erin,' 'Charlie, you're my darling,' and I know not what else. Oh, Daisy, Daisy! are you not ashamed of yourself?--sing me another song." "Indeed, Cornelius, I do not know another." "Then I must have mercy on you." He moved away, but kept a keen, watchful look fastened on me. There was however no need to fear. In a second I was by his side. He chid me for form's sake, then smiled, stroked my hair, and passing his arm around me, said-- "The other one could not have done as much, could she, Daisy?" "What other one, Cornelius?" "The one I carried in my arms from Leigh to Ryde." "No, Cornelius, she could not, and that was why Providence sent her so kind a friend." I forget his answer, but I remember that we sat again on the grassy banks and lingered there until the little brook shone red and burning in the light of the broad round sun that slowly sank down behind us, filling with fiery glow the space between earth and sky. Oh! surely it was a lovely thought in the worshippers of southern lands, to link an act of prayer with the close of day and the setting of the sun. If ever there was an hour for thanksgiving, praise, and adoration, it was this. When should we, poor travellers towards the dark goal of time, find fitter moment to pause, take breath after the journeying of another day, and give a look back to the past, a hope to the future, an aspiration to heaven? At that moment meet, to part almost as soon as met, the splendour and beauty of the day and the soothing solemnity of eve. We can give thanks at once for the gladness that is going, and for the silent rest of coming night. It is the very time for intense and brief worship; for aspiration purer than prayer; for the _Sursum corda_. I did raise my heart in that hour. Was the word too earthly? I know not; God who gave us hearts that love so warmly alone can tell; but as I sat there by Cornelius, my head, in attitude familiar of old, resting on his shoulder, I thanked Him who had given him to me, for the gift, and blessed Him who had sent him back for the return. At length we rose, and left the spot where half a day had passed in enjoyment so pure. We followed a green path where we met, and soon outstripped a friendly couple whom we left, slowly lingering in the cool shadow of the winding lane. They looked like lovers, or a newly married pair--young, happy, oblivious of time, and heeding not the passing of hours. Cornelius gave them a stealthy look, and repressed a half smile. I smiled without disguise, for in the gladness of my heart I thought--"the lady may be fair, and the lover may be devoted, but she cannot be more happy than I am now--to feel within mine the arm of Cornelius; and sure am I, that he whom she seems to like so well, is not half so good, ay, nor half so handsome, as he who reared me." And thus, arm-in-arm, we walked on through landscape scenes that would have gladdened the genial heart of Rubens. The warmth of the setting sun, the rich verdure of the undulating plains, the herds of fair cattle grazing by the green banks and full waters of a calm river, made one feel as if gazing on a land of untroubled peace and untold abundance. But, oh! how glorious o'er the sea, was the hour thus beautiful on land. We reached the extremity of the downs as the sun began to dip in the broad ocean. Blue, green, purple, and burning gold glanced through every wave; the receding coast slowly vanished through glittering mists; the masts of distant ships rose on the golden horizon like the turreted castle of some enchanted region. As we descended a winding path that gently led to the beach, the sun set and the glorious pageantry suddenly vanished. The first pale stars glittered from the depths of the grey sky; the sea looked of a darker and colder blue, and returned to her fathomless bed with a faint murmur; a chill breeze rose, swept along the coast, then died away again; on all things silence set, and the high arch of heaven rose deep and solemn over the plain of the receding sea. Oh! brief life of ours, how beautiful is thy dwelling-place! How deeply did I then feel in my heart, the presence of that Great Spirit which broods over and hallows all it has given to the eye of man to scan! We silently walked homeward along the beach, now grey, quiet, and lonely. A low, large moon hung over the silent downs, from which even the melancholy cry of the plover had died away. Everything seemed subdued to repose, and even in the low rush of the breaking waves, as they rose and fell ever again on the shore, there was a murmur inexpressibly soft and soothing to the ear. We did not speak until we reached the foot of the cliff on which Rock Cottage rose. A light burned in one of the windows and spoke of pleasant welcome. Cornelius looked up and said-- "It is a wild-looking place, quite an eagle's nest, and yet there is a strange sense of home about it." We went up the path, and found the little wooden gate unlocked as usual. Miss O'Reilly came out to meet us, with a shawl thrown over her head. She seized on her brother; I slipped away to my room. When I came down again, in the grey dress after all, I found Kate presiding over a tea-table covered with provisions sufficient for a whole legion of famished travellers, and Cornelius laughing at the extent of her preparations. When the meal was over she took up his sketch-book. "Oh, Kate!" I cried, "don't look--it is such a shame--he would not sketch at all; he began the little fountain and did not even finish it. Is it not too bad?" She sat with the open sketch-book on her lap, but looking at us with a pleased, happy smile. "Yes," she said at length, "it is a shame--but he will do better to- morrow." "Must we go out again to-morrow, Kate?" I asked, a little hesitatingly. "To be sure you must--that is, if you both liked it to-day well enough to wish to begin again." I sat by him--he looked down--I looked up, and we exchanged a conscious smile. "Yes," he said, laying his hand on my head; "I think we both found it a pleasant day." "Delightful, Cornelius, delightful!" I exclaimed, with a warmth that made Kate smile, brought a transient glow to his brow, and won me a tacit and quiet pressure of the hand that was free. I only spoke as I felt. Pleasant days I had known before and was to know again, but none in which, oblivious of the past and heedless of the future, I surrendered myself so freely to the charm of the present time. I laid it all to the return of Cornelius. I had yet to learn from experience that this singleness of enjoyment, this simplicity in receiving happiness, belong almost exclusively to the pleasant season of youth, and--pity that it should be so--only to its first fresh untroubled hours, before the coming of grief or the wakening of passion. CHAPTER VI. How pleasant is the privilege, so little valued, because it is so common, of living in one home with those we love. Life has few things more true or more deep, and holds forth no promises more delightful. To sleep beneath the shelter of the same roof, to meet morn, noon and evening at the same board, to converse familiarly by the same fireside, to share the same sorrows and pleasures, is the ideal of those who love, whatever name their affection may take. The imagination of lovers themselves--and yet what can they not imagine?--has never gone beyond this. After all the trials, temptations and griefs, which may have beset their path, the magic hope of their future is still: one home. Of one part of this happiness, we may be fully conscious, but another we seldom feel, unless after long separation; even as we know that life is sweet, yet rarely pause and stand still to enjoy its sweetness, so though we are well aware of the happiness of union, we sometimes forget to be happy. Too often do we accept the presence of those we love best, as we receive sunshine and our daily bread; wants of our nature fulfilled. I rejoiced in the return of Cornelius with an eager delight I never strove to hide, and which he seemed to share. To hear his step, his voice, his laughter about the house; to meet him daily, and out or within to be constantly near him, was now my happy fate. Twice Miss O'Reilly accompanied us in our long daily walks; but the rest of the time she found some excuse to stay within, and we went out alone. That we should do so, gave her a degree of satisfaction I could not quite make out; but which I could not help perceiving. As I sat alone sewing one morning in the back parlour, Cornelius came, and leaning on the back of my chair, said: "Where shall we go to-day?" "Indeed, Cornelius," I replied, gravely, "I cannot always be going out with you, and leaving Kate alone." "Kate is very fond of solitude," was his calm answer. "Yes, but she might think it selfish." The entrance of Kate interrupted the remark. "The morning is getting very hot," she said, looking at her brother. "Yes," he carelessly answered, "therefore I shall go out before the heat of the day." "Quite right." "I shall even go now." "Of course, but what else?" "What else?" "Yes; do you not take Daisy with you?" "If you can spare her." "Of course I can," replied Kate, whose clouded face immediately brightened, "child, why are you not ready?" What could I do but comply, and again go out walking with Cornelius? I resolved, however, that it should not be so on the following day. I declined accompanying him, giving him my reason, to which he submitted with a silent smile. I even managed to send him off without the knowledge of his sister. He had not long been gone when she came up from the kitchen where she had been engaged. She gave a rapid look round the room, and said hastily: "Where is Cornelius?" "He is gone out sketching, Kate," I replied without looking up from my work. "Why did not you go with him?" I did not answer. "Did he not ask you?" "I did not like to leave you." "Did he ask you?" "Yes, he did." "Do you know where he is?" "He said he would go down the beach." "Well, then, put on your bonnet and be off." I remonstrated, but she was peremptory. I felt the kindness hidden beneath her imperative ways, and, as I rose and passed by her, I could not help giving her a kiss, and saying: "How good you are, Kate." "And how foolish you and he are," she replied, smiling, "not to make the most of this good time." "Why, Kate, we have a whole summer before us, and with it I trust, plenty of fine weather." She told me not to stand dallying there; in a few minutes I was ready, and running down the path that led to the sands. To my surprise, I found Cornelius quietly sitting on a rock at the base of a cliff, and smoking a cigar. He rose on seeing me, came to meet me, and as he took my arm, said: "How long you were." "Did you expect me?" "Of course I did." "But you could not know Kate would send me?" "But I could guess it." "And if she had not sent me, Cornelius?" "I should have gone to fetch you." "Then it seems it is quite a settled matter that I must go out with you every day?" Cornelius stopped short, and looking at me, said earnestly: "Do you object, Daisy?" "Ah," I replied, with a remorseful sigh, "you know very well I only like it too much." He smiled, and we walked on. There were woods about Leigh, and I took him to one, where we lingered, until its glades and avenues, instead of a golden light pouring in from above through the green foliage, were lit up from beneath by the long, red streaks, of a low, setting sun. As I write, there rises before me a vision of a mossy dell, low sunk down and overshadowed by three wide-spreading oaks, beneath which Cornelius and I sat during the still and burning hours of noon. There was little sketching, yet what we said and of what we conversed I know not now. But memory will sometimes keep the aspects of outward nature, when that which impressed them on the mind has faded away and is lost for ever. I had often seen that wood before, but on no day do I seem to have felt so much the calm of its silence, the freshness of its deep shadow, the sweetness of its many murmurs, ever rising from unknown depths, and dying away again as mysteriously as they had awakened. Never do I seem to have breathed in with so much delight, that wild forest fragrance sweeter than the perfumes of any garden. Thus passed not merely that day, but many other days, of which I remember still less. There is always something vague and dreamy in the memory of happiness. Seen from afar, that time is like a sunny landscape, beheld through light and warmth. Dazzled and enchanted, you scarcely know what the passing hour was like, and scarcely remember afterwards what it has been; all that remains is a warm, golden hue cast over all things, and such to me was then in the present, and is in memory, the presence of Cornelius. At the end of a delightful fortnight, I wakened to the consciousness that, though Cornelius went out sketching daily, he sketched very little; and that the two rainy days we had been obliged to spend at home, had been devoted to the task of teaching me Italian, and to nothing else. The little back parlour had been destined, by Kate, to be her brother's studio; but though Mary Stuart stood there, with her face turned to the wall, there came no intimation of a successor to this hapless lady. "Decidedly," I thought, "things cannot go on so." Accordingly, the morning, when, after breakfast, Cornelius stepped up to me, and said: "Where is it to be to-day?" I put on a grave face, and replied: "I must stay at home to-day, Cornelius. I cannot leave everything to Kate, you know." "Very true," answered he, submissively. "Therefore, whilst you are out sketching, I shall just sit here in the window, with work-box and work-basket, and make up for lost time." Before I knew what be was about, the chair was in the window, and near it stood the work-box and work-basket. I felt a little confused at his civility, for which I was, however, going to thank him, when I saw him draw a chair near mine. "Are you not going out?" I asked. "No," he quietly replied, and sat down by me. I worked in perfect silence. He sat, with his elbow resting on the back of my chair, and his eyes following the motion of my darning-needle, handing me my scissors when I wanted them, and picking up my thimble, which fell once or twice. I thought he would get tired of this, but he did not. At length, unable to keep in, I looked up, and said: "Do you not feel dull, Cornelius?" "Not at all," he replied, smiling. "I had no idea that to watch the darning of stockings was so entertaining." As to entertain Cornelius was, by no means, my object, I quietly put by my work, and went up to my room. I had not been there half an hour, when I heard a low tap at my door. I guessed from whom it came, and did not answer it any more than the cough, and the low "Daisy!" which followed. He waited a while, then went down. In a few minutes, Kate entered my room. "Child," she said, "what keeps you here? Cornelius has just found his way to the kitchen, to inform me that you had vanished, and that he felt morally certain you were unwell." "I am quite well," I replied, gravely; "but, as you see, particularly engaged in airing my things, for fear of the moths." "Make haste, then, for he is fidgeting in the front parlour." "Indeed," I thought, "he may fidget. I am not going to make him lose all his time." Instead, therefore, of joining him, when my task was done, I quietly slipped down to the garden; but I had scarcely sat down on the bench beneath the pine trees, when Cornelius came, and settled himself by me. I seemed intent on my crochet; but, as this produced no effect, I rose, and composedly observed the sun was very hot. "Burning!" replied Cornelius, rising too. We went in. The front parlour faced the east, and was as warm as the garden; the back parlour, on the contrary, looked cool and shady. Cornelius quietly brought in my work-basket and work-box, placed a chair for me by the open window, another chair for himself, near mine, then closed the door, and smiled at me. "Yes," I thought, as I sat down, "I am caught; but, since you have such a relish for my company, you shall even hear a bit of my mind." I sat darning my stockings, and meditating how to bring this about, when Cornelius observed, with a touch of impatience: "Am I to see only your side face to-day?" "Do you object to my side face?" I gravely asked. "Oh, no!" he hastily replied. "It is a very charming profile; and I was thinking, just now, how well it would look on a medal or ancient coin." "And why not on a modern coin, as well as on an ancient one?" "With the legend, Daisy Regina, &c," he answered, smiling. "Do you mean to imply I could not grace a throne, and bear a sceptre?" "Heaven forbid; but I wonder what History would say of Queen Daisy!" I looked up to answer calmly: "History would despatch her with a few more &cs., Cornelius; such as: 'The most obscure of our long line of sovereigns, &c. Instead of emulating the Elizabeths and the Catherines, &c. Although with the intellectual mediocrity of her sex, &c. Her reign was nevertheless illustrated by a certain Irish artist, &c, &c.'" "The Irish artist respectfully kisses her Majesty's hand," said Cornelius, raising my hand to his lips with mock homage; "he ventures to hope that, spite of the distance of rank, something like friendship existed between him and Queen Daisy." He still held my hand in his; encouraged by the friendly kindness of the clasp, I replied: "So much friendship that, on one propitious occasion, Queen Daisy ventured to remind her friend that time was passing fast, and his fame yet to win." Cornelius dropped my hand, and asked, gravely: "Does History say how this advice was received?" "History is silent," I replied, with a beating heart. "How do you think it ended, Cornelius?" "I think," he replied, smiling as our looks met, "that most artists would have civilly requested her Majesty to mind the affairs of the State. Painters are a touchy race, better accustomed to royal favour than to royal advice. The brush of Titian was picked up by Charles V.; Holbein found the English Bluebeard gentle; Leonardo da Vinci died in the arms of Francis I.; and, I suppose the artist we now allude to must have been spoiled by favours still more high, for I have heard that on this occasion he had the presumption to request of her Majesty--" "To mind the affairs of the State," I interrupted, again taking up my stocking. "Nay," he replied, gently taking it from me, "to leave by those important cares, and idle away a day with him, was the request, says History." "Oh!" I exclaimed, with a sigh of relief, "I am so glad you are not offended, Cornelius!" "Then you thought I was; and that explains why you looked at me with a sorrowful audacity that seemed to say: 'Be angry if you like. I have said the truth, nothing but the truth, and by that I stand fast.'" "Yes, Cornelius, that is just what I felt; but I am very glad that you are not offended for all that." "Then if you are so glad," he answered smiling, "how did you come to risk it?" "Because I am not quite a child now," I replied earnestly. "Oh! Cornelius, do you not understand that I can love you better than your good pleasure, and your honour better than you?" "And do you not understand," he answered, bending over me a warm and animated face, "that I cannot be offended to see the child's blind affection make room for the heart, mind and feelings of the woman; and call that look in the eyes, and that flush on the cheek?" "I meant to be very quiet," I replied, deprecatingly; "and if I reddened as I spoke, it was because my heart was in it, Cornelius, as it is in everything that concerns you; and I could not help it." "Who wants you to help it?" he asked with mingled tenderness and impatience in his accent, "or to be quiet either. Quiet affection is nonsense: there is but one way of loving or of doing anything, and that is, as much as one can, Daisy." He uttered not a word to which something within me did not echo and reply. To this day, I do not understand placid affection, even though it should take the calmest name. Like him I hold that there is but one true way of loving any one, or anything, with one's whole heart. "As much as one can," I echoed, passing my arm within his; "that's how you are going to set at painting, is it not?" My upraised face looked into his; he did not reply. "You know," I continued, "you said you could paint over again Count Morsikoff's pictures." "And so I will, but not just yet." "Cornelius, do you no longer like painting?" "No longer like it! I like it but too well; and as I know its power over me, I delay placing myself under a spell, even you, Daisy, might not be able to break." "As if I should wish to break it! When do you begin, Cornelius?" "What a hurry you are in!" "I am in a hurry to see you famous." He smoothed my hair with a flattered smile. "Will you begin to-morrow?" I persisted. "No." "After to-morrow?" "No." "Next week?" "No." "But, Cornelius, when will you begin?" I inquired, rather disappointed. "Now." "Now!" I exclaimed, delighted. "Why did you not tell me sooner that you wished for it?" he asked, reproachfully. "I thought you liked the walks, and put off talking of work from day to day." I had a confused impression at the time, that there was something odd in this speech, but in my joy at having succeeded, I forgot it. "It is quite early yet," I said, "you can begin at once. Which shall it be, Cornelius, the women praying, or the children by the fountain?" "Neither one nor the other for the present," he replied, "that is to say I hope not. I have thought of another subject to begin with." "What is it, Cornelius?" I asked, much interested. "I saw a young girl once," he said in a thoughtful tone, like one who looks back into memory, "and she brought to my mind's eye a full and charming picture. She sat within the meditative shadow of an ill-lit room, reading by an open window--well, why do you look at me so?" "I only think that I was sewing that day--you know, not reading; therefore you cannot mean me." "Logically concluded. To resume: the room was gloomy, but the open window gave a sense of space, and admitted the light, high and serene, of a pale evening sky. The book lay open on the lap of her who read, one hand rested upon its pages; the other supported her cheek; the eyes were rapt and thoughtful; the silent lips met and closed with a charming and austere grace; the attitude was meditative, even down to the garment's quiet and gathered folds. The slender figure told of early youth, but there was the calmness of an immortal spirit on the brow, and something beyond time in the bearing and the mien. I remembered the Greek's meditating muse, and Corregio's divine Magdalen reading in the wilderness, and I thought though Pagan times be gone and art may have lost her early faith, she still can tell the story of earnest spirits that live and move within the shadow of our own homes, yet ever seem to dwell serene in their own heights. That is the subject, Daisy, and there is a speech for you." "Is that all, Cornelius?" "All. It will stand in the catalogue, as 'A Young Girl Reading,' and many, unable to see more in it, will give a brief look and pass on. If a few linger near, even though they scarcely know why; if to them it embodies thought, meditation, or some such thing, I am satisfied. Daisy. Well, what do you think of it?" "Nothing for the present; I am thinking whether Jane will do." "What for?" he asked promptly. "To sit for you. She is very pretty, you know." "And she looks very meditative, with her bright black eyes ever open, and her cherry lips ever parted." "I wish you had seen Miss Lindley. She is tall, graceful, and dresses with so much taste. Then she has a pale olive face, and looks very lady- like." "And a lady-like Meditation--who dresses well too--would be the very thing." "But Cornelius," I said, rather perplexed, "how will you manage? I can do for the figure pretty well, I dare say, but the face?" He gave me an odd look, and answered: "Yes, there is a puzzle." "How thoughtless of you." "Very." "Then how will you manage?" "Really," he said, turning round to confront me, "is it possible you do not guess whose face I want, Daisy?" "Mine!" I exclaimed, much astonished. "Yes, yours," he replied, taking my hand in his. "I once saw you reading--" "Sewing, Cornelius." "No [!] reading--do you think I never looked at you but that one time?-- and I liked it, for I saw it would make a very charming picture. The attitude is one in which you often fall unconsciously--simple, true, and graceful. I like it. I like, too, the exquisite colour of your hair, and the meditative light of your gray eyes. Dark eyes may be for passion; blue, for love and sweetness; gray, less beautiful, perhaps, but also less earthly, are for meditation and spiritual thought." "And the meaning of hazel eyes?" I said, looking up at his. "Sincerity," he replied, biting his nether lip to repress a smile. "If, for instance, a person with hazel eyes ever tells you 'you are truly pretty, Daisy, though you do not seem to know it,' believe that person, Daisy." "I shall see about that when the time comes. In the meanwhile, I wish you would begin." He called me a little tyrant, but it was a tyranny he liked, for he yielded to it with an ardour and alacrity that betrayed him. He placed me in the attitude he wanted--sitting by the window, with a book on my lap-- and began at once. I saw he was quite in his element again; and when, after a long sitting, we both rested, I said to him, a little reproachfully: "You like it more than ever, Cornelius. I see it in your face." "It does not annoy you?" he asked, giving me an uneasy look. "Annoy me, Cornelius! Have you forgotten Daisy?" "Ah! but she was a sickly child: and for the merry young girl to be shut up--" "She does not mind being shut up the whole day long, provided it be with Cornelius." "Who, when once he is at his easel, has scarcely a word or a look to give her." "She does not want him to give her words or looks. She wants him to paint a fine picture, than which, she thinks, there is nothing finer; and to become a great painter, than which, she believes, there is nothing greater." "Indeed, then, there is not," he replied, laughing and reddening, and his brown eyes kindling with sudden, though lingering light. "Oh, Daisy!" he added, after a pause, laying his two hands on my shoulders, and looking down at me intently, "what a fine, generous little creature you are!" "Because I do not mind sitting," I replied, smiling. "You forget. Cornelius, I always liked it. Let us return to it, and surprise Kate." Miss O'Reilly was certainly surprised when she came up--much more surprised than pleased--to see the historic style put aside; but when her brother gently informed her that Mary Stuart was not quite a masterpiece, she waxed wroth, indignantly said he would never do better, and only hoped he would do as well. Cornelius heard her quietly, and smiled at me with the security of conscious power. As he went on with his "Young Girl Reading," I was struck with the wonderful progress he had made--it more than fulfilled the promise of the Italian sketches. I expressed my admiration without reserve, and I could not but see in his face, how much it gratified him. The time that followed was, indeed, a happy time, as happy as the past, with much that the past had never known. Cornelius looked engrossed and delighted. He worked either with the impassioned ardour of a lover, or with a lingering tenderness as significant. He dwelt _con amore_, over certain bits, or stood back and looked at the whole fondly, through half-shut eyes, drinking in, with evident delight, that sweet intoxication which lies in the contemplation of our own work, when we can behold in it the fulfilment of some cherished idea. But, at the end of a fortnight, there came a change. He looked gloomy, misanthropic, and painted with the air of an angry lover, who has fallen out with his mistress. Ardour had become scorn--tenderness was changed into sullen languor. I guessed that one of his old desponding fits was on him, and, at length, I spoke. It was on a day when, spite of all his efforts, I could see that he scarcely worked. I left my place, and went up to him. For a while, I looked at the picture; then said: "How it progresses." "Wonderfully." "I wish you would not be ironical, Cornelius." "I wish you would not, Daisy." "I only say what I think: that it progresses." Cornelius laughed, but by no means cheerfully. "I know you long for me to praise it," I observed, quietly. "Indeed, I do not," he interrupted. "Yes, you do: it would give you so good an opportunity of abusing it." "Do you kindly mean to spare me the trouble?" "No; for then you would defend it against all my criticisms. I know very well how you rate your picture, Cornelius." "Do you?" "Yes; I do. You know it will make your reputation; that it will be praised and admired; but it fails in something on which you have set your heart, and, though it may do for the world, it will not do for Cornelius O'Reilly, his own severest judge, public and critic." "Oh, you witch!" he replied, unable to repress a smile. "Do you not like it better now?" I asked, thinking the cloud was beginning to break. "No, Daisy. It is the old story; something within me to which, do what I will, I cannot give birth; it is this torments me, Daisy, it is this." "And let it be this," I replied gravely; "let it be this, Cornelius, you will be better than your pictures: if you were not, if you could give all to art, would art be any longer worth living for? Where would be the mystery, the desire, the hope, the charm, to lure you on for ever. I dare say painting resembles life; and that to feel I am better than my pictures, is like the pleasure of feeling 'I am better than my destiny.'" "And what do you know about that pleasure?" asked Cornelius. "I have felt it," was my involuntary reply. "Well, why not?" I added, reddening beneath his look, "do you think that because I am a girl, I have had no ambition, no dreams of my own, no longing for a little bit of the heroic? We all have, Cornelius, only we don't confess it, for fear of being laughed at." He looked attentively at me and smiled. "What were your dreams about, Daisy?" "Not worth your losing time in listening to them, Cornelius--time, that leads to fame!" The smile vanished from his face. "Not for me," he replied, with a clouded brow. "Why not?" "Because I have no genius." "No genius?" "No," he said impatiently, "not a bit." "Do you mean to say, Cornelius, that you will never be one of the celebrated artists of whom I have read so much?" "Never!" he replied, with a dreary seriousness that proved him, for the moment at least, to be quite in earnest. "Cornelius," I said, decisively, "I am not going to put up with that, you know; fame is not a thing to be laid aside in that fashion." "Fame! what is fame?" "A poor aim, but a glorious reward." "Empty, Daisy, empty. I do not care one pin for fame." "Sour grapes," was the prompt reply which escaped me. "Thank you, Daisy," he answered, reddening. I felt rather disturbed. He resumed: "Sour grapes! The illustration is kind and civil. Sour grapes!" "They must be very sour," I ventured to observe, in a low tone, "for you seem unable to digest them, Cornelius." "I beg your pardon," he said, very gravely, "I do not care for celebrity, and do not want to be famous." "But I do," I warmly answered, "you were asking a while ago about my day- dreams: I will tell you one, a favourite one, of which the fulfilment lies with you:--I am out somewhere; for of course we shall not always live in this quiet way, and I overhear Mrs. H-- asking Mrs. G--, in an audible whisper: 'Who is that commonplace-looking girl in white?' 'Something or other to the celebrated artist, Cornelius O'Reilly.' Mrs. H-- looks at me with sudden veneration, whilst I give her a compassionate glance, implying 'Who ever heard of Mr. H--?'" "You saucy girl," said Cornelius, passing his arm around me, but looking down at me, with anything but a displeased face. "I am not saucy; I am very humble. I am proud by temper, and yet I cannot fancy that if I were to go and earn my bread, it would have a sweeter taste than that you have earned for me so long. I am ambitious, and instead of winning fame for myself, here am I suing you to do it for me!" "And shall it not be won for you?" he asked, fondly smoothing my hair, "that and anything else you wish for, my darling." "Then, don't you see," I replied, triumphantly, "that you have got genius?" "Oh! Daisy," he said sorrowfully, "what brought up that unlucky word? Look at that figure, cold, lifeless thing, it tells its own story." I lost all patience. I felt my face flush, and turning round on Cornelius, I put by at once all the filial reverence of years. "Cornelius!" I exclaimed, indignantly, "you are as capricious as a spoiled child. How can a man of your age indulge in such whims?" "I am not so old as to have my age thrown in my face!" he replied, looking piqued. "I am only a few years beyond legal infancy." "You ought to be ages beyond thinking and speaking as you do. If you have no faith in yourself, why do you paint at all? If I were a man, I would rather be a shoemaker or a tailor, than an artist without faith." "On my word," said Cornelius, looking very angry, "you do speak strongly." "Because _I_ have faith in you," I replied, passing my arm around his neck, and looking into his averted face. "Call the picture bad, but do not say you have no genius. It cuts me to the heart, indeed it does. Besides, I cannot believe it. I never look at your face, but I seem to see the word 'Genius' written there." And, as I spoke, I laid my lips on a brow where eyes less prejudiced than mine might have read the same story. A sudden and burning glow overspread the features of Cornelius; he looked another way, and bit his lips, as if seeking for calmness, as striving to curb down that impatient fever of the blood which, in good or in evil, it is always a sort of pain to betray. I half drew back, thinking him vexed again, but he detained me; and turning towards me a flushed and troubled face, he said with a forced laugh: "Your head has been turned by reading those Lives of the Painters, and you want to turn mine too. To satisfy you, I should be the first painter in England." "In England!" I echoed; "in Christendom, Sir." "Rather high-flown, Daisy. Besides that it sounds like a reminiscence of the seven champions." "High-flown! Ambition is a bird of high feather, Cornelius. I would scorn to aim at the second place when there is the first to win." "Oh! you witch!" he said again, "how well you know me!" "What has become of the evil spirit that possessed you?" I asked, smiling. "Gone to the winds for the present," he answered gaily. "Well then work." "Not yet. Let us rest awhile." He sat down on a low couch by the open window, and made me sit down by him. Since his return, I had not seen his face wear so free and happy a look, as it then wore. His brilliant and deep-set hazel eyes shone beneath the dark arch of the brow, with unusual light, and rested on me with a triumphant tenderness that perplexed me; a warmer glow tinged his cheek, embrowned by a southern sun. There lurked both joy and exultation in the half smile that trembled on his lips: like his sister, he had a very beautiful and fascinating smile; and, as I now gazed at him. I could not help smiling, too, for I thought I had never seen him look half so handsome. In the freak of the moment, I told him so. "Do you know, Mr. O'Reilly?" I said, taking hold of his curved chin, and looking up at him laughing. "Do you know that you are very good-looking?" He half threw back his head, as if in scorn of the compliment; but when I added, "I suppose all great artists are so!" he smiled down at me; and if his smile was somewhat conscious, it was still more fond and tender. "You like me, Daisy; don't you?" he said, bending over me a flushed and happy face. I laughed, and he laughed, too, with the security of the knowledge. "Oh! you may laugh," he said with sparkling eyes; "I know you do. I know it, but I have not deserved it," he added, remorsefully. "Oh! when I think how cold, and how careless I have been; and how you might serve me out now!" "How so, Cornelius?" He smiled, and smoothed my hair without replying. "Why it is you who might serve me out," I said. "Is it?" "Of course, for it is I who have all to gain or lose." "Are you afraid?" "No." He repressed a smile, gave me a curious look, and said I was an odd girl. "And won't the other girls be jealous of me, Cornelius?" I asked, proudly. "Jealous! What for?" "Because you are immortalizing me in a picture." "What else?" "Because you like me." "What else?" "Because I am to be always with you." "And how do you know you are to be always with me?" he asked with a mischievous look; "answer me that." I did not at first; he laughed. "Well," I said, piqued, "am I not to be always with you? Was it not agreed before you went to Italy? Am I not to be the governess?" "The governess!" he echoed, astonished. It was some time before I could make him remember what had passed between us. If I had not been positive, he would have denied it altogether. "How can you think of such nonsense?" he asked, impatiently; "the governess of what?" "Of the children; and please not to call them _what_." "_Them!_ Will you be pleased to remember that I am a poor artist." "Sceptic! Providence will send for every child a new picture to paint." "Providence is very kind. I hope her liberality will know some limits." "The first must be Cornelius or Kate, second ditto, third--" "Daisy!" "There must be a third to be called after the mother, and the fourth after one of her friends; the fifth--" "Daisy!" indignantly asked Cornelius: "do you mean to make a patriarch of me?" "Patriarch or not, there must be a fifth--mine, whom you will call Daisy, in memory of the other Daisy you brought home, wrapped in your cloak." Cornelius turned round to look at me smiling: "So you were piqued," he said, "and brought up the governess to punish me!" "Piqued!" I echoed, laughing in his face, "what about?" He looked a little disconcerted. I thought him vexed, and apologized at once for my want of respect. "Respect!" he replied seeming half astonished, half displeased, "what do I want with respect--your respect?" And he gave me a glance of mingled incredulity and uneasiness. "Cornelius, you said before you went to Italy--" "What about the foolish things, I may have said years ago." he interrupted impatiently; "Surely," he added, looking down at me reproachfully, "surely, we have both outgrown that time." "I hope I have not outgrown my respect for you, Cornelius," I replied rather gravely. "Again!" he said with subdued irritation; "why don't, you ask to call me 'Papa?'" "I would if I thought you would say yes, Cornelius." "No, you would not," he answered reddening and looking vexed; "you know you would not. You know all this is mere childish talk." "Put me to the test!" I said laughing. "I dare you to do it." he replied hastily. "Take warning, and, if troubled with filial feelings, look out for some other paternal parent. C. O. R., Esq., is not the man." "When Louisa Scheppler asked the good Pastor Oberlin--he consented." Cornelius looked at me uneasily and tried to smile. "I know you are only jesting," he observed; "I know it, of course. But yet, Daisy, I would rather you did not." "Is the idea of a daughter so formidable?" I asked. "A daughter! Oh, Daisy!" exclaimed Cornelius a little desperately, "this is too childish! The next thing will be, that you will get out of the teens altogether, and go back to the little girl of ten whom I found here seven years ago." "And you don't want me to do that?" I said amused at the idea. He looked at me expressively. "Oh, no!" he murmured, "oh, no! Surely, you know yourself how charming you have grown." I smiled incredulously. I knew I was improved, but thought it was his affection which transformed a little freshness and colour into so comprehensive a word as charming. "I wonder you will never believe me," he said, looking half annoyed. "I wonder, what is your real opinion of yourself. I do not mean that conventional opinion of one's own inferiority, or at the best mediocrity which, under penalty of being hunted out from decent society, every civilized individual is bound to profess, but that honest opinion of our merits and defects, by which we judge ourselves in our own hearts. Do you mind answering that question?" "No, it is not worth minding." "Then answer it." "You must question me categorically. I have not a ready-made certificate of my good or bad points, to deliver on such short notice." "What do you think of Daisy morally?" "A good sort of girl; has received honest principles; devoutly believes she will never do anything very shocking." "What of her intellectually?" "Sensible, not brilliant." "What of her person?" "Like her mind--plain; but, thank Heaven, has the use of her limbs and senses." "And this common-place character is your real opinion of yourself!" exclaimed Cornelius almost indignantly. "My real opinion; but it is scarcely civil to tell me to my face that I am common-place." "I never said so. That is not my opinion of you, Daisy." "Ah!" I said a little embarrassed, for it was plain he meant to favour me with that opinion. "No," he continued very earnestly, "I do not think you that pale, every- day girl you described. I think you more than good, for you are high- minded; I think you more than sensible, for you are original. You may as well laugh out at once," he added in a piqued tone, "for to crown all, Daisy, I think you pretty, ay, and very pretty." "Oh, Cornelius!" I replied endeavouring to look melancholy; "if you had not made that unlucky addition, I could have believed in the rest--but now!" "Daisy, beauty is manifold: the greatest fool can discover the beauty of a perfectly beautiful woman." "Whereas it requires a peculiar talent to find out the invisible sort of beauty. Judicious remark!" "Allow me to return to the point. My meaning is, that to be able to see and feel none save the self-demonstrative sort of beauty, is common- place." "The other course is decidedly more original; is that the point, Cornelius?" "The point," he replied, fairly provoked, "is, that such as you are, pretty or plain, _I_ find you charming." "Well, then," I said, amused at his persistency, "glamour has fallen on your eyes, and you see me through it." "What if I do?" he answered, in a tone that, like his look, suddenly softened; "will that sort of magic vex you? What is there so pleasant in this world as the face of one we love; and if your face has that pleasantness for me; if the glamour, as you call it, of affection has fallen on my eyes and heart, why should you mind?" Oh! not indifferent, even in the purest affection, are these things. I glanced up into his face; and as it told me how thoroughly he meant all he said, I blushed; then ashamed of blushing, I hung down my head. He stooped to look at me. "Perverse girl," he said, chidingly, "don't you see it was useless to try to frighten and torment me? But you have provoked me. Shall I tell you why I find you so very, very charming?" I looked up at him, and, passing my arms around his neck, I smiled as I replied: "Cornelius, it is because as a father you have reared me; because as a father you love me. What wonder, then, that a father should see some sort of beauty in his daughter's face?" Cornelius looked thunder-struck; then recovering, he gave me an incredulous glance, and attempted a smile, which vanished as he met my astonished look. A burning glow overspread his features: it was not the light blush of boy or girl, called up by idle words, but the ardent fire of a manly heart's deep and passionate emotions. He untwined my arm from around his neck; he rose: his brown eyes lit--his lips trembled. At first he seemed unable to speak; at length he said: "You cannot mean it, Daisy--you cannot mean it." "Why not, Cornelius?" I asked, amazed at his manner. "Do you mean to say that I love you as my daughter or child?" "Yes, Cornelius." "Do you mean to say that you love me as your father?" "Yes, Cornelius." His voice rose and rang with each question; mine sank with every reply. He darted at me a look of the keenest reproach. "Never," he exclaimed, with a fire and vehemence that startled me, "never have I loved you, or shall I love you so; never for a second in the past; never for a second in the future; never, Daisy, never!" And turning from me, he paced the room with hasty steps, a flushed brow, and angry look. At length he stopped before me; for, being somewhat calmer, the fire of his look seemed more earnest and concentrated, the accents of his voice more measured and deep. He said: "Confess you have been jesting." "No, Cornelius, I spoke as I thought." "And you thought that I liked you, as a father likes his child; I defy you to prove it! Since I returned from Italy, have I not done all I could to show you that your esteem, approbation, praise, and love were dearer to me than language could express? Have I not, through all our old familiarity, say, have I not mingled reserve and respect with all my tenderness? Have I not acknowledged the woman in you, and that in a hundred ways? The love of a father? I defy you to prove it, Daisy!" He again paced the room with angry steps. I followed him, and laying my hand on his arm, I said earnestly-- "Cornelius, you should not be angry with me. Have you forgotten that, before you went to Italy, you called me your adopted child? that in your letters you addressed me thus? That on the very evening of your return, when Kate seemed vexed about it, you were not displeased, though you are so angry now?" Cornelius turned a little pale. "I had forgotten it," he said bitterly, "but you forget nothing--nothing; years pass, and words spoken in the heedlessness of ignorance and the presumptuousness of youth, still live in your pitiless memory." "Cornelius," I said, gently, "is it a sin to remember the truth?" "The truth!" he echoed, indignantly, "do not call that the truth. I may have said it, been fool enough to have believed it, but true it has never been. Never, I tell you, never have I felt for you one spark of the affection a father feels for his child, never. Do not think, dream, or imagine such a thing. I deny it in every way in which man can deny. I would, were it in my power, efface from your mind every such remembrance of a past, beyond which we both should look." I began to feel startled. What did Cornelius mean? Why did he object so pertinaciously to a matter like this? I looked up at him and said earnestly-- "Cornelius, I do not understand at all why you are so vexed. Pray tell me." He looked down at me very fixedly. Every trace of ungentle passion had passed away from his features, and there was a strange, undefined tenderness in his gaze, as he said in a low tone-- "If I have been vexed. Daisy, it is to find out a mistake--a great mistake of mine." "What mistake, Cornelius?" "Do you really want to know, Daisy?" "Yes," I said, almost desperately, "I want to know." There was a pause. He still stood by me, looking down in my face. "Do not look so pale, and above all so frightened," he said, gently; "there is no need. How you tremble!" he added, taking my hand in both his, and speaking very sadly, "Oh, Daisy! Daisy!" And he turned his look away with a strange expression of disappointment and pain, of shame and mortification. I hung down my head; I did not dare to look at him, to withdraw my hand, to move. I stood mutely expecting--what I knew not exactly; but I seemed to feel that it must be some shock, dreadful, because violent, that would perforce turn the current of my destiny, and compel it to flow through regions, where of itself, my will would never have led we. Vain fear; unfounded alarm. Cornelius turned to me, and said very calmly-- "The mistake into which I fell, was to think that we understood one another tacitly, Daisy. I do not love you now because I have reared you, but on your own merits, for the sake of that which you have become. And thus I thought that you too liked me, with a higher feeling than gratitude. In short, as I like you myself--as a very dear friend." He spoke simply and naturally. I breathed freely. "Oh! how good, how generous you are!" I exclaimed, moved to the heart by so much delicacy of affection. "You want to raise me to an equality with you. God bless you, Cornelius." I pressed his two hands in mine, with much emotion. "Are you happy?" he asked, looking down at me. "So very happy!" I replied, with a joyous smile. "I am glad of it," he said, trying to smile too. "Shall we resume the sitting?" I asked. "Not to-day. 1 am in no mood to work; I think I shall go out for a walk." I felt somewhat surprised that Cornelius did not ask me to join him; and so was Kate, when she learned from me--she had been in her room all this time--that he was gone out alone. "Why did you not go with him?" she asked, frowning slightly. "He did not ask me, Kate." "You have not quarrelled?" "Oh, no! we are very good friends." The cloud passed away from her brow. She kissed me and said "Of course you are." Cornelius did not come in until late in the evening; he had walked miles, and was so tired that he could scarcely speak. CHAPTER VII. I awoke the next morning with a severe headache; I rose and came down as usual, thinking to hide it; scarcely, however, had I entered the front parlour, when Cornelius asked what ailed me. "Only a headache," I replied, carelessly; but he seemed filled with concern. He made me return to my room where I slept for a few hours, but without feeling any better; I then again went down to the parlour and lay on the sofa. Cornelius, who according to his sister had gone up to listen at my door every ten minutes--sat by me holding my hand. "How feverish she is!" he said to Kate. "There is twice as much fever in your blood as in that of Daisy," decisively replied Miss O'Reilly. "Don't be alarmed, Cornelius," I said quietly, "I do not feel as if I should realize the prediction of Dr. Mixton just yet." "Don't talk of that madman," exclaimed Cornelius, with a troubled face, "he was mad; only fit for Bedlam." "It came into my head by chance, and, as one thought leads to another, I thought, if I were going to die, I should ask two things of Cornelius. That if he married and had daughters, he should call one of them Daisy. Thus there would ever be something in his home to remind him of me; also to bury me here at Leigh--" "Daisy, Daisy!" almost angrily interrupted Cornelius, "what do you mean? I am not going to marry and have daughters; and to think of you as pale and inanimate with the cold earth above you, is a sickening thought." He looked quite pale. I saw there was a deep and secret fear at his heart, and indeed he showed it sufficiently; for as the day advanced and my headache still continued to trouble me, he insisted, spite of my entreaties and those of Kate, on going himself for a physician who resided several miles off. I was touched to the heart by this proof of a love so vigilant. "How kind he is," I said to Kate. "Kind! why surely child, you can see that he doats on you! Is he not making a fool of himself, just because your head aches? Would he not go distracted if anything were to happen to you? Oh, Midge! Midge!" she added, with a half-stifled sigh, "don't you see you are the apple of his eye?" As the heat of the day subsided, I felt suddenly better. The fresh sea- breeze could only do me good, so I went and sat on the bench at the end of the garden, there to watch for the return of Cornelius whose road home lay along the wide sweep of beach beneath me. For a long time I watched in vain; at length I perceived a man's form slowly descending the cliffs; I hastened in for my bonnet and scarf, and merely saying to Kate: "I see him coming," as I passed the parlour door, I was gone before she could open her lips to object. When I reached the sands, I looked in vain for Cornelius. I walked on, thinking he had seen me coming and stood concealed in a cleft of the rocks, but my look searched every one of their dark recesses, and nowhere could discover a token of his presence. It was late, though the singular clearness of the air which prevails by the sea-side, gave more light than belonged to the hour. I resolved to go no further, but to give one more look and return. I climbed up a heap of fallen rocks, and slowly began to scan the whole coast; it looked silent and lonely in the pale light of a rising moon. I was preparing to descend from my post of observation, when I started to perceive a shadow near mine. I looked up and saw William Murray. "William!" I exclaimed, delighted, "William Murray! Oh, how glad I am to see you again." He did not speak, but he took and held both my hands in his, and pressed them warmly, looking down at me with a happy, smiling face. "God bless you!" he said, "God bless you, Daisy! I thought I should never see you again." "Why so, William?" I asked, sitting down on a rock and making him sit down by me. He hesitated as he replied: "Don't you know?" "O, William, what is it? You make my heart beat." "Why we have been wrecked in the Mediterranean. I am sorry to tell you so abruptly; I thought you knew." He was safe before me; but we feel even the past perils of those we love. I felt myself turning faint and pale. William seemed much moved; he assured me that the danger had not been so very great, though in the hour of peril he had indeed thought of me as of one he should see no more. "Oh, William!" I said, looking up, and allowing him again to take my hands in his, "will you not leave that perilous life, and that dangerous sea?" "I cannot, Daisy; why I am only here for two days; I shall not see much of you before I am off again." "For long?" "A year," he replied, sighing. "How long have you been back?" "Two hours." "Why did you not come to me at once?" "Why did I wander up and down here, but to get a sight of you?" "Then it was you I took for Cornelius. You know he is come back. Oh, William! you must call on us and see him. How much you will like him!" "And how fond you are of him, Daisy, said William, in a low tone. "Why, of course, I am; and he deserves it." "Ay, that he does," he warmly replied. "You know, Daisy, I always said he was a good man." "He is a good man, for he does good actions, and never seems to know it. He is a great man--for he has genius, which is a great gift; and," I added, with a smile, "he is a handsome man, too, William." "There are some very fine men amongst those Irish," gravely replied William; "and they wear well too. There's our captain--Captain MacMahon-- who is upwards of fifty, but the most splendid fellow I ever saw--six foot six: then such shoulders and such lungs. He does not roar like Johnstone, or scream like Philipps; but he just opens his mouth, and lets his voice out as it were. Then his fists--you should see his fists, Daisy!" I was much amused, and replied: "I fear Cornelius is not quite equal to Captain MacMahon, yet I think you will like him, William." "This is the second time you say so." "Because I know it--just as I know that he will be delighted with you." William gave me a look, half shy, half pleased, and muttered something that sounded very like: "Did _I_ care for him?" "No," I replied, amused at the question, "not at all. How can I care for a friend who leaves me to go and get wrecked?" "Not at all, Daisy," he echoed; "not at all." He stooped, and looked very eagerly into my face. I drew back with a laugh that was checked by a voice observing behind me: "Daisy, what are you doing here at this hour?" I turned round--it was Cornelius. The moonlight fell full on his pale and angry face. I rose, without answering; 1 felt--and, no doubt, I looked-- like a culprit. He gave me a glance in which sadness and severity blended: then, as it taking pity on my confusion, he silently held out his arm to me. As I took it, I attempted a justification, and said: "I took William for you, Cornelius, and came out to meet you. He is Miss Murray's nephew, you know, and I had not seen him for months. Did you come for me from home? I am sorry--very sorry, Cornelius." I sought his look, but vainly; it was fastened on William, who had risen, and now stood before us. Cornelius eyed him from head to foot, with a keen and scrutinising gaze, which the young man returned. Neither spoke-- there was an evident want of cordiality in the silent glances they exchanged. I began to feel uncomfortable; my sense of uneasiness increased when Cornelius turned towards me, and said coldly: "I am sorry to hurry you away, Daisy, but Kate is very anxious." And without taking the least notice of William, or seeming to think that I could have another word to say to him, he made me turn homewards. I felt so disconcerted at his displeasure, that I neither opened my lips, nor attempted to resist; but, when we had walked on together for a few minute, I gathered courage to say: "I must go back to bid him good evening, Cornelius." I disengaged my arm from his, and lightly ran back to the spot where we had left William, and where he still stood looking after us with folded arms. "Good night, William," I said, holding out my hand. He did not take it, but replied in a tone overflowing with reproach: "Why did you deceive me, Daisy?" "Deceive you, William!" "Why did you pretend to care for me when you are so wrapped up in another, that, from the moment he comes up, you have neither speech nor look for me?" "I have left him to come and bid you good night, and by way of thanks, you accuse me of deceiving you. How, and about what?" "What do you call speaking of him as if he were your grandfather, when I don't believe he is a bit older than I am?" "He is twenty-seven. But what about his age?" "I don't care about his age, nor about his looks either," replied William, with a scornful laugh. "You may think him handsome if you like-- I do not." I felt offended, and replied, shortly: "I never told you Cornelius was old. It was you chose to compare an elegant young man, of twenty-seven, to a coarse sea-captain of fifty, not I. I might add that your remarks are very childish, but I do not want to speak unkindly. Good night, William. I trust that when I come here to- morrow morning, I shall find you in a better temper." I turned away; he followed me. "Will you really come?" he asked, submissively. I replied, "Yes," and hastened away to join Cornelius, who was coming to meet me with a face so overcast, that I saw I was again at fault. "I am so sorry to have brought you back!" I said, forestalling accusation. "I thought you would go on." Cornelius stopped short--we were once more walking homewards--to give me an amazed look, and say in a half indignant tone: "Go on, and leave you alone at this hour with a strange young man!" "He is not strange," I replied, feeling the blush he could not see; "I have known him since we were both children; and Kate can tell you he is only a boy." "A boy scarcely younger than I am," pointedly replied Cornelius. I thought it odd that both he and William should come to conclusions so similar with regard to their respective ages, but I did not venture to reply. Not another word was spoken until we reached the foot of the cliff on which rose our home; then, from the garden above was heard the anxious voice of Kate, exclaiming: "Have you found her, Cornelius?" "Yes," he replied, "she is quite safe." I was dismayed at this proof of the uneasiness I had made them feel. Kate received me very sharply. "I am astonished at you," she said, "to choose the very moment when you are troubled with a headache, and Cornelius is gone for the physician, to run down to the sands!" "You know, Kate, I was better; besides I thought I saw him coming, and went to meet him; but it proved to be William Murray." "The young bear--what brought him back?" "He has been wrecked." "Nonsense! wrecked! he has been spinning a yarn to you, Daisy." "I never yet knew William to tell an untruth," I replied, a little indignantly. "Truth or not, were you to make us anxious just to listen to the stories of that boy. Cornelius has come back from Italy with banditti notions; and he would have it that some ill-looking fellows, whom he met as he was going, had lingered on the beach until dusk to waylay you. So off he ran like a madman. Look at him. See how pale he is still!" Cornelius, who had lingered behind, entered the parlour as his sister spoke; my heart smote me to see that he was deadly pale. He sat down by the table, leaned his elbow upon it, and rested his brow on the palm of his hand, so that his face was shaded from the light. "Cornelius, what ails you?" asked Kate. "I am tired," he answered, without looking up. "Dr. Reeves was out, so I went for Dr. Simpson." "Why that is three miles further off." "Just so, that is what tired me. He too was out." Kate gave me a reproachful look; but indeed there was no need; my conscience troubled me sorely for the heedlessness which had added unnecessary fatigue and alarm to that his ardent affection had already caused him to undergo for my sake. I longed to make some atonement; to offer some explanation; but he gave me no opportunity; he left early, and it was only by his not coming down again, that we knew he had left us for the evening. In appointing to meet William on the sands the following morning, I had not reflected how difficult it would be for me to do so. I turned the subject over and over, and at length resolved to speak to Cornelius. He behaved to me at breakfast as if nothing had occurred; and when we both entered the little studio as usual, his face, though more serious than in the presence of Kate, expressed nothing like displeasure. In whose kindness and indulgence could I confide, if not in his? I hoped he would open the conversation, but, as he did not, I resolved to speak. I went up to his chair, and leaning upon it, said in a low tone: "Cornelius." "Well, Daisy," he replied, looking round. "May I say something to you? But pray," I quickly added, "pray, do not be vexed; promise that you will not." "Daisy!" exclaimed Cornelius, giving me a troubled look. "Well, then, promise nothing. I will trust to your indulgence. I can bear that you should reprove me, but I could not bear to deceive you." He took my hand in his, and, bending on me a look so keen that I began to feel disconcerted, he said slowly: "What do you mean?" I did not answer. "What do you mean?" he said, his voice rising. "Well then!" I exclaimed a little desperately, "I mean that I have made an appointment with William, and that I want your permission to keep it." Cornelius dropped my hand, and looked petrified. "You have made an appointment with that young man!" he said at length. "Yes, Cornelius." "And you come and tell it to me." "Oh, Cornelius, would you have me keep it a secret?" "But to tell it to _me_." "To whom else should I tell it?" "But to ask _me_ to let you keep it." "Of whom else should I ask it?" He seemed unable to reply. He looked at me; but no words passed his trembling lips. I began to feel hurt and dismayed at the manner in which he received my confidence. At length, he said, with forced calmness:-- "This is some mistake of mine; I have misunderstood you, Daisy. You cannot have meant to say that you had appointed a meeting with the young man I saw with you last night." "That was my meaning, Cornelius," I replied, firmly. "You confirm it," he replied, turning pale; "and I, who, after a night of tormenting thought, came down this morning, not knowing how to question you. Oh, Daisy!" There was agitation in his look and in his voice. "Cornelius," I said, with some emotion, "if I have made an appointment with William, where is the harm? It is not the first time I have done so." "Not the first time!" "No, nor the second, nor the third. We have been attached since Kate brought me to Leigh; and before William went to sea, there scarcely passed a day but we met somewhere." "And I have been away two years!" said Cornelius, in a low tone. "Not a day but you met somewhere!" "Yes, on the downs, or on the beach, where you found me last night, and where I had promised to meet him this morning." Cornelius turned on me with flashing eyes. "Unhappy child!" he exclaimed, "what do you mean by telling me all this? What have you been doing in my absence? What sort of a watch has Kate kept over the young girl I left to her care? What sense of honour has he who took so shameless an advantage of your ignorance, but who shall account to me for it yet?" He rose; his brow was stern; his face was pale. Half wild with terror, I threw my arms around his neck, and detained him. "It was my fault!" I exclaimed, eagerly; "all my fault--resent it upon me." "And what can I do to you?" answered Cornelius, looking down at me with strange anger and tenderness in his gaze; "what can I do to you?" "Hear me," I entreated, weeping. He sat down again, subdued at once by the sight of my tears, and said he would listen patiently. "William," I began. "Why speak of him?" he interrupted, with a clouded brow. "You have accused him; I must justify him, or bear my share of the blame." "Blame!" sorrowfully echoed Cornelius; "why should I blame you? I was away, and Kate was negligent, and another was there; it was natural, very natural." Encouraged by the gentleness of his tone, I stooped, and pressing my lips to his cheek, I said, in my most persuasive accents:-- "May I keep my appointment, Cornelius?" He turned upon me a flushed and troubled face. "I have heard of strange, tormenting things," he said, between his set teeth; "but I vow I never heard of anything to equal this. My God!" he added, pressing me to him with strange and sudden passion, "what can you want with that young man?" His look felt like fire; I bowed my face before its wrath. When I spoke, it was to say, in a faltering tone:-- "Cornelius, you are angry again; yet all I want is not to make William wait." "But what do you want with him?--What can you want with him?" desperately asked Cornelius. "He was so unreasonable; he said I did not care for him; and indeed, Cornelius, that was a great mistake of his. All I want is to speak to him a few minutes, and make him hear sense." "Oh, Daisy!" exclaimed Cornelius, with ill repressed anger, "is it possible you do not understand that it is not becoming for a young girl to go and meet a young man in a lonely place?" "Then forbid me to go!" I exclaimed, eagerly; "forbid me, that I may assure William if I broke my word to him, it was to obey you." Cornelius turned very pale; he rose, and said, in a moved and broken tone:-- "I am no tyrant. I do not forbid you to go. I claim no control over your feelings or actions. Go, and stay at your pleasure." Without giving me another look, he turned to his easel. I sat down in the attitude of the young girl reading; but, though every now and then I stole up a look from the open book on mv lap, I never could catch his eye. I felt this keenly; for if there was a thing which Cornelius had of late done more than another, it was to look into my face; and, oh! how kindly he ever looked! At length, I could bear it no longer. I rose, and went up to where he stood painting. He never even glanced around. The calm expostulation with which I had thought to address him, faded from my memory. With involuntary emotion, I sank down at his feet, and, seizing his hand, I exclaimed, with something like passion:-- "Blame me! but look at me, Cornelius; say what you will, but look at me." "Are you mad?" he cried reddening indignantly and forcibly raising me from the ground. "What do you, what can you mean by kneeling to me? Oh, Daisy!" he added with keen reproach, "I would rather you had struck me than you had done that." I stood by him silent and ashamed. "To kneel to me!" he resumed, as if he could not get over it. "For man to kneel to woman may be folly, but at least it is the voluntary submission of strength; but for woman to kneel to man--what is it--save the painful submission of weakness. If you have any regard for me, if you care for me, never do that again." I promised I would not, then added: "Have you forgiven me, Cornelius?" "What have I to forgive?" "You know--I do not." He looked around as I still stood by him in the attitude of an unforgiven child, and he sighed. "You wish for an explanation," he said in a troubled tone, "so do I, and yet I dread it." "Cornelius, I will do all I can not to annoy you. Question me and I will answer you in all the sincerity of my heart. If I have done wrong, it is by mistake, and indeed William too. We are both very young and ignorant, Cornelius?" "Both! What is that young man to you that his name cannot be severed from yours?" "He is my friend, Cornelius." "Why did you never mention his name since my return?" "It must have been because I was so much more absorbed in thinking of what concerned you, than of what concerned myself. I could not otherwise have failed mentioning the name of William, the only companion and friend I have had during your absence." "The only one, Daisy?" "Yes, Cornelius." "I suppose you were a good deal together?" "Yes, a great deal." "Here or at Miss Murray's?" "Neither at one nor at the other," I answered smiling. "We seldom went to Miss Murray's, and as Kate did not like William, nor he her, he never came here. I met him on the sands." "How did you spend your time?" "We played together." "Played!" "Yes, you know we were both quite young then; but as we grew older we left off playing." "And what did you do then?" he asked uneasily. "We walked on the beach, climbed up the cliffs, ran down again, sat when we felt tired and talked." "Of what?" "Of the sea; of anything." There was a pause, then Cornelius said: "He is your friend, you say." "Yes, Cornelius; and though often rude to others, he is ever kind and gentle to me; he likes me, you know." "Do you like him?" "Very much." He laid his hand on my head, and bent down on me a glance that seemed as if it longed to read my very heart. "You like him?" he said in a low tone. "Yes, Cornelius, I like him." More he did not ask; more I did not dare to say, much as I longed to tell; I only ventured to observe: "Do you not want to ask me anything else, Cornelius?" "Nothing else," he replied with a sharp glance that made mine sink down abashed; "but I have a piece of advice to give you: appoint no more meetings with your friend. I do not mean that there was harm in those accidental interviews, in which of course there never passed anything but what you have told." "Oh no, never." "But discretion is needed by a young girl." "Have I been indiscreet?" "A little; but do not think I make much of it. It is a mere childish matter." "You do not think anything else?" "Nothing else," he said, with a look that again disconcerted me, "I have indeed advised--" "Oh! speak not of advice," I interrupted eagerly. "You know that my pleasure is to please you, that I do my own will when I do yours, Cornelius." "You believe that," he replied, "but can I, Daisy?" "Put me to the test then!" We stood side by side. He passed his arm around me, and drew me towards him. "You bid me put you to the test," he said. "Yes," I replied, but my heart beat fast. "There was a time," he resumed with a look of jealous reproach, "when I was, I will not say the only friend you had, but the only friend you thought of or cared for." I felt a sharp and sudden pang of pain, but I said nothing. "Well!" he impatiently exclaimed. "May I not write to him?" I replied, feeling that my colour came and went beneath his gaze. He did not reply. It was plain he would have an entire sacrifice or none. He clasped me so close, that I was obliged to rest my head on his shoulder. As he bent over me, my look met his, and from the gaze I seemed to drink in all the strange and dangerous sweetness of sacrifice. "Well!" he said again. "Yes," I answered, "all--anything you like, Cornelius." I trembled--for my blood rushed to my heart with something like pain and gladness blending in its rapid flow; but he only saw the tears which covered my face, and he exclaimed, with reproachful tenderness: "You weep because I ask you to give up a childish past, which, childish as it is, I would give anything to annihilate. Oh! Daisy, Daisy!" At once I checked my tears. He saw the effort, and, stooping, he pressed a long and lingering kiss on my brow. "Oh! my darling!" he said, ardently, "do not regret it so much. If I will share your friendship with none, is it not because I mean to take on myself the exclusive care of your happiness? Trust in me--in that feeling be a child again. Alas! I sometimes fear that the calmness and serenity of childhood are not merely in your years, but also in your nature. Oh! if, without adding one day to your existence--one dark page to your experience--I could change this!" I tried to smile, but I could not--I felt languid and wretched. My heart ached at what I had done--at William, given up so utterly, with scarcely a cause assigned. I wondered if Cornelius, knowing all, would have exacted the same sacrifice. Once or twice I tried to bring the discourse round to the point I wished; but he shunned this so carefully, that at length my eyes opened: Cornelius wished to know nothing. From that moment I was silent and resigned. If endearing language, and every proof of an ardent affection, could have consoled me, I need not have grieved: but even sitting by Cornelius--- even listening to him--I was haunted by the image of William vainly waiting for me at the old meeting-place. I heard his voice reproachfully exclaiming--now, alas! with how much truth--"You have deceived me!" In the course of the day, we received an invitation to take tea with Miss Murray, in honour of her nephew's return. I said I could not go, and Kate, with a smile, replied she would sacrifice herself, and allow Cornelius to remain and keep me company. We spent a quiet evening together. My head again ached slightly; I was glad of the pretence to lie on the sofa with closed eyes. Cornelius sat by me, holding my hand in his, and thus his sister found us on her return. She looked at us with a pleased face, and said it was well to be a spoiled child like me. "By the bye," she carelessly added, "William Murray is as great a bear as ever. He had been out all day, and looked, when he came in, as if he longed to knock me down." I think I replied, "Indeed." I know that soon after this I went up to my room, there to learn what new pangs can give to grief, and what new bitterness to tears--the sense of an affection betrayed. CHAPTER VIII. I sat to Cornelius as usual on the following day, but not a word did we exchange concerning what had passed. In the course of the afternoon he said he no longer wanted me; I left him, glad of a little solitude and liberty. He joined me in the garden as dusk was falling. He found me sitting on the bench studying Tasso. He asked me if we should not read together. I assented, but twice my tears fell on the page: he closed the book, and said sadly: "Daisy, you need not weep; I release you from your promise." I started slightly: he continued: "I did not think your feelings were so deeply engaged, or I should never have put you to such a test. Come, do not weep; your time for tears is past; see your friend as much as you like, and let your pale, unhappy face reproach me no more that, unable to render you happy myself, I would not let another do it." I could bear no more; every word he uttered pierced mo with a sharper pang. I hid my face in my hand and exclaimed: "Cornelius, you are too good; I do not deserve this; I have seen William; he has but just left me." I looked up, he turned rather pale; but never spoke one word. "You are angry with me," I said. "Angry with you!" he repeated, smiling sadly, but so kindly, that, impelled by the same sense of refuge which I had so often felt in my childish troubles, I threw my arms around his neck, and exclaimed in a voice broken by tears: "Oh, Cornelius, I am so wretched." "I am not angry, indeed I am not," he replied, sighing deeply. "Oh! it is not that, Cornelius; William is again gone away, and if you knew all--Oh, what shall I do!" I cried bitterly on his shoulder. He half rose as if to put me away; but he sat down again with fixed brow and compressed lips. "What shall you do?" he echoed, "what others have done--you shall bear it." I looked up, amazed at the stern bitterness of his tone, at the cold and inexorable meaning of his face, which had turned of a sallow paleness. "But Cornelius," I exclaimed, much hurt, "I like him--" "I don't believe it," he interrupted, biting his lip. "It is a dream--a fancy--the dream of a girl, of a mere child; all girls think they are in love; you have done like the rest." I felt a burning blush overspread my face; my look sank beneath his; the hand which he had taken and still held, trembled in his; he dropped it and said: "And is this the end of it all, Daisy? and do you really like that rough sailor, a mere boy too? Oh, Daisy!" I conquered my scruples and my shame. "Cornelius." I said, looking up at him, "I must speak to you openly once for all. I wanted to do so yesterday; you would not hear me then; pray hear me now." "Why so?" he replied, with evident pain, "I know enough, more than enough." "You do not know all." "Then I can guess." "No, I do not think you can." "Well then, speak, Daisy, and do not linger." "William, as I told you, has not long left me; he came to bid me good- bye, and also--but I must begin from the beginning." "What else was it that he came for?" asked Cornelius. "Let me first tell you the rest." "Never mind the rest. What else did he call for?" "I must go on my own way. I want you to judge of my conduct, as well as to know the issue. Do you remember yesterday all I told you concerning my acquaintance with William?" "Every word." "You are sure you have forgotten nothing?" "Daisy," he exclaimed vehemently, "will you never tell me what he came for?" His look, his tone, commanded a reply. "To ask me whether I would not promise to marry him some day," I replied in a low tone. There was a pause, during which I could hear the beating of my own heart. "Well," at length said Cornelius, "did you give him that promise?" "Guess!" I answered, and that he might not read the truth in my face, I averted it from his gaze. "Guess!" he echoed, with a groan, "imprudent girl, I guess but too easily. Oh, Daisy! how could you pledge yourself, how could you promise that which may be the misery of your whole life." "Cornelius, I did not promise." "But you love him!" he exclaimed with a sort of despair, "and love is surer than vows." In the reply which I then should have made, there was no cause for shame, yet my eyes sought the ground, my face burned, and I hesitated and paused. When I at length looked up, dreading to meet the glance of Cornelius, I perceived that his eyes were riveted on William Murray, who had come up the steep path unheard, and now stood leaning on the low wooden gate, looking at us sadly and gravely. I was the first to break the awkward pause that followed. "I thought you were gone. William," I said, rising, and taking a step towards him. "I could not make up my mind to it," he replied, giving me a look of half reproach. "I could not go without bidding you once more good-bye." He held out his hand to me; I gave him mine across the gate. He took it, and keeping it clasped in his, he turned to Cornelius, and said with repressed emotion: "I don't know why I should be ashamed of it--I am not ashamed of it--Mr. O'Reilly, I love her with my whole heart. I don't think there is another girl like her; at least I am very sure there is not another one for me. I think she likes me; but, hard as I begged, she would promise me nothing-- she could not she said without your knowledge or consent; I said I wanted nobody's knowledge or consent, to like her. We parted rather angrily; but I thought better of it, and came back to speak to you, since she wished it. And look! even here in your presence, she takes her hand from me, lest you should not like it." I did, indeed, withdraw my hand from his, as he spoke, partly because from friendship William had gone to love, partly because I had met the look of Cornelius, which disturbed me. "Mr. O'Reilly," said William, looking at him very fixedly, "do you object?" "No," coldly answered Cornelius. William opened the gate, and stepped in with a triumphant look. "Do you hear that, Daisy?" he exclaimed. "Do not misunderstand me," quietly said Cornelius. "I do not object; but if Daisy wishes for my advice, I certainly advise her not to enter at seventeen into an engagement destined to last her whole life. The human heart changes; it will often loathe the very object of its former wishes, and often, too, learn to long too late for that which it once dreaded as utter misery." "_I_ shall not change!" exclaimed William, giving him an impatient look: "but of course if you advise Daisy against promises, there will be none. I need none to bind me to her; and if she will only promise to try and like me--" "And why should she?" sharply interrupted Cornelius; "what have you done for her to deserve such a promise? What proof has she that you will always deserve it, even as much as you do now?" "I'll tell you what, Mr. O'Reilly," said William, with sparkling eyes, "my opinion is, that though you make a fair show, like most of your countrymen, it is all a humbug, and that you want to keep Daisy for yourself!" Cornelius laughed scornfully, as if disdaining to resent the petulant jealousy of a boy; but I saw his colour rise, and his brow knit slightly. I hastened to interfere; I stepped up to William; I looked up in his face; I took his hands in mine, and pressed them to my heart. "William," I said sadly, "why did you come back? I wish I had spoken more plainly: I love you, but not, indeed, as you mean; I love you as my friend, as a brother, but not otherwise." "Not otherwise!" he said, seeking aw look; "that is hard, Daisy, not otherwise." I turned my head away. "And yet we have been such good friends!" "And are still, William." "Then be my best friend." "Gladly." "Well! what is to marry but to be best friends? Do I not like you more than any other creature? Would I not know you among a thousand? Have I a thought I would not tell you? Not one. And, indeed, I think you, too, like me more than you think now." "No, William, I do not." "Do not be in such a hurry to reply," he answered, with a wishful look; "it may take you longer to find out, than it did me." In his earnestness he had forgotten all about the presence of Cornelius. His importunity wrung the truth from me. "William," I said, "this cannot be; I might promise to try to like you as you wish; but I could not keep that promise. There is a power and a charm that binds me to home, a tie that links me to Cornelius and to Kate, and which I cannot break even for your sake. Believe me, whilst I remain with them, I can love you very dearly; but if I were with you I should be too home-sick and too heart-sick to think of you, William. If we went out together, I know that even with my arm within yours, or your hand in mine, my eyes would ever be seeking out for them, my feet leading me to their dwelling. I like you, William, I like you dearly, but I cannot give you my whole heart." William gave me one look; the tears rushed in his eyes; he dropped my hands. "God bless you, Daisy," he said, and turned away. The gate closed on him; he slowly descended the path. I did not call him back, but sitting down on the bench, I hid my face in my hands and wept bitterly. I felt and felt truly that we had parted to meet no more; that my faithful companion and friend was lost to me, and the pleasant tie of my childhood and youth broken for ever. For awhile Cornelius let me weep; then he did his best to soothe and console me. The very sound of his voice brought comfort to my heart; my tears lost their bitterness, at length they ceased to flow, and I could hear and speak with calmness. "And so," said Cornelius, bending over me, his right hand clasping mine, his left resting on the back of the bench behind me, "and so it was only friendship after all which you felt for William Murray." "You seem surprised, Cornelius." "There was every appearance and every chance against it." "I don't grant the chance." "Because you have lived an isolated life, and know not that the first thing a youth and maiden, situated as you and William were, think of, is to get engaged as fast as they can." "Was that what you thought yesterday, Cornelius?" "Why did you not undeceive me?" "Why did you not ask?" "I did not like to put the question." "Nor I to speak unquestioned. I had never dreamed that William, with whom I was so free, so friendly, with whom I played, picked up shells, and ran about, could think of such a thing. How could you, Cornelius?" "Why not? he was your friend, and a fine young man, too." "Yes," I replied, "and as good-looking as a very fair man can be. But his looks have nothing to do with what I mean, Cornelius." "What is it you mean?" "That he is a mere boy; Kate always called him a boy, and I always thought him one. You do not think I could have been so free with a young man. Indeed, no, Cornelius. And then he is a sailor!" "Do you object to that?" "Most decidedly." "Why, what would you like, Daisy?" "I don't know; but I know what I do not like, and a Lord Admiral himself would not tempt me." "I had no idea you had so many good reasons for rejecting him," said Cornelius, smiling; "he is fair, a boy, and a sailor--have you anything else?" "Yes, Cornelius," I replied, looking up into his face, "I have known him too long--almost as long as you." "Indeed!" he said, abstractedly, "is old acquaintance so great a sin in your opinion, Daisy?" "Not a sin, Cornelius; but I have liked William like a brother, and I cannot like him otherwise." "Daisy, it seems to me that an old and known friend is in general much preferable to the stranger." "That is a good reason, Cornelius, and I am talking of a feeling. Mine is so strong that, much as I like William, I feel a sort of relief in thinking we shall not meet in haste." "Oh! Daisy," sadly said Cornelius, "do you impute that poor boy's affection for you, as a crime to him." "Heaven forbid; but can I help feeling that the charm of our friendship is gone? He liked me one way, I liked him another; after that, what can there be between us? Could I again be free with him? I could not; and to be cold and constrained when I was once so trusting and so frank, would be worse than utter separation. I would rather never see him more, than feel my friendship for him breaking miserably away, Cornelius." I spoke as I felt, with a warmth and earnestness that again made my eyes overflow. Cornelius heard me with an attentive look, then placing his hand on my arm, said, quietly-- "Oh, Daisy, what a lesson!" "A lesson, Cornelius?" "Yes, a lesson, which I, for one, shall not forget. If ever I find myself circumstanced as was your friend, Daisy, I shall have the wisdom not to cast away friendship before I am sure of love." "Cornelius," I said, earnestly, "do you blame me?" "No, no," he quickly replied. "Because if you thought I should--" "No," he interrupted; "not at all. Oh, Daisy! do you not see I am too selfish to wish to make a present of you to the first boy or man who chooses to take a fancy to you?" "And I hope I know better than to leave you and Kate," I replied, confidently. "Oh, Cornelius!" I added, with sudden emotion, "how can daughters leave their father's house for that of a stranger?" He was bending over me with the look and attitude which, even more than act or speech, imply the fond and caressing mood; but, on hearing this, he reddened, drew back, and said, in a short, vexed tone:-- "Don't be filial, Daisy." "Don't be alarmed," I replied, smiling, "I have not forgotten that you called me your friend the other day, and I am going to avail myself of the privilege." "Are you?" he answered, pacified at once. "Yes, I am going to be very bold." He smiled. "To ask a great favour." He looked delighted and inquisitive. "You know," I continued, in my most persuasive accents, and passing my arm within his, "you know it is settled that I am always to remain with you and Kate; but--" "But," he echoed. "But is it settled that you are to remain with us?" "Why not?" he replied, looking astonished. "You spoke of Spain the other evening. What should you want to go to Spain for? I think it would be a great loss of time; besides--" "Besides, Daisy?" he repeated, smoothing my hair. "Besides, I want you to remain with us." "For how long, Daisy?" "For ever." I said it, smiling, for I dreamt not he would consent. "For ever," he repeated, with quiet assent. I looked at him with breathless joy. He smiled. "Ask me for something else," he said. "I dare not," I replied, drawing in a long breath, "lest you should take back the first gift to punish my presumption." "Your presumption! Oh, Daisy!" I gave him a quick look; as our eyes met, I read in his the dangerous and intoxicating knowledge, that he who for seven years had been my master, now voluntarily abdicated that throne of authority where two so seldom sit in peace, and was calling me to something more than equality. My heart beat, my face flushed; I looked at him proudly. "And so," I said, a little agitatedly, "I am really to be your friend. How good!--how kind! But I am not to obey you now?" I asked, breaking off. "Don't name the word," he replied, impatiently. "How odd!" I observed, both startled and amused. "How odd that I, who used to feel so much afraid of you, when you used to chide, punish, turn out of the room--" "I fear," interrupted Cornelius, looking uneasy, "I was rather rude then." "You were not always civil. You once called me a little monkey. Another time--" "Pray don't!" he hastily observed, looking annoyed and disconcerted. "Tell me rather what I am to give you. Are there not shops at Ryde?" "As if I should fancy anything out of a shop." "And what is there that does not come out of a shop?" "What a question for an artist!" "Have I anything you would really fancy?" eagerly inquired Cornelius. "Would you give me your picture, if I were to ask you for it?" "Would you ask me for it?" "No, for I want you to sell it." "And will you not always want me to sell my pictures?" "And is there nothing you will not sell?" I alluded to his Italian drawings, from which Cornelius had often declared nothing should induce him to part. He understood me, for he smiled; but eluded the subject by asking if we should not go in. I assented. We entered the house, and spent, as usual, a quiet evening. When I woke the next morning, the first object that met my eyes was the portfolio of Italian drawings, lying on the table by me. Never had I been so quick in dressing as I was then. I hastened downstairs to the parlour. Cornelius sat reading the newspaper by the table. I went up to him, and standing behind him, gently took it from his hand. "Why so?" he said, demurring. "Oh! you know. But I cannot thank you. All I can say is. I shall never forget that what you would not have given for money, when you wanted money, you gave to me for pure love and friendship. I shall never forget, Cornelius, when you are a rich man and a great man, that when you were but a poor, obscure artist, you gave me all a poor, obscure artist has to give." He did not reply. I stood behind him, with my two hands leaning on the back of his chair. He took them, and gently clasped them around his neck. I stooped, and touching with my lips his bold and handsome brow, I could not help saying: "Oh, my friend! shall I ever have another friend like you?" "Indeed, I hope not," he replied, laughing: and in the glass opposite us, I saw Kate smiling, as she stood looking on in the half gloom of the open door. The heart of youth is light. I liked William. I was sorry for him, but I did not let my remembrance of him press on me too sadly. Had I wished it, it would scarcely have been in my power to be unhappy, when I saw and felt that he who was dearest to me of God's creatures, now loved me as blindly and as devotedly as ever I had loved him. CHAPTER IX. At the end of a fortnight, Kate spoke of returning to our old home in the Grove, which had been vacant for some time. She resolved to go first with Jane and set all to rights, and to leave Cornelius and me to the care of a deaf and half-blind old dame. It was no use, she said, to bring us in the mess. When all was ready, she would write to us; and, as the furniture was not particularly valuable, we could just lock up Rock Cottage, and thus the labours of Cornelius need not be interrupted. He was then working hard at his Young Girl Reading, and entered quite into the spirit of this arrangement. When Kate had been gone above ten days, she wrote to say we might leave whenever we pleased. I felt delighted, but noticed, with concern, that the prospect of our return affected Cornelius very differently. For several days he looked pale and unwell, yet there appeared about him no sign of physical ailment. He seemed in a strange state of restlessness and fever, and wandered about the house like an uneasy spirit. Two or three times he took long lonely walks, from which he came in so worn and languid-looking, that I once asked uneasily: "What ails you, Cornelius?" "Nothing. How flushed you look. Is anything the matter with you?" "I have been stooping packing up--that is all." I returned to the task. He moved away, then came back several times, as if to address me, but never spoke. At tea time, I noticed, with concern, that he touched nothing. I said I was sure he was ill. He denied it; but when our aged servant bad removed the tray, he came and sat by me, made me put by my work, and, taking my two hands in his, began looking at my face with a strange troubled gaze--like one who beholds things in a dream--far and dim. "What is it?" I asked, a little uneasily. "How pale you look!" was his only reply. "I feel tired. Sewing there after tea, my eyes seemed to close involuntarily." "They are closing now. You need sleep, poor child. Go up to your room." "Have you nothing to say to me?" "It will do to-morrow. Go! a long night's rest will do you so much good. Sleep well and long." I said it was too early yet, but even as I spoke, a heaviness not to be conquered by will, pressed down my eyelids. He urged the point and I yielded. How soon I slept that night; how long, deep and peaceful were my slumbers! how light and happy I felt when the morning sun awoke me, and opening my window, I drank in with delight the air still cool with the dews of night. I came down in a happy mood, and ran out to join Cornelius in the garden. He stood by the pine tree, smoking and looking at the sea in a fit of abstraction so deep, that he never heard me, until I passed my arm within his, and said: "How are you to-day?" "Quite well, child." "Then let us have a good, long walk," I said eagerly. "Let us visit once more our old haunts, and take a few green images to smoky London. Shall we?" "As you please, Daisy." "I do please. I have a pastoral longing for breezy freshness, lanes, dells, and streams flowing in the shade. So let as go in to breakfast." He yielded, but with little sympathy for my impatience, he lingered at the meal for an hour and more. When I sought to hurry him, he invariably replied: "There is time enough." I went up to dress; when I came down again, I found him in the garden, walking up and down the path. I joined him, and said "I was quite ready." "Are you?" he quietly answered and continued his walk. I followed him, impatient at his dilatoriness; but he seemed in no haste, for as he might have spoken on any other morning, he said: "I like this garden, Daisy. Spite of the sea air, flowers seem to thrive here. I never saw a finer rose than this. Take it." He gathered it, and gave it to me as he spoke. I murmured a little. This rose was to have been the pride of the bouquet I meant to take to Kate. "There are plenty left," he replied, gathering a few more; then, looking at his watch, carelessly said: "It was time to go." I asked if we should take the path that led to the beach. "Why not go by Leigh, you were wishing for green fields!" "True; besides we can come back by the sands." He did not reply. I took his arm; we traversed the house, and went down the steep path, which had seen some of our first walks in the pleasant lanes and meadows of Leigh. "Only think," I observed after a while, "I have brought the flowers you gave me. They will be quite withered by the time we are home again." Cornelius stopped abruptly, and held me back. "Mind that stone," he said, "you might have hurt yourself. Why did you not look before you?" "Because I feel as if I trod on air," I replied gaily, "and when one feels so, it seems quite ridiculous to trouble one's self with stones, &c. I don't know when I have been in a mood so light and happy. I feel as if this green lane need have no end or turning, and this pleasant day no sunset." He did not answer. My flights of fancy won no response from his graver mood; the dazzling brightness of the deep blue sky, the green freshness of the fields, seemed lost upon him, lost the charm and sweetness of the day. But even his unusual seriousness could not subdue the buoyancy and life which I felt rising within me. My blood flowed, as it only flows in youth or in spring, light, warm and rapid, making of every sensation a brief delight, of every aspect and change of nature an exquisite enjoyment, tempered with that under-current of subtle pain which runs through over-wrought emotions, and subdues at their very highest pitch the sweetest and purest joys of mortal sense. I walked on, like one in a dream, scarcely heeding where we went. At length Cornelius stopped, and said: "Shall we not rest here awhile?" We stood in that green and lonely nook, by the banks of the quiet stream where we had once lingered through the hours of a summer noon. It so chanced that though we had since then often passed by the spot, we had never made it our resting-place. The thought of once more spending here an hour or two was pleasant. I took off my bonnet and suspended it from the branches of the willow; I sat again beneath it; Cornelius unconsciously took the very attitude in which I remembered him--half reclining on the bank, with his brow resting on the palm of his hand. The same bending trees above, with their glimpses of blue sky; the same clear stream flowing on, with its silent world below, and its green wilderness beyond; the same murmur of low and broken sounds around us; the same sweet sense of freshness and solitude made past weeks seem like one unbroken summer day. I felt that sitting there, I could forget how quickly pass on hours, how rapid is the course of time. "Daisy!" suddenly said Cornelius, looking up, "how is it you do not ask me what I had to tell you last night?" "I had forgotten all about it," I answered, smiling, "What is it, Cornelius?" He did not reply at once, but again taking my hands in his, he looked at me so sadly, that my heart sank within me. "Cornelius," I exclaimed, "you have not news--of--Kate?" "No," he quickly replied, "I have sad news for you, my poor child; but Kate is well." "What is it then? What is it, Cornelius? Has she lost her money? Is the house burned down? What is it?" "Nothing like this, Daisy; you would never guess--1 must tell you. God alone knows how hard I find it. Daisy, we are going to part." My arms fell down powerless; I did not speak; I did not weep; I was stunned with the blow. An expression full of trouble and remorse passed over his face. "What have I done?" he exclaimed in an agitated tone, "I wished to spare you until the last moment. Oh! Daisy, for God's sake do not look so." I felt, and I dare say I looked, almost inanimate. He took me in his arms and bending over me, eagerly begged me to forgive him. "It was to spare you, my darling," he said, "I was going to tell you last night, but I thought I would let you sleep in peace, and I kept the weary secret to myself, as I have done these three days." I heard him drearily. It was true then, an actual, dread reality. I summoned strength to ask-- "Why must we part, Cornelius?" "Why?" he echoed sadly. "You must not go, I will not let you," I exclaimed passionately, "or if you go, you must take me with you. I have money of my own; I will be no cost to you, but I will not leave you." He wanted to speak; I laid my hand on his lips. "I tell you that you must either stay at home or take me with you," I said wilfully, "I too want to see Spain." "Daisy, I am not going to Spain." "Where then? To Italy? What for? Who have you left there that is so very dear? Oh! I see! I see! Go, Cornelius, go." And I disengaged myself with wounded pride from the embrace he could find it in his heart to bestow, with that heart full--as I thought in the jealousy of the moment--of another. "That's right, Daisy!" he replied bitterly, "that's right! Make me feel to the end the fever and torment of the last two months." "Are you or are you not going away to marry?" I said, confronting him. "Marry!" he echoed in an impatient and irritated tone, "Marry! I don't think of it." A load was raised from my heart. I breathed. I again. His marriage was the only evil to which I could see no remedy. By the fright it had given me, I perceived how much I had dreaded it; but a vague instinct forbade me to show him this. I quickly changed the subject. "Take me with you," I said entreatingly, "I will give you no trouble." "Trouble! Oh, that indeed I were going away and you with me," he half groaned. "Blessed would be that trouble; too sweet, too delightful the task of bearing you away, alone with me, to some far land." "Cornelius," I said, "tell me all at once. Since you are not going away-- what is it?" "I suppose," he answered after a brief pause, "you know, though you have never alluded to it, that this park before us is your grandfather's; that the house of which we can discern the roof through this grove of elm and beech, is Thornton House. I am taking you there now." "But I shall go back to Rock Cottage with you?" I exclaimed eagerly. "I shall go to London with you, and live there in the house of Kate. Shall I not?" He did not answer; but he half averted his troubled face; his gaze shunned mine. "Cornelius," I said, clinging to him, "I will not go and live with Mr. Thornton, I will not. I don't love him, and I love you and Kate as my life. He treated me unkindly, and you took me and reared me. Unless you turn me out of your home, I will not leave it for his." I spoke with passion and vehemence; holding fast to him, as if to brave the power that would seek to divide us. "Do not speak so wildly," he replied in a soothing tone; "God knows I wish not to compel you--you are free. Daisy." "Then I stay with you and Kate," I cried throwing my arms around his neck. "Will you?" he said with a wistful look, and pressing me to his heart for a moment; but the next he put me away with a deep sigh, and added: "No, Daisy, you cannot, and would not if you could. Do not interrupt me: I have much to say, and I must go far back. You know how your parents married?" "Secretly, I believe." "Yes: one evening your mother, then a girl of your age, left her father's house; she never came back, and died, soon after your birth, a disobedient, unforgiven child." I was sitting by Cornelius with my hand in his, and my head resting on his shoulder. "He is not my father," I thought, "yet never could I forsake him thus." He continued: "This you know, but I scarcely think you know how bitterly your father repented this act of his youth. He often spoke of it to me. 'Cornelius, never rob a man of his child,' he said, 'it is a great sin.' He was right, Daisy; it is a great sin; I felt it then; I feel it far more now; for though you are not my child, I have reared you, and I know that affection is jealous; that to resign a daughter to a stranger, must always be bitter, but that to have her actually stolen from you; to be robbed of the pleasant thing which has for years been your delight and pride, to feel that it is gone beyond recall, the property of another, I know that this is too sharp a pang for speech, almost for thought. I have thought of such a thing; I have thought that another man might step in between you and me, that he might rob me, whilst I looked on powerless and deserted. My God!" he suddenly added, pressing me closer to him, his eyes kindling, his lips trembling, "I have also thought that if it were not for your sake, there was nothing I would not have the heart to do to that man." "You have thought that?" I said, reproachfully, "as if such a thing could ever happen, Cornelius." "If I speak so," he replied, "it is to show you what may be the feelings of the wronged father, and when he is a high-minded man like your father, of him by whom he had been wronged. It was the knowledge of this that made me take you to Mr. Thornton. Oh, how could I be so blind as to call in a stranger to share with me the exclusive and precious privilege Heaven had bestowed, but which I knew not then how to prize! You know, Daisy, that when you were at Mrs. Gray's, I wrote to Mr. Thornton, to obtain back again the boon my folly had forfeited; he cared little for you; he knew you were fretting to return; he consented, but on a condition, to the fulfilment of which I pledged my word--that word, Daisy, which it is death to a man's honour to break--that, whenever he wished it, you were his to claim. He was abroad then, but he returned about a week ago, and his first act has been to write and remind me of my promise." "You pledged yourself for me, Cornelius?" I said dismayed. "Oh! Daisy, forgive me. I acted as I thought your father would have wished me to act; besides, I could not have had you otherwise." "And Mr. Thornton actually wants me!" I exclaimed desperately. "Yes," sadly replied Cornelius. "But I do not want him; I will not have him, or his wealth, Cornelius." "He offers you no wealth, my poor child. Every one knows that his extravagance has made him poor; the estate is mortgaged and entailed; his personal property is small; he has little to give, nothing to bequeath. He is still, as when you knew him, wrapped up in his books." "Then what does he want me for, Cornelius?" "To be the charm of his home, and the delight of his heart and eyes," replied Cornelius, in a voice full of love, fondness, and sorrow. "To be to him all that you have been, and never more can be to me. I knew not how to value you formerly; and now that you have become all I could imagine, I am not allowed to possess you in peace! Scarcely have I recovered from the dread of seeing you throw yourself away on a mere boy, scarcely do I deem myself secure, when peril comes from the quarter whence I least feared it, and I am despoiled of my heart's best treasure." "If you liked me," I said, in a low tone, "you would not, because you could not give me up." "If I liked you!" began Cornelius, but he said no more. "Yes, if you liked me!" I exclaimed in all the passion of my woe; "if you liked me, Cornelius, you would feel what I feel--that such a separation is like death. Tell me that your art requires your absence, I can bear it; tell me that you are too poor to keep me, that I must go, and earn my bread amongst strangers, and I shall bear that, too; for I shall look to a happy future, and a blessed reunion. But this--this, Cornelius, my very heart shrinks from it. I feel that you are to follow one path; and that, though my very being clings to you and Kate, I must tread in another, and see you both for ever receding from before my aching eyes. I am not yet eighteen, Cornelius, and I am so happy! I cannot afford to waste my youth, and throw away my happiness; and if you cared for me, would you not feel so, too?" I spoke with involuntary reproach. "Oh, Daisy!" he exclaimed so scornfully that I immediately repented, "you think me indifferent, because, not to add to your grief, I am silent on mine. You speak of your sorrow; you do not ask yourself what will be to me the cost of this separation. How shall I return alone to the home we left together this morning? What shall I say to Kate--to Kate who reared you--when she asks me for her child'? Why here am I actually giving up to a total stranger, the very thing I most long to keep; here am I taking you from my home, and leading you to the home of another; here am I placing you in the very circumstances that are likely to make me lose you for ever. You are young, Daisy, very young. You will be flattered, caressed, seduced out of old affections, almost unconsciously; and I shall not be there to guard my rights. I know that absence, time, the world will conspire to efface me from your heart; I know it, and yet I accept this." "But why so?" I asked; "why so?" "Because," he replied, with a fixed look, and compressed lips, "because to keep even you, Daisy, with the sense of my own engrossing selfishness, violated honour and trust betrayed upon me, would be gall and wormwood to my soul." "But it is not you who keep me, Cornelius, if it is I who insist on remaining; if I disobey you, brave your authority, say you had no right to pledge yourself for me, and that, whether you like it or not, I will stay with Kate, what can you do then?" His colour came and went; he turned upon me a strange, troubled look; his lip quivered; he took my hand in his, and almost crushed it, then dropped it as if it were fire. "Tempt me not," he said, in a low tone, turning away his look as he spoke. "Tempt me not, for God's sake. I am but flesh and blood--I cannot always answer for myself. There are bounds to self-denial, and limits to self-subjection." I did not answer, but I passed my arm around his neck, and I laid my head on his shoulder. "Daisy, Daisy, my child!" he exclaimed, "do you know what you are doing? Do you know what it is you want to make me do?" I did not reply; but I wept and sobbed freely. He looked at me one moment, turned away, looked again, and turned away no more. He pressed me to his heart--he bent over me--he hushed my grief--he kissed away my tears. "Be it so," he said, desperately. "I have resisted your dangerous tenderness, I cannot resist your grief. Yes, I will break my word to the living, my duty to the dead. I will let it be said of Cornelius O'Reilly, to gratify his own desires he betrayed his trust--he meanly deceived the ignorant affection of the child he had reared. Let those alone dare judge me who, like me, have been tempted." "Then you do keep me!" I exclaimed, laughing and crying for joy. "Oh! yes, I do keep you," he replied, bending on me a look that seemed as if he would attract and gather my whole being into his--a look that, through all my blindness, startled me: but, as it lasted--for a moment only. "Yes, I keep you, Daisy Burns. You have asked to remain with me, and you shall. I will bind you to my home and to me by bonds neither you nor others shall dare to break. Again I say, let those alone who have passed through this fiery trial, and conquered, dare to judge me." I wondered at the repressed vehemence of his tone--at the defiance of his look--at the mingled trouble and scorn which I read in his countenance, usually so pleasant and good-humoured. I wondered, for I felt not thus, as if striving against my own wishes, and arguing with some hidden enemy. With my head still reclining on his shoulder, my hand in his, my mind, heart, and whole being conscious that we were not to be severed--I felt steeped in peace and serene happiness. My eyelids, heavy with recent tears, could almost have closed in slumber, so deep were now the calm and repose that had followed this storm of grief. Therefore I wondered--I could not but wonder--that if he, too, felt happy, there should be in his look and mien so few of the tokens of joy-- for, surely, joy never wore that flushed aspect and troubled glance. It shocked me to see that the meaning of his face was both guilty and resolute--that he looked like one who does a wrong thing, who knows it, but who will do that thing, come what will. He detected my uneasy look, and said, quickly: "Never mind, Daisy; I take on myself the deed and the sin. I care not for the world's opinion--I care not for its esteem." "The world, Cornelius! Why what can it say?" "Accuse me of selfishness. But I say it again: I care not." I laughed. He gave me a look of pain. "Do not laugh so," he said; "do not. I never yet heard that light, girlish laugh of yours, but it presaged some new irritating torment. What are you going to say now?" I saw his temper was chafed. I answered, soothingly: "What can I say, Cornelius, save that only your sensitive conscience could imagine the accusation of selfishness? Those who think you selfish must be crazed. Why here am I to keep, a girl of seventeen, with little or no money, and you not a rich man yet! Why any other man would think me a bore--a burden--and be glad enough to get rid of me. But you are so disinterested, so generous, that you cannot see that." I felt more than I saw the change which these words wrought on Cornelius. It was not that his look turned away; it was not that the arm which encircled me, released its hold; but it was as if a cold shadow suddenly stepped in between us: the life and warmth departed from his clasp; the light and meaning of his look retreated inwardly, to depths where mine could not follow. "You think me disinterested and generous," he said at length. "Do you mean that I do not care about you?" "No, Cornelius, I know better; but your affection is disinterested. Oh! my friend, my more than father, though you could not be my father, how often have I felt that other girls might well be jealous of me, if they but knew, as I know, what it is to have a friend, who is not bound to you by the ties of blood, yet in whom you can trust utterly; on whom you can rely without fear--as I do with you, Cornelius." "Do not," he replied, half pushing me away, and averting his face, "do not, Daisy. I dare not trust myself more than I would trust any other man; and, if I were you, I would not trust the man who could break his word--even for my sake." The words startled me; they woke a chord which, do what I would, I could not lull to sleep or silence. His look and tone as he said, "if I were you, I would not trust the man who could break his word--even for my sake," told me that the sting of his broken word and tarnished honour had already entered, and would never again leave his soul. Then I saw and felt my selfishness in not redeeming his pledge, in dragging him down from that just pride which he took in his unblemished life. I saw, I felt it all, and there rose within me one of those agonizing struggles without which we should not know the power of life; which are the new and bitter birth of our being. Kate and Cornelius O'Reilly had the deep religious feeling of their race. They made not religion the subject of frequent speech, but they bore its love in their hearts; above all, dear and sacred in their home, was held the name of their Redeemer and their God. His spirit, the spirit of self- denial and sacrifice, appeared in their lives, obscured by human weakness no doubt, but a living spirit still. How much had Kate done for her brother! How much had that brother done for me! What had I ever done for either? Nothing, nothing. And now that the hour was come, the hour of self-renonciation, I refused to bear my burden: I cast it on Cornelius. I knew how sacred he held a promise; how galling it would be for him to feel within himself the consciousness of violated truth. I knew it, and with this knowledge came the dread conviction that I was not free; that duty, honour, love, all enjoined the same fatal sacrifice. I said nothing; but Cornelius could feel me, for I felt myself, trembling from head to foot; there were dews on my brow, and a death-like chill had seized my heart; for a moment the inward struggle, "I cannot leave him,"--"thou must," seemed like what we imagine of the spirit torn from the flesh; as bitter and as brief. I submitted silently; but Cornelius required not speech to know it. For a moment he turned pale; for a moment his lips parted, as if to detain me; but he checked the impulse, and said not a word. I could not weep now; my grief was too bitter. I knew I was turning away from the warmth of my life, to enter a barren, sunless region; and I already felt upon me its desolateness and its gloom. The sacrifice was made; but in no humble, no resigned spirit. My whole being revolted against it with mute and powerless resentment. A captive in the subtle net of fate, I felt as if I could have struggled, even unto death, against those slender bonds which I did not dare to break. Cornelius watched me silently, and read on my face what was passing within me. "Daisy," he said, in a low, sad tone, "remember we are not men or women until our hearts are mastered, until our passions--ay, the best and purest--lie subdued." The words subdued my resentful mood to a sorrow more tender and holy. My burden was heavy, but was it more than I could bear? Daughter of the cross, should I dare to repine? I yielded; I tasted the bitter joy which those who bravely drain the cup of sacrifice find in its dregs--a strange sort of sweetness, to be felt, not described, and, alas! not to be envied. "Cornelius!" I replied, and my faltering voice grew more firm as I uttered his name--"Cornelius, I am willing. Your word shall be redeemed!" I was going to rise, but lightly resting his hand on my shoulder, he detained me. He stooped, and laid his lips on my brow. He did not say so, but I knew that this was his farewell kiss--the seal set on the love, care, and tenderness of years. The embrace lasted a moment only; the next he had risen. I rose too; I tied my bonnet-strings; he helped me to wrap my scarf around me: mechanically I picked up the flowers he had given me; then silently took his arm, and left the spot where I had decided my destiny. CHAPTER X. To reach Thornton House, we had to follow the windings of the stream for some time; cross a one-arched bridge that spanned it, then enter the solitary path that led to the old lodge and iron gate. We had not far to go, but my heart seemed to sink with every step I took; as I perceived the dark trees of the park rising before us, a sudden faintness seized me. I stopped short, and laying my head on the shoulder of Cornelius, I said: "Let me cry before you give me up, Cornelius; let me cry--or my heart will break." "I give you up!" he echoed, his eyes kindling, "no mortal man shall make me do that, Daisy. I shall redeem my word by taking you to your grandfather; but from the moment I leave Thornton House, my mind shall have but one thought, my will but one aim: to get you back." Struck with his defiant tone, I raised my head, and checking my tears, drew back to see him better. He met my look firmly. "It is fair play," he said, "so long as you are mine, I will not break my pledge by breathing a word to keep or secure you--even with you for the stakes, I would scorn to cheat--but once he fancies you his, I say you are mine, to win if I can. He may guard you as jealously as ever a Turk his Sultana--I shall still outwit and defy him--cost me what it will-- come what may--I will have you back again." A slight frown knit his brow; his brown eyes were bent on me, with a look both ardent and resolute; there was will and confidence in the smile which curled his lip, and power and daring in his mien. "Cornelius," I said a little startled, "how will you do it?" "Leave that to me, Daisy." "Then, if this is no parting after all," I observed rather perplexed, "why were you so grieved, and why have you let me grieve, Cornelius?" His face fell. He sighed profoundly. "Why?" he said, "why? because, alas! my own will cannot do all. Oh, Daisy! I dread you. I dread you deeply! What avails it to me that I may prevail against others, when with a word you can render me powerless?" He gave me a look of mingled anxiety and doubt. I wanted him to explain himself; but he would not go beyond saying that on me it all depended; an assertion which he repeated with a sigh. I believed him, and passed from grief to sudden gladness. "Then consider it settled," I said laughing joyously. "I am not leaving you, Cornelius. I am going on a week's visit or so to my good grandpapa. Tell Johnstone to send me only the little black trunk, but to put my work in it. I want to have it ready for Kate." We were standing in the path. Cornelius looked down, with a fond yet troubled smile, into my upraised face. "Go on!" he observed, "it sounds too delightful to be true. It is but a dream which the first rude touch of reality will dispel; and yet I like to delude myself and listen; go on!" I did go on, laughing at his credulity. "You must write to Kate," I observed, "and tell her that you are waiting for me. I shall not keep you long; just a week for form's sake." "God grant it," he replied fervently; and we resumed our walk. We found Thornton House as gloomy and neglected as ever. The court was overgrown with grass and weeds; the fountain was still a ruin; the ivy grew thick and dark on the walls, and the yews and cypresses behind only looked more sombre and melancholy for rising, as they did now, in the gay sunlight. When Cornelius knocked at the door, I seemed to expect that the little servant would again open and attempt to oppose our entrance; but, in her stead, a tall, straight housemaid appeared in the gloomy aperture; and, on hearing the name of Cornelius, showed us at once into the same room where, seven years before, we had been ushered by her predecessor. And there, too, surrounded by his books, his papers, maps, globes, stuffed animals, insects, geological specimens, shells, and scientific instruments, we found my grandfather, seated in his arm-chair and unchanged, save for a few more wrinkles. Mr. Thornton received us with abrupt courtesy. When the preliminary greetings had been exchanged, he gave me a sharp look, and startled me with the remark addressed to Cornelius-- "They are not at all alike." Implying, I supposed, that my former and my present self were two individuals. "Not at all," replied Cornelius, who had the faculty of entering at once into the peculiarities of those with whom he conversed. "Of course you are sure it is the right one," suggested Mr. Thornton. "Quite sure." "She has grown," was the next observation of my grandfather; as if the fact astonished him. Cornelius did not answer. My heart sank to see him rise; he laid his hand on my arm, and said gravely-- "Sir, four years ago, I pledged my word that whenever you wished for this young girl, you should have her. Here she is. I have kept my word." "And mean to keep it still?" hinted Mr. Thornton, darting a quick and piercing look from me to him. Cornelius reddened, and replied shortly-- "It is kept, Sir." "And the future may shift for itself. Humph! Well, I suppose you are glad enough to be rid of her! I remember you found her in the way four years ago. So, fancying she would still be more inconvenient as she grew up, I thought I would relieve you from her altogether." He spoke with ironical politeness. Cornelius gave him a defiant look-- which Mr. Thornton received with evident amusement--then he turned to me, glanced at me significantly, pressed my hand, bade me a quiet adieu, bowed haughtily to my grandfather, and was gone. I felt confident that this parting was but to lead to a pleasanter reunion, and yet life is so uncertain--its unhappy chances so often outweigh the more fortunate, that I grew sad, spite of all my confident hopes. "Humph!" said Mr. Thornton, looking at me from under his shaggy eyebrows. "Don't you want to go up to your room?" he added, abruptly. "I should like it," I replied, not much pleased with his manner. He rang. A tall, straight housemaid appeared. "Marks!" said Mr. Thornton, briefly. "Please, Sir!" "Mrs. Marks, you fool! Well, why do you stare?" "I want to know what about Mrs. Marks, Sir." "Tell her to come, of course." The girl never moved. He asked, impatiently: "What are you waiting for, creature?" "Please, Sir, Mrs. Marks will not come." "She will not come!" "No, Sir; she has just had her luncheon. Mrs. Marks never stirs after her luncheon." She spoke confidently. Mr. Thornton reclined back in his chair, uttered an amazed "Ah!" but, recovering himself, he said, with great suavity: "Charlotte, be so good as to give my compliments to Mrs. Marks, and say that I shall feel indebted to her if she will favour me with her company for a few minutes, now," he added, with some stress. Charlotte shook her head sceptically; but she obeyed, and proved more successful than she had anticipated, for, ere long, the door again opened, and admitted Mrs. Marks. In dress and appearance, she looked exactly the same as seven years before. "Mrs. Marks," said Mr. Thornton, with great politeness, "will you have the kindness to show Miss Burns, my grand-daughter, to her room?" Mrs. Marks gave me a look of her cold, fishy eye, and said, "Yes, Sir," in a tone of ice. I saw she remembered me with no pleasant feelings. I followed her out of the study, determined that both she and my grandfather should learn I was no longer a child. She took me to a room on the first floor, large, but plainly furnished, and informed me "this was my apartment." "Thank you," I replied, quietly; "but it is too gloomy. I prefer the room I had formerly." Mrs. Marks did not understand. Mrs. Marks was in a state of obliviousness concerning all that had passed before this day. Mrs. Marks knew Miss Burns, the grand-daughter of Mr. Thornton; of the obstinate little girl whom she had called Burns, Mrs. Marks had no recollection, nor of anything concerning her. Without heeding this, I described to her so minutely the locality of my old apartment, that she could not feign ignorance; but when, in answer to her objection that it was "quite empty," I civilly requested her to cause the furniture around me to be removed to it as soon as possible, Mrs. Marks looked figuratively knocked down. I left her in that prostrate condition, to go down and speak to my grandfather. I could not understand why he had so suddenly claimed me, and what he wanted with me. He did not look as if he liked me a bit better than formerly; certainly not as if inclined to make me "the charm of his home, and the delight of his heart and eyes." "There is something in it," I thought. "Cornelius may fancy that every body is as fond of me as he is, and look for no other motive; but I am sure there is, and I must find it out, if it were only to help him in his mysterious design." I knocked at the door of the study, and, receiving no answer, opened it and looked in. My grandfather never raised his eyes from his book. Unwilling to disturb him, I entered quietly, and, without speaking, sat down by the window. It was a broad, arched casement, partly veiled with ivy hanging down from above, and facing a magnificent avenue of beech trees that stretched far on into the park. They communicated some of their solemn gloom to the apartment; and the contrast of that green woodland aspect with the dusty tomes and air of venerable learning within; of that solitary look out, and of the quiet, white-headed figure bending so intently over its open volume, struck me. "There is a pretty picture for Cornelius," I thought. "I must bear every detail of it in my mind's eye to tell him when we meet." The contrast recalled me to the object of my presence in my grandfather's apartment. I coughed gently; Mr. Thornton started, looked up, and said, "Ah!" with evident astonishment. I looked at him quietly. "Well!" he ejaculated. "Yes," I replied. "Yes what?" he asked, impatiently. I thought I might have asked, "Well what?" with as much reason; but I merely said: "Yes, Sir, I am here." "What for?" "To speak to you, if you please." "What about?" "Is there any lady in the house besides myself?" "No." "Is there to be?" "No." "Am I to keep house?" "Mrs. Marks is my housekeeper." "Then what am I to do?" "Nothing." This was not encouraging; but I persisted. "Then there is nothing for me to do?" "Nothing." "Are you quite sure?" I asked, earnestly. He gave me a surprised look. I continued: "Are you quite sure I cannot be of any use to you, Sir?" "Of none," was his somewhat contemptuous reply. "Well then," I rejoined, with great alacrity, "as I am not to keep house, not to do anything, don't you think, Sir, you had better send me back to Mr. and Miss O'Reilly? You know," I added, impressively, "that I must be of some expense to you here, whereas with them, I should cost you nothing at all; and, though it was very kind of you to think of me, I assure you they did not find me in the way." My grandfather drew in a long breath, and, folding his arms, looked at me from head to foot. "So you are not an hour here, and you already want to be off," he said. "But since you don't want me--" I remonstrated. "I beg your pardon--I do want you," he replied, with ironical politeness; "and the proof I do want you, is, that I have taken the trouble of procuring you, and that I mean to keep you." He spoke as if I were a piece of furniture. I felt very indignant, and reddening, asked: "May I know, Sir, what you want me for?" "No," was the laconic and decisive reply. "Am I to stay here whether I like or not?" "Precisely." "I shall appeal to Mr. O'Reilly," I exclaimed indignantly. "The law does not recognise Mr. O'Reilly," composedly answered Mr. Thornton; "he is nothing to you, not even your guardian. I am your grandfather; and the law," he added, giving me an emphatic look, "recognizes me and my power until you are of age." He seemed to think this sufficient, and again bent over his book. His last words had sunk on my heart like lead. Was it true? could it be true? Did the law give so much power to Mr. Thornton? and, provided he did not ill-use me, would it make me for four years the captive of his pleasure? Could Cornelius really deliver me from this bondage, or, as I began to fear, had he deceived himself, and deceived me? I repented having spoken so openly to Mr. Thornton: and hoping to repair this error, and conciliate him by a more submissive behaviour, I lingered in the study, and took up one of the dusty old volumes scattered everywhere around me. It was a Latin work, but an English treatise on mineralogy had been bound up with it; and this I began reading, or rather I attempted to read. My eyes ever kept wandering from the page down the avenue before me. From its direction, I was sure it led to that quiet stream by which Cornelius and I had sat that same day. In thought I leave the room, hurry down the avenue; the stream is crossed. I follow silent lanes, and traverse lonely fields; a quiet path brings me to Rock Cottage; the garden gate is open; the door stands ajar; I look in; Cornelius is sitting with his back turned to me; I utter his name; he looks round. The sound of the key turning in the lock, woke me from my happy dream. I looked up; Mr. Thornton's chair was vacant; I ran to the door; it resisted my efforts; my grandfather, forgetting, I suppose, my presence, had locked me in. I looked for means of egress, and saw none but the window. I remained patient for about a quarter of an hour; but perceiving that Mr. Thornton did not return, and, from the fact of being shut in, feeling of course the most eager desire to get out, I opened the window, and stepping on the sill, prepared to jump down; it was higher from the ground than I had expected; I looked and hesitated a little. "Allow me to assist you," said a very pleasant voice. I looked round, and saw standing by the window a handsome, gentlemanly man of thirty-five or thereabouts. He had light brown hair, a delicate moustache of the same hue, very fine blue eyes, and a classical profile. As he stood before me, politely offering me his hand to assist my descent, yet scarcely able to repress a smile at my predicament, I fancied I recognized in him the "young Mr. Thornton" I had formerly mistaken for Cornelius. I could not retreat; it would have looked foolish to refuse; so I accepted his assistance, and, as I alighted, said explanatorily: "My grandfather, I mean Mr. Thornton, had forgotten I was there, and locked me in." "Miss Burns!" he said smiling, "I guessed as much." I gave him a look implying, "Who are you?" "Your cousin Edward Thornton," he answered bowing. "I thought so;" I replied gravely, "I remember letting you in by the side-door." "And I have been so fortunate as to help to let you out through the window." I laughed at the turn our discourse was taking. There was a well-bred ease in his manner, sufficient of itself to banish all shyness. "My dilemma," he said quietly, "is very different from yours, Miss Burns; I am in the same unfortunate position, in which you found me seven years ago: I cannot get in. I have tried three doors--in vain." "Here is a fourth," I replied pointing to a low side-door. He knocked against it with his cane, but received no reply. "Decidedly," gravely observed Edward Thornton, "the place is enchanted. As old Spenser would say: 'There reigns a solemn silence over all; Nor voice is heard--'" Here he broke down in the quotation; I ventured to suggest the rest: "--nor wight is seen in bower or hall." "Thank you," he said, with a gracious inclination of his handsome head. "You like Spenser?" he added, resuming the task of tapping against the door with the end of his elegant cane. "Yes," I answered, "and you?" He turned round to give me a surprised look of his fine blue eyes, but he quietly replied: "Yes, I admire Spenser very much." He was at the door again, and this time he condescended to apply to it the heel of a very handsome, aristocratic foot, when a thin, high voice behind us observed: "This way, Edward; I have found means of entering, but I never saw a more barbarous place, never." We both looked round; a lady of middle age, very slender, and attired in pale blue bar?ge, a white lace cloak and a tulle bonnet, over which she balanced a delicate white parasol, was advancing towards us with mincing steps. I fancied I recognised Mrs. Brand, and I was not mistaken. "Have you found no one?" asked her brother. "I have found an idiotic house-maid, and an old goblin housekeeper, from neither of whom could I extract anything, save that Mr. Thornton never so much as hinted we were coming; but that, as our carriage entered the avenue, he was seen to rush from the study, and vanish down the park. Gracious, very!" "Characteristic," said Edward Thornton, smiling with languid grace. "My dear Edward," solemnly observed his sister, "are you aware that there are no beds ready, or indeed, in existence, and that Marks--I believe that is her name--declares there is not a pound of meat in the house." Edward Thornton's handsome face lengthened visibly. "Really," he said, "really!" "I do not mind it," continued Mrs. Brand; "but I am ashamed at the slur cast on our national hospitality. It is one of those things which, if related to me, I should have dismissed with the reply: 'Absurd--not English--absurd!' I am now compelled to acknowledge it as a melancholy fact, from which I cannot help drawing certain conclusions." "Perhaps Miss Burns can enlighten us concerning the domestic arrangements of our eccentric relative," observed Mr. Thornton, turning to me. "I have not been two hours in the house," I replied, smiling. "Miss Burns!" exclaimed Mrs. Brand, with a start. "Really, Edward, I am surprised you did not mention it sooner. You know how I have longed to see our dear young cousin." She tripped up to me as she spoke, and gave my hand a fervent squeeze. Then looking at me through a gold eye-glass: "My dear child," she said, "how well you look--not at all altered. Were I not so short-sighted, I should have known you anywhere--would not you, Edward?" "No," he replied, quietly; "I find Miss Burns much altered; and if I recognised her, it was in spite of the change seven years have worked." "Ah! very true," sighed Mrs. Brand. "Years pass, and the world goes on with all its vanities. My dear girl, have you really no idea of what we are to do for beds and a dinner?" The moral sentiment had been uttered with slow abstraction, but the question relating to the things of the flesh, came out quite briskly. I regretted that I could give Mrs. Brand no information, but repeated my previous statement. "It is a _guet-apens_," she feelingly observed; "a most un-English, uncivilised mode of proceeding--worse than primitive--quite savage. Edward, what do you advise?" "Eggs." "Eggs!" "Yes, I have always laboured under the impression that eggs were the resource of travellers in distress." "When they could get them, I suppose," rather sharply replied his sister. "Yes," he observed, gently tapping his foot with the extremity of his cane. "I should say this was an indispensable condition." "I have sent Brooks to a place called Leigh," resumed Mrs. Brand, "but I have no hopes; for Marks says that this not being market-day, there is no chance of our getting anything." "Excepting visitors," said Mr. Thornton as a sound of carriage wheels was heard in the neighbouring avenue. We stood near the wicket-door, which had so often been my post of observation. A travelling-carriage was coming up the broad avenue. It stopped before the house, and a lady alighted. Affection rendered Mrs. Brand sharp-sighted, for without even using her eye-glass, she exclaimed: "Edith!" and biting her lip, looked uneasily at her brother. "Mrs. Langton!" he said raising his eye-brow, and smoothing his delicate moustache, "why I think it is at least five years since I saw her climbing the Jung-Frau with her gouty old husband. Is he not dead, Bertha?" Bertha did not answer; she had hastened away to her friend. They met most affectionately, and entered the house kissing. "This is quite a gathering of cousins," observed Edward Thornton smiling with some irony, "I suppose you know Mrs. Langton?" "I remember her as Miss Grainger." He silently offered me his arm, I accepted it, and we entered Thornton House. In an old wainscotted parlour, we found the two ladies in close proximity and conversation. The beautiful Edith seemed to me more beautiful than ever; her weeds became her charmingly, and when she rose, and greeted me with a pleasant smile, I still thought her the loveliest creature I had ever looked at. A faint blush mantled her cheek, as she saw Mr. Thornton; he was polite and unmoved. The cloth was laid; Mrs. Brand mournfully observed that the dinner not being more remarkable for quantity than for quality--it was the servants' dinner, she said, but did not say how they were to manage--it would be as prudent not to delay the meal. It consisted of cold beef, hot potatoes, home-brewed ale and musty cheese. Mr. Edward Thornton had the good breeding to look as unconscious of the sorry fare before him, as if he had venison on his plate and claret in his glass. Mrs. Brand sighed and lamented the whole time. Mrs. Langton would have been a woman after Byron's own heart, for she scarcely touched a morsel, and indeed looked much too lovely to eat or do anything but be beautiful, which she certainly did to perfection. As soon as politeness permitted, she retired to a deep bow-window that looked forth into the park; Mr. Thornton soon made his way to her chair, and from where I sat by Mrs. Brand, I could hear fragments of their conversation. He believed he had had the pleasure of seeing her in Switzerland. Had he really seen her? she asked carelessly; she thought one could see nothing but the mountains and precipices in that picturesque country. Did she not like it? inquired Mr. Thornton. Oh, yes; that was to say no; and yet she thought she rather liked it, as much as one could like anything of course. Of course, assented Mr. Thornton with some emphasis. She reddened, rose and came and sat by Mrs. Brand, who immediately began kissing her; whilst her brother, addressing me in his easy polite way, alluded to the beauty of the evening, and proposed a walk over the grounds. My lips parted to decline, but on second thought I consented. "As I was telling you, dear," said Mrs. Langton, but on seeing me take the arm of my cousin, she hesitated slightly. "As you were telling me, dear," echoed Mrs. Brand, giving the hand of her friend a gentle squeeze, and watching her brother and me with the corner of her eye. "Yes, I was telling you," resumed Mrs. Langton. What she was telling her dear Bertha. I know not, for at that precise moment, Mr. Thornton and I left the room. He was my cousin and old enough to be my father; I did not think there could he any impropriety in walking out with him, and, secure on this head, I allowed myself to be entertained by his pleasant discourse, and watched for an opportunity of introducing the questions I wished him to answer. That opportunity not coming, I was obliged to enter on the subject somewhat abruptly. "What a beautiful, rosy cloud," thoughtfully observed my companion. "Mr. Thornton," I said very earnestly, "I am afraid you are going to think me very impertinent." Mr. Thornton thus summoned from his cloud, looked as astonished as a man of the world can look, but he promptly recovered, and of course protested against anything of the sort. "Oh! but I mean it," I resumed; "and yet I cannot help it, you know; that is what makes it so provoking." Mr. Thornton smiled, and felt convinced that I alarmed myself unnecessarily. "No, I assure you I do not; and, to prove it, here it is. What sort of a man is Mr. Thornton?" "A very learned man." "Ah! but I mean in temper." "Eccentric." "And wilful," I suggested. "He is very firm." "I remember hearing formerly that he was very litigious; is it true!" "Why yes," carelessly replied my cousin; "he generally has one or two little law matters going on. He is tenacious of his rights, and never allows them to be infringed. He would spend hundreds sooner than be wronged of a shilling. How do you like this place?" I had not heeded where he was taking me; looking up I perceived that we had reached a wild-looking part of the grounds, and stood by a quiet and solitary well. Between the sombre and massive trees that shed their solemn gloom over it, I caught a distant glimpse of the narrow stream by which Cornelius and I had sat that same day, and of which the glancing waters were now reddened by the setting sun. The well was built against a rise of ground; it was rude, ancient, defaced by time, and partly veiled by moss, and dark creeping plants; the water came out clear and bright from beneath the gloom of its low arch, to fall into a stone basin, then flow away hidden among the high ferns that grew around, and betrayed in its course, only by its low murmur. "It is a wishing-well; will you try its virtues?" said my cousin, pointing with a smile to the iron bowl, hanging from a rusty chain by the low arch. "Did you ever put them to the test, Sir?" I asked, wishfully. "As a boy I did; and found the legend--a legend." "Then I fear it is useless for me to try," I replied, sighing. We turned away from the spot, walked a little longer, then went in. What sort of an evening my three cousins spent together, I know not. I retired early, and went up, sad and disheartened, to that room whence I now feared it passed the power of Cornelius to deliver me. I sat down, and looked around me; vivid images of the past rose with every glance. I went to the window by which I had so often watched for his coming; and looking down on the dark park below, I thought, with an aching heart, of the lonely evening he was spending at Rock Cottage. My own heart was full. I could not bear not to be with him; but every time, even in thought, I imagined our reunion, the dread spectre of the law seemed to rise between us. Cornelius, exposed to trouble, persecution, and loss on my account-- it was not to be thought of. "I must try conciliation," I thought; "rough as he is, Mr. Thornton may be smoothed down. If that will not do, I shall make myself so disagreeable that he will be glad to get rid of me." And with a thought and prayer for the absent one, I fell asleep at a late hour. Our breakfast was a great improvement on the dinner of the preceding day; but this fact failed to conciliate Mrs. Brand, whom I found alone in the parlour. Scarcely giving herself time to return my good-morning, she said, eagerly: "My dear, would you believe it! They actually had ducks! yes, ducks!" she repeated with indignant emphasis; "whilst _we_ dined on cold beef, _they_ had ducks! Now, it is a mere trifle--a matter of no consequence; but it nevertheless happens that _I_ am particularly fond of ducks." "Ducks!" I echoed, not exactly understanding her meaning. "Yes, my dear, _they_, Marks, the servants in short, had ducks for _their_ dinner; I found it out this morning by the merest chance." Mrs. Langton here entered the room, looking as fresh and lovely as the morning. She gave her dear Bertha a kiss, which the other returned, saying breathlessly: "Edith, they had ducks, the cold beef was good enough for us; they had ducks." Edith looked surprised, and, on hearing the story, smiled and said: "Ah!" with charming grace, "and that she fancied she rather liked ducks, but was not quite sure." She sat down in the deep embrasure of the window, and looked out at the park with an abstraction that was not disturbed by the sound of the opening door, and the appearance of Edward Thornton. He informed us that Mr. Thornton was laid up with a rheumatic attack. "Distressing!" abstractedly said Mrs. Brand. "I suppose you know they had ducks?" And as we sat down to breakfast, she recapitulated her wrongs. Mr. Thornton heard her with perfect unconcern, and said "really," then spoke to me of the beauty of the morning, and of Mr. Thornton's rheumatism. "You will be sorry to learn," he said, gently breaking the shell of an egg, "that our excellent relative is completely laid up; I found him in his study lying on a couch, unable to stir, and in acute pain." I was sorry in one sense, and glad in another; I had a vague hope that pain might subdue my obdurate grandpapa, and as soon as breakfast was over, I hastened to his study; wishing to take him by surprise, I ventured to enter without knocking. The surprise was mine. Mr. Thornton, whom I had expected to find groaning on his couch, was standing on the top of a high flight of steps, reaching down heavy quartos. On hearing the door open, he turned round sharply, and looked at me scowling. I rather enjoyed his predicament and said quietly: "I am glad you are better, Sir." He growled an inaudible reply, and came down, hobbling and groaning with every step he took, and darting mistrustful looks at me. I offered him the aid of my shoulder, which he accepted, leaning on me as heavily as he could. I helped him to return to his couch, then quietly sat down facing him. He knew he was at my mercy, and did not tell me to go; but he surlily rejected my proffered services; but I persisted. "I can look for any book for you, Sir," I said. "Look, then," was his ungracious reply. "What book is it, Sir?" "Begin with the first volume on the second shelf." I obeyed, and brought him a heavy tome, which he just looked at, then threw away, briefly saying: "Another." Another I brought him, with the same result; a third, a fourth, and so on throughout the whole shelf. "Are you not tired?" he asked with smooth irony. "Oh, no," I replied, smiling, "shall I begin another shelf?" "No, you need not," he answered, giving it up, "it is an old treatise on mineralogy that has long been lost." I turned to the window; the book I had been reading on the preceding day still lay there open; I silently handed it to my grandfather, who gave it and then me a look of profound surprise, followed by a remarkable smoothing down of mien and accent. "How did you find it?" he asked, looking at it with evident satisfaction. "By chance, Sir." "By chance! Oh! I have another thing missing. Ray's 'Chaos and Creation,' perhaps you could find that too, eh?" He looked at me thoughtfully. Anxious to conciliate him, I replied, eagerly: "Perhaps I might, Sir." "Humph! Can you write? I mean write a round hand, not the abominable slant of most school-girls?" "Yes, Sir: my handwriting is remarkably round." "Transcribe this." He pushed towards me a sheet of hieroglyphics, which I turned over with a dismay that made him chuckle. Unwilling to give him an advantage over me, I sat down and at once entered on my task; the decyphering was the worst part of the business; but after working hard for several hours, I accomplished it to his satisfaction and to mine. 1 thought to rest; but Mr. Thornton was differently inclined. "Can you read?" he asked, "I mean read as you talk, without drawl or singing?" I replied I hoped I could. He said we should see, and handed me the mineralogical treatise. For two hours I read without stopping. At length he said that was enough. I felt quite faint and exhausted, and asked if I could leave him. He assented, adding-- "Mind you keep a look-out for 'Chaos and Creation!'" I promised to do so, and left him much relieved. The day was hot; the air of the close, dusty, old study felt stifling. I went out into the garden at the back of the house, and sat down in the arbour. I had not been there five minutes before I was joined by my cousin, Edward Thornton. He was beginning to make himself very pleasant and agreeable, when Mrs. Langton appeared stepping down daintily from beneath the porch, like a lady in a picture. She had discarded her widow's cap; the warm sunlight gave a brown tint to her jet black hair, and she looked fresh and fair as the rose which she held in one hand, whilst the other slightly raised her sweeping skirt. Mr. Thornton rose and resigned to her his place by me, which she accepted with a gracious smile. He stood before us, talking in his easy, agreeable way; I looked and listened, remembering that in this very spot, seven years before, they had met and parted. They, too, remembered it; for ere long I had the pleasure of finding that I was made the medium of their well-bred sneers. Edward Thornton addressed the chief portion of his discourse to me, and put several unimportant questions, each, more or less, arrows that glanced at Mrs. Langton. "Is it not about seven years ago, that I saw you here?" he observed carelessly. "Yes, Sir, exactly seven years." "It seems a long time, does it not?" he added, addressing Mrs. Langton, as if to remind her that seven years had passed over her beauty. "Very!" she replied, smelling her rose, and looking like one for whom time does not exist. "I remember you quite well," Edward continued, addressing me, "a small fair child, with bright golden hair, which has now deepened into brown." "Do you?" I replied, amused by this little bit of fiction, to which Mrs. Langton listened, smiling at the slight put on her glossy tresses, dark as the raven's wing. "Oh! yes," he continued, "Bertha and I used to call you the little white rose. Your name is Rose, is it not?" "No, my name is Daisy; that is to say, Margaret, but at home I am always called Daisy." "The name of the sweetest wild flower," he replied, smiling; "there may be less beauty about it," he continued, "than about the rose, but then it has a grace and a freshness quite its own." The Rose looked scornful. Not relishing being thus made the instrument of Mr. Edward Thornton's pique, I rose, and spite of his entreaties, left the arbour. Common politeness would not allow him to desert Mrs. Langton; how they got on together is more than I know. They were studiously polite at dinner. When I went up to my room that same evening, I perceived that the little black trunk had arrived. I opened it eagerly, but searched in vain for a letter. A fact, however, struck me. It contained the portfolio of Italian drawings placed there by another hand than mine. I turned them over with a vague hope. I found nothing but a stray scrap of paper, which I took to the light. It was one of those rude and hasty sketches with which artists write down passing ideas: yet, imperfect as it was, I recognised at a glance the well I had so recently seen and visited. A female figure, in which I knew myself, sat by it with her hand shading her eyes, as if watching for something or some one; the disk of the sun, half sunk behind the far horizon and sending forth low spreading rays, indicated the close of day. Evidently Cornelius knew this place and wished me to meet him there at sunset. When? Most probably on the following day. My heart leaped with joy at the thought of seeing him so soon, and with trust and hope on perceiving how faithfully he kept his promise. CHAPTER XI. My first act the next morning was to go and see my grandfather. He received me with a sufficiently cordial growl, and confident, I suppose, of the good understanding between us, no longer kept up the pretence of rheumatic pains in my presence. I again read and transcribed for several hours, at the end of which Mr. Thornton was pleased to say--"I might be off if I liked;" and reminded me not to forget "that Chaos and Creation--" Wishing to sound him still further, I replied-- "Oh! no. I hope to find it before I go." "Eh?" he sharply said. "Before I go with Mr. O'Reilly," I resumed, "he means to stay another week or ten days here." "Who said you were to go with him?" asked Mr. Thornton. "No one. But surely, Sir, you will not care to keep an insignificant girl like me?" He did not answer; I continued. "It would be a great deal better to go with him, than to make him come back and fetch me." "I'll tell you what," interrupted Mr. Thornton, knitting his black brows and looking irate: "if that Irishman, who sent the little girl to school, and who gives the young girl such queer looks, attempts to carry you off, he'll rue it as long as he lives. I'll teach him," he added, impressively, "the meaning of the word 'abduction.' See 9th of George IV." "Abduction. Sir," I said, reddening, "means carrying off by force." "And the law construes fraud into force," coolly answered Mr. Thornton. "See 9th of George IV." I was much perturbed by this threat. Mr. Thornton did not appear to see or notice it, and dismissed me with another hint about "Chaos and Creation." After dinner--our housekeeping was now much improved and, indeed, quite stylish--Mr. Edward Thornton and Mrs. Langton vanished, and I remained with Mrs. Brand, who entertained me, for some time, with the many virtues of her brother. "A most excellent brother he had ever been to her; and since he had come into the Wyndham property, she could say that Poplar Lodge had been as much her home as his--a fact which proved there was nothing like the ties of blood, for Mr. Brand, she was very sorry to say, had not behaved at all delicately; and, satisfied with leaving her a few paltry hundreds a-year, had actually bequeathed to his daughter that delightful Holywell Lodge--a most exquisite place--to which he well knew that she had a particular fancy, not because it was beautiful--she was essentially a person of simple, unsophisticated tastes--but her heart was bound to Holywell. She had spent her honeymoon there, and she was astonished that had not proved a consideration with Mr. Brand." We sat by the window. The trunks of the trees in the park shone warm and red with the light of the setting sun. I wanted to be off, and said carelessly: "What a delightful walk Mrs. Langton and Mr. Thornton are now having!" Mrs. Brand started. "My dear," she said, quickly, "you do not mean--Edith is in her own room surely." "I saw her and Mr. Thornton disappearing behind that clamp of trees." "Imprudent!" exclaimed Mrs. Brand, looking fidgetty. "She takes cold so easy. I must really go after her." She rose, left the room, and hurried off, at once, in the direction I had pointed out. I waited awhile, then slipped out. My way lay exactly opposite to hers. I kept within the shelter of the trees. In a few minutes, I had reached the well; but, to my dismay, I perceived standing by it, and talking quietly together, the objects of Mrs. Brand's search. They stood with their backs turned to me. I sank down, at once, in the high ferns, which closed over me. I knelt stooping, and every now and then cautiously raised my head to look. They lingered awhile longer, then left. When they were out of sight, I sat up, shaking from my loosened hair the dried fern and withered leaves with which it had got entangled. Startled by a low sound near me, I looked round quickly. A few paces from me, the ferns began to move, then a man's arm divided them, and, in the opening appeared the handsome and laughing face of Cornelius. He half sat up, leaning on one elbow, and looked at me, smiling. "Are they gone?" he whispered. I gave a hasty glance around. The sun had nearly set. In its warm and mellow glow, the park looked silent and lonely. Over all things already brooded the stillness of evening. "It's all right," I said, jumping up. "Cornelius, you are tall, and could be seen a good distance, so please to be quiet." "You don't mean to say that I am to remain here on my back?" he asked, indignantly. "I mean that, if you get up, I shall take flight." He fumed and fretted, but I was obdurate. On his back I made him lie, and there I kept him. When he became restless, I threatened to leave him. He submitted, muttering, "Absurd--ridiculous!" and, turning away his flushed and vexed face, he would not speak. I knelt down by him, and, smoothing his hair, asked if he did not feel comfortable, and what more he wanted. At first, I got no answer, but I stroked him into good humour, for, all at once, he snatched my hand, and pressing it tenderly to his lips, informed me he was a savage, and I an angel. I laughed, and said: "That explains what Mr. Thornton meant by your queer looks. I have always heard that the eye of a savage has something quite peculiar." "Queer looks!" echoed Cornelius, reddening; "the queerness is in his eyes, Daisy. But let him have his say. I have taken no vow; but I am determined--" "Cornelius, if you will toss in that extraordinary fashion, I must go." He groaned, but became once more quiet. "Since you are so fidgetty," I said, "why did you not come to see me at Thornton House?" "Why, Daisy," he replied, rolling a stray lock of my hair round his finger, "because I am a burglar, and not a swindler. I may rob a man of his jewel, but I will not cheat him out of it." "Abduction and 9th George IV," rushed into my head; but I carelessly said:-- "So I am to be stolen property." He laughed, and did not contradict it. "But how will you manage?" I asked. "It is not settled yet?" he replied evasively; "but you shall know all the next time we meet here." "Then why this meeting of to-day, Cornelius?--why this useless danger?" "Danger!--there is none for me; and if there were, I would meet and brave it willingly for this sight of your face. Now do not look so like a shy fawn, though it becomes you charmingly. It was quite pretty to watch you hidden in the ferns. Every now and then you raised your fair head like a young Nereid, then dipped it again into that green sea, where I now lie flat like a dead fish; and yet, Daisy, how pleasant it is to be here with you!" "How do you know this place?" "I sketched it years ago on one of my visits to your father; little thinking then that the sulky little girl, who would not kiss me, would one day break every tie for my sake." All doubt that I might not enter into his plans, or that I could refuse to accompany him when the moment came, seemed as if by magic to have left Cornelius. No longer did he, or perhaps could he, anticipate the chance of a refusal. Yet, now, that I saw more clearly to what consequences his scheme might lead, I felt I loved him far too much to consent. But he spoke with so much confidence and hope, that I dreaded undeceiving him. I could rule him in little things; but when his passions were roused--I had tested it in the case of William Murray--he was my master. His vehement feelings swayed me, as a strong wind bows weak reeds before its breath. If, in the burst of anger and grief that would assuredly follow the announcement of my resolve not to agree to his plans, Cornelius insisted on making me accompany him at once, I knew my own weakness well enough to guess that I could not remain behind. So kneeling by him, and looking down somewhat sadly at his triumphant face, I said nothing, but indulged him in his flights of fancy. The warm glow of day had not yet left earth; the moon had risen, but her light was pale and indistinct, as it is in the first hours of evening; it shone with a mild and grey radiance over that quiet spot, fell softly on the trees that sheltered it, and just touched the stone arch of the well, whose waters flowed with a low ripple, then spread away vaguely over the wide park, dotted with dark clumps of trees. The evening was unusually mild and balmy. I felt it both soothing and delightful to be alone with Cornelius at this lonely hour, and in this solitary spot; but most saddening to think we no longer owned the shelter of the same roof, and were no longer to live within the holy circle of the same home. At length, I spoke of going. He detained me as long as he could, and released me with a promise of meeting him there again two days hence. If I could not come, a letter hidden under a stone that lay half buried in the grass, was to tell him so. As we parted, he said, fondly:-- "A few days more, Daisy, and there shall be no more meetings, nor partings either." I did not dare to reply, but turning abruptly from him, I ran away through the high grass, without once looking behind. I had not to read or transcribe on the following day, the best part of which I spent with Mrs. Brand. She spoke a good deal of Mr. Thornton, and dropped mysterious hints, wholly lost on my ignorance; but she assured me she was not at all offended with my reserve, which was quite _de bon go?t_, and decidedly English. I was amused at the idea that I should be accused of reserve for not understanding her sphinx-like mode of speech; I also thought that, for a lady who seemed fond of everything English, a less frequent use of French words, to which her own language offered equivalents, would have been more consistent. But this was one of the little contradictions in which, as I afterwards found, Mrs. Brand indulged. She was very national, but an English dressmaker would have thrown her into fits; English manufactures were irritating to her nerves, and English cooking would have been the death of her. She also once informed me, that but for her dear Edward, her health would compel her to reside on the Continent, in which case, England would, I fear, have been deprived of Mrs. Brand altogether, and the intercourse between them would have been limited to the transmission and receipt of the English "paltry hundreds" which Mr. Brand had bequeathed to his affectionate spouse. That Mrs. Brand was quite a martyr to sisterly affection, was indeed an indubitable fact, for in the course of the morning, she observed to me: "My dear, people may talk about plantations and negro slavery, and factory girls; but I assure you, that the fashionable world is a wide plantation, and that we, the slaves who work it, are worked to death. I came here for a little peace, and behold, I received I know not how many invitations yesterday, and I must pay I know not how many visits to-day. Oh! my dear; if it were not for Edward, I would break my chains and fly." Borne up, however, by the thought of Edward, the slave of the world managed to drag her chain pretty well, and that same afternoon was even equal to the exertion of stepping into her carriage for the purpose of going to work her plantation. Mrs. Langton accompanied her; Edward Thornton remained at home. He had stretched his elegant person in an old- fashioned arm-chair, where he read the newspaper, and looked as politely _ennuy?_ as possible. I sat by the window, looking at the Italian drawings of Cornelius. I had brought them down on the express wish of Mrs. Brand, who, giving them a careless look, had said "how pretty," and thought no more about them. When she left, however, she envied me with a sigh my privilege of being able to stay at home, and congratulated me on my indifference to worldly pleasures. As the door closed on her, Mr. Edward Thornton laid down his newspaper, to say negligently: "And so, Miss Burns, you really don't care for the world! What a little hermitess!" "Do you care about it, Sir?" "I? no; but I'm tired of it." I smiled and shook my head incredulously. I rather liked my cousin; but I could not help thinking that his character of an old man of the world was more put on than real. "You don't believe it?" he said. "No," was my frank reply. "Now, Miss Burns, what should I care for?" "Politics?" "I am sick of them. Standing for a certain borough, and being pelted with eggs and apples, gave me a surfeit." "Pleasure?" "It is too hard work for me." "Money?" "I have got it, and therefore do not care for it." "Horses?" "Over years ago." "Years ago!" I thought, "and you have not come into the Wyndham property more than a year, cousin. Travelling?" I suggested aloud. "Over too. Do you confess yourself mistaken, and acknowledge that I am tired of the world?" "No, Sir!" "No!" "No; you read the newspaper." My cousin opened his fine blue eyes, and looked amused, and seemed to expect more; but I looked at my drawings, and remained mute; he raised his head from the back of the high arm-chair on which it was cushioned. I took no notice of this; he coughed; I never looked up. He took his paper, laid it down, took it up again, and at length feeling either piqued or inquisitive, rose and came round to the back of my chair. I allowed him to stand there, and look over my shoulder, as long as he pleased. "I wonder where Bertha got these!" he said at length in a tone of surprise. "They are mine," I replied quietly, "Mr. O'Reilly gave them to me." "Are they by him?" I assented with some pride. My cousin looked astonished, and pronounced the sketches masterly. He sat down by my side, and looked over the contents of the portfolio; his remarks showed me that he was an excellent judge. We looked slowly; and had not done, when Mrs. Brand and Mrs. Langton returned from their laborious duties. "Have you seen these, Bertha?" said Edward Thornton to his sister. "Yes, lovely things," she replied, carelessly. "Have you?" he asked of Edith, who sat apart, gathered up in her own loveliness, like a self-admiring rose. She answered in the negative, and taking up the portfolio, he seemed inclined to show them to her; but his sister playfully interfered, told him that as he had already seen them, it was not fair; that she was passionately fond of drawings, and would look over these with her dear Edith by whom she accordingly sat most pertinaciously until dinner-time. Her brother remained by me, and talked of Cornelius, whom he emphatically pronounced a man of genius. My ear opened to hear him speak so. "He is more than a man of genius," I replied with some emotion; "he is so good. At least he has always been so to me; he adopted and reared me quite as if I had been his own child, and that was very kind." Mr. Thornton smiled, and spoke of good deeds that brought their own reward. I hinted that if I was a reward, it seemed hard he should be deprived of me. He evidently thought this hard, too; and though he did not say so, I saw he intended influencing Mr. Thornton in my favour. A fact on which I did not place much hope, for I knew enough of my grandfather to guess he was not easily governed. He kept me with him transcribing for several hours the next day; but he never spoke until I was leaving the room, then he said very coolly: "You can do the rest after dinner, whilst I go on with that little business to the wishing-well." My hand was on the door; I turned round to give him a terrified look. He laughed as if he enjoyed my fright. I dare say I looked dismayed enough, for as I left the study, I met my cousin entering, and he gave me an astonished glance. I passed by him swiftly, and ran up to my room, there to write a few words, with which I hastened down again. Not suspecting that my grandfather would see me, or seeing me guess my intention, I went down the beech-tree avenue; but I had not gone ten steps, when the arched casement was thrown open, and Mr. Thornton appeared in the aperture, grim and forbidding. "Miss Burns," he said, sternly, "will you come back, if you please. I want you. Sir, I shall thank you not to interfere." The latter remark was addressed to my cousin, who, standing by him, seemed to plead or urge something. He bowed stiffly and drew back, looking offended. I obeyed the summons I had received, and returned to the study, my eyes overflowing with indignant tears which pride could scarcely restrain. Edward Thornton gave me a look of sympathy, and left as I entered. Mr. Thornton eyed me severely. "You may as well give it up," he said, "for I won't allow it." I sank down on a chair without replying. He continued: "If you ever saw a moth singe its wings at a candle, you know the fate of your friend. Every one knows that though I don't care a farthing for game, I allow no poaching. We were three of us at the wishing-well the other evening. Since he would brave me, why I shall just show him that I have him so," he added expressively uniting his forefinger and thumb, "and that no later than this evening." I gave him a beseeching look; he laughed; I began a supplication; he interrupted with a stern: "I never retract." I steeled my heart, and took a desperate resolve. "Mr. Thornton," I said rising and going up to him, "I will submit to anything, if you will but let Mr. O'Reilly alone. It is because he knows I am so fond of him that he does all this." "That's not true, and you know it," roundly interrupted Mr. Thornton. "It's because he is so fond of you that he can't take his eyes off of you." "Well then, yes," I exclaimed, feeling that perfect sincerity was after all the best policy. "It is because ho likes me. Has he not a right to be fond of me, just as I of him and his sister? I love them both with my whole heart; I long to be with them back again, and I hate being here-- and yet I yield--I submit to anything you may exact; but, to the grief of my loss, I entreat you do not add the torment of a persecution endured for my sake. If you will but disregard this and any other attempt he may make to see me, I will pass my word not to see him without your permission. He has taught me that one's word is a sacred thing; if I give mine I will keep it, though Grod alone knows how much it will cost me." My voice faltered and sank, for, as I thought of the pledge I was offering, I felt scarcely able to speak, and yet I dreaded lest Mr. Thornton should say no, and persist in seeking out Cornelius. He cogitated for a while, then said abruptly: "To spare the time I cannot afford to lose, and for no other reason--I consent; but mind: as you keep your word, I keep mine." I made no answer to this remark, but asked if I might not write to Cornelius to tell him what had passed, and bid him the farewell I was not to utter. He said yes. I wrote at once, and gave him the letter which he promised to forward without delay. Until then, I had not felt my parting from Cornelius. His promise, my own hopes, the light spirit of youth, had sustained me. But now that I was pledged beyond recall, hope forsook me like a faithless friend in the hour of need, and left me to taste in all its bitterness the misery of absence and separation. CHAPTER XII. Years give us strength to suffer. I was no longer a weak and sickly child. I grieved, but my sorrow was not more than I could bear. I was young, and hope soon returned to me, and whispered that, after all, this trial, though bitter, could not last for ever; that I might succeed in conciliating my grandfather; and, should I fail in the attempt, that a few more years would make me my own mistress. My cousin Edward sympathised with me, wondered what could be Mr. Thornton's motives for such strange severity, and what sort of a heart he had thus rudely to break the tender and filial tie which bound me to my adopted father. I thought him very kind; and my only comfort was to look with him over the sketches of Cornelius. Next to seeing him, it was pleasant to hear him spoken of. I seldom uttered his name myself, but I could sit for hours, listening patiently, just for the chance of its being mentioned now and then. This was the charm which lay for me, in the presence of Edward Thornton, which made me regret his absence and welcome his return. He seemed flattered by my evident preference, his sister looked on approvingly, and Mrs. Langton brushed past me haughty and disdainful. At the end of a week, Mr. Edward Thornton announced to me, one evening that we chanced to be alone, his intention of leaving Thornton House early the next day. He was going to London; he promised to call on Cornelius and Kate, tell them he had seen me, and write to me how he had found them. Then he rose, and bade me farewell. "When do you come back?" I asked, with a sigh. "I do not come back," he said, gently. "Oh! but what shall I do?" I exclaimed, dismayed at the prospect of having no one to talk to me of Cornelius, and my eyes filled with involuntary tears. Mr. Edward Thornton looked embarrassed and hinted that his sister remained behind. I did not answer--a pause followed. Then my cousin hoped that, if my grandfather permitted it, I would accompany Mrs. Brand when she left Thornton House for Poplar Lodge. I knew the place well: it stood within a comparatively short distance of the Grove. My heart beat, and my face flushed, at the thought of catching a stray glimpse of Cornelius and Kate. "Oh, I shall be so glad--so happy!" I exclaimed, eagerly. My cousin protested that the joy and happiness would be his; and, respectfully kissing my hand, he bade me a tender adieu. On the very day of his arrival in town, he called at the Grove, and, with a promptitude that touched me, wrote to me, by the same day's post, that he had seen Miss O'Reilly, who seemed quite well, and sent her love to me; but that he had missed her brother. More he did not say, and with this much, I had, perforce, to content myself. His absence made me feel very lonely. We were a strange household, and led a strange life. My grandfather did not think it necessary to trouble himself about his uninvited guests. He never sought our society, or appeared at our table. Mrs. Marks tacitly resented our intrusion by retiring to the stronghold of her high room, whence she occasionally amused herself with ringing her alarum-bell, and now and then emerged to make a descent upon Charlotte below. She saw that Mr. Thornton wanted for nothing, and allowed us to shift as we liked. We went on very well. Mrs. Brand's servant daily foraged for our support, and Mrs. Langton's French maid, with Charlotte as a subordinate, condescended to cook us the exquisite soups and ragouts of her country. Thus we lived most luxuriously in that old wainscotted parlour, where there were scarcely three chairs fit to sit upon. Mrs. Brand and Mrs. Langton did not feel the inconvenience; both before and after the departure of Edward Thornton, they lived in a round of visits and country gaieties. People, I believe, must not have known that I existed, for I was never included in the invitations they received; and the peculiar life my grandfather led, had so thoroughly estranged him from his neighbours, that not one of them ever crossed the threshold of his dwelling. What kept two such gay ladies in so gloomy an abode, was, for some time, more than I could tell, or find out, spite of the mysterious hints which Mrs. Brand dropped now and then. My cousin had been gone a week, when Mr. Thornton was suddenly called away on business. He placed his study under my care, with the strict, but, as it seemed to me, unnecessary prohibition of allowing any one to enter this sacred place. He still employed me as reader and amanuensis, and had left me plenty of manuscripts to transcribe. I sat writing by the open window, when the sound of the opening door made me look up. I saw Mrs. Brand. She came in with a mysterious air, and locked the door after her. I rose, and with some embarrassment, informed her of my grandfather's orders. "I am not at all astonished," she replied, calmly. "I am sorry to be the bearer of such a message," I said, with some emphasis. "True," she sighed, sitting down as she spoke, and her eye wandering keenly over the whole room. I reminded her that Mr. Thornton's orders admitted of no exception. She shook her head, raised her handkerchief to her eyes, withdrew it after a decent pause, and observed, mournfully:-- "Bound as I am to Mr. Thornton by the ties of blood--bound, I may say, by the ties of affection--it is melancholy--My dear, is he to be long out?" "I don't know, ma'am; but he said--" "Yes, dear, I know. Bound by the ties of affection, it is melancholy even to allude to the mysterious calamity which has befallen him. I have with pleasure noticed your reserve." "Indeed, Ma'am, I am ignorant--" "Quite right, dear, quite proper. Of course you have noticed peculiarities of thought, speech, and conduct. No one, indeed, has had so good an opportunity as you have possessed; but you have discreetly abstained from comment. You had heard of dungeons, chains, whips, strait- waistcoats, and keepers; you did not know that there are places where the afflicted are happier far than when allowed the indulgence of their own wayward wills; indeed, where they are only restricted in one or two trifling matters, for their own good of course." She sighed as she concluded. "Excuse me, Ma'am," I said, much astonished, "you mistake; I never thought anything of the sort, and never for a moment connected the places you mention with Mr. Thornton." "I see; you thought of keeping it quiet in the family; very amiable, but impracticable." "No, Ma'am, I did not think of that either." "But, my dear, you must have noticed so many things; indeed you have had rare opportunities, for instance, the change from amiability to moroseness." "I don't think Mr. Thornton ever was amiable, Ma'am." "My dear! the most amiable of men." "Then not in my time, Ma'am." Mrs. Brand gave me a perplexed look, then observed-- "Do you really think, my dear, Mr. Thornton is of sound mind?" "I am sure of it." "My dear, you take a weight from my mind. Edith would have it that he did such strange things when she was here--write such oddities. I wonder what there is in those papers." She stretched forth her hand; I drew away the papers from her reach, and said, quietly-- "There is nothing odd in these papers, Ma'am. They are merely about mineralogy." "Mineralogy!" she exclaimed, eagerly, "my dear, if a lawyer were to see them he might detect what you cannot of course perceive--the scientific madness." "The what, Ma'am?" "'The scientific madness,' you deaf little fool," said the sarcastic voice of my grandfather. Mrs. Brand jumped and I started. We looked round, he was nowhere in the room. He laughed ironically; we turned round and saw his head rising above the window-sill, on which his chin just rested. "So," he said, addressing his cousin, "you are kind enough to trouble yourself about me in my absence. Eh!" Mrs. Brand, the first moment over, was too thorough a woman of the world to allow herself to be disconcerted. "Yes, Mr. Thornton," she said, rising with sorrowful dignity, "your ill- used relatives think of schemes for your benefit; they know their duty to you, and though they should be misunderstood, they will persist in that duty. Good-bye, my dear child, I leave you with regret to the fatal consequences of your blindness." She walked out of the room as she spoke. The head of my grandfather sank down and vanished, and in a few minutes his whole person appeared at the door of the study; he stood there eyeing me from head to foot. "Why did you let her in?" he asked sternly. "I could not help it, Sir." "You should have turned her out." "Sir." "Turned her out. Are you getting deaf?" He seemed in a very bad temper, sat down with his hat on, and hunted for something amongst the books and papers on his table, grumbling all the time. A knock at the door disturbed him; he opened it himself. "Miss Burns is engaged," he said sharply, in reply to something, then re- entered the room, slamming the door and muttering to himself. In a few minutes, there was a sound of carriage wheels rolling down the avenue. "A happy riddance!" grumbled Mr. Thornton. "Will you soon have done that transcribing?" "By dinner-time, Sir." He glanced over my shoulder at what I had done, signified his approbation, and told me, as the others had taken themselves off, I might stay and dine with him. Accordingly, in an hour's time, we had a frugal and silent meal on an end of the table cleared away for that purpose. When the repast was over, Mr. Thornton went to a cupboard, opened it, and brought forth a bottle of old-looking wine, then laid it down and glanced at me significantly. I shook my head, and said I never took wine. "Then you are a little fool," he replied good-humouredly, "for there is nothing better; and this is glorious old port, too." He sat down, poured himself out a tumbler full, and, reclining back in his deep arm-chair, began enjoying slowly the only indulgence he granted to his solitary life. The genial influence of the generous vintage soon became apparent. The sternness of his mouth relaxed; his brow smoothed down; his piercing eyes softened into a sort of careless and jovial good- humour; and when he laid down his glass, it was to thrust his hands in his pockets, and chuckle to himself at the discomfiture of Mrs. Brand. "Scientific madness, eh--and wanted to hook you into it, and that little bit of mineralogy, too--much the lawyers would have made of it! I am a lucky man; every creature I have to do with tries to cheat or outwit me; that Irish friend of yours, you--" "Excuse me, Sir," I interrupted, reddening; "cheating implies trust, and you did not trust us. Mr. O'Reilly is the slave to his word. He kept his to you; I had none to keep. You never asked him if he liked to give me up; you never asked me if I liked being here. Do not wonder he did his best to get me back, and I to get away." I spoke warmly; Mr. Thornton projected his nether lip, and shrugged his shoulders impassionately. "You ridiculous little creature," he said, "why should I ask you if you liked the medicine which I your physician knew to be good for you? Don't you see that Irishman would have got tired of the young girl, as he once did of the little girl, and sent her off somewhere? I spared him the trouble." "Indeed," I replied indignantly, "he would not have got tired of me! If I were his own child, Cornelius could not be fonder of me than he is." Mr. Thornton looked deep into me, and at first said nothing. "If you were his own child--eh!" he at length echoed. "Fudge!" "Fudge, Sir! And why should he not like me? He reared me, he taught me, he watched by me when I was ill; he did everything for me. Why then should he not like me?" I sat within a few paces of my grandfather; he stretched out bis arm, placed his hand under my chin, raised my face so as to meet his bended gaze, and again seemed to read me through. "Silly thing!" he said, a little contemptuously, and dropped his hand, which I immediately caught, and imprisoned in both mine. "Oh, Sir!" I exclaimed, "I have kept my word; I will keep it still; but pray let me go and see them--pray do. Where can the harm be in that? Oh! pray, do let me!" In my eagerness, I could scarcely speak, and the words trembled on my lips. "So," he said, "that is what you have been getting pale about, is it?-- and fretting, eh?" I could not deny the imputation. He took his hand from me, frowned, and looked displeased. "Margaret Burns," he observed, sharply, "you are a fool, and I am a still greater fool not to let you rush on your fate. However, I am not going to do it; so just make up your mind to stay here." With that he rose, took the paper for which he had come back, and left me, bidding me not to forget that "Chaos and Creation." He did not come back for three days, which I spent alone in Thornton House. It rained from morning until night, and I felt dull and miserable. I passed the best part of my time in the study, reading; and there my grandfather found me on his return. The afternoon was not far gone, and the weather seemed inclined to improve. The rain had ceased; yellow streaks of sunlight pierced the gray sky, and lit up the wet park. I sat by the window, through which streamed in a doubtful light; a book lay on my lap unread, and with my two hands clasped upon it, and my head low bent, I was absorbed in a waking dream, when the sound of the opening door roused me. I looked up, and saw Mr. Thornton, in his travelling dress, standing on the threshold, his two hands resting on the head of his cane, his eyes attentively fixed upon me. I said something about his return, and rose. He did not answer, but came in slowly, and began taking off his great coat; then suddenly pausing in the operation, he turned to me, and said abruptly: "What is it about?" "What, Sir?" I asked, astonished. "That you are crying for?" I hung down my head, and did not reply. "Has anything or any one annoyed you, whilst I was away?" he asked, in the same short way. "No. Sir." "Then what are you crying for?" "Oh, Sir, you know!" 1 said, with involuntary emotion. "The old story, eh?" He walked up and down the room with his coat hanging half off from one arm; then suddenly stopping before me, he said: "Since you will be a fool, why be one and have your way. That friend of yours has not yet left Leigh; if he will come here, and comply with a condition that I shall exact, he may take you with him when and for as long as he likes." I could scarcely believe my senses. I gazed incredulously at Mr. Thornton, who told me not to be bewildered, but see about it. I needed no second bidding, and ran out of the room at once. I met Charlotte on the staircase. "Charlotte," I said, breathlessly, "can you take a letter for me to Leigh immediately?" Before the girl could answer, Mrs. Marks, standing on the landing where I had first seen her, chose to interfere. "Charlotte must get Mr Thornton's dinner ready," she said, majestically. "Very well," I replied more quietly; "Richard can do it." "Richard is out," she observed with evident satisfaction. "Then I can do it myself," I said impatiently. I ran up-stairs, got ready, and went off at once. It was only when I had passed the lodge, that it occurred to me Mr. Thornton had not perhaps intended me to be my own messenger; but it was too late to retreat; besides I could not resist the temptation of seeing Cornelius again, so I cast thought behind me, and went on. My heart beat fast as I reached Rock Cottage. The garden-gate stood ajar; the door was open too; I entered and looked into both the parlours, then passed on to the garden, hurried along the gravel path, and caught a glimpse of him going down to the beach. I thought to call him back, but changed my mind, and followed him silently. The path wound away to the sands, sunk between sharp and rugged rocks. Down these, the gate and garden left behind me, I ran lightly. I soon outstripped him, and stood awaiting his approach on a point of rock that projected over the path. He walked with folded arms and eyes bent on the earth. When he was within a few paces of me, I dropped lightly down before him. If I had fallen from the sky, he could scarcely have looked more astonished. He did not speak, but took my hands in his, as if to make sure of my identity. "I am no spirit," I said, "but real flesh and blood." The blood rushed up to his brow. "You are come--come back to me after all!" he exclaimed ardently. "I knew you would." And stooping, he pressed me to his heart with a passionate fondness that made me forget all save the joy of seeing him again. I know not what we said in that first moment. I felt one with him then, and his words of endearment and gladness are irrevocably blended with mine in memory. All I distinctly remember, is finding myself sitting with him in the back-parlour of Rock Cottage, my two bands clasped on his shoulder, my eyes raised up to his, and my ears drinking in with delight every word that fell from his lips. He called me by every fond name he could think of; blessed me over and over, and ended by saying eagerly: "Had we not better go at once, my darling?" I started and woke from my dream. "Cornelius," I replied, hesitatingly, "I have not run away--I am come to see you." He looked transfixed. "To see me!" he said at length; "and do you think I will let you leave me? No, Daisy, you have placed in my way a temptation mortal man could not resist. I tell you that I have you, and that I will keep you." He took my two hands in his. I tried to disengage them; but though his grasp was so gentle I scarcely felt it, it held me completely captive. He smiled at my useless efforts; then said with some reproach: "Oh, Daisy! the little girl whom I carried in my arms seven years ago, was willing enough. I had not, even in jest, to hold her hands. She clasped them around my neck lovingly and trustingly, laid her hand on my shoulder, and had but one fear--lest I should leave her behind." He released me, and added, in his most fervent and beseeching accents: "Come with me, Daisy; come with me. If you ever cared for me, show it now--come with me. Don't drive me to do something desperate--I tell you that I will never leave Leigh without you. Come with me!" He had again clasped his arms around me, and held me within a circle more potent than that of any magic spell. I laid my two hands on his shoulders, and smiled up at him, as I replied: "I should have told you at once, but I was so glad, that I forgot it; and you are so impatient that you won't hear me out. Mr. Thornton has changed his mind--he says I may be with you and Kate again--all on a condition." "What condition?" he promptly asked. "I don't know--he will tell it to you himself, and you will agree to it-- won't you, Cornelius?" "No," he replied, impatiently; "this is a snare. Besides, why submit to a condition when I have you here without one? Oh, Daisy! now is the moment. Fate, or rather Providence, has made us meet--we must not have the madness to part again. I have missed one opportunity--I will not miss another. Trust to me. Cast by all thought, all fear--look not behind or before you. Come, Daisy, not to-morrow--not to-night--but now! Come with me--come!" He rose, as if to lead me away that very moment; but he still held me fast, and that clasp which the passion of the moment only rendered more secure, his flushed face, eager looks, and feverish accents, all breathed the most vehement and ardent entreaty. Subdued by his resolute tenderness, I yielded, but for a moment only; the next, I rallied and resisted. I made a desperate effort, and, both bodily and mentally, asserted my freedom. "No, no, Cornelius," I cried, agitatedly, "I cannot go with you. I, too, have passed my word, and I must keep it--I must keep it; and you must not ask or tempt me to break it--indeed, Cornelius, you must not." I spoke as I felt, with much distress. Cornelius calmed down at once, and entreated me to be pacified. "I had forgotten your promise;" he said, "seeing you here, I had but one thought [] to possess and secure that which I had lost. I will submit to Mr. Thornton's conditions, and take you back to him this moment. What more would you have?" In his earnestness, he again took my hand. My lips parted to thank him, but the entrance of our old servant checked the words. She muttered indistinctly, as was her wont, then kept the door open, and admitted--Mr. Thornton. For a moment, he stood still on the threshold, and looked confounded. Neither Cornelius nor I spoke. "So," he said at length, "I fancy I leave you safe at home writing a letter, and give myself the trouble of coming here to have some private talk with Mr. O'Reilly; and you are actually here before-hand with me." "I could find no one to send the letter by, Sir," I replied, quite dismayed. "I am sorry if I have done wrong." "Wrong!" echoed Cornelius, looking displeased, and drawing me towards him as he spoke. I saw his proud and hasty temper would ruin all; I hastened to interfere. "I have been speaking to Mr. O'Reilly," I said, quickly, "and he has promised to abide by the conditions. You know, Cornelius, you have promised," I added, turning towards him. He could not deny it, but reddened, and bit his lip. Mr. Thornton said nothing, but sat down, and looked at us with a keen and attentive gaze, which Cornelius did not seem to relish. "You wished to speak to me, Sir," he said, at length. "Yes, Sir," composedly answered my grandfather, "I came here for that purpose, just as you came to me on the same errand seven years ago. Sir, I am a plain man, and I shall speak plainly. I think it is a strange thing that since you in some manner forced this young girl upon me, you are ever doing all you can to get her back--ay, and a very strange thing." He looked at him fixedly. Cornelius returned the gaze, and the question: "Is it a stranger thing, Sir, than that you, who accepted this young girl so reluctantly, should since always show yourself so anxious to keep her?" "Perhaps not," drily replied Mr. Thornton; "but I meant to be brief. What I have to say is this: When I placed her with Mrs. Gray, I never intended, Sir, that you should see her face again. I had my motives. The physician having, however, pronounced her consumptive, I thought, if she was to die, she might as well be humoured. But when I returned, a few weeks ago, I learned that the little thing was alive and well; that you, too, had returned from your travels, and had turned out a most vigilant and attentive guardian; and it occurred to me that I might as well remind you of your promise. For this, too, I had my motives. You redeemed your word honourably, without taking advantage of your position or influence; but it was the old story all over--no sooner was she out of your hands, than you were half mad to have her back again. She, too, wanted to be off; and, to show me what a tyrant I was, and what a victim I made of her, she got thin and sallow with all her might. Sir, I give in; on the condition I shall name presently--she may dispose of herself as she thinks fit. But this time, as well as before, you owe me no thanks. It is to gratify her I do it." "And this time, as before, it is to please her I submit to a condition," haughtily replied Cornelius. I still stood by him and gave his arm a warning and entreating pressure. My grandfather calmly resumed: "She is young, and much under your influence. I wish her to remain quite free, and shall be satisfied if you will promise not to make a present of her to any bosom friend of yours that might take a fancy to her, you understand." "Yes, Sir, I understand." replied Cornelius, with subdued irritation, "but I decline pledging myself for her." "I do not require it," said Mr. Thornton, a little ironically, "I care not a rush on whom the silly thing bestows herself, but I like fair play, and want her to give herself, and not to be given--or taken either. If she runs away without your knowledge, depend upon it I shall not accuse you. I ask you to pledge yourself for yourself--do you object?" "No, no," I replied eagerly for him, "Cornelius does not object. Bless you, Mr. Thornton, _he_ does not want to give me away. Of course he does not. You don't, Cornelius, do you?" I added, looking up in his face, and passing my arm within his. My grandfather laughed sarcastically. Cornelius looked exasperated. He seemed to be undergoing a sharp, inward struggle; at length he yielded. "For her sake, Sir," he said, addressing Mr. Thornton, "and hers alone, I yield; I give you the promise you require. Allow me to add that you either trust me a great deal too much, or far too little." He spoke with such defiant pride, that I looked half frightened at my grandfather; but he only smiled and rose. I saw he was going, and left Cornelius to bid him adieu. "Good-bye!" he said, roughly; yet when I passed my arm around his neck, and, for the first time touched his cheek with my lips, he looked more astonished than displeased; but he had so long broken with the charities of life, that to return the embrace probably did not occur to him. All he did was to look from me to Cornelius, and say, with a careless nod: "She's a pretty little thing," having delivered which opinion, he turned away and left us. Scarcely had the door closed on him, when Cornelius broke out. "Oh, Daisy!" he exclaimed, "what have you made me do! And why must I, who hate the mere thought of interference and subjection, thus hold you on the good-will and pleasure of another." He paced the room with agitated steps. I saw his pride suffered, and following him, I did my best to soothe him; at length I succeeded; he stopped short before me, looked down at me with a smile, and said: "I almost forgive your perverse old grandfather everything, for the sake of his last words. You are a pretty little thing--and better than you are pretty," he added fondly. "Then mind you appreciate me," I replied. He said there was no fear that he should not. We left Leigh the next day, and Cornelius, according to the philosophic injunction of Kate, locked up the house and brought the key in his pocket. CHAPTER XIII. Our journey was short and pleasant. Cornelius seemed quite gay again. In order to surprise Kate, we stepped down from the cab at the end of the lane, talking of that evening seven years before, when he had brought me along the same path to the same dwelling. "Oh, Cornelius," I exclaimed, looking up at him, "was it not kind of Mr Thornton to let me come back?" He looked down at me, and smiled as he replied: "I don't know that he meant it as any particular kindness to me; but that he could do me none greater, I mean to show him yet." The lane was long; we walked slowly; the evening was one of early autumn's most lovely ones, brown and mellow, our path was strewn with fallen leaves, but the beauty of summer was still in the sky, and its warmth in the glorious setting sun. As we approached the well-known door, we saw Kate in her hair, standing on the threshold and talking to two little Irish beggars, whom she was scolding and stuffing at the same time. As she turned round, she saw us, and looked at us with incredulous astonishment. I ran up to her, and threw my arm around her neck. "I am come back," I cried, "indeed I am." "I see and feel it; but is it for good?" "To be sure." She kissed me heartily, then pushed me away and said, "there was no getting rid of that girl, but that she knew well enough Cornelius would not come back without her," then she turned to the two petitioners, bade them be off and never show their faces again, and ended by telling them to call for some cold meat on Monday. This matter dispatched, she shut the door and followed us in. As we passed through the garden, I saw with surprise that it was no longer separated from its neighbour. "No," said Kate, with some pride, "it is now one garden and one dwelling, Daisy. No more tenants, you know. I like room. Are you too tired to come and see the changes I have made?" We both said "No," and Miss O'Reilly took us over the whole house at once. It was much larger, and much improved; we had parlours to spare now; drawing-rooms elegantly furnished, bed-rooms more than we needed; so that, as Kate said, if any old friend came from Ireland--though she was afraid they must be all dead, for they never came--or if those two good friends of Cornelius, Schwab and Armari, should leave fair Italy for smoky London, they could be accommodated easily. Thus talking carelessly, Miss O'Reilly took us to the top of the house, where we found the old dream of Cornelius fairly realised: several rooms thrown into one, with a skylight. She laughed at his surprise; pushed him away, and told him to keep his distance when he kissed her, then suddenly flung her arms around his neck and embraced him ardently. We returned to our old life on the very next day, as if it had known no interruption. I sat to Cornelius, who painted with renewed ardour; towards dusk he took me out walking; when evening had fairly set in, he gave me my Italian lesson, and when that was over, he sang and played or read aloud. He never seemed to think of going out; one evening, when his sister insisted on making him leave us, he returned at the end of ten minutes. "He had not been able," he said, "to get beyond the end of the grove. There was, after all, no place like home." "Domestic man!" observed Kate, smiling as he sat down by me on my sofa. Without seeming to hear her, he took up Shakespeare from the table, and began reading aloud the most fervent and beautiful passages from Romeo and Juliet. Then he suddenly closed the book and turning on me, asked how I liked the story of the two Italian lovers. "Were they not a little crazy, Cornelius?" I replied; "but I suppose love always makes people more or less ridiculous." On hearing this heretic sentiment, Cornelius looked orthodox and shocked. "Ridiculous!" he said, "who has put such ideas into your head?" He glanced suspiciously at Kate who hastily observed: "I had nothing to do with it." "Do you think I could not find that out alone?" I asked, laughing. But Cornelius remained quite grave. Did I not know love was a most exalted feeling? That angels loved in Heaven, and that poor mortals could not do better than imitate them on earth? That love was the attribute of the female mind, its charm and its power? On these high moral grounds, he proceeded to give me an eloquent description of the universal passion. It was pure, it was noble, tender and enduring; it was light and very joyous; it had sweetness and great strength; it refined the mind; it purified the heart; and, though seemingly so exclusive, it filled to overflowing with the sense of universal charity. It was a chain of subtle and mysterious sympathies. Here I rapidly passed my forefinger along his profile, and resting it on the tip of his nose, I said gravely: "Kate! is it aquiline or Roman? Aquiline, I think." On feeling and hearing this piece of impertinence, Cornelius turned round on me with such a start of vexation and wrath, that I jumped up, and ran off to the chair of Kate. She only laughed at her brother's discomfiture. He said nothing, but sat fuming alone on the sofa. "Serve you right," she said, "why will you explain love philosophically to a girl of seventeen? Don't you see her hour is not come, and that if it were, she would know more than you could tell her?" Cornelius sharply replied "that was not at all the question, but that when he spoke, he thought he might be listened to." "I did listen to you," I said, "your last words were: 'a chain of subtle and mysterious sympathies.'" He did not answer, but took up Shakespeare, and looked tragic over it. "He's vexed," I whispered audibly to Kate. "He looks like Othello, the Moor of Venice. What shall I do? I am afraid of the sofa-pillow, if I go near him! He looked a while ago as if he longed to throw it at me; just because I said his nose was aquiline, and broke his chain of subtle and mysterious sympathies." "Kate!" said Cornelius, looking up from his book, "can't you make that girl hold her tongue?" Kate declined the office, and sent me back to him. He pretended to be very angry, but when I deliberately took Shakespeare from him and shut it, he smiled, smoothed my hair, and called me by two or three of the fondest of the many fond and endearing names in Irish, English, and Italian, which it was now his habit to bestow upon me, and thus our little quarrels always ended. I was very happy; yet here as well as at Leigh, the restless spirit of youth was stirring within me. Kate had suffered much, she liked repose; Cornelius had travelled, home sufficed him. My sorrows had been few, and Leigh was the extent of my peregrinations. Of home, of the daily comedies and dramas, which can be enacted in a human dwelling, I knew something; but of life, busy, active, outward life I knew less than most girls of my age, and they--poor things--knew little enough. Kate seldom went beyond her garden; when Cornelius took me out in the evening, it was for a quiet walk in the lanes. I said nothing, but I never passed by the landing window on my way to or from the studio, without stopping to look with a secret longing at the cloud of smoke hanging above London. Cornelius found me there on the afternoon which followed his Shakspearian reading, and he said with some curiosity: "Daisy, what attraction is there in that prospect of brick and smoke?" "What part of London lies next to us?" I asked, instead of answering. "Oxford Street; you surely know Oxford Street?" "I remember having been there two or three times." "Two or three times! You do not mean to say you have never been in Oxford Street more than two or three times!" "Indeed I do, Cornelius. I was ten when I came here, always weak and sickly; then we went to Leigh, and we have been back about a fortnight. It is not so wonderful, you see." Cornelius smiled, smoothed my hair, and said something about "violets in the shade, and birds in their nests." "Yes, but birds leave their nests sometimes, don't they, Cornelius?" I asked a little impatiently. "You want to go to town," he exclaimed, astonished. I smiled. "Oh!" he said, reproachfully, "have you really a wish, and will you not give me the pleasure of gratifying it? Do tell me what you wish for, Daisy--pray do." He spoke warmly, and looked eagerly into my face. "Well, then," I replied, "take me some day to Oxford Street. I know the Pantheon is there, and I remember it as a sort of fairy-palace." "Some day!--to-day, Daisy--this very day. Though this is not the season, there must be places worth seeing; museums, exhibitions--" "The streets with the shops, the people, and the great current of life running through them, will entertain me far more than museums or made-up exhibitions." "Why did you not say so sooner?" "Kate dislikes long walks." "But do I?--do I dislike long walks with you, Daisy, in town or country, in lanes or in streets? Is there anything I like better than to please or amuse you?" Without allowing me to thank him, he told me to make haste and get ready. I obeyed, and within an hour, Cornelius and I were walking down Oxford Street. London, according to a figurative mode of speech, was quite empty; that is to say, a few all-important hundreds had taken flight, and left the insignificant thousands behind, just to mind the place in their absence. To me, after the long quietness of Leigh, it looked as gay and crowded as a fair. At once I flew to the shops, like a moth to the light, and Cornelius, with a good humour rare in his sex, not only stood patiently whilst I admired, but kept a sharp look out for every milliner's and linendraper's establishment, saying, eagerly:-- "There's another one, Daisy." But, after a while, I was dazzled with all I saw, deafened with the sound of rolling carriages, bewildered with the unusual aspect of so many people, and glad to take refuge in the Pantheon, with its flowers, its birds, its statues, its pictures, its fanciful stalls, and its profusion of those graceful knick-knacks which have ever been, and ever will be, the delights of a truly feminine heart. We had entered this pretty place by Great Marlborough Street. Cornelius began by buying me a beautiful, but most extravagant bouquet, which I had been imprudent enough to admire, and did not like to refuse. As we loitered about, I looked at one of the birds in the cages around the little fountain, and praised its glowing plumage. "Have it," eagerly said Cornelius, and his purse was out directly. "No, indeed," I quickly replied, "I do not like birds in cages." "Well, then, have one of those squirrels." "I will have nothing alive. And I will not have a plant either," I added, detecting the look he cast at the expensive flowers around us. I compelled him to put back his purse; but as we went on, and inspected the stalls, I bad to entreat add argue him out of buying me, first a vase of magnificent wax flowers; then a _papier-mach?_ table, and thirdly, some costly china. No sooner did my eye chance to light with pleasure on anything, than he insisted on giving it to me. At length, I told him he spoiled all my enjoyment. He asked, with a dissatisfied air, if I was too proud to accept anything from him. I assured him I had no such feeling, and that he might buy me something before we went home, if such was his fancy. "What?" he asked, with a look of mistrust. "Anything you like; but for the present, pray let me look about." He yielded; but I wished afterwards I had let him have his own way; for as we were leaving the Pantheon, with all its temptations, and I thought all right, Cornelius suddenly took me into a shop, and before I could remonstrate, he had bought me a light blue silk dress, as dear as it was pretty. I left the place much mortified; he saw it, and laughed at me, telling me to take this as a lesson, for that he would not be thwarted. We took a cab and rode home; yet it was dusk when we reached the Grove. A light burned in the drawing-room window. We wondered what company Kate was entertaining; and on going up-stairs, found her sitting with our old friend, Mr. Smalley. We had not seen him since his marriage with Miriam Russell. He was now a widower. He looked paler and thinner than formerly; but as good and gentle as ever. He and Cornelius exchanged a greeting friendly, though rather calm and reserved. With me, Mr. Smalley was more open; but as he held my hand in his, he looked at me, and, smiling, turned to Cornelius. "I should never have known in her the sickly child whom I still remember," he said; "indeed, my friend, your adopted daughter has thriven under your paternal care. Hush, darling!" He was addressing a child of two or three, who clung to him, casting shy looks around the room, and seeming very ready to cry. To pacify her, he sat down again, and took her on his knee. She nestled close to him, and was hushed at once. Mr. Smalley made a little paternal apology. Darling had insisted on coming with him, and as she would not stay with his sister Mary, he had to take her with him wherever he went. "Those young creatures," he added, looking at Cornelius, "twine themselves around our very heart-strings. I know what a truly paternal heart yours is for your adopted daughter." "Ay, ay!" interrupted Cornelius, looking fidgetty, "how is Trim?" "He died a year ago," gravely replied Mr. Smalley. "Ah! my friend, my heart smote me when I heard the tidings. I had always been harsh to Trim, you know." "You harsh to any one!" said Cornelius, smiling. But Mr. Smalley assured him his nature was harsh; though, with the grace of God, he had been able to subdue it a little. Darling, he might add, had been the means of softening many an asperity. He kissed her kindly as he spoke. She was a pale, fair-haired little creature, very like him, and evidently indulged to excess. He was wrapped in her, and when of her own accord, she left him to come to me, he felt so much astonished, that he could speak of nothing else. In her two years' life, Darling had never done such a thing before. Indeed her shyness, he plainly hinted, was alone an insuperable obstacle to a second union. "Mr. Smalley," I said, "Darling has just agreed to stay with me, if you will leave her." "You have bewitched her," he replied, giving me a grateful look; but he confessed it would be a great weight off his mind; and with many thanks and evident regret, he left me the treasure of his heart. Darling soon fell asleep in my arms. One of her little hands was clasped around my neck, the other held mine; her fair head rested on my bosom, and her calm, sleeping face lay upraised and unconscious with closed eyes and parted lips. I stooped, and with some emotion, softly kissed the child of my persecutor. Cornelius, who sat by me, whispered the two concluding lines of Wordsworth's sonnet, with a slight modification: "How much is mixed and reconciled in thee, Of mother's love, with maiden purity." Then bending over me, he attempted to embrace Darling; but his beard woke her; she screamed, kicked, burst into a new fit of crying every time he attempted to sit near me, and said "her papa should take me to Rugby." "And be your mamma. No, indeed, Miss Smalley," replied Cornelius, tartly. "She is mine, and I keep her." To teaze her, he passed his arm around me, and caressed me, upon which Darling got into such a passion, that he asked impatiently "if I would not put the sulky little thing to bed?" She succeeded on this and on subsequent occasions in keeping him at a safe distance from me. At first her childish jealousy amused him, but as she was in other respects a very endearing little thing, and engrossed me like a new toy, Cornelius did not relish it at all. He looked especially uncomfortable during Mr. Smalley's daily visits, and to my amusement, for I know well enough what he was afraid of, he did not seem easy, until both Darling and her papa were fairly gone. I always made my own dresses, and I made the blue silk one with great care. It was finished one afternoon before dusk. I put it on in my room, and came down to show it to Kate; she was not in the parlour. I felt anxious to see how it fitted, and got up on a chair to look at myself in the glass over the fire-place. At that very moment Cornelius entered. I jumped down, rather ashamed at being caught. He came up to me, and without saying a word, took a white rose from a vase of flowers, and put it in my hair. I took another, and fastened it to the front of my dress. Then he took my hand in his, and drawing a little back from me, he smiled. I sighed, and asked: "What shall I do with it, Cornelius?" "Look pretty in it, as you do now." "But where shall I wear it?" "Here, of course." "It is only fit for a party. Why have we no party to go to?" "Because people don't ask us," was his frank reply. "I wish they would." "To be seen and admired by others besides Cornelius O'Reilly, you vain little creature." "It is not for that; but I should like a party or so." "Well, when we get invited, I shall take you," he replied, with a smile that provoked me. "Yes," I said, colouring, "but you know no one will ask us. We go nowhere; we see no one, not even artists. I wish you would see artists." "I don't care about English artists," he replied, drily. "Well then, Irish." "Still less. The three kingdoms and the principality do not yield one with whom I would care to spend an hour." "But I want to see artists." "And am I not an artist?" "Oh! I know you so well! What is your friend Armari like?" "A good-looking Italian," replied Cornelius, whistling carelessly, with his hands in his pockets, "rather given to be in love with every woman he sees." "And Mr. Schwab?" "A good-looking German, and a professed woman-hater." "I wish they would come." "But they won't," he said, with evident satisfaction. "You are glad of it!" I exclaimed a little indignantly. "You are glad that I have no parties to go to; that I see no one." I turned away half angrily; he caught me back, ardently entreating me not to be vexed with him; "He could not bear it," he said. Astonished and mute, I looked up into his bending face. The time had been when I had trembled before a look and a frown, and now a petulant speech of mine distressed him thus. "Forgive me," he earnestly continued, "for not having forestalled your wishes; but I cared so little for other society than yours, that I forgot mine might not be to you so delightful and engrossing. A party, I cannot command, but I shall take you to the play this very evening." I wanted to refuse, but he would hear of no objection, though I told him plainly he had not the money to spare. "And if it is my pleasure to spend on you the little I have--what about it, Daisy?" At length I yielded; and, on his request, went up to ask Kate to join us. She refused peremptorily, and said she liked home best. As she helped me to finish my toilet, she gave me sundry instructions concerning my behaviour. I was to let Cornelius be civil to me, it was his turn now, and if he picked up my glove, carried my shawl or put it on, I was to take it as a matter of course. "Very well, Kate," I said, "but it is odd." "Why so!" "I don't know, but it is odd." We were entering the parlour where Cornelius stood waiting for me. I gave him the shawl I had brought down on my arm. "You are to put that on me," I said, "for Kate says you are to be civil to me; so I hope you will, and not disgrace me in the face of the whole house by any want of proper attention due to the sex. I cannot go and tell the people 'you need not wonder at his being so rude; it is all because he knew me when I was a little girl.'" "Impertinent little thing," observed Kate, "I only told her not to be civil to you." "Well, am I? I spoke as impertinently as I could. Did I not, Cornelius?" "Indeed you did," he replied, smiling, and helping me to pin my shawl on. "Have you any more commands for me?" "Only just to hold my fan, my gloves, my scent-bottle, my handkerchief, and to give me your arm." He managed to obey me; Kate smiled approvingly, and we entered the cab which was waiting for us at the door. Cornelius took me to a house which had not long been open, but where both performances and actors were said to be good. We occupied the front seats of a centre box, and commanded a full view of the stage and audience. I was young, unaccustomed to pleasure, and easily amused. I felt interested in the play, and when the second act was over, I turned to Cornelius and said-- "Do you think Lady Ada will marry her cousin?" "I suppose so," he replied, without looking at me. "Oh! Cornelius, I hope not; he is not the right one, you know." "Is he not?" "Oh! dear, no; what can you have been thinking of?" "That there never was a more insolent fellow than that man in the pit," replied Cornelius, who looked much irritated, "for the whole of the last act he has kept his opera-glass fully bent upon you." "Then his neck must ache by this." "How coolly you take it!" "What am I to do?" "Nothing, of course; but surely you will grant that sort of admiration is very insolent." "How do I know it is admiration? He may be thinking 'poor girl, what a pity she is so shockingly dressed, or has such a bad figure, or has not better features!'" "Do you think a man loses a whole act to find out that a girl is plain?" sceptically asked Cornelius. I did not answer. He very unreasonably construed this into being pleased with being looked at. Wishing to get rid of the subject, I asked him to change places with me; he accepted at once, and took my seat, whilst I sat partly behind him. At first this produced nothing; the gentleman with the opera-glass really seemed to enjoy the face of Cornelius quite as much as mine. "He has not found it out yet," I said. But even as I spoke, the individual I alluded to rose and left the pit. "Oh! he has found it out, has he?" ironically inquired Cornelius. The third act was beginning when the door of our box opened, and a foreign-looking man, dark and handsome, entered. I felt sure it was Armari, it was; but it also was the gentleman with the opera-glass, a fact that gave rather an odd character to the greeting of Cornelius. Most foreigners are self-possessed. Signor Armari was pre-eminently so. He looked at me as if he knew not the use of the opera-glass, which he still held, and even had the assurance to offer it to me. I did not know Italian sufficiently to understand the whole of his discourse; but it seemed to me that its chief purport was an enthusiastic, intense admiration of the golden hair, blue eyes, and dazzling complexions of English ladies--a theme that, by no means, appeared to delight Cornelius. Signor Armari remained with us until the play was over. We then parted from him, and never once mentioned his name, until we reached the Grove. Kate was sitting up for us. She received us with a pleased smile, asked how we had been entertained, and what the play was about. I told her as well as I could, but, after the second act, my memory was rather at fault. Cornelius said, pointedly: "You must not wonder if she does not remember it better. I was talking to Armari." "What, your old friend Armari?" interrupted Kate. "Yes, he is in England." He spoke with a calmness that astonished her. "Are you not delighted to see him?" she asked. "I am very glad to see Armari," he replied, in a tone of ice. "I have asked him to dine with us next Thursday. He has promised to bring Schwab." "Schwab, too!--was he there?" "No; he was kept at home by a cold." "They shall have a good dinner," warmly said Kate. "Midge, is Armari as handsome as Cornelius described him in his letters?" "He is good-looking," I replied, awkwardly. "Pleasant?" "Yes--I don't know--I think so." "Armari," gravely said Cornelius, "resembles the celebrated portraits of Raffaelle. He is something more than good-looking--he is a delightful companion, and something more than pleasant." "I am sure he is not the common-place fellow you made him out, Daisy," observed Kate. "I did not make him out anything; I don't think about him at all," I replied, half vexed. "Well, you need not colour up so," she said, looking surprised; "and you need not look so glum about it, Cornelius. Tastes differ." Neither replied. Miss O'Reilly, whose whole thoughts were absorbed in hospitality, did not notice this, but added, with a start: "How long are they to stay?" "Two or three weeks." "Then ask them to spend those two or three weeks here," she rejoined, triumphantly. "I have bed-rooms to spare, you know." "Here--in the house?" exclaimed Cornelius. "Where else should I have bed-rooms?" "Thank you," was his short reply. "Does thank you, mean yes?" "No, indeed. What should they do here?" He seemed impatient and provoked. His sister asked if he would not feel glad to have his friends near him? He replied "Certainly," but that they came to see London, and not to coop themselves up in a suburb. Miss O'Reilly said she would at least make the offer. Her brother looked quite irritated. "Schwab will smoke you to death," he said. "As if I were not used to smoking." "My cigars are nothing to his Turkish pipe. Besides, he swears awfully." "In German," philosophically replied Kate. "Let him, Cornelius: I shall not understand him; and it will only be the worse for his own soul, poor heathenish fellow." "He is a confirmed woman-hater." "Unhappy man, not to know better!--but there is a comfort in it, too. I shall not be afraid of his making love to Daisy." "He will eat you out of house and home." "I am astonished at such a mean, paltry objection," replied Miss O'Reilly, waxing indignant. "Well, then," he said, impatiently, "take it for granted that I do not want Schwab." "I suppose you could not ask Armari alone?" "No," was the prompt reply. "To tell you the truth, Kate, I want to work hard, and their presence in the house would interfere with it." "Could you not say so at once, instead of abusing that unfortunate Schwab? Well, your friends shall at least have a good dinner." Miss O'Reilly was learned in many a dainty dish, and had imparted to me some of her art. Our united skill and efforts produced as luxurious a little dinner for five as one need wish to see. The guests were punctual to the very minute; there was no delay, no spoiling of dishes and chafing of tempers, and all would have gone on admirably, but for an unlucky circumstance. Kate and I did not speak Italian, and the friends of Cornelius did not speak English; bad French was therefore the medium of our conversation. Kate liked talking, and she sat with a provoked air between her two guests whom I watched with silent amusement. With his dark hair, his classical features, ivory throat, and collar turned down ? la Byron, Signor Armari looked very interesting; but all his vivacity seemed gone. He hung his handsome head with dismal grace, like a wounded bird, smiled at the untouched food on his plate, and gave us looks that seemed to say: "Eat away--eat away." The injunction was religiously obeyed by his friend Schwab. He belonged to the handsome Germanic type, and was very like an illustrious personage. He had an honest, hearty northern appetite, and marched into the dishes, and tossed off the claret with a careless vigour that edified Kate. It was pleasant to see him dispatch the choicest dainties of the dessert without even a smile. When he came indeed to some tarts, in which I think I may say I had distinguished myself, his countenance relaxed a little; and when Cornelius informed him that they owed their existence to me, Mr. Schwab looked at me with an uplifting of the eye-brow expressive of wonder and admiration. I had expected a dull evening, and I spent a very pleasant one. The two friends of Cornelius sang and played admirably, and treated us to the most exquisite music I had ever heard. Both Kate and I were delighted, and when they were gone, said how much we had been pleased. "I like that Schwab," observed Kate, "he is very good-looking, and not the bear you made him out, Cornelius. He has a good appetite, but your great eaters are the men after all. The little eaters are only half-and- half sort of people; and then he sings so well, and so does Armari. How handsome he is; but how melancholy he looks! Is he in love?" Cornelius looked on thorns, and replied: "he did not know." To our surprise and vexation, his friends came no more near us. He said they found the distance too great, and spent his evenings with them. I did not like that at all, and one evening spared no coaxing to keep him at home. I passed my arms around his neck, and caressed him, and entreated him to stay with me and Kate. He returned the caresses, called me by every dear name he could think of, protested that he would much rather stay than go, but left me all the same. I had taken the habit--it is one easily taken--of being humoured. I now cried with vexation and grief. Kate said nothing, but privately invited her brother's friends to come and stay with us. They accepted. I shall never forget the face of Cornelius, when she quietly informed him they were coming the next day. "Coming to stay?" he said looking at her incredulously. "Yes, coming to stay," she composedly replied, "you did not think I was going to stand that much longer--such a mean way of receiving one's friends. Why, what would be thought of us in Ireland, if it were known! For shame, Cornelius, you look quite dismayed." So he did, and repeated the word "coming!" with ill-repressed irritation. "Yes, coming!" persisted Kate, "don't trouble yourself about them. I shall so stuff Mr. Schwab's mouth, as to leave no room even for German swearing, and I shall turn up Signor Armari into the drawing room where he may sing Italian to Daisy. So there's a division of tasks." "Nice division, indeed," said Cornelius, seeming much provoked. "You forget that I want Daisy." Our dwelling was honoured the following day by receiving the two strangers. They had made some progress in English; and though Signor Armari was still rather melancholy, we got on much better; but to my annoyance and chagrin, I could scarcely see anything of him or his friend. In the daytime, Cornelius kept me in his studio, which they never entered but twice in my absence; in the evening he either went out with them, or got me in a corner of the sofa, and sat most pertinaciously by me. Once, however, he was late, and accordingly found me between his two friends, hearing them through the universal verb, to love, which one pronounced, "I loaf," and the other, "I loove." They laughed good- humouredly at their own mistakes, and I laughed too; but Cornelius seemed to think it no joke, and looked on with a face of tragic gloom. He took care this should happen no more. At the end of a fortnight our guests left us. Cornelius saw them off, and came back with a pleased and relieved aspect that did not escape his sister. I was sitting with her in the parlour by the fire, for the cold weather was beginning. He sat down by me, smoked a cigar with evident enjoyment, and declared those were the two best fellows he had ever met with--Schwab especially. Something in my face betrayed me; he took out his cigar, and hastily said: "What is it, Daisy?" "What is what, Cornelius?" "What did Armari do to annoy you?" "He did nothing." "Why do you look so odd, then?" I did not answer. "Why, you foolish fellow," said Kate, laughing, and not heeding my entreating look, "it was Schwab, that best of good fellows." "Was he rude or bearish?" asked Cornelius, reddening. "Rude!" she replied, impatiently, "he was too civil!" "Schwab!" echoed Cornelius, in the tone of Caesar's 'Et tu Brute'-- "Schwab, too!" "Cornelius," I said, a little indignantly, "it was Schwab alone, if you please." He did not heed me; he was lost in his indignation and astonishment. "Schwab!" he said again--"Schwab, the woman-hater?" "There are no women-haters," observed his sister; "her tarts softened his obdurate heart from the first day, and Cupid did the rest. Now you need not look so desperately gloomy, Cornelius; he was not more civil than he had a right to be; and when she let him see quietly she did not like it, he, sensible man, thought there were girls as good and as pretty in Germany, and did not break his heart about her. He kept his own counsel, so did we; and but for me, you would be none the wiser." "Thank you," shortly said Cornelius, "but as I know this much, and as I am sure there is more, perhaps you will be good enough to tell me all about Armari now." "Ah! poor fellow," sighed Kate, "he is in a very bad way; I noticed he could scarcely eat, and Schwab said he had not slept a wink since that night at the play." "He will get over it," impatiently interrupted Cornelius. "I have known him seven times in the same way." "Then he must lead rather an agitated life; but, as I was saying, or rather, as Mr. Schwab told me, he has lost rest and appetite since that night at the play, when he saw the beautiful Mrs. Gleaver in the box next yours." She knew all about the opera-glass, and glanced mischievously at her brother. He reddened, looked disconcerted, and exclaimed hastily: "I don't believe a bit of that." "Yes, you do," she replied quietly, "and now, Cornelius, mind my words: that sort of thing is not in the girl's way, and will not be for a good time yet; perhaps never, for she has a very flinty heart." "Don't I know it?" he replied composedly, "and was it not Christian charity made me uneasy about poor Armari? I feared lest that brown, golden hair of hers," he added, smoothing it as he spoke, "might prove such a web as even his heart could not break. Lest her eyebrow, so dark and fine, might be the very bow of Cupid. Lest--" "Spare us the rest," interrupted Kate, "it must be an arrow shot from the eye at the very least. Don't you see, besides, the girl has sense enough to laugh at it all; though I don't mean to say that if Signor Armari loses his heart and gets it back again so easily, he might not have paid her that little compliment. However, he did not, and it is as well, for she does not chance to be one of those soft girls, who, poor things, must be in love to exist; and her jealous grandpapa, who does not care about her himself, and yet won't let another have her, is, if he but knew it, perfectly safe." "Is he?" said Cornelius, throwing back his head in his old way. "Indeed he is," replied his sister, poking the fire in her old way, too; "another piece of advice, Cornelius: don't make the girl vain by talking and acting, as if she were the only decent-looking one in existence." "There grows but one flower in my garden," he said, looking at me with a fond smile, "and so I fancy that every one casts on it a longing eye; as if elsewhere there grew no flowers." His flower laid her head upon his shoulder, and looking up in his face, laughed at him for his pains. "Laugh away!" he observed philosophically, "you have opened in the shade, and you know nothing of the sun; but the sun, my little Daisy, will shine on you yet." CHAPTER XIV. I have often tried to remember how passed the autumn and winter--but in vain. No striking events marked that time; and its subtle changes I was then too heedless and too ignorant to note or understand. Two things I have not forgotten. One is that, next to his painting of course, the chief thought of Cornelius seemed to be to please and amuse me. He spent all his money in taking me about, and literally covered me with his gifts. He had an artist's eye for colour and effect, and was never tired of adorning me in some new way more becoming than the last. When I remonstrated and accused him of extravagance, he asked tenderly if he could spend the money better than on his own darling? In short, the great study of his life seemed to be to lavish on me, every proof of the most passionate fondness. I was and always had been so fond of him myself, that I wondered at nothing, not even at his fits of jealousy; the heart that gives much is not astonished at receiving much, I let myself be loved without caring why or how. I knew he was devotedly fond of me; I feared no rival; I no longer felt the sting of his indifference or the bitter pang of his jealousy. I had nothing to stimulate my curiosity; nothing to desire or to dread; nothing but to be as happy as the day was long. The other thing, I remember, is that I had in some measure seized on the power it had pleased Cornelius to relinquish. My will was more powerful over him, than his over me. I did not seek for it; but thus it was. It is almost ever so in human affections: perfect equality between two seldom exists; the sway yielded up by one is immediately and instinctively assumed by the other. With the least exertion of his will, Cornelius could again have converted me into a submissive and obedient child; but to govern always requires a certain amount of indifference; and he seemed to have lost both the power and the wish to rule. I should not have been human if I had not taken some advantage of this. I loved him as dearly as ever; but, secure of his fondness and affection, 1 did not, as once, make his pleasure my sole law. I also remembered that we had a few differences; mere trifles they then seemed to me, and Kate herself made light of them. "Don't fidget," she invariably said to her brother; "she's but a child." "A child!" he once replied, with a sigh; "you should hear her philosophize with me!" "Well, then, she's a philosophical child." "I don't know what she is," he answered, giving me a reproachful look. "I sometimes think Providence sent her to me as a chastisement for my sins." "Poor sinner!" said Kate, smiling, "what a penance!" We were all three sitting in the parlour by the fireside. I pretended to be much concerned, and hid my face in the sofa-pillow. Cornelius gently entreated me not to take it so much to heart, assured me I was no penance, but the joy of his life, and the light of his eyes; made me look up, and saw me laughing at him again. "There," he said, biting his lip and looking provoked, "do you see her, Kate?" "She is young and merry. Let her laugh." "But why will she not be serious? Why will she be so provokingly flighty and slippery?" "Nonsense!" interrupted Kate. "Let her be what she likes now; she'll be grave enough a few years hence." He sighed, and called me his perverse darling. I laughed again, and bade him sing me an Irish song. He obeyed, and thus it ended. As I was not conscious of giving Cornelius any real cause of offence, I made light of his vexation or annoyance, of which, indeed, as I have felt since then, he showed me but that which he could not help betraying. Had he been more tyrannical or exacting, my eyes might have opened; but he could not bear to give me pain. He let me torment him to my heart's content, also disdaining, it may be, to complain or lament. Once only he lost all patience. It was towards the close of winter. Kate was out; we sat alone in the parlour by the fireside. Cornelius had made me put down my work, and sat by me, holding my two hands in one of his, smoothing my hair with the other, and telling me--he had an eloquent tongue that knew how to tell those things, neither too much in earnest, nor yet too much in jest--of his fondness and affection. But I was not just then in the endearing mood. I tried to disengage my hands, and not succeeding, I said a little impatiently:-- "Pray don't!" He understood, or rather misunderstood me; for he drew away, reddening a little, and looking more embarrassed than displeased, he observed:-- "Where is the harm, Daisy?" "The harm?" I echoed, astonished at the idea, for between him and me I had never felt the shadow of a reserved thought; "why, of course, there is no harm, since it is you," I added, giving one of his dark locks a pull; "but it gives me the fidgets." Cornelius looked exasperated. "Thank you, Daisy," he said, with an indignant laugh, "thank you! I am no one; but I give you the fidgets!" "Why, what have I done now?" I asked, amazed. "How is it, Cornelius, that I so often offend you without even knowing why?" "And is not that the exasperating part of the business?" he exclaimed, a little desperately. "If you cared a pin for me, you would know--you would guess." "If I cared a pin for you!" I began; my tears checked the rest. He stopped in the act of rising, to look down at me with a strange mixture of love and wrath. "I'll tell you what, Daisy," he said, and his voice trembled and his lips quivered, "I'll tell you what, it is an odd thing to feel so much anger against you and yet so much fondness. I feel as if I could do anything to you, but I cannot bear to see you shed those few tears. Daisy, have the charity not to weep." He again sat by me. I checked my tears. He wiped away those that still lingered on my cheek. I looked up at him and asked, a little triumphantly: "Cornelius, where was the use of your flying out so?" "You may well say so," he replied, rather bitterly. "Do you think I don't know that if 1 were cool and careless, you would like me none the worse; but what avails the knowledge, since I never can use it against you?" I laughed at the confession. "And so that is the end of it," he said, looking somewhat downcast, "there seems to be on me a spell, that will never let me end as I begin. Oh! Daisy; why do I like you so well? That is the heel of Achilles--the only vulnerable point which, do what I will, renders me so powerless and so weak." "Then you do like me, you see," I said, smoothing his hair, "spite of all my faults!" "Yes, I do like you," he replied, returning the caress with a peculiar look, "and yet, Daisy, I am getting rather wearied of this task of Sisyphus, which I am ever doing, and which somehow or other is never done." "It was the heel of Achilles a while back, and now it is the stone of Sisyphus! What has put you into so mythological a mood?" Cornelius coloured, then turned pale, but did not answer. "Surely," I exclaimed, "you are not offended now about a few light words! Oh. Cornelius," I added, much concerned, "I see matters will never be right until you resume your authority, and I am again your obedient child. If you had always allowed me to consider you as my dear adopted father."-- I stopped short. He had not spoken; he had not moved; he still sat by me, calm, silent and motionless, with his look fixed on the fire and his hand in mine; but as I spoke, there passed something in his face, and even in his eyes, that told me I was probing to the very quick, the wound my careless hand had first inflicted. "Have I done wrong again?" I asked, dismayed. "Oh, no!" he replied, negligently; "it is only fair; I was once too careless, too indifferent--the girl has avenged the child--that is all!" "I am sure I have said something you don't like," I observed, anxiously. Cornelius took me in his arms and kissed me. "My good little girl," he said, "you are the best little girl in this world; and if you are only a little girl, you cannot help it--so keep your little heart in peace--and God bless you." He spoke kindly, and rose, looking down at me with a sort of fondness and pity which did not escape, and which half offended me. "But I am not a little girl, Cornelius," I replied, in a piqued tone. "Aren't you?" he said, taking hold of my chin with a smile and look that were not free from irony. "I beg your pardon; I thought you were the little girl that so long made a fool of Cornelius O'Reilly!" I gave him a surprised look; he laughed and took his hat; I followed him to the door and detained him. "You are not angry with me!" I observed, uneasily. "Angry with you!" he said, "no, my pet. What should I be angry for?" "I don't know, Cornelius; but I am glad you are not angry." He laughed again, and looked down at me as I stood by him with my hand on his arm, and my upraised face seeking his look; assured me kindly he was not at all angry, and left me. From that evening I could not say that Cornelius was less kind or seemed less fond of me, but I vaguely felt a change in his manner; something lost and gone I could neither understand nor recall. At first I was rather uneasy about it, then I attributed it to his painting, with which he was wholly engrossed. "The Young Girl Reading," had been finished for some time, and he was hard at work on his two Italian pictures. Never did he seem to have loved painting better; never to have given it more of his soul and heart. I went up to him one mild spring afternoon; I found him looking at his three pictures, and so deeply engrossed that he never heard me until I stood close by him. "Confess you were admiring them," I said, looking up at him smiling. He smiled too, but not at me. "Yes," he replied, quietly, "I see better than any one their merits and their faults; but such as they are, they have given me moments of the purest and most intense pleasure man can know." He spoke in a low abstracted tone, with a fixed and concentrated gaze. I looked at him again, and found him thin and pale. "You have been working too hard," I said, "you do not look at all well." "Don't I?" he replied, carelessly. "No. Kate made me notice it yesterday, and said 'the boy is in love, I think!' I said 'yes, and painting is the lady.' Confess, Cornelius, you like it better than anything else in this world." "Yes. Daisy, I do." "Better than me?" "Are you a thing?" "You call me a nice little thing, sometimes." "And so you are," he answered, smiling. "What do you think of that kneeling woman's attitude?" "Beautiful, like all you do, Cornelius." "It is beautiful, Daisy; and, alas! that I should say so, the only truly good thing in the whole picture. Well, no matter; with all my short- comings I am still--thank God for it!--a painter." "And what a triumph awaits you. Oh! Cornelius, how I long to see it!" He did not reply. Some imperfection in one of the figures had caught his eye; he was endeavouring to remove it, and appeared lost and intent in the task. I withdrew gently, and paused on the threshold of the door to look at him. He stood before his easel, absorbed in his labour; the light fell on his handsome profile and defined it clearly; his eyes, bent on his canvas, looked as if they could behold nothing else; no breath seemed to issue from his parted lips; he was enjoying in its fulness, the delight and the charm which God has placed in the labour dear to the artist's heart. In a few days more the pictures were finished and sent to the Academy. Cornelius felt no fear. His confidence was justified, for he soon learned, on good authority, that "The Young Girl Reading" and the two Italian pieces were not rejected. He expressed neither surprise nor pleasure. Indeed there was altogether about him an air of indifference and _ennui_ that struck his sister. She went up to him as he stood leaning against the mantelpiece, and laying her hand on her arm, she asked a little anxiously-- "What's the matter, lad? That girl has not been provoking you again; she's but a child, you know, and will grow wiser." "Of course she will," he replied, smoothing my hair, for I, too, stood by him; "a year or two will make a great change, Kate." His sister smiled a little archly. Cornelius asked if I would not take a walk. I accepted, and we had a long and pleasant stroll in the lanes, that already began to wear the light and tender verdure of spring. I saw by Kate's face when we returned, that something had happened. At length it came out. Mrs. Brand had called to see me. Mrs. Brand had learned by the merest chance that I was no longer at Thornton House, and was greatly grieved that I had not made the fact known to her sooner. Any resentment against me, for refusing to enter into her scheme, with regard to Mr. Thornton, did not seem to linger in her mind. She was all cousinly love and affection, reminded me of the promise I had made to spend some time at Poplar Lodge, and had parted from Miss O'Reilly with the avowed intention of coming to fetch me the very next day. I looked at Cornelius, who smiled, and leaning on the back of my chair, said kindly: "Why should you not have a little change and pleasure, my pet? You will not stay there more than a week or two." "Yes, Cornelius, but it is the time of the Academy." "What matter!" he interrupted; "we know the pictures are all right, and we have months to look at them together." I was very glad he took this view of the subject; for I wished to redeem my promise to my cousin, whose kindness I could not quite forget; and yet I would not for anything or any one have vexed Cornelius. Thus, therefore, it was settled with the approbation of Kate, who added, however, with a peculiar smile: "You let her go, Cornelius; but you'll be dreadful fidgetty until she comes back." "Of course I shall," he replied, smiling rather oddly. I knew he loved me dearly. I looked up at him with some pride; he looked down with an ardent fondness that went to my very heart. Unasked, I promised not to remain more than a week away. In the course of the next day Mrs. Brand called for me. Cornelius had gone out early, and had not come in. I told Kate to bid him adieu, and tell him I should not remain beyond the week. She smiled. "A week, child!" she said; "be glad if he lets you remain three days away." I laughed, kissed her, and entered the light and elegant open carriage in which Mrs. Brand had condescendingly come to visit her obscure little cousin. CHAPTER XV. There is a way of leaning back in an open carriage which only those accustomed to its use can attain--a sort of well-bred indolence--of riding over the world--of indifference to its concerns, which requires long and constant practice. Mrs. Brand possessed that art in the highest degree. Walking in the street, she would have seemed a thin, faded, insignificant woman; but, reclining in her carriage, with her _ennuy?_ air, her carelessness, and her impertinence, she was stamped with aristocracy. We had soon reached Poplar Lodge. It stood about a mile from the Grove, by the lanes, and twice that distance by the high road. I knew the place well--it was small, but the most beautiful residence in the neighbourhood. It stood in the centre of lovely pleasure-grounds--a white and elegant abode, filled with all that could charm the fancy and attract the eye. Pictures, statues, books, furniture, simple yet costly, were there, without that profusion which mars the effect of the most beautiful things. Mrs. Brand perceived my admiration, and led me from room to room with careless ostentation. At length, we came to a small gallery, filled with exquisite pictures. "There are not many," she said, negligently, "but they are good. All modern, and almost all English. The blank spaces which you see will, I dare say, be filled up from this year's Academy." My heart beat fast. I thought at once of Cornelius, and I saw his three pictures already hung up in my cousin's gallery. "And so you like Poplar Lodge," observed Mrs. Brand, taking me back to the drawing-room. "Well, it is a pretty place. And don't you think," she added, sighing as she glanced around her, "that Edward's wife will be a happy woman?" "I don't know, Ma'am; but I know she will have a lovely house, and delightful chairs, too," I added, sinking down, as I spoke, into a most luxurious arm-chair. "My dear, she will have what one who speaks from experience can assure you is far above such worldly comforts--a devoted husband." Mrs. Brand's cambric handkerchief was drawn forth, unfolded, and raised to her eyes in memory of the departed. "And Mrs. Langton and this place will suit one another so well," I said, looking round the luxurious drawing-room. "I can fancy her wandering about those grounds as lovely as a lady in a fairy tale, or passing from one beautiful room to another, like a princess in her palace. She will be the crowning piece of perfection of Mr. Thornton's dwelling." Mrs. Brand hastily removed her handkerchief, and assured me: "That was over--quite over; a most unfortunate affair. It had once been her darling wish to see her friend and her brother united; but even she had felt it was impossible. They had felt it themselves, and had agreed to forget the past." I smiled at the idea of this hollow truce. "Besides," pensively continued Mrs. Brand, "I have strong reasons to believe his affections are engaged elsewhere. I hear him coming in; you will notice at once how pale and low-spirited Edward looks." The entrance of Edward prevented my reply. He started with astonishment on seeing me, and greeted me with a mixture of embarrassment and tender courtesy that surprised me a little. He asked after Mr. Thornton's health. "I hope he is well," I replied, smiling; "but I am your neighbour now. Is it not delightful?" I meant delightful to be again with my friends; to my amusement he smiled and bowed. "Miss Burns has been admiring your pictures," said Mrs. Brand. Mr. Thornton was happy if anything at Poplar Lodge had afforded me pleasure. "Anything!" I echoed, "why it is everything. From his appearance I could not have believed the late Mr. Wyndham had such exquisite taste." Mrs. Brand laughed, and informed me the place was bare in Mr. Wyndham's time. Mr. Thornton's modesty, alarmed at the indirect compliment he had received, induced him to change the subject of discourse by showing me a handsome collection of drawings. We were engaged in looking over them, when Mrs. Langton, who was also on a visit to her dear Bertha, entered. "Those two are always so fond of drawings!" said Mrs. Brand, rising to receive her. I looked up, and saw the beautiful Edith glancing at us across the table. She had left by her weeds, and looked wonderfully lovely in a robe of changing silk. She stood with her hand clasped in that of her friend, and her beautiful arm partly left bare by her falling sleeve. Her face was turned towards us; her dark hair, braided back from her fair brow, wound in a diadem above it; her cheeks were flushed like roses; her blue eyes were full of light and softness. "Mrs. Brand," I thought, "you may do what you like, your Edith shall reign here yet." She graciously expressed her pleasure at seeing me again; and gently sinking down on a divan, looked lovely, until we went down to dinner. I spent the next day, Saturday, shopping in town with Mrs. Brand, and thought it rather hard work. Sunday I claimed and obtained to pass at the Grove. I came upon Cornelius suddenly, as he sat in the back-parlour by the open window; his elbow on the sill, his brow resting on the palm of his hand. Before he knew of my presence, my arms were around his neck, and my lips had touched his cheek. He started, then returned the embrace with lingering tenderness; and Kate, who came in, laughed at us both, and said one might think we had been years apart. It was foolish to be glad to see him again after so short a separation; I knew it, but could not help it. He, too, seemed glad; I had never seen him in better spirits; and seldom had I spent even with him, a pleasanter day. With regret, I saw approach the hour that should take me back to Poplar Lodge. Cornelius said he would accompany me by the lanes. They looked very lovely on that mild spring evening, and we talked pleasantly and happily as we walked along. At length we reached the end of a long lane that brought us to a grated iron door--the back entrance of Poplar Lodge. We stopped short; the place and the moment stand before me like a picture still. The lane was lonely, and hushed rather than silent. The heavy clouds of night were gathering slowly in the lower sky. In its serener heights, the full moon had risen, and now looked down at us between two of the large poplar trees that had given its name to my cousin's abode. I stood by Cornelius, one arm passed in his, his other hand clasping mine. "When will you come back?" he asked, bending over me. "Next Saturday, I hope." "Not before?" "No, Cornelius, I could not, you know." "Can't you try?" "Indeed, Cornelius. I am afraid I cannot. You know I long to be back with you and Kate." "Very well, then; Saturday let it be. And yet, Daisy, why not Friday?" "Cornelius, I assure you I think it would be taken amiss if I were to leave on Friday." He submitted, gave me a quiet kiss, and rang the bell. A white figure emerged from a neighbouring avenue, and Mrs. Langton, recognising me through the iron grating, took down the key that always hung by the door, and admitted me, smiling. I introduced Cornelius somewhat awkwardly. He stood with the light of the moon full on his face and figure. I caught Mrs. Langton giving him two or three rapid and curious looks, but she only made a few civil and commonplace remarks. He answered in the same strain, bowed, and left us. "And so, Miss Burns," softly observed Mrs. Langton, as she closed and locked the gate, "that is your adopted father--as Mr. Edward Thornton calls him, I believe." "Yes," I said, quietly, "Cornelius is, indeed, my adopted father; but he does not like me to consider him so." "Indeed!" "Oh, no: he does me the honour to hold me as his friend." Mrs. Langton suppressed a rosy smile, and talked of the beauty of the evening as we walked through the grounds to the Lodge. Mr. Thornton was out, and Mrs. Brand whispered confidentially that my absence might be the cause. He came in, however, sufficiently early, and as I sat apart rather silent, his sister felt sure I suffered from low spirits, and gave him the duty of enlivening me. He smiled, bowed, and settling himself in a comfortable arm-chair by me, entered on the task. But I remained obstinately grave, until, from topic to topic, he came to the Academy. My cousin gave me the tidings that it was to open in two days. He hoped I would accompany Mrs. Brand. He knew my judgment was excellent, and felt anxious to have my opinion of several pictures he had already secured, and of others he intended purchasing. "Oh, I shall be so glad!" I exclaimed, with an eagerness that made him smile. I reddened at the thought that my motive had been detected, and tried to repair my blunder; but do what I would, I could not help betraying my pleasure. I laughed, I talked, I was not the same. "Have I really succeeded so well?" whispered my cousin. The spirit of mischief is not easily repressed at seventeen. I looked up at him, and answered saucily-- "Better than you think." Mr. Thornton laughed, and declared I was the most delightfully original and _naive_ girl he had ever met with. It rained the whole of the following day, which we spent at Poplar Lodge, to the great disgust of the slave of the world. But the next morning rose lovely and serene. At an early hour we were at the doors of the Royal Academy. I knew that the pictures of Cornelius were accepted; on that head I therefore felt no uneasiness, yet my heart beat as we ascended the steps of the National Gallery. A glance at the catalogue dispelled all lingering fear. As my cousin placed it in my hands, he accompanied it with a pencil case, and a whispered entreaty to mark the pictures I approved. I looked up at him, smiling to think he had chosen a judge so partial. We had no sooner entered the first room than Mrs. Brand was overpowered with the heat. When she recovered, she thought she should go and look at the miniatures with her dear Edith. She knew we did not like the miniatures, and requested that we should go our own way. She and her dear Edith would go their own way. We resisted this a little, but Mrs. Brand was peremptory, and at length we yielded and parted from them. Absorbed in the engrossing thought "Are they well hung?" I performed my critical office very inaccurately; but having been so fortunate as to single out two of the pictures Mr. Thornton had purchased, I escaped detection, and received several warm compliments on my good taste. He was informing me how much he relied upon it, when we suddenly came to the two Italian pieces of Cornelius. "What do you think of these?" I said carelessly. "Poor, very poor," he replied, and passed on. I heard him mortified and mute; all my hopes dispelled at once by all this sweeping censure. The pictures of Cornelius poor! Those two beautiful Italian things, which would have filled so well the blank spaces in the gallery! I was astonished and indignant at Mr. Thornton's bad taste. He might mark his own pictures now, I would have nothing more to do with him; he was evidently conceited, impertinent, insolent, and he had neither heart nor soul, for he could not appreciate the beautiful. Unconscious of my feelings, my cousin went on criticising. "What are they all looking at?" he said, drawing near to where a crowd had gathered around one of the lower paintings. "At some stupid picture or other," I replied, impatiently. "It is always the stupid pictures that the people look at." He smiled at the petulant speech, and, spite of my evident indifference made way for me through the crowd of gazers; but I turned away, I would not look. With an ill-repressed smile of contempt, I listened to the "exquisite," "beautiful," "a wonderful thing," which I heard around me. "Yes," I thought, scornfully, "much you know about it, I dare say." "I really think we must mark this one," whispered my cousin. "What do you say?" I looked up ungraciously, but the book and pencil-case nearly dropped from my hands as I recognized "The Young Girl Reading." "Don't you like it?" asked Mr. Thornton, smiling. Oh! yes, I liked it! and him whose genius had created it, and whose master-hand had fashioned it; ay! and for his sake I liked even those who gazed on it, in a fast increasing crowd; and as if I had never seen it before, I looked with delighted eyes at the work of Cornelius. There was something in the admiration it excited I could not mistake. It was genuine and true. He was at length, after seven years of toil, known and famous. Sudden repute must have something of a breathless joy, but it cannot possess the sweetness of a slow-earned and long-coming fame. I felt as if I could have looked for ever; but the crowd was pressing eagerly behind us: my cousin led me away. "I see you will not mark it," he gaily said, taking the catalogue from me. "Do you really like it?" I asked, stammering. "Do I like it? Why it is a wonderful picture! the most perfect union I have ever seen of the real and ideal. It is not sold, is it?" I replied I thought not. He said he hoped not; that he should be quite concerned to miss it; and he proceeded to pay the genius of Cornelius very high and handsome compliments. I heard him with beating heart and swimming eyes; I felt too happy; it was not more than I had expected ever since the return of Cornelius from Italy; but for being anticipated, his triumph was not to me less glorious and delightful. I could think of nothing else; my eyes saw, but my mind could receive no impressions. Whatever picture I looked at became "The Young Girl Reading" with the crowd around her. Mr. Thornton thought the heat affected me, and proposed joining his sister. We soon found her with Mrs. Langton. They looked dull and tired. As we entered the carriage, Mrs. Brand asked, with her air of _ennui_, how I liked the pictures, and if I had been amused. "More than amused," I replied, warmly. Mr. Thornton half smiled, and looked into the street; Mrs. Brand shut her eyes, and reclined back with an air of satisfaction, and Mrs. Langton flushed up like a rose. I looked at the three, and thought them odd people. On the following evening, the slave of the world was to receive and entertain her master; in other words, to give a party. I had virtuously resolved not to be amused, and not to enjoy the pleasure I could not share with Cornelius; but when the time came, I forgot all about it. It was my first party, and what a party! The rooms were always beautiful, and when lit up, looked splendid. Then this constant rolling of coming and departing carriages; this pouring in of fashionable, well-dressed people; their flow of easy speech, greetings and smiles, gave the whole something so luxurious and seducing, that I felt enchanted. Mrs. Langton, who looked exquisitely lovely in white silk--I wore my blue dress--kindly took me under her patronage. She was a world-known beauty, and whenever she went out, drew crowds around her. We were soon surrounded with adorers. All could not reach the divinity, and a few condescended to offer up incense at my humbler shrine. Two young Englishmen, rosy and bashful; a Dane as pale as Hamlet, and a Spaniard, fell to my stare. We also had an occasional dropping of grave gentlemen in spectacles, or dashing, military-looking men, whiskered and mustachioed, with an apparition of fair ladies, duly attended, who smiled and nodded at Mrs. Langton as they passed smelling bouquets or fanning themselves, but who took care not to linger in such dangerous vicinity. I felt amused and entertained; but my real pleasure began with the daucing. I was fond of it, and I had plenty of pleasant partners. As I once came back to my seat, flushed as much with enjoyment as with the exercise, Mrs. Langton, who would not discompose her beauty by dancing, stooped over me, and gently whispered:-- "You little flirt, one would think you had received world incense all your life. Look opposite," she added, in a still lower tone. I followed the direction of her gaze, and saw in the embrasure of a door, standing and looking at me, with sorrowful attention, Cornelius. "He has been there these two hours," said Mrs. Langton, smiling, "and you never even saw him, which I hold very unkind to me; for, thinking you would like to meet your friend, I asked a card from Bertha, and did not mention the name to her, lest you should not enjoy the surprise. And here am I actually obliged to tell you all about it." I know not what I said to her, I felt so disturbed. I knew that I had surrendered myself rather freely to the pleasures of the evening, and he had seen it all, I had never even perceived him. I looked at him across the crowd that divided us. He caught my eye, and turned away abruptly. I rose, and gliding swiftly through the guests, I tried to join him; but he eluded me. I went from room to room, without being able to reach him. At length, I lost sight of him altogether, and gave up my useless search. I had reached the last room, a pretty little French sort of boudoir, adorned with exquisite Dresden ornaments, and thence called "Dresden" by Mrs. Brand. It was now quite solitary. I sat down, sad and dispirited, on a low couch, and was immediately joined by Mr. Thornton, who had been following me all the time, and gently rallied me on the chase I had led him. He sat down by me, and informed me that he had been wanting to speak to me the whole evening; but I had been so surrounded, that he had found it quite impossible to get at me. I coloured violently: if he had noticed it, what would Cornelius think? "I wanted to tell you," confidentially observed Edward Thornton, drawing closer to me, "that I have secured 'The Young Girl Reading.' She is mine," he added, with rather a long look of his fine blue eyes. "You have bought it," I exclaimed joyfully. "And paid for it," he answered smiling. "How delightful!" I said, "I mean that you have bought it," I added, fearing I had exposed the poverty of Cornelius by the hasty remark. He smiled again, and passed his slender fingers in his brown hair. "Where will you hang it?" I asked eagerly. "In the long vacant place of honour, between my Wilkie and my Mulready." For these two great artists, Cornelius felt a warm and enthusiastic admiration. I thought of his pride and triumph when I should tell him this, and I glowed with a pleasure I cared not to conceal. "Mr. Thornton!" I exclaimed, turning on him flushed and joyous, "you have made me as happy as any crowned queen." "Why have I not a crown to lay it at your feet?" he very gallantly replied, taking my hand, and pressing it gently as he spoke. At that moment, through the door which Edward Thornton had left partly open, I thought I caught sight of Cornelius for an instant; the next he had disappeared in the crowd. I snatched my hand from my cousin, started up, ran to the door, opened it wide, and looked eagerly; but Cornelius had again vanished. I returned much disappointed to Mr. Thornton, who seemed amazed at my precipitate flight. "I had seen Mr. O'Reilly," I said, apologetically. "Mr. O'Reilly! Ah, indeed." "Yes; and I wanted to speak to him. It was for that I came here, you know." My cousin gave me a puzzled look, then suddenly recovering, said hastily: "Of course, it was. Mr. O'Reilly, as you say." "I am sure, you think it odd," I observed uneasily. He denied it with a guarded look. I thought it worse than odd, and my eyes filled with involuntary tears. Mr. Thornton rose and sympathised respectfully. "My dear Miss Burns," he whispered drawing nearer to me, "I am truly grieved; but your kindness, your frank condescension, made me presume-- indeed, I am grieved." I heard him with surprise. "Decidedly," I thought, "we are all wrong," and aloud I observed gravely: "Mr. Thornton, is there not some mistake? I am talking of Mr. O'Reilly." "And so am I," he answered promptly. "And I should like to see if I could not find him." He offered me his arm with a polite start, and an air of tenderness and homage that perplexed me; but though we went all over the rooms, Cornelius was not to be found. As the guests began to thin and depart I lost all hope, and releasing my cousin from duty, sat down in one of the nearly deserted rooms. Mrs. Langton at once came up to me, and asked if I had seen my friend. I replied that I had caught sight of him from the little Dresden room, when I was there with Mr. Thornton. "In the Dresden room," she said, looking astonished; "and do you really, a fair maiden of eighteen, venture to remain alone in a Dresden room? alone with so gay and gallant a gentleman as Edward Thornton? Don't you know, dear?" she added, edging her chair to mine, and lowering her voice; "he is quite a naughty man! Did you never hear of him and Madame Polidori, the singer--no?--nor of Mademoiselle Rosalie, nor of Madame?--" I stopped the list by gravely hoping she was mistaken. She assured me she was not, and wanted to resume the subject, but it was one in which I took neither pleasure nor interest; and I listened so coldly, that she reddened, bit her lip, and left me. The guests were all gone. As she bade the last adieu, Mrs. Brand sank down in a chair by the open window, and sighed to her brother: "Ah! Edward, as our own English Wordsworth so finely says: 'The world is too much with us--'" The rest of the sonnet was lost, I suppose, in the whisper that followed. Mr. Thornton seemed to pay it but faint attention; his look was fixed with intent admiration on Mrs. Langton, who stood by a table turning over the leaves of an album with careless grace. "What a night!" resumed Mrs. Brand; "with that moon and that starry sky, one might forget the world, the vain world for ever, Edward." Edward still looked at the beautiful Edith, and seemed inclined to make a move in her direction, out of the reach of the moon and the starry sky. But his sister looked at me, and whispered something. He bowed his head in assent, and came up to me. He seemed for some mysterious reason to think it incumbent on himself to be very kind and sympathetic, and to speak to me in a tender and soothing tone. Wrapped up in thinking of Cornelius, I paid his words but faint attention; but as my cousin stood with his hand on the back of my chair, I saw Mrs. Langton look at us over her shoulder in silent scorn. I looked at her, too, and as she stood there in all her wonderful beauty, I marvelled jealousy could make her so blind, as to lead her to fear for a moment a plain, humble girl like me. CHAPTER XVI. Although I had not thought it necessary to mention to Mrs. Brand how soon I meant to return to the Grove, she took complete possession of me for the whole of the next day; but, the following morning, I prevented the possibility of her doing so again, by starting out of Poplar Lodge before she had opened her aristocratic eyes. I wanted to see Cornelius, and make him explain his strange conduct. I went by the lane where we had parted. It was a very beautiful lane-- green, secluded, and overshadowed by dark trees. It looked fresh and pleasant on this May morning. The dew glittered on grass, tree and wild flower; the thrush carolled gaily on the young boughs, and the robin red- breast looked at me fearlessly with his bright black eye, as he stood perched on the budding hawthorn hedge. A grievous disappointment waited me at the end of my journey. The blinds were down--the house was closed and silent. I rang, and received no reply. I went to the front, with the same result. For an hour and more I wandered about the lanes; but every time I came back, I found the house in the same state. At length, I returned to Poplar Lodge, where my absence had not been perceived. Mrs. Brand's party had given her a headache. She lay on the drawing-room sofa the whole day long, and would evidently consider it very barbarous to be forsaken. I remained sitting by her until dusk, which brought Mrs. Langton, and relieved me from my duty. I went out on the verandah for a little fresh air. I had not been there long, when a rustling robe passed through the open window. It was the beautiful Edith. "Are you not afraid of taking cold?" she asked aloud; then whispered, "Say no." As "no" chanced to be the truth, I complied with Mrs. Langton's wish. "Oh! that exquisite old thorn!" she sighed; then added, in a low rapid key: "I have been so angry. I heard such strange things about you and Mr. Thornton. All the Dresden room." I laughed. "What are you two chatting about?" asked the voice of Mrs. Brand from within. "I am only telling Miss Burns to mind Captain Craik," coolly replied Mrs. Langton, "he was quite attentive the other night." "Really, Mrs. Langton," I observed impatiently, "you forget the gentleman you allude to could be my father, and is, after all, a middle-aged man." "A middle-aged man!" echoed Mrs. Langton, looking confounded. "You are hard to please, Miss Burns; a most elegant and accomplished gentleman--a middle-aged man!" "If he were an angel, he is not the less near forty." "Still talking of Captain Craik," rather uneasily observed Mrs. Brand, joining us, "Edith, dear, are you not afraid of the tooth-ache?" "No, Bertha, dear." "But I am for you. You must come in." Mrs. Brand slipped her arm within that of her friend, and made her re- enter the drawing-room. But something or some one called her away, for in a few minutes, Mrs. Langton was again by me. She came on me suddenly, before I could efface the trace of recent tears. The evening was light and clear. She looked at me and said: "I could have spared you this, Miss Burns. Mr. Thornton--" "Indeed, Ma'am," I interrupted, "I am not thinking of Mr. Thornton; but I fear Mr. O'Reilly is vexed with me: that is the truth." I thought this would rid me of her tiresome jealousy, but it did not. "Poor child!" she said compassionately, "I see you know nothing. Perhaps it is scarcely right to betray Bertha to you; but can I help also feeling for you? Do you know the play of Shakespeare entitled 'Much Ado about Nothing'?" "Yes, Ma'am, I know it." "Do you remember the ingenious manner in which two of the characters are made to fall in love with one another? Benedick thinks Beatrice is dying for him, and Beatrice thinks the same thing of him." "That was vanity, Ma'am, not love." "Ay, but vanity is a potent passion, and 'Much Ado about Nothing' is a play still daily enacted on the scene of the world." I heard her with some impatience; I thought her discourse resembled the play of which it treated. She saw plain speech alone would make me comprehend her meaning. "Our dear Bertha," she sighed, "has quite a passion for match-making. For instance, she will teaze me about Captain Craik, and says he is mad about me. I don't mind it, provided she does not say the same thing to him." "Oh!" I replied, quite startled, "that would be too bad." "So it would; but I fear it. Captain Craik has been very peculiar of late." I felt uncomfortable. It was not to end with Captain Craik we had travelled over the slow ground of this ambiguous discourse. "Now do you know." resumed Mrs. Langton, "I cannot help fancying that Bertha has been indulging in the same little pastime with you and her brother." "Not with me," I said, eagerly; "she never even hinted it." "You are slow at taking hints," replied Mrs. Langton with a sceptical smile. "But why should she think of me?" I asked, incredulously; "I am not a beauty," I added, looking at her, "I have no wealth--no position. Why should she wish to marry me to her brother?" "To make a good sister-in-law," answered Mrs. Langton, quietly. I felt there was something in that, and remained mute with consternation. "And do you think," she resumed, laughing softly, "he has been quite so slow to take the hint? Why, child, you have scarcely said a word that he has not modestly converted into a proof of your passion for him. Remember how sympathising he was on the evening of the party; he thought: 'Poor little thing! I must be kind. It is plain she is fretting herself away for my sake.'" She spoke with evident conviction. I remembered words and looks, and I grew hot and faint. "Oh, Mrs. Langton!" I exclaimed desperately, "what shall I do? how can I undeceive him?" "Leave the house at once," she promptly replied. "Will it not be better to stay for another day or so, just to be cool with him?" "He will think it shyness." "And despair if I run away. No, I must stay to undeceive him." "And to give him time to inform you in his civil, gentlemanly way, how deeply he feels for you." "Then I can show him I don't want his sympathy." "He will think it pride or pique. Take my advice, Miss Burns. You are in a false position. Retreat." She laid her hand on my arm and spoke impressively. But youth is rash; I scorned the idea of flight. Besides I had no faith in her advice. With the frank indignation of my years, I felt how meanly my candour and inexperience had been imposed upon. "So, Mrs. Brand," I thought resentfully, "you had me here, because you thought I might make a manageable sister-in-law! Much obliged to you, Mrs. Brand; you will have your dear Edith, yet. But to go and tell or imply to her brother that I was in love with him, with a man who might be my father! "Besides, even if it had been true, how barbarous to betray me! And you, too, Mrs. Langton," I thought, looking at her, "you too have not thought it beneath your pride to deceive me: talking ill to me of the very man you love--as much as you can love--accusing him of profligacy! Then, so piqued because I said he was middle-aged!--and so kindly anxious to make me look foolish by running away! Go! no indeed! It is very odd if I cannot finesse a little in my turn, and, without committing myself, get out of this spider's web into which, like a foolish fly, I have got entangled; and it is very odd, too, if I cannot change the web a little, before I spread out my wings and take my flight back to the home foolish flies should never leave." I was thoroughly piqued, and walked restlessly from one end of the verandah to the other. I set my wits to work; thought rapidly followed thought; schemes were made and rejected with every second; at length, both mentally and bodily, I stopped short. "I have it," I thought, triumphantly; "I am not so dull but that I have noticed certain passages between a fair lady and a certain gentleman; I have always thought they would end by marrying; I am certain of it now. I shall act on that belief; say something; no matter what; he likes my _naivete_--to prove to my dear cousin that I consider Edith as good as Mrs. Edward Thornton. Let him like it or not, I shall take his vexation as excellent sport, glide out of it with a laugh, then beg pardon, apologize, and show him he may marry the Queen of Sheba, for all it matters to Daisy Burns." I felt confident of success; and, elated with my scheme, I turned to Mrs. Langton, and said, gaily:-- "I have such a good idea!--only I cannot tell you. But you shall see how it will work." She bit her lip, and gave me a mistrustful look. "I have warned you," she said; "I warn you again; do not think yourself equal to Bertha. If she chooses to convince her brother that you are in love with him, I consider it out of the question that you can prevent her." "I shall see that," I replied, indignantly. "Yes," said Mrs. Langton, "you will have that satisfaction." "Then what should I gain by running away?" I asked, a little tartly. "The best thing I can do is to stay, look on, and learn how these matters are managed." Mrs. Langton gave me another mistrustful look, and withdrew. I saw she did not believe in my sincerity; perhaps she did not think it possible to resist Edward Thornton, and repented having been so frank. Her thoughts did not trouble me. The more I reflected on my scheme, the better I liked it. I enjoyed, in advance, the manner in which my cousin would open his fine blue eyes. I was not vexed with him; but I remembered the Dresden room, and was determined he should be as fairly undeceived as ever he had been deluded. Absorbed in these thoughts, I remained on the verandah, looking at the beautiful garden and grounds beneath. A visitor came, was received by Mrs. Langton, stayed awhile, left, and still I did not re- enter the drawing-room, where Mrs. Brand and her friend now sat, working and talking by lamp-light. At length, scarce knowing why, I began to pay a vague attention to their discourse. "I think we are going to have a storm," said the soft voice of Mrs. Langton; "it will clear the air, perhaps. Doctor Morton says the weather has been so unhealthy; typhus so prevalent amongst the poor. He mentioned the case of a labourer who has just died, leaving a widow and nine children." "Very sad, indeed," composedly replied Mrs. Brand; "but then you know, my dear, typhus is generally confined to the poor--which is a sort of comfort." "It is not always the case," said Edith; "there have been several deaths amongst tradespeople." "Ah! poor things, they have to deal with the poor, you see; but what I mean is, that it seldom goes higher up; which is a great comfort, you know; for what good would it do the poor that those above them should die?" "None, of course. The doctor also mentioned another case--very sad too-- such a fine young man, he had been told, an artist, I think; but he did not know his name, who is lying ill--all but given up." "Really," said Mrs. Brand, "this gets quite alarming. Do you know whereabouts that unfortunate young man lives?" Until then, I had listened to them as we listen to speech in which we take no interest. I was young, full of health; the evening air felt pleasant and fresh about me; and standing on that cool verandah above a fragrant garden, I recked not of the fevered dwellings where the poor perish, and of the sick chamber where even the rich man may be reached by death; but when Mrs. Langton spoke of the young artist who lay given up, I felt touched. When Mrs. Brand asked to know where he dwelt, I just turned my head a little to catch the reply of the beautiful Edith. She gave it carelessly. "In a place called the Grove, I believe; is it far off?" "Two miles away at least," complacently replied Mrs. Brand. I know not how I entered the room; but I know that the two ladies screamed faintly, as they saw me stepping in, through the open window. "Miss Burns, is the house on fire?" exclaimed Mrs. Brand. "'T is he!" I said, with that dead calmness which many find in their woe. "I know it is. We live in the Grove, and there is not another artist in it." "I am not sure he is an artist," said Edith, rising. "I now think it was an architect." "There is no architect in the Grove," I replied; "not one." "My dear," observed Mrs. Brand, soothingly taking my hand, "it is all a mistake, depend upon it." I looked at her, and shook my head. "The house was close and silent; the blinds were drawn down. I know why now--lest the contagion should reach me." Mrs. Brand dropped my hand rather hastily. "I shall send and inquire at once," she observed. "Pacify yourself, my dear." She stretched out her hand to ring the bell. "You need not," I said, "I am going." "Oh! but you must not!" cried Mrs. Brand, "think of the danger." I laughed drearily in her face. "Of the contagion, my dear?" "Do not fear, I shall come back, Ma'am," I replied, turning to the door. She followed me. "My dear, you must have the carriage." "I shall go by the lanes," I said impatiently. The carriage was, I knew, the delay of at least an hour. "By the lanes, at this hour? I cannot allow it, Miss Burns." I turned round upon her. "But I will go," I said, and even in that moment, I wondered the woman could be so blind as to think her will had the power to detain me. Without heeding her astounded look, I ran up to my room, took down my cloth cloak, drew it around me, and drawing the hood over my head, I hastened down stairs to the garden. As I passed underneath the verandah, the voice of Mrs. Langton seemed to call me back, but the wind drowned her words, and I ran fast along the avenue. I had soon reached the iron gate; I took down the key, opened the door, and entered the lane. As 1 turned my back on Poplar Lodge, I caught a last glimpse of it rising against a dark sky, with a faint speck of light glimmering from the drawing-room window. No other light shone on my path; the sun had set bright and glorious, the evening had set in clear and serene; but a sudden eclipse had come; one vast gloom shrouded sky and earth; I never saw summer night like this for intense, for dreary darkness. I knew the way well; I walked straight on, swiftly and without pause, meeting no obstacles, fearing none, like one who passes through vacant space. Once I thought I heard a voice calling on me faintly in the distance behind; but I heeded it not, I did not answer, I did not look round; I went on as in a dream. Raised beyond the body by the passion of my grief, I felt not the ground beneath my feet; all I felt was that the wind as it swept by me with a low rushing sound, seemed to bear me on through that sombre and melancholy night, as a spirit to its viewless home. At length, the air became of a dead stillness; it was as if I had suddenly entered a silent and sultry region in which there was no breathing and no life. I stopped short; I looked round to see that I had not mistaken the way; a streak of fiery lightning passed through the darkness of the sky; for a moment I caught sight of an open space, in which I stood, and saw before me two long lanes diverging from a half ruined gateway, and vanishing into depths of gloom whence seemed to come forth the peal of far thunder that died away in low faint echoes. I knew the spot well; I had not missed the right path; I was half way on my journey. But as if this first flash had only been a signal, the brooding storm now broke forth. Before it fled at once the silence and the gloom of the hour. A low, wild murmur ran along the ground, then rose and lost itself in the wide and desolate hollow of the night; trees tossed about their dark boughs, and groaned lamentably like vexed spirits. As the sound of a loosened flood came the rushing rain, the wind rose ever deepening in its roar; and above all rolled the full thunder, louder than the deafening voice of battle, whilst, cleft with many a swift and silent flash, the dark sky opened like a sea of living fire, below which stretched a long, low moving shore of livid clouds. I stood still and looked; not with fear--to love and fear for what we love, is to be raised beyond all dread--but I felt dazzled with the ceaseless lightning, and dizzy with the tumult of the tempest; the heavy rain beat full in my face and blinded me; the strong gale rose against me in all its might. I could not move on; I could not turn back, seek shelter, or proceed; for a moment I yielded to the burst of the storm, and let the elements wreak their fury on my bowed head. But a thought stronger than even their power, more fearful than their wildest wrath, was on me. I drew down my hood, wrapped my cloak closer around me, and again went on drenched with the pouring rain, and often arrested, but never driven back by the impetuous blast. The storm was violent and brief. Soon the wind fell; the rain grew less heavy; the lightning less frequent and vivid; the thunder slowly retreated; the sky cleared, and melted into soft clouds, behind which, for the first time, shone the watery moon. She looked down on me with a wan and troubled face, boding sorrow; her dim light filled the path I now followed; on either side, like gloomy giants, rose the dark trees; the rain had ceased, but as I passed swiftly beneath the dripping boughs, they seemed shaken by an invisible hand to dash their chill dew-drops in my face. The smell of the wet earth rose strong on the humid air; in the ditch by me, I heard water flowing with a low, gurgling sound, and every now and then I came across a shallow pool lit with a pale and trembling moonbeam. The storm had not terrified me, but now my courage sank. This chill calm after the fury of the tempest; this sound of water faintly flowing, following on tumult so loud, seemed to me to speak of sorrow, death and utter desolation. The nearer I drew to the end of my journey, the more my heart failed me. As I turned down into the lane that led home, the church-clock struck twelve; every stroke sounded like a funeral knell on my ear; then a dog began to howl plaintively. I turned cold and sick--as a child, I had heard that this was a token of death. Oh! with what slow and weary steps, I drew near that door towards which I had hastened through all the anger of the storm, and which my heart now dreaded to reach. As I stood by it, my limbs trembled, my very flesh quivered, my blood seemed to have ceased to flow, my heart to beat, cold dew-drops gathered and stood on my brow, and something, an inward struggle, an agony without a name rose to my lips, and made one gasp for breath, but could not pass them. Twice I stretched out my hand to ring, and twice it fell powerless. I sank down on my knees; I uttered a passionate prayer: I asked--what will not the heart ask for?--for an impossible boon. "Even if he is to die. Oh God, do not let him die; even though he shall be dead, do not let him be dead!" I rose and rang. "Now," I thought, "I shall know it all at once in the face of Kate or Jane, whichever it may be that opens to me." I nerved myself to meet that look, as I heard a door opening within, then a step on the wet gravel, and caught a glimmer of light through the chinks of the door. I heard it unbarred and unbolted, then it opened partly; and standing on the threshold with the light of the upraised lamp in his face, I saw Cornelius. CHAPTER XVII. I think I could endure years of trouble and toil for the joy of that moment. My heart overflowed; I looked at Cornelius, then threw my arms around his neck, and burst into tears. My hood fell back, and with it my loosened hair. "Daisy!" he cried, for he had not recognized me till then. "Good God!" he added with sudden terror, "has anything happened to you?" "Nothing, Cornelius; but I am too happy--too happy--that is all." He drew back a little; looked at my drenched garments and bare head, as he closed the door, and led me in. "Daisy," he asked, anxiously, "what has brought you here at such an hour, in such a plight?" "I thought you were ill, dying, Cornelius! I felt beside myself, and ran home to you like a wild thing." We stood beneath the porch. Cornelius still held the lamp; its light fell on his pale, troubled face. With the arm that was free he drew me towards him, and looked down at me with mingled grief and tenderness. "Oh, Daisy!" he exclaimed, "whilst I sat within, sheltered and unconscious, have you, indeed, been exposed to the fury of this pitiless storm--and for my sake?" I shook back the hair from my face, and looking up into his, smiled. "Cornelius," I said, "if weary miles had divided us; if rivers had flowed across the path; if I should have walked bare-footed over sharp stones, I would have come to you to-night. I could not have kept away; I feel that my very heart would have flown to you, as a bird to its nest." "For Heaven's sake, go up to your room at once," he observed, uneasily. "Here is the light." I took it, and gaily ran up-stairs. I felt light with gladness--a new life flowed in my veins, a new vigour beat with my heart. I blessed God with every faculty of my being: as sincerely as if the miracle I had asked for, had been accomplished. I had soon changed my things, and went down very softly, not to waken Kate. The door of the back-parlour was ajar, and there I found Cornelius, standing by a newly-kindled fire. As I gently closed the door, I said, smiling: "I have made no noise. Kate never woke--how is she?" "She complains of a head-ache. The heat of the day, I suppose." "Yes," I replied, sitting down, taking his hand, and making him sit down by me on a little couch which he had drawn before the fire. "Yes, every one was out this morning, when I called and found the house shut up. Oh, Cornelius! how I thought of that with terror and dismay, as I came along the lanes." "The lanes!--you came by the lanes?" cried Cornelius, turning pale: "alone along that desolate road, where a cry for aid never could be heard! Daisy, how dare you do such a thing? How could they allow it?" "Cornelius, who would be out on such a night to harm me? As to daring, I would have dared anything. Mrs. Brand remonstrated, and sent, I believe, a servant after me; but I outstripped him easily. Terror lent me her wings." "I thought you felt no fear?" "No fear of man, but a most sickening cowardly dread of fever. Oh, Cornelius! if I had found you ill, or in danger of death, what should I have done, what would have become of me?" The mere thought was a torment that again sent the freezing blood to my heart. I shivered, and drew close to him. "There! you are quite pale again," said Cornelius, anxiously. "Oh, Daisy! do you then love me so much--so very much?" I looked up, and smiled at the question. But his face was burning, and expressed mingled pleasure, doubt, and pain. "Oh!" he continued, taking my hands in his, and speaking hesitatingly, "what am I to think of the girl who forgets her friend?" "I knew you were vexed and angry about the party," I interrupted. "I saw you." "And then, on the first false alarm, who returns to him so kindly, on a stormy night, by a dreary way, fearless though alone." "Now, Cornelius, what have I done that a good sister, or friend, or daughter, would not do?" Cornelius dropped my hands, and said, abruptly: "Do you not feel chill?" "Not with that fire. Do you know, Cornelius, now I am here again with you and Kate, I don't see why I should go back to Poplar Lodge. Suppose you ask me to stay. Well, what are you doing?" He had stood up, and was pouring out a glass of wine, which he handed to me. "Take it," he said. "To please you, Cornelius: but I do not want it. The sight of your face at the door was more reviving than wine to me." I just tasted the wine, and handed him the glass. He drank off its contents. His hand, in touching mine, had felt feverish, and he looked rather pale. "You are unwell," I said, uneasily. "Unwell!" he echoed, gaily. "I never felt better." He poured himself out another glass of wine, but I took it from him. "You must not!" I exclaimed, imperatively. "Oh, Cornelius! be careful," I added, imploringly. He laughed at my uneasiness; but there was something dreary in the sound of his laughter, which I did not like. "I tell you I am well--quite well," he persisted; "but I feel uneasy about you, Daisy. How this night will fatigue you! I dare not tell you to go to your room, lest it should be too chill; but will you try and sleep here?" "On condition that, when I am asleep, you will go up, and take some rest yourself." He promised to do so; and, to please him, I laid my head on the pillow of the couch. He removed the lamp from my eyes, but in vain I closed them, and tried to sleep. Every now and then I kept opening them again, and talking in that excited way, which is the result of over-wrought emotion. "Cornelius," I said, "I am now quite resolved to stay with you. I should feel too miserable to be even a day away. Always thinking about typhus, you know." "Sleep, child," was his only reply. I tried; but awhile afterwards I was again talking. "And the Academy!" I said, "and 'The Young Girl Reading'! Are the other pictures sold?" I half-rose on one elbow to look at Cornelius, who sat a little behind me. Without answering, he made me lie down again, and laid his hand on my eyes and brow. He possessed, perhaps, something of mesmeric power, for unconsciously I fell asleep; but mine was not a deep or perfect slumber. I was aware of a change that I could not understand or define. I felt, however, some one bending over me, and a long and lingering kiss was pressed on my brow. "It is Cornelius going up-stairs," I thought even in my sleep, but without awakening. My next remembrance is that I looked up with sudden terror, and that I found myself face to face with Kate, who sat by the table weeping bitterly. I looked for Cornelius and saw him not. "Kate, Kate!" I cried, starting to my feet, "where is he? What has happened?" She shook her head and never replied. I crossed the room and opened the door of the front parlour; it was empty and in confusion; I ran to the front door, opened it, and looked down the moonlit street. "Cornelius!" I cried, "Cornelius!" I paused and listened; all I heard was the sound of a carriage rolling away in the distance. My voice died on my lips in broken accents; my arms fell by my side powerless and dead. He was gone! gone without a word of explanation or adieu. In this one circumstance I read a remote journey and a long absence, and yet I would believe in neither. I re-entered the parlour where Kate still sat in the same attitude. I went up to her. "So he is gone to Yorkshire to see Mr. Smalley?" I said agitatedly. "He is gone to Spain," she briefly answered. My heart fell. "To Spain! for a few months, I suppose?" "For years!" "I don't believe it!" I cried, angrily; "he could not, would not do such a thing. You want to frighten me, Kate, but I don't believe you; no, I don't." "You do; in your heart you do; in your heart you know it." I did know it; for I gave way to a burst of passion and grief, and spoke to Kate as I never before had spoken. "Gone! gone to Spain, and for years! Kate! how dare you let him go and not tell me?" She looked up at me; her eyes flashing through her tears. "And how dare you speak so to me, foolish girl? Is Cornelius anything so near to you as he is to me? Did you rear him, sacrifice your youth to him, and then find yourself cast aside and forsaken, as I am this day?" "He reared me," I cried, weeping passionately. "Claim him by all you have sacrificed to him, my claim is all he has been to me! Oh! Kate, why did he go?" "What right have you to know?" she asked, with a jealous bitterness that exasperated me. "Every right," I replied, indignantly. "What have I done to be so treated?" "What have you done? Why, you have done that I believe there is nothing so dear to him as you are; that his last request was, that instead of going with him, I should stay with you and wait your wakening; that his last kiss was that which he gave you as you slept. If you want to know more, here is a letter for you. Ask me not another question; I shall not answer. I have no more to say, and I have enough of my own grief." She handed me a folded paper. I opened it and read:-- "Forgive me, Daisy, if I forsake you thus by stealth; but partings are bitter things. I wished to spare you some pain, and myself a severe though useless trial. I had promised to leave you and Kate no more; but you must have noticed how restless my temper has been of late; indeed, there is in my blood an unquiet fever which only liberty and a life of wandering can appease. Good bye, Daisy, God bless you! May you be happy, ay, even to the fullness of your heart's wishes." Kate need not have asked for my silence. I laid down her brother's letter without a word, not a syllable could I have uttered then; I was hurt; hurt to the very heart. Cornelius had forsaken me cruelly; he had done to the girl what pity would never have let him do to the child; he had left me in my sleep, without one word of adieu. I felt the shock and bitterness of this sudden separation, and more bitterly still the desertion. How could I, after this, think that Cornelius cared for me? He had liked me, amused himself with me, but I had never been to him that living portion of the heart which we call a friend. I could bear his absence, but that he should not care for me, that he should have been trifling with me all along, I could not bear. I paced the room up and down, vainly trying to keep in my sobs and tears. As I passed by the table, a folded paper caught my attention, I seized it eagerly with that vague hope which clings to everything. In this case it was not deceived. "Oh! Kate, Kate!" I cried, throwing my arms around her neck in a transport of joy too deep not to make me forget the few sharp words that had passed between us. "Well, what is it?" she asked, amazed. "He'll come back; he'll come back; he has forgotten his passport. Oh! I am so glad! so happy; he can't travel without it, you know. I defy him to go to Spain now." I laughed and cried for joy. She sighed. "And if he does come back," she said, "it will be to go away again." "We shall see that," I replied indignantly. "I will not let him, Kate. He has accustomed me to have my way of late, and in this I will have it." She shook her head incredulously; but I was confident and did not heed her; a low rumbling sound down the street had attracted my attention. "There he is!" I cried joyfully; and with a beating heart I ran to the street door. I opened it very softly, and keeping it ajar, I listened. The sound had ceased, and for a moment all I heard was the voice of Kate whispering in my ear-- "Daisy, if you let him go this time, I shall never forgive you. Do not mind what I said; keep him; you can if you wish." I had not time to think on her words or ask her for their meaning; a quick and well-known step was coming up the Grove--the garden gate opened--no bell rang, but a hand tapped lightly at the parlour shutters. I opened the door wide and Cornelius, for it was he, came up to me. "I have forgotten my passport," he said, in a low tone; "it is on the table in the back-parlour. Is she still asleep?" Before I could reply, the moon, that had kept hid behind a dark cloud, came forth bright and undimmed; her light fell on my face; I saw him start. "Will you not come in, Cornelius?" I said quietly. But he stood there at the door of his own home, mute and motionless as a statue. "Well then," I continued, "I must go out to you; perhaps before you cross the seas again, standing on the threshold of your dwelling, you will not refuse to grant me what you did not think fit to give me within it--the luxury of a last adieu--of a last embrace!" I stepped out to him as I spoke; but he made me re-enter the house, and followed me in. "Daisy," he said, with a sigh, "I wished to leave whilst you were away, and fate brought you back; I stole away whilst you were asleep, and I was compelled to return and find you awake. I thought to spare us both some pain. I cannot; be it so; you shall have your wish." His voice plainly said: "Your wish, and no more." "Very well," I replied, quietly; for though I was resolved he should not go, I knew better than to startle him. We re-entered together the back parlour; Kate had left it; but the lamp still burned on the table. Cornelius sat down by it; his face was pale, watchful, determined. I saw he was fully on his guard, and prepared to resist unflinchingly to the last. I was as determined to insist and prevail. Oh! daily life, that art called tame and reproved as dull, how is it that to me thou hast ever been so full of strange agitating dramas, I sat down by Cornelius; I passed my arm within his, and looking up into his face, I said: "When, a few hours ago, I felt so glad to see you safe, Cornelius, I knew not I was looking my last for a long time." He did not answer; I continued: "Oh, if I had known we were going to part, how differently I should have spent this evening! I would not have talked away so foolishly, but have asked you so many questions--settled so many things! whereas now I have only a few minutes, and can think of nothing save that you are going away, Cornelius." He quailed, but only momentarily; if his lip trembled a little, his unmoved look told of unconquerable resolve. "You, it seems," I resumed, "had nothing to say to me, Cornelius, or you could not have wished to go away thus?" He drew forth his watch, and said, briefly: "I must go soon, Daisy." "Kate says you are to be years away--is it true?" His silence was equivalent to an assent. "Well then, give me the farewell of years," I said, passing my arms around his neck, and compelling his face to look down at mine. He seemed a little troubled, and made a motion to rise. I detained him. "A little longer," I entreated; "I have thought of some things about which I wish to question you." "Pray be quick, Daisy." "Why do you go to Spain?" "For change." "You are tired of us?" "I am tired of a quiet life." "Go to France, Cornelius." "Why so?" "It is nearer." "Daisy, I must really go now." "A little longer; I have something else to say." "What is it?" "I have forgotten; but give me time to remember." I laid my head on his shoulder as I spoke. "Daisy," he asked, "what have you to say?" I wept without answering; but saw his eye vainly looking over the table in search of something. "I have it," I said aloud, "I have it, and I will not give it to you, Cornelius, for you must not, no, you must not go." "I knew it," he resignedly exclaimed, "I knew it would come to this; and yet," he added, looking down at me rather wistfully, "it is of no use, Daisy; I must go, and I will go too." "No, Cornelius, you will not; you never could have the heart to do it. Besides, why go?" "For change." "Change! what is change? If I were an artist I would make variety enough in my own mind to be the charm of daily life; and whilst I painted pictures, I would not care a pin for Spain or Italy. If I were an ambitious spirit, I would not go just when my fame was beginning, when glorious prospects were opening before me. If I were a brother, and had a good sister, who loved me dearly, I would not forsake her. If I were a kind-hearted man, and had adopted a poor little orphan girl, reared her, indulged her, made her my friend, and promised not to leave her, I would not break her heart by running away from her; but when she said to me: 'Stay, Cornelius!' I would just give her a kiss, and say: 'Yes, my pet, by all means!'" But in vain. I looked up into his face; he did not kiss me; he did not call me his pet; his lips never parted to say, "Yes, by all means!" His head was sunk on his bosom; his arms were folded; his downcast look never sought mine. I left my place by him to sit down at his feet and see him better. I read sorrow on his face, great sorrow, but no change of purpose. I took one of his hands in mine, and gazing at him through gathering tears: "Cornelius," I said, "are you still going?" He did not reply. "Are you still going?" I asked, laying my head on his knee. He remained silent. "Are you still going?" I persisted, rising as I spoke, and pressing my lips to his cheek. He never moved; he never answered. The blood rushed to my heart with passionate force. I threw back rather than dropped his hand; I stepped away from him with wounded and indignant pride. "Go then!" I exclaimed, with angry tears, "go, here is your passport; take it and with it take back your broken promise and friendship betrayed." "Betrayed!" he echoed, looking up. "Yes, betrayed; I do not retract the word. Want of confidence is treason in friendship, and you have had no confidence in me--why in this house, where as a child I had obeyed you, and could have obeyed you all my life, why did you of your own accord raise me to an equality which was my boast and my pride, when in your heart you meant to treat me as a child to be cheated into a parting? You gave me an empty name; I will have the reality or I will have nothing, Cornelius." I turned away from him as I spoke; he rose and followed me. "Daisy," he said, "what do you mean?" I looked round at him over my shoulder, and replied, reproachfully: "I mean that you do not care for me." "I do not care for you!" "No; you have secrets from me; William never had any secrets; he liked me more than you do, Cornelius." An expression of so much pain passed across his face, that I repented at once. "You cannot believe that?" he replied at length; "you would not say it if you were not very angry with me, Daisy, and yet you know, oh! you know well enough I cannot bear your anger." "Can't you bear it, Cornelius?" I answered turning round to face him, "then don't go; for if you do, I shall be so angry--indeed, you can have no idea of it!" "None, whilst you speak and look so very unlike anger. Oh, Daisy! which is easier: to part from you in wrath or in peace?" "Why part at all? why go?" I replied passing my arm within his, and looking up at his bending face in which I read signs of yielding. "Why remain?" "Because I wish it," I said, making him sit down. "Is that a reason?" "The best of all--for it will make you stay." He did not say yes; but then, he did not say no. "Stay! stay!" he repeated with an impatient sigh. "What for? You do not want me." "Indeed, I do," I replied, triumphantly, "I want you much, very much, just now." "What for?" "To advise me about Mr. Thornton." "Ah! what of him?" exclaimed Cornelius, with a sudden start. "Nothing," I replied, sorry to have said so much. He gave me a look beneath which I felt myself reddening. "He too!" he said, biting his lip and folding his arms like one amazed, "he too! And I was going, actually going, actually leaving you to him." He laughed indignantly and rose; I eagerly caught hold of his arm. "Oh, I am not going," he exclaimed impetuously, throwing down his hat as he spoke. "Catch me going now. No, Daisy," he added, resuming his place by me, and laying his hand on my arm as he bent on me a fixed and resolute look, "though I was fool enough to let him have the picture, he shall not find it quite so easy to get the original." "Oh, Cornelius!" I exclaimed, feeling ready to cry with vexation and shame, "that is not at all what I mean." "Another," he continued with ill-repressed irritation, "it is the strangest thing, that young or old, boys in experience, or worn and wearied with the world, they all want you." "Cornelius, how can you talk so! it is Mrs. Langton whom Mr. Thornton likes." "Mrs. Langton!" "Yes, Mrs. Langton, the great beauty." "So much the better," he replied with a scornful and incredulous laugh, "for he shall not have you, Daisy." "He does not want me," I said desperately; "but if he did, it would be time lost. For I am sure I don't want him." "You do not like him!" observed Cornelius, calming down a little. "Very much as a cousin. Not at all, otherwise." "And you will not have him, will you, Daisy?" He spoke with lingering doubt and uneasiness. "I tell you I shall not have the chance," I replied impatiently. "Oh, Cornelius! will you never leave off fancying that everybody is in love with me?" I could not help laughing as I said it. "Yes, laugh," he said reproachfully, "laugh at me, because like the poor man of the parable told by the Prophet to the sinful King, 'I have but one little ewe lamb; I have nourished it up, it has eaten of my meat, drank of my cup, lain in my bosom, and been unto me as a daughter.' Laugh because I cannot help dreading lest the rich man's insolence should wrest her from me!" "No, Cornelius, I shall laugh no more; but indeed you need not fear that sort of thing at all. Neither for Mr. Thornton, nor for any other member of his sex do I care, and when I say that," I added, reddening a little, "you know what I mean." "Too well!" he replied, in a low, sad tone. "Good bye, Daisy. God bless you!" I remained motionless with surprise and grief. He rose; Kate entered the room. "Oh, Kate!" I cried desperately, "after all but promising to stay, he is going. Speak to him, pray speak to him!" She shook her head and stood a little apart, looking on with quiet attention. I silently placed myself before her brother, but he looked both sad and determined. "You cannot have the heart to do it: you cannot!" I exclaimed, the tears running down my face as I spoke; "you cannot!" "Daisy," he replied, in a tone of mingled pain and reproach, "where is the use of all this? If I could stay, indeed I would; but though I love you so much, that every tear you now shed seems a drop wrung from the life blood of my heart, believe me when I declare that though you should ask me to remain on your bended knees, I should still say no." "Then I shall try!" I exclaimed, despairingly; but before I could sink down at his feet, he had caught hold of both my hands, and compelled me to remain upright. Hope forsook me. "Cornelius," I said, weeping, "will you stay?" "No!" "Cornelius!" I exclaimed, more earnestly. "Will you stay?" This time he did not answer, but his half averted face showed me a profile severe, resolute, and inexorable. "You cannot weary me," I said again; "will you stay?" He turned upon me pale with wrath. "Oh! blind girl--blind to the last!" he cried, his white lips trembling. "You ask me to stay--to stay!" "Yes, Cornelius, again and again!" All patience seemed to forsake him. His eyes lit, his features quivered; he grasped my hands in his with an angry force, of which he was himself unconscious. "Come," he said, striving to be calm, "do not make me say that which I should repent. Let us part as it is--do not insist--do not provoke me to forget honour and truth." I could see that Cornelius was angry with me; that my obstinacy provoked him beyond measure; but his wrath was the wrath of love; it could not terrify me. I even felt and found in it a perilous pleasure, that made me smile as I replied: "But I do insist, Cornelius." His lips parted, as if to utter some vehement reply; then he bit them with angry force, and knit his brow like one who subdues and keeps down some inward strife. Kate quietly stepped up to us. "The knot that will not be unravelled must be cut," she said. "He will stay, Daisy, if you will be his wife." The words seemed sent, like a quivering arrow, through my very heart. Cornelius looked confounded at his sister, who only smiled; then he turned to me, flushed and ardent. As I stood before him, my hands still grasped in his--his face still bent over mine, half upraised--his look, overflowing with passion, reproach, love, anger, and tenderness, sank deep into mine, with a meaning that overpowered me. And yet, as if spell- bound by the strange and wonderful story thus, at once revealed to me, I could not cease to hear it. Kate had not spoken--she still spoke in words that echoed for ever. To speak myself, look away, return once more to the daily life beyond which that moment stood isolated, were not things in my power. I felt like one divided from Time by that immortal Present. "Oh, Daisy!" vehemently exclaimed Cornelius, "how you linger! 'No' should have been uttered at once; 'yes' need not tarry so long. Speak--answer. Must I stay or depart?" He spoke with the feverish impatience that will not brook delay. "Stay!" broke from me, I knew not why nor how; but with the word, my head swam; my limbs failed me; there was a chair by me, I sank down upon it. Cornelius turned very pale, dropped my hands, and walked away without a word. Kate came to me. "Daisy," she said, taking my hand in her own, "what is it? Are you faint? Have this," she added, handing me the glass of wine which, at once, her brother had poured out. "No," I replied, "water." She gave me some. I drank it off, but it did not calm the fever which she took for faintness. I clasped my brow between my hands, to compose and concentrate thought; but my whole being--my mind, faculties, soul, body, and heart, were in tumult and insurrection. I could hear, see, feel--know nothing of that inward world of which I called myself mistress. I rose, terrified at the sudden storm which had broken on my long peace. "Daisy, do not look so wild!" said Kate; and taking me in her arms, she wanted to make me sit down again; but I broke from her. I passed by her brother without giving him a look, ran up to my own room, and locked myself in like one pursued. CHAPTER XVIII. A faint streak of grey was breaking in the east, through the low and heavy clouds of night. I went up to the window, opened it, and kneeling down by it, I looked at that still dark sky, and surrendered myself to the swift current that was bearing me away. There is a rapture in strong emotions that has subdued the strongest; a perilous charm to which the wisest have yielded. What the storm is to our senses--something that raises, appals and lifts up our very being by its sublimity and terror--the strife of the passions is to the soul. They are her elements, from whose conflicts and electric shocks she derives her strength, her greatness, the knowledge that she is. And for this, though they so often blight her fairest hopes, she loves them. It is hard, indeed, to be ever striving against those rebellious servants--to feel torn asunder in the struggle; but sweeter is that bitter contest than a long, lifeless peace. The danger lies not so much in the chance of final subjection, as in that of learning to love the strife too well. More perilous than the sweetest music is its tumult; more endless than are all the delights of the senses, and far more intoxicating is its infinite variety. The soul, in her most blissful repose, has nothing to equal the burning charm of her delirium. My youth had been calm as an ice-bound sea, over which sweep breezes sweet though chill, but that knows neither the storm nor the sunshine of the ardent south. And now the storm had suddenly wakened, and from northern winter, I passed to the glowing tropics. I thought not of love or passion, of bliss or torment; I felt like one seized by foaming rapids, and swept far beyond human ken, with the sound of the rushing torrent ever in my ears. I yielded to a force that would not be resisted. "Let it," I thought, my heart beating with fearless delight; "I care not whither it sends me; let the eddies cast me adrift--or bear me safely on--I care not--this is to live!" I strove not against the current; I sought not to know where I was, until of itself the stream flowed more calm, until its mighty voice died away in faint murmurs, and I found myself floating safe in still waters. Then I looked up, and like one who after sleeping on earth wakens in fairy- land, I beheld with trembling joy the strange and wonderful country to which I had been borne during the long slumber of a year. Cornelius loved me! it was marvellous, incredible, but a great and glorious thing for all that. He loved me! my heart swelled; my soul rose; I felt humble, exalted and blest far beyond the power of speech to render. I had no definite thought, no definite wish, but before me extended the future like an endless summer day; beneath it spread life as an enchanted region which Cornelius and I paced hand in hand, bending our steps towards that golden west where burned a sun that should never set. "Yes, he loves me!" I repeated to myself as I remembered every token unheeded till then. "And do I love him?" oh! how swift came the irresistible reply: "with every power of my soul, with every impulse of my being, with the blood that flows in my veins, with the heart that beats in my bosom." The answer both startled and charmed me. I did not understand it rightly yet, and like one suddenly taken captive, I looked at my bonds and saw incredulously that the liberty of thought, heart and feeling had departed for ever; that an influence as subtle as it was penetrating had taken possession of my being. One moment I rebelled; but after a brief struggle for freedom, I owned myself conquered; with beating heart and burning brow lowly bent, I confessed my master. Filial reverence, sisterly love, friendship, what had become of ye then? Like weak briars and brambles swept away by a swift stream, ye perished at once on the path of passion. I wondered not that ye should be no more. I only wondered ye had ever been: vain words by which I had long been deluded. I looked back into my past. Since I had known him, I could not remember the time when the thought of Cornelius had not been to me as the daily bread of my heart. There had been familiarity in my deepest tenderness, and lingering passion in my very freedom. I had felt intuitively that I could not make my love for a man, young and not of my blood, too sacred and too pure, and that love ever craving for a more perfect, more entire union, had caught eagerly at these shadows of what it sought. I had said to myself, to him, to all, that my affection was that of a child for its father, of a sister for her brother, of a friend for her friend, because it had not occurred to me that a closer tie might one day bind us; and what I had said, I had believed most sincerely. I was very young and very innocent. Of love I had read little, and seen less. So long as it came not to me in visible aspect; so long as I felt not within myself some great change, I dreamt not of it. There is a love that lies in the heart unconscious of itself, like a child asleep in its cradle--and this I had never suspected. There is a love which grows with onr years, until it becomes part of our being; which never agitates, because it has no previous indifference, no remembrance of the time in which it was not, against which to strive; which has purer and deeper signs than the beating heart, the blushing cheek, the averted look--and all this I knew not. Where there is no resistance, there can be no struggle; but because there is no struggle shall any one dare to say-- there is no victory? Reduce to logic the least logical of all passions, and argue with a feeling that smiles at argument, and disdains to reply. Had I then loved Cornelius even as a child? loved him with that purer part of affection which needs not to wait for the growth of years? God alone knows. Love is a great mystery; it is easy to remember the time of its discovery, but wise, indeed, are they who can tell the hour and moment of its birth. I had the wisdom not to ask myself so useless a question. The past vanished from my thoughts; it was all future now. I looked at the eastern sky; it was reddening fast, and grew more bright and burning as I looked. With the superstition of the heart, I watched the dawn of that day, as that which opened my new existence, and for all of the past that it revealed, and I had never seen; for all of the future that it promised, and I had never hoped. I gave thanks to God. I know not how long I had been thus, when a tap at my door disturbed me. I rose, opened, and saw Kate. She made me turn my face to the light, then half smiled, and said: "Cornelius wants to speak to you; he is quite in a way. Pray come down." I followed her down stairs in silence. She opened the back parlour door, closed it, and left me. I stood still; all the blood in my frame seemed to have rushed to my beating heart. It was one thing to be alone with Cornelius, my friend, and another to find myself thus suddenly brought to the presence of Cornelius, my lover. He sat by the open window; beyond it rose the green garden trees tinged with a rosy light, and above them spread the blushing sky. A fresh breeze came in bearing soft sounds of rustling leaves and twittering songs of wakening birds. He too had watched the dawning day; but there seemed to have been at least as much sorrow as love in his vigil. He looked pale, weary, and slowly turned around as I entered. He saw me standing at the door, rose, and came up to me without speaking. I looked at him like one in a dream. He took my passive hand in his, and gave me a troubled glance, then suddenly he passed his other arm around me, looking down at me with the saddest face. "And is it thus indeed, Daisy," he said, in a low tone, "you are pale as death, but as silent; your hand lies in mine chill as ice, but not withdrawn; you yield, mute and meek as a poor little victim to the arms that clasp you! No tears! No words to rouse remorse or sting pride. Nothing but entire sacrifice, and that silent submission." He spoke of paleness; his own face was like marble, his eyes overflowed, his lips trembled, he stooped to press them on my brow. Involuntarily I shunned the embrace. "Do not shrink," he observed, with evident pain, "I mean it as the last. Yes! the last. I never intended putting you to such a trial. Never, Daisy," he continued, giving me a wistful look, "anger at your blindness, and the irresistible temptation of a sudden opportunity, did indeed make me forget, in one moment, the dearly-bought patience of a year; passion, roused to tyranny after her long subjection, and sick of restraint, did indeed vow she would and should be gratified, no matter what the cost might be; but I never meant it. You are young, generous, and devoted. Months ago, if I had spoken, I know--and I knew it then--that I could have had you for the asking. But I could not bear to have you thus. When your grandfather placed so great a trust in my honour, and showed so little faith in my generosity, I laughed at his blindness, for I thought age had cooled his blood, and made him forget the language which is not speech. But alas! I found that I who had taught you many things, could not teach you this lesson. How could I? when what is held the easiest of all, the letting you see what you were to me, I could never accomplish. Do, say, act as I would, the sacredness of your affection ever stood between us. I tried every art, and love has many, but when I spoke so plainly, it seemed as if a very child must have understood me. You looked or smiled with hopeless serenity. I vowed once that cost me what it might, I would not speak until I had made you love me as truly, as ardently as I loved you myself. I waited months, I might have waited years. Well, no matter, it is over now. Be free, forget the trouble of an hour in the peace of a life-time. Be happy, very happy, and yet, oh! how happy, it seems to me, your friend could have made you, if you would but have let him." He released and left me. Touched with his sorrow, I could not restrain my tears. "Weep not for me," he said, with a sad smile; "I shall do. It is true that when I came back from Italy, I secretly boasted that I had escaped both the follies of youth and the dangers of passion. But though Fate, which I braved abroad, has, like a traitor, lain in wait for me in my own home, know, Daisy, that like a man, I can look her in the face, stern and bitter as she wears it on this day, too long delayed, of our separation." "Then you do mean to go?" I exclaimed, troubled to the very heart. "Can you think I would stay?" he replied, vehemently. "Oh! Daisy, tempt me not to call you cold and heartless, to say those things which a lifetime vainly repents and never effaces. Is it because I have passed through a year of the hardest self-subjection ever imposed on mortal; through a year of looks restrained, words hushed, emotions repressed; a year of fever and torment endured, that not a cloud might come over the serenity of your peace--is it for this, Daisy, that you think my heart and my blood so cold as to wish me to stay; as not to see that between complete union or utter separation there can now be no medium?" His look sought mine with a troubled glance; there was fever in his accent, and pain in the half smile with which he spoke. "But why go so soon?" I asked, in a low tone. "Why? Daisy, you ask why? Because endurance has reached her utmost limits, and cannot pass them; because the rest is an abyss over which not even a poor plank stretches; because the thing I have delayed months must be done now or never: because, hard as is your absence, your constant presence is something still harder to bear." He spoke with an ill-subdued irritation I knew not how to soothe. "Cornelius!" I said in my gentlest accents, "if you would but stay and be calm." "Stay and be calm!" he replied impetuously, and pacing the room with hasty steps, that ever came back to me; "why, I have been the calmest of calm men! When, one after another, they attempted to woo and win under my very eyes the only girl for whom I cared, she whom I looked on as my future wife; as the secret betrothed of my heart: when, to add taunt to taunt, as if I were not flesh and blood like them; as if I had not known you more years than they had known you weeks; loved you, when they cared not if you existed, they allowed me with insolent unconsciousness to behold it all, did I not subdue the secret wrath which trembled in every fibre of my being? What more would you have me do? Wait to see in the possession and enjoyment of one more fortunate than the rest, that which should have been my property and my joy; whilst I looked on, a robbed father, a friend forsaken, a lover betrayed, and behold my child, companion, friend and mistress the prize of a stranger!" "Do you think then," he added, stopping short, and speaking with calmer and deeper indignation, "do you think then that I have severed you from the lover of your youth, guarded you from my own friends, watched over you as a miser over his gold, suspected every man who looked at you, sickened at the thought, 'Is it now I am to be robbed?' breathed and lived again at the reply, 'Not yet'--to stay and wait until some other comes and reaps the fruit of all my vain watchfulness." His eyes flashed, and his lips trembled with jealous resentment. Borne away by the force of his own feelings, he had spoken with a vehement rapidity, that left him no room for pause, as they left me no room for interruption. At length he ceased. I looked at him; he had spoken of his patience with feverish anger, of his calmness with bitter indignation; the passionate emotions had left their traces on his brow slightly contracted, on his pale and agitated face, in his look that still burned with ill-repressed fire; but there was sweetness in his reproaches, and a secret pleasantness in his wrath. "Another," I said quietly, "and suppose there is no other. Suppose no one cares for me." "No one!" he echoed, drawing nearer, and taking my hand in his, with a sudden change of mood and accent, "No one, Daisy! Oh! you know there will always be one. One who sat with you by a running stream for the whole of a summer's noon, and at whom your face seemed to look from the clear waters until it sank deep and for ever in his heart. One who waking or sleeping, has loved you since that day, and for whom it is you, Daisy, who care not." I said I did care for him. "But how, how?" he asked, with an impatient sigh, "you mean old affection, habit, friendship, and I, you know well enough, mean none of those things. I love you because do what I will, you attract me irresistibly. If I had met you in the street by chance, I should have said, 'this girl and none other I will have;' I would have followed you, ascertained your dwelling, name and parentage, ay, and made you love me too, Daisy, cold as you are now." "I am not cold, Cornelius." "Alas, no," he replied, a little passionately, "and there too is the mischief. Oh! Daisy, be merciful! Give nothing if you cannot give all. Be at once all ice, and torment me no more with the calm serenity which is never coldness. Do you know how often you have made me burn to remind you, that though I was no one to you, you might be some one to me; that you have made me long for the sting of indifference and pride; for a familiarity less tender, for a tenderness less dangerous? Do you know that if your affection has been too calm for love, it has been very ardent for mere friendship; that it has possessed the perilous charm of passion and purity; passion which would be divine if it could but be pure; purity which, if it were but ardent, would be irresistibly alluring. You have tormented me almost beyond endurance, then when I gave up hope, you have suddenly said and done the kindest things maiden ever said or did. You have deserted me and returned to me, embraced me with the careless confidence of a sister, spoken with the tenderness of a mistress, and perplexed me beyond all mortal knowledge. But why do I speak as if this were over? Daisy! you perplex me still. This very evening have you not declared that you care for no other, then almost as plainly said you cared not for me. Have you not heard me tell you how warmly I love you, yet have you not asked me to stay here in this house ever near you? Nay, though I speak now from the very fulness of my heart, do you not stand, your hand in mine, listening to me with patient, quiet grace? I dare not hope, I will not quite despair; I can do neither, for I protest, Daisy, that you are still to me a riddle and a mystery, and that whether you love him or love him not, is more than Cornelius O'Reilly can tell." Cornelius had said all this without a pause of rest: he spoke with the daring rapidity of passion which tarries not for words, but with many an eloquent change of look, tone, and accent. I had heard him with throbbing bosom and burning brow. For the first time I was addressed in the language of love, and the voice that spoke was very dear to me. Answer I could not. I stood before him, listening to tones that had ceased, but that still echoed in my heart. When he confessed, however, that he did not know whether or not I loved him, an involuntary smile stole over my face, and this he was very quick to see; his look, keen and searching, sought mine; his face, eager and flushed, was bent over me. "Look at me, Daisy," he said, quickly. I looked up, smiling still; for I thought to myself, "I love him, but he shall not know it just yet." But as I looked, a change of feeling came over my heart. I remembered the past, his long goodness, his patient, devoted love, and I could not take my eyes away. "Well," he said, uneasily, "why do you look at me so strangely? My face is not new to you, Daisy. You have had time to know it all these years." Ay, years had passed since our first meeting; and what had he not been to me since then? My adopted father, my kind guardian, my secure protector, my faithful friend, my devoted lover! As I thought of all this, and still looked at him, his kind, handsome face grew dim through gathering tears. "I will tell him all," I thought; "I will be ingenuous and good; tell him how truly, how ardently I love him." The words rose to my lips, and died away unuttered. Is the language in which woman utters such confessions yet invented? Oh! love and pride, tyrants of her heart, how sharp was your contest then in mine! He was bending over me with strange tormenting anxiety in his face. I bowed my head away from his gaze. He half drew me closer, half pushed me back; his hand sought, then rejected, mine. He saw my eyes overflowing. "Oh, Daisy, Daisy!" he exclaimed, "what does this mean?" "Guess," was my involuntary reply. "Do not trifle with me," he said, in a tone of passionate entreaty--"do not." "Trifle with you! Could I, Cornelius?" "Prove it then." He stooped and looked up; for a moment my lips touched his cheek, whilst his lingered on my brow. Many a time before had Cornelius kissed me; but this was the first embrace of a love, mutual, ardent, and yet, God knows it, very pure--ay, far too religiously pure to trouble. And thus it was all understood--all known--all told--without a word. When I felt that the unconscious dream of my whole life was fulfilled; that I was everything to him who had so long been everything to me; when I looked up into his face, met his look, in which the affection of the tried friend, and the love of the lover, unequivocally blended, and knew that no other human being--not even his sister--could claim and fill that place where my heart had found its home, and that as I loved so was I loved,--I also felt that I had conquered fate; that I triumphed over by- gone sorrow, and could defy the might of time. I cried for joy, as I had often cried for grief on that kind heart which had sheltered my forsaken childhood and unprotected youth. "Tears!" he said, with a smile of reproach; and yet he knew well enough they were not tears of sorrow. "They will be to me what the rain has been to the night, Cornelius; a freshening dew." I went up to the open window; I leaned my brow on the cool iron bar; the morning air came in pure, chill, and fragrant. I shivered slightly. Cornelius, who had followed me, saw this, and wanted to close the window. "Do not," I said; "this cool, keen air is delightful. Then I like to watch the rising of that sun that thought to see you far on your journey, and that shall find you here. Besides, bow beautiful our little garden looks!" "Then come out into it for awhile." He took my arm. I yielded. We went down into the garden and paced its narrow gravel path without uttering a word. There came a slight shower; we stepped under the old poplar trees; they yielded more than sufficient shelter. The sun shone through the sparkling drops as they fell, and whilst the fresh rain came down, the birds overhead sang sweetly under the cover of young leafy boughs, as if their song could know no ending. Yes, sweet and near though I knew it to be, it sounded to me as coming from the depths of some dreamy forest far away. I do not think our garden had ever looked so fresh, so pleasant, or been so fragrant as when that shower ceased. The rain-clouds soft and grey, had melted into the vapoury blue of upper air; the warm sunshine tempered the coolness of the breeze, the green grass was white and heavy with the dew of night, and bright with the rain of the morning; the wet gravel sparkled, the dark trunks of the trees trickled slowly, the brown moss clung closer to the old sun- dial, the fresh earth smelt sweet, stock, mignionette, wall-flower, furze, and jessamine yielded their most fragrant odours. Rhododendrons beaten down by the last night's storm trailed on the earth their gorgeous masses, whilst sparkling fox-gloves, with a dew-drop to every flower, still rose straight and tall. We were again walking on. Cornelius suddenly stopped short, and for the first time spoke. "Daisy," he said, earnestly, "you are quite sure, are you not?" "Look at that flower," was my only reply. It was a crimson peony, heavy with rain. I bent it slightly; from the delicate petals, from the heart which seemed untouched by a breath, there poured forth a bright shower of liquid dew. "What about that flower, Daisy?" "It is a peony, Cornelius." "Let it." "Well, I don't think you can prevent it from being one. Peonies will be peonies." "Who wants to interfere with their rights? and what have peonies to do with our discourse, unless that you look very like one just now? Oh, Daisy! are you sure you like me well enough to marry me?" "Don't think, if ever I do such a thing, it shall be for liking, Cornelius." "What for, then?" "To prevent you from marrying any one else." He still looked uneasy, and yet he might have known that, though it is sometimes very hard to know where love is, it is always wonderfully easy to know where he is not. "What would you have?" I asked, a little impatiently. "Is it the love, honour, and obey that troubles you? Well, I have loved you all my life, or very nearly. I honour you more than living creature; as for obedience, I could obey you all the day long, Cornelius." "Do you mean to turn out a Griseldis?" he said, uneasily. "What put such ideas into your head?" "Remembrance of the time--" "I knew you would grow filial again," he interrupted, looking provoked, "instead of answering my question, which was--" "Concerning your wife," I interrupted, in my turn; "what about her? She ought to be a proud woman, and it will be her own fault if she is not happy--ay, a very happy one." He stroked my hair, and smiled quite pleased. "I hope so," he said. "And yet you do not know what I mean to do for her, Daisy. I will paint her pictures that shall beat all the sonnets Petrarch ever sang to his Laura. I will win her fame and money: I will dress her as fine as any queen, until my field-flower shall outshine every flower of the garden. Above all, I will love her as knight of chivalry, or hero of romance, never loved his lady." He spoke with jesting, yet very tender flattery. Love can take every tone, and bend any language to its own meaning. I know not how long we lingered together in that garden. I was the first to become conscious of time. "Where is Kate?" I asked. "Forgotten," replied her low voice. She stood beneath the ivied porch; her head a little inclined; one hand supporting her cheek. She looked down at us with a smile happy, yet not without sadness. "Don't think I envy you the pleasant time," she resumed more gaily; "I like to see people enjoying themselves. When I meet couples in the lanes, I either get out of the way, or, if I cannot do that, I give them internally my benediction. 'Go on,' I think to myself, 'go on; you will never be happier, nor, perhaps, better than you are now. Go on.'" "We want to go in," said Cornelius, as we ascended the steps. As I passed by her, Kate arrested me by laying her hand on my shoulder, and saymg: "Look at that child! She has not slept all night, and there is not a rose of the garden half so fresh. It's a nice thing to be young, Cornelius." She sighed a little, then led the way in to the front parlour, where breakfast was waiting. "Already!" said Cornelius. "Yes, already," she replied, sitting down to pour out the tea: "whilst you were in the clouds, the world has gone on just the same. Midge, why don't you sit near him as usual? you are not ashamed of yourself, are you?" Ashamed! Oh, no! There is no shame in happiness; and God alone knows how happy I felt then sitting by him whom I loved, and facing her whom I loved almost as well. I do not know how I looked, or Cornelius either; for I did not look at him; but I know that Kate was radiant; that every time her bright eyes rested on us, they sparkled like diamonds, and that it touched me to the heart to read the generous, unselfish joy painted on her handsome face. We were no sooner alone, than with her habit of continuing aloud whatever secret train of thought she chanced to be engaged in, Miss O'Reilly said to me in her most positive manner: "I am very glad of it." "Are you, Kate?" I replied, passing my arm around her neck and kissing her. "Yes, you coaxing little thing; for he is devotedly fond of you, and I believe you like him with your whole heart, though it took you so long to find it out. What would you and he have done without me." "I don't know, Kate, but how came you to let him think of going?" "Ah! he quite deceived me in that matter; I never dreamt of it until it was all settled. It was no use my telling him that if you only knew he liked you, you would be glad to have him, as indeed any girl in her senses would. He said you only liked him in a sisterly sort of way, and would be off. I thought I would find out when he was gone, what sort of a way it was, but I had not the trouble." I smiled. She gave me a wistful look and said: "Ah! you don't want to be his niece now, do you?" "No, indeed," I promptly answered. "And I don't wish it either," she replied with a stifled sigh, "time was when I fretted and repined; when I wished I had been the wife of Edward Burns, and that his child had been my child; but that is over. I am glad now that my heart was denied that which it craved so eagerly; that my youth was cold and lonely; that my sorrow which past, purchased him and you a happiness which will I trust endure. Oh, Daisy! this is a good world after all, and with a good God over it; don't you see how the grief of one is made to work the bliss of another; how because your father and I were severed, the two children we loved so dearly can be united?" "I see, Kate," I replied looking up into her face, "that Cornelius is good; that I, too, am what is called a good girl, and yet that we are two selfish creatures; that you alone are truly good and noble." She shook her head with humble denial. "I am an idolator for all that," she replied, her lips trembling slightly, "and you are blind if you do not see it. When I lost my lover, I set my heart on a child--for what are we to do with our hearts, if we don't love with them?--and he has kept it, and if God, to chastise me, were to take him from me to-morrow, I feel I should love him as much in his grave as I do on earth. If it be a sin, I trust to His mercy to forgive it. Sometimes, when my heart fails me, I cling to the recollection of His humanity. He who felt so much tenderness for his dear mother; who loved His brethren so truly; who cherished the beloved disciple; who wept by the grave of Lazarus, will surely not be very severe on a poor woman to whose whole life he thought fit to grant but one delight and one happy love. Do you think he will, Daisy?" I was too much moved to reply. "Now, child," she said gaily, "don't cry, or Cornelius, whom I hear coming down after you, will think I have been scolding my future sister- in-law." "And would you not have the right to do so?" I asked, kissing her with mingled tenderness and reverence. As she returned the embrace, Cornelius entered, and from the threshold of the door, looked at us with a delighted smile. CHAPTER XIX. How Mrs. Langton explained her conduct towards me, is more than I know; but it cannot have been to the dissatisfaction of Edward Thornton; for within two or three weeks they were married. They went to Italy on a matrimonial tour, and there they have resided ever since, leaving Mrs. Brand in happy and undisturbed possession of Poplar Lodge. They thought not of us, and we thought not of them, nor of mortal creature, save Kate. The present effaced the past, and absorbed the future. Familiar affection may not have the romance and mystery of the passion which has given one soul and one heart to beings hitherto strangers; but it has a deeper tenderness and far more sacred purity. Love now sat with us at board and hearth; something unknown lingered at twilight-time in the shadow of the room, and morn and eve a charmed presence haunted every garden-path and bower. Kate allowed us to dream away a few days, then suddenly startled us one evening, by saying quietly: "Cornelius, when do you mean to write to Mr. Thornton?" Cornelius started, and turned a little pale; my work dropped from my hands, and I sank back on my chair. Upon which he looked distracted, and seemed ready to quarrel with Kate for having started such an unwelcome subject. "Nonsense!" she said gaily, "don't you see it is all right." We looked at her, she smiled kindly. "You have written to him?" anxiously observed Cornelius. "I have seen him this very day. You need not open your eyes. What are railroads and express trains for? Why should I not go via Thornton House, and give a look to Rock Cottage; for I trust you do not mean to follow the foolish cockney fashion of associating your honeymoon with hotels and long bills. I shall never forget the impression I received, when Mr. Foster said to his wife with whom he ran away: 'Don't you remember, dear, how they cheated us at that Hotel des Etrangers?' 'Yes, dear,' she replied, 'but you know they were twice as bad at the H?tel d'Angleterre.' Poor things, it was ten years ago, but they had not forgotten it yet." "Kate," interrupted Cornelius, "what about Mr. Thornton." "Why nothing save that he seemed inclined to be merry, and said if he had reflected there was a woman in the case, he could have foretold at once what would become of the secret. Don't you see, you foolish fellow, that he only meant this as a bit of humiliation and punishment for you. But that if he did not want you to marry Daisy, he would not have allowed her to be here. For my part I like him, and did not find him so very grim. He showed me his books, instruments, and when I left, hoped he should see me again." "That is more than he ever did for any one," I said astonished; "Kate, you have made a conquest." She looked handsome enough for it, and so Cornelius told her. She laughed at us, and bade us mind our own business. More she did not say then, but it came out a few days later that Mr. Thornton had told her the sooner Cornelius and I were married, the better he would be pleased. As this was precisely the feeling of Cornelius and Kate, I yielded. We were married very quietly one sunny summer morning; then we bade Kate adieu for a fortnight, which we were to spend in Rock Cottage. It was her darling wish that we should go there, and we gratified her. I remember well how strangely I felt when we reached my old home, now ours. It was not a year since I had left it, but it seemed ages. Everywhere we found touching tokens of the recent presence of Kate, and of her thoughtful tenderness. The sun was setting; we watched it from the beach beneath the pine trees, and never--so at least it seemed to me, and it cannot have been a fancy of mine, for Cornelius said so too--never had the sun set more gloriously, or the sea looked more beautiful than on this the eve of our marriage day. As in the visions of olden prophets, the cloudless heavens before us seemed to open, revealing depths of blazing light with long golden rays that, as they departed from the sun, grew paler until they faded into the deep evening blue. From the cliff whence we looked down, we saw the heavy billows of the sea rolling away towards the far horizon, and touched with a changing light that seemed both alive and burning. The glowing heavens were still; the voice of the ocean was murmuring and low; the land breeze was silent, and thus, looking at the two vast solitudes of sea and sky, we forgot earth beneath and behind us, as we sometimes forget life in the contemplation of eternity. I do not think I ever felt existence less than I did then, though so near to him whom I yet loved with every faculty of my being. But there is in true happiness something sublime that raises the soul far beyond mortality. If I felt anything in that hour, it was that the glorious ideal world which lay before us was not more lovely or more ideal than the new world which I now entered; and where in this life and the next, I hoped to dwell for ever with Cornelius. For to those who love purely, love is its own world, its own solitude, its own new created Eden, green and pleasant where they abide, a new born Adam and Eve, without the temptation and the fall, their hearts filled with tenderness, their souls overflowing with adoration. I know at least that sitting thus by Cornelius, my hand in his, my eyes like his watching that broad, tranquil sun slowly going down to rest, I had never felt more deeply religious, more conscious of God in my heart. As the bright disk dipped in the long line of the cool looking sea, then sank rapidly, and at length vanished beneath the deep wave; as dark clouds advanced across the sky, and the beautiful vision was lost in the purple shadows of coming night, I felt that the earthly sun might set, but that within me dwelt the peace and loveliness of an eternal dawn. When the chill sea breeze began to sweep down the coast, Cornelius made me rise. Through the green garden we walked back to the house. He stopped before the stone steps and said: "It was here I found you lying eight years ago: do you remember, Daisy?" "Yes, Cornelius, I was very wretched, very lonely when you came and sat down by me, took me in your arms, kissed me and consoled me." "God bless you for having remembered it so long!" "As if it were likely I should forget it! Cornelius, I do not think we have ever sat on those stone steps since that day; let us do so now, and talk of all that has happened since then." We did so. It was the pure twilight hour, when earth and all she bears lie dark and sleeping beneath a vast clear sky, to which light seems to have retreated. For awhile we talked, but of its own accord speech soon sunk into silence. What we said I do not remember now; but I still remember how solemnly beautiful was that eve; how the calm moon rose behind the house and looked down at us from her lonely place above; how, as the sky darkened, it grew thick with stars; how the pine-trees bowed to the sea-breeze at the end of the garden; how the waves broke at the foot of the cliff with a low dash, pleasant to the ears, and how as I sat by Cornelius I felt I was no longer a poor orphan child, but a happy and loved woman; no longer an object of pity and sorrow, but the proud companion of his life, and the chosen wife of his heart. Home, realm of woman, pleasant shelter of her youth, gentle dominion granted to her life, I can say that thou hast yielded me some of the purest and deepest joys. Before leaving Leigh, we saw my grandfather, who received us kindly, and bade Cornelius be fond of me. We have now been married three years. He declares he is more in love with me than on the first day, and I believe it. Kate says "nonsense!" but I know well enough she likes us to be so fond of one another. She, too, is very happy; for though she agrees with me that Cornelius has not yet obtained the position he deserves to have, yet, as he is universally acknowledged to be a genuine artist, as his pictures are prized, and sell well, she assures me that, spite of professional jealousy, he will one day be held second to none. I tell her I am sure of it. Cornelius laughs at us, and thinks the very same thing in his heart, for he works harder, and, though he will not confess it, is more eager and ambitious than ever. We are, as we have always been, a good deal together; for we have no children to divert my attention. This is the only sore point with Kate. It seems such a thing never happened before in the O'Reilly family, and she cannot make it out. But Cornelius and I do not mind; we are young, happy and leave the future to Providence. It was last year, when Cornelius went to Spain--for he did go after all, but only for a few months, and I did not like to leave Kate, who seemed to me rather unwell--that I began this narrative. I had just received a letter from William Murray, who wrote to tell me that he was married and happy. My past life seemed to rise before me; so, to recal it, and divert my mind from dwelling too much on the absence of Cornelius, I one evening wrote a few pages, to which, day after day, more were added. Oh my husband! my handsome, gifted husband! I love you much, very much, more than I shall ever tell you, and far more than I have dared to write even here; but if you should some day chance to see that which I never meant to be seen, know, at least, that to your wife, there never was a pleasanter task than thus to record the story of her long love for you, as child, girl, and woman. THE END. PRINTING OFFICE OF THE PUBLISHER. Typographical errors silently corrected: Volume 1 Chapter 5 : =you no lessons.= replaced by =you no lessons?= Chapter 11 : =in a lone tone= replaced by =in a low one= Chapter 11 : =was it not Mr. O'Reilly= replaced by =was it not, Mr. O'Reilly= Chapter 13 : =Well, what is it?= replaced by ="Well, what is it?= Chapter 14 : =examined now.= replaced by =examined now?= Chapter 15 : =it I saw= replaced by =if I saw= Chapter 19 : =rocks at Leigh,= replaced by =rocks at Leigh,"= Volume 2 Chapter 1 : =hastily checked,= replaced by =hastily checked.= Chapter 2 : =knew me not."= replaced by =knew me not.= Chapter 6 : =I forget it= replaced by =I forgot it= Chapter 6 : =thing. I am satisfied= replaced by =thing, I am satisfied= Chapter 6 : =creature you are?= replaced by =creature you are!= Chapter 6 : =with that you know= replaced by =with that, you know= Chapter 6 : =answering that question.= replaced by =answering that question?= Chapter 9 : =bouquet, I meant= replaced by =bouquet I meant= Chapter 9 : =recal= replaced by =recall= Chapter 10 : =There reigns= replaced by ='There reigns= Chapter 10 : =do you advise.= replaced by =do you advise?= Chapter 10 : =Yung-Frau= replaced by =Jung-Frau= Chapter 12 : =trumbler= replaced by =tumbler= Chapter 12 : =You don't Cornelius= replaced by =You don't, Cornelius= Chapter 12 : =next day, day Cornelius= replaced by =next day, and Cornelius= Chapter 13 : =not an artists= replaced by =not an artist= Chapter 16 : =about Nothing?'"= replaced by =about Nothing'?"= Chapter 16 : =poor you see= replaced by =poor, you see= Chapter 17 : =Girl Reading!'= replaced by =Girl Reading'!= Chapter 18 : ="Ashamed= replaced by =Ashamed= 
6065	----	Transcribed by Sean Pobuda THE PERILS OF PAULINE By Charles Goddard CHAPTER I THE BREATH OF DEAD CENTURIES In one of the stateliest mansions on the lower Hudson, near New York, old Stanford Marvin, president of the Marvin Motors Company, dozed over his papers, while Owen, his confidential secretary, eyed him across the mahogany flat-topped desk. A soft purring sound floated in the open window and half-roused the aged manufacturer. It came from one of his own cars--six cylinders chanting in unison a litany of power to the great modern god of gasoline. These things had been in his mind since the motor industry started. He had lived with them, wrestled with them during his meals and taken them to his dreams at night. Now they formed a rhythm, and he heard them in his brain just before the fainting spells, which had come so frequently of late. He glanced at the secretary and noted Owen's gaze with something of a start. "What are you thinking about, Raymond?" he queried, with his customary directness. "Your health, sir," replied Owen, who, like all intelligent rascals, never lied when the truth would do equally well. As a matter of fact, Owen had wondered whether his employer would last a year or a month. He much preferred a month, for there was reason to believe that the Marvin will would contain a handsome bequest to "my faithful secretary." "Oh, bosh!" said the old man. "You and Dr. Stevens would make a mummy of me before I'm dead." "That reminds me, sir," said Owen, smoothly, "that the International Express Company has delivered a large crate addressed to you from Cairo, Egypt. I presume it is the mummy you bought on your last trip. Where shall I place it?" Mr. Marvin's eye coursed around the walls of the handsome library, which had been his office since the doctor had forbidden him to visit his automobile works and steel-stamping mills. "Take out that bust of Pallas Athene," he ordered, "and stand the mummy up in its place." Owen nodded, poised his pencil and prompted: "You were just dictating about the new piston rings." Mr. Marvin drew his hand across his eyes and looked out the window. Within the range of his vision was one of the most charming sights in the world--a handsome youth and a pretty girl, arrayed in white flannels, playing tennis. "Never mind the letters. Tell Harry and Pauline I wish to see them." Alone, the old man opened a drawer and took a dose of medicine, then he unfolded Dr. Stevens's letter and read its final paragraph, which prescribed a change of climate, together with complete and permanent rest or "I will not answer for the consequences." There was little doubt that no primer mover in a great industry was better able to leave its helm than Standford Marvin. His lieutenants were able, efficient and contented. The factories would go of their own momentum for a year or two at least, then his son, Harry, just out of college, should be able, perhaps, to help. His lieutenants had proved Marvin's unerring instinct in judging character. Not one single case came to the old employer's mind of a man who had failed to turn out exactly as he expected. Yet the most trusted man of all, Raymond Owen, the secretary, was disloyal and dishonest. This one exception was easily enough explained. When Owen came to Marvin's attention, fifteen years before, he was a fine, honest, faithful man. It was born and bred in him to be straight. During the first five' or six years in the Marvin household the older man took pains to keep watch on this quiet, tactful youth until he knew all his ways and even his habits of thought. There was no doubt that Owen was as upright and clean as the old man himself. At the age of forty the devil entered into Owen. It came in the form of insomnia. Loss of sleep will make any man irritable and unreasonable, but hardly dishonest. With the sleeplessness, however, came the temptation to take drugs. Owen shifted from one narcotic to another, finally, settling down upon morphine. Five years of the opiate had made him its slave. Every physician knows that morphine fiends become dishonest. The secretary had speculated with his modest savings and lost them. He had borrowed and lost again, and now, for some time, had been betting on horse races. This last had made him acquainted with a certain Montgomery Hicks, who lived well without visible source of income. Through Hicks, Owen had betrayed one of his employer's guarded secrets. Hicks, armed with this secret, promptly changed from a friendly creditor to a blackmailer. Owen, on his way to summon Pauline and Harry, descended to the basement, where the butler, gardener, and a colored man were uncrating the Egyptian mummy. He told them to stand it in place of the bust of Pallas Athene in the library, and then went out, crossing the splendid lawns, and graveled roads to the tennis court. There was no design in Owen's mind against the two players, but of late the instinct of both the hunter and the hunted were showing in him, and it prompted him to approach quietly and under cover. So he passed along the edge of a hedge and stood a moment within earshot. Pauline was about to "serve," but paused to look down at the loosened laces of her small white shoe. She heard Harry's racquet drop and saw him hurdle the net. In another instant he was at her feet tying the tiny bow. "You needn't have done that, Harry," she said. "Oh, no!" Harry affirmed, as he vainly tried to make his bow as trim as its mate. "I suppose not. I don't suppose I need to, think, about you all the time either, or follow you around till that new cocker spaniel of yours thinks I'm part of your shadow. Perhaps I don't need to love you." "Harry, get up! Someone will see you and think you're proposing to me." "Think? They ought to know I'm proposing. But, Pauline, talking about 'need,' there isn't any need of your being so pretty. Your eyes are bigger and bluer than they really need to be. You could see just as well if you didn't have such long, curly lashes, and there isn't any real necessity for the way they group together in that starry effect, like Nell Brinkley's girls. Is there any need of fifteen different beautiful shades of light where the sun strikes your hair just back of your ear?" "Harry, stop this! The score is forty-fifteen." "Yes, all these things are entirely unnecessary. I'm going to have old Mother Nature indicted by the Grand jury for willful, wasteful, wanton extravagance unless--unless--" Harry paused. "Now, Harry, don't use up your whole vocabulary--promise what?" "Promise to marry me at once." "No, Harry, I can't do that--that is, right away. I must have time." "Why time? Pauline, don't you love me?" "Yes, I think I do love you, Harry, and you know there is nobody else in the world." "Then what do you want time for?" "Why, to see life and to know what life really is." "All right. Marry me, and I'll show you life. I'll lead you any kind of a life you want." "No, that won't do. As an old, settled-down, married woman I couldn't really do what I want. I must see life in its great moments. I must have thrills, adventures, see people, do daring things, watch battles. It might be best for me even to see someone killed, if that were possible. As I was telling Harley St. John last night--" "Harley St. John? Well, if I catch that fop taking you motoring again you'll get your wish and see a real nice aristocratic murder. He ought to be put out of his misery, anyway; but where did you get all these sudden notions about wild and strenuous life?" Pauline did not answer. They both heard a discreet cough, and Owen rounded the corner of the hedge. He delivered his message, and the three walked slowly toward the house. Advancing to meet them came a dashy checked suit. Above it was a large Panama hat with a gaudy ribbon. A red necktie was also visible, even at a considerable distance. Between the hat and the necktie a face several degrees darker in color than the tie came into view as the distance lessened. It was Mr. Montgomery Hicks, whose first name was usually pronounced "Mugumry" and thence degenerated into "Mug." Mug's inflamed and scowling face and bulging eyes usually conveyed the general impression that he was about to burst into profanity--a conjecture which frequently proved correct. In this case he merely remarked in a sort of "newsboy" voice: "Mr. Raymond Owen, I believe?" The secretary's sallow face flushed a little as he stepped aside and let Harry and Pauline pass out of earshot. "See here, Mug," complained Owen, "I haven't a cent for you. You will get me discharged if you come around here like this." "Well, I'll get you fired right now," growled Mug, "if you don't come across with the money." And he started toward the front steps. Owen led him out of sight of the house and finally got rid of him. For a blackmailer knows he can strike but once, and, having struck, he loses all power over his victim. So Hicks withheld the blow, collected a paltry thirty dollars, and consented to wait a little while for Marvin to die. Harry and Pauline passed on into the house. He had the straight backbone and well poised head of the West Pointer, but without the unnatural stiffness of the soldier's carriage; the shoulders of the "halfback," and the lean hips of a runner were his, and he had earned them in four years on his varsity football and track teams. The girl beside him, half a head shorter, tripped along with the easy action of a thoroughbred. Both bore the name of Marvin, yet there was no relationship. Harry's mother, long dead, had adopted this girl on Mr. Marvin's first trip to Egypt. Pauline was the daughter of an English father and a native mother. Mrs. Marvin first saw her as a blue-eyed baby, too young to understand that its parents had just been drowned in the Nile. As brother and sister they grew up together until college separated the two. After four years Pauline's dainty prettiness struck Harry with a distinct shock, the delightful sort of shock known as love at first sight. It was really Harry's first sight of her as a woman. Every sense and instinct in him shouted, "Get that girl," and nothing in him answered "No." Mr. Marvin looked unusually pale as those two very vital young persons stepped into the library. He read their thoughts and said quietly. "Harry, I've been placed in the hands of a receiver." "Receiver?" echoed Harry, with amazement, for he knew that Marvin enterprises were financed magnificently. "Yes, Dr. Stevens is the receiver. He says I have exhausted my entire stock of nervous capital, that my account at the bank of physical endurance is overdrawn, nature has called her loans, and you might say that I am a nervous bankrupt." "So All you need is rest," cried Pauline, "and you will be as strong as ever." "Well, before I rest I want to assure myself about you children. Harry, you love Pauline, don't you?" "You bet I do, father." "Pauline, you love Harry, don't you?" "Yes," answered Pauline slowly. "And you will marry right away?" "This very minute, if she would have me," said Harry. "And you, Pauline?" queried the old man. "Yes, father," for she loved him and felt toward him as if she were indeed his daughter. "Perhaps some time I'll marry Harry, but not for a year or two. I couldn't marry him now, it wouldn't be right." "Wouldn't be right?? Well, I'd like to know why not." Pauline was silent a moment. She hated to oppose this fine old man, but her will was as firm as his, and well he knew it. Harry spoke for her: "Oh, she wants to see life before she settles down--wild life, sin and iniquity, battle, murder and sudden death and all that sort of stuff. I don't know what has gotten into women these days, anyway." Then Polly, prettily, daintily, as she did all things, and with charming little blushes and hesitations, confessed her secret. In short, it was her ambition to be a writer, a writer of something worth while--a great writer. To be a great writer one must know life, and to know life one must see it--see the world. She ended by asking the two men if this were not so. They looked at each other and coughed with evident relief it the comparative harmlessness of her whim. "Yes, Polly," said old man Marvin, "a great writer ought to see life in order to know what he is writing about. But what makes you suspect that you have the ability to be even an ordinary writer?" Marvin sire winked at Marvin son and Marvin son winked back, for no man is too old or too young to enjoy teasing a pretty and serious girl. Pauline saw the wink, and her foot ceased tracing a pattern in the carpet and stamped on it instead. "I'll show you what reason I have to think I can write. My first story has just been published in the biggest magazine in the country. I have had a copy of it lying around here for days with my story in it, and nobody has even looked at it." Out she flashed, and Harry after her, almost upsetting the butler and gardener, who appeared in the library doorway. These two worthies advanced upon the statue of Pallas without noticing the master of the house sitting behind his big desk. The butler did notice that a large hound from the stable had followed the gardener into the room. "That's what one gets for letting outdoor servants into the house," muttered the butler, as he hustled the big dog to the front door and ejected him. "Is he addressing himself to me or to the pup, I wonder?" asked the gardener, a fat, good-natured Irishman, as he placed himself in front of the statue. He read the name "Pallas," forced his rusty derby hat down over his ears in imitation of the statue's helmet, and mimicked the pose. Together they staggered out with their burden. A moment later they returned, carrying, with the help of two other men, the mummy in its big case. Owen also entered, and Marvin, with the joy of an Egyptologist, grasped a magnifying glass and examined the case. The old man's bobby had been Egypt, his liberal checks had assisted in many an excavation, and his knowledge of her relics was remarkable. Inserting a steel paper cutter in a crack he deftly pried open the upper half of the mummy's front. Beneath lay the mass of wrappings in which thousands of years ago the priests of the Nile had swathed some lady of wealth and rank. It was a woman, Marvin was sure, from the inscriptions on her tomb, and he believed her to be a princess. The secretary excused himself and went to his room, where his precious morphine pills were hidden. The old man, left alone, deftly opened the many layers of cloth which bound the ancient form. A faint scent that was almost like a presence came forth from the unwrapped folds. Long lost balms they were, ancient spices, forgotten antiseptics of a great race that blossomed and Fell--thousands of years before its time. "I smell the dead centuries," whispered Marvin to himself, "I can almost feel their weight. The world was young when this woman breathed. Perhaps she was pretty and foolish like my Polly--yes, and maybe as stubborn, too. Manetho says they had a good deal to say in those days. Ah, now we shall see her face." He had uncovered a bit of the mummy's forehead when out of the bandages fell a tiny vial. Marvin quickly picked it up. The vial was carved from some sort of green crystal in the shape of a two-headed Egyptian bird god. Without effort the stopper came out and Marvin held the small bottle to his nostrils, only to drop it at the mummy's feet. It exhaled the odor of the mummy which the reek of the centuries intensified a thousand times. It was too much for the old man. He had overtaxed his feeble vitality and felt his senses leaving him. With the entire force of his will he was able to get to a chair, into which he sank. The odor of the vial was still in his nostrils. His eyes were fixed and stared straight ahead, but he could see, in a faint, unnatural yellow light that bathed the room. From the vial, lying at the mummy's feet a vapor appeared to rise. It floated toward the swathed figure, enveloped it and seemed to be absorbed by it. "Perhaps this is death," thought Marvin, "for I cannot move or speak." But something else moved. There was a flutter among the bandages of the mummy. The commotion increased. Something was moving inside. The bandages were becoming loosened. They fell away from the face, and then was Marvin amazed indeed. Instead of the tight, brown parchment-like skin one always finds in these ancient relics appeared a smooth, olive-tinted complexion. It was the face of a young and beautiful woman. The features were serene as if in death, but there was no sunken nose or mummy's hollow eyes. A strand of black hair fell down, and the movement beneath the bandages increased. Out of the folds came an arm, a woman's arm, slender, yet rounded, an arm with light bones and fine sinews, clearly an arm and hand that had never known work. Marvin was well aware that a mummy's arm is invariably a black skeleton claw. At this point the old man made a mental note that he was not dead, for he could feel his own breathing. The arm rapidly and gracefully loosened and removed wrappings from the neck and breast. On the wrist gashed a bracelet made of linked scarabs. The arm now cast away the last covering of the bosom, neck and shoulders. She freed her left hand, lifted out the bottom half of the case and slid the wrappings from her limbs. Barefooted and bare-ankled, clothed only in a shimmering white gown that scarcely covered bare knees, and a white head-dress with a green serpent head in front, she stepped somewhat stiffly into the room. Slowly she made several movements of limbs and body like the first steps of a dance. She rose on her toes, looked down at herself and swayed her lithe hips. It occurred to Marvin that all this was by way of a graceful little stretch after a few thousand years of sleep. Marvin now observed that she was Pauline's height, and age, as well as general size and form. Slightly shorter she might have been, but then she lacked Pauline's high heels. The general resemblance was striking except in the color of the eyes and hair. Pauline's tresses were a light golden yellow, while this girl's hair was black as the hollow of the sphinx. Pauline's eyes were blue, but she who stood before him gazed through eyes too dark to guess their color. The Egyptian had found a little mirror. She patted her hair, adjusted the head-dress, but Marvin waited in vain for the powder puff. From the mirror the girl's eyes wandered to a painting hanging above the desk. It was an excellent likeness of Pauline. The resemblance between the two was obvious, not only to Marvin but evidently to the black-haired girl. She turned to the old man and addressed him in a strange language. Not one word did he recognize, yet the syllables were so clearly and carefully pronounced that he felt he was listening to an educated woman. Some of the tones were like Pauline's, some were not, but all were soft, sweet, modulated. The meaning was clear enough. She wished Marvin to see the resemblance, and she frowned slightly because the rigid, staring figure did not respond. Why should she be impatient, this woman of the Pharaohs who had lain stiff and unresponsive while Babylon and Greece and Rome and Spain had risen and fallen? Soon she resorted to pantomime, pointed to herself and the picture, touched her eyes and nose and mouth and then the corresponding painted features. She felt of her own jet hair, shook her head and looked questioningly at the light coiffure of Pauline. She turned to the old man, evidently asking if the painting were true in this respect. Then she smiled a smile like Pauline's. Perhaps she was asking if Pauline had changed the color of her hair. Now she became interested in a book on the corner of the desk. With little musical exclamations of delight she turned the printed pages and appreciated that the shelves contained hundreds more of these treasures. The typewritten letters lying about excited her admiration and then the pen and ink. She quickly guessed the use of the pen and ran eagerly to the mummy case. A moment's search brought forth a long roll of papyrus. Before Marvin's eyes she unrolled a scroll covered with Egyptian hieroglyphics. There were footsteps in the hall and the Egyptian looked toward the door. Owen entered, looked at Marvin searchingly, placed him in a more comfortable position in the chair, spoke his name and walked out. What seemed most surprising to the sick, man was his secretary's oversight of the girl. He passed in front of her, almost brushing her white robe and yet it was clear that he did not see her. But the Egyptian had seen him and the sight had excited her. She seemed desperately anxious to say something to Marvin, something about Pauline. The mummy had a secret to reveal! She tore the bracelet from her right wrist and tried to force it into Marvin's nerveless grasp. Try as she would, his muscles did not respond. There were voices in the hallway. Harry and Pauline were running downstairs. The Princess gave one last imploring glance at the paralyzed figure, passed her hand gently over his forehead; then she stepped quickly back to the case. Harry and Pauline rushed in, followed less hastily by Owen. They grasped the old man's hands, and Harry, seizing the telephone, called Dr. Stevens. But to the surprise of everybody Marvin suddenly shook off the paralysis, spoke, moved and seemed none the worse for his seizure. CHAPTER II THE WILL Old Mr. Marvin's faculties returned with a snap. There was the library just as it had been before his peculiar seizure. His son Harry was summoning on the telephone Dr. Stevens, the heart specialist, and Pauline, his adopted daughter, was on her knees chafing his hands and anxiously watching his face, while Owen, the secretary, was pouring out a dose of his medicine. But the peculiar yellow light had gone. And what about the mummy? It stood just as he had left it, the lower half of the case was in place, the upper half was out, revealing the loosened bandages and just a glimpse of the forehead. One strand of jet black hair hung down. All was just as it was when the little vial had fallen out. "I'm all right, I'm all right," protested Mr. Marvin, somewhat testily, as he twisted about in his chair to get a good view of the mummy. "Look out, Harry, don't step on that little bottle." Harry looked down and picked up the tiny vial which had fallen from the bandages wrapped about the ancient form. "Smell of it," his father ordered. Harry sniffed it and remarked that it smelled musty and passed it to Pauline. The girl carried it to her nostrils spin and again. She looked perplexed. "Well, what do you think it is?" asked the old man. "Why--I can't remember, but I ought to know. I'm sure I do know." "The devil you do," muttered her faster father. "What makes you think you ought to know?" "Why, it is so familiar. I'm certain I've smelled it often before. Haven't I?" "Well, if you have, Polly, you are a lot older than I am, older than anything in this country, as old as the pyramids. That bottle fell out of the mummy, and I can assure you it has been there some three or four thousand years. When I smelled of that bottle it had a queer effect on me. I felt as if I were going to have one of my fainting spells and was glad to get back to the chair. It's funny about that mummy. I thought she came out and talked to me." "Why, father, what a horrible thing!" sympathized Pauline. "Not horrible at all. She was a beauty and a princess. She was interested in your picture, Polly, and she looked like you, too, except, let's see--yes, her hair was black, jet black, like that one lock you see hanging down." "Oh," interrupted Pauline, "I wish my hair were black, and I often dream that it is, and that I am walking around in a pretty, white pleated dress and my feet are bare." "And a bracelet on your wrist--your right wrist?" questioned Marvin eagerly. "I don't remember," Pauline replied thoughtfully. "Well, we'll see if you had one and also whether I was dreaming or not," announced the old man with a half ashamed look as he rose somewhat unsteadily to his feet. Harry and Pauline tried to keep him quiet. He brushed their warnings aside and walked unsteadily to the mummy. "Let's see its face," suggested Harry carelessly. "No," said his father. "I have an idea that this old but young lady would not care to have us look at her. But there is one thing I must find out. I want to know if she wears a bracelet of linked scarabs on her right wrist or not." All of this was rather a bore to Harry, who lived intensely in the present, had no interest in Egypt, except that Pauline was born and adopted as an orphan baby there, and asked nothing of the future except that it allow him to marry this obstinate but fascinating little creature at the earliest possible moment. The question had been brought up half an hour before, and he wanted it settled at once. Harry wished they would decide about the marriage instead of fussing around with an old mummy. "My son, I venture to say that you would have been interested in this young woman had you met her." "Possibly," the youth admitted with a slight yawn. "Yes," continued his father, busily searching for the mummy's right wrist, "she was probably what you would call a peach." "She may have been a peach in her day," thought Harry, "but today she's a dried apricot." The elder Marvin's searching fingers encountered a hard object. It proved to be a scarab, or sacred Egyptian beetle, carved in black stone. "Did you ever dream about that?" asked Harry, chaffing. "Yes, I have," replied Pauline. Both men looked at her to see if she were serious. "I dreamed that I was very sick and going to die, and an old man with a long, thin beard came in. He gave me a stone beetle like that. Then it seems to me they put it right on my chest and they said--let's see, what did they do that for? I think it was to cure me of something the matter with my heart." "Polly," said Mr. Marvin, "I never knew you had dreams like this. But are you sure they said it would cure your heart? Wasn't it for some other reason?" Pauline thought a moment, while Harry lit a cigarette and his father worked his fingers down toward the mummy's right wrist. "No," said Pauline, "I remember now. It wasn't to cure it at all. It was to make it keep quiet." "Ho, ho!" laughed Harry. "I never knew of any one making it flutter much. I guess that was no dream." Harry's father silenced him with an impatient gesture and turned to Pauline, who was watching the wind make cat's paws on the polished surface of the Hudson River. "Go on, girl, go on. This is remarkable. I have read of this custom in the Egyptian 'Book of the Dead'! Why did they want to keep your heart quiet?" "They said," continued Pauline, dreamily, "that after I died my spirit was to be called before somebody--a God, I guess--who would judge whether I was good enough for Heaven or not. That stone beetle was placed on my heart to make it keep silent and not tell anything wicked I might have done in life. Aren't dreams crazy things? Say, Harry, there goes a hydroplane." The two young people hung out the open window. The old man was absorbed, too. He had at last worked his fingers along the entire length of the mummy's right wrist. It was dry and hard as any mummy he had ever seen, but it bore neither bracelet nor any ornament whatever. "Well," he said, reluctantly, "it was all a dream, interesting but not important. Like Polly's dream, it was just the echo of something I have read or seen." "Oh, pshaw! What are dreams, anyway?" muttered Harry, with impatience. "Dreams," said Pauline, authoritatively, "dreams are the bubbles which rise to the surface of the mind when it cools down in sleep." "Now," observed Harry, quietly, "when you and father are through talking about mummies and dreams I wish you would consider something that I am interested in. I'd like to know how soon you are going to marry me?" "Where did you get that definition of dreams, Polly?" asked the old man. "From my story," said Pauline, proudly. Both men at once remembered that she had gone to find the magazine and show them her first story. They eagerly demanded to see it. Pauline picked up the Cosmopolitan from the floor. She had dropped it in her agitation at finding her foster father had fainted. Sure enough, there it was: FIRE ON AN OCEAN LINER By Pauline Marvin. It was not the biggest feature by any means, but it was quite a little story, and there were several large stirring illustrations. Both men begged her to read it to them, but she modestly declined. Mr. Marvin adjusted his spectacles and read it through from start to finish, frequently looking up to compliment the authoress on some point that pleased him. Harry looked over his father's shoulder, and there could be no doubt they were both held and even thrilled by the story. Mr. Marvin clapped his hands and stated in a loud voice that he was proud of her. Harry expressed his appreciation by a bear-like hug and a kiss, all of which she accepted with blushes and protests. "And--er--did they actually pay you something for this?" asked the old gentleman. "Oh, yes," Pauline assured him. "They sent me a check at once. It paid for that frock you told me was too extravagant." "A hundred dollars?" ventured Harry from the depths of his ignorance of things feminine. Both Pauline and his father cast pitying glances at him. "Look here, young man," said the elder Marvin, "whoever led you to believe that you could buy dresses for a girl like Polly at a hundred dollars? If you contemplate matrimony on any such deluded basis as that you had better back out now before it's too late. Isn't that so, Polly?" "Why, father," protested the youth, "what do I care what her dresses cost? Polly knows everything I have or ever make is hers, and I can't think of a more satisfactory way of spending it than on her." "That's fine, Harry," laughed the father, "you have just the ideal frame of mind and the proper sentiments for a modern husband. You will find, too, that women are very reasonable. If a man gives his wife all he makes, plus the vote, and lets her do just as she pleases--she'll usually let him live in the same house with her, and even get up early enough to see him at breakfast once in a while." "I agree to everything," declared Harry, with the reckless abandon of youth in love. "But I want to know how soon Polly is going to marry me." Pauline, who had said nothing in answer to the preliminary skirmishes, now recognized the main attack and opened up in reply. "I told you I would marry Harry some time, but not for a year or two. You admitted that a writer ought to see life in order to write well. So there you are. I must have a year or two of adventure. There are a thousand things I want to do and see before I settle down as Mrs. Harry Marvin. Suppose we say two years." Harry staggered back as if from a blow. Two years! How preposterous! He couldn't live that long without Pauline. In vain he hurled his protests and objections. She stood, sweet, unruffled, sympathetic, but as firm as the Rocky Mountains. The old man listened to the debate for some time without comment. Then he pressed a button on his desk. In answer came Raymond Owen, the secretary. He had shown the good taste to retire from the library as soon as the conversation became personal. From the vantage point of a room across the hall he had been quietly listening, and decided it a rather unfruitful piece of eavesdropping. He appeared the faithful, deferent employee in every line as he entered. "Come here, Raymond," directed the old man, as sharply as a commanding officer, "and you, Harry, and you, Pauline." They obeyed and quickly lined up before his chair with rather surprised faces, for Mr. Marvin only called them Pauline and Harry when he was very serious. "Raymond, this is the situation: My son loves Pauline and wants to marry her at once. I have no objection; in fact, I would like to see them united at once, but Pauline demurs. She loves Harry, but feels she ought to have two years to see life before settling down. Two years is too much." "I should say so," growled Harry. "But, as my old grandfather, who has been gone these forty years now, used to say: 'When a woman will, she will, and when she won't, she won't--and there's an end on't.' I don't blame her for wanting to have her own way. It's the only plan I've found to get along in this world, but you can't have all your own way. You have to compromise. So Polly is going to have one year--that's enough. "During that year, Raymond, I'm going to put her in your care. You are older and more prudent than either Polly or Harry and will see that she comes to no harm. Take her anywhere she wants to go--around the world if she likes, to do anything within reason. Do you agree?" Mr. Marvin looked at Owen, who accepted the duty as calmly as if it were an order to post a letter. Polly also consented after a moment's hesitation. Harry alone protested and argued. It was a hopeless case and he yielded to overwhelming odds. This matter settled, Mr. Marvin's mind returned to the mummy and his curious delusion that it had come to life. While Owen perused Pauline's story and that willful young woman herself tried to cheer up her disconsolate lover, the old man returned to the mummy. He had searched for the bracelet on the right wrist, but, after all, perhaps the Egyptian might have slipped it onto her left wrist in her hurry to get back. "There it is," he shouted suddenly; "there it is--the bracelet. She wore it on her wrist and he told her to give it to Polly." Mr. Marvin held in his hand a bracelet of scarabs linked together. It looked to him to the very one the reincarnated mummy had worn. Harry and Pauline in wonder came to him, and it was well they did. The excitement and exertion had again overstrained his failing energies. He tottered, and they were just in time to save him from a fall. It was another of his fainting spells, and they lowered him gently into his chair. But the old man was not unconscious yet. Feebly he repeated to Pauline, "Wear this bracelet--wear it always--promise." Pauline promised, and slipped it on her wrist without more than glancing at it. The old man's eyes closed, and it was clear that this faint was more serious than his others. Harry, about to telephone for Dr. Stevens again, was greatly relieved to see the physician stride into the room. There was hardly need of the stethoscope to tell him the end was near. Even before the old man was undressed and in bed, Dr. Stevens had prepared and administered a hypodermic. The patient's eyelids fluttered and Dr. Stevens listened to the faintly moving lips. "The will," called the doctor, "what about the will?" He glanced at every one, but nobody knew. A shadow of anxiety passed over the features of the dying millionaire. Dr. Stevens could see that something of serious importance was on the old man's mind--something of importance about his vast property. Once more he listened and then hastily drawing out his prescription pad and fountain pen he wrote a few sentences at the dying man's dictation, while the patient rallied and opened his eyes. The physician held the blank before his patient, who read it through and nodded. Dr. Stevens then placed the pen in the trembling fingers and guided his signature. A moment more and the physician had signed it as a witness and the butler had done the same. The old manufacturer died as he had lived. The will written on Dr. Stevens's prescription pad was given to Owen. He went to his room and examined it. It read: "Bodley Stevens, M.D. Rx: I bequeath half my estate to my son, Harry, the remainder to my adopted daughter, Pauline, to be held in trust, until her marriage, by my secretary, Raymond Owen." Then followed the signature of the deceased and that of the two witnesses. In vain Owen looked for the handsome bequest to "the faithful secretary." This was a bitter disappointment, and he considered for a moment the advisability of destroying the will. This would make valid one of the earlier wills in which he knew he had not been forgotten. The folly of such a course became evident after a few moments thought. Dr. Stevens, the butler, and several others knew the contents of the document. It was so simple that its meaning could hardly be confused or forgotten, and every one knew it was in his keeping. It occurred to Owen that quite likely such a hasty death-bed will written by a doctor unskilled in law might not be accepted by the courts. Early the next morning Owen suspended his work of answering telegrams of condolence long enough to make a hurried trip to lower Manhattan, where the late Stanford Marvin's lawyers had offices. In vain the great lawyer cudgeled his brains for some flaw. The will ought to be wrong, but it wasn't. The meaning was so clear that even a court couldn't misunderstand it, and the fortune was left to his natural beneficiaries. The lawyer heaved a sigh and said plaintively: "Too bad, too bad. Why didn't they call me?" "Then this will is not valid?" asked Owen. "Oh, no, it will hold; but what a pity that such a great man's last will and testament should be such an--well, so--well, this instrument is not worthy of conveying such a great estate." He contemptuously slipped the simple document into an envelope and placed it in his safe. Owen picked up his hat, but hesitated at the door. A question was forming in his mind and with it a hope. "Mr. Wilmerding," he asked finally, "in case Miss Marvin does not marry who would have charge of the estate?" "I should say," replied the lawyer, "in reply to your question that the estate would be held in trust by you." Returning to the house and entering the library Owen was confronted by the unwelcome spectacle of Montgomery Hicks, generally known as Mug. Hicks, with his gaudy attire, and ugly face, was always an affront to the eye, but to Owen he was a terror, for he held the power of blackmail over the secretary. Owen shrank at the sight of his enemy, but immediately took courage. Though Marvin's death had left the secretary no legacy it had also robbed the blackmailer of his power. Hicks advanced with what he intended to be a winning smile and extended a hot, fat hand. "I see the old man has croaked and I was just dropping in to talk business," Hicks's newsboy voice growled out. "Hicks," said Owen, keeping his hand in his pocket, "if you came here to get your money out of the legacy old man Marvin was to leave me. Well, you won't get it and you never will get it. Marvin didn't leave me a cent, so there is nothing for you to get. He did leave me a job in his will, a job that will last for a year, and neither you nor any one else can force me out of that job. You can't blackmail me any more." "At the end of the year what becomes of you?" asked Hicks. "Then I get a position somewhere else; but that is none of your business." "You don't want a position, Owen. A position calls for work. You don't like hard work any more then I do. You can't stand work much longer, either. Look at your eyes and your skin, how many grains do you take a day, anyway?" "I haven't touched a grain of morphine in six months," lied Owen. "But get out of my way--you can't get anything out of me and you can't blackmail me. If you come to this house again I'll have you thrown out." "Just a minute," said Hicks, as pleasantly as he could, straining his coarse features into the unaccustomed position of a smile. "I didn't come to get money out of you. I know all about the will. What I came for was to help you and give you a tip. You and I can make a lot of easy money together. You've got the opportunity and I've got the brains. Now, to show you I'm your friend, look at this!" Hicks handed him a paper which Owen read with surprise. It was a receipt in full for all Owen owed. Owen put it in his pocket. "That's right, keep it. You and I are going to be so rich before long that a matter of a thousand or two wouldn't be worth talking about between friends." Owen had been under the thumb of this man, had feared and hated him and hoped for the day when he might sneer in his face and defy him. This was the time, and yet he felt Hicks had something to offer. He was in temporary charge of millions. There should be, there must be, some way to make this control permanent or else to delve into these millions while they were in his care. As Hicks hinted, this was an opportunity and he needed not brains, but rather experience and advice. Owen had been a rascal on a short time, why not take a partner like this man Hicks? He would prevent mistakes, and mistakes are all a criminal need fear. Owen fingered uneasily the paper Hicks had put in his hand. He drew it out of his pocket--yes, it was a receipt in full for all that Owen owed the scoundrel. What could be Hicks's scheme? Owen turned a puzzled and worried gaze upon his companion. Hicks observed him closely, read the misgivings in Owen's mind and, drawing close, whispered something in the latter's ear. But Owen's drug-saturated nerves trembled at the thought. He pushed Hicks aside and walked rapidly out of the room, calling over his shoulder: "I won't have anything to do with you. I don't want you to come near me or speak to me again. I'm done with you." "When you want me you know where to find me," was Hicks's parting answer. CHAPTER III PAULINE TAXES THE FIRST TRICK "All right, I'll do it," growled Harry Marvin, with the air of a martyr going to the stake. "I'll do it for your sake, Polly." "Well, you'd better begin to get ready," said Pauline blithely. "I'll climb into a frock coat and endure an hour or two of this afternoon tea chatter," promised Harry, "but first you must talk sense with me for a few minutes." "Oh, Harry," spoke Pauline, softly, "I know what 'talking sense' means. You want to argue about my year of adventure. Now, lets not argue. Let's just be happy. You know I love you and I know you love me, and that ought to be enough. This year will be gone before you know it. I'm going to begin it right away just to please you. The sooner it starts the sooner it will be over." "Begin it?" said Harry. "Why, a month of it is gone now. But it's all nonsense. Polly, if you love me you are going to give up this crazy idea." A maid, bringing the card of Miss Lucille Hamlin, interrupted Harry. She was the first of the afternoon tea party. Polly hurried Harry off to dress, and, of course, he had no further chance to "talk sense" until the door had closed on the last guest. Then he pounced upon her. But Pauline, sweetly stubborn, cheerfully unyielding, insisted on carrying out her father's promise to the letter. Raymond Owen, the secretary of the late Mr. Marvin, had thought it important to overhear this argument, and finally to walk into the library where the debate was going on. If the adventures were to start he had an idea for a beginning. The words of Hicks, the blackmailer, had been in his mind for some thirty days and were beginning to bear fruit. He had soon reached the point of hoping, almost praying, something would happen to Pauline that he might be left in control of her, estate. During the last few days Owen had progressed, from merely hoping to readiness to help his wish to come true. Harry instantly appealed to the secretary to dissuade Pauline. There was no doubt that Owen had some influence over the girl. In years gone by, before Owen had taken to the drug, Pauline had sought him out in many a time of perplexity and learned to rely on his tactful, well-considered advice. To the surprise of the young master of the house, Owen made no attempt to dissuade. Very unobtrusively he pointed out that for many years he had been accustomed to carry out the wishes of Harry's father, and that he was bound to fulfill his last wish in the same way. "Raymond, you're a dear," laughed Pauline; "let's think of something thrilling to do right off. Have you any idea?" "No," lied Owen, "I hadn't given the matter any thought. We might look at a newspaper and see what's happening." Owen had a paper with him and the three examined it together. Owen pretended to discover that an aviation meet was about to be held. His idea, for which Harry promptly hated him, was to induce some aviator to take Pauline as a passenger. Many of the races called for carrying a passenger. Harry made a few objections, but the speed with which they were overruled showed that he had no standing in this court. So Harry subsided, but he thought very hard. Several things were becoming evident to Harry. One was that this year to see life and have adventures was actually going to take place and no opposition on his part would stop it. It was also clear that if he hoped to control Pauline's adventures in any way it would be by the use of his wits, matching them against Pauline and the secretary. When Pauline and Owen decided upon the aeroplane ride, Harry contented himself with remarking that he would have to see about it. Both chuckled when he said it, Pauline outwardly and Owen inwardly. Then they had dinner under the round glassy eye of Aunt Cornelia. Aunt Cornelia was an elderly maiden relative of Harry, who had arrived with others for the funeral and made the brilliant discovery that since Mr. Marvin's death the "social situation," as she termed it, at the Marvin house had become impossible. It seemed, according to Aunt Cornelia, that a young man and a young woman of impressionable age living in the same house unchaperoned constituted an "impossible social situation," Either Pauline or Harry must move out or someone must be installed as chaperon. Of course, the chaperon was the least of the three evils and Aunt Cornelia, being the discoverer of the job, was elected to fill it. Harry ordered a bottle of wine with his dinner. Though he actually drank very little, this unusual event created no little consternation. "Harry, I didn't know you drank?" said Pauline. "I am just beginning. You see, now that I must take over father's affairs and mix with men of the world I ought to get a little experience in things. See life and know what's what." After dinner Harry casually asked if Pauline thought her adventures would lead her to Paris. Pauline thought it likely, whereat Harry remarked that he might see her over there. "I haven't been to Paris since I was a kid, and I really ought to see it, don't you think?" "Yes," agreed Pauline, without enthusiasm, "but wait until we are married and we'll do Paris together." "No, Polly, that won't do. I'm sorry, but as you say, you can't see life after you're married and settled down, so I'll have to do Paris alone." "Harry, are you sure you love me?" Pauline whispered. "Polly, I know it, and everybody else knows it except you. Get Owen, he's a notary public, and I'll take an oath before him that you have been the only girl in all the world, are now and ever will be, world without end, amen." "And I love you, Harry," said Pauline, lowering her eyes until he saw only the silky lashes. "Why, Polly, that's the first time you ever volunteered that information." "Yes, Harry, I love you too much to let you go to Paris." "Paris can't hurt me unless I let it hurt me." "Harry, you won't be quite the same sort of boy when you come back from Paris. Will you promise not to go until we are married?" "Will you promise not to go on this trip of adventure?" "Why should I?" demanded Pauline. "Because you won't ever be quite the same sort of girl when you come back." After breakfast the next morning when the big touring car rolled up to the front door to got Pauline and Owen, Harry was hurt that he had not been consulted. Pauline's belated invitation to go with them to the aviation field in the automobile was declined. Away went the big car to the fine stretch of roads, where it made short work of the distance to the aviation grounds. Owen made a complete canvass of the "hangars" and soon accounted for every machine entered in the race for the next day. From all but one of the aviators he obtained a flat refusal. Not for money or any other consideration would they take a strange woman as a passenger. The only exception was a Frenchman, whose hesitation in declining led Owen to further argument. At the last moment Pauline, impatient at the suspense, entered the Frenchman's "hangar" and added her blandishments to Owen's financial inducements. The gallant foreigner succumbed and a bargain was struck. He exhibited his tame bird of steel and wood and cloth with the utter pride of a mother showing off her only child. The aviator's fingers touched one of the wires and the easy smile left his face. He turned to his mechanics and sharp words followed. A moment later one of his assistants was at work tightening the wire. Owen's eyes scarcely left the wire, and when the opportunity arose he questioned the mechanic as, to what would happen if that particular steel strand should fail during flight. The foreigner explained frankly that the aeroplane would capsize and plunge to the earth. But he assured Owen that no such thing would happen, as he had just tightened the wire in question and would make another inspection after the practice flight that afternoon. All the way home Owen's thoughts were of that wire and what it would mean to him. In the meanwhile Harry, after watching the car depart toward Hempstead, concluded to follow. He went to the picturesque private garage behind the Marvin mansion and soon was, following in the tracks of the bigger car. Arrived on the field, he recognized Pauline's car and awaited patiently until he saw it drive away. Then he interviewed the aviator and learned of the proposed trip on the morrow. Harry's French was nothing to boast of, nor was the Frenchman's English. But they managed to have a long and in the end a heated argument. The birdman said he had given his word to a beautiful lady, and that settled it. Besides, there was no danger in his wonderful machine. Had he not flown upside down and done all the things the great Pegoud himself had done? "As you Americans say--let's see, what is your idiom?" One of his mechanics prompted him: "Ah, yes," he said, with a smile. "I believe the proper expression is, 'I should worry.'" Harry threw up his hands and went home. As he buzzed his horn outside the garage the door was opened by the Marvin chauffeur with a telegram in his hand. The chauffeur's wife was sick and he wanted a couple of days' leave of absence. Harry granted it instantly. That evening he made no mention of either the chauffeur's absence or his trip to the field. Pauline thought she was teasing Harry by saying nothing of her plans. She was sure he was eaten up with curiosity to know the result of her visit and admired his ability, as she thought, to conceal it. Owen spent a nervous evening. He walked out soon after dinner and from a drug-store telephone booth called up a friend in the insurance business. To the secretary's surprise and disappointment he learned that the percentage of accidents to aviators had become comparatively small. Passengers were particularly fortunate. The friend even agreed to obtain accident insurance for any one at a reasonable premium. If aeroplanes had become reasonably safe the chance of Pauline's being killed during the flight on the following day was insignificant. He must give up all hope of wealth from the permanent control of her estate. As the evening wore on Owen began to feel how he had unconsciously relied on this hope. He doubled his evening dose of morphine, but it neither soothed his disappointment nor brought him sleep. Hour after hour, during the night, his sleepless eyes seemed to see that loose wire which the mechanic had explained to be so vitally important. He could see in imagination the machine flying off into the clouds with Pauline in it. He could see it suddenly waver, dip and plunge to the earth. In his mind's eye he saw himself rushing to, the wreck, lifting out the girl's crushed form, wildly calling for a doctor, and exulting all the time that she was beyond human aid. About two o'clock Owen fell into a doze, and in that doze came one of his vivid opium dreams. He beheld Hicks enter his bedroom. It was not Hicks, the blackmailer, but Hicks, the counselor, who had told Owen how he might become rich. Hicks was speaking to him in a sort of noiseless voice, very different from his usual tones. He spoke in a sort of shells or husks of words. The consonants were there, but the vowels were lacking. Yet he heard as plainly as if the red-faced man had shouted. Hicks advised him to be a man, to show courage for once, to risk something, and then reap the reward forever afterward. "Take your motorcycle, ride to the aviation field before daylight, file that wire half through, and fate will take care of the rest." But Owen lacked the nerve. He feared that he would be seen sneaking onto the field at night or at daybreak. Hicks replied that the field was deserted at this hour. Owen then insisted that the aeroplane would be guarded, and even if it were not locked in its hangar the first rasp of a file on the wire would call the attention of some one on guard. No, it was too much, Owen could not do it. Instead, he made a counter suggestion that Hicks should undertake the task, since he was so certain of its success. For his part the secretary agreed to divide all that the estate might be made to yield him. Owen, like everybody else, had seen many strange things in dreams, but never had he known of any character in a dream admitting or even suggesting that he was a dream. Yet this was just what Hicks did. "I would, Owen. I would do it in a minute if I were talking to you. But this isn't me at all. I'm only a dream, in, reality I'm sound asleep in a hotel on upper Broadway, where I am dreaming that I am talking to you. Tomorrow morning I'll remember enough of this dream to make me go down to the aviation field with a sort of premonition that Pauline is going to be killed in an aeroplane." "How did you know about that wire and that she is going to fly tomorrow," asked Owen. "I don't know that," said the phantom Hicks frankly in his empty voice. "There is a third party in this and I don't know who he is or much about him, except that he is not a living being. He seems to be somebody from the past, a priest of some old religion I ought to have studied about when I was at school. I don't know what his motive is, but he is with us. He wants her killed for some reason. He brought this dream of me to you so I could explain. "You needn't worry about the man on guard over the aeroplanes. That man won't wake up, no matter how much noise you make." "How do you know?" Owen asked. "He knows," replied Hicks, "because he has transferred the effects of your morphine from your astral body to his. That's how he knows. You ought to know, too, because you have taken almost enough of the drug to kill you tonight, and yet this is the first time you have even closed your eyes. You'd better let him help us and file that wire as he advises. I'm going now, you will wake up in a moment. This priest man told me after I had given you the message to drop this out of my hand and the dream would end. So here goes. Goodbye." Owen saw Hicks hold his hand over a table and drop a small black shiny object upon it. As it dropped Hicks vanished and Owen awoke. He heard a sharp snap and saw something black and shiny on the table. For a moment the secretary sat quietly in his chair staring at the table and making sure that he was no longer dreaming. Then he examined the black object. It was the scarab which old Mr. Marvin had removed from the folds of the mummy. An image of the beetle which Egypt held sacred, carved in black stone. Owen had not noticed the scarab before his short nap and he could not account for its presence in his room anyway. A little later he donned his motor-cycling suit, tip-toed downstairs, noiselessly went out by a back door and was soon trundling his big two-cylinder motorcycle from the garage. He was careful to push it out of the Marvin premises onto the highway before lighting his lamp and starting. Arriving at the field just at dawn Owen found it as deserted as the spectral Hicks had promised. From the tool kit of his motor-cycle he took two files of different shapes and a pair of pliers and walked briskly and fearlessly over the uneven ground to the hangars. All were closed except one, and that one contained the French machine in which Pauline was to ascend. The secretary knew that this hangar would be open. He knew in advance that he would find a mechanic on guard and sound asleep. Whether real or unreal, awake or asleep, the business of the moment was the filing of that wire. Owen recognized it readily and found it not to be a single wire, as he supposed, but a slender cable composed of many strands. These strands resisted his file and even the clipper attached to his pliers. After what seemed an hour's work he had weakened or broken enough of the metal threads so that the cable stretched perceptibly at that point to do more might cause the cable to break at once and betray what had been done. Owen hurriedly, returned to his machine had dashed back through the beautiful morning air to the Marvin home. Servants were stirring in their rooms and the gardener was engaged in shaking some sort of powder from a can onto a bare spot on the front lawn. He glanced up at Owen without surprise, for these early rides were known to be an old habit of the secretary. Owen took the machine to the garage, satisfied that there was nothing guilty in his appearance or the gardener would have noted it. Stepping out of the garage he met Harry and could not help starting perceptibly. Harry looked him in the eye, and there was nothing for Owen to do but stare steadily back. "You are up very early, Owen," said Harry, looking at the dust on the motor. "Yes, I've been for a long ride. I think the morning air does me good." "You don't look well, Owen. Why don't you go to bed today. I'll take Polly to the meet." "No, thanks. I wouldn't miss seeing Miss Pauline fly," said Owen firmly. CHAPTER IV OWEN WINS THE FIRST GAME Harry Marvin entered the little private garage back of the Marvin mansion, locked the door and drew the shades of the small windows. There were only two automobiles in the garage. One was the big six cylinder touring car in which Pauline and Owen had made their trip the day before to the aviation field. The other was the two-seated runabout that Harry had driven over the same ground just behind them. Having made sure that nobody was about, Harry lifted up the hood of the touring car and without the slightest provocation attacked it with a wrench. He removed the carburetor, took it to pieces, lifted out the hollow metal float and deliberately made two punctures in it. Then he tossed the dismembered parts upon a work bench and was about to operate on the runabout when he heard voices outside. He was barely in time to unlock the door and be found busily working on the car when Pauline entered. She had just learned of the chauffeur's absence. Harry volunteered the additional bad news that the big car was out of order. Like every disappointed woman, she insisted on knowing exactly what was wrong. Harry told her, with many long technical details, and, not knowing at all what he was talking about, she had to be satisfied. Could he fix it in time to get her to the aviation field before the race? Well, that depended partly on whether she would go away and not bother him until breakfast. Pauline could, and she certainly would refrain from bothering him. Never before had Harry found her a bother, nor, for that matter, had any other man in her recollection. Out she went, with more color than usual in her pink cheeks and the light of battle in her eyes. "By George, I've got to play my cards carefully," thought Harry, as he contemplated the runabout. It was evident that he had designs on the health of the two-seater also. But he felt the necessity of subtlety in this case. He could not assassinate it boldly by tearing out a vital organ as he had done to the bigger car. This runabout must die a slow, lingering death. How was he to do it? His first idea was to weaken the tires and invite "blowouts" on the road. But this could not be done with certainty, and some kind friend might supply him with new tires. A more promising idea was to drain the engine of its oil, knowing that sooner or later the pistons would run dry and stick. Such a proceeding would ruin the engine, and Harry was too good a mechanic to spoil a first rate engine, especially one built by his father. He would as soon think of hamstringing a faithful horse. A better plan soon came to him and put him into action. It soon had him flat on his back under the car, boring a hole in the bottom of the gasoline tank. When the life-blood of the car began to trickle out in a stream he stopped the hole with a small wooden peg. The young man now frowned at the only remaining vehicle which had, not received his attention, Owen's motorcycle. Harry went to the hose used for washing down the cards and collected a little water in the palm of his hand. With the other hand he removed the cap from the motorcycle's tank and allowed two or three drops of water to mingle with the gasoline. This done, Harry let down his sleeves, washed his hands, and sauntered in to breakfast, with the unwelcome announcement that the big car was, for the day at least, beyond human aid. There was a flicker of suspicion in Owen's sallow face at the news. He wondered if Harry had disabled the touring car that he might ride alone with Pauline. "I am afraid," said Harry, quietly, "that you will have to ride in the runabout alone with me, Polly. It's rather hard on Raymond, but I guess he must go on his motorcycle or by train." "Oh, I think you wrecked it on purpose," said Pauline, without the slightest suspicion that she was stating the truth. Owen, worried by vague misgivings about Harry, looked into the tank of the runabout to make sure that it was full, and then scurried away on his two wheeled mount. He considered waiting until the runabout was ready to start and keeping the machine in sight, but it seemed wiser to be on the field where he could make sure the Frenchman would not forget his bargain nor start before Pauline arrived. Pauline was ready with such record-breaking suddenness that it gave her the novel experience of waiting for Harry. She bad not forgotten that her lover had asked her not to bother him while he worked on the car. After that slight to her pride the young lady would rather die than go near the garage while he was in it. During the next five minutes unpleasant doubts entered her mind. What could this indifference and neglect mean? She had looked upon Harry ever since his return from college as a personal possession. Of course, technically he wasn't hers until she married him. But if he were not her property, at least she had an option on the handsome youth until such time as she saw fit to either take his name or relinquish him to some one else. In that case she wondered to whom she would like to turn him over. There was her schoolmate and chum, Miss Hamlin. How lucky any man would be to get her, and Harry--how would he feel about it? Then, like a cold draught in her brain came the recollection that Lucille and Harry had corresponded all the four years he was at college. Could it be that she, Pauline, had been too willful and headstrong with Harry? If so, was it possible that the keen edge of his adoration was wearing dull? Pauline had just succeeded in stamping these unpleasant questions deep down into the subconscious parts of her mind when the young man whisked up in the runabout. Pauline's wrath melted rapidly. Harry drove, as he did everything out in the open air, magnificently. His judgment of distances and openings was precise, and his skill in weaving his way through heavy traffic was startling. A good looking young man is seldom seen to better advantage, especially by a girl, than when driving a powerful car. Pauline loved to drive with Harry. Besides his spectacular tricks he had a guileless manner of getting the better of arguments with crossing policemen. Harry was not driving as fast as usual. This fact was impressed on her by shouts and waving of hands from a car which passed them from behind. "That's Lucille," cried Pauline, waving. "Yes, and, confound it, that's Billy Madison taking her to the races." "Well, why shouldn't he?" asked Pauline. "Isn't it all right?" "Yes but it seems to me he is paying deal of attention to Lucille and --say, Polly, you don't suppose she'd be silly enough to care for him, do, you?" That sensation of a cold wave in the back of her brain came again. "I'm sure I don't know," she replied, a little coldly. "Why--does it matter very much to you?" Harry hesitated, even stammered a little, in denying that it did. He stammered, as Pauline well understood, because he was not telling her his true thoughts. It did matter, and she knew it. In reality it mattered because Harry knew too much about young Madison to want him to win the affection of any friend of his, but Harry did not wish to explain. "So Harry does care for Lucille and always has cared," thought Pauline. The sense of possession of the youth beside her faded and he seemed far away. If a man fears he is losing his grip on a girl he redoubles his attentions and racks his brains to be more interesting and attractive to her. A girl in the same situation reverses the tactics. Just as Harry felt the absolute zero which scientists talk about settling upon him, he remembered a very important duty. "Seems to me we don't drift the way we ought to," said Harry, pressing on his clutch pedal and trying to took concerned. "I think we have been a long time getting to the aviation field," was Pauline's chilly answer. Harry stopped the car, went back and pulled out the little wooden plug in the gasoline tank. Then away they went again, leaving a little wet line in the dust of the road. Pauline stared straight ahead. Harry's attempts at conversation fell on the stony ground of silence, or at best brought forth only the briefest and most colorless answers. Soon Harry's practiced ear caught the preliminary warning of waning gasoline, and a moment later, half way up a gentle hill, with a sob from all its six cylinders the car gave up the ghost. A few miles ahead Owen also was in difficulties. He had been sailing along merrily until he stopped at a little roadhouse for a drink. The machine had been all right when he got off and he knew nobody had touched it, yet now it acted as if possessed by the evil one. With great difficulty he was able to start it, and once started it coughed, bucked and showed all the symptoms of bronchitis and pneumonia. By dint of strenuous pedaling Owen helped the asthmatic motor to the top of the next hill. It ran as smoothly as a watch all the way down the other side and then imitated a bunch of cannon crackers on the following rise. Owen was a good motorcycle rider, but a very poor mechanic. His machine had been adjusted, cleaned and kept in repair by the Marvin chauffeur, and the secretary had seldom, cause to investigate it on the road. He had always used the carefully filtered gasoline from the garage, so that he neither understood the present alarming symptoms nor knew their simple cure. His motor was protesting at a drop of water which had entered the needle valve of his carburetor and, being heavier than gasoline, had lodged there and stopped its flow. It would have been an easy, matter to drain the carburetor, but instead Owen with nervous fingers adjusted everything he could get his hands on, and after two hours' work trundled it into a farmhouse and hired the farmer to drive him the short remaining distance to the aviation field. Several machines were in the air, but not the Frenchman's, when the farmer drove up. The roads and the edges of the field were alive with cars and spectators as the secretary hastened to the "hangars." The French aviator welcomed Owen and inquired for the mademoiselle. This confirmed Owen's fears that something had happened to her on the way. It had troubled him a little that the runabout had not passed him on the road, but Harry might have made a detour to avoid some section of bad road. Owen lost another hour in watching and worrying before he made up his mind to go to the rescue. There were plenty of idle cars, but it was not easy to hire one, as they were mostly guarded by chauffeurs with no right to rent or lend them. At last a man was found who was willing to pick up $10 and take a chance that his master would not know about it. The rescue car found them just where they had stopped, half way up the hill. Pauline had run the scale of feminine annoyance, from silence to sarcasm, to tears. The tears produced almost the same effect on Harry's determination to keep Pauline from flying that the drops of water had in Owen's carburetor. The spectacle of the girl he loved weeping had almost broken up his resolve when Owen dashed by, shouted, turned around and drew up alongside. Harry asked for help, and the chauffeur who had never had the pleasure of tinkering with a "Marvin Six," was inclined to dismount and aid at least in diagnosing the car's ailment. While he was thinking about it and surveying the parts which Harry had taken out and strewn about the running board in his pretended trouble hunt Pauline had dashed away her tears and transferred her pretty self to the new car. Pauline and Owen both knew there was barely time to reach the field before the Frenchman's ascent. So with scanty farewells Harry was left to reassemble his car. When he had set up the last nut he replaced the little plug in the tank, produced a can of gasoline from the locker behind the seats, emptied it into his tank and drove at reckless speed for the aviation grounds. He was just in time to see a tiny speck on the edge of the horizon. This, he learned, was the Frenchman's machine. He was told that it carried a passenger. The speck grew rapidly in size, developed the insect shape of a biplane and soon seemed to be over the other end of the aviation field. The young man's joy at seeing the aeroplane returning in safety was dampened by a little feeling of shame that by such devious means he had almost spoiled Pauline's pleasure. "I act like an old woman worrying Polly this way," he decided. "No wonder she is cross to me lately. She must think I would be a tyrant of a--" Harry's last words were choked by a spasm of the throat. There were shouts and gestures from the spectators. A light gust of wind had struck the aeroplane on the right wing. It wavered an instant, like a dragon fly about to alight, and then instead of responding to the aviator's levers turned on its left side and plunged to the ground. A cloud of dust arose, half hiding the wreck, and then the crash of impact came to his ears. There was a second of silence, broken by a groan. Harry heard the groan and didn't even know it came from his own throat. He was in motion now, forcing people to the right and left and running down the field. It seemed miles to the other end, and he was gratefully conscious that others nearer were hurrying to the rescue, if rescue it might be called. The aeroplane had dropped like a stone from a height that forbade hope of escape. Would she be conscious and would he be in time to give and receive a last message of love before her splendid young life was quenched in the black blot of death? Besides grief there was fury in the runner's heart, wrath against Owen for encouraging this foolish and dangerous caprice, against the unfortunate driver who had failed to preserve his precious freight, and against nature who condemns every living thing by one means or another to that same final failure and wreck death. Gasping for breath from his exertions, he was at last within a hundred feet of the ruin, and saw people lifting up the engine and removing a limp figure. Just then two people stepped in his way. He did not turn out but rushed straight at them, rather glad to have something to burl aside in his blind anger, nor did he notice that one was a woman. Harry's plunge carried him between them and knocked both down, just as he had often bowled over the "interference" in his football games. On he lurched, wondering vaguely at hearing his name called. He heard it again and it sounded like Pauline's voice. He turned, and it was Pauline. After all Pauline had arrived too late--had missed that fatal adventure. Owen watched Harry lift Pauline up and wrap her in his arms with a squeeze that hurt. But it was a hurt she loved and though she sobbed as if her heart would break they were sobs of relief and happiness. Owen watched a moment and then slunk away; his schemes had been for nothing. Pauline was alive and happy in her lover's arms, and the secretary was no nearer his goal of permanent control of her estate than before. He walked to the entrance of' the tent and tried to learn from the nurses and doctors who were hurrying in and out whether the French aviator would live or die. Nobody would stop to give him a satisfactory answer. There was a flap in the back of the tent, and through this Owen cautiously peered. He saw a nurse with something that looked like wet absorbent cotton dabbing at a round black object. Presently he saw that the round object was the head of a man blackened by fire. Just then the nurse looked up, saw Owen's guilty face and gave a little exclamation of dismay. At the same instant Owen felt a hand grasp his elbow. Withdrawing his head from the tent, he turned quickly and was confronted by the red face of Hicks, the blackmailer, counselor and dream messenger. The secretary backed away from Hicks with a face of terror. "Don't be scared," said Hicks in a hoarse whisper. "I feel as if I were in this thing as deep as you are." "In what thing?" asked Owen. "Don't bluff, old man," said Hicks. "Didn't you dream about me last night?" "Well, what have my dreams to do with you?" "Stop bluffing," replied Hicks. "Didn't you see me in a dream last night? And didn't I leave a black, shining stone on the table when I left?" Owen did not deny these questions, and the red-visaged man went on: "I see you took my advice--that is, his advice, whoever he is, and you fixed the wire." "Look here, Hicks, in heaven's name, tell me what this means. I did dream about you; you told me to do the thing, and it's your fault. You admit you are in it. Now, what is it?" "Owen," said Hicks, "you and I are a couple of pikers in a big game-- bigger than we understand. We hold the cards, but somebody else is playing the hand for us. He is an old guy and a wise one, four thousand years old, he tells me, and, though it scares me out of my boots to think who I am trailing along with, I'm going to stick and you'd better stick, too, and let him play our hand to the end." "Who is it?" asked Owen, wondering if the morphine had gotten the better of him again or if Hicks were playing some uncanny deceit on him. "I don't know," replied Hicks. "He's somebody who has been dead 4,000 years, and he wants to have this girl Pauline killed so he can get her back. I suppose he's some kind of ghostly white slaver. It isn't our business what he is as long as he takes care of us. If we'll help him he'll help us." "Well, he didn't manage very well today," objected Owen. "He planned all right," rejoined Hicks. "The machine fell, and if she'd been in it she'd have been killed. But the other side played a card. I don't know what the card was, but it took the trick and she didn't go up in the machine. That's all. But don't worry, we'll have better luck some other time." Owen shook his head. He could make nothing of this battle of unseen forces. It was clear to him that he had grasped at the one big chance to get Pauline's estate and had missed it. He told Hicks so frankly. "That's where you're wrong again," insisted Hicks. "If that girl had been killed today it would have been a big blunder." "A blunder?" queried Owen. "Didn't you say that Pauline must be put out of the way before we can get hold of her fortune?" "Listen," said Hicks glancing cautiously about, "come over here away from these people." "What do you mean by saying that it would have been a big blunder if Pauline had been killed in that flying machine?" demanded Owen. "Yes, an almighty big blunder--that's what I said, and I can tell you why. We were pretty stupid not to think of it before. Now here's what's got to happen to Miss Pauline--" Hicks placed his mouth close to Owen's car and whispered. CHAPTER V THE PIRATE AND PAULINE A sort of false quiet, like the calm that broods between storms, kept all serene at the Marvin mansion for a week after the aeroplane catastrophe. Little had been seen of Harry, who was busy with directors' meetings and visits to the factories. Owen had read with alarm of rumors that some one had tampered with a wire of the wrecked biplane. But if the authorities were investigating he saw no signs of it, and suspicion pointed no finger at him. What puzzled and worried Owen more than anything else was his own mind and behavior. Having no belief in the supernatural, he could not account for the dream which had thrown him into a criminal partnership with Hicks. Hicks had blackmailed him in the past, and there was nobody he had feared and hated more than this vulgar and disreputable race track man. Yet Hicks had appeared to him in a dream, and Owen had promptly done his bidding, involving himself in what would probably turn out to be murder. The newspapers reported the French aviator as barely living from day to day. Owen suffered the torment of a lost soul, but, at least he had no more dreams, or spectral visitations. Hicks called him on the telephone once or twice, but the secretary refused to talk. Pauline, too, had a busy week. Besides her usual social activities, she rewrote and finished her new story. It seemed to her even better than the one in the Cosmopolitan Magazine. "This will surely be taken," Pauline thought with a little sigh of regret, "and that means the end of my year of adventures--" She had determined on this course the night after the accident. It was after midnight, and Pauline was trying to marshal the exciting recollections of the day into the orderly mental procession that leads to sleep. Very faintly she heard what sounded like the music of a distant mandolin. Pauline knew it was Harry, went to the open window and looked down on the dark lawn. There he was playing with a bit of straw instead of a pick that his music might not disturb the sleepers in the house. Pauline wanted to throw her arms around him and promise not to cause any more worry. But she didn't, because she couldn't reach him from the window. After Harry had gone Pauline decided to finish her story, send it to a publisher and let his decision be hers. "If they accept it, you stay home and marry Harry," she told the pretty face under the filmy night cap which smiled at her from the mirror. "But if they dare reject it, Harry will have to worry, dear boy though he is." So Pauline lost no time in finishing and submitting her manuscript, inclosing a special delivery stamp and a request please to let her know at once. On Saturday Pauline received a bulky letter in the morning's mail. It was her neatly typed manuscript and a short letter declining her story. The editor thought it charming, showed wonderful imagination, gave great promise of future success, but there was a lack of experience evident throughout--a little unreal, he added. He ventured to suggest that the author would do well to travel around and see the world from different angles. During the afternoon Harvey Schieffelin dropped in for a call. He had found her story in the Cosmopolitan and complimented her then he began to laugh. "Polly, that's a bully story of yours, but you ought to have gone down and watched some stokers do work before you described that scene." "What was wrong in my description?" demanded the young authoress. "Well, you told of a stoker laying his grimy hand on the fire door and pulling it open to rake the fire." "Well, couldn't he do that?" "Oh, yes," laughed Harvey, "he could, but he wouldn't do it more than once. Those doors are almost red hot and would bum the flesh off the stoker's hand, whether it were grimy or not. I'll show you on my yacht some time. What you need is--?" "Harvey, don't you dare tell me I need experience," interrupted Pauline with unexpected heat. Young Schieffelin saw that tears were almost in her eyes. "Well," thought Schieffelin, "this vein leads too close to water," and he hurried to shift the course of the conversation. But the damage was done. Pauline took her story to the little open fireplace in her room and destroyed it. At the same time she destroyed, her resolution to give up the year of adventure. There could be no question, she needed experience. Her adopted father had admitted it, the editor had said it, and even an empty-headed young man like Schieffelin could see it. She was sorry for Harry, but it couldn't be helped. She picked up a copy of "Treasure Island" and soon wished fervently that the days of pirates were back again. Owen gave up his fight against morphine late Friday night. Saturday he was at peace with the world. Gone were all the nerve clamorings and with them went his scruples. All day he kept a furtive watch upon Pauline, and even heard her envious remarks about pirates to Harry when he returned for a weekend at home. Owen sympathized with Pauline in her regret that pirates were extinct. A pirate would have been very useful to the secretary just then. However, there were other cut-throats, plenty of them, and perhaps some other kind would do. There were gunmen, for instance, but, an honest District Attorney had lately made these murderous gentlemen of the underworld almost as quiet as pirates. He was still pondering when Hicks called again on the telephone. This time the secretary responded and made an immediate appointment in a cafe near Forty-second street. Owen related the events of the week, ending with Pauline's hankering for pirates. The two men got their heads together and rapidly evolved a plan. From the cafe they took a taxi and rode along the water front, first on one side of the island of Manhattan and then on the other. The cab stopped near the worst-looking saloons, while the two schemers entered and looked over the sailors and longshoremen refreshing themselves at the bars. After covering several miles of water front they had collected as many as a dozen abominable barroom cigars and a few equally dubious drinks, but had not yet found what they were looking for. On Front Street they saw a man, and both cried out: "Look, there he is." The man was a wild-looking specimen. He had the rolling gait of the deep sea. A squinting eye gave him a villainous leer, while a bristly beard and long gray hair made him a ferocious spectacle. His age was doubtful, as the lines in his ruddy skin might have been cut by dissipation as much as age. The most prominent feature of his unlovely countenance was a nose, fiery red from prolonged exposure to sunburn, or rum-bum. "If he isn't a pirate he ought to be one," said Owen. The man carried the top of a ship's binnacle, as the round brass case which holds a ship's compass is called. He entered the dismal portal of a marine junk shop. The taxi was stopped discreetly a block away. As Owen and Hicks approached the shop they heard a loud argument going on inside. "How much do you want for it?" "Ten dollars. It's a brand-new Negus." "Ten nothing. You stole it, you son of a sea cook. I'll give you a dime for it." "I did not steal it, so help me ---- ------! The captain of that 'lime juicer' over in the North River gave it to me for saving his little gal's life. He begged me to take anything I wanted, but I fancied this. I'll tell you about it." Then Owen and Hicks, listening just outside, heard a fearful and wonderful tale. To relate it in the sailor's own words, stripped of the long deep-sea oaths, would be as impossible as to pick the green specks out of a sage cheese. In brief, the gentleman with the binnacle, sauntering innocently along the docks Friday night, had heard a commotion on the British tramp which he referred to as a "lime juicer." Some fifteen or more long-shoremen had invaded the ship, overcome the captain, tied him down and were about to kidnap his daughter. The teller of the story had walked in and thrashed them all single-handed, driven them off into the darkness, rescued the little girl and released the captain. In gratitude the commander had made him a present of the binnacle head. At the conclusion of the story there was a pause, then the other voice answered: "You're a wonder. As I said before, I'll give you ten cents for the binnacle and ninety cents for the story. Now you can take it or I'll have you pinched for swiping it." "Gimme the dollar," said the hero of the tale, and a moment later he passed down the street with the two eavesdroppers at his heels. The sailor man, proceeding at a rapid pace, suddenly turned a comer like a yacht jibing around a buoy and plunged into a dingy saloon. Owen and Hicks went in after him. Owen ordered and invited the sailor to join them. They learned that his name was Nelson Cromwell Boyd, that he had deserted from the British navy at a tender age, and since then had been through a series of incredible adventures and injustices, which disproved the old adage that you can't keep a good man down. At last Owen intimated that he had a business proposition to discuss, and they adjourned to the sidewalk. "Do you want to earn some money?" asked Hicks. "Well, that depends," said Boyd, doubtfully. "Easy money," suggested Owen. "That's the only kind worth going after," commented the sailor. "That's where we agree with you, my friend," said Hicks. "We are after easy money and plenty of it. Plenty for us and plenty for you, too, if you can keep quiet about it." "That's the kind of talk I like to hear. But as honest man to honest man, I want to warn you that there mustn't be too much work to it. I don't believe in the nobility of labor. I believe that work is the crowning shame and humiliation of the human race. It's all right for a horse or a dog or an ox to work, but a man ought to be above it. It's degrading, interferes with his pleasures and wastes his time." "I feel the same way," agreed Owen, "but somebody has got to work to make shoes and food for us." "Yes," admitted the sailor, "regretfully there will always have to be some work done, and I'm sorry for the poor guys that must do it. But there's been too much work done." "Those sentiments are very noble," said Owen. "It's all very fine to worry about your fellow man. But you would like to have plenty of money even if the rest of the world is fool enough to keep on working." "I suppose so," said the sailor, "but I'm a reformer and my business is to talk, not work." "That's just what we want you to do," said Owen and Hicks in answer. Then they found a table in the rear of a saloon where they could unfold their plan. Boyd was to be introduced to a foolish young girl who had a barrel of money. He was to tell her a deep-sea yam along certain lines, and Owen and Hicks would take care of the rest. "The question is," said Owen, "whether you can talk and act like a sort of reformed pirate." "Leave that to me," he assured them, and led the way out of the saloon and into still another grimy and disreputable place. It was Axel Olofsen's pawnshop and second-hand general supply and clothing store. After much pawing over ancient, worn and rusty weapons, Boyd was at last fitted out. Ole was paid about sixty per cent of what he asked and left to the enjoyment of his Scandinavian melancholy. "You look like a pirate now, sure enough," said Owen, observing Boyd's effect on the driver of the taxicab. "I look it, but I don't quite feel it yet," said Boyd, with deep meaning. "There is something lacking." "What can it be?" asked Hicks. "About three fingers of red-eye," the sailor explained, pointing to a saloon. "That will make my disguise just perfect." In the saloon Hicks and Owen made a little map, wrinkled it and soiled it on the floor, then gave it to the pirate. "Tell her," said Owen as he called for a taxi, "that it is only a copy of your original, which is all worn out." The nearer they approached to the house the more talkative became the "pirate." He demanded to know more details of what was to be done, and finally assumed an air of authority. "You say that rich girl is crazy to see something worth writin' about? Now, I know something better than pirates and buried treasure," shouted the pirate confidently. "Yes, no doubt," Owen replied soothingly and with some alarm at the man's bravado. "But it's pirates she is interested in just now." "Never mind, I say I know something better," insisted the pirate. "If she will go and do what I'm goin' ter tell yer she'll sure see something like she never dreamed of. Now listen to me sharp!" It was an extraordinary proposition the "pirate" made. Owen laughed a gentle discouragement and shook his head, but Hicks fixed his eyes keenly on the man and was evidently turning the suggestion over in his mind. Owen's key admitted the three to the front hall without ringing, but a maid happened to cross the hall and caught sight of Boyd. With a scream and a flutter she retreated. Owen seated his two confederates in the hall and went in search of Pauline. Owen found Pauline alone in the library. Never did a villain propose a scheme to a beautiful girl at a more favorable moment. Half the afternoon and a little while after dinner she had been absorbing "Treasure Island," and now came Owen asking her if she would like to meet a reformed pirate and go on a thrilling and adventurous expedition. "Owen, you are a perfect angel. Bring in your pirate. I'm sorry, though, that he has reformed." Pauline shook hands with Hicks, but hardly noticed him. She had eyes only for the "pirate," who impressed her mightily. With awe and admiration she saw his scowling and squinting eye run over her and then travel about the room. Pauline approved of the "pirate," but the "pirate" did not approve of Pauline, and he almost told her so. But he met the warning eyes of his confederates and restrained himself. He had his story to tell and he would do it. After all, that was the best way to attack this girl and her fortune. "Tell us about the treasure," said Pauline eagerly. "Hush!" he shouted in a voice that made the girl jump. "I'll tell you, but, by the blood of Morgan, if one of you ever tells a living soul I'll cut his liver out," said the "pirate." Pauline gasped, and the secretary told him that it wasn't considered good manners to point with a sharp knife. But they all swore to secrecy and the "pirate" proceeded: "I was but a slip of a lad when I ran away and sailed from Liverpool in the good brig Nancy Lee with as villainous a crew as I ever seen. Where we was bound for and why is none of your business. Them that planned that voyage has cashed in their souls to their Maker and--ah, well, as I was saying, they was a villainous crew, low and vile and bloody-minded. I was the cabin boy and slept on the transoms in the captain's cabin. The weather was awful and the grub was worse. "But all went well till we reached the roarin' forties. The skipper knew how to handle sailors, you bet he did. When they came aft to kick about the grub he knocked 'em down before they said two words." Pauline gave a little exclamation of dismay at this point and the "pirate" turned to her in explanation: "You see, knockin' 'em down quick like that avoids a lot of cross words and unpleasant arguments such as makes hard feelin's on long voyages. "Yes, as I was saying', all went well until the second mate got to knockin' 'em out with his left hand, which the same was all right, too, but he was heard to pass a remark one day that he only hit landlubbers with his left hand. "The crew they was insulted, and that very night the second mate went overboard. Who done it nobody knows, leastways the captain couldn't find out. It made the old man peevish like and he got to arguin' with them sailors instead of wallopin' 'em the way he oughter done, and one day they turned on him. "It was all over in a minute. They had the old man thrown and tied. The first mate came runnin'in, firin' his pistols, but they downed him, too. I took the wheel while they decided what to do. 'Bloody Mike,' their leader, had about persuaded the men to send the captain and mate to Davy Jones's locker and the carpenter was riggin' the plank for 'em to walk when I up and puts in a word. "I pleaded for their lives and, though Mike was dead agin' the idea, they voted to let them live. The last we saw of 'em they was driftin' off in the jolly boat with a jug of water and a loaf of bread." The mariner paused and Pauline suggested delightedly: "And as soon as they had cooled down they were grateful to you and made you their leader?" "They did not," answered the "pirate." "They broached a cask of rum in the forward hold, and I overheard 'em plotting to throw me to the sharks." "How awful," said Pauline. "Yes, miss," agreed the "pirate." It was awkward and embarrassing like for a mere slip of a lad. So I up and goes into the captain's cabin and gets all the pistols and knives and cutlasses there was and brings 'em out on deck. "Pretty soon them drunken devils come a-tumblin' out of the fore hatch, picks up half a dozen capstan bars and some belyin' pins and a marlin spike or two and runs aft a-hollerin' and yellin'. I gives 'em one warnin' and then fires." The "pirate" stopped, coughed and looked around. "Oh, please go on," begged Pauline. "Yes, miss," replied the sailor, "but this talking affects my throat. Could you possibly--?" "Why, certainly," interrupted Owen, "I'll get you a drink." After the sailor had swallowed the biggest drink ever poured out in that house he continued: "Yes, that was as neat a fight as I ever was in. There was some twenty of 'em all told." "And what happened then?" demanded Pauline. "Well, Miss, it come on to blow, and there was the old ship staggerin' along under full sail. It was all I could do to keep the old hulk from foundering', at that, but I stuck to the wheel day after day and night after night. To keep from freezin' I had to drink a lot of grog. Oh, a powerful lot of grog. So much grog that I've been dependent on it ever since--and I'll take a little now, if it's agreeable." It wasn't exactly agreeable, but he got it and continued. "Finally we fetched up, ker-smack, on the rocks of a desert island. All the boats had been smashed and carried away by the storm, so I had to build a raft. The first two loads was all provisions, and then I took the treasure ashore--" "What treasure?" asked Pauline. "Oh, bless your heart, didn't I tell you about the treasure?" "No," said Hicks, with a scowl, "and that's the part we want to hear about." "Oh, money ain't everything," rebuked the "pirate" in a lordly manner. "There was a matter of a million dollars or so in good British gold, and what it was on the 'Nancy Lee' for is nobody's business. I took it all ashore, an' buried it on the island. Here's a copy of the chart I made, and you three is the first to lay human eyes on it." While Pauline examined reverently the dingy bit of paper the "pirate" concluded his yarn. "After I'd buried the last f it, I rigged a mast on the raft and fetched up on one of the Bahamas." "And you have never been back to get the gold?" queried Pauline. "No, miss; though I've started many's the time. But a poor seafarin' man like me finds it hard to fit out a proper expedition. If you fancy the notion and want to go along with me and pay all the expenses I'll divvy up half and half with you. What do you say?" Pauline looked at Owen and Hicks, who nodded approvingly. She had no great faith in finding any gold. Old Mr. Marvin had said that treasure bunts rarely produce any results. But he had also remarked that they were very thrilling, and here, surely, was adventure well worth a little time and money. Pauline agreed, and the "pirate" was in the midst of imposing a blood-curdling oath of secrecy when Harry demanded admittance. Nobody, least of all the sailor, would tell him what was in the wind, except that they were going off on a trip of adventure. The young man disapproved of both Hicks and the "pirate," and the latter showed his dislike of Harry. It was with regret that the man of the sea recollected Owen's stipulation that Harry must on no account be allowed to go with the party. Nothing would have pleased the "pirate" better than to have got these two happy and innocent representatives of "ill-gotten gains" alone with him on the high seas. Pauline, too, wished to have Harry who was frowning and suspiciously demanding information. But she had sworn the oath of a buccaneer, and far be it from her to break faith with the confiding freebooter. So, once more Harry was kept out of Pauline's councils. He was a little provoked at her this time, for her willfulness seemed almost perverse after the lesson she should have learned from the aeroplane wreck. CHAPTER VI THE TREASURE HUNTERS Excitement and activity pervaded the house. Sunday and Monday every one, including Harry, soon knew that Pauline was to take Tuesday's steamer to Old Nassau, in the Bahamas. Harry intended to quietly board the steamer a little earlier than Pauline and surprise the party by appearing after the ship was well out to sea. His plans were' shattered by the young lady's unexpected "early arrival." Harry, with a suitcase in each hand, met her face to face on the pier. There was nothing for him to do but confess, kiss her goodbye and go. It was with a pang of regret that she saw him toss his two suitcases covered with college team labels into a taxicab and depart. An hour later the four treasure hunters stood looking over the rail watching the last passengers come aboard. The "pirate," in a new blue suit, huge Panama hat and light pink necktie, though a rather unusual sight, had been toned down in appearance to a degree that permitted him to walk about among people without causing a crowd to collect. Hicks, too, at Owen's suggestion, had adopted quieter attire. Just as the gangplank was about to be pulled in the deckhands waited to permit a very feeble and bent old man to hobble aboard. He had long, white hair, and his face was mostly gray whiskers, except a pair of dark spectacles. A porter followed him bearing two brand new suitcases. The adventurous four were soon comfortably perched in steamer chairs watching New York harbor slip by them. They had barely reached the Statue of Liberty when the "pirate" launched forth on one of his Munchausen-like tales of the sea. Highly colored, picturesque, untrue and absurd as a stained glass window, nevertheless these yams took on a semblance of reality from the character of the narrator himself. In all his stories the "pirate" was the hero. Nobody noticed that a steward had placed a fifth steamer chair beside the sailor until that worthy reached one of the main climaxes of his narrative. At that point he felt a hand on his shoulder and looked around into the whiskers and black spectacles of the old passenger. The cackling voice remarked: "It's a lie. It's a lie. It's a lie." Every one was astonished, but even the "pirate" had a trace of respect for such great age, and said nothing in reply. After a while he continued, only to be interrupted by the same words. This was too much to endure, and though the if "pirate" held his tongue they rebuked the old dotard by walking away and leaning over the rail. The conversation wandered to the subject of sharks, and Pauline asked if they were as stupid as they looked. "Don't you believe it," the "pirate" assured her. "Them sharks look stupid just to fool you. Why, I remember a time not so long ago down in Choco Bay, on the coast of Colombia, there was an old devil who used to sneak up alongside sailin' vessels in a fog. He carried in his mouth the big iron shank of an anchor he'd picked up from the wreck." "What did he do that for?" asked Hicks. "So the iron would deflect the compass and make them run the ship onto the Kelp Ledges, off the Pinudas, Islands. If a ship went down he stood a good chance of eating one or two o' the passengers. But I don't mind sharks. If you want to know what really annoys me, it's them killer whales in the Antarctic that come a crowdin' and buttin' up against ye." "It's an internal, monumental, epoch-making lie," cackled a voice behind him. Every one looked, and there was the old man. The "pirate" was now thoroughly exasperated. If he couldn't tell a story without being interrupted in this manner life wasn't worth living. He announced that he would find the old man and thrash him. Owen and Hicks were annoyed, but they feared the result of the sailor's fury. They might all be arrested on arriving at Nassau. This would interfere with plans, and must not be thought of. To appease the wrathful "pirate" Owen offered to have the old man thrashed so soundly that he would probably be glad to stay out of sight the rest of the voyage. There were some rascally looking men of Spanish blood among the second cabin passengers who, as Owen and Hicks observed, looked needy and unscrupulous. The secretary found no great embarrassment in explaining that he wished the old man thrashed quietly and privately. The Spaniards agreed to beat him thoroughly for the trifling consideration of ten dollars. They would even throw him overboard for a very reasonable sum additional. But the bargain was struck at ten dollars for a moderate beating, and the foreigners were warned that as he was delicate they must be careful not to kill him. During the next hour or two the old man passed the four treasure hunters in their steamer chairs, but each time the "pirate" ceased talking before he came within earshot. At last the old man stopped in front of Pauline and gazed long at the "pirate." He studied the rascal's face, apparently trying to remember the identity of the man. Slowly the aged head nodded as if he was saying to himself. "Yes, he is the same man." Then, turning to Pauline and shaking a warning finger, the old man delivered a surprising message. Pauline was startled. The three men leaped to their feet. It was with the utmost difficulty that she was able to prevent violence.. Owen excused himself to hunt up his Spaniards and demand an explanation for their slowness. To his surprise they declared that they had tackled him and that he was as quick and powerful as a gorilla. He had thrashed them both and they were glad to escape with their lives. The ex-secretary was incredulous, but they showed cuts and bruises and demanded their money, saying that a joke had been played on them. When Owen refused one of them drew a stiletto and the ten dollars was forthcoming. Returning, ruefully, he related the failure of the Spaniards. The "pirate" at once said: "Now, let me handle him." A few moments later Boyd cornered his ancient adversary on a deserted and wind-swept piece of deck. "Old man," snarled the "pirate," "you say all my stories are lies. Only your gray hairs have saved you from a thrashing before this." "If it's my gray hairs that stop you, I'll remove that obstacle." The "pirate" was amazed to see the aged person take off his hat and remove a gray wig with his left hand while his right fist collided with the "pirate's" eye. When consciousness returned he was lying on the deck with no living thing in sight but a seagull aeroplaning on slanted wings over his head. His return to the party was more rueful than Owen's. "What is the matter with your eye, Mr. Boyd?" asked Pauline innocently. "Why, you see," said the "pirate," "I was looking at a girl with one of these new slit skirts and I stumbled and bumped against a ventilator." "I see," commented Owen to help him out. "You sort of slipped on a sex-appeal, so to speak." "Yes," said the sailor, gratefully. "It was just like that." "It's a lie," said a high, thin voice from somewhere, and they noticed that a porthole behind them was open. Pauline found conversation difficult. Hicks, as a man of few words, which gave him an undeserved reputation for wisdom. The "pirate" had given up spinning yams on account of the old man's unfailing interruption. Owen's mind, too, was preoccupied with a growing suspicion. So the adventurous young lady went to her stateroom and wrote a letter to Harry. The sailor intimated that he had important news which could be only told in the privacy of Owen's stateroom. The secretary suspected this to be only a maneuver on the "pirate's" part to get acquainted with the whiskey he knew Owen kept with him. But the seafarer unfolded the tale of his black eye not truthfully nor accurately, except in that he had recognized Harry under the disguise of the old man. "I more than half suspected it," said Owen, "and I have been watching his stateroom. But there is no way any one can see into his room unless by getting a look in through the porthole." "And there's where you get a good idea," said the "pirate." "But there's no good having a peep' at him without his disguise now that it's Harry," objected Hicks. "No," said the "pirate," turning on Owen his lusterless sea-green eyes, faded by much grog to a dimness that reminded one of the faint lights set in ships' decks and known as "dead-eyes." "No, but your porthole idea is just the scheme to get at him and get rid of him. I can slip down a rope tonight when all is quiet and the fool passengers are over on the other side looking at the bloody moon." "And then what?" said Owen. "I goes down the rope and shoots the old fool! I mean the young fool --through the porthole." "Why, that's murder!" cried Owen. "We'd all swing for it." "No, it ain't murder; it's suicide, 'cause I'll throw the gun in there where they'll find it when they break the door in, and everybody'll think he shot himself." "It's practical," commented Hicks, but Owen protested. At last it was decided that a fourth man was necessary to do the shooting, and the "pirate" volunteered to produce him. "There's an old shipmate o' mine down in the stoke hole working like a nigger. He'll be glad to do the trick for ten dollars, but we'll make it fifty because the poor fellow has a wife and children and needs the money. I'll go get him." Owen and Hicks went on deck while Boyd descended to the fiery vitals of the steamer. It is not an easy matter to smuggle a grimy stoker from his furnace to the upper passenger decks, but the "pirate" managed it. Meanwhile Harry was not losing time. He had taken a dictograph from his baggage, borrowed a few dry batteries and a coil of wire from the wireless operator. He carefully installed the instrument in his stateroom, and led the wires out under his door to the passageway. From there it was an easy task to carry them along the edge of the carpet to the door of Owen's stateroom. Arrived at the point, he was compelled to leave pliers, wire and the receiving instrument under a chair. Like many another stateroom door, Owen's could not be locked easily from the outside, so when the three conspirators went out they left it unlocked. The old man slipped in a moment later and quickly placed the dictograph under the lower bunk. Returning to his own room, the old man took up his instrument and listened. But he was not a very expert electrician and the dictograph for a long time failed to give anything but roars and crackling sounds, though he was convinced there were several persons talking. A last he got the thing adjusted in time to catch the last sentences of the conversation. He recognized the voice of the "pirate." It said: "An then we lowers you down the rope to his porthole. You sticks your gun in and shoot the old fool. Don't forget to throw the gun in afterward, so they'll think he killed himself. See?" "Sure, I got yer, matey," replied a strange voice. After this the dictograph must have got out of order as nothing further came over the wire. After closing the porthole Harry started to take off his disguise with a view of revealing himself and having Owen, Hicks and the "pirate" arrested. Then it occurred to him that he had not heard Owen or Hicks talking and very likely they were not in the room at all. It was probably a crazy, drunken scheme of the old sailor whom he had tormented. Neither Owen nor Hicks had any suspicion, so far as he knew, that behind the whiskers and eyeglasses was Harry. Owen could have no object in shooting him. "Can it be that I am jealous of this man Owen?" he wondered. "Polly has been taking his advice against mine lately. What can that mean?" Peace reigned during the evening while the old liner plunged and rolled past wicked Cape Hatteras. While the passengers listened to the sad orchestra in the saloon Harry, still in his whiskered disguise, sent a wireless to a lawyer in New York requesting him to telegraph Pauline at Nassau something that would make her come home. Then he went back to his stateroom and locked the door. As he stepped in he caught sight of the unbeautiful countenance of Mr. Boyd squinting wickedly at him from far down the passageway. "Just for that evil grin of yours, Mr. Pirate," thought Harry, "I am not going to let you or your friend shoot me until after daylight." So Harry kept his porthole closed tight that night, sleeping rather restlessly without his accustomed ventilation. Twice he heard a faint scraping sound on the outside of his cabin, and a dark shadow eclipsed the faint nimbus of light which the foggy night sent through his porthole. On the deck directly over his head three dark figures sat in deck chairs, while a fourth paced the deck, his cigar glowing like the tail lamp of a distant automobile. The fog began to lift just before dawn, and the stoker, making another trip down his rope, found the porthole open. A hasty inspection of the decks indicated that it was safe to go ahead. Owen, Hicks and the "pirate" quickly lowered the stoker, sitting in a little swing known on the sea as a "bo'sun's chair." In his hand he carried a pistol which Hicks had provided. Each of the three conspirators had revolvers, but the racetrack man's weapon was chosen because he had obtained it from a source to which it could not be traced. Down went the stoker, his bare feet clinging to the gently swaying side of the ship. The porthole was open, and there in the dim interior of the cabin the light was reflected from a pair of spectacles. There, too, were the whiskers and gray hair. The old man seemed to be asleep in his chair right near the porthole. The stoker cocked his revolver and held it ready for instant action. The steamer's fog horn blew a blast at the fast thinning fog. This noise was just what the stoker wanted. He quickly plunged his pistol into the porthole and fired it point blank in the very face of the old man. There could be no question of missing. He looked up at the three eager faces and nodded that all was well. "I've got him," he called out, and was about to hurl the pistol into the stateroom when an unpleasant and unexpected thing happened. A brawny fist shot out of the porthole and collided with the stoker's coal-blackened jaw. More from surprise than the force of the blow, the stoker fell backward into the sea. The three watchers on deck saw the proceeding, and only one, the "pirate," had presence of mind to hurl a lifebuoy. No alarm was sounded. The steamer went on into the sparkling morning sea, leaving behind her a profane and disgusted stoker. This unfortunate had only a lifebuoy to aid him on a fifteen-mile swim to shore. "Never mind," said the "pirate" after the conspirators had gotten over their first fright at the dashing of their plans. "I have an idea; it's a corking idea, and you'll all like it." "What is it?" asked Owen nervously. "Here is your drink now; what's your idea?" But the "pirate" wouldn't tell. He objected that it was too startling for them to carry in their timid brains. He would unfold it when the time came, and he promised them that it would be the greatest and most daring project they had ever heard. A murderous glare lit up the faded eyes and he chuckled to himself, but no offers nor threats would induce him to part with his secret. CHAPTER VII A FLIRTY BUCCANEER Arrived at Nassua, the party proceeded to the King Edward House, where Pauline found a telegram from Philip Carpenter, the lawyer, advising her to return as soon as possible to attend the signing of certain important papers. On account of the message all hands made haste to hunt for a small steamer or launch to complete the trip. Though none of the four saw him, the old man was at the hotel. He lost no time in assuming another and very different disguise, observing to himself that the most valuable part of his college education might prove to be the secrets of "make up" he had learned in his college dramatic club. Owen, with his usual forethought, had arranged in advance to be put in touch at once with all available boats. As a result a gasoline launch, with a cabin and stateroom, about 100 feet long, which had once been a yacht, was chartered. The "pirate's" stipulation that no stranger should see his island made it necessary for Pauline to deposit a check for $2,500 for its safe return. The next morning provisions were brought aboard, the "pirate" declaring that he could run the engine, and all was ready when a difficulty arose. Who was to cook? Pauline volunteered, but Owen objected, and finally the "pirate's" objections to a stranger were overcome. A dark-skinned half-breed, with long, black hair, who had earned half a dollar by helping carry things on board, volunteered in a gruff voice. "I'se fine cook. Best cook on the island. I cook very cheap." Time was too valuable to investigate the man's ability, so he was hired. Off went the white launch. Owen steering under instructions from the "pirate," who soon proved he knew gasoline engines. Out of the harbor they went, and then coasted along the beautiful shores of the island. The sea was calm and the cruise uneventful for some time, when the "pirate" called every one's attention to the fact that it was a long time since breakfast. He went below and addressed the cook, who had shut himself up in his tiny galley, as sailors call a boat's kitchen. "What's your name?" demanded Boyd. "Filipo." "Are you a nigger?" "I guess so; I dunno." "Well, what were your father and mother?" "I dunno." "That's funny; but what I want to know is how soon grub will be ready?" "Right away, senor." "All right, Filipo; see that there is plenty of it." "Dod foul my hawser, if this ain't what yer might call pleasant," declared the "pirate," showing his few teeth in a smile that reminded Pauline of the spiles of an abandoned pier. Pauline was pacing the deck apart from the others, in a pleasant dreaminess scanning the endless azure of the hashed waters. Her thoughts roamed forward and backward--forward to the vague magic land of adventure, where she was to win treasure and delight, fortune and fame; backward to a big, lovely, splendid house in New York City, where a certain tall young man, with brown, unruly hair and shoulders broad as a sheltering wall, must be pining for her. Some one began whistling in the cabin. Pauline paid no attention to it at first, but as the tune suddenly shifted to the very latest musical comedy air she became interested. Owen never whistled, and Hicks, she imagined, seldom went to the theatres. The song shifted from whistle to words: "I'm a greatly wicked person. If there's anybody worse on This terrestrial circumference of guile (Though I very broadly doubt it) I should like to know about it, For I want to be the blackest thing on file. "I'm a bad-mad-man, my dear, I'm a liar and a flyer and flirty buccaneer. I've done everything that's awful that a human being can. I'm a bad--ma-a-d man." "The song from 'Polly Peek-a-boo.' Harry and I heard it only two weeks ago," mused Pauline. Moved by a sudden whimsy, she entered the cabin. There was no one there but the cook. In his dingy linen suit he was standing at the table peeling potatoes and whistling. He stopped as Pauline entered, a tall powerful man, though of slouching posture, he bowed deferentially. "No like me sing--no sing," he suggested. "On the contrary, I like it very much. You sing very well indeed, Filipo. Would you mind telling me where you heard the song you were just singing?" "Big American man, up Nassau--he sing'um. Very fine man--big fool daughter," replied Filipo. "You speak very good English when you sing," remarked Pauline. "Why don't you do it all the time?" The cook hesitated. "Speak good English all time--bad English when sing!" Pauline began to scrutinize half suspiciously this remarkable menial, but he kept stolidly at work at the potatoes, and his dark skin, his scraggly beard, his bagging trousers upturned over bare feet, his general dilapidation of appearance, proved him nothing but one of the common derelicts of the languid islands. "If you could peel potatoes instead of butchering them, there would be a little more to eat in case we run out of supplies, Filipo," suggested Pauline. He turned on her a frank American grin. For an instant the twinkle in the keen blue eyes upset her. It was so, like the twinkle in a pair of keen blue eyes that were supposed to be figuratively weeping for her fate in far-off New York. But instantly he changed his attitude. "No like cook--cook quit," he grumbled. "'Oh, no, indeed, Filipo, you must not be offended. I was just speaking to Mr. Owen this morning about raising your salary." A thick voice came to them from the cabin door. "I begs to report, Miss," said Blinky Boyd, the pirate, reeling in, "that there be mut'ny in yer crew. Mr. Hicks and Mr. Owen, Miss, has rebelled against me authority and has refused me drink." "That is an outrage, Mr. Boyd. They do not realize how your nerve-racking adventures have shattered your strength. I will attend to it myself," said Pauline sympathetically. "Filipo, give Mr. Boyd a drink." "Drink? Yes, meem," replied Filipo, with such unwonted alacrity that Pauline turned in surprise. She saw the slouching figure of the cook suddenly stiffen to his full stalwart height. She saw an ill clad, but majestic giant stride toward the pirate, bowl him over with a gentle tap, pinion his arms and legs in a lifting grasp and carry him toward the door of the cabin. Cries of rage came stuffily from the thick throat of Boyd. "Lemme go, ye scum, lemme go," he yelled. "Filipo! Filipo! Stop this instant! How dare you treat Mr. Boyd in such a manner?" cried the indignant girl. "You say, 'Give--him drink.' He say, 'Lemme go," answered Filipo, pausing with his squirming burden. "Drink! Ye fool, drink! She is felling ye ter gimme a drink," screamed the hero of desperate encounters. "Big, fat drink," agreed the cook, as he strode toward the rail. Pauline rushed upon him. The peril of her precious pirate stirred all her courage. She saw her dreams vanishing--the chief narrator, navigator and guide of the treasure voyage suspended in two strong arms over the blue deep. Forgetting that he was accustomed to conquer twenty men single handed, she felt only pity for his plight. Her soft but determined hand gripped the cook's. "Filipo, obey my orders!" she commanded. "Yes, Mem. Let 'um go. Give 'um drink. Big liar need big drink." He lifted the struggling but utterly helpless form of the pirate over his shoulders, then, with a sudden stooping movement, he made as if to plunge it into the sea. "Help! Help!" cried Pauline, running up the deck. Hicks and Owen rushed from their staterooms. Blinky Boyd was quivering, gasping beside the rail. They found a slouching, uncommunicative cook stolidly washing dishes in the galley. Some hours later while Boyd was sleeping off his potations and Hicks and Owen were deep in conference on deck, Pauline slipped down into the galley ostensibly to explain the rudiments of the culinary art to the cook. "The trouble is you have no respect for a potato, Filipo. You slash the poor thing to pieces, and then you boil it only long enough to hurt its feelings." "Peel potato nice, good," he apologized. "Then peel 'um pirate. Filipo want to peel pirate; boil him just half-hurt him feelings. That's how." "Oh, I see. But I think you do Mr. Boyd a great injustice, Filipo. He has consented to come all the way from New York with us and take command of our boat and find the buried treasure, and--" "Buried potatoes," snapped Filipo with a sudden reversion to his unimpaired English. "Well, at least you understand about tomorrow's breakfast now, don't you?" "Yes, mem. Boil 'um eggs to death; no peel 'um." "No, no, no, Filipo--boil them two minutes and a half. Here, take my watch and go by that. You must be very careful of it, Filipo." "Yes, mem; boil 'um long time; stick fork in, see when soft." "No!" Pauline caught the watch from him. "You don't boil the watch at all, Filipo. You boil the eggs and watch the watch. Can you tell time, Filipo?" "Yes, Mem." "How long is an hour? Peel potatoes--hour is ver' ver' long. Talk to ship's lady--whist!--hour is no time," answered Filipo with upcast hands. Again she eyed him through her long lashes a little askance. He was rather subtle, this half-breed cook, for one who could not even boil an egg. "I will let you have the watch, Filipo," she said gravely, "but you must give it back to me. It is one of the most precious things I have. It was given to me by--Filipo, were you ever in love with a girl?" "Su-u-ure, mem!" replied the cook with sudden enthusiasm. "Love daughter big American--no love me. Big American daughter start from Nassau--get buried treasure--not!" "Filipo, where do you get all your New York slang?" "Big American daughter, she sling slang-good," said Filipo. "Why did you fall in love with her?" "Nice girl--no eat much, no scold cook, no talk about potatoes-- just big fool 'bout buried treasure." "What do you think love is?" "Love-huh!" grunted the cook. "I like girl; girl no like me. Chase all 'round world--no good." "That watch was given to me by the man I love, Filipo," said Pauline. "You won't-boil it--or anything, will you?" As Filipo took the tiny diamond-scarred timepiece from Pauline's hand there was a sound as of some one choking at the top of the steps. The cook sprang to the deck, but there was no one in sight. He returned to Pauline, while Blinky Boyd, gasping more from astonishment than fear, reeled up to Owen and Hicks on the forward deck. "She's gone clean crazy," he panted. "She treats that there cook as if he was a nat'ral human man instid of a sea-rovin' gorilla, worse'n the one I beat In Afriky." "No more gorillas for a while, Blinky," commanded Hicks. "What's happened now?" "She's gone an' guv him her jooled watch to boil eggs by," said the pirate. "By George, we will have to do something with that fellow," muttered Hicks to Owen as they walked away. "Do suthin' to him!" Blinky Boyd was fuming in the wake of Owen and Hicks on their stroll up deck. "Do everythin' to him; make 'im walk the old board; draw'n quarter 'im. Didn't he attempt me life an' ain't he at present engaged in stealin' the fambly jewels?" "Well, have you got any ideas?" asked Owen. "The first thing," whispered Blinky, "is to git him under the in-floo-ence of licker. They never was no cook could stand up agin' the disgraceful habit o' takin' too much and doin' too little. Get 'im under the in-floo-ence." "And then what?" "Then--well, ain't they a lot o' good blue water floatin' around atop the fishes? Ain't they some accommodatin' sharks swimmin' atop the water?" "That's a bit crude--just to throw a man overboard for nothing," said Owen, willing to arouse Boyd's anger. "Fer nothin'? Didn't he insult the master o' this ship. Ain't he tried to starve us to death? Fer wot kind o' nothin', says I." Boyd smote his caving chest in emphasis of his accusations. "And he would have the diamond watch on him in case he should be picked up," suggested Hicks quietly. "That's so," said Owen. "He would have been swimming to shore with the stolen watch and drowned." "But, of course, he would swim to shore, unless--well, it's a case of making sure beforehand. We could persuade him to go in and try to kill Blinky here while Blinky's asleep--then rush in and finish him. Even Pauline was a witness to the attack he made on Blinky this afternoon." The pirate's glowing countenance suddenly, went white. "Not this trip," he said fervently. "I ain't goin' to kill no man in a trap like that. I'm goin' to see it done fair and square in the open --with plenty o' drink in 'im an' 'is conscience clear. I wouldn't see no man die with murder in 'is heart fer me." "I don't like it," said Owen nervously. "I don't like the idea of doing too much. We've got one big piece of work to do that concerns her." He nodded in the direction of the cabin. "Dye mean to say we can't get a poor half-breed cook off this boat without killing him? Why not discharge him?" Hicks uttered a grim chuckle. "I must say I never thought of that. Get a boat manned, will you, Boyd, and we'll put him ashore within half an hour." "All hands for'ard," bellowed the pirate's voice. The "all hands" were Owen, Hicks, the pirate and Pauline. "Why all hands? Can't you handle the cook yourself?" said Owen. "Not to put that cook ashore--ye need a navy," said Boyd. Backed by Owen and Hicks, he moved to the cabin. "You, cook, there--ye're fired. Get off the boat. Yer kerriage waits," he cried down at the busy Filipo. Filipo shuffled almost meekly toward the speaker. He saw the skiff alongside and Hicks and Owen nearby. "Grab 'im," ordered the pirate. "Here's the irons." He produced a pair of rusty handcuffs that had been brought along, among other ominous-looking junk, to impress Pauline. But Filipo was not "fired" yet. With a sudden long-distance lunge he knocked down the pirate, who, thought he was at a safe distance. But Hicks, who had been well schooled in street-fight tactics, thoughtfully stuck out a leg and tripped the cook, who fell upon the groaning Boyd. Boyd, though down, was by no means "out," and held Filipo tight while Owen and Hicks slipped on the handcuffs. "Now to the boat with 'im an' dump 'im ashore wherever It looks hottest an' hungriest." "Yah," he snarled in the face of the prostrate cook, "ye don't interfere no more with the capting of this here vessel. I hopes ye--" But his sentence was cut short, or rather it ended in a shriek of pain and fright, as the cook, suddenly swinging himself from his shoulders, landed a terrifically propelled right foot in the pirate's middle. He was pinned down again the next moment, but Boyd's yell had penetrated to the cabin. "What is the matter--who is hurt?" cried Pauline, rushing to the group on deck. "We have had to order this fellow put ashore. He has twice attacked Boyd, and besides he is useless as a cook," explained Owen. "You will assuredly do nothing of the sort," announced Pauline. "You will take those horrid iron things right off and set him free." "But, my dear Miss Marvin, he is a desperate man. It is dangerous." "What did we come here for but to get into danger?" cried Pauline. "Besides, Filipo is the most interesting person on the ship. I have just devoted a chapter to him in my book, and if you think I'm going to spoil my book because Mr. Boyd gets hurt, or the potatoes aren't done, you're much mistaken." Owen obediently knelt and unlocked the clumsy handcuffs. "You are free, Filipo," said Pauline with the air of a proud princess releasing a serf. "No fired?" grunted Filipo. "Too bad. Bum job." "Now go back to the kitchen, and promise not to strike Mr. Boyd any more." "No hit 'um. Boil 'um. Three minutes; stick fork in hum," said the cook with a cannibal glare at the still writhing pirate. He shuffled off to his pots and pans. Blinky scrambled to his bunk, and Pauline retired to elaborate the fascinating character of Filipo in another chapter of her book of adventure. She did not realize how late it was when at last she put down her pen and moved with soft, slippered steps to the door of the cabin. Over the great vault of the heavens the stars were sprinkled like silver dust. The boat rolled softly, dreamily on the listless waters. A cool breeze scented with the fragrance of the spicy land cooled her brow. She realized that her little stateroom had been very stuffy. It was beautiful here in the hushed night alone. She moved out on deck. They had come to anchor for the night off St. Andrew, and the few faint lights of the town tinged the scene with life. Pauline was thinking of Harry. It would have been nice if he were here now, in the moonlight just for this evening. Of course if he were a regular member of the party, he would spoil the trip by his grumpiness, and probably prevent them from finding any treasure at all. But Harry was a good companion--usually, and Pauline was getting a little tired of the company on the yacht. The night was so still that even her light footstep could be heard on the deck. And she was surprised to hear a muffled hail from some invisible craft astern. As she moved to the rail--her tall form in the yachting suit standing out plainly in the moonlight--she saw a small boat scurry away. She thought she recognized their own small boat--the one the yacht towed --and she quickly made sure that this was true. Pauline turned toward the cabin to rouse the others for a real pirate chase, when she was silenced and stunned by the sight of Filipo, the cook, staggering out of the galley, with his bearded chin drooping on his breast, his knees swaying under him, his arms weaving cubist caricatures in the air and his voice raised in unintelligible song. He was quickly followed by the Pirate, who, to Pauline's amazement, actually presented a picture of sobriety in contrast to Filipo. But on seeing her, Boyd looked frightened. "They have stolen the skiff," cried Pauline. "No, Miss," said Boyd; "they was four of 'em come aboard in one boat, an' we let 'em take ourn ashore to bring a double load o' supplies." Pauline was grievously disappointed. She turned her wrath upon the musical and meandering Filipo. "Filipo!" she demanded. "Go to bed at once." For answer he reeled toward her. "Cook boiled--boiled three minute," he said. Then with a lurch he fell sprawling at her feet. Boyd had started back to the cabin in haste and excitement. Pauline's first instinct was to leave the inebriated man, but pity mastered her and she stooped to lift him. He sprang to his feet without her aid. His blue eyes looked clearly into hers. His body towered again to its commanding height as it had done when he was about to finish the Pirate. He stooped and spoke rapidly, sharply in her ear. There was no pigeon chatter. It was straight English. But as the door of the cabin opened again and Boyd came out, the tall form sank into itself, the knees began to rock, the arms to weave and, staggering back up the deck, he disappeared in the cabin. Pauline stood stupefied. She had been so startled by the sudden transformation of the man that she had hardly understood his strident words. Only one thing she could remember. He had commanded her to go to bed and bar her door. She obeyed but she could not sleep at first. It seemed that hours had passed when a sound outside her door brought her to her feet. She moved to the door and softly opened it. Across the threshold lay Filipo, wide awake. "Go to bed," he said. Again she obeyed and this time she slept. The next morning everything seemed outwardly as usual, the skiff had been restored to its place astern. The Pirate was intoxicated; the cook sober. But there was the threat of trouble in the air, Pauline felt it in the attitude of all the men, even of Owen and Hicks. The Pirate showed a strange new tendency to make friends with Filipo. "Can you steer, cook?" he asked after the latter had announced that dinner was ready. "Yes," said Filipo. "All right, take the wheel and keep her as she's going till we round that point ahead there." Filipo took the wheel and the others descended to find the cabin table set. There was a prodigious amount of fried steak and boiled potatoes as the main part of the meal. To their dismay they found the steak was as tough as leather. A wail of sorrow arose when the potatoes proved to be so hard that Pauline doubted if they had been boiled more than three minutes. The "Pirate," whose table manners savored of the forecastle, tried a biscuit and found it as hard as stone and almost as heavy. In his anger he hurled it at the side of the cabin and was horrified to see it go through the boat's side. He did not know that the biscuit happened to strike a hole that had been temporarily stopped up with putty and paint. He turned speechless to the others and saw Hicks lift a biscuit on high about to dash it onto the cabin floor. With instant presence of mind he seized the arm of Hicks, and in a hoarse voice shouted: "Don't do that, you'll sink the ship. Look what mine did." They all gazed in amazement at the ragged aperture in the side of the cabin through which the sparkling waters of the Atlantic could be seen dancing past. Events moved swiftly that afternoon. Owen, peering in the galley porthole beheld the disguised cook remove his wig to wash his face and recognized the curly light hair of Harry. About four o'clock the launch tied up to the landing at the small village of St. Andrew. There Owen had opportunity to reveal his discovery of Harry's presence to the other two conspirators. They were frightened at first but soon agreed that it was a fine chance to get rid of both at the same time. The pirate confided to them that he had brought a clock-work bomb along and had it in his bag. A few minutes' discussion produced a simple plan. Owen sent the disguised Harry with a bucket, in search of a spring and Pauline was already hunting strange flowers among the palms and creepers. This left the conspirators free to place the bomb under the cabin floor boards, a matter which Owen attended to himself. It was set to explode two hours later. Pauline and Filipo were then summoned and told that there were comfortable lodgings and a good meal obtainable at a village just the other side of the long narrow point of land. If Pauline and Boyd and Filipo would go around in the launch Owen and Hicks would climb through the jungle and get there in time to have a meal already upon the boat's arrival. The two parties separated and all was quiet for some time. Pauline sat on deck with the pirate endeavoring to engage him in conversation. But he grew surlier and surlier in his answers, looking frequently at his watch and often stopping below for a drink. After about an hour and three-quarter, Pauline became a little frightened at his behavior and descended to the cabin. There was the cook reading a cook book, evidently his own. The moment Pauline was out of sight the pirate heaved a sigh of relief and abandoned the wheel. Stepping softly to the stern he pulled in the small boat which was towing astern, leaped in adroitly and cut it adrift. "Filipo," said Pauline, "you told us you were a good cook." "Yes, senorita, I thought I was." "Have you ever cooked before?" "No, but I have a cook book which tells you how every one may be a cook. I thought--" Filipo, did not finish his sentence. His eyes were roving around the cabin in search of something and Pauline was looking very hard at him. "What's that ticking sound?" inquired the cook. He went to the cabin clock and listened. No, it wasn't that. Pauline could hear it, too, and it wasn't her tiny watch. Filipo made a search of the cabin and finally located the sound under the floor. A moment more and he had laid bare the pirate's bomb. He leaped on deck and took in at a glance that the pirate had left in the only boat. In another instant he was below again, tearing off his wig. "Polly, it's I. There's an infernal machine ticking here ready to blow us up." He tried to lift up the bomb, but it was wedged fast. "Harry, for Heaven sake, what do you mean?" "I'll tell you in a minute in the water as soon as we have jumped overboard. Come." He seized Pauline, carried her up on deck. "Where's Mr. Boyd?" "Gone. Take this," answered Harry, putting a life preserver around her. "Now, will you jump or shall I throw you overboard? One, two, three." "I'll jump," said Pauline and with arms around each other they leaped into the warm ocean. On went the white launch serene and unruffled by the desertion of its crew. In answer to Pauline's demand for explanation Harry only answered: "Wait." Finally it came. A belch of flame shot up from the launch driving a column of smoke far into the sky, where it spread out and formed a majestic ring, which floated and curled for many moments. A concussion reached them through the water and another in the air smote their ears. The after part of the launch rode on the waters for a moment and then disappeared. Finally a succession of waves tossed them and passed on. "What does it mean?" gasped the girl. "Insanity--sheer, downright insanity. That wretch of a 'pirate' was a crazy man. "He placed that bomb, intending to kill all of us. And Owen deserves a sound thrashing for having anything to do with such a murderous lunatic." "I think you're rather hard on Owen, Harry," said Pauline. "Of course, we all know that pirates aren't nice persons--but nobody could foresee that the man was crazy." "Well, perhaps. But don't talk, we have a mile and a half swim to shore." They were spared that ordeal by the Silurian liner Caradoc. Arrayed in borrowed clothes they were notified of a second rescue and came out on deck in time to behold in the dusk of evening the "pirate." He was relating to an admiring throng how he had stuck by the burning ship till it exploded. He had actually been blown into the air and had fallen by good luck into the little boat. "It's a lie," said Harry in the old man's cackling voice. The "pirate" heard the voice of the old man and saw the face and the blond hair of Harry. It was too much for his evil and murderous mind to bear. With a shriek he hurled himself over the rail into the sea. The Caradoc stopped and searched, but no trace of the "pirate" could be found. CHAPTER VIII THE COURTELYOU RECEPTION Two weeks later Pauline and Harry were sitting in the library. Through the half-closed blinds a soft breeze bore to them the fragrance of carnations and roses. For the first few days after their return Pauline was so thankful they had not lost their lives that she was reconciled to not having found the treasure. But only for the first few days. She was already growing restless. "You're wasting time, Harry," she said impatiently. "I'd rather face anything than be bored to death." "Polly, it's got to stop; it isn't safe, it isn't sensible, it isn't even fun any more. Won't you drop the whole freakish thing and marry me?" Harry was holding Pauline by the hand as she drew her dainty way out of the library. In laughing rebellion she looked over her shoulder and jeered at him. "Oh, I thought it was I who was going to be afraid," she said. "Well, if you aren't, who is going to be?" "You," she tittered. He drew her back with a gentle but firm grasp. "Honestly, Polly, aren't you satisfied yet? Adventure is all right for breakfast or for luncheon once a month, but as a regular unremitting diet it gets on my nerves." "Still thinking of your own perils?" she volleyed. Harry's fine keen face took on a look of earnest appeal. He let go her hand, but as she started to run up the stairs he held her with his eyes. "You dear, silly boy," she cried, returning a step and clasping him in an impetuous embrace. "You are the nicest brother in all the world-- sometimes--but just now I think that adventure is nicer than brothers --or husbands. I'm having the time of my life, Harry boy, and I'm going on and on, and on with it until I've seen all the wild and wicked people and places in the world." Harry caught her hand and smiled down at her in surrender. A ring at the door bell and the entrance of the maid caused Pauline to flutter up the stairs. They were preparing to attend the Courtelyou's reception that evening to the great Baskinelli, whose musical achievements had been equaled only by his social successes during this, his first New York season. "Anyway," she twinkled from the top of the stairs, "you needn't be frightened for tonight. Nothing so meek and mild as a pianist can hurt you." Harry tossed up his hands in mimic despair and started back to the library. "Yes, I know she is always at home to you, Miss Hamlin," the maid was saying at the door. "What a privileged person I am," laughed Lucille Hamlin. She was Pauline's chum-in-chief, a dark, still tempered girl, in perfect contrast to the adventurous Polly. She greeted Harry with the easy grace of old acquaintanceship. "Still nursing the precious broken heart?" she queried. "For the love of Michael, me and humanity," he pleaded, "can't you do something? She won't listen to me. I'm honestly, deucedly worried, Lucille." "You know very well that nobody could ever do anything with Polly. She always had to have her own way--and that's why you love her, though you don't know it, Harry. Shall I run upstairs, Margaret?" she added, turning to the maid. "No, you're going to stay here," commanded Harry, seizing her hands. "You've got to do something with Pauline. You're the only one who can. She wants a new adventure every day, and a more dangerous one every time. Talk to her, won't you? Tell her it isn't right for her to risk her life when her life is so precious to so many people. No, wait a minute; sit down here. I'm not half through yet." He drew her, under laughing protest, to a seat beside him on the stairs. She realized suddenly how serious he was. She let her hand rest comradely in his pleading grasp. "Why, Harry, yes, if it is really dangerous, you know, I'll do anything I can," she said gravely. They did not see the cold gray face of Raymond Owen appear at the top of the stairs. The face vanished as quickly as it had appeared. In her boudoir Polly was laying out her finery of the evening. There came a soft rap at the door. "Come in," she called, and looked up brightly in Owen's furtive eyes as he opened the door and motioned to her. "Don't say anything, please, Miss Marvin," he whispered, "just come with me for a moment." Bewildered by his manner, she followed to the top of the stairs. He directed her gaze to the two young people in earnest conversation below. It was a picture that might well have startled a less impetuous heart than Pauline's. Harry's hand still clasped Lucille's, and he was leaning toward her in the eagerness of his appeal. "You, will? You promise? Lucille, you've made me happy," Pauline heard him say. Through mist-dimmed eyes, dizzily, she saw the two arise. She saw the man she loved clasp Lucille's other hand. She saw the girl who had been her friend and confidante since childhood draw herself away from him with a lingering withdrawal that could mean--ah, what could it not mean? Polly fled to her room. In Owen's subtle secret battle to retain control of the Marvin millions fate had never so befriended him. None of all the weapons or ruses that he had used to prevent the faithful attachment of Harry and Pauline was as potent as this little seed of jealousy. Pauline rang for her maid. "Tell Miss Hamlin that I am not at home," she said in a voice that started haughtily but ended in a sob. "But, Miss Marvin--" Margaret tried to demur. "Tell Miss Hamlin that I am not at home," repeated Pauline. Lucille had just started up the stairs, leaving Harry with a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. "Well, even if I caret do anything with that wild woman," she laughed back at him, "you know Pauline bears a charmed life. Nothing has ever happened to her yet. Guardian angels surround her--as well as heroes." Harry walked into the library. The agitated Margaret met Lucille on the stairs. "Miss Marvin is--Miss Marvin is not at home," the girl said, flushing crimson. Lucille paused, dumfounded. "But, Margaret, you know I thought--I really thought she was, at home, Miss Hamlin. I hope you won't be offended with me." "I insist upon seeing her," cried Lucille. "I don't believe you are telling me the truth. I'm going right up to her room." Margaret burst into tears. Lucille quickly reconsidered. Indignation took the place of astonishment. She hurried down the stairs and rushed through the door without waiting for Margaret to open it. Pauline, back in her own room, vented her first rage in tears. With her hot face pressed against the pillow, she sobbed out the agony of what she thought her betrayal--her double betrayal, by courtier and comrade at once. But the tears passed. Too vital was the spirit in her, too red flowing in her veins was the blood of fighting ancestors, too strong the fortress of self-command within the blossoming gardens of her youth and beauty for the word surrender ever to come to her mind. True, she had found an adventure that stirred her more deeply than the peril of land or sea or sky could have done. Here was a thrill that had never been listed among her intended tremors. She sent for Owen. Masked as ever in his suave exterior and his manner of mingled obsequiousness and fatherliness, he came instantly. "Mr. Owen, have you known--have you known that this was going on?" "I feel that it is my duty to know what concerns you--even what concerns your happiness, Miss Marvin," he answered. "You mean?" "I mean that I have long had my suspicions." But again the very perfection of his deceit brought Pauline that feeling that she had had since childhood that sense of an insidious influence always surrounding her, always menacing and yet never revealed. This influence, which Owen seemed to embody, was the antagonist of that other mysterious power, so real and yet so inexplicable, that warded and protected her--the spirit of the girl that had stepped from the mummy. But Pauline had seen with her own eyes; she did not need any word of Owen's to convince her of the falsity of her lover. She was quite calm now. She dressed with the utmost care. Margaret, who had seen her in such anger only a short time before, was surprised at her sprightliness and graciousness. A slightly heightened color that only added to the luster of her loveliness, was the single sign of her inward thoughts. She summoned her own car and left the house alone. The drawing room of the Clarence Courtelyou mansion was ablaze with light. There was a little too much light. The Clarence Courtelyou always had a little too much of everything. There was a little too much money; there was a little too much gold leaf decoration in the drawing room, a little too much diamond decoration of Mrs. Courtelyou, and, if you were so fastidiously impolite as to say so, a little too much of Mrs. Courtelyou herself. But Mrs. Courtelyou was struggling toward gentility in such an amiable way that better people liked her. The motherliness and sweet sincerity of her--the fact that she loved her frankly illiterate husband and worshipped, almost from afar, her cultured daughters was the thing that brought her down from the base height of the "climbers" and lifted her kindly, harmless personality to the high simplicities of the elite. She made the natural mistake that other wealthy mendicants at the outer portals of society have made the mistake of pounding at the gates. Instead of letting the splendor of her charitable gifts, the gracefulness of her simplicity, carry her through, she went in for the gorgeous and the costly. As a sort of crowning glory she began to "take up" artists and actors and musicians. She gained the good graces of the best of them, and in her kindly innocence she won the worship of the worst. It was thus that she came to the point of holding a reception for Baskinelli. Not that any one had heard anything black, or even shadowy, against Baskinelli. He had arrived recently from abroad, his foreign fame preceding him, his prospective conquests of America fulsomely foretold, his low brow decorated in advance with laurel. Mrs. Courtelyou added him to her collection with the swiftness and directness of the entomologist discovering a new bug. She herself loved music--without understanding it very deeply--and Baskinelli, whatever might be his other gifts, could summon all the cadences of love from the machines that people call a piano--engine of torture or instrument of joy. For half an hour Harry paced at the foot of the stairs. "I wonder if she's ever coming," he fumed to himself. "It takes 'em so long to do it that they drive you crazy, and when it's done they're so wonderful that they drive you crazy." "Did you--did you wish anything, sir?" asked the butler, entering. "No--just waiting for Miss Pauline, Jenkins--just waiting," sighed Harry. "Why--if I may presume to tell you, sir--Miss, Marvin has gone to the reception," said Jenkins. "Gone!" Harry cried abruptly, hotly, then remembered that he was speaking to a servant and swung into the reception room. He put on his hat and coat and rang for Jenkins again. "How long ago was it that Miss Pauline went out?" "Almost an hour ago, sir." Harry slammed his way out of the door. It was not until he was in the car on his way to the Courtelyous that he began to think--began to think with utterly wrong deductions, as lovers always do. "I must have said too much," he told himself. "She's crazy about these wild pranks and she thinks I'm a stupid goody-goody. What a fool I was to try to prevent her!" "You aren't very nice, Mr. Marvin, to snub my pet musician--my very newest pet musician," Mrs. Courtelyou rebuked him, as he entered. "I didn't mean it. I was waiting for--why, my car went to pieces," he explained. "Is Pauline here?" "Here? She is the only person present. Baskinelli hasn't spoken a word to any one else. He won't play anything unless she suggests the subject. I am glad Mr. Owen is here to protect her." From the scintillant, filmy mist of women around the piano Lucille emerged. She came swiftly to Harry's side. "What is the matter?" she asked. "What is? Tell me." he replied. "What did you say to her?" "I didn't see her, Harry. She sent word that she was not at home." "You don't mean--not after you started upstairs." "Yes--and she hasn't spoken to me all evening." "And she left me waiting at home for half an hour. It's outrageous." Harry strode across the floor just as the music ceased, and Baskinelli arose, bowing to the applause of his feminine admirers. "May I ask the honor to show to you Madame Courtelyou's portrait of myself? It is called 'The Glorification of Imbecility,'" he said as he proffered his arm to Pauline. He was a small man, with sharp features shadowed by a mass of flowing, curling hair--the kind of hair that has come to be called "musical" by the irreverent. The sweep of an abnormal brow gave emphasis to the sudden jut of deep eye sockets, and a dull, sallow skin gave emphasis to the subtle sinister light, of the eyes themselves. Pauline accepted the proffered arm of the artist, but daintily, laughingly, she turned him back to the piano. "You haven't yet escaped, Signor Baskinelli," she said. "We have not yet heard 'Tivoli,' you know." "Tivoli," he cried, with hands upraised in mock disdain. "Why, I wrote the thing myself. Am I to violate even my own masterpieces?" There was a twitter of mocking protest from the women. Baskinelli began to play again. "Pauline, may I speak to you--just a moment?" Harry's vexed voice reached her ear as she stood beside the piano. She turned slowly and looked into his bewildered, angry eyes. "A little later--possibly," she answered, and instantly turned back to Baskinelli. From her no mask of music, no glamour of others' admiration could hide the predatory obsequiousness of Baskinelli. She was not in the least interested in Baskinelli. She had loathed him from the moment when she had looked down on his little oily curls. But if Baskinelli had been Beelzebub he would have enjoyed the favor of Pauline that evening--at least, after Harry had arrived. The glowing piquant beauty of Pauline enthralled Baskinelli. He had never before seen a woman like her--innocent but astute, daring but demure, brilliant but opalescent. When at last they strolled away together into the conservatory his drawing room obeisances became direct declarations of love. Pauline began to be frightened. She fluttered to the door of the conservatory. But there she paused. Voices sounded from the end of a little rose-rimmed alley. They were the voices of Harry and Lucille. Baskinelli was at her side again. "If I have said anything--done anything to offend," he said, with affected contrition, "you will let me make my lowliest apologies, won't you?" Pauline hardly heard him. She was intently listening to the low pitched voices. "I--I think I will run back to the others," she cried suddenly. Baskinelli was left alone. "I congratulate you, Signor, on the success of the evening," said a voice at his shoulder. "There are few among the famous who can conquer drawing rooms as well as auditoriums." The musician turned to face the ingratiating smile of Raymond Owen. "I thank you--I thank you, sir. But I do not believe you. My 'conquest' has turned to catastrophe. I have lost everything." "You mean that you are dissatisfied with the applause?" asked Owen. "No! No! Applause is nothing from the many. There is always one in his audience to whom he plays from his soul." "And that one--tonight?" "The lovely Miss--what, now, is her name--Marvin. She bewitches me --and she scorns me." "Signor Baskinelli, there are other places than drawing rooms, or even conservatories, in which to capture those who captivate." "I--do I quite grasp your meaning, Mistaire Owen?" He tried to disguise the suspicion under an accentuated accent. "I think so, Monsieur Picquot." At the name Baskinelli turned livid. He made a movement as if he would lunge at the throat of Owen, but his fury withered under the glassy smile. "So--we met in Paris?" "Once upon a time--a little incident in the Rue St. Jeanne. A young woman was concerned in that incident--and was not heard of afterward." "And you are trying to blackmail me for the death of Marie Disart! Ha! That is a jest," cried Baskinelli. "I am trying to do nothing of the kind. I simply reminded you of the little affair. I know as well as you that it was all beautifully cleared up, and a man is still in prison for it. I know you are as safe here as that man is in jail, Signor Baskinelli." "What are you talking about, then?" "The little woman that so charmed you here. I remarked merely that those who are captivated can capture." "Not in this country--not among the Puritans. One must be good-- and unhappy." "You haven't forgotten your little friends, Mario, and Di Palma and Vitrio? They are all respected residents of New York. We know, where they might be found." "At Cagliacci's?" "Precisely. Dining upon the best of spaghetti and the richest of wines, and paying for it at the point of a stiletto." "But--ha! You are talking nonsense. We could not find them; they could not find us." "We might telephone and try," suggested Owen. "Cagliacci, you know, is now up-to-date. He has a telephone. He considers it a sign of respectability." "And then what do you propose?" "Picquot--I mean Signor Baskinelli, I propose nothing. Unless possibly there might be--after the reception--a little motor trip to Chinatown. It might amuse the ladies." "You are right. I will invite them all," said Baskinelli. "And how about calling up Marie at Cagliacci's just as an old friend?" "It might be best." They moved together down the corridor and Owen directed their way to a little study secluded from all other apartments of the great house. "You seem to be familiar with the home of our gracious hostess," remarked Baskinelli. "I make it a rule to be familiar with all homes in which Miss Marvin is entertained." "Miss Marvin? You are, then a relative?" "I am her guardian." "Ah-h! You have control--perhaps--of certain small sums bequeathed to her?" "Yes." "And you would like to have as few persons as possible in the Chinatown party?" "As few as possible." In a place known only as Cagliacci's, in the dreg depths of Elizabeth street, the ringing of the telephone bell was much more startling, much more unusual than the crash of a pistol shot or the blast of a bomb. The habitu's moved quietly to the door that leads to the roofs, while Pietro Cagliacci himself wiped the dust-covered receiver on his apron and put it to his ear. He spoke softly, tersely. The conversation was very brief. Within a minute after he had hung up the receiver three grimy-clad, grim-visaged men left the place silently. Harry and Lucille came out of the conservatory. "I tell you there wasn't anything said between us that could have caused it," he was saying. "I was fighting the whole thing hard, but I was fighting it like a beggar. I am always a beggar with Pauline." "But you told her it wasn't right that she was risking other people's lives?" "No, I told you to tell her that." In spite of her distress over Pauline's coldness, Lucille burst into laughter. They were just emerging into the music room. Pauline, like the others, turned at the unexpected sound. She gave one glance at the two and turned haughtily away. Baskinelli was bustling about, making up an impromptu excursion party. "Ha! You people of New York--you do not know what is in New York. All Europe is here--and you never cross Fourteenth street--I mean to say Fifth avenue." "It is more dangerous to cross Fifth avenue than to cross the ocean-- that's probably the reason," said Harry. "The traffic cops along the Gulf Stream are so careful." Pauline stopped Baskinelli's intended reply. She wanted Harry to be ignored utterly. Her anger had made him flippant. His flippancy had put the seal of completeness upon her anger. CHAPTER IX BASKINELLI'S QUARRY A flutter of polite alarm attended Signor Baskinalli's invitation. From the sheltered glitter of a Fifth avenue drawing room to Chinatown was a plunge a little too deep. But Baskinelli was insistent and Pauline was his ardent and efficient recruiting officer. Quite a troop train of limousines carried the invaders to the uncelestial haunts of the Celestials. Baskinelli rode in the car with Pauline and Owen. He had cast off the dignity of the master musician and assumed an air of whimsical recklessness. Harry and Lucille were in the following car. "Oh, please stop fidgeting," exclaimed Lucille. "I'm as nervous as you are." "I know," said Harry, "but I hate to have her alone with that little black snake for five minutes." "Owen is with them." "Owen is worse." The machines drew up in Chatham Square, and the little procession that moved across to Doyers street--dainty slippers on blackened cobblestones, light laughter tinkling under the thunder of the "L," human brightness brushing past the human shadows from the midnight dens --made contrasts picturesque as a pageant in a catacomb. Pauline, on the arm of the chattering Baskinelli, led the way. "Isn't this splendid?" she exclaimed. "I am sure you won't disappoint me, Signor Baskinelli. I hope you aren't going to show us a happy Chinese family at supper. Only the most dreadful sights amuse me." "Ali, but we, must not take risks," replied Baskinelli. "There are some beings in the world, Miss Marvin, so exquisitely precious that a man would commit sin if he placed them in peril." "But only the worst and wickedest places," she admonished Baskinelli. He leaned suddenly very near to her. "Do you really mean that, Miss Marvin?" he asked. "Indeed I do," she answered. "Very well. But first we shall go to the new restaurant. It is yet too early for the worst and wickedest to be abroad or rather to seek their lairs." They climbed a brightly lighted staircase into one of the ordinary Chinese restaurants of the better sort which are conducted almost entirely for Americans, and where Boston baked beans are as likely as not to nudge almond cakes on the bill of fare and champagne flow as commonly as tea. They gathered around one of the larger of the cheaply inlaid tables, and Baskinelli took command of the feast. Harry sat in grim silence, watching Pauline like a protecting dragon. Lucille was sick at heart and repentant of coming. The others chatted merrily among themselves. But by common consent Pauline seemed to have been surrendered to the attentions of the evening pest, who had become a midnight host. He leaned toward her with an ardor that he did not even attempt to disguise. "You are the most wonderful woman in--" "Please make it the universe," pleaded Pauline. "There are so many most wonderful women in the world." "No, let us say chaos," he whispered. "The chaos of a man's heart can be ruled only by the charming uncertainty of woman." The intensity of his words brought to Pauline again the twinge of alarm. Unconsciously she looked around for Harry. It was the last thing in the world she had meant to do. She was angry at herself in an instant, for his fixed, guarding gaze was upon her. She met his eyes and turned quickly to Baskinelli. "Chaos? I've always loved that word," she flashed. "There must be so many lovely adventures where there are no laws." "I said the chaos in a man's heart could be ruled by a woman," said Baskinelli. The impudence of this sudden love making moved her unexpectedly to defiance. "Please let it be ruled, Signor Baskinelli," she said, turning away from him. Baskinelli had sense enough to see that he had gone too far. He turned to the others as the soft-footed Orientals began to spread the mixed and mysterious viands on the table. He glanced at Owen. By the slightest movement imaginable, by the least uplift of his black brows, Owen answered. For the first time Baskinelli knew that the lovely quarry he pursued had a protector-- and no mean, no weak protector. But the arrival of the repast quickly covered the general embarrassment. Everybody could see that Pauline and Harry had had a quarrel and that Pauline, was flirting outrageously with Baskenelli simply for revenge--that is, every one except Harry could see it. "Pardon me, but is that what you call a graft investigation that you are making, Miss Hamlin?" inquired Baskinelli. "No, but the food is so funny. There are so many queer things present, but unidentified," laughed Lucille. "Like a reception to a foreign artist," interrupted Harry with a vindictive glare. "Or shall we say like the conversation of an unhappy guest," said Baskinelli, smilingly turning to note the entrance of a little party of newcomers at the further end of the restaurant. A dashing, well-dressed, fiery-eyed foreigner, the tips of whose waxed mustachios turned up like black stalagmites from the comers of his cavernous mouth, was accompanied by two nondescript figures, who seemed to be embarrassed more by the fact that they had been recently cleansed and shaved than by their rough red shirts and mismatched coats and trousers. The man of the tilted mustachios gave brief, imperative orders to the waiters, whose languid steps seemed to be quickened by his words as by an electric battery. The other two sat silent, like docile dogs in leash. Only for an instant Baskinelli's eyes rested upon the group. "And having tasted the food of the gods, how would you like to visit the gods themselves?" he asked. Pauline agreed enthusiastically. "You mean a joss house--a Chinese church, don't you." "Yes." The joss house that most visitors see in Chinatown is the little one up under the roof at the meeting of Doyers and Pell streets--at the toe of the twisted horseshoe made by these tiny thoroughfares of black fame, where, in spite of all the modern magic of "reform," men still die silently in the hush of secluded corridors and women vanish into the darkness that is worse than death. The little joss house is interesting in the same way that an Indian village at a State fair is interesting. Behind its gaudy staginess and commercial appeal it still holds something of reality from which the imagination can draw a picture of an ancient worship that has held a race of millions in thrall for thousands of years. But it was not to the little joss house that Signor Baskinelli guided the party. In the little joss house the bells are pounded without respite, the visitors come and go at all hours of the day and night-- save the few set hours when the joss sacrifices profit to true prayer. Baskinelli took his guests to the joss house of the Golden Screens. Save for its greater size and more splendid accoutrement, it was little different from the other. But it was walled, in its back alley seclusion, deep behind the outer fronts of Mott street, by a secrecy almost sincerely sacred. The motor cars remained far behind across the square as Baskinelli led the party through the dismal streets and stopped before a dark doorway. A dim light flared behind the door and a Chinaman in American dress admitted them. "I am beginning to be really bored," said Pauline. "Wait; give the wicked a chance," said Baskinelli. They climbed three flights of dingy, narrow stairs, lighted with flaring gas jets. "Wonderful," jeered Pauline. "Not even a secret passage or a subterranean den!" The others followed her laughing lead up the stairs. A Chinaman came out of the door on the second landing, stopped, started in innocent curiosity at the dazzling visitors and went down the stairs. Everything was as still and commonplace as if they had been in the hallway of a Harlem flat building. The silence was not broken or the seeming safety disturbed in the slightest by the soft opening of the first landing door, after they had passed--that is, after all but Owen had passed. No one but Owen saw the piercing black eyes and the tilted mustachios of the face that appeared for an instant at the door. There was a corridor, not so well lighted, at the top of the third flight of stairs. In the dim turns the women drew their skirts about them, a bit wary of the black, short walls. The passage narrowed. They could move now only in single file, and even then their shoulders brushed the walls. Only a far, dull glow from a red lamp over a door at the end of a passage lighted their way. Baskinelli tapped lightly on the door. It was opened by a venerable Chinaman in the flowing robes of a priest. He looked at them doubtfully. Baskinelli spoke three words that his companions did not hear. The priest vanished. Quickly the door was reopened and they stepped into the dim, smoky, stifling presence of the joss. The choking scent of the punk always at the folded feet of the idol was almost suffocating. The place had other odors less noxious and less sweet. Chinamen were lounging in the room as if it had been a place of rest. Three priests were on their knees before the joss swaying forward till their foreheads almost touched the floor, their outstretched arms moving in mystic symmetry with their rocking bodies. A great brass bell hung low beside the idol. But no priest touched the bell. The joss itself was almost the least impressive thing in the room. It stood, or squatted, six feet high, on a block pedestal at the side of the room. The simple hideousness of the painted features served no impressive purpose, but as contrast to the exquisite decorations of the room. Screens of carved wood, so delicately wrought that it seemed a touch would break the graven fibers, were flecked with inlay of pearl and covering of gold. One of the peculiar features of the room was a suit of ancient Chinese armor--a relic that had been rusted and pit-marked by time, but now stood brightly polished beside the statue of the god. A huge two-edged sword was held upright in the steel glove. By the dim light behind the idol the shadow of the sword was cast across the blank face of Baskinelli as he moved forward. He stepped back quickly. The shadow fell between him and Pauline. Again the ancient priest answered a summons at the door. Again he parleyed for a moment--then opened it to the three swarthy foreigners who had been in the restaurant. Baskinelli turned for just in instant to glance at the tall man with the tilted mustache, then resumed immediately his conversation with Pauline. "Why do all the Chinamen run away like that?" she asked. "It is the end of the service; you see the priests are going, too." There was a furtive haste about the departure of the Orientals. And there was a quavering in the manner of the oldest priest--the only one who remained--that seemed born of a hidden fear. The old priest lifted one of the lamps from a wall bracket and set it on the floor beside the idol. He knelt near it and began to pray. The three Italians waited only a moment, then followed the Chinese out of the room. "It is late--we ought to be going," pleaded Lucille. Complete silence had fallen on the room and her words, a little tremulous, had instant effect on the other women. "What about it, Baskinelli? Had we better be going?" asked one of the men. "Yes--yes, I beg only a moment. I wish to show Miss Pauline the--" "You mean Miss Marvin, do you not?" blazed Harry, striding to Baskinelli's side and glaring down at him. "I was interrupted. I had not finished my words. They are, at best, awkward, I beg--" "You beg nothing," said Harry through clenched teeth. Then slowly, grimly: "I want to tell you, you little leper, that if anything happens here tonight--it is going to happen to you." He was so near to the musician that the others did not hear. Baskinelli backed away. Pauline, with the swift, inexplicable, yet unerring instinct of woman, moved as if to seek the shelter of Harry's towering frame. He did not see her. He had whirled at the sound of the opening of a door--a peculiar door set diagonally across a corner of the room behind the joss. Through the yellow silk curtains that hid the entrance came two Chinamen as fantastically hideous as the embroidered dragons on the tapestry. "Put those men out; they cannot come in here; they are full of opium," commanded Baskinelli. "Stop; let them come in; we are going," said the mild voice of Owen. The understanding look of Baskinelli met his. Baskinelli frowned and Owen smiled. They were playing perfectly their roles. The two Chinamen shuffled into the room. The priest arose in jabbering protest. They argued with him acridly. A few feet away one could see that their cheap linen robes covered the ordinary street garb of the Chinamen; that the ugly lines on their faces were painted, as on the face of the Joss. Baskinelli was laughing. The others watched the argument in silence. Every one but the host, and Owen, and Pauline, seemed a little nervous. Suddenly the lamp on the floor went out. There was another at the farther side of the room, but its dim light made the scene more weird than darkness could have made it. "Well, I thought we were going," snapped Harry's strident voice. "We are," replied Baskinelli. "Miss--er--I am afraid to speak-- Miss Marvin, shall we go?" Pauline took his arm. "Ali, but I have forgotten the most precious sight of the evening," suddenly exclaimed the musician. "Only a moment--look here." Interested, Pauline did not notice that Owen softly shut the door upon the receding footsteps of the others. Baskinelli guided her back to the little door behind the screen--the door from which the Chinamen had entered. Baskinelli drew aside the curtain. "There--that is one form of adventure." Pauline looked through the curtain. A suffocating, narcotic odor came to her. What she saw was stifling not only to the senses--but to the soul. She turned away. "Polly!" Harry's voice rang through the little choked room like a thunder blast. "We are coming--we are quite safe," called Baskinelli, with the sneer tinge in his tone. "Very well, then; hurry." Harry's manner aroused Pauline's temper again. She purposely lingered. The two Chinamen were arguing violently now with the priest. Harry had closed the door and followed the others down the outer passage. "Miss Marvin--Pauline!" called Baskinelli with sudden passion. "Have you a heart of stone? Can you not see me helpless in your presence? Do you know what love is?" He stepped towards her and tried to take her in his arms. But she was stronger and far braver than he. She thrust him aside and fled through the door. Baskinelli followed, protesting, pleading. Strangely, as she fled through the narrow corridor, the low, flaring gas jets were extinguished one by one. She groped in darkness. Baskinelli's pleading voice became almost a consolation, a protection. Her elbow struck something in the passageway. The something shrank at the touch. She heard a quick drawn breath that was not Baskinelli's. She tried to run. The tiny passageway chocked her flight. She plunged helplessly between invisible, but gripping walls. She reeled and screamed. There was the sound of a struggle behind her. She heard Baskinelli crying for help--but, oh, so quietly! She reached the stairs. The stairs were blocked by a closed door. The door was barred. But there was a light left burning by the door. Her weak hands beat upon the panels, helplessly, hopelessly. How should she know that there were two doors, locked and sealed beyond? Her wild screams rang through the long passage, through the dark, above the shuffle and beat and cursing of the staged fight. In the dim light she could see the three Italians grappling with the other men. Baskinelli's voice called to her reassuringly. It might well. Baskinelli was in no danger. She placed her softly clothed shoulder to the door and strove to break it. She screamed again. "Harry! Harry!" Dull crashes answered. There was the crack and cleaving of splintered wood. "Hold on! I'm here!" she heard. She fell beside the door. Strong arms seized her. For an instant she felt that she was saved. But she looked up into the lowering face of a man with tilted mustachios. From the wide thick lips came threats and curses. From the outer passageway sounded the crashing of the doors. She let herself be lifted, then, with sudden exertion of her trained strength, she broke the grasp of the man. The door fell open. Harry, bloody and tattered, stood there--alone. "Polly?" "Oh--yes--where are the others? They'll kill you--run!" she cried. He ran forward into the black corridor. A knife thrust, sheathed in silence, ripped his shoulder gave him his cue. He had one man down and trampled. But another was upon him and yet a third. A sharp pain dulled the pulsing of his throat. He felt a tickle down his bared and swinging arm. He fought blindly in the dark. "Polly!" he panted. There was no answer. * * * * * In the Joss House of the Golden Screens the two Chinamen, dazed with opium, set of purpose, were still arguing with the trembling priest. The door fell open and a white woman--with bleeding hands--fell at their feet. "Ha, she has come back!" cried one of the Chinese in his own tongue. There was the sound of steps in the outer passage. "Quick--inside!" breathed the Chinaman, pointing to the den. They lifted Pauline. The old priest stopped them. "Not there--not there!" he cried. "Any one would look in there." They dragged her back. The priest hurried to the outer door and locked it. There was the blunt, battering thrust of a body against the door. "Open, or I'll break it in!" yelled the voice of Harry. The priest opened the door. In deferential silence he saluted the battle grimed newcomer. Battered, panting, bleeding, Harry lunged at the man, gripped him. "Quick--where is she? You'll die like a spiked rat. Where?" he roared. The two other Chinamen were kneeling before the Joss. There was a moment's silence, then a strange sound--like a cry heard afar off. Harry strode to the little pedestal where the suit of armor stood. "Where is she?--or I'll rip this place to cockles!" he thundered. "We do not know what you mean," said the priest. The two Chinamen began to jabber. Other figures reeled from the room behind the curtains. But over all their clamor sounded again the faint cry--distant, but near. In a flash Harry caught from the mailed glove the haft of the sword. As he rushed across the room the Chinese withered away from him. There was a crash as the great sword fell upon one of the windows. Through the broken pane Harry shouted for help. His voice was like a clarion in the silent streets. He turned in time. Three Chinamen, with drawn knives, were upon him. He swung the unwieldy sword above his head. Its sweep saved him. He dashed at the Joss. Again he lifted the sword. A grasp and then a wail of fear sounded through the room. He struck. The head of the statue thudded to the floor. The Chinese rushed upon him. They were desperate now in the face of the violation of their god. But he was behind their god prying open the secret door to the hollow within the statue. "It's all right, Polly," he said as he drew her gently forth. He stood above her with his back to the wall swinging the sacred sword against the onslaught of fanatic men. They fell before him, but more came on. His hands could hardly hold the mighty weapon. For more than half an hour he had been fighting. He was weakening but he braced himself and swung for the last time. There came a hammering at the door. It crashed in. Police clubs whistled right and left. The Chinese fled into their secret lairs. * * * * * "And I guess that will be all," panted Harry in the taxi that took them home. "I don't think you'll ask for any more adventures after this one." "Why didn't you pick up the Joss's head?" replied Pauline. "It would have looked so nice and dreadful in the library?" But the glory of her golden hair nestled upon his torn shoulder and he knew that he would go through all the perils in the world for happiness like this. CHAPTER X KABOFF'S WILD HORSE For several months after old Mr. Marvin's death, Owen had kept to his cubby-hole room adjoining the financier's small, plain-furnished, workaday office. But recently he had got the habit of doing his work in the library, where the tall, pure statues looked down upon his skulking head and the grand old books that had borne their messages of good from generation to generation, held their high thoughts in stately contrast to his skilled and cruel plots. Above the bowed bald head that was planning the death of a young girl to gain her fortune stood a figure of Persephone-child of innocence and sunlight shadowed by black robes of Dis. Upon the coward who feared all but the darkest and most devious passages of crime shone high, clear brows of Caesar and Aurelius. Gray folios of Shakespeare held up to the ambitious ingrate the warning titles of "Lear" and "Hamlet" and "Macbeth." And by his side brooded ever that mystic relic of the farther past--the Mummy, from whose case had stepped a daughter of the Pharaohs in the likeness of Pauline. But Owen thought little of contrasts. He was opening his mail on a morning in early May when he came across an envelope addressed in the awkward scrawl of Hicks. He tore it apart nervously, for if Hicks could be moved to write, it must be a matter of concern. "Dear Owen, No doubt he suspects you of foul play. He has seen his attorneys and is about to take steps to have you removed from the trustee-ship." The paper crackled in Owen's trembling hand. So the Baskinelli incident had gone a little too far. Harry Marvin had sense enough to know that he would not have to fight three murderous Italians and a rabble of Chinese unless there had been a plot behind Pauline's peril. It might be best to go directly after Harry--to put him out of the way first. And yet, Owen pondered, there was no proof of anything wrong. Pauline was admittedly plunging into these adventures of her own free will. Nothing could be proved against him or Hicks. He resumed his work. Among the letters lay an advertising dodger which had been dropped through the door. Owen glanced at it carelessly at first, then with keen interest. He read it over: "BALLOON ASCENSION FROM PALISADES "Signor Panatella, the famous Italian Aeronaut, will make parachute drop from height never before attempted." The ascension was to be made that afternoon from one of the amusement parks on the New Jersey shore of the Hudson. "This is Providence," he muttered to himself, catching up the dodger. Slipping through the door and up the stairs, he tapped at the door of Pauline's room. When there came no answer he entered swiftly, laid a paper on the table and glided back to the hall, back to the library. From there he called up Hicks. Hicks' domiciles were so many and suddenly changeable that he claimed nothing so dignified as a regular telephone number. But he had scribbled on the bottom of his note the number of a saloon on the lower West Side. He was there when Owen rang. "Hello, Hello, . . . Is that you, Hicks? . . . I want to see you. . . . What? . . . No, right away. . . . Broke? . . . you always are .... you'll get the cash all right. . . . What's that? .... Come here? .... Not on your life. I'll come to you .... Not half that time .... I'll take the motorcycle. All right .... Good-by." He hung up the receiver, went up to his room and got into cycling kit. As he came down stairs he met Pauline, who was returning from a shopping trip. "Good morning, Owen," she said brightly. "Do you know, I believe there is more peril in a dry goods store than on a pirate yacht. What parts of my new hat are left?" "Only the becoming ones." She sped on up the stairs. After her first imperative inquiries of the mirror concerning what she considered her wild appearance, she picked up the letters on her dressing table and began to run through them. The large black type of an advertising dodger loomed among the letters. Pauline tripped down the stairs. To Harry, seated on the steps enjoying the Spring sunshine and puffing a leisurely cigarette, appeared a mysterious vision. He knew by the elaborate way in which she took her seat beside him and hid the piece of paper in her hand that she had some new whim in fermentation--something to ask him that she knew he wouldn't want to do. "Yes," he said, moving along the step away from her. "I know you've just bought me the loveliest cravat, that I'm the nicest brother in the world, that I look so handsome in Springy things and--well, what it is?" Pauline pouted at the other end of the step. "I'm going up in a balloon and jump down," she announced, "from a height never before attempted." "Polly I You are going to do nothing of the--" "No, I wasn't going to, until you grew so great and grand. I just wanted to go over and see him fly." She tossed the dodger over to him. He glanced at it. "Well, if you promise you aren't plotting any more pranks, I'll take you." "That's a worth-while brother. It's a pink one." "Pink one?" "Cravat, of course." Harry groaned. "Give it to the cook," he pleaded. "He wears 'em alive. If that fellow goes up at 2:30, you'd better hurry." "I'll be ready before you are." She rose quickly, but Owen, looking, listening, had time to close the door unseen, unheard. At the rear of a little West Side saloon, he signaled with his horn, and Hicks came out. He was a bit shabbier than usual, and he had been drinking, but he was not intoxicated. Owen locked his machine and taking his arm walked him rapidly up the avenue. "What do you mean by writing to me?" demanded Owen. "Haven't I told you never to put words on paper?" "Oh, I guess you got that house wired so nobody'll catch you," grunted Hicks. "Live wires, too-clever butlers, footmen, maids, chauffeurs, cooks; you're safe enough." "You forget those are your wires. They don't know they're working for me. Hicks, are you out of your head? Have you told Bemis that you and I are working together?" "Sure not; but that butler is no fool, Mr. Owen." "Was it from him you found out that Harry had the lawyers after us?" "No--queer thing that, that--it wasn't." "Who, then?" "The little Espinosa." "Espinosa--in New York?" "Yes--met her at the Trocadero a week ago. She'd seen old Calderwood already. I guess she blackmails him--the old reprobate, and him the noble counselor at law for Mr. Harry Marvin!" "So you put her on the scent--for us?" "Why not? The young fellow's been acting suspicious for a long time." "You did very well." "How about some money--I haven't seen the color of a roll since you put that fool Baskinelli into the game. Ain't you coming across?" "Certainly; here," said Owen, handing over enough to sate even the predatory greed of Hicks. "Now, what I want you to do is to find me some one among your horse racing friends who is down and out enough to take a little cash job--at certain slight risks?" "Yes--what?" "I want a good rider on a wild horse. He could make a thousand dollars in an afternoon if the horse should happen to get wild at the right time and do the right thing." "Hm'm," mused Hicks. "I wonder if Eddie Kaboff has still got his livery stable down on Tenth avenue. We might go see." After ten minutes' walk Hicks brought up in front of a bill-plastered door in a fence. He held it open for Owen and they passed across a vacant lot to a large dilapidated-looking stable at the further end. The short, dark man who sat in a tilted chair against the doorway and puffed lazily at a pipe, seemed to embody the spirit of the building and the business done there. He was a man who had once--in the days of racing--been called a "sport." He might still be called "horsey" and would consider the term a compliment. But Eddie Kaboff's fame and fortune had both dwindled since the good old betting days when little swindling games larded the solid profits of crooked races. One by one his thoroughbreds had given up their stalls to truck horses, just as Eddie's diamond studs had given place to plain buttons. His beady black eyes watched the two newcomers on their way across the lot, but he gave no sign of recognition until Hicks and Owen reached the door. "Hello, Eddie," said Hicks. Kaboff got up slowly and extended a flabby hand to his acquaintance. He was introduced to Owen, who let Hicks do the talking. "What's new, Eddie?" "Nuthin'." "Still got that wild horse you never was able to sell?" "Yep." "Can you still manage him yourself?" "I guess I could, but he ain't safe to take among traffic." Hicks stepped close to Kaboff, talking in rapid whispers. The little man turned white. "No, no; I'm too old for that kind of game," he said. Owen drew from his pocket a roll of yellowbacks--the biggest roll Eddie Kaboff had seen since the days of "easy money." "This much to try it," said Owen, "and as much again if you make good." Kaboff's glance wavered a moment between the penetrating eyes of Owen and the money in his hand. "Take it; it's yours." The flabby hand closed almost caressingly around the roll. "We'll go in and have a look at the brute," he said. They followed him through a line of stalls to a large padded box at the far end of the barn. A beautiful bay saddle horse occupied the box. Kaboff entered and called the animal, which answered by flying into a seeming fury, plunging about the box, kicking, rearing and snapping. "Same old devil," muttered Hicks. "He'll do." The sight of an apple in Kaboff's hand calmed the animal. It came to him and ate docilely while he slipped a bridle over its head. Once outside the stall, however, it began another rampage. Hicks held a last whispered conversation with Kaboff, giving him minute instructions. "I can just try it, you know," said Kaboff. "I can't guarantee to get away with it." "As much again if you do, you know," said Owen as he started briskly away with Hicks. The place that Panatella had chosen for the start of his balloon ascension was a field upon the crest of the Palisades above the amusement park. Panatella had brought with him from abroad a reputation for dare-devil adventures in the air. And he had proved his reckless courage in the several brief ascensions that he had already made on this side. Today, with his promise of the longest parachute drop on record, people flocked to the field from New York and all adjacent New Jersey. "I wish you wouldn't always invite that velvet-pawed servant on our trips," grumbled Harry to Pauline, as Owen went for his dustcoat. "Owen is my trustee and guardian. You have no right to speak of him as a servant. Besides, when he's along he keeps you from being silly." Harry stamped out to the garage, swung a new touring car around to the door, and soon, with Owen and Pauline, was speeding for the ferry. Signor Panatella was superintending the filling of the great gas bag. He was a tall, lithe man in pink tights beneath which his muscles bulged angularly like the gas filling the balloon bag. A Latin rapidity of speech and motion added to the pink tights made him comically frog-like, and even the abattis of medals on his breast could not save his dignity. He bustled about giving orders to the workmen who were preparing to cut the ropes, then flitting back to the crowd to answer the questions of impromptu admirers. Pauline had left the car and was standing between Owen and Harry near the rapidly filling bag. "I wish I could talk to him, too--he's so cute and hippety-hoppy," she said. Owen stepped to Panatella's side. "Would you permit the young lady to see the balloon basket?" he asked. "With pleasure," said the airman after a glance at Pauline. He led the way to the basket, and helped Pauline up so that she could look at the equipment, the anchor with its long coil of rope, the sand bags and water bottles. She was plainly fascinated as Panatella explained the manner of his flight and his drop through the air. As she saw them attach the basket to the tugging bag she was thrilled. At this moment there was a flurry of excitement on the outskirts of the crowd. A horseman on a beautiful bay mount, that was evidently unmanageable, came plunging and swerving down the field. The crowd broke and scattered in front of the menacing hoofs that flew in the air as the vicious animal reared. The horseman, clad in a somewhat threadbare riding suit, was a small man with beady black eyes that turned from side to side as he swayed in his saddle. He seemed to be afraid of his mount and to be looking for help. But it was remarkable that apparently so poor a rider held his seat and actually managed to bring the beast to a nervous stand some fifty yards from the balloon. The little man looked around over the heads of the crowd. He caught sight of Owen beside Pauline near the balloon basket. The lifting of his riding cap might or might not have been a salute and signal. "Oh, I wish I hadn't promised Harry not to go up. I know Signor Panatella would take me," sighed Pauline. Harry had turned away to watch the actions of the strange horseman. "You might scare him a little," Owen suggested. Those words were the greatest risk he had taken in all his deeply laid plots. Pauline caught at the suggestion eagerly. She sprang lightly from the little platform into the balloon car. A murmur of mingled astonishment, applause and alarm rose from the crowd. Two of the workmen were cutting the last ropes that held the basket to earth. Ten others were holding it with their hands awaiting the airman. Panatella purposely delayed the moment of mounting the basket. The tugging of the huge balloon against the strength of a dozen men gave impress to his feat, and he liked the state of suspense. But the sound from the surprised throng called his attention now to a scene that made him forget affectation and effect. He started to run toward the basket, shouting peremptory orders: "Out of the car; out of the car instantly, madame! You are risking your life." His excitement infected the crowd. Surging, it seemed to sweep with it the rider on the restive horse. For, as a hand was suddenly lifted in the midst of the crowd the horse apparently overcame the legs braced to spring, it shot forward directly at the balloon basket. The hand that had been raised was the hand of Raymond Owen. All was happening so swiftly that neither Harry nor Panatella reached the basket before the maddened animal. The crowd had given way in panic before it. Cries of fright were mingled with cries of pain as the beast charged straight upon the men holding the basket, felling and crushing them with shoulder and hoof. For an instant a few desperate hands held to the wrenching car. Panatella had all but reached the platform; Harry was within arm's length of it, when, with a writhing twist the bag jerked the basket sideways and upward, knocking to the ground the last two men who had held it and whirling forth into the deathly emptiness of space a cowering, stunned girl, whose white face peered and white hands pleaded over the basket rim--peered down upon the upturned faces of thousands who would have risked their lives to aid, but who stood helpless in their pity, hushed in fear. For a moment Harry had stood dazed. It was as if the twanging taut of the ropes, as the bag tore almost from his grasp the most precious being in the world, had snapped the fibers of action in him. The daze passed quickly, but in the moment of its passing. The balloon, risen now five hundred feet in the air, had swept its way westward over a mile of ground. Harry turned to look for his motor car. Standing as he was at the spot from which the balloon had ascended, he now faced a human barricade. With a shout of warning he charged at what seemed to be a vulnerable point in the files of wedged shoulders. The wall resisted. The throng was lost to all but the dimming view of the balloon. Harry swung right and left with his broad shoulders. He tore his way through. The car was standing where he had left it on the outskirts of the field. As he approached it he saw Owen emerge from the crowd and hurry toward a runabout that had just been driven upon the field. "What's the matter?" yelled a man in the machine, and Harry recognized the voice of Hicks. "Miss Marvin--carried away in the balloon!" cried Owen in a tone of excitement that was not all feigned. He joined Hicks beside the runabout. Harry sprang to the seat of his touring car. It seemed to leap forward. He shot past the two conspirators and heard Owen's voice calling after him: "Wait! Where are you going? I'll go with you." "You're too late," shouted Harry bitterly, over his shoulder. An envelope of dust sealed itself around the spinning wheels of the big machine as he took the road after the balloon. Steadfast but hopeless he fixed his eyes upon the unconquerable thing in its unassailable element--a thing that seemed to be fleeing from him as if inspired by a human will. Death rode beside him at his breakneck speed, but he did not know it. He knew only that he must follow that black beacon in the sky--that he must be there when its flight was over--when the end came. He did not know that Owen and Hicks, in the runabout, were also following--that they, too, watched with an interest as deep as his, with a hope as poignant as his hopelessness, the dizzy voyage of Pauline. CHAPTER XI FROM CLOUD TO CLIFF "Wonder what he thinks he can do," growled Hicks as they sat in the runabout and watched Harry pass them. "Trying to break his own neck--for nothing," replied Owen. "If he keeps up that speed we'll get both birds with one sand bag." "I hope so. He didn't speak, did he? You can see by the way he acts he don't want us around--even now." "It doesn't matter what he wants--it's what he does." "You don't think he can save her?" "He might--and I don't want her saved this time, Hicks, you understand. I can't afford it this time. I've said too much." "Well?" "Where did you get this runabout?" "Upper East Side--private party; I didn't want to do any business near home." "That's right." "How much is this machine worth?" asked Owen irrelevantly. "Oh, six or seven hundred--it ain't new. Why?" "If anything should happen to it, there wouldn't be any trouble, provided the bill was paid, would there?" "I got an idea the owner would grab at $300 for this here buggy. But why?" "And if this automobile disappeared, vanished--no trace of it; you're sure there wouldn't be any investigation?" pursued Hicks. "Yes--it would be all right, I tell you. But I want to know what your scheme is. How can you use this machine to get rid of Harry? Tell me," Owen insisted. "Never mind--yet. How do you make the course of the balloon now?" "I guess she'll go over Quirksborough and then up between Hoxey and Brent." "Then we can pass him at Quirksborough." "How do you figure that?" "He'll stop for gasoline. He hasn't got enough to go more than two miles beyond there. I saw that he hadn't when we set out." "What do you want to pass him for? Why not let 'em both break their own merry little necks an' us pick 'em up an' do the weepin' afterward? That's our music." "You fool! Don't you think a balloon ever came down safe yet? Don't you know that young devil has got his head full of schemes to beat me out' again? I tell you we've got to make sure of this trick. We've got to get him." Unconsciously Hicks brought the machine to a stop as both men strained their eyes at the balloon, now traversing a lower course more slowly. They saw Pauline stand erect in the basket and lift the heavy anchor over the side. Harry, going at terrific speed on the deserted road, saw the drop of the anchor with a thrill of hope. At least--even if it was useless in itself--it showed him that Pauline was brave and calm enough to use her wits. He waved again but there was no answering signal. Suddenly the balloon itself was lost to sight from the road. At the lowering angle, drawn downward partly by the anchor and partly by the gradual loss of gas, it swung over the hills. The road led between two hills. Beyond it curved to the east and north. As he reached the curve Harry was surprised that the balloon was not in sight. When after circling another hill Harry had still failed to pick it up he was alarmed as well as puzzled. The hills had muddled his senses of direction, but he knew that he was near the river again--back on the verge of the Palisades. This added to his fears. There was but one thing to do, though--follow the road. He went on slowly. Suddenly he uttered a cry and threw on full speed. Over the top of a high, jagged cliff, set like a rampart between two bastion knolls, he saw the upper half of the gas bag. It veered and tossed in the wind like a tethered thing. The basket was invisible, but Harry knew that the anchor had caught on the cliff side. As he neared it he discovered that what was a cliff on one side was the river wall on the other. He thanked heaven that the road led to the top of it. He turned the machine up the road, which threaded narrow ledges through growths of bramble and stunted trees. He saw and turned sick in soul and body, for the pulling of the balloon held the basket almost inverted, and Pauline was not in the basket. The anchor had doubled itself into rock or root far down the cliff side. From it the balloon dragged toward the river instead of toward the shore. The taut rope writhed fifty feet out from the top of the declivity. To the edge of the cliff crawled Harry. He moved rapidly, but at the uttermost verge he paused and covered his eyes with his, hand. At last he looked down. To Pauline on her wild flight had come increasing calm. As she felt the balloon reaching lower levels--though it still soared high above the hills--she even allowed herself a little hope. Leaning over, she watched the shining blades of the anchor dance through the air. Northeastward she could see the waves of the great river dancing. On the little anchor, hung her hope of life; in the water beyond the farthest cliff lay her final peril. She had lost track of Harry and the other automobile long ago. She had given up all hope of aid from any living thing. The balloon moved slowly above the palisade. The anchor dragged on the landward side of the knolls. These were sheer rock that the steel talons clawed in vain. The balloon moved out over the river, then suddenly glided back. An eddy of breeze from the water had turned its course. The anchor dangled along the river wall of the precipice. Pauline seized the rope. She alternately pulled and loosened it, trying to hook the anchor to tree or shrub. Suddenly she was flung forward--almost out of the basket. The balloon had stopped with a jerk. Hopefully, fearfully, she pulled in the rope. The anchor held. The balloon was tugging and swaying wildly, but its tether did not break. She looked down at the ledge. Between her and that narrow footing the only thoroughfare was two hundred feet of swaying rope. She pulled upon the rope again. She dropped two more of the heavy ballast bags over the side, and the bag shook and groaned upon its stays as it dragged the anchor deeper into the rock. She put her feet over the edge of the basket. With her hands clutching the rim, she lowered herself. Taking her hands from the basket and grasping the rope, she started down. The raw hemp tore her hands. The fearful strain upon her arms made her sick and faint. Only desperation nerved her after the first ten yards. The wrenching of the balloon whirled and jostled her. At first, holding only by her hands, she was flung out from the aft halyard like a flag. Then instinct told her to wrap her feet around it and she trembled on. She looked down once, saw the far swaying river, and looked quickly up again. It was not until her groping feet touched the rock of the ledge that she opened her eyes again. At the top of a slender rope whirled and veered and battled a balloon with an empty basket. The sound of creaking ropes mingled in her ears with the chugging of a motor car. The chugging seemed a long way off, but its noise seemed to make her dizzy. She sank in a dead faint upon the narrow ledge beside the hooked anchor. "Pauline! Pauline! It's I--Harry. Can't you hear me? Pauline!" There came no sound in answer--only the creaking of the balloon rope in the air, the rasping of the anchor fluke upon the stone. He sprang up and back to the motor and began throwing out the robes, blankets, tools and chains. He laid a blanket on the ground and began to slash it into strips with his pocket knife. In the ends of the strips he cut slits and linked the slits with the chains to form a rope. He paused only once in his frantic labor. That was when he rushed back to the edge of the cliff to look again and call again-in vain. He fastened the chain at the end of his strange line to a sapling growing some ten feet back of the verge and with a throb of relief saw the other end drop to within a few feet of the unconscious girl. He tested the strength of the cable by pulling on it with all his might. It did not give. He put himself over the cliff side and began the descent. Owen and Hicks had not only lost the balloon, but had lost Harry, too. They could follow him only by the deep cut tracks of his flying car, and these were as likely to be over marshes and fields as on the highway. More than once Hicks urged that they turn back. "We can't do no good," he argued. "If they ain't dead they ain't-- that's all." "I've got to be sure," muttered Owen. The little runabout had a hard fight to climb the cliff that Harry's big car had taken so easily. But as they came through the grove into view of the balloon and the empty basket the two felt amply rewarded for their worry and trouble and toil. "By George, it has happened. It's done!" cried Owen. No artist gazing on a finished masterpiece, no conqueror thanking the fates for victory could have spoken with more triumphant fervor. But Hicks was out of the machine and running to Harry's car. He saw the shreds of the blankets; he saw the knife; finally he caught a glimpse of the chain that was fastened to the sapling. "Don't be so sure," grumbled Hicks. "Come on--but come quiet." He got down on his hands and knees and crawled to the edge of the cliff. Owen followed him. Together they drew back with gasps of surprise and anger. Hicks sprang to his feet. His big-bladed knife flashed in his hand. He sawed excitedly at the small chain. A low curse escaped him as the blade bent on the links. Owen had dashed to Harry's auto. He was back with a pair of heavy pliers. In a flash he had cut the chain. The end of it shot over the cliff. There was a startled cry from below. It was several minutes before Hicks and Owen looked down again. The man they thought they had just killed and the girl whom they had marked to die stood on the ledge in each other's arms, oblivious of life or death, or foe or friend, of everything but love. Pauline was still aquiver with the shock of her waking. A cry ringing above her had brought her from her swoon and she had looked up to see the terrible balloon still reeling over her and to find Harry dangling from a rope's end not ten feet away. She rose weakly and stretched out her arms to him. "Be still; don't move, dear," he called softly. "You can't help me. You--" There was a sudden snapping sound from over the top of the cliff. The chain end of the line fell upon his shoulders. He dropped joltingly to the ledge and lunged forward toward a further fall. It was the soft arms of Pauline that caught and held him. Both trembling a little as their lips met. From overhead came the sound of a starting automobile. Harry shouted at the top of his voice. There was no answer. He stopped quickly and picked up the severed end of the life line. "Look; it wasn't broken; it was cut;" he cried. "Good heaven, Polly, who is it that hates us like that?" For answer she merely nestled nearer in his protecting arms. They sat down on the ledge, and Harry's keen eyes watched the tantrums of the balloon in the wind. It was pulling fiercely toward the river now, but the anchor held fast. Suddenly Harry sprang up. Pauline started to follow his example, but he motioned her to stay where she was. In his hand gleamed the revolver, that he had carried ever since the battle in Baskinelli's den. "Who is it?" whispered Pauline. "Can you see some one?" He raised the revolver in the air, took aim and fired. The balloon rope at his feet suddenly slacked and he caught at its sagging loop to gave the anchor from loosening. He fired twice again at the balloon bag, and Pauline, clinging to his shoulder saw the monster that had held her a slave to its elemental power, that, like some winged gorgon had held her captive in the labyrinth of air, crumple and wither and fall at the prick of a bullet; saw it collapse into a mass of tangled leather and rope and slide in final ruin down the smooth cliff. She looked at Harry with the whimsical smile that she could not suppress even on the dizzy heights of danger. "Did you really think I would fly away again?" she asked. "Hopeless ward," he said. "Pitiful case. Miss Pauline Marvin, crazy heiress--thinks she's funny when she's merely getting killed. No, Miss Flippancy, I wanted a line to slide the rest of the way on," he announced as he gave the anchor rope a twist around a rock. Pauline's merriment vanished like a flash. "Oh, I can't do it again, Harry, I can't," she cried tremulously. "It will be easy this time," he told her. "Here, give me your hands." With a piece of the blanket rope he tied her wrists together, and placed her arms about his shoulders, grasping a rope that sagged away to the wrecked balloon on the road far below. He placed a leg over the ledge, wrapped it around the rope and bracing the other foot against the rock wall, started joyously on his fearful task. Joyously, for if ever man rejoiced at the gates of death it was Harry Marvin. To him the chance to risk his life today was a blessing and a boon. It was what he had prayed for, hopelessly, on the long motor dash in the wake of the balloon--just the chance to try and save her. To die with her was all he asked; to die fighting for her was all he wanted; and here he was, holding her in his arms on a stout rope, already half way down the cliff. At the bottom he let her feel the firm earth once more. "Now you can open your eyes," he said. With his torn hands he started to lift her arms from his neck; but she clung there, weeping. "Oh, Harry, you are so patient, so good and brave, and I have made you risk your life again for me." "Sure; that's it; worry about me, now," he grumbled, although he held her tenderly and close. "When will you find out that my life doesn't matter; it's yours that counts?" "I will never, never do it again," said Pauline like a naughty child. "You used to say that when you were four years old. It was usually a lie," said Harry. "I love you," said Pauline irrelevantly. "Then why-in-the-dickens-don't-you-marry me?" he demanded. "Because--" She stopped. Steps sounded from the roadway. They peered through the thicket that concealed them and saw Owen approaching. Pauline hailed him. He turned toward the thicket in obsequious haste. "Thank Heaven, Miss Marvin," he cried. "It must be a miracle. And you are safe, too," he added, turning to Harry. "How did you know I was ever in danger?" inquired Harry grimly. "We heard shots," explained Owen. "We saw the balloon fall and we knew what you had done. It was magnificent. I congratulate you." "Congratulate Polly," said Harry. "She slid out of Heaven, while I only slid down hill." "Where is your car, Mr. Marvin?" "Up on the hill--if the kind persons who cut the chain didn't take it with them." Owen did not change color. "I will go and see if it is there. If not, I'll find Hicks and his runabout. He's waiting somewhere about." He set off briskly up the road. "Polly, you still trust that man?" asked Harry. "One has to trust one's guardian, doesn't one?" He tossed his hands above his head in a gesture of "Give it all up." "That's right; keep 'em there," said a rough voice, and a wiry man with white handkerchiefs tied over his face below the eyes sprang with crunching strides through the bushes. "Keep up your hands, I say," he thundered at Harry, as he leveled a revolver. Pauline was beside him and Harry dared not move. But Pauline dared. With the resourceful courage that always inspired her she whipped his revolver out his hip pocket and fired at the intruder's head. His hat fluttered off into the road. He sprang at Pauline and wrested the gun from her. As Harry rushed him, he had no time to fire, but the butt of one revolver crashed on the young man's forehead. Harry sank unconscious in the road. Pauline knelt beside him. She was screaming for Owen--even for Hicks. Hicks was instantly beside her but not to aid or rescue, for Hicks was the man with the handkerchief mask. He half dragged, half carried Pauline to a thicket that concealed the runabout. He drew a roll of tire tape from under the seat and bound it cruelly around her lips. He took ropes and tied her hands and feet, placed her in the seat beside him and started the machine. If Harry, struggling to rise out of the dust of the road, could have seen Pauline now, bound and gagged beside Hicks in the runabout, he would have known her to be in greater peril than ever the balloon had brought her. Pauline was not long unhidden. As the quick ear of Hicks caught the sound of wheels, he grasped her roughly by the arm and thrust her into the bottom of the machine. Without taking his hand from the lever or slackening speed, he pulled a blanket over her and tucked it in with one hand. "Don't move, either," he growled, "or you know." A farmer on his wagon came around a bend. His cheery "good morning" brought only a grunt from Hicks, but the sound of the kind voice thrilled Pauline. She struggled under the blanket and almost reached a sitting posture before Hicks crushed her back. The runabout had flashed by, but the farmer had seen something that alarmed even his stolid mind. When a half mile up the road he came upon a young man, dazed and wounded, staggering through the dust, he drew rein and leaped out. A draught of whiskey from the farmer's bottle braced Harry. "You passed them on the road?" he cried. "A machine with a man in it and somethin' else--somethin' in the bottom of it that moved," said the farmer. "A horse," said Harry, "quick--one of yours will do." The farmer hesitated. Harry thrust money into his hand. "Quick," he shouted. Together they unharnessed the team. Coatless and hatless, tattered, wounded and stained, Harry swung himself to the bare back of a stirrupless steed and galloped out on what he knew was the most dangerous of all the pathways of Pauline. CHAPTER XII THE OLD GRIGSBY HOUSE PAYS PENANCE To young Bassett, of The American, the excitement of existence, since he became a reporter and joined the jehus of the truth wagon, had consisted mainly of "chasing pictures" in the afternoons and going to strings of banquets at night. He had no more enthusiasm for photographs than he had for banquets. Word painting and graining was his art. And so when a big story walked up and beckoned to him he was as happy as a boy in love. It had been a dull day for news. The evening papers were barren of suggestions and the assignments had run out before Bassett's name was reached. That meant another afternoon of dismal lingering in the office, without even a photograph to chase. Bassett flung himself disgustedly into a chair and straightened a newspaper with a vicious crackle as the last of the other reporters hurried out. He thought he caught a gleam of merry pity in the reporter's eye. Never mind. Let 'em laugh. Let 'em wait. One of these days he'll be the one getting the real stuff and putting it through, too, from tip to type, without a rewrite man or a copy reader touching it. Let 'em wait! "In a balloon? Where?" The suddenly vibrant voice of the city editor talking over the telephone caused Bassett to lower his paper and hushed even the chatter of the office boys. "Palisades--Panatella; yes. Who's the girl? You don't know?" The paper dropped from Bassett's hands. "Much obliged. I'll have a man over there, but you go right ahead." The city editor clicked down the receiver and whirled in his chair. "Oh--Bassett. Our Weehawken man says a young woman has been carried off by Panatella's balloon. They've lost the balloon. Get a car and get over there quick. Go as far as you like, only find the girl and let me hear from you--quick." Bassett jumped to a phone and ordered a high-powered machine to meet him at Ninety-sixth street. He ran down William street, with his straw hat under his arm, and dived into the subway. An express had him at Ninety-sixth street in a few minutes. His machine was there. They dashed for the ferry and were on the aviation field before the bewildered crowd that had witnessed the runaway flight of the balloon had dispersed. Bassett jumped out and mingled with the people. They knew nothing except the general direction toward the west that the balloon had taken. Automobilists had pursued for a long way, but had seen the gas bag turn to the north and disappear in the hills. The automobilists had returned--most of them. Two who had been with the girl before she leaped into the basket had not returned. Bassett got back in the car beside the driver, and they glided off on the westward road. Every one in the farm houses along the route had seen the balloon. But the houses were further and further apart as Bassett's course was drawn northward and, often he missed the trail. The trail was blazed by the wheel ruts of a giant touring car and a small runabout that frequently left the highways and plowed across the fields. He lost them in the middle of a field that was marshy where the automobiles left the road and rock-dry at the middle and further side. After a half-hour's maneuvering he ordered the driver to go back to the road. "Maybe they done the same thing--turned round an' come back," suggested the chauffeur. "Hello, what kind of a rig is that?" he added as a wagon appeared around a bend in the road. The peculiar thing about the "rig" was that while it was a tongued wagon with whiffletrees for two horses, there was only one horse. The driver, a bearded farmer, was urging the patient animal on, although it was impossible for it to do more than plod in its awkward harness. "What's the matter?" called Bassett, cheerily, as the machine drew alongside and stopped. "I dunno," replied the farmer, shaking his grizzled bead. "Ef I was a young feller like you I'd go right off an' find out." "I'll go right away; what's up?" "I dunno. I ain't knowed anythin' like it in this part o' the country in fifty year. First, down yonder on the old river road I meets a autymobile, with a man drivin' it and somethin' alive an' movin' lyin' in a blanket by his feet. I ain't got more'n a half mile back from there when I finds a fine young feller, with his good clothes--what he's got left--tore to pieces, no shoes, or hat on him, an' his head bleedin' bad from cuts. 'Where are they? Did you see a autymobile?' he yells at me. I tells him what I had saw, an' he takes my off hoss there an' goes gallopin' up the road." "What road?" cried Bassett. "Ye circle this here field an' climb the hill, then take the first turn." "Which way?" "West, if you don't want ter jump in the river." "What, we're back at the river," gasped Bassett. "That's about my luck. The balloon's gone over the river; it's in New York, and some Harlem reporter is leading it down to his office on a leash to have it photographed, and I'm--I'm hoodooed, that's all." "I dunno," said the farmer, "but ef ye ast me, I'd say that feller in the autymoble was makin' for the woods beyond Quirksborough. It's lonely up through there, an' he had somethin' in that there machine that he wanted to keep lonely, I'm guessin'." Bassett motioned to the driver to go on. "We might as well see what it is; the balloon's gone home for supper," he said bitterly. In five minutes they reached the turn where the farmer had last seen Harry Marvin disappear. They took the turn into an ill-kept, dust-heavy road that had cast its blight of brown upon the reeds bordering it. The woods became more and more dense and the road more narrow. In some places the dust was crusted, as it had dried after the last rain, and the men in the automobile could see that the wheels of another machine and the hoofs of a galloping horse had plunged through this crust but a short time before. Around a bend in the road, going at full speed, Bassett sighted Harry Marvin for the first time. He stood up beside the driver and hailed him, but Harry did not even turn around. The beat of his horse's hoofs drowned the sound. The deep lines of the runabout's wheels in the dust held his gaze and his senses to one thing alone--the rescue of Pauline. He urged the poor beast to its last tug of strength. Weak and dizzy from his wound, he knew that he could go but a little way afoot. The road's high, close-set wall of trees was broken for the first time by a little clearing. Harry's passing glance showed him that there was a house in the clearing. He was exhausted and a thirst, but his eyes swept back to the wheel tracks on the road. The runabout had gone on. Harry, without drawing rein, was about to follow. But suddenly, weirdly, the rickety walls of the deserted house gave forth a sound, a rattle and a crash, and from a shuttered window beside the low-silled door bellied a sheet of smoke. Harry reined the foaming horse and sprang off. Freed of his weight, the animal staggered on a few paces and fell, panting, in the dust. Harry did not see it. He was battering at the door of the burning house. Hicks could hardly be called a nervous or a timid man. He was certainly not a coward, like Owen; but neither did he have the shrewd, scheming mind which was the bulwark of the craven secretary's weakness. At the moment when they discovered the young lovers safe at the foot of the cliff after the escape from the balloon and rock ledge, the two arch conspirators were two very different men. Owen was shaking like a leaf in his terror of discovery, but thinking of a hundred schemes to save himself. Hicks was deadly cool, and thinking of just one thing--immediate and cold-blooded murder. But now, although he thought he had killed Harry, although he knew he had Pauline gagged and bound in the bottom of the runabout, Hicks was afraid. He was afraid of the incompleteness of the thing. He was eager to have done with the girl as well as with the man. And now this latest plan of Owen's was but another chapter of procrastination. The incident of the farmer's curiosity had unnerved him, too. He put back over his face one of the white handkerchiefs that he had taken off when he began the flight. "There's no more 'pity-the-poor-girl' stuff in this," he said gruffly to Pauline. "If you don't keep quiet I'll kill you. I mean what I say." He still had the instinctive crook sense to conceal his natural voice. Hicks was afraid, but as mile after mile fell behind them and the westerning sun gave promise of the early shelter of dark, he began to gain confidence. He mumbled to himself reminiscently: "The old Grigsby house, eh? Nobody but--" he checked himself. "Nobody but somebody would thought've that." The "old Grigsby house," in front of which the runabout came to a stop after many miles of travel, was set back from the road about three hundred yards. In front of it and on either side, the trees had been cut away, but a tangle of riotous shrubbery lined the path to the door. Behind the house the trees had been left untouched, and now in its tottering condition the venerable building literally rested on two of the great elms, like an old man on crutches. The windows were few and shuttered. The black steel blinds were dead as the eyes of a skull. The steel was not rusted and only a little weather-stained. There were no steps to the door. It opened on the ground level, with a cracked board serving as both porch and foot mat. The signs of attempted preservation were what gave the place its ominous air. There was a menace in the steel shutters of the old Grigsby house, and in the fact that the path to the door was kept clear. Up this path Hicks carried Pauline. Before he lifted her in his arms he tested her bonds. He did not know that Pauline was too terrified to conceive the simplest plan of action. Compared with the fear that possessed her now the torturing suspense of the balloon flight seemed like peace and safety. Hicks held her with one arm while with the other he unlocked the low door. Swinging heavy on strong hinges, it opened into a narrow hall, mildewed with the dampness of decay, the dust of disuse. He carried Pauline up the stairs, which groaned and bent under his steps and pushed open a door. There was a broken chair, a table, a cot, a washstand, with pitcher and bowl, and a small oil lamp set in a bracket on the wail. Hicks laid Pauline on the cot, and lighted the lamp, using the same match for a cigarette. He seemed spurred by a desire to get away as if the tottering, grimy halls held memories too grim for even his hardened soul. After testing the shutters of the window, which were locked on the outside, he stepped back to the cot and cut Pauline's bonds, and removed the bandage from her lips. As she fell back in a half swoon he hurried through the door, closed and locked it and went down the stairs. Half way down he stopped abruptly, stood for a moment listening, then hastened on, dropping his cigarette over the banister. He did not see where it fell. He did not care. His only aim was to get out--to get away. He had heard a sound as he came down the stairs that turned his fear to terror--it was the distant grumble of an automobile horn. He locked the door and sped down the bramble-walled path to the runabout. He had left it in the middle of the road, so that as he leaped in and started again it left no swerve of its wheel ruts toward the old Grigsby house. It was five miles to the nearest town, but Hicks made it in twenty minutes, and without hearing again the threatening automobile horn. The first thing he did was to telephone to Owen. For half an hour Owen had been locked in the library of the Marvin house. The events of the early afternoon, the failure of his best-laid plans, the suspense of waiting the result of Hicks's final move, had made him a nervous wreck. He had lighted a dozen cigars and thrown them away. As many times he had picked up the telephone only to set it down again without calling a number. At last he had taken out the thin tube of light pills, had drawn the shades, switched on the electric lights, and sat down to wait for the half-peace that morphine brought to his conscience. As he leaned back in his chair, awaiting the effect of the drug, the mummy in its case stood in front of him. He closed his eyes in a pleasant stupor. He opened them in terror. For a moment his hands were outstretched in front of him, with claw-like fingers clutching at thin air; then he covered his eyes with them to shut from view the mummy, which stood over him, its upraised hand pointing to him the finger of accusation; its woman's eyes blazing with anger; its cold lips speaking a message that chilled his blood. The telephone bell jangled again and again before Owen found courage to open his eyes. When he did so he clutched at the instrument, eager for the sound of a human voice. "Hello! . . . Yes, this is Owen . . ." He glanced apprehensively over his shoulder at the mummy. Its hand was lowered and it stood motionless as before. He turned excitedly back to the telephone. "It's YOU! Hicks? . . . What news? . . . . She's at Grigsby's? What do you mean? Somebody after you? . . . Not him? . . . I give you my word there hadn't been anything on that road for two months. . . . What have you done? What! Nothing? You should have called the police from Jersey. . . . All gone to pieces? . . . Stay over there, I'll join you tonight. Yes, go back to the house and watch. . . . What? . . . All right." Pauline, left alone, began to regain her courage. After a few moments she was able to stand up and move slowly about her prison room. She tried the door and the window shutters mechanically. She searched the room for something that might be used to batter down the door. There was nothing. She sat on the cot and tried to think. She sprang up again, trembling. The dry, choking smell of smoke had reached her. Hicks's lighted cigarette had fallen among the wisps of old wall paper in the hall. She ran to the door. Baffled, piteous, alone, she turned--and looked on death. For through the cracks in the floor flashed now the golden daggers of flame in sheaths of stifling smoke. She cowered, choking, by the outer wall of the room. The flame daggers grew into scimitars. The inner wall caught fire. There was no outlet for the suffocating smoke. She sprang to the middle of the room and seized the broken chair. With all her might she crashed it against the door. It fell in pieces at her feet. She picked up a leg of the chair and, running to the window, pounded upon the shutters. She screamed, and beat upon the shutters. It was the rattle and crash upon the shutters that made Harry rein in his horse before the old Grigsby house. He saw smoke burst from the lower windows, and, battering on the locked door, he heard her screams. "Harry! Harry!" It was to him she called again in her peril, as she had called before --in the wreck of the yacht, in the den of Baskinelli, and even this day from the rim of the runaway balloon. Always, inspired by that call, he had found their way to safety. He thrust the full weight of his mighty body against the door which held like solid rock. "Harry! Harry!" came the cries again. "I'm coming, Polly; I'm here!" He dashed to where a heavy tree limb had fallen, carried it to the door, raised it and charged with it as a battering ram. He might as well have slapped the door with his flat palm. He looked at the windows whence the smoke poured--smoke mingled with flame. Half crazed by the cries from above, he raised the limb to try to break the shutters. He stopped and let it fall. The toot of an automobile horn and the excited voice of young Bassett stopped him. "What's doing?" gasped the reporter. "Is anybody in there?" Harry pointed to the shuttered window of the upper room. The cries came again, and with the sound, of the woman's voice Bassett turned sick. He made a dizzy charge at the door, but Harry caught him back. "All three together," he said. They flung their strength at the portal--but still it held. Bassett turned away, sobbing. He looked up to see Harry spring into the big car which he forced through the brambles. "What are you doing? You're crazy!" yelled the chauffeur, running toward the machine. "Get her--if I can't--after the smash!" was Harry's answer. The car lunged on at full speed. The impact rocked the burning house. Frame and door crashed down together before the battering car. It plowed for half its length into the smoke and fire, stopped an instant, quivered and backed out again, splendid ruin. On Harry's forehead a deep cut streamed. Bassett sprang to catch him, but he climbed out unhelped. Together they leaped the shattered wall. Through searing smoke they climbed the quaking stairs and burst into the shuttered room. The lamp still flickered dimly in its bracket. "Pauline," called Harry, chokingly, "Pauline, answer me." There was no answer. On hands and knees he groped over the hot floor. He found her by the window, where she had fallen. And flames choked them as they fled. Outside he knelt beside her, chafing her hands, when she wakened. He had turned her so that she did not see the towering glare of the flames as the old Grigsby house furnished burnt penance for its crimes. Pauline raised her arms and touched tenderly his bleeding brow. He lifted her into the car that Bassett and the driver had patched up. "Home, James," said Bassett, with a tired grin, "but stop at a telephone somewhere and let me tell my boss that I've got a piece for the paper." CHAPTER XIII DOUBLE CROSS RANCH "I tell you, Harry, I can't endure it. I couldn't face anyone I know. I want to run away--far, far away, where nobody ever heard of balloons or automobiles, or me." "Polly, you aren't afraid of a little talk, are you? Everyone is saying how brave you were, and, here, when the danger's over, I find you a flimsy little coward!" She picked up one of a pile of newspapers that lay on the stand beside her, and thrust it before Harry's eyes with a manner at once questioning and rebuking. He read the head lines: SOCIETY GIRL CARRIED OFF IN BALLOON Miss Pauline Marvin Has Remarkable Experience After Accident on Palisades. Harry laughed and patted her hand reassuringly. "Oh, but that's only one of them," wailed Pauline. "Look at this one: PAULINE MARVIN LOST IN THE SKY "Can any woman live after that," she cried. "Why, it's no crime to be lost in a balloon," said Harry. "See, they tell it just as it was--they make you a real heroine." "A man might live it down, dear, but a woman, never! To be 'lost in the sky' is altogether too giddy. Margaret!" she called. The maid stepped quickly forward. "You may pack my things, Margaret, and be sure to put in some warm winter ones. Is the snow on mountains cold like real snow, or is it like the frosting on cake?" she inquired, turning again to Harry. "What are you up to this time?" he demanded. "Montana first," she proclaimed with a melodramatic flourish. "And if I am followed by my fame or by my relatives--I shall go on--to the end of the world." Harry had long ago abandoned the idea of laughing at her whims. Even the most fantastic of her projects was serious to her. He merely looked at her in mute suspense awaiting the fall of the blow. "You needn't begin to see trouble-yet," she laughed. "But I am going, Harry. I'm going to accept Mary Haines's invitation and visit her and her nice, queer husband on their ranch. You remember Mrs. Haines, that dear Western girl that we met on the steamer when she was on her honeymoon?" "Well, it's pretty tough just at this time," objected Harry. "Business is bothersome, and I ought to be here; but if you insist . . . " "Oh, you're not coming with me," stated Pauline, cheerily. "In the first place you are not invited, and in the second place you are not needed in the least. Now get me a telegraph blank." He came back with the desired paper and a fountain pen and she scribbled: Mrs. Mary Haines, Rockvale, Montana. Care Double Cross Ranch. Arrive Thursday at 8 a.m. Will explain haste when see you., Pauline Marvin." "Run down and 'phone that to the telegraph office," she told Harry. "And now for the packing, Margaret." She thrust a tiny foot in a pink slipper over the edge of the bed. "But you are ill, Miss Marvin," protested the nurse with a first faint assertion of authority. "That's so," said Polly. "How can we get around that? Oh, yes; it's time for your airing, dear--and when you come back I shall be well and packed." "Plenty of air," suggested Harry sarcastically from the doorway, "if it takes you as long to pack as it does to put on your hat." Pauline flung him a laughing grimace and he strode off to the library. As he was repeating the brief message to the telegraph office he did not hear the light footfalls that ceased at the library door, nor could he see the drawn, gray face of Owen who heard the message spoken over the telephone, and was passing up the stairs with his slow, dignified tread when Harry came into the hall. "Good morning, Mr. Harry. I see you are quite yourself again. Yesterday was a terrible day." "You do look done up," retorted Harry, curtly, as he picked up his hat. Owen's step was not slow or dignified after the door shut upon Harry. He sprang up the last stairs and into his own room. Here on a small writing desk was another telephone. He snatched it up nervously and gave the call number of the place where he had held his first conference with Hicks. He held a brief conversation over the wire, snapped down the receiver, sprang to a wardrobe for his hat and stick and hurried from the house. The dullness that a sleepless night had left in his eyes had disappeared. The fear that had shaken him ever since the uncanny reappearance of Harry and Pauline was dissipated, or at least concealed by a new hope--a new plan of destruction. He knew only that Pauline was going away and that she must be followed --no matter whither her whims might lead. Hicks was seated in a corner of the rendezvous drinking whiskey and water. He was plainly in a black mood. "You got a pretty fat roll yesterday, Hicks. But," Owen drew out his wallet, "here is a little. Get yourself ready to make a trip tomorrow. I'll let you know the time and the train." Hicks looked covetously at the bills, but he demurred: "You mean we're after them two again!" "Hicks, we must be after them because one of them will soon be after us." "Where they goin' now?" "Rockvale, Montana. That is, the girl's going. What I haven't found out yet is whether Harry goes, too. If he stays here, I'll stay, and you'll go West." "After Pauline?" "Ahead of her!" "And then what?" "Then you will have to use your own judgment. But don't get excited and kill her, Hicks." He accompanied the sharp warning with the alleviating roll of yellowbacks, which Hicks quickly deposited in an inside pocket. The next morning they shook hands at the gate of the Pennsylvania station. Hicks looking a bit uncomfortable but much improved, in a suit of new clothes, and carrying a suitcase, hurried to catch the flyer for the West. A few hours later Owen was wishing a happy journey to Pauline at the same station rail. Mary Haines stood in the low doorway of the Double Cross ranch house and gazed down the sun-baked road to where, in the far distance, a little wisp of dust was visible. Laughing, she turned and called to someone inside the house. A towering, slow-moving, but quick-eyed man, in a flannel shirt, with corduroys tucked into the tops of spurred boots, appeared on the stoop. Hal Haines was so tall that his broad-brimmed hat grazed the porch roof of the house. "Hal! Hal!" she cried eagerly. "What do you think? Pauline Marvin is coming to visit us--Pauline Marvin!" "The little girl we met on the ship that I had to yarn to about the wild West?" "Yes, of course. How you did lie to her! Goodness, I hope that's not why she's coming. She'll be awfully disappointed." "Oh, I don't know as it's necessary to disappoint her," said Haines. "If the State of Montana don't know how to entertain a lady from the East as she likes to be entertained it's time to quit bein' a State at all." "Hal!" Mrs. Haines eyed her husband sternly. "I want you to remember who Pauline Marvin is. I'm not going to have her frightened by any of your wild jokes." Haines burst into a ringing laugh. "Honest, my dear, I promised that young lady if she ever came to Rockvale she'd see all the Wild West I told her about. I gave her my word. You don't want to make me out a liar, do you?" "You can say that conditions have changed greatly in the last two years." "Oh, come, just one little hold-up the day she gets here. She'll think it's great. She'll think she's the lost heiress that was carried off in the mountains--the one I told her about." "I tell you I will not hear a word of it. She may be ill or something; it would scare her to death." "I'll ask her if she's ill before I let the boys rob the buck-board. What dye say, mother? Just this once." His boyish joy in the prank brought laughter to her eyes, and he knew that his sins would be condoned. Four days later Hicks, who looked as far from home in his excellent clothes as the clothes looked far from home in Rockvale, alighted, from a lumbering local train. He made an inquiry of a man on the platform, and, carrying a heavy suitcase, slouched up the main street of the town. Ham Dalton's place was the one the man had directed him to, and Hicks, I after engaging the best rooms in the house for seventy-five cents, scrubbed a little of the dust of travel from his person and went down to the bar and gambling room. The drink of whiskey he got made even his trained throat writhe, and he strolled over to the poker table to join a group of calm and plainly-armed spectators of high play. From the conversation he learned that the dam at Red Gut was washed out; that Case Egan, a noted rancher, was in jail for shooting a deputy sheriff, and that Hal Haines was expecting a "millionairess gal" visitor from New York. "When'll she be on?" drawled one of the players. "Tomorrow's express." "Sence when did the express stop at Rockvale?" "Sence the president o' the road told it to stop for this here young person," replied the informant crushingly. Hicks was scanning the faces of the men about him with a purposeful eye. Especially he watched one--a lean man in red shirt and leather breeches, booted and spurred, who stood near the table. Hicks approached him. "Hello, Patten," he said. The man whirled so sharply that the revolver he had drawn, in whirling, caught in Hick's coat and jerked him into the middle of the room. The poker game went on without a sound or sign of interruption. The bartender took a casual look at Hicks and the gunman, then went on talking to a customer, as before. "Hello, Hicks," said Patten, putting up the gun. "I'm much obliged that I didn't kill you. We don't greet old friends quite so hasty out here, boy, as you do in New York--especially when we haven't heard our right name in some years," he added in a lowered voice. "How long have you been here, Pat?" "Eight-nine-twelve years; ever since that friend of yours, Mr. Owen, paid me $10,000 for getting rid of a certain--what he called a certain obstacle." "Which you didn't get rid of?" "No, he made the mistake of paying me in advance, and it didn't seem necessary to harm anybody." "Got any of the money left?" The lean gunman held his head back and guffawed. "It's near here, I guess, but it ain't mine. It dropped between this bar and that table." "Do you want a little job?" asked Hicks. "But let's go in the back room." They strolled into an empty wine room and ordered drinks. "What kind of a job?" asked Patten. Hicks leaned across the table and whispered rapidly. His old acquaintance drew back, with a sudden suspicion. "But no foolin' this time," warned Hicks. "Only part money in advance." He produced $5,000 in bills from his trousers pocket, but secreted it again quickly as the waiter appeared. Patten got up and sauntered out into the barroom, returning presently with three men of his own brand--broad-built, grim-eyed ruffians of the far north country--three of Case Egan's cattlemen. In the meantime Mrs. Haines was flustered not only by the prospect of meeting her distinguished friend, but by the tumultuous staging of the great hold-up scene that was to mark Pauline's welcome. Hal had been up at three o'clock in the morning rehearsing the boys in their parts. He had set off at five o'clock for the station. As Pauline, trim in her traveling suit of gray and blithe in the clear Western air, tripped from the express, all Rockvale was there to meet her. Hal Haines, mighty man that he was in the region, was red with pride as the girl who could stop the express at Rockvale gave him her hand in happy greeting. As he helped her into the two-seated buckboard, no one in the crowd noticed the man who had arrived the night before standing on the platform and pointing out the girl to Tom Patten who was seen to mount and ride rapidly away. "I hope you saved some of that lovely Wild West for me, Mr. Haines," said Pauline, as the finest pair of horses in the Double Cross stable whisked them along the road to the ranch. "Very little left, Miss Marvin--very little left; still--whoa, there! What's this?" At a bend in the road five masked and mounted men had dashed from cover and quickly surrounded the buckboard with a small circle of leveled gun-barrels. Pauline had time to cry out only once before she felt herself gripped by powerful hands and dragged from the wagon seat, where Hal Haines sat shaking with laughter. He stood up and started to draw his revolver slowly. From behind him a lasso was thrown lightly and the noose tightened around his arms. He kept on laughing, although he was a little afraid the boys were overdoing matters. He knew his wife would never forgive him for this actual kidnapping of Pauline--he certainly had never intended it. And she was really frightened. He could tell that by her cries as she was thrust across the pommel of the masked leader's horse and the horse was spurred to a tearing gallop down the road. Haines tried to shout a command and call the joke off, but the riders had all followed after their leader, and he was alone in the buckboard. "They needn't have been so realistic with their knots," he said, as he struggled to free himself from the rope. It was ten minutes before he wriggled free. He picked up the lines and drove on toward the ranch--a little nervous now over the receptions he would get, but still laughing. At the fork where the road to the mountains left the main highway, Haines flashed out his revolver in real excitement. Another group of five masked men had driven their horses out of a clump of small trees. They fired their revolvers as they surrounded the buckboard. Then suddenly discovering that there was no woman passenger, they tore off their masks and came up with quick, eager inquiries. Perhaps for the first time in his life Hal Haines knew what fear was-- not fear for himself, but for another. "Boys, there was another party on the road. They took her. I took 'em for you," he said in a stifled voice. "Come on. Cabot, give me your horse; take the rig back and tell Mrs. Haines." He sprang into the saddle, and, filling their revolvers as they rode, the band of jesters, who had suddenly turned so grimly serious, dashed back toward town. Two miles from where Tom Patten had swung Pauline to his saddle bow they picked up the train hoofs that left the road and made toward the mountains. The men who had set out so gaily a few hours before rode silently, fiercely now. Mile after mile swept behind them as they held to the trail. Sometimes it followed the roads, sometimes it broke over open country. At last it reached the hills and stopped at the river. Patten's band had ridden in the water upstream. After a mile of it the leader ordered three of them out on the south side. They left silently, rode five miles across country and separated, each taking a different route. Patten and one companion kept on with Pauline who was now almost insensible. At last they left the stream on the north bank and climbed into the higher hill country where they entered a thicket and stopped. "Here we are," said Patten. His companion dismounted and lifted Pauline from the other's saddle. With a swift daring and dexterity, born of fear, she flung aside his arms and sprang toward the horse he had just left. She tried to mount, but her strength was gone. They tied her feet with a rope and seated her on a great fallen tree, while they cleared away a tangle of bushes and began to tug with their combined strength at a giant rock, which the bushes had concealed. The stone moved inch by inch until behind it Pauline saw, with a chill shudder, the black opening of a cave. She flung herself from the log pleading piteously. They cut the rope that bound her feet and led her to the cave. As the giant stone was rolled back into its place she uttered one wild far-echoing cry. Then darkness! For many minutes Pauline lay prostrate. A dim light from some hidden orifice in the top of the cave behind a shelving wall, seemed to become brighter as her eyes became more accustomed to the shadows. She arose and began to inspect the cave. It was a chamber of rock about forty feet long and twenty feet wide. The bottom and roof converged slightly towards the end farthest from the giant boulder that formed the door. But even there the cave was twenty-five feet high. The boulder door was set into the rock portal, and not a wisp of light came through the brush that, covered the crevice. Pauline, after a brief hopeless test of her frail strength against the weight of the granite mass, moved slowly along the wall to the extremity of the chamber. Here, about seven feet from the floor, ran a ledge of rock, between two and three feet in width; and, from this ledge upward the wall slanted at an angle of forty-five degrees to a wide shelf or fissure. It was from this fissure that the faint light came. Pauline groped her way back along the other wall to the front of the cave again. Despairing, she sat down on the chill stone. The events of the last few hours had left her in a state of mental vertigo. The hold-up of the buckboard and her carrying off by the bandits seemed fantastically impossible. So this was her "escape" from scenes of adventure. This was the "great, safe, quiet West," where she should forget her perils in New York and wait for others to forget them. She thought of her promise to Harry that she would not try to get into any more scrapes. In her former dangers--even when there seemed hope--she had a buoying trust that there was one man who could save her. He had always saved her. In his protecting shelter she had come to feel almost immune from harm. But with Harry three thousand miles away and totally ignorant of her need of him no sense of imagined protection sustained her now. She took it for granted that Mr. Haines had been made a prisoner or killed. She knew the word would reach Mrs. Haines and the latter would invoke all the powers in the State to find her; but she was, sure she would be dead before anyone unearthed this fearful hiding place. The light at the far end of the cave grew steadily more dim and Pauline judged that the day was waning. A rustling sound caught her ear. Sounds are animate or inanimate. This was unmistakably the sound of a living thing. Pauline trembled a little but she stood up. Was it man or beast that she had for companion in the mysterious cave? She took a faltering step forward. The sound seemed to come nearer. The cave had gone almost pitch dark, and, suddenly, from the mid-level of the back wall--from the rock ledge--there flashed upon the sight of the imprisoned girl two beady, burning eyes. CHAPTER XIV THE GREAT WHITE QUEEN Hal Haines' best driving team was lathered with foam and the buckboard swung through the gate on two wheels as Bill Cabot drove back to the Double Cross Ranch. The young cowboy whom Haines had ordered to carry the news of disaster to Mrs. Haines, seeing the buckboard and only Cabot driving, knew instantly that something had gone wrong. "What is it, Will?" she called, running down to the gate. "Didn't she come? Has anything happened to Hal?" "She was held up and carried off, Mrs. Haines." "I know; I know. You played the joke; but what happened?" She looked at the foaming horses. "What made you drive home like this?" she demanded. "She wasn't carried off by us, Mrs. Haines. Some other crowd got ahead of us--some crowd that meant what they was doing. The Boss and the boys has got the trail by this time, I guess. The Boss said I should come and tell you." For a moment Mrs. Haines looked at him in doubt. "Is this another joke, Will?" she asked. "There hasn't been a hold-up in this section for ten years." "I guess the jokin' is all knocked out've all of us," answered Bill, turning shamefacedly away. "No, ma'am, this is the truth and--and I wish the Boss had took some one else's horse instid of mine." "Never mind. They'll have all the men in Montana out to find that girl, if this isn't a hoax," cried Mrs. Haines in a voice that choked. "Go tell the other boys to get ready. The Sheriff will want them, if Hal doesn't." She sped back to the house and with a trembling hand rang the bell of the old-fashioned telephone that furnished a new blessing to the ranches. A moment later Curt Sikes, the telegraph operator at Rockvale, almost fell from his chair as he took the following message over the wire at Mrs. Haines's dictation: Harry Marvin, Fifth Avenue, New York: Pauline kidnapped. Come at once. Mary Haines. "What--what's it mean, Mrs. Haines?" he gasped into the transmitter. "It ain't the young lady that Hal Just took off the express, is it?" "Yes, that's who it is, Curt. Cabot and the boys are coming into town as fast as they can ride; but you call Sheriff Hill and get as many men as you can-in case we need them. You'll hurry, won't you, Curt?" "Yes, ma'am; and I'll get your message right on the wire. They'll put it ahead all along the line." If Curt's speed in getting the telegram away was inspired partly by burning need of telling the news to Rockvale that did not reflect on Curt. He flashed after the New York message a terse call up and down the line to "Find the Sheriff," and then bolted out to the platform. His shout was heard not only at the little hotel across the street from the station, but at the city limits of Rockvale a good mile away. Rockvale answered the shout as a clan answering the beacozes flare. When Curt Sikes shouted it meant news. His messages along the line had little effect. He had spent the morning flaunting the news to fellow operators and rival communities that the Express had stopped at Rockvale. They had only half believed that, and now this added flourish was too much. Even Sheriff Hill, whom the message overtook at Gatesburg, fifteen miles south, laughed when he read it, and started for Rockvale only because he was going there anyway to get Case Egan. "There ain't much doubt which is now our leadin' city--Butte or Rockvale," he remarked as he swung to his saddle and set off with two deputies. He found something more than overdone home town pride in Rockvale, however. The narrow streets were filled with men, women and curious, wide-mouthed children. Horses, packed for long riding, with rifles bolstered to the saddles, were tied all along the rails of both the main hotel and the station. Curt Sikes was the center of a changing but ever interested group, but two of the Haines posse who had just come in without any report of capture, but with all the vivid news of the hold-up were now the main objects of attention. Briefly they told the story of the pursuit. With Haines leading they had struck a trail that took them to the river. They had waded the river and found no trail on the other side. Knowing the bandits had taken to the middle of the stream, Haines had divided his party. He sent two men down stream, one on each side and he and the three others rode up stream, two on each side. After long rough riding Haines had found a trail coming out of the water. All four had followed it a long way. There were three bandits making the trail, but the three stopped and each took a different direction, one straight up into the hills, one straight down into the valley, and the other off here towards town. Haines and one man had started on the trail to the hills. The other two--the two talking now--had each taken one of the other trails, but had lost them. They thought Haines would lose his, too. It had been a clean, up-to-date expert piece of work--this kidnapping. The getaway had been a work of art, just as the hold-up had been a wonder-piece of stage setting. "You saw all the gang that held you up?" asked the Sheriff. "We wasn't held up--tha'd a been a little too rich, I guess," said one of the cowboys. "It was Boss Haines an' the girl that was stopped." "Well, then, I mean did Haines see the gang? Were any of them Indians?" "Injuns? No. The Boss thinks some of 'em were cattle-crooks from the Case Egan outfit. I guess they ain't no Montana Injuns that'd start anythin' like that." "You guess a lot more than you know," said the Sheriff quietly. "I may be calling on any of you boys for some fast work against old Red Snake any of these days." "What's the trouble, Sheriff?" "Oh, just one of their devils brewing bad medicine again up at Shi-wah-ki village. Red Snake always was a little bit crazy--talking about the thieving white man that stole his country and looking for a chance to get the rest of his people killed off." "I heard that down at Hallick's last week," drawled a man in the crowd. "The Sioux is only waitin' for the Great White Queen to come out o' the heart o' the airth an' lead 'em on the warpath. They got a surprisin' plenty o' arms, too, for reservation Injuns. Know that, Sheriff?" The Sheriff nodded slowly. "I wish Haines would get in," he said. "I'd like to have a talk with him before we start. But it's getting late." The dull thudding of tired horses hoofs from the other side of the hill below town came, to him as an answer. Presently Haines and his companion joined, silently, the eager crowd at the station. The owner of the Double Cross seemed to have aged ten years since he had driven away with Pauline from that same station platform only a few hours before. He would have given all the acres of the Double Cross for just a word about Pauline; he would have given his life to know that she was alive. "There's nothing for it, Sheriff, but to rake the whole country," he said wearily. "They've hidden her somewheres, if they haven't killed her. And if they've killed her, mind, it's me you're to hang for it." The Sheriff laid a strong hand on his old friend's shoulder. "I can get the state militia out to look for that girl, Hal," he said. "By the way, is there anything--anything queer about her?" he asked. "What do you mean?" "Why, only that her folks have been writing to the Governor at Helena. Sikes just gave me this from Governor Casson himself. Who is this Raymond Owen? Who's been wiring to the Governor?" "That's her guardian, I think. H'm," mused Haines as he read the message, "that is queer. I wish they'd have wired me that yesterday." The Sheriff folded the telegram and putting it back in his pocket, stepped up on a box near the hotel door. "I want to call for a hundred volunteer citizens to go hunt this girl," he announced. A minute later, all that was left of Rockvale was the buildings and the women, children and old men who stood watching a cloud of dust blotting the sunset glow and listening to the retreating clatter of a flying cavalcade. Sikes kept the office open late. At 7 o'clock he telephoned to Mrs. Haines at the Double Cross: "What does he say?" she cried. "Just one word--Comin'," said Curt in an aggrieved voice. "He could've sent ten words fer the same price," he grumbled. Red Snake was one of the younger chiefs of the Sioux. He was too young to have had a share in the bloody last stand of his race in their Montana wilderness; but he was old enough to have watched the dwindling of spirit and power among them for twenty years. And every day of watching kindled new hate in the breast of the Indian. In him the spirit of his fathers had left the old unquenchable belief in the Day of Restoration, when, by some supernatural intervention, the Indians would return to their lands, the lands revert to their primeval state, and civilization be lost in the obliterating wilderness. The officers of the Agency had had trouble with Red Snake on several occasions. Twice he had started out at the head of war parties and had been caught just in time to prevent bloodshed among the isolated settlers. But of late he had been docile and peaceful. The new disturbances--the occasional shooting of a cowboy and the petty stealing of cattle dated from the beginning of the sway of a new medicine man in Red Snake's principal village of Shi-wah-ki. His name was of many syllables in the native language, but he was known as Big Smoke. He was a young Indian who had spent some years among the whites in the Southwest, had made a pretense at getting an education, but had reverted violently to the life and faith of his fathers. Big smoke had predicted to Red Snake the coming of the Great White Queen, who would empower the arms of the red man to overthrow the whites and would make him again master of his rightful lands. Red Snake, squatted on a blanket beside his teepee, listened with immobile features but with a thrilled heart. He summoned a council of the chiefs, secretly, and the medicine man addressed his message to them also. Thereafter the Indians of Shi-wah-ki were restive. Their growing spirit of rebellion manifested itself in foolish little offenses against the white men. These were punished with the white man's customary sternness and this increased the rancor of the Indians. It increased, too, their eagerness for the fulfillment of the strange prophecy of the coming of the White Queen. On the very day when the white man's village of Rockvale was in a hubbub of excitement because of the kidnapping of Pauline, the village of Shi-wah-ki was tumultuous with a different fervor. Into the circle of the assembled chiefs, rimmed with awed faces of squaws and papooses, had danced the weird figure of Big Smoke. He had been called upon by Red Snake to announce what further of the White Queen his medicine had revealed. Big Smoke wore the head of a wolf with cow's horns set over the ears. His lithe red body was covered with a long bear skin. His legs were bare to the tops of his gaily beaded moccasins. He circled the silent group with fantastic gyrations and stopped finally in the center. Lifting his hands, he addressed the tribe. First, in glowing rhetoric, he pictured the ancient glory of the Sioux --their wealth in lands, their prowess in the hunt, their triumph over all other red men. He told of their long and brave struggle with the white man, who by the intervention of wicked gods had been enabled to conquer them. But the time of vengeance and retribution had come after long years. The Indian was to return to his own. "The Great Spirit is sending us a leader," said Rig Smoke. "The Great Spirit has spoken to me and said: 'Lo, I will send a White Queen with golden hair. She shall come from the heart of the Earth, and she shall lead your warriors against the oppressor." This was the third time Big Smoke had said this. That was what made it most impressive to the listeners. Big Smoke had staked not only his reputation as a medicine man, but, also his life, upon this wonderful prediction, which had aroused his people as they had not been aroused in fifty years. For it was the law of the ancient code that fulfillment must follow immediately the third announcement of the miracle. If fulfillment failed there remained only the Great Death Stone in the valley. No prophet of the tribe had ever won in the race with the Death Stone. And so the chiefs sat in respectful silence and the young braves arose eager for the war dance when Big Smoke finished speaking. The dance, beginning slowly, waxed wilder; the tom-toms beat more vibrantly, until the whole village was encircled by the painted and bonneted tribesmen. The red glare of daylight fires illuminated the wild faces. The women cowered with their children beside the teepees. In the midst of the tumult, the medicine man stood with hands stretched upward calling on the Great Spirit to send the White Queen. When the dance had subsided, the Council resumed its deliberations. It was arranged that there should be a hunt that afternoon and the foxes or coyotes should be driven as near as possible to the settlements. This would be a means of reconnoitering and it would make the whites think the Indians were engaged in peaceful pursuits. Pauline, after her first startled cry, stood spellbound by the two glowing eyes that shone from the far end of the cave. There was no light now--save for the eyes. The rift in the roof from which the mysterious glow had come seemed to have been closed suddenly. The pitch darkness made the eyes doubly terrible, and just perceptibly they moved and flashed which showed they were living eyes. Pauline longed to scream, but could not. Behind those fiery points imagination could picture all manner of horrible shapes. Was the creature about to spring upon her? The eyes vanished as suddenly as they had appeared. The low rustling sound came again; then the utter silence. Pauline, freed of the uncanny gaze, was able to think and act. If that animal could find its way into her prison house, there must be another entrance to the cave. It was plain that the animal had been crouching on the slant rock above the ledge. Pauline began again to grope around the wall. She could touch the top of the ledge and now in several places she found small crevices in the wall by which she tried to climb. Time and again she fell back. Her soft hands were torn by the jagged rock; her dress was in shreds; her golden hair fell down upon her shoulders. She might have been some preternatural dweller of the place. At last her foot held firm in a crevice three feet above the floor. Clutching the ledge-top, she groped for another step--and found it. In a moment she was on the ledge. She sank there, covering her face with her hands. The eyes had blazed again scarcely three feet away. She felt the breath of hot nostrils, the rough hair of a beast, as the thing sprang. She felt that the end had come, but she still clung to the ledge. As she uncovered her eyes, slowly, she was astonished to see that the faint light had returned. It came, as she had thought, over a concealed shelf of stone above the rocky incline. The eyes had vanished. The cave was still. She began to scale the incline. Her hands and feet caught nubs and slits of the surface and a little higher she felt the cool dampness of earth and grasped the root of a tree. As she drew herself up, she looked over the shelf and saw, at one end of it, the open day. She crawled a little way upon the shelf then stopped. She hardly dared to go on. What if the opening, large enough to admit the light, were too small for her to pass through? What if the light had been only a lure to torture her? What if she must return into the darkness with that thing unknown, the thing with the blazing eyes! She crept on with her eyes shut. A stronger glow of light upon the closed lids told her she had reached the end of the shelving. The next moment would tell her if she had reached freedom or renewed captivity. She looked up. Three of Red Snake's young warriors had gained most of the plaudits of the village during the afternoon of the hunt. They rode together and not only did they bring in many foxes and coyotes but much news of the white people. They had met armed men throughout all the mountain country, riding up and down the river. The armed men had greeted them fairly and had asked them for information of other white men who had stolen a girl and carried her away. The white men were thus fighting among themselves. It was a propitious time for the coining of the new Queen. These three young men, about five o'clock in the afternoon, had just started the drive of a coyote towards the level country when the quarry doubled suddenly and turned into the hills. With shouts and shots, the Indians pursued it, but their horses were no match for it on the devious wooded paths, and grunting their disgust they saw it dive into a burrow in a rocky hollow of the cliff. They dismounted and stood about the mouth of the burrow grumbling and "cursing their luck" in an ancient tongue. At last two of them mounted and started to ride away, and their companion followed, slowly, leading his horse. A sound made him turn his head. With a cry of mingled fear and joy, of awe and triumph, he threw himself prostrate before the mouth of the burrow. The other Indians dashed back. They literally fell from their horses to the feet of the wonderful being who had risen from the heart of the earth--the promised goddess who would lead them against the oppressors. In the poor, disheveled person of Pauline, coming from her prison cave, they saw their great White Queen. CHAPTER XV THE DEATH STONE As the thrilled and frightened Indian lay prostrate at her feet, he might well have believed her to be some creature from another world. Her face was very pale and round it fell in tumultuous glory the cascades of her golden hair. Her dress was torn to shreds by the jagged rocks and there was blood upon the delicate hands that she held out in pleading to the only living thing she saw-the red man. He did not move. She stepped nearer and, stooping, gently touched his shoulder. At the touch he trembled like a leaf, but raised his head and looked at her with terror and awe and adoration in his eyes. "Won't you help me? I have ben a prisoner in the cave. I must find Mr. Haines--Haines, do you hear? Or go to Rockvale--Rockvale," she repeated, hoping that the names at least he might understand. He motioned questioningly toward his horse, and, at her nod, he sprang up and brought the animal to her side. Helping her to mount, he took the bridle and began to lead the way into the thickly wooded hills. The journey was slow and arduous, but it was not long. Darkness had not yet fallen when the hill trail dipped into a valley, and Pauline's weary, hopeful eyes looked down upon a village on the plain. The hope vanished quickly as she realized that the houses of the village were teepees and that the people that moved among them were braves and squaws. An Indian boy of perhaps twelve years sprang suddenly from a thicket beside the trail, gave one glance at her, and, with a shriek, set off at full speed toward the teepees. Cries sounded and resounded from the hills. Tom-toms were beating. She became aware that the Indians were swarming about her and acclaiming her a guest of unusual honor. They stopped her horse at the entrance to Red Snake's teepee. The great chief stepped forth himself, with Big Smoke, the medicine man, close behind him. The prophet, who had foretold the coming of the Great White Queen, wore a mien of pride and triumph, even as he bowed low before Pauline. But of all the red folk in Shi-wah-ki village, Big Smoke was undoubtedly the most amazed at the fulfillment of his prophecy. The braves who were assigned to lift Pauline from her horse and bear her into the Chief's teepee were surprised that one immortal should be so weak as almost to fall into their arms, so weary as to be scarcely able to walk. But Pauline, seated upon a high pile of furs within the teepee, where the weird light of a fire fell upon her pallid features and her flowing hair, presented a picture strange and marvelous. They gathered around her, Red Snake and the medicine man in the center of the adobe, the lesser chiefs behind them, and in another circle the ranks of the braves. Even in her utter exhaustion, the savage solemnity of the gathering fascinated Pauline. Had she been left alone she would have fallen asleep upon the piled furs; but this low muttering, grim-visaged assemblage of the red men forced her to respectful attention. That they honored her, she understood; but she saw, too, that the Indians were all armed and some of them were painted. As Red Snake arose to address the tribe a menacing murmur filled the teepee and the young chiefs whetted their knives upon the ground. Red Snake's harangue, unintelligible to Pauline, had an electrical effect upon the Indians. Frequently as he spoke he turned toward her and always when he did so he bent his head upon his breast and raised his mighty arms in token of submission to a power mightier than his own. As he finished, Pauline arose, swaying a little from her great weakness. She shook her head in token that she did not understand. Her outstretched, pleading hands bewildered, but subdued the warlike assembly. Red Snake called a ringing summons, and from the rear circle of the audience shuffled forward the strangest man Pauline had ever seen. His undersized, stooping form was garbed in a miner's cast-off red shirt, a ranchman's ex-trousers, a pair of tattered moccasins and a much-dented derby hat, with a lone feather in the band of it. It was White Man's Hat, a half-breed interpreter. As he approached, cringing and bowing, Pauline noted that a penetrating, not unkindly eye gleamed from under his bushy brow, scrutinizing her in flashes between his obeisances. Unlike the other Indians, he was not afraid to look the Great White Queen in the face, as he solemnly repeated the last words of Red Snake: "According to the prophecy, you have come from the heart of the world to lead us against those who steal our land." Pauline stood for a moment in complete bewilderment. Then, as the meaning of the words, with the meaning of the strange gathering, flashed upon her mind, she took a step forward, speaking in earnest protest. But she spoke only to the Chief, for the Indians had broken all restraint and were crushing their way out of the teepee, with cries and brandishing of weapons. They swept the little interpreter with them. And Red Snake saw in Pauline's look and tone of appeal only the pleading of a wronged goddess for vengeance upon her enemies. He called the women of his household, who shyly led the Queen away. Darkness had fallen as the women glided ahead of her to a spot outside the main village, where a spacious teepee had been erected apart. Only a peaceful moon and a firmament glittering with stars lighted their path. But from the town behind came terrifying yells, the rattle of tom-toms and occasionally a rifle shot as the braves prepared their spirits for the test of battle. Pauline found her new home filled with all the luxuries and sacred relics of the tribe. There were rugs richer than those in the Chief's house; the walls were festooned with strung beads, and on the large, low couch of bear skins lay the most splendid of Indian raiment. The women, with better understanding than men of the earthly needs of immortals, made her lie down, while they bathed her aching temples and wounded hands, replaced her torn garments with a gorgeous blanket robe and smoothed her flying tresses into long comfortable braids. Other women came bringing food. And there was a pipe and a pouch of agency tobacco with which the goddess might soothe the hours before repose. Pauline ate eagerly while the women looked oil in silent approval. When she had finished, she arose smiling and signed to them that she would rest. They left softly, and neither the exciting recollections of the day's adventures nor the tumult of the braves outside could hold her for a moment longer from the blessedness of sleep. She slept far into the next morning. But so did the village, for the Indians had reveled to exhaustion. It was nearly noon before she attired herself in a fringed and beaded dress of buckskin, with leggings and exquisite little moccasins and laughingly permitted one of the women attendants to place a painted war feather in her hair. Thus clad and with her wide braids falling, she sat regally to receive the morning call of Red Snake. She was beginning to take a tremulous pleasure in the game of being an immortal. Pauline's questing spirit was too happy in adventure not to find a thrill in being thus translated from hungering captive to reigning queen, from queen to angel. Red Snake's call was formal and politely brief. He brought with him the amusing interpreter to inquire if the Spirit had found comfort in the hospitality of his people, and more particularly if the war dance of the preceding night had given her satisfaction. Pauline replied, with gracious solemnity, that her Spirit had found good repose and had been comforted by the pleasant music. "And when will the White Queen lead us against our enemies--the men of her own color, but not of her kind?" inquired the Chief with child-like eagerness. Pauline hesitated an instant after the interpreter repeated the question. Then, recovering herself, she answered gravely: "Today, Red Snake, the Queen rests from her long journey out of the Happy Hunting Ground. Tomorrow also. Upon the next day, perhaps, she will lead the warriors." The little interpreter's keen eyes flashed understandingly as he left out the word "perhaps" in repeating her answer. Red Snake was elated. He made profound salutations, promised that the war party would do her honor, and hastened away to announce the news. The interpreter lingered, pretending to smooth the door rug. He looked up suddenly and his eyes met Pauline's with an expression of friendly interest. Instinctively she accepted the tacitly offered friendship. "You are a white man--you speak English," she said. "Part white--part red. You speak all white," he added significantly. "Of course," she whispered, stepping to his side. "I am not a Queen-- not a Spirit. I do not know why they believe I am. But I must get away--to Rockvale, to Mr. Haines's ranch, to the white people anywhere. You will help me?" He looked at her pityingly now. He had believed that she was an accomplice of the medicine man in a shrewd fraud, and he had merely wanted to share the joke, risky as it was. To find her an accidental and unwilling monarch struck him dumb. "That is very hard," he said slowly. "Look!" He parted the folds of the teepee door curtain so that she looked out toward the village. Three women sat next the door and beyond were groups of braves, still in their war paint, some conversing, some stalwart and still. They seemed to be doing nothing in particular. "Well?" questioned Pauline. He led her across the teepee to a narrow slit in the rear curtain. Through this she peered as she had peered through the door and saw exactly what she had seen though the door--women crouching at their tasks in the near foreground, an armed circle of warriors beyond. Now she understood. "I am a prisoner then?" "They will guard you night and day." "Why?" "It was prophesied that a Great White Queen would come to lead them to battle. You have come, as the prophet said, and you have promised to lead them to battle. Above all, be proud, and not afraid." The ioterpreter hesitated a moment. "There was another White Queen whose coming was prophesied many hundreds of years ago," he said. "She came. She led the Indians victory over other Indians and then she vanished in the strangest way. I would tell you of it--but I am afraid. They say her spirit is always near. Some day you may know how she vanished." Before she could speak again, he had glided out of the teepee. While Pauline was away Harry had planned to accomplish mighty labors. With masculine fatuity he let himself believe--before she went away --that a man can get more work done with his goddess afar than when Cupid has a desk in his office. It did not take more than thirty-six hours to turn separation into bereavement; not more than forty-eight to turn his "freedom for work" into slavery to the fidgets. The office, instead of a refuge, became a prison to him. However, he made a pretense of sticking to the grind, and it was not until the Thursday on which his chartings showed Pauline would arrive at Rockvale that he actually quit and went home. He slipped into the library to be alone. It was more restful here. As he sat in the great leather chair and unfolded a newspaper, the portrait of Pauline smiled brightly down at him in seeming camaraderie. At his side stood the Mummy so intimately associated with her and his dead father's strange vision from the tomb. Harry began to read, but he was still nervous to the point of excitement, and his thoughts wandered from the words. He was suddenly conscious of another presence in the room. He let the paper fall and gazed intently at the portrait. But a moment later, Harry Marvin sprang excitedly from the chair and fairly leaped towards the picture. From somewhere out of the dim air of the library a hand had reached and touched his. It had touched his shoulder and then, with a commanding finger, had pointed upward at the picture on the wall. "The Mummy! It has warned again," gasped Harry. "Polly, Polly!" he cried to the portrait, "I'm coming. Just hold on." He strode bark to the table and pressed a bell. "Tell Reynolds to pack me up, Bemis," he charged the astonished butler. "Tell him it's for Montana in a rush. Have a machine ready for me in fifteen minutes." Even Bemis's constitutional aversion to haste was overridden. He sped into the hall, calling to the valet, as Harry picked up a telephone. "Hello, this is H. B. Marvin. I want our private car attached to the Chicago flyer," he said. "No matter if it holds up the flyer, I'll have President Grigsby's authorization in your hands in five minutes. Thank you. Goodbye." As he reached the door of the machine, a messenger boy turned up the steps. Harry called to him, took the telegram and read Mrs. Haines' message: "Pauline kidnapped; come at once." With a muffled ejaculation, he dropped the slip of paper and sprang into the car, which in ten minutes pulled up to the station just as the disgruntled, but curious trainmen were coupling the luxurious Marvinia to the eighteen-hour express. Owen coming quietly down the steps of the Marvin house, picked up the telegram which Harry had let fall. Reading it, he smiled, and he was still smiling when another messenger boy followed him to the door. Owen took the second message and the smile broadened into an ugly grin as he read: "Raymond Owen Fifth avenue, New York. All's well. Hicks." Five days after the disappearance of Pauline, the express stopped again at Rockvale station. As Harry swung from the rear step to the dingy platform, there were many curious eyes to observe his arrival, but the watchers were mostly women and children. The men of Rockvale were still out on the long hunt for Pauline. Harry hurried first to the station telephone. Sikes had got Mrs. Haines on the wire as soon as the smoke of the express had been sighted ten miles away. But all she could tell Harry was that there was nothing to tell. His lips were set in a hard line as he hung up the receiver. He asked a few hasty questions of Sikes, hurried across to the little hotel, paid for a room and hired a horse. Blankets and provisions strapped behind, he was out and away up the road to the mountains within an hour. And while he urged his sturdy little mount to better speed on his uncharted journey, Pauline, not twenty miles away, was preparing for the last journey she might ever make. The blow had fallen. Her royal place, her immortal power had vanished. The Indians had permitted one postponement of the day of battle. She had said that the Spirits had spoken to her and warned against bloodshed upon that day. It should be the second day thereafter the Spirits had said. The Indians were disappointed, but they bowed to the edict. The morrow passed quietly, but on the next day--the fifth of her royal captivity--she was summoned from her house by the assembled chiefs in battle paint and feathers. She tried to whisper through the doorway that the Spirits had forbidden again, but Red Snake answered: "You are greater than all other Spirits; you will lead us today!" "Tell them," said Pauline to the interpreter, "that the White Queen does not lead today!" Red Snake, his face black with anger, after haranguing the chiefs, turned to Pauline: "Daughter of the Earth--twice our warriors have been ready for battle and you would not lead them. Today you must go before the Oracle and prove your immortality. The Oracle will tell." The warriors departed; only the little interpreter remained. "What does it mean?" cried Pauline. "It is the race with the Great Death Stone," he answered, and his own voice trembled. "But," he whispered, "I will ride. I will try to find help. Wait." He slipped under the back of the teepee. Unseen by the excited Indians, he made his way to the line of ponies, with lariats and rifles swung from their saddles. He picked one and, mounting, rode slowly out of the village, speaking here and there to the braves he met. Pauline, left alone, fell upon her knees and prayed. Harry met Haines and two of his posse on the road to the mountains. They were on their way back to a general rendezvous ordered by the Sheriff, but Harry continued on his way up the mountain. Mile after mile the little mustang put behind him while the sun was still high. On the slope of a hill they came to a crossroads, and Harry, riding almost blindly, reined to the right. The pony swerved wildly to the left. Instinctively Harry gave the frightened horse its head. A half mile farther on the animal stopped and sniffed the wind. At the same instant Harry heard a feeble shout from the road. A weirdly garbed little half breed lay on the ground holding the bridle of the horse that had thrown him. "Ankle gone," he explained. "Riding for help, I help was. You ride now. White girl--they're killing her up there now." "White girl? Where? Talk fast, man." "Two miles over the mountain and down to the valley straight ahead. You go to the bottom of the valley, not to the top--not where the Indians are. Climb tree; take my rope; it's the only chance now." Harry caught the coiled lariat from the other's saddle and rode as he had never ridden before. All was vague in his mind, except that Pauline was near, was in peril, and he must reach her. How, by road and trail, he ever reached the Valley of the Death Stone Harry never knew. Perhaps chance, perhaps some invisible courier guided him to the lonely spot. After long, hard riding he was attracted by the low rumble of many voices lifted in a sort of chant. Following the voices, he came to the foot of a steep cliff side where a long trench, partly of natural formation, partly hewn from the stone, made a chute or runway from mountain top to valley. At the upper end of the runway a motley band of Indians were engaged in some weird worship. Harry started his horse up the steep in the shelter of the woods. When he came to a spot where a huge tree limb crossed the runway, he remembered the little half breed's words, "Climb the tree; it is the only chance." Almost at the same instant from the midst of the Indian group emerged two giant braves carrying a white woman between them. They placed her in the runway. Her golden hair, unbound, floated on the wind. Harry choked back a cry, threw aside his rifle, caught the lariat, and, swinging up the tree, crawled swiftly out on the overhanging limb. Concealed by the foliage he waited. A rifle cracked, and, for the first time, he saw that at the top of the runway, behind Pauline, the stood a mighty boulder, almost perfectly round, the diameter of which--about five feet--fitted the trench so well that it could roll in it like a ball in a bowling gutter. None even among the Indians knew how many times the Stone of Death had rolled and been dragged back again to the top of the cliff. The stains upon it were unnumbered. Up on its surface was written in blood the doom of the false prophets and pretending immortals. None had ever won in the race with the Death Stone. The crack of the rifle was the signal for a group of red men to press behind the stone to free it on its fearful course. It was also the signal for Pauline to run. Her hair streamed wildly in the wind as she sped, like a frightened deer, down the deadly path. The rifle sounded again and the Indians heaved the stone into the trench. It rumbled as it came on. It gained upon the fleeing girl. They had planned to prolong the torture by giving her a hopeless lead. Dancing, gesticulating, shouting, the Indians watched the race. Only one watcher was silent and motionless. Hidden by the leaves he braced himself upon the tree limb. For the first moments after the rock was released he had turned sick and dizzy. Now, as they came near--the thing relentless but inanimate pursuing the thing helpless, beautiful and most precious to him of all things in the world, not the quiver of a muscle hindered the desperate task that he had set himself. A moment later he was sobbing like a child as he half dragged, half carried Pauline to his waiting horse. By the magic of luck, by the mystery of a protecting Fate, the lariat noose had fallen about her shoulders. To the amazed and terrified Indians up the cliff she had soared suddenly, spirit-like, out of the trench and vanished in the foliage of the tree, while the boulder thundered on, cheated of its prey. But swiftly out of the woods upon the open plain below appeared a rider with a woman clasped before him on the saddle. The baffled Indians scurried for their horses. They reached the valley. They gained upon the burdened horseman and his tired horse. They fired as they rode, the bullets spitting venomously in the dust around Harry and Pauline. The pony stumbled. Harry jerked it up and it struggled bravely on, but the cries behind sounded louder. The bullets hit nearer. Suddenly the firing increased. There were more cries. And Harry, reining the pony saw, galloping over the ridge to the westward, the full posse of Hal Haines. They fired as they came. They cut between him and the Indians. He stopped the pony and lifted Pauline to the ground. "My precious one, God bless you and forgive us all," sobbed Mrs. Haines as Polly was caught in her mothering embrace. "And you--you had to come all the way from New York to save her," she added, turning to Harry. "Don't say anything about it, Mrs. Haines," he said in a stage whisper. "I came out here to rest and avoid publicity." CHAPTER XVI SOPHIE MCALLAN'S WEDDING A few days after their return from Montana Pauline sat reading by the library window. They had come late to the country this Summer and the park of Castle Marvin had had time to leave and bloom into utter splendor. It was like a flowery kingdom in the Land of Faery, and as her eyes were lifted listlessly now and then from the printed page, they roamed over the garden which lay like some vast and radiant Oriental rug in Nature's palace hall. The distant forest was the palace wall, tapestried in green; its dome, a sky of tender blue; its lamp, the morning sun; its Prince, her Harry standing in the garden. "He should always stand in the garden," thought Pauline tenderly. "The flowers are such a splendid foil for him." She shut her eyes in sheer satiety of beauty. Not even the shabby man mopping his hot forehead as he came along the road, marred the picture. She was a little surprised to see him, a moment later, talking in an easy way with Harry but there was no false pride in her lover--brother and all men were his friends until they proved themselves his enemies. All except Owen. The shabby man, holding his hat between his nervous hands, was evidently an applicant for work. Harry pointed to the flower beds and the rose trees with a nod of inquiry. The man assented vaguely. And they came on up the path together, making their way towards the servants' quarters over the garage. Harry paused at the window: "I have hired a new gardener, who does not know his own name," he said as they passed on. Pauline turned back to the pages of the Cosmopolitan. A picture in an article on the motor races caught her eye and held it for some reason that she did not at first understand. It was a picture of a man in auto-racer's costume, with a helmet tight upon his head and the keen features and daring eyes peculiar to those who live by peril. She had started to read the caption when she was interrupted by Bemis bringing her letters. With a little flutter of pleasure, womanlike, she began to read the letters from their postmarks before opening them. She hit upon one that brought a little peal of laughter from her, and she opened it eagerly and read: "Walter and I want you and Harry to be with us at the wedding. Don't faint. We decided only yesterday, and it's going to be very quiet, with just the few people whom we can reach with informal notes like this. You can motor over in an hour. Tell Harry our lions arrived last Thursday from Germany, and after the wedding the keeper will exhibit them. If Harry won't come to see me married, he'll come to see the lions. "Yours in a flurry, Sophie McAllan." Pauline laughed again. It was like her unconventional chum, Sophie, to arrange her wedding with the same startling haste that had marked all the breathless events of her life. The lions she mentioned were typical of her original ideas. She had suddenly announced to her parents one day that she was tired of domestic animals and was going to keep lions instead. And her amused and amazed father had not only been forced to yield, but to keep his eye out all over Europe, Asia and Africa for new bargains in well bred lions ever since. It was also typical of Sophie that she had selected from among all the dashing wooers; at her heels, Walter Trumwell, simple and sedate, who was horrified by her pranks and shocked by her use of slang, but who adored her with the devotion of a frightened puppy. Their engagement had been long announced. It was only in its high-handed abruptness that the wedding was a surprise. Pauline dropped the letter on the table and hurried from the room to look for Harry. He had head her first call and was coming in from the garage. Pausing at the door of the library, where he had last seen her, he narrowly avoided a collision with Owen, who was hurrying out. The look of covert guilt on the secretary's face aroused his latent suspicion. But Owen, quickly recovering himself, bowed, apologized and passed on. Harry stepped into the library. He saw the open letter on the table, looked at the envelope and saw that, he was included in the address. He read the letter, and the old look of trouble came into his eyes as he turned to see if Owen were watching. As he stepped into the hall he saw the secretary leaving the house. He stood in the doorway and watched Owen depart in his own machine, driven by his own chauffeur, a sullen young fellow whom the other employees held in aversion. "He's up to something. I wonder what harm he could do at the McCallan wedding," muttered Harry, as he moved down the steps and out to where the new gardener was working. The man had been greatly improved as to cleanliness and clothes, but there was still the strange distant look in his eyes as he got up from a flower bed to speak to Harry. Pauline, after circling the house in vain search of her brother, had returned to her unread letters and her magazine. As she lifted the latter from the table, the picture of the man in racing costume again struck her eye, and this time she read the caption: "Ralph Palmer, whose skull was fractured in the Vanderbilt Cup Race and who disappeared from a hospital six weeks ago." She studied the face again. It seemed the living likeness of one whom she had seen dead. Suddenly her thoughts crystallized and she sprang up. She rushed again to the front door, carrying the magazine open and saw Harry and the gardener talking on the path. She ran down to them. The gardener took off his hat, but Pauline looked at him with such piercing scrutiny that he hurried to resume his work. Harry, after a brief affectionate greeting, turned to give some last instructions, and, behind his back, Pauline stole another look at the magazine. "It is; I am sure it is," she said half aloud. Harry turned quickly. "What is, dear goddess of the garden?" he asked cheerily. Pauline closed the magazine abruptly. "Oh! I--I was dreaming," she answered, with a little nervous laugh. "You can't have a dream when you are one," he said, putting his arm about her waist as they moved back towards the house. "I have news," she exclaimed, remembering the wedding invitation. "Sophie McCallan is to be married tonight--just like that--without telling till the last minute." "I read the letter in the library." "Did you tell Farrell to have the car ready?" "I will, dearest. But I am not sure that I can go." "But you must go." "I got a telegram this morning, and I must go into town." "To New York! Oh, Hairy, I simply hate your old business. Haven't we got enough money without trying to make all there is in the world? Aren't we..." "No, not to New York--just into Westbury, Miss Firebrand. I must use the wire direct to the office." "Absurd. Why don't you telephone your message?" "Code messages, dear. They can't be talked." "But you'll be back in time to go with me?" "I'll do my best. I'm starting directly. There's Farrell with the machine now." "But Farrell must get my car ready." "He will. Farrell isn't going with me." Her threats and pretty pleadings followed him as he drove away. But Harry did not drive towards Westbury farther than the first crossroads. Instead, he swerved out across country towards Windywild, the great McCallan estate. Only a vague purpose moved him. His suspicions were groping. But he was forming dimly in his mind a plan to keep Pauline away from the McCallan wedding. Premonition whispered that even among the nuptial gayeties there might be danger. On the crest of Winton's Hill, from which the road slopes down to beautiful Windywild through parked forests, but from which the rambling white villa, with its barns and garage can be seen in striking bird's-eye view, Harry stopped his machine. To his far vision there was no unusual stir about the McCallan house, in spite of the wedding day. Owen's car was not at the gate nor in the yard, and he certainly would not have sent it to the garage if he were making a business visit to the manager of the estate. With a hateful sense of spying on the innocent and the sincere dread of being met there by anyone--even by Owen--he was about to turn around, go back and agree to take Pauline to the wedding, when the movement of a figure through the distant garage yard made him stiffen to attention and strain his gaze. In an instant he had whipped his binoculars from under the seat of the runabout and was staring through them at the establishment below. A few moments afterwards he carefully replaced the glasses, and drove away. Owen had left the Marvin place in haste, seemingly intent upon a direct and important errand, but if any one had seen where the car stopped an hour later, both the haste and the errand would still have been unexplained. They were in the loneliest stretch of woods a half mile beyond the McCallan house when Owen leaned forward and said to his driver: "You may stop here." "Yes, sir," answered the young man with a respect that he showed to no one else. He drew the machine to the roadside and then asked: "Am I to go with you or stay here?" "Stay here," answered Owen. "But don't sit there lolling in the seat. We have broken down--you understand--and you will keep us broken down and keep on mending the machine until I return." Owen, who was not averse to physical effort when his dearest object was at stake, walked the half mile to Windywild rapidly. Unlike Harry's, Owen's plans were definite and fixed. He strode through the front gate but took his way immediately to the stable in front of which two grooms were currying a restless horse. "Hello, Simon," said Owen. "My car has broken down up the road here. I wonder if you can help me out." "I guess so," said the groom, not very cheerfully. "We got plenty to do today as it is, Mr. Owen, with the weddin' party on an' them gol blamed lions to look after." "Who talka da lions?" cried a grim voice, and, turning, Owen pretended to see for the first time a short, heavy set man of the gypsy type, seated on a box at the stable door smoking a cigarette and evidently regarding all the world as the object of his personal hate. "Why, who is that man?" asked Owen of the groom in a tone of condescending interest. "Where have I seen him before?" "If ye ever saw him before, ye wouldn't want to see him again," declared the groom. "He's Garcia, Miss Sophie's new lion tamer, but we ain't had time to tame him yet. He's wild." The answer to this taunt was a rush from Garcia, who, uttering an unintelligible roar that might have done credit to one of his lions, sprang towards the groom. The latter took quick refuge behind the horse. The man's fury made Owen step aside, too, but he looked on with an appreciative smile. As Garcia came back, growling, to his seat on the box, the secretary stepped up to him and held out his hand. "Is it really you?" he said, the patronage in his voice offsetting the familiarity of his manner. "If it looks like me, it is me," snarled the Gypsy. "Him--over there," he cried, pointing to the groom, "he donta looka like his own face if I get him." "Come, old friend," said Owen in a low voice. "Don't you remember me? Don't you remember the Zoological Garden in Brussels and the lion that bent a cage so easily one day that it killed Herr Bruner, of Berlin." The last words spoken almost in a whisper, had an electrical effect upon the lion tamer. He fairly writhed in his seat and cowered away from Owen as from one who held a knife over his head. It was at this moment that Harry, looking from the hill, put away his binoculars and turned his car around. "Come, let's see the lions, may I?" asked Owen, cheerily ignoring the man's terror, secretly enjoying it. Without a word Garcia led the way into the stables. The lions, six in number, were quartered in box stalls rebuilt with heavy steel bars. They had been quiet, but the sight of a stranger set them wild and their roaring thundered through the building. Garcia led Owen to farthest cage and stopped abruptly. "You after me?" he inquired, his nerve partially recovered. "Yes, but to help you, not to harm you, old friend." "You lie, I theenk. You tella the police of the leetle accident in Bresseli--no?" "No, indeed; you are too useful a man to lose, Garcia. Besides, I need you again." The gypsy held up his hands in refusal. "No," he whispered. "I hava one dead man's face here always." He pointed to his eyes. "I cry it away; I go all over da world. I not forget. He not forget. He folla me." Owen laughed. "Come, come," he said, "you are foolish. You had nothing to do with that affair, except to loosen one little bar ever so little. (Garcia groaned.) And it would be just as easy to leave say a cage door open tonight while they're having the wedding." "You mean--?" "I mean only a little joke. Nobody will be hurt, I feel sure. Of course, if any one should be, you could not be blamed. Come, I want a quick answer. If you won't do it, of course--you don't want anything said about Brussels, do you, old friend?" The man uttered another cry. Owen drew money from his pocket. The man seized it greedily. If he was to do the blackest of deeds, there was nothing in his conscience to prevent him from profiting. "Tonight--during the wedding, remember," said Owen. "I will give you the signal. And, mind, you brute, if you don't do it, you know what I'll do to you." A few moments later he was out chatting cheerily with the grooms. "I'm not going to ask you to help me with the car, Simon," he said. "You're too crowded today, I see. I'll send Farrell up to the Hodgins House and wait for him. Good-day." He swung off down the road, greatly at peace with all the world. He did not even rebuke his chauffeur when he caught him loafing on the grass. Harry and the household chauffeur, Farrell, were talking together outside the garage and Harry was handing a $10 bill to Farrell, who grinned broadly as he pocketed it. Owen saw nothing in this to cause him apprehension. Harry was always generous with the employees. It was well for Owen's plan that he should go to the wedding in so pleasant a mood. Pauline looked up from her book as Harry entered the library. "I'm so happy," she cried. "You are a darling boy to come home so soon." He accepted her rewarding kiss gratefully. "Yes, I think it's all right," he said, "though there are some serious matters in hand at the office." The butler appeared at the door. "Farrell asks if he may have a word with you, Sir." "Farrell? Why, yes; let him come here." The chauffeur, cap in hand, stepped into the room. "Guess I got to take the big car to New York, Sir. I haven't got the parts to fix it, and I can't get them nowhere but in New York." "Very well; that's all right, Farrell." "But be back surely by four o'clock, Farrell," warned Pauline. "You are the only driver I have." "Oh, I'll get back all right, Miss." But immediately after uttering these words in a tone of perfect respect, Farrell committed an astonishing offense against the laws that separate servitor and employer. He caught the shimmer of a wink upon Harry's eye, and he had the audacity to return it. Three minutes afterwards Farrell did a stranger thing. Going direct from the house to the telephone in the garage, he took up the receiver and called up the house. Owen, passing by, stopped spellbound, at the door, to hear these mandatory words spoken by the chauffeur to Harry Marvin, whose answering voice could actually be heard by Owen through the open window of the library. "Mr. Marvin, you are needed at your office. Come at once," phoned Farrell. He was grinning again as he came out of the garage, got into a machine and drove away. Owen gazed after him with puzzled, lowering brows. CHAPTER XVII PALMER COMES BACK Harry had just hung up the receiver of the telephone and had turned to Pauline with feigned disappointment. "My office is calling me," he said. "I'm needed there at once. I shan't be able to go to the wedding." The sight of the happiness fading from her flowerlike face filled him with shame. It was the first time in his life that he had lied to her and he was half sorry now that he had done so. But he must go through with it now, and if there was apology in the kisses he pressed on her reproachful eyes it was not confessed. "I am going to the wedding just the same," declared Pauline. "Of course, you are," he agreed heartily. "Farrell will be back with the car by five o'clock." "But who will chaperon me?" she objected, woman-like, to her own decision. "It would look absurd to take Margaret, and Owen isn't invited." "You will not need a chaperon going over--provided Farrell gets back," he said as he took his hat from the table. "You mean you don't believe Farrell will get back!" she exclaimed. "You are treating me like a child. You don't want me to go to the wedding just because you can't go." "Now, don't, don't," he pleaded, as she started to leave the room. "I don't mean anything of the kind. I mean Farrell is the only man who can drive the large car or the roadster safely. There is no reason in the world why he shouldn't get back." "And how am I to come home?" she demanded, turning again toward him. "I will call for you in the runabout on my way from New York. Perhaps even I shall be able to arrive in time to greet the happy pair," he added cheerfully. "You'll make my excuses." Owen, who was listening at the door, had just time, to glide away before Harry hurried out. The young master of the house had driven far toward the station before the secretary returned to the library. This time he entered and pretended to be hunting for a magazine. Pauline's disconsolate face gave him the excuse he desired. "Why, Miss Marvin, has anything happened?" he asked in a tone of concern. "Oh, everything has gone wrong," she cried, almost in tears. "What do you mean?" "Harry is called to the city just when we are invited to Sophie McCallan's wedding, and Farrell has taken the limousine for some silly repairs. They'll not get back; I know they'll not. They never do." "But, Miss Marvin?" "Oh, don't try to apologize for him. He cares more for his old business than he does for me. He makes automobiles himself, and yet I can't have enough for my own personal use. I'm sorry I forgave him," she flared. "You are right, Miss Marvin; it is an outrage." She looked at Owen in astonishment. It was the first time she had ever heard him venture a critical word against Harry. "I think it is your fault," she declared. "You are the one who should see that I have cars and drivers--everything I want." "But you know the machines have not come from the town house, Miss Marvin. They will be here tomorrow." "Well, Owen, it isn't for you to say that what my brother does is an outrage. He does everything for the best." "Miss Marvin, Harry is lying to you," he said quietly. "He and your chauffeur have formed a plot against you. Your car will not be back this afternoon at all." She sprang to her feet, furious. "Owen, be still! How do you dare to say such things?" Raymond Owen had found his great moment, His enemy had set his own trap and Owen would see that he should not escape easily. The opportunity to break forever the bond of faith and affection between Harry and Pauline had come. His voice rose as he poured out his revelations and denunciations. Pauline was leaving the room, when he thrust himself before her. "You must hear me. I know what I say is true. It hurts me as deeply as it will hurt you, but you must hear it. I believe I have discovered --by the merest accident--the cause of all your perils. The plots against you have been arranged at home." "You are mad. I will not listen to you. Let me pass." "Not until you have heard," he declared firmly. "I was passing the door of the garage only a few moments ago," he went on in a rapid whisper. "I saw Farrell at the telephone. He called the private house number--the number of this phone on the table. You and Mr. Marvin were sitting here. I was so surprised that I stopped and listened to Farrell's words. I could see Mr. Marvin listening at the phone here. Farrell said: 'Mr. Marvin, you are needed at your office. Come at once.' Then he hung up the receiver and came out, laughing. He got into the limousine and drove off towards the city. If he could drive the limousine to the city, could he not drive it to the McCallan's for you?" Pauline put her hands to her ears with a protesting cry. "It isn't true," she whispered. "It is only a scheme of Farrell's to get an afternoon off." "It is a scheme of Harry's to keep you from the wedding--for what purpose only he knows. It is one of many schemes that have held your life in constant peril. I saw their plan arranged. I saw your brother hand money to Farrell at the door of the garage and they parted, laughing." Pauline's mind whirled. "I won't believe it! I can't; I can't!" she cried. Doubt and fear and fury mingled in her breast. Weeping tumultuously, she rushed past Owen and up to her own room. Two hours later, the struggle over, she called Margaret, who bathed her hot temples and dressed her for the wedding. Harry Marvin, in town, tried his best to make good use of the time he had stolen. But the thought of his well-meant chicanery was heavy on his mind and it was not unmixed with apprehension. After all, Pauline might find a way to go to the wedding. Might he not, instead of having averted a danger, simply have absented himself from the scene of danger when he was most needed? His nervousness increased. He found himself incapable of work, and at three o'clock, to the surprise of his clerks, who had thought his unexpected visit must mean an important conference of directors, he called a taxicab and started for Westbury. But he had no intention of going to Castle Marvin unless it was necessary. He meant to telephone from Westbury and learn whether or not Pauline had gone to the wedding. If she had not, he would remain away until late. A few minutes before four o'clock, Farrell, with his pretty wife whom he had called to share his plot and his holiday, drove up to a rural telegraph office. They were both laughing as Farrell handed this message to the operator: Miss Pauline Marvin, Castle Marvin, Westbury. Blow-out. Can't get back this evening. George Farre "You--don't want to say what kind of a blow-out it is, do you?" grinned the operator, glancing out of the window at the spic and span machine. "If you don't see everything you look at, you'll save your eyesight," replied Farrell cheerfully. At the next town he telephoned to the Marvin office in New York. He came out of the booth with a worried look. "The boss has left in a taxi for home," he said. "Wonder what that means. Guess we better sort of travel along towards Westbury. He might need me." They changed their course and had driven for some time at an easy rate through the smiling country when the sound of a machine coming up speedily behind caused Farrell to look around. The passenger in the open cab waved his hand and Farrell, saluting, slowed down. The cars stopped, side by side. Harry raised his hat to the young woman. "You're not going home, are you, Farrell?" he said. "I heard you'd left the office and I thought something might have happened, and I'd be near enough so you could get me quick." "Nothing has happened. I'll get along nicely with this cab. You'd better keep a good distance and not come home until tomorrow morning." "Very well, sir. That suits us fine." Farrell grinned. The taxi started on and Farrell turned off at the next crossroad. "He's a great boss, but a queer one," he said to his wife. "It's a queer family all around. I wonder what's being cooked up now." As the time of Farrell's expected return drew near Pauline's despair and anger increased with every moment. When four o'clock struck she arose and walked nervously out to the garage to ask if any word had been received from Farrell. She found Owen there. As she turned toward him, after her futile questioning, Pauline's grief suddenly mounted to anger. "It is after four, and Farrell has not returned," she exclaimed. She had come out to the yard in the exquisite white gown that she was to wear to the wedding, a flashing jewel at her white throat, her hair done regally high. Now, in her anger, she was a picture of fury made beautiful. Her outburst was interrupted by a messenger boy with a telegram. She opened the message with nervous fingers. "Blow out. Can't get back this evening," she read. She tore the message into pieces, dropped them and, stamped upon them with her white slippers. "It's true, it's true!" she cried, turning desperately to Owen. "I am terribly, hopelessly sorry--but I knew that it was true," he said solemnly. At this moment along the drive came the new gardener wheeling a barrow of fresh mold, his rake and hoe lying across it. "Palmer!" Pauline cried. The man let fall the barrow as if he had been cut with a whip lash. He looked up and for an instant his dazed eyes seemed to brighten. Then he picked up the barrow as if no one had spoken and went on. Pauline followed him. "Bring out the roadster," she called over her shoulder, and, as she stopped beside the gardener. The garage men, bewildered, but used to the kindly vagaries of their pretty employer, sent the machine down driveway. "Can you drive an automobile, Palmer?" asked Pauline. This time the man's eyes did not brighten. He looked at her respectfully, but dully. She drew him to the car and repeated the question. He only grinned foolishly and kept on shaking his head. "Wait," she said, and, running back to the house, reappeared directly wearing her hat and flowing white wrap. "Come, Palmer, you must drive me to the wedding," she declared. She made him get into the car and take the wheel. As she got in beside him, his hands fumbled aimlessly with the lever. "Palmer! Palmer!" she dinned his forgotten name into his ears. "Don't you remember the race, the road, the flying cars, the speed, the speed! Don't you remember the man who was in the lead--the man the crowd cheered for? That was you, Palmer, the greatest of all the drivers." She leaned forward in the seat, arms outstretched as if holding a tugging wheel, eyes set straight ahead, slippered feet threading imaginary levers, graceful body swerving. He watched her, frowning. A vague purpose seemed to animate the hand groping with the levers. "Wake up, Palmer! It's time for the race--the Vanderbilt Cup. Kirby and Michaels have started. There's Wharton coming to the line. Don't you see the crowds? Can't you hear them cheering? Palmer! Palmer! * * * Yes, we're coming! * * * Palmer is coming back. * * * Way there!" He found the self-starter; the engine sounded. He found the clutch and gears. His eyes were shut. The car started slowly and he opened his eyes. Pauline sank back in the seat, laughing and clapping her hands, half hysterically. "Bravo, Palmer!" she exulted. The astonished workmen saw them glide through the outer gate. Raymond Owen from his window saw them and rubbed his hands pleasantly. Fate indeed seemed to be favoring his deadly work today! The car swung into the highway. "Drive faster," commanded Pauline. The listless hands hardened on the wheel. She saw him bend over and fix his vision on the road. She thrilled at the miracle she had wrought. More speed, and the wind blew her cape from her shoulders; the dust beat in her face. She merely tightened her veil and sat silent. "Take the first turn to the right," she called in his ear as they neared the crossroad. He did not slacken the speed. "It's a sharp turn; slow a little," she cautioned. He did not seem to hear her. She placed her hand sharply on his arm. He drove past the crossroad, the speed to the last notch. Pauline tried to stand up in the seat and seize the wheel. He thrust her back with one hand, not even looking at her. He was leaning far over the wheel now, his eyes blazing. She could see the beat of blood in his temple. "Stop! Stop! You are on the wrong road. You will kill us both!" she screamed in his deaf ears. She tried again to wrest the wheel from him, but this time he held her fast after he had flung her back. She had raised up a Frankenstein for her own destruction. She was being driven by a madman. As they took the curve outside Westbury village another car filled with men and women fairly grazed them. The women screamed and the men shouted wildly after them. But they flashed on. Down the hill at Gangley's Mills the pace grew even greater. From the west prong of the road fork at the bottom a taxicab shot into view. There was a shout of warning, a rattle and creak as the taxi swerved, safe by inches. On the skirts of Clayville a group of farmers and a constable were arguing a roadside dispute. Pauline could see dim figures leap into the road waving arms; she could hear them shouting. The figures jumped to either side as Palmer drove through the group. They sprang back into the road, cursing and shaking their fists, only to be routed anew by the rush of the taxicab following. The roadster straightened out on the ledge of Scrogg Hill. In spite of the curve and the precipice Palmer held his speed. His daring, his utter mastery, stirred a kind of admiration in Pauline and the death she saw looming stirred anew her courage. She wrenched her arm free from his grip. She stood up and swung her weight against the man, rasping for the wheel. The car swerved toward the cliff, but he jerked it back, striking at her brutally with his free hand. She fell in the seat, but returned, desperate, to the encounter. She caught the wheel. She tried to command it, but his strength drew the other way. The machine shot toward the abyss. There was a crackle as the wooden guide fence splintered under the wheels. There was a crash! Harry, leaning from the taxicab behind, uttered a groan. The roadster had gone over the cliff. Fifty feet down the rock-gnarled hillside they took Pauline from the clutch of the dead driver. His fall had broken hers and it was only from fear that she had fainted. Harry, pressing the taxi driver's flask to her lips, saw her eyes open and his cry was like a prayer of thanksgiving. When Harry lifted Pauline to carry her to the taxicab, to his abasement he felt her hands press him away. He thought she had not yet recovered, that she believed herself still in the grasp of the madman. He set her on her feet and looked at her questioningly. Without a word she turned from him and started up the road. "Pauline!" he cried. "What do you mean? Don't you know me? It's Harry." She kept on without turning. He caught her by the arm. "Don't you know me, your brother?" he pleaded. She turned, tremblingly. "You are not my brother," she blazed. "And I did not know you until today." "You are hurt and ill, dearest. Come, let me take you home." She walked on up the road. "But where are you going?" he demanded. "I am going to the wedding. You tried to keep me away by your base trick but you can't do it." Now he understood. "I know; I know," he groaned. "It was the meanest and most useless thing. But I did not think it was safe for you to go to the wedding. I am sorry to the bottom of my heart." "Goodbye," she said coldly, walking on. "But you can't go like that," he exclaimed, pointing to her torn and draggled clothes, her unfastened hair. "It is better to go to friends whom I can trust," she said coldly, and moved on. As gently as he could he lifted her in his arms and carried her to the taxicab. Placing her in the seat he followed, and as the machine started began to pour out his repentance. She would not even answer, but sat with averted face, weeping and trembling. At last she became quiet. He drew her tattered wrap closer about her shoulders and put his arm around her so that her head rested against his breast. A moment later, looking down, he was surprised to see that she was smiling like a tired child. CHAPTER XVIII A HOT YOUNG COMET "That's right; praise her; pet her; make her think she's great, so she'll do it all over again." Harry turned away wrathfully from the joyous greetings of Lucille and Chauncey Hamlin to Pauline. "Harry is quite right," said Lucille. "I ought to snub you entirely. It is disgraceful, it's wicked to be as brave as you are, Polly." "Oh, I say, Lucy," pleaded her brother. "You'll have Miss Pauline all upset." "She likes it," snapped Harry. "She's been upset out of everything from a balloon to a house afire, and now she's looking for new capsizable craft." "Polly! You wouldn't try it again! You don't want any more thrills after this?" Lucille's astonishment was sincere. Pauline cast a serpentine glance at Harry. "Am I to live quietly at home with a creature like him?" she inquired. "Why don't you have me beheaded, O Great White Queen?" "The braves are reserved for torture. Where are you people going so bright and early?" she added turning to Chauncey. "Going to take you for a little morning spin. Car's perfectly safe." "Yes, do come along, Polly," urged Lucille. "What! In a safe car? Never!" exclaimed Harry. "It isn't done, you know--not in this family. Now, if you had a hot restless young comet hitched at the door, Chauncey." Pauline laughed merrily. "No, I couldn't go this morning even behind a restless young comet." She glanced mischievously at Harry. "Duty before pleasure; have important business on hand. No, I can't tell even you, Lucille--you're not to be trusted. You'd be sure to tell Harry." As the Hamlins drove off, Harry turned anxiously. "You've not forgotten your promise? There is to be a long rest from wildness, isn't there--no more adventures?" "Yes--a rest from wild ones. I am going to have a tame adventure now." "Polly, Polly! What do you mean?" "This," she answered, taking the morning paper from the table. Unfolding it, she showed him a headline: GREAT LORDNOR STABLES TO BE AUCTIONED World-Famous Horses of Late Millionaire Sportsman Under Hammer. "Well?" questioned Harry. "Don't you see?" she tantalized him. "Not in the least." "I am going to buy Firefly and ride him in the steeplechase handicap." Harry's smile was almost despairing, but he answered quickly. "Oh, I see. You'll have me ride him and break my precious neck. I thought for a second you meant to ride yourself." "That's just what I do mean. It will be gorgeously exciting--and perfectly safe." "Safe?" "Well, of course, I might be killed by a fall or something." He laughed in spite of himself. "I shall not permit it," he said. "You will not permit it?" she beamed. "Then I'll ask my guardian. I may ride Firefly in the steeplechase if I choose, mayn't I, Owen?" she asked brightly. Pauline could never bear malice; already she had forgiven Owen, as well as Harry. The secretary had just entered and was watching the two with a questioning eye. "If we own Firefly, you may," he smiled back at her. "I told you," she triumphed over Harry. "But we don't own him," said Owen, puzzled. "We shall this afternoon. The Lordnor stables are being sold. Please give me a great deal of money so that I can't be outbid." "Does Miss Pauline really mean this?" asked the secretary. "She does," Harry answered in a tone of disgust at what he thought now was only Owen's weakness. There seemed no chance of a plot against Pauline in this original scheme of her own. "She rides wonderfully. I do not see why she should not," Owen condescended. "You don't seem to see much of anything," declared Harry. "But you'll take me to the auction?" coaxed Pauline. "I'll have to--or you'll spend the whole estate on a Shetland pony." Owen sauntered from the room, laughing. Bareheaded he walked quite across the garden and down into the wood-copse by the path gate. A gypsy was leaning upon the gate and gazing nervously up and down the road. He turned at the sound of Owen's footsteps, and the eyes of the young chief, Michel Mario, gazed apprehensively into the smiling eyes of the secretary. "How are you, Balthazar?" greeted Owen. "Don't use that name to me," pleaded the gypsy. "You have work for me? I have come all the way back from Port Vincent to see you." "It was kind of you," said Owen with the faintest tinge of sarcasm. "Yes, I have important work for you. Have you ever doctored a horse, Balthazar?" "Many times--but not with my beauty medicine," grinned the chief. "I mean with a hypodermic needle. I mean a race horse-so that he might possibly fall in a race." "And injure the rider?" "Exactly." "It is very easy--but very dangerous. I should want--" "I know; I know," exclaimed Owen petulantly. "Here is the money." Balthazar gloated over the yellow bills. "And here is the weapon." The Gypsy took the needle from the hand of the secretary and thrust it quickly into the inside pocket of his blouse. "Thank you, master. I will do what you say," said the Gypsy, making a move to go. "Not quite so fast," commanded Owen. "You do not know the place or the time." "The Jericho track next Saturday," answered the Gypsy promptly. "What is the horse?" "Firefly. It will be bought at the Jericho stables this afternoon. You will be there to see it and to remember it. Goodbye now." "Goodbye master--and many thanks." Michael Caliban, wealthiest of sportsmen, attended the auction of the Lordnor stables, and seemed bent on adding the entire string of splendid horses to his own far-famed monarchs of the track. The only time during the afternoon that he met with defeat was when the famous steeplechaser Firefly was brought out. "Five hundred dollars," said Caliban curtly. "Six hundred," said the musical voice of a girl and the crowd turned to look. Caliban smiled condescendingly. "A thousand," he said. "There, you see you can't do it. The horse isn't worth any more," cautioned Harry. "Fifteen hundred dollars," cried Pauline. "Does she mean that, or is this only a joke?" demanded Caliban, turning to the auctioneer. "The lady's word is good enough for me. Going at fifteen hundred-- going, going--" "Two thousand dollars. I guess that'll stop any jokes around here," grinned Caliban. "Three thousand," said Pauline so quickly that even Harry gasped, cut short in mid-protest. Caliban turned away and strode disgustedly out of the crowd amid hoots of laughter. "He is worth it; why he is worth any price," cried Pauline as the smiling groom led Firefly up to her. The magnificent animal thrust its nose instantly between her outstretched arms, and as she patted him delightedly the crowd rippled with spontaneous applause. Harry joined her on the way to see Firefly put in his stall. He gave the caretaker instructions, and laughingly dragged Pauline away from her new pet. As they entered their machine, Raymond Owen came from behind the stable. Engrossed in the business complications growing out of the European conflict, Harry had quite forgotten Firefly and the steeplechase when the day of the great Jericho handicap arrived. He was in the library reading a letter when there burst upon his sight through the open doorway a vision that took his breath away. Pauline, in full jockey uniform, white and blue and yellow, was pirouetting on her gleaming black boots before him. "Polly!" he cried, unable to grasp the meaning of the prank. "Have you cut off your hair?" he added in alarm. "No; here it is," she laughed, snapping off her visored cap and revealing masses of hair. "Oh, don't do it," he begged. "Look! Here's a letter from the McCallans asking us to their house party in the Adirondacks. We're expected tomorrow. Let's go there instead." He handed her the letter. Without glancing at it she flicked it into the air with her riding crop and danced out of her room.. "So I surrender again," he murmured, laughing in spite of himself. Riding out toward the starting line, Pauline swerved her course a little to avoid the gaze of the gentlemen riders who eyed her curiously. She heard a call from an automobile beside the track and rode, over to where Harry and Owen were seated in the car. Their lifted hats as, she bent to shake hands with them caused the crowd to stare in astonishment. Pauline, blushing furiously, sped Firefly to the line. "That horse works queer," commented Harry, as she rode away. "Do you think so?" asked Owen. "Yes, it's on edge, but its legs are shaky. I wonder..." But the riders were ready. The signal sounded. The crowd's cheer rose in the names of their various favorites. Field-glasses were unbuckled. "By jolly, Firefly took the first jump in the lead," cried Harry, a thrill of admiration lightening the worry in his heart. "He's all right," said Owen. Over the wide green the horses began to string out, with Firefly ahead. "She's going to win it; I believe she is," exclaimed Harry excitedly as he and Owen stood in the automobile. "No--no; he wobbled at the fourth jump. He's losing ground." But Firefly seemed suddenly to grip his strength as one horse passed him. He pulled himself together under Pauline's urging. He regained the lead. They came down splendidly toward the homestretch. The bodies of the powerful beasts rose one by one over the last hedge. "They're over! They've won--or, heaven help her! They're down!" Leading at the last jump, the drugged heart of the great horse had conquered his courage. As he stumbled heavily, Pauline shot over his head and lay helpless in the path of the other riders. Harry, dashing madly toward the track, but hopelessly far from her, had to turn away his head as the crashing hoofs passed her. When he looked again, attendants were carrying her swiftly to the clubhouse. He sped toward it, Owen following. Harry tore his way through the excited crowd to the side of Pauline. A doctor was administering restoratives. Pauline opened her eyes and looked about her bewildered. She saw Harry's anxious face and smiled penitently. "I've--learned a lesson this time," she whispered. "It is nothing serious--her shoulder bruised a little," said the doctor. "Thank Heaven!" breathed Raymond Owen with well feigned emotion. CHAPTER XIX OWEN OFFERS A REWARD Cries of delight coming, in the voice of Pauline, from the direction of the garage made Harry lay down his newspaper and go forth to investigate. As he approached he saw Bemis and Lucille's coachman lifting a crate from a carriage. From within the crate came the whimpering barks of an imprisoned bull terrier. "Oh, isn't he dear?" cried Pauline turning to Harry. "I don't know, I haven't yet made his acquaintance. Where did he come from?" "Lucille sent him to me. Johnson just brought him over. Hurry, Bemis, and let him out. The poor darling!" "Is that what is called puppy love?" inquired Harry. "Hush," commanded Pauline. "And Bemis, run and tell Martha to cook something for him--a beefsteak and potatoes." "And oysters on the half shell," suggested Harry. "Love me," announced Pauline sternly, "love my dog." The coachman had ripped of the last top bar of the crate and a splendid terrier sprang out with a suddenness that made Pauline retreat a little. But, as if he had been trained to his part, he bent his head, and, with wagging tail, approached her. In an instant she was kneeling beside him rewarding his homage with enthusiastic pats and fantastic encomiums. "Why, he likes me already--isn't he charming?" she demanded. Harry threw up his hands-- "And this for a dog--a new dog--possibly a mad dog!" "You are a brute." The dog was making rapid acquaintance with his new home, investigating the garage and, more profoundly, the kitchen, door. "Here, Cyrus, come Cyrus," called Pauline, and started towards the house. Owen, in his motorcycle togs, was lighting a cigar on the veranda when they came up the steps. Without even pretending to enter into Pauline's enthusiasm over the terrier, he excused himself and walked off briskly in the direction of the garage. A few minutes later they saw him on the motorcycle speeding down the drive. "I wonder what the impressive business is today," remarked Harry sarcastically. "Let poor Owen alone. He is good and kind even if he doesn't care for Cyrus." "Look here! Why don't you ever say any of these nice things to me-- the things, you say to dogs--and secretaries?" "Because I've promised to marry you--some day--and it is fatal to let a husband--even a futurity husband--know that you admire him." "Well, as long as you do, it is all right." A half mile down the main road to Westbury a runabout was drawn up, and a converted gypsy was alternately pretending to repair an imaginary break and relieving his nerve-strain by pacing the road. Balthazar's fantastic garments had given way to a plain sack suit and motor duster, but the profit of his employment by Raymond Owen was worth the discomfort of becoming "civilized." The muttering of a distant motor made him fall to his knees and, wrench in hand, wiggle hastily under the machine. To all appearance he was bitterly pre-occupied with the woes of a stalled tourist when a motorcycle chugged to a stop beside the runabout and Owen called him. "I thought you had failed of our appointment, master," he said eagerly as he crawled out. "I have waited for more than half an hour." "It is sad that you should be inconvenienced, old friend," answered Owen. "I have done what you commanded me, master," Balthazar said with an ingratiating smile. "I have found them." "Found whom?" "The friends I spoke about at our last meeting--the little band that earns money by--making it." "Oh, yes--your counterfeiters. Are they to be trusted?" "Master, all guilty men are to be trusted. There is always protection in knowing the sins of others." "Sometimes, Balthazar, I almost suspect you of possessing a brain. But, remember, I have told you that I shall soon be through--unless you accomplish something." "Master, it is because I dare not risk your freedom--your life. For myself I care nothing. I live to serve you, who have been my benefactor." "You lie, of course," remarked Owen casually. "But what of the new plan?" "They are in Bantersville, only twelve miles from Castle Marvin. A house that has been long occupied and with no houses near." "And they are still manufacturing coins there?" "Yes; but they are becoming frightened. Two of the distributors have been arrested. They would be glad of a safer, a swifter method of making money." "Come along, then." Owen mounted the motorcycle while Balthazar sprang to the seat and started the runabout. They sped briskly over the roads, turning at last into an old weed-grown wagon path fringed copse-like by the branches of ever-hanging trees. The machine swished through the barrier leaves and came out upon a small clearing where there stood a gaunt house, evidently long deserted. Balthazar drove on along the road for almost a quarter of a mile before he stopped the machine, Owen following without question. They left the runabout and the motorcycle and walked back to the house. "It is an excellent location," commented Owen, as Balthazar lead the way into a basement entrance. "Who did you say was the man in charge of the--concern?" "Rupert Wallace. He is a world-traveler like yourself, though no match for you in mind, master." Balthazar, as he spoke, was rapping lightly on a wall, which had no sign of a door. It was pitch dark where they stood. But suddenly with hardly a sound, two sliding doors opened to the Gypsy's signal and a faint light from a gas jet on the wall gleamed on an inner passage. Balthazar, closely followed by Owen, walked quickly down the secret hall, and, without signal this time, another set of silent doors opened upon a brightly lighted room. A crabbed, withered woman admitted them. The room was overheated because of the presence of a gas forge on which a cauldron of metal was being melted. On one side there was a stamping press, and on the other a set of molds. Wallace noted Owen's curiosity, and stepping to the table in the middle of the room, picked up a handful of half-dollar pieces. "You are interested in our work--the work of supplying the poor with sufficient funds to meet the increased cost of living," he said, smiling. "These are some of our product. We are proud of them. The weight is exactly that of the true fifty-cent piece. And only one man in fifty could tell the difference in the ring of the metal." Owen looked at the coins in sincere admiration. "It is very remarkable," he said. "But Balthazar tells me--" "I know. You have a little business of secrecy for myself and my friends. You may speak here in perfect safety, Mr. Owen. Gossip is not a fault--or a possibility--of our profession." "I do not believe there is anything to say but what Balthazar has already told you, except--" Owen hesitated. "Except what, master? Is there a change in the plan?" asked Balthazar. "I think there might be. Something occurred today that might give us a favorable lead. Miss Pauline received as a gift a terrier dog. I believe it could be made use of." "In what way?" asked the counterfeiter. "By stealing it and bringing it here." "I don't understand--ah, yes; indeed I do." "Excellent, master," exclaimed Balthazar. "It could be done today. Can I have two of your men, Rupert?" "Yes; take Gaston and Firenzi. They are always to be trusted." At his words two men, stepped forward. One of them had been working at the metal pots. But in response to a hurried word from Rupert he quickly threw off his cap and apron, and caught up a hat and coat. Rupert Wallace stepped to the side of the room where a pair of upright levers stood out of the floor like the levers of an automobile. He pulled the one nearest him and the sliding doors parted softly. Owen and Balthazar, with their new escort, stepped through. For a moment, Wallace waited. Then he drew back the other lever, and the departing guests found as they reached the end of the secret passage, that their path opened, almost magically before them, in the hushed unfolding of the second door. "Goodbye, Cyrus," said, Harry as Pauline strolling down the garden with him, tossed to her new pet a dainty from the box of bon-bons she carried. "What do you mean by that?" she demanded. "That the oysters on the half shell would be better for his health." "I didn't give him oysters on the half shell." "No; but you gave him everything else in the house. He is stuffed like the fatted calf--or like the prodigal son--I don't care which--" "If he likes candy he shall have candy," declared Pauline, sitting down on an arbor bench and extending another sugar-plum to the dog. The gratitude of Cyrus was expressed in a leap to the side of his mistress. As Harry sat down, he discovered that Cyrus had occupied the favored place beside Pauline. Next instant there was a yowl of dismay and the adored gift of Lucille fell several feet away from the bench. "Harry! I think that is dreadful!" exclaimed Pauline, springing to her feet. "I do, too," he answered. "That was why I threw it off the bench." "To treat a poor innocent dumb creature like that!" "Polly! You don't mean it, do you? You think I hurt him?" "You've-hurt-his-feelings." "That doesn't matter, but if I've hurt yours--it does. I apologize." "You are always joking. You don't understand how sweet and dear animals are. You will probably treat me the same way after we are married." She ran to the spot where the wary Cyrus was munching the last piece of candy. But he accepted her caresses without enthusiasm, keeping a careful eye on Harry. She called to the dog and walked briskly toward the house. But Cyrus did not follow. The box of candy was still on the garden bench, and Cyrus was not immune to temptation. Owen followed on his motorcycle the runabout in which Balthazar and the two chosen members of Rupert Wallace's band made their swift journey toward Castle Marvin. A quarter of a mile from the grounds Owen drew alongside. "This would be a good place to stop. The car can be hidden in the lane." "Yes; master," said Balthazar. He wheeled the machine upon a narrow roadway into the cover of the woods, and, with his companions, got out. Owen rode on ahead and was waiting for them as they neared the little foot path gate to the Marvin grounds. "Look through the hedge there," he directed. Balthazar crawled on his hands and knees to the box wall that surrounded the grounds. He thrust his shoulders through the bush and gazed for a moment at the dog devouring Pauline's bon-bons on the bench. "I should say it would be well to act now--instantly, master," he cried, returning. "Go on. I will be at the house, and will try to hold them back if there is any noise." As Owen began to wheel his cycle up the drive to Castle Marvin, Balthazar and his two aides wriggled through the hedge-row, crossed a strip of sward and reached the bench. Balthazar caught the dog's head in his powerful hands. There was not a sound. The animal's muzzle was shut fast and in a minute it had been tied, leg and body. They ran to the gate, to the runabout, and were away. "Why Harry, I can't find him anywhere. What could have happened to him?" cried Pauline, rushing into the library. "Owen lost? Thank Heaven!" he exclaimed fervently. "No; Cyrus. Harry it's your fault. He was angry because you pushed him off the bench and he ran away." "Polly," he said, wheeling in his chair, "I am not worried. I decline to be worried. And I am going away from here." "Not before you help me find Cyrus." "Yes--long before." She turned and whisked crossly out of the room. Harry picked up his hat and coat, and in a few minutes was being driven away by Farrell on an urgent call to town. Pauline stood on the veranda and watched his departure with silent wrath. "I wonder if he is really cruel--or--if he is just a man and doesn't know any better," she pondered audibly. Then, as she saw Owen approaching from the side path, "Oh, Owen, won't you help me? I've lost Cyrus!" "Cyrus? Am I sure whom you mean? Ah, yes; the new member of our family circle." "Yes; he's gone." "The only thing to do, I should say, is to advertise. I will call up the newspapers immediately, Miss Pauline." "You are dear! I must have him back. Think what Lucille would say if I lost him on the first day!" "I'll offer a generous reward and he'll soon be back." "Thank you, Owen." CHAPTER XX CYRUS MAKES A REPUTATION The proceedings behind the hidden doors in the cellar of the ruined house between Bathwater and Castle Marvin were not interrupted by so small a matter as the kidnapping of an heiress--a kidnapping that had progressed no further as yet than the capture of a dog. As Owen stepped into the den the next forenoon he saw the bull terrier tied to the wall. "I see we have the main ingredient of the repast in hand." "The main ingredient and the most dangerous," said Wallace. "He has done nothing but howl and bark. May we kill him?" "Not yet," answered Owen. "It is possible that she might demand sight of him before entering the house, or some nonsense of that sort. I would let him howl a little longer." "Very well," laughed Wallace. "What orders have you for us today, sir?" The other counterfeiters kept steadily on at their work over the melting pots, the molds and stamping machines. The old woman was stacking half-dollar pieces at the table. "Why do you have the woman here?" demanded Owen suddenly. "To prevent starvation," answered Wallace. "Carrie is not only our purchasing agent, but our excellent cook." The hag looked up for a moment with a cackle of appreciation; then bent again to her work. "Can she write?" asked Owen. "Yes." "Well, then, she can help us. Here is an advertisement which appears in the morning papers." He presented a newspaper clipping to Wallace, which read: LOST--A fine white bull terrier. Finder will receive liberal reward if dog is returned to Pauline Marvin. Castle Marvin, N. Y. "What do you want Carrie to do?" "Answer the advertisement. Just call her over here." The hag laid down the coins and moved laboriously to the, table. Wallace produced from a drawer a pen, paper and ink, and told the woman to take his chair. Owen dictated: "Miss Pauline Marvin: "A dog came to my house yesterday which I think is the one you advertise for. I am an old, crippled woman and it's hard for me to get out. Can't you come and see if it is your dog? "Mary Sheila, 233 Myrtle Avenue." The old woman wrote slowly in a shaking hand, and Owen waited patiently while she addressed an envelope. Then he placed the letter in the envelope, sealed it, and took his leave. "And no sign of Cyrus?" inquired Harry cheerily as he entered the library, where Pauline sat disconsolate. She did not even answer and she was still gazing dejectedly out of the window when Bemis brought in the mail. Two of the letters she laid aside, unread; the third, she opened: "A dog came to my house yesterday --" Her face lighted with hope and happiness; she read no further. "Oh, isn't Owen--splendid," she breathed. "He knew just what to do." And with the letter in her hand she ran out to the veranda. "Harry! Harry!" she called across the garden. There was no answer. "Run up to Mr. Marvin's room and see if he is there, Margaret. Bemis, go out and see if he is at the garage." "No, Miss Marvin," said Bemis. "He has gone into Westbury." Pauline stood silent for a moment. "Well, then I must go myself," she said with quick decision. She sped upstairs and within a few minutes was, out at the garage in her motoring dress. A mechanic was working over her racing car in front of the garage, the racing car that was just recovering from recent calamity in the international race. "Is it all fixed, Employ? Can I drive it today?" she asked eagerly. "Why--yes, ma'am--you could," said the mechanic. "But I haven't got it polished up yet." "That doesn't matter in the least. I want to use it to day--now." She sprang lightly to the seat of the lithe racer and in a moment was away down the drive. NO. 233 Myrtle avenue was an address a little difficult to find. Myrtle avenue was well outside the new town and Pauline had made several inquiries before an elderly man, whom she found in the telegraph office, volunteered directions. She thanked him, and drove back for two miles before she found the turn he had indicated. The appearance of the place was unprepossessing enough to dampen even the ambitious courage of Pauline. But the sight of woman on the porch training a vine over the front door, allayed her fears. "You are Mrs. Sheila--you sent me a message that you had found my dog?" she asked, approaching. For a moment the confusion that the woman had meant to simulate was sincere. She had expected to see no such vision as that of Pauline on the blackened steps of the coiners' den. "A dog?" she quavered vaguely. Then, "Oh, yes, my--dear little lady --the pretty white dog. He came to us yesterday. My son he brought me the newspaper, and--" "Oh, you are just a dear," cried Pauline. "May I see him now? I am so fond of him!" "Yes, my little lady. Will you come in?" Pauline followed her into the basement. She stepped back with a tremor of suspicion as the woman rapped three times upon the folding doors, and they opened silently on their oiled rails. But she was inside the narrow passage, and the light that gleamed through the second pair of doors allayed her anxiety. With a bow and the wave of a directing hand, the old woman waited for Pauline to enter. In a breath she was seized from both sides. Strong cruel hands held her, while Wallace smothered her cries with a tight-drawn bandage. She had hardly had time to see the little terrier tugging at his chain in the corner of the room, but his wild barking was all she knew of possible assistance in the plight in which she found herself. They laid her on the floor. She heard a voice that seemed strangely familiar giving abrupt orders. Pauline sought in vain to place the memory of the voice of Balthazar, the Gypsy. Suddenly she heard cries. The barking of the dog had stopped and there was the thud of heavy foot steps on the stone floor of the cellar. "Catch him! Shoot if you have to," came the command in the mysteriously familiar voice. She felt that her captors were no longer near. There was a beat of rushing foot-steps on the floor. It was several minutes before she heard voices again. "The cur hasn't been there long enough to know her. It won't make any difference," said Wallace, coming through the open doors. "But I'm sorry it got away." "Where is Miss Pauline?" asked Harry, as he entered the house on his return from Westbury. "She has found her dog, sir," answered Margaret, smiling. "She went to get him--with the racing car." His brow darkened. "The advertisement was answered, you mean, Margaret?" "I think so, sir." An hour later he walked into the garden and sat down on the rustic bench where he and Pauline had quarreled. He had just taken up his newspaper when he was startled by the spring of a small warm body fairly into his face. Lowering the torn paper, he saw Pauline's dog cavorting around the bench in circles of excitement. The animal rushed towards him again, but did not leap this time. It came very near and, with braced feet, began to bark wildly. Harry stood up. The dog, with another volley of barks, started towards the gate. Harry followed instinctively. The terrier dashed ahead of him, reached the, gate, returned, renewed the appealing barks, and again led the way. In another minute Harry was following the urgent little guide. He was thoroughly stirred now. As the dog returned to him the second time, with its appealing yelps, he quickened his speed. After traversing five miles of dust-laden road they reached a certain house on the thoroughfare, which still carried the dignity of "Myrtle avenue." The dog rushed up the steps. Harry, following closely, was surprised to find the door was ajar. He entered and found himself in the cellar passageway. A sound outside made him grasp the broken rope on the collar of the dog. It was an automobile wheezing to a stop and it was followed by the sound of voices. The outer door opened. Harry drew the dog aside into the darkness and held its muzzle tight. Four men entered. One rapped on the wall and the panels opened softly. The man went in. Harry's hand had fallen on a slim stick as he stooped in the darkness, and he slipped the stick into the aperture between the folding doors. He carried the dog to the outer door and thrust it through. Then he came back. "Who is the woman?" asked a gruff voice. "She does not concern you. Have you distributed all of the coins?" "All but $5,000. She's a peach, ain't she?" The door crashed at their heels. Harry was in the room. He had gripped Wallace by the throat before the man could stir. The others backed toward their hidden weapons. Shots blazed in the room but the smoke was protection for Harry, swinging wildly at whomsoever he saw. "You're there, Polly?" "Yes," she gasped, tugging at her bonds in desperation. She was almost free. Harry had Wallace at his feet and Wallace's gun was in his hand. He blazed blindly through room. A shriek told of one man gone. Pauline felt strong hands grasp her. She was whisked through the door; through the outer door and away, into the fresh air, and into the waiting automobile. She felt Harry's hot breath on her fore head as they sped in flight. There was clamor behind them for a moment car was starting. Then came only the thrash of footsteps through the grassy road as the coiners rushed to their own machine. One stern command reached the ears of Pauline and Harry as they sped on: "It's your lives or theirs. Get them or kill yourselves." "It's no use, Polly. Come," cried Harry, after a time. His voice sounded grim, peremptory. The machine with a sudden swerve had gone almost off the road with an exploded tire. It was only Harry's powerful hand that had saved them from wreck. But as he helped Pauline out and led her on a run into the forest he heard the sound of the pursuing machine coming to a stop and the tumult of voices behind them. He knew that one peril had only been supplanted by another. "Where--Where are we going, Harry?" "The Gorman camp--if we can make it; if we can reach the river." "There's the old quarry," she exclaimed as they came out on the crest of a blast-gnarled cliff overlooking a stream. "I know their camp is near the quarry." "But on the other side of the river. Don't talk; run," he pleaded, leading her down a footpath that traced a winding way over the face of the cliff into the quarry. In the shelter of the rocks there stood two small buildings about five hundred yards apart. One was the old tool house of the deserted quarry. The other was a hunter's hut, evidently newly built. A commanding cry came from the top of the cliff. "Halt or we fire!" They ran on. A shot echoed and a bullet flattened itself against the stone base of the quarry not two yards from Pauline. "In here--quick," said Harry, dragging her to the hunter's lodge and thrusting her through the open door. There was another shot and the thud of another bullet as he slammed the door. "It looks like a fight now, Polly," he said, as he' moved quickly around the hut. "And thank Heaven--here's something to fight with." From a rack in the wall he lifted down a Winchester rifle and a belt of cartridges. "Get into the corner and lie down," he ordered. "No, give me the revolver," cried Pauline. She did not wait for his protest, but drew from hilt coat pocket the pistol he had wrested from Wallace. For an instant he looked at her with mingled admiration, love and fear. He opened the little window of the hut, aimed and fired three shots at the group of six men who were running down the cliff path. "Into the tool house," ordered Balthazar, stopping only for a glance at one of his fellows who had fallen. The five gained the workmen's hut and burst the door open. Immediately from the air hole and the wide chinks in the sagging walls came a blaze of shots. A small white dog ran down the path into the quarry, but no one saw it. Balthazar was searching the tool-house. "Ha!" he exclaimed suddenly. "That is what we want!" He lifted from the floor a box of blasting powder. But the next instant he dropped it and sprawled, cursing, beside the half-spilled contents. Another man, shot through the body, had fallen over his leader. Balthazar quickly recovered himself. He whisked about the hut and found a coil of fuse. The shots were still dinning in his ears while he fashioned, with the powder and the box and the fuse, a bomb powerful enough to have shattered tons of imbedded stone. "Stop shooting," he commanded. "Here's a better way!" As he suddenly threw open the door and dashed out, he nearly fell over the dog whining in terror. But Balthazar kept on. In a better business--with a heart in him--he would have been counted among the bravest of men. Running a swaying, zigzag course, in the very face of the fire of Harry and Pauline, he reached the hunter's hut and dropped the bomb beside it. He did not try to return. With the long fuse in his hand he moved into shelter behind the hut, struck a match, lighted the fuse, and fled toward the river. After him ran the small white dog. Balthazar turned and uttered a scream of rage. He dashed at the animal, which dodged and passed him. In its teeth it held the bomb he had just laid at the risk of his life. The fuse was sputtering behind as the dog fled. Balthazar pursued desperately. The path to the river led through a narrow defile of rock. But the beast was not trapped at the water's edge as the Gypsy had expected. It took to the water with a wide plunge. Balthazar turned away, cursing. He rushed back to the huts. The guns and pistols were silent. He picked up from the side of the path a huge piece of wood. As he neared his companions, he shouted: "Come out! Rush them, You cowards! Follow me!" Harry fired his last two shots and two men fell. Pauline had long ago emptied the revolver. Three men came on. There was a crash as the log in Balthazar's mighty hands beat down the door and he staggered through. But Harry was upon him. He hurled the Gypsy across the room. He charged at the others and one went down. Through the door came four men. "It's Harry. Help him!" cried Pauline. Balthazar charged straight at the newcomers but he did not attempt to fight. He was out through the door and away to the river before they could intercept him. Within a few moments his companions lay bound on the hut floor. "But how did you find out? How did you know we needed you?" asked Pauline afterward of young Richard Gorman, whose camping party had been the rescuers. "That's the girl who told us," he said, pointing to a dejected little bull terrier that stood, quaking with excitement, a few feet away. "Cyrus!" cried Pauline, running and clutching the little terrier in her arms. "Yes, he brought us the dead bomb and we knew something was up." CHAPTER XXI THE GUEST OF HONOR "Well, prove it," said Harry. "Show me that you mean it!" "Why, Harry, what a woman says she, always means." "Always means not to do." "But, Harry, really I'm going to be good this time," pleaded Pauline. They were emerging from the gate of the Marvin mansion to the avenue, and as Harry turned to Pauline with a skeptical reply on his lips, the approach of a young man of military bearing stopped him. "By Jove, isn't that--who the deuce is it? Why, Benny Summers!" The young man was hurrying by without recognition, when Harry called sharply: "Hello, Ben!" "Harry--Harry Marvin! By the coin of Croesus, is it really you?" "No," said Harry, grasping his hand, "not the 'you' you used to know. I've been driven into premature old age by caring for a militant sister. Polly, this is Ensign Summers of the navy. Please promise me that you won't get him into danger, because he used to be a friend of mine. He has never done anything more dangerous than run a submarine and shoot torpedoes out of it in a field of mines." "A submarine? Torpedoes?" cried Pauline. "Isn't that beautiful." "But, Benny, how are you? What have you been doing? I haven't seen you in a thousand years." "I'm still at it. And I've got it, Harry. I give you my word, I have." "Got what?" "The torpedo--I mean THE torpedo, in capital letters and italics with a line under the word. I've invented one that would blow--well-- I've got it." "Congratulations, felicitations, laudatory, remarks, and enthusiasm," cried Harry. "Without having slightest idea what a torpedo is, I rejoice with you. Come on back to the house, and tell us about it." "I'm sorry, I can't, Harry, now. I'm engaged for a conference with the Naval Board, and I'm late already. But will you and Miss Marvin come to luncheon with me tomorrow?" "Why not you with us, we saw you first?" Summers laughed. "Well, for this reason, I want you to meet Mlle. de Longeon, who will preside at this particular luncheon, and who is--" The flush that came suddenly to the cheeks of the young officer brought involuntary laughter from Harry and Pauline. "I take that as an acceptance--the Kerrimore, East Fifty-sixth street," he called, sharing in their laughter as he fled. But at the gate of the Marvin house he came upon Raymond Owen. There was a hasty clasp of hands and "You're to come, too," cried Summers, continuing his flight. "Where am I to come?" asked Owen, as he approached Harry and Pauline. "To luncheon with Ensign Summers tomorrow. Isn't he dear? I love men who blush. They seem so innocent." "The Fates defend us!" implored Harry. * * * * * Ensign Summers had gained a position beyond his rank in the navy. A natural bent toward science and a patriotic bent toward the use of science as a means of national defense had inspired him to experiments which had resulted in success amazing even to himself. He had been allowed--during the year preceding the meeting with Harry and Pauline --a leave of absence. In that time he had visited Italy, France, England and Germany, and had studied under naval experts. He had come back home with his own little idea undiminished in its importance to his own mind, and he had proceeded with youthful enthusiasm and effrontery to prove its importance to the highest of his commanders. The tests now about to be made--tests of a new torpedo gun and new torpedo--had been ordered by the mightiest in the land. Triumphant in his discovery and wealthy in his own right, Summers was the happiest of men. It was in Paris that he had met Mlle. del Longeon. Exquisitely beautiful, of the alluring and languorous type, quick of wit, tactful, and with great charm of manner, she had completely fascinated the young officer. He had vowed his adoration of her almost before he knew her. His avowals had been repulsed with just that margin of insincerity that would double his ardor. It had required many letters to induce Mlle. de Longeon to leave her beloved Paris and visit friends in America. Summers knew she was not a Frenchwoman, but he was totally in the dark as to what was her nationality. Summers didn't care. He was madly mad in love with her, and there was no other thing to consider. It was for this reason that Mlle. de Longeon was the guest of honor at the little luncheon in his rooms, to which he had invited Harry and Pauline. The affair was quite informal. There were a number of navy men present, a few young married people. The atmosphere of the gathering was "sublimely innocuous," as Mlle. de Longeon remarked to Summers in the hall after the guests had departed. But Mlle. de Longeon had met one guest who did not impress her as innocuous--or sublime--Raymond Owen. Pauline had presented the secretary on his arrival, and Owen had immediately devoted himself to her. Not long after luncheon was served the voice of Mlle. de Longeon rose suddenly above the general talk. "But, Mr. Summers, you have not told us yet of your new invention. When shall the plans be ready? When shall you rise to the realization of your true success?" Summers beamed his happiness in the face of the brazen compliment, like the good and silly boy he was. "I'm supposed to keep this secret," he answered, "but I can trust every one here, I know. The plans are going to be sent out day after tomorrow." "You mean you will have them completed--all those intricate plans?" queried Mlle. de Longeon in a tone of breathless admiration. "I'll work all tonight and most of tomorrow; but, of course, it's only a case of putting into words ideas that have already been put into solid metal. My gun and torpedo are ready for work. It isn't so very difficult, and it's--well, it's a lot of fun." "And great honor," paid the woman he loved. For a moment their eyes met, but only for a moment. The next, Catin, the valet, who was taking charge of the luncheon, under pretense of anticipating a waiter moved quickly to fill her wine glass. Even the subtle eye of Owen was not sharp enough to see Mlle. de Longeon pass him a crushed slip of paper, and she had been too long trained to concealment of even the simplest emotions to betray uneasiness now. Nevertheless, there was the possibility of surprising Mlle. de Longeon, and that possibility was realized as she glanced at Raymond Owen. His set, tense face reflected for the moment all his hatred of Harry and Pauline, who were talking blithely with Ensign Summers, another naval officer and two of the wives of the civilian visitors. She turned to him with a suddenness that would have seemed abrupt in the manner of one less beautiful. "Mr. Owen, do come to see me," she said. "I am sure--at least I think I am sure--that we have many matters of mutual interest." In her softly modulated tones, the invitation had no significance beyond the literal meaning of the words. "It will be an honor," he answered. "Tomorrow evening, then?" "Delighted. And, later, the Naval Ball?" "No, I'm afraid the Ensign will not permit any one else to take me to the ball; but we shall meet there, afterward." In a New York street, among the lower there was at that time a foreign agency that was not a consulate, but was visited by diplomats of the highest rank in a certain nation, the name of which, or the mystery of whose suspicions, need not be touched upon. There was no regular staff at the agency. The rooms were maintained under the name of a certain foreign gentleman--or, rather, under the name that he chose to assume. There were two servants, but they saw little of the master of the house. He was seldom at home, but when he was, he had many visitors. An hour after the luncheon in the rooms of Ensign Summers, the master of the mysterious dwelling was at home. And he had four guests. It would have, greatly surprised Ensign Summers had he known that one of the diplomat's guests was his own man servant, Catin. "It is the worst duty I have ever had to perform," the diplomat said solemnly. "It means, almost certainly, your death. But it is death for your country. It is the command of your country. The submarine must be destroyed and the plans--we shall get the plans through another agent." "I am not afraid to die," said Catin. "Then here is the model of a submarine--not of the one you will enter, of course, but it will give you an idea. I have marked the place where you will secrete the explosive until the proper moment. I have also indicated the position for you to take in order to have some faint chance of reaching the surface and being saved." One of the other men stepped forward and handed Catin a small square box. "This is the explosive. You know how to handle it." With a military salute, Catin turned and left the place. Within half an hour he was carefully brushing Ensign Summers' clothes, as Summers came in. "Would it be too much to ask, sir," inquired the perfect valet, "that I might accompany you in the submarine? I am afraid you will be very uncomfortable without me." Summers laughed good-naturedly. "It's impossible, Catin. This boat is a government secret in itself, and my new torpedo makes it a double secret. No one but a picked crew will be allowed on it, except--" "'Except, sir?" "Well, I admit I could command it. But it would be very unwise, Catin, and, I assure you, I shall get along all right." Mlle. de Longeon's apartment was characteristic of the lady herself. The artist would have found it a little too luxurious for good taste-- a little over-toned in the richness of draperies, the heavy scent of flowers, the subtleties of half-screened divans--there was something more than feminine--something feline. To Raymond Owen, however, it was ideal. The dimmed ruby lights, the suggestive shadows of the tapestries, were in tune with the surreptitious mind of the secretary. But there remained for him a picture that he admired more--Mlle. de Longeon coming through the portieres with a cry of pleasure. "I am so glad you came--and so sorry I must send you away quickly," exclaimed Mlle. de Longeon. "The little ensign has telephoned that he is coming early to take me for a drive before the ball." "I can come again--if I may have the honor," said Owen, rising quickly. "Oh, there is time for a word," she said, smiling. "There was something you wished to say to me, was there not? Something you did not care to say at the luncheon yesterday?" "Yes. Why do you hate Miss Marvin?" Owen was silent for a moment. "Why do you hate the little ensign, as you call another?" "What do you mean?" "I mean that we can be of service to one another, in all likelihood, and that, therefore, we should be frank friends. You wish to have Pauline Marvin out of the way, do you not?" "How did you find that out?" "People engaged in similar business find out many things. Now I--" "Wish to be rid of Ensign Summers." "Precisely." "You are an international agent?" "Yes. And I offer you my aid and the aid of the powerful men I control in return for your aid to me and them. Is it a bargain?" They were seated on one of the curtained divans, a low-turned light above them. She leaned forward. Her long, delicate hand touched his. A splendid jewel at her throat heightened the magic of her beauty. "Because it is my business to hate him--and make love to him at the same time. Come, Mr. Owen, let us be frank." For the first time in his life Owen felt himself mastered by the sheer fascination of a woman. "What am I to do?" he said breathlessly. "I will tell you tonight at the ball. Now you must run away." He arose instantly, but as she stood beside him, he turned, caught her in his arms and kissed her passionately. She protested with a little cry and a struggle not too violent to damage her coiffure. He drew back from her. There was something of astonishment in his eyes--astonishment at himself. "You are the only woman in the world who ever made me do that," he gasped. "Go, go," she pleaded. "But you are angry? You break our agreement?" "No, but I am overcome. I shall meet you tonight." He caught her hand to his lips, and hurried from the house. It was more than an hour after he observed her arrival at the Naval Ball before Owen had the privilege of a greeting from Mlle. de Longeon, and then it was only a smile as she passed him on the arm of a distinguished looking foreign diplomat. Owen saw that she spoke a quiet word to her escort, who turned and looked at Owen. She beamed brightly at Owen, who smiled back at her, and moved slowly toward the door of the conservatory into which she and the diplomat had disappeared. He was surprised, a moment later, to see Pauline rush by him, with a little laugh. "Is anything the matter?" Owen called. "Nothing you can help. Stay right where you are," she cried. Owen laughed his understanding and moved over to where Harry and Lucille were talking with Ensign Summers. Meanwhile, Pauline, in the darkest recess of the conservatory was pinning together a broken garter. As she started back to the ballroom she was surprised to hear voices near her. There was something about their foreign accent that roused the ever-venturous, ever-curious interest of Pauline. She crept along a row of palms and peered through an aperture. Mlle. de Longeon and the diplomat were talking together as they paced the aisle of palms on the other side. Pauline crept nearer. Presently the voice of the diplomat became distinguishable. "It is all arranged. The thing is to be done in Submarine B-2 tomorrow. All you have now to do is--" Pauline could not catch the final words. The two moved back to the ballroom. She followed close behind, a little suspicious, but with the thrill of a new plan gripping her. She saw Ensign Summers step forward early to greet Mile. de Longeon. Another dance was beginning. "This one is Mr. Owen's," said Mile. de Longeon, as she moved away on the arm of the secretary. "Have you anything to tell me?" he asked. "Yes. Induce her to make Summers take her down in his submarine tomorrow, and she will never trouble you again." As the dance ended, Pauline and Harry, Summers and Lucille, joined them. "Mr. Summers, I have a great request to make," declared Pauline. "I grant it before you breathe a word," he answered. "I want you to take me along on your submarine trip tomorrow." "Polly, have you gone crazy all over again?" cried Harry. "I don't believe it would be--" began Summers. "It must be," she commanded. "Well, I promised too soon, but I'll keep my word." Owen and Mile. de Longeon had stepped aside. "What does it mean?" gasped the secretary. "She is doing the very thing we want her to do." "Sometimes Fate aids the worthy," said Mile. de Longeon softly. CHAPTER XXII SUBMARINE B-2 At the dock of the navy yard a submarine lay ready for departure. There was nothing about its appearance to indicate that its mission was of more than ordinary importance. But it was an unusual thing to see a woman aboard, and the curiosity of the crew was matched by that of the young officers who had come down to see Summers off on his voyage of many chances. The officers got little reward for their considerate interest. Ensign Summers was engaged. He was explaining to Pauline, as they stood on the deck of the war-craft, the entire history of submarines from the time of Caesar, or Washington, or somebody to the present day, and Pauline was listening with that childlike simplicity which women use for the purpose of making men look foolish. "By Jove! I thought he was tied, heart and hope, to the lovely foreigner," exclaimed one of the shoreward observers. "So he is," said another. "But Mlle. de Longeon isn't interested in his daily toil. Do you know who the young lady up there is?" "No. She must have got a dispensation from the secretary himself to go on this trip." "So she did--easy as snapping your thumb. She's Miss Pauline Marvin, daughter of the richest man that has died in twenty years." The boat gong sounded the signal of departure. Summers, with a hasty apology, left Pauline and stepped forward. The engines began to rumble. The deadly and delicate craft--masterpiece of modern naval achievement--drew slowly from the pier. There was a shout. Summers, delivering rapid orders on deck, turned with an expression of annoyance to see his faithful man servant, Catin, out of breath and excited, rushing toward the boat. Summers ordered the vessel stopped. It had moved not more than stepping distance from the pier and in a moment Catin was beside his master on the deck. "She told me it must--" he paused, gasping for breath. "Who told you what?" demanded Summers. "Mlle. de Longeon. I am sure it is a message of importance. She told me I must give it to you before you risked your life on the voyage." "Mlle. de Longeon!" He caught the letter from Catin's hand. "My Hero--I cannot keep the secret any longer, cannot wait to tell you that it is you I love. Estelle de Longeon." Summers walked slowly, dizzily up the deck was in an ecstasy. He was oblivious to all the world--even to Pauline, who stood questioning an officer at the rail. The fact that his servant, Catin, slipped silently down the hatchway to the main compartment, and thence on to the pump room at the vessel's bottom, would hardly have interested him ---even if he had known it. "Shall we put off, sir?" The second officer saluted. The Ensign came to himself instantly. "Yes, of course. I put back only for an important message," he said. "My man got off, did he?" "I think so." "All right. Go ahead." Catin, with that rare fortune which sometimes favors the wicked, had chosen precisely the right moment for his ruse. The crew of the submarine were all on deck save those in the engine room, and his quick passage to the vitals of the vessel was unseen. Once in the pump room, he hastily drew from under his coat the bomb placed in his hands at the conference of diplomats, wound its clock-work spring and laid it beside the pumps. There was a strange look on the man's face as he did this--a look at once proud and pitiful. Catin had not sense of treachery or shame. The deed in itself did not lack the dignity of courage, for, with the others, he was planned his own death. And while the others were to die suddenly, ignorant of their peril, Catin was to die in deliberate knowledge of it. On deck Pauline was eagerly questioning an under officer about the torpedoes, when Summers came up. "You'll have to come down and see for yourself," he said, overhearing her. "First I'll show you the pump room--the most important part of us," he was saying as Catin, in the boat's bottom, first caught the sound of nearing voices. Catin leaped up the steps from the pump room. He was in the nick of time. A large locker in the main compartment gave him refuge just as Pauline and Summers reached the room. "The pumps are our life-savers," said Summers, as he directed Pauline down the second ladder. "If they go wrong when we're under water we can't come up." "And what do you do then?" asked Pauline innocently. "Oh, just-stay down." Catin waited breathless in his hiding place until they returned. "By heaven, they didn't find it!" he breathed eagerly. Pauline and Ensign Summers stood at the rail watching the foamy rush of a fast motor boat, when a hail sounded across the water. A man was standing up in the motor boat and calling through a megaphone. Summers raised his glasses. "Do you know who that is?" he asked laughingly. "Of course not. What does he want?" "It's Harry, and I suspect he wants to take you away from us." Pauline uttered an exclamation of annoyance. "Isn't he silly!" she cried, "One would think I was, a baby, the way he watches me." Soon the voice of Harry could be plainly distinguished. "Clear your ship; I am going to sink you," he called. "Cargo too precious this trip; don't do it," answered Summers. "Let me take the megaphone," demanded Pauline. "What do you mean by following us?" she cried. "I don't trust that sardine can, and I want a regular boat on hand when you are wrecked." "I am very angry with you. It looks as if--" Her words were drowned in Summers' laughter. "Never mind. I know a way we can escape from him," he said. "How?" "Why, sink the boat." "That will be splendid." He stepped aside and gave a terse order. Delightedly, Pauline watched the brief, machine-like movements of the crew trimming the deck. Summers escorted her back to the conning tower. They descended. Within a few moments the wonderful craft was buried under the waves. "There he is--looking for us," laughed Summers, as he made room for Pauline at the periscope. Amazed, fascinated, she gazed from what seemed the bottom of the sea out upon the rolling surface of the waves. Harry's motorboat was near and he was standing in the bow, scanning the water with binoculars. "And he can't see us?" asked Pauline. "Oh, yes, he'll pick up out periscope after a while. Shall we fire the torpedo at him?" "Yes, please," said Pauline. Summers' laugh was cut short. As if someone had taken his jest in earnest and really fired a projectile, the crash of an explosion came from the bottom of the boat. "Stay here--" ordered Summers with a set face as he joined the rush of seamen into the pump room. But Pauline followed. An officer, with blanched face but steady voice, came up to Summers. "What was it, Grimes?" "It seems to have been a bomb, sir. There was no powder down there." The face of the Ensign darkened with suspicion and alarm. "A bomb? So they were going after us--the enemy! We'd better get right up and back to port, Grimes." "I have to report, sir--the pumps are disabled." Summers turned with a look of pity toward Pauline, who stood at his elbow. "And we can't get up again?" she questioned. "There is one chance, but--" He stopped openly and listened. "Open that locker," he commanded. A seaman pulled back the door of the locker and disclosed the cringing form and defiant face of Catin. "Catin! You!" The man stepped forward with a smile of triumph. "You set off the bomb? You wanted to kill me?" "I did my duty. I obeyed my orders as you obey your orders. I had no enmity for you. I am, in fact, sorry that you were fool enough not to see that I was a little more than a valet." "You are a spy, Catin?" "Yes, sir. And I have done my work, and I am willing to die with the rest of you." Pauline drew back, shuddering. She touched Summers' arm. "Oh, Mr. Summers, I believe--" "What is it?" "I believe I know of the plot. I was in the conservatory at the naval ball. A man and a woman--" "A woman?" "Mlle. de Longeon and her diplomatic friend--you remember." "Yes--well?" "They talked together in whispers. The man said 'The thing will be done on Submarine B-2 tomorrow.'" A look of agony that the fear of death could not have caused came into the face of the young Ensign. "Mlle. de Longeon? No!" "Yes! Mlle. de Longeon," sneered Catin stepping nearer. "Mlle. de Longeon is the principal proof of my statement that you are a fool. Mlle. de Longeon recommended me to you as a capable valet, did she not? Mlle. de Longeon frequently was your guest. Now Mlle. de Longeon has the plans of your submarine and your torpedo--plans which I took the liberty of removing from the little cupboard over the desk in your workroom." Summers sprang forward but he recovered himself. "I should have told you," wailed Pauline. "How should you have known?" said Summers. In a moment he had lost his life work and his love. Suddenly he straightened himself. The soldier in him mastered the man. "There is still a chance--one little chance," he said. "To get out?" cried Pauline. "Yes--through the torpedo tube." She shuddered. "I am going to make you do it," he said, "because it is the only chance. The men will follow you. Harry's boat will be near." "And you?" "I do not matter any more. Come." A gunner opened the great tube as Summers led Pauline into the torpedo room. Obediently she entered the strange passageway of peril and of hope. "Goodbye," he said, "and good luck." "Goodbye," she answered. "You are a brave man. You are as brave-- you are as fine--as Harry." From the end of the torpedo tube a woman's form shot to the surface of the water. Choking, dazed, but courageous, Pauline tried to turn on her back and gain breath. But they were well out to seat and the waves were crushing. "What is that?" asked Harry, pointing and passing his glasses to the boatman. The man looked and without a word swung the craft about and put the engine at top speed. And in a few moments Harry's strong arms drew her from the water. "My darling, what has happened?" he gasped. "Don't think of me--think of them!" she begged, weakly. "They were trapped--down there. There was a bomb--a plot--the machinery is ruined. Harry, help them!" The boatman who overheard Pauline's first cry of appeal, now came forward respectfully. "There's a revenue cutter--the Iroquois-- coming out," he said, significantly. Harry looked. "Splendid!" he cried. "Can we signal her?" "No, but we can catch her?" Shouts from a speeding motorboat brought the Government vessel to a stop. Officers came to the rail and helped Harry and Pauline to the deck. "Ensign Summers and his crew are sunk in their submarine. The pumps are gone. There was a bomb explosion. Can you get help?" "Where are they?" "You can pick up their buoy with a glass--there." The chief officer looked through his glass. "Yes," he said. "You'll come abroad, or keep your own boat?" "We've got another piece of work to do--if we can leave our friends to your guarding," said Harry. "Well have the wrecking tugs and divers in twenty minutes." Harry and Pauline climbed back to the motorboat and sped up the bay. "What did you mean another piece of work?" asked Pauline as she clung to his arm. "My car is at the Navy Yard pier," was his only answer. She still clung to him in tremulous uncertainty as the motor sped them up through Broadway, into Fifth avenue, and on to the door of Mlle. de Longeon's hotel. She and the diplomatic grandee who had held the confidential conference with her in the conservatory at the naval ball were together in her suite. "And you have the plans actually in your possession?" he said. "Yes. It has been a tedious process. It was easy to make him fall in love, but he is so fearfully scrupulous about his work. It took even his valet three months to locate the secret hiding place of the papers." "A little more caution mingled with his scruples and he would not now be dead at the bottom of the bay." "Oh, this is the day, is it?" asked Mlle. de Longeon, wearily. "After all, it is rather cruel to Catin." "To die for his country?" "Nonsense! He dies because he knows he would be killed in a crueler way if he refused to obey you." The diplomat smiled. "Will you give me the plans?" "Yes--why, Marie, what is it?" A maid had entered with cards. "I am not at home today." Mlle. de Longeon moved to her writing desk, removed from it a packet of papers, and, with a little courtesy gave it into the eager hands of the diplomat. "It has been a splendid achievement, Mademoiselle," he said, enthusiastically. "I shall see that--what? Who is this?" he exclaimed, as Harry and Pauline burst into the room. "Marie, Marie, I told you that I was at home to no one!" screamed Mlle. de Longeon. "How dare you intrude in these apartments?" demanded the diplomat. "I dare, because I want those papers," declared Harry. The packet was still in the diplomat's hands. He tried to thrust it into his pocket, but Harry was upon him. They clinched, broke from each other's grasp and struggled furiously. As the last resource the diplomat drew the packet from his breast and flung it across the room toward Mlle. de Longeon. She pounced upon it. But Pauline was beside her. Stronger both in body and in spirit than the adventuress, she grasped her wrists, and in the luxurious, soft-curtained room there raged two battles. But the struggles did not last long. Harry hurled his antagonist, an exhausted wreck, to the floor, and sprang to the side of Pauline. Throwing off Mlle. de Longeon's grasp, he picked up the packet from the floor, and with Pauline ran from the room. A revenue cutter was landing a group of faint and silent men, at the pier of the Navy Yard when an automobile flashed in. "Hurrah! They did it! You're safe!" cried Pauline, rushing past Harry to greet Ensign Summers. The officer took her extended hands gratefully, but there was no light in his eyes as he answered. "Safe--and dishonored," he said. "I am only glad for my men." "Why dishonored?" asked Harry. "Don't you understand?" "The man," said Pauline, curiously, "the man who placed the bomb? Where is he?" "Dead," said Summers. "He broke the tube after you were released and then attacked me with a knife. I had to kill him." "Good for you!" broke in Harry. "But what's all the gloom talk for? This stuff about dishonor? You've proved yourself a hero, man." "I have lost the most important documents of the Navy Department-- through a silly entanglement with a woman." "No, you haven't. We went and got them for you," said Harry, presenting the packet of plans. CHAPTER XXIII A PAPER CHASE In Balthazar's band, which had failed so often do away with Pauline Marvin, there was, nevertheless, one man who had attracted the particular interest Raymond Owen--Louis Wrentz. Physically and mentally brutal, he had always been one to oppose Balthazar's delays. Six months before Owen would have shuddered at the thought of employing this ruffian. Then his great aim was to be rid of Pauline by the most indirect and secret means. But Pauline's hair-breadth escape a few weeks before from Mlle de. Longeon's cleverly planned plot, the almost incredible rescue of the submarine and recovery of Ensign Summers' torpedo boat plans, as well as the fact that the year of adventure was rapidly drawing to a close and that Harry's growing hostility and the increasing danger of exposure at the hands of some one of his aides, made the secretary willing to take every chance, made it imperative that he should have a lieutenant who could be trusted to strike boldly. Owen sent for Wrentz. The man appeared in the guise of a servant seeking employment, and was brought up to Owen's private sitting-room. "Wrentz, I want you to take charge of my work hereafter," said the secretary. "You mean the work of--" Owen raised his hand in caution. "The work of conducting a certain person to a far country." "But Balthazar?" questioned Wrentz. "I am through with Balthazar. He's done nothing but procrastinate. All his plans have failed because it was to his profit that they should fail." "I'll do the work quickly. What's your present plan?" "A very simple one, but one that must be very shrewdly handled. It will mean that you and some of your friends will have to make a trip to Philadelphia. Where shall I be able to call you within a day or two?" "At Stroob's lodging house, in Avenue B." "Very well. Be prepared to act on short notice." "I'll stick close to the place, sir." "And, Wrentz, understand that you are also to act firmly. No Balthazar, tactics. I'm through being tricked." "I'm sure I never failed you, sir," said Wrentz, with an aggrieved air. Owen smiled. "True, but temptation occasionally leads even the most honest of men astray," he said, sarcastically. While this last plot was being hatched Pauline and Harry were playing chess in the library. As she checkmated him for the third time he arose in mock disgust. "They say chess is a perfect mental test. I wonder who is the brains of this family now?" she taunted. "There's a difference between brains and hare-brains. You know, I lost because I had that Chicago thing on my mind." "Oh, isn't that settled yet?" "No; I'm expecting to be called up any minute with a message that will send me out there." "Oh, Harry! That's terrible! When you go to Chicago you never get back for a whole week." "If you like me so much, why don't you marry me and go with me on all my trips?" "Conceited!" she began, but her face fell again as the telephone bell sounded. Harry answered it, and after a few rapid questions turned to Pauline. "That's what it is," he said; "I go tomorrow. I must see Owen," and rang the bell. "Owen," Pauline exclaimed upon his entrance, "Harry must go to Chicago tomorrow. Isn't it dreadful?" "I am very sorry. But I hope it will not be for long." "No," said Harry, curtly. "Look over these papers." An hour later Owen drew from his typewriter this letter: Miss Pauline Marvin, Carson & Brown, Publishers, 9 Weston Place, Philadelphia. New York. Dear Madam: After reading your marine story, published in the Cosmopolitan Magazine, we have decided you are just the person to write a new serial we have in mind. Would you be interested to call on us at your earliest opportunity? Yours very truly, J. R. Carson." Owen sealed, addressed and, stamped the letter and enclosed it in a larger envelope, which he addressed to a friend in Philadelphia, with instructions to post the enclosure in that city. He did not trust the mailing of the double letter to a servant, but, putting on his motor togs, prepared to ride to Westbury. "Well, he's got a reprieve; he's going to stay with us one more day," Pauline cried, happily, as she met Owen in the hall. For the flash of an instant something twinged at the cold heart of the secretary. The bright beauty of Pauline, her happiness, her love for her foster brother, struck home the first realization of something missing--and never to be achieved--in his grim existence. Perhaps for the moment Raymond Owen had a dim understanding of the value of innocence. The next afternoon Pauline stood on the veranda bidding Harry goodbye. "I hate to go, Polly, but I must," he said. "I hate to leave you with that--secretary." "Harry, please don't start again on that. You know I don't agree with you, and--and I don't want to quarrel with you when you're going away." "Very well," he said, embracing her, "but don't get into any of your scrapes while I am away. Remember, it's a long way to Chicago." "And Tipperary," she laughed. "Goodbye, darling boy, and run home the minute you can." "I will. Goodbye." Pauline had turned dejectedly back toward the house when the sound of steps on the walk drew her attention. It was the postman. "I'll take them," she said, extending her hand. She ran over the envelopes swiftly until she came to one which bore the corner mark of a publishing concern in Philadelphia. She had never heard of the firm of Carson & Brown, but, to her enthusiasm of young authorship, the very name "publisher" was magical. She opened the letter hastily and read. For a moment she stood spellbound with happiness. The realization of her dreams was at hand. Publishers were calling for her work instead of sending it back when she sent it to them. With a glad cry, and waving the treasured letter, she rushed out into the garden to Owen. "It's happened!" she sang, gaily. "I am discovered." "You are what, Miss Pauline?" "Don't you understand? Can't you see?" "Not exactly, while you slant that letter above your head like a reprieve for a doomed man." "Well, read it." She leaned breathlessly over his shoulder as he read the familiar lines. "Miss Pauline, it is splendid!" he exclaimed. "I was always sure you would be successful with your writing." "Yes, you encouraged me to get new experiences, while Harry always opposed me," she said. "But, oh, I wish Harry was here to see this." "Shall you go to Philadelphia?" inquired Owen "Indeed--shall and instantly." "Is it so urgent as that." "Of course. They might change their minds any moment and get some one else to write the story. Will you see what train I can take this evening, Owen, while I run and pack a few things?" "With pleasure--but don't you think some one ought to accompany you?" "To Philadelphia? Nonsense. It's just like crossing the street. Please, Owen, don't you begin to worry about every little thing I do." "Very well," he laughed. As soon as she was gone he selected a time table, and scanned the train list. Then he took up the telephone and called a number. "Hello, Wrentz?" "This is Owen. It worked. Be at the Pennsylvania station with your men tonight. And, Wrentz, if the plan I gave you fails, I leave it to you to invent a new one. You understand? What? No. I don't want any return this time." Before Owen had helped Pauline into her car and bidden her goodbye, Wrentz and his men were on watch in the railroad station. "Goodbye and good luck." Pauline was standing in the aisle, the porter stowing her baggage into her drawing room, when the men entered the car. She noted them with curiosity. There was nothing very sinister about them, but they seemed obviously out of place, but the next moment she had forgotten about them, and for the twentieth time, was reading her own story in the Cosmopolitan. For now, in the light of the magic it had wrought, she was bent on studying every word--to absorb the power of her own genius, so to speak--in order that "her publishers" should not be disappointed in the forthcoming novel. When Pauline got off the train at Philadelphia she did not notice that one of the four men who had aroused her curiosity walked behind her as she left, or that he was joined by the three others in the taxicab which followed hers. When she left the cab at one of the fashionable hotels, Wrentz alone followed her. He was at Pauline's elbow when she registered. As she followed the bell boy through the lobby, he stepped to the desk, and, noting the number of Pauline's room--NO. 22--he signed his name under hers with a flourish. "By the way," he said easily to the clerk, "is that pet room of' mine vacant--the one I had last year?" The clerk smiled. "I'll see," he said. "I had forgotten it was your pet room. I can't remember everybody." "Oh, I was just here for a few days," said Wrentz. "I remember you." "Yes, sir; 24 is yours," said the clerk. "Front." Wrentz stood at the cigar counter to make a purchase. He did not wish to follow Pauline so closely that she might know he had taken the room next to hers. In spite of her excitement, Pauline slept soundly that night. The next morning she had breakfast in her own room and at ten o'clock was ready to go to "Carson & Brown's." She was considerably provoked by the ignorance of the hotel clerk, who not only did not know the publishing house of Carson & Brown, but could not even direct her to Weston place. He called the head porter and taxicab manager. The latter had an idea. "I don't think it's Weston Place, but there's a Weston Street down in --well, it's not a very good section of the city, Miss. I wouldn't want to--" "Never mind. In New York some of our best publishing houses are perfect barns. You may call a taxicab." "Yes, Miss." "Publishing house in Weston Street-whew! But she doesn't look crazy," he instructed one of his chauffeurs. "I don't know what the game is, but it's a good job." Pauline's spirits revived as the cab whisked her through the big business streets, newly a-bustle with their morning life. She had a sense of pity for the workers hastening to their uninspiring toil. How few of them had ever received even a letter from a publisher! How few had known the thrill of successful authorship! A few moments after Pauline's departure Louis Wrentz and his companions set to work. Two of the men left the room and sauntered to opposite ends of the hall where they lingered on watch. Wrentz and the other man stepped out briskly and each with a screwdriver in his hand began unfastening the number-plates over the doors of rooms 22 and 24. A low cough sounded down the corridor and they quickly desisted from their task and retired to their room while a maid passed by. In a moment they were out again. Wrentz passed the number plate of 24 to his assistant, who handed back the plate Of 22. The numbers were refastened on the wrong doors. The watchers were called back. "Now," said Wrentz, "it is only a matter of waiting." Pauline's cab passed out of the central city into the region of factories. "This looks like the section where the print shops are in New York," she said confidently to herself. But the driver kept on into streets of dingy, ancient houses--streets crowded with unkempt children and lined with push-carts. "Are you sure you got the right address of them publishers, Miss?" he asked after awhile. "The next street is Weston and it don't look very promisin'." She drew the letter from her handbag and showed it to him. "Well, that's the queerest thing I know," he said, astonished by the letterhead. "I've been drivin' cabs--horse and taxi--for twenty years, and I never heard of no such people or no such place." "Well, at least go around the corner and see. Perhaps it is a new firm that isn't listed as yet," said Pauline. The driver swung the cab into a street even more bleak and bedraggled than the one they had just traversed. He stopped and got out. Pauline followed him. A blear-eyed man, slouching on a stoop, looked up in faint curiosity as she addressed him. "There ain't no No. 9 Weston Street," he answered. "It usta be over there, but it's burnt down." Pauline's face fell. "Well, this is certainly stupid," she exclaimed. "Of course it isn't Weston Street; it's Weston Place, as the letter says." "But my 'City Guide' ain't got no such place in it, miss," answered the chauffeur. "Well, I'll go back to, the hotel," she said dejectedly. She was on the verge of tears as she left the elevator and started for her room. She had looked through all the directories and street guides and knew at last that she had been the victim of a cruel hoax. All her joy and pride of yesterday had turned to humiliation and grief. She wanted to be alone--and have a good cry. She was puzzled for a moment as she drew her key from her handbag and glanced at the numbers on the doors. She had been almost sure that No. 22 was the left-hand door, but she had been in such excitement that she could not trust any of her impressions. She started to place the key in the lock of the right-hand door. Like a flash it opened inward and two pairs of hands gripped her. Her cry was stifled by a hand over her mouth. She was dragged into the room. CHAPTER XXIV THE MUMMY'S LAST WARNING Pauline had barely time to recognize in her new captors the four strange men who had attracted her attention on the train, before a bandage was drawn over her eyes, another over her mouth, and cruel, heavy hands began to bind her limbs. As she listened to the rough voices of the men, the mystery of the "Carson & Brown" letter was entirely cleared away. "That was easy," commented Wrentz. "Easier than the rest of the work will be," said one. "Shall we leave her on the floor, boss?" asked another. "Yes, of course." "Then I'll put a pillow under her head." "Pillow? Why a pillow? Since when did you become tender-hearted, Rocco?" Rocco scowled, but he made no reply. "You don't need any pillows or Pullman cars on the way to heaven," said Wrentz with a snarling laugh. The laugh was checked abruptly by a rap on the door. For an instant the ruffians looked at each other in alarm. There was no telling whether to open that door would be to face the drawn revolvers of detectives or only the expectant eyes of a bellboy. There was nothing to do but to answer, however. Wrentz moved to the door. "Who is it?" he asked. "Your trunk, sir." "You are the porter?" "Yes, sir." "Well, you can leave the trunk at the door. I am too busy to be interrupted just now. But here--" Wrentz opened the door an inch and passed a dollar bill to the porter. "I am going to need you again in a few hours," he said. "Yes, sir; thank you, sir." "Move the girl over behind the bed--out of range there," commanded Wrentz. Two men seized Pauline and dragged her across the room where she could not be seen through the door, which Wrentz now opened wide. In the corridor outside stood a large trunk. Wrentz and one of the men lifted it and carried it into the room. "Your baggage is light," said the man. "It will be heavier in a little while. Open it." They obeyed. "Do you think it is large enough?" asked Wrentz. "Large enough for what--the girl?" demanded Rocco, who had been sulking since his rebuke. "You are shrewd, Rocco. You have guessed rightly I suppose you'll want to put a pillow in it." "Yes, I would," said Rocco, who was the youngest of the band, "or else I would kill her first. What is the use of torture?" Wrentz's dark fact grew even blacker as he eyed the young man. "If you were a grown man, Rocco," he said, "instead of a soft-hearted boy, you would know that there is one form of murder that is always found out--the trunk murder. And I want to say this to you," he added with growing heat, "that if I hear one more word of rebellion from you this prisoner will be alive some hours after you have departed. Now, then, into the trunk with her." Rocco sullenly helped the others in the grim task. The trunk, large as it was, was not deep enough to permit Pauline a sitting posture, nor long enough to prevent the painful cramping of her limbs. But she was deadened to physical pain. With the words of her doom still ringing in her ears--the calm discussion of her death--her terror was her torture. The choking gag, the cutting bonds, the stifling trunk--in which the knife of Wrentz had cut but a few air holes--these were as nothing to the agony of her spirit--the agony of a lingering journey toward a certain but mysterious end. Pauline had been a prisoner before, had been through many and desperate dangers, but her heart had never failed her utterly until she felt the pressure of the trunk lid on her bent shoulders and heard the clamping of the locks that bound her in. She could still hear the voices. "I'll go down and settle my bill and send up that porter," Wrentz was saying. "Don't let him help with the trunk, except to run the elevator. You're sure your car is at the side entrance--not out in front?" "Yes." "I will meet you there." Pauline had been so carefully bound that she could not stir in the trunk. As she felt it lifted and carried rapidly through the corridor to the hotel elevator she strained with all her might to make a noise --to beat with hands or feet or even with her head, the sides of the receptacle. But it was no use. She was carried through the hotel and out to the side entrance without attracting attention. She felt the trunk lifted over the men's heads, and the whirring of an automobile told her that she was being placed in the machine. "Well, you didn't care much for your pet room this time, Mr. Wrentz," smiled the clerk as Wrentz asked for his bill. "Indeed I did, but a message has called me back to New York." He paid his bill and hurried out to the big car in the back of which Pauline's trunk had been placed. Springing to the wheel, he ordered his followers in, and they drove away. Once on suburban roads, Wrentz, either fearful of pursuit or drunk with success, began speeding. Along the railroad tracks the noise of their speed drew a tumult of wild sounds from a string of gaily painted cars on the siding. The snarls and howls of beasts were mingled with the angry cries of men who seemed to be at work on the other side of the cars. To Pauline the noises came faintly, but with a horrid and unearthly note. She, who had been the victim of so many cruet and fantastic plots, knew not what new danger the roaring of the beasts threatened. In a moment, though, her mind was set at rest on this point. For Rocco, the young bandit, turning to the man next him, asked: "What does it mean? What are they doing?" "It is a circus train," answered the man. "They are loading the beasts into the cars." Pauline felt the machine swerve sharply and evidently take to a by-road, for she could hear the swish of leaves on overhanging branches as they brushed through. "This place will do," she heard Wrentz say. "Now, be quick about it." "It has come," breathed Pauline to herself. "This is the place where I am to die." Through her mind, in piteous pageant, flashed thoughts of home, of Harry, of even Raymond Owen. There was a great loneliness in the hour of doom. But it would be over quickly. She shut her eyes tight and clenched her tied hands as the trunk was taken from the machine and placed upon the ground. "Open it," commanded Wrentz. "I don't want her to die in there." The men quickly unclamped the locks and lifted Pauline out. "Take off the ropes and the bandages," ordered Wrentz. "Take them off? Why, she'll scream," exclaimed one. "If she does you may choke her to death in the car," replied Wrentz. "Why not here?" asked the oldest of the men. "Didn't Mr. --" "Hush your mouth! You confounded rascal!" Wrentz screamed. "Are you going to mention that name here?" "What harm--as long as she is to die? Dead women tell no more tales than dead men." "I will name all names that are to be spoken," declared Wrentz. "Well, he of the name that is unspoken--at least he did say that we must have no delays. We want to earn our money as well as you, Louis --remember that." "Come, come," he said. "This is no way to be arguing among friends. You'll get your money all right; but there is one thing to remember-you ain't get it except through me. So let me handle the matter. Put the girl in the car." Pauline, although her bonds had been cut away, was unable to rise to her feet. They lifted her to her feet. She took a step or two, while they watched her curiously. Quickly strength and self-control came back to her. With a sudden spring, she struck at Wrentz with her fist, and as he drew back, astonished she darted across the roadway toward the wood. It was but a futile, maneuver. She had gone but a few paces when she was gripped from behind and snatched back. "You see, Louis--I told you she would do something of the kind," said the old bandit. "And I told you it would do no harm. Place her in the car between you and Rocco. If she screams or makes a move to get away you may do as you wish, but not until then." Pauline still struggled feebly as she was lifted into the machine. Wrentz kicked the empty trunk to the side of the byroad and took the wheel again. He drove back to the main drive that skirted the railroad. Distant as they were by now, the clamor of the caged beasts in the circus train could still be heard. To Pauline the creatures seemed less wild and cruel than these, her human captors. Wrentz put on even greater speed than he had ventured before. Two policemen, Burgess and Blount, of the Motorcycle Squad, were standing by their wheels in the roadway when the sound of the car's rush reached their ears from half a mile away. "By George, that fellow's coming some," exclaimed Blount. "And looks as if he wasn't going to stop," said the other. "Halt! Halt, there!" he commanded, as the machine flashed up in a mantle of dust. "They are coming, Louis," said one of the men. "I know they are. But there is no machine made that can catch this one. Have your guns ready, though. In case they begin to fire, pick them off." Pauline shuddered at the matter-of-fact way in which Rocco and the man on the other side drew their heavy pistols from their hip pockets and rested them on their knees. "Do you see the girl in that car?" yelled Burgess to his companion over the din of their streaking machines. "Yes. We want that party for more than speeding, I guess," answered Blount. They bent low over their handle-bars and raced on. "If he takes the 'S' curve like that we've got him--dead or alive," said Burgess. "And it looks as if he would. By George, he is!" Wrentz's car had shot suddenly out of sight around a twist in the road. Wrentz was an able driver, and, even at its terrific speed, the machine took the first turn gracefully. But Wrentz had not counted on a second shorter turn to the opposite direction. And he worked the wheel madly for a second swerve; the huge car skidded, spun round, and, reeling on two wheels for an instant, turned over in the ditch. It was several moments before Pauline opened her eyes. She shut them quickly and staggered to her feet shuddering--she had been lying across Rocco's dead body which had broken her fall and saved her life. Two other men lay motionless in the road. But from under the overturned car there came a sound, and Pauline realized, with quick alarm, that Wrentz was still alive. She ran across the road and into the parked woods that hid the railroad from the drive. Wrentz struggled out from beneath the car. His eyes swept swiftly from the bodies of his dead comrades to the form of Pauline just vanishing in the thicket. He was bruised and bleeding, but with the instinct of a beast of prey he followed his quarry. "Dead or alive was right," said Burgess, jumping from his wheel and examining the bodies in the road. "I wonder what that fellow was up to. And where is the girl?" "I saw her and one of the men make into the park there," said Blount. "You take charge here and I'll go after them." As he moved into the thicket in the direction Pauline had taken young Blount's attention was attracted by a new commotion. The park was on the crest of a steep cliff overlooking the railroad tracks and from the tracks came a riot of voices. Blount forced his way through the wood to a viewpoint from the cliff. Below him a score of men were moving rapidly along the tracks in wide, open order, evidently bent on some sort of a hunt. "The circus men," said Blount to himself. "An animal must have got out. This is certainly some day for business." He turned back to the work in hand. Pauline, spurred by terror as she realized that Wrentz was again upon her trail, had sped like a wild thing through the park paths. She could hear the heavy footsteps of her pursuer close behind. She could hear also a shouting from afar off. She made toward the shouting-- the sound of any voice but the voices of the inhuman men who had planned her death was welcome to her ears. She came out upon the cliff where it sloped steeply to the railroad yards, but not too steeply to prevent her descending. From her position, the lines of freight cars cut off from her vision the strange group of hunters who were shouting. Running, stumbling, creeping, clutching at small bushes, she scrambled down the cliff. "Stop and come back!" she heard a menacing voice behind her. She sped on the faster. A line of high bushes fringed the bottom of the cliff. Between the bushes and the first rails ran a ditch. Sheltered from all view from above, Pauline dragged herself along this ditch, seeking a hiding place. She knew her strength was almost gone. She was in terror of fainting. If she could hide somewhere and rest-- A single empty freight car stood on the outer track a hundred yards away. Its open door offered the only means of concealment that she had. She believed that the bushes were high enough still to shield her while she climbed into the car. In this she was wrong. Wrentz, watching from above--for he was afraid of the voices on the tracks, below and had not followed Pauline --watched with pleasure as she crawled to the side of the car, and, after two failures, managed to drag herself through the high door. She sank exhausted. Gradually, however, her strength returned. Her mind recovered from the dazing experiences of the last few hours. She began to gain courage and to plan her further flight. As she moved toward the car door to reconnoiter, the sense of an invisible presence suddenly possessed her. Instinctively she turned. One glance behind her and every fiber of her body seemed to turn to stone. Fear she had known, but never terror such as this. She stood paralyzed, unable to close her eyes, unable to move. For there beside her, towering above her in horrible strength, with wildly grinning face and cruelly outreaching claws, stood the thing that gave explanation to the hunt outside and the shouting. Pauline was in the clutches of a gorilla. She fainted as she felt herself gripped in the hairy arms. Wrentz was gloating as he stood on watch over Pauline's hiding place. In a little while the men, would be out of the railroad yard and he would go down and finish the work. But his rejoicings were turned into amazement by the sight which now presented itself at the door of the car. With Pauline, carried over one arm as if she had been a wisp of straw, the gorilla was crawling down to the trackside. Wrentz saw it crawl along the ditch and heard the crunch of broken bushes as the huge creature clambered up the cliff. Wondering, scarcely able to believe his eyes, Wrentz followed at a safe distance. Young Policeman Blount, searching for the fugitive chauffeur of the wrecked automobile and the mysterious young woman who had escaped from it, paused at the sound of heavy foot-falls. A low, guttural, snarling sound--a sound hardly human--accompanied the footsteps. He had reached the bottom of the cliff a half mile from where Pauline had found her perilous shelter. Peering up through the bushes, his astonishment and horror were a match for the astonishment and joy of Wrentz. The gorilla, with Pauline still clutched in the mighty paw, had reached almost the top of the cliff at its steepest point. Blount blew his whistle, blast after blast. He started up the cliff, but came back at the sound of hurrying footsteps and calls; the hunters from the railroad yards had heard the signal. "Hello! Have you seen anything of the gorilla?" yelled the first man to come up. Blount pointed up the cliff side to where the hideous beast was just dragging Pauline over the topmost ledge. The men stood spell-bound with pity. "A girl!" gasped one of them. "She's as good as dead, if she isn't dead now. He just killed our foreman back in the yards." "No, thank heaven!" cried Blount, "she's not dead. Look!" At the top of the cliff they saw Pauline's form suddenly quicken into life. The gorilla had released its hold upon her to make sure of its footing on the perilous ledge. Now she stood, a frail, pitiful, hopeless thing, fighting--actually assailing the beast, more mighty than a dozen men. Their hearts sick within them they watched the brief struggle. Wrentz, too, watched it, from his hiding place on the top of the cliff. But his heart was not sick. In a moment, he was sure, his work would be accomplished for him, and his employer would be rid of Pauline Marvin in a way that could reflect no blame on any one. Blount started up the cliff. He took it for granted that the others would follow, but looking down after gaining half the distance, he saw the circus men still huddled together in fascinated awe. "Look! Look!" they called to him. "He's taking her up the tree." Blount looked and saw the gorilla climbing ponderously the trunk of a large tree, the branches of which overhung the precipice. Blount climbed on frantically. He stopped again. The gorilla was crawling out upon one of the overhanging branches! The strange beast-brain had conceived a death for Pauline more terrible than any Raymond Owen bad ever plotted. Wrentz himself might have envied the gorilla. Blount drew his revolver. He was not more than a hundred feet below them now. "It's the chance of hitting her against the chance of saving her," he muttered. He fired. With a snarl of pain the gorilla turned and bit savagely at its shoulder. Blount rushed on. He stopped again and fired. He was at the verge of the cliff. He could blaze away now with no danger of hitting Pauline, for he was a sure marksman. With a great throb of joy in his heart the gallant young fellow saw the beast turn, and, leaving Pauline with her arms around the limb, her eyes shut against the dizzy depths below, move back and scramble down. Blount was on the cliff-top as the gorilla reached the ground. The beast charged. Blount fired again. Again the gorilla, snarling, bit at its wounded side, but it came an as if a dozen lives vitalized the gross body. Blount backed away from the cliff, but the monster was upon him. It clutched him, hurled him to ground, dragged him back to the dizzy verge. Slowly Blount was pressed over the precipice. The watchers below saw him in his last struggle writhe in the deathly grasp, twist his revolver and fire three shots into the heart of the gorilla. Down the long fall to the jagged rocks went the beast. Pauline was bending over the bleeding, battered form of the young officer when the circus crew reached them. "Oh, you are brave, brave!" she cried. He opened his eyes and grinned merrily. "If I'm brave, I'd like to know what you are." "Oh, I'm not brave, I'm nothing but a selfish little pig," cried Pauline. "I've treated the dearest fellow in the world shamefully. He's forgiven me over and over, but he won't forgive me this time." "He'll forgive you anything, Mim," Blount assured her, "for the sake of getting you safe back. But I shouldn't like to be the man who got you into this, when he hears of it." "The man's safe enough," said Burgess, who had just up in time to hear Blount's last words. "No, he didn't escape that way," as Blount uttered an ejaculation of disgust. "He ran full tilt into me and when I tried to arrest him he drew his revolver on me. By good luck I got him first--yes, Jo, he's dead." "Dead," repeated Pauline in a low tone. "How horrible to go out of life a moment after you had tried to commit murder." "It's not his first," Burgess said coolly. "We've been after him and his gang these six months. It was Wrentz, Jo, and I made a haul of papers that'll get somebody into trouble." "Oh, don't hurt the young one," cried Pauline. "He tried to help me." "Rocco? He was dead when they picked him up. And, now, Miss Marvin, hadn't I better get you a taxi?" "Yes, thank you, but," with irrepressible curiosity, "how did you know me?" Burgess smiled. "How did I know you? I beg your pardon, Miss, but for nearly a year your picture's been in every paper, more or less, in the United States. You're a big head-liner--it's an honor to meet you, face to face. But it's Blount has all the luck. He's saved you--he'll be a head-liner himself tomorrow." The hot color rushed over Pauline's face. "A head-liner"--so that was what she meant to the public, to the man on the street. "Please, Please, don't let this get into the Papers," she begged. "I'll do anything in the world for you if you'll just keep it out of the papers." "Will you tell us about those other adventures?" Burgess asked eagerly. "It's a sure thing that somebody's been pulling the wires, making you walk the tight rope, and somebody that knows everything you do. Any man on the force who could spot him would be made." "No, no," Pauline insisted, an uneasy remembrance of Harry's suspicions lending emphasis to her denial. "Some of those things were done before anybody out of the house could know." "Just as I said," Burgess agreed triumphantly. "It's somebody in the house. Why he knew about your bull terrier, and the papers had it had just been given you the day before--darned clever little dog to give your folks the clue." "Cyrus?" Pauline's face broke into smiles and dimples. "He's the cleverest, dearest, most beautiful dog in the world." "Fine dog, yes Miss, if he's like the picture the reporters got." Pauline's face clouded--for the moment she had forgotten the horrors of publicity. "You won't put this in the papers?" she pleaded. "He shan't," Blount raised himself weakly on his elbow. "If the reporters haven't got it already, we'll keep you out of it anyhow, Miss." "Keep a scoop like this out of the papers?" Burgess laughed aloud. "You're talking through your hat, Blount, it can't be done." In one terrible flash Pauline saw her name in capitals, her photograph almost life-size, photographs of her trunk, the gorilla, Blount, in head-liners, too, and Harry, furious, too far away for moral suasion; stern, cold, unforgiving, worse still, disgusted. She realized as she had never realized before that Harry was what counted most, Harry was the one thing she could not live without. To the terrors of these hours was added the terror of losing him. She burst into wild sobs. "I want Harry, I don't want anything in the world but Harry! Oh, take me home, please take me home!" Burgess got a taxi and went with her to the hotel, where She was put to bed, a doctor sent for, and where at last she fell asleep. But it was not until noon the next day that she was able to take the train for New York. And then began, two hours and a half that Pauline remembered to the last hour of her life. Her photograph stared at her from the front page of every daily paper--even the glasses and thick veil she wore to conceal her identity could not soften the conspicuous pictures. Newsboys called her name, and the gorilla story, Wrentz, and Blount's names, together--every passenger in the car, it seemed to her, men, women, and children, were discussing her. There were silly jokes, contemptuous criticism, half-laughing suggestions that there was something "queer about Miss Marvin." just behind her, she heard one woman say to another, "But, then, my dear, what could you expect of any girl whose mother was an Egyptian" as if this equaled breaking the whole Decalogue. Though she had wired Owen, the motor did not meet her, and feeling more than ever forlorn and forsaken, Pauline got into a taxi. Never had the old place looked so beautiful as today when she felt that it could never be her home again--she must tell Harry that her mother was an Egyptian and then even if he could forgive her this last adventure he would never marry her. Oh, how could she have been so silly, so conceited, so cruel to Harry! And what a fool she had been to go in search of experience in order to write. If she couldn't write with all this beauty spread out before her, if she couldn't write by living a real, human, everyday life, the sort of life that brings you close to normal people, how could she ever hope to write by living on excitement --on abnormal excitement and with abnormal people and situations? She paid the driver and was walking slowly up the steps of the veranda, when, suddenly, she halted as if she had been struck. What was that? It couldn't be--yes, it was--funeral streamers hanging from the door-knob! With a scream that rang through the closed door, Pauline fainted. When she recovered consciousness she was in the library. Bemis and Margaret were bending over her, and strong, tender arms were around her. "Harry," she murmured instinctively. "Don't try to talk, my darling, drink this. You go," to Bemis and Margaret. "Oh, Harry, I thought you were dead." "I'm very much alive," Harry said with a tremulous laugh. "But Harry, what does all that black on the door mean?" "It means," said Harry, savagely, "that though the mills of the gods grind slowly they grind surely--Owen's dead." "Owen!" Her eyes large with terror, Blount's words ringing in her ears-- "I shouldn't like to be the man at the bottom of this when Mr. Marvin hears of it." "'Owen," she repeated in a breathless whisper. "Harry, you didn't kill him?" "He didn't give me the chance. He was dead when I got here--overdose of morphine Dr. Stevens said. Seems he was a drug fiend." "Why that was the reason," Pauline said, her filling with tears. "He was crazy, he didn't know what he was doing. Poor Owen, poor Owen"-- then turned hastily to safer topics. "But I thought you went to Chicago for a week." "I did, but, you'll laugh, Pauline--I know it sounds fool--the Mummy came to me just as she came to me in Montana. I took the first train home. I knew you were in danger--I knew it was a warning. I'll ever trust, you out of my sight again--you've got to marry me now." Pauline shrank back from his kisses. "No, no, Harry I can't--I won't --there was a woman on the train said my mother was an Egyptian." Harry broke into a peal of laughter and caught her in his arms. "Is that the only reason you won't?" "Harry, is it true?" "I don't know and I don't care--what difference does it make who your mother was? You are you, that's all I care for." His voice shook. "I love you so, Pauline, that I can't stand this life any longer--another adventure--" Pauline silenced him with a kiss. "I'm all through with adventures," she declared. "Harry, I'm going to--" "Marry me? Polly, do you mean it?" "Yes, yes. Oh, my dearest, I've been a selfish, silly, conceited little pig, but I'm cured, I'm cured at last." As he clasped her in his arms, the shutter swung violently to, and the case containing the Mummy fell with a clatter to the floor. Harry ran and lifted it as tenderly as if it had been a little child. "I suppose we can hardly keep her here," he said regretfully, "but we'll give, no, I can't give her up entirely, we'll lend her to the Metropolitan Art Museum where she'll receive due honor. She's been a faithful friend to us, Polly." "And here's another," exclaimed Pauline, as Cyrus ran frantically into the room, and leaping upon the couch with ecstatic barks of welcome, threatened again to take the place that belonged by right to Harry. But this time Harry joined in Pauline's caresses. THE END 
848	----	Transcribed from the 1899 Charles Scribner's Sons edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org THE BLACK ARROW--A TALE OF THE TWO ROSES Critic on the Hearth: No one but myself knows what I have suffered, nor what my books have gained, by your unsleeping watchfulness and admirable pertinacity. And now here is a volume that goes into the world and lacks your _imprimatur_: a strange thing in our joint lives; and the reason of it stranger still! I have watched with interest, with pain, and at length with amusement, your unavailing attempts to peruse _The Black Arrow_; and I think I should lack humour indeed, if I let the occasion slip and did not place your name in the fly-leaf of the only book of mine that you have never read--and never will read. That others may display more constancy is still my hope. The tale was written years ago for a particular audience and (I may say) in rivalry with a particular author; I think I should do well to name him, Mr. Alfred R. Phillips. It was not without its reward at the time. I could not, indeed, displace Mr. Phillips from his well-won priority; but in the eyes of readers who thought less than nothing of _Treasure Island_, _The Black Arrow_ was supposed to mark a clear advance. Those who read volumes and those who read story papers belong to different worlds. The verdict on _Treasure Island_ was reversed in the other court; I wonder, will it be the same with its successor? _R. L. S._ SARANAC LAKE, April 8, 1888. PROLOGUE--JOHN AMEND-ALL On a certain afternoon, in the late springtime, the bell upon Tunstall Moat House was heard ringing at an unaccustomed hour. Far and near, in the forest and in the fields along the river, people began to desert their labours and hurry towards the sound; and in Tunstall hamlet a group of poor country-folk stood wondering at the summons. Tunstall hamlet at that period, in the reign of old King Henry VI., wore much the same appearance as it wears to-day. A score or so of houses, heavily framed with oak, stood scattered in a long green valley ascending from the river. At the foot, the road crossed a bridge, and mounting on the other side, disappeared into the fringes of the forest on its way to the Moat House, and further forth to Holywood Abbey. Half-way up the village, the church stood among yews. On every side the slopes were crowned and the view bounded by the green elms and greening oak-trees of the forest. Hard by the bridge, there was a stone cross upon a knoll, and here the group had collected--half a dozen women and one tall fellow in a russet smock--discussing what the bell betided. An express had gone through the hamlet half an hour before, and drunk a pot of ale in the saddle, not daring to dismount for the hurry of his errand; but he had been ignorant himself of what was forward, and only bore sealed letters from Sir Daniel Brackley to Sir Oliver Oates, the parson, who kept the Moat House in the master's absence. But now there was the noise of a horse; and soon, out of the edge of the wood and over the echoing bridge, there rode up young Master Richard Shelton, Sir Daniel's ward. He, at the least, would know, and they hailed him and begged him to explain. He drew bridle willingly enough--a young fellow not yet eighteen, sun-browned and grey-eyed, in a jacket of deer's leather, with a black velvet collar, a green hood upon his head, and a steel cross-bow at his back. The express, it appeared, had brought great news. A battle was impending. Sir Daniel had sent for every man that could draw a bow or carry a bill to go post-haste to Kettley, under pain of his severe displeasure; but for whom they were to fight, or of where the battle was expected, Dick knew nothing. Sir Oliver would come shortly himself, and Bennet Hatch was arming at that moment, for he it was who should lead the party. "It is the ruin of this kind land," a woman said. "If the barons live at war, ploughfolk must eat roots." "Nay," said Dick, "every man that follows shall have sixpence a day, and archers twelve." "If they live," returned the woman, "that may very well be; but how if they die, my master?" "They cannot better die than for their natural lord," said Dick. "No natural lord of mine," said the man in the smock. "I followed the Walsinghams; so we all did down Brierly way, till two years ago, come Candlemas. And now I must side with Brackley! It was the law that did it; call ye that natural? But now, what with Sir Daniel and what with Sir Oliver--that knows more of law than honesty--I have no natural lord but poor King Harry the Sixt, God bless him!--the poor innocent that cannot tell his right hand from his left." "Ye speak with an ill tongue, friend," answered Dick, "to miscall your good master and my lord the king in the same libel. But King Harry--praised be the saints!--has come again into his right mind, and will have all things peaceably ordained. And as for Sir Daniel, y' are very brave behind his back. But I will be no tale-bearer; and let that suffice." "I say no harm of you, Master Richard," returned the peasant. "Y' are a lad; but when ye come to a man's inches, ye will find ye have an empty pocket. I say no more: the saints help Sir Daniel's neighbours, and the Blessed Maid protect his wards!" "Clipsby," said Richard, "you speak what I cannot hear with honour. Sir Daniel is my good master, and my guardian." "Come, now, will ye read me a riddle?" returned Clipsby. "On whose side is Sir Daniel?" "I know not," said Dick, colouring a little; for his guardian had changed sides continually in the troubles of that period, and every change had brought him some increase of fortune. "Ay," returned Clipsby, "you, nor no man. For, indeed, he is one that goes to bed Lancaster and gets up York." Just then the bridge rang under horse-shoe iron, and the party turned and saw Bennet Hatch come galloping--a brown-faced, grizzled fellow, heavy of hand and grim of mien, armed with sword and spear, a steel salet on his head, a leather jack upon his body. He was a great man in these parts; Sir Daniel's right hand in peace and war, and at that time, by his master's interest, bailiff of the hundred. "Clipsby," he shouted, "off to the Moat House, and send all other laggards the same gate. Bowyer will give you jack and salet. We must ride before curfew. Look to it: he that is last at the lych-gate Sir Daniel shall reward. Look to it right well! I know you for a man of naught. Nance," he added, to one of the women, "is old Appleyard up town?" "I'll warrant you," replied the woman. "In his field, for sure." So the group dispersed, and while Clipsby walked leisurely over the bridge, Bennet and young Shelton rode up the road together, through the village and past the church. "Ye will see the old shrew," said Bennet. "He will waste more time grumbling and prating of Harry the Fift than would serve a man to shoe a horse. And all because he has been to the French wars!" The house to which they were bound was the last in the village, standing alone among lilacs; and beyond it, on three sides, there was open meadow rising towards the borders of the wood. Hatch dismounted, threw his rein over the fence, and walked down the field, Dick keeping close at his elbow, to where the old soldier was digging, knee-deep in his cabbages, and now and again, in a cracked voice, singing a snatch of song. He was all dressed in leather, only his hood and tippet were of black frieze, and tied with scarlet; his face was like a walnut-shell, both for colour and wrinkles; but his old grey eye was still clear enough, and his sight unabated. Perhaps he was deaf; perhaps he thought it unworthy of an old archer of Agincourt to pay any heed to such disturbances; but neither the surly notes of the alarm bell, nor the near approach of Bennet and the lad, appeared at all to move him; and he continued obstinately digging, and piped up, very thin and shaky: "Now, dear lady, if thy will be, I pray you that you will rue on me." "Nick Appleyard," said Hatch, "Sir Oliver commends him to you, and bids that ye shall come within this hour to the Moat House, there to take command." The old fellow looked up. "Save you, my masters!" he said, grinning. "And where goeth Master Hatch?" "Master Hatch is off to Kettley, with every man that we can horse," returned Bennet. "There is a fight toward, it seems, and my lord stays a reinforcement." "Ay, verily," returned Appleyard. "And what will ye leave me to garrison withal?" "I leave you six good men, and Sir Oliver to boot," answered Hatch. "It'll not hold the place," said Appleyard; "the number sufficeth not. It would take two score to make it good." "Why, it's for that we came to you, old shrew!" replied the other. "Who else is there but you that could do aught in such a house with such a garrison?" "Ay! when the pinch comes, ye remember the old shoe," returned Nick. "There is not a man of you can back a horse or hold a bill; and as for archery--St. Michael! if old Harry the Fift were back again, he would stand and let ye shoot at him for a farthen a shoot!" "Nay, Nick, there's some can draw a good bow yet," said Bennet. "Draw a good bow!" cried Appleyard. "Yes! But who'll shoot me a good shoot? It's there the eye comes in, and the head between your shoulders. Now, what might you call a long shoot, Bennet Hatch?" "Well," said Bennet, looking about him, "it would be a long shoot from here into the forest." "Ay, it would be a longish shoot," said the old fellow, turning to look over his shoulder; and then he put up his hand over his eyes, and stood staring. "Why, what are you looking at?" asked Bennet, with a chuckle. "Do, you see Harry the Fift?" The veteran continued looking up the hill in silence. The sun shone broadly over the shelving meadows; a few white sheep wandered browsing; all was still but the distant jangle of the bell. "What is it, Appleyard?" asked Dick. "Why, the birds," said Appleyard. And, sure enough, over the top of the forest, where it ran down in a tongue among the meadows, and ended in a pair of goodly green elms, about a bowshot from the field where they were standing, a flight of birds was skimming to and fro, in evident disorder. "What of the birds?" said Bennet. "Ay!" returned Appleyard, "y' are a wise man to go to war, Master Bennet. Birds are a good sentry; in forest places they be the first line of battle. Look you, now, if we lay here in camp, there might be archers skulking down to get the wind of us; and here would you be, none the wiser!" "Why, old shrew," said Hatch, "there be no men nearer us than Sir Daniel's, at Kettley; y' are as safe as in London Tower; and ye raise scares upon a man for a few chaffinches and sparrows!" "Hear him!" grinned Appleyard. "How many a rogue would give his two crop ears to have a shoot at either of us? Saint Michael, man! they hate us like two polecats!" "Well, sooth it is, they hate Sir Daniel," answered Hatch, a little sobered. "Ay, they hate Sir Daniel, and they hate every man that serves with him," said Appleyard; "and in the first order of hating, they hate Bennet Hatch and old Nicholas the bowman. See ye here: if there was a stout fellow yonder in the wood-edge, and you and I stood fair for him--as, by Saint George, we stand!--which, think ye, would he choose?" "You, for a good wager," answered Hatch. "My surcoat to a leather belt, it would be you!" cried the old archer. "Ye burned Grimstone, Bennet--they'll ne'er forgive you that, my master. And as for me, I'll soon be in a good place, God grant, and out of bow-shoot--ay, and cannon-shoot--of all their malices. I am an old man, and draw fast to homeward, where the bed is ready. But for you, Bennet, y' are to remain behind here at your own peril, and if ye come to my years unhanged, the old true-blue English spirit will be dead." "Y' are the shrewishest old dolt in Tunstall Forest," returned Hatch, visibly ruffled by these threats. "Get ye to your arms before Sir Oliver come, and leave prating for one good while. An ye had talked so much with Harry the Fift, his ears would ha' been richer than his pocket." An arrow sang in the air, like a huge hornet; it struck old Appleyard between the shoulder-blades, and pierced him clean through, and he fell forward on his face among the cabbages. Hatch, with a broken cry, leapt into the air; then, stooping double, he ran for the cover of the house. And in the meanwhile Dick Shelton had dropped behind a lilac, and had his crossbow bent and shouldered, covering the point of the forest. Not a leaf stirred. The sheep were patiently browsing; the birds had settled. But there lay the old man, with a cloth-yard arrow standing in his back; and there were Hatch holding to the gable, and Dick crouching and ready behind the lilac bush. "D'ye see aught?" cried Hatch. "Not a twig stirs," said Dick. "I think shame to leave him lying," said Bennet, coming forward once more with hesitating steps and a very pale countenance. "Keep a good eye on the wood, Master Shelton--keep a clear eye on the wood. The saints assoil us! here was a good shoot!" Bennet raised the old archer on his knee. He was not yet dead; his face worked, and his eyes shut and opened like machinery, and he had a most horrible, ugly look of one in pain. "Can ye hear, old Nick?" asked Hatch. "Have ye a last wish before ye wend, old brother?" "Pluck out the shaft, and let me pass, a' Mary's name!" gasped Appleyard. "I be done with Old England. Pluck it out!" "Master Dick," said Bennet, "come hither, and pull me a good pull upon the arrow. He would fain pass, the poor sinner." Dick laid down his cross-bow, and pulling hard upon the arrow, drew it forth. A gush of blood followed; the old archer scrambled half upon his feet, called once upon the name of God, and then fell dead. Hatch, upon his knees among the cabbages, prayed fervently for the welfare of the passing spirit. But even as he prayed, it was plain that his mind was still divided, and he kept ever an eye upon the corner of the wood from which the shot had come. When he had done, he got to his feet again, drew off one of his mailed gauntlets, and wiped his pale face, which was all wet with terror. "Ay," he said, "it'll be my turn next." "Who hath done this, Bennet?" Richard asked, still holding the arrow in his hand. "Nay, the saints know," said Hatch. "Here are a good two score Christian souls that we have hunted out of house and holding, he and I. He has paid his shot, poor shrew, nor will it be long, mayhap, ere I pay mine. Sir Daniel driveth over-hard." "This is a strange shaft," said the lad, looking at the arrow in his hand. "Ay, by my faith!" cried Bennet. "Black, and black-feathered. Here is an ill-favoured shaft, by my sooth! for black, they say, bodes burial. And here be words written. Wipe the blood away. What read ye?" "'_Appulyaird fro Jon Amend-All_,'" read Shelton. "What should this betoken?" "Nay, I like it not," returned the retainer, shaking his head. "John Amend-All! Here is a rogue's name for those that be up in the world! But why stand we here to make a mark? Take him by the knees, good Master Shelton, while I lift him by the shoulders, and let us lay him in his house. This will be a rare shog to poor Sir Oliver; he will turn paper colour; he will pray like a windmill." They took up the old archer, and carried him between them into his house, where he had dwelt alone. And there they laid him on the floor, out of regard for the mattress, and sought, as best they might, to straighten and compose his limbs. Appleyard's house was clean and bare. There was a bed, with a blue cover, a cupboard, a great chest, a pair of joint-stools, a hinged table in the chimney corner, and hung upon the wall the old soldier's armoury of bows and defensive armour. Hatch began to look about him curiously. "Nick had money," he said. "He may have had three score pounds put by. I would I could light upon't! When ye lose an old friend, Master Richard, the best consolation is to heir him. See, now, this chest. I would go a mighty wager there is a bushel of gold therein. He had a strong hand to get, and a hard hand to keep withal, had Appleyard the archer. Now may God rest his spirit! Near eighty year he was afoot and about, and ever getting; but now he's on the broad of his back, poor shrew, and no more lacketh; and if his chattels came to a good friend, he would be merrier, methinks, in heaven." "Come, Hatch," said Dick, "respect his stone-blind eyes. Would ye rob the man before his body? Nay, he would walk!" Hatch made several signs of the cross; but by this time his natural complexion had returned, and he was not easily to be dashed from any purpose. It would have gone hard with the chest had not the gate sounded, and presently after the door of the house opened and admitted a tall, portly, ruddy, black-eyed man of near fifty, in a surplice and black robe. "Appleyard"--the newcomer was saying, as he entered; but he stopped dead. "Ave Maria!" he cried. "Saints be our shield! What cheer is this?" "Cold cheer with Appleyard, sir parson," answered Hatch, with perfect cheerfulness. "Shot at his own door, and alighteth even now at purgatory gates. Ay! there, if tales be true, he shall lack neither coal nor candle." Sir Oliver groped his way to a joint-stool, and sat down upon it, sick and white. "This is a judgment! O, a great stroke!" he sobbed, and rattled off a leash of prayers. Hatch meanwhile reverently doffed his salet and knelt down. "Ay, Bennet," said the priest, somewhat recovering, "and what may this be? What enemy hath done this?" "Here, Sir Oliver, is the arrow. See, it is written upon with words," said Dick. "Nay," cried the priest, "this is a foul hearing! John Amend-All! A right Lollardy word. And black of hue, as for an omen! Sirs, this knave arrow likes me not. But it importeth rather to take counsel. Who should this be? Bethink you, Bennet. Of so many black ill-willers, which should he be that doth so hardily outface us? Simnel? I do much question it. The Walsinghams? Nay, they are not yet so broken; they still think to have the law over us, when times change. There was Simon Malmesbury, too. How think ye, Bennet?" "What think ye, sir," returned Hatch, "of Ellis Duckworth?" "Nay, Bennet, never. Nay, not he," said the priest. "There cometh never any rising, Bennet, from below--so all judicious chroniclers concord in their opinion; but rebellion travelleth ever downward from above; and when Dick, Tom, and Harry take them to their bills, look ever narrowly to see what lord is profited thereby. Now, Sir Daniel, having once more joined him to the Queen's party, is in ill odour with the Yorkist lords. Thence, Bennet, comes the blow--by what procuring, I yet seek; but therein lies the nerve of this discomfiture." "An't please you, Sir Oliver," said Bennet, "the axles are so hot in this country that I have long been smelling fire. So did this poor sinner, Appleyard. And, by your leave, men's spirits are so foully inclined to all of us, that it needs neither York nor Lancaster to spur them on. Hear my plain thoughts: You, that are a clerk, and Sir Daniel, that sails on any wind, ye have taken many men's goods, and beaten and hanged not a few. Y' are called to count for this; in the end, I wot not how, ye have ever the uppermost at law, and ye think all patched. But give me leave, Sir Oliver: the man that ye have dispossessed and beaten is but the angrier, and some day, when the black devil is by, he will up with his bow and clout me a yard of arrow through your inwards." "Nay, Bennet, y' are in the wrong. Bennet, ye should be glad to be corrected," said Sir Oliver. "Y' are a prater, Bennet, a talker, a babbler; your mouth is wider than your two ears. Mend it, Bennet, mend it." "Nay, I say no more. Have it as ye list," said the retainer. The priest now rose from the stool, and from the writing-case that hung about his neck took forth wax and a taper, and a flint and steel. With these he sealed up the chest and the cupboard with Sir Daniel's arms, Hatch looking on disconsolate; and then the whole party proceeded, somewhat timorously, to sally from the house and get to horse. "'Tis time we were on the road, Sir Oliver," said Hatch, as he held the priest's stirrup while he mounted. "Ay; but, Bennet, things are changed," returned the parson. "There is now no Appleyard--rest his soul!--to keep the garrison. I shall keep you, Bennet. I must have a good man to rest me on in this day of black arrows. 'The arrow that flieth by day,' saith the evangel; I have no mind of the context; nay, I am a sluggard priest, I am too deep in men's affairs. Well, let us ride forth, Master Hatch. The jackmen should be at the church by now." So they rode forward down the road, with the wind after them, blowing the tails of the parson's cloak; and behind them, as they went, clouds began to arise and blot out the sinking sun. They had passed three of the scattered houses that make up Tunstall hamlet, when, coming to a turn, they saw the church before them. Ten or a dozen houses clustered immediately round it; but to the back the churchyard was next the meadows. At the lych-gate, near a score of men were gathered, some in the saddle, some standing by their horses' heads. They were variously armed and mounted; some with spears, some with bills, some with bows, and some bestriding plough-horses, still splashed with the mire of the furrow; for these were the very dregs of the country, and all the better men and the fair equipments were already with Sir Daniel in the field. "We have not done amiss, praised be the cross of Holywood! Sir Daniel will be right well content," observed the priest, inwardly numbering the troop. "Who goes? Stand! if ye be true!" shouted Bennet. A man was seen slipping through the churchyard among the yews; and at the sound of this summons he discarded all concealment, and fairly took to his heels for the forest. The men at the gate, who had been hitherto unaware of the stranger's presence, woke and scattered. Those who had dismounted began scrambling into the saddle; the rest rode in pursuit; but they had to make the circuit of the consecrated ground, and it was plain their quarry would escape them. Hatch, roaring an oath, put his horse at the hedge, to head him off; but the beast refused, and sent his rider sprawling in the dust. And though he was up again in a moment, and had caught the bridle, the time had gone by, and the fugitive had gained too great a lead for any hope of capture. The wisest of all had been Dick Shelton. Instead of starting in a vain pursuit, he had whipped his crossbow from his back, bent it, and set a quarrel to the string; and now, when the others had desisted, he turned to Bennet and asked if he should shoot. "Shoot! shoot!" cried the priest, with sanguinary violence. "Cover him, Master Dick," said Bennet. "Bring me him down like a ripe apple." The fugitive was now within but a few leaps of safety; but this last part of the meadow ran very steeply uphill; and the man ran slower in proportion. What with the greyness of the falling night, and the uneven movements of the runner, it was no easy aim; and as Dick levelled his bow, he felt a kind of pity, and a half desire that he might miss. The quarrel sped. The man stumbled and fell, and a great cheer arose from Hatch and the pursuers. But they were counting their corn before the harvest. The man fell lightly; he was lightly afoot again, turned and waved his cap in a bravado, and was out of sight next moment in the margin of the wood. "And the plague go with him!" cried Bennet. "He has thieves' heels; he can run, by St Banbury! But you touched him, Master Shelton; he has stolen your quarrel, may he never have good I grudge him less!" "Nay, but what made he by the church?" asked Sir Oliver. "I am shrewdly afeared there has been mischief here. Clipsby, good fellow, get ye down from your horse, and search thoroughly among the yews." Clipsby was gone but a little while ere he returned carrying a paper. "This writing was pinned to the church door," he said, handing it to the parson. "I found naught else, sir parson." "Now, by the power of Mother Church," cried Sir Oliver, "but this runs hard on sacrilege! For the king's good pleasure, or the lord of the manor--well! But that every run-the-hedge in a green jerkin should fasten papers to the chancel door--nay, it runs hard on sacrilege, hard; and men have burned for matters of less weight. But what have we here? The light falls apace. Good Master Richard, y' have young eyes. Read me, I pray, this libel." Dick Shelton took the paper in his hand and read it aloud. It contained some lines of very rugged doggerel, hardly even rhyming, written in a gross character, and most uncouthly spelt. With the spelling somewhat bettered, this is how they ran: "I had four blak arrows under my belt, Four for the greefs that I have felt, Four for the nomber of ill menne That have opressid me now and then. One is gone; one is wele sped; Old Apulyaird is ded. One is for Maister Bennet Hatch, That burned Grimstone, walls and thatch. One for Sir Oliver Oates, That cut Sir Harry Shelton's throat. Sir Daniel, ye shull have the fourt; We shall think it fair sport. Ye shull each have your own part, A blak arrow in each blak heart. Get ye to your knees for to pray: Ye are ded theeves, by yea and nay! "JON AMEND-ALL of the Green Wood, And his jolly fellaweship. "Item, we have mo arrowes and goode hempen cord for otheres of your following." "Now, well-a-day for charity and the Christian graces!" cried Sir Oliver, lamentably. "Sirs, this is an ill world, and groweth daily worse. I will swear upon the cross of Holywood I am as innocent of that good knight's hurt, whether in act or purpose, as the babe unchristened. Neither was his throat cut; for therein they are again in error, as there still live credible witnesses to show." "It boots not, sir parson," said Bennet. "Here is unseasonable talk." "Nay, Master Bennet, not so. Keep ye in your due place, good Bennet," answered the priest. "I shall make mine innocence appear. I will, upon no consideration, lose my poor life in error. I take all men to witness that I am clear of this matter. I was not even in the Moat House. I was sent of an errand before nine upon the clock"-- "Sir Oliver," said Hatch, interrupting, "since it please you not to stop this sermon, I will take other means. Goffe, sound to horse." And while the tucket was sounding, Bennet moved close to the bewildered parson, and whispered violently in his ear. Dick Shelton saw the priest's eye turned upon him for an instant in a startled glance. He had some cause for thought; for this Sir Harry Shelton was his own natural father. But he said never a word, and kept his countenance unmoved. Hatch and Sir Oliver discussed together for a while their altered situation; ten men, it was decided between them, should be reserved, not only to garrison the Moat House, but to escort the priest across the wood. In the meantime, as Bennet was to remain behind, the command of the reinforcement was given to Master Shelton. Indeed, there was no choice; the men were loutish fellows, dull and unskilled in war, while Dick was not only popular, but resolute and grave beyond his age. Although his youth had been spent in these rough, country places, the lad had been well taught in letters by Sir Oliver, and Hatch himself had shown him the management of arms and the first principles of command. Bennet had always been kind and helpful; he was one of those who are cruel as the grave to those they call their enemies, but ruggedly faithful and well willing to their friends; and now, while Sir Oliver entered the next house to write, in his swift, exquisite penmanship, a memorandum of the last occurrences to his master, Sir Daniel Brackley, Bennet came up to his pupil to wish him God-speed upon his enterprise. "Ye must go the long way about, Master Shelton," he said; "round by the bridge, for your life! Keep a sure man fifty paces afore you, to draw shots; and go softly till y' are past the wood. If the rogues fall upon you, ride for 't; ye will do naught by standing. And keep ever forward, Master Shelton; turn me not back again, an ye love your life; there is no help in Tunstall, mind ye that. And now, since ye go to the great wars about the king, and I continue to dwell here in extreme jeopardy of my life, and the saints alone can certify if we shall meet again below, I give you my last counsels now at your riding. Keep an eye on Sir Daniel; he is unsure. Put not your trust in the jack-priest; he intendeth not amiss, but doth the will of others; it is a hand-gun for Sir Daniel! Get your good lordship where ye go; make you strong friends; look to it. And think ever a pater-noster-while on Bennet Hatch. There are worse rogues afoot than Bennet. So, God-speed!" "And Heaven be with you, Bennet!" returned Dick. "Ye were a good friend to me-ward, and so I shall say ever." "And, look ye, master," added Hatch, with a certain embarrassment, "if this Amend-All should get a shaft into me, ye might, mayhap, lay out a gold mark or mayhap a pound for my poor soul; for it is like to go stiff with me in purgatory." "Ye shall have your will of it, Bennet," answered Dick. "But, what cheer, man! we shall meet again, where ye shall have more need of ale than masses." "The saints so grant it, Master Dick!" returned the other. "But here comes Sir Oliver. An he were as quick with the long-bow as with the pen, he would be a brave man-at-arms." Sir Oliver gave Dick a sealed packet, with this superscription: "To my ryght worchypful master, Sir Daniel Brackley, knyght, be thys delyvered in haste." And Dick, putting it in the bosom of his jacket, gave the word and set forth westward up the village. BOOK I--THE TWO LADS CHAPTER I--AT THE SIGN OF THE SUN IN KETTLEY Sir Daniel and his men lay in and about Kettley that night, warmly quartered and well patrolled. But the Knight of Tunstall was one who never rested from money-getting; and even now, when he was on the brink of an adventure which should make or mar him, he was up an hour after midnight to squeeze poor neighbours. He was one who trafficked greatly in disputed inheritances; it was his way to buy out the most unlikely claimant, and then, by the favour he curried with great lords about the king, procure unjust decisions in his favour; or, if that was too roundabout, to seize the disputed manor by force of arms, and rely on his influence and Sir Oliver's cunning in the law to hold what he had snatched. Kettley was one such place; it had come very lately into his clutches; he still met with opposition from the tenants; and it was to overawe discontent that he had led his troops that way. By two in the morning, Sir Daniel sat in the inn room, close by the fireside, for it was cold at that hour among the fens of Kettley. By his elbow stood a pottle of spiced ale. He had taken off his visored headpiece, and sat with his bald head and thin, dark visage resting on one hand, wrapped warmly in a sanguine-coloured cloak. At the lower end of the room about a dozen of his men stood sentry over the door or lay asleep on benches; and somewhat nearer hand, a young lad, apparently of twelve or thirteen, was stretched in a mantle on the floor. The host of the Sun stood before the great man. "Now, mark me, mine host," Sir Daniel said, "follow but mine orders, and I shall be your good lord ever. I must have good men for head boroughs, and I will have Adam-a-More high constable; see to it narrowly. If other men be chosen, it shall avail you nothing; rather it shall be found to your sore cost. For those that have paid rent to Walsingham I shall take good measure--you among the rest, mine host." "Good knight," said the host, "I will swear upon the cross of Holywood I did but pay to Walsingham upon compulsion. Nay, bully knight, I love not the rogue Walsinghams; they were as poor as thieves, bully knight. Give me a great lord like you. Nay; ask me among the neighbours, I am stout for Brackley." "It may be," said Sir Daniel, dryly. "Ye shall then pay twice." The innkeeper made a horrid grimace; but this was a piece of bad luck that might readily befall a tenant in these unruly times, and he was perhaps glad to make his peace so easily. "Bring up yon fellow, Selden!" cried the knight. And one of his retainers led up a poor, cringing old man, as pale as a candle, and all shaking with the fen fever. "Sirrah," said Sir Daniel, "your name?" "An't please your worship," replied the man, "my name is Condall--Condall of Shoreby, at your good worship's pleasure." "I have heard you ill reported on," returned the knight. "Ye deal in treason, rogue; ye trudge the country leasing; y' are heavily suspicioned of the death of severals. How, fellow, are ye so bold? But I will bring you down." "Right honourable and my reverend lord," the man cried, "here is some hodge-podge, saving your good presence. I am but a poor private man, and have hurt none." "The under-sheriff did report of you most vilely," said the knight. "'Seize me,' saith he, 'that Tyndal of Shoreby.'" "Condall, my good lord; Condall is my poor name," said the unfortunate. "Condall or Tyndal, it is all one," replied Sir Daniel, coolly. "For, by my sooth, y' are here and I do mightily suspect your honesty. If ye would save your neck, write me swiftly an obligation for twenty pound." "For twenty pound, my good lord!" cried Condall. "Here is midsummer madness! My whole estate amounteth not to seventy shillings." "Condall or Tyndal," returned Sir Daniel, grinning, "I will run my peril of that loss. Write me down twenty, and when I have recovered all I may, I will be good lord to you, and pardon you the rest." "Alas! my good lord, it may not be; I have no skill to write," said Condall. "Well-a-day!" returned the knight. "Here, then, is no remedy. Yet I would fain have spared you, Tyndal, had my conscience suffered. Selden, take me this old shrew softly to the nearest elm, and hang me him tenderly by the neck, where I may see him at my riding. Fare ye well, good Master Condall, dear Master Tyndal; y' are post-haste for Paradise; fare ye then well!" "Nay, my right pleasant lord," replied Condall, forcing an obsequious smile, "an ye be so masterful, as doth right well become you, I will even, with all my poor skill, do your good bidding." "Friend," quoth Sir Daniel, "ye will now write two score. Go to! y' are too cunning for a livelihood of seventy shillings. Selden, see him write me this in good form, and have it duly witnessed." And Sir Daniel, who was a very merry knight, none merrier in England, took a drink of his mulled ale, and lay back, smiling. Meanwhile, the boy upon the floor began to stir, and presently sat up and looked about him with a scare. "Hither," said Sir Daniel; and as the other rose at his command and came slowly towards him, he leaned back and laughed outright. "By the rood!" he cried, "a sturdy boy!" The lad flushed crimson with anger, and darted a look of hate out of his dark eyes. Now that he was on his legs, it was more difficult to make certain of his age. His face looked somewhat older in expression, but it was as smooth as a young child's; and in bone and body he was unusually slender, and somewhat awkward of gait. "Ye have called me, Sir Daniel," he said. "Was it to laugh at my poor plight?" "Nay, now, let laugh," said the knight. "Good shrew, let laugh, I pray you. An ye could see yourself, I warrant ye would laugh the first." "Well," cried the lad, flushing, "ye shall answer this when ye answer for the other. Laugh while yet ye may!" "Nay, now, good cousin," replied Sir Daniel, with some earnestness, "think not that I mock at you, except in mirth, as between kinsfolk and singular friends. I will make you a marriage of a thousand pounds, go to! and cherish you exceedingly. I took you, indeed, roughly, as the time demanded; but from henceforth I shall ungrudgingly maintain and cheerfully serve you. Ye shall be Mrs. Shelton--Lady Shelton, by my troth! for the lad promiseth bravely. Tut! ye will not shy for honest laughter; it purgeth melancholy. They are no rogues who laugh, good cousin. Good mine host, lay me a meal now for my cousin, Master John. Sit ye down, sweetheart, and eat." "Nay," said Master John, "I will break no bread. Since ye force me to this sin, I will fast for my soul's interest. But, good mine host, I pray you of courtesy give me a cup of fair water; I shall be much beholden to your courtesy indeed." "Ye shall have a dispensation, go to!" cried the knight. "Shalt be well shriven, by my faith! Content you, then, and eat." But the lad was obstinate, drank a cup of water, and, once more wrapping himself closely in his mantle, sat in a far corner, brooding. In an hour or two, there rose a stir in the village of sentries challenging and the clatter of arms and horses; and then a troop drew up by the inn door, and Richard Shelton, splashed with mud, presented himself upon the threshold. "Save you, Sir Daniel," he said. "How! Dickie Shelton!" cried the knight; and at the mention of Dick's name the other lad looked curiously across. "What maketh Bennet Hatch?" "Please you, sir knight, to take cognisance of this packet from Sir Oliver, wherein are all things fully stated," answered Richard, presenting the priest's letter. "And please you farther, ye were best make all speed to Risingham; for on the way hither we encountered one riding furiously with letters, and by his report, my Lord of Risingham was sore bested, and lacked exceedingly your presence." "How say you? Sore bested?" returned the knight. "Nay, then, we will make speed sitting down, good Richard. As the world goes in this poor realm of England, he that rides softliest rides surest. Delay, they say, begetteth peril; but it is rather this itch of doing that undoes men; mark it, Dick. But let me see, first, what cattle ye have brought. Selden, a link here at the door!" And Sir Daniel strode forth into the village street, and, by the red glow of a torch, inspected his new troops. He was an unpopular neighbour and an unpopular master; but as a leader in war he was well-beloved by those who rode behind his pennant. His dash, his proved courage, his forethought for the soldiers' comfort, even his rough gibes, were all to the taste of the bold blades in jack and salet. "Nay, by the rood!" he cried, "what poor dogs are these? Here be some as crooked as a bow, and some as lean as a spear. Friends, ye shall ride in the front of the battle; I can spare you, friends. Mark me this old villain on the piebald! A two-year mutton riding on a hog would look more soldierly! Ha! Clipsby, are ye there, old rat? Y' are a man I could lose with a good heart; ye shall go in front of all, with a bull's eye painted on your jack, to be the better butt for archery; sirrah, ye shall show me the way." "I will show you any way, Sir Daniel, but the way to change sides," returned Clipsby, sturdily. Sir Daniel laughed a guffaw. "Why, well said!" he cried. "Hast a shrewd tongue in thy mouth, go to! I will forgive you for that merry word. Selden, see them fed, both man and brute." The knight re-entered the inn. "Now, friend Dick," he said, "fall to. Here is good ale and bacon. Eat, while that I read." Sir Daniel opened the packet, and as he read his brow darkened. When he had done he sat a little, musing. Then he looked sharply at his ward. "Dick," said he, "Y' have seen this penny rhyme?" The lad replied in the affirmative. "It bears your father's name," continued the knight; "and our poor shrew of a parson is, by some mad soul, accused of slaying him." "He did most eagerly deny it," answered Dick. "He did?" cried the knight, very sharply. "Heed him not. He has a loose tongue; he babbles like a jack-sparrow. Some day, when I may find the leisure, Dick, I will myself more fully inform you of these matters. There was one Duckworth shrewdly blamed for it; but the times were troubled, and there was no justice to be got." "It befell at the Moat House?" Dick ventured, with a beating at his heart. "It befell between the Moat House and Holywood," replied Sir Daniel, calmly; but he shot a covert glance, black with suspicion, at Dick's face. "And now," added the knight, "speed you with your meal; ye shall return to Tunstall with a line from me." Dick's face fell sorely. "Prithee, Sir Daniel," he cried, "send one of the villains! I beseech you let me to the battle. I can strike a stroke, I promise you." "I misdoubt it not," replied Sir Daniel, sitting down to write. "But here, Dick, is no honour to be won. I lie in Kettley till I have sure tidings of the war, and then ride to join me with the conqueror. Cry not on cowardice; it is but wisdom, Dick; for this poor realm so tosseth with rebellion, and the king's name and custody so changeth hands, that no man may be certain of the morrow. Toss-pot and Shuttle-wit run in, but my Lord Good-Counsel sits o' one side, waiting." With that, Sir Daniel, turning his back to Dick, and quite at the farther end of the long table, began to write his letter, with his mouth on one side, for this business of the Black Arrow stuck sorely in his throat. Meanwhile, young Shelton was going on heartily enough with his breakfast, when he felt a touch upon his arm, and a very soft voice whispering in his ear. "Make not a sign, I do beseech you," said the voice, "but of your charity tell me the straight way to Holywood. Beseech you, now, good boy, comfort a poor soul in peril and extreme distress, and set me so far forth upon the way to my repose." "Take the path by the windmill," answered Dick, in the same tone; "it will bring you to Till Ferry; there inquire again." And without turning his head, he fell again to eating. But with the tail of his eye he caught a glimpse of the young lad called Master John stealthily creeping from the room. "Why," thought Dick, "he is a young as I. 'Good boy' doth he call me? An I had known, I should have seen the varlet hanged ere I had told him. Well, if he goes through the fen, I may come up with him and pull his ears." Half an hour later, Sir Daniel gave Dick the letter, and bade him speed to the Moat House. And, again, some half an hour after Dick's departure, a messenger came, in hot haste, from my Lord of Risingham. "Sir Daniel," the messenger said, "ye lose great honour, by my sooth! The fight began again this morning ere the dawn, and we have beaten their van and scattered their right wing. Only the main battle standeth fast. An we had your fresh men, we should tilt you them all into the river. What, sir knight! Will ye be the last? It stands not with your good credit." "Nay," cried the knight, "I was but now upon the march. Selden, sound me the tucket. Sir, I am with you on the instant. It is not two hours since the more part of my command came in, sir messenger. What would ye have? Spurring is good meat, but yet it killed the charger. Bustle, boys!" By this time the tucket was sounding cheerily in the morning, and from all sides Sir Daniel's men poured into the main street and formed before the inn. They had slept upon their arms, with chargers saddled, and in ten minutes five-score men-at-arms and archers, cleanly equipped and briskly disciplined, stood ranked and ready. The chief part were in Sir Daniel's livery, murrey and blue, which gave the greater show to their array. The best armed rode first; and away out of sight, at the tail of the column, came the sorry reinforcement of the night before. Sir Daniel looked with pride along the line. "Here be the lads to serve you in a pinch," he said. "They are pretty men, indeed," replied the messenger. "It but augments my sorrow that ye had not marched the earlier." "Well," said the knight, "what would ye? The beginning of a feast and the end of a fray, sir messenger;" and he mounted into his saddle. "Why! how now!" he cried. "John! Joanna! Nay, by the sacred rood! where is she? Host, where is that girl?" "Girl, Sir Daniel?" cried the landlord. "Nay, sir, I saw no girl." "Boy, then, dotard!" cried the knight. "Could ye not see it was a wench? She in the murrey-coloured mantle--she that broke her fast with water, rogue--where is she?" "Nay, the saints bless us! Master John, ye called him," said the host. "Well, I thought none evil. He is gone. I saw him--her--I saw her in the stable a good hour agone; 'a was saddling a grey horse." "Now, by the rood!" cried Sir Daniel, "the wench was worth five hundred pound to me and more." "Sir knight," observed the messenger, with bitterness, "while that ye are here, roaring for five hundred pounds, the realm of England is elsewhere being lost and won." "It is well said," replied Sir Daniel. "Selden, fall me out with six cross-bowmen; hunt me her down. I care not what it cost; but, at my returning, let me find her at the Moat House. Be it upon your head. And now, sir messenger, we march." And the troop broke into a good trot, and Selden and his six men were left behind upon the street of Kettley, with the staring villagers. CHAPTER II--IN THE FEN It was near six in the May morning when Dick began to ride down into the fen upon his homeward way. The sky was all blue; the jolly wind blew loud and steady; the windmill-sails were spinning; and the willows over all the fen rippling and whitening like a field of corn. He had been all night in the saddle, but his heart was good and his body sound, and he rode right merrily. The path went down and down into the marsh, till he lost sight of all the neighbouring landmarks but Kettley windmill on the knoll behind him, and the extreme top of Tunstall Forest far before. On either hand there were great fields of blowing reeds and willows, pools of water shaking in the wind, and treacherous bogs, as green as emerald, to tempt and to betray the traveller. The path lay almost straight through the morass. It was already very ancient; its foundation had been laid by Roman soldiery; in the lapse of ages much of it had sunk, and every here and there, for a few hundred yards, it lay submerged below the stagnant waters of the fen. About a mile from Kettley, Dick came to one such break in the plain line of causeway, where the reeds and willows grew dispersedly like little islands and confused the eye. The gap, besides, was more than usually long; it was a place where any stranger might come readily to mischief; and Dick bethought him, with something like a pang, of the lad whom he had so imperfectly directed. As for himself, one look backward to where the windmill sails were turning black against the blue of heaven--one look forward to the high ground of Tunstall Forest, and he was sufficiently directed and held straight on, the water washing to his horse's knees, as safe as on a highway. Half-way across, and when he had already sighted the path rising high and dry upon the farther side, he was aware of a great splashing on his right, and saw a grey horse, sunk to its belly in the mud, and still spasmodically struggling. Instantly, as though it had divined the neighbourhood of help, the poor beast began to neigh most piercingly. It rolled, meanwhile, a blood-shot eye, insane with terror; and as it sprawled wallowing in the quag, clouds of stinging insects rose and buzzed about it in the air. "Alack!" thought Dick, "can the poor lad have perished? There is his horse, for certain--a brave grey! Nay, comrade, if thou criest to me so piteously, I will do all man can to help thee. Shalt not lie there to drown by inches!" And he made ready his crossbow, and put a quarrel through the creature's head. Dick rode on after this act of rugged mercy, somewhat sobered in spirit, and looking closely about him for any sign of his less happy predecessor in the way. "I would I had dared to tell him further," he thought; "for I fear he has miscarried in the slough." And just as he was so thinking, a voice cried upon his name from the causeway side, and, looking over his shoulder, he saw the lad's face peering from a clump of reeds. "Are ye there?" he said, reining in. "Ye lay so close among the reeds that I had passed you by. I saw your horse bemired, and put him from his agony; which, by my sooth! an ye had been a more merciful rider, ye had done yourself. But come forth out of your hiding. Here be none to trouble you." "Nay, good boy, I have no arms, nor skill to use them if I had," replied the other, stepping forth upon the pathway. "Why call me 'boy'?" cried Dick. "Y' are not, I trow, the elder of us twain." "Good Master Shelton," said the other, "prithee forgive me. I have none the least intention to offend. Rather I would in every way beseech your gentleness and favour, for I am now worse bested than ever, having lost my way, my cloak, and my poor horse. To have a riding-rod and spurs, and never a horse to sit upon! And before all," he added, looking ruefully upon his clothes--"before all, to be so sorrily besmirched!" "Tut!" cried Dick. "Would ye mind a ducking? Blood of wound or dust of travel--that's a man's adornment." "Nay, then, I like him better plain," observed the lad. "But, prithee, how shall I do? Prithee, good Master Richard, help me with your good counsel. If I come not safe to Holywood, I am undone." "Nay," said Dick, dismounting, "I will give more than counsel. Take my horse, and I will run awhile, and when I am weary we shall change again, that so, riding and running, both may go the speedier." So the change was made, and they went forward as briskly as they durst on the uneven causeway, Dick with his hand upon the other's knee. "How call ye your name?" asked Dick. "Call me John Matcham," replied the lad. "And what make ye to Holywood?" Dick continued. "I seek sanctuary from a man that would oppress me," was the answer. "The good Abbot of Holywood is a strong pillar to the weak." "And how came ye with Sir Daniel, Master Matcham?" pursued Dick. "Nay," cried the other, "by the abuse of force! He hath taken me by violence from my own place; dressed me in these weeds; ridden with me till my heart was sick; gibed me till I could 'a' wept; and when certain of my friends pursued, thinking to have me back, claps me in the rear to stand their shot! I was even grazed in the right foot, and walk but lamely. Nay, there shall come a day between us; he shall smart for all!" "Would ye shoot at the moon with a hand-gun?" said Dick. "'Tis a valiant knight, and hath a hand of iron. An he guessed I had made or meddled with your flight, it would go sore with me." "Ay, poor boy," returned the other, "y' are his ward, I know it. By the same token, so am I, or so he saith; or else he hath bought my marriage--I wot not rightly which; but it is some handle to oppress me by." "Boy again!" said Dick. "Nay, then, shall I call you girl, good Richard?" asked Matcham. "Never a girl for me," returned Dick. "I do abjure the crew of them!" "Ye speak boyishly," said the other. "Ye think more of them than ye pretend." "Not I," said Dick, stoutly. "They come not in my mind. A plague of them, say I! Give me to hunt and to fight and to feast, and to live with jolly foresters. I never heard of a maid yet that was for any service, save one only; and she, poor shrew, was burned for a witch and the wearing of men's clothes in spite of nature." Master Matcham crossed himself with fervour, and appeared to pray. "What make ye?" Dick inquired. "I pray for her spirit," answered the other, with a somewhat troubled voice. "For a witch's spirit?" Dick cried. "But pray for her, an ye list; she was the best wench in Europe, was this Joan of Arc. Old Appleyard the archer ran from her, he said, as if she had been Mahoun. Nay, she was a brave wench." "Well, but, good Master Richard," resumed Matcham, "an ye like maids so little, y' are no true natural man; for God made them twain by intention, and brought true love into the world, to be man's hope and woman's comfort." "Faugh!" said Dick. "Y' are a milk-sopping baby, so to harp on women. An ye think I be no true man, get down upon the path, and whether at fists, back-sword, or bow and arrow, I will prove my manhood on your body." "Nay, I am no fighter," said Matcham, eagerly. "I mean no tittle of offence. I meant but pleasantry. And if I talk of women, it is because I heard ye were to marry." "I to marry!" Dick exclaimed. "Well, it is the first I hear of it. And with whom was I to marry?" "One Joan Sedley," replied Matcham, colouring. "It was Sir Daniel's doing; he hath money to gain upon both sides; and, indeed, I have heard the poor wench bemoaning herself pitifully of the match. It seems she is of your mind, or else distasted to the bridegroom." "Well! marriage is like death, it comes to all," said Dick, with resignation. "And she bemoaned herself? I pray ye now, see there how shuttle-witted are these girls: to bemoan herself before that she had seen me! Do I bemoan myself? Not I. An I be to marry, I will marry dry-eyed! But if ye know her, prithee, of what favour is she? fair or foul? And is she shrewish or pleasant?" "Nay, what matters it?" said Matcham. "An y' are to marry, ye can but marry. What matters foul or fair? These be but toys. Y' are no milksop, Master Richard; ye will wed with dry eyes, anyhow." "It is well said," replied Shelton. "Little I reck." "Your lady wife is like to have a pleasant lord," said Matcham. "She shall have the lord Heaven made her for," returned Dick. "It trow there be worse as well as better." "Ah, the poor wench!" cried the other. "And why so poor?" asked Dick. "To wed a man of wood," replied his companion. "O me, for a wooden husband!" "I think I be a man of wood, indeed," said Dick, "to trudge afoot the while you ride my horse; but it is good wood, I trow." "Good Dick, forgive me," cried the other. "Nay, y' are the best heart in England; I but laughed. Forgive me now, sweet Dick." "Nay, no fool words," returned Dick, a little embarrassed by his companion's warmth. "No harm is done. I am not touchy, praise the saints." And at that moment the wind, which was blowing straight behind them as they went, brought them the rough flourish of Sir Daniel's trumpeter. "Hark!" said Dick, "the tucket soundeth." "Ay," said Matcham, "they have found my flight, and now I am unhorsed!" and he became pale as death. "Nay, what cheer!" returned Dick. "Y' have a long start, and we are near the ferry. And it is I, methinks, that am unhorsed." "Alack, I shall be taken!" cried the fugitive. "Dick, kind Dick, beseech ye help me but a little!" "Why, now, what aileth thee?" said Dick. "Methinks I help you very patently. But my heart is sorry for so spiritless a fellow! And see ye here, John Matcham--sith John Matcham is your name--I, Richard Shelton, tide what betideth, come what may, will see you safe in Holywood. The saints so do to me again if I default you. Come, pick me up a good heart, Sir White-face. The way betters here; spur me the horse. Go faster! faster! Nay, mind not for me; I can run like a deer." So, with the horse trotting hard, and Dick running easily alongside, they crossed the remainder of the fen, and came out upon the banks of the river by the ferryman's hut. CHAPTER III--THE FEN FERRY The river Till was a wide, sluggish, clayey water, oozing out of fens, and in this part of its course it strained among some score of willow-covered, marshy islets. It was a dingy stream; but upon this bright, spirited morning everything was become beautiful. The wind and the martens broke it up into innumerable dimples; and the reflection of the sky was scattered over all the surface in crumbs of smiling blue. A creek ran up to meet the path, and close under the bank the ferryman's hut lay snugly. It was of wattle and clay, and the grass grew green upon the roof. Dick went to the door and opened it. Within, upon a foul old russet cloak, the ferryman lay stretched and shivering; a great hulk of a man, but lean and shaken by the country fever. "Hey, Master Shelton," he said, "be ye for the ferry? Ill times, ill times! Look to yourself. There is a fellowship abroad. Ye were better turn round on your two heels and try the bridge." "Nay; time's in the saddle," answered Dick. "Time will ride, Hugh Ferryman. I am hot in haste." "A wilful man!" returned the ferryman, rising. "An ye win safe to the Moat House, y' have done lucky; but I say no more." And then catching sight of Matcham, "Who be this?" he asked, as he paused, blinking, on the threshold of his cabin. "It is my kinsman, Master Matcham," answered Dick. "Give ye good day, good ferryman," said Matcham, who had dismounted, and now came forward, leading the horse. "Launch me your boat, I prithee; we are sore in haste." The gaunt ferryman continued staring. "By the mass!" he cried at length, and laughed with open throat. Matcham coloured to his neck and winced; and Dick, with an angry countenance, put his hand on the lout's shoulder. "How now, churl!" he cried. "Fall to thy business, and leave mocking thy betters." Hugh Ferryman grumblingly undid his boat, and shoved it a little forth into the deep water. Then Dick led in the horse, and Matcham followed. "Ye be mortal small made, master," said Hugh, with a wide grin; "something o' the wrong model, belike. Nay, Master Shelton, I am for you," he added, getting to his oars. "A cat may look at a king. I did but take a shot of the eye at Master Matcham." "Sirrah, no more words," said Dick. "Bend me your back." They were by that time at the mouth of the creek, and the view opened up and down the river. Everywhere it was enclosed with islands. Clay banks were falling in, willows nodding, reeds waving, martens dipping and piping. There was no sign of man in the labyrinth of waters. "My master," said the ferryman, keeping the boat steady with one oar, "I have a shrew guess that John-a-Fenne is on the island. He bears me a black grudge to all Sir Daniel's. How if I turned me up stream and landed you an arrow-flight above the path? Ye were best not meddle with John Fenne." "How, then? is he of this company?" asked Dick. "Nay, mum is the word," said Hugh. "But I would go up water, Dick. How if Master Matcham came by an arrow?" and he laughed again. "Be it so, Hugh," answered Dick. "Look ye, then," pursued Hugh. "Sith it shall so be, unsling me your cross-bow--so: now make it ready--good; place me a quarrel. Ay, keep it so, and look upon me grimly." "What meaneth this?" asked Dick. "Why, my master, if I steal you across, it must be under force or fear," replied the ferryman; "for else, if John Fenne got wind of it, he were like to prove my most distressful neighbour." "Do these churls ride so roughly?" Dick inquired. "Do they command Sir Daniel's own ferry?" "Nay," whispered the ferryman, winking. "Mark me! Sir Daniel shall down. His time is out. He shall down. Mum!" And he bent over his oars. They pulled a long way up the river, turned the tail of an island, and came softly down a narrow channel next the opposite bank. Then Hugh held water in midstream. "I must land you here among the willows," he said. "Here is no path but willow swamps and quagmires," answered Dick. "Master Shelton," replied Hugh, "I dare not take ye nearer down, for your own sake now. He watcheth me the ferry, lying on his bow. All that go by and owe Sir Daniel goodwill, he shooteth down like rabbits. I heard him swear it by the rood. An I had not known you of old days--ay, and from so high upward--I would 'a' let you go on; but for old days' remembrance, and because ye had this toy with you that's not fit for wounds or warfare, I did risk my two poor ears to have you over whole. Content you; I can no more, on my salvation!" Hugh was still speaking, lying on his oars, when there came a great shout from among the willows on the island, and sounds followed as of a strong man breasting roughly through the wood. "A murrain!" cried Hugh. "He was on the upper island all the while!" He pulled straight for shore. "Threat me with your bow, good Dick; threat me with it plain," he added. "I have tried to save your skins, save you mine!" The boat ran into a tough thicket of willows with a crash. Matcham, pale, but steady and alert, at a sign from Dick, ran along the thwarts and leaped ashore; Dick, taking the horse by the bridle, sought to follow, but what with the animal's bulk, and what with the closeness of the thicket, both stuck fast. The horse neighed and trampled; and the boat, which was swinging in an eddy, came on and off and pitched with violence. "It may not be, Hugh; here is no landing," cried Dick; but he still struggled valiantly with the obstinate thicket and the startled animal. A tall man appeared upon the shore of the island, a long-bow in his hand. Dick saw him for an instant, with the corner of his eye, bending the bow with a great effort, his face crimson with hurry. "Who goes?" he shouted. "Hugh, who goes?" "'Tis Master Shelton, John," replied the ferryman. "Stand, Dick Shelton!" bawled the man upon the island. "Ye shall have no hurt, upon the rood! Stand! Back out, Hugh Ferryman." Dick cried a taunting answer. "Nay, then, ye shall go afoot," returned the man; and he let drive an arrow. The horse, struck by the shaft, lashed out in agony and terror; the boat capsized, and the next moment all were struggling in the eddies of the river. When Dick came up, he was within a yard of the bank; and before his eyes were clear, his hand had closed on something firm and strong that instantly began to drag him forward. It was the riding-rod, that Matcham, crawling forth upon an overhanging willow, had opportunely thrust into his grasp. "By the mass!" cried Dick, as he was helped ashore, "that makes a life I owe you. I swim like a cannon-ball." And he turned instantly towards the island. Midway over, Hugh Ferryman was swimming with his upturned boat, while John-a-Fenne, furious at the ill-fortune of his shot, bawled to him to hurry. "Come, Jack," said Shelton, "run for it! Ere Hugh can hale his barge across, or the pair of 'em can get it righted, we may be out of cry." And adding example to his words, he began to run, dodging among the willows, and in marshy places leaping from tussock to tussock. He had no time to look for his direction; all he could do was to turn his back upon the river, and put all his heart to running. Presently, however, the ground began to rise, which showed him he was still in the right way, and soon after they came forth upon a slope of solid turf, where elms began to mingle with the willows. But here Matcham, who had been dragging far into the rear, threw himself fairly down. "Leave me, Dick!" he cried, pantingly; "I can no more." Dick turned, and came back to where his companion lay. "Nay, Jack, leave thee!" he cried. "That were a knave's trick, to be sure, when ye risked a shot and a ducking, ay, and a drowning too, to save my life. Drowning, in sooth; for why I did not pull you in along with me, the saints alone can tell!" "Nay," said Matcham, "I would 'a' saved us both, good Dick, for I can swim." "Can ye so?" cried Dick, with open eyes. It was the one manly accomplishment of which he was himself incapable. In the order of the things that he admired, next to having killed a man in single fight came swimming. "Well," he said, "here is a lesson to despise no man. I promised to care for you as far as Holywood, and, by the rood, Jack, y' are more capable to care for me." "Well, Dick, we're friends now," said Matcham. "Nay, I never was unfriends," answered Dick. "Y' are a brave lad in your way, albeit something of a milksop, too. I never met your like before this day. But, prithee, fetch back your breath, and let us on. Here is no place for chatter." "My foot hurts shrewdly," said Matcham. "Nay, I had forgot your foot," returned Dick. "Well, we must go the gentlier. I would I knew rightly where we were. I have clean lost the path; yet that may be for the better, too. An they watch the ferry, they watch the path, belike, as well. I would Sir Daniel were back with two score men; he would sweep me these rascals as the wind sweeps leaves. Come, Jack, lean ye on my shoulder, ye poor shrew. Nay, y' are not tall enough. What age are ye, for a wager?--twelve?" "Nay, I am sixteen," said Matcham. "Y' are poorly grown to height, then," answered Dick. "But take my hand. We shall go softly, never fear. I owe you a life; I am a good repayer, Jack, of good or evil." They began to go forward up the slope. "We must hit the road, early or late," continued Dick; "and then for a fresh start. By the mass! but y' 'ave a rickety hand, Jack. If I had a hand like that, I would think shame. I tell you," he went on, with a sudden chuckle, "I swear by the mass I believe Hugh Ferryman took you for a maid." "Nay, never!" cried the other, colouring high. "A' did, though, for a wager!" Dick exclaimed. "Small blame to him. Ye look liker maid than man; and I tell you more--y' are a strange-looking rogue for a boy; but for a hussy, Jack, ye would be right fair--ye would. Ye would be well favoured for a wench." "Well," said Matcham, "ye know right well that I am none." "Nay, I know that; I do but jest," said Dick. "Ye'll be a man before your mother, Jack. What cheer, my bully! Ye shall strike shrewd strokes. Now, which, I marvel, of you or me, shall be first knighted, Jack? for knighted I shall be, or die for 't. 'Sir Richard Shelton, Knight': it soundeth bravely. But 'Sir John Matcham' soundeth not amiss." "Prithee, Dick, stop till I drink," said the other, pausing where a little clear spring welled out of the slope into a gravelled basin no bigger than a pocket. "And O, Dick, if I might come by anything to eat!--my very heart aches with hunger." "Why, fool, did ye not eat at Kettley?" asked Dick. "I had made a vow--it was a sin I had been led into," stammered Matcham; "but now, if it were but dry bread, I would eat it greedily." "Sit ye, then, and eat," said Dick, "while that I scout a little forward for the road." And he took a wallet from his girdle, wherein were bread and pieces of dry bacon, and, while Matcham fell heartily to, struck farther forth among the trees. A little beyond there was a dip in the ground, where a streamlet soaked among dead leaves; and beyond that, again, the trees were better grown and stood wider, and oak and beech began to take the place of willow and elm. The continued tossing and pouring of the wind among the leaves sufficiently concealed the sounds of his footsteps on the mast; it was for the ear what a moonless night is to the eye; but for all that Dick went cautiously, slipping from one big trunk to another, and looking sharply about him as he went. Suddenly a doe passed like a shadow through the underwood in front of him, and he paused, disgusted at the chance. This part of the wood had been certainly deserted, but now that the poor deer had run, she was like a messenger he should have sent before him to announce his coming; and instead of pushing farther, he turned him to the nearest well-grown tree, and rapidly began to climb. Luck had served him well. The oak on which he had mounted was one of the tallest in that quarter of the wood, and easily out-topped its neighbours by a fathom and a half; and when Dick had clambered into the topmost fork and clung there, swinging dizzily in the great wind, he saw behind him the whole fenny plain as far as Kettley, and the Till wandering among woody islets, and in front of him, the white line of high-road winding through the forest. The boat had been righted--it was even now midway on the ferry. Beyond that there was no sign of man, nor aught moving but the wind. He was about to descend, when, taking a last view, his eye lit upon a string of moving points about the middle of the fen. Plainly a small troop was threading the causeway, and that at a good pace; and this gave him some concern as he shinned vigorously down the trunk and returned across the wood for his companion. CHAPTER IV--A GREENWOOD COMPANY Matcham was well rested and revived; and the two lads, winged by what Dick had seen, hurried through the remainder of the outwood, crossed the road in safety, and began to mount into the high ground of Tunstall Forest. The trees grew more and more in groves, with heathy places in between, sandy, gorsy, and dotted with old yews. The ground became more and more uneven, full of pits and hillocks. And with every step of the ascent the wind still blew the shriller, and the trees bent before the gusts like fishing-rods. They had just entered one of the clearings, when Dick suddenly clapped down upon his face among the brambles, and began to crawl slowly backward towards the shelter of the grove. Matcham, in great bewilderment, for he could see no reason for this flight, still imitated his companion's course; and it was not until they had gained the harbour of a thicket that he turned and begged him to explain. For all reply, Dick pointed with his finger. At the far end of the clearing, a fir grew high above the neighbouring wood, and planted its black shock of foliage clear against the sky. For about fifty feet above the ground the trunk grew straight and solid like a column. At that level, it split into two massive boughs; and in the fork, like a mast-headed seaman, there stood a man in a green tabard, spying far and wide. The sun glistened upon his hair; with one hand he shaded his eyes to look abroad, and he kept slowly rolling his head from side to side, with the regularity of a machine. The lads exchanged glances. "Let us try to the left," said Dick. "We had near fallen foully, Jack." Ten minutes afterwards they struck into a beaten path. "Here is a piece of forest that I know not," Dick remarked. "Where goeth me this track?" "Let us even try," said Matcham. A few yards further, the path came to the top of a ridge and began to go down abruptly into a cup-shaped hollow. At the foot, out of a thick wood of flowering hawthorn, two or three roofless gables, blackened as if by fire, and a single tall chimney marked the ruins of a house. "What may this be?" whispered Matcham. "Nay, by the mass, I know not," answered Dick. "I am all at sea. Let us go warily." With beating hearts, they descended through the hawthorns. Here and there, they passed signs of recent cultivation; fruit trees and pot herbs ran wild among the thicket; a sun-dial had fallen in the grass; it seemed they were treading what once had been a garden. Yet a little farther and they came forth before the ruins of the house. It had been a pleasant mansion and a strong. A dry ditch was dug deep about it; but it was now choked with masonry, and bridged by a fallen rafter. The two farther walls still stood, the sun shining through their empty windows; but the remainder of the building had collapsed, and now lay in a great cairn of ruin, grimed with fire. Already in the interior a few plants were springing green among the chinks. "Now I bethink me," whispered Dick, "this must be Grimstone. It was a hold of one Simon Malmesbury; Sir Daniel was his bane! 'Twas Bennet Hatch that burned it, now five years agone. In sooth, 'twas pity, for it was a fair house." Down in the hollow, where no wind blew, it was both warm and still; and Matcham, laying one hand upon Dick's arm, held up a warning finger. "Hist!" he said. Then came a strange sound, breaking on the quiet. It was twice repeated ere they recognised its nature. It was the sound of a big man clearing his throat; and just then a hoarse, untuneful voice broke into singing. "Then up and spake the master, the king of the outlaws: 'What make ye here, my merry men, among the greenwood shaws?' And Gamelyn made answer--he looked never adown: 'O, they must need to walk in wood that may not walk in town!'" The singer paused, a faint clink of iron followed, and then silence. The two lads stood looking at each other. Whoever he might be, their invisible neighbour was just beyond the ruin. And suddenly the colour came into Matcham's face, and next moment he had crossed the fallen rafter, and was climbing cautiously on the huge pile of lumber that filled the interior of the roofless house. Dick would have withheld him, had he been in time; as it was, he was fain to follow. Right in the corner of the ruin, two rafters had fallen crosswise, and protected a clear space no larger than a pew in church. Into this the lads silently lowered themselves. There they were perfectly concealed, and through an arrow-loophole commanded a view upon the farther side. Peering through this, they were struck stiff with terror at their predicament. To retreat was impossible; they scarce dared to breathe. Upon the very margin of the ditch, not thirty feet from where they crouched, an iron caldron bubbled and steamed above a glowing fire; and close by, in an attitude of listening, as though he had caught some sound of their clambering among the ruins, a tall, red-faced, battered-looking man stood poised, an iron spoon in his right hand, a horn and a formidable dagger at his belt. Plainly this was the singer; plainly he had been stirring the caldron, when some incautious step among the lumber had fallen upon his ear. A little further off, another man lay slumbering, rolled in a brown cloak, with a butterfly hovering above his face. All this was in a clearing white with daisies; and at the extreme verge, a bow, a sheaf of arrows, and part of a deer's carcase, hung upon a flowering hawthorn. Presently the fellow relaxed from his attitude of attention, raised the spoon to his mouth, tasted its contents, nodded, and then fell again to stirring and singing. "'O, they must need to walk in wood that may not walk in town,'" he croaked, taking up his song where he had left it. "O, sir, we walk not here at all an evil thing to do. But if we meet with the good king's deer to shoot a shaft into." Still as he sang, he took from time to time, another spoonful of the broth, blew upon it, and tasted it, with all the airs of an experienced cook. At length, apparently, he judged the mess was ready; for taking the horn from his girdle, he blew three modulated calls. The other fellow awoke, rolled over, brushed away the butterfly, and looked about him. "How now, brother?" he said. "Dinner?" "Ay, sot," replied the cook, "dinner it is, and a dry dinner, too, with neither ale nor bread. But there is little pleasure in the greenwood now; time was when a good fellow could live here like a mitred abbot, set aside the rain and the white frosts; he had his heart's desire both of ale and wine. But now are men's spirits dead; and this John Amend-All, save us and guard us! but a stuffed booby to scare crows withal." "Nay," returned the other, "y' are too set on meat and drinking, Lawless. Bide ye a bit; the good time cometh." "Look ye," returned the cook, "I have even waited for this good time sith that I was so high. I have been a grey friar; I have been a king's archer; I have been a shipman, and sailed the salt seas; and I have been in greenwood before this, forsooth! and shot the king's deer. What cometh of it? Naught! I were better to have bided in the cloister. John Abbot availeth more than John Amend-All. By 'r Lady! here they come." One after another, tall, likely fellows began to stroll into the lawn. Each as he came produced a knife and a horn cup, helped himself from the caldron, and sat down upon the grass to eat. They were very variously equipped and armed; some in rusty smocks, and with nothing but a knife and an old bow; others in the height of forest gallantry, all in Lincoln green, both hood and jerkin, with dainty peacock arrows in their belts, a horn upon a baldrick, and a sword and dagger at their sides. They came in the silence of hunger, and scarce growled a salutation, but fell instantly to meat. There were, perhaps, a score of them already gathered, when a sound of suppressed cheering arose close by among the hawthorns, and immediately after five or six woodmen carrying a stretcher debauched upon the lawn. A tall, lusty fellow, somewhat grizzled, and as brown as a smoked ham, walked before them with an air of some authority, his bow at his back, a bright boar-spear in his hand. "Lads!" he cried, "good fellows all, and my right merry friends, y' have sung this while on a dry whistle and lived at little ease. But what said I ever? Abide Fortune constantly; she turneth, turneth swift. And lo! here is her little firstling--even that good creature, ale!" There was a murmur of applause as the bearers set down the stretcher and displayed a goodly cask. "And now haste ye, boys," the man continued. "There is work toward. A handful of archers are but now come to the ferry; murrey and blue is their wear; they are our butts--they shall all taste arrows--no man of them shall struggle through this wood. For, lads, we are here some fifty strong, each man of us most foully wronged; for some they have lost lands, and some friends; and some they have been outlawed--all oppressed! Who, then, hath done this evil? Sir Daniel, by the rood! Shall he then profit? shall he sit snug in our houses? shall he till our fields? shall he suck the bone he robbed us of? I trow not. He getteth him strength at law; he gaineth cases; nay, there is one case he shall not gain--I have a writ here at my belt that, please the saints, shall conquer him." Lawless the cook was by this time already at his second horn of ale. He raised it, as if to pledge the speaker. "Master Ellis," he said, "y' are for vengeance--well it becometh you!--but your poor brother o' the greenwood, that had never lands to lose nor friends to think upon, looketh rather, for his poor part, to the profit of the thing. He had liever a gold noble and a pottle of canary wine than all the vengeances in purgatory." "Lawless," replied the other, "to reach the Moat House, Sir Daniel must pass the forest. We shall make that passage dearer, pardy, than any battle. Then, when he hath got to earth with such ragged handful as escapeth us--all his great friends fallen and fled away, and none to give him aid--we shall beleaguer that old fox about, and great shall be the fall of him. 'Tis a fat buck; he will make a dinner for us all." "Ay," returned Lawless, "I have eaten many of these dinners beforehand; but the cooking of them is hot work, good Master Ellis. And meanwhile what do we? We make black arrows, we write rhymes, and we drink fair cold water, that discomfortable drink." "Y' are untrue, Will Lawless. Ye still smell of the Grey Friars' buttery; greed is your undoing," answered Ellis. "We took twenty pounds from Appleyard. We took seven marks from the messenger last night. A day ago we had fifty from the merchant." "And to-day," said one of the men, "I stopped a fat pardoner riding apace for Holywood. Here is his purse." Ellis counted the contents. "Five score shillings!" he grumbled. "Fool, he had more in his sandal, or stitched into his tippet. Y' are but a child, Tom Cuckow; ye have lost the fish." But, for all that, Ellis pocketed the purse with nonchalance. He stood leaning on his boar-spear, and looked round upon the rest. They, in various attitudes, took greedily of the venison pottage, and liberally washed it down with ale. This was a good day; they were in luck; but business pressed, and they were speedy in their eating. The first-comers had by this time even despatched their dinner. Some lay down upon the grass and fell instantly asleep, like boa-constrictors; others talked together, or overhauled their weapons: and one, whose humour was particularly gay, holding forth an ale-horn, began to sing: "Here is no law in good green shaw, Here is no lack of meat; 'Tis merry and quiet, with deer for our diet, In summer, when all is sweet. Come winter again, with wind and rain-- Come winter, with snow and sleet, Get home to your places, with hoods on your faces, And sit by the fire and eat." All this while the two lads had listened and lain close; only Richard had unslung his cross-bow, and held ready in one hand the windac, or grappling-iron that he used to bend it. Otherwise they had not dared to stir; and this scene of forest life had gone on before their eyes like a scene upon a theatre. But now there came a strange interruption. The tall chimney which over-topped the remainder of the ruins rose right above their hiding-place. There came a whistle in the air, and then a sounding smack, and the fragments of a broken arrow fell about their ears. Some one from the upper quarters of the wood, perhaps the very sentinel they saw posted in the fir, had shot an arrow at the chimney-top. Matcham could not restrain a little cry, which he instantly stifled, and even Dick started with surprise, and dropped the windac from his fingers. But to the fellows on the lawn, this shaft was an expected signal. They were all afoot together, tightening their belts, testing their bow-strings, loosening sword and dagger in the sheath. Ellis held up his hand; his face had suddenly assumed a look of savage energy; the white of his eyes shone in his sun-brown face. "Lads," he said, "ye know your places. Let not one man's soul escape you. Appleyard was a whet before a meal; but now we go to table. I have three men whom I will bitterly avenge--Harry Shelton, Simon Malmesbury, and"--striking his broad bosom--"and Ellis Duckworth, by the mass!" Another man came, red with hurry, through the thorns. "'Tis not Sir Daniel!" he panted. "They are but seven. Is the arrow gone?" "It struck but now," replied Ellis. "A murrain!" cried the messenger. "Methought I heard it whistle. And I go dinnerless!" In the space of a minute, some running, some walking sharply, according as their stations were nearer or farther away, the men of the Black Arrow had all disappeared from the neighbourhood of the ruined house; and the caldron, and the fire, which was now burning low, and the dead deer's carcase on the hawthorn, remained alone to testify they had been there. CHAPTER V--"BLOODY AS THE HUNTER" The lads lay quiet till the last footstep had melted on the wind. Then they arose, and with many an ache, for they were weary with constraint, clambered through the ruins, and recrossed the ditch upon the rafter. Matcham had picked up the windac and went first, Dick following stiffly, with his cross-bow on his arm. "And now," said Matcham, "forth to Holywood." "To Holywood!" cried Dick, "when good fellows stand shot? Not I! I would see you hanged first, Jack!" "Ye would leave me, would ye?" Matcham asked. "Ay, by my sooth!" returned Dick. "An I be not in time to warn these lads, I will go die with them. What! would ye have me leave my own men that I have lived among. I trow not! Give me my windac." But there was nothing further from Matcham's mind. "Dick," he said, "ye sware before the saints that ye would see me safe to Holywood. Would ye be forsworn? Would you desert me--a perjurer?" "Nay, I sware for the best," returned Dick. "I meant it too; but now! But look ye, Jack, turn again with me. Let me but warn these men, and, if needs must, stand shot with them; then shall all be clear, and I will on again to Holywood and purge mine oath." "Ye but deride me," answered Matcham. "These men ye go to succour are the I same that hunt me to my ruin." Dick scratched his head. "I cannot help it, Jack," he said. "Here is no remedy. What would ye? Ye run no great peril, man; and these are in the way of death. Death!" he added. "Think of it! What a murrain do ye keep me here for? Give me the windac. Saint George! shall they all die?" "Richard Shelton," said Matcham, looking him squarely in the face, "would ye, then, join party with Sir Daniel? Have ye not ears? Heard ye not this Ellis, what he said? or have ye no heart for your own kindly blood and the father that men slew? 'Harry Shelton,' he said; and Sir Harry Shelton was your father, as the sun shines in heaven." "What would ye?" Dick cried again. "Would ye have me credit thieves?" "Nay, I have heard it before now," returned Matcham. "The fame goeth currently, it was Sir Daniel slew him. He slew him under oath; in his own house he shed the innocent blood. Heaven wearies for the avenging on't; and you--the man's son--ye go about to comfort and defend the murderer!" "Jack," cried the lad "I know not. It may be; what know I? But, see here: This man hath bred me up and fostered me, and his men I have hunted with and played among; and to leave them in the hour of peril--O, man, if I did that, I were stark dead to honour! Nay, Jack, ye would not ask it; ye would not wish me to be base." "But your father, Dick?" said Matcham, somewhat wavering. "Your father? and your oath to me? Ye took the saints to witness." "My father?" cried Shelton. "Nay, he would have me go! If Sir Daniel slew him, when the hour comes this hand shall slay Sir Daniel; but neither him nor his will I desert in peril. And for mine oath, good Jack, ye shall absolve me of it here. For the lives' sake of many men that hurt you not, and for mine honour, ye shall set me free." "I, Dick? Never!" returned Matcham. "An ye leave me, y' are forsworn, and so I shall declare it." "My blood heats," said Dick. "Give me the windac! Give it me!" "I'll not," said Matcham. "I'll save you in your teeth." "Not?" cried Dick. "I'll make you!" "Try it," said the other. They stood, looking in each other's eyes, each ready for a spring. Then Dick leaped; and though Matcham turned instantly and fled, in two bounds he was over-taken, the windac was twisted from his grasp, he was thrown roughly to the ground, and Dick stood across him, flushed and menacing, with doubled fist. Matcham lay where he had fallen, with his face in the grass, not thinking of resistance. Dick bent his bow. "I'll teach you!" he cried, fiercely. "Oath or no oath, ye may go hang for me!" And he turned and began to run. Matcham was on his feet at once, and began running after him. "What d'ye want?" cried Dick, stopping. "What make ye after me? Stand off!" "Will follow an I please," said Matcham. "This wood is free to me." "Stand back, by 'r Lady!" returned Dick, raising his bow. "Ah, y' are a brave boy!" retorted Matcham. "Shoot!" Dick lowered his weapon in some confusion. "See here," he said. "Y' have done me ill enough. Go, then. Go your way in fair wise; or, whether I will or not, I must even drive you to it." "Well," said Matcham, doggedly, "y' are the stronger. Do your worst. I shall not leave to follow thee, Dick, unless thou makest me," he added. Dick was almost beside himself. It went against his heart to beat a creature so defenceless; and, for the life of him, he knew no other way to rid himself of this unwelcome and, as he began to think, perhaps untrue companion. "Y' are mad, I think," he cried. "Fool-fellow, I am hasting to your foes; as fast as foot can carry me, go I thither." "I care not, Dick," replied the lad. "If y' are bound to die, Dick, I'll die too. I would liever go with you to prison than to go free without you." "Well," returned the other, "I may stand no longer prating. Follow me, if ye must; but if ye play me false, it shall but little advance you, mark ye that. Shalt have a quarrel in thine inwards, boy." So saying, Dick took once more to his heels, keeping in the margin of the thicket and looking briskly about him as he went. At a good pace he rattled out of the dell, and came again into the more open quarters of the wood. To the left a little eminence appeared, spotted with golden gorse, and crowned with a black tuft of firs. "I shall see from there," he thought, and struck for it across a heathy clearing. He had gone but a few yards, when Matcham touched him on the arm, and pointed. To the eastward of the summit there was a dip, and, as it were, a valley passing to the other side; the heath was not yet out; all the ground was rusty, like an unscoured buckler, and dotted sparingly with yews; and there, one following another, Dick saw half a score green jerkins mounting the ascent, and marching at their head, conspicuous by his boar-spear, Ellis Duckworth in person. One after another gained the top, showed for a moment against the sky, and then dipped upon the further side, until the last was gone. Dick looked at Matcham with a kindlier eye. "So y' are to be true to me, Jack?" he asked. "I thought ye were of the other party." Matcham began to sob. "What cheer!" cried Dick. "Now the saints behold us! would ye snivel for a word?" "Ye hurt me," sobbed Matcham. "Ye hurt me when ye threw me down. Y' are a coward to abuse your strength." "Nay, that is fool's talk," said Dick, roughly. "Y' had no title to my windac, Master John. I would 'a' done right to have well basted you. If ye go with me, ye must obey me; and so, come." Matcham had half a thought to stay behind; but, seeing that Dick continued to scour full-tilt towards the eminence and not so much as looked across his shoulder, he soon thought better of that, and began to run in turn. But the ground was very difficult and steep; Dick had already a long start, and had, at any rate, the lighter heels, and he had long since come to the summit, crawled forward through the firs, and ensconced himself in a thick tuft of gorse, before Matcham, panting like a deer, rejoined him, and lay down in silence by his side. Below, in the bottom of a considerable valley, the short cut from Tunstall hamlet wound downwards to the ferry. It was well beaten, and the eye followed it easily from point to point. Here it was bordered by open glades; there the forest closed upon it; every hundred yards it ran beside an ambush. Far down the path, the sun shone on seven steel salets, and from time to time, as the trees opened, Selden and his men could be seen riding briskly, still bent upon Sir Daniel's mission. The wind had somewhat fallen, but still tussled merrily with the trees, and, perhaps, had Appleyard been there, he would have drawn a warning from the troubled conduct of the birds. "Now, mark," Dick whispered. "They be already well advanced into the wood; their safety lieth rather in continuing forward. But see ye where this wide glade runneth down before us, and in the midst of it, these two score trees make like an island? There were their safety. An they but come sound as far as that, I will make shift to warn them. But my heart misgiveth me; they are but seven against so many, and they but carry cross-bows. The long-bow, Jack, will have the uppermost ever." Meanwhile, Selden and his men still wound up the path, ignorant of their danger, and momently drew nearer hand. Once, indeed, they paused, drew into a group, and seemed to point and listen. But it was something from far away across the plain that had arrested their attention--a hollow growl of cannon that came, from time to time, upon the wind, and told of the great battle. It was worth a thought, to be sure; for if the voice of the big guns were thus become audible in Tunstall Forest, the fight must have rolled ever eastward, and the day, by consequence, gone sore against Sir Daniel and the lords of the dark rose. But presently the little troop began again to move forward, and came next to a very open, heathy portion of the way, where but a single tongue of forest ran down to join the road. They were but just abreast of this, when an arrow shone flying. One of the men threw up his arms, his horse reared, and both fell and struggled together in a mass. Even from where the boys lay they could hear the rumour of the men's voices crying out; they could see the startled horses prancing, and, presently, as the troop began to recover from their first surprise, one fellow beginning to dismount. A second arrow from somewhat farther off glanced in a wide arch; a second rider bit the dust. The man who was dismounting lost hold upon the rein, and his horse fled galloping, and dragged him by the foot along the road, bumping from stone to stone, and battered by the fleeing hoofs. The four who still kept the saddle instantly broke and scattered; one wheeled and rode, shrieking, towards the ferry; the other three, with loose rein and flying raiment, came galloping up the road from Tunstall. From every clump they passed an arrow sped. Soon a horse fell, but the rider found his feet and continued to pursue his comrades till a second shot despatched him. Another man fell; then another horse; out of the whole troop there was but one fellow left, and he on foot; only, in different directions, the noise of the galloping of three riderless horses was dying fast into the distance. All this time not one of the assailants had for a moment shown himself. Here and there along the path, horse or man rolled, undespatched, in his agony; but no merciful enemy broke cover to put them from their pain. The solitary survivor stood bewildered in the road beside his fallen charger. He had come the length of that broad glade, with the island of timber, pointed out by Dick. He was not, perhaps, five hundred yards from where the boys lay hidden; and they could see him plainly, looking to and fro in deadly expectation. But nothing came; and the man began to pluck up his courage, and suddenly unslung and bent his bow. At the same time, by something in his action, Dick recognised Selden. At this offer of resistance, from all about him in the covert of the woods there went up the sound of laughter. A score of men, at least, for this was the very thickest of the ambush, joined in this cruel and untimely mirth. Then an arrow glanced over Selden's shoulder; and he leaped and ran a little back. Another dart struck quivering at his heel. He made for the cover. A third shaft leaped out right in his face, and fell short in front of him. And then the laughter was repeated loudly, rising and reechoing from different thickets. It was plain that his assailants were but baiting him, as men, in those days, baited the poor bull, or as the cat still trifles with the mouse. The skirmish was well over; farther down the road, a fellow in green was already calmly gathering the arrows; and now, in the evil pleasure of their hearts, they gave themselves the spectacle of their poor fellow-sinner in his torture. Selden began to understand; he uttered a roar of anger, shouldered his cross-bow, and sent a quarrel at a venture into the wood. Chance favoured him, for a slight cry responded. Then, throwing down his weapon, Selden began to run before him up the glade, and almost in a straight line for Dick and Matcham. The companions of the Black Arrow now began to shoot in earnest. But they were properly served; their chance had past; most of them had now to shoot against the sun; and Selden, as he ran, bounded from side to side to baffle and deceive their aim. Best of all, by turning up the glade he had defeated their preparations; there were no marksmen posted higher up than the one whom he had just killed or wounded; and the confusion of the foresters' counsels soon became apparent. A whistle sounded thrice, and then again twice. It was repeated from another quarter. The woods on either side became full of the sound of people bursting through the underwood; and a bewildered deer ran out into the open, stood for a second on three feet, with nose in air, and then plunged again into the thicket. Selden still ran, bounding; ever and again an arrow followed him, but still would miss. It began to appear as if he might escape. Dick had his bow armed, ready to support him; even Matcham, forgetful of his interest, took sides at heart for the poor fugitive; and both lads glowed and trembled in the ardour of their hearts. He was within fifty yards of them, when an arrow struck him and he fell. He was up again, indeed, upon the instant; but now he ran staggering, and, like a blind man, turned aside from his direction. Dick leaped to his feet and waved to him. "Here!" he cried. "This way! here is help! Nay, run, fellow--run!" But just then a second arrow struck Selden in the shoulder, between the plates of his brigandine, and, piercing through his jack, brought him, like a stone, to earth. "O, the poor heart!" cried Matcham, with clasped hands. And Dick stood petrified upon the hill, a mark for archery. Ten to one he had speedily been shot--for the foresters were furious with themselves, and taken unawares by Dick's appearance in the rear of their position--but instantly, out of a quarter of the wood surprisingly near to the two lads, a stentorian voice arose, the voice of Ellis Duckworth. "Hold!" it roared. "Shoot not! Take him alive! It is young Shelton--Harry's son." And immediately after a shrill whistle sounded several times, and was again taken up and repeated farther off. The whistle, it appeared, was John Amend-All's battle trumpet, by which he published his directions. "Ah, foul fortune!" cried Dick. "We are undone. Swiftly, Jack, come swiftly!" And the pair turned and ran back through the open pine clump that covered the summit of the hill. CHAPTER VI--TO THE DAY'S END It was, indeed, high time for them to run. On every side the company of the Black Arrow was making for the hill. Some, being better runners, or having open ground to run upon, had far outstripped the others, and were already close upon the goal; some, following valleys, had spread out to right and left, and outflanked the lads on either side. Dick plunged into the nearest cover. It was a tall grove of oaks, firm under foot and clear of underbrush, and as it lay down hill, they made good speed. There followed next a piece of open, which Dick avoided, holding to his left. Two minutes after, and the same obstacle arising, the lads followed the same course. Thus it followed that, while the lads, bending continually to the left, drew nearer and nearer to the high road and the river which they had crossed an hour or two before, the great bulk of their pursuers were leaning to the other hand, and running towards Tunstall. The lads paused to breathe. There was no sound of pursuit. Dick put his ear to the ground, and still there was nothing; but the wind, to be sure, still made a turmoil in the trees, and it was hard to make certain. "On again," said Dick; and, tired as they were, and Matcham limping with his injured foot, they pulled themselves together, and once more pelted down the hill. Three minutes later, they were breasting through a low thicket of evergreen. High overhead, the tall trees made a continuous roof of foliage. It was a pillared grove, as high as a cathedral, and except for the hollies among which the lads were struggling, open and smoothly swarded. On the other side, pushing through the last fringe of evergreen, they blundered forth again into the open twilight of the grove. "Stand!" cried a voice. And there, between the huge stems, not fifty feet before them, they beheld a stout fellow in green, sore blown with running, who instantly drew an arrow to the head and covered them. Matcham stopped with a cry; but Dick, without a pause, ran straight upon the forester, drawing his dagger as he went. The other, whether he was startled by the daring of the onslaught, or whether he was hampered by his orders, did not shoot; he stood wavering; and before he had time to come to himself, Dick bounded at his throat, and sent him sprawling backward on the turf. The arrow went one way and the bow another with a sounding twang. The disarmed forester grappled his assailant; but the dagger shone and descended twice. Then came a couple of groans, and then Dick rose to his feet again, and the man lay motionless, stabbed to the heart. "On!" said Dick; and he once more pelted forward, Matcham trailing in the rear. To say truth, they made but poor speed of it by now, labouring dismally as they ran, and catching for their breath like fish. Matcham had a cruel stitch, and his head swam; and as for Dick, his knees were like lead. But they kept up the form of running with undiminished courage. Presently they came to the end of the grove. It stopped abruptly; and there, a few yards before them, was the high road from Risingham to Shoreby, lying, at this point, between two even walls of forest. At the sight Dick paused; and as soon as he stopped running, he became aware of a confused noise, which rapidly grew louder. It was at first like the rush of a very high gust of wind, but soon it became more definite, and resolved itself into the galloping of horses; and then, in a flash, a whole company of men-at-arms came driving round the corner, swept before the lads, and were gone again upon the instant. They rode as for their lives, in complete disorder; some of them were wounded; riderless horses galloped at their side with bloody saddles. They were plainly fugitives from the great battle. The noise of their passage had scarce begun to die away towards Shoreby, before fresh hoofs came echoing in their wake, and another deserter clattered down the road; this time a single rider and, by his splendid armour, a man of high degree. Close after him there followed several baggage-waggons, fleeing at an ungainly canter, the drivers flailing at the horses as if for life. These must have run early in the day; but their cowardice was not to save them. For just before they came abreast of where the lads stood wondering, a man in hacked armour, and seemingly beside himself with fury, overtook the waggons, and with the truncheon of a sword, began to cut the drivers down. Some leaped from their places and plunged into the wood; the others he sabred as they sat, cursing them the while for cowards in a voice that was scarce human. All this time the noise in the distance had continued to increase; the rumble of carts, the clatter of horses, the cries of men, a great, confused rumour, came swelling on the wind; and it was plain that the rout of a whole army was pouring, like an inundation, down the road. Dick stood sombre. He had meant to follow the highway till the turn for Holywood, and now he had to change his plan. But above all, he had recognised the colours of Earl Risingham, and he knew that the battle had gone finally against the rose of Lancaster. Had Sir Daniel joined, and was he now a fugitive and ruined? or had he deserted to the side of York, and was he forfeit to honour? It was an ugly choice. "Come," he said, sternly; and, turning on his heel, he began to walk forward through the grove, with Matcham limping in his rear. For some time they continued to thread the forest in silence. It was now growing late; the sun was setting in the plain beyond Kettley; the tree-tops overhead glowed golden; but the shadows had begun to grow darker and the chill of the night to fall. "If there were anything to eat!" cried Dick, suddenly, pausing as he spoke. Matcham sat down and began to weep. "Ye can weep for your own supper, but when it was to save men's lives, your heart was hard enough," said Dick, contemptuously. "Y' 'ave seven deaths upon your conscience, Master John; I'll ne'er forgive you that." "Conscience!" cried Matcham, looking fiercely up. "Mine! And ye have the man's red blood upon your dagger! And wherefore did ye slay him, the poor soul? He drew his arrow, but he let not fly; he held you in his hand, and spared you! 'Tis as brave to kill a kitten, as a man that not defends himself." Dick was struck dumb. "I slew him fair. I ran me in upon his bow," he cried. "It was a coward blow," returned Matcham. "Y' are but a lout and bully, Master Dick; ye but abuse advantages; let there come a stronger, we will see you truckle at his boot! Ye care not for vengeance, neither--for your father's death that goes unpaid, and his poor ghost that clamoureth for justice. But if there come but a poor creature in your hands that lacketh skill and strength, and would befriend you, down she shall go!" Dick was too furious to observe that "she." "Marry!" he cried, "and here is news! Of any two the one will still be stronger. The better man throweth the worse, and the worse is well served. Ye deserve a belting, Master Matcham, for your ill-guidance and unthankfulness to meward; and what ye deserve ye shall have." And Dick, who, even in his angriest temper, still preserved the appearance of composure, began to unbuckle his belt. "Here shall be your supper," he said, grimly. Matcham had stopped his tears; he was as white as a sheet, but he looked Dick steadily in the face, and never moved. Dick took a step, swinging the belt. Then he paused, embarrassed by the large eyes and the thin, weary face of his companion. His courage began to subside. "Say ye were in the wrong, then," he said, lamely. "Nay," said Matcham, "I was in the right. Come, cruel! I be lame; I be weary; I resist not; I ne'er did thee hurt; come, beat me--coward!" Dick raised the belt at this last provocation, but Matcham winced and drew himself together with so cruel an apprehension, that his heart failed him yet again. The strap fell by his side, and he stood irresolute, feeling like a fool. "A plague upon thee, shrew!" he said. "An ye be so feeble of hand, ye should keep the closer guard upon your tongue. But I'll be hanged before I beat you!" and he put on his belt again. "Beat you I will not," he continued; "but forgive you?--never. I knew ye not; ye were my master's enemy; I lent you my horse; my dinner ye have eaten; y' 'ave called me a man o' wood, a coward, and a bully. Nay, by the mass! the measure is filled, and runneth over. 'Tis a great thing to be weak, I trow: ye can do your worst, yet shall none punish you; ye may steal a man's weapons in the hour of need, yet may the man not take his own again;--y' are weak, forsooth! Nay, then, if one cometh charging at you with a lance, and crieth he is weak, ye must let him pierce your body through! Tut! fool words!" "And yet ye beat me not," returned Matcham. "Let be," said Dick--"let be. I will instruct you. Y' 'ave been ill-nurtured, methinks, and yet ye have the makings of some good, and, beyond all question, saved me from the river. Nay, I had forgotten it; I am as thankless as thyself. But, come, let us on. An we be for Holywood this night, ay, or to-morrow early, we had best set forward speedily." But though Dick had talked himself back into his usual good-humour, Matcham had forgiven him nothing. His violence, the recollection of the forester whom he had slain--above all, the vision of the upraised belt, were things not easily to be forgotten. "I will thank you, for the form's sake," said Matcham. "But, in sooth, good Master Shelton, I had liever find my way alone. Here is a wide wood; prithee, let each choose his path; I owe you a dinner and a lesson. Fare ye well!" "Nay," cried Dick, "if that be your tune, so be it, and a plague be with you!" Each turned aside, and they began walking off severally, with no thought of the direction, intent solely on their quarrel. But Dick had not gone ten paces ere his name was called, and Matcham came running after. "Dick," he said, "it were unmannerly to part so coldly. Here is my hand, and my heart with it. For all that wherein you have so excellently served and helped me--not for the form, but from the heart, I thank you. Fare ye right well." "Well, lad," returned Dick, taking the hand which was offered him, "good speed to you, if speed you may. But I misdoubt it shrewdly. Y' are too disputatious." So then they separated for the second time; and presently it was Dick who was running after Matcham. "Here," he said, "take my cross-bow; shalt not go unarmed." "A cross-bow!" said Matcham. "Nay, boy, I have neither the strength to bend nor yet the skill to aim with it. It were no help to me, good boy. But yet I thank you." The night had now fallen, and under the trees they could no longer read each other's face. "I will go some little way with you," said Dick. "The night is dark. I would fain leave you on a path, at least. My mind misgiveth me, y' are likely to be lost." Without any more words, he began to walk forward, and the other once more followed him. The blackness grew thicker and thicker. Only here and there, in open places, they saw the sky, dotted with small stars. In the distance, the noise of the rout of the Lancastrian army still continued to be faintly audible; but with every step they left it farther in the rear. At the end of half an hour of silent progress they came forth upon a broad patch of heathy open. It glimmered in the light of the stars, shaggy with fern and islanded with clumps of yew. And here they paused and looked upon each other. "Y' are weary?" Dick said. "Nay, I am so weary," answered Matcham, "that methinks I could lie down and die." "I hear the chiding of a river," returned Dick. "Let us go so far forth, for I am sore athirst." The ground sloped down gently; and, sure enough, in the bottom, they found a little murmuring river, running among willows. Here they threw themselves down together by the brink; and putting their mouths to the level of a starry pool, they drank their fill. "Dick," said Matcham, "it may not be. I can no more." "I saw a pit as we came down," said Dick. "Let us lie down therein and sleep." "Nay, but with all my heart!" cried Matcham. The pit was sandy and dry; a shock of brambles hung upon one hedge, and made a partial shelter; and there the two lads lay down, keeping close together for the sake of warmth, their quarrel all forgotten. And soon sleep fell upon them like a cloud, and under the dew and stars they rested peacefully. CHAPTER VII--THE HOODED FACE They awoke in the grey of the morning; the birds were not yet in full song, but twittered here and there among the woods; the sun was not yet up, but the eastern sky was barred with solemn colours. Half starved and over-weary as they were, they lay without moving, sunk in a delightful lassitude. And as they thus lay, the clang of a bell fell suddenly upon their ears. "A bell!" said Dick, sitting up. "Can we be, then, so near to Holywood?" A little after, the bell clanged again, but this time somewhat nearer hand; and from that time forth, and still drawing nearer and nearer, it continued to sound brokenly abroad in the silence of the morning. "Nay, what should this betoken?" said Dick, who was now broad awake. "It is some one walking," returned Matcham, and "the bell tolleth ever as he moves." "I see that well," said Dick. "But wherefore? What maketh he in Tunstall Woods? Jack," he added, "laugh at me an ye will, but I like not the hollow sound of it." "Nay," said Matcham, with a shiver, "it hath a doleful note. An the day were not come"-- But just then the bell, quickening its pace, began to ring thick and hurried, and then it gave a single hammering jangle, and was silent for a space. "It is as though the bearer had run for a pater-noster while, and then leaped the river," Dick observed. "And now beginneth he again to pace soberly forward," added Matcham. "Nay," returned Dick--"nay, not so soberly, Jack. 'Tis a man that walketh you right speedily. 'Tis a man in some fear of his life, or about some hurried business. See ye not how swift the beating draweth near?" "It is now close by," said Matcham. They were now on the edge of the pit; and as the pit itself was on a certain eminence, they commanded a view over the greater proportion of the clearing, up to the thick woods that closed it in. The daylight, which was very clear and grey, showed them a riband of white footpath wandering among the gorse. It passed some hundred yards from the pit, and ran the whole length of the clearing, east and west. By the line of its course, Dick judged it should lead more or less directly to the Moat House. Upon this path, stepping forth from the margin of the wood, a white figure now appeared. It paused a little, and seemed to look about; and then, at a slow pace, and bent almost double, it began to draw near across the heath. At every step the bell clanked. Face, it had none; a white hood, not even pierced with eye-holes, veiled the head; and as the creature moved, it seemed to feel its way with the tapping of a stick. Fear fell upon the lads, as cold as death. "A leper!" said Dick, hoarsely. "His touch is death," said Matcham. "Let us run." "Not so," returned Dick. "See ye not?--he is stone blind. He guideth him with a staff. Let us lie still; the wind bloweth towards the path, and he will go by and hurt us not. Alas, poor soul, and we should rather pity him!" "I will pity him when he is by," replied Matcham. The blind leper was now about halfway towards them, and just then the sun rose and shone full on his veiled face. He had been a tall man before he was bowed by his disgusting sickness, and even now he walked with a vigorous step. The dismal beating of his bell, the pattering of the stick, the eyeless screen before his countenance, and the knowledge that he was not only doomed to death and suffering, but shut out for ever from the touch of his fellow-men, filled the lads' bosoms with dismay; and at every step that brought him nearer, their courage and strength seemed to desert them. As he came about level with the pit, he paused, and turned his face full upon the lads. "Mary be my shield! He sees us!" said Matcham, faintly. "Hush!" whispered Dick. "He doth but hearken. He is blind, fool!" The leper looked or listened, whichever he was really doing, for some seconds. Then he began to move on again, but presently paused once more, and again turned and seemed to gaze upon the lads. Even Dick became dead-white and closed his eyes, as if by the mere sight he might become infected. But soon the bell sounded, and this time, without any farther hesitation, the leper crossed the remainder of the little heath and disappeared into the covert of the woods. "He saw us," said Matcham. "I could swear it!" "Tut!" returned Dick, recovering some sparks of courage. "He but heard us. He was in fear, poor soul! An ye were blind, and walked in a perpetual night, ye would start yourself, if ever a twig rustled or a bird cried 'Peep.'" "Dick, good Dick, he saw us," repeated Matcham. "When a man hearkeneth, he doth not as this man; he doth otherwise, Dick. This was seeing; it was not hearing. He means foully. Hark, else, if his bell be not stopped!" Such was the case. The bell rang no longer. "Nay," said Dick, "I like not that. Nay," he cried again, "I like that little. What may this betoken? Let us go, by the mass!" "He hath gone east," added Matcham. "Good Dick, let us go westward straight; I shall not breathe till I have my back turned upon that leper." "Jack, y' are too cowardly," replied Dick. "We shall go fair for Holywood, or as fair, at least, as I can guide you, and that will be due north." They were afoot at once, passed the stream upon some stepping-stones, and began to mount on the other side, which was steeper, towards the margin of the wood. The ground became very uneven, full of knolls and hollows; trees grew scattered or in clumps; it became difficult to choose a path, and the lads somewhat wandered. They were weary, besides, with yesterday's exertions and the lack of food, and they moved but heavily and dragged their feet among the sand. Presently, coming to the top of a knoll, they were aware of the leper, some hundred feet in front of them, crossing the line of their march by a hollow. His bell was silent, his staff no longer tapped the ground, and he went before him with the swift and assured footsteps of a man who sees. Next moment he had disappeared into a little thicket. The lads, at the first glimpse, had crouched behind a tuft of gorse; there they lay, horror-struck. "Certain, he pursueth us," said Dick--"certain! He held the clapper of his bell in one hand, saw ye? that it should not sound. Now may the saints aid and guide us, for I have no strength to combat pestilence!" "What maketh he?" cried Matcham. "What doth he want? Who ever heard the like, that a leper, out of mere malice, should pursue unfortunates? Hath he not his bell to that very end, that people may avoid him? Dick, there is below this something deeper." "Nay, I care not," moaned Dick; "the strength is gone out of me; my legs are like water. The saints be mine assistance!" "Would ye lie there idle?" cried Matcham. "Let us back into the open. We have the better chance; he cannot steal upon us unawares." "Not I," said Dick. "My time is come, and peradventure he may pass us by." "Bend me, then, your bow!" cried the other. "What! will ye be a man?" Dick crossed himself. "Would ye have me shoot upon a leper?" he cried. "The hand would fail me. Nay, now," he added--"nay, now, let be! With sound men I will fight, but not with ghosts and lepers. Which this is, I wot not. One or other, Heaven be our protection!" "Now," said Matcham, "if this be man's courage, what a poor thing is man! But sith ye will do naught, let us lie close." Then came a single, broken jangle on the bell. "He hath missed his hold upon the clapper," whispered Matcham. "Saints! how near he is!" But Dick answered never a word; his teeth were near chattering. Soon they saw a piece of the white robe between some bushes; then the leper's head was thrust forth from behind a trunk, and he seemed narrowly to scan the neighbourhood before he once again withdrew. To their stretched senses, the whole bush appeared alive with rustlings and the creak of twigs; and they heard the beating of each other's heart. Suddenly, with a cry, the leper sprang into the open close by, and ran straight upon the lads. They, shrieking aloud, separated and began to run different ways. But their horrible enemy fastened upon Matcham, ran him swiftly down, and had him almost instantly a prisoner. The lad gave one scream that echoed high and far over the forest, he had one spasm of struggling, and then all his limbs relaxed, and he fell limp into his captor's arms. Dick heard the cry and turned. He saw Matcham fall; and on the instant his spirit and his strength revived; With a cry of pity and anger, he unslung and bent his arblast. But ere he had time to shoot, the leper held up his hand. "Hold your shot, Dickon!" cried a familiar voice. "Hold your shot, mad wag! Know ye not a friend?" And then laying down Matcham on the turf, he undid the hood from off his face, and disclosed the features of Sir Daniel Brackley. "Sir Daniel!" cried Dick. "Ay, by the mass, Sir Daniel!" returned the knight. "Would ye shoot upon your guardian, rogue? But here is this"--And there he broke off, and pointing to Matcham, asked: "How call ye him, Dick?" "Nay," said Dick, "I call him Master Matcham. Know ye him not? He said ye knew him!" "Ay," replied Sir Daniel, "I know the lad;" and he chuckled. "But he has fainted; and, by my sooth, he might have had less to faint for! Hey, Dick? Did I put the fear of death upon you?" "Indeed, Sir Daniel, ye did that," said Dick, and sighed again at the mere recollection. "Nay, sir, saving your respect, I had as lief 'a' met the devil in person; and to speak truth, I am yet all a-quake. But what made ye, sir, in such a guise?" Sir Daniel's brow grew suddenly black with anger. "What made I?" he said. "Ye do well to mind me of it! What? I skulked for my poor life in my own wood of Tunstall, Dick. We were ill sped at the battle; we but got there to be swept among the rout. Where be all my good men-at-arms? Dick, by the mass, I know not! We were swept down; the shot fell thick among us; I have not seen one man in my own colours since I saw three fall. For myself, I came sound to Shoreby, and being mindful of the Black Arrow, got me this gown and bell, and came softly by the path for the Moat House. There is no disguise to be compared with it; the jingle of this bell would scare me the stoutest outlaw in the forest; they would all turn pale to hear it. At length I came by you and Matcham. I could see but evilly through this same hood, and was not sure of you, being chiefly, and for many a good cause, astonished at the finding you together. Moreover, in the open, where I had to go slowly and tap with my staff, I feared to disclose myself. But see," he added, "this poor shrew begins a little to revive. A little good canary will comfort me the heart of it." The knight, from under his long dress, produced a stout bottle, and began to rub the temples and wet the lips of the patient, who returned gradually to consciousness, and began to roll dim eyes from one to another. "What cheer, Jack!" said Dick. "It was no leper, after all; it was Sir Daniel! See!" "Swallow me a good draught of this," said the knight. "This will give you manhood. Thereafter, I will give you both a meal, and we shall all three on to Tunstall. For, Dick," he continued, laying forth bread and meat upon the grass, "I will avow to you, in all good conscience, it irks me sorely to be safe between four walls. Not since I backed a horse have I been pressed so hard; peril of life, jeopardy of land and livelihood, and to sum up, all these losels in the wood to hunt me down. But I be not yet shent. Some of my lads will pick me their way home. Hatch hath ten fellows; Selden, he had six. Nay, we shall soon be strong again; and if I can but buy my peace with my right fortunate and undeserving Lord of York, why, Dick, we'll be a man again and go a-horseback!" And so saying, the knight filled himself a horn of canary, and pledged his ward in dumb show. "Selden," Dick faltered--"Selden"--And he paused again. Sir Daniel put down the wine untasted. "How!" he cried, in a changed voice. "Selden? Speak! What of Selden?" Dick stammered forth the tale of the ambush and the massacre. The knight heard in silence; but as he listened, his countenance became convulsed with rage and grief. "Now here," he cried, "on my right hand, I swear to avenge it! If that I fail, if that I spill not ten men's souls for each, may this hand wither from my body! I broke this Duckworth like a rush; I beggared him to his door; I burned the thatch above his head; I drove him from this country; and now, cometh he back to beard me? Nay, but, Duckworth, this time it shall go bitter hard!" He was silent for some time, his face working. "Eat!" he cried, suddenly. "And you here," he added to Matcham, "swear me an oath to follow straight to the Moat House." "I will pledge mine honour," replied Matcham. "What make I with your honour?" cried the knight. "Swear me upon your mother's welfare!" Matcham gave the required oath; and Sir Daniel re-adjusted the hood over his face, and prepared his bell and staff. To see him once more in that appalling travesty somewhat revived the horror of his two companions. But the knight was soon upon his feet. "Eat with despatch," he said, "and follow me yarely to mine house." And with that he set forth again into the woods; and presently after the bell began to sound, numbering his steps, and the two lads sat by their untasted meal, and heard it die slowly away up hill into the distance. "And so ye go to Tunstall?" Dick inquired. "Yea, verily," said Matcham, "when needs must! I am braver behind Sir Daniel's back than to his face." They ate hastily, and set forth along the path through the airy upper levels of the forest, where great beeches stood apart among green lawns, and the birds and squirrels made merry on the boughs. Two hours later, they began to descend upon the other side, and already, among the tree-tops, saw before them the red walls and roofs of Tunstall House. "Here," said Matcham, pausing, "ye shall take your leave of your friend Jack, whom y' are to see no more. Come, Dick, forgive him what he did amiss, as he, for his part, cheerfully and lovingly forgiveth you." "And wherefore so?" asked Dick. "An we both go to Tunstall, I shall see you yet again, I trow, and that right often." "Ye'll never again see poor Jack Matcham," replied the other, "that was so fearful and burthensome, and yet plucked you from the river; ye'll not see him more, Dick, by mine honour!" He held his arms open, and the lads embraced and kissed. "And, Dick," continued Matcham, "my spirit bodeth ill. Y' are now to see a new Sir Daniel; for heretofore hath all prospered in his hands exceedingly, and fortune followed him; but now, methinks, when his fate hath come upon him, and he runs the adventure of his life, he will prove but a foul lord to both of us. He may be brave in battle, but he hath the liar's eye; there is fear in his eye, Dick, and fear is as cruel as the wolf! We go down into that house, Saint Mary guide us forth again!" And so they continued their descent in silence, and came out at last before Sir Daniel's forest stronghold, where it stood, low and shady, flanked with round towers and stained with moss and lichen, in the lilied waters of the moat. Even as they appeared, the doors were opened, the bridge lowered, and Sir Daniel himself, with Hatch and the parson at his side, stood ready to receive them. BOOK II--THE MOAT HOUSE CHAPTER I--DICK ASKS QUESTIONS The Moat House stood not far from the rough forest road. Externally, it was a compact rectangle of red stone, flanked at each corner by a round tower, pierced for archery and battlemented at the top. Within, it enclosed a narrow court. The moat was perhaps twelve feet wide, crossed by a single drawbridge. It was supplied with water by a trench, leading to a forest pool and commanded, through its whole length, from the battlements of the two southern towers. Except that one or two tall and thick trees had been suffered to remain within half a bowshot of the walls, the house was in a good posture for defence. In the court, Dick found a part of the garrison, busy with preparations for defence, and gloomily discussing the chances of a siege. Some were making arrows, some sharpening swords that had long been disused; but even as they worked, they shook their heads. Twelve of Sir Daniel's party had escaped the battle, run the gauntlet through the wood, and come alive to the Moat House. But out of this dozen, three had been gravely wounded: two at Risingham in the disorder of the rout, one by John Amend-All's marksmen as he crossed the forest. This raised the force of the garrison, counting Hatch, Sir Daniel, and young Shelton, to twenty-two effective men. And more might be continually expected to arrive. The danger lay not therefore in the lack of men. It was the terror of the Black Arrow that oppressed the spirits of the garrison. For their open foes of the party of York, in these most changing times, they felt but a far-away concern. "The world," as people said in those days, "might change again" before harm came. But for their neighbours in the wood, they trembled. It was not Sir Daniel alone who was a mark for hatred. His men, conscious of impunity, had carried themselves cruelly through all the country. Harsh commands had been harshly executed; and of the little band that now sat talking in the court, there was not one but had been guilty of some act of oppression or barbarity. And now, by the fortune of war, Sir Daniel had become powerless to protect his instruments; now, by the issue of some hours of battle, at which many of them had not been present, they had all become punishable traitors to the State, outside the buckler of the law, a shrunken company in a poor fortress that was hardly tenable, and exposed upon all sides to the just resentment of their victims. Nor had there been lacking grisly advertisements of what they might expect. At different periods of the evening and the night, no fewer than seven riderless horses had come neighing in terror to the gate. Two were from Selden's troop; five belonged to men who had ridden with Sir Daniel to the field. Lastly, a little before dawn, a spearman had come staggering to the moat side, pierced by three arrows; even as they carried him in, his spirit had departed; but by the words that he uttered in his agony, he must have been the last survivor of a considerable company of men. Hatch himself showed, under his sun-brown, the pallour of anxiety; and when he had taken Dick aside and learned the fate of Selden, he fell on a stone bench and fairly wept. The others, from where they sat on stools or doorsteps in the sunny angle of the court, looked at him with wonder and alarm, but none ventured to inquire the cause of his emotion. "Nay, Master Shelton," said Hatch, at last--"nay, but what said I? We shall all go. Selden was a man of his hands; he was like a brother to me. Well, he has gone second; well, we shall all follow! For what said their knave rhyme?--'A black arrow in each black heart.' Was it not so it went? Appleyard, Selden, Smith, old Humphrey gone; and there lieth poor John Carter, crying, poor sinner, for the priest." Dick gave ear. Out of a low window, hard by where they were talking, groans and murmurs came to his ear. "Lieth he there?" he asked. "Ay, in the second porter's chamber," answered Hatch. "We could not bear him further, soul and body were so bitterly at odds. At every step we lifted him, he thought to wend. But now, methinks, it is the soul that suffereth. Ever for the priest he crieth, and Sir Oliver, I wot not why, still cometh not. 'Twill be a long shrift; but poor Appleyard and poor Selden, they had none." Dick stooped to the window and looked in. The little cell was low and dark, but he could make out the wounded soldier lying moaning on his pallet. "Carter, poor friend, how goeth it?" he asked. "Master Shelton," returned the man, in an excited whisper, "for the dear light of heaven, bring the priest. Alack, I am sped; I am brought very low down; my hurt is to the death. Ye may do me no more service; this shall be the last. Now, for my poor soul's interest, and as a loyal gentleman, bestir you; for I have that matter on my conscience that shall drag me deep." He groaned, and Dick heard the grating of his teeth, whether in pain or terror. Just then Sir Daniel appeared upon the threshold of the hall. He had a letter in one hand. "Lads," he said, "we have had a shog, we have had a tumble; wherefore, then, deny it? Rather it imputeth to get speedily again to saddle. This old Harry the Sixt has had the undermost. Wash we, then, our hands of him. I have a good friend that rideth next the duke, the Lord of Wensleydale. Well, I have writ a letter to my friend, praying his good lordship, and offering large satisfaction for the past and reasonable surety for the future. Doubt not but he will lend a favourable ear. A prayer without gifts is like a song without music: I surfeit him with promises, boys--I spare not to promise. What, then, is lacking? Nay, a great thing--wherefore should I deceive you?--a great thing and a difficult: a messenger to bear it. The woods--y' are not ignorant of that--lie thick with our ill-willers. Haste is most needful; but without sleight and caution all is naught. Which, then, of this company will take me this letter, bear me it to my Lord of Wensleydale, and bring me the answer back?" One man instantly arose. "I will, an't like you," said he. "I will even risk my carcase." "Nay, Dicky Bowyer, not so," returned the knight. "It likes me not. Y' are sly indeed, but not speedy. Ye were a laggard ever." "An't be so, Sir Daniel, here am I," cried another. "The saints forfend!" said the knight. "Y' are speedy, but not sly. Ye would blunder me headforemost into John Amend-All's camp. I thank you both for your good courage; but, in sooth, it may not be." Then Hatch offered himself, and he also was refused. "I want you here, good Bennet; y' are my right hand, indeed," returned the knight; and then several coming forward in a group, Sir Daniel at length selected one and gave him the letter. "Now," he said, "upon your good speed and better discretion we do all depend. Bring me a good answer back, and before three weeks, I will have purged my forest of these vagabonds that brave us to our faces. But mark it well, Throgmorton: the matter is not easy. Ye must steal forth under night, and go like a fox; and how ye are to cross Till I know not, neither by the bridge nor ferry." "I can swim," returned Throgmorton. "I will come soundly, fear not." "Well, friend, get ye to the buttery," replied Sir Daniel. "Ye shall swim first of all in nut-brown ale." And with that he turned back into the hall. "Sir Daniel hath a wise tongue," said Hatch, aside, to Dick. "See, now, where many a lesser man had glossed the matter over, he speaketh it out plainly to his company. Here is a danger, 'a saith, and here difficulty; and jesteth in the very saying. Nay, by Saint Barbary, he is a born captain! Not a man but he is some deal heartened up! See how they fall again to work." This praise of Sir Daniel put a thought in the lad's head. "Bennet," he said, "how came my father by his end?" "Ask me not that," replied Hatch. "I had no hand nor knowledge in it; furthermore, I will even be silent, Master Dick. For look you, in a man's own business there he may speak; but of hearsay matters and of common talk, not so. Ask me Sir Oliver--ay, or Carter, if ye will; not me." And Hatch set off to make the rounds, leaving Dick in a muse. "Wherefore would he not tell me?" thought the lad. "And wherefore named he Carter? Carter--nay, then Carter had a hand in it, perchance." He entered the house, and passing some little way along a flagged and vaulted passage, came to the door of the cell where the hurt man lay groaning. At his entrance Carter started eagerly. "Have ye brought the priest?" he cried. "Not yet awhile," returned Dick. "Y' 'ave a word to tell me first. How came my father, Harry Shelton, by his death?" The man's face altered instantly. "I know not," he replied, doggedly. "Nay, ye know well," returned Dick. "Seek not to put me by." "I tell you I know not," repeated Carter. "Then," said Dick, "ye shall die unshriven. Here am I, and here shall stay. There shall no priest come near you, rest assured. For of what avail is penitence, an ye have no mind to right those wrongs ye had a hand in? and without penitence, confession is but mockery." "Ye say what ye mean not, Master Dick," said Carter, composedly. "It is ill threatening the dying, and becometh you (to speak truth) little. And for as little as it commends you, it shall serve you less. Stay, an ye please. Ye will condemn my soul--ye shall learn nothing! There is my last word to you." And the wounded man turned upon the other side. Now, Dick, to say truth, had spoken hastily, and was ashamed of his threat. But he made one more effort. "Carter," he said, "mistake me not. I know ye were but an instrument in the hands of others; a churl must obey his lord; I would not bear heavily on such an one. But I begin to learn upon many sides that this great duty lieth on my youth and ignorance, to avenge my father. Prithee, then, good Carter, set aside the memory of my threatenings, and in pure goodwill and honest penitence give me a word of help." The wounded man lay silent; nor, say what Dick pleased, could he extract another word from him. "Well," said Dick, "I will go call the priest to you as ye desired; for howsoever ye be in fault to me or mine, I would not be willingly in fault to any, least of all to one upon the last change." Again the old soldier heard him without speech or motion; even his groans he had suppressed; and as Dick turned and left the room, he was filled with admiration for that rugged fortitude. "And yet," he thought, "of what use is courage without wit? Had his hands been clean, he would have spoken; his silence did confess the secret louder than words. Nay, upon all sides, proof floweth on me. Sir Daniel, he or his men, hath done this thing." Dick paused in the stone passage with a heavy heart. At that hour, in the ebb of Sir Daniel's fortune, when he was beleaguered by the archers of the Black Arrow and proscribed by the victorious Yorkists, was Dick, also, to turn upon the man who had nourished and taught him, who had severely punished, indeed, but yet unwearyingly protected his youth? The necessity, if it should prove to be one, was cruel. "Pray Heaven he be innocent!" he said. And then steps sounded on the flagging, and Sir Oliver came gravely towards the lad. "One seeketh you earnestly," said Dick. "I am upon the way, good Richard," said the priest. "It is this poor Carter. Alack, he is beyond cure." "And yet his soul is sicker than his body," answered Dick. "Have ye seen him?" asked Sir Oliver, with a manifest start. "I do but come from him," replied Dick. "What said he? what said he?" snapped the priest, with extraordinary eagerness. "He but cried for you the more piteously, Sir Oliver. It were well done to go the faster, for his hurt is grievous," returned the lad. "I am straight for him," was the reply. "Well, we have all our sins. We must all come to our latter day, good Richard." "Ay, sir; and it were well if we all came fairly," answered Dick. The priest dropped his eyes, and with an inaudible benediction hurried on. "He, too!" thought Dick--"he, that taught me in piety! Nay, then, what a world is this, if all that care for me be blood-guilty of my father's death? Vengeance! Alas! what a sore fate is mine, if I must be avenged upon my friends!" The thought put Matcham in his head. He smiled at the remembrance of his strange companion, and then wondered where he was. Ever since they had come together to the doors of the Moat House the younger lad had disappeared, and Dick began to weary for a word with him. About an hour after, mass being somewhat hastily run through by Sir Oliver, the company gathered in the hall for dinner. It was a long, low apartment, strewn with green rushes, and the walls hung with arras in a design of savage men and questing bloodhounds; here and there hung spears and bows and bucklers; a fire blazed in the big chimney; there were arras-covered benches round the wall, and in the midst the table, fairly spread, awaited the arrival of the diners. Neither Sir Daniel nor his lady made their appearance. Sir Oliver himself was absent, and here again there was no word of Matcham. Dick began to grow alarmed, to recall his companion's melancholy forebodings, and to wonder to himself if any foul play had befallen him in that house. After dinner he found Goody Hatch, who was hurrying to my Lady Brackley. "Goody," he said, "where is Master Matcham, I prithee? I saw ye go in with him when we arrived." The old woman laughed aloud. "Ah, Master Dick," she said, "y' have a famous bright eye in your head, to be sure!" and laughed again. "Nay, but where is he, indeed?" persisted Dick. "Ye will never see him more," she returned--"never. It is sure." "An I do not," returned the lad, "I will know the reason why. He came not hither of his full free will; such as I am, I am his best protector, and I will see him justly used. There be too many mysteries; I do begin to weary of the game!" But as Dick was speaking, a heavy hand fell on his shoulder. It was Bennet Hatch that had come unperceived behind him. With a jerk of his thumb, the retainer dismissed his wife. "Friend Dick," he said, as soon as they were alone, "are ye a moon-struck natural? An ye leave not certain things in peace, ye were better in the salt sea than here in Tunstall Moat House. Y' have questioned me; y' have baited Carter; y' have frighted the Jack-priest with hints. Bear ye more wisely, fool; and even now, when Sir Daniel calleth you, show me a smooth face for the love of wisdom. Y' are to be sharply questioned. Look to your answers." "Hatch," returned Dick, "in all this I smell a guilty conscience." "An ye go not the wiser, ye will soon smell blood," replied Bennet. "I do but warn you. And here cometh one to call you." And indeed, at that very moment, a messenger came across the court to summon Dick into the presence of Sir Daniel. CHAPTER II--THE TWO OATHS Sir Daniel was in the hall; there he paced angrily before the fire, awaiting Dick's arrival. None was by except Sir Oliver, and he sat discreetly backward, thumbing and muttering over his breviary. "Y' have sent for me, Sir Daniel?" said young Shelton. "I have sent for you, indeed," replied the knight. "For what cometh to mine ears? Have I been to you so heavy a guardian that ye make haste to credit ill of me? Or sith that ye see me, for the nonce, some worsted, do ye think to quit my party? By the mass, your father was not so! Those he was near, those he stood by, come wind or weather. But you, Dick, y' are a fair-day friend, it seemeth, and now seek to clear yourself of your allegiance." "An't please you, Sir Daniel, not so," returned Dick, firmly. "I am grateful and faithful, where gratitude and faith are due. And before more is said, I thank you, and I thank Sir Oliver; y' have great claims upon me both--none can have more; I were a hound if I forgot them." "It is well," said Sir Daniel; and then, rising into anger: "Gratitude and faith are words, Dick Shelton," he continued; "but I look to deeds. In this hour of my peril, when my name is attainted, when my lands are forfeit, when this wood is full of men that hunger and thirst for my destruction, what doth gratitude? what doth faith? I have but a little company remaining; is it grateful or faithful to poison me their hearts with your insidious whisperings? Save me from such gratitude! But, come, now, what is it ye wish? Speak; we are here to answer. If ye have aught against me, stand forth and say it." "Sir," replied Dick, "my father fell when I was yet a child. It hath come to mine ears that he was foully done by. It hath come to mine ears--for I will not dissemble--that ye had a hand in his undoing. And in all verity, I shall not be at peace in mine own mind, nor very clear to help you, till I have certain resolution of these doubts." Sir Daniel sat down in a deep settle. He took his chin in his hand and looked at Dick fixedly. "And ye think I would be guardian to the man's son that I had murdered?" he asked. "Nay," said Dick, "pardon me if I answer churlishly; but indeed ye know right well a wardship is most profitable. All these years have ye not enjoyed my revenues, and led my men? Have ye not still my marriage? I wot not what it may be worth--it is worth something. Pardon me again; but if ye were base enough to slay a man under trust, here were, perhaps, reasons enough to move you to the lesser baseness." "When I was lad of your years," returned Sir Daniel, sternly, "my mind had not so turned upon suspicions. And Sir Oliver here," he added, "why should he, a priest, be guilty of this act?" "Nay, Sir Daniel," said Dick, "but where the master biddeth there will the dog go. It is well known this priest is but your instrument. I speak very freely; the time is not for courtesies. Even as I speak, so would I be answered. And answer get I none! Ye but put more questions. I rede ye be ware, Sir Daniel; for in this way ye will but nourish and not satisfy my doubts." "I will answer you fairly, Master Richard," said the knight. "Were I to pretend ye have not stirred my wrath, I were no honest man. But I will be just even in anger. Come to me with these words when y' are grown and come to man's estate, and I am no longer your guardian, and so helpless to resent them. Come to me then, and I will answer you as ye merit, with a buffet in the mouth. Till then ye have two courses: either swallow me down these insults, keep a silent tongue, and fight in the meanwhile for the man that fed and fought for your infancy; or else--the door standeth open, the woods are full of mine enemies--go." The spirit with which these words were uttered, the looks with which they were accompanied, staggered Dick; and yet he could not but observe that he had got no answer. "I desire nothing more earnestly, Sir Daniel, than to believe you," he replied. "Assure me ye are free from this." "Will ye take my word of honour, Dick?" inquired the knight. "That would I," answered the lad. "I give it you," returned Sir Daniel. "Upon my word of honour, upon the eternal welfare of my spirit, and as I shall answer for my deeds hereafter, I had no hand nor portion in your father's death." He extended his hand, and Dick took it eagerly. Neither of them observed the priest, who, at the pronunciation of that solemn and false oath, had half arisen from his seat in an agony of horror and remorse. "Ah," cried Dick, "ye must find it in your great-heartedness to pardon me! I was a churl, indeed, to doubt of you. But ye have my hand upon it; I will doubt no more." "Nay, Dick," replied Sir Daniel, "y' are forgiven. Ye know not the world and its calumnious nature." "I was the more to blame," added Dick, "in that the rogues pointed, not directly at yourself, but at Sir Oliver." As he spoke, he turned towards the priest, and paused in the middle of the last word. This tall, ruddy, corpulent, high-stepping man had fallen, you might say, to pieces; his colour was gone, his limbs were relaxed, his lips stammered prayers; and now, when Dick's eyes were fixed upon him suddenly, he cried out aloud, like some wild animal, and buried his face in his hands. Sir Daniel was by him in two strides, and shook him fiercely by the shoulder. At the same moment Dick's suspicions reawakened. "Nay," he said, "Sir Oliver may swear also. 'Twas him they accused." "He shall swear," said the knight. Sir Oliver speechlessly waved his arms. "Ay, by the mass! but ye shall swear," cried Sir Daniel, beside himself with fury. "Here, upon this book, ye shall swear," he continued, picking up the breviary, which had fallen to the ground. "What! Ye make me doubt you! Swear, I say; swear!" But the priest was still incapable of speech. His terror of Sir Daniel, his terror of perjury, risen to about an equal height, strangled him. And just then, through the high, stained-glass window of the hall, a black arrow crashed, and struck, and stuck quivering, in the midst of the long table. Sir Oliver, with a loud scream, fell fainting on the rushes; while the knight, followed by Dick, dashed into the court and up the nearest corkscrew stair to the battlements. The sentries were all on the alert. The sun shone quietly on green lawns dotted with trees, and on the wooded hills of the forest which enclosed the view. There was no sign of a besieger. "Whence came that shot?" asked the knight. "From yonder clump, Sir Daniel," returned a sentinel. The knight stood a little, musing. Then he turned to Dick. "Dick," he said, "keep me an eye upon these men; I leave you in charge here. As for the priest, he shall clear himself, or I will know the reason why. I do almost begin to share in your suspicions. He shall swear, trust me, or we shall prove him guilty." Dick answered somewhat coldly, and the knight, giving him a piercing glance, hurriedly returned to the hall. His first glance was for the arrow. It was the first of these missiles he had seen, and as he turned it to and fro, the dark hue of it touched him with some fear. Again there was some writing: one word--"Earthed." "Ay," he broke out, "they know I am home, then. Earthed! Ay, but there is not a dog among them fit to dig me out." Sir Oliver had come to himself, and now scrambled to his feet. "Alack, Sir Daniel!" he moaned, "y' 'ave sworn a dread oath; y' are doomed to the end of time." "Ay," returned the knight, "I have sworn an oath, indeed, thou chucklehead; but thyself shalt swear a greater. It shall be on the blessed cross of Holywood. Look to it; get the words ready. It shall be sworn to-night." "Now, may Heaven lighten you!" replied the priest; "may Heaven incline your heart from this iniquity!" "Look you, my good father," said Sir Daniel, "if y' are for piety, I say no more; ye begin late, that is all. But if y' are in any sense bent upon wisdom, hear me. This lad beginneth to irk me like a wasp. I have a need for him, for I would sell his marriage. But I tell you, in all plainness, if that he continue to weary me, he shall go join his father. I give orders now to change him to the chamber above the chapel. If that ye can swear your innocency with a good, solid oath and an assured countenance, it is well; the lad will be at peace a little, and I will spare him. If that ye stammer or blench, or anyways boggle at the swearing, he will not believe you; and by the mass, he shall die. There is for your thinking on." "The chamber above the chapel!" gasped the priest. "That same," replied the knight. "So if ye desire to save him, save him; and if ye desire not, prithee, go to, and let me be at peace! For an I had been a hasty man, I would already have put my sword through you, for your intolerable cowardice and folly. Have ye chosen? Say!" "I have chosen," said the priest. "Heaven pardon me, I will do evil for good. I will swear for the lad's sake." "So is it best!" said Sir Daniel. "Send for him, then, speedily. Ye shall see him alone. Yet I shall have an eye on you. I shall be here in the panel room." The knight raised the arras and let it fall again behind him. There was the sound of a spring opening; then followed the creaking of trod stairs. Sir Oliver, left alone, cast a timorous glance upward at the arras-covered wall, and crossed himself with every appearance of terror and contrition. "Nay, if he is in the chapel room," the priest murmured, "were it at my soul's cost, I must save him." Three minutes later, Dick, who had been summoned by another messenger, found Sir Oliver standing by the hall table, resolute and pale. "Richard Shelton," he said, "ye have required an oath from me. I might complain, I might deny you; but my heart is moved toward you for the past, and I will even content you as ye choose. By the true cross of Holywood, I did not slay your father." "Sir Oliver," returned Dick, "when first we read John Amend-All's paper, I was convinced of so much. But suffer me to put two questions. Ye did not slay him; granted. But had ye no hand in it?" "None," said Sir Oliver. And at the same time he began to contort his face, and signal with his mouth and eyebrows, like one who desired to convey a warning, yet dared not utter a sound. Dick regarded him in wonder; then he turned and looked all about him at the empty hall. "What make ye?" he inquired. "Why, naught," returned the priest, hastily smoothing his countenance. "I make naught; I do but suffer; I am sick. I--I--prithee, Dick, I must begone. On the true cross of Holywood, I am clean innocent alike of violence or treachery. Content ye, good lad. Farewell!" And he made his escape from the apartment with unusual alacrity. Dick remained rooted to the spot, his eyes wandering about the room, his face a changing picture of various emotions, wonder, doubt, suspicion, and amusement. Gradually, as his mind grew clearer, suspicion took the upper hand, and was succeeded by certainty of the worst. He raised his head, and, as he did so, violently started. High upon the wall there was the figure of a savage hunter woven in the tapestry. With one hand he held a horn to his mouth; in the other he brandished a stout spear. His face was dark, for he was meant to represent an African. Now, here was what had startled Richard Shelton. The sun had moved away from the hall windows, and at the same time the fire had blazed up high on the wide hearth, and shed a changeful glow upon the roof and hangings. In this light the figure of the black hunter had winked at him with a white eyelid. He continued staring at the eye. The light shone upon it like a gem; it was liquid, it was alive. Again the white eyelid closed upon it for a fraction of a second, and the next moment it was gone. There could be no mistake. The live eye that had been watching him through a hole in the tapestry was gone. The firelight no longer shone on a reflecting surface. And instantly Dick awoke to the terrors of his position. Hatch's warning, the mute signals of the priest, this eye that had observed him from the wall, ran together in his mind. He saw he had been put upon his trial, that he had once more betrayed his suspicions, and that, short of some miracle, he was lost. "If I cannot get me forth out of this house," he thought, "I am a dead man! And this poor Matcham, too--to what a cockatrice's nest have I not led him!" He was still so thinking, when there came one in haste, to bid him help in changing his arms, his clothing, and his two or three books, to a new chamber. "A new chamber?" he repeated. "Wherefore so? What chamber?" "'Tis one above the chapel," answered the messenger. "It hath stood long empty," said Dick, musing. "What manner of room is it?" "Nay, a brave room," returned the man. "But yet"--lowering his voice--"they call it haunted." "Haunted?" repeated Dick, with a chill. "I have not heard of it. Nay, then, and by whom?" The messenger looked about him; and then, in a low whisper, "By the sacrist of St. John's," he said. "They had him there to sleep one night, and in the morning--whew!--he was gone. The devil had taken him, they said; the more betoken, he had drunk late the night before." Dick followed the man with black forebodings. CHAPTER III--THE ROOM OVER THE CHAPEL From the battlements nothing further was observed. The sun journeyed westward, and at last went down; but, to the eyes of all these eager sentinels, no living thing appeared in the neighbourhood of Tunstall House. When the night was at length fairly come, Throgmorton was led to a room overlooking an angle of the moat. Thence he was lowered with every precaution; the ripple of his swimming was audible for a brief period; then a black figure was observed to land by the branches of a willow and crawl away among the grass. For some half hour Sir Daniel and Hatch stood eagerly giving ear; but all remained quiet. The messenger had got away in safety. Sir Daniel's brow grew clearer. He turned to Hatch. "Bennet," he said, "this John Amend-All is no more than a man, ye see. He sleepeth. We will make a good end of him, go to!" All the afternoon and evening, Dick had been ordered hither and thither, one command following another, till he was bewildered with the number and the hurry of commissions. All that time he had seen no more of Sir Oliver, and nothing of Matcham; and yet both the priest and the young lad ran continually in his mind. It was now his chief purpose to escape from Tunstall Moat House as speedily as might be; and yet, before he went, he desired a word with both of these. At length, with a lamp in one hand, he mounted to his new apartment. It was large, low, and somewhat dark. The window looked upon the moat, and although it was so high up, it was heavily barred. The bed was luxurious, with one pillow of down and one of lavender, and a red coverlet worked in a pattern of roses. All about the walls were cupboards, locked and padlocked, and concealed from view by hangings of dark-coloured arras. Dick made the round, lifting the arras, sounding the panels, seeking vainly to open the cupboards. He assured himself that the door was strong and the bolt solid; then he set down his lamp upon a bracket, and once more looked all around. For what reason had he been given this chamber? It was larger and finer than his own. Could it conceal a snare? Was there a secret entrance? Was it, indeed, haunted? His blood ran a little chilly in his veins. Immediately over him the heavy foot of a sentry trod the leads. Below him, he knew, was the arched roof of the chapel; and next to the chapel was the hall. Certainly there was a secret passage in the hall; the eye that had watched him from the arras gave him proof of that. Was it not more than probable that the passage extended to the chapel, and, if so, that it had an opening in his room? To sleep in such a place, he felt, would be foolhardy. He made his weapons ready, and took his position in a corner of the room behind the door. If ill was intended, he would sell his life dear. The sound of many feet, the challenge, and the password, sounded overhead along the battlements; the watch was being changed. And just then there came a scratching at the door of the chamber; it grew a little louder; then a whisper: "Dick, Dick, it is I!" Dick ran to the door, drew the bolt, and admitted Matcham. He was very pale, and carried a lamp in one hand and a drawn dagger in the other. "Shut me the door," he whispered. "Swift, Dick! This house is full of spies; I hear their feet follow me in the corridors; I hear them breathe behind the arras." "Well, content you," returned Dick, "it is closed. We are safe for this while, if there be safety anywhere within these walls. But my heart is glad to see you. By the mass, lad, I thought ye were sped! Where hid ye?" "It matters not," returned Matcham. "Since we be met, it matters not. But, Dick, are your eyes open? Have they told you of to-morrow's doings?" "Not they," replied Dick. "What make they to-morrow?" "To-morrow, or to-night, I know not," said the other, "but one time or other, Dick, they do intend upon your life. I had the proof of it; I have heard them whisper; nay, they as good as told me." "Ay," returned Dick, "is it so? I had thought as much." And he told him the day's occurrences at length. When it was done, Matcham arose and began, in turn, to examine the apartment. "No," he said, "there is no entrance visible. Yet 'tis a pure certainty there is one. Dick, I will stay by you. An y' are to die, I will die with you. And I can help--look! I have stolen a dagger--I will do my best! And meanwhile, an ye know of any issue, any sally-port we could get opened, or any window that we might descend by, I will most joyfully face any jeopardy to flee with you." "Jack," said Dick, "by the mass, Jack, y' are the best soul, and the truest, and the bravest in all England! Give me your hand, Jack." And he grasped the other's hand in silence. "I will tell you," he resumed. "There is a window, out of which the messenger descended; the rope should still be in the chamber. 'Tis a hope." "Hist!" said Matcham. Both gave ear. There was a sound below the floor; then it paused, and then began again. "Some one walketh in the room below," whispered Matcham. "Nay," returned Dick, "there is no room below; we are above the chapel. It is my murderer in the secret passage. Well, let him come; it shall go hard with him;" and he ground his teeth. "Blow me the lights out," said the other. "Perchance he will betray himself." They blew out both the lamps and lay still as death. The footfalls underneath were very soft, but they were clearly audible. Several times they came and went; and then there was a loud jar of a key turning in a lock, followed by a considerable silence. Presently the steps began again, and then, all of a sudden, a chink of light appeared in the planking of the room in a far corner. It widened; a trap-door was being opened, letting in a gush of light. They could see the strong hand pushing it up; and Dick raised his cross-bow, waiting for the head to follow. But now there came an interruption. From a distant corner of the Moat House shouts began to be heard, and first one voice, and then several, crying aloud upon a name. This noise had plainly disconcerted the murderer, for the trap-door was silently lowered to its place, and the steps hurriedly returned, passed once more close below the lads, and died away in the distance. Here was a moment's respite. Dick breathed deep, and then, and not till then, he gave ear to the disturbance which had interrupted the attack, and which was now rather increasing than diminishing. All about the Moat House feet were running, doors were opening and slamming, and still the voice of Sir Daniel towered above all this bustle, shouting for "Joanna." "Joanna!" repeated Dick. "Why, who the murrain should this be? Here is no Joanna, nor ever hath been. What meaneth it?" Matcham was silent. He seemed to have drawn further away. But only a little faint starlight entered by the window, and at the far end of the apartment, where the pair were, the darkness was complete. "Jack," said Dick, "I wot not where ye were all day. Saw ye this Joanna?" "Nay," returned Matcham, "I saw her not." "Nor heard tell of her?" he pursued. The steps drew nearer. Sir Daniel was still roaring the name of Joanna from the courtyard. "Did ye hear of her?" repeated Dick. "I heard of her," said Matcham. "How your voice twitters! What aileth you?" said Dick. "'Tis a most excellent good fortune, this Joanna; it will take their minds from us." "Dick," cried Matcham, "I am lost; we are both lost. Let us flee if there be yet time. They will not rest till they have found me. Or, see! let me go forth; when they have found me, ye may flee. Let me forth, Dick--good Dick, let me away!" She was groping for the bolt, when Dick at last comprehended. "By the mass!" he cried, "y' are no Jack; y' are Joanna Sedley; y' are the maid that would not marry me!" The girl paused, and stood silent and motionless. Dick, too, was silent for a little; then he spoke again. "Joanna," he said, "y' 'ave saved my life, and I have saved yours; and we have seen blood flow, and been friends and enemies--ay, and I took my belt to thrash you; and all that time I thought ye were a boy. But now death has me, and my time's out, and before I die I must say this: Y' are the best maid and the bravest under heaven, and, if only I could live, I would marry you blithely; and, live or die, I love you." She answered nothing. "Come," he said, "speak up, Jack. Come, be a good maid, and say ye love me!" "Why, Dick," she cried, "would I be here?" "Well, see ye here," continued Dick, "an we but escape whole we'll marry; and an we're to die, we die, and there's an end on't. But now that I think, how found ye my chamber?" "I asked it of Dame Hatch," she answered. "Well, the dame's staunch," he answered; "she'll not tell upon you. We have time before us." And just then, as if to contradict his words, feet came down the corridor, and a fist beat roughly on the door. "Here!" cried a voice. "Open, Master Dick; open!" Dick neither moved nor answered. "It is all over," said the girl; and she put her arms about Dick's neck. One after another, men came trooping to the door. Then Sir Daniel arrived himself, and there was a sudden cessation of the noise. "Dick," cried the knight, "be not an ass. The Seven Sleepers had been awake ere now. We know she is within there. Open, then, the door, man." Dick was again silent. "Down with it," said Sir Daniel. And immediately his followers fell savagely upon the door with foot and fist. Solid as it was, and strongly bolted, it would soon have given way; but once more fortune interfered. Over the thunderstorm of blows the cry of a sentinel was heard; it was followed by another; shouts ran along the battlements, shouts answered out of the wood. In the first moment of alarm it sounded as if the foresters were carrying the Moat House by assault. And Sir Daniel and his men, desisting instantly from their attack upon Dick's chamber, hurried to defend the walls. "Now," cried Dick, "we are saved." He seized the great old bedstead with both hands, and bent himself in vain to move it. "Help me, Jack. For your life's sake, help me stoutly!" he cried. Between them, with a huge effort, they dragged the big frame of oak across the room, and thrust it endwise to the chamber door. "Ye do but make things worse," said Joanna, sadly. "He will then enter by the trap." "Not so," replied Dick. "He durst not tell his secret to so many. It is by the trap that we shall flee. Hark! The attack is over. Nay, it was none!" It had, indeed, been no attack; it was the arrival of another party of stragglers from the defeat of Risingham that had disturbed Sir Daniel. They had run the gauntlet under cover of the darkness; they had been admitted by the great gate; and now, with a great stamping of hoofs and jingle of accoutrements and arms, they were dismounting in the court. "He will return anon," said Dick. "To the trap!" He lighted a lamp, and they went together into the corner of the room. The open chink through which some light still glittered was easily discovered, and, taking a stout sword from his small armoury, Dick thrust it deep into the seam, and weighed strenuously on the hilt. The trap moved, gaped a little, and at length came widely open. Seizing it with their hands, the two young folk threw it back. It disclosed a few steps descending, and at the foot of them, where the would-be murderer had left it, a burning lamp. "Now," said Dick, "go first and take the lamp. I will follow to close the trap." So they descended one after the other, and as Dick lowered the trap, the blows began once again to thunder on the panels of the door. CHAPTER IV--THE PASSAGE The passage in which Dick and Joanna now found themselves was narrow, dirty, and short. At the other end of it, a door stood partly open; the same door, without doubt, that they had heard the man unlocking. Heavy cobwebs hung from the roof; and the paved flooring echoed hollow under the lightest tread. Beyond the door there were two branches, at right angles. Dick chose one of them at random, and the pair hurried, with echoing footsteps, along the hollow of the chapel roof. The top of the arched ceiling rose like a whale's back in the dim glimmer of the lamp. Here and there were spyholes, concealed, on the other side, by the carving of the cornice; and looking down through one of these, Dick saw the paved floor of the chapel--the altar, with its burning tapers--and stretched before it on the steps, the figure of Sir Oliver praying with uplifted hands. At the other end, they descended a few steps. The passage grew narrower; the wall upon one hand was now of wood; the noise of people talking, and a faint flickering of lights, came through the interstices; and presently they came to a round hole about the size of a man's eye, and Dick, looking down through it, beheld the interior of the hall, and some half a dozen men sitting, in their jacks, about the table, drinking deep and demolishing a venison pie. These were certainly some of the late arrivals. "Here is no help," said Dick. "Let us try back." "Nay," said Joanna; "maybe the passage goeth farther." And she pushed on. But a few yards farther the passage ended at the top of a short flight of steps; and it became plain that, as long as the soldiers occupied the hall, escape was impossible upon that side. They retraced their steps with all imaginable speed, and set forward to explore the other branch. It was exceedingly narrow, scarce wide enough for a large man; and it led them continually up and down by little break-neck stairs, until even Dick had lost all notion of his whereabouts. At length it grew both narrower and lower; the stairs continued to descend; the walls on either hand became damp and slimy to the touch; and far in front of them they heard the squeaking and scuttling of the rats. "We must be in the dungeons," Dick remarked. "And still there is no outlet," added Joanna. "Nay, but an outlet there must be!" Dick answered. Presently, sure enough, they came to a sharp angle, and then the passage ended in a flight of steps. On the top of that there was a solid flag of stone by way of trap, and to this they both set their backs. It was immovable. "Some one holdeth it," suggested Joanna. "Not so," said Dick; "for were a man strong as ten, he must still yield a little. But this resisteth like dead rock. There is a weight upon the trap. Here is no issue; and, by my sooth, good Jack, we are here as fairly prisoners as though the gyves were on our ankle bones. Sit ye then down, and let us talk. After a while we shall return, when perchance they shall be less carefully upon their guard; and, who knoweth? we may break out and stand a chance. But, in my poor opinion, we are as good as shent." "Dick!" she cried, "alas the day that ever ye should have seen me! For like a most unhappy and unthankful maid, it is I have led you hither." "What cheer!" returned Dick. "It was all written, and that which is written, willy nilly, cometh still to pass. But tell me a little what manner of a maid ye are, and how ye came into Sir Daniel's hands; that will do better than to bemoan yourself, whether for your sake or mine." "I am an orphan, like yourself, of father and mother," said Joanna; "and for my great misfortune, Dick, and hitherto for yours, I am a rich marriage. My Lord Foxham had me to ward; yet it appears Sir Daniel bought the marriage of me from the king, and a right dear price he paid for it. So here was I, poor babe, with two great and rich men fighting which should marry me, and I still at nurse! Well, then the world changed, and there was a new chancellor, and Sir Daniel bought the warding of me over the Lord Foxham's head. And then the world changed again, and Lord Foxham bought my marriage over Sir Daniel's; and from then to now it went on ill betwixt the two of them. But still Lord Foxham kept me in his hands, and was a good lord to me. And at last I was to be married--or sold, if ye like it better. Five hundred pounds Lord Foxham was to get for me. Hamley was the groom's name, and to-morrow, Dick, of all days in the year, was I to be betrothed. Had it not come to Sir Daniel, I had been wedded, sure--and never seen thee, Dick--dear Dick!" And here she took his hand, and kissed it, with the prettiest grace; and Dick drew her hand to him and did the like. "Well," she went on, "Sir Daniel took me unawares in the garden, and made me dress in these men's clothes, which is a deadly sin for a woman; and, besides, they fit me not. He rode with me to Kettley, as ye saw, telling me I was to marry you; but I, in my heart, made sure I would marry Hamley in his teeth." "Ay!" cried Dick, "and so ye loved this Hamley!" "Nay," replied Joanna, "not I. I did but hate Sir Daniel. And then, Dick, ye helped me, and ye were right kind, and very bold, and my heart turned towards you in mine own despite; and now, if we can in any way compass it, I would marry you with right goodwill. And if, by cruel destiny, it may not be, still ye'll be dear to me. While my heart beats, it'll be true to you." "And I," said Dick, "that never cared a straw for any manner of woman until now, I took to you when I thought ye were a boy. I had a pity to you, and knew not why. When I would have belted you, the hand failed me. But when ye owned ye were a maid, Jack--for still I will call you Jack--I made sure ye were the maid for me. Hark!" he said, breaking off--"one cometh." And indeed a heavy tread was now audible in the echoing passage, and the rats again fled in armies. Dick reconnoitred his position. The sudden turn gave him a post of vantage. He could thus shoot in safety from the cover of the wall. But it was plain the light was too near him, and, running some way forward, he set down the lamp in the middle of the passage, and then returned to watch. Presently, at the far end of the passage, Bennet hove in sight. He seemed to be alone, and he carried in his hand a burning torch, which made him the better mark. "Stand, Bennet!" cried Dick. "Another step, and y' are dead." "So here ye are," returned Hatch, peering forward into the darkness. "I see you not. Aha! y' 'ave done wisely, Dick; y' 'ave put your lamp before you. By my sooth, but, though it was done to shoot my own knave body, I do rejoice to see ye profit of my lessons! And now, what make ye? what seek ye here? Why would ye shoot upon an old, kind friend? And have ye the young gentlewoman there?" "Nay, Bennet, it is I should question and you answer," replied Dick. "Why am I in this jeopardy of my life? Why do men come privily to slay me in my bed? Why am I now fleeing in mine own guardian's strong house, and from the friends that I have lived among and never injured?" "Master Dick, Master Dick," said Bennet, "what told I you? Y' are brave, but the most uncrafty lad that I can think upon!" "Well," returned Dick, "I see ye know all, and that I am doomed indeed. It is well. Here, where I am, I stay. Let Sir Daniel get me out if he be able!" Hatch was silent for a space. "Hark ye," he began, "return to Sir Daniel, to tell him where ye are, and how posted; for, in truth, it was to that end he sent me. But you, if ye are no fool, had best be gone ere I return." "Begone!" repeated Dick. "I would be gone already, an' I wist how. I cannot move the trap." "Put me your hand into the corner, and see what ye find there," replied Bennet. "Throgmorton's rope is still in the brown chamber. Fare ye well." And Hatch, turning upon his heel, disappeared again into the windings of the passage. Dick instantly returned for his lamp, and proceeded to act upon the hint. At one corner of the trap there was a deep cavity in the wall. Pushing his arm into the aperture, Dick found an iron bar, which he thrust vigorously upwards. There followed a snapping noise, and the slab of stone instantly started in its bed. They were free of the passage. A little exercise of strength easily raised the trap; and they came forth into a vaulted chamber, opening on one hand upon the court, where one or two fellows, with bare arms, were rubbing down the horses of the last arrivals. A torch or two, each stuck in an iron ring against the wall, changefully lit up the scene. CHAPTER V--HOW DICK CHANGED SIDES Dick, blowing out his lamp lest it should attract attention, led the way up-stairs and along the corridor. In the brown chamber the rope had been made fast to the frame of an exceeding heavy and ancient bed. It had not been detached, and Dick, taking the coil to the window, began to lower it slowly and cautiously into the darkness of the night. Joan stood by; but as the rope lengthened, and still Dick continued to pay it out, extreme fear began to conquer her resolution. "Dick," she said, "is it so deep? I may not essay it. I should infallibly fall, good Dick." It was just at the delicate moment of the operations that she spoke. Dick started; the remainder of the coil slipped from his grasp, and the end fell with a splash into the moat. Instantly, from the battlement above, the voice of a sentinel cried, "Who goes?" "A murrain!" cried Dick. "We are paid now! Down with you--take the rope." "I cannot," she cried, recoiling. "An ye cannot, no more can I," said Shelton. "How can I swim the moat without you? Do you desert me, then?" "Dick," she gasped, "I cannot. The strength is gone from me." "By the mass, then, we are all shent!" he shouted, stamping with his foot; and then, hearing steps, he ran to the room door and sought to close it. Before he could shoot the bolt, strong arms were thrusting it back upon him from the other side. He struggled for a second; then, feeling himself overpowered, ran back to the window. The girl had fallen against the wall in the embrasure of the window; she was more than half insensible; and when he tried to raise her in his arms, her body was limp and unresponsive. At the same moment the men who had forced the door against him laid hold upon him. The first he poinarded at a blow, and the others falling back for a second in some disorder, he profited by the chance, bestrode the window-sill, seized the cord in both hands, and let his body slip. The cord was knotted, which made it the easier to descend; but so furious was Dick's hurry, and so small his experience of such gymnastics, that he span round and round in mid-air like a criminal upon a gibbet, and now beat his head, and now bruised his hands, against the rugged stonework of the wall. The air roared in his ears; he saw the stars overhead, and the reflected stars below him in the moat, whirling like dead leaves before the tempest. And then he lost hold, and fell, and soused head over ears into the icy water. When he came to the surface his hand encountered the rope, which, newly lightened of his weight, was swinging wildly to and fro. There was a red glow overhead, and looking up, he saw, by the light of several torches and a cresset full of burning coals, the battlements lined with faces. He saw the men's eyes turning hither and thither in quest of him; but he was too far below, the light reached him not, and they looked in vain. And now he perceived that the rope was considerably too long, and he began to struggle as well as he could towards the other side of the moat, still keeping his head above water. In this way he got much more than halfway over; indeed the bank was almost within reach, before the rope began to draw him back by its own weight. Taking his courage in both hands, he left go and made a leap for the trailing sprays of willow that had already, that same evening, helped Sir Daniel's messenger to land. He went down, rose again, sank a second time, and then his hand caught a branch, and with the speed of thought he had dragged himself into the thick of the tree and clung there, dripping and panting, and still half uncertain of his escape. But all this had not been done without a considerable splashing, which had so far indicated his position to the men along the battlements. Arrows and quarrels fell thick around him in the darkness, thick like driving hail; and suddenly a torch was thrown down--flared through the air in its swift passage--stuck for a moment on the edge of the bank, where it burned high and lit up its whole surroundings like a bonfire--and then, in a good hour for Dick, slipped off, plumped into the moat, and was instantly extinguished. It had served its purpose. The marksmen had had time to see the willow, and Dick ensconced among its boughs; and though the lad instantly sprang higher up the bank, and ran for his life, he was yet not quick enough to escape a shot. An arrow struck him in the shoulder, another grazed his head. The pain of his wounds lent him wings; and he had no sooner got upon the level than he took to his heels and ran straight before him in the dark, without a thought for the direction of his flight. For a few steps missiles followed him, but these soon ceased; and when at length he came to a halt and looked behind, he was already a good way from the Moat House, though he could still see the torches moving to and fro along its battlements. He leaned against a tree, streaming with blood and water, bruised, wounded, alone, and unarmed. For all that, he had saved his life for that bout; and though Joanna remained behind in the power of Sir Daniel, he neither blamed himself for an accident that it had been beyond his power to prevent, nor did he augur any fatal consequences to the girl herself. Sir Daniel was cruel, but he was not likely to be cruel to a young gentlewoman who had other protectors, willing and able to bring him to account. It was more probable he would make haste to marry her to some friend of his own. "Well," thought Dick, "between then and now I will find me the means to bring that traitor under; for I think, by the mass, that I be now absolved from any gratitude or obligation; and when war is open, there is a fair chance for all." In the meanwhile, here he was in a sore plight. For some little way farther he struggled forward through the forest; but what with the pain of his wounds, the darkness of the night, and the extreme uneasiness and confusion of his mind, he soon became equally unable to guide himself or to continue to push through the close undergrowth, and he was fain at length to sit down and lean his back against a tree. When he awoke from something betwixt sleep and swooning, the grey of the morning had begun to take the place of night. A little chilly breeze was bustling among the trees, and as he still sat staring before him, only half awake, he became aware of something dark that swung to and fro among the branches, some hundred yards in front of him. The progressive brightening of the day and the return of his own senses at last enabled him to recognise the object. It was a man hanging from the bough of a tall oak. His head had fallen forward on his breast; but at every stronger puff of wind his body span round and round, and his legs and arms tossed, like some ridiculous plaything. Dick clambered to his feet, and, staggering and leaning on the tree-trunks as he went, drew near to this grim object. The bough was perhaps twenty feet above the ground, and the poor fellow had been drawn up so high by his executioners that his boots swung clear above Dick's reach; and as his hood had been drawn over his face, it was impossible to recognise the man. Dick looked about him right and left; and at last he perceived that the other end of the cord had been made fast to the trunk of a little hawthorn which grew, thick with blossom, under the lofty arcade of the oak. With his dagger, which alone remained to him of all his arms, young Shelton severed the rope, and instantly, with a dead thump, the corpse fell in a heap upon the ground. Dick raised the hood; it was Throgmorton, Sir Daniel's messenger. He had not gone far upon his errand. A paper, which had apparently escaped the notice of the men of the Black Arrow, stuck from the bosom of his doublet, and Dick, pulling it forth, found it was Sir Daniel's letter to Lord Wensleydale. "Come," thought he, "if the world changes yet again, I may have here the wherewithal to shame Sir Daniel--nay, and perchance to bring him to the block." And he put the paper in his own bosom, said a prayer over the dead man, and set forth again through the woods. His fatigue and weakness increased; his ears sang, his steps faltered, his mind at intervals failed him, so low had he been brought by loss of blood. Doubtless he made many deviations from his true path, but at last he came out upon the high-road, not very far from Tunstall hamlet. A rough voice bid him stand. "Stand?" repeated Dick. "By the mass, but I am nearer falling." And he suited the action to the word, and fell all his length upon the road. Two men came forth out of the thicket, each in green forest jerkin, each with long-bow and quiver and short sword. "Why, Lawless," said the younger of the two, "it is young Shelton." "Ay, this will be as good as bread to John Amend-All," returned the other. "Though, faith, he hath been to the wars. Here is a tear in his scalp that must 'a' cost him many a good ounce of blood." "And here," added Greensheve, "is a hole in his shoulder that must have pricked him well. Who hath done this, think ye? If it be one of ours, he may all to prayer; Ellis will give him a short shrift and a long rope." "Up with the cub," said Lawless. "Clap him on my back." And then, when Dick had been hoisted to his shoulders, and he had taken the lad's arms about his neck, and got a firm hold of him, the ex-Grey Friar added: "Keep ye the post, brother Greensheve. I will on with him by myself." So Greensheve returned to his ambush on the wayside, and Lawless trudged down the hill, whistling as he went, with Dick, still in a dead faint, comfortably settled on his shoulders. The sun rose as he came out of the skirts of the wood and saw Tunstall hamlet straggling up the opposite hill. All seemed quiet, but a strong post of some half a score of archers lay close by the bridge on either side of the road, and, as soon as they perceived Lawless with his burthen, began to bestir themselves and set arrow to string like vigilant sentries. "Who goes?" cried the man in command. "Will Lawless, by the rood--ye know me as well as your own hand," returned the outlaw, contemptuously. "Give the word, Lawless," returned the other. "Now, Heaven lighten thee, thou great fool," replied Lawless. "Did I not tell it thee myself? But ye are all mad for this playing at soldiers. When I am in the greenwood, give me greenwood ways; and my word for this tide is: 'A fig for all mock soldiery!'" "Lawless, ye but show an ill example; give us the word, fool jester," said the commander of the post. "And if I had forgotten it?" asked the other. "An ye had forgotten it--as I know y' 'ave not--by the mass, I would clap an arrow into your big body," returned the first. "Nay, an y' are so ill a jester," said Lawless, "ye shall have your word for me. 'Duckworth and Shelton' is the word; and here, to the illustration, is Shelton on my shoulders, and to Duckworth do I carry him." "Pass, Lawless," said the sentry. "And where is John?" asked the Grey Friar. "He holdeth a court, by the mass, and taketh rents as to the manner born!" cried another of the company. So it proved. When Lawless got as far up the village as the little inn, he found Ellis Duckworth surrounded by Sir Daniel's tenants, and, by the right of his good company of archers, coolly taking rents, and giving written receipts in return for them. By the faces of the tenants, it was plain how little this proceeding pleased them; for they argued very rightly that they would simply have to pay them twice. As soon as he knew what had brought Lawless, Ellis dismissed the remainder of the tenants, and, with every mark of interest and apprehension, conducted Dick into an inner chamber of the inn. There the lad's hurts were looked to; and he was recalled, by simple remedies, to consciousness. "Dear lad," said Ellis, pressing his hand, "y' are in a friend's hands that loved your father, and loves you for his sake. Rest ye a little quietly, for ye are somewhat out of case. Then shall ye tell me your story, and betwixt the two of us we shall find a remedy for all." A little later in the day, and after Dick had awakened from a comfortable slumber to find himself still very weak, but clearer in mind and easier in body, Ellis returned, and sitting down by the bedside, begged him, in the name of his father, to relate the circumstance of his escape from Tunstall Moat House. There was something in the strength of Duckworth's frame, in the honesty of his brown face, in the clearness and shrewdness of his eyes, that moved Dick to obey him; and from first to last the lad told him the story of his two days' adventures. "Well," said Ellis, when he had done, "see what the kind saints have done for you, Dick Shelton, not alone to save your body in so numerous and deadly perils, but to bring you into my hands that have no dearer wish than to assist your father's son. Be but true to me--and I see y' are true--and betwixt you and me, we shall bring that false-heart traitor to the death." "Will ye assault the house?" asked Dick. "I were mad, indeed, to think of it," returned Ellis. "He hath too much power; his men gather to him; those that gave me the slip last night, and by the mass came in so handily for you--those have made him safe. Nay, Dick, to the contrary, thou and I and my brave bowmen, we must all slip from this forest speedily, and leave Sir Daniel free." "My mind misgiveth me for Jack," said the lad. "For Jack!" repeated Duckworth. "O, I see, for the wench! Nay, Dick, I promise you, if there come talk of any marriage we shall act at once; till then, or till the time is ripe, we shall all disappear, even like shadows at morning; Sir Daniel shall look east and west, and see none enemies; he shall think, by the mass, that he hath dreamed awhile, and hath now awakened in his bed. But our four eyes, Dick, shall follow him right close, and our four hands--so help us all the army of the saints!--shall bring that traitor low!" Two days later Sir Daniel's garrison had grown to such a strength that he ventured on a sally, and at the head of some two score horsemen, pushed without opposition as far as Tunstall hamlet. Not an arrow flew, not a man stirred in the thicket; the bridge was no longer guarded, but stood open to all corners; and as Sir Daniel crossed it, he saw the villagers looking timidly from their doors. Presently one of them, taking heart of grace, came forward, and with the lowliest salutations, presented a letter to the knight. His face darkened as he read the contents. It ran thus: _To the most untrue and cruel gentylman_, _Sir Daniel Brackley_, _Knyght_, _These_: I fynde ye were untrue and unkynd fro the first. Ye have my father's blood upon your hands; let be, it will not wasshe. Some day ye shall perish by my procurement, so much I let you to wytte; and I let you to wytte farther, that if ye seek to wed to any other the gentylwoman, Mistresse Joan Sedley, whom that I am bound upon a great oath to wed myself, the blow will be very swift. The first step therinne will be thy first step to the grave. RIC. SHELTON. BOOK III--MY LORD FOXHAM CHAPTER I--THE HOUSE BY THE SHORE Months had passed away since Richard Shelton made his escape from the hands of his guardian. These months had been eventful for England. The party of Lancaster, which was then in the very article of death, had once more raised its head. The Yorkists defeated and dispersed, their leader butchered on the field, it seemed,--for a very brief season in the winter following upon the events already recorded, as if the House of Lancaster had finally triumphed over its foes. The small town of Shoreby-on-the-Till was full of the Lancastrian nobles of the neighbourhood. Earl Risingham was there, with three hundred men-at-arms; Lord Shoreby, with two hundred; Sir Daniel himself, high in favour and once more growing rich on confiscations, lay in a house of his own, on the main street, with three-score men. The world had changed indeed. It was a black, bitter cold evening in the first week of January, with a hard frost, a high wind, and every likelihood of snow before the morning. In an obscure alehouse in a by-street near the harbour, three or four men sat drinking ale and eating a hasty mess of eggs. They were all likely, lusty, weather-beaten fellows, hard of hand, bold of eye; and though they wore plain tabards, like country ploughmen, even a drunken soldier might have looked twice before he sought a quarrel in such company. A little apart before the huge fire sat a younger man, almost a boy, dressed in much the same fashion, though it was easy to see by his looks that he was better born, and might have worn a sword, had the time suited. "Nay," said one of the men at the table, "I like it not. Ill will come of it. This is no place for jolly fellows. A jolly fellow loveth open country, good cover, and scarce foes; but here we are shut in a town, girt about with enemies; and, for the bull's-eye of misfortune, see if it snow not ere the morning." "'Tis for Master Shelton there," said another, nodding his head towards the lad before the fire. "I will do much for Master Shelton," returned the first; "but to come to the gallows for any man--nay, brothers, not that!" The door of the inn opened, and another man entered hastily and approached the youth before the fire. "Master Shelton," he said, "Sir Daniel goeth forth with a pair of links and four archers." Dick (for this was our young friend) rose instantly to his feet. "Lawless," he said, "ye will take John Capper's watch. Greensheve, follow with me. Capper, lead forward. We will follow him this time, an he go to York." The next moment they were outside in the dark street, and Capper, the man who had just come, pointed to where two torches flared in the wind at a little distance. The town was already sound asleep; no one moved upon the streets, and there was nothing easier than to follow the party without observation. The two link-bearers went first; next followed a single man, whose long cloak blew about him in the wind; and the rear was brought up by the four archers, each with his bow upon his arm. They moved at a brisk walk, threading the intricate lanes and drawing nearer to the shore. "He hath gone each night in this direction?" asked Dick, in a whisper. "This is the third night running, Master Shelton," returned Capper, "and still at the same hour and with the same small following, as though his end were secret." Sir Daniel and his six men were now come to the outskirts of the country. Shoreby was an open town, and though the Lancastrian lords who lay there kept a strong guard on the main roads, it was still possible to enter or depart unseen by any of the lesser streets or across the open country. The lane which Sir Daniel had been following came to an abrupt end. Before him there was a stretch of rough down, and the noise of the sea-surf was audible upon one hand. There were no guards in the neighbourhood, nor any light in that quarter of the town. Dick and his two outlaws drew a little closer to the object of their chase, and presently, as they came forth from between the houses and could see a little farther upon either hand, they were aware of another torch drawing near from another direction. "Hey," said Dick, "I smell treason." Meanwhile, Sir Daniel had come to a full halt. The torches were stuck into the sand, and the men lay down, as if to await the arrival of the other party. This drew near at a good rate. It consisted of four men only--a pair of archers, a varlet with a link, and a cloaked gentleman walking in their midst. "Is it you, my lord?" cried Sir Daniel. "It is I, indeed; and if ever true knight gave proof I am that man," replied the leader of the second troop; "for who would not rather face giants, sorcerers, or pagans, than this pinching cold?" "My lord," returned Sir Daniel, "beauty will be the more beholden, misdoubt it not. But shall we forth? for the sooner ye have seen my merchandise, the sooner shall we both get home." "But why keep ye her here, good knight?" inquired the other. "An she be so young, and so fair, and so wealthy, why do ye not bring her forth among her mates? Ye would soon make her a good marriage, and no need to freeze your fingers and risk arrow-shots by going abroad at such untimely seasons in the dark." "I have told you, my lord," replied Sir Daniel, "the reason thereof concerneth me only. Neither do I purpose to explain it farther. Suffice it, that if ye be weary of your old gossip, Daniel Brackley, publish it abroad that y' are to wed Joanna Sedley, and I give you my word ye will be quit of him right soon. Ye will find him with an arrow in his back." Meantime the two gentlemen were walking briskly forward over the down; the three torches going before them, stooping against the wind and scattering clouds of smoke and tufts of flame, and the rear brought up by the six archers. Close upon the heels of these, Dick followed. He had, of course, heard no word of this conversation; but he had recognised in the second of the speakers old Lord Shoreby himself, a man of an infamous reputation, whom even Sir Daniel affected, in public, to condemn. Presently they came close down upon the beach. The air smelt salt; the noise of the surf increased; and here, in a large walled garden, there stood a small house of two storeys, with stables and other offices. The foremost torch-bearer unlocked a door in the wall, and after the whole party had passed into the garden, again closed and locked it on the other side. Dick and his men were thus excluded from any farther following, unless they should scale the wall and thus put their necks in a trap. They sat down in a tuft of furze and waited. The red glow of the torches moved up and down and to and fro within the enclosure, as if the link bearers steadily patrolled the garden. Twenty minutes passed, and then the whole party issued forth again upon the down; and Sir Daniel and the baron, after an elaborate salutation, separated and turned severally homeward, each with his own following of men and lights. As soon as the sound of their steps had been swallowed by the wind, Dick got to his feet as briskly as he was able, for he was stiff and aching with the cold. "Capper, ye will give me a back up," he said. They advanced, all three, to the wall; Capper stooped, and Dick, getting upon his shoulders, clambered on to the cope-stone. "Now, Greensheve," whispered Dick, "follow me up here; lie flat upon your face, that ye may be the less seen; and be ever ready to give me a hand if I fall foully on the other side." And so saying he dropped into the garden. It was all pitch dark; there was no light in the house. The wind whistled shrill among the poor shrubs, and the surf beat upon the beach; there was no other sound. Cautiously Dick footed it forth, stumbling among bushes, and groping with his hands; and presently the crisp noise of gravel underfoot told him that he had struck upon an alley. Here he paused, and taking his crossbow from where he kept it concealed under his long tabard, he prepared it for instant action, and went forward once more with greater resolution and assurance. The path led him straight to the group of buildings. All seemed to be sorely dilapidated: the windows of the house were secured by crazy shutters; the stables were open and empty; there was no hay in the hay-loft, no corn in the corn-box. Any one would have supposed the place to be deserted. But Dick had good reason to think otherwise. He continued his inspection, visiting the offices, trying all the windows. At length he came round to the sea-side of the house, and there, sure enough, there burned a pale light in one of the upper windows. He stepped back a little way, till he thought he could see the movement of a shadow on the wall of the apartment. Then he remembered that, in the stable, his groping hand had rested for a moment on a ladder, and he returned with all despatch to bring it. The ladder was very short, but yet, by standing on the topmost round, he could bring his hands as high as the iron bars of the window; and seizing these, he raised his body by main force until his eyes commanded the interior of the room. Two persons were within; the first he readily knew to be Dame Hatch; the second, a tall and beautiful and grave young lady, in a long, embroidered dress--could that be Joanna Sedley? his old wood-companion, Jack, whom he had thought to punish with a belt? He dropped back again to the top round of the ladder in a kind of amazement. He had never thought of his sweetheart as of so superior a being, and he was instantly taken with a feeling of diffidence. But he had little opportunity for thought. A low "Hist!" sounded from close by, and he hastened to descend the ladder. "Who goes?" he whispered. "Greensheve," came the reply, in tones similarly guarded. "What want ye?" asked Dick. "The house is watched, Master Shelton," returned the outlaw. "We are not alone to watch it; for even as I lay on my belly on the wall I saw men prowling in the dark, and heard them whistle softly one to the other." "By my sooth," said Dick, "but this is passing strange! Were they not men of Sir Daniel's?" "Nay, sir, that they were not," returned Greensheve; "for if I have eyes in my head, every man-Jack of them weareth me a white badge in his bonnet, something chequered with dark." "White, chequered with dark," repeated Dick. "Faith, 'tis a badge I know not. It is none of this country's badges. Well, an that be so, let us slip as quietly forth from this garden as we may; for here we are in an evil posture for defence. Beyond all question there are men of Sir Daniel's in that house, and to be taken between two shots is a beggarman's position. Take me this ladder; I must leave it where I found it." They returned the ladder to the stable, and groped their way to the place where they had entered. Capper had taken Greensheve's position on the cope, and now he leaned down his hand, and, first one and then the other, pulled them up. Cautiously and silently, they dropped again upon the other side; nor did they dare to speak until they had returned to their old ambush in the gorse. "Now, John Capper," said Dick, "back with you to Shoreby, even as for your life. Bring me instantly what men ye can collect. Here shall be the rendezvous; or if the men be scattered and the day be near at hand before they muster, let the place be something farther back, and by the entering in of the town. Greensheve and I lie here to watch. Speed ye, John Capper, and the saints aid you to despatch. And now, Greensheve," he continued, as soon as Capper had departed, "let thou and I go round about the garden in a wide circuit. I would fain see whether thine eyes betrayed thee." Keeping well outwards from the wall, and profiting by every height and hollow, they passed about two sides, beholding nothing. On the third side the garden wall was built close upon the beach, and to preserve the distance necessary to their purpose, they had to go some way down upon the sands. Although the tide was still pretty far out, the surf was so high, and the sands so flat, that at each breaker a great sheet of froth and water came careering over the expanse, and Dick and Greensheve made this part of their inspection wading, now to the ankles, and now as deep as to the knees, in the salt and icy waters of the German Ocean. Suddenly, against the comparative whiteness of the garden wall, the figure of a man was seen, like a faint Chinese shadow, violently signalling with both arms. As he dropped again to the earth, another arose a little farther on and repeated the same performance. And so, like a silent watch word, these gesticulations made the round of the beleaguered garden. "They keep good watch," Dick whispered. "Let us back to land, good master," answered Greensheve. "We stand here too open; for, look ye, when the seas break heavy and white out there behind us, they shall see us plainly against the foam." "Ye speak sooth," returned Dick. "Ashore with us, right speedily." CHAPTER II--A SKIRMISH IN THE DARK Thoroughly drenched and chilled, the two adventurers returned to their position in the gorse. "I pray Heaven that Capper make good speed!" said Dick. "I vow a candle to St. Mary of Shoreby if he come before the hour!" "Y' are in a hurry, Master Dick?" asked Greensheve. "Ay, good fellow," answered Dick; "for in that house lieth my lady, whom I love, and who should these be that lie about her secretly by night? Unfriends, for sure!" "Well," returned Greensheve, "an John come speedily, we shall give a good account of them. They are not two score at the outside--I judge so by the spacing of their sentries--and, taken where they are, lying so widely, one score would scatter them like sparrows. And yet, Master Dick, an she be in Sir Daniel's power already, it will little hurt that she should change into another's. Who should these be?" "I do suspect the Lord of Shoreby," Dick replied. "When came they?" "They began to come, Master Dick," said Greensheve, "about the time ye crossed the wall. I had not lain there the space of a minute ere I marked the first of the knaves crawling round the corner." The last light had been already extinguished in the little house when they were wading in the wash of the breakers, and it was impossible to predict at what moment the lurking men about the garden wall might make their onslaught. Of two evils, Dick preferred the least. He preferred that Joanna should remain under the guardianship of Sir Daniel rather than pass into the clutches of Lord Shoreby; and his mind was made up, if the house should be assaulted, to come at once to the relief of the besieged. But the time passed, and still there was no movement. From quarter of an hour to quarter of an hour the same signal passed about the garden wall, as if the leader desired to assure himself of the vigilance of his scattered followers; but in every other particular the neighbourhood of the little house lay undisturbed. Presently Dick's reinforcements began to arrive. The night was not yet old before nearly a score of men crouched beside him in the gorse. Separating these into two bodies, he took the command of the smaller himself, and entrusted the larger to the leadership of Greensheve. "Now, Kit," said he to this last, "take me your men to the near angle of the garden wall upon the beach. Post them strongly, and wait till that ye hear me falling on upon the other side. It is those upon the sea front that I would fain make certain of, for there will be the leader. The rest will run; even let them. And now, lads, let no man draw an arrow; ye will but hurt friends. Take to the steel, and keep to the steel; and if we have the uppermost, I promise every man of you a gold noble when I come to mine estate." Out of the odd collection of broken men, thieves, murderers, and ruined peasantry, whom Duckworth had gathered together to serve the purposes of his revenge, some of the boldest and the most experienced in war had volunteered to follow Richard Shelton. The service of watching Sir Daniel's movements in the town of Shoreby had from the first been irksome to their temper, and they had of late begun to grumble loudly and threaten to disperse. The prospect of a sharp encounter and possible spoils restored them to good humour, and they joyfully prepared for battle. Their long tabards thrown aside, they appeared, some in plain green jerkins, and some in stout leathern jacks; under their hoods many wore bonnets strengthened by iron plates; and, for offensive armour, swords, daggers, a few stout boar-spears, and a dozen of bright bills, put them in a posture to engage even regular feudal troops. The bows, quivers, and tabards were concealed among the gorse, and the two bands set resolutely forward. Dick, when he had reached the other side of the house, posted his six men in a line, about twenty yards from the garden wall, and took position himself a few paces in front. Then they all shouted with one voice, and closed upon the enemy. These, lying widely scattered, stiff with cold, and taken at unawares, sprang stupidly to their feet, and stood undecided. Before they had time to get their courage about them, or even to form an idea of the number and mettle of their assailants, a similar shout of onslaught sounded in their ears from the far side of the enclosure. Thereupon they gave themselves up for lost and ran. In this way the two small troops of the men of the Black Arrow closed upon the sea front of the garden wall, and took a part of the strangers, as it were, between two fires; while the whole of the remainder ran for their lives in different directions, and were soon scattered in the darkness. For all that, the fight was but beginning. Dick's outlaws, although they had the advantage of the surprise, were still considerably outnumbered by the men they had surrounded. The tide had flowed, in the meanwhile; the beach was narrowed to a strip; and on this wet field, between the surf and the garden wall, there began, in the darkness, a doubtful, furious, and deadly contest. The strangers were well armed; they fell in silence upon their assailants; and the affray became a series of single combats. Dick, who had come first into the mellay, was engaged by three; the first he cut down at the first blow, but the other two coming upon him, hotly, he was fain to give ground before their onset. One of these two was a huge fellow, almost a giant for stature, and armed with a two-handed sword, which he brandished like a switch. Against this opponent, with his reach of arm and the length and weight of his weapon, Dick and his bill were quite defenceless; and had the other continued to join vigorously in the attack, the lad must have indubitably fallen. This second man, however, less in stature and slower in his movements, paused for a moment to peer about him in the darkness, and to give ear to the sounds of the battle. The giant still pursued his advantage, and still Dick fled before him, spying for his chance. Then the huge blade flashed and descended, and the lad, leaping on one side and running in, slashed sideways and upwards with his bill. A roar of agony responded, and, before the wounded man could raise his formidable weapon, Dick, twice repeating his blow, had brought him to the ground. The next moment he was engaged, upon more equal terms, with his second pursuer. Here there was no great difference in size, and though the man, fighting with sword and dagger against a bill, and being wary and quick of fence, had a certain superiority of arms, Dick more than made it up by his greater agility on foot. Neither at first gained any obvious advantage; but the older man was still insensibly profiting by the ardour of the younger to lead him where he would; and presently Dick found that they had crossed the whole width of the beach, and were now fighting above the knees in the spume and bubble of the breakers. Here his own superior activity was rendered useless; he found himself more or less at the discretion of his foe; yet a little, and he had his back turned upon his own men, and saw that this adroit and skilful adversary was bent upon drawing him farther and farther away. Dick ground his teeth. He determined to decide the combat instantly; and when the wash of the next wave had ebbed and left them dry, he rushed in, caught a blow upon his bill, and leaped right at the throat of his opponent. The man went down backwards, with Dick still upon the top of him; and the next wave, speedily succeeding to the last, buried him below a rush of water. While he was still submerged, Dick forced his dagger from his grasp, and rose to his feet, victorious. "Yield ye!" he said. "I give you life." "I yield me," said the other, getting to his knees. "Ye fight, like a young man, ignorantly and foolhardily; but, by the array of the saints, ye fight bravely!" Dick turned to the beach. The combat was still raging doubtfully in the night; over the hoarse roar of the breakers steel clanged upon steel, and cries of pain and the shout of battle resounded. "Lead me to your captain, youth," said the conquered knight. "It is fit this butchery should cease." "Sir," replied Dick, "so far as these brave fellows have a captain, the poor gentleman who here addresses you is he." "Call off your dogs, then, and I will bid my villains hold," returned the other. There was something noble both in the voice and manner of his late opponent, and Dick instantly dismissed all fears of treachery. "Lay down your arms, men!" cried the stranger knight. "I have yielded me, upon promise of life." The tone of the stranger was one of absolute command, and almost instantly the din and confusion of the mellay ceased. "Lawless," cried Dick, "are ye safe?" "Ay," cried Lawless, "safe and hearty." "Light me the lantern," said Dick. "Is not Sir Daniel here?" inquired the knight. "Sir Daniel?" echoed Dick. "Now, by the rood, I pray not. It would go ill with me if he were." "Ill with _you_, fair sir?" inquired the other. "Nay, then, if ye be not of Sir Daniel's party, I profess I comprehend no longer. Wherefore, then, fell ye upon mine ambush? in what quarrel, my young and very fiery friend? to what earthly purpose? and, to make a clear end of questioning, to what good gentleman have I surrendered?" But before Dick could answer, a voice spoke in the darkness from close by. Dick could see the speaker's black and white badge, and the respectful salute which he addressed to his superior. "My lord," said he, "if these gentlemen be unfriends to Sir Daniel, it is pity, indeed, we should have been at blows with them; but it were tenfold greater that either they or we should linger here. The watchers in the house--unless they be all dead or deaf--have heard our hammering this quarter-hour agone; instantly they will have signalled to the town; and unless we be the livelier in our departure, we are like to be taken, both of us, by a fresh foe." "Hawksley is in the right," added the lord. "How please ye, sir? Whither shall we march?" "Nay, my lord," said Dick, "go where ye will for me. I do begin to suspect we have some ground of friendship, and if, indeed, I began our acquaintance somewhat ruggedly, I would not churlishly continue. Let us, then, separate, my lord, you laying your right hand in mine; and at the hour and place that ye shall name, let us encounter and agree." "Y' are too trustful, boy," said the other; "but this time your trust is not misplaced. I will meet you at the point of day at St. Bride's Cross. Come, lads, follow!" The strangers disappeared from the scene with a rapidity that seemed suspicious; and, while the outlaws fell to the congenial task of rifling the dead bodies, Dick made once more the circuit of the garden wall to examine the front of the house. In a little upper loophole of the roof he beheld a light set; and as it would certainly be visible in town from the back windows of Sir Daniel's mansion, he doubted not that this was the signal feared by Hawksley, and that ere long the lances of the Knight of Tunstall would arrive upon the scene. He put his ear to the ground, and it seemed to him as if he heard a jarring and hollow noise from townward. Back to the beach he went hurrying. But the work was already done; the last body was disarmed and stripped to the skin, and four fellows were already wading seaward to commit it to the mercies of the deep. A few minutes later, when there debauched out of the nearest lanes of Shoreby some two score horsemen, hastily arrayed and moving at the gallop of their steeds, the neighbourhood of the house beside the sea was entirely silent and deserted. Meanwhile, Dick and his men had returned to the ale-house of the Goat and Bagpipes to snatch some hours of sleep before the morning tryst. CHAPTER III--ST. BRIDE'S CROSS St. Bride's cross stood a little way back from Shoreby, on the skirts of Tunstall Forest. Two roads met: one, from Holywood across the forest; one, that road from Risingham down which we saw the wrecks of a Lancastrian army fleeing in disorder. Here the two joined issue, and went on together down the hill to Shoreby; and a little back from the point of junction, the summit of a little knoll was crowned by the ancient and weather-beaten cross. Here, then, about seven in the morning, Dick arrived. It was as cold as ever; the earth was all grey and silver with the hoarfrost, and the day began to break in the east with many colours of purple and orange. Dick set him down upon the lowest step of the cross, wrapped himself well in his tabard, and looked vigilantly upon all sides. He had not long to wait. Down the road from Holywood a gentleman in very rich and bright armour, and wearing over that a surcoat of the rarest furs, came pacing on a splendid charger. Twenty yards behind him followed a clump of lances; but these halted as soon as they came in view of the trysting-place, while the gentleman in the fur surcoat continued to advance alone. His visor was raised, and showed a countenance of great command and dignity, answerable to the richness of his attire and arms. And it was with some confusion of manner that Dick arose from the cross and stepped down the bank to meet his prisoner. "I thank you, my lord, for your exactitude," he said, louting very low. "Will it please your lordship to set foot to earth?" "Are ye here alone, young man?" inquired the other. "I was not so simple," answered Dick; "and, to be plain with your lordship, the woods upon either hand of this cross lie full of mine honest fellows lying on their weapons." "Y' 'ave done wisely," said the lord. "It pleaseth me the rather, since last night ye fought foolhardily, and more like a salvage Saracen lunatic than any Christian warrior. But it becomes not me to complain that had the undermost." "Ye had the undermost indeed, my lord, since ye so fell," returned Dick; "but had the waves not holpen me, it was I that should have had the worst. Ye were pleased to make me yours with several dagger marks, which I still carry. And in fine, my lord, methinks I had all the danger, as well as all the profit, of that little blind-man's mellay on the beach." "Y' are shrewd enough to make light of it, I see," returned the stranger. "Nay, my lord, not shrewd," replied Dick, "in that I shoot at no advantage to myself. But when, by the light of this new day, I see how stout a knight hath yielded, not to my arms alone, but to fortune, and the darkness, and the surf--and how easily the battle had gone otherwise, with a soldier so untried and rustic as myself--think it not strange, my lord, if I feel confounded with my victory." "Ye speak well," said the stranger. "Your name?" "My name, an't like you, is Shelton," answered Dick. "Men call me the Lord Foxham," added the other. "Then, my lord, and under your good favour, ye are guardian to the sweetest maid in England," replied Dick; "and for your ransom, and the ransom of such as were taken with you on the beach, there will be no uncertainty of terms. I pray you, my lord, of your goodwill and charity, yield me the hand of my mistress, Joan Sedley; and take ye, upon the other part, your liberty, the liberty of these your followers, and (if ye will have it) my gratitude and service till I die." "But are ye not ward to Sir Daniel? Methought, if y' are Harry Shelton's son, that I had heard it so reported," said Lord Foxham. "Will it please you, my lord, to alight? I would fain tell you fully who I am, how situate, and why so bold in my demands. Beseech you, my lord, take place upon these steps, hear me to a full end, and judge me with allowance." And so saying, Dick lent a hand to Lord Foxham to dismount; led him up the knoll to the cross; installed him in the place where he had himself been sitting; and standing respectfully before his noble prisoner, related the story of his fortunes up to the events of the evening before. Lord Foxham listened gravely, and when Dick had done, "Master Shelton," he said, "ye are a most fortunate-unfortunate young gentleman; but what fortune y' 'ave had, that ye have amply merited; and what unfortune, ye have noways deserved. Be of a good cheer; for ye have made a friend who is devoid neither of power nor favour. For yourself, although it fits not for a person of your birth to herd with outlaws, I must own ye are both brave and honourable; very dangerous in battle, right courteous in peace; a youth of excellent disposition and brave bearing. For your estates, ye will never see them till the world shall change again; so long as Lancaster hath the strong hand, so long shall Sir Daniel enjoy them for his own. For my ward, it is another matter; I had promised her before to a gentleman, a kinsman of my house, one Hamley; the promise is old--" "Ay, my lord, and now Sir Daniel hath promised her to my Lord Shoreby," interrupted Dick. "And his promise, for all it is but young, is still the likelier to be made good." "'Tis the plain truth," returned his lordship. "And considering, moreover, that I am your prisoner, upon no better composition than my bare life, and over and above that, that the maiden is unhappily in other hands, I will so far consent. Aid me with your good fellows"-- "My lord," cried Dick, "they are these same outlaws that ye blame me for consorting with." "Let them be what they will, they can fight," returned Lord Foxham. "Help me, then; and if between us we regain the maid, upon my knightly honour, she shall marry you!" Dick bent his knee before his prisoner; but he, leaping up lightly from the cross, caught the lad up and embraced him like a son. "Come," he said, "an y' are to marry Joan, we must be early friends." CHAPTER IV--THE GOOD HOPE An hour thereafter, Dick was back at the Goat and Bagpipes, breaking his fast, and receiving the report of his messengers and sentries. Duckworth was still absent from Shoreby; and this was frequently the case, for he played many parts in the world, shared many different interests, and conducted many various affairs. He had founded that fellowship of the Black Arrow, as a ruined man longing for vengeance and money; and yet among those who knew him best, he was thought to be the agent and emissary of the great King-maker of England, Richard, Earl of Warwick. In his absence, at any rate, it fell upon Richard Shelton to command affairs in Shoreby; and, as he sat at meat, his mind was full of care, and his face heavy with consideration. It had been determined, between him and the Lord Foxham, to make one bold stroke that evening, and, by brute force, to set Joanna free. The obstacles, however, were many; and as one after another of his scouts arrived, each brought him more discomfortable news. Sir Daniel was alarmed by the skirmish of the night before. He had increased the garrison of the house in the garden; but not content with that, he had stationed horsemen in all the neighbouring lanes, so that he might have instant word of any movement. Meanwhile, in the court of his mansion, steeds stood saddled, and the riders, armed at every point, awaited but the signal to ride. The adventure of the night appeared more and more difficult of execution, till suddenly Dick's countenance lightened. "Lawless!" he cried, "you that were a shipman, can ye steal me a ship?" "Master Dick," replied Lawless, "if ye would back me, I would agree to steal York Minster." Presently after, these two set forth and descended to the harbour. It was a considerable basin, lying among sand hills, and surrounded with patches of down, ancient ruinous lumber, and tumble-down slums of the town. Many decked ships and many open boats either lay there at anchor, or had been drawn up on the beach. A long duration of bad weather had driven them from the high seas into the shelter of the port; and the great trooping of black clouds, and the cold squalls that followed one another, now with a sprinkling of dry snow, now in a mere swoop of wind, promised no improvement but rather threatened a more serious storm in the immediate future. The seamen, in view of the cold and the wind, had for the most part slunk ashore, and were now roaring and singing in the shoreside taverns. Many of the ships already rode unguarded at their anchors; and as the day wore on, and the weather offered no appearance of improvement, the number was continually being augmented. It was to these deserted ships, and, above all, to those of them that lay far out, that Lawless directed his attention; while Dick, seated upon an anchor that was half embedded in the sand, and giving ear, now to the rude, potent, and boding voices of the gale, and now to the hoarse singing of the shipmen in a neighbouring tavern, soon forgot his immediate surroundings and concerns in the agreeable recollection of Lord Foxham's promise. He was disturbed by a touch upon his shoulder. It was Lawless, pointing to a small ship that lay somewhat by itself, and within but a little of the harbour mouth, where it heaved regularly and smoothly on the entering swell. A pale gleam of winter sunshine fell, at that moment, on the vessel's deck, relieving her against a bank of scowling cloud; and in this momentary glitter Dick could see a couple of men hauling the skiff alongside. "There, sir," said Lawless, "mark ye it well! There is the ship for to-night." Presently the skiff put out from the vessel's side, and the two men, keeping her head well to the wind, pulled lustily for shore. Lawless turned to a loiterer. "How call ye her?" he asked, pointing to the little vessel. "They call her the Good Hope, of Dartmouth," replied the loiterer. "Her captain, Arblaster by name. He pulleth the bow oar in yon skiff." This was all that Lawless wanted. Hurriedly thanking the man, he moved round the shore to a certain sandy creek, for which the skiff was heading. There he took up his position, and as soon as they were within earshot, opened fire on the sailors of the Good Hope. "What! Gossip Arblaster!" he cried. "Why, ye be well met; nay, gossip, ye be right well met, upon the rood! And is that the Good Hope? Ay, I would know her among ten thousand!--a sweet shear, a sweet boat! But marry come up, my gossip, will ye drink? I have come into mine estate which doubtless ye remember to have heard on. I am now rich; I have left to sail upon the sea; I do sail now, for the most part, upon spiced ale. Come, fellow; thy hand upon 't! Come, drink with an old shipfellow!" Skipper Arblaster, a long-faced, elderly, weather-beaten man, with a knife hanging about his neck by a plaited cord, and for all the world like any modern seaman in his gait and bearing, had hung back in obvious amazement and distrust. But the name of an estate, and a certain air of tipsified simplicity and good-fellowship which Lawless very well affected, combined to conquer his suspicious jealousy; his countenance relaxed, and he at once extended his open hand and squeezed that of the outlaw in a formidable grasp. "Nay," he said, "I cannot mind you. But what o' that? I would drink with any man, gossip, and so would my man Tom. Man Tom," he added, addressing his follower, "here is my gossip, whose name I cannot mind, but no doubt a very good seaman. Let's go drink with him and his shore friend." Lawless led the way, and they were soon seated in an alehouse, which, as it was very new, and stood in an exposed and solitary station, was less crowded than those nearer to the centre of the port. It was but a shed of timber, much like a blockhouse in the backwoods of to-day, and was coarsely furnished with a press or two, a number of naked benches, and boards set upon barrels to play the part of tables. In the middle, and besieged by half a hundred violent draughts, a fire of wreck-wood blazed and vomited thick smoke. "Ay, now," said Lawless, "here is a shipman's joy--a good fire and a good stiff cup ashore, with foul weather without and an off-sea gale a-snoring in the roof! Here's to the Good Hope! May she ride easy!" "Ay," said Skipper Arblaster, "'tis good weather to be ashore in, that is sooth. Man Tom, how say ye to that? Gossip, ye speak well, though I can never think upon your name; but ye speak very well. May the Good Hope ride easy! Amen!" "Friend Dickon," resumed Lawless, addressing his commander, "ye have certain matters on hand, unless I err? Well, prithee be about them incontinently. For here I be with the choice of all good company, two tough old shipmen; and till that ye return I will go warrant these brave fellows will bide here and drink me cup for cup. We are not like shore-men, we old, tough tarry-Johns!" "It is well meant," returned the skipper. "Ye can go, boy; for I will keep your good friend and my good gossip company till curfew--ay, and by St. Mary, till the sun get up again! For, look ye, when a man hath been long enough at sea, the salt getteth me into the clay upon his bones; and let him drink a draw-well, he will never be quenched." Thus encouraged upon all hands, Dick rose, saluted his company, and going forth again into the gusty afternoon, got him as speedily as he might to the Goat and Bagpipes. Thence he sent word to my Lord Foxham that, so soon as ever the evening closed, they would have a stout boat to keep the sea in. And then leading along with him a couple of outlaws who had some experience of the sea, he returned himself to the harbour and the little sandy creek. The skiff of the Good Hope lay among many others, from which it was easily distinguished by its extreme smallness and fragility. Indeed, when Dick and his two men had taken their places, and begun to put forth out of the creek into the open harbour, the little cockle dipped into the swell and staggered under every gust of wind, like a thing upon the point of sinking. The Good Hope, as we have said, was anchored far out, where the swell was heaviest. No other vessel lay nearer than several cables' length; those that were the nearest were themselves entirely deserted; and as the skiff approached, a thick flurry of snow and a sudden darkening of the weather further concealed the movements of the outlaws from all possible espial. In a trice they had leaped upon the heaving deck, and the skiff was dancing at the stern. The Good Hope was captured. She was a good stout boat, decked in the bows and amidships, but open in the stern. She carried one mast, and was rigged between a felucca and a lugger. It would seem that Skipper Arblaster had made an excellent venture, for the hold was full of pieces of French wine; and in the little cabin, besides the Virgin Mary in the bulkhead which proved the captain's piety, there were many lockfast chests and cupboards, which showed him to be rich and careful. A dog, who was the sole occupant of the vessel, furiously barked and bit the heels of the boarders; but he was soon kicked into the cabin, and the door shut upon his just resentment. A lamp was lit and fixed in the shrouds to mark the vessel clearly from the shore; one of the wine pieces in the hold was broached, and a cup of excellent Gascony emptied to the adventure of the evening; and then, while one of the outlaws began to get ready his bow and arrows and prepare to hold the ship against all comers, the other hauled in the skiff and got overboard, where he held on, waiting for Dick. "Well, Jack, keep me a good watch," said the young commander, preparing to follow his subordinate. "Ye will do right well." "Why," returned Jack, "I shall do excellent well indeed, so long as we lie here; but once we put the nose of this poor ship outside the harbour--See, there she trembles! Nay, the poor shrew heard the words, and the heart misgave her in her oak-tree ribs. But look, Master Dick! how black the weather gathers!" The darkness ahead was, indeed, astonishing. Great billows heaved up out of the blackness, one after another; and one after another the Good Hope buoyantly climbed, and giddily plunged upon the further side. A thin sprinkle of snow and thin flakes of foam came flying, and powdered the deck; and the wind harped dismally among the rigging. "In sooth, it looketh evilly," said Dick. "But what cheer! 'Tis but a squall, and presently it will blow over." But, in spite of his words, he was depressingly affected by the bleak disorder of the sky and the wailing and fluting of the wind; and as he got over the side of the Good Hope and made once more for the landing-creek with the best speed of oars, he crossed himself devoutly, and recommended to Heaven the lives of all who should adventure on the sea. At the landing-creek there had already gathered about a dozen of the outlaws. To these the skiff was left, and they were bidden embark without delay. A little further up the beach Dick found Lord Foxham hurrying in quest of him, his face concealed with a dark hood, and his bright armour covered by a long russet mantle of a poor appearance. "Young Shelton," he said, "are ye for sea, then, truly?" "My lord," replied Richard, "they lie about the house with horsemen; it may not be reached from the land side without alarum; and Sir Daniel once advertised of our adventure, we can no more carry it to a good end than, saving your presence, we could ride upon the wind. Now, in going round by sea, we do run some peril by the elements; but, what much outweighteth all, we have a chance to make good our purpose and bear off the maid." "Well," returned Lord Foxham, "lead on. I will, in some sort, follow you for shame's sake; but I own I would I were in bed." "Here, then," said Dick. "Hither we go to fetch our pilot." And he led the way to the rude alehouse where he had given rendezvous to a portion of his men. Some of these he found lingering round the door outside; others had pushed more boldly in, and, choosing places as near as possible to where they saw their comrade, gathered close about Lawless and the two shipmen. These, to judge by the distempered countenance and cloudy eye, had long since gone beyond the boundaries of moderation; and as Richard entered, closely followed by Lord Foxham, they were all three tuning up an old, pitiful sea-ditty, to the chorus of the wailing of the gale. The young leader cast a rapid glance about the shed. The fire had just been replenished, and gave forth volumes of black smoke, so that it was difficult to see clearly in the further corners. It was plain, however, that the outlaws very largely outnumbered the remainder of the guests. Satisfied upon this point, in case of any failure in the operation of his plan, Dick strode up to the table and resumed his place upon the bench. "Hey?" cried the skipper, tipsily, "who are ye, hey?" "I want a word with you without, Master Arblaster," returned Dick; "and here is what we shall talk of." And he showed him a gold noble in the glimmer of the firelight. The shipman's eyes burned, although he still failed to recognise our hero. "Ay, boy," he said, "I am with you. Gossip, I will be back anon. Drink fair, gossip;" and, taking Dick's arm to steady his uneven steps, he walked to the door of the alehouse. As soon as he was over the threshold, ten strong arms had seized and bound him; and in two minutes more, with his limbs trussed one to another, and a good gag in his mouth, he had been tumbled neck and crop into a neighbouring hay-barn. Presently, his man Tom, similarly secured, was tossed beside him, and the pair were left to their uncouth reflections for the night. And now, as the time for concealment had gone by, Lord Foxham's followers were summoned by a preconcerted signal, and the party, boldly taking possession of as many boats as their numbers required, pulled in a flotilla for the light in the rigging of the ship. Long before the last man had climbed to the deck of the Good Hope, the sound of furious shouting from the shore showed that a part, at least, of the seamen had discovered the loss of their skiffs. But it was now too late, whether for recovery or revenge. Out of some forty fighting men now mustered in the stolen ship, eight had been to sea, and could play the part of mariners. With the aid of these, a slice of sail was got upon her. The cable was cut. Lawless, vacillating on his feet, and still shouting the chorus of sea-ballads, took the long tiller in his hands: and the Good Hope began to flit forward into the darkness of the night, and to face the great waves beyond the harbour bar. Richard took his place beside the weather rigging. Except for the ship's own lantern, and for some lights in Shoreby town, that were already fading to leeward, the whole world of air was as black as in a pit. Only from time to time, as the Good Hope swooped dizzily down into the valley of the rollers, a crest would break--a great cataract of snowy foam would leap in one instant into being--and, in an instant more, would stream into the wake and vanish. Many of the men lay holding on and praying aloud; many more were sick, and had crept into the bottom, where they sprawled among the cargo. And what with the extreme violence of the motion, and the continued drunken bravado of Lawless, still shouting and singing at the helm, the stoutest heart on board may have nourished a shrewd misgiving as to the result. But Lawless, as if guided by an instinct, steered the ship across the breakers, struck the lee of a great sandbank, where they sailed for awhile in smooth water, and presently after laid her alongside a rude, stone pier, where she was hastily made fast, and lay ducking and grinding in the dark. CHAPTER V--THE GOOD HOPE (continued) The pier was not far distant from the house in which Joanna lay; it now only remained to get the men on shore, to surround the house with a strong party, burst in the door and carry off the captive. They might then regard themselves as done with the Good Hope; it had placed them on the rear of their enemies; and the retreat, whether they should succeed or fail in the main enterprise, would be directed with a greater measure of hope in the direction of the forest and my Lord Foxham's reserve. To get the men on shore, however, was no easy task; many had been sick, all were pierced with cold; the promiscuity and disorder on board had shaken their discipline; the movement of the ship and the darkness of the night had cowed their spirits. They made a rush upon the pier; my lord, with his sword drawn on his own retainers, must throw himself in front; and this impulse of rabblement was not restrained without a certain clamour of voices, highly to be regretted in the case. When some degree of order had been restored, Dick, with a few chosen men, set forth in advance. The darkness on shore, by contrast with the flashing of the surf, appeared before him like a solid body; and the howling and whistling of the gale drowned any lesser noise. He had scarce reached the end of the pier, however, when there fell a lull of the wind; and in this he seemed to hear on shore the hollow footing of horses and the clash of arms. Checking his immediate followers, he passed forward a step or two alone, even setting foot upon the down; and here he made sure he could detect the shape of men and horses moving. A strong discouragement assailed him. If their enemies were really on the watch, if they had beleaguered the shoreward end of the pier, he and Lord Foxham were taken in a posture of very poor defence, the sea behind, the men jostled in the dark upon a narrow causeway. He gave a cautious whistle, the signal previously agreed upon. It proved to be a signal far more than he desired. Instantly there fell, through the black night, a shower of arrows sent at a venture; and so close were the men huddled on the pier that more than one was hit, and the arrows were answered with cries of both fear and pain. In this first discharge, Lord Foxham was struck down; Hawksley had him carried on board again at once; and his men, during the brief remainder of the skirmish, fought (when they fought at all) without guidance. That was perhaps the chief cause of the disaster which made haste to follow. At the shore end of the pier, for perhaps a minute, Dick held his own with a handful; one or two were wounded upon either side; steel crossed steel; nor had there been the least signal of advantage, when in the twinkling of an eye the tide turned against the party from the ship. Someone cried out that all was lost; the men were in the very humour to lend an ear to a discomfortable counsel; the cry was taken up. "On board, lads, for your lives!" cried another. A third, with the true instinct of the coward, raised that inevitable report on all retreats: "We are betrayed!" And in a moment the whole mass of men went surging and jostling backward down the pier, turning their defenceless backs on their pursuers and piercing the night with craven outcry. One coward thrust off the ship's stern, while another still held her by the bows. The fugitives leaped, screaming, and were hauled on board, or fell back and perished in the sea. Some were cut down upon the pier by the pursuers. Many were injured on the ship's deck in the blind haste and terror of the moment, one man leaping upon another, and a third on both. At last, and whether by design or accident, the bows of the Good Hope were liberated; and the ever-ready Lawless, who had maintained his place at the helm through all the hurly-burly by sheer strength of body and a liberal use of the cold steel, instantly clapped her on the proper tack. The ship began to move once more forward on the stormy sea, its scuppers running blood, its deck heaped with fallen men, sprawling and struggling in the dark. Thereupon, Lawless sheathed his dagger, and turning to his next neighbour, "I have left my mark on them, gossip," said he, "the yelping, coward hounds." Now, while they were all leaping and struggling for their lives, the men had not appeared to observe the rough shoves and cutting stabs with which Lawless had held his post in the confusion. But perhaps they had already begun to understand somewhat more clearly, or perhaps another ear had overheard, the helmsman's speech. Panic-stricken troops recover slowly, and men who have just disgraced themselves by cowardice, as if to wipe out the memory of their fault, will sometimes run straight into the opposite extreme of insubordination. So it was now; and the same men who had thrown away their weapons and been hauled, feet foremost, into the Good Hope, began to cry out upon their leaders, and demand that someone should be punished. This growing ill-feeling turned upon Lawless. In order to get a proper offing, the old outlaw had put the head of the Good Hope to seaward. "What!" bawled one of the grumblers, "he carrieth us to seaward!" "'Tis sooth," cried another. "Nay, we are betrayed for sure." And they all began to cry out in chorus that they were betrayed, and in shrill tones and with abominable oaths bade Lawless go about-ship and bring them speedily ashore. Lawless, grinding his teeth, continued in silence to steer the true course, guiding the Good Hope among the formidable billows. To their empty terrors, as to their dishonourable threats, between drink and dignity he scorned to make reply. The malcontents drew together a little abaft the mast, and it was plain they were like barnyard cocks, "crowing for courage." Presently they would be fit for any extremity of injustice or ingratitude. Dick began to mount by the ladder, eager to interpose; but one of the outlaws, who was also something of a seaman, got beforehand. "Lads," he began, "y' are right wooden heads, I think. For to get back, by the mass, we must have an offing, must we not? And this old Lawless--" Someone struck the speaker on the mouth, and the next moment, as a fire springs among dry straw, he was felled upon the deck, trampled under the feet, and despatched by the daggers of his cowardly companions. At this the wrath of Lawless rose and broke. "Steer yourselves," he bellowed, with a curse; and, careless of the result, he left the helm. The Good Hope was, at that moment, trembling on the summit of a swell. She subsided, with sickening velocity, upon the farther side. A wave, like a great black bulwark, hove immediately in front of her; and, with a staggering blow, she plunged headforemost through that liquid hill. The green water passed right over her from stem to stern, as high as a man's knees; the sprays ran higher than the mast; and she rose again upon the other side, with an appalling, tremulous indecision, like a beast that has been deadly wounded. Six or seven of the malcontents had been carried bodily overboard; and as for the remainder, when they found their tongues again, it was to bellow to the saints and wail upon Lawless to come back and take the tiller. Nor did Lawless wait to be twice bidden. The terrible result of his fling of just resentment sobered him completely. He knew, better than any one on board, how nearly the Good Hope had gone bodily down below their feet; and he could tell, by the laziness with which she met the sea, that the peril was by no means over. Dick, who had been thrown down by the concussion and half drowned, rose wading to his knees in the swamped well of the stern, and crept to the old helmsman's side. "Lawless," he said, "we do all depend on you; y' are a brave, steady man, indeed, and crafty in the management of ships; I shall put three sure men to watch upon your safety." "Bootless, my master, bootless," said the steersman, peering forward through the dark. "We come every moment somewhat clearer of these sandbanks; with every moment, then, the sea packeth upon us heavier, and for all these whimperers, they will presently be on their backs. For, my master, 'tis a right mystery, but true, there never yet was a bad man that was a good shipman. None but the honest and the bold can endure me this tossing of a ship." "Nay, Lawless," said Dick, laughing, "that is a right shipman's byword, and hath no more of sense than the whistle of the wind. But, prithee, how go we? Do we lie well? Are we in good case?" "Master Shelton," replied Lawless, "I have been a Grey Friar--I praise fortune--an archer, a thief, and a shipman. Of all these coats, I had the best fancy to die in the Grey Friar's, as ye may readily conceive, and the least fancy to die in John Shipman's tarry jacket; and that for two excellent good reasons: first, that the death might take a man suddenly; and second, for the horror of that great, salt smother and welter under my foot here"--and Lawless stamped with his foot. "Howbeit," he went on, "an I die not a sailor's death, and that this night, I shall owe a tall candle to our Lady." "Is it so?" asked Dick. "It is right so," replied the outlaw. "Do ye not feel how heavy and dull she moves upon the waves? Do ye not hear the water washing in her hold? She will scarce mind the rudder even now. Bide till she has settled a bit lower; and she will either go down below your boots like a stone image, or drive ashore here, under our lee, and come all to pieces like a twist of string." "Ye speak with a good courage," returned Dick. "Ye are not then appalled?" "Why, master," answered Lawless, "if ever a man had an ill crew to come to port with, it is I--a renegade friar, a thief, and all the rest on't. Well, ye may wonder, but I keep a good hope in my wallet; and if that I be to drown, I will drown with a bright eye, Master Shelton, and a steady hand." Dick returned no answer; but he was surprised to find the old vagabond of so resolute a temper, and fearing some fresh violence or treachery, set forth upon his quest for three sure men. The great bulk of the men had now deserted the deck, which was continually wetted with the flying sprays, and where they lay exposed to the shrewdness of the winter wind. They had gathered, instead, into the hold of the merchandise, among the butts of wine, and lighted by two swinging lanterns. Here a few kept up the form of revelry, and toasted each other deep in Arblaster's Gascony wine. But as the Good Hope continued to tear through the smoking waves, and toss her stem and stern alternately high in air and deep into white foam, the number of these jolly companions diminished with every moment and with every lurch. Many sat apart, tending their hurts, but the majority were already prostrated with sickness, and lay moaning in the bilge. Greensheve, Cuckow, and a young fellow of Lord Foxham's whom Dick had already remarked for his intelligence and spirit, were still, however, both fit to understand and willing to obey. These Dick set, as a body-guard, about the person of the steersman, and then, with a last look at the black sky and sea, he turned and went below into the cabin, whither Lord Foxham had been carried by his servants. CHAPTER VI--THE GOOD HOPE (concluded) The moans of the wounded baron blended with the wailing of the ship's dog. The poor animal, whether he was merely sick at heart to be separated from his friends, or whether he indeed recognised some peril in the labouring of the ship, raised his cries, like minute-guns, above the roar of wave and weather; and the more superstitious of the men heard, in these sounds, the knell of the Good Hope. Lord Foxham had been laid in a berth upon a fur cloak. A little lamp burned dim before the Virgin in the bulkhead, and by its glimmer Dick could see the pale countenance and hollow eyes of the hurt man. "I am sore hurt," said he. "Come near to my side, young Shelton; let there be one by me who, at least, is gentle born; for after having lived nobly and richly all the days of my life, this is a sad pass that I should get my hurt in a little ferreting skirmish, and die here, in a foul, cold ship upon the sea, among broken men and churls." "Nay, my lord," said Dick, "I pray rather to the saints that ye will recover you of your hurt, and come soon and sound ashore." "How!" demanded his lordship. "Come sound ashore? There is, then, a question of it?" "The ship laboureth--the sea is grievous and contrary," replied the lad; "and by what I can learn of my fellow that steereth us, we shall do well, indeed, if we come dryshod to land." "Ha!" said the baron, gloomily, "thus shall every terror attend upon the passage of my soul! Sir, pray rather to live hard, that ye may die easy, than to be fooled and fluted all through life, as to the pipe and tabor, and, in the last hour, be plunged among misfortunes! Howbeit, I have that upon my mind that must not be delayed. We have no priest aboard?" "None," replied Dick. "Here, then, to my secular interests," resumed Lord Foxham: "ye must be as good a friend to me dead, as I found you a gallant enemy when I was living. I fall in an evil hour for me, for England, and for them that trusted me. My men are being brought by Hamley--he that was your rival; they will rendezvous in the long holm at Holywood; this ring from off my finger will accredit you to represent mine orders; and I shall write, besides, two words upon this paper, bidding Hamley yield to you the damsel. Will he obey? I know not." "But, my lord, what orders?" inquired Dick. "Ay," quoth the baron, "ay--the orders;" and he looked upon Dick with hesitation. "Are ye Lancaster or York?" he asked, at length. "I shame to say it," answered Dick, "I can scarce clearly answer. But so much I think is certain: since I serve with Ellis Duckworth, I serve the house of York. Well, if that be so, I declare for York." "It is well," returned the other; "it is exceeding well. For, truly, had ye said Lancaster, I wot not for the world what I had done. But sith ye are for York, follow me. I came hither but to watch these lords at Shoreby, while mine excellent young lord, Richard of Gloucester, {1} prepareth a sufficient force to fall upon and scatter them. I have made me notes of their strength, what watch they keep, and how they lie; and these I was to deliver to my young lord on Sunday, an hour before noon, at St. Bride's Cross beside the forest. This tryst I am not like to keep, but I pray you, of courtesy, to keep it in my stead; and see that not pleasure, nor pain, tempest, wound, nor pestilence withhold you from the hour and place, for the welfare of England lieth upon this cast." "I do soberly take this up on me," said Dick. "In so far as in me lieth, your purpose shall be done." "It is good," said the wounded man. "My lord duke shall order you farther, and if ye obey him with spirit and good will, then is your fortune made. Give me the lamp a little nearer to mine eyes, till that I write these words for you." He wrote a note "to his worshipful kinsman, Sir John Hamley;" and then a second, which he-left without external superscripture. "This is for the duke," he said. "The word is 'England and Edward,' and the counter, 'England and York.'" "And Joanna, my lord?" asked Dick. "Nay, ye must get Joanna how ye can," replied the baron. "I have named you for my choice in both these letters; but ye must get her for yourself, boy. I have tried, as ye see here before you, and have lost my life. More could no man do." By this time the wounded man began to be very weary; and Dick, putting the precious papers in his bosom, bade him be of good cheer, and left him to repose. The day was beginning to break, cold and blue, with flying squalls of snow. Close under the lee of the Good Hope, the coast lay in alternate rocky headlands and sandy bays; and further inland the wooded hill-tops of Tunstall showed along the sky. Both the wind and the sea had gone down; but the vessel wallowed deep, and scarce rose upon the waves. Lawless was still fixed at the rudder; and by this time nearly all the men had crawled on deck, and were now gazing, with blank faces, upon the inhospitable coast. "Are we going ashore?" asked Dick. "Ay," said Lawless, "unless we get first to the bottom." And just then the ship rose so languidly to meet a sea, and the water weltered so loudly in her hold, that Dick involuntarily seized the steersman by the arm. "By the mass!" cried Dick, as the bows of the Good Hope reappeared above the foam, "I thought we had foundered, indeed; my heart was at my throat." In the waist, Greensheve, Hawksley, and the better men of both companies were busy breaking up the deck to build a raft; and to these Dick joined himself, working the harder to drown the memory of his predicament. But, even as he worked, every sea that struck the poor ship, and every one of her dull lurches, as she tumbled wallowing among the waves, recalled him with a horrid pang to the immediate proximity of death. Presently, looking up from his work, he saw that they were close in below a promontory; a piece of ruinous cliff, against the base of which the sea broke white and heavy, almost overplumbed the deck; and, above that, again, a house appeared, crowning a down. Inside the bay the seas ran gayly, raised the Good Hope upon their foam-flecked shoulders, carried her beyond the control of the steersman, and in a moment dropped her, with a great concussion, on the sand, and began to break over her half-mast high, and roll her to and fro. Another great wave followed, raised her again, and carried her yet farther in; and then a third succeeded, and left her far inshore of the more dangerous breakers, wedged upon a bank. "Now, boys," cried Lawless, "the saints have had a care of us, indeed. The tide ebbs; let us but sit down and drink a cup of wine, and before half an hour ye may all march me ashore as safe as on a bridge." A barrel was broached, and, sitting in what shelter they could find from the flying snow and spray, the shipwrecked company handed the cup around, and sought to warm their bodies and restore their spirits. Dick, meanwhile, returned to Lord Foxham, who lay in great perplexity and fear, the floor of his cabin washing knee-deep in water, and the lamp, which had been his only light, broken and extinguished by the violence of the blow. "My lord," said young Shelton, "fear not at all; the saints are plainly for us; the seas have cast us high upon a shoal, and as soon as the tide hath somewhat ebbed, we may walk ashore upon our feet." It was nearly an hour before the vessel was sufficiently deserted by the ebbing sea; and they could set forth for the land, which appeared dimly before them through a veil of driving snow. Upon a hillock on one side of their way a party of men lay huddled together, suspiciously observing the movements of the new arrivals. "They might draw near and offer us some comfort," Dick remarked. "Well, an' they come not to us, let us even turn aside to them," said Hawksley. "The sooner we come to a good fire and a dry bed the better for my poor lord." But they had not moved far in the direction of the hillock, before the men, with one consent, rose suddenly to their feet, and poured a flight of well-directed arrows on the shipwrecked company. "Back! back!" cried his lordship. "Beware, in Heaven's name, that ye reply not." "Nay," cried Greensheve, pulling an arrow from his leather jack. "We are in no posture to fight, it is certain, being drenching wet, dog-weary, and three-parts frozen; but, for the love of old England, what aileth them to shoot thus cruelly on their poor country people in distress?" "They take us to be French pirates," answered Lord Foxham. "In these most troublesome and degenerate days we cannot keep our own shores of England; but our old enemies, whom we once chased on sea and land, do now range at pleasure, robbing and slaughtering and burning. It is the pity and reproach of this poor land." The men upon the hillock lay, closely observing them, while they trailed upward from the beach and wound inland among desolate sand-hills; for a mile or so they even hung upon the rear of the march, ready, at a sign, to pour another volley on the weary and dispirited fugitives; and it was only when, striking at length upon a firm high-road, Dick began to call his men to some more martial order, that these jealous guardians of the coast of England silently disappeared among the snow. They had done what they desired; they had protected their own homes and farms, their own families and cattle; and their private interest being thus secured, it mattered not the weight of a straw to any one of them, although the Frenchmen should carry blood and fire to every other parish in the realm of England. BOOK IV--THE DISGUISE CHAPTER I--THE DEN The place where Dick had struck the line of a high-road was not far from Holywood, and within nine or ten miles of Shoreby-on-the-Till; and here, after making sure that they were pursued no longer, the two bodies separated. Lord Foxham's followers departed, carrying their wounded master towards the comfort and security of the great abbey; and Dick, as he saw them wind away and disappear in the thick curtain of the falling snow, was left alone with near upon a dozen outlaws, the last remainder of his troop of volunteers. Some were wounded; one and all were furious at their ill-success and long exposure; and though they were now too cold and hungry to do more, they grumbled and cast sullen looks upon their leaders. Dick emptied his purse among them, leaving himself nothing; thanked them for the courage they had displayed, though he could have found it more readily in his heart to rate them for poltroonery; and having thus somewhat softened the effect of his prolonged misfortune, despatched them to find their way, either severally or in pairs, to Shoreby and the Goat and Bagpipes. For his own part, influenced by what he had seen on board of the Good Hope, he chose Lawless to be his companion on the walk. The snow was falling, without pause or variation, in one even, blinding cloud; the wind had been strangled, and now blew no longer; and the whole world was blotted out and sheeted down below that silent inundation. There was great danger of wandering by the way and perishing in drifts; and Lawless, keeping half a step in front of his companion, and holding his head forward like a hunting dog upon the scent, inquired his way of every tree, and studied out their path as though he were conning a ship among dangers. About a mile into the forest they came to a place where several ways met, under a grove of lofty and contorted oaks. Even in the narrow horizon of the falling snow, it was a spot that could not fail to be recognised; and Lawless evidently recognised it with particular delight. "Now, Master Richard," said he, "an y' are not too proud to be the guest of a man who is neither a gentleman by birth nor so much as a good Christian, I can offer you a cup of wine and a good fire to melt the marrow in your frozen bones." "Lead on, Will," answered Dick. "A cup of wine and a good fire! Nay, I would go a far way round to see them." Lawless turned aside under the bare branches of the grove, and, walking resolutely forward for some time, came to a steepish hollow or den, that had now drifted a quarter full of snow. On the verge, a great beech-tree hung, precariously rooted; and here the old outlaw, pulling aside some bushy underwood, bodily disappeared into the earth. The beech had, in some violent gale, been half-uprooted, and had torn up a considerable stretch of turf and it was under this that old Lawless had dug out his forest hiding-place. The roots served him for rafters, the turf was his thatch; for walls and floor he had his mother the earth. Rude as it was, the hearth in one corner, blackened by fire, and the presence in another of a large oaken chest well fortified with iron, showed it at one glance to be the den of a man, and not the burrow of a digging beast. Though the snow had drifted at the mouth and sifted in upon the floor of this earth cavern, yet was the air much warmer than without; and when Lawless had struck a spark, and the dry furze bushes had begun to blaze and crackle on the hearth, the place assumed, even to the eye, an air of comfort and of home. With a sigh of great contentment, Lawless spread his broad hands before the fire, and seemed to breathe the smoke. "Here, then," he said, "is this old Lawless's rabbit-hole; pray Heaven there come no terrier! Far I have rolled hither and thither, and here and about, since that I was fourteen years of mine age and first ran away from mine abbey, with the sacrist's gold chain and a mass-book that I sold for four marks. I have been in England and France and Burgundy, and in Spain, too, on a pilgrimage for my poor soul; and upon the sea, which is no man's country. But here is my place, Master Shelton. This is my native land, this burrow in the earth! Come rain or wind--and whether it's April, and the birds all sing, and the blossoms fall about my bed--or whether it's winter, and I sit alone with my good gossip the fire, and robin red breast twitters in the woods--here, is my church and market, and my wife and child. It's here I come back to, and it's here, so please the saints, that I would like to die." "'Tis a warm corner, to be sure," replied Dick, "and a pleasant, and a well hid." "It had need to be," returned Lawless, "for an they found it, Master Shelton, it would break my heart. But here," he added, burrowing with his stout fingers in the sandy floor, "here is my wine cellar; and ye shall have a flask of excellent strong stingo." Sure enough, after but a little digging, he produced a big leathern bottle of about a gallon, nearly three-parts full of a very heady and sweet wine; and when they had drunk to each other comradely, and the fire had been replenished and blazed up again, the pair lay at full length, thawing and steaming, and divinely warm. "Master Shelton," observed the outlaw, "y' 'ave had two mischances this last while, and y' are like to lose the maid--do I take it aright?" "Aright!" returned Dick, nodding his head. "Well, now," continued Lawless, "hear an old fool that hath been nigh-hand everything, and seen nigh-hand all! Ye go too much on other people's errands, Master Dick. Ye go on Ellis's; but he desireth rather the death of Sir Daniel. Ye go on Lord Foxham's; well--the saints preserve him!--doubtless he meaneth well. But go ye upon your own, good Dick. Come right to the maid's side. Court her, lest that she forget you. Be ready; and when the chance shall come, off with her at the saddle-bow." "Ay, but, Lawless, beyond doubt she is now in Sir Daniel's own mansion." answered Dick. "Thither, then, go we," replied the outlaw. Dick stared at him. "Nay, I mean it," nodded Lawless. "And if y' are of so little faith, and stumble at a word, see here!" And the outlaw, taking a key from about his neck, opened the oak chest, and dipping and groping deep among its contents, produced first a friar's robe, and next a girdle of rope; and then a huge rosary of wood, heavy enough to be counted as a weapon. "Here," he said, "is for you. On with them!" And then, when Dick had clothed himself in this clerical disguise, Lawless produced some colours and a pencil, and proceeded, with the greatest cunning, to disguise his face. The eyebrows he thickened and produced; to the moustache, which was yet hardly visible, he rendered a like service; while, by a few lines around the eye, he changed the expression and increased the apparent age of this young monk. "Now," he resumed, "when I have done the like, we shall make as bonny a pair of friars as the eye could wish. Boldly to Sir Daniel's we shall go, and there be hospitably welcome for the love of Mother Church." "And how, dear Lawless," cried the lad, "shall I repay you?" "Tut, brother," replied the outlaw, "I do naught but for my pleasure. Mind not for me. I am one, by the mass, that mindeth for himself. When that I lack, I have a long tongue and a voice like the monastery bell--I do ask, my son; and where asking faileth, I do most usually take." The old rogue made a humorous grimace; and although Dick was displeased to lie under so great favours to so equivocal a personage, he was yet unable to restrain his mirth. With that, Lawless returned to the big chest, and was soon similarly disguised; but, below his gown, Dick wondered to observe him conceal a sheaf of black arrows. "Wherefore do ye that?" asked the lad. "Wherefore arrows, when ye take no bow?" "Nay," replied Lawless, lightly, "'tis like there will be heads broke--not to say backs--ere you and I win sound from where we're going to; and if any fall, I would our fellowship should come by the credit on't. A black arrow, Master Dick, is the seal of our abbey; it showeth you who writ the bill." "An ye prepare so carefully," said Dick, "I have here some papers that, for mine own sake, and the interest of those that trusted me, were better left behind than found upon my body. Where shall I conceal them, Will?" "Nay," replied Lawless, "I will go forth into the wood and whistle me three verses of a song; meanwhile, do you bury them where ye please, and smooth the sand upon the place." "Never!" cried Richard. "I trust you, man. I were base indeed if I not trusted you." "Brother, y' are but a child," replied the old outlaw, pausing and turning his face upon Dick from the threshold of the den. "I am a kind old Christian, and no traitor to men's blood, and no sparer of mine own in a friend's jeopardy. But, fool, child, I am a thief by trade and birth and habit. If my bottle were empty and my mouth dry, I would rob you, dear child, as sure as I love, honour, and admire your parts and person! Can it be clearer spoken? No." And he stumped forth through the bushes with a snap of his big fingers. Dick, thus left alone, after a wondering thought upon the inconsistencies of his companion's character, hastily produced, reviewed, and buried his papers. One only he reserved to carry along with him, since it in nowise compromised his friends, and yet might serve him, in a pinch, against Sir Daniel. That was the knight's own letter to Lord Wensleydale, sent by Throgmorton, on the morrow of the defeat at Risingham, and found next day by Dick upon the body of the messenger. Then, treading down the embers of the fire, Dick left the den, and rejoined the old outlaw, who stood awaiting him under the leafless oaks, and was already beginning to be powdered by the falling snow. Each looked upon the other, and each laughed, so thorough and so droll was the disguise. "Yet I would it were but summer and a clear day," grumbled the outlaw, "that I might see myself in the mirror of a pool. There be many of Sir Daniel's men that know me; and if we fell to be recognised, there might be two words for you, brother, but as for me, in a paternoster while, I should be kicking in a rope's-end." Thus they set forth together along the road to Shoreby, which, in this part of its course, kept near along the margin or the forest, coming forth, from time to time, in the open country, and passing beside poor folks' houses and small farms. Presently at sight of one of these, Lawless pulled up. "Brother Martin," he said, in a voice capitally disguised, and suited to his monkish robe, "let us enter and seek alms from these poor sinners. _Pax vobiscum_! Ay," he added, in his own voice, "'tis as I feared; I have somewhat lost the whine of it; and by your leave, good Master Shelton, ye must suffer me to practise in these country places, before that I risk my fat neck by entering Sir Daniel's. But look ye a little, what an excellent thing it is to be a Jack-of-all-trades! An I had not been a shipman, ye had infallibly gone down in the Good Hope; an I had not been a thief, I could not have painted me your face; and but that I had been a Grey Friar, and sung loud in the choir, and ate hearty at the board, I could not have carried this disguise, but the very dogs would have spied us out and barked at us for shams." He was by this time close to the window of the farm, and he rose on his tip-toes and peeped in. "Nay," he cried, "better and better. We shall here try our false faces with a vengeance, and have a merry jest on Brother Capper to boot." And so saying, he opened the door and led the way into the house. Three of their own company sat at the table, greedily eating. Their daggers, stuck beside them in the board, and the black and menacing looks which they continued to shower upon the people of the house, proved that they owed their entertainment rather to force than favour. On the two monks, who now, with a sort of humble dignity, entered the kitchen of the farm, they seemed to turn with a particular resentment; and one--it was John Capper in person--who seemed to play the leading part, instantly and rudely ordered them away. "We want no beggars here!" he cried. But another--although he was as far from recognising Dick and Lawless--inclined to more moderate counsels. "Not so," he cried. "We be strong men, and take; these be weak, and crave; but in the latter end these shall be uppermost and we below. Mind him not, my father; but come, drink of my cup, and give me a benediction." "Y' are men of a light mind, carnal, and accursed," said the monk. "Now, may the saints forbid that ever I should drink with such companions! But here, for the pity I bear to sinners, here I do leave you a blessed relic, the which, for your soul's interest, I bid you kiss and cherish." So far Lawless thundered upon them like a preaching friar; but with these words he drew from under his robe a black arrow, tossed it on the board in front of the three startled outlaws, turned in the same instant, and, taking Dick along with him, was out of the room and out of sight among the falling snow before they had time to utter a word or move a finger. "So," he said, "we have proved our false faces, Master Shelton. I will now adventure my poor carcase where ye please." "Good!" returned Richard. "It irks me to be doing. Set we on for Shoreby!" CHAPTER II--"IN MINE ENEMIES' HOUSE" Sir Daniel's residence in Shoreby was a tall, commodious, plastered mansion, framed in carven oak, and covered by a low-pitched roof of thatch. To the back there stretched a garden, full of fruit-trees, alleys, and thick arbours, and overlooked from the far end by the tower of the abbey church. The house might contain, upon a pinch, the retinue of a greater person than Sir Daniel; but even now it was filled with hubbub. The court rang with arms and horseshoe-iron; the kitchens roared with cookery like a bees'-hive; minstrels, and the players of instruments, and the cries of tumblers, sounded from the hall. Sir Daniel, in his profusion, in the gaiety and gallantry of his establishment, rivalled with Lord Shoreby, and eclipsed Lord Risingham. All guests were made welcome. Minstrels, tumblers, players of chess, the sellers of relics, medicines, perfumes, and enchantments, and along with these every sort of priest, friar, or pilgrim, were made welcome to the lower table, and slept together in the ample lofts, or on the bare boards of the long dining-hall. On the afternoon following the wreck of the Good Hope, the buttery, the kitchens, the stables, the covered cartshed that surrounded two sides of the court, were all crowded by idle people, partly belonging to Sir Daniel's establishment, and attired in his livery of murrey and blue, partly nondescript strangers attracted to the town by greed, and received by the knight through policy, and because it was the fashion of the time. The snow, which still fell without interruption, the extreme chill of the air, and the approach of night, combined to keep them under shelter. Wine, ale, and money were all plentiful; many sprawled gambling in the straw of the barn, many were still drunken from the noontide meal. To the eye of a modern it would have looked like the sack of a city; to the eye of a contemporary it was like any other rich and noble household at a festive season. Two monks--a young and an old--had arrived late, and were now warming themselves at a bonfire in a corner of the shed. A mixed crowd surrounded them--jugglers, mountebanks, and soldiers; and with these the elder of the two had soon engaged so brisk a conversation, and exchanged so many loud guffaws and country witticisms, that the group momentarily increased in number. The younger companion, in whom the reader has already recognised Dick Shelton, sat from the first somewhat backward, and gradually drew himself away. He listened, indeed, closely, but he opened not his mouth; and by the grave expression of his countenance, he made but little account of his companion's pleasantries. At last his eye, which travelled continually to and fro, and kept a guard upon all the entrances of the house, lit upon a little procession entering by the main gate and crossing the court in an oblique direction. Two ladies, muffled in thick furs, led the way, and were followed by a pair of waiting-women and four stout men-at-arms. The next moment they had disappeared within the house; and Dick, slipping through the crowd of loiterers in the shed, was already giving hot pursuit. "The taller of these twain was Lady Brackley," he thought; "and where Lady Brackley is, Joan will not be far." At the door of the house the four men-at-arms had ceased to follow, and the ladies were now mounting the stairway of polished oak, under no better escort than that of the two waiting-women. Dick followed close behind. It was already the dusk of the day; and in the house the darkness of the night had almost come. On the stair-landings, torches flared in iron holders; down the long, tapestried corridors, a lamp burned by every door. And where the door stood open, Dick could look in upon arras-covered walls and rush-bescattered floors, glowing in the light of the wood fires. Two floors were passed, and at every landing the younger and shorter of the two ladies had looked back keenly at the monk. He, keeping his eyes lowered, and affecting the demure manners that suited his disguise, had but seen her once, and was unaware that he had attracted her attention. And now, on the third floor, the party separated, the younger lady continuing to ascend alone, the other, followed by the waiting-maids, descending the corridor to the right. Dick mounted with a swift foot, and holding to the corner, thrust forth his head and followed the three women with his eyes. Without turning or looking behind them, they continued to descend the corridor. "It is right well," thought Dick. "Let me but know my Lady Brackley's chamber, and it will go hard an I find not Dame Hatch upon an errand." And just then a hand was laid upon his shoulder, and, with a bound and a choked cry, he turned to grapple his assailant. He was somewhat abashed to find, in the person whom he had so roughly seized, the short young lady in the furs. She, on her part, was shocked and terrified beyond expression, and hung trembling in his grasp. "Madam," said Dick, releasing her, "I cry you a thousand pardons; but I have no eyes behind, and, by the mass, I could not tell ye were a maid." The girl continued to look at him, but, by this time, terror began to be succeeded by surprise, and surprise by suspicion. Dick, who could read these changes on her face, became alarmed for his own safety in that hostile house. "Fair maid," he said, affecting easiness, "suffer me to kiss your hand, in token ye forgive my roughness, and I will even go." "Y' are a strange monk, young sir," returned the young lady, looking him both boldly and shrewdly in the face; "and now that my first astonishment hath somewhat passed away, I can spy the layman in each word you utter. What do ye here? Why are ye thus sacrilegiously tricked out? Come ye in peace or war? And why spy ye after Lady Brackley like a thief?" "Madam," quoth Dick, "of one thing I pray you to be very sure: I am no thief. And even if I come here in war, as in some degree I do, I make no war upon fair maids, and I hereby entreat them to copy me so far, and to leave me be. For, indeed, fair mistress, cry out--if such be your pleasure--cry but once, and say what ye have seen, and the poor gentleman before you is merely a dead man. I cannot think ye would be cruel," added Dick; and taking the girl's hand gently in both of his, he looked at her with courteous admiration. "Are ye, then, a spy--a Yorkist?" asked the maid. "Madam," he replied, "I am indeed a Yorkist, and, in some sort, a spy. But that which bringeth me into this house, the same which will win for me the pity and interest of your kind heart, is neither of York nor Lancaster. I will wholly put my life in your discretion. I am a lover, and my name--" But here the young lady clapped her hand suddenly upon Dick's mouth, looked hastily up and down and east and west, and, seeing the coast clear, began to drag the young man, with great strength and vehemence, up-stairs. "Hush!" she said, "and come! Shalt talk hereafter." Somewhat bewildered, Dick suffered himself to be pulled up-stairs, bustled along a corridor, and thrust suddenly into a chamber, lit, like so many of the others, by a blazing log upon the hearth. "Now," said the young lady, forcing him down upon a stool, "sit ye there and attend my sovereign good pleasure. I have life and death over you, and I will not scruple to abuse my power. Look to yourself; y' 'ave cruelly mauled my arm. He knew not I was a maid, quoth he! Had he known I was a maid, he had ta'en his belt to me, forsooth!" And with these words, she whipped out of the room and left Dick gaping with wonder, and not very sure if he were dreaming or awake. "Ta'en my belt to her!" he repeated. "Ta'en my belt to her!" And the recollection of that evening in the forest flowed back upon his mind, and he once more saw Matcham's wincing body and beseeching eyes. And then he was recalled to the dangers of the present. In the next room he heard a stir, as of a person moving; then followed a sigh, which sounded strangely near; and then the rustle of skirts and tap of feet once more began. As he stood hearkening, he saw the arras wave along the wall; there was the sound of a door being opened, the hangings divided, and, lamp in hand, Joanna Sedley entered the apartment. She was attired in costly stuffs of deep and warm colours, such as befit the winter and the snow. Upon her head, her hair had been gathered together and became her as a crown. And she, who had seemed so little and so awkward in the attire of Matcham, was now tall like a young willow, and swam across the floor as though she scorned the drudgery of walking. Without a start, without a tremor, she raised her lamp and looked at the young monk. "What make ye here, good brother?" she inquired. "Ye are doubtless ill-directed. Whom do ye require? And she set her lamp upon the bracket. "Joanna," said Dick; and then his voice failed him. "Joanna," he began again, "ye said ye loved me; and the more fool I, but I believed it!" "Dick!" she cried. "Dick!" And then, to the wonder of the lad, this beautiful and tall young lady made but one step of it, and threw her arms about his neck and gave him a hundred kisses all in one. "Oh, the fool fellow!" she cried. "Oh, dear Dick! Oh, if ye could see yourself! Alack!" she added, pausing. "I have spoilt you, Dick! I have knocked some of the paint off. But that can be mended. What cannot be mended, Dick--or I much fear it cannot!--is my marriage with Lord Shoreby." "Is it decided, then?" asked the lad. "To-morrow, before noon, Dick, in the abbey church," she answered, "John Matcham and Joanna Sedley both shall come to a right miserable end. There is no help in tears, or I could weep mine eyes out. I have not spared myself to pray, but Heaven frowns on my petition. And, dear Dick--good Dick--but that ye can get me forth of this house before the morning, we must even kiss and say good-bye." "Nay," said Dick, "not I; I will never say that word. 'Tis like despair; but while there's life, Joanna, there is hope. Yet will I hope. Ay, by the mass, and triumph! Look ye, now, when ye were but a name to me, did I not follow--did I not rouse good men--did I not stake my life upon the quarrel? And now that I have seen you for what ye are--the fairest maid and stateliest of England--think ye I would turn?--if the deep sea were there, I would straight through it; if the way were full of lions, I would scatter them like mice." "Ay," she said, dryly, "ye make a great ado about a sky-blue robe!" "Nay, Joan," protested Dick, "'tis not alone the robe. But, lass, ye were disguised. Here am I disguised; and, to the proof, do I not cut a figure of fun--a right fool's figure?" "Ay, Dick, an' that ye do!" she answered, smiling. "Well, then!" he returned, triumphant. "So was it with you, poor Matcham, in the forest. In sooth, ye were a wench to laugh at. But now!" So they ran on, holding each other by both hands, exchanging smiles and lovely looks, and melting minutes into seconds; and so they might have continued all night long. But presently there was a noise behind them; and they were aware of the short young lady, with her finger on her lips. "Saints!" she cried, "but what a noise ye keep! Can ye not speak in compass? And now, Joanna, my fair maid of the woods, what will ye give your gossip for bringing you your sweetheart?" Joanna ran to her, by way of answer, and embraced her fierily. "And you, sir," added the young lady, "what do ye give me?" "Madam," said Dick, "I would fain offer to pay you in the same money." "Come, then," said the lady, "it is permitted you." But Dick, blushing like a peony, only kissed her hand. "What ails ye at my face, fair sir?" she inquired, curtseying to the very ground; and then, when Dick had at length and most tepidly embraced her, "Joanna," she added, "your sweetheart is very backward under your eyes; but I warrant you, when first we met he was more ready. I am all black and blue, wench; trust me never, if I be not black and blue! And now," she continued, "have ye said your sayings? for I must speedily dismiss the paladin." But at this they both cried out that they had said nothing, that the night was still very young, and that they would not be separated so early. "And supper?" asked the young lady. "Must we not go down to supper?" "Nay, to be sure!" cried Joan. "I had forgotten." "Hide me, then," said Dick, "put me behind the arras, shut me in a chest, or what ye will, so that I may be here on your return. Indeed, fair lady," he added, "bear this in mind, that we are sore bested, and may never look upon each other's face from this night forward till we die." At this the young lady melted; and when, a little after, the bell summoned Sir Daniel's household to the board, Dick was planted very stiffly against the wall, at a place where a division in the tapestry permitted him to breathe the more freely, and even to see into the room. He had not been long in this position, when he was somewhat strangely disturbed. The silence, in that upper storey of the house, was only broken by the flickering of the flames and the hissing of a green log in the chimney; but presently, to Dick's strained hearing, there came the sound of some one walking with extreme precaution; and soon after the door opened, and a little black-faced, dwarfish fellow, in Lord Shoreby's colours, pushed first his head, and then his crooked body, into the chamber. His mouth was open, as though to hear the better; and his eyes, which were very bright, flitted restlessly and swiftly to and fro. He went round and round the room, striking here and there upon the hangings; but Dick, by a miracle, escaped his notice. Then he looked below the furniture, and examined the lamp; and, at last, with an air of cruel disappointment, was preparing to go away as silently as he had come, when down he dropped upon his knees, picked up something from among the rushes on the floor, examined it, and, with every signal of delight, concealed it in the wallet at his belt. Dick's heart sank, for the object in question was a tassel from his own girdle; and it was plain to him that this dwarfish spy, who took a malign delight in his employment, would lose no time in bearing it to his master, the baron. He was half-tempted to throw aside the arras, fall upon the scoundrel, and, at the risk of his life, remove the telltale token. And while he was still hesitating, a new cause of concern was added. A voice, hoarse and broken by drink, began to be audible from the stair; and presently after, uneven, wandering, and heavy footsteps sounded without along the passage. "What make ye here, my merry men, among the greenwood shaws?" sang the voice. "What make ye here? Hey! sots, what make ye here?" it added, with a rattle of drunken laughter; and then, once more breaking into song: "If ye should drink the clary wine, Fat Friar John, ye friend o' mine-- If I should eat, and ye should drink, Who shall sing the mass, d'ye think?" Lawless, alas! rolling drunk, was wandering the house, seeking for a corner wherein to slumber off the effect of his potations. Dick inwardly raged. The spy, at first terrified, had grown reassured as he found he had to deal with an intoxicated man, and now, with a movement of cat-like rapidity, slipped from the chamber, and was gone from Richard's eyes. What was to be done? If he lost touch of Lawless for the night, he was left impotent, whether to plan or carry forth Joanna's rescue. If, on the other hand, he dared to address the drunken outlaw, the spy might still be lingering within sight, and the most fatal consequences ensue. It was, nevertheless, upon this last hazard that Dick decided. Slipping from behind the tapestry, he stood ready in the doorway of the chamber, with a warning hand upraised. Lawless, flushed crimson, with his eyes injected, vacillating on his feet, drew still unsteadily nearer. At last he hazily caught sight of his commander, and, in despite of Dick's imperious signals, hailed him instantly and loudly by his name. Dick leaped upon and shook the drunkard furiously. "Beast!" he hissed--"beast and no man! It is worse than treachery to be so witless. We may all be shent for thy sotting." But Lawless only laughed and staggered, and tried to clap young Shelton on the back. And just then Dick's quick ear caught a rapid brushing in the arras. He leaped towards the sound, and the next moment a piece of the wall-hanging had been torn down, and Dick and the spy were sprawling together in its folds. Over and over they rolled, grappling for each other's throat, and still baffled by the arras, and still silent in their deadly fury. But Dick was by much the stronger, and soon the spy lay prostrate under his knee, and, with a single stroke of the long poniard, ceased to breathe. CHAPTER III--THE DEAD SPY Throughout this furious and rapid passage, Lawless had looked on helplessly, and even when all was over, and Dick, already re-arisen to his feet, was listening with the most passionate attention to the distant bustle in the lower storeys of the house, the old outlaw was still wavering on his legs like a shrub in a breeze of wind, and still stupidly staring on the face of the dead man. "It is well," said Dick, at length; "they have not heard us, praise the saints! But, now, what shall I do with this poor spy? At least, I will take my tassel from his wallet." So saying, Dick opened the wallet; within he found a few pieces of money, the tassel, and a letter addressed to Lord Wensleydale, and sealed with my Lord Shoreby's seal. The name awoke Dick's recollection; and he instantly broke the wax and read the contents of the letter. It was short, but, to Dick's delight, it gave evident proof that Lord Shoreby was treacherously corresponding with the House of York. The young fellow usually carried his ink-horn and implements about him, and so now, bending a knee beside the body of the dead spy, he was able to write these words upon a corner of the paper: My Lord of Shoreby, ye that writt the letter, wot ye why your man is ded? But let me rede you, marry not. JON AMEND-ALL. He laid this paper on the breast of the corpse; and then Lawless, who had been looking on upon these last manoeuvres with some flickering returns of intelligence, suddenly drew a black arrow from below his robe, and therewith pinned the paper in its place. The sight of this disrespect, or, as it almost seemed, cruelty to the dead, drew a cry of horror from young Shelton; but the old outlaw only laughed. "Nay, I will have the credit for mine order," he hiccupped. "My jolly boys must have the credit on't--the credit, brother;" and then, shutting his eyes tight and opening his mouth like a precentor, he began to thunder, in a formidable voice: "If ye should drink the clary wine"-- "Peace, sot!" cried Dick, and thrust him hard against the wall. "In two words--if so be that such a man can understand me who hath more wine than wit in him--in two words, and, a-Mary's name, begone out of this house, where, if ye continue to abide, ye will not only hang yourself, but me also! Faith, then, up foot! be yare, or, by the mass, I may forget that I am in some sort your captain and in some your debtor! Go!" The sham monk was now, in some degree, recovering the use of his intelligence; and the ring in Dick's voice, and the glitter in Dick's eye, stamped home the meaning of his words. "By the mass," cried Lawless, "an I be not wanted, I can go;" and he turned tipsily along the corridor and proceeded to flounder down-stairs, lurching against the wall. So soon as he was out of sight, Dick returned to his hiding-place, resolutely fixed to see the matter out. Wisdom, indeed, moved him to be gone; but love and curiosity were stronger. Time passed slowly for the young man, bolt upright behind the arras. The fire in the room began to die down, and the lamp to burn low and to smoke. And still there was no word of the return of any one to these upper quarters of the house; still the faint hum and clatter of the supper party sounded from far below; and still, under the thick fall of the snow, Shoreby town lay silent upon every side. At length, however, feet and voices began to draw near upon the stair; and presently after several of Sir Daniel's guests arrived upon the landing, and, turning down the corridor, beheld the torn arras and the body of the spy. Some ran forward and some back, and all together began to cry aloud. At the sound of their cries, guests, men-at-arms, ladies, servants, and, in a word, all the inhabitants of that great house, came flying from every direction, and began to join their voices to the tumult. Soon a way was cleared, and Sir Daniel came forth in person, followed by the bridegroom of the morrow, my Lord Shoreby. "My lord," said Sir Daniel, "have I not told you of this knave Black Arrow? To the proof, behold it! There it stands, and, by the rood, my gossip, in a man of yours, or one that stole your colours!" "In good sooth, it was a man of mine," replied Lord Shoreby, hanging back. "I would I had more such. He was keen as a beagle and secret as a mole." "Ay, gossip, truly?" asked Sir Daniel, keenly. "And what came he smelling up so many stairs in my poor mansion? But he will smell no more." "An't please you, Sir Daniel," said one, "here is a paper written upon with some matter, pinned upon his breast." "Give it me, arrow and all," said the knight. And when he had taken into his hand the shaft, he continued for some time to gaze upon it in a sullen musing. "Ay," he said, addressing Lord Shoreby, "here is a hate that followeth hard and close upon my heels. This black stick, or its just likeness, shall yet bring me down. And, gossip, suffer a plain knight to counsel you; and if these hounds begin to wind you, flee! 'Tis like a sickness--it still hangeth, hangeth upon the limbs. But let us see what they have written. It is as I thought, my lord; y' are marked, like an old oak, by the woodman; to-morrow or next day, by will come the axe. But what wrote ye in a letter?" Lord Shoreby snatched the paper from the arrow, read it, crumpled it between his hands, and, overcoming the reluctance which had hitherto withheld him from approaching, threw himself on his knees beside the body and eagerly groped in the wallet. He rose to his feet with a somewhat unsettled countenance. "Gossip," he said, "I have indeed lost a letter here that much imported; and could I lay my hand upon the knave that took it, he should incontinently grace a halter. But let us, first of all, secure the issues of the house. Here is enough harm already, by St. George!" Sentinels were posted close around the house and garden; a sentinel on every landing of the stair, a whole troop in the main entrance-hall; and yet another about the bonfire in the shed. Sir Daniel's followers were supplemented by Lord Shoreby's; there was thus no lack of men or weapons to make the house secure, or to entrap a lurking enemy, should one be there. Meanwhile, the body of the spy was carried out through the falling snow and deposited in the abbey church. It was not until these dispositions had been taken, and all had returned to a decorous silence, that the two girls drew Richard Shelton from his place of concealment, and made a full report to him of what had passed. He, upon his side, recounted the visit of the spy, his dangerous discovery, and speedy end. Joanna leaned back very faint against the curtained wall. "It will avail but little," she said. "I shall be wed to-morrow, in the morning, after all!" "What!" cried her friend. "And here is our paladin that driveth lions like mice! Ye have little faith, of a surety. But come, friend lion-driver, give us some comfort; speak, and let us hear bold counsels." Dick was confounded to be thus outfaced with his own exaggerated words; but though he coloured, he still spoke stoutly. "Truly," said he, "we are in straits. Yet, could I but win out of this house for half an hour, I do honestly tell myself that all might still go well; and for the marriage, it should be prevented." "And for the lions," mimicked the girl, "they shall be driven." "I crave your excuse," said Dick. "I speak not now in any boasting humour, but rather as one inquiring after help or counsel; for if I get not forth of this house and through these sentinels, I can do less than naught. Take me, I pray you, rightly." "Why said ye he was rustic, Joan?" the girl inquired. "I warrant he hath a tongue in his head; ready, soft, and bold is his speech at pleasure. What would ye more?" "Nay," sighed Joanna, with a smile, "they have changed me my friend Dick, 'tis sure enough. When I beheld him, he was rough indeed. But it matters little; there is no help for my hard case, and I must still be Lady Shoreby!" "Nay, then," said Dick, "I will even make the adventure. A friar is not much regarded; and if I found a good fairy to lead me up, I may find another belike to carry me down. How call they the name of this spy?" "Rutter," said the young lady; "and an excellent good name to call him by. But how mean ye, lion-driver? What is in your mind to do?" "To offer boldly to go forth," returned Dick; "and if any stop me, to keep an unchanged countenance, and say I go to pray for Rutter. They will be praying over his poor clay even now." "The device is somewhat simple," replied the girl, "yet it may hold." "Nay," said young Shelton, "it is no device, but mere boldness, which serveth often better in great straits." "Ye say true," she said. "Well, go, a-Mary's name, and may Heaven speed you! Ye leave here a poor maid that loves you entirely, and another that is most heartily your friend. Be wary, for their sakes, and make not shipwreck of your safety." "Ay," added Joanna, "go, Dick. Ye run no more peril, whether ye go or stay. Go; ye take my heart with you; the saints defend you!" Dick passed the first sentry with so assured a countenance that the fellow merely figeted and stared; but at the second landing the man carried his spear across and bade him name his business. "_Pax vobiscum_," answered Dick. "I go to pray over the body of this poor Rutter." "Like enough," returned the sentry; "but to go alone is not permitted you." He leaned over the oaken balusters and whistled shrill. "One cometh!" he cried; and then motioned Dick to pass. At the foot of the stair he found the guard afoot and awaiting his arrival; and when he had once more repeated his story, the commander of the post ordered four men out to accompany him to the church. "Let him not slip, my lads," he said. "Bring him to Sir Oliver, on your lives!" The door was then opened; one of the men took Dick by either arm, another marched ahead with a link, and the fourth, with bent bow and the arrow on the string, brought up the rear. In this order they proceeded through the garden, under the thick darkness of the night and the scattering snow, and drew near to the dimly-illuminated windows of the abbey church. At the western portal a picket of archers stood, taking what shelter they could find in the hollow of the arched doorways, and all powdered with the snow; and it was not until Dick's conductors had exchanged a word with these, that they were suffered to pass forth and enter the nave of the sacred edifice. The church was doubtfully lighted by the tapers upon the great altar, and by a lamp or two that swung from the arched roof before the private chapels of illustrious families. In the midst of the choir the dead spy lay, his limbs piously composed, upon a bier. A hurried mutter of prayer sounded along the arches; cowled figures knelt in the stalls of the choir, and on the steps of the high altar a priest in pontifical vestments celebrated mass. Upon this fresh entrance, one of the cowled figures arose, and, coming down the steps which elevated the level of the choir above that of the nave, demanded from the leader of the four men what business brought him to the church. Out of respect for the service and the dead, they spoke in guarded tones; but the echoes of that huge, empty building caught up their words, and hollowly repeated and repeated them along the aisles. "A monk!" returned Sir Oliver (for he it was), when he had heard the report of the archer. "My brother, I looked not for your coming," he added, turning to young Shelton. "In all civility, who are ye? and at whose instance do ye join your supplications to ours?" Dick, keeping his cowl about his face, signed to Sir Oliver to move a pace or two aside from the archers; and, so soon as the priest had done so, "I cannot hope to deceive you, sir," he said. "My life is in your hands." Sir Oliver violently started; his stout cheeks grew pale, and for a space he was silent. "Richard," he said, "what brings you here, I know not; but I much misdoubt it to be evil. Nevertheless, for the kindness that was, I would not willingly deliver you to harm. Ye shall sit all night beside me in the stalls: ye shall sit there till my Lord of Shoreby be married, and the party gone safe home; and if all goeth well, and ye have planned no evil, in the end ye shall go whither ye will. But if your purpose be bloody, it shall return upon your head. Amen!" And the priest devoutly crossed himself, and turned and louted to the altar. With that, he spoke a few words more to the soldiers, and taking Dick by the hand, led him up to the choir, and placed him in the stall beside his own, where, for mere decency, the lad had instantly to kneel and appear to be busy with his devotions. His mind and his eyes, however, were continually wandering. Three of the soldiers, he observed, instead of returning to the house, had got them quietly into a point of vantage in the aisle; and he could not doubt that they had done so by Sir Oliver's command. Here, then, he was trapped. Here he must spend the night in the ghostly glimmer and shadow of the church, and looking on the pale face of him he slew; and here, in the morning, he must see his sweetheart married to another man before his eyes. But, for all that, he obtained a command upon his mind, and built himself up in patience to await the issue. CHAPTER IV--IN THE ABBEY CHURCH In Shoreby Abbey Church the prayers were kept up all night without cessation, now with the singing of psalms, now with a note or two upon the bell. Rutter, the spy, was nobly waked. There he lay, meanwhile, as they had arranged him, his dead hands crossed upon his bosom, his dead eyes staring on the roof; and hard by, in the stall, the lad who had slain him waited, in sore disquietude, the coming of the morning. Once only, in the course of the hours, Sir Oliver leaned across to his captive. "Richard," he whispered, "my son, if ye mean me evil, I will certify, on my soul's welfare, ye design upon an innocent man. Sinful in the eye of Heaven I do declare myself; but sinful as against you I am not, neither have been ever." "My father," returned Dick, in the same tone of voice, "trust me, I design nothing; but as for your innocence, I may not forget that ye cleared yourself but lamely." "A man may be innocently guilty," replied the priest. "He may be set blindfolded upon a mission, ignorant of its true scope. So it was with me. I did decoy your father to his death; but as Heaven sees us in this sacred place, I knew not what I did." "It may be," returned Dick. "But see what a strange web ye have woven, that I should be, at this hour, at once your prisoner and your judge; that ye should both threaten my days and deprecate my anger. Methinks, if ye had been all your life a true man and good priest, ye would neither thus fear nor thus detest me. And now to your prayers. I do obey you, since needs must; but I will not be burthened with your company." The priest uttered a sigh so heavy that it had almost touched the lad into some sentiment of pity, and he bowed his head upon his hands like a man borne down below a weight of care. He joined no longer in the psalms; but Dick could hear the beads rattle through his fingers and the prayers a-pattering between his teeth. Yet a little, and the grey of the morning began to struggle through the painted casements of the church, and to put to shame the glimmer of the tapers. The light slowly broadened and brightened, and presently through the south-eastern clerestories a flush of rosy sunlight flickered on the walls. The storm was over; the great clouds had disburdened their snow and fled farther on, and the new day was breaking on a merry winter landscape sheathed in white. A bustle of church officers followed; the bier was carried forth to the deadhouse, and the stains of blood were cleansed from off the tiles, that no such ill-omened spectacle should disgrace the marriage of Lord Shoreby. At the same time, the very ecclesiastics who had been so dismally engaged all night began to put on morning faces, to do honour to the merrier ceremony which was about to follow. And further to announce the coming of the day, the pious of the town began to assemble and fall to prayer before their favourite shrines, or wait their turn at the confessionals. Favoured by this stir, it was of course easily possible for any man to avoid the vigilance of Sir Daniel's sentries at the door; and presently Dick, looking about him wearily, caught the eye of no less a person than Will Lawless, still in his monk's habit. The outlaw, at the same moment, recognised his leader, and privily signed to him with hand and eye. Now, Dick was far from having forgiven the old rogue his most untimely drunkenness, but he had no desire to involve him in his own predicament; and he signalled back to him, as plain as he was able, to begone. Lawless, as though he had understood, disappeared at once behind a pillar, and Dick breathed again. What, then, was his dismay to feel himself plucked by the sleeve and to find the old robber installed beside him, upon the next seat, and, to all appearance, plunged in his devotions! Instantly Sir Oliver arose from his place, and, gliding behind the stalls, made for the soldiers in the aisle. If the priest's suspicions had been so lightly wakened, the harm was already done, and Lawless a prisoner in the church. "Move not," whispered Dick. "We are in the plaguiest pass, thanks, before all things, to thy swinishness of yestereven. When ye saw me here, so strangely seated where I have neither right nor interest, what a murrain I could ye not smell harm and get ye gone from evil?" "Nay," returned Lawless, "I thought ye had heard from Ellis, and were here on duty." "Ellis!" echoed Dick. "Is Ellis, then, returned? "For sure," replied the outlaw. "He came last night, and belted me sore for being in wine--so there ye are avenged, my master. A furious man is Ellis Duckworth! He hath ridden me hot-spur from Craven to prevent this marriage; and, Master Dick, ye know the way of him--do so he will!" "Nay, then," returned Dick, with composure, "you and I, my poor brother, are dead men; for I sit here a prisoner upon suspicion, and my neck was to answer for this very marriage that he purposeth to mar. I had a fair choice, by the rood! to lose my sweetheart or else lose my life! Well, the cast is thrown--it is to be my life." "By the mass," cried Lawless, half arising, "I am gone!" But Dick had his hand at once upon his shoulder. "Friend Lawless, sit ye still," he said. "An ye have eyes, look yonder at the corner by the chancel arch; see ye not that, even upon the motion of your rising, yon armed men are up and ready to intercept you? Yield ye, friend. Ye were bold aboard ship, when ye thought to die a sea-death; be bold again, now that y' are to die presently upon the gallows." "Master Dick," gasped Lawless, "the thing hath come upon me somewhat of the suddenest. But give me a moment till I fetch my breath again; and, by the mass, I will be as stout-hearted as yourself." "Here is my bold fellow!" returned Dick. "And yet, Lawless, it goes hard against the grain with me to die; but where whining mendeth nothing, wherefore whine?" "Nay, that indeed!" chimed Lawless. "And a fig for death, at worst! It has to be done, my master, soon or late. And hanging in a good quarrel is an easy death, they say, though I could never hear of any that came back to say so." And so saying, the stout old rascal leaned back in his stall, folded his arms, and began to look about him with the greatest air of insolence and unconcern. "And for the matter of that," Dick added, "it is yet our best chance to keep quiet. We wot not yet what Duckworth purposes; and when all is said, and if the worst befall, we may yet clear our feet of it." Now that they ceased talking, they were aware of a very distant and thin strain of mirthful music which steadily drew nearer, louder, and merrier. The bells in the tower began to break forth into a doubling peal, and a greater and greater concourse of people to crowd into the church, shuffling the snow from off their feet, and clapping and blowing in their hands. The western door was flung wide open, showing a glimpse of sunlit, snowy street, and admitting in a great gust the shrewd air of the morning; and in short, it became plain by every sign that Lord Shoreby desired to be married very early in the day, and that the wedding-train was drawing near. Some of Lord Shoreby's men now cleared a passage down the middle aisle, forcing the people back with lance-stocks; and just then, outside the portal, the secular musicians could be descried drawing near over the frozen snow, the fifers and trumpeters scarlet in the face with lusty blowing, the drummers and the cymbalists beating as for a wager. These, as they drew near the door of the sacred building, filed off on either side, and, marking time to their own vigorous music, stood stamping in the snow. As they thus opened their ranks, the leaders of this noble bridal train appeared behind and between them; and such was the variety and gaiety of their attire, such the display of silks and velvet, fur and satin, embroidery and lace, that the procession showed forth upon the snow like a flower-bed in a path or a painted window in a wall. First came the bride, a sorry sight, as pale as winter, clinging to Sir Daniel's arm, and attended, as brides-maid, by the short young lady who had befriended Dick the night before. Close behind, in the most radiant toilet, followed the bridegroom, halting on a gouty foot; and as he passed the threshold of the sacred building and doffed his hat, his bald head was seen to be rosy with emotion. And now came the hour of Ellis Duckworth. Dick, who sat stunned among contrary emotions, grasping the desk in front of him, beheld a movement in the crowd, people jostling backward, and eyes and arms uplifted. Following these signs, he beheld three or four men with bent bows leaning from the clerestory gallery. At the same instant they delivered their discharge, and before the clamour and cries of the astounded populace had time to swell fully upon the ear, they had flitted from their perch and disappeared. The nave was full of swaying heads and voices screaming; the ecclesiastics thronged in terror from their places; the music ceased, and though the bells overhead continued for some seconds to clang upon the air, some wind of the disaster seemed to find its way at last even to the chamber where the ringers were leaping on their ropes, and they also desisted from their merry labours. Right in the midst of the nave the bridegroom lay stone-dead, pierced by two black arrows. The bride had fainted. Sir Daniel stood, towering above the crowd in his surprise and anger, a clothyard shaft quivering in his left forearm, and his face streaming blood from another which had grazed his brow. Long before any search could be made for them, the authors of this tragic interruption had clattered down a turnpike stair and decamped by a postern door. But Dick and Lawless still remained in pawn; they had, indeed, arisen on the first alarm, and pushed manfully to gain the door; but what with the narrowness of the stalls and the crowding of terrified priests and choristers, the attempt had been in vain, and they had stoically resumed their places. And now, pale with horror, Sir Oliver rose to his feet and called upon Sir Daniel, pointing with one hand to Dick. "Here," he cried, "is Richard Shelton--alas the hour!--blood guilty! Seize him!--bid him be seized! For all our lives' sakes, take him and bind him surely! He hath sworn our fall." Sir Daniel was blinded by anger--blinded by the hot blood that still streamed across his face. "Where?" he bellowed. "Hale him forth! By the cross of Holywood, but he shall rue this hour!" The crowd fell back, and a party of archers invaded the choir, laid rough hands on Dick, dragged him head-foremost from the stall, and thrust him by the shoulders down the chancel steps. Lawless, on his part, sat as still as a mouse. Sir Daniel, brushing the blood out of his eyes, stared blinkingly upon his captive. "Ay," he said, "treacherous and insolent, I have thee fast; and by all potent oaths, for every drop of blood that now trickles in mine eyes, I will wring a groan out of thy carcase. Away with him!" he added. "Here is no place! Off with him to my house. I will number every joint of thy body with a torture." But Dick, putting off his captors, uplifted his voice. "Sanctuary!" he shouted. "Sanctuary! Ho, there, my fathers! They would drag me from the church!" "From the church thou hast defiled with murder, boy," added a tall man, magnificently dressed. "On what probation?" cried Dick. "They do accuse me, indeed, of some complicity, but have not proved one tittle. I was, in truth, a suitor for this damsel's hand; and she, I will be bold to say it, repaid my suit with favour. But what then? To love a maid is no offence, I trow--nay, nor to gain her love. In all else, I stand here free from guiltiness." There was a murmur of approval among the bystanders, so boldly Dick declared his innocence; but at the same time a throng of accusers arose upon the other side, crying how he had been found last night in Sir Daniel's house, how he wore a sacrilegious disguise; and in the midst of the babel, Sir Oliver indicated Lawless, both by voice and gesture, as accomplice to the fact. He, in his turn, was dragged from his seat and set beside his leader. The feelings of the crowd rose high on either side, and while some dragged the prisoners to and fro to favour their escape, others cursed and struck them with their fists. Dick's ears rang and his brain swam dizzily, like a man struggling in the eddies of a furious river. But the tall man who had already answered Dick, by a prodigious exercise of voice restored silence and order in the mob. "Search them," he said, "for arms. We may so judge of their intentions." Upon Dick they found no weapon but his poniard, and this told in his favour, until one man officiously drew it from its sheath, and found it still uncleansed of the blood of Rutter. At this there was a great shout among Sir Daniel's followers, which the tall man suppressed by a gesture and an imperious glance. But when it came to the turn of Lawless, there was found under his gown a sheaf of arrows identical with those that had been shot. "How say ye now?" asked the tall man, frowningly, of Dick. "Sir," replied Dick, "I am here in sanctuary, is it not so? Well, sir, I see by your bearing that ye are high in station, and I read in your countenance the marks of piety and justice. To you, then, I will yield me prisoner, and that blithely, foregoing the advantage of this holy place. But rather than to be yielded into the discretion of that man--whom I do here accuse with a loud voice to be the murderer of my natural father and the unjust retainer of my lands and revenues--rather than that, I would beseech you, under favour, with your own gentle hand, to despatch me on the spot. Your own ears have heard him, how before that I was proven guilty he did threaten me with torments. It standeth not with your own honour to deliver me to my sworn enemy and old oppressor, but to try me fairly by the way of law, and, if that I be guilty indeed, to slay me mercifully." "My lord," cried Sir Daniel, "ye will not hearken to this wolf? His bloody dagger reeks him the lie into his face." "Nay, but suffer me, good knight," returned the tall stranger; "your own vehemence doth somewhat tell against yourself." And here the bride, who had come to herself some minutes past and looked wildly on upon this scene, broke loose from those that held her, and fell upon her knees before the last speaker. "My Lord of Risingham," she cried, "hear me, in justice. I am here in this man's custody by mere force, reft from mine own people. Since that day I had never pity, countenance, nor comfort from the face of man--but from him only--Richard Shelton--whom they now accuse and labour to undo. My lord, if he was yesternight in Sir Daniel's mansion, it was I that brought him there; he came but at my prayer, and thought to do no hurt. While yet Sir Daniel was a good lord to him, he fought with them of the Black Arrow loyally; but when his foul guardian sought his life by practices, and he fled by night, for his soul's sake, out of that bloody house, whither was he to turn--he, helpless and penniless? Or if he be fallen among ill company, whom should ye blame--the lad that was unjustly handled, or the guardian that did abuse his trust?" And then the short young lady fell on her knees by Joanna's side. "And I, my good lord and natural uncle," she added, "I can bear testimony, on my conscience and before the face of all, that what this maiden saith is true. It was I, unworthy, that did lead the young man in." Earl Risingham had heard in silence, and when the voices ceased, he still stood silent for a space. Then he gave Joanna his hand to arise, though it was to be observed that he did not offer the like courtesy to her who had called herself his niece. "Sir Daniel," he said, "here is a right intricate affair, the which, with your good leave, it shall be mine to examine and adjust. Content ye, then; your business is in careful hands; justice shall be done you; and in the meanwhile, get ye incontinently home, and have your hurts attended. The air is shrewd, and I would not ye took cold upon these scratches." He made a sign with his hand; it was passed down the nave by obsequious servants, who waited there upon his smallest gesture. Instantly, without the church, a tucket sounded shrill, and through the open portal archers and men-at-arms, uniformly arrayed in the colours and wearing the badge of Lord Risingham, began to file into the church, took Dick and Lawless from those who still detained them, and, closing their files about the prisoners, marched forth again and disappeared. As they were passing, Joanna held both her hands to Dick and cried him her farewell; and the bridesmaid, nothing downcast by her uncle's evident displeasure, blew him a kiss, with a "Keep your heart up, lion-driver!" that for the first time since the accident called up a smile to the faces of the crowd. CHAPTER V--EARL RISINGHAM Earl Risingham, although by far the most important person then in Shoreby, was poorly lodged in the house of a private gentleman upon the extreme outskirts of the town. Nothing but the armed men at the doors, and the mounted messengers that kept arriving and departing, announced the temporary residence of a great lord. Thus it was that, from lack of space, Dick and Lawless were clapped into the same apartment. "Well spoken, Master Richard," said the outlaw; "it was excellently well spoken, and, for my part, I thank you cordially. Here we are in good hands; we shall be justly tried, and, some time this evening, decently hanged on the same tree." "Indeed, my poor friend, I do believe it," answered Dick. "Yet have we a string to our bow," returned Lawless. "Ellis Duckworth is a man out of ten thousand; he holdeth you right near his heart, both for your own and for your father's sake; and knowing you guiltless of this fact, he will stir earth and heaven to bear you clear." "It may not be," said Dick. "What can he do? He hath but a handful. Alack, if it were but to-morrow--could I but keep a certain tryst an hour before noon to-morrow--all were, I think, otherwise. But now there is no help." "Well," concluded Lawless, "an ye will stand to it for my innocence, I will stand to it for yours, and that stoutly. It shall naught avail us; but an I be to hang, it shall not be for lack of swearing." And then, while Dick gave himself over to his reflections, the old rogue curled himself down into a corner, pulled his monkish hood about his face, and composed himself to sleep. Soon he was loudly snoring, so utterly had his long life of hardship and adventure blunted the sense of apprehension. It was long after noon, and the day was already failing, before the door was opened and Dick taken forth and led up-stairs to where, in a warm cabinet, Earl Risingham sat musing over the fire. On his captive's entrance he looked up. "Sir," he said, "I knew your father, who was a man of honour, and this inclineth me to be the more lenient; but I may not hide from you that heavy charges lie against your character. Ye do consort with murderers and robbers; upon a clear probation ye have carried war against the king's peace; ye are suspected to have piratically seized upon a ship; ye are found skulking with a counterfeit presentment in your enemy's house; a man is slain that very evening--" "An it like you, my lord," Dick interposed, "I will at once avow my guilt, such as it is. I slew this fellow Rutter; and to the proof"--searching in his bosom--"here is a letter from his wallet." Lord Risingham took the letter, and opened and read it twice. "Ye have read this?" he inquired. "I have read it," answered Dick. "Are ye for York or Lancaster?" the earl demanded. "My lord, it was but a little while back that I was asked that question, and knew not how to answer it," said Dick; "but having answered once, I will not vary. My lord, I am for York." The earl nodded approvingly. "Honestly replied," he said. "But wherefore, then, deliver me this letter?" "Nay, but against traitors, my lord, are not all sides arrayed?" cried Dick. "I would they were, young gentleman," returned the earl; "and I do at least approve your saying. There is more youth than guile in you, I do perceive; and were not Sir Daniel a mighty man upon our side, I were half-tempted to espouse your quarrel. For I have inquired, and it appears ye have been hardly dealt with, and have much excuse. But look ye, sir, I am, before all else, a leader in the queen's interest; and though by nature a just man, as I believe, and leaning even to the excess of mercy, yet must I order my goings for my party's interest, and, to keep Sir Daniel, I would go far about." "My lord," returned Dick, "ye will think me very bold to counsel you; but do ye count upon Sir Daniel's faith? Methought he had changed sides intolerably often." "Nay, it is the way of England. What would ye have?" the earl demanded. "But ye are unjust to the knight of Tunstall; and as faith goes, in this unfaithful generation, he hath of late been honourably true to us of Lancaster. Even in our last reverses he stood firm." "An it pleased you, then," said Dick, "to cast your eye upon this letter, ye might somewhat change your thought of him;" and he handed to the earl Sir Daniel's letter to Lord Wensleydale. The effect upon the earl's countenance was instant; he lowered like an angry lion, and his hand, with a sudden movement, clutched at his dagger. "Ye have read this also?" he asked. "Even so," said Dick. "It is your lordship's own estate he offers to Lord Wensleydale?" "It is my own estate, even as ye say!" returned the earl. "I am your bedesman for this letter. It hath shown me a fox's hole. Command me, Master Shelton; I will not be backward in gratitude, and to begin with, York or Lancaster, true man or thief, I do now set you at freedom. Go, a Mary's name! But judge it right that I retain and hang your fellow, Lawless. The crime hath been most open, and it were fitting that some open punishment should follow." "My lord, I make it my first suit to you to spare him also," pleaded Dick. "It is an old, condemned rogue, thief, and vagabond, Master Shelton," said the earl. "He hath been gallows-ripe this score of years. And, whether for one thing or another, whether to-morrow or the day after, where is the great choice?" "Yet, my lord, it was through love to me that he came hither," answered Dick, "and I were churlish and thankless to desert him." "Master Shelton, ye are troublesome," replied the earl, severely. "It is an evil way to prosper in this world. Howbeit, and to be quit of your importunity, I will once more humour you. Go, then, together; but go warily, and get swiftly out of Shoreby town. For this Sir Daniel (whom may the saints confound!) thirsteth most greedily to have your blood." "My lord, I do now offer you in words my gratitude, trusting at some brief date to pay you some of it in service," replied Dick, as he turned from the apartment. CHAPTER VI--ARBLASTER AGAIN When Dick and Lawless were suffered to steal, by a back way, out of the house where Lord Risingham held his garrison, the evening had already come. They paused in shelter of the garden wall to consult on their best course. The danger was extreme. If one of Sir Daniel's men caught sight of them and raised the view-hallo, they would be run down and butchered instantly. And not only was the town of Shoreby a mere net of peril for their lives, but to make for the open country was to run the risk of the patrols. A little way off, upon some open ground, they spied a windmill standing; and hard by that, a very large granary with open doors. "How if we lay there until the night fall?" Dick proposed. And Lawless having no better suggestion to offer, they made a straight push for the granary at a run, and concealed themselves behind the door among some straw. The daylight rapidly departed; and presently the moon was silvering the frozen snow. Now or never was their opportunity to gain the Goat and Bagpipes unobserved and change their tell-tale garments. Yet even then it was advisable to go round by the outskirts, and not run the gauntlet of the market-place, where, in the concourse of people, they stood the more imminent peril to be recognised and slain. This course was a long one. It took them not far from the house by the beach, now lying dark and silent, and brought them forth at last by the margin of the harbour. Many of the ships, as they could see by the clear moonshine, had weighed anchor, and, profiting by the calm sky, proceeded for more distant parts; answerably to this, the rude alehouses along the beach (although in defiance of the curfew law, they still shone with fire and candle) were no longer thronged with customers, and no longer echoed to the chorus of sea-songs. Hastily, half-running, with their monkish raiment kilted to the knee, they plunged through the deep snow and threaded the labyrinth of marine lumber; and they were already more than half way round the harbour when, as they were passing close before an alehouse, the door suddenly opened and let out a gush of light upon their fleeting figures. Instantly they stopped, and made believe to be engaged in earnest conversation. Three men, one after another, came out of the ale-house, and the last closed the door behind him. All three were unsteady upon their feet, as if they had passed the day in deep potations, and they now stood wavering in the moonlight, like men who knew not what they would be after. The tallest of the three was talking in a loud, lamentable voice. "Seven pieces of as good Gascony as ever a tapster broached," he was saying, "the best ship out o' the port o' Dartmouth, a Virgin Mary parcel-gilt, thirteen pounds of good gold money--" "I have bad losses, too," interrupted one of the others. "I have had losses of mine own, gossip Arblaster. I was robbed at Martinmas of five shillings and a leather wallet well worth ninepence farthing." Dick's heart smote him at what he heard. Until that moment he had not perhaps thought twice of the poor skipper who had been ruined by the loss of the Good Hope; so careless, in those days, were men who wore arms of the goods and interests of their inferiors. But this sudden encounter reminded him sharply of the high-handed manner and ill-ending of his enterprise; and both he and Lawless turned their heads the other way, to avoid the chance of recognition. The ship's dog had, however, made his escape from the wreck and found his way back again to Shoreby. He was now at Arblaster's heels, and suddenly sniffing and pricking his ears, he darted forward and began to bark furiously at the two sham friars. His master unsteadily followed him. "Hey, shipmates!" he cried. "Have ye ever a penny pie for a poor old shipman, clean destroyed by pirates? I am a man that would have paid for you both o' Thursday morning; and now here I be, o' Saturday night, begging for a flagon of ale! Ask my man Tom, if ye misdoubt me. Seven pieces of good Gascon wine, a ship that was mine own, and was my father's before me, a Blessed Mary of plane-tree wood and parcel-gilt, and thirteen pounds in gold and silver. Hey! what say ye? A man that fought the French, too; for I have fought the French; I have cut more French throats upon the high seas than ever a man that sails out of Dartmouth. Come, a penny piece." Neither Dick nor Lawless durst answer him a word, lest he should recognise their voices; and they stood there as helpless as a ship ashore, not knowing where to turn nor what to hope. "Are ye dumb, boy?" inquired the skipper. "Mates," he added, with a hiccup, "they be dumb. I like not this manner of discourtesy; for an a man be dumb, so be as he's courteous, he will still speak when he was spoken to, methinks." By this time the sailor, Tom, who was a man of great personal strength, seemed to have conceived some suspicion of these two speechless figures; and being soberer than his captain, stepped suddenly before him, took Lawless roughly by the shoulder, and asked him, with an oath, what ailed him that he held his tongue. To this the outlaw, thinking all was over, made answer by a wrestling feint that stretched the sailor on the sand, and, calling upon Dick to follow him, took to his heels among the lumber. The affair passed in a second. Before Dick could run at all, Arblaster had him in his arms; Tom, crawling on his face, had caught him by one foot, and the third man had a drawn cutlass brandishing above his head. It was not so much the danger, it was not so much the annoyance, that now bowed down the spirits of young Shelton; it was the profound humiliation to have escaped Sir Daniel, convinced Lord Risingham, and now fall helpless in the hands of this old, drunken sailor; and not merely helpless, but, as his conscience loudly told him when it was too late, actually guilty--actually the bankrupt debtor of the man whose ship he had stolen and lost. "Bring me him back into the alehouse, till I see his face," said Arblaster. "Nay, nay," returned Tom; "but let us first unload his wallet, lest the other lads cry share." But though he was searched from head to foot, not a penny was found upon him; nothing but Lord Foxham's signet, which they plucked savagely from his finger. "Turn me him to the moon," said the skipper; and taking Dick by the chin, he cruelly jerked his head into the air. "Blessed Virgin!" he cried, "it is the pirate!" "Hey!" cried Tom. "By the Virgin of Bordeaux, it is the man himself!" repeated Arblaster. "What, sea-thief, do I hold you?" he cried. "Where is my ship? Where is my wine? Hey! have I you in my hands? Tom, give me one end of a cord here; I will so truss me this sea-thief, hand and foot together, like a basting turkey--marry, I will so bind him up--and thereafter I will so beat--so beat him!" And so he ran on, winding the cord meanwhile about Dick's limbs with the dexterity peculiar to seamen, and at every turn and cross securing it with a knot, and tightening the whole fabric with a savage pull. When he had done, the lad was a mere package in his hands--as helpless as the dead. The skipper held him at arm's length, and laughed aloud. Then he fetched him a stunning buffet on the ear; and then turned him about, and furiously kicked and kicked him. Anger rose up in Dick's bosom like a storm; anger strangled him, and he thought to have died; but when the sailor, tired of this cruel play, dropped him all his length upon the sand and turned to consult with his companions, he instantly regained command of his temper. Here was a momentary respite; ere they began again to torture him, he might have found some method to escape from this degrading and fatal misadventure. Presently, sure enough, and while his captors were still discussing what to do with him, he took heart of grace, and, with a pretty steady voice, addressed them. "My masters," he began, "are ye gone clean foolish? Here hath Heaven put into your hands as pretty an occasion to grow rich as ever shipman had--such as ye might make thirty over-sea adventures and not find again--and, by the mass I what do ye? Beat me?--nay; so would an angry child! But for long-headed tarry-Johns, that fear not fire nor water, and that love gold as they love beef, methinks ye are not wise." "Ay," said Tom, "now y' are trussed ye would cozen us." "Cozen you!" repeated Dick. "Nay, if ye be fools, it would be easy. But if ye be shrewd fellows, as I trow ye are, ye can see plainly where your interest lies. When I took your ship from you, we were many, we were well clad and armed; but now, bethink you a little, who mustered that array? One incontestably that hath much gold. And if he, being already rich, continueth to hunt after more even in the face of storms--bethink you once more--shall there not be a treasure somewhere hidden?" "What meaneth he?" asked one of the men. "Why, if ye have lost an old skiff and a few jugs of vinegary wine," continued Dick, "forget them, for the trash they are; and do ye rather buckle to an adventure worth the name, that shall, in twelve hours, make or mar you for ever. But take me up from where I lie, and let us go somewhere near at hand and talk across a flagon, for I am sore and frozen, and my mouth is half among the snow." "He seeks but to cozen us," said Tom, contemptuously. "Cozen! cozen!" cried the third man. "I would I could see the man that could cozen me! He were a cozener indeed! Nay, I was not born yesterday. I can see a church when it hath a steeple on it; and for my part, gossip Arblaster, methinks there is some sense in this young man. Shall we go hear him, indeed? Say, shall we go hear him?" "I would look gladly on a pottle of strong ale, good Master Pirret," returned Arblaster. "How say ye, Tom? But then the wallet is empty." "I will pay," said the other--"I will pay. I would fain see this matter out; I do believe, upon my conscience, there is gold in it." "Nay, if ye get again to drinking, all is lost!" cried Tom. "Gossip Arblaster, ye suffer your fellow to have too much liberty," returned Master Pirret. "Would ye be led by a hired man? Fy, fy!" "Peace, fellow!" said Arblaster, addressing Tom. "Will ye put your oar in? Truly a fine pass, when the crew is to correct the skipper!" "Well, then, go your way," said Tom; "I wash my hands of you." "Set him, then, upon his feet," said Master Pirret. "I know a privy place where we may drink and discourse." "If I am to walk, my friends, ye must set my feet at liberty," said Dick, when he had been once more planted upright like a post. "He saith true," laughed Pirret. "Truly, he could not walk accoutred as he is. Give it a slit--out with your knife and slit it, gossip." Even Arblaster paused at this proposal; but as his companion continued to insist, and Dick had the sense to keep the merest wooden indifference of expression, and only shrugged his shoulders over the delay, the skipper consented at last, and cut the cords which tied his prisoner's feet and legs. Not only did this enable Dick to walk; but the whole network of his bonds being proportionately loosened, he felt the arm behind his back begin to move more freely, and could hope, with time and trouble, to entirely disengage it. So much he owed already to the owlish silliness and greed of Master Pirret. That worthy now assumed the lead, and conducted them to the very same rude alehouse where Lawless had taken Arblaster on the day of the gale. It was now quite deserted; the fire was a pile of red embers, radiating the most ardent heat; and when they had chosen their places, and the landlord had set before them a measure of mulled ale, both Pirret and Arblaster stretched forth their legs and squared their elbows like men bent upon a pleasant hour. The table at which they sat, like all the others in the alehouse, consisted of a heavy, square board, set on a pair of barrels; and each of the four curiously-assorted cronies sat at one side of the square, Pirret facing Arblaster, and Dick opposite to the common sailor. "And now, young man," said Pirret, "to your tale. It doth appear, indeed, that ye have somewhat abused our gossip Arblaster; but what then? Make it up to him--show him but this chance to become wealthy--and I will go pledge he will forgive you." So far Dick had spoken pretty much at random; but it was now necessary, under the supervision of six eyes, to invent and tell some marvellous story, and, if it were possible, get back into his hands the all-important signet. To squander time was the first necessity. The longer his stay lasted, the more would his captors drink, and the surer should he be when he attempted his escape. Well, Dick was not much of an inventor, and what he told was pretty much the tale of Ali Baba, with Shoreby and Tunstall Forest substituted for the East, and the treasures of the cavern rather exaggerated than diminished. As the reader is aware, it is an excellent story, and has but one drawback--that it is not true; and so, as these three simple shipmen now heard it for the first time, their eyes stood out of their faces, and their mouths gaped like codfish at a fishmonger's. Pretty soon a second measure of mulled ale was called for; and while Dick was still artfully spinning out the incidents a third followed the second. Here was the position of the parties towards the end: Arblaster, three-parts drunk and one-half asleep, hung helpless on his stool. Even Tom had been much delighted with the tale, and his vigilance had abated in proportion. Meanwhile, Dick had gradually wormed his right arm clear of its bonds, and was ready to risk all. "And so," said Pirret, "y' are one of these?" "I was made so," replied Dick, "against my will; but an I could but get a sack or two of gold coin to my share, I should be a fool indeed to continue dwelling in a filthy cave, and standing shot and buffet like a soldier. Here be we four; good! Let us, then, go forth into the forest to-morrow ere the sun be up. Could we come honestly by a donkey, it were better; but an we cannot, we have our four strong backs, and I warrant me we shall come home staggering." Pirret licked his lips. "And this magic," he said--"this password, whereby the cave is opened--how call ye it, friend?" "Nay, none know the word but the three chiefs," returned Dick; "but here is your great good fortune, that, on this very evening, I should be the bearer of a spell to open it. It is a thing not trusted twice a year beyond the captain's wallet." "A spell!" said Arblaster, half awakening, and squinting upon Dick with one eye. "Aroint thee! no spells! I be a good Christian. Ask my man Tom, else." "Nay, but this is white magic," said Dick. "It doth naught with the devil; only the powers of numbers, herbs, and planets." "Ay, ay," said Pirret; "'tis but white magic, gossip. There is no sin therein, I do assure you. But proceed, good youth. This spell--in what should it consist?" "Nay, that I will incontinently show you," answered Dick. "Have ye there the ring ye took from my finger? Good! Now hold it forth before you by the extreme finger-ends, at the arm's-length, and over against the shining of these embers. 'Tis so exactly. Thus, then, is the spell." With a haggard glance, Dick saw the coast was clear between him and the door. He put up an internal prayer. Then whipping forth his arm, he made but one snatch of the ring, and at the same instant, levering up the table, he sent it bodily over upon the seaman Tom. He, poor soul, went down bawling under the ruins; and before Arblaster understood that anything was wrong, or Pirret could collect his dazzled wits, Dick had run to the door and escaped into the moonlit night. The moon, which now rode in the mid-heavens, and the extreme whiteness of the snow, made the open ground about the harbour bright as day; and young Shelton leaping, with kilted robe, among the lumber, was a conspicuous figure from afar. Tom and Pirret followed him with shouts; from every drinking-shop they were joined by others whom their cries aroused; and presently a whole fleet of sailors was in full pursuit. But Jack ashore was a bad runner, even in the fifteenth century, and Dick, besides, had a start, which he rapidly improved, until, as he drew near the entrance of a narrow lane, he even paused and looked laughingly behind him. Upon the white floor of snow, all the shipmen of Shoreby came clustering in an inky mass, and tailing out rearward in isolated clumps. Every man was shouting or screaming; every man was gesticulating with both arms in air; some one was continually falling; and to complete the picture, when one fell, a dozen would fall upon the top of him. The confused mass of sound which they rolled up as high as to the moon was partly comical and partly terrifying to the fugitive whom they were hunting. In itself, it was impotent, for he made sure no seaman in the port could run him down. But the mere volume of noise, in so far as it must awake all the sleepers in Shoreby and bring all the skulking sentries to the street, did really threaten him with danger in the front. So, spying a dark doorway at a corner, he whipped briskly into it, and let the uncouth hunt go by him, still shouting and gesticulating, and all red with hurry and white with tumbles in the snow. It was a long while, indeed, before this great invasion of the town by the harbour came to an end, and it was long before silence was restored. For long, lost sailors were still to be heard pounding and shouting through the streets in all directions and in every quarter of the town. Quarrels followed, sometimes among themselves, sometimes with the men of the patrols; knives were drawn, blows given and received, and more than one dead body remained behind upon the snow. When, a full hour later, the last seaman returned grumblingly to the harbour side and his particular tavern, it may fairly be questioned if he had ever known what manner of man he was pursuing, but it was absolutely sure that he had now forgotten. By next morning there were many strange stories flying; and a little while after, the legend of the devil's nocturnal visit was an article of faith with all the lads of Shoreby. But the return of the last seaman did not, even yet, set free young Shelton from his cold imprisonment in the doorway. For some time after, there was a great activity of patrols; and special parties came forth to make the round of the place and report to one or other of the great lords, whose slumbers had been thus unusually broken. The night was already well spent before Dick ventured from his hiding-place and came, safe and sound, but aching with cold and bruises, to the door of the Goat and Bagpipes. As the law required, there was neither fire nor candle in the house; but he groped his way into a corner of the icy guest-room, found an end of a blanket, which he hitched around his shoulders, and creeping close to the nearest sleeper, was soon lost in slumber. BOOK V--CROOKBACK CHAPTER I--THE SHRILL TRUMPET Very early the next morning, before the first peep of the day, Dick arose, changed his garments, armed himself once more like a gentleman, and set forth for Lawless's den in the forest. There, it will be remembered, he had left Lord Foxham's papers; and to get these and be back in time for the tryst with the young Duke of Gloucester could only be managed by an early start and the most vigorous walking. The frost was more rigorous than ever; the air windless and dry, and stinging to the nostril. The moon had gone down, but the stars were still bright and numerous, and the reflection from the snow was clear and cheerful. There was no need for a lamp to walk by; nor, in that still but ringing air, the least temptation to delay. Dick had crossed the greater part of the open ground between Shoreby and the forest, and had reached the bottom of the little hill, some hundred yards below the Cross of St. Bride, when, through the stillness of the black morn, there rang forth the note of a trumpet, so shrill, clear, and piercing, that he thought he had never heard the match of it for audibility. It was blown once, and then hurriedly a second time; and then the clash of steel succeeded. At this young Shelton pricked his ears, and drawing his sword, ran forward up the hill. Presently he came in sight of the cross, and was aware of a most fierce encounter raging on the road before it. There were seven or eight assailants, and but one to keep head against them; but so active and dexterous was this one, so desperately did he charge and scatter his opponents, so deftly keep his footing on the ice, that already, before Dick could intervene, he had slain one, wounded another, and kept the whole in check. Still, it was by a miracle that he continued his defence, and at any moment, any accident, the least slip of foot or error of hand, his life would be a forfeit. "Hold ye well, sir! Here is help!" cried Richard; and forgetting that he was alone, and that the cry was somewhat irregular, "To the Arrow! to the Arrow!" he shouted, as he fell upon the rear of the assailants. These were stout fellows also, for they gave not an inch at this surprise, but faced about, and fell with astonishing fury upon Dick. Four against one, the steel flashed about him in the starlight; the sparks flew fiercely; one of the men opposed to him fell--in the stir of the fight he hardly knew why; then he himself was struck across the head, and though the steel cap below his hood protected him, the blow beat him down upon one knee, with a brain whirling like a windmill sail. Meanwhile the man whom he had come to rescue, instead of joining in the conflict, had, on the first sign of intervention, leaped aback and blown again, and yet more urgently and loudly, on that same shrill-voiced trumpet that began the alarm. Next moment, indeed, his foes were on him, and he was once more charging and fleeing, leaping, stabbing, dropping to his knee, and using indifferently sword and dagger, foot and hand, with the same unshaken courage and feverish energy and speed. But that ear-piercing summons had been heard at last. There was a muffled rushing in the snow; and in a good hour for Dick, who saw the sword-points glitter already at his throat, there poured forth out of the wood upon both sides a disorderly torrent of mounted men-at-arms, each cased in iron, and with visor lowered, each bearing his lance in rest, or his sword bared and raised, and each carrying, so to speak, a passenger, in the shape of an archer or page, who leaped one after another from their perches, and had presently doubled the array. The original assailants; seeing themselves outnumbered and surrounded, threw down their arms without a word. "Seize me these fellows!" said the hero of the trumpet; and when his order had been obeyed, he drew near to Dick and looked him in the face. Dick, returning this scrutiny, was surprised to find in one who had displayed such strength, skill and energy, a lad no older than himself--slightly deformed, with one shoulder higher than the other, and of a pale, painful, and distorted countenance. {2} The eyes, however, were very clear and bold. "Sir," said this lad, "ye came in good time for me, and none too early." "My lord," returned Dick, with a faint sense that he was in the presence of a great personage, "ye are yourself so marvellous a good swordsman that I believe ye had managed them single-handed. Howbeit, it was certainly well for me that your men delayed no longer than they did." "How knew ye who I was?" demanded the stranger. "Even now, my lord," Dick answered, "I am ignorant of whom I speak with." "Is it so?" asked the other. "And yet ye threw yourself head first into this unequal battle." "I saw one man valiantly contending against many," replied Dick, "and I had thought myself dishonoured not to bear him aid." A singular sneer played about the young nobleman's mouth as he made answer: "These are very brave words. But to the more essential--are ye Lancaster or York?" "My lord, I make no secret; I am clear for York," Dick answered. "By the mass!" replied the other, "it is well for you." And so saying, he turned towards one of his followers. "Let me see," he continued, in the same sneering and cruel tones--"let me see a clean end of these brave gentlemen. Truss me them up." There were but five survivors of the attacking party. Archers seized them by the arms; they were hurried to the borders of the wood, and each placed below a tree of suitable dimension; the rope was adjusted; an archer, carrying the end of it, hastily clambered overhead; and before a minute was over, and without a word passing upon either hand, the five men were swinging by the neck. "And now," cried the deformed leader, "back to your posts, and when I summon you next, be readier to attend." "My lord duke," said one man, "beseech you, tarry not here alone. Keep but a handful of lances at your hand." "Fellow," said the duke, "I have forborne to chide you for your slowness. Cross me not, therefore. I trust my hand and arm, for all that I be crooked. Ye were backward when the trumpet sounded; and ye are now too forward with your counsels. But it is ever so; last with the lance and first with tongue. Let it be reversed." And with a gesture that was not without a sort of dangerous nobility, he waved them off. The footmen climbed again to their seats behind the men-at-arms, and the whole party moved slowly away and disappeared in twenty different directions, under the cover of the forest. The day was by this time beginning to break, and the stars to fade. The first grey glimmer of dawn shone upon the countenances of the two young men, who now turned once more to face each other. "Here," said the duke, "ye have seen my vengeance, which is, like my blade, both sharp and ready. But I would not have you, for all Christendom, suppose me thankless. You that came to my aid with a good sword and a better courage--unless that ye recoil from my misshapenness--come to my heart." And so saying, the young leader held out his arms for an embrace. In the bottom of his heart Dick already entertained a great terror and some hatred for the man whom he had rescued; but the invitation was so worded that it would not have been merely discourteous, but cruel, to refuse or hesitate; and he hastened to comply. "And now, my lord duke," he said, when he had regained his freedom, "do I suppose aright? Are ye my Lord Duke of Gloucester?" "I am Richard of Gloucester," returned the other. "And you--how call they you?" Dick told him his name, and presented Lord Foxham's signet, which the duke immediately recognised. "Ye come too soon," he said; "but why should I complain? Ye are like me, that was here at watch two hours before the day. But this is the first sally of mine arms; upon this adventure, Master Shelton, shall I make or mar the quality of my renown. There lie mine enemies, under two old, skilled captains--Risingham and Brackley--well posted for strength, I do believe, but yet upon two sides without retreat, enclosed betwixt the sea, the harbour, and the river. Methinks, Shelton, here were a great blow to be stricken, an we could strike it silently and suddenly." "I do think so, indeed," cried Dick, warming. "Have ye my Lord Foxham's notes?" inquired the duke. And then, Dick, having explained how he was without them for the moment, made himself bold to offer information every jot as good, of his own knowledge. "And for mine own part, my lord duke," he added, "an ye had men enough, I would fall on even at this present. For, look ye, at the peep of day the watches of the night are over; but by day they keep neither watch nor ward--only scour the outskirts with horsemen. Now, then, when the night watch is already unarmed, and the rest are at their morning cup--now were the time to break them." "How many do ye count?" asked Gloucester. "They number not two thousand," Dick replied. "I have seven hundred in the woods behind us," said the duke; "seven hundred follow from Kettley, and will be here anon; behind these, and further, are four hundred more; and my Lord Foxham hath five hundred half a day from here, at Holywood. Shall we attend their coming, or fall on?" "My lord," said Dick, "when ye hanged these five poor rogues ye did decide the question. Churls although they were, in these uneasy, times they will be lacked and looked for, and the alarm be given. Therefore, my lord, if ye do count upon the advantage of a surprise, ye have not, in my poor opinion, one whole hour in front of you." "I do think so indeed," returned Crookback. "Well, before an hour, ye shall be in the thick on't, winning spurs. A swift man to Holywood, carrying Lord Foxham's signet; another along the road to speed my laggards! Nay, Shelton, by the rood, it may be done!" Therewith he once more set his trumpet to his lips and blew. This time he was not long kept waiting. In a moment the open space about the cross was filled with horse and foot. Richard of Gloucester took his place upon the steps, and despatched messenger after messenger to hasten the concentration of the seven hundred men that lay hidden in the immediate neighbourhood among the woods; and before a quarter of an hour had passed, all his dispositions being taken, he put himself at their head, and began to move down the hill towards Shoreby. His plan was simple. He was to seize a quarter of the town of Shoreby lying on the right hand of the high road, and make his position good there in the narrow lanes until his reinforcements followed. If Lord Risingham chose to retreat, Richard would follow upon his rear, and take him between two fires; or, if he preferred to hold the town, he would be shut in a trap, there to be gradually overwhelmed by force of numbers. There was but one danger, but that was imminent and great--Gloucester's seven hundred might be rolled up and cut to pieces in the first encounter, and, to avoid this, it was needful to make the surprise of their arrival as complete as possible. The footmen, therefore, were all once more taken up behind the riders, and Dick had the signal honour meted out to him of mounting behind Gloucester himself. For as far as there was any cover the troops moved slowly, and when they came near the end of the trees that lined the highway, stopped to breathe and reconnoitre. The sun was now well up, shining with a frosty brightness out of a yellow halo, and right over against the luminary, Shoreby, a field of snowy roofs and ruddy gables, was rolling up its columns of morning smoke. Gloucester turned round to Dick. "In that poor place," he said, "where people are cooking breakfast, either you shall gain your spurs and I begin a life of mighty honour and glory in the world's eye, or both of us, as I conceive it, shall fall dead and be unheard of. Two Richards are we. Well, then, Richard Shelton, they shall be heard about, these two! Their swords shall not ring more loudly on men's helmets than their names shall ring in people's ears." Dick was astonished at so great a hunger after fame, expressed with so great vehemence of voice and language, and he answered very sensibly and quietly, that, for his part, he promised he would do his duty, and doubted not of victory if everyone did the like. By this time the horses were well breathed, and the leader holding up his sword and giving rein, the whole troop of chargers broke into the gallop and thundered, with their double load of fighting men, down the remainder of the hill and across the snow-covered plain that still divided them from Shoreby. CHAPTER II--THE BATTLE OF SHOREBY The whole distance to be crossed was not above a quarter of a mile. But they had no sooner debauched beyond the cover of the trees than they were aware of people fleeing and screaming in the snowy meadows upon either hand. Almost at the same moment a great rumour began to arise, and spread and grow continually louder in the town; and they were not yet halfway to the nearest house before the bells began to ring backward from the steeple. The young duke ground his teeth together. By these so early signals of alarm he feared to find his enemies prepared; and if he failed to gain a footing in the town, he knew that his small party would soon be broken and exterminated in the open. In the town, however, the Lancastrians were far from being in so good a posture. It was as Dick had said. The night-guard had already doffed their harness; the rest were still hanging--unlatched, unbraced, all unprepared for battle--about their quarters; and in the whole of Shoreby there were not, perhaps, fifty men full armed, or fifty chargers ready to be mounted. The beating of the bells, the terrifying summons of men who ran about the streets crying and beating upon the doors, aroused in an incredibly short space at least two score out of that half hundred. These got speedily to horse, and, the alarm still flying wild and contrary, galloped in different directions. Thus it befell that, when Richard of Gloucester reached the first house of Shoreby, he was met in the mouth of the street by a mere handful of lances, whom he swept before his onset as the storm chases the bark. A hundred paces into the town, Dick Shelton touched the duke's arm; the duke, in answer, gathered his reins, put the shrill trumpet to his mouth, and blowing a concerted point, turned to the right hand out of the direct advance. Swerving like a single rider, his whole command turned after him, and, still at the full gallop of the chargers, swept up the narrow bye-street. Only the last score of riders drew rein and faced about in the entrance; the footmen, whom they carried behind them, leapt at the same instant to the earth, and began, some to bend their bows, and others to break into and secure the houses upon either hand. Surprised at this sudden change of direction, and daunted by the firm front of the rear-guard, the few Lancastrians, after a momentary consultation, turned and rode farther into town to seek for reinforcements. The quarter of the town upon which, by the advice of Dick, Richard of Gloucester had now seized, consisted of five small streets of poor and ill-inhabited houses, occupying a very gentle eminence, and lying open towards the back. The five streets being each secured by a good guard, the reserve would thus occupy the centre, out of shot, and yet ready to carry aid wherever it was needed. Such was the poorness of the neighbourhood that none of the Lancastrian lords, and but few of their retainers, had been lodged therein; and the inhabitants, with one accord, deserted their houses and fled, squalling, along the streets or over garden walls. In the centre, where the five ways all met, a somewhat ill-favoured alehouse displayed the sign of the Chequers; and here the Duke of Gloucester chose his headquarters for the day. To Dick he assigned the guard of one of the five streets. "Go," he said, "win your spurs. Win glory for me: one Richard for another. I tell you, if I rise, ye shall rise by the same ladder. Go," he added, shaking him by the hand. But, as soon as Dick was gone, he turned to a little shabby archer at his elbow. "Go, Dutton, and that right speedily," he added. "Follow that lad. If ye find him faithful, ye answer for his safety, a head for a head. Woe unto you, if ye return without him! But if he be faithless--or, for one instant, ye misdoubt him--stab him from behind." In the meanwhile Dick hastened to secure his post. The street he had to guard was very narrow, and closely lined with houses, which projected and overhung the roadway; but narrow and dark as it was, since it opened upon the market-place of the town, the main issue of the battle would probably fall to be decided on that spot. The market-place was full of townspeople fleeing in disorder; but there was as yet no sign of any foeman ready to attack, and Dick judged he had some time before him to make ready his defence. The two houses at the end stood deserted, with open doors, as the inhabitants had left them in their flight, and from these he had the furniture hastily tossed forth and piled into a barrier in the entry of the lane. A hundred men were placed at his disposal, and of these he threw the more part into the houses, where they might lie in shelter and deliver their arrows from the windows. With the rest, under his own immediate eye, he lined the barricade. Meanwhile the utmost uproar and confusion had continued to prevail throughout the town; and what with the hurried clashing of bells, the sounding of trumpets, the swift movement of bodies of horse, the cries of the commanders, and the shrieks of women, the noise was almost deafening to the ear. Presently, little by little, the tumult began to subside; and soon after, files of men in armour and bodies of archers began to assemble and form in line of battle in the market-place. A large portion of this body were in murrey and blue, and in the mounted knight who ordered their array Dick recognised Sir Daniel Brackley. Then there befell a long pause, which was followed by the almost simultaneous sounding of four trumpets from four different quarters of the town. A fifth rang in answer from the market-place, and at the same moment the files began to move, and a shower of arrows rattled about the barricade, and sounded like blows upon the walls of the two flanking houses. The attack had begun, by a common signal, on all the five issues of the quarter. Gloucester was beleaguered upon every side; and Dick judged, if he would make good his post, he must rely entirely on the hundred men of his command. Seven volleys of arrows followed one upon the other, and in the very thick of the discharges Dick was touched from behind upon the arm, and found a page holding out to him a leathern jack, strengthened with bright plates of mail. "It is from my Lord of Gloucester," said the page. "He hath observed, Sir Richard, that ye went unarmed." Dick, with a glow at his heart at being so addressed, got to his feet and, with the assistance of the page, donned the defensive coat. Even as he did so, two arrows rattled harmlessly upon the plates, and a third struck down the page, mortally wounded, at his feet. Meantime the whole body of the enemy had been steadily drawing nearer across the market-place; and by this time were so close at hand that Dick gave the order to return their shot. Immediately, from behind the barrier and from the windows of the houses, a counterblast of arrows sped, carrying death. But the Lancastrians, as if they had but waited for a signal, shouted loudly in answer; and began to close at a run upon the barrier, the horsemen still hanging back, with visors lowered. Then followed an obstinate and deadly struggle, hand to hand. The assailants, wielding their falchions with one hand, strove with the other to drag down the structure of the barricade. On the other side, the parts were reversed; and the defenders exposed themselves like madmen to protect their rampart. So for some minutes the contest raged almost in silence, friend and foe falling one upon another. But it is always the easier to destroy; and when a single note upon the tucket recalled the attacking party from this desperate service, much of the barricade had been removed piecemeal, and the whole fabric had sunk to half its height, and tottered to a general fall. And now the footmen in the market-place fell back, at a run, on every side. The horsemen, who had been standing in a line two deep, wheeled suddenly, and made their flank into their front; and as swift as a striking adder, the long, steel-clad column was launched upon the ruinous barricade. Of the first two horsemen, one fell, rider and steed, and was ridden down by his companions. The second leaped clean upon the summit of the rampart, transpiercing an archer with his lance. Almost in the same instant he was dragged from the saddle and his horse despatched. And then the full weight and impetus of the charge burst upon and scattered the defenders. The men-at-arms, surmounting their fallen comrades, and carried onward by the fury of their onslaught, dashed through Dick's broken line and poured thundering up the lane beyond, as a stream bestrides and pours across a broken dam. Yet was the fight not over. Still, in the narrow jaws of the entrance, Dick and a few survivors plied their bills like woodmen; and already, across the width of the passage, there had been formed a second, a higher, and a more effectual rampart of fallen men and disembowelled horses, lashing in the agonies of death. Baffled by this fresh obstacle, the remainder of the cavalry fell back; and as, at the sight of this movement, the flight of arrows redoubled from the casements of the houses, their retreat had, for a moment, almost degenerated into flight. Almost at the same time, those who had crossed the barricade and charged farther up the street, being met before the door of the Chequers by the formidable hunchback and the whole reserve of the Yorkists, began to come scattering backward, in the excess of disarray and terror. Dick and his fellows faced about, fresh men poured out of the houses; a cruel blast of arrows met the fugitives full in the face, while Gloucester was already riding down their rear; in the inside of a minute and a half there was no living Lancastrian in the street. Then, and not till then, did Dick hold up his reeking blade and give the word to cheer. Meanwhile Gloucester dismounted from his horse and came forward to inspect the post. His face was as pale as linen; but his eyes shone in his head like some strange jewel, and his voice, when he spoke, was hoarse and broken with the exultation of battle and success. He looked at the rampart, which neither friend nor foe could now approach without precaution, so fiercely did the horses struggle in the throes of death, and at the sight of that great carnage he smiled upon one side. "Despatch these horses," he said; "they keep you from your vantage. Richard Shelton," he added, "ye have pleased me. Kneel." The Lancastrians had already resumed their archery, and the shafts fell thick in the mouth of the street; but the duke, minding them not at all, deliberately drew his sword and dubbed Richard a knight upon the spot. "And now, Sir Richard," he continued, "if that ye see Lord Risingham, send me an express upon the instant. Were it your last man, let me hear of it incontinently. I had rather venture the post than lose my stroke at him. For mark me, all of ye," he added, raising his voice, "if Earl Risingham fall by another hand than mine, I shall count this victory a defeat." "My lord duke," said one of his attendants, "is your grace not weary of exposing his dear life unneedfully? Why tarry we here?" "Catesby," returned the duke, "here is the battle, not elsewhere. The rest are but feigned onslaughts. Here must we vanquish. And for the exposure--if ye were an ugly hunchback, and the children gecked at you upon the street, ye would count your body cheaper, and an hour of glory worth a life. Howbeit, if ye will, let us ride on and visit the other posts. Sir Richard here, my namesake, he shall still hold this entry, where he wadeth to the ankles in hot blood. Him can we trust. But mark it, Sir Richard, ye are not yet done. The worst is yet to ward. Sleep not." He came right up to young Shelton, looking him hard in the eyes, and taking his hand in both of his, gave it so extreme a squeeze that the blood had nearly spurted. Dick quailed before his eyes. The insane excitement, the courage, and the cruelty that he read therein filled him with dismay about the future. This young duke's was indeed a gallant spirit, to ride foremost in the ranks of war; but after the battle, in the days of peace and in the circle of his trusted friends, that mind, it was to be dreaded, would continue to bring forth the fruits of death. CHAPTER III--THE BATTLE OF SHOREBY (Concluded) Dick, once more left to his own counsels, began to look about him. The arrow-shot had somewhat slackened. On all sides the enemy were falling back; and the greater part of the market-place was now left empty, the snow here trampled into orange mud, there splashed with gore, scattered all over with dead men and horses, and bristling thick with feathered arrows. On his own side the loss had been cruel. The jaws of the little street and the ruins of the barricade were heaped with the dead and dying; and out of the hundred men with whom he had begun the battle, there were not seventy left who could still stand to arms. At the same time, the day was passing. The first reinforcements might be looked for to arrive at any moment; and the Lancastrians, already shaken by the result of their desperate but unsuccessful onslaught, were in an ill temper to support a fresh invader. There was a dial in the wall of one of the two flanking houses; and this, in the frosty winter sunshine, indicated ten of the forenoon. Dick turned to the man who was at his elbow, a little insignificant archer, binding a cut in his arm. "It was well fought," he said, "and, by my sooth, they will not charge us twice." "Sir," said the little archer, "ye have fought right well for York, and better for yourself. Never hath man in so brief space prevailed so greatly on the duke's affections. That he should have entrusted such a post to one he knew not is a marvel. But look to your head, Sir Richard! If ye be vanquished--ay, if ye give way one foot's breadth--axe or cord shall punish it; and I am set if ye do aught doubtful, I will tell you honestly, here to stab you from behind." Dick looked at the little man in amaze. "You!" he cried. "And from behind!" "It is right so," returned the archer; "and because I like not the affair I tell it you. Ye must make the post good, Sir Richard, at your peril. O, our Crookback is a bold blade and a good warrior; but, whether in cold blood or in hot, he will have all things done exact to his commandment. If any fail or hinder, they shall die the death." "Now, by the saints!" cried Richard, "is this so? And will men follow such a leader?" "Nay, they follow him gleefully," replied the other; "for if he be exact to punish, he is most open-handed to reward. And if he spare not the blood and sweat of others, he is ever liberal of his own, still in the first front of battle, still the last to sleep. He will go far, will Crookback Dick o' Gloucester!" The young knight, if he had before been brave and vigilant, was now all the more inclined to watchfulness and courage. His sudden favour, he began to perceive, had brought perils in its train. And he turned from the archer, and once more scanned anxiously the market-place. It lay empty as before. "I like not this quietude," he said. "Doubtless they prepare us some surprise." And, as if in answer to his remark, the archers began once more to advance against the barricade, and the arrows to fall thick. But there was something hesitating in the attack. They came not on roundly, but seemed rather to await a further signal. Dick looked uneasily about him, spying for a hidden danger. And sure enough, about half way up the little street, a door was suddenly opened from within, and the house continued, for some seconds, and both by door and window, to disgorge a torrent of Lancastrian archers. These, as they leaped down, hurriedly stood to their ranks, bent their bows, and proceeded to pour upon Dick's rear a flight of arrows. At the same time, the assailants in the market-place redoubled their shot, and began to close in stoutly upon the barricade. Dick called down his whole command out of the houses, and facing them both ways, and encouraging their valour both by word and gesture, returned as best he could the double shower of shafts that fell about his post. Meanwhile house after house was opened in the street, and the Lancastrians continued to pour out of the doors and leap down from the windows, shouting victory, until the number of enemies upon Dick's rear was almost equal to the number in his face. It was plain that he could hold the post no longer; what was worse, even if he could have held it, it had now become useless; and the whole Yorkist army lay in a posture of helplessness upon the brink of a complete disaster. The men behind him formed the vital flaw in the general defence; and it was upon these that Dick turned, charging at the head of his men. So vigorous was the attack, that the Lancastrian archers gave ground and staggered, and, at last, breaking their ranks, began to crowd back into the houses from which they had so recently and so vaingloriously sallied. Meanwhile the men from the market-place had swarmed across the undefended barricade, and fell on hotly upon the other side; and Dick must once again face about, and proceed to drive them back. Once again the spirit of his men prevailed; they cleared the street in a triumphant style, but even as they did so the others issued again out of the houses, and took them, a third time, upon the rear. The Yorkists began to be scattered; several times Dick found himself alone among his foes and plying his bright sword for life; several times he was conscious of a hurt. And meanwhile the fight swayed to and fro in the street without determinate result. Suddenly Dick was aware of a great trumpeting about the outskirts of the town. The war-cry of York began to be rolled up to heaven, as by many and triumphant voices. And at the same time the men in front of him began to give ground rapidly, streaming out of the street and back upon the market-place. Some one gave the word to fly. Trumpets were blown distractedly, some for a rally, some to charge. It was plain that a great blow had been struck, and the Lancastrians were thrown, at least for the moment, into full disorder, and some degree of panic. And then, like a theatre trick, there followed the last act of Shoreby Battle. The men in front of Richard turned tail, like a dog that has been whistled home, and fled like the wind. At the same moment there came through the market-place a storm of horsemen, fleeing and pursuing, the Lancastrians turning back to strike with the sword, the Yorkists riding them down at the point of the lance. Conspicuous in the mellay, Dick beheld the Crookback. He was already giving a foretaste of that furious valour and skill to cut his way across the ranks of war, which, years afterwards upon the field of Bosworth, and when he was stained with crimes, almost sufficed to change the fortunes of the day and the destiny of the English throne. Evading, striking, riding down, he so forced and so manoeuvred his strong horse, so aptly defended himself, and so liberally scattered death to his opponents, that he was now far ahead of the foremost of his knights, hewing his way, with the truncheon of a bloody sword, to where Lord Risingham was rallying the bravest. A moment more and they had met; the tall, splendid, and famous warrior against the deformed and sickly boy. Yet Shelton had never a doubt of the result; and when the fight next opened for a moment, the figure of the earl had disappeared; but still, in the first of the danger, Crookback Dick was launching his big horse and plying the truncheon of his sword. Thus, by Shelton's courage in holding the mouth of the street against the first attack, and by the opportune arrival of his seven hundred reinforcements, the lad, who was afterwards to be handed down to the execration of posterity under the name of Richard III., had won his first considerable fight. CHAPTER IV--THE SACK OF SHOREBY There was not a foe left within striking distance; and Dick, as he looked ruefully about him on the remainder of his gallant force, began to count the cost of victory. He was himself, now that the danger was ended, so stiff and sore, so bruised and cut and broken, and, above all, so utterly exhausted by his desperate and unremitting labours in the fight, that he seemed incapable of any fresh exertion. But this was not yet the hour for repose. Shoreby had been taken by assault; and though an open town, and not in any manner to be charged with the resistance, it was plain that these rough fighters would be not less rough now that the fight was over, and that the more horrid part of war would fall to be enacted. Richard of Gloucester was not the captain to protect the citizens from his infuriated soldiery; and even if he had the will, it might be questioned if he had the power. It was, therefore, Dick's business to find and to protect Joanna; and with that end he looked about him at the faces of his men. The three or four who seemed likeliest to be obedient and to keep sober he drew aside; and promising them a rich reward and a special recommendation to the duke, led them across the market-place, now empty of horsemen, and into the streets upon the further side. Every here and there small combats of from two to a dozen still raged upon the open street; here and there a house was being besieged, the defenders throwing out stools and tables on the heads of the assailants. The snow was strewn with arms and corpses; but except for these partial combats the streets were deserted, and the houses, some standing open, and some shuttered and barricaded, had for the most part ceased to give out smoke. Dick, threading the skirts of these skirmishers, led his followers briskly in the direction of the abbey church; but when he came the length of the main street, a cry of horror broke from his lips. Sir Daniel's great house had been carried by assault. The gates hung in splinters from the hinges, and a double throng kept pouring in and out through the entrance, seeking and carrying booty. Meanwhile, in the upper storeys, some resistance was still being offered to the pillagers; for just as Dick came within eyeshot of the building, a casement was burst open from within, and a poor wretch in murrey and blue, screaming and resisting, was forced through the embrasure and tossed into the street below. The most sickening apprehension fell upon Dick. He ran forward like one possessed, forced his way into the house among the foremost, and mounted without pause to the chamber on the third floor where he had last parted from Joanna. It was a mere wreck; the furniture had been overthrown, the cupboards broken open, and in one place a trailing corner of the arras lay smouldering on the embers of the fire. Dick, almost without thinking, trod out the incipient conflagration, and then stood bewildered. Sir Daniel, Sir Oliver, Joanna, all were gone; but whether butchered in the rout or safe escaped from Shoreby, who should say? He caught a passing archer by the tabard. "Fellow," he asked, "were ye here when this house was taken?" "Let be," said the archer. "A murrain! let be, or I strike." "Hark ye," returned Richard, "two can play at that. Stand and be plain." But the man, flushed with drink and battle, struck Dick upon the shoulder with one hand, while with the other he twitched away his garment. Thereupon the full wrath of the young leader burst from his control. He seized the fellow in his strong embrace, and crushed him on the plates of his mailed bosom like a child; then, holding him at arm's length, he bid him speak as he valued life. "I pray you mercy!" gasped the archer. "An I had thought ye were so angry I would 'a' been charier of crossing you. I was here indeed." "Know ye Sir Daniel?" pursued Dick. "Well do I know him," returned the man. "Was he in the mansion?" "Ay, sir, he was," answered the archer; "but even as we entered by the yard gate he rode forth by the garden." "Alone?" cried Dick. "He may 'a' had a score of lances with him," said the man. "Lances! No women, then?" asked Shelton. "Troth, I saw not," said the archer. "But there were none in the house, if that be your quest." "I thank you," said Dick. "Here is a piece for your pains." But groping in his wallet, Dick found nothing. "Inquire for me to-morrow," he added--"Richard Shelt--Sir Richard Shelton," he corrected, "and I will see you handsomely rewarded." And then an idea struck Dick. He hastily descended to the courtyard, ran with all his might across the garden, and came to the great door of the church. It stood wide open; within, every corner of the pavement was crowded with fugitive burghers, surrounded by their families and laden with the most precious of their possessions, while, at the high altar, priests in full canonicals were imploring the mercy of God. Even as Dick entered, the loud chorus began to thunder in the vaulted roofs. He hurried through the groups of refugees, and came to the door of the stair that led into the steeple. And here a tall churchman stepped before him and arrested his advance. "Whither, my son?" he asked, severely. "My father," answered Dick, "I am here upon an errand of expedition. Stay me not. I command here for my Lord of Gloucester." "For my Lord of Gloucester?" repeated the priest. "Hath, then, the battle gone so sore?" "The battle, father, is at an end, Lancaster clean sped, my Lord of Risingham--Heaven rest him!--left upon the field. And now, with your good leave, I follow mine affairs." And thrusting on one side the priest, who seemed stupefied at the news, Dick pushed open the door and rattled up the stairs four at a bound, and without pause or stumble, till he stepped upon the open platform at the top. Shoreby Church tower not only commanded the town, as in a map, but looked far, on both sides, over sea and land. It was now near upon noon; the day exceeding bright, the snow dazzling. And as Dick looked around him, he could measure the consequences of the battle. A confused, growling uproar reached him from the streets, and now and then, but very rarely, the clash of steel. Not a ship, not so much as a skiff remained in harbour; but the sea was dotted with sails and row-boats laden with fugitives. On shore, too, the surface of the snowy meadows was broken up with bands of horsemen, some cutting their way towards the borders of the forest, others, who were doubtless of the Yorkist side, stoutly interposing and beating them back upon the town. Over all the open ground there lay a prodigious quantity of fallen men and horses, clearly defined upon the snow. To complete the picture, those of the foot soldiers as had not found place upon a ship still kept up an archery combat on the borders of the port, and from the cover of the shoreside taverns. In that quarter, also, one or two houses had been fired, and the smoke towered high in the frosty sunlight, and blew off to sea in voluminous folds. Already close upon the margin of the woods, and somewhat in the line of Holywood, one particular clump of fleeing horsemen riveted the attention of the young watcher on the tower. It was fairly numerous; in no other quarter of the field did so many Lancastrians still hold together; thus they had left a wide, discoloured wake upon the snow, and Dick was able to trace them step by step from where they had left the town. While Dick stood watching them, they had gained, unopposed, the first fringe of the leafless forest, and, turning a little from their direction, the sun fell for a moment full on their array, as it was relieved against the dusky wood. "Murrey and blue!" cried Dick. "I swear it--murrey and blue!" The next moment he was descending the stairway. It was now his business to seek out the Duke of Gloucester, who alone, in the disorder of the forces, might be able to supply him with a sufficiency of men. The fighting in the main town was now practically at an end; and as Dick ran hither and thither, seeking the commander, the streets were thick with wandering soldiers, some laden with more booty than they could well stagger under, others shouting drunk. None of them, when questioned, had the least notion of the duke's whereabouts; and, at last, it was by sheer good fortune that Dick found him, where he sat in the saddle directing operations to dislodge the archers from the harbour side. "Sir Richard Shelton, ye are well found," he said. "I owe you one thing that I value little, my life; and one that I can never pay you for, this victory. Catesby, if I had ten such captains as Sir Richard, I would march forthright on London. But now, sir, claim your reward." "Freely, my lord," said Dick, "freely and loudly. One hath escaped to whom I owe some grudges, and taken with him one whom I owe love and service. Give me, then, fifty lances, that I may pursue; and for any obligation that your graciousness is pleased to allow, it shall be clean discharged." "How call ye him?" inquired the duke. "Sir Daniel Brackley," answered Richard. "Out upon him, double-face!" cried Gloucester. "Here is no reward, Sir Richard; here is fresh service offered, and, if that ye bring his head to me, a fresh debt upon my conscience. Catesby, get him these lances; and you, sir, bethink ye, in the meanwhile, what pleasure, honour, or profit it shall be mine to give you." Just then the Yorkist skirmishers carried one of the shoreside taverns, swarming in upon it on three sides, and driving out or taking its defenders. Crookback Dick was pleased to cheer the exploit, and pushing his horse a little nearer, called to see the prisoners. There were four or five of them--two men of my Lord Shoreby's and one of Lord Risingham's among the number, and last, but in Dick's eyes not least, a tall, shambling, grizzled old shipman, between drunk and sober, and with a dog whimpering and jumping at his heels. The young duke passed them for a moment under a severe review. "Good," he said. "Hang them." And he turned the other way to watch the progress of the fight. "My lord," said Dick, "so please you, I have found my reward. Grant me the life and liberty of yon old shipman." Gloucester turned and looked the speaker in the face. "Sir Richard," he said, "I make not war with peacock's feathers, but steel shafts. Those that are mine enemies I slay, and that without excuse or favour. For, bethink ye, in this realm of England, that is so torn in pieces, there is not a man of mine but hath a brother or a friend upon the other party. If, then, I did begin to grant these pardons, I might sheathe my sword." "It may be so, my lord; and yet I will be overbold, and at the risk of your disfavour, recall your lordship's promise," replied Dick. Richard of Gloucester flushed. "Mark it right well," he said, harshly. "I love not mercy, nor yet mercymongers. Ye have this day laid the foundations of high fortune. If ye oppose to me my word, which I have plighted, I will yield. But, by the glory of heaven, there your favour dies! "Mine is the loss," said Dick. "Give him his sailor," said the duke; and wheeling his horse, he turned his back upon young Shelton. Dick was nor glad nor sorry. He had seen too much of the young duke to set great store on his affection; and the origin and growth of his own favour had been too flimsy and too rapid to inspire much confidence. One thing alone he feared--that the vindictive leader might revoke the offer of the lances. But here he did justice neither to Gloucester's honour (such as it was) nor, above all, to his decision. If he had once judged Dick to be the right man to pursue Sir Daniel, he was not one to change; and he soon proved it by shouting after Catesby to be speedy, for the paladin was waiting. In the meanwhile, Dick turned to the old shipman, who had seemed equally indifferent to his condemnation and to his subsequent release. "Arblaster," said Dick, "I have done you ill; but now, by the rood, I think I have cleared the score." But the old skipper only looked upon him dully and held his peace. "Come," continued Dick, "a life is a life, old shrew, and it is more than ships or liquor. Say ye forgive me; for if your life be worth nothing to you, it hath cost me the beginnings of my fortune. Come, I have paid for it dearly; be not so churlish." "An I had had my ship," said Arblaster, "I would 'a' been forth and safe on the high seas--I and my man Tom. But ye took my ship, gossip, and I'm a beggar; and for my man Tom, a knave fellow in russet shot him down. 'Murrain!' quoth he, and spake never again. 'Murrain' was the last of his words, and the poor spirit of him passed. 'A will never sail no more, will my Tom.'" Dick was seized with unavailing penitence and pity; he sought to take the skipper's hand, but Arblaster avoided his touch. "Nay," said he, "let be. Y' have played the devil with me, and let that content you." The words died in Richard's throat. He saw, through tears, the poor old man, bemused with liquor and sorrow, go shambling away, with bowed head, across the snow, and the unnoticed dog whimpering at his heels, and for the first time began to understand the desperate game that we play in life; and how a thing once done is not to be changed or remedied, by any penitence. But there was no time left to him for vain regret. Catesby had now collected the horsemen, and riding up to Dick he dismounted, and offered him his own horse. "This morning," he said, "I was somewhat jealous of your favour; it hath not been of a long growth; and now, Sir Richard, it is with a very good heart that I offer you this horse--to ride away with." "Suffer me yet a moment," replied Dick. "This favour of mine--whereupon was it founded?" "Upon your name," answered Catesby. "It is my lord's chief superstition. Were my name Richard, I should be an earl to-morrow." "Well, sir, I thank you," returned Dick; "and since I am little likely to follow these great fortunes, I will even say farewell. I will not pretend I was displeased to think myself upon the road to fortune; but I will not pretend, neither, that I am over-sorry to be done with it. Command and riches, they are brave things, to be sure; but a word in your ear--yon duke of yours, he is a fearsome lad." Catesby laughed. "Nay," said he, "of a verity he that rides with Crooked Dick will ride deep. Well, God keep us all from evil! Speed ye well." Thereupon Dick put himself at the head of his men, and giving the word of command, rode off. He made straight across the town, following what he supposed to be the route of Sir Daniel, and spying around for any signs that might decide if he were right. The streets were strewn with the dead and the wounded, whose fate, in the bitter frost, was far the more pitiable. Gangs of the victors went from house to house, pillaging and stabbing, and sometimes singing together as they went. From different quarters, as he rode on, the sounds of violence and outrage came to young Shelton's ears; now the blows of the sledge-hammer on some barricaded door, and now the miserable shrieks of women. Dick's heart had just been awakened. He had just seen the cruel consequences of his own behaviour; and the thought of the sum of misery that was now acting in the whole of Shoreby filled him with despair. At length he reached the outskirts, and there, sure enough, he saw straight before him the same broad, beaten track across the snow that he had marked from the summit of the church. Here, then, he went the faster on; but still, as he rode, he kept a bright eye upon the fallen men and horses that lay beside the track. Many of these, he was relieved to see, wore Sir Daniel's colours, and the faces of some, who lay upon their back, he even recognised. About half-way between the town and the forest, those whom he was following had plainly been assailed by archers; for the corpses lay pretty closely scattered, each pierced by an arrow. And here Dick spied among the rest the body of a very young lad, whose face was somehow hauntingly familiar to him. He halted his troop, dismounted, and raised the lad's head. As he did so, the hood fell back, and a profusion of long brown hair unrolled itself. At the same time the eyes opened. "Ah! lion driver!" said a feeble voice. "She is farther on. Ride--ride fast!" And then the poor young lady fainted once again. One of Dick's men carried a flask of some strong cordial, and with this Dick succeeded in reviving consciousness. Then he took Joanna's friend upon his saddlebow, and once more pushed toward the forest. "Why do ye take me?" said the girl. "Ye but delay your speed." "Nay, Mistress Risingham," replied Dick. "Shoreby is full of blood and drunkenness and riot. Here ye are safe; content ye." "I will not be beholden to any of your faction," she cried; "set me down." "Madam, ye know not what ye say," returned Dick. "Y' are hurt"-- "I am not," she said. "It was my horse was slain." "It matters not one jot," replied Richard. "Ye are here in the midst of open snow, and compassed about with enemies. Whether ye will or not, I carry you with me. Glad am I to have the occasion; for thus shall I repay some portion of our debt." For a little while she was silent. Then, very suddenly, she asked: "My uncle?" "My Lord Risingham?" returned Dick. "I would I had good news to give you, madam; but I have none. I saw him once in the battle, and once only. Let us hope the best." CHAPTER V--NIGHT IN THE WOODS: ALICIA RISINGHAM It was almost certain that Sir Daniel had made for the Moat House; but, considering the heavy snow, the lateness of the hour, and the necessity under which he would lie of avoiding the few roads and striking across the wood, it was equally certain that he could not hope to reach it ere the morrow. There were two courses open to Dick; either to continue to follow in the knight's trail, and, if he were able, to fall upon him that very night in camp, or to strike out a path of his own, and seek to place himself between Sir Daniel and his destination. Either scheme was open to serious objection, and Dick, who feared to expose Joanna to the hazards of a fight, had not yet decided between them when he reached the borders of the wood. At this point Sir Daniel had turned a little to his left, and then plunged straight under a grove of very lofty timber. His party had then formed to a narrower front, in order to pass between the trees, and the track was trod proportionally deeper in the snow. The eye followed it under the leafless tracery of the oaks, running direct and narrow; the trees stood over it, with knotty joints and the great, uplifted forest of their boughs; there was no sound, whether of man or beast--not so much as the stirring of a robin; and over the field of snow the winter sun lay golden among netted shadows. "How say ye," asked Dick of one of the men, "to follow straight on, or strike across for Tunstall?" "Sir Richard," replied the man-at-arms, "I would follow the line until they scatter." "Ye are, doubtless, right," returned Dick; "but we came right hastily upon the errand, even as the time commanded. Here are no houses, neither for food nor shelter, and by the morrow's dawn we shall know both cold fingers and an empty belly. How say ye, lads? Will ye stand a pinch for expedition's sake, or shall we turn by Holywood and sup with Mother Church? The case being somewhat doubtful, I will drive no man; yet if ye would suffer me to lead you, ye would choose the first." The men answered, almost with one voice, that they would follow Sir Richard where he would. And Dick, setting spur to his horse, began once more to go forward. The snow in the trail had been trodden very hard, and the pursuers had thus a great advantage over the pursued. They pushed on, indeed, at a round trot, two hundred hoofs beating alternately on the dull pavement of the snow, and the jingle of weapons and the snorting of horses raising a warlike noise along the arches of the silent wood. Presently, the wide slot of the pursued came out upon the high road from Holywood; it was there, for a moment, indistinguishable; and, where it once more plunged into the unbeaten snow upon the farther side, Dick was surprised to see it narrower and lighter trod. Plainly, profiting by the road, Sir Daniel had begun already to scatter his command. At all hazards, one chance being equal to another, Dick continued to pursue the straight trail; and that, after an hour's riding, in which it led into the very depths of the forest, suddenly split, like a bursting shell, into two dozen others, leading to every point of the compass. Dick drew bridle in despair. The short winter's day was near an end; the sun, a dull red orange, shorn of rays, swam low among the leafless thickets; the shadows were a mile long upon the snow; the frost bit cruelly at the finger-nails; and the breath and steam of the horses mounted in a cloud. "Well, we are outwitted," Dick confessed. "Strike we for Holywood, after all. It is still nearer us than Tunstall--or should be by the station of the sun." So they wheeled to their left, turning their backs on the red shield of sun, and made across country for the abbey. But now times were changed with them; they could no longer spank forth briskly on a path beaten firm by the passage of their foes, and for a goal to which that path itself conducted them. Now they must plough at a dull pace through the encumbering snow, continually pausing to decide their course, continually floundering in drifts. The sun soon left them; the glow of the west decayed; and presently they were wandering in a shadow of blackness, under frosty stars. Presently, indeed, the moon would clear the hilltops, and they might resume their march. But till then, every random step might carry them wider of their march. There was nothing for it but to camp and wait. Sentries were posted; a spot of ground was cleared of snow, and, after some failures, a good fire blazed in the midst. The men-at-arms sat close about this forest hearth, sharing such provisions as they had, and passing about the flask; and Dick, having collected the most delicate of the rough and scanty fare, brought it to Lord Risingham's niece, where she sat apart from the soldiery against a tree. She sat upon one horse-cloth, wrapped in another, and stared straight before her at the firelit scene. At the offer of food she started, like one wakened from a dream, and then silently refused. "Madam," said Dick, "let me beseech you, punish me not so cruelly. Wherein I have offended you, I know not; I have, indeed, carried you away, but with a friendly violence; I have, indeed, exposed you to the inclemency of night, but the hurry that lies upon me hath for its end the preservation of another, who is no less frail and no less unfriended than yourself. At least, madam, punish not yourself; and eat, if not for hunger, then for strength." "I will eat nothing at the hands that slew my kinsman," she replied. "Dear madam," Dick cried, "I swear to you upon the rood I touched him not." "Swear to me that he still lives," she returned. "I will not palter with you," answered Dick. "Pity bids me to wound you. In my heart I do believe him dead." "And ye ask me to eat!" she cried. "Ay, and they call you 'sir!' Y' have won your spurs by my good kinsman's murder. And had I not been fool and traitor both, and saved you in your enemy's house, ye should have died the death, and he--he that was worth twelve of you--were living." "I did but my man's best, even as your kinsman did upon the other party," answered Dick. "Were he still living--as I vow to Heaven I wish it!--he would praise, not blame me." "Sir Daniel hath told me," she replied. "He marked you at the barricade. Upon you, he saith, their party foundered; it was you that won the battle. Well, then, it was you that killed my good Lord Risingham, as sure as though ye had strangled him. And ye would have me eat with you--and your hands not washed from killing? But Sir Daniel hath sworn your downfall. He 'tis that will avenge me!" The unfortunate Dick was plunged in gloom. Old Arblaster returned upon his mind, and he groaned aloud. "Do ye hold me so guilty?" he said; "you that defended me--you that are Joanna's friend?" "What made ye in the battle?" she retorted. "Y' are of no party; y' are but a lad--but legs and body, without government of wit or counsel! Wherefore did ye fight? For the love of hurt, pardy!" "Nay," cried Dick, "I know not. But as the realm of England goes, if that a poor gentleman fight not upon the one side, perforce he must fight upon the other. He may not stand alone; 'tis not in nature." "They that have no judgment should not draw the sword," replied the young lady. "Ye that fight but for a hazard, what are ye but a butcher? War is but noble by the cause, and y' have disgraced it." "Madam," said the miserable Dick, "I do partly see mine error. I have made too much haste; I have been busy before my time. Already I stole a ship--thinking, I do swear it, to do well--and thereby brought about the death of many innocent, and the grief and ruin of a poor old man whose face this very day hath stabbed me like a dagger. And for this morning, I did but design to do myself credit, and get fame to marry with, and, behold! I have brought about the death of your dear kinsman that was good to me. And what besides, I know not. For, alas! I may have set York upon the throne, and that may be the worser cause, and may do hurt to England. O, madam, I do see my sin. I am unfit for life. I will, for penance sake and to avoid worse evil, once I have finished this adventure, get me to a cloister. I will forswear Joanna and the trade of arms. I will be a friar, and pray for your good kinsman's spirit all my days." It appeared to Dick, in this extremity of his humiliation and repentance, that the young lady had laughed. Raising his countenance, he found her looking down upon him, in the fire-light, with a somewhat peculiar but not unkind expression. "Madam," he cried, thinking the laughter to have been an illusion of his hearing, but still, from her changed looks, hoping to have touched her heart, "madam, will not this content you? I give up all to undo what I have done amiss; I make heaven certain for Lord Risingham. And all this upon the very day that I have won my spurs, and thought myself the happiest young gentleman on ground." "O boy," she said--"good boy!" And then, to the extreme surprise of Dick, she first very tenderly wiped the tears away from his cheeks, and then, as if yielding to a sudden impulse, threw both her arms about his neck, drew up his face, and kissed him. A pitiful bewilderment came over simple-minded Dick. "But come," she said, with great cheerfulness, "you that are a captain, ye must eat. Why sup ye not?" "Dear Mistress Risingham," replied Dick, "I did but wait first upon my prisoner; but, to say truth, penitence will no longer suffer me to endure the sight of food. I were better to fast, dear lady, and to pray." "Call me Alicia," she said; "are we not old friends? And now, come, I will eat with you, bit for bit and sup for sup; so if ye eat not, neither will I; but if ye eat hearty, I will dine like a ploughman." So there and then she fell to; and Dick, who had an excellent stomach, proceeded to bear her company, at first with great reluctance, but gradually, as he entered into the spirit, with more and more vigour and devotion: until, at last, he forgot even to watch his model, and most heartily repaired the expenses of his day of labour and excitement. "Lion-driver," she said, at length, "ye do not admire a maid in a man's jerkin?" The moon was now up; and they were only waiting to repose the wearied horses. By the moon's light, the still penitent but now well-fed Richard beheld her looking somewhat coquettishly down upon him. "Madam"--he stammered, surprised at this new turn in her manners. "Nay," she interrupted, "it skills not to deny; Joanna hath told me, but come, Sir Lion-driver, look at me--am I so homely--come!" And she made bright eyes at him. "Ye are something smallish, indeed"--began Dick. And here again she interrupted him, this time with a ringing peal of laughter that completed his confusion and surprise. "Smallish!" she cried. "Nay, now, be honest as ye are bold; I am a dwarf, or little better; but for all that--come, tell me!--for all that, passably fair to look upon; is't not so?" "Nay, madam, exceedingly fair," said the distressed knight, pitifully trying to seem easy. "And a man would be right glad to wed me?" she pursued. "O, madam, right glad!" agreed Dick. "Call me Alicia," said she. "Alicia," quoth Sir Richard. "Well, then, lion-driver," she continued, "sith that ye slew my kinsman, and left me without stay, ye owe me, in honour, every reparation; do ye not?" "I do, madam," said Dick. "Although, upon my heart, I do hold me but partially guilty of that brave knight's blood." "Would ye evade me?" she cried. "Madam, not so. I have told you; at your bidding, I will even turn me a monk," said Richard. "Then, in honour, ye belong to me?" she concluded. "In honour, madam, I suppose"--began the young man. "Go to!" she interrupted; "ye are too full of catches. In honour do ye belong to me, till ye have paid the evil?" "In honour, I do," said Dick. "Hear, then," she continued; "Ye would make but a sad friar, methinks; and since I am to dispose of you at pleasure, I will even take you for my husband. Nay, now, no words!" cried she. "They will avail you nothing. For see how just it is, that you who deprived me of one home, should supply me with another. And as for Joanna, she will be the first, believe me, to commend the change; for, after all, as we be dear friends, what matters it with which of us ye wed? Not one whit!" "Madam," said Dick, "I will go into a cloister, an ye please to bid me; but to wed with anyone in this big world besides Joanna Sedley is what I will consent to neither for man's force nor yet for lady's pleasure. Pardon me if I speak my plain thoughts plainly; but where a maid is very bold, a poor man must even be the bolder." "Dick," she said, "ye sweet boy, ye must come and kiss me for that word. Nay, fear not, ye shall kiss me for Joanna; and when we meet, I shall give it back to her, and say I stole it. And as for what ye owe me, why, dear simpleton, methinks ye were not alone in that great battle; and even if York be on the throne, it was not you that set him there. But for a good, sweet, honest heart, Dick, y' are all that; and if I could find it in my soul to envy your Joanna anything, I would even envy her your love." CHAPTER VI--NIGHT IN THE WOODS (concluded): DICK AND JOAN The horses had by this time finished the small store of provender, and fully breathed from their fatigues. At Dick's command, the fire was smothered in snow; and while his men got once more wearily to saddle, he himself, remembering, somewhat late, true woodland caution, chose a tall oak and nimbly clambered to the topmost fork. Hence he could look far abroad on the moonlit and snow-paven forest. On the south-west, dark against the horizon, stood those upland, heathy quarters where he and Joanna had met with the terrifying misadventure of the leper. And there his eye was caught by a spot of ruddy brightness no bigger than a needle's eye. He blamed himself sharply for his previous neglect. Were that, as it appeared to be, the shining of Sir Daniel's camp-fire, he should long ago have seen and marched for it; above all, he should, for no consideration, have announced his neighbourhood by lighting a fire of his own. But now he must no longer squander valuable hours. The direct way to the uplands was about two miles in length; but it was crossed by a very deep, precipitous dingle, impassable to mounted men; and for the sake of speed, it seemed to Dick advisable to desert the horses and attempt the adventure on foot. Ten men were left to guard the horses; signals were agreed upon by which they could communicate in case of need; and Dick set forth at the head of the remainder, Alicia Risingham walking stoutly by his side. The men had freed themselves of heavy armour, and left behind their lances; and they now marched with a very good spirit in the frozen snow, and under the exhilarating lustre of the moon. The descent into the dingle, where a stream strained sobbing through the snow and ice, was effected with silence and order; and on the further side, being then within a short half mile of where Dick had seen the glimmer of the fire, the party halted to breathe before the attack. In the vast silence of the wood, the lightest sounds were audible from far; and Alicia, who was keen of hearing, held up her finger warningly and stooped to listen. All followed her example; but besides the groans of the choked brook in the dingle close behind, and the barking of a fox at a distance of many miles among the forest, to Dick's acutest hearkening, not a breath was audible. "But yet, for sure, I heard the clash of harness," whispered Alicia. "Madam," returned Dick, who was more afraid of that young lady than of ten stout warriors, "I would not hint ye were mistaken; but it might well have come from either of the camps." "It came not thence. It came from westward," she declared. "It may be what it will," returned Dick; "and it must be as heaven please. Reck we not a jot, but push on the livelier, and put it to the touch. Up, friends--enough breathed." As they advanced, the snow became more and more trampled with hoof-marks, and it was plain that they were drawing near to the encampment of a considerable force of mounted men. Presently they could see the smoke pouring from among the trees, ruddily coloured on its lower edge and scattering bright sparks. And here, pursuant to Dick's orders, his men began to open out, creeping stealthily in the covert, to surround on every side the camp of their opponents. He himself, placing Alicia in the shelter of a bulky oak, stole straight forth in the direction of the fire. At last, through an opening of the wood, his eye embraced the scene of the encampment. The fire had been built upon a heathy hummock of the ground, surrounded on three sides by thicket, and it now burned very strong, roaring aloud and brandishing flames. Around it there sat not quite a dozen people, warmly cloaked; but though the neighbouring snow was trampled down as by a regiment, Dick looked in vain for any horse. He began to have a terrible misgiving that he was out-manoeuvred. At the same time, in a tall man with a steel salet, who was spreading his hands before the blaze, he recognised his old friend and still kindly enemy, Bennet Hatch; and in two others, sitting a little back, he made out, even in their male disguise, Joanna Sedley and Sir Daniel's wife. "Well," thought he to himself, "even if I lose my horses, let me get my Joanna, and why should I complain?" And then, from the further side of the encampment, there came a little whistle, announcing that his men had joined, and the investment was complete. Bennet, at the sound, started to his feet; but ere he had time to spring upon his arms, Dick hailed him. "Bennet," he said--"Bennet, old friend, yield ye. Ye will but spill men's lives in vain, if ye resist." "'Tis Master Shelton, by St. Barbary!" cried Hatch. "Yield me? Ye ask much. What force have ye?" "I tell you, Bennet, ye are both outnumbered and begirt," said Dick. "Caesar and Charlemagne would cry for quarter. I have two score men at my whistle, and with one shoot of arrows I could answer for you all." "Master Dick," said Bennet, "it goes against my heart; but I must do my duty. The saints help you!" And therewith he raised a little tucket to his mouth and wound a rousing call. Then followed a moment of confusion; for while Dick, fearing for the ladies, still hesitated to give the word to shoot, Hatch's little band sprang to their weapons and formed back to back as for a fierce resistance. In the hurry of their change of place, Joanna sprang from her seat and ran like an arrow to her lover's side. "Here, Dick!" she cried, as she clasped his hand in hers. But Dick still stood irresolute; he was yet young to the more deplorable necessities of war, and the thought of old Lady Brackley checked the command upon his tongue. His own men became restive. Some of them cried on him by name; others, of their own accord, began to shoot; and at the first discharge poor Bennet bit the dust. Then Dick awoke. "On!" he cried. "Shoot, boys, and keep to cover. England and York!" But just then the dull beat of many horses on the snow suddenly arose in the hollow ear of the night, and, with incredible swiftness, drew nearer and swelled louder. At the same time, answering tuckets repeated and repeated Hatch's call. "Rally, rally!" cried Dick. "Rally upon me! Rally for your lives!" But his men--afoot, scattered, taken in the hour when they had counted on an easy triumph--began instead to give ground severally, and either stood wavering or dispersed into the thickets. And when the first of the horsemen came charging through the open avenues and fiercely riding their steeds into the underwood, a few stragglers were overthrown or speared among the brush, but the bulk of Dick's command had simply melted at the rumour of their coming. Dick stood for a moment, bitterly recognising the fruits of his precipitate and unwise valour. Sir Daniel had seen the fire; he had moved out with his main force, whether to attack his pursuers or to take them in the rear if they should venture the assault. His had been throughout the part of a sagacious captain; Dick's the conduct of an eager boy. And here was the young knight, his sweetheart, indeed, holding him tightly by the hand, but otherwise alone, his whole command of men and horses dispersed in the night and the wide forest, like a paper of pins in a bay barn. "The saints enlighten me!" he thought. "It is well I was knighted for this morning's matter; this doth me little honour." And thereupon, still holding Joanna, he began to run. The silence of the night was now shattered by the shouts of the men of Tunstall, as they galloped hither and thither, hunting fugitives; and Dick broke boldly through the underwood and ran straight before him like a deer. The silver clearness of the moon upon the open snow increased, by contrast, the obscurity of the thickets; and the extreme dispersion of the vanquished led the pursuers into wildly divergent paths. Hence, in but a little while, Dick and Joanna paused, in a close covert, and heard the sounds of the pursuit, scattering abroad, indeed, in all directions, but yet fainting already in the distance. "An I had but kept a reserve of them together," Dick cried, bitterly, "I could have turned the tables yet! Well, we live and learn; next time it shall go better, by the rood." "Nay, Dick," said Joanna, "what matters it? Here we are together once again." He looked at her, and there she was--John Matcham, as of yore, in hose and doublet. But now he knew her; now, even in that ungainly dress, she smiled upon him, bright with love; and his heart was transported with joy. "Sweetheart," he said, "if ye forgive this blunderer, what care I? Make we direct for Holywood; there lieth your good guardian and my better friend, Lord Foxham. There shall we be wed; and whether poor or wealthy, famous or unknown, what, matters it? This day, dear love, I won my spurs; I was commended by great men for my valour; I thought myself the goodliest man of war in all broad England. Then, first, I fell out of my favour with the great; and now have I been well thrashed, and clean lost my soldiers. There was a downfall for conceit! But, dear, I care not--dear, if ye still love me and will wed, I would have my knighthood done away, and mind it not a jot." "My Dick!" she cried. "And did they knight you?" "Ay, dear, ye are my lady now," he answered, fondly; "or ye shall, ere noon to-morrow--will ye not?" "That will I, Dick, with a glad heart," she answered. "Ay, sir? Methought ye were to be a monk!" said a voice in their ears. "Alicia!" cried Joanna. "Even so," replied the young lady, coming forward. "Alicia, whom ye left for dead, and whom your lion-driver found, and brought to life again, and, by my sooth, made love to, if ye want to know!" "I'll not believe it," cried Joanna. "Dick!" "Dick!" mimicked Alicia. "Dick, indeed! Ay, fair sir, and ye desert poor damsels in distress," she continued, turning to the young knight. "Ye leave them planted behind oaks. But they say true--the age of chivalry is dead." "Madam," cried Dick, in despair, "upon my soul I had forgotten you outright. Madam, ye must try to pardon me. Ye see, I had new found Joanna!" "I did not suppose that ye had done it o' purpose," she retorted. "But I will be cruelly avenged. I will tell a secret to my Lady Shelton--she that is to be," she added, curtseying. "Joanna," she continued, "I believe, upon my soul, your sweetheart is a bold fellow in a fight, but he is, let me tell you plainly, the softest-hearted simpleton in England. Go to--ye may do your pleasure with him! And now, fool children, first kiss me, either one of you, for luck and kindness; and then kiss each other just one minute by the glass, and not one second longer; and then let us all three set forth for Holywood as fast as we can stir; for these woods, methinks, are full of peril and exceeding cold." "But did my Dick make love to you?" asked Joanna, clinging to her sweetheart's side. "Nay, fool girl," returned Alicia; "it was I made love to him. I offered to marry him, indeed; but he bade me go marry with my likes. These were his words. Nay, that I will say: he is more plain than pleasant. But now, children, for the sake of sense, set forward. Shall we go once more over the dingle, or push straight for Holywood?" "Why," said Dick, "I would like dearly to get upon a horse; for I have been sore mauled and beaten, one way and another, these last days, and my poor body is one bruise. But how think ye? If the men, upon the alarm of the fighting, had fled away, we should have gone about for nothing. 'Tis but some three short miles to Holywood direct; the bell hath not beat nine; the snow is pretty firm to walk upon, the moon clear; how if we went even as we are?" "Agreed," cried Alicia; but Joanna only pressed upon Dick's arm. Forth, then, they went, through open leafless groves and down snow-clad alleys, under the white face of the winter moon; Dick and Joanna walking hand in hand and in a heaven of pleasure; and their light-minded companion, her own bereavements heartily forgotten, followed a pace or two behind, now rallying them upon their silence, and now drawing happy pictures of their future and united lives. Still, indeed, in the distance of the wood, the riders of Tunstall might be heard urging their pursuit; and from time to time cries or the clash of steel announced the shock of enemies. But in these young folk, bred among the alarms of war, and fresh from such a multiplicity of dangers, neither fear nor pity could be lightly wakened. Content to find the sounds still drawing farther and farther away, they gave up their hearts to the enjoyment of the hour, walking already, as Alicia put it, in a wedding procession; and neither the rude solitude of the forest, nor the cold of the freezing night, had any force to shadow or distract their happiness. At length, from a rising hill, they looked below them on the dell of Holywood. The great windows of the forest abbey shone with torch and candle; its high pinnacles and spires arose very clear and silent, and the gold rood upon the topmost summit glittered brightly in the moon. All about it, in the open glade, camp-fires were burning, and the ground was thick with huts; and across the midst of the picture the frozen river curved. "By the mass," said Richard, "there are Lord Foxham's fellows still encamped. The messenger hath certainly miscarried. Well, then, so better. We have power at hand to face Sir Daniel." But if Lord Foxham's men still lay encamped in the long holm at Holywood, it was from a different reason from the one supposed by Dick. They had marched, indeed, for Shoreby; but ere they were half way thither, a second messenger met them, and bade them return to their morning's camp, to bar the road against Lancastrian fugitives, and to be so much nearer to the main army of York. For Richard of Gloucester, having finished the battle and stamped out his foes in that district, was already on the march to rejoin his brother; and not long after the return of my Lord Foxham's retainers, Crookback himself drew rein before the abbey door. It was in honour of this august visitor that the windows shone with lights; and at the hour of Dick's arrival with his sweetheart and her friend, the whole ducal party was being entertained in the refectory with the splendour of that powerful and luxurious monastery. Dick, not quite with his good will, was brought before them. Gloucester, sick with fatigue, sat leaning upon one hand his white and terrifying countenance; Lord Foxham, half recovered from his wound, was in a place of honour on his left. "How, sir?" asked Richard. "Have ye brought me Sir Daniel's head?" "My lord duke," replied Dick, stoutly enough, but with a qualm at heart, "I have not even the good fortune to return with my command. I have been, so please your grace, well beaten." Gloucester looked upon him with a formidable frown. "I gave you fifty lances, {3} sir," he said. "My lord duke, I had but fifty men-at-arms," replied the young knight. "How is this?" said Gloucester. "He did ask me fifty lances." "May it please your grace," replied Catesby, smoothly, "for a pursuit we gave him but the horsemen." "It is well," replied Richard, adding, "Shelton, ye may go." "Stay!" said Lord Foxham. "This young man likewise had a charge from me. It may be he hath better sped. Say, Master Shelton, have ye found the maid?" "I praise the saints, my lord," said Dick, "she is in this house." "Is it even so? Well, then, my lord the duke," resumed Lord Foxham, "with your good will, to-morrow, before the army march, I do propose a marriage. This young squire--" "Young knight," interrupted Catesby. "Say ye so, Sir William?" cried Lord Foxham. "I did myself, and for good service, dub him knight," said Gloucester. "He hath twice manfully served me. It is not valour of hands, it is a man's mind of iron, that he lacks. He will not rise, Lord Foxham. 'Tis a fellow that will fight indeed bravely in a mellay, but hath a capon's heart. Howbeit, if he is to marry, marry him in the name of Mary, and be done!" "Nay, he is a brave lad--I know it," said Lord Foxham. "Content ye, then, Sir Richard. I have compounded this affair with Master Hamley, and to-morrow ye shall wed." Whereupon Dick judged it prudent to withdraw; but he was not yet clear of the refectory, when a man, but newly alighted at the gate, came running four stairs at a bound, and, brushing through the abbey servants, threw himself on one knee before the duke. "Victory, my lord," he cried. And before Dick had got to the chamber set apart for him as Lord Foxham's guest, the troops in the holm were cheering around their fires; for upon that same day, not twenty miles away, a second crushing blow had been dealt to the power of Lancaster. CHAPTER VII--DICK'S REVENGE The next morning Dick was afoot before the sun, and having dressed himself to the best advantage with the aid of the Lord Foxham's baggage, and got good reports of Joan, he set forth on foot to walk away his impatience. For some while he made rounds among the soldiery, who were getting to arms in the wintry twilight of the dawn and by the red glow of torches; but gradually he strolled further afield, and at length passed clean beyond the outposts, and walked alone in the frozen forest, waiting for the sun. His thoughts were both quiet and happy. His brief favour with the Duke he could not find it in his heart to mourn; with Joan to wife, and my Lord Foxham for a faithful patron, he looked most happily upon the future; and in the past he found but little to regret. As he thus strolled and pondered, the solemn light of the morning grew more clear, the east was already coloured by the sun, and a little scathing wind blew up the frozen snow. He turned to go home; but even as he turned, his eye lit upon a figure behind, a tree. "Stand!" he cried. "Who goes?" The figure stepped forth and waved its hand like a dumb person. It was arrayed like a pilgrim, the hood lowered over the face, but Dick, in an instant, recognised Sir Daniel. He strode up to him, drawing his sword; and the knight, putting his hand in his bosom, as if to seize a hidden weapon, steadfastly awaited his approach. "Well, Dickon," said Sir Daniel, "how is it to be? Do ye make war upon the fallen?" "I made no war upon your life," replied the lad; "I was your true friend until ye sought for mine; but ye have sought for it greedily." "Nay--self-defence," replied the knight. "And now, boy, the news of this battle, and the presence of yon crooked devil here in mine own wood, have broken me beyond all help. I go to Holywood for sanctuary; thence overseas, with what I can carry, and to begin life again in Burgundy or France." "Ye may not go to Holywood," said Dick. "How! May not?" asked the knight. "Look ye, Sir Daniel, this is my marriage morn," said Dick; "and yon sun that is to rise will make the brightest day that ever shone for me. Your life is forfeit--doubly forfeit, for my father's death and your own practices to meward. But I myself have done amiss; I have brought about men's deaths; and upon this glad day I will be neither judge nor hangman. An ye were the devil, I would not lay a hand on you. An ye were the devil, ye might go where ye will for me. Seek God's forgiveness; mine ye have freely. But to go on to Holywood is different. I carry arms for York, and I will suffer no spy within their lines. Hold it, then, for certain, if ye set one foot before another, I will uplift my voice and call the nearest post to seize you." "Ye mock me," said Sir Daniel. "I have no safety out of Holywood." "I care no more," returned Richard. "I let you go east, west, or south; north I will not. Holywood is shut against you. Go, and seek not to return. For, once ye are gone, I will warn every post about this army, and there will be so shrewd a watch upon all pilgrims that, once again, were ye the very devil, ye would find it ruin to make the essay." "Ye doom me," said Sir Daniel, gloomily. "I doom you not," returned Richard. "If it so please you to set your valour against mine, come on; and though I fear it be disloyal to my party, I will take the challenge openly and fully, fight you with mine own single strength, and call for none to help me. So shall I avenge my father, with a perfect conscience." "Ay," said Sir Daniel, "y' have a long sword against my dagger." "I rely upon Heaven only," answered Dick, casting his sword some way behind him on the snow. "Now, if your ill-fate bids you, come; and, under the pleasure of the Almighty, I make myself bold to feed your bones to foxes." "I did but try you, Dickon," returned the knight, with an uneasy semblance of a laugh. "I would not spill your blood." "Go, then, ere it be too late," replied Shelton. "In five minutes I will call the post. I do perceive that I am too long-suffering. Had but our places been reversed, I should have been bound hand and foot some minutes past." "Well, Dickon, I will go," replied Sir Daniel. "When we next meet, it shall repent you that ye were so harsh." And with these words, the knight turned and began to move off under the trees. Dick watched him with strangely-mingled feelings, as he went, swiftly and warily, and ever and again turning a wicked eye upon the lad who had spared him, and whom he still suspected. There was upon one side of where he went a thicket, strongly matted with green ivy, and, even in its winter state, impervious to the eye. Herein, all of a sudden, a bow sounded like a note of music. An arrow flew, and with a great, choked cry of agony and anger, the Knight of Tunstall threw up his hands and fell forward in the snow. Dick bounded to his side and raised him. His face desperately worked; his whole body was shaken by contorting spasms. "Is the arrow black?" he gasped. "It is black," replied Dick, gravely. And then, before he could add one word, a desperate seizure of pain shook the wounded man from head to foot, so that his body leaped in Dick's supporting arms, and with the extremity of that pang his spirit fled in silence. The young man laid him back gently on the snow and prayed for that unprepared and guilty spirit, and as he prayed the sun came up at a bound, and the robins began chirping in the ivy. When he rose to his feet, he found another man upon his knees but a few steps behind him, and, still with uncovered head, he waited until that prayer also should be over. It took long; the man, with his head bowed and his face covered with his hands, prayed like one in a great disorder or distress of mind; and by the bow that lay beside him, Dick judged that he was no other than the archer who had laid Sir Daniel low. At length he, also, rose, and showed the countenance of Ellis Duckworth. "Richard," he said, very gravely, "I heard you. Ye took the better part and pardoned; I took the worse, and there lies the clay of mine enemy. Pray for me." And he wrung him by the hand. "Sir," said Richard, "I will pray for you, indeed; though how I may prevail I wot not. But if ye have so long pursued revenge, and find it now of such a sorry flavour, bethink ye, were it not well to pardon others? Hatch--he is dead, poor shrew! I would have spared a better; and for Sir Daniel, here lies his body. But for the priest, if I might anywise prevail, I would have you let him go." A flash came into the eyes of Ellis Duckworth. "Nay," he said, "the devil is still strong within me. But be at rest; the Black Arrow flieth nevermore--the fellowship is broken. They that still live shall come to their quiet and ripe end, in Heaven's good time, for me; and for yourself, go where your better fortune calls you, and think no more of Ellis." CHAPTER VIII--CONCLUSION About nine in the morning, Lord Foxham was leading his ward, once more dressed as befitted her sex, and followed by Alicia Risingham, to the church of Holywood, when Richard Crookback, his brow already heavy with cares, crossed their path and paused. "Is this the maid?" he asked; and when Lord Foxham had replied in the affirmative, "Minion," he added, "hold up your face until I see its favour." He looked upon her sourly for a little. "Ye are fair," he said at last, "and, as they tell me, dowered. How if I offered you a brave marriage, as became your face and parentage?" "My lord duke," replied Joanna, "may it please your grace, I had rather wed with Sir Richard." "How so?" he asked, harshly. "Marry but the man I name to you, and he shall be my lord, and you my lady, before night. For Sir Richard, let me tell you plainly, he will die Sir Richard." "I ask no more of Heaven, my lord, than but to die Sir Richard's wife," returned Joanna. "Look ye at that, my lord," said Gloucester, turning to Lord Foxham. "Here be a pair for you. The lad, when for good services I gave him his choice of my favour, chose but the grace of an old, drunken shipman. I did warn him freely, but he was stout in his besottedness. 'Here dieth your favour,' said I; and he, my lord, with a most assured impertinence, 'Mine be the loss,' quoth he. It shall be so, by the rood!" "Said he so?" cried Alicia. "Then well said, lion-driver!" "Who is this?" asked the duke. "A prisoner of Sir Richard's," answered Lord Foxham; "Mistress Alicia Risingham." "See that she be married to a sure man," said the duke. "I had thought of my kinsman, Hamley, an it like your grace," returned Lord Foxham. "He hath well served the cause." "It likes me well," said Richard. "Let them be wedded speedily. Say, fair maid, will you wed?" "My lord duke," said Alicia, "so as the man is straight"--And there, in a perfect consternation, the voice died on her tongue. "He is straight, my mistress," replied Richard, calmly. "I am the only crookback of my party; we are else passably well shapen. Ladies, and you, my lord," he added, with a sudden change to grave courtesy, "judge me not too churlish if I leave you. A captain, in the time of war, hath not the ordering of his hours." And with a very handsome salutation he passed on, followed by his officers. "Alack," cried Alicia, "I am shent!" "Ye know him not," replied Lord Foxham. "It is but a trifle; he hath already clean forgot your words." "He is, then, the very flower of knighthood," said Alicia. "Nay, he but mindeth other things," returned Lord Foxham. "Tarry we no more." In the chancel they found Dick waiting, attended by a few young men; and there were he and Joan united. When they came forth again, happy and yet serious, into the frosty air and sunlight, the long files of the army were already winding forward up the road; already the Duke of Gloucester's banner was unfolded and began to move from before the abbey in a clump of spears; and behind it, girt by steel-clad knights, the bold, black-hearted, and ambitious hunchback moved on towards his brief kingdom and his lasting infamy. But the wedding party turned upon the other side, and sat down, with sober merriment, to breakfast. The father cellarer attended on their wants, and sat with them at table. Hamley, all jealousy forgotten, began to ply the nowise loth Alicia with courtship. And there, amid the sounding of tuckets and the clash of armoured soldiery and horses continually moving forth, Dick and Joan sat side by side, tenderly held hands, and looked, with ever growing affection, in each other's eyes. Thenceforth the dust and blood of that unruly epoch passed them by. They dwelt apart from alarms in the green forest where their love began. Two old men in the meanwhile enjoyed pensions in great prosperity and peace, and with perhaps a superfluity of ale and wine, in Tunstall hamlet. One had been all his life a shipman, and continued to the last to lament his man Tom. The other, who had been a bit of everything, turned in the end towards piety, and made a most religious death under the name of Brother Honestus in the neighbouring abbey. So Lawless had his will, and died a friar. Footnotes: {1} At the date of this story, Richard Crookback could not have been created Duke of Gloucester; but for clearness, with the reader's leave, he shall so be called. {2} Richard Crookback would have been really far younger at this date. {3} Technically, the term "lance" included a not quite certain number of foot soldiers attached to the man-at-arms. 
35228	----	AIRY FAIRY LILIAN BY "THE DUCHESS" AUTHOR OF "PORTIA," "MOLLY BAWN," ETC., ETC. NEW YORK INTERNATIONAL BOOK COMPANY 3, 4, 5 AND 6 MISSION PLACE AIRY FAIRY LILIAN. CHAPTER I. "Home, sweet Home." --_Old English Song._ Down the broad oak staircase--through the silent hall--into the drawing-room runs Lilian, singing as she goes. The room is deserted; through the half-closed blinds the glad sunshine is rushing, turning to gold all on which its soft touch lingers, and rendering the large, dull, handsome apartment almost comfortable. Outside everything is bright, and warm, and genial, as should be in the heart of summer; within there is only gloom,--and Lilian clad in her mourning robes. The contrast is dispiriting: there life, here death, or at least the knowledge of it. There joy, here the signs and trappings of woe. The black gown and funereal trimmings hardly harmonize with the girl's flower-like face and the gay song that trembles on her lips. But, alas! for how short a time does our first keen sorrow last! how swiftly are our dead forgotten! how seldom does grief kill! When eight long months have flown by across her father's grave Lilian finds, sometimes to her dismay, that the hours she grieves for him form but a short part of her day. Not that her sorrow for him, even at its freshest, was very deep; it was of the subdued and horrified rather than the passionate, despairing kind. And though in truth she mourned and wept for him until her pretty eyes could hold no longer tears, still there was a mildness about her grief more suggestive of tender melancholy than any very poignant anguish. From her the dead father could scarcely be more separated than had been the living. Naturally of a rather sedentary disposition, Archibald Chesney, on the death of the wife whom he adored, had become that most uninteresting and selfish of all things, a confirmed bookworm. He went in for study, of the abstruse and heavy order, with an ardor worthy of a better cause. His library was virtually his home; he had neither affections nor desires beyond. Devoting himself exclusively to his books, he suffered them to take entire possession of what he chose to call his heart. At times he absolutely forgot the existence of his little three-year-old daughter; and if ever the remembrance of her did cross his mind it was but to think of her as an incubus,--as another misfortune heaped upon his luckless shoulders,--and to wonder, with a sigh, what he was to do with her in the future. The child, deprived of a tender mother at so early an age, was flung, therefore, upon the tender mercies of her nurses, who alternately petted and injudiciously reproved her, until at length she bade fair to be as utterly spoilt as a child can be. She had one companion, a boy-cousin about a year older than herself. He too was lonely and orphaned, so that the two children, making common cause, clung closely to each other, and shared, both in infancy and in early youth, their joys and sorrows. The Park had been the boy's home ever since his parents' death, Mr. Chesney accepting him as his ward, but never afterward troubling himself about his welfare. Indeed, he had no objection whatever to fill the Park with relations, so long as they left him undisturbed to follow his own devices. Not that the education of these children was neglected. They had all tuition that was necessary; and Lilian, having a talent for music, learned to sing and play the piano very charmingly. She could ride, too, and sit her horse _a merveille_, and had a passion for reading,--perhaps inherited. But, as novels were her principal literature, and as she had no one to regulate her choice of them, it is a matter of opinion whether she derived much benefit from them. At least she received little harm, as at seventeen she was as fresh-minded and pure-hearted a child as one might care to know. The County, knowing her to be an heiress,--though not a large one,--called systematically on her every three months. Twice she had been taken to a ball by an enterprising mother with a large family of unpromising sons. But as she reached her eighteenth year her father died, and her old home, the Park, being strictly entailed on heirs male, passed from her into the hands of a distant cousin utterly unknown. This young man, another Archibald Chesney, was abroad at the time of his kinsman's death,--in Egypt, or Hong-Kong, or Jamaica,--no one exactly knew which--until after much search he was finally discovered to be in Halifax. From thence he had written to the effect that, as he probably should not return to his native land for another six months, he hoped his cousin (if it pleased her) would continue to reside at the Park--where all the old servants were to be kept on--until his return. It did please his cousin; and in her old home she still reigned as queen, until after eight months she received a letter from her father's lawyer warning her of Archibald Chesney's actual arrival in London. This letter failed in its object. Lilian either would not or could not bring herself to name the day that should part her forever from all the old haunts and pleasant nooks she loved so well. She was not brave enough to take her "Bradshaw" and look up the earliest train that ought to convey her away from the Park. Indeed, so utterly wanting in decency and decorum did she appear at this particular epoch of her existence that the heart of her only aunt--her father's sister--was stirred to its depths. So much so that, after mature deliberation (for old people as well as great ones move slowly), she finally packed up the venerable hair-trunk that had seen the rise and fall of several monarchs, and marched all the way from Edinburgh to this Midland English shire, to try what firm expostulation could do in the matter of bringing her niece to see the error of her ways. For a whole week it did very little. Lilian was independent in more ways than one. She had considerable spirit and five hundred pounds a year in her own right. Not only did she object to leave the Park, but she regarded with horror the prospect of going to reside with the guardians appointed to receive her by her father. Not that this idea need have filled her with dismay. Sir Guy Chetwoode, the actual guardian, was a young man not likely to trouble himself overmuch about any ward; while his mother, Lady Chetwoode, was that most gracious of all things, a beautiful and lovable old lady. Why Mr. Chesney had chosen so young a man to look after his daughter's interests must forever remain a mystery,--perhaps because he happened to be the eldest son of his oldest friend, long since dead. Sir Guy accepted the charge because he thought it uncivil to refuse, and chiefly because he believed it likely Miss Chesney would marry before her father's death. But events proved the fallacy of human thought. When Archibald Chesney's demise appeared in the _Times_ Sir Guy made a little face and took meekly a good deal of "chaffing" at his brother's hands; while Lady Chetwoode sat down, and, with a faint sinking at her heart, wrote a kindly letter to the orphan, offering her a home at Chetwoode. To this letter Lilian had sent a polite reply, thanking "dear Lady Chetwoode" for her kindness, and telling her she had no intention of quitting the Park just at present. Later on she would be only too happy to accept, etc., etc. Now, however, standing in her own drawing-room, Lilian feels, with a pang, the game is almost played out; she must leave. Aunt Priscilla's arguments, detestable though they be, are unhappily quite unanswerable. To her own heart she confesses this much, and the little gay French song dies on her lips, and the smile fades from her eyes, and a very dejected and forlorn expression comes and grows upon her pretty face. It is more than pretty, it is lovely,--the fair, sweet childish face, framed in by its yellow hair; her great velvety eyes, now misty through vain longing, are blue as the skies above her; her nose is pure Greek; her forehead, low, but broad, is partly shrouded by little wandering threads of gold that every now and then break loose from bondage, while her lashes, long and dark, curl upward from her eyes, as though hating to conceal the beauty of the exquisite azure within. She is not tall, and she is very slender but not lean. She is willful, quick-tempered, and impetuous, but large-hearted and lovable. There is a certain haughtiness about her that contrasts curiously but pleasantly with her youthful expression and laughing kissable mouth. She is straight and lissome as a young ash-tree; her hands and feet are small and well shaped; in a word, she is _chic_ from the crown of her fair head down to her little arched instep. Just now, perhaps, as she hears the honest sound of her aunt's footstep in the hall, a slight pout takes possession of her lips and a flickering frown adorns her brow. Aunt Priscilla is coming, and Aunt Priscilla brings victory in her train, and it is not every one can accept defeat with grace. She hastily pulls up one of the blinds; and as old Miss Chesney opens the door and advances up the room, young Miss Chesney rather turns her shoulder to her and stares moodily out of the window. But Aunt Priscilla is not to be daunted. "Well, Lilian," she says, in a hopeful tone, and with an amount of faith admirable under the circumstances, "I trust you have been thinking it over favorably, and that----" "Thinking what over?" asks Lilian; which interruption is a mean subterfuge. "----And that the night has induced you to see your situation in its proper light." "You speak as though I were the under house-maid," says Lilian with a faint sense of humor. "And yet the word suits me. Surely there never yet was a situation as mine. I wish my horrid cousin had been drowned in----. No, Aunt Priscilla, the night has not reformed me. On the contrary, it has demoralized me, through a dream. I dreamt I went to Chetwoode, and, lo! the very first night I slept beneath its roof the ceiling in my room gave way, and, falling, crushed me to fine powder. After such a ghastly warning do you still advise me to pack up and be off? If you do," says Lilian, solemnly, "my blood be on your head." "Dreams go by contraries," quotes Miss Priscilla, sententiously. "I don't believe in them. Besides, from all I have heard of the Chetwoodes they are far too well regulated a family to have anything amiss with their ceilings." "Oh, how _you do_ add fuel to the fire that is consuming me!" exclaims Lilian, with a groan. "A well-regulated family!--what can be more awful? Ever since I have been old enough to reason I have looked with righteous horror upon a well-regulated family. Aunt Priscilla, if you don't change your tune I vow and protest I shall decide upon remaining here until my cousin takes me by the shoulders and places me upon the gravel outside." "I thought, Lilian," says her aunt, severely, "you promised me yesterday to think seriously of what I have now been saying to you for a whole week without cessation." "Well, so I am thinking," with a sigh. "It is the amount of thinking I have been doing for a whole week without cessation that is gradually turning my hair gray." "It would be all very well," says Miss Priscilla, impatiently, "if I could remain with you; but I cannot. I must return to my duties." These duties consisted of persecuting poor little children every Sunday by compelling them to attend her Scriptural class (so she called it) and answer such questions from the Old Testament as would have driven any experienced divinity student out of his mind; and on week-days of causing much sorrow (and more bad language) to be disseminated among the women of the district by reason of her lectures on their dirt. "And your cousin is in London, and naturally will wish to take possession in person." "How I wish poor papa had left the Park to me!" says Lilian, discontentedly, and somewhat irrelevantly. "My dear child, I have explained to you at least a dozen times that such a gift was not in his power. It goes--that is, the Park,--to a male heir, and----" "Yes, I know," petulantly. "Well, then I wish it _had_ been in his power to leave it to me." "And how about writing to Lady Chetwoode?" says Aunt Priscilla, giving up the argument in despair. (She is a wise woman.) "The sooner you do so the better." "I hate strangers," says Lilian, mournfully. "They make me unhappy. Why can't I remain where I am? George or Archibald, or whatever his name is, might just as well let me have a room here. I'm sure the place is large enough. He need not grudge me one or two apartments. The left wing, for instance." "Lilian," says Miss Chesney, rising from her chair, "how old are you? Is it possible that at eighteen you have yet to learn the meaning of the word 'propriety'? You--a _young girl_--to remain here alone with a _young man_!" "He need never see me," says Lilian, quite unmoved by this burst of eloquence. "I should take very good care of that, as I know I shall detest him." "I decline to listen to you," says Miss Priscilla, raising her hands to her ears. "You must be lost to all sense of decorum even to imagine such a thing. You and he in one house, how should you avoid meeting?" "Well, even if we did meet," says Lilian, with a small rippling laugh impossible to quell, "I dare say he wouldn't bite me." "No,"--sternly,--"he would probably do worse. He would make love to you. Some instinct warns me," says Miss Priscilla, with the liveliest horror, gazing upon the exquisite, glowing face before her, "that within five days he would be making _violent_ love to you." "You strengthen my desire to stay," says Lilian, somewhat frivolously, "I should so like to say 'No' to him!" "Lilian, you make me shudder," says Miss Priscilla, earnestly. "When I was your age, even younger, I had a full sense of the horror of allowing any man to mention my name lightly. I kept all men at arm's length, I suffered no jesting or foolish talking from them. And mark the result," says Miss Chesney, with pride: "I defy any one to say a word of me but what is admirable and replete with modesty." "Did any one ever propose to you, auntie?" asks Miss Lilian with a naughty laugh. "Certainly. I had many offers," replies Miss Priscilla, promptly,--which is one of the few lies she allows herself; "I was persecuted by suitors in my younger days; but I refused them all. And if you will take my advice, Lilian," says this virgin, with much solemnity, "you will never, _never_ put yourself into clutches of a _man_." She utters this last word as though she would have said a tiger or a serpent, or anything else ruthless and bloodthirsty. "But all this is beside the question." "It is, rather," says Lilian, demurely. But, suddenly brightening, "Between my dismal dreaming last night I thought of another plan." "Another!" with open dismay. "Yes,"--triumphantly,--"it occurred to me that this bugbear my cousin might go abroad again. Like the Wandering Jew, he is always traveling; and who knows but he may take a fancy to visit the South Pole, or discover the Northwestern Passage, or go with Jules Verne to the centre of the earth? If so, why should not I remain here and keep house for him? What can be simpler?" "Nothing,"--tritely,--"but unfortunately he is not going abroad again." "No! How do you know that?" "Through Mr. Shrude, the solicitor." "Ah!" says Lilian, in a despairing tone, "how unhappy I am! Though I might have known that wretched young man would be the last to do what is his palpable duty." There is a pause. Lilian's head sinks upon her hand; dejection shows itself in every feature. She sighs so heavily that Miss Priscilla's spirits rise and she assures herself the game is won. Rash hope. Suddenly Lilian's countenance clears; she raises her head, and a faint smile appears within her eyes. "Aunt Priscilla, I have yet another plan," she says, cheerfully. "Oh, my dear, I do hope not," says poor Miss Chesney, almost on the verge of tears. "Yes, and it emanated from you. Supposing I were to remain here, and he did fall in love with me, and married me: what then? Would not that solve the difficulty? Once the ceremony was performed he might go prying about all over the known globe for all that I should care. I should have my dear Park. I declare," says Lilian, waxing valiant, "had he but one eye, or did he appear before me with a wooden leg (which I hold to be the most contemptible of all things), nothing should induce me to refuse him under the circumstances." "And are you going to throw yourself upon your cousin's generosity and actually ask him to take pity on you and make you his wife? Lilian, I fancied you had some pride," says Miss Chesney, gravely. "So I have," says Lilian, with a repentant sigh. "How I wish I hadn't! No, I suppose it wouldn't do to marry him in that way, no matter how badly I treated him afterward to make up for it. Well, my last hope is dead." "And a good thing too. Now, had you not better sit down and write to Lady Chetwoode or your guardian, naming an early date for going to them? Though what your father could have meant by selecting so young a man as a guardian is more than I can imagine." "Because he wished me to live with Lady Chetwoode, who was evidently an old flame; and because Sir Guy, from all I hear, is a sort of Admirable Crichton--something as prosy as the Heir of Redclyffe, as dull as Sir Galahad. A goody-goody old-young man. For my part, I would have preferred a hoary-headed gentleman, with just a little spice of wickedness about him." "Lilian, don't be flippant," in a tone of horror. "I tremble when I reflect on the dangers that must attend your unbridled tongue." "Well, but, Aunt Priscilla,"--plaintively,--"one doesn't relish the thought of spending day after day with a man who will think it his duty to find fault every time I give way to my sentiments, and probably grow pale with disgust whenever I laugh aloud. Shan't I lead him a life!" says the younger Miss Chesney, viciously, tapping the back of one small hand vigorously against the palm of the other. "With the hope of giving that young man something to cavil at, I shall sustain myself." "Child," says Miss Priscilla, "let me recommend a course of severe study to you as the best means of subduing your evil inclinations." "I shall take your advice," says the incorrigible Lilian; "I shall study Sir Guy. I expect that will be the severest course of study I have ever undergone." "Get your paper and write," says Miss Priscilla, who, against her will, is smiling grimly. "I suppose, indeed, I must," says Lilian, seating herself at her davenport with all the airs of a finished martyr. "'Needs must,' you know, Aunt Priscilla. I dare say you recollect the rest of that rather vulgar proverb. I shall seal my fate this instant by writing to Lady Chetwoode. But, oh!" turning on her chair to regard her aunt with an expression of the keenest reproach, "how I wish you had not called them a 'well-regulated family!'" CHAPTER II. "Be not over-exquisite To cast the fashion of uncertain evils."--MILTON. Through the open windows the merry-making sun is again dancing, its bright rays making still more dazzling the glory of the snowy table-cloth. The great silver urn is hissing and fighting with all around, as though warning his mistress to use him, as he is not one to be trifled with; while at the lower end of the table, exactly opposite Sir Guy's plate, lies the post upon a high salver, ready to the master's hand, as has been the custom at Chetwoode for generations. Evidently the family is late for breakfast. As a rule, the Chetwoode family always is late for breakfast,--just sufficiently so to make them certain everything will be quite ready by the time they get down. Ten o'clock rings out mysteriously from the handsome marble clock upon the chimney-piece, and precisely three minutes afterward the door is thrown open to admit an elderly lady, tall and fair, and still beautiful. She walks with a slow, rather stately step, and in spite of her years carries her head high. Upon this head rests the daintiest of morning caps, all white lace and delicate ribbon bows, that match in color her trailing gown. Her hands, small and tapering, are covered with rings; otherwise she wears no adornment of any kind. There is a benignity about her that goes straight to all hearts. Children adore her, dogs fawn upon her, young men bring to her all their troubles,--the evil behavior of their tailors and their mistresses are alike laid before her. Now, finding the room empty, and knowing it to be four minutes after ten, she says to herself, "The first!" with a little surprise and much pardonable pride, and seats herself with something of an air before the militant urn. When we are old it is so sweet to us to be younger than the young, when we are young it is so sweet to us to be just _vice versa_. Oh, foolish youth! An elderly butler, who has evidently seen service (in every sense of the word), and who is actually steeped in respectability up to his port-wine nose, hovers around the breakfast, adjusting this dish affectionately, and straightening that, until all is carefully awry, when he leaves the room with a sigh of satisfaction. Perhaps Lady Chetwoode's self-admiration would have grown beyond bounds, but that just at this instant voices in the hall distract her thoughts. The sounds make her face brighten and bring a smile to her lips. "The boys" are coming. She draws the teacups a little nearer to her and makes a gentle fuss over the spoons. A light laugh echoes through the hall; it is answered and then the door once more opens, and her two sons enter, Cyril, being the youngest, naturally coming first. On seeing his mother he is pleased to make a gesture indicative of the most exaggerated surprise. "Now, who could have anticipated it?" he says. "Her gracious majesty already assembled, while her faithful subjects---- Well," with a sudden change of tone, "for my part I call it downright shabby of people to scramble down-stairs before other people merely for the sake of putting them to the blush." "Lazy boy! no wonder you are ashamed of yourself when you look at the clock," says Lady Chetwoode, smiling fondly as she returns his greeting. "Ashamed! Pray do not misunderstand me. I have arrived at my twenty-sixth year without ever having mastered the meaning of that word. I flatter myself I am a degree beyond that." "Last night's headache quite gone, mother?" asks Sir Guy, bending over her chair to kiss her; an act he performs tenderly, and as though the doing of it is sweet to him. "Quite, my dear," replies she; and there is perhaps the faintest, the _very_ faintest, accession of warmth in her tone, an almost imperceptible increase of kindliness in her smile as she speaks to her eldest son. "That's right," says he, patting her gently on the shoulder; after which he goes over to his own seat and takes up the letters lying before him. "Positively I never thought of the post," says Lady Chetwoode. "And here I have been for quite five minutes with nothing to do. I might as well have been digesting my correspondence, if there is any for me." "One letter for you; five, as usual, for Cyril; one for me," says Guy. "All Cyril's." Examining them critically at arm's length. "Written evidently by _very_ young women." "Yes, they _will_ write to me," returns Cyril, receiving them with a sigh and regarding them with careful scrutiny. "It is nothing short of disgusting," he says presently, singling out one of the letters with his first finger. "This is the fourth she has written me this week, and as yet it is only Friday. I won't be able to bear it much longer; I shall certainly make a stand one of these days." "I would if I were you," says Guy, laughing. "I have just heard from Lilian Chesney," suddenly says Lady Chetwoode, speaking as though a bombshell had fallen in their midst. "And she is really coming here next week!" "No!" says Guy, without meaning contradiction, which at the moment is far from him. "Yes," replies his mother, somewhat faintly. "Another!" murmurs Cyril, weakly,--he being the only one of the three who finds any amusement in the situation. "Well, at all events, _she_ can't write to me, as we shall be under the same roof; and I shall dismiss the very first servant who brings me a _billet-doux_. How pleased you do look, Guy! And no wonder;--a whole live ward, and all to yourself. Lucky you!" "It is hard on you, mother," says Guy, "but it can't be helped. When I promised, I made sure her father would have lived for years to come." "You did what was quite right," says Lady Chetwoode, who, if Guy were to commit a felony, would instantly say it was the only proper course to be pursued. "And it might have been much worse. Her mother's daughter cannot fail to be a lady in the best sense of the word." "I'm sure I hope she won't, then," says Cyril, who all this time has been carefully laying in an uncommonly good breakfast. "If there is one thing I hate, it is a young lady. Give me a girl." "But, my dear, what an extraordinary speech! Surely a girl may be a young lady." "Yes, but unfortunately a young lady isn't always a girl. My experience of the former class is, that, no matter what their age, they are as old as the hills, and know considerably more than they ought to know." "And just as we had got rid of one ward so successfully we must needs get another," says Lady Chetwoode, with a plaintive sigh. "Dear Mabel! she was certainly very sweet, and I was excessively fond of her, but I do hope this new-comer will not be so troublesome." "I hope she will be as pleasant to talk to and as good to look at," says Cyril. "I confess I missed Mab awfully; I never felt so down in my life as when she declared her intention of marrying Tom Steyne." "I never dreamed the marriage would have turned out so well," says Lady Chetwoode, in a pleased tone. "She was such an--an--unreasonable girl. But it is wonderful how well she gets on with a husband." "Flirts always make the best wives. You forget that, mother." "And what a coquette she was? If Lilian Chesney resembles her, I don't know what I shall do. I am getting too old to take care of pretty girls." "Perhaps Miss Chesney is ugly." "I hope not, my dear," says Lady Chetwoode, with a strong shudder. "Let her be anything but that. I can't bear ugly women. No, her mother was lovely. I used to think"--relapsing again into the plaintive style--"that one ward in a lifetime would be sufficient, and now we are going to have another." "It is all Guy's fault," says Cyril. "He does get himself up so like the moral Pecksniff. There is a stern and dignified air about him would deceive a Machiavelli, and takes the hearts of parents by storm. Poor Mr. Chesney, who never even saw him, took him on hearsay as his only child's guardian. This solitary fact shows how grossly he has taken in society in general. He is every bit as immoral as the rest of us, only----" "Immoral! My _dear_ Cyril----" interrupts Lady Chetwoode, severely. "Well, let us say frivolous. It has just the same meaning nowadays, and sounds nicer. But he looks a 'grave and reverend,' if ever there was one. Indeed, his whole appearance is enough to make any passer-by stop short and say, 'There goes a good young man.'" "I'm sure I hope not," says Guy, half offended, wholly disgusted. "I should be inclined to shoot any one who told me I was a 'good young man.' I have no desire to pose as such: my ambition does not lie that way." "I don't believe you know what you are saying, either of you," says Lady Chetwoode, who, though accustomed to them, can never entirely help showing surprise at their sentiments and expressions every now and then. "I should be sorry to think everybody did not know you to be (as I do) good as gold." "Thank you, Madre. One compliment from you is worth a dozen from any one else," says Cyril. "Any news, Guy? You seem absorbed. I cannot tell you how I admire any one who takes an undisguised interest in his correspondence. Now I"--gazing at his five unopened letters--"cannot get up the feeling to save my life. Guy,"--reproachfully,--"don't you see your mother is dying of curiosity?" "The letter is from Trant," says Guy, looking up from the closely written sheet before him. "He wants to know if we will take a tenant for 'The Cottage.' 'A lady'"--reading from the letter--"'who has suffered much, and who wishes for quietness and retirement from the world.'" "I should recommend a convent under the circumstances," says Cyril. "It would be the very thing for her. I don't see why she should come down here to suffer, and put us all in the dumps, and fill our woods with her sighs and moans." "Is she young?" asks Lady Chetwoode, anxiously. "No,--I don't know, I'm sure. I should think not, by Trant's way of mentioning her. 'An old friend,' he says, though, of course, that might mean anything." "Married?" "Yes. A widow." "Dear me!" says Lady Chetwoode, distastefully. "A most objectionable class of people. Always in the way, and--er--very designing, and that." "If she is anything under forty she will want to marry Guy directly," Cyril puts in, with an air of conviction. "If I were you, Guy, I should pause and consider before I introduced such a dangerous ingredient so near home. Just fancy, mother, seeing Guy married to a woman probably older than you!" "Yes,--I shouldn't wonder," says Lady Chetwoode, nervously. "My dear child, do nothing in a hurry. Tell Colonel Trant you--you--do not care about letting The Cottage just at present." "Nonsense, mother! How can you be so absurd? Don't you think I may be considered proof against designing widows at twenty-nine? Never mind Cyril's talk. I dare say he is afraid for himself. Indeed, the one thing that makes me hesitate about obliging Trant is the knowledge of how utterly incapable my poor brother is of taking care of himself." "It is only too true," says Cyril, resignedly. "I feel sure if the widow is flouted by you she will revenge herself by marrying me. Guy, as you are strong, be merciful." "After all, the poor creature may be quite old, and we are frightening ourselves unnecessarily," says Lady Chetwoode, in all sincerity. At this both Guy and Cyril laugh in spite of themselves. "Are you really afraid, mother?" asks Cyril, fondly. "What a goose you are about your 'boys'! Are we always to be children in your eyes? Not that I wonder at your horror of widows. Even the immortal Weller shared your sentiments, and warned his 'Samivel' against them. Never mind, mother; console yourself. I for one swear by all that is lovely never to seek this particular 'widder' in marriage." False oath. "You see he seems to take it so much for granted, my giving The Cottage and that, I hardly like to refuse." "It would not be of the least consequence, if it was not situated actually in our own woods, and not two miles from the house. There lies the chief objection," says Lady Chetwoode. "Yes. Yet what can I do? It is a pretty little place, and it seems a pity to let it sink into decay. This tenant may save it." "It is a lovely spot. I often fancy, Guy," says his mother, somewhat sadly, "I should like to go and live there myself when you get a wife." "Why should you say that?" says Guy, almost roughly. "If my taking a wife necessitates your quitting Chetwoode, I shall never burden myself with that luxury." "You don't follow out the Mater's argument, dear boy," says Cyril, smoothly. "She means that when your sylvan widow claims you as her own she _must_ leave, as of course the same roof could not cover both. But you are eating nothing, mother; Guy's foolish letter has taken away your appetite. Take some of this broiled ham!" "No, thank you, dear, I don't care for----" "Don't perjure yourself. You know you have had a positive passion for broiled ham from your cradle up. I remember all about it. I insist on your eating your breakfast, or you will have that beastly headache back again." "My dear," says his mother, entreatingly, "do you think you could be silent for a few minutes while I discuss this subject with your brother?" "I shan't speak again. After that severe snubbing consider me dumb. But do get it over quick," says Cyril. "I can't be mute forever." "I suppose I had better say yes," says Guy, doubtfully. "It looks rather like the dog in the manger, having The Cottage idle and still refusing Trant's friend." "That reminds me of a capital story," breaks in the irrepressible Cyril, gayly. "By Jove, what a sell it was! One fellow met another fellow----" "I shall refuse, of course, if you wish it," Guy goes on, addressing his mother, and scorning to notice this brilliant interruption. "No, no, dear. Write and say you will think about it." "Won't you listen to my capital story?" asks Cyril, in high disgust. "Very good. You will both be sorry afterward,--when it is too late." Even this awful threat takes no effect. "Unfortunately, I can't do that," says Guy, answering Lady Chetwoode. "His friend is obliged to leave the place she is now in, immediately, and he wants her to come here next week,--next"--glancing at the letter--"Saturday." "Misfortunes never come single," remarks Cyril; "ours seem to crowd. First a ward, and then a widow, and all in the same week." "Not only the same week, but the same day," exclaims Lady Chetwoode, looking at her letter; whereupon they all laugh, though they scarcely know why. "What! Is she too coming on Saturday?" asks Guy. "How ill-timed! I am bound to go to the Bellairs, on that day, whether I like it or not, to dine, and sleep and spend my time generally. The old boy has some young dogs of which he is immensely proud, and has been tormenting me for a month past to go and see them. So yesterday he seized upon me again, and I didn't quite like to refuse, he seemed so bent on getting my opinion of the pups." "Why not go early, and be back in time for dinner?" "Can't, unfortunately. There is to be a dinner there in the evening for some cousin who is coming to pay them a visit; and I promised Harry, who doesn't shine in conversation, to stay and make myself agreeable to her. It's a bore rather, as I fear it will look slightly heathenish my not being at the station to meet Miss Chesney." "Don't put yourself out about that: I'll do all I can to make up for your loss," says Cyril, who is eminently good-natured. "I'll meet her if you wish it, and bring her home." "Thanks, old man: you're awfully good. It would look inhospitable neither of us being on the spot to bid her welcome. Take the carriage and----" "Oh, by Jove, I didn't bargain for the carriage. To be smothered alive in July is not a fascinating idea. Don't you think, mother,"--in an insinuating voice,--"Miss Chesney would prefer the dogcart or the----" "My dear Cyril! Of course you must meet her in the carriage," says his mother, in the shocked tone that usually ends all disputes. "So be it. I give in. Though when I arrive here in the last stage of exhaustion, reclining in Miss Chesney's arms, you will be to blame," says Cyril, amiably. "But to return to your widow, Guy; who is to receive her?" "I dare say by this time she has learned to take care of herself," laughing. "At all events, she does not weigh upon my conscience, even should I consent to oblige Trant,"--looking at his mother--"by having her at The Cottage as a tenant." "It looks very suspicious, her being turned out of her last place," Cyril says, in an uncomfortable tone. "Perhaps----" Here he pauses somewhat mysteriously. "Perhaps what?" asks his mother, struck by his manner. "Perhaps she is mad," suggests Cyril, in an awesome whisper. "An escaped lunatic!--a maniac!" "I know no one who borders so much on lunacy as yourself," says Guy. "After all, what does it matter whether our tenant is fat, fair, and forty, or a lean old maid! It will oblige Trant, and it will keep the place together. Mother, tell me to say yes." Thus desired, Lady Chetwoode gives the required permission. "A new tenant at The Cottage and a young lady visitor,--a permanent visitor! It only requires some one to leave us a legacy in the shape of a new-born babe, to make up the sum of our calamities," says Cyril, as he steps out of the low French window and drops on to the sward beneath. CHAPTER III. "She was beautiful as the lily-bosomed Houri that gladdens the visions of the poet when, soothed to dreams of pleasantness and peace, the downy pinions of Sleep wave over his turbulent soul!"--_From the Arabic._ All the flowers at Chetwoode are rejoicing; their heads are high uplifted, their sweetest perfumes are making still more sweet the soft, coquettish wind that, stealing past them, snatches their kisses ere they know. It is a glorious day, full of life, and happy sunshine, and music from the throats of many birds. All the tenors and sopranos and contraltos of the air seem to be having one vast concert, and are filling the woods with melody. In the morning a little laughing, loving shower came tumbling down into the earth's embrace, where it was caught gladly and kept forever,--a little baby shower, on which the sunbeams smiled, knowing that it had neither power nor wish to kill them. But now the greedy earth has grasped it, and others, knowing its fate, fear to follow, and only the pretty sparkling jewels that tremble on the grass tell of its having been. In the very centre of the great lawn that stretches beyond the pleasure-grounds stands a mighty oak. Its huge branches throw their arms far and wide, making a shelter beneath them for all who may choose to come and seek there for shade. Around its base pretty rustic chairs are standing in somewhat dissipated order, while on its topmost bough a crow is swaying and swinging as the soft wind rushes by, making an inky blot upon the brilliant green, as it were a patch upon the cheek of a court belle. Over all the land from his lofty perch this crow can see,--can mark the smiling fields, the yellowing corn, the many antlered deer in the Park, the laughing brooklets, the gurgling streams that now in the great heat go lazily and stumble sleepily over every pebble in their way. He can see his neighbors' houses, perhaps his own snug nest, and all the beauty and richness and warmth of an English landscape. But presently--being a bird of unformed tastes or unappreciative, or perhaps fickle--he tires of looking, and flapping heavily his black wings, rises slowly and sails away. Toward the east he goes, the sound of his harsh but homely croak growing fainter as he flies. Over the trees in their gorgeous clothing, across the murmuring brooks, through the uplands, over the heads of the deer that gaze at him with their mournful, gentle eyes, he travels, never ceasing in his flight until he comes to a small belt of firs, evidently set apart, in the centre of which stands "The Cottage." It is considerably larger than one would expect from its name. A long, low, straggling house, about three miles from Chetwoode entrance-gate, going by the road, but only one mile, taking a short cut through the Park. A very pretty house,--with a garden in front, carefully hedged round, and another garden at the back,--situated in a lovely spot,--perhaps the most enviable in all Chetwoode,--silent, dreamy, where one might, indeed, live forever, "the world forgetting, by the world forgot." In the garden all sorts of the sweetest old-world flowers are blooming,--pinks and carnations, late lilies and sweet-williams; the velvety heartsease, breathing comfort to the poor love-that-lies-a-bleeding; the modest forget-me-not, the fragrant mignonette (whose qualities, they rudely say surpass its charms), the starry jessamine, the frail woodbine; while here and there from every nook and corner shines out the fairest, loveliest, queenliest flower of all,--the rose. Every bush is rich with them; the air is heavy with their odor. Roses of every hue, of every size, from the grand old cabbage to the smallest Scotch, are here. One gazes round in silent admiration, until the great love of them swells within the heart and a desire for possession arises, when, growing murderous, one wishes, like Nero, they had but one neck, that they might all be gathered at a blow. Upon the house only snow-white roses grow. In great masses they uprear their heads, peeping curiously in at the windows, trailing lovingly round the porches, nestling under the eaves, drooping coquettishly at the angles. To-day a raindrop has fallen into each scented heart, has lingered there all the morning, and is still loath to leave. Above the flowers the birds hover twittering; beneath them the ground is as a snowy carpet from their fallen petals. Poor petals! How sad it is that they must fall! Yet, even in death, how sweet! It is Saturday. In the morning the new tenant was expected; the evening is to bring the new ward. Lady Chetwoode, in consequence, is a little trouble-minded. Guy has gone to the Bellairs'. Cyril is in radiant spirits. Not that this latter fact need be recorded, as Cyril belongs to those favored ones who at their birth receive a dowry from their fairy godparents of unlimited good-humor. He is at all times an easy-going young man, healthy, happy, whose path in life up to this has been strewn with roses. To him the world isn't "half a bad place," which he is content to take as he finds it, never looking too closely into what doesn't concern him,--a treatment the world evidently likes, as it regards him (especially the gentler portion of it) with the utmost affection. Even with that rare class, mothers blessed with handsome daughters, he finds favor, either through his face or his manner, or because of the fact that though a younger son, he has nine hundred pounds a year of his own and a pretty place called Moorlands, about six miles from Chetwoode. It was his mother's portion and is now his. He is tall, broad-shouldered, and rather handsome, with perhaps more mouth than usually goes to one man's share; but, as he has laughed straight through from his cradle to his twenty-sixth year, this is scarcely to be wondered at. His eyes are gray and frank, his hair is brown, his skin a good deal tanned. He is very far from being an Adonis, but he is good to look at, and to know him is to like him. Just now, luncheon being over, and nothing else left to do, he is feeling rather bored than otherwise, and lounges into his mother's morning-room, being filled with a desire to have speech with somebody. The somebody nearest to him at the moment being Lady Chetwoode, he elects to seek her presence and inflict his society upon her. "It's an awful nuisance having anything on your mind, isn't it, mother?" he says, genially. "It is indeed, my dear," with heartfelt earnestness and a palpable expectation of worse things yet to come. "What unfortunate mistake have you been making now?" "Not one. 'You wrong me, Brutus.' I have been as gently behaved as a skipping lamb all the morning. No; I mean having to fetch our visitor this evening weighs upon my spirits and somehow idles me. I can settle to nothing." "You seldom can, dear, can you?" says Lady Chetwoode, mildly, with unmeant irony. "But"--as though suddenly inspired--"suppose you go for a walk?" This is a mean suggestion, and utterly unworthy of Lady Chetwoode. The fact is, the day is warm and she is sleepy, and she knows she will not get her forty winks unless he takes himself out of the way. So, with a view to getting rid of him, she grows hypocritically kind. "A walk will do you good," she says. "You don't take half exercise enough. And, you know, the want of it makes people fat." "I believe you are right," Cyril says, rising. He stretches himself, laughs indolently at his own lazy figure in an opposite mirror, after which he vanishes almost as quickly as even she can desire. Five minutes later, with an open book upon her knee, as a means of defense should any one enter unannounced, Lady Chetwoode is snoozing comfortably; while Cyril, following the exact direction taken by the crow in the morning, walks leisurely onward, under the trees, to meet his fate! Quite unthinkingly, quite unsuspiciously, he pursues his way, dreaming of anything in the world but The Cottage and its new inmate, until the house, suddenly appearing before him, recalls his wandering thoughts. The hall-door stands open. Every one of the windows is thrown wide. There is about everything the unmistakable _silent_ noise that belongs to an inhabited dwelling, however quiet. The young man, standing still, wonders vaguely at the change. Then all at once a laugh rings out; there is an undeniable scuffle, and presently a tiny black dog with a little mirthful yelp breaks from the house into the garden and commences a mad scamper all round and round the rose trees. An instant later he is followed by a trim maid-servant, who, flushed but smiling, rushes after him, making well-directed but ineffectual pounces on the truant. As she misses him the dog gives way to another yelp (of triumph this time), and again the hunt goes on. But now there comes the sound of other feet, and Cyril, glancing up from his interested watch over the terrier's movements, sees surely something far, far lovelier than he has ever seen before. Even at this early moment his heart gives a little bound and then seems to cease from beating. Upon the door-step stands a girl--although quite three-and-twenty she still looks the merest girl--clad in a gown of clear black-and-white cambric. A huge coarse white apron covers all the front of this gown, and is pinned, French fashion, half-way across her bosom. Her arms, white and soft, and rounded as a child's, are bared to the elbows, her sleeves being carefully tucked up. Two little feet, encased in Louis Quinze slippers, peep coyly from beneath her robe. Upon this vision Cyril gazes, his whole heart in his eyes, and marks with wondering admiration each fresh beauty. She is tall, rather _posée_ in figure, with a small, proud head, and the carriage of a goddess. Her features are not altogether perfect, and yet (or rather because of it) she is extremely beautiful. She has great, soft, trusting eyes of a deep rare gray, that looking compel the truth; above her low white forehead her hair rolls back in silky ruffled waves, and is gathered into a loose knot behind. It is a rich nut-brown in color, through which runs a faint tinge of red that turns to burnished gold under the sun's kiss. Her skin is exquisite, pale but warm, through which as she speaks the blood comes and lingers awhile, and flies only to return. Her mouth is perhaps, strictly speaking, in a degree imperfect, yet it is one of her principal charms; it is large and lovable, and covers pretty teeth as white as snow. For my part I love a large mouth, if well shaped, and do not believe a hearty laugh can issue from a small one. And, after all, what is life without its laughter? A little white cap of the "mob" description adorns her head, and is trimmed fancifully with black velvet bows that match her gown. Her hands are small and fine, the fingers tapering; just now they are clasped together excitedly; and a brilliant color has come into her cheeks as she stands (unconscious of criticism) and watches the depravity of her favorite. "Oh! catch him, Kate," she cries, in a clear, sweet voice, that is now rather impetuous and suggests rising indignation. "Wicked little wretch! He shall have a good whipping for this. Dirty little dog,"--(this to the black terrier, in a tone of reproachful disgust)--"not to want his nice clean bath after all the dust of yesterday and to-day!" This rebuke is evidently lost upon the reprobate terrier, who still flies before the enemy who follows on his heels in hot pursuit. Round and round, in and out, hither and thither he goes, the breathless maid after him, the ceaseless upbraiding of his mistress ringing in his ears. The nice clean bath has no charms for this degenerate dog, although his ablutions are to be made sweet by the touch of those snowy dimpled hands now clasped in an agony of expectation. No, this miserable animal, disdaining all the good things in store for him, rushes past Kate, past his angry mistress, past the roses, out through the bars of the gate right into Cyril's arms! Oh, ill-judging dog! Cyril, having caught him, holds him closely, in spite of his vehement struggles, for, scenting mischief in the air, he fights valiantly for freedom. Kate runs to the garden-gate, so does the bare-armed goddess, and there, on the path, behold their naughty treasure held fast in a stranger's arms! When she sees him the goddess suddenly freezes and grows gravely dignified. The smile departs from her lips, the rich crimson dies, while in its place a faint, delicate blush comes to suffuse her cheeks. "This is your dog, I think?" says Cyril, pretending to be doubtful on the subject; though who could be more sure? "Yes,--thank you." Then as her eyes fall upon her lovely naked arms the blush grows deeper and deeper, until at length her face is red as one of her own perfect roses. "He was very dusty after yesterday's journey, and I was going to wash him," she says, with a gentle dignity but an evident anxiety to explain. "Lucky dog!" says Cyril gravely, in a low tone. Kate has disappeared into the background with the refractory pet, whose quavering protests are lost in the distance. Again silence has fallen upon the house, the wood, the flowers. The faintest flicker of a smile trembles for one instant round the corners of the stranger's lips, then is quickly subdued. "Thank you, sir," she says, once more, quietly, and turning away, is swallowed up hurriedly by the envious roses. All the way home Cyril's mind is full of curious thought, though one topic alone engrosses it. The mistress of that small ungrateful terrier has taken complete and entire possession of him, to the exclusion of all other matter. So the widow has not arrived in solitary state,--that is evident. And what a lovely girl to bring down and bury alive in this quiet spot. Who on earth can she be? How beautiful her arms were, and her hands!--Even the delicate, tinted filbert nails had not escaped his eager gaze. How sweet she looked, how bright! Surely a widow would not be fit company for so gay a creature; and still, when she grew grave at the gate, when her smile faded, had not a wistful, sorrowful expression fallen across her face and into her exquisite eyes? Perhaps she, too, has suffered,--is in trouble, and, through sympathy, clings to her friend the widow. After a moment or two, this train of thought being found unsatisfactory, another forces its way to the surface. By the bye, why should she not be her sister,--that is, the widow's? Of course; nothing more likely. How stupid of him not to have thought of that before! Naturally Mrs. Arlington has a sister, who has come down with her to see that the place is comfortable and well situated and that, and who will stay with her until the first loneliness that always accompanies a change has worn away. And when it has worn away, what then? The conclusion of his thought causes Cyril an unaccountable pang, that startles even himself. In five minutes--in five short minutes--surely no woman's eyes, however lovely, could have wrought much mischief; and yet--and yet--what was there about her to haunt one so? He rouses himself with an effort and refuses to answer his own question. Is he a love-sick boy, to fancy himself enthralled by each new pretty face he sees? Are there only one laughing mouth and one pair of deep gray eyes in the world? What a fool one can be at times! One can indeed! He turns his thoughts persistently upon the coming season, the anticipation of which, only yesterday, filled him with the keenest delight. But three or four short weeks to pass, and the 12th will be here, bringing with it all the joy and self-gratulation that can be derived from the slaying of many birds. He did very well last year, and earned himself many laurels and the reputation of being a crack shot. How will it be this season? Already it seems to him he scents the heather, and feels the weight of his trusty gun upon his shoulder, and hears the soft patter of his good dog's paws behind him. What an awful sell it would be if the birds proved scarce! Warren spoke highly of them the other day, and Warren is an old hand; but still--but still---- How could a widow of forty have a sister of twenty--unless, perhaps, she was a step-sister? Yes, that must be it. Step---- Pshaw! It is a matter of congratulation that just at this moment Cyril finds himself in view of the house, and, pulling out his watch, discovers he has left himself only ten minutes in which to get himself ready before starting for the station to meet Miss Chesney. Perforce, therefore, he leaves off his cogitations, nor renews them until he is seated in the detested carriage _en route_ for Trustan and the ward, when he is so depressed by the roof's apparent intention of descending bodily upon his head that he lets his morbid imagination hold full sway and gives himself up to the gloomiest forebodings, of which the chief is that the unknown being in possession of such great and hitherto unsurpassed beauty is, of course, not only beloved by but hopelessly engaged to a man in every way utterly unworthy of her. When he reaches Trustan the train is almost due, and two minutes afterward it steams into the station. The passengers alight. Cyril gazes anxiously up and down the platform among the women, trying to discover which of them looks most likely to bear the name of Chesney. A preternaturally tall young lady, with eyes like sloes and a very superior figure, attracts him most. She is apparently alone, and is looking round as though expecting some one. It is--it must be she. Raising his hat, Cyril advances toward her and makes a slight bow, which is not returned. The sloes sparkle indignantly, the superior figure grows considerably more superior; and the young lady, turning as though for protection from this bad man who has so insolently and openly molested her in the broad daylight, lays her hand with an expression of relief upon the arm of a gentleman who has just joined her. "I thought you were never coming," she says, in a clear distinct tone meant for Cyril's discomfiture, casting upon that depraved person a glance replete with scorn. As her companion happens to be Harry Bellair of Belmont, Mr. Chetwoode is rather taken aback. He moves aside and colors faintly. Harry Bellair, who is a young gentleman addicted to huge plaids, and low hats, and three or four lockets on his watch chain, being evidently under the impression that Cyril has been "up to one of his larks," bestows upon him in passing a covert but odiously knowing wink, that has the effect of driving Cyril actually wild, and makes him give way to low expressions under his breath. "Vulgar beast!" he says at length out loud with much unction, which happily affords him instant relief. "Are you looking for me?" says a soft voice at his elbow, and turning he beholds a lovely childish face upturned somewhat timidly to his. "Miss Chesney?" he asks, with hesitation, being mindful of his late defeat. "Yes," smiling. "It _is_ for me, then, you are looking? Oh,"--with a thankful sigh,--"I am so glad! I have wanted to ask you the question for two minutes, but I was afraid you might be the wrong person." "I wish you had spoken," laughing: "you would have saved me from much ignominy. I fancied you something altogether different from what you are," with a glance full of kindly admiration,--"and I fear I made rather a fool of myself in consequence. I beg your pardon for having kept you so long in suspense, and especially for having in my ignorance mistaken you for that black-browed lady." Here he smiles down on the fair sweet little face that is smiling up at him. "Was it that tall young lady you called a 'beast'?" asks Miss Lilian, demurely. "If so, it wasn't very polite of you, was it?" "Oh,"--with a laugh,--"did you hear me? I doubt I have begun our acquaintance badly. No, notwithstanding the provocation I received (you saw the withering glance she bestowed upon me?), I refrained from evil language as far as she was concerned, and consoled myself by expending my rage upon her companion,--the man who was seeing after her. Are you tired?--Your journey has not been very unpleasant, I hope?" "Not unpleasant at all. It was quite fine the entire time, and there was no dust." "Your trunks are labeled?" "Yes." "Then perhaps you had better come with me. One of the men will see to your luggage, and will drive your maid home. She is with you?" "Yes. That is, my nurse is; I have never had any other maid. This is Tipping," says Miss Chesney, moving back a step or two, and drawing forward with an affectionate gesture, a pleasant-faced, elderly woman of about fifty-five. "I am glad to see you, Mrs. Tipping," says Cyril, genially, who does not think it necessary, like some folk, to treat the lower classes with studied coldness, as though they were a thing apart. "Perhaps you will tell the groom about your mistress's things, while I take her out of this draughty station." Lilian follows him to the carriage, wondering as she goes. There is an air of command about this new acquaintance that puzzles her. Is he Sir Guy? Is it her guardian in _propria persona_ who has come to meet her? And could a guardian be so--so--likable? Inwardly she hopes it may be so, being rather impressed by Cyril's manner and handsome face. When they are about half-way to Chetwoode she plucks up courage to say, although the saying of it costs her a brilliant blush, "Are you my guardian?" "I call that a most unkind question," says Cyril. "Have I fallen short in any way, that the thought suggests itself? Do you mean to insinuate that I am not guarding you properly now? Am I not taking sufficiently good care of you?" "You _are_ my guardian then?" says Lilian, with such unmistakable hope in her tones that Cyril laughs outright. "No, I am not," he says; "I wish I were; though for your own sake it is better as it is. Your guardian is no end a better fellow than I am. He would have come to meet you to-day, but he was obliged to go some miles away on business." "Business!" thinks Miss Chesney, disdainfully. "Of course it would never do for the goody-goody to neglect his business. Oh, dear! I know we shall not get on at all." "I am very glad he did not put himself out for me," she says, glancing at Cyril from under her long curling lashes. "It would have been a pity, as I have not missed him at all." "I feel intensely grateful to you for that speech," says Cyril. "When Guy cuts me out later on,--as he always does,--I shall still have the memory of it to fall back upon." "Is this Chetwoode?" Lilian asks, five minutes later, as they pass through the entrance gate. "What a charming avenue!"--putting her head out of the window, "and so dark. I like it dark; it reminds me of"--she pauses, and two large tears come slowly, slowly into her blue eyes and tremble there--"my home," she says in a low tone. "You must try to be happy with us," Cyril says, kindly, taking one of her hands and pressing it gently, to enforce his sympathy; and then the horses draw up at the hall door, and he helps her to alight, and presently she finds herself within the doors of Chetwoode. CHAPTER IV. "Ye scenes of my childhood, whose loved recollection Embitters the present, compared with the past."--BYRON. When Lady Chetwoode, who is sitting in the drawing-room, hears the carriage draw up to the door, she straightens herself in her chair, smoothes down the folds of her black velvet gown with rather nervous fingers, and prepares for an unpleasant surprise. She hears Cyril's voice in the hall inquiring where his mother is, and, rising to her feet, she makes ready to receive her new ward. She has put on what she fondly hopes is a particularly gracious air, but which is in reality a palpable mixture of fear and uncertainty. The door opens; there is a slight pause; and then Lilian, slight, and fair, and pretty, stands upon the threshold. She is very pale, partly through fatigue, but much more through nervousness and the self-same feeling of uncertainty that is weighing down her hostess. As her eyes meet Lady Chetwoode's they take an appealing expression that goes straight to the heart of that kindest of women. "You have arrived, my dear," she says, a ring of undeniable cordiality in her tone, while from her face all the unpleasant fear has vanished. She moves forward to greet her guest, and as Lilian comes up to her takes the fair sweet face between her hands and kisses her softly on each cheek. "You are like your mother," she says, presently, holding the girl a little way from her and regarding her with earnest attention. "Yes,--very like your mother, and she was beautiful. You are welcome to Chetwoode, my dear child." Lilian, who is feeling rather inclined to cry, does not trust herself to make any spoken rejoinder, but, putting up her lips of her own accord, presses them gratefully to Lady Chetwoode's, thereby ratifying the silent bond of friendship that without a word has on the instant been sealed between the old woman and the young one. A great sense of relief has fallen upon Lady Chetwoode. Not until now, when her fears have been proved groundless, does she fully comprehend the amount of uneasiness and positive horror with which she has regarded the admittance of a stranger into her happy home circle. The thought that something unrefined, disagreeable, unbearable, might be coming has followed like a nightmare for the past week, but now, in the presence of this lovely child, it has fled away ashamed, never to return. Lilian's delicate, well-bred face and figure, her small hands, her graceful movements, her whole air, proclaim her one of the world to which Lady Chetwoode belongs, and the old lady, who is aristocrat to her fingers' ends, hails the fact with delight. Her beauty alone had almost won her cause, when she cast that beseeching glance from the doorway; and now when she lets the heavy tears grow in her blue eyes, all doubt is at end, and "almost" gives way to "quite." Henceforth she is altogether welcome at Chetwoode, as far as its present gentle mistress is concerned. "Cyril took care of you, I hope?" says Lady Chetwoode, glancing over her guest's head at her second son, and smiling kindly. "Great care of me," returning the smile. "But you are tired, of course; it is a long journey, and no doubt you are glad to reach home," says Lady Chetwoode, using the word naturally. And though the mention of it causes Lilian a pang, still there is something tender and restful about it too, that gives some comfort to her heart. "Perhaps you would like to go to your room," continues Lady Chetwoode, thoughtfully, "though I fear your maid cannot have arrived yet." "Miss Chesney, like Juliet, boasts a nurse," says Cyril; "she scorns to travel with a mere maid." "My nurse has always attended me," says Lilian, laughing and blushing. "She has waited on me since I was a month old. I should not know how to get on without her, and I am sure she could not get on without me. I think she is far better than any maid I could get." "She must have an interest in you that no new-comer could possibly have," says Lady Chetwoode, who is in the humor to agree with anything Lilian may say, so thankful is she to her for being what she is. And yet so strong is habit that involuntarily, as she speaks, her eyes seek Lilian's hair, which is dressed to perfection. "I have no doubt she is a treasure,"--with an air of conviction. "Come with me, my dear." They leave the room together. In the hall the housekeeper, coming forward, says respectfully: "Shall I take Miss Chesney to her room, my lady?" "No, Matthews," says Lady Chetwoode, graciously; "it will give me pleasure to take her there myself." By which speech all the servants are at once made aware that Miss Chesney is already in high favor with "my lady," who never, except on very rare occasions, takes the trouble to see personally after her visitors' comfort. * * * * * When Lilian has been ten minutes in her room Mrs. Tipping arrives, and is shown up-stairs, where she finds her small mistress evidently in the last stage of despondency. These ten lonely minutes have been fatal to her new-born hopes, and have reduced her once more to the melancholy frame of mind in which she left her home in the morning. All this the faithful Tipping sees at a glance, and instantly essays to cheer her. Silently and with careful fingers she first removes her hat, then her jacket, then she induces her to stand up, and, taking off her dress, throws round her a white wrapper taken from a trunk, and prepares to brush the silky yellow hair that for eighteen years has been her own to dress and tend and admire. "Eh, Miss Lilian, child, but it's a lovely place!" she says, presently, this speech being intended as a part of the cheering process. "It seems a fine place," says the "child," indifferently. "Fine it is indeed. Grander even than the Park, I'm thinking." "'Grander than the Park'!" says Miss Chesney, rousing to unexpected fervor. "How can you say that? Have you grown fickle, nurse? There is no place to be compared to the Park, not one in all the world. You can think as you please, of course,"--with reproachful scorn,--"but it is _not_ grander than the Park." "I meant larger, ninny," soothingly. "It is not larger." "But, darling, how can you say so when you haven't been round it?" "How can _you_ say so when _you_ haven't been round it?" This is a poser. Nurse meditates a minute and then says: "Thomas--that's the groom that drove me--says it is." "Thomas!"--with a look that, had the wretched Thomas been on the spot, would infallibly have reduced him to ashes; "and what does Thomas know about it? It is _not_ larger." Silence. "Indeed, my bairn, I think you might well be happy here," says nurse, tenderly returning to the charge. "I don't want you to think about me at all," says Miss Chesney, in trembling tones. "You agreed with Aunt Priscilla that I ought to leave my dear, dear home, and I shall never forgive you for it. I am not happy here. I shall never be happy here. I shall die of fretting for the Park, and when I am _dead_ you will perhaps be satisfied." "Miss Lilian!" "You shan't brush my hair any more," says Miss Lilian, dexterously evading the descent of the brush. "I can do it for myself very well. You are a traitor." "I am sorry, Miss Chesney, if I have displeased you," says nurse, with much dignity tempered with distress: only when deeply grieved and offended does she give her mistress her full title. "How dare you call me Miss Chesney!" cries the young lady, springing to her feet. "It is very unkind of you, and just now too, when I am all alone in a strange house. Oh, nurse!" throwing her arms round the neck of that devoted and long-suffering woman, and forgetful of her resentment, which indeed was born only of her regret, "I am so unhappy, and lonely, and sorry! What shall I do?" "How can I tell you, my lamb?"--caressing with infinite affection the golden head that lies upon her bosom. "All that I say only vexes you." "No, it doesn't: I am wicked when I make you think that. After all,"--raising her face--"I am not quite forsaken; I have you still, and you will never leave me." "Not unless I die, my dear," says nurse, earnestly. "And, Miss Lilian, how can you look at her ladyship without knowing her to be a real friend. And Mr. Chetwoode too; and perhaps Sir Guy will be as nice, when you see him." "Perhaps he won't," ruefully. "That's nonsense, my dear. Let us look at the bright side of things always. And by and by Master Taffy will come here on a visit, and then it will be like old times. Come, now, be reasonable, child of my heart," says nurse, "and tell me, won't you look forward to having Master Taffy here?" "I wish he was here now," says Lilian, visibly brightening. "Yes; perhaps they will ask him. But, nurse, do you remember when last I saw Taffy it was at----" Here she shows such unmistakable symptoms of relapsing into the tearful mood again, that nurse sees the necessity of changing the subject. "Come, my bairn, let me dress you for dinner," she says, briskly, and presently, after a little more coaxing, she succeeds so well that she sends her little mistress down to the drawing-room, looking her loveliest and her best. CHAPTER V. "Thoughtless of beauty, she was beauty's self, Recluse amid the close-embowering woods." --THOMSON. Next morning, having enjoyed the long and dreamless sleep that belongs to the heart-whole, Lilian runs down to the breakfast-room, with the warm sweet flush of health and youth upon her cheeks. Finding Lady Chetwoode and Cyril already before her, she summons all her grace to her aid and tries to look ashamed of herself. "Am I late?" she asks, going up to Lady Chetwoode and giving her a little caress as a good-morning. Her very touch is so gentle and childish and loving that it sinks straight into the deepest recesses of one's heart. "No. Don't be alarmed. I have only just come down myself. You will soon find us out to be some of the laziest people alive." "I am glad of it: I like lazy people," says Lilian; "all the rest seem to turn their lives into one great worry." "Will you not give me a good-morning, Miss Chesney?" says Cyril, who is standing behind her. "Good-morning," putting her hand into his. "But that is not the way you gave it to my mother," in an aggrieved tone. "No?--Oh!"--as she comprehends,--"but you should remember how much more deserving your mother is." "With sorrow I acknowledge the truth of your remark," says Cyril, as he hands her her tea. "Cyril is our naughty boy," Lady Chetwoode says; "we all spend our lives making allowances for Cyril. You must not mind what he says. I hope you slept well, Lilian; there is nothing does one so much good as a sound sleep, and you looked quite pale with fatigue last night. You see"--smiling--"how well I know your name. It is very familiar to me, having been your dear mother's." "It seems strangely familiar to me also, though I never know your mother," says Cyril. "I don't believe I shall ever be able to call you Miss Chesney. Would it make you very angry if I called you Lilian?" "Indeed, no; I shall be very much obliged to you. I should hardly know myself by the more formal title. You shall call me Lilian, and I shall call you Cyril,--if you don't mind." "I don't think I do,--much," says Cyril; so the compact is signed. "Guy will be here surely by luncheon," says Lady Chetwoode, with a view of giving her guest pleasure. "Oh! will he really?" says Lilian, in a quick tone, suggestive of dismay. "I am sure of it," says Guy's mother fondly: "he never breaks his word." "Of course not," thinks Lilian to herself. "Fancy a paragon going wrong! How I hate a man who never breaks his word! Why, the Medes and Persians would be weak-minded compared with him." "I suppose not," she says aloud, rather vaguely. "You seem to appreciate the idea of your guardian's return," says Cyril, with a slight smile, having read half her thoughts correctly. "Does the mere word frighten you? I should like to know your real opinion of what a guardian ought to be." "How can I have an opinion on the subject when I have never seen one?" "Yet a moment ago I saw by your face you were picturing one to yourself." "If so, it could scarcely be Sir Guy,--as he is not old." "Not very. He has still a few hairs and a few teeth remaining. But won't you then answer my question? What is your ideal guardian like?" "If you press it I shall tell you, but you must not betray me to Sir Guy," says Lilian, turning to include Lady Chetwoode in her caution. "My ideal is always a lean old gentleman of about sixty, with a stoop, and any amount of determination. He has a hooked nose on which gold-rimmed spectacles eternally stride; eyes that look one through and through; a mouth full of trite phrases, unpleasant maxims, and false teeth; and a decided tendency toward the suppression of all youthful follies." "Guy will be an agreeable surprise. I had no idea you could be so severe." "Nor am I. You must not think me so," says Lilian, blushing warmly and looking rather sorry for having spoken; "but you know you insisted on an answer. Perhaps I should not have spoken so freely, but that I know my real guardian is not at all like my ideal." "How do you know? Perhaps he too is toothless, old, and unpleasant. He is a great deal older than I am." "He can't be a great deal older." "Why?" "Because"--with a shy glance at the gentle face behind the urn--"Lady Chetwoode looks so young." She blushes again as she says this, and regards her hostess with an air of such thorough good faith as wins that lady's liking on the spot. "You are right," says Cyril, laughing; "she _is_ young. She is never to grow old, because her 'boys,' as she calls us, object to old women. You may have heard of 'perennial spring;' well, that is another name for my mother. But you must not tell her so, because she is horribly conceited, and would lead us an awful life if we didn't keep her down." "Cyril, my dear!" says Lady Chetwoode, laughing, which is about the heaviest reproof she ever delivers. All this time, her breakfast being finished, Lilian has been carefully and industriously breaking up all the bread left upon her plate, until now quite a small pyramid stands in the centre of it. Cyril, having secretly crumbled some of his, now, stooping forward, places it upon the top of her hillock. "I haven't the faintest idea what you intend doing with it," he says, "but, as I am convinced you have some grand project in view, I feel a mean desire to be associated with it in some way by having a finger in the pie. Is it for a pie? I am dying of vulgar curiosity." "I!"--with a little shocked start; "it doesn't matter, I--I quite forgot. I----" She presses her hand nervously down upon the top of her goodly pile, and suppresses the gay little erection until it lies prostrate on her plate, where even then it makes a very fair show. "You meant it for something, my dear, did you not?" asks Lady Chetwoode, kindly. "Yes, for the birds," says the girl, turning upon her two great earnest eyes that shine like stars through regretful tears. "At home I used to collect all the broken bread for them every morning. And they grew so fond of me, the very robins used to come and perch upon my shoulders and eat little bits from my lips. There was no one to frighten them. There was only me, and I loved them. When I knew I must leave the Park,"--a sorrowful quiver making her voice sad,--"I determined to break my going gently to them, and at first I only fed them every second day,--in person,--and then only every third day, and at last only once a week, until"--in a low tone--"they forgot me altogether." "Ungrateful birds," says Cyril, with honest disgust, something like moisture in his own eyes, so real is her grief. "Yes, that was the worst of all, to be so _soon_ forgotten, and I had fed them without missing a day for five years. But they were not ungrateful; why should they remember me, when they thought I had tired of them? Yet I always broke the bread for them every morning, though I would not give it myself, and to-day"--she sighs--"I forgot I was not at home." "My dear," says Lady Chetwoode, laying her own white, plump, jeweled hand upon Lilian's slender, snowy one, as it lies beside her on the table, "you flatter me very much when you say that even for a moment you felt this house home. I hope you will let the feeling grow in you, and will try to remember that here you have a true welcome forever, until you wish to leave us. And as for the birds, I too love them,--dear, pretty creatures,--and I shall take it as a great kindness, my dear Lilian, if every morning you will gather up the crumbs and give them to your little feathered friends." "How good you are!" says Lilian, gratefully, turning her small palm upward so as to give Lady Chetwoode's hand a good squeeze. "I know I shall be happy here. And I am so glad you like the birds; perhaps here they may learn to love me, too. Do you know, before leaving the Park, I wrote a note to my cousin, asking him not to forget to give them bread every day?--but young men are so careless,"--in a disparaging tone,--"I dare say he won't take the trouble to see about it." "I am a young man," remarks Mr. Chetwoode, suggestively. "Yes, I know it," returns Miss Chesney, coolly. "I dare say your cousin will think of it," says Lady Chetwoode, who has a weakness for young men, and always believes the best of them. "Archibald is very kind-hearted." "You know him?"--surprised. "Very well, indeed. He comes here almost every autumn to shoot with the boys. You know, his own home is not ten miles from Chetwoode." "I did not know. I never thought of him at all until I knew he was to inherit the Park. Do you think he will come here this autumn?" "I hope so. Last year he was abroad, and we saw nothing of him; but now he has come home I am sure he will renew his visits. He is a great favorite of mine; I think you, too, will like him." "Don't be too sanguine," says Lilian; "just now I regard him as a usurper; I feel as though he had stolen my Park." "Marry him," says Cyril, "and get it back again. Some more tea, Miss--Lilian?" "If you please--Cyril,"--with a light laugh. "You see, it comes easier to me than to you, after all." "_Place aux dames!_ I felt some embarrassment about commencing. In the future I shall put my _mauvaise honte_ in my pocket, and regard you as something I have always longed for,--that is, a sister." "Very well, and you must be very good to me," says Lilian, "because never having had one, I have a very exalted idea of what a brother should be." "How shall you amuse yourself all the morning, child?" asks Lady Chetwoode. "I fear you're beginning by thinking us stupid." "Don't trouble about me," says Lilian. "If I may, I should like to go out and take a run round the gardens alone. I can always make acquaintance with places quicker if left to find them out for myself." When breakfast is over, and they have all turned their backs with gross ingratitude upon the morning-room, she dons her hat and sallies forth bent on discovery. Through the gardens she goes, admiring the flowers, pulling a blossom or two, making love to the robins and sparrows, and gay little chaffinches, that sit aloft in the branches and pour down sonnets on her head. The riotous butterflies, skimming hither and thither in the bright sunshine, hail her coming, and rush with wanton joy across her eyes, as though seeking to steal from them a lovelier blue for their soft wings. The flowers, the birds, the bees, the amorous wind, all woo this creature, so full of joy and sweetness and the unsurpassable beauty of youth. She makes a rapid rush through all the hothouses, feeling almost stifled in them this day, so rich in sun, and, gaining the orchard, eats a little fruit, and makes a lasting conquest of Michael, the head-gardener, who, when she has gone into generous raptures over his arrangements, becomes her abject slave on the spot, and from that day forward acknowledges no power superior to hers. Tiring of admiration, she leaves the garrulous old man, and wanders away over the closely-shaven lawn, past the hollies, into the wood beyond, singing as she goes, as is her wont. In the deep green wood a delicious sense of freedom possesses her; she walks on, happy, unsuspicious of evil to come, free of care (oh, that we all were so!), with nothing to chain her thoughts to earth, or compel her to dream of aught but the sufficing joy of living, the glad earth beneath her, the brilliant foliage around, the blue heavens above her head. Alas! alas! how short is the time that lies between the child and the woman! the intermediate state when, with awakened eyes and arms outstretched, we inhale the anticipation of life, is as but one day in comparison with all the years of misery and uncertain pleasure to be eventually derived from the reality thereof! Coming to a rather high wall, Lilian pauses, but not for long. There are few walls either in Chetwoode or elsewhere likely to daunt Miss Chesney, when in the humor for exploring. Putting one foot into a friendly crevice, and holding on valiantly to the upper stones, she climbs, and, gaining the top, gazes curiously around. As she turns to survey the land over which she has traveled, a young man emerges from among the low-lying brushwood, and comes quickly forward. He is clad in a light-gray suit of tweed, and has in his mouth a meerschaum pipe of the very latest design. He is very tall, very handsome, thoughtful in expression. His hair is light brown,--what there is of it,--his barber having left him little to boast of except on the upper lip, where a heavy, drooping moustache of the same color grows unrebuked. He is a little grave, a little indolent, a good deal passionate. The severe lines around his well-cut mouth are softened and counterbalanced by the extreme friendliness of his kind, dark eyes, that are so dark as to make one doubt whether their blue is not indeed black. Lilian, standing on her airy perch, is still singing, and imparting to the surrounding scenery the sad story of "Barb'ra Allen's" vile treatment of her adoring swain, and consequent punishment, when the crackling of leaves beneath a human foot causing her to turn, she finds herself face to face with a stranger not a hundred yards away. The song dies upon her lips, an intense desire to be elsewhere gains upon her. The young man in gray, putting his meerschaum in his pocket as a concession to this unexpected warbler, advances leisurely; and Lilian, feeling vaguely conscious that the top of a wall, though exalted, is not the most dignified situation in the world, trusting to her activity, springs to the ground, and regains with mother earth her self-respect. "How could you be so foolish? I do hope you are not hurt," says the gray young man, coming forward anxiously. "Not in the least, thank you," smiling so adorably that he forgets to speak for a moment or two. Then he says with some hesitation, as though in doubt: "Am I addressing my--ward?" "How can I be sure," replies she, also in doubt, "until I know whether indeed you are my--guardian?" "I am Guy Chetwoode," says he, laughing, and raising his hat. "And I am Lilian Chesney," replies she, smiling in return, and making a pretty old-fashioned reverence. "Then now I suppose we may shake hands without any breach of etiquette, and swear eternal friendship," extending his hand. "I shall reserve my oath until later on," says Miss Chesney, demurely, but she gives him her hand nevertheless, with unmistakable _bonhommie_. "You are going home?" glancing up at him from under her broad-brimmed hat. "If so, I shall go with you, as I am a little tired." "But this wall," says Guy, looking with considerable doubt upon the uncompromising barrier on the summit of which he had first seen her. "Had we not better go round?" "A thousand times no. What!"--gayly--"to be defeated by such a simple obstacle as that? I have surmounted greater difficulties than that wall many a time. If you will get up and give me your hands, I dare say I shall be able to manage it." Thus adjured, Guy climbs, and, gaining the top, stoops to give her the help desired; she lays her hand in his, and soon he draws her in triumph to his side. "Now to get down," he says, laughing. "Wait." He jumps lightly into the next field, and, turning, holds out his arms to her. "You must not risk your neck the second time," he says. "When I saw you give that tremendous leap a minute ago, my blood froze in my veins. Such terrible exertion was never meant for--a fairy!" "Am I so very small?" says Lilian. "Well, take me down, then." She leans toward him, and gently, reverentially he takes her in his arms and places her on the ground beside him. With such a slight burden to lift he feels himself almost a Hercules. The whole act does not occupy half a minute, and already he wishes vaguely it did not take so _very_ short a time to bring a pretty woman from a wall to the earth beneath. In some vague manner he understands that for him the situation had its charm. Miss Chesney is thoroughly unembarrassed. "There is something in having a young guardian, after all," she says, casting upon him a glance half shy half merry, wholly sweet. She lays a faint emphasis upon the "young." "You have had doubts on the subject, then?" "Serious doubts. But I see there is truth in the old saying that 'there are few things so bad but that they might have been worse.'" "Do you mean to tell me that I am 'something bad'?" "No"--laughing; "how I wish I could! It is your superiority frightens me. I hear I must look on you as something superlatively good." "How shocking! And in what way am I supposed to excel my brethren?" "In every way," with a good deal of malice: "I have been bred in the belief that you are a _rara avis_, a model, a----" "Your teachers have done me a great injury. I shudder when I contemplate the bitter awakening you must have when you come to know me better." "I hope so. I dare say"--naively--"I could learn to like you very well, if you proved on acquaintance a little less immaculate than I have been led to believe you." "I shall instantly throw over my pronounced taste for the Christian virtues, and take steadily to vice," says Guy, with decision: "will that satisfy your ladyship?" "Perhaps you put it a little too strongly," says Lilian, demurely. "By the bye"--irrelevantly,--"what business took you from home yesterday?" "I have to beg your pardon for that,--my absence, I mean; but I could not help it. And it was scarcely business kept me absent," confesses Chetwoode, who, if he is anything, is strictly honest, "rather a promise to dine and sleep at some friends of ours, the Bellairs, who live a few miles from us." "Then it wasn't really that bugbear, business? I begin to revive," says Miss Chesney. "No; nothing half so healthy. I wish I had some more legitimate excuse to offer for my seeming want of courtesy than the fact of my having to attend a prosy dinner; but I haven't. I feel I deserve a censure, yet I hope you won't administer one when I tell you I found a very severe punishment in the dinner itself." "I forgive you," says Lilian, with deep pity. "It was a long-standing engagement, and, though I knew what lay before me, I found I could not elude it any longer. I hate long engagements; don't you?" "Cordially. But I should never dream of entering on one." "I did, unfortunately." "Then don't do it again." "I won't. Never. I finally make up my mind. At least, most certainly not for the days you may be expected." "I fear I'm a fixture,"--ruefully: "you won't have to expect me again." "Don't say you fear it: I hope you will be happy here." "I hope so, too, and I think it. I like your brother Cyril very much, and your mother is a darling." "And what am I?" "Ask me that question a month hence." "Shall I tell you what I think of you?" "If you wish," says Lilian, indifferently, though in truth she is dying of curiosity. "Well, then, from the very first moment my eyes fell upon you, I thought to myself: She is without exception the most---- After all, though, I think I too shall reserve my opinion for a month or so." "You are right,"--suppressing valiantly all outward symptoms of disappointment: "your ideas then will be more formed. Are you fond of riding, Sir Guy?" "Very. Are you?" "Oh! am I not? I could ride from morning till night." "You are enthusiastic." "Yes,"--with a saucy smile,--"that is one of my many virtues. I think one should be thoroughly in earnest about everything one undertakes. Do you like dancing?" "Rather. It entirely depends upon whom one may be dancing with. There are some people"--with a short but steady glance at her--"that I feel positive I could dance with forever without knowing fatigue, or what is worse, _ennui_. There are others----" an expressive pause. "I have felt," says Sir Guy, with visible depression, "on certain occasions, as though I could commit an open assault on the band because it would insist on playing its waltz from start to finish, instead of stopping after the first two bars and thereby giving me a chance of escape." "Poor 'others'! I see you can be unkind when you choose." "But that is seldom, and only when driven to desperation. Are you fond of dancing? But of course you are: I need scarcely have asked. No doubt you could dance as well as ride from morning until night." "You wrong me slightly. As a rule, I prefer dancing from night until morning. You skate?" "Beautifully!" with ecstatic fervor; "I never saw any one who could skate as well." "No? You shan't be long so. Prepare for a downfall to your pride. I can skate better than any one in the world." Here they both laugh, and, turning, let their eyes meet. Instinctively they draw closer to each other, and a very kindly feeling springs into being. "They maligned you," says Lilian, softly raising her lovely face, and gazing at him attentively, with a rather dangerous amount of ingenuousness. "I begin to fancy you are not so very terrific as they said. I dare say we shall be quite good friends after all." "I wish I was as sure of most things as I am of my own feeling on that point," says Guy, with considerable warmth, holding out his hand. She slips her cool, slim fingers into his, and smiles frankly. There they lie like little snow-flakes on his broad palm, and as he gazes on them a great and most natural desire to kiss them presents itself to his mind. "I think we ought to ratify our vow of good-fellowship," says he, artfully, looking at her as though to gain permission for the theft, and seeing no rebuff in her friendly eyes, stoops and steals a little sweetness from the white hand he holds. They are almost at the house by this time, and presently, gaining the drawing-room, find Lady Chetwoode sitting there awaiting them. "Ah, Guy, you have returned," cries she, well pleased. "Yes, I found my guardian straying aimlessly in a great big wood, so I brought him home in triumph," says Lilian's gay voice, who is in high good humor. "Is luncheon ready? Dear Lady Chetwoode, do not say I am late for the second time to-day." "Not more than five minutes, and you know we do not profess to live by rule. Run away, and take off your hat, child, and come back to me again." So Lilian does as she is desired, and runs away up the broad stairs in haste, to reduce her rebellious locks to order; yet so pleased is she with her _rencontre_ with her guardian, and the want of ferocity he has displayed, and the general desirableness of his face and figure, that she cannot refrain from pausing midway in her career to apostrophize a dark-browed warrior who glowers down upon her from one of the walls. "By my halidame, and by my troth, and by all the wonderful oaths of your period, Sir Knight," says she, smiling saucily, and dropping him a wicked curtsey, "you have good reason to be proud of your kinsman. For, by Cupid, he is a monstrous handsome man, and vastly agreeable!" After this astounding sally she continues her flight, and presently finds herself in her bedroom and almost in nurse's arms. "Lawks-amussy!" says that good old lady, with a gasp, putting her hand to her side, "what a turn you did give me! Will the child never learn to walk?" "I have seen him!" says Lilian, without preamble, only pausing to give nurse a naughty little poke in the other side with a view to restoring her lost equilibrium. "Sir Guy?" anxiously. "Even so. The veritable and awful Sir Guy! And he isn't a bit awful, in spite of all we heard; isn't that good news? and he is very handsome, and quite nice, and apparently can enjoy the world as well as another, and can do a naughty thing at a pinch; and I know he likes me by the expression of his eyes, and he actually unbended so far as to stoop to kiss my hand! There!" All this without stop or comma. "Kissed your hand, my lamb! So soon! he did not lose much time. How the world does wag nowadays!" says nurse, holding aloft her hands in pious protest. "Only to know you an hour or so, and to have the face to kiss your hand! Eh, but it's dreadful, it's brazen! I do hope this Sir Guy is not a wolf in sheep's clothing." "It was very good clothing, anyhow. There is consolation in that. I could never like a man whose coat was badly cut. And his hands,--I particularly noticed them,--they are long, and well shaped, and quite brown." "You seem mightily pleased with him on so short an acquaintance," says nurse, shrewdly. "Brown hand, forsooth,--and a shapely coat! Eh, child, but there's more wanting than that. Maybe it's thinking of being my Lady Guy you'll be, one of these days?" "Nurse, I never met so brilliant a goose as you! And would you throw away your lovely nursling upon a paltry baronet? Oh! shame! And yet"--teasingly--"one might do worse." "I'll tell you that, when I see him," says cautious nurse, and having given one last finishing touch to her darling's golden head, dismisses her to her luncheon and the pernicious attentions of the daring wolf. CHAPTER VI. "CLAUD: 'In mine eye, she is the sweetest lady that ever I looked on.'"--_Much Ado About Nothing_. It is that most satisfactory hour of all the twenty-four,--dinner-hour. Even yet the busy garish day has not quite vanished, but peeps in upon them curiously through the open windows,--upon Lady Chetwoode mild and gracious, upon the two young men, upon airy Lilian looking her bravest and bonniest in some transparent gown of sombre black, through which her fair young neck and arms gleam delicately. Her only ornaments are roses,--rich, soft white roses, gathered from the gardens outside: one, sweeter and happier than its fellows, slumbers cozily in her golden hair. Cyril and she, sitting opposite to each other, smile and jest and converse across the huge bowl of scented flowers that stands in the centre of the table, while Guy, who is a little silent, keeps wondering secretly whether any other woman has skin so dazzlingly fair, or eyes so blue, or hair so richly gilded. "I have seen the widow," he says at length, rousing himself to a sense of his own taciturnity. "On my way home this morning, before I met you,"--turning to Lilian,--"I thought it my duty to look her up, and say I hoped she was comfortable, and all that." "And you saw her?" asks Cyril, regarding Guy attentively. "Yes; she is extremely pretty, and extremely coy,--cold I ought to say, as there didn't seem to be even the smallest spice of coquetry about her." "That's the safest beginning of all," says Cyril confidentially to his mother, "and no doubt the latest. I dare say she looked as though she thought he would never leave." "She did," says Guy, laughing, "and, what is more unflattering, I am sure she meant it." "Clever woman!" "However, if she intended what you think, she rather defeated her object; as I shan't trouble her again in a hurry. Can't bear feeling myself in the way." "Is she really pretty?" Cyril asks, curiously, though idly. "Really; almost lovely." "Evidently a handsome family," thinks Cyril. "I wonder if he saw my friend the sister, or step-sister, or companion." "She looks sad, too," goes on Guy, "and as though she had a melancholy story attached to her." "I do hope not, my dear," interrupts his mother, uneasily. "There is nothing so objectionable as a woman with a story. Later on one is sure to hear something wrong about her." "I agree with you," Cyril says, promptly. "I can't bear mysterious people. When in their society, I invariably find myself putting a check on my conversation, and blushing whenever I get on the topic of forgeries, burglaries, murders, elopements, and so forth. I never can keep myself from studying their faces when such subjects are mentioned, to see which it was had ruffled the peace of their existence. It is absurd, I know, but I can't help it, and it makes me uncomfortable." "Does this lady live in the wood, where I met you?" asks Lilian, addressing Guy, and apparently deeply interested. "Yes, about a mile from that particular spot. She is a new tenant we took to oblige a friend, but we know nothing about her." "How very romantic!" says Lilian; "it is just like a story." "Yes; the image of the 'Children of the Abbey,' or 'The Castle of Otranto,'" says Cyril. "Has she any one living with her, Guy?" carelessly. "Yes, two servants, and a small ill-tempered terrier." "I mean any friends. It must be dull to be by one's self." "I don't know. I saw no one. She don't seem ambitious about making acquaintances, as, when I said I hoped she would not find it lonely, and that my mother would have much pleasure in calling on her, she blushed painfully, and said she was never lonely, and that she would esteem it a kindness if we would try to forget she was at the cottage." "That was rather rude, my dear, wasn't it?" says Lady Chetwoode mildly. "It sounds so, but, as she said it, it wasn't rude. She appeared nervous, I thought, and as though she had but lately recovered from a severe illness. When the blush died away, she was as white as death." "Well, I shan't distress her by calling," says Lady Chetwoode, who is naturally a little offended by the unknown's remark. Unconsciously she has been viewing her coming with distrust, and now this unpleasing message--for as a message directly addressed to herself she regards it--has had the effect of changing a smouldering doubt into an acknowledged dislike. "I wonder how she means to employ her time down here," says Cyril. "Scenery abounds, but lovely views don't go a long way with most people. After a while they are apt to pall." "Is there pretty scenery round Truston?" asks Lilian. "Any amount of it. Like 'Auburn,' it is the 'loveliest village of the plain.' But I can't say we are a very enterprising people. Sometimes it occurs to one of us to give a dinner-party, but no sooner do we issue the invitations than we sit down and repent bitterly; and on rare occasions we may have a ball, which means a drive of fourteen miles on a freezing night, and universal depression and sneezing for a week afterward. Perhaps the widow is wise in declining to have anything to do with our festive gatherings. I begin to think there is method in her madness." "Miss Chesney doesn't agree with you," says Guy, casting a quick glance at Lilian: "she would go any distance to a ball, and dance from night till morning, and never know depression next day." "Is that true, Miss Chesney?" "Sir Guy says it is," replies Lilian, demurely. "When I was young," says Lady Chetwoode, "I felt just like that. So long as the band played, so long I could dance, and without ever feeling fatigue. And provided he was of a good figure, and could dance well, I never much cared who my partner was, until I met your father. Dear me! how long ago it seems!" "Not at all," says Cyril; "a mere reminiscence of yesterday. When I am an old gentleman, I shall make a point of never remembering anything that happened long ago, no matter how good it may have been." "Perhaps you won't have anything good to remember," says Miss Lilian, provokingly. "Guy, give Miss Chesney another glass of wine," says Cyril, promptly: "she is evidently feeling low." "Sir Guy," says Miss Chesney, with equal promptitude, and a treacherous display of innocent curiosity, "when you were at Belmont last evening did you hear Miss Bellair say anything of a rather rude attack made upon her yesterday at the station by an ill-bred young man?" "No," says Sir Guy, rather amazed. "Did she not speak of it? How strange! Why, I fancied----" "Miss Chesney," interposes Cyril, "if you have any regard for your personal safety, you will refrain from further speech." "But why?"--opening her great eyes in affected surprise. "Why may I not tell Sir Guy about it? Poor Miss Bellair! although a stranger to me, I felt most genuine pity for her. Just fancy, Sir Guy, a poor girl alone upon a platform, without a soul to take care of her, what she must have endured, when a young man--_apparently_ a gentleman--walked up to her, and taking advantage of her isolated position, bowed to her, simpered impertinently, and was actually on the very point of addressing her, when fortunately her cousin came up and rescued her from her unhappy situation. Was it not shameful? Now, what do you think that rude young man deserved?" "Extinction," replies Guy, without hesitation. "I think so too. Don't you, Lady Chetwoode?" Lady Chetwoode laughs. "Now, I shall give my version of the story," says Cyril. "I too was present----" "And didn't fly to her assistance? Oh, fie!" says Lilian. "There was once an unhappy young man, who was sent to a station to meet a young woman, without having been told beforehand whether she was like Juno, tall enough to 'snuff the moon,' or whether she was so insignificant as to require a strong binocular to enable you to see her at all." "I am not insignificant," says Lilian, her indignation getting the better of her judgment. "Am I speaking of you, Miss Chesney?" "Well, go on." "Now, it came to pass that as this wretched young man was glaring wildly round to see where his charge might be, he espied a tall young woman, apparently in the last stage of exhaustion, looking about for some one to assist her, and seeing no one else, for the one he sought had meanly, and with a view to his discomfiture, crept silently behind his back----" "Oh, Cyril!" "Yes, I maintain it; she crept silently behind his back, and bribed her maid to keep silence. So this wretched young man walked up to Juno, and pulled his forelock, and made his very best Sunday bow, and generally put his foot in it. Juno was so frightened by the best bow that she gave way to a stifled scream, and instantly sank back unconscious into the arms of her betrothed, who just then ran frantically upon the scene. Upon this the deluded young man----" "That will do," interrupts Lilian, severely. "I am certain I have read it somewhere before; and--people should always tell the truth." "By the bye," says Guy, "I believe Miss Bellair did say something last night about an unpleasant adventure at the station,--something about a very low person who had got himself up like a gentleman, but was without doubt one of the swell mob, and who----" "You needn't go any further. I feel my position keenly. Nevertheless, Miss Bellair made a mistake when she rejected my proffered services. She little knows what a delightful companion I can be. Can't I, Miss Chesney?" "Can he, Lady Chetwoode? I am not in a position to judge." "If a perpetual, never-ceasing flow of conversation has anything to do with it, I believe he must be acknowledged the most charming of his sex," says his mother, laughing, and rising, bears away Lilian with her to the drawing-room. CHAPTER VII. "A dancing shape, an image gay, To haunt, to startle, and waylay." --WORDSWORTH. When seven long uneventful days have passed away, every one at Chetwoode is ready to acknowledge that the coming of Lilian Chesney is an occurrence for which they ought to be devoutly thankful. She is a boon, a blessing, a merry sunbeam, darting hither and thither about the old place, lighting up the shadows, dancing through the dark rooms, casting a little of her own inborn joyousness upon all that comes within her reach. To Lady Chetwoode, who is fond of young life, she is especially grateful, and creeps into her kind heart in an incredibly short time, finding no impediment to check her progress. Once a day, armed with huge gloves and a gigantic scissors, Lady Chetwoode makes a tour of her gardens, snipping, and plucking, and giving superfluous orders to the attentive gardeners all the time. After her trots Lilian, supplied with a basket and a restless tongue that seldom wearies, but is always ready to suggest, or help the thought that sometimes comes slowly to her hostess. "As you were saying last night, my dear Lilian----" says Lady Chetwoode, vaguely, coming to a full stop before the head gardener, and gazing at Lilian for further inspiration; she had evidently remembered only the smallest outline of what she wants to say. "About the ivy on the north wall? You wanted it thinned. You thought it a degree too straggling." "Yes,--yes; of course. You hear, Michael, I want it clipped and thinned, and---- There was something else about the ivy, my child, wasn't there?" "You wished it mixed with the variegated kind, did you not?" "Ah, of course. I wonder how I ever got on without Lilian," says the old lady, gently pinching the girl's soft peach-like cheek. "Florence, without doubt, is a comfort,--but--she is not fond of gardening. Shall we come and take a peep at the grapes, dear?" And so on. Occasionally, too,--being fond of living out of doors in the summer, and being a capital farmeress,--Lady Chetwoode takes a quiet walk down to the home farm, to inspect all the latest arrivals. And here, too, Miss Lilian must needs follow. There are twelve merry, showy little calves in one field, that run all together in their ungainly, jolting fashion up to the high gate that guards their domain, the moment Lady Chetwoode and her visitor arrive, under the mistaken impression that she and Lilian are a pair of dairy-maids coming to solace them with unlimited pans of milk. Lilian cries "Shoo!" at the top of her gay young voice, and instantly all the handsome, foolish things scamper away as though destruction were at their heels, leaving Miss Chesney delighted at the success of her own performance. Then in the paddock there are four mad little colts to be admired, whose chief joy in life seems to consist in kicking their hind legs wildly into space, while their more sedate mothers stand apart and compare notes upon their darlings' merit. This paddock is Lilian's special delight, and all the way there, and all the way back she chatters unceasingly, making the old lady's heart grow young again, as she listens to, and laughs at, all the merry stories Miss Chesney tells her of her former life. To-day--although the morning has been threatening--is now quite fine. Tired of sulking, it cleared up half an hour ago, and is now throwing out a double portion of heat, as though to make up for its early deficiencies. The "King of the East, ... girt With song and flame and fragrance, slowly lifts His golden feet on those empurpled stairs That climb into the windy halls of heaven," and, casting his million beams abroad, enlivens the whole earth. It is a day when one might saunter but not walk, when one might dream though wide awake, when one is perforce amiable because argument or contradiction would be too great an exertion. Sir Guy--who has been making a secret though exhaustive search through the house for Miss Chesney--now turns his steps toward the orchard, where already instinct has taught him she is usually to be found. He is not looking quite so _insouciant_, or carelessly happy, as when first we saw him, now two weeks ago; there is a little gnawing, dissatisfied feeling at his heart, for which he dare not account even to himself. He thinks a good deal of his ward, and his ward thinks a good deal of him; but unfortunately their thoughts do not amalgamate harmoniously. Toward Sir Guy Miss Chesney's actions have not been altogether just. Cyril she treats with affection, and the utmost _bonhommie_, but toward his brother--in spite of her civility on that first day of meeting--she maintains a strict and irritating reserve. He is her guardian (detestable, thankless office), and she takes good care that neither he or she shall ever forget that fact. Secretly she resents it, and openly gratifies that resentment by denying his authority in all things, and being specially willful and wayward when occasion offers; as though to prove to him that she, for one, does not acknowledge his power over her. Not that this ill-treated young man has the faintest desire to assert any authority whatever. On the contrary, he is most desirous of being all there is of the most submissive when in her presence; but Miss Chesney declines to see his humility, and chooses instead to imagine him capable of oppressing her with all sorts of tyrannical commands at a moment's notice. There is a little cloud on his brow as he reaches the garden and walks moodily along its principal path. This cloud, however, lightens and disappears, as upon the southern border he hears voices that tell him his search is at an end. Miss Chesney's clear notes, rather raised and evidently excited, blend with those of old Michael Ronaldson, whose quavering bass is also uplifted, suggesting unwonted agitation on the part of this easy-going though ancient gentleman. Lilian is standing on tip-toe, opposite a plum-tree, with the long tail of her black gown caught firmly in one hand, while with the other she points frantically in a direction high above her head. "Don't you see him?" she says, reproachfully,--"there--in that corner." "No, that I don't," says Michael, blankly, sheltering his forehead with both hands from the sun's rays, while straining his gaze anxiously toward the spot named. "Not see him! Why, he is a big one, a _monster_! Michael," says Lilian, reproachfully, "you are growing either stupid or short-sighted, and I didn't expect it from you. Now follow the tip of my finger; look right along it now--now"--with growing excitement, "don't you see it?" "I do, I do," says the old man, enthusiastically; "wait till I get 'en--won't I pay him off!" "Is it a plum you want?" asks Guy, who has come up behind her, and is lost in wonder at what he considers is her excitement about the fruit. "Shall I get it for you?" "A plum! no, it is a snail I want," says Lilian eagerly, "but I can't get at it. Oh, that I had been born five inches taller! Ronaldson, you are not tall enough; Sir Guy will catch him." Sir Guy, having brought a huge snail to the ground, presents him gravely to Lilian. "That is the twenty-third we have caught to-day," says she, "and twenty-nine yesterday,--in all forty-eight. Isn't it, Michael?" "I think it makes fifty-two," suggests Sir Guy, deferentially. "Does it? Well, it makes no difference," says Miss Chesney, with a fine disregard of arithmetic; "at all events, either way, it is a tremendous number. I'm sure I don't know where they come from,"--despairingly,-- "unless they all walk back again during the night." "And I wouldn't wonder too," says Michael, _sotto voce_. "Walk back again!" repeats Guy, amazed. "Don't you kill them?" "Miss Chesney won't hear of 'en being killed, Sir Guy," says old Ronaldson, sheepishly; "she says as 'ow the cracklin' of 'en do make her feel sick all over." "Oh, yes," says Lilian, making a little wry face, "I hate to think of it. He used to crunch them under his heel, so," with a shudder, and a small stamp upon the ground, "and it used to make me absolutely faint. So we gave it up, and now we just throw them over the wall, so,"--suiting the action to the word, and flinging the slimy creature she holds with dainty disgust, between her first finger and thumb, over the garden boundary. Guy laughs, and, thus encouraged, so does old Michael. "Well, at all events, it must take them a long time to get back," says Lilian, apologetically. "On your head be it if we have no vegetables or fruit this year," says Chetwoode, who understands as much about gardening as the man in the moon, but thinks it right to say something. "Come for a walk, Lilian, will you? It is a pity to lose this charming day." He speaks with marked diffidence (his lady's moods being uncertain), which so far gains upon Miss Chesney that in return she deigns to be gracious. "I don't mind if I do," she replies, with much civility. "Good-morning, Michael;" and with a pretty little nod, and a still prettier smile in answer to the old man's low salutation, she walks away beside her guardian. Far into the woods they roam, the teeming woods all green and bronze and copper-colored, content and happy in that no actual grief disturbs them. "The branches cross above their eyes, The skies are in a net;" the fond gay birds are warbling their tenderest strains. "Along the grass sweet airs are blown," and all the myriad flowers, the "little wildings" of the forest, "earth's cultureless buds," are expanding and glowing, and exhaling the perfumed life that their mother, Nature, has given them. Chetwoode is looking its best and brightest, and Sir Guy might well be proud of his possessions; but no thought of them enters his mind just now, which is filled to overflowing with the image of this petulant, pretty, saucy, lovable ward, that fate has thrown into his path. "Yes, it is a lovely place!" says Lilian, after a pause spent in admiration. She has been looking around her, and has fallen into honest though silent raptures over all the undulating parks and uplands that stretch before her, far as the eye can see. "Lovely!--So," with a sigh, "was my old home." "Yes. I think quite as lovely as this." "What!" turning to him with a start, while the rich, warm, eager flush of youth springs to her cheeks and mantles there, "you have been there? You have seen the Park?" "Yes, very often, though not for years past. I spent many a day there when I was younger. I thought you knew it." "No, indeed. It makes me glad to think some one here can remember its beauties with me. But you cannot know it all as I do: you never saw my own particular bit of wood?"--with earnest questioning, as though seeking to deny the hope that strongly exists. "It lies behind the orchard, and one can get to it by passing through a little gate in the wall, that leads into the very centre of it. There at first, in the heart of the trees one sees a tangled mass with giant branches overhanging it, and straggling blackberry bushes protecting it with their angry arms, and just inside, the coolest, greenest, freshest bit of grass in all the world,--my fairy nook I used to call it. But you--of course you never saw it." "It has a huge horse-chestnut at its head, and a silver fir at its feet." "Yes,--yes!" "I know it well," says Chetwoode, smiling at her eagerness. "It was your mother's favorite spot. You know she and my mother were fast friends, and she was very fond of me. When first she was married, before you were born, I was constantly at the Park, and afterward too. She used to read in the spot you name, and I--I was a delicate little fellow at that time, obliged to lie a good deal, and I used to read there beside her with my head in her lap, by the hour together." "Why, you know more about my mother than I do," says Lilian, with some faint envy in her tones. "Yes,"--hastily, having already learned how little a thing can cause an outbreak, when one party is bent on war,--"but you must not blame me for that. I could not help it." "No,"--regretfully,--"I suppose not. Before I was born, you say. How old that seems to make you!" "Why?"--laughing. "Because I was able to read eighteen years ago? I was only nine, or perhaps ten, then." "I never could do my sums," says Lilian: "I only know it sounds as though you were the Ancient Mariner or Methuselah, or anybody in the last stage of decay." "And yet I am not so very old, Lilian. I am not yet thirty." "Well, that's old enough. When I am thirty I shall take to caps with borders, and spectacles, and long black mittens, like nurse. Ha, ha!" laughs Lilian, delighted at the portrait of herself she has drawn, "shan't I look nice then?" "I dare say you will," says Guy, quite seriously. "But I would advise you to put off the wearing of them for a while longer. I don't think thirty old. I am not quite that." "A month or two don't signify,"--provokingly; "and as you have had apparently a very good life I don't think it manly of you to fret because you are drawing to the close of it. Some people would call it mean. There, never mind your age: tell me something more about my mother. Did you love her?" "One could not help loving her, she was so gentle, so thoroughly kind-hearted." "Ah! what a pity it is I don't resemble her!" says Lilian, with a suspiciously deep sigh, accepting the reproach, and shaking her head mournfully. "Was she like that picture at home in the drawing-room? I hope not. It is very lovely, but it lacks expression, and has no tenderness about it." "Then the artist must have done her great injustice. She was all tenderness both in face and disposition as I remember her, and children are very correct in their impressions. She was extremely beautiful. You are very like her." "Am I, Sir Guy? Oh, thank you. I didn't hope for so much praise. Then in one thing at least I do resemble my mother. Am I more beautiful or less so?" "That is quite a matter of opinion." "And what is yours?" saucily. "What can it matter to you?" he says, quickly, almost angrily. "Besides, I dare say you know it." "I don't, indeed. Never mind, I shall find out for myself. I am so glad"--amiably--"you knew my mother, and the dear Park! It sounds horrible, does it not, but the Park is even more dear to me than--than her memory." "You can scarcely call it a 'memory'; she died when you were so young,--hardly old enough to have an idea. I recollect you so well, a little toddling thing of two." "The plot thickens. You knew _me_ also? And pray, Sir Guardian, what was I like?" "You had blue eyes, and a fair skin, a very imperious will, and the yellowest hair I ever saw." "A graphic description! It would be madness on the part of any one to steal me, as I should infallibly be discovered by it. Well, I have not altered much. I have still my eyes and my hair, and my will, only perhaps rather more of the latter. Go on: you are very unusually interesting to-day: I had no idea you possessed such a fund of information. Were you very fond of me?" "Very," says Chetwoode, laughing in spite of himself. "I was your slave, as long as I was with you. Your lightest wish was my law. I used even----" A pause. "Yes, do go on: I am all attention. 'I used even----'" "I was going to say I used to carry you about in my arms, and kiss you into good humor when you were angry, which was pretty often," replies Guy, with a rather forced laugh, and a decided accession of color; "but I feared such a very grown-up young lady as you might be offended." "Not in the least,"--with a gay, perfectly unembarrassed enjoyment at his confusion. "I never heard anything so amusing. Fancy you being my nurse once on a time. I feel immensely flattered when I think such an austere individual actually condescended to hold me in his arms and kiss me into good humor. It is more than I have any right to expect. I am positively overwhelmed. By the bye, had your remedy the desired effect? Did I subdue my naughty passion under your treatment?" "As far as I can recollect, yes," rather stiffly. Nobody likes being laughed at. "How odd!" says Miss Chesney. "Not very," retorts he: "at that time _you_ were very fond of _me_." "That is even odder," says Miss Chesney, who takes an insane delight in teasing him. "What a pity it is you cannot invent some plan for reducing me to order now!" "There are some tasks too great for a mere mortal to undertake," replies Sir Guy, calmly. Miss Chesney, not being just then prepared with a crushing retort, wisely refrains from speech altogether, although it is by a superhuman effort she does so. Presently, however, lest he should think her overpowered by the irony of his remark, she says, quite pleasantly: "Did Cyril ever see me before I came here?" "No." Then abruptly, "Do you like Cyril?" "Oh, immensely! He suits me wonderfully, he is so utterly devoid of dignity, and all that. One need not mind what one says to Cyril; in his worst mood he could not terrify. Whereas his brother----" with a little malicious gleam from under her long, heavy lashes. "Well, what of his brother?" "Nay, Sir Guy, the month we agreed on has not yet expired," says Lilian. "I cannot tell you what I think of you yet. Still, you cannot imagine how dreadfully afraid I am of you at times." "If I believed you, it would cause me great regret," says her guardian, rather hurt. "I am afraid, Lilian, your father acted unwisely when he chose Chetwoode as a home for you." "What! are you tired of me already?" asks she hastily, with a little tremor in her voice, that might be anger, and that might be pain. "Tired of you? No! But I cannot help seeing that the fact of my being your guardian makes me abhorrent to you." "Not quite that," says Miss Chesney, in a little soft, repentant tone. "What a curious idea to get into your head? dismiss it; there is really no reason why it should remain." "You are sure?" with rather more earnestness than the occasion demands. "Quite sure. And now tell me how it was I never saw you until now, since I was two years old." "Well, for one thing, your mother died; then I went to Eton, to Cambridge, got a commission in the Dragoons, tired of it, sold out, and am now as you see me." "What an eventful history!" says Lilian, laughing. At this moment, who should come toward them, beneath the trees, but Cyril, walking as though for a wager. "'Whither awa?'" asks Miss Lilian, gayly stopping him with outstretched hands. "You have spoiled my quotation," says Cyril, reproachfully, "and it was on the very tip of my tongue. I call it disgraceful. I was going to say with fine effect, 'Where are you going, my pretty maid?' but I fear it would fall rather flat if I said it now." "Rather. Nevertheless, I accept the compliment. Are you in training? or where are you going in such a hurry?" "A mere constitutional," says Cyril, lightly,--which is a base and ready lie. "Good-bye, I won't detain you longer. Long ago I learned the useful lesson that where 'two is company, three is trumpery.' Don't look as though you would like to devour me, Guy: I meant no harm." Lilian laughs, so does Guy, and Cyril continues his hurried walk. "Where does that path lead to?" asks Lilian, looking after him as he disappeared rapidly in the distance. "To The Cottage first, and then to the gamekeeper's lodge, and farther on to another entrance-gate that opens on the road." "Perhaps he will see your pretty tenant on his way?" "I hardly think so. It seems she never goes beyond her own garden." "Poor thing! I feel the greatest curiosity about her, indeed I might say an interest in her. Perhaps she is unhappy." "Perhaps so; though her manner is more frozen than melancholy. She is almost forbidding, she is so cold." "She may be in ill health." "She may be," unsympathetically. "You do not seem very prepossessed in her favor," says Lilian, impatiently. "Well, I confess I am not," carelessly. "Experience has taught me that when a woman withdraws persistently from the society of her own sex, and eschews the companionship of her fellow-creatures, there is sure to be something radically wrong with her." "But you forget there are exceptions to every rule. I confess I would give anything to see her," says Lilian, warmly. "I don't believe you would be the gainer by that bargain," replies he, with conviction, being oddly, unaccountably prejudiced against this silent, undemonstrative widow. * * * * * Meantime, Cyril pursues his way along the path, that every day of late he has traveled with unexampled perseverance. Seven times he has passed along it full of hope, and only twice has been rewarded, with a bare glimpse of the fair unknown, whose face has obstinately haunted him since his first meeting with it. On these two momentous occasions, she has appeared to him so pale and wan that he is fain to believe the color he saw in her cheeks on that first day arose from vexation and excitement, rather than health,--a conclusion that fills him with alarm. Now, as he nears the house between the interstices of the hedge he catches the gleam of a white gown moving to and fro, that surely covers his divinity. Time proves his surmise right. It is the admired incognita, who almost as he reaches the gate that leads to her bower, comes up to one of the huge rose-bushes that decorate either side of it, and--unconscious of criticism--commences to gather from it such flowers as shall add beauty to the bouquet already growing large within her hands. Presently the restless feeling that makes us all know when some unexpected presence is near, compels her to raise her head. Thereupon her eyes and those of Cyril Chetwoode meet. She pauses in her occupation as though irresolute; Cyril pauses too; and then gravely, unsmilingly, she bows in cold recognition. Certainly her reception is not encouraging; but Cyril is not to be daunted. "I hope," he says, deferentially, "your little dog has been conducting himself with due propriety since last I had the pleasure of restoring him to your arms?" This Grandisonian speech surely calls for a reply. "Yes," says Incognita, graciously. "I think it was only the worry caused by change of scene made him behave so very badly that--last day." So saying, she turns from him, as though anxious to give him a gentle _congé_. But Cyril, driven to desperation, makes one last effort at detaining her. "I hope your friend is better," he says, leaning his arms upon the top of the gate, and looking full of anxiety about the absent widow. "My brother--Sir Guy--called the other day, and said she appeared extremely delicate." "My friend?" staring at him in marked surprise, while a faint deep rose flush illumines her cheek, making one forget how white and fragile she appeared a moment since. "Yes. I mean Mrs. Arlington, our tenant. I am Cyril Chetwoode," raising his hat. "I hope the air here will do her good." He is talking against time, but she is too much occupied to notice it. "I hope it will," she replies, calmly, studying her roses attentively, while the faintest suspicion of a smile grows and trembles at the corner of her mobile lips. "You are her sister, perhaps?" asks Cyril, the extreme deference of his whole manner taking from the rudeness of his questioning. "No--not her sister." "Her friend?" "Yes. Her dearest friend," replies Incognita, slowly, after a pause, and a closer, more prolonged examination of her roses; while again the curious half-suppressed smile lights up her face. There are few things prettier on a pretty face than an irrepressible smile. "She is fortunate in possessing such a friend," says Cyril, softly; then with some haste, as though anxious to cover his last remark, "My brother did not see you when he called?" "Did he say so?" "No. He merely mentioned having seen only Mrs. Arlington. I do not think he is aware of your existence." "I think he is. I have had the pleasure of speaking with Sir Guy." "Indeed!" says Cyril, and instantly tells himself he would not have suspected Guy of so much slyness. "Probably it was some day since--you met him----" "No, it was on that one occasion when he called here." "I dare say I misunderstood," says Cyril, "but I certainly thought he said he had seen only Mrs. Arlington." "Well?" "Well?" "_I_ am Mrs. Arlington!" "What!" says Cyril, with exaggerated surprise,--and a moment later is shocked at the vehemence of his own manner. "I beg your pardon, I am sure," he says, contritely; "there is no reason why it should not be so, but you seem so--I had no idea you wore a--that is--I mean I did not think you were married." "You had no idea I was a widow," corrects Mrs. Arlington, coldly. "I do not see why you need apologize. On the contrary, I consider you have paid me a compliment. I am glad I do not look the character. Good-morning, sir; I have detained you too long already." "It is I who have detained you, madam," says Cyril, speaking coldly also, being a little vexed at the tone she has employed toward him, feeling it to be undeserved. "I fear I have been unhappy enough to err twice this morning,--though I trust you will see--unwittingly." He accompanies this speech with a glance so full of entreaty and a mute desire for friendship as must go straight to the heart of any true woman; after which, being a wise young man, he attempts no further remonstrance, but lifts his hat, and walks away gloomily toward his home. Mrs. Arlington, who is not proof against so much reproachful humility, lifts her head, sees the dejected manner of his departure, and is greatly struck by it. She makes one step forward; checks herself; opens her lips as though to speak; checks herself again; and finally, with a little impatient sigh, turns and walks off gloomily toward her home. CHAPTER VIII. "And sang, with much simplicity,--a merit Not the less precious, that we seldom hear it." --_Don Juan_. The rain is beating regularly, persistently, against the window-panes; there is no hope of wandering afield this evening. A sullen summer shower, without a smile in it, is deluging gardens and lawns, tender flowers and graveled walks, and is blotting out angrily all the glories of the landscape. It is half-past four o'clock. Lady Chetwoode is sitting in the library reclining in the coziest arm-chair the room contains, with her knitting as usual in her hands. She disdains all newer, lighter modes of passing the time, and knits diligently all day long for her poor. Lilian is standing at the melancholy window, counting the diminutive lakes and toy pools forming in the walk outside. As she looks, a laurel leaf, blown from the nearest shrubbery, falls into a fairy river, and floats along in its current like a sedate and sturdy boat, with a small snail for cargo, that clings to it bravely for dear life. Presently a stick, that to Lilian's idle fancy resolves itself into an iron-clad, runs down the poor little skiff, causing it to founder with all hands on board. At this heart-rending moment John enters with a tea-tray, and, drawing a small table before Lady Chetwoode, lays it thereon. Her ladyship, with a sigh, prepares to put away her beloved knitting, hesitates, and then is lost in so far that she elects to finish that most mysterious of all things, the rounding of the heel of her socks, before pouring out the tea. Old James Murland will be expecting these good gray socks by the end of the week, and old James Murland must not be disappointed. "Lady Chetwoode," says Lilian, with soft hesitation, "I want to ask you a question." "Do you, dear? Then ask it." "But it is a very odd question, and perhaps you will be angry." "I don't think I shall," says Lady Chetwoode ("One, two, three, four," etc.) "Well, then, I like you so much--I love you so much," corrects Lilian, earnestly, "that, if you don't mind, I should like to call you some name a little less formal than Lady Chetwoode. Do you mind?" Her ladyship lays down her knitting and looks amused. "It seems no one cares to give me my title," she says. "Mabel, my late ward, was hardly here three days when she made a request similar to yours. She always called me 'Auntie.' Florence calls me, of course, 'Aunt Anne;' but Mabel always called me 'Auntie.'" "Ah! that was prettier. May I call you 'Auntie' too? 'Auntie Nannie,'--I think that a dear little name, and just suited to you." "Call me anything you like, darling," says Lady Chetwoode, kissing the girl's soft, flushed cheek. Here the door opens to admit Sir Guy and Cyril, who are driven to desperation and afternoon tea by the incivility of the weather. "The mother and Lilian spooning," says Cyril. "I verily believe women, when alone, kiss each other for want of something better." "I have been laughing at Lilian," says Lady Chetwoode: "she, like Mabel, cannot be happy unless she finds for me a pet name. So I am to be 'Auntie' to her too." "I am glad it is not to be 'Aunt Anne,' like Florence," says Cyril, with a distasteful shrug; "that way of addressing you always grates upon my ear." "By the bye, that reminds me," says Lady Chetwoode, struggling vainly in her pocket to bring to light something that isn't there, "Florence is coming home next week. I had a letter from her this morning telling me so, but I forgot all about it till now." "You don't say so!" says Cyril, in a tone of unaffected dismay. Now, when one hears an unknown name mentioned frequently in conversation, one eventually grows desirous of knowing something about the owner of that name. Lilian therefore gives away to curiosity. "And who is Florence?" she asks. "'Who is Florence?'" repeats Cyril; "have you really asked the question? Not to know Florence argues yourself unknown. She is an institution. But I forgot, you are one of those unhappy ones outside the pale of Florence's acquaintance. How I envy--I mean pity you!" "Florence is my niece," says Lady Chetwoode: "she is at present staying with some friends in Shropshire, but she lives with me. She has been here ever since she was seventeen." "Is that very long ago?" asks Lilian, and her manner is so _naïve_ that they all smile. "She came here----" begins Lady Chetwoode. "She came here," interrupts Cyril, impressively, "precisely five years ago. Have you mastered that date? If so, cling to it, get it by heart, never lose sight of it. Once, about a month ago, before she left us to go to those good-natured people in Shropshire, I told her, quite accidentally, I thought she came here _nine_ years ago. She was very angry, and I then learned that Florence angry wasn't nice, and that a little of her in that state went a long way. I also learned that she came here five years ago." "Am I to understand," asks Lilian, laughing, "that she is twenty-six?" "My dear Lilian, I do hope you are not 'obtoose.' Has all my valuable information been thrown away? I have all this time been trying to impress upon you the fact that Florence is only twenty-two, but it is evidently 'love's labor lost.' Now do try to comprehend. She was twenty-two last year, she is twenty-two this year, and I am almost positive that this time next year she will be twenty-two again!" "Cyril, don't be severe," says his mother. "Dearest mother, how can you accuse me of such a thing? Is it severe to say Florence is still young and lovely?" "Do you and Florence like each other?" asks Lilian. "Not too much. I am not staid enough for Florence. She says she likes earnest people,--like Guy." "Ah!" says Lilian. "What?" Guy hearing his name mentioned looks up dreamily from the _Times_, in the folds of which he has been buried. "What about me?" "Nothing. I was only telling Lilian in what high esteem you are held by our dear Florence." "Is that all?" says Guy, indifferently, going back to the thrilling account of the divorce case he has been studying. "What a very ungallant speech!" says Miss Chesney, with a view to provocation, regarding him curiously. "Was it?" says Guy, meeting her eyes, and letting the interesting paper slip to the floor beside him. "It was scarcely news, you see, and there is nothing to be wondered at. If I lived with people for years, I am certain I should end by being attached to them, were they good or bad." "She doesn't waste much of her liking upon me," says Cyril. "Nor you on her. She is just the one pretty woman I ever knew to whom you didn't succumb." "You didn't tell me she was pretty," says Lilian, hastily, looking at Cyril with keen reproach. "'Handsome is as handsome does,' and the charming Florence makes a point of treating me very unhandsomely. You won't like her, Lilian; make up your mind to it." "Nonsense! don't let yourself be prejudiced by Cyril's folly," says Guy. "I am not easily prejudiced," replies Lilian, somewhat coldly, and instantly forms an undying dislike to the unknown Florence. "But she really is pretty?" she asks, again, rather persistently addressing Cyril. "Lovely!" superciliously. "But ask Guy all about her: he knows." "Do you?" says Lilian, turning her large eyes upon Guy. "Not more than other people," replies he, calmly, though there is a perceptible note of irritation in his voice, and a rather vexed gleam in his blue eyes as he lets them fall upon his unconscious brother. "She is certainly not lovely." "Then she is very pretty?" "Not even _very_ pretty in my eyes," replies Sir Guy, who is inwardly annoyed at the examination. Without exactly knowing why, he feels he is behaving shabbily to the absent Florence. "Still, I have heard many men call her so." "She is decidedly pretty," says Lady Chetwoode, with decision, "but rather pale." "Would you call it pale?" says Cyril, with suspicious earnestness. "Well, of course that may be the new name for it, but I always called it sallow." "Cyril, you are incorrigible. At all events, I miss her in a great many ways," says Lady Chetwoode, and they who listen fully understand the tone of self-reproach that runs beneath her words in that she cannot bring herself to miss Florence in all her ways. "She used to pour out the tea for me, for one thing." "Let me do it for you, auntie," says Lilian, springing to her feet with alacrity, while the new name trips melodiously and naturally from her tongue. "I never poured out tea for any one, and I should like to immensely." "Thank you, my dear. I shall be much obliged; I can't bear to leave off this sock now I have got so far. And who, then, used to pour out tea for you at your own home?" "Nurse, always. And for the last six months, ever since"--with a gentle sigh--"poor papa's death, Aunt Priscilla." "That is Miss Chesney?" "Yes. But tea was never nice with Aunt Priscilla; she liked it weak, because of her nerves, she said (though I don't think she had many), and she always would use the biggest cups in the house, even in the evening. There never," says Lilian, solemnly, "was any one so odd as my Aunt Priscilla. Though we had several of the loveliest sets of china in the world, she never would use them, and always preferred a horrid glaring set of blue and gold that was my detestation. Taffy and I were going to smash them all one day right off, but then we thought it would be shabby, she had placed her affections so firmly on them. Is your tea quite right, Lady Chetwoode--auntie, I mean,"--with a bright smile,--"or do you want any more sugar?" "It is quite right, thank you, dear." "Mine is without exception the most delicious cup of tea I ever tasted," says Cyril, with intense conviction. Whereat Lilian laughs and promises him as many more as he can drink. "Will you not give me one?" says Guy, who has risen and is standing beside her, looking down upon her lovely face with a strange expression in his eyes. How pretty she looks pouring out the tea, with that little assumption of importance about her! How deftly her slender fingers move among the cups, how firmly they close around the handle of the quaint old teapot! A lump of sugar falls with a small crash into the tray. It is a refractory lump, and runs in and out among the china and the silver jugs, refusing to be captured by the tongs. Lilian, losing patience (her stock of it is small), lays down the useless tongs, and taking up the lump between a dainty finger and thumb, transfers it triumphantly to her own cup. "Well caught," says Cyril, laughing, while it suddenly occurs to Guy that Florence would have died before she would have done such a thing. The sugar-tongs was made to pick up the sugar, therefore it would be a flagrant breach of system to use anything else, and of all other things one's fingers. Oh, horrible thought! Methodical Florence. Unalterable, admirable, tiresome Florence! As Sir Guy speaks, Lilian being in one of her capricious moods, which seem reserved alone for her guardian, half turns her head toward him, looking at him out of two great unfriendly eyes, says: "Is not that yours?" pointing to a cup that she has purposely placed at a considerable distance from her, so that she may have a decent excuse for not offering it to him with her own hands. "Thank you," Chetwoode says, calmly, taking it without betraying the chagrin he is foolish enough to feel, but he is very careful not to trouble her a second time. It is evident to him that, for some reason or reasons unknown, he is in high disgrace with his ward; though long ago he has given up trying to discover just cause for her constant displays of temper. Lady Chetwoode is knitting industriously. Already the heel is turned, and she is on the fair road to make a most successful and rapid finish. Humanly speaking, there is no possible doubt about old James Murland being in possession of the socks to-morrow evening. As she knits she speaks in the low dreamy tone that always seems to me to accompany the click of the needles. "Florence sings very nicely," she says; "in the evening it was pleasant to hear her voice. Dear me, how it does rain, to be sure! one would think it never meant to cease. Yes, I am very fond of singing." "I have rather a nice little voice," says Miss Chesney, composedly,--"at least"--with a sudden and most unlooked-for accession of modesty--"they used to say so at home. Shall I sing something for you, auntie? I should like to very much, if it would give you any pleasure." "Indeed it would, my dear. I had no idea you were musical." "I don't suppose I can sing as well as Florence,"--apologetically,--"but I will try the 'Banks of Allan Water,' and then you will be able to judge for yourself." She sits down, and sings from memory that very sweet and dear old song,--sings it with all the girlish tenderness of which she is capable, in a soft, sweet voice, that saddens as fully as it charms,--a voice that would certainly never raise storms of applause, but is perfect in its truthfulness and exquisite in its youth and freshness. "My dear child, you sing rarely well," says Lady Chetwoode, while Guy has drawn near, unconsciously to himself, and is standing at a little distance behind her. How many more witcheries has this little tormenting siren laid up in store for his undoing? "It reminds me of long ago," says auntie, with a sigh for the gay hours gone: "once I sang that song myself. Do you know any Scotch airs, Lilian? I am so fond of them." Whereupon Lilian sings "Comin' thro' the Rye" and "Caller Herrin'," which latter brings tears into Lady Chetwoode's eyes. Altogether, by the time the first dressing-bell rings, she feels she has made a decided success, and is so far elated by the thought that she actually condescends to forego her ill-temper for this occasion only, and bestows so gracious a smile and speech upon her hapless guardian as sends that ill-used young man to his room in radiant spirits. CHAPTER IX. "So young, and so untender."--_King Lear._ "I wonder why on earth it is some people cannot choose proper hours in which to travel," says Cyril, testily. "The idea of electing--(not any more, thank you)--to arrive at ten o'clock at night at any respectable house is barely decent." "Yes, I wish she had named any other hour," says Lady Chetwoode. "It is rather a nuisance Guy having to go to the station so late." "Dear Florence is so romantic," remarks Cyril: "let us hope for her sake there will be a moon." It is half-past eight o'clock, and dinner is nearly over. There has been some haste this evening on account of Miss Beauchamp's expected arrival; the very men who are handing round the jellies and sweetmeats seem as inclined to hurry as their pomposity will allow: hence Cyril's mild ill-humor. No man but feels aggrieved when compelled to hasten at his meals. Miss Chesney has arrayed herself with great care for the new-comer's delectation, and has been preparing herself all day to dislike her cordially. Sir Guy is rather silent; Cyril is not; Lady Chetwoode's usual good spirits seem to have forsaken her. "Are you really going to Truston after dinner?" asks Lilian, in a tone of surprise, addressing Sir Guy. "Yes, really; I do not mind it in the least," answering his mother's remark even more than hers. "It can scarcely be called a hardship, taking a short drive on such a lovely night." "Of course not, with the prospect before him of so soon meeting this delightful cousin," thinks Lilian. "How glad he seems to welcome her home! No fear he would let Cyril meet _her_ at the station!" "Yes, it certainly is a lovely evening," she says, aloud. Then, "Was there no other train for her to come by?" "Plenty," answers Cyril; "any number of them. But she thought she would like Guy to 'meet her by moonlight alone.'" It is an old and favorite joke of Cyril's, Miss Beauchamp's admiration for Guy. He has no idea he is encouraging in any one's mind the impression that Guy has an admiration for Miss Beauchamp. "I wonder you never tire of that subject," Guy says, turning upon his brother with sudden and most unusual temper. "I don't fancy Florence would care to hear you forever making free with her name as you do." "I beg your pardon a thousand times. I had no idea it was a touchy subject with you." "Nor is it," shortly. "She will have her wish," says Lilian, alluding to Cyril's unfortunate quotation, and ignoring the remark that followed. "I am sure it will be moonlight by ten,"--making a critical examination of the sky through the window, near which she is sitting. "How charming moonlight is! If I had a lover,"--laughing,--"I should never go for a drive or walk with him except beneath its cool white rays. I think Miss Beauchamp very wise in choosing the hour she has chosen for her return home." This is intolerable. The inference is quite distinct. Guy flushes crimson and opens his mouth to give way to some of the thoughts that are oppressing him, but his mother's voice breaking in checks him. "Don't have any lovers for a long time, child," she says: "you are too young for such unsatisfactory toys. The longer you are without them, the happier you will be. They are more trouble than gratification." "I don't mean to have one," says Lilian, with a wise shake of her blonde head, "for years and years. I was merely admiring Miss Beauchamp's taste." "Wise child!" says Cyril, admiringly. "Why didn't you arrive by moonlight, Lilian? I'm never in luck." "It didn't occur to me: in future I shall be more considerate. Are you fretting because you can't go to-night to meet your cousin? You see how insignificant you are: you would not be trusted on so important a mission. It is only bad little wards you are sent to welcome." She laughs gayly as she says this; but Guy, who is listening, feels it is meant as a reproach to him. "There are worse things than bad little wards," says Cyril, "if you are a specimen." "Do you think so? It's a pity every one doesn't agree with you. No, Martin," to the elderly servitor behind her chair, who she knows has a decided weakness for her: "don't take away the ice pudding yet: I am very fond of it." "So is Florence. You and she, I foresee, will have a stand-up fight for it at least once a week. Poor cook! I suppose she will have to make two ice puddings instead of one for the future." "If there is anything on earth I love, it is an ice pudding." "Not better than me, I trust." "Far, far better." "Take it away instantly, Martin; Miss Chesney mustn't have any more: it don't agree with her." At this Martin smiles demurely and deferentially, and presents the coveted pudding to Miss Chesney; whereat Miss Chesney makes a little triumphant grimace at Cyril and helps herself as she loves herself. Dinner is over. The servants,--oh, joy!--have withdrawn: everybody has eaten as much fruit as they feel is good for them. Lady Chetwoode looks at Lilian and half rises from her seat. "It is hardly worth while your leaving us this evening, mother," Guy says, hastily: "I must so soon be running away if I wish to catch the train coming in." "Very well,"--re-seating herself: "we shall break through rules, and stay with you for this one night. You won't have your coffee until your return?" "No, thank you." He is a little _distrait_, and is following Lilian's movements with his eyes, who has risen, thrown up the window, and is now standing upon the balcony outside, gazing upon the slumbering flowers, and upon the rippling, singing brooks in the distance, the only things in all creation that never seem to sleep. After a while, tiring of inanimate nature, she turns her face inward and leans against the window-frame, and being in an idle mood, begins to pluck to pieces the flower that has rested during dinner upon her bosom. Standing thus in the half light, she looks particularly fair, and slight, and childish,-- "A lovely being, scarcely formed or moulded, A rose with all its sweetest leaves yet folded." Some thought crossing Lady Chetwoode's mind, born of the long and loving glance she has been bestowing upon Lilian, she says: "How I detest fat people. They make me feel positively ill. Mrs. Boileau, when she called to-day, raised within me the keenest pity." "She is a very distressing woman," says Guy, absently. "One feels thankful she has no daughter." "Yes, indeed; the same thought occurred to me. Though perhaps not fat now, she would undoubtedly show fatal symptoms of a tendency toward it later on. Now you, my dear Lilian, have happily escaped such a fate: you will never be fat." "I'm sure I hope not, if you dislike the idea so much," says Lilian, amused, letting the ghastly remains of her ill-treated flower fall to the ground. "If you only knew the misery I felt on hearing you were coming to us," goes on Lady Chetwoode, "dreading lest you might be inclined that way; not of course but that I was very pleased to have you, my dear child, but I fancied you large and healthy-looking, with a country air, red cheeks, black hair, and unbounded _gaucherie_. Imagine my delight, therefore, when I beheld you slim and self-possessed, and with your pretty yellow hair!" "You make me blush, you cover me with confusion," says Miss Chesney, hiding her face in her hands. "Yes, yellow hair is my admiration," goes on Lady Chetwoode, modestly: "I had golden hair myself in my youth." "My dearest mother, we all know you were, and are, the loveliest lady in creation," says Guy, whose tenderness toward his mother is at times a thing to be admired. "My dear Guy, how you flatter!" says she, blushing a faint, sweet old blush that shows how mightily pleased she is. "Do you know," says Lilian, "in spite of being thought horrid, I like comfortable-looking people? I wish I had more flesh upon my poor bones. I think," going deliberately up to a glass and surveying herself with a distasteful shrug,--"I think thin people have a meagre, gawky, hard look about them, eminently unbecoming. I rather admire Mrs. Mount-George, for instance." "Hateful woman!" says Lady Chetwoode, who cherishes for her an old spite. "I rather admire her, too," says Sir Guy, unwisely,--though he only gives way to this opinion through a wild desire to help out Lilian's judgment. "Do you?" says that young lady, with exaggerated emphasis. "I shouldn't have thought she was a man's beauty. She is a little too--too-- demonstrative, too _prononcée_." "Oh, Guy adores fat women," says Cyril, the incorrigible; "wait till you see Florence: there is nothing of the 'meagre, gawky, hard' sort about her. She has a decided leaning toward _embonpoint_." "And I imagined her quite slight," says Lilian. "You must begin then and imagine her all over again. The only flesh there isn't about Florence is fool's flesh. It is hardly worth while, however, your creating a fresh portrait, as the original," glancing at his watch, "will so soon be before you. Guy, my friend, you should hurry." Lilian returns to the balcony, whither Chetwoode's eyes follow her longingly. He rises reluctantly to his feet, and says to Cyril, with some hesitation: "You would not care to go to meet Florence?" "I thank you kindly,--no," says Cyril, with an expressive shrug; "not for Joe! I shall infinitely prefer a cigar at home, and Miss Chesney's society,--if she will graciously accord it to me." This with a smile at Lilian, who has again come in and up to the table, where she is now eating daintily a showy peach, that has been lying neglected on its dish since dinner, crying vainly, "Who'll eat me? who'll eat me?" She nods and smiles sweetly at Cyril as he speaks. "I am always glad to be with those who want me," she says, carefully removing the skin from her fruit; "specially you, because you always amuse me. Come out and smoke your cigar, and I will talk to you all the time. Won't that be a treat for you?" with a little low, soft laugh, and a swift glance at him from under her curling lashes that, to say the truth, is rather coquettish. "There, Guy, don't you envy me, with such a charming time before me?" says Cyril, returning her glance with interest. "No, indeed," says Lilian, raising her head and gazing full at Chetwoode, who returns her glance steadily, although he is enduring grinding torments all this time, and almost--_almost_ begins to hate his brother. "The last thing Sir Guy would dream of would be to envy you my graceless society. Fancy a guardian finding pleasure in the frivolous conversation of his ward! How could you suspect him of such a weakness?" Here she lets her small white teeth meet in her fruit with all the airs of a little _gourmande_, and a most evident enjoyment of its flavor. There is a pause. Cyril has left the room in search of his cigar-case. Lady Chetwoode has disappeared to explore the library for her everlasting knitting. Sir Guy and Lilian are alone. "I cannot remember having ever accused you of being frivolous, either in conversation or manner," says Chetwoode, presently, in a low, rather angry tone. "No?" says naughty Lilian, with a shrug: "I quite thought you had. But your manner is so expressive at times, it leaves no occasion for mere words. This morning when I made some harmless remark to Cyril, you looked as though I had committed murder, or something worthy of transportation for life at the very least." "I cannot remember that either. I think you purposely misunderstand me." "What a rude speech! Oh, if I had said that! But see how late it is," looking at the clock: "you are wasting all these precious minutes here that might be spent so much more--profitably with your cousin." "You mean you are in a hurry to be rid of me," disdaining to notice her innuendo; "go,--don't let me detain you from Cyril and his cigar." He turns away abruptly, and gives the bell a rather sharp pull. He is so openly offended that Lilian's heart smites her. "Who is misunderstanding now?" she says, with a decided change of tone. "Shall you be long away, Sir Guy?" "Not very," icily. "Truston, as you know, is but a short drive from this." "True." Then with charmingly innocent concern, "Don't you like going out so late?--you seem a little cross." "Do I?" "Yes. But perhaps I mistake; I am always making mistakes," says Miss Lilian, humbly; "I am very unfortunate. And you know what Ouida says, that 'one is so often thought to be sullen when one is only sad.' Are _you_ sad?" "No," says Guy, goaded past endurance; "I am not. But I should like to know what I have done that you should make a point at all times of treating me with incivility." "Are you speaking of me?"--with a fine show of surprise, and widely-opened eyes; "what can you mean? Why, I shouldn't dare be uncivil to my guardian. I should be afraid. I should positively die of fright," says Miss Chesney, feeling strongly inclined to laugh, and darting a little wicked gleam at him from her eyes as she speaks. "Your manner"--bitterly--"fully bears out your words. Still I think---- Why doesn't Granger bring round the carriage? Am I to give the same order half a dozen times?"--this to a petrified attendant who has answered the bell, and now vanishes, as though shot, to give it as his opinion down-stairs that Sir Guy is in "a h'orful wax!" "Poor man, how you have frightened him!" says Lilian, softly. "I am sorry if I have vexed you." Holding out a small hand of amity,--"Shall we make friends before you go?" "It would be mere waste of time," replies he, ignoring the hand; "and, besides, why should you force yourself to be on friendly terms with me?" "You forget----" begins Lilian, somewhat haughtily, made very indignant by his refusal of her overture; but, Cyril and Lady Chetwoode entering at this moment simultaneously, the conversation dies. "Now I am ready," Cyril says, cheerfully. "I took some of your cigars, Guy; they are rather better than mine; but the occasion is so felicitous I thought it demanded it. Do you mind?" "You can have the box," replies Guy, curtly. To have a suspected rival in full possession of the field, smoking one's choicest weeds, is not a thing calculated to soothe a ruffled breast. "Eh, you're not ill, old fellow, are you?" says Cyril, in his laziest, most good-natured tones. "The whole box! Come, my dear Lilian, I pine to begin them." Miss Chesney finishes her peach in a hurry and prepares to follow him. "Lilian, you are like a baby with a sweet tooth," says Lady Chetwoode. "Take some of those peaches out on the balcony with you, child: you seem to enjoy them. And come to me to the drawing-room when you tire of Cyril." So the last thing Guy sees as he leaves the room is Lilian and his brother armed with peaches and cigars on their way to the balcony; the last thing he hears is a clear, sweet, ringing laugh that echoes through the house and falls like molten lead upon his heart. He bangs the hall-door with much unnecessary violence, steps into the carriage, and goes to meet his cousin in about the worst temper he has given way to for years. * * * * * Half-past ten has struck. The drawing-room is ablaze with light. Lady Chetwoode, contrary to custom, is wide awake, the gray sock lying almost completed upon her lap. Lilian has been singing, but is now sitting silent with her idle little hands before her, while Cyril reads aloud to them decent extracts from the celebrated divorce case, now drawing to its unpleasant close. "They ought to be here now," says Lady Chetwoode, suddenly, alluding not so much to the plaintiff, or the defendant, or the co-respondents, as to her eldest son and Miss Beauchamp. "The time is up." Almost as she says the words the sound of carriage-wheels strikes upon the ear, and a few minutes later the door is thrown wide open and Miss Beauchamp enters. Lilian stares at her with a good deal of pardonable curiosity. Yes, in spite of all that Cyril said, she is very nearly handsome. She is tall, _posée_, large and somewhat full, with rather prominent eyes. Her mouth is a little thin, but well shaped; her nose is perfect; her figure faultless. She is quite twenty-six (in spite of artificial aid), a fact that Lilian perceives with secret gratification. She walks slowly up the room, a small Maltese terrier clasped in her arms, and presents a cool cheek to Lady Chetwoode, as though she had parted from her but a few hours ago. All the worry and fatigue of travel have not told upon her: perhaps her maid and that mysterious closely-locked little morocco bag in the hall could tell upon her; but she looks as undisturbed in appearance and dress as though she had but just descended from her room, ready for a morning's walk. "My dear Florence, I am glad to welcome you home," says Lady Chetwoode, affectionately, returning her chaste salute. "Thank you, Aunt Anne," says Miss Beauchamp, in carefully modulated tones. "I, too, am glad to get home. It was quite delightful to find Guy waiting for me at the station!" She smiles a pretty lady-like smile upon Sir Guy as she speaks, he having followed her into the room. "How d'ye do, Cyril?" Cyril returns her greeting with due propriety, but expresses no hilarious joy at her return. "This is Lilian Chesney whom I wrote to you about," Lady Chetwoode says, putting out one hand to Lilian. "Lilian, my dear, this is Florence." The girls shake hands. Miss Beauchamp treats Lilian to a cold though perfectly polite stare, and then turns back to her aunt. "It was a long journey, dear," sympathetically says "Aunt Anne." "Very. I felt quite exhausted when I reached Truston, and so did Fanchette; did you not, _ma bibiche_, my treasure?"--this is to the little white stuffy ball of wool in her arms, which instantly opens two pink-lidded eyes, and puts out a crimson tongue, by way of answer. "If you don't mind, aunt, I think I should like to go to my room." "Certainly, dear. And what shall I send you up?" "A cup of tea, please, and--er--anything else there is. Elise will know what I fancy; I dined before I left. Good-night, Miss Chesney. Good-night, Guy; and thank you again very much for meeting me"--this very sweetly. And then Lady Chetwoode accompanies her up-stairs, and the first wonderful interview is at an end. "Well?" says Cyril. "I think her quite handsome," says Lilian, enthusiastically, for Guy's special benefit, who is sitting at a little distance, glowering upon space. "Cyril, you are wanting in taste." "Not when I admire you," replies Cyril, promptly. "Will you pardon me, Lilian, if I go to see they send a comfortable and substantial supper to my cousin? Her appetite is all that her best friend could wish." So saying, he quits the room, bent on some business of his own, that has very little to do, I think, with the refreshment of Miss Beauchamp's body. When he has gone, Lilian takes up Lady Chetwoode's knitting and examines it critically. For the first time in her life she regrets not having given up some of her early years to the mastering of fancy work; then she lays it down again, and sighs heavily. The sigh says quite distinctly how tedious a thing it is being alone in the room with a man who will not speak to one. Better, far better, be with a dummy, from whom nothing could be expected. Sir Guy, roused to activity by this dolorous sound, crosses the room and stands directly before her, a contrite expression upon his face. "I have behaved badly," he says. "I confess my fault. Will you not speak to me, Lilian?" His tone is half laughing, half penitent. "Not"--smiling--"until you assure me you have left all your ill-temper behind you at Truston." "I have. I swear it." "You are sure?" "Positive." "I do hope you did not bestow it upon poor Miss Beauchamp?" "I don't know, I'm sure. I hope not," says Guy, lightly; and there is something both in his tone and words that restores Miss Chesney to amiability. She looks at him steadily for a moment, and then she smiles. "I am forgiven?" asks Guy, eagerly, taking courage from her smile. "Yes." "Shake hands with me, then," says he, holding out his own. "You expect too much," returns Lilian, recoiling. "Only an hour ago, you refused to take my hand: how then can I now accept yours?" "I was a brute, nothing less!" declares he, emphatically. "Yet do accept it, I implore you." There is a good deal more meaning in his tone than even he himself is quite aware of. Miss Chesney either does not or will not see it. Raising her head, she laughs out loud, a low but thoroughly amused laugh. "Any one listening would say you were proposing to me," she says, mischievously; whereupon he laughs too, and seats himself upon the low ottoman beside her. "I shouldn't mind," he says; "should you?" "Not much. I suppose one must go through it some time or other." "Have you ever had a--proposal?" "Why do you compel me to give you an answer that must be humiliating? No; I have never had a proposal. But I dare say I shall have one or two before I die." "I dare say. Unless you will now accept mine"--jestingly--"and make me the happiest of men." "No, thank you. You make me such an admirable guardian that I could not bear to depose you. You are now in a proud position (considering the ward you have); do not rashly seek to better it." "Your words are golden. But all this time you are keeping me in terrible suspense. You have not yet quite made friends with me." Then Lilian places her hand in his. "Though you don't deserve it," she says, severely, "still----" "Still you do accept me--it, I mean," interrupts Guy, purposely, closing his fingers warmly over hers. "I shall never forget that fact. Dear little hand!" softly caressing it, "did I really scorn it an hour ago? I beg its pardon very humbly." "It is granted," answers Lilian, gayly. But to herself she says, "I wonder how often has he gone through all this before?" Nevertheless, in spite of doubts on both sides, the truce is signed for the present. CHAPTER X. "How beautiful is the rain! After the dust and heat. To the dry grass, and the drier grain, How welcome is the rain!"--LONGFELLOW. Miss Chesney, who, had she been born a man and a gardener, could have commanded any wages, is on her knees beside some green plants, busily hunting for slugs. These ravishers of baby flowers and innocent seedlings are Miss Chesney's especial abhorrence. It is in vain to tell her that they must be fed,--that they, as well as the leviathan, must have their daily food; she declines to look upon their frequent depredations in any other light than as wanton mischief. Upon their destruction she wastes so much of her valuable time that, could there be a thought in their small, slimy, gelatinous bodies, they must look upon her as the fell destroyer of their race,--a sort of natural enemy. She is guiltless of gloves, and, being heated in the chase, has flung her hat upon the velvet sward beside her. Whereupon the ardent sun, availing of the chance, is making desperate love to her, and is kissing with all his might her priceless complexion. It is a sight to make a town-bred damsel weep aloud! Miss Beauchamp, sailing majestically toward this foolish maiden, with her diaphanous skirts trailing behind her, a huge hat upon her carefully arranged braids, and an enormous garden umbrella over all, looks with surprise, largely mingled with contempt, upon the kneeling figure. She marks the soft beauty of the skin, the exquisite penciling of the eyebrows, the rich color on the laughing lips, and, marking, feels some faint anger at the reckless extravagance of the owner of these unpurchasable charms. To one long aware of the many advantages to be derived from such precious unguents as creme d'Ispahan, velvetine, and Chinese rouge, is known also all the fear of detection arising from the daily use of them. And to see another richly and freely endowed by Nature with all the most coveted tints, making light of the gift, seems to such a one a gross impertinence, a miserable want of gratitude, too deep for comprehension. Pausing near Lilian, with the over-fed Maltese panting and puffing beside her, Miss Beauchamp looks down upon her curiously, upon the rose-leaf face, the little soiled hands, the ruffled golden head, and calculates to a fraction the exact amount of mischief that may be done by the possession of so much youth and beauty. The girl is far too pretty. There is really no knowing what irremediable harm she may not have done already. "What a mess you are making of yourself!" says Florence, in a tone replete with lady-like disgust. "I am, rather," says Lilian, holding aloft the small hand, on which five dusty fingers disport themselves, while she regards them contemplatively; "but I love it, gardening I mean. I would have made a small fortune at flower-shows, had I given my mind to it earlier: not a prize would have escaped me." "Every one with an acre of garden thinks that," says Miss Beauchamp. "Do they?" smiling up at the white goddess beside her. "Well, perhaps so. 'Hope springs eternal in the human breast,' and a good thing, too." "Don't you think you will be likely to get a sunstroke?" remarks Florence, with indifferent concern. "No; I am accustomed to go about without my hat," answers Lilian: "of course, as a rule, I wear it, but it always gives me a feeling of suffocation; and as for a veil, I simply couldn't bear one." Miss Beauchamp, glancing curiously at the peach-like complexion beneath her, wonders enviously how she does it, and then reflects with a certain sense of satisfaction that a very little more of this mad tampering with Nature's gifts will create such havoc as must call for the immediate aid of the inestimable Rimmel and his fellows. The small terrier, awaking from the tuneful snooze that always accompanies her moments of inactivity, whether she be standing or lying, now rolls over to Lilian and makes a fat effort to lick her dear little Grecian nose. At which let no one wonder, as a prettier little nose was never seen. But Lilian is so far unsympathetic that she strongly objects to the caress. "Poor Fanchette!" she says, kindly, recoiling a little, "you must forgive me, but the fact is I can't bear having my face licked. It is bad taste on my part, I know, and I hope you will grant me pardon. No, I cannot pet you either, because I think my earthy fingers would not improve your snowy coat." "Come away, Fanchette; come away, _petite_, directly; do you hear?" cries Miss Beauchamp, in an agony lest the scented fleece of her "curled darling" should be defiled. "Come to its own mistress, then. Don't you see you are disturbing Lilian?" this last as a mild apology for the unaffected horror of her former tone. So saying, she gathers up Fanchette, and retires into the shaded shrubberies beyond. Almost as she disappears from view, Guy comes upon the scene. "Why, what are you doing?" he calls out while yet a few yards from her. "I have been shocking your cousin," returns Lilian, laughing. "I doubt she thinks me a horrible unlady-like young woman. But I can't help that. See how I have soiled my hands!" holding up for his inspection her ten little grimy fingers. "And done your utmost to ruin your complexion, all for the sake of a few poor slugs. What a blood-thirsty little thing you are!" "I don't believe there is any blood in them," says Lilian. "Do come away. One would think there wasn't a gardener about the place. You will make yourself ill, kneeling there in the sun; and look how warm you are; it is a positive shame." "But I have preserved the lives, and the beauty of all these little plants." "Never mind the plants. Think of your own beauty. I came here to ask you if you will come for a walk in the woods. I have just been there, and it is absolutely cool." "I should like to immensely," springing to her feet; "but my hands,"--hesitating,--"what am I to do with them? Shall I run in and wash them? I shan't be one minute." "Oh, no!"--hastily, having a wholesome horror of women's minutes, "come down to the stream, and we will wash them there." This suggestion, savoring of unconventionality, finds favor in Miss Chesney's eyes, and they start, going through the lawn, for the tiny rivulet that runs between it and the longed-for woods. Kneeling beside it, Lilian lets the fresh gurgling water trail through her fingers, until all the dust falls from them and floats away on its bosom; then reluctantly she withdraws her hands and, rising, looks at them somewhat ruefully. "Now, how shall I dry them?" asks she, glancing at the drops of water that fall from her fingers and glint and glisten like diamonds in the sun's rays. "In your handkerchief," suggests Guy. "But then it would be wet, and I should hate that. Give me yours," says Miss Chesney, with calm selfishness. Guy laughs, and produces an unopened handkerchief in which he carefully, and, it must be confessed, very tardily dries her fingers, one by one. "Do you always take as long as that to dry your own hands?" asks Lilian, gravely, when he has arrived at the third finger of the second hand. "Always!" without a blush. "Your dressing, altogether, must take a long time?" "Not so long as you imagine. It is only on my hands I expend so much care." "And on mine," suggestively. "Exactly so. Do you never wear rings?" "Never. And for the very best reason." "And that?" "Is because I haven't any to wear. I have a few of my mother's, but they are old-fashioned and heavy, and look very silly on my hands. I must get them reset." "I like rings on pretty hands, such as yours." "And Florence's. Yes, she has pretty hands, and pretty rings also." "Has she?" "What! Would you have me believe you never noticed them? Oh, Sir Guy, how deceitful you can be!" "Now, that is just the very one vice of which I am entirely innocent. You wrong me. I couldn't be deceitful to save my life. I always think it must be so fatiguing. Most young ladies have pretty hands, I suppose; but I never noticed those of Miss Beauchamp, or her rings either, in particular. Are you fond of rings?" "Passionately fond," laughing. "I should like to have every finger and both of my thumbs covered with them up to the first knuckle." "And nobody ever gave you one?" "Nobody," shaking her head emphatically. "Wasn't it unkind of them?" With this remark Sir Guy does not coincide: so he keeps silence, and they walk on some yards without speaking. Presently Lilian, whose thoughts are rapid, finding the stillness irksome, breaks it. "Sir Guy----" "Miss Chesney." As they all call her "Lilian," she glances up at him in some surprise at the strangeness of his address. "Well, and why not," says he, answering the unmistakable question in her eyes, "when you call me 'Sir Guy' I wish you would not." "Why? Is it not your name?" "Yes, but it is so formal. You call Cyril by his name, and even with my mother you have dropped all formality. Why are you so different with me? Can you not call me 'Guy'?" "Guy! Oh, I _couldn't_. Every time the name passed my lips I should faint with horror at my own temerity. What! call my guardian by his Christian name? How can you even suggest the idea? Consider your age and bearing." "One would think I was ninety," says he, rather piqued. "Well, you are not far from it," teasingly. "However, I don't object to a compromise. I will call you Uncle Guy, if you wish it." "Nonsense!" indignantly. "I don't want to be your uncle." "No? Then Brother Guy." "That would be equally foolish." "You won't, then, claim relationship with me?" in a surprised tone. "I fear you look upon me as a _mauvais sujet_. Well, then,"--with sudden inspiration,--"I know what I shall do. Like Esther Summerson, in 'Bleak House,' I shall call you 'Guardian.' There!" clapping her hands, "is not that the very thing? Guardian you shall be, and it will remind me of my duty to you every time I mention your name. Or, perhaps,"--hesitating-- "'Guardy' will be prettier." "I wish I wasn't your guardian," Guy says, somewhat sadly. "Don't be unkinder than you can help," reproachfully. "You won't be my uncle, or my brother, or my guardian? What is it, then, that you would be?" To this question he could give a very concise answer, but does not dare do so. He therefore maintains a discreet silence, and relieves his feelings by taking the heads off three dandelions that chance to come in his path. "Does it give you so very much trouble, the guardianship of poor little me," she asks, with a mischievous though charming smile, "that you so much regret it?" "It isn't that," he answers, slowly, "but I fear you look coldly on me in consequence of it. You do not make me your friend, and that is unjust, because it was not my fault. I did not ask to be your guardian; it was your father's wish entirely. You should not blame me for what he insisted on." "I don't,"--gayly,--"and I forgive you for having acceded to poor papa's proposal: so don't fret about it. After all,"--naughtily,--"I dare say I might have got worse; you aren't half bad so far, which is wise of you, because I warn you I am an _enfant gaté_; and should you dare to thwart me I should lead you such a life as would make you rue the day you were born." "You speak as though it were my desire to thwart you." "Well, perhaps it is. At all events," with a relieved sigh,--"I have warned you, and now it is off my mind. By the bye, I was going to say something to you a few minutes ago when you interrupted me." "What was it?" "I want you"--coaxingly--"to take me round by The Cottage, so that I may get a glimpse at this wonderful widow." "It would be no use; you would not see her." "But I might." "And if so, what would you gain by it? She is very much like other women: she has only one nose, and not more than two eyes." "Nevertheless she rouses my curiosity. Why have you such a dislike to the poor woman?" "Oh, no dislike," says Guy, the more hastily in that he feels there is some truth in the accusation. "I don't quite trust her: that is all." "Still, take me near The Cottage; _do_, now, Guardy," says Miss Chesney, softly, turning two exquisite appealing blue eyes upon him, which of course settles the question. They instantly turn and take the direction that leads to The Cottage. But their effort to see the mysterious widow is not crowned with success. To Miss Chesney's sorrow and Sir Guy's secret joy, the house appears as silent and devoid of life as though, indeed, it had never been inhabited. With many a backward glance and many a wistful look, Lilian goes by, while Guy carefully suppresses all expressions of satisfaction and trudges on silently beside her. "She must be out," says Lilian, after a lengthened pause. "She must be always out," says Guy, "because she is never to be seen." "You must have come here a great many times to find that out," says Miss Chesney, captiously, which remark puts a stop to all conversation for some time. And indeed luck is dead against Lilian, for no sooner has she passed out of sight than Mrs. Arlington steps from her door, and, armed with a book and a parasol, makes for the small and shady arbor situated at the end of the garden. But if Lilian's luck has deserted her, Cyril's has not. He has walked down here this evening in a rather desponding mood, having made the same journey vainly for the last three days, and now--just as he has reached despair--finds himself in Mrs. Arlington's presence. "Good-evening," he says, gayly, feeling rather elated at his good fortune, raising his hat. "Good-evening," returns she, with a faint blush born of a vivid recollection of all that passed at their last meeting. "I had no idea I should see you to-day," says Cyril; which is the exact truth,--for a wonder. "Why? You always see me when you come round here, don't you?" says Mrs. Arlington; which is not the truth, she having been the secret witness of his coming many times, when she has purposely abstained from being seen. "I hope," says Cyril, gently, "you have forgiven me for having inadvertently offended you last--month." "Last week, you mean!" in a surprised tone. "Is it really only a week? How long it seems!" says Cyril. "Are you sure it was only last week?" "Quite sure," with a slight smile. "Yes, you are forgiven. Although I do not quite know that I have anything to forgive." "Well, I had my own doubts about it at the time," says Cyril; "but I have been carefully tutoring myself ever since into the belief that I was wrong. I think my principal fault lay in my expressing a hope that the air here was doing you good; and that--to say the least of it--was mild. By the bye, _is_ it doing you good?" "Yes, thank you." "I am glad of it, as it may persuade you to stay with us. What lovely roses you have! Is that one over there a 'Gloire de Dijon'? I can scarcely see it from this, and I'm so fond of roses." "This, do you mean?" plucking one. "No, it is a Marshal Neil." "Ah, so it is. How stupid of me to make the mistake!" says Cyril, who in reality knows as much about roses as about the man in the Iron Mask. As he speaks, two or three drops of rain fall heavily upon his face,--one upon his nose, two into his earnest eyes, a large one finds its way cleverly between his parted lips. This latter has more effect upon him than the other three combined. "It is raining," he says, naturally but superfluously, glancing at his coat-sleeve for confirmation of his words. Heavier and heavier fall the drops. A regular shower comes pattering from the heavens right upon their devoted heads. The skies grow black with rain. "You will get awfully wet. Do go into the house," Cyril says, anxiously glancing at her bare head. "So will you," with hesitation, gazing with longing upon the distant arbor, toward which she is evidently bent on rushing. "I dare say,"--laughing,--"but I don't much mind even if I do catch it before I get home." "Perhaps"--unwillingly, and somewhat coldly--"you would like to stand in the arbor until the shower is over?" "I should," replies Mr. Chetwoode, with alacrity, "if you think there will be room for two." There _is_ room for two, but undoubtedly not for three. The little green bower is pretty but small, and there is only one seat. "It is extremely kind of you to give me standing-room," says Cyril, politely. "I am very sorry I cannot give you sitting-room," replies Mrs. Arlington, quite as politely, after which conversation languishes. Cyril looks at Mrs. Arlington; Mrs. Arlington looks at Marshal Neil, and apparently finds something singularly attractive in his appearance. She even raises him to her lips once or twice in a fit of abstraction: whereupon Cyril thinks that, were he a marshal ten times over, too much honor has been done him. Presently Mrs. Arlington breaks the silence. "A little while ago," she says, "I saw your brother and a young lady pass my gate. She seemed very pretty." "She is very pretty," says Cyril, with a singular want of judgment in so wise a young man. "It must have been Lilian Chesney, my brother's ward." "He is rather young to have a ward." "He is, rather." "He is older than you?" "Unfortunately, yes, a little." "You, then, are very young?" "Well, I'm not exactly an infant,"--rather piqued at the cool superiority of her tone: "I am twenty-six." "So I should have thought," says Mrs. Arlington, quietly, which assertion is as balm to his wounded spirit. "Are your brother and his ward much attached to each other?" asks she, idly, with a very palpable endeavor to make conversation. "Not very much,"--laughing, as he remembers certain warlike passages that have occurred between Guy and Lilian, in which the former has always had the worst of it. "No? She prefers you, perhaps?" "I really don't know: we are very good friends, and she is a dear little thing." "No doubt. Fair women are always to be admired. You admire her very much?" "I think her pretty; but"--with an indescribable glance at the "nut-brown locks" before him, that says all manner of charming things--"her hair, to please me, is far too golden." "Oh, do you think so?" says Mrs. Arlington, surprised. "I saw her distinctly from my window, and I thought her hair very lovely, and she herself one of the prettiest creatures I have ever seen." "That is strong praise. I confess I have seen others I thought better worthy of admiration." "You have been lucky, then,"--indifferently. "When one travels, one of course sees a great deal, and becomes a judge on such matters." "I didn't travel far to find that out." "To find what out?" "A prettier woman than Miss Chesney." "No?" with cold unconcern and an evident want of interest on the subject. "How lovely the flowers look with those little drops of rain in their hearts!--like a touch of sorrow in the very centre of their joy." "You like the country?" "Yes, I love it. There is a rest, a calm about it that to some seems monotony, but to me is peace." A rather troubled shade falls across her face. An intense pity for her fills Cyril's breast together with a growing conviction (which is not a pleasing one) that the dead and gone Arlington must have been a king among his fellows. "I like the country well enough myself," he says, "but I hardly hold it in such esteem as you do. It is slow,--at times unbearable. Indeed, a careful study of my feelings has convinced me that I prefer the strains of Albani or Nilsson to those of the sweetest nightingale that ever 'warbled at eve,' and the sound of the noisiest cab to the bleating of the melancholy lamb; while the most exquisite sunrise that could be worked into poetry could not tempt me from my bed. Have I disgusted you?" "I wonder you are not ashamed to give way to such sentiments,"--with a short but lovely smile. "One should never be ashamed of telling the truth, no matter how unpleasant it may be." "True!" with another smile, more prolonged, and therefore lovelier, that lights up all her face and restores to it the sweetness and freshness of a child's. Cyril, looking at her, forgets the thread of his discourse, and says impulsively, as though speaking to himself, "It seems impossible." "What does?" somewhat startled. "Forgive me; I was again going to say something that would undoubtedly have brought down your heaviest displeasure on my head." "Then don't say it," says Mrs. Arlington, coloring deeply. "I won't. To return to our subject: the country is just now new to you, perhaps. After a while you will again pine for society." "I do not think so. I have seen a good deal of the world in my time, but never gained anything from it except--sorrow." She sighs heavily; again the shadow darkens her face and dims the beauty of her eyes. "It must have caused you great grief losing your husband so young," says Cyril, gently, hardly knowing what to say. "No, his death had nothing to do with the trouble of which I am thinking," replies Mrs. Arlington, with curious haste, a quick frown overshadowing her brow. Her fingers meet and clasp each other closely. Cyril is silent, being oppressed with another growing conviction which completely routs the first and leads him to believe the dead and gone Arlington a miserable brute, deserving of hanging at the very least. This conviction, unlike the first, carries consolation with it. "I am sorry you would not let my mother call on you," he says, presently. "Did Sir Guy say I would not see her?" asks she, with some anxiety. "I hope he did not represent me as having received her kind message with ingratitude." "No, he merely said you wished to see no one." "He said the truth. But then there are ways of saying things, and I should not like to appear rude. I certainly do not wish to see any one, but for all that I should not like to offend your mother." There is not the very smallest emphasis on the word "your," yet somehow Cyril feels flattered. "She is not offended," he says, against his conscience, and is glad to see his words please her. After a slight pause he goes on: "Although I am only a stranger to you, I cannot help feeling how bad it is for you to be so much alone. You are too young to be so isolated." "I am happier so." "What! you would care to see no one?" "I would care to see no one," emphatically, but with a sigh. "How dreadfully in the way you must have found me!" says Cyril, straightening himself preparatory to departure. "The rain, I see, is over." (It has been for the last ten minutes.) "I shall therefore restore you to happiness by taking myself away." Mrs. Arlington smiles faintly. "I don't seem to mind you much," she says, kindly, but with a certain amount of coldness. "Pray do not think I have wished you away." "This is the first kind thing you have ever said to me," says Cyril, earnestly. "Is it? I think I have forgotten how to make pretty speeches," replies she, calmly. "See, the sun is coming out again. I do not think, Mr. Chetwoode, you need be afraid any longer of getting wet." "I'm afraid--I mean--I am sure not," says Cyril, absently. "Thank you very much for the shelter you have afforded me. Would you think me very _exigeant_ if I asked you to give me that rose you have been ill-treating for the last half hour?" "Certainly not," says Mrs. Arlington, hospitably; "you shall have it if you care for it; but this one is damaged; let me get you a few others, fresher and sweeter." "No, thank you. I do not think you _could_ give me one either fresher or sweeter. Good-evening." "Good-bye," returns she, extending her hand; and, with the gallant Marshal firmly clasped in his hand, Cyril makes a triumphant exit. He has hardly gone three yards beyond the gate that guards the widow's bower when he finds himself face to face with Florence Beauchamp, rather wet, and decidedly out of temper. She glances at him curiously, but makes no remark, so that Cyril hopes devoutly she may not have noticed where he has just come from. "What a shower we have had!" he says, with a great assumption of geniality and much politeness. "You do not seem to have got much of it," replies she, with lady-like irritability, looking with open disfavor upon the astonishing dryness of his clothes. "No,"--amiably,--"I have escaped pretty well. I never knew any cloth to resist rain like this,--doesn't even show a mark of it. I am sorry I cannot say the same for you. Your gown has lost a good deal of its pristine freshness; while as for your feather, it is, to say the least of it, dejected." No one likes to feel one's self looking a guy. Cyril's tender solicitude for her clothes has the effect of rendering Miss Beauchamp angrier than she was before. "Oh, pray don't try to make me more uncomfortable than I am," she says, sharply. "I can imagine how unlovely I am looking. I detest the country: it means simply destruction to one's clothes and manners," pointedly. "It has been raining ever since I came back from Shropshire." "What a pity you did come back just yet!" says Cyril, with quite sufficient pause to throw an unpleasant meaning into his words. "As to the country, I entirely agree with you; give me the town: it never rains in the town." "If it does, one has a carriage at hand. How did you manage to keep yourself so dry, Cyril?" "There is plenty of good shelter round here, if one chooses to look for it." "Evidently; very good shelter, I should say. One would almost think you had taken refuge in a house." "Then one would think wrong. Appearances, you know, are often deceitful." "They are indeed. What a beautiful rose that is!" "Was, you mean. It has seen its best days. By the bye, when you were so near The Cottage, why didn't you go in and stay there until the rain was over?" "I shouldn't dream of asking hospitality from such a very suspicious sort of person as this Mrs. Arlington seems to be," Miss Beauchamp replies, with much affectation and more spitefulness. "You are right,--you always _are_," says Cyril, calmly. "One should shun the very idea of evil. Extreme youth can never be too careful. Good-bye for the present, Florence; I fear I must tear myself away from you, as duty calls me in this direction." So saying, he turns into another path, preferring a long round to his home to a further _tête-à-tête_ with the charming Florence. But Florence has not yet quite done with him. His supercilious manner and that last harmless remark about "extreme youth" rankles in her breast; so that she carries back to Chetwoode with her a small stone carefully hidden in her sleeve wherewith to slay him at a convenient opportunity. * * * * * The same shower that reduces Miss Beauchamp to sullen discontent behaves with equal severity to Lilian, who reaches home, flushed and laughing, drenched and out of breath, with the tail of her gown over her shoulders and a handkerchief round her neck. Guy is with her; and it seems to Lady Chetwoode (who is much concerned about them) as though they had rather enjoyed than otherwise their enforced run. Florence, who arrives some time after them, retires to her room, where she spends the two hours that must elapse before dinner in repairing all dilapidations in face and figure. At seven o'clock precisely she descends and gains the drawing-room as admirably dressed as usual, but with her good humor still conspicuous by its absence. She inveighs mildly against the evening's rain, as though it had been specially sent for the ruin of her clothes and complexion, and says a good deal about the advantages to be derived from a town life, which is decidedly gracious, considering how glad she has been all these past years to make her home at Chetwoode. When dinner is almost over she turns to Cyril and says, with deliberate distinctness: "Until to-day I had no idea you were acquainted with--the widow." There is no mistaking whom she means. The shot is well fired, and goes straight home. Cyril changes color perceptibly and does not reply instantly. Lady Chetwoode looks at him with marked surprise. So does Lilian. So does Sir Guy. They all await his answer. Miss Beauchamp's petty triumph is complete. "Had you not?" says Cyril. "I wonder so amazing a fact escaped your knowledge." "Have you met Mrs. Arlington? You never mentioned it, Cyril," says Lady Chetwoode. "Oh, yes," says Miss Beauchamp, "he is quite intimate there: aren't you, Cyril? As I was passing The Cottage to-day in a desperate plight, I met Cyril coming out of the house." "Not out of the house," corrects Cyril, calmly, having quite recovered his self-possession; "out of the garden." "Was it? You were so enviably dry, in spite of the rain, I quite thought you had been in the house." "For once your usually faultless judgment led you astray. I was in an arbor, where Mrs. Arlington kindly gave me shelter until the rain was over." "Was Mrs. Arlington in the arbor too?" "Yes." "How very romantic! I suppose it was she gave you the lovely yellow rose you were regarding so affectionately?" says Miss Beauchamp, with a low laugh. "I always think, Florence, what a fortune you would have made at the bar," says Cyril, thoughtfully; "your cross-examinations would have had the effect of turning your witnesses gray. I am utterly convinced you would have ended your days on the woolsack. It is a pity to see so much native talent absolutely wasted." "Not altogether wasted," sweetly: "it has at least enabled me to discover how it was you eluded the rain this evening." "You met Mrs. Arlington before to-day?" asks Guy, who is half amused and half relieved, as he remembers how needlessly jealous he has been about his brother's attentions to Lilian. He feels also some vague doubts as to the propriety of Cyril's losing his heart to a woman of whom they know nothing; and his singular silence on the subject of having made her acquaintance is (to say the least of it) suspicious. But, as Cyril has been in a chronic state of love-making ever since he got into his first tall hat, this doubt causes him but little uneasiness. "Yes," says Cyril, in answer to his question. "Is she as pretty as Sir Guy says?" asks Lilian, smiling. "Quite as pretty, if not more so. One may always depend upon Guy's taste." "What a good thing it was you knew her! It saved you from that dreadful shower," says Lilian, good-naturedly, seeing intuitively he is vexed. "We were not so fortunate: we had to run for our lives all the way home. It is a pity, Florence, you didn't know her also, as, being so near the house, you might have thrown yourself upon her hospitality for a little while." "I hardly think I see it in that light," drawls Florence, affectedly. "I confess I don't feel exactly ambitious about making the acquaintance of this Mrs.--er----" "Arlington is her name," suggests Cyril, quietly. "Have you forgotten it? My dear Florence, you really should see some one about your memory: it is failing every day." "I can still remember _some_ things," retorts Miss Beauchamp, blandly. By this time it has occurred to Lady Chetwoode that matters are not going exactly smoothly; whereupon she glances at Miss Beauchamp, then at Lilian, and finally carries them both off with her to the drawing-room. "If there is one thing I detest," says Cyril, throwing himself back in his chair, with an impatient movement, when he has closed the door upon them, "it is a vindictive woman. I pity the man who marries Florence Beauchamp." "You are rather hard upon her, are you not?" says Guy. "I have known her very good-natured." "Lucky you! I cannot recall many past acts of kindness on her part." "So you met Mrs. Arlington?" says Guy, carelessly. "Yes; one day I restored to her her dog; and to-day she offered me shelter from the rain, simply because she couldn't help it. There our acquaintance rests." "Where is the rose she gave you?" asks Guy, with a laugh, in which, after a moment's struggle, Cyril joins. "Don't lose your heart to her, old boy," Guy says, lightly; but Cyril well knows he has meaning in what he says. * * * * * CHAPTER XI. "There were two cousins almost like to twins; And so they grew together, like two flowers Upon one stem."--SHELLEY. "It was a babe, beautiful from its birth."--SHELLEY. The next day awakes calm and fair, and full of the rich ripeness that belongs to August. Lilian, opening her blue eyes upon the world at half-past seven, calls her nurse, and being dressed rushes forth into the garden to drink in all the first sweet freshness of the day. The dew still lingers upon lawn and blossom; the spiders' webs glisten like jeweled nets in the dancing sunbeams; the exquisite opal flush of the morning sky has grown and spread and deepened, until all the heavens are tinged with warmest carmine. There is "splendor in the grass," and "glory in the flower," and Lilian, flitting from bush to bush, enjoys everything to its utmost; she plucks two pale roses for her own bosom, and one, deep red and richly perfumed, to lay beside Lady Chetwoode's plate. This is a usual morning offering not to be neglected. Just as she has made a careful choice, the breakfast bell rings loudly, and, running at her quickest--most reckless--speed through the hall, she barely succeeds in stopping herself as she comes up to Sir Guy at the door of the morning-room. "Oh," cries she, with a little gasp, "another moment and I should have been in your arms. I never saw you. Good-morning, Guardy," gayly. "Good-morning, my ward. I beg you to understand I could have welcomed that other moment. Why, what an early little bird you are! How long have you been abroad?" "For hours and hours, half a day, while you--lazy man--were sound asleep. See what spoil I have gathered:" pointing to the heavy roses at her breast. "Lovely, indeed," says Guy, who is secretly of opinion that the wild-rose complexion she has snatched from the amorous wind is by far the loveliest spoil of the two. "And is not this sweet?" she says, holding up to his face the "red, red rose," with a movement full of grace. "Very," replies he, and stooping presses his lips lightly to her white hand. "I meant the rose, not the hand," says she, with a laugh and a faint blush. "Did you? I thought the hand very much the sweeter of the two. Is it for me?" "No!" says Miss Chesney, with much emphasis; and, telling him he is quite too foolish to be listened to any longer, she opens the door of the breakfast-room, and they both enter it together, to find all the others assembled before them, and the post lying in the centre of the table. All, that is, that remains of it,--namely, one letter for Lilian and two or three for Guy. These latter, being tinged with indigo, are of an uninteresting description and soon read. Miss Chesney's, on the contrary, is evidently full of information. It consists of two whole sheets closely covered by a scrawling handwriting that resembles nothing so much as the struggles of a dying fly. When she has read it twice over carefully--and with considerable difficulty--she lays it down and looks anxiously at Lady Chetwoode. "Auntie," she begins, with a bright blush and a rather confused air. "Yes, dear?" "This letter"--touching it--"is from my cousin." "Yes,--from your cousin? The lad who grew up with you at the Park?" says Lady Chetwoode, with a kindly nod of comprehension. Then ensues a pause. Somehow every one has stopped talking, and Lady Chetwoode has set down the teapot and turned to Lilian with an air full of expectancy. They all feel that something yet remains to be said. Possessed with this idea, and seeing Lilian's hesitation, Lady Chetwoode says, in her gentlest tones: "Well, dear?" "He is unhappy," says Lilian, running one of her fingers up and down the table-cloth and growing more and more embarrassed: "every year he used to come to the Park for his holidays, and now----" "And now he cannot go to the Park: is that it?" "Yes. A little while ago he joined his regiment, and now he has leave of absence, and he has nowhere to spend it except at Colonel Graham's, who is his guardian and his uncle, and he _hates_ Colonel Graham," says Lilian, impressively, looking at Lady Chetwoode with appealing eyes. "Poor boy," says that kindest of women, "I do not like to hear of his being unhappy. Perhaps, Lilian, you would wish----" "I want you to ask him here," says Lilian, quickly and boldly, coloring furiously, and fixing her great honest eyes on Lady Chetwoode. "He said nothing about it, but I know he would like to be where I am." "My dear, of course," says Lady Chetwoode, with most unusual briskness for her, "ask him instantly to come here as _soon_ as you like, to stay as _long_ as you like." "Auntie Nannie," says Lilian, rising tumultuously from her chair, "you are the dearest, kindest, best of women!" She presses her lips gently, although rapturously, to her auntie's cheek, after which she returns to her seat. "Now I am thoroughly content," she says naively: "I could not bear to picture Taffy wretched, and that old Colonel Graham is a downright Tartar!" "'Taffy'! what an extraordinary name!" says Florence. "Is it a fancy name?" "No; it is, I am ashamed to say, a nickname. I believe he was christened James, but one day when we were both almost babies he stole from me my best doll and squeezed the eyes out of it to see what lay behind, and I was very angry, and said he was a regular 'Taffy' to do such a thing. You know the old rhyme?" turning to Lady Chetwoode with a blush and a light laugh: "Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief, Taffy came to my house And stole a piece of beef. There is a good deal more of it, quite as interesting, but of course you know it. Nurse laughed when I so christened him, and after that he was always called 'Master Taffy' by the servants, and nothing else." "How nicknames do cling to one!" "I don't believe I should know him by any other now. It suits him much better than his own, as he doesn't look the least in the world like a James." "How old is your cousin?" asks Florence, with an eye to business. "A year older than I am." "And that is----" "Nineteen." "Indeed! I should have thought you older than that." "He is very like me, and he is a dragoon!" says Lilian, proudly. "But I have never seen him since he was gazetted." "Then you have not seen him in his uniform?" says Guy. "No. But he tells me," glancing at her letter, "he looks 'uncommonly jolly' in it." They all laugh. Even Florence condescends to be amused. "When may we expect this hero?" asks Guy, kindly. "His leave begins next week," answers Lilian, looking at Lady Chetwoode. "If he might come then, it would be such a comfort to him." "Of course he must come then," says Lady Chetwoode. "Do not let him lose a day of his precious leave. I remember when Guy was in the army how stingy they were about granting him a few days now and then." "The Mater's 'few days' always meant eight months out of the twelve," says Cyril, laughing, "and anything like the abuse she used to shower upon the colonel because he didn't see it in the light that she did, was never heard. It is unfit for publication." "Archibald Chesney is coming here the twenty-ninth," says Guy. "So you will be able to make choice between your two cousins." "Is Archibald coming?" surprised. "But my choice is already made. No one shall ever get inside Taffy in my affections." "Thrice blessed Taffy," says Cyril. "See what it is to be a young and gallant plunger!" "That wouldn't weigh with me," says Lilian, indignantly. "Would it not?" asks Guy. "I was hoping otherwise. I was a plunger once. What is the renowned Taffy's other name?" "Musgrave," says Lilian. "A very pretty name," remarks Miss Beauchamp, who has received an unexpected check by the morning's post, and is consequently in high good humor. "I think so too," returns Lilian. "Five distinct blushes, and all about Taffy," says Cyril, meditatively. "Happy Taffy! I have counted them religiously. Are you very much in love with him, Lilian?" "'In love'! nonsense!" laughing. "If you only saw Taffy! (But," with a glad smile, "you soon will.) He never remembers anything half an hour after he has said it, and besides," scornfully, "he is only a boy." "'Only a boy'! Was there ever such willful waste! Such reckless, extravagant, woful waste! To throw away five priceless, divine blushes upon 'only a boy'! Oh, that I were a boy! Perhaps, Lilian, when you come to know me longer I shall be happy enough to have one whole blush all to myself." "Be consoled," says Miss Chesney, saucily: "I feel assured the longer I know you, the more reason I shall have to blush for you!" * * * * * All through the day Miss Chesney's joy makes itself felt. She is thoroughly happy, and takes very good care every one shall know it. She sings through the house, "up-stairs, down-stairs, and in my lady's chamber," gay as any lark, and inundates her nurse with vain conjectures and interrogations; as for example, whether she thinks Taffy will be much changed,--and whether twelve months could possibly produce a respectable moustache,--and if she really believes the fact of his being a full-blown dragoon will have a demoralizing effect upon him. "An' no doubt it will, ninny," says nurse, shaking her beribboned head very solemnly, "I have no opinion of those soldiering ways myself. I fear me he will be growing wilder an' wilder every day." "Oh! if that's all!" says Miss Lilian, with a relieved sigh. "I am only afraid he will be growing steadier and steadier; and Taffy would be ruined if he gave himself airs. I can't endure dignified young men." "I don't think you need fret about that, my dear," says nurse, with conviction. "I never yet saw much signs of it about him." Having used up all nurse's powers of conversation, Lilian goes on to Lady Chetwoode's boudoir, and finds out from her the room Taffy will be likely to occupy. Having inspected it, and brought up half the servants to change every article of furniture in the room into a different position, and given as much trouble as possible, and decided in her own mind the precise flowers she will place upon his dressing-table the morning of his arrival, she goes back to her auntie to tell her all she has done. In fact, any one so busy as Miss Chesney during all this day can scarcely be imagined. Her activity is surprising, and draws from Cyril the remark that she ought to go as hospital nurse to the wounded Turks, as she seems eminently fitted for an energetic life. After luncheon she disappears for a while, so that at last--though not for long--something like repose falls upon the house, which sinks into a state of quietude only to be equaled by that of Verne's "Van Tricasse." Miss Beauchamp is in her room, studying art; Cyril is walking with a heart full of hope toward The Cottage; Lilian is absent; Guy is up-stairs with his mother, relating to her a new grievance anent poachers. The lad now in trouble is an old offender, and Guy is puzzled what to do with him. As a rule all scamps have something interesting about them, and this Heskett is an unacknowledged favorite of Sir Guy's. "Still I know I ought to dismiss him," he says, with a rather troubled air, and an angry, disappointed expression upon his face. "He is young, poor lad," says Lady Chetwoode. "So he is, and his mother is so respectable. One hardly knows what to do. But this last is such a flagrant act, and I swore I would pack him about his business if it occurred again. The fact is, I rather fancy the boy, and his wild ways, and don't like driving him to destruction. What shall I do, mother?" "Don't do anything, my dear," replies she, easily. "I wish I could follow your advice,"--smiling,--"but, unfortunately, if I let him off again I fear it will be a bad example to the others. I almost think----" But what he thinks on this particular subject is never known. There is a step outside the door,--a step well known to one at least of those within,--the "soft frou-frou and rustle" of a woman's gown,--and then the door is pushed very gently open, and Lilian enters, with a curious little bundle in her arms. "See what I've got!" she cries, triumphantly, going over to Lady Chetwoode, and kneeling down beside her. "It's a baby, a real live baby! look at it, auntie; did you ever see such a beauty?" "A baby," says Lady Chetwoode, fearfully, putting up her glasses, and staring cautiously down upon the rosy little fellow who in Lilian's encircling arms is making a desperate effort to assert his dignity, by sitting up and glaring defiantly around him. "Yes, indeed; I carried him away when I found him, and have been playing with him for the last ten minutes in my own room. Then I began to think that you might like to see him, too." "That was very nice of you, my dear," with some hesitation. "It is certainly a very clean baby, but its dress is coarse. Whose baby is it?" "He belongs to the laundress, I think," says Lilian, "but I'm not quite sure. I was running through the kitchen when I saw him; isn't he a rogue?" as baby puts up a chubby hand to seize the golden locks so near him: "look at his eyes, as big as saucers." She laughs delightedly, and baby laughs back at her again, and makes another violent jump at her yellow hair. Sir Guy, gazing intently at the pretty picture, at Lilian's flushed and lovely face, thinks he has never before seen her look half so sweet. Gay, merry, fascinating she always is, but with this new and womanly tenderness within her eyes, her beauty seems trebled. "See, he wants my hair: is he not a darling?" she says, turning her face, rose-red with pleasure, up to Sir Guy. "The laundress's child,--Lilian, my _dear_!" says Lady Chetwoode, in a faint tone of expostulation. "Well, Jane was holding it in her arms, but it can't be hers, decidedly, because she hasn't got one." "Proof positive," says Guy. "Nor can it be cook's, because hers is grown up: so it must be the laundress's. Besides, she was standing by, and she looked so glad about it and so pleased when I took it that I am sure she must be his mother. And of course she is proud of you, you bonny boy: so should I be, with your lovely face. Oh, look at his little fists! he is doubling them up just as though he were going to fight the world. And so he shall fight it, if he likes, a darling! Come; your mammy is pining for you." As she speaks she rises, but baby is loath to go yet awhile. He crows so successfully at Lady Chetwoode that he makes another conquest of her, and receives several gentle pats and a kiss from her, to Lilian's great gratification. "But he is too heavy for you," says her ladyship, addressing Lilian. "Guy, ring the bell for one of the servants to take him down." "And offend his mother mortally. No indeed, auntie. We should get no clothes fit to wear next week if we committed such a _betise_. As I brought him up, so I shall carry him down, though, to do him justice, he _is_ heavy. No servant shall touch him, the sweet boy,"--this to baby in a fond aside. "I will carry him down for you," says Guy, advancing slowly from the window where he has been standing. "You! Oh, Sir Guy, fancy you condescending to touch a baby. Though I forgot," with a quick, mischievous look at him from her azure eyes, "I believe there once was a baby you even professed to be fond of; but that was long ago. By the bye, what were you looking so stern about just as I came in? Were you passing sentence of death on any one?" "Not quite so bad as that," says Lady Chetwoode. "It is another of those tiresome poachers. And this Heskett, is certainly a very naughty boy. He was caught in the act last night, and Guy doesn't know what to do with him." "Let him off, forgive him," says Lilian, lightly, speaking to her guardian. "You can't think how much pleasanter you will feel if you do." "I believe you are right," says Guy, laughing, "and I dare say I should give him a last chance, but that I have passed my word. Give me that great heavy child: he looks as though he were weighing you down to the ground." "I think she holds him very prettily," says Lady Chetwoode: "I should like to have a picture of her just so." "Perhaps some day she will gratify you," returns Guy, encouragingly. "Are you going to give me that _enfant terrible_, Miss Chesney, before you expire?" "I am stronger than you think. And are you quite sure you can hold a baby? that you won't let it fall? Take care, now, and don't look as though you thought he would break. That will do. Auntie, don't you think he would make a capital nurse?" "I hope that child will reach its mother alive," says auntie, in a tone suggestive of doubt, after which Guy, escorted by Lilian, leaves the room. Half-way down the stairs this brilliant procession meets Florence coming up. "What is that?" she asks, stopping short in utter amazement, and staring blankly at the baby, who is blinking his great eyes in a most uncompromising fashion and is evidently deriving much refreshment from his little fat, red thumb. "A baby," says Guy, gravely. "A real live baby," says Lilian, "a real small duck," giving the child's plump cheek a soft pinch over Guy's shoulder. "Don't be frightened, Florence; he don't bite; you may give him a kiss in all safety." "Thanks," says Florence, drawing her skirts closer round her, as though the very idea has soiled her garments. "I don't care about kissing promiscuous babies. Really, Guy, if you only knew how ridiculous you look, you would spare yourself the humiliation of being so seen by your servants." "Blame Lilian for it all," returns Guy. "I know I shall blush myself to death if I meet any of the women." "I think Sir Guy never before looked so interesting," says Miss Chesney, who is making frantic play all this time with the baby; but its mood has changed, and now her most energetic efforts are received--not with smiles--but with stolid indifference and unblinking contempt by the young gentleman in arms. "I cannot say I agree with you," Miss Beauchamp says, with much subdued scorn, "and I do not think it is kind to place any one in a false position." She lets a little disdainful angry glance fall upon Lilian,--who unfortunately does not profit by it, as she does not see it,--and sweeps up the stairs to her aunt's apartments, while Guy (who is not to be sneered out of his undertaking) stalks on majestically to the kitchen, followed by Lilian, and never pauses until he places the chubby little rogue he carries in its mother's arms,--who eventually turns out to be the laundress. "I am not a judge," he says to this young woman, who is curtsying profusely and is actually consumed with pride, "but Miss Chesney has declared your son to be the loveliest child in the world, and I always agree with Miss Chesney,--for reasons of my own." "Oh, thank you, Sir Guy; I'm sure I'm much obliged to you, Miss Chesney," says the laundress, turning the color of a full-blown peony, through excitement. "What is his name?" asks Lilian, giving the boy a last fond poke with her pretty slender finger. "Abiram, miss," replies the mother, which name much displeases Lilian, who would have liked to hear he was called Alaric, or Lancelot, or any other poetical appellation suitable for the most beautiful child in the world. "A very charming name," says Guy, gravely; and, having squeezed a half-sovereign into the little fellow's fat hand, he and Lilian go through the passages into the open air. "Guardy," says Lilian, "what is a 'promiscuous baby'?" "I wish I knew," replies he: "I confess it has been puzzling me ever since. We must ask Florence when we go in." Here they both laugh a little, and stroll on for a time in silence. At length, being prompted thereto by her evil genius, Lilian says: "Tell me, who is the Heskett you and auntie were talking about just now?" "A boy who lives down in the hollow beneath Leigh's farm,--a dark boy we met one day at the end of the lawn; you remember him?" "A lad with great black eyes and a handsome face with just a little _soupçon_ of wickedness about him? of course I do. Oh! I like that boy. You must forgive him, Sir Guy, or I shall be unhappy forever." "Do you know him?" "Yes, well. And his mother, too: she is a dear old thing, and but that she has an undeniable penchant for tobacco, would be perfection. Guardy, you _must_ forgive him." "My dear child, I can't." "Not when I ask you?" in a tone of purest astonishment. "Not even then. Ask me something else,--in fact, anything,--and I will grant it, but not this." "I want nothing else," coldly. "I have set my heart on freeing this poor boy and you refuse me: and it is my first request." "It is always your first request, is it not?" he says, smiling a rather troubled smile. "Yesterday----" "Oh, don't remind me of what I may have said yesterday," interrupts Miss Chesney, impatiently: "think of to-day! I ask you to forgive Heskett--for my sake." "You should try to understand all that would entail," speaking the more sternly in that it makes him positively wretched to say her nay: "if I were to forgive Heskett this time, I should have every second man on my estate a poacher." "On the contrary, I believe you would make them all your devoted slaves. 'The quality of mercy is not strain'd; It droppeth, as the gentle dew from heaven, Upon the place beneath; it is twice bless'd.'" "I have said I would not, and even you can hardly think it right that I should break my word." "No, you would rather break his mother's heart!" By this time the spoiled Lilian has quite made up her mind to have her own way, and is ready to try any means to gain it. "Your word!" she says disdainfully: "if you are going to emulate the Medes and Persians, of course there is no use of my arguing with you. You ought to be an ancient Roman; even that detestable Brutus might be considered soft-hearted when compared with you." "Sneering, Lilian, is a habit that should be confined to those old in sorrow or worldly wisdom: it sits badly on such lips as yours." "Then why compel me to indulge in it? Give me my way in this one instance, and I will be good, and will probably never sneer again." "I cannot." "Then don't!" naughtily, made exceeding wroth by (what she is pleased to term) his obstinacy. "I was foolish in thinking I could influence you in any way. Had Florence asked you, you would have said yes instantly." "Florence would never have asked me to do anything so unreasonable." "Of course not! Florence never does wrong in your eyes. It is a pity every one else does not regard her as favorably as you do." "I think every one thinks very highly of her," angrily. "Do you? It probably pleases you to think so. I, for one, do not." "There is a certain class of people whose likes and dislikes cannot possibly be accounted for," says Guy, somewhat bitterly. "I think you would find a difficulty in explaining to me your vehement antipathy toward Miss Beauchamp. You should remember 'unfounded prejudices bear no weight.'" "That sounds like one of Miss Beauchamp's own trite remarks," says Lilian, with a disagreeable laugh. "Did you learn it from her?" To this Chetwoode makes no reply, and Lilian, carried away by resentment at his open support of Florence, and by his determination not to accede to her request about young Heskett, says, passionately: "Why should you lose your temper about it?" (it is her own temper that has gone astray). "It is all not worth a quarrel. Any one may plainly see how hateful I am to you. In a thousand ways you show me how badly you think of me. You are a petty tyrant. If I could leave your house, where I feel myself unwelcome,--at least as far as _you_ are concerned,--I would gladly do so." Here she stops, more from want of breath than eloquence. "Be silent," says Guy, turning to confront her, and thereby showing a face as pale as hers is flushed with childish rage and bafflement. "How dare you speak like that!" Then, changing his tone, he says quietly, "You are wrong; you altogether mistake. I am no tyrant; I do what is just according to my own conscience. No man can do more. As to what else you may have said, it is _impossible_ you can feel yourself unwelcome in my house. I do not believe you feel it." "Thank you," still defiant, though in truth she is a little frightened by his manner: "that is as much as to say I am telling a lie, but I do believe it all the same. Every day you thwart and disappoint me in one way or another, and you know it." "I do not, indeed. It distresses me much that you should say so. So much, that against my better judgment I give in to you in this matter of Heskett, if only to prove to you how you wrong me when you say I wish to thwart you. Heskett is pardoned." So saying, he turns from her abruptly and half contemptuously, and, striking across the grass, makes for a path that leads indirectly to the stables. When he has gone some yards it occurs to Miss Chesney that she feels decidedly small. She has gained her point, it is true, but in a sorry fashion, and one that leaves her discontented with her success. She feels that had he done rightly he would have refused to bandy words with her at all upon the subject, and he would not have pardoned the reprehensible Heskett; something in his manner, too, which she chooses to think domineering, renders her angry still, together with a vague, uneasy consciousness that he has treated her throughout as a child and given in to her merely because it is a simpler matter to surrender one's judgment than to argue with foolish youth. This last thought is intolerable. A child, indeed! She will teach him she is no child, and that women may have sense although they have not reached the admirable age of six-and-twenty. Without further thought she runs after him, and, overtaking him just as he turns the corner, says, very imperiously, with a view to sustaining her dignity: "Sir Guy, wait: I want to speak to you." "Well," he says, stopping dead short, and answering her in his iciest tones. He barely looks at her; his eyes, having once met hers, wander away again without an instant's lingering, as though they had seen nothing worthy of attention. This plain ignoring of her charms is bitter to Miss Chesney. "I do not want you to forgive that boy against your will," she says, haughtily. "Take back your promise." "Impossible! You have made me break my word to myself; nothing shall induce me to break my word to you. Besides, it would be unfair to Heskett. If I were to dismiss him now I should feel as though I had wronged him." "But I will not have his pardon so." "What!"--scornfully,--"after having expended ten minutes in hurling at me some of the severest eloquence it has ever been my fate to listen to, all to gain this Heskett's pardon, you would now have it rescinded! Am I to understand so much?" "No; but I hate ungraciousness." "So do I,"--meaningly,--"even more than I hate abuse." "Did I abuse you?" "I leave you to answer that question." "I certainly," with some hesitation, "said you were a tyrant." "You did," calmly. "And that----" "Do not let us go over such distasteful ground again," interrupts he, impatiently: "you said all you could say,--and you gained your object. Does not even that satisfy you?" "I wish I had never interested myself in the matter," she says, angrily, vexed with herself, and with him, and with everything. "Perhaps your wisdom would have lain in that direction," returns he, coolly. "But as you did interest yourself, and as victory lies with you, you should be the one to rejoice." "Well, I don't," she says impulsively. And then she looks at him in a half-defiant, half-penitent, wholly charming way, letting her large soft eyes speak for her, as they rest full upon his face. There is something in her fresh young beauty almost irresistible. Guy, with an angry sigh, acknowledges its power, and going nearer to her, takes both her clasped hands in his. "What a bad-tempered little girl you are!" he says, in a jesting tone, that is still full of the keenest reproach. "Am I as bad as Brutus and all those terrible Medes and Persians? I confess you made me tremble when you showered upon me all those awful comparisons." "No, no, I was wrong," she says, hastily, twining her small fingers closely round his; then very softly, "You are always forgiving me, are you not? But yet--tell me, Guardy--are you not really glad you have pardoned that poor Heskett? I cannot be pleased about it myself so long as I think I have only wrung your promise from you against your will. Say you are glad, if only to make me happy." "I would do anything to make you happy,--anything," he says, in a strange tone, reading anxiously her lovely _riante_ face, that shows no faintest trace of such tenderness as he would fain see there; then, altering his voice with an effort, "Yes, I believe I am glad," he says, with a short laugh: "your intercession has removed a hateful duty from my shoulders." "Where is the boy? Is he locked up, or confined anywhere?" "Nowhere. I never incarcerate my victims," with a slight trace of bitterness still in his manner. "He is free as air, in all human probability poaching at this present moment." "But if he knows there is punishment in store for him, why doesn't he make his escape?" "You must ask him that, because I cannot answer the question. Perhaps he does not consider me altogether such a fiend as you do, and may think it likely I will show mercy at the last moment." "Or perhaps," says Lilian, "he has made his escape long ago." "I don't think so. Indeed, I am almost sure, if you look straight along that field"--pointing in a certain direction--"you will see the young gentleman in question calmly smoking the pipe of peace upon a distant wall." "It is he," says Lilian, in a low tone, after a careful examination of the youthful smoker. "How little he seems to fear his fate!" "Yes, just fancy how lightly he views the thought of falling into the clutches of a monster!" remarks Chetwoode, with a mocking smile. "I think you are a little hard on me," says Lilian, reproachfully. "Am I?" carelessly preparing to leave her. "If you see that promising _protégé_ of yours, Lilian, you can tell him from me that he is quite at liberty to carry on his nightly games as soon as he pleases. You have no idea what a solace that news will be to him; only, if you have any regard for him, advise him not to be caught again." So saying, he leaves her and continues his interrupted march to the stables. When Miss Chesney has spent a moment or two inveighing silently against the hardness and uncharitableness of men in general and Sir Guy Chetwoode in particular, she accepts the situation, and presently starts boldly for the hollow in which lies the modest homestead of the venerable Mrs. Heskett. The unconscious cause of the battle royal that has just taken place has evidently finished his pipe and lounged away through the woods, as he is nowhere to be seen. And Miss Chesney makes up her mind, with a view to killing the time that must elapse before dinner, to go straight to his mother's cottage, and, by proclaiming Sir Guy's leniency, restore peace to the bosom of that ancient dame. And as she walks she muses on all that has passed between herself and her guardian during the last half-hour. After all, what did she say that was so very bad? She had certainly compared him to Brutus, but what of that? Brutus in his day was evidently a shining light among his people, and, according to the immortal Pinnock, an ornament to his sex. Suppose he did condemn his only son to death, what did that signify in a land where the deed was looked upon as meritorious? Weak-minded people of the present day might call him an old brute for so doing, but there are two sides to every question, and no doubt the young man was a regular nuisance at home, and much better out of the way. Then again she had likened him to the Medes and Persians; and why not? Who should say the Medes and Persians were not thoroughly respectable gentlemen, polished and refined? and though in this case again there might be some who would prefer the manners of a decent English gentleman to those of the present Shah, that is no reason why the latter should be regarded so ignominiously. She has reached this highly satisfactory point in her argument when a body dropping from a tree near her, almost at her feet, startles her rudely from her meditations. "Dear me!" says Lilian, with much emphasis, and then knows she is face to face with Heskett. He is a tall lad, brown-skinned as an Italian, with eyes and hair of gypsy dye. As he stands before Lilian now, in spite of his daring nature, he appears thoroughly abashed, and with his eyes lowered, twirls uneasily between his hands the rather greasy article that usually adorns his brow. "I beg your pardon, miss," he says, slowly, "but might I say a word to you?" "I am sorry to hear such bad accounts of you, Heskett," says Miss Chesney, in return, with all the airs of a dean and chapter. "Sir Guy has been telling you, miss?" says the lad, eagerly; "and it is about my trouble I wanted to see you. They say you have great weight with the baronet, miss, and once or twice you spoke kindly to me, and I thought maybe you would say a word for me." "You are mistaken: I have no influence," says Lilian, coloring faintly. "And besides, Heskett, there would be little use in speaking for you, as you are not to be trusted." "I am, Miss Chesney, I am indeed, if Sir Guy would only try me again. I don't know what tempted me last night, but I got my lesson then, and never again, I swear, Miss----" Here a glance at Lilian's face checks further protestations. She is not looking at him; her gaze is concentrated upon the left pocket of his coat, though, indeed, there is little worthy of admiration in the cut of that garment. Following the direction of her eyes, Heskett's fall slowly, until at length they fasten upon the object that has so attracted her. Sticking up in that luckless left pocket, so as plainly to be seen, is a limp and rather draggled brown wing, the undeniable wing of a young grouse. "Heskett," says Lilian, severely, "what have you been doing?" "Nothing, miss," desperately. "Heskett," still more severely, and with just a touch of scorn in her tone, "speak the truth: what have you got in your pocket?" "It's just a grouse, then," says the boy, defiantly, producing the bonny brown bird in question. "And a fat one," supplements Lilian. "Oh, Heskett, when you know the consequences of poaching, how can you do it?" "'Tis because I do know it,"--recklessly: "it's all up with me this time because the baronet swore he'd punish me next time I was caught, and he never breaks his word. So I thought, miss, I'd have a last fling, whatever came of it." "But it isn't 'all up' with you," says Lilian. "I have spoken to Sir Guy, and he has promised to give you one more chance. But I cannot speak again, Heskett, and if you still persist in your evil ways I shall have spoken in vain." "You spoke for me?" exclaims he, incredulously. "Yes. But I fear I have done no good." The boy's eyes seek the ground. "I didn't think the likes of you would care to say a kind word for such as me,--and without the asking," he says, huskily. "Look here, Miss Chesney, if it will please you, I swear I will never again snare a bird." "Oh, Heskett, will you promise really?" returns Lilian, charmed at her success, "and can I trust you? You know you gave your word before to Sir Guy." "But not to you, miss. Yes, I will be honest to please you. And indeed, Miss Chesney, when I left home this morning I never meant to kill a thing. I started with a short oak stick in my hand, quite innocent like, and up by the bit of heather yonder this young one ran across my path; I didn't seek it, and may bad luck go with the oak stick, for, before I knew what I meant, it flew from me, and a second later the bird lay dead as mutton. Not a stir in it. I was always a fine shot, miss, with a stick or a stone," says the accomplished Heskett, regarding his grouse with much pride. "Will you have it, miss?" he says then, holding it out to her. "No, thank you," loftily: "I am not a receiver of stolen goods; and it is stolen, remember that." "I suppose so, miss. Well, as I said before, I will be honest now to please you, you have been so good to me." "You should try to please some One higher," says Lilian, with a solemnity that in her is sweeter than it is comical. "Nay, then, miss,--to please you first, if I may." "Tell me," says Lilian, shifting ground as she finds it untenable, "why do you never come to church?" "It's so mighty dull, miss." "You shouldn't find it so. Come and say your prayers, and afterward you may find it easier to be good. You should not call church dull," with a little reproving shake of the head. "Do _you_ never find it stupid, Miss Chesney?" asks Heskett, with all diffidence. Lilian pauses. This is a home-thrust, and her innate honesty prevents the reply that trembles on her lips. She _does_ find it very stupid now and then. "Sometimes," she says, with hesitation, "when Mr. Austen is preaching I cannot think it quite as interesting as it might be: still----" "Oh, as for him," says Heskett, with a grin, "he ought to be shot, miss, begging your pardon, that's what he ought. I never see him I don't wish he was a rabbit snug in one o' my snares as was never known to fail. Wouldn't I wring his neck when I caught him! maybe not! comin' around with his canting talk, as though he was the archbishop hisself." "How dare you speak of your clergyman in such a way?" says Lilian, shocked; "you are a bad, bad boy, and I am very angry with you." "Don't then, Miss Chesney," piteously; "I ask your pardon humbly, and I'll never again speak of Mr. Austen if you don't like. But he do aggravate awful, miss, and frightens the life out o' mother, because she do smoke a bit of an evenin', and it's all the comfort she have, poor soul. There's the Methody parson below, even he's a better sort, though he do snivel horrid. But I'll do anything to please you, miss, an' I'll come to church next Sunday." "Well, mind you do," says Lilian, dismissing him with a gracious nod. So Heskett departs, much exercised in mind, and in the lowest spirits, being full of vague doubts, yet with a keen consciousness that by his promise to Miss Chesney he has forfeited his dearest joy, and that from him the glory of life has departed. No more poaching, no more snaring, no more midnight excursions fraught with delicious danger: how is he to get on in future, with nothing to murder but time? Meanwhile Miss Chesney, coming home flushed with victory, encounters Florence in the garden wandering gracefully among the flowers, armed as usual with the huge umbrella, the guardian of her dear complexion. "You have been for a walk?" she asks Lilian, with astonishing _bonhommie_. "I hope it was a pleasant one." "Very, thank you." "Then you were not alone. Solitary walks are never pleasant." "Nevertheless, mine was solitary." "Then, Guy did not go with you?" somewhat hastily. "No. He found he had something to do in the stables," Lilian answers, shortly. Miss Beauchamp laughs a low, soft, irritative laugh. "How stupid Guy is!" she says. "I wonder it never occurs to him to invent a new excuse: whenever he wants to avoid doing anything unpleasant to him, he has always some pressing business connected with the stables to take him away. Have you noticed it?" "I cannot say I have. But then I have not made a point of studying his eccentricities. Now you have told me this one, I dare say I shall remark it in future. You see," with a slight smile, "I hold myself in such good esteem that it never occurred to me others might find my company disagreeable." "Nor do they, I am sure,"--politely,--"but Guy is so peculiar, at times positively odd." "You amaze me more and more every moment. I have always considered him quite a rational being,--not in the least madder than the rest of us. I do hope the new moon will have no effect upon him." "Ah! you jest," languidly. "But Guy does hold strange opinions, especially about women. No one, I think, quite understands him but me. We have always been so--fond of each other, he and I." "Yes? Quite like brother and sister, I suppose? It is only natural." "Oh, _no_" emphatically, her voice taking a soft intonation full of sentimental meaning, "not in the very _least_ like brother and sister." "Like what then?" asks Lilian, somewhat sharply for her. "How downright you are!" with a little forced laugh, and a modest drooping of her white lids; "I mean, I think a brother and sister are hardly so necessary to each other's happiness as--as we are to each other, and have been for years. To me, Chetwoode would not be Chetwoode without Guy, and I fancy--I am sure--it would scarcely be home to Guy without me." This with a quiet conviction not to be shaken. "Perhaps you can see what I mean? though, indeed," with a smile, "I hardly know myself what it is I _do_ mean." "Ah!" says Lilian, a world of meaning in her tone. "The only fault I find with him," goes on Florence, in the low, prettily modulated tone she always adopts, "is, that he is rather a flirt. I believe he cannot help it; it is second nature to him now. He adores pretty women, and at times his manner to them is rather--er--caressing. I tell him it is dangerous. Not perhaps that it makes much difference nowadays, does it? when women have learned to value attentions exactly at what they are worth. For my own part, I have little sympathy with those foolish Ariadnes who spend their lives bemoaning the loss of their false lovers. Don't you agree with me?" "Entirely. Utterly," says Lilian, in a curious tone that might be translated any way. "But I cannot help thinking Fortune very hard on the poor Ariadnes. Is that the dressing-bell? How late it has grown! I am afraid we must go in if we wish to be in time for dinner." Miss Beauchamp being possessed with the same fear, they enter the house together, apparently in perfect amity with each other, and part in peace at their chamber doors. Lilian even bestows a little smile upon her companion as she closes hers, but it quickly changes into an unmistakable little frown as the lock is turned. A shade falls across her face, an impatient pucker settles comfortably upon her forehead, as though it means to spend some time there. "What a hateful girl that is!" Lilian says to herself, flinging her hat with a good deal of vehemence on to the bed (where it makes one desperate effort to range itself and then rolls over to the floor at the other side), and turning two lovely wrathful eyes toward the door, as though the object of her anger were still in sight. "Downright detestable! and quite an old maid; not a doubt of it. Women close on thirty are always so spiteful!" Here she picks up the unoffending hat, and almost unconsciously straightens a damaged bow while her thought still runs on passionately. So Sir Guy "adores pretty women." By the bye, it was a marvelous concession on Miss Beauchamp's part to acknowledge her as such, for without doubt all that kindly warning was meant for her. Going up to her glass, Lilian runs her fingers through the rippling masses of her fair hair, and pinches her soft cheeks cruelly until the red blood rushes upward to defend them, after which, she tells herself, even Florence could scarcely have said otherwise. And does Miss Beauchamp think _herself_ a "pretty woman?" and does Sir Guy "adore _her_?" She said he was a flirt. But is he? Cyril is decidedly given that way, and some faults run in families. Now she remembers certain lingering glances, tender tones, and soft innuendoes meant for her alone, that might be placed to the account of her guardian. She smiles somewhat contemptuously as she recalls them. Were all these but parts of his "caressing" manner? Pah! what a sickening word it is. She blushes hotly, until for a full minute she resembles the heart of a red, red rose. And for that minute she positively hates her guardian. Does he imagine that she--_she_--is such a baby as to be flattered by the attentions of any man, especially by one who is the lover of another woman? for has not Florence both in words and manner almost claimed him as her own? Oh, it is too abominable! And---- But never mind, wait, and when she has the opportunity, won't she show him, that's all? What she is to show him, or how, does not transpire. But this awful threat, this carefully disguised and therefore sinister menace, is evidently one of weight, because it adds yet a deeper crimson to Miss Chesney's cheeks, and brings to life a fire within her eyes, that gleams and sparkles there unrebuked. Then it quietly dies, and nurse entering finds her little mistress again calm, but unusually taciturn, and strangely forgetful of her teasing powers. CHAPTER XII. "Sae sweet his voice, sae smooth his tongue His breath's like caller air; His very fit has music in't, As he comes up the stair. And will I see his face again? And will I hear him speak? I'm downright dizzy with the thought, In troth I'm like to greet."--W. J. MICKLE. It is the most important day of all the three hundred and sixty-five, at least to Lilian, because it will bring her Taffy. Just before dinner he will arrive, not sooner, and it is now only half-past four. All at Chetwoode are met in the library. The perfume of tea is on the air; the click of Lady Chetwoode's needles keeps time to the conversation that is buzzing all round. Miss Beauchamp, serene and immovable as ever, is presiding over the silver and china, while Lilian, wild with spirits, and half mad with excitement and expectation, is chattering with Cyril upon a distant sofa. Sir Guy, upon the hearthrug, is expressing his contempt for the views entertained by a certain periodical on the subject of a famous military scandal, in real parliamentary language, and Florence is meekly agreeing with him straight through. Never was any one (seemingly) so thoroughly _en rapport_ with another as Florence with Sir Guy. Her amiable and rather palpable determination to second his ideas on all matters, her "nods and becks and wreathed smiles," when in his company, would, if recited, fill a volume in themselves. But I don't deny it would be a very stupid volume, from the same to the same: so I suppress it. "Sir Guy," says Lilian, suddenly, "don't look so stern and don't stand with one hand in your breast, and one foot advanced, as though you were going to address the House." "Well, but he is going to address the House," says Cyril, reprovingly: "we are all here, aren't we?" "It is perfectly preposterous," says Guy, who is heated with his argument, and scarcely hears what is going on around him, so great is his righteous indignation. "If being of high birth is a reason why one must be dragged into notoriety, one would almost wish one was born a----" "Sir Guy," interrupts Lilian again, throwing at him a paper pellet she has been preparing for the last two minutes, with sure and certain aim, "didn't you hear me desire you not to look like that?" Sir Guy laughs, and subsides into a chair. Miss Beauchamp shrugs her shapely shoulders and indulges in a smile suggestive of pity. "I begin to feel outrageously jealous of this unknown Taffy," says Cyril. "I never knew you in such good spirits before. Do you always laugh when you are happy?" "'Much laughter covers many tears,'" returns Lilian, gayly. "Yes, I am very happy,--so happy that I think a little would make me cry." "Oh, don't," says Cyril, entreatingly; "if you begin I'm safe to follow suit, and weeping violently always makes me ill." "I can readily believe it," says Miss Chesney. "Your expression is unmistakably doleful, O knight of the rueful countenance!" "And his manner is so dejected," remarks his mother, smiling. "Have you not noticed how silent he always is? One might easily imagine him the victim of an unhappy love tale." "If you say much more," says Mr. Chetwoode, "like Keats, I shall 'die of a review.' I feel much offended. It has been the dream of my life up to this that society in general regarded me as a gay and brilliant personage, one fitted to shine in any sphere, concentrating (as I hoped I did) rank, beauty, and fashion in my own body." "_Did_ you hope all that?" asks Lilian, with soft impertinence. "'A modest hope, but modesty's my forte,'" returns he, mildly. "No, Miss Chesney, I won't be told I am conceited. This is a case in which we 'all do it;' every one in this life thinks himself better than he is." "I am glad you so scrupulously exonerate the women," says Lilian, maliciously. At this moment a step is heard in the hall outside. Lilian starts, and rises impulsively to her feet; her face lights; a delicate pink flush dawns upon it slowly, and then deepens into a rich carnation. Instinctively her eyes turn to Lady Chetwoode, and the breath comes a little quicker from her parted lips. "But," she murmurs, raising one hand, and speaking in the low tone one adopts when intently listening,--"but that I know he can't be here for another hour, I should say that was--Taffy!" The door has opened. A tall, very young man, with a bright boyish face, fair brown hair, and a daring attempt at a moustache, stands upon the threshold. Lilian, with a little soft glad cry, runs to him and throws herself into his arms. "Oh, dear, dear boy, you have come!" she says, whereupon the tall young man laughs delightedly, and bestows upon her an honest and most palpable hug. "Hug," quotha! and what is a "hug"? asks the fastidious reader: and yet, dear ignorance, I think there is no word in all the English language, or in any other language, that so efficiently describes the enthusiasm of a warm embrace as the small one of three letters. Be it vulgar or not, however, I cannot help it: the fact remains. Taffy openly and boldly hugged Miss Chesney before her guardian's eyes, and Miss Chesney does not resent it; on the contrary, she kisses him with considerable _empressement_, and then turns to Lady Chetwoode, who is an admiring spectator of the scene. Cyril is visibly amused; Sir Guy a trifle envious; Miss Beauchamp thinks the new-comer far too grown for the reception of such a public demonstration of affection on the part of a well-conducted young woman, but is rather glad than otherwise that Lilian has so far committed herself before her guardian. "It is Taffy," says Lilian, with much pride. "I knew it was. Do you know," turning her sweet, flushed, excited face to her cousin, "the moment I heard your step outside, I said, 'That is Taffy,' and it _was_," with a charming laugh. Meanwhile Mr. Musgrave is being kindly received by Lady Chetwoode and her sons. "It was so awfully good of you to ask me here!" he is saying, gratefully, and with all a boy's delightful frankness of tone and manner. "If you hadn't, I shouldn't have known what to do, because I hate going to my guardian's, one puts in such a bad time there, the old man is so grumpy. When I got your invitation I said to myself, 'Well, I _am_ in luck!'" Here he is introduced to Miss Beauchamp, and presses the hand she extends to him with much friendliness, being in radiant spirits with himself and the world generally. "Why, Taffy, you aren't a bit altered, though I do think you have grown half an inch or so," says Lilian, critically, "and I am so glad of it. When I heard you had really joined and become an undeniable 'heavy,' I began to fear you would change, and grow grand, and perhaps think yourself a man, and put on a great deal of 'side;' isn't that the word, Sir Guy?" saucily, peeping at him from behind Taffy's back. "You mustn't correct me, because I heard you use that word this morning; and I am sure you would not give way to a naughty expression." "We are all very glad to have you, Mr. Musgrave," says Lady Chetwoode, graciously, who has taken an instantaneous fancy to him. "I hope your visit will be a happy one." "Thank you, I know it will; but my name is Taffy," says young Musgrave. "I hope you will call me by it. I hardly know myself by any other name now." He says this with a laugh so exactly like Lilian's that they all notice it, and comment upon it afterward. Indeed, both in feature and manner he strongly resembles his cousin. Lady Chetwoode smiles, and promises to forget the more formal address for the future. "I have so many things to show you," exclaims Lilian, fondly. "The stables here are even better than at the Park, and I have a brown mare all my own, and I am sure I could beat you at tennis now, and there are six lovely new fat little puppies; will you come and see them? but perhaps"--doubtfully--"of course you are tired." "He must be tired, I think, and hungry too," says Guy, coming up to him and laying his hand upon his shoulder, "If you can spare him for a moment or two, Lilian, I will show Taffy his room." Here Guy smiles at his new guest, and when Guy smiles he is charming. Mr. Musgrave likes him on the spot. "I will go with you," says Lilian promptly, who is never troubled with the pangs of etiquette, and who cannot as yet bear to lose sight of her boy. "Such a pretty room as it is! It is near mine, and has an exquisite view from it,--the lake, and the swans, and part of the garden. Oh, Taffy, I am so _glad_ you are come!" They are half-way up the stairs by this time, and Lilian, putting her hand through her cousin's arm, beams upon him so sweetly that Guy, who is the looker-on, feels he would give a small fortune for permission to kiss her without further delay. Taffy does kiss her on the instant without having to waste any fortune or ask any permission; and Chetwoode, seeing how graciously the caress is received and returned, feels a strange trouble at his heart. How fond she is of this boy! Surely he is more to her than any cousin ever yet was to another. At the head of the stairs another interruption occurs. Advancing toward them, arrayed in her roomiest, most amazing cap, and clad in her Sunday gown, appears Mrs. Tipping, shining with joy and expectation. Seeing Taffy, she opens wide her capacious arms, into which Mr. Musgrave precipitates himself and is for the moment lost. When he comes to light again, he embraces her warmly, and placing his hands upon her shoulders, regards her smilingly. "Bless the boy, how he has grown, to be sure!" says nurse, with tears in her eyes; taking out her spectacles with much deliberation, she carefully adjusts them on her substantial nose, and again subjects him to a loving examination. "Yes; hasn't he, nurse? I said so," remarks Lilian, in raptures, while Sir Guy stands behind, much edified. "So have you, nurse," says Master Taffy,--"_young_. I protest it is a shame the way you go on deceiving the public. Every year only sees you fresher and lovelier. Why, you are ten years younger than when last I saw you. It's uncommonly mean of you not to give us a hint as to how you manage it." "Tut," says nurse, giving him a scornful poke with her first finger, though she is tremendously flattered; "be off with you; you are worse than ever. Eh, but I always knew how it would be if you took to soldiering. All the millingtary has soft tongues, and the gift o' the gab." "How do you know, nurse?" demands Mr. Musgrave: "I always understood the fortunate Tipping was a retired mason. I am afraid at some period of your life you must have lost your heart to a bold dragoon. Never mind: my soldiering shan't bring me to grief, if only for your sake." "Eh, darling, I hope not," says nurse, surveying with fond admiration his handsome boyish face: "such bonnie looks as yours should aye sit upon a high head." "I decline to listen to any more flattery. It is downright demoralizing," says Mr. Musgrave, virtuously, and presently finds himself in his pretty room, that is sweet with the blossoms of Lilian's gathering. * * * * * Mr. Musgrave on acquaintance proves as great a success as his cousin: indeed, to like one is to like the other, as no twins could be more similar. He takes very kindly to the house and all its inmates, and is, after one day's association, as much at home with them as though they had been his chosen intimates all his life. His disposition is certainly sweeter than Lilian's,--bad temper of any sort being quite unknown to him; whereas Miss Chesney possesses a will of her own, and a very quick temper indeed. He is bright, sunny, lovable in disposition, and almost "without guile." So irresistible is he that even Miss Beauchamp smiles upon him, and is singularly gracious to him, considering he is not only a youngster but--far worse--a detrimental. He has one very principal charm. Unlike all the youthful soldiers it has been my misfortune to meet, he does not spend his days wearying his friends with a vivid description of his rooms, his daily duties when on parade, his colonel, and his brother officers. For this grace alone his familiars should love him and be grateful to him. Nevertheless, he is so far human that, the evening after his arrival, he whispers to Lilian how he has brought his uniform with him, for her inspection only. Whereupon Lilian, delighted, desires him to go up that instant and put it on, that she may pass judgment upon him without delay. No, she will not wait another second; she cannot know peace or happiness until she beholds him in all his grandeur. After a faint demur, and the suggestion that as it is late he could scarcely get it on and have time afterward to dress for dinner, he gives in, and, binding her to secrecy, runs up-stairs, having named a certain time for her to follow him. Half an hour later, Miss Beauchamp, sweeping slowly along the corridor up-stairs, hears the sound of merriment coming from young Musgrave's room, and stops short. Is that Lilian's voice? surely it is; and in her cousin's room! The door is almost closed,--not quite; and, overcome by curiosity, she lays her hand against it, and, pushing it gently open, glances in. Before the dressing-table, clothed in military garments of the most _recherché_ description, is Taffy, while opposite to him, full of open admiration, stands Miss Chesney. Taffy is struggling with some part of his dress that declines to fall into a right position, and Lilian is flouting him merrily for the evident inexperience he betrays. Florence, astonished--nay, electrified--by this scene, stands motionless. A young woman in a young man's bedroom! Oh, shocking! To her carefully educated mind, the whole thing borders on the improper, while to have it occur in such a well-regulated household as Chetwoode fills her with genuine horror. So struck is she by the criminality of it all that she might have stayed there until now, but that a well-known step coming up the stairs warns her that eavesdropping is not the most honorable position to be caught in. She moves away, and presently finds herself face to face with Guy. He is coming lazily along the corridor, but stops as he sees her. "What is it, Florence? You look frightened," he says, half jestingly. "No, not frightened," Florence answers, coldly, "though I confess I am a good deal amazed,"--her tone says "disgusted," and Guy knows the tone. "Really, that girl seems absolutely ignorant of the common decencies of society!" "Of whom are you speaking?" asks Guy, coloring. "Of whom can I say such things but Lilian? She is the only one of my acquaintance deserving of such a remark, and it is not my fault that we are acquainted. I think it is clearly Aunt Anne's duty to speak to her, or yours. There are moments when one positively blushes for her." "Why, what has she been doing?" asks Guy, overcome with astonishment at this outburst on the part of the usually calm Florence. "Doing! Do you not hear her in her cousin's room? Is that the proper place for a young lady?" At this instant a sound of laughter coming from Mr. Musgrave's apartment gives truth to her accusations, and with a slight but expressive shrug of her white shoulders, Florence sails majestically down the stairs, while Sir Guy instinctively moves on toward Taffy's quarters. Miss Beauchamp's touch has left the door quite open, so that, standing on the threshold, he can see clearly all that is within. By this time Taffy is quite arrayed, having finally resorted to his cousin's help. "There!" says Lilian, triumphantly, "now you are ready. Oh! I say, Taffy, how nice you do look!" "No; do I?" returns Mr. Musgrave, with admirable modesty, regarding himself bashfully though complacently in a full-length mirror. His tall young figure is well drawn up, his head erect; unconsciously he has assumed all the full-blown, starchy airs of a military swell. "Does the coat fit well, do you think?" he asks, turning to await her answer with doubtful anxiety. "It is simply perfection," returns she reassuringly, "not a wrinkle in it. Certainly you owe your tailor something for turning you out so well." "I do," says Taffy, feelingly. "I had no idea it would make such a difference in you," goes on Lilian; "you look quite grown up." "Grown up,--nonsense," somewhat indignantly; "I should think I was indeed. Just twenty, and six feet one. There are very few fellows in the service as good a height as I am. 'Grown up,' indeed!" "I beg your pardon," Lilian says, meekly. "Remember I am only a little rustic, hardly aware of what a man really means. Talking of fitting, however, do you know," thoughtfully, and turning her head to one side, the better to mark the effect, "I think--I fancy--there is just a little pucker in your trousers, just at the knee." "No; is there?" says Taffy, immediately sinking into the deepest melancholy as he again refers to the glass. Here Sir Guy comes forward and creates a diversion. He is immensely amused, but still sore and angry at Florence's remarks, while wishing Lilian would not place herself in such positions as to lay her open to unkind criticism. "Oh, here is Sir Guy," says that young lady, quite unembarrassed; "he will decide. Sir Guy, do you think his trousers fit very well? Look here, now, is there not the faintest pucker here?" "I think they fit uncommonly well," says Guy, gravely. Taffy has turned a warm crimson and is silent; but his confusion arises not from Miss Chesney's presence in his room, but because Chetwoode has discovered him trying on his new clothes like a school-boy. "Lilian wanted so much to see me in my uniform," he says, meanly, considering how anxious he himself has been to show himself to her in it. "Yes, and doesn't he look well in it?" asks Lilian, proudly; "I had no idea he could look so handsome. Most men appear perfect fools in uniform, but it suits Taffy. Don't you think so?" "I do; and I think something else, too; your auntie is coming up-stairs, and if she catches you in Taffy's room she will give you a small lecture on the proprieties." This is the mildest rebuke he can think of. Not that he thinks her at all worthy of rebuke, but because he is afraid of Florence's tongue for her sake. "Why?" asks Lilian, opening large eyes of utter amazement, after which the truth dawns upon her, and as it dawns amuses her intensely. "Do you mean to say," blushing slightly, but evidently struck with the comicality of the thought,--"what would auntie say, then, if she knew Taffy had been in mine? Yes; he was,--this afternoon,--just before lunch," nodding defiantly at Sir Guy, "actually in mine; and he stole my eau de Cologne, which I thought mean of him. When I found it was all gone, I was very near running across to your room to replenish my bottle. Was it not well I didn't? Had I done so I should of course have earned two lectures, one from auntie and one from--you!" provokingly. "Why, Guardy, how stupid you are! Taffy is just the same as my brother." "But he is not your brother," says Guy, beginning to feel bewildered. "Yes, he is, and better than most brothers: aren't you, Taffy?" "Are you angry with Lil for being in my room?" asks Mr. Musgrave, surprised; "she thinks nothing of it: and why should she? Bless you, all last year, when we were at home--at the Park--she used to come in and settle my ties when we were going out anywhere to dinner, or that." "Sir Guy never had a sister, so of course he doesn't understand," says Lilian, disdainfully, whereupon Guy gives up the point. "I wish you would come down and show yourself to auntie. Do now, Taffy,"--coaxingly: "you can't think how well you look. Come, if only to please me." "Oh, I couldn't," says Taffy. "I really couldn't, you know. She would think me such an awful fool, and Miss Beauchamp would laugh at me, and altogether it wouldn't be form. I only meant to show myself to you, but----" "Guy, my dear," says Lady Chetwoode from the doorway, "why, what is going on here?" advancing and smiling gently. "Oh, auntie, I am so glad you have come!" says Lilian, going forward to welcome her: "he would not go down-stairs to you, though I did my best to persuade him. Is he not charming in uniform?" "He is, indeed. Quite charming! He reminds me very much of what Guy was when first he joined his regiment." Not for a moment does Lady Chetwoode--dear soul--think of improprieties, or wrong-doing, or the "decencies of society." And, watching her, Guy grows gradually ashamed of himself. "It was really selfish of you, my dear Taffy, to deny me a glimpse of you." "Well, I didn't think you'd care, you know," says Mr. Musgrave, who is positively consumed with pride, and who is blushing like a demoiselle. "I couldn't resist coming in when I saw you from the doorway. All my people were in the army: so I have quite an affection for it. But Lilian, darling, dinner is almost ready, and you have not yet changed your dress." "I shan't be a minute," says Lilian; and Guy, lighting a candle, escorts her to her own room, while Lady Chetwoode goes down-stairs. "Shall I get you the eau de Cologne now?" he asks, pausing on her threshold for a moment. "If," says Miss Chesney, lowering her eyes with affected shyness, "you are _quite_ sure there would be nothing reprehensible in my accepting it, I should like it very much, thank you. By the bye, that reminds me," glancing at him with a mocking smile, "Lady Chetwoode quite forgot to deliver that small lecture. You, Sir Guy, as my guardian, should have reminded her." CHAPTER XIII. "Sweets to the sweet."--_Hamlet._ "I am going to London in the morning. Can I do anything for anybody?" asks Sir Guy, at exactly twenty minutes past ten on Wednesday night. "Madre, what of you?" "Nothing, dear, thank you," says the Madre, lazily enough, her eyes comfortably closed. "But to-morrow, my dear boy! why to-morrow? You know we expect Archibald." "I shall be home long before he arrives, if I don't meet him and bring him with me." "Some people make a point of being from home when their guests are expected," says Miss Lilian, pointedly, raising demure eyes to his. "Some other people make a point of being ungenerous," retorts he. "Florence, can I bring you anything?" "I want some wools matched: I cannot finish the parrot's tail in my crewel-work until I get them, and you will be some hours earlier than the post." "What! you expect me to enter a fancy shop--is that what you call it?--and sort wools, while the young woman behind the counter makes love to me? I should die of shame." "Nonsense! you need only hand in the envelope I will prepare for you, and wait until you receive an answer to it." "Very good. I dare say I shall survive so much. And you, my ward? How can I serve you?" "In a thousand ways, but modesty forbids my mentioning them. _Au reste_, I want bonbons, a new book or two, and--the portrait of the handsomest young man in London." "I thoroughly understand, and am immensely flattered. I shall have myself taken the moment I get there. Would you prefer me sitting or standing, with my hat on or off? A small size or a cabinet?" Miss Chesney makes a little grimace eminently becoming, but disdains direct reply. "I said a _young_ man," she remarks, severely. "I heard you. Am not I in the flower of my youth and beauty?" "Lilian evidently does not think so," says Florence, with a would-be air of intense surprise. "Why should I, when it suits me to think differently?" returns Lilian, calmly. Florence rather amuses her than otherwise. "Sir Guy and I are quite good friends at present. He has been civil to me for two whole days together, and has not once told me I have a horrid temper, or held me up to scorn in any way. Such conduct deserves reward. Therefore I liken him to an elderly gentleman, because I adore old men. You see, Guardy?" with an indescribably fascinating air, that has a suspicion of sauciness only calculated to heighten its charm. "I should think he is old in reality to you," says Florence: "you are such a child." "I am," says Lilian, agreeably, though secretly annoyed at the other's slighting tone. "I like it. There is nothing so good as youth. I should like to be eighteen always. But for my babyish ways and utter hopelessness, I feel positive Sir Guy would have beaten me long ago. But who could chastise an infant?" "In long robes," puts in Cyril, who is deep in the intricacies of chess with Mr. Musgrave. "Besides, I am 'Esther Summerson,' and he is 'Mr. Jarndyce,' and Esther's 'Guardy' very rightly was in perfect subjection to his ward." "Esther's guardian, if I remember correctly, fell in love with her; and she let him see"--dreamily but spitefully--"that she preferred another." "Ah, Sir Guy, think of that. See what lies before you," says Lilian, coloring warmly, but braving it out to the end. "I am sure you are going to ask me what I should like, Guy," breaks in Cyril, languidly, who is not so engrossed by his game but that he can heed Lilian's embarrassment. "Those cigars of yours are excellent. I shall feel obliged by your bringing me (as a free gift, mind) half a dozen boxes. If you do, it will be a saving, as for the future I shall leave yours in peace." "Thank you: I shall make a note of it," says Guy, laughing. "Do you go early, Sir Guy?" asks Lilian, presently. She is leaning back in a huge lounging-chair of blue satin that almost conceals from view her tiny figure. In her hands is an ebony fan, and as she asks the question she closes and uncloses it indolently. "Very early. I must start at seven to catch the train, if I wish to get my business done and be back by five." "What an unearthly hour for a poor old gentleman like you to rise! You won't recover it in a hurry. You will breakfast before you go?" "Yes." "What a lunch you will eat when you get to town! But don't overdo it, Guardy. You will be starving, no doubt; but remember the horrors of gout. And who will give you your breakfast at seven?" She raises her large soft eyes to his and, unfurling her fan, lays it thoughtfully against her pretty lips. Sir Guy is about to make an eager reply, when Miss Beauchamp interposes. "I always give Guy his breakfast when he goes to London," she says, calmly yet hastily. "Check!" says Cyril, at this instant, with his eyes on the board. "My dear Musgrave, what a false move!--a fatal delay. Don't you know bold play generally wins?" "Sometimes it loses," retorts Taffy, innocently; which reply, to his surprise, appears to cause Mr. Chetwoode infinite amusement. "Whenever you do go," says Lilian to Sir Guy, "don't forget my sweetmeats: I shall be dreaming of them until I see you again. Have you a pocket-book? Yes. Well, put down in it what I most particularly love. I like chocolate creams and burnt almonds better than anything in the world." Cyril, with dreamy sentiment, "How I wish I was a burnt almond!" Miss Chesney, viciously, "If you were, what a bite I would give you!" Taffy, to Sir Guy, "Lilian's tastes and mine are one. If you are really going to bring lollypops, please make the supply large. When I think of burnt almonds I feel no end hungry." Lilian, vigorously, "You shan't have any of mine, Taffy. Don't imagine it! Yesterday you ate every one Cyril brought me from Fenston. I crossed the room for one instant, and when I came back the box was literally cleared. Wasn't it a shame? I shan't go into partnership with you over Sir Guy's confections." Taffy, _sotto voce_, "Greedy little thing!" Then suddenly addressing Sir Guy, "I think I saw your old colonel--Trant--about the neighborhood to-day." Cyril draws himself up with a start and looks hard at the lad, who is utterly unconscious of the private bombshell he has discharged. "Trant!" says Guy, surprised; "impossible. Unless, indeed," with a light laugh, "he came to look after his _protégée_, the widow." "Mrs. Arlington? I saw her yesterday," says Taffy, with animation. "She was in her garden, and she is lovely. I never saw anything so perfect as her smile." "I hope you are not _épris_ with her. We warn everybody against our tenant," Guy says, smiling, though there is evident meaning in his tone. "We took her to oblige Trant,--who begged we would not be inquisitive about her; and literally we are in ignorance of who she is, or where she came from. Widows, like cousins, are dangerous," with a slight glance at his brother, who is leaning back in his chair, a knight between his fingers, taking an exhaustive though nonchalant survey of the painted ceiling, where all the little loves and graces are playing at a very pronounced game of hide-and-seek among the roses. "I hope," says Florence, slowly, looking up from the _rara avis_ whose tail she is elaborately embroidering,--the original of which was never yet (most assuredly) seen by land or sea,--"I hope Colonel Trant, in this instance, has not played you false. I cannot say I admire Mrs. Arlington's appearance. Though no doubt she is pretty,--in a certain style," concludes Miss Beauchamp, who is an adept at uttering the faint praise that damns. "Trant is a gentleman," returns Guy, somewhat coldly. Yet as he says it a doubt enters his mind. "He has the name of being rather fast in town," says young Musgrave, vaguely; "there is some story about his being madly in love with some mysterious woman whom nobody knows. I don't remember exactly how it is,--but they say she is hidden away somewhere." "How delightfully definite Taffy always is!" Lilian says, admiringly; "it is so easy to grasp his meaning. Got any more stories, Taffy? I quite begin to fancy this Colonel Trant. Is he as captivating as he is wicked?" "Not quite. I am almost sure I saw him to-day in the lane that runs down between the wood and Brown's farm. But I may be mistaken; I was certainly one or two fields off, yet I have a sure eye, and I have seen him often in London." "Perhaps Mrs. Arlington is the mysterious lady of his affections," says Guy, laughing, and, the moment the words have passed his lips, regrets their utterance. Cyril's eyes descend rapidly from the ceiling and meet his. On the instant a suspicion unnamed and unacknowledged fills both their hearts. "Do you really think Trant came down to see your tenant?" asks Cyril, almost defiantly. "Certainly not," returning the other's somewhat fiery glance calmly. "I do not believe he would be in the neighborhood without coming to see my mother." At the last word, so dear to her, Lady Chetwoode wakes gently, opens her still beautiful eyes, and smiles benignly on all around, as though defying them to say she has slumbered for half a second. "Yes, my dear Guy, I quite agree with you," she says, affably, _apropos_ of nothing unless it be a dream, and then, being fully roused, suggests going to bed. Whereupon Florence says, with gentle thoughtfulness, "Indeed yes. If Guy is to be up early in the morning he ought to go to bed now," and, rising as her aunt rises, makes a general move. When the women have disappeared and resigned themselves to the tender mercies of their maids, and the men have sought that best beloved of all apartments, the Tabagie, a sudden resolution to say something that lies heavy on his mind takes possession of Guy. Of all things on earth he hates most a "scene," but some power within him compels him to speak just now. The intense love he bears his only brother, his fear lest harm should befall him, urges him on, sorely against his will, to give some faint utterance to all that is puzzling and distressing him. Taffy, seduced by the sweetness of the night, has stepped out into the garden, where he is enjoying his weed alone. Within, the lamp is almost quenched by the great pale rays of the moon that rush through the open window. Without, the whole world is steeped in one white, glorious splendor. The stars on high are twinkling, burning, like distant lamps. Anon, one darts madly across the dark blue amphitheatre overhead, and is lost in space, while the others laugh on, unheeding its swift destruction. The flowers are sleeping, emitting in their dreams faint, delicate perfumed sighs; the cattle have ceased to low in the far fields: there is no sound through all the busy land save the sweet soughing of the wind and the light tread of Musgrave's footsteps up and down outside. "Cyril," says Guy, removing the meerschaum from between his lips, and regarding its elaborate silver bands with some nervousness, "I wish you would not go to The Cottage so often as you do." "No? And why not, _très cher_?" asks Cyril, calmly, knowing well what is coming. "For one thing, we do not know who this Mrs. Arlington is, or anything of her. That in itself is a drawback. I am sorry I ever agreed to Trant's proposal, but it is too late for regret in that quarter. Do not double my regret by making me feel I have done you harm." "You shall never feel that. How you do torture yourself over shadows, Guy! I always think it must be the greatest bore on earth to be conscientious,--that is, over-scrupulous, like you. It is a mistake, dear boy, take my word for it,--will wear you out before your time." "I am thinking of you, Cyril. Forgive me if I seem impertinent. Mrs. Arlington is lovely, graceful, everything of the most desirable in appearance, but----" A pause. "_Après?_" murmurs Cyril, lazily. "But," earnestly, "I should not like you to lose your heart to her, as you force me to say it. Musgrave says he saw Trant in the lane to-day. Of course he may have been mistaken; but was he? I have my own doubts, Cyril," rising in some agitation,--"doubts that may be unjust, but I cannot conquer them. If you allow yourself to love that woman, she will bring you misfortune. Why is she so secret about her former life? Why does she shun society? Cyril, be warned in time; she may be a----, she may be anything," checking himself slowly. "She may," says Cyril, rising with a passionate irrepressible movement to his feet, under pretense of lighting the cigar that has died out between his fingers. Then, with a sudden change of tone and a soft laugh, "The skies may fall, of course, but we scarcely anticipate it. My good Guy, what a visionary you are! Do be rational, if you can. As for Mrs. Arlington, why should she create dissension between you and me?" "Why, indeed?" returns Guy, gravely. "I have to ask your pardon for my interference. But you know I only speak when I feel compelled, and always for your good." "You are about the best fellow going, I know that," replies Cyril, deliberately, knocking the ash off his cigar; "but at times you are wont to lose your head,--to wander,--like the best of us. I am safe enough, trust me. 'What's Hecuba to me, or I to Hecuba?' Come, don't let us spoil this glorious night by a dissertation on what we neither of us know anything about. What a starlight!" standing at the open casement, and regarding with quick admiration the glistening dome above him. "I wonder how any one looking on it can disbelieve in a heaven beyond!" Here Musgrave's fair head makes a blot in the perfect calm of the night scene. "Is that you, Taffy? Where have you been all this time?--mooning?--you have had ample opportunity. But you are too young for Melancholy to mark you as her own. It is only old folk like Guy," with a laughing though affectionate glance backward to where his brother stands, somewhat perplexed, beside the lamp, "should fall victims to the blues." "A fig for melancholy!" says Taffy, vaulting lightly into the room, and by his presence putting an end to all private conversation between the brothers. * * * * * The next morning Lilian (to whom early rising is a pure delight), running down the broad stone stairs two steps at a time, finds Guy on the eve of starting, with Florence beside him, looking positively handsome in the most thrilling of morning gowns. She has forsaken her virtuous couch, and slighted the balmy slumber she so much loves, to give him his breakfast, and is still unremitting in her attentions, and untiring with regard to her smiles. "Not gone!" says Lilian, wickedly: "how disappointed I am, to be sure! I fancied my bonbons an hour nearer to me than they really are. Bad Guardy, why don't you hurry?" She says this with the prettiest affectation of infantile grace, accompanied by a coquettish glance from under her sweeping lashes that creates in Florence a mad desire to box her ears. "You forget it will not hasten the train five seconds, Guy's leaving this sooner than he does," she says, snubbingly. "To picture him sitting in a draughty station could not--I should think--give satisfaction to any one." "It could"--willfully--"to me. It would show a proper anxiety to obey my behests. Guardy," with touching concern, "are you sure you are warm enough? Now do promise me one thing,--that you will beware of the crossings; they say any number of old men come to grief in that way yearly, and are run over through deafness, or short sight, or stupidity in general. Think how horrid it would be if they sent us home your mangled remains." "Go in, you naughty child, and learn to speak to your elders with respect," says Guy, laughing, and putting her bodily inside the hall-door, from whence she trips out again to wave him a last adieu, and kiss her hand warmly to him as he disappears round the corner of the laurustinus bush. And Sir Guy drives away full of his ward's fresh girlish loveliness, her slender lissome figure, her laughing face, the thousand tantalizing graces that go to make her what she is; forgetful of Miss Beauchamp's more matured charms,--her white gown,--her honeyed words,--everything. All day long Lilian's image follows him. It is beside him in the crowded street, enters his club with him, haunts him in his business, laughs at him in his most serious moods; while she, at home, scarce thinks of him at all, or at the most vaguely, though when at five he does return she is the first to greet him. "He has come home! he is here!" she cries, dancing into the hall. "Have you escaped the crossings? and rheumatism? and your old enemy, lumbago? Good old Guardy, let me help you off with your coat. So. Positively, he is all here,--not a bit of him gone,--and none the worse for wear!" "Tired, Guy?" asks Florence, coming gracefully forward,--slowly, lest by unseemly haste she should disturb the perfect fold of her train, that sets off her figure to such advantage. She speaks warmly, appropriatingly, as one's wife might, after a long journey. "Tired! not he," returns Lilian irreverently: "he is quite a gay old gentleman. Nor hungry either. No doubt he has lunched profusely in town, 'not wisely, but too well,' as somebody says. Where are my sweeties, Sir Ancient?" "My dear Lilian,"--rebukingly,--"if you reflect, you will see he must be both tired and hungry." "So am I for my creams: I quite pine for them. Sir Guy, where _are_ my sweeties?" "Here, little cormorant," says Guy, as fondly as he dares, handing her a gigantic _bonbonnière_ in which chocolates and French sweetmeats fight for mastery: "have I got you what you wanted?" "Yes, indeed; _best_ of Guardys, I only wish I might kiss my thanks." "You may." "Better not. Such a condescension on my part might turn your old head. Oh, Taffy," with an exclamation, "you bad greedy boy; you have taken half my almonds! Well, you shan't have any of the others, for punishment. Auntie and Florence and I will eat the rest." "Thanks," drawls Florence, languidly, "but I am always so terrified about toothache." "What a pity!" says Miss Chesney. "If I had toothache, I should have all my teeth drawn instantly, and false ones put in their place." To this Miss Beauchamp, being undecided in her own mind as to whether it is or is not an impertinence, deigns no reply. Cyril, with a gravity that belies his innermost feelings, gazes hard at Lilian, only to acknowledge her innocent of desire to offend. "You did not meet Archibald?" asks Lady Chetwoode of Guy. "No: I suppose he will be down by next train. Chesney is always up to time." "Lilian, my dear, where is my fourth knitting-needle?" asks auntie, mildly. "I lent it to you this morning for some purpose." "It is up-stairs; you shall have it in one moment," returns Lilian, moving toward the door; and Sir Guy, muttering something about getting rid of the dust of travel, follows her out of the room. At the foot of the stairs he says: "Lilian." "Yes?" "I have brought you yet another bonbon. Will you accept it?" As he speaks he holds out to her an open case, in which lies a pretty ring composed of pearls and diamonds. "For me? Oh, Sir Guy!" says Lilian, flushing with pleasure, "what a lovely present to bring me!" Then her expression changes, and her face falls somewhat. She has lived long enough to know that young men do not, as a rule, go about giving costly rings to young women without a motive. Perhaps she ought to refuse it. Perhaps auntie would think it wrong of her to take it. And if there is really anything between him and Florence---- Yet what a pretty ring it is, and how the diamonds glitter! And what woman can resign diamonds without a struggle? "Will auntie be vexed if I take it?" she asks, honestly, after a pause, raising her clear eyes to his, thereby betraying the fear that is tormenting her. "Why should she? Surely," with a smile, "an elderly guardian may make a present to his youthful ward without being brought to task for it." "And Florence?" asks Lilian, speaking impulsively, but half jestingly. "Does it signify what she thinks?" returns he, a little stiffly. "It is a mere bauble, and scarcely worth so much thought. You remember that day down by the stream, when you said you were so fond of rings?" "No." "Well, I do, as I remember most things you say, be they kind or cruel," softly. "To-day, though I cannot explain why, this ring reminded me of you, so I bought it, thinking you might fancy it." "So I do: it is quite too lovely," says Lilian, feeling as though she had been ungracious, and, what is worse, prudish. "Thank you very much. I shall wear it this evening with my new dress, and it will help me to make an impression on my unknown cousin." She holds out her hand to him; it is the right one, and Guy slips the ring upon the third finger of it, while she, forgetting it is the engaged finger, makes no objection. Sir Guy, still holding the little cool slim hand, looks at her fixedly, and, looking, decides regretfully that she is quite ignorant of his meaning. "How it sparkles!" she says, moving her hand gently to and fro so that the light falls upon it from different directions. "Thank you again, Guardy; you are always better to me than I deserve." She says this warmly, being desirous of removing all traces of her late hesitation, and quite oblivious of her former scruples. But the moment she leaves him she remembers them again, and, coming down-stairs with Lady Chetwoode's needle, and finding her alone, says, with a heightened color, "See what a charming present Sir Guy has brought me." "Very pretty indeed," Lady Chetwoode says, examining the ring with interest. "Dear Guy has such taste, and he is always so thoughtful, ever thinking how to please some one. I am glad it has been you this time, pussy," kissing the girl's smiling lips as she bends over her. So that Miss Chesney, reassured by her auntie's kind words, goes up to dress for the reception of her cousin Archibald, with a clear and therefore happy conscience. Not for all the diamonds in Christendom would she have concealed even so small a secret as the acceptance of this ring from one whom she professes to love, and who she knows trusts in her. CHAPTER XIV. "_Kate._ I never saw a better fashioned gown, More quaint, more pleasing, nor more commendable." --_Taming of the Shrew._ This dressing of Lilian for the undoing of her cousin is a wonderful affair, and occupies a considerable time. Not that she spends any of it in a dainty hesitation over the choice of the gown fated to work his overthrow; all that has been decided on long ago, and the fruit of many days' deep thought now lies upon her bed, bearing in its every fold--in each soft fall of lace--all the distinguishing marks that stamp the work of the inimitable Worth. At length--nurse having admired and praised her to her heart's content, and given the last fond finishing touches to her toilet--Miss Chesney stands arrayed for conquest. She is dressed in a marvelous robe of black velvet--cut _à la Princesse_, simply fashioned, fitting _à merveille_,--being yet in mourning for her father. It is a little open at the throat, so that her neck--soft and fair as a child's--may be partly seen (looking all the whiter for the blackness that frames it in), and has the sleeves very tight and ending at the elbow, from which rich folds of Mechlin lace hang downward. Around her throat are a narrow band of black velvet and three little strings of pearls that once had been her mother's. In her amber hair a single white rose nestles sleepily. Standing erect before her glass, she contemplates herself in silence,--marks the snowy loveliness of her neck and arms, her slender hands (on one of which Guy's ring is sparkling brilliantly), her rippling yellow hair in all its unstudied sleekness, the tender, exquisite face, rose-flushed, and, looking gladly upon it all,--for very love of it,--stoops forward and presses a kiss upon the delicate beauty that smiles back upon her from the mirror. "How do I look, nurse?" she asks, turning with a whimsical grace to the woman who is regarding her with loving admiration. "Shall we captivate our cousin?" "Ay, so I think, my dear," replies nurse, quietly. "Were you willing, my beauty, I'm nigh sure you could coax the birds off the bushes." "You are an old dear," says Miss Chesney, tenderly, pressing her own cheek, soft with youth's down, against the wrinkled one near her. "But I must go and show myself to Taffy." So saying, she opens the door, and trips away from Mrs. Tipping's adoring eyes, down the corridor, until she stops at Taffy's door. "Taffy!" "Yes." The answer comes in muffled tones. "May I come in?" "Yes," still more muffled. Turning the handle of the door, Lilian enters, to find Mr. Musgrave in his shirt-sleeves before a long mirror, struggling with his hair, which is combed straight over his forehead. "It won't come right," he says, casting a heart-rending glance at Lilian, who laughs with most reprehensible cruelty, considering the situation. "I am glad to find you are not suffocated," she says. "From your tone, I prepared myself--outside--for the worst. Here, bend your head, you helpless boy, and I will do it for you." Taffy kneeling before her submissively, she performs her task deftly, successfully, and thereby restores peace once more to the bosom of the dejected dragoon. "You should hire me as your valet," she says, lightly; "when you are away from me, I am afraid to think of all the sufferings you must undergo. Are you easier in your mind now, Taffy?" "Oh, I say! what a swell you are!" says that young man, when he is sufficiently recovered to glance round. "I call that rig-out downright fetching. Where did you get that from?" "Straight from Monsieur Worth," returns Lilian, with pardonable pride, when one remembers what a success she is, drawing up her slim young figure to its fullest height, and letting her white hands fall clasped before her, as she poses for well-earned admiration. "Is not it pretty? And doesn't it fit like a glove?" "It does. It gives you really a tolerably good figure," with all a brother's calm impertinence, while examining her critically. "You have got yourself up regardless, so I suppose you mean mischief." "Well, if this doesn't soften his heart, nothing will," replies Miss Chesney, vainly regarding her velvet, and alluding, as Musgrave well knows, to her cousin Archibald. "You really think I look nice, Taffy? You think I am _chic_?" "I do, indeed. I am not a judge of women's clothing, but I like black velvet, and when I have a wife she shall wear nothing else. I would say more in your favor, but that I fear over-much praise might have a bad effect upon you, and cause you to die of your 'own dear loveliness.'" "_Méchant!_" says Lilian, with a charming pout. "Never mind, I know you admire me intensely." "Have I not said so in the plainest Queen's English? But that time has fatally revealed to me the real character of the person standing in those costly garments, I feel I should fall madly in love with you to-night." "Silly child!"--turning up her small nose with immeasurable disdain,--"do you think I would deign to accept your boyish homage? No; I like _men_! Indeed!"--with disgraceful affectation,--"I think it my duty to warn you not to waste time burning your foolish fingers at _my_ shrine." She moves him aside with one small finger, the better to see how charming she is in another glass. This one reveals to her all the sweetness she has seen before--and something more. Scarcely has she glanced into it, when her complexion, that a moment since was a soft and lovely pink, changes suddenly, and flames into a deep crimson. There, at the farthest end of the long room reflected in the glass,--staring back at her,--coatless, motionless, with a brush suspended from each hand, stands a man, lost in wonder and most flattering astonishment. Miss Chesney, turning round with a start, finds that this vision is not belonging to the other world, but is a real _bona fide_ creature of flesh and blood,--a young man, tall, broad-shouldered, and very dark. For a full minute they stare silently at each other, oppressed with thoughts widely different in character, while Taffy remains blissfully ignorant of the situation, being now engaged in a desperate conflict with a refractory tie. Then one of the brushes falls from the stranger's hand, and the spell is broken. Miss Chesney, turning impetuously, proceeds to pour out the vials of her wrath upon Taffy. "I think you might have told me," she says, in clear, angry tones, casting upon him a glance meant to wither. But Mr. Musgrave distinctly refuses to be withered. "Eh? What? _By Jove!_" he says, vaguely, as the awful truth dawns upon him. Meanwhile Lilian sweeps majestically to the door, her velvets trailing behind her. All her merry kittenish ways have disappeared; she walks as a young queen might who has been grossly affronted in open court. "Give you my honor I quite forgot him," murmurs Taffy, from the spot where he is rooted through sheer dismay. His tones are dismal in the extreme, but Miss Chesney disdains to hear or argue, and, going out, closes the door with much determination behind her. The stranger, suppressing a smile, stoops to pick up the fallen brush, and the scene is at an end. Down the stairs, full of vehement indignation, goes Lilian, thoughts crowding upon her thick and heavy. Could anything be more unfortunate? Just when she had got herself up in the most effective style,--just when she had hoped, with the aid of this velvet gown, to make a pleasing and dignified _entrée_ into his presence in the drawing-room below,--she has been led into making his acquaintance in Taffy's bedroom! Oh! horror! She has been face to face with him in his shirt-sleeves, with his odious brushes in his hands, and a stare of undeniable surprise upon his hateful face! Oh! it is insupportable! And what was it she said to Taffy? What did she do? Hastily her mind travels backward to the conversation that has just taken place. First, _she combed Taffy's hair_. Oh! miserable girl! She closes two azure eyes with two slender fingers from the light of day, as this thought occurs to her. Then, she smirked at her own graceful image in Taffy's glass, and made all sorts of conceited remarks about her personal appearance, and then she said she hoped to subjugate "_him_." What "him" could there be but this one? and of course he knows it. Oh! unhappy young woman! As for Taffy, bad, bad boy that he is, never to give her a hint. Vengeance surely is in store for him. What right had he to forget? If there is one thing she detests, it is a person devoid of tact. If there is one thing she could adore, it would be the power to shake the wretched Taffy out of his shoes. What is there left to her but to gain her room, plead bad headache, and spend the remainder of the evening in retirement? In this mood she gains the drawing-room door, and, hesitating before it, thinks better of the solitary-confinement idea; and, entering the room, seats herself in a cozy chair and prepares to meet her fate with admirable calmness. Dinner is ready,--waiting,--and still no Archibald. Then there is a step in the hall, the door is thrown open, and he enters, as much hurried as it is possible for a well-bred young man to be in this nineteenth century. Lady Chetwoode instantly says, with old-fashioned grace, the sweeter that it is somewhat obsolete,---- "Lilian, permit me to introduce to you your cousin, Archibald Chesney." Whereupon Lilian bows coldly and refuses to meet her cousin's eyes, while kind Lady Chetwoode thinks it is a little stiff of the child, and most unlike her, not to shake hands with her own kin. An awkward pause is almost inevitable, when Taffy says out loud, to no one in particular, but with much gusto: "How odd it is they should never have seen each other until now!" after which he goes into silent agonies of merriment over his own wit, until brought to his senses by an annihilating glance from Lilian. The dinner-hour is remarkable for nothing except Lilian's silence. This, being so utterly unexpected, is worthy of note. After dinner, when the men gain the drawing-room, Archibald, coming over, deliberately pushes aside Miss Chesney's velvet skirts, and seats himself on the low ottoman beside her with modest determination. Miss Chesney, raising her eyes, regards him curiously. He is tall, and eminently gloomy in appearance. His hair is of a rare blackness, his eyes are dark, so is his skin. His eyebrows are slightly arched, which gives him an air of melancholy protest against the world in general. His nose is of the high and mighty order that comes under the denomination of aquiline, or hooked, as may suit you best. Before his arrival Cyril used to tell Lilian that if Nature had meant him for anything it was to act as brigand in a private theatre; and Lilian, now calling to mind this remark, acknowledges the truth of it, and almost laughs in the face of her dark-browed cousin. Nevertheless she refrains from outward mirth, which is wisdom on her part, as ridicule is his _bête noir_. Despite the extreme darkness of his complexion he is unmistakably handsome, though somewhat discontented in expression. Why, no one knows. He is rich, courted, as are all young men with a respectable rent-roll, and might have made many a titled _débutante_ Mrs. Chesney had he so chosen. He has not even a romantic love-affair to fall back upon as an excuse for his dejection; no unfortunate attachment has arisen to sour his existence. Indeed, it is seldom the owner of landed property has to complain on this score, all such luxuries being reserved for the poor of the earth. Archibald Chesney's gloom, which is becoming if anything, does not sink deeper than his skin. It gives a certain gentleness to his face, and prevents the ignorant from guessing that he is one of the wildest, maddest young men about London. Lilian, regarding him with quiet scrutiny, decides that he is good to look at, and that his eyes are peculiarly large and dark. "Are you angry with me for what happened up-stairs?" he asks, gently, after a pause spent in as earnest an examination of her as any she has bestowed upon him. "Up-stairs?" says Lilian, with raised brows of inquiry and carefully studied ignorance. "I mean my unfortunate _rencontre_ with you in Musgrave's room." "Oh, dear, no," with clear denial. "I seldom grow angry over _trifles_. I have not thought of it since." She utters her fib bravely, the truth being that all during dinner she has been consumed with shame. "Have you not? _I_ have. I have been utterly miserable ever since you bestowed that terrible look upon me when your eyes first met mine. Won't you let me explain my presence there? I think if you do you will forgive me." "It was not your fault: there is nothing about which you need apologize," says Lilian; but her tone is more cordial, and there is the faintest dimpling of a smile around her mobile lips. "Nevertheless I hate myself in that I caused you a moment's uneasiness," says Mr. Chesney, that being the amiable word he employs for her ill-temper. "I shall be discontented until I tell you the truth: so pray let me." "Then tell it," says Lilian. "I have a man, a perfect treasure, who can do all that man can possibly do, who is in fact faultless,--but for one small weakness." "And that is?" "Like Mr. Stiggins, his vanity is--brandy hot. Now and then he drinks more of it than is good for him, though to do him justice not very often. Once in six months, regular as clockwork, he gets hopelessly drunk, and just now the time being up, he, of course, chose this particular day to make his half-yearly exhibition of himself, and having imbibed brandy _ad lib._, forgot to bring himself and my traps to Chetwoode in time for the first dressing-bell." "What a satisfactory sort of servant!" "He is, very, when he is sober,--absolutely invaluable. And then his little mistakes occur so seldom. But I wish he had not chosen this night of all others in which to play me false. I don't know what I should have done had I not thrown myself upon Musgrave's mercy and borrowed his brushes and combs and implements of war generally. As it was, I had almost given up hope of being able to reach the drawing-room at all to-night, when just at the last moment my 'treasure' arrived with my things and--any amount of concealed spirits. Do I bore you with my explanation? It is very good of you to listen so patiently, but I should have been too unhappy had I been prevented from telling you all this." "I think, after all, it is I should explain my presence in that room," says Lilian, with a gay, irresistible laugh that causes Guy, who is at the other end of the room, to lift his head and regard her anxiously. He is sitting near Florence, on a sofa (or rather, to speak more correctly, she is sitting near him), and is looking bored and _gêné_. Her laugh pains him unaccountably; glancing next at her companion he marks the still admiration in the dark face as it gazes into her fair one. Already--_already_--he is surely _empressé_. "But the fact is," Lilian is saying, "I have always been in the habit of visiting Taffy's room before he has quite finished his dressing, to see if there be any little final touch required that I might give him. Did you meet him in London?" "No; never saw him until a couple of hours ago. Very nice little fellow, I should say. Cousin of yours?" "Yes: isn't he a pet?" says Lilian, eagerly, always glad to hear praise of her youthful plunger. "There are very few like him. He is my nearest relative, and you can't think how I love that boy." "That boy is, I should say, older than you are." "Ye--es," doubtfully, "so he says: about a year, I think. Not that it matters," says Miss Chesney, airily, "as in reality I am any number of years older than he is. He is nothing but a big child, so I have to look after him." "You have, I supposed, constituted yourself his mother?" asks Archibald, intensely amused at her pretty assumption of maternity. "Yes," with a grave nod, "or his elder sister, just as I feel it my duty at the moment to pet or scold him." "Happy Taffy!" "Not that he gives me much trouble. He is a very good boy generally." "He is a very handsome boy, at all events. You have reason to be proud of your child. I am your cousin also." "Yes?" "Yes." A pause, after which Mr. Chesney says, meekly: "I suppose you would not take me as a second son?" "I think not," says Lilian, laughing; "you are much too important a person and far too old to be either petted or scolded." "That is very hard lines, isn't it? You might say anything you liked to me, and I am almost positive I should not resent it. And if you will be kind enough to turn your eyes on me once more, I think you will acknowledge I am not so very old." "Too old for me to take in hand. I doubt you would be an unruly member,--a _mauvais sujet_,--a disgrace to my teaching. I should lose caste. At dinner I saw you frown, and frowns,"--with a coquettishly plaintive sigh--"frighten me!" "Do you imagine me brutal enough to frown upon my mother?--and such a mother?" "Nevertheless, I cannot undertake your reformation. You should remember you are scarcely in my good books. Are you not a usurper in my eyes? Have you not stolen from me my beloved Park?" "Ah! true. But you can have it back again, you know," returns he, in a low tone, half jest, though there is a faint under-current--that is almost earnestness--running through it. At this moment Lady Chetwoode saves Lilian the embarrassment of a reply. "Sing us something, darling," she says. And Lilian, rising, trails her soft skirts after her across the room, and, sitting down at the piano, commences "Barbara Allen," sweetly, gravely, tenderly, as is her wont. Guy's gaze is following her. The pure though _piquante_ face, the golden hair, the rich old-fashioned texture of the gown, all combine to make a lovely picture lovelier. The words of the song make his heart throb, and bring to life a certain memory of earlier days, when on the top of a high wall he first heard her singing it. Pathetically, softly, she sings it, without affectation or pretense of any kind, and, having finished, still lets her fingers wander idly over the notes (drawing from them delicate minor harmonies that sadden the listener), whilst the others applaud. Guy alone being silent, she glances at him presently with a smile full of kindliness, that claims and obtains an answering smile in return. "Have I ever seen that gown on you before?" he asks, after a pause. "No. This dress is without doubt an eminent success, as everybody admires it. No; you never saw it before. Do you like it?" "More than I can say. Lilian, you have formed your opinion of your cousin, and--you like him?" "Very much, indeed. He is handsome, _debonnaire_, all that may be desired, and--he quite likes Taffy." "A passport to your favor," says Chetwoode, smiling. "Though no one could help liking the boy." Then his eyes seeking her hands once more, fasten upon the right one, and he sees the ring he had placed upon the third finger a few hours before now glistens bravely upon the second. The discovery causes him a pang so keen that involuntarily he draws himself up to his full height, and condemns himself as a superstitious fool. As if she divines his thought,--though in reality she knows nothing of it,--Lilian says, gazing admiringly at the glittering trinket in question: "I think your ring grows prettier and prettier every time I look at it. But it would not stay on the finger you chose; while I was dressing it fell off; so, fearing to lose it, I slipped it upon this one. It looks as well, does it not?" "Yes," said Chetwoode, though all the time he is wishing with all his heart it had not fallen from the engagement finger. When we love we grow fearful; and with fear there is torment. "Why don't you ask Florence to sing?" asks Lilian, suddenly. Archibald Chesney has risen and lounged over to the piano, and now is close beside her. To Guy's jealous ears it seems as though the remark was made to rid her of his presence. "Because I detest French songs," he answers, somewhat sharply,--Miss Beauchamp being addicted to such foreign music. "Do you?" says Lilian, laughing at his tone, which she fully understands, and straightway sings one (the gayest, brightest, most nonsensical to be found in her _repertoire_) in her sweet fresh voice, glancing at him with a comical challenge in her eyes every time the foolish yet tender refrain occurs. When she has finished she says to him, saucily: "Well, Sir Guy?" And he answers: "I am vanquished, utterly convinced. I confess I now like French songs as well as any others." "I like them ten times better," says Archibald, impulsively, "when they are sung by you. There is a _verve_, a gayety about them that other songs lack. Have you any more? Do you know any of Gounod's? I like them, though they are of a different style." "They are rather beyond me," says Lilian, laughing. "But hear this: it is one of Beranger's, very simply set, but I think pretty." This time she sings to _him_,--unmistakably,--a soft little Norman love-song, full of grace and tenderest entreaty, bestowing upon him all the beguiling smiles she had a moment since given exclusively to her guardian, until at length Sir Guy, muttering "coquette" to his own heart, turns aside, leaving Chesney master of the field. Lilian, turning from her animated discussion with Archibald, follows his departing footsteps with her eyes, in which lies a faintly malicious smile; an expression full of suppressed enjoyment curves her lips; she is evidently satisfied at his abrupt retreat, and continues her interrupted conversation with her cousin in still more joyous tones. Perhaps this is how she means to fulfill her mysterious threat of "showing" Sir Guy. CHAPTER XV. "I will gather thee, he cried, Rosebud brightly blowing! Then I'll sting thee, it replied, And you'll quickly start aside With the prickle glowing. Rosebud, rosebud, rosebud red, Rosebud brightly blowing!" --GOETHE--_translated_. "Nurse, wash my hair," says Lilian, entering her nurse's sanctum, which is next her own, one lovely morning early in September when "Dew is on the lea, And tender buds are fretting to be free." The fickle sun is flinging its broad beams far and near, now glittering upon the ivied towers, and now dancing round the chimney-tops, now necking with gold the mullioned window. Its brightness is as a smile from the departing summer, the sweeter that it grows rarer every hour; its merry rays spread and lengthen, the wind grows softer, balmier, beneath its influence; it is as the very heart of lazy July. "And on the woods and on the deep The smile of heaven lay. It seemed as if the day were one Sent from beyond the skies, Which shed to earth above the sun A light of Paradise." There is an "inviolable quietness" in all the air. Some late roses have grown, and cluster round Lilian's window; stooping out, she kisses and caresses them, speaking to them as though they were (as indeed they are) her dear friends, when nurse's voice recalls her to the present, and the inner room. "La, my dear," says Mrs. Tipping, "it is only four days since I washed it before." "Never mind, ninny; wash it again. To-day is so delicious, with such a dear little breeze, and such a prodigality of sun, that I cannot resist it. You know how I love running through the air with my hair wet, and feeling the wind rushing through it. And, nurse, be sure now"--coaxingly--"you put plenty of soda in the water." "What, and rot all your pretty locks? Not I, indeed!" says nurse, with much determination. "But you must; you will now, won't you?" in a wheedling tone. "It never stands properly out from my head unless it is full of soda." "An' what, I wonder, would your poor mamma say to me if she could see me spoiling your bonny hair this day, an' it the very color of her own? No, no; I cannot indeed. It goes against my conscience, as it were. Go get some one else to wash it, not me; it would sadden me." "If you won't wash it, no one else shall," pouts Lilian. And when Lilian pouts she looks so lovely, and so naughty, and so irresistible, that, instead of scolding her for ill-temper, every one instantly gives in to her. Nurse gives in, as she has done to her little mistress's pout ever since the latter was four years old, and forthwith produces soap and water and plenty of soda. The long yellow hair being at length washed, combed out carefully, and brushed until it hangs heavily all down her back, Lilian administers a soft little kiss to her nurse as reward for her trouble, and runs delightedly down the stairs, straight into the open air, without hat, or covering of any kind for her head. The garden is listless and sleepy. The bees are silent, the flowers are nodding drowsily, wakened into some sort of life by the teasing wind that sighs and laughs around them unceasingly. Lilian plucks a blossom here and there, and scatters far and near the gaudy butterfly in very wantonness of enjoyment, while the wooing wind whistles through her hair, drying it softly, lovingly, until at last some of its pristine gloss returns to it, and its gold shines with redoubled vigor beneath the sun's rays. As she saunters, reveling--as one from Fairyland might revel--in the warmth and gladness of the great heathen god, she sings; and to Guy in his distant study the sound and the words come all too distinctly,-- "Why shouldn't I love my love? Why shouldn't he love me? Why shouldn't he come after me, Since love to all is free?" Beneath his window she pauses, and, finally, running up the steps of the balcony, peers in, full of an idle curiosity. Sir Guy's den is the most desirable room in the house,--the coziest, the oddest, the most interesting. Looking at it, one guesses instinctively how addicted to all pretty things the owner is, from women down to less costly _bijouterie_. Lovely landscapes adorn the walls side by side with Greuze-like faces, angelic in expression, unlike in appearance. There are a few portraits of beauties well known in the London and Paris worlds, frail as they are fair, false as they are _piquante_, whose garments (to do him justice) are distinctly decent, perhaps more so than their characters. But then indecency has gone out of fashion. There are two or three lounges, some priceless statuettes, a few bits of _bric-a-brac_ worth their weight in gold, innumerable yellow-backed volumes by Paul de Kock and his fellows, chairs of all shapes and sizes, one more comfortable and inviting than the other, enough meerschaum pipes and cigarette-holders and tobacco-stands to stock a small shop, a couple of dogs snoozing peacefully upon the hearth-rug, under the mistaken impression that a fire is burning in the grate, a writing-table, and before it Sir Guy. These are the principal things that attract Lilian's attention, as she gazes in, with her silken hair streaming behind her in the light breeze. On the wall she cannot see, there are a few hunters by Herring, a copy of Millais' "Yes or No," a good deal of stable-ware, and beneath them, on a table, more pipes, cheroots, and boxes of cigars, mixed up with straw-covered bottles of perfume, thrust rather ignominiously into the corner. A shadow falling across the paper on which he is writing, Guy raises his head, to see a fairy vision staring in at him,--a little slight figure, clothed in airy black with daintiest lace frillings at the throat and wrists, and with a wealth of golden hair brought purposely all over her face, letting only the laughing sapphire eyes, blue as the skies above her, gleam out from among it. "Open the door, O hermit, and let a poor wanderer in," croons this fairy, in properly saddened tones. Rising gladly, he throws wide the window to her, whereupon she steps into the room, still with her face hidden. "You come?" asks he, in a deferential tone. "To know what you are doing, and what can keep you in-doors this exquisite day. Do you remember how late in the season it is? and that you are slighting Nature? She will be angry, and will visit you with storms and drooping flowers, if you persist in flouting her. Come out. Come out." "Who are you?" asks Guy. "Are you Flora?" He parts her hair gently and throws it back over her shoulders. "I thought you a nymph,--a fairy,--a small goddess, and----" "And behold it is only Lilian! Naughty Lilian! Are you disappointed, Sir Guardian?" She laughs, and running her fingers through all her amber locks, spreading them out on either side of her like a silken veil, that extends as far as her arms can reach. She is lovely, radiant, bright as the day itself, fairer than the lazy flowers. "What a child you are!" says Guy, with some discontent in his voice, feeling how far, _far_ younger than he she is. "Am I? Nonsense! Nurse says," going to a glass and surveying herself with critical eyes, "nurse says I am a 'very well grown girl of my age.'" Almost unconsciously she assumes nurse's pompous though adoring manner to such perfection that Guy laughs heartily. "That is right, Guardy," says Miss Lilian, with bland encouragement. "I like to hear you laugh; of late you have grown almost as discontented to look at as my cousin. Have I amused you?" "Yes; your assumption of Mrs. Tipping was admirable. Though I am not sure that I agree with her: you are not very much grown, are you? I don't think you are up to my shoulder." "What a tarradiddle!" says Lilian. "Get off that table directly and let me convince you." As Guy obeys her and draws himself up to his liberal six feet one, she goes to him and lays her soft head against his arm, only to find he--not she--is right; she is half an inch below his shoulder. Standing so, it takes Guy all he knows to keep himself from throwing his arms round her and straining her to the heart that beats for her so passionately,--that beats for her alone. "You have raised your shoulder," she says, most unfairly: "it wasn't half so high yesterday. You shouldn't cheat!--What a charming room yours is! I quite envy it to you. And the flowers are so well selected. Who adorns your den so artistically? Florence? But of course it is the invaluable Florence: I might have known. That good creature always does the correct thing!" "I think it is the mother sees to it," replies he, gently. "Oh, is it? Kind auntie! What a delicious little bit of blue! Forget-me-not, is it? How innocent it looks, and babyish, in its green leaves! May I rob you, Sir Guy? I should like a spray or two for my dress." "You may have anything you wish that I can give you." "What a noble offer!--Are you going to waste much more time over your tiresome letters?" glancing with pretty impertinence at the half-finished sheets lying on the table near her: "I suppose they are all business, or love, or suchlike rubbish! Well, good-bye, Guardy, I must go and finish the drying of my hair; you will find me in the garden when you come to the end of your last _billet-doux_." So saying, she trips away from him down the handsome oak-paneled room, and disappears through the doorway that leads into the hall. Where she goes the sunshine seems to follow her. To Guy's fancy it appears as though a shadow has fallen suddenly into the room, when the last glimpse of her yellow hair has vanished out of sight. With a rather abstracted air he betakes himself once more to his writing, and tries to forget her. But somehow the impetus that urged him on half an hour ago is wanting; the spur to his industry has lost its sharpness; and presently, throwing down his pen with an impatient gesture, he acknowledges himself no longer in the mood for work. What a child she is!--again the thought occurs to him;--yet with what power to torture! To-day all sweetness and honeyed gayety, to-morrow indifferent, if not actually repellent. She is an anomaly,--a little frail lily beset with thorns that puts forth its stings to wound, and probe, and madden, when least expected. Only yesterday--after an hour's inward conflict--he had convinced himself of her love for her cousin Archibald, with such evident pleasure did she receive his very marked attentions. And now,--to-day,--surely if she loved Chesney her eyes could not have dwelt so kindly upon another as they did a few minutes since upon her guardian. With what a pretty grace she had demanded that blue forget-me-not and placed it in the bosom of her dress! With what evident sincerity she had hinted at her wish to see him in the garden when his work should be over! Perhaps--perhaps---- Of late a passionate desire to tell her of the affection with which she has inspired him consumes him daily,--hourly; but a fear, a sad certainty of disappointment to follow on his declaration has hitherto checked the words that so often tremble on his lips. Now the unwonted gentleness of her manner tempts him to follow her and put his fate "to the touch," and so end all the jealous anguish and heart-burnings that torment him all day long. Quitting his sanctum, he crosses the hall, and enters the drawing-room, where he finds Florence alone. She is, as usual, bending industriously over her crewel work; the parrot's tail is now in a high state of perfection, not a color in the rainbow being missing from it. Seeing Guy, she raises her head and smiles upon him sweetly, blandly, invitingly. "Where is Lilian?" asks Guy, abruptly, with all the tactless truthfulness of a man when he has one absorbing object in view. Miss Beauchamp's bland smile freezes on her lips, and shows itself no more. She makes answer, nevertheless, in an unmoved tone: "Where she always is,--in the garden with her cousin, Mr. Chesney." "Always?" says Guy, lightly, though in reality his face has grown suddenly pale, and his fingers clinch involuntarily. "Well," in her unchangeable placid staccato voice, "generally. He seems very _épris_ with her, and she appears to receive his admiration favorably. Have you not noticed it?" "I cannot say I have." "No?"--incredulously--"how extraordinary! But men are proverbially dull in the observation of such matters as love-affairs. Some, indeed," with slow meaning, "are positively _blind_." She lays her work upon the table before her and examines it critically. She does not so much as glance at her victim, though secretly enjoying the knowledge that he is writhing beneath the lash. "Chesney would be a good match for her," says Guy, with the calmness of despair. But his calmness does not deceive his companion. "Very good. The Park, I am told, is even larger than Chetwoode. You, as her guardian, should, I think, put carefully before her all the advantages to be derived from such a marriage." Here she smooths out her parrot, and, turning her head slightly to one side, wonders whether a little more crimson in the wings would not make them look more attractive. No, perhaps not: they are gaudy enough already,--though one often sees--a parrot--with---- "I don't believe mere money would have weight with Lilian," Guy breaks in upon her all-important reverie, with a visible effort. "No? Perhaps not. But then the Park is her old home, and she, who professes such childish adoration for it, might possibly like to regain it. You really should speak to her, Guy. She should not be allowed to throw away such a brilliant chance, when a few well-chosen words might bias her in the right direction." Guy makes no reply, but, stepping on to the balcony outside, walks listlessly away, his heart in a tumult of fear and regret, while Miss Beauchamp, calmly, and with a certain triumph, goes on contentedly with her work. A nail in Lilian's coffin has, she hopes, been driven, and sews her hopes into the canvas beneath her hand, as long ago the Parisian women knitted their terrible revenge and cruel longings into their children's socks, whilst all the flower and beauty and chivalry of France fell beneath the fatal guillotine. Guy, wandering aimlessly, full of dismal thought, follows out mechanically his first idea, and turns in the direction of the garden, the spot so beloved by his false, treacherous little mistress. In the distance he sees her; she is standing motionless in the centre of a grassplot, while behind her Chesney is busily engaged tying back her yellow hair with a broad piece of black ribbon she has evidently given him for the purpose. He has all her rich tresses gathered together in one, and is lingering palpably over his task. In his coat is placed conspicuously the blue forget-me-not begged of Guy by Lilian only a few minutes ago as though her heart were set upon its possession. "Coquette," mutters Chetwoode between his teeth. "Not done yet?" asks the coquette at this moment of her cousin, giving her head a little impatient shake. "Yes, just done," finishing up in a hurry the somewhat curious bow he is making. "Well, now run," says Lilian, "and do as I bade you. I shall be here on this spot when you return. You know how I hate waiting: so don't be long,--do you hear?" "Does that mean you will be impatient to see me again?" "Of course," laughing. "I shall be _dying_ to see you again, longing, pining for your return, thinking every minute an hour until you come back to me." Thus encouraged, Archibald quickly vanishes, and Guy comes slowly up to her. "I think you needn't have put that flower in Chesney's coat," he says, in an aggrieved tone. "I had no idea you meant it for his adornment." "Is it in his coat?" As she makes this mean reply she blushes a rich warm crimson, so full of consciousness that it drives Guy absolutely wild with jealousy. "Yes, now I remember," she says, with an assumption of indifference; "he either took it from me, or asked me for it, I quite forget which." "Do you?" "I do," resenting his manner, which borders on disbelief, and is in her eyes highly objectionable. "Why should I trouble myself to recollect such trifles?" After a pause, and with a distinct effort, Chetwoode says: "You were foolishly prejudiced against your cousin before his arrival. I am glad you have learned to be civil to him." "More than that, I have learned to like him very much indeed. He is quite charming, and not in the least _exigeant_, or _difficile_," this rather pronounced. "Besides, he is my cousin, and the master of my old home. Whenever I think of the dear Park I naturally think of him, until now they are both associated in my mind: this adds to my liking." Guy's heart sinks within him as he remembers Florence's words and now hears Lilian's own confession. He glances at her despairingly. She is picking a flower to pieces, and as she does so a little soft sigh escapes her. Is it for her lost home? Is she already dreaming of an hour when she may return to it once more as its happy mistress? Is she mercenary, as Florence hinted? or is it homesickness that is tempting her? or can it be that at heart she loves this cousin? "It is the same with all women," he says bitterly; "the last comer is always the best, the newest face the dearest." "I do not understand you,"--with cold reproof; "surely you are wandering from the subject: we were saying nothing about last comers or new faces. If you happen to be in a bad temper, Sir Guy, I really think it a little hard that you should come here to inflict it upon me." "I am not in a bad temper,"--indignantly. "No? It seems very like it," says Miss Chesney. "I can't bear cross people: they are always saying unpleasant as well as unmeaning things. New faces, indeed! I really wish Archibald would come; he is always agreeable, and never starts distasteful topics. Ah, here he is! Archie, how long you have been! I thought you were never coming! Sir Guy is in one of his terrible moods, and has frightened me out of my life. I was in danger of being lectured off the face of the earth. No woman should be pitied but she that has a guardian! You have come to my rescue barely in time: another minute, and you would have found only a lifeless Lilian." Sir Guy, black with rage, turns aside. Archibald, ignorant of the storm brewing, sinks beside her contentedly upon the grass. CHAPTER XVI. "O spirit of love, how fresh and quick thou art!"--SHAKESPEARE. It is the gloaming,--that tenderest, fondest, most pensive time of all the day. As yet, night crouches on the borders of the land, reluctant to throw its dark shadow over the still smiling earth, while day is slowly, sadly receding. There is a hush over everything; above, on their leafy perches, the birds are nestling, and crooning their cradle songs; the gay breeze, lazy with its exertions of the day, has fallen asleep, so that the very grasses are silent and unstirred. An owl in the distance is hooting mournfully. There is a serenity on all around, an all-pervading stillness that moves one to sadness and fills unwittingly the eyes with tears. It is the peace that follows upon grief, as though the busy world, that through all the heat and turmoil of the day has been weeping and groaning in anguish, has now for a few short hours found rest. The last roses of summer in Mrs. Arlington's garden, now that those gay young sparks the bees have deserted them, are growing drowsy, and hang their heavy heads dejectedly. Two or three dissipated butterflies, fond of late hours and tempted by the warmth, still float gracefully through the air. Cecilia, coming down the garden path, rests her arms upon her wicket gate and looks toward Chetwoode. She is dressed in an exquisite white cambric, fastened at the throat by a bit of lavender ribbon; through her gown here and there are touches of the same color; on her head is a ravishing little cap of the mob description, that lends an additional charm to her face, making her seem, if possible, more womanly, more lovable than ever. As she leans upon the gate a last yellow sunbeam falls upon her, peeps into her eyes, takes a good-night kiss from her parted lips, and, descending slowly, lovingly, crosses her bosom, steals a little sweetness from the white rose dying on her breast, throws a golden shade upon her white gown, and finally dies chivalrously at her feet. But not for the dear devoted sunbeam does that warm blush grow and mantle on her cheek; not for it do her pulses throb, her heart beat fast. Toward her, in his evening dress, and without his hat, regardless of consequences, comes Cyril, the quickness of his step betraying a flattering haste. As yet, although many weeks have come and gone since their first meeting, no actual words of love have been spoken between them; but each knows the other's heart, and has learned that eyes can speak a more eloquent language, can utter tenderer thoughts, than any the lips can frame. "Again?" says Cecilia, softly, a little wonder, a great undisguised gladness, in her soft gray eyes. "Yes; I could not keep away," returns he, simply. He does not ask to enter, but leans upon the gate from his side, very close to her. Most fair men look well in evening clothes; Cyril looks downright handsome: his blonde moustache seems golden, his blue eyes almost black, in the rays of the departing sun: just now those eyes are filled with love and passionate admiration. Her arms, half bare, with some frail shadowy lace falling over them, look rounded and velvety as a child's in the growing dusk; the fingers of her pretty, blue-veined hands are interlaced. Separating them, Cyril takes one hand between both his own and strokes it fondly, silently, yet almost absently. Suddenly raising his head, he looks at her, his whole heart in his expression, his eyes full of purpose. Instinctively she feels the warmth, the tenderness of his glance, and changes from a calm lily into an expectant rose. Her hand trembles within his, as though meditating flight, and then lies passive as his clasp tightens firmly upon it. Slowly, reluctantly, as though compelled by some hidden force, she turns her averted eyes to his. "Cecilia," murmurs he, imploringly, and then--and then their lips meet, and they kiss each other solemnly, with a passionate tenderness, knowing it is their betrothal they are sealing. * * * * * "I wish I had summoned courage to kiss you a week ago," he says, presently. He is inside the gate now, and seems to have lost in this shamefully short time all the hesitation and modesty that a few minutes ago were so becoming. His arm is around her; even as he makes this _risqué_ remark, he stoops and embraces her again, without even having the grace to ask permission, while she (that I should live to say it of Cecilia!) never reproves him. "Why?" she asks, smiling up at him. "See how I have wasted seven good days," returns he, drinking in gladly all the beauty of her face and smile. "This day last week I might have been as happy as I am now,--whereas I was the most miserable wretch alive, the victim of suspense." "You bore your misery admirably: had you not told me, I should never have guessed your wretchedness. Besides, how do you know I should have been so kind to you seven long days ago?" "I know it,--because you love me." "And how do you know that either?" asks she, with new-born coquetry that sits very sweetly upon her. "Cyril, when did you begin to love me?" "The very moment I first saw you." "No, no; I do not want compliments from _you_: I want the very honest truth. Tell me." "I have told you. The honest truth is this. That morning after your arrival when I restored your terrier to you, I fell in love with you: you little thought then, when I gave your dog into your keeping, I was giving my heart also." "No," in a low, soft voice, that somehow has a smile in it, "how could I? I am glad you loved me always,--that there was no time when I was indifferent to you. I think love at first sight must be the sweetest and truest of all." "You have the best of it, then, have you not?" with a rather forced laugh. "Not only did I love you from the first moment I saw you, but you are the only woman I ever really cared for; while you," with some hesitation, and turning his eyes steadily away from hers, "you--of course--did love--once before." "Never!" The word comes with startling vehemence from between her lips, the new and brilliant gladness of her face dies from it. A little chill shudder runs through all her frame, turning her to stone; drawing herself with determination from his encircling arms, she stands somewhat away from him. "It is time I told you my history," she says, in cold, changed tones, through which quivers a ring of pain, while her face grows suddenly as pale, as impenetrable as when they were yet quite strangers to each other. "Perhaps when you hear it you may regret your words of to-night." There is a doubt, a weariness in her voice that almost angers him. "Nonsense!" he says, roughly, the better to hide the emotion he feels; "don't be romantic; nobody commits murder, or petty larceny, or bigamy nowadays, without being found out; unpleasant mysteries, and skeletons in the closet have gone out of fashion. We put all our skeletons in the _Times_ now, no matter how we may have to blush for their nakedness. I don't want to hear anything about your life if it makes you unhappy to tell it." "It doesn't make me unhappy." "But it does. Your face has grown quite white, and your eyes are full of tears. Darling, I won't have you distress yourself for me." "I have not committed any of the crimes you mention, or any other particular crime," returns she, with a very wan little smile. "I have only been miserable ever since I can remember. I have not spoken about myself to any one for years, except one friend; but now I should like to tell you everything." "But not there!" holding out his hands to her reproachfully. "I don't believe I could hear you if you spoke from such a distance." There is exactly half a yard of sward between them. "If you are willfully bent on driving us both to the verge of melancholy, at least let us meet our fate together." Here he steals his arm round her once more, and, thus supported, and with her head upon his shoulder, she commences her short story: "Perhaps you know my father was a Major in the Scots Greys; your brother knew him: his name was Duncan." Cyril starts involuntarily. "Ah, you start. You, too, knew him?" "Yes, slightly." "Then," in a curiously hard voice, "you knew nothing good of him. Well," with a sigh, "no matter; afterward you can tell me what it was. When I was eighteen he brought me home from school, not that he wanted my society,--I was rather in his way than otherwise, and it wasn't a good way,--but because he had a purpose in view. One day, when I had been home three months, a visitor came to see us. He was introduced to me by my father. He was young, dark, not ugly, well-mannered," here she pauses as though to recover breath, and then breaks out with a passion that shakes all her slight frame, "but hateful, vile, _loathsome_." "My darling, don't go on; I don't want to hear about him," implores Cyril, anxiously. "But I must tell you. He possessed that greatest of all virtues in my father's eyes,--wealth. He was rich. He admired me; I was very pretty then. He dared to say he loved me. He asked me to marry him, and--I refused him." As though the words are forced from her, she utters them in short, unequal sentences; her lips have turned the color of death. "I suppose he went then to my father, and they planned it all between them, because at this time he--that is, my father--began to tell me he was in debt, hopelessly, irretrievably in debt. Among others, he mentioned certain debts of (so-called) honor, which, if not paid within a given time, would leave him not only a beggar, but a disgraced one upon the face of the earth; and I believed him. He worked upon my feelings day by day, with pretended tears, with vows of amendment. I don't know," bitterly, "what his share of the bargain was to be, but I do know he toiled for it conscientiously. I was young, unusually so for my age, without companions, romantic, impressionable. It seemed to me a grand thing to sacrifice myself and thereby save my father; and if I would only consent to marry Mr. Arlington he had promised not only to avoid dice, but to give up his habits of intemperance. It is an old story, is it not? No doubt you know it by heart. Crafty age and foolish youth,--what chance had I? One day I gave in, I said I would marry Mr. Arlington, and he sold me to him three weeks later. We were married." Here her voice fails her again, and a little moan of agonized recollection escapes her. Cyril, clasping her still closer to him, presses a kiss upon her brow. At the sweet contact of his lips she sighs, and two large tears gathering in her eyes roll slowly down her cheeks. "A week after my wretched marriage," she goes on, "I discovered accidentally that my father had lied to me and tricked me. His circumstances were not so bad as he had represented to me, and it was on the condition that he was to have a certain income from Mr. Arlington yearly that he had persuaded me to marry him. He did not long enjoy it. He died," slowly, "two months afterward. Of my life with--my husband I shall not tell you; the recital would only revolt you. Only to think of it now makes me feel deadly ill; and often from my dreams, as I live it all over again, I start, cold with horror and disgust. It did not last long, which was merciful: six months after our marriage he eloped with an actress and went to Vienna." "The blackguard! the scoundrel!" says Cyril, between his teeth, drawing his breath sharply. "I never saw him again. In a little while I received tidings of his death: he had been stabbed in a brawl in some drinking-house, and only lived a few hours after it. And I was once more free." She pauses, and involuntarily stretches forth both her hands into the twilight, as one might who long in darkness, being thrust into the full light of day, seeks to grasp and retain it. "When I heard of his death," she says, turning to Cyril, and speaking in a clear intense tone, "I _laughed_! For the first time for many months, I laughed aloud! I declared my thankfulness in a distinct voice. My heart beat with honest, undisguised delight when I knew I should never see him again, should never in all the years to come shiver and tremble in his hated presence. He was dead, and I was heartily glad of it." She stops, in terrible agitation. An angry fire gleams in her large gray eyes. She seems for the moment to have utterly forgotten Cyril's nearness, as in memory she lives over again all the detested past. Cyril lays his hand lightly upon her shoulder, her eyes meet his, and then the anger dies from them. She sighs heavily, and then goes on: "After that I don't know what happened for a long time, because I got brain-fever, and, but for one friend who all through had done his best for me, I should have died. He and his sister nursed me through it, and brought me back to life again; but," mournfully, "they could not restore to me my crushed youth, my ruined faith, my girlish hopes. A few months had changed me from a mere child into a cold, unloving woman." "Don't say that," says Cyril, gently. "Until now," returns she, looking at him with eyes full of the most intense affection; "now all is different." "Beloved, how you have suffered!" he says, pressing her head down again upon his breast, and caressing with loving fingers her rich hair. "But it is all over, and if I can make you so, you shall be happy in the future. And your one friend? Who was he?" She hesitates perceptibly, and a blush creeping up dyes her pale face crimson. "Perhaps I know," says Cyril, an unaccountable misgiving at his heart. "Was it Colonel Trant? Do not answer me if you do not wish it," very gently. "Yes, it was he. There is no reason why I should not answer you." "No?" "No." "He asked Guy to let you have the cottage?" "Yes; I had wearied of everything, and though by some chance I had come in for all Mr. Arlington's property, I only cared to go away and hide myself somewhere where I should find quiet and peace. I tried several places, but I was always restless until I came here." She smiles faintly. Cyril, after a pause, says, hesitatingly: "Cecilia, did you ever care for--for--Trant?" "Never: did you imagine that? I never cared for any one but you; I never shall again. And you, Cyril," the tears rushing thickly to her eyes, "do you still think you can love me, the daughter of one bad man, the wife of another? I can hardly think myself as good as other women when I remember all the hateful scenes I have passed through." "I shall treat you to a crowning scene if you ever dare say that again," says Cyril, whose spirits are rising now she has denied having any affection for Trant. "And if every relation you ever had was as bad as bad could be, I should adore you all the same. I can't say any more." "You needn't," returns she, laughing a little. "Oh, Cyril, how sweet it is to be beloved, to me especially, who never yet (until now) had any love offered me; at least," correcting herself hastily, "any I cared to accept!" "But you had a lover?" asks he, earnestly. "Yes, one." "Trant again?" letting his teeth close somewhat sharply on his under lip. "Yes." "Cecilia, I am afraid you liked that fellow once. Come, confess it." "No, indeed, not in the way you mean; but in every other way more than I can tell you. I should be the most ungrateful wretch alive if it were otherwise. As a true friend, I love him." "How dare you use such a word to any one but me?" says Cyril, bending to smile into her eyes. "I warn you not to do it again, or I shall be dangerously and outrageously jealous. Tears in your eyes still, my sweet? Let me kiss them away: poor eyes! surely they have wept enough in their time to permit of their only smiling in the future." When they have declared over and over again (in different language every time, of course) the everlasting affection each feels for the other, Cecilia says: "How late it grows! and you are in your evening dress, and without a hat. Have you dined?" "Not yet; but I don't want any dinner." (By this remark, O reader, you may guess the depth and sincerity of his love.) "We generally dine at half-past seven, but to-night we are to starve until eight to oblige Florence, who has been spending the day somewhere. So I dressed early and came down to see you." "At eight," says Cecilia, alarmed: "it is almost that now. You must go, or Lady Chetwoode will be angry with me, and I don't want any one belonging to you to think bad thoughts of me." "There is plenty of time: it can't be nearly eight yet. Why, it is only half an hour since I came." "It is a quarter to eight," says Cecilia, solemnly. "Do go, and come again as early as you can to-morrow." "You will be glad to see me?" "Yes, if you come very early." "And you are sure, my own darling, that you really love me?" "Quite, _quite_ sure," tenderly. "What a bore it is having to go home this lovely evening!" discontentedly. "Certainly 'Time was made for slaves.' Well,"--with a sigh,--"good-night. I suppose I must go. I shall run down directly after breakfast. Good-night, my own, my dearest." "Good-night, Cyril." "What a cold farewell! I shan't go away at all if you don't say something kinder." Standing on tiptoe, Cecilia lays her arms around his neck. "Good-night, my--darling," she whispers, tremulously, and with a last lingering caress they part, as though years were about to roll by before they can meet again. CHAPTER XVII. "And, though she be but little, she is fierce." --_Midsummer Night's Dream._ "RENE. Suffer love! A good epithet! I do suffer love, indeed, for I love thee against my will."--_Much Ado About Nothing._ It is a glorious evening toward the close of September. The heat is intense, delicious, as productive of happy languor as though it was still the very heart of summer. Outside upon the grass sits Lilian, idly threading daisies into chains, her riotous golden locks waving upon her fair forehead beneath the influence of the wind. At her feet, full length, lies Archibald, a book containing selections from the works of favorite poets in his hand. He is reading aloud such passages as please him and serve to illustrate the passion that day by day is growing deeper for his pretty cousin. Already his infatuation for her has become a fact so palpable that not only has he ceased to deny it to himself, but every one in the house is fully aware of it, from Lady Chetwoode down to the lowest housemaid. Sometimes, when the poem is an old favorite, he recites it, keeping his dark eyes fixed the while upon the fair coquettish face just above him. Upon the balcony looking down upon them sits Florence, working at the everlasting parrot, with Guy beside her, utterly miserable, his whole attention concentrated upon his ward. For the past week he has been wretched as a man can be who sees a rival well received before his eyes day after day. Miss Beauchamp's soft speeches and tender glances, although many and pronounced, fail to console him, though to others he appears to accept them willingly enough, and to make a generous return, spending--how, he hardly knows, though perhaps _she_ does--a good deal of time in her society. He must indeed be devoid of observation if now he cannot pass a strict examination of the hues of that crewel bird (this is not a joke), for wherever he may be, there Miss Beauchamp is sure to show a few minutes later, always with her wools. Noting all this, be sure Lilian draws from it her own conclusions. As each clear silvery laugh reaches him from below, Guy frowns and winces at every fond poetical sentiment that, floated upward by the wind, falls upon his ears. "See the mountain kiss high heaven, And the waves clasp one another; No sister flower would be forgiven If it disdained its brother: And the sunlight clasps the earth, And the moonbeams kiss the sea: What are all these kissings worth, If thou kiss not me?" The words recited by Mr. Chesney with much _empressement_ soar upward and gain Guy's ear; Archibald is pointing his quotation with many impassioned glances and much tender emphasis; all of which is rather thrown away upon Lilian, who is not in the least sentimental. "Read something livelier, Archie," she says, regarding her growing chain with unlimited admiration. "There is rather too much honey about that." "If you can snub Shelley, I'm sure I don't know what it is you _do_ like," returns he, somewhat disgusted. A slight pause ensues, filled up by the faint noise of the leaves of Chesney's volume as he turns them over impatiently. "'Oh, my Luve's like a red, red, rose,'" he begins, bravely, but Lilian instantly suppresses him. "Don't," she says: "that's worse. I always think what a horrid 'luve' she must have been. Fancy a girl with cheeks like that rose over there! Fancy writing a sonnet to a milk-maid! Go on, however; the other lines are rather pretty." "Oh, my love's like a melody That's sweetly played in tune," reads Archie, and then stops. "It is pretty," he says, agreeably; "but if you had heard the last word persistently called 'chune,' I think it would have taken the edge off your fancy for it. I had an uncle who adored that little poem, but he _would_ call the word 'chune,' and it rather spoiled the effect. He's dead," says Mr. Chesney, laying down his book, "but I think I see him now." "In the pride of youth and beauty, With a garland on his brow," quotes Lilian, mischievously. "Well, not quite. Rather in an exceedingly rusty suit of evening clothes at the Opera. I took him there in a weak moment to hear the 'late lamented Titiens' sing her choicest song in 'Il Trovatore,'--you know it?--well, when it was over and the whole house was in a perfect uproar of applause, I turned and asked him what he thought of it, and he instantly said he thought it was 'a very pretty "chune"!' Fancy Titiens singing a 'chune'! I gave him up after that, and carefully avoided his society. Poor old chap, he didn't bear malice, however, as he died a year later and left me all his money." "More than you deserved," says Lilian. Here Cyril and Taffy appearing on the scene cause a diversion. They both simultaneously fling themselves upon the grass at Lilian's feet, and declare themselves completely used up. "Let us have tea out here," says Lilian, gayly, "and enjoy our summer to the end." Springing to her feet, she turns toward the balcony, careless of the fact that she has destroyed the lovely picture she made sitting on the greensward, surrounded by her attendant swains. "Florence, come down here, and let us have tea on the grass," she calls out pleasantly to Miss Beauchamp. "Do, Florence," says Archibald, entreatingly. "Miss Beauchamp, you really _must_," from Taffy, decides the point. Florence, feeling it will look ungracious to refuse, rises with reluctance, and sails down upon the _quartette_ below, followed by Sir Guy. "What an awful time we shall be having at Mrs. Boileau's this hour to-morrow night," says Cyril, plaintively, after a long silence on his part. "I shudder when I think of it. No one who has never spent an evening at the Grange can imagine the agony of it." "I vow I would rather be broken on the wheel than undergo it," says Archibald. "It was downright mean of Lady Chetwoode to let us all in for it. And yet no doubt things might have been worse; we ought to feel devoutly thankful old Boileau is well under the sod." "What was the matter with him?" asks Lilian. "Don't name him," says Cyril, "he was past all human endurance; my blood runs cold when I remember, I once did know him. I rejoice to say he is no more. His name was Benjamin: and as he was small and thin, and she was large and fat, she (that is, Mrs. Boileau) was always called 'Benjamin's portion.' That's a joke; do you see it?" "I do: so you don't take any bobs off _my_ wages," retorts Miss Chesney, promptly, with a distinct imitation of Kate Stantley. "And yet I cannot see how all this made the poor man odious." "No, not exactly that, though I don't think a well-brought-up man should let himself go to skin and bone. He was intolerable in other ways. One memorable Christmas day Guy and I dined with him, and he got beastly drunk on the sauce for the plum-pudding. We were young at the time, and it made a lasting impression upon us. Indeed, he was hardly the person to sit next at a prolonged dinner-party, first because he was unmistakably dirty, and----" "Oh, Cyril!" "Well, and why not? It is not impossible. Even Popes, it now appears, can be indifferent to the advantages to be derived from soap and water." "Really, Cyril, I think you might choose a pleasanter subject upon which to converse," says Florence, with a disgusted curl of her short upper lip. "I beg pardon all round, I'm sure," returns Cyril, meekly. "But Lilian should be blamed: she _would_ investigate the matter; and I'm nothing, if not strictly truthful. He was a very dirty old man, I assure you, my dear Florence." "Mrs. Boileau, however objectionable, seems to have been rather the best of the two: why did she marry him?" asks Lilian. "Haven't the remotest idea, and, even if I had, I should be afraid to answer any more of your pertinent questions," with an expressive nod in the direction of Florence. "I can only say it was a very feeble proceeding on the part of such a capable person as Mrs. Boileau." "Just 'another good woman gone wrong,'" suggests Taffy, mildly. "Quite so," says Archibald, "though she adored him,--she said. Yet he died, some said of fever, others of--Mrs. Boileau; no attention was ever paid to the others. When he _did_ droop and die she planted all sorts of lovely little flowers over his grave, and watered them with her tears for ever so long. Could affection farther go?" "Horrible woman!" says Miss Chesney, "it only wanted that to finish my dislike to her. I hope when I am dead no one will plant flowers on _my_ grave: the bare idea would make me turn in it." "Then we won't do it," says Taffy, consolingly. "I wish we had a few Indian customs in this country," says Cyril, languidly. "The Suttee was a capital institution. Think what a lot of objectionable widows we should have got rid of by this time; Mrs. Boileau, for instance." "And Mrs. Arlington," puts in Florence, quietly. An unaccountable silence follows this speech. No one can exactly explain why, but every one knows something awkward has been said. Cyril outwardly is perhaps the least concerned of them all: as he bites languidly a little blade of green grass, a faint smile flickers at the corners of his lips; Lilian is distinctly angry. "Poor Mrs. Boileau; all this is rather ill-natured, is it not?" asks Florence, gently, rising as though a dislike to the gossip going on around her compels her to return to the house. In reality it is a dislike to damp grass that urges her to flight. "Shall I get you a chair, Florence?" asks Cyril, somewhat irrelevantly as it seems. "Pray don't leave us, Miss Beauchamp," says Taffy. "If you will stay on, we will swear not to make any more ill-natured remarks about any one." "Then I expect silence will reign supreme, and that the remainder of the _conversazione_ will be of the deadly-lively order," says Archibald; and, Cyril at this moment arriving with the offered chair, Miss Beauchamp is kindly pleased to remain. As the evening declines, the midges muster in great force. Cyril and Taffy, being in the humor for smoking,--and having cheroots,--are comparatively speaking happy; the others grow more and more secretly irritated every moment. Florence is making ladylike dabs at her forehead every two seconds with her cambric handkerchief, and is regretting keenly her folly in not retiring in-doors long ago. Midges sting her and raise uninteresting little marks upon her face, thereby doing irremediable damage for the time being. The very thought of such a catastrophe fills her with horror. Her fair, plump hands are getting spoiled by these blood-thirsty little miscreants; this she notices with dismay, but is ignorant of the fact that a far worse misfortune is happening higher up. A tasteless midge has taken a fancy to her nose, and has inflicted on it a serious bite; it is swelling visibly, and a swelled nose is not becoming, especially when it is set as nearly as nature will permit in the centre of a pale, high-bred, but expressionless face. Ignorant, I say, of this crowning mishap, she goes on dabbing her brow gently, while all the others lie around her dabbing likewise. At last Lilian loses all patience. "Oh! _hang_ these midges!" she says, naturally certainly but rather too forcibly for the times we live in. The petulance of the soft tone, the expression used, makes them all laugh, except Miss Beauchamp, who, true to her training, maintains a demeanor of frigid disapproval, which has the pleasing effect of rendering the swelled nose more ludicrous than it was before. "Have I said anything very _bizarre_?" demands Lilian, opening her eyes wide at their laughter. "Oh!"--recollecting--"did I say 'hang them'? It is all Taffy's fault, he will use schoolboy slang. Taffy, you ought to be ashamed of yourself: don't you see how you have shocked Florence?" "And no wonder," says Archibald, gravely; "you know we swore to her not to abuse anything for the remainder of this evening, not even these little winged torments," viciously squeezing half a dozen to death as he speaks. "How are we going to the Grange to-morrow evening?" asks Taffy, presently. The others have broken up and separated; Cyril and Archibald, at a little distance, are apparently convulsed with laughter over some shady story just being related by the former. "I suppose," goes on Taffy, "as Lady Chetwoode won't come, we shall take the open traps, and not mind the carriage, the evenings are so fine. Who is to drive who, is the question." "No; who is to drive poor little I, is the question. Sir Guy, will you?" asks Lilian, plaintively, prompted by some curious impulse, seeing him silent, handsome, moody in the background. A moment later she could have killed herself for putting the question to him. "Guy always drives me," says Florence, calmly: "I never go with any one else, except in the carriage with Aunt Anne. I am nervous, and should be miserable with any one I could not quite trust. Careless driving terrifies me. But Guy is never careless," turning upon Chetwoode a face she fondly hopes is full of feeling, but which unfortunately is suggestive of nothing but a midge's bite. The nose is still the principal feature in it. Placed in this awkward dilemma, Guy can only curse his fate and be silent. How can he tell Florence he does not care for her society, how explain to Lilian his wild desire for hers? He bites his moustache, and, with his eyes fixed gloomily upon the ground, maintains a disgusted silence. Truly luck is dead against him. "Oh,--that indeed!" says Lilian, and, being a thorough woman, of course makes no allowance for his unhappy position. Evidently,--according to her view of the case,--from his silent acquiescence in Miss Beauchamp's plan, he likes it. No doubt it was all arranged between them early this morning; and she, to have so far forgotten herself as to ask him to drive her! Oh! it is intolerable! "You are quite right," she says sweetly to Florence, even producing a smile for the occasion, as women will when their hearts are sorest. "There is nothing so depressing as nervousness when driving. Perhaps Archibald will take pity upon me. Archie!" calling out to him, "come here. I want you to do me a great favor,"--with an enchanting smile. "Would it be putting you out dreadfully if I asked you to drive me to Mrs. Boileau's to-morrow evening?"--another smile still more enchanting. "You really mean it?" asks Archibald, delighted, his dark face lighting, while Guy, looking on helplessly, almost groans aloud. "You know how glad I shall be: I had no idea when I got up this morning such luck was in store for me. _Dear_ Mrs. Boileau! if she could only guess how eager I am to start for her _charming_ Grange!" He says this in a laughing tone, but Chetwoode fully understands that, like the famous well, it has truth at the bottom of it. "It grows late, does it not?" Florence says, rising gracefully. "I think we had better go in-doors. We have left Aunt Anne too long alone." "Auntie is lying down. Her head is bad," says Lilian; "I was with her just before I came out, and she said she wished to be alone." "Yes; she can't bear noise," remarks Florence, calmly, but meaningly. "I must go and see how she is." There is the faintest suspicion of an emphasis upon the personal pronoun. "That will be very kind of you, dear," says Miss Chesney, suavely. "And Florence--would you like anything to rub your poor nose?--cold cream--or glycerine--or that; nurse has all those sorts of things, I'm sure." This is a small revenge of Lilian's, impossible to forego; while enjoying it, she puts on the tenderest air of sympathetic concern, and carefully regards Miss Beauchamp's nose with raised brows of solicitude. "My nose?" repeats Florence, reddening. "Yes, dear. One of those unkind little insects has bitten it shamefully, and now it is all pink and swollen. Didn't you know it? I have been feeling so sorry for you for the last ten minutes. It is too bad,--is it not? I hardly think it will be well before dinner, and it is so disfiguring." All this she utters in tones of the deepest commiseration. Florence wisely makes no reply. She would have borne the tortures of the rack rather than exhibit any vehement temper before Guy; so she contents herself with casting a withering glance upon Lilian,--who receives it with the utmost _sang-froid_,--and, putting her handkerchief up to the wounded member, sweeps into the house full of righteous indignation. Sir Guy, after lengthened hesitation, evidently makes up his mind to do something, and, with his face full of purpose, follows her. This devotion on his part is more than Lilian--in spite of her suspicions--has bargained for. "Gone to console his 'sleepy Venus' for the damage done to her 'Phidian nose,'" she says to Taffy, with rather a bitter laugh. "Little girls should neither quote Don Juan nor say ill-natured things," replies that youth, with an air of lofty rebuke. But Lilian, not being in the mood for even Taffy's playfulness, makes no answer, and walks away to her beloved garden to seek consolation from the flowers. Whatever Guy's conference with Florence was about, it was short and decisive, as in five minutes he again emerged from the house, and, looking vainly around him, starts in search of Lilian. Presently, at the end of the long lawn, he sees her. "Well, has her poor dear nose recovered all its pristine freshness?" she asks him, in a rather reckless tone, as he comes up to her. "Lilian," says Guy, abruptly, eagerly, taking no notice of this sally,--indeed, scarcely hearing,--"it was all a mistake; I could not speak plainly a moment ago, but I have arranged it all with Florence; and--will you let me drive you to Mrs. Boileau's to-morrow evening?" "No, thank you," a quick gleam in her large eyes that should have warned him; "I would not make Florence unhappy for the world. Think of her nerves!" "She will be quite as safe with Cyril--or--your cousin." "Which cousin?" "Chesney." "I think not, because I am going with Archibald." "You can easily break off with him," anxiously. "But supposing I do not wish to break off with him?" "Am I to think, then, you prefer going with your cousin?" in a freezing tone. "Certainly, I prefer his society to yours, ten thousand times," forcibly; "it was mere idleness made me say I wished to go with you. Had you agreed to my proposition I should probably have changed my mind afterward, so everything is better as it is; I am glad now you did not answer me differently." "I did not answer you at all," returns Guy, unwisely. "No, you were _afraid_," returns she, with a mocking laugh that sends the red blood to his forehead. "What do you mean?" he asks, angrily. "Nothing. It was foolish my mentioning the subject. We are disputing about a mere trifle. I am going with Archie whatever happens, because I like him, and because I know he is always glad to be with me." She turns as though to leave him, and Guy impulsively catches her hand to detain her; as he does so, his eyes fall upon the little white fingers imprisoned in his own, and there, upon one of them--beside his own ring--he sees another,--newer. "Who gave you that?" he asks, impulsively, knowing well the answer to his question. "Archibald," removing her hand quietly, but with determination. A dead silence follows. Then, speaking calmly by a supreme effort, Guy says: "I suppose so. Are you going to marry your cousin, Lilian?" "Is it in the capacity of guardian you ask that question?" defiantly. "You should remember I don't acknowledge one." "Must I understand by that you will accept him, or have accepted him?" "Certainly not. You told me yesterday you found it impossible to understand me at any time; why seek to do what is beyond your power? However, I don't mind telling you that as yet Archibald has not made me a formal offer of his heart and hand. No doubt"--mockingly--"when he does me the honor to propose to me, he will speak to you on the subject." Then she laughs a little. "Don't you think it is rather absurd arranging matters for poor Archie without his consent? I assure you he has as much idea of proposing to me as the man in the moon." "If you are not engaged to him you should not wear his ring," severely. "I am not engaged to you, and I wear your ring. If it is wrong to accept a ring from a man to whom one is not engaged, I think it was very reprehensible of you to give me this," pointing to it. "With me it is different," Guy is beginning, rather lamely, not being sure of his argument; but Miss Chesney, disdaining subterfuge, interrupts him. "A thing is either right or wrong," she says, superbly. "I may surely wear either none, or both." "Then remove both," says Guy, feeling he would rather see her without his, if it must only be worn in conjunction with Chesney's. "I shan't," returns Lilian, deliberately. "I shall wear both as long as it suits me,--because I adore rings." "Then you are acting very wrongly. I know there is little use in my speaking to you, once you are bent upon having your own way. You are so self-willed, and so determined." "Without a friend, what were humanity, To hunt our errors up with a good grace?" quotes Lilian lightly. "There is no use in your lecturing me, Sir Guy; it does me little good. _You_ want _your_ way, and I want _mine_; I am not 'self-willed,' but I don't like tyranny, and I always said you were tyrannical." "You are of course privileged to say what you like," haughtily. "Very well; then I _shall_ say it. One would think I was a baby, the way you--scold--and torment me," here the tears of vexation and childish wrath rise in her eyes; "but I do not acknowledge your authority; I have told you so a hundred times, and I never shall,--never, never, never!" "Lilian, listen to me----" "No, I will not. I wonder why you come near me at all. Go back to Florence; she is so calm, so sweet, so--_somnolent_,"--with a sneer,--"that she will not ruffle your temper. As for me, I hate disagreeable people! Why do you speak to me? It does neither of us any good. It only makes you ill-mannered and me thoroughly unhappy." "Unhappy!" "Yes," petulantly, "_miserable_. Surely of late you must have noticed how I avoid you. It is nothing but scold, scold, scold, all the time I am with you; and I confess I don't fancy it. You might have known, without my telling you, that I detest being with you!" "I shall remember it for the future," returns he, in a low voice, falling back a step or two, and speaking coldly, although his heart is beating wildly with passionate pain and anger. "Thank you," retorts Lilian: "that is the kindest thing you have said to me for many a day." Yet the moment his back is turned she regrets this rude speech, and all the many others she has given way to during the last fortnight. Her own incivility vexes her, wounds her to the heart's core, for, however mischievously inclined and quick-tempered she may be, she is marvelously warm-hearted and kindly and fond. For full five minutes she walks to and fro, tormented by secret upbraidings, and then a revulsion sets in. What does it matter after all, she thinks, with an impatient shrug of her pretty soft shoulders. A little plain speaking will do him no harm,--in fact, may do him untold good. He has been so petted all his life long that a snubbing, however small, will enliven him, and make him see himself in his true colors. (What his true colors may be she does not specify even to herself.) And if he is so devoted to Florence, why, let him then spend his time with her, and not come lecturing other people on matters that don't concern him. Such a fuss about a simple emerald ring indeed! Could anything be more absurd? Nevertheless she feels a keen desire for reconciliation; so much so that, later on,--just before dinner,--seeing Sir Guy in the shrubberies, walking up and down in deepest meditation,--evidently of the depressing order,--she makes up her mind to go and speak to him. Yes, she has been in the wrong; she will go to him, therefore, and make the _amende honorable_; and he (he is not altogether bad!) will doubtless rejoice to be friends with her again. So thinking, she moves slowly though deliberately up to him, regarding the while with absolute fervor the exquisite though frail geranium blossom she carries in her hand. It is only partly opened, and is delicately tinted as her own skin. When she is quite close to her guardian she raises her head, and instantly affects a deliciously surprised little manner at the fact of his unexpected (?) nearness. "Ah, Sir Guy, you here?" she says, airily, with an apparent consummate forgetfulness of all past broils. "You are just in time: see what a lovely flower I have for you. Is not the color perfect? Is it not sweet?" proffering to him the pale geranium. "It is," replies he, taking the flower mechanically, because it is held out to him, but hardly looking at it. His face is pale with suppressed anger, his lips are closely set beneath his fair moustache; she is evidently not forgiven. "And yet I think," he says, slowly, "if you knew my opinion of you, you would be the last to offer me a flower." "And what then is your opinion?" demands Lilian, growing whiter and whiter until all her pretty face has faded to the "paleness o' the pearl." Instinctively she recoils a little, as though some slight blow has touched and shaken her. "I think you a heartless coquette," returns he, distinctly, in a low tone that literally rings with passion. "Take back your gift. Why should you waste it upon one who does not care to have it?" And, flinging the flower contemptuously at her feet, he turns and departs. For a full minute Miss Chesney neither stirs nor speaks. When he is quite gone, she straightens herself, and draws her breath sharply. "Well, I never!" she says, between her little white teeth, which is a homely phrase borrowed from nurse, but very expressive, and with that she plants a small foot viciously upon the unoffending flower and crushes it out of all shape and recognition. * * * * * Dinner is over, and almost forgotten; conversation flags. Even to the most wakeful it occurs that it must be bordering upon bed-hour. Lilian, whose nightly habit is to read for an hour or two in her bed before going to sleep, remembering she has left her book where she took off her hat on coming into the house some hours ago, leaves the drawing-room, and, having crossed the large hall, turns into the smaller one that leads to the library. Midway in this passage one lamp is burning; the three others (because of some inscrutable reason known only to the under-footman) have not been lit: consequently to-night this hall is in semi-darkness. Almost at the very end of it Miss Chesney finds herself face to face with her guardian, and, impelled by mischief and coquetry, stops short to confront him. "Well, Sir Guy, have you got the better of your naughty temper?" she asks, saucily. "Fie, to keep a little wicked black dog upon your shoulder for so long! I hope by this time you are properly ashamed of yourself, and that you are ready to promise me never to do it again." Guy is silent. He is thinking how lovely she is, how indifferent to him, how unattainable. "Still unrepentant," goes on Lilian, with a mocking smile: "you are a more hardened sinner than ever I gave you credit for. And what is it all about, pray? What has vexed you? Was it my cousin's ring? or my refusing to accompany you to-morrow to Mrs. Boileau's?" "Both," replies he, feeling compelled to answer. "I still think you should not wear your cousin's ring unless engaged to him." "Nor yours either, of course," with a frown. "How you do love going over the same ground again and again! Well," determinately, "as I told you before, I shall wear both--do you hear?--just as long as I please. So now, my puissant guardian," with a gesture that is almost a challenge, "I defy you, and dare you to do your worst." Her tone, as is intended, irritates him; her beauty, her open though childish defiance madden him. Gazing at her in the uncertain light, through which her golden hair and gleaming sapphire eyes shine clearly, he loses all self-control, and in another moment has her in his arms, and has kissed her once, twice, passionately. Then recollection, all too late, returns, and shocked, horrified at his own conduct, he releases her, and, leaning against the wall with folded arms and lowered eyes, awaits his doom. Standing where he has left her, pale as a little colorless ghost, with her lips as white as death, and her great eyes grown black through mingled terror and amazement, Lilian regards him silently. She does not move, she scarcely seems to breathe; no faintest sound of anger escapes her. Then slowly--slowly raising her handkerchief, she draws it lightly across her lips, and with a gesture full of contempt and loathing flings it far from her. After which she draws herself up to her extremest height, and, with her head erect and her whole figure suggestive of insulted pride and dignity, she sweeps past him into the library, closing the door quietly behind her. When the last sound of her footsteps has disappeared, Guy rouses himself as if from a hateful dream, and presses his hand to his forehead. Stooping, he picks up the disdained handkerchief, that lies mournfully in the corner, thrusts it into his bosom, and turning away toward his own quarters, is seen no more that night. CHAPTER XVIII. "The best laid schemes o' mice and men Gang aft a-gley, And lea'e us nought but grief and pain, For promised joy."--BURNS. All next day Lilian treats him as though to her eyes he is invisible. She bestows upon him none of the usual courtesies of life; she takes no "good-morrow," nor gives one. She is singularly deaf when he speaks; except when common etiquette compels her to return an answer to one or other of his speeches, she is dumb to him, or, when thus compelled, makes an answer in her iciest tones. At five o'clock they all start for the Grange, Mrs. Boileau being one of those unpleasant people who think they can never see enough of their guests, or that their guests can never see enough of them,--I am not sure which,--and who consequently has asked them to come early, to inspect her gardens and walk through her grounds before dinner. As the grounds are well worth seeing, and the evening is charming for strolling, this is about the pleasantest part of the entertainment. At least so thinks Lilian, who (seeing Guy's evident depression) is in radiant spirits. So does Archibald, who follows her as her shadow. They are both delighted at everything about the Grange, and wander hither and thither, looking and admiring as they go. And indeed it is a charming old place, older perhaps than Chetwoode, though smaller and less imposing. The ivy has clambered up over all its ancient walls and towers and battlements, until it presents to the eye a sheet of darkest, richest green, through which the old-fashioned casements peep in picturesque disorder, hardly two windows being in a line. Inside, steps are to be met with everywhere in the most unexpected places,--curious doors leading one never knows where,--ghostly corridors along which at dead of night armed knights of by-gone days might tramp, their armor clanking,--winding stairs,--and tapestries that tell of warriors brave and maidens fair, long since buried and forgotten. Outside, the gardens are lovely and rich in blossom. Here, too, the old world seems to have lingered, the very flowers themselves, though born yesterday, having all the grace and modesty of an age gone by. Here "The oxlips and the nodding violet grow: Quite over-canopied with lush woodbine, with sweet musk-roses and with eglantine." Here too the "nun-like lily" hangs its head, the sweet "neglected wall-flower" blows, the gaudy sunflower glitters, and the "pale jessamine, the white pink, and the pansy freaked with jet," display their charms; while among them, towering over all through the might of its majesty, shines the rose,--"Joy's own flower," as Felicia Hemans sweetly calls it. Now--being late in the season--the blossom is more scarce, though still the air is heavy with delicate perfume, and the eyes grow drunk with gazing on the beauty of the autumn flowers. Through them goes Lilian, with Archibald gladly following. All day long he has had her to himself, and she has been so good to him, so evidently pleased and contented with his society alone, that within his breast an earnest hope has risen, so strongly, that he only waits a fitting opportunity to lay his heart and fortune at her feet. "I can walk no more," says Lilian, at last, sinking upon the grass beneath the shade of a huge beech that spreads its kindly arms above her. "Let us sit here and talk." Archibald throws himself beside her, and for a few minutes silence reigns supreme. "Well?" says Lilian, at length, turning lazy though inquisitive eyes upon her companion. "Well?" says Archibald in return. "I said you were to talk," remarks Lilian, in an aggrieved tone. "And you have not said one word yet. You ought to know by this time how I dislike silence." "Blame yourself: I have been racking my brains without success for the last two minutes to try to find something suitable to say. Did you ever notice how, when one person says to another, 'Come, let us talk,' that other is suddenly stricken with hopeless stupidity? So it is now with me: I cannot talk: I am greatly afraid." "Well, I can," says Lilian, "and as I insist on your doing so also, I shall ask you questions that require an answer. First, then, did you ever receive a note from me on my leaving the Park, asking you to take care of my birds?" "Yes." "And you fed them?" "Regularly," says Archibald, telling a fearful lie deliberately, as from the day he read that note to this he has never once remembered the feathered friends she mentions, and even now as he speaks has only the very haziest idea of what she means. "I am glad of that," regarding him searchingly. "It would make me unhappy to think they had been neglected." "Don't be unhappy, then," returning her gaze calmly and unflinchingly: "they are all right: I took care of that." His manner is truthful in the extreme, his eyes meet hers reassuringly. It is many years since Mr. Chesney first learned the advantage to be derived from an impassive countenance. And now with Lilian's keen blue eyes looking him through and through, he feels doubly thankful that practice has made him so perfect in the art of suppressing his real thoughts. He has also learned the wisdom of the old maxim,-- "When you tell a lie, tell a good one, When you tell a good one, stick to it," and sticks to his accordingly. "I am so pleased!" says Lilian, after a slight pause, during which she tells herself young men are not so wretchedly thoughtless after all, and that Archibald is quite an example to his sex in the matter of good nature. "One of my chiefest regrets on leaving home was thinking how my birds would miss me." "I am sorry you ever left it." "So am I, of course. I was very near declining to do so at the last moment. It took Aunt Priscilla a full week to convince me of the error of my ways, and prove to me that I could not live alone with a gay and (as she hinted) wicked bachelor." "I have never been so unfortunate as to meet her," says Archibald, mildly, "but I would bet any money your Aunt Priscilla is a highly objectionable and interfering old maid." "No, she is not: she is a very good woman, and quite an old dear in some ways." "She is an old maid?" raising himself on his elbow with some show of interest. "Well, yes, she is; but I like old maids," says Lilian, stoutly. "Oh, she _likes_ old maids," says Mr. Chesney, _sotto voce_, sinking back once more into his lounging position. He evidently considers there is nothing more to be said on that head. "And so she wouldn't let you stay?" "No. You should have seen her face when I suggested writing to you to ask if I might have a suite of rooms for my own use, promising faithfully never to interfere with you in any way. It was a picture!" "It pained you very much to leave the Park?" "It was death to me. Remember, it had been my home all my life; every stick and stone about the place was dear to me." "It was downright brutal, my turning you out," says Archibald, warmly: "I could hate myself when I think of it. But I knew nothing of it, and--I had not seen you then." "If you had, would you have let me stay on?" "I think so," returns he, softly, gazing with dangerous tenderness at the delicate rose-tinted face above him. Then, "Even so, I wish you had asked me; I so seldom go near the place, you would have been thoroughly welcome to stay on in it, had you been the ugliest person breathing." "So I said at the time, but Aunt Priscilla would not hear of it. I am sure I heard enough about the proprieties at that time to last me all my life. When all arguments failed," says Miss Chesney, breaking into a gay laugh, as recollection crowds upon her, "I proposed one last expedient that nearly drove auntie wild with horror. What do you think it was?" "Tell me." "I said I would ask your hand in marriage, and so put an end to all slanderous tongues; that is, if you consented to have me. See what a narrow escape you had," says Lilian, her merriment increasing: "it would have been so awkward to refuse!" Archibald gazes at her earnestly. He has been through the hands of a good many women in his time, but now confesses himself fairly puzzled. Is her laughter genuine? is it coquetry? or simply amusement? "Had you ever a proposal, Lilian?" asks he, quietly, his eyes still riveted upon her face. "No," surprised: "what an odd question! I suppose it is humiliating to think that up to this no man has thought me worth loving. I often imagine it all," says Lilian, confidentially, taking her knees into her embrace, and letting her eyes wander dreamily over to the hills far away behind the swaying trees. "And I dare say some day my curiosity will be gratified. But I do hope he won't write: I should like to _see_ him do it. I wouldn't," says Miss Chesney, solemnly, "give a pin for a man who wouldn't go down on his knees to his lady-love." This last remark under the circumstances is eminently unwise. A moment later Lilian is made aware of it by the fact of Archibald's rising and going down deliberately on his knees before her. "It can scarcely be news to you to tell you I love you," says he, eagerly. "Lilian, will you marry me?" "What are you saying?" says Miss Chesney, half frightened, half amused: "you must be going mad! Do get up, Archie: you cannot think how ridiculous you look." "Tell me you will marry me," entreats that young man, unmoved even by the fact of his appearing grotesque in the eyes of his beloved. "No; I will not," shaking her head. "Archie, do move: there is the most dreadful spider creeping up your leg." "I don't care; let him creep," says Archibald, valiantly; "I shan't stir until you give me a kind answer." "I don't know what to say; and besides I can do nothing but laugh while you maintain your present position. Get up instantly, you foolish boy: you are ruining the knees of your best trousers." Whether this thought carries weight with Mr. Chesney I know not, but certainly he rises to his feet without further demur. "You spoke about the Park a few minutes ago," he says, slowly; "you know now you can have it back again if you will." "But not in that way. Did you think I was hinting?" growing rather red. "No; please don't say another word. I wonder you can be so silly." "Silly!" somewhat aggrieved; "I don't know what you mean by that. Surely a fellow may ask a woman to marry him without being termed 'silly.' I ask you again now. Lilian, will you marry me?" "No, no, no, certainly not. I have no intention of marrying any one for years to come,--if ever. I think," with a charming pout, "it is very unkind of you to say such things to me,--and just when we were such good friends too; spoiling everything. I shall never be comfortable in your society again; I'm sure I never should have suspected you of such a thing. If I had----" A pause. "You would not have come here with me to-day, you mean?" gloomily. "Indeed I should not. Nothing would have induced me. You have put me out terribly." "I suppose you like Chetwoode," says Archibald, still more gloomily. Having never been denied anything since his birth, he cannot bring himself to accept this crowning misfortune with becoming grace. "I like everybody,--except Florence," returns Lilian, composedly. Then there is another pause, rather longer than the first, and then--after a violent struggle with her better feelings--Miss Chesney gives way, and laughs long and heartily. "My dear Archibald, don't look so woe-begone," she says. "If you could only see yourself! You look as though every relation you ever had was dead. Why, you ought to be very much obliged to me. Have you never heard Mr. Punch's advice to young men about to marry?" "I don't want any one's advice; it is late for that, I fancy. Lilian--darling--_darling_--won't you----" "I won't, indeed," recoiling and waving him back, while feeling for the first time slightly embarrassed; "don't come a step nearer; nobody ever made love to me before, and I perfectly _hate_ it! I hope sincerely no one will ever propose to me again." "_I_ shall!" doggedly; "I shan't give you up yet. You have not thought about it. When you know me better you may change your mind." "Do not deceive yourself," gently, "and do not be offended. It is not you I have an objection to, it is marriage generally. I have only begun my life, and a husband must be such a bore. Any number of people have told me so." "Old maids, such as your Aunt Priscilla, I dare say," says Archibald, scornfully. "Don't believe them. I wouldn't bore you: you should have everything exactly your own way." "I have that now." "And I will wait for you as long as you please." "So you may," gayly; "but mind, I don't desire you. "May I take that as a grain of hope?" demands he, eagerly grasping this poor shadow of a crumb with avidity, only to find later on it is no crumb at all. "Don't be cruel, Lilian: every one thinks differently after a while; you may also. You have said I am not hateful to you; if then you would only promise to think it over----" "Impossible," airily: "I never think: it is too fatiguing. So are you, by the bye, just now. I shan't stay with you any longer, lest I should be infected. Good-bye, Archie; when you are in a pleasanter mood you can return to me, but until then adieu." So saying, she catches her train in one hand and runs away from him fast as her fleet little feet can carry her. Down the pathway, round under the limes, into another path runs she, where suddenly she finds herself in Taffy's presence. "Whither away, fair maid?" asks that youth, removing the cigar from his lips that he is enjoying all alone. "I am running away from Archie. He was so excessively dull and disagreeable that I could not bring myself to waste another moment on him, so I ran away and left him just _planté là_," says Miss Chesney, with a little foreign gesture and a delicious laugh that rings far through the clear air, and reaches Archibald's ears as he draws nearer. "Come, I hear footsteps," whispers she, slipping her hand into Taffy's. "Help me to hide from him." So together they scamper still farther away, until at last they arrive breathless but secure in the shrubberies that surround one side of the house. When they have quite recovered themselves, it occurs to Taffy that he would like to know all about it. "What was he saying to you?" asks he _à propos_ of Chesney. "Nothing," promptly. Taffy, curiously: "Well, certainly that _was_ very disagreeable." Lilian, demurely: "It was." At this Taffy lays his hands upon her shoulders and gives her a good shake. "Tell me directly," says he, "what he was saying to you." "How can I?" innocently; "he says so much and none of it worth repeating." "Was he making love to you?" "No. Oh, no," mildly. "I'm certain he was," with conviction. "And look here, Lil, don't you have anything to do with him: he isn't up to the mark by any means. He is too dark, and there is something queer about his eyes. I once saw a man who had cut the throats of his mother, his grandmother, and all his nearest relations,--any amount of them,--and his eyes were just like Chesney's. Don't marry him, whatever you do." "I won't," laughing: "I should hate to have my throat cut." "There's Chetwoode, now," says Taffy, who begins to think himself a very deep and delicate diplomatist. "He is a very decent fellow all round if you like." "I do like, certainly. It is quite a comfort to know Sir Guy is not indecent." "Oh, you know what I mean well enough. There's nothing underhand about Chetwoode. By the bye, what have you been doing to him? He is awfully down on his luck all day." "I!" coldly. "What should I do to Sir Guy?" "I don't know, I'm sure, but girls have a horrid way of teasing a fellow while pretending to be perfectly civil to him all the time. It is my private opinion," says Mr. Musgrave, mysteriously,--"and I flatter myself I am seldom wrong,--that he is dead spoons on you." "Really, Taffy!" begins Lilian, angrily. "Yes, he is: you take my word for it. I'm rather a judge in such matters. Bet you a fiver," says Mr. Musgrave, "he proposes to you before the year is out." "I wonder, Taffy, how you can be so vulgar!" says Lilian, with crimson cheeks, and a fine show of superior breeding. "I never bet. I forbid you to speak to me on this subject again. Sir Guy, I assure you, has as much intention of proposing to me as I have of accepting him should he do so." "More fool you," says Taffy, unabashed. "I'm sure he is much nicer than that melancholy Chesney. If I were a girl I should marry him straight off." "Perhaps he would not marry you," replies Lilian, cuttingly. "Wouldn't he? he would like a shot, if I were like Lilian Chesney," says Taffy, positively. "'Like a shot'--what does that mean?" says Miss Chesney, with withering sarcasm. "It is a pity you cannot forget your schoolboy slang, and try to be a gentleman. I don't think you over hear that 'decent fellow' Sir Guy, or even that cut-throat Archibald, use it." With this parting shaft she marches off overflowing with indignation, leaving Mr. Musgrave lost in wonder at her sudden change of manner. "What on earth is up with her now?" he asks himself, desperately; but the dressing-bell ringing at this moment disarms thought, and sends him in-doors to prepare for dinner. Mrs. Boileau has asked no one to meet them except a lank and dreary curate, who is evidently a prime favorite with her. He is an Honorable Mr. Boer, with nothing attractive about him except a most alarming voice that makes one glance instinctively at his boots under the mistaken impression that the sound must come from them. This is rather unfortunate for the curate, as his feet are not (or rather _are_) his strong point, Nature having endowed them with such a tremendous amount of heel, and so much sole, innocent of instep, as makes them unpleasantly suggestive of sledge-hammers. He is painfully talkative, and oppressively evangelical, which renders him specially abhorrent to Lilian, who has rather a fancy for flowers and candles and nice little boys in white shirts. He is also undecided whether it is Miss Beauchamp or Miss Chesney he most admires. They have equal fortunes, and are therefore (in his clerical eyes) equally lovely. There is certainly more of Miss Beauchamp, but then there is a vivacity, a--ahem--"go," if one might say so, about Miss Chesney perfectly irresistible. Had one of these rival beauties been an heiress, and the other rich in love's charms, I think I know which one Mr. Boer would have bowed before,--not that I even hint at mercenary motives in his reverence, but as it is he is much exercised in his mind as to which he shall honor with his attentions. I think Lilian wins the day, because after dinner he bears down upon her determinately, and makes for the fauteuil in which she lies ensconced looking bored and _ennuyée_ to the last degree. Dinner has been insipid, the whole evening a mistake; neither Guy nor Archibald will come near her, or even look at her; and now Mr. Boer's meditated attack is the last straw that breaks the camel's back. "I consider the school-board very much to blame," begins that divine while yet some yards distant, speaking in his usual blatant tones, that never change their key-note, however long they may continue to insult the air. "So do I," says Lilian, very gently and sweetly, but with such unmistakable haste as suggests a determination on her part to bring the undiscussed subject to an ignominious close. "I quite agree with you; I think them terribly to blame. But I beg your pardon for one moment: I want to ask Mr. Chetwoode a question that has been haunting me for hours." Rising, she glides away from him over the carpet, leaving Mr. Boer--who takes a long time to understand anything, and could not possibly believe in a rebuff offered to himself in person--watching the tail of her long sweeping gown, and wondering curiously if all the little white frillings beneath it may not have something to do with a falling petticoat. At this point he pulls himself together with a start, and fears secretly he is growing immodest. In the meantime Lilian has reached Cyril, who is sitting at a table somewhat apart, gazing moodily at a book containing prints of the chief villages in Wales. He, like herself, is evidently in the last stage of dejection. Bending over him, she whispers in an awful tone, but with a beaming smile meant to mystify the observant Boer: "If you don't instantly deliver me from that man I shall make a point of going off into such a death-like swoon as will necessitate my being borne from the room. He is now going to tell me about that miserable school-board all over again, and I can't and won't stand it." "Poor child," says Cyril, with deepest sympathy; "I will protect you. If he comes a step nearer, I swear to you I will have his blood." Uttering this comforting assurance in the mildest tone, he draws a chair to the table, and together they explore Wales in print. Then there is a little music, and a good deal of carefully suppressed yawning, and then the carriages are announced and they all bid their hostess good-night, and tell a few pretty lies about the charming evening they have spent, etc. "Cyril, will you drive me home?" Lilian says to him hurriedly in the hall, while they are being finally cloaked and shawled. As she says it she takes care to avoid his eyes, so she does not see the look of amused scrutiny that lies in them. "So soon!" he says, tragically. "It was an easy victory! I shall be only too charmed, my dear Lilian, to drive you to the other end of the world if need be." So they start and drive home together placidly, through the cool, soft night. Lilian is strangely silent, so is Cyril,--the calm beauty of the heavens above them rendering their lips mute. "Now glowed the firmament With living sapphires; Hesperus, that led The starry host, rode brightest; till the moon, Rising in clouded majesty, at length-- Apparent queen!--unveiled her peerless light, And o'er the dark her silver mantle threw." The night is very calm, and rich in stars; brilliant almost as garish day, but bright with that tender, unchanging, ethereal light--clear, yet full of peaceful shadow--that day can never know. "There is no dew on the dry grass to-night, Nor damp within the shadow of the trees; The wind is intermitting, dry and light." Lilian sighs gently as they move rapidly through the still air,--a sigh not altogether born of the night's sweetness, but rather tinged with melancholy. The day has been a failure, and though through all its windings she has been possessed by the spirit of gayety, now in the subdued silence of the night the reaction setting in reduces her to the very verge of tears. Cyril, too, is very quiet, but _his_ thoughts are filled with joy. Lifting his gaze to the eternal vault above him, he seems to see in the gentle stars the eyes of his beloved smiling back at him. A dreamy happiness, an exquisite feeling of thankfulness, absorb him, making him selfishly blind to the sadness of his little companion. "How silent you are!" Lilian says, at length, unable to endure her tormenting reverie any longer. "Am I?" smiling. "I was thinking of some lines I read yesterday: the night is so lovely it recalls them. Of course they are as well known to you as to me; but hear them: "How beautiful is the night! A dewy freshness fills the silent air; No mist obscures, nor cloud, nor streak, nor stain, Breaks the serene of heaven: In full-orb'd glory yonder moon divine Rolls through the dark-blue depths." "Yes, they are pretty lines: they are Southey's, I think," says Lilian, and then she sighs again, and hardly another word is spoken between them until they reach home. As they pull up at the hall-door, Guy, who has arrived a little before them, comes forward, and, placing one foot upon the step of Cyril's T-cart, takes Lilian in his arms and lifts her to the ground. She is so astonished at the suddenness of this demonstration on his part that she forgets to make any protest, only--she turns slowly and meaningly away from him, with lowered eyes and with averted head. With a beseeching gesture he detains her, and gains for a moment her attention. He is looking pale, miserable; there is an expression of deep entreaty in his usually steady blue eyes. "Lilian, forgive me," he whispers, anxiously, trying to read her face by the moonlight: "I have been sufficiently punished. If you could guess all I have endured to-day through your coldness, your scorn, you would say so too. Forgive me." "Impossible," returns she, haughtily, in clear tones, and, motioning him contemptuously to one side, follows Cyril into the house. Inside they find Lady Chetwoode not only up and waiting for them, but wide awake. This latter is a compliment so thoroughly unexpected as to rouse within them feelings of the warmest gratitude. "What, Madre! you still here?" says Cyril. "Why, we imagined you not only out of your first but far into your second beauty sleep by this time." "I missed you all so much I decided upon waiting up for you," Lady Chetwoode answers, smiling benignly upon them all; "besides, early in the evening--just after you left--I had a telegram from dear Mabel, saying she and Tom will surely be here to dinner to-morrow night. And the idea so pleased me I thought I would stay here to impart my news and hear yours." Every one in the room who knows Mrs. Steyne here declares his delight at the prospect of so soon seeing her again. "She must have made up her mind at the very last moment," says Guy. "Last week she was undecided whether she should come at all. She hates leaving London." "She must be at Steynemore now," remarks Cyril. "Lilian, my dear child, how pale you are!" Lady Chetwoode says, anxiously taking Lilian's hand and rubbing her cheeks gently with loving fingers. "Cold, too! The drive has been too much for you, and you are always so careless about wraps. I ordered supper in the library an hour ago. Come and have a glass of wine before going to bed." "No, thank you, auntie: I don't care for anything." "Thank you, Aunt Anne, I think I will take something," interposes Florence, amiably; "the drive was long. A glass of sherry and one little biscuit will, I feel sure, do me good." Miss Beauchamp's "one little biscuit," as is well known, generally ends in a substantial supper. "Come to the library, then," says Lady Chetwoode, and still holding Lilian's hand, draws it within her arm, and in her own stately Old-World fashion leads her there. When they have dismissed the butler, and declared their ability to help one another, Lady Chetwoode says pleasantly: "Now tell me everything. Had you an agreeable evening?" "Too agreeable!" answers Cyril, with suspicious readiness: "I fear it will make all other entertainments sink into insignificance. I consider a night at Mrs. Boileau's the very wildest dissipation. We all sat round the room on uneasy chairs and admired each other: it would perhaps have been (if _possible_) a more successful amusement had we not been doing the same thing for the past two months,--some of us for years! But it was tremendously exciting all the same." "Was there no one to meet you?" "My dear mother, how could you suspect Mrs. Boileau of such a thing!" "Yes,--there was a Mr. Boer," says Florence, looking up blandly from her chicken, "a man of very good family,--a clergyman----" "No, a curate," interrupts Cyril, mildly. "He made himself very agreeable," goes on Florence, in her soft monotone, that nothing disturbs. "He was so conversational, and so well read. You liked him, Lilian?" "Who? Mr. Boer? No; I thought him insufferable,--so dull,--so prosy," says Lilian, wearily. She has hardly heard Miss Beauchamp's foregoing remarks. "His manner, certainly, is neither frivolous nor extravagant," Florence returns, somewhat sharply, "but he appeared sensible and earnest, rare qualities nowadays." "Did I hear you say he wasn't extravagant?" breaks in Cyril, lazily, purposely misconstruing her application of the word. "My dear Florence, consider! Could anything show such reckless extravagance as the length of his coat-tails? I never saw so much superfluous cloth in any man's garment before. It may be saintly, but it was cruel waste!" "How did you amuse yourselves?" asks Lady Chetwoode, hastily, forestalling a threatening argument. "As best we might. Lilian and I amused each other, and I think we had the best of it. If our visit to the Grange did no other good, it at least awoke in me a thorough sense of loyalty: I cannot tell you," with a glance at Lilian, "how often I blessed the 'Prints of Wales' this night." "Oh, Cyril, what a miserable joke!" says Lilian, smiling, but there is little warmth in her smile, and little real merriment in her usually gay tones. All this, Cyril--who is sincerely fond of her--notes with regret and concern. "Guy, give Lilian a glass of Moselle," says his mother at this moment; "it is what she prefers, and it will put a little color into her cheeks: she looks fatigued." As she says this she moves across the room to speak to Florence, leaving Lilian standing alone upon the hearth-rug. Guy, as desired, brings the wine and hands it to Lilian. "No, thank you," turning from him coldly. "I do not wish for it." "Nevertheless, take it," Guy entreats, in a low voice: "you are terribly white, and," touching her hand gently, "as cold as death. Is it because _I_ bring it you will not have it? Will you take it from Taffy?" A choking sensation rises in Miss Chesney's throat; the unbidden tears spring to her eyes; it is by a passionate effort alone she restrains them from running down her cheeks. As I have said before, the day had been a distinct failure. She will not speak to Guy, Archibald will not speak to her. A sense of isolation is oppressing and weighing her down. She, the pet, the darling, is left lonely, while all the others round her laugh and jest and accept the good the gods provide. Like a spoilt child, she longs to rush to her nurse and have a good cry within the shelter of that fond woman's arms. Afraid to speak, lest her voice betray her, afraid to raise her eyes, lest the tell-tale tears within them be seen, she silently--though against her will--takes the glass Sir Guy offers, and puts it to her lips, whereupon he is conscious of a feeling of thankfulness,--the bare fact of her accepting anything at his hands seeming to breathe upon him forgiveness. Lilian, having finished her Moselle, returns him the glass silently. Having carried it to the table, he once more glances instinctively to where he has left her standing. She has disappeared. Without a word to any one, she has slipped from the library and sought refuge in her own room. CHAPTER XIX. "This much, however, I may add; her years Were ripe, they might make six-and-twenty springs; But there are forms which Time to touch forbears, And turns aside his scythe to vulgar things."--_Don Juan._ Next day creates but little change in Lilian's demeanor. So far as Guy is concerned, her manner is still frozen and unrelenting. She shows no sign of a desire to pardon, and Chetwoode noting this grows hardened, and out-Herods Herod in his imitation of her coldness. Archibald, on the contrary, gives in almost directly. Finding it impossible to maintain his injured bearing beyond luncheon, he succumbs, and, throwing himself upon her mercy, is graciously received and once more basks in the full smiles of beauty. At heart Lilian is glad to welcome him back, and is genial and sweet to him as though no ugly _contretemps_ had occurred between them yesterday. Mabel Steyne being expected in the evening, Lady Chetwoode is especially happy, and takes no heed of minor matters, or else her eldest son's distraction would surely have claimed her attention. But Mabel's coming is an event, and a happy one, and at half-past seven, pleased and complacent, Lady Chetwoode is seated in her drawing-room, awaiting her arrival. Lilian and Florence are with her, and one or two of the others, Guy among them. Indeed, Mrs. Steyne's coming is a gratification the more charming that it is a rarity, as she seldom visits the country, being strongly addicted to city pursuits and holding country life and ruralism generally in abhorrence. Just before dinner she arrives; there is a little flutter in the hall, a few words, a few steps, and then the door is thrown open, and a young woman, tall, with dark eyes and hair, a nose slightly celestial, and a very handsome figure, enters. She walks swiftly up the room with the grand and upright carriage that belongs to her, and is followed by a tall, fair man, indolent though good to look at, with a straw-colored moustache, and as much whisker as one might swear by. "Dear auntie, I have come!" says Mrs. Steyne, joyfully, which is a fact so obvious as to make the telling of it superfluous. "Mabel, my dear, how glad I am to see you!" exclaims Lady Chetwoode, rising and holding out her arms to her. A pretty pink flush comes to life in the old woman's cheeks making her appear ten years younger, and adding a thousand charms to her sweet old face. They kiss each other warmly, the younger woman with tender _empressement_. "It is kind of you to say so," she says, fondly. "And you, auntie--why, bless me, how young you look! it is disgraceful. Presently I shall be the auntie, and you the young and lovely Lady Chetwoode. Darling auntie, I am delighted to be with you again!" "How do you do, Tom?" Lady Chetwoode says, putting her a little to one side to welcome her husband, but still holding her hand. "I do hope you two have come to stay a long time in the country." "Yes, until after Christmas, so you will have time to grow heartily sick of us," says Mrs. Steyne. "Ah, Florence." She and Florence press cheeks sympathetically, as though no evil passages belonging to the past have ever occurred between them. And then Lady Chetwoode introduces Lilian. "This is Lilian," she says, drawing her forward. "I have often written to you about her." "My supplanter," remarks Mabel Steyne, turning with a smile that lights up all her handsome brunette face. As she looks at Lilian, fair and soft and pretty, the rather _insouciant_ expression that has grown upon her own during her encounter with Florence fades, and once more she becomes her own gay self. "I hope you will prove a better companion to auntie than I was," she says, with a merry laugh, taking and pressing Lilian's hand. Lilian instinctively returns the pressure and the laugh. There is something wonderfully fetching in Mrs. Steyne's dark, brilliant eyes. "She is the best of children!" Lady Chetwoode says, patting Lilian's shoulder; "though indeed, my dear Mabel, I saw no fault in you." "Of course not. Have you noticed, Miss Chesney, Lady Chetwoode's greatest failing? It is that she will not see a fault in any one." "She never mentioned your faults, at all events," Lilian answers, smiling. "I hope your baby is quite well?" Florence asks, calmly, who is far too well bred ever to forget her manners. "The darling child,--yes,--I hope she is well," Lady Chetwoode says, hastily, feeling as though she has been guilty of unkindness in not asking for the baby before. Miss Beauchamp possesses to perfection that most unhappy knack of placing people in the wrong position. "Quite, thank you," answering Lady Chetwoode instead of Florence, while a little fond glance that is usually reserved for the nursery creeps into her expressive eyes. "If you admired her before, you will quite love her now. She has grown so big and fat, and has such dear little sunny curls all over her head!" "I like fair babies," says Lilian. "Because you are a fair baby yourself," says Cyril. "She can say Mammy and Pappy quite distinctly, and I have taught her to say Auntie very sweetly," goes on Mrs. Steyne, wrapt in recollection of her offspring's genius. "She can say 'cake' too, and--and that is all, I think." "You forget, Mabel, don't you?" asks her husband, languidly. "You underrate the child's abilities. The other day when she was in a frenzy because I would not allow her to pull out my moustache in handfuls she said----" "She was never in a frenzy, Tom," indignantly: "I wonder how you can say so of the dear angel." "Was she not? if _you_ say so, of course I was mistaken, but at the time I firmly believed it was temper. At all events, Lady Chetwoode, on that momentous occasion she said, 'Nanna warragood,' without a mistake. She is a wonderful child!" "Don't pay any attention to him, auntie," with a contemptuous shrug. "He is himself quite idiotic about baby, so much so that he is ashamed of his infatuation. I shall bring her here some day to let you see her." "You must name the day. Would next Monday suit you?" "You needn't press the point," Tom Steyne says, warningly: "but for me, the child and its nurse would be in the room at this moment. Mab and I had a stand-up fight about it in the hall just before starting, and it was only after a good deal of calm though firm expostulation I carried the day. I represented to her that as a rule babies are not invited out to dine at eight o'clock at night, and that children of her age are generally more attractive to their mothers than to any one else." "Barbarian!" says Lady Chetwoode. "How have you been getting on in London, Mab," asks Cyril. "Made any new conquests?" "Several," replies Tom; "though I think on the whole she is going off. She did not make up her usual number this season. She has, however, on her list two nice boys in the F. O., and an infant in the Guards. She is rather unhappy about them, as she cannot make up her mind which it is she likes best." "Wrong, Tom. Yesterday I made it up. I like the 'infant' best. But what really saddens me is that I am by no means sure he likes _me_ best. He is terribly fond of Tom, and I sometimes fear thinks him the better fellow of the two." At this moment the door opens and Taffy comes in. "Why! Here is my 'infant,'" exclaims Mabel, surprised. "Dear Mr. Musgrave, I had no idea I should meet you here." "My dear Mrs. Steyne! I had no idea such luck was in store for me. I am so glad to see you again! Lilian, why didn't you break it to me? Joyful surprises are sometimes dangerous." "I thought you knew. We have been discussing 'Mabel's' coming," with a shy smile, "all the past month." "But how could I possibly guess that the 'Mabel' who was occupying everybody's thoughts could be my Mrs. Steyne?" "Ours!" murmurs Tom, faintly. "Yes, mine," says Taffy, who is not troubled with over-much shyness. "Mr. Musgrave is your cousin?" Mabel asks, turning to Lilian. "No, I am her son," says Taffy: "you wouldn't think it--would you? She is a good deal older than she looks, but she gets herself up wonderfully. She is not a bad mother," reflectively, "when one comes to think of it." "I dare say if you spoke the truth you would confess her your guardian angel," says Mabel, letting a kindly glance fall on pretty Lilian. "She takes care of you, no doubt." "And such care," answers Lilian; "but for me I do believe Taffy would have gone to the bad long ago." "'Taffy'! what a curious name. So quaint,--and pretty too, I think. May I," with a quick irrepressible glance, that is half fun, half natural coquetry, "call you Taffy?" "You may call me anything you like," returns that young gentleman, with the utmost _bonhommie_ "Call me Daphne, call me Chloris, Call me Lalage, or Doris, Only--_only_--call me thine!" "It is really mortifying that I can't," says Mrs. Steyne, while she and the others all laugh. "Sir," says Tom Steyne, "I would have you remember the lady you are addressing is my wife." Says Taffy, reproachfully: "Do you think I don't remember it,--to my sorrow?" They have got down to dinner and as far as the fish by this time, so are all feeling friendly and good-natured. "Tell you what you'll do, Mab," says Guy. "You shall come over here next week to stay with us, and bring baby and nurse with you,--and Tom, whether he likes it or not. We can give him as much good shooting as will cure him of his laziness." "Yes, Mabel, indeed you must," breaks in Lady Chetwoode's gentle voice. "I want to see that dear child very badly, and how can I notice all her pretty ways unless she stays in the house with me?" "Say yes, Mrs. Steyne," entreats Taffy: "I shall die of grief if you refuse." "Oh, that! Yes, auntie, I shall come, thank you, if only to preserve Mr.--Taffy's life. But indeed I shall be delighted to get back to the dear old home for a while; it is so dull at Steynemore all by ourselves." "Thank you, darling," says Tom, meekly. After dinner Mrs. Steyne, who has taken a fancy to Lilian, seats herself beside her in the drawing-room and chatters to her unceasingly of all things known and unknown. Guy, coming in later with the other men, sinks into a chair near Mabel, and with Miss Beauchamp's Fanchette upon his knee employs himself in stroking it and answering Mabel's numerous questions. He hardly looks at Lilian, and certainly never addresses her, in which he shows his wisdom. "No, I can't bear the country," Mrs. Steyne is saying. "It depresses me." "In the spring surely it is preferable to town," says Lilian. "Is it? I suppose so, because I have so often heard it; but my taste is vitiated. I am not myself out of London. Of course Tom and I go somewhere every year, but it is to please fashion we go, not because we like it. You will say I exaggerate when I tell you that I find music in the very roll of the restless cabs." Lilian tells her that she will be badly off for music of that kind at Steynemore; but perhaps the birds will make up for the loss. "No, you will probably think me a poor creature when I confess to you I prefer Albani to the sweetest nightingale that ever trilled; that I simply detest the discordant noise made by the melancholy lamb; that I think the cuckoo tuneless and unmusical, and that I find no transcendent pleasure in the cooing of the fondest dove that ever mourned over its mate. These beauties of nature are thrown away upon me. Woodland groves and leafy dells are to me suggestive of suicide, and make me sigh for the 'sweet shady side of Pall Mall.' The country, in fact, is lonely, and my own society makes me shudder. I like noise and excitement, and the babel of tongues." "You forget the flowers," says Lilian, triumphantly. "No, my dear; experience has taught me I can purchase them cheaper and far finer than I can grow them for myself. I am a skeptic, I know," smiling. "I will not try to convert you to my opinion." "Certainly I can see advantages to be gained from a town life," says Lilian, thoughtfully, leaning her elbow on a small table near her, and letting her chin sink into her little pink palm. "One has a larger circle of acquaintances. Here everything is narrowed. One lives in the house with a certain number of persons, and, whether one likes them or the reverse, one must put up with them. There is no escape. Yes,"--with an audible and thoroughly meant sigh,--"that is very sad." This little ungracious speech, though uttered in the most innocent tone, goes home (as is intended) to Guy's heart. He conceals, however, all chagrin, and pulls the ears of the sleepy snowball he is caressing with an air of the calmest unconcern. "You mention a fact," says Mrs. Steyne, the faintest inflection of surprise in her manner. "But you, at least, can know nothing of such misery. Chetwoode is famous for its agreeable people, and you,--you appear first favorite here. For the last hour I have been listening, and I have heard only 'Lilian, look at this,' or, 'Lilian, listen to that,' or 'Lilian, child, what was it you told me yesterday?' You seem a great pet with every one here." Lilian laughs. "Not with every one," she says. "No?"--raising her straight dark brows. "Is there then an enemy in the camp? Not Cyril, surely?" "Oh, no, not Cyril." Their voices involuntarily have sunk a little, and, though any one near can still hear distinctly, they have all the appearance of people carrying on a private conversation. "Guy?" Lilian is silent. Guy's face, as he still strokes the dog dreamily, has grown haughty in the extreme. He, like Mabel, awaits her answer. "What?" says Mrs. Steyne, in an amused tone, evidently treating the whole matter as a mere jest. "So you are not a pet with Guy! How horrible! I cannot believe it. Surely Guy is not so ungallant as to have conceived a dislike for you? Guy, do you hear this awful charge she is bringing against you? Won't you refute it? Dear boy, how stern you look!" "Do I? I was thinking of something disagreeable." "Of me?" puts in Lilian, _sotto voce_, with a faint laugh tinged with bitterness. "Why should you think what I say so extraordinary? Did you ever know a guardian like his ward, or a ward like her guardian? I didn't--especially the latter. They always find each other _such_ a mistake!" Sir Guy, raising his head, looks full at Lilian for a moment; his expression is almost impossible to translate; then, getting up, he crosses the room deliberately and seats himself beside Florence, who welcomes him with one of her conventional smiles that now has something like warmth in it. "I think you are a very cruel little girl," says Mrs. Steyne, gently, not looking at Lilian, and then turns the conversation in another channel. "You will stay in the country until after Christmas?" says Lilian, somewhat hastily. "Yes; something has gone wrong with our steward's accounts, and Tom is dissatisfied with him. So he has been dismissed, and we shall stay on here until we please ourselves with another." "I am glad you live so near. Three miles is only a walk, after all." "In good weather a mere nothing, though for my own part I am not addicted to exercise of any sort: I believe, however, Steynemore's proximity to Chetwoode was one of my chief reasons for marrying Tom." "I am glad of any reason that made you do so. If you won't mind my saying it, I will tell you I like you very much,"--with a slight blush. "I am very charmed to hear it," says Mrs. Steyne, heartily, whose liking for Lilian has grown steadily: "I should be very much disappointed if you didn't. I foresee we shall be great friends, and that you and auntie will make me fall quite in love with Tom's native soil. But"--naively--"you must not be unkind to poor Guy." CHAPTER XX. "_Orl._--Is't possible that on so little acquaintance You should like her? that, but seeing, You should love her?"--_As You Like It._ Four weeks have flown by swiftly, with ungracious haste,--as do all our happiest moments,--leaving their mark behind them. In their train Taffy has passed away from Chetwoode, and all in the house have mourned his departure openly and sincerely. Miss Chesney for two whole days was inconsolable, and cried her pretty eyes very nearly out; after which she recovered, and allowed herself to find consolation in the thought that he has promised to return to them for a fortnight at Christmas-tide. "Summer was dead, and Autumn was expiring, And infant Winter laughed upon the land All cloudlessly and cold." The men spend half their days wondering if it will be a good hunting-season, the women are wrapt in delicious dreams of fur and velvet. At The Cottage all the roses have fluttered into their graves, but in their place a sweet flower has bloomed. Cecilia's eyes have grown brighter, gladder, her step firmer, her cheek richer in the tint that rivals the peach. In her calm home she has but one thought, one hope, and that is Cyril. She has forbidden him to mention their engagement to Lady Chetwoode, so as yet the sweet secret is all their own. Florence has gained a _bona fide_ admirer, Mr. Boer--after much deliberation--having, for private reasons, decided in favor of Miss Beauchamp and her fifteen thousand pounds. But not for Mr. Boer, however well connected, or however fondly cherished by a rich and aged uncle, can Miss Beauchamp bring herself to resign all hope of Guy and Chetwoode. At Steynemore, Mabel and her baby are laughing the happy hours away; though, to speak more accurately, it is at Chetwoode most of them are spent. At least every second week they drive over there, to find their rooms ready, and stay on well content to talk and crow at "auntie," until the handsome head of that dearest of old ladies is fairly turned. Lilian has of course gone over heart and mind to Miss Steyne, who rewards her affection by practicing upon her the most ingenious tortures. With a craftiness terrible in one so young, she bides her opportunity and then pulls down all her friend's golden hair; at other times she makes frantic efforts at gouging out her eyes, tries to cut her eye-teeth upon her slender fingers, and otherwise does all in her power to tear her limb from limb. She also appears to find infinite amusement in scrambling up and down Miss Chesney's unhappy knees, to the detriment of that dainty lady's very dainty gowns, and shows symptoms of fight when she refuses to consume all such uninviting remnants of cake and bonbons as lie heavy on her hands. Altogether Lilian has a lively time of it with Mabel's heiress, who, nevertheless, by right of her sweet witcheries and tender baby tricks, has gained a fast hold upon her heart. But if Baby knows a slave in Lilian, Lilian knows a slave in some one else. Up to this Archibald has found it impossible to tear himself away from her loved presence; though ever since that fatal day at the Grange he has never dared speak openly to her of his attachment. Day by day his passion has grown stronger, although with every wind her manner toward him seems to vary,--now kind, to-morrow cold, anon so full of treacherous fancies and disdainful glances as to make him wonder whether in truth it is hatred and not love for her that fills his heart to overflowing. She is "One of those pretty, precious plagues, which haunt A lover with caprices soft and dear, That like to make a quarrel, when they can't Find one, each day of the delightful year; Bewitching, torturing, as they freeze or glow, And--what is worst of all--won't let you go." Between her and Guy a silent truce has been signed. They now converse with apparent geniality; at times they appear, to outsiders, even to affect each other's society; but secretly they still regard each other with distrust, and to them alone is known the frailty of the coating that lies over their late hostility. It is three o'clock, and the day for a wonder is fine, all the past week having been sullen and full of a desire to rain. Now the clouds have disappeared, and the blue sky dotted with tiny flakes of foam-like vapor is overhead. The air is crispy, and, though cold, full of life and invigorating power. "I shall go for a walk," says Lilian, appearing suddenly in the billiard-room, looking like a little northern fairy, so encased is she in velvet and dark fur. Upon her yellow hair is resting the most coquettish of fur caps, from beneath which her face smiles fairer and fresher for its rich surroundings. The two men she addresses look up, and let the honest admiration they feel for her beauty betray itself in their eyes. Outside of the window, seated on the sill, which is some little distance from the ground, is Archibald, smoking. Archibald, as a rule, is always smoking. Inside is Guy, also indulging in a cigar, and disputing volubly about some knotty point connected with guns or cartridges, or the proper size of shot to be used for particular birds, I cannot remember exactly what; I do remember, however, that the argument completely falls through when Lilian makes her appearance. "Were there ever such lazy men?" says Miss Lilian, scornfully. "Did all the shooting with Tom Steyne last week do you up so completely? I warned you, if you will be pleased to recollect, that there wasn't much work in you. Well, I am going to the wood. Who will come with me?" "I will," say Guy and Archibald, in a breath. And then ensues a pause. "_Embarras de richesses_," says Miss Chesney, with a gay laugh and a slight elevation of her brows. "You shouldn't all speak at once. Now, which shall I choose?" Then, impelled by the spirit of mischief that always possesses her when in her guardian's presence, she says, "It would be a shame to take you out, Sir Guy, would it not? You seem so cozy here,"--glancing at the fire,--"while Archibald is evidently bent on exercise." "As you please, of course," says Guy, with well-feigned indifference, too well feigned for Miss Chesney's liking; it angers her, and awakes within her a desire to show how little she heeds it. Her smile ripens and rests alone on Archibald, insensibly her manner toward her cousin takes a warmer tinge; going over to the window, she lays her hand lightly on his shoulder, and, leaning over, looks at the ground beneath. "Could I get out there?" she asks, a little fearfully, though in truth at another time she would regard with disdain the person who should tell her she could not jump so small a distance. "It would be so much better than going all the way round." "Of course you can," returns he, dropping instantly downward, and then looking up at her; "it is no height at all." "It looks high from here, does it not?" still doubtful. "I should perhaps break my neck if I tried to jump it. No," regretfully, "I must go round, unless, indeed,"--with another soft glance meant for Guy's discomfiture, and that alas! does terrible damage to Archibald's heart,--"you think you could take me down." "I know I could," replies he, eagerly. "You are sure?" hesitating. "I am very heavy, mind." Archibald laughs and holds out his arms, and in another moment has taken her, slender fairy that she is, and deposited her safely on the ground. Sir Guy, who has been an unwilling though fascinated spectator of this scene, grows pale and turns abruptly aside as Archibald and Lilian, laughing gayly, disappear into the shrubberies beyond. But once out of sight of the billiard-room windows, Miss Chesney's gayety cruelly deserts her. She is angry with Guy for reasons she would rather die than acknowledge even to herself, and she is indignant with Archibald for reasons she would be puzzled to explain at all, while hating herself for what she is pleased to term her frivolity, such as jumping out of windows as though she were still a child, and instead of being a full-grown young woman! What must Gu----what would any one think of her? "It was awfully good of you to choose me," says Archibald, after a few minutes, feeling foolishly elated at his success. "For what?" coldly. "For a walk." "Did I choose you?" asks Lilian, in a tone that should have warned so worldly-wise a young man as Chesney. He, however, fails to be warned, and rushes wildly on his destruction. "I thought so," returns he, growing perplexed: "Chetwoode was quite as anxious to accompany you as I was, and you decided in my favor." "Simply because you were outside the window, and looked more like moving than he did." "He was considerably sold for all that," says this foolish Archibald, with an idiotic laugh, that under the circumstances is madness. Miss Chesney freezes. "Sold? how?" she asks, with a suspicious thirst for knowledge. "I don't understand." The continued iciness of her tone troubles Archibald. "You seem determined not to understand," he says, huffily. "I only mean he would have given a good deal to go with you, until you showed him plainly you didn't want him." "I never meant to show him anything of the kind. You quite mistake." "Do I?" with increasing wrath. "Well, I think when a woman tells a fellow she thinks it would be a pity to disturb him, it comes to very much the same thing in the end. At all events, Chetwoode took it in that light." "How silly you can be at times, Archibald!" says Lilian, promptly: "I really wish you would not take up such absurd notions. Sir Guy did _not_ look at it in that light; he knows perfectly well I detest long walks, and that I seldom go for one, so he did not press the point. And in fact I think I shall change my mind now: walking is such a bore, is it not?" "Are you not coming then?" stopping short, and growing black with rage: "you don't seem to know your own mind for two minutes together, or else you are trying to provoke me! First you ask me to go to the wood with you, and now you say you will not go. What am I to think of it?" "I wouldn't be rude, if I were you," says Miss Chesney, calmly, "and I wouldn't lose my temper. You make me absolutely uncomfortable when you let that wicked look grow upon your face. One would think you would like to murder me. Do try to be amiable! And as for trying to provoke you, I should not take the trouble! No, I shall not go with you now, certainly: I shall go with Cyril," pointing to where Cyril is sauntering toward the entrance to the wood at some short distance from them. Without waiting to address another word to the discomfited Archibald, she runs to Cyril and slips her hand within his arm. "Will you take me with you wherever you are going?" she says, smiling confidently up into his face. "What a foolish question! of course I am only too glad to get so dear a little companion," replies he, smothering a sigh very successfully; though, to be honest, he is hardly enraptured at the thought of having Lilian's (or any one's) society just now. Nevertheless he buries his chagrin, and is eminently agreeable to her as they stroll leisurely in the direction of The Cottage. When they come up to it Lilian pauses. "I wish this wonderful goddess would come out. I want to see her quite close," she says, peeping through the hedge. "At a distance she is beautiful: I am always wondering whether 'distance lends enchantment to the view.'" "No, it does not," absently. He is looking over the hedge. "You seem to know all about it," archly: "shall I ask how? What lovely red berries!" suddenly attracted by some coloring a few yards away from her. "Do you see? Wait until I get some." Springing on to a bank, she draws down to her some bunches of mountain-ash berry, that glow like live coals in the fading greenery around them, and having detached her prize from the parent stem, prepares to rejoin her companion, who is somewhat distant. "Why did you not ask me to get them for you?" he asks, rousing himself from his reverie: "how precipitate you always are! Take care, child: that bank is steep." "But I am a sure-footed little deer," says Miss Chesney, with a saucy shake of her pretty head, and, as she speaks, jumps boldly forward. A moment later, as she touches the ground, she staggers, her right ankle refuses to support her, she utters a slight groan, and sinks helplessly to the ground. "You have hurt yourself," exclaims Cyril, kneeling beside her. "What is it, Lilian? Is it your foot?" "I think so," faintly: "it seems twisted. I don't know how it happened, but it pains me terribly. Just there all the agony seems to rest. Ah!" as another dart of anguish shoots through the injured ankle. "My dear girl, what shall I do for you? Why on earth did you not take my advice?" exclaims Cyril, in a distracted tone. A woman's grief, a woman's tears, always unman him. "Don't say you told me how it would be," murmurs Lilian, with a ghastly attempt at a smile that dies away in another moan. "It would be adding insult to injury. No, do not stir me: do not; I cannot bear it. Oh, Cyril, I think my ankle is broken." With this she grows a little paler, and draws her breath with a sharp sound, then whiter, whiter still, until at last her head sinks heavily upon Cyril's supporting arm, and he finds she has fallen into a deep swoon. More frightened than he cares to allow, Cyril raises her in his arms and, without a moment's thought, conveys his slight burden straight to The Cottage. Cecilia, who from an upper window has seen him coming with his strange encumbrance, runs down to meet him at the door, her face full of anxiety. "What is it?" she asks, breathlessly, bending over Lilian, who is still fainting. "Poor child! how white she is!" "It is Lilian Chesney. She has sprained her foot, I think," says Cyril, who is white too with concern: "will you take her in while I go for a carriage?" "Of course. Oh, make haste: her lips are quivering. I am sure she is suffering great agony. Bring her this way--or--no--shall I lay her on my bed?" "The drawing-room sofa will do very well," going in and laying her on it. "Will you see to her? and give her some brandy and--and that." "Yes, yes. Now go quickly, and send a messenger for Dr. Bland, while you bring the carriage here. How pretty she is! what lovely hair! Poor little thing! Go, Cyril, and don't be long." When he has disappeared, Mrs. Arlington summons Kate, and together they cut the boot off Lilian's injured foot, remove the dainty little silk stocking, and do for her all that can be done until the doctor sees her. After which, with the help of eau de Cologne, and some brandy, they succeed in bringing her to life once more. "What has happened?" she asks, languidly, raising her hand to her head. "Are you better now?" Mrs. Arlington asks, in return, stooping kindly over her. "Yes, thank you, much better," gazing at her with some surprise: "it was stupid of me to faint. But"--still rather dazed--"where am I?" "At The Cottage. Mr. Chetwoode brought you here." "And you are Mrs. Arlington?" with a slight smile. "Yes," smiling in return. "Kate, put a little water into that brandy, and give it to Miss Chesney." "Please do not, Kate," says Lilian, in her pretty friendly fashion: "I hate brandy. If"--courteously--"I may have some sherry instead, I should like it." Having drunk the sherry, she sits up and looks quietly around her. The room is a little gem in its own way, and suggestive of refinement of taste and much delicacy in the art of coloring. Between the softly-tinted pictures that hang upon the walls, rare bits of Worcester and Wedgwood fight for mastery. Pretty lounging-chairs covered with blue satin are dispersed here and there, while cozy couches peep out from every recess. _Bric-a-brac_ of all kinds covers the small velvet tables, that are hung with priceless lace that only half conceals the spindle legs beneath. Exquisite little marble Loves and Venuses and Graces smile and pose upon graceful brackets; upon a distant table two charming Dresden baskets are to be seen smothered in late flowers. All is bright, pretty, and artistic. "What a charming room!" says Lilian, with involuntary, and therefore flattering admiration. "You like it? I fear it must look insignificant to you after Chetwoode." "On the contrary, it is a relief. There, everything is heavy though handsome, as is the way in all old houses; here, everything is bright and gay. I like it so much, and you too if you will let me say so," says Lilian, holding out her hand, feeling already enslaved by the beauty of the tender, lovely face looking so kindly into hers. "I have wanted to know you so long, but we knew"--hesitating--"you wished to be quiet." "Yes, so I did when first I came here; but time and solitude have taught me many things. For instance,"--coloring faintly,--"I should be very glad to know you; I feel sadly stupid now and then." "I am glad to hear you say so; I simply detest my own society," says Miss Chesney, with much vivacity, in spite of the foot. "But,"--with a rueful glance at the bandaged member,--"I little thought I should make your acquaintance in this way. I have given you terrible trouble, have I not?" "No, indeed, you must not say so. I believe"--laughing,--"I have been only too glad, in spite of my former desire for privacy, to see some one from the outer world again. Your hair has come down. Shall I fasten it up again for you?" Hardly waiting an answer, she takes Lilian's hair and binds and twists it into its usual soft knot behind her head, admiring it as she does so. "How soft it is, and how long, and such a delicious color, like spun silk! I have always envied people with golden hair. Ah, here is the carriage: I hope the drive home will not hurt you very much. She is ready now, Mr. Chetwoode, and I think she looks a little better." "I should be ungrateful otherwise," says Lilian. "Mrs. Arlington has been so kind to me, Cyril." "I am sure of that," replies he, casting a curious glance at Cecilia that rather puzzles Lilian, until, turning her eyes upon Cecilia, she sees what a pretty pink flush has stolen into her cheeks. Then the truth all at once flashes upon her, and renders her rather silent, while Cyril and Mrs. Arlington are making the carriage more comfortable for her. "Come," says Cyril, at length taking her in his arms. "Don't be frightened; I will hurt you as little as I can help." He lifts her tenderly, but the movement causes pain, and a touch of agony turns her face white again. She is not a hero where suffering is concerned. "Oh, Cyril, be careful," says Mrs. Arlington, fearfully, quite unconscious in her concern for Lilian's comfort that she has used the Christian name of her lover. When Lilian is at length settled in the carriage, she raises herself to stoop out and take Cecilia's hand. "Good-bye, and thank you again so much," she says, earnestly. "And when I am well may I come and see you?" "You may, indeed,"--warmly. "I shall be anxiously expecting you; I shall now"--with a gentle glance from her loving gray eyes--"have a double reason for wishing you soon well." Moved by a sudden impulse, Lilian leans forward, and the two women as their lips meet seal a bond of friendship that lasts them all their lives. For some time after they have left Cecilia's bower Lilian keeps silence, then all at once she says to Cyril, in tones of the liveliest reproach: "I wouldn't have believed it of you." "Would you not?" replies he, somewhat startled by this extraordinary address, being plunged in meditation of his own. "You don't say so! But what is it then you can't believe?" "I think"--with keen upbraiding--"you might have told _me_." "So I should, my dear, instantly, if I only knew what it was," growing more and more bewildered. "If you don't want to bring on brain-fever, my good Lilian, you will explain what you mean." "You must have guessed what a treat a _real_ love-affair would be to me, who never knew a single instance of one," says Lilian, "and yet you meanly kept it from me." "Kept what?" innocently, though he has the grace to color hotly. "Don't be deceitful, Cyril, whatever you are. I say it was downright unkind to leave me in ignorance of the fact that all this time there was a real, unmistakable, _bona fide_ lover near me, close to me, at my _very elbow_, as one might say." "I know I am happy enough to be at your elbow just now," says Cyril, humbly, "but, to confess the truth, I never yet dared to permit myself to look upon you openly with lover's eyes. I am still at a loss to know how you discovered the all-absorbing passion that I--that _any one_ fortunate enough to know you--must feel for you." "Don't be a goose," says Miss Chesney, with immeasurable scorn. "Don't you think I have wit enough to see you are head over ears in love with that charming, beautiful creature down there in The Cottage? I don't wonder at that: I only wonder why you did not tell me of it when we were such good friends." "Are you quite sure I had anything to tell you?" "Quite; I have eyes and I have ears. Did I not see how you looked at her, and how she blushed all up to the roots of her soft hair when you did so? and when you were placing me in the carriage she said, 'Oh, Cyril!' and what was the meaning of that, Master Chetwoode, eh? She is the prettiest woman I ever saw," says Lilian, enthusiastically. "To see her is indeed to love her. I hope _you_ love her properly, with all your heart?" "I do," says Cyril, simply. "I sometimes think, Lilian, it cannot be for one's happiness to love as I do." "Oh, this is delightful!" cries Lilian, clapping her hands. "I am glad you are in earnest about it; and I am glad you are both so good-looking. I don't think ugly people ought to fall in love: they quite destroy the romance of the whole thing." "Thanks awfully," says Cyril. "I shall begin to hold up my head now you have said a word in my favor. But,"--growing serious--"you really like her, Lilian? How can you be sure you do after so short an acquaintance?" "I always like a person at once or not at all. I cannot explain why; it is a sort of instinct. Florence I detested at first sight; your Mrs. Arlington I love. What is her name?" "Cecilia." "A pretty name, and suited to her: with her tender beautiful face she looks a saint. You are very fortunate, Cyril: something tells me you cannot fail to be happy, having gained the love of such a woman." "Dear little sibyl," says Cyril, lifting one of her hands to his lips, "I thank you for your prophecy. It does me good only to hear you say so." CHAPTER XXI. "As on her couch of pain a child was lying."--_Song._ Lilian's injury turns out to be not only a sprain, but a very bad one, and strict quiet and rest for the sufferer are enjoined by the fat little family doctor. So for several days she lies supine and obedient upon a sofa in Lady Chetwoode's boudoir, and makes no moan even when King Bore with all his horrible train comes swooping down upon her. He is in greatest force at such times as when all the others are down-stairs dining and she is (however regretfully) left to her own devices. The servants passing to and fro with dishes sometimes leave the doors open, and then the sound of merry voices and laughter, that seems more frequent because she is at a distance and cannot guess the cause of their merriment, steals up to her, as she lies dolefully upon her pillows with her hands clasped behind her sunny head. When four days of penance have so passed, Lilian grows _triste_, then argumentative, then downright irritable, distracting Lady Chetwoode by asking her perpetually, with tears in her eyes, when she thinks she will be well. "She is so tired of lying down. Her foot must be nearly well now. It does not hurt her nearly so much. She is sure, if she might only use it a little now and then, it would be well in half the time," and so on. At last, when a week has dragged itself to a close, Lilian turns her cajoleries upon the doctor, who is her sworn vassal, and coaxes and worries him into letting her go down-stairs, if only to dine. "Eh? So soon pining for freedom? Why, bless me, you have been only two or three days laid up." "Six long, _long_ days, dear doctor." "And now you would run the risk of undoing all my work. I cannot let you put your foot to the ground for a long time yet. Well,"--softened by a beseeching glance,--"if you must go down I suppose you must; but no walking, mind! If I catch you walking I shall put you into irons and solitary confinement for a month. I dare say, Lady Chetwoode,"--smiling archly down upon Miss Chesney's slight figure,--"there will be some young gentleman to be found in the house not only able but willing to carry to the dining-room so fair a burden!" "We shall be able to manage that easily. And it will be far pleasanter for her to be with us all in the evening. Guy, or her cousin Mr. Chesney, can carry her down." "I think, auntie," speaking very slowly, "I should prefer Archibald." "Eh! eh! you hear, madam, she prefers Archibald,--happy Archibald!" cackles the little doctor, merrily, being immensely tickled at his own joke. "Archibald Chesney is her cousin," replies Lady Chetwoode, with a sigh, gazing rather wistfully at the girl's flushed, averted face. So Lilian gains the day, and Sir Guy coming into his mother's boudoir half an hour later is told the glad news. "Dr. Bland thinks her so much better," Lady Chetwoode tells him. "But she is not to let her foot touch the ground; so you must be careful, darling," to Lilian. "Will you stay with her a little while, Guy? I must go and write some letters." "I shan't be in the least lonely by myself, auntie," says Lilian, smoothly, letting her fingers stray meaningly to the magazine beside her; yet in spite of this chilling remark Sir Guy lingers. He has taken up his station on the hearth-rug and is standing with his back to the fire, his arms crossed behind him, and instead of seeking to amuse his wounded ward is apparently sunk in reverie. Suddenly, after a protracted silence on both sides, he raises his head, and regarding her earnestly, says: "May I take you down to dinner to-night, Lilian?" "Thank you," formally: "it is very kind of you to offer, Sir Guy. But Archie was here a moment ago, and he has promised to take that trouble upon himself." Then, in a low but perfectly distinct tone, "I can trust Archie!" Although no more is said, Guy thoroughly understands her thoughts have traveled backward to that one unlucky night when, through a kiss, he sinned past all chance of pardon. As his own mind follows hers, the dark color mounts slowly to his very brow. "Am I never to be forgiven for that one offense?" he asks, going up to her couch and looking gravely down upon her. "I have forgiven, but unhappily I cannot forget," returns she, gently, without letting her eyes meet his. Then, with an air of deliberation, she raises her magazine, and he leaves the room. So Sir Guy retires from the contest, and Archibald is elected to the coveted position of carrier to her capricious majesty, and this very night, to her great joy, brings her tenderly, carefully, to the dining-room, where a sofa has been prepared for her reception. It so happens that three days later Archibald is summoned to London on business, and departs, leaving with Lilian his faithful promise to be back in time to perform his evening duty toward her. But man's proposals, as we know, are not always carried out, and Chesney's fall lamentably short; as just at seven o'clock a telegram arriving for Lady Chetwoode tells her he has been unexpectedly detained in town by urgent matters, and cannot by any possibility get home till next day. Cyril is dining with some bachelor friends near Truston: so Lady Chetwoode, who is always thoughtful, bethinks her there is no one to bring Lilian down to dinner except Guy. This certainly, for some inward reason, troubles her. She sighs a little as she remembers Lilian's marked preference for Chesney's assistance, then she turns to her maid--the telegram has reached her as she is dressing for dinner--and says to her: "A telegram from Mr. Chesney: he cannot be home to dinner. My hair will do very well. Hardy: go and tell Sir Guy he need not expect him." Hardy, going, meets Sir Guy in the hall below, and imparts her information. Naturally enough, he too thinks first of Lilian. Much as it displeases his pride, he knows he must in common courtesy again offer her his rejected services. There is bitterness in the thought, and perhaps a little happiness also, as he draws his breath rather quickly, and angrily suppresses a half smile as it curls about his lips. To ask her again, to be again perhaps refused! He gazes irresolutely at the staircase, and then, with a secret protest against his own weakness, mounts it. The second dinner-bell has already sounded: there is no time for further deliberation. Going reluctantly up-stairs, he seeks with slow and lingering footsteps his mother's boudoir. The room is unlit, save by the glorious fire, half wood, half coal, that crackles and laughs and leaps in the joy of its own fast living. Upon a couch close to it, bathed in its warm flames, lies the little slender black-robed figure so inexpressibly dear to him. She is so motionless that but for her wide eyes, gazing so earnestly into the fire, one might imagine her wrapt in slumber. Her left arm is thrown upward so that her head rests upon it, the other hangs listlessly downward, almost touching the carpet beneath her. She looks pale, but lovely. Her golden hair shines richly against the crimson satin of the cushion on which she leans. As Guy approaches her she never raises her eyes, although without doubt she sees him. Even when he stands beside her and gazes down upon her, wrathful at her insolent disregard, she never pretends to be aware of his near presence. "Dinner will be ready in three minutes," he says, coldly: "do you intend coming down to-night?" "Certainly. I am waiting for my cousin," she answers, with her eyes still fixed upon the fire. "I am sorry to be the conveyer of news that must necessarily cause you disappointment. My mother has had a telegram from Chesney saying he cannot be home until to-morrow. Business detains him." "He promised me he would return in time for dinner," she says, turning toward him at last, and speaking doubtfully. "No doubt he is more upset than you can be at his unintended defection. But it is the case for all that. He will not be home to-night." "Well, I suppose he could not help it." "I am positive he couldn't!" coldly. "You have great faith in him," with an unpleasant little smile. "Thank you, Sir Guy: it was very kind of you to bring me such disagreeable news." As she ceases speaking she turns back again to the contemplation of the fire, as though desirous of giving him his _congé_. "I can hardly say I came to inform you of your cousin's movements," replies he, haughtily; "rather to ask you if you will accept my aid to get down-stairs?" "Yours!" "Even mine." "No, thank you," with slow surprise, as though she yet doubts the fact of his having again dared to offer his services: "I would not trouble you for worlds!" "The trouble is slight," he answers, with an expressive glance at the fragile figure below him. "But yet a trouble! Do not distress yourself, Sir Guy: Parkins will help me, if you will be so kind as to desire him." "Your nurse"--hastily--"would be able, I dare say." "Oh, no. I can't bear trusting myself to women. I am an arrant coward. I always think they are going to trip, or let me drop, at every corner." "Then why refuse my aid?" he says, even at the price of his self-respect. "No; I prefer Parkins!" "Oh, if you prefer the assistance of a _footman_, there is nothing more to be said," he exclaims, angrily, going toward the door much offended, and with just a touch of disgust in his tone. Now, Miss Chesney does not prefer the assistance of a footman; in fact, she would prefer solitude and a lonely dinner rather than trust herself to such a one; so she pockets her pride, and, seeing Sir Guy almost outside the door, raises herself on her elbow and says, pettishly, and with the most flagrant injustice: "Of course I can stay here all by myself in the dark, if there is no one to take me down." "I wish I understood you," says Guy, irritably, coming back into the room. "Do you mean you wish me to carry you down? I am quite willing to do so, though I wish with all my heart your cousin were here to take my place. It would evidently be much pleasanter for all parties. Nevertheless, if you deign to accept my aid," proudly, "I shall neither trip nor drop you, I promise." There is a superciliousness in his manner that vexes Lilian; but, having an innate horror of solitude, go down she will: so she says, cuttingly: "You are graciousness itself! you give me plainly to understand how irksome is this duty to you. I too wish Archie were here, for many reasons, but as it is----" she pauses abruptly; and Guy, stooping, raises her quietly, tenderly, in his arms, and, with the angry scowl upon his face and the hauteur still within his usually kind blue eyes, begins his march down-stairs. It is rather a long march to commence, with a young woman, however slender, in one's arms. First comes the corridor, which is of a goodly length, and after it the endless picture-gallery. Almost as they enter the latter, a little nail half hidden in the doorway catches in Lilian's gown, and, dragging it roughly, somehow hurts her foot. The pain she suffers causes her to give way to a sharp cry, whereupon Guy stops short, full of anxiety. "You are in pain?" he says, gazing eagerly into the face so close to his own. "My foot," she answers, her eyes wet with tears; "something dragged it: oh, how it hurts! And you promised me to be so careful, and now----but I dare say you are _glad_ I am punished," she winds up, vehemently, and then bursts out crying, partly through pain, partly through nervousness and a good deal of self-torturing thought long suppressed, and hides her face childishly against his sleeve because she has nowhere else to hide it. "Lay me down," she says, faintly. There is a lounging-chair close to the fire that always burns brightly in the long gallery: placing her in it, he stands a little aloof, cursing his own ill-luck, and wondering what he has done to make her hate him so bitterly. Her tears madden him. Every fresh sob tears his heart. At last, unable to bear the mental agony any longer, he kneels down beside her, and, with an aspect of the deepest respect, takes one of her hands in his. "I am very unfortunate," he says, humbly. "Is it hurting you very much?" "It is better now," she whispers; but for all that she sobs on very successfully behind her handkerchief. "You are not the only one in pain,"--speaking gently but earnestly: "every sob of yours causes me absolute torture." This speech has no effect except to make her cry again harder than ever. It is so sweet to a woman to know a man is suffering tortures for her sake. A little soft lock of her hair has shaken itself loose, and has wandered across her forehead. Almost unconsciously but very lovingly, he moves it back into its proper place. "What have I done, Lilian, that you should so soon have learned to hate me?" he whispers: "we used to be good friends." "So long ago"--in stifled tones from behind the handkerchief--"that I have almost forgotten it." "Not so very long. A few weeks at the utmost,--before your cousin came." "Yes,"--with a sigh,--"before my cousin came." "That is only idle recrimination. I know I once erred deeply, but surely I have repented, and---- Tell me why you hate me." "I cannot." "Why?" "Because I don't know myself." "What! you confess you hate me without cause?" "That is not it." "What then?" "How can I tell you," she says, impatiently, "when I know I don't hate you _at all_?" "Lilian, is that true?" taking away the handkerchief gently but forcibly that he may see her face, which after all is not nearly so tear-stained as it should be, considering all the heart-rending sobs to which he has been listening. "Are you sure? am I not really distasteful to you? Perhaps even,"--with an accession of hope, seeing she does not turn from him,--"you like me a little, still?" "When you are good,"--with an airy laugh and a slight pout--"I do a _little_. Yes,"--seeing him glance longingly at her hand,--"you may kiss it, and then we shall be friends again, for to-night at least. Now do take me down, Sir Guy: if we stay here much longer I shall be seeing bogies in all the corners. Already your ancestors seem to be frowning at me, and a more dark and blood-thirsty set of relatives I never saw. I hope you won't turn out as bad to look at in your old age." "It all depends. When we are happy we are generally virtuous. Misery creates vice." "What a sententious speech!" He has taken up his fair burden again, and they are now (very slowly, I must say) descending the stairs. "Now here comes a curve," she says, with a return of all her old sauciness: "please do not drop me." "I have half a mind to," laughing. "Suppose, now, I let you fall cleverly over these banisters on to the stone flooring beneath, I should save myself from many a flout and many a scornful speech, and rid myself forever of a troublesome little ward." Leaning her head rather backward, she looks up into his face and smiles one of her sweetest, tenderest smiles. "I am not afraid of you now, Guardy," she murmurs, softly; whereat his foolish heart beats madly. The old friendly appellation, coming so unexpectedly from her, touches him deeply: it is with difficulty he keeps himself from straining her to his heart and pressing his lips upon the beautiful childish mouth upheld to him. He has had his lesson, however, and refrains. He is still regarding her with unmistakable admiration, when Miss Beauchamp's voice from the landing above startles them both, and makes them feel, though why they scarcely know, partners in guilt. There is a metallic ring in it that strikes upon the ear, and suggests all sorts of lady-like disgust and condemnation. "I am sure, Guy, if Lilian's foot be as bad as she says it is, she would feel more comfortable lying on a sofa. Are you going to pose there all the evening for the benefit of the servants? I think it is hardly good taste of you to keep her in your arms upon the public staircase, whatever you may do in private." The last words are uttered in a rather lower tone, but are still distinctly audible. Lilian blushes a slow and painful red, and Sir Guy, giving way to a naughty word that is also distinctly audible, carries her down instantly to the dining-room. CHAPTER XXII. "For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds; Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds. * * * * * This thought is as a death."--SHAKESPEARE. The next day is dark and lowering, to Lilian's great joy, who, now she is prevented by lameness from going for one of her loved rambles, finds infinite satisfaction in the thought that even were she quite well, it would be impossible for her to stir out of doors. According to her mode of arguing, this is one day not lost. About two o'clock Archibald returns, in time for luncheon, and to resume his care of Lilian, who gives him a gentle scolding for his desertion of her in her need. He is full of information about town and their mutual friends there, and imparts it freely. "Everything is as melancholy up there as it can be," he says, "and very few men to be seen: the clubs are deserted, all shooting or hunting, no doubt. The rain was falling in torrents all the day." "Poor Archie, you have been having a bad time of it, I fear." "In spite of the weather and her ruddy locks, Lady Belle Damascene has secured the prize of the season, out of season. She is engaged to Lord Wyntermere: it is not yet publicly announced, but I called to see her mother for five minutes, and so great was her exultation she could not refrain from whispering the delightful intelligence into my ear. Lady Belle is staying with his people now in Sussex." "Certainly, 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder.' She is painfully ugly," says Miss Beauchamp. "Such feet, such hands, and such a shocking complexion!" "She is very kind-hearted and amiable," says Cyril. "That is what is always said of a plain woman," retorts Florence. "When you hear a girl is amiable, always conclude she is hideous. When one's trumpeter is in despair, he says that." "I am sure Lord Wyntermere must be a young man of good sound sense," says Lilian, who never agrees with Florence. "If she has a kind heart he will never be disappointed in her. And, after all, there is no such great advantage to be derived from beauty. When people are married for four or five years, I dare say they quite forget whether the partner of their joys and sorrows was originally lovely or the reverse: custom deadens perception." "It is better to be good than beautiful," says Lady Chetwoode, who abhors ugly women: "you know what Carew says: "But a smooth and steadfast mind, Gentle thoughts and calm desires, Hearts with equal love combined, Kindle never-dying fires; Where these are not, I despise Lovely cheeks or lips or eyes." "Well done, Madre," says Cyril. "You are coming out. I had no idea you were so gifted. Your delivery is perfect." "And what are you all talking about?" continues Lady Chetwoode: "I think Belle Damascene very sweet to look at. In spite of her red hair, and a good many freckles, and--and--a rather short nose, her expression is very lovable: when she smiles I always feel inclined to kiss her. She is like her mother, who is one of the best women I know." "If you encourage my mother she will end by telling you Lady Belle is a beauty and a reigning toast," says Guy, _sotto voce_. Lady Chetwoode laughs, and Lilian says: "What is every one wearing now, Archie?" "There is nobody to wear anything. For the rest they had all on some soft, shiny stuff like the dress you wore the night before last." "What an accurate memory you have!" says Florence, letting her eyes rest on Guy's for a moment, though addressing Chesney. "Satin," translates Lilian, unmoved. "And their bonnets?" "Oh, yes! they all wore bonnets or hats, I don't know which," vaguely. "Naturally; mantillas are not yet in vogue. You are better than 'Le Follet,' Archie; your answers are so satisfactory. Did you meet any one we know?" "Hardly any one. By the bye,"--turning curiously to Sir Guy,--"was Trant here to-day?" "No," surprised: "why do you ask?" "Because I met him at Truston this morning. He got out of the train by which I went on,--it seems he has been staying with the Bulstrodes,--and I fancied he was coming on here, but had not time to question him, as I barely caught the train; another minute's delay and I should have been late." Archibald rambles on about his near escape of being late for the train, while his last words sink deep into the minds of Guy and Cyril. The former grows singularly silent; a depressed expression gains upon his face. Cyril, on the contrary, becomes feverishly gay, and with his mad observations makes merry Lilian laugh heartily. But when luncheon is over and they all disperse, a gloom falls upon him: his features contract; doubt and a terrible suspicion, augmented by slanderous tales that forever seem to be poured into his ears, make havoc of the naturally kind expression that characterizes his face, and with a stifled sigh he turns and walks toward the billiard-room. Guy follows him. As Cyril enters the doorway, he enters too, and, closing the door softly, lays his hand upon his shoulder. "You heard, Cyril?" he says, with exceeding gentleness. "Heard what?" turning somewhat savagely upon him. "My dear fellow,"--affectionate entreaty in his tone,--"do not be offended with me. Will you not listen, Cyril? It is very painful to me to speak, but how can I see my brother so--so shamefully taken in without uttering a word of warning." "If you were less tragic and a little more explicit it might help matters," replies Cyril, with a sneer and a short unpleasant laugh. "Do speak plainly." "I will, then,"--desperately,--"since you desire it. There is more between Trant and Mrs. Arlington than we know of. I do not speak without knowledge. From several different sources I have heard the same story,--of his infatuation for some woman, and of his having taken a house for her in some remote spot. No names were mentioned, mind; but, from what I have unwillingly listened to it is impossible not to connect these evil whispers that are afloat with him and her. Why does he come so often to the neighborhood and yet never dare to present himself at Chetwoode?" "And you believe Trant capable of so far abusing the rights of friendship as to ask you--_you_--to supply the house in the remote spot?" "Unfortunately, I must." "You are speaking of your friend,"--with a bitter sneer,--"and you can coldly accuse him of committing so blackguardly an action?" "If all I have heard be true (and I have no reason to doubt it), he is no longer any friend of mine," says Guy, haughtily. "I shall settle with him later on when I have clearer evidence; in the meantime it almost drives me mad to think he should have dared to bring down here, so close to my mother, his----" "What?" cries Cyril, fiercely, thrusting his brother from him with passionate violence. "What is it you would say? Take care, Guy; take care: you have gone too far already. From whom, pray, have you learned your infamous story?" "I beg your pardon," Guy says, gently, extreme regret visible in his countenance. "I should not have spoken so, under the circumstances. It was not from one alone, but from several, I heard what I now tell you,--though I must again remind you that no names were mentioned; still, I could not help drawing my own conclusions." "They lied!" returns Cyril, passionately, losing his head. "You may tell them so for me. And you,"--half choking,--"you lie too when you repeat such vile slanders." "It is useless to argue with you," Guy says, coldly, the blood mounting hotly to his forehead at Cyril's insulting words, while his expression grows stern and impenetrable. "I waste time. Yet this last word I will say: Go down to The Cottage--now--this moment--and convince yourself of the truth of what I have said." He turns angrily away: while Cyril, half mad with indignation and unacknowledged fear, follows this final piece of advice, and almost unconsciously leaving the house, takes the wonted direction, and hardly draws breath until the trim hedges and pretty rustic gates of The Cottage are in view. The day is showery, threatening since dawn, and now the rain is falling thickly, though he heeds it not at all. As with laggard steps he draws still nearer the abode of her he loves yet does not wholly trust, the sound of voices smites upon his ear. He is standing upon the very spot--somewhat elevated--that overlooks the arbor where so long ago Miss Beauchamp stood and learned his acquaintance with Mrs. Arlington. Here now he too stays his steps and gazes spell-bound upon what he sees before him. In the arbor, with his back turned to Cyril, is a man, tall, elderly, with an iron-gray moustache. Though not strictly handsome, he has a fine and very military bearing, and a figure quite unmistakable to one who knows him: with a sickly chill at his heart, Cyril acknowledges him to be Colonel Trant. Cecilia is beside him. She is weeping bitterly, but quietly, and with one hand conceals her face with her handkerchief. The other is fast imprisoned in both of Trant's. A film settles upon Cyril's eyes, a dull faintness overpowers him, involuntarily he places one hand upon the trunk of a near elm to steady himself; yet through the semi-darkness, the strange, unreal feeling that possesses him, the voices still reach him cruelly distinct. "Do not grieve so terribly: it breaks my heart to see you, darling, _darling_," says Trant, in a low, impassioned tone, and raising the hand he holds, presses his lips to it tenderly. The slender white fingers tremble perceptibly under the caress, and then Cecilia says, in a voice hardly audible through her tears: "I am so unhappy! it is all my fault; knowing you loved me, I should have told you before of----" But her voice breaks the spell: Cyril, as it meets his ears, rouses himself with a start. Not once again does he even glance in her direction, but with a muttered curse at his own folly, turns and goes swiftly homeward. A very frenzy of despair and disappointment rages within him: to have so loved,--to be so foully betrayed! Her tears, her sorrow (connected no doubt with some early passages between her and Trant), because of their very poignancy, only render him the more furious. On reaching Chetwoode he shuts himself into his own room, and, feigning an excuse, keeps himself apart from the rest of the household all the remainder of the evening and the night. "Knowing you loved me,"--the words ring in his ears. Ay, she knew it,--who should know it better?--but had carefully kept back all mention of the fact when pressed by him, Cyril, upon the subject. All the world knew what he, poor fool, had been the last to discover. And what was it her tender conscience was accusing her of not having told Trant before?--of her flirtation, as no doubt she mildly termed all the tender looks and speeches, and clinging kisses, and loving protestations so freely bestowed upon Cyril,--of her flirtation, no doubt. The next morning, after a sleepless night, he starts for London, and there spends three reckless, miserable days that leave him wan and aged through reason of the conflict he is waging with himself. After which a mad desire to see again the cause of all his misery, to openly accuse her of her treachery, to declare to her all the irreparable mischief she has done, the utter ruin she has made of his life, seizes hold upon him, and, leaving the great city, and reaching Truston, he goes straight from the station to The Cottage once so dear. In her garden Cecilia is standing all alone. The wind is sighing plaintively through the trees that arch above her head, the thousand dying leaves are fluttering to her feet. There is a sense of decay and melancholy in all around that harmonizes exquisitely with the dejection of her whole manner. Her attitude is sad and drooping, her air depressed; there are tears, and an anxious, expectant look in her gray eyes. "Pining for her lover, no doubt," says Cyril, between his teeth (in which supposition he is right); and then he opens the gate, and goes quickly up to her. As she hears the well-known click of the latch she turns, and, seeing him, lets fall unheeded to the ground the basket she is holding, and runs to him with eyes alight, and soft cheeks tinged with a lovely generous pink, and holds out her hands to him with a little low glad cry. "At last, truant!" she exclaims, joyfully; "after three whole long, long days; and what has kept you from me? Why, Cyril, Cyril!"--recoiling, while a dull ashen shade replaces the gay tinting of her cheeks,--"what has happened? How oddly you look! You,--you are in trouble?" "I am," in a changed, harsh tone she scarcely realizes to be his, moving back with a gesture of contempt from the extended hands that would so gladly have clasped his. "In so far you speak the truth: I have discovered all. One lover, it appears, was not sufficient for you; you should dupe another for your amusement. It is an old story, but none the less bitter. No, it is useless your speaking," staying her with a passionate movement: "I tell you I know _all_." "All what?" she asks. She has not removed from his her lustrous eyes, though her lips have turned very white. "Your perfidy." "Cyril, explain yourself," she says, in a low, agonized tone, her pallor changing to a deep crimson. And to Cyril hateful certainty appears if possible more certain by reason of this luckless blush. "Ay, you may well change countenance," he says, with suppressed fury in which keen agony is blended; "have you yet the grace to blush? As to explanation, I scarcely think you can require it; yet, as you demand it, you shall have it. For weeks I have been hearing of you tales in which your name and Trant's were always mingled; but I disregarded them; I madly shut my ears and was deaf to them; I would not believe, until it was too late, until I saw and learned beyond dispute the folly of my faith. I was here last Friday evening!" "Yes?" calmly, though in her soft eyes a deep well of bitterness has sprung. "Well, you were there, in that arbor"--pointing to it--"where _we_"--with a scornful laugh--"so often sat; but then you had a more congenial companion. Trant was with you. He held your hand, he caressed it; he called you his 'darling,' and you allowed it, though indeed why should you not? doubtless it is a customary word from him to you! And then you wept as though your heart, your _heart_"--contemptuously-- "would break. Were you confessing to him your coquetry with me? and perhaps obtaining an easy forgiveness?" "No, I was not," quietly, though there is immeasurable scorn in her tone. "No?" slightingly. "For what, then, were you crying?" "Sir,"--with a first outward sign of indignation,--"I refuse to tell you. By what right do you now ask the question? yesterday, nay, an hour since, I should have felt myself bound to answer any inquiry of yours, but not now. The tie between us, a frail one as it seems to me, is broken; our engagement is at an end: I shall not answer you!" "Because you dare not," retorts he, fiercely, stung by her manner. "I think you dare too much when you venture so to address me," in a low clear tone. "And yet, as it is in all human probability the last time we shall ever meet, and as I would have you remember all your life long the gross injustice you have done me, I shall satisfy your curiosity. But recollect, sir, these are indeed the final words that shall pass between us. "A year ago Colonel Trant so far greatly honored me as to ask me to marry him: for many reasons I then refused. Twice since I came to Chetwoode he has been to see me,--once to bring me law papers of some importance, and last Friday to again ask me to be his wife. Again I refused. I wept then, because, unworthy as I am, I know I was giving pain to the truest, and, as I know now,"--with a faint trembling in her voice, quickly subdued--"the _only_ friend I have! When declining his proposal, I gave my reason for doing so! I told him I loved another! That other was you!" Casting this terrible revenge in his teeth, she turns, and, walking majestically into the house, closes the door with significant haste behind her. This is the one solitary instance of inhospitality shown by Cecilia in all her life. Never until now was she known to shut her door in the face of trouble. And surely Cyril's trouble at this moment is sore and needy! To disbelieve Cecilia when face to face with her is impossible. Her eyes are truth itself. Her whole manner, so replete with dignity and offended pride, declares her innocent. Cyril stands just where she had left him, in stunned silence, for at least a quarter of an hour, repeating to himself miserably all that she has said, and reminding himself with cold-blooded cruelty of all he has said to her. At the end of this awful fifteen minutes, he bethinks himself his hair must now, if ever, be turned gray; and then, a happier and more resolute thought striking him, he takes his courage in his two hands, and walking boldly up to the hall door, knocks and demands admittance with really admirable composure. Abominable composure, thinks Cecilia, who in spite of her stern determination never to know him again, has been watching him covertly from behind a handkerchief and a bedroom curtain all this time, and is now stationed at the top of the staircase, with dim eyes, but very acute ears. "Yes," Kate tells him, "her mistress is at home," and forthwith shows him into the bijou drawing-room. After which she departs to tell her mistress of his arrival. Three minutes, that to Cyril's excited fancy lengthen themselves into twenty, pass away slowly, and then Kate returns. "Her mistress's compliments, and she has a terrible headache, and will Mr. Chetwoode be so kind as to excuse her?" Mr. Chetwoode on this occasion is not kind. "He is sorry," he stammers, "but if Mrs. Arlington could let him see her for five minutes, he would not detain her longer. He has something of the utmost importance to say to her." His manner is so earnest, so pleading, that Kate, who scents at least a death in the air, retires full of compassion for the "pore gentleman." And then another three minutes, that now to the agitated listener appear like forty, drag themselves into the past. Suspense is growing intolerable, when a well-known step in the hall outside makes his heart beat almost to suffocation. The door is opened slowly, and Mrs. Arlington comes in. "You have something to say to me?" she asks, curtly, unkindly, standing just inside the door, and betraying an evident determination not to sit down for any consideration upon earth. Her manner is uncompromising and forbidding, but her eyes are very red. There is rich consolation in this discovery. "I have," replies Cyril, openly confused now it has come to the point. "Say it, then. I am here to listen to you. My servant tells me it is something of the deepest importance." "So it is. In all the world there is nothing so important to me. Cecilia,"--coming a little nearer to her,--"it is that I want your forgiveness; I ask your pardon very humbly, and I throw myself upon your mercy. You must forgive me!" "Forgiveness seems easy to you, who cannot feel," replies she, haughtily, turning as though to leave the room; but Cyril intercepts her, and places his back against the door. "I cannot let you go until you are friends with me again," he says, in deep agitation. "Friends!" "Think what I have gone through. _You_ have only suffered for a few minutes, _I_ have suffered for three long days. Think of it. My heart was breaking all the time. I went to London hoping to escape thought, and never shall I forget what I endured in that detestable city. Like a man in a dream I lived, scarcely seeing, or, if seeing, only trying to elude, those I knew. At times----" "You went to London?" "Yes, that is how I have been absent for three days; I have hardly slept or eaten since last I saw you." Here Cecilia is distinctly conscious of a feeling of satisfaction: next to a man's dying for you the sweetest thing is to hear of a man's starving for you! "Sometimes," goes on Cyril, piling up the agony higher and higher, and speaking in his gloomiest tones, "I thought it would be better if I put an end to it once for all, by blowing out my brains." "How dare you speak to me like this?" Cecilia says in a trembling voice: "it is horrible. You would commit suicide? Am I not unhappy enough, that you must seek to make me more so? Why should you blow your brains out?" with a shudder. "Because I could not live without you. Even now,"--reproachfully,--"when I see you looking so coldly upon me, I almost wish I had put myself out of the way for good." "Cyril, I forbid you to talk like this." "Why? I don't suppose you care whether I am dead or alive." This artful speech, uttered in a heart-broken tone, does immense execution. "If you were dead," begins she, forlornly, and then stops short, because her voice fails her, and two large tears steal silently down her cheeks. "Would you care?" asks Cyril, going up to her and placing one arm gently round her; being unrepulsed, he gradually strengthens this arm with the other. "Would you?" "I hardly know." "Darling, don't be cruel. I was wrong, terribly, unpardonably wrong ever to doubt your sweet truth; but when one has stories perpetually dinned into one's ears, one naturally grows jealous of one's shadow, when one loves as I do." "And pray, who told you all these stories?" "Never mind." "But I do mind," with an angry sob. "What! you are to hear lies of me, and to believe them, and I am not even to know who told you them! I do mind, and I insist on knowing." "Surely it cannot signify now, when I tell you I don't believe them." "It does signify, and I should be told. But indeed I need not ask," with exceeding bitterness; "I know. It was your brother, Sir Guy. He has always (why I know not) been a cruel enemy of mine." "He only repeated what he heard. He is not to be blamed." "It _was_ he, then?" quickly. "But 'blamed'?--of course not; no one is in the wrong, I suppose, but poor me! I think, sir,"--tremulously,--"it would be better you should go home, and forget you ever knew any one so culpable as I am. I should be afraid to marry into a family that could so misjudge me as yours does. Go, and learn to forget me." "I can go, of course, if you desire it," laying hold of his hat: "that is a simple matter; but I cannot promise to forget. To some people it may be easy, to me impossible." "Nothing is impossible. The going is the first step. Oblivion"--with a sigh--"will quickly follow." "I do not think so. But, since you wish my absence--" He moves toward the door with lowered head and dejected manner. "I did not say I wished it," in faltering tones; "I only requested you to leave me for your own sake, and because I would not make your people unhappy. Though"--piteously--"it should break my heart, I would still bid you go." "Would it break your heart?" flinging his hat into a corner (for my own part, I don't believe he ever meant going): coming up to her, he folds her in his arms. "Forgive me, I entreat you," he says, "for what I shall never forgive myself." The humbleness of this appeal touches Cecilia's tender heart. She makes no effort to escape from his encircling arms; she even returns one out of his many caresses. "To think you could behave so badly to me!" she whispers, reproachfully. "I am a brute! I know it." "Oh, no! indeed you are not," says Mrs. Arlington. "Well, yes,"--drawing a long breath,--"I forgive you; but _promise_, promise you will never distrust me again." Of course he gives the required promise, and peace is once more restored. "I shall not be content with an engagement any longer," Cyril says, presently. "I consider it eminently unsatisfactory. Why not marry me at once? I have nine hundred a year, and a scrap of an estate a few miles from this,--by the bye, you have never yet been to see your property,--and, if you are not afraid to venture, I think we might be very happy, even on that small sum." "I am not afraid of anything with you," she says, in her calm, tender fashion; "and money has nothing to do with it. If," with a troubled sigh, "I ever marry you, I shall not come to you empty-handed." "'If: dost thou answer me with ifs?'" quotes he, gayly. "I tell you, sweet, there is no such word in my dictionary. I shall only wait a favorable opportunity to ask my mother's consent to our marriage." "And if she refuses it?" "Why, then I shall marry you without hers, or yours, or the consent of any one in the world." "You jest," she says, tears gathering in her large appealing eyes. "I would not have you make your mother miserable." "Above all things, do not let me see tears in your eyes again," he says, quickly. "I forbid it. For one thing, it makes me wretched, and"--softly--"it makes me feel sure _you_ are wretched, which is far worse. Cecilia, if you don't instantly dry those tears I shall be under the painful necessity of kissing them away. I tell you I shall get my mother's consent very readily. When she sees you, she will be only too proud to welcome such a daughter." Soon after this they part, more in love with each other than ever. CHAPTER XXIII. "_Phebe._--I have more cause to hate him than to love him: For what had he to do to chide at me?"--_As You Like It._ When Lilian's foot is again strong and well, almost the first use she makes of it is to go to The Cottage to see Cecilia. She is gladly welcomed there; the two girls are as pleased with each other as even in fond anticipation they had dreamed they should be: and how seldom are such dreams realized! They part with a secret though mutual hope that they shall soon see each other again. Of her first two meetings with the lovely widow Lilian speaks openly to Lady Chetwoode; but with such an utter want of interest is her news received that instinctively she refrains from making any further mention of her new acquaintance. Meantime the friendship ripens rapidly, until at length scarcely a week elapses without Lilian's paying at least one or two visits at The Cottage. Of the strength of this growing intimacy Sir Guy is supremely ignorant, until one day chance betrays to him its existence. It is a bright but chilly morning, one of November's rawest efforts. The trees, bereft of even their faded mantle, that has dropped bit by bit from their meagre arms, now stand bare and shivering in their unlovely nakedness. The wind, whistling shrilly, rushes through them with impatient haste, as though longing to escape from their gaunt and most untempting embraces. There is a suspicion of snow in the biting air. In The Cottage a roaring fire is scolding and quarreling vigorously on its way up the chimney, illuminating with its red rays the parlor in which it burns; Cecilia is standing on one side of the hearth, looking up at Lilian, who has come down by appointment to spend the day with her, and who is mounted on a chair hanging a picture much fancied by Cecilia. They are freely discussing its merits, and with their gay chatter are outdoing the noisy fire. To Cecilia the sweet companionship of this girl is not only an antidote to her loneliness, but an excessive pleasure. The picture just hung is a copy of the "Meditation," and is a special favorite of Lilian's, who, being the most unsentimental person in the world, takes a tender delight in people of the visionary order. "Do you know, Cecilia," she says, "I think the eyes something like yours?" "Do you?" smiling. "You flatter me." "I flatter 'Mademoiselle la Meditation,' you mean. No; you have a thoughtful, almost a wistful look about you, at times, that might strongly remind any one of this picture. Now, I"--reflectively--"could _never_ look like that. When I think (which, to do me justice, is seldom), I always dwell upon unpleasant topics, and in consequence I maintain on these rare occasions an exceedingly sour, not to say ferocious, expression. I hate thinking!" "So much the better," replies her companion, with a faint sigh. "The more persistently you put thought behind you, the longer you will retain happiness." "Why, how sad you look! Have I, as usual, said the wrong thing? You _mustn't_ think,"--affectionately,--"if it makes you sad. Come, Cis, let me cheer you up." Cecilia starts as though struck, and moves backward as the pretty abbreviation of her name sounds upon her ear. An expression of hatred and horror rises and mars her face. "Never call me by that name again," she says with some passion, laying her hand upon the sideboard to steady herself. "Never! do you hear? My father called me so----" she pauses, and the look of horror passes from her, only to be replaced by one of shame. "What must you think of me," she asks, slowly, "you who honored your father? I, too, had a father, but I did not--no, I did not love him. Am I hateful, am I unnatural, in your eyes?" "Cecilia," says Lilian, with grave simplicity, "you could not be unnatural, you could not be hateful, in the sight of any one." "That name you called me by"--struggling with her emotion--"recalled old scenes, old memories, most horrible to me. I am unhinged to-day: you must not mind me." "You are not well, dearest." "That man, my husband,"--with a strong shudder,--"he, too, called me by that name. After long years," she says, throwing out her hands with a significant gesture, as though she would fain so fling from her all haunting thoughts, "I cannot rid myself of the fear, the loathing, of those past days. _Are_ they past? Is my terror an omen that they are not yet ended?" "Cecilia, you shall not speak so," says Lilian, putting her arms gently round her. "You are nervous and--and upset about something. Why should you encourage such superstitious thoughts, when happiness lies within your grasp? How can harm come near you in this pretty wood, where you reign queen? Come, smile at me directly, or I shall tell Cyril of your evil behavior, and send him here armed with a stout whip to punish you for your naughtiness. What a whip that would be!" says Lilian, laughing so gleefully that Cecilia perforce laughs too. "How sweet you are to me!" she says, fondly, with tears in her eyes. "At times I am more than foolish, and last night I had a terrible dream; but your coming has done me good. Now I can almost laugh at my own fears, that were so vivid a few hours ago. But my youth was not a happy one." "Now you have reached old age, I hope you will enjoy it," says Miss Chesney, demurely. Almost at this moment, Sir Guy Chetwoode is announced, and is shown by the inestimable Kate into the parlor instead of the drawing-room, thereby causing unutterable mischief. It is only the second time since Mrs. Arlington's arrival at The Cottage he has put in an appearance there, and each time business has been his sole cause for calling. He is unmistakably surprised at Lilian's presence, but quickly suppresses all show of emotion. At first he looks faintly astonished, but so faintly that a second later one wonders whether the astonishment was there at all. He shakes hands formally with Mrs. Arlington, and smiles in a somewhat restrained fashion upon Lilian. In truth he is much troubled at the latter's evident familiarity with the place and its inmate. Lilian, jumping down from her high elevation, says to Cecilia: "If you two are going to talk business, I shall go into the next room. The very thought of anything connected with the bugbear 'Law' depresses me to death. You can call me, Cecilia, when you have quite done." "Don't be frightened," says Guy, pleasantly, though inwardly he frowns as he notes Lilian's unceremonious usage of his tenant's Christian name. "I shan't detain Mrs. Arlington two minutes." Then he addresses himself exclusively to Cecilia, and says what he has to say in a perfectly courteous, perfectly respectful, perfectly freezing tone,--to all of which Cecilia responds with a similar though rather exaggerated amount of coldness that deadens the natural sweetness of her behavior, and makes Lilian tell herself she has never yet seen Cecilia to such disadvantage, which is provoking, as she has set her heart above all things on making Guy like her lovely friend. Then Sir Guy, with a distant salutation, withdraws; and both women feel, silently, as though an icicle had melted from their midst. "I wonder why your guardian so dislikes me," says Mrs. Arlington, in a somewhat hurt tone. "He is ever most ungenerous in his treatment of me." "Ungenerous!" hastily, "oh, no! he is not that. He is the most generous-minded man alive. But--but----" "Quite so, dear,"--with a faint smile that yet has in it a tinge of bitterness. "You see there is a 'but.' I have never wronged him, yet he hates me." "Never mind who hates you," says Lilian, impulsively. "Cyril loves you, and so do I." "I can readily excuse the rest," says Mrs. Arlington, with a bright smile, kissing her pretty consoler with grateful warmth. * * * * * An hour after Lilian's return to Chetwoode on this momentous day, Guy, having screwed his courage to the sticking-point, enters his mother's boudoir, where he knows she and Lilian are sitting alone. Lady Chetwoode is writing at a distant table; Miss Chesney, on a sofa close to the fire, is surreptitiously ruining--or, as she fondly but erroneously believes, is knitting away bravely at--the gray sock her ladyship has just laid down. Lilian's pretty lips are pursed up, her brow is puckered, her soft color has risen as she bends in strong hope over her work. The certain charm that belongs to this scene fails to impress Sir Guy, who is too full of agitated determination to leave room for minor interests. "Lilian," he says, bluntly, with all the execrable want of tact that characterizes the very gentlest of men, "I wish you would not cultivate an acquaintance with Mrs. Arlington." "Eh?" says Lilian, looking up in somewhat dazed amazement from her knitting, which is gradually getting into a more and more hopeless mess, "what is it, then, Sir Guy?" "I wish you would not seek an intimacy with Mrs. Arlington," repeats Chetwoode, speaking all the more sternly in that he feels his courage ebbing. The sternness, however, proves a mistake; Miss Chesney resents it, and, scenting battle afar off, encases herself in steel, and calmly, nay, eagerly, awaits the onslaught. "What has put you out?" she says, speaking in a tone eminently calculated to incense the listener. "You seem disturbed. Has Heskett been poaching again? or has that new pointer turned out a _disappointer_? What has poor Mrs. Arlington done to you, that you must send her to Coventry?" "Nothing, only----" "Nothing! Oh, Sir Guy, surely you must have some substantial reason for tabooing her so entirely." "Perhaps I have. At all events, I ask you most particularly to give up visiting at The Cottage." "I am very sorry, indeed, to seem disobliging, but I shall not give up a friend without sufficient reason for so doing." "A friend! Oh, this is madness," says Sir Guy, with a perceptible start; then, turning toward his mother, he says, in a rather louder tone, that adds to the imperiousness of his manner, "Mother, will _you_ speak to Lilian, and desire her not to go?" "But, my dear, why?" asks Lady Chetwoode, raising her eyes in a vague fashion from her pen. "Because I will not have her associating with people of whom we know nothing," replies he, at his wit's end for an excuse. This one is barefaced, as at any other time he is far too liberal a man to condemn any one for being a mere stranger. "I know a good deal of her," says Lilian, imperturbably, "and I think her charming. Perhaps,--who knows?--as she is unknown, she may prove a duchess in disguise." "She may, but I doubt it," replies he, a disagreeable note of irony running through his speech. "Have you discovered her parentage?" asks Lady Chetwoode, hastily. "Is she of low birth? Lilian, my dear, don't have low tastes: there is nothing on earth," says Lady Chetwoode, mildly, "so--so--so _melancholy_ as a person afflicted with low tastes." "If thinking Mrs. Arlington a lady in the very best sense of the word is a low taste, I confess myself afflicted," says Miss Chesney, rather saucily; whereupon Lady Chetwoode, who knows mischief is brewing and is imbued with a wholesome horror of all disputes between her son and his ward, rises hurriedly and prepares to quit the room. "I hope Archie will not miss his train," she says, irrelevantly. "He is always so careless, and I know it is important he should see his solicitor this evening about the transfer of York's farm. Where is Archibald?" "In the library, I think," responds Lilian. "Dear Archie, how we shall miss him! shan't we, auntie?" This tenderly regretful speech has reference to Mr. Chesney's intended departure, he having at last, through business, been compelled to leave Chetwoode and the object of his adoration. "We shall, indeed. But remember,"--kindly,--"he has promised to return to us at Christmas with Taffy." "I do remember," gayly; "but for that, I feel I should give way to tears." Here Lady Chetwoode lays her hand upon the girl's shoulder, and presses it gently, entreatingly. "Do not reject Guy's counsel, child," she says, softly; "you know he always speaks for your good." Lilian makes no reply, but, gracefully turning her head, lays her red lips upon the gentle hand that still rests upon her shoulder. Then Lady Chetwoode leaves the room, and Lilian and her guardian are alone. An ominous silence follows her departure. Lilian, who has abandoned the unhappy sock, has now taken in hand a very valuable Dresden china cup, and is apparently examining it with the most profound interest. "I have your promise not to go again to The Cottage?" asks Sir Guy at length, the exigency of the case causing his persistency. "I think not." "Why will you persist in this obstinate refusal?" angrily. "For many reasons," with a light laugh. "Shall I tell you one? Did you ever hear of the 'relish of being forbidden?'" "It is not a trifling matter. If it was possible, I would tell you what would prevent your ever wishing to know this Mrs. Arlington again. But, as it is, I am your guardian,"--determinately,--"I am responsible for you: I do not wish you to be intimate at The Cottage, and in this one matter at least I must be obeyed." "Must you? we shall see," replies Miss Chesney, with a tantalizing laugh that, but for the sweet beauty of her _riante_ face, her dewy, mutinous mouth, her great blue eyes, now ablaze with childish wrath, would have made him almost hate her. As it is, he is exceeding full of an indignation he scarcely seeks to control. "I, as your guardian, forbid you to go to see that woman," he says, in a condensed tone. "And why, pray?" "I cannot explain: I simply forbid you. She is not fit to be an associate of yours." "Then I will _not_ be forbidden: so there!" says Miss Chesney, defiantly. "Lilian, once for all, do not go to The Cottage again," says Guy, very pale. "If you do you will regret it." "Is that a threat?" "No; it is a warning. Take it as such if you are wise. If you go against my wishes in this matter, I shall refuse to take charge of you any longer." "I don't want you to take charge of me," cries Lilian, tears of passion and wounded feeling in her eyes. In her excitement she has risen to her feet and stands confronting him, the Dresden cup still within her hand. "I am not a beggar, that I should crave your hospitality. I can no doubt find a home with some one who will not hate me as you do." With this, the foolish child, losing her temper _in toto_, raises her hand and, because it is the nearest thing to her, flings the cherished cup upon the floor, where it lies shattered into a thousand pieces. In silence Guy contemplates the ruins, in silence Lilian watches him; no faintest trace of remorse shows itself in her angry fair little face. I think the keenest regret Guy knows at this moment is that she isn't a boy, for the simple reason that he would dearly like to box her ears. Being a woman, and an extremely lovely one, he is necessarily disarmed. "So now!" says Miss Lilian, still defiant. "I have a great mind," replies Guy, raising his eyes slowly to hers, "to desire you to pick up every one of those fragments." This remark is unworthy of him, proving that in his madness there is not even method. His speech falls as a red spark into the hot fire of Miss Chesney's wrath. "_You_ desire!" she says, blazing instantly. "What is it you would say? 'Desire!' On the contrary, _I_ desire _you_ to pick them up, and I shall stay here to see my commands obeyed." She has come a little closer to him, and is now standing opposite him with flushed cheeks and sparkling eyes. With one firm little finger she points to the _débris_. She looks such a fragile creature possessed with such an angry spirit that Chetwoode, in spite of himself acknowledging the comicality of the situation, cannot altogether conceal a smile. "Pick them up," says Lilian imperatively, for the second time. "What a little Fury you are!" says Guy; and then, with a faint shrug, he succumbs, and, stooping, does pick up the pieces of discord. "I do it," he says, raising himself when his task is completed, and letting severity once more harden his features, "to prevent my mother's being grieved by such an exhibition of----" "No, you do not," interrupts she; "you do it because I wished it. For the future understand that, though you are my guardian, I will not be treated as though I were a wayward child." "Well, you _have_ a wicked temper!" says Guy, who is very pale, drawing his breath quickly. He smiles as he says it, but it is a smile more likely to incense than to soothe. "I have not," retorts Lilian, passionately. "But that you goaded me I should never have given way to anger. It is you who have the wicked temper. I dislike you! I hate you! I wish I had never entered your house! And"--superbly, drawing herself up to her full height, which does not take her far--"I shall now leave it! And I shall never come back to it again!" This fearful threat she hurls at his head with much unction. Not that she means it, but it is as well to be forcible on such occasions. The less you mean a thing, the more eloquent and vehement you should grow; the more you mean it, the less vehemence the better, because then it is energy thrown away: the fact accomplished later on will be crushing enough in itself. This is a rule that should be strictly observed. Guy, whose head is held considerably higher than its wont, looks calmly out of the window, and disdains to take notice of this outburst. His silence irritates Miss Chesney, who has still sufficient rage concealed within her to carry her victoriously through two quarrels. She is therefore about to let the vials of her wrath once more loose upon her unhappy guardian, when the door opens, and Florence, calm and stately, sweeps slowly in. "Aunt Anne not here?" she says; and then she glances at Guy, who is still holding in his hands some of the fragments of the broken cup, and who is looking distinctly guilty, and then suspiciously at Lilian, whose soft face is crimson, and whose blue eyes are very much darker than usual. There is a second's pause, and then Lilian, walking across the room, goes out, and bangs the door, with much unnecessary violence, behind her. "Dear me!" exclaims Florence, affectedly, when she has recovered from the shock her delicate nerves have sustained through the abrupt closing of the door. "How vehement dear Lilian is! There is nothing so ruinous to one's manners as being brought up without the companionship of well-bred women. The loss of it makes a girl so--so--hoydenish, and----" "I don't think Lilian hoydenish," interrupts Guy, who is in the humor to quarrel with his shadow,--especially, strange as it seems, with any one who may chance to speak ill of the small shrew who has just flown like a whirlwind from the room. "No?" says Miss Beauchamp, sweetly. "Perhaps you are right. As a rule,"--with an admiring glance, so deftly thrown as to make one regret it should be so utterly flung away,--"you always are. It may be only natural spirits, but if so,"--blandly,--"don't you think she has a great deal of natural spirits?" "I don't know, I'm sure," says Sir Guy. As he answers he looks at her, and tells himself he hates all her pink and white fairness, her dull brown locks, her duller eyes, and more, _much_ more than all, her large and fleshy nose. "Has she?" he says, in a tone that augurs ill for any one who may have the hardihood to carry on the conversation. "I think she has," says Florence, innocently, a little touch of doggedness running beneath the innocency. "But, oh, Guy, is that Aunt Anne's favorite cup? the Dresden she so much prizes? I know it cost any amount of money. Who broke it?" "I did," returns Guy, shortly, unblushingly, and moving away from her, quits the room. Going up the staircase he pauses idly at a window that overlooks the avenue to watch Archibald disappearing up the drive in the dog-cart. Even as he watches him, vaguely, and without the least interest in his movements,--his entire thoughts being preoccupied with another object,--lo! that object emerges from under the lime-trees, and makes a light gesture that brings Chesney to a full stop. Throwing the reins to the groom, he springs to the ground, and for some time the two cousins converse earnestly. Then Guy, who is now regarding them with eager attention, sees Chesney help Lilian into the trap, take his seat beside her and drive away up the avenue, past the huge laurustinus, under the elms, on out of sight. A slight pang shoots across Guy's heart. Where are they going, these two? "I shall never return:"--her foolish words, that he so honestly considers foolish, come back to him now clearly, and with a strange persistency that troubles him, repeat themselves over again. Chesney is going to London, but where is Lilian going? The child's lovely, angry face rises up before him, full of a keen reproach. What was she saying to Archibald just now, in that quick vehement fashion of hers? was she upbraiding her guardian, or was she----? If Chesney had asked her then to take any immediate steps toward the fulfilling of her threat, would she, would she----? Bah! he draws himself up with a shiver, and smiles contemptuously at the absurdity of his own fears, assuring himself she will certainly be home to dinner. But dinner comes, and yet no Lilian! Lady Chetwoode has been obliged to give in an hour ago to one of her severest headaches, and now lies prone upon her bed, so that Miss Beauchamp and Guy perforce prepare to partake of that meal alone. Florence is resplendent in cream-color and blue, which doesn't suit her in the least, though it is a pretty gown, one of the prettiest in her wardrobe, and has been donned by her to-night for Guy's special delectation, finding a _tête-à-tête_ upon the cards. Chetwoode regards her with feverish anxiety as she enters the drawing-room, hoping to hear some mention made of the absent Lilian; but in this hope he is disappointed. She might never have been a guest at Chetwoode, so little notice does Miss Beauchamp take of her non-appearance. She says something amiable about "Aunt Anne's" headache, suggests a new pill as an unfailing cure for "that sort of thing," and then eats her dinner placidly, quietly, and, with a careful kindness that not one of the dishes shall feel slighted by her preference for another, patronizes all alike, without missing any. It is indeed a matter for wonder and secret admiration how Miss Beauchamp can so slowly, and with such a total absence of any appearance of gluttony, get through so much in so short a space of time. She has evidently a perfect talent for concealing any amount of viands without seeming to do so, which, it must be admitted, is a great charm. To-night I fear Guy scarcely sees the beauty of it! He is conscious of feeling disgust and a very passion of impatience. Does she not notice Lilian's absence? Will she never speak of it? A strange fear lest she should express ignorance of his ward's whereabouts ties his own tongue. But she, she does, she _must_ know, and presently no doubt will tell him. How much more of that cream is she going to eat? Surely when the servants go she will say something. Now she has nearly done: thank the stars the last bit has disappeared! She is going to lay down her spoon and acknowledge herself satisfied. "I think, Guy, I will take a little more, _very_ little, please. This new cook seems quite satisfactory," says Florence, in her slow, even, self-congratulatory way. A naughty exclamation trembles on Sir Guy's lips; by a supreme effort he suppresses it, and gives her the smallest help of the desired cream that decency will permit. After which he motions silently though peremptorily to one of the men to remove _all_ the dishes, lest by any chance his cousin should be tempted to try the cream a third time. His own dinner has gone away literally untasted. A terrible misgiving is consuming him. Lilian's words are still ringing and surging in his brain,--"I shall never return." He recalls all her hastiness, her impulsive ways, her hot temper. What if, in a moment of pride and rage, she should have really gone with her cousin! If--it is impossible! ridiculously, utterly impossible! Yet his blood grows cold in spite of his would-be disbelief; a sickening shiver runs through his veins even while he tells himself he is a fool even to imagine such a thing. And yet, where is she? "I suppose Lilian is at Mabel Steyne's," says Miss Beauchamp, calmly, having demolished the last bit on her plate with a deep sigh. "Is she?" asks Guy, in a tone half stifled. As he speaks, he stoops as though to pick up an imaginary napkin. "Your napkin is here," says Florence, in an uncompromising voice: "don't you see it?" pointing to where it rests upon the edge of the table. "Lilian, then,"--with a scrutinizing glance,--"did not tell you where she was going?" "No. There is no reason why she should." "Well, I think there is," with a low, perfectly lady-like, but extremely irritating laugh: "for one thing, her silence has cost you your dinner. I am sorry I did not relieve your mind by telling you before. But I could not possibly guess her absence could afflict you so severely. She said something this morning about going to see Mabel." "I dare say," quietly. The minutes drag. Miss Beauchamp gets through an unlimited quantity of dried fruit and two particularly fine pears in no time. She is looking longingly at a third, when Guy rises impatiently. "If she is at Mabel's I suppose I had better go and bring her home," he says, glancing at the clock. "It is a quarter to nine." "I really do not think you need trouble yourself," speaking somewhat warmly for her: "Mabel is sure to send her home in good time, if she is there!" She says this slowly, meaningly, and marks how he winces and changes color at her words. "Then think how cold the night is!" with a comfortable shiver and a glance at the leaping fire. "Of course she is at Steynemore," says Guy, hastily. "I would not be too sure: Lilian's movements are always uncertain: one never quite knows what she is going to do next. Really,"--with a repetition of her unpleasant laugh,--"when I saw her stepping into the dog-cart with her cousin to-day, I said to myself that I should not at all wonder if----" "What?" sternly, turning full upon her a pale face and flashing eyes. Miss Beauchamp's pluck always melts under Guy's anger. "Nothing," sullenly; "nothing at least that can concern you. I was merely hurrying on in my own mind a marriage that must eventually come off. The idea was absurd, of course, as any woman would prefer a fashionable wedding to all the inconvenience attendant on a runaway match." "You mean----" "I mean"--complacently--"Lilian's marriage with her cousin." "You speak"--biting his lips to maintain his composure--"as though it was all arranged." "And is it not?" with well-affected surprise. "I should have thought you, as her guardian, would have known all about it. Perhaps I speak prematurely; but one must be blind indeed not to see how matters are between them. Do sit down, Guy: it fidgets one to see you so undecided. Of course, if Lilian is at Steynemore she is quite safe." "Still, she may be expecting some one to go for her." "I think, if so, she would have told you she was going," dryly. "Tom hates sending his horses out at night," says Guy,--which is a weak remark, Tom Steyne being far too indolent a man to make a point of hating anything. "Does he?" with calm surprise, and a prolonged scrutiny of her cousin's face. "I fancied him the most careless of men on that particular subject. Before he was married he used to drive over here night after night, and not care in the least how long he kept the wretched animals standing in the cold." "But that was when he was making love to Mabel. A man in love will commit any crime." "Oh, no, long before that." "Perhaps, then, it was when he was making love to you," with a slight smile. This is a sore point. "I don't remember that time," says Miss Beauchamp with perfect calmness but a suspicious indrawing of her rather meagre lips. "If some one must go out to-night, Guy, why not send Thomas?" "Because I prefer going myself," replies he, quietly. Passing through the hall on his way to the door, he catches up a heavy plaid that happens to be lying there, on a side-couch, and, springing into the open trap outside, drives away quickly under the pale cold rays of the moon. He has refused to take any of the servants with him, and so, alone with his thoughts, follows the road that leads to Steynemore. They are not pleasant thoughts. Being only a man, he has accepted Miss Beauchamp's pretended doubts about Lilian's safety as real, and almost persuades himself his present journey will bear him only bitter disappointment. As to what he is going to do if Lilian has not been seen at Steynemore, that is a matter on which he refuses to speculate. Drawing near the house, his suspense and fear grow almost beyond bounds. Dismounting at the hall-door, which stands partly open, he flings the reins to Jericho, and going into the hall, turns in the direction of the drawing-room. While he stands without, trying to summon courage to enter boldly, and literally trembling with suppressed anxiety, a low soft laugh breaks upon his ear. As he hears it, the blood rushes to his face; involuntarily he raises his hand to his throat, and then (and only then) quite realizes how awful has been the terror that for four long hours has been consuming him. The next instant, cold and collected, he turns the handle of the door, and goes in. Upon a low seat opposite Mabel Steyne sits Lilian, evidently in the gayest spirits. No shadow of depression, no thought of all the mental agony he has been enduring, mars the brightness of her _mignonne_ face. She is laughing. Her lustrous azure eyes are turned upward to her friend, who is laughing also in apparent appreciation of her guest's jest; her parted lips make merry dimples in her cheeks; her whole face is full of soft lines of amusement. As Guy comes in, Mabel rises with a little exclamation, and goes toward him with outstretched hands. "Why, Guy!" she says, "good boy! Have you come for Lilian? I was just going to order the carriage to send her home. Did you walk or drive?" "I drove." He has studiously since his entrance kept his eyes from Lilian. The smile has faded from her lips, the happy light from her eyes; she has turned a pale, proud little face to the fire, away from her guardian. "I made Lilian stay to dinner," says Mabel, who is too clever not to have remarked the painful constraint existing between her guest and Sir Guy. "Tom has been out all day shooting and dining at the Bellairs, so I entreated her to stay and bear me company. Won't you sit down for a while? It is early yet; there cannot be any hurry." "No, thank you. My mother has a bad headache, and, as she does not know where Lilian is, I think it better to get home." "Oh, if auntie has a headache, of course----" "I shall go and put on my hat," says Lilian, speaking for the first time, and rising with slow reluctance from her seat. "Don't stir, Mab: I shan't be a minute: my things are all in the next room." "Lilian is not very well, I fear," Mrs. Steyne says, when the door has closed upon her, "or else something has annoyed her. I am not sure which," with a quick glance at him. "She would eat no dinner, and her spirits are very fitful. But she did not tell me what was the matter, and I did not like to ask her. She is certainly vexed about something, and it is a shame she should be made unhappy, poor pretty child!" with another quick glance. "I thought she seemed in radiant spirits just now," remarks Guy, coldly. "Yes; but half an hour ago she was so depressed I was quite uneasy about her: that is why I used the word 'fitful.' Get her to eat something before she goes to bed," says kindly Mabel, in an undertone, as Lilian returns equipped for her journey. "Good-night, dear," kissing her. "Have you wraps, Guy?" "Yes, plenty. Good-night." And Mabel, standing on the door-steps, watches them until they have vanished beneath the starlight. It is a dark but very lovely night. Far above them in the dim serene blue a fair young crescent moon rides bravely. As yet but a few stars are visible, and they gleam and shiver and twinkle in the eternal dome, restless as the hearts of the two beings now gazing silently upon their beauty. "Silently, one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven, Blossomed the lonely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels." A creeping shadow lies among the trees; a certain sense of loneliness dwells in the long avenue of Steynemore as they pass beneath the branches of the overhanging foliage. A quick wind rustles by them, sad as a sigh from Nature's suffering breast, chill as the sense of injury that hangs upon their own bosoms. Coming out upon the unshaded road, a greater light falls upon them. The darkness seems less drear, the feeling of separation more remote, though still Pride sits with triumphant mien between them, with his great wings outspread to conceal effectually any penitent glance or thought. The tender pensive beauty of the growing night is almost lost upon them. "All round was still and calm; the noon of night Was fast approaching; up th' unclouded sky The glorious moon pursued her path of light, And shed a silv'ry splendor far and nigh; No sound, save of the night-wind's gentlest sigh, Could reach the ear." A dead silence reigns between them: they both gaze with admirable perseverance at the horse's ears. Never before has that good animal been troubled by two such steady stares. Then Lilian stirs slightly, and a little chattering sound escapes her, that rouses Guy to speech. "You are tired?" he says, in freezing tones. "Very." "Cold?" "_Very._" "Then put this round you," disagreeably, but with evident anxiety, producing the cozy plaid. "No, thank you." "Why?" surprised. "Because it is yours," replies she, with such open and childish spite as at any other time would have brought a smile to his lips. Now it brings only a dull pain to his heart. "I am sorry I only brought what you will not wear," he answers: "it did not occur to me you might carry your dislike to me even to my clothes. In future I shall be wiser." Silence. "Do put it on!" anxiously: "you were coughing all last week." "I wouldn't be hypocritical, if I were you," with withering scorn. "I feel sure it would be a matter for rejoicing, where you are concerned, if I coughed all next week, and the week after. No: keep your plaid." "You are the most willful girl I ever met," wrathfully. "No doubt. I dare say you have met only angels. I am not one, I rejoice to say. Florence is, you know; and one piece of perfection should be enough in any household." Silence again. Not a sound upon the night-air but the clatter of the horse's feet as he covers bravely the crisp dry road, and the rushing of the wind. It is a cold wind, sharp and wintry. It whistles past them, now they have gained the side of the bare moor, with cruel keenness, cutting uncivilly the tops of their ears, and making them sink their necks lower in their coverings. Miss Chesney's small hands lie naked upon the rug. Even in the indistinct light he knows that they are shivering and almost blue. "Where are your gloves?" he asks, when he can bear the enforced stillness no longer. "I forgot them at Mabel's." Impulsively he lays his own bare hand upon hers, and finds it chilled, nearly freezing. "Keep your hands inside the rug," he says, angrily, though there is a strong current of pain underlying the anger, "and put this shawl on you directly." "I will not," says Lilian, though in truth she is dying for it. "You shall," returns Chetwoode, quietly, in a tone he seldom uses, but which, when used, is seldom disobeyed. Lilian submits to the muffling in silence, and, though outwardly ungrateful, is inwardly honestly rejoiced at it. As he fastens it beneath her chin, he stoops his head, until his eyes are on a level with hers. "Was it kind of you, or proper, do you think, to make me so--so uneasy as I have been all this afternoon and evening?" he asks, compelling her to return his gaze. "Were you uneasy?" says Miss Chesney, viciously and utterly unrepenting: "I am glad of it." "Was it part of your plan to make my mother wretched also?" This is a slight exaggeration, as Lady Chetwoode has not even been bordering on the "wretched," and is, in fact, up to the present moment totally ignorant of Lilian's absence. "I certainly did not mean to make dear auntie unhappy," in a faintly-troubled tone. "But I shall tell her all the truth, and ask her pardon, when I get home,--_back_, I mean," with studied correction of the sweet word. "What is the truth?" "First, that I broke her lovely cup. And then I shall tell her why I stayed so long at Steynemore." "And what will that be?" "You know very well. I shall just say to her, 'Auntie, your son, Sir Guy, behaved so rudely to me this afternoon, I was obliged to leave Chetwoode for a while.' Then she will forgive me." Sir Guy laughs in spite of himself; and Lilian, could he only have peeped into the deep recesses of the plaid, might also be plainly seen with her pretty lips apart and all her naughty bewitching face dimpling with laughter. These frivolous symptoms are, however, rapidly and sternly suppressed on both sides. "I really cannot see what awful crime I have committed to make you so taciturn," she says, presently, with a view to discussing the subject. "I merely went for a drive with my cousin, as he should pass Steynemore on his way to the station." "Perhaps that was just what made my misery," softly. "What! my going for a short drive with Archie? Really, Sir Guy, you will soon be taken as a model of propriety. Poor old Archie! I am afraid I shan't be able to make you miserable in that way again for a very long time. How I wish those tiresome lawyers would let him alone!" "Ask them to surrender him," says Guy, irritably. "I would,"--cheerfully,--"if I thought it would do the least good. But I know they are all made of adamant." "Lilian,"--suddenly, unexpectedly,--"is there anything between you and your cousin?" "Who?"--with wide, innocent, suspiciously innocent eyes,--"Taffy?" "No," impatiently: "of course I mean Chesney," looking at her with devouring interest. "Yes,"--disconsolately, with a desire for revenge,--"more miles than I care to count." "I feel"--steadily--"it is a gross rudeness my asking, and I know you need not answer me unless you like; but"--with a quick breath--"try to answer my question. Has anything passed between you and Chesney?" "Not much," mildly: "one thrilling love-letter, and that ring." "He never asked you to marry him?" with renewed hope. "Oh, by the bye, I quite forgot that," indifferently. "Yes, he did ask me so much." "And you refused him?" asks Guy, eagerly, intensely, growing white and cold beneath the moon's pitiless rays, that seem to take a heartless pleasure in lighting up his agitated face at this moment. But Lilian's eyes are turned away from his: so this degradation is spared him. "No--n--o, not exactly," replies she. "You accepted him?" with dry lips and growing despair. "N--o, not exactly," again returns Miss Chesney, with affected hesitation. "Then what _did_ you do?" passionately, his impatient fear getting the better of his temper. "I don't feel myself at liberty to tell you," retorts Lilian, with a provoking assumption of dignity. Sir Guy looks as though he would like to give her a good shake, though indeed it is quite a question whether he has even the spirits for so much. He relapses into sulky silence, and makes no further attempt at conversation. "However," says Lilian, to whom silence is always irksome, "I don't mind telling you what I shall do if he asks me again." "What?" almost indifferently. "I shall accept him." "You will do very wisely," in a clear though constrained voice that doesn't altogether impose upon Lilian, but nevertheless disagrees with her. "He is very rich, very handsome, and a very good fellow all round." "I don't much care about good fellows," perversely: "they are generally deadly slow; I am almost sure I prefer the other sort. I am afraid mine is not a well-regulated mind, as I confess I always feel more kindly disposed toward a man when I hear something bad of him." "Perhaps if I told you something bad about myself it might make you feel more kindly disposed toward me," with a slight smile. "Perhaps it might. But I believe you are incapable of a bad action. Besides, if I felt myself going to like you, I should stop myself instantly." A pained hurt expression falls into his eyes. "I think," he says, very gently, "you must make a point of reserving all your cruel speeches for me alone. Do you guess how they hurt, child? No, I am sure you do not: your face is far too sweet to belong to one who would willingly inflict pain. Am I to be always despised and hated? Why will you never be friends with me?" "Because"--in a very low whisper--"you are so seldom good to me." "Am I? You will never know how hard I try to be. But"--taking her hand in his--"my efforts are always vain." He glances sorrowfully at the little hand he holds, and then at the pretty face beneath the velvet hat so near him. Lilian does not return his glance: her eyes are lowered, her other hand is straying nervously over the tiger-skin that covers her knees; they have forgotten all about the cold, the dreary night, everything; for a full half mile they drive on thus silently, her hand resting unresistingly in his; after which he again breaks the quiet that exists between them. "Did you mean what you said a little time ago about Chetwoode not being your home?" "I suppose so," in a rather changed and far softer tone. "Yes. What claim have I on Chetwoode?" "But your tone implied that if even you had a claim it would be distasteful to you." "Did it?" "Don't you know it did?" "Well, perhaps I didn't mean quite that. Did _you_ mean all you said this morning?" "Not all, I suppose." "How much of it, then?" "Unless I were to go through the whole of our conversation again, I could not tell you that, and I have no wish to do so: to be pained"--in a low voice--"as I have been, once in a day is surely sufficient." "Don't imagine I feel the least sorrow for you," says Lilian, making a wild attempt at recovering her ill humor, which has melted and vanished away. "I don't imagine it. How could I? One can scarcely feel sorrow or pity for a person whom one openly professes to 'hate' and 'despise,'" markedly, while searching her face anxiously with his eyes. Miss Chesney pauses. A short but sharp battle takes place within her breast. Then she raises her face and meets his eyes, while a faint sweet smile grows within her own: impelled half by a feeling of coquetry, half by a desire to atone, she lets the fingers he has still imprisoned close with the daintiest pressure upon his. "Perhaps," she whispers, leaning a little toward him, and raising her lips very close to his cheek as though afraid of being heard by the intrusive wind, "perhaps I did not quite mean that either." Then, seeing how his whole expression changes and brightens, she half regrets her tender speech, and says instantly, in her most unsentimental fashion: "Pray, Sir Guy, are you going to make your horse walk all the way home? Can you not pity the sorrows of a poor little ward? I am absolutely frozen: do stir him up, lazy fellow, or I shall get out and run. Surely it is too late in the year for nocturnal rambles." "If my life depended upon it, I don't believe I could make him go a bit faster," returns he, telling his lie unblushingly. "I forgot you were disabled," says Miss Chesney, demurely, letting her long lashes droop until they partially (but only partially) conceal her eyes from her guardian. "How remiss I am! When one has only got the use of one hand, one can do so little; perhaps"--preparing to withdraw her fingers slowly, lingeringly from his--"if I were to restore you both yours, you might be able to persuade that horse to take us home before morning." "I beg you will give yourself no trouble on my account," says Guy, hastily: "I don't want anything restored. And if you are really anxious to get 'home'"--with a pleased and grateful smile, "I feel sure I shall be able to manage this slow brute single-handed." So saying, he touches up the good animal in question rather smartly, which so astonishes the willing creature that he takes to his heels, and never draws breath until he pulls up before the hall door at Chetwoode. "Parkins, get us some supper in the library," says Sir Guy, addressing the ancient butler as he enters: "the drive has given Miss Chesney and me an appetite." "Yes, Sir Guy, directly," says Parkins, and, going down-stairs to the other servants, gives it as his opinion that "Sir Guy and Miss Chesney are going to make a match of it. For when two couples," says Mr. Parkins, who is at all times rather dim about the exact meaning of his sentences, "when two couples takes to eating _teet-a-teet_, it is all up with 'em." Whereupon cook says, "Lor!" which is her usual expletive, and means anything and everything; and Jane, the upper housemaid, who has a weakness for old Parkins's sayings, tells him with a flattering smile that he is "dreadful knowin'." Meantime, Sir Guy having ascertained that Miss Beauchamp has gone to her room, and that his mother is better, and asleep, he and Lilian repair to the library, where a cozy supper is awaiting them, and a cheerful fire burning. Now that they are again in-doors, out of the friendly darkness, with the full light of several lamps upon them, a second edition of their early restraint--milder, perhaps, but still oppressive--most unaccountably falls between them. Silently, and very gently, but somewhat distantly, he unfolds the plaid from round her slight figure, and, drawing a chair for her to the table, seats himself at a decided distance. Then he asks her with exemplary politeness what she will have, and she answers him; then he helps her, and then he helps himself; and then they both wonder secretly what the other is going to say next. But Lilian, who is fighting with a wild desire for laughter, and who is in her airiest mood, through having been compelled, by pride, to suppress all day her usual good spirits, decides on making a final effort at breaking down the barrier between them. Raising the glass of wine beside her, she touches it lightly with her lips, and says, gayly: "Come, fill, and pledge me, Sir Guy. But stay; first let me give you a little quotation that I hope will fall as a drop of nectar into your cup and chase that nasty little frown from your brow. Have I your leave to speak?" with a suspicion of coquetry in her manner. Chetwoode's handsome lips part in a pleased smile: he turns his face gladly, willingly, to hers. "Why do you ask permission of your slave, O Queen of Hearts?" he answers, softly, catching the infection of her gayety. He gazes at her with unchecked and growing admiration, his whole heart in his eyes; telling himself, as he has told himself a thousand times before, that to-night she is looking her fairest. Her cheeks are flushed from her late drive; one or two glittering golden lovelocks have been driven by the rough wind from their natural resting-place, and now lie in gracious disorder on her white forehead; her lustrous sapphire eyes are gleaming upon him, full of unsubdued laughter; her lips are parted, showing all the small even teeth within. She stoops toward him, and clinking her glass against his with the prettiest show of _bonne camaraderie_, whispers, softly: "Come, let us be happy together." "Together!" repeats Guy, unsteadily, losing his head, and rising abruptly from his seat as though to go to her. She half rises also, seriously frightened at the unexpected effect of her mad words. What is he going to say to her? What folly urged her on to repeat that ridiculous line? The idea of flight has just time to cross her mind, but not time to be acted upon, when the door is thrown open suddenly, and Cyril--who has at this moment returned from his dinner party--entering noisily, comes to her rescue. CHAPTER XXIV. "I have some naked thoughts that roam about And loudly knock to have their passage out."--MILTON. It goes without telling that Lilian gains the day, Guy's one solitary attempt at mastery having failed ignominiously. She persists in her allegiance to her friend, and visits The Cottage regularly as ever; being even more tender than usual in her manner toward Cecilia, as she recollects the narrowness of him who could (as she believes) without cause condemn her. And Sir Guy, though resenting her defiance of his wishes, and smarting under the knowledge of it, accepts defeat humbly, and never again refers to the subject of the widow, which henceforth is a tabooed one between them. Soon after this, indeed, an event occurs that puts an end to all reason why Lilian should not be as friendly with Mrs. Arlington as she may choose. One afternoon, most unexpectedly, Colonel Trant, coming to Chetwoode, demands a private interview with Sir Guy. Some faint breaths of the scandal that so closely and dishonorably connects his name with Cecilia's have reached his ears, and, knowing of her engagement with Cyril, he has hastened to Chetwoode to clear her in the eyes of its world. Without apology, he treats Guy to a succinct and studied account of Cecilia's history,--tells of all her sorrows, and gentle forbearance, and innocence so falsely betrayed, nor even conceals from him his own deep love for her, and his two rejections, but makes no mention of Cyril throughout the interview. Guy, as he listens, grows remorseful, and full of self-reproach,--more, perhaps, for the injustice done to his friend in his thoughts, than for all the harsh words used toward Mrs. Arlington, though he is too clean-bred not to regret that also. He still shrinks from all idea of Cecilia as a wife for Cyril. The daughter of a man who, though of good birth, was too sharp in his dealings for decent society, and the wife of a man, who, though rich in worldly goods, had no pretensions to be a gentleman at all, could certainly be no mate for a Chetwoode. A woman of no social standing whatsoever, with presumably only a pretty face for a dowry,--Cyril must be mad to dream of her! For him, Guy, want of fortune need not signify; but for Cyril, with his expensive habits, to think of settling down with a wife on nine hundred a year is simply folly. And then Cyril's brother thinks with regret of a certain Lady Fanny Stapleton, who, it is a notorious fact, might be had by Cyril for the asking. Guy himself, it may be remarked, would not have Lady Fanny at any price, she being rather wanting in the matter of nose and neck; but younger brothers have no right to cultivate fastidious tastes, and her snubby ladyship has a great admiration for Cyril, and a fabulous fortune. All the time Trant is singing Cecilia's praises, Guy is secretly sighing over Lady Fanny and her comfortable thousands, and is wishing The Cottage had been knocked into fine dust before Mrs. Arlington had expressed a desire to reside there. Nevertheless he is very gentle in his manner toward his former colonel all the day, spending with him every minute he stays, and going with him to the railway station when at night he decides on returning to town. Inwardly he knows he would like to ask his forgiveness for the wrong he has done him in his thoughts, but hardly thinks it wisdom to let him know how guilty toward him he has been. Cyril, he is fully persuaded, will never betray him; and he shrinks from confessing what would probably only cause pain and create an eternal breach between them. However, his conscience so far smites him that he does still further penance toward the close of the evening. Meeting Cyril on his way to dress just before dinner, he stops him. "If you will accept an apology from me so late in the day," he says, "I now offer you one for what I said of Mrs. Arlington some time since. Trant has told me all the truth. I wronged her grossly, although"--with a faint touch of bitterness--"when I _lied_ about her I did so unconsciously." "Don't say another word, old man," says Cyril, heartily, and much gratified, laying his hand lightly upon his shoulder. "I knew you would discover your mistake in time. I confess at the moment it vexed me you should lend yourself to the spreading of such an absurd report." "Yes, I was wrong." Then, with some hesitation, "Still, there was an excuse for me. We knew nothing of her. We know nothing still that we can care to know." "How you worry yourself!" says Cyril, with a careless shrug, letting his hand, however, drop from his brother's shoulder, as he fully understands the drift of his conversation. "Why can't you let things slide as I do? It is no end a better plan." "I am only thinking of a remark you made a long time ago," replies Guy, with a laugh, partially deceived by Cyril's indifferent manner: "shall I remind you of it? 'Samivel, Samivel, my son, never marry a widder.'" CHAPTER XXV. "_Hel._--How happy some, o'er other some can be!" --_Midsummer Night's Dream._ It is very close on Christmas; another week will bring in the twenty-fifth of December, with all its absurd affectation of merriment and light-heartedness. Is any one, except a child, ever really happy at Christmas, I wonder? Is it then one chooses to forget the loved and lost? to thrust out of sight the regrets that goad and burn? Nay, rather, is it not then our hearts bleed most freely, while our eyes grow dim with useless tears, and a great sorrow that touches on despair falls upon us, as we look upon the vacant seat and grow sick with longing for the "days that are no more?" Surely it is then we learn how vain is our determination to forget those unobtrusive ones who cannot by voice or touch demand attention. The haunting face, that once full of youth and beauty was all the world to us, rises from its chill shroud and dares us to be happy. The poor eyes, once so sweet, so full of gayest laughter, now closed and mute forever, gleam upon us, perchance across the flowers and fruit, and, checking the living smile upon our lips, ask us reproachfully how is it with us, that we can so quickly shut from them the doors of our hearts, after all our passionate protests, our vows ever to remember. Oh, how soon, how _soon_, do we cease our lamentations for our silent dead! When all is told, old Father Christmas is a mighty humbug: so I say and think, but I would not have you agree with me. Forgive me this unorthodox sentiment, and let us return to our--lamb! Archibald has returned to Chetwoode; so has Taffy. The latter is looking bigger, fuller, and, as Mrs. Tipping says, examining him through her spectacles with a criticising air, "more the man," to his intense disgust. He embraces Lilian and Lady Chetwoode, and very nearly Miss Beauchamp, on his arrival, in the exuberance of his joy at finding himself once more within their doors, and is welcomed with effusion by every individual member of the household. Archibald, on the contrary, appears rather done up, and faded, and, though evidently happy at being again in his old quarters, still seems sad at heart, and discontented. He follows Lilian's movements in a very melancholy fashion, and herself also, until it becomes apparent to every one that his depression arises from his increasing infatuation for her; while she, to do her justice, hardly pretends to encourage him at all. He lives in contemplation of her beauty and her saucy ways, and is unmistakably _distrait_ when circumstances call her from his sight. In his case "absence" has indeed made the heart grow fonder, as he is, if possible, more imbecile about her now than when he left, and, after struggling with his feelings for a few days, finally makes up his mind to tempt fortune again, and lay himself and his possessions at his idol's feet. * * * * * It is the wettest of wet days; against the window-panes the angry rain-drops are flinging themselves madly, as though desirous of entering and rendering more dismal the room within, which happens to be the library. Sir Guy is standing at the bow-window, gazing disconsolately upon the blurred scene outside. Cyril is lounging in an easy chair with a magazine before him, making a very creditable attempt at reading. Archibald and Taffy are indulging in a mild bet as to which occupant of the room will make the first remark. Lady Chetwoode is knitting her one hundred and twenty-fourth sock for the year. Lilian is dreaming, with her large eyes fixed upon the fire. The inestimable Florence (need I say it?) is smothered in crewel wools, and is putting a rose-colored eye into her already quite too fearful parrot. "I wonder what we shall do all day," says Guy, suddenly, in tones of the deepest melancholy. Whereupon Taffy, who has been betting on Cyril, and Chesney, who has been laying on Lilian, are naturally, though secretly indignant. "Just what we have been doing all the rest of the day,--nothing," replies Lilian, lazily: "could anything be more desirable?" "I hope it will be fine to-morrow," says Mr. Musgrave, in an aggrieved voice. "But it won't, I shouldn't wonder, just because the meet is to be at Bellairs, and one always puts in such a good day there." "I haven't got enough pluck to think of to-morrow," says Guy, still melancholy: "to-day engrosses all my thoughts. What _is_ to become of us?" "Let us get up a spelling-bee," says Miss Beauchamp, with cheerful alacrity; "they are so amusing." "Oh, don't! please, Miss Beauchamp, don't," entreats Taffy, tearfully,--"unless you want to disgrace me eternally. I can't spell anything; and, even if I could, the very fact of having a word hurled at my head would make me forget all about it, even were it an old acquaintance." "But, my dear fellow," says Cyril, laying down his "Temple Bar," with all the air of a man prepared to argue until he and his adversary are black in the face, "that is the fun of the whole matter. If you spelled well you would be looked upon as a swindler. The greater mistakes you make, the more delighted we shall be; and if you could only succeed like that man in 'Caste' in spelling character with a K, we should give you two or three rounds of applause. People never get up spelling-bees to hear good spelling: the discomfiture of their neighbors is what amuses them most. Have I relieved your mind?" "Tremendously. Nevertheless, I fling myself upon your tender mercies, Miss Beauchamp, and don't let us go in for spelling." "Then let us have an historical-bee," substitutes Florence, amiably; she is always tender where Taffy is concerned. "The very thing," declares Cyril, getting up an expression of the strongest hope. "Perhaps, if you do, I shall get answers to two or three important questions that have been tormenting me for years. For instance, I want to know whether the 'gossip's bowl' we read of was made of Wedgwood or Worcester, and why our ancestors were so uncomfortable as to take their tea out of 'dishes.' It must have got very cold, don't you think? to say nothing at all of the inconvenience of being obliged to lift it to one's lips with both hands." "It didn't mean an actual 'dish,'" replies Florence, forgetting the parrot's rosy optic for a moment, in her desire to correct his ignorance: "it was merely a term for what we now call cup." "No, was it?" says Cyril, with an affectation of intense astonishment; whereupon they all laugh. "Talking of tea," says Lady Chetwoode, "I wonder where it is. Taffy, my dear, will you ring the bell?" Tea is brought, tea is consumed; but still the rain rains on, and their spirits are at zero. "I shall go out, 'hail, rain, or shine,'" says Cyril, springing to his feet with sudden desperation. "So shall I," declares Guy, "to the stables. Taffy, will you come with me?" "As nobody wants me," says Lilian, "I shall make a point of wanting somebody. Archie, come and have a game of billiards with me before dinner." "My dear Guy, does it not still rain very hard?" protests Florence, anxiously. "Very," laughing. "You will get wet," with increasing anxiety, and a tender glance cleverly directed. "Wet! he will get drenched," exclaims Cyril; "he will probably get his death of cold, and die of inflammation of the lungs. It is horrible to think of it! Guy, be warned; accept Florence's invitation to stay here with her, and be happy and dry. As sure as you are out to-day, you may prepare to shed this mortal coil." "Forgive me, Florence, I must go or suffocate," says Guy, refusing to be warned, or to accept Miss Beauchamp's delicate hint: and together he and Musgrave sally forth to inspect the stables, while Lilian and Archibald retire to the billiard-room. When they have played for some time, and Archibald has meanly allowed Lilian to win all the games under the mistaken impression that he is thereby cajoling her into staying with him longer than she otherwise might have done, she suddenly destroys the illusion by throwing down her cue impatiently, and saying, with a delicious little pout: "I hate playing with people who know nothing about the game! there is no excitement in it. I remark when I play with you I always win. You're a regular muff at billiards, Archie; that's what _you_ are." This is a severe blow to Archie's pride, who is a first-class hand at billiards; but he grins and bears it. "If you will give me a few more lessons," he says, humbly, "I dare say I shall improve." "No, I can't afford to waste my time, and you are too tiresome. Let us go into the drawing-room." "Rather let us stay here for a while," he says, earnestly. "They are all out, and I--I have something to say to you." During the last half-hour one of the men has come in and given the fire a poke and lit the lamps, so that the room looks quite seductive. Miss Chesney, glancing doubtfully round, acknowledges so much, and prepares to give in. "I hope it is something pleasant," she says, _àpropos_ of Archie's last remark. "You have been looking downright miserable for days. I hope sincerely, you are not going melancholy mad, but I have my doubts of it. What is the matter with you, Archie? You used to be quite a charming companion, but now you are very much the reverse. Sometimes, when with you, your appearance is so dejected that if I smile I feel absolutely heartless. Do try to cheer up, there's a good boy." "A fellow can't be always simpering, especially when he is wretched," retorts he, moodily. "Then don't be wretched. That is the very thing to which I object. You are the very last man in the world who ought to suffer from the blues. Anything wrong with you?" "Everything. I love a woman who doesn't care in the very least for me." "Oh, so that is what you have been doing in London, is it?" says Lilian, after a short pause that makes her words still more impressive. "I certainly did think you weren't in a very great hurry to return, and that you looked rather blighted when you did come. I doubt you have been dancing the 'Geliebt und verloren' waltzes once too often. Did she refuse you?" "I love you, Lilian, and only you," returns he, reproachfully. "No, do not turn from me; let me plead my cause once more. Darling, I have indeed tried to live without you, and have failed; if you reject me again you will drive me to destruction. Lilian, be merciful; say something kind to me." "You promised me," says Lilian, nervously, moving away from him, "never to speak on this subject again. Oh, why is it that some people will insist on falling in love with other people? There is something so stupid about it. Now, _I_ never fall in love; why cannot you follow my good example?" "I am not bloodless, or----" "Neither am I," holding up her pretty hand between her and the fire, so that the rich blood shows through the closed fingers of it. "But I have common sense, the one thing you lack." "_You_ are the one thing I lack," possessing himself of her hand and kissing it fatuously. "Without you I lack everything. Beloved, must I learn to look upon you as my curse? Give me, I entreat you, one little word of encouragement, if only one; I starve for want of it. If you only knew how I have clung for months, and am still clinging, to the barest shadow of a hope, you would think twice before you destroyed that one faint gleam of happiness." "This is dreadful," says Lilian, piteously, the ready tears gathering in her eyes. "Would you marry a woman who does not love you?" "I would,"--eagerly,--"when that woman assures me she does not love another, and I have your word for that." Lilian winces. Then, trying to recover her spirits: "'What one suffers for one's country--_men_!'" she misquotes, with an affectation of lightness. "Archie, billiards have a demoralizing effect upon you. I shan't play with you again." "I don't want to bribe you," says Chesney, turning a little pale, and declining to notice her interruption; "I should be sorry to think I could do so; but I have ten thousand a year, and if you will marry me you shall have a thousand a year pin-money, and five thousand if you survive me." "It would spoil my entire life fearing I shouldn't survive you," says Miss Chesney, who, in spite of her nervousness, or because of it, is longing to laugh. "You will, you need not be afraid of that." "It sounds dazzling," murmurs Lilian, "more especially when you give me your word you will die first; but still I think it downright shabby you don't offer me the whole ten." "So I will!"--eagerly--"if----" "Nonsense, Archie," hastily: "don't be absurd. Cannot you see I am only in jest? I am not going to marry any one, as I told you before. Come now,"--anxiously,--"don't look so dismal. You know I am very, _very_ fond of you, but after all one cannot marry every one one is fond of." "I suppose not," gloomily. "Then do try to look a little pleasanter. They will all notice your depression when we return to them." "I don't care," with increasing gloom. "But I do. Archie, look here, dear,"--taking the high and moral tone,--"do you think it is right of you to go on like this, just as if----" "I don't care a hang what is right, or what is wrong," says Mr. Chesney, with considerable vehemence. "I only know you are the only woman I ever really cared for, and you won't have me. Nothing else is of the slightest consequence." "I am not the only woman in the world. Time will show you there are others ten times nicer and lovelier." "I don't believe it." "Because you don't wish to," angrily. "In the first place, I am far too small to be lovely." "You are tall enough for my fancy." "And my mouth is too large," with growing irritation. "It is small enough for my taste." "And sometimes, when the summer is very hot, my skin gets quite _freckled_," with increasing warmth. "I adore freckles. I think no woman perfect without them." "I don't believe you," indignantly; "and at all events I have a horrible temper, and I defy you to say you like _that_!" triumphantly. "I do," mournfully. "The hardest part of my unfortunate case is this, that the unkinder you are to me the more I love you." "Then I won't have you love me," says Miss Chesney, almost in tears: "do you hear me? I forbid you to do it any more. It is extremely rude of you to keep on caring for me when you know I don't like it." "Look here, Lilian," says Archie, taking both her hands, "give me a little hope, a bare crumb to live on, and I will say no more." "I cannot, indeed," deeply depressed. "Why? Do you love any other fellow?" "Certainly not," with suspicious haste. "Then I shall wait yet another while, and then ask you again." "Oh, don't!" exclaims Lilian, desperately: "I _beg_ you won't. If I thought I was going to have these scenes all over again at intervals, it would kill me, and I should learn to hate you. I should, indeed; and then what would you do? Think of it." "I won't," doggedly; "I often heard 'Faint heart never won fair lady,' and I shall take my chance. I shall never give you up, so long as you are not engaged to any other man." There is a pause. Lilian's blue eyes are full of tears that threaten every moment to overflow and run down her pale cheeks. She is desperately sorry for Archibald, the more so that her heart tells her she will never be able to give him the consolation that alone can do him any good. Seeing the expression of tender regret that softens her face, Archibald falls suddenly upon his knees before her, and, pressing his lips to her hands, murmurs, in deep agitation: "My own, my dearest, is there no pity in your kind heart for me?" At this most unlucky moment Sir Guy lays his hand upon the door, and pushing it lightly open, enters. Five minutes later all the world might have entered freely, but just now the entrance of this one man causes unutterable pain. Archibald has barely time to scramble to his feet; the tears are still wet on Lilian's cheeks; altogether it is an unmistakable situation, and Guy turns cold and pale as he recognizes it as such. Chesney on his knees, with Lilian's hands imprisoned in his own; Lilian in tears,--what can it mean but a violent love scene? Probably they have been quarreling, and have just made it up again. "The falling out of faithful friends, but the renewal is of love." As he meets Lilian's shamed eyes, and marks the rich warm crimson that has mantled in her cheeks, Chetwoode would have beaten a precipitous retreat, but is prevented by Taffy's following on his heels somewhat noisily. "It is a charming night, Lil," says that young man, with his usual _bonhommie_. "The rain is a thing of the past. We shall have our run after all to-morrow." "Indeed! I am glad of that," replies Lilian, half indifferently; though being the woman of the party, she is of course the quickest to recover self-possession. "I should have died of despair had the morning proved unkind." "Well, you needn't die for a while. I say, Lil," says Mr. Musgrave, regarding her curiously, "what's the matter with you, eh? You look awfully down in the mouth. Anything wrong?" "Nothing," sharply: "what should be?" "Can't say, I'm sure. But your cheeks," persists this miserable boy, "are as red as fire." "I--that is--it _was_ the fire," confusedly, directing a wrathful glance at him, which is completely thrown away, as Mr. Musgrave is impervious to hints: "I was sitting close to it." "That goes without telling. Any one would imagine by your color, you had been put upon the hob to simmer. By the bye,"--a most fortunate access of ignorance carrying his thoughts into another channel,--"what is a hob? I don't believe I ever saw one." "Hob, substantive, short for goblin: as hobgoblin," says Cyril at this moment, having entered, how, or from where, nobody knows. "Still bent upon historical research?" "It has something to do with kettles, I think," says Taffy. "I don't quite believe your meaning for it." "Don't you? I am sorry for you. I do. But some people never will learn." "That is true," says Lilian, somewhat abruptly. Involuntarily her eyes fall on Chesney. He has been staring in moody silence at the fire since Chetwoode's entrance, but now, at her words, straightens himself, and gives way to a low, rather forced, laugh. "_Experientia docet_," says Guy, in a queer tone impossible to translate. "Time is a stern school-master, who compels us against our will,"--letting his eyes meet Lilian's--"to learn many things." "It has taught me one thing," puts in Cyril, who looks half amused,--"that the dressing-bell has rung some time since." "Has it?" says Lilian, rising with alacrity, and directing a very grateful glance at him: "I never heard it. I shall scarcely have time now to get ready for dinner. Why did you not tell me before?" As she speaks, she sweeps by him, and he, catching her hand, detains her momentarily. "Because, when one is not in the habit of it, one takes time to form a good tarradiddle," replies he, in a soft whisper. She returns his kindly pressure, and, going into the hall, finds that full five minutes must elapse before the bell really rings. "Dear Cyril!" she murmurs to herself, almost aloud, and, running up to her room, cries a good deal upon nurse's breast before that kind creature can induce her to change her gown. After which she gets into her clothes, more because it would be indecent to go without them than from any great desire to look her best. CHAPTER XXVI. "For now she knows it is no gentle chase. * * * * * She looks upon his lips, and they are pale; She takes him by the hand, and that is cold; She whispers in his ears a heavy tale, As if they heard the woful words she told: She lifts the coffer-lids that close his eyes, Where lo! two lamps, burnt out, in darkness lies. * * * * * Two glasses, where herself, herself beheld A thousand times, and now no more reflect; Their virtue lost, wherein they late excell'd, And every beauty robb'd of his effect."--SHAKESPEARE. "'A southern wind and a cloudy sky proclaim it a hunting morning,'" quotes Miss Chesney, gayly, entering the breakfast-room at nine o'clock next morning, looking, if anything, a degree more bewitching than usual in her hat and habit: in her hand is a little gold-mounted riding-whip, upon her lovable lips a warm, eager smile. "No one down but me!" she says, "at least of the gentler sex. And Sir Guy presiding! what fun! Archie, may I trouble you to get me some breakfast? Sir Guy, some tea, please: I am as hungry as a hawk." Sir Guy pours her out a cup of tea, carefully, but silently. Archie, gloomy, but attentive, places before her what she most fancies: Cyril gets her a chair; Taffy brings her some toast: all are fondly dancing attendance on the little spoiled fairy. "What are you looking at, Taffy?" asks she, presently, meeting her cousin's blue eyes, that so oddly resemble her own, fixed upon her immovably. "At you. There is something wrong with your hair," replies he, unabashed: "some of the pins are coming out. Stay steady, and I'll wheel you into line in no time." So saying, he adjusts the disorderly hair-pin; while Chetwoode and Chesney, looking on, are consumed with envy. "Thank you, dear," says Lilian, demurely, giving his hand a little loving pat: "you are worth your weight in gold. Be sure you push it in again during the day, if you see it growing unruly. What a delicious morning it is!" glancing out of the window; "too desirable perhaps. I hope none of us will break our necks." "Funky already, Lil?" says Taffy, with unpardonable impertinence. "Never mind, darling, keep up your heart; I'm fit as a fiddle myself, and will so far sacrifice my life as to promise you a lead whenever a copper brings me in your vicinity. I shall keep you in mind, never fear." "I consider your remarks beneath notice, presumptuous boy," says Miss Chesney, with such a scornful uplifting of her delicate face as satisfies Taffy, who, being full of mischief, passes on to bestow his pleasing attentions on the others of the party. Chesney first attracts his notice. He is standing with his back to a screen, and has his eyes fixed in moody contemplation on the floor. Melancholy on this occasion has evidently marked him for her own. "What's up with you, old man? you look suicidal," says Mr. Musgrave, stopping close to him, and giving him a rattling slap on the shoulder that rather takes the curl out of him, leaving him limp, but full of indignation. "Look here," he says, in an aggrieved tone, "I wish you wouldn't do that, you know. Your hands, small and delicate as they are,"--Taffy's hands, though shapely, are decidedly large,--"can hurt. If you go about the world with such habits you will infallibly commit murder sooner or later: I should bet on the sooner. One can never be sure, my dear fellow, who has heart-disease and who has not." "Heart-disease means love with most fellows," says the irrepressible Taffy, "and I have noticed you aren't half a one since your return from London." At this _mal à propos_ speech both Lilian and Chesney change color, and Guy, seeing their confusion, becomes miserable in turn, so that breakfast is a distinct failure, Cyril and Musgrave alone being capable of animated conversation. Half an hour later they are all in the saddle and are riding leisurely toward Bellairs, which is some miles distant, through as keen a scenting wind as any one could desire. At Grantley Farm they find every one before them, the hounds sniffing and whimpering, the ancient M. F. H. cheery as is his wont, and a very fair field. Mabel Steyne is here, mounted on a handsome bay mare that rather chafes and rages under her mistress's detaining hand, while at some few yards' distance from her is Tom, carefully got up, but sleepy as is his wont. One can hardly credit that his indolent blue eyes a little later will grow dark and eager as he scents the fray, and, steadying himself in his saddle, makes up his mind to "do or die." Old General Newsance is plodding in and out among the latest arrivals, prognosticating evil, and relating the "wondrous adventures" of half a century ago, when (if he is to be believed) hounds had wings, and hunters never knew fatigue. With him is old Lord Farnham, who has one leg in his grave, literally speaking, having lost it in battle more years ago than one cares to count, but who rides wonderfully nevertheless, and is as young to speak to, or rather younger, than any nineteenth-century man. Mabel Steyne is dividing her attentions between him and Taffy, when a prolonged note from the hounds, and a quick cry of "gone away," startles her into silence. Talkers are scattered, conversation forgotten, and every one settles down into his or her saddle, ready and eager for the day's work. Down the hill like a flash goes a good dog fox, past the small wood to the right, through the spinnies, straight into the open beyond. The scent is good, the pack lively: Lilian and Sir Guy are well to the front; Archibald close beside them. Cyril to the left is even farther ahead; while Taffy and Mabel Steyne can be seen a little lower down, holding well together, Mabel, with her eyes bright and glowing with excitement, sailing gallantly along on her handsome bay. After a time--the fox showing no signs of giving in--hedges and doubles throw spaces in between the riders. Sir Guy is far away in the distance, Taffy somewhat in the background; Cyril is out of sight; while Miss Chesney finds herself now side by side with Archibald, who is riding recklessly, and rather badly. They have just cleared a very uncomfortable wall, that in cold blood would have damped their ardor, only to find a more treacherous one awaiting them farther on, and Lilian, turning her mare's head a little to the left, makes for a quieter spot, and presently lands in the next field safe and sound. Archibald, however, holds on his original course, and Lilian, turning in her saddle, watches with real terror his next movement. His horse, a good one, rises gallantly, springs, and cleverly, though barely, brings himself clear to the other side. Both he and his master are uninjured, but it was a near thing, and makes Miss Chesney's heart beat with unpleasant rapidity. "Archibald," she says, bringing herself close up to his side as they gallop across the field, and turning a very white face to his, "I wish you would not ride so recklessly: you will end by killing yourself if you go on in this foolish fashion." Her late fear has added a little sharpness to her tone. "The sooner the better," replies he, bitterly. "What have I got to live for? My life is of no use, either to myself or to any one else, as far as I can see." "It is very wicked of you to talk so!" angrily. "Is it? You should have thought of that before you made me think so. As it is, I am not in the humor for lecturing to do me much good. If I am killed, blame yourself. Meantime, I like hunting: it is the only joy left me. When I am riding madly like this, I feel again almost happy--almost," with a quickly suppressed sigh. "Still, I ask you, for my sake, to be more careful," says Lilian, anxiously, partly frightened, partly filled with remorse at his words, though in her heart she is vexed with him for having used them. "Her fault if he gets killed." It is really too much! "Do you pretend to care?" asks he, with a sneer. "Your manner is indeed perfect, but how much of it do you mean? Give me the hope I asked for last night,--say only two kind words to me,--and I will be more careful of my life than any man in the field to-day." "I think I am always saying kind things to you," returns she, rather indignant; "I am only too kind. And one so foolishly bent on being miserable as you are, all for nothing, deserves only harsh treatment. You are not even civil to me. I regret I addressed you just now, and beg you will not speak to me any more." "Be assured I shan't disobey this your last command," says Archibald, in a low, and what afterward appears to her a prophetic tone, turning away. The field is growing thin. Already many are lying scattered broadcast in the ditches, or else are wandering hopelessly about on foot, in search of their lost chargers. The hounds are going at a tremendous pace; a good many horses show signs of flagging; while the brave old fox still holds well his own. Taffy came to signal grief half an hour ago, but now reappears triumphant and unplucked, splashed from head to heel, but game for any amount still. Mrs. Steyne in front a-fighting hard for the brush, while Lilian every moment is creeping closer to her on the bonny brown mare that carries her like a bird over hedges and rails. Sir Guy is out of sight, having just vanished down the slope of the hill, only to reappear again a second later. Archibald is apparently nowhere, and Miss Chesney is almost beginning to picture him to herself bathed in his own gore, when raising her head she sees him coming toward her at a rattling pace, his horse, which is scarcely up to his weight, well in hand. Before him rises an enormous fence, beneath which gleams like a silver streak a good bit of running water. It is an awkward jump, the more so that from the other side it is almost impossible for the rider to gauge its dangers properly. Lilian makes a faint sign to him to hold back, which he either does not or will not see. Bringing his horse up to the fence at a rather wild pace, he lifts him. The good brute rises obediently, springs forward, but jumps too short, and in another second horse and rider are rolling together in a confused mass upon the sward beyond. The horse, half in and half out of the water, recovers himself quickly, and, scrambling to his feet, stands quietly ashamed, trembling in every limb, at a little distance from his master. But Archibald never stirs; he lies motionless, with his arms flung carelessly above his head, and his face turned upward to the clouded sky,--a brilliant speck of crimson upon the green grass. Lilian, with a sickening feeling of fear, and a suppressed scream, gallops to his side, and, springing to the ground, kneels down close to him, and lifts his head upon her knee. His face is deadly pale, a small spot of blood upon his right cheek rendering even more ghastly its excessive pallor. A frantic horror lest he be dead fills her mind and heart. Like funeral bells his words return and smite cruelly upon her brain: "If I am killed blame yourself." _Is_ she to blame? Oh, how harshly she spoke to him! With what bitterness did she rebuke--when he--when he was only telling her of his great love for her! Was ever woman so devoid of tender feeling? to goad and rail at a man only because she had made conquest of his heart! And to choose this day of all others to slight and wound him, when, had she not been hatefully, unpardonably blind, she might have seen he was bent upon his own destruction. How awfully white he is! Has death indeed sealed his lips forever? Oh, that he might say one word, if only to forgive her! With one hand she smooths back his dark crisp hair from his forehead, and tries to wipe away with her handkerchief the terrible blood-stain from his poor cheek. "Archie, Archie," she whispers to him, piteously, bending her face so close to his that any one might deem the action a caress, "speak to me: will you not hear me, when I tell you how passionately I regret my words?" But no faintest flicker of intelligence crosses the face lying so mute and cold upon her knees. For the first time he is stone deaf to the voice of her entreaty. Perhaps some foolish hope that her call might rouse him had taken possession of her; for now, seeing how nothing but deepest silence answers her, she lets a groan escape her. Will nobody ever come? Lifting in fierce impatience a face white as the senseless man's beneath her, she encounters Guy's eyes fixed upon her, who has by chance seen the catastrophe, and has hastened to her aid. "Do something for him,--something," she cries, trembling; "give him brandy! it will, it _must_ do him good." Guy, kneeling down beside Chesney, places his hand beneath his coat, and feels for his heart intently. "He is not dead!" murmurs Lilian, in an almost inaudible tone: "say he is alive. I told him never to speak to me again: but I did not dream I should be so terribly obeyed. Archie, Archie!" Her manner is impassioned. Remorse and terror, working together, produce in her all the appearance, of despairing anguish. She bears herself as a woman might who gazes at the dead body of him she holds dearest on earth; and Guy, looking silently upon her, lets a fear greater than her own, a more intolerable anguish, enter his heart even then. "He is not dead," he says, quietly, forcing himself to be calm. Whereupon Lilian bursts into a storm of tears. "Are you sure?" cries she; "is there no mistake? He looks so--so--_like_ death," with a shuddering sigh. "Oh, what should I have done had he been killed?" "Be happy, he is alive," says Guy, between his dry lips, misery making his tones cold. All his worst fears are realized. In spite of pretended indifference, it is plain to him that all her wayward heart has been given to her cousin. Her intense agitation, her pale agonized face, seem to him easy to read, impossible to misunderstand. As he rises from his knees, he leaves all hope behind him in possession of his wounded rival. "Stay with him until I bring help: I shan't be a minute," he says, not looking at her, and presently returning with some rough contrivance that does duty for a stretcher, and a couple of laborers. They convey him home to Chetwoode, where they lay him, still insensible, upon his bed, quiet and cold as one utterly bereft of life. Then the little doctor arrives, and the door of Chesney's chamber is closed upon him and Guy, and for the next half-hour those outside--listening, watching, hoping, fearing--have a very bad time of it. At last, as the sick-room door opens, and Guy comes into the corridor, a little figure, that for all those miserable thirty minutes has sat crouching in a dark corner, rises and runs swiftly toward him. It is Lilian: she is trembling visibly, and the face she upraises to his is pale--nay, gray--with dread suspense. Her white lips try to form a syllable, but fail. She lays one hand upon his arm beseechingly, and gazes at him in eloquent silence. "Do not look like that," says Guy, shocked at her expression. He speaks more warmly than he feels, but he quietly removes his arm so that her hand perforce drops from it. "He is better; much better than at first we dared hope. He will get well. There is no immediate danger. Do you understand, Lilian?" A little dry sob breaks from her. The relief is almost too intense; all through her dreary waiting she had expected to hear nothing but that he was in truth--as he appeared in her eyes--dead. She staggers slightly, and would have fallen but that Chetwoode most unwillingly places his arm round her. "There is no occasion for all this--nervousness," he says, half savagely, as she lays her head against his shoulder and cries as though her heart would break. At this supreme moment she scarcely remembers Guy's presence, and would have cried just as comfortably with her head upon old Parkins's shoulder. Perhaps he understands this, and therefore fails to realize the rapture he should know at having her so unresistingly within his arms. As it is, his expression is bored to the last degree: his eyebrows are drawn upward until all his forehead lies in little wrinkles. With a determination worthy of a better cause he has fixed his eyes upon the wall opposite, and refuses to notice the lovely golden head of her who is weeping so confidingly upon his breast. It is a touching scene, but fails to impress Guy, who cannot blind himself to (what he believes to be) the fact that all these pearly tears are flowing for another,--and that a rival. With his tall figure drawn to its fullest height, so as to preclude all idea of tenderness, he says, sharply: "One would imagine I had brought you bad news. You could not possibly appear more inconsolable if you had heard of his death. Do try to rouse yourself, and be reasonable: he is all right, and as likely to live as you are." At this he gives her a mild but undeniable shake, that has the desired effect of reducing her to calmness. She checks her sobs, and, moving away from him, prepares to wipe away all remaining signs of her agitation. "You certainly are not very sympathetic," she says, with a last faint sob, casting a reproachful glance at him out of two drowned but still beautiful eyes. "I certainly am not," stiffly: "I can't 'weep my spirit from my eyes' because I hear a fellow is better, if you mean that." "You seem to be absolutely grieved at his chance of recovery," viciously. "I have no doubt I seem to you all that is vilest and worst. I learned your opinion of me long ago." "Well,"--scornfully--"I think you need scarcely choose either this time, or place, for one of your stand-up fights. When you remember what you have just said,--that you are actually _sorry_ poor dear Archie is alive,--I think you ought to go away and feel very much ashamed of yourself." "Did I say that?" indignantly. "Oh, I don't know," indifferently,--as though his denial now cannot possibly alter the original fact; "something very like it, at all events." "How can you so malign me, Lilian?" angrily. "No one can be more heartily sorry for poor Chesney than I am, or more pleased at his escape from death. You willfully misunderstand every word I utter. For the future,--as all I say seems to annoy,--I beg you will not trouble yourself to address me at all." "I shall speak to you just whenever I choose," replies Miss Chesney, with superb defiance. At this thrilling instant Chesney's door is again opened wide, and Dr. Bland comes out, treading softly, and looking all importance. "You, my dear Miss Chesney!" he says, approaching her lightly; "the very young lady of all others I most wished to see. Not that there is anything very curious about that fact," with his cozy chuckle; "but your cousin is asking for you, and really, you know, upon my word, he is so very excitable, I think perhaps--eh?--under the circumstances, you know, it would be well to gratify his pardonable desire to see you--eh?" "The circumstances" refer to the rooted conviction, that for weeks has been planted in the doctor's breast, of Miss Chesney's engagement to her cousin. "To see me?" says Lilian, shrinking away involuntarily, and turning very red. Both the tone and the blush are "confirmation strong" of the doctor's opinion. And Guy, watching her silently, feels, if possible, even more certain than before of her affection for Chesney. "To be sure, my dear; and why not?" says the kindly little doctor, patting her encouragingly on the shoulder. He deals in pats and smiles. They are both part of his medicine. So,--under the circumstances,-- through force of habit, would he have patted the Queen of England or a lowly milkmaid alike,--with perhaps an additional pat to the milkmaid, should she chance to be pretty. Lilian, being rich in nature's charms, is a special favorite of his. "But--" says Lilian, still hesitating. To tell the truth, she is hardly ambitious of entering Archibald's room, considering their last stormy parting; and, besides, she is feeling sadly nervous and out of sorts. The ready tears spring again to her eyes; once more the tell-tale blood springs hotly to her cheeks. Guy's fixed gaze--he is watching her with a half sneer upon his face--disconcerts her still further. Good Dr. Bland entirely mistakes the meaning of her confusion. "Now, my dear child, if I give you leave to see this reckless cousin, we must be cautious, _very_ cautious, and quiet, _extremely_ quiet, eh? That is essential, you know. And mind, no tears. There is nothing so injurious on these occasions as tears! Reminds one invariably of last farewells and funeral services, and coffins, and all such uncomfortable matters. I don't half like granting these interviews myself, but he appears bent on seeing you, and, as I have said before, he is impetuous,--_very_ impetuous." "You think, then," stammers Lilian, making one last faint effort at escape from the dreaded ordeal,--"you think----" "I don't think," smiling good-naturedly, "I _know_ you must not stay with him longer than five minutes." "Good doctor, make it three," is on the point of Lilian's tongue, but, ashamed to refuse this small request of poor wounded Archibald, she follows Dr. Bland into his room. On the bed, lying pale and exhausted, is Archibald, his lips white, his eyes supernaturally large and dark. They grow even larger and much brighter as they rest on Lilian, who slowly, but--now that she again sees him so weak and prostrate--full of pity, approaches his side. "You have come, Lilian," he says, faintly: "it is very good of you,--more than I deserve. I vexed you terribly this morning, did I not? But you will forgive me now I have come to grief," with a wan smile. "I have nothing to forgive," says Lilian, tremulously, gazing down upon him pityingly through two big violet eyes so overcharged with tears as makes one wonder how they can keep the kindly drops from running down her cheeks. "But you have. Oh, Archie, let me tell you how deeply I deplore having spoken so harshly to you to-day. If"--with a shudder--"you had indeed been killed, I should never have been happy again." "I was unmanly," says Chesney, holding out his hand feebly for hers, which is instantly given. "I am afraid I almost threatened you. I am thoroughly ashamed of myself." "Oh, hush! I am sure you are speaking too much; and Dr. Bland says you must not excite yourself. Are you suffering much pain?" very tenderly. "Not much;" but the drawn expression of his face belies his assertion. "To look at you"--softly--"gives me ease." "I wonder you don't hate me," says Lilian, in a distressed tone, fighting hard to suppress the nervous sob that is rising so rebelliously in her throat. Almost at this moment--so sorry is she for his hopeless infatuation for her--she wishes he did hate her. "Yet I am not altogether to blame, and I have suffered more than I can tell you since you got that terrible fall!" This assurance is very sweet to him. "When I saw you lying motionless,--when I laid your head upon my knees and tried to call you back to life, and you never answered me, I thought--" "You!" interrupts he, hastily; "did your hands succor me?" "Yes," coloring warmly; "though it was very little good I could do you, I was so frightened. You looked so cold,--so still. I thought then, 'suppose it was my cross words had induced him to take that fence?' But"--nervously--"it wasn't: that was a foolish, a conceited thought, with no truth in it." "Some little truth, I think," sadly. "When you told me 'never to speak to you again,'--you recollect?--there came a strange hard look into your usually kind eyes--" pressing her hand gently to take somewhat from the sting of his words--"that cut me to the heart. Your indifference seemed in that one moment to have turned to hatred, and I think I lost my head a little. Forgive me, sweetheart, if I could not then help thinking that death could not be much worse than life." "Archie,"--gravely,--"promise me you will never think that again." "I promise." There is a short pause. It is growing almost dark. The wintry day, sad and weakly from its birth, is dying fast. All the house is silent, hushed, full of expectancy; only a little irrepressible clock in the next room ticks its loudest, as though defying pain or sorrow to affect it in any way. "Is it your arm?" asks Lilian, gently, his other hand being hidden beneath the sheet, "or----" "No; two of my ribs, I believe, and my head aches a good deal." "I am tormenting you with my foolish chatter," rising remorsefully, as though to quit the room. "No, no," eagerly; "I tell you it makes me easier to see you; it dulls the pain." Slowly, painfully he draws her hand upward to his lips, and kisses it softly. "We are friends again?" he whispers. "Yes,--always friends," tightening her fingers sympathetically over his. "If"--very earnestly--"you would only try to make up your mind never to speak to me again as you did--last night, I believe another unpleasant word would never pass between us." "Do not fear," he says, slowly: "I have quite made up my mind. Rather than risk bringing again into your eyes the look I saw there to-day, I would keep silence forever." Here Dr. Bland puts his head inside the door, and beckons Lilian to withdraw. "The five minutes are up," he says, warningly, consulting the golden turnip he usually keeps concealed somewhere about his person, though where, so large is it, has been for years a matter of speculation with his numerous patients. "I must go," says Lilian, rising: the door is open, and all that goes on within the chamber can be distinctly heard in the corridor outside. "Now try to sleep, will you not? and don't worry, and don't even think if you can help it." "Must you go?" wistfully. "I fear I must." "You will come again to-morrow, very early?" "I will come to-morrow, certainly, as early as I can. Good-night." "Good-night." Closing the door softly behind her, she advances into the corridor, where she still finds Guy and Dr. Bland conversing earnestly. Perhaps they have been waiting for her coming. "So you have persuaded him to go to sleep?" asks the doctor, beaming kindly upon "pretty Miss Chesney," that being the title given to her long ago by the country generally. "Yes. I think he will sleep now," Lilian answers. "He looks very white, poor, poor fellow, but not so badly as I expected." "I suppose your presence did him good. Well, I will take a last look at him before leaving," moving toward the closed door. "Can I do anything for you?" asks Guy, following him, glad of any excuse that makes him quit Lilian's side. "Yes,"--smiling,--"you can, indeed. Take your ward down-stairs and give her a glass of wine. She is too pale for my fancy. I shall be having her on my hands next if you don't take care." So saying, he disappears. Guy turns coldly to Lilian. "Will you come down, or shall I send something up to you?" he asks, icily. Lilian's fears have subsided; consequently her spirits have risen to such a degree that they threaten to overflow every instant. A desire for mischief makes her heart glow. "I shall go with you," she says, with a charming grimace. "I might blame myself in after years if I ever willingly failed to cultivate every second spent in your agreeable society." So saying, she trips down-stairs gayly beside him, a lovely, though rather naughty, smile upon her lips. CHAPTER XXVII. "_Claud._--In mine eye, she is the sweetest lady that ever I looked on."--_Much Ado About Nothing._ Because of Archibald's accident, and because of much harassing secret thought, Christmas is a failure this year at Chetwoode. Tom Steyne and his wife and their adorable baby come to them for a week, it is true, and try by every means in their power to lighten the gloom that hangs over the house, but in vain. Guy is obstinately _distrait_, not to say ill-tempered; Lilian is fitful,--now full of the wildest spirits, and anon capricious and overflowing with little imperious whims; Archibald, though rapidly mending, is of course invisible, and a complete dead letter; while Cyril, usually the most genial fellow in the world and devoid of moods, is at this particular time consumed with anxiety, having at last made up his mind to reveal to his mother his engagement to Cecilia and ask her consent to their speedy marriage. Yet another full month elapses, and already the first glad thought of spring is filling every breast, before he really brings himself to speak upon the dreaded subject. His disclosure he knows by instinct will be received ungraciously and with disapprobation, not only by Lady Chetwoode, but by Sir Guy, who has all through proved himself an enemy to the cause. His determined opposition will undoubtedly increase the difficulties of the situation, as Lady Chetwoode is in all matters entirely ruled by her eldest son. Taking Lilian into his confidence, Cyril happens to mention to her this latter sure drawback to the success of his suit, whereupon she generously declares herself both able and willing to take Sir Guy in hand and compel him to be not only non-combative on the occasion, but an actual partisan. At these valiant words Cyril is so transported with hope and gratitude that, without allowing himself time for reflection, he suddenly and very warmly embraces his pretty colleague, calling her, as "Traddles" might have done, "the dearest girl in the world," and vowing to her that but for one other she is indeed "the only woman he ever loved." Having recovered from the astonishment caused by this outbreak on the part of the generally nonchalant Cyril, Miss Chesney draws her breath slowly, and wends her way toward Sir Guy's private den, where she knows he is at present sure to be found. "Are you busy?" she asks, showing her face in the doorway, but not advancing. "Not to you," courteously. They are now on friendly though somewhat constrained speaking terms. "Will you give me, then, a little of your time? It is something very important." "Certainly," replies he, surprised both at the solemnity of her manner and at the request generally. "Come in and shut the door." "It is just a question I would ask of you," says Lilian, uncomfortably, now she has come to the point, finding an extraordinary difficulty about proceeding. At length, with a desperate effort she raises her head, and, looking full at him, says, distinctly: "Sir Guy, when two people love each other very dearly, don't you think they ought to marry?" This startling interrogation has the effect of filling Chetwoode with dismay. He turns white in spite of his vigorous attempt at self-control, and involuntarily lays his hand upon the nearest chair to steady himself. Has she come here to tell him of her affection for her cousin? "There must be something more," he says, presently, regarding her fixedly. "Yes, but answer me first. Don't you think they ought?" "I suppose so,"--unwillingly,--"unless there should be some insuperable difficulty in the way." "He suspects me; he knows my errand," thinks Lilian, letting her eyes seek the carpet, which gives her all the appearance of feeling a very natural confusion. "He hopes to entangle me. His 'difficulty' is poor dear Cecilia's very disreputable papa." "No difficulty should stand in the way of love," she argues, severely. "Besides, what is an 'insuperable difficulty'? Supposing one of them should be unhappily less--less respectable than the other: would that be it?" Sir Guy opens his eyes. Is it not, then, the cousin? and if not, who? "Less respectable." He runs through the long list of all the young men of questionable morals with whom he is acquainted, but can come to no satisfactory conclusion. Has she possibly heard of certain lawless doings of Archibald in earlier days, and does she fear perhaps that he, her guardian, will refuse consent to her marriage because of them? At this thought he freezes. "I think all unsuitable marriages a crime," he says, coldly. "Sooner or later they lead to the bitterest of all repentance. To marry one one cannot respect! Surely such an act carries with it its own punishment. It is a hateful thought. But then----" "You do not understand," pleads Lilian, rising in her eagerness, and going nearer to him, while her large eyes read his face nervously as she trembles for the success of her undertaking. "There is no question of 'respect.' It is not that I mean. These two of whom I speak will never repent, because they love each other so entirely." "What a stress you lay on the word love!" he says, in a half-mocking, wholly bitter tone. "Do you believe in it?" "I do, indeed. I cannot think there is anything in this world half so good as it," replies she, with conviction, while reddening painfully beneath his gaze. "Is it not our greatest happiness?" "I think it is our greatest curse." "How can you say that?" with soft reproach. "Can you not see for yourself how it redeems all the misery of life for some people?" "Those two fortunate beings of whom you are speaking, for instance," with a sneer. "All people are not happy in their attachment. What is to become of those miserable wretches who love, but love in vain? Did you never hear of a homely proverb that tells you 'one man's meat is another man's poison'?" "You are cynical to-day. But to return; the two to whom I allude have no poison to contend with. They love so well that it is misery to them to be apart,--so devotedly that they know no great joy except when they are together. Could such love cool? I am sure not. And is it not cruel to keep them asunder?" Her voice has grown positively plaintive; she is evidently terribly in earnest. "Are you speaking of yourself?" asks Guy, huskily, turning with sudden vehemence to lay his hand upon her arm and scan her features with intense, nay, feverish anxiety. "Of myself?" recoiling. "No! What can you mean? What is it that I should say of myself?" Her cheeks are burning, her eyes are shamed and perplexed, but they have not fallen before his: she is evidently full of secret wonder. "It is for Cyril I plead, and for Cecilia," she says, after a strange pause. "Cyril!" exclaims he, the most excessive relief in tone and gesture. "Does he want to marry Mrs. Arlington?" "Yes. I know you have a prejudice against her,"--earnestly,--"but that is because you do not know her. She is the sweetest woman I ever met." "This has been going on for a long time?" "I think so. Cyril wished to marry her long ago, but she would not listen to him without auntie's consent. Was not that good of her? If I was in her place, I do not believe I should wait for any one's consent." "I am sure"--dryly--"you would not." "No, not even for my guardian's," replies she, provokingly; then, with a lapse into her former earnestness, "I want you to be good to her. She is proud, prouder than auntie even, and would not forgive a slight. And if her engagement to Cyril came to an end, he would never be happy again. Think of it." "I do," thoughtfully. "I think it is most unfortunate. And she a widow, too!" "But such a widow!" enthusiastically. "A perfect darling of a widow! I am not sure, after all,"--with rank hypocrisy,--"that widows are not to be preferred before mere silly foolish girls, who don't know their own minds half the time." "Is that a description of yourself?" with an irrepressible smile. "Don't be rude! No 'mere silly girl' would dare to beard a stern guardian in his den as I am doing! But am I to plead in vain? Dear Sir Guy, do not be hard. What could be dearer than her refusing to marry Cyril if it should grieve auntie? 'She would not separate him from his mother,' she said. Surely you must admire her in that one instance at least. Think of it all again. They love each other, and they are unhappy; and you can turn their sorrow into joy." "Now they love, of course; but will it last? Cyril's habits are very expensive, and he has not much money. Do you ever think you may be promoting a marriage that by and by will prove a failure? The day may come when they will hate you for having helped to bring them together." "No," says Lilian, stoutly, shaking her _blonde_ head emphatically; "I have no such unhealthy thoughts or fancies. They suit each other; they are happy in each other's society; they will never repent their marriage." "Is that your experience?" he asks, half amused. "I have no experience," returns she, coloring and smiling: "I am like the Miller of the Dee; I care for nobody, no, not I,--for nobody cares for me." "You forget your cousin." The words escape him almost without his consent. Miss Chesney starts perceptibly, but a second later answers his taunt with admirable composure. "What? Archie? Oh! he don't count; cousins are privileged beings. Or did you perhaps mean Taffy? But answer me, Sir Guy: you have not yet said you will help me. And I am bent on making Cecilia happy. I am honestly fond of her; I cannot bear to see you think contemptuously of her; while I would gladly welcome her as a sister." "I do not see how her marrying Cyril can make her your sister," replies he, idly; and then he remembers what he has said, and the same thought striking them both at the same moment, they let their eyes meet uneasily, and both blush scarlet. Guy, sauntering to the window, takes an elaborate survey of the dismal landscape outside; Lilian coughs gently, and begins to count industriously all the embroidered lilies in the initial that graces the corner of her handkerchief. One--two--three---- "They might as well have put in four," she says out loud, abstractedly. "What?" turning from the window to watch the lovely _mignonne_ face still bent in contemplation of the lilies. "Nothing," mildly: "did I say anything?" "Something about 'four,' I thought." "Perhaps"--demurely--"I was thinking I had asked you four times to be good-natured, and you had not deigned to grant my request. When Lady Chetwoode speaks to you of Cyril and Cecilia, say you will be on their side. Do not vote against them. Promise." He hesitates. "Not when _I_ ask you?" murmurs she, in her softest tones, going a little nearer to him, and uplifting her luminous blue eyes to his. Still he hesitates. Miss Chesney takes one step more in his direction, which is necessarily the last, unless she wishes to walk through him. Her eyes, now full of wistful entreaty, and suspiciously bright, are still fixed reproachfully upon his. With a light persuasive gesture she lays five white, slender fingers upon his arm, and whispers, in plaintive tones: "I feel sure I am going to cry." "I promise," says Sir Guy, instantly, laughing in spite of himself, and letting his own hand close with unconscious force over hers for a moment. Whereupon Miss Chesney's lachrymose expression vanishes as if by magic, while a smile bright and triumphant illuminates her face in its stead. "Thank you," she says, delightedly, and trips toward the door eager to impart her good news. Upon the threshold, however, she pauses, and glances back at him coquettishly, perhaps a trifle maliciously, from under her long heavily-fringed lids. "I knew I should win the day," she says, teasingly, "although you don't believe in love. Nevertheless, I thank you again, and"--raising her head, and holding out one hand to him with a sweet _bizarre_ grace all her own--"I would have you know I don't think you half such a bad old guardy after all!" * * * * * Almost at this moment Cyril enters his mother's boudoir, where, to his astonishment, he finds her without companions. "All alone, Madre?" he says, airily, putting on his gayest manner and his most fetching smile to hide the perturbation that in reality he is feeling. His heart is in his boots, but he wears a very gallant exterior. "Yes," replies Lady Chetwoode, looking up from her work, "and very dull company I find myself. Have you come to enliven me a little? I hope so: I have been _gêne_ to the last degree for quite an hour." "Where is the inevitable Florence?" "In the drawing-room, with Mr. Boer. I can't think what she sees in him, but she appears to value his society highly. To-day he has brought her some more church music to try over, and I really wish he wouldn't. Anything more afflicting than chants tried over and over again upon the piano I can't conceive. They are very bad upon the organ, but on the piano! And sometimes he _will_ insist on singing them with her!" Here two or three wailing notes from down-stairs are wafted, weeping into the room, setting the hearers' teeth on edge. To even an incorrect ear it might occur that Mr. Boer's stentorian notes are not always in tune! "My dear, my dear," exclaims Lady Chetwoode, in a voice of agony, "shut the door close; _closer_, my dear Cyril, they are at it again!" "It's a disease," says Cyril, solemnly. "A great many curates have it. We should count ourselves lucky that laymen don't usually catch it." "I really think it is. I can't bear that sort of young man myself," says Lady Chetwoode, regretfully, who feels some gentle grief that she cannot bring herself to admire Mr. Boer; "but I am sure we should all make allowances; none of us are perfect; and Mrs. Boileau assures me he is very earnest and extremely zealous. Still, I wish he could try to speak differently: I think his mother very much to blame for bringing him up with such a voice." "She was much to blame for bringing him up at all. He should have been strangled at his birth!" Cyril says this slowly, moodily, with every appearance of really meaning what he says. He is, however, unaware of the blood-thirsty expression he has assumed, as though in support of his words, being in fact miles away in thought from Mr. Boer and his Gregorian music. He is secretly rehearsing a coming conversation with his mother, in which Cecilia's name is to be delicately introduced. "That is going rather far, is it not?" Lady Chetwoode says, laughing. "A man is not an automaton. He cannot always successfully stifle his feelings," says Cyril, still more moodily, _àpropos_ of his own thoughts; which second most uncalled-for remark induces his mother to examine him closely. "There is something on your mind," she says, gently. "You are not now thinking of either me or Mr. Boer. Sit down, dear boy, and tell me all about it." "I will tell you standing," says Cyril, who feels it would be taking advantage of her ignorance to accept a chair until his disclosure is made. Then the private rehearsal becomes public, and presently Lady Chetwoode knows all about his "infatuation," as she terms it, for the widow, and is quite as much distressed about it as even he had expected. "It is terrible!" she says, presently, when she has somewhat recovered from the first shock caused by his intelligence; "and only last spring you promised me to think seriously of Lady Fanny Stapleton." "My dear mother, who could think seriously of Lady Fanny? Why, with her short nose, and her shorter neck, and her anything but sylph-like form, she has long ago degenerated into one vast joke." "She has money," in a rather stifled tone. "And would you have me sacrifice my whole life for mere money?" reproachfully. "Would money console you afterward, when you saw me wretched?" "But why should you be wretched?" Then, quickly, "Are you so very sure this Mrs. Arlington will make you happy?" "Utterly positive!" in a radiant tone. "And are you ready to sacrifice every comfort for mere beauty?" retorts she. "Ah, Cyril, beware: you do not understand yet what it is to be hampered for want of money. And there are other things: when one marries out of one's own sphere, one always repents it." "One cannot marry higher than a lady," flushing. "She is not a countess, or an honorable, or even Lady Fanny; but she is of good family, and she is very sweet, and very gentle, and very womanly. I shall never again see any one so good in my eyes. I entreat you, dear mother, not to refuse your consent." "I shall certainly say nothing until I see Guy," says Lady Chetwoode, tearfully, making a last faint stand. "Then let us send for him, and get it over," Cyril says, with gentle impatience, who is very pale, but determined to finish the subject one way or the other, now and forever. Almost as he says it, Guy enters; and Lady Chetwoode, rising, explains the situation to him in a few agitated words. True to his promise to Lilian, and more perhaps because a glance at his brother's quiet face tells him opposition will be vain, Guy says a few things in favor of the engagement. But though the words are kind, they are cold; and, having said them, he beats an instantaneous retreat, leaving Cyril, by his well-timed support, master of the field. "Marry her, then, as you are all against me," says Lady Chetwoode, the tears running down her cheeks. It is very bitter to her to remember how Lady Fanny's precious thousands have been literally flung away. All women, even the best and the sweetest, are mercenary where their sons are concerned. "And you will call upon her?" says Cyril, after a few minutes spent in an effort to console her have gone by. "Call!" repeats poor Lady Chetwoode, with some indignation, "upon that woman who absolutely declined to receive me when first she came! I have a little pride still remaining, Cyril, though indeed you have humbled a good deal of it to-day," with keen reproach. "When first she came,"--apologetically,--"she was in great grief and distress of mind." "Grief for her husband?" demands she; which is perhaps the bitterest thing Lady Chetwoode ever said in her life to either of her "boys." "No," coldly; "I think I told you she had never any affection for him." Then his voice changes, and going over to her he takes her hand entreatingly, and passes one arm over her shoulder. "Can you not be kind to her for my sake?" he implores. "Dearest mother, I cannot bear to hear you speak of her as 'that woman,' when I love her so devotedly." "I suppose when one is married one may without insult be called a woman," turning rather aside from his caress. "But then she was so little married, and she looks quite a girl. You will go to see her, and judge for yourself?" "I suppose there is nothing else left for me to do. I would not have all the county see how utterly you have disappointed me. I have been a good mother to you, Cyril,"--tremulously,--"and this is how you requite me." "It cuts me to the heart to grieve you so much,"--tenderly,--"you, my own mother. But I--I have been a good son to you, too, have I not, dear Madre?" "You have indeed," says Lady Chetwoode; and then she cries a little behind her handkerchief. "How old is she?" with quivering lips. "Twenty-two or twenty-three, I am not sure which," in a subdued tone. "In manner is she quiet?" "Very. Tranquil is the word that best expresses her. When you see her you will acknowledge I have not erred in taste." Lady Chetwoode with a sigh lays down her arms, and when Cyril stoops his face to hers she does not refuse the kiss he silently demands, so that with a lightened conscience he leaves the room to hurry on the wings of love to Cecilia's bower. All the way there he seems to tread on air. His heart is beating, he is full of happiest exultation. The day is bright and joyous; already one begins to think of winter kindly as a thing of the past. All nature seems in unison with his exalted mood. Reaching the garden he knows so well and loves so fondly, he walks with eager, longing steps toward a side path where usually she he seeks is to be found. Now standing still, he looks round anxiously for Cecilia. But Cecilia is not there! CHAPTER XXVIII. "_Lys._--How now, my love? Why is your cheek so pale? How chance the roses there do fade so fast? _Her._--Belike, for want of rain, which I could well Between them from the tempest of mine eyes." --_Midsummer Night's Dream._ Up in her chamber sits Cecilia, speechless, spell-bound, fighting with a misery too great for tears. Upon her knee lies an open letter from which an enclosure has slipped and fallen to the ground. And on this last her eyes, scorched and distended, are fixed hopelessly. The letter itself is from Colonel Trant: it was posted yesterday, and received by her late last night, though were you now to tell her a whole year has elapsed since first she read its fatal contents, I do not think she would evince much doubt or surprise. It was evidently hastily penned, the characters being rough and uneven, and runs as follows: "Austen Holm. Friday. "MY DEAR GIRL,--The attempt to break bad news to any one has always seemed to me so vain, and so unsatisfactory a proceeding, and one so likely to render even heavier the blow it means to soften, that here I refrain from it altogether. Yet I would entreat you when reading what I now enclose not to quite believe in its truth until further proofs be procured. I shall remain at my present address for three days longer: if I do not by then hear from you, I shall come to The Cottage. Whatever happens, I know you will remember it is my only happiness to serve you, and that I am ever your faithful friend, "GEORGE TRANT." When Cecilia had read so far, she raised the enclosure, though without any very great misgivings, and, seeing it was from some unknown friend of Trant's, at present in Russia, skimmed lightly through the earlier portion of it, until at length a paragraph chained her attention and killed at a stroke all life and joy and happy love within her. "By the bye," ran this fatal page, "did you not know a man named Arlington?--tall, rather stout, and dark; you used to think him dead. He is not, however, as I fell against him yesterday by chance and learned his name and all about him. He didn't seem half such a dissipated card as you described him, so I hope traveling has improved his morals. I asked him if he knew any one called Trant, and he said, 'Yes, several.' I had only a minute or two to speak to him, and, as he never drew breath himself during that time, I had not much scope for questioning. He appears possessed of many advantages,--pretty wife at home, no end of money, nice place, unlimited swagger. Bad form all through, but genial. You will see him shortly in the old land, as he is starting for England almost immediately." And so on, and on, and on. But Cecilia, then or afterward, never read another line. Her first thought was certainly not of Cyril. It was abject, cowering fear,--a horror of any return to the old loathed life,--a crushing dread lest any chance should fling her again into her husband's power. Then she drew her breath a little hard, and thought of Trant, and then of Cyril; and _then_ she told herself, with a strange sense of relief, that at least one can die. But this last thought passed away as did the others, and she knew that death seldom comes to those who seek it; and to command it,--who should dare do that? Hope dies hard in some breasts! In Cecilia's the little fond flame barely flickered, so quickly did it fade away and vanish altogether before the fierce blast that had assailed it. Not for one moment did she doubt the truth of the statement lying before her. She was too happy, too certain; she should have remembered that some are born to misfortune as the sparks fly upward. "She had lived, she had loved," and here was the end of it all! All night long she had not slept. She had indeed lain upon her bed, her pillow had known the impress of her head, but through every minute of the lonely, silent awesome hours of gloom, her great eyes had been wide open, watching for the dawn. At last it came. A glorious dawn; a very flush of happy youth; the sweeter that it bespoke a warm and early spring. At first it showed pale pink with expectation, then rosy with glad hope. From out the east faint rays of gold rushed tremulously, and, entering the casement, cast around Cecilia's head a tender halo. When happiness lies within our grasp, when all that earth can give us (alas! how little!) is within our keeping, how good is the coming of another day,--a long, perfect day, in which to revel, and laugh, and sing, as though care were a thing unknown! But when trouble falls upon us, and this same terrible care is our only portion, with what horror, what heart-sinking, do we turn our faces from the light and wish with all the fervor of a vain wish that it were night! The holy dawn brought but anguish to Cecilia. She did not turn with impatience from its smiling beauty, but heavy tears gathered slowly, and grew within her sorrowful gray eyes, until at length (large as was their home) they burst their bounds and ran quickly down her cheeks, as though glad to escape from what should never have been their resting-place. Swiftly, silently, ran the little pearly drops, ashamed of having dimmed the lustre of those lovely eyes that only yester morning were so glad with smiles. Sitting now in her bedroom, forlorn and desolate, with the cruel words that have traveled all the way across a continent to slay her peace throbbing through her brain, she hears Cyril's well-known step upon the gravel outside, and, springing to her feet as though stabbed, shrinks backward until the wall yields her a support. A second later, ashamed of her own weakness, she straightens herself, smooths back her ruffled hair from her forehead, and, with a heavy sigh and colorless face, walks down-stairs to him who from henceforth must be no more counted as a lover. Slowly, with lingering steps that betray a broken heart, she draws nigh to him. Seeing her, he comes quickly forward to greet her, still glad with the joy that has been his during all his walk through the budding woods, a smile upon his lips. But the smile soon dies. The new blankness, the terrible change, he sees in the beloved face sobers him immediately. It is vivid enough even at a first glance to fill him with apprehension: hastening to her as though eager to succor her from any harm that may be threatening, he would have taken her in his arms, but she, with a little quick shudder, putting up her hands, prevents him. "No," she says, in a low changed tone; "not again!" "Something terrible has happened," Cyril says, with conviction, "or you would not so repulse me. Darling, what is it?" "I don't know how to tell you," replies she, her tone cold with the curious calmness of despair. "It cannot be so very bad," nervously; "nothing can signify greatly, unless it separates you from me." A mournful bitter laugh breaks from Cecilia, a laugh that ends swiftly, tunelessly, as it began. "How nearly you have touched upon the truth!" she says, miserably; and then, in a clear, hard voice, "My husband is alive." A dead silence. No sound to disturb the utter stillness, save the sighing of the early spring wind, the faint twitter of the birds among the budding branches as already they seek to tune their slender throats to the warblings of love, and the lowing of the brown-eyed oxen in the fields far, far below them. Then Cyril says, with slow emphasis: "I don't believe it. It's a lie! It is impossible!" "It is true. I feel it so. Something told me my happiness was too great to last, and now it has come to an end. Alas! alas! how short a time it has continued with me! Oh, Cyril!"--smiting her hands together passionately,--"what shall I do? what shall I do? If he finds me he will kill me, as he often threatened. How shall I escape?" "It is untrue," repeats Cyril, doggedly, hardly noting her terror and despair. His determined disbelief restores her to calmness. "Do you think I would believe except on certain grounds?" she says. "Colonel Trant wrote me the evil tidings." "Trant is interested; he might be glad to delay our marriage," he says, with a want of generosity unworthy of him. "No, no, _no_. You wrong him. And how should he seek to delay a marriage that was yet far distant?" "Not so very distant. I have yet to tell you"--with a strange smile--"my chief reason for being here to-day: to ask you to receive my mother to-morrow, who is coming to welcome you as a daughter. How well Fate planned this tragedy! to have our crowning misfortune fall straight into the lap of our newly-born content! Cecilia,"--vehemently,--"there must still be a grain of hope somewhere. Do not let us quite despair. I cannot so tamely accept the death to all life's joys that must follow on belief." "You shall see for yourself," replies she, handing to him the letter that all this time has lain crumbled beneath her nerveless fingers. When he has read it, he drops it with a groan, and covers his face with his hands. To him, too, the evidence seems clear and convincing. "I told you to avoid me. I warned you," she says, presently, with a wan smile. "I am born to ill-luck; I bring it even to all those who come near me--especially, it seems, to the few who are unhappy enough to love me. Go, Cyril, while there is yet time." "There is not time," desperately: "it is already too late." He moves away from her, and in deep agitation paces up and down the secluded garden-path; while she, standing alone with drooping head and dry miserable eyes, scarcely cares to watch his movements, so dead within her have all youth and energy grown. "Cecilia," he says, suddenly, stopping before her, and speaking in a low tone, that, though perfectly clear, still betrays inward hesitation, while his eyes carefully avoid hers, "listen to me. What is he to you, this man that they say is still alive, that you should give up your whole life for him? He deserted you, scorned you, left you for another woman. For two long years you have believed him dead. Why should you now think him living? Let him be dead still and buried in your memory; there are other lands,"--slowly, and still with averted eyes,--"other homes: why should we not make one for ourselves? Cecilia,"--coming up to her, white but earnest, and holding out his arms to her,--"come with me, and let us find our happiness in each other!" Cecilia, after one swift glance at him, moves back hastily. "How dare you use such words to me?" she says, in a horror-stricken voice; "how dare you tempt me? you, _you_ who said you loved me!" Then the little burst of passion dies; her head droops still lower upon her breast; her hands coming together fall loosely before her in an attitude descriptive of the deepest despondency. "I believed in you," she says, "I trusted you. I did not think _you_ would have been the one to inflict the bitterest pang of all." She breathes these last words in accents of the saddest reproach. "Nor will I!" cries he, with keen contrition, kneeling down before her, and hiding his face in a fold of her gown. "Never again, my darling, my life! I forgot,--I forgot you are as high above all other women as the sun is above the earth. Cecilia, forgive me." "Nay, there is nothing to forgive," she says. "But, Cyril,"--unsteadily,--"you will go abroad at once, for a little while, until I have time to decide where in the future I shall hide my head." "Must I?" "You must." "And you,--where will you go?" "It matters very little. You will have had time to forget me before ever I trust myself to see you again." "Then I shall never see you again," replies he, mournfully, "if you wait for that. 'My true love hath my heart, and I have hers.' How can I forget you while it beats warm within my breast?" "Be it so," she answers, with a sigh: "it is a foolish fancy, yet it gladdens me. I would not be altogether displaced from your mind." So she lays her hand upon his head as he still kneels before her, and gently smooths and caresses it with her light loving fingers. He trembles a little, and a heavy dry sob breaks from him. This parting is as the bitterness of death. To them it _is_ death, because it is forever. He brings the dear hand down to his lips, and kisses it softly, tenderly. "Dearest," she murmurs, brokenly, "be comforted." "What comfort can I find, when I am losing you?" "You can think of me." "That would only increase my sorrow." "Is it so with you? For me I am thankful, very thankful, for the great joy that has been mine for months, the knowledge that you loved me. Even now, when desolation has come upon us, the one bright spot in all my misery is the thought that at least I may remember you, and call to mind your words, your face, your voice, without sin." "If ever you need me," he says, when a few minutes have elapsed, "you have only to write, 'Cyril, I want you,' and though the whole world should lie between us, I shall surely come. O my best beloved! how shall I live without you?" "Don't,--do not speak like that," entreats she, faintly. "It is too hard already: do not make it worse." Then, recovering herself by a supreme effort, she says, "Let us part now, here, while we have courage. I think the few arrangements we can make have been made, and George Trant will write, if--if there is anything to write about." They are standing with their hands locked together reading each other's faces for the last time. "To-morrow you will leave Chetwoode?" she says, regarding him fixedly. "To-morrow! I could almost wish there was no to-morrow for either you or me," replies he. "Cyril," she says, with sudden fear, "you will take care of yourself, you will not go into any danger? Darling,"--with a sob,--"you will always remember that some day, when this is quite forgotten, I shall want to see again the face of my dearest friend." "I shall come back to you," he says quietly. He is so quiet that she tells herself now is a fitting time to break away from him; she forces herself to take the first step that shall part them remorselessly. "Good-bye," she says, in faltering tones. "Good-bye," returns he, mechanically. With the slow reluctant tears that spring from a broken heart running down her pale cheeks, she presses her lips fervently to his hands, and moves slowly away. When she has gone a few steps, frightened at the terrible silence that seems to have enwrapped him, benumbing his very senses, she turns to regard him once more. He has never stirred; he scarcely seems to breathe, so motionless is his attitude; as though some spell were on him, he stands silently gazing after her, his eyes full of dumb agony. There is something so utterly lonely in the whole scene that Cecilia bursts into tears. Her sobs rouse him. "Cecilia!" he cries, in a voice of mingled passion and despair that thrills through her. Once more he holds out to her his arms. She runs to him, and flings herself for the time into his embrace. He strains her passionately to his heart. Her sobs break upon the silent air. Once again their white lips form the word "farewell." There is a last embrace, a last lingering kiss. All is over. CHAPTER XXIX. "The flower that smiles to-day To-morrow dies; All that we wish to stay Tempts and then flies. What is this world's delight? Lightning that mocks the night, Brief even as bright."--SHELLEY. At Chetwoode they are all assembled in the drawing-room,--except Archibald, who is still confined to his room,--waiting for dinner: Cyril alone is absent. "What can be keeping him?" says his mother, at last, losing patience as she pictures him dallying with his betrothed at The Cottage while the soup is spoiling and the cook is gradually verging toward hysterics. She suffers an aggrieved expression to grow within her eyes as she speaks from the depths of the softest arm-chair the room contains, in which it is her custom to ensconce herself. "Nothing very dreadful, I dare say," replies Florence, in tones a degree less even than usual, her appetite having got the better of her self-control. Almost as she says the words the door is thrown open, and Cyril enters. He is in morning costume, his hair is a little rough, his face pale, his lips bloodless. Walking straight up to his mother, without looking either to the right or to the left, he says, in a low constrained voice that betrays a desperate effort to be calm: "Be satisfied, mother: you have won the day. Your wish is fulfilled: I shall never marry Mrs. Arlington: you need not have made such a difficulty about giving your consent this morning, as now it is useless." "Cyril, what has happened?" says Lady Chetwoode, rising to her feet alarmed, a distinct pallor overspreading her features. She puts out one jeweled hand as though to draw him nearer to her, but for the first time in all his life he shrinks from her gentle touch, and moving backward, stands in the middle of the room. Lilian, going up to him, compels him with loving violence to turn toward her. "Why don't you speak?" she asks, sharply. "Have you and Cecilia quarreled?" "No: it is no lovers' quarrel," with an odd change of expression: "we have had little time for quarreling, she and I: our days for love-making were so short, so sweet!" There is a pause: then in a clear harsh voice, in which no faintest particle of feeling can be traced, he goes on: "Her husband is alive; he is coming home. After all,"--with a short unlovely laugh, sad through its very bitterness,--"we worried ourselves unnecessarily, as she was not, what we so feared, a widow." "Cyril!" exclaims Lilian; she is trembling visibly, and gazes at him as though fearing he may have lost his senses. "I would not have troubled you about this matter," continues Cyril, not heeding the interruption, and addressing the room generally, without permitting himself to look at any one, "but that it is a fact that must be known sooner or later; I thought the sooner the better, as it will end your anxiety and convince you that this _mesalliance_ you so dreaded,"--with a sneer,--"can never take place." Guy, who has come close to him, here lays his hand upon his arm. "Do not speak to us as though we could not feel for you," he says, gently, pain and remorse struggling in his tone, "believe me----" But Cyril thrusts him back. "I want neither sympathy nor kind words now," he says, fiercely: "you failed me when I most required them, when they might have made _her_ happy. I have spoken on this subject now once for all. From this moment let no one dare broach it to me again." Guy is silent, repentant. No one speaks; the tears are running down Lilian's cheeks. "May not I?" she asks, in a distressed whisper. "Oh, my dear! do not shut yourself up alone with your grief. Have I not been your friend? Have not I, too, loved her? poor darling! Cyril, let me speak to you of her sometimes." "Not yet; not now," replies he, in the softest tone he has yet used, a gleam of anguish flashing across his face. "Yes, you were always true to her, my good little Lilian!" Then, sinking his voice, "I am leaving home, perhaps for years; do not forsake her. Try to console, to comfort----" He breaks down hopelessly; raising her hand to his lips, he kisses it fervently, and a second later has left the room. For quite two minutes after the door had closed upon him, no one stirs, no one utters a word. Guy is still standing with downcast eyes upon the spot that witnessed his repulse. Lilian is crying. Lady Chetwoode is also dissolved in tears. It is this particular moment Florence chooses to make the first remark that has passed her lips since Cyril's abrupt entrance. "Could anything be more fortunate?" she says, in a measured, congratulatory way. "Could anything have happened more opportunely? Here is this objectionable marriage irretrievably prevented without any trouble on our parts. I really think we owe a debt of gratitude to this very unpleasant husband." "Florence," cries Lady Chetwoode, with vehement reproach, stung to the quick, "how can you see cause for rejoicing in the poor boy's misery! Do you not think of him?" After which she subsides again, with an audible sob, into her cambric. But Lilian is not so easily satisfied. "How dare you speak so?" she says, turning upon Florence with wet eyes that flash fire through their tears. "You are a cold and heartless woman. How should _you_ understand what he is feeling,--poor, poor Cyril!" This ebullition of wrath seems to do her good. Kneeling down by her auntie, she places her arms round her, and has another honest comfortable cry upon her bosom. Florence draws herself up to her full height, which is not inconsiderable, and follows her movements with slow, supercilious wonder. She half closes her white lids, and lets her mouth take a slightly disdainful curve,--not too great a curve, but just enough to be becoming and show the proper disgust she feels at the terrible exhibition of ill-breeding that has just taken place. But as neither Lilian nor Lady Chetwoode can see her, and as Guy has turned to the fire and is staring into its depths with an expression of stern disapproval upon his handsome face, she presently finds she is posing to no effect, and gives it up. Letting a rather vindictive look cover her features, she sweeps out of the drawing-room up to her own chamber, and gets rid of her bad temper so satisfactorily that after ten minutes her maid gives warning, and is ready to curse the day she was born. The next morning, long before any one is up, Cyril takes his departure by the early train, and for many days his home knows him no more. * * * * * A mighty compassion for Cecilia fills the hearts of all at Chetwoode--all, that is, except Miss Beauchamp, who privately considers it extremely low and wretched form, to possess a heart at all. Lady Chetwoode, eager and anxious to atone for past unkind thought, goes down to The Cottage in person and insists on seeing its sad tenant,--when so tender and sympathetic is she, that, the ice being broken and pride vanquished, the younger woman gives way, and, laying her head upon the gentle bosom near her, has a hearty cry there, that eases even while it pains her. I have frequently noticed that when one person falls to weeping in the arms of another, that other person maintains a _tendresse_ for her for a considerable time afterward. Cecilia's lucky rain of tears on this occasion softens her companion wonderfully, so that Lady Chetwoode, who only came to pity, goes away admiring. There is an indescribable charm about Cecilia, impossible to resist. Perhaps it is her beauty, perhaps her exquisite womanliness, combined with the dignity that sits so sweetly on her. Lady Chetwoode succumbs to it, and by degrees grows not only sympathetic toward her, but really attached to her society,--"now, when it is too late," as poor Cecilia tells herself, with a bitter pang. Yet the friendship of Cyril's mother is dear to her, and helps to lighten the dreary days that must elapse before the news of her husband's return to life is circumstantially confirmed. They have all entreated her to make The Cottage still her home, until such unwelcome news arrives. Colonel Trant's friend has again written from Russia, but without being able to add another link to the chain of evidence. "He had not seen Arlington since. He had changed his quarters, so they had missed, and he had had no opportunity of cross-examining him as to his antecedents; but he himself had small doubt he was the man they had so often discussed together. He heard he had gone south, through Turkey, meaning to make his voyage home by sea; he had mentioned something about preferring that mode of traveling to any other. He could, of course, easily ascertain the exact time he meant to return to England, and would let Trant know without delay," etc. All this is eminently unsatisfactory, and suspense preying upon Cecilia commits terrible ravages upon both face and form. Her large eyes look at one full of a settled melancholy; her cheeks grow more hollow daily; her once elastic step has grown slow and fearful, as though she dreads to overtake misfortune. Every morning and evening, as the post hour draws nigh, she suffers mental agony, through her excessive fear of what a letter may reveal to her, sharper than any mere physical pain. Cyril has gone abroad; twice Lilian has received a line from him, but of his movements or his feelings they know nothing. Cecilia has managed to get both these curt letters into her possession, and no doubt treasures them, and weeps over them, poor soul, as a saint might over a relic. Archibald, now almost recovered, has left them reluctantly for change of air, in happy ignorance of the sad events that have been starting up among them since his accident, as all those aware of the circumstances naturally shrink from speaking of them, and show a united desire to prevent the unhappy story from spreading further. So day succeeds day, until at length matters come to a crisis, and hopes and fears are at an end. CHAPTER XXX. "Love laid his sleepless head On a thorny rose bed; And his eyes with tears were red And pale his lips as the dead. "And fear, and sorrow, and scorn, Kept watch by his head forlorn, Till the night was overworn, And the world was merry with morn. "And joy came up with the day, And kissed love's lips as he lay, And the watchers, ghostly and gray, Sped from his pillow away. "And his eyes at the dawn grew bright And his lips waxed ruddy as light: Sorrow may reign for a night, But day shall bring back delight." --SWINBURNE. The strong old winter is dead. He has died slowly, painfully, with many a desperate struggle, many a hard fight to reassert his power; but now at last he's safely buried, pushed out of sight by all the soft little armies of green leaves that have risen up in battle against him. Above his grave the sweet, brave young grasses are springing, the myriad flowers are bursting into fuller beauty, the birds, not now in twos or threes, but in countless thousands, are singing melodiously among the as yet half-opened leaves, making all the woods merry with their tender madrigals. The whole land is awake and astir, crying, "Welcome" to the flower-crowned spring, as she flies with winged feet over field, and brook, and upland. It is the first week in March, a wonderfully soft and lamb-like March even at this early stage of its existence. Archibald has again returned to Chetwoode, strong and well, having been pressed to do so by Lady Chetwoode, who has by this time brought herself, most reluctantly, to believe his presence necessary to Lilian's happiness. Taffy has also turned up quite unexpectedly, which makes his welcome perhaps a degree more cordial. Indeed, the amount of leave Mr. Musgrave contrives to get, and the scornful manner in which he regards it, raise within the bosoms of his numerous friends feelings of admiration the most intense. "Now, will you tell me what is the good of giving one a miserable fortnight here, and a contemptible fortnight there?" he asks, pathetically, in tones replete with unlimited disgust. "Why can't they give a fellow a decent three months at once, and let him enjoy himself? it's beastly mean, that's what it is! keeping a man grinding at hard duty morning, noon, and night." "It is more than that in your case: it is absolutely foolish," retorts Miss Chesney, promptly. "It shows an utter disregard for their own personal comfort. Your colonel can't be half a one; were I he, I should give you six months' leave twice every year, if only to get rid of you." "With what rapture would I hail your presence in the British army!" replies Mr. Musgrave, totally unabashed. * * * * * To-day is Tuesday. To-morrow, after long waiting that has worn her to a shadow, Cecilia is to learn her fate. To-morrow the steamer that is bringing to England the man named Arlington is expected to arrive; and Colonel Trant, as nervous and passionately anxious for Cecilia's sake as she can be for her own, has promised to meet it, to go on board, see the man face to face, so as to end all doubt, and telegraph instant word of what he will learn. Lilian, alone of them all, clings wildly and obstinately to the hope that this Arlington may not be _the_ Arlington; but she is the only one who dares place faith in this barren suggestion. At The Cottage, like one distracted, Cecilia has locked herself into her own room, and is pacing restlessly up and down the apartment, as though unable to sit, or know quiet, until the dreaded morrow comes. At Chetwoode they are scarcely less uneasy. An air of impatient expectation pervades the house. The very servants (who, it is needless to say, know all about it, down to the very lightest detail) seem to walk on tiptoe, and wear solemnly the dejected expression they usually reserve for their pew in church. Lady Chetwoode has fretted herself into one of her bad headaches, and is quite prostrate; lying on her bed, she torments herself, piling the agony ever higher, as she pictures Cyril's increased despair and misery should their worst fears be confirmed,--forgetting that Cyril, being without hope, can no longer fear. Lilian, unable to work or read, wanders aimlessly through the house, hardly knowing how to hide her growing depression from her cousins, who alone remain quite ignorant of the impending trouble. Mr. Musgrave, indeed, is so utterly unaware of the tragedy going on around him, that he chooses this particular day to be especially lively, not to say larky, and overpowers Lilian with his attentions; which so distracts her that, watching her opportunity, she finally effects her escape through the drawing-room window, and, running swiftly through the plantations, turns in the direction of the wood. She eludes one cousin, however, only to throw herself into the arms of another. Half-way to The Cottage she meets Archibald coming leisurely toward her. "Take me for a walk," he says, with humble entreaty; and Lilian, who, as a rule, is kind to every one except her guardian, tells him, after an unflattering pause, he may accompany her to such and such a distance, but no farther. "I am going to The Cottage," she says. "To see this Lady of Shalott, this mysterious Mariana in her moated grange?" asks Chesney, lightly. Odd as it may sound, he has never yet been face to face with Cecilia. Her determined seclusion and her habit of frequenting the parish church in the next village, which is but a short distance from her, has left her a stranger to almost every one in the neighborhood. Archibald is indeed aware that The Cottage owns a tenant, and that her name is Arlington, but nothing more. The fact of her never being named at Chetwoode has prevented his asking any idle questions and thereby making any discoveries. When they have come to the rising mound that half overlooks The Cottage garden, Lilian comes to a standstill. "Now you must leave me," she says, imperatively. "Why? We are quite a day's journey from The Cottage yet. Let me see you to the gate." "How tiresome you are!" says Miss Chesney; "just like a big baby, only not half so nice: you always want more than you are promised." As Chesney makes no reply to this sally, she glances at him, and, following the direction of his eyes, sees Cecilia, who has come out for a moment or two to breathe the sweet spring air, walking to and fro among the garden paths. It is a very pale and changed Cecilia upon whom they look. "Why," exclaims Chesney, in a tone of rapt surprise, "surely that is Miss Duncan!" "No,"--amazed,--"it is Mrs. Arlington, Sir Guy's tenant." "True,"--slowly,--"I believe she did marry that fellow afterward. But I never knew her except as Miss Duncan." "You knew her?" "Very slightly,"--still with his eyes fixed upon Cecilia, as she paces mournfully up and down in the garden below them, with bent head and slow, languid movements. "Once I spoke to her, but I knew her well by sight; she was, she _is_, one of the loveliest women I ever saw. But how changed she is! how altered, how white her face appears! or can it be the distance makes me think so? I remember her such a merry girl--almost a child--when she married Arlington." "Yes? She does not look merry now," says Lilian, the warm tears rising in her eyes: "poor darling, no wonder she looks depressed!" "Why?" "Oh," says Lilian, hesitating, "something about her husband, you know." "You don't mean to say she is wearing sackcloth and the willow, and all that sort of thing, for Arlington all this time?" in a tone of astonishment largely flavored with contempt. "I knew him uncommonly well before he married, and I should think his death would have been a cause for rejoicing to his wife, above all others." "Ah! that is just it," says Lilian, consumed with a desire to tell: she sinks her voice mysteriously, and sighs a heavy sigh tinctured with melancholy. "Just so," unsympathetically. "Some women, I believe, are hopeless idiots." "They are not," indignantly; "Cecilia is not an idiot; she is miserable because he is--alive! _Now_ what do you think?" "Alive!" incredulously. "Exactly so," with all the air of a triumphant _raconteur_. "And when she had believed him dead, too, for so long! is it not hard upon her, poor thing! to have him come to life again so disagreeably without a word of warning? I really think it is quite enough to kill her." "Well, I never!" says Mr. Chesney, staring at her. It isn't an elegant remark, but it is full of animated surprise, and satisfies Lilian. "Is it not a tragedy?" she says, growing more and more pitiful every moment. "All was going on well (it doesn't matter what), when suddenly some one wrote to Colonel Trant to say he had seen this odious Mr. Arlington alive and well in Russia, and that he was on his way home. I shall always"--viciously--"hate the man who wrote it: one would think he had nothing else to write about, stupid creature! but is it not shocking for her, poor thing?" At this, seemingly without rhyme or reason (except a depraved delight in other people's sufferings), Mr. Chesney bursts into a loud enjoyable laugh, and continues it for some seconds. He might perhaps have continued it until now, did not Lilian see fit to wither his mirth in the bud. "Is it a cause for laughter?" she asks, wrathfully; "but it is _just like you_! I don't believe you have an atom of feeling. Positively I think you would laugh if _auntie_, who is almost a mother to you, was _dead_!" "No, I should not," declares Archibald, subsiding from amusement to the very lowest depths of sulk: "pardon me for contradicting you, but I should not even _smile_ were Lady Chetwoode dead. She is perhaps the one woman in the world whose death would cause me unutterable sorrow." "Then why did you laugh just now?" "Because if you had seen a man lie dead and had attended his funeral, even _you_ might consider it a joke to hear he was 'alive and well.'" "You saw him dead!" "Yes, as dead as Julius Cæsar," morosely. "It so happened I knew him uncommonly well years ago: 'birds of a feather,' you know,"--bitterly,-- "'flock together.' We flocked for a considerable time. Then I lost sight of him, and rather forgot all about him than otherwise, until I met him again in Vienna, more than two years ago. I saw him stabbed,--I had been dining with him that night,--and helped to carry him home; it seemed a slight affair, and I left him in the hands of a very skillful physician, believing him out of danger. Next morning, when I called, he was dead." "Archie,"--in a low awe-struck whisper,--"is it all true?" "Perfectly true." "You could not by any possibility be mistaken?" "Not by any." "Then, Archie," says Lilian, solemnly, "you are a _darling_!" "Am I?" grimly. "I thought I was a demon who could laugh at the demise of his best friend." "Nonsense!" tucking her hand genially beneath his arm; "I only said that out of vexation. Think as little about it as I do. I know for a fact you are not half a bad boy. Come now with me to The Cottage, that I may tell this extraordinary, this delightful story to Cecilia." "Is Cecilia Miss Duncan?" "No, Mrs. Arlington. Archie,"--seriously,--"you are quite, utterly sure you know all about it?" "Do you imagine I dreamed it? Of course I am sure. But if you think I am going down there to endure hysterics, and be made damp with tears, you are much mistaken. I won't go, Lilian; you needn't think it; I--I should be afraid." "Console yourself; I shan't require your assistance," calmly. "I only want you to stay outside while I break the good news to her, lest she should wish to ask you a question. I only hope, Archie, you are telling me the exact truth,"--severely,--"that you are not drawing on your imagination, and that it was no other man of the same name you saw lying dead?" "Perhaps it was," replies he, huffily, turning away as they reach the wicket gate. "Do not stir from where you are now," says she, imperiously: "I may want you at any moment." So Archibald, who does not dare disobey her commands, strays idly up and down outside the hedge, awaiting his summons. It is rather long in coming, so that his small stock of patience is nearly exhausted when he receives a message begging him to come in-doors. As he enters the drawing-room, however, he is so struck with compassion at the sight of Cecilia's large, half-frightened eyes turned upon him that he loses all his ill humor and grows full of sympathy. She is very unlike the happy Cecilia of a month ago, still more unlike the calm, dignified Cecilia who first came to Chetwoode. She is pale as the early blossoms that lie here and there in soft wanton luxuriance upon her tables; her whole face is eager and expectant. She is trembling perceptibly from head to foot. "What is it you would tell me, sir?" she asks, with deep entreaty. It is as though she longs yet fears to believe. "I would tell you, madam," replies Chesney, respect and pity in his tone, taking and holding the hand she extends to him, while Lilian retains the other and watches her anxiously, "that fears are groundless. A most gross mistake has, I understand, caused you extreme uneasiness. I would have you dismiss this trouble from your mind. I happened to know Jasper Arlington well: I was at Vienna the year he was there; we met often. I witnessed the impromptu duel that caused his death; I saw him stabbed; I myself helped to carry him to his rooms; next morning he was dead. Forgive me, madam, that I speak so brusquely. It is best, I think, to be plain, to mention bare facts." Here he pauses, and Cecilia's breath comes quickly; involuntarily her fingers close round his; a question she hardly dares to ask trembles on her lips. Archibald reads it in the silent agony of her eyes. "I saw him dead," he says, softly, and is rewarded by a grateful glance from Lilian. Cecilia's eyes close; a dry, painful sob comes from between her pallid lips. "She will faint," cries Lilian, placing her arms round her. "No, I shall not." By a great effort Cecilia overcomes the insensibility fast creeping over her. "I thank you, sir," she says to Archibald: "your words sound like truth. I would I dared believe them! but I have been so often----" she stops, half choked with emotion. "What must you think me but inhuman?" she says, sobbingly. "All women except me mourn their husband's death; I mourn, in that I fear him living." "Madam," replies Archibald, scarcely knowing what to say, "I too knew Jasper Arlington; for me, therefore, it would be impossible to judge you harshly in this matter. Were you, or any other living soul, to pretend regret for him, pardon me if I say I should deem you a hypocrite." "You must believe what he has told you," says Lilian, emphatically: "it admits of no denial. But, to-morrow, at all events, will bring you news from Colonel Trant that will compel you to acknowledge its truth." "Yes, yes. Oh, that to-morrow was here!" murmurs Cecilia, faintly. And Lilian understands that not until Trant's letter is within her hands will she allow herself to entertain hope. Silently Lilian embraces her, and she and Archibald return home. * * * * * At Chetwoode very intense relief and pleasure are felt as Lilian relates her wonderful story. Every one is only too willing to place credence in it. Chesney confesses to some sensations of shame. "Somehow," he says, "it never occurred to me your tenant might be Jasper Arlington's wife and the pretty Miss Duncan who tore my heart into fritters some years ago. And I knew nothing of all this terrible story about her husband's supposed resuscitation until to-day. It is a 'comedy of errors.' I feel inclined to sink into the ground when I remember how I have walked about here among you all, with full proof of what would have set you all at rest in no time, carefully locked up in my breast. Although innocent, Lady Chetwoode, I feel I ought to apologize." "I shall go down and make her come up to Chetwoode," says her ladyship, warmly. "Poor girl! it is far too lonely for her to be down there by herself, especially just now when she must be so unstrung. As soon as I hear she has had that letter from George Trant, I shall persuade her to come to us." The next evening brings a letter from Trant that falls like a little warm seal of certainty upon the good news of yesterday. "Going down to the landing-place," writes he, "I found the steamer had really arrived, and went on board instantly. With my heart beating to suffocation I walked up to the captain, and asked him if any gentleman named Arlington had come with him. He said, 'Yes, he was here just now,' and looking round, pointed to a tall man bending over some luggage. 'There he is,' he said. I went up to the tall man. I could see he was a good height, and that his hair was black. As I noted this last fact my blood froze in my veins. When I was quite close to him he raised himself, turned, and looked full at me! And once more my blood ran warmly, comfortably. It was _not_ the man I had feared to see. I drew my breath quickly, and to make assurance doubly sure, determined to ask his name. "'Sir,' I said, bluntly, forgetful of etiquette, 'is your name Arlington?' "'Sir,' replied he, regarding me with calm surprise, 'it is.' At this moment I confess I lost my head. I became once more eighteen, and impulsive. I grasped his hands; I wrung them affectionately, not to say violently. "'Then, my dear sir,' I exclaimed, rapturously, 'I owe you a debt of gratitude. I thank you with all my heart. Had you not been born an Arlington, I might now be one of the most miserable men alive; as it is, I am one of the happiest.' "My new friend stared. Then he gave way to an irrepressible laugh, and shrugged his shoulders expressively. "'My good fellow,' said he, 'be reasonable. Take yourself back again to the excellent asylum from which you have escaped, and don't make further fuss about it. With your genial disposition you are sure to be caught.' "At this I thought it better to offer him some slight explanation, which so amused him that he insisted on carrying me off with him to his hotel, where we dined, and where I found him a very excellent fellow indeed." In this wise runs his letter. Cecilia reads it until each comforting assertion is shrined within her heart and doubt is no longer possible. Then an intense gratitude fills her whole being; her eyes grow dim with tears; clasping her hands earnestly, she falls upon her knees. CHAPTER XXXI. "How like a winter hath my absence been From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year! What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen, What old December's bareness everywhere!" --SHAKESPEARE. So Lady Chetwoode goes down to The Cottage in her carriage, and insists upon carrying Cecilia back with her,--to which, after a slight demur, Cecilia gladly assents. "But how to get Cyril," says practical Lilian, who is with them. "He is in Amsterdam," answers Cecilia, with some hesitation. "Colonel Trant told me so in his letter." "Colonel Trant is the most wonderful man I know," says Lilian; "but Amsterdam of all places! What on earth can any one want in Amsterdam?" At this they all laugh, partly because they are still somewhat nervously inclined, and partly because (though why, I cannot explain) they seem to find something amusing in the mere thought of Amsterdam. "I hope he won't bring back with him a fat _vrouw_," says Miss Chesney. And then she runs up-stairs to tell Kate to get ready to accompany her mistress. Turning rather timidly toward Lady Chetwoode, Cecilia says: "When Cyril returns, then,--you will not--you do not----" "When he returns, my dear, you must marry him at once, if only to make amends for all the misery the poor boy has been enduring. But,"--kindly--"you must study economy, child; remember you are not marrying a rich man." "He is rich enough for me," smiling; "though indeed it need not signify, as I have money enough for both. I never spoke of it until now, because I wished to keep it as a little surprise for him on--on our wedding-day, but at Mr. Arlington's death I inherited all his fortune. He never altered the will made before our marriage, and it is nearly four thousand a year, I think," simply: "Colonel Trant knows the exact amount, because he is a trustee." Lady Chetwoode colors deeply. This woman, whom she had termed "adventuress," is in reality possessed of a far larger fortune than the son she would have guarded from her at all hazards; proves to be an heiress, still further enriched by the priceless gifts of grace and beauty! To say the very least of it, Lady Chetwoode feels small. But, pride coming to her rescue, she says, somewhat stiffly, while the pleasant smile of a moment since dies from her face: "I had no idea you were so--so--in fact, I believed you almost portionless. I was led--how I know not--but I certainly was led to think so. What you say is a surprise. With so much money you should hesitate before taking any final step. The world is before you,--you are young, and very charming. I will ask you to forgive an old woman's bluntness; but remember, there is always something desirable in a title. I would have you therefore consider. My son is no match for you where _money_ is concerned." This last emphatically and very proudly. Cecilia flushes, and grows distressed. "Dear Lady Chetwoode," she says, taking her hand forcibly. "I entreat you not to speak to me so. Do not make me again unhappy. This money, which up to the present I have scarcely touched, so hateful has it been to me, has of late become almost precious to my sight. I please myself with the thought that the giving of it to--to Cyril--may be some small return to him for all the tenderness he has lavished upon me. Do not be angry with me that I cherish, and find such intense gratification in this idea. It is so sweet to give to those we love!" "You have a generous heart," Lady Chetwoode answers, moved by her generous manner, and pleased too, for money, like music, "hath charms." "If I have seemed ungracious, forget it. Extreme wonder makes us at times careless of courtesy, and we did not suspect one who could choose to live in such a quiet spot as this of being an heiress." "You will keep my secret?" anxiously. "I promise. You shall be the first to tell it to your husband upon your wedding-day. I think," says the elder lady, gracefully, "he is too blessed. Surely you possessed treasure enough in your own person!" * * * * * So Cecilia goes to Chetwoode, and shortly afterward Lady Chetwoode conceives a little plot that pleases her intensely, and which she relates with such evident gusto that Lilian tells her she is an _intrigante_ of the deepest dye, and that positively for the future she shall feel quite afraid of her. "I never heard anything so artful," says Taffy, who has with much perseverance wormed himself into their confidence. In fact, after administering various rebuffs they all lose heart, and confess to him the whole truth out of utter desperation. "Downright artful!" repeats Mr. Musgrave, severely. "I shouldn't have believed you capable of it." But Cecilia says it is a charming scheme, and sighs for its accomplishment. Whereupon a telegram is written and sent to Cyril. It is carefully worded, and, though strictly truthful in letter, rather suggests the idea that his instant return to Chetwoode will be the only means of saving his entire family from asphyxiation. It is a thrilling telegram, almost bound to bring him back without delay, had he but one grain of humanity left in his composition. It evokes an answer that tells them he has started on receipt of their message, and names the day and hour they may expect him, wind and weather permitting. * * * * * It is night,--a rather damp, decidedly unlovely night. The little station at Truston is almost deserted: only the station-master and two melancholy porters represent life in its most dejected aspect. Outside the railings stands the Chetwoode carriage, the horses foaming and champing their bits in eager impatience to return again to their comfortable stables. Guy, with a cigar between his lips, is pacing up and down, indifferent alike to the weather or the delay. One of the melancholy porters, who is evidently in the final stage of depression, tells him the train was due five minutes ago, and hopes dismally there has been no accident higher up on the line. Guy, who is lost in thought, hopes so too, and instantly offers the man a cigar, through force of habit, which the moody one takes sadly, and deposits in a half-hearted fashion in one of his numerous rambling pockets to show to his children when he gets home. "If ever I _do_ get home," he says to himself, hopelessly, taking out and lighting an honest clay that has seen considerable service. Then a shrill whistle rings through the air, the train steams lazily into the station, and Guy, casting a hasty glance at the closed blinds of the carriage outside, hastens forward to meet Cyril, who is the only passenger for Truston to-night. "Has anything happened?" he asks, anxiously, advancing to greet Sir Guy. "Yes, but nothing to make you uneasy. Do not ask me any questions now: you will hear all when you get home." "Our mother is well?" "Quite well. Are you ready? What a beastly objectionable night it is! Have you seen to everything, Buckley? Get in, Cyril. I am going outside to finish my cigar." When Guy chooses, he is energetic. Cyril is not, and allows himself to be pushed unresistingly in the direction of the carriage. "Hurry, man: the night is freezing," says Guy, giving him a final touch. "Home, Buckley." Guy springs up in front. Cyril finds himself in the brougham, and in another instant they are beyond the station railings, rolling along the road leading to Chetwoode. As Cyril closes the door and turns round, the light of the lamps outside reveals to him the outline of a dark figure seated beside him. "Is it you, Lilian?" he asks, surprised; and then the dark figure leans forward, throws back a furred hood, and Cecilia's face, pale, but full of a glad triumph, smiles upon him. "You!" exclaims he, unsteadily, unable through utter amazement to say anything more, while with his eyes he gathers in hungrily each delicate beauty in that "sweetest face to him in all this world." Whereupon Cecilia nods almost saucily, though the tears are thick within her lovely eyes, and answers him: "Yes, it is even I. Are you glad or sorry, that you stare so rudely at me? and never a word of greeting! Shame, then! Have you left all your manners behind you in Amsterdam? I have come all this way, this cold night, to bid you welcome and bring you home to Chetwoode, and yet---- Oh, Cyril!" suddenly flinging herself into his longing arms, "it is all right at last, my dear--dear--_dear_, and you may love me again as much as ever you like!" When explanations have come to an end, and they are somewhat calmer, Cyril says: "But how is it that you are here with Guy, and going to Chetwoode?" "I am staying at Chetwoode. Your mother came herself, and brought me back with her. How kind she is, how sweet! Even had I never known you, I should have loved her dearly." This last assurance from the lips of his beloved makes up the sum of Cyril's content. "Tell me more, sweetheart," he says, contented only to listen. With his arms round her, with her face so close to his, with both their hearts beating in happy unison, he hardly cares to question, but is well pleased to keep silence, and listen to the soft, loving babble that issues from her lips. Her very words seem to him, who has so long wearied for them, set to tenderest music. "Like flakes of feathered snow, they melted as they fell." "I have so much to tell, I scarcely know where to begin. Do you know you are to escort me to a ball at Mrs. Steyne's next week? No? why, you know nothing; so much for sojourning in Amsterdam. Then I suppose you are ignorant of the fact that I have ordered the most delicious dress you ever beheld to grace the occasion and save myself from disgracing you. And you are to be very proud of me, and to admire me immensely, or I shall never forgive you." "I am pretty certain not to deserve condign punishment on that score," fondly. "Darling, can it be really true that we are together again, that all the late horrible hopelessness is at an end? Cecilia, if this should prove a dream, and I awoke now, it would kill me." "Nay, it is no dream," softly. Turning up her perfect face, until the lips are close to his, she whispers, "Kiss me, and be convinced." CHAPTER XXXII. "How hard it is to hide the sparks of nature!" --_Cymbeline._ "No, truly, Ursula, she is too disdainful I know, her spirits are as coy and wild As haggards of the rock. * * * * * Disdain and scorn ride sparkling in her eyes, Misprising what they look on." --_Much Ado About Nothing._ "Sir Guy," says Miss Chesney, two days later, bursting into his private sanctum as "the eve is declining," in a rather stormy fashion, "I must ask you to speak to your groom Buckley: he has been exceedingly rude to me." "Rude? Buckley?" exclaims Sir Guy, with a frown, throwing down the paper he has been trying to read in the fast growing gloom. It is dusk, but the red light of the fire flickers full upon his face, betraying the anger that is gathering there. A looker-on would have readily understood by it that Buckley's hours for grooming at Chetwoode are few. "Yes. I told him to have Saracen saddled for me to-morrow morning, as the meet is at Ryston, and I expect a good run; and he said he should not do it without your permission, or orders, or something equally impertinent." "Saracen!" returns Chetwoode, aghast, losing sight of Buckley's miserable behavior, or rather condoning it on the spot; "you don't mean to tell me that for one moment you dreamed of riding Saracen?" "Certainly I did. And why not?" preparing for battle. "Because the idea is simply absurd. You could not possibly ride him. He is not half trained." "Archibald rode him last week, and says he is perfect, and quite safe. I have decided on trying him to-morrow." "I wish Chesney would not put such thoughts into your head. He is _not_ safe, and he has never been ridden by a woman." "That is just why I fancy him: I have often before now ridden horses that had never had a lady on their backs until I rode them. And to-morrow I feel sure will be a good day, besides being probably my last meet for the season." "My dear child, I think it would indeed be your last meet were you to ride that brute: his temper is thoroughly uncertain." "You told me a few days ago my hand could make any horse's mouth, and now----" "I told you then what I tell you again now, that you are one of the best woman riders I ever saw. But for all that, you would find it impossible to manage Saracen." "You refuse him to me, then?" with an ominous gleam in her eyes. "I wish you would not look at it in that light: I merely cannot consent to let you break your neck. If your own mare does not please you, you can take my mount, or any other in the entire stables." "No, thank you, I only want that one." "But, my dear Lilian, pray be reasonable!" entreats Chetwoode, warmly, and just a trifle impatiently: "do you think I would be doing my duty by you if I sanctioned such a rash proceeding?" "Your duty?" unpleasantly, and with a certain scornful uplifting of her small Grecian nose. "Just so," coldly; "I am your guardian, remember." "Oh, pray do not perpetually seek to remind me of that detestable fact," says Miss Chesney, vindictively; whereupon Sir Guy freezes, and subsides into dead and angry silence. Lilian, sweeping over to the darkening window, commences upon the pane a most disheartening tattoo, that makes the listener long for death. When Chetwoode can stand it no longer, he breaks the oppressive stillness. "Perhaps you are not aware," he says, angrily, "that a noise of that description is intensely irritating." "No. _I_ like it," retorts Miss Chesney, tattooing louder than ever. "If you go on much longer, you will drive me out of my mind," remarks Guy, distractedly. "Oh, don't let it come to that," calmly; "let me drive you out of the room first." "As to my guardianship," says Chetwoode, in a chilling tone, "console yourself with the reflection that it cannot last forever. Time is never at a standstill, and your twenty-first birthday will restore you to freedom. You can then ride as many wild animals and kill yourself as quickly as you please, without asking any one's consent." "I can do that now too, and probably shall. I have quite made up my mind to ride Saracen to-morrow!" "Then the sooner you unmake that mind the better." "Well,"--turning upon him as though fully prepared to crush him with her coming speech,--"if I don't ride him I shall stay at home altogether: there!" "I think that will be by far the wiser plan of the two," returns he, coolly. "What! and lose all my day!" cries Lilian, overwhelmed by the atrocity of this remark, "while you and all the others go and enjoy yourselves! How hatefully selfish you can be! But I won't be tyrannized over in this fashion. I shall go, and on Saracen too." "You shall not," firmly. Miss Chesney has come close up to where he is standing on the hearth-rug. The fire-light dances and crackles merrily, casting its rays, now yellow, now deep crimson, over their angry faces, as though drawing keen enjoyment from the deadly duel going on so near to it. One pale gleam lingers lovingly upon Lilian's sunny head, throwing over it yet another shade, if possible richer and more golden than its fellows; another lights up her white hands, rather defiantly clinched, one small foot in its high-heeled shoe that has advanced beyond her gown, and two blue eyes large with indignant astonishment. Guy is returning her gaze with almost equal indignation, being angrily remindful of certain looks and scenes that of late have passed between them. "You defy me?" says Lilian, slowly. "I do." "You _refuse_ me?" as though not quite believing the evidence of her senses. "I do. I forbid you to ride that one horse." "Forbid me!" exclaims she passionately, tears starting to her eyes. "You are fond of forbidding, as it seems to me. Recollect, sir, that, though unhappily your ward, I am neither your child nor your wife." "I assure you I had never the presumption to imagine you in the latter character," he answers, haughtily, turning very pale, but speaking steadily and in a tone eminently uncomplimentary. "Your voice says more than your words," exclaims Lilian, too angry to weigh consequences. "Am I to understand"--with an unlovely laugh--"you think me unworthy to fill so exalted a position?" "As you press me for the truth," says Chetwoode, who has lost his temper completely, "I confess I should hardly care to live out my life with such a----" "Yes, go on; 'with such a--' shrew, is it? or perhaps virago?" "As you wish it," with a contemptuous shrug; "either will suit, but I was going to say 'flirt.'" "Were you?" cries she, tears of mortification and rage dimming her eyes, all the spoiled child within her rising in arms. "Flirt, am I? and shrew? Well, I will not have the name of it without the gain of it. I hate you, hate you, _hate_ you!" With the last word she raises her hand suddenly and administers to him a sound and wholesome box upon the ear. The effect is electric. Sir Guy starts back as though stunned. Never in all his life has he been so utterly taken aback, routed with such deadly slaughter. The dark, hot color flames into his cheeks. Shame for her--a sort of horror that she should have been guilty of such an act--overpowers him. Involuntarily he puts one hand up to the cheek her slender fingers, now hanging so listlessly at her side, have wounded, while regarding her with silent amazement largely mixed with reproach. As for Lilian, the deed once done, she would have given worlds to recall it,--that is, secretly,--but in this life, unfortunately, facts accomplished cannot be undone. Outwardly she is as defiant as ever, and, though extremely white, steadily and unflinchingly returns his gaze. Yet after a little, a very little while, her eyes fall before his, her pretty, proud head droops somewhat, a small remnant of grace springs up in the very middle of all her passion and disdain. She is frightened, nervous, contrite. When the silence has become absolutely unbearable, Guy says, in a low tone that betrays not the faintest feeling: "I am afraid I must have said something to annoy you terribly. I confess I lost my temper, and otherwise behaved as a gentleman should not. I beg your pardon." His voice is that of a stranger; it is so altered she scarcely knows it. Never in their worst disputes has he so spoken to her. With a little sickening feeling of despair and terror at her heart, she turns away and moves toward the door. "Are you going? Pray take care. The room is very dark where the fire-light does not penetrate," says Guy, still in the same curiously changed voice, so full of quiet indifference, so replete with the cold courtesy we accord to those who are outside and beyond our affections. He opens the door for her, and bows very slightly as she passes through, and then closes it again calmly, while she, with weary, listless footsteps, drags herself up-stairs and throws herself upon her bed. Lying there with dry and open eyes, not daring to think, she hardly cares to analyze her own feelings. She knows she is miserable, and obstinately tries to persuade herself it is because she has been thwarted in her desire to ride Saracen, but in vain. After a struggle with her better thoughts, she gives in, and acknowledges her soreness of heart arises from the conviction that she has forever disgraced herself in her guardian's eyes. She will never be able to look at him again, though in truth that need scarcely signify, as surely in the future he will not care to see where she may be looking. It is all over. He is done with her. Instinctively she understands from his altered manner how he has made up his mind never again to exercise his right over her as guardian, never again to concern himself about either her weal or her woe. She is too wretched to cry, and lies prostrate, her pulses throbbing, her brain on fire. "What is it, my bird?" asks nurse, entering, and bending solicitously over her. "Are you not well? Does your head ache?" "It is not my head," plaintively. "Your side, my lamb?" "Yes, it is my side," says Lilian, laying her hand pathetically upon her heart; and then, overcome by the weight of her own sorrows, she buries her head in her pillows and bursts into tears. "Eh, hinny, don't cry," says nurse, fondly. "We must all have pains there at times, an' we must just learn to bear them as best we may. Come, look up, my bairn; I will put on a good mustard blister to-night, and to-morrow I tell you it won't magnify at all," winds up nurse, fluently, who rather prides herself upon her management of the Queen's English, and would scorn to acknowledge the misplacement of a word here and there; and indeed, after all, when one comes to think of it, it does _not_ "magnify" very much. But Lilian sobs on disconsolately. And next morning she has fresh cause to bewail her evil conduct. For the day breaks and continues through all its short life so wet, so wild, so stormy, that neither Saracen nor any other horse can leave the stables. Hunting is out of the question, and with a fresh pang, that through its severity is punishment enough for her fault, she knows all her temper of the night before was displayed for naught. CHAPTER XXXIII. "Meanwhile the day sinks fast, the sun is set, And in the lighted hall the guests are met; The beautiful looked lovelier in the light Of love, and admiration, and delight Reflected from a thousand hearts and eyes, Kindling a momentary paradise." --SHELLEY: _Ginevra_. It is the night of Mabel Steyne's ball. In the library at Chetwoode they are almost every one assembled, except Lilian, and Florence Beauchamp, and Mr. Musgrave, whose dressing occupies a considerable part of his life, and who is still sufficiently young to find pleasure in it. Lady Chetwoode in gray satin is looking charming; Cecilia, lovely, in the palest shade of blue. She is standing at a table somewhat apart, conversing with Cyril, who is fastening a bracelet upon one of her arms. Guy and Archibald are carrying on a desultory conversation. And now the door opens, and Lilian comes in. For the first time for a whole year she has quite discarded mourning to-night, and is dressed in pure white. Some snowdrops are thrown carelessly among the folds of the tulle that covers and softens her silk gown; a tiny spray of the same flower lies nestling in her hair. She appears more fairy-like, more child-like and sweeter than ever, as she advances into the room, with a pretty consciousness of her own beauty, that sits charmingly upon her. She is a perfect little vision of loveliness, and is tenderly aware of the fact. Her neck is fair, her shoulders rounded and kissable as an infant's; her eyes are gleaming, her lips apart and smiling; her sunny hair, that is never quite as smooth as other people's, lies in rippling coils upon her head, while across her forehead a few short rebellious love-locks wander. Seeing her, Sir Guy and Chesney are filled with a simultaneous longing to take her in their arms and embrace her then and there. Sweeping past Sir Guy, as though he is invisible, she goes on, happy, radiant toward Lady Chetwoode. She is in her airiest mood, and has evidently cast behind her all petty _désagréments_, being bent on enjoying life to its fullest for this one night at least. "Is not my dress charming, auntie? does it not become me?" she asks, with the utmost _naïveté_, casting a backward glance over her shoulder at her snowy train. "It does, indeed. Let me congratulate you, darling," says Lady Chetwoode to her favorite: "it is really exquisite." "Lovely as its wearer," says Archibald, with a suppressed sigh. "Pouf!" says Lilian, gayly: "what a simile! It is a rudeness; who dares compare me with a paltry gown? A tenth part as lovely, you mean. How refractory this button is!" holding out to him a rounded arm to have the twelfth button of her glove fastened; "try can you do it for me?" Here Taffy enters, and is apparently struck with exaggerated admiration as he beholds her. "Ma conscience!" he says, in the words of the famous Dominie, "what a little swell we are! Titania, my dear, permit me to compliment you on the success you are sure to have. Monsieur Worth has excelled himself! Really, you are very nearly pretty. You'll have a good time of it to-night, I shouldn't wonder." "I hope so," gladly; "I can hardly keep my feet quiet, I do so long to dance. And so you admire me?" "Intensely. As a tribute to your beauty, I think I shall give you a kiss." "Not for worlds," exclaims she, retreating hastily. "I know your embraces of old. Do let me take my flowers and tulle uncrushed to Mabel's, or I shall complain of you to her, and so spoil your evening." "I am glad to see you have recovered your usual spirits," maliciously: "this morning you were nowhere. I could not get a word out of you. Ever since yesterday, when you were disappointed about your run, you have been in 'doleful dumps.' All day you looked as though you thought there was 'nothing so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy.' You seemed to revel in it." "Perhaps I was afraid to encourage you. Once set going, you know you cannot stop," says Lilian, laughing, while two red spots, caused by his random remark, rise and burn in her cheeks. "We are late, are we not?" says Florence, entering at this moment; and as Florence never errs, Archibald instantly gives his arm to Lady Chetwoode and takes her down to the carriage. Taffy, who has already opened an animated conversation with Miss Beauchamp on the horrors of square dances, accompanies her; Cyril disappears with Cecilia, and Lilian is left alone in the library with Sir Guy. Curving her body gracefully, Lilian gathers up with slow nonchalance her long train, and, without bestowing a glance upon Guy, who is silently waiting to escort her to the smaller brougham, goes up to a mirror to take a last lingering survey of her own bewitching image. Then she calmly smooths down her glove, then refastens a bracelet that has come undone, while he, with a bored expression on his face, waits impatiently. By this, Archibald, who has had ample time to put Lady Chetwoode in her carriage and come all the way back to find a fan forgotten by Miss Beauchamp, re-enters the room. Lilian beams upon him directly. "Good Archie," she says, sweetly, "you have returned just in time. There was positively nobody to take poor little me to the brougham." She slips her hand beneath his arm, and walks past Sir Guy composedly, with laughing friendly eyes uplifted to her cousin's. * * * * * The ball is at its height. The first small hour of morning has sounded. The band is playing dreamily, sweetly; flowers are nodding everywhere, some emitting a dying fragrance, others still fresh and sweet as when first plucked. Afar off the faint splashing of the fountains in the conservatories echoes tremulously, full of cool imaginings, through the warm air. Music and laughter and mirth--real and unreal--are mixed together in one harmonious whole. Mrs. Steyne has now an unaffected smile upon her face, being assured her ball is an undeniable success, and is allowing herself to be amused by Taffy, who is standing close beside her. Tom Steyne, who, like Sir Charles Coldstream, is "thirty-three and used up," is in a corner, silently miserable, suffering himself to be flirted at by a gay young thing of forty. He has been making despairing signs to Taffy to come to his assistance, for the past five minutes, which signals of distress that young gentleman basely declines to see. Every one is busy asking who Mrs. Arlington can be, and, as nobody knows, everybody undertakes to tell his or her neighbor "all about her." And by this time every one is aware she is enormously rich, the widow of an Indian nabob, from whom she was divorced on account of some "fi-fi story, my dear, that is never mentioned now," and that she is ever so many years older than she really looks; "painting is brought to such perfection nowadays!" All night long Sir Guy has not asked Lilian to dance; he has held himself aloof from her, never even allowing his glance to stray in her direction, although no smallest grace, no faintest coquetry, of hers has escaped his notice. To him the whole evening has been a miserable failure. He has danced, laughed, flirted a good deal, "as is his nature to,"--more particularly with Florence,--but he has been systematically wretched all through. Lilian and Archibald have been inseparable. She has danced with him, in defiance of all decent rules, dance after dance, even throwing over some engagements to continue her mad encouragement of him. She has noted Sir Guy's attention to his cousin, and, noting (although in her heart she scarcely believes in it), has grown a little reckless as to what judgment people may form of her evident appreciation of Chesney's society. There is indeed a memorable five minutes when she absolutely deliberates as to whether she will or will not accept her cousin's hand, and so give herself a way to escape from Sir Guy's dreaded displeasure. But, while deliberating, she quite forgets the terrible disappointment she is laying up in store for him, who has neither thought, nor eyes, nor words, for any one but her. Being the undisputed belle of the evening, she naturally comes in for a heavy share of attention, and, be sure, does not altogether escape unkind comment. "Oh, poor Tom! Do look at Tom and that fearful Miss Dumaresque," says Mrs. Steyne, who just at this moment discovers the corner where Tom is doing his utmost to "suffer and be strong." It is, however, a miserable attempt, as he is visibly depressed and plainly on the point of giving way altogether. "Somebody must go to his succor," says Mabel, with decision: "the question is, who? You, my dear Taffy, I think." "Not I," says Taffy; "please, dear Mrs. Steyne, do not afflict me so far. I couldn't, indeed. I am very dreadfully afraid of Miss Dumaresque; besides, I never pity Tom even when in his worst scrapes. We all know"--sentimentally--"he is the happiest man alive; when he does fall in for his bad quarter of an hour, why not let him endure it like another? And he is rather in a hat, now, isn't he?" taking an evident keen delight in Mr. Steyne's misfortunes. "I wouldn't be in his shoes for a good deal. He looks as if he was going to cry. The fact is, the gods have pampered him so much, that it is a shame not to let him know for a few minutes what real distress means." "But what if he _should_ die!" reproachfully: "one so unaccustomed to adversity as Tom would be very likely to sink under it. He looks half dead already! Mark the hunted expression in his poor dear eyes." "I wish you would mark the forlorn and dejected expression in other people's eyes," in an injured tone; "but all that, of course, goes for nothing." "In yours, do you mean?" with exaggerated sympathy. "My dear boy, have you a secret sorrow? Does concealment, like that nasty worm, prey upon you? I should be unhappy forever if I could bring myself to think so." "Then don't think so; come, let us finish this waltz, and forget that lucky fellow in the corner." "What! you would have me trip it on the light fantastic toe while Tom is enduring torment? Never! Whatever I may do in prosperity, in adversity I 'never will desert Mr. Micawber.'" "I vow I think you are jealous of that antiquated though still frisky damsel," says Taffy, ready to explode with laughter at the bare idea, as he watches the frisky one's attempt at subjugating the hapless Tom. "You have discovered my hidden fear," replies Mabel, laughing, too: "forgive my weakness. There are moments when even the strongest break down! Wait here patiently for me, and I have no doubt with a little skill I shall be able to deliver him." At one side of the ball-room, close to an upper window, is a recess, dimly lit, and partially curtained, in which it is possible for two or three to stand without letting outsiders be aware of their vicinity: into this nook Lilian and Archibald have just withdrawn, she having confessed to a faint sense of fatigue. The sweet lingering notes of the waltz "Geliebt und Verloren" are saddening the air; now they swell, now faint, now almost die out altogether, only to rise again full of pathetic meaning. "How charming it is to be here!" says Lilian, sinking into a cushioned seat with a sigh of relief, "apart from every one, and yet so near; to watch their different expressions, and speculate upon their secret feelings, without appearing rude: do you not think so? Do you like being here?" "Yes, I like being here with you,"--or anywhere else, he might have added, without deviating from the truth. At this moment Guy, who is not dancing, happens to saunter up, and lean against the curtains of the window close to their hiding-place, totally unconscious of their presence. From where she is sitting Lilian can distinctly see him, herself unseen. He looks moody, and is evidently enchanted with the flavor of his blonde moustache. He is scarcely noticeable from where he stands, so that when two men come leisurely up to the very mouth of the retreat, and dispose of themselves luxuriously by leaning all their weight upon the frail pillars against which the curtains hang, they do not perceive him. One is Harry Bellair, who has apparently been having a good many suppers; the other is his friend. Mr. Bellair's friend is not as handsome as he might be. There is a want of jaw, and a general lightness about him (not of demeanor: far be it from me to hint at that!) that at a first glance is positively startling. One hardly knows where his flesh ends or his hair begins, while his eyes are a marvel in themselves, making the beholder wonder how much paler they _can_ get without becoming pure white. His moustache is of the vaguest tints, so vague that until acquaintance ripens one is unaware of its existence. Altogether, he is excellently bleached. To-night, to add to his manifold attractions, he appears all shirt-front and white tie, with very little waistcoat to speak of. In his left and palest optic is the inevitable eyeglass, in which he is supposed by his intimates to sleep, as never yet has human being (except perhaps his mamma in the earlier scenes of his existence) seen him without it. In spite of all this, however, he looks mild, and very harmless. "She is awfully lovely," says Mr. Bellair, evidently continuing a conversation, and saying it with an audible sigh; "quite too lovely for me." "You seem fetched," says his friend, directing a pale but feeling ray upon him through the beloved glass. "I am, I confess it," says Mr. Bellair, effusively; "I adore her, and that's a fact: but she would not look at me. She's in love with her cousin,--Chesney, you know,--and they're to be married straight off the reel, next month, I think--or that." "Hah!" says the friend. "She's good to look at, do you know, and rather uncommon style, in spite of her yellow hair. She's a ward of Chetwoode's, isn't she? Always heard he was awfully _épris_ there." By this time Lilian is crimson, and Archibald hardly less so, though he is distinctly conscious of a desire to laugh; Lilian's eyes are riveted on Sir Guy, who has grown very pale and has turned a frowning brow upon these luckless young men. "Not a bit of it," says Mr. Bellair, "at least now. He was, I believe, but she bowled him over in a couple of months and laughed at him afterward. No, Chesney is the white-headed boy with her. Not that I see much in him myself," discontentedly. "Sour-looking beggar," rejoins the friend, with kind sympathy. It is growing tremendously jolly for the listeners. Lilian turns a pained, beseeching glance upon Archibald, who returns the glance, but declares by gesture his inability to do anything. He is still secretly amused, and not being able from his point of vantage to see Chetwoode, is scarcely as confused as Lilian. Should he now stir, and walk out of his place of concealment with Miss Chesney, he would only cover with shame the unsuspecting gossips and make two enemies for life, without doing any good. Chetwoode is in the same condition, but though angry and bitterly stung by their words, hardly cares to resent them, being utterly unaware of Lilian's eyes, which are bent upon him. He waits impatiently for the moment when Mr. Bellair and his "fat friend" may choose to move on. Did he know who was so close to him, watching every expression of his face, impatience might have passed all bounds. As it is, a few chance remarks matter little to him. But Mr. Bellair's friend has yet something else to say. "Fine girl, Miss Beauchamp," says this youth, languidly; "immensely good form, and that. Looks like a goddess." "There's a lot of her, if you mean that. But she's too nosy," says Mr. Bellair, grumpily, a sense of injury full upon him. His own nose is of the charming curt and simple order: his "friends in council" (who might be more select) are wont to call it playfully a "spud." "Far too nosy! I hate a woman all nose! makes her look so like a mope." "You've been getting a snubbing there," says his friend, this time unfeelingly and with an inhuman chuckle. "I have," valiantly: "she has too much of the goddess about her for my fancy: choke-full of dignity and airs, you know, and all that sort of rubbish. It don't go down, I take it, in the long run. It's as much as she can do to say 'how d'ye do' to you, and she looks a fellow up and down half a dozen times before she gives him a waltz. You don't catch me inviting her to the 'mazy dance' again in a hurry. I hate affectation. I wouldn't marry that girl for untold gold." "She wouldn't have you," says his friend, with a repetition of the unpleasant chuckle. "Maybe she wouldn't," replies Mr. Bellair, rather hurt. "Anyhow, she is not to be named in the same day with Miss Chesney. I suppose you know she is engaged to Chetwoode, so you needn't get spoony on her," viciously; "it is quite an old affair, begun in the cradle, I believe, and kept up ever since: never can understand that sort of thing myself; would quite as soon marry my sister. But all men aren't alike." "No, they aren't," says the friend, with conviction. "Why don't he marry her, though? He must be tired of looking at her." "He funks it, that's what it is," says Mr. Bellair, "and no wonder; after seeing Miss Chesney he must feel rather discontented with his choice. Ah!"--with a sigh warranted to blow out the largest wax candle,--"there's a girl for you if you like!" "Don't weep over it, old boy, at least here; you'll be seen," says his friend, jovially, with odious want of sympathy; after which they are pleased to remove themselves and their opinions to another part of the room. When they have gone, Lilian, who has been turning white and red at intervals all through the discussion, remains motionless, her eyes still fixed on Chetwoode. She does not heed Archibald's remark, so earnestly is she regarding her guardian. Can it be true what they have just said, that he, Sir Guy, has been for years engaged to Florence? At certain moments such a thought has crossed her own mind, but never until to-night has she heard it spoken of. Chetwoode, who has moved, comes a little nearer to where she is standing, and pauses there, compelled to it by a pressure in the crowd. "With what taste do they accredit me!" he says, half aloud, with a rather pale smile and a slight curl of his short upper lip, discernible even beneath his drooping moustache. His eyes are directed toward Florence, who is standing, carrying on a lifeless flirtation at a little distance from him; there is distaste in every line of his face, and Lilian, marking it, draws a long breath, and lets the smile return to her mobile lips. "Was Chetwoode there all the time?" asks Archibald, aghast. "Yes: was it not horrible?" replies she, half laughing. "Poor Mr. Bellair! I had no idea I had done so much mischief." The hours are growing older, Lady Chetwoode is growing tired. Already with the utmost craftiness has she concealed five distinct yawns, and begins to think with lingering fondness of eider-down and bedroom fires. Florence, too, who is sitting near her, and who is ever careful not to overdo the thing, is longing for home, being always anxious to husband as far as possible her waning youth and beauty. "Lilian, dearest, I think you must come home now," Lady Chetwoode says, tapping the girl's white arms, as she stops close to her in the interval of a dance. "So soon, auntie!" says Lilian, with dismay. She is dancing with a very good-looking guardsman, who early in the evening did homage to her charms, and who ever since has been growing worse and worse; by this time he is very bad indeed, and scorns to look at any one in the room except Miss Chesney, who, to confess the truth, has been coquetting with him unremittingly for the past half-hour, without noticing, or at least appearing to notice, Archibald's black looks or Sir Guy's averted ones. At Lady Chetwoode's words, the devoted guardsman turns an imploring glance upon his lovely partner, that fills her (she is kind-hearted) with the liveliest compassion. Yes, she will make one last effort, if only to save him from mental suicide. "Dear auntie, if you love me, 'fly not yet,'" she says, pathetically. "It is so long since I have danced, and"--with the faintest, fleetest glance at the guardsman--"I am enjoying myself so much." "Lady Chetwoode, it can't be done," interposes Tom Steyne, who is standing by: "Miss Chesney has promised me the next dance, and I am living in the expectation of it. At my time of life I have noticed a tendency on the part of beauty to rather shun my attentions; Miss Chesney's condescension, therefore, has filled me with joy. She must wait a little longer: I refuse to resign my dance with the _belle_ of the evening." "Go and finish your dance, child: I will arrange with auntie," says Mabel, kindly; whereupon Lilian floats away gladly in the arms of her warrior, leaving Mrs. Steyne to settle matters. "You shall go home, dear, with Florence, because you are tired, and Cyril and his exceedingly beautiful _fiancée_ shall go with you; leave the small night brougham for Lilian, and Guy can take her home. I shan't keep her beyond another hour, and I shall see that she is well wrapped up." So it arranges itself; and by and by, when an hour has passed away, Lilian and Guy discover to their horror they are in for a _tête-à-tête_ drive to Chetwoode. They bid good-bye to the unconscious Mabel, and, silently entering the brougham, are presently driving swiftly through the fresh cool air. "Are you quite comfortable?" Guy asks, as in duty bound, very stiffly. "Quite, thank you," replies she, even more stiffly; after which outbreak of politeness "silence reigns supreme." When a good half-mile has been traversed, Guy, who is secretly filled with wonder at the extreme taciturnity of his usually lively companion, so far descends from his pedestal of pride as to turn his head cautiously in her direction: to his utter amazement, he finds she has fallen fast asleep! The excitement and fatigue of dancing, to which she has been so long unaccustomed, have overpowered her, and, like a tired child as she is, she has given way to restful slumber. Her pale blue cashmere has fallen a little to one side so that a white arm, soft and round as a baby's, can be seen in all the abandon of sleep, naked beside her, the hand half closed like a little curled shell. Not yet quite convinced that her slumber is real, Guy lays his hand gently upon hers, but at the touch she makes no movement: no smallest ripple of consciousness crosses her face. In the faint light of the lamp he regards her curiously, and wonders, with a pang, how the little fury of a few hours ago can look so angelic now. At this moment, as he watches her, all the anger that has lain in his heart for her melts, vanishes, never to return. Then he sees her attitude is uncomfortable: her face is very pale, her head is thrown too much back, a little troubled sigh escapes her. He thinks, or at least tries to think,--let not me be the one to judge him,--she will have unhappy dreams if she continues much longer in her present position. Poor child! she is quite worn out. Perhaps he could manage to raise her in a degree, without disturbing her reviving repose. Slipping his arm gently round her, he lifts her a little, and draws her somewhat nearer to him. So gently does he move her, that Lilian, who is indeed fatigued, and absolutely tired out with her exertions of the evening, never awakes, but lets her heavy, sleepy little head drop over to the other side, down upon Chetwoode's shoulder. Guy does not stir. After all, what does it matter? she is easier so, and it can hurt neither of them; she never has been, she never will be, anything to him; in all probability she will marry her cousin. At this point he stops and thinks about her treatment of that handsome guardsman, and meditates deeply thereon. To him she is a mystery, a lovely riddle yet unsolved; but with his arm round her, and her face so near his own, he is conscious of feeling an irrepressible gladness. A thrill of happiness, the only touch of it he has known for many days, fills his heart, while with it is a bitter regret that chills it at its birth. The carriage rattles over some unusually large stone, and Lilian awakes. At first an excessive sense of drowsiness dulls her perception, and then, all at once, it flashes across her mind that she has been asleep, and that now she is encircled, supported by Guy's arm. Even in the friendly darkness a warm flush suffuses her face, born half of quick indignation, half of shame. Raising herself hastily, she draws back from his embrace, and glances up at him with open surprise. "You are awake?" says Guy, quietly; he has relaxed his hold, but still has not altogether withdrawn his support. As their eyes meet in the uncertain flickering light that comes to them from outside, she sees so much sadness, so much tenderness in his, that her anger is instantly disarmed. Still, she moves yet a little farther from him, while forgetting to make any reply. "Are you uncomfortable?" asks he, slowly, as though there is nothing out of the common in his sitting thus with his arm round her, and as though a mere sense of discomfort can be the only reason for her objection to it. He does not make the slightest effort to detain her, but still lets her feel his nearness. "No," replies Miss Chesney, somewhat troubled; "it is not that, only----" "Then I think you had better stay as you are. You are very tired, I can see, and this carriage is not the easiest in the world." With gentle boldness he replaces the offending arm in its old position, and wisely refrains from further speech. Lilian is confounded. She makes no effort to release herself, being filled with amazement at the extraordinary change in his manner, and, perhaps, wholly glad of it. Has he forgiven her? Has he repented him of his stern looks and cold avoidance? All night long he has shunned her persistently, has apparently been unaware of her presence; and now there is something in his tone, in his touch, that betrays to her what sets her heart beating treacherously. Presently Guy becomes aware of this fact, and finding encouragement in the thought that she has not again repulsed him, says, softly: "Were you frightened when you awoke?" "Yes, a little." "You are not frightened now?" "No, not now. At first, on waking, I started to find myself here." "Here," may mean the carriage, or her resting-place, or anything. After a short pause: "Sir Guy,"--tremulously. "Yes." "You remember all that happened the night before last?" "I do," slowly. "I have wanted ever since to tell you how sorry I am for it all, to beg your pardon, to ask you to----" she stops, afraid to trust her voice further, because of some little troublesome thing that rises in her throat and threatens to make itself heard. "I don't want you to beg my pardon," says Guy, hastily, in a pained tone. "If I had not provoked you, it would never have happened. Lilian, promise me you will think no more about it." "Think about it! I shall never cease thinking about it. It was horrible, it was shameful of me. I must have gone mad, I think. Even now, to remember it makes me blush afresh. I am glad it is dark,"--with a little nervous laugh,--"because you cannot see my face. It is burning." "Is it?" tenderly. With gentle fingers he touches her soft cheek, and finds it is indeed, as she has said, "burning." He discovers something else also,--tears quite wet upon it. "You are crying, child," he says, startled, distressed. "Am I? No wonder. I _ought_ to suffer for my hateful conduct toward you. I shall never forgive myself." "Nonsense!" angrily. "Why should you cry about such a trifle? I won't have it. It makes me miserable to know any thought of me can cause you a tear." "I cry"--with a heavy sob--"because I fear you will never think well of me again. I have lost your good opinion, if indeed"--sadly--"I ever had it. You _must_ think badly of me." "I do not," returns he, with an accent that is almost regret. "I wish I could. It matters little what you do, I shall never think of you but as the dearest and sweetest girl I ever met. In that"--with a sigh--"lies my misfortune." "Not think badly of me! and yet you called me a flirt! Am I a flirt?" Chetwoode hesitates, but only for a minute; then he says, decidedly, though gently: "Perhaps not a flirt, but certainly a coquette. Do not be angry with me for saying so. Think how you passed this one evening. First remember the earlier part of it, and then your cruel encouragement of the luckless guardsman." "But the people I wanted to dance with wouldn't ask me to dance," says Lilian, reproachfully, "and what was I to do? I did not care for that stupid Captain Monk: he was handsome, but insufferably slow, and--and--I don't believe I cared for _any one_." "What! not even for----" He pauses. Not now, not at this moment, when for a sweet though perhaps mad time she seems so near to him in thought and feeling, can he introduce his rival's name. Unconsciously he tightens his arm round her, and, emboldened by the softness of her manner, smooths back from her forehead the few golden hairs that have wandered there without their mistress's will. Lilian is silent, and strangely, unutterably happy. "I wish we could be always friends," she says, wistfully, after a little eloquent pause. "So do I,"--mournfully,--"but I know we never shall be." "That is a very unkind speech, is it not? At least"--slipping five warm little fingers into his disengaged hand--"_I_ shall always be a friend of _yours_, and glad of every smallest thing that may give you happiness." "You say all this now, and yet to-morrow,"--bending to look at her in the ungenerous light,--"to-morrow you may tell me again that you 'hate me.'" "If I do,"--quickly,--"you must not believe me. I have a wretched temper, and I lost it completely when I said that the other night. I did not mean it. I do not hate you, Guy: you know that, do you not?" Her voice falls a little, trembles, and softens. It is the first time she has ever called him by his Christian name without its prefix, and Guy's pulses begin to throb a little wildly. "If you do not hate me, what then?" he asks. "I like you." "Only that?" rather unsteadily. "To like honestly is perhaps best of all." "It may be, but it does not satisfy me. One _likes_ many people." Lilian is silent. She is almost positive now that he loves her, and while longing to hear him say so, shrinks from saying what will surely bring forth the avowal. And yet if she now answers him coldly, carelessly---- "If I say I am fond of you," she says, in a tone so low, so nervous, as to be almost unheard, "will that do?" The carriage some time since has turned in the avenue gate. They are approaching the house swiftly; already the lights from the windows begin to twinkle through the leafy branches of the trees: their time is short. Guy forgets all about Chesney, all about everything except the girlish face so close to his own. "_Are_ you fond of me, Lilian?" he asks, entreatingly. There is no reply: he stoops, eager to read his fate in her expression. His head touches hers; still lower, and his moustache brushes her cheek; Lilian trembles a little, but her pale lips refuse to answer; another instant, and his lips meet hers. He kisses her warmly, passionately, and fancies--is it fancy?--that she returns his caress faintly. Then the carriage stops. The men alight. Sir Guy steps out, and Miss Chesney lays her hand in his as he helps her to descend. He presses it warmly, but fails in his anxious attempt to make her eyes meet his: moving quickly past him into the house, she crosses the hall, and has her foot upon the first step of the stairs, when his voice arrests her. "Good-night, Lilian," he says, rather nervously, addressing her from a few yards' distance. He is thinking of a certain night long ago when he incurred her anger, and trembles for the consequences of his last act. Lilian hesitates. Then she turns partly toward him, though still keeping half her face averted. Her cheeks are crimson; her eyes, shamed and full of tears, are bent upon the ground. For one swift instant she raises them and lets a soft, shy glance meet his. "Good-night," she whispers, timidly holding out to him her hand. Guy takes it gladly, reverently. "Good-night, my own darling," answers he, in a voice choked with emotion. Then she goes up-stairs, and is lost in her own chamber. But for Guy there is neither rest nor sleep. Flinging off his coat and waistcoat, he paces incessantly up and down his room, half mad with doubt and fear. Does she love him? That is the whole burden and refrain of his thoughts; does she? Surely her manner has implied it, and yet---- A terrible misgiving oppresses him, as he remembers the open dislike that of late she has shown to his society, the unconcealed animosity she has so liberally displayed toward him. Can it be that he has only afforded her amusement for the passing hour? Surely this child, with her soft innocent face and truthful eyes, cannot be old in the wiles and witcheries of the practiced flirt. She has let her head rest upon his shoulder, has let his fingers wander caressingly over her hair, has let tears lie wet upon her cheeks for him; and then he thinks of the closing scene, of how he has kissed her, as a lover might, unrebuked. But then her manner toward Chesney; true, she had discarded his attentions toward the close of the night, and accepted willingly those of the guardsman, but this piece of seeming fickleness might have arisen out of a lover's quarrel. What if during all their memorable drive home she has been merely trifling with him,--if now, this instant, while he is miserable because of his love for her and the uncertainty belonging to it, she should be laughing at his folly, and thinking composedly of her coming marriage with her cousin! Why then, he tells himself savagely, he is well rid of her, and that he envies no man her possession! But at the thought he draws his breath hard; his handsome face grows set and stern, a haggard look comes into his blue eyes and lingers round his mouth. Flinging open the window, he leans out to feel the cold air beat upon him, and watches the coming of the morn. "Now the bright morning star, day's harbinger, Comes dancing from the east." Guy watches its coming, yet scarcely notes its beauty, so full of dark forebodings are his thoughts. Yet it brings him determination and courage to face his fate. To-day he will end this intolerable doubt, and learn what fortune has in store for him, be it good or bad; of this he is finally resolved. She shall declare herself in one of two characters, either as his affianced wife, or as the very vilest coquette the world contains. And yet her tears!--Again he holds her in his arms. Again his lips meet hers. Again he feels the light pressure of her little tired head upon his shoulder, hears her soft regular breathing. With a groan he rouses himself from these recollections that torture him by their very sweetness. CHAPTER XXXIV. "Thou art my life, my love, my heart, The very eyes of me, And hast command of every part, To live and die for thee."--R. HERRICK. The next morning comes, but no Lilian appears at breakfast. Florence alone of the gentler members of the family puts in an appearance; she is as properly composed, as carefully attired, as delicately tinted, as though the ball of the night before was unknown to her. Lilian, on the contrary,--lazy little thing!--is still lying in her bed, with her arms flung above her graceful head, dreaming happy idle dreams. Miss Beauchamp, behind the urn, is presiding with unimpeachable elegance of deportment over the cups and saucers; while pouring out the tea, she makes a running commentary on the events of the night before, dropping into each cup, with the sugar,--perhaps with a view to modulating its sweetness,--a sarcastic remark or two about her friends' and acquaintances' manners and dress. Into Guy's cup she lets fall a few words about Lilian, likely, as she vainly hopes, to damage her in his estimation; not that she much fears her as a rival after witnessing Chetwoode's careful avoidance of her on the previous evening; nevertheless, under such circumstances, it is always well to put in a bad word when you can. She has most of the conversation to herself (Guy and Archibald being gloomy to a painful degree, and Cyril consumed with a desire to know when Cecilia may be reasonably expected to leave her room), until Mr. Musgrave enters, who appears as fresh as a daisy, and "uncommon fit," as he informs them gratuitously, with an air of the utmost _bonhommie_. He instantly catches and keeps up the conversational ball, sustaining it proudly, and never letting it touch the ground, until his friends, rising simultaneously, check him cruelly in the very midst of a charming anecdote. Even then he is not daunted, but, following Cyril to the stables (finding him the most genial of the party), takes up there a fresh line, and expresses his opinions as cheerfully and fluently on the subject of "The Horse," as though he had been debarred from speaking for a month and has only just now recovered the use of the organ of speech. * * * * * It is half-past one. A soft spring sun is smiling on the earth, and Lilian, who rather shrinks from the thought of meeting Sir Guy again, and has made a rapid descent from her own room into the garden, is walking there leisurely to and fro, gathering such "pallid blossoms" as she likes best: a few late snowdrops, "winter's timid children," some early lilies, "a host of daffodils," a little handful of the "happy and beautiful crocuses," now "gayly arrayed in their yellow and green," all these go to fill the basket that hangs upon her arm. As she wanders through the garden, inhaling its earliest perfumes, and with her own heart throbbing rather tumultuously as she dreams again of each tender word and look that passed between her and Guy last night, a great longing and gladness is hers; at this moment the beauty and sweetness of life, all the joy to be found everywhere for those who, with a thankful spirit, seek for it, makes itself felt within her. George Herbert's lovely lines rise to her mind, and half unconsciously, as she walks from bed to bed, she repeats them to herself aloud. "How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean Are thy returns! ev'n as the flow'rs in spring; To which, besides their own demean, The late past frosts tributes of pleasure bring. Grief melts away like snow in May, As if there were no such cold thing." Surely _her_ grief has melted away, and, with it, distrust and angry feeling. Having arranged her bouquet of all such tender plants as do now "upraise their loaded stems," she walks toward the library window, and, finding it open, steps in. It is a bow-window, and the sun has been making love to her eyes, so that not until she has advanced a yard or two, does she discover she is not alone; she then stops short, and blushes painfully. At the other end of the room stand Guy and Chesney, evidently in earnest conversation. Archibald is talking; Guy, with his eyes upon the ground, is pale as death, and silent. As they see Lilian, both men start guiltily, and fall somewhat farther apart: a heavy sense of impending trouble makes itself felt by all three. Then Guy, regaining self-possession, raises his head and looks full at Lilian. "Lilian is here, let her speak for herself," he says, in a forced tone of composure, addressing Chesney, but with his eyes riveted upon her. "What is it?" asks Lilian, white as the snowdrops in her trembling hand. "Your cousin asked me--He wishes to marry you," returns Guy, unsteadily, a look of such mute agony and entreaty in his eyes as touches Lilian to the quick. "He has spoken to me as your guardian. He says he has some hope; he would have me plead for him, but that is impossible." He has spoken so far with difficulty; now in a clear tone he goes on, "Speak, Lilian: let your answer come from your own lips." His voice is wonderfully steady, but there is always the same searching look of entreaty on his face. "Dear Archie," says Lilian, trembling perceptibly, while all the poor spring blossoms fall unheeded to her feet, and lie there still and dead, as some offering laid on the shrine of Venus, "how can I speak to you? I _cannot_ marry you. I love you,--you are my dear cousin, and my friend, but,--but----" "It is enough," says Chesney, quietly. "Hope is at an end. Forgive me my persistency. You shall not have to complain of it again." Sadly, with a certain dignity, he reaches the door, opens it, and, going out, closes it gently behind him. Hope with him, indeed, is dead! Never again will it spring within his breast. When he has gone, an awful silence ensues. There is a minute that is longer than an hour; there is an hour that may be shorter than any minute. Happy are they that have enjoyed this latter. The particular minute that follows on Archibald's retreat seems to contain a whole day-ful of hours, so terrible is its length to the two he leaves behind. Lilian's eyes are fastened upon, literally bound to, a little sprig of myrtle that lies among the ill-fated flowers at her feet. Not until many days have passed can she again look upon a myrtle spray without feeling a nervous beating at her heart; she is oppressed with fear; she has at this moment but one longing, and that is to escape. A conviction that her longing is a vain one only adds to her discomfiture; she lacks the courage to lift her head and encounter the eyes she knows are fixed upon her. At length, unable longer to endure the dreadful stillness, she moves, and compels herself to meet Chetwoode's gaze. The spell is broken. "Lilian, will you marry--_me_?" asks he, desperately, making a movement toward her. A quick, painful blush covers Lilian's face, lingers a moment, then dies away, leaving her pale, motionless as a little marble statue,--perfect, but lifeless. Almost as it fades it reappears again, so sudden is the transition, changing her once more into very lovable flesh and blood. "Will you marry me?" repeats Guy, coming still closer to her. His face is white with anxiety. He does not attempt to touch her, but with folded arms stands gazing down in an agony of suspense upon the lips that in another instant will seal his fate for good or evil. "I have half a mind to say no," whispers Miss Chesney, in a low, compressed voice. Her head is drooping; her fingers are nervously intertwined. A flicker, the very faintest tremble of the old merry smile, hovers round her mouth as she speaks, then vanishes away. "Lilian,"--in a tone full of vehement reproach,--"do not trifle with me--now. Answer me: why do you so speak to me?" "Because--I think--you ought to have asked me long ago!" returns she, casting a half-shy, half-tender glance at him upward from the azure eyes that are absolutely drowned in tears. Then, without a word of warning, she bursts out crying, and, Guy catching her passionately in his arms, she sobs away all her nervous gladness upon his heart. "My darling,--my sweet,--do you really love me?" asks Guy, after a few moments given up to such ecstasy as may be known once in a lifetime,--not oftener. "What a question!" says Lilian, smiling through eyes that are still wet. "I have not once asked it of you. I look into your eyes and I see love written there in great big letters, and I am satisfied. Can you not see the same in mine? Look closely,--very closely, and try if you cannot." "Dear eyes!" says Guy, kissing them separately. "Lilian, if indeed you love me, why have you made life so odious to me for the last three months?" "Because I wasn't going to be civil to people who were over-attentive to other people," says Lilian, in her most lucid manner. "And--sometimes--I thought you liked Florence." "Florence? Pshaw! Who could like Florence, having once seen you?" "Mr. Boer could, I'm sure. He has seen me,--as seldom as I could manage, certainly,--but still enough to mark the wide difference between us." "Boer is a lunatic," says Guy, with conviction,--"quite unaccountable. But I think I could forgive him all his peccadilloes if he would promise to marry Florence and remove her. I can stand almost anything--except single chants as performed by her." "Then all my jealousy was for nothing?" with a slight smile. "All. But what of mine? What of Chesney?" He regards her earnestly as he asks the question. "Poor Archie," she says, with a pang of real sorrow and regret, as she remembers everything. And then follows a conversation confined exclusively to Archibald,--being filled with all the heart-burnings and despair caused by that unhappy young man's mistaken attentions. When the subject has exhausted itself, and they are once more silent, they find themselves thoughtful, perhaps a little sad. A sigh escapes Lilian. Raising her head, she looks at her lover anxiously. "Guy," she says, rather tremulously, "you have never said one reproachful word to me about what happened the other night--in the library. I am thinking of it now. When I call to mind my wretched temper I feel frightened. Perhaps--perhaps--I shall not make you happy." "I defy you to make me unhappy so long as you can tell me honestly you love me. Do not take advantage of it"--with a light laugh--"if I confess to you I would rather have a box on the ear from you than a kiss from any other woman. But such is the degrading truth. Nevertheless" --teasingly--"next time I would ask you, as a favor, not to do it _quite_ so hard!" "Ah, Guy," tearfully, and with a hot blush, "do not jest about it." "How can I do anything else to-day?" Then, tenderly, "Still sad, my own? Take that little pucker off your brow. Do you imagine any act of yours could look badly in my eyes? 'You are my life--my love--my heart.' When I recollect how miserable I was yesterday, I can hardly believe in my happiness of to-day." "Dearest," says Lilian, her voice faltering, "you are too good to me." Then, turning to him, of her own sweet will, she throws her arms around his neck, and lays her soft flushed cheek to his. "I shall never be bad to you again, Guy," she whispers; "believe that; never, never, never!" * * * * * Coming into the hall a little later, they encounter her ladyship's maid, and stop to speak to her. "Is Lady Chetwoode's head better?" asks Lilian. "Can I see her, Hardy?" "Yes, Miss Chesney. She is much better; she has had a little sleep, and has asked for you several times since she awoke. I could not find you anywhere." "I will go to her now," says Lilian, and she and Guy, going up-stairs, make their way to Lady Chetwoode's room. "Better, auntie?" asks Lilian, bending over her, as she sits in her comfortable arm-chair. "Rather better, darling," returns auntie, who is now feeling as well as possible (though it is yet too soon to admit it even to herself), and who has just finished a cutlet, and a glass of the rare old port so strongly recommended by Dr. Bland. "Guy, bring over that chair for Lilian. Sitting up late at night always upsets me." "It was a horrible ball," says Miss Lilian, ungratefully. "I didn't enjoy it one bit." "No?" in amazement. "My dear, you surprise me. I thought I had never seen you look so joyous in my life." "It was all forced gayety," with a little laugh. "My heart was slowly breaking all the time. I wanted to dance with one person, who obstinately refused to ask me, and so spoiled my entire evening. Was it not cruel of that 'one person'?" "The fact is," says Guy, addressing his mother, "she behaved so infamously, and flirted so disgracefully, all night, that the 'one person' was quite afraid to approach her." "I fear you did flirt a little," says Lady Chetwoode, gentle reproof in her tone; "that handsome young man you were dancing with just before I left--and who seemed so devoted--hardly went home heart-whole. That was naughty, darling, wasn't it? You should think of--of--other people's feelings." It is palpable to both her hearers she is alluding to Chesney. "Auntie," says Miss Chesney, promptly, and with the utmost _naïveté_, "if you scold me, I feel sure you will bring on that nasty headache again." She is bending over the back of Lady Chetwoode's chair, where she cannot be seen, and is tenderly smoothing as much of her pretty gray hair as can be seen beneath the lace cap that adorns her auntie's head. Sir Guy laughs. "Ah! I shall never make you a good child, so long as your guardian encourages you in your wickedness," says Lady Chetwoode, smiling too. "Do I encourage her? Surely that is a libel," says Guy: "she herself will bear me witness how frequently--though vainly--I have reasoned with her on her conduct. I hardly know what is to be done with her, unless----" here he pauses, and looks at Lilian, who declines to meet his glance, but lets her hand slip from Lady Chetwoode's head down to her shoulder, where it rests nervously--"unless I take her myself, and marry her out of hand, before she has time to say 'no.'" "Perhaps--even did you allow me time--I should not say 'no,'" says Lilian, with astonishing meekness, her face like the heart of a "red, red rose." Something in her son's eyes, something in Lilian's tone, rouses Lady Chetwoode to comprehension. "What is it?" she asks, quickly, and with agitation. "Lilian, why do you stand there? Come here, that I may look at you? Can It be possible? Have you two----" "We have," replies Lilian, interrupting her gently, and suddenly going down on her knees, she places her arms round her. "Are you sorry, auntie? Am I very unworthy? Won't you have me for your daughter after all?" "Sorry!" says Lady Chetwoode, and, had she spoken volumes, she could not have expressed more unfeigned joy. "And has all your quarreling ended so?" she asks, presently, with an amused laugh. "Yes, just so," replies Guy, taking Lilian's hand, and raising it to his lips. "We have got it all over before our marriage, so as to have none afterward. Is it not so, Lilian?" She smiles assent, and there is something in the smile so sweet, so adorable, that, in spite of his mother "and a'," Guy kisses her on the spot. "I am so relieved," says Lady Chetwoode, regarding her new daughter with much fondness, "and just as I had given up all hope. Many times I wished for a girl, when I found myself with only two troublesome boys, and now at last I have one,--a real daughter." "And I a mother. Though I think my name for you will always be the one by which I learned to love you,--Auntie," returns Lilian, tenderly. At this moment Cecilia opens the door cautiously, and, stepping very lightly, enters the room, followed by Cyril, also on tiptoe. Seeing Lady Chetwoode, however, standing close to Lilian and looking quite animated and not in the least invalided, they brighten up, and advance more briskly. "Dear Madre," says Cecilia, who has adopted Cyril's name for his mother, "I am glad to see you so much better. Is your headache quite gone?" "Quite, my dear. Lilian has cured it. She is the most wonderful physician." And then the new-comers are told the delightful story, and Lilian receives two more caresses, and gets through three or four blushes very beautifully. They are still asking many questions, and uttering pretty speeches, when a step upon the corridor outside attracts their attention. It is a jaunty step, and undoubtedly belongs to Mr. Musgrave, who is informing the household generally, at the top of his fresh young voice, that he is "ragged and torn," and that he rather enjoys it than otherwise. Coming close to the door, however, he moderates his transports, and, losing sight of the vagabond, degenerates once more into that very inferior creature, a decently-clothed and well-combed young gentleman. Opening the door with praiseworthy carefulness, he says, in the meekest and most sympathetic voice possible: "I hope your headache is better, Lady Chetwoode?" By this time he has his head quite inside the door, and becomes pleasantly conscious that there is something festive in the air within. The properly lachrymose expression he has assumed vanishes as if by magic, while his usual debonair smile returns to his lips. "Oh, I say--then it was all a swindle on the part of Hardy, was it?" he asks. "Dear Lady Chetwoode, it makes me feel positively young again to see you looking so well. Your woman hinted to me you were at the point of death." "Come in, Taffy. You too shall hear what has revived me," says her ladyship, smiling, and thereupon unfolds her tale to him, over which he beams, and looks blessings on all around. "I knew it," he says; "could have told everybody all about it months ago! couldn't I, Lil? Remember the day I bet you a fiver he would propose to you in six months?" "I remember nothing of the kind," says Miss Chesney, horribly shocked. "Taffy, how can you say such a thing?" "Tell us all about it, Taffy," entreats Cyril, languidly, from the depths of an arm-chair. "I feel so done up with all I have gone through this morning, that I long for a wholesome exciting little tale to rouse me a bit. Go on." "Oh, it was only that day at Mrs. Boileau's last autumn," begins Taffy. "Taffy, I desire you to be silent," says Lilian, going up to him and looking very determined. "Do not attempt to speak when I tell you not to do so." "Was the betting even, Taffy?" asks Cyril. "No. She said----" "_Taffy!_" "She said he had as much idea of proposing to her as she had of----" "Taffy!" "Marrying him, even should he ask her," winds up Mr. Musgrave, exploding with joy over his discomfiting disclosure. "No one believes you," says Lilian, in despair, while they all laugh heartily, and Cyril tells her not to make bad bets in future. "Not one," says Sir Guy, supporting her as in duty bound; "but I really think you ought to give him that five pounds." "Certainly I shall not," says Miss Chesney, hotly. "It is all a fabrication from beginning to end. I never made a bet in my life. And, besides, the time he named was the end of the year, and _not_ in six months." At this avowal they all roar, and Guy declares he must take her out for a walk, lest she should commit herself any further. * * * * * The happy day at length is drawing to a close. Already it is evening, though still the dying light lingers, as if loath to go. Archibald Chesney, after a hurried private interview with Lady Chetwoode, has taken his departure, not to return again to Chetwoode until time has grown into years. In her own room Lilian, even in the midst of her new-born gladness, has wept bitterly for him, and sorrowed honestly over the remembrance of his grief and disappointment. Of all the household Florence alone is still in ignorance of the wonderful event that has taken place since morning. Her aunt has declared her intention of being the one to impart the good news to her, for which all the others are devoutly thankful. She--Miss Beauchamp--has been out driving all the afternoon for the benefit of her dear complexion; has visited the schools, and there succeeded in irritating almost to the verge of murder the unhappy teacher and all the wretched little children; has had an interview with Mr. Boer, who showed himself on the occasion even more _empressé_ than usual; has returned, and is now once more seated at her work in the drawing-room, covered with wools and glory. Near her sits Lilian, absently winding a tiny ball of wool. Having finished her task, she hands it to Florence with a heavy sigh indicative of relief. "Thanks. Will you do another?" asks Florence. "No,--oh, no," hastily. Then, laughing, "You mustn't think me uncivil," she says, "but I am really not equal to winding up another, of these interminable balls. My head goes round as fast as the wool, if not faster." "And are you going to sit there doing nothing?" asks Florence, glancing at her with ill-concealed disapproval, as the young lady proceeds to ensconce herself in the coziest depths of the coziest chair the room contains, as close to the fire as prudence will permit. "I am almost sure of it," she answers, complacently, horrifying the proper Florence being one of her chief joys. "I am never really happy until I feel myself thoroughly idle. I detest being useful. I love doing 'nothing,' as you call it. I have always looked upon Dr. Watts's bee as a tiresome lunatic." "Do you never think it necessary to try to--improve your mind?" "Does crewel-work improve the mind?" opening her eyes for an instant lazily. "Certainly; in so far that it leaves time for reflection. There is something soothing about it that assists the mind. While one works one can reflect." "Can one?" naughtily: "I couldn't. I can do any number of things, but I am almost positive I couldn't reflect. It means--doesn't it?--going over and over and over again disagreeable scenes, and remembering how much prettier one might have behaved under such and such circumstances. I call that not only wearying but unpleasant. No, I feel sure I am right. I shall never, if I can help it, reflect." "Then you are content to be a mere butterfly--an idler on the face of the earth all your days?" asks Florence, severely, taking the high and moral tone she has been successfully cultivating ever since her acquaintance with Mr. Boer. "As long as I can. Surely when I marry it will be time enough to grow 'useful,' and go in for work generally. You see one can't avoid it then. Keeping one's husband in order, I have been always told, is an onerous job." "You intend marrying, then?" Something in the other's tone has roused Florence to curiosity. She sits up and looks faintly interested. "Yes." "Soon?" "Perhaps." "You are serious?" "Quite serious." "Ah!" A pause. Miss Beauchamp takes up two shades of wool and examines them critically. They are so exactly alike that it can make little difference which she chooses. But she is methodical, and would die rather than make one false stitch in a whole acre of canvas. Having made her choice of the two shades, she returns to the attack. "I had no idea you liked your cousin so much," she says. "So much! How much?" says Lilian, quickly turning very red. Her cousin is a sore subject with her just now. "I do not think we are speaking of Archibald." "No; but I thought you said----" "Nothing of him, I am sure," still hastily. "Oh! I beg your pardon. I quite fancied----" Here she pauses, somewhat mystified. Then, "You and he are very good friends, are you not?" "Very," coldly. "And yet," with an elephantine attempt at playfulness, "I certainly did think last night some quarrel had arisen between you. He looked so savage when you were dancing with Captain Monk. His eyes are handsome, but at times I have noticed a gleam in them that might safely be termed dangerous." "Have you? I have not." "No? How strange! But no doubt when with you---- For my own part, I confess I should be quite afraid of him,--of annoying him, I mean." "I have never yet felt afraid of any one," returns Lilian, absently. "How I do admire your courage,--your pluck, if I may so call it," says Florence, hesitating properly over the unlady-like word. "Now, _I_ am so different. I am painfully nervous with some people. Guy, for instance, quite tyrannizes over me," with the little conscious laugh that makes the old disgust rise warmly in Lilian's breast. "I should be so afraid to contradict Guy." "And why?" "I don't know. He looks so--so---- I really can hardly explain; but some sympathetic understanding between us makes me know he would not like it. He has a great desire for his own way." "Most people have,"--dryly. "I never feel those sympathetic sensations you speak of myself, but I could guess so much." "Another reason why I should refrain from thwarting his wishes is this," says Florence, sorting her colors carefully, "I fancy, indeed I _know_, he could actually dislike any one who systematically contradicted him." "Do you think so? I contradict him when I choose." "Yes," blandly: "that exactly illustrates my idea." "You think, then, he dislikes me?" says Lilian, raising herself the better to examine her companion's features, while a sense of thorough amusement makes itself felt within her. "Dislike"--apologetically--"is a hard word. And yet at times I think so. Surely you must have noticed how he avoids you, how he declines to carry out any argument commenced by you." "I blush for my want of sensibility," says Lilian, meekly. "No, I have not noticed it." "Have you not?" with exaggerated surprise. "I have." At this most inopportune moment Guy enters the room. "Ah, Guy," says Lilian, quietly, "come here. I want to tell you something." He comes over obediently, gladly, and stands by her chair. It is a low one, and he leans his arm upon the back of it. "Florence has just said you hate being contradicted," she murmurs, in her softest tones. "If she did, there was a great deal of truth in the remark," he answers, with an amused laugh, while Florence glances up triumphantly. "Most fellows do, eh?" "And that I am the one that generally contradicts you." "That is only half a truth. If she had said who _always_ contradicts me, it would have been a whole one." Lilian rises. She places her hand lightly on his arm. "She also said that for that reason you dislike me." The words are uttered quietly, but somehow tears have gathered in the violet eyes. "Dislike!" exclaims her lover, the very faint symptoms of distress upon his darling's face causing him instant pain. "Lilian! how absurd you are! How could such a word come to be used between us? Surely Florence must know--has not my mother told you?" he asks, turning to Miss Beauchamp a look full of surprise. "I know nothing," replies she, growing a shade paler. At this moment she does know, and determines finally to accept, when next offered, the devotion Mr. Boer has been showering upon her for the past two months. Yes, she will take him for better, for worse, voice, low-church tendencies, and all. The latter may be altered, the former silenced. "I know nothing," she says; "what is it?" "Merely this, that Lilian and I are going to be married this summer. Lilian, of your goodness do not contradict me, in this one matter at least," bending a tender smile upon his betrothed, who returns it shyly. "I confess you surprise me," says Florence, with the utmost self-possession, though her lips are still a trifle white. "I have never been so astonished in my life. You seem to me so unsuited--so--but that only shows how impossible it is to judge rightly in such a case. Had I been asked to name the feeling I believed you two entertained for each other, I should unhesitatingly have called it hatred!" "How we have deceived the British Public!" says Guy, laughing, although at her words a warm color has crept into his face. "For the future we must not 'dissemble.' Now that we have shown ourselves up in our true colors, Florence, you will, I hope, wish us joy." "Certainly, with all my heart," in a tone impossible to translate: "my only regret is, that mere wishing will not insure it to you." Here a servant opening the door informs Miss Beauchamp that Lady Chetwoode wishes to see her for a few minutes. "Say I shall be with her directly," returns Florence, and, rising leisurely, she sweeps, without the smallest appearance of haste, from the room. Then Lilian turns to Sir Guy: "How curiously she uttered that last speech!--almost as though she hoped we should not be happy, I am sure I am right; she does not want you to marry me." "She was not enthusiastic in her congratulations, I admit. But that need not affect us. I am not proud. So long as _you_ want to marry me, I shall be quite content." Lilian's reply, being wordless, need not be recorded here. "Spiteful thing," remarks she, presently, _à propos_ of the spotless Florence. "Poor, Boer!" replies he. "You think she will marry _him_?" heavily, and most unflatteringly, emphasized. "I do." "Poor Florence!" returns she. "When I think that, I can forgive her all her sins. Dreadful man! I do hope she will make his life a burden to him." "I am sure you will live to see one hope fulfilled. Though I dare say he has a better chance of peace in the years to come than I have: Florence, at all events, does not go about boxing people's----" "Guy," says Miss Chesney, imperatively, laying her hand upon his lips, "if you dare to finish that sentence, or if you ever refer to that horrible scene again, I shall most positively refuse to marry---- Oh! here is Mr. Boer. Talk of somebody! Look, it is he, is it not?" Standing on tiptoe, she cranes her neck eagerly, and rather flattens her pretty nose against the window-pane in a wild endeavor to catch a glimpse of Mr. Boer's long-tailed coat, which "hangs" very much "down behind," before it quite disappears in a curve of the avenue. Presently it comes to view again from behind the huge laurustinus bush, and they are now quite convinced it is indeed the amorous parson. "Yes, it is he," says Guy, staring over his betrothed's head, as he catches the first glimpse. "And evidently full of purpose. Mark the fell determination in his clerical stride." "She saw him this morning at the schools,--she told me so,--and here he is again!" says Lilian, in an awe-struck tone. "There must be something in it. As you say, he really seems bent on business of some sort; perhaps he is come----" "With a new chant, as I'm a sinner," says Chetwoode, with a groan. "Let us go into the library: the baize and that large screen stifles sound." "No, to propose! I mean: there is a curious look about him as if, if----" "He was going to execution?" "No, to Florence." "That is quite the same thing." "I hear his step," says Lilian, hurriedly, flinging open the window, "and hers too! She must have seen him coming, and run to meet him with open arms. Not for worlds would I spoil sport, or put them in a 'tender taking.' Let us fly." Stepping out on the balcony, she turns to glance back at him. "Will you follow me?" she asks, a certain arch sweetness in her eyes. "To the end of the world!" returns he, eagerly, and together, hand in hand, they pass out of sight. THE END. 
9665	----	Kirschner and PG Distributed Proofreaders DELIA BLANCHFLOWER BY MRS. HUMPHRY WARD AUTHOR "LADY ROSE'S DAUGHTER," ETC. Frontispiece in color by WILL FOSTER DELIA BLANCHFLOWER Chapter I "Not a Britisher to be seen--or scarcely! Well, I can do without 'em for a bit!" And the Englishman whose mind shaped these words continued his leisurely survey of the crowded salon of a Tyrolese hotel, into which a dining-room like a college hall had just emptied itself after the mid-day meal. Meanwhile a German, sitting near, seeing that his tall neighbour had been searching his pockets in vain for matches, offered some. The Englishman's quick smile in response modified the German's general opinion of English manners, and the two exchanged some remarks on the weather--a thunder shower was splashing outside--remarks which bore witness at least to the Englishman's courage in using such knowledge of the German tongue as he possessed. Then, smoking contentedly, he leant against the wall behind him, still looking on. He saw a large room, some seventy feet long, filled with a miscellaneous foreign crowd--South Germans, Austrians, Russians, Italians--seated in groups round small tables, smoking, playing cards or dominoes, reading the day's newspapers which the funicular had just brought up, or lazily listening to the moderately good band which was playing some Rheingold selection at the farther end. To his left was a large family circle--Russians, according to information derived from the headwaiter--and among them, a girl, apparently about eighteen, sitting on the edge of the party and absorbed in a novel of which she was eagerly turning the pages. From her face and figure the half savage, or Asiatic note, present in the physiognomy and complexion of her brothers and sisters, was entirely absent. Her beautiful head with its luxuriant mass of black hair, worn low upon the cheek, and coiled in thick plaits behind, reminded the Englishman of a Greek fragment he had admired, not many days before, in the Louvre; her form too was of a classical lightness and perfection. The Englishman noticed indeed that her temper was apparently not equal to her looks. When her small brothers interrupted her, she repelled them with a pettish word or gesture; the English governess addressed her, and got no answer beyond a haughty look; even her mother was scarcely better treated. Close by, at another table, was another young girl, rather younger than the first, and equally pretty. She too was dark haired, with a delicate oval face and velvet black eyes, but without any of the passionate distinction, the fire and flame of the other. She was German, evidently. She wore a plain white dress with a red sash, and her little feet in white shoes were lightly crossed in front of her. The face and eyes were all alive, it seemed to him, with happiness, with the mere pleasure of life. She could not keep herself still for a moment. Either she was sending laughing signals to an elderly man near her, presumably her father, or chattering at top speed with another girl of her own age, or gathering her whole graceful body into a gesture of delight as the familiar Rheingold music passed from one lovely _motif_ to another. "You dear little thing!" thought the Englishman, with an impulse of tenderness, which passed into foreboding amusement as he compared the pretty creature with some of the matrons sitting near her, with one in particular, a lady of enormous girth, whose achievements in eating and drinking at meals had seemed to him amazing. Almost all the middle-aged women in the hotel were too fat, and had lost their youth thereby, prematurely. Must the fairy herself--Euphrosyne--come to such a muddy vesture in the end? Twenty years hence?--alack! "Beauty that must die." The hackneyed words came suddenly to mind, and haunted him, as his eyes wandered round the room. Amid many coarse or commonplace types, he yet perceived an unusual number of agreeable or handsome faces; as is indeed generally the case in any Austrian hotel. Faces, some of them, among the very young girls especially, of a rose-tinted fairness, and subtly expressive, the dark brows arching on white foreheads, the features straight and clean, the heads well carried, as though conscious of ancestry and tradition; faces, also, of the _bourgeoisie_, of a simpler, Gretchen-like beauty; faces--a few--of "intellectuals," as he fancied,--including the girl with the novel?--not always handsome, but arresting, and sometimes noble. He felt himself in a border land of races, where the Teutonic and Latin strains had each improved the other; and the pretty young girls and women seemed to him like flowers sprung from an old and rich soil. He found his pleasure in watching them--the pleasure of the Ancient Mariner when he blessed the water-snakes. Sex had little to say to it; and personal desire nothing. Was he not just over forty?--a very busy Englishman, snatching a hard-earned holiday--a bachelor, moreover, whose own story lay far behind him. "_Beauty that must die_" The words reverberated and would not be dismissed. Was it because he had just been reading an article in a new number of the _Quarterly_, on "Contemporary Feminism," with mingled amazement and revolt, roused by some of the strange facts collected by the writer? So women everywhere--many women at any rate--were turning indiscriminately against the old bonds, the old yokes, affections, servitudes, demanding "self-realisation," freedom for the individuality and the personal will; rebelling against motherhood, and life-long marriage; clamouring for easy divorce, and denouncing their own fathers, brothers and husbands, as either tyrants or fools; casting away the old props and veils; determined, apparently, to know everything, however ugly, and to say everything, however outrageous? He himself was a countryman, an English provincial, with English public school and university traditions of the best kind behind him, a mind steeped in history, and a natural taste for all that was ancient and deep-rooted. The sketch of an emerging generation of women, given in the _Quarterly_ article, had made a deep impression upon him. It seemed to him frankly horrible. He was of course well acquainted, though mainly through the newspapers, with English suffragism, moderate and extreme. His own country district and circle were not, however, much concerned with it. And certainly he knew personally no such types as the _Quarterly_ article described. Among them, no doubt, were the women who set fire to houses, and violently interrupted or assaulted Cabinet ministers, who wrote and maintained newspapers that decent people would rather not read, who grasped at martyrdom and had turned evasion of penalty into a science, the continental type, though not as yet involved like their English sisters in a hand-to-hand, or fist-to-fist struggle with law and order, were, it seemed, even more revolutionary in principle, and to some extent in action. The life and opinions of a Sonia Kovalevski left him bewildered. For no man was less omniscient than he. Like the Cabinet minister of recent fame, in the presence of such _femmes fortes_, he might have honestly pleaded, _mutatis mutandis_, "In these things I am a child." Were these light-limbed, dark-eyed maidens under his eyes touched with this new anarchy? They or their elders must know something about it. There had been a Feminist congress lately at Trient--on the very site, and among the ghosts of the great Council. Well, what could it bring them? Was there anything so brief, so passing, if she did but know it, as a woman's time for happiness? "_Beauty that must die_." As the words recurred, some old anguish lying curled at his heart raised its head and struck. He heard a voice--tremulously sweet--"Mark!--dear Mark!--I'm not good enough--but I'll be to you all a woman can." _She_ had not played with life--or scorned it--or missed it. It was not _her_ fault that she must put it from her. In the midst of the crowd about him, he was no longer aware of it. Still smoking mechanically, his eyelids had fallen over his eyes, as his head rested against the wall. He was interrupted by a voice which said in excellent though foreign English-- "I beg your pardon, sir--I wonder if I might have that paper you are standing on?" He looked down astonished, and saw that he was trampling on the day's _New York Herald_, which had fallen from a table near. With many apologies he lifted it, smoothed it out, and presented it to the elderly lady who had asked for it. She looked at him through her spectacles with a pleasant smile. "You don't find many English newspapers in these Tyrolese hotels?" "No; but I provide myself. I get my _Times_ from home." "Then, as an Englishman, you have all you want. But you seem to be without it to-night?" "It hasn't arrived. So I am reduced, as you see, to listening to the music." "You are not musical?" "Well, I don't like this band anyway. It makes too much noise. Don't you think it rather a nuisance?" "No. It helps these people to talk," she said, in a crisp, cheerful voice, looking round the room. "But they don't want any help. Most of them talk by nature as fast as the human tongue can go!" "About nothing!" She shrugged her shoulders. Winnington observed her more closely. She was, he guessed, somewhere near fifty; her scanty hair was already grey, and her round, plain face was wrinkled and scored like a dried apple. But her eyes, which were dark and singularly bright, expressed both energy and wit; and her mouth, of which the upper lip was caught up a little at one corner, seemed as though quivering with unspoken and, as he thought, sarcastic speech. Was she, perchance, the Swedish _Schriftstellerin_ of whom he had heard the porter talking to some of the hotel guests? She looked a lonely-ish, independent sort of body. "They seem nice, kindly people," he said, glancing round the salon. "And how they enjoy life!" "You call it life?" He laughed out. "You are hard upon them, madame. Now I--being a mere man--am lost in admiration of their good looks. We in England pride ourselves on our women, But upon my word, it would be difficult to match this show in an English hotel. Look at some of the faces!" She followed his eyes--indifferently. "Yes--they've plenty of beauty. And what'll it do for them? Lead them into some wretched marriage or other--and in a couple of years there will be neither beauty nor health, nor self-respect, nor any interest in anything, but money, clothes, and outwitting their husbands." "You forget the children!" "Ah--the children"--she said in a dubious tone, shrugging her shoulders again. The Englishman--whose name was Mark Winnington--suddenly saw light upon her. A Swedish writer, a woman travelling alone? He remembered the sketch of "feminism" in Sweden which he had just read. The names of certain woman-writers flitted through his mind. He felt a curiosity mixed with distaste. But curiosity prevailed. He bent forward. And as he came thereby into stronger light from a window on his left, the thought crossed the mind of his neighbour that although so fully aware of other people's good looks, the tall Englishman seemed to be quite unconscious of his own. Yet in truth he appeared both to her, and to the hotel guests in general, a kind of heroic creature. In height he towered beside the young or middle-aged men from Munich, Buda-Pesth, or the north Italian towns, who filled the _salon_. He had all that athlete could desire in the way of shoulders, and lean length of body; a finely-carried head, on which the brown hair was wearing a little thin at the crown, while still irrepressibly strong and curly round the brow and temple; thick penthouse brows, and beneath them a pair of greyish eyes which had already made him friends with the children and the dogs and half the grown-ups in the place. The Swedish lady admitted--but with no cordiality--that human kindness could hardly speak more plainly in a human face than from those eyes. Yet the mouth and chin were thin, strong and determined; so were the hands. The man's whole aspect, moreover, spoke of assured position, and of a keen intelligence free from personal pre-occupations, and keeping a disinterested outlook on the world. The woman who observed him had in her handbag a book by a Russian lady in which Man, with a capital, figured either as "a great comic baby," or as the "Man-Beast," invented for the torment of women. The gentleman before her seemed a little difficult to fit into either category. But if she was observing him, he had begun to question her. "Will you forgive me if I ask an impertinent question?" "Certainly. They are the only questions worth asking." He laughed. "You are, I think, from Sweden?" "That is my country." "And I am told you are a writer?" She bent her head. "I can see also that you are--what shall I say?--very critical of your sex--no doubt, still more of mine! I wonder if I may ask "-- He paused, his smiling eyes upon her. "Ask anything you like." "Well, there seems to be a great woman-movement in your country. Are you interested in it?" "You mean--am I a feminist? Yes, I happen to dislike the word; but it describes me. I have been working for years for the advancement of women. I have written about it--and in the Scandinavian countries we have already got a good deal. The vote in Sweden and Norway; almost complete equality with men in Denmark. Professional equality, too, has gone far. We shall get all we want before long?" Her eyes sparkled in her small lined face. "And you are satisfied?" "What human being of any intelligence--and I am intelligent," she added, quietly,--"ever confessed to being 'satisfied'? Our shoe pinched us. We have eased it a good deal." "You really find it substantially better to walk with?" "Through this uncomfortable world? Certainly. Why not?" He was silent a little. Then he said, with his pleasant look, throwing his head back to observe her, as though aware he might rouse her antagonism. "All that seems to me to go such a little way." "I daresay," she said, indifferently, though it seemed to him that she flushed. "You men have had everything you want for so long, you have lost the sense of value. Now that we want some of your rights, it is your cue to belittle them. And England, of course, is hopelessly behind!" The tone had sharpened. He laughed again and was about to reply when the band struck up Brahm's Hungarian dances, and talk was hopeless. When the music was over, and the burst of clapping, from all the young folk especially, had died away, the Swedish lady said abruptly-- "But we had an English lady here last year--quite a young girl--very handsome too--who was an even stronger feminist than I." "Oh, yes, we can produce them--in great numbers. You have only to look at our newspapers." His companion's upper lip mocked at the remark. "You don't produce them in great numbers--like the young lady I speak of." "Ah, she was good-looking?" laughed Winnington. "That, of course, gave her a most unfair advantage." "A man's jest," said the other dryly--"and an old one. But naturally women take all the advantage they can get--out of anything. They need it. However, this young lady had plenty of other gifts--besides her beauty. She was as strong as most men. She rode, she climbed, she sang. The whole hotel did nothing but watch her. She was the centre of everything. But after a little while she insisted on leaving her father down here to over-eat himself and play cards, while she went with her maid and a black mare that nobody but she wanted to ride, up to the _Jagd-hütte_ in the forest. There!--you can see a little blue smoke coming from it now"-- She pointed through the window to the great forest-clothed cliff, some five thousand feet high, which fronted the hotel; and across a deep valley, just below its topmost point, Mark Winnington saw a puff of smoke mounting into the clear sky. --"Of course there was a great deal of talk. The men gossipped and the women scoffed. Her father, who adored her and could not control her in the least, shrugged his shoulders, played bridge all day long with an English family, and would sit on the verandah watching the path--that path there--which comes down from the _Jagd-hütte_ with a spy-glass. Sometimes she would send him down a letter by one of the Jager's boys, and he would send a reply. And every now and then she would come down--riding--like a Brunhilde, with her hair all blown about her--and her eyes--_Ach_, superb!" The little dowdy woman threw up her hands. Her neighbour's face shewed that the story interested and amused him. "A Valkyrie, indeed! But how a feminist?" "You shall hear. One evening she offered to give an address at the hotel on 'Women and the Future.' She was already of course regarded as half mad, and her opinions were well known. Some people objected, and spoke to the manager. Her father, it was said, tried to stop it, but she got her own way with him. And the manager finally decided that the advertisement would be greater than the risk. When the evening came the place was _bondé_; people came from every inn and pension round for miles. She spoke beautiful German, she had learnt it from a German governess who had brought her up, and been a second mother to her; and she hadn't a particle of _mauvaise honte_. Somebody had draped some Austrian and English flags behind her. The South Germans and Viennese, and Hungarians who came to listen--just the same kind of people who are here to-night--could hardly keep themselves on their chairs. The men laughed and stared--I heard a few brutalities--but they couldn't keep their eyes off her, and in the end they cheered her. Most of the women were shocked, and wished they hadn't come, or let their girls come. And the girls themselves sat open-mouthed--drinking it in." "Amazing!" laughed the Englishman. "Wish I had been there! Was it an onslaught upon men?" "Of course," said his companion coolly. "What else could it be? At present you men are the gaolers, and we the prisoners in revolt. This girl talked revolution--they all do. 'We women _intend_ to have equal rights with you!--whatever it cost. And when we have got them we shall begin to fashion the world as _we_ want it--and not as you men have kept it till now. _Gare à vous!_ You have enslaved us for ages--you may enslave us a good while yet--but the end is certain. There is a new age coming, and it will be the age of the free woman!'--That was the kind of thing. I daresay it sounds absurd to you--but as she put it--as she looked it--I can tell you, it was fine!" The small, work-worn hands of the Swedish lady shook on her knee. Her eyes seemed to hold the Englishman at bay. Then she added, in another tone. "Some people of course walked out, and afterwards there were many complaints from fathers of families that their daughters should have been exposed to such a thing. But it all passed over." "And the young lady went back to the forest?" "Yes,--for a time." "And what became of the black mare?" "Its mistress gave her to an inn-keeper here when she left. But the first time he went to see the horse in the stable, she trampled on him and he was laid up for weeks." "Like mistress, like mare?--Excuse the jest! But now, may I know the name of the prophetess?" "She was a Miss Blanchflower," said the Swedish lady, boggling a little over the name. "Her father had been a governor of one of your colonies." Winnington started forward in his chair. "Good heavens!--you don't mean a daughter of old Bob Blanchflower!" "Her father's name was Sir Robert Blanchflower." The tanned face beside her expressed the liveliest interest. "Why, I knew Blanchflower quite well. I met him long ago when I was staying with an uncle in India--at a station in the Bombay presidency. He was Major Blanchflower then"-- The speaker's brow furrowed a little as though under the stress of some sudden recollection, and he seemed to check himself in what he was saying. But in a moment he resumed:-- "A little after that he left the army, and went into Parliament. And--precisely!--after a few years they made him governor somewhere--not much of a post. Then last year his old father, a neighbour of mine in Hampshire, quite close to my little place, went and died, and Blanchflower came into a fortune and a good deal of land besides. And I remember hearing that he had thrown up the Colonial Service, had broken down in health, and was living abroad for some years to avoid the English climate. That's the man of course. And the Valkyrie is Blanchflower's daughter! Very odd that! I must have seen her as a child. Her mother"--he paused again slightly--"was a Greek by birth, and gloriously handsome. Blanchflower met her when he was military attaché at Athens for a short time.--Well, that's all very interesting!" And in a ruminating mood the Englishman took out his cigarette-case. "You smoke, Madame?" The Swedish lady quietly accepted the courtesy. And while the too insistent band paused between one murdered Wagnerian fragment and another, they continued a conversation which seemed to amuse them both. * * * * * A little later the Englishman went out into the garden of the hotel, meaning to start for a walk. But he espied a party of young people gathered about the new lawn-tennis court where instead of the languid and dishevelled trifling, with a broken net and a wretched court, that was once supposed to attract English visitors, he had been already astonished to find Austrians and Hungarians--both girls and boys--playing a game quite up to the average of a good English club. The growing athleticism and independence, indeed, of the foreign girl, struck, for Winnington, the note of change in this mid-European spectacle more clearly than anything else. It was some ten years since he had been abroad in August, a month he had been always accustomed to spend in Scotch visits; and these young girls, with whom the Tyrol seemed to swarm, of all European nationalities other than English, still in or just out of the schoolroom; hatless and fearless; with their knapsacks on their backs, sometimes with ice-axes in their hands; climbing peaks and passes with their fathers and brothers; playing lawn-tennis like young men, and shewing their shapely forms sometimes, when it was a question of attacking the heights, in knicker-bocker costume, and at other times in fresh white dresses and bright-coloured jerseys, without a hint of waist; these young Atalantas, budding and bloomed, made the strongest impression upon him, as of a new race. Where had he been all these years? He felt himself a kind of Rip van Winkle--face to face at forty-one with a generation unknown to him. No one of course could live in England, and not be aware of the change which has passed over English girls in the same direction. But the Englishman always tacitly assumes that the foreigner is far behind him in all matters of open-air sport and physical development. Winnington had soon confessed the touch of national arrogance in his own surprise; and was now the keen and much attracted spectator. On one of the grounds he saw the little German girl--Euphrosyne, as he had already dubbed her--having a lesson from a bullying elder brother. The youth, amazed at his own condescension, scolded his sister perpetually, and at last gave her up in despair, vowing that she would never be any good, and he was not going to waste his time in teaching such a ninny. Euphrosyne sat down beside the court, with tears in her pretty eyes, her white feet crossed, her dark head drooping; and two girl companions, aged about sixteen or seventeen, like herself, came up to comfort her. "I could soon shew you how to improve your service, Mademoiselle," said Winnington, smiling, as he passed her. Euphrosyne looked up startled, but at sight of the handsome middle-aged Englishman, whom she unkindly judged to be not much younger than her father, she timidly replied:-- "It is hateful, Monsieur, to be so stupid as I am!" "Let me shew you," repeated Winnington, kindly. At this moment, a vigilant English governess--speaking with a strong Irish-American accent--came up, and after a glance at the Englishman, smilingly acquiesced. The two comforters of Euphrosyne, graceful little maids, with cherry-coloured jerseys over their white frocks, and golden brown hair tied with the large black bows of the _Backfisch_, were eager to share the lesson, and soon Winnington found himself the centre of a whole bevy of boys and girls who had run up to watch Euphrosyne's performance. The English governess, a good girl, in spite of her accent, and the unconscious fraud she was thereby perpetrating on her employers, thought she had seldom witnessed a more agreeable scene. "He treats them like princesses, and yet he makes them learn," she thought, a comment which very fairly expressed the mixture of something courtly with something masterful in the Englishman's manner. He was patience itself; but he was also frankness itself, whether for praise or blame; and the eagerness to please him grew fast and visibly in all these young creatures. But as soon as he had brought back Euphrosyne's smiles, and roused a new and fierce ambition to excel in all their young breasts, he dropped the lesson, with a few gay slangy words, and went his way, leaving a stir behind him of which he was quite unconscious. And there was no Englishman looking on who might have told the charmed and conquered maidens that they had just been coached by one of the most famous of English athletes, born with a natural genius for every kind of game, from cricket downwards. * * * * * On his way to the eastern side of the pass on which stood the group of hotels, Winnington got his post from the _concierge_, including his nightly _Times_, and carried it with him to a seat with which he was already familiar. But he left the _Times_ unopened, for the spectacle before him was one to ravish the senses from everything but itself. He looked across the deep valley of the Adige, nearly four thousand feet below him, to the giant range of the Dolomite Alps on the eastern side. The shadow of the forest-clad mountain on which he stood spread downwards over the plain, and crept up the mountains on the farther edge. Above a gulf of deepest blue, inlaid with the green of vineyards and forest lakes, he beheld an aerial world of rose-colour--the giant Dolomites, Latemar, Rosengarten, Schlern--majestic rulers of an upper air, so pure and luminous, that every tiny shadow cast by every wisp of wandering cloud on the bare red peaks, was plainly visible across the thirty miles of space. Rosengarten, with its snowless, tempest-beaten crags, held the centre, flushing to its name; and to the right and left, peak ranged beyond peak, like courtiers crowding to their king; chief among them a vast pyramid, blood-red in the sunset, from which the whole side, it seemed, had been torn away, leaving a gash so fresh it might have been ripped by a storm of yesterday, yet older perhaps than Calvary.... The great show faded through every tone of delicate beauty to a starry twilight,--passion into calm. Winnington watched till it was done, still with the Keatsian tag in his mind, and that deep inner memory of loss, to which the vanished splendour of the mountains seemed to make a mystic answering. He was a romantic--some would have said a sentimental person, with a poet always in his pocket, and a hunger for all that might shield him from the worst uglinesses of life, and the worst despairs of thought; an optimist, and, in his own sense, Christian. He had come abroad to wander alone for a time, because as one of the busiest, most important and most popular men in a wide country-side, he had had a year of unceasing and strenuous work, with no time to himself; and it had suddenly been borne in upon him, in choosing between the Alps and Scotland, that a man must sometimes be alone, for his soul's health. And he had never relished the luxury of occasional solitude so sharply as on this pine-scented evening in Tyrol. It was not till he was sitting again under the electric light of the hotel verandah that he opened his _Times_. The first paragraph which his eye lit upon was an obituary notice of Sir Robert Blanchflower "whose death, after a long illness and much suffering, occurred last week in Paris." The notice ended with the words--"the deceased baronet leaves a large property both in land and personalty. His only child, a daughter, Miss Delia Blanchflower, survives him." Winnington laid down the paper. So the Valkyrie was now alone in the world, and mistress no doubt of all her father's wealth. "I must have seen her--I am sure there was a child about"; he said to himself again; and his thoughts went groping into a mostly forgotten past, and as he endeavoured to reconstruct it, the incident which had brought him for a few weeks into close relations with Robert Blanchflower, then Major Blanchflower of the--Dragoons, came at last vividly back to him. An easy-going husband--a beautiful wife, not vicious, but bored to death--the inevitable third, in the person of a young and amorous cavalry officer--and a whole Indian station, waiting, half maliciously, half sadly, for the _banal_ catastrophe:--it was thus he remembered the situation. Winnington had arrived on the scene as a barrister of some five years' standing, invalided after an acute attack of pneumonia, and the guest for the winter of his uncle, then Commissioner of the district. He discovered in the cavalry officer a fellow who had been his particular protégé at Eton, and had owed his passionately coveted choice for the Eleven largely to Winnington's good word. The whole dismal little drama unveiled itself, and Winnington was hotly moved by the waste and pity of it. He was entertained by the Blanchflowers and took a liking to them both. The old friendship between Winnington and the cavalryman was soon noticed by Major Blanchflower, and one night he walked home with Winnington, who had been dining at his house, to the Commissioner's quarters. Then, for the first time, Winnington realised what it may be to wrestle with a man in torment. The next day, the young cavalryman, at Winnington's invitation, took his old friend for a ride, and before dawn on the following day, the youth was off on leave, and neither Major nor Mrs. Blanchflower, Winnington believed, had ever seen him again. What he did with the youth, and how he did it, he cannot exactly remember, but at least he doesn't forget the grip of Blanchflower's hand, and the look of deliverance in his strained, hollow face. Nor had Mrs. Blanchflower borne her rescuer any grudge. He had parted from her on the best of terms, and the recollection of her astonishing beauty grows strong in him as he thinks of her. So now it is her daughter who is stirring the world! With her father's money and her mother's eyes,--not to speak of the additional trifles--eloquence, enthusiasm, &c.--thrown in by the Swedish woman, she ought to find it easy. The dressing-gong of the hotel disturbed a rather sleepy reverie, and sent the Englishman back to his _Times_. And a few hours later he went to a dreamless bed, little guessing at the letter which was even then waiting for him, far below, in the Botzen post-office. Chapter II Winnington took his morning coffee on a verandah of the hotel, from which the great forests of Monte Vanna were widely visible. Upwards from the deep valley below the pass, to the topmost crags of the mountain, their royal mantle ran unbroken. This morning they were lightly drowned in a fine weather haze, and the mere sight of them suggested cool glades and verdurous glooms, stretches of pink willow herb lighting up the clearings--and in the secret heart of them such chambers "deaf to noise and blind to light" as the forest lover knows. Winnington promised himself a leisurely climb to the top of Monte Vanna. The morning foretold considerable heat, but under the pines one might mock at Helios. Ah!--Euphrosyne! She came, a vision of morning, tripping along in her white shoes and white dress; followed by her English governess, the lady, as Winnington guessed, from West Belfast, tempered by Brooklyn. The son apparently was still in bed, nor did anyone trouble to hurry him out of it. The father, a Viennese judge _en retraite_, as Winnington had been already informed by the all-knowing porter of the hotel, was a shrewd thin-lipped old fellow, with the quiet egotism of the successful lawyer. He came up to Winnington as soon as he perceived him, and thanked him in good English for his kindness to Euphrosyne of the day before. Winnington responded suitably and was soon seated at their table, chatting with them while they took their coffee. Euphrosyne shewed a marked pleasure in his society, and upon Winnington, steeped in a holiday reaction from much strenuous living, her charm worked as part of the charm of the day, and the magic of the mountain world. He noticed, however, with a revival of alarm, that she had a vigorous German appetite of her own, and as he watched the rolls disappear he trembled for the slender figure and the fawn-like gait. After breakfast, while the governess and the girl disappeared, the father hung over the verandah smoking, beside the Englishman, to whom he was clearly attracted. He spoke quite frankly of his daughter, and her bringing up. "She is motherless; her mother died when she was ten years old; and since, I must educate her myself. It gives me many anxieties, but she is a sweet creature, _dank sei gott_! I will not let her approach, even, any of these modern ideas about women. My wife hated them; I do also. I shall marry her to an honest man, and she will make a good wife and a good house-mother." "Mind you choose him well!" said Winnington, with a shrug. His eyes at that moment were critically bent on a group of Berliners, men of the commercial and stock-broking class, who, with their wives, had arrived a couple of nights before. The men were strolling and smoking below. They were all fat, red-faced and overbearing. When they went for walks, the man stalked in front along the forest paths, and the woman followed behind, carrying her own jacket. Winnington wondered what it might be like to be the wife of any of them. These _Herren_ at any rate might not be the worse for a little hustling from the "woman movement." He could not, however, say honestly that the wives shewed any consciousness of ill-fortune. They were almost all plump, plumper even than their husbands, expensively dressed and prosperous looking; and the amount of Viennese beer they consumed at the forest restaurants to which their husbands conducted them, seemed to the Englishman portentous. "Yes, my daughter is old-fashioned," resumed the ex-judge, complacently, after a pause. "And I am grateful to Miss Johnson, who has trained her very well. If she were like some of the girls one sees now! Last year there was a young lady here--_Ach, Gott!_" He raised his shoulders, with a contemptuous mouth. "Miss Blanchflower?" asked Winnington, turning towards the speaker with sudden interest. "That I believe was her name. She was mad, of course. _Ach_, they have told you?--of that _Vortrag_ she gave?--and the rest? After ten minutes, I made a sign to my daughter, and we walked out. I would not have had her corrupted with these ideas for the whole world. And such beauty, you understand! That makes it more dangerous. _Ja, ja, Liebchen--ich komme gleich!_" For there had been a soft call from Euphrosyne, standing on the steps of the hotel, and her fond father hurried away to join her. At the same moment, the porter emerged, bearing a bundle of letters and newspapers which had just arrived. Eager for his _Times_ Winnington went to meet him, and the man put into his hands what looked like a large post. He carried it off into the shelter of the pines, for the sun was already blazing on the hotel. Two or three letters on county business he ran through first. His own pet project, as County Councillor,--a county school for crippled children, was at last getting on. Foundation stone to be laid in October--good! "But how the deuce can I get hold of some more women to help work it! Scandalous, how few of the right sort there are about! And as for the Asylums Committee, if we really can't legally co-opt women to it, as our clerk says"--he looked again at a letter in his hand--"the law is an ass!--a double-dyed ass. I swear I won't visit those poor things on the women's side again. It's women's work--let them do it. The questions I have to ask are enough to make an old gamp blush. Hallo, what's this?" He turned over a large blue envelope, and looked at a name stamped across the back. It was the name of a well-known firm of London solicitors. But he had no dealings with them, and could not imagine why they should have written to him. He opened the letter carelessly, and began to read it,--presently with eager attention, and at last with amazement. It ran as follows: "From Messrs. MORTON, MANNERS & LATHOM, Solicitors, Adelphi, London, W. C." "Dear Sir,--We write on behalf of Lord Frederick Calverly, your co-executor, under Sir Robert Blanchflower's will, to inform you that in Sir Robert's last will and testament--of which we enclose a copy--executed at Meran six weeks before his decease, you are named as one of his two executors, as sole trustee of his property, and sole guardian of Sir Robert's daughter and only child, Miss Delia Blanchflower, until she attains the age of twenty-five. We believe that this will be a complete surprise to you, for although Sir Robert, according to a statement he made during his last illness to his sister, Miss Elizabeth Blanchflower, intended to communicate with you before signing the will, his weakness increased so rapidly, after it was finally drawn up, that he was never able to do so. Indeed the morning after his secretary had written out a clear copy of what he himself had put together, he had a most alarming attack from which he rallied with difficulty. That afternoon he signed the will, and was just able to write you the letter which we also enclose, marked by himself, as you will see. He was never properly conscious afterwards, and he died in Paris last Thursday, and was buried in the Protestant cemetery at Mont Parnasse on the Saturday following. The will which was in our custody was opened in London yesterday, by Lord Frederick Calverly, in Miss Blanchflower's presence. We understand from her that she has already written to you on the subject. Lord Frederick would also have done so, but that he has just gone to Harrogate, in a very poor state of health. He begs us to say that he is of course quite aware that your engagements may not allow you to accept the functions offered you under the will, and that he will be in considerable anxiety until he knows your decision. He hopes that you will at least accept the executorship; and indeed ventures to appeal very strongly on that account to your old friendship for Sir Robert; as he himself sees no prospect of being able to carry out unaided the somewhat heavy responsibilities attaching to the office. "You will see that a sum of £4000 is left to yourself under the will." We remain, dear Sir, Your obedient servants, MORTON, MANNERS & LATHOM. "(Solicitors.)" "MARK WINNINGTON, Esq., J. P. Bridge End, Maumsey, Hants." A bulky document on blue paper, and also a letter had dropped to the ground. Winnington stooped for the letter, and turned it over in stupification. It was addressed in a faltering hand, and marked, "To be forwarded after my death." He hastily broke the seal. "MY DEAR MARK WINNIXGTON,--I know well what I am laying upon you. I have no right to do it. But I remember certain days in the past, and I believe if you are still the same man you were then, you will do what I ask. My daughter ought to be a fine woman. At present she seems to me entirely and completely out of her mind. She has been captured by the extreme suffrage movement, and by one of the most mischievous women in it; and I have no influence with her whatever. I live in terror of what she may do; of what they may lead her to do. To attempt to reason with her is useless; and for a long time my health has been such that I have avoided conflict with her as much as possible. But things have now come to such a pass that something must be done, and I have tried in these last weeks, ill as I am, to face the future. I want if I can to save Delia from wasting herself, and the money and estates I should naturally leave her, upon this mad campaign. I want, even against her will, to give her someone to advise and help her. I feel bitterly that I have done neither. The tropics ruined me physically, and I seem to have gone to pieces altogether the last few years. But I love my child, and I can't leave her without a real friend or support in the world. I have no near relations, except my sister Elizabeth, and she and Delia are always at feud. Freddie Calverly my cousin, is a good fellow in his way, though too fussy about his health. He has a fair knowledge of business, and he would have been hurt if I had not made him executor. So I have appointed him, and have of course left him a little money. But he could no more tackle Delia than fly. In the knock-about life we have led since I left the Colonial Service, I seem to have shed all my old friends. I can think of no one who could or would help me in this strait but you--and you know why. God bless you for what you once did for me. There was never any other cloud between my poor wife and me. She turned to me after that trouble, and we were happy till the end. "I have heard too something of you from Maumsey people, since I inherited Maumsey, though I have never been able to go there. I know what your neighbours think of you. And now Delia is going to be your neighbour. So, drawing a bow at a venture, as a dying man must, I have made you Delia's guardian and trustee, with absolute power over her property and income till she is twenty-five. When she attains that age--she is now nearly twenty-two--if she marries a man approved by you, or if you are satisfied that her connection with militant suffragism has ceased, the property is to be handed over to her in full possession, and the trust will come to an end. If on the contrary, she continues in her present opinion and course of action, I have left directions that the trust is to be maintained for Delia's life-time, under certain conditions as to her maintenance, which you will find in the will. If you yourself are not willing to administer the trust, either now or later, the property will devolve to the Public Trustee, for whom full instructions are left. And at Delia's death it will be divided among her heirs, if she has any, and various public objects. "I cannot go further into details. My strength is almost out. But this one thing may I beg?--if you become my child's guardian, get the right person to live with her. I regard that as all-important. She must have a chaperon, and she will try to set up one of the violent women who have divided her from me. Especially am I in dread of a lady, an English lady, a Miss Marvell, whom I engaged two years ago to stay with us for the winter and read history with Delia. She is very able and a very dangerous woman, prepared I believe, to go to any length on behalf of her 'cause.' At any rate she filled Delia's head with the wildest suffragist notions, and since then my poor child thinks of nothing else. Even since I have been so ill--this last few weeks--I know she has been in communication with this woman. She sympathises with all the horrible things they do, and I am certain she gives all the money she can to their funds. Delia is a splendid creature, but she is vain and excitable and they court her. I feel that they might tempt her into any madness. "Goodbye. I made the doctor give me strychnine and morphia enough to carry me through this effort. I expect it will be the last. Help me, and my girl--if you can--for old sake's sake. Goodbye." Your grateful old friend, "ROBERT BLANCHFLOWER." "Good heavens!" was all Winnington could find to say, as he put down the letter. Then, becoming aware, as the verandah filled after breakfast, that he was in a very public place, he hastily rose, thrust the large solicitor's envelope, with its bulky enclosures into his coat pocket, and proceeded to gather up the rest of his post. As he did so, he suddenly perceived a black-edged letter, addressed in a remarkably clear handwriting, with the intertwined initials D. B. in the corner. A fit of silent laughter, due to his utter bewilderment, shook him. He put the letter with all its fellows into another pocket and hurried away into the solitude of the woods. It was some time before he had succeeded in leaving all the tourists' paths and seats behind. At last in a green space of bilberry and mossy rock, with the pines behind him, and the chain of the Dolomites, sun-bathed, in front, he opened and read his "ward's" first letter to him. "DEAR MR. WINNINGTON,--I understood--though very imperfectly--from my father, before he died, that he had appointed you my guardian and trustee till I should reach the age of twenty-five, and he explained to me so far as he could his reason for such a step. And now I have of course read the will, and the solicitors have explained to me clearly what it all means. "You will admit I think that I am placed in a very hard position. If my poor father had not been so ill, I should certainly have tried to argue with him, and to prevent his doing anything so unnecessary and unjust as he has now done--unjust both to you and to me. But the doctors absolutely forbade me to discuss any business with him, and I could do nothing. I can only hope that the last letter he wrote to you, just before his death, and the alterations he made in his will about the same time, gave him some comfort. If so, I do not grudge them for one moment. "But now you and I have to consider this matter as sensible people, and I suggest that for a man who is a complete stranger to me, and probably altogether out of sympathy with the ideas and principles, I believe in and am _determined_ to act upon--(for otherwise my father would not have chosen you)--to undertake the management of my life and affairs, would be really grotesque. It must lead to endless friction and trouble between us. If you refuse, the solicitors tell me, the Public Trustee--which seems to be a government office--will manage the property, and the Court of Chancery will appoint a guardian in accordance with my father's wishes. That would be bad enough, considering that I am of full age and in my right mind--I can't promise to give a guardian chosen in such a way, a good time. But at any rate, it would be less odious to fight a court and an office, if I must fight, than a gentleman who is my near neighbour in the county, and was my father's and mother's friend. I do hope you will think this over very carefully, and will relieve both yourself and me from an impossible state of things. I perfectly realise of course that my father appointed you my guardian, in order to prevent me from making certain friends, and doing certain things. But I do not admit the right of any human being--not even a father--to dictate the life of another. I intend to stick to my friends, And to do what my conscience directs. "Should you however accept the guardianship--after this candid statement of mine--you will, I suppose, feel bound to carry out my father's wishes by refusing me money for the purposes he disapproved. He told me indeed that I should be wholly dependent on my guardian for money during the next three years, even though I have attained my legal majority. I can say to you what I could not say to him, that I _bitterly resent_ an arrangement which treats a grown person like a child. Such things are not done to _men_. It is only women who are the victims of them. It would be _impossible_ to keep up friendly relations with a guardian, who would really only be there--only exist--to thwart and coerce me. "Let me point out that at the very beginning a difference must arise between us, about the lady I am to live with. I have chosen my chaperon already, as it was my moral, if not my legal right to do. But I am quite aware that my father disapproved of her, and that you will probably take the same view. She belongs to a militant suffrage society, and is prepared at any moment to suffer for the great cause she and I believe in. As to her ability, she is one of the cleverest women in England. I am only too proud that she has consented--for a time--to share my life, and nothing will _induce_ me to part with her--as long as she consents to stay. But of course I know what you--or any ordinary man--is likely to think of her. "No!--we cannot agree--it is impossible we should agree--as guardian and ward. If indeed, for the sake of your old friendship with my father, you would retain the executorship--I am sure Lord Frederick Calverly will be no sort of use!--till the affairs of the will, death-duties, debts, and so on, are settled--and would at the same time give up _any_ other connection with the property and myself, I should be enormously grateful to you. And I assure you I should be very glad indeed--for father's sake--to have your advice on many points connected with my future life; and I should be all the more ready to follow it, if you had renounced your legal power over me. "I shall be much obliged if you will make your decision as soon as possible, so that both the lawyer and I may know how to proceed." Yours faithfully, DELIA BLANCHFLOWER. Mark Winnington put down the letter. Its mixture of defiance, patronage and persuasion--its young angry cleverness--would have tickled a naturally strong sense of humour at any other time. But really the matter was too serious to laugh at. "What on earth am I to do!" He sat pondering, his mind running through a number of associated thoughts, of recollections old and new; those Indian scenes of fifteen years ago; the story told him by the Swedish lady; recent incidents and happenings in English politics; and finally the tone in which Euphrosyne's father had described the snatching of his own innocent from the clutches of Miss Blanchflower. Then it occurred to him to look at the will. He read it through; a tedious business; for Sir Robert had been a wealthy man and the possessions bequeathed--conditionally bequeathed--to his daughter were many and various. Two or three thousand acres of land in one of the southern counties, bordering on the New Forest; certain large interests in Cleveland ironstone and Durham collieries, American and South African shares, Canadian mortgage and railway debentures:--there was enough to give lawyers and executors work for some time, and to provide large pickings for the Exchequer. Among the legacies, he noticed the legacy of £4000 to himself. "Payment for the job!" he thought, and shook his head, smiling. The alternative arrangements made for transferring the trust to the Public Trustee, should Winnington decline, and for vesting the guardianship of the daughter in the Court of Chancery, subject to the directions of the will, till she should reach the age of twenty-five, were clear; so also was the provision that unless a specific signed undertaking was given by the daughter on attaining her twenty-fifth birthday, that the moneys of the estate would not be applied to the support of the "militant suffrage" propaganda, the trust was to be made permanent, a life income of £2000 a year was to be settled on Miss Blanchflower, and the remainder, i.e. by far the major part of Sir Robert's property, was to accumulate, for the benefit of his daughter's heirs should she have any, and of various public objects. Should Miss Blanchflower sign the undertaking and afterwards break it, the Public Trustee was directed to proceed against her, and to claim the restitution of the property, subject always to her life allowance. "Pretty well tied up," thought Winnington, marvelling at the strength of feeling, the final exasperation of a dying man, which the will betrayed. His daughter must somehow--perhaps without realising it--have wounded him to the heart. He began to climb again through the forest that he might think the better. What would be the situation, supposing he undertook what his old friend asked of him? He himself was a man of moderate means and settled habits. His small estate and modest house which a widowed sister shared with him during six months in the year, left him plenty of leisure from his own affairs, and he had filled that leisure, for years past, to overflowing, with the various kinds of public work that fall to the country gentleman with a conscience. He was never idle; his work interested him, and there was no conceit in his quiet knowledge that he had many friends and much influence. Since the death of the girl to whom he had been engaged for six short months, fifteen years before this date, he had never thought of marriage. The circumstances of her death--a terrible case of lingering typhoid--had so burnt the pity of her suffering and the beauty of her courage into his mind, that natural desire seemed to have died with her. He had turned to hard work and the bar, and equally hard physical exercise, and so made himself master both of his grief and his youth. But his friendships with women had played a great part in his subsequent life. A natural chivalry, deep based, and, in manner, a touch of caressing charm, soon evoked by those to whom he was attached, and not easily confounded in the case of a man so obviously manly with any lack of self-control, had long since made him a favourite of the sex. There were few women among his acquaintances who did not covet his liking; and he was the repository of far more confidences than he had ever desired. No one took more trouble to serve; and no one more carelessly forgot a service he had himself rendered, or more tenaciously remembered any kindness done him by man, woman or child. His admiration for women was mingled indeed often with profound pity; pity for the sorrows and burdens that nature had laid upon them, for their physical weakness, for their passive role in life. That beings so hampered could yet play such tender and heroic parts was to him perennially wonderful, and his sense of it expressed itself in an unconscious homage that seemed to embrace the sex. That the homage was not seldom wasted on persons quite unworthy of it, his best women friends were not slow to see; but in this he was often obstinate and took his own way. This mingling in him of an unfailing interest in the sex with an entire absence of personal craving, gave him a singularly strong position with regard to women, of which he had never yet taken any selfish advantage; largely, no doubt, because of the many activities, most of them disinterested, by which his life was fed and freshened; as a lake is by the streams which fill it. He was much moved by his old friend's letter, and he walked about pondering it, till the morning was almost gone. The girl's position also seemed to him particularly friendless and perilous, though she herself, apparently, would be the last person to think so, could she only shake herself free from the worrying restrictions her father had inflicted on her. Her letter, and its thinly veiled wrath, shewed quite plainly that the task of any guardian would be a tough one. Miss Blanchflower was evidently angry--very angry--yet at the same time determined, if she could, to play a dignified part; ready, that is, to be civil, on her own conditions. The proposal to instal as her chaperon, instantly, without a day's delay, the very woman denounced in her father's last letter, struck him as first outrageous, and then comic. He laughed aloud over it. Certainly--he was not bound in any way to undertake such a business. Blanchflower had spoken the truth when he said that he had no right to ask it. And yet-- His mind dallied with it. Suppose he undertook it, on what lines could he possibly run it? His feeling towards the violent phase of the "woman's movement," the militancy which during the preceding three or four years had produced a crop of outrages so surprising and so ugly, was probably as strong as Blanchflower's own. He was a natural Conservative, and a trained lawyer. Methods of violence in a civilised and constitutional State, roused in him indignant abhorrence. He could admit no excuse for them; at any rate no justification. But, fundamentally? What was his real attitude towards this wide-spread claim of women, now so general in many parts of the world admitted indeed in some English Colonies, in an increasing number of the American states, in some of the minor European countries--to share the public powers and responsibilities of men? Had he ever faced the problem, as it concerned England, with any thoroughness or candour? Yet perhaps Englishmen--all Englishmen--had now got to face it. Could he discover any root of sympathy in himself with what were clearly the passionate beliefs of Delia Blanchflower, the Valkyrie of twenty-one, as they were also the passionate beliefs of the little Swedish lady, the blue-stocking of fifty? If so, it might be possible to guide, even to control such a ward, for the specified three years, at any rate, without exciting unseemly and ridiculous strife between her and her guardian. "I ought to be able to do it"--he thought--"without upsetting the apple-cart!" For, as he examined himself he realised that he held no closed mind on the subject of the rights or powers or grievances of women. He had taken no active part whatever in the English suffragist struggle, either against woman suffrage or for it; and in his own countryside it mattered comparatively little. But he was well aware what strong forces and generous minds had been harnessed to the suffrage cause, since Mill first set it stirring; and among his dearest women friends there were some closely connected with it, who had often mocked or blamed his own indifference. He had always thought indeed, and he thought still--for many reasons--that they attributed a wildly exaggerated importance to the vote, which, as it seemed to him, went a very short way in the case of men. But he had always been content to let the thing slide; having so much else to do and think about. Patience then, and respect for honest and disinterested conviction, in any young and ardent soul; sharp discrimination between lawful and unlawful means of propaganda, between debate, and stone-throwing; no interference with the first, and a firm hand against the second:--surely, in that spirit, one might make something of the problem? Winnington was accustomed to be listened to, to get round obstacles that other men found insuperable. It was scarcely conceit, but a just self-confidence which suggested to him that perhaps Miss Blanchflower would not prove so difficult after all. Gentleness, diplomacy, decision,--by Jove, they'd all be wanted! But his legal experience (he had been for some years a busy barrister), and his later life as a practical administrator had not been a bad training in each and all of these qualities. Of course, if the girl were merely obstinate and stupid, the case might indeed be hopeless. But the picture drawn by the Swedish woman of the "Valkyrie" on her black mare, of the ardent young lecturer, facing her indifferent or hostile audience with such pluck and spirit, dwelt with him, and affected him strongly. His face broke into amusement as he asked himself the frank question--"Would you do it, if you hadn't heard that tale?--if you knew that your proposed ward was just a plain troublesome chit of a schoolgirl, bitten with suffragism?" He put the question to himself, standing on a pinnacle of shadowed rock, from which the world seemed to sink into blue gulfs beneath him, till on the farther side of immeasurable space the mountains re-emerged, climbing to the noonday sun. And he answered it without hesitation. Certainly, the story told him had added a touch of romance to the bare case presented by the batch of letters:--had lent a force and point to Robert Blanchflower's dying plea, it might not otherwise have possessed. For, after all, he, Winnington, was a very busy man; and his life was already mortgaged in many directions. But as it was--yes--the task attracted him. At the same time, the twinkle in his grey eyes shewed him ironically aware of himself. "Understand, you old fool!--the smallest touch of philandering--and the whole business goes to pot. The girl would have you at her mercy--and the thing would become an odious muddle and hypocrisy, degrading to both. Can you trust yourself? You're not exactly made of flint: Can you play the part as it ought to be played?" Quietly, his face sank into rest. For him, there was that in memory, which protected him from all such risks, which had so protected him for fifteen years. He felt quite sure of himself. Ever since his great loss he had found his natural allies and companions among girls and young women as much as among men. The embarrassment of sex seemed to have passed away for him, but not the charm. Thus, he took what for him was the easier path of acceptance. Kindly and scrupulous as he was, it would have been hard for him in any case to say No to the dead, more difficult than to say it to the living. Yes!--he would do what was possible. _The Times_ that morning contained a long list of outrages committed by militant suffragists--houses burnt down, meetings disturbed, members attacked. In a few months, or weeks, perhaps, without counsel to aid or authority to warn her, the Valkyrie might be running headlong into all the perils her father foresaw. He pledged himself to protect her if he could. * * * * * The post which left the hotel that evening took with it a short note from Mark Winnington to Messrs. Morton, Manners & Lathom, accepting the functions of executor, guardian and trustee offered him under Sir Robert Blanchflower's will, and appointing an interview with them at their office; together with a somewhat longer one addressed to "Miss Delia Blanchflower, Claridge's Hotel, London. "DEAR MISS BLANCHFLOWER, Pray let me send you my most sincere condolence. Your poor father and I were once great friends, and I am most truly sorry to hear of his death. "Thank you for your interesting letter. But I find it impossible to refuse your father's dying request to me, nor can I believe that I cannot be of some assistance to his daughter. Let me try. We can always give it up, if we cannot work it, but I see no reason why, with good will on both sides, we should not make something of it. "I am returning to London ten days from now, and hope to see you within a fortnight. "Please address, 'Junior Carlton Club, Pall Mall.'" Believe me, Yours very truly, "MARK WINNINGTON." On his arrival, in London, Winnington found a short reply awaiting him. "DEAR MR. WINNINGTON,--As you please. I am however shortly leaving for Maumsey with Miss Marvell, who, as I told you, has undertaken to live with me as my chaperon. "We shall hope to see you at Maumsey." Yours faithfully, "DELIA BLANCHFLOWER." A few days later, after long interviews with some very meticulous solicitors, a gentleman, very much in doubt as to what his reception would be, took train for Maumsey and the New Forest, with a view to making as soon as possible a first call upon his ward. Chapter III "We ought soon to see the house." The speaker bent forward, as the train, sweeping round a curve, emerged from some thick woods Into a space of open country. It was early September and a sleepy autumnal sunshine lay upon the fields. The Stubbles just reaped ran over the undulations of the land in silky purples and gold; the blue smoke from the cottages and farms hung poised in mid air; the eye could hardly perceive any movement in the clear stream beside the line, as it slipped noiselessly by over its sandy bed; it seemed a world where "it was always afternoon"; and the only breaks in its sunny silence came from the occasional coveys of partridges that rose whirring from the harvest-fields as the train passed. Delia Blanchflower looked keenly at the English scene, so strange to her after many years of Colonial and foreign wandering. She thought, but did not say--"Those must be my fields--and my woods, that we have just passed through. Probably I rode about them with Grandpapa. I remember the pony--and the horrid groom I hated!" Quick the memory returned of a tiny child on a rearing pony, alone with a sulky groom, who, out of his master's sight, could not restrain his temper, and struck the pony savagely and repeatedly over the head, to an accompaniment of oaths; frightening out of her wits the little girl who sat clinging to the creature's neck. And next she saw herself marching in erect--a pale-faced thing of six, with a heart of fury,--to her grandfather, to demand justice on the offender. And grandpapa had done her bidding then as always; the groom was dismissed that day. It was only grandmamma who had ever tried to manage or thwart her; result, perpetual war, decided often for the time by the brute force at command of the elder, but ever renewed. Delia's face flamed again as she thought of the most humiliating incident of her childhood; when Grandmamma, unable, to do anything with her screaming and stamping self, had sent in despair for a stalwart young footman, and ordered him to "carry Miss Delia up to the nursery." Delia could still feel herself held, wriggling and shrieking face downwards, under the young man's strong arm, unable either to kick or to scratch, while Grandmamma half fearful, half laughing, watched the dire ascent from the bottom of the stairs. "Male tyranny--my first taste of it!" thought Delia, smiling at herself. "It was fated then that I should be a militant." She looked across at her friend and travelling companion, half inclined to tell the story; but the sight of Gertrude Marvell's attitude and expression checked the trivial reminiscence on her lips. "Are you tired?" she said, laying her hand on the other's knee. "Oh, no. Only thinking." "Thinking of what?"-- "Of all there is to do."-- A kind of flash passed from one face to the other, Delia's eyes darkly answering. They looked at each other for a little, as though in silent conversation, and then Delia turned again to the landscape outside. Yes, there was the house, its long, irregular line with the village behind it. She could not restrain a slight exclamation as she caught sight of it, and her friend opposite turned interrogatively. "What did you say?" "Nothing--only there's the Abbey. I don't suppose I've seen it since I was twelve." The other lady put up an eye-glass and looked where Miss Blanchflower pointed; but languidly, as though it were an effort to shake herself free from pre-occupying ideas. She was a woman of about thirty-five, slenderly made, with a sallow, regular face, and good, though short-sighted eyes. The eyes were dark, so was the hair, the features delicate. Under the black shady hat, the hair was very closely and neatly coiled. The high collar of the white blouse, fitting tightly to the slender neck, the coat and skirt of blue serge without ornament of any kind, but well cut, emphasized the thinness, almost emaciation, of the form. Her attitude, dress, and expression conveyed the idea of something amazingly taut and ready--like a ship cleared for action. The body with its clothing seemed to have been simplified as much as possible, so as to become the mere instrument of the will which governed it. No superfluity whatever, whether of flesh on her small bones, or of a single unnecessary button, fold, or trimming on her dress, had Gertrude Marvell ever allowed herself for many years. The general effect was in some way formidable; though why the neat precision of the little lady should convey any notion of this sort, it would not at first sight have been easy to say. "How old did you say it is?"--she asked, after examining the distant building, which could be now plainly seen from the train across a stretch of green park. "Oh, the present building is nothing--a pseudo-Gothic monstrosity, built about 1830," laughed Delia; "but there are some old remains and foundations of the abbey. It is a big, rambling old place, and I should think dreadfully in want of doing up. My grandfather was a bit of a miser, and though he was quite rich, he never spent a penny he could help." "All the better. He left the more for other people to spend." Miss Marvell smiled--a slight, and rather tired smile, which hardly altered the face. "Yes, if they are allowed to spend it!" said Delia, with a shrug. "Oh well, anyway the house must be done up--painted and papered and that kind of thing. A trustee has got to see that things of that sort are kept in order, I suppose. But it won't have anything to do with me, except that for decency's sake, no doubt, he'll consult me. I shall be allowed to choose the wall-papers I suppose!" "If you want to," said the other drily. Delia's brows puckered. "We shall have to spend some time here, you know, Gertrude! We may as well have something to do." "Nothing that might entangle us, or take too much of our thoughts," said Miss Marvell, gently, but decidedly. "I'm afraid I like furnishing," said Delia, not without a shade of defiance. "And I object--because I know you do. After all--you understand as well as I do that _every day_ now is important. There are not so many of us, Delia! If you're going to do real work, you can't afford to spend your time or thoughts on doing up a shabby house." There was silence a moment. Then Delia said abruptly--"I wonder when that man will turn up? What a fool he is to take it on!" "The guardianship? Yes, he hardly knows what he's in for." A touch of grim amusement shewed itself for a moment in Miss Marvell's quiet face. "Oh, I daresay he knows. Perhaps he relies on what everyone calls his 'influence.' Nasty, sloppy word--nasty sloppy thing! Whenever I'm 'influenced,' I'm degraded!" The young shoulders straightened themselves fiercely. "I don't know. It has its uses," said the other tranquilly. Delia laughed radiantly. "O well--if one can make the kind of weapon of it you do. I don't mean of course that one shouldn't be rationally persuaded. But that's a different thing. 'Influence' makes me think of canting clergymen, and stout pompous women, who don't know what they're talking about, and can't argue--who think they've settled everything by a stale quotation--or an appeal to 'your better self'--or St. Paul. If Mr. Winnington tries it on with 'influence'--we'll have some fun." Delia returned to her window. The look her companion bent upon her was not visible to her. It was curiously detached--perhaps slightly ironical. "I'm wondering what part I shall play in the first interview!" said Miss Marvell, after a pause. "I represent the first stone in Mr. Winnington's path. He will of course do his best to put me out of it." "How can he?" cried Delia ardently. "What can he do? He can't send for the police and turn you out of the house. At least I suppose he could, but he certainly won't. The last thing a gentleman of his sort wants is to make a scandal. Every one says, after all, that he is a nice fellow!"--the tone was unconsciously patronising--"It isn't his fault if he's been placed in this false position. But the great question for me is--how are we going to manage him for the best?" She leant forward, her chin on her hands, her sparkling eyes fixed on her friend's face. "The awkward thing is"--mused Miss Marvell--"that there is so little _time_ in which to manage him. If the movement were going on at its old slow pace, one might lie low, try diplomacy, avoid alarming him, and so forth. But we've no time for that. It is a case of blow on blow--action on action--and the publicity is half the battle." "Still, a little management there must be, to begin with!--because I--we--want money, and he holds the purse-strings. Hullo, here's the station!" She jumped up and looked eagerly out of the window. "They've sent a fly for us. And there's the station-master on the lookout. How it all comes back to me!" Her flushed cheek showed a natural excitement. She was coming back as its mistress to a house where she had been happy as a child, which she had not seen for years. Thoughts of her father, as he had been in the old days before any trouble had arisen between them, came rushing through her mind--tender, regretful thoughts--as the train came slowly to a standstill. But the entire indifference or passivity of her companion restrained her from any further expression. The train stopped, and she descended to the platform of a small country station, alive apparently with traffic and passengers. "Miss Blanchflower?" said a smiling station-master, whose countenance seemed to be trying to preserve the due mean between welcome to the living and condolence for the dead, as, hat in hand, he approached the newcomers, and guided by her deep mourning addressed himself to Delia. "Why, Mr. Stebbing, I remember you quite well," said Delia, holding out her hand. "There's my maid--and I hope there's a cart for the luggage. We've got a lot." A fair-haired man in spectacles, who had also just left the train, turned abruptly and looked hard at the group as he passed them. He hesitated a moment, then passed on, with a curious swinging gait, a long and shabby over-coat floating behind him--to speak to the porter who was collecting tickets at the gate opening on the road beyond. Meanwhile Delia had been accosted by another gentleman, who had been sitting reading his _Morning Post_ on the sunny platform, as the train drew up. He too had examined the new arrivals with interest, and while Delia was still talking to the station-master, he walked up to her. "I think you are Miss Blanchflower: But you won't remember me." He lifted his hat, smiling. Delia looked at him, puzzled. "Don't you remember that Christmas dance at the Rectory, when you were ten, and I was home from Sandhurst?" "Perfectly!--and I quarrelled with you because you wouldn't give me champagne, when I'd danced with you, instead of lemonade. You said what was good for big boys wasn't good for little girls--and I called you a bully--" "You kicked me!--you had the sharpest little toes!" "Did I?" said Delia composedly. "I was rather good at kicking. So you are Billy Andrews?" "Right. I'm Captain now, and they've just made me adjutant down here for the Yeomanry. My mother keeps house for me. You're coming here to live? Please let me say how sorry I was to see your sad news." The condolence was a little clumsy but sincere. "Thank you. I must go and see to the luggage. Let me introduce you to Miss Marvell--Captain Andrews--Miss Marvell." That lady bowed coldly, as Delia departed. The tall, soldierly man, whose pleasant looks were somewhat spoilt by a slightly underhung mouth, and prominent chin, disguised, however, by a fine moustache, offered assistance with the luggage. "There is no need, thank you," said Miss Marvell. "Miss Blanchflower and her maid will see to it." And the Captain noticed that the speaker remained entirely passive while the luggage was being collected and piled into a fly by the porters, directed by Miss Blanchflower and her maid. She stood quietly on the platform, till all was ready, and Delia beckoned to her. In the intervals the soldier tried to make conversation, but with very small success. He dwelt upon some of the changes Miss Blanchflower would find on the estate; how the old head-keeper, who used to make a pet of her, was dead, and the new agent her father had put in was thought to be doing well, how the village had lost markedly in population in the last few years--this emigration to Canada was really getting beyond a joke!--and so forth. Miss Marvell made no replies. But she suddenly asked him a question. "What's that house over there?" She pointed to a grey façade on a wooded hill some two miles off. "That's our show place--Monk Lawrence! We're awfully proud of it--Elizabethan, and that kind of thing. But of course you've heard of Monk Lawrence! It's one of the finest things in England." "It belongs to Sir Wilfrid Lang?" "Certainly. Do you know him? He's scarcely been there at all, since he became a Cabinet Minister; and yet he spent a lot of money in repairing it a few years ago. They say it's his wife's health--that it's too damp for her. Anyway it's quite shut up,--except that they let tourists see it once a month." "Does anybody live in the house?"-- "Oh--a caretaker, of course,--one of the keepers. They let the shooting. Ah! there's Miss Blanchflower calling you." Miss Marvell--as the gallant Captain afterwards remembered--took a long look at the distant house and then went to join Miss Blanchflower. The Captain accompanied her, and helped her to stow away the remaining bags into the fly, while a small concourse of rustics, sprung from nowhere, stolidly watched the doings of the heiress and her friend. Delia suddenly bent forward to him, as he was about to shut the door, with an animated look--"Can you tell me who that gentleman is who has just walked off towards the village?"--she pointed. "His name is Lathrop. He lives in a place just the other side of yours. He's got some trout-hatching ponds--will stock anybody's stream for them. Rather a queer customer!"--the good-natured Captain dropped his voice. "Well, good-bye, my train's just coming. I hope I may come and see you soon?" Delia nodded assent, and they drove off. "By George, she's a beauty!" said the Captain to himself as he turned away. "Nothing wrong with her that I can see. But there are some strange tales going about. I wonder who that other woman is. Marvell--Gertrude Marvell?--I seem to have heard the name somewhere.--Hullo, Masham, how are you?" He greeted the leading local solicitor who had just entered the station, a man with a fine ascetic face, and singularly blue eyes. Masham looked like a starved poet or preacher, and was in reality one of the hardest and shrewdest men of business in the southern counties. "Well, did you see Miss Blanchflower?" said the Captain, as Masham joined him on the platform, and they entered the up train together. "I did. A handsome young lady! Have you heard the news?" "No." "Your neighbor, Mr. Winnington--Mark Winnington--is named as her guardian under her father's will--until she is twenty-five. He is also trustee, with absolute power over the property." The Captain shewed a face of astonishment. "Gracious! what had Winnington to do with Sir Robert Blanchflower!" "An old friend, apparently. But it is a curious will." The solicitor's abstracted look shewed a busy mind. The Captain had never felt a livelier desire for information. "Isn't there something strange about the girl?"--he said, lowering his voice, although there was no one else in the railway carriage. "I never saw a more beautiful creature! But my mother came home from London the other day with some very queer stories, from a woman who had met them abroad. She said Miss Blanchflower was awfully clever, but as wild as a hawk--mad about women's rights and that kind of thing. In the hotel where she met them, people fought very shy of her." "Oh, she's a militant suffragist," said the solicitor quietly--"though she's not had time yet since her father's death to do any mischief. That--in confidence--is the meaning of the will." The adjutant whistled. "Goodness!--Winnington will have his work cut out for him. But he needn't accept." "He has accepted. I heard this morning from the London solicitor." "Your firm does the estate business down here?" "For many years. I hope to see Mr. Winnington to-morrow or next day. He is evidently hurrying home--because of this." There was silence for a few minutes; then the Captain said bluntly: "It's an awful pity, you know, that kind of thing cropping up down here. We've escaped it so far." "With such a lot of wild women about, what can you expect?" said the solicitor briskly. "Like the measles--sure to come our way sooner or later." "Do you think they'll get what they want?" "What--the vote? No--not unless the men are fools." The refined, apostolic face set like iron. "None of the womanly women want it," said the Captain with conviction. "You should hear my mother on it." The solicitor did not reply. The adjutant's mother was not in his eyes a model of wisdom. Nor did his own opinion want any fortifying from outside. Captain Andrews was not quite in the same position. He was conscious of a strong male instinct which disavowed Miss Blanchflower and all her kind; but at the same time he was exceedingly susceptible to female beauty, and it troubled his reasoning processes that anybody so wrong-headed should be so good-looking. His heart was soft, and his brain all that was wanted for his own purposes. But it did not enable him-it never had enabled him--to understand these extraordinary "goings-on," which the newspapers were every day reporting, on the part of well-to-do, educated women, who were ready--it seemed--to do anything outrageous--just for a vote! "Of course nobody would mind if the rich women--the tax-paying women--had a vote--help us Tories famously. But the women of the working-classes--why, Good Lord, look at them when there's any disturbance on--any big strike--look at Tonypandy!--a deal sight worse than the men! Give them the vote and they'd take us to the devil, even quicker than Lloyd George!" Aloud he said-- "Do you know anything about that lady Miss Blanchflower had with her? She introduced me. Miss Marvell--I think that was the name. I thought I had heard it somewhere." The solicitor lifted his eyebrows. "I daresay. She was in the stone-throwing raid last August. Fined 20s. or a month, for damage in Pall Mall. She was in prison a week; then somebody paid her fine. She professed great annoyance, but one of the police told me it was privately paid by her own society. She's too important to them--they can't do without her. An extremely clever woman." "Then what on earth does she come and bury herself down here for?" cried the Captain. Masham shewed a meditative twist of the lip. "Can't say, I'm sure. But they want money. And Miss Blanchflower is an important capture." "I hope that girl will soon have the sense to shake them off!" said the Captain with energy. "She's a deal too beautiful for that kind of thing. I shall get my mother to come and talk to her." The solicitor concealed his smile behind his _Daily Telegraph_. He had a real liking and respect for the Captain, but the family affection of the Andrews household was a trifle too idyllic to convince a gentleman so well acquainted with the seamy side of life. What about that hunted-looking girl, the Captain's sister? He didn't believe, he never had believed that Mrs. Andrews was quite so much of an angel as she pretended to be. Meanwhile, no sooner had the fly left the station than Delia turned to her companion-- "Gertrude!--did you see what that man was reading who passed us just now? Our paper!--the _Tocsin_." Gertrude Marvell lifted her eyebrows slightly. "No doubt he bought it at Waterloo--out of curiosity." "Why not out of sympathy? I thought he looked at us rather closely. Of course, if he reads the _Tocsin_ he knows something about you! What fun it would be to discover a comrade and a brother down here!" "It depends entirely upon what use we could make of him," said Miss Marvell. Then she turned suddenly on her companion--"Tell me really, Delia--how long do you want to stay here?" "Well, a couple of months at least," said Delia, with a rather perplexed expression. "After all, Gertrude, it's my property now, and all the people on it, I suppose, will expect to see one and make friends. I don't want them to think that because I'm a suffragist I'm going to shirk. It wouldn't be good policy, would it?" "It's all a question of the relative importance of things," said the other quietly. "London is our head quarters, and things are moving very rapidly." "I know. But, dear, you did promise! for a time"--pleaded Delia. "Though of course I know how dull it must be for you, when you are the life and soul of so many things in London. But you must remember that I haven't a penny at this moment but what Mr. Winnington chooses to allow me! We must come to some understanding with him, mustn't we, before we can do anything? It is all so difficult!"--the girl's voice took a deep, passionate note--"horribly difficult, when I long to be standing beside you--and the others--in the open--fighting--for all I'm worth. But how can I, just yet? I ought to have eight thousand a year, and Mr. Winnington can cut me down to anything he pleases. It's just as important that I should get hold of my money--at this particular moment--as that I should be joining raids in London,--more important, surely--because we want money badly!--you say so yourself. I don't want it for myself; I want it all--for the cause! But the question is, how to get it--with this will in our way. I--" "Ah, there's that house again!" exclaimed Miss Marvell, but in the same low restrained tone that was habitual to her. She bent forward to look at the stately building, on the hill-side, which according to Captain Andrews' information, was the untenanted property of Sir Wilfrid Lang, whom a shuffle of offices had just admitted to the Cabinet. "What house?"--said Delia, not without a vague smart under the sudden change of subject. She had a natural turn for declamation; a girlish liking to hear herself talk; and Gertrude, her tutor in the first place, and now her counsellor and friend, had a quiet way of snubbing such inclinations, except when they could be practically useful. "You have the gifts of a speaker--we shall want you to speak more and more," she would say. But in private she rarely failed to interrupt an harangue, even the first beginnings of one. However, the smart soon passed, and Delia too turned her eyes towards the house among the trees. She gave a little cry of pleasure. "Oh, that's Monk Lawrence!--such a lovely--lovely old place! I used often to go there as a child--I adored it. But I can't remember who lives there now." Gertrude Marvell handed on the few facts learned from the Captain. "I knew"--she added--"that Sir Wilfrid Lang lived somewhere near here. That they told me at the office." "And the house is empty?" Delia, flushing suddenly and vividly, turned to her companion. "Except for the caretaker--who no doubt lives some where on the ground-floor." There was silence a moment. Then Delia laughed uncomfortably. "Look here, Gertrude, we can't attempt anything of that kind _there_: I remember now--it was Sir Wilfrid's brother who had the house, when I used to go there. He was a great friend of Father's; and his little girls and I were great chums. The house is just wonderful--full of treasures! I am sorry it belongs to Sir Wilfrid--but nobody could lift a finger against Monk Lawrence!" Miss Marvell's eyes sparkled. "He is the most formidable enemy we have," she said softly, between her closed lips. A tremor seemed to run through her slight frame. Then she smiled, and her tone changed. "Dear Delia, of course I shan't run you into any--avoidable--trouble, down here, apart from the things we have agreed on." "What have we agreed on? Remind me!" "In the first place, that we won't hide our opinions--or stop our propaganda--to please anybody." "Certainly!" said Delia. "I shall have a drawing-room meeting as soon as possible. You seem to have fixed up a number of speaking engagements for us both. And we told the office to send us down tons of literature." Then her face broke into laughter--"Poor Mr. Winnington!" * * * * * "A rather nice old place, isn't it?" said Delia, an hour later, when the elderly housekeeper, who had received them with what had seemed to Delia's companion a quite unnecessary amount of fuss and family feeling, had at last left them alone in the drawing-room, after taking them over the house. The girl spoke in a softened voice. She was standing thoughtfully by the open window looking out, her hands clasping a chair behind her. Her thin black dress, made short and plain, with a white frill at the open neck and sleeves, by its very meagreness emphasized the young beauty of the wearer,--a beauty full of significance, charged--over-charged--with character. The attitude should have been one of repose; it was on the contrary one of tension, suggesting a momentary balance only, of impetuous forces. Delia was indeed suffering the onset of a wave of feeling which had come upon her unexpectedly; for which she had not prepared herself. This rambling old house with its quiet garden and early Victorian furniture, had appealed to her in some profound and touching way. Her childhood stirred again in her, and deep inherited things. How well she remembered the low, spacious room, with its oak wainscotting, its book-cases and its pictures! That crayon over the writing-table of her grandmother in her white cap and shawl; her grandfather's chair, and the old Bible and Prayer-book, beside it, from which he used to read evening prayers; the stiff arm-chairs with their faded chintz covers; the writing-table with its presentation inkstand; the groups of silhouettes on the walls, her forbears of long ago; the needlework on the fire-screen, in which, at nine years old, she had been proud to embroider the white rose-bud still so lackadaisically prominent; the stool on which she used to sit and knit beside her grandmother; the place on the run where the old collie used to lie--she saw his ghost there still!--all these familiar and even ugly objects seemed to be putting out spiritual hands to her, playing on nerves once eagerly responsive. She had never stayed for long in the house; but she had always been happy there. The moral atmosphere of it came back to her, and with a sense of the old rest and protection. Her grandfather might have been miserly to others; he had always been kind to her. But it was her grandmother who had been supreme in that room. A woman of clear sense and high character; narrow and prejudiced in many respects, but sorely missed by many when her turn came to die; a Christian in more than name; sincerely devoted to her teasing little granddaughter. A woman who had ordered her household justly and kindly; a personality not soon forgotten. "There is something of her in me still," thought Delia--"at least, I hope there is. And where--is the rest of me going?" "I think I'll take off my things, dear," said Gertrude Marvell, breaking in on the girl's reverie. "Don't trouble. I know my room." The door closed. Delia was now looking out into the garden, where on the old grass-slopes the September shadows lay--still and slumbrous. The peace of it, the breath of its old-world tradition, came upon her, relaxing the struggle of mind and soul in which she had been living for months, and that ceaseless memory which weighed upon her of her dying father,--his bitter and increasing recoil from all that, for a while, he had indulgently permitted--his final estrangement from her, her own obstinacy and suffering. "Yes!"--she cried suddenly, out loud, to the rosebushes beyond the open window--"but it had a reason--it _had_ a reason!" She clasped her hands fiercely to her breast. "And there is no birth without pain." Chapter IV A few days after her arrival, Delia woke up in the early dawn in the large room that had been her grandmother's. She sat up in the broad white bed with its dimity curtains, her hands round her knees, peering into the half darkened room, where, however, she had thrown the windows wide open, behind the curtains, before going to sleep. On the opposite wall she saw an indifferent picture of her father as a boy of twelve on his pony; beside it a faded photograph of her mother, her beautiful mother, in her wedding dress. There had never been any real sympathy between her mother and her grandmother. Old Lady Blanchflower had resented her son's marriage with a foreign woman, with a Greek, in particular. The Greeks were not at that moment of much account in the political world, and Lady Blanchflower thought of them as a nation of shams, trading on a great past which did not belong to them. Her secret idea was that out of their own country they grew rich in disreputable ways, and while at home, where only the stupid ones stayed, they were a shabby, half-civilised people, mostly bankrupt. She could not imagine how a girl got any bringing up at Athens, and believed nothing that her son told her. So that when the young Mrs. Blanchflower arrived, there were jars in the household, and it was not long before the spoilt and handsome bride went to her husband in tears, and asked to be taken away. Delia was surprised and touched, therefore, to find her mother's portrait in her grandmother's room, where nothing clearly had been admitted that had not some connection with family affection or family pride. She wondered whether on her mother's death her grandmother had hung the picture there in dumb confession of, or penance for, her own unkindness. The paper of the room was a dingy grey, and the furniture was heavily old-fashioned and in Delia's eyes inconvenient. "If I'm going to keep the room I shall make it all white," she thought, "with proper fitted wardrobes, and some low bookcases--a bath, too, of course, in the dressing-room. And they must put in electric light at once! How could they have done without it all this time! I believe with all its faults, this house could be made quite pretty!" And she fell into a reverie,--eagerly constructive--wherein Maumsey became, at a stroke, a House Beautiful, at once modern and aesthetically right, a dim harmony in lovely purples, blues and greens, with the few fine things it possessed properly spaced and grouped, the old gardens showing through the latticed windows, and golden or silvery lights, like those in a Blanche interior, gleaming in its now dreary rooms. Then at a bound she sprang out of bed, and stood upright in the autumn dawn. "I hate myself!" she said fiercely--as she ran her hands through the mass of her dark hair, and threw it back upon her shoulders. Hurrying across the room in her night-gown, she threw back the curtains. A light autumnal mist, through which the sun was smiling, lay on the garden. Stately trees rose above it, and masses of flowers shewed vaguely bright; while through the blue distances beyond, the New Forest stretched to the sea. But Delia was looking at herself, in a long pier-glass that represented almost the only concession to the typical feminine needs in the room. She was not admiring her own seemliness; far from it; she was rating and despising herself for a feather-brained waverer and good-for-nothing. "Oh yes, you can _talk_!" she said, to the figure in the glass--"you are good enough at that! But what are you going to _do_!--Spend your time at Maple's and Waring--matching chintzes and curtains?--when you've _promised_--you've _promised_! Gertrude's right. There _are_ all sorts of disgusting cowardices and weaknesses in you! Oh! yes, you'd like to go fiddling and fussing down here--playing the heiress--patronising the poor people--putting yourself into beautiful clothes--and getting heaps of money out of Mr. Winnington to spend. It's in you--it's just in you--to throw everything over--to forget everything you've felt, and everything you've vowed--and just _wallow_ in luxury and selfishness and snobbery! Gertrude's absolutely right. But you shan't do it! You shan't put a hand to it! Why did that man take the guardianship? Now it's his business. He may see to it! But _you_--you have something else to do!" And she stood erect, the angry impulse in her stiffening all her young body. And through her memory there ran, swift-footed, fragments from a rhetoric of which she was already fatally mistress, the formulae too of those sincere and goading beliefs on which her youth had been fed ever since her first acquaintance with Gertrude Marvell. The mind renewed them like vows; clung to them, embraced them. What was she before she knew Gertrude? She thought of that earlier Delia as of a creature almost too contemptible to blame. From the maturity of her twenty-one years she looked back upon herself at seventeen or eighteen with wonder. That Delia had read nothing--knew nothing--had neither thoughts or principles. She was her father's spoilt child and darling; delighting in the luxury that surrounded his West Indian Governorship; courted and flattered by the few English of the colonial capital, and by the members of her father's staff; with servants for every possible need or whim; living her life mostly in the open air, riding at her father's side, through the sub-tropical forests of the colony; teasing and tyrannising over the dear old German governess who had brought her up, and whose only contribution to her education--as Delia now counted education--had been the German tongue. Worth something!--but not all those years, "when I might have been learning so much else, things I shall never have time to learn now!--things that Gertrude has at her finger's end. Why wasn't I taught properly--decently--like any board school child! As Gertrude says, we women want everything we can get! We _must_ know the things that men know--that we may beat them at their own game. Why should every Balliol boy--years younger than me--have been taught his classics and mathematics,--and have everything brought to him--made easy for him--history, political economy, logic, philosophy, laid at his lordship's feet, if he will just please to learn!--while I, who have just as good a brain as he, have had to pick up a few scraps by the way, just because nobody who had charge of me ever thought it worth while to teach, a girl. But I have a mind!--an intelligence!--even if I am a woman; and there is all the world to know. Marriage? Yes!--but not at the sacrifice of everything else--of the rational, civilised self." On the whole though, her youth had been happy enough, with recurrent intervals of _ennui_ and discontent. Intervals too of poetic enthusiasm, or ascetic religion. At eighteen she had been practically a Catholic, influenced by the charming wife of one of her father's aides-de-camp. And then--a few stray books or magazine articles had made a Darwinian and an agnostic of her; the one phase as futile as the other. "I knew nothing--I had no mind!"--she repeated with energy,--"till Gertrude came." And she thought with ardour of that intellectual awakening, under the strange influence of the apparently reserved and impassive woman, who had come to read history with her for six months, at the suggestion of a friend of her father's, a certain cultivated and clever Lady Tonbridge, "who saw how starved I was." So, after enquiry, a lady who was a B.A. of London, and had taken first-class honour in history--Delia's ambition would accept nothing less--had been found, who wanted for health's sake a winter in a warm climate, and was willing to read history with Governor Blanch-flower's half-fledged daughter. The friendship had begun, as often, with a little aversion. Delia was made to work, and having always resented being made to do anything, for about a month she disliked her tutor, and would have persuaded Sir Robert to send her away, had not England been so far off, and the agreement with Miss Marvell, whose terms were high, unusually stringent. But by the end of the month the girl of eighteen was conquered. She had recognised in Gertrude Marvell accomplishments that filled her with envy, together with an intensity of will, a bitter and fiery purpose, that astounded and subdued a young creature in whom inherited germs of southern energy and passion were only waiting the touch that starts the ferment. Gertrude Marvell had read an amazing amount of history, and all from one point of view; that of the woman stirred to a kind of madness by what she held to be the wrongs of her sex. The age-long monopoly of all the higher forces of civilisation by men; the cruel and insulting insistence upon the sexual and maternal functions of women, as covering the whole of her destiny; the hideous depreciation of her as an inferior and unclean creature, to which Christianity, poisoned by the story of Eve, and a score of barbarous beliefs and superstitions more primitive still, had largely contributed, while hypocritically professing to enfranchise and exalt her; the unfailing doom to "obey," and to bring forth, that has crushed her; the labours and shames heaped upon her by men in the pursuit of their own selfish devices; and the denial to her, also by men, of all the higher and spiritual activities, except those allowed by a man-made religion:--this feminist gospel, in some respects so bitterly true, in others so vindictively false, was gradually and unsparingly pressed upon Delia's quick intelligence. She caught its fire; she rose to its call; and there came a day when Gertrude Marvell breaking through the cold reserve she had hitherto interposed between herself and the pupil who had come to adore her, threw her arms round the girl, accepting from her what were practically the vows of a neophyte in a secret and revolutionary service. Joyous, self-dedicating moment! But it had been followed by a tragedy; the tragedy of Delia's estrangement from her father. It was not long before Sir Robert Blanchflower, a proud self-indulgent man, with a keen critical sense, a wide acquaintance with men and affairs, and a number of miscellaneous acquirements of which he never made the smallest parade, had divined the spirit of irreconcilable revolt which animated the slight and generally taciturn woman, who had obtained such a hold upon his daughter. He, the god of his small world, was made to feel himself humiliated in her presence. She was, in fact, his intellectual superior, and the truth was conveyed to him in a score of subtle ways. She was in his house simply because she was poor, and wanted rest from excessive overwork, at someone else's expense. Otherwise her manner suggested--often quite unconsciously--that she would not have put up with his household and its regulations for a single day. Then, suddenly, he perceived that he had lost his daughter, and the reason of it. The last year of his official life was thenceforward darkened by an ugly and undignified struggle with the woman who had stolen Delia from him. In the end he dismissed Gertrude Marvell. Delia shewed a passionate resentment, told him frankly that as soon as she was twenty-one she should take up "the Woman's movement" as her sole occupation, and should offer herself wherever Gertrude Marvell, and Gertrude's leaders, thought she could be useful. "The vote _must_ be got!"--she said, standing white and trembling, but resolute, before her father--"If not peaceably, then by violence. And when we get it, father, you men will be astonished to see what we shall do with it!" Her twenty-first birthday was at hand, and would probably have seen Delia's flight from her father's house, but for Sir Robert's breakdown in health. He gave up his post, and it was evident he had not more than a year or two to live. Delia softened and submitted. She went abroad with him, and for a time he seemed to throw off the disease which had attacked him. It was during a brighter interval that, touched by her apparent concessions, he had consented to her giving the lecture in the Tyrolese hotel the fame of which had spread abroad, and had even taken a certain pleasure in her oratorical success. But during the following winter--Sir Robert's last--which they spent at Meran, things had gone from bad to worse. For months Delia never mentioned Gertrude Marvell to her father. He flattered himself that the friendship was at an end. Then some accident revealed to him that it was as close as, or closer than ever; that they were in daily correspondence; that they had actually met, unknown to him, in the neighbourhood of Meran; and that Delia was sending all the money she could possibly spare from her very ample allowance to "The Daughters of Revolt," the far-spreading society in which Gertrude Marvell was now one of the leading officials. Some of these dismal memories of Meran descended like birds of night upon Delia, as she stood with her arms above her head, in her long night-gown, looking intently but quite unconsciously into the depths of an old rosewood cheval glass. She felt that sultry night about her once more, when, after signing his will, her father opened his eyes upon her, coming back with an effort from the bound of death, and had said quite clearly though faintly in the silence-- "Give up that woman, Delia!--promise me to give her up." And Delia had cried bitterly, on her knees beside him--without a word--caressing his hand. And the cold fingers had been feebly withdrawn from hers as the eyes closed. "Oh papa--papa!" The low murmur came from her, as she pressed her hands upon her eyes. If the Christian guesses were but true, and in some quiet Elysian state he might now understand, and cease to be angry with her! Was there ever a great cause won without setting kin against kin? "A man's foes shall be they of his own household." "It wasn't my fault--it wasn't my fault!" No!--and moreover it was her duty not to waste her strength in vain emotion and regret. Her task was _doing_, not dreaming. She turned away, banished her thoughts and set steadily about the task of dressing. * * * * * "Please Miss Blanchflower, there are two or three people waiting to see you in the servants' hall." So said the tall and gentle-voiced housekeeper, Mrs. Bird, whose emotions had been, in Miss Marvell's view, so unnecessarily exercised on the evening of Delia's home-coming. Being a sensitive person, Mrs. Bird had already learnt her lesson, and her manner had now become as mildly distant as could be desired, especially in the case of Miss Blanchflower's lady companion. "People? What people?" asked Delia, looking round with a furrowed brow. She and Gertrude were sitting together on the sofa when the housekeeper entered, eagerly reading a large batch of letters which the London post had just brought, and discussing their contents in subdued tones. "It's the cottages, Miss. Her Ladyship used always to decide who should have those as were vacant about this time of year, and two or three of these persons have been up several times to know when you'd be home." "But I don't know anything about it"--said Delia, rising reluctantly. "Why doesn't the agent--why doesn't Mr. Frost do it?" "I suppose--they thought--you'd perhaps speak a word to Mr. Frost, Miss," suggested Mrs. Bird. "But I can send them away of course, if you wish." "Oh no, I'll come"--said Delia. "But it's rather tiresome--just as"--she looked at Gertrude. "Don't be long," said Miss Marvell, sharply, "I'll wait for you here." And she plunged back into the letters, her delicate face all alive, her eyes sparkling. Delia departed--evidently on a distasteful errand. But twenty minutes later, she returned flushed and animated. "I _am_ glad I went! Such tyranny--such monstrous tyranny!" She stood in front of Gertrude breathing fast, her hands on her hips. "What's the matter?" "My grandmother had a rule--can you imagine anything so cruel!--that no girl--who had gone wrong--was to be allowed in our cottages. If she couldn't be provided for in some Home or other, or if her family refused to give her up, then the family must go. An old man has been up to see me--a widower with two daughters--one in service. The one in service has come to grief--the son of the house!--the usual story!"--the speaker's face had turned fiercely pale--"and now our agent refuses to let the girl and her baby come home. And the old father says--'What am I to do, Miss? I can't turn her out--she's my own flesh and blood. I've got to stick to her--else there'll be worse happening. It's not _justice_, Miss--and it's not Gospel.' Well!"--Delia seated herself with energy,--"I've told him to have her home at once--and I'll see to it." Gertrude lifted her eyebrows, a gesture habitual with her, whenever Delia wore--as now--her young prophetess look. Why feel these things so much? Human nerves have only a certain limited stock of reactions. Avenge--and alter them! But she merely said-- "And the others?" "Oh, a poor mother with eight children, pleading for a cottage with three bedrooms instead of two! I told her she should have it if I had to build it!--And an old woman who has lived fifty-two years in her cottage, and lost all her belongings, begging that she mightn't be turned out--for a family--now that it's too big for her. She shan't be turned out! Of course I suppose it would be common sense"--the tension of the speaker's face broke up in laughter--"to put the old woman into the cottage of the eight children--and put the eight children into the old woman's. But human beings are not cattle! Sentiment's something! Why shouldn't a woman be allowed to die in her old home,--so long as she pays the rent? I hate all this interference with people's lives! And it's always the women who come worst off. 'Oh Mr. Frost, he never pays no attention to us women. He claps 'is 'ands to his ears when he sees one of us, and jest runs for it.' Well, I'll make Mr. Frost listen to a woman!" "I'm afraid Mr. Winnington is his master," said Gertrude quietly. Delia, crimson again, shrugged her shoulders. "We shall see!" Gertrude Marvell looked up. "Look here, Delia, if you're going to play the part of earthly Providence to this village and your property in general--as I've said to you before--you may as well tell the 'Daughters' you can't do anything for them. That's a profession in itself; and would take you all your time." "Then of course, I shan't do it," said Delia, with decision. "But I only want to put in an appearance--to make friends with the people--just for a time, Gertrude! It doesn't do to be _too_ unpopular. We're not exactly in good odour just now, are we?" And sitting down on a stool beside the elder woman, Delia leant her head against her friend's knee caressingly. Gertrude gave an absent touch to the girl's beautiful hair, and then said-- "So you _will_ take these four meetings?" "Certainly!" Delia sprang up. "What are they? One at Latchford, one at Brownmouth--Wanchester--and Frimpton. All right. I shall be pelted at Brownmouth. But rotten eggs don't matter so much when you're looking out for them--except on your face--Ugh!" "And the meeting here?" "Of course. Can't I do what I like with my own house? We'll have the notices out next week." Gertrude looked up-- "When did you say that man--Mr. Winnington--was coming?" "His note this morning said 4:30." "You'd better see him alone--for the first half hour anyway." Delia made a face. "I wish I knew what line to take up. You've been no use at all, Gertrude!" Gertrude smiled. "Wait till you see him," she said coolly. "Mother-wit will help you out." "I wish I had anything to bargain with." "So you have." "Pray, what?" "The meeting here. You _could_ give that up. And he needn't know anything of the others yet awhile." "What a charming opinion he will have of us both, by and bye," laughed Delia, quietly. "And by all accounts he himself is a simple paragon.--Heavens, how tiresome!" Gertrude Marvell turned back to her letters. "What does anyone know about a _man_?" she said, with slow deliberation. The midday post at Maumsey brought letters just after luncheon. Delia turning hers over was astonished to see two or three with the local postmark. "What can people from _here_ be writing to me about?" Gertrude absorbed in the new weekly number of the _Tocsin_ took no notice, till she was touched on the shoulder by Delia. "Yes?" "Gertrude!--it's too amazing!" The girl's tone was full of a joyous wonder. "You know they told us at head-quarters that this was one of the deadest places in England--a nest of Antis--nothing doing here at all. Well, what do you think?--here are _three_ letters by one post, from the village--all greeting us--all knowing perfectly who you are--that you have been in prison, etcetera--all readers of the _Tocsin_, and burning to be doing something--" "Burning something?" interposed the other in her most ordinary voice. Delia laughed, again with the note of constraint. "Well, anyway, they want to come and see us." "Who are they?" "An assistant mistress at the little grammar-school--that's No. 1. No. 2--a farmer's daughter, who says she took part in one of the raids last summer, but nobody knows down here. Her father paid her fine. And No. 3. a consumptive dressmaker, who declares she hasn't much life left anyway, and she is quite willing to give it to the 'cause'! Isn't it wonderful how it spreads--it spreads!" "Hm"--said Miss Marvell. "Well, we may as well inspect them. Tell them to come up some time next week after dusk." As she spoke, the temporary parlour-maid threw open the door of the room which Delia had that morning chosen as her own sitting-room. "Are you at home, Miss? Mrs. France would like to see you." "Mrs. France?--Mrs. France? Oh, I know--the doctor's wife--Mrs. Bird was talking of him this morning. Well, I suppose I must go." Delia moved unwillingly. "I'm coming, Mary." "Of course you must go," said Gertrude, a little peremptorily. "As we are here we may as well reconnoitre the whole ground--find out everything we can." * * * * * In the drawing-room, to which some flowers, and a litter of new books and magazines had already restored its inhabited look, Delia found a woman awaiting her, in whom the girl's first glance discerned a personality. She was dressed with an entire disregard of the fashion, in plain, serviceable clothes. A small black bonnet tied under the chin framed a face whose only beauty lay in the expression of the clear kind eyes, and quiet mouth. The eyes were a little prominent; the brow above them unusually smooth and untroubled, answering to the bands of brown hair touched with grey which defined it. But the rest of the face was marked by many deep lines--of experience, or suffering?--which showed clearly that its owner had long left physical youth behind. And yet perhaps youth--in some spiritual poetic sense--was what Mrs. France's aspect most sharply conveyed. She rose as Delia entered, and greeted her warmly. "It is nice to see you settled here! Dr. France and I were great friends of your old grandmother. He and she were regular cronies. We were very sorry to see the news of your poor father's death." The voice was clear and soft, and absolutely sincere. Delia felt drawn to her. But it had become habitual to her to hold herself on the defensive with strangers, to suspect hostility and disapproval everywhere. So that her manner in reply, though polite enough, was rather chilly. But--the girl's beauty! The fame of it had indeed reached Maumsey in advance of the heiress. Mrs. France, however, in its actual presence was inclined to say "I had not heard the half!" She remembered Delia's mother, and in the face before her she recognised again the Greek type, the old pure type, reappearing, as it constantly does, in the mixed modern race. But the daughter surpassed her mother. Delia's eyes, of a lovely grey blue, lidded, and fringed, and arched with an exquisite perfection; the curve of the slightly bronzed cheek, suggesting through all its delicacy the fulness of young, sensuous life; the mouth, perhaps a trifle too large, and the chin, perhaps a trifle too firm; the abundance of the glossy black hair, curling wherever it was allowed to curl, or wherever it could escape the tight coils in which it was bound--at the temples, and over the brow; the beauty of the uncovered neck, and of the amply-rounded form which revealed itself through the thin black stripe of the mourning dress:--none of these "items" in Delia's good looks escaped her admiring visitor. "It's to be hoped Mr. Mark realises his responsibilities," she thought, with amusement. Aloud, she said-- "I remember you as quite a little thing staying with your Grandmother--but you wouldn't remember me. Dr. France was grieved not to come, but it's his hospital day." Delia thanked her, without effusion. Mrs. France presently began to feel conversation an effort, and to realise that the girl's wonderful eyes were very observant and very critical. Yet she chose the very obvious and appropriate topic of Lady Blanchflower, her strong character, her doings in the village, her relation to the labourers and their wives. "When she died, they really missed her. They miss her still." "Is it good for a village to depend so much on one person?" said Delia in a detached voice. Mrs. France looked at her curiously. Jealousy of one's grandmother is not a common trait in the young. It struck her that Miss Blanchflower was already defending herself against examples and ideals she did not mean to follow. And again amusement--and concern!--on Mark Winnington's account made themselves felt. Mrs. France was quite aware of Delia's "militant" antecedents, and of the history of the lady she had brought down to live with her. But the confidence of the doctor's wife in Winnington's powers and charm was boundless. "He'll be a match for them!" she thought gaily. Meanwhile in reply, she smilingly defended her old friend Lady Blanchflower from the implied charge of pauperising the village. "Not at all! She never gave money recklessly--and the do-nothings kept clear of her. But she was the people's friend--and they knew it. They're very excited about your coming!" "I daresay I shall change some things," said Delia decidedly. "I don't approve of all Mr. Frost has been doing." "Well, you'll have your guardian to help you," said Mrs. France quietly. Delia flushed, straightened her shoulders, and said nothing. This time Mrs. France was fairly taken by surprise. She knew nothing more of Sir Robert Blanchflower's will than that he had made Mr. Mark Winnington his daughter's guardian, till she reached the age of twenty-five. But that any young woman--any motherless and fatherless girl--should not think herself the most lucky of mortals to have obtained Mark Winnington as guide and defender, with first claim on his time, his brains, his kindness, seemed incredible to Mark's old friend and neighbour, accustomed to the daily signs of his immense and deserved popularity. Then it flashed upon her--"Has she ever seen him?" The doubt led to an immediate communication of the news that Winnington had arrived from town that morning. Dr. France had seen him in the village. "You know him, of course, already?" "Not at all," said Delia, indifferently. "He and I are perfect strangers." Mrs. France laughed. "I rather envy you the pleasure of making friends with him! We are all devoted to him down here." Delia lifted her eyebrows. "What are his particular virtues? It's monotonous to possess them _all_." The slight note of insolence was hardly disguised. "No two friends of his would give you the same answer. I should give you a different catalogue, for instance, from Lady Tonbridge--" "Lady Tonbridge!" cried Delia, waking up at last. "You don't mean that Lady Tonbridge lives in this neighbourhood?" "Certainly. You know her?" "She came once to stay with us in the West Indies. My father knew her very well before she married. And I owe her--a great debt"--the last words were spoken with emphasis. Mrs. France looked enquiring. "--she recommended to us the lady who is now living with me here--my chaperon--Miss Marvell?" There was silence for a moment. Then Mrs. France said, not without embarrassment-- "Your father desired she should live with you?" Delia flushed again. "No. My father did not understand her." "He did not agree with her views?" "Nor with mine. It was horrid--but even relations must agree to differ. Why is Lady Tonbridge here? And where is Sir Alfred? Papa had not heard of them for a long time." "They separated last year"--said Mrs. France gravely. "But Mr. Winnington will tell you. He's a great friend of hers. She does a lot of work for him." "Work?" "Social work!" smiled Mrs. France--"poor-law--schools--that kind of thing. He ropes us all in." "Oh!" said Delia, with her head in the air. Mrs. France laughed outright. "That seems to you so unimportant--compared to the vote." "It _is_ unimportant!" said Delia, impetuously. "Nothing really matters but the vote. Aren't you a Suffragist, Mrs. France?" Mrs. France smilingly shook her head. "I don't want to meddle with the men's business. And we're a long way yet from catching up with our own. Oh, my husband has a lot of scientific objections. But that's mine." Then her face grew serious--"anyway, we can all agree, I hope, in hating violence. That can never settle it." She looked a little sternly at her young companion. "That depends," said Delia. "But we mustn't argue, Mrs. France. I should only make you angry. Ah!" She sprang up and went to the window, just as steps could be heard on the gravel outside. "Here's someone coming." She turned to Mrs. France. "Is it Mr. Winnington?" "It is!" said her visitor, after putting on her glasses. Delia surveyed him, standing behind the lace curtain, and Mrs. France was relieved to see that a young person of such very decided opinions could be still girlishly curious. She herself rose to go. "Good-bye. I won't interrupt your talk with him." "Good-looking?" said Delia, with mischief in her eyes, and a slight gesture towards the approaching visitor. "Don't you know what an athlete he is--or was?" "Another perfection? Heavens!--how does he endure it?" said the girl, laughing. Mrs. France took her leave. She was a very motherly tender-hearted woman, and she would like to have taken her old friend's grandchild in her arms and kissed her. But she wisely refrained; and indeed the instinct to shake her was perhaps equally strong. "How long will she stand gossiping on the doormat with the paragon," said Delia savagely to herself, when she was left alone. "Oh, how I hate a 'charming man'!" She moved stormily to and fro, listening to the distant sounds of talk in the hall, and resenting them. Then suddenly she paused opposite one of the large mirrors in the room. A coil of hair had loosened itself; she put it right; and still stood motionless, interrogating herself in a proud concentration. "Well?--I am quite ready for him." But her heart beat uncomfortably fast as the door opened, and Mark Winnington entered. Chapter V As Winnington advanced with outstretched hand to greet her, Delia was conscious of a striking physical presence, and of an eye fixed upon her at once kind and penetrating. "How are you? You've been through a terrible time! Are you at all rested? I'm afraid it has been a long, long strain." He held her hand in both his, asking gentle questions about her father's illness, interrogating her looks the while with a frank concern and sympathy. Delia was taken by surprise. For the first time that day she was reminded of what was really, the truth. She _was_ tired--morally and physically. But Gertrude Marvell never recognised anything of the kind; and in her presence Delia rarely confessed any such weakness even to herself. As it was, her eyes and mouth wavered a little under Winnington's look. "Thank you," she said quietly. "I shall soon be rested." They sat down. Delia was conscious--unwillingly conscious, of a nervous agitation she did her best to check. For Winnington also it was clearly an awkward moment. He began at once to talk of his old recollections of her parents, of her mother's beauty, of her father's reputation as the most dashing soldier on the North-West frontier, in the days when they first met in India. "But his health was even then very poor. I suppose it was that made him leave the army?" "Yes--and then Parliament," said Delia. "He was ordered a warm climate for the winter. But he could never have lived without working. His Governorship just suited him." She spoke with charming softness, beguiled from her insensibly by Winnington's own manner. At the back of Winnington's mind, as they talked, ran perpetual ejaculations--ejaculations of the natural man in the presence of so much beauty. But his conversation with her flowed the while with an even gentleness which never for a moment affected intimacy, and was touched here and there with a note of deference, even of ceremony, which disarmed his companion. "I never came across your father down here--oddly enough," he said presently. "He had left Sandhurst before I went to Eton; and then there was Oxford, and then the bar. My little place belonged then to a cousin, and I had hardly ever seen it. But of course I knew, your grandmother--everybody did. She was a great centre--a great figure. She has left her mark here. Don't you find it so?" "Yes. Everybody seems to remember her." But, in a moment, the girl before him had changed and stiffened. It seemed to Winnington, as to Mrs. France, that she pulled herself up, reacting against something that threatened her. The expression in her eyes put something between them. "Perhaps you know"--she said--"that my grandmother didn't always get on with my mother?" He wondered why she had reminded him of that old family jar, which gossip had spread abroad. Did it really rankle in her mind? Odd, that it should! "Was that so?" he laughed. "Oh, Lady Blanchflower had her veins of unreason. One had to know where to have her." "She took Greeks for barbarians--my father used to say," said Delia, a little grimly. "But she was very good to me--and so I was fond of her." "And she of you. But there are still tales going about--do you mind?--of the dances you led her. It took weeks and months, they say, before you and she arrived at an armed truce--after a most appalling state of war! There's an old gardener here--retired now--who remembers you quite well. He told me yesterday that you used to be very friendly with him, and you said to him once--'I like Granny!--she's the master of me!'" The laughter in Winnington's eyes again kindled hers. "I was a handful--I know." There was a pause. Then she added--"And I'm afraid--I've gone on being a handful!" Gesture and tone showed that she spoke deliberately. "Most people of spirit are--till they come to handle themselves," he replied, also with a slight change of tone. "But that's just what women are never allowed to do, Mr. Winnington!" She turned suddenly red, and fronted him. "There's always some man, who claims to manage them and their affairs. We're always in leading-strings--nobody ever admits we're grown up. Why can't we be allowed like men--to stumble along our own way? If we make mistakes, let's _pay_ for them! But let us at some time in our lives--at least--feel ourselves free beings!" There was no mistaking the purport of these words. They referred clearly to her father's will, and her own position. After a moment's thought, Winnington bent forward. "I think I understand what you mean," he said gravely. "And I sympathise with it more than you imagine." Delia looked up impetuously-- "Then why, Mr. Winnington, did you consent to be my guardian?" "Because--quite honestly--because I thought I could be of more use to you perhaps than the Court of Chancery; and because your father's letter to me was one very difficult to put aside." "How could anyone in my father's state of health really judge reasonably!" cried Delia. "I daresay it sounds shocking to you, Mr. Winnington, but I can't help putting it to myself like this--Papa was always able to contrive his own life as he chose. In his Governorship he was a small king. He tried a good many experiments. Everybody deferred to him. Everybody was glad to help him. Then when his money came and the estate, nobody fettered him with conditions; nobody interfered with him. Grandpapa and he didn't agree in a lot of things. Papa was a Liberal; and Grandpapa was an awfully hot Conservative. But Grandpapa didn't appoint a trustee, or tie up the estates--or anything of that kind. It is simply and solely because I am a woman that these things are done! I am not to be allowed _my_ opinions, in _my_ life, though Papa was quite free to work for his in his life! This is the kind of thing we call tyranny,--this is the kind of thing that's driving women into revolt!" Delia had risen. She stood in what Gertrude Marvell would have called her "pythian" attitude, hands behind her, her head thrown back, delivering her prophetic soul. Winnington, as he surveyed her, was equally conscious of her beauty and her absurdity. But he kept cool, or rather the natural faculty which had given him so much authority and success in life rose with a kind of zest to its new and unaccustomed task. "May I perhaps suggest--that your father was fifty-two when he succeeded to this estate--and that you are twenty-one?" "Nearly twenty-two," she interrupted, hastily. "Nearly twenty-two," repeated Winnington. "And I assure you, that what with 'People's Budgets,' and prowling Chancellors, and all the new turns of the screw that the Treasury is for ever putting on, inheriting an estate nowadays is no simple matter. Your father thought of that. He wished to provide someone to help you." "I could have found lawyers to help me." "Of course you could. But my experience is that solicitors are good servants but bad masters. It wants a good deal of practical knowledge to direct them, so that you get what you want. I have gone a little way into the business of the estate this morning with Mr. Masham, and in town, with the Morton Manners people. I see already some complications which will take me a deal of time and thought to straighten out. And I am a lawyer, and if you will let me say so, just double your age." He smiled at her, but Delia's countenance did not relax. Her mouth was scornful. "I daresay that's quite true, Mr. Winnington. But of course you know it was _not_ on that account--or at any rate not chiefly on that account, that my father left things as he did. He wished"--she spoke clearly and slowly--"simply to prevent my helping the Suffrage movement in the way I think best." Winnington too had risen, and was standing with one hand on the mantelpiece. His brow was slightly furrowed, not frowning exactly, but rather with the expression of one trying to bring his mind into as close touch as possible with another mind. "I must of course agree with you. That is evidently one of the objects of the will, though by no means--I think--the only one. And as to that, should you not ask yourself--had not your father a right, even a duty, to look after the disposal of his money as he thought best? Surely it was his responsibility--especially as he was old, and you were young." Delia had begun to feel impatient--to resent the very mildness of his tone. She felt, as though she were an insubordinate child, being gently reasoned with. "No, I don't admit it!" she said passionately. "It was tampering with the right of the next generation!" "Might you not say the same of the whole--or almost the whole of our system of inheritance?" he argued. "I should put it--that the old are always trying to preserve and protect something they know is more precious to them than it can be to the young--something as to which, with the experience of life behind them, they believe they are wiser than the young. _Ought_ the young to resent it?" "Yes," persisted Delia. "_Yes_! They should be left to make their own experiments." "They have _life_ wherewith to make them! But the dead--" He paused. But Delia felt and quivered under the unspoken appeal; and also under the quick touch of something more personal--more intimate--in his manner, expressing, it seemed, some deep feeling of his own. He, in turn, perceived that she had grown very pale; he guessed even that she was suddenly not very far from tears. He seemed to realise the weeks, perhaps months, of conflict through which the girl had just passed. He was sincerely sorry for her--sincerely drawn to her. Delia broke the silence. "It is no good I think discussing this any more--is it? There's the will, and the question is"--she faced him boldly--"how are you and I going to get on, Mr. Winnington?" Winnington's seriousness broke up. He threw her a smiling look, and with his hands in his pockets began to pace the room reflectively. "I really believe we can pull it off, if we look at it coolly," he said at last, pausing in front of her. "I am no bigot on the Suffrage question--frankly I have not yet made up my mind upon it. All that I am clear about--as your father was clear--is that outrage and violence are _wrong_--in any cause. I cannot believe that we shan't agree there!" He looked at her keenly. Delia was silent. Her face betrayed nothing, though her eyes met his steadily. "And in regard to that, there is of course one thing that troubles me"--he resumed--"one thing in which I beg you to take my advice"-- Delia breathed quick. "Gertrude Marvell?" she said. "Of course I knew that was coming!" "Yes. That we must settle, I think." He kept his eyes upon her. "You can hardly know that she is mentioned by name in your father's last letter--the letter to me---as the one person whose companionship he dreaded for you--the one person he hoped you would consent to part from." Delia had turned white. "No--I didn't know." "For that reason, and for others, I do entreat you"--he went on, earnestly--"not to keep her here. Miss Marvell may be all that you believe her. I have nothing to say against her,--except this. I am told by those who know that she is already quite notorious in the militant movement. She has been in prison, and she has made extremely violent speeches, advocating what Miss Marvell calls war, and what plain people call--crime. That she should live with you here would not only prejudice your future, and divide you from people who should be your natural friends; it would be an open disrespect to your father's memory." There was silence. Then Delia said, evidently mastering her excitement with difficulty. "I can't help it. She _must_ stay with me. Nobody need know--about my father. Her name is not mentioned in the will." "No. That is true. But his letter to me as your guardian and trustee ought to be regarded equitably as part of the will; and I do not see how it would be possible for me to acquiesce in something so directly contrary to his last wishes. I beg you to look at it from my point of view--" "I do"--said Delia, flushing again. "But my letter warned you--" "Yes--but I felt on receiving it that you could not possibly be aware of the full strength of your father's feeling. Let me read you his words." He took an envelope from his pocket, observing her. Delia hastily interposed. "Don't, Mr. Winnington!--I'm sure I know." "It is really my duty to read it to you," he said, courteously but firmly. She endured it. The only sign of agitation she shewed was the trembling of her hands on the back of the chair she leant upon. And when he returned it to his pocket, she considered for a moment or two, before she said, breathing unevenly, and stumbling a little.-- "That makes no difference, Mr. Winnington. I expect you think me a monster. All the same I loved my father in my own way. But I am not going to barter away my freedom for anything or anyone. I am not part of my father, I am myself. And he is not here to be injured or hurt by anything I do. I intend to stick to Gertrude Marvell--and she to me." And having delivered her ultimatum, she stood like a young goddess, expectant and defiant. Winnington's manner changed. He straightened himself, with a slight shake of his broad shoulders, and went to look out of the window at the end of the room. Delia was left to contemplate the back of a very tall man in a serge suit and to rate herself for the thrill--or the trepidation--she could not help feeling. What would he say when he spoke again? She was angry with herself that she could not quite truthfully say that she did not care. When he returned, she divined another man. The tone was as courteous as ever, but the first relation between them had disappeared; or rather it had become a business relation, a relation of affairs. "You will of course understand--that I cannot _acquiesce_ in that arrangement?" Delia's uncomfortable sense of humor found vent in a laugh--as civil however as she could make it. "I do understand. But I don't quite see what you can do, Mr. Winnington!" He smiled--quite pleasantly. "Nor do I--just yet. But of course Miss Marvell will not expect that your father's estate should provide her with the salary that would naturally fall to a chaperon whom your guardian could approve?" "I shall see to that. We shall not trouble you," said Delia, rather fiercely. "And I shall ask to see Miss Marvell before I go this morning--that I may point out to her the impropriety of remaining here against your father's express wishes." Delia nodded. "All right--but it won't do any good." He made no reply, except to turn immediately to the subject of her place of residence and her allowance. "It is I believe understood that you will live mainly here--at Maumsey." "On the contrary!--I wish to spend a great part of the winter in London." "With Miss Marvell?" "Certainly." "I cannot, I am afraid, let you expect that I shall provide the money." "It is my own money!" "Not legally. I hate insisting on these things; but perhaps you ought to know that the _whole_ of your father's property--everything that he left behind him, is in trust." "Which means"--cried Delia, quivering again--"that I am really a pauper!--that I own nothing but my clothes--barely those!" He felt himself a brute. "Can I really keep this up!" he thought. Aloud, he said--"If you would only make it a little easy for your trustee, he would be only too thankful to follow out your wishes!" Delia made no reply, and Winnington took another turn up and down before he paused in front of her with the words:-- "Can't we come to a compact? If I agree to London--say for six or seven weeks--is there no promise you can make me in return?" With an inward laugh Delia remembered Gertrude's injunction to "keep something to bargain with." "I don't know"--she said, reluctantly. "What sort of promise do you want?" "I want one equal to the concession you ask me to make," he said gravely. "In my eyes nothing could be more unfitting than that you should be staying in London--during a time of particularly violent agitation--under the chaperonage of Miss Marvell, who is already committed to this agitation. If I agree to such a direct contradiction of your father's wishes, I must at least have your assurance that you will do nothing violent or illegal, either down here or in London, and that in this house above all you will take some pains to respect Sir Robert's wishes. That I am sure you will promise me?" She could not deny the charm of his direct appealing look, and she hesitated. "I was going to have a drawing-room meeting here as soon as possible"--she said, slowly. "On behalf of the 'Daughters of Revolt'?" She silently assented. "I may feel sure--may I not?--that you will give it up?" "It is a matter of conscience with us"--she said proudly--"to spread our message wherever we go." "I don't think I can allow you a conscience all to yourself," he said smiling. "Consider how I shall be straining mine--in agreeing to the London plan!" "Very well"--the words came out reluctantly. "If you insist--and if London is agreed upon--I will give it up." "Thank you," he said quietly. "And you will take part in no acts of violence, either here or in London? It seems strange to use such words to you. I hate to use them. But with the news in this week's papers I can't help it. You will promise?" There was a short silence. "I will join in nothing militant down here," said Delia at last. "I have already told Miss Marvell so." "Or in London?" She straightened herself. "I promise nothing about London." Guardian and ward looked straight into each other's faces for a few moments. Delia's resistance had stirred a passion--a tremor--in her pulses, she had never known in her struggle with her father. Winnington was clearly debating with himself, and Delia seemed to see the thoughts coursing through the grey eyes that looked at her, seriously indeed, yet not without suggesting a man's humorous spirit behind them. "Very well"--he said--"we will talk of London later.--Now may we just sit down and run through the household arrangements and expenses here--before I see Miss Marvell. I want to know exactly what you want doing to this house, and how we can fix you up comfortably." Delia assented. Winnington produced a note-book and pencil. Through his companion's mind was running meanwhile an animated debate. "I'm not bound to tell him of those other meetings I have promised? 'Yes, you are!' No,--I'm not. They're not to be here--and if I once begin asking his leave for things--there'll be no end to it. I mean to shew him--once for all--that I am of age, and my own mistress. He can't starve me--or beat me!" Her face broke into suppressed laughter as she bent it over the figures that Winnington was presenting to her. * * * * * "Well, I am rather disappointed that you don't want to do more to the house," said Winnington, as he rose and put up his note-book. "I thought it might have been an occupation for the autumn and winter. But at least we can decide on the essential things, and the work can be done while you are in town. I am glad you like the servants Mrs. Bird has found for you. Now I am going off to the Bank to settle everything about the opening of your account, and the quarterly cheque we have agreed on shall be paid in to-morrow." "Very well." But instantly through the girl's mind there shot up the qualifying thought. "_He_ may say how it is to be spent--but _I_ have made no promise!" He approached her to take his leave. "My sister comes home to-night. Will you try the new car and have tea with us on Thursday?" Delia assented. "And before I go I should like to say a word about some of the neighbours." He tried to give her a survey of the land. Lady Tonbridge, of course, would be calling upon her directly. She was actually in the village--in the tiniest bandbox of a house. Her husband's brutality had at last--two years before this date--forced her to leave him, with her girl of fifteen. "A miserable story--better taken for granted. She is the pluckiest woman alive!" Then the Amberleys--the Rector, his wife and daughter Susy were pleasant people--"Susy is a particular friend of mine. It'll be jolly if you like her." "Oh, no, she won't take to me!" said Delia with decision. "Why not?" But Delia only shook her head, a little contemptuously. "We shall see," said Winnington. "Well, good night. Remember, anything I can do for you--here I am." His eyes smiled, but Delia was perfectly conscious that the eager cordiality, the touch of something like tenderness, which had entered into his earlier manner, had disappeared. She realised, and with a moment's soreness, that she had offended his sense of right--of what a daughter's feeling should be towards a dead father, at any rate, in the first hours of bereavement, when the recollections of death and suffering are still fresh. "I can't help it," she thought stubbornly. "It's all part of the price one pays." But when he was gone, she stood a long time by the window without moving, thinking about the hour which had just passed. The impression left upon her by Winnington's personality was uncomfortably strong. She knew now that, in spite of her bravado, she had dreaded to find it so, and the reality had more than confirmed the anticipation. She was committed to a struggle with a man whom she must respect, and could not help liking; whose only wish was to help and protect her. And beside the man's energetic and fruitful maturity, she became, as it were, the spectator of her own youth and stumbling inexperience. But these misgivings did not last long. A passionate conviction, a fanatical affection, came to her aid, and her doubts were impatiently dismissed. * * * * * Winnington found Miss Blanchflower's chaperon in a little sitting-room on the ground floor already appropriated to her, surrounded with a vast litter of letters and newspapers which she hastily pushed aside as he entered. He had a long interview with her, and as he afterwards confessed to Lady Tonbridge, he had rarely put his best powers forward to so little purpose. Miss Marvell did not attempt to deny that she was coming to live at Maumsey in defiance of the wishes of Delia's father and guardian, and of the public opinion of those who were to be henceforward Delia's friends and neighbours. "But Delia has asked me to live with her. She is twenty-one, and women are not now the mere chattels they once were. Both she and I have wills of our own. You will of course give me no salary. I require none. But I don't see how you're going to turn me out of Delia's house, if Delia wishes me to stay." And Winnington must needs acknowledge, at least to himself, that he did not see either. He put the lady however through a cross-examination as to her connection with militancy which would have embarrassed or intimidated most women; but Gertrude Marvell, a slight and graceful figure, sitting erect on the edge of her chair, bore it with perfect equanimity, apparently frank, and quite unashamed. Certainly she belonged to the "Daughters of Revolt," the record of her imprisonment was there to shew it; and so did Delia. The aim of both their lives was to obtain the parliamentary vote for women, and in her opinion and that of many others, the time for constitutional action--"for that nonsense"--as she scornfully put it, had long gone by. As to what she intended to do, or advise Delia to do, that was her own affair. One did not give away one's plans to the enemy. But she realised, of course, that it would be unkind to Delia to plunge her into possible trouble, or to run the risk herself of arrest or imprisonment during the early days of Delia's mourning; and of her own accord she graciously offered the assurance that neither she nor Delia would commit any illegality during the two months or so that they might be settled at Maumsey. As to what might happen later, she, like Delia, declined to give any assurances. The parliamentary situation was becoming desperate, and any action whatever on the part of women which might serve to prod the sluggish mind of England before another general election, was in her view not only legitimate but essential. "Of course I know what your conscience says on the matter," she said, with her steady eyes on Winnington. "But--excuse me for saying so--your conscience is not my affair." Winnington rose, and prepared to take his leave. If he felt nonplussed, he managed not to shew it. "Very well. For the present I acquiesce. But you will scarcely wonder, Miss Marvell, after this interview between us, if you find yourself henceforward under observation. You are here in defiance of Miss Blanchflower's legal guardian. I protest against your influence over her; and I disapprove of your presence here. I shall do my best to protect her from you." She nodded. "There of course, you will be in your right." And rising, she turned to the open window and the bright garden outside, with a smiling remark on the decorative value of begonias, as though nothing had happened. Winnington's temperament did not allow him to answer a woman uncivilly under any circumstances. But they parted as duellists part before the fray. Miss Marvell acknowledged his "Good afternoon," with a pleasant bow, keeping her hands the while in the pockets of her serge jacket, and she remained standing till Winnington had left the room. "Now for Lady Tonbridge!" thought Winnington, as he rode away. "If she don't help me out, I'm done!" At the gate of Maumsey he stopped to speak to the lodge-keeper, and as he did so, a man opened the gate, and came in. With a careless nod to Winnington he took his way up the drive. Winnington looked after him in some astonishment. "What on earth can that fellow be doing here?" He scented mischief; little suspecting however that a note from Gertrude Marvell lay in the pocket of the man's shabby overcoat, together with that copy of the _Tocsin_ which Delia's sharp eyes had detected the week before in the hands of its owner. Meanwhile as he drove homeward, instead of the details of county business, the position of Delia Blanchflower, her personality, her loveliness, her defiance of him, absorbed his mind completely. He began to foresee the realities of the struggle before him, and the sheer dramatic interest of it held him, as though someone presented the case, and bade him watch how it worked out. Chapter VI The village or rather small town of Great Maumsey took its origin in a clearing of that royal forest which had now receded from it a couple of miles to the south. But it was still a rural and woodland spot. The trees in the fields round it had still a look of wildness, as survivors from the primeval chase, and were grouped more freely and romantically than in other places; while from the hill north of the church, one could see the New Forest stretching away, blue beyond blue, purple beyond purple, till it met the shining of the sea. Great Maumsey had a vast belief in itself, and was reckoned exclusive and clannish by other places. It was proud of its old Georgian houses, with their white fronts, their pillared porches, and the pediment gables in their low roofs. The owners of these houses, of which there were many, charmingly varied, in the long main street, were well aware that they had once been old-fashioned, and were now as much admired in their degree, as the pictures of the great English artists, Hogarth, Reynolds, Romney, with which they were contemporary. There were earlier houses too, of brick and timber, with overhanging top stories and moss-grown roofs. There was a green surrounded with post and rails, on which a veritable stocks still survived, kept in careful repair as a memento of our barbarous forbears, by the parish Council. The church, dating from that wonderful fourteenth century when all the world must have gone mad for church-building, stood back from the main street, with the rectory beside it, in a modest seclusion of their own. It was all very English, very spick and span, and apparently very well to do. That the youth of the village was steadily leaving it for the Colonies, that the constant marrying in and in which had gone on for generations had produced an ugly crop of mental deficiency, and physical deformity among the inhabitants--that the standard of morals was too low, and the standard of drink too high--were matters well known to the Rector and the Doctor. But there were no insanitary cottages, and no obvious scandals of any sort. The Maumsey estate had always been well managed; there were a good many small gentlefolk who lived in the Georgian houses, and owing to the competition of the railways, agricultural wages were rather better than elsewhere. About a mile from the eastern end of the village was the small modernised manor-house of Bridge End, which belonged to Mark Winnington, and where his sister Alice, Mrs. Matheson, kept him company for the greater part of the year. The gates leading to Maumsey lay a little west of the village, while on the hill to the north rose, conspicuous against its background of wood, the famous old house of Monk Lawrence. It looked down upon Maumsey on the one hand and Bridge End on the other. It was generally believed that the owner of it, Sir Wilfrid Lang, had exhausted his resources in restoring it, and that it was the pressure of debt rather than his wife's health which had led to its being shut up so long. The dwellers in the village regarded it as the jewel in their landscape, their common heritage and pride. Lady Tonbridge, whose little drawing-room and garden to the back looked out on the hill and the old house, was specially envied because she possessed so good a view of it. She herself inhabited one of the very smallest of the Georgian houses, in the main street of Maumsey. She paid a rent of no more than £40 a year for it, and Maumsey people who liked her, felt affectionately concerned that a duke's grand-daughter should be reduced to a rent and quarters so insignificant. Lady Tonbridge however was not at all concerned for the smallness of her house. She regarded it as the outward and visible sign of the most creditable action of her life--the action which would--or should--bring her most marks when the recording angel came to make up her account. Every time she surveyed its modest proportions the spirit of freedom danced within her, and she envied none of the noble halls in which she had formerly lived, and to some of which she still paid occasional Visits. At tea-time, on the day following Winnington's first interview with his ward, Madeleine Tonbridge came into her little drawing-room, in her outdoor things, and carrying a bundle of books under the arm. As far as such words could ever apply to her she was tired and dusty. But her little figure was so alert and trim, her grey linen dress and its appointments so dainty, and the apple-red in her small cheeks so bright, that one might have conceived her as just fresh from a maid's hands, and stepping out to amuse herself, instead of as just returning from a tedious afternoon's work, by which she had earned the large sum of five shillings. A woman of forty-five, she looked her age, and she had never possessed any positive beauty, unless it were the beauty of delicate and harmonious proportion. Yet she had been pestered with suitors as a girl, and unfortunately had married the least desirable of them all. And now in middle life, no one had more devoted men-friends; and that without exciting a breath of scandal, even in a situation where one might have thought it inevitable. She looked round her as she entered. "Nora!--where are you?" A girl, apparently about seventeen, put her head in through the French window that opened to the garden. "Ready for tea, Mummy?" "Rather!"--said Lady Tonbridge, with energy, as she put a match to the little spirit kettle on the tea-table where everything stood ready. "Come in, darling." And throwing off her hat and jacket, she sank into a comfortable arm-chair with a sigh of fatigue. Her daughter quietly loosened her mother's walking-shoes and took them away. Then they kissed each other, and Nora went to look after the tea. She was a slim, pale-faced school-girl, with yellow-brown eyes, and yellow-brown hair, not as yet very attractive in looks, but her mother was convinced that it was only the plainness of the cygnet, and that the swan was only a few years off. Nora, who at seventeen had no illusions, was grateful to her mother for the belief but did not share it in the least. "I'm sure you gave that girl half an hour over time," she said reprovingly, as she handed Lady Tonbridge her cup of tea--"I can't think why you do it." She referred to the solicitor's daughter whom Lady Tonbridge had been that afternoon instructing in the uses of the French participle. "Nor can I. A kind of ridiculous _esprit de métier_ I suppose. I undertook to teach her French, and when after all these weeks she don't seem to know a thing more than when she began, I feel as if I were picking her dear papa's pockets." "Which is absurd," said Nora, buttering her mother's toast, "and I can't let you do it. Half a crown an hour is silly enough already, and for you to throw in half an hour extra for nothing, can't be stood." "I wish I could get it up to four hours a day," sighed the mother, munching happily at her toast, while she held out her small stockinged feet to the fire which Nora had just lit. "Just think. Ten shillings a day--six days a week--ten months in the year. Why it would pay the rent, we could have another servant, and I could give you twenty pounds a year more for your clothes." "Much obliged--but I prefer a live Mummy--and no clothes--to a dead one. More tea?" "Thanks. No chance, of course. Where could one find four persons a day, in Maumsey, or near Maumsey, who want to learn French? The notion's absurd. I shouldn't get the lessons I do, if it weren't for the 'Honourable.'" "Snobs!" "Not at all! Not a single family out of the people I go to deserve to be called snobs. It's the natural dramatic instinct in us all. You don't expect an 'Honourable' to be giving French lessons at half a crown an hour, and when she does, you say--'Hullo! Some screw loose, somewhere!'--and you at once feel a new interest in the French tongue, and ask her to come along. I don't mind it a bit. I sit and spin yarns about Drawing-rooms and Court balls, and it all helps.--When did you get home?" For Nora attended a High School in a neighbouring town, some five miles away, journeying there and back by train. "Half-past four. I met Mr. Winnington in his car, and he said he'd be here about six." "Good. I'm dying to talk to him. I have written to the Abbey to say we will call to-morrow. Of course, I ought to be her nursing mother in these parts"--said Lady Tonbridge reflectively--"I knew Sir Robert in frocks, and we were always pals. But my dear, it was I who hatched the cockatrice!" Nora nodded gravely. "It was I," pursued Lady Tonbridge, penitentially,--"who saddled him with that woman--and I know he never forgave me. He as good as told me so when we last met--for those few hours--at Basle. But how could I tell? How could anybody tell--she would turn out such a creature? I only knew that she had taken all kinds of honours. I thought I was sending him a treasure." "All the same you did it, Mummy. And it won't do to give yourself airs now! That's what Mr. Winnington says. You've got to help him out." "I say, don't talk secrets!" said a voice just outside the room. "For I can't help hearing 'em. May I come in?" And, pushing the half-open door, Mark Winnington stood smiling on the threshold. "I apologise. But your little maid let me in--and then vanished somewhere, like greased lightning--after a dog." "Oh, come in," said Lady Tonbridge, with resignation, extending at the same time a hand of welcome--"the little maid, as you call her, only came from your workhouse yesterday, and I haven't yet discovered a grain of sense in her. But she gets plenty of exercise. If she isn't chasing dogs, it's cats." "Don't you attack my schools," said Winnington seating himself at the tea-table. "They're A1, and you're very lucky to get one of my girls." Madeleine Tonbridge replied tartly, that if he was a poor-law guardian, and responsible for a barrack school it was no cause for boasting. She had not long parted with another of his girls, who had tried on her blouses, and gone out in her boots. She thought of offering the new girl a free and open choice of her wardrobe to begin with, so as to avoid unpleasantness. "We all know that every mistress has the maid she deserves," said Winnington, deep in gingerbread cake. "I leave it there--" "Yes, jolly well do!" cried Nora, who had come to sit on a stool in front of her mother and Winnington, her eager eyes glancing from one to the other--"Don't start Mummy on servants, Mr. Winnington. If you do, I shall go to bed. There's only one thing worth talking about--and that's--" "Maumsey!" he said, laughing at her. "Have you accomplished anything?" asked Lady Tonbridge. "Don't tell me you've dislodged the Fury?" Winnington shook his head. "_J'y suis--j'y reste_!" "I thought so. There is no civilised way by which men can eject a woman. Tell me all about it." Winnington, however, instead of expatiating on the Maumsey household, turned the conversation to something else--especially to Nora's first attempts at golf, in which he had been her teacher. Nora, whose reasonableness was abnormal, very soon took the hint, and after five minutes' "chaff" with Winnington, to whom she was devoted, she took up her work and went back to the garden. "Nobody ever snubs me so efficiently as Nora," said Madeleine Tonbridge, with resignation, "though you come a good second. Discreet I shall never be. Don't tell me anything if you don't want to." "But of course I want to! And there is nobody in the world so absolutely bound to help me as you." "I knew you'd say that. Don't pile it on. Give me the kitten--and describe your proceedings." Winnington handed her the grey Persian kitten reposing on a distant chair, and Lady Tonbridge, who always found the process conducive to clear thinking, stroked and combed the creature's beautiful fur, while the man talked,--with entire freedom now that they were _tête-à-tête._ She was his good friend indeed, and she had also been the good friend of Sir Robert Blanchflower. It was natural that to her he should lay his perplexities bare. * * * * * But after she had heard his story and given her best mind to his position, she could not refrain from expressing the wonder she had felt from the beginning that he should ever have accepted it at all. "What on earth made you do it? Bobby Blanchflower had no more real claim on you than this kitten!" Winnington's grey eyes fixed on the trees outside shewed a man trying to retrace his own course. "He wrote me a very touching letter. And I have always thought that men--and women--ought to be ready to do this kind of service for each other. I should have felt a beast if I had said No, at once. But I confess now that I have seen Miss Delia, I don't know whether I can do the slightest good." "Hold on!" said Lady Tonbridge, sharply,--"You can't give it up--now." Winnington laughed. "I have no intention of giving it up. Only I warn you that I shall probably make a mess of it." "Well"--the tone was coolly reflective--"that may do _you_ good--whatever happens to the girl. You have never made a mess of anything yet in your life. It will be a new experience." Winnington protested hotly that her remark only shewed how little even intimate friends know of each other's messes, and that his were already legion. Lady Tonbridge threw him an incredulous look. As he sat there in his bronzed and vigorous manhood, the first crowsfeet just beginning to shew round the eyes, and the first streaks of grey in the brown curls, she said to herself that none of her young men acquaintance possessed half the physical attractiveness of Mark Winnington; while none--old or young--could rival him at all in the humane and winning spell he carried about with him. To see Mark Winnington _aux prises_ with an adventure in which not even his tact, his knowledge of men and women, his candour, or his sweetness, might be sufficient to win success, piqued her curiosity; perhaps even flattered that slight inevitable malice, wherewith ordinary mortals protect themselves against the favourites of the gods. She was determined however to help him if she could, and she put him through a number of questions. The girl then was as handsome as she promised to be? A beauty, said Winnington--and of the heroic or poetic type. And the Fury? Winnington described the neat, little lady, fashionably Pressed and quiet mannered, who had embittered the last years of Sir Robert Blanchflower, and firmly possessed herself of his daughter. "You will see her to-morrow, at my house, when you come to tea. I carefully didn't ask her, but I am certain she will come, and Alice and I shall of course have to receive her." "She is not thin-skinned then?" "What fanatic is? It is one of the secrets of their strength." "She probably regards us all as the dust under her feet," said Lady Tonbridge. "I wonder what game she will be up to here. Have you seen the _Times_ this morning?" Winnington nodded. It contained three serious cases of arson, in which Suffragette literature and messages had been discovered among the ruins, besides a number of minor outrages. An energetic leading article breathed the exasperation of the public, and pointed out the spread of the campaign of violence. By this time Lady Tonbridge had carried her visitor into the garden, and they were walking up and down among the late September flowers. Beyond the garden lay green fields and hedgerows; beyond the fields rose the line of wooded hill, and, embedded in trees, the grey and gabled front of Monk Lawrence. Winnington reported the very meagre promise he had been able to get out of his ward and her companion. "The comfort is," said Lady Tonbridge, "that this is a sane neighbourhood--comparatively. They won't get much support. Oh, I don't know though--" she added quickly. "There's that man--Mr. Lathrop, Paul Lathrop--who took Wood Cottage last year--a queer fish, by all accounts. I'm told he's written the most violent things backing up the militants generally. However, his own story has put _him_ out of Court." "His own story?" said Winnington, with a puzzled look. "Don't be so innocent!" laughed Lady Tonbridge, rather impatiently. "I always tell you you don't give half place enough in life to gossip-'human nature's daily food.' I knew all about him a week after he arrived. However, I don't propose to save you trouble, Mr. Guardian! Go and look up a certain divorce case, with Mr. Lathrop's name in it, some time last year--if you want to know. That's enough for that." But Winnington interrupted her, with a disturbed look. "I happened to meet that very man you are speaking of--yesterday--in the Abbey drive, going to call." Lady Tonbridge shrugged her shoulders. "There you see their freemasonry. I don't suppose they approve his morals--but he supports their politics. You won't be able to banish him!--Well, so the child is lovely? and interesting?" Winnington assented warmly. "But determined to make herself a nuisance to you? Hm! Mr. Mark--dear Mr. Mark--don't fall in love with her!" Winnington's expression altered. He did not answer for a moment. Then he said, looking away-- "Do you think you need have said that?" "No!"--cried Madeleine Tonbridge remorsefully. "I am a wretch. But don't--_don't_!" This time he smiled at her, though not without vexation. "Do you forget that I am nearly old enough to be her father?" "Oh that's nonsense!" she said hastily. "However--I'm not going to flatter you--or tease you. Forgive me. I put it out of my head. I wonder if there is anybody in the field already?" "Not that I am aware of." "Of course you know this kind of thing spoils a girl's prospects of marriage enormously. Men won't run the risk." Winnington laughed. "And all the time, you're a Suffragist yourself!" "Yes, indeed I am," was the stout reply. "Here am I, with a house and a daughter, a house-parlourmaid, a boot-boy, and rates to pay. Why shouldn't I vote as well as you? But the difference between me and the Fury is that she wants the vote this year--this month--_this minute_--and I don't care whether it comes in my time--or Nora's time--or my grandchildren's time. I say we ought to have it--that it is our right--and you men are dolts not to give it us. But I sit and wait peaceably till you do--till the apple is ripe and drops. And meanwhile these wild women prevent its ripening at all. So long as they rage, there it hangs--out of our reach. So that I'm not only ashamed of them as a woman--but out of all patience with them as a Suffragist! However for heaven's sake don't let's discuss the horrid subject. I'll do all I can for Delia--both for your sake and Bob's--I'll keep my best eye on the Fury--I feel myself of course most abominably responsible for her--and I hope for the best. Who's coming to your tea-party?" Winnington enumerated. At the name of Susy Amberley, his hostess threw him a sudden look, but said nothing. "The Andrews'--Captain, Mrs. and Miss--," Lady Tonbridge exclaimed. "Why did you ask that horrid woman?" "We didn't! Alice indiscreetly mentioned that Miss Blanchflower was coming to tea, and she asked herself." "She's enough to make any one militant! If I hear her quote 'the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world' once more, I shall have to smite her. The girl's _down-trodden_ I tell you! Well, well--if you gossip too little, I gossip too much. Heavens!--what a light!" Winnington turned to see the glow of a lovely afternoon fusing all the hill-side in a glory of gold and amethyst, and the windows in the long front of Monk Lawrence taking fire under the last rays of a fast-dropping sun. "Do you know--I sometimes feel anxious about that house!" said Madeleine Tonbridge, abruptly. "It's empty--it's famous--it belongs to a member of the Government. What is to prevent the women from attacking it?" "In the first place, it isn't empty. The Keeper, Daunt, from the South Lodge, has now moved into the house. I know, because Susy Amberley told me. She goes up there to teach one of my cripples--Daunt's second girl. In the next, the police are on the alert. And last--who on earth would dare to attack Monk Lawrence? The odium of it would be too great. A house bound up with English history and English poetry--No! They are not such fools!" Lady Tonbridge shook her head. "Don't be so sure. Anyway you as a magistrate can keep the police up to the mark." Winnington departed, and his old friend was left to meditate on his predicament. It was strange to see Mark Winnington, with his traditional, English ways and feelings--carried, as she always felt, to their highest--thus face to face with the new feminist forces--as embodied in Delia Blanchflower. He had resented, clearly resented, the introduction--by her, Madeleine--of the sex element into the problem. But how difficult to keep it out! "He will see her constantly--he will have to exercise his will against hers--he will get his way--and then hate himself for conquering--he will disapprove, and yet admire,--will offend her, yet want to please her--a creature all fire, and beauty, and heroisms out of place! And she--could she, could I, could any woman I know, fight Mark Winnington--and not love him all the time? Men are men, and women are women--in spite of all these 'isms,' and 'causes.' I bet--but I don't know what I bet!--" Then her thoughts gradually veered away from Mark to quite another person. How would Susan Amberley be affected by this new interest in Mark Winnington's life? Madeleine's thoughts recalled a gentle face, a pair of honest eyes, a bearing timid and yet dignified. So she was teaching one of Mark's crippled children? And Mark thought no doubt she would have done the like for anyone else with a charitable hobby? Perhaps she would, for her heart was a fount of pity. All the same, the man--blind bat!--understood nothing. No fault of his perhaps; but Lady Tonbridge felt a woman's angry sympathy with a form of waste so common and so costly. And now the modest worshipper must see her hero absorbed day by day, and hour by hour, in the doings of a dazzling and magnificent creature like Delia Blanchflower. What food for torment, even in the meekest spirit! So that the last word the vivacious woman said to herself was a soft "Poor Susy!" dropped into the heart of a September rose as she stooped to gather it. Chapter VII A small expectant party were gathered for afternoon tea in the book-lined sitting-room--the house possessed no proper drawing-room--of Bridge End. Mrs. Matheson indeed, Mark's widowed sister, would have resented it had anyone used the word "party" in its social sense. Miss Blanchflower's father had been dead scarcely a month; and Mrs. Matheson in her quiet way, held strongly by all the decencies of life. It was merely a small gathering of some of the oldest friends and neighbours of Miss Blanchflower's family--those who had stood nearest to her grandparents--to welcome the orphan girl among them. Lady Tonbridge--of whom it was commonly believed, though no one exactly knew why, that Bob Blanchflower, as a youth had been in love with her, before ever he met his Greek wife; Dr. France, who had attended both the old people till their deaths, and had been much beloved by them; his wife; the Rector, Mrs. Amberley, and Susy:--Mrs. Matheson had not intended to ask anyone else. But the Andrews' had asked themselves, and she had not had the moral courage to tell them that the occasion was not for them. She was always getting Mark into difficulties, she penitently reflected, by her inability to say No, at the right time, and with the proper force, Mark could always say it, and stick to it smiling--without giving offence. Mrs. Matheson was at the tea-table. She was tall and thin, with something of her brother's good looks, but none of his over-flowing vitality. Her iron-grey hair was rolled back from her forehead; she wore a black dress with a high collar of white lawn, and long white cuffs. Little Mrs. Amberley, the Rector's wife, sitting beside her, envied her hostess her figure, and her long slender neck. She herself had long since parted with any semblance of a waist, and the boned collars of the day were a perpetual torment to one whose neck, from the dressmaker's point of view, scarcely existed. But Mrs. Amberley endured them, because they were the fashion; and to be moderately in the fashion meant simply keeping up to the mark--not falling behind. It was like going to church--an acceptance of that "general will," which according to the philosophers, is the guardian of all religion and all morality. The Rector too, who was now handing the tea-cake, believed in fashion--ecclesiastical fashion. Like his wife, he was gentle and ineffective. His clerical dress expressed a moderate Anglicanism, and his opinions were those of his class and neighbourhood, put for him day by day in his favourite newspaper, with a cogency at which he marvelled. Yet he was no more a hypocrite than his wife, and below his common-places both of manner and thought there lay warm feelings and a quick conscience. He was just now much troubled about his daughter Susy. The night before she had told her mother and him that she wished to go to London, to train for nursing. It had been an upheaval in their quiet household. Why should she dream of such a thing? How could they ever get on without her? Who would copy out his sermons, or help with the schools? And her mother--so dependent on her only daughter! The Rector's mind was much disturbed, and he was accordingly more absent and more ineffective than usual. Susy herself, in a white frock, with touches of blue at her waist, and in her shady hat, was moving about with cups of tea, taking that place of Mrs. Matthews's lieutenant, which was always tacitly given her by Winnington and his sister on festal occasions at Bridge End. As she passed Winnington, who had been captured by Mrs. Andrews, he turned with alacrity-- "My dear Miss Susy! What are you doing? Give me that cup!" "No--please! I like doing it!" And she passed on, smiling, towards Lady Tonbridge, whose sharp eyes had seen the trivial contact between Winnington and the girl. How the mere sound of his voice had changed the aspect of the young face! Poor child--poor child! "How well you look Susy! Such a pretty dress!" said Madeleine tenderly in the girl's ear. Susy flushed. "You really think so? Mother gave it me for a birthday present." She looked up with her soft, brown eyes, which always seemed to have in them, even when they smiled, a look of pleading--as of someone at a disadvantage. At the same moment Winnington passed her. "_Could_ you go and talk to Miss Andrews?" he said, over his shoulder, so that only she heard. Susy went obediently across the room to where a silent, dark-haired girl sat by herself, quite apart from the rest of the circle. Marion Andrews was plain, with large features and thick wiry hair. Maumsey society in general declared her "impossible." She rarely talked; she seemed to have no tastes; and the world believed her both stupid and disagreeable. And by contrast with the effusive amiabilities of her mother, she could appear nothing else. Mrs. Andrews indeed had a way of using her daughter as a foil to her own qualities, which must have paralysed the most self-confident, and Marion had never possessed any belief in herself at all. As Susy Amberley timidly approached her, and began to make conversation, she looked up coldly, and hardly answered. Meanwhile Mrs. Andrews was pouring out a flood of talk under which the uncomfortable Winnington--for it always fell to him as host to entertain her--sat practising endurance. She was a selfish, egotistical woman, with a vast command of sloppy phrases, which did duty for all that real feeling or sympathy of which she possessed uncommonly little. On this occasion she was elaborately dressed,--overdressed--in a black satin gown, which seemed to Winnington, an ugly miracle of trimming and tortured "bits." Her large hat was thick with nodding plumes, and beside her spotless white gloves and showy lace scarf, her daughter's slovenly coat and skirt, of the cheapest ready-made kind, her soiled gloves, and clumsy shoes, struck even a man uncomfortably. That poor girl seemed to grow plainer and more silent every year. He was just shaking himself free from the mother, when Dr. and Mrs. France were announced. The doctor came in with a furrowed brow, and a preoccupied look. After greeting Mrs. Matheson, and the other guests, he caught a glance of enquiry from Winnington and went up to him. "The evening paper is full of the most shocking news!" he said, with evident agitation. "There has been an attempt on Hampton Court--and two girls who were caught breaking windows in Piccadilly have been badly hurt by the crowd. A bomb too has been found in the entrance of one of the tube stations. It was discovered in time, or the results might have been frightful." "Good Heavens--those women again!" cried Mrs. Andrews, lifting hands and eyes. No one else spoke. But in everyone's mind the same thought emerged. At any moment the door might open, and Delia Blanchflower and her chaperon might come in. The doctor drew Winnington aside into a bow-window. "Did you know that the lady living with Miss Blanchflower was a member of this League of Revolt?" "Yes. You mean they are implicated in these things?" "Certainly! I am told Miss Marvell was once an official--probably is still. My dear Winnington--you can't possibly allow it!" He spoke with the freedom of an intimate friend. "How can I stop it," said Winnington, frowning. "My ward is of age. If Miss Marvell does anything overt--But she has promised to do nothing violent down here--they both have." The doctor, an impetuous Ulsterman with white hair, and black eyes, shrugged his shoulders impatiently. "When women once take to this kind of thing"--he was interrupted by Mrs. Andrews' heavy voice rising above the rather nervous and disjointed conversation of the other guests--"If women only knew where their real power lies, Mrs. Matheson! Why, 'the hand that rocks the cradle'--" A sudden crash was heard. "Oh, dear"--cried Lady Tonbridge, who had upset a small table with a plate of cakes on it across the tail of Mrs. Andrews' dress--"how stupid I am!" "My gown!--my gown!" cried Mrs. Andrews in an anguish, groping for the cakes. In the midst of the confusion the drawing-room door had opened, and there on the threshold stood Delia Blanchflower, with a slightly-built lady behind her. Winnington turned with a start and went forward to greet them. Dr. France left behind in the bow-window observed their entry with a mingling of curiosity and repulsion. It seemed to him that their entry was that of persons into a hostile camp,--the senses all alert against attack. Delia was of course in black, her face sombrely brilliant in its dark setting of a plain felt hat, like the hat of a Cavalier without its feathers. "She knows perfectly well we have been talking about her!" thought Dr. France,--"that we have seen the newspapers. She comes in ready for battle--perhaps thirsty for it! She is excited--while the woman behind her is perfectly cool. The two types!--the enthusiast--and the fanatic. But, by Jove, the girl is handsome!" Through the sudden silence created by their entry, Delia made her way to Mrs. Matheson. Holding her head very high, she introduced "My chaperon--Miss Marvell." And Winnington's sister nervously shook hands with the quietly smiling lady who followed in Miss Blanchflower's wake. Then while Delia sat down beside the hostess, and Winnington busied himself in supplying her with tea, her companion fell to the Rector's care. The Rector, like Winnington, was not a gossip, partly out of scruples, but mainly perhaps because of a certain deficient vitality, and he had but disjointed ideas on the subject of the two ladies who had now settled at the Abbey. He understood, however, that Delia, whom he remembered as a child, was a "Suffragette," and that Mr. Winnington, Delia's guardian, disapproved of the lady she had brought with her, why, he could not recollect. This vague sense of something "naughty" and abnormal gave a certain tremor to his manner as he stood beside Gertrude Marvell, shifting from one foot to the other, and nervously plying her with tea-cake. Miss Marvell's dark eyes meanwhile glanced round the room, taking in everybody. They paused a moment on the figure of the doctor, erect and spare in a closely-buttoned coat, on his spectacled face, and conspicuous brow, under waves of nearly white hair; then passed on. Dr. France watched her, following the examining eyes with his own. He saw them change, with a look--the slightest passing look--of recognition, and at the same moment he was aware of Marion Andrews, sitting in the light of a side window. What had happened to the girl? He saw her dark face, for one instant, exultant, transformed; like some forest hollow into which a sunbeam strikes. The next, she was stooping over a copy of "Punch" which lay on the table beside her. A rush of speculation ran through the doctor's mind. "And you are settled at Maumsey?" Mrs. Matheson was saying to Delia; aware as soon as the question was uttered that it was a foolish one. "Oh no, not settled. We shall be there a couple of months." "The house will want some doing up, Mark thinks." "I don't think so. Not much anyway. It does very well." There was an entire absence of girlish softness or shyness in the speaker's manner, though it was both courteous and easy. The voice--musically deep--and the splendid black eyes, that looked so steadily at her, intimidated Mark Winnington's gentle sister. Mrs. Andrews, whose dress, after Susy's ministration, had been declared out of danger, bent across the tea-table, all smiles and benevolence again, the plumes in her black hat nodding-- "It's like old times to have the Abbey open again, Miss Blanchflower! Every week we used to go to your dear grandmother, for her Tuesday work-party. I'm afraid you'll hardly revive _that_!" Delia brought a rather intimidating brow to bear upon the speaker. "I'm afraid not." Lady Tonbridge, who had already greeted Delia as a woman naturally greets the daughter of an old friend, came up as Delia spoke to ask for a second cup of tea, and laid her hand on the girl's shoulder. "Very sorry to miss you yesterday. I won't insult you by saying you've grown. How about the singing? You used to sing I remember when I stayed with you." "Yes--but I've given it up. I took lessons at Munich last spring. But I can't work at it enough. And if one can't work, it's no good." "Why can't you work at it?" Delia suddenly looked up in her questioner's face. Her gravity broke up in a broad smile. "Because there's so much else to do." "What else?" The look of excited defiance in the girl's eyes sharpened. "Do you really want to know?" "Certainly. The Suffrage and that kind of thing?" said Madeleine Tonbridge lightly. "The Suffrage and that kind of thing!" repeated Delia, still smiling. Captain Andrews who was standing near, and whose martial mind was all in confusion, owing to Miss Blanchflower's beauty, put in an eager word. "I never can understand, Miss Blanchflower, why you ladies want the vote! Why, you can twist us round your little fingers!" Delia turned upon him. "But I don't want to twist you round my little finger!" she said, with energy. "It wouldn't give me the smallest pleasure." "I thought you wanted to manage us," said the Captain, unable to take his eyes from her. "But you do manage us already!" Delia's glance showed her uncertain whether the foe was worth her steel. "We want to manage ourselves," she said at last, smiling indifferently. "We say you do it badly." The Captain attempted to spar with her a little longer. Winnington meanwhile stood, a silent listener, amid the group round the tea-table. He--and Dr. France--were both acutely conscious of the realities behind this empty talk; of the facts recorded in the day's newspapers; and of the connection between the quiet lady in grey who had come in with Delia Blanchflower, and the campaign of public violence, which was now in good earnest alarming and exasperating the country. Where was the quiet lady in grey? Winnington was thinking too much about his ward to keep a constant eye upon her. But Dr. France observed her closely, and he presently saw what puzzled him anew. After a conversation, exceedingly bland, though rather monosyllabic, on Miss Marvell's part, with the puzzled and inarticulate Rector, Delia's chaperon had gently and imperceptibly moved away from the tea-table. That she had been very coldly received by the company in general was no doubt evident to her. She was now sitting beside that strange girl Marion Andrews--to whom, as the Doctor had seen, she had been introduced--apparently--by the Rector. And as Dr. France caught sight of her, she and Marion Andrews rose and walked to a window opening on the garden, apparently to look at the blaze of autumn flowers outside. But it was the demeanour of the girl which again drew the doctor's attention. Marion Andrews, who never talked, was talking fast and earnestly to this complete stranger, her normally sallow face one glow. It was borne in afresh upon Dr. France that the two were already acquainted; and he continued to watch them as closely as politeness allowed. * * * * * "Will you come and look at the house?" said Winnington to his ward. "Not that we have anything to shew--except a few portraits and old engravings that might interest you. But it's rather a dear old place, and we're very fond of it." Delia went with him in silence. He opened the oval panelled dining-room, and shewed her the portraits of his father, the venerable head of an Oxford college, in the scarlet robes of a D.D., and others representing his forebears on both sides--quiet folk, painted by decent but not important painters. Delia looked at them and hardly spoke. Then they went into Mrs. Matheson's room, which was bright with pretty chintzes, books and water-colours, and had a bow-window looking on the garden. Still Delia said nothing, beyond an absent Yes or No, or a perfunctory word of praise. Winnington became very soon conscious of some strong tension in her, which was threatening to break down; a tension evidently of displeasure and resentment. He guessed what the subject of it might be, but as he was most unwilling to discuss it with her, if his guess were correct, he tried to soothe and evade her by such pleasant talk as the different rooms suggested. The house through which he led her was the home, evidently, of a man full of enthusiasms and affections, caring intensely for many things, for his old school, of which there were many drawings and photographs in the hall and passages, for the two great games in which he himself excelled; for poetry and literature--the house overflowed everywhere with books; for his County Council work, and all the projects connected with it; for his family and his intimate friends. "Who is that?" asked Delia, pointing to a charcoal drawing in Mrs. Matheson's sitting-room, of a noble-faced woman of thirty, in a delicate evening dress of black and white. "That is my mother. She died the year after it was taken." Delia looked at it in silence a moment. There was something in its dignity, its restfulness, its touch of austerity which challenged her. She said abruptly--"I want to speak to you please, Mr. Winnington. May we shut the door?" Winnington shut the door of his sister's room, and returned to his guest. Delia had turned very white. "I hear Mr. Winnington you have reversed an order I wrote to our agent about one of the cottages. May I know your reasons?" "I was very sorry to do so," said Winnington gently; "but I felt sure you did not understand the real circumstances, and I could not come and discuss them with you." Delia stood stormily erect, and the level light of the October afternoon streaming in through a west window magnified her height, and her prophetess air. "I can't help shocking you, Mr. Winnington. I don't accept what you say. I don't believe that covering up horrible things makes them less horrible. I want to stand by that girl. It is cruel to separate her from her old father!" Winnington looked at her in distress and embarrassment. "The story is not what you think it," he said earnestly. "But it is really not fit for your ears. I have given great thought and much time to it, yesterday and to-day. The girl--who is mentally deficient--will be sent to a home and cared for. The father sees now that it is the best. Please trust it to me." "Why mayn't I know the facts!" persisted Delia, paler than before. A flash of some quick feeling passed through Winnington's eyes. "Why should you? Leave us older folk, dear Miss Delia, to deal with these sorrowful things." Indignation blazed up in her. "It is for women to help women," she said, passionately. "It is no good treating us who are grown up--even if we are young--like children any more. We intend to _know_--that we may protect--and save." "I assure you," said Winnington gravely, "that this poor girl shall have every care--every kindness. So there is really no need for you to know. Please spare yourself--and me!" He had come to stand by her, looking down upon her. She lifted her eyes to his unwillingly, and as she caught his smile she was invaded by a sudden consciousness of his strong magnetic presence. The power in the grey eyes, and in the brow over-hanging them, the kind sincerity mingled with the power, and the friendliness that breathed from his whole attitude and expression, disarmed her. She felt herself for a moment--and for the first time--young and ignorant,--and that Winnington was ready to be in the true and not merely in the legal sense, her "guardian," if she would only let him. But the moment of weakening was soon over. Her mind chafed and twisted. Why had he undertaken it--a complete stranger to her! It was most embarrassing--detestable--for them both! And there suddenly darted through her memory the recollection of a certain item in her father's will. Under it Mr. Winnington received a sum of £4,000 out of her father's estate, "in consideration of our old friendship, and of the trouble I am asking him to undertake in connection with my estates,"--or words to that effect. Somehow, she had never yet paid much attention to that clause in the will. It occurred in a list of a good many other legacies, and had been passed over by the lawyers in explaining the will to her, as something entirely in the natural course of things. But the poisonous thought suggested itself--"It was that which bribed him!--he would have given it up, but for that!" He might not want it for himself--very possibly!--but for his charities, his Cripple School and the rest. Her face stiffened. "If you have arranged with her father, of course I can't interfere," she said coldly. "But don't imagine, please, Mr. Winnington, for one moment, that I accept your view of the things I 'needn't know.' If I am to do my duty to the people on this estate--" "I thought you weren't going to live on the estate?" he said, lifting his eyebrows. "Not at once--not this winter." She was annoyed to feel herself stammering. "But of course I have a responsibility--" The kindly laugh in his grey eyes faded. "Yes--I quite admit that,--a great responsibility," he said slowly. "Do you mind if I mention another subject?" "The meetings?" she said, quickly. "You mean that?" "Yes--the meetings. I have just seen the placard in the village." "Well?" Her loveliness in defiance dazzled him, but he held on stoutly. "You said nothing to me about these meetings the other day." "You never asked me!" He paused a moment. "No--but was it quite--quite fair to me--to let me suppose that the drawing-room meeting at Maumsey, which you kindly gave up, was the only meeting you had in view?" He saw her breath fluttering. "I don't know what you supposed, Mr. Winnington! I said nothing." "No. But you let me draw an inference--a mistaken inference. However--let that be. Can I not persuade you--now--to give up the Latchford meeting, and any others of the same kind you may have ahead?" She flamed at him. "I refuse to give them up!" she said, setting her teeth. "I have as much right to my views as you, Mr. Winnington! I am of full age, and I intend to work for them." "Setting fire to houses--which is what your society is advocating--and doing--hardly counts as 'views,'" he said, with sudden sternness. "Risking the lives, or spoiling the property of one's fellow countrymen, is not the same thing as political argument." "It's _our_ argument--" she said passionately.--"The men who are denying us the vote understand nothing else!" The slightest humorous quiver in Winnington's strong mouth enraged her still further. But he spoke with most courteous gravity. "Then I can't persuade you to give up these meetings? I should of course make no objection whatever, if these were ordinary Suffrage meetings. But the Society you are going to represent and collect money for is a Society that exists _to break the law_. And its members have--just lately--come conspicuously into collision with the law. Your father would have protested, and I am bound to protest--in his name." "I cannot give them up." He was silent a moment. "If that is so"--he said at last--"I must do my best to protect you." "I don't want any protection!" "I am a magistrate, as well as your guardian. You must allow me to judge. There is a very bitter feeling abroad, after these--outrages--of the last few days. The village where you are going to speak has some rowdy elements--drawn from the brickfields near it. You will certainly want protection. I shall see that you get it." He spoke with decision. Delia bit her lip. "We prefer to risk our lives," she said at last. "I mean--there isn't any risk!--but if there were--our lives are nothing in comparison with the cause!" "You won't expect your friends to agree with you," he said drily; then, still holding her with an even keener look, he added-- "And there is another point in connection with these meetings which distresses me. I see that you are speaking on the same platform--with Mr. Paul Lathrop--" "And why not?"--she flashed, the colour rushing to her cheeks. He paused, walked away with his hands in his pockets, and came back again. "I have been making some enquiries about him. He is not a man with whom you ought to associate--either in public, or in private." She gave a sound--half scorn--half indignation which startled him. "You mean--because of the divorce case?" He looked at her amazed. "That is what I meant. But--I certainly do not wish to discuss it with you. Will you not take it from me that Mr. Lathrop is not--cannot be--a man whom as a young unmarried woman you ought to receive in your house--or with whom you should be seen in public." "No, indeed I won't take it from you!" she said passionately. "Miss Marvell knows--Miss Marvell told me. He ran away with some one he loved. Her husband was _vile_! But she couldn't get any help--because of the law--the abominable law--which punishes women--and lets men go free. So they went away together, and after a little she died. Alter your law, Mr. Winnington!--make it equal for men and women--and then we'll talk." As she spoke--childishly, defiant--Winnington's mind was filled with a confusion of clashing thoughts--the ideals of his own first youth which made such a speech in the mouth of a girl of twenty-one almost intolerable to him--and the moral conditions--slowly gained--of his maturity. He agreed with what she said. And yet it was shocking to him to hear her say it. "I don't quarrel with you as to that," he said, gravely, after a moment. "Though I confess that in my belief you are too young to have any real opinion about it. But there was much in the case which concerned Mr. Lathrop, of which you _can_ have no idea. I repeat--he is not a fit companion for you--and you do yourself harm by appearing with him--in public or private." "Miss Marvell approves"--said Delia obstinately. Winnington's look grew sterner. "I appeal again to your father's memory," he said with energy. He perceived her quickened breath, but she made no no reply. He walked away from her, and stood looking out of the window for a little. When he came back to her, it was with a change of manner and subject. "I should like you to understand that I have been doing all I _could_ to carry out your wishes with regard to the cottages." He drew a paper out of his pocket, on which he had made some notes representing his talk that morning with the agent of the Maumsey estates. But in her suppressed excitement she hardly listened to him. "It isn't exactly _business_, what we've done," he said at last, as he put up the papers; "but we wanted you to have your way--about the old woman--and the family of children." He smiled at her. "And the estate can afford it." Delia thanked him ungraciously. She felt like a child who is offered sixpence for being good at the dentist's. It was his whole position towards her--his whole control and authority--that she resented. And to be forced to be grateful to him at the same time, compelled to recognise the anxious pains he had taken to please her in nine-tenths of the things she wanted, was really odious: she could only chafe under it. He took her back to the drawing-room. Delia walked before him in silence. She was passionately angry; and yet beneath the stormy currents of the upper mind, there were other feelings, intermittently active. It was impossible to hate him!--impossible to help liking him. His frankness and courtesy, his delicacy of feeling and touch forced themselves on her notice. "I daresay!"--she said; "--but that's the worst of it. If Papa hadn't done this fatal, _foolish_ thing, of course we should have made friends!" * * * * * The Amberleys walked home together when the party dispersed. Mrs. Amberley opened the discussion on the newcomers. "She is certainly handsome, but rather bold-looking. Didn't you think so, father?" "I wasn't drawn to her. But she took no account of us," said the Rector, with his usual despondent candour. In truth he was not thinking about Miss Blanchflower, but only about the possible departure of his daughter, Susy. "I thought her beautiful!--but I'm sorry for Mr. Winnington!" exclaimed Susy, a red spot of excitement or indignation in each delicate cheek. "Mrs. Matheson told me they will only do exactly what they wish--that they won't take her brother's advice. Very wrong, very wrong." The Rector shook his grey head. "Young women were different in my youth." Mrs. Amberley sighed, and Susy biting her lip, knew that her own conduct was perhaps more in question than Miss Blanchflower's. They reached home in silence. Susy went to light her father's candles in his modest book-littered study. Then she put her mother on the sofa in the drawing-room, rubbed Mrs. Amberley's cold hands and feet, and blew up the fire. Suddenly her mother threw an arm round her neck. "Oh, Susy, must you go?" Susy kissed her. "I should come back"--she said after a moment in a low troubled voice. "Let me get this training, and then if you want me, darling, I'll come back." "Can't you be happy with us, Susy?" "I want to _know_ something--and _do_ something," said Susy, with intensity--evading the question. "It's such a big world, mother! I'll be better worth having afterwards." Mrs. Amberley said nothing. But a little later she went into her husband's study. "Frank--I think we'll have to let her," she said piteously. The Rector looked up assentingly, and put his hand in his wife's. "It's strange how different it all seems nowadays," said Mrs. Amberley, in her low quavering voice. "If I'd wanted to do what Susy wants, my mother would have called me a wicked girl to leave all my duties--and I shouldn't have dared. But we can't take it like that, Frank, somehow." "No," said the Rector slowly. "In the old days it used to be only _duties_ for the young--now it's rights too. It's God's will." "Susy loves us, Frank. She's a good girl." "She's a good girl--and she shall do what she thinks proper," said the Rector, rising heavily. So they gave their consent, and Susy wrote her application to Guy's hospital. Then they all three lay awake a good deal of the night,--almost till the autumn robin began to sing in the little rectory garden. As for Susy, in the restless intervals of restless sleep, she was always back in the Bridge End drawing-room watching Delia Blanchflower come in, with Mark Winnington behind. How glorious she looked! And every day he would be seeing her, every day he would be thinking about her--just because she was sure to give him so much trouble. "And what right have _you_ to complain?" she asked herself, trampling on her own pain. Had he ever said a word of love to her, ever shewn himself anything else than the kind and sympathetic friend--sometimes the inspiring teacher in the causes he had at heart? Never! And yet--insensibly--his smile, his word of praise or thanks, the touch of his firm warm hand, the sound of his voice, the look in his eyes--it was for them she had now learned to live. Yes!--and because she could no longer trust herself, she must go. She would not fail or harass him; she was his friend. She would go away and scrub hospital floors, and polish hospital taps. That would tame the anguish in her, and some day she would be strong again--and come back--to those beloved ones who had given her up--so tenderly. Chapter VIII The whole of Maumsey and its neighbourhood had indeed been thrown into excitement by certain placards on the walls announcing three public meetings to be held--a fortnight later--by the "Daughters of Revolt"--at Latchford, Brownmouth, and Frimpton. Latchford was but fifteen miles from Maumsey, and frequent trains ran between them. Brownmouth and Frimpton, also, were within easy distance by rail, and the Maumseyites were accustomed to shop at either. So that a wide country-side felt itself challenged--invaded; at a moment when a series of startling outrages--destruction of some of the nation's noblest pictures, in the National Gallery and elsewhere, defacement of churches, personal attacks on Ministers--by the members of various militant societies, especially "The League of Revolt," had converted an already incensed public opinion into something none the less ugly, none the less alarming, because it had as yet found no organised expression. The police were kept hard at work protecting open-air meetings on the Brownmouth and Frimpton beaches, from an angry populace who desired to break them up; every unknown woman who approached a village or strolled into a village church, was immediately noticed, immediately reported on, by hungry eyes and tongues alert for catastrophe; and every empty house had become an anxiety to its owners. And of course the sting of the outrage lay in the two names which blazed in the largest of black print from the centre of the placards. "The meeting will be addressed by Gertrude Marvell (D.R.), Delia Blanchflower (D.R.), and Paul Lathrop." Within barely two months of her father's death, this young lady to be speaking on public platforms, in the district where she was still a new-comer and a stranger, and flaunting in the black and orange of this unspeakable society!--such was the thought of all quiet folk for miles round. The tide of callers which had set in towards Maumsey Abbey ceased to flow; neighbours who had been already introduced to her, old friends of her grandparents, passed Delia on the road with either the stiffest of bows or no notice at all. The labourers stared at her, and their wives, those deepest well-heads of Conservatism in the country, were loud in reprobation. Their astonishment that "them as calls theirselves ladies" should be found burning and breaking, was always, in Winnington's ears, a touching thing, and a humbling. "Violence and arson" they seemed to say, "are good enough for the likes of us--you'd expect it of us. But _you_--the glorified, the superfine--who have your meals brought you regular, more food than you can eat, and more clothes than you can wear--_you_!" So that, underlying the country women's talk, and under the varnish of our modern life, one caught the accents and the shape of an old hierarchical world; and the man of sympathy winced anew under the perennial submission and disadvantage of the poor. Meanwhile Delia's life was one long excitement. The more she realised the disapproval of her neighbours, the more convinced she was that she was on the right road. She straightened her girlish back; she set her firm red mouth. Every morning brought reams of letters and reports from London, for Gertrude Marvell was an important member of the "Daughters'" organisation, and must be kept informed. The reading of them maintained a constant ferment in Delia. In any struggle of women against men, just as in any oppression of women by men, there is an element of fever, of madness, which poisons life. And in this element Delia's spirit lived for this brief hour of her youth. Led by the perpetual influence of the older mind and imagination at her side, she was overshadowed with the sense of women's wrongs, haunted by their grievances, burnt up by a flame of revolt against fate, against society, above all, against men, conceived as the age-long and irrational barrier in the path of women. It was irrational, and therefore no rational methods were any good. Nothing but waspishly stinging and hurting this great Man-Beast, nothing but defiance of all rules and decorums, nothing but force--of the womanish kind--answering to force, of the masculine kind, could be any use. Argument was foolish. They--the Suffragists--had already stuffed the world with argument; which only generated argument. To smash and break and burn, in more senses than one, remained the only course, witness Nottingham Castle, and the Hyde Park railings. And if a woman's life dashed itself to pieces in the process, well, what matter? The cause would only be advanced. One evening, not long after the tea-party at Bridge End, a group of persons, coming from different quarters, converged quietly, in the autumn dusk, on Maumsey Abbey. Marion Andrews walked in front, with a Miss Foster, the daughter of one of the larger farmers in the neighbourhood; and a short limping woman, clinging to the arm of a vigorously-built girl, the Science Mistress of the small but ancient Grammar School of the village, came behind. They talked in low voices, and any shrewd bystander would have perceived the mood of agitated expectancy in which they approached the house. "It's wonderful!" said little Miss Toogood, the lame dressmaker, as they turned a corner of the shrubbery, and the rambling south front rose before them,--"_wonderful_!--when you think of the people that used to live here! Why, old Lady Blanchflower looked upon you and me, Miss Jackson, as no better than earwigs! I sent her a packet of our leaflets once by post. Well--_she_ never used to give me any work, so she couldn't take it away. But she got Mrs. David Jones at Thring Farm to take away hers, and Mrs. Willy Smith, the Vet's wife, you remember?--and two or three more. So I nearly starved one winter; but I'm a tough one, and I got through. And now there's one of _us_ sits in the old lady's place! Isn't that a sign of the times?" "But of course!" said her companion, whose face expressed a kind of gloomy ardour. "We're winning. We must win--sometime!" The cheerfulness of the words was oddly robbed of its effect by the tragic look of the speaker. Miss Toogood's hand pressed her arm. "I'm always so sorry"--murmured the dressmaker--"for those others--those women--who haven't lived to see what we're going to see, aren't you?" "Yes," assented the other, adding--with the same emotional emphasis--"But they've all helped--every woman's helped! They've all played their parts." "Well, I don't know about Lady Blanchflower!" laughed Miss Toogood, happily. "What did she matter? The Antis are like the bits of stick you put into a hive. All they do is to stir up the bees." Meanwhile Marion Andrews was mostly silent, glancing restlessly however from side to side, as though she expected some spy, some enemy--her mother?--to emerge upon them from the shadows of the shrubbery. Her companion, Kitty Foster, a rather pretty girl with flaming red hair, the daughter of a substantial farmer on the further side of the village, chattered unceasingly, especially about the window-breaking raid in which she had been concerned, the figure she had cut at the police court, the things she had said to the magistrate, and the annoyance she had felt when her father paid her fine. "They led me a life when they got me home. And mother's been so ill since, I had to promise I'd stay quiet till Christmas anyway. But then I'm off! It's fine to feel you're doing something real--something hot and strong--so that people can't help taking notice of you. That's what I say to father, when he shouts at me--'we're not going to _ask_ you now any more--we've asked long enough--we're going to _make_ you do what we want.'" And the girl threw back her head excitedly. Marion vaguely assented, and the talk beside her rambled on, now violent, now egotistical, till they reached the Maumsey door. * * * * * "Now that we've got women like you with us--it can't be long--it can't be long!" repeated Miss Toogood, clasping her hands, as she looked first at Delia, and then at the distant figure of Miss Marvell, who in the further drawing-room, and through an archway, could be seen talking with Marion Andrews. Delia's brows puckered. "I'm afraid it will be long," she said, with a kind of weary passion. "The forces against us are so strong. But we must just go on--and on--straight ahead." She sat erect on her chair, very straight and slim, in her black dress, her hands, with their long fingers, tightly pressed together on her knee. Miss Toogood thought she had never seen anyone so handsome, or so--so splendid! All that was romantic in the little dressmaker's soul rose to appreciate Delia Blanchflower. So young and so self-sacrificing--and looking like a picture of Saint Cecilia that hung in Miss Toogood's back room! The Movement was indeed wonderful! How it broke down class barriers, and knit all women together! As her eyes fell on the picture of Lady Blanchflower, in a high cap and mittens, over the mantelpiece, Miss Toogood felt a sense of personal triumph over the barbarous and ignorant past. "What I mind most is the apathy of people--the people down here. It's really terrible!" said the science mistress, in her melancholy voice. "Sometimes I hardly know how to bear it. One thinks of all that's going on in London--and in the big towns up north--and here--it's like a vault. Everyone's really against us. Why the poor people--the labourers' wives--they're the worst of any!" "Oh no!--we're getting on--we're getting on!" said Miss Toogood, hastily. "You're too despondent, Miss Jackson, if you'll excuse me--you are indeed. Now I'm never downhearted, or if I am, I say to myself--'It's all right somewhere!--somewhere that you can't see.' And I think of a poem my father was fond of--'If hopes are dupes, fears may be liars--And somewhere in yon smoke concealed--Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers--And but for you possess the field!' That's by a man called Arthur Clough--Miss Blanchflower--and it's a grand poem!" Her pale blue eyes shone in their wrinkled sockets. Delia remembered a recent visit to Miss Toogood's tiny parlour behind the front room where she saw her few customers and tried them on. She recollected the books which the back parlour contained. Miss Toogood's father had been a bookseller--evidently a reading bookseller--in Winchester, and in the deformed and twisted form of his daughter some of his soul, his affections and interests, survived. "Yes, but what are you going to give us to _do_, Miss Blanchflower?" said Kitty Foster, impatiently--"I don't care what I do! And the more it makes the men mad, the better!" She drew herself up affectedly. She was a strapping girl, with a huge vanity and a parrot's brain. A year before this date a "disappointment" had greatly embittered her, and the processions and the crowded London meetings, and the window-breaking riots into which she had been led while staying with a friend, had been the solace and relief of a personal rancour and misery she might else have found intolerable. "_I_ can't do anything--not anything public"--said Miss Jackson, with emphasis--"or I should lose my post. Oh the slavery it is! and the pittance they pay us--compared to the men. Every man in the Boys' school get £120 and over--and we're thought lucky to get £80. And I'll be bound we work more hours in the week than they do. It's _hard_!" "That'll soon be mended," said Miss Toogood hopefully. "Look at Norway! As soon as the women got the vote, why the women's salaries in public offices were put up at once." The strong, honest face of the teacher refused to smile. "Well it isn't always so, Miss Toogood. I know they say that in New Zealand and Colorado--where we've got the vote--salaries aren't equal by any manner of means." The dressmaker's withered cheek flushed red. "'_They_ say'"--she repeated scornfully. "That's one of the Anti dodges--just picking out the things that suit 'em, and forgetting all the rest. Don't you look at the depressing things--I never do! Look at what helps us! There's a lot o' things said--and there's a lot of things ain't true--You've got to pick and choose--you can't take 'em as they come. No one can." Miss Jackson looked puzzled and unconvinced; but could think of no reply. The two persons in the distance appeared in the archway between the drawing-rooms, Gertrude Marvell leading. Everyone looked towards her; everybody listened for what she would say. She took Delia's chair, Delia instinctively yielding it, and then--her dark eyes measuring and probing them all while she talked, she gave the little group its orders. Kitty Foster was to be one of the band of girl-sellers of the _Tocsin_, in Latchford, the day of the meeting. The town was to be sown with it from end to end, and just before the meeting, groups of sellers, in the "Daughters'" black and orange, were to appear in every corner of the square where the open-air meeting was to be held. "But we'll put you beside the speaker's waggon. You're so tall, and your hair is enough to advertise anything!" With a grim little smile, she stretched out a hand and touched Kitty Foster's arm. "Yes, isn't it splendid!" said Delia, ardently. Kitty flushed and bridled. Her people in the farmhouse at home thought her hair ugly, and frankly told her so. It was nice to be admired by Miss Blanchflower and her friend. Ladies who lived in a big house, with pictures and fine furniture, and everything handsome, must know better than farm-people who never saw anything but their cattle and their fields. "And you"--the clear authoritative voice addressed Miss Toogood--"can you take round notices?" The speaker looked doubtfully at the woman's lame foot and stick. Miss Toogood replied that she would be at Latchford by midday, and would take round notices till she dropped. The teacher who could do nothing public, was invited to come to Maumsey in the evening, and address envelopes. Miss Marvell had lately imported a Secretary, who had set up her quarters in the old gun room on the ground floor, and had already filled it with correspondence, and stacked it with the literature of the Daughters. Miss Jackson eagerly promised her help. Nothing was apportioned to Marion Andrews. She sat silent following the words and gestures of that spare figure in the grey cloth dress, in whom they all recognised their chief. There was a feverish brooding in her look, as though she was doubly conscious--both of the scene before her, and of something only present to the mind. "You know why we are holding these meetings"--said Gertrude Marvell, presently. No one answered. They waited for her. "It is a meeting of denunciation," she said, sharply. "You know in the Land League days in Ireland they used to hold meetings to denounce a landlord--for evictions--and that landlord went afterwards in fear--scorned--and cursed--and boycotted. Well, that's what we're going to do with Ministers in their own localities where they live! We can't boycott yet--we haven't the power. But we can denounce--we can set people on--we can hold a man up--we can make his life a burden to him. And that's what we're going to do--with Sir Wilfrid Lang. He's one of this brutal Cabinet that keeps women in prison--one of the strongest of them. His speeches have turned votes against us in the House of Commons, time after time. We mean to be even with Sir Wilfrid Lang!" She spoke quite quietly--almost under her breath; but her slender fingers interlocked, and a steady glow had overflowed her pale cheeks. A tremor passed through all her listeners--a tremor of excitement. "What can we _do_?" said Miss Toogood at last, in a low voice. Her eyes stared out of her kind old face, which had grown white. "Ah, leave that to us!" said Miss Marvell, in another voice, the dry organising voice, which was her usual one. And dropping all emotion and excitement, she began rapidly to question three out of the four women as to the neighbourhood, the opinions of individuals and classes, the strength in it of the old Suffrage societies, the presence or absence of propaganda. They answered her eagerly. They all felt themselves keyed to a higher note since she had entered the room. They had got to business; they felt themselves a power, the rank and file of an "army with banners," under direction. Even Delia, clearly, was in the same relation towards this woman whom the outer world only knew as her--presumably--paid companion. She was questioned, put right, instructed with the rest of them. Only no one noticed that Marion Andrews took little or no part in the conversation. An autumn wind raged outside, and the first of those dead regiments of leaves which would soon be choking the lanes were pattering against the windows. Inside, the fire leapt as the daylight faded, helped by a couple of lamps, for Maumsey knew no electricity, and Delia, under Gertrude's prompting, had declared against the expense of putting it in. In the dim illumination the faces of the six women emerged, typical all of them of the forces behind the revolutionary wing of the woman's movement. Enthusiasms of youth and age--hardships of body and spirit--rancour and generous hope--sore heart and untrained mind--fanatical brain and dreaming ignorance--love unsatisfied, and energies unused--they were all there, and all hanging upon, conditioned by something called "the vote," conceived as the only means to a new heaven and a new earth. * * * * * When Delia had herself dismissed her guests into the darkness of the October evening, she returned thoughtfully to where Gertrude Marvell was standing by the drawing-room fire, reading a letter. "You gave them all something to do except that Miss Andrews, Gertrude? I wonder why you left her out?" "Oh, I had a talk with her before." The tone was absent, and the speaker went on reading her letter. "When you took her into the back drawing-room?" The slightest possible flicker passed through Gertrude's drooped eyelids. "She was telling me a lot about her home-life--poor oppressed thing!" Delia asked no more. But she felt a vague discomfort. Presently Gertrude put down her letter, and turned towards her. "May I have that cheque, dear--before post-time? If you really meant it?" "Certainly." Delia went to her writing-table, opened a drawer and took out her cheque-book. A laugh--conscious and unsteady--accompanied the dipping of her pen into the ink. "I wonder what he'll say?" "Who?" "Mr. Winnington--when I send him all the bills to be paid." "Isn't he there to pay the bills?" Delia's face shewed a little impatience. "You're so busy, dear, that I am afraid you forget all I tell you about my own affairs. But I _did_ tell you that my guardian had trustingly paid eight hundred pounds into the bank to last me till the New Year, for house and other expenses--without asking me to promise anything either!" "Well, now, you are going to let us have £500. Is there any difficulty?" "None--except that the ordinary bills I don't pay, and can't pay, will now all go in to my guardian, who will of course be curious to know what I have done with the money. Naturally there'll be a row." "Oh, a row!" said Gertrude Marvell, indifferently. "It's your own money, Delia. Spend it as you like!" "I intend to," said Delia. "Still--I do rather wish I'd given him notice. He may think it a mean trick." "Do you care what he thinks?" "Not--much," said Delia slowly. "All the same, Gertrude"--she threw her head back--"he is an awfully good sort." Gertrude shrugged her shoulders. "I daresay. But you and I are at war with him and his like, and can't stop to consider that kind of thing. Also your father arranged that he should be well paid for his trouble." Delia turned back to the writing-table, and wrote the cheque. "Thank you, dearest," said Gertrude Marvell, giving a light kiss to the hand that offered the cheque. "It shall go to headquarters this evening--and you'll have the satisfaction of knowing that you've financed all the three bye-election campaigns that are coming--or nearly." * * * * * Gertrude had gone away to her own sitting-room and Delia was left alone. She hung over the fire, in an excited reverie, her pulses rushing; and presently she took a letter from the handbag on her wrist, and read it for the second time by the light of the blaze she had kindled in the grate. * * * * * "I will be at the Rose and Crown at least half an hour before the meeting. We have got a capital waggon for you to speak from, and chosen the place where it is to stand. I am afraid we may have some rough customers to deal with. But the police have been strongly warned--that I have found out--though I don't know by whom--and there will be plenty of them. My one regret is that I cannot be in the crowd, so as both to see and hear you. I must of course stick to the waggon. What a day for us all down here!--for our little down-trodden band! You come to us as our Joan of Arc, leading us on a holy war. You shame us into action, and to fight with you is itself victory. When I think of how you looked and how you talked the other night! Do you know that you have a face 'to launch a thousand ships?' No, I am convinced you never think of it--you never take your own beauty into consideration. And you won't imagine that I am talking in this way from any of the usual motives. Your personal charm, if I may say so, is merely an item in our balance sheet; your money--I understand you have money--is another. You bring your beauty and your money in your hand, and throw them into the great conflagration of the Cause--just as the women did in Savonarola's day. You fling them away--if need be--for an idea. And because of it, all the lovers of ideas, and all the dreamers of great dreams will be your slaves and servants. Understand!--you are going to be loved and followed, as no ordinary woman, even with your beauty, is ever loved and followed. Your footsteps may be on the rocks and flints--I promise you no easy, nor royal road. There may be blood on the path! But a cloud of witnesses will be all about you--some living and some dead; you will be carried in the hearts of innumerable men and women--women above all; and if you stand firm, if your soul rises to the height of your call, you will be worshipped, as the saints were worshipped. "Only let nothing bar your path. Winnington is a good fellow, but a thickheaded Philistine all the same. You spoke to me about him with compunction. Have no compunctions. Go straight forward. Women have got to shew themselves ruthless, and hard, and cunning, like men--if they are to fight men." "Yours faithfully, PAUL LATHROP." Delia's thoughts danced and flamed, like the pile of blazing wood before her. What a singular being was this Paul Lathrop! He had paid them four or five visits already; and they had taken tea with him once in his queer hermitage under the southern slope of the Monk Lawrence hill--a one-storey thatched cottage, mostly built by Lathrop himself with the help of two labourers, standing amid a network of ponds, stocked with trout in all stages. Inside, the roughly-plastered walls were lined with books--chiefly modern poets, with French and Russian novels, and with unframed sketches by some of the ultra clever fellows, who often, it seemed, would come down to spend Sunday with Lathrop, and talk and smoke till dawn put out the lights. She found him interesting--certainly interesting. His outer man--heavy mouth and lantern cheeks--dreamy blue eyes, and fair hair--together with the clumsy power in his form and gait, were not without a certain curious attraction. And his story--as Gertrude Marvell told it--would be forgiven by the romantic. All the same his letter had offended Delia greatly. She had given him no encouragement to write in such a tone--so fervid, so emotional, so intimate; and she would shew him--plainly--that it offended her. Nevertheless the phrases of the letter ran in her mind; until her discomfort and resentment were lost in something else. She could not quiet her conscience about that cheque! Not indeed as to giving it to the "Daughters." She would have given everything she possessed to them, keeping the merest pittance for herself, if fate and domestic tyranny had allowed. No!--but it hurt her--unreasonably, foolishly hurt her--that she must prepare herself again to face the look of troubled amazement in Mark Winnington's eyes, without being able to justify herself to herself, so convincingly as she would have liked to do. "I am simply giving my own money to a cause I adore!" said one voice in the mind. "It is not legally yours--it is legally his," said another. "You should have warned him. You have got hold of it under false pretences." "Quibbles! It _is_ mine--equitably," replied the first. "He and I are at war. And I _have_ warned him." "At war?" Her tiresome conscience kicked again. Why, not a day had passed since her settlement at Maumsey, without some proof, small or great, of Winnington's consideration and care for her. She knew--guiltily knew, that he was overwhelmed by the business of the executorship and the estate, and had been forced to put aside some of his own favourite occupations to attend to it. "Well!--my father made it worth his while!" But her cheek reddened, with a kind of shame, as the thought passed through her mind. Even in this short time and because of the daily contact which their business relations required, she was beginning to know Winnington, to realise something of his life and character. And as for the love borne him in the neighbourhood--it was really preposterous--bad for any man! Delia pitied herself, not only because she was Winnington's ward against her will, but because of the silent force of public opinion that upheld him, and must necessarily condemn her. So he had once been engaged? Lady Tonbridge had told her so. To a gentle, saintly person of course!--a person to suit him. Delia could not help a movement of half petulant curiosity--and then an involuntary thrill. Many women since had been in love with him. Lady Tonbridge had said as much. And he--with no one! But he had a great many women friends? No doubt!--with that manner, and that charm. Delia resented the women friends. She would have been quite ready indeed to enrol herself among them--to worship with the rest--from afar; were it not for ideas, and principles, and honesty of soul! As it was, she despised the worship of which she was told, as something blind and overdone. It was not the greatest men--not the best men--who were so easily and universally beloved. What did he really think of her? Did he ever guess that there was something else in her than this obstinacy, this troublesomeness with which she was forced to meet him? She was sorry for herself, much more than for him; because she must so chill and mislead a man who _ought_ to understand her. Looking up she saw a dim reflection of her own beauty in the glass above the mantelpiece. "No, I am _not_ either a minx, or a wild-cat!"--she thought, as though she were angrily arguing with someone. "I could be as attractive, as 'feminine,' as silly as anyone else, if I chose! I could have lovers--of course--just like other girls--if it weren't"-- For what? At that moment she hardly knew. And why were her eyes filling with tears? She dashed them indignantly away. But for the first time, this cause, this public cause to which she was pledged presented itself to her as a sacrifice to be offered, a noble burden to be borne, rather than as something which expressed the natural and spontaneous impulse of her life. Which meant that, already, since her recapture by this English world, since what was hearsay had begun to be experience, the value of things had slightly and imperceptibly changed. * * * * * The days ran on. One evening, just before the first of the "Daughters'" meetings, which was to be held at Latchford, Winnington appeared in Lady Tonbridge's drawing-room to ask for a cup of tea on his way to a public dinner in Wanchester. He seemed pre-occupied and worried; and she fed him before questioning him. But at last she said-- "You couldn't prevail on her to give up any of these performances?" "Miss Delia? Not one. But it's only the Latchford one that matters. Have you been talking to her?" He looked at her a little plaintively, as though he _could_ have reminded her that she had promised him a friend's assistance. "Of course! But I might as well talk to this table. She won't really make friends--nor will Miss Marvell allow her. It's the same, I find, with everyone else. However, I'm bound to say, the neighbourhood is just now in the mood that it doesn't much want to make friends!" "I know," said Winnington, with a sigh--relapsing into silence. "Is she taking an interest in the property--the cottages?" He shook his head. "I'm sure she meant to. But it seems to be all dropped." "Provoking!" said Madeleine, drily--"considering how you've been slaving to please her--" Winnington interrupted--not without annoyance-- "How can she think of anything else when she's once deep in this campaign? One must blame the people who led her into it!" "Oh! I don't know!" said Lady Tonbridge, protesting. "She's a very clever young woman, with a strong will of her own." "Captured just at the impressionable moment!" cried Winnington--"when a girl will do anything--believe anything--for the person she loves!" "Well the prescription should be easy--at her age. Change the person! But then comes the question: Is _she_ loveable? Speak the truth, Mr. Guardian!" Winnington began a rather eager assent. Watch her with the servants, the gardeners, the animals! Then you perceived what should be the girl's natural charm and sweetness-- "'Hm. Does she show any of it to you?" Winnington laughed. "You forget--I am always there as the obstacle in the path. But if it weren't for the sinister influence--in the background." And again he went off at score--describing various small incidents that had touched or pleased him, as throwing light upon what he vowed was the real Delia. Madeleine listened, watching him attentively the while. When he took his leave and she was alone, she sat thinking for some time, and then going to a cupboard in her writing-table, which held her diaries of past years, she rummaged till she found one bearing a date fifteen years old. She turned up the entry for the sixteenth of May: "She died last night. This morning, at early service, Mark was there. We walked home together. I doubt whether he will ever marry--now. He is not one of those men who are hurried by the mere emotion and unbearableness of grief, into a fresh emotion of love. But what a lover--what a husband lost!" She closed the book, and stood with it in her hand--pondering. * * * * * As he left her house, and turned towards the station Winnington passed a lady to whom he bowed, recognising her as Miss Andrews. "Hope you've got an umbrella!" he said to her cheerily, as he passed. "The rain's coming!" She smiled, pleased like all the world to be addressed with that Winningtonian manner which somehow implied that the person addressed was, for the moment at any rate, his chiefest concern. Immediately after meeting him she turned from the village street, and began to mount a lane leading to the slope on which Monk Lawrence stood. Her expression as she walked along, sometimes with moving lips, had grown animated and sarcastic. Here were two men, a dead father and a live guardian, trying to coerce one simple girl--and apparently not making much of a job of it. She gloried in what she had been told or perceived of Delia Blanchflower's wilfulness, which seemed to her mother and her brother the Captain so monstrous. Only--could one entirely trust anybody like Delia Blanchflower--so prosperous--and so good-looking? Miss Andrews mounted the hill, passed through a wood that ran along its crest, and took a footpath, leading past the edge of a railway cutting, from which the wonderful old house could be plainly seen. She paused several times to look at it, wrapped in a kind of day-dream, which gave a growing sombreness to her harsh and melancholy features. Beyond the footpath a swing gate opened into a private path leading to the house. She opened the gate, and walked a little way up the path, in the fast gathering darkness. But she was suddenly arrested by the appearance of a figure in the far distance, black against the pale greys of the house. It was a policeman on his beat--she caught one of the gleams of a lantern. Instantly she turned back, groped her way again through the wood, and into a side road leading to her brother's house. She found her mother lying on the sofa in the drawing-room, the remains of a rather luxurious tea beside her--her outdoor clothes lying untidily about the room. "Where have you been?" said Mrs. Andrews, fretfully--"there were several letters I wanted written before post." "I wanted a little air. That linen business took me all the morning." For it was the rule in the Andrews' household that the house linen should be gone through every six months with a view to repairs and renewals. It was a tedious business. Mrs. Andrews' nerves did not allow her to undertake it. It fell therefore, and had always fallen to the only daughter, who was not made for housewifery tasks, and detested the half-yearly linen day accordingly. Her tone displeased her mother. "There you are--grumbling again, Marion! What else have you to do, I should like to know, than your home duties?" Marion made no reply. What was the use of replying? But her black eyes, as she helped herself wearily to some very cold tea, took note of her mother's attitude. It was only the week before that Dr. France had expressed himself rather pointedly to the effect that more exercise and some fresh interests in life "would be good for Mrs. Andrews." Mrs. Andrews returned to the ladies' paper she was reading. The fashion plates for the week were unusually attractive. Marion observed her unseen. Suddenly the daughter said:-- "I must ask you for that five pounds, mother. Bill promised it me. My underclothing is literally in rags. I've done my best, and it's past mending. And I must have another decent dress." "There you are,--clamouring for money again"--said her mother, bouncing up on the sofa--"when you know how hard-pressed Bill is. He's got another instalment to pay for the motor the end of this week." "Yes--the motor you made him get!"--said Marion, as though the words burst from her. "And why shouldn't he, pray! The money's his--and mine. It was high time we got rid of that rattletrap. It jolted me to pieces." "You said a little while ago it would do very well for another year. Anyway, Bill promised me something for clothes this month--and he also said that he'd pay my school of art fees, at Wanchester, and give me a third season ticket. Is that all done with too?" The girl sat erect, her face with its sparkling eyes expressing mingled humiliation and bitterness. "Oh, well really, I can't stand these constant disputes!" said Mrs. Andrews, rising angrily from the sofa. "You'd better go to your brother. If he likes to waste his money, he can of course. But I've got none to spare." She paused at the door--"As for your underclothing, I daresay I could find you something of mine you could make do for a bit. Now do be sensible!--and don't make a scene with Bill!" She closed the door. Marion walked to the side window of the drawing-room, and stood looking at the wooded slope of the hill, with Monk Lawrence in the distance. Her heart burned within her. She was thirty-four. She had never had any money of her own--she had never been allowed any education that would fit her to earn. She was absolutely dependent on her mother and brother. Bill was kind enough, though careless, and often selfish. But her mother rubbed her dependence into her at every turn--"And yet I earn my clothes and my keep--every penny of them!" she thought, fiercely. A year before this date she had been staying in London with a cousin who sometimes took pity on her and gave her a change of scene. They had gone together for curiosity's sake to a "militant" meeting in London. A lady, slight in figure, with dark eyes and hair, had spoken on the "economic independence of women"--as the only path to the woman's goal of "equal rights" with men. She had spoken with passion, and Marion's sore heart had leapt to answer her. That lady was Gertrude Marvell. Marion had written to her, and there had been a brief acquaintance, enough to kindle the long-repressed will and passion of the girl's stormy nature. She had returned home, to read, in secret, everything that she could find on the militant movement. The sheer violence of it appealed to her like water to the thirsty. War, war!--on a rotten state of society, and the economic slavery of women! And now her first awakener, her appointed leader, her idol had appeared in this dead country-side, with orders to give, and tasks to impose. And she should be obeyed--to the letter! The girl's heavy eyes kindled to a mad intensity, as she stood looking at the hill-side, now almost dark, except for that distant light, which she knew as the electric lamp still lit at sunset, even in Sir Wilfrid's absence, over the stately doorway of Monk Lawrence. But she was not going to the Latchford meeting. "Don't give yourself away. Don't be seen with the others. Keep out of notice. There are more important things for you to do--presently. Wait!" The words echoed in her ears. She waited; exulting in the thought that no one, not even Miss Blanchflower, knew as much as she; and that neither her mother nor her brother had as yet any idea of her connection with the "Daughters." Her "silly suffrage opinions" were laughed at by them both--good-humouredly, by Bill. Of the rest, they knew nothing. Chapter IX "Mark! you've done the day's work of two people already!" cried Mrs. Matheson in a tone of distress. "You don't mean to say you're going in to Latchford again?--and without waiting for some food?" She stood under the porch of Bridge End remonstrating with her brother. "Can't be helped, dear!" said Winnington, as he filled his pipe--"I'm certain there'll be a row to-night, and I must catch this train!" "What, that horrid meeting! Delia Blanchflower lets you slave and slave for her, and never takes the smallest notice of your wishes or your advice! She ought to be ashamed!" The sister's mild tone trembled with indignation. "She isn't!" laughed Winnington. "I never knew anyone less so. But we can't have her ill treated. Expect me back when you see me!" And kissing his hand to his sister, he went out into a dark and blustering evening. Something had just gone wrong with the little motor car he generally drove himself, and there was nothing for it but to walk the mile and a half to the railway station. He had spent the whole day in County Council business at Wanchester, was tired out, and had now been obliged to leave home again without waiting even for a belated cup of tea. But there was no help for it. He had only just time to catch the Latchford train. As he almost ran to the station he was not conscious however of any of these small discomforts; his mind was full of Delia. He did not encourage anyone but Madeleine Tonbridge to talk to him about his ward; but he was already quite aware, before his old friend laid stress on it, of the hostile feeling towards Delia and her chaperon that was beginning to show itself in the neighbourhood. He knew that she was already pronounced heartless, odious, unprincipled, consumed with a love of notoriety, and ready for any violence, at the bidding of a woman who was probably responsible at that very moment--as a prominent organiser in the employ of the society contriving them--for some of the worst of the militant outrages. His condemnation of Delia's actions was sharp and unhesitating; his opinion of Miss Marvell not a whit milder than that of his neighbours. Yet he had begun, as we have seen, to discover in himself a willingness, indeed an eagerness to excuse and pity the girl, which was wholly lacking in the case of the older woman. Under the influence, indeed, of his own responsive temperament, Winnington was rapidly drifting into a state of feeling where his perception of Delia's folly and unreason was almost immediately checked by some enchanting memory of her beauty, or of those rare moments in their brief acquaintance, when the horrid shadow of the "Movement" had been temporarily lifted, and he had seen her, as in his indulgent belief she truly was--or was meant to be. She flouted and crossed him perpetually; and he was beginning to discover that he only thought of her the more, and that the few occasions when he had been able to force a smile out of her,--a sudden softness in her black eyes, gone in a moment!--were constantly pleading for her in his mind. All part no doubt of his native and extreme susceptibility to the female race--the female race in general. For he could see himself, and laugh at himself, _ab extra_, better than most men. At the station he came across Captain Andrews, and soon discovered from that artless warrior that he also was bound for Latchford, with a view to watching over Delia Blanchflower. "Can't have a lot of hooligans attacking a good-looking girl like that--whatever nonsense she talks!" murmured the Captain, twisting his sandy moustache; "so I thought I'd better come along and see fair play. Of course I knew you'd be there." The train was crowded. Winnington, separated from the Captain, plunged into a dimly-lighted third class, and found himself treading on the toes of an acquaintance. He saluted an elderly lady wearing a bonnet and mantle of primeval cut, and a dress so ample in the skirt that it still suggested the days of crinoline. She was abnormally tall, and awkwardly built; she wore cotton gloves, and her boots were those of a peasant. She carried a large bag or reticule, and her lap was piled with brown parcels. Her large thin face was crowned by a few straggling locks of what had once been auburn hair, now nearly grey, the pale spectacled eyes were deeply wrinkled, and the nose and mouth slightly but indisputably crooked. "My dear Miss Dempsey!--what an age since we met! Where are you off to? Give me some of those parcels!" And Winnington, seizing what he could lay hands on, transferred them to his own knees, and gave a cordial grip to the right hand cotton glove. Miss Dempsey replied that she had been in Brownmouth for the day, and was going home. After which she smiled and said abruptly, bending across her still laden knees and his--so as to speak unheard by their neighbours-- "Of course I know where you're going to!" "Do you?" The queer head nodded. "Why can't you keep her in order?" "Her? Who?" "Your ward. Why don't you stop it?" "Stop these meetings? My ward is of age, please remember, and quite aware of it." Miss Dempsey sighed. "Naughty young woman!" she said, yet with the gentlest of accents. "For us of the elder generation to see our work all undone by these maniacs! They have dashed the cup from our very lips." "Ah! I forgot you were a Suffragist," said Winnington, smiling at her. "Suffragist?" she held up her head indignantly--"I should rather think I am. My parents were friends of Mill, and I heard him speak for Woman Suffrage when I was quite a child. And now, after the years we've toiled and moiled, to see these mad women wrecking the whole thing!" Winnington assented gravely. "I don't wonder you feel it so. But you still want it--the vote--as much as ever?" "Yes!" she said, at first with energy; and then on a more wavering note--"Yes,--but I admit a great many things have been done without it that I thought couldn't have been done. And these wild women give one to think. But you? Are you against us?--or has Miss Delia converted you?" He smiled again, but without answering her question. Instead, he asked her in a guarded voice-- "You are as busy as ever?" "I am there always--just as usual. I don't have much success. It doesn't matter." She drew back from him, looking quietly out of window at the autumn fields. Over her wrinkled face with its crooked features, there dawned a look of strange intensity, mingled very faintly with something exquisite--a ray from a spiritual world. Winnington looked at her with reverence. He knew all about her; so did many of the dwellers in the Maumsey neighbourhood. She had lived for half-a-century in the same little house in one of the back-streets of Latchford, a town of some ten thousand inhabitants. Through all that time her life had been given to what is called "rescue work"--though she herself rarely called it by that name. She loved those whom no one else would love--the meanest and feeblest of the outcast race. Every night her door stood on the latch, and as the years passed, thousands knew it. Scarcely a week went by, that some hand did not lift that latch, and some girl in her first trouble, or some street-walker, dying of her trade, did not step in to the tiny hall where the lamp burnt all night, and wait for the sound of the descending footsteps on the stairs, which meant shelter and pity, warmth and food. She was constantly deceived, sometimes robbed; for such things she had no memory. She only remembered the things which cannot be told--the trembling voices of hope or returning joy--the tenderness in dying eyes, the clinging of weak hands, the kindness of "her poor children." She had written--without her name--a book describing the condition of a great seaport town where she had once lived. The facts recorded in it had inspired a great reforming Act. No one knew anything of her part in it--so far as the public was concerned. Many persons indeed came to consult her; she gave all her knowledge to those who wanted it; she taught, and she counselled, always as one who felt herself the mere humble mouthpiece of things divine and compelling; and those who went away enriched did indeed forget her in her message, as she meant them to do. But in her own town as she passed along the streets, in her queer garb, blinking and absently smiling as though at her own thoughts, she was greeted often with a peculiar reverence, a homage of which her short sight told her little or nothing. Winnington especially had applied to her in more than one difficulty connected with his public work. It was to her he had gone at once when the Blanchflower agent had come to him in dismay reporting the decision of Miss Blanchflower with regard to the half-witted girl whose third illegitimate child by a quite uncertain father had finally proved her need of protection both from men's vileness, and her own helplessness. Miss Dempsey had taken the girl first into her own house, and then, persuading and comforting the old father, had placed her in one of the Homes where such victims are sheltered. Winnington briefly enquired after the girl. She as briefly replied. Then she added:--as other travellers got out and they were left to themselves. "So Miss Blanchflower wanted to keep her in the village?" Winnington nodded, adding-- "She of course had no idea of the real facts." "No. Why should she?--_Why should she_!--" the old lips repeated with passion. "Let her keep her youth while she can! It's so strange to me--how they will throw away their youth! Some of us must know. The black ox has trodden on us. A woman of thirty must look at it all. But a girl of twenty! Doesn't she see that she helps the world more by _not_ knowing!--that her mere unconsciousness is _our_ gain--_our_ refreshment." The face of the man sitting opposite her, reflected her own feeling. "You and I always agree," he said warmly. "I wish you'd make friends with her." "Who? Miss Blanchflower? What could she make out of an old stager like me!" Miss Dempsey's face broke into amusement at the notion. "And I don't know that I could keep my temper with a militant. Well now you're going to hear her speak--and here we are." * * * * * Winnington and Captain Andrews left the station together. Latchford owned a rather famous market, and market day brought always a throng of country folk into the little town. A multitude of booths under flaring gas jets--for darkness had just fallen--held one side of the square, and the other was given up to the hurdles which penned the sheep and cattle, and to their attendant groups of farmers and drovers. The market place was full of people, but the crowd which filled it was not an ordinary market-day crowd. The cattle and sheep indeed had long since gone off with their new owners or departed homeward unsold. The booths were most of them either taken down or were in process of being dismantled. For the evening was falling fast; it was spitting with rain; and business was over. But the shop windows in the market-place were still brilliantly lit, and from the windows of the Crown Inn, all tenanted by spectators, light streamed out on the crowd below. The chief illumination came however from what seemed to be a large shallow waggon drawn up not far from the Crown. Three people stood in it; a man--who was speaking--and two women. From either side, a couple of motor lamps of great brilliance concentrated upon them threw their faces and figures into harsh relief. The crowd was steadily pressing toward the waggon, and it was evident at once to Winnington and his companion that it was not a friendly crowd. "Looks rather ugly, to me!" said Andrews in Winnington's ear. "They've got hold of that thing which happened at Wanchester yesterday, of the burning of that house where the care-taker and his children only just escaped." A rush of lads and young men passed them as he spoke--shouting-- "Pull 'em down--turn 'em out!" Andrews and Winnington pursued, but were soon forced back by a retreating movement of those in front. Winnington's height enabled him to see over the heads of the crowd. "The police are keeping a ring," he reported to his companion--"they seem to have got it in hand! Ah! now they've seen me--they'll let us through." Meanwhile the shouts and booing of the hostile portion of the audience--just augmented by a number of rough-looking men from the neighbouring brickfields--prevented most of the remarks delivered by the male speaker on the cart from reaching the audience. "Cowards!" said an excited woman's voice--"that's all they can do!--howl like wild beasts--that's all they're fit for!" Winnington turned to see a tall girl, carrying an armful of newspapers. She had flaming red hair, and she wore a black and orange scarf, with a cap of the same colours. "Foster's daughter," he thought, wondering. "What happens to them all!" For he had known Kitty Foster from her school days, and had never thought of her except as a silly simpering flirt, bent on the pursuit of man. And now he beheld a maenad, a fury. Suddenly another woman's voice cut across the others-- "Aren't you ashamed of those colours! Go home--and take them off. Go home and behave like a decent creature!" Heads were turned--to see a middle-aged woman of quiet dress and commanding aspect, sternly pointing to the astonished Kitty Foster. "Do you see that girl?"--the woman continued, addressing her neighbours,--"she's got the 'Daughters'' colours on. Do you know what the Daughters have been doing in town? You've seen about the destroying of letters in London. Well, I'll tell you what that means. I had a little servant I was very fond of. She left me to go and live near her sister in town. The sister died, and she got consumption. She went into lodgings, and there was no one to help her. She wrote to me, asking me to come to her. Her letter was destroyed in one of the pillar-boxes raided--by those women--" She pointed. "Then she broke her heart because she thought I'd given her up. She daren't write again. And now I've found her out--in hospital--dying. I've seen her to-day. If it hadn't have been for these demented creatures she might ha' lived for years." The woman paused, her voice breaking a little. Kitty Foster tossed her head. "What are most women in hospital for?" she said, shrilly. "By the fault of men!--one way or the other. That's what we think of." "Yes I know--that's one of the shameless things you say--to us who have husbands and sons we thank God for!" said the elder woman, quivering. "Go and get a husband!--if you can find one to put up with you, and hold your tongue!" She turned her back. The girl laughed affectedly. "I can do without one, thank you. It's you happy married women that are the chief obstacle in our path. Selfish things!--never care for anybody but yourselves!" "Hallo--Lathrop's down--that's Miss Blanchflower!" said Andrews, excitedly. "Let's go on!" And at the same moment a mounted constable, who had been steadily making his way to them, opened a way for the two J.P.'s through the crowd, which after the tumult of hooting mingled with a small amount of applause, which had greeted Lathrop's peroration, had relapsed into sudden silence as Delia Blanchflower came forward, so that her opening words, in a rich clear voice were audible over a large area of the market-place. * * * * * What did she say? Certainly nothing new! Winnington knew it all by heart--had read it dozens of times in their strident newspaper, which he now perused weekly, simply that he might discover if he could, what projects his ward might be up to. The wrongs of women, their wrongs as citizens, as wives, as the victims of men, as the "refuse of the factory system"--Winnington remembered the phrase in the _Tocsin_ of the week before--the uselessness of constitutional agitation--the need "to shake England to make her hear"--it was all the "common form" of the Movement; and yet she was able to infuse it with passion, with conviction, with a wild and natural eloquence. Her voice stole upon him--hypnotized him. His political and economic knowledge told him that half the things she said were untrue, and the rest irrelevant. His moral sense revolted against her violence--her defence of violence. A girl of twenty-one addressing this ugly, indifferent crowd, and talking calmly of stone-throwing and arson, as though they were occupations as natural to her youth as dancing or love-making!--the whole thing was abhorrent--preposterous--to a man of order and peace. And yet he had never been more stirred, more conscious of the mad, mixed poetry of life, than he was, as he stood watching the slender figure on the waggon--the gestures of the upraised arm, and the play of the lights from the hotel, and from the side lamps, now on the deep white collar that lightened her serge jacket, and on the gesticulating hand, or the face that even in these disfiguring cross-lights could be nothing else than lovely. She was speaking too long--a common fault of women. He looked from her to the faces of the crowd, and saw that the spell, compounded partly of the speaker's good looks and partly of sheer gaping curiosity, was breaking. They were getting restless, beginning to heckle and laugh. Then he heard her say. "Of course we know--you think us fools--silly fools! You say it's a poor sort of fighting--and what do we hope to get by it? Pin-pricks you call it--all that women can do. Well, so it is--we admit it. It _is_ a poor sort of fighting--we don't admire it any more than you. But it's all men have left to women. You have disarmed us--and fooled us--and made slaves of us. You won't allow us the constitutional weapon of the vote, so we strike as we can, and with what weapons we can--" "Makin' bonfires of innercent people an' their property, ain't politics, Miss!" shouted a voice. "Hear, Hear!" from the crowd. "We haven't killed anybody--but ourselves!" The answer flashed. "Pretty near it! Them folks at Wanchester only just got out--an' there were two children among 'em," cried a man near the waggon. "An' they've just been up to something new at Brownmouth--" All heads turned towards a young man who spoke from the back of the audience. "News just come to the post-office," he shouted--"as the new pier was burnt out early this morning. There's a bit o' wanton mischief for you!" A howl of wrath rose from the audience, amid which the closing words of Delia's speech were lost. Winnington caught a glimpse of her face--pale and excited--as she retreated from the front of the waggon in order to make room for her co-speaker. Gertrude Marvell, as Winnington soon saw, was far more skilled in street oratory than her pupil. By sheer audacity she caught her audience at once, and very soon, mingling defiance with sarcasm, she had turned the news of the burnt pier into a Suffragist parable. What was that blaze in the night, lighting up earth and sea, but an emblem of women's revolt flaming up in the face of dark injustice and oppression? Let them rage! The women mocked. All tyrannies disliked being disturbed--since the days of Nebuchadnezzar. And thereupon, without any trace of excitement, or any fraction of Delia's eloquence, she built up bit by bit, and in face of the growing hostility of the crowd, an edifice of selected statements, which could not have been more adroit. It did not touch or persuade, but it silenced; till at the end she said--each word slow and distinct-- "Now--all these things _you_ may do to women, and nobody minds--nobody troubles at all. But if _we_ make a bonfire of a pier, or an empty house, by way of drawing attention to your proceedings, then, you see red. Well, here we are!--do what you like--torture, imprison us!--you are only longing, I know--some of you--to pull us down now and trample on us, so that you may _show_ us how much stronger men are than women! All right!--but where one woman falls, another will spring up. And meanwhile the candle we are lighting will go on burning till you give us the vote. Nothing simpler--nothing easier. _Give us the vote_!--and send your canting Governments, Liberal, or Tory, packing, till we get it. But until then--windows and empty houses, and piers and such-like, are nothing--but so many opportunities of making our masters uncomfortable, till they free their slaves! Lucky for you, if the thing is no worse!" She paused a moment, and then added with sharp and quiet emphasis-- "And why is it specially necessary that we should try to stir up this district--whether you like our methods or whether you don't? Because--you have living here among you, one of the worst of the persecutors of women! You have here a man who has backed up every cruelty of the Government--who has denied us every right, and scoffed at all our constitutional demands--your neighbour and great landlord, Sir Wilfrid Lang! I call upon every woman in this district, to avenge women on Sir Wilfrid Lang! We are not out indeed to destroy life or limb--we leave that to the men who are trying to coerce women--but we mean to sweep men like Sir Wilfrid Lang out of our way! Meanwhile we can pay special attention to his meetings--we can harass him at railway stations--we can sit on his doorstep--we can put the fear of God into him in a hundred ways--in short we can make his life a tenth part as disagreeable to him as he can make ours to us. We can, if we please, make it a _burden_ to him--and we intend to do so! And don't let men--or women either--waste their breath in preaching to us of 'law and order.' Slaves who have no part in making the law, are not bound by the law. Enforce it if you can! But while you refuse to free us, we despise both the law and the making of the law. Justice--which is a very different thing from law--Justice is our mistress!--and to her we appeal." Folding her arms, she looked the crowd in the face. They seemed to measure each other; on one side, the lines of upturned faces, gaping youths, and smoking workmen, farmers and cattlemen, women and children; on the other, defying them, one thin, neatly-dressed woman, her face, under the lamps, a gleaming point in the dark. Then a voice rose from a lounging group of men, smoking like chimneys--powerful fellows; smeared with the clay of the brickfields. "Who's a-makin' slaves of you, Ma'am? There's most of us workin' for a woman!" A woman in the middle of the crowd laughed shrilly--a queer, tall figure in a battered hat-- "Aye--and a lot yo' give 'er ov a Saturday night, don't yer?" "Sir Wilfrid's a jolly good feller, miss," shouted another man. "Pays 'is men good money, an' no tricks. If you come meddlin' with him, in these parts, you'll catch it." "An' we don't want no suffragettes here, thank you!" cried a sarcastic woman's voice. "We was quite 'appy till you come along, an' we're quite willin' now for to say 'Good-bye, an' God bless yer!'" The crowd laughed wildly, and suddenly a lad on the outskirts of the crowd picked up a cabbage-stalk that had fallen from one of the market-stalls, and flung it at the waggon. The hooligan element, scattered through the market-place, took up the hint at once; brutal things began to be shouted; and in a moment the air was thick with missiles of various sorts, derived from the refuse of the day's market--vegetable remains of all kinds, fragments of wood and cardboard boxes, scraps of filthy matting, and anything else that came handy. The audience at first disapproved. There were loud cries of "Stow it!"--"Shut up!"--"Let the ladies alone!"--and there was little attempt to obstruct the police as they moved forward. But then, by ill-luck, the powerfully-built fair-haired man, who had been speaking when Winnington and Andrews entered the market place, rushed to the front of the waggon, and in a white heat of fury, began to denounce both the assailants of the speakers, and the crowd in general, as "cowardly louts"--on whom argument was thrown away--who could only be reached "through their backs, or their pockets"--with other compliments of the same sort, under which the temper of the "moderates" rapidly gave way. "What an ass! What a damned ass!" groaned Andrews indignantly. "Look here Winnington, you take care of Miss Blanchflower--I'll answer for the other!" And amid a general shouting and scuffling, through which some stones were beginning to fly, Winnington found himself leaping on the waggon, followed by Andrews and a couple of police. Delia confronted him--undaunted, though breathless. "What do you want? We're all right!" "You must come away at once. I can get you through the hotel." "Not at all! We must put the Resolution." "Come Miss!--" said the tall constable behind Winnington--"no use talking! There's a lot of fellows here that mean mischief. You go with this gentleman. He'll look after you." "Not without my friend!" cried Delia, both hands behind her on the edge of the waggon--erect and defiant. "Gertrude!--" she raised her voice--"What do you wish to do?" But amid the din, her appeal was not heard. Gertrude Marvell however could be clearly seen on the other side of the waggon, with Paul Lathrop beside her, listening to the remonstrances and entreaties of Andrews, with a smile as cool, as though she were in the drawing-room of Maumsey Abbey, and the Captain were inviting her to trifle with a cup of tea. "Take her along, Sir!" said the policeman, with a nod to Winnington. "It's getting ugly." And as he spoke, a man jumped upon the waggon, a Latchford doctor, an acquaintance of Winnington's, who said something in his ear. The next moment, a fragment of a bottle, flung from a distance, struck Winnington on the wrist. The blood rushed out, and Delia, suddenly white, looked from it to Winnington's face. The only notice he took of the incident was expressed in the instinctive action of rolling his handkerchief round it. But it stirred him to lay a grasp upon Delia's arm, which she could hardly have resisted. She did not, however, resist. She felt herself lifted down from the waggon, and hurried along, the police keeping back the crowd, into the open door of the hotel. Shouts of a populace half enraged, half amused, pursued her. "Brutes--Cowards!" she gasped, between her teeth--then to Winnington--"Where are you taking me? I have the car!" "There's a motor belonging to a doctor ready at once in the yard of the hotel. Better let me take you home in it. Andrews, I assure you, will look after Miss Marvell!" They passed through the brilliantly-lighted inn, where landlady, chambermaids, and waiters stood grinning in rows to see, and Winnington hurried his charge into the closed motor standing at the inn's back door. "Take the street behind the hotel, and get out by the back of the town. Be quick!" said Winnington to the chauffeur. Booing groups had already begun to gather at the entrance of the yards, and in the side street to which it led. The motor passed slowly through them, then quickened its pace, and in what seemed an incredibly short time, they were in country lanes. Delia leant hack, drawing long breaths of fatigue and excitement. Then she perceived with disgust that her dress was bemired with scraps of dirty refuse, and that some mud was dripping from her hat. She took off the hat, shook it out of the window of the car, but could not bring herself to put it on again. Her hair, loosely magnificent, framed a face that was now all colour and passion. She hated herself, she hated the crowd; it seemed to her she hated the man at her side. Suddenly Winnington turned on the electric light--with an exclamation. "So sorry to be a nuisance--but have you got a spare handkerchief? I'm afraid I shall spoil your dress!" And Delia saw, to her dismay, that his own handkerchief which he had originally tied round his wound was already soaked, and the blood was dripping from it on to the motor-rug. "Yes--yes--I have!" And opening her little wrist-bag, she took out of it two spare handkerchiefs, and tied them, with tremulous hands, round the wrist he held out to her,--a wrist brown and spare and powerful, like the rest of him. "Now--have you got anything you could tie round the arm, above the wound--and then twist the knot?" She thought. "My veil!" She slipped it off in a moment, a long motor veil of stout make. He turned towards her, pushing up his coat sleeve as high as it would go, and shewing her where to put the bandage. She helped him to turn back his shirt sleeve, and then wound the veil tightly round the arm, so as to compress the arteries. Her fingers were warm and strong. He watched them--he felt their touch--with a curious pleasure. "Now, suppose you take this pencil, and twist it in the knot--you know how? Have you done any First Aid?" She nodded. "I know." She did it well. The tourniquet acted, and the bleeding at once slackened. "All right!" said Winnington, smiling at her. "Now if I keep it up that ought to do!" She drew down the sleeve, and he put his hand into the motor-strap hanging near him, which supported it. Then he threw his head back a moment against the cushions of the car. The sudden loss of blood on the top of a long fast, had made him feel momentarily faint. Delia looked at him uneasily--biting her lip. "Let us go back to Latchford, Mr. Winnington, and find a doctor." "Oh dear no! I'm only pumped for a moment. It's going off. I'm perfectly fit. When I've taken you home, I shall go in to our Maumsey man, and get tied up." There was silence. The hedges and fields flew by outside, under the light of the motor, stars overhead, Delia's heart was full of wrath and humiliation. "Mr. Winnington--" "Yes!" He sat up, apparently quite revived. "Mr. Winnington--for Heaven's sake--do give me up!" He looked at her with amused astonishment. "Give you up!--How?" "Give up being my guardian! I really can't stand it. I--I don't mind what happens to myself. But it's too bad that I should be forced to--to make myself such a nuisance to you--or desert all my principles. It's not fair to _me_--that's what I feel--it's not indeed!" she insisted stormily. He saw her dimly as she spoke--the beautiful oval of the face, the white brow, the general graciousness of line, so feminine, in truth!--so appealing. The darkness hid away all that shewed the "female franzy." Distress of mind--distress for his trumpery wound?--had shaken her, brought her back to youth and childishness? Again he felt a rush of sympathy--of tender concern. "Do you think you would do any better with a guardian chosen by the Court?" he asked her, smiling, after a moment's pause. "Of course I should! I shouldn't mind fighting a stranger in the least." "They would be very unlikely to appoint a stranger. They would probably name Lord Frederick." "He wouldn't dream of taking it!" she said, startled. "And you know he is the laziest of men." They both laughed. But her laugh was a sound of agitation, and in the close contact of the motor he was aware of her quick breathing. "Well, it's true he never answers a letter," said Winnington. "But I suppose he's ill." "He's been a _malade imaginaire_ all his life, and he isn't going to begin to put himself out for anybody now!" she said, scornfully. "Your aunt, Miss Blanchflower?" "I haven't spoken to her for years. She used to live with us when I was eighteen. She tried to boss me, and set father against me. But I got the best of her." "I am sure you did," said Winnington. She broke out-- "Oh, I know you think me a perfectly impossible creature whom nobody could ever get on with!" He paused a moment, then said gravely-- "No, I don't think anything of the kind. But I do think that, given what you want, you are going entirely the wrong way to get it." She drew a long and desperate breath. "Oh, for goodness sake don't let's argue!" He refrained. But after a moment he added, still more gravely--"And I do protest--most strongly!--against the influence upon you of the lady you have taken to live with you!" Delia made a vehement movement. "She is my friend!--my dearest friend!" she said, in a shaky voice. "And I believe in her, and admire her with all my heart!" "I know--and I am sorry. Her speech this evening--all the latter part of it--was the speech of an Anarchist. And the first half was a tissue of misstatements. I happen to know something about the facts she dealt with." "Of course you take a different view!" "I _know_," he said, quietly--a little sternly. "Miss Marvell either does not know, or she wilfully misrepresents." "You can't prove it!" "I think I could. And as to that man--Mr. Lathrop--but you know what I think." They both fell silent. Through all his own annoyance and disgust, Winnington was sympathetically conscious of what she too must be feeling--chafed and thwarted, at every turn, by his legal power over her actions, and by the pressure of his male will. He longed to persuade her, convince her, soothe her; but what chance for it, under the conditions she had chosen for her life? The motor drew up at the door of the Abbey, and Winnington turned on the light. "I am afraid I can't help you out. Can you manage?" She stooped anxiously to look at his wrist. "It's bleeding worse again! I am sure I could improve that bandage. Do come in. My maid's got everything." He hesitated--then followed her into the house. The maid was summoned, and proved an excellent nurse. The wound was properly bandaged, and the arm put in a sling. Then, as the maid withdrew, Delia and her guardian were left standing together in the drawing-room, lit only by a dying gleam of fire, and a single lamp. "Good-night," said Winnington, gently. "Don't be the least alarmed about Miss Marvell. The train doesn't arrive for ten minutes yet. Thank you for looking after me so kindly." Delia laughed--but it was a sound of distress. Suddenly he stooped, lifted her hand, and kissed it. "What you are doing seems to me foolish--and _wrong!_ I am afraid I must tell you so plainly," he said, with emotion. "But although I feel like that--my one wish--all the time--is--forgive me if it sounds patronising!--to help you--and stand by you. To see you in that horrid business to-night--made me--very unhappy. I am old-fashioned I suppose--but I could hardly bear it. I wish I could make you trust me a little!" "I do!" she said, choked. "I do--but I must follow my conscience." He shook his head, but said no more. She murmured good-night, and he went. She heard the motor drive away, and remained standing where he had left her, the hand he had kissed hanging at her side. She still felt the touch of his lips upon it, and as the blood rushed into her cheeks, her heart was conscious of new and strange emotions. She longed to go to him as a sister or a daughter might, and say--"Forgive me--understand me--don't despair of me!" The trance of feeling broke, and passed away. She caught up a cloak and went to the hall door to listen for Gertrude Marvell. "What I _shall_ have to say to him before long, is--'I have tricked you this quarter out of £500--and I mean to do it again next quarter--if I can!' He won't want to kiss my hand again!" Chapter X Two men sat smoking and talking with Paul Lathrop in the hook-littered sitting-room of his cottage. One was a young journalist, Roger Blaydes, whose thin, close-shaven face wore the knowing fool's look of one to whom the world's his oyster, and all the bricks for opening it familiar. The other was a god-like creature, a poet by profession, with long lantern-jaws, grey eyes deeply set, and a mass of curly black hair, from which the face with its pallor and its distinction, shone dimly out like the portrait of a Cinquecento. Lathrop, in a kind of dressing-gown, as clumsily cut as the form it wrapped, his reddish hair and large head catching the firelight, had the look of one lazily at bay, as wrapped in a cloud of smoke, he twined from one speaker to the other. "So you were at another of these meetings last night?" said Blaydes, with a mouth half smiling, half contemptuous. "Yes. A disgusting failure! They didn't even take the trouble to pelt us." The poet--Merian by name--moved angrily on his chair. Blaydes threw a sly look at him, as he knocked the ash from his cigarette. "And what the deuce do you expect to get by it all?" Paul Lathrop paused a moment--and at last said with a lift of the eyebrows:-- "Well!--I have no illusions!" Merian broke out indignantly-- "I say, Lathrop--why should you try and play up to that cynic there? As if he ever had an illusion about anything!" "Well, but one may have faith without illusions," protested Blaydes, with hard good temper. "I doubt whether Lathrop has an ounce of either!" Lathrop reached out for a match. "What's the good of 'faith'--and what does anyone mean by it? Sympathies--and animosities: they're enough for me." "And you really are in sympathy with these women?" said the other. The tone was incredulous. Merian brought his hand violently down on the table. "Don't you talk about them, Blaydes! I tell you, they're out of your ken." "I daresay," said Blaydes, composedly. "I was only trying to get at what Lathrop means by going into the business." Paul Lathrop sat up. "I'm in sympathy with anything that harasses, and bothers and stings the governing classes of this country!" he said, with an oratorical wave of his cigarette. "What fools they are! In this particular business the Government is an ass, the public is an ass, the women, if you like, are asses. So long as they don't destroy works of art that appeal to me, I prefer to bray with them than with their enemies." Merian rose impatiently--a slim, dark-browed St. George towering over the other two. "After that, I'd rather hear them attacked by Blaydes, than defended by you, Lathrop!" he said with energy, as he buttoned up his coat. Lathrop threw him a cool glance. "So for you, they're all heroines--and saints?" "Never mind what they are. I stand by them! I'm ready to give them what they ask." "Ready to hand the Empire over to them--to smash like the windows in Piccadilly?" said Blaydes. "Hang the Empire!--what does the Empire matter! Give the people in these islands what they _want_ before you begin to talk about the Empire. Well, good-bye, I must be off!" He nodded to the other two, and opened the door of the Hermitage which led directly into the outer air. On the threshold he turned and looked back, irresolutely, as though in compunction for his loss of temper. Framed in the doorway against a background of sunset sky, his dark head and sparely-noble features were of a singular though melancholy beauty. It was evident that he was full of speech, of which he could not in the end unburden himself. The door closed behind him, and he was gone. "Poor devil!" said Blaydes, tipping the end of his cigarette into the fire-"he's in love with a girl who's been in prison three times. He thinks she'll kill herself--and he can't influence her at all. He takes it hard. Well, now look here"--the young man's expression changed and stiffened--"I understand that you too are seeing a good deal of one of these wild women--and that she's both rich--and a beauty?" He looked up, with a laugh. Lathrop's aspect was undisturbed. "Nothing to do with it!--though your silly little mind will no doubt go on thinking so." The other laughed again--with a more emphatic mockery. Lathrop reddened--then said quietly-- "Well, I admit that was a lie. Yes, she is handsome--and if she were to stick to it--sacrifice all her life to it--in time she might make a horrible success of this thing. Will she stick to it?" "Are you in love with her, Paul?" "Of course! I am in love with all pretty women--especially when I daren't shew it." "You daren't shew it?" "The smallest advance on my part, in this quarter, brings me a rap on the knuckles. I try to pitch what I have to say in the most impersonal and romantic terms. No good at all! But all egg-dancing is amusing, so I dance--and accept all the drudgery she and Alecto give me to do." "Alecto? Miss Marvell?" "Naturally." "These meetings must be pretty boring." "Especially because I can't keep my temper. I lose it in the vulgarest way--and say the most idiotic things." There was a pause of silence. The eyes of the journalist wandered round the room, coming back to Lathrop at last with renewed curiosity. "How are your affairs, Paul?" "Couldn't be worse. Everything here would have been seized long ago, if there had been anything to seize. But you can't distrain on trout--dear slithery things. And as the ponds afford my only means of sustenance, and do occasionally bring in something, my creditors have to leave me the house and a few beds and chairs so that I may look after them." "Why don't you write another book?" "Because at present I have nothing to say. And on that point I happen to have a conscience--some rays of probity, left." He got up as he spoke, and went across the room, to a covered basket beside the fire. "Mimi!" he said caressingly--"poor Mimi!" He raised a piece of flannel, and a Persian kitten lying in the basket--a sick kitten--lifted its head languidly. "_Tu m'aimes_, Mimi?" The kitten looked at him with veiled eyes, already masked with death. Lathrop stooped for a saucer of warm milk standing by the fire. The kitten refused it, but when he dipped his fingers in the milk, it made a momentary effort to lick them, then subsiding, sank to sleep again. "Poor little beast!" said Blaydes--"what's the matter?" "Some poison--I don't know what. It'll die tonight." "Then you'll be all alone?" "I'm never alone," said Lathrop, with decision. And rising he went to the door of the cottage--which opened straight on the hill-side, and set it open. It was four o'clock on a November day. The autumn was late, and of a marvellous beauty. The month was a third gone and still there were trees here and there, isolated trees, intensely green as though they defied decay. The elder trees, the first to leaf under the Spring, were now the last to wither. The elms in twenty-four hours had turned a pale gold atop, while all below was still round and green. But the beeches were nearly gone; all that remained of them was a thin pattern of separate leaves, pale gold and faintly sparkling against the afternoon sky. Such a sky! Bands of delicate pinks, lilacs and blues scratched across an inner-heaven of light, and in the mid-heaven a blazing furnace, blood-red, wherein the sun had just plunged headlong to its death. And under the sky, an English scene of field and woodland, fading into an all-environing forest, still richly clothed. While in the foreground and middle distance, some trees already stripped and bare, winter's first spoil, stood sharply black against the scarlet of the sunset. And fusing the whole scene, hazes of blue, amethyst or purple, beyond a Turner's brush, "What beauty!--my God!" Blaydes came to stand beside the speaker, glancing at him with eyes half curious, half mocking. "You get so much pleasure out of it?" For answer, Lathrop murmured a few words as though to himself, a sudden lightening in his sleepy eyes-- L'univers--si liquide, si pur!-- Une belle eau qu'on voudrait boire. "I don't understand French"--said Blaydes, with a shrug--"not French verse, anyway." "That's a pity," was the dry reply--"because you can't read Madame de Noailles. Ah!--there are Lang's pheasants calling!--his tenants I suppose--for he's left the shooting." He pointed to a mass of wood on his left hand from which the sound came. "They say he's never here?" "Two or three times a year,--just on business. His wife--a little painted doll--hates the place, and they've built a villa at Beaulieu." "Rather risky leaving a big house empty in these days--with your wild women about!" Lathrop looked round. "Good heavens!--who would ever dream of touching Monk Lawrence! I bet even Gertrude Marvell hasn't nerve enough for that. Look here!--have you ever seen it?" "Never." "Come along then. There's just time--while this light lasts." They snatched their caps, and were presently mounting the path which led ultimately through the woods of Monk Lawrence to the western front. Blaydes frowned as he walked. He was a young man of a very practical turn of mind, who in spite of an office-boy's training possessed an irrelevant taste for literature which had made him an admirer of Lathrop's two published volumes. For some time past he had been Lathrop's chancellor of the exchequer--self-appointed, and had done his best to keep his friend out of the workhouse. From the tone of Paul's recent letters he had become aware of two things--first, that Lathrop was in sight of his last five pound note, and did not see his way to either earning or borrowing another; and secondly, that a handsome girl had appeared on the scene, providentially mad with the same kind of madness as had recently seized on Lathrop, belonging to the same anarchial association, and engaged in the same silly defiance of society; likely therefore to be thrown a good deal in his company; and last, but most important, possessed of a fortune which she would no doubt allow the "Daughters of Revolt" to squander--unless Paul cut in. The situation had begun to seem to him interesting, and having already lent Lathrop more money than he could afford, he had come down to enquire about it. He himself possessed an income of three hundred a year, plus two thousand pounds left him by an uncle. Except for the single weakness which had induced him to lend Lathrop a couple of hundred pounds, his principles with regard to money were frankly piratical. Get what you can--and how you can. Clearly it was Lathrop's game to take advantage of this queer friendship with a militant who happened to be both rich and young, which his dabbling in their "nonsense" had brought about. Why shouldn't he achieve it? Lathrop was as clever as sin; and there was the past history of the man, to shew that he could attract women. He gripped his friend's arm as they passed into the shadow of the wood. Lathrop looked at him with surprise-- "Look here, Paul"--said the younger man in a determined voice--"You've got to pull this thing off." "What thing?" "You can marry this girl if you put your mind to it. You tell me you're going about the country with her speaking at meetings--that you're one of her helpers and advisers. That is--you've got an A1 chance with her. If you don't use it, you're a blithering idiot." Paul threw back his head and laughed. "And what about other people? What about her guardian, for instance--who is the sole trustee of the property--who has a thousand chances with her to my one--and holds, I venture to say--if he knows anything about me--the strongest views on the subject of _my_ moral character?" "Who is her guardian?" "Mark Wilmington. Does that convey anything to you?" Blaydes whistled. "Great Scott!" "Yes. Precisely 'Great Scott!'" said Lathrop, mocking. "I may add that everybody here has their own romance on the subject. They are convinced that Winnington will soon cure her of her preposterous notions, and restore her, tamed, to a normal existence." Blaydes meditated,--his aspect showing a man checked. "I saw Winnington playing in a county match last August," he said--with his eyes on the ground--"I declare no one looked at anybody else. I suppose he's forty; but the old stagers tell you that he's just as much of an Apollo now as he was in his most famous days--twenty years ago." "Don't exaggerate. He _is_ forty, and I'm thirty--which is one to me. I only meant to suggest to you a _reasonable_ view of the chances." "Look here--_is_ she as handsome as people say?" "Blaydes!--this is the last time I shall allow you to talk about her--you get on my nerves. Handsome? I don't know." He walked on, muttering to himself and twitching at the trees on either hand. "I am simply putting what is your duty to yourself--and your creditors," said Blaydes, sulkily--"You must know your affairs are in a pretty desperate state." "And a girl like that is to be sacrificed--to my creditors! Good Lord!" "Oh, well, if you regard yourself as such an undesirable, naturally, I've nothing to say. Of course I know--there's that case against you. But it's a good while ago; and I declare women don't look at those things as they used to do. Why don't you play the man of letters business? You know very well, Paul, you could earn a lot of money if you chose. But you're such a lazy dog!" "Let me alone!" said Lathrop, rather fiercely. "The fact that you've lent me a couple of hundred really doesn't give you the right to talk to me like this." "I won't lend you a farthing more unless you promise me to take this thing seriously," said Blaydes, doggedly. Lathrop burst into a nervous shout of laughter. "I say, do shut up! I assure you, you can't bully me. Now then--here's the house!" And as he spoke they emerged from the green oblong, bordered by low yew edges, from which as from a flat and spacious shelf carved out of the hill, Monk Lawrence surveyed the slopes below it, the clustered village, the middle distance with its embroidery of fields and trees, with the vaporous stretches of the forest beyond, and in the far distance, a shining line of sea. "My word!--that is a house!" cried Blaydes, stopping to survey it and get his townsman's breath, after the steep pitch of hill. "Not bad?" "Is it shown?" "Used to be. It has been shut lately for fear of the militants." "But they keep somebody in it?" "Yes--in some room at the back. A keeper, and his three children. The wife's dead. Shall I go and see if he'll let us in? But he won't. He'll have seen my name at that meeting, in the Latchford paper." "No, no. I shall miss my train. Let's walk round. Why, you'd think it was on fire already!" said Blaydes, with a start, gazing at the house. For the marvellous evening now marching from the western forest, was dyeing the whole earth in crimson, and the sun just emerging from one bank of cloud, before dropping into the bank below, was flinging a fierce glare upon the wide grey front of Monk Lawrence. Every window blazed, and some fine oaks still thick with red leaf, which flanked the house on the north, flamed in concert. The air was suffused with red; every minor tone, blue or brown, green or purple, shewed through it, as through a veil. And yet how quietly the house rose, in the heart of the flame! Peace brooding on memory seemed to breathe from its rounded oriels, its mossy roof, its legend in stone letters running round the eaves, the carved trophies and arabesques which framed the stately doorway, the sleepy fountain with its cupids, in the courtyard, the graceful loggia on the northern side. It stood, aloof and self-contained, amid the lightnings and arrows of the departing sun. "No--they'd never dare to touch that!" said Lathrop as he led the way to the path skirting the house. "And if I caught Miss Marvell at it, I'm not sure I shouldn't hand her over myself!" "Aren't we trespassing?" said Blaydes, as their footsteps rang on the broad flagged path which led from the front court to the terrace at the back of the house. "Certainly. Ah, the dog's heard us." And before they had gone more than a few steps further, a burly man appeared at the further corner of the house, holding a muzzled dog--a mastiff--on a leash. "What might you be wanting, gentlemen?" he said gruffly. "Why, you know me, Daunt. I brought a friend up to look at your wonderful place. We can walk through, can't we?" "Well, as you're here, Sir, I'll let you out by the lower gate. But this is private ground, Sir, and Sir Wilfrid's orders are strict,--not to let anybody through that hasn't either business with the house or an order from himself." "All right. Let's have a look at the back and the terrace, and then we'll be off; Sir Wilfrid coming here?" "Not that I know of, Sir," said the keeper shortly, striding on before the two men, and quieting his dog, who was growling at their heels. As he spoke he led the way down a stately flight of stone steps by which the famous eastern terrace at the back of the house was reached. The three men and the dog disappeared from view. Steadily the sunset faded. An attacking host of cloud rushed upon it from the sea, and quenched it. The lights in the windows of Monk Lawrence went out. Dusk fell upon the house and all its approaches. Suddenly, two figures--figures of women--emerged in the twilight from the thick plantation, which protected the house on the north. They reached the flagged path with noiseless feet, and then pausing, they began what an intelligent spectator would have soon seen to be a careful reconnoitering of the whole northern side of the house. They seemed to examine the windows, a garden door, the recesses in the walls, the old lead piping, the creepers and shrubs. Then one of them, keeping close to the house wall, which was in deep shadow, went quickly round to the back. The other awaited her. In the distance rose at intervals a dog's uneasy bark. In a very few minutes the woman who had gone round the house returned and the two, slipping back into the dense belt of wood from which they had come, were instantly swallowed up by it. Their appearance and their movements throughout had been as phantom-like and silent as the shadows which were now engulfing the house. Anyone who had seen them come and go might almost have doubted his own eyes. * * * * * Daunt the Keeper returned leisurely to his quarters in some back premises of Monk Lawrence, at the southeastern corner of the house. But he had but just opened his own door when he again heard the sound of footsteps in the fore-court. "Well, what's come to the folk to-night"--he muttered, with some ill-humour, as he turned back towards the front. A woman!--standing with her back to the house, in the middle of the forecourt as though the place belonged to her, and gazing at the piled clouds of the west, still haunted by the splendour just past away. A veritable Masque of Women, all of the Maenad sort, had by now begun to riot through Daunt's brain by night and day. He raised his voice sharply-- "What's your business here, Ma'am? There is no public road past this house." The lady turned, and came towards him. "Don't you know who I am, Mr. Daunt? But I remember you when I was a child." Daunt peered through the dusk. "You have the advantage of me, Madam," he said, stiffly. "Kindly give me your name." "Miss Blanchflower--from Maumsey Abbey!" said a young, conscious voice. "I used to come here with my grandmother, Lady Blanchflower. I have been intending to come and pay you a visit for a long time--to have a look at the old house again. And just now I was passing the foot of your hill in a motor; something went wrong with the car, and while they were mending it, I ran up. But it's getting dark so quick, one can hardly see anything!" Daunt's attitude showed no relaxation. Indeed, quick recollections assailed him of certain reports in the local papers, now some ten days old. Miss Blanchflower indeed! She was a brazen one--after all done and said. "Pleased to see you, Miss, if you'll kindly get an order from Sir Wilfrid. But I have strict instructions from Sir Wilfrid not to admit anyone--not anyone whatsoever--to the gardens or the house, without his order." "I should have thought, Mr. Daunt, that only applied to strangers." The tones shewed annoyance. "My father, Sir Robert Blanchflower, was an old friend of Sir Wilfrid's." "Can't help it, Miss," said Daunt, not without the secret zest of the Radical putting down his "betters." "There are queer people about. I can't let no one in without an order." As he spoke, a gate slammed on his left, and Daunt, with the feeling of one beset, turned in wrath to see who might be this new intruder. Since the house had been closed to visitors, and a notice to the effect had been posted in the village, scarcely a soul had penetrated through its enclosing woods, except Miss Amberley, who came to teach Daunts crippled child. And now in one evening here were three assaults upon its privacy! But as to the third he was soon reassured. "Hullo, Daunt, is that you? Did I hear you telling Miss Blanchflower you can't let her in? But you know her of course?" said a man's easy voice. Delia started. The next moment her hand was in her guardian's, and she realised that he had heard the conversation between herself and Daunt, realised also that she had committed a folly not easily to be explained, either to Winnington or herself, in obeying the impulse which--half memory, half vague anxiety,--had led her to pay this sudden visit to the house. Gertrude Marvell had left Maumsey that morning, saying she should be in London for the day. Had Gertrude been with her, Delia would have let Monk Lawrence go by. For in Gertrude's company it had become an instinct with her--an instinct she scarcely confessed to herself--to avoid all reference to the house. At sight of Winnington, however, who was clearly a privileged person in his eyes, Daunt instantly changed his tone. "Good evening, Sir. Perhaps you'll explain to this young lady? We've got to keep a sharp lookout--you know that, Sir." "Certainly, Daunt, certainly. I am sure Miss Blanchflower understands. But you'll let _me_ shew her the house, I imagine?" "Why, of course, Sir! There's nothing you can't do here. Give me a few minutes--I'll turn on some lights. Perhaps the young lady will walk in?" He pointed to his own rooms. "So you still keep the electric light going?" "By Sir Wilfrid's wish, Sir,--so as if anything did happen these winter nights, we mightn't be left in darkness. The engine works a bit now and then." He led the way towards his quarters. The door into his kitchen stood open, and in the glow of fire and lamp stood his three children, who had been eagerly listening to the conversation outside. One of them, a little girl, was leaning on a crutch. She looked up happily as Winnington entered. "Well, Lily--" he pinched her cheek--"I've got something to tell Father about you. Say 'how do you do' to this lady." The child put her hand in Delia's, looking all the while ardently at Winnington. "Am I going to be in your school, Sir?" "If you're good. But you'll have to be dreadfully good!" "I am good," said Lily, confidently. "I want to be in your school, please Sir." "But such a lot of other little girls want to come too! Must I leave them out?" Lily shook her head perplexed. "But you promithed," she lisped, very softly. Winnington laughed. The child's hand had transferred itself to his, and nestled there. "What school does she mean?" asked Delia. At the sound of her voice Winnington turned to her for the first time. It was as though till then he had avoided looking at her, lest the hidden thought in each mind should be too plain to the other. He had found her--Sir Robert Blanchflower's daughter--on the point of being curtly refused admission to the house where her father had been a familiar inmate, and where she herself had gone in and out as a child. And he knew why; she knew why; Daunt knew why. She was a person under suspicion, a person on whom the community was keeping watch. Nevertheless, Winnington entirely believed what he had overheard her say to the keeper. It was no doubt quite true that she had turned aside to see Monk Lawrence on a sudden impulse of sentiment or memory. Odd that it should be so!--but like her. That _she_ could have any designs on the beautiful old place was indeed incredible; and it was equally incredible that she would aid or abet them in anyone else. And yet--there was that monstrous speech at Latchford, made in her hearing, by her friend and co-militant, the woman who shared her life! Was it any wonder that Daunt bristled at the sight of her? He had, however, to answer her question. "My county school," he explained. "The school for invalid children--'physical defectives'--that we are going to open next summer. I came to tell Daunt there'd be a place for this child. She's an old friend of mine." He smiled down upon the nestling creature--"Has Miss Amberley been to see you lately, Lily?" At this moment Daunt returned to the kitchen, with the news that the house was ready. "The light's not quite what it ought to be, Sir, but I daresay you'll be able to see a good deal. Miss Amberley, Sir, she's taught Lily fine. I'm sure we're very much obliged to her--and to you for asking her." "I don't know what the sick children here will do without her, Daunt. She's going away--wants to be a nurse." "Well, I'm very sorry, Sir. She'll be badly missed." "That she will. Shall we go in?" Winnington turned to Delia, who nodded assent, and followed him into the dim passages beyond the brightly-lighted kitchen. The children, looking after them, saw the beautiful lady disappearing, and felt vaguely awed by her height, her stiff carriage and her proud looks. Delia, indeed, was again--and as usual--in revolt, against herself and circumstances. Why had she been such a fool as to come to Monk Lawrence at all, and then to submit to seeing it--on sufferance!--in Winnington's custody? And how he must be contrasting her with Susy Amberley!--the soft sister of charity, plying her womanly tasks, in the manner of all good women, since the world began! She saw herself as the anarchist prowling outside, tracked, spied on, held at arm's length by all decent citizens, all lovers of ancient beauty, and moral tradition; while, within, women like Susy Amberley sat Madonna-like, with the children at their knee. "Well, we stand for the children too--the children of the future!" she said to herself defiantly. "This is the old hall--and the gallery that was put up in honour of Elizabeth's visit here in 1570--" she heard Winnington saying--"One of the finest things of its kind. But you can hardly see it." The electric light indeed was of the feeblest. A dim line of it ran round the carved ceiling, and glimmered in the central chandelier. But the mingled illumination of sunset and moonrise from outside contended with it on more than equal terms; and everything in the hall, tapestries, armour, and old oak, the gallery above, the dais with its carved chairs below, had the dim mystery of a stage set ready for the play, before the lights are on. Daunt apologised. "The gardener'll be here directly, Sir. He knows how to manage it better than I." And in spite of protests from the two visitors he ran off again to see what could he done to better the light. Delia turned impetuously on her companion. "I know you think I have no business to be here!" Winnington paused a moment, then said-- "I was rather astonished to see you here, certainly." "Because of what we said at Latchford the other day?" "_You_ didn't say it!" "But I agreed with it--I agreed with every word of it!" "Then indeed I _am_ astonished that you should wish to see Sir Wilfrid Lang's house!" he said, with energy. "My recollections of it have nothing to do with Sir Wilfrid. I never saw him that I know of." "All the same, it belongs to him." "No!--to history--to the nation!" "Then let the nation guard it--and every individual in the nation! But do you think Miss Marvell would take much pains to protect it?" "Gertrude said nothing about the house." "No; but if I had been one of the excitable women you command, my one desire after that speech would have been to do some desperate damage to Sir Wilfrid, or his property. If anything does happen, I am afraid everyone in the neighbourhood will regard her as responsible." Delia moved impatiently. "Can't we say what we think of Sir Wilfrid--because he happens to possess a beautiful house?" "If you care for Monk Lawrence, you do so,--with this campaign on foot--only at great risk. Confess, Miss Delia!--that you were sorry for that speech!" He turned upon her with animation. She spoke as though under pressure, her head thrown back, her face ivory within the black frame of the veil. "I--I shouldn't have made it." "That's not enough. I want to hear you say you regret it!" The light suddenly increased, and she saw him looking at her, his eyes bright and urgent, his attitude that of the strong yet mild judge, whose own moral life watches keenly for any sign of grace in the accused before him. She realised for an angry moment what his feeling must be--how deep and invincible, towards these "outrages" which she and Gertrude Marvell regarded by now as so natural and habitual--outrages that were calmly planned and organised, as she knew well, at the head offices of their society, by Gertrude Marvell among others, and acquiesced in--approved--by hundreds of persons like herself, who either shrank from taking a direct part in them, or had no opportunity of doing so. "But I shall soon make opportunities!--" she thought, passionately; "I'm not going to be a shirker!" Aloud she said in her stiffest manner--"I stand by my friends, Mr. Winnington, especially when they are ten times better and nobler than I!" His expression changed. He turned, like any courteous stranger, to playing the part of showman of the house. Once more a veil had fallen between them. He led her through the great suite of rooms on the ground-floor, the drawing-room, the Red Parlour, the Chinese room, the Library. They recalled her childish visits to the house with her grandmother, and a score of recollections, touching or absurd, rushed into her mind--but not to her lips. Dumbness had fallen on her;--nothing seemed worth saying, and she hurried through. She was conscious only of a rich confused impression of old seemliness and mellowed beauty,--steeped in fragrant and famous memories, English history, English poetry, English art, breathing from every room and stone of the house. "In the Red Parlour, Sidney wrote part of the 'Arcadia.'--In the room overhead Gabriel Harvey slept.--In the Porch rooms Chatham stayed--his autograph is there.--Fox advised upon all the older portion of the Library"--and so on. She heard Winnington's voice as though through a dream. What did it matter? She felt the house an oppression--as though it accused or threatened her. As they emerged from the library into a broad passage, Winnington noticed a garden door at the north end of the passage, and called to Daunt who was walking behind them. They went to look at it, leaving Delia in the corridor. "Not very secure, is it?" said Winnington, pointing to the glazed upper half of the door--"anyone might get in there." "I've told Sir Wilfrid, Sir, and sent him the measurements. There's to be an iron shutter." "H'm--that may take time. Why not put up something temporary?--cross-bars of some sort?" They came back towards Delia, discussing it. Unreasonably, absurdly, she held it an offence that Winnington should discuss it in her presence; her breath grew stormy. Daunt turned to the right at the foot of a carved staircase, and down a long passage leading to the kitchens, he and Winnington still talking. Suddenly--a short flight of steps, not very visible in a dark place. Winnington descended them, and then turned to look for Delia who was just behind-- "Please take care!--" But he was too late. Head in air--absorbed in her own passionate mood, Delia never saw the steps, till her foot slipped on the topmost. She would have fallen headlong, had not Winnington caught her. His arms received her, held her, released her. The colour rushed into his face as into hers. "You are not hurt?" he said anxiously. "I ought to have held a light," said Daunt, full of concern. But the little incident had broken the ice. Delia laughed, and straightened her Cavalier hat, which had suffered. She was still rosy as they entered Daunt's kitchen, and the children who had seen her silent and haughty entrance, hardly recognised the creature all life and animation who returned to them. The car stood waiting in the fore-court. Winnington put her in. As Delia descended the hill alone in the dark, she closed her eyes, that she might the more completely give herself to the conflict of thoughts which possessed her. She was bitterly ashamed and sore, torn between her passionate affection for Gertrude Marvell, and what seemed to her a weak and traitorous wish to stand better with Mark Winnington. Nor could she escape from the memory--the mere physical memory--of those strong arms round her, resent it as she might. * * * * * As for Winnington, when he reached home in the moonlight, instead of going in to join his sister at tea, he paced a garden path till night had fallen. What was this strong insurgent feeling he could neither reason with nor silence? It seemed to have stolen upon him, amid a host of other thoughts and pre-occupations, secretly and insidiously, till there it stood--full-grown--his new phantom self--challenging the old, the normal self, face to face. Trouble, self-scorn overwhelmed him. Recalling all his promises to himself, all his assurances to Lady Tonbridge, he stood convicted, as the sentry who has shut his eyes and let the invader pass. Monstrous!--that in his position, with this difference of age between them, he should have allowed such ideas to grow and gather head. Beautiful wayward creature!--all the more beguiling, because of the Difficulties that bristled round her. His common sense, his judgment were under no illusions at all about Delia Blanchflower. And yet-- This then was _passion_!--which must be held down and reasoned down. He would reason it down. She must and should marry a man of her own generation--youth with youth. And, moreover, to give way to these wild desires would be simply to alienate her, to destroy all his own power with her for good. The ghostly presence of his life came to him. He cried out to her, made appeal to her, in sackcloth and ashes. And then, in some mysterious, heavenly way she was revealed to him afresh; not as an enemy whom he had offended, not as a lover slighted, but as his best and tenderest friend. She closed no gates against the future:--that was for himself to settle, if closed they were to be. She seemed to walk with him, hand in hand, sister with brother--in a deep converse of souls. Chapter XI Gertrude Marvell was sitting alone at the Maumsey breakfast-table, in the pale light of a December day. All around her were letters and newspapers, to which she was giving an attention entirely denied to her meal. She opened them one after another, with a frown or a look of satisfaction, classifying them in heaps as she read, and occasionally remembering her coffee or her toast. The parlourmaid waited on her, but knew very well--and resented the knowledge--that Miss Marvell was scarcely aware of her existence, or her presence in the room. But presently the lady at the table asked-- "Is Miss Blanchflower getting up?" "She will be down directly, Miss." Gertrude's eyebrows rose, unconsciously. She herself was never late for an 8:30 breakfast, and never went to bed till long after midnight. The ways of Delia, who varied between too little sleep and the long nights of fatigue, seemed to her self-indulgent. After her letters had been put aside and the ordinary newspapers, she took up a new number of the _Tocsin_. The first page was entirely given up to an article headed "How LONG?" She read it with care, her delicate mouth tightening a little. She herself had suggested the lines of it a few days before, to the Editor, and her hints had been partially carried out. It gave a scathing account of Sir Wilfrid's course on the suffrage question--of his earlier coquettings with the woman's cause, his defection and "treachery," the bitter and ingenious hostility with which he was now pursuing the Bill before the House of Commons. "An amiable, white-haired nonentity for the rest of the world--who only mention him to marvel that such a man was ever admitted to an English Cabinet--to us he is the 'smiler with the knife,' the assassin of the hopes of women, the reptile in the path. The Bill is weakening every day in the House, and on the night of the second reading it will receive its 'coup de grace' from the hand of Sir Wilfrid Lang. Women of England--_how long_!--" Gertrude pushed the newspaper aside in discontent. Her critical sense was beginning to weary of the shrieking note. And the descent from the "assassin of the hopes of women" to "the reptile in the path" struck her as a silly bathos. Suddenly, a reverie--a waking dream--fell upon her, a visionary succession of sights and sounds. A dying sunset--and a rising wind, sighing through dense trees--old walls--the light from a kitchen window--voices in the distance--the barking of a dog.... "Oh Gertrude!--how late I am!" Delia entered hurriedly, with an anxious air. "I should have been down long ago, but Weston had one of her attacks, and I have been looking after her." Weston was Delia's maid who had been her constant companion for ten years. She was a delicate nervous woman, liable to occasional onsets of mysterious pain, which terrified both herself and her mistress, and had hitherto puzzled the doctor. Gertrude received the news with a passing concern. "Better send for France, if you are worried. But I expect it will be soon over." "I don't know. It seems worse than usual. The man in Paris threatened an operation. And here we are--going up to London in a fortnight!" "Well, you need only send her to the Brownmouth hospital, or leave her here with France and a good nurse." "She has the most absurd terror of hospitals, and I certainly couldn't leave her," said Delia, with a furrowed brow. "You certainly couldn't stay behind!" Gertrude looked up pleasantly. "Of course I want to come--" said Delia slowly. "Why, darling, how could we do without you? You don't know how you're wanted. Whenever I go up town, it's the same--'When's she coming?' Of course they understood you must be here for a while--but the heart of things, the things that concern _us_--is London." "What did you hear yesterday?" asked Delia, helping herself to some very cold coffee. Nothing was ever kept warm for her, the owner of the house; everything was always kept warm for Gertrude. Yet the fact arose from no Sybaritic tendency whatever on Gertrude's part. Food, clothing, sleep--no religious ascetic could have been more sparing than she, in her demands upon them. She took them as they came--well or ill supplied; too pre-occupied to be either grateful or discontented. And what she neglected for herself, she equally neglected for other people. "What did I hear?" repeated Gertrude. "Well, of course, everything is rushing on. There is to be a raid on Parliament as soon as the session begins--and a deputation to Downing Street. A number of new plans, and devices are being discussed. And there seemed to me to be more volunteers than ever for 'special service'?" She looked up quietly and her eyes met Delia's;--in hers a steely ardour, in Delia's a certain trouble. "Well, we want some cheering up," said the girl, rather wearily. "Those two last meetings were--pretty depressing!--and so were the bye-elections." She was thinking of the two open-air meetings at Brownmouth and Frimpton. There had been no violence offered to the speakers, as in the Latchford case; the police had seen to that. Her guardian had made no appearance at either, satisfied, no doubt, after enquiry, that she was not likely to come to harm. But the evidence of public disapproval could scarcely have been more chilling--more complete. Both her speaking, and that of Gertrude and Paul Lathrop, seemed to her to have dropped dead in exhausted air. An audience of boys and girls--an accompaniment of faint jeers, testifying rather to boredom than hostility--a sense of blank waste and futility when all was over:--her recollection had little else to shew. Gertrude interrupted her thought. "My dear Delia!--what you want is to get out of this backwater, and back into the main stream! Even I get stale here. But in those great London meetings--there one catches on again!--one realises again--what it all _means_! Why not come up with me next week, even if the flat's not ready? I can't have you running down like this! Let's hurry up and get to London." The speaker had risen, and standing behind Delia, she laid her hand on the waves of the girl's beautiful hair. Delia looked up. "Very well. Yes, I'll come. I've been getting depressed. I'll come--at least if Weston's all right." * * * * * "I'm afraid, Miss Blanchflower, this is a very serious business!" Dr. France was the speaker. He stood with his back to the fire, and his hands behind him, surveying Delia with a look of absent thoughtfulness; the look of a man of science on the track of a problem. Delia's aspect was one of pale consternation. She had just heard that the only hope of the woman, now wrestling upstairs with agonies of pain, lay in a critical and dangerous operation, for which at least a fortnight's preliminary treatment would be necessary. A nurse was to be sent for at once, and the only question to be decided was where and by whom the thing was to be done. "We _can_ move her," said France, meditatively; "though I'd rather not. And of course a hospital is the best place." "She won't go! Her mother died in a hospital, and Weston thinks she was neglected." "Absurd! I assure you," said France warmly. "Nobody is neglected in hospitals." "But one can't persuade her--and if she's forced against her will, it'll give her no chance!" said Delia in distress. "No, it must be here. You say we can get a good man from Brownmouth?" They discussed the possibilities of an operation at Maumsey. Insensibly the doctor's tone during the conversation grew more friendly, as it proceeded. A convinced opponent of "feminism" in all its forms, he had thought of Delia hitherto as merely a wrong-headed, foolish girl, and could hardly bring himself to be civil at all to her chaperon, who in his eyes belonged to a criminal society, and was almost certainly at that very moment engaged in criminal practices. But Delia, absorbed in the distresses of someone she cared for, all heart and eager sympathy, her loveliness lending that charm to all she said and looked which plainer women must so frequently do without was a very mollifying and ingratiating spectacle. France began to think her--misled and unbalanced of course--but sound at bottom. He ended by promising to make all arrangements himself, and to go in that very afternoon to see the great man at Brownmouth. When Delia returned to her maid's room, the morphia which had been administered was beginning to take effect, and Weston, an elderly woman with a patient, pleasing face, lay comparatively at rest, her tremulous look expressing at once the keenness of the suffering past, and the bliss of respite. Delia bent over her, dim-eyed. "Dear Weston--we've arranged it all--it's going to be done here. You'll be at home--and I shall look after you." Weston put out a clammy hand and faintly pressed Delia's warm fingers-- "But you were going to London, Miss. I don't want to put you out so." "I shan't go till you're out of the wood, so go to sleep--and don't worry." * * * * * "Delia!--for Heaven's sake be reasonable. Leave Weston to France, and a couple of good nurses. She'll be perfectly looked after. You'll put out all out plans--you'll risk everything!" Gertrude Marvell had risen from her seat in front of a crowded desk. The secretary who generally worked with her in the old gun room, now become a militant office, had disappeared in obedience to a signal from her chief. Anger and annoyance were plainly visible on Gertrude's small chiselled features. Delia shook her head. "I can't!" she said. "I've promised. Weston has pulled _me_ through two bad illnesses--once when I had pneumonia in Paris--and once after a fall out riding. I daresay I shouldn't be here at all, but for her. If she's going to have a fight for her life--and Doctor France doesn't promise she'll get through--I shall stand by her." Gertrude grew a little sallower than usual as her black eyes fastened themselves on the girl before her who had hitherto seemed so ductile in her hands. It was not so much the incident itself that alarmed her as a certain new tone in Delia's voice. "I thought we had agreed--that nothing--_nothing_--was to come before the Cause!" she said quietly, but insistently. Delia's laugh was embarrassed. "I never promised to desert Weston, Gertrude. I couldn't--any more than I could desert you." "We shall want every hand--every ounce of help that can be got--through January and February. You undertook to do some office work, to help in the organisation of the processions to Parliament, to speak at a number of meetings--" Delia interrupted. "As soon as Weston is out of danger, I'll go--of course I'll go!--about a month from now, perhaps less. You will have the flat, Gertrude, all the same, and as much money as I can scrape together--after the operation's paid for. I don't matter a tenth part as much as you, you know I don't; I haven't been at all a success at these meetings lately!" There was a certain young bitterness in the tone. "Well, of course you know what people will say." "That I'm shirking--giving in? Well, you can contradict it." Delia turned from the window beside which she was standing to look at Gertrude. A pale December sunshine shone on the girl's half-seen face, and on the lines of her black dress. A threatening sense of change, mingled with a masterful desire to break down the resistance offered, awoke in Gertrude. But she restrained the dictatorial instinct. Instead, she sat down beside the desk again, and covered her face with her hand. "If I couldn't contradict it--if I couldn't be sure of you--I might as well kill myself," she said with sudden and volcanic passion, though in a voice scarcely raised above its ordinary note. Delia came to her impulsively, knelt down and put her arms round her. "You know you can be sure of me!" she said, reproachfully. Gertrude held her away from her. Her eyes examined the lovely face so close to her. "On the contrary! You are being influenced against me." Delia laughed. "By whom, please?" "By the man who has you in his power--under our abominable laws." "By my guardian?--by Mark Winnington? Really! Gertrude! Considering that I had a fresh quarrel with him only last week--on your account--at Monk Lawrence--" Gertrude released herself by a sudden movement. "When were you at Monk Lawrence?" "Why, that afternoon, when you were in town. I missed my train at Latchford, and took a motor home." There was some consciousness in the girl's look and tone which did not escape her companion. She was evidently aware that her silence on the incident might appear strange to Gertrude. However, she frankly described her adventure, Daunt's surliness, and Winnington's appearance. "He arrived in the nick of time, and made Daunt let me in. Then, while we were going round, he began to talk about your speech, and wanted to make me say I was sorry for it. And I wouldn't! And then--well, he thought very poorly of me--and we parted--coolly. We've scarcely met since. And that's all." "What speech?" Gertrude was sitting erect now with queerly bright eyes. "The speech about Sir Wilfrid--at Latchford." "What else does he expect?" "I don't know. But--well, I may as well say, Gertrude--to you, though I wouldn't say it to him--that I--I didn't much admire that speech either!" Delia was now sitting on the floor with her hands round her knees, looking up. The slight stiffening of her face shewed that it had been an effort to say what she had said. "So _you_ think that Lang ought to be approached with 'bated breath and whispering humbleness'--just as he is on the point of trampling us and our cause into the dirt?" "No--certainly not! But why hasn't he as good a right to his opinion as we to ours--without being threatened with personal violence?" Gertrude drew a long breath of amazement. "I don't quite see, Delia, why you ever joined the 'Daughters'--or why you stay with them." "That's not fair!"--protested Delia, the colour flooding in her cheeks. "As for burning stupid villas--that are empty and insured--or boathouses--or piers--or tea-pavilions, to keep the country in mind of us,--that's one thing. But threatening _persons_ with violence--that's--somehow--another thing. And as to villas and piers even--to be quite honest--I sometimes wonder, Gertrude!--I declare, I'm beginning to wonder! And why shouldn't one take up one's policy from time to time and look at it, all round, with a free mind? We haven't been doing particularly well lately." Gertrude laughed--a dry, embittered sound--as she pushed the _Tocsin_ from her. "Oh well, of course, if you're going to desert us in the worst of the fight, and to follow your guardian's lead--" "But I'm not!" cried Delia, springing to her feet. "Try me. Haven't I promised--a hundred things? Didn't I say all you expected me to say at Latchford? And, on the whole"--her voice dragged a little--"the empty houses and the cricket pavilions--still seem to me fair game. It's only--as to the good it does. Of course--if it were Monk Lawrence--" "Well--if it were Monk Lawrence?" "I should think that a crime! I told you so before." "Why?" Delia looked at her friend with a contracted brow. "Because--it's a national possession! Lang's only the temporary owner--the trustee. We've no right to destroy what belongs to _England_." Gertrude laughed again--as she rose from the tea-table. "Well, as long as women are slaves, I don't see what England matters to them. However, don't trouble yourself. Monk Lawrence is all right. And Mr. Winnington's a charmer--we all know that." Delia flushed angrily. But Gertrude, having gathered up her papers, quietly departed, leaving her final shaft to work. Delia went back to her own sitting-room, but was too excited, too tremulous indeed, to settle to her letters. She had never yet found herself in direct collision with Gertrude, impetuous as her own temper was. Their friendship had now lasted nearly three years. She looked back to their West Indian acquaintance, that first year of adoration, of long-continued emotion,--mind and heart growing and blossoming together. Gertrude, during that year, had not only aroused her pupil's intelligence; she had taught a motherless girl what the love of women may be for each other. To make Gertrude happy, to be approved by her, to watch her, to sit at her feet--the girl of nineteen had asked nothing more. Gertrude's accomplishments, her coolness, her self-reliance, the delicate precision of her small features and frame, the grace of her quiet movements, her cold sincerity, the unyielding scorns, the passionate loves and hates that were gradually to be discovered below the even dryness of her manner,--by these Delia had been captured; by these indeed, she was still held. Gertrude was to her everything that she herself was not. And when her father had insisted on separating her from her friend, her wild resentment, and her girlish longing for the forbidden had only increased Gertrude's charm tenfold. The eighteen months of their separation, too, had coincided with the rise of that violent episode in the feminist movement which was represented by the founding and organisation of the "Daughters" society. Gertrude though not one of the first contrivers and instigators of it, had been among the earliest of its converts. Its initial successes had been the subject of all her letters to Delia; Delia had walked on air to read them. At last the world was moving, was rushing--and it seemed that Gertrude was in the van. Women were at last coming to their own; forcing men to acknowledge them as equals and comrades; and able to win victory, not by the old whining and wheedling, but by their own strength. The intoxication of it filled the girl's days and nights. She thought endlessly of processions and raids, of street-preaching, or Hyde Park meetings. Gertrude went to prison for a few days as the result of a raid on Downing Street. Delia, in one dull hotel after another, wearily following her father from "cure" to "cure," dreamed hungrily and enviously of Gertrude's more heroic fate. Everything in those days was haloed for her--the Movement, its first violent acts, what Gertrude did, and what Gertrude thought--she saw it all transfigured and aflame. And now, since her father's death, they had been four months together--she and her friend--in the closest intimacy, sharing--or so Delia supposed--every thought and every prospect. Delia for the greater part of that time _had_ been all glad submission and unquestioning response. It was quite natural--absolutely right--that Gertrude should command her house, her money, her daily life. She only waited for Gertrude's orders; it would be her pride to carry them out. Until-- What had happened? The girl, standing motionless beside her window, confessed to herself, as she had not been willing to confess to Gertrude, that something _had_ happened--some change of climate and temperature in her own life. In the first place, the Movement was not prospering. Why deny it? Who could deny it? Its first successes were long past; its uses as advertisement were exhausted; the old violences and audacities, as they were repeated, fell dead. The cause of Woman Suffrage had certainly not advanced. Check after check had been inflicted on it. The number of its supporters in the House of Commons had gone down and down. By-elections were only adding constantly to the number of its opponents. "Well, what then?"--said the stalwarts of the party--"More outrages, more arson, more violence! We _must_ win at last!" And, meanwhile, blowing through England like a steadily increasing gale, could be felt the force of public anger, public condemnation. Delia since her return to England had felt the chill of it, for the first time, on her own nerves and conscience. For the first time she had winced--morally--even while she mocked at her own shrinking. Was that Gertrude pacing outside? The day was dark and stormy. But Gertrude, who rarely took a walk for pleasure, scarcely ever missed the exercise which was necessary to keep her in health. Her slight figure, wrapped in a fur cape, paced a sheltered walk. Her shoulders were bent, her eyes on the ground. Suddenly it struck Delia that she had begun to stoop, that she looked older and thinner than usual. "She is killing herself!"--thought the girl in a sudden anguish--"killing herself with work and anxiety. And yet she always says she is so strong. What can I do? There is nobody that matters to her--nobody!--but me!" And she recalled all she knew--it was very little--of Gertrude's personal history. She had been unhappy at home. Her mother, a widow, had never been able to get on with her elder daughter, while petting and spoiling her only son and her younger girl, who was ten years Gertrude's junior. Gertrude had been left a small sum of money by a woman friend, and had spent it in going to a west-country university and taking honours in history. She never spoke now of either her mother or her sister. Her sister was married, but Gertrude held no communication with her or her children. Delia had always felt it impossible to ask questions about her, and believed, with a thrilled sense of mystery, that some tragic incident or experience had separated the two sisters. Her brother also, it seemed, was as dead to her. But on all such personal matters Gertrude's silence was insuperable, and Delia knew no more of them than on the first day of their meeting. Indomitable figure! Worn with effort and struggle--worn above all with _hating_. Delia looked at it with a sob in her throat. Surely, surely, the great passion, the great uplifting faith they had felt in common, was vital, was true! Only, somehow, after the large dreams and hopes of the early days, to come down to this perpetual campaign of petty law-breaking, and futile outrage, to these odious meetings and shrieking newspapers, was to be--well, discouraged!--heart-wearied. "Only, she is not wearied, or discouraged!" thought Delia, despairingly. "And why am I?" Was it hatefully true--after all--that she was being influenced--drawn away? The girl flushed, breathing quick. She must master herself!--get rid of this foolish obsession of Winnington's presence and voice--of a pair of grave, kind eyes--a look now perplexed, now sternly bright--a personality, limited no doubt, not very accessible to what Gertrude called "ideas," not quick to catch the last new thing, but honest, noble, tender, through and through. Absurd! She was holding her own with him; she would hold her own. That very day she must grapple with him afresh. She had sent him a note that morning, and he had replied in a message that he would ride over to luncheon. For the question of money was urgent. Delia was already overdrawn. Yet supplies were wanted for the newly rented flat, for Weston's operation, for Gertrude's expenses in London--for a hundred things. She paced up and down, imagining the conversation, framing eloquent defences for her conduct, and again, from time to time, meanly, shamefacedly reminding herself of Winnington's benefit under the will. If she was a nuisance, she was at least a fairly profitable nuisance. * * * * * Winnington duly arrived at luncheon. The two ladies appeared to him as usual--Gertrude Marvell, self-possessed and quietly gay, ready to handle politics or books, on so light a note, that Winnington's acute recollection of her, as the haranguing fury on the Latchford waggon, began to seem absurd even to himself. Delia also, lovely, restless, with bursts of talk, and more significant bursts of silence, produced on him her normal effect--as of a creature made for all delightful uses, and somehow jangled and out of tune. After luncheon, she led the way to her own sitting-room. "I am afraid I must talk business," she said abruptly as she closed the door and stood confronting him. "I am overdrawn, Mr. Winnington, and I must have some more money." Winnington laid down his cigarette, and looked at her in open-mouthed amazement. "Overdrawn!--but--we agreed--" "I know. You gave me what you thought was ample. Well, I have spent it, and there is nothing left to pay house bills, or servants with, or--or anything." Her pale defiance gave him at once a hint of the truth. "I fear I must ask what it has been spent on," he said, after a pause. "Certainly. I gave £500 of it in one cheque to Miss Marvell. Of course you will guess how it has been spent." Winnington took up his cigarette again, and smoked it thoughtfully. His colour was, perhaps, a little higher than usual. "I am sorry you have done that. It makes it rather awkward both for you and for me. Perhaps I had better explain. The lawyers have been settling the debts on your father's estate. That took a considerable sum. A mortgage has been paid off, according to directions in Sir Robert's will. And some of the death duties have been paid. For the moment there is no money at all in the Trust account. I hope to have replenished it by the New Year, when I understood you would want fresh funds." He sat on the arm of a chair and looked at her quietly. Delia made no attempt at explanation or argument. After a short silence, she said-- "What will you do?" "I must, of course, lend you some of my own." Delia flushed violently. "That is surely absurd, Mr. Winnington! My father left a large sum!" "As his trustee I can only repeat that until some further securities are realised--which may take a little time--I have no money. But _you_ must have money--servants and tradesmen can't go unpaid. I will give you, therefore, a cheque on my own bank--to replace that £500." He drew his cheque book from his breast pocket. Delia was stormily walking up and down. It struck him sharply, first that she was wholly taken by surprise; and next that shock and emotion play finely with such a face as hers. He had never seen her so splendid. His own pulses ran. "This--this is not at all what I want, Mr. Winnington! I want my own money--my father's money! Why should I distress and inconvenience you?" "I have tried to explain." "Then let the lawyers find it somehow. Aren't they there to do such things?" "I assure you this is simplest. I happen"--he smiled--"to have enough in the bank. Alice and I can manage quite well till January!" The mention of Mrs. Matheson was quite intolerable in Delia's ears. She turned upon him-- "I can't accept it! You oughtn't to ask it." "I think you must accept it," he said with decision. "But the important question with me is--the further question--am I not really bound to restore this money to your father's estate?" Delia stared at him bewildered. "What _do_ you mean!" "Your father made me his trustee in order that I might protect his money--from uses of which he disapproved--and protect you, if I could, from actions and companions he dreaded. This £500 has gone--where he expressly wished it not to go. It seems to me that I am liable, and that I ought to repay." Delia gasped. "I never heard anything so absurd!" "I will consider it," he said gravely. "It is a case of conscience. Meanwhile"--he began to write the cheque--"here is the money. Only, let me warn you, dear Miss Delia,--if this were repeated, I might find myself embarrassed. I am not a rich man!" Silence. He finished writing the cheque, and handed it to her. Delia pushed it away, and it dropped on the table between them. "It is simply tyranny--monstrous tyranny--that I should be coerced like this!" she said, choking. "You must feel it so yourself! Put yourself in my place, Mr. Winnington." "I think--I am first bound--to try and put myself in your father's place," he said, with vivacity. "Where has that money gone, Miss Delia?" He rose, and in his turn began to pace the little room. "It has been proved, in evidence, that a great deal of this outrage is _paid_ outrage--that it could not be carried on without money--however madly and fanatically devoted, however personally disinterested the organisers of it may be--such as Miss Marvell. You have, therefore, taken your father's money to provide for this payment--payment for all that his soul most abhorred. His will was his last painful effort to prevent this being done. And yet--you have done it!" He looked at her steadily. "One may seem to do evil"--she panted--"but we have a faith, a cause, which justifies it!" He shook his head sadly, Delia sat very still, tormented by a score of harassing thoughts. If she could not provide money for the "Daughters" what particular use could she be to Gertrude, or Gertrude's Committee? She could speak, and walk in processions, and break up meetings. But so could hundreds of others. It was her fortune--she knew it--that had made her so important in Gertrude's eyes. It had always been assumed between them that a little daring and a little adroitness would break through the meshes of her father's will. And how difficult it was turning out to be! At that moment, an idea occurred to her. Her face, responsive as a wave to the wind, relaxed. Its sullenness disappeared in sudden brightness--in something like triumph. She raised her eyes. Their tremulous, half whimsical look set Winnington wondering what she could be going to say next. "You seem to have beaten me," she said, with a little nod--"or you think you have." "I have no thoughts that you mightn't know," was the quiet reply. "You want me to promise not to do it again?" "If you mean to keep it." As he stood by the fire, looking down upon her rather sternly--she yet perceived in his grey eyes, something of that expression she had seen there at their first meeting--as though the heart of a good man tried to speak to her. The same expression--and yet different; with something added and interfused, which moved her strangely. "Odd as it may seem, I will keep it!" she said. "Yet without giving up any earlier purpose, or promise, whatever." Each word was emphasized. His face changed. "I won't worry _you_ in any such way again," she added hastily and proudly. Some other words were on her lips, but she checked them. She held out her hand for the cheque, and the smile with which she accepted it, after her preceding passion, puzzled him. She locked up the cheque in a drawer of her writing-table. Winnington's horse passed the window, and he rose to go. She accompanied him to the hall door and waved a light farewell. Winnington's response was ceremonious. A sure instinct told him to shew no further softness. His dilemma was getting worse and worse, and Lady Tonbridge had been no use to him whatever. Chapter XII One of the first days of the New year rose clear and frosty. When the young housemaid who had temporarily replaced Weston as Delia's maid drew back her curtains at half-past seven, Delia caught a vision of an opaline sky with a sinking moon and fading stars. A strewing of snow lay on the ground, and the bare black trees rose, vividly separate, on the white stretches of grass. Her window looked to the north along the bases of the low range of hills which shut in the valley and the village. A patch of paler colour on the purple slope of the hills marked the long front of Monk Lawrence. As she sleepily roused herself, she saw her bed littered with dark objects--two leather boxes of some size, and a number of miscellaneous cases--and when the maid had left the room, she lay still, looking at them. They were the signs and symbols of an enquiry she had lately been conducting into her possessions, which seemed to her to have yielded very satisfactory results. They represented in the main the contents of a certain cupboard in the wall of her bedroom where Lady Blanchflower had always kept her jewels, and where, in consequence, Weston had so far locked away all that Delia possessed. Here were all her own girlish ornaments--costly things which her father had given her at intervals during the three or four years since her coming out; here were her Mother's jewels, which Sir Robert had sent to his bankers after his wife's death, and had never seen again during his lifetime; and here were also a number of family jewels which had belonged to Delia's grandmother, and had remained, after Lady Blanchflower's death, in the custody of the family lawyers, till Delia, to whom they had been left by will, had appeared to claim them. Delia had always known that she possessed a quantity of valuable things, and had hitherto felt but small interest in them. Gertrude's influence, and her own idealism had bred in her contempt for gauds. It was the worst of breeding to wear anything for its mere money value; and nothing whatever should be worn that wasn't in itself beautiful. Lady Blanchflower's taste had been, in Delia's eyes, abominable; and her diamonds,--tiaras, pendants and the rest--had absolutely nothing to recommend them but their sheer brute cost. After a few glances at them, the girl had shut them up and forgotten them. But they _were_ diamonds, and they must be worth some thousands. It was this idea which had flashed upon her during her last talk with Winnington, and she had been brooding over it, and pondering it ever since. Winnington himself was away. He and his sister had been spending Christmas with some cousins in the midlands. Meanwhile Delia recognised that his relation to her had been somewhat strained. His letters to her on various points of business had been more formal than usual; and though he had sent her a pocket Keats for a Christmas present, it had arrived accompanied merely by his "kind regards" and she had felt unreasonably aggrieved, and much inclined to send it back. His cheque meanwhile for £500 had gone into Delia's bank. No help for it--considering all the Christmas bills which had been pouring in! But she panted for the time when she could return it. As for his threat of permanently refunding the money out of his own pocket, she remembered it with soreness of spirit. Too bad! Well, there they lay, on the counterpane all round her--the means of checkmating her guardian. For while she was rummaging in the wall-safe, the night before, suddenly the fire had gone down, and the room had sunk to freezing point. Delia, brought up in warm climates, had jumped shivering into bed, and there, heaped round with the contents of the cupboard, had examined a few more cases, till sleep and cold overpowered her. In the grey morning light she opened some of the cases again. Vulgar and ugly, if you like--but undeniably, absurdly worth money! Her dark eyes caught the sparkle of the jewels running through her fingers. These tasteless things--mercifully--were her own--her very own. Winnington had nothing to say to them! She could wear them--or give them--or sell them, as she pleased. She was alternately exultant, and strangely full of a fluttering anxiety. The thought of returning Winnington's cheque was sweet to her. But her disputes with him had begun to cost her more than she had ever imagined they could or would. And the particular way out, which, a few weeks before, she had so impatiently desired--that he should resign the guardianship, and leave her to battle with the Court of Chancery as best she could--was no longer so attractive to her. To be cherished and cared for by Mark Winnington--no woman yet, but had found it delightful. Insensibly Delia had grown accustomed to it--to his comings and goings, his business-ways, abrupt sometimes, even peremptory, but informed always by a kindness, a selflessness that amazed her. Everyone wanted his help or advice, and he must refuse now--as he had never refused before--because his time and thoughts were so much taken up with his ward's affairs. Delia knew that she was envied; and knew also that the neighbours thought her an ungrateful, unmanageable hoyden, totally unworthy of such devotion. She sat up in bed, dreaming, her hands round her knees. No, she didn't want Winnington to give her up! Especially since she had found this easy way out. Why should there be any more friction between them at all? All that _he_ gave her henceforward should be religiously spent on the normal and necessary things. She would keep accounts if he liked, like any good little girl, and shew them up. Let him do with the trust fund exactly what he pleased. For a long time at any rate, she could be independent of it. Why had she never thought of such a device before? But how to realise the jewels? In all business affairs, Delia was the merest child. She had been brought up in the midst of large expenditure, of which she had been quite unconscious. All preoccupation with money had seemed to her mean and pettifogging. Have it!--and spend it on what you want. But wants must be governed by ideas--by ethical standards. To waste money on personal luxury, on eating, drinking, clothes, or any form of mere display, in such a world as Gertrude Marvell had unveiled to her, seemed to Delia contemptible and idiotic. One must have _some_ nice clothes--some beauty in one's surroundings--and the means of living as one wished to live. Otherwise, to fume and fret about money, to be coveting instead of giving, buying and bargaining, instead of thinking--or debating--was degrading. She loathed shopping. It was the drug which put women's minds to sleep. Who would help her? She pondered. She would tell no one till it was done; not even Gertrude, whose cold, changed manner to her hurt the girl's proud sense to think of. "I must do it properly--I won't be cheated!" The London lawyers? No. The local solicitor, Mr. Masham? No! Her vanity was far too keenly conscious of their real opinion of her, through all their politeness. Lady Tonbridge? No! She was Mark Winnington's intimate friend--and a constitutional Suffragist. At the notion of consulting her,--on the means of providing funds for "militancy"--Delia sprang out of bed, and went to her dressing, dissolved in laughter. And presently--sobered again, and soft-eyed--she was stealing along the passage to Weston's door for a word with the trained nurse who was now in charge. Just a week now--to the critical day. * * * * * "Is Miss Marvell, in? Ask if she will see Mr. Lathrop for a few minutes?" Paul Lathrop, left to himself, looked round Delia's drawing-room. It set his teeth on edge. What pictures--what furniture! A certain mellowness born of sheer time, no doubt--but with all its ugly ingredients still repulsively visible. Why didn't the heiress burn everything and begin again? Was all her money to be spent on burning other people's property, when her own was so desperately in need of the purging process--or on dreary meetings and unreadable newspapers? Lathrop was already tired of these delights; his essentially Hedonist temper was re-asserting itself. The "movement" had excited and interested him for a time; had provided besides easy devices for annoying stupid people. He had been eager to speak and write for it, had persuaded himself that he really cared. But now candour--and he was generally candid with himself--made him confess that but for Delia Blanchflower he would already have cut his connection with the whole thing. He thought with a mixture of irony and discomfort of his "high-falutin" letter to her. "And here I am--hanging round her"--he said to himself, as he strolled about the room, peering through his eye-glass at its common vases, and trivial knick-knacks--"just because Blaydes bothers me. I might as well cry for the moon. But she's worth watching, by Jove. One gets copy out of her, if nothing else! I vow I can't understand why my dithyrambs move her so little--she's dithyrambic enough herself!" The door opened. He quickly pulled himself together. Gertrude Marvell came in, and as she gave him an absent greeting, he was vaguely struck by some change in her aspect, as Delia had long been. She had always seemed to him a cold half-human being, in all ordinary matters. But now she was paler, thinner, more remote than ever. "Nerves strained--probably sleepless--" he said to himself. "It's the pace they will live at--it kills them all." This kind of comment ran at the back of his brain, while he plunged into the "business"--which was his pretence for calling. Gertrude, as a District Organizer of the League of Revolt, had intrusted him with the running of various meetings in small places, along the coast, for which it humiliated him to remember that he had agreed to be paid. For at his very first call upon them, Miss Marvell had divined his impecunious state, and pounced upon him as an agent,--unknown, he thought, to Miss Blanchflower. He came now to report what had been done, and to ask if the meetings should be continued. Gertrude Marvell shook her head. "I have had some letters about your meetings. I doubt whether they have been worth while." Miss Marvell's manner was that of an employer to an employee. Lathrop's vanity winced. "May I know what was wrong with them?" Gertrude Marvell considered. Her gesture, unconsciously judicial, annoyed Lathrop still further. "Too much argument, I hear,--and too little feeling. Our people wanted more about the women in prison. And it was thought that you apologised too much for the outrages." The last word emerged quite simply, as the only fitting one. Lathrop laughed,--rather angrily. "You must be aware, Miss Marvell, that the public thinks they want defence." "Not from us!" she said, with energy. "No one speaking for us must ever apologise for militant acts. It takes all the heart out of our people. Justify them--glory in them--as much as you like." There was a pause. "Then you have no more work for me?" said Lathrop at last. "We need not, I think, trouble you again. Your cheque will of course be sent from head-quarters." "That doesn't matter," said Lathrop, hastily. The reflection crossed his mind that there is an insolence of women far more odious than the insolence of men. "After all they are our inferiors! It doesn't do to let them command us," he thought, furiously. He rose to take his leave. "You are going up to London?" "I am going. Miss Blanchflower stays behind, because her maid is ill." He stood hesitating. Gertrude lifted her eyebrows as though he puzzled her. She never had liked him, and by now all her instincts were hostile to him. His clumsy figure, and slovenly dress offended her, and the touch of something grandiose in his heavy brow, and reddish-gold hair, seemed to her merely theatrical. Her information was that he had been no use as a campaigner. Why on earth did he keep her waiting? "I suppose you have heard some of the talk going about?" he said at last, shooting out the words. "What talk?" "They're very anxious about Monk Lawrence--after your speech. And there are absurd stories. Women have been seen--at night--and so on." Gertrude laughed. "The more panic the better--for us." "Yes--so long as it stops there. But if anything happened to that place, the whole neighbourhood would turn detective--myself included." He looked at her steadily. She leant one thin hand on a table behind her. "No one of course would have a better chance than you. You are so near." Their eyes crossed. "By George!" he thought--"you're in it. I believe to God you're in it." And at that moment he felt that he hated the willowy, intangible creature who had just treated him with contempt. But as they coldly touched hands, the door opened again, and Delia appeared. "Oh I didn't mean to interrupt--" she said, retreating. "Come in, come in!" said Gertrude. "We have finished our business--and Mr. Lathrop I am sure will excuse me--I must get some letters off by post--" And with the curtest of bows she disappeared. "I have brought you a book, Miss Blanchflower," Lathrop nervously began, diving into a large and sagging pocket. "You said you wanted to see Madame de Noailles' second volume." He brought out "Les Éblouissements," and laid it on the table beside her. Delia thanked him, and then, all in a moment, as she stood beside him, a thought struck her. She turned her great eyes full upon him, and he saw the colour rushing into her cheeks. "Mr. Lathrop!" "Yes." "Mr. Lathrop--I--I dreadfully want some practical advice. And I don't know whom to ask." The soreness of his wounded self-love vanished in a moment. "What can I do for you?" he asked eagerly. And at once his own personality seemed to expand, to throw off the shadow of something ignoble it had worn in Gertrude's presence. For Delia, looking at him, was attracted by him. The shabby clothes made no impression upon her, but the blue eyes did. And the childishness which still survived in her, beneath all her intellectualisms, came impulsively to the surface. "Mr. Lathrop, do you--do you know anything about jewelry?" "Jewelry? Nothing!--except that I have dabbled in pretty things of that sort as I have dabbled in most things. I once did some designing for a man who set up--in Bond Street--to imitate Lalique. Why do you ask? I suppose you have heaps of jewels?" "Too many. I want to sell some jewels." "Sell?--But--" he looked at her in astonishment. She reddened still more deeply; but spoke with a frank charm. "You thought I was rich? Well, of course I ought to be. My father was rich. But at present I have nothing of my own--nothing! It is all in trust--and I can't get at it. But I _must_ have some money! Wait here a moment!" She ran out of the room. When she came back she was carrying a miscellaneous armful of jewellers' cases. She threw them down on the sofa. "They are all hideous--but I am sure they're worth a great deal of money." And she opened them with hasty fingers before his astonished eyes. In his restless existence he had accumulated various odd veins of knowledge, and he knew something of the jewelry trade of London. He had not only drawn designs, he had speculated--unluckily--in "De Beers." For a short time Diamonds had been an obsession with him, then Burmah rubies. He had made money out of neither; it was not in his horoscope to make money out of anything. However there was the result--a certain amount of desultory information. He took up one piece after another, presently drawing a magnifying glass out of his pocket to examine them the better. "Well, if you want money--" he said at last, putting down a _rivière_ which had belonged to Delia's mother--"That alone will give you some thousands!" Delia's eyes danced with satisfaction--then darkened. "That was Mamma's. Papa bought it at Constantinople--from an old Turkish Governor--who had robbed a province--spent the loot in Paris on his wives--and then had to disgorge half his fortune--to the Sultan--who got wind of it. Papa bought it at a great bargain, and was awfully proud of it. But after Mamma died, he sent it to the Bank, and never thought of it again. I couldn't wear it, of course--I was too young." "How much money do you want?" "Oh, a few thousands," said Delia, vaguely. "Five hundred pounds, first of all." "And who will sell them for you?" She frowned in perplexity. "I--I don't know." "You don't wish to ask Mr. Winnington?" "Certainly not! They have nothing to do with him. They are my own personal property," she added proudly. "Still he might object--Ought you not to ask him?" "I shall not tell him!" She straightened her shoulders. "He has far too much bother on my account already." "Of course, if I could do anything for you--I should be delighted. But I don't know why you should trust me. You don't know anything about me!" He laughed uncomfortably. Delia laughed too--in some confusion. It seemed to him she suddenly realised she had done something unusual. "It is very kind of you to suggest it--" she said, hesitating. "Not at all. It would amuse me. I have some threads I can pick up still--in Bond Street. Let me advise you to concentrate on that _rivière_. If you really feel inclined to trust me, I will take it to a man I know; he will show it to--" he named a famous firm. "In a few days--well, give me a week--and I undertake to bring you proposals. If you accept them, I will collect the money for you at once--or I will return you the necklace, if you don't." Delia clasped her hands. "A week! You think it might all be finished in a week?" "Certainly--thereabouts. These things--" he touched the diamonds--"are practically money." Delia sat ruminating, with a bright excited face. Then a serious expression returned. She looked up. "Mr. Lathrop, this ought to be a matter of business between us--if you do me so great a service?" "You mean I ought to take a commission?" he said, calmly. "I shall do nothing of the kind." "It is more than I ought to accept!" she cried. "Let your kindness--include what I wish." He shook his fair hair impatiently. "Why should you take away all my pleasure in the little adventure?" She looked embarrassed. He went on-- "Besides we are comrades--we have stood together in the fight. I expect this is for the Cause! If so I ought to be angry that you even suggested it!" "Don't be angry!" she said gravely. "I meant nothing unkind. Well, I thank you very much--and there are the diamonds." She gave him the case, with a quiet deliberate movement, as if to emphasize her trust in him. The simplicity with which it was done pricked him uncomfortably. "I'm no thief!--" he thought angrily. "She's safe enough with me. All the same, if she knew--she wouldn't speak to me--she wouldn't admit me into her house. She doesn't know--and I am a cad!" "You can't the least understand what it means to be allowed to do you a service!" he said, with emotion. But the tone evidently displeased her. She once more formally thanked him; then sprang up and began to put the cases on the sofa together. As she did so, steps on the gravel outside were heard through the low casement window. Delia turned with a start, and saw Mark Winnington approaching the front door. "Don't say anything _please_!" she said urgently. "This has nothing to do with my guardian." And opening the door of a lacquer cabinet, she hurriedly packed the jewelry inside with all the speed she could. Her flushed cheek shewed her humiliated by the action. * * * * * Winnington stood in the doorway, silent and waiting. After a hasty greeting to the new-comer, Delia was nervously bidding Lathrop good-bye. "In a week!" he said, under his breath, as she gave him her hand. "A week!" she repeated, evidently impatient for him to be gone. He exchanged a curt bow with Winnington, and the door closed on him. There was a short silence. Winnington remained standing, hat in hand. He was in riding dress--a commanding figure, his lean face reddened, and the waves of his grizzled hair slightly loosened, by a buffeting wind. Delia, stealing a glance at him, divined a coming remonstrance, and awaited it with a strange mixture of fear and pleasure. They had not met for ten days; and she stammered out some New Year's wishes. She hoped that he and Mrs. Matheson had enjoyed their visit. But without any reply to her politeness, he said abruptly-- "Were you arranging some business with Mr. Lathrop?" She supposed he was thinking of the militant Campaign. "Yes," she said, eagerly. "Yes, I was arranging some business." Winnington's eyes examined her. "Miss Delia, what do you know about that man?--except that story--which I understand Miss Marvell told you." "Nothing--nothing at all! Except--except that he speaks at our meetings, and generally gets us into hot water. He has a lot of interesting books--and drawings--in his cottage; and he has lent me Madame de Noailles' poems. Won't you sit down? I hope you and Mrs. Matheson have had a good time? We have been to church--at least I have--and given away lots of coals and plum-puddings--at least I have. Gertrude thought me a fool. We have had the choir up to sing carols in the servants' hall, and given them a sovereign--at least I did. And I don't want any more Christmas--for a long, long, time!" And with that, she dropped into a chair opposite Winnington, who sat now twirling his hat and studying the ground. "I agree with you," he said drily when she paused. "I felt when I was away that I had better be here. And I feel it now doubly." "Because?" "Because--if my absence has led to your developing any further acquaintance with the gentleman who has just left the room, when I might have prevented it, I regret it deeply." Delia's cheeks had gone crimson again. "You knew perfectly well Mr. Winnington, that we had made acquaintance with Mr. Lathrop! We never concealed it!" "I knew, of course, that you were both members of the League, and that you had spoken at meetings together. I regretted it--exceedingly--and I asked you--in vain--to put an end to it. But when I find him paying a morning call here--and lending you books--that is a very different matter!" Delia broke out-- "You really are _too_ Early-Victorian, Mr. Winnington!--and I can't help being rude. Do you suppose you can ever turn me into a bread-and-butter miss? I have looked after myself for years--you don't understand!" She faced him indignantly. Winnington laughed. "All right--so long as the Early Victorians may have their say. And my say about Mr. Lathrop is--again that he is not a fit companion for you, or any young girl,--that he is a man of blemished character--both in morals and business. Ask anybody in this neighbourhood!" He had spoken with firm emphasis, his eyes sparkling. "Everybody in the neighbourhood believes anything bad, about him--and us!" cried Delia. "Don't, for Heaven's sake, couple yourself, and the man--together!" said Winnington, flushing with anger. "I know nothing about him, when you first arrived here. Mr. Lathrop didn't matter twopence to me before. Now he does matter." "Why?" Delia's eyes were held to his, fascinated. "Simply because I care--I care a great deal--what happens to you," he said quietly, after a pause. "Naturally, I must care." Delia looked away, and began twisting her black sash into knots. "Bankruptcy--is not exactly a crime." "Oh, so you knew that farther fact about him? But of course--it is the rest that matters. Since we spoke of this before, I have seen the judge who tried the case in which this man figured. I hate speaking of it in your presence, but you force me. He told me it was one of the worst he had ever known--a case for which there was no defence or excuse whatever." "Why must I believe it?" cried Delia impetuously. "It's a man's judgment! The woman may have been--Gertrude says she was--horribly unhappy and ill-treated. Yet nothing could be proved--enough to free her. Wait till we have women judges--and women lawyers--then you'll see!" He laughed indignantly--though not at all inclined to laugh. And what seemed to him her stubborn perversity drove him to despair. "In this case, if there had been a woman judge, I am inclined to think it would have been a good deal worse for the people concerned. At least I hope so. Don't try to make me believe, Miss Delia, that women are going to forgive treachery and wickedness more easily than men!" "Oh, 'treachery!'--" she murmured, protesting. His look both intimidated and drew her. Winnington came nearer to her, and suddenly he laid his hand on both of hers. Looking up she was conscious of a look that was half raillery, half tenderness. "My dear child!--I must call you that--though you are so clever--and so--so determined to have your own way. Look here! I'm going to plead my rights. I've done a good deal for you the last three months--perhaps you hardly know all that has been done. I've been your watch-dog--put it at that. Well, now give the watch-dog, give the Early-Victorian, his bone! Promise me that you will have no more dealings with Mr. Lathrop. Send him back his books--and say 'Not at Home!'" She was really distressed. "I can't, Mr. Winnington!--I'm so sorry!--but I can't." "Why can't you?" He still held her. A score of thoughts flew hither and thither in her brain. She had asked a great favour of Lathrop--she had actually put the jewels into his hands! How could she recall her action? And when he had done her such a service, if he succeeded in doing it--how was she to turn round on him, and cut him the very next moment? Nor could she make up her mind to confess to Winnington what she had done. She was bent on her scheme. If she disclosed it _now_ everything might be upset. "I really _can't!_" she repeated, gravely, releasing her hands. Winnington rose, and began to pace the drawing room. Delia watched him--quivering--an exquisite vision herself, in the half lights of the room. When he paused at last to speak, she saw a new expression in his eyes. "I shall have to think this over, Miss Blanchflower--perhaps to reconsider my whole position." She was startled, but she kept her composure. "You mean--you may have--after all--to give me up?" He forced a very chilly smile. "You remember--you asked me to give you up. Now if it were only one subject--however important--on which we disagreed, I might still do my best, though the responsibility of all you make me connive at is certainly heavy. But if you are entirely to set at defiance not only my advice and wishes as to this illegal society to which you belong, and as to the violent action into which I understand you may be led when you go to town, but also in such a matter as we have just been discussing--then indeed, I see no place for me. I must think it over. A guardian appointed by the Court might be more effective--might influence you more." "I told you I was a handful," said Delia, trying to laugh. But her voice sounded hollow in her own ears. He offered no reply--merely repeating "I must think it over!"--and resolutely changing the subject, he made a little perfunctory conversation on a few matters of business--and was gone. After his departure, Delia sat motionless for half an hour at least, staring at the fire. Then suddenly she sprang up, went to the writing-table, and sat down to write-- "Dear Mr. Mark--Don't give me up! You don't know. Trust me a little! I am not such a fiend as you think. I am grateful--I am indeed. I wish to goodness I could show it. Perhaps I shall some day. I hadn't time to tell you about poor Weston--who's to have an operation--and that I'm not going to town with Gertrude--not for some weeks at any rate. I shall be alone here, looking after Weston. So I can't disgrace or worry you for a good while any way. And you needn't fret about Mr. Lathrop--you needn't _really_! I can't explain--not just yet--but it's all right. Mayn't I come and help with some of your cripple children? or the school? or something? If Susy Amberly can do it, I suppose I can--I'd like to. May I sign myself--though I _am_ a handful-" "Yours affectionately, DELIA BLANCHFLOWER." She sat staring at the paper, trembling under a stress of feeling she could not understand--the large tears in her eyes. Chapter XIII "Pack the papers as quickly as you can--I am going to town this afternoon. Whatever can't be packed before then, you can bring up to me tomorrow." A tired girl lifted her head from the packing-case before which she was kneeling. "I'll do my best, Miss Marvell--But I'm afraid it will be impossible to finish to-day." And she looked wearily round the room laden with papers--letters, pamphlets, press-cuttings--on every available table and shelf. Gertrude gave a rather curt assent. Her reason told her the thing was impossible; but her will chafed against the delay, which her secretary threatened, of even a few hours in the resumption of her work in London, and the re-housing of all its tools and materials. She was a hard mistress; though no harder on her subordinates than she was on herself. She began to turn her own hand to the packing, and missing a book she had left in the drawing-room the night before, she went to fetch it. It was again a morning of frosty sunshine, and the garden outside lay in dazzling light. The drawing-room windows were open, and through one of them Gertrude perceived Delia moving about outside on the whitened grass. She was looking for the earliest snowdrops which were just beginning to bulge from the green stems, pushing up through the dead leaves under the beech trees. She wore a blue soft shawl round her head and shoulders, and she was singing to herself. As she raised herself from the ground, and paused a moment looking towards the house, but evidently quite unconscious of any spectators, Gertrude could not take her eyes from the vision she made. If radiant beauty, if grace, and flawless youth can "lift a mortal to the skies," Delia stood like a young goddess under the winter sun. But there was much more than beauty in her face. There was a fluttering and dreamy joy which belongs only to the children of earth. The low singing came unconsciously from her lips, as though it were the natural expression of the heart within. Gertrude caught the old lilting tune:-- "For oh, Greensleaves was all my joy-- For oh, Greensleaves was my heart's delight-- And who but my lady Greensleaves--" The woman observing her did so with a strange mixture of softness and repulsion. If Gertrude Marvell loved anybody, she loved Delia--the captive of her own bow and spear, and until now the most loyal, the most single-minded of disciples. But as she saw Delia walk away to a further reach of the garden, the mind of the elder woman bitterly accused the younger. Delia's refusal to join the militant forces in London, at this most critical and desperate time, on what seemed to Gertrude the trumpery excuse of Weston's illness, had made an indelible impression on a fanatical temper. If she had cared--if she had _really_ cared--she could not have done any such thing. "What have I been wasting my time here for?" she asked herself; and reviewing the motives which had induced her to accept Delia's proposal that they should live together, she accused herself sharply of a contemptible lack of judgment and foresight. For no mere affection for Delia Blanchflower would have influenced her, at the time when Delia, writing to tell her of the approaching death of Sir Robert, implored her to come and share her life. "You know I shall have money, dearest Gertrude,"--wrote Delia--"Come and help me to spend it--for the Cause." And for the sake of the Cause,--which was then sorely in want of money--and only for its sake, Gertrude had consented. She was at that time rapidly becoming one of the leading spirits in the London office of the "Daughters," so that to bury herself, even for a time, in a country village, some eighty miles from London, was a sacrifice. But to secure what seemed likely to be some thousands a year from a willing giver, such a temporary and modified exile had appeared to her worth while; and she had at once planned a campaign of "militant" meetings in the towns along the South Coast, by way of keeping in touch with "active work." But, in the first place, the extraordinary terms of Sir Robert's will had proved far more baffling than she and Delia had ever been willing to believe. And, in the next place, the personality of Mark Winnington had almost immediately presented itself to Gertrude as something she had never reckoned with. A blustering and tyrannical guardian would have been comparatively easy to fight. Winnington was formidable, not because he was hostile, resolutely hostile, to their whole propaganda of violence; that might only have spurred a strong-willed girl to more passionate extremes. He was dangerous,--in spite of his forty years--because he was delightful; because, in his leisurely, old-fashioned way, he was so loveable, so handsome, so inevitably attractive, Gertrude, looking back, realised that she had soon perceived--vaguely at least--what might happen, what had now--as she dismally guessed--actually happened. The young, impressionable creature, brought into close contact with this charming fellow--this agreeable reactionary--had fallen in love! That was all. But it was more than enough. Delia might be still unconscious of it herself. But this new shrinking from the most characteristic feature of the violent policy--this new softness and fluidity in a personality that when they first reached Maumsey had begun already to stiffen in the fierce mould of militancy--to what could any observer with eyes in their head attribute them but the influence of Mark Winnington--the daily unseen presence of other judgments and other ideals embodied in a man to whom the girl's feelings had capitulated? "If I could have kept her to myself for another year, he could have done nothing. But he has intervened before her opinions were anything more than the echoes of mine;--and for the future I shall have less and less chance against him. What shall we ever get out of her as a married woman? What would Mark Winnington--to whom she will give herself, body and soul,--allow us to get out of her? Better break with her now, and disentangle my own life!" With such thoughts, a pale and brooding woman pursued the now distant figure of Delia. At the same time Gertrude Marvell had no intention whatever of provoking a premature breach which might deprive either the Cause or herself of any help they might still obtain from Delia in the desperate fight immediately ahead. She, personally, would have infinitely preferred freedom and a garret to Delia's flat, and any kind of dependence on Delia's money. "I was not born to be a parasite!" she angrily thought. But she had no right to prefer them. All that could be extracted from Delia should be extracted. She was now no more to Gertrude than a pawn in the game. Let her be used--if she could not be trusted! But if this had fallen differently, if she had remained the true sister-in-arms, given wholly to the joy of the fight, Gertrude's stern soul would have clasped her to itself, just as passionately as it now dismissed her. "No matter!" The hard brown eyes looked steadily into the future. "That's done with. I am alone--I shall be alone. What does it signify?--a little sooner or later?" The vagueness of the words matched the vagueness of certain haunting premonitions in the background of the mind. Her own future always shaped itself in tragic terms. It was impossible--she knew it--that it should bring her to any kind of happiness. It was no less impossible that she should pause and submit. That active defiance of the existing order, on which she had entered, possessed her, gripped her, irrevocably. She was like the launched stone which describes its appointed curve--till it drops. As for any interference from the side of her own personal ties and affections,--she had none. In her pocket she carried a letter she had received that morning, from her mother. It was plaintive, as usual. "Winnie's second child arrived last week. It was an awful confinement. The first doctor had to get another, and they only just pulled her through. The child's a misery. It would be much better if it had died. I can't think what she'll do. Her husband's a wretched creature--just manages to keep in work--but he neglects her shamefully--and if there ever is anything to spend, _he_ spends it--on his own amusement. She cried the other day, when we were talking of you. She thinks you're living with a rich lady, and have everything you want--and she and her children are often half-starved. 'She might forgive me now, I do think--' she'll say sometimes--'And as for Henry, if I did take him away from her, she may thank her stars she didn't marry him. She'd have killed him by now. She never could stand men like Henry. Only, when he was a young fellow, he took her in--her first, and then me. It was a bad job we ever saw him.' "Why are you so set against us, Gertrude?--your own flesh and blood. I'm sure if I ever was unkind to you I'm sorry for it. You used to say I favoured Albert at your expense--Well, he's as good as dead to me now, and I've got no good out of all the spoiling I gave him. I sit at home by myself, and I'm a pretty miserable woman. I read everything I can in the papers about what you're doing--you, who were my only child, seven years before Albert came. It doesn't matter to you what I think--at least, it oughtn't. I'm an old woman, and whatever I thought I'd never quarrel with you. But it would matter to me a good deal, if you'd sometimes come in, and sit by the fire a bit, and chat. It's three years since I've even seen you. Winnie says you've forgotten us--you only care about the vote. But I don't believe it. Other people may think the vote can make up for everything--but not you. You're too clever. Hoping to see you," "Your lonely old mother, JANET MARVELL." To that letter, Gertrude had already written her reply. Sometime--in the summer, perhaps, she had said to her mother. And she had added the mental proviso--"if I am alive." For the matters in which she was engaged were no child's play, and the excitements of prison and hunger-striking might tell even on the strongest physique. No--her family were nothing to her. Her mother's appeal, though it should not be altogether ignored, was an insincere one. She had always stood by the men of the family; and for the men of the family, Gertrude, its eldest daughter, felt nothing but loathing and contempt. Her father, a local government official in a western town, a small-minded domestic tyrant, ruined by long years of whisky-nipping between meals; her only brother, profligate and spendthrift, of whose present modes of life the less said the better; her brother-in-law, Henry Lewison, the man whom, in her callow, ignorant youth, she was once to have married, before her younger sister supplanted her--a canting hypocrite, who would spend his day in devising petty torments for his wife, and begin and end it with family prayers:--these types, in a brooding and self-centred mind, had gradually come to stand for the whole male race. Nor had her lonely struggle for a livelihood, after she had fled from home, done anything to loosen the hold of these images upon her. She looked back upon a dismal type-writing office, run by a grasping employer; a struggle for health, warring with the struggle for bread; sick headache, sleeplessness, anaemia, yet always within, the same iron will driving on the weary body; and always the same grim perception on the dark horizon of an outer gulf into which some women fell, with no hope of resurrection. She burnt again with the old bitter sense of injustice, on the economic side; remembering fiercely her own stinted earnings, and the higher wages and larger opportunities of men, whom, intellectually, she despised. Remembering too the development of that new and ugly temper in men--men hard-pressed themselves--who must now see in women no longer playthings or sweethearts, but rivals and supplanters. So that gradually, year by year, there had strengthened in her that strange, modern thing, a woman's hatred of men--the normal instincts of sex distorted and embittered. And when suddenly, owing to the slow working of many causes, economic and moral, a section of the Woman Suffrage movement had broken into flame and violence, she had flung her very soul to it as fuel, with the passion of one to whom life at last "gives room." In that outbreak were gathered up for her all the rancours, and all the ideals of life, all its hopes and all its despairs. Not much hope!--and few ideals. Her passion for the Cause had been a grim force, hardly mixed with illusion; but it had held and shaped her. Meanwhile among women she has found a few kindred souls. One of them, a fellow-student, came into money, died, and left Gertrude Marvell a thousand pounds. On that sum she had educated herself, had taken her degree at a West Country University, had moved to London and begun work as a teacher and journalist. Then again, a break down in health, followed by a casual acquaintance with Lady Tonbridge--Sir Robert's offer--its acceptance--Delia! How much had opened to her with Delia! _Pleasure_, for the first time; the sheer pleasure of travel, society, tropical beauty; the strangeness also of finding herself adored, of feeling that young loveliness, that young intelligence, all yielding softness in her own strong hands-- Well, that was done;--practically done. She cheated herself with no vain hopes. The process which had begun in Delia would go forward. One more defeat to admit and forget. One more disaster to turn one's back upon. And no disabling lamentations! Her eyes cleared, her mouth stiffened. She went quietly back to her packing. "Gertrude! What _are_ you doing?" The voice was Delia's. She stood on the threshold of Gertrude's den, looking with amazement, at the littered room and the packing-cases. "I find I must go up at once--They want help at the office." Gertrude, who was writing a letter, delivered the information over her shoulder. "But the flat won't be ready!" "Never mind. I can go to a hotel for a few days." A cloud dropped over the radiance of Delia's face, fresh from the sun and frost outside. "I can't bear your going alone!" "Oh, you'll come later," said Gertrude indifferently. "Did you--did you--have such urgent letters this morning?" "Well--you know things _are_ urgent! But then, you see, you have made up your mind to stay with Weston!" A slight mocking look accompanied the words. "Yes--I must stay with Weston," said Delia, slowly, and then perceiving that the typist showed no signs of leaving them together, and that confidential talk was therefore impossible, she reluctantly went away. Weston that morning was in much pain, and Delia sat beside her, learning by some new and developing instinct how to soothe her. The huntress of the Tyrolese woods had few caressing ways, and pain had always been horrible to her; a thing to be shunned, even by the spectator, lest it should weaken the wild natural energies. But Weston was very dear to her, and the maid's suffering stirred deep slumbering powers in the girl's nature. She watched the trained Nurse at her work, and copied her anxiously. And all the time she was thinking, thinking, now of Gertrude, now of her letter to Winnington. Gertrude was vexed with her, thought her a poor creature--that was plain. "But in a fortnight, I'll go to her,--and they'll see!--" thought the girl's wrestling mind. "And before that, I shall send her money. I can't help what she thinks. I'm not false!--I'm not giving in! But I must have this fortnight,--just this fortnight;--for Weston's sake, and--" For her proud sincerity would not allow her to pretend to herself. What had happened to her? She felt the strangest lightness--as though some long restraint had broken down; a wonderful intermittent happiness, sweeping on her without reason, and setting the breath fluttering. It made her think of what an old Welsh nurse of her childhood had once told her of "conversion," in a Welsh revival, and its marvellous effects; how men and women walked on air, and the iron bands of life and custom dropped away. Then she rose impatiently, despising herself, and went downstairs again to try and help Gertrude. But the packing was done, the pony-cart was ordered, and in an hour more, Gertrude was gone. Delia was left standing on the threshold of the front door, listening to the sound of the receding wheels. They had parted in perfect friendliness, Gertrude with civil wishes for Weston's complete recovery, Delia with eager promises--"I shall soon come--_very_ soon!"--promises of which, as she now remembered, Gertrude had taken but little notice. But as she went back into the house, the girl had a queer feeling of catastrophe, of radical change. She passed the old gun-room, and looked in. All its brown paper bundles, its stacks of leaflets, its books of reference were gone; only a litter of torn papers remained here and there, to shew what its uses had been. And suddenly, a swell of something like exultation, a wild sense of deliverance, rushed upon her, driving out depression. She went back to the drawing-room, with little dancing steps, singing under her breath. The flowers wanted freshening. She went out to the greenhouse, and brought in some early hyacinths and violets till the room was fragrant. Some of them she took up to Weston, chatting to the patient and her nurse as she arranged them, with such sweetness, such smiles, such an abandonment of kindness, that both looked after her amazed, when, again, she vanished. What had become of the imperious absent-minded young woman of ordinary days? Delia lunched alone. And after lunch she grew restless. He must have received her letter at breakfast-time. Probably he had some tiresome meetings in the morning, but soon--soon-- She tried to settle to some reading. How long it was since she had read anything for the joy of it!--anything that in some shape or other was not the mere pemmican of the Suffrage Movement; dusty arguments for, or exasperating arguments against. She plunged into poetry--a miscellaneous volume of modern verse--and the new world of feeling in which her mind had begun to move, grew rich, and deep, and many-coloured about her. Surely--a sound at the gate! She sat up, crimson. Well?--she was going to make friends with her guardian--to bury the hatchet--for a whole fortnight at least. Only that. Nothing more--nothing--nothing! Steps approached. She hastily unearthed a neglected work-basket, and a very ancient piece of half-done embroidery. Was there a thimble anywhere--or needles! Yes!--by good luck. Heavens!--what shamming! She bent over the dingy bit of silk, her cheeks dimpling with laughter. Their first greetings were done, and Winnington was sitting by her--astride a chair, his arms lying along the top of it, his eyes looking down upon her, as she made random stitches in what looked like a futurist design. "Do you know that you wrote me a very, _very_ nice letter?" and as he spoke, she heard in his voice that tone--that lost tone, which she had heard in it at their very first interview, before she had chilled and flouted him, and made his life a burden to him. Her pulses leapt; but she did not look up. "I wonder whether--you quite deserved it? You were angry with me--for nothing!" "I am afraid I can't agree!" The voice now was a little dry, and a pair of very keen grey eyes examined her partially hidden face. She pushed her work away and looked up. "You ought!" she said vehemently. "You accused me--practically--of flirting with Mr. Lathrop. And I was doing nothing of the kind!" He laughed. "I never imagined that you were--or could be--flirting with Mr. Lathrop." "Then why did you threaten to give me up if I went on seeing him?" He hesitated--but said at last--gravely-- "Because I could not take the responsibility." "How would it help me--to give me up? According to you--" she breathed fast--"I should only--go to perdition--the quicker!" Her eyes still laughed, but behind the laughter there was a rush of feeling which communicated itself to him. "May I suggest that it is not necessary to go to perdition--at all--fast or slow?" She shook her head. Silence followed; which Winnington broke. "You said you would like to come and see some of the village people--your own people--and the school? Was that serious?" "Certainly!" She raised an indignant countenance. "I suppose you think--like everybody--that because I want the vote, I can't care about anything else?" "You'll admit it has a way of driving everything else out," he said, mildly. "Have you ever been into the village--for a month?--for two months? The things you wanted have been done. But you haven't been to see." She sprang to her feet. "Shall I come now?" "If it suits you. I've saved the afternoon." She ran out of the room to put on her things, upsetting as she did so, the work-box with which she had been masquerading, and quite unconscious of it. Winnington, smiling to himself, stooped to pick up the reels and skeins of silk. One, a skein of pink silk with which she had been working, he held in his hand a moment, and, suddenly, put in his pocket. After which he drifted absently to the hearthrug, and stood waiting for her, hat in hand. He was thinking of that moment in the wintry dawn when he had read her letter. The shock of emotion returned upon him. But what was he to do? What was really in her mind?--or, for the matter of that, in his own? She re-appeared, radiant in a moleskin cap and furs, and then they both awkwardly remembered--he, that he had made no inquiry about Weston, and she, that she had said nothing of Gertrude Marvell's hurried departure. "Your poor maid? Tell me about her. Oh, but she'll do well. We'll take care of her. France is an awfully good doctor." Her eyes thanked him. She gave him a brief account of Weston's state; then looked away. "Do you know--that I'm quite alone? Gertrude went up to town this morning?" Winnington gave a low whistle of astonishment. "She had to--" said Delia, hurriedly. "It was the office--they couldn't do without her." "I thought she had undertaken to be your chaperon?" The girl coloured. "Well yes--but of course--the other claim came first." "You don't expect me to admit that," said Winnington, with energy. "Miss Marvell has left you alone?--_alone_?--at a moment's notice--with your maid desperately ill--and without a word to me, or anybody?" His eyes sparkled. "Don't let's quarrel!" cried Delia, as she stood opposite to him, putting on her gloves. "_Don't_! Not to-day--not this afternoon! And we're sure to quarrel if we talk about Gertrude." His indignation broke up in laughter. "Very well. We won't mention her. Well, but look here--" he pondered--"You _must_ have somebody. I would propose that Alice should come and keep you company, but I left her in bed with what looks like the flu. Ah!--I have it. But--am I really to advise? You are twenty-one, remember,--nearly twenty-two!" The tender sarcasm in his voice brought a flood of colour to her cheeks. "Go on!" she said, and stood quivering. "Would you consider asking Lady Tonbridge to come and stay with you? Nora is away on a visit." Delia moved quietly to the writing-table, pulled off her gloves, sat down to write a note. He watched her, standing behind her; his strained yet happy look resting on the beautiful dark head. She rose, and held out the note, addressed to Lady Tonbridge. He took the note, and the hand together. The temptation was irresistible. He raised the hand and kissed it. Both were naturally reminded of the only previous occasion on which he had done such a thing; and as he dropped his hold, Delia saw the ugly scar which would always mark his left wrist. "Thank you!"--he said warmly--"That'll be an immense relief to my mind." "You mustn't think she'll convert me," said Delia, quickly. "Why, she's a Suffragist!" Delia shrugged her shoulders. "_Pour rire_!" "Let's leave the horrid subject alone--shall we?" Delia assented; and they set out, just as the winter sun of a bright and brilliant afternoon was beginning to drop towards its setting. * * * * * When Delia afterwards looked back on those two hours in Mark Winnington's company, she remembered them as a time enskied and glorified. First, the mere pleasure of the senses--the orange glow of the January evening, the pleasant crackling of the frosty ground, the exhilaration of exercise, and of the keen pungent air; then the beauty of the village and of the village lanes in the dusk, of the blue smoke drifting along the hill, of the dim reds and whites of the old houses, and the occasional gleams of fire and lamp through the small-paned windows; the gaiety of the children racing home from school, the dignity of the old labourers, the seemliness of the young. It was good to be alive--in England--breathing English air. It was good to be young and strong-limbed, with all one's life before one. And next--and greater--there was the pleasure of Winnington beside her, of his changed manner, of their new comradeship. She felt even a curious joy in the difference of age between them. Now that by some queer change, she had ceased to stand on her dignity with him, to hold him arrogantly at arm's length, there emerged in her a childish confidence and sweetness, enchanting to the man on whom it played. "May I?--" "Do you think I might?--" she would say, gently, throwing out some suggestion or other, as they went in and out of the cottages, and the humbleness in her dark eyes, as though a queen stooped, began to turn his head. And how beautiful this common human life seemed that evening--after all the fierce imaginings in which she had lived so long! In the great towns beyond the hills, women were still starved and sweated,--still enslaved and degraded. Man no doubt was still the stupid and vicious tyrant, the Man-Beast that Gertrude Marvell believed him. But here in this large English village, how the old primal relations stood out!--sorrow-laden and sin-stained often, yet how touching, how worthy, in the main, of reverence and tenderness! As they went in and out of the cottages of her father's estate, the cottages where Winnington was at home, and she a stranger, all that "other side" of any great argument began to speak to her--without words. The world of politics and its machinery, how far away!--instead, the world of human need, and love, and suffering unveiled itself this winter evening to Delia's soul, and spoke to her in a new language. And always it was a language of sex, as between wives and husbands, mothers and sons, sisters and brothers. No isolation of one sex or the other. No possibility of thinking of them apart, as foes and rivals, with jarring rights and claims. These old couples tending each other, clinging together, after their children had left them, till their own last day should dawn; these widowed men or women, piteously lost without the old companion, like the ox left alone in the furrow; these young couples with their first babies; these dutiful or neglectful sons, these hard or tender daughters; these mothers young and old, selfish or devoted:--with Winnington beside her, Delia saw them all anew, heard them all anew. And Love, in all its kinds, everywhere the governing force, by its presence or its absence!--Love abused and degraded, or that Love, whether in the sunken eyes of the old, or on the cheeks of the young, which is but "a little lower than the angels." And what frankly amazed her was Winnington's place in this world of labouring folk. He had given it ten years of service; not charity, but simply the service of the good citizen; moved by a secret, impelling motive, which Delia had yet to learn. And how they rewarded him! She walked beside a natural ruler, and felt her heart presently big with the pride of it. "But the cripples?" She enquired for them, with a touch of sarcasm. "So far," she said, "the population Maumsey, appeared to be quiet exceptionally able-bodied." "Goodness!" said Winnington--"I can't shew you more than two or three cripples to a village. Maumsey only rejoices in two. My county school will collect from the whole county. And I should never have found out the half of them, if it hadn't been for Susy Amberley." "How did she discover them?" asked Delia, without any sort of cordiality. "We--the County Council--put the enquiry into her hands. I showed her--a bit. But she's done it admirably. She's a wonderful little person, Susy. What the old parents will do without her when she goes to London I can't think." "Why is she going?" Winnington shrugged his shoulders kindly. "Wants a training--wants something more to do. Quite right--if it makes her happy. You women have all grown so restless nowadays." He laughed into the rather sombre face beside him. And the face lit up--amazingly. "Because the world's so _marvellous_," said Delia, with her passionate look. "And there's so little time to explore it in. You men have always known that. Now we women know it too." He pondered the remark--half smiling. "Well, you'll see a good deal of it before you've done," he said at last. "Now come and look at what I've been trying to do for the women who complained to you." And he shewed her how everything had been arranged to please her, at the cost of infinite trouble, and much expense. The woman with the eight children had been moved into a spacious new cottage made out of two old ones; the old granny alone in a house now too big for her, had been induced to take in a prim little spinster, the daughter of a small grocer just deceased; and the father of the deficient girl, for whom Miss Dempsey had made herself responsible, received Winnington with a lightening of his tired eyes, and taking him out of earshot of Delia, told him how Bessie "had got through her trouble," and was now earning money at some simple hand-work under Miss Dempsey's care. "I didn't know you were doing all this!" said Delia, remorsefully, as they walked along the village street. "Why didn't you tell me?" "I think I did tell you--once or twice. But you had other things to think about." "I hadn't!" said Delia, with angry energy. "I hadn't, you needn't make excuses for me!" He smiled at her, a little gravely, but said nothing--till they reached a path leading to an isolated cottage-- "Here's a cripple at last!--Susy!--You here?" For as the door opened to his knock, a lady rose from a low seat, and faced them. Winnington grasped her by the hand. "I thought you were already gone." "No--they've put it off again for a week or two--no vacancy yet." She shook hands formally with Delia. "I came to have another look at this boy. Isn't he splendid?" She pointed to a grinning child of five sitting on the edge of the kitchen table, and dangling a pair of heavily ironed legs. The mother proudly shewed them. He had been three months in the Orthopaedic Hospital, she told Delia. The legs twisted with rickets had been broken and set twice, and now he was "doing fine." She set him down, and made him walk. "I never thought to see him do that!" she said, her wan face shining. "And it's all his doing--" she pointed to Winnington, "and Miss Susy's." Meanwhile Susy and Winnington were deep in conversation--very technical much of it--about a host of subjects they seemed to have in common. Delia silent and rather restless, watched them both, the girl's sweet, already faded, face, and Winnington's expression. When they emerged from the cottage Susy said shyly to Delia-- "Won't you come to tea with me some day next week?" "Thank you. I should like to. But my maid is very ill. Else I should be in London." "Oh, I'm very sorry. May I come to you?" Delia thanked her coldly. She could have beaten herself for a rude, ungracious creature; yet for the life of her she could not command another manner. Susy drew back. She and Winnington began to talk again, ranging over persons and incidents quite unknown to Delia--the frank talk, full of matter of comrades in a public service. And again Delia watched them acutely--jealous--yet not in any ordinary sense. When Susy turned back towards the Rectory, Delia said abruptly-- "She's helped you a great deal?" "Susy!" He went off at score, ending with--"What France and I shall do without her, I don't know. If we could only get more women--_scores more women_--to do the work! There we sit, perched up aloft on the Council, and what we want are the women to advise us, and the women's hands--_to do the little things_--which make just all the difference!" She was silent a moment, and then said sorely--"I suppose that means, that if we did all the work we might do--we needn't bother about the vote." He turned upon with animation-- "I vow I wasn't thinking about the vote!" "Miss Amberley doesn't seem to bother about it." Winnington's voice shewed amusement. "I can't imagine Susy a suff. It simply isn't in her." "I know plenty of suffragists just as good and useful as she is," said Delia, bristling. Winnington did not immediately reply. They had left the village behind, and were walking up the Maumsey lane in a gathering darkness, each electrically conscious of the other. At last he said in a changed tone-- "Have I been saying anything to wound you? I didn't mean it." She laughed unsteadily. "You never say anything to wound me. I was only--a kind of fretful porcupine--standing up for my side." "And the last thought in my mind to-night was to attack your 'side,'" he protested. Her tremulous sense drank in the gentleness of his voice, the joy of his strong, enveloping presence, and the sweetness of her own surrender which had brought him back to her, the thought of it vibrating between them, unspoken. Until, suddenly, at the door of the Abbey, Winnington halted and took her by both hands. "I must go home. Good-night. Have you got books to amuse you?" "Plenty." "Poor child!--all alone! But you'll have Lady Tonbridge to-morrow." "How do you know? She mayn't come." "I'm going there now. I'll make her. You--you won't be doing any more embroidery to-night?" He looked at her slyly. Delia laughed out. "There!--when one tries to be feminine, that's how you mock!" "'_Mock_!' I admired. Good-night!--I shall be here to-morrow." He was gone--into the darkness. Delia entered the lonely house, in a bewilderment of feeling. As she passed Gertrude's deserted sitting-room on her way to the staircase, she saw that the parlourmaid had lit a useless lamp there. She went in to put it out. As she did so, a torn paper among the litter on the floor attracted her notice. She stooped and took it up. It seemed to be a fragment of a plan--a plan of a house. It shewed two series of rooms, divided by a long passage. One of the rooms was marked "Red Parlour," another, "Hall," and at the end of the passage, there were some words, clearly in Gertrude Marvell's handwriting-- "_Garden door, north_." With terror in her heart, Delia brought the fragment to the lamp, and examined every word and line of it. Recollections flashed into her mind, and turned her pale. That what she held was part of a general plan of the Monk Lawrence ground-floor, she was certain--dismally certain. And Gertrude had made it. Why? Delia tore the paper into shreds and burnt the shreds. Afterwards she spent an oppressed and miserable night. Her friend reproached her, on the one side; and Winnington, on the other. Chapter XIV Lady Tonbridge was sitting in the window-seat of a little sitting-room adjoining her bedroom at Maumsey Abbey. That the young mistress of Maumsey had done her best to make her guest comfortable, that guest most handsomely acknowledged. Some of the few pretty things which the house contained had been gathered there. The chintz covered sofa and chairs, even though the chintz was ugly, had the pleasant country-house look, which suggests afternoon tea, and chatting friends; a bright fire, flowers and a lavish strewing of books completed the hospitable impression. Yet Madeleine Tonbridge had by no means come to Maumsey Abbey, at Winnington's bidding, as to a Land of Cockaigne. She at all events regarded Delia as a "handful," and was on the watch day by day for things outrageous. She could not help liking the beautiful creature--almost loving her! But Delia was still a "Daughter of Revolt"--apparently unrepentant; that dangerous fanatic, her pretended chaperon, was still in constant correspondence with her; the papers teemed with news of militant outrages, north, south, east and west; and riotous doings were threatened for the meetings of Parliament by Delia's Society. On all these matters Delia shut her proud lips. Indeed her new reticence with regard to militant doings and beliefs struck Lady Tonbridge as more alarming than the young and arrogant defiance with which on her first arrival she had been wont to throw them at the world. Madeleine could not rid herself of the impression during these weeks that Delia had some secret cause of anxiety connected with the militant propaganda. She was often depressed, and there were moments when she shewed a nervousness not easily accounted for. She scarcely ever mentioned Gertrude Marvell; and she never wrote her letters in public; while those she received, she would carry away to the gun room--which she had now made her own particular den--before she opened them. At the same time, if Weston recovered from the operation, in three weeks or so it would be possible for Delia to leave Maumsey; and it was generally understood that she would then join her friend in London, just in time for the opening of Parliament. For the moment, it was plain she was not engaged in any violent doings. But who could answer for the future? And meanwhile, what was Mark Winnington about? It was all very well to sit there trifling with the pages of the _Quarterly Review_! In her moments of solitude by night or day, during the five days she had already spent at Maumsey, Madeleine had never really given her mind to anything else but the engrossing question. "Is he in love with her--or is he not?" Of course she had foreseen--had feared--the possibility of it, from that very first moment, almost--when Winnington had written to her describing the terms of Bob Blanchflower's will, and his own acceptance of the guardianship. Yet why "feared"? Had she not for years desired few things so sincerely as to see Winnington happily married? As to that old tragedy, with its romantic effect upon his life, her first acquiescence in that effect, as something irrevocable, had worn away with time. It now seemed to her an intolerable thing that Agnes Clay's death should forever stand between Winnington and love. It was positively anti-social--bad citizenship--that such a man as Mark Winnington should not produce sons and daughters for the State, when all the wastrels and cheats in creation were so active in the business. All the same she had but rarely ventured to attack him on the subject, and the results had not been encouraging. She was certain that he had entered upon the guardianship of Delia Blanchflower in complete single-mindedness--confident, disdainfully confident, in his own immunity; and after that first outburst into which friendship had betrayed her, she had not dared to return to the subject. But she had watched him--with the lynx eyes of a best friend; and that best friend, a woman to whom love affairs were the most interesting things in existence. In which, of course, she knew she was old-fashioned, and behind the mass of the sex, now racing toward what she understood was called the "economic independence of women"--_i.e._ a life without man. But in spite of watching, she was much perplexed--as to both the persons concerned. She had now been nearly a week at Maumsey, in obedience to Delia's invitation and Winnington's urging. The opportunity indeed of getting to know Mark's beautiful--and troublesome--ward, more intimately, was extremely welcome to her curiosity. Hitherto Gertrude Marvell had served as an effective barrier between Delia and her neighbours. The neighbours did not want to know Miss Marvell, and Miss Marvell, Madeleine Tonbridge was certain, had never intended that the neighbours should rob her of Delia. But now Gertrude Marvell had in some strange sudden way vacated her post; and the fortress lay open to attack and capture, were anyone strong enough to seize it. Moreover Delia's visitor had not been twenty-four hours in the house before she had perceived that Delia's attitude to her guardian was new, and full of suggestion to the shrewd bystander. Winnington had clearly begun to interest the girl profoundly--both in himself, and in his relation to her. She now wished to please him, and was nervously anxious to avoid hurting or offending him. She was always conscious of his neighbourhood or his mood; she was eager--though she tried to conceal it--for information about him; and three nights already had Lady Tonbridge lingered over Delia's bedroom fire, the girl on the rug at her feet, while the elder woman poured out her recollections of Mark Winnington, from the days when she and he had been young together. As to that vanished betrothed, Agnes Clay,--the heroine of Winnington's brief engagement--Delia's thirst for knowledge, in a restless, suppressed way, had been insatiable. Was she jealous of that poor ghost, and of all those delicate, domestic qualities with which her biographer could not but invest her? The daughter of a Dean of Wanchester--retiring, spiritual, tender,--suggesting a cloistered atmosphere, and _The Christian Year_--she was still sharp in Madeleine's recollection, and that lady felt a certain secret and mischievous zest in drawing her portrait, while Delia, her black brows drawn together, her full red mouth compressed, sat silent. Then--Wilmington as a friend!--upon that theme indeed Madeleine had used her brightest colours. And to make this passive listener understand what friendship meant in Wilmington's soul, it had been necessary for the speaker to tell her own story, as much at least as it was possible for her to tell, and Delia to hear. A hasty marriage--"my own fault, my dear, as much as my parents'!"--twelve years of torment and humiliation at the hands of a bad man, descending rapidly to the pit, and quite willing to drag his wife and child with him, ending in a separation largely arranged by Winnington--and then-- "We retired, Nora and I, on a decent allowance, my own money really, only like a fool, I had let it all get into Alfred's hands. We took a house at Richmond. Nora was fifteen. For two years my husband paid the money. Then he wrote to say he was tired of doing without his daughter, and he required her to live with him for six months in the year, as a condition of continuing the allowance. I refused. We would sooner both of us have thrown ourselves into the Thames. Alfred blustered and threatened--but he could do nothing--except cut off the allowance, which he did, at once. Then Mark Winnington found me the cottage here, and made everything smooth for us. I wouldn't take any money from him, though he was abominably ready to give it us! But he got me lessons--he got me friends. He's made everybody here feel for us, and respect us. He's managed the little bits of property we've got left--he's watched over Nora--he's been our earthly Providence--and we both adore him!" On which the speaker, with a flickering smile and tear-dashed eyes, had taken Delia's face in her two slender hands-- "And don't be such a fool, dear, as to imagine there's been anything in it, ever, but the purest friendship and good-heartedness that ever bound three people together! My greatest joy would be to see him married--to a woman worthy of him--if there is one! And he I suppose will find his reward in marrying Nora--to some nice fellow. He begins to match-make for her already." Delia slowly withdrew herself. "And he himself doesn't intend to marry?" She asked the question, clasping her long arms round her knees, as she sat on the floor, her dark eyes--defiantly steady on her guest's face. Lady Tonbridge could hear her own answer. "L'homme propose! Let the right woman try!" Whereupon Delia, a delicious figure, in a slim white dressing-gown, a flood of curly brown hair falling about her neck and shoulders, had sprung up, and bidden her guest a hasty good-night. One other small incident she recalled. _A propos_ of some anxious calculation made by Winnington's sister Alice Matheson one day in talk with Lady Tonbridge--Delia being present--as to whether Mark could possibly afford a better motor than the "ramshackle little horror" he was at present dependent on, Delia had said abruptly, on the departure of Mrs. Matheson-- "But surely the legacy my father left Mr. Winnington would get a new motor!" "But he hasn't taken it, and never will!" Lady Tonbridge had cried, amazed at the girl's ignorance. "Why not?" Delia had demanded, almost fiercely, looking very tall, and oddly resentful. Why not? "Because one doesn't take payment for that sort of thing!" had been Mark's laughing explanation, and the only explanation that she, Madeleine, had been able to get out of him. She handed it on--to Delia's evident discomfort. So, all along, this very annoying--though attaching--young woman had imagined that Winnington was being handsomely paid for putting up with her? * * * * * And Winnington? Here again, it was plain there was a change of attitude, though what it meant Madeleine could not satisfactorily settle with herself. In the early days of his guardianship he had been ready enough to come to her, his most intimate woman-friend, and talk about his ward, though always with that chivalrous delicacy which was his gift among men. Of late he had been much less ready to talk; a good sign! And now, since Gertrude Marvell's blessed departure, he was more at Maumsey than he had ever been before. He seemed indeed to be pitting his own influence against Miss Marvell's, and in his modest way, yet consciously, to be taking Delia in hand, and endeavouring to alter her outlook on life; clearing away, so far as he could, the atmosphere of angry, hearsay propaganda in which she had spent her recent years, and trying to bring her face to face with the deeper loves and duties and sorrows which she in her headstrong youth knew so little about, while they entered so profoundly into his own upright and humane character. Well, but did all this mean _love_?--the desire of the man for the woman. Madeleine Tonbridge pondered it. She recollected a number of little acts and sayings, throwing light upon his profound feeling for the girl, his sympathy with her convictions, her difficulties, her wild revolts against existing abuses and tyrannies. "I learn from her"--he had said once, in conversation,--"she teaches me many things." Madeleine could have laughed in his face--but for the passionate sincerity in his look. One thing she perceived--that he was abundantly roused on the subject of that man Lathrop's acquaintance with his ward. Lathrop's name had not been mentioned since Lady Tonbridge's arrival, but she received the impression of a constant vigilance on Winnington's part, and a certain mystery and unhappiness on Delia's. As to the notion that such a man as Paul Lathrop could have any attraction for such a girl as Delia Blanchflower, the idea was simply preposterous,--except on the general theory that no one is really sane, and every woman "is at heart a rake." But of course there was the common interest, or what appeared to be a common interest in this militant society to which Delia was still so intolerably committed! And an unscrupulous man might easily make capital out of it. At this stage in the rambling reverie which possessed her, Lady Tonbridge was aware of footsteps on the gravel outside. Winnington? He had proposed to take Delia for a ride that afternoon, to distract her mind from Weston's state, and from the operation which was to take place early the following morning. She drew the curtain aside. Paul Lathrop! Madeleine felt herself flushing with surprise and indignation. The visitor was let in immediately. It surely was her duty to go down and play watchdog. She firmly rose. But as she did so, there was a knock at her door, and Delia hurriedly entered. "I--I thought I'd better say--Mr. Lathrop's just come to see me--on business. I'm so sorry, but you won't mind my coming to say so?" Lady Tonbridge raised her eyebrows. "You mean--you want to see him alone? All right. I'll come down presently." Delia disappeared. * * * * * For more than half an hour did that "disreputable creature," as Lady Tonbridge roundly dubbed him, remain closeted with Delia, in Delia's drawing-room. Towards the end of the time the visitor overhead was walking to and fro impatiently, vowing to herself that she was bound--positively bound to Winnington--to go down and dislodge the man. But just as she was about to leave her room, she again heard the front door open and close. She ran to the window just in time to see Lathrop departing--and Winnington arriving!--on foot and alone. She watched the two men pass each other in the drive--Winnington's start of haughty surprise--and Lathrop's smiling and, as she thought, insolent greeting. It seemed to her that Winnington hesitated--was about to stop and address the intruder. But he finally passed him by with the slightest and coldest recognition. Lathrop's fair hair and slouching shoulders disappeared round a corner of the drive. Winnington hurried to the front door and entered. Lady Tonbridge resolutely threw herself into an arm-chair and took up a novel. "Now let them have it out! I don't interfere." * * * * * Meanwhile Delia, with a red spot of agitation on either cheek, was sitting at the old satin-wood bureau in the drawing-room, writing a cheque. A knock at the door disturbed her. She half rose, to see Wilmington open and close it. A look at his face startled her. She sank back into her chair, in evident confusion. But her troubled eyes met his appealingly. Wilmington's disturbance was plain. "I had ventured to think--to hope--" he began, abruptly--"that although you refused to give me your promise when I asked it, yet that you would not again--or so soon again--receive Mr. Lathrop--privately." Delia rose and came towards him. "I told Lady Tonbridge not to come down. Was that very wrong of me?" She looked at him, half smiling, half hanging her head. "It was unwise--and, I think, unkind!" said Winnington, with energy. "Unkind to you?" She lifted her beautiful eyes. There was something touching in their strained expression, and in her tone. "Unkind to yourself, first of all," he said, firmly. "I must repeat Miss Delia, that this man is not a fit associate for you or any young girl. You do yourself harm by admitting him--by allowing him to see you alone--and you hurt your friends." Delia paused a moment. "Then you don't trust me at all?" she said at last, slowly. Winnington melted. How pale she looked! He came forward and took her hand-- "Of course I trust you! But you don't know--you are too young. You confess you have some business with Mr. Lathrop that you can't tell me--your guardian; and you have no idea to what misrepresentations you expose yourself, or with what kind of a man you have to deal!" Delia withdrew her hand, and dropped into a chair--her eyes on the carpet. "I meant--" she said, and her tone trembled--"I did mean to have told you everything to-day." "And now--now you can't?" She made no reply, and in the silence he watched her closely. What could account for such an eclipse of all her young vivacity? It was clear to him that that fellow was entangling her in some monstrous way--part and parcel no doubt of this militant propaganda--and calculating on developments. Winnington's blood boiled. But while he stood uncertain, Delia rose, went to the bureau where she had been writing, brought thence a cheque, and mutely offered it. "What is this?" he asked. "The money you lent me." And to his astonishment he saw that the cheque was for £500, and was signed "Delia Blanchflower." "You will of course explain?" he said, looking at her keenly. Suddenly Delia's embarrassed smile broke through. "It's--it's only that I've been trying to pay my debts!" His patience gave way. "I'm afraid I must tell you--very plainly--that unless you can account to me for this cheque, I must entirely refuse to take it!" Delia put her hands behind her, like a scolded child. "It is my very own," she protested, mildly. "I had some ugly jewels that my grandmother left me, and I have sold them--that's all." Winnington's grey eyes held her. "H'm--and--has Mr. Lathrop had anything to do with the sale?" "Yes!" She looked up frankly, still smiling. "He has managed it for me." "And it never occurred to you to apply to your guardian in such a matter? Or to your lawyer?" She laughed--with what he admitted was a very natural scorn. "Ask my guardian to provide me with the means of helping the 'Daughters'--when he regards us all as criminals? On the contrary, I wanted to relieve your conscience, Mr. Winnington!" "I can't say you have succeeded," he said, grimly, as he began to pace the drawing-room, with slow steps, his hands in his pockets. "Why not? Now--everything you give me--can go to the right things--what you consider the right things. And what is my own--my very own--I can use as I please." Yet neither tone nor gesture were defiant, as they would have been a few weeks before. Rather her look was wistful--appealing--as she stood there, a perplexing, but most charming figure, in her plain black dress, with its Quakerish collar of white lawn. He turned on her impetuously. "And Mr. Lathrop has arranged it all for you?" "Yes. He said he knew a good deal about jewellers. I gave him some diamonds. He took them to London, and he has sold them." "How do you know he has even treated you honestly!" "I am certain he has done it honestly!" she cried indignantly. "There are the letters--from the jewellers--" And running to the bureau, she took thence a packet of letters and thrust them into Winnington's hands. He looked them through in silence,--turning to her, as he put them down. "I see. It is of course possible that this firm of jewellers have paid Mr. Lathrop a heavy commission behind the scenes, of which you know nothing. But I don't press that. Indeed I will assume exactly the contrary. I will suppose that Mr. Lathrop has acted without any profit to himself. If so, in my eyes it only makes the matter worse--for it establishes a claim on you. Miss Delia!--" his resolute gaze held her--"I do not take a farthing of this money unless you allow me to write to Mr. Lathrop, and offer him a reasonable commission for his services!" "No--no! Impossible!" She turned away from him, towards the window, biting her lip--in sharp distress. "Then I return you this cheque"--he laid it down beside her. "And I shall replace the money,--the £500--which I ought never to have allowed you to spend as you have done, out of my own private pocket." She stood silent, looking into the garden, her chest heaving. She thought of what Lady Tonbridge had told her of his modest means--and those generous hidden uses of them, of which even his most intimate friends only got an occasional glimpse. Suddenly she went up to him-- "Will you--will you promise me to write civilly?" she said, in a wavering voice. "Certainly." "You won't offend--insult him?" "I will remember that you have allowed him to come into this drawing-room, and treated him as a guest," said Winnington coldly. "But why, Miss Delia, are you so careful about this man's feelings? And is it still impossible that you should meet my wishes--and refuse to see him again?" She shook her head--mutely. "You intend--to see him again?" "You forget--that we have--business together." Winnington paused a moment, then came nearer to the chair on which she had dropped. "This last week--we have been very good friends--haven't we, Miss Delia?" "Call me Delia, please!" "Delia, then!--we have come to understand each other much better--haven't we?" She made a drooping sign of assent. "_Can't_ I persuade you--to be guided by me--as your father wished--during these next years of your life? I don't ask you to give up your convictions--your ideals. We should all be poor creatures without them! But I do ask you to give up these violent and illegal methods--this violent and illegal Society--with which you have become entangled. It will ruin your life, and poison your whole nature!--unless you can shake yourself free. Work for the Suffrage as much as you like--but work for it honourably--and lawfully. I ask you--I beg of you!--to give up these associates--and these methods." The tenderness and gravity of his tone touched the girl's quivering senses almost unbearably. It was like the tenderness of a woman. She felt a wild impulse to throw herself into his arms, and weep. But instead she grew very white and still. "I can't!"--was all she said, her eyes on the ground. Winnington turned away. Suddenly--a sound of hasty steps in the hall outside--and the door was opened by a nurse, in uniform. "Miss Blanchflower!--can you come?" Delia sprang up. She and the nurse disappeared together. * * * * * Winnington guessed what had happened. Weston who was to face a frightful operation on the morrow as the only chance of saving her life, had on the whole gone through the fortnight of preparatory treatment with wonderful courage. But during the last forty-eight hours, there had been attacks of crying and excitement, connected with the making of her will, which she had insisted on doing, being herself convinced that she would die under the knife. Medically, all such agitation was disastrous. But the only person who could calm her at these moments was Delia, whom she loved. And the girl had shewn in dealing with her a marvellous patience and strength. Presently Madeleine Tonbridge came downstairs--with red eyes. She described the scene of which she had just been a witness in Weston's room. Delia, she said, choking again at the thought of it, had been "wonderful." Then she looked enquiringly at Winnington-- "You met that man going away?" He sat down beside her, unable to disguise his trouble of mind, or to resist the temptation of her sympathy and their old friendship. "I am certain there is some plot afoot--some desperate business--and they are trying to draw her into it! What can we do?" Lady Tonbridge shook her head despondently. What indeed could they do, with a young lady of full age,--bent on her own way? Then she noticed the cheque lying open on the table, and asked what it meant. "Miss Delia wishes to repay me some money I lent her," said Winnington, after a pause. "As matters stand at present, I prefer to wait. Would you kindly take charge of the cheque for her? No need to worry her about it again, to-night." * * * * * Delia came down at tea-time, pale and quiet, like one from whom virtue has gone out. By tacit consent Winnington and Lady Tonbridge devoted themselves to her. It seemed as though in both minds there had arisen the same thought of her as orphaned and motherless, the same pity, the same resentment that anything so lovely should be unhappy--as she clearly was; and not only, so both were convinced, on account of her poor maid. Winnington stayed on into the lamplight, and presently began to read aloud. The scene became intimate and domestic. Delia very silent, sat in a deep arm chair, some pretence at needlework on her knee, but in reality doing nothing but look into the fire, and listen to Winnington's voice. She had changed while upstairs into a white dress, and the brilliance of her hair, and wide, absent eyes above the delicate folds of white, seemed to burn in Winnington's consciousness as he read. Presently however, Lady Tonbridge looking up, was startled to see that the girl had imperceptibly fallen asleep. The childish sadness and sweetness of the face in its utter repose seemed to present another Delia, with another history. Madeleine hoped that Winnington had not observed the girl's sleep; and he certainly gave no sign of it. He went on reading; and presently his companion, noticing the clock, rose very quietly, and went out to give a letter to the parlour-maid for post. As she entered the room again, however, she saw that Winnington had laid down his book. His eyes were now on Delia--his lips parted. All the weather-beaten countenance of the man, its deep lines graven by strenuous living, glowed as from an inward light--marvellously intense and pure. Madeleine's pulse leapt. She had her answer to her speculations of the afternoon. Meanwhile through Delia's sleeping mind there swept scenes and images of fear. She grew restless, and as Lady Tonbridge slipped again into her chair by the fire, the girl woke suddenly with a long quivering sigh, a sound of pain, which provoked a quick movement of alarm in Winnington. But she very soon recovered her usual manner; and Winnington said good-night. He went away carrying his anxieties with him through the dark, carrying also a tumult of soul that would not be stilled. Whither was he drifting? Of late he had felt sure of himself again. Her best friend and guide--it was that he was rapidly becoming--with that, day by day, he bade himself be content. And now, once more, self-control was uprooted and tottering. It was the touch of this new softness, this note of innocent appeal, even of bewildered distress, in her, which was kindling all his manhood, and breaking down his determination. He raged at the thought of Lathrop. As to any danger of a love-affair, like Lady Tonbridge, he scouted the notion. It would be an insult to Delia to suppose such a thing. But it was simply intolerable in his eyes that she should have any dealings with the fellow--that he should have the audacity to call at her house, to put her under an obligation. And he was persuaded there was more than appeared in it; more than Delia's devices for getting money, wherewith to feed the League of Revolt. She was clearly anxious, afraid. Some shadow was brooding over her, some terror that she could not disclose:--of that Winnington was certain. And this man, whom she had already accepted as her colleague in a public campaign, was evidently in the secret; might be even the cause of her fears. He began hotly to con the terms of his letter to Lathrop; and then had to pull himself up, remembering unwillingly what he had promised Delia. Chapter XV "Do you know anything more?" The voice was Delia's; and the man who had just met her in the shelter of the wooded walk which ran along the crest of the hill above the Maumsey valley, was instantly aware of the agitation of the speaker. "Nothing--precise. As I told you last week--you needn't be afraid of anything immediate. But my London informants assure me that elaborate preparations are certainly going on for some great _coup_ as soon as Parliament meets--against Sir Wilfrid. The police are uneasy, though puzzled. They have warned Daunt, and Sir Wilfrid is guarded." "Then of course our people won't attempt it! It would be far too dangerous." "Don't be too sure! You and I know Miss Marvell. If she means to burn Monk Lawrence, she'll achieve it, whatever the police may do." The man and the girl walked on in silence. The January afternoons were lengthening a little, and even under the shadow of the wood Lathrop could see with sufficient plainness Delia's pale beauty--strangely worn and dimmed as it seemed to him. His mind revolted. Couldn't the jealous gods spare even this physical perfection? What on earth had been happening to her? He supposed a Christian would call the face "spiritualised." If so, the Christian--in his opinion--would be a human ass. "I have written several times to Miss Marvell--very strongly," said Delia at last. "I thought you ought to know that. But I have had no reply." "Why don't you go--instead of writing?" "It has been impossible. My maid has been so terribly ill." Lathrop expressed his sympathy. Delia received it with coldness and a slight frown. She hurried on-- "I've written again--but I haven't sent it. Perhaps I oughtn't to have written by post." "Better not. Shall I be your messenger? Miss Marvell doesn't like me--but that don't matter." "Oh, no, thank you." The voice was hastily emphatic; so that his vanity winced. "There are several members of the League in the village. I shall send one of them." He smiled--rather maliciously. "Are you going to tackle Miss Andrews herself?" "You're still--quite _certain_--that she's concerned?" "Quite certain. Since you and I met--a fortnight ago isn't it?--I have seen her several times, in the neighbourhood of the house--after dark. She has no idea, of course, that I have been prowling round." "What have you seen?--what can she be doing?" asked Delia. "Of course I remember what you told me--the other day." Lathrop's belief was that a close watch was now being kept on Daunt--on his goings and comings--with a view perhaps to beguiling him away, and then getting into the house. "But he has lately got a niece to stay with him, and help look after the children, and the house. His sister who is married in London, offered to send her down for six months. He was rather surprised, for he had quite lost sight of his sister; but he tells me it's a great relief to his mind. "So you talk to him?" "Certainly. Oh, he knows all about me--but he knows too that I'm on the side of the house! He thinks I'm a queer chap--but he can trust me--in _that_ business. And by the way, Miss Blanchflower, perhaps I ought to let you understand that I'm an artist and a writer, before I'm a Suffragist, and if I come across Miss Marvell--engaged in what you and I have been talking of--I shall behave just like any other member of the public, and act for the police. I don't want to sail--with you--under any false pretences!" "I know," said Delia, quietly. "You came to warn me--and we are acting together. I understand perfectly. You--you've promised however"--she could not keep her voice quite normal--"that you'd let me know--that you'd give me notice before you took any step." Lathrop nodded. "If there's time--I promise. But if Daunt or I come upon Miss Marvell--or any of her minions--torch in hand--there would not be time. Though, of course, if I could help her escape, consistently with saving the house--for your sake--I should do so. I am sure you believe that?" Delia made no audible reply, but he took her silence for consent. "And now"--he resumed--"I ought to be informed without delay, whether your messenger finds Miss Marvell and how she receives your letter." "I will let you know at once." "A telegram brings me here--this same spot. But you won't wire from the village?" "Oh no, from Latchford." "Well, then, that's settled. Regard me, please, as your henchman. Well!--have you read any Madame de Noailles?" He fancied he saw a slight impatient movement. "Not yet, I'm afraid. I've been living in a sick room." Again he expressed polite sympathy, while his thoughts repeated--"What waste!--what absurdity!" "She might distract you--especially in these winter days. Her verse is the very quintessence of summer--of hot gardens and their scents--of roses--and June twilights. It takes one out of this leafless north." He stretched a hand to the landscape. And suddenly, while his heavy face kindled, he began to recite. His French was immaculate--even to a sensitive and well-trained ear; and his voice, which in speaking was disagreeable, took in reciting deep and beautiful notes, which easily communicated to a listener the thrill, the passion, of sensuous pleasure, which certain poetry produced in himself. But it communicated no such thrill to Delia. She was only irritably conscious of the uncouthness of his large cadaverous face, and straggling fair hair; of his ragged ulster, his loosened tie, and all the other untidy details of his dress. "And I shall have to go on meeting him!" she thought, with repulsion. "And at the end of this walk (the gate was in sight) I shall have to shake hands with him--and he'll hold my hand." She loathed the thought of it; but she knew very well that she Was under coercion--for Gertrude's sake. The recollection of Winnington--away in Latchford on county business--smote her sharply. But how could she help it? She must--_must_ keep in touch with this man--who had Gertrude in his power. While these thoughts were running through her mind, he stopped his recitation abruptly. "Am I to help you any more--with the jewels?" Delia started. Lathrop was smiling at her, and she resented the smile. She had forgotten. But there was no help for it. She must have more money. It might be, in the last resort, the means of bargaining with Gertrude. And how could she ask Mark Winnington! So she hurriedly thanked him, naming a tiara and two pendants, that she thought must be valuable. "All right," said Lathrop, taking out a note-book from his breast pocket, and looking at certain entries he had made on the occasion of his visit to Maumsey. "I remember--worth a couple of thousand at least. When shall I have them?" "I will send them registered--to-morrow--from Latchford." "_ Très bien_! I will do my best. You know Mr. Winnington has offered me a commission?" His eyes laughed. Delia turned upon him. "And you ought to accept it, Mr. Lathrop! It would be kinder to all of us." She spoke with spirit and dignity. But he laughed again and shook his head. "My reward, you see, is just _not_ to be paid. My fee is your presence--in this wood--your little word of thanks--and the hand you give me--on the bargain!" They had reached the gate, and he held out his hand. Delia had flushed violently, but she yielded her own. He pressed it lingeringly, as she had foreseen, then released it and opened the gate for her. "Good-bye then. A word commands me--when you wish. We keep watch--and each informs the other--barring accidents. That is, I think, the bargain." She murmured assent, and they parted. Half way back towards his own cottage, Lathrop paused at a spot where the trees were thin, and the slopes of the valley below could be clearly seen. He could still make out her figure nearing the first houses of the village. "I think she hates me. Never mind! I command her, and meet me she must--when I please to summon her. There is some sweetness in that--and in teasing the stupid fellow who no doubt will own her some day." And he thought exultantly of Winnington's letter to him, and his own insolent reply. It had been a perfectly civil letter--and a perfectly proper thing for a guardian to do. But--for the moment-- "I have the whip hand--and it amuses me to keep it,--Now then for Blaydes!" For there, in the doorway of the cottage, stood the young journalist, waiting and smoking. He was evidently in good humour. "Well? She came?" "Of course she came. But it doesn't matter to you." "Oh, doesn't it! I suppose she wants you to sell something more for her?" Lathrop did not reply. Concerning Gertrude Marvell, he had not breathed a word to Blaydes. They entered the hut together, and Lathrop rekindled the fire. The two men sat over it smoking. Blaydes plied his companion with eager questions, to which Lathrop returned the scantiest answers. At last he said with a sarcastic look-- "I was offered four hundred pounds this afternoon--and refused it." "The deuce you did!" cried Blaydes, fiercely. "What about my debt--and what do you mean?" "Ten per cent. commission," said Lathrop, drawing quietly at his cigar. "Sales up to two thou., a fortnight ago. I shall get the same money--or more--for the next batch." "Well, that's all right! No need to get it out of the lady, if you're particular. Get it out of the other side. Any fool could manage that." "I shall not get a farthing out of the other side. I shall not make a doit out of the whole transaction!" "Then you're a d----d fool," said Blaydes, in a passion. "And a dishonest fool besides!" "Easy, please! What hold should I have on this girl--this splendid creature--if I were merely to make money out of her? As it is, she's obliged to me--she treats me like a gentleman. I thought you had matrimonial ideas." "I don't believe you've got the ghost of a chance!" grumbled Blaydes, his mind smarting under the thought of the lost four hundred pounds, out of which his debt might have been paid. "Nor do I," said Lathrop, coolly. "But I choose to keep on equal terms with her. You can sell me up when you like." He lounged to the window, and threw it open. The January day was closing, not in any glory of sunset, but with interwoven greys and pearls, and delicate yellow lights slipping through the clouds. "I shall always have _this_"--he said to himself, passionately, as he drank in the air and the beauty--"whatever happens." Recollection brought back to him Delia's proud, virginal youth, and her springing step as she walked beside him through the wood. His mind wavered again between triumph and self-disgust. His muddy past returned upon him, mingled, as always, with that invincible respect for her, and belief in something high and unstained in the depths of his own nature, to which his weakened and corrupt will was yet unable to give any effect. "What I have done is not 'me'"--he thought. "At any rate not all 'me.' I am better than it. I suspect Winnington has told her something--measuring it chastely out. All the same--I shall see her again." * * * * * Meanwhile Delia was descending the hill pursued by doubts and terrors. The day was now darkening fast, and heavy snow-clouds were coming down over the valley. The wind had dropped, but the heavy air was bitter-cold and lifeless, as though the earth waited sadly for the silencing and muffling of the snow. And in Delia's heart there was a like dumb expectancy of change. The old enthusiasms, and ideals and causes, seemed for the moment to lie veiled and frozen within her. Only two figures emerged sharply in the landscape of thought--Gertrude--and Winnington. Since that day, the day before Weston's operation, when Paul Lathrop had brought her evidence--collected partly from small incidents and observations on the spot, partly from information supplied him by friends in London--which had sharpened all her own suspicions into certainties, she had never known an hour free from fear. Her letters had remained wholly unanswered. She did not even know where Gertrude was; though it seemed to her that letters addressed to the head office of the League of Revolt must have been forwarded. No! Gertrude was really planning this hateful thing; the destruction of this beautiful and historic house, with all its memories and its treasures, in order to punish a Cabinet Minister for his opposition to Woman Suffrage, and so terrorise others. Moreover it meant the risking of human life--Daunt--his children, complete indifference also to Delia's feelings, Delia's pain. What was she to do? Betray her friend?--go to Winnington for help? But he was a magistrate. If such a plot were really on foot--and Lathrop was himself convinced that petroleum and explosives were already stored somewhere in the neighbourhood of the house--Winnington could only treat such a thing as a public servant, as a guardian of the law. Any appeal to him to let private interests--even _her_ interests--interfere, would, she felt certain, be entirely fruitless. Once go to him, the police must be informed--it would be his clear duty; and if such proofs of the plot existed as Lathrop believed, Gertrude would be arrested, and her accomplices. Including Delia herself? That possibility, instead of frightening her, gave the girl some momentary comfort. For that _might_ perhaps secure Winnington's silence? But no!--her common sense dismissed the notion. Winnington would discover at once that she had had no connection whatever with the business. Lathrop's evidence alone would be enough. And that being so, her confession would simply hand Gertrude over to Winnington's conscience. And Mark Winnington's conscience was a thing to fear. And yet the yearning to go to him--like the yearning of an unhappy child--was so strong. Traitor!--yes, _traitor_!--double-dyed. And pausing just outside the village, at a field gate, Delia leant over it, gazing into the lowering sky, and piteously crying to some power beyond--some God, "if any Zeus there be," on whom the heart in its trouble might throw itself. Her thought ran backwards and forwards over the past months and years. The burning moments of revolt through which she had lived--the meetings of the League with their multitudes of faces, strained, fierce faces, alive, many of them, with hatreds new to English life, new perhaps to civilised history,--and the intermittent gusts of pity and fury which had swept through her own young ignorance as she listened, making a hideous thing of the future and of human fate:--she lived through them all again. Individual personalities recurred to her, the wild looks of delicate, frenzied women, who had lost health, employment, and the love of friends--suffered in body, mind and estate for this "cause" to which she too had vowed herself. Was she alone to desert, to fail--both the cause and her friend, who had taught her everything? "It's not my will--not my _will_--that shrinks"--she moaned to herself. "If I _believed_--if I still believed!" But why was the fire gone out of the old faiths, the savour from the old hopes? Was she less moved by the sufferings, the toils, the weakness of her sex? She could remember nights of weeping over the wrongs of women, after an impassioned evening with Gertrude. And now--had the heart of flesh become a heart of stone? Was she no longer worthy of the great crusade, the vast upheaval? She could not tell. She only knew that the glamour of it all was gone--that there were many hours when the Movement lay like lead upon her life. Was it simply that her intelligence had revolted, that she had come to see the folly, the sheer, ludicrous folly of a "physical force" policy which opposed the pin-pricks of women to the strength of men? Or was it something else--something far more compelling--more convincing--more humiliating! "I've just fallen in love!--_fallen in love!_"--the words repeated themselves brazenly, desperately, in her mind:--"and I can't think for myself--judge for myself any longer! It's abominable--but it's true!" The very thought of Winnington's voice and look made her tremble as she walked. Eternal weakness of the eternal woman! She scorned herself, yet a bewildering joy sang through her senses. Nevertheless she held it at bay. She had her promised word--her honour--to think of. Gertrude still expected her in London--on the scene of action. "And I shall go," she said to herself with resolute inconsistency, "_I shall go_!" What an angel Mark Winnington had been to her, this last fortnight! She recalled the day of Weston's operation, and all the long days since. The poor gentle creature had suffered terribly; death had been just held off, from hour to hour; and was only now withdrawing. And Delia, sitting by the bed, or stealing with hushed foot about the house, was not only torn by pity for the living sufferer, she was haunted again by all the memories of her father's dying struggle--bitter and miserable days! And with what tenderness, what strength, what infinite delicacy of thought and care, had she been upheld through it all! Her heart melted within her. "There are such men in the world--there are!--and a year ago I should have simply despised anyone who told me so!" Yet after these weeks of deepening experience, and sacred feeling, in which she had come to love Mark Winnington with all the strength of her young heart, and to realise that she loved him, the first use that she was making of a free hour was to go, unknown to him--for he was away on county business at Wanchester--and meet Paul Lathrop! "But he would understand," she said to herself, drearily, as she moved on again. "If he knew, he would understand." * * * * * Now she must hurry on. She turned into the broad High Street of the village, observed by many people, and half way down, she stopped at a door on which was a brass plate, "Miss Toogood, Dressmaker." The lame woman greeted her with delight, and there in the back parlour of the little shop she found them gathered,--Kitty Foster, the science-mistress, Miss Jackson, and Miss Toogood,--the three "Daughters," who were now coldly looked on in the village, and found pleasure chiefly in each other's society. Marion Andrews was not there. Delia indeed fancied she had seen her in the dusk, walking in a side lane, that led into the Monk Lawrence road, with another girl, whom Delia did not know. It was a relief, however, not to find her--for the moment. The faces of the three women in the back parlour, were all strained and nervous; they spoke low, and they gathered round Delia with an eagerness which betrayed their own sense of isolation--of being left leaderless. "You will be going up soon, won't you?" whispered Miss Toogood, as she stroked the sleeve of Delia's jacket. "The _Tocsin_ says there'll be great doings next week--the day Parliament meets." "I've got my orders!"--said Kitty Foster, tossing her red hair mysteriously. "Father won't keep me down here any longer. I've made arrangements to go up to-morrow and lodge with a cousin in Battersea. She's as deep in it as I am." "And I'm hoping they'll find room for me in the League office," said the science-mistress. "I can't stand this life here much longer. My Governors are always showing me they think us all criminals, and they'll find an excuse for getting rid of me whenever they can. I daren't even put up the 'Daughters' colours in my room now." Her hollow, anxious eyes, with the fanatical light in them clung to Delia--to the girl's noble head, and the young face flushed with the winter wind. "But we shall get it this session, shan't we?" said Miss Toogood eagerly, still stroking Delia's fur. "The Government will give in--they must give in." And she began to talk with hushed enthusiasm of the last month's tale of outrages--houses burnt, windows broken, Downing Street attacked, red pepper thrown over a Minister, ballot-boxes spoiled-- Suddenly it all seemed to Delia so absurd--so pathetic-- "I don't think we shall get the Bill!" she said, sombrely. "We shall be tricked again." "Dear, dear!" said Miss Toogood, helplessly. "Then we shall have to go on. It's war. We can't stop." And as she stood there, sadly contemplating the "war," in which, poor soul, she had never yet joined, except by sympathy, a little bill-distributing and a modest subscription, she seemed to carry on her shoulders the whole burden of the "Movement"--herself, the little lame dressmaker, on the one side--and a truculent British Empire on the other. "We'll make them smart anyway!" cried Kitty Foster. "See if we don't!" Delia hurriedly opened her business. Would one of them take a letter for her to London--an important letter to Miss Marvell that she didn't want to trust to the post. Whoever took it must go to the League office and find out where Miss Marvell was, and deliver it--personally. She couldn't go herself--till after the doctors' consultation, which was to be held on Monday--if then. Miss Jackson at once volunteered. Her face lightened eagerly. "It's Saturday. I shall be free. And then I shall see for myself--at the office--if they can give me anything to do. When they write, they seem to put me off." Delia gave her the letter, and stayed talking with them a little. They, it was evident, knew nothing of the anxiety which possessed her. And as to their hopes and expectations--why was it they now seemed to her so foolish and so ignorant? She had shared them all, such a little while before. And meanwhile they made much of her. They tried to keep her with them in the little stuffy parlour, with its books which had belonged to Miss Toogood's father, and the engraving of Winchester cathedral, and the portrait of Mr. Keble. That "Miss Blanchflower" was with them, seemed to reflect a glory on their little despised coterie. They admired her and listened to her, loath to let her go. But at last Delia said Good-bye, and stepped out again into the lights of the village street. As she walked rapidly towards Maumsey, and the village houses thinned and fell away, she suddenly noticed a dark figure in front of her. It was Marion Andrews. Delia ran to overtake her. Marion stopped uncertainly when she heard herself called. Delia, breathless, laid a hand on her arm. "I wanted to speak to you!" "Yes!" The girl stood quiet. It was too dark now to see her face. "I wanted to tell you--that there are suspicions--about Monk Lawrence. You are being watched. I want you to promise to give it up!" There was no one on the road, above which some frosty stars had begun to come out. Marion Andrews moved on slowly. "I don't know what you mean, Miss Blanchflower." "Don't, please, try to deceive me!" cried Delia, with low-voiced urgency. "You have been seen at night--following Daunt about, examining the doors and windows. The person who suspects won't betray us. I've seen to that. But you must give it up--you _must_! I have written to Miss Marvell." Marion Andrews laughed,--a sound of defiance. "All right. I don't take my orders from any one but her. But you are mistaken, Miss Blanchflower, quite mistaken. Good-night." And turning quickly to the left, she entered a field path leading to her brother's house, and was immediately out of sight. Delia went on, smarting and bewildered. How clear it was that she was no longer trusted--no longer in the inner circle--and that Gertrude herself had given the cue! The silent and stubborn Marion Andrews was of a very different type from the three excitable or helpless women gathered in Miss Toogood's parlour. She had ability, passion, and the power to hold her tongue. Her connection with Gertrude Marvell had begun, in London, at the "Daughters" office, as Delia now knew, long before her own appearance at Maumsey. When Gertrude came to the Abbey, she and this strange, determined woman were already well acquainted, though Delia herself had not been aware of it till quite lately. "I have been a child in their hands!--they have _never_ trusted me!" Heart and vanity were equally wounded. As she neared the Maumsey gate, suddenly a sound--a voice--a tall figure in the twilight. "Ah, there you are!" said Winnington. "Lady Tonbridge sent me to look for you." "Aren't you back very early?" Delia attempted her usual voice. But the man who joined her at once detected the note of effort, of tired pre-occupation. "Yes--our business collapsed. Our clerk's too good--leaves us nothing to do. So I've been having a talk with Lady Tonbridge." Delia was startled; not by the words, but by the manner of them. While she seemed to Winnington to be thinking of something other than the moment--the actual moment, her impression was the precise opposite, as of a sharp, intense consciousness of the moment in him, which presently communicated its own emotion to her. They walked up the drive together. "At last I have got a horse for you," said Winnington, after a pause. "Shall I bring it to-morrow? Weston is going on so well to-night, France tells me, that he may be able to say 'out of danger' to-morrow. If so, let me take you far afield, into the Forest. We might have a jolly run." Delia hesitated. It was very good of him. But she was out of practice. She hadn't ridden for a long time. Winnington laughed aloud. He told--deliberately--a tale of a young lady on a black mare, whom no one else could ride--of a Valkyrie--a Brunhilde--who had exchanged a Tyrolese hotel for a forest lodge, and ranged the wide world alone-- "Oh!"--cried Delia, "where did you hear that?" He described the talk of the little Swedish lady, and that evening on the heights when he had first heard her name. "Next day came the lawyers' letter--and yours--both in a bundle." "You'll agree--I did all I could--to put you off!" "So I understood--at once. You never beat about the bush." There was a tender laughter in his voice. But she had not the heart to spar with him. He felt rather than saw her drooping. Alarm--anxiety--rushed upon him, mingled in a tempest-driven mind with all that Madeleine Tonbridge, in the Maumsey drawing-room, had just been saying to him. That had been indeed the plain speaking of a friend!--attacking his qualms and scruples up and down, denouncing them even; asking him indignantly, who else could save this child--who else could free her from the sordid entanglement into which her life had slipped--but he? "You--you only, can do it!" The words were still thundering through his blood. Yet he had not meant to listen to his old friend. He had indeed withstood her firmly. But this sad and languid Delia began, again, to put resistance to flight--to tempt--to justify him--driving him into action that his cooler will had just refused. Suddenly, as they walked under the overshadowing trees of the drive, her ungloved hand hanging beside her, she felt it taken, enclosed in a warm strong clasp. A thrill, a shiver ran through her. But she let it stay. Neither spoke. Only as they neared the front door with the lamp, she softly withdrew her fingers. There was no one in the drawing-room, which was scented with early hyacinths, and pleasantly aglow with fire-light. Winnington closed the door, and they stood facing each other. Delia wanted to cry out--to prevent him from speaking--but she seemed struck dumb. He approached her. "Delia!" She looked at him still helplessly silent. She had thrown off her hat and furs, and, in her short walking-dress, she looked singularly young and fragile. The change which had tempered the splendid--or insolent--exuberance of her beauty, which Lathrop had perceived, had made it in Winnington's eyes infinitely more appealing, infinitely more seductive. Love and fear, mingled, had "passed into her face," like the sculptor's last subtle touches on the clay. "Delia!" How all life seemed to have passed into a name! "I'm not sure that I ought to speak! I'm not sure it's fair. It--it seems like taking advantage. If you think so, don't imagine I shall ever press it again. I'm twenty years older than you--I've had my youth. I thought everything was closed for me--but--" He paused a moment--then his voice broke into a low cry--"Dear! what have you done to make me love you so?" He came nearer. His look spoke the rest. Delia retreated. "What have I done?" she said passionately. "Made your life one long worry!--ever since you saw me. How can you love me?--you oughtn't!--you oughtn't!" He laughed. "Every quarrel we had I loved you the better. From our very first talk in this room--" She cried out, putting up her hands, as though to protect herself against the power that breathed from his face and shining eyes. "Don't--don't!--I can't bear it." His expression changed. "Delia!" "Oh, I do thank you!" she said, piteously, "I would--if I could. I--I shall never care for any one else--but I can't--I can't." He was silent a moment, and then said, taking her hands, and putting them to his lips-- "Won't you explain?" "Yes, I'll try--I ought to. You see"--she looked up in anguish--"I'm not my own--to give--and I--No, no, I couldn't make you happy!" "You mean--you're--you're too deeply pledged to this Society?" He had dropped her hands, and stood looking at her, as if he would read her through. "I must go up to town next week," she said hurriedly. "I must go, and I must do what Gertrude tells me. Perhaps--I can protect--save her. I don't know. I daresay I'm absurd to think so--but I might--and I'm bound. But I'm promised--promised in honour--and I can't--get free. I can't give up Gertrude--and you--you could never bear with her--or accept her. And so--you see--I should just make you miserable!" He walked away, his hands in his pockets, and came back. Then suddenly he took her by the shoulders. "You don't imagine I shall acquiesce in this!" he said passionately--"that I shall endure to see you tied and chained by a woman whom I know you have ceased to respect, and I believe you have ceased to love!" "No!--no!--" she protested. "I think it is so," he said, steadily. "That is how I read it!" She gave a sob--quickly repressed. Then she violently mastered herself. "If it were true--I can't marry you. I won't be treacherous--nor a coward. And I won't ruin your life. Dear Mr. Mark--it's quite, quite impossible. Let's never talk of it again." And straightening all her slender body, she faced him with that foolish courage, that senseless heroism, which women have so terribly at command. So far, however from obliging her, he broke into a tempest of discussion bringing to bear upon her all the arguments that love or common sense dictated. If she really cared for him at all, if she even thought it possible she might care, was she going to refuse all help--all advice--from one to whom she had grown so dear?--to whom everything she did was now of such vital, such desperate importance? He pleaded for himself--guessing it to be the more hopeful way. "It's been a lonely life, Delia, till you came! And now you've filled it. For God's sake, listen to me! Let me protect you, dear--let me advise you--trust yourself to me. Do you imagine I should want to dictate to you--or tyrannise over you? Do you imagine I don't sympathise with your faiths, your ideals--that I don't feel for women--what they suffer--what they endure--in this hard world? Delia, we'd work together!--it mightn't be always in the same way--nor always with the same opinions--but we'd teach--we'd help each other. Your own conscience--your own mind--I see it plainly--have turned against this horrible campaign--and the woman who's led you into it. How she's treated you! Would any friend, any real _friend_ have left you alone through this Weston business? And you've given her everything--your house, your money, yourself! It makes me _mad_. I do implore you to break with her--as gently, as generously as you like--but _free yourself_! And then!"--he drew a long breath--"what a life we'd make together!" He sat down beside her. Under the strong overhanging brows, his grey eyes still pleaded with her--silently. But she was just strong enough, alas!--the poor child!--to resist him. She scarcely replied; but her silence held the gate--against his onslaughts. And at last she tottered to her feet. "Mr. Mark--dear Mr. Mark!--let me go!" Her voice, her aspect struck him dumb. And before he could rally his forces again, the door shut, and she was gone. Chapter XVI "So I mustn't argue any more?" said Lady Tonbridge, looking at Delia, who was seated by her guest's fire, and wore the weary aspect of one who had already been argued with a good deal. Madeleine's tone was one of suppressed exasperation. Exasperation rather with the general nature of things than with Delia. It was difficult to be angry with one whose perversity made her so evidently wretched. But as to the "intolerable woman" who had got the girl's conscience--and Winnington's happiness--in her power, Lady Tonbridge's feelings were at a white heat. How to reason with Delia, without handling Gertrude Marvell as she deserved---there was the difficulty. In any case, Delia was unshakeable. If Weston were really out of danger--Dr. France was to bring over the Brownmouth specialist on Monday--then that very afternoon, or the next morning, Delia must and would go to London to join Gertrude Marvell. And six days later Parliament would re-assemble under the menace of raids and stone-throwings, to which the _Tocsin_ had been for weeks past summoning "The Daughters of Revolt," throughout the country, in terms of passionate violence. In those proceedings Delia had apparently determined to take her part. As to this Lady Tonbridge had not been able to move her in the least. The case for Winnington seemed indeed for the moment desperate. After his scene with Delia, he had left the Abbey immediately, and Lady Tonbridge, though certain that something important--and disastrous--had happened, would have known nothing, but for a sudden confession from Delia, as the two ladies sat together in the drawing-room after dinner. Delia had abruptly laid down her book, with which she was clearly only trifling--in order to say-- "I think I had better tell you at once that my guardian asked me to marry him, this afternoon, and I refused." Since this earthquake shock, Madeleine Tonbridge could imagine nothing more unsatisfactory than the conversations between them which had begun in the drawing-room, and lingered on till, now, at nearly midnight, sheer weariness on both sides had brought them to an end. When Madeleine had at last thrown up argument as hopeless, Delia with a face of carven wax, and so handsome through it all that Lady Tonbridge could have beaten her for sheer vexation, had said a quiet goodnight and departed. But she was _in love with him_, the foolish, obstinate child!--wildly, absorbingly in love with him! The fact was tragically evident, in everything she said, and everything she left unsaid. The struggle lay then between her loyalty to her friend, the passionate loyalty of woman to woman, so newly and strangely developed by the Suffrage movement, and Winnington's advancing influence,--the influence of a man equipped surely with all the means of victory--character, strength, charm--over the girl's heart and imagination. He must conquer! And yet Madeleine Tonbridge, staring into the ashes of a dwindling fire, had never persuaded herself--incorrigible optimist that she was--to so little purpose. What _was_ there at the back of the girl's mind? Something more than appeared; though what appeared was bad enough. One seemed at times to catch a glimpse of some cloaked and brooding Horror, in the dim background of the girl's consciousness, and overshadowing it. What more likely indeed, with this wild campaign sweeping through the country? She probably knew or suspected things that her moral sense condemned, to which she was nevertheless committed. "We shall end by proving all that the enemy says of us; we shall give our chance away for a generation!" "Do for Heaven's sake keep the young lady at home!" The speaker was Dr. France. After seeing his patient, dismissing the specialist, and spending half an hour _tête-à-tête_ with Delia, he came down to see Lady Tonbridge in a state that in any one else would have been a state of agitation. In him all that appeared was a certain hawkish glitter in the eye, and a tendency to pull and pinch a scarcely existing moustache. But Madeleine, who knew him well, understood that he was just as much at feud with the radical absurdity of things as she was. "No one can keep her at home. Delia is of age," she said, rising to meet him, with a face as serious as his own. "If she gets into prison, and hunger-strikes, she'll injure herself! She's extraordinarily run down with this business of Weston's. I don't believe she could stand the sheer excitement of what she proposes to do." "She's told you?" "Quite enough. If she once goes up to town--if she once gets into that woman's clutches, no one can tell what will happen. Oh, you women--you women!" And the doctor walked tigerishly up and down the room. "That some of the cleverest and wisest of you can stoop to dabbling in a business like this! Upon my word it's an eye-opener!--it pulls one up. And you think you can drive men by such antics! The more you smash and burn, the more firmly goes down the male foot--yes, and the female too!" And the doctor, with a glare, and a male foot as firm as he could make it, came to a stop beside Lady Tonbridge--who looked at him coolly. "Excellent!--but no concern of mine. I'm not a militant. I want the vote just as much as Delia does!" said Lady Tonbridge, firmly. "Don't forget that." "No, you don't--you don't! Excuse me. You are a reasonable woman." "Half the reasonable women in England want the vote. Why shouldn't I have a vote--as well as you?" "Because, my dear lady--" the doctor smote the table with his hand for emphasis--"because the parliamentary vote means the government _of men by men_--without which we go to pieces. And you propose now to make it include the government of men by women--which is absurd!--and if you try it, will only break up the only real government that exists, or can exist!" "Oh!--'physical force,'" said Madeleine, contemptuously, with her nose in the air. "Well--did I--did you--make the physical difference between men and women? Can we unmake it?" "We are governed by discussion--not by force." "Are we? Look at South Africa--look at Ulster--look at the labour troubles that have been, and are to be. And then you women come along with your claim to the vote! What are you doing but breaking up all the social values--weakening all the foundations of the social edifice! Woe!--to you women especially--when you teach men to despise the vote--when men come to know that behind the paper currency of a vote which may be a man's or a woman's, there is nothing but an opinion--bad or good! At present, I tell you, the great conventions of democracy hold because there is reality of bone and muscle behind them! Break down that reality--and sooner or later we come back to force again--through bloodshed and anarchy!" "Inevitable--all the same!" cried Madeleine. "Why did you ever let us taste education?--if you are to deny us for ever political equality?" "Use your education, my dear Madam!" said the doctor, indignantly. "Are there not many roads to political equality?--many forms of government within government, that may be tried, before you insist on ruining us by doing men's work in the men's way? Hasn't it taken more than a hundred years to settle that Irish question, which began with the Union? Is it a hundred years since it was a hanging matter to steal a handkerchief off a hedge? Can't you give us a hundred years for the Woman Question? Sixty years only, since the higher education of women began! Isn't the science of government developing every day? Women have got, you say, to be fitted into government--I agree! I _agree_! But _don't rush it_! Claim everything--what you like!--except only that sovereign vote, which controls, and must control, the male force of an Empire!" "Jove's thunder!" scoffed Lady Tonbridge. "Well--my dear old friend!--you and I shan't agree--you know that. Now what can I do for Delia?" "Nothing," said France gloomily. "Unless some one goes up to watch over her." "Her guardian will go," said Madeleine quietly, after a pause. They eyed each other. "You're sure?" said France. "Quite sure--though I've not said a word to him--nor he to me." "All right then--she's worth it! By George, she's got the makings of something splendid in her. I tell you she's had as much to do as any of us with saving the life of that woman upstairs. Courage?--tenderness?--'not arf.'" The slangy term shewed the speaker's desire to get rid of his own feelings. He had, at any rate, soon smothered them, and he and Lady Tonbridge, their chairs drawn close, fell into a very confidential discussion. France was one of those country doctors, not rare fortunately in England, in whom a whole neighbourhood confides, whom a whole neighbourhood loves; all the more if a man betrays a fair allowance of those gnarls and twists of character, of strong prejudices, and harmless manias, which enable the common herd to take him to their bosoms. Dr. France was a stamp-collector, a player--indifferent--on the cornet, a rabid Tory, and a person who could never be trusted to deal faithfully and on C.O.S. principles with tramps and "undesirables." Such things temper the majesty of virtue, and make even the good human. He had known and prescribed for Winnington since he was a boy in knickers; he was particularly attached to Lady Tonbridge. What he and Madeleine talked about is not of great importance to this narrative; but it is certain that France left the house in much concern for a man he loved, and a girl who, in the teeth of his hottest beliefs, had managed to touch his feelings. Delia spent the day in packing. Winnington made no sign. In the afternoon,--it was a wet Saturday afternoon--Lady Tonbridge sitting in the drawing-room, saw the science mistress of the Dame Perrott School coming up the drive. Madeleine knew her as a "Daughter," and could not help scowling at her--unseen. She was at once admitted however, and spent a short time with Delia in the Library. And when Miss Jackson closed the Library door behind her on her way out of the house, Delia broke the seal of a letter which had been given into her hands:-- "I am very sorry, my dear Delia, you should have taken these silly reports so much to heart. You had better dismiss them from your mind. I have given no such orders as you suppose--nor has the Central Office. The plan you found referred to something quite different--I really can't remember what. I can't of course be responsible for all the 'Daughters' in England, but I have much more important business to think of just now than the nonsense Mr. Lathrop seems to have been stuffing you with. As to W-----L-----, it would only be worth while to strike at him, if our affairs _go wrong_--through him. At present, I am extraordinary hopeful. We are winning every day. People see that we are in earnest, and mean to succeed--at whatever cost. "I am glad you are coming up on Monday. You will find the flat anything but a comfortable or restful place,--but that you will be prepared for. Our people are amazing!--and we shall get into the House on Thursday, or know the reason why. "For the money you sent, and the money you promise--best thanks. Everybody is giving. It is the spirit of the Crusader, 'Dieu le veult!'" "Your affectionate G. M." Delia read and re-read it. It was the first time Gertrude had deliberately tried to deceive her, and the girl's heart was sore. Even now, she was not to be trusted--"now that I am risking everything--_everything_!" And with the letter in her lap, she sat and thought of Winnington's face, as he had turned to look at her, before leaving the drawing-room the night before. * * * * * The day passed drearily. The hills and trees were wrapped in a damp fog, and though the days were lengthening fast, the evening closed like November. Madeleine thought with joy of getting back to her tiny house and her Nora. Nora, who was not yet out, seemed to have been enjoying a huge success in the large cousinly party with whom she had been spending the Christmas holidays. "But it's an odd place, Mummy. In the morning we 'rag'; and the rest of the day we talk religion. Everybody is either Buddhist or 'Bahai'--if that's the right way to spell it. It sounds odd, but it seems to be a very good way of getting on with young men." Heavens! What did it matter how you played the old game, or with what counters, so long as it was played? And as Lady Tonbridge watched the figure of Delia gliding through the house, wrapped in an estranging silence, things ancient and traditonal returned upon her in flood, and nothing in the world seemed worth having but young love and happy marriage!--if you could get them! She--and her heart knew its bitterness--had made the great throw and lost. * * * * * Sunday passed in the same isolation. But on Sunday afternoon Delia took the motor out alone, and gave no reason either before or after. "If she's gone out to meet that man, it's a scandal!" thought Madeleine wrathfully, and could hardly bring herself to be civil when the girl returned--pale, wearied, and quite uncommunicative. But she was very touching in a mute, dignified way, all the evening, and Madeleine relented fast. And, as they sat in the fire-lit drawing-room, when the curtains were drawn, Delia suddenly brought a stool close to Lady Tonbridge's side, and, sitting at her feet, held up appealing arms. Madeleine, with a rush of motherliness, gathered her close; and the beautiful head lay, very quiet, on her breast. But when she would have entreated, or argued, again, Delia implored her--"Don't--don't talk!--it's no good. Just let me stay." Late that night, all being ready for departure, Delia went in to say good-night, and good-bye to Weston. "You'll be downstairs and as strong as a horse, when I come back," she said gaily, stroking the patient's emaciated fingers. Weston shook her head. "I don't think I shall ever be good for much, Miss Delia. But"--and her voice suddenly broke--"I believe I'd go through it all again--just to know--what--you could be--to a poor thing--like me." "Weston!--" said Delia, softly--"if you talk like that--and if you dare to cry, Nurse will turn me out. You're going to get quite well, but whether you're well or ill, here you stay, Miss Rosina Weston!--and I'm going to look after you. Polly hasn't packed my things half badly." Polly was the under-housemaid, whom Delia was taking to town. "She wouldn't be worth her salt, if she hadn't," said Weston tartly. "But she can't do your hair, Miss--and it's no good saying she can." "Then I'll do it myself. I'll make some sort of a glorious mess of it, and set the fashion." But her thought said--"If I go to prison, they'll cut it off. Poor Weston!" Weston moved uneasily-- "Miss Delia?" "Yes." "Don't you go getting yourself into trouble. Now don't you!" And with tears in her eyes, the ghostly creature pressed the girl's hand to her lips. Delia stooped and kissed her. But she made no reply. Instead she began to talk of the new bed-rest which had just been provided for Weston, and on which the patient professed herself wonderfully comfortable. "It's better than the one we had at Meran--for papa." Her voice dropped. She sat at the foot of Weston's bed looking absently into some scene of the past. "Nothing ever gave him ease--your poor Papa!" said Weston, pitifully. "He did suffer! But don't you go thinking about it this time of night, Miss Delia, or you won't sleep." Delia said goodnight, and went away. But she did think of her father--with a curious intensity. And when she fell fitfully asleep, she dreamt that she saw him standing beside her in some open foreign place, and that he looked at her in silence, steadily and coldly. And she stretched out her hands, in a rush of grief--"Kiss me, father! I was unkind--horribly--horribly unkind!" With the pain of it, she woke suddenly and the visualising sense seemed still to perceive in the darkness the white head and soldierly form. She half rose, gasping. Then, as though a photographic shutter were let down, the image passed from the brain, and she lay with heaving breast, trying to find her way back into what we call reality. But it was a reality even more wretched than those recollections to which her dream had recalled her. For it was held and possessed by Winnington, and now by the threatening vision of Monk Lawrence, spectral amid the red ruin of fire. She had stopped the motor that day at the foot of the hill on which the house stood, and using Winnington's name, had made a call on the cripple child. Daunt had received her with a somewhat gruff civility, and was not communicative about the house and its defence. But she gathered--without herself broaching the subject--that he was scornfully confident of his power to protect it against "them creeping women," and she had come home comforted. The cripple child had clung to her silently; and on coming away, Delia had felt a small wet kiss upon her hand. A touching creature!--with her wide blue eyes, and delicate drawn face. It was feared that another abscess might be developing in the little hip, where for a time disease had been quiescent. * * * * * On Monday morning the doctors came early. They gave a favourable verdict, and Delia at once decided on an afternoon train. All the morning, Lady Tonbridge hovered round her, loth to take her own departure, and trying every now and then to re-open the subject of London, to make the girl promise to send for her--to consult Winnington, if any trouble arose. But Delia would not allow any discussion. "I shall be with Gertrude--she'll tell me what to do," was all she would say. Lady Tonbridge was dropped at her own door by Delia, on her way to the station. Nora was there to welcome her, but not all their joy in recovering each other, could repair Madeleine's cheerfulness. She stood, looking after the retreating car with such a face that Nora exclaimed-- "Mother, what _is_ the matter!" "I'm watching the tumbril out of sight," said Lady Tonbridge incoherently. "Shall we ever see her again?" That, however, was someone else's affair. Delia took her own and her housemaid's tickets for London, saw her companion established, and then, preferring to be alone, stepped into an empty carriage herself. She had hardly disposed her various packages, and the train was within two minutes of starting, when a tall man came quickly along the platform, inspecting the carriages as he passed. Delia did not see him till he was actually at her window. In another moment he had opened and closed the door, and had thrown down his newspapers and overcoat on the seat. The train was just starting, and Delia, crimson, found herself mechanically shaking hands with Mark Winnington. "You're going up to town?" She stammered it. "I didn't know--" "I shall be in town for a few days. Are you quite comfortable? A footwarmer?" For the day was cold and frosty, with a bitter east wind. "I'm quite warm, thank you." The train ran out of the station, and they were soon in the open country. Delia leant back in her seat, silent, conscious of her own hurrying pulses, but determined to control them. She would have liked to be indignant--to protest that she was being persecuted and coerced. But the recollection of their last meeting, and the sheer, inconvenient, shameful, joy of his presence there, opposite, interposed. Winnington himself was quite cool; there were no signs whatever of any intention to renew their Friday's conversation. His manner and tone were just as usual. Some business at the Home Office, connected with his County Council work, called him to town. He should be staying at his Club in St. James's St. Alice Matheson also would be in town. "Shall we join for a theatre, one night?" he asked her. She felt suddenly angered. Was she never to be believed, never to be taken seriously? "To-morrow, Mr. Mark, is the meeting of Parliament." "That I am aware of." "The day after, I shall probably be in prison!" She fronted him bravely, though, as he saw, with an effort. He paused a moment, but showed no astonishment. "I hope not. I think not," he said, quietly. Delia took up the evening paper she had just bought at the station, opened it, and looked at the middle page. "There are our plans," she said, defiantly, handing it to him. "Thank you. I have already seen it." But he again read through attentively the paragraph to which she pointed him. It was headed "Militant Plans for To-morrow." A procession of five hundred women was to march on the Houses of Parliament, at the moment of the King's Speech. "We insist"--said the Manifesto issued from the offices of the League of Revolt--"upon our right of access to the King, or failing His Majesty, to the Prime Minister. We mean business and we shall be armed." Winnington pointed to the word "armed." "With stones--I presume?" "Well, not revolvers, I hope!" said Delia. "I should certainly shoot myself." Tension broke up in slightly hysterical laughter. She was already in better spirits. There was something exciting--exhilarating even--in the duel between herself and Winnington, which was implied in the conversation. His journey up to town, the look in his grey eyes meant--"I shall prevent you from doing what you are intending to do." But he could not prevent it. If he was the breakwater, she was the storm-wave, driven by the gale--by the wind from afar, of which she felt herself the sport, and sometimes the victim--without its changing her purpose in the least. "Only I shall not refuse food!" she thought. "I shall spare him that. I shall serve my sentence. It won't be long." But afterwards? Would she then be free? Free to follow Gertrude or not, according to her judgment? Would she have "purged" her promise--paid her shot--recovered the governance of herself? Her thoughts discussed the future, when, all in a moment, Winnington, watching her from behind his _Times_, saw a pale startled look. It seemed to be caused by something in the landscape. He turned his eyes to the window and saw that they were passing an old manor house, with a gabled front, standing above the line, among trees. What could that have had to do with the sudden contraction of the beautiful brow, the sudden look of terror--or distress? The house had a certain resemblance to Monk Lawrence. Had it reminded her of that speech in the Latchford marketplace from which he was certain she had recoiled, no less than he? "You'll let me take you to the flat? I've been over it once, but I should like to see it's in order." She hesitated, but how could she refuse? He put her into a taxi, having already dispatched her maid with the luggage in another, and they started. "I expect you'll find a lot of queer people there!" she said, trying to laugh. "At least you'll think them queer." "I shall like to see the people you are working with," he said, gravely. Half way to Westminster, he turned to her. "Miss Delia!--it's my plain duty to tell you--again--and to keep on telling you, even though it makes you angry, and even though I have no power to stop you, that in taking part in these doings to-morrow, you are doing a wrong thing, a grievously wrong thing! If I were only an ordinary friend, I should try to dissuade you with all my might. But I represent your father--and you know what he would have felt." He saw her lips tremble. But she spoke calmly, "Yes,--I know. But it can't be helped. We can't agree, Mr. Mark, and it's no good my trying to explain, any more--just yet!--" she added, in a lower tone. "'Just yet'? What do you mean by that?" "I mean that some time,--perhaps sometime soon--I shall be ready to argue the whole thing with you--what's right and what's wrong. Now I can't argue--I'm not free to. Don't you see--'Ours not to make reply,--ours but to do, or die.'" Her smile flashed out. "There's not going to be any dying about it however--you know that as well as I do." Then with a touch of mockery she bent towards him. "You won't persuade me, Mr. Mark, that you take us very seriously! But I'm not angry at that--I'm not angry--at anything!" And her face, as he scanned it, melted--changed--became all soft sadness, and deprecating appeal. Never had she seemed to him so fascinating. Never had he felt himself so powerless. He thought, despairingly--"If I had her to myself, I could take her in my arms, and make her give way!" But here were the first signs of arrival--a narrow Westminster street--a towering group of flats. The taxi stopped, and Winnington jumped out. Chapter XVII Delia's luggage was brought in by the hall porter, and she and Winnington stood waiting for the lift. Meanwhile Winnington happened to notice, through the open door of the mansions, a couple of policemen standing just outside, on the pavement, and two others on the further side of the street. It seemed to him they were keeping the house which Delia and he had just entered under observation. The lift descended. There were in it four women, all talking eagerly in subdued tones. One was grey-haired, the others were quite young girls. The strained, excited look on all their faces struck Winnington sharply as they emerged from the lift. One of the girls looked curiously at Delia and her tall companion. The grey-haired lady's attention was caught by the policeman outside. She gave a little chuckle. "We shall have plenty to do with those gentry to-morrow!" she said to the girl beside her, drawing her cloak round her so that it displayed a black and orange badge. Delia approached her. "Is Miss Marvell here?" They all stopped and eyed her. "Yes, she's upstairs. She's just come back from the Central. But she's very busy," said the elder lady. "She won't see you without an appointment." One of the girls suddenly looked at Delia, and whispered to the speaker. "Oh, I see!" said that lady, vaguely. "Are you Miss Blanchflower?" "Yes." "I beg your pardon. Miss Marvell's expecting you of course. Do make her rest a bit if you can. She's simply _splendid_! She's going to be one of our great leaders. I'm glad you won't miss it after all. You've been delayed, haven't you?--by somebody's illness. Well, it's going magnificently! We shall make Parliament listen--at last. Though they'll protect themselves no doubt with any number of police--cowards!" The eyes of the speaker, as her face came into the light of the hall lamp, sparkled maliciously. She seemed to direct her words especially to Winnington, who stood impassive. Delia turned to the lift, and they ascended. They were admitted, after much ringing. A bewildered maid looked at Delia, and the luggage behind her, as though she had never heard of her before. And the whole flat in the background seemed alive with voices and bustle. Winnington lost patience. "Tell this man, please, where to take Miss Blanchflower's luggage at once. And where is the drawing-room?" "Are you going to stay, Miss?" said the girl. "There's only the small bedroom vacant." Delia burst out laughing--especially at the sight of Winnington's irate countenance. "All right. It'll do quite well. Now tell me where Miss Marvell is." "I mustn't interrupt her, Miss." "This is my flat," said Delia, good-humouredly--"so I think you must. And please shew Mr. Winnington the drawing-room." The girl, with an astonished face, opened a door for Winnington, into a room filled with people, and then--unwillingly--led Delia along the passage. Winnington looked round him in bewilderment. He had entered, it seemed, upon a busy hive of women. The room was full, and everybody in it seemed to be working at high pressure. A young lady at a central table was writing telegrams as fast as possible, and handing them to a telegraph clerk who was waiting. Two typewriters were busy in the further corners. A woman, with a sharply clever face, was writing near by, holding her pad on her knee, while a printer's boy, cap in hand, was sitting by her waiting for her "copy." Two other women were undoing and sorting rolls of posters. Winnington caught the head-lines--"Women of England, strike for your liberties!" "Remember our martyrs in prison!"--"Destroy property--and save lives!" "If violence won freedom for men, why not for women!" And in the distance of the room were groups in eager discussion. A few had maps in their hands, and others note-books, in which they took down the arrangements made. So far as their talk reached Winnington's ears, it seemed to relate to the converging routes of processions making for Parliament Square. "How do you do, Mr. Winnington," said a laughing voice, as a daintily-dressed woman, with fair fluffy hair came towards him. He recognised the sister of a well-known member of Parliament, a lady who had already been imprisoned twice for window-breaking in Downing Street. "Who would have thought to see you here!" she said, gaily, as they shook hands. "Surprising--I admit! I came to see Miss Blanchflower settled in her flat. But I seem to have stumbled into an office." "The Central Office simply couldn't hold the work. We were all in each other's way. So yesterday, by Miss Marvell's instructions, some of us migrated here. We are only two streets from the central." "Excellent!" said Winnington. "But it might perhaps have been well to inform Miss Blanchflower." The flushed babyish face under the fashionable hat looked at him askance. Lady Fanny's tone changed--took a sharpened edge. "Miss Blanchflower--you may be quite sure--will be as ready as anyone else to make sacrifices for the cause. But we don't expect _you_ to understand that!" "Nobody can doubt your zeal, Lady Fanny." "Only my discretion? Oh, I've long left that to take care of itself. What are you here for?" "To look after my ward." Lady Fanny eyed him again. "Of course! I had forgotten. Well, she'll be all right." "What are you really preparing to do to-morrow?" "Force our way into the House of Commons!" "Which means--get into an ugly scrimmage with the police, and put your cause back another few years?" "Ah! I can't talk to you, if you talk like that! There isn't time," she threw back, with laughing affectation, and nodding to him, she fluttered off to a distant table where a group of girls were busy making black and orange badges. But her encounter with him seemed to have affected the hive. Its buzz sank, almost ceased. Winnington indeed suddenly discovered that all eyes were fixed upon him--that he was being closely and angrily observed. He was conscious, quickly and strangely conscious, of an atmosphere of passionate hostility, as though a pulse of madness ran through the twenty or thirty women present. Meredithian lines flashed into memory-- "Thousand eyeballs under hoods Have you by the hair--" and a shock of inward laughter mingled in his mind with irritation for Delia--who was to have no place apparently in her own flat for either rest or food--and the natural wish of a courteous man not to give offense. At the same moment, he perceived on one of the tables a heap of new and bright objects; and saw at once that they were light hammers, fresh from the ironmongers. Near them lay a pile of stones, and two women were busily casing the stones in a printed leaflet. But he had no sooner become aware of these things than several persons in the room moved so as to stand between him and them. He went back into the passage, closing the door behind him. The little parlour-maid came hurriedly from the back regions carrying a tray on which was tea and bread and butter. "Are you taking that to Miss Blanchflower?" "Yes, Sir." "Shew me the way, please." Winnington followed her, and she, after a scared look, did not attempt to stop him. She paused outside a door, and instantly made way for him. He knocked, and at the "Come in" he entered, the maid slipping in after him with the tea. Two persons rose startled from their seats--Delia and Gertrude Marvell. He had chanced upon the dining-room, which no less than the drawing-room had been transformed into an office and a store-room. Masses of militant literature, copies of the _Tocsin_, books and Stationery covered the tables, while, on the wall opposite the door, a large scale map of the streets in the neighbourhood of the Houses of Parliament had been hung over a picture. It seemed to him that Delia looked ill and agitated. He walked up to her companion, and spoke with vivacity-- "Miss Marvell!--I protest altogether against your proceedings in this house! I protest against Miss Blanchflower's being drawn into what is clearly intended to be an organised riot, which may end in physical injury, even in loss of life--which will certainly entail imprisonment on the ringleaders. If you have any affection for Delia you will advise her to let me take her to my sister, who is in town to-night, at Smith's Hotel, and will of course most gladly look after her." Gertrude, who seemed to him somehow to have dwindled and withered into an elderly woman since he had last seen her, looked him over from head to foot with a touch of smiling insolence, and then turned quietly to Delia. "Will you go, Delia?" "No!" said Delia, throwing back her beautiful head. "No! This is my place, Mr. Mark. I'm very sorry--but you must leave me here. Give my love to Mrs. Matheson." "Delia!" He turned to her imploringly. But the softness she had shewn on the journey had died out of her face. She stood resolved, and some cold dividing force seemed to have rolled between them. "I don't see what you can do, Mr. Winnington," said Gertrude, still smiling. "I have pointed that out to you before. As a matter of fact Delia will not even be living here on money provided by you at all. She has other resources. You have no hold on her--no power--that I can see. And she wishes to stay with me. I think we must bid you good night. We are very busy." He stood a moment, looking keenly from one to the other, at Gertrude's triumphant eyes blazing from her emaciated face, at Delia's exalted, tragic air. Then, with a bow, and in silence, he left the room, and the house. * * * * * It was quite dark when he emerged on Milbank Street. All the neighbourhood of the Houses of Parliament and the Abbey seemed to be alive with business and traffic. But Palace Yard was still empty save for a few passing figures, and there was no light on the Clock Tower. A placard on the railings of the Square caught his notice--"Threatened Raid on the House of Commons. Police precautions." At the same moment he was conscious that a policeman standing at the corner of the House of Commons had touched his hat to him, grinning broadly. Winnington recognised a Maumsey man, whom he had befriended in various ways, who owed his place indeed in the Metropolitan force to Winnington's good word. "Hullo, Hewson--how are you? Flourishing?" The man's face beamed again. He was thinking of a cricket match the year before under Winnington's captaincy. Like every member of the eleven, he would have faced "death and damnation" for the captain. They walked along the man's beat together. A thought struck Winnington. "You seem likely to have some disturbance here tomorrow?" he said, as they neared Westminster Bridge. "It's the ladies, Sir. They do give a lot of trouble!" Winnington laughed--paused--then looked straight at the fine young man who was evidently so glad to see him. "Look here, Hewson--I'll tell you something--keep it to yourself! There'll be a lady in that procession to-morrow whom I don't want knocked about. I shall be here. Is there anything you can do to help me? I shall try and get her out of the crowd. Of course I shall have a motor here." Hewson looked puzzled, but eager. He described where he was likely to be stationed, and where Winnington would probably find him. If Mr. Winnington would allow him, he would tip a wink to a couple of mates, who could be trusted--and if he could do anything to help, why, he would be "rare pleased" to do it. "But I'm afraid it'll be a bad row, Sir. There's a lot of men coming--from Whitechapel--they say." Winnington nodded and walked on. He went to his club, and dined there, refusing a friend's invitation to go and dine with him at home. And after dinner, as the best means of solitude, he went out again into the crowded streets, walking aimlessly. The thought of Delia arrested--refused bail--in a police cell--or in prison--tormented him. All the traditional, fastidious instincts of his class and type were strong in him. He loathed the notion of any hand laid upon her, of any rough contact between her clean youth, and the brutalities of a London crowd. His blood rushed at the thought of it. The mere idea of any insult offered her made him murderous. He turned down Whitehall, and at a corner near Dover House he presently perceived a small crowd which was being addressed by a woman. She had brought a stool with her, and was standing on it. A thin slip of a girl, with a childish, open face and shrill voice. He went up to listen to her, and stood amazed at the ignorant passion, the reckless violence of what she was saying. It seemed indeed to have but little effect upon her hearers. Men joined the crowd for a few minutes, listened with upturned impassive faces, and went their way. A few lads attempted horse-play, but stopped as a policeman approached; and some women carrying bundles propped them against a railing near, and waited, lifting tired eyes, and occasionally making comments to each other. Presently, it appeared to Winnington that the speaker was no more affected by her own statements--appalling as some of them were--than her hearers. She appeared to be speaking from a book--to have just learnt a lesson. She was then a paid speaker? And yet he thought not. Every now and then phrases stood out--fiercely sincere--about the low wages of women, their exclusion from the skilled trades, the marriage laws, the exploiting and "selling" of women, and the like. And always, in the background of the girl's picture, the hungry and sensual appetites of men, lying in wait for the economic and physical weakness of the woman. He waited until she had finished. Then he helped her down from her perch, and made a way for her through the crowd. She looked at him in astonishment. "Thank you, Sir,--don't trouble! Last night I was pelted with filth. Are you one of us?" He shook his head, smiling. "I didn't agree with you. I advise you to look up some of those things you said. But you speak very well. Good-night." She looked at him angrily, gathered up her skirt with a rattle, in a small hand, and disappeared. He presently turned back towards Buckingham Gate, and in a narrow Westminster street, as he passed the side of a high factory building, suddenly there emerged from a door-way a number of women and girls, who had evidently been working over-time. Some of them broke at once into loud talk and laughter, as though in reaction from the confinement and tension of their work, some--quite silent--turned their tired faces to him as they passed him; and some looked boldly, provocatively at the handsome man, who on his side was clearly observing them. They were of all types, but the majority of the quite young girls were pale and stunted, shewing the effect of long hours, and poor food. The coarse or vicious faces were few; many indeed were marked by a modest or patient gentleness. The thin line of hurrying forms disappeared into darkness and distance, some one way, some another; and Winnington was left to feel that in what he had seen--this everyday incident of a London street--he had been aptly reminded of what a man who has his occupation and dwelling amid rural scenes and occupations too readily forgets--that toiling host of women, married and unmarried, which modern industry is every day using, or devouring, or wasting. The stream of lives rushes day by day through the industrial rapids; some of it passing on to quiet and fruitful channels beyond the roar, and some lost and churned for ever in the main tumult of the river. This new claim upon women, on the part of society, in addition to the old claims of home and motherhood--this vast industrial claim--must it not change and modify everything in time?--depress old values, create new? "The vote!--give us the vote! and all will be well. More wages, more food, more joy, more share in this glorious world!--that's what the vote means--give us the vote!" Such, in effect, had been the cry of that half-mad speaker in Whitehall, herself marked and injured by the economic struggle. The appeal echoed in Winnington's heart. And Delia seemed to be at his side, raising her eager eyes to his, pressing him for admission. Had he, indeed, thought enough of these things?--taken enough to heart this new and fierce struggle of women with life and circumstance, that is really involved in the industrial organisation of the modern world? He passed on--up Buckingham Gate, towards the Palace. Turning to the left, he was soon aware of two contrasted things:--an evening party going on at a well-known Embassy, cars driving up and putting down figures in flashing dresses, and gold-encrusted uniforms, emerging, and disappearing within its open doors--and only twenty yards away, a group of women huddled together in the cold, outside a closed fish-shop, waiting to buy for a few pence the broken or spoiled fish of the day. But a little further on he suddenly plunged into a crowd coming down Grosvenor Place. He stopped to watch it, and saw that it accompanied a long procession of men tramping back from Hyde Park. A banner held by the leaders bore the words--"Unemployed and starving! Give us work or bread." And Winnington remembered there was a docker's strike going on in Limehouse, passionately backed and defended by the whole body of the local clergy. His eyes examined the faces and forms in the procession. Young and old, sickly and robust, they passed him by, all of them marked and branded by their tyrant, Labour; rolled like the women amid the rocks and whirlpools of the industrial stream; marred and worn like them, only more deeply, more tragically. The hollow eyes accused him as they passed--him, with his ease of honoured life. "What have you made of us, your brethren?--you who have had the lead and the start!--you who have had till now the fashioning of this world in which we suffer! What is wrong with the world? We know no more than you. But it is your business to know! For God's sake, you who have intelligence and education, and time to use them, think for us!--think with us!--find a way out! More wages--more food--more leisure--more joy!--By G--d! we'll have them, or bring down your world and ours in one ruin together!" And then far back, from the middle of the last century, there came to Winnington's listening mind the cry of the founders of English democracy. "The vote!--give us the vote!--and bring in the reign of plenty and of peace." And the vote was given. Sixty years--and still this gaunt procession!--and all through Industrial England, the same unrest, the same bitterness! The vote? What is it actually going to mean, in struggle for life and happiness that lies before every modern Community? How many other methods and forces have already emerged, and must yet emerge, beside it! The men know it. And meanwhile, the women--a section of women--have seized with the old faith, on the confident cries of sixty years ago?--with the same disillusion waiting in the path? He passed on, drawn again down Constitution Hill, and the Mall, back to the Houses of Parliament and the River.... The night was clear and frosty. He paused on Westminster Bridge, and leant over the parapet, feasting his eyes on that incomparable scene which age cannot wither nor custom stale for the heart of an Englishman. The long front of the Houses of Parliament rose darkly over the faintly moonlit river; the wharves and houses beyond, a medley of strong or delicate line, of black shadow and pale lights, ran far into a vaporous distance powdered with lamps. On the other side St. Thomas's Hospital, and an answering chain of lamps, far-flung towards Battersea. Between, the river, heaving under a full tide, with the dim barges and tugs passing up and down. "The Mississippi, Sir, is dirty water--the St. Lawrence is cold, dirty water--but the Thames, Sir, is liquid 'istory!" That famous _mot_ of a Labour Minister delighted Mark's dreaming sense. The river indeed as it flowed by, between buildings new and old, seemed to be bearing the nation on its breast, to symbolise the ever-renewed life of a great people. What tasks that life had seen!--what vaster issues it had still to see!-- And in that dark building, like a coiled and secret spring ready to act when touched, the Idea which ruled that life, as all life, in the end, is ruled. On the morrow, a few hundred men would flock to that building, as the representatives and servants of the Idea--of that England which lives "while we believe." And the vote behind them?--the political act which chose and sent them there? Its social power, and all its ordinary associations, noble or ignoble, seemed suddenly to vanish, for Winnington, engulfed in something infinitely greater, something vital and primitive, on which all else depended. He hung, absorbed, over the sliding water, giving the rein to reverie. He seemed to see the English Spirit, hovering, proudly watchful, above that high roof beside the dark water-way, looking out to sea, and across the world. What indomitable force, what ichor gleaming fire, through the dark veins of that weary Titan, sustained him there?--amid the clash of alien antagonisms, and the mysterious currents of things? What but the lavished blood and brain of England's sons?--that rude primal power that men alone can bring to their country? Let others solve their own problems! But can women share the male tasks that make and keep _us_ a Nation, amid a jarring and environing host of Nations?--an Empire, with the guardianship of half the world on its shoulders? And if not, how can men rightly share with women the act which controls those tasks, and chooses the men to execute them? And yet!--all his knowledge of human life, all his tenderness for human suffering, rushed in to protest that the great question was only half answered, when it was answered so. He seemed to see the Spirit of England, Janus-like, two-faced, with one aspect looking out to sea, the other, brooding over the great city at its feet, and turned inland towards the green country and studded towns beyond. And as to that other, that home-face of England, his dreaming sense scarcely knew whether it was man or woman. There was in it male power, but also virgin strength, and mother love. Men and women might turn to it equally--for help. No need for women in the home tasks--the national house-keeping of this our England? He laughed--like France--at the mere suggestion of the doubt. Why, that teeming England, north and south, was crying out for the work of women, the help of women! Who knew it better than he? But call in thought!--call in intelligence! Find out the best way to fit the work to the organism, the organism to the work. What soil so rich as England in the seed of political ideas? What nation could so easily as we evolve new forms out of the old to fit new needs? But what need for patience in the process--for tolerance--for clear thinking! And while England ponders, bewildered by the very weight of her own load, and its responsibilities, comes, suddenly, this train of Maenads rushing through the land, shrieking and destroying. He groaned in spirit, as he thought of Delia's look that day--of the tragic-comic crowd around her. Again his thoughts flew hither and thither, seeking to excuse, to understand her, and always, as it seemed, with her dear voice in his ears--trembling--rushing--with the passionate note he knew. "Mr. Winnington!" He looked up. An elderly woman, plain-featured, ill-dressed, stood beside him, her kind eyes blinking under the lamp overhead. He recognised Miss Dempsey, and grasped her by the hand. "My dear lady, where have you sprung from?" She hesitated, and then said, supporting herself on the parapet of the bridge, as though thankful for the momentary rest. "I had to go in search of someone." He knew very well what she meant. "You've found her?" "Yes." "Can anyone help?" "No. The poor thing's safe--with good people who understand." He asked no more about her errand. He knew very well that day after day, and week after week, her tired feet carried her on the same endless quest--seeking "that which was lost." But the stress of thought in his own mind found expression in a question which surprised her. "Would the vote help you? Is that why you want it?" She smiled. "Oh, no! Oh, dear no!" she said, with emphasis; after a moment, adding in a lower tone, scarcely addressed to her companion--"'_It cost more--to redeem their souls_!'" And again--"Dear Mr. Mark, men are what their mothers make them!--that is the bottom truth. And when women are what God intended them to be, they will have killed the ape and the tiger in men. But law can't do it. Only the Spirit." Her face shone a little. Then, in her ordinary voice--"Oh, no--I want the vote for quite other reasons. It is our right--and it is monstrous we shouldn't have it!" Her cheeks flushed. He turned his friendly smile upon her, without attempting to argue. They walked back over the bridge together. * * * * * The following day rose in wind and shower. But the February rain cleared away towards noon, and the high scudding clouds, with bright spaces between, suddenly began to prophesy Spring. From Hyde Park, down the Mall, and along Whitehall, the troops gathered and the usual crowd sprang up in their rear, pressing towards Parliament Square, or lining the route. Winnington had sent a note early to Delia by messenger; but he expected no reply, and got none. All he could do was to hide a motor in Dean's Yard, to hold a conference or two with the friendly bobby in Parliament Square, and then to wander about the streets looking restlessly at the show. It duly passed him by, the Cinderella-coach, with the King and Queen of fairy-tale, the splendid Embassy carriages, the Generals on their gleaming horses, the Guards, in their red cloaks--and all the rest. The Royalties disappeared up the carpeted stairs into the House of Lords, and after half an hour, while the bells of St. Margaret's filled all the air with tumult, came out, again; and again the ermined Queen, and the glistening King passed bowing along the crowd. Winnington caught hold of a Hampshire member in the crowd. "When does the House meet?" "Everything adjourned till four. They'll move the Address about five. But everyone expects a row." Nothing for it but to wait and stroll, to spend half an hour in the Abbey, and take a turn along the Embankment.... And gradually, steadily the Square filled up, no one knew how. The soldiers disappeared, but policemen quietly took their places. All the entrances to the House of Commons were carefully guarded, groups as they gathered were dispersed, and the approaches to the House, in Old and New Palace Yards, were rigorously kept free. But still the crowd in Parliament Square grew and thickened. Girls, with smiling excited faces, still moved to and fro in it, selling the _Tocsin_. Everybody waited expectant. Then the chimes of the Abbey struck four. And as they died away, from a Westminster street, from Whitehall, and from Milbank, there arose a simultaneous stir and shouting. And presently, from each quarter appeared processions of women, carrying black and orange banners making their way slowly through the throng. The crowd cheered and booed them as they passed, swaying to this side and that. And as each procession neared the outer line of police, it was firmly but courteously stopped, and the leaders of it must needs parley with the mounted constables who sat ready to meet them. Winnington, jumping on the motor which he had placed opposite St. Margaret's, drew out some field-glasses, and scanned the advancing lines of women. The detachment coming from Whitehall seemed to be headed by the chiefs of the whole organisation, to judge from the glistening banner which floated above its foremost group. Winnington examined it closely. Gertrude Marvell was not there, nor Delia. Then he turned westwards. Ah, now he saw her! That surely was she!--in the front ranks of the lines coming from Milbank. For a moment, he saw the whole scene in orderly and picturesque array, the cordons of police, the mounted constables, the banners of the processions, the swaying crowds, Westminster Hall, the clock tower, with its light:--the next, everything was tossed in wild confusion. Some savage impelling movement in the crowd behind had broken the lines of police. The women were through! He could see the scurrying forms running across the open spaces, pursued, grappled with. He threw himself into the crowd, which had rapidly hemmed him in, buffeting it from side to side like a swimmer into troubled waters. His height, his strength, served him well, and by the time he had reached the southern corner of St. Margaret's, a friendly hand gripped him. "Do you see her, Sir?" "Near the front!--coming from Milbank." "All right! Follow me, Sir. This way!" And with Hewson, and apparently two other police, Winnington battled his way towards the tumult in front of St. Stephen's entrance. The mounted police were pressing the crowd back with their horses, and as Winnington emerged into clear ground, he saw a melee of women and police,--some women on the ground, some held between police on either side, and one group still intact. In it he recognised Gertrude Marvell. He saw her deliberately strike a constable in the face. Then he lost sight of her. All he saw were the steps of St. Stephen's entrance behind, crowded with Members of Parliament. Suddenly another woman fell, a grey-haired woman, and almost immediately a girl who was struggling with two policemen, disengaged herself and ran to help. She bent over the woman, and lifted her up. The police at once made way for them, but another wild rush from behind seemed to part them--sweep them from view-- "Now, Sir!" said Hewson, on tiptoe--"Hold on! They've got the old lady safe. I think the young one's hurt." They pressed their way through. Winnington caught sight of Delia again, deadly white, supported by a policeman on one side, and a gentleman on the other. Andrews!--by George! Winnington cursed his own ill-luck in not having been the first to reach her; but the gallant Captain was an ally worth having, all the same. Mark was at her side. She lifted a face, all pain and bitter indignation. "Cowards--Cowards!--to treat an old woman so!--Let me go--let me go back! I must find her!" "She's all safe, Miss--she's all safe--you go home," said a friendly policeman. "These gentlemen will look after you! Stand back there!" And he tried to open a passage for them. Winnington touched her arm. But an involuntary moan startled him. "She's hurt her arm"--said Andrews in his ear--"twisted it somehow. Go to the other side of her--put your arm round her, and I'll clear the way." Delia struggled--"No--no!--let me go!" But she was powerless. Winnington nearly carried her through the crowd, while her faintness increased. By the time they reached the motor, she was barely conscious. The two men lifted her in. Andrews stood looking at her a moment, as she sank back with Winnington beside her, his ruddy countenance expressing perhaps the most acute emotion of which its possessor had ever yet been capable. "Good-night. You'll take her home," he said gruffly, and lifted his hat. But the next moment he ran back to say--"I'll go back and find out what's happened. She'll want to know. Where are you taking her?" "Smith's Hotel," said Winnington--"to my sister." And he gave the order to the chauffeur. They set out. Mark passed his arm round her again, to support her, and she drooped unconsciously upon his shoulder. A fierce joy--mingled with his wrath and disgust. This must be--this should be the _end_! Was such a form made for sordid violence and strife? Her life just breathed against his--he could have borne her so for ever. But as soon as they had revived her, and she opened her eyes in Mrs. Matheson's sitting-room at the hotel, she burst into a cry of misery. "Where's Gertrude!--let me go to her! Where am I?" As they wrestled with and soothed her, a servant knocked. "A gentleman to see you, Sir, downstairs." Winnington descended, and found Andrews--breathless with news. Eighty women arrested--Miss Marvell among the ringleaders, for all of whom bail has been refused? While the riot had been going on in Parliament Square, another detachment of women had passed along Whitehall, smashing windows as they went. And at the same moment, a number of shop-windows had been broken in Piccadilly. The Prime Minister had been questioned in the Commons, and Sir Wilfrid Lang had denounced the "Daughters'" organisation, and the mad campaign of violence to which they were committed, in an indignant speech much cheered by the House. * * * * * The days that followed were days of nightmare both for Delia and those who watched over her. Gertrude Marvell and ten others went to prison, without the option of a fine. About forty of the rank and file who refused to pay their fines, or give surety for good behaviour, accompanied their leaders into duress. The country rang with the scandal of what had happened, and with angry debate as to how to stop the scandal in the future. The Daughters issued defiant broadsheets, and filled the _Tocsin_ with brave words. And the Constitutionalists who had pinned their hopes on the Suffrage Bill before the House, wrung their hands, and wailed to heaven and earth to keep these mad women in order. Delia sat waiting--waiting--all these intolerable hours. She scarcely spoke to Winnington, except to ask him for news, or to thank him, when every evening, owing to a personal knowledge of the Home Secretary, he was able to bring her the very latest news of what was happening in prison. Gertrude had refused food; forcible feeding would very soon have to be abandoned; and her release, on the ground of danger to life, might have to be granted. But in view of the hot indignation of the public, the Government were not going to release any of the prisoners before they absolutely must. Delia herself was maimed and powerless. How the wrenching of her arm had come about--whether in the struggle with the two constables who had separated her from Gertrude, or in the attempt to raise her companion from the ground--she could not now remember. But a muscle had been badly torn; she wore a sling and suffered constant and often severe pain. Neither Alice Matheson, nor Lady Tonbridge--who had rushed up to town--ever heard her complain, except involuntarily, of this pain. Madeleine indeed believed that there was some atoning satisfaction in it, for Delia's wounded spirit. If she was not with Gertrude in prison, at least she too was suffering--if only a fraction of what Gertrude was enduring. The arm however was not the most serious matter. As France had long since perceived, she had been overstrained in nursing Weston, and the events since she left Maumsey had naturally increased the mischief. She had become sleepless and neurasthenic. And Winnington watched day by day the eclipse of her radiant youth, with a dumb wrath almost as Pagan as that which a similar impression had roused in Lathrop. The nights were her worst time. She lived then, in prison, with Gertrude, vividly recalling all that she had ever heard from the Daughters who had endured it, of the miseries and indignities of prison life. But she also lived again through the events which had preceded and followed the riot; her quick intelligence pondered the comments of the newspapers, the attitude of the public, the measured words and looks of these friends who surrounded her. And there were many times when sitting up in bed alone, suffering and sleepless, she asked herself bitterly--"were we just fools!--just fools?" But whatever the mind replied, the heart and its loyalty stood firm. She was no more free now than before--that was the horrible part of it! It was this which divided her from Winnington. The thought of how he had carried her off from the ugly or ridiculous scenes which the newspapers described--scenes of which she had scarcely any personal memory, alternately thrilled and shamed her. But the aching expectation of Gertrude's return--the doubt in what temper of mind and what plight of body she would return--dominated everything else. At last came the expected message. "In consequence of a report from the prison doctors and his own medical advisers, the Home Secretary has ordered the immediate release of Miss Gertrude Marvell." Winnington was privately notified of the time of release, information which was refused to what remained of the Daughters' organisation, lest there should be further disturbance. He took a motor to the prison gate, and put a terribly enfeebled woman and her nurse into it. Gertrude did not even recognise him, and he followed the motor to the Westminster flat, distracted by the gloomiest forebodings. Delia was already at the flat to receive her friend, having quietly--but passionately--insisted, against all the entreaties of Mrs. Matheson and Lady Tonbridge. Winnington helped the nurse and the porter to carry Gertrude Marvell upstairs. They laid her on the bed, and the doctor who had been summoned took her in charge. As he was leaving the room, Winnington turned back--to look at his enemy. How far more formidable to him in her weakness than in her strength! The keen eyes were closed, the thin mouth relaxed and bloodless shewing the teeth, the hands mere skin and bone. She lay helpless and only half-conscious on her pillows, with nurse and doctor hovering round her, and Delia kneeling beside her. Yet, as he closed the door, Winnington realised her power through every vein! It rested entirely with her whether or no she would destroy Delia, as she must in the end destroy herself. He waited in the drawing-room for Delia. She came at last, with a cold and alien face. "Don't come again, please! Leave us to ourselves. I shall have doctors--and nurses. We'll let you know." He took her hands tenderly. But she drew them away--shivering a little. "You don't know--you can't know--what it means to me--to _us_--to see what she has suffered. There must be no one here but those--who sympathise--who won't reproach--" Her voice failed her. There was nothing for it but to go. Chapter XVIII Great is the power of martyrdom!--of the false no less than the true--and whether the mind consent or no. During the first week of Gertrude Marvell's recovery--or partial recovery--from her prison ordeal, both Winnington and Delia realised the truth of this commonplace to the full. Winnington was excluded from the flat. Delia, imprisoned within it, was dragged, day by day, through deep waters of emotion and pity. She envied the heroism of her friend and leader; despised herself for not having been able to share it; and could not do enough to soothe the nervous suffering which Gertrude's struggle with law and order had left behind it. But with the beginning of the second week some strange facts emerged. Gertrude was then sufficiently convalescent to be moved into the drawing-room, to see a few visitors, and to exchange experiences. All who came belonged to the League, and had been concerned in the Parliamentary raid. Most of them had been a few days or a week in prison. Two had been hunger-strikers. And as they gathered round Gertrude in half-articulate worship, Delia, passing from one revealing moment to another, suddenly felt herself superfluous--thrust away! She could not join in their talk except perfunctorily; the violence of it often left her cold and weary; and she soon recognised half in laughter, half bitterly, that, as one who had been carried out of the fray, like a naughty child, by her guardian, she stood in the opinion of Gertrude's visitors, on a level altogether inferior to that of persons who had "fought it out." This, however, would not have troubled her--she was so entirely of the same opinion herself. But what began to wound her to the quick was Gertrude's own attitude towards her. She had been accustomed for so long to be Gertrude's most intimate friend, to be recognised and envied as such, that to be made to feel day by day how small a hold--for some mysterious reason--she now retained on that fierce spirit, was galling indeed. Meanwhile she had placed all the money realised by the sale of her jewels,--more than three thousand pounds--in Gertrude's hands for League purposes; her house was practically Gertrude's, and had Gertrude willed, her time and her thoughts would have been Gertrude's also. She would not let herself even think of Winnington. One glance at the emaciated face and frame beside her was enough to recall her from what had otherwise been a heavenly wandering. But she was naturally quick and shrewd, and she soon made herself face the fact that she was supplanted. Supplanted by many--but especially by one. Marion Andrews had not been in the raid--Delia often uneasily pondered the why and wherefore. She came up to town a week after it, and was then constantly in Gertrude's room. Between Delia, and this iron-faced, dark-browed woman, with her clumsy dress and brusque ways, there was but little conversation. Delia never forgot their last meeting at Maumsey; she was often filled with dire forebodings and suspicions; and as the relation between Gertrude and Miss Andrews became closer, they grew and multiplied. At last one morning Gertrude turned her back on invalid ways. She got up at her usual time; she dismissed her nurse; and in the middle of the morning she came in upon Delia, who, in the desultory temper born of physical strain, was alternately trying to read Marshall's "Economics of Industry," and writing to Lady Tonbridge about anything and everything, except the topics that really occupied her mind. Delia sprang up to get her a shawl, to settle her on the sofa. But Gertrude said impatiently-- "Please don't fuss. I want to be treated now as though I were well--I soon shall be. And anyway I am tired of illness." And she took a plain chair, as though to emphasize what she had said. "I came to talk to you about plans. You're not busy!" "Busy!" The scornful tone was a trifle bitter also, as Gertrude perceived. Delia put aside her book, and her writing-board, and descended to her favourite place on the hearth rug. The two friends surveyed each other. "Gertrude, it's absurd to talk as though you were well!" cried Delia. "You look a perfect wreck!" But there was more in what she saw--in what she felt--than physical wreck. There was a moral and spiritual change, subtler than any physical injury, and probably more permanent. Gertrude Marvell had never possessed any "charm," in the sense in which other leaders of the militant movement possessed it. A clear and narrowly logical brain, the diamond sharpness of an astonishing will, and certain passions of hate, rather than passions of love, had made the strength of her personality, and given her an increasing ascendancy. But these qualities had been mated with a slender physique--trim, balanced, composed--suggesting a fastidious taste, and nerves perfectly under control; a physique which had given special accent and emphasis to her rare outbreaks of spoken violence. Refinement, seemliness, "ladylikeness,"--even Sir Robert Blanchflower in his sorest moments would scarcely have denied her these. In a measure they were there still, but coupled with pathetic signs of some disintegrating and poisonous influence. The face which once, in its pallid austerity, had not been without beauty, had now coarsened, even in emaciation. The features stood out disproportionately; the hair had receded from the temples; something ugly and feverish had been, as it were, laid bare. And composure had been long undermined. The nurse who had just left had been glad to go. Gertrude received Delia's remark with impatience. "Do please let my looks alone! As if you could boast!" The speaker's smile softened as she looked at the girl's still bandaged arm, and pale cheeks. "That in fact is what I wanted to say, Delia. You ought to be going home. You want the country and the garden. And I, it seems--so this tiresome Doctor says--ought to have a fortnight's sea." "Oh--" said Delia, with a sudden flush. "So you think we ought to give up the flat? Why can't I come with you to the sea?" "I thought you had begun to do various things--cripples--and cottages--and schools--for Mr. Winnington," said Gertrude, drily. "I wanted to--but Weston's illness stopped it--and then I came here." "Well, you 'wanted to.' And why shouldn't you?" There was a silence. Then Delia looked up--very pale now--her head thrown back. "So you mean you wish to get rid of me, Gertrude!" "Nothing of the sort. I want you to do--what you clearly wish to do." "When have I ever shown you that I wished to desert you--or--the League?" "Perhaps I read you better than you do yourself," said Gertrude, slightly reddening too. "Of course you have been goodness--generosity--itself. But--this cause wants more than gifts--more than money-it wants a woman's _self_!" "Well?" Delia waited. Gertrude moved impatiently. "Why should we play the hypocrite with each other!" she said at last. "You won't deny that what Mr. Winnington thinks--what Mr. Winnington feels--is infinitely more important to you now than what anybody else in the world thinks or feels?" "Which I shewed by coming up here against his express wishes?--and joining in the raid, after he had said all that a man could say against it, both to you and to me?" "Oh, I admit you did your best--you did your best," said Gertrude sombrely. "But I know you, Delia!--I know you! Your heart's not in it--any more." Delia rose, and began slowly to pace the room. There was a wonderful virginal dignity--a suppressed passion--in her attitude, as though she wrestled with inward wound. But she said nothing, except to ask--as she paused in front of Gertrude-- "Where are you going--and who is going with you?" "I shall go to the sea, somewhere--perhaps to the Isle of Wight. I daresay Marion Andrews will come with me. She wants to escape her mother for a time." "Marion Andrews?" repeated Delia thoughtfully. Then, after a moment--"So you're not coming down to Maumsey any more?" "Ask yourself what there is for me to do there, my dear child! Frankly, I should find the society of Mr. Winnington and Lady Tonbridge rather difficult! And as for their feelings about me!" "Do you remember--you promised to live with me for a year?" "Under mental reservation," said Gertrude, quietly. "You know very well, I didn't accept it as an ordinary post." "And now there's nothing more to be got out of me? Oh, I didn't mean anything cruel!" added the girl hastily. "I know you must put the cause first." "And you see where the cause is," said Gertrude grimly. "In ten days from now Sir Wilfrid Lang will have crushed the bill." "And everybody seems to be clamouring that we've given them the excuse!" Fierce colour overspread Gertrude's thin temples and cheeks. "They'll take it, anyway; and we've got to do all we can--meetings, processions, way-laying Ministers--the usual things--and any new torment we can devise." "But I thought you were going to Southsea!" "Afterwards--afterwards!" said Gertrude, with visible temper. "I shall run down to Brighton tomorrow, and come back fresh on Monday." "To this flat?" "Oh no--I've found a lodging." Delia turned away--her breath fluttering. "So we part to-morrow!" Then suddenly she faced round on Gertrude. "But I don't go, Gertrude--till I have your promise!" "What promise?" "To let--Monk Lawrence _alone_!" said the girl with sudden intensity, and laying her uninjured hand on a table near, she stooped and looked Gertrude in the eyes. Gertrude broke into a laugh. "You little goose! Do you think I look the kind of person for nocturnal adventures?--a cripple--on a stick? Yes, I know you have been talking to Marion Andrews. She told me." "I warned _you_," said Delia, with determination--"which was more to the point. Everything Mr. Lathrop told me, I handed on to you." There was an instant's silence. Then Gertrude laid a skeleton hand upon the girl's hand--gripping it painfully. "And do you suppose--that anything Mr. Lathrop could say, or you could say, could prevent my carrying out plans that seemed to me necessary--in this war!" Delia gasped. "Gertrude!--you mean to do it!" Gertrude released her--almost threw her hand away. "I have told you why you are a fool to think so. But if you do think so, go and tell Mr. Winnington! Tell him everything!--make him enquire. I shall be in town--ready for the warrant." The two faced each other. "And now," said Gertrude--"though I am convalescent--we have had enough of this." She rose tottering--and felt for her stick. Delia gave it her. "Gertrude!" It was a bitter cry of crushed affection and wounded trust. It arrested Gertrude for a moment on her way to the door. She turned in indecision--then shook her head--muttered something inarticulate, and went. * * * * * That afternoon Delia sent a telegram to Lady Tonbridge who had returned to Maumsey--"Can you and Nora come and stay with me for three months. I shall be quite alone." She also despatched a note to Winnington's club, simply to say that she was going home tomorrow. She had no recent news of Winnington's whereabouts, but something told her that he was still in town--still near her. Then she turned with energy to practical affairs--arrangements for giving up the flat, dismissing some servants, despatching others to Maumsey. She had something of a gift for housekeeping, and on this evening of all others she blessed its tasks. When they met at dinner, Gertrude was perfectly placid and amiable. She went to bed early, and Delia spent the hours after dinner in packing, with her maid. In the middle of it came a line from Winnington--"Good news indeed! I go down to Maumsey early, to see that the Abbey is ready for you. Don't bother about the flat. I have spoken to the Agents. They will do everything. _Au revoir!"_ The commonplace words somehow broke down her self-control. She sent away her maid, put out the glaring electric light, and sat crouched over the fire, in the darkness, thinking her heart out. Once she sprang up suddenly, her hands at her breast--"Oh Mark, Mark--I'm coming back to you, Mark,--I'm coming back--I'm _free!_"--in an ecstasy. But only to feel herself the next moment, quenched--coerced--her happiness dashed from her. If she gave herself to Mark, her knowledge, her suspicions, her practical certainty must go with the gift. She could not keep from him her growing belief that Monk Lawrence was vitally threatened, and that Gertrude, in spite of audacious denials, was still madly bent upon the plot. And to tell him would mean instant action on his part: arrest--prison--perhaps death--for this woman she had adored, whom she still loved with a sore, disillusioned tenderness. She could not tell him!--and therefore she could not engage herself to him. Had Gertrude realised that?--counted upon it? No. She must work in other ways--through Mr. Lathrop--through various members of the "Daughters" Executive who were personally known to her. Gertrude must be restrained--somehow--by those who still had influence with her. The loneliness of that hour sank deep into Delia's soul. Never had she felt herself so motherless, so forlorn. Her passion for this elder woman during three years of fast-developing youth had divided her from all her natural friends. As for her relations, her father's sister, Elizabeth Blanchflower, a selfish, eccentric old maid, had just acknowledged her existence in two chilly notes since she returned to England; while Lord Frederick, Winnington's co-executor, had in the same period written her one letter of half-scolding, half-patronising advice, and sent a present of game to Maumsey. Since then she understood he had been pursuing his enemy the gout from "cure" to "cure," and "Mr. Mark" certainly had done all the executor's work that had not been mere formality. She had no friends, no one who cared for her!--except Winnington--her chilled heart glowed to the name!--Lady Tonbridge, and poor Weston. Among the Daughters she had acquaintances, but no intimates. Gertrude had absorbed her; she had lived for Gertrude and Gertrude's ideas. And now she was despised--cast out. She tried to revive in herself the old crusading flame--the hot unquestioning belief in Women's Rights and Women's Wrongs--the angry contempt for men as a race of coarse and hypocritical oppressors, which Gertrude had taught her. In vain. She sat there, with these altruistic loves and hates--premature, artificial things!--drooping away; conscious only, nakedly conscious, of the thirst for individual happiness, personal joy--ashamed of it too, in her bewildered youth!--not knowing that she was thereby best serving her sex and her race in the fore-ordained ways of destiny. And the wickedness of men? But to have watched a good man, day by day, had changed all the values of the human scene. Her time would come again--with fuller knowledge--for bitter loathing of the tyrannies of sex and lust. But this, in the natural order, was her hour for hope--for faith. As the night grew deeper, the tides of both rose and rose within her--washing her at last from the shores of Desolation. She was going home. Winnington would be there--her friend. Somehow, she would save Gertrude. Somehow--surely--she would find herself in Mark's arms again. She went to sleep with a face all tears, but whether for joy or sorrow, she could hardly have told. Next morning Marion arrived early, and carried Gertrude off to Victoria, en route for Brighton. Gertrude and Delia kissed each other, and said Good-bye, without visible emotion. "Of course I shall come down to plague you in the summer," said Gertrude, and Delia laughed assent--with Miss Andrews standing by. The girl went through a spasm of solitary weeping when Gertrude was finally gone; but she soon mastered it, and an hour later she herself was in the train. Oh, the freshness of the February day--of the spring breathing everywhere!--of the pairing birds and the springing wheat--and the bright patches of crocuses and snowdrop in the gardens along the line. A rush of pleasure in the mere return to the country and her home, in the mere welling back of health, the escape from daily friction, and ugly, violent thoughts, overflowed all her young senses. She was a child on a holiday. The nightmare of the Raid--of those groups of fighting, dishevelled women, ignominiously overpowered, of the grinning crowd, the agonising pain of her arm, and the policeman's rough grip upon it--began to vanish "in black from the skies." Until--the train ran into the long cutting half way between Latchford and Maumsey, above which climbed the steep woods of Monk Lawrence. Delia knew it well. And she had no sooner recognised it than her gaiety fell--headlong--like a shot bird. She waited in a kind of terror for the moment when the train should leave the cutting, and the house come into view, on its broad terrace carved out of the hill. Yes, there it was, far away, the incomparable front, with its beautiful irregularities, and its equally beautiful symmetries, with its oriel windows flashing in the sun, the golden grey of its stone work, the delicate tracery on its tall twisted chimneys, and the dim purples of its spreading roofs. It lay so gently in the bosom of the woods which clasped it round--as though they said--"See how we have guarded and kept it through the centuries for you, the children of to-day." The train sped on, and looking back Delia could just make out a whitish patch on the lower edge of the woods. That was Mr. Lathrop's cottage. It seemed to her vaguely that she had seen his face in the front rank of the crowd in Parliament Square; but she had heard nothing of him, or from him since their last talk. She had indeed written him a short veiled note as she had promised to do, after Gertrude's first denials, repeating them--though she herself disbelieved them--and there had been no reply. Was he at home? Had he perhaps discovered anything more? When she alighted at Maumsey, with her hand in Winnington's, the fresh colour in her cheeks had disappeared again, and he was dismayed anew at her appearance, though he kept it to himself. But when she was once more in the familiar drawing-room, sitting in her grandmother's chair, obliged to rest while Lady Tonbridge poured out tea--Nora was improving her French in Paris--and Winnington, with his hands in his pockets, talked gossip and gardening, without a word of anything that had happened since they three had last met in that room; when Weston, ghostly but convalescent, came in to show herself; when Delia's black spitz careered all over his recovered mistress, and even the cats came to rub themselves against her skirts, it was impossible not to feel for the moment, tremulously happy, and strangely delivered--in this house whence Gertrude Marvell had departed. How vivid was the impression of this latter fact on the other two may be imagined. When Delia had gone upstairs to chat with Weston, Lady Tonbridge looked at Winnington-- "To what do we owe this crowning mercy? Who dislodged her?" Winnington's glance was thoughtful. "I guess it has been her own doing entirely. But I know nothing." "Hm.--Well, if I may advise, dear Mr. Mark, ask no questions. And"--his old friend put a hand on his arm--"May I go on?" A smile, not very gay, permitted her. "Let her be!" she said softly, with a world of sympathy in her clear brown eyes. "She's suffered--and she's on edge." He laid his hand on hers, but said nothing. * * * * * The days passed by. Winnington did as he had been told; and Madeleine Tonbridge seemed to see that Delia was dumbly grateful to him. Meanwhile in the eyes of her two friends she made little or no advance towards recapturing her former health and strength. The truth, of course, was that she was consumed by devouring and helpless anxiety. She wrote to Lathrop, posting the letter at a distant village; and received no answer. Then she ascertained that he was not at the cottage, and a casual line in the _Tocsin_ informed her that he had been in town taking part in the foundation of an "outspoken" newspaper--outspoken on "the fundamental questions of sex, liberty, and morals involved in the suffrage movement." But a letter addressed "To be forwarded" to the _Tocsin_ office produced no more result than her first. Meanwhile she had written imploringly to various prominent members of the organisation in London pointing out the effect on public opinion that must be produced all through Southern England by any attack on Monk Lawrence. She received two cold and cautious replies. It seemed to her that the writers of them were even more in the dark than she. The days ran on. The newspapers were full of the coming Woman Suffrage Bill, and its certain defeat in the Commons. Sir Wilfrid Lang was leading the forces hostile to the Suffrage, and making speech after speech in the country to cheering audiences, denouncing the Bill, and the mad women who had tried to promote it by a campaign of outrage, "as ridiculous as it was criminal." He was to move the rejection of it on the second reading, and was reported to be triumphantly confident of the result. Winnington meanwhile became more and more conscious of an abnormal state of nerve and brain in this pale Delia, the shadow of her proper self, and as the hours went on, he was presently for throwing all Madeleine's counsels aside, and somehow breaking through the girl's silence, in the hope of getting at--and healing--the cause of it. He guessed of course at a hundred things to account for it--at a final breach between her and Gertrude--at the disappointment of cherished hopes and illusions--at a profound travail of mind, partly moral, partly intellectual, going back over the past, and bewildered as to the future. But at the first sign of a change of action, of any attempt to probe her, on his part, she was off--in flight; throwing back at him often a look at once so full of pain and so resolute that he dared not pursue her. She possessed at all times a great personal dignity, and it held him at bay. He himself--unconsciously--enabled her to hold him at bay. Naturally, he connected some of the haunting anxiety he perceived with Monk Lawrence, and with Gertrude Marvell's outrageous speech in Latchford market-place. But he himself, on the other hand, was not greatly concerned for Monk Lawrence. Not only he---the whole neighbourhood was on the alert, in defence of the famous treasure-house. The outside of the building and the gardens were patrolled at night by two detectives; and according to Daunt's own emphatic assurance to Winnington, the house was never left without either the Keeper himself or his niece in it, to mount guard. They had set up a dog, with a bark which was alone worth a policeman. And finally, Sir Wilfrid himself had been down to see the precautions taken, had especially ordered the strengthening of the side door, and the provision of iron bars for all the ground floor windows. As to the niece, Eliza Daunt, she had not made herself popular with the neighbours or in the village; but she seemed an efficient and managing woman, and that she "kept herself to herself" was far best for the safety of Monk Lawrence. Whenever during these days Winnington's business took him in the Latchford direction, so that going or coming he passed Monk Lawrence, he would walk up to the Abbey in the evening, and in the course of the gossip of the day, all the reassuring news he had to give would be sure to drop out; while Delia sat listening, her eyes fixed on him. And then, for a time, the shadow almost lifted, and she would be her young and natural self. In this way, without knowing it, he helped her to keep her secret, and, intermittently, to fight down her fears. On one of these afternoons, in the February twilight, he had been talking to both the ladies, describing _inter alia_ a brief call at Monk Lawrence and a chat with Daunt, when Madeleine Tonbridge went away to change her walking dress, and he and Delia were left alone. Winnington was standing in the favourite male attitude--his hands in his pockets, and his back to the fire; Delia was on a sofa near. The firelight flickered on the black and white of her dress, and on the face which in losing something of its dark bloom had gained infinitely in other magic for the eyes of the man looking down upon her. Suddenly she said-- "Do you remember when you wanted me to say--I was sorry for Gertrude's speech--and I wouldn't?" He started. "Perfectly." "Well, I am sorry now. I see--I know--it has been all a mistake." She lifted her eyes to his, very quietly--but the hands on her lap shook. His passionate impulse was to throw himself at her feet, and silence any further humbleness with kisses. But he controlled himself. "You mean--that violence--has been a mistake?" "Yes--just that. Oh, of course!"--she flushed again--"I am just as much for _women_--I am just as rebellious against their wrongs--as I ever was. I shall be a Suffragist always. But I see now--what we've stirred up in England. I see now--that we can't win that way--and that we oughtn't to win that way." He was silent a moment, and then said in a rather muffled voice-- "I don't know who else would have confessed it--so bravely!" His emotion seemed to quiet her. She smiled radiantly. "Does it make you feel triumphant?" "Not in the least!" She held out both hands, and he grasped them, smiling back--understanding that she wished him to take it lightly. Her eyes indeed now were full of gaiety--light swimming on depths. "You won't be always saying 'I told you so?'" "Is it my way?" "No. But perhaps it's cunning on your part. You know it pays better to be generous." They both laughed, and she drew her hands away. In another minute, she had asked him to go on with some reading aloud while she worked. He took up the book. The blood raced in his veins. "Soon, soon!"--he said to himself, only to be checked by the divining instinct which added--"but not yet!" * * * * * Only a few more days now, to the Commons debate. Every morning the newspapers contained a crop of "militant" news of the kind foreshadowed by Gertrude Marvell--meetings disturbed, private parties raided, Ministers waylaid, windows smashed, and the like, though in none of the reports did Gertrude's own name appear. Only two days before the debate, a glorious Reynolds in the National Gallery was all but hopelessly defaced by a girl of eighteen. Feeling throughout the country surged at a white-heat. Delia said little or nothing, but the hollows under her eyes grew steadily darker, and her cheeks whiter. Nor could Winnington, for all his increasing anxiety, devote himself to soothing or distracting her. An ugly strike in the Latchford brickfields against nonunion labour was giving the magistrates of the country a good deal of anxiety. Some bad outrages had already occurred, and Winnington was endeavouring to get a Board of Trade arbitration,--all of which meant his being a good deal away from home. Meanwhile Delia was making a new friend. Easily and simply, though no one knew exactly how, Susy Amberley had found her way to the heart of the young woman so much talked about and so widely condemned by the county. Her own departure for London had been once more delayed by the illness of her mother. But the worst of her own struggle was over now; and no one had guessed it. She was a little older, though it was hardly perceptible to any eye but her mother's; a little graver; in some ways sweeter, in others perhaps a trifle harder, like the dipped sword. Her dress had become less of a care to her; she minded the fashions less than her mother. And there had opened before her more and more alluringly that world of social service, which is to so many beautiful souls outside Catholicism the equivalent of the vowed and dedicated life. But just as of old, she guessed Mark Winnington's thoughts, and by some instinct divined his troubles. He loved Delia Blanchflower; that she knew by a hundred signs; and there were rough places in his road,--that too she knew. They were clearly not engaged; but their relation was clearly, also, one of no ordinary friendship. Delia's dependence on him, her new gentleness and docility were full of meaning--for Susy. As to the causes of Delia's depression, why, she had lost her friend, or at any rate, to judge from the fact that Delia was at Maumsey, while Miss Marvell remained, so report said, in London--had ceased to agree or act with her. Susy divined and felt for the possible tragedy involved. Delia indeed never spoke of the militant propaganda; but she often produced on Susy a strange impression as of someone listening--through darkness. The net result of all these guessings was that the tender Susy fell suddenly in love with Delia--first for Mark's sake, then for her own; and became in a few days of frequent meetings, Delia's small worshipper and ministering spirit. Delia surrendered, wondering; and it was soon very evident that, on her side, the splendid creature, in her unrevealed distress, pined after all to be loved, and by her own sex. She told Susy no secrets, either as to Winnington, or Gertrude; but very soon, just as Susy was certain about her, so she--very pitifully and tenderly--became certain about Susy. Susy loved--or had once loved--Winnington. And Delia knew very well, whom Winnington loved. The double knowledge softened all her pride--all her incipient jealousy away. She took Susy into her heart, though not wholly into her confidence; and soon the two began to walk the lonely country roads together hand in hand. Susy's natural tasks took her often among the poor. But Delia would not go with her. She shrank during these days, with a sick distaste from the human world around her,--its possible claims upon her. Her mind was pre-engaged; and she would not pretend what she could not feel. This applied especially to the folk on her father's estate. As to the neighbours of her own class, they apparently shrank from her. She was left coldly alone. No one called, but Susy, France and his wife, and Captain Andrews. Mrs. Andrews indeed was loud in her denunciation of Delia and all her crew. Her daughter Marion had abominably deserted all her family duties, without any notice to her family, and was now--according to a note left behind--brazenly living in town with some one or other of the "criminals" to whom Miss Blanchflower of course, had introduced her. But as she had given no address she was safe from pursuit. Mrs. Andrews' life had never been so uncomfortable. She had to maid herself, and do her own housekeeping, and the thing was Scandalous and intolerable. She filled the local air with wailing and abuse. But her son, the gallant Captain, would not allow any abuse of Delia Blanchflower in his presence. He had begun, indeed, immediately after Delia's return, to haunt the Abbey so persistently that Madeleine Tonbridge had to make an opportunity for a few quiet words in his ear, after which he disappeared disconsolate. But he was a good fellow at heart, and the impression Delia had made upon him, together with some plain speaking on the subject from Lady Tonbridge, in the course of a chance meeting in the village, roused a remorseful discomfort in him about his sister. He tried honestly to find out where she was, but quite in vain. Then he turned upon his Mother, and told her bluntly she was herself to blame for her daughter's flight. "Between us, we've led her a dog's life, Mother, there, that's the truth! All the same, I'm damned sorry she's taken up with this business." However, it mattered nothing to anybody whether the Captain was "damned sorry" or not. The hours were almost numbered. The Sunday before the Tuesday fixed for the Second Reading came and went. It was a foggy February day, in which the hills faded from sight, and all the world went grey. Winnington spent the afternoon at Maumsey. But neither he nor Madeleine seemed to be able to rouse Delia during that day from a kind of waking dream--which he interpreted as a brooding sense of some catastrophe to come. He was certain that her mind was fixed on the division ahead--the scene in the House of Commons--and on the terror of what the "Daughters"--Gertrude perhaps in the van--might be planning and plotting in revenge for it. His own feeling was one of vast relief that the strain would be so soon over, and his own tongue loosed. Monk Lawrence was safe enough! And as for any other attempt at vengeance, he dismissed the notion with impatient scorn. But meanwhile he said not a word that could have jarred on any conviction or grief of Delia's. Sometimes indeed they touched the great subject itself--the "movement" in its broad and arguable aspects; though it seemed to him that Delia could not bear it for long. Mind and heart were too sore; and her weary reasonableness made him long for the prophetic furies of the autumn. But always she felt herself enwrapped by a tenderness, a chivalry that never failed. Only between her and it--between her and him--as she lay awake through broken nights, some barrier rose--dark and impassable. She knew it for the barrier of her own unconquered fear. Chapter XIX On this same Sunday night before the date fixed for the Suffrage debate, a slender woman, in a veil and a waterproof, opened the gate of a small house in the Brixton Road. It was about nine o'clock in the evening. The pavements were wet with rain, and a gusty wind was shrieking through the smutty almond and alder trees along the road which had ventured to put out their poor blossoms and leaves in the teeth of this February gale. The woman stood and looked at the house after shutting the gate, as though uncertain whether she had found what she was looking for. But the number 453, on the dingy door, could be still made out by the light of the street opposite, and she mounted the steps. A slatternly maid opened the door, and on being asked whether Mrs. Marvell was at home, pointed curtly to a dimly lighted staircase, and disappeared. Gertrude Marvell groped her way upstairs. The house smelt repulsively of stale food, and gas mingled, and the wailing wind from outside seemed to pursue the visitor with its voice as she mounted. On the second floor landing, she knocked at the door of the front room. After an interval, some shuffling steps came to the door, and it was cautiously opened. "What's your business, please?" "It's me--Gertrude. Are you alone?" A sound of astonishment. The door was opened, and a woman appeared. Her untidy, brown hair, touched with grey, fell back from a handsome peevish face of an aquiline type. A delicate mouth, relaxed and bloodless, seemed to make a fretful appeal to the spectator, and the dark circles under the eyes shewed violet on a smooth and pallid skin. She was dressed in a faded tea-gown much betrimmed, covered up with a dingy white shawl. "Well, Gertrude--so you've come--at last!"--she said, after a moment, in a tone of resentment. "If you can put me up for the night--I can stay. I've brought no luggage." "That doesn't matter. There's a stretcher bed. Come in." Gertrude Marvell entered, and her mother closed the door. "Well, mother--how are you?" The daughter offered her cheek, which the elder woman kissed. Then Mrs. Marvell said bitterly-- "Well, I don't suppose, Gertrude, it much matters to you how I am." Gertrude took off her wet waterproof, and hat, and sitting down by the fire, looked round her mother's bed-sitting-room. There was a tray on the table with the remains of a meal. There were also a large number of women's hats, some trimmed, some untrimmed, some in process of trimming, lying about the room, on the different articles of furniture. There was a tiny dog in a basket, which barked shrilly and feebly as Gertrude approached the fire, and there were various cheap illustrated papers and a couple of sixpenny novels to be seen emerging from the litter here and there. For the rest, the furniture was of a squalid lodging-house type. On the chimney-piece however was a bunch of daffodils, the only fresh and pleasing object in the room. To Gertrude it was as though she had seen it all before. Behind the room, there stretched a succession of its ghostly fellows--the rooms of her childhood. In those rooms she could remember her mother as a young and comely woman, but always with the same slovenly dress, and the same untidy--though then abundant and beautiful--hair. And as she half shut her eyes she seemed also to see her younger sister coming in and out--malicious, secretive--with her small turn-up nose, pouting lips, and under-hung chin. She made no reply to her mother's complaining remark. But while she held her cold hands to the blaze that Mrs. Marvell stirred up, her eyes took careful note of her mother's aspect. "Much as usual," was her inward comment. "Whatever happens, she'll outlive me." "You've been going on with the millinery?" She pointed to the hats. "I hope you've been making it pay." "It provides me with a few shillings now and then," said Mrs. Marvell, sitting heavily down on the other side of the fire--"which Winnie generally gets out of me!" she said sharply. "I am a miserable pauper now, as I always have been." Gertrude's look was unmoved. Her mother had, she knew, all that her father had left behind him--no great sum, but enough for a solitary woman to live on. "Well, anyway, you must be glad of it as an occupation. I wish I could help you. But I haven't really a farthing of my own, beyond the interest on my £1000. I handle a great deal of money, but it all goes to the League, and I never let them pay me more than my bare expenses. Now then, tell me all about everybody!" And she lay back in the dilapidated basket-chair that had been offered her, and prepared herself to listen. The family chronicle was done. It was as depressing as usual, and Gertrude made but little comment upon it. When it was finished, Mrs. Marvell rose, and put the kettle on the fire, and got out a couple of fresh cups and saucers from a cupboard. As she did so, she looked round at her visitor. "And you're as deep in that militant business as ever." Gertrude made a negligent sign of assent. "Well, you'll never get any good of it." The mother's pale cheek flushed. It excited her to have this chance of speaking her mind to her clever and notorious daughter, whom in many ways she secretly envied, while heartily disapproving her acts and opinions. Gertrude shrugged her shoulders. "What's the good of arguing?" "Well, it's true"--said the mother, persisting. "Every new thing you do, turns more people against you. Winnie's a Suffragist--but she says you've spoilt all their game!" Gertrude's eyes shone; she despised her mother's opinion, and her sister's still more, and yet once again in their neighbourhood, once again in the old environment, she could not help treating them in the old defiant brow-beating way. "And you think, I suppose, that Winnie knows a good deal about it?" "Well, she knows what everybody's saying--in the trams--and the trains everywhere. Hundreds of them that used to be for you have turned over." "Let them!" The contemptuous tone irritated Mrs. Marvell. But at the same time she could not help admiring her eldest daughter, as she sat there in the fire-light, her quiet well-cut dress, her delicate hands and feet. It was true indeed, she was a scarce-crow for thinness, and looked years older--"somehow gone to pieces"--thought the mother, vaguely, and with a queer, sudden pang. "And you're going on with it?" "What? Militancy? Of course we are--more than ever!" "Why, the men laugh at you, Gertrude!" "They won't laugh--by the time we've done," said Gertrude, with apparent indifference. Her mother had not sufficient subtlety of perception to see that the indifference was now assumed, to hide the quiver of nerves, irreparably injured by excitement and overstrain. "Well, all I know is, it's against nature to suppose that women can fight men." Mrs. Marvell's remarks were rather like the emergence of scattered spars from a choppy sea. "We shall fight them," said Gertrude, sourly--"And what's more, we shall beat them." "All the same we've got to live with them!" cried her mother, suddenly flushing, as old memories swept across her. "Yes,--on our terms--not theirs!" "I do believe, Gertrude, you hate the very sight of a man!" Gertrude smiled again; then suddenly shivered, as though the cold wind outside had swept through the room. "And so would you--if you knew what I do!" "Well I do know a good bit!" protested Mrs. Marvell. "And I'm a married woman,--worse luck! and you're not. But you'll never see it any other way than your own, Gertie. You got a kink in you when you were quite a girl. Last week I was talking about you to a woman I know--and I said--'It's the girls ruined by the bad men that make Gertrude so mad'--and she said--'She don't ever think of the boys that are ruined by the bad women!--Has she ever had a son--not she!' And she just cried and cried. I suppose she was thinking of something." Gertrude rose. "Look here, mother. Can I go to bed? I'm awfully tired." "Wait a bit. I'll make the bed." Gertrude sat down by the fire again. Her exhaustion was evident, and she made no attempt to help her mother. Mrs. Marvell let down the chair-bed, drew it near the fire, and found some bed-clothes. Then she produced night-things of her own, and helped Gertrude undress. When her daughter was in bed, she made some tea, and dry toast, and Gertrude let them be forced on her. When she had finished, the mother suddenly stooped and kissed her. "Where are you going to now, Gertrude? Are you staying on with that lady in Hamptonshire?" "Can't tell you my plans just yet," said Gertrude sleepily--"but you'll know next week." The lights were put out. Both women tried to sleep, and Gertrude was soon heavily asleep. But as soon as it was light, Mrs. Marvell heard her moving, the splash of water, and the lighting of the fire. Presently Gertrude came to her side fully dressed-- "There, mother, I've made _you_ a cup of tea! And now in a few minutes I shall be off." Mrs. Marvell sat up and drank the tea. "I didn't think you'd go in such a hurry," she said, fretfully. "I must. My day's so full. Well, now look here, Mother, I want you to know if anything were to happen to me, my thousand pounds would come to you first, and then to Winnie and her children. And it's my wish, that neither my brother nor Henry shall touch a farthing of it. I've made a will, and that's the address of my solicitors, who're keeping it." She handed her mother an envelope. Mrs. Marvell put down her tea, and put her handkerchief to her eyes. "I believe you're up to something dreadful, Gertrude,--which you won't tell me." "Nonsense," said Gertrude, not however unkindly. "But we mayn't see each other for a good while. There!--I'll open the windows--that'll make you feel more cheerful." And she drew up the blinds to the dull February day, and opened a window. "I'll telephone to Winnie as I go past the Post Office to come and spend the day with you--and I'll send up the servant to do your room. Now don't fret." "I'm a lonely old woman, Gertrude:--and I wish I was dead." Gertrude frowned. "You should try and read something, Mother--better than these trashy novels. When I've time, I'll send you a parcel of books--I've got a good many. And don't you let your work go--it's good for you. Now good-bye." The two women kissed--Mrs. Marvell embracing her daughter with a sudden fierceness of emotion to which Gertrude submitted, almost for the first time in her life. Then her mother pushed her away. "Good-bye, Gertrude--you'd better go!" Gertrude went out noiselessly, closing the door behind her with a lingering movement, unlike her. In the tiny hall below, she found the "general" at work, and sent her up to Mrs. Marvell. Then she went out into the grey February morning, and the little girl of the landlady standing on the steps saw her enter one of the eastward-bound trams. Monday afternoon came. Winnington had been called away to Wanchester by urgent County business; against his will, for there had been some bad rioting the day before at Latchford, and he would rather have gone to help his brother magistrates. But there was no help for it. Lady Tonbridge was at the little Georgian house, shutting it up for six months. Delia was left alone in the Abbey, consumed with a restless excitement she had done her best to hide from her companions. She suddenly made up her mind that she would go and see for herself, and by herself, what was happening at Monk Lawrence. She set out unobserved and on foot, and had soon climbed the hill and reached the wood walk along its crest where she had once met Lathrop. Half way through, she came on two persons whom she at once recognised as the science-mistress, Miss Jackson, and Miss Toogood. They were waiting slowly, and, as it seemed to Delia, sadly; the little dressmaker limping painfully, with her head thrown back and a face of fixed and tragic distress. When they saw Delia, they stopped in agitation. "Oh, Miss Blanchflower!--" Delia who knew that Miss Jackson had been in town hoping for work at the Central Office of the League of Revolt, divined at once that she had been disappointed. "They couldn't find you anything?" The teacher shook her head. "And the Governors have given me a month's salary here in lieu of notice. I've left the school, Miss Blanchflower! I was in the Square you know, that day--and at the Police Court afterwards. That was what did it. And I have my old mother to keep." A pair of haggard eyes met Delia's. "Oh, but I'll help!" cried Delia.--"You must let me help!--won't you?" "Thank you--but I've got a few savings," said the teacher quietly. "It isn't that so much. It's--well, Miss Toogood feels it too. She was in town--she saw everything. And she knows what I mean. We're disheartened--that's what it is!" "With the movement?" said Delia, after a moment. "It seemed so splendid when we talked of it down here--and--it _was_--so horrible!" Her voice dropped. "So horrible!" echoed Miss Toogood drearily. "It wasn't what we meant, somehow. And yet we'd read about it. But to see those young women beating men's faces--well, it did for me!" "The police were rough too!" cried Miss Jackson. "But you couldn't wonder at it, Miss Blanchflower, could you?" Delia looked into the speaker's frank, troubled face. "You and I felt the same," she said in a choked voice. "It was ugly--and it was absurd." She walked back with them a little way, comforting them, as best she could. And her sympathy, her sweetness did--strangely--comfort them. When she left them, they walked on, talking tenderly of her, counting on _her_ good fortune, if there was none for them. At the end of the walk, towards Monk Lawrence, another figure emerged from the distance. Delia started, then gathered all her wits; for it was Lathrop. He hurried towards her, breathless, cutting all preliminaries-- "I was coming to find you. I arrived this morning. There is something wrong! I have just been to the house, and there is no one there." "What do you mean?" "No one. I went to Daunt's rooms. Everything locked. The house absolutely dark--everywhere. And I know that he has had the strictest orders!" Without a word, she began to run, and he beside her. When she slackened, he told her that while in London he had made the most skilful enquiries he could devise as to the plot he believed to be on foot. But--like Delia's own--they had been quite fruitless. Those persons who had shared suspicion with him in December were now convinced that the thing was dropped. All that he had ascertained was that Miss Marvell was in town, apparently recovered, and Miss Andrews with her. "Well--and were you pleased with your raid?" he asked her, half mockingly, as he opened the gate of Monk Lawrence for her. She resented the question, and the tone of it, remembering his first grandiloquent letter to her. "_You_ ought to be," she said, drily. "It was the kind of thing you recommended." "In that letter I wrote you! I ought to have apologised to you for that letter long ago. I am afraid it was an exercise. Oh, I felt it, I suppose, when I wrote it." There was a touch of something insolent in his voice. She made no reply. If it had not been for the necessity which yoked them, she would not have spent another minute in his company, so repellent to her had he become--both in the inner and the outer man. She tried only to think of him as an ally in a desperate campaign. They hastened up the Monk Lawrence drive. The house stood still and peaceful in the February afternoon. The rooks from the rookery behind were swirling about and over the roofs, filling the air with monotonous sound which only emphasized the silence below. A sheet of snowdrops lay white in the courtyard, where a child's go-cart upset, held the very middle of the stately approach to the house. Delia went to the front door, and rang the bell--repeatedly. Not a sound, except the dim echoes of the bell itself from some region far inside. "No good!" said Lathrop. "Now come to the back." They went round to the low addition at the back of the house, where Daunt and his family had now lived for many months. Here also there was nobody. The door was locked. The blinds were drawn down. Impossible to see into the rooms, and neither calling nor knocking produced any response. Lathrop stood thinking. "Absolutely against orders! I know--for Daunt himself told me--that he had promised Lang never to leave the house without putting some deputy he could trust in charge. He has gone and left no deputy--or the deputy he did leave has deserted." "What's the nearest house--or cottage?" "The Gardeners' cottages, beyond the kitchen garden. Only one of them occupied now, I believe. Daunt used to live there before he moved into the house. Let's go there!" They ran on. The walled kitchen garden was locked, but they found a way round it to where three creeper-grown cottages stood in a pleasant lonely space girdled by beech-woods. One only was inhabited, but from that the smoke was going up, and a babble of children's voices emerged. Lathrop knocked. There was a sudden sound, and then a silence within. In a minute however the door was opened, and a strapping black-eyed young woman stood on the threshold looking both sulky and astonished. "Are you Daunt's niece?" said Lathrop. "I am, Sir. What do you want with him?" "Why isn't he at Monk Lawrence?" asked Lathrop roughly. "He told me himself he was not to leave the house unguarded." "Well, Sir, I don't know I'm sure what business it is of yours!" said the woman, flushing with anger. "He got bad news of his son, whose ship arrived at Portsmouth yesterday, and the young man said to be dying, on board. So he went off this afternoon. I've only left it for ten minutes and I'm going back directly. Mrs. Cresson here had asked the children to tea, and I brought them over. And I'll thank you, Sir, not to go spying on honest people!" And she would have slammed the door in his face, but that Delia came forward. "We had no intention of spying upon you, Miss Daunt--indeed we hadn't. But I am Miss Blanchflower, who came here before Christmas, with Mr. Winnington, and I should have been glad to see Mr. Daunt and the children. Lily!--don't you remember me?"--and she smiled at the crippled child--a delicate blue-eyed creature--whom she saw in the background. But the child, who seemed to have been crying violently, did not come forward. And the other two, who had their fingers in their mouths, were equally silent and shrinking. In the distance an old woman sat motionless in her chair by the fire, taking no notice apparently of what was going on. The young woman appeared for a moment confused or excited. "Well, I'm sorry, Miss, but my Uncle won't be back till after dark. And I wouldn't advise you to come in, Miss,"--she hurriedly drew the door close behind her--"the doctor thinks two of the children have got whooping-cough--and I didn't send them to school today." "Well, just understand, Miss Daunt, if that's your name," said Lathrop, with emphasis--"that till you return to the house, we shall stay there. We shall walk up and down there, till you come back. You know well enough there are people about, who would gladly do an injury to the house, and that it's not safe to leave it. Monk Lawrence is not Sir Wilfrid Lang's property only. It belongs to the whole nation, and there are plenty of people that'll know the reason why, if any harm comes to it." "Oh, very well. Have it your own way, Sir! I'll come--I'll come--fast enough," and the speaker, with a curious half-mocking look at Lathrop, flounced back into the cottage, and shut the door. They waited. There were sounds of lowered voices, and crying children. Then Miss Daunt emerged defiantly, and they all three walked back to Monk Lawrence. The keeper's niece unlocked the door leading to Daunt's rooms. But she stood sulkily in the entry. "Now I hope you're satisfied, Sir. I don't know, I'm sure, why you should come meddling in other people's affairs. And I daresay you'll say something against me to my uncle!" "Well, anyway, you keep watch!" was the stern reply. "I take my rounds often this way, as your Uncle knows. I daresay I shall be by here again tonight. Can the children find their way home alone?" "Well, they're not idiots, Sir! Good-night to you. I've got to get supper." And brusquely shutting the door in their faces, she went inside. They perceived immediately afterwards that she had lit a light in the kitchen. "Well, so far, all right," said Lathrop, as he and Delia withdrew. "But the whole thing's rather--queer. You know that old woman, Mrs. Cresson, is not all there, and quite helpless?" He pondered it as they walked back through the wood, his eyes on the ground. Delia shared his undefined anxiety. She suggested that he should go back to the house in an hour or so, to see if Daunt had returned, and complain of his niece's breach of rules. Lathrop agreed. "How do we know who or what that girl is?"--he said slowly--"that she mayn't have been got hold of?" The same terror grew in Delia. She walked on beside him absorbed in speculation and discussion, till, without noticing, she had reached the farther gate of the wood-walk. Outside the gate, ran the Wanchester road, climbing the down, amid the woods. To reach the field path leading to the Abbey, Delia must cross it. She and Lathrop emerged from the wood still talking in low voices, and stood beside the gate. A small car, with one man driving it, was descending the long hill. But Delia had her back to it. It came nearer. She turned, and saw Winnington approaching her--saw the look on his face. For a moment she wavered. Then with a bow and a hasty "Good Evening," she left Lathrop, and stepped into the road, holding up her hand to stop the car. "How lucky!" she said, clearly, and gaily,--"just as it's going to rain! Will you take me home?" Winnington, without a word, made room for her beside him. The two men exchanged a slight greeting--and the car passed. Lathrop walked quickly back in the direction of Monk Lawrence. His vanity was hugely pleased. "By George!--that was one to me! It's quite evident she hasn't taken him into her confidence--doesn't want magistrates interfering--no doubt. And meanwhile she appeals to _me_--she depends on _me_. Whatever happens--she'll have to be grateful to me. That fellow with his wry face can't stop it. What a vision she made just now under the wood--'belle dame sans merci!'--hating my company--and yet compelled to it. It would make a sonnet I think--I'll try it tonight." * * * * * Meanwhile in the dark corridors of Monk Lawrence a woman groping, met another woman. The two dim figures exchanged some whispered words. Then one of them returned to the back regions. Lathrop, passing by, noticed smoke rising from the Daunts' chimney, and was reassured. But in an hour or so he would return to look for Daunt himself. He had no sooner descended the hill to his own cottage, in the fast gathering dusk, than Eliza Daunt emerged. She left the light burning in the keeper's kitchen, and some cold supper on the table. Then with a laugh which was half a sob of excitement she ran down the path leading to the garden cottages. She was met by a clamour of rebellious children, as she opened Mrs. Cresson's door. "Where's Daddy, Liza?--where's Daddy! Why can't we go home! We want our Daddy!" "Hold your noise!" said Eliza roughly--"or it'll be the worse for you--Daddy won't be home for a couple of hours yet, and I promised Fred Cresson, I'd get Mrs. Cresson's tea for her. Lily, stop crying--and get the tray!" The crippled child, red-eyed, unwillingly obeyed. Neither she nor her sisters could understand why they had been brought over to tea with Mrs. Cresson of whose queer half-imbecile ways they were all terrified. Their father had gone off in a great hurry--because of the telegram which had come. And Fred had bicycled down to Latchford to see somebody about a gardener's place. And now there was no one left but Liza and Mrs. Cresson--of whom, for different reasons, the three little girls were equally afraid. And Lily's heart especially was sore for her father. She knew very well they were all doing what was forbidden. But she dared not complain. They had found Cousin 'Liza a hard woman. After Eliza Daunt had left Daunt's kitchen, for the space of half an hour, a deep and brooding quiet settled on Monk Lawrence. The old house held that in its womb, which must soon crash to light; but for this last brief space, all was peace. The twilight of a clear February evening mellowed the grey walls, and the moss-grown roofs; the house spoke its last message--its murmured story, as the long yoke-fellow of human life--to the tranquil air; and the pigeons crooned about it, little knowing. Presently from the same door which had seen Eliza Daunt depart, a woman cautiously emerged. She was in dark clothes, closely veiled. With noiseless step, she passed round the back of the house, pausing a moment to look at the side door on the north side which had been lately strengthened by Sir Wilfrid's orders. Then she gained the shelter of the close-grown shrubbery, and turning round she stood a few seconds motionless, gazing at the house. In spite of her quiet movements, she was trembling from head to foot--with excitement, not fear. "It's beautiful," she was saying to herself--"and precious--and I've destroyed it." Then--with a fierce leap in the blood--"_Beauty_! And what about the beauty that men destroy? Let them _pay_!" But as she stood there a sudden disabling storm of thought--misgiving--argument--swept through her brain. She seemed to hear on all sides voices in the air--the voices of friends and foes, of applause and execration--Delia's voice among them! And at the mere imagination of it, a shiver of anger ran through her. She thought of Delia now, only as of one who had deserted and disobeyed. But with the illusion of the ear, there came also an illusion of vision. The months of her recent life rose before her, in one hurrying spectacle of scenes and faces, and the spectacle aroused in her but one idea--one sickening impression--of crushing and superhuman effort. What labour!--what toil! She shuddered under it. Then, suddenly, her mind ran back to the early years before, beyond, the days of "war"--sordid, unceasing war--when there had been time to love, to weep, to pity, to enjoy; before wrath breeding wrath, and violence begetting violence, had driven out the Spirits of Tenderness and Hope. She seemed to see, to feel them--the sad Exiles!--fleeing along desert ways; and her bitter heart cried out to them--for the only--the last time. For in the great names of Love and Justice, she had let Hate loose within her, and like the lion-cub nurtured in the house, it had grown to be the soul's master and gaoler; a "doom" holding the citadels of life, and working itself out to the appointed end. But the tumult in which she stood began to unnerve her. By a last exercise of will she was able to pull herself together. Rapidly, as one well used to them, she made her way through the shrubbery paths; round the walled garden, and behind the gardeners' cottages. She heard the children in Mrs. Cresson's cottage as she passed, Lily still fretfully crying, and the old woman's voice scolding. Poor children!--they would be horribly frightened--but nothing worse. The thick overgrown wood of fir and beech behind the cottages received her, swallowed up the slight insignificant form. In the wood there was still light enough to let her grope her way along the path, till at the end, against an opening to the sky, she saw the outlines of a keeper's hut. Then she knew that she was worn out, and must rest. She pushed the door ajar, and sat crouching on the threshold, while the schemes and plottings of the preceding weeks ran disjointedly through memory. Marion was safe by now--she had had an hour's start. And Eliza too had gone. Nothing could be better than the arrangements made for those two. But she herself was not going--not yet. Her limbs failed her; and beyond the sheltering woods, she seemed to become electrically aware of hostile persons, of nets drawn round her, cutting off escape. As to that, she felt the most supreme indifference to what might happen to her. The indifference, indeed, passed presently into a strange and stinging temptation to go back--back to the dark house--to see with her own eyes what her hands had done. She resisted it with difficulty.... Suddenly, a sound from the distance--beyond the cottages--as of a slight explosion. She started, and throwing back her veil, she sat motionless in the doorway of the hut, her face making a dim white patch upon the darkness. Chapter XX "Take me home!--take me home quick! I want to talk to you. Not now--not here!" The car flew along. Mark barely looked at Delia. His face was set and pale. As for her, while they ran through the village and along the country road between it and Maumsey, her mind had time to adjust itself to that flashing resolution which had broken down a hundred scruples and swept away a hundred fears, in that moment on the hill when she had met his eyes, and the look in them. What must he think of her? An assignation with that man, on the very first afternoon when his tender watchfulness left her for an hour! No, it could not be borne that he should read her so! She must clear herself! And thought, leaping beacon-like from point to point told her, at last, that for Gertrude too, she had chosen wrongly. Thank Heaven, there was still time! What could a girl do, all alone--groping in such a darkness? Better after all lay the case before Mark's judgment, Mark's tenderness, and trust him with it all. Trust her own power too--see what a girl could do with the man who loved her! The car stopped at the Abbey door, and Winnington, still absolutely silent, helped her to alight. She led the way, past the drawing-room where Lady Tonbridge sat rather anxiously expecting her, to that bare room on the ground floor, the little gun-room, which Gertrude Marvell had made her office, and where many signs of her occupation still remained--a calendar on the wall marking the "glorious" dates of the League--a flashlight photograph of the first raid on Parliament some years before--a faded badge, and scattered piles of newspapers. A couple of deal tables and two chairs were all the furniture the room contained, in addition to the cupboards, painted in stone-colour, which covered the walls. Delia closed the door, and threw off her furs. Then, with a gesture of complete abandonment, she went up to Winnington, holding out her hands-- "Oh, Mark, Mark, I want you to help me!" He took her hands, but without pressing them. His face, frowning and flushed, with a little quivering of the nostrils, began to terrify her-- "Oh, Mark,--dear Mr. Mark--I went to see Mr. Lathrop--because--because I was in great trouble--and I thought he could help me." He dropped the hands. "You went to _him_--instead of to me? How long have you been with him? Did you write to him to arrange it?" "No, no--we met by accident. Mark, it's not myself--it's a fear I have--a dreadful, dreadful fear!" She came close to him, piteously, just murmuring-- "It's Monk Lawrence!--and Gertrude!" He started, and looked at her keenly-- "You know something I don't know?" "Oh yes, I do, I do!" she said, wringing her hands. "I ought to have told you long ago. But I've been afraid of what you might do--I've been afraid for Gertrude. Can't you see, Mark? I've been trying to make Mr. Lathrop keep watch--enquire--so that they wouldn't dare. I've told Gertrude that I know--I've written to people--I've done all I could. And this afternoon I felt I must go there and see for myself, what precautions had been taken--and I met Mr. Lathrop--" She gave a rapid account of their visit to the house,--of its complete desertion--of the strange behaviour of the niece--and of the growing alarm in her own mind. "There's something--there's some plot. Perhaps that woman's in it. Perhaps Gertrude's got hold of her--or Miss Andrews. Anyway, if that house can be left quite alone--ever--they'll get at it--that I'm sure of. Why did she take the children away? Wasn't that strange?" Then she put her hands on the heart that fluttered so--and tried to smile-- "But of course till the Bill's thrown out, there can be no danger, can there? There _can't_ be any!" she repeated, as though appealing to him to reassure her. "I don't understand yet," he said gravely. "Why do you suspect Miss Marvell, or a plot at all? There was no such idea in your mind when we went over the house together?" "No, none!--or at least not seriously--there was nothing, really, to go on"--she assured him eagerly. "But just after--you remember Mr. Lathrop's coming--that day--?--when you scolded me?" He could not help smiling a little--rather bitterly. "I remember you said you couldn't explain. Of course I thought it was something connected with Miss Marvell, or your Society--but--" "I'm going to explain"--she said, trying hard for composure. "I'm going to tell it all in order." And sitting down, her head resting on her hand, with Winnington standing before her, she told the whole story of the preceding weeks--the alternations of fear and relief--Lathrop's suspicions--Gertrude's denials--the last interview between them. As for the man looking down upon her beautiful bowed head, his heart melted within him as he listened. The sting remained that she should have asked anyone else than he to help her--above all that she should have humbled herself to ask it of such a man as Lathrop. Anxiety remained, for Monk Lawrence itself, and still more for what might be said of her complicity. But all that was further implied in her confession, her drooping sweetness, her passionate appeal to him--the beauty of her true character, its innocence, its faith, its loyalty--began to flood him with a feeling that presently burst its bounds. She wound up with most touching entreaties to him, to save and shield her friend--to go himself to Gertrude and warn her--to go to the police--without disclosing names, of course--and insist that the house should be constantly patrolled. He scarcely heard a word of this. When she paused--there was silence a moment. Then she heard her name--very low-- "Delia!" She looked up, and with a long breath she rose, as though drawn invisibly. He held out his arms, and she threw hers round his neck, hiding her face against the life that beat for her. "Oh, forgive me!"--she murmured, after a little, childishly pressing her lips to his--"forgive me--for everything!" The tears were in his eyes. "You've gone through all this!--alone!" he said to her, as he bent over her. "But never again, Delia--never again!" She was the first to release herself--putting tears away. "Now then--what can we do?" He resumed at once his ordinary manner and voice. "We can do a great deal. I have the car here. I shall go straight back to Monk Lawrence, and see Daunt to-night. That woman's behaviour must be reported--and explained. An hour--an hour and a half?--since you were there?"--he took out his watch--"He's probably home by now--it's quite dark--he'd scarcely risk being away after dark. Dearest, go and rest!--I shall come back later--after dinner. Put it out of your mind." She went towards the hall with him hand in hand. Suddenly there was a confused sound of shouting outside. Lady Tonbridge opened the drawing-room door with a scared face-- "What is it? There are people running up the drive. They're shouting something!" Winnington rushed to the front door, Delia with him. With his first glance at the hill-side, he understood the meaning of the cries--of the crowd approaching. "My God!--_too late_!" For high on that wooded slope, a blaze was spreading to the skies--a blaze that grew with every second--illuminating with its flare the woods around it, the chimneys of the old house, the quiet stretches of the hill. "Monk Lawrence is afire, Muster Winnington!" panted one of Winnington's own labourers who had outstripped the rest. "They're asking for you to come! They've telephoned to Latchford for the engines, and to Brownmouth and Wanchester too. They say it's burning like tow--there must be petrol in it, or summat. It's the women they say!--spite of Mr. Daunt and the perlice!" Then he noticed Delia standing beside Winnington on the steps, and held his tongue, scowling. Winnington's car was still standing at the steps. He set it going in a moment. "My cloak!" said Delia, looking round her--"And tell them to bring the car!" "Delia, you're not going?" cried Madeleine, throwing a restraining arm about her. "But of course I am!" said the girl amazed. "Not with him--because I should be in his way." Various persons ran to do her bidding. Winnington already in his place, with a labourer beside him, and two more in the seat behind him, beckoned to her. "Why should you come, dearest! It will only break your heart. We'll do all that can be done, and I'll send back messages." She shook her head. "I shall come! But don't think of me. I won't run any risks." There was no time to argue with her. The little car sped away, and with it the miscellaneous crowd who had rushed to find Winnington, as the natural head of the Maumsey community, and the only magistrate within reach. Delia and Madeleine were left standing on the steps, amid a group of frightened and chattering servants--gazing in despairing rage at the ever-spreading horror on the slope of the down, at the sudden leaps of flame, the vast showers of sparks drifting over the woods, the red glare on the low hanging clouds. The garnered beauty of four centuries, one of England's noblest heirlooms, was going down in ruin, at the bidding of a handful of women, hurling themselves in disappointed fury on a community that would not give them their way. Sharp-toothed remorse had hold on Delia. If she had only gone to Wilmington earlier! "My fault!--my fault!" When the car came quickly round, she and Lady Tonbridge got into it. As they rushed through the roads, lit on their way by that blaze in the heart of the hills, of which the roaring began to reach their ears, Delia sat speechless, and death-like, reconstructing the past days and hours. Not yet two hours since she had left the house--left it untouched. At that very moment, Gertrude or Gertrude's agents must have been within it. The whole thing had been a plot--the children taken away--the house left deserted. Very likely Daunt's summons to his dying son had been also part of it. And as to the niece--what more probable than that Gertrude had laid hands on her months before, guided perhaps by the local knowledge of Marion Andrews,--and had placed her as spy and agent in the doomed house till the time should be ripe? The blind and fanatical devotions which Gertrude was able to excite when she set herself to it, was only too well known to Delia. Where was Gertrude herself? For Delia was certain that she had not merely done this act by deputy. In the village, every person who had not gone rushing up the hill was standing at the doors, pale and terror-stricken, watching the glare overhead. The blinds of Miss Toogood's little house were drawn close. And as Delia passed, angry looks and mutterings pursued her. The car mounted the hill. Suddenly a huge noise and hooting behind them. They drew into the hedge, to let the Latchford fire-engine thunder past, a fine new motor engine, just purchased and equipped. "There'll be three or four more directly, Miss"--shouted one of her own garden lads, mounting on the step of the car. "But they say there's no hope. It was fired in three places, and there was petrol used." At the gate, the police--looking askance especially at Miss Blanchflower--would have turned them back. But Delia asked for Winnington, and they were at last admitted into the circle outside the courtyard, where beyond reach of the sparks, and falling fragments, the crowd of spectators was gathered. People made way for her, but Lady Tonbridge noticed that nobody spoke to her, though as soon as she appeared all the angry or excited attention that the crowd could spare from the fire was given to her. Delia was not aware of it. She stood a little in front of the crowd, with her veil thrown back, her hands clasped in front of her, an image of rapt despair. Her face, like all the faces in the crowd, was made lurid--fantastic--by the glare of the flames; and every now and then, as though unconsciously, she brushed away the mist of tears from her eyes. "Aye she's sorry now!"--said a stout farmer, bitterly, to his neighbour--"now that she's led them as is even younger than herself into trouble. My girl's in prison all along of her--and that woman as they do say is at the bottom of this business." The speaker was Kitty Foster's father. Kitty had just been sentenced to six months' imprisonment for the burning of a cricket pavilion in the Midlands, and her relations were sitting in shame and grief for her. "Whoever 'tis as did it 'ull have a job to get away"--said the man he addressed. "They've got a lot o' police out. Where's 'Liza Daunt, I say? They're searching for her everywhere. Daunt's just come upon the engine from Latchford--saw the fire from the train. He says he's been tricked--a put-up job he says. There wasn't nothing wrong with his son, he says, when he got to Portsmouth. If they do catch 'em, the police will have to guard 'em safe. It won't do to let the crowd get at 'em. They're fair mad. Oh, Lord!--it's caught another roof!" And a groan rose from the fast-thickening multitude, as another wall fell amid a shower of sparks and ashes, and the flames, licking up and up, caught the high-pitched roof of the great hall, and ran along the stone letters of the parapet, which spelt out the motto--"Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it." The fantastic letters themselves, which had been lifted to their places before the death of Shakespeare, seemed to dance in the flame like living and tormented things. Meanwhile in the courtyard, and on the side lawns, scores of persons were busy removing furniture, pictures and tapestries. Winnington was leading and organising the rescue parties, now inside, now outside the house. And near him, under his orders, worked Paul Lathrop, in his shirt sleeves, superhumanly active, and superhumanly strong--grinding his teeth with rage sometimes, as the fire defeated one effort after another to check it. Daunt, also was there, pouring out incoherent confidences to the police, and distracted by the growing certainty that his niece had been one of the chief authors of the plot. His children naturally had been his first thought. But the Rector, who had just been round to enquire for them at Mrs. Cresson's cottage, came back breathless, shouting "all safe!"--and Daunt rushed off to help the firemen; while Amberley reported to Susy the pitiable misery of Lily, the little cripple, who had been shrieking for her father in wild outbursts of crying, refusing to believe that he was not in the fire. Susy, who loved the child, would have gladly gone to find her, and take her home to the Rectory for the night. But, impossible to leave her post at Delia's side, and this blazing spectacle that held the darkness! Two village women, said the Rector, were in charge of the children. "No chance!" said Lathrop, bitterly, pausing for a moment beside Winnington, while they both took breath--the sweat pouring from their smoke-blackened faces. "If one could get to the top of that window with the big hose--one could reach the roof better"--panted Winnington, pointing to the still intact double oriel which ran up through two stories of the building, to the east of the doorway. "I see!" Lathrop dashed away. And in a few seconds he and a fireman could be seen climbing from a ladder upon a ledge, a carved string-course, which connected the eastern and western oriels above the main doorway. They crawled along the ledge like flies, clinging to every projection, every stem of ivy, the fireman dragging the hose. The crowd watched, all eyes. Winnington, after a rapid look or two, turned away with the thought--"That fellow's done some rock-climbing in his day!" But against such a doom as had now gripped Monk Lawrence, nothing availed. Lathrop and his companion had barely scaled the parapet of the window when a huge central crash sent its resounding din circling round the leafless woods, and the two climbing figures disappeared from view amid a fresh rush of smoke and flame. The great western chimney-stack had fallen. When the cloud of smoke drifted away, a gaping cavity of fire was seen just behind the two men; it could only be a matter of minutes before the wall and roof immediately behind them came down upon them. The firemen shouted to them from below. A long ladder was brought and run up to within twenty feet of them. Lathrop climbed down to it over the scorched face of the oriel, his life in jeopardy at every step. Then steadying himself on the ladder,--and grasping a projection in the wall, he called to the man above, to drop upon his shoulders. It was done, by a miracle--and both holding on, the man above by the projections of the wall and Lathrop by the ladder, descended, till the two were within reach of safety. A thin roar of cheers rose from the environing throng, scarcely audible amid the greater roar of the flames. Lathrop, wearied, depressed, with bleeding hands, came back to Winnington's side. Winnington looked round. For the first time Lathrop saw through Mark's grey eyes the generous heart within--unveiled. "Splendid! Are you hurt?" "Only scorched and scratched. Give me another job!" "Come along then." And thenceforward the two worked side by side, like brothers, in the desperate attempt to save at least the Great Hall, and the beautiful rooms adjoining; the Porch Room, with its Chatham memorials; the library too, with its stores of seventeenth-century books, its busts, and its portraits. But the flames rushed on and on, with a fiendish and astounding rapidity. Fragments of news ran back to the onlookers. The main staircase had been steeped in petrol--and sacks full of shavings had been stored in the panelled spaces underneath it. Fire-lighters heaped together had been found in the Red Parlour--to be dragged out by the firemen--but again too late!--for the fire was already gnawing at the room, like a wild prowling beast. A back staircase too had been kindled with paraffin--the smell of it was everywhere. And thus urged, a very demon of fire seemed to have seized on the beautiful place. There was a will and a passion of destruction in the flames that nothing could withstand. As the diamond-paned windows fell into nothing-ness, the rooms behind shewed for a brief space; carved roofs, stately fireplaces, gleaming for a last moment, before Time knew them no more, and all that remained of them was the last vision of their antique beauty, stamped on the aching memories of those who watched. "Why did you let her come!" said France vehemently in Lady Tonbridge's ear, with his eyes on Delia. "It's enough to kill her. She must know who's done it!" Lady Tonbridge shook her head despairingly, and both gazed, without daring to speak to her, on the girl beside them. Madeleine had taken one cold hand. France was torn with pity for her--but what comfort was there to give! Her tears had dried. But there was something now in her uncontrollable restlessness as she moved ghost-like along the front of the spectators, pressing as near to the house as the police would permit, scanning every patch of light or shadow, which suggested to those who followed her, possession by some torturing fear--some terror of worse still to come. Meanwhile the police were thinking not only of the house, but still more of its destroyers. They had a large number of men on the spot, and a quick-witted inspector in charge. It was evident from many traces that the incendiaries had only left the place a very short time before the outbreak of the fire; they could not be far away. Scouts were flung out on all the roads; search parties were in all the woods; every railway station had been warned. On the northern side, the famous Loggia, built by an Italianate owner of the house, in the first half of the sixteenth century--a series of open arches, with twisted marble pillars--ran along the house from front to rear. It was approached on the south by a beautiful staircase, of which the terra-cotta balustrading had been copied from a famous villa on Como, and a similar staircase gave access to it from the garden to the north. The fight for the Great Hall which the Loggia adjoined, was being followed with agonised anxiety by the crowds. The Red Parlour, with all its carvings and mouldings had gone, the porch room was a furnace of fire, with black spars and beams hanging in ragged ruin across it. The Great Hall seemed already tottering, and in its fall, the Loggia too must go. Then, as every eye hung upon the work of the firemen and the play of the water, into the still empty space of the Loggia, and illumined by the glare of the flames, there emerged with quiet step, the figure of a woman. She came forward: she stood with crossed arms looking at the crowd. And at the same moment, behind her, there appeared the form of a child, a little fair-haired girl, hobbling on a crutch, in desperate haste, and wailing--"Father!" Delia saw them, and with one wild movement she was through the cordon of police, and running for the house. Winnington, at the head of his salvage corps, perceived her, and ran too. "Delia!--go back!--go back!" "Gertrude!" she said, gasping--and pointed to the Loggia. And he had hardly looked where all the world was looking, when a part of the roof of the Hall at the back, fell suddenly outwards and northwards, in a blaze of flame. Charred rafters stood out, hanging in mid air, and the flames leapt on triumphant. At the same moment, evidently startled by some sound behind her, the woman turned, and saw what the crowd saw--the child, limping on its crutch, coming towards her, calling incoherently. Her own cry rang out, as she ran towards the cripple, waving her back. And as she did so, came another thundering fall, another upward rush of flame, as a fresh portion of the roof fell eastwards, covering the Loggia and blotting out the figures of both woman and child. With difficulty the police kept back the mad rush of the crowd. The firemen swarmed to the spot. But the child was buried deep under flaming ruin, where her father, Daunt, who had rushed to save her, was only restrained by main force from plunging after her, to his death. The woman they brought out--alive. France, Delia and Winnington were beside her. "Stand back!" shouted the mild old Rector--transformed into a prophet-figure, his white hair streaming--as the multitude swayed against the cordon of police. "Stand back! all of you--and pray--for this woman!" In a dead silence, men, shivering, took off their hats, and women sobbed. "Gertrude!" Delia called, in her anguish, as she knelt beside the charred frame, over which France who was kneeling on the other side had thrown his coat. The dark eyes opened in the blackened face, the scorched lips unlocked. A shudder ran through the dying frame. "The child!--the child!" And with that cry to heaven,--that protesting cry of an amazed and conquered soul--Gertrude Marvell passed away. * * * * * Thus ended the First Act of Delia's life. When three weeks later, after a marriage at which no one was present except the persons to be married, Lady Tonbridge, and Dr. France, Winnington took his wife far from these scenes to lands of summer and of rest, he carried with him a Delia ineffaceably marked by this tragedy of her youth. Children, as they come, will sometime re-kindle the natural joy in a face so lovely. And till that time arrives Winnington's tenderness will be the master-light of all her day. But there are sounds once heard that live for ever in the mind. And in Delia's there will reverberate till death that wail of a fierce and childless woman--that last cry of nature in one who had defied nature--of womanhood in one who had renounced the ways of womanhood: "_the child--the child_!" Not long after the destruction of Monk Lawrence and the marriage of Delia, Paul Lathrop left the Maumsey neighbourhood. His debts had been paid by some unknown friend or friends, and he fell back into London literary life, where he maintained a precarious but--to himself--not unpleasant existence. Miss Jackson, the science-mistress, went to Vancouver, married the owner of a lumber camp, and so tamed her soul. Miss Toogood lived on, rarely employed, and seldom going outside the tiny back parlour, with its pictures of Winchester and Mr. Keble. But Lady Tonbridge and Delia do their best to lighten the mild melancholy which grows upon her with age; and a little red-haired niece who came to live with her, keeps her old aunt's nerves alive and alert by various harmless vices--among them an incorrigible interest in the Maumsey and Latchford youth. Marion Andrews and Eliza Daunt disappeared together. They were not captured on that terrible night when Gertrude Marvell, convinced that she could not escape, and perhaps not much caring to escape, came back to look on the ruin she had so long and carefully prepared, and perished in the heart of it--not alone. But such desperate happenings as the destruction of Monk Lawrence, to whatever particular calamities they may lead, are but a backward ripple on the vast and ceaseless tide of human efforts towards a new and nobler order. Delia must still wrestle all her life with the meaning of that imperious call to women which this century has sounded; and of those further stages, upwards and onwards, to which the human spirit, in Man or Woman, is perennially urged by the revealing forces that breathe through human destiny. Two days after the death of Gertrude Marvell, the immediate cause on which she and her fellows had wrought such havoc, went down in Parliament to long and bitter eclipse. But the end is not yet. And for that riddle of the Sphinx to which Gertrude and her fellows gave the answer of a futile violence, generations more patient and more wise, will yet find the fitting key. THE END 
40385	----	http://www.girlebooks.com - Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org RUTLEDGE By MIRIAM COLES HARRIS NEW YORK: DERBY & JACKSON, 498 BROADWAY. 1860. CHAPTER I. "Heavily hangs the broad sunflower, Over its grave i' the earth so chilly; Heavily hangs the hollyhock, Heavily hangs the tiger lily." TENNYSON. It was the gloomy twilight of a gloomy November day; dark and leaden clouds were fast shutting out every lingering ray of daylight; and the wind, which moaned dismally around the house, was tossing into mad antics the leaves which strewed the playground. The lamps were not lighted yet; of visible fires the _pensionnat_ of St. Catharine's was innocent; a dull black stove, more or less gigantic, according to the size of the apartment, gloomed in every one, and affected favorably the thermometer, if not the imagination. We paced untiringly up and down the dim corridor--Nelly, Agnes and I--three children, who, by virtue of our youth, ought to have been let off, one would have thought, for some years yet, from the deep depression that was fast settling on our spirits. In truth we were all three very miserable, we thought--Nelly and Agnes, I am afraid, more so than I, who in common justice ought to have participated deeply in, as I was the chief occasion of, their grief. My trunk was packed and strapped, and stood outside the door of my dormitory, ready for the porter's attention. In it lay my school-books, closed forever, as I hoped; and souvenirs innumerable of school friendships and the undying love of the extremely young persons by whom I was surrounded. From them I was to be severed to-morrow, as was expected, and "It might be for years, and it might be for ever," as Nelly had just said, choking up on the last sentence. I _did_ feel unhappy, and very much like "choking up" too, when I passed the great windows, that looked into the playground, and remembered all the mad hours of frolic I had passed there; when I took down my shawl from the peg where it had hung nightly for five years, and remembered, with a thrill, it was "the last time;" when the lid of my empty desk fell down with an echo that sounded drearily through the long school-room; when I thought "where I might be this time to-morrow," and when Agnes' and Nelly's arms twined about me, reminded me of the rapidly approaching hour of separation from those who had represented the world to me for five years--whom I had loved and hated, and by whom I had been loved and hated, with all the fervor of sixteen. The hatreds now were softened down by the nearness of the parting; all my ancient foes, (and they had not been few), had "made up" and promised forgiveness and forgetfulness entire; and all ancient feuds were dead. All my friends now loved me with tenfold the ardor they had ever felt before; all the staff of teachers, who had, I am afraid, a great deal to forgive, of impatient self-will, mad spirits and thoughtless inattention, were good enough to forget all, and remember only what they were pleased to call the truth and honesty and courage, that in the years we had been together, they had never known to fail. They little knew how their unlooked for praise humbled me; and how far more deeply than any reproach, it made me realize the waste of time and talents that I had to look back upon. So, most unexpectedly to myself, I found that I was going off with flying colors; that all were joining to deplore my departure and laud my good qualities; and that, from being rather a "limb" in the eyes of the school, and a hopeless sinner in my own, I was promoted, temporarily, to the dignity of heroine at St. Catharine's. It was with a very full heart that I remembered all this; and deeper feelings than I had known since my childhood were stirred by the kindness I was certain was as undeserved as it was unexpected. But such a future dawned before me, that tender regret struggled hard with giddy hope for the mastery. In almost every girl's life, leaving school is a marked and important event; and imagination has always a wide, and generally well-cultivated field for its powers, even when home and future are as certain as things mundane can be. But in my case there was so much room for dreaming, so much raw material for fancy to work up, that a tamer and less imaginative child than I was, would have been tempted into castle-building. The sad event that five years before had placed me, a stunned, bewildered, motherless child, in the midst of strangers, had largely developed the turn for dreaming that such children always possess. The sympathy and love that God provides for every child that is born into the world, withdrawn, they turn "not sullen, nor in scorn," but from an instinct He has himself implanted, inward, for their sympathy and counsel. So it happened, that though Nelly and Agnes, and a dozen merry girls beside, were my sworn friends and very firmest allies, none of them knew anything of the keen wonder and almost painful longing with which I pictured the future to myself. They knew, of course, the simple facts, that as I had no father or mother, I was to go and live with my aunt, who had been in Europe until this summer and whom I had not seen since my mother died; that she had three daughters, one older, two younger than myself; that she had sent me some pretty things from Paris, and was, probably, very kind, and I should have a very nice time. They knew only these bare beams and framework of the gorgeous fabric I had reared upon them; they little knew the hours of wakefulness in which I wondered whether I should be happy or miserable in that new home; whether my aunt would love me as I already most ardently loved her; whether the new cousins were at all like Nelly and Agnes; and whether they were prepared to value the wealth of affection I had in reserve for them. But time would soon settle all this into certainty; and my aunt's last letter, containing all the final arrangements for my journey, I at present knew by heart. The only possible shade of uncertainty about my starting, lay in the chance of the gentleman who was to be my escort, being detained by business a day or two longer at C----, and not arriving to-night, as had been considered probable. Nelly built greatly upon this possibility, and as the twilight deepened, and the moaning wind and growing darkness pressed more and more upon us, we turned to that as our only chance of comfort. Nelly had said, for the twentieth time, "I am sure he will not come till to-morrow, it is too late for him now," when a sharp ring at the bell made us all start, and sent the blood swiftly enough through _my_ veins, and, I suppose, no less swiftly through my young companions'; for Nelly convulsively clasped me round the neck and burst into tears, while Agnes said, in a choking voice, "I'm certain of it!" And for three dreadful minutes of suspense we stood motionless, holding our breath, and watching for the first token of the approach of the messenger who should confirm or confute our forebodings. At last, steps echoed along the hall, and bearing a dim candle, which blinked nervously at every step, appeared the Biddy who officiated as waiter at St. Catharine's. She had a card in her hand, and our end of the corridor seemed her destination, and our party the party she was in search of. "Well?" said Agnes, making a distracted effort to break the silence, as Biddy groped stupidly and slowly toward us. "A gentleman," she said, "a gentleman to see you, miss," and she handed me the card. "I knew it," said Agnes, with a deep sigh, as, per favor of the blinking candle, the three heads, clustered over the card, made out the name, "Mr. Arthur Rutledge." "Oh, I am so frightened!" I said, sitting down on the lowest step of the stairs. "Girls, what shall I do?" Nelly shook her head; she did not wonder I was afraid; for five years I had encountered no gentlemen more alarming than the professors, and no strangers more intimidating than occasional new scholars; and knew no more how to conduct myself on this occasion, than if I had not received Miss Crowen's valuable instructions on deportment. I had been taught to swim, theoretically, on shore, and now was to be pushed suddenly out into deep water, to make the best use I could of my scientific knowledge. As was to be supposed, I found myself not much the better for it. "He's not a young gentleman though," said Agnes, "and I shouldn't mind it much if I were you." "Oh, of course he's not young, or Aunt Edith would not have had me go with him. He's as old as the hills, I know but that makes it so much the worse; and then, he was abroad with my aunt and cousins, and knows them all so well; and Aunt Edith calls him 'an accomplished gentleman of high standing;' and oh! I am sure I shall blush and act like a fool, and disgrace myself; and aunt is so particular." Nelly condoled, Agnes counselled, and I stood shivering in an agony of apprehension and dismay, when the heavy tread of Miss Crowen on the stairs, gave an impetus to my faltering steps, and sent me parlor-wards with emphasis. "If you don't hurry," whispered Agnes. "Miss Crowen will drag you in, and make one of her horrible speeches about educational advantages and mental culture, and put you through a course of mathematical problems, and make you show off on the piano, if not sing." The wily Agnes had touched the right chord. Threatened with this new horror, I grew reckless, and without a moment more of hesitation, bolted into the parlor, and stood confronting the object of my terror, before I had had time in the least to prepare my line of conduct. I stood for a moment with burning cheeks and downcast eyes, unable to articulate a word, and saw nothing, heard nothing, till I found myself seated on the sofa, and being talked to in a kind manner by the dreaded stranger, who sat beside me. If my "Yes sir," and "No sir," came in in the right places, I can claim no sort of credit for it; for neither then nor now, had or have I the faintest apprehension of anything he said. By and by, however, under the influence of that steady unmoved voice, my alarm began to subside, and my scared senses, after fluttering hopelessly about, like a dislodged brood of swallows, began at last to collect themselves again, and resume their proper functions. By degrees I began to comprehend what he was talking about, and in process of time, commanded my voice sufficiently to answer him audibly, and before the interview was over, had the courage to raise my eyes, and satisfy myself as to the personal appearance of this my destined protector in the three days' journey we had in prospect. And the result of this investigation was, the instant establishment, upon a firm basis, of ease and confidence. For few men or women, much less children or girls, ever looked into Mr. Rutledge's face, without feeling that they saw their master, but withal so firm and kind a master, that all thought of resistance to his will, or stubborn maintenance of their own, together with all foolish vanity and consciousness, vanished at once and forever, or returned but seldom, and was soon conquered. If I had cherished any romantic hope that this "accomplished gentleman" might prove anything out of which I could make that dearest dream of schoolgirl's heart, a lover, I likewise relinquished that most speedily, for nothing in the person before me, gave encouragement to such an idea. Rather below than above the medium size, and of a firm, well-proportioned figure, Mr. Rutledge gave one, from his commanding and decided carriage, the impression of a much larger man. His dark hair was slightly dashed with grey, his eyes were keen and cold, the lines of care and thought about his brow were deep and strong. If his face could be said to have an attraction, it lay in the rare smile that sometimes changed the sternness of his mouth into winning sweetness and grace. But this was so rare that it could hardly be called a characteristic of his habitually cold stern face. That it wore it that evening however, I knew then as now, was because I was a child, and a miserable, frightened one besides. I never doubted that he knew how I felt, and read me thoroughly. The interview was, according to the prim little clock on the mantelpiece, by no means a long one; and after introducing (with but indifferent grace) Miss Crowen, who entered the room with elephantine tread, to my visitor, he took leave, having arranged to come for me the next morning at six. That last evening, with its half-strange, excited novelty of leave-taking, and last messages and last thoughts, is still distinct in my memory; and the start with which I answered Biddy's call in the darkness of the November morning, the dressing with cold hurried hands that were not half equal to the task, the wild way in which everything came dancing through my mind, as I tried to say my prayers, the utter inability to taste a mouthful of the breakfast Miss Crowen herself had superintended, the thrill with which I heard the carriage drive up to the door, are as vivid as recollections can well be. And I am in no danger, either of forgetting the moment, when, with half a dozen of my schoolfellows who had been allowed to see me off, I descended the steps toward the carriage, the door of which Mr. Rutledge was holding open. The kind good bye of Miss Crowen, the warm embraces of the girls, Nelly's tears, Agnes' wistful look, are memories I cannot part with if I would. The carriage door shut to with a snap, the horses started forward at a brisk pace, and we were off, and I had left school and childhood behind me forever. I did not cry at all, though I felt desperately like it; but the consciousness that Mr. Rutledge looked sharply at me to see how I took it, made me struggle harder to keep back my tears, and seem womanly and composed. In this I succeeded beyond my hopes, and before half an hour had passed, the bracing air of the fine autumn morning, the rapid pace at which we rolled along, and the new delight to my cloistered eyes, of farms, and villages, woods rich in the many colors of the fall, and meadows and uplands basking in its sunshine, made me feel as if I had been months away from school, and as if the melancholy of last night were some strange distant dream. Seventeen never dreamed more fantastic dreams than I did that morning, however, as I leaned back in the carriage and idly watched the gay landscape past which we were hurrying. It was quite a relief to me that my companion, after attending to my comfort in every necessary way, settled himself in his corner of the carriage, and taking a book from his valise, devoted himself to its perusal, and left me to my own thoughts the entire morning. He did not put it up till we reached the town where we were to dine and wait for the cars. Dinner did not prove a very animated meal; my companion, after asking me about school, and whether I felt sorry to leave it, and a few more questions of the same nature (such as people always put to school-girls, and by which they unconsciously give great offence), seemed to consider his conversational duty performed, and fell into a state of abstraction, which made his face look harder and colder than ever; and as I stealthily regarded him from under my eyelashes, some of last night's alarm threatened to return. But I tried to overcome it, and endeavored to reassure myself by remembering how kind he was when I was so much embarrassed, and how well he had helped me through the interview that he might have made so terrible; and that he did not talk to me--why, certainly it was not strange that a gentleman of his age should not have much in common with a girl of mine. By and by the cars came tearing through the town with a whoop and a shriek, that seemed to excite everybody wonderfully, considering the frequency of the occurrence. Passengers, porters, newsboys, in one mad crowd, rushed toward the depot, each emulating in his own proper person, the noble rage of the snorting, impatient monster, upon whose energy we were all depending. The only individual entirely unexcited, was my escort, who never for a moment lost the appearance of sang froid and indifference that an earthquake would not have startled him out of, I was convinced. Though we did not hurry, we were, before many of our fellow-voyagers, in possession of the best seats, and most commodiously, because most deliberately, settled for the journey. Mr. Rutledge was emphatically a good traveller, carrying the clear-sighted precision and deliberation of his mind into all the details of travel, and thereby securing himself from the petty annoyances that people often think unworthy of attention, but which do more than they suspect, toward marring pleasure and destroying comfort. I aptly followed his manner, and was a marvel of unconcerned deliberation in the matter of securing my seat and arranging my shawls, books and bags; which drew from him the remark, with an approving glance, that he perceived I was used to travelling. That observation, either from the fact of its being so absurdly incorrect in its premises, or from the stronger fact of its being the only one addressed to me until 7 P.M., when we stopped at F---- for purposes of refreshment, impressed itself very much upon my mind. After the wretched meal, called by compliment tea, which we were allowed twenty minutes to partake of, had been dispatched, and we were again settled in the cars in which we were to travel all night, commenced the trials of the journey--to me, at least, for I was an entire novice, not having been twenty miles away from St. Catharine's since I was first taken there, and having but a dim recollection of that, my first and last journey till the present time. Being also subject to the most unbearably severe headaches upon any unusual excitement, it is not very wonderful that on this occasion I was attacked with one, and before night had actually set in, was as completely miserable, as in the morning I had been completely happy. Excitement and weariness began to tell most painfully upon me. Not a bone but ached, not a nerve in my whole body but throbbed and quivered. It was as impossible to think quietly as to sit quietly. Homesickness, for the home I had been longing to get away from for five years--all the miserable things I had ever suffered or dreaded--all the fancied and real trials of my life, then and there beset my aching head, and made sleep or composure an impossibility. If there had been a soul to speak to, a human voice to say a single word of sympathy, however commonplace, I thought it would have made the night endurable. But among the sleepy, senseless crowd around, the only one I had a right to expect attention from, or to whom I was entitled to address a word, was as regardless of my existence as any of the rest. Mr. Rutledge occupied the seat before me, and the imperfect light of the lamp that rattled and flickered above us, showed me more plainly than any other object, his fixed, unsympathizing face, as he leaned against the window of the car, his lips compressed and his brow knit. He did not sleep any more than I did, nor do I think he was a whit more comfortable; but he had his impatience under better control, and never moved a muscle or uttered a sound for hours together. It was the most torturing thing to watch him, so entirely unmoved by the discomforts that were, I was firmly convinced, driving me mad; and in my jaundiced eyes, his profile took a thousand wizard shapes. It would have been a relief if he had moved in ever so slight a degree to one side or the other; but a painted face upon a painted window could not have been more rigid than the one before me. I was dying of thirst, was smothering for want of air, ached in every limb, and there were hours yet to morning! The monotonous motion of the cars, and their accompanying noises, harsh and shrill, made to my perfectly unaccustomed ear a frightful combination of discord; and this all coming upon my excited and sensitive nerves, worked me up into a state of wretchedness that naturally resulted in that climax of woes feminine, a fit of crying. I could no more have helped it than the wind could have helped blowing, and never having learned to control myself, could not suppress the indulgence of an emotion which, an hour afterward, I remembered with acute mortification. I tried to smother my sobs, but they reached at last the ear of my silent companion, who started, and turning toward me, asked, with a shade of impatience in his tone, what was the matter? Was I ill? That question, so put, in the indescribable tone that shows to a sensitive ear a want of sympathy the most galling, was the best cure that could have been devised for my tears. They were done, altogether; but in their place, the angry blood flew to my face, and I inly vowed, in accordance with school-girl notions of right, never to forget or forgive the insult. Angrily averting my head, I declined any assistance or attention whatever, and pride having thus stepped in to the rescue, I was able to maintain as rigid a demeanor as Mr. Rutledge himself. For a moment he looked at me with an expression that I could not quite make out, then with the slightest possible shrug of the shoulders, turned away, and seating himself again in the corner, resumed his former attitude. That was enough; all my spirit was roused; I had always been good at hating, but the present crisis brought out powers I had never been aware of before; and there was a great deal in the fact of my having made a fool of myself in the presence of Mr. Rutledge, to help me along in detesting him; and not being in a particularly reasonable or well-governed frame of mind, the aversion I had conceived increased with alarming rapidity. It was wonderful how powerful my resentment was to keep my weariness and impatience in check. I did not move an inch nor utter a single word; I would have borne the rack and torture rather than exhibit, after that shrug, another shade of emotion. When at last, morning being broadly awake, we were released from our prison for an hour to breakfast and rest at a way-station that seemed most utterly repugnant to those two ideas, Mr. Rutledge asked me if I would not prefer, on account of my fatigue, waiting there till the next train, which would arrive at noon? I answered, "_Decidedly_ not," with so much emphasis, that he only bowed and turned away; with what opinion of my temper it is not pleasant to think. Before the day was over, he had, I presume, concluded, that he had taken under his charge about as willful and disagreeable a young miss as ever tried the patience of parent or protector. The day wore on, much after the manner of yesterday. That night at twelve, we expected to arrive at C---- where we were to rest till morning; and thence taking the boat, were to reach our journey's end about noon. It was toward evening of that weary day; I was sitting listlessly looking out upon the dreary suburbs of the town which we seemed approaching, and thinking, by way of diverting myself, of Nelly and Agnes and school, and what they were doing now, and whether they missed me; when there came a sudden jar, then a horrid crash, a shriek that rent the air, a blow upon my head that made a hideous glare of light, then darkness absolute, and I knew no more. CHAPTER II. "The brightest rainbows ever play Above the fountains of our tears." MACKAY. How long after it was that consciousness returned, I cannot tell; if indeed that bewildered dizzy realization of things present that gradually forced itself upon me, can be called consciousness. I was lying on the ground, and looked, upon opening my eyes, up at the clear evening sky. It could not have been long after sunset, and all the scene around me, when at last I tried to comprehend it, was distinct enough. Some distance from where I lay, there was a bridge and an embankment, perhaps thirty feet high. Between that and me, a horrid mass loomed up against the sky, black and shapeless, one car piled above another in an awful wreck. Dark figures lay around me on the ground, some writhing in agony, others motionless and rigid; groans and cries the most appalling smote my ear. But my ear and all my senses were so stunned and bewildered, that to see and hear was not to feel alarm or awe or pity, only dull stupor and discomfort. I did not feel the least desire to move or speak, the least solicitude about my fate. Half unconsciously I lay watching the fading light in the sky, and the dark figures that soon were swarming around, bending over and raising up the wounded, and thrusting lanterns into the faces of such as lay stiff and still and did not heed their ejaculations. At last two men came up to where I lay, and one, from the exclamation of recognition he made as they bent over me, I knew to be Mr. Rutledge. The effect of the lantern glaring so suddenly in my face, was to make me start up, with some broken exclamation; but the words had hardly left my lips, when an acute pain and then a giddy blindness rushed over me, and I sunk back, and with a horrible sensation of falling down, down, to unfathomable darkness, I was again insensible. I suppose I must have remained in that state all night, for it was daylight when I was again sufficiently conscious to know what was going on around me. Mr. Rutledge was sitting by me and was saying to the physician, whose entrance had, I think, first aroused me, that he considered me doing very well, the fever was evidently abating, and that he thought the doctor would agree with him that I might soon be moved to more comfortable quarters. "If any such can be found," the doctor answered; "but every house in the town, as well as both the hotels, are crowded with the sufferers, and I think your chance of comfort is as good here as it will be anywhere else; for, sir, it is a wretched little town at the best. I wish we could boast better accommodations for strangers." "Then doctor," said Mr. Rutledge, "I am sure you will consent to what I have been thinking of as the most feasible plan. You know it is but eight miles to Norbury, and my country place is only three miles beyond. The house, to be sure, is closed for the winter; I little expected to be visiting it so soon. But there are several servants in it, and it can quickly be made comfortable, and Mrs. Roberts, my housekeeper, is an excellent nurse. Don't you agree with me that any or all of these reasons are sufficient to make it wise to try to get there as soon as possible? For it is not going to be any joke to stay in this dingy place for a fortnight, and that child will not be fit to travel any sooner; and this arm of mine does not feel much like bearing the motion of those accursed cars again very soon." Mr. Rutledge's arm was bound up, and an occasional expression of pain crossed his face, though that was the only time he alluded to it. The doctor made an unequivocal opposition to Mr. Rutledge's proposition, and raised innumerable objections to it, all of which he quietly put aside and overruled. It was easy to see who would carry the day; but the doctor did not give over for a long while. When at length he had been unwillingly brought to say that it _might_ do no harm to be moved in the course of the morning to Rutledge, he started another unanswerable objection--a suitable vehicle could not be obtained in the town for love or money, he declared. "I will manage that," said Mr. Rutledge, and left the room. The doctor shook his head as the door closed, and said, partly to himself, and partly to the woman who seemed to be officiating as nurse: "He goes at his own risk; it may do or it may not." "He's a gentleman what's used to doing as he wants to, I guess," remarked the woman, "and don't think any too much of other people's opinions." "You are very correct," said the doctor, with importance. "A little learning is a dangerous thing, and Mr. Rutledge knows just enough of medicine to be confident of his own judgment. I only hope his imprudence may not be visited upon this poor child. So young!" he continued, shaking his head. The woman shook hers, and looked at him with reverence, while he went on to describe my case at great length, and in such alarmingly long words, that I was in danger of being frightened back into a high fever, had not the return of Mr. Rutledge saved me from any further display of Dr. Sartain's scientific knowledge. Mr. Rutledge saw in a moment the state of the case, for he looked at me attentively as he came in, and I heard him mutter in a low tone as he felt my pulse, "This won't do." Then aloud, he told the doctor that the carriage he had been fortunate enough to engage would be at the door in about an hour and a half, and that he would not detain him any longer at present, but would recommend his taking a little rest, for he should be obliged to ask him to accompany his patient during the drive; it would be safer, he thought, and as he could return in the carriage, it would involve no great loss of time; though he well knew Dr. Sartain could hardly spare a moment from the demands of his extensive practice, etc. The doctor, somewhat mollified, consented and retired. Mr. Rutledge then sent the woman off, and telling me, cheerfully and kindly, that I was doing very nicely, and that he thought a little sleep would strengthen me for the journey, darkened the windows, and throwing himself into an easy-chair, seemed inclined to set me the example. The lounge or settee on which I was placed, had been made as comfortable as the circumstances would permit, but still was painfully far from easy; and I tossed about, excited and restless, for some time. But, gradually reassured by Mr. Rutledge's quiet composure and cheerfulness, and soothed by the stillness of the room, I fell into a very refreshing sleep. It was about noon when we started, the doctor being in the carriage with me, Mr. Rutledge, I am sorry to remember, going in a much less comfortable vehicle. It did not trouble me seriously at the time, however. Dr. Sartain's opinion to the contrary notwithstanding, I was by no means injured by the ride, and when we drove under the gateway that conveyed to my listless intellect the knowledge that we had reached Rutledge, besides a little increased languor and weariness, I felt no worse than when we left the town. Mr. Rutledge, who was in advance, reached the house first, and in a moment the excitement that our arrival had produced became apparent; two or three maids rushed out from a side-door as Mr. Rutledge ascended the steps, and, overcome with alarm at the sight of two carriages, and their master with his arm in a sling, rushed back again wringing their hands, and displaying many symptoms of consternation. Mr. Rutledge in the mean time had entered the house, and soon appeared at the door accompanied by a tall, elderly woman, in a black bombazine dress, and a lace cap with white ribbons, to whom he was explaining, in a concise and forcible manner, the state of affairs, and what was to be done. They came down to the carriage, and Mr. Rutledge introduced "Mrs. Roberts" to the doctor and to me, and then assisting me to alight, we ascended the broad stone steps to the piazza, and thence into a wide hall. Mr. Rutledge told the housekeeper that it would, he thought, be best for me to go immediately up to her room, where I could lie on the sofa till my apartment could be made ready. Accordingly I went upstairs, and took possession of Mrs. Roberts' sofa and Mrs. Roberts' room, both sombre and stiff enough, but infinitely more easy and prepossessing than the lady herself. I cannot imagine that at that very early stage of our acquaintance, she could have entertained any personal resentment toward me, and yet I was entirely possessed of that belief from the first moment that I saw her. But I have since discovered that she invariably impressed all strangers with a similar conviction, and from that, and from subsequent knowledge of her character, I have concluded that it was merely "a way she had," and was by no means to be regarded as an expression of her sentiments toward any one. Unhappily, I did not have this light upon her, and soon began to feel myself in the hands of a grim tyrant, whose only motive in exertions made ostensibly for my benefit, was to get possession of me, soul and body, and render, me, if possible, more wretched than she found me. I lay quietly on the sofa where she had placed me, with no ungentle hand to be sure, but without the slightest relaxing of her blue lips, or the smallest indication of pity in her uncompromising eyes; and watched her as she pursued her plan of operations, steadily and energetically. She certainly knew what she was about, and for precision and promptness must have been a treasure in Mr. Rutledge's eyes. There was an incredible amount of work accomplished in that house within the next hour; rooms were opened, fires were lighted, beds were aired; sounds of sweeping and dusting and beating of mattresses, filling of pitchers, and crackling of fires, reached my indolent ears. Mrs. Roberts, standing before a huge open wardrobe, dealt out sheets, pillow-cases, towels, table-cloths and napkins to the maids, who bustled about with distressing activity, not unfrequently goaded on by a few sharp words from their mistress, who ruled them, I could see, with a rod of iron. The threat, however, that stirred up their flagging energies most effectually, seemed to be, the wrath of Mr. Rutledge. I began to feel myself drawn sympathizingly toward the maids, and could not help wondering whether they were as much afraid of the master, and as much averse to the mistress of the house as I was, and whether they wished themselves away as much; and if they did, why they didn't go; or whether, indeed, people ever got away who once came in it. The gloom of the great hall, with its broad, stone staircase, on which the servants' steps echoed drearily, and the dark glimpses of shut-up rooms that I had caught on my way up, seemed to favor this latter idea--I would write for my aunt to come for me immediately; I would ask the doctor to take me back with him. I should die if they left me in this gloomy place. Perhaps I might die here--who could tell? The doctor had said I was very ill. Tears came but too easily in those foolish days, and burying my throbbing temples in the pillow, I cried as if my heart would break, or as if it had indeed broken. My emotion was none the lighter because it was imaginary, nor none the easier to bear because it was absurd. Children's troubles and terrors are only less severe than those of maturer minds, as they are shorter lived; while they last they are, if possible, more violent and less bearable. And at that time I was, to all intents and purposes, a child, and a sick, nervous, excited one besides. By and by Mrs. Roberts came up to where I lay motionless with my face hidden in the pillows, and, leaning over me, said in her chilling tones, "Are you comfortable? Will you have anything?" I did not move. She listened for a moment, then going to the door said to some one outside: "She's asleep, sir, and doing well. You had better take some rest yourself." The door closed, and I suppressed my sobs to listen. In a few minutes Mrs. Roberts came again to look at me, then noiselessly left the room. I could endure it no longer, and throwing back the blankets, raised myself and sat upright. I cried for a long while; every minute the prison feeling seemed to grow stronger, till at last it drove me to that climax of desperation which, in actual prisoners, results in knocking down turnkeys, and (according to the newspapers) doing many frantic and atrocious acts, to reach "the blessed sun and air," from which they have been "banned and barred." I had reached that climax, I say; I had dried my tears, and sat still, with clenched hands, some wild plan of escape arranging itself in my brain, when the door suddenly opened, and Mrs. Roberts reappeared. "Oh, you're awake, are you? I'll call the doctor; he's got through setting Mr. Rutledge's arm, and was just going." I hurriedly pushed the hair from my flushed face, and tried to look composed as the doctor entered with Mrs. Roberts, and followed soon by Mr. Rutledge, who came, he said, to get the doctor's directions, and to see if Mrs. Roberts was doing everything for me that I required. The doctor sat down by me, and taking hold of my wrist, asked me if I felt better for my sleep. Mr. Rutledge, looking at me, said, "Not much sleep, I am afraid. How is it?" I pressed my lips very tight together to keep from crying, and shook my head. Mrs. Roberts, who did not probably notice the gesture, said, "Oh, yes, she's slept nicely for three-quarters of an hour." Then she and the doctor talked about me as if I were in the next room, and no way interested in the affair. After many directions given and received, and many injunctions and much emphasis, the doctor rose to go, saying that he should not be able to come again until the day after to-morrow (unless, of course, I should be taken with any unexpected symptoms); in the mean time he hoped he left me in safe hands (with a look direct at Mrs. Roberts). Mr. Rutledge smothered a smile, accompanied him to the door, and parted from him very courteously, then returned to me. He hoped, he said, that I did not mind trusting myself to him during the doctor's absence, and Mrs. Roberts would, he knew, take as good care of me as the doctor himself could. He then went on to say that he had telegraphed my aunt last evening to prevent her feeling any alarm on hearing of the accident, and that he had written to her more fully by mail to-day, telling her of my improvement, and assuring her that it would not be necessary for her to come on, as I could have every care here. "In two or three weeks," he continued, "I trust you will be perfectly well and entirely fit to travel." Two or three weeks! The thought was too dreadful and bursting into tears, I exclaimed: "I am well enough to go now! I had rather go home with the doctor!" Mr. Rutledge was silent for a moment, then sitting down beside me, in the doctor's vacated seat, said, as if he were speaking to a very little child: "You are not well enough to start now; it might do you a great deal of harm. Possibly you may be able to go much sooner than the doctor thinks; only be patient a day or two, and depend upon it, I will let you go the very minute you can bear it." I shook my head and sobbed convulsively. "My dear little girl," he said, "you are too nervous now to be reasonable, but you must try and be quiet and not cry, for that is the very worst thing for you, and will keep you here longer than anything else. Your head aches, doesn't it?" "Yes, dreadfully," I sobbed. "Well, the more you cry, the more it will ache, and the more it aches, the more fever you will have, and that is just what you must get rid of before you can be fit to start for home. You will feel very differently, I assure you, to-morrow morning, after you have had a good night's sleep." "I can't sleep!" I exclaimed. "Oh yes, you can! The doctor has left you some powders that will make that all right, and I will give you one now." He mixed it in a glass that Mrs. Roberts had brought for the purpose, and I drank it, then followed his advice and lay my hot and throbbing head on the pillow. He sat down again, and continued, speaking soothingly, and in a manly, kind voice, still as if I were about eight years old. "Your room will be ready in a few moments, and I think you will be more comfortable there than in this old-fashioned retreat of Mrs. Roberts'. Hair-cloth and mahogany are rather dismal for sensitive nerves, it must be acknowledged," glancing with a smile around the apartment. "The room you are to have is on the other side of the hall, and looks out on the park, and is quite cheerful and pleasant. And if you do not like to be alone, Mrs. Roberts shall come and sleep on the sofa by you." The expression of my face was probably unmistakable; much as I dreaded solitude, I dreaded Mrs. Roberts more, and was immensely relieved when my companion added, "Perhaps, though, on the whole, Kitty had better come and wait on you. Kitty is one of the maids, and is very pleasant, and I think you will like her. I will send her to you now. She will give you your medicine, and sit by you for company. You must send her to me if there is anything more I can do for you to night. I hope the headache will all be gone by to-morrow morning." And with a few more kind words the master left me, and the maid soon appeared, whose bright face and cheerful care helped along very considerably the cure that was already begun. It was a pleasure to be waited on by Kitty; it was a pleasure to hear her clear young voice and to be served by her strong young arms. She must, I think, have had strict orders not to leave me; for after everything in the way of arranging the pillows and smoothing the blankets, and adjusting everything in the neighborhood of the sofa, had been accomplished, she still lingered beside me, asking if I was comfortable, if she shouldn't get me a glass of water, if I wouldn't like the curtains drawn back a little, etc. Mrs. Roberts, who had returned, was sitting by the window, a huge basket of work beside her, over which she was straining her eyes, economical of every ray of the rapidly fading daylight. She was too utilitarian in her turn of mind to submit quietly to the sight of Kitty's idleness, and very soon suggested to her that she had better go downstairs to her work. Kitty said, "Yes ma'am," but didn't go. Again Mrs. Roberts suggested, and again Kitty cleverly evaded. The third time, the mistress laid down her work, and any one less stout-hearted than the young person before her would have trembled at the sharp tone in which she repeated her order. If it had been addressed to me, I am sure I should have submitted in trepidation; as it was, I trembled for Kitty, who, however, was nothing daunted, and turning round, said, in a tone just one remove from pert: "Mr. Rutledge, ma'am, sent me up, and told me to stay with the young lady, and to wait on her; and, also, he says that's to be my duty while she's here, ma'am." A genuine thundercloud lowered on Mrs. Roberts' face, but a portentous "Umph" was all the rejoinder she made to this decisive speech. Kitty reassured me with a little nod, and I quite rejoiced in our apparent victory. Before long, a servant knocked at the door, and announced that my room was ready. Then succeeded a pleasant bustle and excitement incident to my removal to it. Kitty insisted upon considering me a perfectly helpless invalid, and would have carried me, if I had not remonstrated, and Mrs. Roberts had not sneered at the idea. As it was, she wrapped me up so that I could hardly move, and supporting me with her arm, preceded by Mrs. Roberts, we crossed the hall, and stopped at the door of the apartment assigned to me. "Oh, what a pretty room!" I exclaimed, as we entered it. Kitty was charmed that I liked it, and proceeded with great satisfaction to do the honors. Wheeling toward me an easy-chair, and settling me in it before the bright fire that blazed on the hearth, she said with animation: "Isn't it a pretty room, miss? I've always said, that though the others were bigger and finer, there wasn't one that had such a sweet pretty look about it as the blue room had. It's just fit for a young lady like you." Kitty was not wrong about its being a pretty room; I never saw a prettier myself. It was not large, but well-proportioned and airy. Opposite the door there was a bay window, with white curtains trimmed with blue, and the same at the other two windows. The bed at the end of the room stood in a recess, curtained in the same manner. The walls were papered with a delicate blue paper, the wood-work about the room was oak, and all the furniture was oak and light blue. The carpet, which was in itself a study, was an arabesque pattern of oak upon a light-blue ground. The slender vases on the mantel, the pictures in their carved oak frames, had an inexpressible charm for eyes so long accustomed to the bare walls and wooden presses of a boarding school dormitory. And even to a maturer taste, I think it would have been pleasing; for I do not remember ever to have seen a room more entirely in keeping, and in which there was less out of place and inharmonious. Indeed, this impression was so strong, that I involuntarily begged Kitty to put away my dark plaid shawl, the sight of which, upon the delicate blue sofa, annoyed me exceedingly; and I thought with satisfaction of a certain blue morning dress in my trunk, that I could put on to-morrow, by way of being in keeping with the room. And the white lava pin and earrings, Agnes' parting gift, which I had never worn yet, and admired beyond expression, would come in play exactly. While Kitty made herself delightfully busy in unpacking my trunk, which stood in the little dressing-room at the right, and bestowing my modest wardrobe in the drawers and closets thereof, I lay nestling in the soft depths of that marvellous Sleepy Hollow of a chair, that holding me lovingly in its capacious arms, seemed to perform every office of a good old nurse, even to the singing of lullabies. Though that kind attention, I think, really emanated from the glowing, merry fire, which sung, crackled, and blazed most hospitably at my feet. The headache that an hour ago had seemed so insupportable, had now subsided to a dull throbbing that was comparatively ease and comfort; and to lie there, and look at the fire, and think about nothing, and speak to nobody, and be sure that Kitty was near me, and Mrs. Roberts and "the master" very far away, was all I asked or desired. This negative sort of bliss found a temporary interruption in the necessary departure of Kitty to the kitchen, to procure my tea and bring up candles. I felt rather babyishly about it, and nothing but shame kept me from telling Kitty that I had rather do without my tea, and go to bed by firelight, than have her leave me. She did not stay away very long, however, and the nice cup of tea and crisp thin slice of toast, that she brought back with her, quite compensated me for the self-denial I had had to exercise in letting her go. These edibles, Kitty, with all the pomp and circumstance of war, arranged upon the little table beside me, placing the tall wax candles in the centre, and distributing the diminutive pieces of the dainty little tête-à-tête set in the most advantageous manner. The tea tasted very nicely out of the thin china cup, that felt like a play-thing when I lifted it, accustomed as I was to the heavy bluish-white crockery of boarding-school, and though I lacked the vigorous appetite, that had made the primitive meals of that establishment enjoyable, still, the delicate food before me had a decided relish. Kitty very much enjoyed my appreciation of it, and was very sorry she could not go down and bring me another slice of toast, but Mr. Rutledge had said I must not have any more. "I couldn't eat any more, thank you," I said, rather haughtily, though Mr. Rutledge, and not the kind Kitty, inspired the hauteur. Mrs. Roberts made us a call soon after this, and said it was high time I went to bed, and told Kitty sharply, she knew it was her work, keeping me up so long, and hurried up the preparations for retiring, with energy. Kitty looked saucy, but did not dare to rebel, and only indulged in defiance after the door was closed behind the intruder. She again returned, however, on a final tour of inspection, after I was comfortably arranged in the fair white delicious bed, that seemed to be a special partner of tired nature's sweet restorer, who was good for any amount on its demand. She "poked in every corner" as Kitty expressed it, and found a dozen things to object to in her arrangements, pulled open drawers, and set Kitty poutingly at work to settle them properly, and made my temples throb again with alarm lest she should find something objectionable among my clothes, some rent in my school frock, or an undarned stocking smuggled through the vigilant scrutiny of last week's wash. She sent Kitty for her mattress and blankets, and superintended the arrangement of them, though I could see she did not enter cordially into the plan; but as Mr. Rutledge had ordered that Kitty should sleep beside me, I was sure she would not dare to oppose it. At last there was no excuse for a longer tarry, and she withdrew; Kitty, with a triumphant gesture, slid the bolt upon her, and we "settled our brains for a long winter's nap." A nap not altogether uninterrupted on my part, by troubled dreams, and sudden starts, and foolish fears; but my waking was always met by Kitty's ready care and soothing sympathy; and toward morning quieted into a long refreshing sleep. CHAPTER III. "O Time! thou must untangle this, not I, 'Tis too hard a knot for me to untie." When I awoke, it was to the pleasant reality of morning and sunshine, that had found their way through the light curtains of my pleasant room, and made it pleasanter than ever. Kitty was at my side in an instant, and a brighter fresher face to greet one's waking vision could not be desired. She managed, by prompt and clever measures, to keep off Mrs. Roberts till I had had my breakfast, and risen and been dressed. It was matter of great astonishment to me to find myself so absurdly weak, my strength and spirits at school having passed into a proverb. This sudden illness had reduced me extremely, however, as I found whenever I attempted any exertion, and all Kitty's services were required. While she was dressing me, she chatted very confidentially, though always with a tone of deference that counterbalanced the liberty she took in talking at all. Our distaste for Mrs. Roberts was potent in putting us on as good terms as young lady and young lady's maid could well be, and there is a sort of freemasonry in youth that sets at defiance the restrictions of rank, and that drew us, the two youngest things in the stately old house, together, naturally and irresistibly. I call it an old house, because it impressed me at first as such. It was solid and dark, and excepting my room and one or two others on the same floor, had very little that was light and modern-looking about it. It had been built, Kitty said, in the time of Mr. Rutledge's father, and was called the finest house in the country. Loads of money, she informed me, he had spent upon it; workmen had been sent for, hundreds of miles, to do the carving and paint the walls, and no money and no labor was spared to make it a fine place, and indeed there was none like it anywhere around; and now to think of its being shut up like a prison half the year, and sometimes all the year; it was a shame, Kitty thought, upon her honor it was. I asked her why Mr. Rutledge did not live there? She did not know; she supposed it was lonesome; he never stayed home for over a couple of months, and then would be off, for no one knew how long. Sometimes he went to Europe, and was gone two or three years at a time. And such dull times as it was _then_ at Rutledge, if you please! Nobody but Mrs. Roberts, and the cook, and dairy-woman, besides the farm hands. Nothing to do but stand Mrs. Roberts' preaching from morning till night. She only wished she'd lived in the old times that her father talked about, when Rutledge was the gayest of the gay. (Her father, she explained, had been gardener there for thirty years, and had lived on the place from a boy.) Such fine doings! Ah! if Mr. Rutledge would only take it into his head to have such times now! It was when he was very young, and Mr. Richard and Miss Alice, and there was nothing but balls and picnics and pleasure-parties all the time, company staying in the house, and visitors from the neighborhood for miles around. Ah! it was mighty different now! "What has become of the others? Is Mr. Rutledge the only one left?" Mr. Rutledge, Kitty told me, was the youngest of the three. Mr. Richard died when he was just twenty-four--a month after his father--and so Mr. Rutledge came into the property when he was a mere lad. "But the daughter, Alice, what became of her?" "I don't know exactly," said Kitty, lowering her voice, and looking anxiously toward the door. "They never talk about her; something must have happened very strange, for there's always a mystery about Miss Alice. The old servants on the place will never say a word about her; and though I've teased father again and again, I never could get anything out of him." "But, Kitty," I exclaimed eagerly, my curiosity thoroughly excited, "what makes you think she isn't dead?" "Oh! that much I know, that she didn't die then, and that she didn't die at home in this house, and isn't buried there below in the churchyard by the others; and I know she was away when old Mr. Rutledge died; because once father said it was an awful thing, when he lay so ill, and out of his head, to hear him call upon her to come home. All that night before he died, he would call 'Alice! Alice!' till you could hear it all over the house. And father says," continued the girl, in a still lower tone, "that sometimes of wild dark nights, when he's coming past the house late from his work, he could swear for all the world that he hears the old man still calling 'Alice! Alice!' till it makes his blood freeze to listen to it. And then, when I say 'Where was she, father, all the time, and why didn't she come to him?' he always says, 'that's not for the like of you to hear about; it's none of your business, child, nor mine,' and sends me off about something else." "But, Kitty," I persisted, "is that all you know of her? Tell me all you've ever heard; was she pretty?" "Oh, so pretty! You can't think how white her skin was, and her eyes like violets, so large and blue, and curls all over her head--loose, shiny curls." "How do you know," I said quickly; "surely you never saw her, did you?" Kitty blushed and stammered, and said, "No, not exactly; but there was something she had seen she'd never told anybody about; she didn't know whether she ought to;" but the result was, she at last imparted to me the following: When Kitty was about twelve years old, it appeared, from her account, the demon of curiosity was stronger in her even than it was now, and her keen young eyes had detected long before that time, what had escaped many maturer observers, viz., that at the end of the upper hall there was a room, that was ignored in all descriptions of the house, and might well, indeed, have been overlooked. A huge wardrobe stood in the middle of the space between the corner room on the east, and the corner room on the west, of the hall; and none but a very inquiring mind like Kitty's would have investigated the exact dimensions of these rooms, whether they met and were separated but by a partition, or whether a distinct room, the width of the hall, and corresponding to Mr. Rutledge's dressing-room at the opposite end, existed between them. Kitty crept down on the lawn and looked up on the outside, and discovered a large window, the shutters of which were closed and dusty; and on exploring the corner rooms, they corroborated her suspicions--they did not extend across the hall. Behind that wardrobe, Kitty knew, then, existed a door; and night and day the insane desire to penetrate beyond it, haunted the child. At length, circumstances seemed to favor the fulfillment of her wishes. It was a beautiful, mild May day, and the untiring energy of Mrs. Roberts was enjoying a full swing in the pursuit of her favorite _divertissement_ of house-cleaning. Doors and windows were thrown open; all manner of scouring and scrubbing was going on in all parts of the house. Step-ladders and water-pails graced the hall; the odor of soap-suds and lime filled the air. Serene amid the confusion, Mrs. Roberts applied herself to the overlooking and rearranging the identical wardrobe in the hall, that had so long been the fascination and torment of little Kitty, who, it may well be supposed, was "on hand" during the operation. Demure and useful, she made herself very officious in assisting Mrs. Roberts in her labors, standing, for hours together, to be loaded with the heavy piles of rich old curtains from the shelves, faded long ago, and antiquated table-covers, heavy Marseilles coverlets, that must have made the sleepers of old time ache to turn over under; great packages folded up in linen, through the ends of which Kitty's eager eyes caught glimpses of satin and brocade, and the tarnished buttons of military clothes. Kitty never thought of her aching arms, or her tired little feet; she never took her eyes away, and never lost a movement of Mrs. Roberts, nor a sight of anything before her; and after dinner, following like a kitten at the housekeeper's heels, came back to the fascinating business of disinterring the faded glories of the past. By three o'clock, the shelves were all emptied and the drawers all taken out; and Mrs. Roberts was just beginning the important business of dusting and wiping them, and restoring their precious contents, when a man from the fields came posting up to the house in the greatest haste, with the intelligence that a pair of the farm-horses had run away, and done no end of damage to themselves and to the man who was driving them, who was now lying below the barn in a state of insensibility, and Mrs. Roberts' assistance was instantly required. It was not a case that admitted of a demur, and the housekeeper bustled off, leaving Kitty with orders to stay where she was, and take care of the things left about till she came back, and, taking the only woman who was upstairs with her, left Kitty in possession of the field. She did not mean to move the wardrobe, but it was so natural just to try how heavy it was, and if it would really stir! And to her surprise and guilty pleasure, the wardrobe, lightened of its weighty contents, yielded to her touch, and moved a little--a very little--way forward; but enough to show to her eager eyes, in the dark wood-work, a door, over which generations of painstaking spiders had spun their webs unchecked, and where the scourge of Mrs. Roberts' eye had failed, or feared to penetrate. Kitty, holding her breath for fear, turned the knob; it resisted; it was locked, of course, possibly on the outside, and the key might have been taken out. An expedient struck the child's fertile brain; and she darted across the hall, and, possessing herself of the key of the corresponding room, darted back again and applied it to the lock. It fitted, and turned in it; the knob yielded to her eager grasp, and, too near the completion of her wishes now to pause, she wound her lithe figure through the narrow aperture, and pushing open the door, stood within the mysterious room! For a moment, Kitty's heart beat quick; an awe crept over her; for a moment she longed to be out in the sunshine again. But her elastic spirits and indomitable curiosity soon triumphed over the transitory dread inspired by the darkness and solemnity of the deserted chamber, and the close, dead atmosphere, and the unearthly stillness; and, gaining courage every moment, she made her way, with what caution she might, toward the window, undid the fastening, and, pushing up a very little way the heavy sash, turned the blind, and let in a ray of God's blessed sunlight, dim and dull enough, though, through the dusty panes, into this strange room, deserted these many, many years, it would seem, both of God and man. Kitty was a bold child, little given to nervousness or timidity, or she would have shrunk in terror from the weird, fantastic shadows that the dim light showed about the room. But that was not Kitty's way; and, sitting down on a divan by the window, she rested her elbows on her knees and her chin upon her hands, in contemplative fashion, and proceeded to look about her. What a strange sight it must have been! the slow sunbeam creeping over the faded carpet, and lighting up the dust-covered furniture and the dusky walls. Kitty's glance first turned, naturally enough, to the bed, which, richly curtained and spacious, stood on the left of the door. The curtains were swept back and the bed was made, but it was apparent that some one had occupied it, lying on the outside; the pillows were displaced and crushed, and the coverlet was deranged. That, since the occupation of that _some one_, the room had never been arranged or touched, seemed evident, from the confusion and disorder that prevailed. The door of the wardrobe on the right was partly open, and a dress was hanging out from it. A shawl, faded beyond recognition, hung upon the chair near Kitty, and at her feet lay a slipper--such a slim, pretty little slipper! while on the toilette table, you could have sworn, a hasty hand had just dropped the stopper in that odor-bottle, and pushed back the glove-box that stood open under the glass. Pins rusted in the embroidered cushion; dust inch thick on the mirror and over all, told of a dreary space since any human face had been reflected there. Upon a little table by the window stood a work-box and some books, and in a slender vase, the ghosts of some flowers that fell to dust at Kitty's touch. But what most excited her wonder, was a picture, that, with its face to the wall, was placed on the floor near the door. It evidently did not belong to the furniture of the room, and had been put there hastily, and to be out of the way. Kitty surveyed it from her seat curiously, and at last crept up to it, and turned it around, then slipping down on the carpet before it, was soon lost in admiration of the lovely face it presented to her. The lustre of the dark-blue eyes, and the delicate outline of the oval face, from which large wavy curls of fair hair were pushed back with girlish freedom, stamped themselves indelibly upon Kitty's retentive memory. It must have been an odd sight; the eager child, in that dark, uncanny room, upon her hands and knees before the picture, watching it in utter fascination, forgetful of the passing moments, and of all save the sweet face so strangely banished from the light. But the heavy shutting of the hall door, and the sound of voices in the hall below, put a sudden period to these fancies, and brought her to her feet with a desperate start and a pang of genuine fear. This was a tangible terror, and as such, Kitty's common sense succumbed to it. With nervous haste, she restored the picture, flew across the room and drew down the window, and made the best of her way back toward the door. But in her haste, her feet became entangled in something, and tripping up, in an instant she lay at full length on the floor. She disengaged her feet from the impediment that had caused her fall; it was a long ribbon, and a locket was attached to it; hastily thrusting them into her bosom, she picked herself up, and sprang toward the door. Steps were already mounting the stairs; a voice she knew too well was already audible; the unused lock grated and creaked cruelly under the nervous hands that struggled with it; but, with the strength of terror, she mastered it at last--locked it, dropped the key in her pocket, slipped through the narrow space between the wall and the wardrobe, with an eager push restored the latter to its place, and before Mrs. Roberts reached the landing, stood, a pallid, trembling, but undetected culprit, among the piles of valuables she had been left to guard. The habitual darkness of that end of the hall, increased by the near approach of twilight, screened her white cheeks from the scrutiny of Mrs. Roberts' searching eyes, and the haste that lady was in to restore the wardrobe to its ancient and uninterrupted order, further favored her escape. But she fully paid the penalty of her crime--she acknowledged, in the dread she felt lest it should be discovered, and the unaccustomed alarm she endured, when on dark nights, her ruthless mistress sent her candleless to bed; and she, with suspended breath and strained ear, would creep past the mysterious chamber to her own little loft above, to lie whole hours awake and trembling. Her fertile imagination had supplied the wanting links in the chain of fact; and the fair-haired Alice, the banished daughter of the house, was her dream of beauty by day and her haunting terror by night. "But Kitty," I exclaimed, breathlessly, "does no one else know of the room? Does no one ever go in it?" "Oh yes! Mrs. Roberts must know of it, for she lived here long before the present Mr. Rutledge was master; she knows all the family secrets, I'll warrant. But neither she nor any one else ever troubles _that_ room, I'm pretty sure. I've watched it close enough, and the wardrobe never has been stirred since that day I did it, six years ago last spring. Hardly any one goes to that end of the hall; the corner rooms are shut up and not used, and Mr. Rutledge's own rooms, and Mrs. Roberts', and this one for visitors, being all on this side of the house, there's very little occasion for anybody to go near the others in the rear." "What was in the locket you picked up?" I asked. "It was a miniature, tied by a long narrow blue ribbon, and that night, when I got upstairs, I bolted the door and looked at it; it was the picture of a gentleman, young and so"---- CHAPTER IV. "The deeds we do, the words we say-- Into still air they seem to fleet: We count them ever past-- But they shall last-- In the dread judgment they And we shall meet!" LYRA INNOCENTIUM. But our antiquarian researches were brought to a sudden conclusion by the appearance of Mrs. Roberts at the door, whose cold eye seemed to say, she comprehended at a glance that we were in mischief, and no effort should be wanting on her part to thwart our further confidence. That much she _looked_, the following she said: "Mr. Rutledge desires to know how the young lady is, and whether she is ready to see him?" "She'll be ready in one minute," said Kitty, hurrying nervously the retarded business of arranging my hair. Mrs. Roberts stationed herself at the fire, and threefold increased Kitty's nervousness, and my trepidation, by the stony gaze she fixed upon us. At last, however, the operation was concluded, and Kitty helped me to the sofa, and regulated the light from the window, put away my dressing-gown, and gave the last touches to the room; while Mrs. Roberts looked on sardonically, and then told Kitty to go and call her master. I had hoped this order of things would have been reversed, and that Mrs. Roberts herself would have gone to summon my dreaded visitor, leaving me a moment's time to recover my composure, under the genial influence of Kitty's sturdy courage, which to do her justice, she had not long been disarmed of. As it was, the housekeeper's efforts at conversation were not of an enlivening character, her first remark being, "that Kitty was much of a chatter-box, and she should speak to the master to give her altogether downstairs work to do, where there would be nobody to be hindered or bothered by her tattle." I tried to remonstrate, but, for my life, could not say an audible word, and nervous and trembling to an absurd degree, I listened for the approaching footsteps in the hall. The door opened, and Mr. Rutledge entered. Walking up to me in his firm quick way, he said, extending his left hand: "Well, my young friend, and how's the headache?" I stammered something about its being better, while he sat down beside me, and with wonderful tact and patience, tried to amuse and draw me into conversation. Now it was an inexplicable thing to me at that time, that I, who had never known the first emotions of awe before, in presence even of the imposing dignitaries of St. Catharine's--I who had pulled the wool alike over the eyes of governesses and professors--I, who had enjoyed, if ever any did in that establishment, the privilege of doing as I pleased, by reason of the inability of anybody to prevent me--that I should, I say, be so utterly subdued and humble, before this quiet stranger, was an inexplicable thing to me. I had yet to learn, that those, clothed in a little brief authority, and holding temporary sway over young minds and wills, are not always and inevitably so far exalted, in intellect and in character, above those they are supposed to govern, as were to be wished, and as they sincerely desire to appear. Narrow-minded pedantry and injudicious ignorance often rush in, to responsibilities and duties that angels might well tremble to assume--the moulding for good or evil, the flexile souls of children during the most vital years of their lives. Be this as it may, I quailed for the first time before a superior, and not without a stubborn feeling of resistance, owned myself in the presence of one I feared. I suppose I must have looked very childish, with my hair brushed down simply and knotted low on my neck, and a tiny linen collar turned over my plain blue merino frock; the lava pin and earrings having been unavoidably omitted in the hasty completion of my toilette. These circumstances of dress, I comforted myself, might account in part for the manner in which Mr. Rutledge continued to treat me, and which was very galling to my pride, for being at the most sensitive period of adolescence, nothing could have been more humbling than to be regarded as childish and immature. Such considerations did not add to my ease of manner, or grace of deportment, and all Mr. Rutledge's well-selected topics of conversation fell to the ground for want of a sustaining power on my side. At last relinquishing the attempt, he turned to Mrs. Roberts, and gave her minute instructions in regard to my medicine and diet, felt my pulse, and pronounced me very much improved; but he judged it, he said, very much better for me to lie on the sofa pretty quietly all day. Perhaps by to-morrow, I might be well enough to come downstairs for a little while, he continued, looking attentively at me, to see, I suppose, how I bore the intelligence of my prolonged captivity. He did not see any expression of impatience in my face, however, firstly, because I did not feel any, and secondly, because, if I had, I would have concealed it to-day. He rose to go, first turning toward the bay window, where he stood for some minutes thoughtfully, attracted by the beauty of the landscape it overlooked. "After all," he said at length, addressing Mrs. Roberts more than me, and his own thoughts, perhaps, more than either, "the view of the lake is finer from this window than from any other in the house. The slope of the lawn is beautiful, and that opening in the pine grove on the left, through which you see up to the head of the lake, is very fine. Mrs. Roberts," abruptly, "do you remember when that opening was cut?" "Yes sir," said Mrs. Roberts (she was never known to have forgotten anything), "it was during Mrs. Rutledge, your mother's last illness; she sat a great deal in that window, and your father had it cut to suit her fancy. I remember the very morning that the workmen began it; she was so interested, and quite tired herself with watching them, and sending them orders." "Ah! I think I remember something of it. I must have been"---- "Just eight years old, sir," said Mrs. Roberts with precision. "She died the next spring, when Mr. Richard was in his sixteenth year; there was just four years between you and"---- "Yes, I know." A dark frown contracted his brow; a forbidding compression of the lips renewed the dread that had begun to lessen under his patient kindness. During the five minutes that he stood thus by the window, we were, I suppose, as entirely forgotten as one of us, at least, desired to be. The trivial Present fell back into insignificance and oblivion before the iron domination of some stern memory, that touched with ruthless hand, his tenderest affection, that humbled his pride, and baffled his indomitable will. This much I could see, in the restless light of his dark eye, as it wandered over the familiar scene; child as I was, I could not but see the suffering in his face. At last, with an effort, he threw off the tyrant memory, and abruptly turning, quitted the room. Something almost as human as a sigh escaped from Mrs. Roberts' blue lips, as his steps echoed across the hall, and his door closed heavily. With me, the day passed quietly and pleasantly enough; Mrs. Roberts took the precaution to leave Kitty alone with me as little as possible, always managing to come in, when Kitty had got nicely fixed with her sewing at the furthest window, and find some excuse to send her away for half an hour or so. But as Kitty had brought me some books from the library, and as I felt too lazy and indifferent to object to anything, I did not much mind her surveillance. The chicken soup that Kitty brought me for my dinner, was the very nicest ever administered to hungry convalescent; and after the meal was concluded, and the afternoon sun shut out, I made up for all deficiencies in last night's repose by a very satisfactory sleep; from which I awoke with a start, to find that I had slept "the all-golden afternoon" quite away, and that twilight was stealing over the quiet lake, and the rich autumn woods. I smoothed back the tumbled hair from my face, and leaning against the window, looked thoughtfully out. The sun had but just gone down, and left the horizon still glowing with his light, without a single cloud to break the unruffled calm of sky and lake. Not a breath of wind stirred the dead leaves that lay thick beneath the trees in the park--not a sound broke the stillness. How hushed and silent the dark house was! How much more to the past did it seem to belong, than to the living actual present. And turn my eyes or thoughts whichever way I might, they still reverted to some thing that would remind me of the strange story I had heard that morning, still brought before me the desolate room, where the dust of years lay on all traces of her, who, banished, or wronged, or fled, had darkened forever the home she left. With her, it seemed, had vanished the gaiety, the life of the house; following fast upon her absence had come death and desolation; and the sole survivor of this, her ancient race, grew stern and silent at the merest allusion to her. My young brain grew feverish and impatient at the baffling mystery, and refused to entertain any other thought or interest. A vague dread and superstitious awe crept over me as the twilight waxed dimmer and greyer, and the dying fire smouldered on the hearth, and the stillness remained unbroken. Where was everybody; or had I slept over a few years, and were they all dead? And was I the only living thing in the great house--another Princess in another Day-dream, only wakened without the kiss, and the prince gone off in a huff? I laughed aloud, but my laughter had a very hollow sound, and only made the succeeding silence more ghastly; it was very foolish, but I was exceedingly uncomfortable. Why didn't Kitty come? I could not find a bell. I searched in vain for matches; the fire was past service, and could not for its life, have raised flame enough to light a candle. Every minute the room grew darker and chillier, every minute the silence grew more and more oppressive. I began to think of what Kitty had said of the voice that still called "Alice" through the vacant halls; and then I wondered whether this were not the very room in which the father died; and then I tried not to listen or hear anything, and the next moment found myself with strained ear, watching for the lightest sound. At last I could endure it no longer, and groping my way to the door, opened it, and held my breath, as I listened for some sound to indicate that I was not the only thing that breathed and lived within the gloomy walls. But such sound was wanting; a more vacant, drearier silence reigned without than within the room; through the long hall and distant corridors, not a footfall, not a motion; the rustle of my own dress awoke the only echoes. I dared not look toward the end of the hall that I had learned so much to dread; but starting forward and leaning over the balusters I called "Kitty," in a voice that would fain have been stentorian, but was in actual fact a whisper. No answer, of course, and the faltering whisper seemed to float down the dreary vacancy with mocking lightness and unconcern. I called again, this time desperation overcoming the choking terror. Then there was a sound of some one moving, a door opened on the opposite side of the hall, a light appeared, and Mr. Rutledge's voice said, "What is it?" What was it, indeed; it would have been difficult to say just what it was, and so I found it. "Oh! it is you. I beg your pardon. Do you want Kitty?" I said yes, and that I had been asleep, and just waked up a little while since, and could not find any matches. My white cheeks told the rest. Mr. Rutledge explained that Kitty had been sent to the post-office, and had not returned yet; he was very sorry she had not been at hand to attend to me, and coming across the hall, brought a light to my door. Very much ashamed of my fears, I went in to get my candle. "Why," he said, looking in; "your fire is all out, it looks dreary enough; I am afraid you will take cold. You had better come down to the library and have tea with me. How will that do?" "It will do very well," I said decidedly; for as to staying up there all alone till Kitty came back, it was not to be thought of, and folding my shawl around me, I stepped out into the hall, and with great satisfaction, shut the door of my room, and followed Mr. Rutledge through the hall and down the stairs. I kept pretty close to him, as we descended into the vast chilly-looking lower hall, but the coldness of its marble pavement, and the darkness of its heavy panels, only made the library, as we entered it, doubly attractive. The fire that would have made any other room uncomfortable at that season of the year, only warmed pleasantly the wide and lofty apartment. As Kitty said, "those great windows let in no end of air, and it took a power of wood to make it fit to stay in." And a "power of wood" now lay, "a solid core of heat" upon the hearth, casting a warm glow over the book cases that lined the walls, and the huge windows with their crimson drapery. The room delighted me; there was such an air of comfort and elegance about it, and the warm fire and bright lamp took from it the look of old-fashioned grandeur that is so comfortless, but so universal, in houses that have remained unchanged for a generation or so. "What a delightful room!" I could not help exclaiming, as my eyes wandered eagerly over the long rows of books, that stood one above another, from floor to ceiling, in every variety of binding, from the dusky calf of a hundred or so years ago, to the elegant morocco and gilt of to-day. "Yes, it is quite a delightful room for any one who likes books," said Mr. Rutledge, seating himself by the fire; "do you like them?" "That's rather a general question, sir," I said, walking up to the case on the right side of the fireplace, where some more modern-looking volumes tempted my curiosity. "So it is," answered my companion, pushing his chair a little further from the fire, and leaning back, shading his eyes with his hand. "It _is_ rather general, I admit; but to reduce it to a more particular and answerable shape, are you fond of reading?" "Some sort of books I like to read, sir." "What is the sort you like?" "Why," I said, rather puzzled, "I like--why I can't tell you exactly--but I like books that amuse me, that are not dry and stupid." "There are so many different criterions of dryness and stupidity," said Mr. Rutledge with an amused smile, "that your answer, I must confess, doesn't give me much light; some people might consider as highly interesting, you know, what you and I might look upon as hopelessly dry and stupid." I thought, as Mr. Rutledge said, "you and I," that it was very polite in him to put it so, but that he probably knew as well as I, that we had very different tastes, and that my favorite books were as unknown and indifferent to him, as his literary proclivities were, in all probability, elevated above, and incomprehensible to me. "For instance," he said, "I like natural history. Now, a great many persons think it very dull. How is it with you?" "That's just a case in point," I answered, with an effort not to care what he thought of me, "I never could get interested in it at all." "I am not surprised; it is not very often attractive to those of your age and sex. Now, leaving off the 'natural,' perhaps you're fond of history?" I reflected a moment; but while "White's Universal," and "Esquisses Historiques" were so vividly fresh and hateful, how could I honestly say I liked history? Yet I knew there were some historical works that I had as soon read as novels, but I did not know how to explain it; so I said, "I don't like all history, by any means." "Neither do I," said Mr. Rutledge; "we agree on that point, and I am certain we shall on many others, if we can only get at them. Suppose you take any shelf, for instance, the lower one on your right, and let us see what we think of the contents. What's the first volume this way?" I stooped down and read off the name, "Hallam's Middle Ages." "Ah!" exclaimed my interlocutor, "we have stumbled upon history in earnest. How do you stand affected toward 'Hallam's Middle Ages'?" "I like it exceedingly, sir." I responded very concisely, very much afraid of being pressed to give my reasons, which would have involved me in utter dismay and confusion, for in common with most very young persons, I liked because I liked, and disliked upon the same discriminating principle. "What comes next?" asked Mr. Rutledge, to my great relief. "'Goldsmith's Animated Nature.'" "Ah! you don't like that. What follows?" "A long row of 'Buffon,' sir, and then 'Tytler's Universal History.' I haven't read 'Buffon,' and I think Tytler--well--very nice, but tiresome, you know." "Try the shelf above." "The first book, sir, is 'Irving's Goldsmith.'" "Did you ever read it?" I said Miss Crowen had given it to me to read, last vacation. "You found it tiresome?" "Tiresome! why, sir, I think it is the nicest book in the world. I can't help thinking how Goldsmith would love Mr. Irving, if he knew about it! Next, sir, comes a very pretty copy of 'Macaulay's Roman Lays,' and five volumes of his 'Essays.'" "Did Miss Crowen give you Macaulay to read?" "I took it from the library, and she did not make any objection." "And what do you think of him as a writer?" I did not need to look in his face to know how much diverted he was at the idea of extracting a criticism of the great historian from such a chit as I; and summoning all my courage to the aid of my pride, I answered steadily. "If one of my 'age and sex,' sir, can be considered to have an opinion, I should say, that though Mr. Macaulay is probably the most brilliant writer of the century, he is the one who has done the least good. I don't think any one who has the least faith, reverence, or loyalty, can read him except under protest." "Which means," said Mr. Rutledge, "that you and Mr. Macaulay are so unhappy as to differ on some points of politics and theology, _n'est ce pas?_" "I know very little about politics, and less about theology; I only know how I feel when he calls King Charles the First 'a bungling villain,' 'a bad man,' and says even prettier things about Lord Stafford; I know it vexes me when he elevates Cromwell 'into a man whose talents were equal to the highest duties of a soldier and a prince,' and never omits an opportunity of sneering, with a mixture of contempt and pity, at that slow old institution, the Church of England." "And you do not agree with him?" "Agree with him!" "What sentiments," exclaimed Mr. Rutledge, "what sentiments for a young republican! Do you mean to tell me that _you_ don't look upon the death-warrant of Charles as the 'Major Charta' of England? Do you mean to say that you don't regard it as the first step in that blessed march of liberty that is regenerating the world?" "A blessed march indeed!" I cried indignantly, "over the dead bodies of honor and obedience, faith and loyalty! A blessed march, to the tune of the Marseillaise and murder!" "But, my young friend, how do you make that view of the subject agree with your patriotism as an American, and your veneration for Washington? Were there no carcasses of deceased obedience and loyalty under his chariot-wheels?" "_Grâce à Dieu_!" I cried, eagerly, "it was Liberty, but Liberty with a different cap on, and marching under very different colors, that Washington fought for; no more the same deity that Cromwell and Robespierre acknowledged, than the idol of the Hindoo is the God we worship!" Mr. Rutledge shrugged his shoulders, and begged me to explain the difference to him. And with a vehement mixture of enthusiasm, ignorance and anger, I tried to explain my meaning to him, but, as was not difficult to foresee, made but little headway in my argument, every moment adding to my adversary's coolness and my own impatience. I altogether forgot my diffidence and alarm; I was too angry and excited to think who it was I was talking to; I only knew he was opposing and tripping me up, and saying the most hateful things in the coolest way, and exasperating me to the highest degree, and not being a bit exasperated with all my saucy replies; and it was not till I had exhausted all my combined wrath and logic, that I caught a lurking smile about his mouth, that flashed upon me the conviction that I was entirely the victim of his wit, and that he had just been arguing on the wrong side for the sake of argument and amusement. "After all," I exclaimed, "I believe you think just as I do, and have only been talking so, to draw me out!" "Why, mademoiselle! How can you suspect me of such duplicity?" he said, with his peculiar short laugh. And seizing a book, I sank down on the sofa to hide my burning cheeks behind its pages. How angry, frightened and mortified I felt, no words can tell, and every stealthy glance I obtained of my neighbor but added to my vexation. Wholly absorbed in his paper, he seemed to have forgotten all about me and my indignation; and having furnished him with half an hour's amusement, I was to be pushed aside to make way for a more serious train of thought, such as was now knitting his brow, and fixing his attention over some political debate or Congressional transaction. I might smooth my ruffled temper at my leisure; no danger of interruption or observation; I might solace myself with what consolation was to be found in the reflection, that whatever I had said savoring of exaggeration or absurdity, was by this time doubtless entirely forgotten by my companion. But it was a slim comfort, and could not displace the angry thought--what business had he to catechise me so; make me stand there, and tell him what books I had read, and then lead me on to say all manner of foolish things? My cheeks glowed at the recollection. There was one comfort; I knew enough now, never to let him have the amusement of making me angry again; he should never hear anything but monosyllables from me henceforth; I would be ice and marble when he was by. Presently there came a low knock at the door, and Kitty appeared, very fresh and rosy from her walk, and entering, laid upon the table some papers and a couple of letters. "Ah!" said the master, in a tone of satisfaction, reaching out his hand for them, "the mail is late to-night. You may send tea up; we will take it here this evening." Kitty looked in great astonishment to see me downstairs, but the etiquette of the place forbade anything more on my part than a glance of recognition, and Kitty retired to order tea sent up. Till that refreshment arrived, and was arranged upon the table, Mr. Rutledge devoted himself to the newly-arrived papers, of whose contents he possessed himself with surprising celerity; and before the servant announced that tea was ready, I had watched his eyes scan rapidly every column of every paper; and looking up from the last one as Thomas made his announcement, he laid it aside, and turned toward the table, asking me, with a smile, if I should mind the trouble of pouring out tea. It was an attention, he said, that he was generally obliged to pay to himself, but it would make it much more agreeable if I would take the trouble. I took my place behind the heavy silver service, and with fingers that trembled very visibly, proceeded, for the first time in my life, to fill that womanly office. Mr. Rutledge looked on silently, and without note or comment received and drank his tea. The toast and cake were unpatronized; Mr. Rutledge, I am inclined to think, forgot them, so absorbed did he appear in his own thoughts; and I, for my part, shrinking behind the urn, considered myself sufficiently taxed in swallowing a cup of tea, which almost choked me, as it was. It was not till the tea-things were removed that Mr. Rutledge allowed himself to open his letters, doing this, as everything else, at great disadvantage, and with some effort, with his left hand. I resumed my book, and did not raise my eyes, till some time having elapsed, Mr. Rutledge, rising, handed me a letter, which he said had come inclosed to him in one he had just received from my aunt. I opened it with considerable interest, and looking up from the reading of it with a smile, met Mr. Rutledge's eye, who said: "Mrs. Churchill seems to be very much alarmed about you. I think it's quite lucky that she was prevented from coming on in person, for she would have considered herself basely deceived, I am afraid, if she had dropped in upon us this evening; the two objects of her solicitude taking tea comfortably downstairs, in the apparent enjoyment of uninterrupted health. My bandaged arm, I believe, is the only visible reminder of the accident." "How is it to-day, sir?" I asked, rather faintly. He looked a little inclined to smile, remembering, no doubt, that this was the first time I had vouchsafed an inquiry concerning it; but he answered very civilly, that it was rather painful: whether old Sartain had made some blunder in setting it, or whether he had not kept it sufficiently quiet, he could not tell. However, he had no doubt it would soon be all right, etc. Therewith he dismissed the subject; but I could not dismiss so easily, a little feeling of remorse for my selfishness and thoughtlessness; and he had been so careful of _my_ comfort, too! Perhaps from that reflection, I was very prompt to drop my book in my lap, and be very attentive to his first remark, as, pushing away the pile of letters and papers, he leaned thoughtfully back in his chair, and said: "You have not seen your aunt for a long time, have you?" "It is rather more than five years, sir, since I have seen her." "Have you been at school all that time?" "Yes, sir; I have been there vacations and all. Aunt Edith went away the year after I was put there, and only came back last spring." "Josephine is considerably older than you, is she not?" "Just two years, sir; Josephine was nineteen last month, and I shall be seventeen the 28th of December, and Grace is eighteen months younger." "I suppose you remember them quite well?" "Not very, sir; I have never seen a great deal of them. We lived in the country, and excepting when we went to town for a visit, we were not together. You met them abroad, did you not, sir?" "Yes; we travelled through Switzerland together, and I saw them very frequently last winter in Paris." "Oh!" I exclaimed, eagerly, quite forgetting my dignified resolutions, "do tell me about them. Is Josephine taller than I, and is she pretty? They say she sings so beautifully! Does she?" "Where shall I begin?" he said, with a smile. "Such an avalanche of questions overwhelms me. First, as to height; well (thoughtfully), let me consider. It is difficult to judge. Stand up, and let me see how tall you are." I sprang up, in perfectly good faith, and stood erect before him for three full minutes, while, with a critical eye, he surveyed me from head to foot. "I should say," he continued very deliberately, while I resumed my seat, "I should say that there was not the difference of an eighteenth of an inch between you." "Really?" I exclaimed. "Why, isn't that odd! It's very nice, isn't it, for us to be so near alike?" "I did not say you were near alike." "Oh, but in size I mean. I know we don't look alike. Josephine used to be such a thin, dark, old-looking little girl, that I cannot imagine her tall and grown-up." "I think," continued Mr. Rutledge, "that she is still rather slighter than you are; though your additional shade of health and robustness will, I fancy, soon be lost, under the influence of town habits and constant dissipation." "Are they very gay? Does my aunt go a great deal into society?" I asked. "They did in Paris, and I fancy it will be the same in New York. In fact, there is little doubt of it." "I wonder," I said, leaning my cheek on my hand, and looking thoughtfully into the fire--"I do so wonder whether I shall like it." "Ah! my child," he said rather sadly, "you need not waste much wonder upon that; you will like it but too well. Wonder, with a shudder and a prayer, how you will bear the ordeal." He sighed, and pressed his hand for a moment before his eyes; then catching my wistful look, he continued in a lighter tone: "But I do not mean to frighten you; people, you know, are very apt to preach against what they are tired of, and inveigh against the world after they have 'been there,' and have seen its best and its worst, and tasted eagerly of both; and have spent years in its service, and are only disgusted when they find that it will yield them no more. They have no right to discourage you young things, just on the threshold, eager and impatient for you don't know what of glory and delight." "Why, yes; I'm sure they have a right to warn us, if they see our danger. I am sure it is their duty." "Oh!" he said, with one of his quick laughs, "it would be a thankless task; they would not be heeded. You all have to go through it, and how you come out is only a question of degree--some more, and some less tainted--according to the stuff you're made of." "I don't want to believe that." "You want to believe, I suppose, that you can go into the fire and not be burned; that you can go into the world and not grow worldly; that you can spend your youth in vanity, and not reap vexation of spirit; that you can go cheek by jowl with hollowness, and falsehood, and corruption, and yet keep truth and purity in your heart! You want to believe this, my little girl, but you must go to some one who has seen less, or seen it with different eyes from me, to hear it." "I want to believe the truth, whether it's easy or hard, and I had rather know it now, at the beginning, if I've got to know it, than when it is forced upon me by experience." "Wisely said, _ma petite;_ self-denial, hard as it is, is easier than repentance; but there are few of us who would not rather take our chances for escaping repentance and 'dodge' the self-denial, too. Is not that the way?" "I don't know; I suppose so. But, if the world is really as dangerous as you say, why should kind mothers and friends take the young girls they have the charge of, into it? Why should my aunt, for instance, take Josephine into society, the very gayest and most brilliant?" An almost imperceptible smile flitted across my companion's face at my question, but he answered quite seriously: "A great many different motives actuate parents; the principal, I suppose, are such as these: The children, they reason, are young, and they must have enjoyment; and so they cram them with sweets till they have no relish for healthier food. Sorrow, they say, comes soon enough; let them be happy while they may; and so they fit them for bearing it by an utter waste of mind and body in a mad pursuit of pleasure. And then, they must be established in the world; their temporal interests must be attended to. And the myriads offered up on that altar, it would freeze your young blood to know of! And then," he continued, with an amused look at my perplexity, "then there is another very potent reason why they cannot be kept in the nest--for before they are well fledged, the willful little brood will try their wings, and neither law nor logic will suffice to keep them back. Now, even you, sensible and correctly-judging young lady as you have this evening discovered yourself to be, would, I fear, not bear the test of a trial; I am afraid your courage would droop before the self denial of the first ball or two, and you would soon be drawn into the vortex without a struggle." "I don't think so," I said. "I am pretty sure that if I resolved not to go into society--being convinced that I ought not--I should be able to keep my resolution. And even if I should see that it was best for me not to go out till I am older, but to stay at home and study and improve myself, this winter, at least, I know I could do it. If I thought that balls and parties were wrong, I am certain I should never go to one." "That would be carrying the thing too far. Do not suppose that I mean anything like that. What I condemn is the wholesale worldliness--the unwearied career of folly that I have seen so much of, utterly excluding all cultivation of heart or intellect--utterly ignoring all beyond the present. That's the snare I would warn you of, my little friend. I know perhaps, better than you do, the trials that lie before you; so when I tell you that you will have need of all the courage, and self-denial, and resolution that you are mistress of, to keep you from that darkest of all lives--the life of a worldly woman--you must remember, I have seen many plays played out--have watched the opening and ending of more careers than one, the bloom and blight of more than one young life." A pause fell--a long and thoughtful one--while my companion, shading his eyes from the firelight, gazed fixedly upon vacancy, and some time had passed before he shook off the momentary gloom, and resumed, in a lighter tone: "That accident was a miserable business, was it not? Keeping you a prisoner in this dull old place, and knocking I don't know how many plans of mine in the head. And it is impossible to tell how many days it may be before I am able to travel, even if you should be. Perhaps, however, I may succeed in finding an escort for you, as I suppose you are impatient to be in New York." "Oh, I beg you will not take any trouble about it; I like it here very well. I am not in the least hurry, and I hope you will not go a moment before you are fit, on my account." My effort at civility was rewarded by a smile to which no one could be indifferent; and in reply, Mr. Rutledge said that he was glad to find me so philosophical; that I must amuse myself as well as I could, and he should tell Mrs. Churchill, when he wrote, that I was in a fair way of being made a strong-minded woman; between Mrs. Roberts' austere example in the conduct of the household, and his own invaluable moral lectures, my mind would be in no danger of rusting during my captivity. "Not to mention," he added gravely, "very able and improving mental exercise in the criticism of the most eminent living historians." I hung my head at this last cut, administered, however, so daintily, that it was impossible to resent it; and being on the rack till he should get away from the subject, I quickly reverted to his letter to my aunt, asking when he should write, and desiring permission to inclose a note to her at the same time. He should probably write to-night, he said, glancing up at the bronze clock, which pointed to nine. "Writing, however, with my left hand, is a business requiring much time and application, and possibly I may not attempt it till to-morrow morning." Blushing very much, I said I wished I could be of service in writing that or any other letters for him; it would give me great pleasure. He thanked me for the offer, but considered it, he said, entirely too much to ask of me. I must remember I was still an invalid. I laughed at the idea, and the result was, that in five minutes I was seated at the library table, with a portfolio before me, writing a letter to my aunt at Mr. Rutledge's dictation. I was in high spirits at the idea of being useful, and the pen flew over the paper almost as fast as the words were uttered. I rather writhed under the necessity of writing without demur of myself as "the little girl," and "your young niece;" but there was nothing to be said, and after finishing it, and adding a few lines of my own, I enveloped and directed it. I asked if there was any other I could write for him. He said there was one he was anxious to dispatch in the morning; so taking another sheet of paper, I began another letter. It was one on business, full of law terms and dry details, but fortunately not very long, and writing it as rapidly as possible, in my boldest, freest hand, I soon laid it ready for dispatch beside the other. "What else?" I inquired, taking a fresh sheet of paper. "You are not tired?" "Not in the least, sir," and I rapidly wrote the date, and with my pen suspended over the paper, awaited his dictation. Without a word of explanation, he began to dictate as quickly as before, in French. For a moment my heart failed me, as the teasing French verbs rushed on my bewildered ear; but rallying instantly, without raising my eyes or giving the least evidence of my discomfiture, I began to write. Thanks to Mademoiselle Céline's drilling, I was pretty ready at "dictée," and after the first surprise, got along very well. It was quite a severe exercise to keep pace with his rapid language, feeling all the while as if an error would be irreparable. I would not appear to read it over, of course, for purposes of correction, any more than I would have done the English ones. I managed, however, while looking for an envelope, and wiping my pen, to glance hurriedly and anxiously through it, and was somewhat comforted to meet no fault apparent, at least, on such a rapid scrutiny. I folded and addressed it, not, though, without some misgivings, and after receiving thanks, and a refusal of further services, glanced at the clock, and rose to go upstairs. Mr. Rutledge lit my candle, and as he handed it to me, said I must do as I found it most agreeable about coming downstairs to my meals. He should be most happy to have a companion whenever I felt well enough to come down; but Kitty, he hoped, would make me comfortable whenever I preferred remaining upstairs. I bowed, and said, "Yes sir," rather unmeaningly, and passed out of the door, which he held open for me, and which he was charitable enough not to shut till I was safe in my own room. Kitty, active and pleasant as ever, awaited me there, and I threw myself in the easy-chair before the fire, while she unbraided and combed my hair, with a feeling of great comfort and complacency. She congratulated me upon going downstairs; and indirectly and respectfully endeavored to ascertain whether I had found master as formidable as I had anticipated. I did not wish to commit myself on this point; but finding that Kitty herself stood in a little wholesome awe of him, I was tempted to acknowledge that I did not feel altogether at ease downstairs; upon which she said, she guessed I wasn't the only one; nobody on the place, from Mrs. Roberts down, dared say their souls were their own when Mr. Rutledge was by. "But then, he's a kind master, is he not?" I asked. "Oh, yes! None better; that everybody knows. He's as liberal as can be; but then he expects everything to go on _just so;_ and every man on the place knows that he won't put up with a bit of laziness or shirking. And so, whether he's here or not, things go on like clock-work, and the Rutledge farm is a perfect garden, everybody says. Better a good deal, I guess, than it used to be in old Mr. Rutledge's time, though there were twice as many men on it then, and twice as much money spent on it; but there was too much feasting and company for anybody to attend much to work, and I suppose the old gentleman was what they call a high liver, and cared more for his hounds and horses, and dinner-parties and wine, than for looking after his farm." "How old was Mr. Arthur Rutledge when his father died?" "Oh, a mere lad, sixteen or so; and for a time, I've heard them say, things went on bad enough, nobody to look after anything, the farm just going to destruction. For, the trouble all coming together, his father's and Mr. Richard's death, and whatever it was about Miss Alice, it was too much for Mr. Arthur, and brought on a dreadful fever, and for weeks they couldn't tell how it would go with him. Mrs. Roberts nursed him day and night; I guess she was the best friend he had, for he was the last of the family, you see, and hadn't a relation in the world, and though he had plenty of fine folks for his acquaintance, fine folks don't seem to think they're needed when people are in trouble and come to die; and I don't know but what they're right; they would be rather in the way. However, they didn't have much to do for Mr. Arthur that time; and at last the fever turned, and he began to get better." Kitty had an attentive auditor, and she only too willingly talked on, and gave me all the facts she was possessed of. I had nothing else to think about just then, and so it was not to be wondered at that I made the most of them, and gave many an hour to the working up and embellishing of Kitty's story. I pictured to myself the lonely boy, coming back to life with no one to welcome him in the changed house. I fancied him pale and melancholy, wandering through the deserted halls and empty rooms, finding at every turn something to remind him of his grief. I could not blame him when, as my informant said, he grew to be morose and gloomy, and to hate the very name of home; for, going abroad, he did not come near it for years, and seemed to have lost all interest in it. The estate, during this time, was managed by an agent, who neglected it shamefully, and in whose charge it was fast going to ruin. But suddenly, the young master returned, and to the surprise of all, took things into his own hands; dismissed those who had been living in idleness at his expense so long, only retaining such as were willing to conform themselves to the new _régime_, and by industry and faithfulness to regain what had been lost during this long period of neglect. It was a reform which required great energy and perseverance, but these the young heir possessed, and before a year was over, things wore a very different aspect; the house was repaired and the grounds put in order; the farm began to show the presence of a master. The reform did not stop here, however. For more than fifty years, there had been no church nearer than Hilton, a distance of six miles, which the family at Rutledge nominally attended, when the weather was fine; but, unhappily, Sunday and Sunday duties were by no means of paramount interest at Rutledge; and, naturally, master and tenantry fell into a criminal neglect of all the outward duties of religion. In the village which lay about a mile to the south of Rutledge, there had once, before the Revolution, been a church edifice, but long since it had fallen into ruins, and only a neglected graveyard remained to attest its former site. Here, Mr. Rutledge had built a church, and repairing a cottage that lay at the southern extremity of his farm, and not a quarter of a mile from the church, had turned it into a parsonage, where he had established a clergyman, who had labored very faithfully and very successfully among the almost heathenish inhabitants of the place, and had immeasurably improved its character. "But still you say, Kitty, Mr. Rutledge does not live here much of the time. I should think he would be happy in a place where he had done so much good." Kitty shook her head. "There is too much to remind him of old times, I suppose, for him to like it here; besides, it's very lonesome. He does his duty by it, but I don't believe he'll ever stay here more than he thinks he has to, to keep things straight." I reminded Kitty, by and by, of the miniature of which we had been talking when Mrs. Roberts interrupted us in the morning. "Should you like to see it?" Kitty asked. "Of all things," I replied; and Kitty, laying down the brush, said she would run up to her room and get it. She stopped a moment, after she had cautiously opened the door, to listen if Mrs. Roberts was still awake, then leaving it ajar, stole quietly up the stairs. My heart beat guiltily as I listened to her retreating footsteps. What business had I to be prying into family secrets? I was involuntarily ashamed of myself, but how could I help it? How could I resist the temptation? It could do no harm; I should only just look at it, and should be no wiser after all. It seemed an age before Kitty's returning footsteps rejoiced my ear, and I did not feel safe till, again within the room, she slid the bolt behind her, and put into my hand the old-fashioned locket, with its faded blue ribbon. I started up, and going to the light, bent down to examine it. "It's like none of the family," Kitty said. "Their pictures are in the dining-room, and I've compared them all." It certainly, I saw myself, was not in the least like Mr. Rutledge. It was a face I could not altogether understand. The eyes were dark, and perhaps tender in their light, but about the mouth--and a handsome well cut mouth, too--there was a something I could not define, that suggested coldness and insincerity; something that repelled me when I first looked, but seemed to disappear after a longer scrutiny. The features were regular and strikingly handsome, the skin a clear olive, the hair dark and wavy. As far as my limited knowledge of these things went, what was visible of the uniform appeared to me to be that of a French officer, and the letters, in tiny characters, engraved on the back, "à Paris, 1830," seemed to confirm the probability. "Twenty-four years ago," I said. "That was the year before old Mr. Rutledge died," said Kitty. I kept it in my hand while she undressed me, and only returned it to her as she was leaving me for the night. But she said, "You'd better keep it, Miss, if you will, to-night. I am afraid to go to my trunk to put it away, for Dorothy, the cook, sleeps in the room where we keep our trunks, and she's just gone upstairs." I consented, and for safety put it under my pillow. I wished it anywhere else, however, after the door had closed; and Kitty departing, ----"Left the world to darkness and to me." CHAPTER V. "Girls blush, sometimes, because they are alive, Half wishing they were dead to save the shame. The sudden blush devours them, neck and brow They have drawn too near the fire of life, like gnats. And flare up bodily, wings and all. What then? Who's sorry for a gnat--or girl?" E.B. BROWNING. The question, whether I should breakfast downstairs or alone, was settled by the ringing of the bell before Kitty had half done my hair, and as I would not for worlds have been two minutes late at any meal that Mr. Rutledge was to share, I determined to "take the benefit of the act," and remain an invalid till dinner-time. "What a dismal day, Miss!" remarked my maid, as she made herself busy in removing my breakfast from the table. "How shall you manage to amuse yourself?" "I don't mind the rain in the least," I answered, wheeling my admired chair up to the window, and throwing myself into it, with a lapful of books and work. "I think a rainy day is splendid." And so, indeed, I found it for a while. I read till I had extracted all the honey from the pile of reviews and magazines before me, and then pushed them away, and leaning against the window, gazed out on the dreary landscape. A sheet of rain and mist hid the lake, the pine grove looked black and sullen, the trees in the park tossed mournfully about their naked branches, as showers of yellow leaves fell in gusts upon the ground; the wind moaned dismally around the house, and dashed the rain, by fits and starts, against the windows with a heavy sound. It was very nice to feel that it could not get in, and that there was stout glass and stone between me and the pitiless autumn storm, and a snug and cosy shelter from its fury. But by and by I grew rather tired of watching the rain and the leaves, and yawning, began to cast about for some more attractive occupation. This I found for a short time in my worsted work, which I disinterred from the depths of my trunk, and applied myself to in great earnest for half an hour. But the motive for exertion was wanting; I could not help thinking wearily, that there was not the least hurry about finishing it, and those roses would blow, on demand, any time during the next six years, with as much advantage as at present. And so I laid it down and took to the window again, wondering, with a sigh, whether all young ladyhood were like this; and if it were, how it happened that we did not hear of more early deaths--deaths from utter ennui and exhaustion. I had for so long been used to having every half hour in the day filled up with some unavoidable exercise of mind or body, that I felt entirely lost without the routine, and firmly resolved, as soon as I should be settled at my aunt's, to begin a course of study which should fill up all these idle moments, and give some vigor to my faculties. "I should die of this in a month," I thought; and seizing one of the rejected Reviews, the only literature at hand, I resolutely set myself to read the longest, driest paper in it. And really, after the task was accomplished, though I am sorry to say I was not by much the clearer in my views on the particular branch of science of which it treated, still I felt decidedly better satisfied with myself for the effort, and experienced less compunction in taking, after lunch, a short nap. Kitty had been absent all the morning, having been detailed for some pressing laundry work by the practical Mrs. Roberts, for which I was still owing her a grudge, when, just as I awoke from my nap, she walked in, and accepting the chair I offered her, made me quite a little visit. I exerted myself to appear amiable, and was congratulating myself on the success of my efforts, and on the absence of all disagreeable topics, when, just as she was going, her keen eyes having made the circuit of the room many times, she detected something amiss in the bed, and walking across to the recess where it stood, began to examine the manner in which it was made. "That Kitty," she said, "was not to be trusted to make even a bed by herself. She was sure I did not lie comfortably." And stooping down, she began to dissect it. My heart gave a spasmodic thump, and then stood "stock-still for sheer amazement," not to say consternation, when it flashed across me that I had left the guilty miniature between the mattresses, where, in the sleepless nervousness of last night, I had put it, in order to have it as far out of the way as possible. It was the strangest thing that I should never have thought of it since I waked up. "And now," I thought, with a cold chill, "now it is probably under Mrs. Roberts' very nose, and Kitty and I are undone." I hardly breathed as I watched her throwing back blanket and sheet, and making sad havoc among the bolsters and pillows, giving the one a contemptuous shake, and the other an indignant poke; all the while most animatedly anathematizing the the unlucky Kitty. I had already pictured Kitty and myself dragged by the hair of our guilty heads, before Mr. Rutledge, for judgment, and terrified into confession by that awful look of his, when to my unspeakable relief, Mrs. Roberts stopped just short of the mattress, and coming indignantly across the room, rang for Kitty, who promptly answered the bell. She looked somewhat blank to find that the summons was not to dress me, but to stand one of Mrs. Roberts' tirades. Mrs. Roberts was, I believe, troubled with rheumatism, "the worst kind," and the cold storm and east wind had aggravated these long-tried enemies to an unbearable pitch, and it was well known in the house that there was but one remedy that succeeded in the least in allaying the irritation of her nerves, but one soothing panacea, and that was, a thorough and satisfactory "blow-out" or scolding; the raking fore-and-aft some adversary's craft with the unerring fire of her indignation, the entire annihilation, soul and body, for the time being, of the victim that happened first to cross her path. And tradition pointed to Kitty as the favorite scape-goat on these occasions. She knew her fate, I am certain, from the moment she caught the dull glare of Mrs. Roberts' eye, and doggedly tossing her pretty head to one side, stood ready to confront her. Did she call that bed _made_, Mrs. Roberts would like to know? Kitty considered it made--yes. She did, did she? Then she would please to come across the room and try if she could do it as well the second time. I made Kitty an agonized gesture, which she promptly understood, but which Mrs. Roberts also caught sight of, and was at her elbow in an instant. It was a pretty severe contest of skill between the veteran rat-catcher and the keen little mouser; Mrs. Roberts knew there was _something_, and inly vowed to scent it out; Kitty was as determined to elude her vigilance, and as is not unusual, youth and dexterity triumphed. From under the very eyes of Mrs. Roberts, Kitty, under cover of a zealous shake of the mattress, bore off the miniature, and smuggling it in her apron, passed by where I was sitting, and threw it into my lap. I thrust it down to the lowest depths of my pocket, and looked with admiration at Kitty's unshaken composure, as she continued her work under the galling fire of Mrs. Roberts' sarcasms. The bed at last was made irreproachably; even Mrs. Roberts could find no fault with its unruffled exterior; though to my unpractised eye, it had looked much the same before its revisal. It seemed a long time before the antagonists withdrew, and a longer still before my tranquillity of temper was restored. How I wished the miniature safely back in Kitty's trunk, in the furthest corner of the attic! That came of doing what I was ashamed of! I did not feel as if I could look any one in the face till it was out of my hands. I did not venture to ring for Kitty, for I felt certain Mrs. Roberts stood with the door of her room ajar, ready to pounce upon her if she came in sight again; so I exerted myself to perform the duties of my _toilette_ unaided. They were not arduous, and I was soon dressed, and vainly trying to interest myself in my embroidery till the bell should ring. It was still an open question whether I should go downstairs; I half inclined to playing invalid a little longer, and taking this one more meal in my room. But then the dreary prospect of my solitary dinner, and the long dull twilight, with nothing but my own thoughts for entertainment, and the longer, duller evening, with nothing to amuse but what had failed of that object during the day, weighed down the balance in favor of a change of scene, and I was on my feet in an instant, as my watch pointed to three, and the bell announced dinner, simultaneously. I pushed the worsted into my workbox, and putting the miniature hastily into a drawer, essayed to lock it, but the key was defective, for some cause, and would not turn, and not daring to run the risk of being late, I again put it into my pocket, and hurried down. As I reached the lower hall, I remembered that I had not the least idea which door led into the dining-room, and so had to try three or four which gave no evidence of being inhabited, furniture being covered and windows closed, before I hit upon the right one. I entered hesitatingly, not discovering, till I was fairly in the room, that I was the only occupant of it. The table was laid for two, and the dinner was already served, but the master was not yet down. As some minutes passed and he did not appear, I had time to look around, and get acquainted with the _salle à manger._ It was a fine room, old-fashioned though it was; and modern architecture has still to produce its rival in my eyes. The ceiling was very high, the fireplace wide, with tiled jambs; the wood-work carved in stiff but stately patterns; the windows were deep, with enticing window-seats, and the walls were covered with pictures. Pictures, I imagined, of people who had once owned Rutledge: some of them, perhaps, lived in this very house, ate and drank in this very room. There were several portraits, that I rather hurried over, of pompous-looking people in very old-time style, but I knew in a moment the handsome picture over the mantelpiece. It was the late Mr. Rutledge, like Mr. Arthur, but infinitely handsomer, on a larger scale, with a jovial, pleasant face, but I thought, less intellectual in the expression. Then I was certain that the picture on the right represented Richard, the heir, who had died so soon after his father. Ah! But, I thought, what a handsome, gentle face! What soft eyes! If Mr. Arthur had only looked like him, what a nice, thing it would be to be dining _tête-à-tête_ with him. _Quel dommage!_ If he had only lived! But I felt inclined to laugh when I remembered that his younger brother might easily, as far as age was concerned, have been my father, and the handsome Richard himself could almost, well, yes, quite, have stood to me in the relation, more reverend than romantic, of grandfather. So, with a wistful look at the pensive, delicate face that never had grown, never could grow old, I glanced at the empty panel that intervened between this picture and the the next. That space surely once had held a portrait, and with a rapid transition of fancy, I thought of the picture with its face to the wall, in the deserted room upstairs. That was it, I made no manner of doubt, that had once hung here. Beyond it was the mother's portrait, fair, gentle, and sad: beneath this picture, and depending from its frame, hung a little crayon sketch, that I examined with interest, thinking to find it identical, possibly, with the miniature, which I pulled from my pocket to compare. But a glance refuted that idea; not the faintest likeness between them, nothing in common but human features. It represented (the sketch I mean) a boy of about my own age, with such a fine, glowing, ardent face as made "new life-blood warm the bosom," only to look into his truthful eyes, only to catch the merry smile that lingered about his handsome mouth. It had, however, such a likeness to Mr. Rutledge, that I should, despite the difference that time had wrought have imagined him to be the original of the picture, had I not found, written hastily and faintly in one corner, "Obit. 1830," and some words in Latin that I could not make myself mistress of. I was so intent upon it, that I did not notice Mr. Rutledge's entrance till he stood beside me. I pocketed the miniature, which I still held in my hand, in hot haste, and turned to meet his inquiring eyes. "Are you making acquaintance with my ancestors?" he asked. I answered that I had been looking at the pictures. "But this," pointing to the crayon head, "this is not an ancestor, is it?" "No," he said, with a half smile, "not exactly an ancestor; a relation." I asked him if it was not considered like him. He had been told, he said, that there was some resemblance. I looked at it with a critical eye, and then remarked that the resemblance lay, I thought, in the contour of the face, and perhaps something about the eyes; but the expression was as different from his as it was possible for an expression to be. "That's true," he said looking at it sadly; "that face expresses what no man's face can express after thirty: hope and courage, and an unshaken confidence in the honesty of his fellows." I did not fancy that doctrine very much, so I began talking of the other pictures. Of the older ones, Mr. Rutledge gave me some slight sketches, passing briefly by those that I knew he could have told me most about. But I turned admiringly back to the sketch that had so much taken my fancy. "After all," I said, "this is the finest face among them." Mr. Rutledge shook his head dissentingly, and looked sadly up at Richard's portrait. "No indeed," I exclaimed, "that's not near so good a face as this; handsomer, perhaps, dreamy and poetical, but not so brave and spirited. Look at the impatient fire in those eyes! And his smile is truth itself. There is something so determined in the attitude too." "He was, I believe, an honest, truthful lad," said Mr. Rutledge, unenthusiastically. "He was more than that I'm sure," I exclaimed, "or would have been, if he had lived. With that high spirit he would have made everything bend to him; and if fair fortune hadn't smiled upon his humble birth (which, however, I suppose she did, being a Rutledge), he would have conquered her, you may be sure. I am certain he wouldn't have known the meaning of the words despair and doubt; but come what might, would have hoped and believed to the end." "But perhaps," said my companion, "perhaps a hand of ice might have been laid upon his youth; a cruel blow might in one day have dashed from him all that feeds hope and faith; perhaps disgrace, grief, illness, coming all together, might have crushed out of him all energy and spirit. What would have become of your hero then? Would he have hoped, when death and the grave had all that he loved? Would he have believed, when what from his cradle he had most trusted in had proved false and worthless?" I was a little startled at the bitterness of his tone, but persisted, "All that wouldn't have happened to him. 'Fortune favors the brave.'" "Not always, _petite_, not always," he said, with an ironical laugh. "Nevertheless, I wish he had lived," I said; "I am sure he would have been my hero." "Why," said Mr. Rutledge, looking at me, "why, if, as you say, that boy had lived, he would have been--let me see--nearly forty years old: and that, you know, would have made it out of the question for you to love him." "I never thought of that," I said naively. "Well then, I wish I had lived when he did, and been born thirty years ago." "What! Your youth all over? No, little simpleton, whatever you wish, don't be wild enough to wish that! Make the best of your youth, and freshness, and spirit, for they'll take themselves off some fine day, and leave you nothing to do but to look back." "That's according to the use I make of them, I suppose," I answered, a little ungraciously. "I am not at all afraid that I shall be bitter and misanthropical when I am old, if I spend my youth as I ought." Mr. Rutledge laughed very much as if he thought I meant it for him; yet the laugh was not altogether a happy one, and he continued: "See to it then, child, that you use them right. I do not mean to discourage you. I have no doubt you will be very happy and contented when forty comes around on the string of birth-days. Always being and provided, of course, that the hero, or one as near like him as possible, has come in at the right time to realize your dreams." "But I don't believe," I said, perversely, "that I shall ever have any lover that I shall like as much as I should have done this one." "He would have made you an earnest lover, certainly, if that would have won you, with perhaps a dash of impetuosity and tyranny in his love; but that is what you women like, is it not?" "How can I tell?" I said, very demurely. "I forgot," he answered, laughing, "I forgot that you were just out of school, and could not be supposed to know anything about love and lovers." "Of course not," I said, putting my hands in the pockets of my basque, and looking at the ground over my left shoulder, after the manner of a French print I had seen in Mademoiselle Céline's room. "Of course not." Mr. Rutledge seemed to take in such good part my saucy ways, that I began, to feel much more at my ease, and laughed quite like myself, when on going to the table we found the soup very unattractively cold; "glacée," Mr. Rutledge said it was. "While people moralize they are very apt to forget the realities; and so we have let the soup get cold, and the dinner get burned, very likely, and shall have to wait for it as it has been waiting for us." Mr. Rutledge rang, and a servant and hot soup promptly appeared, and dinner was soon in progress, and a very pleasant dinner it proved. For the time, my companion forgot abstraction, and I forgot timidity, and both forgot the dismal storm without. Mr. Rutledge condescended to be entertaining, and I deigned to forget all former slights, and be entertained. Unluckily, however, at dessert, I made some allusion to the loneliness in which he usually took his meals, and that seemed to raise some disagreeable recollection, for his face darkened, and he said, after a short pause: "Yes, young lady, it is long since I have seen any face, and most of all, a woman's face, opposite me at this solitary table." Then he fell into a fit of musing that made me feel uncomfortably sorry for my mal-à-propos speech. I could not help wondering who had last sat where I did, and the thought was anything but genial; my eyes wandered involuntarily to the empty panel; and it was with a feeling of relief that I arose from the table and followed my host toward the library. As we passed the crayon picture, however, I paused a moment, and Mr. Rutledge, turning, said: "You're not tired of it yet?" I said no, I liked it better all the time, and to-morrow I meant to bring my drawing materials down and make a copy of it, if he was willing. "You are welcome to the picture itself, if you'll accept it," he said, indifferently, proceeding to unhook it from the frame of the picture above, to which it hung. I was mute with amazement for a moment, and hardly found breath to exclaim: "How strange that you do not value it!" He replied that there were two or three sketches of the same face about the house, and he did not care particularly for this one. It gave him great pleasure to give it to me, if I fancied it. I hope I thanked him, but I am not at all certain that I did. I seized the picture with great _goût_, and ran into the library, and up to the lightest window, to enjoy it by myself. Mr. Rutledge threw himself into a chair, and his hand being before his eyes, I could not see whether he slept or not. I looked long and earnestly at my favorite in every light, and from every point; then got up on a chair and reached down a Latin Dictionary to help translate the sentence written below the date. But I could not get it right; and gave up in despair. That amusement exhausted, and no other presenting, in the course of time the unavoidable weariness, and want of elasticity consequent upon my three days' confinement to the house, began to make themselves felt, and at last, I thought, to become utterly unbearable. I conceived the mad plan of getting my shawl and hood, and escaping to the piazza for a little exercise, though the rain had beaten furiously upon almost every part of it. I got up, and was stealing noiselessly toward the door, when Mr. Rutledge, whom I had fancied asleep, said uneasily, without altering his position: "Why do you go away?" "I am so tired of the house, sir, I am going to wrap up and walk up and down on the piazza for a little while. It will not hurt me," I continued, pleadingly; "mayn't I?" "On no account," he said decidedly; "it would be absurd, after the fever you have had." "I am positive it would not hurt me, sir." "And I am positive it would." As Mr. Rutledge had not turned toward me at all, I suppose he did not see how very angry I looked, and how very red my face was. Perhaps his thoughts had gone off to something else, for he did not say anything more; and I stood drumming on the table, waiting for him to continue; determined, _determined_ not to go back and sit down, till, exasperated beyond patience by his silence, I said, moving toward the door: "I suppose then, sir, you have no objection to my going to my own room." "Why, yes," he said, "I have, decidedly. I think it would be much more sensible for you to amuse yourself down here." "I've failed in doing that, sir, already." "Well, then, stay and amuse me." "That's entirely beyond my power, I am afraid; sir," I answered, shrugging my shoulders. "You cannot tell till you have tried," he said; "I have a wretched headache. Don't you feel sorry for me?" "Of course, sir, exceedingly. But unluckily, I don't see how I can help you." "Oh, it's of no importance. Pray go." I stood irresolute and very uncomfortable. "If there's anything you'll have for your head, sir"---- "No, there's nothing, thank you." This was the way in which I repaid his indulgence and attention! This was a nice return for the care he had taken of me during my illness. I would have given worlds for a good excuse to stay, but Mr. Rutledge seemed determined not to give me any. At last, after everything else had failed, I said, hesitatingly: "Would it annoy you to have me read aloud to you, sir?" He would not trouble me on any account, he said. "But," I answered eagerly, "it is not the slightest trouble. I should like to do it, I assure you." He would not think of putting such a task upon me. "But do say," I exclaimed, "whether or not you like reading aloud." He liked it very much, but begged me not to trouble myself. That was enough, and in a moment I was by the fire. "What shall I read, sir?" "Anything you fancy." "You are the most provoking man," I thought, as I looked up and down the shelves in search of a book. I shrewdly concluded that I might as well please myself in the choice, as it was not probable that Mr. Rutledge would attend to three words of what I read, even if he did not go to sleep. So recognizing an old friend in "Sintram," I took it from the bookcase, and sitting down in the window-seat, opened its familiar pages with some pleasure. Familiar, that is, they had been to my childhood, but it was some years since I had seen the book. It was not long, however, before I forgot myself and my auditor over the strange, wild, touching story. The dreary storm without, the growing gloom within, all added to the charm of its wild pathos. I read on, bending forward to catch the last grey light from the window, till, baffled by the rapidly-deepening twilight, I left it, and sitting down on a low seat by the fire, read on by its flickering light. If I had not been sure that no one was attending, I should have stopped for shame at the trembling of my voice, which I could not control, as I read the lines that tell to Sintram his release from terror and temptation: "Death comes to set thee free-- O meet him cheerily As thy true friend; And all thy fears shall cease, And in eternal peace Thy penance end." A low, quick-drawn sigh told me that I was not alone in my interest in the tale. I finished it, and dropping the book in my lap, sat resting my head on my hand, and gazing dreamily into the fire. Presently steps in the hall interrupted my revery, and I rose to put the book away. As I passed Mr. Rutledge, he held out his hand, and, as I laid my own in it, he said, "thank you," and looked at me with the most mournful expression in his eyes. The tears rushed involuntarily into mine as I met his glance; I did not know which to pity most, Sintram or my companion. He saw the pity in my look, and remembered it, long after the emotion had passed. A servant entered at that moment, with the brightest of cheerful lamps; Mr. Rutledge ordered more wood on the fire, which presently blazed and crackled genially; the curtains were drawn, and the conquered twilight and moaning wind were banished from the room. Mr. Rutledge roused himself from his abstracted mood, and I said to myself, "What can I do to keep him from thinking of the things that trouble him?" And, woman enough to like the task, I set myself to make the evening a pleasant one, and to keep all dullness and ennui away. And it was a very happy evening to me, and not a dull one, I am certain, to my host. I made tea with much less trepidation than on the evening before, and it proved almost magical in curing Mr. Rutledge's headache. I could hardly believe the clock was right when it struck ten, the evening had seemed so short. I took my picture from the mantelpiece, and bidding my companion good night, ran upstairs two steps at a time, not remembering till I reached the top, that Miss Crowen had condemned the practice as unladylike. "I hope Mr. Rutledge wasn't listening," I thought with mortification. If Mr. Rutledge wasn't, Mrs. Roberts was, though, for I heard her door shut softly soon after I had reached my room, and presently she found an excuse for coming in upon me, which she did rather suddenly, as I was standing before the new picture, looking at it very earnestly, as I leisurely unbraided my hair. I went over to the glass, however, very quickly upon her entrance; and after her errand was over, she quite inadvertently, it would seem, glanced up at the picture, but _I_ knew she had seen it the first thing when she came in. "Why," she exclaimed, looking surprised, "how came Mr. Rutledge's picture up here? It has always hung under his mother's in the dining-room. There must be some mistake," she continued, looking inquiringly at me. An alarming truth began to dawn on my mind, a vivid blush spread over my face, and Mrs. Roberts never once took her eyes off me. "I fancied it, and Mr. Rutledge said I might have it," I stammered. Mrs. Robert's blue lips parted for an instant in a contemptuous curl; then, looking stonier than ever, she said: "Yes, it is a good likeness; or was, at least, when he was a young man; he's sadly changed since then; he's an old and an altered man now, is Mr. Arthur Rutledge." The housekeeper, saying this with emphasis, and having no excuse for staying longer, was obliged to withdraw. "Yes, ma'am," I muttered, as I locked the door after her, "I know he's an old man, I know he's nearly forty years old: who better? for he told me so himself." And my cheeks scorched with blushes, as one by one, I recalled my foolish speeches. How stupid, how blind I had been. Why, as I looked at the picture now, there wasn't a feature in the face that could possibly have been mistaken for any one else, not a shade nor outline that was not characteristic. I could have cried with vexation. How should I ever dare to look him in the face again? "My hero!" And I covered my face with my hands, and started up guiltily, and put it out of the way before I unlocked the door for Kitty. CHAPTER VI. "The Sundays of man's life Threaded together on time's string, Make bracelets to adorn the wife Of the eternal glorious King. On Sunday, heaven's gate stands ope; Blessings are plentiful and rife; More plentiful than hope." HERBERT. "Mr. Rutledge's compliments, Miss, and he begs you will breakfast without him this morning; he isn't well enough to come down," said the servant, as I entered the dining-room next morning. "Is his arm worse?" I asked. "It pains him a good deal, Miss; and he's had a very bad night. Michael has ridden over to get the doctor." That was bad news, certainly; I wished very much I could do something for him; but as I couldn't, the next best thing was to eat my breakfast; which, however, was rather choky and unpalatable in all that grand solemnity, with the tall Thomas (Mr. Rutledge's own man, temporarily supplying the post of waiter) looking down at me. I broke down on the second slice of toast, and concluded to give it up and go into the library. It seemed incredible that it had stormed yesterday; such splendid sunshine, such a clear sky, I thought, I had never seen before. I would have given anything for a race down the avenue in that keen, bracing wind, but I determined heroically that I would not stir out of the house till Mr. Rutledge gave me permission. But about eleven o'clock my reading was interrupted by the abrupt entrance of Kitty, who, with her face all aglow with pleasure, announced to me that Mr. Rutledge had ordered the carriage for me to take a drive, if I felt like it; and sent word, that if I was willing, he thought Kitty had better accompany me. I tossed away my book, exclaiming, "it was grand," and, followed by Kitty, ran upstairs. "How odd," she said, as in breathless haste she prepared me for the drive, "how odd that Mr. Rutledge shouldn't have sent word for Mrs. Roberts to go with you, miss, isn't it?" "Odd, but very nice, Kitty," I answered, with a grimace that made her laugh; and as the carriage drove to the door, we ran down the stairs, Kitty putting on her bonnet and shawl as we went. I am sure it would have eased for a moment Mr. Rutledge's pain, if he could have known the extent of the pleasure he had conferred on the two children who so delightedly occupied his carriage that morning. All Kitty's knowledge of it, I suspect, had hitherto been speculative, and I think one of the dearest wishes of her heart was gratified when she tried experimentally the softness of its new dark green cushions, and in her own proper person occupied the front seat, an honor whereof she had only dreamed before. It was a perfect autumn day; the air was exhilarating, the sunshine brilliant, the scenery picturesque, and a great deal less than that would have sufficed to make me happy in those days; and before we reëntered the park gate, three hours had slipped away in the most unsuspected manner. Kitty having gathered, at my request, an armful of the few gay autumn leaves remaining after yesterday's storm, I entertained myself, during the drive home, with arranging them in a bouquet. The glossy dark laurel leaves, and the varied and bright hues of the maple and sumac, with some vivid red berries, name unknown, made quite a pretty and attractive combination. As we reached home, I was seized with an audacious intention, which I put into execution before allowing myself time to "think better of it." "Kitty," I said, "take this to Mr. Rutledge's door, and give it to Thomas for him, and say I hope he is better, and I am very much obliged to him for sending me to drive, and that I enjoyed it very much." I was rather alarmed when Kitty had accomplished her errand, but it was too late to retract. That evening was a very long one; I went upstairs at nine o'clock, wondering at its interminable length. The next day was Sunday. Mr. Rutledge was no better, and I went to church alone in the carriage, with only Kitty to attend me, Mrs. Roberts, she said, not being able to leave "the master." It was a beautiful little church, Gothic, and built of stone, with nothing wanting to render it church-like and solemn. When I looked at the tablets on the wall, that recorded, one after another, the deaths of Warren Rutledge, and Maria, his wife, and Richard, their son, I could not help thinking it must be sad for him to come here, Sunday after Sunday, and see that; but then it's easier to think of such things in church than anywhere else; somehow, quick and dead do not seem so far separated there. Why, I could not tell, but there I remembered a great deal more thoughtfully and thankfully than I had done before, the evening, not a week ago, when I had lain, living and unhurt, among the dead and dying. It was strange, in the humored nervousness of the first day or two, and the returning health and spirits of the following, how little I had thought of it. And when Mr. Shenstone read his text: "Were there not ten cleansed? But where are the nine? There are not found that returned to give glory to God, save this stranger," my heart smote me. I indeed had forgotten, and had taken carelessly, and without much thought, my preservation from a terrible death. I indeed had gone on without giving glory to God, without acknowledging the mercy by which I yet lived. Mr. Shenstone's sermon was one that those who recognize only as eloquence, pathos and fire and passion, would have pronounced very far from eloquent. His manner was quiet, and not particularly impressive, his language simple and unostentatious. But he possessed the true kind of sermon eloquence--keen perception of spiritual things, and the clearest knowledge of the Christian life. He had learning and talents; but it was not by them alone that he gained so deep a reverence from his humble parishioners, so strong an influence over them. It was because his own hope was high, that he could elevate theirs. It was because learning and talents and fame were things indifferent to him, save as aids in the service he had entered, that he could descend to their level, to raise them more nearly to his own. They could grasp what he taught them, for it was "a reasonable religious and holy hope," a rule of life, sober, practical, and simple, that led to high things, but began with low. It was because his heart was in his work, that his work prospered; because the World, the Flesh, and the Devil, were his sworn and baffled enemies, and not his half encouraged and secret allies, that in his little flock he made such headway against them; because "through faith and prayer" he kept his own heart and life pure, he could see more clearly to guide them. Thus it was, that though Mr. Shenstone hardly took his eyes from his notes, and used very few gestures, and those few awkward ones--though he preached quietly and unenthusiastically--though there were no ornaments of rhetoric, no efforts at oratory, it was a sermon that, to this day, I distinctly remember, and never, I fancy, shall forget. Keen, pithy, conclusive, no one could help acknowledging its power; kind, earnest, sincere, no one could doubt its spirit; full of a devotion the purest, a faith that pierced to heaven itself, a love that cast out all fear and slothfulness, no one could listen and not be better for the listening. He put old truths in new lights, and gave to the familiar Gospel story a vivid interest, that often reading had made tame and unimpressive. He brought distinctly before the imagination the Samaritan village, through which the Saviour was passing on his way to Jerusalem; the sad company of leprous men, cut off from the sympathy and society of their fellows, who attracted his notice. That they "stood afar off," not daring to approach him, was no obstacle to him; no distance could put them beyond the pity of that watchful eye, beyond the attention of that ear, ever open to the prayers of his people. They were marked, miserable, suffering men, and as such they cried with all their hearts and humbly, "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!" It was their one chance for restoration to home and kindred, no doubt they cried with all their hearts. They were considered beyond the reach of human aid; no doubt they cried humbly. And He "who hath never failed them that seek Him," had mercy on them and heard their cry and helped them. Sending them simply and unostentatiously to the ordained means of cure and cleansing, they, obeying eagerly and unquestioningly, were cured and cleansed. On their way to the priests, the hated disease left the bodies it had so long degraded and afflicted, and with the glow of returning health, they felt they were men once more, men without a curse and a reproach upon them. And with returning health came the pride, the self reliance that had been only slumbering, not dead, under the weight of the punishment laid on them. Without a thought of Him to whom they owed the power to do it, they hurried forward, one perhaps to his farm, another to his merchandise, long denied, absent, but unforgotten idols. Among the crowd, but one remembered to be thankful, but one returned to give glory to God. And he was a Samaritan, but another name to Jewish ears, for infamy and contempt. No doubt he had been in a good school to learn humility among these proud Jews, who, even in their degradation, had probably never forgotten to revile and to persecute. And on him alone, of all the ten, rested the blessing and commendation, beside which the bodily cure was but a paltry gift. These things were written for our admonition; they had called for mercy in their extremity, they had been heard and their prayer granted, and they had forgotten whence came the mercy, and had used it only to harden themselves in worldliness and sin. Had this case no parallel in Christian times? Was Jewish ingratitude the last that had been offered to Divine love? Were there none, among the Congregation of Christ's flock, who in time of peril and temptation, had with all their hearts and humbly cried for mercy, which when sent they had forgotten to be thankful for? The vows made in a time of terror and despair, fade in the sunshine of returning prosperity, the blessing is used, the Giver is forgotten. Must not such a sin look black to Him who is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity? Will it not provoke Him more surely than any other, to leave the ingrate forever to the idols of his choice, to let him see, when next comes peril and perplexity, how worthless and how frail they are, and how fearful a thing it is, to forfeit forever the protection of a God that can save. If any such there were, let them repent while there was yet time, let them wash out the ingratitude that stained their souls, with penitential tears, and purify themselves with prayer and fast, and daily self-denial. Let them remember that mercy was not yet withdrawn, that a period was not yet put to His forgiveness; but how near the time might be, how short the term of their probation, none could tell, not even the angels in heaven. Ah! I thought, as we passed out of church, If I could always come to this little church, and hear Mr. Shenstone preach, there would not be much danger of my caring more than I ought for that wicked world Mr. Rutledge talks about. I had not yet learned that there is not much merit in doing well when there is no temptation to do evil, and that, though there was no harm, but great propriety, in wishing to be kept away from all chance of temptation, still, if my station in life lay in the world, the safest prayer would be, not to be taken out of the world, but to be kept from the evil. In the afternoon, I went to church alone, and this time on foot, Kitty pointing me out a path across the fields that shortened the distance very considerably. I recognized Mrs. Roberts in the pew in front of me; and began to feel somewhat ashamed of my unreasonable aversion, as I caught sight of tears on her wrinkled cheeks, and heard a slight trembling in her usually harsh voice. Who knows, I thought, how much she may have suffered, and what heavy cares may have worn those wrinkles so deep, and made her so harsh and exacting? I really determined to be more charitable and patient, and that very evening, by way of bringing good desires to good effects, I went softly to Mrs. Roberts' door and knocked. Now it was one thing to feel the beauty and power of Christian charity and forbearance, under the influence of Mr. Shenstone's earnest voice, and in the solemn stillness of the dusky church, and another to realize it brought down to fact, before the door of Mrs. Roberts' sitting-room, and under the influence of her grim "come in." My courage was beginning to fail, and I felt tempted to make a precipitate retreat, letting the good resolutions evaporate as good resolutions too often do, in pretty sentiment. But remembering how very contrary this was to Mr. Shenstone's practical directions, after a moment's hesitation, I opened the door and entered. Mrs. Roberts was sitting by a small table with a small lamp upon it, reading a Bible, which, upon my entrance, she shuffled away, very much as if she were ashamed to be caught at it; then turned toward me with a look of surprise that was anything but agreeable. She could not avoid asking me to sit down, which I did, slipping into the first chair I reached, and stammering out something about thinking she was lonely, and that she might be glad of company for a little while. She stiffly replied she was too much used to being alone, to mind it at all, and thereupon ensued an awkward silence. The mahogany and haircloth looked dismaller than ever by the feeble light of the little lamp, and Mrs. Roberts' face looked colder and harder. How I wished myself out again! What possible good could my coming do? What could I talk about? Mrs. Roberts did not make any attempt to relieve my embarrassment, but sat rigidly silent, wondering, in her heart, I knew, what brought me. I at last hit upon what seemed an unexceptionable topic, and said, what a nice day it had been. Rather warm for the season, it had appeared to Mrs. Roberts. Then I rung the changes upon the lateness of the fall, the beauty of the woods, my admiration for the little church, the goodness of Mr. Shenstone, but all without producing the slightest unbending in my auditor. She simply assented or dissented (always the latter, I thought, when she conscientiously could), and beyond it I could not get. By and by, I said quite warmly, feeling sure that I should strike the right chord this time: "What a fine old place this is! I like it better every day." She gave me a quick, suspicious look, and replied quite snappishly: "I shouldn't think it would be very pleasant to a young lady of your age." "What does she mean by being so cross about it?" I pondered. "Is she afraid I am going to put it in my pocket and carry it away with me when I go. Really I think I've done my duty; she won't let me be kind, and now I can, without any scruple, say good night." As I rose to go, my eye fell on a book on the table, the title of which I stooped to read. "Ah!" I cried, "'Holy Living and Dying;' how familiar it looks!" And with a mist of tears before my eyes, I turned over its well-remembered pages. Rutledge, Mrs. Roberts, were all faded away, and I was in a dim sick-room, where, on a little table by the bed a Bible and Prayer-book and Taylor's "Holy Living and Dying," had lain day after day, and week after week, the guides and comforters of a dying saint. Again I was a child, half frightened at I knew not what, in that tranquil room, half soothed by the placid smile that always met me there. Again the choking sensation rose in my throat, the nameless terror subdued me, as when longing to do something loving, I had read aloud, till my tears blinded me, in this same book. I had never seen it since then; since I had been away at school; but those five years of exile were swept away at a breath as I opened it. I sat down, and, shading my eyes with my hand, glanced over paragraphs that I knew word for word, and that made my heart ache to recall. After a while, however, the bitterness of the first recognition passed away, and it became a sort of sad pleasure to read what brought back so vividly the love and grief of my childhood. "Shall I read aloud to you?" I said, looking up. "I shall be very glad to hear you," she answered, in a softened tone. I do not know whether she divined the cause of my unsteady voice, but it is not unlikely that she did, or the book may have had some similar association for herself, for after I had read nearly an hour, and closed it, she said, with a voice not over firm: "I am very much obliged to you, young lady; that is a book that, for whatever cause we read it, is good for young and old." "I shall be very glad to read in it again to you whenever you would like to hear me, Mrs. Roberts," I said, as I rose to go. She accompanied me to the door, and held the light till I had crossed the hall to my own room. If I had not done her any good by the effort I had made, at least I had done some to myself. CHAPTER VII. "He that knows better how to tame a shrew, Now let him speak; 'tis charity to shew." It was a lovely afternoon, milder than November often vouchsafes, and perfectly clear. The sun was pretty low, and its slanting beams lighted the smooth lake and threw long shadows across the lawn and over the garden, through the winding paths of which I was now sauntering. The last two days having been marked by no improvement in Mr. Rutledge, he had, of course, not been out of his room, and I had been left pretty much to myself, and had improved the time in perfecting my knowledge of the out-door attractions of the place, and from stable to garden, I now knew it thoroughly. Delightful days those were, saving the occurrence of a little loneliness and ennui that would creep over me as evening approached; delightful days, when, without a thought of care for present or future, I wandered unchecked over the loveliest spot I had as yet seen. A long avenue led from the house to the gate; the lawn on the right sloped down to the lake, a lovely sheet of water surrounded on three sides by woods; and around as far as the eye could reach, stretched wide fields, rich with cultivation, and woodlands where one could almost fancy the axe had never resounded. Further, however, than the gate, and the lake, and the boundaries of the lawn, I had never dared to venture. Dared, though, is not exactly the term; for if I had even thought of the word in that connection, I should probably have gone miles in an opposite direction, to prove that, as to that, I _dared_ go anywhere. But I had a sort of chivalrous respect for what I was certain would be the wishes of my protector, now _hors de combat_, and determined, therefore, to stay within the grounds. Which were ample enough to satisfy any reasonable young person, certainly, and picturesque enough, and well kept enough for the most fastidious. That particular afternoon, as the declining sun lighted up the dark massive house, and the fine old trees, nearly bare though they were, and the winding paths of the garden and broad fields beyond, Rutledge seemed to me the realization of all I had ever dreamed or read, of beauty and of stateliness. I walked slowly down the garden; the faint smell of some lingering grapes on the arbor overhead perfumed the air; the dead leaves rustled under my feet, alone breaking the stillness peculiar to an autumn afternoon, unprofaned by the many murmurs of insect-life, or the animating song of summer bird. You might listen for hours, and a nut dropping off the tree among the dry leaves, or the tinkling of a cow-bell, acres off across the fields, or the letting down a pair of bars somewhere about the farm, would be all the sounds that would break the serene silence. But just when I was speculating on this, I heard another and a very distinct sound, and looking whence it proceeded, discovered it to be the shutting of the hall door, and presently some one descended the steps and walked leisurely toward the garden. "Hurrah!" I exclaimed aloud, "it's Mr. Rutledge!" And I ran down the path, followed closely by a little terrier, who had introduced himself to my notice at the barn, and not being unfavorably received, had attended my movements ever since. It was not till I was within a few yards of Mr. Rutledge, that the recollection of that unlucky "hero" business brought me to a sudden stand-still, and took all the cordiality out of my greeting. He had seen me coming, and was waiting for me, evidently, however, somewhat at a loss to account for my sudden shyness, putting it down, it is probable, though, to the score of childishness and folly along with the rest of my shortcomings and absurdities. "I see," he said, extending his hand, "that you've been getting better as industriously as I have been getting worse. You begin to look quite like the little girl I brought away from St. Catharine's." "I am as well as possible, sir. How is your arm?" "It isn't _my_ arm! it is Doctor Sartain's. I don't take any of the responsibility of it. I do not think, however, it could possibly be much worse, as far as I can be supposed to judge." He spoke lightly, but I perceived in a moment that he was looking very much paler than when I had last seen him. "Ought you to be out, sir, if you still suffer from it?" "I suppose not," he answered, as we walked slowly down the path; "but to tell you the truth, I was tired of the house, and _coûte qui coûte_, determined to get a breath of fresh air." I couldn't help remembering a certain scene in the library not many days ago, and giving him rather a wicked look, made him remember it too. "I had nobody, however, you see, to make me stay in and by showing a little firmness at the risk of putting me in a bad temper, keep me from doing an imprudent thing." "I should have supposed, sir, that Mrs. Roberts would have been in her element on such an occasion. I thought she always adopted the opposition ticket." "By the way," he said, laughing, "how do you and Mrs. Roberts get on? You weren't very much charmed with her at first sight, were you?" "I do not adore her yet, sir, but I don't think she's quite as dreadful as I did." "You thought, poor child," he continued in the same tone, "that you were in a dreary prison. Absurd as it was, I could not help feeling dreadfully sorry for you; and ought to feel so yet, I suppose, only I've had no time lately to feel sorry for anybody but myself." "Indeed, sir, I think you are the fittest subject," I said a little nettled. "I am as contented as possible, and shouldn't mind staying here a year." "You like Rutledge, then?" "Yes," I returned, "but I hardly dare say so, after the way in which Mrs. Roberts snapped me up about it the other night." "How was that," he asked, with some curiosity. I related the peculiar manner in which she had received my admiration of it, and ended by asking him if he could imagine what was the cause of it. "Oh," he said, carelessly, "you must not mind what she says, and make all excuses for her. She has had a great deal of trouble, and is naturally of a nervous and irritable disposition, and living here alone has increased all her peculiarities in a very great degree." "In a very uncomfortable degree," I said; and Mr. Rutledge was continuing, when his further remarks were cut short by the desertion of two of the party, to wit, the terrier and myself. Now I had no intention of being rude, but looking down at that moment, I discovered that Tigre had possessed himself of one of my gloves, and was gnawing and shaking it with unspeakable _goût_. I made a motion to take it from him, whereon the rascal darted away down the path, then paused an instant, and before I could reach him, was away again toward the barn. I could not surrender so, and forgetting everything but the chase, tore after him at the top of my speed. To see the way in which that little object "streaked" along, looking back at me out of the corners of his eyes! Four legs naturally get over the ground faster than two, and Tigre had the start of me besides, but I had graduated in running at St. Catharine's, and was not to be beaten by such an antagonist as this. It was a steeple chase of no unexciting character. "We staid not for brake, and we stopped not for stone." A ditch intervened, but proved no obstacle, and on we tore, till we reached the low fence that separated the grounds from the outbuildings. Tigre shot under it--I took it at a flying-leap. He was making for the barn, and once there, he would baffle me; some favorite hole or inaccessible cranny would shelter him from my pursuit, and hide forever from human gaze my ill-fated glove. This goading thought sustained my flagging energy in the same proportion that the nearness of the goal reanimated that of Tigre. On, on, with desperate resolve! Stephen leaned on his spade to witness the issue of the race, Michael paused, the currycomb in his suspended hand, to see the result; and both involuntarily ejaculated, "Pretty well done!" as on the very threshold of the barn, I sprang upon my opponent and wrested the glove from his determined teeth! And in a frantic romp, we rolled together over and over on the hay, Tigre's active paws and nose in my very face, his excitement carrying him beyond all bounds of decorum, and mine, alas! making me as forgetful of all proprieties; till an approaching footstep recalled me to my senses. Throwing down Tigre, I sprang up, and hastily shaking the hay from my dress, and pushing back my disordered hair, prepared myself for the lecture I knew I deserved, and "cut and dried" a very impertinent rejoinder. I might have saved myself the trouble; Mr. Rutledge did not take any more notice of me than if I had been Tigre's four-legged and shaggy compatriot. Passing through the barn, he called up one of the men, and gave him orders about the storing of some grain; sent for another upon the question of supplies; talked with Stephen about the state of the grape-vines; with Michael about the condition of the colts; inspected the poultry-yard; pronounced upon the cattle; equally a connoisseur, and thoroughly at home on every point. During this time, I leaned thoughtfully against the barn door, and reviewed my own conduct, and that of Mr. Rutledge. Of course, I had been unladylike and all that--I knew it as well as anybody; but then, I was old enough to do as I liked, and who had a right to reprove me? Well, nobody _had_ reproved me. But then, I knew just as well what he thought of me; I knew he considered me rude, disrespectful, childish; and it would have been ten times less hateful of him to have been angry and done with it, than to have taken no notice of me in any way, just as if he had at once dropped me out of his esteem, consideration and recollection altogether. Angry, humbled, but rebellious, I lingered a long while near him, with a hope that he would say something that I could resent, but no such chance was afforded me. Mr. Rutledge's whole mind was given to his business; and sullenly enough, I called to Tigre and turned toward the house. It was unlucky that I did not know how to whistle--I longed to whistle a tune, and put my hands in my pockets with a jaunty and defiant air as I passed Mr. Rutledge on my way to the house. As it was, I was obliged to content myself with the significant attitude alone, that was meant to convey tones of don't-care sauciness and indifference. I did not feel at all like going indoors when I reached the house, though it was growing dark very rapidly; and with Tigre at my heels, paced for a long while up and down the stone walk before the steps of the piazza. The sound of Mr. Rutledge's approaching footsteps, far from checking my walk, quickened it considerably, and calling to Tigre, just as he reached the terrace, I started at a brisk pace down the avenue. Mr. Rutledge stopped and called me; I went on, pretending not to hear. He called again, and this time there was no avoiding it. I turned sharply round and said: "Did you speak, sir?" "It is too late for you to be out; you will take cold." "I am not afraid, sir, I shall soon be in;" and I turned away. "But it is too late," repeated Mr. Rutledge, in a voice I could not mistake. "You must excuse my interference, but I should prefer your coming in now." I looked down the avenue, the moon was just rising, though day had not quite faded in the west; I wondered what would be the result if I dared rebel; I almost determined I would. But I glanced toward the house; Mr. Rutledge stood holding the door open for me with a resolute quietness that made resistance impossible. With a bad enough grace I turned back, ran up the steps, and passed through the doorway without raising my eyes, and never stopped till I had gained the second story, and locked myself into my own room. Most bitter and most extravagant tears I shed of course, very angry and very implacable resolves I made; and finished off by a violent fit of contrition and humility under the influence of which I started to my feet, and remembering that it was long past tea-time, hastily smoothed my hair, and followed by my little favorite, ran quickly down the stairs and paused a moment at the library door. All contrition, I half opened it, and looking in, with a most April-like face, whereon smiles and tears contended, said humbly: "May Tigre and I come in, sir?" Mr. Rutledge sat reading by the fire; tea was on the table. He looked up a moment, then resumed his book. "Without doubt; tea is waiting." I came up to the fire, and stood leaning against the mantelpiece. If he would only look up, and not be so hopelessly cold and indifferent! My penitent speeches fled at the sight; I could never tell him how ashamed and sorry I felt, while he looked so. He did not look any otherwise, however, all through the uncomfortable meal, that I thought never meant to end; nor during the uncomfortable hours that succeeded the uncomfortable meal, that seemed to stretch out, like a clown's leg, indefinitely and interminably. I had time to realize and become very well acquainted with the fact, that I had forfeited the newly-acquired position of companion, and had sunk to the capricious child again. He had just begun to treat me like a reasonable creature, and to talk to me for something besides the kindness of amusing me, and now by my own folly, I had made an end to all this, and compelled him to see in me nothing but childishness and self-will. Mr. Rutledge, after tea, had taken up his book again, and pushed across the table to me some new reviews that had come that day, saying, perhaps I might find something amusing in them. That meant I was to amuse myself. That meant there was to be no talking, no reading aloud, no dictating of letters. "It's all Tigre's fault, the little villain!" I ejaculated, mentally, pushing him angrily down from my lap, as I took up the literature assigned me. The discarded favorite uttered a low whine, looked pleadingly up in my angry face, then walked over to his master, and putting his paws on the arm of his chair, wagged his tail, and looked imploringly for permission to spring up. But an impatient "Off, sir!" made him withdraw abashed, and, standing on the rug between us, he gazed wonderingly from one to the other. If it had not been for the precedent of "the dog in the manger," and the proverbial comparison of all cross people to "Hall's dog," I should have been certain that such scenes were entirely new to Tigre, and that in the bosom of his family bad tempers were unknown. As it was, he looked very much mystified and considerably shocked; and at length concluded to lie down where he was, at an equal distance from both antagonists, to whose movements, however, he lent an attentive eye and ear. But there was not much to repay his watchfulness; for beyond an occasional symptom of fatigue on my part, and the periodical turning of the leaves of Mr. Rutledge's book, dire and entire quiet reigned. At last, at half past nine, I sprang up, determined to put an end to such an evening; and with a firm resolution not to say more than the one necessary word, "good night," I looked furtively toward my companion. He had closed the book, and leaning his face on his hand sat looking into the fire. Just so he had looked the other night when I had felt so sorry for him; and perhaps I felt the least bit sorry now. To my good night, he replied, carelessly, "Good night;" then, looking up at the clock, said: "It is early yet." "But I am very tired," and I moved toward the door. "I forgot to ask you, sir," I said, turning back, "whether you had any letters you would like to have answered?" "No, thank you; none of any importance. You need not stay." Contrition, pity, good resolutions, etc., all rushed over me; making three steps back into the room, and swallowing down the rebellious pride and temper, I came out with-- "If I am a child, sir, I am old enough to know when I have done wrong, and not too old to be willing to acknowledge it. I am very well aware that I have been rude and disrespectful to you, and I hope you will have the goodness to excuse it." He looked at me for a moment with a puzzled air, as if he had not quite expected the sudden humiliation; though I am not sure that my attitude implied so much of humiliation as it did of determined conscientiousness. After a moment's quiet scrutiny, which I bore unflinchingly, he said: "I am not quite sure that I understand to what you allude, nor how I come to be entitled to pass judgment on your conduct. Pray explain." The blood mounted to my temples as I answered: "I acknowledged my faults to you, because they were committed against you; because to you I owed respect, attention, and courtesy, which I failed to show. I owed this to you as my elder, my host, and the person who, in a manner, had charge of me." "You seem to have analyzed your duty pretty thoroughly, I must acknowledge! You have stricter views of duty than most persons of your age." "I don't resent the sarcasm, sir; I know it is well merited." "I did not intend it sarcastically. I say again you have shown a habit of mind, that, if persevered in, will lead you to a high standard of excellence." "My failures in duty, since I came here, sir, have been too conspicuous to let me understand you literally." "You judge yourself severely; I cannot recall any very flagrant offences." "They would not," I said, as steadily as I could, "be likely to make the same impression on you as on me; with me they were matters of conscience; with you they were, I hope, only occasion of momentary surprise, or better, of indifference and inattention." "On the contrary," said Mr. Rutledge, "I have watched you attentively since you came here, and have taken quite a strong interest in all you have said and done." "You are kind," I exclaimed, nettled more at the tone than the words. "Then I shall have to be doubly careful while I have the honor to be under your eye." He went on, as if he had not heard me: "It has appeared to me that you are in most respects"---- "I must beg," I exclaimed, with an impatient gesture, "that you will defer your summary till I am in a better frame of mind to bear it. Just now, it wouldn't be as profitable as you, no doubt, desire to make it." "I should be sorry," he replied, "to spoil the humility you have taken such pains to get in order for the occasion, and will not say a word to interfere with it." "Do you know humility when you see it, sir?" I could not help saying under my breath. "I learned a good deal about it when I was young," he answered, "and thought, till I came to years of discretion, that I knew all that could be taught in regard to it. But I have since discovered that there is more spurious coin bearing that stamp than almost any other; false pride, wounded vanity, morbid self-love, all get themselves up under the title of humility, and pass current very readily." I bowed. "Wounded vanity fits me, I think. May I retire, sir, if you have nothing further to say?" "But I have," he exclaimed, suddenly changing his tone. "I have a great deal more to say." And, taking my hand, he drew me down into the chair beside him, and looking at me with a mixture of kindness and mirth, he said: "So you are beginning to feel ashamed of yourself, are you? You are such an absurd child, it is impossible to be angry with you, or tired of you, for you are never two minutes alike. Upon my word you're quite a study!" He did not let go my hand, and though I turned my face away, I could not escape his eyes. "The uncertain glory of an April day," he exclaimed. "Why, a minute ago you were angry, then you were pleased, now you are frightened, and I suppose you will wind up with a burst of tears. How is one to take you?" For this style of lecture I had not any retort ready, so I only hung my head, and was silent. "One moment you are a woman, intelligent and sensible, the next a pettish child. One day you show a sympathy, a tact, a depth of feeling, that go to one's very heart; the next, capricious, silly, and childish, you destroy it all. Sometimes you amuse yourself with Tigre, sometimes with me. And," he continued, after a pause, "sometimes you talk too much, and sometimes, as at present, for instance, too little. Well?" he went on, interrogatively, having elicited no reply. "Well? Have you nothing to say for yourself? Then go!" he exclaimed, throwing my hand from him. "I am tired of you; you've been one thing too long; you've been silent exactly two minutes." I got up very quickly, and retreated toward the door. "What?" said Mr. Rutledge, rising and standing by the fire. "You are going? Why, we have but just made up." "I am not quite positive that we have," I answered, lighting my candle. "It's rather a one-sided make-up, it strikes me." "How so? You surely haven't any complaint to make of me, after all my unexampled goodness to you?" "Of course not!" I exclaimed; "nothing to say about your treating me like a baby, and expecting me to behave like a woman, making me talk to make you laugh, and putting my French and my temper to the hardest tests you could think of; and then, after I've vexed you by a little inattention, pushing me aside, as if I weren't capable of understanding a reproof, and turning your back on me for a whole evening. _I_ have nothing to complain of, of course! Good night, sir." "Stay a moment! You take away my breath with all that catalogue. _I_ tease you! _I_ laugh at you! Impossible!" "So I said, sir; and now, if you please, good night." "Ah! I see I must get you away to your aunt; I shall spoil you if I keep you here much longer. You are getting very saucy; Miss Crowen wouldn't own you." "I am afraid you are right there," I said, with a little sigh; "I don't think I am improving very much." "Well, then," he said, seriously, "suppose we determine to do better for the future, and instead of trifling and teasing, be good sensible friends. Will that suit you?" "I think it would be about as one-sided a friendship as the reconciliation was." "Why? Are you not willing to be my friend?" "Of course I am; but friendship implies equality, and all that sort of thing, and the power to help each other. Now, you know the absurdity of my being your friend, as well as I know it, and you are laughing at me." "Do I look as if I were laughing at you?" And indeed he did not. "Well, but," I continued, "you know perfectly well I like you, and would do anything in the world to serve you, but that cannot make up for my inability to do it, you see." "You can do a great deal to help me," he answered. "There are a hundred ways in which you can prove yourself my friend." I laughed incredulously. "You doubt it?" he said. "Listen, little girl. I have not many friends. I do not choose to believe in many people. I choose to believe in you; therefore you can do me a kindness by keeping alive in my heart a little faith in human nature. I have many cares to harass me in the present; much that is sad to remember of the past. By your youth and cheerfulness you can brighten the one; by your gentleness and sympathy you can soothe the recollections of the other. Youth is gone from me forever, but you can be the link between it and me, and keep it in sight a little longer. You can show me what I once was, earnest, hopeful, and trusting, and so keep me from forgetting what I should be. Above all, you can be honest, and never deceive me; and faithful, and never withdraw from your allegiance. This is what you can do for me: now, what can I do for you?" I tried to speak, but the words wouldn't come, so he helped me to them. "You find it difficult to enumerate my duties? Something like this, perhaps, is what you will require of me. I must be careful not to wound the sensitiveness of one naturally much more susceptible to unkindness than myself. I must bear patiently with childish faults, and not forget the indulgence due to youth. I must be just and unflattering, and when my maturer judgment suggests amendment, it is my duty, is it not, to point it out? For having been over the same ground that you are to travel, I can give you many hints that will make your path an easier one, if you will but receive them. And finally, I am to have your interest always at heart, and to observe the same faith and truthfulness toward you that I expect you to maintain toward me. Will you subscribe to that? Is it what you would require of me?" "Yes, that is fair, I think." "Well, then, give me your hand upon it, and remember the compact is sealed; we are friends henceforth! Stay, what shall we have as a reminder of this promise? Some pledge, some security is necessary, for we might forget, in the lapse of years, you know." He went up to an escritoire in a distant corner of the room, and unlocking it, took from a secret drawer two or three little boxes, and from these selecting one, replaced the others, turned the key, and came back to the table. The box contained a bracelet of curious foreign coins, handsomely mounted--a very unique and elegant ornament. This Mr. Rutledge proceeded to fit around my wrist, and with my assistance (having the use of only one hand) clasped. "Are you willing to wear it always," he said, "_in memoriam_?" "Yes." "Well, then good bye to liberty!" and he turned a tiny gold key that I had not noticed in the clasp, and took it out. I must confess to a feeling not unlike bondage when the lock was snapped and the key withdrawn; and involuntarily exclaimed: "But what if I want to take it off?" "You must not want to, the thing is irrevocable," he said coolly, fastening the key upon his watch-chain, "help me with this. I have but one hand, you know." "I don't altogether like the idea," I said obeying him nevertheless, and arranging the little key on his chain. "You should have thought of that before," he said with a laugh. "It is too late to retract. You may well look serious," he continued noticing my expression. "You forgot, when you made it, what a solemn thing a promise was; but now you'll have something to remind you of its weight, and of the impossibility of getting rid of it. There's no danger now that you'll forget you promised to be my friend; you are bound, irrevocably, solemnly, forever!" "I thought you weren't to tease," I exclaimed shaking my arm. "It's a very pretty thing, but I shall hate it if I feel that I must wear it always, and that I can't take it off when I want to." "That's exactly what I meant to guard against. If you could take it off whenever you were tired of it, you would of course soon throw it aside, and there would be an end of compact, friendship and all. I hope you know me better than to suppose I would be satisfied with such an arrangement! _Now_, no matter how many little obstacles in the way of oceans, mountains, and other imbecile contrivances of Nature for the separation of friends, intervene, I shall feel as if I had a check upon your conduct, a guardian of my place in your affections that will make me quite easy about it. For you know of course, the legends that are related of such gifts. I hope you are not superstitious, but you remember the power attributed to them; how such a pledge will surely take the giver's part, and grow tighter and tighter till the pain is unendurable should the wearer, in her inmost heart, harbor a thought of treachery or faithlessness." "I suppose, sir, having my arm amputated in case I changed my mind, would free me from the obligation of wearing it, would it not?" Mr. Rutledge shook his head gravely. "I am not of the opinion that it would; but I hope we shall not have to proceed to any such extreme measures." "Oh, it's my left arm, I shouldn't mind very much. You manage so well with one, that I should feel encouraged by your example, if my handcuff should grow too unbearable." "Still there are advantages in possessing the use of both, that I would not advise you to give up unnecessarily. For instance, if you wanted a cigar from the case on the top of that étagère, which cannot be reached down without two hands, your temper would be severely tried in having to ring for Thomas to get it for you, or having to depend upon the uncertain charity of a most capricious friend who might or might not, be in the humor to serve you." "But I shouldn't be likely to want a cigar," I said as standing in a chair I lifted down the case, and took out one. "There are matches on the mantelpiece," he said nonchalantly as I handed it to him. I brought the matches, drew one, and held it for him, as he lit his cigar. "Anything more sir?" "Nothing but the evening paper, which you interrupted me in reading, half an hour ago." "I beg your pardon, sir, but you haven't had a paper in your hand since tea," I said, hunting among the piles of books and papers on the table for it. "Here it is. Good night." "Doesn't common kindness suggest your staying to read it for me." "No sir, it hasn't suggested it as yet," I replied as I took up my long neglected candle. "It suggests 'good-night,' sir," and the door closed between us before he could answer. The moon was making my room so bright, that I soon put out the candle as superfluous, and wrapping my dressing gown about me, sat in the bay window for a long, long while, watching the soft shadows on the lawn, and the silvery smoothness of the lake. Ah! how hateful it would be to leave this quiet place, and go among strangers again! The idea of city life had never been altogether attractive, but now seemed most distasteful. Altogether, my new home in New York did not to-night attract my errant fancy, neither did the old school life draw it back regretfully, from a Present so sufficing that I did not ask myself why it was better than Past or Future; nor why my fancy, usually so eager on the wing, should lie so contentedly in so calm a nest. CHAPTER VIII. "Be good, sweet child, and let who will be clever, Do noble things, not dream them, all day long So shalt thou make life, death, and that vast forever, One grand, sweet song." KINGSLEY. "No one who aspires to the honor of writing my letters," said Mr. Rutledge, as I entered the breakfast-room, "can indulge in such late hours as these. Twenty minutes to eight, Mademoiselle, and the mail goes at ten. You are getting in shocking habits." "Why sir!" I exclaimed, "I've been up two hours at least." "And what have you been doing all that time, I should like to be informed?" "I've been to the barn and fed the kittens, and to the stable and fed the dogs; and then I went to the garden for some flowers, but the frost had been there before me and there wasn't one worth pulling. So to get warm (it's very chilly out this morning) I ran down the avenue, and across to the chestnut wood, and so home by the lake. And here are all the chestnuts those rascally village boys have left!" I exclaimed, throwing a couple of handfuls on the table. "I do wonder, sir, you allow them to commit such trespasses, so near the house too. I would keep at least that grove for my own use. I never saw finer trees, and a week ago they were loaded, Stephen says. Yesterday morning there were two boys up threshing one of the largest trees; I heard them, just as I came under it; the nuts were falling down nicely, so I began to pick them up as unconcernedly as possible, and got my pockets and apron full, while the young vagabonds up in the tree didn't dare, of course, to breathe, for fear of being discovered and had to see me carrying off their precious nuts without a word. I didn't leave a shell, I assure you; I never enjoyed anything more and went down this morning in hope of another adventure." "I hope," said Mr. Rutledge very seriously, "that you will never do such an imprudent thing again. You should never go into the woods without taking Kitty with you, least of all, when there are such marauders about." "I took Solo and Dash with me, and I would have kept them up there till noon, if I had caught them at it again, the rascals." "You are very thoughtless, not to be aware of the danger of provoking such lawless fellows." "I cannot see the danger; not half a mile from the house, and with two great dogs to back me. And 'if the worst came to the worst,' I know I could outrun the longest-legged loafer among them." The words were hardly out of my mouth, when I remembered that this latter accomplishment had not appeared to win me any favor from Mr. Rutledge in the unlucky affair of the glove yesterday; and, with a blush, I hastily, by way of effacing the impression, continued: "But if you don't approve, of course I will not do so again; and when Kitty can't be spared to go with me, I will stay nearer the house." "Kitty always can be spared, and though I am sorry to insist upon your taking her, I shall be much better satisfied to know you are not alone." "Very well, sir. May I trouble you for another biscuit?" "You have a fine color this morning. Rutledge agrees with you." "Famously," I replied, applying myself with great satisfaction to my breakfast; "and as I have so much to do before ten o'clock, there's no time to lose." "Not a minute; but I should be uncomfortable to think you were starved; don't hurry so frantically." "There! I'm ready now," I exclaimed, in a few minutes following him into the library with a light step, and singing snatches of a gay tune. "I see you do not dread work," he said, as I sat down before the writing-table, and took up a pen with alacrity. "Not when I can see daylight through it, sir, and a reasonable prospect ahead of getting it done. Now, sir." And Mr. Rutledge dictated, and I wrote for an hour, without the slightest intermission. At the end of that time he said: "Do you think you are equal to the task of answering those two letters by yourself, of which I will give you a general idea, while I look over those accounts with Maurice and Ruthven, to be added to the New Orleans letter? It is important that they should all be dispatched to-day." "If you are willing to trust me, I am willing to try." And I immediately began the task. It was by no means an easy one; but by referring to the letters to be answered, and by keeping before my mind the synopsis Mr. Rutledge had briefly given me, I was able to finish them to his satisfaction; added the memoranda he had been making to the other letter, sealed and addressed them all, and had the package ready for Michael when he appeared at the door at ten o'clock. "You have worked pretty well for two hours," said Mr. Rutledge, as for a moment I leaned my head on my hand. "I am afraid you are tired." "Not in the least," I said bravely, looking up. "Then get your bonnet and come out with me. It is too fine a day to stay in the house." As I followed him through the hall, Mrs. Roberts encountered us at the dining-room door. Her greeting to me was stiffer than ever. To Mr. Rutledge she said: "If you can spare the time, sir, you would oblige me very much by looking over the 'household expenses' this morning; Dorothy has got her account with the grocer in a great snarl, and hasn't done much better with the butcher, and I can't make them all come out right." "My good friend," said Mr. Rutledge, "if you had appealed to me any other time, I might have helped you, but I have been doing quite as much this morning as I think prudent; to-morrow I will attend to the books." "I am sorry," said Mrs. Roberts, uneasily; "but to-day is the day the grocer brings in his account, and I don't like those sort of people to suppose there's any irregularity in the accounts we keep. They're always ready enough to take advantage." "Couldn't I help you, Mrs. Roberts?" I asked. "I should be very willing to." She gave me a look which plainly said, "_You_ help _me!_" but she merely answered: "Thank you, Miss, but Mr. Rutledge understands the books better than any one; and if he felt able"---- "But he doesn't," said the gentleman in question. "The grocer can come to-morrow with his bill. It will not signify for once." Still Mrs. Roberts demurred, and I saw there would be no peace till she worried Mr. Rutledge into it, so I renewed my offer of assistance. This time it seemed to strike her in a more favorable light. "If I didn't mind the trouble, perhaps I might help her reckon it up. She wasn't as quick at figures as she used to be." I would do my best, I said, untying my bonnet. But Mr. Rutledge peremptorily interfered. "By no means, Mrs. Roberts. She has been writing two hours already for me; she must have nothing more at present," and he walked on toward the door. But the housekeeper was by no means vanquished, and clung tenaciously to my offer. She was sure, she said, the young lady would be glad to oblige an old woman. And duty so plainly pointed that way, that I wavered no longer. I had made up my mind to be kind to Mrs. Roberts; here was the chance to carry my good resolutions into effect. Throwing my bonnet into a chair, I said: "If you will excuse me from walking with you, Mr. Rutledge, I will see what I can do to help Mrs. Roberts." "I cannot excuse you," he replied, with decision. "I do not think it best for you to be confined to the house any longer at present." "Oh," I exclaimed, while Mrs. Roberts looked on anxiously, "I have been used to studying and writing nine hours out of the twenty-four at school, and this morning's business has been mere play. I shall not think of feeling tired for hours yet, so please do not make any objections. Come, Mrs. Roberts," I continued, going toward the stairs, and giving her a little nod. She hesitated, and I saw her glance uneasily at Mr. Rutledge. I now perceived that he was more than vexed; but I was strong enough to dare even that, when I was as certain as I now was about what I ought to do. He naturally, I thought, didn't like to have his wishes interfered with; but that could not alter the right for me, "and he cannot help but see that when he thinks it over." So again summoning Mrs. Roberts, I excused myself to him, and ran upstairs, followed lumberingly by the housekeeper, while the hall door closed, with no gentle emphasis, between us and the sunny autumn morning. I am only doing Mrs. Roberts justice, when I say that on that particular occasion, she manifested diplomatic talents, which, in another sphere of life, would have won her no inconsiderable place. I had not given her credit for the tact and acuteness that developed themselves that morning, and which, added to her well-known decision and unalterable devotion to the one idea that happened to be uppermost, formed the elements of a character I had not sufficiently looked up to. This, of course, I did not appreciate at first, and went at my task with the kindest desire to get Mrs. Roberts out of her perplexity, and unravel the tangled threads of Dorothy's arithmetical inaccuracies. It was the greatest effort of self-denial that I could well have attempted, for besides the heroism required to give up my walk with Mr. Rutledge, on this splendid day, and spending the morning instead with the only person I sincerely disliked in the house, and in the room of all others that I was most averse to, was added my unconquerable detestation of mathematical calculations of all kinds. From the multiplication table up, I held all such exercises in abomination. But Miss Crowen, with her usual discrimination, having detected this weak point in my character, bent her whole mind to the strengthening of it, and night and day, labored to instill into my unwilling brain the rules and methods it was constitutionally unfitted to receive. Other studies were made to bend before it; favorite pursuits were sacrificed to this one object; passionate tears had washed the distracting figures from the hated slate; high tragedy had been enacted before the blackboard, and stormy scenes in the study had only strengthened Miss Crowen in her determination to enforce obedience, and her pupil in resistance to what she looked upon as tyrannical injustice. The result of this continued struggle was, that after nearly five years of drilling in that branch of study, to the exclusion of more congenial pursuits, I left St. Catharine's with about the amount of mathematical knowledge usually acquired by girls of ordinary application in a year and a half. I was too fresh, however, from such exercises, not to be quite competent to master the difficulties presented in the Rutledge "Household Expenses," and before an hour had passed, had reduced the "snarl" to a very comprehensible state, and calling to Mrs. Roberts to come and look over it, I began to explain the errors I had found, and the manner in which I had corrected them, in as lucid language as I could command. But Mrs. Roberts was hopelessly obtuse; she put on her glasses and fumbled among the loose papers on which Dorothy registered her financial transactions, with agonizing bewilderment. In vain I assured her I had copied them off on the book, and they would give her no light on the subject; she could not give them up, and again and again looked them over, and bemoaned Dorothy's inaccuracy and her own stupidity. She hoped I would excuse her, but she could not really get her mind quite clear about that last column; would it be asking too much of me to run it over again aloud. I tried to be patient, and again went over it, and explained the case in all its bearings. I resolutely kept my back to the window, and would, if I could, have forgotten that there was such a thing as sunshine in the world; but, however I may have succeeded in that attempt, I could not help hearing Mr. Rutledge's step on the stone walk outside, as he returned from the direction of the stables; nor could I help being aware that he entered the house, paused a moment in the library, then came upstairs. The fragrance of an Havana penetrating the keyhole, told he had passed this door, and gone into his dressing-room. My fingers flew over the columns; in proportion as my patience diminished Mrs. Roberts' dullness increased; she fretted, she groaned, she bewildered me with questions, and almost crying with vexation, I exclaimed, as I heard the horses coming up from the stable: "Oh, Mrs. Roberts! Won't you please understand! Can't you see the only mistake was in that second figure, and that I've put it all right? Can't you see it balances?" But Mrs. Roberts couldn't see, and her obtuseness redoubled, as Mr. Rutledge's door opened and closed again, and his steps echoed down the staircase and across the hall. I could not help leaning back, and glancing out of the window, while tears of disappointment and vexation rushed to my eyes, as I saw Mr. Rutledge drive off with Michael in the light wagon, and the identical pair of fast trotters that I had made admiring acquaintance with a few days since at the stable. As their hoofs clattered rapidly down the avenue, I could have thrown the account-books at Mrs. Roberts' head, for in truth it began to dawn upon me that that worthy person had had some ends of her own to serve in keeping me so long at the work of elucidation, and that something besides natural dullness of comprehension had been in the way of her understanding my calculations. I began to reflect on the absurdity of supposing that a woman who had for years had the charge of such an establishment as Rutledge, could be in reality so dull and ignorant as she had appeared this morning. There could be no doubt but that she had intended to keep me in the house; for what cause, I could not yet determine. The mists that had obscured her intellect, began now, however, to clear away; and it was not long before she pronounced herself quite satisfied on all points, even on the vexed and tortured question of that "last column," and I was released from my task. I did not doubt the sincerity of Mrs. Roberts' rather meagre thanks, nor the truthfulness of her slight commendation of my patience. It was not in her way to flatter, and I knew that for some cause she distrusted me, and that whatever praise she awarded me, was fairly wrung from her by her stubborn sense of justice. Though I knew Mrs. Roberts had been generalling this morning, there was that about her that forbade my doubting her habitual truthfulness. I merely replied that she was welcome to the assistance I had been able to give her, and with a weary step I left the room. At the door I found Tigre waiting for me with wistful earnestness in his erected ears and attentive eyes. I took him in my arms, and carried him into my own room, where I tried to enter with spirit into the frolic he seemed to desire. But it proved a miserable failure; I could not enjoy that or anything else; my head ached "splittingly," and the sunshine streaming in at the window made it worse, and playing with Tigre made it worse, and reading, writing, thinking, all made it worse. What should I do? I hadn't even the spirit to go out into the fresh air; but, leaning wearily on the dressing-table, counted the heads on my bracelet, and wondered that I could have been so happy this morning. By and by, I summoned sufficient energy to smooth my hair, and bathe my head with eau de Cologne; then, calling Tigre, I concluded to go to the library for a book. I found that apartment rather more endurable than my own just then, as the sun did not come in there at that hour of the morning, and the light was very subdued, and the room was quietness itself; so, taking a book from the table, I arranged the cushions of the sofa alluringly, and motioning Tigre to his place beside me, sat down to reading. It would have been a thrilling book that could have riveted my wandering thoughts that morning; and unluckily the book I had chosen was very far from that stamp; it was a third-rate novel of the highly wrought order, into whose pages characters, incidents, scenes, were crowded in such bewildering profusion, that one's appreciative powers were fagged out and exhausted, before the first chapter was accomplished, and, like a restaurant dinner, where all the dishes taste alike, there was but one flavor to the whole array of dramatis personæ from heroine to _bête noire;_ but "one gravy" for roast, bouilli, and ragout. The wearying tide of adjectives and interjections stunned my senses; the book slipped from my hands, and, leaning my head on the cushions, my eyes closed, and with one arm round Tigre and the other under my head, I slept, realizing even in sleep that the bracelet touched my cheek. The precise duration of my nap I could not tell; but when I awoke, it was to find Mr. Rutledge standing by me, I started up, and he said: "I meant to be angry, but you look so pale and tired I think you are punished enough already. Does your head ache still?" he continued, laying his hand on my shoulder. "You would have done better to have followed my advice. I knew you would repent." "I don't repent, though," I said, quite decidedly. "I haven't even thought of repenting, and would do it all over again, if the same circumstances occurred." "You begin to relent toward Mrs. Roberts, then," he said, coolly. "I thought yesterday you didn't particularly affect my worthy housekeeper." "My liking or disliking her doesn't alter the question of my duty. And, Mr. Rutledge, I don't think it's kind in you to pretend not to understand my motive. You must know that in all reason, I could not prefer staying worrying in the house over some tiresome accounts, to going out on such a splendid day; and you must see that there was no way for me to refuse her conscientiously. You yourself say she is old, and particular, and fixed in her ways; and I am certain you often put yourself out to humor her; how can you blame me for not leaving her to fret and worry over something that I could do for her in half the time?" Mr. Rutledge looked down at me, but said nothing, while I briefly concluded my defence, adding at the end, a concise request that he'd please not say anything more about the matter. "We will consider it amicably adjusted, then," he said, "and direct our attention to something else. What, for instance, do you propose doing with yourself this afternoon?" "I haven't thought anything about it. Take a walk, perhaps." "You are so fond of being useful," he said, rather wickedly, "would you like to go down to the village for the letters?" "Yes, I should like it very well, only I don't know the way exactly; but I suppose I can inquire." "Will you ride or walk? Michael can drive you down, or Kitty can walk with you." "I think I'll walk, if it makes no difference," I said, indifferently. "I suppose," said Mr. Rutledge, "you don't like riding on horseback?" Like it! There was no need to answer; my face told fully my enthusiastic preference for that mode of travel. "I do not know if there is any horse in the stable that I would venture to let you ride. Madge I am afraid of. How long since you've ridden?" "Not since I've been away at school; but I'm not a bit afraid. I used to ride constantly at home. I had the dearest little pony; but he was spirited enough, and I always managed him. I don't really think you need be afraid to trust me," I went on, pleadingly. Mr. Rutledge shook his head; Madge was only fit for an experienced rider; she was too full of spirit for such a child to manage. Now, Madge had been my secret admiration ever since I had had the entrée of the stables, and I felt that life offered, at that moment, no more tempting honor than a seat on her back; and it may be supposed I was not lukewarm in my pleading. I urged, coaxed, entreated; I appealed to his generosity, I promised everlasting gratitude. "Dear Mr. Rutledge," I cried, "you know I go at my own risk; it will be my own fault if anything happens to me. And oh! it will be _so_ unkind if you refuse me the very first favor I ever asked of you!" I am not sure about the tears at this point of the petition, though I was quite in earnest enough to have cried, and I had begun to appreciate the availability of tears as a weapon sufficiently to have used them if they had occurred. Certain it is, however, that Mr. Rutledge began to relent, and at last, though evidently much against his better judgment, gave the desired permission. "But remember, I don't approve it." "Oh! but you will," I exclaimed, "when you see how quiet she'll be with me!" "And you have no habit," he continued. "I'll manage that. Kitty's a host in herself; I'll press her into the service." My companion half sighed as I flew out of the room and upstairs, where, in two minutes' time, I was deep in consultation with Kitty on the subject of the habit. She entered into the plan with great ardor, and racked her brains to devise something feasible. I sat on the bed and waited breathlessly for the bright thought that I was sure would come, sooner or later, to Kitty's clever brain. "You say you have a jacket that will do," she said, meditatively. "Yes, the very thing--black cloth, trimmed with buttons and all that; and now, if I only had a long enough skirt. Oh, Kitty! can't you think of something?" Kitty knit her brows, and, after a moment, said, thoughtfully: "There's a whole piece of black bombazine, that was left over from the last funeral, upstairs in a trunk I know of. Sylvie and I could run up the breadths in no time. Would you mind?" "Oh, Kitty! I couldn't quite stand that!" I exclaimed, between a shudder and a laugh. "Can't you think of anything else?" "I have it!" cried she, with a sudden illumination of countenance. "I have it!" "What!--how? Oh, do tell me!" "Why," said my artful maid, with mischief in every line of her bright face, "why, Mrs. Roberts, by way of keeping me busy this morning, gave me her best bombazine dress to rub off and press out, and it's downstairs this minute; and you see, she always has a wide hem to her dresses, and a great piece turned in at the top; so by letting out all this, and putting on a piece around the waist, where it'll come under the basque, it will make you the very nicest riding-skirt in the world." And Kitty's eyes danced. "Capital!" I cried. "But then, Kitty, I'm afraid it wouldn't be right; I'm afraid"---- "Don't disturb yourself, Miss; it'll be ready before you want it," and my conscientious scruples were cut short by the abrupt exit of my maid, who was out of hearing before I could remonstrate. The dinner-bell rang at the same moment, and I ran down at the summons, too much excited, and too nervous, however, to do more than go through the ceremony of a meal. Mr. Rutledge was rather thoughtful; he called me a foolish child for being so much excited about such a trifling affair. As I rose to leave the table, he asked me if I had succeeded in improvising a habit. I said yes, and that my present perplexity lay only in the matter of a hat. He proposed to see if he could help me, by a review of his chapeaux, past and present; and after trying on at least a dozen caps and hats, beaver, straw, cloth, and velvet, I decided upon a little black jockey cap, that was the trimmest, nattiest thing imaginable, and I knew, from Mr. Rutledge's approving glance, vastly becoming. So I bounded off to my room, to submit myself to Kitty's hands for the next twenty minutes. Very pretty, she assured me, I looked, as, the last touch bestowed, she stepped back to take a survey of me. "So slim and elegant, Miss, in your black clothes, and that jaunty little cap, and your hair so smooth and tight to your head; nothing in the way, nothing flying," said Kitty, with a gesture signifying her aversion to the decorated style of equestrian costume, so popular with our contemporaries. "And that skirt!" she exclaimed, smothering her laughter, "who would think it was the very one Mrs. Roberts had on, day before yesterday, when she was all dressed to go to the Parsonage! Wouldn't her hair stand on end, Miss, if she could see it trailing along the floor! The precious dress she always takes off before she'll go down to the kitchen, even to give an order!" "Oh, I'm really sorry, Kitty! Indeed, I've a great mind not to wear it." "Why, Miss," she said, in alarm, "don't think anything about it. It won't hurt it a bit; I'll have it just as good as when she gave it to me, if I sit up half the night to fix it!" And Kitty buttoned my boots with great _empressement_, and as Madge's hoofs struck on the stone walk below, she hurried me off, thrusting my gloves and handkerchief into my hand, and wishing me a very nice time. CHAPTER IX. "Thy steps are dancing toward the bound Between the child and woman, And thoughts and feelings more profound, And other years are coming." SIDNEY WALKER. If I say that my heart beat a little quicker, as I came in sight of the group before the steps, I shall acknowledge to no inexcusable weakness. Mrs. Roberts stood a little at one side, with a darker, more gloomily prophetical cast of countenance than ever, and seemed to be giving some unwelcome advice to Mr. Rutledge, who, saying briefly, "I cannot disappoint her now," turned uneasily to Michael, who held the horses, and who was to accompany me, and appeared to give him some emphatic directions, to which the man, from time to time, nodded assent. And the mare herself! Michael's whole strength was but sufficient to control her under the unaccustomed restraint. She was a beautiful animal, glossy black, clean-limbed, and delicately made, with a head and neck that told "she came of gentle blood," as plainly as aristocratic lineaments ever spoke. The insane absurdity of my controlling such a fiery, powerful thing as she, rushed sickeningly over me, but I never for a moment entertained the idea of giving up. If I had been ten times surer than I was, that I should be thrown within the first half mile, I should have rejected with scorn the advice of Mrs. Roberts, who now came forward and favored me with her views on the subject of the proposed expedition. I had more than one reason for desiring to keep her at a distance; so raising my skirt as carefully as I could, I ran down the steps to where Mr. Rutledge stood. When he saw me, he immediately cleared his brow of the shade of anxiety that had been contracting it during his conversation with Michael, and said, smilingly: "Madge Wildfire is as impatient to be off as her mistress." "Pretty creature!" I said, patting her neck with a hand that trembled visibly; then, with a voice that was meant to be very cheerful and unconcerned, I added: "What a perfect afternoon it is! I wish you were going." "I wish I were," he said, taking in at a glance the unsteadiness of the hand that patted Madge's neck, and the direful whiteness of the lips that spoke. After a moment of reflection he turned to Michael and gave him some order that sent him rapidly toward the stable, while Thomas was summoned to hold the horses, and telling me to wait a moment, Mr. Rutledge hurried into the house. I did not rightly comprehend the reason of this delay, till I saw him reappear, with riding gloves on and a whip in his hand followed by Mrs. Roberts, whose astonishment and anxiety were undisguised. "It's madness sir! With one hand you can hardly guide your own horse, let alone that creature she's to ride; and if you'll forgive me for being so plain, you may have to pay dearly for it! You are humoring a foolish girl at the risk of your life!" Mr. Rutledge stopped short. "My old friend," he said in a tone of decision, "you know I will always bear with more from you, than from almost any one else; but you must remember, there is such a thing as going too far. I cannot be interfered with in this way, even by you," and he descended the steps. Mrs. Roberts groaned, and turned away, silenced temporarily. Michael reappeared with Mr. Rutledge's horse, Madge was soothed, and brought to where I stood, and Michael tossed me up on her back. Before I could realize the dizzy height, or get the reins fairly in my grasp, she was off with an eager bound that showed how great had been her impatience at the delay. I kept my seat--more I did not attempt to do, as at a tearing pace she darted down the avenue. The reins were in my hands, but they might as well have been around her neck, for all the use I made of them. Fortunately the gate was open, but before we reached it Mr. Rutledge was by my side. "To the left," he said, as we dashed through it. It was, however, because Madge's fancy lay that way, that she took it; I cannot flatter myself that my faintly suggestive touch on the left rein had anything to do with influencing her decision. And _on_ we flew, Michael clattering behind us. It was a pretty clear straight road, bordered on both sides by trees, and slightly descending ground. In a moment, Mr. Rutledge spoke, but so quietly and unexcitedly that I felt soothed even by the tone. "You sit very well; don't lean forward quite so much; that's better," and in a few minutes he added, "keep a steady rein, don't pull suddenly or hard, but just firm. She is perfectly kind, and you can manage her very nicely after you get used to her." A confidence in Madge's good disposition, certainly was encouraging, and as Mr. Rutledge didn't seem to feel any alarm or discomposure of any kind, but on the contrary, an assurance that I was equal to what I had undertaken, perhaps, after all I was; and under these influences, something like composure began to return to my startled nerves and something like strength to tighten my hold upon the reins. Still we were tearing onward, Michael now left far behind, and the question of _stopping_ began to exercise me painfully. I knew from the pull upon the bridle, and the eager bounds of the animal beneath me, that as yet, it formed no part of _her_ intention. Presently Mr. Rutledge said, quite nonchalantly-- "I think, when we begin to ascend that hill on our right, we'd better pull up a little. Keep a steady rein till we get there. Let Madge know who's mistress; the lower one's the curb; now, pull; whoa, Madge!" And Madge _did_ whoa, that is, she slackened in a slight, a very slight degree, her frantic pace, checked perhaps by the new determination of her rider's rein, and the startling emphasis of that decided "whoa." It was but a very slight symptom of irresolution on her part, but it gave me the advantage; from that moment I determined to be mistress, and before we reached the brow of the hill, Madge had quieted to a walk. I was as white as a ghost, and shook all over, but my companion was considerate enough not to notice it, and checked with a look, Michael's exclamations of alarm, as with open eyes and mouth, that attendant galloped up. Several miles of country had been got over, before I began, in any degree, to realize that I was out for the purpose of enjoying myself, or before I was able to think of anything in heaven or earth, save the beast I rode. At last, however, I began to feel, with a sense of exultation the more elating in proportion to the struggle I had had to gain it, that I had my horse under entire control, and with that consciousness, color came to my cheeks, and warmth to my numb hands and feet; I could laugh and talk then, could see that the sky was clear and sunny, and the country we were crossing, the very prettiest and most picturesque imaginable; could feel the wind blowing fresh against my face, as we galloped rapidly over the open road; or listen, with an ear keenly awake to every phase of pleasure, to the rustling of the dead leaves beneath our horses' feet, and the clear ringing of our voices in the still air, as we sauntered along woody passes, or threaded our way through unfrequented bridle-paths. "How delightful it is!" I exclaimed, and my exclamation was echoed in my companion's look of intense enjoyment. There was a freedom from restraint, an abandonment to the pleasures of the present, that I had not seen in him before. Ten years of care and trial seemed lifted from his brow; a glow of health on his face, and a clear light in his eye, made him almost handsome; and for the time, it was easy for me to forget the differences of age and circumstances; it was an involuntary thing to look upon him as the companion whom most I liked of all I had ever found; the readiest, the keenest, the kindest; one who understood me, himself, and all the world; who could govern me, but whose very tyranny was pleasant; who was, in fact, so far and unquestionably my superior, that it pleased him to lay aside all differences, and be, for the time, the companion and equal of a child, whose very youth and ignorance, appeared the passports to his favor. For the first time, during this ride he talked to me of himself, and of his past life, but a past far separated from all association or connection with Rutledge. He recounted, for my entertainment, travels and adventures, that had the most exciting charm to my crude ear, at least. And indeed I doubt whether an older and more critical taste could have found anything but pleasure in his vigorous sketches of scenes and incidents that had impressed themselves upon his memory. He was, indeed, an excellent _raconteur_, and had, beyond any one I have ever known, the power of bringing up, in bodily shape and presence, the places and characters he chose to recall. Whether it was a sunrise among the Alps, or a scene in a French café, it was equally distinct and life-like; I saw the glittering of the sharp cloud piercing icy peaks, as, one by one, they caught the rosy sunlight; or, the men and women in their foreign dress and eager manner, lived and spoke before me, gesticulated, rattled off their voluble absurdities, and vanished from the scene, to give place to pictures of quiet English villages, with sunny meadows and long green lanes, grey churches and mossy gravestones, or quaint old Flemish towns, with their "cathedrals vast and dim," and tall, gloomy houses overhanging the narrow streets; or the rich warmth of some Italian landscape; or the vastness of the illimitable plains of Granada, that stretch away on all sides from the ruined Alhambra; Constantinople, with its mosques and minarets; the Holy City, with its mongrel population and half profaned associations, all were distinctly realized by me, as if I had in very deed been there. Mr. Rutledge rarely exercised his talents for description, and my enraptured attention seemed to surprise him. "You are an admirable listener," he said, laughingly; "no flattery could be subtler than that attitude of interest. I should grow positively garrulous if you were with me much. I must send you away! I hate a talking man; with such an eloquent face before me, I shall learn to talk hours at a time." "I won't look at you if you don't want me to, only don't stop talking. Ah! please!" I exclaimed, as he pointed to the rapidly sinking sun, and turned his horse's head toward home. "I cannot go home yet." "But it will be dark before we reach it, as it is," he said. "There's a moon!" "I shall never let you come again, if you are not 'good' about going home. Come!" His tone wasn't alarming, and I said: "I've just got in the spirit of it; and that's the best piece of road we've seen yet. I couldn't think of going back under another mile; indeed I couldn't." Mr. Rutledge still persisted in refusing permission, though, as I said, his tone was not alarming; not, for instance, as it had been last evening, when he called me in from the terrace. Though his face was perfectly serious, there was a look of smothered merriment about his mouth, that quite recalled the crayon sketch in my trunk. He was a good horseman, and no attitude could have been more advantageous to him than his present one, sitting easily and gracefully on his fine horse, and indicating with a turn of his head, the direction which he desired, nay, commanded me to take. We were just on the summit of a hill; the sunset was lighting up the woods behind, the road stretched smooth and broad before us. I turned my head us decidedly in that direction, saying: "There's another road turns off to the left of that bridge toward Rutledge, I know, for we drove there the other day; and it isn't more than two miles further. That's the way _I'm_ going home. 'They'll have fleet steeds that follow.'" And, touching Madge, I was off, without a look behind. It was, indeed some minutes before I turned around to see how near Mr. Rutledge might be; but what was my chagrin on finding myself alone, Michael only visible descending the hill at full speed. I paused to wait for him with ill-concealed impatience. "Where's your master, Michael?" "Gone back, miss." "Are you sure?" "Yes, miss. I think he's going home by way of the village, and that he's going to get the letters from the office on his way." "Couldn't we overtake him possibly?" "I'm afraid not, miss; we've got two miles further to go, and the horses are not as fresh as when we started, miss." That was a very palpable fact; indeed, both Michael's arguments seemed equally invincible; but I evaded them by exclaiming: "Isn't there any shorter way back to the village? Think quick, Michael, I know there must be." Michael thought, as quickly as he could, no doubt, but very slowly, it seemed to me. "Yes, Miss," he said, meditatively, after a moment's pause, "yes, Miss, there is another; but it's but a wild road for the like of you to be travelling--so late too." "Which way is it?" I said, with an impatient wave of the hand. "To the right, Miss, about a quarter of a mile further on; it strikes off through Hemlock Hollow. It's a lonesome road, though, Miss, and there may be one or two pairs of bars to take down before we get to the end." "You're sure, however, that you know the way, and that it's shorter?" I asked. Michael thought he was sure. "Then, my man, we'll try it; and keep as near to me as you can." And turning Madge's head, I gave her liberty to do her best. Michael had much ado, I fear, to keep in sight of me; but I cared very little for his guardianship, or indeed for any other circumstance or occurrence whatsoever, so long as I reached the village and the post-office before Mr. Rutledge quitted them. Michael was nearer right than he generally had the good fortune to be, when he described the Hemlock Hollow road as a wild and lonesome one. It was an unfrequented wood road; the trees met above it; there was neither foot-path nor fence on either side; it was just a way hewn down and cleared for one wagon to pass. Lying in a hollow, it was always damper, and colder, and darker, than anywhere else, and as I pressed on, I couldn't help being struck with the chilliness of the air, and "the rich moist smell of the rotting leaves" that lay thick upon the road. How fast the light had faded! I never knew twilight to come on so rapidly. "Never mind," I reasoned, "it cannot be long before we are out of this hollow, and then we shall be so near the village that I shall not mind the dark, and after that Mr. Rutledge will be with us. He will not be angry, I know; there was too much laughing about his mouth, when he motioned me homeward. I am sure he won't be angry; but I almost wish----Michael!" "Yes, Miss," called out my attendant in the distance. "How long before we are out of this wood?" "I don't rightly remember the length of it, Miss," gasped the panting esquire, as he reached me. "Well," I said, "it's growing dark so fast, you must whip up, and make all the haste you can." "Saving your presence, that's exactly what I've been doing for the last three hours; and though I'm as anxious to get on as yourself, Miss, my horse is just a bit _exhausted._" I had to suppress a laugh at his dejected looks. Melancholy had marked for her own both horse and rider. "Well, Michael," I said, encouragingly, "it cannot be very long before we reach the village, and then you shall have time to rest. Keep up as well as you can, meantime." And unable to control my own impatience, I rode on, and in a little while was again out of sight, or rather out of hearing, for sight was fast becoming a useless gift, so rapidly had night descended, and so effectually did the thick trees shut out what of light might have been still left in the sky. I again called to Michael, who again was far behind, and again had to be waited for. I was certain we had gone three or four miles, and yet there was no sign of an opening, no change in the monotonous, narrow road. "Are you quite positive, Michael," I said, "that this is the right road? Are you certain it leads to the village?" He had never been over it but once, he said, and that was two years ago, but he thought he knew it; it didn't seem so long to him before, though, he must confess. A genuine pang of fear crossed me as I saw the man's bewilderment and uncertainty, and as I realized that I must depend on myself, for he knew no more about the road than I did, it was plain, and seemed, indeed, fast losing his wits, from sheer fatigue and terror. "Think a minute, Michael," I said, in a firm voice, "how ought the road to terminate? Does it come directly out on the turnpike, or do we have to cross any fields before we reach it?" If he remembered right, there was a field to cross--no--he couldn't be sure, on the whole, that the road didn't open right into the turnpike, after all. Perhaps it didn't, though; it was two years since he had been over it, and how could he remember--so dark as it was, too! A moment's reflection told me that there was no use in going back till we had tried a little further, for the turnpike could not be very distant. I thought I had a general idea of where the village lay, and that we were going toward it. So cheering up my attendant as well as I could, and suiting my pace to his, I endured another half mile of pretty uncomfortable suspense before an opening in the trees, and a patch of cloudy sky, sent a ray of comfort to my heart. "Courage, Michael!" I cried, "here's the end of our troubles--here's an opening in the woods. Is this the way the road looked, do you think?" Michael sprang down from his horse with great alacrity, to let down the bars that retarded our progress. Ah, yes! This was all right--just as he said; he knew we had to cross a field. Quite reassured, I told him to ride on in front, as he seemed to know the way now, and he valiantly led on, along the edges of what seemed to me a ploughed field; but Michael being positive that there was a beaten road along it, I submitted to his judgment. By and by, we came to another pair of bars, which Michael confidently took down, and conscientiously put up after we had passed through, and again led the van. In the meantime, I watched the sky with anxiety. The wind was rising, and swept cold across the fields; the clouds, though broken and flying, obscured the light of the moon, yet low in the east. I had no way but to trust to Michael, and I tried to do it without any misgivings, as he seemed so confident; but it was not long before he began to waver again. After a pause, and a moment's bewildered gaze around, he struck his hand upon his forehead, and exclaimed: "Upon my honor, Miss, it's my opinion we're in a dreadful fix! I know no more than the dead where we are!" "Fool!" I cried, starting forward in an agony of apprehension, "why didn't you say so before?" Michael gave a miserable groan, and seemed utterly confounded. "Let us go back as fast as ever we can!" I exclaimed. "That's just what I can't see how to do," whined my hopeful guide, "for between letting down, and putting up bars, and crossing backward and forward, I can't seem to to remember where we did come in." It was too true; the place we had entered seemed a wild open common, fenced on two sides, while on the others, it stretched away into woods and hills; but since we had entered it, we had ridden so irregularly, that I was, as well as Michael, at a loss to tell on which side we had come in, and if there was a wagon track, it was too dark to see it. I made a strong effort to command myself, and said concisely, "The best way, Michael, is for me to ride along the fence here, and see if I can't find something that will direct me to the place where we came in, while you ride across the fields, there, on the left, and see if you can't find a road through the woods, and come back as soon as you've found any, and tell me." Michael obeyed, and spurred off toward the woods, while I picked my way back along the irregular fence, which in some places was quite hidden by the high bushes, that grew thick on either side, while in others, it was quite open and unobscured. But the uncertain light, the similarity of one pair of bars, and one side of the common to another, completely baffled me, and I was as much bewildered as Michael himself. I tried, however, to be brave and keep up my courage, trusting momentarily that Michael would return and report favorably of a road on the other side, which would lead _somewhere;_ anything was better than this pathless common. I tried to be patient as the moments passed without any signs of his return. I walked my horse up and down beside the fence, and struggled manfully to be calm. There was not light enough left to see him till he got near me; all I could do was to wait. And I did wait; hours, it seemed to me, till every nerve throbbed with fear, and the nameless horrors that night and solitude always bring to those who brave them for the first, crowded so upon me, that I would rather have ridden into certain danger, than have waited there another moment; and I dashed across the common, toward the dark woods that skirted it. I halted and called as loudly as I could, but no answer came. Then riding along the edge of the wood, I called again, with all my strength, and waited for the reply as if my life hung upon the sound of a human voice. None came, and half wild at the dawning of this new terror, entire isolation, I whipped Madge to her utmost speed, and flew along the whole length of the wood, then back again, shouting Michael's name. At that moment the moon came out from behind the shifting clouds, and halting suddenly, I looked around me; the common, as far as I could see, was bare; the woods were before me; I had halted at the entrance of a road that led into them. Perhaps Michael was wandering there, and calling once more, I waited in vain for any answer but the swaying of the boughs in the night wind, and the panting of my tired horse. At this renewed disappointment, all my firmness gave way, and all the perils and horrors that fancy suggested rushed upon me; dropping the reins upon the horse's neck, and covering my face with my hands, I uttered a cry of despair. Startled by it, and by the sudden relaxing of the reins, the horse gave a bound forward, and dashed terrified into the woods. That I was not unseated, is the strangest part of all my strange adventure; but conscious of nothing, save an agonized fear of losing this my only living companion, I clung tightly to her neck, as brushing against the overhanging boughs, and swaying from side to side of the narrow road, she tore onward in her headlong race. Of the length of time that passed before, spent with fatigue and shuddering in every limb, she paused suddenly before a fallen tree that blockaded the road, I can form no idea. It was all, as then in acting, so now in recalling, one wild dream of terror. It may have been moments, or perhaps only seconds, before, raising myself from my crouching attitude, I looked around, and saw the position of the horse, and the fright that she was in. The moon was shining fitfully through the naked branches of the forest around us, and right across the road, lay the giant trunk of a fallen tree; while the only sound except the moaning of the wind, was the brawling of a stream that ran beside the road. Madge shook violently, while I tried to soothe her, but in vain. I slipped down from the saddle, still holding the bridle over my arm, and almost fell, from the dizzy feeling on first touching the ground after being so long in one position. I regained my feet, and approaching her, patted her neck, and tried to urge her to make the leap; it was unbearable to think of staying an instant here! But it was hopeless; with her feet planted in the earth, and eyes dilated with terror, she refused to move. A groan of misery escaped me as this last hope was cut off; I tied the bridle to a low branch, and sitting down upon the fallen tree, buried my face in my hands, in hopeless, stupefied despair. The cold night-air was chilling me to the heart; my habit was, at best, but barely warm enough in the day, and when heated with exercise; now, the wind seemed to strike through and through me; and I crouched down, hiding my eyes from the ghastly, fitful dancing of the moonbeams, and shook from head to foot. Look in whatever way I might, there was nothing but terror staring me in the face. How many miles I was from any human habitation, I did not dare to think; but indeed it mattered little; I could not, benumbed and aching as I was, have walked half a mile, even with the certainty of help before me; and I doubted whether, if the horse could have been coaxed over the cruel obstacle that stopped her course, I could have mounted her again. I was bound, helpless, hopeless! My exaggerated fancy refused all hope, and seized all that was frightful, and held up before me the dread that, unless some unforeseen help should come, I should perish during the slow waning of the awful night that had but just begun. I saw life and youth, "And time and hope behind me cast," and one black shadow creeping toward me, slowly, but with unswerving tread; silently, but with intensest gaze, freezing me with horror. And with a sort of mockery, the words that had seemed so soothing and peaceful, when, life was sure and unthreatened, rang in my ears: "Death comes to set thee free-- O meet him cheerily As thy true friend." Starting to my feet, I cried aloud, as if stung with sudden pain: "No, no! not such death as this; I cannot! Oh, is there no help!" And calling passionately Mr. Rutledge's name, I listened as if it were impossible that I could call on him in vain. But no voice nor answer came; the swaying branches moaned loudly as the angry wind swept through them; the swollen stream rushed by with a mournful sound; the dead leaves fluttered in the fitful blast: this was my answer--this was all the help my appeals would gain. With a cry of anguish, I cast myself down upon the earth, and sent to heaven such a prayer as only despair and mortal terror can wring from the heart. Not as people pray at home, morning and evening, with Death at worst a distant enemy, and Terror and Temptation just so many words; not as people pray from duty, or from habit, or out of respect to religion, I prayed then. Not as I had often asked for mercy, Sunday after Sunday, in the Litany, and thought I was in earnest, did I ask for it now; but with such agony of earnestness, such wild entreaty, as those ten men in the Samaritan village put into their prayer for mercy; a De Profundis that came from the lowest depths of abasement and despair. It was a fearful struggle, but it passed over, and left me calmer. Whether it was that hope was dead, and the quiet that crept over me was the quiet of despair, or that really faith and resignation had come at last, I could not tell; but exhausted, benumbed, half dead, I lay motionless upon the ground, while the moments, crept slowly on, and formed themselves into hours; and still, with an ear that never lost a note of all the dirge that sounded through the forest, I lay, face downward, indifferent and apathetic. Consciousness never slept a single moment of the dreadful hours that passed over me, but Fear and Excitement did; and these terrible enemies only woke, when a sound that was not brawl of stream or roar of wind, profaned the ghastly solitude. It was a sound far fainter and less appalling than those I had been listening to, unmoved, so long, but it roused the keenest terror. Far down the road, I first caught it, so low that it might have been the falling of a nut the high wind had shaken from its tree; again, this time nearer, and the leaves rustle, and a chance bough crackles. I do not stir a hair's breadth from where I lie--the step approaches--I do not raise my head nor move a muscle--I do not think, nor wonder what it is, but all faculties absorbed in one, all energies concentrated in that one effort, I listen for the approaching sound. Nearer and nearer; and the quick terror shoots through every chilled vein. In another moment--but with resistless power, horror sweeps over every sense, and in one wild surge, blots out reason, memory, and consciousness. CHAPTER X. "O, I have passed a miserable night, So full of fearful dreams, of ugly sights, That as I am a Christian faithful man, I would not spend another such a night, Though 'twere to buy a world of happy days; So full of dismal terror was the time." RICHARD III. A shapeless tissue of dreams follow this dark warp upon the web of memory--how much the flashes of half-received truth, how much the fabric of distorted fancy, I cannot say. Into some such form as this, they have shaped themselves: mixed up in a confused way with the sights and sounds of that wild solitude, comes the recollection of being clasped in arms whose familiar hold inspired no terror; of hurried words of endearment, and a kiss upon my forehead that lulled the returning pulsations of fear into repose again; then a blank; then shouting voices, and the sound of footsteps, many and heavy, rouse me once more into faint and fitful consciousness, and dim and spectral as a graveyard dance of witches, appear strange men with lanterns, who cluster round me; and as I close my eyes in shuddering fear, Michael's face, in distorted ugliness, takes a hundred ghastly shapes, dances before my eyes, and keeps out everything else, for a space of time unspeakably frightful, as it is immeasurably long. At last, dull stupor overpowers it; and long, long, after that, comes a woman's kind face and gentle touch; then a hand and voice that are unfamiliar and unwelcome; cat-like and soft, from which I shrink in aversion. Then, they too vanish, and when next the uncertain mist of oblivion rolls up, I am lying in a long low room, strange and new to me, but not unpleasing, even by the dim light that burns upon the table, shaded from me by a painted screen. My eyes wander around inquiringly upon the simple furniture of the room, the dark, low walls, the piles of books and pamphlets that heap the shelves irregularly, till they rest upon the two figures at the other end of the room. A fire burns low on the hearth, and beside it sits a man, stooping his head upon his hand. Another in an attitude that is familiar to me, stands with his arm upon the mantelpiece shading his eyes from the light. They talk low and earnestly; sometimes the one standing by the mantelpiece strides impatiently backward and forward, across the room, and resumes his former attitude. He by the fire never moves. I try to listen, but the effort confuses me; and it is a long while before any of their words reach me, and then only in a broken, uncertain way. The first I catch are those of the voice that is familiar to me: "It is the first time I ever rejected your counsel; the first time I ever put aside your warning. Do you believe me when I say it pains me to the heart, after so many years of steadfast and close friendship, to rebel against the sacrifice it requires of me? But you do not know what you ask, indeed you do not!" "Perhaps not, Arthur, perhaps not," answered his companion, in a low voice. "Do not think again of what I said; it was an over-anxiety for your happiness that prompted me to speak; and now forget the words, and remember only the love that moved them." "No, Shenstone, I will not forget them," the other says, warmly; "I know too well the value of your counsels. I will remember what you have said, and keep the caution by me, when there is need for caution. But you must not blame me, if I cannot put aside at once a hope that has got so strong a hold upon me. I promise you to do nothing rashly, to let nothing blind my judgment, to put the test of absence, change of scene, change of interest, upon us both; years, if you will, shall pass before I dare attempt to realize my hope; years that shall prove its possibility, or show its folly; but do not ask me to give it up at once." Mr. Shenstone shook his head. "Will it be easier to tear up the cherished hope of years, than to put down the fond fancy of a day, my friend, do you think?" "I am not a man given to fancies, am I, Shenstone? A life as cold as the last twenty years of mine has been, does not look much like the pursuit of fancies. You have known--who better?--the bitterness that poisoned the very fountain-head of my youth; you have seen how it has tainted the current of my whole life; how that after years of suffering and self-denial, it only needs a word, a recollection of the past to bring the bitter flood back upon my heart. You know all this, and yet you deny me the only charm I see in life; the only light that gilds the dark future! Is this kind?" He walked impatiently across the room, then came back to his place. The other did not look up nor speak. "I know what you would say," continued his companion, after a moment; "I know you would remind me that the same blow that blighted my youth, struck deeper at your heart; that you have learned to live without what was life to you once; that I can learn the same hard lesson. I have tried, oh, my friend! I have tried to gain your heights of faith and hope; but still the unconquered flesh drags me down: the curse that generations of godless ancestors have laid upon me is unexpiated yet. You stand now where I cannot hope to stand till "Death comes to set me free." Death, that I shall have won! And hoped for, you know longingly, in the old days of wretchedness." "That's past, Arthur, thank God's good grace; and life is no longer a penance to you; and that it never may be again, God in His mercy grant, and spare you what I dreaded for you. God bring you higher than I stand, but by a gentler way, if it be His will! Arthur, it was a fiercer struggle than even you can understand, in which my faith was born. It was a conflict that lasts through most men's lives, that I passed through at one dire struggle, and died unto the world forever. But, looking backward, oh, Arthur, I can look back now and see how ----"One dead joy appears The platform of some better hope." Better, as heaven is than earth, as peace is than temptation, as the service of God is than the weary bondage of the world!" He lifted his head a moment, as if in involuntary triumph, then bent it again, and was silent. At that moment the door softly opened, and the woman I had seen before stole up to where I lay, and bending down, looked in my face with anxious inquiry, while the friends at the other end of the room hushed their earnest tones, and one (my head was throbbing too much to see which) started forward, and said anxiously: "Has the doctor come back yet, Mrs. Arnold?" "He is in the hall at this moment, sir," she answered, with preciseness of manner, and a peculiar sweetness of voice. Again the door opened, and again I heard the cat-like step, and felt the velvet touch that sent a shiver through me; and then succeeded a throbbing pain in my temples, dull aching in every limb, a high fever coursing through every vein, and I lived over again in delirium the scenes from which I had just escaped. Again I was lying beneath the roaring forest trees; again the sharp throes of mortal terror wrung from me the cry that I had uttered then, this time to be soothed by a tender and familiar voice; then restless with pain, and burning with fever, only pacified from that dream to be hurried off into another, wilder and more terrible. With glaring eyes and demoniac faces, the crowd of men, with Michael at their head, were in mad pursuit of a flying horse and rider; with hideous jeers and yells they urge them on, and closing round the frantic steed, they tear me, clinging round her, from Madge's neck, and holding me down upon the ground, wrench from my arm the bracelet, that resists, at first, their strongest efforts, till the warm blood flows, and the torn flesh quivers, as staggering back, a ruffian lifts the bloody prize, and with a wild cry I wake, only to drop into another broken slumber, and to dream another hideous dream. This time it is Mrs. Roberts, who, with rigid, cruel face, holds me down, and binding my powerless hands, thrusts me, struggling and frantic, into the dread, mysterious darkness of _that room_. And choking with terror, the agony is dispelled by the low voice that says, "What is it now, poor child?" and panting with fright, I cling to the hand that soothes me, and only from its steady grasp gain anything like peace. And so the night wears on. How much of these wild dreams revealed themselves in speech I know not, and how much of the history of that night belongs to fact, and how much to fancy, it is beyond me to decide. CHAPTER XI. "Oh! what a tangled web we weave, When first we practise to deceive!" SCOTT. Emerging from this sea of dreams tumultuous, I seemed, on a certain cold, grey morning, to be stranded on the shores of reality by an ebbing tide of water gruel and weak tea. Having, from my extreme youth, entertained undisguised aversion to these articles of food, I had steadily refused to let a spoonful pass my lips; consequently, my nurse and doctor not having relinquished a hope that in time I would come to terms, many separate editions of these invigorating compounds stood upon the table by my bed, in bowls of larger growth, in teacups and saucers, and every variety of earthen and china vessels, all covered and arranged with consummate care and skill. These observations I made with great interest, as after a long period of dreamy stupor, the "keen demands of appetite," or some indignant protest of nature against such indolent inactivity, roused me; and raising myself upon my elbow, I looked around with much curiosity and some bewilderment. The room was entirely unfamiliar, long and old-fashioned looking. The bed and the one window were curtained with white dimity; the walls and ceiling were white-washed to a painful whiteness; the counterpane, the pillows, the sheets, were one drift of snow. Indeed, so forcible was this impression, that for a moment it was a question with me whether I had not just waked up from a nap in one of those snow-houses, so called, which it had been the delight of my childhood to construct, being excavations in some adjacent snow-bank, achieved with the help of a friendly spade, in which I would lie and dream of icy palaces, and frosty fairy fabrics. The idea that I had been napping it in one of these juvenile architectural devices, was favored by the lowness of the white ceiling, which seemed almost within touch, and the long, narrow shape of the room, terminating in a small, white-curtained window, through which I caught a glimpse of cold grey sky, that suggested snow and chill. A tiny fire, however, in a tiny grate, and a woman sewing by what I had conceived to be the mouth of the cave, but which, I was obliged to confess, was unmistakably a window, quite dispelled the illusion, and I had nothing left me but to come down to cold reality again, after a sojourn in dream-land so long as to render me a little uncertain and bewildered on all mundane matters. I looked quite attentively for some time at the woman by the window, then startled her very considerably by saying suddenly: "Are you the one they call Mrs. Arnold?" She dropped her work, started up, and approached the bed, saying, in her precise manner and sweet voice: "That is my name, Miss. Can I do anything for you?" "No," I said slowly, looking at her, "I don't think of anything, thank you." And while Mrs. Arnold, after arranging the pillows, and in a neat, quick-handed way, straightening and tidying everything on the table and around the bed, returned to her work, I watched her very attentively, and I am afraid very rudely, from the slight color that arose in her pale cheek as she caught my eye again and again fixed on her inquiringly. She was a middle-aged woman, about middle-size, with nothing peculiar in dress or manner, except a scrupulous precision and neatness. Her hair was very grey, but her face was a younger one than you would have expected to see, after looking at her slightly-stooping figure and white hair. Her skin was unwrinkled and clear, her eyes soft and brown, and the sweetest possible smile sometimes stirred her lips. But it died very quickly always, and never seemed to come voluntarily; only "when called for," and then to cheer or comfort some one else--never because of any happy emotion within, that found that expression for itself. She conveyed the idea of a woman who had been a very high-spirited and impetuous one, but who was now a very broken and sad one; a soul ----"By nature pitched too high, By sufferings plunged too low," but now past struggle and rebellion, subdued and desolated, waiting patiently for the end. This much I read, or thought I read, in her quiet face, as still leaning on my elbow, I watched her movements. I was irresistibly attracted to her, and essayed to continue our brief conversation, by saying: "Hasn't 'that Kitty,' as Mrs. Roberts calls her, been here since I have been sick?" "She has been here, and went away only half an hour ago, to get some of your things. I expect her back every minute." "I thought I'd seen her," I rejoined, meditatively. "And how about Mrs. Roberts, has she been here?" "She has; she was here all yesterday afternoon." I lay quite still for a little while, then said, rather abruptly: "I can't exactly make it out--where am I, and whose house is this?" Mrs. Arnold smiled kindly, and turning toward me, said: "You have been too sick to know much about anything; you are at the Parsonage, and this is Mr. Shenstone's house, and I am Mr. Shenstone's housekeeper. And now do not puzzle your head with any more thinking; ask me any questions you want to know, and then try to lie quiet." "I think I've been quiet long enough in all conscience!" I said, with energy. "I feel a great deal better, Mrs. Arnold." "I am very glad to hear it, Miss. Will you have something to eat?" "What can I have?" "Some very nice gruel, Miss, or some"---- "Wait a minute, Mrs. Arnold," I said, rising up and speaking very impressively; "there is no use, indeed there is no use, in asking me to take such things; I never can, and you will only have to give it up at last. Miss Crowen had to; I stood it out till she thought I was going to die on her hands, I believe, and had to give me something decent at last. People are always trying to make me eat gruel, and farina, and arrowroot, and beef-tea, and such miseries, just as soon as I'm in the least bit sick, and begin to care what I eat. Now don't you be so unkind, will you, dear Mrs. Arnold?" Mrs. Arnold smiled; it was the doctor, she said, who had prescribed the gruel; if he was willing to give me something nicer, she should be very happy to prepare it for me. "Do you know," I said, mysteriously, "that as a general thing, I don't think much of doctors? Country doctors least of all. One's common sense is the best guide in most cases. Why, it stands to reason, that I know better what I ought to have to eat, when I'm not well, than a great strong man does, who never lost his appetite in his life, and doesn't in the least care what he has to eat, as long as there's enough of it! I am the best judge, you must see plainly, Mrs. Arnold." Mrs. Arnold shook her head; doctors mightn't know what we would like, she said, always, but it was just possible they might know what was best for us, being disinterested judges. Didn't I think so? "By no means," I exclaimed, "unless they are peculiarly intelligent men, and not like that odious Dr. Sartain, who nearly frightened me to death, and nearly killed Mr. Rutledge, by setting his arm badly. Mr. Rutledge himself is ten times better a doctor. He can tell what's the matter with people by just looking at them; and," I continued, coming abruptly back to the point of interest, and hoping to carry it by the suddenness of the attack, "he would never make any one eat water-gruel if they hated it. I'm positive, if you asked him, he'd say, 'let her have what she wants, of course, it cannot do her any harm.'" Mrs. Arnold shook her head again, and said: "Ah, Miss, it's very hard to say 'no;' but it must be, till the doctor comes, whom I am expecting every minute." "What's the doctor's name?" "His name is Hugh, Miss; a very fine young man they say; he is just settled in the village, and every one is very much pleased with him; he is getting all the practice away from Dr. Sartain, who, though he lives so far away, has been for a long time the nearest physician. But here's his gig at the door now," continued she, coming up to the bed. "Are you ready to see him?" "Yes, quite," I answered; and she hurried down to usher up the doctor. Now I had my own views regarding this gentleman, and all Mrs. Arnold's commendation could not change the current of my feelings toward him; so when he approached my bedside, it was a very slight and stiff recognition that his arrival elicited from me. He did not seem a whit annoyed by it, however, and with unruffled blandness, laid down his hat and gloves, and seated himself, while Mrs. Arnold stood at the foot of the bed, unobtrusively attentive. The new doctor was a good-sized, good-looking man, with reddish hair and whiskers, and very white teeth and very light eyes. That he "hailed" from New England no one could doubt after five minutes spent in his society; equality and fraternity, go-a-head-i-tiveness and go-to-the-deuce-if-you-get-in-my-way-itiveness were still visible to an impartial eye, under all the layers of suavity, professional decorum and good breeding, with which his educational residence in the metropolis had plastered over the native roughnesses of his rustic breeding. If the chill penury that usually represses the noble rage of the New England youth, had not been defeated of its cruel purpose by a "little annuity" from his maternal grandfather, elevating him from the plough to the practice of medicine, one could not help thinking how fine a specimen of the genuine Yankee he would have been. How he would have risen from a boyhood devoted to whittling, swapping, and carting lumber, to a youth engaged in itinerant mercantile transactions, and an early manhood consecrate to science and literature, in the onerous post of common-school teacher. The hero he would have been at quiltings and at singing-schools! The bargains he would have driven in tin and garden-seeds, exchanged for feathers and rags! The matchless cuteness, the inherent cunning, that would have marked his career! "But whither would conjecture stray?" The little annuity ($150) had intervened, and Dr. Hugh stood before the public a professional gentleman in the midst of a growing practice, a rising man in a country where, once started, it is easier to rise than to sit still. He was, at the moment when I was making these reflections on his character, suavely regarding me, and had softly laid two fingers upon my wrist, and, with head slightly inclined, was counting my pulse. The result gratified him; for looking up with a complacency that indicated very plainly the source to which he attributed the improvement, he said, addressing Mrs. Arnold: "A marked change for the better, madam--a marked change." It was an involuntary thing for me to pull my hand impatiently from his continued touch, and to turn my head away, so disagreeably did his manner impress me. No change of tone, however, indicated any resentment as he said, in apology for me, as it appeared: "A little restless and feverish yet, I am afraid." "On the contrary," I said, with great distinctness, turning toward him again, "on the contrary, I never felt quieter or less feverish in my life. I am quite well, except a little weakness, which will be remedied by allowing me suitable and nourishing food; and Mrs. Arnold is only waiting for your permission to get me some broiled chicken and roast oysters, which I have no doubt you are perfectly willing to allow." The doctor looked astonished at this emphatic declaration and proposition, and for a space seemed inclined to resist such unheard of demands; but seeing, no doubt, the hopelessness of bringing me to reason, and the fear of alienating irretrievably so important a patient as the guest at the great house, he thought it best to yield as graciously as possible. The idea of losing the chance of the Rutledge patronage was not to be entertained for a moment, and it is my opinion that, with a view to averting such a blow to his success, he would have conceded me an unlimited grant of lobster-salad and turtle soup, if I had been pleased to fancy those viands. As it was, however, I bore my triumph very unexcitedly, merely giving Mrs. Arnold a significant look, which indicated as much hungry complacency as was consistent with my dignity; upon which she proposed descending to prepare my meal, and Kitty entering just then, she considered herself no longer necessary, and withdrew for that purpose. The doctor being engaged in writing a prescription, I had nothing to distract my attention from Kitty, who overwhelmed me with congratulations upon my improved condition; which congratulations, however, I could not with sincerity return, for having, in her eagerness, run every step of the way to Rutledge and back, her condition was best described by the inelegant term, "blown." "But oh, Miss," she exclaimed, in panting incoherency, "it is so nice to see you opening your eyes and taking notice! Mr. Rutledge will be so glad!" "How is he, and why didn't he come?" I asked. "Well," said Kitty, candidly, "I wasn't to tell you, but _I_ don't see the harm. Mr. Rutledge's arm has been bad again, and he can't go out of the house. But here's a note for you from him." And Kitty pulled from her apron-pocket a note, that I seized eagerly. And forgetting doctor and maid, with flushed cheeks and parted lips, I read and reread the brief note--very brief, but very characteristic--kind, almost tender--concise, pithy, and vigorous, with just a dash of humor and raillery at the close, and "Always your friend, Arthur Rutledge." With a pleased smile, my eyes lingered over the words, till raising them inadvertently, they encountered the doctor's, fixed searchingly on my face. He averted them in an instant, however, but not before he had caught a sight of the quick blush that mounted to my temples. "I was thinking," he said, apologetically, "I was thinking that the light was rather strong for your eyes. Shall not the young woman darken the window a little?" I rejected the proposal contemptuously, and the medical gentleman, after an abortive attempt at a compliment, and a bow that was a shade less complacent than usual, took his leave. "I hate that man!" I exclaimed, as the door closed behind him. "I never shall learn to treat him civilly." Kitty shrugged her shoulders. "The people in the village think there's nobody like him. He's got a very taking way with all the common folks, putting his arm around the women's waists, and patting the men on the shoulder, and talking to everybody alike. But I don't like the look of him, for all his fair-and-softly ways. And he's been watching you, Miss, for the last five minutes, as a cat watches a mouse." I bit my lip, but merely said: "No matter, Kitty; he may be a good doctor for all that, and he will not have a chance to watch me much longer, I hope. You may darken the window; I believe he was right about that matter, and I'll try to sleep a little till my breakfast, or whatever it is, comes up. In the meantime, perhaps you had better go and see if you cannot help Mrs. Arnold." Kitty obeyed, and in a few minutes I was left alone, but unluckily with no very pleasant thoughts to keep me company, and no overtures from tired nature's sweet restorer either, to put them to flight. I was very much irritated at the doctor's manner, and a good deal annoyed at having expressed my irritation so warmly to Kitty; and compunctious visitings also troubled me about my self-will on the subject of the broiled chicken and oysters, to which was added a confused sort of penitential alarm about the purloined riding-skirt, and to crown all, a startling discovery, that made me absolutely weak with fright. The miniature, which for some time past had been vacillating between my pocket and my trunk, as its safety demanded, had, on the afternoon of my ride, being lying on the table before me, while I was dressing, but on an alarm of Mrs. Roberts' approach, I had thrown the ribbon around my neck, and hid it in my bosom, whence, in my hurry and excitement, I had forgotten to take it, and it had remained there during my ride, for I remembered feeling it, with no pleasant association at the time either, while I was waiting for Michael on the common. This I distinctly remembered, and--now it was gone. That was all I knew; that was enough to make me sick with fright. I covered up my face, and lay quiet, but very miserable. What would I not have given if I had never touched that miniature, or worn that skirt. The business of deceit was new to me, and in proportion it looked black. I had almost fretted myself into a fever, when Mrs. Arnold reappeared with my _goûté_, most temptingly arranged upon the cleanest of china and whitest of napkins. She placed it by me, and announced that it was ready. I looked up in her face, my own rather flushed, no doubt, and said: "You see he let me have it, Mrs. Arnold." "I see he did, Miss," she answered, quite gravely. "I knew he would; I was right after all." "I hope so, Miss." Her grave looks troubled me. I did not take the knife and fork she offered me, but looking at her earnestly, I said, abruptly: "Mrs. Arnold, honestly, do you think that's bad for me?" She looked somewhat startled by my question, but answered quietly: "Honestly, Miss, I think it is a risk; but the doctor has consented, and I have nothing to say." "Very well," I said, pushing the table back, "I am sorry to have given you so much trouble for nothing. Will you warm that gruel for me." Mrs. Arnold paused in the act of raising the cover from the oysters: "Do you mean, Miss, that you do not intend to eat this?" "Yes," I said, concisely, "I will take the gruel, if you'll warm it, please. There's fire enough there." She gave me rather a curious look; then quietly removed the tray into the hall, and proceeded to warm the gruel. I swallowed the tasteless compound without flinching, while Mrs. Arnold watched me silently, and took away the emptied bowl without a word of comment. I lay very silent but very sleepless till Kitty came up; then watched anxiously till Mrs. Arnold should leave the room, which she was very long in doing. When at last she did, I started up, exclaiming: "Bolt that door, and come here, Kitty!" She obeyed, but not very cheerfully, I fancied; indeed there had been a shade of anxiety on her face for some time. "Kitty," I said, hurriedly and gravely, "I've lost the miniature; do you know anything about it?" She did not look surprised, but very unhappy, as she answered: "I know it's gone, Miss; but where, I know no more than the dead." She then explained--that that night, just after she had been sent for, and arrived, as she came into the study where I was lying, she found Mr. Shenstone and the doctor both standing by me, Mrs. Arnold at the fire, preparing some medicine; Mr. Rutledge had just passed her in the hall. I seemed delirious, for I started up and exclaimed something incoherently, then fell back, and Mr. Shenstone stooping down, said something soothingly, but instantly started back, with an exclamation of dismay and astonishment, which of course did not escape either the doctor or Kitty. The latter hurried up, and stole a glance at me, and she could scarcely repress a similar cry when she saw the guilty miniature, which had slipped from my dress, lying in full view. Mr. Shenstone's face was pale, and he put his hand to his forehead, as if in pain. Her only hope was, that the light being dim, he had not seen it distinctly, and now the thing was to get it away before either he or the doctor had had a second look. Giving the table-cover a sudden jerk, she precipitated the lamp upon the floor, and involved the room in sudden darkness. Deprecating her awkwardness, she hurried to pick up the lamp. While the others were engaged in remedying the accident, and finding a light, about which there seemed much difficulty, she stole to where I lay, and attempted to rescue the miniature; but, alas! in vain. Some one had been there before her, and a cold hand on my breast touched hers, as she groped for it, and was suddenly withdrawn. It was not my hand, for mine were burning with fever; and when, after a moment more of delay, a light was struck, Mrs. Arnold and Mr. Shenstone stood in the middle of the room by the table, and the doctor at the opposite end, by the mantelpiece, looking for some matches that Mrs. Arnold had said were kept there. She looked down at me; I lay quietly, one hand under my head, the other at my side. An end of blue ribbon hung from my dress; it had been cut off hastily, for a glance told her the edge was too smooth to have been torn. Kitty was a keen observer, and her whole heart was in this mystery; she watched, as if her life had depended on it, to see who should betray the least sign of guilt, but she was completely baffled. Certainly not Mr. Shenstone; he even looked curiously at the ribbon, and then sternly at Kitty, as if supposing she had taken it; not the doctor, for he was at the other end of the room, and was more unconcerned and indifferent than any one present; not Mrs. Arnold, for not having been beside me when the miniature slipped from my dress, she could not have seen it, and consequently she could not have taken it in the dark, and so readily too. "Ah!" Kitty exclaimed, "I passed a dreadful night, Miss; I didn't know what it was to close my eyes; such awful thoughts as would come!" "What do you mean?" I said hurriedly. "Which of them do you think has it?" "Ah, Miss!" she exclaimed, with a burst of tears, "I wish I thought any of 'em had it! I've had enough of meddling with dead people's things for the rest of my life, that I have!" "I wish you would speak intelligibly; what do you mean?" I exclaimed, angrily. Kitty answered by fresh tears, "Oh, don't make me talk about it! Indeed, I cannot!" "I shall be very much displeased if you act in this way any longer," I said, with emphasis, as Kitty still shook her head. I heard footsteps in the hall; catching her arm, I exclaimed: "Tell me instantly what you mean!" "Oh, Miss!" she whispered, white and trembling, "that hand, that awful hand! It was colder than any stone, and sent a chill through me when I touched it; I never, never can"---- "You foolish girl," I exclaimed, impatiently, "I didn't think you were so silly"---- But at that moment some one knocked at the door, and Kitty, wiping her eyes and smoothing her hair, ran to open it. It was only Mary, with some coal; but it interrupted our conversation, which could only after that be resumed by broken snatches, wherein I urgently impressed upon Kitty my certainty of the miniature's being in possession of one or other of the parties in the room at the time of its disappearance, and the entire contempt in which I held her superstitious theory in regard to it. Kitty's belief on that point, however, could not be shaken, and I grew weary of reiterating my arguments. At last I found an opportunity, when we were alone, to propound another question: "What has been done about the riding-skirt?" "Oh, Miss," exclaimed Kitty, uneasily, "why do you worry about those things now? It will make your head ache to talk; I know master wouldn't like it." Kitty soon saw the futility of attempting to evade the matter; so she gave me a plain commonsensical statement of affairs, commencing from the moment I dashed down the avenue on Madge Wildfire's back; from which time it appeared, her difficulties began. Mrs. Roberts, after watching us out of the gate, the storm on her brow blackening every instant, turned away with a determined step, and entering the house, called to Kitty, saying she was in a great hurry for the dress she had given her to press off; she had important business at the Parsonage, and there was no time to lose. "I don't think you'll find Mr. Shenstone home, ma'am," Kitty had volunteered. "I saw him passing along the road toward Norbury, when I was down at the lodge half an hour ago." This information had appeared to give great disquietude to Mrs. Roberts, and in consequence of it, she had given up her plan of going out, and had retired misanthropically to her room, while Kitty had danced down to the kitchen in great glee, to communicate to Sylvie her narrow escape. But in half an hour, Mrs. Roberts' bell rang hastily, and Kitty apprehensively went up to answer it. "I have concluded, after all," said that lady, "to go to the Parsonage, and leave a note for Mr. Shenstone if he is not in; so get my dress for me as quickly as you can." "Yes, ma'am," Kitty had answered; but in passing the window, she had cast a look out. "It's most five o'clock now, ma'am, you'll be caught out in the dark; hadn't Thomas better run down with the note for you? Or maybe I could go?" But Mrs. Roberts was quite firm. "No, she did not care to trust to any one but herself in this case." And again she desired her to get the dress with all haste. Haste she certainly did make, in getting to the kitchen and calling Sylvie into consultation; which measure, however, did not tend to elucidate in any great degree the problem that at present perplexed her brain. Sylvie was one of the "raving distracted" kind, and invariably lost her wits on occasion of their being particularly required, and the only assistance she attempted to render, in this trying emergency, was ejaculatory and interjectional condolence on the apparent hopelessness of the case. Kitty, in disgust, slammed the door in her face, put her hands to her head in a wild way for a moment, then bounded upstairs again. "Oh, dear Mrs. Roberts," she exclaimed, as she entered the room, "it struck me on my way down, that perhaps you'd rather wear your old black silk instead of that nice bombazine, as it is getting so late, and the road is so dusty. We haven't had rain, you know, for an age." Mrs. Roberts drew herself up. Was she or was she not capable of judging what clothes she was to put on? Would it be necessary for her to go down and get the dress she wanted herself? "By _no_ means," Kitty said; and starting forth again, sat herself down on the third step of the stairs, in direst perplexity. But time pressed; there was no leisure for deliberation. She flew to a closet where some superannuated garments of the housekeeper's hung, selected the most presentable of the series of black bombazine skirts suspended in funereal rows upon the pegs; darted back, and with great composure, laid it on the sofa, while, with officious zeal, she proceeded to divest Mrs. Roberts of her house-costume, and invest her with her walking-dress. By skillfully interposing her person between the dress and the strong light, and putting it on and arranging it entirely with her own hands, she escaped detection. And arrayed in this ancient garment, the housekeeper sallied forth on her way to the Parsonage. Too anxious to be triumphant this time, Kitty stole out after her, to see the effect of the sunlight upon the foxy, faded black; but Mrs. Roberts was too much engrossed with cankering cares of a sterner kind, to think of her bombazine. At the gate, however, to her great content, she encountered Mr. Shenstone on his way from Norbury, and stopping him, held a long and anxious consultation with him (in which, said Kitty, _par parenthèse_, "I overheard her say some pretty things about you; but no matter)." She then parted from the clergyman, and returned slowly toward the house, Kitty following anxiously behind the hedge. The setting sun threw the most dazzling beams down the avenue. Kitty's heart beat, as she saw the housekeeper cast her eyes meditatively upon her dress; then, as the sunlight struck full upon it, she stooped a little down, and paused, and looked again, and again adjusted her glasses. She began, in truth, to "smell a rat," for passing her hand rapidly over the front breadth, she shook her head doubtingly, then lifted the suspicious garment to the sunlight, then holding it at arms' length, uttered an exclamation of surprise, turned it up, and examining the hem all around, dropped it; turned the pocket inside out--felt of the band around the waist--recognized its unfamiliarity--and with a low muttering of suppressed wrath, gathered herself up, and hastened toward the house. "It's all up!" groaned poor Kitty, as, by the back way, she darted into the kitchen, and awaited with trembling the pull of Mrs. Roberts' bell. "Kitty Carter," said Mrs. Roberts, in an awful voice, as she entered the room, "you have been practising upon me in an abominable manner. I have borne your saucy ways for a long time, but the end has now come. You can't deceive me; I'm too quick for you, and you shall be exposed. It's my intention to make Mr. Rutledge acquainted with your deceitful practices; and that, you are aware, is just the same as giving you warning; for Mr. Rutledge has never been known to endure anything of the kind in his house." Kitty quailed under this attack; but, rallying in a moment, asked Mrs. Roberts if she'd please tell her what was the matter? Her answer was a peremptory order to bring up the dress she had given her in the morning. For once in her life, Kitty had nothing to say; while Mrs. Roberts exclaimed: "It's my belief, Kitty Carter, that dress is lying where I put it this morning, and that you haven't touched it." "I wish from my soul I hadn't," thought the unlucky girl. "Now go down this moment and fetch it to me, finished or unfinished, or you forfeit your place." The only way that opened for Kitty, was to assume a position, good or bad, and maintain it through thick and thin. Therefore, with staunch determination, she replied: "I have not done the dress, ma'am; I didn't think you'd want it so soon; and I had rather not bring it up till it's finished." "This minute, or you lose your place," said the exasperated housekeeper. Kitty respectfully resisted the demand; it was contrary to her principles to give up work half finished. If Mrs. Roberts would give her time, she would do it; but before the dress was in order, she must decline bringing it up. Then the storm burst in all its fury. Sylvie was called up; Mrs. Roberts made a descent in person upon the kitchen, which was placed under martial law, Thomas and two of the stable-boys guarding the different entrances, while Dorothy and one of the farm-hands accompanied Mrs. Roberts in her inquisitorial progress through the lower departments. Altogether, such a tragedy had not convulsed the basement of Rutledge for many a long year; not, indeed, since the pranks of Kitty's childhood had been the scandal of the place. Kitty remembered with comfort, that she had weathered more than one storm there; and remembering this, took heart again, though, it must be confessed, things looked black enough. The dress not being and appearing anywhere, "from garret to basement," Kitty Carter was formally pronounced suspended from her duties, until such time as Mr. Rutledge, being informed of her offences, should himself dismiss her from the house. To that dark crisis had succeeded the alarm produced by the non-appearance of the equestrian party; then the consternation consequent upon the arrival of Michael, several hours later, announcing that the young lady had been lost, hunted for, and found, by all the men in the village, and was now lying, half dead, at the Parsonage; and, finally, that by order of Mr. Rutledge, Kitty, her maid, was to repair thither immediately to attend upon her. This materially changed the look of affairs; and it was hoped, by the anti-administration party, that the storm had blown over, and, in the new excitement, would be forgotten. But such hopes were futile indeed, and entertained by weak minds, not capable of sounding the depths of a resentment such as rankled in Mrs. Roberts' recollection. The very next day, in a solemn interview in the library, Mr. Rutledge was informed of the nature of the complaint against Kitty, and distinctly declared, that unless the matter was very shortly cleared up, he should be under the necessity of dismissing her from his service. And this sword was now hanging over poor Kitty's head; and Kitty's stout heart was sinking at the prospect of the only punishment that could have had much terror for her; for Rutledge was the only home she had ever known, and the only place she loved. "But it doesn't signify," she said bravely, dashing away a furtive tear; "I can get another place, and I'll look out that there's no Mrs. Roberts in the family." "But, Kitty," I exclaimed, "why didn't you tell? Mr. Rutledge would have overlooked it, I know." "What, _tell!_" cried Kitty, scornfully, "and get you into trouble, too? No, indeed, I know Mr. Rutledge well enough to know he'd have been angry with you as well as with me; and if you take my advice, Miss, you won't say a word about it. One's enough to take the blow; it won't make it any easier to have another getting it too. Just let the matter stand as it is; it will be all right. There, don't fret!" she exclaimed, cheerfully; "it worries me to death to see you mind it so! Why, Miss, it's nothing; how need you care?" "But, Kitty," I exclaimed, clinging to a last hope, "was the dress much spoiled?" "Oh dear, yes! muddied, torn, stained, as if you'd been dragged through the streets in it." Our conversation was again abruptly brought to a close by the advent of Mary, this time with a message to Kitty from Mrs. Arnold, desiring her help downstairs. And again, turning my face to the pillow, with a miserable sigh, I was left alone. CHAPTER XII. "The very gentlest of all human natures He joined to courage strong, And love outreaching unto all God's creatures, With sturdy hate of wrong." WHITTIER. Evening was closing in, and filling the little room where I lay with fitful shadows, which the tiny blaze of fire in the grate was incompetent to dispel. If it had been possible for me to be more miserable than I had been all day, I should indeed have "loathed the hour" when gloom and darkness so palpably and hopelessly descend, but the climax of misery and self-reproach had been reached by daylight, and outward dreariness could only increase, in a very slight degree, the inward gloom. The faults I had been guilty of, and the errors into which I had led, or allowed Kitty to go, seemed to me, and justly, the first steps in a most dangerous path. I fully realized the sins, and their effect upon my conscience, apart from their consequences and punishment. These last, I was aware, were hard enough. I knew I had done what must lower me in Mr. Rutledge's esteem; to be the accomplice in a deception, however slight, was to sink just that much in his regard, whose rigid truthfulness and honor were offended by the least prevarication. I knew I had given Mrs. Roberts grounds for all her former distrust and aversion, and placed myself lower than she could have estimated me. Above all, poor Kitty was the victim on whom it fell hardest, and how much of the blame of not checking her or guiding her right lay on my shoulders, I dared not think. I was really attached to the brave, quick-witted girl, and remembered, with humiliation, how ignorant and untaught she was, and how naturally and unavoidably her faults were the results of her unguided impetuosity, while mine were committed in the light of an instructed conscience and educated intellect. But with me to suffer pain, was to seek some cure for it. My repentances were not often fruitless; I could no more have lain there, and endured that self-reproach, without resolving on some way to allay it, than I could have submitted to a dagger in my breast without attempting to draw it out. The only remedy I could see, was painful enough, but there was no help for it. "Mrs. Arnold," I implored, "do put down your work, and come and sit by me; I want to ask you something." Mrs. Arnold left her seat by the window, and laying down the knitting that her rapid fingers plied alike through daylight and darkness, came to my bedside and sat down. She saw I was excited and feverish, and in her gentle way strove to soothe and amuse me. She talked of a great many things about the parish that she thought might interest me--of the school children, and the Christmas festivities that were preparing, and in some way Rutledge was spoken of, and its dullness and gloominess. "But I don't think it's gloomy in the least," I said; "I think it's the most beautiful place I ever was in in my life. Don't you think it's delightful?" "I used to think so," she said, sadly. "Have you been there lately?" I demanded. "Never since I left it first," she answered, musingly. "Then you lived there once?" She assented half unconsciously. "What were you?" I asked, very suddenly; "were you housekeeper?" "No, I was governess, Miss," she answered; then started, as if she had said more than she had intended, and hastily turned the conversation to something else. But I could not so quickly turn my thoughts. This woman, then, who tended me, with sad, soft eyes and voice, had been the governess and companion of Alice--had known from the beginning the storm that had burst over Rutledge, and was herself, perhaps, involved in this dark story of the past, that was meeting me at every turn. The miniature would have startled her, perhaps, if she could have seen it. What if she, in reality, had it now, and hers was the cold hand upon my breast that had seized it? But no; Kitty was sure it was not. And then my thoughts reverted to my own remorse and trouble that had only been momentarily lulled by Mrs. Arnold's conversation. There was a pause just then, and raising myself on my elbow, I said, looking intently at my companion: "Mrs. Arnold, did you ever confess a sin to Mr. Shenstone, and ask counsel of him when you were very miserable?" At my words, Mrs. Arnold gave a start; but recovering herself, she said, in a voice somewhat agitated: "Why do you ask me such a question?" "Because," I said, too much absorbed in my own trouble to heed her agitation, "because I am very miserable, and don't know exactly what to do; I am sure he is the only one who can help me, and I must tell him before I sleep to-night, if only I can get the courage! Oh, Mrs. Arnold! tell me, is he very severe? Or will he be kind--and would you dare, if you were me?" "I cannot tell what trouble you have on your mind, but I can answer for it, if human help can lighten it, Mr. Shenstone will give you all the help he can. And if it is but between you and heaven, he will show you the way to get at peace. Oh, my dear young lady! you need not be afraid to open your heart to one who knows so much about God's mercy and men's sins. You need not be afraid but that he will be as tender as he is wise; indeed, you need not fear him." She spoke rapidly and earnestly; her whole manner of precision and composure seemed to be broken down and melted before some recollection that my trouble seemed to recall. I laid my burning hand in hers, and said with a sigh: "Oh, if I only dared!" "But why should you fear?" she continued, earnestly. "Why should you fear, when I tell you that he has only kindness and pity in his heart--that he has looked with forbearance and compassion on blacker sins than ever stained your young soul; and when I tell you--for I have reason to know--that he can bring light out of darkness, and can show a way of peace to even the most tortured and despairing. It may," she continued, "be but a very little sin that is weighing on you, and turning you out of the right way; but from little sins grow heavy punishments, and better find now the best way of putting it out of your heart, and putting something good in its stead. You have all life before you," she said, with a weary sigh, "and repentance is easier and more hopeful work, than it is to come back, when one has spent one's inheritance of life in sin, having nothing to offer heaven but fruitless tears." Her voice trembled with emotion; she looked pityingly at me as, struggling to keep back my tears, I hid my face in the pillow, and caressing the hand that still lay in hers, she went on to persuade me to the only remedy she knew for my unhappiness. I still felt shudderingly afraid to make the dreadful effort, and faltered something about my fear of his goodness and superiority, and the contempt he would feel for me when he knew how weak and sinful I had been. "Would it give you courage," she said, in a low tone, "to know how he once received the repentance of a very miserable woman--a woman who had not only sinned against heaven, but against him--who had done more than any one else to blight his happiness and make his life desolate, but who, having met the due reward of her deeds, came back to die in misery where she had failed to live in innocence? Shall I tell you of this?" I whispered "Yes," and she went on in a low voice: "It is no matter what the sins were that brought me to the misery I shall tell you of; it is no matter whether they were committed for myself, or for the love of one whom I would have died to serve; it is no matter for me to tell you that they grew from little unchecked thoughts of pride and self-will, and little half-intended acts of deception, into the monster sins that overshadowed my life; it is enough that I had come to the recompense of them--that in remorse, in utter consternation, I mourned as one without hope. What did I know of hope? Six feet of foreign mound covered the remains of her I had served and sinned for. Shame and infamy covered her name; hope was dead in my heart; faith had never been lit there. Alone in a land of strangers, there was but one longing in my breast that exceeded the desire for death, and that was the craving to see home again. It makes me shudder even now to recall that journey--weary months of fatigue, and exposure and misery; the only thought that kept me up, a dreary one at best, to see home once more, and die before a word of reproach could stab me, or a familiar voice recall the wretched past. "It was a still, clear December night, when, footsore and weary, I saw, with a strange thrill, the lights of a little village, that my heart told me was the little village I had come thousands of miles to see, and that I had not seen nor heard from since my guilty flight, long years ago, on a December night, still and cold as this. I hurried on, my sinking strength nerved up for a last effort, till I should reach a woody knoll I knew overlooked the village, and there, I said, I will die. In my hand I held what I knew would free me; I had carried it in my bosom for months and months, only waiting for this moment. At last I reached the spot, and sinking down on the hard ground, covered my face a moment with my hands, then looked down upon the scene before me. There lay the village, its white houses gleaming in the moonlight--there the familiar road wound round the foot of the hill--there was the broad street, the old mill, the placid lake in the distance, and beyond it, clear against the sky, the dark outlines of Rutledge; massive, and gloomy, and lifeless, it stood far off from the cheery village, with its animation and content. Not a window of the little hamlet but showed a kindly light, while the great house beyond was dark and silent--not a gleam of light from all its sombre front. A horror and remorse that you cannot understand came over me, such as I had thought my dead heart was incapable of harboring; then despair settled on it again, and I prepared for death. But as I was looking--and I was not dreaming--between the desolate house and me, distinct against the dark woods, there shone out a silver cross. I was not dreaming--I was terribly awake; but there it glittered, still and bright. Not a sound broke the stillness of the frosty air, not another feature in the landscape changed; I strained my eyes to catch the least wavering or fading of the distinct lines, but calm and clear the holy sign still lit the dark stretch of woodland between me and Rutledge, and never wavered or faded. I was not superstitious, but this came to me like a token from heaven, and I held the fatal vial unopened in my hand. What if this was meant to tell me there was forgiveness yet--that there was a sanctifying calm even over the cold desolation of that dark house--that the sins were done away, and that mercy had shone out. With that sign before me, I did not dare to add that one sin more to those I had already committed; I did not dare to die by my own hand. And then a desire took possession of me to know something of what had passed in all these years, or if there was, indeed, none remaining to loathe and execrate me. And finally, hiding the vial in my bosom, I crept down, and keeping my eye still fixed on the shining cross, I turned into the broad street that led to the village. One after another of the cheerful lights I passed, not daring to go in, pausing before each gate, and then hurrying on, determined to try the next. By and by, the cross was lost among the trees, and my courage began to fail, when, on a sudden, I found myself at the gate of a church-yard, and looking up, saw, what was most unexpected and unfamiliar, the arches and spire of a little church, on the site of the neglected old graveyard I remembered; and there, above it, gleamed the cross that had stayed my hand from suicide, which, catching the rays of the rising moon, had shone out with such a message of mercy. "I opened the little gate, and stealing across the churchyard, bent down to read the names upon the graves that had been made since I had been away. I mournfully traced out one familiar name after another, till, with a groan, I turned away from the gloomy spot, and shutting the gate, struck off into the road again. I dragged on, till I reached the outskirts of the village, then sat down to rest. A single light, at a little distance, shone from a cottage on the edge of the woods, that I knew bordered Rutledge Park. A boy passed by me, and summoning courage, I stopped him, and asked him what house that was. 'The Parsonage,' he said. And there, I thought, is where I will go, and hear, perhaps, whether there is any hope for such as me in either world. When I reached the low gate of the garden in front of it, I did not allow myself time to think, but walked down the path, and stepping on the little porch, knocked faintly at the door. The blinds of the window where the light was, being open, I looked in, and saw the only occupant of it, who had been reading by the lamp on the table, rise to answer my knock. "'Can I see the clergyman?' I asked, in a low voice. "'Come in, this way,' he said, kindly, leading the way to the room he had left; 'I am the clergyman.' "He told me to sit down by the fire, and then, in a tone that moved me strangely, asked if he could help or direct me in any way. "I was too near the gate of death to see in him anything but the minister of God; and, forgetting that he was a man and a stranger, began in a broken, husky voice, the recital of the doubts and the despair I had been fighting with. I do not know how much of my story I betrayed, or what, in this extremity of wretchedness, I said; but pausing at the end, and frightened by his silence, I raised my eyes, and faltered: "'Would God have mercy after that, do you think?' "The clergyman's face was white as mine: his voice shook as he said: "'If He has let you live, He means to forgive you, you may be sure.' "'He has let me live,' I said, eagerly, and I told him of the cross that had held me back from suicide. He pressed his hand before his eyes, then said, after a moment, in a broken voice: "'Take it for a sign, then, that He is waiting to be gracious; that there is peace on earth, as well as mercy in heaven, for you.' "'Never peace; I have no right to hope for that, only a chance of pardon before I die.' "'A sure hope of pardon, if you verily repent, and a sure sense of peace, if you strive to put in deeds, the repentance that God has put in your heart.' "'There is nothing left in life for me to do,' I said, with a bitter sigh. "'So I thought once,' he said, 'but I have learned that God never leaves a soul on earth, without leaving some work for it to do, to keep it from despair, some sin to be atoned for, some duty to be fulfilled. Can you think of none?' "'None,' I said; 'there is nothing left for me, my repentance comes too late; there is none left but my weary self, to profit by it.' "'There is a work I know of waiting for you, Rachel Arnold,' he said, in a voice that thrilled through and through me. It all came upon me then; with a low cry, I started up and sprang toward the door; but he interposed. "'Let me go,' I cried; 'I cannot face you in this world! Wait, before you bring your accusation, till we are at God's tribunal! Let me go, and I will never offend your sight again. Oh! why are you not dead, like all the rest? Why are you left to drive me back to despair again?' And in an agony I sank down at his feet. "'I am left,' he said, raising me up, 'to guide you back to peace and duty; to tell you of God's infinite loving kindness, and to show you how much of hope there is for you, in this world and in the next; and to assure you, if you need the assurance, that I as utterly forgive you, as I hope for God's forgiveness for myself.' "'You never would say so,' I murmured, 'if you knew all.' "'I know enough to understand your remorse; the rest you can tell to God; I say again, from my soul, I forgive you.' "But I never raised my face, nor looked at him, till I had told him all, and he had said again: "'With all my heart I forgive you. The past is cancelled; stay here, and help me in the work that God has set us to do, and obliterate the sins that this place has seen, by faithful striving in the labor of restoring it to his service again.' "My dear young lady," said Mrs. Arnold, in a trembling voice, "can you fear him after that?" "No," I exclaimed, with tears; "let me see him now." CHAPTER XIII. "Make no enemies; he is insignificant indeed that can do thee no harm." LACON. "Well," says Mrs. Arnold, with an inquiring look, as she was preparing to leave me for the night, "was I right, or do you feel sorry you followed my advice?" "Ah! no, indeed!" I exclaimed; "it's all right now! I can see all through it, and I am so much happier!" and I took her hand affectionately as she left me. It was all right, or nearly so. I had found, after the first awkwardness, that it was very easy to tell Mr. Shenstone things that I had never supposed I could tell to any one; there was something in his manner that divested one of all fear and shyness, and suggested only the interest and earnestness of one whose highest desire it was, to set forward in the right way, all who were faltering and uncertain. He made my duty very clear, and gave me many simple suggestions that I wondered I had never thought of before. He then told me what it seemed to him I ought to do, in the matter of remedying the mischief I had caused. Acknowledging my fault to Mrs. Roberts in person, was a very humiliating, but a very wholesome mortification, and one which he unhesitatingly recommended. And the restoration to her of a dress equally as valuable as the one she had lost, was also his advice, and, if it shortened uncomfortably my already rather scanty supply of pocket-money, so much the better lesson it would be. He would himself undertake acquainting Mr. Rutledge with the circumstances, and representing them in the most favorable light. About the miniature I had just begun to tell him, intending to say as much as I could without implicating Kitty, when a knock at the door interrupted us, and "the doctor" was announced. His visit was not quite as trying as it had been in the morning, owing to the increased stock of patience and good resolutions I had been laying in since then; and indeed, they continued to influence my endurance of him during the daily visits that he inflicted on me while I remained at the Parsonage. I had had so much of the effects of willfulness, that I determined never to be self-willed again, and not so much as to ask him when I might go back to Rutledge; and he, for his part, seemed determined not to volunteer the permission till I should ask for it. But the matter at last was settled by Mr. Shenstone, who came up one morning while the doctor was with me, and said he had just received a note from Mr. Rutledge, saying that from the account the doctor had given him of me, he should fancy I was well enough to come back, and if the doctor's permission could be obtained, he would send the carriage for me that afternoon at four o'clock. I looked at the doctor with breathless interest; the doctor looked at me with searching curiosity, while he said, as slowly as the occasion permitted, and with as long a preface, and as protracted an utterance as he could command: "I should be most unwilling to be the cause of disappointing Mr. Rutledge, or of occasioning any vexation to the young lady, by denying the permission that Mr. Rutledge seems to expect and desire; though I am certain, he has no intention of influencing my decision against my better judgment, or of inducing me to say anything, that in my capacity of medical adviser, would involve any departure from strict veracity and prudence. I am aware that it is often difficult for a disinterested party to resist the reasonable and natural desires of those whose judgments are warped by their wishes, and that the only reward the conscientious physician gets, in such cases, is the aversion and coldness of those whose good he is most interested in. In this case, however, I am certain, that from the well-known good sense and sagacity of Mr. Rutledge, and the _unquestioned amiability_ of the young lady, I should have nothing to fear." "Then," said Mr. Shenstone, kindly, evidently seeing my anxiety, and wishing to put an end to it, "then you do not consider it desirable to allow the change?" "I am not prepared to say so, entirely," he answered; "I was going on to remark, that I should not have allowed any of the considerations I mentioned to influence me, had I really deemed it imprudent for the young lady to leave her present residence. But, considering her rapid convalescence, and the mildness of the day, and the care I am certain will be taken to make the drive an easy one, and the harm which a disappointment might occasion her, I think I am justified in according my consent to Mr. Rutledge's arrangement." I don't think I could have endured a minute more of this kind of suspense, and probably the doctor knew this, and so brought his discourse to a termination, after having tried my nerves as long, and given me as many cuts, as he considered me capable of enduring. I began to suspect, indeed, that he had perceived my aversion to him, and that in a quiet and unostentatious manner, he returned the sentiment, and would lose no occasion of letting me benefit by it. This was mere conjecture, however, for the doctor's manner was as assiduously polite, as blandly gallant as ever. And indeed, his anxious interest would not suffer him to allow me to go unattended to Rutledge; but at four o'clock, when I was bidding adieu to Mr. Shenstone, and being seated comfortably in the carriage by Mrs. Arnold and Kitty, the sorrel horse and shiny gig drew up beside us, and in an _empressé_ manner, the doctor sprang out, and in his own person superintended the arrangements for my comfort, and declared that he should not feel quite easy till he had seen me safe at Rutledge; and for that purpose, as well as that of paying a professional visit to the master of it, he should drive on, and be there to receive us. An unconscious tinge of hauteur was all, in my manner, that escaped of the vexation I felt at the announcement. His presence altered very much my conduct at leaving the Parsonage. If he had not been there, I am sure I should have managed to tell Mr. Shenstone something of the gratitude I felt for the unmerited interest in, and kindness toward me, that he had shown; as it was, I could only look down, and appear unspeakably awkward, at his kind expressions of affection and regret, as he said good bye. And, instead of throwing my arms around Mrs. Arnold's neck, as I wanted to do, and telling her I was fonder of her than of almost anybody else in the world, and that I should never forget her care and goodness, I could only, with that man looking on, give her my hand, and say something unintelligibly about coming to see her again before I went away. The carriage started, and the gig first followed, then passed it, and by the time we reached the gate, the sorrel horse was standing before the door, and the sorrel driver thereof waiting for us, in company with Mr. Rutledge on the steps. "Now Kitty," I said, as we drove into the park, "now Kitty, keep your courage up. Mr. Shenstone says he has seen Mr. Rutledge, and he has promised to excuse you; all you have got to do is to make an apology to Mrs. Roberts, and that's nothing! Why, I've got to do the same thing, and you'll see how brave I'll be about it." Kitty shook her head dejectedly. "I never hated to do anything more." And here the carriage stopped, and Mr. Rutledge and the doctor came down to it. "Ah," said the former, kindly, "you have come back at last. I did not know whether the doctor and Mrs. Arnold ever meant to let you return to Rutledge." His tone was kind--but--what more did I want? I did not dare to look up; I felt Dr. Hugh's eyes on my face, and murmuring some broken commonplace about being happy to be back again, hurried up the steps and into the house, Kitty following with my shawls and packages. At the head of the stairs, I stopped till she overtook me, and telling her hastily that I was going immediately to Mrs. Roberts, and she must give me the package that contained the dress, and be ready to go in, and make her apology as soon as I came out, I left her, and crossed over to the door of Mrs. Roberts' room. It was a mean and cowardly thing to hope, no doubt, but I did, notwithstanding, most ardently desire that it might so happen that the housekeeper was not in her room, and that I might have a brief respite before the dreadful penance was undertaken, and in that hope I gave an undemonstrative knock, to which Mrs. Roberts' voice responded promptly, "Come in." Coming in was an easy part of it; walking up to her and saying, "How are you?" was easy too; and remarking, "I am better, thank you," was the easiest of all. But after that! Standing blankly before that rigid black bombazine figure, whose bluish lips were obstinately compressed, and whose unsympathetic eyes were regarding me inquiringly, it was anything but easy to say what I had come to say--it was anything but pleasant to remember I was to be humble. But there was no help for it. I gulped down my pride and aversion, and simply and honestly told my story, making every allowance truth would permit me for Kitty, putting all the blame that was possible on myself, making no cowardly excuses, and no submissive apologies, but telling a very straightforward and honest story, in a very downright and unequivocal manner, and winding up with a request that she would consider that I regretted my share in the business, and was desirous of making her every amend for the annoyance and inconvenience I had occasioned her. No other course could have been as well calculated to mollify Mrs. Roberts; any undue humility would have aroused her suspicions--the least attempt to conciliate her would have settled her in her aversion--the smallest parade of penitence she would have stigmatized as hypocrisy; but as it was, she was met on her own ground, and could do nothing but yield, in an ungracious manner, an ungracious acknowledgment of my honesty and sincerity, and a promise to consider the offence atoned for. I put the package down on the table, telling her what it contained, and again recommending Kitty to her mercy, turned and left the room. I found that young person awaiting me in an unenviable state of mind. I told her I should never have the least respect for her again, if she lost her courage now, and then I talked to her a little _à la_ Shenstone, and then rallied her a little _à la_ myself, and finally sent her off, quite staunch again, to meet her offended mistress, while I employed the time in taking off my bonnet and cloak, and arranging the different articles that I had brought back, in the drawers. Despite my attempts at nonchalance, I felt a little unhappy. I did not yet know how far Mr. Rutledge had put me out of the place I had held in his regard, since he knew of my fault, and I could not feel quite at ease till I heard my pardon from his own lips. At last Kitty returned, looking a little pale and agitated, but acknowledging that, on the whole, she was glad she had gone. The interview had been, it appeared, rather a stirring one, but Kitty had kept her temper, and Mrs. Roberts had, at last, after expending her wrath upon an unresisting subject, come to terms, and the curtain had dropped upon comparative tranquillity. Then I told Kitty we must have done with deceits, little and great, and related how near I had come to telling Mr. Shenstone about the miniature, and that I meant to tell him the very first chance, or else Mr. Rutledge. But Kitty fell into such an ecstasy of terror, and with such vehement tears and entreaties besought me never to expose her, and promised such eternal devotion to truth henceforth, if I would only spare her that insupportable mortification and disgrace, that at last I yielded, and, to my own sorrow, promised to hazard no attempt to clear up that mystery, and to make no confessions to any one in regard to it. After dressing my hair and arranging the room, Kitty left me, and I sat down in my favorite seat in the bay window, with the double purpose of whiling away the time and watching for the doctor's departure. But that devoutly wished consummation did not crown my waiting; moment after moment passed, and still the doctor tarried, and at last Thomas came out and led the sorrel horse away to the stable. "That man's going to stay to tea, I know," I ejaculated, indignantly. "I've a great mind not to go downstairs." The unremunerative policy, however, of spiting myself, had early been impressed on me, and I wisely abandoned all thought of pursuing it, and reconciled myself to the trial with all possible heroism. I should not go down till the last minute. That was all the indignation I should indulge in. Twilight was descending fast; the afternoon had not been a bright one, and contrary to the nature of such things, was particularly short-lived. There was a light streak around the horizon, that suggested to the weather-wise the idea of snow impending; above, and all over the rest of the sky, there was nothing to relieve the dull grey hue. The line of light grew narrower and narrower, the cold grey shroud settled down lower and heavier, the lake and lawn grew more and more indistinct, the shadows thickened within, the darkness increased without, and imperceptibly night stole over us, and still I sat dreamily by the window, picturing to myself for the hundredth time, and as I did at all dreamy moments, Rutledge as it used to be--the halls filled with servants, the rooms with guests; carriages rolling to the door; music and laughter echoing through the house; Alice lovely and admired; Richard, with his refined, aristocratic face; and the young Arthur, as the sketch he gave me, had recorded him. Then I joined to this links that I had caught from Mrs. Arnold's broken story; the flight, the dreary exile in a foreign land, and death finishing a career that infamy and shame had branded. But what had Mr. Shenstone to do with it all? Perhaps he had loved Alice; perhaps it was the loss of her that was the terrible trial of which he had spoken to Mr. Rutledge when I was lying half unconscious in the study. Then I tried to put together more of what I had then heard; but the more I pondered, the more confused and indistinct it all grew, and ended by bringing up, in all its perplexity, the tormenting mystery of the lost miniature. Why must I be so baffled about that? Why had I put it out of my power, by my promise to Kitty, to go to Mr. Rutledge honestly, and tell him the story, and ask him to help me to discover who had taken it, and so rid my fancy of the hateful idea that Kitty had suggested, which, do what I would, had come, between sleeping and waking, every time I had closed my eyes since she had told me of it. In the dead of night, the cold hand upon my bosom would wake me with a start; I would reason away the fright, and try to sleep again, but as soon as unconsciousness would come, the chilling horror would come too, and startle me into sleepless watching. I despised myself for the folly; but I had begun to hate the darkness. Even now, the dusky thickening twilight, with its creeping shadows, made me nervous; a chill seemed to strike to my very heart, and I caught myself starting at every sound, and trembling at every flicker of the dying firelight. Under these circumstances, the hour that intervened between the closing in of twilight and the ringing of the tea-bell, could not fail to be a very long and uncomfortable one, and the promptness with which I hurried down at the summons, attested my preference for social hours and habits over solitude and contemplation. CHAPTER XIV. "What! old, and rich, and childless, too, And yet believe my friends are true? Truth might, perhaps, to those belong, To those who loved me poor and young; But, trust me, for the new I have, They'll love me dearly--in my grave." Dr. Hugh was suavity and amiability itself; his host was courteous and attentive; I only, of the party, was abstracted and silent, and could not enter, with any interest, into the discussions, political, social, and educational, to which the medical guest led the way. He frequently appealed to me, but I answered mechanically and at random, and was soon involved in my own thoughts again, while the two gentlemen carried on the conversation learnedly enough between themselves. Though Dr. Hugh showed equal readiness in argument, and had, moreover, the advantage of choosing his topics in all cases, I could not help contrasting the brusque inelegance of his tone with the well-bred ease and quiet of Mr. Rutledge's. One was trying to please and to _appear_, the other was simply _being_ what was innate and habitual. Altogether the doctor was, on this occasion, the most animated and chatty of the trio at the tea-table, and though Mr. Rutledge did a proper share of the talking, still his manner was not unreserved, either to his guest or to me. Whether this was the effect of the change in his feelings toward me, or only the presence of a third party, I could not tell; but it was very tormenting, and made the doctor's stay unbearably tedious, and the termination of it an unspeakable relief. When the hall door closed behind him, however, I could have wished him back, for it was even worse to find myself alone with Mr. Rutledge, for the first time since the strange night of which I had so many strange recollections. Since then, was he alienated or altered, or had he forgotten his interest in me during the days of absence that had intervened? His voice brought the perplexing reverie to an end, and dispelled the doubts forever "Now that that tiresome doctor has taken himself off," he said, in a tone so changed and so divested of its reserve, that it almost startled me, "perhaps you'll have the grace to come to me, and tell me how glad you are to be home again." He held out his hand, and I was by his side in a moment. "'Home is not home without thee,'" he said. "What, I should like to be informed, am I to do when you're gone 'for good,' as this Yankee gentleman would say?" Surprise and pleasure brightened my face, and I had some saucy words on my lips, when the door softly opened, and _the doctor_ stood hesitatingly on the threshold, apologizing for his abrupt return and entrance, on the ground of having forgotten to impress upon the young lady the importance of continuing the powders she had been taking. He had not thought of this neglect of his till he had actually got into his buggy at the door, and then remembered it "on a sudden," and was so much alarmed at thinking what the consequences might be, that he had sprung out, and hurried in to give a parting charge on the subject. Every three hours, he reiterated, and then apologized again to Mr. Rutledge for the interruption. Mr. Rutledge received his apologies rather stiffly, and begged him to be easy on the matter of the powders; he had no doubt the young lady would follow his advice implicitly, and he trusted the result would be as gratifying as Dr. Hugh himself could wish. And the gentlemen both bowed, and Mr. Rutledge accompanied his guest to the door with undiminished politeness, but with a slight contraction of the brow, that augured ill for the doctor's cause. There was much expression in the doctor's parting salutation to me; his glance had been rapid, but he had not omitted, in his observation, the total change of attitude, expression and voice, that had ensued upon his withdrawing from the two people who had been so _distraits_ and undemonstrative all the evening; it was a significant fact, and he had not been slow to seize upon it. And I liked him less than ever after he left us for the second time that evening. "Mr. Rutledge," I said, when he had returned from convoying the doctor to the door, "did you notice what a disagreeable impression Dr. Hugh seemed to make upon Tigre? He keeps at a little distance from him, and barks in the short, snappish way that he always does when the tortoise-shell cat prowls into the barn." Mr. Rutledge smiled at the analogy I seemed to trace. "I don't altogether fancy the man myself, but one must not be too readily influenced by fancies; no doubt he's very good in his way, and seems to be much more of a physician than old Sartain. It's a bad way to expect too much of people, and I hope you'll never get as much in the habit of it as I have always been." With that he dismissed the subject, and presently pointing to the seat beside him, told me I need not think of saying good night yet, as he had a great deal to say to me. Without much reluctance, I sat down, and listened submissively. "In the first place, you have not asked what your aunt says to this new delay." "Well, what does she say?" I asked, a little uneasily. "She says, that unless you arrive very shortly at New York, she shall feel herself obliged to leave all her pressing household cares, sick children, undisciplined servants, and come on for you in person." "It's a new thing for her to be so anxious about me," I exclaimed, impatiently. "I was sick a month last summer at school, and she never suggested the idea of coming on to see me." "Be that as it may, her anxiety at present knows no bounds, and I have in vain rendered the most elaborate accounts of your state, and in all ways endeavored to weaken her fears. This very afternoon I received another letter, more decided than the last in its request, that if you were able to be moved, you might be brought on immediately; if not, she would at once start for this place, and my answer was to be instantly communicated to her by telegraph." "You have sent it?" "Yes, three hours ago," he answered, looking at me attentively. "Well, what did you tell her?" "That we should start to-morrow morning at eleven o'clock." I struggled hard to keep up, under the unexpected blow, and answered, as I bit my lip and choked down the tears: "Very well, sir, I will try to be ready in time." "The doctor says it will be perfectly safe," continued Mr. Rutledge, quietly. "And there is no appeal from his opinion," I interrupted, tartly. "I am so much better myself," he went on, as if he had not heard me, "that there is no imprudence in my attempting it; and I can see no objection to complying with your aunt's request immediately. Indeed, I feel that I could not do otherwise." His indifferent way of speaking of what to me was such a vital matter, roused my pride less than it wounded my sensitiveness, and I had much ado to master myself enough to say: "If you had had the goodness to tell me before, I need not have wasted this evening, but could have spent it in packing." "You cannot have much to do, I am sure. Kitty can pack everything in the morning, and I thought it was best not to worry you by telling you of it before." "I must go up immediately, however," I said, rising. "I cannot let you go yet," he said, detaining me. "Do you remember this is the last evening you are to spend at Rutledge?" "And what of that?" "You ought to be sorry." I shrugged my shoulders, and said, it was a pity I could not gratify his taste for the pathetic. "Ah, nonsense, child!" he said, with a sudden change of manner, "we have so little time left, it's foolish to waste any of it in idle pretences. You may as well cry; I know you are sorry enough, I know you can hardly keep back your tears." That broke down all my self-control; burying my face in my hands, I burst into a passion of tears. There was no use in attempting to command myself, and indeed I never thought of it. Mr. Rutledge took my hand, and attempted to draw it away from my face, then suddenly relinquishing it, walked rapidly once or twice across the room, returned, and sat down by me. "You will make it harder than ever for me to let you go, if you cry so bitterly," he said, after a pause. "You will soon forget your grief, and be as happy in your new home as you have been here, while I shall, for a long while, miss you, and be lonely without you. Do you not see I have the most to regret?" I shook my head, while the sobs came more chokingly than ever. "Foolish child!" he said, "this is but a transitory feeling with you; it will vanish in the sunshine of to-morrow. In a week, you will have forgotten all about Rutledge." Now my anger mastered my tears, and looking up, I exclaimed: "You are always telling me I am a child! You are always treating me as if I were a senseless plaything! I am tired of it; I could almost hate you for it!" He looked at my flashing eyes with a strange intentness, as if he would read me through and through. "But you are a child; it would be folly for me to treat you otherwise; how can I know that your affections and sensibilities are other than those of any ardent, impetuous child?" With an impatient gesture, I interrupted him; and turning away, hid my face on the sofa again. "That is the way!" he exclaimed. "No child could be more changeable; one moment, I have half a mind to think you are a woman, and the next, you turn away, and pout, and cry." "You shan't have that to say of me again!" I exclaimed, conquering my tears with a huge effort, and raising my head. "I will be cold enough, if that's what you want. I won't trouble you with my tears again, even if you try to make me cry, as you did a little while ago. I can be as indifferent and unkind as you are yourself, if that will be any proof of my maturity and wisdom." "Indifferent? Ah, there you show your childishness and ignorance more plainly than you think! Culpably indifferent and unkind!" he said, with a short laugh. "But," with a softening of his voice, "whatever there may have been of neglect or unkindness in my manner, remember, when you think of it hereafter, that there was nothing that answered to it, in my heart; remember that I shall never cease to feel the strongest interest in you, the kindest affection for you; remember, whenever you need a friend, you have promised to appeal to me. And remember, too," he continued, in a lighter tone, "all the rest of the engagements that you entered into, of which that bracelet is to be the souvenir. I have the greatest faith in it; I shall never feel very far separated from you, with this little key so near my heart," he said, touching the trinket on his chain. "As for me," I exclaimed, bitterly, "I shall have to wear this bracelet as I've promised to; but I shall try my best to forget the giver and all about him! As for the promises, I don't care _that_ for them!" And in emphatic contempt I snapped my fingers. Mr. Rutledge smiled, as if he knew enough about my indignation to bear up under it, and said, coaxingly and low: "Ah, surely you're not going to desert me already; my little friend is the one thing in the world I care for, just now; what would be the result, if she were to turn faithless?" I averted my head. "You should have been prepared for that when you took a child into your friendship." "Ah! that rankles still, I see. Well, now, turn your face toward me, and look up, while I assure you, solemnly you know, and most sincerely, that I do not think you are childish in most things, that I do believe you are honest and true, and altogether, excepting a few pardonable caprices, as good a friend as one need desire. Doesn't that satisfy you? What could I say more flattering?" "Oh! as to saying, you are unrivalled at that; it's the doing that you are deficient in. It's all very fine for you to call me your friend, and say how lonely you shall be without me, and all that style of thing; and then, in the next breath, tell me to get ready to go away to-morrow, and remark that you cannot see the least objection to my aunt's plan--and look and laugh just as usual. That doesn't seem much like meaning what you say, surely!" "But what," he said, "would you have me do? If it made me perfectly miserable to part with you, it is still my duty to do it. Tell me any way of getting out of it." "Let me stay at Rutledge," I exclaimed, turning toward him with pleading eyes; "just let me stay here. I hate New York, I hate society, I don't even know my aunt; and here I am so happy, and I have just got used to it all, and am beginning to feel at home, and it is cruel to take me to another strange place! I will be so good and useful; I will study and improve myself, and help Mrs. Arnold with the school-children and the poor people, and keep Mrs. Roberts' accounts, and read to you, and write your letters, and be just as good and obedient as possible; not in the least self-willed, not a bit unlady-like. Just try," I went on, coaxingly; "you will not know me, I shall be so amiable!" "But," he said, with a strange mixture of fondness and irony in his tone, "what would _Madame votre tante_ say to such an arrangement?" "She would say, of course, that if I wanted to, I was very welcome to stay; she has daughters enough already, and not having seen me, she can't be expected to know whether she wants me or not." "Very well; supposing for a moment, that your aunt had given her consent, and that there was no obstacle in the way of your remaining here, how many weeks do you suppose it would be before you would begin to think regretfully of the gay life you had given up, and the pleasures you had put out of your power, before you would begin to sigh for companions of your own age, and excitements greater than your life here could offer? Believe me, it would not be long before you would be thoroughly 'aweary' of the quiet routine of Rutledge, and thoroughly tired of your bargain." I protested against this injustice, and exhausted every argument to prove my superiority to such fickleness, but Mr. Rutledge remained unconvinced. "I do not say you are more fickle than are all other untamed young things of seventeen; it isn't your fault that you are not older and wiser; it is my misfortune. In the nature of things, you cannot stay forever ignorant and innocent, and indifferent to the world-- "'Let the wild falcon soar her swing, She'll stoop when she has tired her wing.'" "It's very strange," I said, "that you should tell me I must put myself in the way of the very temptations that you were so earnest in cautioning me against not long ago. Why must I go into society, when I don't want it? Why must I try the snares of the world, when, in reality, I am best content away from it?" "You must first know what it is you renounce, my pretty child; you must first see what other places are like, before you can judge whether Rutledge will content you, and what other friends are like, before you can tell how worthy of your affection this first one is. Wait till you are a little older; wait a year or two, and then if you still turn to Rutledge, it is your home forever." Wait a year or two! If he had said, "Wait till the early part of the twentieth century," it could hardly have seemed a more insupportable term of banishment. "Ah!" he said, with a sigh, "a year or two seems an age to you now; when you have passed through as many as I have, you'll begin to realize how short they are, how very small a part of a life they form, and how very quickly they pass." I shook my head. "They would go soon enough if there was anything pleasant to mark them; but if they are to be passed in longing for their end, they will be ages indeed." "No fear that the next two or three years of your life will be passed in that way, my friend. It would be a heavy blow, indeed, that would take the elasticity out of your spirit, and daunt the courage that I know will make your life a worthy one. Be true to yourself; keep your heart pure, and the world will not hurt you; you will only see how far it is from satisfying you." "Oh!" I exclaimed, "if I might never have to go in it! If I could _only_ stay here. You can't understand how miserable it makes me to go among strangers again. And I am so fond of this place! You need not be afraid that I shall get tired of it; I don't get tired of people and places when once I like them. Do you suppose I ever was tired of my own dear home, or ever would have been, if I had not been taken away from it?" And at that recollection the tears came blindingly into my eyes. "You have never told me about your home. Were you happy there?" he asked, kindly. "Tell me about it." It seemed strange when I remembered it, but it did not seem so at the time, that I should tell him what I had never told to the dearest of my confidants, had never before put into words; but there was a sympathy in his tone that was irresistible; for the time, my grief seemed his; I did not wonder why his interest was so strong in my recollections; I did not think it strange that tears shone in his eyes when they filled mine, nor that his voice trembled as he told me of his sympathy; he was my friend; he was kinder and better than any one else in the world; that was enough. "Poor little homesick child, you must have been miserable enough, among so many strange faces, with such an aching heart. It was a cruel thing to send you off so far, without a single familiar face to comfort you, and so soon after such a shock." "Aunt Edith thought it was best for me, I suppose. Perhaps it was; that is, if it is best for anything living to be wholly miserable, it was very good for me. And now," I went on, turning to him, beseechingly, "how can you know whether it's best for me to be sent away from here? I shall be dreadfully homesick there, I know; I shall be so strange and forlorn among all those gay people; I know you will be sorry if you don't let me stay. I know you will say, when it is too late, 'she was right after all; I should not have made her go.' You will miss me, I know you will. Think how dreary the long evenings will be, and how lonely!" "Ah! Don't appeal to my selfishness; let that slumber if it can; don't make my duty any harder than it is already. Be a good, self-denying child, as you have always been, and go because I think it is best for you, and because it is your duty to go, and mine to send you. Will you try?" "Yes," I said, sadly, "if there's no help, I will try to make the best of it, and think as little as possible about what might have been, and as much as possible about what I ought to do." "That's my brave little friend again! You haven't been with Mr. Shenstone without profit. He has made you already as philosophical as himself." "If I could be near Mr. Shenstone," I said, with a sigh, "there would be some chance of my learning to control myself and be good. One can hardly help doing right, with his teaching." "It may seem so to you," he answered, "and I acknowledge it is a great assistance; but, alas! good counsel cannot accomplish the warfare. If it could, those who have the benefit of Mr. Shenstone's would be fortunate indeed; but we have to struggle and conquer for ourselves; no one can do it for us." "But you do not mean to say that it isn't the greatest advantage and comfort to have the advice and guidance of such a wise and holy man? You do not mean that you do not think Mr. Shenstone the best and the most devout of men?" Mr. Rutledge smiled at my enthusiasm. "Do not be afraid that Mr. Shenstone will suffer at my hands. He has been my guide and counsellor ever since I was younger than you; and so, you see, I have reason to know, experimentally, the value of his counsels, and the possibility of not doing right in spite of them. He is the noblest of men, the most clear-sighted and wise of counsellors, and my nearest and truest friend, and yet, for all that, I have often gone contrary to his rules, and, no doubt, often grieved his kind heart. But, so it goes! The human heart, you are aware, my young friend, is the very perversest of all created things. Now, at this very moment, would you believe it, I am doing what that same good and wise Mr. Shenstone has warned me not to do; and, moreover, mean to continue doing it." I looked in astonishment. "I wonder at you, sir. You will be sorry in the end. Mr. Shenstone, I am certain, knows better than you do." "How can you possibly know? You cannot tell anything about the right of the case." "No, of course I don't know anything about it; but from the nature of things, Mr. Shenstone is the most likely to be right. He's older than you, he's a clergyman, and--well--you will not be angry, but I think he is much less likely to be governed by his wishes than you, much more likely to see the right, and give up everything else for it, and to look at things clear of the mists that other people see them through. You know what I mean," I continued, "even though I don't express it very well; and oh! Mr. Rutledge, I am sure you must see, if you think about it at all, that it is very unwise in you to reject Mr. Shenstone's advice. The time may come when you'll regret it." "Nevertheless, I shall do it." From perversity, perhaps, as much as anything else, I continued to urge what I thought right. There was quite a fascination in contradicting and opposing Mr. Rutledge; it gave me a giddy sense of elation to think I dared do it, and though I did not gain my point, it diverted me from the thoughts of to-morrow's pain, till the clock struck, and I started up in alarm. "It's only eleven, Cinderella; there's no need for such a frightened look. There is an hour left of your last evening at Rutledge." "No, indeed; Kitty is waiting for me, and there is so much to be done before to-morrow at ten o'clock. Good night, sir." "Ah, I see you are in a hurry; you are tired. Why didn't you go before? Ten is your usual hour." The clock had struck another half hour before my last evening at Rutledge was ended--before the last good night was spoken at the library door, and, with a sad enough heart, I ascended the stairs, and traversed the dreary hall, where not even ghostly terrors would have had power to startle me from the heavy grief that was lying at my heart. My room was cheerless; the candle died flickeringly as I opened the door; the fire was dead long since; poor Kitty, tired with waiting, had fallen asleep on the rug, with one of the sofa pillows under her head. I covered her softly with some shawls, wrapped one about myself, stole to the bay window, and leaning my forehead against the pane, cried as if my heart would break. CHAPTER XV. "What is this passing scene? A peevish April day! A little sun, a little rain, And then night sweeps along the plain, And all things fade away." KIRKE WHITE. The grey dawn was just breaking when I woke Kitty. She started up bewildered, and her bewilderment did not decrease when I told her the object of this reveille. I never had any cause to doubt the sincerity of the grief she showed on this occasion. I had added as much to the pleasure of her life since I had been at Rutledge, as she had increased the comfort of mine; and it was with no very light hearts that we went about the business of packing. There was too much to be done, however, to admit of much sentiment, and we both bestirred ourselves so diligently, that before the breakfast bell rung my trunk was strapped and labelled, my bag filled with everything necessary for the journey, and my bonnet, cloak and shawl lying ready on the bed. There was not another article now about the room that belonged to me. What a dreary and forsaken look it had already; the toilet-table dismantled of its recent ornaments; the books and work that had given so bright and familiar a look to the pretty room, now all removed, and a bit of card, a ball of cord, and some withered flowers, were all that graced the étagère and the table. I did not dare trust myself to enter into particulars, even in thought, and with a very resolute voice, telling Kitty I would come up immediately after breakfast, and see if there was anything more for her to do, I went downstairs. The first floor presented signs of an exciting stir; there was a very unusual bustle and movement in the quiet hall--a trunk and a valise stood at the front door, a pile of cloaks and wrappers lay beside them; Thomas' long limbs were animated with unwonted energy, Mrs. Roberts bustled in and out of pantries, and to and fro through side-doors and entries, in a very startling manner; Sylvie was more raving distracted than ever--flew unmeaningly up and down stairs--took the wrong thing to the wrong place--irritated everybody, and was in the way generally. Mr. Rutledge, in the library, gave audience to farmer, gardener, groom, and carpenter--delivered orders--paid bills--settled accounts--the one undisturbed member of the commonwealth. It was evident that the sudden marching orders had taken them all by surprise, and unsettled most of their brains. Stephen, alone, I was happy to notice, seemed to preserve in some degree the possession of his reasoning faculties, and did not "haze" to the same extent as the others. Kitty, I thought, comes honestly by her _sang froid._ I stood some minutes by the hall window gazing out upon the dreary winter landscape, the dull sky, the brown bare trees, the hard grey earth, ashes of roses in hue, the nether millstone in hardness. It had been the coldest night of the season, the water that stood in the narrow carriage-tracks and in the little crescents that the horses' hoofs had made, was frozen hard; the trees, the hedges, looked as if they were, too--so still and stiff they stood. Not a bit of wind was stirring, but the temperature was evidently moderating. "Softening down for snow," Stephen remarked, as he passed out; "you'll not have it so cold for your journey, Miss. It's too bad that you're going, such fine sleighing as we have at Rutledge a little later in the season. You should stay and enjoy it, Miss." "I wish, indeed I could, Stephen," I said, with great sincerity. "It's a long while since I've had a good sleigh-ride. The roads must be splendid for it here, so broad and clear." "Beautiful, Miss; packed smooth, and hard as the house floor, and as dry as sand. You might walk over 'em in your thin slippers, and never wet your feet. And the snow lays sometimes better than a month without a rain or a thaw, the weather as clear as a bell and as cold as Christmas-thermometer down to nobody knows where, and nobody minds, after they're used to it. But maybe you're afraid of the cold?" "Not I! It's the very thing I like. I'd give anything for a ride behind those bays, wrapped up to the eyes in furs, on the coldest day Rutledge ever saw. I know they must go like the very wind when there's snow on the ground; don't they?" "Aye, Miss, that they do!" exclaimed Stephen, warming up at the mention of his favorites; for though the garden was his particular province, as the oldest man in the service, he took a fatherly interest in everything animate and inanimate on the place. "That they do! There's nothing in this part of the country has ever begun to come up to 'em. I'd like you to see 'em go, when their spirit's up! 'Taint many young ladies," he continued, with a "gentleman of the old school" bow, "'taint many young ladies as can tell a horse when they see him; but everybody says that you sit like a born horsewoman, and Michael, stupid rascal as he is, swears you ride like a cavalry officer. Nobody but the master ever managed that Madge so before." I acknowledged the compliment with a laugh and a blush, and encouraged Stephen to continue his bulletin of the stable, in which he well knew my interest. Indeed, the worthy gardener was not to blame for his loquacity, as this was by no means the beginning of our acquaintance; many a chat I had had with him over the garden-gate, while he leaned on his spade, and discoursed willingly of the ancient glories of the house of Rutledge, and the manifold virtues of the present master of it. I knew he was a faithful, honest old fellow, shrewd and intelligent beyond his class, and altogether, inestimably superior to many old fogies in the higher walks of life, and being certain that he was very much delighted to be talked to, I very much enjoyed talking to him. He was just saying, with great appearance of sincerity, that he did not know what they should all do, now I was going. I had waked up the old place "amazing;" it was a long while since there had been anybody so cheerful-like and bright in it; and as for his Kitty, he really did not know how she could content herself after me--when we were both startled by finding that Mr. Rutledge had been an undemonstrative auditor of the whole conversation, and ostensibly engaged in putting some books into the valise behind us, was quietly listening, and no doubt criticising, all that had been said. Stephen looked a little confused, only a very little though, and with dogged dignity gave me many good wishes for the journey, bowed and withdrew. I turned around and faced the intruder with a determination not to be ashamed of myself, and not to acknowledge that I had been unduly familiar with an inferior, and to submit to no lecture; but his face was so different from anything that I had expected, that I blushed, and looked very foolish, instead of very defiant. He laughed outright. "Upon my word," he exclaimed, "I never saw old Stephen so nearly embarrassed in my life; during an acquaintance of some forty years, I never saw him approach so near a blush! And you, young lady, certainly have an extraordinary taste for low life! You have no greater passion, that I can see, than the one you have just been acknowledging to Stephen, for horseflesh generally; and as for dogs, your mind runs on them continually; Kitty shares your confidence--Stephen is hail-fellow-well-met--Michael swears by you, and"---- "That's enough for the present, if you please," I said, hurrying into the dining-room. "You will have coffee, sir?" I continued, very blandly, sitting down at the table. "Are you sure you know enough of such things to make me a palatable cup? I know you could saddle my horse for me in extremity, and groom the bays to perfection, but whether you're to be trusted with anything so feminine as making coffee, really you must excuse me for being a little skeptical." "Ah! please, Mr. Rutledge!" But it did not please Mr. Rutledge to do anything but tease me just at that time. After breakfast was over, he told me, looking at his watch in his precise manner, that there was just an hour and a quarter before it would be time to start, and if I had nothing better to do, I might come down to the stables with him, and give my parting orders about the care of the horses and dogs. I did not know whether this invitation was given sarcastically or sincerely, but I preferred accepting it in the latter sense; so I ran upstairs and put on my bonnet and cloak and joined him in the hall in a very short time. He evidently did not mean to give me opportunity for any sentimental regrets, for he never before had been half so teasing. I could not do anything right, though I was a baa-lamb, as far as submissiveness went. I walked either too slow or too fast, was too chatty with the groom, or too taciturn with him; there was not a fault or indiscretion in all our previous acquaintance that I did not then and there have to bear the penalty of. It was only when I came to say good-bye to Madge that my courage gave way completely, and I leaned my forehead on her glossy neck to conceal the silly tears that filled my eyes. "I verily believe," said Mr. Rutledge, "that she knows you. She does not submit to such familiarity from strangers." Finding that I did not answer, he continued, in a kinder tone: "I think, as you broke her in, to feminine usage at least, you are entitled to her; so I make her over to you, body and soul, if soul she has, to have and to hold, from this day forward; and a tender mistress may she find you." "Thank you," I said, without raising my head; "a very useful gift; of about as much service to me as if you should make over to me your right and title in the fastest pair of reindeer in the employ of the Hudson's Bay Company." "Why, don't you mean ever to come here again? If you don't, you had better take her with you. Any way, she is mine no longer. What shall be done with her? Shall Michael blanket and prepare her to accompany us to New York? or will you leave her here till you come back?" "Ah! Do you fancy I am child enough to believe in such a conveyance as that? It wouldn't stand in any court of law." "What would you have? There isn't a magistrate within four miles, and we haven't the time to draw up a document properly. I will tell you what can be done as next best. I will record the transaction here, above her manger, and there it shall remain to remotest ages, 'to witness if I lie.'" Mr. Rutledge took out his penknife, and with considerable ingenuity carved in the sturdy old oak beam, the transfer of Madge Wildfire from himself to me, using, for brevity, only initials, and then the date. I climbed up to the fourth round of the ladder when it was completed, and did my best to achieve a signature, but the result was so unsatisfactory that Mr. Rutledge put beneath it, "her mark," and so it stands to this day, I suppose. This transaction having consumed a good deal of the hour and a quarter that we had before starting, Mr. Rutledge rather hurried up my adieux with my new favorite, and it was very ungraciously that he submitted to wait till I had cut a lock from her black mane, and embraced her tenderly for the twentieth time. "Nobody is to ride her, remember," I said, as we went out; "only, of course, the man who takes care of her, when it is necessary for exercise." "Your orders shall be obeyed. Any further instructions that may occur to you in the course of the winter you had better commit to paper and send to me, and I will observe them faithfully." "Oh, I depend entirely on your integrity; I am confident you will be careful of her. Anyway," I continued, "it's a comfort to know I own anything at Rutledge, and have a sort of claim upon its hospitality still. Ah! how long it will be before I walk up this road with you again, Mr. Rutledge!" "Maybe not," he answered. "You shall, if you will, come back and make me a visit before many months are over; you shall come back and see how Rutledge looks in her June dress, "'When all this leafless and uncolored scene, Shall flush into variety again;' when this dull November sky shall have given place to the warmest summer sunshine, and this hard, frozen earth shall be soft and brown, and roses shall be blooming about this dreary porch, and the garden shall be one wilderness of sweets, and the trees and the lawn shall be all of the richest green. Will you come then, if I send for you?" I checked my look of delight with a sigh: "you'll forget before that time, I'm afraid. And I don't believe my aunt would let me come." "You may trust that to me. Haven't you seen that I make people do as I wish them to? Do you not believe that I can induce your aunt to let you come, if I continue to want you, and you continue to want to come?" "Perhaps so," I said, half incredulously; "but if I remember right, my Aunt Edith is fond of her own way too, is she not?" "She has that reputation," he answered, with a short laugh. "But _cela ne fait rien_. You shall come if you wish to. Leave it to me, and say nothing about it." "June is a long way off yet, but it is better than two or three years, the term of my 'honorable banishment,' that you first decreed." Before we reached the house, the snow-flakes began to descend, large, and soft, and white, floating down in fast-increasing thickness, "As though life's only call or care Were graceful motion." "How pretty it makes the landscape!" I said, pausing on the steps. "In among the bare trees there, it makes such a charming variety and lightness, and in a few minutes every twig will be feathered with it, and fences, and roofs, and all. Why can't we wait till we have had one sleigh-ride?" "This snow will not amount to anything; we should have to wait a long while for a sleigh-ride. It is too early yet for that entertainment; a fortnight hence will be time enough to expect it." "I think you are mistaken," I said, looking wisely at the clouds, "there's plenty of snow up there, and we shall have enough of it before night, depend upon it. Hadn't we better wait till to-morrow? It would be dreadful to be caught in a heavy snow-storm on the way." "Have you forgotten your good resolutions of last night?" he said, in a low tone. "There's the carriage." And without answering a word I ran upstairs. Kitty wrapped me tenderly in my soft shawl, and fastened my fur tippet carefully round my neck. "Oh, Kitty! you'll smother me!" I cried. But it was something less tangible than tippet or shawl that was smothering me just then, and choking my breath. I gave one glance around the room, thrust a _douceur_ into Kitty's hand, and telling her to bring down my travelling-bag, hurried out without a second look, and downstairs without a second thought, sustained by the determination not to make a baby of myself and cry. The library was empty; I passed on through the hall. Mr. Rutledge was already at the carriage, superintending the packing in it of numerous valises, books, shawls, and packages. Mrs. Roberts, bluer than ever with the cold, stood by him, busy with all the arrangements for his comfort, and looking a shade more cheerless than usual, at the prospect of separation from the master who stood to her lonely old age in the place of son and friend. "I believe she does love him," I thought, and warming toward her at the idea of one redeeming weakness, I walked up to her and said, extending my hand: "Good bye, Mrs. Roberts. I am afraid you will be glad to get rid of such a troublesome guest; but I assure you I am very sorry to have given you trouble, and very much obliged to you for the attention you have shown me." Mrs. Roberts gave me her hand, and answered, without any undignified haste: "All attentions you have received from me you are very welcome to. I hope never to be wanting in my duty to any guest of Mr. Rutledge's." "Then you can't regard me with favor for any other cause? Ah, Mrs. Roberts, I don't know why it is you would never like me, even before I gave you any reason to dislike me." "Mrs. Roberts will learn to think differently some day, I hope," said Mr. Rutledge, without looking up from his occupation. "Is there anything more to go here?" There was nothing, the last package was bestowed in its place, the last strap secured. Thomas, who was to accompany his master to New York, stood waiting for us to enter the carriage. Michael was on the box. "We are all ready, then," and he motioned me to enter. "Good bye, Mrs. Roberts," he continued. "I believe there is nothing further that I wanted to say to you. Make yourself as comfortable as you can this winter, and let me hear from you occasionally. I shall be back by the latter part of January, however, and I hope everything will go on well till then." Mrs. Roberts looked very much as if she thought nothing more improbable than his being back in January, but only said: "Good bye, sir. I shall write." Mr. Rutledge followed me into the carriage, and shut the door. I bowed again to Mrs. Roberts, and looked out anxiously for Kitty, who had not appeared since she brought down my bag; but at that moment Kitty, in person, was discovered at the other window of the carriage, bringing me a glove she said she had found, which, however, I guessed was only a ruse to get another good bye. "Ah, Kitty, that's the glove Tigre gnawed, and I never have found the mate to it since that day; of course it's useless, so you'd better keep it to 'remember me by,' as they say. Good bye, again." Kitty said, "Good bye, Miss," but with so tearful and woebegone a look, withal, that even Mr. Rutledge was touched, and leaning forward, he said: "Don't take it so very much to heart, my good girl. Your young mistress will be back again, sometime, I hope. And be as obliging and submissive as you can to Mrs. Roberts, Kitty; remember it was my last charge." And dropping some coins into her hand, he told Michael to drive on. At this moment Tigre rushed whining to the carriage, and I begged he might be allowed to drive to the station, and come back in the carriage. Mr. Rutledge consenting, Kitty placed the tawny favorite in my arms, and, "Smack went the whip, Round went the wheels," but I have known gladder folks. From the back of the carriage I watched the lessening figures on the piazza, as we drove rapidly down the avenue, and an involuntary sigh escaped me as a winding of the road hid the dark house, with its snow-capped roofs and porticoes, from my sight. "Good bye till June," I said, regretfully. "Till June," repeated Mr. Rutledge, pulling Tigre's ears, and making him yelp. "Do you understand, Tigre? This young lady means to come back in June, if she doesn't change her mind. Understand the condition, Tigre. What do you think of our chance?" The cur, by way of answer, began gnawing at my tippet. "Don't destroy that too, sir," I exclaimed. "You've ruined one pair of gloves for me already. Isn't it singular, what could have become of that other one," I continued. "I've searched high and low for it--everywhere, in fact." "Where did you see it last?" he inquired. "I cannot remember anything about it, after--after--Tigre and I started on our race. Don't scold," I said, coaxingly, "you know I am going to reform." "Careless girl," he said, gloomily, "what will you lose next?" "It wasn't my fault; I've looked everywhere for it. Isn't it strange what has become of it?" "Very strange," said Mr. Rutledge, gravely. "Indeed, I may say, in a high degree mysterious." CHAPTER XVI. "Get thee back, Sorrow, get thee back! My brow is smooth, mine eyes are bright, My limbs are full of health and strength, My cheeks are fresh, my heart is light." MACKAY. "Why, which way are we going?" I exclaimed, as we turned off, on an opposite road, about quarter of a mile before reaching the well-remembered depot and gloomy suburbs which had been, I supposed, our destination. "To tell you the truth," said my _compagnon de voyage_, "I have begun to look upon railroads as an invention of the enemy, and to prefer any other mode of travel. So that, considering we are both invalids (a fact you are constantly overlooking), and cannot bear fatigue or excitement, I have arranged our route after this manner: we drive, to-day, by easy stages as far as W.; then a night's rest there; and to-morrow morning go on to C., where we part with the carriage, and take the day-boat down the river, which will bring us to the haven of our desires to-morrow evening about seven o'clock. This seemed a more agreeable plan than going by cars, and I thought would be less fatiguing." "_A la bonne heure!_" I cried, remembering it was three times as long as the railroad route. It proved a most delightful journey; the further we went, the thinner the snow-clouds grew, and as the day wore on, they disappeared altogether, and the sun came out, faint and pale, and the air grew soft and mild. The carriage was the easiest imaginable, the roads were in good condition, the horses disdained their burden, and the occasional respites which their master decreed, the scenery was as varied and charming as inland scenery at that season of the year could possibly be; every change and amusement that the limits of the carriage admitted of, Mr. Rutledge's care had provided; and we were two companions who had at least the charm of freshness for each other, and were not as yet bored with one another's society, whatever we might be in the course of time. We tried to read, but the pages of my new novel did not turn very fast; I gave it up before the heroine (the records of whose nursery reminiscences occupied two thirds of the volume) had entered her tenth year. Mr. Rutledge's review had, I afterward found, but two of the leaves cut, though he read it assiduously for an hour and a half. So we tacitly agreed to resign literature, and devote our attention to the scenery, which, as we approached the Hudson, certainly did grow worthy of attention. The purple-headed mountains already were discernible against the pale sky; the hills grew steeper, the roads wilder. There was an anecdote or a legend attached to every dark wood or antiquated farmhouse we passed. Mr. Rutledge seemed to know every inch of the way, and to be familiar with its history since its settlement by the pale-faced gentry; though it is my belief, that where he did not know of any entertaining tradition "to cheat the toil, and cheer the way," he waived all conscientious regard to veracity, and improvised one on the spot. Very engrossing they were, however, whether manufactured from "whole cloth" or founded on fact, and it was quite three o'clock before any of the party (inside passengers at least) began to revolve seriously the question of dinner. Then, however, it appeared that Mrs. Roberts' care had provided us with the most delicate and tempting of collations, and we stopped to enjoy it at the outskirts of a little village, by the side of a fresh, clear brook that was on its way, I suppose, "to join the brimming river," that was our destination also. We went by different routes, however, and I never have seen the pretty little eddying streamlet since that pleasant lunch upon its banks, when Mr. Rutledge filled my cup from its clear waters, and Thomas cooled the wine in its bosom. Rather a superfluous service, I couldn't help thinking, in consideration of the season and state of the thermometer; but it brought out in strong relief the methodic precision of Thomas' mind. He was an invaluable machine; once wound up correctly, he ran for any given time, but as to any exercise of his reasoning faculties in the discharge of his duties, that was as totally wanting as in other machines. Any display of it from him, would have been as startling to his master, as it would have been, had the watch in his pocket suddenly addressed him in good English. Thomas, however, was just the servant for Mr. Rutledge; he would have been worse than useless to a lazy man who wanted a valet to take care of him; but Mr. Rutledge chose to do his own thinking in most cases, and only wanted his orders promptly executed, which Thomas certainly was capable of doing, and did to admiration. A very nice lunch Mrs. Roberts had prepared for us, and we drank her health gratefully in some very superior Burgundy. We did not hurry ourselves at all; and as I treated Tigre to some of the remaining delicacies, and Thomas packed up the baskets again, Mr. Rutledge lazily sketched the group from the carriage window, on a blank leaf in my book; making rather a spirited drawing of it, only caricaturing grotesquely the length of Thomas' legs, and my eyelashes. Then we got _en route_ again, and with occasional stoppings to sketch, which I insisted on, and occasional pauses at village inns to water the horses, or rather to wash their faces, the afternoon wore on. "Tired?" Of course not, never fresher in my life. What a nuisance railcars are, with their distracting racket and bustle and jar. Why do not people always travel in carriages? Mr. Rutledge agreed with me that it was very pleasant; indeed, he seemed to enjoy it, just as he did that ride I had such good cause to remember. He left all care and sadness behind at Rutledge, and gave himself up to the present. In that little travelling-cap, too, I was sure he didn't look a day over thirty. "Mr. Rutledge, you look to-day so like that crayon sketch of your young relative, that you gave me. It is really wonderful." Mr. Rutledge laughed, and asked me if I continued to admire it. "Oh, as much as ever," I answered, laughing, and blushing, too, under cover of the twilight, for the short November day had faded. He evidently thought I was still deceived about the picture, and I did not enlighten him. "I mean to hang it in the very best light in my room in New York, where I can look at it from 'morn to dewy eve,' if I choose." "I advise you not; Josephine will ferret out the mystery, and expose your romantic devotion. She isn't given that way herself, and will not spare you. Your ideas of hero-worship and hers might not agree." "Well, if they do not, it may prove fortunate in the end. We shall not be so likely to interfere with each other." "If you do, 'may I be there to see!'" "Which would you bet on?" Mr. Rutledge, after a protest against such language from such lips, deliberated somewhat upon my question, and then favored me with his opinion. We were, he thought, in point of will, about equally matched; but my French-bred cousin, he was afraid, had a little the advantage of me in coolness, and had enjoyed the benefit of a training and experience which might tell heavily against me. And much more to the same effect, which I only laughed at then, but remembered afterward with less amusement. All this while it was growing darker and darker, and we did not arrive at W----, as it was proper we should have done some time since. This seemed at length to strike Mr. Rutledge, and he called to Michael to know if he was sure of the road. Michael was sure, and again we went on. At the end of another half hour, however, Mr. Rutledge again stopped him, and as it was too dark to see anything of the road, he directed him to drive toward the only light we could discover, which proved to emanate from the dingy window of a low farmhouse about a quarter of a mile off. At Thomas' thundering knock, appeared a bony rustic in his shirt-sleeves, who came wonderingly to the carriage, shading a candle with his hand, which threw fantastic shadows on his rough, open-mouthed visage, followed by an untidy-looking woman, and a whole troop of shaggy, uncombed children, evidently just roused from their first nap. Mr. Rutledge, after long perseverance, elicited the information that he sought, which proved anything but agreeable, being a confirmation of his fears. We had come five miles out of our way, W---- lying just ten miles to the south, while we had been, under Michael's guidance, pursuing a course due north. Michael was a miserable and a scared man, when the thunders of his master's wrath fell upon him. Mr. Rutledge was not very demonstrative or vehement, but he conveyed the idea of an angry man as alarmingly as I should care to see it represented. No wonder Michael was scared; even I felt a little awe-struck till after he had shut the carriage door, and we had turned to retrace our course. "Are you very tired?" he said. "I would not have had this happen upon any consideration. You will be utterly worn out, and unable to travel to-morrow. I thought I had arranged it admirably for you, but this Hibernian numbskull has upset it all." I assured him that, on my account, he need not anathematize the luckless Michael further, for I was not in the least tired, and did not mind the detention at all. Owing to this little contretemps, it was ten o'clock when we arrived at W----, and halted at the door of its most promising hotel, which was at best but a shabby affair. I would not have acknowledged it on any account, but I was dreadfully tired and sleepy, and could hardly conceal these humiliating frailties, while the landlord and a drowsy waiter or two bustled about to get us some "tea;" which meal, arranged upon a remote end of a dreary, long table, in a dingy, long room, was utterly unpalatable, and I was but too grateful to Mr. Rutledge for excusing me when a chambermaid appeared to say my room was ready, and conduct me to it. It seemed direfully early next morning when the same functionary appeared to awake me, with the intelligence that breakfast would shortly be on the table, and the gentleman had sent her to call me, and to see if there was any way in which she could help me. "The gentleman" had evidently backed his suggestion with some specimens of the United States currency, for she was overwhelmingly attentive, and helped me to dress in "no time." Breakfast, arranged again as a little colony, at the end of the long table, was considerably more inviting than last night's meal, Thomas having had orders to beat up the town for spring chickens and fresh butter, and, being a veteran in the recruiting service, had of course succeeded. Mr. Rutledge looked a little anxiously at me, and said I was wretchedly pale, and he did not know about going on. I laughed at the idea, and we were soon _en route_ again, driving briskly along in the eye of a strong wind, and with the bluest of skies overhead. Arrived at C----, we had an hour to spare, before the arrival of the boat, which I spent in the parlor of the very pretending steamboat hotel, in writing a few lines of adieu and apology to Mrs. Arnold, accounting, as satisfactorily as I could, for my unceremonious and abrupt departure, and desiring a renewal of my acknowledgments to Mr. Shenstone. Of this, Mr. Rutledge approved, and wrote a few lines to Mr. Shenstone to accompany it. Then came the parting from Tigre, and the sending back of the carriage, which seemed like severing the last tie to Rutledge. Tigre was much affected, poor beast, and looked wistfully back, out of the carriage window, as far as we could see. A bell rings, a rush occurs, Thomas devotes himself to the baggage, Mr. Rutledge gives his arm to me, we thread the crowded wharf, the blue Hudson dances in the sunlight, the fine steamer holds her breath, and tries to lie still while we get on board. "O Tiber! Father Tiber! To whom the Romans pray, A Roman's life, a Roman's arms, take thou in charge this day." I am luxuriously established in the saloon, with every imaginable wish attended to, and easy-chairs, books, papers, and cushions enough to satisfy five invalids, but they do not satisfy me. I am bored with the heat, and the whimpering of the pale children, whom a lean, sallow-looking mother feeds unremittingly with "bolivars" and "taffy;" I am tired with the swinging of those lamps overhead, and the everlasting rocking of a stout lady in a red plush rocking-chair, and with looking at the gaudy colors in the carpet, and I rush out for a brisk walk on the deck with Mr. Rutledge. What a day it is! How impossible to be otherwise than happy and hopeful; how inevitably the dark phantoms of doubt and dread take themselves off in the light of such a sun as this, and in the sight of such a scene! The waves dance bright and gay in the sunshine; the mountains rise, on either hand, into the blue and cloudless sky; in a word, the loveliest river in all this lovely river-braided New World lays before me, the heart of seventeen beats in my bosom, the glow of health and exercise tingles in my veins; what wonder that I forget the tears of yesterday, the separation, the homesickness, the loneliness that I so dreaded. Neither can my companion altogether resist the influences of the hour. If the sharp air and the quick walk have, as he says, made the tardy roses bloom again on my cheeks, they have also brought a glow to his face, and a sparkle to his eye, and untamed wit and sarcasm to his lips. He quizzes our fellow voyagers, tells me odd stories of former travel, droll sketches of western journeyings, and California "experiences." Then the laugh dies, as some winding of the river brings suddenly before us a picture too grand to be looked at with trifling words and laughter on our lips. And Mr. Rutledge has the "right thing" to say then, in his rich manly voice, and the right words to embody the voiceless thoughts that crowd to my own lips--words that do not jar or desecrate, but make the beauty tangible and the grandeur more ennobling. By and by, most of our fellow travellers give up to the cold and go below; and at last we are left with only a persevering artist, who holds his hat on with one hand, and sketches with the other, and a couple of ladies, whose ruddy cheeks, thick shoes, grey dresses, plaid shawls, "boas" and big bonnets, proclaim indisputably to be H.B.M.'s loyal and unalienated subjects. It has always been a question with me, as yet unanswered, whether by any act of Parliament these "proud islanders," out on their travels, are prohibited from appearing in anything but the invariable grey dress, plaid shawl, boa, and big bonnet, in which they invariably do appear. After a while, even they go down, and a solitary cadaverous-looking man, in the dress of a Romish priest, is our only companion. He paces up and down one corner of the deck, never raising his heavy eyes, but reading prayers diligently out of a little book, his thin lips moving rapidly. It is no doubt a good and pious thing to read prayers out of a little book; but it seems to me, that with that grand and glorious lesson spread upon the mountains there before us, it would be a very pardonable thing to look up at it, and to give God thanks. It is rather a bore to go down to dinner, and after that, to be sentenced to a term of imprisonment in the saloon, because, forsooth, it is too cold outside, and I must rest. But late in the afternoon, I plead that the wind has fallen, that there is no possible chance of my taking cold, and I must see the sun set among the Highlands, and I gain reluctant permission; and now for another walk! The sunset is beyond my hopes; the twilight steals down after it, soft and dusky, and broods about the rocky Palisades, and dulls to dimness the dancing waves, and settles, grey and thick, around the pretty villas and white cottages that dot the banks, and deepens slowly, till all is one sombre hue in earth and sky, and one fair star comes out to establish the reign of night. We are late this evening in arriving at New York; we should have been there some time ago; in less than half an hour we shall be at the wharf, Mr. Rutledge says. All my gaiety and spirits have fled; I wonder that I could have forgotten. Still we pace the deck; there is no talk of cold or fatigue now; indeed, not much talk of any kind. "We are in sight of your new home now," says my companion, pointing "Where the lamps quiver So far in the river." And I cannot reply, to save my life. A mist of tears dim the glare of those lights, at first sight. We near the wharf; the bell rings; the busy hum of the city reaches our ears less and less faintly; the dim figures that crowd the wharf grow more distinct. "We had better go below," I say, with a shiver, "I have to find my books and shawls, and it is growing so cold." Perhaps if I had known more about that "untold, untried to-morrow," which I so vaguely dreaded, I should have shrunk more even than I did, from ending this short hour before its dawning. But, "It is well we cannot see What the end will be." CHAPTER XVII. "And all that fills the heart of friends When first they feel, with secret pain, Their lives henceforth have separate ends, And never can be one again." LONGFELLOW. Thomas being at once the most determined and the most imposing of attendants, he speedily succeeded in clearing a way for us through the crowd of hackmen, carmen, and newsboys, and in selecting the most promising of the array of vehicles offered for our accommodation; installing us and our luggage therein and thereon; and bestowing his own long limbs _à côté du cocher_, we were soon rattling over pavements, rough and jarring to a miserable degree. Mr. Rutledge perceived how frightened and nervous I was, and first tried to laugh away, then to coax away, my foolish dread of meeting my aunt. It was in vain; for once, his kindness and eloquence were lost upon me. I could think of nothing but the approaching interview; and looking out of the window, counted eagerly the blocks we passed. "How much further is it?" I asked, despairingly, as we rumbled through bewildering labyrinths of dark and narrow streets. "Aren't we nearly there?" "My dear little rustic, we are not quarter of the way. We have a long drive before us yet, and if you will renounce the pleasure of looking out at those crazy lamp-posts, and turn your face this way, I will promise to tell you long enough before we reach Gramercy Square, for you to get up a very pretty speech to rush into your aunt's arms withal. In the meantime, think about me, and not about her." I tried to obey, while my companion amused and humored me like the spoilt child I was fast becoming under his indulgence. It was impossible not to feel reassured by his manner, and soothed by it, half teasing and half tender; but all the terror returned, when, looking at his watch, and then out into the street, he said: "I promised to tell you; we are now in Fourth Avenue; in about three minutes and a quarter, we shall turn into Gramercy Square, and in about one minute and three quarters from that time, we shall stop at the door of your new home. You have just five minutes to smooth your hair, pinch some color into your white cheeks, say good bye, and tell me how good and faithful a friend you are going to be." "Oh," I cried, in great alarm, "surely you will go in! I shall _die_ if I have to go alone. Dear Mr. Rutledge! You would not be so unkind. Just think how little I know my aunt, and how I shall feel to be all alone without one soul I know. You surely will not leave me." Mr. Rutledge laughed and yielded; before I was aware, the carriage had stopped, and Thomas had mounted the steps and rung the bell. In a moment, a stream of light from the hall showed the bell was answered. Thomas returned to open the door of the carriage, and with Mr. Rutledge's kind words in my ear, and the kind touch of his hand on mine, I crossed the dreaded threshold. The servant, who recognized Mr. Rutledge deferentially, showed us into a parlor, where the soft light, the rich curtains, and the pleasant warmth, gave one an instant feeling of luxury and comfort. The next room was only dimly lighted; but beyond that, through lace hangings, was visible a brighter room, and glimpses of glass and silver, made it apparent that dinner was but just over. From this room, pushing aside the drapery with graceful haste, issued a lady, who I knew at once to be my aunt Edith. There never was a firmer and more elastic tread than hers, nor a better turned and more graceful figure; the modish little cap upon her head, with its floating ribbons, was all that at that distance looked matronly enough to designate her as the mother of the demoiselle who followed her. Mr. Rutledge advanced to meet her, thus shielding me a moment longer. Her greeting to him was as gracious and cordial as possible, but she looked eagerly forward, saying quickly: "_Mais où est l'enfant?_" Mr. Rutledge laughed, and turned to me, "_La voici_," he said, appreciating her look of amazement. "Impossible!" she exclaimed, starting back. "My child I never should have known you," she continued, taking me by both hands, and kissing me as affectionately as she could for her bewilderment. She held me off, and looked at me again; then gave Mr. Rutledge a quick, searching look, and said rapidly in French, in a tone that was not altogether as light and jesting as it was meant to appear, "And this is the 'little girl' you have been writing to me about for the last three weeks; this is 'the child' you have had the care of. Upon my word, monsieur, your notions of infancy and mine differ!" Mr. Rutledge answered lightly, but very indifferently; really he begged Mrs. Churchill would forgive his misrepresentation of facts, if he had been guilty of any; he was, he acknowledged, culpably unenlightened on the different stages of rosebud-opening; it had struck him that the rosebud under discussion was in the unopened and undeveloped state, and so he had spoken of it; but he begged Mrs. Churchill would excuse his ignorance and inattention. Mrs. Churchill said, recovering an easy tone: "Ah, we all know your sad willfulness and coldness!" This in French; then in English, "Josephine, my child, here is your new cousin." Josephine came forward, and with pretty _empressement_, kissed me on both cheeks, and held my hand affectionately as she exclaimed: "Why, mamma! she is taller than I am, and so much older than I expected!" "And you are so different!" I said, gazing admiringly at her slight, elegant figure, and pleasing brunette face. "Do not forget your old friend for your new one, though, Miss Josephine," said Mr. Rutledge, extending his hand. Josephine looked very coquettish and pretty, dropped her eyes, and gave him her hand, saying: "You were so long in coming, we began to doubt whether you cared for that title." "Put my long-delayed return, Miss Josephine, down to a combination of the most adverse and unconquerable circumstances. What with runaway cars, and runaway horses, broken arms, and brain fevers, the wonder is, not that we did not arrive before, but that we arrived at all." "Do not keep that poor child standing any longer," exclaimed my aunt, drawing me gently to a sofa, while Mr. Rutledge and Josephine seated themselves opposite, and talked as if they were, indeed, "friends of old," while Josephine's laugh, which, gay as it was, hadn't altogether a true ring to it, conveyed the idea of more familiarity and intimacy than I was quite prepared for. Meanwhile my aunt untied my bonnet-strings, smoothed my hair, and said I was growing so like my poor dear mother. No doubt it was kindly meant, but I had never yet learned to bear calmly the least allusion to my grief, and the tears rushed into my eyes, and the dawning confidence and self-possession were miserably dashed back again, and I had to struggle hard to make any reply at all. My aunt soothingly praised my pretty sensibility, and only made matters worse. Then she told me to wipe away my tears, and come into the dining-room with her. I followed gladly, and she rang and ordered coffee, and made me sit beside her and tell her all about my journey, and whether I still felt any ill effects from my accident, and how I liked Rutledge, and whether I was glad to leave school. It was strange, that with all this kindness my reserve did not melt faster; but it was a miserable fact, that I felt more awe and admiration for, than ease and sympathy with, my new-found relative. I longed to appear well in her eyes, and win her affection, but I never was more awkward and ill at ease. She had a way of looking at me that showed me she was making up an estimate of me, and I felt as if I were sitting for my picture all the time, and was as easy and natural as persons generally are under those circumstances. I asked, at last, where my other cousins were. Grace was at her lessons, but would be down presently; Esther was sent to bed. Indeed, a violent scuffling and roars of "Let me see her, too," smothered by a voluble French reprimand, had announced to me, upon first entrance, that _la petite_ was about making her exit. I took off my cloak, and accepted my aunt's suggestion, that I should not go to my room till I had had a cup of coffee. Mr. Rutledge and my cousin were presently summoned from the other room, and coffee was served. Josephine was very bright and piquant, talking well and amusingly; Mr. Rutledge was more sarcastic and man-of-the-world-ly than he had been at home; my aunt was graceful, winning, and polished, only making my wretched awkwardness and silence more conspicuous and striking. I longed to redeem myself, but there was a spell upon me; monosyllables and unfinished sentences were all the contributions toward the conversation that I could command, till Josephine exclaimed: "Why, how quiet you are! You do not say a word. Is she always so silent, Mr. Rutledge?" Mr. Rutledge smiled, and turned toward me. "How is it, mademoiselle?" he said. "I have had but a short experience of your cousin's conversational powers," he continued, to Josephine; "I must confess that I have sometimes fancied that she held those powers somewhat in reserve; but I have no doubt that among companions of her own age, and in the congenial society of her young cousins, she will become as charmingly loquacious." Josephine patted me patronizingly on the shoulder; my aunt looked at me thoughtfully; Mr. Rutledge turned to me for confirmation of his words, with a bow and a smile that staggered me completely. I began to wonder whether he had ever been anything more to me than the polite stranger he now appeared. Whether, in truth, the last three weeks had not been all a dream, and that railroad accident had not in some way affected my brain. Just then the door opened, and enter my second cousin. If I may be pardoned for applying so unadmiring an epithet to so near a relative, I should describe this young person as very insipid-looking; very undeveloped for her age, with an unmistakable flavor of bread-and-butter and pertness; with rather a drawl in her tone, and rather a pout on her lips; fair-skinned and fair-haired, rather pretty, perhaps, but far from lovable. On the whole, I was not attracted toward my cousin Grace, but I kissed her dutifully, and held her limp, inexpressive hand a minute or so in mine, while she said, "How d'ye do, Mr. Rutledge," in a drawling voice, that formed a striking contrast to her sister's vivacious tones. Before very long, Mr. Rutledge turned to my aunt, and apologized for intruding so long on a family reunion, and promising himself the pleasure of waiting on her very soon again, said a cordial good night. There had been some commenting on a new picture, and we were all standing in a group before it, at the other end of the dining-room, when Mr. Rutledge took his leave. There were many jesting and pleasant words exchanged with the others as he withdrew, having shaken hands with them. I had shrunk into the background, and waited, my heart in my throat, to know whether I was forgotten, when he suddenly turned back, before he reached the door, and said: "_Pardon!_ Have I said good night to my young travelling companion? Ah! there you are. I am afraid you are very tired; I am not sure that we have not travelled too fast for such an inexperienced tourist." "She couldn't have done Switzerland at our pace, last summer, I am afraid, could she?" said Josephine, complacently. Mr. Rutledge made some rejoinder complimentary to Miss Josephine's powers of endurance, then concluded his brief adieux to me, and with "more last words" to the others, withdrew. Josephine leaned rather listlessly against the mantelpiece, said, "Mamma, how very well Mr. Rutledge is looking!" then going to the piano, asked me if I played, and sitting down, ran her fingers lightly over the keys, while I approached, and standing by her, listened admiringly to her delicate and masterly touch. I felt stranger and forlorner than ever, though, as she played on, talking to me idly as she played, till her mother called to her, rather sharply: "Josephine, you are very thoughtless; don't you know she is tired? Come, my dear, you had better go upstairs immediately." Josephine leaned over her shoulder, touched my cheek, lightly with her lips, and said, "Good night; you'll feel brighter by to-morrow." My aunt called Grace to take me up to my room, kissed me good-night, and said she hoped I would be comfortable. Grace, who had just established herself at her embroidery, pouted slightly, and said in French (a language with which, it seemed taken for granted, I was unacquainted), "Why can't Josephine?" rising slowly to obey, nevertheless. A few sharp words silenced her speedily; another silvery good-night to me, and I followed my cousin upstairs. A more cat-in-a-strange-garrety, uncomfortable, bewildered feeling I never before had experienced; from Mr. Rutledge down, they all seemed to treat me as if I were somebody else. "If I be I, as I do hope I be," I ejaculated, with a miserable attempt at a laugh, as the old nursery rhyme came into my head, "perhaps I shall know myself when I am left alone and have time to think." But Grace did not seem inclined to allow me that luxury; for, having conducted me to my room, she came in, and did the honors rather more graciously than I had expected, lit the gas, pulled down the shades, put my bonnet and cloak away in the wardrobe, and then sat down on the foot of the bed, and looked at me with great appearance of interest. The fact was, Grace possessed, in no ordinary degree, that truly womanly trait, curiosity; and justly considered, that as she had been made to come upstairs against her will, it was but fair that she should compensate herself in any lawful way that presented, and now that she was up here, to see as much as she could of the manners and habits of the new comer. With a view to this harmless little entertainment, she began her investigations by saying: "Where's the rest of your baggage? In the closet?" (She was leaning over the balusters when my trunk was brought up, and knew, as well as I did, that there was only one.) "No," I said, blushing, "I didn't have but that trunk." Grace squeezed up her mouth a little, but didn't make any rejoinder. "Do you like your room?" she asked, after a minute. As I had just been contrasting it mentally with the blue room at Rutledge, I could not help another blush, and a little confusion, as I replied that it did very well. "Mamma seemed to have an idea that you were quite a little girl," she continued, "and that this was very nice for you. It opens out of the nursery, you see, and if you don't mind Esther's squalling, it _is_ very nice." She laughed a little, and I tried to smile as I answered that I liked children, and should not mind being near my little cousin. "I hope you'll like Esther," said Grace, with a shrug of her shoulders. "When she isn't kicking Félicie, or howling to be taken out, or squalling after mamma, she's sitting on the floor in the sulks, and as that's the least troublesome of her moods, nobody interferes with her. Oh, she's a sweet child!" And Grace's laugh sounded more like thirty than fifteen. I was ashamed of myself for being so embarrassed and abashed by a girl so much my junior, but there was something about Grace that I was not used to; a sort of gutta-percha insensibility, a lazy coolness that I had not expected from her drawling, listless way. Nothing of the woman seemed developed in her but the sharpness; and with that she was born, I suppose. She was still a little girl in her tastes and pursuits; loved to play with Esther, whom I afterward found she bullied and teased shamefully; did not aspire to beaux and young-ladyhood, but contented herself with keeping the sharpest imaginable lookout upon the concerns of every one in the house, and having a finger in every possible pie; being at once the pertest and most persevering of medlers. She kept up a desultory talk while I was unbraiding my hair and preparing for bed; asked questions that galled me, told facts that discouraged me, till I was fairly heartsick, and would have been willing to have bought her off at any price; and looked upon the advent of Félicie with a summons from madame for her, as the most blessed release that could have been. I locked the door after her with a bursting heart, and threw myself upon the bed in an agony of crying. What would have been merely a fit of homesickness, and a loneliness soon to be conquered and forgotten with girls of a different temperament, was a longer and more lasting struggle with me. It was wholesome discipline, no doubt; but now, disheartened, I recognized no hope in all the dark horizon; saw nothing in the future that was worth living through the present for; disappointment, pain, and loneliness had taken the color out of every hope, and made what should have been morning, a night, and that of the blackest. "Would it last?" was a question I asked myself even then, the dawning reason of the woman within me combating the passion of the child. "No, no," reason whispered; "'to mortals no Sorrow is immortal;' the storm will spend itself, and calm of some kind will come." But the child's heart refused to be comforted, and passionately rejected reason; there was no truth in friendship, there was no kindness in any one; there was nothing but loneliness, and coldness, and cruelty in all the world. CHAPTER XVIII. "A month ago, and I was happy! No, Not happy--yet encircled by deep joy, Which, though 'twas all around, I could not touch. But it was ever thus with Happiness: It is the gay to-morrow of the mind, That never comes." BARRY CORNWALL. Sleep, which proverbially forsakes the wretched, paid but little court to me that first night in my new home; my swollen eyelids were sullied with too many tears, in truth, to win his favorable regard; but toward morning, exhaustion and unconsciousness came compassionately to relieve the misery and wakefulness that had guarded my pillow all night; and the dull light of a winter morning, struggling in through the half-drawn curtains, was the next summons that I had to consciousness again. I started up, aroused more fully by a sharp pain in my arm, that had momentarily been growing harder, till it had succeeded, with the aid of the advancing daylight, in waking me thoroughly. It was some seconds before I knew what it was caused by; the bracelet on the arm that had been under my head had been pushed up from the wrist, and in that way, had grown tighter and tighter, till, indeed, the pain had been unendurable. It brought Mr. Rutledge's words to my mind strangely enough; with a blush of shame and pleasure, I bent over the souvenir; "I will never doubt again," I whispered, sincerely repentant. Heaviness had endured, bitterly, for the night, but joy, or a faint and tiny promise of it, had as surely come in the morning; and with energy and something like happiness, I set myself to make the best of my little room, and my new position. No Kitty to braid my hair, no Kitty to unpack my trunk; so the sooner I got used to performing those little offices for myself, the better, decidedly. "Something to do" was the kindest boon that could have been given me, and as such, I received it, and before the house was astir at all, I had unpacked my trunk, arranged my books upon the table, my dresses in the wardrobe, and the little knick-knacks that were regarded as decorative, on the mantelpiece and under the dressing-glass. The crayon-sketch never saw the daylight in Gramercy Square. A stolen look at it, now and then, under the half-raised lid of my trunk, was all I ever ventured on. Mine was not a very cheerful or attractive room, certainly; but I should soon be used to it, I reflected, and it would seem nice enough. Then I drew up the shades, and looked out with much interest upon my first daylight-view of the great metropolis. Certainly, the wrong side of city houses is no more advantageous a view of them than is the wrong side of other fabrics; and in proportion as the velvet is rich and gorgeous, so is the reverse dull and plain. My room being in the rear of the house, I of course had the benefit of the wrong side of the neighboring houses; which, I will do them the justice to say, were as dismal and unpretending as houses need be. They had all of them, with one consent, put their best foot foremost; the gorgeous foot presented to the street, was of brown stone, plate glass, and carving; the slip-shod foot left in the background, was dingy for want of paint, unsightly with clothes-lines and ash-barrels, neglected and forlorn. However, I thought cheerfully, some strange comfort attends even so exalted a state as "two pair back;" there was an unlimited view of the sky, much greater than the lower rooms could command. Indeed, when there was anything but lead-color overhead, I concluded that these windows must be very cheerful. The spire of a church, however, not far off (which, I was happy to observe, had no wrong side), was the one grace of the prospect. It would not do to think of the way in which the mists were rolling up from the lake, this grey, hazy morning, nor how the pines on its bank were reflected in its still surface; nor, indeed, at all of the scene, bold and picturesque even in its wintry desolation, that had met my waking vision for the last few happy weeks. Late breakfasts were apparently the order of the day in this establishment; the hands of my watch were creeping around toward nine o'clock, and still no indication of the approach of that meal. Beyond the occasional smothered sound of a broom or duster in the hall, there had been nothing to suggest that any one was awake throughout the house, except a fretful little voice that I had heard at intervals since dawn, in the room next mine. Listening very attentively, I found that it proceeded from the young troublesome, whose picture had been so feelingly drawn for me last night by Grace. She was evidently importuning Félicie to get up and dress her; and the tone, peevish and whining as it was, had a sort of pathos for me, remembering, as I too distinctly did, the cruel punishment that it is to a child to lie in bed after being once thoroughly awake. For two hours, little Esther had been tossing about, and crying to get up, and the only response she had received from her nurse, had been now and then a sleepy growl or an impatient threat. Injustice always irritated me; besides, I had a curiosity to see this child, who evidently met with so little favor, and time was hanging rather heavy on my hands just then, so I went to the door that communicated with the nursery, and opening it softly, looked in. The shutters being darkened, it was still not many removes from dawn, and I could but dimly make out the dimensions of the large, scantily furnished room; but there was light enough for me to see the figure of the child, sitting up in her little bed, crying piteously, "_Lève-toi, Félicie, j'ai si froid._" She stopped suddenly on seeing me, and looked up in my face as I approached her. "Is this my little cousin Essie?" I said, sitting down on the bed and taking one of her icy little hands in mine. Cold she certainly was; the fire had gone out entirely, and she had been sitting up undressed so long, that her teeth were chattering and her lips fairly blue. I kissed her wet cheeks, and giving her to understand that this was her new cousin, asked if she was not going to be very fond of me? She looked more amazed than before, but beyond a cessation of her tears, she made no attempt at a rejoinder. I rubbed her hands, and tried to warm her cold little feet, talking to her kindly all the time. "Is this your dressing-gown, Essie?" I asked, taking up a little blue flannel garment from the foot of the bed. She nodded an assent, and I put it around her. "Now," I continued, taking her up in my arms, "will you go into my room and get warm by my fire?" "Yes," said Esther, laconically. So picking up her shoes and stockings, I raised her in my arms and carried her into the other room. She was between five and six years old, but so slight and childish that her weight was nothing. I sat down by the fire and held her in my lap, while I put on her shoes and stockings, and warmed her into something like animation. "So Félicie wouldn't wake up," I said, at length. I had touched the right chord; the vehement childish sense of wrong was stirred, and with eager, blundering earnestness, she detailed her grievances. Félicie never would wake up; Félicie wouldn't give her a drink of water some nights when she was _so_ thirsty; Félicie left her alone sometimes when it was _so_ dark; and Félicie was cross, and Félicie was wicked, and, in fine, she hated her. I shook my head at this, and gave her a little moral lecture upon the wickedness of hating nurses, further illustrating and embellishing my subject by the story of a little girl who had once indulged in that dreadful passion, and had come to a very sad end in consequence. The moral lecture, I am afraid, was overlooked; but the story was most greedily received, and I was obliged to succeed it with another and another, before I could induce her to go and get her clothes, and let me put them on for her. When she was nearly dressed, Félicie woke up, and not finding her young charge in bed, was somewhat startled and unmistakably angry, and in no dulcet tones was calling her name, when she looked into my room, and, on seeing me, sank suddenly into a softer strain, and apologized for oversleeping: she had had such a wakeful night, was not well, etc., and would Mademoiselle Esther come and have her hair brushed now? Mademoiselle Esther, a moment before the quietest, gentlest child alive, had, at the sound of that voice, flushed up into angry defiance, and planting herself at my side, met her nurse's advance with a very ugly scowl. She wouldn't go and have her hair brushed; she didn't want a nice clean apron on; she didn't care if she was late for breakfast; and Félicie, though she never lost the bland tone she had assumed, looked malignant enough to have "shaken her out of her shoes and stockings." At length I persuaded her to submit to Félicie's proposals, and be made ready to go down to breakfast with me, and she held very firm possession of my hand, as, after the bell had rung, we descended the stairs. My aunt was already below; Grace and Josephine straggled in after long intervals; indeed, we were half through breakfast before they came down. My aunt looked charmingly in her fresh morning dress and pretty cap, was very kind, gave Esther and me her cheek to kiss, and, after reading the paper, talked to me somewhat. Esther seemed not to have much appetite; but having set her heart upon a roll and some cold chicken, her mamma had graciously allowed her to be gratified, and she was very tranquilly eating her breakfast, when the entrance of Grace, who made some teasing little gesture as she passed, made her pout and whine, and disturbed her serenity considerably. It was not, however, till Grace, calling to the servant for some marmalade, suggested a forbidden dainty to her mind, and she exclaimed, "I want marmalade, too," that the worst came. Grace interposes pertly, "You can't have any--mamma says you can't;" Essie passionately protests, "I will;" mamma sharply interposes, "You shall not;" a burst of tears from Essie, and a smothered titter from Grace, then Essie passionately pushes back her plate, and refuses to touch another mouthful; whereon mamma asserts her authority, and sternly orders her to resume her biscuit and chicken under pain of banishment. The sobbing child does not, cannot, _I_ think, obey, and, at the end of an ominous silence, mamma motions John to remove her from the table, which is effected after violent resistance and struggling, and amid a tempest of screams and protestations, exit Essie in the arms of John. It was well that my aunt did not order me to resume my breakfast. After that little episode, I am afraid I should have been unable to obey, and I should not have liked to have been carried out in the arms of John. Josephine exclaimed upon the nuisance of crying children; Grace laughed slily, as if she thought it capital fun; mamma sighed over the strange perverseness and dreadful temper of that child; but my heart ached for the wretched little exile. How Félicie would gloat over her disgrace, I knew; how indigestion, injustice, and mortification, would bring on a fit of the sulks that would last half the day, and pave the way for the repetition of a similar scene at lunch. Perhaps because I had been a willful, sensitive, and passionate child myself, I knew how to appreciate the disadvantages under which poor little Essie labored. I knew what exquisite tenderness and gentleness were necessary to guard that sensitiveness from turning into the very gall of bitterness, and that quick temper from becoming the uncontrollable and damning passion that would blight her whole life. More watchful care, more prayerful earnestness, does such a child's rearing require, than if she had been laid upon her mother's love, a moaning cripple, or a blind and helpless sufferer. Just as soul is more precious than body, so is the responsibility heavier, the task more awful, of training and molding such a sensitive nature, to whose morbid fancy a cold repulse is a cruel blow, and an impatient word a rankling wound. The tenderest and most yearning love should surround and guard such a child's career, putting aside with careful hand the snares and trials that beset the way of life, till the maturing judgment shall have learned to control the exaggerated fancy. The winds of heaven should not be suffered to visit too roughly such a restless and unquiet heart, till the uncertain mists of dawn and early morning have melted before the clear and certain day. Between the rough and torturing world and the scared and shrinking soul, the mother's love should interpose, shielding, soothing, reassuring. God meant it to be so; may His pity be the guard of the little ones, whom death, the world, the flesh, or the devil, have defrauded of their right! No one could look at my hollow-eyed and puny little cousin, with that unhappy and unchild-like contraction of the brow, and that troubled expression of the eyes, without knowing that she was of a nervous temperament the most excitable and keen, and of a will and temper the strongest. To Josephine's spirit and Grace's acuteness, she added an almost morbid sensitiveness and delicacy of organization, of which they were entirely innocent, and which they could in no way comprehend. That she did not inherit it from her mother, was pretty evident; Grace was the nearest copy of the maternal model; "la petite" was altogether a stranger and an alien, not understood and not attractive. Her mother had never forgiven her sex; a boy had been the darling wish of both parents, and this third disappointment had not been graciously received, at least by the mother; for I believe "the baby" had held a tender part in her father's heart during the two years of her life which he lived to see. Perhaps my uncle would have understood the wayward child better than his wife did, had he lived to see her develop; there must have been, I was sure, depths of gentleness and tenderness in his heart; for though he was almost a stranger to me, living as we had done, so far from the world in which he had held a busy part, still he was my mother's only brother, and they had never forgotten their early affection. The recollection of it helped me to bear with patience the caprices and willfulness of his little daughter; for, pity her as I might, there was no denying that Esther was a very vexatious and trying child, and there certainly was a very fair excuse for the disaffection of the household. How far the household had to thank themselves for it, however, was another matter, and one which I thought would have repaid investigation. The scene consequent upon the Marmalade Act, must have been no novelty in the Churchill breakfast, for the waves closed over poor Essie's banishment in an instant, and things resumed their smooth and unruffled appearance almost immediately. The next disturbance they received, was in the form of a sharp ring at the bell, which caused Josephine, without raising her eyes from the paper she was reading, to adjust with better grace the sweep of her dress upon the carpet, and to present to view an eighth of an inch more of the rosette on her slipper; while Grace, looking up from her plate, said saucily: "What's the use, Joseph? It's too early for anybody but Phil; and you know you don't care for Phil." Josephine gave her a snapping look out of her black eyes, and if there had been time, no doubt would have made good their promise of a tart rejoinder, but the opening of the door, and the entrance of the six feet two inches of manliness, known and described as "Phil," prevented its consummation. I did not know at the time, but I soon did know, who and what this privileged Phil was, who was so much at home at my aunt's house, and so well received and constant a guest. Philip Arbuthnot was, it appeared, my Aunt Edith's only nephew, and the most invaluable and untiring of escorts; supplying the place, in short, only too willingly, of son and brother to his aunt and her unprotected daughters. In the matter of securing opera boxes and concert tickets, cashing drafts, looking after the family interest in Wall street, having a general supervision of the stable, keeping coachman, footman, and waiter in wholesome awe, and in a thousand other ways, he was of inestimable service. What the family would have come to without him, is too painful a speculation to be entered upon unnecessarily. Figaro-ci, Figaro-là, and Figaro liking nothing better than his occupation. He bent his whole mind to it; I never could discover that, he had any other interest or employment in life; lounging around to Gramercy Square after breakfast, embellishing the library sofa with his listless length till lunch, while Josephine practised, or my aunt talked business with him. Then, at one o'clock, after putting them in the carriage (he was not a ladies' man, and hated morning visits), Phil would lounge back to the Clarendon, and by dint of a series of smokes in the reading-room, an hour or so at billiards, and a drive on the road, would manage to get rid of the day, and, at or about five o'clock, would lounge back again to Gramercy Square for dinner and the engagements of the evening. He had been educated at West Point, and though he had not, strictly speaking, covered himself with glory, at the rather searching examination of that rigorous old institution, just passing and that was all, they said, escaping emphatically by the skin of his teeth, still he had been in a very fair way of promotion, when, just before the departure of his aunt's family for Europe, he had unexpectedly and abruptly resigned, and accompanied them. Having inherited a fortune just large enough to serve as a narcotic to ambition and energy, and just moderate enough to prevent his playing any prominent part in Vanity Fair, Phil seemed in the enjoyment of an existence very much to his taste, and entirely satisfying to him. If, in my crude and enthusiastic view of life, it struck _me_ as an existence at once debasing to his nature, and dishonest to his manliness, it was because I had not yet learned that what one-third of the men, and two-thirds of the women in society look upon as the proper business of their lives, must, in the nature of things, be the correct view of the subject. "The night cometh when no man can work," I thought, in my simplicity; the day, at best, is but a short and uncertain one; for every soul sent on earth there is a work allotted; what less than madness is it for the strong man to lie down in his strength and sleep away this day of grace? Seeing that the undone work does not fade with the fading daylight, but an evergrowing and thickening shadow, will horribly increase the blackness of that night; will be a treasure of wrath against that time of wrath, and the perdition of such men as have chosen to be ungodly. Such naïve and unpracticable ideas as these, would, no doubt, have brought an avalanche of ridicule on my head, had I been unwise enough to impart any of them to my new friends; but a protective instinct kept me from such a blunder; and as I hourly saw with clearer eyes the dissimilarity between them and me, so I hourly grew more reserved and silent. "Don't she ever say anything?" I could not help overhearing Phil ask, as I left the breakfast-room. I longed to hear Josephine's reply; but an inconvenient sentiment of honor prevented my stopping to listen for it. I could not, however, avoid being auditor to the lazy laugh that it elicited from Phil, and the blood mounted to my temples at the sound. "I wonder if they think me stupid or sulky," I said to myself. "I wonder if they ever thought how it must feel to be a stranger in the midst of people who know and understand each other. I wonder if I ever shall be one of them." There was another, however, of the household that I felt pretty sure was as much a stranger and an alien as I was, though she had spent nearly six years in it, and I turned my steps naturally to the nursery. Poor little Essie had, as I expected, fretted and cried herself into a sick headache, and was sitting sulkily in a remote corner of the room, her doll untouched beside her, and her hands in her lap. Félicie, sitting by the window with a sardonic smile on her lips, employed herself about ripping up an evening dress of Josephine's. I called to Essie to come into my room; she pouted and averted her head. I made a coaxing promise of "something pretty," when Félicie interposed "that she was in disgrace, and perhaps mademoiselle had better not speak to her, as her mamma had sent her up for a punishment." "Her mamma did not mean that she should be made unhappy for all the morning, however," I said, advancing boldly. "As mademoiselle pleases," answered Félicie, with a very wicked look, and a very sweet voice. Esther at length accepted my overtures, and consented to heal her bosom's woe with a picture-book and a bon-bon out of my trunk. I shut the door between my room and the nursery very tight, and gradually Essie's fretful unhappiness relaxed into something like childish enjoyment, in the comparative cheerfulness of my room, and the exertions I made for her entertainment. She possessed the characteristic, very rare and invaluable among children, of being easily amused, and also of continuing amused for a long while, with the same thing. So it happened, that the picture-book did not pall upon her taste, nor the bon-bon lose its charm, for two full hours, and she was still sitting demure as a kitten beside me, while I worked and occasionally explained to her the pictures, when Aunt Edith entered. She had evidently forgotten the occurrence of the morning, and seemed very well pleased to find us both so well provided for. After looking about the room, and ascertaining that I had everything that I needed, she sat down by the fire, and resumed the estimate she had been interrupted in making up last night. The conscious blood dyed my cheeks, the faltering words found only awkward and constrained utterance; the more my aunt tried to read me, the more blurred and unreadable did I become. She tried me upon all possible questions--school, and its studies and routine; Rutledge, and my visit there; the journey, and my escort. Upon all points, I was equally unsatisfactory, and the interview had but one decisive result, which I attained only by great effort. I had determined that whenever I should have a chance, I would ask a favor of my aunt; and this appearing a fitting opportunity, with many misgivings and much trepidation, I propounded it to her; and was unspeakably relieved and surprised to find that she not only acquiesced in, but most cordially approved of the motion. It was to the effect, that for this winter, I should be excused from going at all into society, and might be allowed to study and improve myself. The proposal, I saw, relieved my aunt's mind from some weight that had encumbered it. She agreed with me most heartily in considering it much the most judicious course. I was really too young to go into society; she had never ceased to regret having brought out Josephine so early; next winter I should be so much better fitted to enjoy it, etc. The plans for the employment of my time were very soon arranged. I was to share Grace's French and German lessons, and to read history and philosophy with her, under the guidance of one Mr. Olman, a young and inexpensive professor of literature and the belles-lettres, who came three times a week. My hours of study and recitation were all distinctly marked out, and it was agreed I should begin that very day. Grace was sent to bring me her French grammar and show me the lesson, and after lunch, we were summoned to the study (a small front room on the second story), to meet Mr. Olman, our literary professor. Certainly, if I had looked upon Grace as a marvel of sharpness last night, my respect for her in that regard, suffered no diminution after seeing the manner in which she slipped through Mr. Olman's literary fingers, and came out triumphant at the end of the two hours, without the vaguest idea of what he had been laboring at. She hated history, philosophy, and the belles-lettres, and never thought of preparing the abstracts and reviews that he requested; and as he was unspeakably afraid of her himself, she found no difficulty in eluding the detested tasks. He was a slim young man, dressing in black and wearing spectacles--very nervous and very much given to blushing. Indeed, his face, at the end of the lesson, was ordinarily of a violent _rose de chine_ color, and his hands so trembling and cold, that it was a great relief to me when he succeeded in collecting his books and papers and getting on his overcoat. I never saw so merciless a persecution; the slyest, "cutest," and the most naïve way of tripping him up in the full tide of his discourse, and then bewailing her mistake; never by any chance omitting an opportunity of making him blush and putting him in an agony of nervousness. I am certain, so acutely did he suffer at her hands, that if in an unguarded moment he had been brought to acknowledge who of all others he most detested and dreaded, he would have answered, unhesitatingly, "my pupil, from two to four, on Monday, Wednesday and Friday." Indignant as I felt at Grace, it was no easy matter to keep from laughing at the results of her pertness and _aplomb;_ and notwithstanding Mr. Olman was evidently a well-read and cultivated scholar, I anticipated in these lessons more of pain than of pleasure; and although I determined to apply myself thoroughly to all he directed, still, four o'clock was, and would, I feared, continue to be, a release. At dinner, that evening, Grace gave the bulletin of "Mr. Olman's latest," and though her mother reproved her, no one thought it necessary to discourage her by not laughing. Phil's "Ha! ha!" was honest and unequivocal; he meant, he declared, some day to secrete himself under the piano, and see Grace put the professor to rout and confusion. He hated professors, for his part, and he'd like to see 'em all put to rout and confusion. "Professors arn't in your line, are they, Phil?" said Grace, with a laugh. "I beg, Phil," exclaimed Josephine, "that you'll never present yourself unexpectedly to that wretched man. I am sure he'd swoon at the sight of your breadth of shoulder and length of limb. You'd make at least three of him." "Say four," put in Grace. "The professor doesn't weigh an ounce over thirty-five pounds. I asked him, the other day, apropos of ancient weights and measures, if he'd ever been weighed, and what the result was." "You saucy child," said Phil, "I wonder he didn't box your ears." "No danger of that," responded Grace, complacently. "The professor knows better than to quarrel with his bread and butter; he knows that pupils don't grow on every bush, and it would take a great deal more than that to provoke him into a retort. He only bites his lips, and grows red in the face, and says, 'This is irrelevant, Miss Churchill.'" "Upon my word," said Josephine, with a sneer, "by the time the poor man finishes your education, I think he'll be fit to be translated to his reward, without any further sojourn in the church militant. No honest council would deny him canonization after such a fiery trial." "Poor old Mabire must have a high place by this time, if his reward is at all proportioned to his sufferings," said Grace, slily. "You remember, Josephine, how sweet you used to be to that old man? I liked to listen at the study door, and hear him walk up and down the floor, and grind his teeth and gasp, 'C'est trop, c'est trop!' I suppose the bread-and-butter question prevented his speaking to mamma; but, really, you must confess, he was a victim! Now _I_ never go the lengths of biting and scratching, but always confine myself to"---- "Grace, _mon ange_," cried Josephine, flushing up angrily, "if you don't want to be sent to take your meals in the nursery, you had better learn to be less pert and"---- "Truthful's the word you want, dear," drawled Grace, unconcernedly. "It's the last word I should think of applying to you," retorted her sister. "_Tout doucement, chérie!_" ejaculated Grace, squeezing up her mouth. But at this juncture, mamma, who had been engaged in opening some notes and cards of invitation that John had brought in, now becoming aroused to a sense of the impending storm, came to the rescue, and in a few cutting words used up everybody present, Phil and myself included, and restored a forced peace; and during the remainder of the meal, Josephine sulked, Phil looked heartily distressed, and I felt miserably uncomfortable, Grace alone preserving an unmoved and complacent demeanor. It was just as we had finished dessert, that there came a ring at the bell that made me start. Foolish as it was, I had been listening to the bell all day, with a vague kind of hope that it would prove of interest to me; and when John presented a card to my aunt, which contained the only familiar name to me in this strange place, and, in fact, the only name I cared to see, I really feared that Grace's quick ear would catch the loud throbbing of my heart, as she surely did catch the quick blush on my cheeks. "It is Mr. Rutledge," said my aunt. "Josephine, will you go into the parlor, and I will join you in a moment? Phil, may I ask you to look over that deed we were speaking of this morning? The library is vacant; I suppose you do not want to be interrupted. And you, young ladies (to Grace and me), will find a good fire in the study, and an excellent chance for preparing your German for to-morrow. Mr. Waschlager, you know, comes at ten on Thursdays." Josephine, with a coquettish look in the glass, hurried off to the parlor; Phil accepted his lot with a resigned sigh; Grace grumblingly obeyed, and I followed her, biting my lips, and struggling to keep back the tears of disappointment, as I heard, through the half open door, a familiar voice and laugh, that my homesick ear had been longing for all day. CHAPTER XIX. ----"Sweet heaven, she takes me up As if she had fingered me, and dog-eared me, And spelled me by the fire-side, half a life! She knows my turns, my feeble points." E.B. BROWNING. Christmas came and passed; my birthday came and passed; the holidays were "over and done," and we were busily at work again with our various professors; and, in my heart, I acknowledged that I liked work better than play in my new home. Sundays and holidays were the times that tried my soul. I do not mean in church; Christmas anthems, Christmas hopes and aspirations had never before touched me so deeply as now, when there was so much of dullness and coldness in the world outside. In church I did not feel my loneliness so much, but it was the coming back to the frivolity and uncongeniality of home that left the greatest blank. I do not mean to suggest, that during all these weeks I had been as pining and heartsick as I had been on the first day of my initiation. That day, it is true, had been a fair index of the rest, but the acute disappointment and pain had worn off, and I had learned to make the best of it, and to go through my daily routine with a less heavy, but perhaps an emptier and less hoping heart. "The ox, when he is weary, treads surest." I was weary and unhopeful, and so, perhaps, trod more safely the somewhat devious and perplexing path that lay before me. If the subduing effect of a keenly felt and unkind disappointment, and a miserable loneliness and want of sympathy, had not kept my impetuosity and self-will in check, I perhaps should not have passed with so little injury through scenes that were quite new and bewildering to me. As it was, I was sad enough to think, sober enough to choose, and yet young and elastic enough not to be crushed by the weight of my trial, but to bow and fit myself to the yoke. I reasoned in a way that was childish in its simplicity, and yet wise in its unworldliness. "I have been very presumptuous and vain," I thought. "I have fancied myself the companion and friend of one who, by forgetting me, has shown me my mistake, while there was yet time to correct it. I have been indulging in a very foolish, though a very happy, dream; but as long as he knows nothing of it, I am certain I can conquer it in time, and be more humble for the rest of my life. I have not found much sympathy or love in the only home I shall probably ever have; I don't suppose I shall ever be particularly happy again, but there is something higher than mere happiness that I can try to gain, and make myself worthy of that communion of saints in which I have been taught to believe; stretching through earth and heaven, of all kindreds and peoples and tongues, among whom I have no present comrade, it is true, but there is one saint at rest, who has no other care than her child's peace--who loved me better than all the world beside, when she was here--who will not forget her love and tenderness in the rest that she has entered into." And so, with a humbled heart, I set myself to the "trivial round, the common task," that gave me, indeed, much room for self-denial and patience, but gave me, too, the peace that impatience and resistance never would have brought. Much there was, indeed, of error and folly, many mistaken steps and struggles of conscience, much sinning and repenting, but, on the whole, it was a straighter and a safer path than a pleasanter one would have been. There was, in truth, little danger of being in love with the world, seen from the stand-point I had been placed in. Home continued pretty much as usual. Of my aunt and Josephine, we of the study and the nursery saw comparatively little. As the season advanced, and the gaiety increased, there was not much time, of course, at my aunt's command for any but the most imperative home duties; this being Josephine's first winter in New York, it was a thing of the highest moment to bring her out properly, and no sacrifice was considered too great. Not that she neglected her household, or regular duties; at whatever hour she may have returned home the night before, my Aunt Edith never failed to appear at breakfast punctually; never failed to hear Esther repeat her Collect, and glance over Grace's theme; never failed to overlook the grocer's, baker's, and butcher's accounts; to visit in person daily, kitchen, laundry, butler's pantry, nursery, and study; to keep, in short, that eye over her entire establishment that it required to preserve its matchless order and regularity. No wonder that my aunt looked haggard and worn; no wonder that unwelcome wrinkles were writing themselves on her brow, and that her rounded figure was fast losing its roundness. To serve one master is as much as one human being is capable of. In the miserable attempt to serve two, how many wrecks of soul and body are daily wrought. I said we saw very little of my aunt; it seemed very little, for her daily visits to us, though regular, were of necessity hurried, and at meals she was generally either preoccupied and thoughtful, or busy with Phil in arrangements and plans for the pressing demands of society. Josephine, now-a-days, had her breakfast sent to her room, and was not ordinarily visible before twelve o'clock. Then came visiting hours; and at dinner, though, when they did not dine out, we enjoyed the society of my aunt, and Josephine, and Phil, still it seemed to me, they were all rather listless and stupid; but perhaps they were only reserving their energies for the evening. After study hours, sometimes, and just before my bed-time, I would go down to Josephine's room by particular request, and assist her at her toilette; her new maid, Frances, being, she declared, the clumsiest, stupidest thing that ever breathed, and having a most unbearable trick of bursting into tears whenever she was scolded, which, I suppose, deprived Josephine of all pleasure in her attendance. My services suited her better, and I often had the honor of superseding Frances. Not that I minded it at all; it was the only glimpse I had into the gay world that I was as yet so ignorant of. I liked to array Josephine in her elegant Parisian dresses, to arrange the drooping flowers in her glossy black hair, and to clasp the rich bracelets on her arms. Grace, on these occasions, was strictly forbidden the room; late hours, dissipation and fatigue had not materially improved Josephine's temper; and her pert young sister's allusions to bones, necks à la gridiron, etc., tried her beyond endurance; and mamma interposing, Grace, for once, was kept at bay. I will not deny a vague feeling of regret and longing, as I watched my cousin's floating drapery downstairs, and thought of the gay scene she was starting for; and as Phil wrapped her light cloak around her, and whispered his honest praises in her ear, as she followed her mother to the door, and I turned back to my lonely little room, it did seem to me that there was great need of faith to believe that her lot and mine were ordered by the same unerring and impartial Wisdom. Our lessons went on pretty much as at first. With Mr. Olman, I was rather a check upon Grace, and the poor man began to regard me with something like gratitude. He was a good teacher, and gave me plenty of work, for which I, in my turn, was grateful. Our French lessons, it appeared to me, were rather a hollow mockery, Mdlle. Berteau, our preceptress, being a chatty little woman, who spent one-half her time in gossiping with Grace about Paris and pretty things, and the other half in helping her write the exercises she had been too lazy to prepare the night before. I also found later, that mademoiselle had been in the habit of supplying her young pupil surreptitiously with some rather questionable French literature. Upon a threat of disclosing this circumstance to mamma, Grace made me a solemn promise to renounce it; but I must confess I never felt any great security about its fulfillment. Our German proved rather more satisfactory. Mr. Waschlager, a strapping, burly, bearded fellow, with a loud voice and considerable energy of manner, inspired Miss Grace with much greater respect than delicate Mr. Olman, with his nervousness and tremor. His imperfect knowledge of our mother-tongue, also, rendered any sly innuendoes quite powerless to annoy him, and Grace's very strikingly imperfect knowledge of _his_ maternal mode of speech, put it quite out of her ability to insult him, if she had dared. So that, with the exception of having ordinarily to write her exercises for her, and give her the benefit of my researches in the dictionary at the last moment, I enjoyed my German lesson very much, and made quite rapid advances in that language. A week or two before my arrival, Esther's daily governess (from all accounts a miserably weak and injudicious person) had been dismissed, having been found entirely incompetent to manage her young charge; and, till another should be procured, I had asked my aunt if I should not teach her for an hour or two every day. The offer had been very gladly accepted, and, somehow, after a week or two, all question of obtaining a new governess had died out, and Essie and her lessons had quietly devolved on me. I did not mind it very much; the child was good enough, and, with a little coaxing, got on tolerably well; but it was rather hard always to be tied down to that duty for the hours that I invariably felt most like reading or sewing, both of which occupations I found entirely incompatible with the due direction of Miss Esther's early mathematical efforts, and the proper supervision of her attempts at penmanship. I had the benefit of her society at other hours also; she kept pretty closely at my side during my leisure moments, favored by my vicinity to the nursery, and was my invariable companion in my walks: Grace never walked, except when ordered out under pain of her mother's displeasure, and Félicie was, of course, only too glad to shift the duty of exercising Miss Esther upon me. And as my aunt had a prejudice against full carriages, she and Josephine were generally considered a sufficient burden for the horses on Sunday, and Grace being commonly threatened with headache on that day, Esther and I were left to ourselves in the matter of church; and finding one not far distant, that had some free seats within its ample limits, we profited by the discovery, and pretty constantly filled two of them; Esther holding fast to my dress, never for a moment letting go of it through service or sermon; at times it seemed to me, as I caught her strange troubled eyes fixed on the rich colors of the chancel window, or the misty blue of the vaulted roof, that "her heart was envious of her eye," and she clung to me, uncertain and hesitating, as her one tie to earth. I never could quite make out the child; with all her pettishness, and very willful and trying naughtiness, there were moods and fancies about her that thoroughly puzzled me. The only way, I found, was to be as patient as possible with the one, and humor the other as far as was practicable. I introduced her to her Prayer-book frequently at church, but to little effect; she would obey for the moment, then the book would drop unheeded from her hand, and she would presently be gazing dreamily before her again. Never letting go my dress, she would slip down on her knees when the others did, but when I glanced at her, it was always to find that strange wistful look on her upturned face, that always gave me a vague feeling of uneasiness. She was by no means a precocious child--rather a backward and undeveloped one; but sometimes she startled me with questions that were as much beyond what I had expected of her, as they were beyond me to answer lucidly. Besides our dislike of Félicie and our liking for Trinity Chapel, there was another bond of sympathy between my little cousin and me, and that was, our cordial antipathy to "company" days and times. Not that we ever had much personal interest in them, but the moral atmosphere of the house, for the whole of the day on which one of my aunt's elaborate dinner-parties occurred, was extremely grating to our nerves. My aunt was always a little more decided and hurried, Josephine a shade more imperious, Grace perter, Félicie more hateful, John more given to short answers--in fact, no member of the household but felt oppressed by the coming event. Grace and I dined with Esther at "the little dinner" at one, on such occasions, and all we saw of the contents of the carriages that, about six, began to roll up to the door, was seen from over the balusters of the third-story staircase. My aunt, it is true, had at first proposed to me to put on my new silk, and come downstairs, but it seemed to me that the invitation was rather lukewarm, and she agreed with me very readily in thinking that for this winter, it was better for me to stay altogether out of society. "You will be all the fresher when you do appear, my love," said my aunt Edith. So, _par conséquent_, I saw but little of the visitors at the house, though, through Grace, and the general table talk and accidental meetings in the parlor, I kept the run of the most intimate and familiar ones. Among the gentlemen, there was a Captain McGuffy, an army friend of Phil's, who was a good deal at the house, principally noticeable for his appetite and his moustache. Also, a stale old beau named Reese, who was a kind of heir-loom in fashionable families, handed down from mother to daughter along with other antique and valued relics, to grace their entrée into society. He had been an admirer of my aunt Edith's in her opening bloom, but was now made over to Josephine, by that unselfish parent, to swell the list of the younger one's retainers. Besides these, there was a Mr. Wynkar, very young and very insignificant, endured principally, I fancied, for his utility; and a young Frenchman, who was quite new on the tapis, and much the rage. But it was a fact patent even to my simplicity, that Mr. Rutledge was, _par excellence_, the most courted and desired guest in Gramercy Square. For him, Josephine's smiles came thickest and sweetest, and the daring freedom of speech and wit that characterized her bearing with Phil and his military _confrère_, were, in his presence, toned down into a spirited, but most taking coquetry, and the anxious frown on Aunt Edith's brow was smoothed away whenever John announced, "Mr. Rutledge, madam." That those announcements were very frequent, could never cease to be a matter of interest to me, though there seemed little excuse for my feeling any deeper personal concern in them than John himself. Being always expected to retire directly from dinner to the study, we of course lost all evening visitors, and in the daytime, it was even less likely that we should encounter any one from the parlor. More than once, on dinner-party nights, I had stood so near him, that I could have whispered and he would have heard; shrinking down in the shadow of the landing-place, I had watched him leave the dressing-room slowly, always walking through the upper hall very leisurely, and looking attentively around. But the darkness of that upper landing-place would baffle even his keen eye; my very heart would stand still--the breath would not pass my parted lips, and there would be no danger that his quick ear should discover that which I would have died rather than he should have known. I would watch him down the stairs, see him pause a moment before the parlor-door, then, as he opened it, there would come, for an instant, the gay clamor of many voices, the rustling of silks, the ringing of laughter, then in an instant shut again, and I would creep back to my dark and cheerless little room with a heart that, had I been older and less humble, would have been bitter and resentful, but as it was, was only aching and sad. I often wondered whether, if that bracelet had not been fastened irrevocably on my arm, I should have taken it off? Whether, if I could, I would have put far out of sight, all souvenirs of that happy visit, that nobody seemed to remember now but me. Whether it would have been any easier to forget, if I could have broken my promise as he most assuredly had broken his. Of course he had broken it; the only folly had been in my ever expecting him to remember such a jest an hour after it was spoken. A one-sided friendship, indeed it was, upon reflection, a very absurd friendship, between an ignorant school-girl and an elegant, high-bred, cultivated gentleman, and one who, as Grace said one day at the table, if he wasn't the coolest and most indifferent of men, would be a perfect lion in society. "He's too _jeuced_ stiff and haughty to be tolerated," said Mr. Wynkar, who, with Capt. McGuffy and Phil, was dining with us in such _petit comité_, that it was not considered necessary to exclude the juniors from the board. "You and he arn't intimate, then," said Grace, with a sly laugh, which Josephine rather encouraged in a quiet way. "I never could see," said Capt. McGuffy, from under his moustache, "what everybody finds in that man so remarkable. He has a tolerably correct idea of a horse, and rides pretty well; but beyond that, I think he's rather a stick." Grace elevated her eyebrows, and Mr. Wynkar went on to say, "that for his part, he thought there was nothing about him but his money and his family. Rutledge was a good name, and he was, without doubt, the best match in society." "Match!" exclaimed the captain. "He's no more idea of marrying than a monk. I pity the girl that sets her affections on his establishment. _Ma foi_! She'd about as well make _beaux yeux_ at the bronze general in Union Square. Her chance of making an impression would be about as good." "McGuffy's right," said Phil, warmly. "If everybody knew as much as he does, they'd let Mr. Rutledge alone, and turn their attention to subjects that would pay better." "Army men upon a thousand a year, for instance," said Josephine, under her breath, and with an irritated contraction of the brow. "Yes," said Mrs. Churchill, quite blandly, "it is peculiar, that any one can see in him a marrying man. At his age, it is very seldom that one of his disposition feels any inclination to form new ties and interests, and enter upon so different a life. Nothing could surprise me more than to hear that Mr. Rutledge was going to be married." Grace squeezed up her mouth in a significant way, and gave a funny look at her mother as she said this, evidently exercising great self-denial in not answering. Mr. Ellerton Wynkar took upon himself that office, and agreed entirely with Mrs. Churchill, adding, however, that there were some stories about the early life of the gentleman, that he didn't know whether to believe or not. Was it true that he had been so dissipated when he was a young man? Mrs. Churchill smiled, and shrugged her shoulders. She knew nothing about that; he had spent most of his early life abroad, she said, and sowed his wild oats, if he had any to sow, on another continent, and it was but fair for us to be content to take him as he wished to appear at home, and ignore the other continent. "You may bet your head," exclaimed the captain, emphatically, "that no man with a fortune like his, ever settled down into morality and farming, without having a good time or so, to begin with. Trust him for that! The ladies wouldn't like him so well, if there wasn't a touch of the sinner about him." Aunt Edith shook her head, and said that was a shocking doctrine; while Josephine declared, with a laugh, they had to like sinners--there was nothing else in society; and Mr. Wynkar taking it as a personal tribute, pulled his pale moustache and smiled, while the captain concentrated his herculean powers on an appropriate rejoinder, and Grace drew the attention of the table to me, by exclaiming: "Why, what's the matter? You look as if you had been shot." "Rather, as if she'd like to shoot us," said Josephine, laughing. "What _have_ we done to excite such horror? I hope you're not making yourself unhappy on Mr. Rutledge's account. I think he's able to take care of himself." "If I had known," said Mr. Wynkar, with an apologetic wave of the hand, and a smile that was meant to be ironical, "if I had known that Mr. Rutledge had so enthusiastic a friend present, I should have been more careful; and I most humbly beg, that what I have said may be forgiven." The captain laughed a great laugh, and said he might have known that wherever there was a pretty face, there was a friend to Mr. Rutledge; and Grace asked, artlessly, what made me blush so; while only good-natured Phil came to the rescue, and in his blunt, honest way, exclaimed: "It's my opinion she's much in the right of it. I shouldn't think much of her, if she wasn't angry at hearing anybody used up so, all on suspicion, too. If there's anything against him, why, hang it, come out and say so; but this making a man out a rascal, because people like him and because he's got a fortune, upon my soul, I think it's a scurvy sort of trick, that I do." "Don't hit him any more--he's got friends," whined Grace. "Phil quite mistakes us if he thinks we are not all Mr. Rutledge's friends," said Mrs. Churchill. "No one dreamed of saying anything that could possibly be considered uncomplimentary." "I don't know, Aunt Edith," said Phil, rather warmly; "but I hope you don't pay me that sort of compliment when I'm not by." "Indeed we don't," exclaimed Josephine, laughing. "When you're absent, Phil (which isn't often, you know), we all say you're the best fellow in the world, and count the hours till you come back." "Then I think the best thing I can do is to stay away," he answered, with a sort of sigh. "Ah, Phil, I know you wouldn't have the heart!" said Josephine, in a low tone, with a bright flash of her coquettish eye; which had the effect of subduing her cousin for the rest of the evening, and keeping him obedient to her slightest whim. Though the rest of the family seemed to forget very soon the little episode that had been so excruciating to me, and so amusing to them, I do not think it was lost upon my aunt. I always found her looking at me very narrowly whenever Mr. Rutledge was mentioned, and she on more than one occasion, in my presence, took pains to speak of him in a way that seemed to put a greater distance than ever between us, of his age, his eccentricities, his reserve. My aunt might have saved herself the trouble. I "knew my place" by this time, and shrunk as naturally from meeting him now, as I had before been eager and forward. On the one or two occasions when I could not avoid encountering him, it had been in her presence, and I had been shy and cold to a degree that must have been unaccountable to him, if he had given the matter a thought, which I very much doubted. I had excused myself as hurriedly as possible, and slipped back to the study, glad to be by myself again, yet bitterly sorry, as soon as it was too late, that I had not staid where only I wished to be--where only I found any pleasure, if such a doubtful emotion indeed could be called pleasure. It was the nearest approach to it, however, that my life presented; it was what I looked forward to, spite of my good resolves from day to day; yet, when the wished-for pleasure came, with strange shyness and perverseness, I thrust it away out of my own reach, then cried passionately at the disappointment, and began to hope again. The most inexplicable and contradictory thing in all this world of contradictions, is a woman's heart, before experience has tutored it. The woman herself does not understand it. What wonder if its strange willfulness and sudden impulses hopelessly bewilder and mislead the one of all others whom she most desires to please, and for whom alone, if the truth were known, the foolish heart throbs and flutters and pines. CHAPTER XX. "Doth not the world show men a very Judas' part, and betray them unto Satan, saying, whom I kiss with a feigned sign of love, take them--torture them?" SUTTON. "Mamma says," drawled out Grace, sauntering into the study one snowy morning, as I sat busy at my German, "mamma says, that as you write a good hand, you may direct these cards for her, and she will excuse you to Mr. Waschlager, if you don't have time to finish your German before he comes." I could not help a slight exclamation of impatience as I relinquished my books, and took the long list of names and the basketful of blank envelopes that Grace handed me. "How glad I am that I don't write a nice hand!" she ejaculated, as she threw herself lazily into a chair by the window, and leaning on her elbow, gazed out into the streets, now "dumb with snow," but where, before an hour was over, the jingling of an occasional sleigh-bell would be but a prelude to the merry music with which, till the snow vanished, they were to resound. "I should think you'd be glad to get rid of your German; though, I suppose, it's only 'out of the frying-pan,' for you have a good morning's work before you in those precious cards." I didn't trust myself to answer, and, after a pause, Grace went on: "I should think mamma might have set Josephine to write those things herself, don't you? The party's all on her account, and she and Phil are doing nothing down in the library this morning." Grace looked a little longer at the lessening snow-flakes, then continued, pleasantly: "What shall you wear? For we've got to come down, mamma said so; and she said, too, that she didn't believe you had anything fit to wear." "I haven't given a thought to the subject. Pray, don't talk, Grace, you confuse me." "But you'll have to give it a thought," she exclaimed. "Josephine's going to wear her new pink silk, and I should think you'd want to look nicely the first time you go into company. Ella Wynkar was saying the other day, she thought it was the queerest thing you never went anywhere." "Grace, really if you can't be quiet, I must go into my own room. I won't waste any more time misdirecting these cards, which I cannot help doing if you talk all the while." She subsided for a few minutes, but pretty soon began again. "It's going to be splendid sleighing; it's stopped snowing altogether, and I believe the sun is actually coming out; don't you wish there was any chance of your having a sleigh-ride?" "No," I exclaimed, impatiently; "I don't wish for anything but quiet, and if you must be lazy yourself, I don't see what need there is of making other people so." "You're shockingly out of temper this morning," said Grace, shrugging her shoulders and getting up to go. "I think I shall have to 'leave you to your own reflections,' as mamma always says after giving any of us a lecture. I must go and see what mischief Esther is in. She has been too quiet this morning." I saw, by the sly gleam in Grace's eye, that Esther's peace was over; I knew the futility of argument, and attempted none; ten minutes after, a distressed little voice outside, crying, "Won't you speak to Grace? She's got the brushes out of my paint-box, and she won't give 'em to me," showed me how Grace was killing time. I opened the door for the little _malheureuse_, told her not to mind about the paint-brushes, but if she'd be a quiet child, she might sit down here and look at the big "Pilgrim's Progress;" so I installed her in Grace's vacated seat, by the window, and she dried her tears, and looked the book through twice; then, kneeling in the chair, gazed out into the street, so quietly that I almost forgot her existence. My task was a distasteful one, insomuch as it interfered with pleasanter occupations, and I had great difficulty in keeping my patience to its completion; but at last it was ended, and the last name on the list copied on the envelope of the last card, and replaced in the basket, and, fagged and dispirited, I pushed them away, and, crossing over to the window, sat down by it, and took the child on my knee. No wonder the scene had fascinated her so long; it certainly was bright and picturesque. Snow is as magical a beautifier as moonlight; it freshens up, gilds over, and brightens the worn-out surface of every-day, and makes a pretty picture of a common reality. I had never suspected Gramercy Park of beauty before, but under the light mantle of this snow it became lovely. The trees bent with its light weight; it capped and decorated the iron railings, and crested the roofs and window-casings of the houses on the square. It lay white and unsullied on the ground, and in the courtyards; only a few children had as yet burst nursery bounds, and, wild with delight, rushed into the new element; and but a few shovels and brooms were at work. The sky had come out gorgeously blue, the sunshine was glittering gaily on the white snow; it was altogether a brilliant picture, done in high colors, but possessing the advantage that nature's pictures always enjoy, of not having an inharmonious or jarring tinge. Even the sleigh-loads of gaily-dressed people that began to dash past, seemed to have got themselves up to match and not mar the scene. The bright colors of the sleigh-robes, the flashing of the silver bells, the red cheeks of the girls, the gay clothes of the pretty children, were quite harmonious and quite effective. Esther looked at it for a long while in perfect content, as she would have looked at a nice picture-book; by and by, it began to assume a more personal character on her eyes. "I should like to go out and ride myself," she said, at length. "So should I, but there doesn't seem much chance of it," I answered; "therefore, it's best not to think about it." "Other children go," she said. "I don't see why I can't. I think mamma might have a sleigh." "That's mamma's business, and not yours," I said; "and there are more little children who don't ride than there are little children who do. There is one, for instance, coming out of the area, who has been poking about, in all the ash-barrels in the square, for a few cinders to keep him warm at home. Poor little fellow! Don't you feel sorry for him, Essie? His ears and nose are so red, and his lips are almost purple. I don't believe _he's_ had a sleigh-ride, do you?" Essie looked down thoughtfully at him, but didn't answer; no more repinings occurring, however, I inferred that she had profited by the train of thought the shivering little object below us had suggested. I still sat by the window, with Essie in my lap and a book in my hand, when, with a cry of pleasure, she started up, exclaiming, as a sleigh drew up at the door: "There's Mr. Rutledge, and I know he's come for us to ride! Hurrah!" I bent forward, just in time to meet his eye, as he sprang from the sleigh, and to return awkwardly his salutation. Esther waited for no permission, but bounded from my lap, flew across the room, and downstairs before I could recall her, and opened the door for him before he had rung the bell. There was a very enthusiastic meeting between them, and an excited "That's good!" from the child, and in a moment she was back again at my side, breathless and eager, exclaiming: "Mr. Rutledge has come for us all, to drive out to High Bridge. Put on your things quick--quick as ever you can." "Who's going? Who did he ask?" I said, breathless as the child herself. "You, me, mamma, Josephine, all of us! Be quick." "But listen, Essie," I exclaimed, following her to the hall, as she bounded off up to the nursery. "Stop a minute. What did he say?--did he say _me?_" "Yes, yes, he said, 'run up and ask your cousin if she'll take that ride this morning that we talked about at Rutledge, and I'll go into the parlor and ask your mamma and Miss Josephine;' and now let me run for Félicie to get me ready;" and the child was off again, but came back obediently when I called her. I held her tight by the hand, as, with a beating heart, I leaned over the balusters, and heard the merry voices in the hall below. I could not distinguish what Mr. Rutledge said, but I heard Josephine's laughing rejoinder: "I assure you, I didn't mean to hint, last night, when I said I longed for a sleigh-ride again; but it was just like you, to remember it. It's a charming day. How we shall enjoy it!" I led Essie to the stairs, and leaning down, said: "Go down and tell Mr. Rutledge, that he's very kind, but I beg he will excuse me to-day." The child looked bewildered, and exclaimed: "But, aren't you going?" "No; go down and say just what I have told you, remember; and then come back, and I'll help you get ready." Esther wonderingly obeyed, and slid down the stairs like a spirit. I scorned to listen any longer, though I would have given anything and everything I possessed to have unravelled the tangled maze of voices in the hall, and known how my refusal was received. Pride to the rescue! however, and I was bending over my German, when my aunt looked in a moment at the door, to inquire if I didn't care to go. I said, "No, thank you; I have my translation to finish, and, if you are willing, I will stay at home." Just then, Josephine and Grace came up, and Essie burst into the room, exclaiming: "Mamma, mamma, what shall I wear? What frock had I better put on?" "Why, you're not going," cried Josephine, pettishly. "Surely, mamma, you do not mean to let that child go. There's no room for her if Phil goes, and she'll be whimpering with the cold in ten minutes." "Mr. Rutledge only asked her for politeness," said Grace. "He never thought of such a snip really going." "She'll spoil everything," said Josephine, decidedly. "I don't care to go if she does." "I think, on the whole, my dear Essie," said Mrs. Churchill, "that it is best for you not to go. You must amuse yourself at home, and be a good child; we shall not be gone very long." The little girl's lips moved, as if she would speak, but no words came, and, as the others left the room, I looked at her with some anxiety. I never saw a face so changed. The brief radiance that had lighted it had passed away, and in its place was a livid look of passion that fairly frightened me. "Why, Essie, child, don't take it so to heart," I said, soothingly, attempting to touch her cold, clenched hand, but with a fierce gesture she released herself and turned away. I tried to pacify and divert her, but received no word in answer, till, from the window, we saw the party enter the sleigh, and after a moment of adjusting sleigh-robes and furs, the fine horses started spiritedly forward, to the music of their own merry bells; then, with a violent scream, the child threw herself upon the floor, and shook from head to foot with a passion that many men and women pass through life without experiencing. Such tempests cannot fail to blight the souls they sweep over; they bow the cracking forest, and strip it of its leaves; the tender sapling, alone and unprotected in its flexile youth, can hardly escape undesolated. Swayed and whipped about with the fierce blast, all that is tender and delicate about it must be blighted; the stem that should have been fair and straight, must, if it survive the trial, be twisted, and rough, and gnarled; it may strike a deeper root; it will never cast as fine a shade, nor be as fair a tree. If, unable to sustain the storm, the frail stem snap, and the life-blood ooze away, is it a questionable providence, or an utter mercy? "Essie, my dear little girl," I continued, as the child still lay sobbing on the floor, long after the first burst of temper had expended itself, "Essie, you will surely make yourself sick; you are chilled through already, and the room is getting cold; come upstairs with me." But no, the headstrong child would not go upstairs, but would lie there, and only there, and sob, and cry, and refuse all comfort. It was not till the shaking of sleigh-bells at the door announced the return of the party, that my arguments had the least effect. "Don't let them see you lying there, Esther. Come up, and let me wash the tears off your face and smooth your hair," I said; and she allowed me to lift her up, and lead her upstairs, before her sisters came in. Félicie was busy with a skirt of Josephine's, so I shut the nursery door and kept the child with me. But this time there was no soothing her; she was fretful and trying beyond anything I had ever seen; perhaps if I had not been so miserable myself then, I could not have been as patient with her, as I remember I was. I was wretched enough to have lain down and sobbed myself, but the office of comforter is incompatible with that of mourner, and so is an office twice blessed; for tempting as is the luxury of tears, the reward of self-control is always greater and more lasting. "The dinner-bell will soon ring, Essie, and you will not be ready to come down to dessert; come and let me brush your hair." "I don't want to go down; I don't want any dessert," she whined. Her hands were now hot and feverish, her teeth chattering with nervousness, and I recognized the approach of one of her sick headaches. I did not much wonder that she did not want to go down, so I coaxed her to let me undress her, and put her to bed, "and if you'll be a good child, you may sleep with me to-night." "Very well," she said, laconically, with a weary sigh; and before the dinner-bell rang, I had laid her, quieted, in my bed, with, however, a very wide-awake and nervous stare about her eyes, but no tears and not much fretting. For the next few days, the absorbing cares of the approaching party must have prevented my Aunt Edith from seeing the real indisposition of Esther. That her increasing irritability was the result of illness, I could not doubt, as I had ascertained for myself, that she could be as quiet as other children, when she was well. Josephine declared, I spoiled the teasing little object. Grace said, with a laugh: "You can't reproach yourself with anything of the kind, can you, Joseph?" And Phil, taking "the teasing little object" on his knee, said: "Aunt Edith, upon my word, the child grows lighter every time I take her up. Is she well?" "I mean to have the doctor this morning," she answered, looking up from her writing. "I am rather worried about her; she is a little feverish. Esther, don't stay by the window; it is too cold for you. Go up to the nursery, and tell Félicie to put a little sacque on you." So Esther was remanded to the nursery, and it being the day before the party, there was plenty to be done and thought of for all hands. And though the doctor came, he did not seem much impressed with her state of health--left a very innocent prescription that was not sent for till the next day, and eased everybody's mind exceedingly. What a very comfortable thing it is to be able to pin one's faith to a medical coatsleeve, and according as it is elevated or depressed, be soothed or terrified. Any disinterested observer, I think, would have agreed with Esther and me, that party-giving was not in any way conducive to home comfort. That wretched day, lessons of course were given up; the study being turned into a dressing-room, and the nursery sharing the same fate--my room was the sanctuary where Grace and Esther sought refuge from the bustle and confusion of the first and second floors, and no paradise it proved, Essie being unbearably peevish and Grace unbearably provoking. Aunt Edith tore herself away from the claims of upholsterer, florist, and waiter for a moment, to look in upon us--gave the final directions about our dresses, and pronounced Esther's sentence, which she had been dreading for days, to wit, that she must not go downstairs. It was a most proper sentence, but it was a cruel disappointment, and the child of course cried herself into another headache. I induced her to go to bed about seven o'clock, but she sat bolt upright, watching eagerly the operations of the hairdresser, who had come to Grace and me, before arranging Josephine's hair. "Esther, do go to sleep, and stop bothering!" cried Grace. "You've done nothing but worry this whole day." A fresh burst of tears was the answer to this, and Grace was more incensed than ever. "I think this is a pursuit of pleasure under difficulties, indeed," I exclaimed, despairing. "I hope all parties are not as much trouble! Will it pay, do you suppose?" "_Cela dépend_," said Grace; "if you get attended to, it may; if you have to talk to the old ladies, and look over books of engravings in the corner, it wont." I inly wondered which would be my fate, as I glanced at the pretty muslin on the foot of the bed. "Not the old ladies and the engravings I hope." It was my first party, and though everything seemed to conspire to make it a punishment, still I would have been more than human if I had felt no excitement when I first dressed myself in party-dress. White muslin and coral ornaments were not very elaborate certainly, but they were a great contrast to the plain clothes I had seen myself in since I could remember. When Grace was dressed, she went down, but Essie clung to me and begged me to stay so piteously, that I could not resist; and turning out the gas, I sat down on the bed by her, and told her stories by the dozen, and sung her hymns, in the vain hope of getting her to sleep; but she seemed to grow wider awake every minute. Ten o'clock chimed; the music began; the carriages were rolling to the door, and still she held my hand firmly, and said, "go on," in a hopelessly-clear voice, every time I paused in my recital. I was beginning to be in dire perplexity about leaving her, when the door opened, and Grace put her head in, saying, hurriedly: "Mamma sent me up to say you must come down directly; half the people are here, and they are beginning to dance. Come as quick as you can," and Grace disappeared. There was another burst of grief from Esther to be soothed and subdued, and at last, taking my gloves and fan, and kissing her good night, I stole out of the room, thinking her quite reconciled; but when half way down the stairs, I looked back, and saw the child, in her long white nightgown, standing at the head of the staircase, and heard her heart-broken voice begging me to come back, it was so lonesome, she was so sick. At the foot stood Grace. "Mamma is displeased that you do not come." What should I do? I ran upstairs again. Essie stood shivering at the door, a bright spot on each cheek, and an excited glitter in her eye. "Essie!" I exclaimed, "why will you be so naughty? Don't you know mamma has sent for me twice? Do you want me to be scolded?" "No, but I don't want to be left; it is so lonesome up here." "But don't you know I promised to send Félicie up; and do I ever break my promises?" "I don't want Félicie to come; she's cross," said the child. "Well, then, Frances shall come; will she do?" "Frances is busy, and you'll forget all about me when you get down there among the people." "No, I won't, my darling," I said, stooping down, as she put her arms around my neck. "I will send Frances, and come up and see you in a little while myself. Be a good child, and go get in bed. Good night." She laid her burning little cheek against mine for a moment; then submissively went in, and I turned to go downstairs. As I rose from my stooping attitude, I looked in at the nursery door, which, in my hurry, I had forgotten was the gentlemen's dressing-room; and that, as well as the hall, was strongly lighted. Two gentlemen, just within the door, had been witnesses of the scene of distress just enacted, and apparently not inattentive ones either. They were evidently strangers to each other, and one was so to me; I never remembered to have seen him before. The other was Mr. Rutledge. He held out his hand with a smile, as I started back in confusion on seeing them. I gave him mine with a desperate blush, and saying, hurriedly, that I must go down for Frances, without giving him time for another word, I ran down the stairs, and into the second hall, whence, picking my way as daintily as I could, I threaded the narrowness and darkness of the private staircase, that led to the butler's pantry. There I found, as I had expected, an eager group of domestics gazing in through the windows into the parlors, watching the dancing with an interest only second to that of the dancers themselves. I singled out Frances from the group, and calling her to me, told her my errand, and she, with a submissive sigh for the lost festivities, followed me upstairs. I saw her safely at the door of Essie's room, then, turning, began to descend, this time more slowly, and to think seriously of the alarming matter of my entrée. As I neared the parlors, the music, the odor of the flowers, the brilliant lights, the gay dresses, all crowded intoxicatingly upon my brain. "I only knew 'twas fair and sweet, 'Twas wandering on enchanted ground, With dizzy brow and tottering feet." It was not a ball-room, it was the fairy-land, the magic, the romance, of which I had dreamed; what adventures lay within it for me; what untold delirious joy should I experience when I had crossed the threshold. And how should I cross it? Alone and timid, how could I stem that flashing, glittering crowd? And, among them all, whose protection should I seek, to whose side should I make my way? There was no time for hesitation; I was at the door; the gentleman whom I had seen upstairs, stood aside to let me pass; two or three ladies made way for me, and in a moment more I found myself at my aunt's side. "You are very late," she said, in a low tone. "I could not help it, Aunt Edith," I began; but a new arrival took up her attention, and I was left to make my own reflections upon the scene before me. It took a few minutes for me to come to my senses sufficiently to look about, and see things reasonably. It was some time before I recognized Josephine among the many strange faces. She was not dancing, but, with an admiring crowd around her, stood at the other end of the room, dispensing her coquettish smiles with tact and judgment. Grace was dancing with a lazy sort of grace that became her. Her partner was a painfully shy, undeveloped college youth, of whom, I could see, she was making all manner of ridicule, judging from the contortions of merriment visible on the face of her _vis-à-vis_, Captain McGuffy, with whom she exchanged a whispered witticism every time they met. Phil, with a self-denying heroism I had not given him credit for, was doing the agreeable to every one, dancing with all the girls who didn't seem to be having a nice time, and doing the honors of the house to the gentlemen without a groan. An occasional smile from Josephine, and a few words of approval from Mrs. Churchill, seemed to be all the reward he asked. Many of the faces about me were familiar. Grace had pointed them out to me in the street, and I had occasionally met them in the hall; but, of all the crowd, only one was an acquaintance, and that very far from a familiar one. Josephine's most intimate and particular confidante, Miss Ella Wynkar, gave me a look in passing, that was not striking for its graciousness, and a little nod. I had seen her at dinner more than once, when she had dined with us, and gone to the opera under my aunt's chaperonage. I never could understand her intimacy with Josephine; I knew they were dying of jealousy of each other, and Josephine, for one, never omitted an opportunity of saying an ill-natured thing about her friend behind her friend's back; and her friend, I felt certain, was not any more scrupulous; notwithstanding, they were the most loving and tender of companions, and continually seeking each other's society. Josephine made visits with Ella, and Ella shopped with Josephine. Mrs. Churchill took Ella to the opera, and Mrs. Wynkar chaperoned Josephine to matinées and weddings. Ella was the whitest of blondes, and neither intellectually nor physically at all in Josephine's style; she had not a pretty or expressive feature in her face; a general look of whiteness and sweetness about her, being her sole attraction. She was very much below Josephine in intelligence, but was not destitute of a certain shrewdness of her own, which, with some little exertion, kept her up to her friend's level. She lacked Josephine's nice French tact and polish, and was very American and very New York in her rather "loud" style, and very high-colored mode of expressing herself. Josephine must have an intimate friend, however, and so, I suppose, the most advantageous and proper one was selected. Such coalitions are recognized in society, whereunto, of course, people must conform. Ella, as I have said, was not at the pains to recognize me very affably on the evening of the party. I bit my lip and didn't mind, but somehow the glamor of romance was beginning to recede from the scene, and I was beginning only to see a roomful of people, strange to me, and none too affectionate to each other, flirting, dancing, quizzing each other; dowagers in velvet watching daughters in tarletan, young beaux elbowing old beaux, and every man showing himself unmistakably for himself. At first, it amused me to watch the people and their ways, but soon, like Essie and her sleigh-ride, I began to feel as if it would be very pleasant to have somebody to talk to, and be entertained by, as the other young ladies had. I felt hopelessly frightened, and shrunk as far as possible into the corner behind my aunt, whenever I caught any one's eye; which wasn't often, however, for every one seemed too busy with themselves and their partners, or companions, to notice me. Grace, passing near me with a young collegian or two, whispered, "Are you having a stupid time?" and the truth that I was having just such a time, made the blood rush to my cheeks. My aunt turned to me and said: "Why are you so quiet? Go and amuse yourself; you are at home, you know--talk to some one," and she turned away. I was at home, yes, I knew that. As one of the young ladies of the house, I was of course entitled to be freed from some of the trammels that society imposes upon those of my age and sex. I might with propriety go and talk to any young ladies who were disengaged and silent; but I really felt no inclination to avail myself of this privilege. Every one seemed engaged but me; no one noticed me, and I retreated further into the corner than before. It was very kind in my aunt to tell me to go and amuse myself. I wondered if she had contented herself with giving such a kind permission to Josephine on the night of her first party, when she was new to society, and strange and partner-less in it? "This is society, then," I said to myself. "Mr. Rutledge needn't have warned me so against it. I do not see much danger of my loving it too well. It isn't any too pleasant to be alone and unattended to; it is rather bitter to feel that every one who looks at me must think, 'what a dull time that girl is having!' and wonder why I know no one." It _was_ bitter enough, and for a while I longed to get out of it all, and steal upstairs, and be by myself, but I knew for the present that was hopeless, so I did the wisest thing I could have done, viz., set to work to reason myself out of my discontent and folly, and tried the "dodge" recommended in the old Greek comedy, that is, "being revenged on fortune by becoming a philosopher." And a philosopher, in white muslin and coral, then and there I became; and in ten minutes, the pettishness had all vanished from my heart, and, _par conséquent_, from my face, and I was myself again. This was a strange termination of all my day-dreams; a strange entrée into the world; but no doubt it was the best thing that could have happened to me. Had I not promised to renounce it, and had it not been very wrong for me to have gone on hoping to reap some pleasure from it, notwithstanding? Was not this the kindest way to bring to my remembrance the vow and promise that I had so nearly forgotten. Was it not better for me to remember at the outset, that it and I were never to be in league, never to be other than enemies? That if "there was no way but this," this was not so very hard and cruel a way? Poor Frances upstairs, with her swollen eyes and wan face, had doubtless a harder yoke to bear in her youth than I had, and so, with a hundred other swollen-eyed and wan-faced girls whom I daily met in the streets. "Let's think on our marcies," I mentally ejaculated, quoting with a half smile, the words of old "Aunt Chloe" to her husband on their cruel parting. Which, by the way, is the finest passage in all that strange story of "Uncle Tom;" a passage unalloyed by affectation, exaggeration or false sentiment--simple, great, and heroic--worth twenty little Eva's dying speeches, and unnatural angelhood. After the lapse of an hour, I thought I might be allowed to keep my promise to Essie, so I stole quietly out of the gay crowd, and went up to my room. Esther had gone to sleep, and Frances, startled from an attitude of weeping, obeyed my permission to go down and watch the dancing for half an hour, while I should relieve guard and take care of the child, whose burning temples and restless moaning made me certain that it was not right to leave her alone. She did not wake up, however, during my vigil, and Frances came back very punctually. I kissed the little sleeper again, and with a very much sobered fancy, descended to the parlors. Mr. Rutledge stood at the foot of the stairs, and joined me as I reached the hall. "Hasn't _la petite_ gone to sleep yet?" he asked, offering me his arm. "Oh yes! some time ago." "Then you prefer upstairs to downstairs, even on gala nights?" he inquired, with a smile. "I don't know exactly," I answered; but at this moment, Phil made his appearance with the gentleman who had been at the dressing-room door when Essie had made her unexpected _début_. "Ah, here you are!" he exclaimed; "we have been hunting you high and low for a good half hour." And he presented, "Mr. Viennet." The name, and his very slight foreign accent, assured me that this was the young Frenchman of whom I had heard so much from Grace and Josephine. He was at once "the best dancer," "the handsomest fellow," and "the cleverest man" in society, so when he bowed very low and asked me to dance, it was as if the planet Mercury had slid down the starry floor of heaven and demanded the honor of my hand. All I could do was to drop my eyes, blush very much, and assent. Mr. Rutledge released me instantly, bowed and drew back. Mr. Viennet gave me his arm, and in a moment we were on the floor. Nobody that dances well but loves it. I danced well, and I loved it. Mr. Viennet told me he knew _that_, the moment he looked at me, and as he seemed to take a wicked pleasure in saying such things, and making me blush, I soon regained my self-possession, and a certain degree of sauciness wherewith to parry these remarks. The captain was my vis-à-vis, and he whispered as we met: "Upon my soul, Miss Josephine'll have to look to her laurels; my friend Victor seems mightily _épris._" "Is the captain asking you to dance?" demanded Mr. Viennet. "Remember, mademoiselle, you are engaged to me for the next." The next dance proved a polka. I had half resolved never to dance anything but quadrilles; I had not thought much about the matter, but I had an indefinite sort of idea that some people condemned polkas and waltzes, and that it would be better not to indulge in them. But I had made no resolution strong enough to resist my partner's persuasions, and that fine floor, and the magic of the music. Before I knew it, I was flying down the room with Mr. Viennet, and having once tasted of that delirious pleasure, there was no putting the cup from my lips. One dance merged into another, polka, redowa, waltz, succeeded each other in intoxicating rapidity; a turn in the hall, or an ice in the library, being the only rest between. It did not take one whit from my pleasure, rather added extremely thereunto, that a face I knew too well, but sterner and colder than I had ever seen it, was watching me with marked disapproval. I avoided meeting his eye as I floated past him; I never laughed so gaily or danced so well as when I knew we were near him; my handsome partner owed half the smiles I gave him, to the fact of that stern face. I had been unnaturally depressed too long not to be unnaturally excited now. I was all my school-days' self again, with an under-current of something stronger and deeper, and more dangerous. "You don't look like the same girl. How you do love to dance!" said Phil, in a low tone, as he brought up some one else to introduce. "Victor, my fine fellow, you must come and talk with somebody else. Mrs. Churchill says you shall not dance with her niece again. Go and make your peace with her." "_De tout mon coeur_," he returned. "And I will release mademoiselle for this dance; but of course she remembers that she has promised me the next." I laughed at this bold invention, as I went off with my new partner; but Mr. Viennet claimed me resolutely at the end of the quadrille, and though there was no lack of partners now, still he continued to be the prominent one, _malgré_ Josephine's black looks, and Aunt Edith's distant coldness. Not all the king's horses, nor all the king's men, could bring me back to where I had stood before I knew my power. I was dizzy with my triumph yet; it was no time to talk to me of moderation. I had just begun to feel that there was no reason why I should not enjoy myself as other girls enjoyed themselves. I did not feel submissive toward those who had kept me down so long. I answered Josephine's sarcasm with a sarcasm as biting. I returned Grace's compliment with interest. To Ellerton Wynkar, who asked me to dance, I regretted, but was engaged for the rest of the evening, and sent him away with a hauteur that paid off all old scores. At supper, I held a miniature court at one end of the room, and not Josephine's self ever swayed a more despotic rule. And when "the German" began, no one ever led the German but Victor Viennet, and with no one else would he dance, so I was then and there initiated into the intricacies of that genteel game of romps. As we paused in the first figure, I glanced at my silent mentor. He was just bidding my aunt good night, and left the room without a look toward the dancers. My interest in the game began to flag somewhat after that, but still it was dancing, and I loved that well enough never to tire. The dance was ended, and the room nearly deserted, before my partner left me. As the door closed on the last guest, Josephine threw herself into an easy-chair, exclaiming: "I'm tired to death! I thought they would never go." "Tired! I could dance till noon," I cried. "It's a positive punishment to go to bed. Good night," and I ran upstairs. It was one thing to go to bed, and another thing to go to sleep--one thing to shut my eyes, but quite another thing to shut out the pageantry of fancy that the darkness did not quench. Conjecture, hope, anticipation, longing, made wild work in my brain that night. Everything was too new, and strange, and dazzling, to yield at once to the control of reason. The curtain had risen upon too brilliant a scene to fade from my imagination, even after it had fallen. New faces, snatches of music, conversations, danced through my mind; but above all other sensations, a new sense of injustice and resentment made itself felt, and defiance took the place of the unquestioning submission I had rendered before. This was the thorn in my new crown of roses that took away from it its simplicity, its unalloyed beauty, and, perhaps, its innocence. CHAPTER XXI. "Who pleasure follows pleasure slays; God's wrath upon himself he wreaks; But all delights rejoice his days Who takes with thanks, yet never seeks." COVENTRY PATMORE. Two days after this, I was surprised by the appearance on my plate, at breakfast, of two notes. The first proved to be an invitation for a party from a Mrs. Humphrey, cards for which Mrs. and Miss Churchill had received a week ago. "Well!" exclaimed Josephine, unceremoniously, "I wonder what inspired Mrs. Humphrey to send you an invitation." "It would be difficult to say," I returned, taking up the second. "Certainly no suggestion from you." "Alps on Alps!" exclaimed Grace, looking over my shoulder. "Tickets for the Charity Ball! What next?" "What, indeed," I said. "John, some more sugar in my coffee, if you please." "Really, you don't seem much excited by your invitations. I suppose you don't intend to accept them?" "Accept them!" echoed Josephine. "What an idea! It would be perfectly absurd to think of it, when it's understood that she's not out yet." "I think I'll risk that," I answered, decidedly. "If Aunt Edith has no objection, I will avail myself of any invitations that I may receive for the next ten days. After that, Lent, you know, will decide the matter for us all." "You must follow the dictates of your own judgment," returned my aunt, coldly. "Staying at home was your own choice, going out is at your own option." "I know, dear aunt," I replied, with unaltered _sang froid_, "that you would do anything to indulge me in anything reasonable, and as I have quite set my heart upon this, I am sure you will not make any objection to it. You are the last person to put anything in the way of my pleasure and advantage." "Pleasure and advantage are not always synonymous terms, my dear. What you might be pleased to consider pleasure, I might look upon as anything but advantageous, you know." "Oh! we shall not differ as to that, I fancy. You cannot be more careful of me than of Josephine, and she has certainly tested pretty thoroughly the merits of the question. I should not think of going out as she does, to two or three parties of an evening, and spending the intervening hours of daylight in bed; but just three or four balls before the season closes, to see what it's all like, I really must enjoy, with your permission." "Or without it," muttered Josephine. "You have enough _aplomb_ to sustain you in that or any other impertinence you might undertake." "Josephine," said her mother, sternly, "you forget yourself. My dear," to me, "you know I shall put no obstacle in the way of your enjoyment. You have my full permission to do as you think best." "Thank you," I answered; "and I have the greatest desire to go to one of these mammoth charity balls. How lucky that it comes to-night, and that Mrs. Humphrey's is to-morrow, so that I can go to both." "In what, if I may ask," said Grace, "do you propose appearing?" "That's a question, I fancy, that has not occurred to our young friend," remarked Josephine. "It's easily enough settled," I answered. "White muslin, 'with variations,' will be a sufficient toilette for _me_, you know." "You'll excuse me for saying, that I think it is a matter of very little moment to any one but yourself," said she, with a laugh, as she rose from the table. "Don't be spiteful, Joseph," said Grace, the only error of whose tactics was, that she could not confine herself to any one side in an encounter, and could not resist administering a blow on any exposed cranium, indiscriminately of friend or foe--"don't be spiteful, Joseph. She couldn't help taking off Victor, you know. It was trying, to be sure, but then it left you more time for 'the substantials.'" Josephine, pressing her lips together, darted a threatening look at her sister, who, with a pleasant little nod, slipped through the folding doors and vanished. "May I speak to you a moment?" I said, following Mrs. Churchill into the butler's pantry. "Certainly," she answered, in a tone that did not invite confidence. I had followed my aunt to say two things to her: the first was about myself, the second was about Esther. I had meant to say that if she really thought I was doing an unwise thing in going to these balls, I was willing to give them up. Conscience had made a suggestion or two that morning, and I was not yet careless about its admonitions. A kind word of advice, a look of motherly reluctance to deny me pleasure, and yet of motherly solicitude for my good, would have settled the doubt, and put me in the right way. But the tone in which she said "certainly," and proceeded to fit the key into the wine-closet, without so much as a look toward me, roused all the evil in my heart. "You will never be troubled with any of my repentances," I thought, angrily; and then, in a tone that I suppose took its color from my thoughts, I said: "I came to say, Aunt Edith, that perhaps you are not aware how much it irritates Essie to have Félicie take care of her. Félicie doesn't seem to have a pleasant way with her, and now she is confined to the nursery, she is continually fretted and unhappy. I find her more feverish every time I go upstairs, and I thought perhaps if you were willing to let Frances sit up there instead, she would amuse and keep her quiet better. She seems to like Frances." Mrs. Churchill turned around and regarded me attentively for a moment, then said: "I am sorry that your own good sense did not teach you the impropriety of such an interference as this, and that I am obliged to remind you of our relative positions, before you can understand how much such a thing as this offends me. The management of the household is my province, and any interference or advice concerning it I reject decidedly. If Esther is peevish and ill-tempered, I certainly hope Félicie will be strict with her. I have no intention of humoring her caprices, or disarranging the family to suit her whims. You may dismiss the subject from your mind entirely." I bowed and left the room, with what bitter and resentful feelings it is easy to imagine. When Essie came crying to the door of my room, half an hour after, I sent her away; I was busy, she must not come in, and though her miserable face haunted me, I stubbornly put back the counsel that it gave me. I had been told not to interfere, and I would obey. All day I did not interfere--all day the evil spirit ruled, and I heard, without a remonstrance, the storm from the nursery, which, however, gradually subsided as the day advanced. I had enough employment, meantime, to keep down conscience; there was a flounce of my white dress to be repaired, and the blue bows to be made before evening. Mr. Waschlager did not come; Mr. Olman, poor man, had been ill for a week, and to-morrow was Miss Berteau's day, so there was nothing of duty to fill up the hours that would have hung heavily if it had not been for the anticipations of, and preparations for, the evening, I turned the key of my door on Grace, and the key of my heart on poor little Essie, and toward evening threw myself into a chair by the fire, and read the latest number of "The Newcomes." And who ever read Thackeray without feeling the greatest longing to see the world which he decries? Who ever laid down a volume of his without a more eager thirst for the pomps and vanities than they had ever felt before? Who wouldn't have been Ethel, "with all swelldom at her feet," even if she did cheat herself of her happiness, and stored up sorrow for the heavy years to come? Who could have the heart to say that Pen, in his zenith, wasn't to be envied? or that George Osborne wasn't a good fellow? I, for one, never felt any less attracted toward them because Mr. Thackeray, after spending on them the finest colors on his pallet, tells us they are not to be approved after all, and that they are not in the right way, and that they have any amount of discipline to go through before they are perfected. I always felt inclined to "skip" the discipline; the natural man was the genuine one--the improvement wasn't spicy. So, on this occasion, I read on, fascinated, till twilight's gradual fingers stole between me and the page, and I reluctantly gave it up, and dreamed on about the story till the dinner bell rang. Then I started up, struck with a feeling of remorse that Essie had missed her accustomed twilight story for the first time this winter. I smoothed my hair and hurried into the nursery. Silence reigned there; Félicie sat by the dim light, quietly pursuing her work. I asked for Essie, and she rather sullenly pointed to the bed. It was unusual for her to sleep at this hour; indeed at all hours she was a light sleeper, and I had never before known her to be willing to lie down even in the daytime, so it was with some surprise that, on stooping down, I saw she was sleeping, and sleeping heavily. "Why does she sleep so soundly, Félicie?" I said, looking up. "Because she's sleepy, I suppose, mademoiselle," she answered, rather shortly. It was not worth while being angry with the woman, and indeed I did not feel like resenting any impertinence to myself, as I looked down at the quiet face of the little girl. Asleep, and free from the haggard, restless expression that her features ordinarily wore, she was almost pretty, almost child-like, but even in sleep there was a weary look about her that was pitiful. "Poor little mite," I murmured, "I've been unkind to you all day. Why won't you wake up and kiss me?" But she did not wake; and when, in the selfishness of my self-reproach, I lifted her up and kissed her, in the hope that it would rouse her, the little arms fell down, limp and lifeless, and the little head sunk heavily back on the pillow, and she slept on unmoved. My interference in the morning had not been without its effect; as I left by one door, my aunt entered by another. She had been up twice since morning, and I could see she was uneasy; but, looking down at the child, I heard her say, in a tone of relief: "Ah! she's sleeping nicely now!" and the voice of Félicie responded blandly. I think it was a load off her mind, for at dinner she was unusually affable. Phil and Captain McGuffy were dining with us, and were to accompany us in the evening. The captain was extremely gracious to me; and as on former occasions he had appeared as nearly unconscious of my presence as was possible, I simply concluded that the sagacious captain was like the rest of the world, and was better satisfied to trust looking through his neighbors' glasses than through his own. "Ever so many people," he said to me, as the soup was being removed (the captain rarely conversed much while there was anything engrossing on the table), "ever so many people have asked me about sending you invitations, and I've told 'em by all means; for you certainly were going out." "Why didn't you remind them of Grace and Esther, and let them have the whole of the nursery, while they were about it?" asked Josephine, scornfully. "Grace can speak for herself," said that young person, tartly. "You may tell them, if they ask anything about me," she continued, turning to the captain, "that they needn't look for my _début_ till Josephine is disposed of, and I am, _par excellence_, Miss Churchill." "Then," said the captain, gallantly, "you will not have a long time to wait, if what they say is true. I hear it hinted, Miss Josephine, that since Mr. Rutledge came from abroad this last time, he is quite changed, softened, you know, and made rather a society man; and they _do_ say that his friends in Gramercy Square have something to do with it." "I can't imagine how," said Josephine, all smiles and blushes. "If Joseph knew when she was well off," interposed Grace, who loved to damp her sister's triumphs, "she wouldn't blush; she doesn't look well; she grows mahogany color, doesn't she Phil. Why, you're blushing too! What's the matter with everybody?" "Everybody is blushing at your rudeness," said Mrs. Churchill, gravely. "I am sorry to be obliged to reprove you at the table; but I assure you, if you are not more careful"---- "Oh, mamma! you've always said it wasn't polite to deliver a reprimand in company; don't break through your rule. I won't say another word about blushing. Let's talk of something pleasanter. So," she continued, turning to the captain, "they really say Mr. Rutledge wants to marry Josephine?" "Grace, leave the table," said her mother, concisely, but in a tone there was no mistaking, and which fell on the ears of the startled company with uncomfortable clearness, and on none more unexpectedly than on those of the young delinquent herself, who had never been so unequivocally disgraced before. She had trusted greatly to her mother's partiality and her own acuteness in warding off reproof, and this took her quite by surprise. She had not calculated the dangerous nature of the ground she was treading on, nor the decision of her mother's character when once roused, and so this edict came upon her like a clap of thunder. She was constitutionally incapable of blushing, or of looking confused, but she approached on this occasion more nearly to a state of embarrassment than I had ever supposed she could; but recovering herself in a moment, she deliberately folded her napkin and put it on the table, pushed back her chair, made a low courtesy, and saying, "Bon soir, mesdames; bon soir, messieurs," retreated in good order. Rather an awkward pause ensued upon her exit; but it was soon broken by Mrs. Churchill's half laughing apology for her pertness, and Josephine was too much delighted with her adversary's discomfiture to be long silent. And she almost forgot to be spiteful to me, too, in the triumph of her acknowledged conquest. Even the dreaded task of dressing and preparing for the ball was accomplished without half of its accustomed drawbacks. Grace wisely kept out of sight, and Frances was less fluttering and timid than usual, so that at nine o'clock we all mustered in the parlor with comparatively undisturbed tempers. I had left Esther still asleep when I came down. Félicie had undressed her and put her back in bed without arousing her. "You'd hardly let me go so quietly if you were awake, I think," I said to myself, as I bent down to kiss her. I found myself much more excited than I meant to be, as the carriage drew near the Academy of Music. My excitement, however, had time enough to cool, for carriages choked the streets on every hand, and it was the work of half an hour to effect an entrance. The steps were crowded, the lobbies were crowded, the cloak-room was a hopeless crush, but the full sense of bewilderment did not overcome me, till following the captain and Mrs. Churchill, we ascended another pair of stairs, and passing through a side door, stood looking down upon the magnificent scene below. The captain said he had never seen anything finer in this country, so I felt at liberty to be enchanted with it. The decorations and lights were brilliant, the music delightful, and the sight of so many thousands of gaily-dressed people crowding the boxes, the passages, the floor, could not fail to excite the enthusiasm of one so new to such scenes as I was. To Josephine, on the other hand, the ball seemed by no means a wholly rapturous affair. A ruthless foot had trodden on her dress, and torn the lowest flounce; Phil was out of humor, and refused to be devoted; the captain had his hands full with mamma, and Josephine searched in vain among the crowd for the one or ones she wanted. We were in a private box, and too far from the floor to recognize the dancers easily, and by some neglect, the opera-glasses had been left in the carriage. Josephine was unspeakably annoyed. They might as well be looking out of the third-story window at home, she declared. For me, the scene was enough for the present, without any nearer interest in it. If I could have been further forward, it would have been pleasure enough to me to have looked on, but my aunt and cousin occupying the front of the box, left me no view of the house, but over their heads. By and by, however, the door of the box opened, and Mr. Rutledge entered. He had exchanged a few words with me before Josephine saw him; her face lighted up instantly, and after a cordial welcome from mamma, a place was made for him in front. This, however, he declined to occupy, as the captain had been on the ground before him, and was better entitled to the position. He had an opera-glass, which he handed to Josephine, and good humor was partially restored. The captain availed himself of the front seat, and criticised the dancers for madame's benefit; Phil stood behind his cousin's chair, and Mr. Rutledge was left to me. I knew this arrangement did not suit; I knew my aunt was hearing very little of the captain's commentary; I knew that Josephine, but for Phil's jealous watchfulness, would have paid much more heed to Mr. Rutledge's low conversation with me, than to her desired opera-glass. I remembered, but too vividly, the conversation at dinner; and though I struggled hard with my pride and my timidity, the words died on my lips, my answers were hesitating and reserved, and for the most part, insincere; I said the very things that, the next moment, I would have given worlds to have unsaid; I felt that every word was estranging us more hopelessly, and yet there seemed a spell upon us--I could not be myself. The questions I had meant to ask him, if I should ever have a chance, the sentences of which I had said to myself a hundred times, I could now no more have uttered than if they had been in an unknown tongue. When he spoke of Rutledge, the blood that always flashed into my face at the name, now rushed to my heart, and left me paler and more listless than before. If my manner wore any change while he talked of his return there in a few days, and of my friends, Kitty and Stephen, Madge and Tigre, it was an increased indifference and coldness. I said no more than "yes" when he asked me if I still remembered them with interest, and "I don't know exactly," when he asked what message he should take to them from me. Then he changed the subject, and with his accustomed way of reading my face while he talked, he asked me about my impressions of society. Which was most to my taste now, city or country? "I don't know exactly," I said, hesitatingly. "I think I know," he said, with a laugh that nettled me, low and pleasant as it was. "I think there is small doubt about your preferences just now. You acknowledge my wisdom at last, do you not? You see it was best for you to come to the city?" "Yes," I said, lifting my eyes for a moment. "You were very right. I ought to thank you very much for your advice." "My dear," said my aunt, leaning toward us, "you cannot see at all there. You must take my place for a little while, I insist upon it." The captain rose with great _empressement_, and insisted upon my accepting his seat, and in the midst of the confusion consequent upon this change, the door of the box opened again, and Mr. Viennet entered. Mr. Rutledge was placing a chair for me as I looked up and recognized the new comer. The chilled and frightened blood that had crept fluttering round my heart, at this moment rushed into my face, and burned guiltily in my cheeks, as I caught Mr. Rutledge's eye. Mr. Viennet, after a moment devoted to salutation, inquiry and compliment, entered a protest against our remaining any longer in such a detestable corner, pronouncing it _de_testable, in his charming little French way. No one could get at us; he had only found us by the merest chance. We must come downstairs--everybody was on the floor--everybody was dancing. He assured madame it was perfectly _convenable;_ it was spoiling the pleasure of too many to hide ourselves any longer. This met Josephine's views exactly, and she importuned "mamma" very prettily to yield. "Mamma" looked doubtingly for a moment at Mr. Rutledge, who responded to the look by saying that he really thought her strict ideas of propriety might allow this liberty without suffering any outrage. It was something new for New York, but these balls had taken very well, and the best people attended them, not only as spectators, but as participators. As for dancing, he said, with a slight shrug, he rather wondered at any lady's liking such an exhibition; but a promenade on the floor for half an hour or so, he really should think we would find more entertaining than remaining in our box. This partly settled the wavering in Mrs. Churchill's mind, and with a dainty sort of reluctance, she gave her consent to our going on the floor for a little while. "Cheek by jowl with Tom, Dick and Harry," muttered Phil, giving his arm to Josephine, who took it with but indifferent grace, and bit her lip in annoyance, as, standing nearest the door, Mr. Rutledge and Mr. Viennet at the same moment offered me an arm. Can any girl understand the impulse that made me accept Mr. Viennet's? No man possibly can; my only hope of comprehension is from my own incomprehensible, perverse, self-torturing sex. Once on the floor, it was hardly to be expected that we could obey my aunt's injunction to keep together, and within sight of her. In five minutes her ermine and diamonds, and the captain's moustache and epaulettes, were, though very dear, of course, to memory, utterly lost to sight, and Paul and Virginia were not more romantically alone than were we, in that vast human wilderness. It was a very amusing and nice thing to be lost. For half an hour we searched for our party, though not, it must be confessed, as if our whole happiness in life depended on our success, but no trace of them could be discovered. "We must amuse ourselves _alors_, mademoiselle, and let them look for us," said my companion. "Was there ever such a waltz before? You cannot resist it any longer, I know you cannot." Perhaps I might have resisted it, as well as his eloquent pleading, if, raising my eyes at this moment to the boxes we had occupied, I had not caught sight of Josephine and Mr. Rutledge, who had returned there, evidently much more interested in each other than in anything below them. "I'll dance once," I said, and in a moment his arm was on my waist, and we were floating along the elastic floor to such music as the fairies dance to, on soft summer nights, with the blue vault of heaven above their heads, and the green sward beneath their feet, and all wild ecstatic and untamed rapture thrilling in their elfin bosoms. Conscience was drugged that night; self-will and pride, self-appointed regents, were holding sway as only usurpers can; and the glowing hours fled away without record or remorse. "_N'importe_," murmured my companion, when I suggested a doubt, and _n'importe_ I allowed it to be, as, whirling giddily from end to end of the vast area, or sauntering slowly through the gradually lessening crowd, we let the minutes slip away into hours. It was rather a startling recall to stern reality, when, at one end of the hall, suddenly encountering Phil, he laid a heavy hand on my partner's arm, exclaiming: "Victor, my boy, if you've any mercy on that unlucky girl, come this way. There is such a scolding in store for her as she never had before. The carriage has been waiting an hour, and the captain and I, being detailed for the detective service, have pursued you faithfully, but you have eluded us most skillfully, I'll do you the justice to say! And Mr. Rutledge and the ladies have watched you from upstairs, and said--well, we won't say what pretty things." "Extraordinary!" exclaimed Victor. "Why, _we_ have been hunting for _you_ till we were entirely discouraged, disheartened, in despair!" "Ah, well!" exclaimed Phil, with a laugh, leading the way. "I only hope you'll be able to make Mrs. Churchill believe it. It's my duty to prepare you for the worst, however." "And our duty to be brave," said my comrade. "And fortune favors such, they tell us, mademoiselle." Certainly I could not feel otherwise than grateful to my protector for his ingenious and powerful defence, as we appeared before the offended group at the door of the cloakroom. Though my aunt received it politely, I well knew the wrath that her knit brow portended, and Josephine's look of contempt was unmistakable. Mr. Rutledge had his visor down; no earthly intelligence could discover anything of his emotions through that impassive exterior. Even the captain was irritated; Phil was neutral, but Victor was my only friend. "Good night," he whispered, as he put me into the carriage. "We'll finish that redowa at Mrs. Humphrey's to-morrow night." I wished, with all my heart, it was to-morrow night, and all that I foresaw must intervene, safely past. The scolding was not to come before morning, I saw at once, and when my aunt, on our arrival at home, dismissed me to my room, it was with a cold, "I wish to have a few minutes' conversation with you after breakfast to-morrow." With that dread before me--with a guilty sense of wrong-doing, and a bitter sense of shame, a humbled condemnation of myself, and an angry resentment toward others, the restless hours of that night offered anything but repose, anything but pleasant retrospect or anticipation. * * * * * CHAPTER XXII. "And if some tones be false or low, What are all prayers beneath But cries of babes, that cannot know Half the deep thought they breathe?" KEBLE. Mrs. Churchill understood, if ever any did, the art of reprimand. Without the least appearance of agitation herself, with a perfectly unmoved and stony composure, she managed to overawe and disarm the prisoner at the bar, whatever might be his or her offence, or shade or degree of guilt. Defence died on my lips at the dreaded interview, and I bore my sentence in silence, which was, a total seclusion from society after to-night--a return to the oblivion of the nursery and study. This ball at Mrs. Humphrey's was to be my last appearance in public till I should have learned how to behave myself. As I had accepted, it was proper I should go to-night, otherwise she would no means have allowed it. "_Nous verrons_," I said to myself, as I went upstairs. "If I continue to want to go to parties, no doubt she will have to let me go. I am a fraction too old to be put in a dark closet, or sent to bed for being naughty, and Aunt Edith knows it." That Wednesday was a very busy day to Mrs. Churchill and Josephine. A wedding reception took up the morning, from which they returned but to dress for a dinner at the Wynkars, and thence returning, made a hurried toilette for the ball. It seemed making rather a toil of pleasure, if one might judge from my aunt's haggard looks, and Josephine's impatient complaints. There was an anxious contraction on Mrs. Churchill's brow as she came down from the nursery after breakfast, and apparently a struggle in her mind between home duties and social duties, when it became necessary for her to decide about going out. That she sincerely believed in the stringent nature of both, no one could doubt who watched her closely. It was not pleasure that took her away from little Essie that morning; it was a mistaken sense of duty. She had set up for her worship an idol, in whose hard service she had unconsciously come to sacrifice time, ease, and affection, as stoically as many have suffered in a cause whose reward is not altogether seen and ended in this world. So it was, that, trying to make up for her absence by many injunctions and cautions to those left in charge, she turned her back upon the child for the greater part of the day. "I hoped," said she, as she paused at the nursery door, in her rustling silk and heavy India shawl, "I hoped that the doctor would have come before I went out, but I really do not see but what you can do as well as I can, Félicie. Pay particular attention to his directions, and send John out immediately for any prescription he may leave for her. And be sure you tell him just how she was yesterday, and how well she slept last night. I don't like," she continued, taking off one glove to feel again of the child's hot forehead, "her having fever again this morning. I thought yesterday she was so much better." "Oh, madam is too anxious. It is nothing but a little excitement that has brought it on again," said the nurse. "If madam would tell Mademoiselle Esther how very naughty it is for her to cry to go into her cousin's room, and fret and strike me when I try to keep her quiet, perhaps she might mind better. It is that that brings her fever on, madam, I am afraid." "Now, Esther," said her mother, with authority, "I shall have to punish you if you do so any more. I shall be very angry if you do not mind Félicie to-day, and if you hurt or strike her, remember I shall punish you when I come back--do you hear?" Esther heard, yes. She sat bolt upright in her little bed, and looked at the speaker with her parched lips parted, and a strange, bewildered expression in her eyes, and a restless movement of her tiny hands. Before the interview was over, however, the startled look had settled into a vacant, listless stare; and a peevish moan, after her mother left the room, was all the evidence she gave of being impressed or alarmed by the injunctions laid upon her. I heard the miserable little complainer unmoved as long as I could; after a while, putting down my book, I went into the nursery. She stretched out her arms, and cried: "Take me to your room." "If you will stop crying," I said, taking her up in my arms, and wrapping her dressing-gown about her. Félicie looked up quickly, and said, "_Madame a dit que non._" Félicie always lied in her native tongue, and this was but an additional proof to me that madame had said no such thing, and I told her so, rather strongly. Grace came in just then, and Félicie appealed to her for confirmation. "Certainly," said Grace, promptly, "mamma's last charge was that Esther should not go out of the nursery; so, missy, you may just make yourself easy where you are. Don't suppose everybody is going to spoil you like your precious cousin there." Essie still clung tightly round my neck; much, however, as my pride rebelled, there was no way but to submit to the orders they promulged. So, carrying her back to the bed, and loosening her arms from my neck, I put her down with, "No matter, sweetheart; if Mahomet brings his work, and sits down by the mountain, that will do as well, will it not?" "I don't know what you mean," said the child, uneasily. "She means to plague you, Esther; she's been scolded this morning, and she's in bad humor," said Grace. "Don't throw stones, Miss Grace," I retorted. "I wasn't sent away from the table, if I was scolded." "Mamma'll never forget your performance last night, the longest day she lives," continued Grace. "I never saw her half so angry before. In fact, from all accounts, you must have got it from all quarters, but what Mr. Rutledge said was the worst." "What did he say, pray?" "_Wouldn't_ you like to know!" she cried, in her teasing, school-girl fashion. "I don't believe you could tell me, if I did." "I could if I wanted to," she exclaimed. "I heard mamma and Josephine talking it over this morning. The door of the dressing-room was open a crack, and I heard every word. Now, honey, _don't_ you wish I'd tell you?" "I don't want to hear half as much as you want to tell me," I returned, trying to be unmoved. "Oh! don't be uneasy on my account," she said. "I haven't the least idea of telling you. Only, I didn't suppose Mr. Rutledge could be so severe, and on 'his little friend,' too!" "That--for Mr. Rutledge!" I exclaimed, with a disdainful snap of my fingers. "I don't care the fraction of a pin for his opinion!" "I'll tell him," cried Grace, with delighted eyes. "Do," I answered; and hiding my burning face on the pillow with Esther, I said: "What shall we do to amuse ourselves this morning, Essie? Shall I tell you a story?" "Yes," said Esther, looking pleased. "Ask her to tell you about the ball last night, and Mr. Victor Viennet," said Grace, as she went out of the door. "No," said the little girl, "I'd rather have her tell me about the little dog Tigre at Rutledge, and how he used to stand outside of her door, and whine to come in. Won't you now?" "Oh, that's tiresome, Essie," I said, "I'll tell you something else." "Then tell me about the boys that stole the chestnuts, and about the lake, and the great trees, and the artemisias and the grapevines in the garden. Tell me, won't you now?" she went on, coaxingly. "You'd rather hear a fairy story, Esther," I said; "or something out of your pretty Christmas book, I am sure." "No," said Esther, "I want to hear about the country, I wish they'd take me to the country," she continued, wearily; then, raising herself on her elbow, and looking at me earnestly, she said, "do you believe they ever will? Do you believe I'll be made to always stay in this nursery, without any flowers or birds, or anything I like? If I should die in it, would I stay in it always, or would they take me out? Tell me, would they?" "Of course, Essie," I said, half impatiently, uncomfortable under her earnest eyes. "I do not like to hear you talk so. You know, I've told you often, that there's a home for us where we shall go after we die, better than any home here, where good children are, and holy men and women; and it's all a great deal brighter and happier than anything we can imagine; so don't trouble yourself to think about it; only be good." "But I am not good," she said, with a sort of agony in her voice; "you know I am not." "Essie," I said, soothingly, drawing her toward me, "nobody is good. I am not, and you are not, and nobody is; but if we are sorry when we're wrong, and ask God to forgive us, and help us, He will, you may be sure. Why, Essie, He loves you, little foolish girl as you are, more than you can possibly tell. He loves you, and he would not let you perish for anything." "Are you sure of that?" she said, eagerly. "Perfectly sure," I answered. "Madame ordered," said Félicie, "that Miss Esther should be kept perfectly quiet. She's talking too much, and exciting herself. It would be better to have the room darkened, and let her go to sleep." "I can't go to sleep, and she shan't go away," exclaimed the child. "I haven't the least idea of going, Essie; so lie down, and I'll tell you about the country." And, till my own heart ached as hers did, in its narrow city bounds, I told her of the country, and how soon the first warm spring days would loose the ice-bound brooks, and let the pines see themselves once more in the lake. And in the lots, the violets would be springing up thickly in the moist sod, and the faint green would be coloring the meadows and lawns, and the skies would be soft and blue, and the slow, warm wind would waft along the fleecy clouds, and stir the budding trees, and linger over the soft, wet earth, and creep into cold and wintry houses, and into cold and wintry hearts, and stir all things with a sense of warmth and ecstasy. Throughout the day I hardly left my little cousin; she was feverish and restless, and never closed her eyes or rested a moment. About four o'clock, however, I went down to practise for an hour, and when I came upstairs again, she had fallen asleep. Her mother, coming up at the same time, was much relieved to find her sleeping, and Félicie gave a very satisfactory account of her; so that she dressed for the dinner in comparative comfort. The doctor's visit had occurred while I was downstairs, and had been a very hurried one. Grace and I dined alone, very sociably and cheerfully, Grace reading a French novel, and I "the Newcomes," in all the pauses of the meal. I went upstairs as soon as it was over, and found Esther still asleep. It was a wet, miserable evening. The rain was dripping slowly and heavily from the roof to the window-sill, and from the window-sill to the piazza below. A thick, suffocating fog, possessed the earth, through which the distant lights blinked drearily; even the noises of the streets sounded muffled and subdued. It was so warm, that the low soft-coal fire in the grate seemed oppressive; yet, when I opened the window, there was a damp, choking heaviness in the air that was worse, even, than the dry heat of the room. It seemed as if the spirit of the fog was sitting a night-mare on my breast, and pressing down with a hand like lead the beating of my heart, and stopping my very breath. There was no shaking off the weight, nor driving away the gloomy fancies that the hour bred. It was in vain that I lit the gas, and closed the blinds, and laying my ball-dress on the bed, tried to interest myself in my preparations for the evening. Between me and all pleasant anticipation, there hung a black pall of presentiment, and no effort of my will could put it aside. The very struggle to free myself from it, seemed to make the gloom close thicker around me. The house was so still; the servants were all downstairs; the ticking of the clock on the nursery mantelpiece was all the sound that broke the stillness, and that, so regular, so monotonous, was worse than silence. It was a time "For thought to do her part," for conscience and reason to be heard. Should I go into the world and try to forget it? Should I leave the little helpless child asleep there, in charge of a woman I distrusted and disliked, and go where music and pleasure would drown the dread for her that was gnawing at my heart? What, that was good for hours of trial, had I learned in my short experience of pleasure? What, that I could remember with satisfaction, had occurred in the two nights of gaiety that I had just passed through? What, in the flatteries of Victor Viennet, in the admiring eyes of strangers, in the envy of my cousin, that I could dare to remember in church--on Sunday--under a quiet evening sky--or on a fresh, pure early summer morning? Alas! it was out of tune with all of these; there was utterly a fault about it--it turned to ashes as I grasped it. It was not true pleasure. It was not a worthy pursuit. As far as I had followed it already, it had led me into sin, into pride, insincerity and anger. It had done me no good. I felt that. Had I the courage to put it away from me now? Could I say, without an effort, I will keep myself out of the way of seeing Victor Viennet again? I will never remember but to condemn the hours that I have spent with him? Could I return to the dull routine I had formerly marked out for myself, without an effort that would cost me many tears? But if I could not do this, what was my religion worth? If this self-denial was so hard, did it not prove that the world had got a very tight hold of my heart, and that the sooner I wrenched myself from its grasp the better? On the other hand, there was no definite reason why I should not go, there was only this vague feeling of uneasiness about Essie that tormented me and kept me back, and this unsettled question about the profitableness of going into the world. How should I decide? My affection for my little cousin tugged strongly at my heart. Pride and inclination pulled as fiercely the other way. A feeling that I did not give a name to, but which was stronger than either, prompted me to follow my own desires, and leave Essie to her fate. What business was it of mine? If other people neglected their children, and left their duties for their pleasures, why need I concern myself? Why need I take upon myself their discarded responsibilities? At last I stole on tiptoe to the bed again, to see if she still slept. Not much sleep in those frightened eyes. "Why! Essie, my pet, when did you wake up?" With a sigh of relief, and a little relaxing of the look of terror, she raised herself up, and saying hurriedly, "how still it is! I thought you had gone away," she twined both small hands tightly round my wrist. "Oh, no!" I said, sitting down by her, "it isn't time yet. I shall not go for an hour or two." "Don't go at all, please don't go," whispered the child, panting for breath, and clinging to me in an agony. "If you knew how awful it was to be alone, and how still the room was, you wouldn't leave me, indeed you wouldn't. Besides," she went on hurriedly, "how can you tell what'll become of me while you're gone? Nobody else loves me, nobody else is good to me. I am troublesome and wicked--only God and you care anything about me." It was useless to soothe or reason with her now. I knew little of illness, but I saw in a moment that the wild delirium of fever was burning in my little companion's veins, and raging in her brain. I was frightened at the strength of the little hands that fastened themselves on mine, and the hurry and wildness of the broken sentences she uttered. All I could do, was to promise that I would not go, and assure her that there were no "ugly shadows" on the wall--that nobody was coming to take her away--that it was all because her head ached so. But when Félicie appeared, it was a less easy matter to control her. She screamed, and hid her face, and cried to me to send her away--she hated her--she gave her horrid stuff--she made her angry, and a thousand other vehement exclamations in alternate French and English. The nurse, with a subdued glare of anger in her eyes, would fain have soothed her, for her voice, shrill with the strength of fever, could easily have been heard downstairs, and Mrs. Churchill had come home and was now in her dressing-room. My alarm had overcome my pride by this time, and loosing my hands from the child's grasp, I gave her into Félicie's charge, and ran downstairs. The door of the dressing-room was locked, and it was some minutes before I was admitted, and during those minutes, my alarm had time to cool, and when at last I entered the room, it was with a full recollection of the last rebuff I had received when I pleaded Esther's cause, and a cold determination to do my duty and no more. "Why are you not dressed, if you intend accompanying us?" she said. "I do not intend going this evening," I answered; "and I came, Aunt Edith, to say that I think you had better see Esther before you go out; she has a great deal of fever, and is very much excited." I never before had realized how dangerous a thing it was to touch with even the daintiest hand, the festering wound that both pride and remorse conspire to hide from the sight even of the sufferer's self. I could not have done anything worse for poor Essie's cause, than just what I did do, and she shared with me in the feeling of vexation and resentment that my words awakened in her mother's breast. I soon forgot the severity of the rebuff I had received, however, when coming into the nursery, I took the struggling child from Félicie, and watched with anxiety the gradual subsiding of the fit of passion that had convulsed her. From whatever cause it might be, she was evidently growing quieter, and in less than half an hour, the little head on my arm had relaxed its tossings, and sunk into repose, while a dreamy languor dulled the wildness of her eyes, and save when the slightest movement woke an alarm that I would leave her, she lay quite motionless. "She is better now," said Félicie, in a low tone, who was watching her with her basilisk eyes as she lay apparently sleeping. A nervous tightening of the slight fingers on my wrist at the sound of her voice, showed me that it was only apparently. When Mrs. Churchill had completed her toilette, she came upstairs. Esther, with her long eyelashes sweeping her crimsoned cheeks, lay so quiet that there seemed some reason in her mother's cutting rebuke for the unnecessary alarm I had given her. I began to feel heartily ashamed of it myself, and wondered that I had been so easily frightened. Félicie, with a wicked look of exultation, said, that if Miss Esther hadn't been in a passion, she wouldn't have brought the fever on again. She had been better all day, the doctor had said she had scarcely any fever, when he was here. Mrs. Churchill hoped, with a withering look, that I would get used to ill temper in time, and not think it necessary to disturb the household whenever Esther had a fit of crying. Then feeling the child's pulse, and giving many and minute directions for the care of her during the night, she went away. As, a moment after, the hall door closed with a heavy sound, a momentary tremor passed over the child's frame, and opening her eyes, a strange light fluttered for an instant in them, as she murmured, "you will not go away?" then closed them again, and she seemed to sleep. I watched beside her for an hour; then releasing myself from her unresisting hands, and kissing her lightly, I went into my own room. I returned several times to look at her again, before I put the light out and lay down to sleep. How many times the monotonous nursery-clock struck the half hour before I slept, I cannot tell; the heavy air was broken by no other sound; there was nothing in the silent house, shrouded by the close fog without and the dead silence within, to keep me awake, yet it was long before I slept. But sleep, when it came, was heavy and dreamless--a sort of dull stifling of consciousness, in keeping with the night. Hours of this sleep had passed over me, when a fierce grasp upon my arm, and a hissing voice in my ear, woke me with a terrified start, and chilled me with horror, as struggling to collect my senses, I tried to comprehend Félicie's frantic words. In a moment, they made their way to my brain, and burned themselves there. "I've given her too much--I cannot wake her! O mon Dieu! _Je l'ai tuée! Je l'ai tuée!_" A horrible sickening faintness for an instant rushed over me, then a keen sense of agony like an electric flash thrilled through me, and without a look, a thought, a word, I was kneeling at the little bed in the nursery. But, as my eager eyes searched the whitened face on the pillow there, and as my aching ears listened for the almost inaudible breathing, and my hand touched the cold arms that lay outside the covers, such a cry burst from my lips as might have waked the dead, if dead were indeed before me. But there was no voice nor answer; there was an awful stillness when I listened for response; when I raised my eyes in wild appeal from the white face of the child, there was but a horrible face above me, whereon was all the pallor of death, without its calm repose; such a face as the lost and damned may wear when their sentence is new in their ears--when endless perdition is but just begun, and life and hope but just cut off. Another moment, and all the house was roused. Putting back, with one strong effort, the agony and hopelessness that welled up from my heart, I mastered myself enough to direct the terrified and helpless servants. Dispatching different ones to the nearest doctors I could think of, another for my aunt, another for all the restoratives that occurred to me, the next few minutes of suspense passed. But before the doctor could arrive, I knew there was no need of his coming. There had been a little flutter of the drooping eyelid, ever so slight a quiver of the parted lip, and bending down, I had listened, with agonized suspense, for the low breathing, and called her name with the tenderness that never finds perfect expression till death warns us it shall be the last. Then a little arm crept round my neck, the soft eye opened for a moment, a sigh stirred the bosom that my forehead touched, and, as the arm relaxed its faint clasp, I knew that Essie was a stranger and an alien no longer, but was where it were better for us all to be--where there is peace, eternal, unbroken, beyond the reach of sin forever. For those first moments, when I knelt alone beside the little bed, with the soft arm still round my neck, and the breath of that sigh still on the air, there was no feeling that I had suffered a bereavement, that death and sorrow had entered the house; but holy thoughts of God and heaven--strange longings for the rest that she had entered into--a sort of hushed and hallowed awe, as if the new angel still lingered, with a half regret at leaving me alone--as if the parting, if parting there were to be, were but for a "little while"--as if the communion of saints were so divine and comfortable a thing, that there was no need for tears and sorrow. But when there came a sudden tumult below, hurried steps upon the stairs, a sound beside me, a pause, and then a cry that made my blood freeze in my veins, I knew that there was more than joy in heaven--that there was bitter agony on earth: that there was more than an angel won above--that there was a child dead below--a household in mourning--a mother's heart writhing in torture--a judgment fallen--a punishment following close upon a sin--a remorse begun that no time could heal, that no other life could quench, no other love allay. CHAPTER XXIII. "Back, then, complainer; loathe thy life no more, Nor deem thyself upon a desert shore, Because the rocks thy nearer prospect close." KEBLE. Félicie had fled. When, in the agonized confusion of that dreadful night, she was at last remembered and searched for, there was no trace of her to be found, and all future inquiry was equally unavailing. The wretched woman need not have concealed herself with such desperate fear; no one felt any heart to search her out, or revenge on her the death of her little charge. No one of that sad household but knew, in their hearts, that there was a sin at more than her door--a sin that lay heavy in proportion to its unnaturalness and strangeness. Those were wretched nights and days that followed little Esther's death. The vehement grief that, in the first hours of amazement and remorse, had burst from the miserable mother, was succeeded by a calm more unnatural and more alarming. My heart ached for the misery that showed itself but too plainly in her haggard face and restless eyes; but, shutting herself up in her cold and speechless wretchedness, from all sympathy, I longed, but did not dare, to offer any. And I, perhaps more than any other, involuntarily recalled the phantom she was trying to fly, the remorse that she was struggling to subdue. Though her self-control, even then, was almost perfect, I could see that she never looked at me unmoved--that she winced at any attention from me, as if a newly bleeding wound had been roughly handled, and shrunk more than ever into herself. She refused all visitors, even the most intimate. Josephine was the only one of the family whose presence did not seem to pain her, and at times even she was sent away. She was too strong and proud a woman not to bear her sorrow, as she bore all other emotions, alone. Not even Josephine saw any further into her heart than strangers did. With the resumption of the ordinary household ways, came the cold insincerity that custom sanctions, of banishing from familiar mention the name that, a month ago, had been a household word, now recurring hourly to the lips, but hourly to be hushed and sent back to deal another pang to the aching heart. No more allusion was made to Essie than if, a few short weeks ago, she had not been one of this small circle, the youngest, and "the child," who, welcome or unwelcome, had necessarily, and by virtue of her position, claimed some part of the time and notice of those around her. It was impossible to define how much of the subdued apathy of Grace's manner was owing to the grief she felt at her sister's loss, and how much to a sort of cowardly nervousness and shrinking from the idea of death. For days after the shock, she was like my shadow, dreading, evidently more than anything else, to be left alone, shunning her mother and everything that brought the hateful subject to her thoughts, trying, with all ingenuity, to divert herself and think of other things. It was useless to attempt to lead her higher, to make her see in her little sister's death anything but dread and horror. She shrunk from all mention of it with aversion, and turned eagerly to any diverting subject, and before any other member of the family, she shook off the depression it had caused. With Josephine it had been different. At first she was awe-struck and stunned, and for a while there seemed a danger of her falling into a morbid state of feeling; but as the freshness of the shock wore away, her elasticity returned, and with it the old impatience and imperiousness, that the absence of amusement and excitement only heightened. A storm indeed had passed over our house, but a storm that had not purified and cleared the atmosphere, only left it more close and sultry than before; the black sky, indeed, had brightened again, leaving comparative sunshine overhead, but threatening clouds still lingered around the horizon, and distant rumbling still warned of danger. I missed more than I had fancied possible, my little companion and pupil. No hour in the day but brought some fresh souvenir of the tortured young life that had ended its penance so early, the shrinking little soul that had been released so soon. It was not seldom, in those dark days, that I thought, with something like envy, of the peace she had inherited, and with something like repining of my lonely lot. How many years of warfare might stretch between me and the end; how many chances that I might fail or faint, grow weary, or yield to sin; while the little child I had so long looked upon with pity, so long tried to help and guide, now redeemed and safe, and everlastingly at peace, had passed "the golden portals of the City of the Blest." Good angels had pitied her, struggling and bewildered on her way, and lifting her in their arms, had carried her home; floating through the blue ether, in a moment of time she had passed the rough and weary road that would have taken a lifetime to have traversed alone. But no angels, it seemed to me, looked on my weary path; no sympathy, from heaven or of men, came to help me as I pressed on alone. Parting and death, repentance and self-accusation made that Lent a time of heartfelt sorrow; and before Easter-week was over, the low fever that had been hanging about me since the spring began, accomplished its errand, and laid me on a tedious bed of sickness. Is there any one who has ever been sick "away from home," among strangers, courteous and attentive, perhaps, but whose courtesy and attention were of duty, not love, that cannot understand what it was to be lying, day after day, in a "home" like mine, knowing it was the only one I had a right to, or a hope of, this side heaven, and knowing, through all the exaggerating excitement of fever, and the languid hopelessness of slow convalescence, that in it there was no one to whom the care of me was not a penance, that no hour was so grudged as that spent by my bedside? Cold faces met me when I waked from my feverish, troubled sleep, commonplace, unsympathetic voices fell upon my ear, when, unnerved and childish, I longed for nothing so much as for a kind word or a caressing touch. They were very attentive; I had every care; my recovery was as rapid as the doctor wished; it had not been a very alarming illness; nobody was particularly excited about it. They said it was a "light case," and I could not be doing better. They had a right to know, certainly; but oh! the weariness of that dark room, the length of those spring days, the stillness of those warm nights, the loathing of those city sounds, the longing for the country! June was now not many weeks off; and hour after hour, the question, "would Mr. Rutledge remember his promise?" perplexed my brain. I knew I had done enough to have forfeited it; I knew it had been made hastily; that, indescribably and unaccountably, he was changed since then, and we had ceased to be anything like friends. Still, I was nearly certain he would keep his word; whatever else he might forget, he would not forget that. No matter if it bored him, as I almost knew it would, I was sure he would do it just the same. Though I had a thousand fears that I should not be allowed to go, I knew I should be sent for, and I was not disappointed. It was the first morning that I had breakfasted downstairs; I had been well enough for a week, but a languor and indifference possessed me that made me averse to all thought of change or exertion. Now, however, that I was actually in the cool dining-room, where white curtains replaced the heavy winter drapery of the windows, and white matting the thick carpet, I wondered that I had not made the effort before. It was vastly more attractive than my own room, certainly; and the parlors, as I glanced into them, looked in comparison, almost imposing in their vastness. The world, I saw, had been creeping in again. There were notes and cards on the table, and a lovely basket of violets; the piano was open, and some new music lay on it. Josephine, too, at breakfast, talked of drives and engagements that showed the days of mourning were over. There was little difference in my aunt's manner from formerly, but she looked ten years older, and was somewhat colder and more precise. "Who on earth can that be from?" Grace exclaimed, as John brought in the letters, and Mrs. Churchill took up the only one that did not look like an invitation or a milliner's circular. "It's from out of town," she continued, reaching out her hand for the envelope, as her mother laid it down. "It's postmarked Rutledge! What can Mr. Rutledge have to say to mamma? Joseph, doesn't your heart beat?" If Joseph's didn't, mine did, and so quickly, too, that I felt sick and faint, and dreaded lest Grace's prying eyes should inquire the cause of my alternating color. But the letter absorbed the attention of all, and I could only wait till Mrs. Churchill should divulge its contents. Josephine tried to look undisturbed, but there was an accent of impatience in her tone, as she said: "Well, dear mamma, may I see it, if ever you should finish it? I suppose there is nothing that I may not know about." "It is a very kind letter," said Mrs. Churchill, as she glanced back to the beginning; "very kind, indeed, and you are all interested in it. Mr. Rutledge says that he has been detained at his place several weeks longer than he had anticipated, and there is now a prospect of his being obliged to remain till possibly the middle of summer; in which event, he thinks that we could not do a kinder thing than come and pay him a visit. He describes the country as looking very delightfully, and promises all sorts of rural amusements if we will come; and, by way of insuring the enjoyment of the young ladies, he begs we will make up a party to accompany us, and suggests the Wynkars, Mr. Reese, Captain McGuffy, Phil, of course, and any one else we may choose to ask. He is really very urgent, and begs we will not refuse to enliven the gloomy old mansion with our presence for awhile. He puts it entirely into my hands, and begs I will invite whom I choose." "Delightful!" exclaimed Josephine. "Mamma, could anything be nicer?" "Mr. Rutledge is 'a gentleman and a scholar,'" said Grace; "he ought to be encouraged. You'll accept, of course?" "_Cela dépend_," said her mother, thoughtfully. "Oh, mamma!" cried Josephine, "you cannot dream of refusing. What possible objection can there be? We do not want to go to Newport before the middle of July, and of course we can't stay in town all through June. This is the very thing; and you know I'd rather go to Rutledge than any other place in the world. Surely, mamma, you cannot think of refusing." "There are a great many things to be considered, my dear." "Ah," cried Grace, with unusual animation, "there'll be no peace till you say, yes. I long to get out of this dusty city. What else does he say, mamma?" "Not much," answered her mother, glancing down the second page. "He says he only heard a few days ago of my niece's illness, which he hopes will not prove serious, and that a change of air, and return to the scene of her last year's convalescence will be of benefit to her." "How do you imagine he heard she had been sick?" asked Grace. "I haven't the least idea, I am sure," said Josephine. "It's of no great consequence, any way. But, mamma, who shall we ask? The captain, of course, and Phil, and, I suppose, the Wynkars; Ella will be delighted, no doubt, and think it's all on her account! And about Mr. Reese--he's such a tiresome old fogie, let's get somebody in his place." "Ask Victor Viennet," said Grace, "just to spite Ella Wynkar. You know she hates him. He's as nice as anybody." "I haven't quite made up my mind," said Josephine, with dignity. "Wait till I have made up mine," said her mother, quietly. So this was the way which Mr. Rutledge had found to keep his promise to me, and gratify his own wishes at the same time. It took away all the pleasure of my anticipations, however, to have it fulfilled in this way. It seemed to me a sort of desecration of the grand, quiet stateliness of the old place to have all these gay people invading it. I could hardly fancy it full of careless, noisy, chattering guests, resounding with the captain's loud laugh, and Ella Wynkar's unmeaning cackle. What would Mrs. Roberts say? How would Kitty like it? CHAPTER XXIV. "In all his humors, whether grave or mellow, He's such a testy, touchy, pleasant fellow, Has so much mirth, and wit, and spleen about him, There is no living with him, or without him." "The next station will be Rutledge," said Phil, leaning back to announce the fact to the detachment of our party in the rear. "I am not sorry to hear it, for one," said Ella Wynkar, with a yawn. "Josephine, chère, are you not tired to death?" But Josephine, chère, was too busy with collecting books, shawls, and bags, and loading the captain therewith, in anticipation of our arrival at the station, to vouchsafe an answer. "Travelling all day is rather exhausting," said Phil, looking at his watch. "It's half-past six--a little behind time, but it won't hurt Mr. Rutledge to wait for us awhile. Ah! there's the whistle. We shall be at the station in another minute. Now, Aunt Edith, if you and Miss Wynkar will trust yourselves to me, I think the rest are provided for. Victor! what are you about? Don't you see we're here, man?" Victor started up, and taking my parasol and shawl, offered me his arm as the train stopped, and the conductor, bursting open the car door, shouted "Rutledge!" as if we were to escape for our lives. I heard Mr. Rutledge's voice before I saw him. We were the last of the party, and there being a little crowd at the car-door, we were obliged to stand for a moment inside, while the others stepped on the platform. It was a lovely June evening; the air was fresh and soft, and the sunset had left a rich glow on the sky, and lighted up with new verdure the green earth. It was so delicious to be out of the city; it was so bewildering to feel I was at Rutledge again. And with a beating heart, I followed my escort, as he forced a way for me through the crowd, and stepped down on the platform. Mr. Rutledge was waiting to receive us. I was not quite self-possessed enough myself to be certain that I saw a slight change in his manner as he recognized my companion; if it did occur, however, it was overcome as quickly, and he welcomed Mr. Viennet courteously. With a few words of welcome and congratulation upon my recovery, he led the way toward the carriage. My aunt and Miss Wynkar were already in it. Josephine and Captain McGuffy were established in a light wagon by themselves, while the open carriage and the bays stood as yet unappropriated. "I think, Mrs. Churchill," said Mr. Rutledge, standing at the open door of the carriage, "that perhaps you had better make a place for this young lady inside. She is not very strong as yet, I fancy, and the evening air"---- "Oh! pray," I exclaimed, shrinking back, "let me go in the open carriage. I hate a close carriage--it always makes my head ache." "There's not the least dampness in the air to-night," urged Mr. Viennet, and meeting with no further opposition, I turned to the open carriage, and at a whispered suggestion from him, mounted up upon the front seat. He sprang up beside me, and taking the reins from Michael, who, bowing delightedly, had been saying, "Welcome back, Miss," ever since the train stopped, we only waited for Grace and Ellerton Wynkar to get in, before we started off at a round pace, leaving the carriage and the captain, and Mr. Rutledge, who was on horseback, far behind. It was a lovely evening. The fields and woods were in their freshest green; everything, from the grass by the roadside to the waving forest trees, looked as they never can look after June. The dust of summer, and its parching heat, had not yet soiled and shrivelled the smallest leaf or blade; but fresh from the warm spring rains, and the pleasant spring sunshine, they budded and shone as if there were no such thing as scorching summer heats, and choking dust, and parching thirst, to come. The sky--fit sky to bend over such an earth--was of the clearest blue, and the few clouds that hung around the setting sun were light and fleecy, tinged with rose and tipped with gold. The soft breeze, coming out of the west over fields of clover and acacias in bloom, and lilac hedges, and cottage gardens full of early flowers, and cottage porches covered with blowing roses and climbing honeysuckles, steeped the listening senses with a sort of silent ecstasy, that made commonplace conversation a profanation of the hour. Why _would_ Grace and her companion keep up such a constant chattering. It was unbearable; and when Ellerton, leaning forward, offered Victor his cigar-case, the latter, with a quick gesture of impatience, exclaimed: "Ah! _merci_, not to-night. It's too nice an evening, my good friend, to be spoiled with such perfumes. The young ladies like roses better than cigars, I fancy." And Ellerton, who reverenced Victor as a high authority on all social questions, quietly put away his cigar-case, and said no more about it. It was a long drive from the station to the house, and our hopes of being the first of the party to arrive, were dashed by the occurrence of a little accident just as we entered the village. The off horse, shying violently at a loaded wagon, as we passed it rapidly, reared and fell back, breaking the pole in two, and throwing himself and his fellow into ecstasies of fear, plunging and struggling with the want of presence of mind, and the reckless disregard of consequences always manifested by terrified horseflesh under circumstances of sudden alarm. Victor, however, was a good horseman, and after a short battle, brought them to terms, Grace, meantime, shrieking violently, and Ellerton imploring him to let him get the ladies out at once, which looked rather like one word for the ladies and two for himself. Victor requested him simply to hold his tongue and sit still, and Ellerton, without a remonstrance, acquiesced, as the horses, now subdued, stood quite unresisting, while Victor, giving the reins to me, sprang down, followed by Michael from behind, and the countryman, whose load of brush had caused the accident. We were, fortunately, just by a blacksmith's shed, and in a few minutes that official himself, in his leathern apron and bare arms, was busily employed in remedying the mishap. The horses were still a little restive, and Victor was standing by the head of one and Michael by the other, when the rest of the party came up. Quite an excitement was created, of course, at seeing us in this disabled condition, and our host, springing from his horse, hurried up in some alarm to ascertain for himself the extent of the accident, which Ellerton Wynkar, standing up in the carriage, explained at large to the rest of the party, adding that, "it might have been something serious if we had not been very prompt." Victor bit his lip to keep from laughing, and Grace turned away her head; nothing but the consciousness of not having distinguished herself during the action, restrained her from bringing down Mr. Wynkar "a peg or two" by a statement of facts. Mr. Rutledge, finding that the repairing of the pole was likely to occupy some little time longer, said that the young ladies had better get in the carriage; he had no doubt Mr. Arbuthnot would willingly give up his seat. Phil, of course, most urgently begged we would do so, but for me, the idea of being cooped up in the carriage with Mrs. Churchill, and Ella, and Grace, was insupportable, and I expressed my resolution of staying by the ship. Mr. Viennet and the smithy said it would only be a few minutes more, and I declared I didn't in the least mind waiting, it was such a lovely evening, and I couldn't think of crowding the carriage. Grace, partly from perversity, and partly from a little lingering fear of the bays, said she should accept Phil's invitation, and without more ado, gave her hand to Mr. Rutledge and sprang out. "May I advise you?" said he, coming back to me after he had put Grace in the carriage. "Not against my will, if you please. Indeed, I had rather wait." "That settles it," he answered, bowing. "I'm sorry, gentlemen," he continued, to Victor and Ellerton, "to leave you in this fashion, but my duties, as host, require me to ride forward with the ladies, and I hope you will soon follow us." Victor assured him of his perfect confidence, that we would be at home almost as soon as they would; and then, with a polite commendation of his fortitude under misfortune, Mr. Rutledge threw himself upon his horse, and galloped after the carriage. I could not help feeling a little awkwardly; it is never pleasant to be the only lady among a number of gentlemen. Besides those of our own party, several men of the village had collected around us, and with their hands in their pockets, and in a very easy, sauntering way, were offering their comments on the accident. Victor walked angrily up to one, who, with a short pipe between his lips, had ventured rather too near, and was leaning nonchalantly against the fore-wheel; and knocking the pipe out of his mouth, took him by the shoulder and ordered him to take himself off. Didn't he see there was a lady in the carriage? The man moved sulkily away, but I saw him more than once look back with an ugly expression in his eyes toward Victor, as he crossed the road and disappeared in the woods that skirted the highway. Just at that moment, a sorrel horse drew up beside us, and an inquiring face was thrust out from the gig behind it. "What's the matter, Michael? Anybody hurt? An accident, did you say?" inquired a voice that gave me a cold chill. "That detestable doctor already!" And returning stiffly his salutations as he recognized me, and hurried up to the carriage, I said there had been no accident to anything but the pole of the carriage, and that was nearly remedied, and we had plenty of assistance. The doctor bowed, but did not seem in the least discomposed by my too obvious rudeness, and leaning comfortably on the wheel, as the dismissed clown had done before him, continued to address me in a tone of easy familiarity that was too annoying to me to be concealed, and my face must have told the story; for Victor, calling to one of the men to hold the horses a moment, walked quickly up behind the doctor, and laying his hand heavily on his shoulder, said, in a tone by no means equivocal: "I say, my good fellow, you are annoying this lady, and I must ask you to step back!" The doctor did step back, and turning quickly, faced him. "Victor Viennet, as I am a sinner!" I looked on in wonder, as I saw Victor give a violent start, and change color; then recovering himself after a moment, he said, in altered voice: "I ask your pardon, Dr. Hugh, I didn't see your face. How, under heaven, did you happen to turn up here?" There was an expression on Victor's face, as he said this, which seemed involuntarily to indicate that the fact of Dr. Hugh's turning up here, was just the most disagreeable fact that could possibly have transpired, and so essentially "cute" a man as the doctor, could not have failed to see it, but it did not seem in the least to interfere with his complacency. "How did I happen to turn up here? Why, my good fellow (as you said just now), by the most natural process in the world. You see, after we parted, a year ago, in the city"---- "Yes, yes," said Victor, hurriedly, and in a low tone, "I've got to look after the smith now. You can tell me there." And making some apology to me for the continued detention, he turned to retrace his steps. The doctor followed, and passed his arm familiarly through Victor's, at which I saw he winced, but did not attempt to resent; and the doctor continued to talk to him in a low and confidential tone. Twilight had already descended before the smith pronounced the job completed, and Michael, backing up the horses, put them to the carriage. While this was being accomplished, Victor and Dr. Hugh, standing a few paces apart from the others, talked together, or rather, the doctor talked and Victor listened with ill-concealed impatience. I could not hear a word that passed, but I could see that Victor was suffering torture at the hands of the bland doctor, and his face, for several minutes after he had parted from him and resumed his seat in the carriage, wore an expression of pain and anger. We had started and driven on for some distance before either spoke, and the first to break the silence, I said, with more curiosity than courtesy: "How in the world did you happen to know that detestable doctor? I didn't suppose anybody had ever seen him before he came here." "Detestable you may well call him," said Victor, below his breath, and with a sort of groan. "I'd rather have met the arch-fiend himself!" Then hastily remembering himself, he apologized, exclaiming, with a laugh, that the fellow always put him out of temper, and bored him to death, and he hoped he should never see him again, and he didn't mean to trouble himself any further about him. With that last resolution, his spirits rose, and in a few minutes he was as gay as ever. We were dashing along at such an inspiriting pace, that no one could help throwing dull care, and all things sad and gloomy, to the winds, and being pro tem. in the highest spirits. "I am sure you drive as well as you dance," said Victor, putting the reins into my hands. "Let me see whether you know how to handle the ribbons." Put upon my mettle in that way, nothing could have induced me to have declined the undertaking, though I happened to know a thing or two in the early history of the bays that Mr. Viennet was evidently ignorant of, and the recollection of which put a nervous intensity into the grasp I had upon the reins. "Admirable!" said Victor, with enthusiasm; "I see you understand what you are about. You manage those beasts as well as I could, and there's no denying it, they do pull." "_Pull_ isn't the word," I thought; "but no matter." "What a good road!" exclaimed Victor. "We're going like the wind. Ellerton, this is fine, is it not?" "Charming," said Ellerton, feebly, from the back seat; "charming; I never saw a lady drive so well; but don't you think, it's getting so dark, it would be better for you to take the reins? You can see better, you know." "On the contrary," said Victor, with great glee, "on the contrary; the female vision, you know, is proverbially the sharpest. Shall I touch up that near horse? He rather lags," he continued, wickedly, to me. "Oh no, thank you!" I said, breathlessly, but trying to laugh. "I'm sure you're tired," said Mr. Wynkar, with great feeling. "You speak as if you were. Victor, you lazy dog, take the reins, if you have any politeness left." "I haven't," said Victor, leaning back with composure. "I haven't a vestige left. I used up the last I had about me on that boor with the short pipe, who gave me such a gracious look as he walked off." "Yes," I exclaimed, "I think you'll hear from him again." "Not improbable," said Victor, coolly. "I have a knack at getting into scrapes that's only exceeded by my knack at getting out of them. Now I think of it, he didn't look like a pleasant sort of fellow to meet in a dark piece of woods like this." We had just driven into the woods that stretched about half a mile this side of the gate of Rutledge Park, and the faint young moon that had been lighting us since we left the village, had no power to penetrate the dense foliage that met over our heads, and shut out moon and sky. It did not make me any more comfortable to remember that there was a short path from the village across these woods, and that any one on foot could reach this point almost as soon as in a carriage by the road. I did not feel like laughing at Ellerton Wynkar's little gasp of fear, and Victor's gay laugh and easy tone of assurance, far from inspiring me with confidence, made me doubly nervous and apprehensive. I only wished that I dared ask him to be quiet till we were out into the open road again. But he seemed possessed with mischief--he quizzed Ellerton, told droll stories, and laughed till the woods rang again. But through it all, I strained my ear to catch the faintest noise by the roadside; and when the horses, more intent than I, shied violently to one side and dashed forward, with a quivering, desperate pull upon the reins, I was quite prepared for what succeeded. A large stone whirred swiftly through the air, just grazed my cheek, and fell with a crashing sound on the other side of the road. "Good heavens!" cried Victor, starting forward, "are you hurt?" "No, no," I exclaimed; "for heaven's sake, be quiet." "Give me the reins," he cried, snatching them. "No, no!" I answered, keeping them by a desperate exertion of strength. "I shall never forgive you if you stop the horses." "I shall never forgive myself for the danger I have brought you in," he said, in a low tone. "You will never trust yourself to my protection again, I fear," he continued earnestly, as we drove into the park gate. "Oh, I'm not afraid as long as I hold the ribbons," I answered, trying to laugh, but drawing a freer breath as we cleared the woods and came into the moonlight again. "You are cruel," he said, in a lower tone still. "There's the house at last!" exclaimed Ellerton, with a sigh of relief so profound that we both started. "How are you getting on, behind there?" asked Victor. "I'd forgotten all about you, Ellerton. That was a neat little compliment from our friend in the woods, now wasn't it? But the least said about those little attentions the better, I've always found; you understand. 'Oh no, we never mentions him,' under any circumstances." "Of course not," said Ellerton, acquiescently. "I should not speak of it on any account." "And, Michael, my man," continued Victor, putting his hand in his pocket, "whist's the word about this little adventure, you know." Michael touched his hat, and, pocketing the coin that Victor tossed him, promised absolute silence on the subject. The horses, as we came up the avenue, slackened their pace, and gave us time to look around. Sunset, starlight moonlight, had neither of them abdicated the bright June sky, but all combined to light up the picture for us, and make the lake a sheet of silver, and the dark, old house as fair as it could be made. "A fine old place, indeed," said Victor, with a temporary shade of seriousness on his face. "It must be pleasant to have such an ancestral home as that. These Rutledges are a high family, are they not?" "One of the very best in the State;" answered Ellerton, feeling that "family" was always a toast to which he was called upon to respond. "There are very few in the country who can go back so far. The Rutledges have always been very exclusive, and held themselves very high, and so have never lost their position." "Ha!" said Victor, with a little darkening of the brow. "That's the style, is it? Our host, then, is a proud man, I am to understand--one who values birth, and that sort of thing, and plumes himself upon it, and regards with a proper scorn all who have come into the world under less favorable auspices than himself." "Exactly," said Ellerton. "I think that's Rutledge exactly. He's what you'd call a regular aristocrat, and proud as Lucifer himself." "I kiss his hand!" cried Victor, with a dash of bitterness in his tone. "Commend me to such a man as that! I reverence his largeness of soul, his nobility of nature! I long to show him in what esteem I hold him." "I think you mistake Mr. Rutledge," I began eagerly; but before I had time to say another word we were at the door, and Mr. Rutledge himself, descending the steps quickly, and speaking with some anxiety, exclaimed: "We have been very uneasy about you. I have just sent orders to the stable for horses to start to meet you. Has anything happened?" "The pole required just three times as long to repair as Mr. Smithy said it would," answered Victor, "and we, very foolishly depending upon his word in the matter, were much disappointed in not reaching the house three-quarters of an hour ago. I am sorry to have caused you any uneasiness." "It is dissipated now," said Mr. Rutledge, courteously. "I only regret that your arrival should have been marked by such a misadventure." "What would he say if he knew of misadventure number two?" said Victor, _sotto voce_, as he assisted me to alight. "I feel positively superstitious. No good is coming of this visit, depend upon it!" As we were half-way up the steps, I found I had forgotten my parasol, and Victor went back to look for it. Mr. Rutledge, seizing the opportunity of his absence, said to me quickly: "I see you drove those horses; you must promise me you will never do it again." "Why not?" I asked, haughtily. "No matter why; you must promise me you will never touch the reins again behind them." "I am sure I drove them up in style; Michael himself could not have done it better. I don't think I can bind myself never to do it again. You'll have to excuse me from promising." "I remember; you have a prejudice against promising." There was something in his tone, and in the short laugh that followed these words, that brought back so much of what I had been trying to forget, and revived so much of what I had half forgiven, that I made no effort to keep back the hasty words that rushed to my lips. "Can you wonder at it? My experience has been so unfortunate; why, less than a year ago, I made a promise that, I suppose, was as binding as most other promises, and meant about as much; and I have found it a chain at once the lightest and most galling--empty as air, and yet the hatefullest restraint--the veriest mockery, and yet a thing I can't get rid of! That's briefly what I think of promises, and why you must excuse me from making one." "I will excuse you," he said, looking at me with eyes that never faltered; "I will excuse you, with all my heart, from making or keeping any promise to me." This upon the threshold! Under the very shadow of the doorway! I felt faint and giddy as I passed on into the hall. Kitty, with a low cry of delight, sprung forward to meet me. "Kitty, I am so glad!" I said, laying my hand upon her arm. "Isn't it a long time since I went away? But I am so tired; do take me to my room." Kitty flew up the stairs in delight, only stopping occasionally to ask me if I didn't feel well, and if she couldn't help me. All the others had gone to their rooms; not even Mrs. Roberts was to be seen. "She's got her hands too full to prowl around now," said Kitty, with a wicked shake of the head. She led the way to my old room, and, to my surprise, putting her hand in her pocket, drew out the key, and fitted it in the lock. "What's the reason of its being locked up?" I said in surprise. "Reason enough, Miss," said Kitty, with a profound look. Then, admitting me and shutting the door carefully, continued, in a less guarded tone: "The idea of your coming back here and having any but your own room! And it's been just as much as I could do to keep Mrs. Roberts from putting Miss Churchill in it. Such a time as I had about it when the baggage came! None of the ladies had come upstairs yet; they were all walking about the piazza and hall with master, and Thomas was seeing to the trunks being carried up, and I overheard Mrs. Roberts say: 'Thomas, Miss Churchill's baggage is to be put in the blue room, and her mamma's and Miss Grace's in the oak-chamber opposite, and Miss Wynkar's goes in the south room.' 'No, I beg your pardon, ma'am,' I says, coming forward, '_my_ young lady's trunk goes to the blue room, if you please. I've master's own orders for it, and I'll go ask him again if you choose.'_Your_ young lady, indeed!' says Mrs. Roberts, throwing me such an awful look. 'Thomas, you will attend to my orders.' I flew upstairs and put the key in my pocket, and Thomas tipped me a wink, and left your trunk outside the door. And now," said Kitty, stopping a moment to recover breath, "don't you think it looks pleasant, Miss?" "Indeed it does, Kitty," I said, gratefully, sinking down in an easy-chair, and looking about me admiringly. It looked whiter and cooler than ever. There were new book-shelves in the recesses, and new curtains at the windows; roses, mignonette and heliotrope, filled the slender vases, and the wax candles on the dressing-table shed the softest light around the room. Kitty, busying herself about putting away my bonnet and shawls, chatted on eagerly. "Gay times, these, for Rutledge," she went on, after having answered my inquiries for Stephen and the others. "Gay times, and busy times. Who'd ever have thought to see this house full of company again?" "Yes," I said, "so busy, I am afraid, I shall not have much of your attendance, Kitty. It will not be like last fall, when you had nothing to do but wait on me. What nice times those were! I wish all the rest of the people were miles away, Kitty, and there was no one in the house that wasn't here last November." "Oh!" exclaimed Kitty, deprecatingly, "I'm sure you'll enjoy it, Miss, with so many young gentlemen and ladies. I'm certain master thought you would, or he wouldn't have asked them. And as for my waiting on you, why that's all settled, and Mrs. Roberts knows it too. Mr. Rutledge told me this very morning that he supposed it would please me to be allowed to attend upon you, and that I was to consider that my duty as long as you were here. Mrs. Roberts had come in for some directions, and she heard it all. She jerked her head, and flounced a little, but didn't dare to say a word. But," continued Kitty, anxiously, "I'm afraid you are not well. Can I get you anything? Won't you lie down? Oh! I am afraid you are crying." Kitty's fears were not unfounded. The tears rushed to my eyes, and hiding my face in my hands, I tried, but vainly, to suppress the hysterical sobs that choked me, as I essayed to answer her anxious questions. She was so disappointed and alarmed at my unexpected mood that she hardly knew what to do, and I tried, as soon as I could speak, to assure her that I was really very glad to get back, that there was nothing the matter, only I was very nervous and tired. "And there's the tea-bell!" exclaimed Kitty, in dismay, "and everybody else is dressed! What's to be done?" "There's nothing for it, Kitty, but to let me go to bed. I can't go downstairs to-night--it would kill me. Undress me, and then don't let a soul come in--not even my aunt. That's a good Kitty: it isn't the first time you've taken care of me." "Ah!" said Kitty, with tears in her kind eyes, "if I only knew what to do to make you better! It isn't the headache that I mean--a cup of tea and a good night's rest will make that all right; but you ain't the same young lady that you were last fall. I saw that the minute you stepped into the hall. There's something on your mind; I knew it the instant you spoke. When you used to talk, it was as if there was a laugh in your voice all the time, and now you talk as if you were tired, and hated to open your lips." "So I am, Kitty," I said, with a fresh burst of crying. "I am tired and heart-sick, and when I talk it's no wonder there are 'tears in my voice.' There are a great many things to make me unhappy; you mustn't ask me anything about them; but it's so long since I've had anybody to care for me, and nurse me, that it makes me babyish, I believe. There!" I exclaimed, after a minute, conquering my tears, "don't think anything more about it, Kitty, but help me to undress." There could have been no better medicine for my aching head and heart, than that Kitty administered. It was a perfect luxury to resign myself into her hands, to feel that I needn't think again to-night if I didn't choose, that I was sure of being watched over and cared for, come what might. I had not realized, till I came into its sunshine again, how perfectly necessary to anything like happiness an atmosphere of love is. I had known that, in my home, I had felt chilled and forlorn. I had given no pleasure to others, and received none myself; but, child-like, I had only known it was, and had not asked why. But now, that kind and tender hands rendered the services that I had long wearily performed for myself, and a watchful care provided for my comfort and remembered my tastes, I realized how unnatural and unkind a thing it is for anything of human mold to be denied human love and sympathy; I realized how necessary to the fair growth and goodly proportions of a nature, is the sunshine of kindness and affection. Since I had left Rutledge, I had never known what it was to be caressed and favored; misconstrued, slighted, and put aside by those around me, the natural result had been reserve, distrust, and aversion on my part. I was, as Kitty said, not the same girl I had been. I knew better than Kitty did how deep the change had gone--how far below the surface the blight had struck. The brave, gay heart of the child was dead in my bosom forever. Whatever there might be to hope for, in the future, it must be the life-and-death struggle and victory of the woman, not the careless happiness of the child. CHAPTER XXV. "Love is hurt with jar and fret, Love is made a vague regret, Eyes with idle tears are wet, Idle habit links us yet-- What is love? for we forget; Ah! no, no!" TENNYSON. My bright eyed maid had something evidently on her mind the next morning, as stealing early to my bedside, she found me awake and quite ready for her services. I caught sight of her perplexed face in the glass, as she dressed my hair, and said at last, "What are you thinking about, Kitty, has anything happened?" "Happened? Oh, no, Miss," she said, blushing, and a little confused. "I was only thinking--I was only wondering"---- "Well, Kitty?" "I mean that--that is--are you very fond of Miss Churchill?" I laughed and blushed a little in my turn, and said: "Why no, not particularly, I think." "Because _I_ think she's a very haughty lady, for my part; and if I am any judge, her maid, Frances, is a much-put-upon young woman, that's all." "What has led you to that conclusion so soon?" I asked, with a smile. "Oh! nothing particular, ma'am, only some of Miss Churchill's ruffled morning dresses got crushed in the packing, and Frances was in the laundry till after twelve o'clock last night, fluting 'em over; and I've noticed, Frances starts and flusters when her lady's bell rings, as if there were a scolding for her at the other end of the wire, that's all." "Oh, that's a trifle! Frances is nervous," I said, apologetically. "What did my aunt say when you told her my message last night?" "Nothing but 'very well,' and 'I am sorry to hear it.' There wasn't time for any more, for the gentleman they call Captain, with the big moustache, came up for her to play whist, and she went away with him. But," said Kitty, hesitatingly, and looking at me very sharply, "I don't know whether I ought to tell you, but there was a gentleman who didn't seem to take it quite so coolly as Mrs. Churchill did." "Who, pray?" I asked, as the blood started to my cheeks. "The young French gentleman, Miss; I think they call him Mr."---- "Oh, Mr. Viennet!" "I wonder, Miss, why you say 'Oh, Mr. Viennet!' as if you were disappointed," said Kitty, quite nettled. "I'm sure he's the handsomest gentleman among 'em; and if you could have seen him, when he followed me up the stairs, and asked about you, I am sure you'd think better of it; and he's got the handsomest eyes! I can't think why you don't like him." "I have not said I did not; and besides, Kitty," I continued, gravely, "it's not right for you to talk to the gentlemen; you must be careful." "I know, Miss; but who could help talking to such a nice gentleman, just answering his questions? I'm sure he could get round Mrs. Roberts herself, if he tried! let alone people that ain't made of stone or leather. And," continued Kitty, "isn't it odd, Miss, but all the time he was talking to me, I couldn't help wondering where I'd seen him before? I know for a certainty, that he's never been within forty miles of Rutledge till now, and I've never been twenty miles away from it; and yet, for my life, I couldn't get it out of my head, that some where or other I'd seen him before!" "It's a very foolish idea to have in your head, Kitty, and a very improbable one at the best; so I wouldn't trouble myself any further about it, if I were you." I did not mention it to Kitty, but I could not help being struck with the similarity of my own impressions on first meeting Victor Viennet. It was the vaguest, mistiest chain of reminiscence that his face seemed to stir, but till I had seen him several times, it continued to perplex me. I could not account for it in any way; but the association or recollection, or whatever it was, had faded before a closer acquaintance; and now Victor Viennet's handsome face suggested Victor Viennet, and nobody or nothing more. "These will match your lilac muslin exactly, Miss," said Kitty, offering me a handful of purple "morning glories." "I ran out to get you some flowers before I came in to wake you, but I was in such a hurry, that I couldn't go as far as the garden, and so just picked these out of the hedge." I thanked her as I fastened them in my dress; they looked lovely with the dew still shining on them. It was yet a good while to breakfast, but I turned to go downstairs, accepting, with a smile at the newness of such services, the dainty handkerchief that Kitty shook out for me. The fresh morning breeze swept softly through the wide hall as I descended the stairs. Summer had come in and taken the gloomy old place by storm. A pyramid of flowers stood on the dark oak table in the centre, a mocking-bird in its gay cage hung at one end, and over the cold marble pavement the sunshine was creeping fast. The house was so quiet, that I could almost fancy I was alone in it, and crossing the hall, I went up to the library door; but a cowardly irresolution made me turn away, and pass on to the north door of the hall, which, as well as the front one, stood wide open. The broad fields stretched far away June-like and lovely in the sunshine; the hedges and trees were in such luxuriant leaf, that they quite hid the stables and outhouses on the left that last fall had been so prominent in the landscape. Looking from the parlor windows, there was the same view of the lake that I had from my room. The mists were rolling up from its fair bosom, and the foliage that crowned its banks was of the freshest and glossiest green. The dew was glittering on the lawn, early birds twittered and sang in the branches overhead, and on the breeze came the rich perfume of the roses that climbed from pillar to pillar of the piazza. Rutledge had fulfilled my anticipations; in my weary, longing day-dreams, I had never pictured anything fairer than this. It was with a half-defined feeling of curiosity that I wandered through the large parlors, furnished in an odd mixture of old-fashioned splendor and modern elegance. It was _terra incognita_ to me; I had never entered these rooms before. I could hardly understand how the sunshine and fresh air came to be so much at home in them, as it seemed they now were. It was difficult to believe that these finely furnished, habitable looking apartments, had been closed and unused for twenty years and more. They had been thoroughly revised, no doubt, and the past put to the rout; but they were strange and unattractive to me, and I turned again to the library. Listening at the door before I pushed it open, I entered noiselessly. There was no need of so much caution; this room was as untenanted as its neighbors, save by thronging memories and torturing regrets, and they entered with me. Here at least there was no change; the wide casements were open to the morning, but the white north light seemed subdued and cold after the sunshine of the other rooms, and the dark panelling and frowning moldings looked a defiance at the intruding summer. I liked it better so; there had been change enough without this last stronghold of memory being invaded. Every article of furniture in the room--the table, with its pile of papers at one end and books at the other, the familiar paper-cutter lying by the unopened review, the heavy bronze inkstand, the graceful lamp, the chair, pushed back half a yard from the table--minded me of the happy hours that it would have been wiser to forget. One of the bookcases stood open, and a book lay on the table as if recently read, and a card marked the reader's place. I took it up involuntarily. It was Sintram, and the words swam before me as I bent over its familiar pages. On the card that had served for a mark, were written a few lines in a well known hand; and as I raised my eyes from them to the window, I saw Mr. Rutledge himself approaching the house from the direction of the stables. With a hurried movement I slipped the card in my pocket, and finding nothing else to replace it with, pulled one of the flowers from my bosom, and hastily shutting it between the leaves, threw the book on the table, and ran into the hall. If I had been a fugitive from justice, I could not have had a more guilty feeling than that which now impelled me to escape from meeting Mr. Rutledge. But there was no time to get upstairs; he would see me from the piazza if I went into the parlor; and while I stood in the hall, trembling with eagerness, and alarm, and irresolution, my retreat was cut off by the sudden appearance of Victor descending the stairs, who with an exclamation of pleasure, hurried toward me, and taking my hand was bowing over it in most devout fashion, when Mr. Rutledge entered the hall. Victor looked a little confused, and paused in the midst of an elegant French speech, while the quick crimson dyed my cheeks, all of which Mr. Rutledge appeared to ignore, as, approaching us, he said good morning with his usual courtesy of manner, expressed his pleasure in the improvement apparent in my looks, and then to Victor his astonishment at finding him a person of such early habits. "Pray do not give me any credit for getting up this morning," said Victor with a hasty wave of the hand. "I assure you I detest early rising with my whole French soul, and haven't seen a sun younger than three hours old since I can remember; but, my dear sir, with all homage to the most comfortable of beds, and the pleasantest room I ever occupied in my life, I never passed such a night! When at last I slept, my dreams were so frightful that I was thankful to wake, and would have resorted to any means to have kept myself awake, if there had been the slightest danger of my closing my eyes again." "What room did you occupy?" I asked. "The corner room at the north end of the hall, it is, I think." "It is most unfortunate," said Mr. Rutledge, looking a little annoyed. "Are you subject to wakeful nights?" "Never remember such an occurrence before," he returned. "I have enjoyed the plebeian luxury of sound sleep all my life, and so am more at a loss to account for my experience of last night." "Were you disturbed by any noise--conscious of any one moving in the house?" "No, the house was silent, silent as death! _Ma foi!_ I believe that was the worst of it. If I were superstitious, I should tell you of the only thing that interrupted it; but I know how credulous and absurd it would sound to dispassionate judges, and how I should ridicule anything of the kind in another person; but this strange nightmare has taken such possession of me, I cannot shake it off." His face expressed intense feeling as he spoke, and the usual levity of his manner was quite gone. "What was it?" I said earnestly, and Mr. Rutledge looked indeed so far from ridiculing his emotion, that Victor went on rapidly: "You will think me a person of imaginative and excitable temperament, but I must assure you to the contrary, and that I never before yielded to a superstitious fancy, and have always held in great contempt all who were influenced by such follies. Will you believe me then, when I tell you that last night I was startled violently from my sleep, by a voice that sounded, from its hollowness and ghastliness, as if it came from the fleshless jaws of a skeleton, calling again and again, in tones that made my blood curdle, a familiar name, and one that at any time, I cannot hear without emotion. Sleep had nothing to do with it! I was as wide awake as I am now. But pshaw!" he exclaimed, suddenly turning, "I shall forget all about it in an hour, and I beg you'll do the same," and not giving either of us time to answer, he went on in an altered tone: "Mr. Rutledge, what a fine place you have! I have been admiring the view from my window. Have you purchased it recently? I don't remember to have seen a finer estate in America." "It is a valuable and well located farm," answered Mr. Rutledge, rather indifferently; "but farming is not my specialty, and I never should have encumbered myself voluntarily with such a care, if it had not devolved upon me by inheritance." "Ah!" said Victor with a slight accent of irony, that from last night's conversation I was prepared for; "It was then a case of greatness thrust, etc. But sir, it must add a great charm to this already charming home, to think that it has been the birth-place and family altar, as it were, of generations of your ancestors? Surely you are not insensible to such sentiments of pride and affection." "Associations of that kind, of course, invest a place with a certain kind of interest; but I cannot lay claim to as much feeling on the subject as perhaps would be becoming. Like you, sir," he said, with a bow, "I have a dread of claiming credit for habits and feelings that I do not possess and entertain." Victor looked a little annoyed that he had not succeeded in drawing out Mr. Rutledge's aristocratic and overbearing sentiments, and he would not have given up the subject, had not Mr. Rutledge, with a firm and quiet hand, put it aside, and led the way to other topics. "How is it," he said to me, "that you have not noticed your small friend Tigre? He has been at your feet for the last five minutes, looking most wistfully for a kind word." I started in confusion and surprise, and stooping down, covered the dog with caresses. The poor little rascal was frantic with delight, springing up to my face, and ejaculating his welcome in short barks and low whines, tearing around me, and then running off a little distance and looking back enthusiastically. "He is evidently inviting you to another steeple-chase," said Mr. Rutledge. I blushed violently at the recollection, and wished Tigre anywhere but where he was. "Have you lost your interest in the turf, since your season in town, or have other interests and tastes developed themselves while it has lain dormant?" "Other tastes have developed themselves, I believe," I answered. "Break it gently to Tigre, I beg you then, for I am sure he has been living all winter on the hope of another romp. He does not appreciate the lapse of time, and the changes involved, so readily as his betters, you know." "He has, at least, the grace to receive them more kindly," I returned, stooping to pat him. "Tigre, if I am too old to run races, I am not debarred as yet from taking walks, I believe, and I would propose that we indulge in one. Mr. Viennet, are you too old to be of the party?" Mr. Rutledge turned shortly toward the library, Victor and I passed out on the piazza, and, with Tigre in close attendance, descended the broad steps to the terrace. Breakfast was nearly completed when we returned, and the party at the table looked up in amazement as we entered the room. "I should admire to know," exclaimed Ella Wynkar, who affected Boston manners, and "admired" a good deal, "I should admire to know where you two have been! Mr. Arbuthnot declares that Mr. Viennet has been up since daybreak; and as for _you_," she said, turning to me, "I heard your door shut hours ago." "Restrain your admiration, Miss Wynkar," said Victor, as he placed a chair for me. "We have been taking a short turn on the terrace for the fresh air. I wonder you did not emulate our example." "Terrace, indeed!" exclaimed Phil. "I've been on the piazza for half an hour, and I'll take my oath you weren't within gunshot of the terrace all that time." "Don't perjure yourself, my good fellow," said Victor, coolly, "but assist us to some breakfast. The terrace has given us an appetite." "How is your headache, my dear?" said my aunt, from across the table. "My headache, ma'am? Oh, I forgot--I beg your pardon; it's better, thank you." "How serious it must have been!" said Josephine. "Oh! by the way, Mr. Rutledge, it isn't worth while to ask them to join us in _our_ party this morning, is it? They didn't ask us to go with them." Mr. Rutledge shrugged his shoulders. "I think, Miss Josephine, we are safe in asking them; they wouldn't accept, of course, and we should save our credit, you know." "I would not trust them, sir. It's my advice that they're not asked." "Then," returned Mr. Rutledge, with a low bow and his finest smile, "as with me to hear is to obey, I resign all thought of remonstrance, and acquiesce in the decree." Josephine accepted the homage very graciously, and the jest was kept up around the table till I, for one, was heartily sick of it. No one supposed, however, that I would be fool enough to take it in earnest; but I was just such a fool; and when, an hour or two later, the horses were brought to the door, and the scattered party summoned from library, parlor, billiard-room, and garden, to prepare for the drive, I was struggling with a fit of ill-temper in my own room, which resulted in my "begging to be excused," when Thomas came to the door to announce the carriage. My refusal didn't seem to damp the spirits of the party much. I looked through the half closed blinds to see them start. Victor at the last minute pleaded a headache, and "begged to be excused," on which occasion the captain made one of the jokes for which he was justly famous, and led off the laugh after it. "The pretty darling's in the sulks, I suppose," I heard Grace say; but no one was at the pains to resent or applaud the remark, and I listened to the departing carriage-wheels and the lessening sound of merry voices with anything but a merry heart. One never feels very complacent after spiting oneself; the inelegant describe the state of feeling by the adjective "small;" and I was not rendered any more comfortable by finding that I had made a prisoner of myself for the morning. If Victor had only gone, as I had anticipated, I should have consoled myself for the loss of the drive by a nice ramble around the grounds, and down to the stables; but as it was, I would not, for any consideration, have run the risk of encountering him. I heartily repented my walk before breakfast, and the relative position it seemed to place us in, made worse by our both remaining at home. Everybody and everything seemed to conspire to place us together, and my pride and my honesty both rebelled against such an arrangement. So, after listening to the sound of his steps pacing the terrace, the hall, and the piazza for a full hour, I began to find my captivity intolerable, and determined to make a visit to the housekeeper's room, and pay my devoirs to that functionary. Looking stealthily over the balusters, I ascertained that Victor was still smoking in the hall, so I ran across to the door of Mrs. Roberts' room, which was standing partly open, and asked if I might come in. Receiving permission, I entered, and did my best to appear amiable in Mrs. Roberts' eyes. She was, of course, as stiff as anything human could well be, but she was too busy to be very ungracious. This sudden influx of visitors had startled her out of the slow and steady routine of the last twenty years, and though, on the whole, she acquitted herself well, it was a very trying and bewildering position for the old woman. I longed for something to do to appease the self-reproach I felt for my bad temper, and it struck me that I couldn't do a more praiseworthy and disagreeable thing than to help Mrs. Roberts in some of the duties that seemed to press so heavily upon her. So, sitting down by her, I said: "Mrs. Roberts, you'd better let me help you with those raisins; I haven't a thing to do this morning." "That's a pity," said Mrs. Roberts, briefly. "In my day, young ladies always thought it most becoming to have some occupation." "That's just my view of the case, Mrs. Roberts, and if you'll allow me, I'll have an occupation immediately." Sylvie set the huge bowl of raisins on the table, and I drew them toward me, saying she must allow me to help her with them. Mrs. Roberts thought not; it would spoil my dress. "Then I'll put an apron on." She was afraid I did not know how. "You can teach me, Mrs. Roberts;" and I began without further permission. To say that Mrs. Roberts melted before all this amiability would be to say that Mrs. Roberts had ceased to be Mrs. Roberts. She was a degree or two less gruff, I believe, at the end of the long hour I spent in her service, in the seeding of those wretched raisins; but that was all, and fortunately I had not expected more. I undertook it as a penance, and it did not lose that character from any excess of kindness on her part. After the raisins were dispatched, Mrs. Roberts applied herself to the copying of a recipe from an old cookery-book, for which she seemed in something of a hurry. Dorothy was waiting for it, Sylvie said. "You'd better let me do it for you, Mrs. Roberts," I said, leaning over her shoulder. Mrs. Roberts declined, with dignity, for some time, but at last thoughtfully slid the spectacles off her nose, and seemed to deliberate about granting my request. She was not a very ready scribe, and she had a dozen other things to do, all of which weighed with my urgency, and in two minutes I was at the desk, copying out of a venerable cookery-book, the receipt that Mrs. Roberts indicated. I was in pretty engrossing business, I found one duty succeeded another very regularly; Mrs. Roberts, I saw, had determined to get as much out of me now as she could. A dread of draughts was one of her peculiarities, so the door and the front windows were closed against the pleasant breeze, and to this I attribute it that we were unconscious of the return of the riding party till the door opened suddenly and Mr. Rutledge entered. "Mrs. Roberts," he said, "you are wanted below. Miss Churchill has hurt her ankle in getting out of the carriage, and I have come to you for some arnica." Mrs. Roberts bustled over to the medicine chest, and, taking the bottle of arnica and a roll of linen in her hand, hurried out of the room; while Mr. Rutledge, crossing over to the table where I sat, stood looking down at me without speaking, while I nervously went on with my writing without raising my eyes. "Why did you not go with us this morning?" he said at last, sitting down by the table. "I didn't want to." "That is a very good reason; but I think you would have done better to have thwarted your inclination for once. There are two reasons why it would have been wiser to have gone." "What is one?" I demanded. "One is that your staying looked unamiable, and as if you could not take a joke." "Well, it only looked as I felt. I was unamiable, and I didn't like the joke. What is the other?" "The other, I am pretty sure to make you angry by giving, but I must risk that. Your refusing to go looked very much as if you preferred another tête-à-tête, to the society of us all." "I cannot see that," I said, looking up flushed and angry. "When I supposed that I was the only member of the party who intended to stay at home, I cannot see how it could be inferred that I remained from any such motive." "I, for one, had no doubt of it." "You are kind!" I cried. "It is pleasant to feel I am always sure of one, at least, to put the kindest construction on what I do." "Is my niece accounting for her willfulness in staying at home this morning?" said the slow, soft voice of Mrs. Churchill, that crept into my senses like a subtle poison, and silenced the angry words on my lips. "Are you not penitent, _ma chère_," she said, approaching me, and laying her cold hand lightly on my hair. "Do you not begin to see how unwise such tempers are? How often must I entreat you, my love, to be less hasty and suspicious and self-willed? Though I am not discouraged with these childish faults, Mr. Rutledge," turning to him apologetically, "I own they are somewhat trying. Ever since that unlucky night at the Academy of Music, I have felt"---- "Aunt Edith!" I exclaimed, with flashing eyes, averting my head from her touch and springing up. "Aunt Edith, that time has never been mentioned between us since you gave me my reprimand. I cannot understand why you bring it up now, and before a stranger!" "Mr. Rutledge can hardly be called a stranger," she began. "If not so to you, remember he is to me," I interrupted. "However that may be," she went on, "he was unluckily the witness of that evening's errors. He saw the self-will and temper that you took no pains to conceal, and the love of admiration that led you to a most unaccountable act of imprudence." "I should think," I returned, trembling with passion, "that that time would have no more pleasant memories for you than me. I should think we might agree not to stir among its ashes. There may be some smoldering remorse alive in them yet!" For a moment, my aunt's face grew white, and her eye faltered and sunk; angry as I was, I bitterly repented the stab I had given her. Then she raised her eyes and fixed them on my face with a stern and freezing look. I don't know what she said; it was too cruel to listen to. I don't know what I answered; would that it had no record anywhere! From that date, there was no disguise between aunt and niece of the sentiments they had mutually inspired. The flimsy gauze that reserve and decorum had raised between them was torn to fragments before that storm, and henceforth there was no pretence of an affection that had never existed. Two natures more utterly discordant and unsympathetic could not well be imagined. There was nothing but some frail bands of duty and convenience, that had kept up the mask of sympathy so far, and then and there they were snapped irrevocably; and the mask fell prone upon the ground and was trampled under foot. They had better have turned me houseless into the street than have turned me out of their hearts in this way; in one case, I could have sought another shelter, and won myself another home. In this, I was driven out, burning with anger and stung with injustice, from every heart I had had a right to seek a home in, and before me lay a cold and inhospitable world. Was the outcast or the world to blame for the inevitable result? The outcast, no doubt; outcasts always are. * * * * * "Look--look, Josephine!" cried Grace, bursting into the library, where most of the party were assembled that evening. Josephine, with her foot on the sofa, being the nucleus. "Ella, and Phil, and I have just come from rowing on the lake, and see what we found, up by the pine trees at the other end of the lake, floating on the water." "What is it?" said Josephine, languidly; "a water-lily?" "Water-lilies used to be white when I studied botany, Joseph, and this, you may observe, is purple." "And morning-glories, when I studied botany," said Phil, "did not grow on lakes, but in gardens. Now, as this was discovered on the water, the question naturally arises, how, by whom, and under what circumstances, did it get there?" "And putting this and that together," said Ella Wynkar, "we think that the young lady who had morning-glories in her dress this morning, must have taken a row on the lake, instead of a walk on the terrace." "That doesn't follow," said Victor, "any more than it would follow that Miss Wynkar had visited the desert of Sahara, if a straw hat similar to the one she has in her hand, should be found there." "Mr. Viennet, you are not sufficiently calm for such difficult reasoning. The fact is established; don't attempt to controvert it," said Josephine. "In any case, I am entitled to the flower, I think," he returned, taking it from the table, and fastening it in his button-hole. "No one will dispute it with you, I fancy," said Josephine, with a laugh. "You seem to have marked your way with morning-glories," said Mr. Rutledge, who, sitting by the table, was turning over the leaves of a book. There was another, crushed and faded, and staining the leaves with its purple blood. "One can hardly believe they are contemporaries," said Victor, "mine is so much fresher." "They are the frailest and shortest-lived of flowers," said Mr. Rutledge, tossing the flower away. "Hardly worth the passing admiration that their beauty excites." CHAPTER XXVI. "If hope but deferred causeth sickness of heart, What sorrow, to see it forever depart." "This rain knocks the pic-nic all in the head," said Phil, lounging into the breakfast-room, "and everybody's sure of being in a bad humor on account of the disappointment. What shall we all do with ourselves?" "Play billiards, can't we?" said the captain. "I hate billiards, for my part," said Grace, looking dismally out of the window. "And Josephine's ankle's too bad to play, and Ellerton isn't well enough, and my pretty cousin there never did anything she was asked to yet; and Mr. Viennet consequently will refuse, and Phil's too lazy, and mamma won't take the trouble, and Mr. Rutledge has letters to write; so I think you'll be at a loss for anybody to play with you, Captain McGuffy." "So it would seem," said the captain, consoling himself with some breakfast. "I can't see anything better to be done than this, then." "It is rather your vocation, I think," returned Grace. "But with the rest of us, it is an enjoyment that at best cannot last over an hour, and there are twelve to be got rid of before bed-time." "It _is_ trying," said Josephine. "And I've no more crimson for my sofa-cushion, and no chance of matching it nearer than Norbury. I really don't know what I shall do all day." "If one only had a good novel!" yawned Ella Wynkar. "But there isn't anything worth reading in the library. I wonder Mr. Rutledge doesn't get some interesting books." "There he comes; ask him," said Grace, maliciously. "No, I don't like to. Mr. Rutledge is so odd, there's no knowing how he might take it." Mr. Rutledge entered at this moment, followed by Tigre, and Miss Wynkar, partly because she was glad of anything to amuse herself with, and partly for the sake of a pretty attitude, sprung forward and caught the dog in her arms. "Take care! he's just been out in the rain," exclaimed Mr. Rutledge, but not in time to save the pretty morning dress from Tigre's muddy paws; and with an exclamation of disgust she threw down the dog, who, whining piteously from a blow against the table, came limping over to me. "Poor fellow! that was a sudden reverse," said Victor, stooping to pat him. "Give me your paw, my friend, and accept my sympathy." Ella darted an angry look toward us, and, I am certain, never forgave the laugh that escaped me. "This is a dull day, young ladies," exclaimed Mr. Rutledge, throwing himself into a chair. "How shall we dispose of it?" "Philosophy to the rescue!" said Josephine, with a charming smile. "It is only dull compared with what you had promised us." "The pic-nic will hold good for another day, we'll trust. In the meantime, what shall we do to-day?" "Who ever heard of doing anything but growl on such a day as this?" said Phil, leaning over Josephine's chair. "Ladies weren't made for anything but sunshine, I'm certain," said the captain, thoughtfully, over his last cup of coffee. Miss Wynkar and the Misses Churchill made the expected outcry at this speech, and Mr. Rutledge, after the excitement had subsided, went on with a proposal that quite brought down the house. It was to the effect that, as the gay people of the neighborhood, the Masons of Windy Hill, and the Emersons of Beech Grove, had each proposed something for the general benefit, it seemed expedient that some entertainment should be got up at Rutledge. What should it be? The Masons were to have tableaux, and the Emersons' invitations were out for a _fête champêtre_. What was left for them to do? "Oh! a thousand things," exclaimed Josephine, with sparkling eyes. "A ball, or private theatricals, or a masquerade--anything, in fact, would be delightful." "A plain ball would never do after the fête and tableaux," said Ella Wynkar, decidedly. "Whatever you do, I beg, don't let those simpering Mason girls get ahead of you," suggested Grace. "They've been rehearsing their tableaux for a fortnight, and they mean to have them perfect." "What do you think of theatricals, then?" said Mr. Rutledge. "We can send for dresses, etc., from town, and we have plenty of time to rehearse. And, Arbuthnot, I know yon have all the requisites for a manager, and could bring out a play in excellent style." "You will be astonished to find the amount of dramatic talent undeveloped in this company," exclaimed Victor. "All the improvement I can suggest is, that the play represented should be written for the occasion. Now, if I might be allowed, I should propose that Miss Wynkar and Captain McGuffy be named to write the play, and Ellerton, as the man of the most cultivated literary taste, and soundest judgment, be appointed to revise and correct it. The éclat of producing such an entirely original play, you must see, would be immense." The irony of his speech was too broad for even the Wynkars to miss, and Ella colored angrily, while Ellerton, who was not a proficient at repartee, moved uneasily on his chair, and looked very wretched, till Mr. Rutledge came to the rescue with a few words, that, administering the keenest, quietest, politest possible reprimand to Victor for his impertinence, reinstated the objects of his ridicule in complacency again, and quite changed the face of the day. Victor bit his lip; these two liked each other less and less every day, it was but too evident. Victor's overbearing and tyrannical disposition found an incessant obstacle to its gratification in the iron will and better disciplined, but equally unyielding character of Mr. Rutledge. I tried in vain to remove Victor's prejudices against his host; but there was an angry flash of his eye whenever the subject was mentioned, that did not encourage me to continue it. And it was equally impossible not to resent Mr. Rutledge's misapprehension of Victor's character. In everything he misjudged him, and, it was evident, put down to the worst motive much that was only hasty and ill-judged. While my reason told me that he was often to blame, the injustice and harshness of Mr. Rutledge's judgment often roused my sympathy in his behalf, and that dangerous sentiment, pity, was creeping insensibly into my heart. He was, it was true, a man of no religious principle, but I had come to regard that as the inevitable result of his foreign education, and in no way his own fault. Then there was a light, careless tone in his conversation, a disregard of others, an almost imperceptible sneer, that a month ago I should have looked upon with alarm and distrust. But the subtle flattery of his devotion, the contrast between his manner and that of Mr. Rutledge, and, indeed, of all the others, had melted away these prejudices, and now I hardly saw, and only half blamed, the self-willed impetuosity and impatient sneering of the young foreigner, who, there could be no doubt, was daily becoming more unpopular among the party at Rutledge. Our host had never liked him; Miss Churchill could not be expected to continue her favor, now that he took no pains to conceal what was the attraction for him at Rutledge; Grace had never cordially liked any one in her life, but Victor had been rather a favorite, till he had put down her sauciness, on one or two occasions, in such a manner as to make her as vehement in her dislike as her lazy nature rendered her capable of being; Ella Wynkar hated him--he laughed at her French, and never omitted an opportunity of turning her pretensions into ridicule; Ellerton had formerly been very much infatuated with the young Frenchman, who had carried all before him in society, and been so general a favorite, but Ellerton was too tempting a subject for Victor's humor, and he was very careless of his popularity; even with Phil and the captain he was growing indifferent and distant. Mrs. Churchill alone showed no change in her feeling toward him; he was only acting the part she meant him to act, and fulfilling the design she had in inviting him to accompany us. These feelings, and their causes, so apparent on a retrospective study of them, were, of course, by the restraints of good breeding, and the relative positions of all parties, studiously concealed, and only to be guessed at in unguarded moments. "You are not going to follow the dramatic corps, I hope," said Victor, with a curl of his lip, as the party moved off to the library, to look over some plays and consult about the proposed entertainment. "They would have asked me if they had wanted me, I suppose," I answered, reddening a little. "Then, is there any law to prevent our staying where we are?" he asked, throwing himself back in the deep window seat opposite me. And there we passed the live-long morning, Victor idly twisting the worsteds of my work, and idly gazing out upon the storm, or in upon my face, and idly talking in his low, rich voice, and holding me, against my will, enthralled. The portraits on the walls looked down upon us with a dumb intelligence, almost a warning sternness; the rain tried to weary us out; the old clock struck the passing hours distinctly; the sound of voices in the library, after a long while, died away, and then the party passed through the hall and into the parlor, and Josephine's voice, at the piano succeeded, and then a dance, but still we did not move. What was the spell that kept me there, I could not have told. Whatever it was, it was tightening the toils around me, and shutting me off more hopelessly than ever from all paths but the one I had almost involuntarily taken. It appeared at dinner, that the theatricals were given up, owing, principally, I could not but suspect, to the want of harmony that has characterized all the attempts at private theatricals that I have ever witnessed, no one, under any circumstances, having been known to be pleased with the rôle assigned to him or her, and all manner of discontent prevailing on all sides. But Mr. Rutledge, with great discretion, put it upon other grounds--the short time that intervened for preparing them, etc. It was agreed that patriotism and propriety both pointed to the Fourth of July as the appropriate day, and a _bal masqué_ was determined on instead of the theatricals. It was to be the most delightful affair. Mr. Rutledge had promised to ask everybody, to send to town for dresses, and to have the house so beautifully decorated. "Ah!" said Josephine with a ravishing smile, "Mr. Rutledge is the best, the kindest of men." Mr. Rutledge, starting from a fit of abstraction at that moment, certainly did not convey the idea of any very excessive kindness or goodness. The sternest frown contracted his brow, and in the cold rigidity of his face, one would never have looked for anything gentle or tender, and the expression that succeeded it under the influence of Josephine's smile, was bitter and cynical, even to the most indifferent observer. Rain-storms in June have a way of abating their violence toward evening, and breaking away enough to let the declining sun look for half an hour over the wet and shining earth, and make of the desolate place the freshest and most beautiful of Edens, cheering the silenced birds into song, and the wet flowers into perfume, and the breaking clouds into yellow lustre. A whole fair sunshiny day is nothing to it. The sudden brilliancy and freshness are worth all the gloom that have made them so dazzling. There was not a tree in the park that afternoon, not a flower on the lawn, that did not shine and sparkle with a brightness it had never worn before. There was a fine coolness too, in the fresh wind, soft and June-like as it was. "Is it too late for a ride?" asked Josephine, stepping out on the piazza where we were all sitting. "A ride on horseback would be delightful, would it not?" "Delightful!" echoed Ella Wynkar. "It would be a capital thing," said Phil, rising. "I wonder how it is about saddle-horses--are there any fit for ladies in the stable, do you know?" "There are only two that would do for us ladies, Mr. Rutledge said," answered Josephine, "but several that you gentlemen could ride, and I think it would be the nicest thing in the world to have a brisk canter this fine afternoon. What do you say, Captain McGuffy?" "By all means," responded the captain. "I wonder where Mr. Rutledge is." "In the library," said Grace. "Then, Miss Josephine, you are the proper person to go and ask his permission. We know for whose sweet sake all obstacles are overcome, and if you ask, we are sure of our ride." "Yes," said Ellerton, who was excellent in chorus. "Yes, there is no doubt he'll have the stables emptied in five minutes, if you want a ride." Phil bit his lip, as Josephine, with a very conscious look, sprang up, saying, "Absurd! It's only because you are afraid to ask yourselves that you want me to go." And with a coquettish shrug of the shoulders, and a very arch laugh, she ran through the hall and disappeared at the library door. In a few moments she reappeared, and accompanied by Mr. Rutledge, joined us on the piazza. There was a subdued tone of triumph in her voice as she said, "The horses will be at the door in five minutes, good people, not a moment to be lost. Who is going?" "I am sorry," said Mr. Rutledge, "that there are but two horses fit for the ladies' use. There are enough, however, for all the gentlemen. Mr. Viennet, you will find that chestnut mare you were admiring yesterday, very good under the saddle." Victor bowed, and, looking at me, said, "What do you ride?" "I do not mean to ride this afternoon," I said quickly. "Come, Ella!" exclaimed Josephine, "it will take us some minutes to put on our habits," and the two friends flew upstairs. Mr. Rutledge approaching me, said in a low tone, "Will you lend Madge to your cousin or Miss Wynkar if you do not ride yourself?" "It is a matter of very small moment to me who rides Madge," I returned haughtily. "You cannot imagine that I attach any serious meaning to the jest of last fall." "That's as you will," he said, carelessly turning away. I had no desire to see the equestrians set off, so going into the hall for my garden hat and a light shawl, I was stealing quietly out at the north door, when on the threshold I met Mr. Rutledge and Grace, who had come around the piazza and were just entering. "Where are you going?" said that young person inquisitively. "I have not quite made up my mind," I answered, trying to pass her. "You're going to walk, and I have a great mind to go with you," she said, intercepting my exit. "You will excuse me for saying I had rather not have you," I returned shortly. "Sweet pet! Its temper don't improve," she said provokingly. "You are an insufferable child," I exclaimed, vexed beyond endurance, and, pushing her aside, I hurried through the doorway. But the fringe of her shawl caught in the bracelet on my arm, and, much against my will, I had to turn back to release it. Grace enjoyed my vexation unspeakably, and did not assist very materially in unfastening the fringe, which, if the truth must be told, was a very difficult task for my trembling and impatient fingers. The touch of Mr. Rutledge's cold, steady hand on my arm, as he stooped to help me, added tenfold to my impatience. "Break it," I exclaimed, "you'll never be able to untangle it." "Oh that mysterious bracelet!" cried Grace. "You'd never tell me where it came from." "It is a perfect torment," I exclaimed, trying to wrench the long silk fringe from the links in which it had become hopelessly twisted. "It catches in everything." "Then why do you wear it, may I ask?" said Mr. Rutledge, coolly. "Only because I cannot help myself." "Can't I assist you?" asked Victor, who had followed me. "Very possibly," said Mr. Rutledge. "It is rather a delicate affair and requires patience, more, I confess, than I have at command." "And some strength. Can't you break this thing, Mr. Viennet? I cannot unclasp it, and it annoys me beyond endurance." "I have no doubt that Mr. Viennet can," said Mr. Rutledge, laying the arm, bracelet, and entangled fringe in Victor's hand. He tried in vain for a moment to disengage the fringe or unclasp the bracelet, while Grace drawled, "I advise you to hurry, Mr. Viennet; my cousin bites her lip as if she were desperately angry." "I cannot break it," said Victor, "without hurting you, of course." "No matter for that! I am so anxious to have it off, that I should not mind a little pain." Victor shook his head. "Do not ask me to do it." "Perhaps I should be less tender," said Mr. Rutledge, bending over it again, and the frail links yielded instantly to the vice-like grasp of his strong hand. A cry escaped me as the bracelet snapped, and fell on the ground at my feet. "You are hurt!" exclaimed Victor, starting forward and catching my hand over which the blood from the wrist was trickling. "It is nothing," I said, pulling it away, and wrapping my shawl around it. "It is only scratched a little." "Not very deep, I fancy," said Mr. Rutledge; while Grace, shrugging her shoulders, exclaimed, as she entered the house: "Well! you are the oddest set of people! All three of you as pale as ashes, and as much in earnest as if it were a matter of life and death! Mr. Rutledge, I shall coax you to tell me all about it." "About what?" asked Mr. Rutledge, following her. And as I caught Grace's saucy voice, and Mr. Rutledge's quick, sarcastic laugh, as they passed down the hall, my very breath came quick and short, under the maddening pressure of a pain I had never felt before. Pique, jealousy, vexation, I had known enough of, but this, that dashed all other passions to the dust, and held me gasping in such terrible subjection, was nearer to a deadly sin. It shot so keen through every vein, it burned so madly in my brain, that for a moment, pride and reason were stunned; and, regardless of Victor's eyes fixed on my face, with a low cry of pain, I pressed my hand to my forehead, then flew down the steps, and vanished from his sight in the shrubbery. He could hardly have followed me if he had chosen; I was out of sight of the house before he could have realized that I had left him. The cool, fresh wind in my face only allayed the pain enough to give me fresh strength to fly from what, alas! could not be left behind. The still, unruffled expanse of the lake, as I reached its banks, gave me that sort of a pang, that it gives one to wake up from a short troubled sleep, when death and trouble have come in the night, and find the sunshine flooding the room. It was so utterly out of tune, so calmly impassive while such hot passion was raging in my heart--so smiling and indifferent while I was throbbing with such acute pain, that I sprang away from the sight of it, and hurried on into the woods, never pausing till I had reached the pine grove at the head of the lake. It was better there; the pine-trees moan when there is no breath to stir them--sunshine and singing-birds penetrate their solemn depths but rarely; and at last I stopped, panting and trembling, on a knoll that rose abruptly in the midst of this forest sanctuary. I sunk down on the slippery ground at the foot of a tall pine, and leaning my throbbing temples on my hands, tried to think and reason. Do the wild flowers and mountain herbage raise their heads and meet the sunshine and shake off the blight, an hour after the burning lava has swept over their frail beauty? Thought, reason, faith, were as impossible at that moment to me, as growth, and feeling, and verdure are to them. I did not think--I could not reason; some hateful words rang in my ears, and a wild, confused purpose mingled with the chaos that passion had made in my mind; but beyond that I was incapable of thought. An hour, perhaps, passed so; the sunset was fast fading out of the sky, when the sound of voices through the woods struck my ear, and listening, I recognized the tones of the returning riding-party. There was a bridle-path, I knew, just below this knoll, through which they were returning from Norbury, and springing up, I gathered my light muslin dress about me, and pressing through the thicket that lay between it and me, waited for them to pass. A low fence ran across the ravine, and half-kneeling behind this, I watched for them with eager eyes. At last they came, defiling past me one by one, through the narrow path, the gentlemen first, then Ella Wynkar, and in a moment after, Madge Wildfire's glossy head appeared through the opening, so near that I might have patted her arched neck, or felt the breath from her dilated nostrils, and touched the gloved hand that held the reins so tightly in her impatient mouth. Josephine's dark cheek glowed with exercise and excitement, and as she sat, with her head half-turned, in attention to the low tones of the horseman who followed her closely, I could not help acknowledging, with a sharp pang, the beauty that I had never before appreciated. And her companion saw it too; his stern face softened as he watched the radiant smiles chase each other over her varying mouth; his eye, restless with an impatient fire, fell with pleasure on her eager, attentive face. He was thinking--how well I knew it! A thousand devils whispered it in my ear--he was thinking, "this face is gentle and womanly--it turns to me for pleasure--it is bright and gay--no storms sweep over it; it has never repulsed and disappointed me. Shall I end the doubt, and say, it is the face that shall be the loadstar of my future, the sunshine and pleasure of my life?" The horses threaded their way daintily down the narrow ravine--the pleasant voices died away in the distance; I raised myself from my bending attitude, and with blanched cheeks and parted lips, strained my gaze to catch the last trace of them. If the assembled tribes of earth and air had been there to see, I could not have brought one tinge of color to my pallid face, nor taken the deadly stare out of my eyes, I could only have done as I did now, when suddenly I found I was not alone, utter a faint exclamation, and turning sick and giddy, lean against the fence for support. The stealthy, cat-like tread of the intruder brought him to my side in a moment. I knew, from the instant I met the glance of his basilisk eyes, that he had been reading my face to some purpose--that he knew the miserable story written on it. "You look agitated," said Dr. Hugh, bending toward me obsequiously. "May I ask if anything has happened to distress you?" His tones were so hateful that I cried quickly: "No, nothing so much as seeing you;" and, springing across the low barrier, I hurried down the path. I knew he was following me stealthily; nothing but that fear would have driven me back to the house again. The path was narrow and irregular; other paths branched off from it, and before I got within sight of the lake again, I was thoroughly bewildered, and in the gathering twilight, the huge trees took weird forms, the "paths grew dim," and no familiar landmark appeared to guide me. Pausing in fright and bewilderment, I crouched for a moment behind a clump of trees, and listened. I had eluded my pursuer; in a second's time, I heard his soft step treading cautiously and swiftly down the path that I had inadvertently left. With a sigh of relief, I looked about me, and finding that the lake was just visible through an opening in the trees, knew my whereabouts immediately, and only waited for Dr. Hugh to be well out of the way to start across the park toward the house. Several minutes elapsed before I ventured to rise from my hiding-place; listening again intently, I was about to spring from the thicket, and effect my escape across the park, when, with a start of fear, I heard a heavy step crashing among the underbrush in the direction from which we had come; a heavy step, and then a pause. My heart seemed to stand still as I waited to hear more. The next sound was a low whistle; a long pause, and then the signal was repeated. No answer came; and with a low and surly oath, the new-comer advanced nearer to where I crouched. Through a gap in the thicket, I could see him as he approached, and even by this dusky light, I recognized the thickset figure and slouching gait of the man whom Victor had so wantonly insulted on the evening of our arrival--of whose enmity there could be no reasonable doubt. It was not a comfortable thought, but certainly some evil purpose must have brought him here; and for whom, too, was that signal given? It seemed almost incredible that such a spirit of revenge should possess itself of such a sluggish, low-born nature; yet I could not doubt that it was some design of revenge that kept him lurking about the neighborhood. I knew that Victor would be in peril if he were abroad to-night. And it was not comfortable, either, to remember that it was my fault that he had given the insult; for my protection that he had incurred this malice. How should I ever forgive myself if any evil came of it? Victor was my only friend at Rutledge; I could not but be grateful; the recollection of a thousand kindnesses started up at the thought of the danger I had involved him in, and I almost forgot that now I shared it. Motionless and breathless, I saw him pass within two feet of me, stop, whistle again, and then, after a pause, throwing himself at full length on the ground, with his face toward the park, within a few yards of where I was, lie waiting for I did not dare to think what. Victor, I was certain, would be somewhere about the grounds, watching for my return; this direction, sooner or later, he would inevitably take. Moment after moment crept on; every movement of the stranger--even his heavy breathing--were as distinct as if he had been within reach of my hand, and the least motion on my part--the faintest rustle of my dress, or of the branches of the thicket--would, of course, be as audible to him, and most dangerous to me; indeed, if he were to turn this way, I could hardly hope to escape detection, for my light drapery, only half hid behind the dark thicket, would inevitably betray me. How long this would last--how determined he could be in his vigil--I dreaded to conjecture. None but Victor was likely to come to my assistance, and that was just the very worst of all. There was still enough light left in the west to distinguish, as I looked eagerly that way, that a figure, from the direction of the house, was crossing the lawn toward us. I turned sick with fear as I recognized, bounding before the rapidly-approaching walker, Victor's constant companion, little Tigre; and this, no doubt, was Victor. I alone could warn him of the danger that awaited him; but, faint and almost paralyzed with fear, I had not strength nor courage to stir. The villain beside me, less quick-sighted, had not yet discovered his advance. He was not yet half-way across the park; there might be time. I made a desperate resolve, and, clearing the copse at one bound, flew, as only terror and desperation can fly. I heard the startled oath the man uttered, and the cracking of the birch boughs as he regained his feet; I heard him spring forward in pursuit, but by that time I was out of the wood and on the lawn, and in another instant I had reached my goal. Catching his arm, I exclaimed vehemently, forgetting everything in my terror: "Don't go near that horrid wood, _Victor!_ Come back, as you value your life!" I was too much terrified to await his reply; but, calling to him to follow me, I ran on at the top of my speed, and never paused till I had reached the terrace, and, sinking down on the stone steps, I covered my face with my hands, panting and exhausted. Raising my head as I heard his step beside me, I began: "You don't know how narrow an escape you have had! That"---- "You have made a mistake," interrupted my companion. "It is not _Victor_." With an exclamation of amazement and chagrin, I sprung from him up the steps. I had made a miserable mistake, indeed; it was Mr. Rutledge. CHAPTER XXVII. "But 'mid his mirth, 'twas often strange How suddenly his cheer would change, His look o'ercast and lower-- Even so 'twas strange how, evermore, Soon as the passing pang was o'er, Forward he rushed, with double glee, Into the stream of revelry." SCOTT. The _fête champêtre_ proved a success; it was a perfect day; the house, a very fine modern one, and the grounds, had appeared to the best advantage; the dancing tent had been just full enough, the toilettes lovely, and the whole thing so well got up and successful, that Josephine began half to repent not having decided upon such an entertainment for the Fourth instead of the proposed masquerade. "This is just the place for a fête," she said, as we were all sitting in the parlor next morning "talking it over." "This lawn is twice the size of the Emersons', and this piazza, inclosed and decorated, would be the prettiest thing in the world. Indeed, there is no doubt in my mind but that it would have been an infinitely handsomer affair than theirs, if we had decided upon a _fête_." "It would not have been dignified, Miss Josephine," said Mr. Rutledge, with a smile, "to have followed so closely in their steps, and I do not think we need have any fears for the masquerade." "Not the smallest," said Mrs. Churchill. "With Mr. Rutledge as leader, and Josephine as aid-de-camp, I am certain there is no such word as fail. This absurd child," she continued, bending gracefully over her pretty daughter, "this absurd child, Mr. Rutledge, enters so with all her heart into whatever she undertakes, that I have to laugh at her continually. She can think of nothing now, but this masquerade, and only this morning"---- "Now, mamma!" remonstrated Josephine. "Only this morning," her mother went on, "she said to me, 'I was so worried, mamma, I couldn't sleep last night, for Mr. Rutledge has trusted to my taste about the decorations, and if he should be disappointed, I should be perfectly miserable.' Did you ever hear of anything so silly?" she continued, with a light caress. "Never," said Mr. Rutledge, looking admiringly at Josephine's averted conscious face. "Am I so very terrible, then?" "No," said Josephine with a pretty shyness, "oh no! but then, you know--you see--I should be so sorry to disappoint or displease you. I know you wouldn't say a word, but I should be perfectly miserable if you were not pleased." "Where are you going, Phil?" asked Grace, as her cousin strode out into the hall. "Anywhere, Gracie," I heard him say, under his breath. "It doesn't make much difference where." Poor Phil! There was a sharp pain at his honest heart, I knew. I watched him from the window, as with hasty strides he crossed the lawn, and disappeared into the woods. But Josephine didn't see; Mr. Rutledge was sketching a plan for the decorations, and she was leaning over the paper with fixed attention. "If those people are coming to lunch," said Ella Wynkar, getting up from a tête-à-tête chat with the captain, "it is time we were dressed to receive them. Come, Josephine, it would never be forgiven, if we should not be ready." "Yes," exclaimed Mr. Rutledge, starting up and looking at his watch, "I had forgotten about that. They will be here in half an hour. Miss Josephine, did you ever effect your toilet in half an hour, in your life?" "You shall see!" cried Josephine, dancing out of the room. Mrs. Churchill followed, with a laughing apology for her daughter's wild spirits; since she had been at this delightful place, she had, she declared, been like a bird let loose. "The linnet born within the cage, That never knew the summer woods," I longed to say to my aunt, would hardly know how to enjoy them. The miserable prisoner that had spent all its life, in narrow cramped limits, on the sill of a city window, hopped on a smooth perch, and eaten canary-seed and loaf-sugar since its nativity, would hardly be at home in wide, sunny fields, or "groves deep and high," would shudder to clasp with its tender claws the rough bark of the forest twigs, and would be doubtful of the flavor of a wild strawberry, and think twice before it would stoop to drink of the roaring mountain-stream. It would, I fancy, before nightfall, creep miserably back to its cage, as the fittest, safest, most comfortable place for its narrowed and timid nature. "So!" said Victor, looking at me with a curl on his handsome lip, as the drawing-room was vacated by all but ourselves. "Are you going to spend an hour of this splendid fresh morning in making yourself fine?" "Not if I know myself intimately!" I exclaimed, cramming my work, thimble, and scissors into my workbox, and springing up. "I do not fancy devoting three hours to those tiresome Mason girls nor their horse-and-dog brothers. I shall never be missed, and I am going to the village for a walk." "Why to the village?" said Victor, following me, and reaching down my flat hat from the deer's horns that it had been decorating in the hall. "Why will you not come to the lake and let me row you up to the pines?" "I ought to have paid my devoirs to the housekeeper at the Parsonage the very day I arrived," I answered, as we descended the steps. "She is a great friend of mine, and she will be hurt if I neglect her any longer. Indeed, it's a very pleasant walk, and you'll be repaid for taking it, if we should find Mr. Shenstone at home. He is so kind, and the very best man in the world." "That's the clergyman?" said Victor, making a grimace. "I don't affect clergymen, as a general thing, but for your sake I will try to be favorably impressed; your friends I always try to admire; our host, for instance, who just passed down the terrace, without so much as a look toward us, though he could not possibly have avoided seeing us. Why do you bite your lip?" continued he, watching me narrowly. "I cannot learn the signs of your face. Pale and red, smiling and frowning, like any April day. There! what chord have I touched now? The thought gave you actual pain." "Nothing!" I exclaimed, hurriedly. "There's Stephen on the lawn. I want to talk to him," and I ran across to where he stood, leaning on his rake, watching us. While I talked to him, Victor threw himself upon the heap of new-cut hay at a little distance from us, and played with Tigre. I saw that Stephen's eyes often wandered to where he lay, his hat off, the wind lifting the dark hair from his handsome face. "If I might make so bold," said Stephen, in a low tone, as I was turning away, "has that young gentleman lived long in this country?" "I do not know, really," I said, with a laugh. "Shall I ask him, Stephen?" "No, Miss, I shouldn't like you to ask him; but I should like to know." "I'll find out for you sometime," I said, as I nodded a good bye and rejoined Victor. It was, as he said, a splendid day--all sultriness dissipated by the strong wind. We had a beautiful walk through the woods, though I couldn't quite forget "our rustic friend," as Victor called his unknown enemy; but he made such a joke of it that it was impossible to have much feeling of alarm connected with it. The village, however, he seemed not to care to visit. "Had I not better wait for you here?" he said, lingering as we passed out of the woods into the lane that led to the village. "No, indeed," I said, perversely; "if you stay here I shall go home another way." He laughed, but rather uneasily, and followed me. I bent my head so that my hat hid my face as we entered the low gate of the Parsonage, for I dreaded Victor's inquiring eyes just then. I preceded him down the little path bordered with flowers, and, stepping on the porch, raised the knocker. We waited for several minutes, and still no answer; so, telling my companion to follow me, I passed on into the study. "What a cool, shady, pleasant room!" said Victor, as he gave me a seat and threw himself into another. "I am sure I could write a sermon myself against the pomps and vanities if I had such a sweet, calm retreat to repose in meantime." "Pshaw!" he exclaimed impatiently, "what do these men know of temptation, who have never felt a passion stronger than this summer wind, nor seen a rood beyond their own study windows! These calm, slow natures, bred in the retirement and quiet of the country, can preach, perhaps with profit, to their humble flocks; but to men who have been in the thick of the fight, never." I shook my head. "You will not say that after you have seen Mr. Shenstone; but here he comes." The clergyman stood for a moment in the doorway before he entered, his tall, stooping figure nearly filling it. I advanced to meet him, and Victor rose. The room was so dark that at first he did not recognize me, and, of course, saw but indistinctly my companion. But as I spoke, he extended his hand cordially, and gave us both a kind reception. "I have been expecting a visit from you," he said, sitting down beside me, and speaking in the quiet tone that was habitual with him, and looking at me with his kind smile. "You have been here some days, have you not?" "Yes, sir, and I've meant to come; but there has been something going on every day that has interfered, and I have supposed every day, sir, that you would be there." "Ah!" he said, with the slightest perceptible fading of the smile, "I have been so long out of gay company that I should not be at home there now. The quiet of my little village suits me best." I knew this would be a confirmation of Victor's judgment, so I hurried on to say, "But, sir, you sometimes go among gay people. I am sure you are often at Windy Hill, and at the Emersons, are you not?" "Sometimes--oh! yes; but it seems different with Rutledge. It would be to me," he went on in a lower tone, "unspeakably grating and painful to see that place throw off the gloom and silence that it has worn for twenty years--twenty years and more. But you cannot be expected to understand this. I had forgotten you were nearly a child as yet. You only know regret and sorrow by name, I suppose." There must have been an involuntary denial of this on my face, for he looked at me attentively for a moment; then, in a tone that had a little sadness in it, he said: "But you are older than you were last fall, my child, I see; one takes quick strides sometimes toward maturity after one has crossed the threshold. This little girl and I, Mr. Viennet, were very good friends last year and I hope that the world has not separated us quite, though it has changed one of us a little, I fear." I could not keep back the sudden tears that rushed into my eyes; the tone of sympathy so strange to my ears exorcised the evil tempers that had swayed me so long. If it had not been for Victor's presence, I should have thrown off the reserve and silence that I had so long maintained toward all around me, and have saved myself perhaps from years of misery. Only Mr. Shenstone's compassionate eyes saw the emotion that flashed through mine; murmuring some excuse about finding Mrs. Arnold, I quitted the room. I found her in the apartment that had been my sick-room, busy as ever with her silent, rapid needle. Throwing my arms around her neck, I kissed her affectionately. "Why have you not been before?" she said, quietly. "Because I haven't done anything right or pleasant since I came," I returned, with a little bitterness. Mrs. Arnold shook her head. "Mr. Shenstone would tell you not to let that go on." "Don't!" I exclaimed, with an impatient gesture; "don't tell me what I ought to do--don't talk to me about my duty. I am sick and tired of it all. I want to forget all about everything that makes me miserable, and only be petted and made much of," and, throwing myself down on a low stool at her feet, I drew her hand around my neck. "You were always willful," she said, sadly; "but you used to like to hear about your duty." "I don't now; I've got over that. I shall never come to the Parsonage if you talk to me about it. We don't have time for duty at Rutledge now-a-days. Oh! Mrs. Arnold, it seems like a different place. Why don't you come and see how fine the house looks. There's to be a masquerade on the Fourth. You should come and see how beautifully it will be decorated, and how pretty all our dresses will be." The hand around my neck was quickly withdrawn; with a sudden start, she rose and walked nervously about the room, the color fluttering in her cheeks, and her hand passing rapidly over her smooth, grey hair. "Yes, yes," she said at last, sitting down and trying to command herself. "I know it is all right; you are young and you ought to enjoy yourself. I hope you are happy there." "You need not imagine that I am!" I exclaimed bitterly. "You may be sure I have enough to keep me down, and make me wretched, gay as they all are. But I'm not going to talk about it," I said, interrupting myself, "for you'll begin to tell me how I ought to bear it, and that I can't listen to now. Tell me how the school goes on. Does the new teacher work well, and do the children like her?" "Very much," said Mrs. Arnold, relapsing slowly into her ordinary manner. "I should like you to go with me some day to see them." The archives of the Parish School, and many minor matters of interest, served to occupy our tongues, if not our minds, for the next half hour, and it was only the sudden recollection of having left Mr. Shenstone and Victor, two entire strangers, at each other's mercy, that brought an end to the interview. Starting up, I said: "It is time for me to go. Come down, Mrs. Arnold, and see whether you think Mr. Viennet as handsome as Kitty does." She very reluctantly followed me downstairs, and waited in the porch to see us, and say good bye as we should pass out. I found Victor and Mr. Shenstone talking. Victor, it seemed to me, treated his entertainer with several degrees more of reverence than I had imagined he could either feel or affect toward any one. Mr. Shenstone's manner was rather less tranquil than ordinary, though, it struck me. He accompanied us to the door, and looked very earnestly at Victor as we came into the stronger light. "I shall hope for the pleasure of another visit before you leave the country, Mr. Viennet," he said slowly, as we parted at the threshold. "I shall not fail to do myself the honor," returned Victor, in a manner less French, and more sincere than usual, bowing very low. "Isn't he handsome?" I whispered, in a careless aside to Mrs. Arnold, as we passed her on the porch. But to my surprise, she had started back, with the same dilated, agitated look in her eyes, that she had worn upstairs, and the fluttering color coming and going on her face as she watched Victor, while her pale lips opened, but no sound passed them. I stared in wonder, but she drew back hastily, and disappeared in the house. "You will have a pleasant walk," said Mr. Shenstone, thoughtfully, as he watched us down the path. "I'm afraid not," muttered Victor, between his teeth, as at the gate Dr. Hugh joined us with a most affable bow. He proposed to accompany us on our way, he said, if agreeable to us. He was going as far as the Park, to see that delicate-looking young Mr. Wynkar, to whom he had just been summoned. "Over-eaten himself, no doubt," said Victor, impatiently, "Ah?" said the doctor, nodding intelligently, "is that his trouble? I fancied as much. Your pale, cadaverous-looking people generally are the very mischief among the provisions." Victor's lip curled; I could see he chafed under this familiarity. Why does he endure it, I thought. His imperious temper brooks no annoyance from those around him; daily there is some new evidence of his self-will and determination; why does he so tamely submit to what, there wants no penetration to see, is galling him to distraction. It was almost impossible to realize that this was my gay, sparkling companion of an hour ago. Pale and abstracted he walked beside me, answering, at random, the doctor's many questions--gnawing his lip at the occasional familiarities of his manner, but offering no affront or slight. Our constrained and uncomfortable walk brought us to the house just as the Masons were getting into their carriage. The whole party stood on the piazza, and the approach for us was anything but a pleasant thing. "Courage," whispered Victor, seeing me falter as every eye turned toward us. "Be as queenly as you can. You had a right to go; there was no intimation given you that there was to be company at lunch. It would be cowardly indeed to mind _their_ slights." Victor had touched the right chord; the color flashed back into my cheeks, and with as queenly a step as he could have desired, I advanced to meet the strangers. "You must excuse my cousin," cried Grace, interrupting our rather formal greetings. "She never allows anything to interfere with her rural tastes, and as she is addicted to tête-à-tête rows and lonely rambles, we are quite cut off from her society." The Misses Mason looked at me as if they were afraid of me, the Messrs. Mason as if they would have been, if they had not been such brave men. I do not know exactly what I said, it was all a kind of dream, I was so intensely worked up; but whatever my answer was, it must have been clever, and a good retort, for Victor's clear laugh rang in the air, and the young ladies tittered, and looked at Grace to see how she bore it, and the least ponderous of the two young gentlemen slapped the captain on the back with a low: "By George! She's not to be put down! I like her spirit." A month ago, perhaps, the interview that I had to go through with my aunt after the departure of the guests, would have made me quite miserable; but now, it was utterly powerless. We were openly at war, and no hostile message could alter the state of affairs. I could have laughed in her face, for all the impression that it made on me, but of course I preserved the external respect I owed her, and neither by look nor word betrayed how indifferent a matter it was to me whether she approved or dissented. "A word with you, my friend," I heard the doctor say to Victor, passing his arm through his and leading him off toward the terrace. Victor set his lips firmly together, and his face darkened; there was a storm brewing; the wily doctor was going too far, if he did not wish to feel the wrath of it. For half an hour, I watched them from my window; they had gone to a retired walk in the shrubbery, where only at a certain turn I could catch sight of them. Victor's face, whenever I could see it, was white and passionate, and his gestures showed that he had dashed aside the restraint he had set upon himself. His was not an impotent and childish anger either; it was the strong wrath of a strong man, snared and trapped, exasperated and tortured by an enemy wily and powerful, with some secret hold upon his victim, that gave his weakness and meanness the strength of a giant. I watched, fascinated and terrified, for every glimpse of the two faces, as the two men strode up and down the alley. If Victor's tormentor had seen his face as I did, surely he would have paused. How could confidence and pride so blind a man as to make him insensible to the danger of rousing to such a pitch, such a fierce southern nature? They had blinded him, however, for Dr. Hugh's face expressed nothing but cunning and triumph, guarded and subdued by habitual self-control. That night, as we were separating for our rooms, Victor announced carelessly that his pleasant visit was nearly at an end. He had that day received letters that made it necessary for him to sail in next week's steamer, and he should have to tear himself away from Rutledge in a day or two. The color went and came in my face as I met Mr. Rutledge's eye; Victor studiously avoided looking at me, and the others were too much absorbed in the announcement to heed me. "Why, Victor!" exclaimed Phil, heartily, stung perhaps with some slight self-reproach for his recent neglect; "why, old fellow, we shan't know what to do without you! It's a shame to break up a pleasant party like this. Make it the next steamer, and stay over another week, and we'll all go together." "Do, I beg of you, Victor," echoed Ellerton. "And you couldn't go without that day's woodcock shooting we've been talking of," said the captain. "The law's up next week, you know." "And you've forgotten the masquerade!" exclaimed Josephine. "And the Masons' tableaux!" cried Ella. "And my cousin's feelings," added Grace, slily. "And what of your own, my pretty Miss Grace?" said Victor, carrying the war so abruptly over into her territory that she had no time to collect her wits for a retort. "My own heart is broken at the idea of leaving you. Are you perfectly unmoved at the sight of my sorrow? I shall never believe in woman again." "I do not know," said Mr. Rutledge, "what other inducements we can hold out of sufficient power to detain Mr. Viennet longer. If there is anything so imperative as he suggests, however, I imagine that our persuasions will be thrown away." "Quite thrown away, sir, I regret to admit," said Victor, with a low and significant bow. "I can enjoy your hospitality no longer than Wednesday morning." CHAPTER XXVIII. "And as the dove, to far Palmyra flying From where her native founts of Antioch beam, Weary, exhausted, longing, panting, sighing, Lights sadly at the desert's bitter stream, "So many a soul, o'er life's drear desert faring, Love's pure, congenial spring unfound, unquaffed, Suffers--recoils--then, thirsty and despairing Of what it would, descends, and sips the nearest draught." "You are cruel," said Victor, in a low tone, as I followed the rest of the party into the library after dinner. "This is my last day, and you will not give me a moment." "Who's for a ride? Mr. Rutledge wants to know," said Grace, coming in from the piazza. "Not I, for one," exclaimed Ella, throwing herself back on the sofa. "I'm going to save myself for this evening." "And you, too, Josephine, dear," said her mother, "had better not tire yourself any more. You will be perfectly fagged if you go to drive, and you want to keep yourself fresh for the Masons." "Aren't you made of sterner stuff?" whispered Victor. "Aren't you equal to a drive and a party in the same twenty-four hours? It is heavy work, I know, but your constitution seems a good one." "I think I'll venture," I said, following Grace into the hall. "There's Kitty on the stairs. Mr. Viennet, tell her to bring me my bonnet, please." Kitty was only too glad to obey Mr. Viennet's orders at any time, and she flew to get my things. "Get mine at the same time, young woman," drawled Grace. Before Kitty had returned from her double errand, the horses were at the door. "Our friends, the bays," said Victor. "But I think our host means to drive them himself. He has the reins in his hands." "Are these all your recruits, Miss Grace?" said Mr. Rutledge. "Yes. Josephine and Ella are afraid of their complexions, or their tempers, or something, and won't come, and I can't find Captain McGuffy or Phil." Victor stood ready to hand me into the carriage; I immediately took possession of the back seat. "This is a very selfish arrangement," said Victor, discontentedly, as Grace was about to follow me. "Miss Grace, you'd have a much better view of the country up there beside Mr. Rutledge." "And Grace might drive," I added; "she's so fond of horses." "As you please," she said, with a shrug. "I only go for ballast yet awhile, I know, and it's evident I'm not wanted here. Mr. Rutledge, do _you_ want me?" "Miss Grace, my happiness will not be complete till you comply with Mr. Viennet's disinterested suggestion;" and Grace mounted up beside him. I had undertaken, in that drive, more than I was quite equal to. I had brought myself into the position that I had been avoiding all day, a tête-à-tête of the most unequivocal kind with a man whose devotion it was impossible to ignore, and I had gone too far to retract entirely. It was cruel to treat him with coldness, now that we were on the eve of a long separation, and to repel with indifference the tenderness that shone in his eloquent eyes and faltered in his low tones. Our companions left us entirely to ourselves; my awkward attempts to draw them into a general conversation were all frustrated by Mr. Rutledge's cool indifference, and Grace's cool impertinence. The only time that Mr. Rutledge addressed a single remark voluntarily to me, was on our way home. We had driven around by Norbury, and were returning by way of the post-office. Suddenly drawing the reins, Mr. Rutledge stopped for an instant on the brow of the hill. "Do you remember this?" he said, abruptly, turning to me, and fixing his eyes on my face. Remember it? My cheek was crimson with the recollection then; the scene would never fade but with life and memory. It was just here, that, in the glow of the autumn sunset, he and I had parted on that ever-to-be-remembered evening, when my willfulness had led me into such danger. Hemlock Hollow lay dark and dense below us. Far off at the left, the mill and bridge that had served as a landmark then, gleamed in the setting sun. The forest foliage was greener and thicker now, but the picture was the same; I could never have got it out of my memory if I had tried; and yet, when Mr. Rutledge asked me that sudden question, a wicked lie, or as wicked a prevarication, rose to my lips. "Yes, I think I remember it. Didn't we go this way to the Emersons' the day of the fête?" "I think we did--yes," said Mr. Rutledge, with an almost imperceptible compression of the lips, as, bending forward, he startled the eager horses with a galling lash of the whip. Grace was quite white with alarm as we reached the village. "Mr. Rutledge, why _do_ you drive so frightfully fast? I am terrified to death." He drew the horses in a little, and, looking down at her, said: "Were we going fast? I am sorry I frightened you; for my part, I thought we crept." He paused a moment at the Parsonage gate. Mrs. Arnold was in the garden; Mr. Rutledge called out to her that he had brought Mr. Shenstone's letters and papers, but had not time to stop to see him. She approached the carriage, looking so lady-like and attractive, with her soft, white hair smoothed plain under her neat cap, and her clinging dark dress, that Victor said, involuntarily to me: "What an attractive-looking person! I never saw a gentler face." She was quite absorbed in attending to the message Mr. Rutledge left for Mr. Shenstone, and in her retiring modesty I do not think she ventured a look at us, till Victor, who had been watching her with interest, addressed some remark to her. She raised her eyes at the sound of his voice in a startled way, the same fluttering, frightened look transformed her quiet features, and trying in vain to command herself, she stammered some excuse, and turned away. "Strange!" exclaimed Victor, as we drove on. "Did you notice the odd way in which that person looked at me, both now and the other day?" "It _is_ strange," said Mr. Rutledge, thoughtfully. "Can you account for it in any way?" "In no way, sir. I do not think I ever enjoyed the happiness of meeting her before I visited this neighborhood; and since my residence in it, I cannot remember having done anything to have rendered myself at all an object of interest to her." "Who's that bowing so graciously to you?" interrupted Grace. "Oh! Ellerton's medical adviser." "By the way, Mr. Viennet," said Mr. Rutledge, turning rather abruptly to him, "the doctor tells me he is an old friend of yours." "Hardly a friend, if I understand the term aright," returned Victor, changing color slightly. "I knew him when he was studying medicine in the city two or three years ago. I lost sight of him entirely after that, and the renewal of our acquaintance has been attended with more zest on his part than on mine." "I believe he is rather apt to presume," said Mr. Rutledge, briefly, and there the conversation dropped. We were rather a taciturn party for the remainder of the way. Tea was waiting for us on our return, and after it, Grace and I had to make quite a hurried toilet for the party, the others being already dressed. "Aunt Edith, be kind enough to let me accompany you," I said, hurriedly, following her into the carriage, as we all stood, ready to start, on the stone walk below the piazza. Victor, with a look of disappointment, closed the door upon Mrs. Churchill, Grace, Ella, and myself. "Miss Josephine," I had heard Mr. Rutledge say, "it is such a lovely night, you will surely not refuse to let me drive you. It will be infinitely pleasanter than going in the carriage, I assure you." It was a very long and a very silent drive for the inmates of the carriage, to Windy Hill; and when we arrived there, we found the gentlemen of our party awaiting our coming with some impatience. The curtain would be raised in a moment, Phil said; the tableaux had been retarded as long as possible on our account. Where were Josephine and Mr. Rutledge? "Echo answers where," said Grace. "Taking the longest way, you may be sure, and making the most of this lovely moonlight." Mrs. Churchill did not seem very uneasy, and after a little consultation in the dressing-room, it was decided that we should not wait for them, but should all go down to the parlor. Accordingly we descended the stairs and entered the room _en masse_. It was quite full, and as they had only been waiting for our arrival, in a few moments the curtain rose. The tableaux were very fine, no doubt; there were murmurs of applause and exclamations of admiration from all the company. All were enthusiastically received, and some were encored. I tried to attend, but my recollection of them is only a confused jumble of convent and harem scenes, trials of queenly personages, and signings of death warrants and marriage contracts; Effie Deans, and Rebekah at the well, the eve of St. Bartholomew, and the landing of the Pilgrims. I tried to attend, both to the tableaux and to Victor's whispered conversation, but there was "something on my mind" as Kitty would have said, too engrossing to allow me to succeed. Do what I might, I still found myself listening eagerly for the sound of carriage wheels outside. Victor noticed my abstracted and nervous manner, and turned away at last with a half sigh. The curtain rose and fell many times, the audience admired, applauded and encored, with untiring enthusiasm, the little French clock above me on the mantelpiece, marked the departing minutes faithfully, and still they did not come. This was as unlike Josephine as it was unlike Mr. Rutledge. Something dreadful had happened, I was sure; something that would make the memory of this night forever terrible, and what a miserable mockery it was for us all to be laughing and talking so thoughtlessly. Mrs. Churchill was anxious, I could see, but she tried very faithfully to conceal it, and laughed and turned off all conjectures about them with her usual skillful nonchalance. Phil had walked the piazza as long as he could endure it, then throwing himself upon his horse, had galloped off in the direction of Rutledge. At last the parlors were cleared of all the appurtenances of the tableaux, and the dancing began. I was standing by a window listening--oh, how eagerly!--for the sound of wheels, when Victor approached me, and asked for the next dance. "Indeed you must excuse me, I cannot dance," I said almost impatiently, "ask somebody else." The look with which he turned away would have cut me to the heart, if my heart had not been too selfishly miserable to mind the pain of others. He did not dance, but leaning against the window opposite gazed abstractedly out. The gay music and merry voices grated perhaps as cruelly on his mood as on mine. I never had had less the command of myself; the persons who came up to talk to me, could make nothing of me; I could not talk, could not find a word of answer to their questions. At length a gentleman who had been standing near me for some minutes, said kindly: "These rooms are too warm for you, will you come on the piazza for a little while?" I gave him a grateful look, and taking his arm, followed him out into the fresh air. Several others were there before us, and accepting my cicerone's offer of a seat, I leaned against the vine-covered pillar, and looked intently down the road that led winding up from the lodge. My companion evidently understood and pitied my anxiety and did not attempt to make me talk. At last! there came a distant sound of wheels, and as they rapidly neared the house, I involuntarily covered my face with my hands. What might they bring? What news might I hear in another moment? "They are safe," said my companion, kindly. "Look, they are at the door." I looked up. Josephine, with a light laugh, was springing up the steps. Mr. Rutledge, who had thrown the reins to a servant, was following her. Mrs. Churchill and a group of others hurried out to meet them. "My dear," she exclaimed hurriedly, "what has detained you? We have been excessively worried about you." "Why, mamma," laughed the daughter, lightly kissing her mother's cheek, "I knew you would scold, and I didn't mean to have been so naughty, but you know it was such a sweet evening, and Mr. Rutledge said that wild Hemlock Hollow looked so picturesque by moonlight, that we couldn't resist the temptation of going that way, and after we had driven--oh! I can't tell you how far--we suddenly came upon a huge old tree that had fallen across the road, and over it of course we could not get, and the woods were so dense on either side that it was impossible to get around it, so the only thing left for us to do, was to turn, and make the best of our way back." "I assure you, Mrs. Churchill," said Mr. Rutledge, "I am very much annoyed at having caused you this anxiety. You will fancy me very careless, but it was a contretemps I had never dreamed of." The whole party passed out of sight into the hall. A group who stood near us and had been watching the scene, also moved on toward the door, but as they turned away I caught the words from one of them: "It looks very much like it, and it will be an excellent thing on both sides; but I never thought till lately, that he would marry." "Will you go in," said my companion. "Yes, if you please," and we followed the crowd. "Ah! you look like a different person," he said, smiling as we went into the light. I saw as we passed a mirror that a bright spot was burning on each cheek, and my eyes were shining unnaturally. "I could see you were dreadfully anxious about your cousin, and indeed I could not wonder at it." "For the last time," said Victor in a low tone at my side, "will you dance with me?" I yielded, and in a moment we were on the floor. Not an instant after that did I stop to think. If I had, my cheek would have paled to have found at the mercy of what fierce hatred, resentment and jealousy, my unguided soul then was, and whither they were hurrying me. To others, I was only a gay young girl, revelling in her first flush of triumph, thoughtless, innocent and happy. God help all such innocence and happiness! It was the last dance; the carriage was already at the door. Mrs. Churchill had limited us to five minutes; two or three were contending for my hand. Victor had hung around me all the evening, and I caught a gleam of his sad, expressive eyes. Josephine, on Mr. Rutledge's arm, passed us at the moment. Turning toward Victor, I said to the others with a smile, "Mr. Viennet says this will be his last dance in America. I think I must give it to him." A flash of hope lighted up his handsome face. I trembled at what I had done as I took my place among the dancers. The words that I knew I must hear before we parted, I heard now. There was but a moment for the recital, but it sufficed. Was it that such homage soothed my wounded pride; or that, bewildered by this tempest of emotions, I had mistaken gratitude for tenderness, kind regard for love? Whatever may have been my motive or excuse, the fact remained the same. Before I parted with Victor Viennet at the carriage door, I had accepted his love, and promised myself to him irrevocably. How hot and still the night had grown! I leaned my forehead on the carriage window to cool its burning. The horses seemed to creep over the smooth road; I clenched my hands together to quiet their impatience. My companions, leaning back on the cushions, slept or rested. This very tranquillity maddened me, and, holding my breath lest they should know how gaspingly it came, I wished and longed to be alone once more. I could not, did not dare to think till there were bolts and bars between me and the world. At last I caught sight of the welcome lights of Rutledge, and almost before the deliberate horses had stopped in front of the house, I burst open the carriage door, and flew up the steps. "Have the others got home yet?" I asked of Kitty eagerly. "No, Miss; but they'll be here in a minute. I see the lights of the barouche just by the park gate." The other ladies paused in the parlor till the rest of the party should arrive; for me, I never stopped till I was within the sanctuary of my own room. "No matter for undressing me to-night," I said to Kitty, who had followed me. "I can do all that is necessary for myself, and don't come till I ring for you in the morning; I am so tired I shall want to rest." With a look of some disappointment she turned away, and I slid the bolt, with a trembling hand, between me and the outer world. But not between me and conscience, not between me and memory, not between me and remorse. I had thought, when once I am alone, this misery will vent itself in tears--this insufferable pain will yield to the relief of solitude and quiet. But I did not know with what I had to deal. I did not estimate what foes I had invoked--what remorse and regret were to be my comrades through the slow hours of that night. With suicidal hand, it seemed to me, I had shut myself out forever from peace, forever from all chance of happiness. Nothing now but misery: the past, a sin and guilt to recall; the future, weariness but to imagine. The promise I had given was to me as irrevocable and sacred as the marriage vow itself; and self-reproach only riveted the fetters more hopelessly, as I remembered the manly love of which I was so unworthy. To draw back now, would but add perjury to my sins, and deal undeserved misery to the man I had deceived. No, hypocrisy became a duty now; he should never know the agony that I had wrestled with when I had first looked my engagement in the face. He should never know how the first hours of it had been blackened. But oh! plead repentance, I will bury this hateful secret in my heart; I will only live to serve him; I will make him happy; I will be a true and faithful wife. True? questioned a voice within me; and with a miserable groan I hid my face, and owned that I must leave truth at the threshold of this new relation. I must enter it with a dead love in my heart, a false vow on my lips. CHAPTER XXIX. "Alas! I have nor hope nor health, Nor peace within nor calm around-- * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * I could lie down like a tired child, And weep away the life of care Which I have borne, and yet must bear Till death, like sleep, might steal on me." SHELLEY. "How late you have slept, Miss!" said Kitty, as she hurried up in answer to my bell. "I have been expecting you would ring for the last hour. Did you know, Miss, they are all at breakfast?" "It will not take me many minutes," I said, sitting down for her to braid my hair. Kitty was in a desperate hurry this morning; her fingers trembled so she could hardly manage the heavy braids. "The other young ladies are down some time ago," she said, with a sharp look at me in the glass. "I suppose if they were tired, they would get up this morning out of politeness to Mr. Viennet, as he goes away at ten, and he might think rather hard of it if they didn't take the trouble to come down in time to say good bye to him." Encouraged, perhaps, by the color that suffused my face, she went on: "As for him, he's been up since daybreak, walking up and down the hall, and on the piazza, and starting and changing color every time a door opened or any one came on the stairs. I don't believe he wants to go away very much." "Kitty, you are getting my hair too low; you're not thinking of what you are about." Kitty blushed in her turn, and said nothing more, but hurried on my toilet. It was soon completed. I would thankfully have delayed it, but there was no longer anything to wait for, no longer the least excuse, and, to Kitty's inexpressible relief, I turned to leave the room. Kitty did not suspect with what a beating heart it was, though, and with what a blur before my eyes. I hardly saw the familiar objects in the hall, hardly distinguished a word in the hum of voices in the breakfast-room, as I paused an instant at the threshold. But there was no time for wavering now. I pushed open the door and entered. There was a momentary hush on my entrance: Phil made a place for me beside him, saying: "It is something new for you to be late. Aren't you well?" "Dissipation doesn't agree with you, I fear," said Mrs. Churchill. "You look quite pale this morning." "Mamma!" exclaimed Josephine, in a tone mock-confidential, just loud enough for every one to hear. "That is unkind! Surely, you remember what happens to-day!" "Come, come, that's not fair," said Phil. "I thought you were more considerate, Joe. Let your cousin have her breakfast in peace." "Don't let me keep everybody waiting," I said, faintly. "Well, if you'll excuse us," exclaimed Josephine, starting up. "We have all finished." Then with a wicked look, "Mr. Viennet, you've been through your breakfast some time. Don't you want to take a farewell promenade on the piazza?" Mr. Viennet bowed, and expressed his pleasure in rather a low voice. "Mr. Arbuthnot, you're not going to forsake me, are you?" I asked, as the others rose. "Of course not," said Phil. "I am always your very good friend when you'll allow me to be." Josephine little knew how much I thanked her for her manoeuvre; though done from motives the least amiable, it was the kindest thing she could have thought of. "Don't take that strong coffee," said Phil, noticing how my hand trembled, and substituting for it a cup of tea; then putting everything within my reach, he sent the servant away, and began reading the paper himself. If Phil Arbuthnot should ever prove himself my worst enemy, I never could forget the considerateness of that morning. He was tender-hearted and kind as a woman, and great, strong man as he was, there was a delicacy of feeling and gentleness about him, that suffered with everything weak and suffering, and strove, at all costs, to give aid and comfort. And aid and comfort, prompted by such a heart, could not fail to soothe. In his eyes, women were sacred; their influence over him unbounded. If he only had been thrown with those who could have elevated and purified, instead of narrowing and lowering his nature, how noble and large-hearted a man he might have been. He had sacrificed his profession, his prospects in life, and all that elevates and nerves a man, to his love for Josephine. How far she accepted it, how she meant to requite it, there is no need to say. I think she liked him; I think that she felt for him a tenderness that no one else could ever awaken in her heart. He had been her lover ever since they were girl and boy together, and in those young days, perhaps, she had fancied that the happiest thing in the world, would be to marry Phil. But such sweet romance had been scorched and shrivelled by the first breath of the world. Josephine had renounced such folly early; she was wise and prudent beyond her years, and she had been trained in a good school. Some wondered that Mrs. Churchill could trust her daughter so constantly with a man of as pleasing an address as Phil; cousins were so apt to fancy each other. "I have perfect confidence in Josephine," said Mrs. Churchill, proudly. It was not misplaced; Josephine Churchill might have been trusted with Cupid in person, if he had not been a desirable _parti_. "What time is it?" I asked of Phil, in a low tone, after I had exhausted every device for prolonging my breakfast. "Five minutes to ten," he answered, looking at his watch. "Shall we take a turn on the piazza, if you have finished?" I followed him to the piazza. "It is too sunny for you," he said, as I screened my aching eyes from the light. "The parlor is pleasanter." Ella was at the piano, playing some light air (very light, indeed, for the piano was not her forte), and chatting with Capt. McGuffy, who hung over her. Mrs. Churchill, Josephine, Grace, Ellerton, Victor and Mr. Rutledge were at the other end of the room. "We shall miss you so much, Mr. Viennet," Josephine was saying, in a very charming tone. "Your place cannot be filled. Mr. Rutledge, cannot you manage to have him arrive at the station a few minutes too late?" "Why didn't you suggest it a little sooner, Miss Josephine?" said Mr. Rutledge, with a smile, as he looked at his watch. "I think I hear the horses at the door now. Thomas will attend to your baggage--don't trouble yourself, Mr. Viennet." "It is all ready, sir; I have nothing to do but make my adieux, and such painful work had better be short. Mrs. Churchill, I have many pleasures to remember during my residence in America, but none so great as those for which I am indebted to you. Will you accept my sincere thanks?" I had not dared before to look at him, but I stole a glance at his face now. It was deadly pale, and showed but too plainly the pain and disappointment that he was trying to conceal. The whole party now gathered round him; his parting with Josephine was very courteous, on her part very gracious; with Grace the same; a little less warm with Miss Wynkar, perhaps; but no one cared to revive old quarrels now. When he approached me, I gave him my hand, but my eyes were fastened on the ground. He held it for one instant, then dropping it, turned hastily away. "Mr. Rutledge," he said, in a voice that trembled audibly, despite his manly efforts to control it, "I have to thank you for your hospitality. I shall not soon forget my visit here." Mr. Rutledge's manner had less coldness than usual in it, as he bade his young guest good bye; there was no lack of warmth in the adieux of the other gentlemen. And I, cruel and cowardly, stood rooted to the floor; I was afraid to acknowledge what I had not been afraid to promise; I was letting him go without a word of kindness, when I might never see him again; when I was, in the sight of heaven, affianced to him, when nothing could absolve me from my vow, shrink and falter as I might. He had reached the hall, and stood for an instant in the doorway as I raised my eyes. They met his; I sprang forward from the circle where I stood. "Victor, I am not afraid they should know it now," I whispered, putting my hand in his. I only knew the misery I had caused him, when I saw the change that came into his face, the light that hope lit in his eyes. He had but short grace to tell his love--a few brief minutes before we parted, perhaps for many years, yet nothing could have made me more certain of the depth and ardor of it, than those few moments did. We walked once down the hall, then slowly back again, "You must go now," I whispered, as we reached the door. "Good bye!" For a moment he stood as if it were an effort rending soul and body to leave me; he held my hands tightly in his own, then, bending forward, pressed a kiss on my forehead, and was gone. It was the seal of our engagement, that first kiss; I stood in the sight of what was all the world to me, tacitly acknowledging what I had done. I was parting from the lover to whom they all fancied I was devoted, but it was shame, and not love, that brought the blood into my cheeks to meet his first caress. I did not move or raise my eyes till the sound of carriage-wheels died away down the avenue. Then the treacherous color receded slowly from my face, and left it white as marble. Conquering as best I might the giddy faintness that came over me, I walked steadily into the parlor, where the whispering and amazed group of ladies still stood. Not heeding Josephine's, "Well, my dear, we weren't quite prepared for this! We didn't know how far things had gone," I went up to Mrs. Churchill and said: "I should have told you of this before, Aunt Edith. I have accepted Mr. Viennet." "I should have been gratified by your confidence if you had chosen to bestow it. However, you have my congratulations," and she gave me her hand, and touched her lips lightly to my forehead. "I suppose we must all congratulate you," said Grace, with a laugh. "But, really, it took _me_ so entirely by surprise, that I shan't be able to collect my wits for an appropriate speech under two hours." "I will excuse you from it altogether," I said, turning away to the door. I stopped involuntarily as I passed Josephine. "If it is a matter of congratulation at all, I hope I have yours, Josephine," I said, holding out my hand. "Of course," she returned, awkwardly, accepting my hand. "Of course you have." I looked at her for a moment; it was so strange that I should be so miserable and she so blessed. We, "two daughters of one race"--the same blood flowing in our veins--the same woman's heart beating in our bosoms--why was it that I was forbidden every good, tempted of the devil, driven into evil, and she, unfeeling and light-hearted, smiled down at me from her secure height of happiness, wore carelessly the love that I would have died to win, played thoughtlessly with it in my jealous sight, and made a jest of what was life and death to me. She did not understand my strange and wistful look, and, with a smothered sigh, I withdrew my gaze, and turned away. Perhaps her mother could have interpreted it better; perhaps, if she had chosen, she could have told her daughter I was not the happy fiancée I seemed; and perhaps, if she had chosen, she could have told her to whom I owed the greater part of what I suffered. I mounted the stairs with a slow and heavy step; Mr. Rutledge passed me coming down. He did not raise his eyes nor look at me, but in the glance I had of his face it seemed to me darker and moodier than ever, and his step heavier and more decided. He went toward the stables, and in a few minutes I heard his horse's hoofs clattering down the avenue. If my head had ached twice as madly as it did, I should not have dared to stay away from dinner. As I entered the dining-room, it was with rather a doubtful feeling of relief that I found only ladies there. The presence of the gentlemen always proved something of a restraint upon the vivacious tongue of Grace, and Josephine was never in a good humor when there was no one upon whom to exercise her charms. Indeed, the whole table presented a significant contrast to its usual animation. Toilettes had been deferred till evening, I found. Josephine and Ella took no pains to conceal their ennui, and Grace revelled in impertinence. The gentlemen--_i.e._ Phil, Captain McGuffy, and Ellerton--were shooting woodcock, and Mr. Rutledge had gone off on business, and it was possible, he had left word, that he might not return till late. "Let's have a glorious nap," said Josephine, as we left the table. "It will be time enough to dress just before tea-time. They will none of them be back sooner than eight o'clock." Ella had been asleep all the morning, but she never objected to a nap; indeed, I believe sleeping was, next to the pleasure of dressing herself, the principal _divertissement_ of her life. Josephine and Ella went to their rooms, Mrs. Churchill followed them upstairs, Grace ran off to find "old Roberts" and get the key of the locked-up bookcases in the library, and I was left to myself. It was a hot and sultry afternoon; not a breath moved the motionless leaves in the park, not a ripple stirred the lake; the insects hummed drowsily in the hot, hazy air, the declining sun abated neither heat nor power as he neared the horizon, but glared steadily upon the still parched earth. Too languid and miserable to find a cooler place, I sat on the piazza hour after hour, and watched listlessly the slowly-declining sun, the inanimate and sultry landscape. Even nightfall brought no relief. The sun withdrew his light, it is true; but the sultriness that his reign had bred continued to brood over the earth; no dew refreshed it, no moisture wet the thirsty flowers. The stars, faint and dim, hardly shed a ray of light through the thick air. It was a night that, superstition and presentiment whispered, would prompt dark deeds. Under cover of its weird-like gloom, treachery and murder would steal abroad, and black sins would stain the souls of some of the sons of men before the light of day renewed the face of the earth. None of us could help feeling the influence of it; dispirited and languid, the whole party dragged through the evening with an unwonted lack of vivacity. Music and dancing failed; the gentlemen pleaded fatigue, and the ladies were very ready to accept the excuse, and at an early hour we separated to our rooms. But I dreaded mine; I dreaded the sleepless hours that I must count before the dawning. Once that night I slept, but it was a short sleep, and worse than waking. The nightmare of my fate was less horrible than the nightmare of my fancy, and, shuddering with terror, I paced the floor to drive away the chance of its recurrence; I pressed my clenched fingers tightly on my breast to drive away the chill of that Phantom Hand, that had frozen my very soul. Why had that long-forgotten terror come back to haunt me now? CHAPTER XXX. "Death is King--and _Vivat Rex!_"--TENNYSON. It was late on the following morning when I entered the breakfast-room; very fluttering and nervous, I anticipated the usual allusions to my pale looks, and Grace's amiable bantering, but quite a different scene from the one I had expected met me. Too much absorbed to notice my entrance, the whole group were clustered together, intent upon the newly-arrived paper. They had evidently devoured it, and now were commenting eagerly upon the news it contained, and referring constantly to it. Only Mr. Rutledge, with knit brow, leaning forward on the table, seemed to note my entrance. "I never heard a more cool-blooded, revolting thing," said Phil. "I suppose the whole country is alive with it now," remarked the captain. "The wretch can hardly escape detection, thanks to the telegraph, railroads, and police of this nineteenth century. The news, no doubt, has spread far and wide by this time." "It will haunt me till the day of my death!" exclaimed Josephine. "I never read so horrible a murder." "Oh," said Grace, coolly, "it's only because we knew him that it seems so dreadful. There are just as awful things in the paper every day." "There has never been anything in this part of the country though, I fancy, that has caused as much excitement," said Phil. "Thomas tells me that the furore in the village is intense; the men do not think of going to their work, but stand in groups about, while most of them have formed themselves into a sort of vigilance committee, and swear that the murderer shall be tracked. The poor doctor, you know, was quite a popular man, and such a thing as this is so unheard of, that the country-people are entirely beside themselves about it." "What is it you are talking about?" I faltered, leaning on the back of a chair for support, and trying to be self-possessed. "Oh! Why, have you just come down?" exclaimed Grace, delighted to find a fresh auditor for the awful tale that she seemed really to enjoy relating. "Why, you must know that last night, a man coming from Norbury, late in the evening, discovered the body of Dr. Hugh lying at the entrance of a wood about four miles from the village, stabbed in four or five places, and quite cold. His horse and gig were tied to a tree close by, and the footprints on the ground beside where the body was found, show that the poor wretch did not yield to his murderer without a desperate struggle. His hands were"---- "You are making it unnecessarily horrible," said Mr. Rutledge, sternly, and starting forward, placed a chair for me, and poured out a glass of water. "Why, she's going to faint!" exclaimed Ella Wynkar, staring at me with her dull, blue eyes, while Mrs. Churchill came forward ejaculating, "What is the matter? Are you ill?" "It is not at all strange that she should be shocked at hearing such a thing so suddenly," answered Mr. Rutledge for me. "You must remember, Miss Grace, we all had it more gradually: first my suspicions, then Thomas' report, then the morning paper; which is very different from hearing it all at a breath, and without any warning." Mr. Rutledge tried to divert them from the theme, and save me from the faintness which his quick eye detected at each new disclosure or conjecture, but in vain. Nothing else could be thought or spoken of. How the murderer should be hunted down, what blood-thirsty and revengeful men were already on the track, how impossible was his escape; these were the pleasant topics of the morning Within those two hours I learned more self-command than all my previous life had taught me, for I had an awful dread at my heart, and I had to listen to these things, as if I were very indifferent to them. Phil said, for the honor of the county, he supposed, Mr. Rutledge would do all in his power to ferret the thing out; and Mr. Rutledge rather reluctantly assented, and said he supposed it was his duty. "And," added the captain, "from what you've said of some slight clue you thought you had to guide you, I suppose you may be of great service, and it's every man's duty to bring the perpetrator of such a deed to justice. By Jove! I wish I could help it along!" "I suppose you are right," said Mr. Rutledge, with a sigh. "I am going to ride over to the court-house now. Thomas, has my horse been brought around?" "He is at the door now, sir," said Thomas. Mr. Rutledge, with a brief good-morning, left the room, and after a moment in the library, repassed the dining-room door with his riding-whip and hat in his hand. I listened to his retreating footsteps in a kind of nightmare; I must speak to him before he started on his cruel errand; I must speak, and yet a spell sealed my lips, a horrible tyranny chained me motionless. That clue--what did it mean?--why did he look at me so strangely?--I knew but too well. I heard him pass down the hall slowly and pause at the door; in another moment he would be gone. I started from the room. "Mr. Rutledge!" He turned as I stood before him, white and trembling. "What is it?" he said, regarding me with a kind of compassion. "What do you want to say?" "I want to say--I want to ask you if you have no pity--if you have the cruelty to want another murder--if there is not blood enough already shed. Don't listen to what those men tell you," I hurried on, "don't believe them, when they say it is your duty. It is not! It is your duty to be merciful. It is your duty to leave vengeance to God. It is your duty to leave the miserable and the sinful to His justice, and not to hurry them before man's!" He looked down at me with a pity in his eyes that was almost divine. "You need not fear me," he said, turning from me; and descending the steps mounted his horse and rode slowly away. * * * * * "There are a few things," I overheard Kitty say to Frances outside my door, "in which I should be glad if my young lady was more like yours. Now there must be some comfort in dressing Miss Josephine, she cares about things; but all my work is thrown away, sometimes I think. My young lady has no heart for anything, never looks in the glass after I've taken all the pains in the world with her, and is just as likely to throw herself on the bed after her hair is fixed for dinner, as if she had a nightcap on. For the last two days," Kitty went on in a low tone, for Frances and she were very good friends now, "for the last two days she has been so miserable, it makes my heart ache to see her. And as for the masquerade to-night! she don't care _that_ for it. I've worked my fingers to the bone to get her dress ready, and like as not, she won't stay downstairs ten minutes after she gets it on. The whole house is thinking about nothing else, everybody is in such spirits about it, the young ladies are just crazy with their dresses and the fun they're going to have, while she, poor young thing, hardly knows or cares what she's to wear, and stays moping in her room all day by herself." "It's a hard thing to have one's young man away," said Frances in her soft voice, and with a little sigh that told she knew just how hard it was. Kitty didn't answer. I was afraid she would, and would tell her how inexplicable she found her mistress's moods. But Kitty was true to me, though she did love a little gossip, and let my _douleur_ pass for what she very shrewdly suspected it was not, and soon reverted to the all-absorbing subject of the masquerade. "Would you ever know the house!" she said, looking admiringly up and down the hall. "And doesn't the piazza look beautiful, and the hall. And just think how all those colored lamps will look when they're lighted. Really, I can't think what's got into master to take all this trouble, and turn the house inside out, to please a lot of young ladies that he doesn't care a straw for!" Frances opened her eyes as if this were heresy. Kitty went on with energy: "Miss Josephine Churchill needn't flatter herself that she's ever going to be more at home at Rutledge than she is now. I don't know a great deal, but I know enough to know that." "And I could tell you something perhaps," said Frances, "that might make you change your mind." "I'd like to hear it!" "Oh, but it wouldn't be right. I never talk about my young lady's secrets." "But you might tell _me_," urged Kitty, artfully, "I've been so open with you." "Come down to the laundry then, while I press out these flounces," and the two maids flitted downstairs to whisper over the secrets that their respective mistresses had fondly fancied were buried in the recesses of their own hearts. And so each way I turned, there was a new dagger to stab me. No wonder that as Kitty said, I had no heart for anything, and only longed to be away and be at rest. Anxiety was added to the remorse and regret that I had first thought insupportable, and such an anxiety as made my nights sleepless, and my days a misery. No wonder that my white face, and the dark ring around my eyes bore hourly witness to the heaviness of my heart. "Why so sad and pale, young sinner?" called out Grace that evening, as about an hour after tea we were dispersing to our rooms to dress for the all-important occasion. "I think you ought to appear as Mariana, and sing 'I am aweary, aweary;' don't you think so, Mr. Rutledge?" "Miss Grace, I haven't given the subject enough thought." "I would give worlds to know what you are going to wear, Mr. Rutledge!" exclaimed Josephine. "But I _know_ I shall detect you instantly. I should know your step and carriage under twenty dominoes, and among a thousand people." "Pretty high figures those, Joseph! Phil, I shall know you by your stride, and you couldn't disguise your voice if you practised a year, and that bow is 'Philip Arbuthnot, His Mark,' all the world over!" "The best way to disguise our voices," said Capt. McGuffy, "is to speak French. I think we had all better agree to do it." "Ella will not object," said Grace, "now Mr. Viennet is not here to criticise." "Hush, Grace!" cried her sister maliciously. "How can you be so thoughtless? Why do you continually harrow up your cousin's feelings. By the way, this is the day the steamer sails, is it not?" "No, yesterday," said Ellerton. "The list of passengers will be in to-day's papers. Has the mail come yet, Mr. Rutledge?" "There is Thomas with it now." Thomas deposited the package on the hall table and withdrew. I was standing nearest of the group to it, and putting out my hand, took up the "Times." The others approached and with great interest examined the letters. "Why my dear!" said Josephine pleasantly, "I'm astonished that there's none for you! Not a word since he went away. That doesn't look devoted!" The color went and came in my face, but it wasn't the taunt that I minded. "Never mind!" cried Grace, "don't break its heart about him! It shall have another lover, it shall have the big Mason, so it shall!" "May I trouble you for the 'Times' one moment?" asked Ellerton Wynkar, "I want to look over the departures." "According to my cousin," I said, tightening my grasp upon the paper, "I have the greatest interest in them, and I must beg the privilege of reading the list first." "That's not fair!" cried Grace. "How do you know but we have lovers sailing in the 'Arago' as well as you? I must have that paper," and, springing forward, she grasped my wrists. She could have overcome me in a moment, for just then I was as weak as a child; but Mr. Rutledge, in his firm, quiet way, released my hands, and, holding Grace's tightly in his own, said: "You had better make your escape with it to your room; I cannot insure you if you stay." With a grateful look and a forced laugh I ran upstairs, locked myself in my room, and, tearing open the paper, glanced hurriedly up and down the columns for the list of the "Arago's" passengers. At last I found it, and skimmed eagerly through it. It was as I expected; I was not disappointed nor shocked; but my hand trembled so I could hardly cut the paragraph out. Ringing for Kitty, I sent the paper down, with my compliments to Mr. Wynkar. It was nearly nine o'clock before Kitty came back to dress me. I had rung twice, but received no answer. When she did come, I saw in a moment that the delay had been caused by some unusual and exciting cause. She was nervous and uneasy, and started at every sound. Whenever I caught her eye, it dropped quickly before mine, and she hurried on with less than her usual care, the dress on which she had bestowed so much pains and regarded with so much pride. When I was dressed, I looked at myself with some surprise; I was, indeed, effectually disguised. Over my white tarletan ball-dress, I wore a domino of white silk, trimmed with heavy white fringe, and instead of the ordinary hideous black satin mask, a silver gauze before the upper part of my face, and a fall of white lace concealed my features entirely. The heels of my white kid boots were made very high, and that, together with the long sweeping dress, made me appear so much taller than usual, that that one circumstance would of itself have deceived almost any one. I noticed, after I was all dressed, and ready to go down, that Kitty was a long time in adjusting, to her entire satisfaction, the cord and tassel that confined the domino at the waist. Just as I was leaving the room, I chanced to look down, and saw that there was a narrow blue ribbon knotted to one of the tassels. "What's this, Kitty? Take it off, please." "That? O, it's nothing, Miss. The tassel was a little loose, and I fastened it up." "But all the rest of my dress is white--this spoils the effect. You'd better take a piece of white ribbon." "Oh! Miss" (a little impatiently), "how particular you've grown! I thought you wouldn't mind the bit of blue, and it's _so_ late. The carriages have been coming this half hour." "Well, no matter then. I'll go down." Kitty preceded me, stealing an occasional look around, to ascertain that there was no one in sight, then beckoned me across the hall, hurried me down the private staircase and through a labyrinth of pantries, to a door that opened upon the shrubbery. "This way," whispered Kitty. "Follow me." CHAPTER XXXI. "O purblind race of miserable men, How many among us at this very hour Do forge a life-long trouble for ourselves By taking true for false, or false for true." TENNYSON. I followed Kitty down the dark paths of the shrubbery, and, as far as I could tell, through the dazzling gauze of my mask, some distance across the park. "Where are you taking me? There is no need of such precaution." "O yes, indeed," she answered eagerly, "if you had gone right around the house and gone in, they would have known in a minute that it was somebody who lived there. Mr. Wynkar and the captain were on the steps, watching. I saw them." She hurried me on till we reached a clump of trees too far from the lamps suspended to the branches of those on the lawn to be lighted by them; then pausing, she looked quickly around. "Are you not tired, Miss?" she said, raising her voice. "Hadn't you better rest a minute here? We walked so fast." "No," I answered, with slight impatience. "I want to go immediately to the house." "Yes, Miss," she said, uneasily. "Just wait till this carriage passes." It might have been fancy, but I thought I heard a step behind me, and starting forward, I called Kitty instantly to follow me. She could not but obey, and only left me where the lamps from the piazza threw too strong a light for her to venture. Whispering to me where I should find her if I wanted her during the evening, she slipped away, and I walked on. The carriage reached the entrance, and the occupants of it alighted and disappeared within the awning before I arrived at it. There were several groups of masked figures on the piazza as I entered the inclosed walk from the carriageway, and, mounting the steps, approached the door. "How spectral!" whispered one. "And look at that black shadow following so close." I turned involuntarily at this; a black domino whom I had not perceived had entered with me, and I hurried forward into the house a little abruptly, to escape his companionship, and, crossing the brilliant and beautifully decorated hall, I entered the drawing-room. There was a temporary lull in the dancing, and I paused a moment to reconnoitre before I advanced to Mrs. Churchill. She was unmasked, and was to receive the guests; she stood at the other end of the room, and it was rather a formidable thing to cross to her, but remembering to disguise my step, I walked slowly and with some stateliness over to where she stood, made my devoirs, and turned away; but half a yard behind me was my black shadow. All eyes were upon us. "What a ghostly pair!" exclaimed a vivacious peasant girl from the folding-doors. "I shall not be astonished if, when the masks are dropped at supper-time, a skeleton should step out of that black domino, and preside at the feast!" "And a nymph of Lurley out of that white drapery," said "General Washington," approaching and offering me his arm. We made the tour of the rooms, admired the flowers, discussed the dresses, and tried to find each other out. I soon discovered my companion to be Mr. Emerson of the Grove, a fine, dignified old gentleman, whom I had always admired. His unconscious interest in, and admiration for, a tall brunette, whose black eyes sparkled even through her mask, betrayed her immediately to me as his daughter, Miss Janet Emerson. The Misses Mason were flower-girls of course; their mamma, by virtue of her literary proclivities and immense fund of sentiment, appeared as a sibyl, and told fortunes untiringly; the younger Mr. Mason wore an English hunting-dress, and the elder one escaped my observation among the crowd of greater strangers in the room. An Oxford student paid me marked attention, but discovering the unmistakable white eyelashes and feeble voice of my pet aversion, Ellerton Wynkar, I became discouragingly distant and severe, and he transferred his devotion to a pretty Greek dress, which I soon concluded must enshrine the indolent loveliness of my cousin Grace. Beyond this, my penetration was entirely at fault; among the crowd of grotesque and graceful figures, I tried in vain to recognize any of our own party. There were half a dozen men of Phil's height, and as many of Mr. Rutledge's make; so many imitated the captain's military manner, that it was impossible to recognize the stork among the cranes. There were two Louis Quatorze costumes, that more than any others suggested Josephine and Ella, but I could not be positive; they were so exactly alike, that even when together one could not detect a shade of difference either in dress or manner. The powdered hair and masks, of course, concealed the diversity of color and complexion. "Those two are the most distinguished-looking in the room," said General Washington, by way of small talk. "I suppose you have recognized them--Miss Churchill and her cousin." "Which cousin?" "The one who is engaged to the young Frenchman. Quite a pretty girl. I never saw her look so well as she does to-night." "Which is Mr. Rutledge, do you know?" I asked. "I have not made him out yet, but if you care to know the surest way will be to stay here, in the neighborhood of Miss Churchill: he will not be very far off!" "Then let us sit here," and I sank down on a sofa. "Your cavalier keeps a faithful watch upon your movements," said my companion. "He has followed you from room to room, and is just behind you now." "Who is it that you mean?" "The black domino--the gentleman who came with you." And the black domino at that moment bent down, and, in a low, smothered voice, asked me if I would dance. I declined very quickly, and turned away my head. "Miss Churchill, will you dance this set with me?" asked a gentleman, in French, approaching me. Disguised as the voice was, there was something familiar in it. I gave him my hand, and we took our places at the head of the room. It very soon became evident that he had mistaken me for Miss Churchill, and I determined to keep up the character. It was not very difficult; we were exactly the same size, and I had always been a good mimic, so that, in five minutes, I was coquetting, twisting my fan, and taking off Josephine to the life. It was not so easy to find out who I was quizzing. He was evidently a master of the art of deception, disguised his voice, his step, his manner, and was never off his guard an instant. He did not answer to anybody's description exactly, though I was constantly convinced, by his familiarity with us all, that he was "one of us." I tried to bait him with allusions to all our acquaintance, but he was too wary to rise to any of them. "How did you find me out so easily?" I said, with a laugh so like Josephine's that I was absolutely startled myself. "I thought I was disguised beyond all detection." "Not from me." "Ah, you are so clever!" I said, putting my head on one side, with an affectation characteristic of Josephine. "Now help me to discover some of the others. Who is our vis-à-vis in the Spanish dress?" "_You_ should not have to ask." "_Mais qui?_" "Mr. Arbuthnot, _sans doute_." "Ah! my heart should have told me Phil! Which is the captain?" "'Ivanhoe,' there by the door, talking with the 'Father of his Country.'" "And oh! tell me, for I am dying to know, have you found out my cousin?" "I do not think she is in the room." "Impossible! Then she must be ill." "Indifferent, more probably." "Ah! perhaps. 'There is but one with whom she has heart to be gay!' But has nobody been up to see what has become of her?" "No one, I fancy." "Had I better go?" "That's as you please," with a slight shrug. "Well, I'll see, after this dance. Who is that black domino, pray?" "That is more than I can tell you. He is the only man in the room whom I have not detected. He has not danced, nor spoken to any one, I think. I shall watch him closely and be near him when he unmasks." "Yes, but that's rather uncertain. He may leave the room before then." "That's very possible. He seems to be hovering near us. Suppose, after this dance, you draw him into conversation, and try to make him out? He seems to avoid me, and I am really very curious to know him." "Very well, to gratify you, I will try to detect him; but my cousin--will you take that duty off my hands?" "Yes, I will send a servant to inquire, and report the result to you." "Thank you. How _kind_ you always are! I should know that goodness of heart under twenty dominoes, and among a thousand people!" My companion, bowing low, gave me a quick look from under the cowl of his monk's habit. "You are too flattering," he said, and the dance ended. The black domino was at my elbow, and nodding significantly to my partner, I turned abruptly to him, and said, still in imitation of Josephine's voice: "Will you give me your arm? My partner has another engagement." He bowed, and offered me his arm. His voice, when he spoke, was so low, and so studiously disguised, it was impossible to detect anything from that; his coarse black domino hung so long and amply about him, and the hood was drawn so tightly around his mask, that no one could possibly distinguish anything of his face, figure, or carriage. Before we had made the tour of the rooms, I began to repent my bargain. There was something in his manner that made me most uncomfortable. I determined not to give up my assumed vivacity, but it was like chatting with a ghost; and when I went with him into the punch-room, and raised a glass to my lips, bowing to him over it, it seemed like a "hob-and-nob with Death," and the laugh I laughed was a very faint and forced one, as we set our half-tasted glasses down. I was so uncomfortable at being alone with him, that I stammered hurriedly: "Shan't we go back to the dancing-room?" "Are you afraid of me?" he said quickly, and in a low tone, "can you not give me a moment from your pleasure?" "Sir!" I said, shrinking back; "I haven't the least idea who you are." "You can forget, it seems. I envy you the power!" "You talk in riddles," I said, going toward the door. Another party entered the room, and my companion followed me out. "What a grotesque scene!" I said, looking up and down the wide hall, where wreaths of flowers and lights and floating flags hung, and thronging across whose marble pavement were groups of fantastic figures. "I never was at a masquerade before. Is it not diverting?" "Will you come upon the piazza?" asked my companion, not heeding my remark. "It is too warm here." "No," I exclaimed, hurriedly, "I cannot, here is my partner." The "friar of orders grey" obeyed my hasty summons, and I accepted his arm with very great _empressement_, stammering some excuse to the sable domino in the doorway, and walked down the hall. "Well, have you discovered him?" "No, I do not know him at all, he is very odd. I think he is a stranger. Not anybody, at all events, that any of us know well." "I cannot understand it," he said, musingly. "I thought you would have been able to have obtained some clue. He seemed willing to talk to you." "Only too willing!" "Did he seem to recognize you?" "I cannot tell exactly; he certainly thought he knew, but whether it were not a mistake on his part, I cannot say." "He avoids me; I cannot make anything of him; I shall have to put some one else on the track." "What of my cousin?" I asked. "I found Kitty, who says she is not very well, but will probably be in the room a little before supper." "Ah, thank you. You have no idea, I suppose, what her dress is to be?" "Kitty gave me to understand, very quietly, that she would wear a rose-colored domino." "There is a rose-colored domino just entering; do you imagine that is the fair _fiancée?_" "Very possibly," said my companion. "She is going to dance. Is that Phil with her?" Phil at this moment asked my partner to be his vis-à-vis, so we were again drawn into the dance. By this time, half the people in the room thought I was Miss Churchill, and addressed me accordingly. In one of the pauses of the quadrille, as some one calling me by that name had turned away, the black domino, who stood a little behind me on my left, leaned forward and whispered: "You cannot deceive _me;_ it was not Miss Churchill who was to have a blue ribbon on her tassel." I started; what intrigue was that Kitty about? The dance was over; Phil and his partner left the room and turned toward the piazza. "Shall we go into the fresh air?" said my companion, following them with his eyes. I took his arm, and we went on the piazza. The soft light of the colored lamps, the mellow music floating out to us, the cool air in our faces--I met with a gasp of relief and pleasure. Leading me to a seat rather more secluded than the others, my companion threw himself on the sofa beside me, and exclaimed, removing his mask: "This is so unsupportably warm, I must take it off for a moment's relief, as I believe you know me. Well! Miss Josephine, how do you think our masquerade has succeeded? Are you satisfied with the result?" "Perfectly," I said, feeling very guilty, and leaning back further into the shade. "It has been a delightful affair." He rested his brow thoughtfully and sadly on his hand for a moment. "You are tired," I said. "Miserably tired." It was well for me he did not require me to talk; I should have betrayed myself if I had attempted it. His eyes were riveted on the pair who stood a few yards from us. Phil, bending down, was whispering in low tones to his companion in the pink domino. There was something in her attitude, as she listened with half-bent head, that I could not fail to recognize, and from below the edge of her domino, I caught a glimpse of yellow brocade. There was but one to whom Phil could talk in those earnest tones--but one to whom he could tell that tale. Josephine, I saw, must have gone upstairs, and put on the domino over her first dress, the more to puzzle some of her partners. Kitty had in some way become acquainted with her intention, and seized upon it to further the deception that she saw prevailed in regard to me. There was very little that escaped that clever jade. I wished, with a sigh, that she were less unscrupulous. In a few moments, the cousins passed where we sat, nearly concealed from them, walking slowly and talking earnestly. "You cannot ask me to endure it longer; this suspense is misery," he said, with a quiver in his manly voice. "Dear Phil," murmured the clear, low tones of his companion, "you must know my feelings toward you; I have never tried to hide them; but you know how it is--you know it would be madness for either of us to think of each other." "Why would it be madness?" he urged. "Oh, Josephine! Why cannot you give up the ambition that separates us? Depend upon it, it has stood in the way of your happiness all your life." It had been impossible to avoid hearing this conversation; my companion, starting up, looked after the retreating figures amazed and stern. In his haste, he had pulled down an American flag that had been draped over the sofa we occupied. I started up, and involuntarily raised my hand to replace it. The loose sleeve fell back from my arm, and in the strong light of the lamp overhead, the scar on my wrist caught his eye. With a quick, imperious movement, he seized my hand before I could withdraw it, and held it firmly in one of his, while with the other he raised my mask. "You have deceived me," he said, between his teeth. "You have deceived yourself, you are the victim of your own prejudices. You cannot say I did more than humor your decision!" I returned, quickly. "You only acted a womanly and natural part, lied sweetly in every glance of your bright eyes, in every turn of your graceful figure, in every word on your red lips! I don't blame you; you are a woman." "You are too cruel! you will repent this some day; it will be the bitterest thing you have to remember; the recollection of it will make you suffer as you have made me suffer." "Never fear but I shall have enough to suffer, if the present is any earnest of the future for me! Your kindest wishes will be more than realized. For a proud man," he said, with a low, bitter laugh, flinging from him the hand he held, "for a proud man, I have had some humiliations that you would hardly believe if I told you! You could hardly understand them in your simplicity; your soft, woman's heart would bleed, perhaps, but it would heal itself too soon to allay in any great degree my wretchedness. Your morning-glory tenderness would droop before the fierceness of my pain, it would die in my hot grasp!--I will not ask your pity, but spare me your detestation. Save the aversion that your eyes showed then, for those who have deserved it better at your hands." There was a sound of voices from within, a window near us was thrown open, and a group of people, laughing and talking, stepped out on the piazza. Hastily restoring my mask to its place, I turned away and entered the house through the window they had opened. "You may have deceived one who is indifferent to you; you cannot deceive one who loves you," said a low voice in my ear, and the black figure I instinctively dreaded stood beside me. "For the sake of heaven, come with me, one moment!" "Who are you?" I murmured, shrinking back. He bent down and whispered a name in my ear, at which the color left my cheek, the light my eye, almost the life my pulses. "Will you come?" I bent my head without a word, and followed him out of the hall, down the terrace, through the winding paths of the shrubbery, across the garden; hurrying on to suit his fierce pace, but chilled to the heart with a terror that was no longer nameless. CHAPTER XXXII. "O man! while in thy early years, How prodigal of time! Misspending all thy precious hours, Thy glorious, youthful prime! Alternate follies take the sway; Licentious passions burn; Which tenfold force give Nature's law, That man was made to mourn." BURNS. The spot to which my companion led me was a ruined summerhouse, not a stone's throw from the outer garden hedge. It was a lonely place in a sort of hollow, a low, dense orchard stretched dark on one side, while a little knoll, crowned with copse, rose between it and all view of the house and grounds on the other, and a little stream fell murmuring down from rock to rock through the ravine. Why it was so deserted and dilapidated, I had never exactly known; but from something Stephen had said, when I had questioned him about it, I had conjectured that it was associated with the shame and fall of her whose memory was even yet so painful, and that ruin and decay were welcome to hide the place from all eyes. The night wind was moaning wildly down the little hollow; the ghastly moonlight flickered fitfully through the broken roof and moldering arches; the moss-grown, slimy stones rocked beneath my tread; steadying myself by one of the posts of the ruined doorway, I stood still and waited for my companion to speak. He had sunk down on a seat, but in a moment, raising his head, he loosed the hood of his domino, and, as it fell back, rose and turned his face toward me. With a faint cry, I put out my hands and started back. In the haggard, bloodless face, the wild and troubled eye of the man before me, I could hardly recognize a feature of Victor Viennet's handsome face. "No need to start away and put out your white hands to keep me off," he said, with a laugh that made my blood run cold. "No need to press your pale lips together to keep back that cry of horror! I have risked my life--aye--sold it, rather--for this interview, and yet I would not lay my guilty grasp upon the hand you have promised to me, I would not touch the distantest fold of your white dress! There is no need to droop, and flutter, and clasp your hands, and pray me to be calm--don't turn your eyes on me with such a look as that! You try to say you love me yet; wait till I tell you, wait till you know all, before you say you love me!" "You need not tell me, Victor," I faltered, "I guessed it from the first." "You guessed it from the first, and yet dared come here--alone--at midnight--with me! No, you have not guessed it. Your girl's heart never framed the outline of such a sin, you will swoon but to hear its name!" The night wind howling through the shivering trees, the restless brook moaning down the hollow, if ever their wild lament had ceased, would have heard, brokenly and incoherently, such a story as this: In a quaint, secluded village, in some remote province of France, Victor Viennet's early childhood had been passed. It was a childhood so companionless that, but that he was happy and needed nothing save his sad mother's love and his wild freedom, one would have pitied him even then, before he knew the shame he had to bear and the sufferings it would bring. For months together no stranger's foot would cross the threshold of the lonely cottage; the neighbors looked askance at the two pale women and the pretty boy, who had come so strangely and so stealthily into their midst, and rumor had been busy even there. The village children were forbid to play with "le petit Anglais;" they taunted and mocked him, and he, in his turn, spurned and hated them, and clung more entirely to his mother, who strove to interfere between him and every insult, every harshness, and vexation. And but too well she succeeded in guarding him; when death came to unloose her arms from around him, he was left too sensitive and shrinking a plant to bear the first breath of the scorching simoon of scorn and ignominy that had been gathering up its strength so long. The fatal secret of his birth, that explained all, burst suddenly upon him while his childish heart was yet bleeding with his first grief. He learned that he must thank his dead mother for the brand of shame that he must bear through life; that for her, whom he had worshipped as an angel, there was on every lip a name of scorn. He learned that every man's hand was against him, as an outcast and a bastard; and all the strength of his nature became a strength of hatred; his southern blood turned to gall in his young veins. The home that had been his sanctuary, his city of refuge, was a desecrated and hateful place. The same fever that had struck down his mother, had laid her nurse and companion low. Tenderness and compassion had been blasted in the boy's heart; they had both deceived and wronged him; he owed nothing to the memory of the one, nor to the misery of the other; and without a look, he left her in her unconsciousness, and turned his back forever on his home, with the curse in his heart for which he had not yet learned the words. Who needs be told the career on which the boy entered? Who but would sicken and turn away from the record of his houseless wanderings, his desperate shifts, his recklessness and wickedness. Who that could read with anything but sorrow of the scenes of squalid want, of cunning vice, of mad profligacy, through which he passed before his youth was yet begun. There could be but one result; all that was weak in him was bent to the service of sin, all that was noble was turned to bitterness; the refinement of his nature made him rise, but it was to no heights of truth and virtue; ambition had taken the place of all noble aspirations, and sustained him through ignominy, and reproach, and poverty, helped him to trample on difficulties that would have daunted a less desperate man, and scruples that would have shaken a better one, aided him to free himself from the pollutions that his wild boyhood had contracted, and to shake off the trammels of the past, and crown himself with the success that he had made his god. But through it all, there lived a fear lest the forgotten stain of his birth should be revived, the foundation stone be pulled from his fair fabric of good fortune; and this morbid dread so haunted him, that he came to hate the very sunshine and soft air of France, to fear the very children in the streets, the strangers whose curious eyes he met in the thoroughfares of business. And with all the fearful and enslaved of the earth, he turned his eyes toward the fair land that promises absolution and new life to the sinful and miserable of other lands, and denies its rich benison of hope and freedom neither to the criminal who flies from justice, nor the miserable who flies from memory. With three thousand miles of ocean between him and France, perhaps he could shake off the slavish dread that gnawed forever at his peace, and rise to a position where he need not fear its sting. The untainted air of that new land had never heard the whisper of his shame, should never hear it; even in his own bosom, it should die forgotten and unfeared. But than his strong will, there had been a stronger. Within the first week of his arrival in America, he was seized with a malignant fever, and from delirium and raving, sunk to stupor and an almost death-like torpor, and for weeks lay so. When at last he rallied and shook off the lethargy that had so long dulled intelligence and feeling, it was to find, that in the first hours of his delirium, he had betrayed his secret and undone himself; and betrayed it to a man whom neither honor nor pity could bind, but whose cunning malice gloated over the power his discovery had invested him with, and who would use it maliciously and unscrupulously. It did no good to rave and curse his fate; all the power of his strong will must go to the repairing of the error, and to the hushing and pacifying this low man who held him at such advantage. It seemed an easy enough thing at first; the man was ready to promise silence and assure him of his good will, and seemed to require nothing in return but good fellowship and confidence. Anything would have been easier for Victor to have given; his proud spirit revolted at such companionship and bondage, but at the first sign of contempt or impatience, the glistening serpent showed his sting, and chafed and despairing, the victim felt the toils tighten around him. There was no escape from his familiarity; he haunted and exasperated him, dogged his steps, followed him into the company of men who could not but wonder at the intimacy and draw their own conclusions from his endurance of such a man. With the exception of this cruel drawback, the new land indeed proved an Eldorado to Victor. Friends thickened, fortune smiled; he rose with hasty steps to success, social and commercial. Only the sly gleam of Dr. Hugh's treacherous eye sent an occasional fear through the pride of his heart, and kept it in a sort of check. But it did not humble him, it only galled and goaded him, and quickened his determination to prove himself a man for a' that; it strengthened his haughtiness and self-reliance. In the course of a year or two, however, circumstances somewhat changed; Dr. Hugh left the city, and Victor breathed freer. Occasional letters still reached him, keeping him in mind, but they ceased after awhile, and the young adventurer began to feel secure; he was on the road to fortune, the only barrier to success was gone, and the happiness he had never dared enjoy before, seemed just within his grasp. And just then, just when the new hopes of love, and the nearly crowned ambition, most demanded the hiding of the hated secret, chance threw him upon the only man who held it. No wonder that his cheek had blanched the evening that he came to Rutledge, when he found the doctor there before him. The doctor had not forgotten, the doctor had not lost sight of him, though he had lost sight of the doctor, and soon his stealthy hand was on the festering wound again, and his old cunning at work to exasperate his victim, and with a new zest. That Victor had been a successful man of business he had not minded; it only made his power over him the more desirable, and the remuneration for his silence greater; but that Victor should be the successful lover of one whom he had reason to regard with resentment and aversion, was too severe a trial for his love of malice to endure. Here was an opportunity for humbling the girl who had treated him with scorn and ridicule, and the proud man who endured him with but half concealed impatience. Victor Viennet should give up the woman he loved, and only buy a promise of continued silence at a heavy price. The girl should lose her lover; in any case he promised himself that. If Victor refused to give her up, a whisper in his ear of what he knew of _her_ secret, would damp his ardor and bring pride to weigh down the balance as he wished. And her pride, if even Victor's infatuation led him to prefer exposure and disgrace to separation, would never suffer her to marry a man, who, from the first she had never loved, now stripped of his name and honor. In any event that was secure to him. But he had overreached his aim when he drove Victor to resolve on such a sudden departure. Once in Europe, he might lose track of him; his vigilance at such a distance might be eluded, and all but his revenge would be lost; and chance had thrown into his hand the threads of a mystery that only time could unravel, that promised power over more than him; but Victor's absence would ruin all. Late on the night before his intended departure from Rutledge, a note was handed to him from Dr. Hugh, demanding another interview before he sailed. Victor dared not neglect or refuse the demand. It was too late now to change his plans, and of all things he desired to conceal the fact of his having any private business with Dr. Hugh, from his host and the guests at Rutledge. Gnashing his teeth at the humiliation of feeling himself at the beck and call of this low villain, and cursing the fate that forced him to stoop to such stratagems, he hastily returned a few lines to the doctor, appointing to meet him the following day at noon, at Brandon, the next station to Rutledge, distant about twelve miles, intending to send his baggage on in the train in which he should start, and remaining an hour at Brandon with the doctor, should go on himself in the next train. By this, he would avoid suspicion and meet the persecutor on neutral ground. He found no difficulty in leaving the cars unobserved, and repairing to the inn he had appointed for rendezvous. The bar-room was crowded with passengers for the cars going west, so, an unnoticed guest, he awaited with growing impatience the keeping of his appointment. Half suspecting that the man's object was to keep him back, and make him lose the train, his impatience and vexation knew no bounds, as the hour slowly waned and no one appeared. The train came rushing through the town, paused a moment, and rushed on, and his last chance for that day had passed. For one moment he had resolved to defy his persecutor, and escape him once and forever; but he knew that before another sunset his secret would be published, and what was this vexation to that ruin? As the crowd hurried from the tavern to the ears, a horseman had alighted at the door, and Victor shrunk back with a guilty feeling of humiliation and fear as he recognized Mr. Rutledge. What a degrading bondage was this for a man of honor--what a damnable humiliation! To be skulking away from the man whom, a few hours ago, he had met as his host and his equal. To be waiting submissively the pleasure of a low villain, whose greedy cunning and mean rascality marked him below the revenge of a gentleman. "It shall end," muttered Victor, between his teeth, as he screened himself from the sight of the new comer, who had entered the bar-room. He was engaged for several minutes in conversation with the bar-keeper, left a message for a neighboring workman, paid a bill for the cartage of some timber, and was about leaving the room, when his eye fell upon a note that was lying on a table near the door; and Victor's dark cheek mantled with shame and vexation, as, taking it up, Mr. Rutledge read, in a tone of surprise: "Mr. Victor Viennet. To be left at the Brandon Shades." "When was this brought here?" he inquired of the man behind the bar. "This morning, sir, I think," he returned. "A man from your village came with it--a dark, thick-set fellow, if I'm not mistaken; one of the hands from the factory." "And no one has called for it--no one answering to that name has been here?" "Not to my knowledge, sir." Mr. Rutledge knit his brow, and paced the floor uneasily. The haughty curl of his lip, as he glanced again at the note, made the blood boil in Victor's veins. It was almost impossible to keep back the defiant words that rushed to his lips; but detection would be fatal now, and he remained motionless, while Mr. Rutledge, crossing over to the barkeeper, said, in a lower tone: "You will oblige me by noticing who comes for that note, and by what way he returns. I will stop here on my return from Renwick, before night." The man promised obsequiously, and Mr. Rutledge left the room. Victor only waited to hear his horse's hoofs die away down the street, and to see the bar-keeper's attention fully engaged with a group of jovial mechanics just entering for their noon-day drink, to leave his place of concealment, and possessing himself hastily of the note, opened it carefully, and abstracting the contents, substituted a business circular which he had in his pocket, sealed up the envelope again, threw it on the table, and left the room by a side-door. He had walked some distance down the street before he ventured to read the letter, which proved, of course, to be from Dr. Hugh, apologizing for the delay, but saying that it would be impossible for him to be at Brandon before four o'clock. At that hour he should hope to find Mr. Viennet at the Shades, as first named, etc. "The Shades" was the last place where he desired to see him now, so he determined to walk forward on the road to Rutledge, and meet him on the way. It was a hot and dusty road, upon which the afternoon sun shone down unmercifully, but the heat and the dust were unheeded and indifferent to the over-wrought and exasperated traveller. The exercise and the fatigue of walking were in some measure a relief to his strained nerves, and without stopping to reflect, he hurried fiercely on, till eight miles of the twelve had been accomplished. Something familiar in the road had drawn his attention to his locality, and warned him of his nearness to Rutledge. It had been so lonely and monotonous a road before that, his attention had not been attracted to it; he had passed the last farmhouse three or four miles back, and only paused now, struck by the familiarity of the Hemlock Hollow road, leading off at the left. It was now only four miles to the village, and he stopped, resolved to await Dr. Hugh here. It was no balm to his vexed and angry mood, to remember how near he was to what was at once dearest and most unattainable to him. It was no soother to his wounded pride, to feel that he was skulking like a thief around the place where for weeks he had been entertained as a guest; and as hour after hour dragged on, and no one approached down the lonely road, his impatience grew into a kind of frenzy, and before the glaring sun had sunk behind the woods, and the thick, dull twilight had crept slowly over the gloomy hollow, from an angry and exasperated, he had become a revengeful and desperate man. It was in this mood that his persecutor met him. It was when all the venomous rancor that a long subjection had bred in his haughty nature, was roused to its utmost, that the interview for which Dr. Hugh had schemed, and planned, and lied, took place. Cold and cunning, plausible and imperturbable, he met a man with whose keenest feelings he had been playing for years, and who was even then lacerated to madness by insults and indignities that would have roused a tamer nature. Some fiend was blinding his eyes surely, and lulling him into security, that he did not feel a warning throb of fear as he rode into the lonely hollow, and through the dusky twilight discerned the waiting form of him he had wronged so deeply. Some luring devil put into his mouth the cold and sneering words with which he greeted him--the fool-hardy and contemptuous bravado with which he taunted him. Beyond any length he had ever gone before, he now dared, claiming his power over him, defying him to disdain it, and threatening him with instant exposure if he dared leave America. And when Victor, driven to desperation, and quivering with passion, turned fiercely upon him and defied him to do it--from this hour he cared not whether it was known or not, the cunning fiend in the wretch's bosom prompted him to ask if he had grown tired of his pretty mistress so soon, that he gave her up so easily? Or did he flatter himself that the haughty girl, at whose feet he had been so long, would continue her hardly-won smiles when she knew him for a nameless, low-born adventurer, hiding the stain of his birth at the cost of his honor? "You may tell it! You may proclaim it the length and breadth of the land! Who will believe you, low villain and known knave as you are, against the word and credit of a gentleman? Who will believe your paltry version of the delirium of a fever, that none but you heard--none but you interpreted? They will ask you for proofs--what then?" "I will give them proofs. I will tell them more than you know yourself of the story of your birth, and prove it by more damning proofs than you have dreamed existed. You doubt me? You defy and mock the threat? Listen! At this moment I hold that about me that would prove the tale I tell to be as true as heaven, and would send you branded to lower depths of shame than you have ever known. I hold it but till you shall dare to thwart me, till you shall dare to set a foot on foreign shores, and then the world--the woman that you love--the friends you trust--your gloating enemies--shall have the story, and shall see its proof!" The words hissed through the dead, dull, twilight of the still night, and smote like livid fire on the brain of him who heard them--on his overwrought and maddened brain--and shot through every pulse, and tingled like wild-fire in his veins. The whispers of hell crept into his tempted soul; there was no light in the heavens above--there was none on the dark earth; the still night had no voice to breathe the things that should be done; hell had no torments worse than these, and these he might be free from with one blow! one cunning, short, sharp blow--one quick, well-aimed, unerring blow! It would revenge him--free him--restore him to peace--give him back his love. If there is joy in heaven over one sinner that repents, what must there be of demoniac triumph in the vaults of hell, when another yields to sin--a fresh soul is lost! What mad exultation and unholy joy must have echoed in the regions of the damned, as the last cry of the murdered man died away among the whispering tree-tops and gloomy depths of Hemlock Hollow! and Victor Viennet pressed his blood-stained hand before his eyes to blot out the image that now neither time, nor sleep, nor anything save death could efface from his guilty vision. A horror, of such fear as none but murderers know, fell upon him as he bent over that ghastly corpse, hardly still from the death-struggle yet--hardly cold in the life-blood that his hand had spilled. He had not feared his foe in life with such palpitating fear as now, when, with eager, trembling hands, he searched, unresisted, for the fatal proof that he had threatened him with. That found, he no longer strove to resist the impulse of flight, and through the blackness and stillness of that night, chased by such terror and such remorse as God suffers the dead to avenge themselves with, he fled from the sight of the dead and the justice of the living. But the morning found him a baffled and a desperate man. The news had spread far and wide, the country was alive with it. A large reward had been offered for the apprehension of the murderer, and no boor within miles around but tried his best to earn it, and sharpened up his sluggish wits, and stood his watch, and scoured the woods, with incredible activity. It soon became apparent, though, to the wretched fugitive, that there was one on his track who brought more knowledge of the facts to the chase than his compeers, or, indeed, than he chose to own. One there was, who night and day dogged and hunted him with unflagging energy and terrible certainty, and from whom he knew he had no chance of escape if once he left the woods and high lands and took to the open country. There was only one hope, that of eluding and wearing him out, and back he plunged into the woods again, and night and day fought desperately against his fate. He had seen his pursuer pass almost within pistol-shot of him, and had recognized in him one who added the spur of malice to the sordid love of gold that animated the others. It was the dread of losing his game, and putting others on the track, that kept him from divulging what he knew, which was enough to fasten the murder upon the man to meet whom, to his knowledge, the doctor had started on the evening of his murder. And much more he might have told, of concerted plans to dog and waylay the young stranger, and to keep him in their power--of malicious watching, and intriguing, and vindictive hatred and cunning, and cruel purposes. But this he kept in his own vile breast, and, inspired by thirst for blood and love of gold, he pursued with deadly vigilance the murderer of the man whose tool and accomplice he had been. The third night of this unequal warfare was waning; the fugitive, worn out and hopeless, had resolved to end it; he had lost all privilege to hope, all right to love, and without these what was life worth? The breaking dawn showed him that he was in the pine-grove that bordered Rutledge lake. He felt no fear at the danger of his nearness to detection; he had done with fear now; what malice his enemies had to wreak must be wreaked on his dead body; and God have pity on the only one of all the world who would suffer pain or shame from his disgrace! Parting the thick branches, he made his way down to the water's-edge. In the dim light of dawn, the lake spread calm and unruffled before him, but what was this that lay so dark and motionless among the reeds and lily-pads, not a stone's throw from the shore? Dark and motionless as the haunting memory of that corpse in the black Hollow; nothing but flesh and blood ever showed so dumb and horrible through the grey light--nothing but death ever lay so still as that. It was the stark and lifeless form of his enemy that he looked upon, and dying hope started up and whispered of reprieve; all might not be over yet, and suicide and temptation drew back chagrined. It looked almost like a mercy from the Heaven he had outraged that the only tongue that could have betrayed him had been stilled in death, and that not by his hand, and a dumb feeling of gratitude warmed his heart and melted him into something like repentance toward the Father and the Heaven he had sinned against. Now flight was clear and almost easy; once safely beyond the neighborhood of Rutledge, there would be nothing to prevent his escaping to Canada; no suspicion as yet had been attached to his name, and no one need know that he had not fulfilled his intention of sailing at the time he had mentioned, till he was safely embarked from Halifax. But then love stepped in, and pleaded for one last look--one last embrace--before the life-long separation that his crime had doomed him to; what could one day more or less endanger him? And Fate, baffled of his ruin at one hand, now lured him into this worse snare, and he yielded. Hiding himself through the day in the dense thicket that covered the opposite bank of the lake, he had ventured forth at twilight, and by bold manoeuvre and sharpened cunning, had obtained an interview with Kitty. Not one girl in a thousand would have been capable of what he required of her--not one in a thousand would have been willing or trustworthy; but Kitty was as true as steel; her keen wits were equal to the task, and though she only guessed the truth, the rack and torture could not have won it from her. Before she dressed me for the evening, she had dressed Victor in the coarse domino that she had made since twilight for him, out of the black stuff that had lain so many years in the trunk upstairs, forgotten and unused since the last time that the household was in mourning. She had brought about the meeting and recognition between us, and now watched anxiously for us, no doubt, somewhere in the shrubbery. We were both but too unconscious of the flight of the moments now so precious, when Kitty, with hurried hand, pushed aside the branches of the thicket, and sprang down the ravine. "Fly, fly for your life, Mr. Victor! You are lost, if you stop for a moment! The officers are at the house; they say a suspicious person has been seen hanging about the grounds, and master has given them permission to search the outhouses and the premises, and they say the police are swarming all around. My dear young lady, let him go! Oh, that I should see you in such trouble!" "But where shall I go!" murmured Victor, burying his face in his hands. "I see no safety anywhere; the blood-hounds are on my track. It would have been easy to die this morning! Why did I shrink from it then?" "Kitty!" I gasped, "can you think of no place--nowhere that we can hide him?" "None! They will search the barn and stables. There's not an inch of ground about the place they'll spare." "And the house; have they a warrant for that?" "They have searched the house, they had gone nearly through it before I knew anything about it; I was watching for you outside." "Then, Kitty, the house is the safest place, if they are out of it; and, if we could only get him there, there is _one room_ where he would be safe!" Kitty started with a keen look as she caught my meaning. "Heaven help us! If we only could--I can think of one way--if you wouldn't be afraid"---- "No, no, I wouldn't be afraid of anything," I said, laying my hand in Victor's. "Speak quick." "Mr. Victor must give me his domino, and you and I must watch our chance and go boldly in at the front door; there's no other way, there are people all over the hall and piazza, and plenty saw you go out together, and will notice if you come back alone; there has been a great deal of suspicion about the black domino, and master, I know, is on the look-out for him, and very likely will try to find out; and no harm's done, you know, if I'm found in it; and then soon as I'm in the house I'll slip upstairs, and throw down the pink domino that Miss Josephine has taken off by this time, and Mr. Victor will wait for it at the west corner of house, where it is more retired than anywhere else; he'll put it on where it's dark there, in the shade of the trees, and join you on the piazza, where you'll wait for him, and then try to get him upstairs while they're at supper. I'll have the keys ready and get everybody out of the way. It's the only thing we can do--there's not a minute to lose!" It was desperate enough, but I saw no other way. Whispering a courage and confidence I did not feel to Victor, I hurried off his domino, and Kitty threw it over her dress. There was no time for fear; I did not stop to think, or I should not have shaken off Victor's grasp so hastily as I did, when we reached the shrubbery, nor have parted with so hurried an adieu, only imploring him to be calm and cautious, and not to lose a minute in gaining the west corner of the house. "Alas!" murmured Kitty, as we hurried up the steps, "there's a hundred chances to one we don't see him again! It'll be just God's mercy and nothing else, if he gets into the house. There goes the constable now, and the men"---- "Which way?" I gasped. "Down toward the garden. Heaven help him! If he only sees them in time! Take my arm, Miss, and come in; we can't stop now to see whether they meet him; they're watching us on the piazza." I needed all the support of Kitty's arm as I entered the hall; the glare of the lights made me sick and faint, and she hurried me to a chair. "Don't wait a minute to attend to me," I murmured, "hurry upstairs." "It won't do yet; everybody is looking at us; I must sit down and talk to you awhile." A gentleman, Mr. Mason, approached me, and began to rally me upon keeping up my incognito so long, the rest of the maskers, he said, had consented to reveal themselves. "Say you won't unmask till supper," whispered Kitty. I mechanically repeated the words. Others came up to talk to me, there was evidently some curiosity felt about me; I knew that I was not recognized. I can hardly tell how I found answers to the questions put to me; the questioners must have been satisfied with very vague and senseless responses, if mine satisfied them. Kitty, at once prompt and self-possessed, relieved me, and kept up her own part, disguising her voice, and answering readily. Unable to control my agony at the delay any longer, I exclaimed suddenly: "I feel faint, won't you (turning to the black domino) won't you get the bottle of salts I left in the dressing-room?" Her height and step nearly betrayed her; and Mr. Mason catching sight of a woman's foot as she ran up the stairs, proclaimed the fact, and excited a general exclamation of wonder. "Never saw a character better sustained--everybody had thought it a man all the evening." I listened for the opening of the window in the west room overhead, then for Kitty's step as she stole out. I I heard it through all the din of music and of voices. Then came a dreadful suspense; how to get rid of the people, how to get on the piazza, I could not tell. Victor might even now be waiting for me, a moment more might be too late; the officers might at any instant return. Just then supper was announced, and, "now you have promised to unmask, now you must tell us who you are," exclaimed the gentlemen. "Not while you are all here," I exclaimed, "I will not take off my mask to-night unless you all go to supper and leave me." It was long before I rid myself of my admirers; the last one was dismissed to bring me an ice, and the instant I was alone, I stole out on the piazza and round to the appointed spot, and sheltering myself from sight, waited with a throbbing heart the appearance of the rose-colored domino. But the throbs sunk to faint and sickening slowness as minute after minute passed and no one came; dull, slow, torturing minutes that seemed to count themselves out by the dropping of my life's blood, each one left me so much fainter and more deathlike than before. Reason and endurance began to give way under the intense pressure, the laughter and merriment from within rang hideously in my ears, the gaudy lamps and glaring lights swam before me, I clung to the balcony for support; it seemed to reel from my grasp, and staggering forward, I should have fallen, but for the arm of some one that approached, and hurried to my side. He pushed back my mask and in a moment the fresh air in my face revived me, I raised my head and cast an agonized look down the walk that led to the shrubbery, and this time it was hope and not despair that followed the look. "Pray leave me," I said imperiously to my attendant, "I am well now, I had rather be alone." It was only when he turned to leave me that I saw it was Mr. Rutledge; the figure that approached down the walk claimed all my thoughts. It faltered a moment irresolutely on the steps. "Courage!" I whispered putting my hand in his. "Follow me to this window, and we will cross the parlors, they are nearly clear." I knew that the spirit of the man I led was broken hopelessly, he who had been so brave and reckless! At every step he wavered and held back; "I cannot," he murmured shrinking as we reached the hall, now filling with the gay throng from the supper room and library and the adjoining balconies. I hurried him forward, nerved with a new courage; I braved the inquisitive eyes of the crowd that thronged us, I had a bold answer for all their questions, a repartee for all their jests, and so I fought my way to the foot of the stairs. "Go up," I whispered to Victor, pushing him forward, and turning, I kept back with laugh and raillery the knot of people clustered round the landing-place. "You shall be mobbed!" cried Grace. "We all unmasked half an hour ago. No one has a right to invisibility now!" "I am just going up to unmask, but you will not let me." "Will you promise to come instantly down?" asked Mr. Mason. "Instantly." "Will you dance the next set with me?" asked Ellerton. "With great pleasure." "Then it's but fair we should leave her," said Phil, and they moved away. Kitty, as I reached the upper hall, made me a hasty gesture to turn out the light at the head of the stairs. I obeyed, and in a moment the lights at that end of the hall were all extinguished, and only one left burning dimly at the other extremity. "Quick!" whispered Kitty. "Mrs. Roberts is in her room. I have the key." We hurried toward her, groping along the dark passage. The heavy wardrobe moved from its place with a dull, rumbling sound; the key grated in the unused lock. "Quick! quick!" whispered Victor. "There is a step on the stairs!" There was a cruel moment of suspense as the key refused to turn; Victor held my hand in his with a grasp of iron; a low cry of despair burst from Kitty, as the step on the stairs mounted quickly. It was a matter of life and death indeed; discovery seemed inevitable now. "Push, push it with all your might," I cried in an agony, "perhaps it will give way!" "Thank heaven!" murmured Victor, as it yielded to her desperate strength. In less time than it takes to speak it, the door closed upon him, the wardrobe was pushed back to its place. "What is the meaning of this?" said the stern voice of the master at the head of the stairs. "Why are the lights put out? Who is there? Answer me." Kitty thrust me into the nearest room, and advanced to meet her angry master. "It's me, sir--Kitty; and I was just come up myself to see what had made it so dark up here; I think, sir, that the north windows there have been left open, and the wind has come up strong from that way, and the draught has put them out. It was very careless of Mrs. Roberts not to look after it," she continued, busying herself in relighting the lamps. "Kitty," said Mr. Rutledge in a voice that I knew had more terror for the girl, than any other in the world, "your falsehoods are very ready, but they can never deceive me, remember that. Tell me promptly who put the lamps out." "The fact is, master," she said dropping her eyes and looking contrite as she approached him, "my poor young lady has had a fainting-fit down stairs, and she wanted to get to her own room without anybody recognizing her, so I turned the lights out, for several of the young gentlemen were waiting about the stairs to see what room she'd go to." "That lie is even more ingenious than the first. It is useless to question you further; you do not know how to speak the truth even when it is the best policy. Bring that light and follow me." "Don't scold Kitty," I said, faintly, coming forward. "It was my fault, I wanted the lights put out. I thought it would do no harm, just for a moment, but I beg your pardon." Mr. Rutledge turned abruptly away with a curling lip. "Mistress and maid together are too much for a plain man like me. I accept whatever interpretation you choose to put upon it." And he strode angrily down the stairs. "Take off your domino and go down quick!" exclaimed Kitty. "Oh Kitty! How can I? I can hardly stand, I am so faint." "No matter," she said, inexorably. "Everybody will be wondering if you don't come, and there's been enough already! Take this, Miss, and do be brave, and don't give way." She poured me out a dose of valerian; I swallowed it, submitted unquestioningly to her as she smoothed my hair, and arranged my dress and sent me downstairs. After that it is all a misty sort of dream; I danced and laughed with a gaiety that startled all who had seen the recent listlessness of my manner; I was daring, coquettish, brilliant; I hardly knew what words were on my lips, but they must have been light and merry, for the others laughed and whispered: "What would absent friends say to such high spirits!" and arch and coquettish I turned away to hide the pang their words awoke, and danced--danced till the last guest had gone and the tired musicians faltered at their task, and the weary members of the household eagerly turned to their own rooms. Once in mine, the unnatural tension of my nerves gave way; Kitty laid me on the bed, and for hours, I fancy, thought it an even chance whether I ever came out of that death-like swoon or not. CHAPTER XXXIII. "I lived on and on, As if my heart were kept beneath a glass And everybody stood, all eyes and ears, To see and hear it tick," E.B. BROWNING. "Mr. Rutledge, sir!" exclaimed the captain, vehemently, bringing his hand down on the table with a force that made the glasses ring, "it's my opinion that there's a black mystery to be unravelled yet about that murder. It's my opinion that all our ears would tingle if we knew the truth. Certainly, in some inexplicable way, this place is connected with it. The man lurking about the grounds, the footprints across the garden-beds, the cravat found at the old summer-house--all seem to point out this neighborhood as his hiding-place." "I cannot see that exactly, Captain McGuffy," returned his host. "I acknowledge that there is a mystery, and a dark one, yet to be cleared away from the matter; and that the murderer may have taken a temporary refuge in the woods near the house, is a possible, though not an infallible deduction to be drawn from the circumstances you have mentioned. The fact of garden-beds defaced with footprints on such a night as that of the masquerade, can hardly excite any surprise; and as to the suspicious-looking person lurking about the grounds all day, why, none of the three witnesses who swear to having seen him, can at all describe his appearance or occupation. A drunken loafer from the village sleeping off the effects of a night's carouse in the shelter of our woods, is a much more simple interpretation of it, to my mind." The captain shook his head. "I cannot agree with you, sir; I cannot think that that cravat, blood-stained and soiled, was left in the summer-house by any village loafer. Village loafers, sir, do not, as a general thing, wear such cravats, nor stain them with anything darker than the drippings of their lager-bier." "I know you'll all laugh at me,"' said Ellerton Wynkar, "but, absurd as it is, I can't help thinking I've seen that cravat worn by----. Good heavens! what's the matter now! Mrs. Churchill, your niece is going to faint!" "Oh no!" said Grace, coolly passing me a glass of water. "Only turning white and looking distractingly pretty, then rallying a little, and looking up and saying faintly, 'I'm better, thank you,' and regaining composure gradually and gracefully. That's the programme. We're quite used to it by this time. When I have a _fiancé_ who must go to Europe, I shall be perfected in the art of graceful grief if I attend properly to the example I have now before me." "There's one art you're not perfected in at all events," said Phil. "What's that, bonnie Phil; what's that?" "The art of feeling," said her cousin, shortly. "Grace is thoughtless," said her mother, and entered into an apology so elaborate, that Phil was really distressed, and felt that he had been most unkind and unjust. He gave his hand to Grace, and said, with an honest smile: "I didn't mean any reproach, Gracie, only you know you _are_ a tease!" "But, sir," continued the captain, unable to relinquish the subject that most interested him, "do you really feel that everything has been done toward the clearing up of this mystery that lays within your power? Don't you think that if some stronger measures were taken, some more detectives placed on the track, the thing might be ferreted out? It's aggravating to one's feelings to think that the villain may be within pistol shot of us, and get clear after all." "It makes me so nervous," said Ella Wynkar, "I can't sleep at night, and Josephine makes Frances barricade the doors and windows as if we were preparing to stand a siege." "It's truly horrible," said Josephine, with a shudder. "I wouldn't go half a dozen yards from the house alone for any consideration." "Yes, Joseph, you are a coward, there's no denying it. Mr. Rutledge, what do you think of a girl of her age looking in all the closets, and even the bureau drawers, before she goes to bed at night, and making Frances sit beside her till she gets asleep?" "I really think," said Mr. Rutledge, rising from the table, "that you are all alarming yourselves unnecessarily. Every precaution has been taken to insure the arrest of any suspicious person, and there is no danger of any abatement in the zeal and activity of our rustic police. The woods and neighborhood are swarming with volunteer detectives, and till the offer of the reward is withdrawn, you may rest assured that their assiduity will not be. I think the young ladies may omit the nightly barricading, and excuse Frances from mounting guard after eleven o'clock. I should not advise your walking very far from the house unattended, but beyond that, really, I think you need not take any trouble." "And really _I_ think," muttered the captain, as we moved into the hall, "that he takes it very coolly. Upon my word, I didn't think he was the man to let such a thing as this be passed over in such an indifferent way." "God bless him for it!" I thought in my heart. "Stephen is waiting at the door to speak with you, sir," said Thomas to his master. Stephen's face expressed such a volume of alarm and importance, that we involuntarily stopped in the hall, as he answered Mr. Rutledge's inquiry as to his errand. "The body of a man, sir, has just been found in the lake. It has evidently been there a day or more. The men are down there, sir; I came immediately up to let you know." Mr. Rutledge gave a hurried glance at me, as he said quickly: "Possibly one of the laborers. I will go down with you at once." Capt. McGuffy, with an I-told-you-so nod to Phil, snatched his hat, and, followed by the other gentlemen, hurried with Stephen toward the lake. The ladies, in a frightened group, clustered together on the lawn and watched them from a distance. How well I could have told them who it was, and how long the bloated, disfigured corpse had lain floating among the reeds and alder-bushes at the head of the lake! How their ears, indeed, would tingle, if they should know the quarter part of what I knew. How sleepless and terrified Josephine's nights might well be, if she knew that a single foot of brick and mortar was all that separated her from the execrated murderer, with the horror of whose crime the country rang. How doubly aghast she would be, if she knew that the murderer was none other than the guest she had herself invited to Rutledge--the brilliant and clever man whose admiration she had vainly striven to obtain--the affianced husband of her cousin! What if they knew all this? What if my brain should give way under the pressure of this dreadful secret, and I should betray all! Sometimes I really thought I was losing my reason; the knowledge that I held the life of another in my own weak hands, made them tremble more; the keeping of the secret was wearing my very life away; sleepless nights and wretched days were doing their sure work with me, and the terrible excitement within, shone out in my eyes and burned in a crimson spot on each white cheek, throbbed in my quick pulse and sapped the strength and vigor of my being. I could have wrestled with and overcome fear and timidity, if they had been all; I could have been brave and strong, if I had had but his sin to cover, his crime to hide; if I had been true, if my own heart had been pure of sin, I could have borne it. But it was the weight of remorse, added to all the rest, that crushed me to the dust. It was remembering how great a part I had had in Victor's sin, that took all courage out of my heart. If I had not deceived him, and allowed him to believe I loved him--would he not now have been safe? From those first beginnings of pride and resentment, I traced my sin in regard to him. Whenever they had got a foothold, the soothing flattery of Victor's love had crept in, to allay and lull the pain they caused. And I had not remembered to pray in those hours; I had trusted to myself, and gone on sinning. Just so far as I had been estranged from duty, and grown cold to holy things, just so far had I gone forward in the path which had now brought me to such terrible bewilderment. Whenever I had prayed and repented, his influence and the temptation of his presence had been weakened or withdrawn; whenever I had listened to the whispers of wounded pride or determined resentment, his voice had been at my ear, his love laid at my feet. When little Essie's death had drawn my thoughts awhile toward heaven, and made me realize the littleness and impotence of pride and wrath, and the insignificance of things seen, the power and eternity of things unseen, he had been forgotten and indifferent; but so soon as I had allowed the return of worldliness, so soon had I found myself snared in hypocrisy and deceit toward him. The little sins of every day, they had tempted me on to where I now stood. It was so easy to look back and see it all--how one slight omission of duty had led to another--how one moment of indulgence had weakened self-control--one disregard of truth had grown into the tyrant sin from which I could not now release myself; struggle as I might, I was helpless in its grasp. Every step but plunged me deeper; every word was but a fresh deceit. I saw Victor that evening for a few moments; Kitty had watched long for a safe chance to admit me. Mrs. Roberts, contrary to all precedent, had taken her knitting and seated herself in one of the hall windows, declaring that it was the coolest place in the house, and there remained the whole afternoon. There was nothing to induce her to do it but the obstinate instincts of her nature, to which she was ever true. She may have had some lurking suspicion that there was "something going on" upstairs, and though entirely ignorant of its nature, she could not doubt its evil tendency, believing as she had reason to, that Kitty was concerned in it. She had encountered that young person on the stairs after dinner, with a surreptitious plate of confectionery and fruit from dessert. Kitty had readily answered upon demand, that it was for her young lady; and Mrs. Roberts had very tartly remarked that in _her_ time, young ladies thought it best manners to eat as much as they wanted at the table, and not take the credit of being delicate, and then have extra plates of good things brought up to their rooms. Kitty could hardly brook the implied taunt, but she had to swallow it. She hovered anxiously around all the afternoon, inventing all manner of excuses to get Mrs. Roberts away, but to no avail, and it was only after dusk, when she had at last withdrawn to order tea, that Kitty eagerly beckoned me to follow her to the door of the hidden room, that had always had such a mysterious awe in my eyes. As I crept through the narrow space between the wardrobe and the door, I grasped Kitty's hand with an involuntary shudder. "Don't go away," I whispered. "No, Miss. I'll stay just outside the door and watch, and you must come the very minute I tap at it, for Mrs. Roberts will be back as soon as ever she has given out the things for tea. I won't go away, don't be afraid, Miss." The twilight was too dim for me to distinguish anything as Kitty closed the door softly behind me, and I groped my way into the room. "Victor!" I said, in a whisper, as no sound met my ear. A dark figure between me and the faint light of the window, started forward as I spoke, and, in another moment, my hands were grasped in hands as cold and trembling. Did it give me a shudder to remember the work those hands had done in the grey shadowy twilight, one short week before? I tried not to think of it. I tried to remember it was the man who loved me--who had risked his life for my love. But crime and remorse had strangely darkened and changed him. There was a wild sort of despair in his very tenderness--a fierce recklessness when he spoke of the future; I tried in vain to reassure myself and soothe him, but I quailed before a nature, beside the strength of whose passion, all that I had known or seen of despair and desperation faded into insignificance. A weak man can sin weakly, and bewail it feebly and with tears: a strong man, who is hurried into crime by the very intensity and strength, of his nature, turns fiercely upon the remorse that besets him; the very gall of bitterness is his repentance--blood and curses are the tears he sheds. Tenderness and confidence shrunk back affrighted from such contact; I trembled in his grasp, and he caught a suspicion of my fear. I never shall forget the agony of the gesture with which he released me, and turning away, buried his face in his hands. I started forward, and tried, in faltering accents, to assure him of--what? The words died on my lips. At that moment there was a hurried tap at the door, and Kitty's voice whispered: "Quick!" "There is your release!" he exclaimed, bitterly. "You have done your duty; draw a long breath, and hurry back into the light and freedom of the outer world. Quick! I must not keep you." "You are wrong," I murmured, "I must go, but it is just as dark and miserable outside to me, as it is here for you. Don't fancy, Victor, that there is any pleasure for me now." "You need not remind me of that!" he exclaimed, sinking down, and bowing his face on the table before him. "You need not remind me of that! I know I have dragged you down with me in my fall, and it is the cruellest thought in all my cruel anguish; but you shall be freed--be sure you shall be freed!" "Why will you talk so strangely, Victor? What have I done to make you doubt me now? I would die to serve you--I have no other thought than how to save you from the danger that threatens"---- Kitty shook the door impatiently, and implored me to come out. "I must go, Victor," I whispered. "Will you not speak to me? Good night." I bent over him, and touched my lips to his forehead, and then groped my way hastily to the door. He did not move or speak, and I turned back irresolutely, to beg him for a word of forgiveness, but Kitty, opening the door, caught me by the hand, and pulled me out. "They are all asking for you; Miss Josephine has been upstairs for you, and when she came down and said you weren't in your room, master looked so white, and started up so frightened, that the others all caught it of him, and began to call you and hunt all about for you; and I couldn't let you know, for old Roberts was marching up and down the hall, and keeping her eyes all about her. She's gone into her room a minute--now's your chance; run right down the private staircase--there's nobody in the butler's pantry--go out on the piazza, and so around to the front door. Quick! She's coming back!" I should have done anything Kitty told me to do at that moment. It was lucky for me she was the clear-headed, ingenious girl she was. I ran downstairs, and hurried round the piazza. At the hall door I paused a moment, and leaned against one of the pillars, to recover myself before I entered. Some one hurrying out of the house brushed against me. An exclamation of surprise and relief escaped his lips, and looking up, I saw Mr. Rutledge. "Where have you been?" he asked, abruptly. The suddenness of the question, and my miserable nervousness, overcame my self-possession entirely. I struggled in vain to speak, but ended by putting my face in my hands, and bursting into a flood of tears. "You are not well," he said, kindly, taking my hand and drawing me to a seat. "You are very unhappy. I cannot bear to see you suffer so. Will you not tell me what it is, and let me help you?" "No one can help me--no one can do me the least good." "You think so, perhaps; but you do not know how far I might. You do not know how much I would sacrifice to see you happy again. If you will only confide to me the anxiety that I see is killing you, I will promise to further your wishes, and to endeavor to relieve your mind, at the cost of anything to myself except my honor." I shook my head. "You cannot help me--no one can." "If it is only grief at parting with your lover," he went on, quickly, "I cannot do you any good; but if it is what I fear for you, I can perhaps advise you--perhaps materially aid you. Trust in me for this; show the confidence in me that you have hitherto refused, and you shall see how well I will serve you--how unselfishly and unreservedly I will try to restore you to happiness." Pity can make the human face almost like the face of an angel; there is no emotion that is so transforming. When pride, self-will, and selfishness, resign their sway, and pity, heaven-born and god-like, dawns, all that is mean, and coarse, and earthly, seems to fade before it, to grow dumb and quiet in the calm radiance of its risen fullness. Such pity beamed on me now, but its healing and tenderness came too late, "As on the uprooted flower, the genial rain." "You are very kind," I murmured; "but there is nothing anybody can do for me." He rose sadly. "I will not torment you, then. Will you come into the house? If you desire to go to your room, I will manage your excuses for you." With almost inaudible thanks, I hurried into the hall and upstairs. My aunt came up in the course of the evening, but Kitty represented me as "just going to sleep," and I was spared an interview. "Kitty!" I exclaimed, starting up, long after she had fancied I was soothed to sleep, "how--how will it all end? What is to become of him after we go? It was decided yesterday that we leave in two days' time, and you know it will not be safe for him to think of escape till the excitement has died away in the country. Poor Victor! What is to become of him?" "Don't fret," said Kitty, soothingly, "even if you have to leave him here, there'll be no more danger for him than if you stayed. Mr. Rutledge is going too, you know, and the house will be shut up, and it will be safer, if anything, than now. I'll write you every day of my life, and tell you how things go on. And, depend upon it, the worst of the danger is over. Since this body has been found in the lake, people will begin to content themselves that there's no use in looking further for the murderer--that he did it and then drowned himself in despair. Michael hasn't brought up the news of the inquest yet--he's waiting in the village to hear it; but I've no manner of doubt what it'll be. Everybody knows he and the doctor had dealings together, and that, with the character he bears, will tell against him." "You don't suppose he had any papers about him that might do Victor harm?" "If he had had, they wouldn't be of any use now; they've been in the water too long to serve any purpose, good or bad. No, Black John, as they call him, will have to bear the credit of the crime he was hunting poor Mr. Victor to death for. There ain't many that he didn't deserve to take the credit of. Everybody knows that he was nothing slow at all manner of wickedness, and it seems the likeliest thing in the world that he should do the devil's work; and, mark my words, before a week is over, there won't be man, woman or child in the country round, that won't curse Black John as Dr. Hugh's murderer. It won't do him much harm now, poor wretch; a few curses more or less won't make much difference to him where he is now, I suppose." "Had he a wife?" "A drunken, half-crazy thing. She spends her time between the poor-house and the grog-shop. She'll never mind about her husband, beyond howling for an hour or two when she first hears it, if she happens to be sober. Now, Miss, don't think any more about it, but try to go to sleep. You'll be quite worn out." And Kitty threw herself upon her mattress by my bed, where she now slept, and, faithfullest and tenderest of attendants, never left me, day or night. CHAPTER XXXIV. "Nor peace nor ease, the heart can know, That, like the needle true, Turns at the touch of joy or woe, But, turning, trembles too." GREVILLE. "Things seem to be taking a new turn," said the captain, meditatively, over his coffee the next morning. "I own I thought we were at the bottom of the mystery, yesterday, but this woman's testimony seems to set us all adrift again, and we're no nearer a conclusion than we were a week ago." "What woman's?" asked Ellerton, who had just come in. "The man's wife," said the captain. "What man's?" demanded Ella, who generally arrived at a subject about ten minutes after it had been introduced. "Why the man who was supposed to have murdered the doctor, Miss Ella, and whose body was found in the lake. We were all mightily relieved yesterday, and thought the murderer had found his reward, and were only sorry that he'd cheated the hangman. But in the meantime his wife turns up, and brings a lot of things to light; swears that on the night of the murder he was at Brandon, on an errand for the doctor, and brings the landlord and barkeeper of the 'Brandon Shades' to testify to his remaining there till after eleven o'clock. She also states that the doctor and her husband were on good terms, and that the doctor often employed him in a confidential way; that there was a person who, she knew, bore malice against the doctor; she had overheard a conversation between her husband and Dr. Hugh, in which"---- "But her testimony goes for nothing," I interrupted, eagerly. "She is well known to be half crazy, and hardly ever sober. Her testimony can't be worth a straw--nobody would listen to her for a moment." "I don't know about that; her story hangs together, she's sober enough now, and will be kept so till they have done with her. She says that the doctor came to their shanty late the night before the murder, and called John out; she crept to the keyhole and listened. She lost a good deal of what they said for a little while, they talked so low; then John raised his voice, and said with an oath, he'd take down the villain's pride for him a bit; he wondered the doctor had stood his cursed ugliness so long; for his part, he'd put a bullet through him to-morrow, with pleasure. The doctor hushed him, and said, 'Not so fast, John, not so fast, wait awhile; we must get a little more out of him before we send him to his long account. We'll settle up old scores with pleasure, after we've no further use for him. Attend to this little errand for me to-morrow, and don't let him slip, and that'll be the first step toward a reckoning.'" "Well, but I cannot see," said Mr. Rutledge, "what it all amounts to, even if the woman's testimony is received, which is more than doubtful. She didn't hear any names. Nobody has any doubt but that the doctor had plenty of enemies, and that her man John was a scoundrel, and I cannot see what else her evidence goes to prove." "It goes to prove that there was _somebody_ with whom the doctor was not on good terms, who has not appeared on the stage as yet, and of whom we want to get hold. It goes to prove, my dear sir, that the man John was sent to Brandon on a matter in some way connected with this person; and, to my mind, when we shall have, found out who that person was, we shall have found out who was the murderer of Dr. Hugh!" "But," said Phil, "what do the barkeeper and landlord of 'The Shades' say? Don't they know who he came to meet, and for whom he waited till eleven?" "John, it seems, 'kept dark,' lounged around the bar-room, and spoke little to any one, as was his manner, but went often to the door, and seemed to wait for some one. The barkeeper thinks, but is not sure, that it was he who was there once before during the morning, with a letter which he left, directed to a gentleman whose name he has forgotten, who never called for it." "Ah!" cried Phil, "now we shall get at it, I think. What became of the letter?" "The letter," interrupted Mr. Rutledge, "the letter that was left there that morning"---- I crushed the newspaper that lay beside me with my nervous hand; I smothered the cry that trembled on my lips, but my eyes burned on his face. He avoided them and went on. "The letter which was left there by some one, who, it is conjectured, only _conjectured_, may have been this man, was addressed to some person not at all known in Brandon, and who never came for it. It was opened and examined, and proved to be only the business circular of some importing house in New York. So all idea of tracing anything from that was given up, and the letter thrown aside." "Strange," said Phil, thoughtfully. "I should have thought something could have been made out of it. In a small place like Brandon, where everybody knows everybody, I should have thought that the circumstance of a strange name on a letter left at a little tavern would have excited some interest." "Brandon is a railway station, you know, and consequently there are strangers always coming and going." "Do you remember the name on the letter, sir?" "Some foreign name, I think. Captain McGuffy, do you remember it?" said Mr. Rutledge, indifferently. "I don't think I heard it," returned the captain. "And I really have the curiosity to want to know something more about that letter, though all the legal gentlemen, I know, have decided against its usefulness in the case. I must remember to ask Judge Talbot to let me look at it," he continued, taking out his memorandum-book and making an entry. "Phil, don't you feel like taking a drive over to Brandon with me, this morning, and seeing if there's anything new to be learned?" "Captain McGuffy," I exclaimed, "don't you want to do me a favor? I am perfectly wild to have a ride on horseback this morning, and you know you promised to give me some lessons in 'cavalry practice' before we left, and there is only one day more. What do you say to a canter over to Windy Hill this fine morning?" The captain fell in with the proposition very readily, and Mr. Rutledge suggested that it would be a very good arrangement for all of the party to accompany us, in the carriage and open wagon, and to make our farewell call, also, to the Emersons. "To-morrow may not be fine," said Mr. Rutledge, "and perhaps we had better secure to-day." The rest were agreed, and we hurried off to dress; as the two places were far distant from each other and from Rutledge, it was necessary to start as soon as possible. In my dread lest Phil should decline being of the party, and should ride over to Brandon by himself, I called out to him to know if he would not accept an appointment in my regiment? He laughed, and accepted; and unheeding the flaming battery of Josephine's eyes, I ran up to put on my habit. There was another lady's horse in the stable, besides the one I should use, but Josephine and Ella, though dying to ride, would neither of them volunteer to accompany me. "You are too nervous to ride, Miss," said Kitty, as she buttoned my gloves. "See how your hand shakes. Why will you go? You are not fit." "I must; there is no help. Tell him why I go, Kitty, and that I will be back as soon as I can, and you must manage to let me see him in the course of the afternoon. And be sure you make him understand about my going." Glorious Madge! I had never expected to mount her again. I had never expected to burden her with such a heavy heart. What a contrast to the daring young rider of a few short months ago. Madge Wildfire was as eager and untamed as then, but not so her mistress. Her mistress, the fire quenched in her eye, the pride of her free step humbled, the courage of her spirit broken, trembled at the very beauty of the animal she rode. "You are not fit for this," said Mr. Rutledge, in a low tone, as he put me in the saddle. "You had better give it up. It is not too late; let one of the others take your place." "No, thank you. I shall be better for the ride." "Captain McGuffy, you must remember your pupil is rather inexperienced," he said, uneasily, as the captain mounted and rode up beside me. "Madge has not been used for some time, and she is feeling very fine." "No danger," said the captain, as, followed by Phil, we trotted rapidly down the avenue. There must have been a touch of human intelligence and sympathy in Madge; she was burning to be off on a mad race across the country; she was fairly throbbing with impatience; my weak grasp upon her bridle she could have thrown off with one toss of her arched neck; but, quivering with life and fire as she was, she restrained her pace to suit my fears, and minded my slightest touch, with more than human gentleness. By degrees, I came to realize this, and reassured and emboldened, I sat more firmly and rode less timidly. The cool air of the morning braced and strengthened my nerves; I could hardly have believed that I could have felt so differently in so short a time, and every foot of ground we put between us and Rutledge, seemed to distance just so far my anxiety and wretchedness. My companions amused themselves, and thought they were amusing me, by reminiscences of military adventures, frontier experiences, and camp life; which served to keep them occupied, and give me time to rest and recover myself. When we rode into the lodge gate at Windy Hill, I was indeed so much better for my ride, that even Phil noticed the change in my expression. "You ought to have ridden every day while we have been here. You must ride to-morrow by all means." We were the first of the party to arrive, and had been seated in the parlor some minutes, enjoying the prattle of the Misses Mason, before the others drove up. All were made hugely welcome. One is surest of appreciation, socially, in a visit to a lonely country place, where visitors are at a premium, and where there are pining young daughters, and unemployed young sons, and a hospitable head of the family, to swell the note of welcome. All these elements of hospitality we found at Windy Hill; never were guests more welcome, and the only doubt seemed to be, whether we should ever be allowed to go. Lunch did not suffice, we must stay to dinner. Mason _père_ said it should be so, and Mason _fils_ ordered the carriage away, and the horses taken out. Mrs. Churchill pleaded our toilets, but was overruled. Mr. Rutledge advanced the necessity for our visit at Beech Grove as an obstacle. That should be no objection. After dinner the young people should join us, and we could all go together. There being really no reason why we should not accept this hospitality, it was at last decided we should remain. The morning slipped away very fast; there was a great deal to be seen about the place; fine views and pretty walks on every hand, outside, and a library and picture-gallery full of interest within. New merchandisable interest, that is. The Masons had just returned from Europe, and had brought with them whatever had been procurable for money, unbacked by taste or judgment. The result was, a good many pictures in rather questionable taste, but framed and hung unexceptionably; a great deal of so-so statuary, engravings bought by the portfolio, and "gems of art," bearing about the same relation to high art, that the contents of some jeweller's show-case, in Chatham street, bears to the Koh-i-noor. My particular friend, the younger Mr. Mason, attended me through the library and picture-gallery; and though the names of the pictures and the prices of the books seemed to be the items that he was most familiar with, I could not but admire the grasp of mind that could master and retain such dry statistics. By the time that dinner was announced, I felt that we had earned it, so much listening, looking, admiring had we done. Dinner at the Masons' was never a brief meal; the master of the house had known too much of short commons in his boyhood, and eighteen-penny lunches at second-rate eating-houses during his clerkship, not to place a full value upon the luxuries of the table; and on the present occasion nothing was wanting to make it an elaborate and elegant repast, honorable to guests and entertainers. It was five o'clock before we left the table, and fully six before we were in the saddle. The ride to Beech Grove occupied another hour; a mere call, of course, was impossible. We were quite as cordially, though rather less enthusiastically, welcomed by Mr. Emerson and his black-eyed daughter; the horses were again sent away, and we were told to consider ourselves prisoners for the evening. Not a very dreary and insupportable prison, certainly, we were condemned to. Beech Grove was a lovely spot; the house, about one-third the size of the one we had just left, was a gem in point of architectural beauty and tasteful decoration. Cultivation and refinement spoke at every turn--choice pictures, rare books, exquisite bronzes, were the natural and unobtrusive furniture of the rooms; one was not called upon to admire by anything more demonstrative than quiet enjoyment and ease. It was the atmosphere of the place that one was to revel in; and no obligation existed to analyze its component parts. The realization of the speedy termination of our pleasant intercourse, at least for the present, gave a very natural charm to the evening, and made it a very prolonged and happy one. At least, to those of us who had not forgotten how to be happy; for me, I could hardly remember when I had not been wretched, so agonizingly long and miserable had the past fortnight been, and so strongly had it marked itself on my memory. I looked with a kind of wonder at the light-heartedness of my companions. Was it possible I had ever found anything to laugh at in such things as called forth their merriment, or anything to stir my anger in their puerile slights and taunts? Grace was vexed by my indifference, and tried, with no contemptible ingenuity, to irritate me; and Josephine and Ella too, resented my determined appropriation of their beaux. I was too listless though, at last they found, to make it pay to tease me; so, by degrees, they dropped off and left me. Even Mr. Mason, it was evident, was beginning to think that he had overrated my spirit, and the captain, that my overtures of the morning did not mean quite so much, after all, as he had flattered himself. Miss Emerson, who was a nice, bright girl, not in the least afraid of herself or of any one else, and with whom one felt intimate after half an hour's acquaintance, ran up to me and asked me _sotto voce_, if it didn't bore me to death to have that man talk to me; she was sure I looked tired, and she meant to relieve me; so, with some clever excuse, in a few minutes she hurried me off to the library, made me lie on the sofa while she sat beside me, and chatted with me in her peculiarly piquant and amusing manner. It was very nice and comfortable to be treated so; but I could not help wondering what her other guests would think of her for absenting herself from them so much. It was a matter of very little moment to Miss Janet, however, what any one but "Papa" thought of her, and she was sure of a tender judgment from him always; but at last it seemed to strike her that even he might consider it rather negligent to leave the parlor so long, so springing up, she said: "I must go back to those people; but remember, you are not to stir; or, yes, you may sit here by the table, and look over these engravings. You are not fit to be dragged about making visits; they're a set of heathens to make you go. I know you hate it. What _is_ the matter, really, now?" she said, abruptly, stooping over me, and fixing her black eyes on my face. "You don't look like the same girl latterly. If I hadn't known you before, I should have thought you were tiresome and mopish and had no spirit. I like you better than your French cousins, and I wish you'd come and stay with me. Won't you? I'll make Papa coax Mrs. Churchill to let you stay after they go." I shook my head and sighed. "You look as if it were no use to talk about it; but I don't give it up, though I must go to the parlor. I shall come back and look after you every little while, and I'm going to send some one to entertain you while I'm gone." "Oh! I'd rather not--I'd rather be quiet"---- Miss Janet shook her head with a very pretty determined shake. "You shall have somebody that won't bore you--somebody that I like and that you like; the only man here, in point of fact, worth talking to, except Papa," and she ran off. I leaned back in my chair and tried to be patient; since we left Windy Hill every minute had grown longer than the last. I had been in a fever of anxiety about the effect our absence might produce on Victor. I knew his morbid bitterness would construe it into a willful thing on my part, and that the neglect would seem unpardonable and cruel. The evening had seemed interminable, and no one dreamed of going yet. In a few moments I heard Miss Emerson's voice in the hall, and Mr. Rutledge's in reply. "Of course, since you desire it, I will do my best to be entertaining; but you know you have not told me who it is I am to devote myself to." "O, you shall see for yourself; go in the library, she is there, and be sure you amuse and please her, for she's my particular favorite," and with a laugh and a nod, she left him in the door. Mr. Rutledge started a little, and did not look very much pleased when he recognized me; but there was no help, so he sat down beside me at the table. "Miss Emerson told me she should send some one to entertain me. I didn't know she meant to send you." "Is there any one you would prefer? Mr. Arbuthnot, the captain, or your heavy adorer, Mr. Theodore Mason? You need not hesitate to tell me. I will resign in favor of any one you name." I was too miserable to be angry at his tone; with a languid movement of my hand, I answered: "If you are willing to stay, sir, there is no one I should like so well." "It is not often you allow yourself in anything so gracious as that. I will stay with pleasure. But Miss Emerson says I must entertain you--I must be agreeable. Now, though I dare not, for my life, disobey anything so blackeyed and imperious, still I haven't the first idea how to proceed, and unless you give me a hint, I am certain I shall fail. What shall I talk about? What do young ladies like, literature or gossip--people or things?" "My tastes haven't changed, Mr. Rutledge; you used to find no difficulty in talking to me--at least, I never supposed it cost you much effort, and you always succeeded in entertaining me; so if that is honestly your object to-night, I do not think you need be at a loss." "What did I use to talk about, when I amused you, if ever I was so happy? If you would give me a suggestion"---- He turned his eyes full on me, as I answered: "When you first used to talk to me, you seemed to think me a very foolish, frightened child, and were very kind and gentle. Then, after you had found out I was old enough to understand you, and clever enough to appreciate you, you used to talk to me about your travels, and the people you had met, the countries you had seen. Sometimes you would talk to me about books, and make me tell you what ones I liked, and after you were convinced, I was prejudiced and enthusiastic enough to make it worth your while to oppose me, you would amuse yourself by contradicting and thwarting me. Then you would suddenly change and be kind--oh! so kind!--and treat me as if I were fit to be your friend and your companion; you would tell me about the world that I had only dreamed of then; you warned me of its danger, its heartlessness and treachery; you counselled me, and talked as if you really cared what became of me; you told me the world was full of coldness and unkindness, but oh! you did not tell me half you might have told me about that. Then, sometimes--not often--you would tell me some slight thing about yourself; you looked sterner and colder than ever when you did; your eye would flash, and your lip would curl--some unseen chain would gall you when you thought of the Past; something that came with its memory humbled you, you hated it, you hated yourself; but I liked you--I liked you better then than when you were talking to please me, or to instruct me, or to please or instruct other people; you were involuntary then--you were yourself--and though I liked you in those days whatever you did, I liked you best of all when you talked of yourself." "Then I will talk of myself now; I have promised to entertain you, and you have told me how to do it. They are dancing in the parlor now, and the music and the laughing will screen us from them; you can listen at your ease, and be entertained without fear of interruption. I believe you when you say you like to hear me talk of myself, because it pleases me to believe it, and men, you know, will go great lengths to believe anything that suits their vanity. "But first, you will not mind anything that I may say--you will not shrink and blush? Remember, it is a man's life, and not a woman's, that you are to hear about--a dark life, and not a prosperous one--and to make it vivid to you, I must show you the blackness of the shadow and the depth of the gloom; you must know what the trial has been before you can know what grim strength was needed to endure it--what coldness and sternness, as you call them, to keep down the pain within. You are a child no longer; you know something of what suffering is, so I can tell you with some hope of pity, if you will listen and not be dainty--if you will forget all about yourself, and think only of what you hear. Can you be such a listener? Such only are worthy of confidence. I never found one before, but I will try you. Do you hear the rumbling of that distant thunder? How strangely it mixes with the music across the hall! There is a storm coming up; we cannot go home for two hours yet, and they will not tire of dancing even then"---- There was a keen, piercing flash of lightning. "Does it make you nervous? You used to be afraid in thunder-storms." "I don't mind the lightning any more than the flare of the candle to-night, Mr. Rutledge. Why don't you go on with what you promised to tell me?" "I will not begin by telling you about my childhood; a happy childhood is a thing to be enjoyed once in reality, and forever in memory, but not to be talked about; no one but the man himself can see the least pathos or deliciousness in the details and recollections of his nursery days; to others they are weariness and folly; to him they are the sweetest pages in his memory; but he must not hope to find there is any other than himself who can see any interest in them. Perhaps his mother, if God spares her to him--perhaps the woman whom he has taught to love him, and to whom he is all the world--perhaps his young children, before they have learned their perfect lesson of egotism and selfishness--may listen as if the story were their own; but I have found no one to whom I could be egotistical and not be wearisome; I have found that most people like to hear about themselves, and I have not thwarted them. "But you shall hear of what I have told no one else." CHAPTER XXXV. ----"Of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: 'It might have been!" Whittier. And I did hear it; I heard during the slow gathering and heavy bursting of that summer storm, the story about which my imagination had been so busy, and of which I had so longed to be assured; I heard from Mr. Rutledge's own lips, of his happy childhood, his hopeful boyhood. He described himself as he was then, as if he were describing some one else, some one who had died and left the light of day; for it was nothing else but death that passed upon him, a death to hope and faith, a death to tenderness and trust, a death to all but stern endurance and sufferings that make life worse than death. If he had not been just so enthusiastic and full of hope, he could not have been so dashed down to despair; but because he had never dreamed that there could be anything but truth and purity and honor in those he loved, just so cruel and fatal was the awakening from the dream. He told me of his brother, the handsome Richard: with a soul too refined and delicate for the rough world he had to do with, a temperament that recoiled with pain from all that was coarse or common, a pride that was so intuitive that it could hardly be overcome, so unconscious that it could hardly be called a sin, so fostered that he, at least, was not to blame for it. To him it was not matter of exultation that he was rich and well-born and high-bred; it was only his native air, his place in life, his vital breath, without which he must have died. Never overbearing and imperious, his reserve saved him from familiarity, his gentleness from aversion. Ah! Rutledge had then a worthy heir, noble, handsome, high-toned enough to fill even his proud father's ambition. And then he told me, and it cost him a keen pang to speak her name, of Alice, his beautiful sister; of the adoration with which he had looked up to her, the pride which every one of the narrow home circle felt in her loveliness and grace. He had believed she was almost an angel; he had never looked above her for purity and truth, and in one cruel moment he had to learn that she was false and sinful, that she had fallen below the lowest, that "she had mixed her ancient blood with shame," that the darling and pride of every heart was now the disgrace and anguish of every heart. The story that he told me did not sound at all like this; I could no more tell it as he told it, than I could paint one of Church's pictures. I could, perhaps, describe, so as to make intelligible, the picture or the story, but it would be as impossible for me to render faithfully, in every delicate tone and touch, in the masterly strength and vivid power, the one as the other. I listened with every pulse; my heart stopped, spellbound, before that story; not even my own life could have had more interest to me than his; and vaguely--but oh! how bitterly--it began to dawn upon me, that once I might have had the power to have made the past forgotten in the present, to have won him to believe in love and truth once more; that in my fatal choice I had not doomed myself alone, that three souls, instead of my own sinning one, were writhing now under the curse of my folly and deceit. Alice Rutledge's name had perished forever from the records of the good and pure; where would mine be, when the secrets of all hearts should be revealed? Not among the good, with a lie on my lips, a life-long hypocrisy to be carried in my heart; not among the pure, cherishing yet this unconquered passion, while in the sight of Heaven I was breaking a vow only less sacred than the one I must make before the altar. But it is her story and not mine I am to tell. If human love and care could suffice to keep any soul, under the pressure of a strong temptation, Alice Rutledge might have been safe; yet environed and hemmed in with affection, she fell; honor, pride, filial love, were powerless to keep her back. The only principle that can save man or woman in the hour when the powers of darkness have leave to try them, she lacked, and lacking that, fell hopelessly from the earthly paradise which alone she had lived for or regarded. The fair, frail daughter of a godless house, the child whose glance had never been directed to anything higher than virtue and honor, to whom no principle more binding than that of morality had been taught, whose frailty had never been strengthened by any aid more powerful and enduring than the yearning fondness of the hearts that doted on her; what wonder that when the powers of hell assaulted her, no strength could stand against them that was not divine, no work stand in that day, that was of wood, or hay, or stubble, no work that had not Heaven's own seal to resist the devouring flame! All that the wit and knowledge and virtue of man could teach, Alice Rutledge had been taught; but the only lesson that could have done her any good in that day, she had never learned. The lesson that she should have lisped at her mother's knee, that should have been implanted before any earthly desire had taken root in her flexile soul, had never been given to her. The "sign to angels known," had not marked her baby-forehead, holy hands had not overshadowed her before the strife began, all her goodness and strength were of the earth, earthy, and the prince of this world won an easy victory over them. When temptation came, it found her careless, secure. How was it a possible thing for her to fall? Why need she renounce what was but a pleasant dream, as innocent as it was secret. She was promised to one whom she had meant to love; she had, perhaps, loved him at first, but with a shade too much of awe to make it perfect love, and the weakness and timidity of her nature made her shrink involuntarily from what was higher and stronger, and cling to what was lower, and nearer to her own level. And so she yielded, little by little, to the fascinations of an intercourse that, had she listened to it, even her own weak heart would have told her was a sin. She was bound by betrothal, her tempter was bound by marriage; if the glamour of destruction had not been over her already, she could have seen the madness of such an intimacy, the sure perdition that such a violation of right, even in thought, must lead to. But it was the very impossibility and security that ensnared her, that blinded those around her. Richard's dearest friend, the most desired and welcome guest at her father's house, the most accomplished and refined gentleman she knew, how could she see in him the traitor that he was? She, almost a child in years and inexperience, and he, a man of the world, with the world's worst principles, and withal, so wily, so eloquent, so impassioned, was it strange that before she dreamed of danger, she was snared beyond redemption. The destruction of her principles had been so gradual, the instilling of his so artful, that the work was nearly done before the lost girl saw her peril. Then, no one can tell the struggles of her tempted soul; duty and reason against sinful love and guilty passion; but who can question for a moment which way the balance turned? There was none of whom she could ask counsel. She had deceived and outraged all she loved, so shamefully, by the very thought of what now tempted her, that it was worse than death to betray in the least her misery. The one to whom at last she turned, was the one least fitted to direct her; her companion, governess and friend was only less worldly and thoughtless than her charge; she loved her with all her heart, would have sacrificed anything to serve her; she never dreamed of the danger she was in till too late; terrified, she strove to bring her back to reason, but in vain. Alice's was the stronger will, and she weakly yielded to it, and became the reluctant tool in the hands of the seducer. In one awful moment it burst upon the proud old man that his name was branded with disgrace, his daughter fled, his love outraged, his honor stabbed a deadly blow; all that he had lived for lost; all that he had hoped for blighted. In that household there was such amazement and wrath and desolation as are horrible but to imagine. Love outraged most cruelly, friendship betrayed most vilely, all that was pure turned into sin, all that was true turned false. In one short hour, the pride of that ungodly home was humbled to the dust, its fair name stained with shame, its very life's blood oozing from that cruel wound. "Therefore revenge became it well?" Therefore the agony that nothing else could allay, should seek to dull itself in vengeance, should hunt to the very death the shameless traitor? Should hurl blighting curses on the head of her who had brought this ruin on her home? But God stayed the impotent wrath of man. He took the vengeance that alone is His, in His own hands; the curses that the outraged father called down on his erring child, clustered, a black and ghastly troop, around his own dying bed, and shut off the last ray of mercy. Before a hand could be raised to deal vengeance, death struck down the father, and but few days and nights of anguish and solicitude had passed before his heir lay dead beside him, and the life of the boy who alone of all survived, lay trembling in the balance. For a long while it seemed uncertain whether God had not forgotten the race that had so long forgotten Him; whether He had not turned away His face, and they should all die and turn again to their dust; whether the memory of them should not be rooted off of the earth, and their name perish from among the children of men. For a long while, the boy lay between life and death, but when at last life conquered, and he came back to the changed and desolated world, it was with but little gratitude for the boon that had been granted him, with almost a loathing of the life that had been spared to him. It is not necessary to the purposes of my story nor will it further its elucidation, to repeat the history of the years that followed. It is sufficient that they were years of misanthropy and misery, almost of infidelity. Travel, change, society, neither attracted nor soothed him; the life he led it suited no one to join him in, and in the midst of the world he lived unmolested by it and regardless of it. At last--what need to tell when or how--there came an awakening; he saw the truth he had been so long shutting his eyes from, he saw God's mercy and his own sin, and rousing from his apathy he bent himself to the work that lay before him. We know what that work was, and how well he fulfilled it; from the misanthropic recluse, he became the Christian. I knew all this, and much more, that he did not tell me. "The story has been too long already, I will leave you now," said Mr. Rutledge with a sudden change of voice; "I have finished my office of _raconteur_, you have listened well; almost I could swear to having seen a tear glisten in your eye, almost I could take my oath you have not once thought of yourself and your young lady sensibilities, but have been absorbed to forgetfulness of them all by the story of one who is almost a stranger to you, quite a stranger, indeed, you said not long ago." "I did not mean that when I said it, Mr. Rutledge, I repented of it a minute afterward. And I want to say to you now--I am sorry from my heart for that, and the many other hypocrisies you know I have been guilty of. You don't know all, you would despise me if you did; if you knew how cowardly I have been, and how deceitful. I have not meant it; I have said a hundred things that I have cried for afterward, that I never would have said if I had not been too proud and too angry to have controlled myself. But believe me, I am miserably sorry now. Will you forgive me?" He leaned forward for a moment on the table, and shading his eyes with his hand, fixed them on my face. "Forgive you?" he said in a low, clear tone, "Forgive you? no--not yet--you must not ask it yet! When I have conquered _my_ pride and _my_ passion, you may ask me to forgive you, but not now--not now!" "Aunt Edith, do you want me?" I faltered, starting up. Mrs. Churchill moved from where she stood beside the doorway and entered the room. "You have been absent a long while," she said in a soft voice, "we have been wondering where you were. Mr. Rutledge, how have you managed to amuse my listless and _distraite_ young niece so long? Have you been studying a map of France with her, or poring over a chart of the Atlantic? For such pursuits are all, I believe, that have any interest for her now." "Miss Emerson, who sent me to entertain the young lady, did not confine me to those topics," he answered, rising, "and I have ventured to go beyond them. She will pardon me, I know, if I have not succeeded in my attempts to interest her." And Mr. Rutledge bowed and withdrew. "I have a few words to say to you," said Mrs. Churchill, with muffled hatred in her low tones. "You have withdrawn yourself from my confidence, and from my affections; but remember, you cannot withdraw yourself from my authority. It is perfectly useless for you to attempt to deceive me; from the first night you came under my roof, I have known you thoroughly. You are a care and a vexation to me daily; your coquetry, your vanity, your boldness, I have hitherto tried to see unmoved, knowing I was unable to influence you; but where influence fails, authority may step in. And authority, for your own sake, for the sake of the man you are engaged to, for my own dignity, I shall use to prevent the recurrence of such evenings as this." "The authority you hold, Aunt Edith," I returned with a steadiness of tone and manner she was quite unprepared for, "the authority you hold over me, I beg to remind you, is very limited. Don't fancy I am unacquainted with the circumstances that have placed me in your care. I know every word of my mother's will, I have known it from a child. My fortune is placed at my own disposal after I am eighteen; till then I am recommended--_recommended_, Aunt Edith, to your care, and naturally devolve on you, but I know that I am free: I know that after next December I am my own mistress, and till that time, no one has any right but that of seniority and affection to dictate to me. So we understand each other, Aunt Edith, you say rightly, and why waste words? You cannot influence me; you have lost the only power you ever had over me. I came to you an affectionate, trusting child; you did not care to win my affection, you took no pains to make me trust in you. I threatened unconsciously to interfere in the plans you had for Josephine, and you, without a scruple, sacrificed me to her: you sacrificed my happiness, my peace, to the ambition you had for her; you have misled, thwarted, tortured me to make the path clear for her; you have done what in the sight of heaven will one day be a millstone round your neck to sink you to perdition! Oh! if I had but seen it all as clearly a few short weeks ago, as now I see it, you would not have had your triumph as near as you think you have it now! But because I was a foolish, trusting child, it was not hard to deceive me; because I looked to you for direction, you had the power to mislead me; because I had strong feelings it was all the easier to ensnare me. Let me say what I have to say now; this is our reckoning--I never want to have another explanation; we have understood each other perfectly since we came to Rutledge, this plain talk we scarcely needed, and let us end it. As long as I can endure to stay with you, just so long will I stay, and not a moment beyond it. As long as I must stay, you must bear the vexation and the trial of my presence, but you may be sure, your release will not be very distant. I am not bound to you nor to your children by one tie of gratitude or affection, and those that restrain me of custom and convenience, don't cost much in the snapping!" "All this tirade has wandered very far of the mark. I began to give you a caution and a command which my duty required me to give, and your duty required you to heed; and you fly angrily off on some unmeaning invectives which are very harmless because of their unmeaningness; if it were not the case, I should call you sternly to account for your words, and make you retract them." "Unmeaning or not, Aunt Edith, they are sown in your memory, and nothing can root them out. They will bear bitter fruit some day, I promise you. They will yield a rich harvest, when the early growths of ambition and worldliness have died down, and left you only the withered husks and stalks of remorse and regret to satisfy your hunger withal. And now unless you want to publish this, will you go into the parlor and let me follow you?" "I have something more to say to you"---- "There comes Miss Emerson; if it is anything that will bear being said before her, pray continue." "Ah! Is it not delightful!" cried our pretty hostess. "Mr. Rutledge and the other gentlemen have been out, holding a post-mortem examination of the storm, and they have decided that it has left so black a state of heavens and so wet a state of roads that it is impossible to think of your going home to-night, so you will have to stay till to-morrow, _bongré malgré_. And I am so charmed. Ah! _you_ are not, though, I see plainly enough, you want to go back to that tiresome Rutledge. What can it be, Mrs. Churchill? What is the matter with her. Though to be sure, the pale cheeks are gone now; I think I prescribed well. Mr. Rutledge must have said something very exciting all the while he was in here, to have given you such a bright color and such flashing eyes." "A very little excitement brings that result, Miss Emerson. She has not learned much self-possession or self-control yet; we must excuse her." "Oh! by all means. I am only glad she looks brighter than when I left her. But will you come into the parlor? Miss Josephine is going to give us one more song before we go to our rooms." Josephine's song was gay and brilliant, her voice was rich and full, but they failed to drive the dreary echo of Victor's last words out of my mind, that deepened and strengthened as the night advanced: "You shall be freed! Be sure you shall be freed!" The lights shone clear and soft on the gay groups that peopled the rooms around me; but instead of them, I seemed to see, far nearer and more distinct, the deserted chamber at Rutledge, where the guilt of the Past and the crime of the Present, kept awful watch together. CHAPTER XXXVI. "My care is like my shadow in the sun, Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it; Stands and lies by me, does what I have done, This too familiar care does make me rue it." QUEEN ELIZABETH. Late breakfast, long lingering at the table, delay in ordering the horses, lengthened adieux, all combined to retard our starting for home on the following morning. I had stood ready on the piazza, waiting for the others to come out, for fifteen minutes; every new delay increased unbearingly my nervousness. "Spare that innocent vine," said Phil, arresting my riding-whip. "You have beaten that cluster of roses to fragments." "Will they never come!" I ejaculated. "It is so tiresome to wait for all those adieux. Can't we start?" "Certainly," said he, signalling the man who held our horses. "We can ride forward; they will soon overtake us, and McGuffy can accompany the carriage as far as the cross-road. He is going to Brandon, I believe, this morning." I stepped back. "After all, it would hardly be polite to go, as he was of the riding party. There they come from the greenhouse. They must be ready now." At last, we were mounted, and our companions arranged for the drive, our last good byes said; but the understanding was, as we parted, that the whole party of Masons and Emersons should adjourn to Rutledge for the evening, where a grand finale, in the shape of a supper and a dance, should wind up the festivities of the season. The pretty Janet whispered, as I went down from the saddle to exchange a parting word with her, "I have not given up the visit yet, Papa promises to take Mrs. Churchill by storm this evening, and you must consent." As we rode along, I gave a sigh to the impossibility of this; nothing could give me pleasure now, but this seemed more like it than anything else. To be quietly with Janet, and to learn to love her, and to unlearn the terrible lesson of the last few weeks, looked almost like peace. But I knew too well what my aunt's answer would be, as she was to be appealed to, and without throwing off the mask of deference that I still preserved and wished to preserve, I could not resist her decision. I well knew the programme sketched out for me, for the rest of the summer: in the thrice empty dreariness of Gramercy Park I was to be immured, while the others whiled away the pleasant weeks at Newport and Nahant. The Wynkars, Capt. McGuffy and Phil had consented to make their plans agree with the Churchills, and Mr. Rutledge had promised to join them in the course of a fortnight. He had made his arrangements to leave home on the same day that we did, and accompany us part of the way; business in the western part of the State would occupy him for some ten days; but, at the end of that time, he proposed rejoining the party at Newport. Nothing had been said to me about my plans, but I knew from something that escaped inadvertently, that the subject had been canvassed, and it had been decided that the income allowed me would not warrant such an expense, and that, with Frances, I was to be dropped at home, while mamma's maid should serve also for Josephine and Grace for the remainder of the summer. I should have loathed the gaiety of Newport, the crowd and the excitement would have been insupportable to me; but the prospect of being smothered in that silent, dark house in the hot city, hateful with memories of my recent illness, and with trials that I could never forget, was even harder to anticipate. But I had to submit. What a future for seventeen. "Wait till December," whispered Hope, just stirring his wounded, drooping wings, just trembling with a faint life that for days had seemed extinct. "Yes," I thought, with a bitter sigh, "in December I shall be of age, it will be a glorious thing to be my own mistress! To begin the world when I've lost all interest in it--to do as I please when there's nothing on earth that pleases me--to be free from restraint and authority, and from all human love and care! To be _independent!_ God help me! What a glorious thing it will be. All hope points to December!" But my release, such as it was, was nearer than December. I might have spared myself the hateful anticipations with which I blackened the fresh summer morning. I had not seen any further into futurity than the rest of the human family, who fret about their fate and look whole years ahead, and put the misery of a lifetime into the present, and torture themselves about what they know is, and fear is to be, till the flood of God's judgment comes and sweeps all away, and leaves them bewildered in the midst of a strange desolation and a new terror. "Phil," said Capt. McGuffy, as we rode slowly along through the loveliest, freshest country, washed by last night's rain; and gleaming in the morning sun--of which I had not seen one beauty, in my absorbing anxiety--"Phil, may I trust this young lady to you, if I leave you at the cross-road? I want to ride over to Brandon for half an hour before dinner." "Oh, Captain McGuffy!" I exclaimed, startled out of future fears by present dangers, "why do you take that tiresome ride this morning? It will be sunny and disagreeable before you get back to Rutledge; wait till after dinner." The captain still leaned to the idea of accomplishing it all "under one head," and having the rest of the day at home I didn't dare to press the subject, but seeing my only chance lay in engrossing their attention to the exclusion from their memories of the Brandon project, I worked faithfully to accomplish my design, and succeeded in a great measure. Before we had gone another half mile, I had enticed the captain into the enthusiastic description of a bull-baiting in Mexico, at which Phil and he had "assisted," and into the recollection of which they both seemed to enter with great ardor. We were on the top of Ridgway Hill--the road for a good mile stretched away at its foot, while on the left, branched off the Brandon turnpike. "Heaven send they may forget it!" I ejaculated, bending forward to renew my questions about the bull-baiting. The carriages were coming close behind--the bull-fight soon began to flag. "Phil," began the captain again. "Capt. McGuffy," I cried, "Madge is fairly beside herself this morning, I can hardly hold her; we have been creeping all the way from the Grove, what do you say to a race, a bona fide race, and I'll ask no favor. It's a clear road from here to Rutledge, and he's the best fellow who clears the park gate first!" "Done!" cried the captain, catching fire from my eyes; and before another minute, we were off on the maddest race I ever ran or hope to run. For a while, the three straining beasts were nearly neck and neck, the three dilated nostrils and fiery eyes were nearly on a line; then gradually, very gradually, Madge's black head gained an inch or so upon them, an inch or so, and then we were a foot in advance. Phil drove the spurs into his horse--he sprang forward, but soon fell back again--the captain urged Vagabond on with lash and oath; I did not move the loosened bridle on Madge's neck--steady and unswerving she kept the road, each spring as even and as sure as if measured and done by rule--no relaxing of the eager neck--no gasping in the even breath. I only saw, with a heartfelt sigh of relief, that the Brandon turnpike lay unnoticed far behind us, and Madge might take us where she liked: but when I dashed through the park gate, half a dozen yards in advance of Phil, and the captain in a fury with Vagabond, perfectly blown, quarter of a mile in the rear, I was quite helpless and weak from excitement. "I don't know which to be proudest of, the young lady or the mare," said Stephen, as he lifted me down. "I wouldn't have missed seeing you come in for considerable money." I hurried into the house and upstairs, leaving Phil to make all explanations and apologies: Kitty had seen me, and followed close behind me. "Well?" I asked, breathlessly, as she closed the door. "Nothing, Miss, nothing has happened. Do lie down and rest; you look fit to drop." "But he is well? What did he say--has nothing happened?" "Nothing has happened. I only saw him for a moment yesterday. Mrs. Roberts kept me close at marking linen all the rest of the day and evening; and this morning I had only a few moments to speak to him when I went in, for her door was open a crack, and I didn't dare to stay: you look so tired--won't you let me undress you?" "But how did he seem? what did he say about my being away?" "Oh!" returned Kitty, rather uneasily, "he asked why the house was so quiet, and whether you'd got back yet: he looks a little pale and badly, but I'm sure that's natural enough. Anybody would get pale and gloomy shut up day after day in that awful room, among all poor Miss Alice's books and pictures and things, all looking so dusty and dismal; it gives me a shudder only to go inside the door." "But he doesn't know anything about her; you've never told him anything about the room?" "I didn't mean to, Miss; I had no thought of opening my lips about it; but he made me tell him--he wouldn't be satisfied till I had told him every word I knew about the family troubles. What put it into his head to ask, I think was something he had come across in a French book he had been reading; it was a little note that had marked the place. He held it in his hand as I came in, and he looked so white and strange, I was almost frightened. Oh, so many questions as he put me! so eager as he was! He seemed to look so through and through me with those black eyes of his, I didn't dare to keep back anything I knew. And then he asked me about master; if he had really loved his sister--if he had grieved for her, and tried to find her out, or if he held her memory in contempt--if he tried to forget that she had ever lived, and hated to hear her name." "You didn't tell him that he did, Kitty?" "How could I help it, Miss? You would not have had me tell him _a lie_. I had to tell him how it was. I had to tell him that her name was forbidden here--that no one dared for their lives to breathe a word about those times to the master--that her picture, and all that belonged to her, was put out of sight forever--that her room was shut up and hid as much from the living, as the poor lady was herself in her lonesome grave beyond seas. And he clenched his hand till the blood sprung under his nails, and his very lips were white like the wall; he said so low I could just hear him, 'but he shall not forget!' I am no coward, Miss, but I confess I was right glad when I got outside again." All that wretched day I watched for a chance to see him. Kitty, nearly as anxious as I was myself, hovered around to try to clear the way for me, but in vain. No other day had the upper hall been so favorite a resort. Josephine had ordered her trunks to be put out there, and Ella's also, and Frances was packing them. Ellerton and Grace, lounging on the stairs, watched the operation, Mrs. Churchill sat with her door open. I cannot possibly describe the misery it gave me to know what danger might arise from this delay. I knew too much already of Victor's morbid jealousy, to imagine it was not brooding now over this long neglect. The hours were leaden-winged and fiery-footed; each slow passing one seemed to burn into my very soul. Kitty wiped away frequent tears as she busied herself about my packing; there were no tears in my eyes as I walked quickly up and down the room, or lay, face downward on the bed, trying to stifle thoughts that I could not endure. "There's dinner!" said Kitty, ruefully. "And there's no hope of any more chance after it. Mrs. Roberts is at her eternal knitting in the hall window, and Frances won't stop packing these four hours yet. But don't you worry, Miss; I'll manage it, somehow. Go down to dinner, and _don't_ fret!" Of course not, why should I? What was there in my circumstances to occasion it? Nothing, of course; and nothing, either, to fret about in Josephine's taunts and Grace's sauciness, in the cold eyes of my aunt, in Ella's supercilious scorn; nothing to fret about when the captain talked of the murder and the evidence, the state of the public mind, and the state of his own private mind, in regard to it; when Ellerton talked about the news from town, and the letters he had just received from some of his inestimable chums there resident, and of the inexplicable nature of the fact that none of them had spoken of meeting or seeing Victor before he sailed, and of his own conviction that it was very strange we had heard nothing from him since he left, _very_ strange. "Oh!" cried Grace, "that's the way, they say, with these foreigners, adventurers, may be. You mustn't be astonished, my dear (turning pleasantly to me), you mustn't be astonished if you shouldn't hear from him 'never no more.' These French meteors, they say, sometimes flash through society in that way, and dazzle everybody, then sink into their native night again. And you know it is just possible our Victor may be of that order; but, of course, I don't want to distress you, only it's as well you should be prepared." "Grace, hush! you are a saucy child; but really it _is_ odd that we have never heard a word from him since he left." "Did you expect to, Josephine? I didn't suppose you had made any arrangements to correspond. I am sorry I didn't know how deep your interest was, I might have relieved your mind before. Mr. Viennet is very well. I have heard from him more than once since we parted." An exclamation of surprise went round the table; I was overwhelmed with questions and reproaches. "You might have told us, really, now I think," said Ellerton. "Why did you not ask me, then?" "Why, we thought you'd tell, to be sure. We didn't know how sacred you considered his epistles." "What sort of a journey did he have? What day did he get in town?" "He didn't say much about his journey. I fancy from something he said that he met with some detentions." "Didn't he send any messages to anybody?" "None that I remember." "Ungrateful rascal!" "He succeeded, I suppose, in getting a state-room? He had some fears that he would be too late." "He didn't say a word about it." "Absurd! what did he talk about, then?" "Not about his journey, nor his stateroom, nor you, Josephine; but you know there are more things, and as interesting, in heaven and earth, to us both, strange as it may seem to you." "_Pardon!_ I had forgotten!" "You won't hear again before the Persia is in, will you?" "That will be in three weeks, will it not?" "Yes; that will be after we are at Newport. To whose care do your letters come addressed?" "Really, Mr. Wynkar, you are too kind. Your interest is so unexpected!" "Let us all drink to his _bon voyage_," said the captain, filling my glass. "_Avec plaisir_," cried Josephine, and Phil said heartily, as he poured her out a glass: "Victor's a good fellow; he has my best wishes on land or sea." "And mine," said Mr. Rutledge, very low. Why was there a hush around the table as that toast was drunk? Why did a sort of shade creep over the careless mirth of the company? Not surely because they guessed that he whose health they drank was within hearing, almost, of their words, nor because they knew how fallen and how wretched he was; but because, perhaps unconsciously, the gloom on their host's face, and the misery on mine, damped for a moment their gaiety and confidence. "The last day at Rutledge!" murmured Josephine, with a pretty sigh, as we left the dining-room. "I cannot bear to think of it. I never had so happy a fortnight in my life. Shall any of us ever forget this visit?" "It doesn't seem as if we'd been here a week," said Ella, "does it?" "A week! It seems to me a year!" I exclaimed, involuntarily. "That doesn't speak well for your enjoyment, at all events; Mr. Rutledge will never ask you to come again. Will you, Mr. Rutledge?" "I am afraid, Miss Wynkar, that it will be out of my power to enjoy the honor of any one's society here for a long while to come. I am going abroad in the course of a month, and"---- "You, Mr. Rutledge!" exclaimed more than one voice, and Josephine's color suffered a shade of diminution. "It is a sudden determination, is it not, sir?" asked Phil. "No, I have been thinking of it for some weeks, but I have not till recently had much idea of the time I should start." "Mr. Rutledge does not look upon crossing the Atlantic for a few months, as any way more formidable than going to town for a night, he has been such a traveller," said Mrs. Churchill, with admirable composure; but _I_ knew the effort that it cost her. "You do not think of being absent long, I suppose?" "It is uncertain; I shall make my arrangements to be gone for about two years, but something may occur to detain me longer, in which case I can easily settle all things here by letter. I have trusty persons in my employ, and I think there is no chance of my presence being necessary at home for a long while to come." "I envy you," said Ellerton; "I wish I could run off for a year or two." I saw Josephine's lips move, but she could not command her voice, and, bending down, she caressed Tigre with a nervous hand. I could not but pity her; I had not realized before how much her heart had been set upon this match; and wounded pride is next in sting to wounded love. The gentlemen lit their cigars, and talked of Mr. Rutledge's plans; we all lounged idly about the north end of the hall; the doors were all open, and a fine fresh breeze came in. I had been listening anxiously to a faint sound overhead, _where_ I knew too well; a hasty stride from one end to the other of the room above us. "Hark!" cried Grace, "what's that? I heard the same sound this morning." Every one stopped talking, and listened. "The house is haunted, you may depend," said Josephine. "There have been strange noises next my room for the last three nights." "That's a peculiar sound. What do you make of it, Mr. Rutledge?" said Ellerton, walking toward the stairs. "It is nothing," he returned, advancing that way too. "Some of the servants are up there now, perhaps; I will go and see. Don't trouble yourself, Mr. Wynkar." "I'll go," I cried, starting forward. "Perhaps it's Kitty, she may be waiting for me." Ellerton paused and listened; Mr. Rutledge passed up before him, followed closely by Tigre. I brushed past Ellerton and kept close to Mr. Rutledge. Mrs. Roberts was standing at the head of the stairs. "Mrs. Roberts," said Ellerton, "we're investigating an unusual noise up here. Can you account for it?" Now, Mrs. Roberts never could abide the insinuation that anything might possibly be going on of which she was ignorant; if she had nosed anything herself, she did not, as we have seen, lack zeal in ferreting it out, but it was impossible to put her on a new scent; she refused to acknowledge any other sagacity than her own. So, on the present occasion, as she had heard no noise, she utterly scouted the idea, and assigned some trifling cause for it; the girls, she said, had been in the attic, clearing out an old store-room; probably that was what Mr. Rutledge had heard. Ellerton hurried down to inform the ladies of the explanation, and Mr. Rutledge, crossing the hall, was going toward his dressing-room, when Tigre, who had been exploring the neighborhood, now rushed whining along the hall, with his nose to the floor. The attention of all was attracted to him; he darted under the wardrobe, and began scratching and growling earnestly at the door of Victor's hiding-place. I followed Mr. Rutledge's quick glance from my face to the wardrobe, and, starting forward, I tried to call off Tigre. "Come here, sir! Come here, I say!" But he was too intent upon his discovery to heed me. "He is a little nuisance," said Mrs. Roberts. "I never approved having him allowed to come upstairs." "Tigre, what are you after, sir?" said Mr. Rutledge, as he walked down the hall toward him. "Oh, nothing, I'm sure, sir, nothing!" I cried, following him. "Don't scold him. Tigre, come out, you rascal! come out, I say!" and I stamped vehemently on the floor. "He will not mind you," said Mr. Rutledge, in a low voice. "He will obey his instincts, and persevere till he has reached the object of his search." "He isn't searching for anything," I exclaimed, dropping down on my knees and stooping till I could see under the wardrobe. "If I could only reach him. Tigre--you torment--if you don't come, I'll whip you, _so!_ Here, here, _poor_ fellow! Come here, my pet!" Tigre desisted a moment from his whining, and wavered in his determination. I thrust my arm under the wardrobe, seized him, and drew him, yelping, out; then, springing up, ran across the hall, and almost threw him into my room. Mr. Rutledge watched me silently with a contracted brow, and crossing over to his own room, shut himself into it. Not a very faithful index, certainly of the real feelings of men and women, is to be obtained from their outward and visible emotions. A very gay party, no doubt, the visitors who came that night to Rutledge, thought they found there. They little guessed how unhappy and disappointed a man their courteous host was, nor that Mrs. Churchill, serene and charming, was looking in the face the failure of the hopes of years, nor that the pretty Josephine's smiles were in ghastly contrast with the bitterness of her spirit; nor that Phil, who knew her face too well to be deceived by them, was smarting under the realizing sense it gave him of her ambition and worldliness. And if they had guessed the interpretation of _my_ gaiety! There were just enough of us to make the dancing spirited, and to keep every one on the floor. We had before always danced in the parlors, but some evil spirit prompted Grace to propose that we should try a double set of Lancers in the hall. Everybody, encouraged, doubtless, by their attendant evil spirits, seemed to think nothing could be more delightful than the hall, and urged the moving of the piano out there; and there we adjourned. I tried not to remember how plainly we could be heard in a certain room at the end of the hall above; how the laughing and the music would grate on the jealous ears there. If he caught the tones of my voice, he would not know that I laughed because I must keep pace with the captain's jokes, and encourage him in punning and joke-making, to keep him from the hideous topic that he always turned to when left to himself; and to drive away the suspicion that sharpened Mr. Rutledge's eyes, and to keep Mr. Mason my admirer, and no more. "Like the lady of 'Old Oak Chest' memory, 'I'm weary of dancing,'" I cried at length, "let's amuse ourselves some other way." "Play hide-and-seek, like that ancient party?" asked Phil, throwing himself on the lowest step of the stairs. "That's not a bad suggestion!" exclaimed Grace. "This is just the place for such an adventure. I don't mean that I want anybody to be smothered in a chest exactly, but lost for a little while, and hunted for, you know. It would be so jolly." "So it would!" echoed Ellerton. "And there's no end of capital hiding-places about the house, so many odd rooms where you'd never expect them; and acres of attic, beyond a doubt!" "Come!" cried Josephine, "we're all ripe for adventure. Let's have a game of hide-and-seek." "Delightful!" cried the youngest Miss Mason. "I'm ready for anything," said Phil, getting up and shaking himself. "I'm afraid you will not find any oak chests," said Mr. Rutledge, discouragingly. "Oh! yes, we will," cried Grace, "chests, and crannies, and closets, and wardrobes, and trap-doors without number. A regiment of soldiers might be hid away in this house and nobody the wiser." Everybody was in the spirit of it now, and it was useless to oppose. "Who shall hide first?" demanded Grace. "Oh, your cousin, of course!" cried the captain. "She proposed the game." I was voted in by acclamation. "And you must take somebody with you, it will make it more exciting, but you must hide in separate places," added Grace. "Very well; the captain must go out with me, and you must all go into the parlor, and promise, on your honor, to stay there five minutes by the clock, and then we give you leave to find us." "We promise," said Ellerton; "but remember, you are to hide somewhere in the house, and to surrender yourselves in half an hour if you are not found before." "Always provided," said the captain, shutting the parlor-doors upon them, "that we're not smothered in some old chest in the meantime." CHAPTER XXXVII. "Sweetest lips that ever were kissed, Brightest eyes that ever have shone, May sigh and whisper, and _he_ not list, Or look away, and never be missed Long or ever a month be gone." "Where shall we go?" said the captain, in a whisper, as we paused in the hall irresolutely. "What do you think of the dining-room, behind the tall clock for one of us?" The captain shook his head. "They'll look there the first thing; it will not do. But in the second story, there's a huge old wardrobe that I've noticed at the north end, that would be a capital place for one." "Yes, I know where you mean, but I think it's locked, and we haven't the key, and it would take too long to hunt up the housekeeper and get it. There's the lower part of a bookcase in the library empty. Captain McGuffy, if you only could get into it! Not even Mr. Rutledge knows about it. Mrs. Roberts only cleared the books out of it last week, and you'd be as safe as possible. Do try if you can't arrange it, and I'll go somewhere upstairs; I know a place." Captain McGuffy consented, and we hurried to the library. The hiding-place was not so large as I had fancied, but still my companion agreed to risk it. He doubled up like a jack-knife; it was perfectly wonderful to me how he ever got his long limbs into so small a compass. "Are you comfortable?" I asked, smothering a laugh. "Don't shut the door tight," he whispered, hoarsely. "I can't stand this long." I had no time for more lengthened condolences, but hurried off to dispose of myself. The second story was entirely clear; the servants were all downstairs; Mrs. Roberts was busy about supper. I resolved to hide behind the linen-press outside her door; but first, I thought, if I were quick, I could go one instant to Victor's door, whisper my excuses, and promise to come back when they were all gone. It was rather a dangerous thing to do, but the moment I heard the parlor-door open, I could fly to my hiding-place; I dared not lose this chance. Moving aside the wardrobe with some effort, I tapped low at the door. Again--and no answer. "Victor," I whispered at the key-hole, "come to the door one moment;" but not a sound from within. Apprehension of I do not know what new danger overcame my prudence, and I wasted the few precious seconds I had to spare in irresolution. When it was too late to effect my escape, I heard the door of the parlor burst open, and Josephine's voice crying, "Allons!" They separated to all parts of the house, Grace, Janet, and Ellerton flying up the stairs. There was but one thing for me to do: I hurriedly pulled the wardrobe after me into its place, opened the door, entered, and closed it stealthily behind me. Only when I was in it, did I realize the folly of what I had done. The room was as dark and silent as the grave; such a silence and such a darkness as would have chilled a stouter heart than mine. I whispered Victor's name--there was no answer. Had he fled, then, and was I alone in this horrid room--shut up in it for hours perhaps? No! I would risk all and grope my way out, no matter if I encountered them all. I could endure this no longer. All Kitty had told me--all I ever fancied of the ghastly terrors of the room--crowded into my mind, and, starting forward, I attempted to find the door, but in my bewilderment and the utter blackness around me, I must have turned away, instead of toward it. My outstretched hand struck against an icy surface; I screamed and started back, my foot slipped and I fell, striking my temple heavily against some projection. The fall and the blow stunned me for awhile; then returning consciousness suggested all that they had mercifully absolved me from. Alice Rutledge's neglected, dishonored room--Alice Rutledge's sin-troubled spirit haunting it--the curses that had been spoken in it--the agony that had been endured in it--the years of silence that had passed over it--and now, a murderer's hiding-place--a murderer with crime fresh upon him. And oh! the horror of that crime! It seemed almost as if it had been me instead of Victor who had done it. My brain seemed reeling--had I not been there--had I not seen--heard--that of which I never lost the memory--or was it only haunting me from another's lips? Was _that_ avenging ghost here, too--within the limits of this dreadful room? Was that a touch of human hand upon my breast?--was it fancy, or--or--was that a breath upon my cheek? A thousand horrid whispers--hollow laughter--dying shrieks--filled the air; within these accursed walls, it was weird and unearthly all; without, I heard, but as through triple dungeon walls, the voices of those I had left behind; I heard their steps overhead, their searching, high and low, in every nook and corner for me; I heard them call my name, and pause for answer. I tried to call, but a nightmare stifled my voice. As one might feel who had buried himself yet living--who had pulled the coffin-lid down on his own head, and heard the devils eagerly filling the grave up and laughing at their work--and at each new shovelful of heavy clay had felt the distance between him and life grow shorter, and felt the weight press heavier and heavier, and the horror and the darkness grow tighter and tighter around him, and the remorse, and the helplessness, and the terror--so I felt that hideous night, and so I feel whenever I remember it. The house quieted, I heard the carriages drive away, then the faint good-nights, and the closing of the many doors, and all grew into repose. That was cruel; they had forgotten me--they had given me up easily! But I would make them hear--I would get out of this sepulchral place, and I started to my feet. Just then the handle of the door turned, and a ray of light streamed across the room. It was Mr. Rutledge who entered; but the sternness and whiteness of his face repressed the cry of joy with which I had started forward. The light, though, had put all the ghastly train to flight, and I breathed freer as I looked around and saw that he and I were alone in the room. He closed the door, and pressing his hand for a moment before his eyes, looked up and around the apartment. I suppose he had never been in it since it had been closed upon the flight of his sister, and since his father's curse had doomed it to desolation. I followed his glance around the dim and dusky walls--the familiar pictures--the disordered, time-stained ornaments--the tall, canopied bed--the open wardrobe. A low groan escaped his lips, and sinking on a chair, he bowed his head in his hands upon the table. Some sound from me at last aroused him, and looking up, he said: "I knew I should find you here. What evil spirit brought you to this place! Are you alone?" "Yes," I faltered, coming to him, "I am alone. Take me out, for the love of heaven! I have been in such terror--Victor is not here--I have"---- I stopped, with an exclamation of alarm. I had betrayed my secret. "It is better that he has gone," he said, but without any surprise; "it could not have been kept up much longer. I hope, for your sake, he may be safe. Flight would have been better a week ago. I could have managed it, but you would not trust me. Did you really think," he continued, rising slowly from his seat, and looking at me with an expression compounded of bitterness, and tenderness, and sadness, "did you really think I did not know you were hiding your lover in my house--that you were dying a thousand deaths in the midst of this careless crowd? Why, child," he said, laying his hand on my shoulder, and looking into my eyes, "I know every expression of this face better than I know my own. I know its flashes of fear, its white mantle of despair, and its crimson glow of love, too well to be deceived. If I had needed confirmation of my suspicions on the morning after Dr. Hugh's murder, that Victor Viennet was the guilty man, I should have had only to have looked in your face. And from that dreadful day to this, I have read there each event as it has come to pass. I have helped you in your lover's cause, though you did not know it. I have worked day and night to mislead his persecutors, to allay the suspicions and blind the eyes of the authorities; and I have nearly succeeded. There is very little danger now, if he is prudent and dexterous in his flight. Do not tremble so; you need not fear for him. By this time he is probably beyond the only part of his journey that was attended with much risk." I burst into tears; it was so hard to hear him say all this, and talk to me as if I had nothing to be miserable about, now that Victor was safe. Ah! this was but the beginning. A life-time lay before me full of such hours as this. "It is a heavy fate, poor child," he said, compassionately. "I would have saved you from it if I could." "You don't know half how heavy!" I sobbed. "If you did, you wouldn't think it a sin for me to pray to die." "Take the harder penance, and submit to live. Death doesn't always come for the asking. God has sent you a terrible trial, but he will help you through it if you will only keep that in mind." "No, no. God did not send it. I have brought it on myself--it is all my own deed! Oh! if you only knew"---- "I do know. I know you are disappointed in the man you love--that you have found weakness where you fancied strength: but I know that, woman-like, you still love, if possible, more tenderly than before your idol was shattered, and that you are shrinking now from the prospect of a long and uncertain separation. I pity you, believe me, I pity you; but these are griefs that time has a cure for. Do not talk of despair till you have felt what it is to be unloved and unblest--to be without an interest on earth, with but a slender right to hope in heaven--to be thwarted in all you undertake, balked of all you desire--till you have seen another and an unworthier hand take down your crown of life, and wear it careless in your sight." "Perhaps I know all that as well as you," was on my lips, but I only hid my face and turned away. He did not understand the gesture, and said sadly, after a pause: "Why are you so wretched? I have assured you there is little danger, and what is there so insupportable in the separation of a year or two? Or is it something in the manner of parting; were you unprepared to find him gone? Did he leave no good bye?" "No," I said, glad to have some excuse for my tears; "I never dreamed of his going--it is too unkind! And I shall never forgive myself either; when I saw him last, there was some misunderstanding, and I have not explained it to him! He has gone away in despair and in anger! Oh, I shall never, never forgive myself!" "You may overrate the cause," said my companion, "perhaps he may have found it more prudent to fly now, and could not wait to see you. Look about the room, there may be a letter somewhere, or he may have left one with Kitty." "Kitty knows nothing of it, and I do not see any letter." "What is that little package--beyond you--there on the table?" I seized it, and, bending eagerly over the light, read my name upon it. My hand trembled so that I could hardly open it. Within the first paper there was a letter; my eyes glanced hurriedly over it, but from another wrapping something dropped, one sight of which served to make me grasp the table for support, and drop the letter on the floor. "What is it?" cried my companion, starting forward, and picking up my letter, leading me to a chair. "Read it to me--I can't--I don't understand," I faltered, putting back the letter in his hand. He looked at me hesitatingly a moment, then read it aloud: "I promised you freedom. Well! I have been a coward not to have given it to you sooner; but when you read this, there will be such a gulf between us, that you may well grant a little pity to the cowardice that only feared death as a separation from you--that only clung to life as sweetened by your love. "It is trite to tell you of my love--to tell you to be happy--to say I forgive the coldness that you strove to hide--and to ask forgiveness for the pain I have given you. You know all this--better, much better than at this dreadful hour I can tell you--and though you can never know in its fullness the agony that the parting inflicts on me, there is no need that you should realize it: I have done enough to make you miserable already. Forget all this black dream; it will soon be over, and be again the happy girl I found you. "But one thing more. Would you know who it is to whom you had affianced yourself--to whose life you had promised to unite yours--whose name you had promised to bear? It is a good name--_mon ange_--an ancient name--an honorable! Ask your proud host if it is not; ask him if there is a better in the country, or one that a woman need be prouder to bear. It is no new name to your ears; it is _Rutledge;_ the only name I have any claim to, though, perhaps, my host would say that was but a slender one: did his sister lose the ancient and honored name she was born with, when she lost her honor, when she stepped down from her high place, and stooped to sin? Or did she drag down that name with her in her fall? Did it cling to her, like a robe of mockery and scorn, only making her shame the greater; did it descend with the heritage of infamy, to the child of her shame? Or did it die with her, and has her neglected grave the only right to bear the record of it? Ask our host--he can tell you more of it than I. But tell him I am not inclined to dispute it with him: I am not as proud of the name as he; tell him I loathe--I execrate it! I could almost wish to live to show him my contempt for it--to show him what a low wretch could share with him his inheritance and his pride. If he doubts it--if he questions whether the same blood runs in our veins, show him the only souvenir I have to leave you--the picture of my father. Ask him if he remembers Alice Rutledge's lover. He will not need more damning proof; it came to me like a message from the dead--it may go to him as such. Tell him that a murderer wrenched it from his victim's dying grasp; that it has struck awe to his guilty soul at every glance; that it has hurried him on to perdition. But if he longs to be more certain, show him these two letters; one that I have worn next my heart for years--the other, that I found between the leaves of a forgotten book in this ghastly room. "The God whom you believe in bless you, and, if he has the right--forgive me! "VICTOR." "I don't understand--what does he mean--where has he gone?" I said, wildly, pressing my hand to my head. "I am so bewildered, I can't think. Oh! don't look so awfully! There must be some mistake. You can't believe that--that--oh! heaven help me!" My companion did not speak; my eyes searched his blanched face in vain for comfort--a wild impulse seized me; I grasped the candle in my hand, and, with a hasty look around the apartment, hurried to the bed and drew aside the curtains. I did not swoon or cry; I did not even drop the candle from my hand, nor loose the grasp with which I held back the curtains; but, with glazed eyes and freezing veins, gazed steadily at what lay before me. Pale with the unmistakable pallor of death, one arm thrown above his head, the other buried in his bosom, his dark tangled curls lying distinct against the pillow, his manly limbs rigid--a crimson stream that had stained his breast, and was creeping down upon the bed, gave awful proof that Victor and I had indeed parted forever--that my wretched lover lay dead before me. Brought so suddenly to my sight, there was nothing in that moment of the remorse and the lingering tenderness that after the first shock nearly deprived me of reason; it was only horror--staring, ghastly horror--at the sight of his dead body--at the thought of his lost soul; the words that rang in my head, and the first that struggled to my lips were: "God have mercy on his soul! God have mercy on his soul!" Dead--without a prayer--dead--by his own hand--cast out forever from God's mercy--a wailing, damned, lost soul through all eternity. I stood as if turned to stone; my companion, in an agony of grief and consternation, had thrown himself on his knees beside the bed; his iron fortitude broken down before this awful judgment that, laying bare the anguish of the past, had interwoven itself so strangely with the present; the unerring retribution that had worked out this end to sins so long ago committed. But no sob or cry came from my lips; no tears dimmed my riveted eyes. I heard the broken words that burst from him as in a dream, and neither knew nor felt that there was anything in this world but blank horror--hopeless consternation--till from a slight movement of the candle, I caught the shine of a trinket that the unhappy man had worn around his neck. Bending forward, I saw in a moment what it was. A little ring of mine, and a link of the broken bracelet, worn on a chain next his heart while living, now wet with blood, was lying still above the heart that beat no more. At that sight a passion of tears came to my relief. His tender and devoted love, the miserable return I had made, the unkindness of our parting, my shameful injustice and deceit, the cruelty of his sufferings, all rushed over me and shook me with a tempest of tears and sobs. I threw myself beside him on the bed, and covered his cold hand with tears and caresses; wild with pain and remorse, I laid my cheek against his on the pillow, and implored him to forgive me, to speak to me but once, to say I had not killed him; with incoherent passion I called heaven to witness that I really loved him--that I would have been true to him--that I would have died for him--that I had nothing else to live for or to love. It was long before, worn out by excess of weeping, I yielded to my companion, and was led faint and almost unresisting from the room. With a few words of pity, he left me in my own apartment, reluctantly turning away from me, so wretched and so lonely. But I shook my head; I did not want any one, I had rather be by myself. "No one can do you much good, it is true," he said sadly. "God help you!" and he left me. I stood motionless for some minutes after the door closed upon him. Then, stung by some fresh recollection and by the added terrors of solitude, I paced rapidly up and down the room, and flinging myself on my knees by the bedside, I prayed incoherently and passionately for Victor--for myself--for pardon and for death. I could not endure one thought or one occupation long: before I rose from my knees my resolution was taken; my brain would have given way if I had not had some necessity for exertion, some design to carry out. And strange and sudden as my determination was, I doubt whether I could have done anything wiser and better. There was one uncontrollable longing uppermost--to escape from this place, to hide myself forever from all who had ever known me here. Stealthily and hurriedly, for Kitty was sleeping in the dressing-room, I went through my preparations. They were not many; there were some letters to be burned and one to be written, some clothes to be selected and made up into a package, a trinket to be clasped round Kitty's arm, and a coin slipped in her hand, and I was ready. I looked at my watch; it was half-past three, the faint grey dawn was just streaking the eastern sky, I must go. Where should I put my letter? I sat down and hurriedly wrote the address, then with a momentary indecision, the first that had marked my rapid movements since my resolution was taken, I opened and read it over: "You will not be surprised when you find that I have gone away. You can understand, if you will think a moment about it, and try to realize what I should have to endure in concealing and controlling my feelings, that it is the only thing I could do. My life with Mrs. Churchill has grown so intolerable that I had before this resolved it should not continue. And now is the best time to do what at any other moment would be painful, but which at this, is only a relief. Inquiries and investigations as to where I go, will be just so many cruelties; will you do this last of many kindnesses, and help to cover my retreat, and keep them from any attempts to find me? It would kill me to have to face any of them now; will you not trust me enough to help me to the only comfort possible to me now, solitude and rest? You are ingenious, you can divert them from it, if you try; it is not as if they had any instincts of affection to guide them in finding me out. You need not let them know that I did not project the pastime of last night to accomplish a premeditated flight. If you ever had any kindness for me, do not try to find me out yourself, _do not let them_. You may trust me when I promise you I will do nothing rash, nothing that you would not approve if I could tell you. I promise you that I will remember my religion and my womanhood, and spend what length of life God sentences me to, as penitently, patiently and reasonably as He will grant me grace to do. If you will show this proof of confidence and friendship, you will never repent it. "God knows, you have little reason to trust in me: but I am changed--I am much changed--I will not deceive you now. If you will believe in me this once, and shield me from exposure, and leave me in peace where I may choose to go, I will pledge you my word that as soon as I shall ascertain that you have sailed for Europe, I will write you fully and truthfully where I am, and what I intend to do, and will from that time make no secret of my place of abode and my plans. "There is another thing--but I need not ask it of you. You, for your own sake are concerned to keep this cruel secret that I have so long been hiding, a secret still. It passes now from my hands to yours. Perhaps I should be insensible to disgrace and ignominy; they cannot harm _him_ now: but oh! shield me from them, save his memory from shame. Do not let the world know of it till that day when the secrets of all hearts shall be revealed; when God shall commit all judgment to His Son, who is more merciful than man--more compassionate and more just. "You have helped me hitherto, though I did not know whose hand was smoothing my way; do not give up now, despairing. Kitty and Stephen will be faithful, no one else need know the secrets of that dreadful room. "I am not so selfish as you think. I do not forget that you are only less miserable than I am, as you have only grief and not remorse to bear. Heaven send you the peace I have no right to ask for myself." I folded my letter quickly and sealed it; then with one more look at Kitty, and one hurried glance around the familiar room, I put out the candle, took the package from the table and stole out. Where should I put my letter? It must be within reach of no other hand than his; no one must know that I had written to him. The hall--no words can tell its gloom, the early dawn just turning its darkness into spectral dimness. If inevitable detection had been the result, I could not have helped the hurried, incautious steps with which I crossed it, and listened at Mr. Rutledge's door. Within the inner room I heard a step pacing restlessly up and down, but no other sound. He was awake, then; I stooped, and softly tried the handle of the door. It was locked; he would be the first to open it; so I slipped the letter under it, and springing up, fled down the stairs and through the hall, without a look behind, with no thought but that of escape, no fear so strong as that of detection. I had forgotten everything now but flight. It was Heaven's mercy and nothing else, as poor Kitty would have said, that no one was aroused by the loud sliding of the bolts, that required all my strength to move; I hardly stopped to pull the heavy door to, after me; I should not have heard, if the whole household had been in pursuit, for the wild throbbing of my heart, the maddening pressure on my brain, the choking fear, kept me insensible to sight and sound. I flew on, through the shrubbery, across the unfrequented, dark orchard; my feet tangled in the rank, wet grass that lay in the field beyond it, my light dress tore to fragments in the thicket that bordered the western extremity of the park; but on, till the thickest of the forest sheltered me; then sinking exhausted and panting upon the ground, I hid my eyes and shuddered at the terrors I was flying, and the dismal blank, and dread uncertainty of what was beyond. CHAPTER XXXVIII. "Vous qui pleurez, venez à ce Dieu, car il pleure. Vous qui souffrez, venez à lui, car il guerit. Vous qui tremblez, venez à lui, car il sourit. Vous qui passez, venez à lui, car il demeure." ECRIT AU BAS D'UN CRUCIFIX. The years that have passed since that night, have been long and strange years. At first they were too strange and hopeless and blank to be borne without repining; I knew but too well the curse that turns life into a burden and a dread, and makes the wretched soul cry in the morning, "would God, it were evening," and in the evening, "would God, it were morning!" I knew what it was to dread solitude, and yet to shrink from the reproach of any human face; to hate life, and yet to fear death; to know to the fullest the terrors of remorse and the bitterness of repentance. I have passed through this howling wilderness, passed through it once and forever; it lies black and horrible behind me; when I look back, I cross myself and murmur a prayer; but beyond--thank God's good grace--lies a plain path; over it shines the steady star of faith, the cold, clear light of duty fills the sky, the still air breathes peace; the promise is faint of the life that now is, but of that which is to come, of the bliss that never tires, the joy that never ceases, the majesty of the Glory that fills the heaven beyond the dividing limit of that horizon, I can dream and hope, till the dream fills my soul to satisfaction, and the hope grows strong as life itself. The daily routine of my life is easily described, and the occupations that served to soothe and sustain me will not take many words to paint. The refuge I had sought upon my flight from Rutledge, was not distant; Mr. Shenstone's compassion was the first I asked; he heard, fresh from its occurrence, the awful story of Victor's death, the not less awful story of his life. I needed no truer friend than he; and though it opened anew the recollection of his own early trial, I did not suffer from the association it awoke; he was only tenderer and kinder. Mr. Rutledge regarded my request. Whether he suspected my retreat or not, I could not tell, but in the confusion and excitement that ensued upon the discovery of my flight, I have reason to believe he influenced the direction of the search that was instituted, and did not thwart the general idea, that I had fled to the city to rejoin Victor, who, it was soon learned, had not sailed when he had appointed. All was mystery and confusion, but this idea saved me from pursuit here, and gave something for suspicion to fasten and feed upon, and out of which to build up an effigy, to receive the maledictions and reproaches of the world. All this was less than indifferent to me; while they were searching for me with venom and wrath, and bemoaning my iniquities with dainty horror, and execrating my hypocrisy, and settling my fate, and clearing themselves forever of any further part or lot in me, I was much nearer the other world than this; so near indeed, that when after long weeks of hovering between this and the unseen, I gradually awoke to the knowledge that I was still to stay in life, I had so far lost my interest in it, that it gave me hardly a moment's concern to find that Mrs. Churchill had discovered my place of retreat, and had written in almost insulting language to Mr. Shenstone, forbidding my return to her, and casting me off forever. Mr. Shenstone seemed sadly distressed to communicate this to me; the languid smile with which I received it, reassured him. "She could not have done me a greater favor, sir; she has saved me the trouble of saying that I would not return to her, and she knew it very well. She is glad to be rid of me, and hurried to spare her dignity the rebuff that she knew it would receive as soon as I was able to put pen to paper." But there was a harder task to perform; my promise to Mr. Rutledge was yet unfulfilled. I understood from Mr. Shenstone that he had sailed for Havre a fortnight after I had left Rutledge, and I dared no longer delay my promised communication to him. A very brief and simple letter told him all that was necessary. In the course of the winter there came an answer to it, short but kind, with nothing wanting in consideration and interest, characteristic and manly, yet with a shade of formality and restraint, differing from all phases of our former intercourse; ever so slight a shade, it is true, but it made me put this his last letter away, with the same feeling that I think I should have had, if I had just turned away from my last look at him in his coffin. He was dead to _me_, at least. Occasional letters, indeed, came from him to Mr. Shenstone, generally with some mention of my name; Mr. Shenstone always showed them to me; they brought back old times, and made me restless and vaguely sad for a day or two, then the _dead_ feeling would come back, and all would be the same as before. As time wore on, the letters grew almost imperceptibly shorter and less explicit; he was travelling--he was here--at such a time he should be there--such places pleased him--such spots were changed since his former visits; then would follow some general directions about the farm--remembrances to Mrs. Arnold and to me--kind inquiries into Mr. Shenstone's own health--renewed assurances of friendship--and so the letter would end. Of my aunt's family I rarely heard. They went abroad the year after we parted; I saw occasionally by the papers their residence at Paris, or their journeying in Italy; and Grace's marriage with a Frenchman of good family came to my knowledge through the same means. Why Josephine still lingered unmarried I could only conjecture. Phil Arbuthnot returned to America after spending a year with them in Paris, and I believe has never rejoined them. So much for these once prominent participators in my interest, and now of myself. In the home I had chosen I was soon as necessary as I was occupied; Mrs. Arnold saw life and usefulness receding from her now with less pain, that she saw one younger and stronger, able to take up the duties that she had reluctantly laid down. There was no chance for time to hang heavy on my hands; besides the occupations of the house, there were unnumbered calls upon my energies in the parish. Mr. Shenstone was no longer young, almost an old man now, and though his energy never flagged, his strength did, and I found many ways of relieving him, and inducing him to save himself and depend on me. I have no doubt he saw it was the kindest thing he could do for me, and so the more willingly yielded the duties to me. No one that sets himself or herself earnestly at work, with a sincere desire to do right, and to atone for the past, but will, sooner or later, feel the good effect of such effort; his languor will yield before the invigorating glow of exercise, his nerves will regain the tone they had lost, his pulse will beat with something of its old vigor; he will, though never again the same man, be once more a man, be free from the corroding melancholy that threatened to be his ruin, and be ready to look on life with steadier, wiser eyes than in his youth. Such reward work brings; no matter how plain and coarse and unattractive the work may be, no matter if, in itself, it has no interest and no charm, the will, the duty, the spirit in which it is done, will give it its interest and its charm, and will bring it its certain reward. Youth can hardly see this, misery cannot at first acknowledge it, but none ever faithfully and patiently tried it, without finding the truth of it. There is a lonely grave in the very heart of the pine forest, unmarked by cross or stone, above which no prayers but mine have ever been said, which the dark moss covers thickly, and around which the trees sound their everlasting dirge. I have not learned to be tranquil there; years more of faith and prayer may take the sting out of that sorrow, and bring me to leave it utterly in His high hand who seeth not as man seeth. If prayer could avail, after the grave had shut her mouth upon any of the children of men, if fast and vigil, tears and penance, could mitigate the wrath decreed against them, I might hope, I might stand by that desolate mound with a less despairing heart. I have tried to realize that God's ways are not as our ways, that nothing is impossible with him, that His mercy is as incomprehensible as is His power; and that our puny prayers, however they may chasten and purify ourselves, are not needed, and not efficient in influencing His sentence on our brothers' souls. There is enough to do among the living. "Let the dead Past bury its dead." There are souls yet unsentenced to be prayed for and to be gained, there are children to be brought to baptism and to be led aright, there are dark homes of poverty and sin to be invaded with the light of truth and love; there is doubt to be won to faith, ignorance to be enlightened, sluggish indolence to be roused, God's church to work for, His honor to be extended, our most holy faith to be spread and reverenced; there is no need to languish for want of work, or to waste tears and prayers upon that which is already in the hands of Almighty Love and Almighty Power. Yes; I believe I was, through it all, happier than Mrs. Churchill, haggard and worn in a service whose nominal wages are pleasure and ease; and than Josephine, wasting her youth in the pursuit of an ambition that had rewarded her as yet by nothing but vanity and vexation of spirit. A gay hotel in Paris, and a secluded country parsonage--on the one hand wealth, the pleasures of society, the admiration of the world, on the other seclusion, the annihilation of every hope that had its root only in this earth, the love only of the poor, the aged and the suffering, yet I would not have exchanged their gaiety for my peace, their prosperity for my adversity. "What should we do without you, child?" said Mr. Shenstone, kindly, one day as I was leaving him. "What should we do without these young eyes and this young zeal? I am afraid the village would begin to tire of its old pastor, and to fret about his old ways and his new negligences, if we had not this fresh enthusiast to throw herself into the breach, and to save both flock and pastor from discouragement and disgust. You have assimilated yourself strangely to those you have fallen among. Tell me truly, my dear child, are you never weary of this dull life--never tired of the companionship of two solitary, sad people, old and spiritless? We are apt to forget--you cheer and comfort us--we must depress and sadden you." "You? Oh, Mr. Shenstone! You know to whom it is I owe it that I have conquered depression and sadness. You have done everything for me; may I do nothing for you? It is little enough, surely, but it is my greatest pleasure." "If it is--then go," he said, with a sad smile on his wan, furrowed face. "Go and fulfill the duties that God has taken out of my hands, and I will try to be patient and stay at home in idleness. I will try to remember, 'They also serve who only stand and wait.' But God knows, it is the hardest kind of service!" Every day lately had been adding to his languor; I watched with anxious foreboding his slow step and altered tone. It was the twenty-fourth of December, and I knew that the contrast of his present inactivity at this holy season, to former diligence, must be a keen trial to him with his stern rules of duty. I left the house with a sigh, and went out into the clear, still air of the winter afternoon, with the energy of youth and earnestness in my veins, and thought, wonderingly, of the different grades of trials, the "anguish of all sizes" that God's elect must pass through, "Till every pulse beat true to airs divine." It must be hard, indeed, to "stand and wait," to feel that energy and strength are going before life goes, and that there is nothing left to do, only to endure. Such a trial, it seemed to me, would be the worst of all: as long as there is work there is a panacea, but take away that, and the burden grows intolerable. God spare me that! And I hurried on through my many duties with double thankfulness that they were so many. The short winter afternoon was all too short for them--it was almost sundown when I started to cross the common on my return from a distant cottage. There was but one thing more to do to-night; the school-children were waiting for me to go into the church and practice their Christmas-hymn with them, and it was late already, so I quickened my pace. I found my young pupils waiting for me around the gate of the churchyard; they hailed me with acclamations, and clustering round my skirts, followed me into the church. They were too well taught to continue their chattering there, even if they had been unrestrained by my presence, but I could not but believe the scene must have struck them with some reverence, thoughtless and trifling though too many of them were. The lowering sun streamed in through the stained glass of the western windows, and lit up gorgeously the sombre church, illuminating the joyful Christmas words above the altar, touching cross and star and tablet with soft light, and laying rich and warm upon the glossy wreaths that were twined round font and chancel, desk and pillar. Coming from the cold air and wintry landscape, into such a mellow, warm, green sanctuary, where there seemed no winter and no chill, I could understand the feeling that checked the children's mirth so suddenly, and made them look wistfully and silently around; and when their sweet, young voices followed mine in the Christmas-hymn, and when the organ yielded its full tones to my touch, arch and rafter, pavement and aisle seemed to stretch away into infinity; the light that filled the church was the glory of heaven; the sweet music, the voices of the angels; and time and earth seemed to fade and recede, and floating down that path of glory, I could almost have touched the open gates of heaven--almost have mingled in the white-robed throng within. The chains of sin and sense fall off--the sounds of warfare die away--the terrors of the conflict with the hosts of hell are all forgotten; if one's soul could follow in the wake of one's longing at such a moment as this, death would indeed be conquered--the king of terrors be cheated of his prey. The glory had faded from the west, and dullness and gloom had crept into the church before the young choir dispersed. It seemed as if the very spirit of music had possessed the children; hymn after hymn, anthem and carol, and never tired or flagging. As at last I rose to go, and bent forward to shut the organ, one of them whispered eagerly: "There's somebody been below there in the church! I hear steps going down the aisle; and hark! The door just opened and shut again." "No matter," I said, a little startled. "Some one has heard the music, and come in to listen. Follow me quietly, children: it is almost dark; we have stayed too late." The little group separated at the church door; bidding them good-night, and taking by the hand the child whose way lay partly with mine going home, I took the path toward the village. It gave me, I confess, a little uneasiness to see how faint the daylight was, and the conjecture--who could have been in the church so long and so silent, recurred again and again uncomfortably. It was too late to trust little Rosy to go home alone, so, though it took me a full half mile beyond my own road, I kept on with her; and beguiling her with a Christmas story as we went, soon succeeded in forgetting foolish fears, _malgré_ the twilight and the lonesome road. At last we reached the little gate of Rosy's home, and stooping to kiss her as I left her at it, I was turning away, when a carriage drove quickly past toward Brandon. It was a strange carriage, and it gave me a sort of start; I could not quite recover my composure for some minutes; but then strangers came so seldom through the village at this season, it was not very wonderful after all that I had been startled. However, I reflected, it was not improbably some one on the way from northward, detained by the freezing of the river, and hurrying on to catch the evening train from Brandon; and with that, dismissed the subject from my mind. When I reached home, I hurried into the study, anxious to explain to Mr. Shenstone the cause of my long absence, and to make amends for it by enlivening his evening. I found him alone; Mrs. Arnold had not been able to leave her room for several days, and the study was in darkness, and tea had not been thought of. "Why, how dismal you look, sir!" I exclaimed, as I came in. "I beg you will excuse my staying till this hour; but the children were so in love with their own voices, that I could not get them away; and that little gipsy of a Rosy had to be escorted all the way home. Kitty should have brought you lights, sir; shall I ring?" "No, not just yet; I am in no hurry. Sit down; are you not tired? I have wondered at your being so late. You have missed a visitor." "A visitor? No! Why, who?" "One whom I little expected to see, and much less expected to have had so short a visit from. I confess it has quite startled and unsettled me, seeing him so unexpectedly and for such a moment. But he could not stay over night, and the Brandon train leaves at half-past six, he says. He was sorry you were away." "Mr. Rutledge has been here?" "Yes." "And gone?" "And gone." CHAPTER XXXIX. "Be not amazed at life. 'Tis still The mode of God with his elect, Their hopes exactly to fulfill, In times and ways they least expect." Coventry Patmore. The winter passed heavily away: no change for the better relieved our fears for Mr. Shenstone, and, before spring, poor Mrs. Arnold died, and left me alone with the burden of care and dread. All that time is like a sad, slow dream; I cannot tell the days apart as I look back upon them--the one fear that grew daily colored all events alike. It was like no other approaching death that I had ever seen. I knew he was longing for his release; but what would be release to him would be my sentence of banishment--my separation from the only friend I had, the severing of the only tie I knew. Still it seemed vague and far off, and the warm spring days came slowly on, and crept into June, before either he or I knew how very few he had yet to live. The doctor had at last to tell me what every one else knew--that Mr. Shenstone could not live a week. I do not think that he himself, though knowing well that the time was at hand, had been aware how very near it was. I knew it was not too near for his desires; but one earthly care vexed the holy calm of his death-bed. "I must see Arthur before I die. Write to him again, and beg him to come quickly. He could not have realized what I meant him to understand when you wrote last, or he would have been here before." I wrote again urgently, and told him in the plainest words what the necessity for his coming was, and how anxiously Mr. Shenstone desired an interview before he died; that it was the one ungratified wish that disturbed his last moments; the letter was hurriedly dispatched, and yet day after day passed and no answer came. It was cruel to see the momentary eagerness with which the dying man's eye lighted up at each new sound without, and to hear the faint sigh with which he sank back at the fresh disappointment. I had my own interpretation of this silence; but I dared not tell him. Through the winter his letters had been irregular; it was now some weeks since any had come; I did not feel a doubt but that he had gone abroad again, and, in the hurry of departure, had omitted to write. Something that Mrs. Fielding (the pretty Janet Emerson, married and living at New Orleans, but on a visit to her old home, who had found me out and come to see me a month or so before) had said, confirmed my suspicions. "I heard from Paris a week or so ago," she said, "that your cousin, Miss Churchill, and Mr. Rutledge are really to be married. Upon my word, you must excuse me; but it is a shame. I grudge him to her. Ah! _méchante_, if you had made the proper use of that evening in the library that I gave you, she would not have had him." I had not told Mr. Shenstone this; nor dared I tell him that there was hardly a hope that his friend was still in America. A week had elapsed since my letter had been sent; the end was surely approaching--we could not shut our eyes to that. That morning, Mr. Shenstone had, with great pain and difficulty, refusing my assistance, himself written a few lines to Mr. Rutledge, and, sealing it, had committed it to my hands, charging me to deliver it to him as soon as he should come. From the moment that that was done, he had put off all care, and given himself wholly up to the exercises of religion and the preparations for death. Of my future he had never spoken much. God would direct my lot mercifully, he was sure; he left me, his sole earthly care, with faith, to God's protection. He desired that for the present I should remain, with the two servants, in the house, till some other home presented, or till the parsonage was required for his successor. It was a holy, religious day; such peace as soothed the last hours of his life told well for the service in which he had spent it. It was not like death--it was like the coming of a blessing that had been long prayed for. We had with him received the sacrament, and heard the faint words that told his triumph and his hope, and stood waiting around him, almost following him to the courts of heaven, almost forgetting with him, the world in which our path still lay; when through the window, open to the sunset of a June evening, there came the sound of a hurried arrival. "It is Arthur," murmured the dying man, faintly, turning his eyes on me. "Go and bring him to me." I hurried to the door and down the path. "You have not a moment to lose," I said, without a word of preparation or salutation. "He can hardly live an hour, and he desires to see you." "Good heaven! Has it indeed come to that!" he exclaimed, following me up the stairs. I left him at the door; for half an hour they were alone together, then Mr. Rutledge opened the door and called me hastily to come in. I obeyed; but only in time to receive the last blessing of the dying saint, and, kneeling in unspeakable sorrow by his bedside, to feel his hand rest tenderly on my head, with a silent benediction, even after his departing soul had carried its supplication and its intercession to the very presence of the Divine Benefactor. Two days had passed since the funeral; there was no more anxiety to engross, no more watching to employ me; the blank idleness that is the earliest pain after a great loss, was just then creeping over me with its worst power. There was nothing more to do--the house was settled to its ordinary ways, and I sat alone in my little room in the deepening twilight, with a sadder sense of my loneliness than I had had before. It was not time yet for me to think of what was to become of me; I had a right to rest a little before I faced any greater change, yet harassing thoughts of my homelessness and desolation crowded on me to make my present trial heavier. There was no one on earth I had a right to call my friend, save only the humble ones who could offer me nothing but gratitude and affection, and who were as unable to direct and help me, as I was to direct and help myself. It was long before I could summon courage enough to say that I must decide upon some change, and to resolve that it must be done now. There was no right and no propriety in staying longer here than till I had arranged some other home; indeed for some reasons this was the last roof that I should stay under now. But my resolves came quick when they did come--I saw that the sooner I began my new life the better; it would be like another death if I waited till a few months hence before I left this dear home; now, in this time of change and restlessness, I could best bear the pain. To-morrow, I had resolved, I would go out and try to find some cottage or some rooms, where, with Kitty to attend me, I could make the best of my slender fortune, and remain quietly at least for the present, when a knock at the door aroused me. The servant said: "Mr. Rutledge is in the study, Miss, and desires to see you for a few moments." "Ask him to excuse me to-night," I began; but no, it was as easy now as it would ever be, so telling the woman to say I would be down in a moment, I shut the door and tried to prepare myself. There was a good deal to help me to be calm; some pride and some humility--a prayer--and the remembrance of my sorrow--and the gulf that lay between the present and the past; and I went downstairs quite self-possessed and quiet. The study was so dusky I could hardly see my visitor's face as he rose to meet me. I longed to keep the dusk, but said: "Do you mind twilight, sir? My head aches a little, but if you prefer it, I will send for candles." "Not at all," he said, sitting down opposite me in the window. "I am sorry to hear you are not well. Kitty told me, when she admitted me, that it was doubtful whether you could come down; but I fancied you would not have the least hesitation in declining to see me if you were not able." "I did think, sir, when you were first announced, that I would beg you to excuse me; but I remembered that possibly you might be returning to the city to-morrow, and this might be my last chance of seeing you, so I made an effort to come down." There was a moment's pause, which I broke by saying: "I wanted to see you, sir, about the change in my plans, which, as Mr. Shenstone's nearest friend, you would, perhaps, be kind enough to sanction." "It was about that that I came this evening." "You are very kind, sir, and so I may go at once to the subject. You know, of course, of Mr. Shenstone's legacy; that, with my own property, is sufficient to provide very comfortably for Kitty and myself. I propose making my arrangements to leave here within a fortnight, keeping Kitty with me; but for the other servant, Mary, I would ask your advice. She has been some time in the family, and is a faithful person. Would it be best to leave her in the house till it is otherwise occupied, or to provide a place for her, and close the house? You know, as I shall have the packing up and settling of all at the last, it is necessary I should know your wishes." "I do not quite comprehend. I had understood from Mr. Shenstone that it was his wish that you should remain for the present here. Did he not express the same to you?" "He did, sir, but it was a mistaken kindness. I had rather go now; and I do not think there can be any wrong in disregarding a request which he only meant as an indulgence and a respite, and would not have insisted on if he had known my reasons." "Can I know them?" "They are so many, sir, it would not be worth while to trouble you." "Am I wrong when I fancy that one is, that the house belongs to one from whom you would not endure an obligation?" "You put it too harshly, sir; but in truth I do not like obligations." "You would incur none, then, let me assure you, by remaining here. The house will be unoccupied; I should be glad to have some one in it, and there is, I fear, little chance of having the parish permanently suited with a clergyman before fall, and even after that, there is no necessity of retaining this as a parsonage; there are one or two houses nearer the church, which would, indeed, be more convenient." "Thank you, sir, but it will be impossible. You do not estimate the difficulties. I cannot stay here: and perhaps you will be kind enough to tell me what to do about the arrangement of the books. Shall they be packed, or are they to remain on the shelves? And here, sir, is the key of the private drawers in that book-case, that I was to give you when you came." My voice faltered as I delivered my kind friend's last message. There was a long pause, then Mr. Rutledge said: "These things are very trying to you now; there is no need that you should distress yourself by attending to them at once. Leave them till later." "No, sir, it is better that they should be all arranged before you go. I do not mind the effort of undertaking it at once." "But how do you know I am going? Why will not a few weeks hence do as well?" "Why, sir, as I told you, I should prefer that everything were settled, the papers arranged, the house vacated, before you go abroad. It may make no difference, but it will be more agreeable to me." "I am not going abroad; I do not intend to leave America again. Can you not be contented to let things rest as they are at present, and to let me, in some degree, take the place of him you have lost? Consider, you are homeless and friendless--you have no one to direct or guide you"---- "I have considered this, sir, more fully, perhaps, than you have. There is not a circumstance in my fate that I have not weighed. Indeed, I do not need so much pity; your attention has just been called to it, and so it sounds new and dreadful to you for a woman to be left so alone. But I am used to the idea, and I do not mind it. People will be kind to me, no doubt, and I shall do very well." "Then you are resolved to go away from here?" "Within a fortnight, sir." "And you refuse all offers of assistance from me, of all kinds?" "Why, sir, you know it would be useless to trouble you, when I do not need any; but I hope you understand that I am very grateful for your goodness." "I understand it fully, and that you decline any further demonstration of it. But if you have no scruple against telling me where you intend to go, perhaps it would be wiser to do it, as some cases may occur which you cannot foresee, in which it would be safer for you to have the judgment and advice of one whose age and experience place him above you in knowledge, of the world, at least." "It would be impossible for me to tell you, sir, for I do not know in the least where I shall go. You know I have not had time to arrange my plans definitely--it is only two days--since--since--I have had to think about them." "And you will not take more time, and put off any change for a few months--you will not let me advise you?" "Mr. Rutledge, you are trying to make me seem rude; I have but one answer to make, and it sounds so ungracious you are not kind to oblige me to repeat it." "I will not; I believe I understand how you wish it to stand; and perhaps you are right. It is not necessary to detain you longer," he continued, rising, "there is nothing of importance left to say, I believe. About the books and furniture, I should prefer having them left for the present in the house; I will not trouble you to do anything but to send the keys, when you leave, to my house. Mrs. Roberts will take charge of them. The papers I can look over at my leisure. In regard to the servant you spoke of--I will mention her to Mrs. Roberts, and will see that she is provided with a situation. Is there anything more?" "Nothing that I remember at this moment, sir. You are very kind; I shall endeavor to leave everything in the order you would wish." "I do not doubt it; I hope you will be able to bear whatever you intend to put upon yourself, but you will do well not to overtask your strength or fortitude just now; you are not at not at present fit for exertion. But I forget"---- I rose, and held out my hand; he went on: "You know you have always my best wishes; there is no need for me to say that." "I know it, sir," I replied, with what steadiness of voice I could. "I wish I could tell you how"----but the words choked me. He did not relinquish my hand, but with a sudden change from the cold tone of his last words, he exclaimed hurriedly, and with a smothered vehemence: "You wish you could tell me what? You wish you could tell me what I already know--could tell me that you pity me--that you are sorry for the pain you give me? That you know how much it costs me to say a final farewell to you--and that you are sorry--sorry. No! You need not wish to do it; I can spare you that. I came to you to-night to see if time, and sorrow, and necessity had not helped me in my suit; to try, for the last time, whether there was any chance of winning you; I came to tempt you by the fortune and the luxury I could offer you, just to endure my love, and to repay, by ever so cold a kindness, the devotion of years. I came, misled by a hope held out by one who loved us both too well to be an impartial judge; and I find you colder, more distant than ever, and that the hope I have been trying to extinguish so long is only rekindled to be quenched at last utterly! "Foolish girl!" he went on, in a lower tone, "how little you know what you throw away. How vain to cling so fondly to a memory. Believe me, it will not be wronging the dead--I little thought I should ever stoop to ask it, but only try to love me--only consent to give me your esteem and consideration, and I will take the risk of teaching you to love me. Is it nothing to be loved as I have loved you? To be the first, and last, and only choice of a man who has had so many to choose from? Have you no vanity that can be touched--no pride? If you had, I could allure you by the promise that you should be proud of the position you would hold; those who have slighted you should look at you with envy--those who"---- "Oh, Mr. Rutledge do not talk of those things now--I have given them up forever; I shall never care again for the world--but--there is something else--I"---- "You relent!" he murmured, eagerly. "You will consent to forget the past--you will"---- "I must tell you one thing first; I must tell you something that I have told to no one else. Heaven have mercy on me if it is a sin, or if I am betraying what I should still conceal. I never felt the love you think I did. I deceived him and you; but as I have been bitterly punished, and bitterly penitent, so Heaven forgive me for it! Between him and me there was another love, that began before I ever saw him--that is not ended yet--that has never known change or wavering." "And that love?" Within his arms, my face hidden on his shoulder, I could whisper the answer to that question, and the confession of the folly, and deceit, and pride, that had so long kept me from him. 
1023	----	and revised by Thomas Berger and Joseph E. Loewenstein, M.D. BLEAK HOUSE by CHARLES DICKENS CONTENTS Preface I. In Chancery II. In Fashion III. A Progress IV. Telescopic Philanthropy V. A Morning Adventure VI. Quite at Home VII. The Ghost's Walk VIII. Covering a Multitude of Sins IX. Signs and Tokens X. The Law-Writer XI. Our Dear Brother XII. On the Watch XIII. Esther's Narrative XIV. Deportment XV. Bell Yard XVI. Tom-all-Alone's XVII. Esther's Narrative XVIII. Lady Dedlock XIX. Moving On XX. A New Lodger XXI. The Smallweed Family XXII. Mr. Bucket XXIII. Esther's Narrative XXIV. An Appeal Case XXV. Mrs. Snagsby Sees It All XXVI. Sharpshooters XXVII. More Old Soldiers Than One XXVIII. The Ironmaster XXIX. The Young Man XXX. Esther's Narrative XXXI. Nurse and Patient XXXII. The Appointed Time XXXIII. Interlopers XXXIV. A Turn of the Screw XXXV. Esther's Narrative XXXVI. Chesney Wold XXXVII. Jarndyce and Jarndyce XXXVIII. A Struggle XXXIX. Attorney and Client XL. National and Domestic XLI. In Mr. Tulkinghorn's Room XLII. In Mr. Tulkinghorn's Chambers XLIII. Esther's Narrative XLIV. The Letter and the Answer XLV. In Trust XLVI. Stop Him! XLVII. Jo's Will XLVIII. Closing In XLIX. Dutiful Friendship L. Esther's Narrative LI. Enlightened LII. Obstinacy LIII. The Track LIV. Springing a Mine LV. Flight LVI. Pursuit LVII. Esther's Narrative LVIII. A Wintry Day and Night LIX. Esther's Narrative LX. Perspective LXI. A Discovery LXII. Another Discovery LXIII. Steel and Iron LXIV. Esther's Narrative LXV. Beginning the World LXVI. Down in Lincolnshire LXVII. The Close of Esther's Narrative PREFACE A Chancery judge once had the kindness to inform me, as one of a company of some hundred and fifty men and women not labouring under any suspicions of lunacy, that the Court of Chancery, though the shining subject of much popular prejudice (at which point I thought the judge's eye had a cast in my direction), was almost immaculate. There had been, he admitted, a trivial blemish or so in its rate of progress, but this was exaggerated and had been entirely owing to the "parsimony of the public," which guilty public, it appeared, had been until lately bent in the most determined manner on by no means enlarging the number of Chancery judges appointed--I believe by Richard the Second, but any other king will do as well. This seemed to me too profound a joke to be inserted in the body of this book or I should have restored it to Conversation Kenge or to Mr. Vholes, with one or other of whom I think it must have originated. In such mouths I might have coupled it with an apt quotation from one of Shakespeare's sonnets: "My nature is subdued To what it works in, like the dyer's hand: Pity me, then, and wish I were renewed!" But as it is wholesome that the parsimonious public should know what has been doing, and still is doing, in this connexion, I mention here that everything set forth in these pages concerning the Court of Chancery is substantially true, and within the truth. The case of Gridley is in no essential altered from one of actual occurrence, made public by a disinterested person who was professionally acquainted with the whole of the monstrous wrong from beginning to end. At the present moment (August, 1853) there is a suit before the court which was commenced nearly twenty years ago, in which from thirty to forty counsel have been known to appear at one time, in which costs have been incurred to the amount of seventy thousand pounds, which is A FRIENDLY SUIT, and which is (I am assured) no nearer to its termination now than when it was begun. There is another well-known suit in Chancery, not yet decided, which was commenced before the close of the last century and in which more than double the amount of seventy thousand pounds has been swallowed up in costs. If I wanted other authorities for Jarndyce and Jarndyce, I could rain them on these pages, to the shame of--a parsimonious public. There is only one other point on which I offer a word of remark. The possibility of what is called spontaneous combustion has been denied since the death of Mr. Krook; and my good friend Mr. Lewes (quite mistaken, as he soon found, in supposing the thing to have been abandoned by all authorities) published some ingenious letters to me at the time when that event was chronicled, arguing that spontaneous combustion could not possibly be. I have no need to observe that I do not wilfully or negligently mislead my readers and that before I wrote that description I took pains to investigate the subject. There are about thirty cases on record, of which the most famous, that of the Countess Cornelia de Baudi Cesenate, was minutely investigated and described by Giuseppe Bianchini, a prebendary of Verona, otherwise distinguished in letters, who published an account of it at Verona in 1731, which he afterwards republished at Rome. The appearances, beyond all rational doubt, observed in that case are the appearances observed in Mr. Krook's case. The next most famous instance happened at Rheims six years earlier, and the historian in that case is Le Cat, one of the most renowned surgeons produced by France. The subject was a woman, whose husband was ignorantly convicted of having murdered her; but on solemn appeal to a higher court, he was acquitted because it was shown upon the evidence that she had died the death of which this name of spontaneous combustion is given. I do not think it necessary to add to these notable facts, and that general reference to the authorities which will be found at page 30, vol. ii.,* the recorded opinions and experiences of distinguished medical professors, French, English, and Scotch, in more modern days, contenting myself with observing that I shall not abandon the facts until there shall have been a considerable spontaneous combustion of the testimony on which human occurrences are usually received.** In Bleak House I have purposely dwelt upon the romantic side of familiar things. 1853 *Transcriber's note. This referred to a specific page in the printed book. In this Project Gutenberg edition the pertinent information is in Chapter XXX, paragraph 90. ** Another case, very clearly described by a dentist, occurred at the town of Columbus, in the United States of America, quite recently. The subject was a German who kept a liquor-shop and was an inveterate drunkard. CHAPTER I In Chancery London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes--gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest. Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds. Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time--as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look. The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln's Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery. Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth. On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor ought to be sitting here--as here he is--with a foggy glory round his head, softly fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains, addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief, and outwardly directing his contemplation to the lantern in the roof, where he can see nothing but fog. On such an afternoon some score of members of the High Court of Chancery bar ought to be--as here they are--mistily engaged in one of the ten thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one another up on slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, running their goat-hair and horsehair warded heads against walls of words and making a pretence of equity with serious faces, as players might. On such an afternoon the various solicitors in the cause, some two or three of whom have inherited it from their fathers, who made a fortune by it, ought to be--as are they not?--ranged in a line, in a long matted well (but you might look in vain for truth at the bottom of it) between the registrar's red table and the silk gowns, with bills, cross-bills, answers, rejoinders, injunctions, affidavits, issues, references to masters, masters' reports, mountains of costly nonsense, piled before them. Well may the court be dim, with wasting candles here and there; well may the fog hang heavy in it, as if it would never get out; well may the stained-glass windows lose their colour and admit no light of day into the place; well may the uninitiated from the streets, who peep in through the glass panes in the door, be deterred from entrance by its owlish aspect and by the drawl, languidly echoing to the roof from the padded dais where the Lord High Chancellor looks into the lantern that has no light in it and where the attendant wigs are all stuck in a fog-bank! This is the Court of Chancery, which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire, which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse and its dead in every churchyard, which has its ruined suitor with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress borrowing and begging through the round of every man's acquaintance, which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right, which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope, so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart, that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give--who does not often give--the warning, "Suffer any wrong that can be done you rather than come here!" Who happen to be in the Lord Chancellor's court this murky afternoon besides the Lord Chancellor, the counsel in the cause, two or three counsel who are never in any cause, and the well of solicitors before mentioned? There is the registrar below the judge, in wig and gown; and there are two or three maces, or petty-bags, or privy purses, or whatever they may be, in legal court suits. These are all yawning, for no crumb of amusement ever falls from Jarndyce and Jarndyce (the cause in hand), which was squeezed dry years upon years ago. The short-hand writers, the reporters of the court, and the reporters of the newspapers invariably decamp with the rest of the regulars when Jarndyce and Jarndyce comes on. Their places are a blank. Standing on a seat at the side of the hall, the better to peer into the curtained sanctuary, is a little mad old woman in a squeezed bonnet who is always in court, from its sitting to its rising, and always expecting some incomprehensible judgment to be given in her favour. Some say she really is, or was, a party to a suit, but no one knows for certain because no one cares. She carries some small litter in a reticule which she calls her documents, principally consisting of paper matches and dry lavender. A sallow prisoner has come up, in custody, for the half-dozenth time to make a personal application "to purge himself of his contempt," which, being a solitary surviving executor who has fallen into a state of conglomeration about accounts of which it is not pretended that he had ever any knowledge, he is not at all likely ever to do. In the meantime his prospects in life are ended. Another ruined suitor, who periodically appears from Shropshire and breaks out into efforts to address the Chancellor at the close of the day's business and who can by no means be made to understand that the Chancellor is legally ignorant of his existence after making it desolate for a quarter of a century, plants himself in a good place and keeps an eye on the judge, ready to call out "My Lord!" in a voice of sonorous complaint on the instant of his rising. A few lawyers' clerks and others who know this suitor by sight linger on the chance of his furnishing some fun and enlivening the dismal weather a little. Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least, but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit. The little plaintiff or defendant who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world. Fair wards of court have faded into mothers and grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and gone out; the legion of bills in the suit have been transformed into mere bills of mortality; there are not three Jarndyces left upon the earth perhaps since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the court, perennially hopeless. Jarndyce and Jarndyce has passed into a joke. That is the only good that has ever come of it. It has been death to many, but it is a joke in the profession. Every master in Chancery has had a reference out of it. Every Chancellor was "in it," for somebody or other, when he was counsel at the bar. Good things have been said about it by blue-nosed, bulbous-shoed old benchers in select port-wine committee after dinner in hall. Articled clerks have been in the habit of fleshing their legal wit upon it. The last Lord Chancellor handled it neatly, when, correcting Mr. Blowers, the eminent silk gown who said that such a thing might happen when the sky rained potatoes, he observed, "or when we get through Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Mr. Blowers"--a pleasantry that particularly tickled the maces, bags, and purses. How many people out of the suit Jarndyce and Jarndyce has stretched forth its unwholesome hand to spoil and corrupt would be a very wide question. From the master upon whose impaling files reams of dusty warrants in Jarndyce and Jarndyce have grimly writhed into many shapes, down to the copying-clerk in the Six Clerks' Office who has copied his tens of thousands of Chancery folio-pages under that eternal heading, no man's nature has been made better by it. In trickery, evasion, procrastination, spoliation, botheration, under false pretences of all sorts, there are influences that can never come to good. The very solicitors' boys who have kept the wretched suitors at bay, by protesting time out of mind that Mr. Chizzle, Mizzle, or otherwise was particularly engaged and had appointments until dinner, may have got an extra moral twist and shuffle into themselves out of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. The receiver in the cause has acquired a goodly sum of money by it but has acquired too a distrust of his own mother and a contempt for his own kind. Chizzle, Mizzle, and otherwise have lapsed into a habit of vaguely promising themselves that they will look into that outstanding little matter and see what can be done for Drizzle--who was not well used--when Jarndyce and Jarndyce shall be got out of the office. Shirking and sharking in all their many varieties have been sown broadcast by the ill-fated cause; and even those who have contemplated its history from the outermost circle of such evil have been insensibly tempted into a loose way of letting bad things alone to take their own bad course, and a loose belief that if the world go wrong it was in some off-hand manner never meant to go right. Thus, in the midst of the mud and at the heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery. "Mr. Tangle," says the Lord High Chancellor, latterly something restless under the eloquence of that learned gentleman. "Mlud," says Mr. Tangle. Mr. Tangle knows more of Jarndyce and Jarndyce than anybody. He is famous for it--supposed never to have read anything else since he left school. "Have you nearly concluded your argument?" "Mlud, no--variety of points--feel it my duty tsubmit--ludship," is the reply that slides out of Mr. Tangle. "Several members of the bar are still to be heard, I believe?" says the Chancellor with a slight smile. Eighteen of Mr. Tangle's learned friends, each armed with a little summary of eighteen hundred sheets, bob up like eighteen hammers in a pianoforte, make eighteen bows, and drop into their eighteen places of obscurity. "We will proceed with the hearing on Wednesday fortnight," says the Chancellor. For the question at issue is only a question of costs, a mere bud on the forest tree of the parent suit, and really will come to a settlement one of these days. The Chancellor rises; the bar rises; the prisoner is brought forward in a hurry; the man from Shropshire cries, "My lord!" Maces, bags, and purses indignantly proclaim silence and frown at the man from Shropshire. "In reference," proceeds the Chancellor, still on Jarndyce and Jarndyce, "to the young girl--" "Begludship's pardon--boy," says Mr. Tangle prematurely. "In reference," proceeds the Chancellor with extra distinctness, "to the young girl and boy, the two young people"--Mr. Tangle crushed--"whom I directed to be in attendance to-day and who are now in my private room, I will see them and satisfy myself as to the expediency of making the order for their residing with their uncle." Mr. Tangle on his legs again. "Begludship's pardon--dead." "With their"--Chancellor looking through his double eye-glass at the papers on his desk--"grandfather." "Begludship's pardon--victim of rash action--brains." Suddenly a very little counsel with a terrific bass voice arises, fully inflated, in the back settlements of the fog, and says, "Will your lordship allow me? I appear for him. He is a cousin, several times removed. I am not at the moment prepared to inform the court in what exact remove he is a cousin, but he IS a cousin." Leaving this address (delivered like a sepulchral message) ringing in the rafters of the roof, the very little counsel drops, and the fog knows him no more. Everybody looks for him. Nobody can see him. "I will speak with both the young people," says the Chancellor anew, "and satisfy myself on the subject of their residing with their cousin. I will mention the matter to-morrow morning when I take my seat." The Chancellor is about to bow to the bar when the prisoner is presented. Nothing can possibly come of the prisoner's conglomeration but his being sent back to prison, which is soon done. The man from Shropshire ventures another remonstrative "My lord!" but the Chancellor, being aware of him, has dexterously vanished. Everybody else quickly vanishes too. A battery of blue bags is loaded with heavy charges of papers and carried off by clerks; the little mad old woman marches off with her documents; the empty court is locked up. If all the injustice it has committed and all the misery it has caused could only be locked up with it, and the whole burnt away in a great funeral pyre--why so much the better for other parties than the parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce! CHAPTER II In Fashion It is but a glimpse of the world of fashion that we want on this same miry afternoon. It is not so unlike the Court of Chancery but that we may pass from the one scene to the other, as the crow flies. Both the world of fashion and the Court of Chancery are things of precedent and usage: oversleeping Rip Van Winkles who have played at strange games through a deal of thundery weather; sleeping beauties whom the knight will wake one day, when all the stopped spits in the kitchen shall begin to turn prodigiously! It is not a large world. Relatively even to this world of ours, which has its limits too (as your Highness shall find when you have made the tour of it and are come to the brink of the void beyond), it is a very little speck. There is much good in it; there are many good and true people in it; it has its appointed place. But the evil of it is that it is a world wrapped up in too much jeweller's cotton and fine wool, and cannot hear the rushing of the larger worlds, and cannot see them as they circle round the sun. It is a deadened world, and its growth is sometimes unhealthy for want of air. My Lady Dedlock has returned to her house in town for a few days previous to her departure for Paris, where her ladyship intends to stay some weeks, after which her movements are uncertain. The fashionable intelligence says so for the comfort of the Parisians, and it knows all fashionable things. To know things otherwise were to be unfashionable. My Lady Dedlock has been down at what she calls, in familiar conversation, her "place" in Lincolnshire. The waters are out in Lincolnshire. An arch of the bridge in the park has been sapped and sopped away. The adjacent low-lying ground for half a mile in breadth is a stagnant river with melancholy trees for islands in it and a surface punctured all over, all day long, with falling rain. My Lady Dedlock's place has been extremely dreary. The weather for many a day and night has been so wet that the trees seem wet through, and the soft loppings and prunings of the woodman's axe can make no crash or crackle as they fall. The deer, looking soaked, leave quagmires where they pass. The shot of a rifle loses its sharpness in the moist air, and its smoke moves in a tardy little cloud towards the green rise, coppice-topped, that makes a background for the falling rain. The view from my Lady Dedlock's own windows is alternately a lead-coloured view and a view in Indian ink. The vases on the stone terrace in the foreground catch the rain all day; and the heavy drops fall--drip, drip, drip--upon the broad flagged pavement, called from old time the Ghost's Walk, all night. On Sundays the little church in the park is mouldy; the oaken pulpit breaks out into a cold sweat; and there is a general smell and taste as of the ancient Dedlocks in their graves. My Lady Dedlock (who is childless), looking out in the early twilight from her boudoir at a keeper's lodge and seeing the light of a fire upon the latticed panes, and smoke rising from the chimney, and a child, chased by a woman, running out into the rain to meet the shining figure of a wrapped-up man coming through the gate, has been put quite out of temper. My Lady Dedlock says she has been "bored to death." Therefore my Lady Dedlock has come away from the place in Lincolnshire and has left it to the rain, and the crows, and the rabbits, and the deer, and the partridges and pheasants. The pictures of the Dedlocks past and gone have seemed to vanish into the damp walls in mere lowness of spirits, as the housekeeper has passed along the old rooms shutting up the shutters. And when they will next come forth again, the fashionable intelligence--which, like the fiend, is omniscient of the past and present, but not the future--cannot yet undertake to say. Sir Leicester Dedlock is only a baronet, but there is no mightier baronet than he. His family is as old as the hills, and infinitely more respectable. He has a general opinion that the world might get on without hills but would be done up without Dedlocks. He would on the whole admit nature to be a good idea (a little low, perhaps, when not enclosed with a park-fence), but an idea dependent for its execution on your great county families. He is a gentleman of strict conscience, disdainful of all littleness and meanness and ready on the shortest notice to die any death you may please to mention rather than give occasion for the least impeachment of his integrity. He is an honourable, obstinate, truthful, high-spirited, intensely prejudiced, perfectly unreasonable man. Sir Leicester is twenty years, full measure, older than my Lady. He will never see sixty-five again, nor perhaps sixty-six, nor yet sixty-seven. He has a twist of the gout now and then and walks a little stiffly. He is of a worthy presence, with his light-grey hair and whiskers, his fine shirt-frill, his pure-white waistcoat, and his blue coat with bright buttons always buttoned. He is ceremonious, stately, most polite on every occasion to my Lady, and holds her personal attractions in the highest estimation. His gallantry to my Lady, which has never changed since he courted her, is the one little touch of romantic fancy in him. Indeed, he married her for love. A whisper still goes about that she had not even family; howbeit, Sir Leicester had so much family that perhaps he had enough and could dispense with any more. But she had beauty, pride, ambition, insolent resolve, and sense enough to portion out a legion of fine ladies. Wealth and station, added to these, soon floated her upward, and for years now my Lady Dedlock has been at the centre of the fashionable intelligence and at the top of the fashionable tree. How Alexander wept when he had no more worlds to conquer, everybody knows--or has some reason to know by this time, the matter having been rather frequently mentioned. My Lady Dedlock, having conquered HER world, fell not into the melting, but rather into the freezing, mood. An exhausted composure, a worn-out placidity, an equanimity of fatigue not to be ruffled by interest or satisfaction, are the trophies of her victory. She is perfectly well-bred. If she could be translated to heaven to-morrow, she might be expected to ascend without any rapture. She has beauty still, and if it be not in its heyday, it is not yet in its autumn. She has a fine face--originally of a character that would be rather called very pretty than handsome, but improved into classicality by the acquired expression of her fashionable state. Her figure is elegant and has the effect of being tall. Not that she is so, but that "the most is made," as the Honourable Bob Stables has frequently asserted upon oath, "of all her points." The same authority observes that she is perfectly got up and remarks in commendation of her hair especially that she is the best-groomed woman in the whole stud. With all her perfections on her head, my Lady Dedlock has come up from her place in Lincolnshire (hotly pursued by the fashionable intelligence) to pass a few days at her house in town previous to her departure for Paris, where her ladyship intends to stay some weeks, after which her movements are uncertain. And at her house in town, upon this muddy, murky afternoon, presents himself an old-fashioned old gentleman, attorney-at-law and eke solicitor of the High Court of Chancery, who has the honour of acting as legal adviser of the Dedlocks and has as many cast-iron boxes in his office with that name outside as if the present baronet were the coin of the conjuror's trick and were constantly being juggled through the whole set. Across the hall, and up the stairs, and along the passages, and through the rooms, which are very brilliant in the season and very dismal out of it--fairy-land to visit, but a desert to live in--the old gentleman is conducted by a Mercury in powder to my Lady's presence. The old gentleman is rusty to look at, but is reputed to have made good thrift out of aristocratic marriage settlements and aristocratic wills, and to be very rich. He is surrounded by a mysterious halo of family confidences, of which he is known to be the silent depository. There are noble mausoleums rooted for centuries in retired glades of parks among the growing timber and the fern, which perhaps hold fewer noble secrets than walk abroad among men, shut up in the breast of Mr. Tulkinghorn. He is of what is called the old school--a phrase generally meaning any school that seems never to have been young--and wears knee-breeches tied with ribbons, and gaiters or stockings. One peculiarity of his black clothes and of his black stockings, be they silk or worsted, is that they never shine. Mute, close, irresponsive to any glancing light, his dress is like himself. He never converses when not professionally consulted. He is found sometimes, speechless but quite at home, at corners of dinner-tables in great country houses and near doors of drawing-rooms, concerning which the fashionable intelligence is eloquent, where everybody knows him and where half the Peerage stops to say "How do you do, Mr. Tulkinghorn?" He receives these salutations with gravity and buries them along with the rest of his knowledge. Sir Leicester Dedlock is with my Lady and is happy to see Mr. Tulkinghorn. There is an air of prescription about him which is always agreeable to Sir Leicester; he receives it as a kind of tribute. He likes Mr. Tulkinghorn's dress; there is a kind of tribute in that too. It is eminently respectable, and likewise, in a general way, retainer-like. It expresses, as it were, the steward of the legal mysteries, the butler of the legal cellar, of the Dedlocks. Has Mr. Tulkinghorn any idea of this himself? It may be so, or it may not, but there is this remarkable circumstance to be noted in everything associated with my Lady Dedlock as one of a class--as one of the leaders and representatives of her little world. She supposes herself to be an inscrutable Being, quite out of the reach and ken of ordinary mortals--seeing herself in her glass, where indeed she looks so. Yet every dim little star revolving about her, from her maid to the manager of the Italian Opera, knows her weaknesses, prejudices, follies, haughtinesses, and caprices and lives upon as accurate a calculation and as nice a measure of her moral nature as her dressmaker takes of her physical proportions. Is a new dress, a new custom, a new singer, a new dancer, a new form of jewellery, a new dwarf or giant, a new chapel, a new anything, to be set up? There are deferential people in a dozen callings whom my Lady Dedlock suspects of nothing but prostration before her, who can tell you how to manage her as if she were a baby, who do nothing but nurse her all their lives, who, humbly affecting to follow with profound subservience, lead her and her whole troop after them; who, in hooking one, hook all and bear them off as Lemuel Gulliver bore away the stately fleet of the majestic Lilliput. "If you want to address our people, sir," say Blaze and Sparkle, the jewellers--meaning by our people Lady Dedlock and the rest--"you must remember that you are not dealing with the general public; you must hit our people in their weakest place, and their weakest place is such a place." "To make this article go down, gentlemen," say Sheen and Gloss, the mercers, to their friends the manufacturers, "you must come to us, because we know where to have the fashionable people, and we can make it fashionable." "If you want to get this print upon the tables of my high connexion, sir," says Mr. Sladdery, the librarian, "or if you want to get this dwarf or giant into the houses of my high connexion, sir, or if you want to secure to this entertainment the patronage of my high connexion, sir, you must leave it, if you please, to me, for I have been accustomed to study the leaders of my high connexion, sir, and I may tell you without vanity that I can turn them round my finger"--in which Mr. Sladdery, who is an honest man, does not exaggerate at all. Therefore, while Mr. Tulkinghorn may not know what is passing in the Dedlock mind at present, it is very possible that he may. "My Lady's cause has been again before the Chancellor, has it, Mr. Tulkinghorn?" says Sir Leicester, giving him his hand. "Yes. It has been on again to-day," Mr. Tulkinghorn replies, making one of his quiet bows to my Lady, who is on a sofa near the fire, shading her face with a hand-screen. "It would be useless to ask," says my Lady with the dreariness of the place in Lincolnshire still upon her, "whether anything has been done." "Nothing that YOU would call anything has been done to-day," replies Mr. Tulkinghorn. "Nor ever will be," says my Lady. Sir Leicester has no objection to an interminable Chancery suit. It is a slow, expensive, British, constitutional kind of thing. To be sure, he has not a vital interest in the suit in question, her part in which was the only property my Lady brought him; and he has a shadowy impression that for his name--the name of Dedlock--to be in a cause, and not in the title of that cause, is a most ridiculous accident. But he regards the Court of Chancery, even if it should involve an occasional delay of justice and a trifling amount of confusion, as a something devised in conjunction with a variety of other somethings by the perfection of human wisdom for the eternal settlement (humanly speaking) of everything. And he is upon the whole of a fixed opinion that to give the sanction of his countenance to any complaints respecting it would be to encourage some person in the lower classes to rise up somewhere--like Wat Tyler. "As a few fresh affidavits have been put upon the file," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, "and as they are short, and as I proceed upon the troublesome principle of begging leave to possess my clients with any new proceedings in a cause"--cautious man Mr. Tulkinghorn, taking no more responsibility than necessary--"and further, as I see you are going to Paris, I have brought them in my pocket." (Sir Leicester was going to Paris too, by the by, but the delight of the fashionable intelligence was in his Lady.) Mr. Tulkinghorn takes out his papers, asks permission to place them on a golden talisman of a table at my Lady's elbow, puts on his spectacles, and begins to read by the light of a shaded lamp. "'In Chancery. Between John Jarndyce--'" My Lady interrupts, requesting him to miss as many of the formal horrors as he can. Mr. Tulkinghorn glances over his spectacles and begins again lower down. My Lady carelessly and scornfully abstracts her attention. Sir Leicester in a great chair looks at the file and appears to have a stately liking for the legal repetitions and prolixities as ranging among the national bulwarks. It happens that the fire is hot where my Lady sits and that the hand-screen is more beautiful than useful, being priceless but small. My Lady, changing her position, sees the papers on the table--looks at them nearer--looks at them nearer still--asks impulsively, "Who copied that?" Mr. Tulkinghorn stops short, surprised by my Lady's animation and her unusual tone. "Is it what you people call law-hand?" she asks, looking full at him in her careless way again and toying with her screen. "Not quite. Probably"--Mr. Tulkinghorn examines it as he speaks--"the legal character which it has was acquired after the original hand was formed. Why do you ask?" "Anything to vary this detestable monotony. Oh, go on, do!" Mr. Tulkinghorn reads again. The heat is greater; my Lady screens her face. Sir Leicester dozes, starts up suddenly, and cries, "Eh? What do you say?" "I say I am afraid," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, who had risen hastily, "that Lady Dedlock is ill." "Faint," my Lady murmurs with white lips, "only that; but it is like the faintness of death. Don't speak to me. Ring, and take me to my room!" Mr. Tulkinghorn retires into another chamber; bells ring, feet shuffle and patter, silence ensues. Mercury at last begs Mr. Tulkinghorn to return. "Better now," quoth Sir Leicester, motioning the lawyer to sit down and read to him alone. "I have been quite alarmed. I never knew my Lady swoon before. But the weather is extremely trying, and she really has been bored to death down at our place in Lincolnshire." CHAPTER III A Progress I have a great deal of difficulty in beginning to write my portion of these pages, for I know I am not clever. I always knew that. I can remember, when I was a very little girl indeed, I used to say to my doll when we were alone together, "Now, Dolly, I am not clever, you know very well, and you must be patient with me, like a dear!" And so she used to sit propped up in a great arm-chair, with her beautiful complexion and rosy lips, staring at me--or not so much at me, I think, as at nothing--while I busily stitched away and told her every one of my secrets. My dear old doll! I was such a shy little thing that I seldom dared to open my lips, and never dared to open my heart, to anybody else. It almost makes me cry to think what a relief it used to be to me when I came home from school of a day to run upstairs to my room and say, "Oh, you dear faithful Dolly, I knew you would be expecting me!" and then to sit down on the floor, leaning on the elbow of her great chair, and tell her all I had noticed since we parted. I had always rather a noticing way--not a quick way, oh, no!--a silent way of noticing what passed before me and thinking I should like to understand it better. I have not by any means a quick understanding. When I love a person very tenderly indeed, it seems to brighten. But even that may be my vanity. I was brought up, from my earliest remembrance--like some of the princesses in the fairy stories, only I was not charming--by my godmother. At least, I only knew her as such. She was a good, good woman! She went to church three times every Sunday, and to morning prayers on Wednesdays and Fridays, and to lectures whenever there were lectures; and never missed. She was handsome; and if she had ever smiled, would have been (I used to think) like an angel--but she never smiled. She was always grave and strict. She was so very good herself, I thought, that the badness of other people made her frown all her life. I felt so different from her, even making every allowance for the differences between a child and a woman; I felt so poor, so trifling, and so far off that I never could be unrestrained with her--no, could never even love her as I wished. It made me very sorry to consider how good she was and how unworthy of her I was, and I used ardently to hope that I might have a better heart; and I talked it over very often with the dear old doll, but I never loved my godmother as I ought to have loved her and as I felt I must have loved her if I had been a better girl. This made me, I dare say, more timid and retiring than I naturally was and cast me upon Dolly as the only friend with whom I felt at ease. But something happened when I was still quite a little thing that helped it very much. I had never heard my mama spoken of. I had never heard of my papa either, but I felt more interested about my mama. I had never worn a black frock, that I could recollect. I had never been shown my mama's grave. I had never been told where it was. Yet I had never been taught to pray for any relation but my godmother. I had more than once approached this subject of my thoughts with Mrs. Rachael, our only servant, who took my light away when I was in bed (another very good woman, but austere to me), and she had only said, "Esther, good night!" and gone away and left me. Although there were seven girls at the neighbouring school where I was a day boarder, and although they called me little Esther Summerson, I knew none of them at home. All of them were older than I, to be sure (I was the youngest there by a good deal), but there seemed to be some other separation between us besides that, and besides their being far more clever than I was and knowing much more than I did. One of them in the first week of my going to the school (I remember it very well) invited me home to a little party, to my great joy. But my godmother wrote a stiff letter declining for me, and I never went. I never went out at all. It was my birthday. There were holidays at school on other birthdays--none on mine. There were rejoicings at home on other birthdays, as I knew from what I heard the girls relate to one another--there were none on mine. My birthday was the most melancholy day at home in the whole year. I have mentioned that unless my vanity should deceive me (as I know it may, for I may be very vain without suspecting it, though indeed I don't), my comprehension is quickened when my affection is. My disposition is very affectionate, and perhaps I might still feel such a wound if such a wound could be received more than once with the quickness of that birthday. Dinner was over, and my godmother and I were sitting at the table before the fire. The clock ticked, the fire clicked; not another sound had been heard in the room or in the house for I don't know how long. I happened to look timidly up from my stitching, across the table at my godmother, and I saw in her face, looking gloomily at me, "It would have been far better, little Esther, that you had had no birthday, that you had never been born!" I broke out crying and sobbing, and I said, "Oh, dear godmother, tell me, pray do tell me, did Mama die on my birthday?" "No," she returned. "Ask me no more, child!" "Oh, do pray tell me something of her. Do now, at last, dear godmother, if you please! What did I do to her? How did I lose her? Why am I so different from other children, and why is it my fault, dear godmother? No, no, no, don't go away. Oh, speak to me!" I was in a kind of fright beyond my grief, and I caught hold of her dress and was kneeling to her. She had been saying all the while, "Let me go!" But now she stood still. Her darkened face had such power over me that it stopped me in the midst of my vehemence. I put up my trembling little hand to clasp hers or to beg her pardon with what earnestness I might, but withdrew it as she looked at me, and laid it on my fluttering heart. She raised me, sat in her chair, and standing me before her, said slowly in a cold, low voice--I see her knitted brow and pointed finger--"Your mother, Esther, is your disgrace, and you were hers. The time will come--and soon enough--when you will understand this better and will feel it too, as no one save a woman can. I have forgiven her"--but her face did not relent--"the wrong she did to me, and I say no more of it, though it was greater than you will ever know--than any one will ever know but I, the sufferer. For yourself, unfortunate girl, orphaned and degraded from the first of these evil anniversaries, pray daily that the sins of others be not visited upon your head, according to what is written. Forget your mother and leave all other people to forget her who will do her unhappy child that greatest kindness. Now, go!" She checked me, however, as I was about to depart from her--so frozen as I was!--and added this, "Submission, self-denial, diligent work, are the preparations for a life begun with such a shadow on it. You are different from other children, Esther, because you were not born, like them, in common sinfulness and wrath. You are set apart." I went up to my room, and crept to bed, and laid my doll's cheek against mine wet with tears, and holding that solitary friend upon my bosom, cried myself to sleep. Imperfect as my understanding of my sorrow was, I knew that I had brought no joy at any time to anybody's heart and that I was to no one upon earth what Dolly was to me. Dear, dear, to think how much time we passed alone together afterwards, and how often I repeated to the doll the story of my birthday and confided to her that I would try as hard as ever I could to repair the fault I had been born with (of which I confessedly felt guilty and yet innocent) and would strive as I grew up to be industrious, contented, and kind-hearted and to do some good to some one, and win some love to myself if I could. I hope it is not self-indulgent to shed these tears as I think of it. I am very thankful, I am very cheerful, but I cannot quite help their coming to my eyes. There! I have wiped them away now and can go on again properly. I felt the distance between my godmother and myself so much more after the birthday, and felt so sensible of filling a place in her house which ought to have been empty, that I found her more difficult of approach, though I was fervently grateful to her in my heart, than ever. I felt in the same way towards my school companions; I felt in the same way towards Mrs. Rachael, who was a widow; and oh, towards her daughter, of whom she was proud, who came to see her once a fortnight! I was very retired and quiet, and tried to be very diligent. One sunny afternoon when I had come home from school with my books and portfolio, watching my long shadow at my side, and as I was gliding upstairs to my room as usual, my godmother looked out of the parlour-door and called me back. Sitting with her, I found--which was very unusual indeed--a stranger. A portly, important-looking gentleman, dressed all in black, with a white cravat, large gold watch seals, a pair of gold eye-glasses, and a large seal-ring upon his little finger. "This," said my godmother in an undertone, "is the child." Then she said in her naturally stern way of speaking, "This is Esther, sir." The gentleman put up his eye-glasses to look at me and said, "Come here, my dear!" He shook hands with me and asked me to take off my bonnet, looking at me all the while. When I had complied, he said, "Ah!" and afterwards "Yes!" And then, taking off his eye-glasses and folding them in a red case, and leaning back in his arm-chair, turning the case about in his two hands, he gave my godmother a nod. Upon that, my godmother said, "You may go upstairs, Esther!" And I made him my curtsy and left him. It must have been two years afterwards, and I was almost fourteen, when one dreadful night my godmother and I sat at the fireside. I was reading aloud, and she was listening. I had come down at nine o'clock as I always did to read the Bible to her, and was reading from St. John how our Saviour stooped down, writing with his finger in the dust, when they brought the sinful woman to him. "So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself and said unto them, 'He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her!'" I was stopped by my godmother's rising, putting her hand to her head, and crying out in an awful voice from quite another part of the book, "'Watch ye, therefore, lest coming suddenly he find you sleeping. And what I say unto you, I say unto all, Watch!'" In an instant, while she stood before me repeating these words, she fell down on the floor. I had no need to cry out; her voice had sounded through the house and been heard in the street. She was laid upon her bed. For more than a week she lay there, little altered outwardly, with her old handsome resolute frown that I so well knew carved upon her face. Many and many a time, in the day and in the night, with my head upon the pillow by her that my whispers might be plainer to her, I kissed her, thanked her, prayed for her, asked her for her blessing and forgiveness, entreated her to give me the least sign that she knew or heard me. No, no, no. Her face was immovable. To the very last, and even afterwards, her frown remained unsoftened. On the day after my poor good godmother was buried, the gentleman in black with the white neckcloth reappeared. I was sent for by Mrs. Rachael, and found him in the same place, as if he had never gone away. "My name is Kenge," he said; "you may remember it, my child; Kenge and Carboy, Lincoln's Inn." I replied that I remembered to have seen him once before. "Pray be seated--here near me. Don't distress yourself; it's of no use. Mrs. Rachael, I needn't inform you who were acquainted with the late Miss Barbary's affairs, that her means die with her and that this young lady, now her aunt is dead--" "My aunt, sir!" "It is really of no use carrying on a deception when no object is to be gained by it," said Mr. Kenge smoothly, "Aunt in fact, though not in law. Don't distress yourself! Don't weep! Don't tremble! Mrs. Rachael, our young friend has no doubt heard of--the--a--Jarndyce and Jarndyce." "Never," said Mrs. Rachael. "Is it possible," pursued Mr. Kenge, putting up his eye-glasses, "that our young friend--I BEG you won't distress yourself!--never heard of Jarndyce and Jarndyce!" I shook my head, wondering even what it was. "Not of Jarndyce and Jarndyce?" said Mr. Kenge, looking over his glasses at me and softly turning the case about and about as if he were petting something. "Not of one of the greatest Chancery suits known? Not of Jarndyce and Jarndyce--the--a--in itself a monument of Chancery practice. In which (I would say) every difficulty, every contingency, every masterly fiction, every form of procedure known in that court, is represented over and over again? It is a cause that could not exist out of this free and great country. I should say that the aggregate of costs in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Mrs. Rachael"--I was afraid he addressed himself to her because I appeared inattentive"--amounts at the present hour to from SIX-ty to SEVEN-ty THOUSAND POUNDS!" said Mr. Kenge, leaning back in his chair. I felt very ignorant, but what could I do? I was so entirely unacquainted with the subject that I understood nothing about it even then. "And she really never heard of the cause!" said Mr. Kenge. "Surprising!" "Miss Barbary, sir," returned Mrs. Rachael, "who is now among the Seraphim--" "I hope so, I am sure," said Mr. Kenge politely. "--Wished Esther only to know what would be serviceable to her. And she knows, from any teaching she has had here, nothing more." "Well!" said Mr. Kenge. "Upon the whole, very proper. Now to the point," addressing me. "Miss Barbary, your sole relation (in fact that is, for I am bound to observe that in law you had none) being deceased and it naturally not being to be expected that Mrs. Rachael--" "Oh, dear no!" said Mrs. Rachael quickly. "Quite so," assented Mr. Kenge; "--that Mrs. Rachael should charge herself with your maintenance and support (I beg you won't distress yourself), you are in a position to receive the renewal of an offer which I was instructed to make to Miss Barbary some two years ago and which, though rejected then, was understood to be renewable under the lamentable circumstances that have since occurred. Now, if I avow that I represent, in Jarndyce and Jarndyce and otherwise, a highly humane, but at the same time singular, man, shall I compromise myself by any stretch of my professional caution?" said Mr. Kenge, leaning back in his chair again and looking calmly at us both. He appeared to enjoy beyond everything the sound of his own voice. I couldn't wonder at that, for it was mellow and full and gave great importance to every word he uttered. He listened to himself with obvious satisfaction and sometimes gently beat time to his own music with his head or rounded a sentence with his hand. I was very much impressed by him--even then, before I knew that he formed himself on the model of a great lord who was his client and that he was generally called Conversation Kenge. "Mr. Jarndyce," he pursued, "being aware of the--I would say, desolate--position of our young friend, offers to place her at a first-rate establishment where her education shall be completed, where her comfort shall be secured, where her reasonable wants shall be anticipated, where she shall be eminently qualified to discharge her duty in that station of life unto which it has pleased--shall I say Providence?--to call her." My heart was filled so full, both by what he said and by his affecting manner of saying it, that I was not able to speak, though I tried. "Mr. Jarndyce," he went on, "makes no condition beyond expressing his expectation that our young friend will not at any time remove herself from the establishment in question without his knowledge and concurrence. That she will faithfully apply herself to the acquisition of those accomplishments, upon the exercise of which she will be ultimately dependent. That she will tread in the paths of virtue and honour, and--the--a--so forth." I was still less able to speak than before. "Now, what does our young friend say?" proceeded Mr. Kenge. "Take time, take time! I pause for her reply. But take time!" What the destitute subject of such an offer tried to say, I need not repeat. What she did say, I could more easily tell, if it were worth the telling. What she felt, and will feel to her dying hour, I could never relate. This interview took place at Windsor, where I had passed (as far as I knew) my whole life. On that day week, amply provided with all necessaries, I left it, inside the stagecoach, for Reading. Mrs. Rachael was too good to feel any emotion at parting, but I was not so good, and wept bitterly. I thought that I ought to have known her better after so many years and ought to have made myself enough of a favourite with her to make her sorry then. When she gave me one cold parting kiss upon my forehead, like a thaw-drop from the stone porch--it was a very frosty day--I felt so miserable and self-reproachful that I clung to her and told her it was my fault, I knew, that she could say good-bye so easily! "No, Esther!" she returned. "It is your misfortune!" The coach was at the little lawn-gate--we had not come out until we heard the wheels--and thus I left her, with a sorrowful heart. She went in before my boxes were lifted to the coach-roof and shut the door. As long as I could see the house, I looked back at it from the window through my tears. My godmother had left Mrs. Rachael all the little property she possessed; and there was to be a sale; and an old hearth-rug with roses on it, which always seemed to me the first thing in the world I had ever seen, was hanging outside in the frost and snow. A day or two before, I had wrapped the dear old doll in her own shawl and quietly laid her--I am half ashamed to tell it--in the garden-earth under the tree that shaded my old window. I had no companion left but my bird, and him I carried with me in his cage. When the house was out of sight, I sat, with my bird-cage in the straw at my feet, forward on the low seat to look out of the high window, watching the frosty trees, that were like beautiful pieces of spar, and the fields all smooth and white with last night's snow, and the sun, so red but yielding so little heat, and the ice, dark like metal where the skaters and sliders had brushed the snow away. There was a gentleman in the coach who sat on the opposite seat and looked very large in a quantity of wrappings, but he sat gazing out of the other window and took no notice of me. I thought of my dead godmother, of the night when I read to her, of her frowning so fixedly and sternly in her bed, of the strange place I was going to, of the people I should find there, and what they would be like, and what they would say to me, when a voice in the coach gave me a terrible start. It said, "What the de-vil are you crying for?" I was so frightened that I lost my voice and could only answer in a whisper, "Me, sir?" For of course I knew it must have been the gentleman in the quantity of wrappings, though he was still looking out of his window. "Yes, you," he said, turning round. "I didn't know I was crying, sir," I faltered. "But you are!" said the gentleman. "Look here!" He came quite opposite to me from the other corner of the coach, brushed one of his large furry cuffs across my eyes (but without hurting me), and showed me that it was wet. "There! Now you know you are," he said. "Don't you?" "Yes, sir," I said. "And what are you crying for?" said the gentleman, "Don't you want to go there?" "Where, sir?" "Where? Why, wherever you are going," said the gentleman. "I am very glad to go there, sir," I answered. "Well, then! Look glad!" said the gentleman. I thought he was very strange, or at least that what I could see of him was very strange, for he was wrapped up to the chin, and his face was almost hidden in a fur cap with broad fur straps at the side of his head fastened under his chin; but I was composed again, and not afraid of him. So I told him that I thought I must have been crying because of my godmother's death and because of Mrs. Rachael's not being sorry to part with me. "Confound Mrs. Rachael!" said the gentleman. "Let her fly away in a high wind on a broomstick!" I began to be really afraid of him now and looked at him with the greatest astonishment. But I thought that he had pleasant eyes, although he kept on muttering to himself in an angry manner and calling Mrs. Rachael names. After a little while he opened his outer wrapper, which appeared to me large enough to wrap up the whole coach, and put his arm down into a deep pocket in the side. "Now, look here!" he said. "In this paper," which was nicely folded, "is a piece of the best plum-cake that can be got for money--sugar on the outside an inch thick, like fat on mutton chops. Here's a little pie (a gem this is, both for size and quality), made in France. And what do you suppose it's made of? Livers of fat geese. There's a pie! Now let's see you eat 'em." "Thank you, sir," I replied; "thank you very much indeed, but I hope you won't be offended--they are too rich for me." "Floored again!" said the gentleman, which I didn't at all understand, and threw them both out of window. He did not speak to me any more until he got out of the coach a little way short of Reading, when he advised me to be a good girl and to be studious, and shook hands with me. I must say I was relieved by his departure. We left him at a milestone. I often walked past it afterwards, and never for a long time without thinking of him and half expecting to meet him. But I never did; and so, as time went on, he passed out of my mind. When the coach stopped, a very neat lady looked up at the window and said, "Miss Donny." "No, ma'am, Esther Summerson." "That is quite right," said the lady, "Miss Donny." I now understood that she introduced herself by that name, and begged Miss Donny's pardon for my mistake, and pointed out my boxes at her request. Under the direction of a very neat maid, they were put outside a very small green carriage; and then Miss Donny, the maid, and I got inside and were driven away. "Everything is ready for you, Esther," said Miss Donny, "and the scheme of your pursuits has been arranged in exact accordance with the wishes of your guardian, Mr. Jarndyce." "Of--did you say, ma'am?" "Of your guardian, Mr. Jarndyce," said Miss Donny. I was so bewildered that Miss Donny thought the cold had been too severe for me and lent me her smelling-bottle. "Do you know my--guardian, Mr. Jarndyce, ma'am?" I asked after a good deal of hesitation. "Not personally, Esther," said Miss Donny; "merely through his solicitors, Messrs. Kenge and Carboy, of London. A very superior gentleman, Mr. Kenge. Truly eloquent indeed. Some of his periods quite majestic!" I felt this to be very true but was too confused to attend to it. Our speedy arrival at our destination, before I had time to recover myself, increased my confusion, and I never shall forget the uncertain and the unreal air of everything at Greenleaf (Miss Donny's house) that afternoon! But I soon became used to it. I was so adapted to the routine of Greenleaf before long that I seemed to have been there a great while and almost to have dreamed rather than really lived my old life at my godmother's. Nothing could be more precise, exact, and orderly than Greenleaf. There was a time for everything all round the dial of the clock, and everything was done at its appointed moment. We were twelve boarders, and there were two Miss Donnys, twins. It was understood that I would have to depend, by and by, on my qualifications as a governess, and I was not only instructed in everything that was taught at Greenleaf, but was very soon engaged in helping to instruct others. Although I was treated in every other respect like the rest of the school, this single difference was made in my case from the first. As I began to know more, I taught more, and so in course of time I had plenty to do, which I was very fond of doing because it made the dear girls fond of me. At last, whenever a new pupil came who was a little downcast and unhappy, she was so sure--indeed I don't know why--to make a friend of me that all new-comers were confided to my care. They said I was so gentle, but I am sure THEY were! I often thought of the resolution I had made on my birthday to try to be industrious, contented, and true-hearted and to do some good to some one and win some love if I could; and indeed, indeed, I felt almost ashamed to have done so little and have won so much. I passed at Greenleaf six happy, quiet years. I never saw in any face there, thank heaven, on my birthday, that it would have been better if I had never been born. When the day came round, it brought me so many tokens of affectionate remembrance that my room was beautiful with them from New Year's Day to Christmas. In those six years I had never been away except on visits at holiday time in the neighbourhood. After the first six months or so I had taken Miss Donny's advice in reference to the propriety of writing to Mr. Kenge to say that I was happy and grateful, and with her approval I had written such a letter. I had received a formal answer acknowledging its receipt and saying, "We note the contents thereof, which shall be duly communicated to our client." After that I sometimes heard Miss Donny and her sister mention how regular my accounts were paid, and about twice a year I ventured to write a similar letter. I always received by return of post exactly the same answer in the same round hand, with the signature of Kenge and Carboy in another writing, which I supposed to be Mr. Kenge's. It seems so curious to me to be obliged to write all this about myself! As if this narrative were the narrative of MY life! But my little body will soon fall into the background now. Six quiet years (I find I am saying it for the second time) I had passed at Greenleaf, seeing in those around me, as it might be in a looking-glass, every stage of my own growth and change there, when, one November morning, I received this letter. I omit the date. Old Square, Lincoln's Inn Madam, Jarndyce and Jarndyce Our clt Mr. Jarndyce being abt to rece into his house, under an Order of the Ct of Chy, a Ward of the Ct in this cause, for whom he wishes to secure an elgble compn, directs us to inform you that he will be glad of your serces in the afsd capacity. We have arrngd for your being forded, carriage free, pr eight o'clock coach from Reading, on Monday morning next, to White Horse Cellar, Piccadilly, London, where one of our clks will be in waiting to convey you to our offe as above. We are, Madam, Your obedt Servts, Kenge and Carboy Miss Esther Summerson Oh, never, never, never shall I forget the emotion this letter caused in the house! It was so tender in them to care so much for me, it was so gracious in that father who had not forgotten me to have made my orphan way so smooth and easy and to have inclined so many youthful natures towards me, that I could hardly bear it. Not that I would have had them less sorry--I am afraid not; but the pleasure of it, and the pain of it, and the pride and joy of it, and the humble regret of it were so blended that my heart seemed almost breaking while it was full of rapture. The letter gave me only five days' notice of my removal. When every minute added to the proofs of love and kindness that were given me in those five days, and when at last the morning came and when they took me through all the rooms that I might see them for the last time, and when some cried, "Esther, dear, say good-bye to me here at my bedside, where you first spoke so kindly to me!" and when others asked me only to write their names, "With Esther's love," and when they all surrounded me with their parting presents and clung to me weeping and cried, "What shall we do when dear, dear Esther's gone!" and when I tried to tell them how forbearing and how good they had all been to me and how I blessed and thanked them every one, what a heart I had! And when the two Miss Donnys grieved as much to part with me as the least among them, and when the maids said, "Bless you, miss, wherever you go!" and when the ugly lame old gardener, who I thought had hardly noticed me in all those years, came panting after the coach to give me a little nosegay of geraniums and told me I had been the light of his eyes--indeed the old man said so!--what a heart I had then! And could I help it if with all this, and the coming to the little school, and the unexpected sight of the poor children outside waving their hats and bonnets to me, and of a grey-haired gentleman and lady whose daughter I had helped to teach and at whose house I had visited (who were said to be the proudest people in all that country), caring for nothing but calling out, "Good-bye, Esther. May you be very happy!"--could I help it if I was quite bowed down in the coach by myself and said "Oh, I am so thankful, I am so thankful!" many times over! But of course I soon considered that I must not take tears where I was going after all that had been done for me. Therefore, of course, I made myself sob less and persuaded myself to be quiet by saying very often, "Esther, now you really must! This WILL NOT do!" I cheered myself up pretty well at last, though I am afraid I was longer about it than I ought to have been; and when I had cooled my eyes with lavender water, it was time to watch for London. I was quite persuaded that we were there when we were ten miles off, and when we really were there, that we should never get there. However, when we began to jolt upon a stone pavement, and particularly when every other conveyance seemed to be running into us, and we seemed to be running into every other conveyance, I began to believe that we really were approaching the end of our journey. Very soon afterwards we stopped. A young gentleman who had inked himself by accident addressed me from the pavement and said, "I am from Kenge and Carboy's, miss, of Lincoln's Inn." "If you please, sir," said I. He was very obliging, and as he handed me into a fly after superintending the removal of my boxes, I asked him whether there was a great fire anywhere? For the streets were so full of dense brown smoke that scarcely anything was to be seen. "Oh, dear no, miss," he said. "This is a London particular." I had never heard of such a thing. "A fog, miss," said the young gentleman. "Oh, indeed!" said I. We drove slowly through the dirtiest and darkest streets that ever were seen in the world (I thought) and in such a distracting state of confusion that I wondered how the people kept their senses, until we passed into sudden quietude under an old gateway and drove on through a silent square until we came to an odd nook in a corner, where there was an entrance up a steep, broad flight of stairs, like an entrance to a church. And there really was a churchyard outside under some cloisters, for I saw the gravestones from the staircase window. This was Kenge and Carboy's. The young gentleman showed me through an outer office into Mr. Kenge's room--there was no one in it--and politely put an arm-chair for me by the fire. He then called my attention to a little looking-glass hanging from a nail on one side of the chimney-piece. "In case you should wish to look at yourself, miss, after the journey, as you're going before the Chancellor. Not that it's requisite, I am sure," said the young gentleman civilly. "Going before the Chancellor?" I said, startled for a moment. "Only a matter of form, miss," returned the young gentleman. "Mr. Kenge is in court now. He left his compliments, and would you partake of some refreshment"--there were biscuits and a decanter of wine on a small table--"and look over the paper," which the young gentleman gave me as he spoke. He then stirred the fire and left me. Everything was so strange--the stranger from its being night in the day-time, the candles burning with a white flame, and looking raw and cold--that I read the words in the newspaper without knowing what they meant and found myself reading the same words repeatedly. As it was of no use going on in that way, I put the paper down, took a peep at my bonnet in the glass to see if it was neat, and looked at the room, which was not half lighted, and at the shabby, dusty tables, and at the piles of writings, and at a bookcase full of the most inexpressive-looking books that ever had anything to say for themselves. Then I went on, thinking, thinking, thinking; and the fire went on, burning, burning, burning; and the candles went on flickering and guttering, and there were no snuffers--until the young gentleman by and by brought a very dirty pair--for two hours. At last Mr. Kenge came. HE was not altered, but he was surprised to see how altered I was and appeared quite pleased. "As you are going to be the companion of the young lady who is now in the Chancellor's private room, Miss Summerson," he said, "we thought it well that you should be in attendance also. You will not be discomposed by the Lord Chancellor, I dare say?" "No, sir," I said, "I don't think I shall," really not seeing on consideration why I should be. So Mr. Kenge gave me his arm and we went round the corner, under a colonnade, and in at a side door. And so we came, along a passage, into a comfortable sort of room where a young lady and a young gentleman were standing near a great, loud-roaring fire. A screen was interposed between them and it, and they were leaning on the screen, talking. They both looked up when I came in, and I saw in the young lady, with the fire shining upon her, such a beautiful girl! With such rich golden hair, such soft blue eyes, and such a bright, innocent, trusting face! "Miss Ada," said Mr. Kenge, "this is Miss Summerson." She came to meet me with a smile of welcome and her hand extended, but seemed to change her mind in a moment and kissed me. In short, she had such a natural, captivating, winning manner that in a few minutes we were sitting in the window-seat, with the light of the fire upon us, talking together as free and happy as could be. What a load off my mind! It was so delightful to know that she could confide in me and like me! It was so good of her, and so encouraging to me! The young gentleman was her distant cousin, she told me, and his name Richard Carstone. He was a handsome youth with an ingenuous face and a most engaging laugh; and after she had called him up to where we sat, he stood by us, in the light of the fire, talking gaily, like a light-hearted boy. He was very young, not more than nineteen then, if quite so much, but nearly two years older than she was. They were both orphans and (what was very unexpected and curious to me) had never met before that day. Our all three coming together for the first time in such an unusual place was a thing to talk about, and we talked about it; and the fire, which had left off roaring, winked its red eyes at us--as Richard said--like a drowsy old Chancery lion. We conversed in a low tone because a full-dressed gentleman in a bag wig frequently came in and out, and when he did so, we could hear a drawling sound in the distance, which he said was one of the counsel in our case addressing the Lord Chancellor. He told Mr. Kenge that the Chancellor would be up in five minutes; and presently we heard a bustle and a tread of feet, and Mr. Kenge said that the Court had risen and his lordship was in the next room. The gentleman in the bag wig opened the door almost directly and requested Mr. Kenge to come in. Upon that, we all went into the next room, Mr. Kenge first, with my darling--it is so natural to me now that I can't help writing it; and there, plainly dressed in black and sitting in an arm-chair at a table near the fire, was his lordship, whose robe, trimmed with beautiful gold lace, was thrown upon another chair. He gave us a searching look as we entered, but his manner was both courtly and kind. The gentleman in the bag wig laid bundles of papers on his lordship's table, and his lordship silently selected one and turned over the leaves. "Miss Clare," said the Lord Chancellor. "Miss Ada Clare?" Mr. Kenge presented her, and his lordship begged her to sit down near him. That he admired her and was interested by her even I could see in a moment. It touched me that the home of such a beautiful young creature should be represented by that dry, official place. The Lord High Chancellor, at his best, appeared so poor a substitute for the love and pride of parents. "The Jarndyce in question," said the Lord Chancellor, still turning over leaves, "is Jarndyce of Bleak House." "Jarndyce of Bleak House, my lord," said Mr. Kenge. "A dreary name," said the Lord Chancellor. "But not a dreary place at present, my lord," said Mr. Kenge. "And Bleak House," said his lordship, "is in--" "Hertfordshire, my lord." "Mr. Jarndyce of Bleak House is not married?" said his lordship. "He is not, my lord," said Mr. Kenge. A pause. "Young Mr. Richard Carstone is present?" said the Lord Chancellor, glancing towards him. Richard bowed and stepped forward. "Hum!" said the Lord Chancellor, turning over more leaves. "Mr. Jarndyce of Bleak House, my lord," Mr. Kenge observed in a low voice, "if I may venture to remind your lordship, provides a suitable companion for--" "For Mr. Richard Carstone?" I thought (but I am not quite sure) I heard his lordship say in an equally low voice and with a smile. "For Miss Ada Clare. This is the young lady. Miss Summerson." His lordship gave me an indulgent look and acknowledged my curtsy very graciously. "Miss Summerson is not related to any party in the cause, I think?" "No, my lord." Mr. Kenge leant over before it was quite said and whispered. His lordship, with his eyes upon his papers, listened, nodded twice or thrice, turned over more leaves, and did not look towards me again until we were going away. Mr. Kenge now retired, and Richard with him, to where I was, near the door, leaving my pet (it is so natural to me that again I can't help it!) sitting near the Lord Chancellor, with whom his lordship spoke a little part, asking her, as she told me afterwards, whether she had well reflected on the proposed arrangement, and if she thought she would be happy under the roof of Mr. Jarndyce of Bleak House, and why she thought so? Presently he rose courteously and released her, and then he spoke for a minute or two with Richard Carstone, not seated, but standing, and altogether with more ease and less ceremony, as if he still knew, though he WAS Lord Chancellor, how to go straight to the candour of a boy. "Very well!" said his lordship aloud. "I shall make the order. Mr. Jarndyce of Bleak House has chosen, so far as I may judge," and this was when he looked at me, "a very good companion for the young lady, and the arrangement altogether seems the best of which the circumstances admit." He dismissed us pleasantly, and we all went out, very much obliged to him for being so affable and polite, by which he had certainly lost no dignity but seemed to us to have gained some. When we got under the colonnade, Mr. Kenge remembered that he must go back for a moment to ask a question and left us in the fog, with the Lord Chancellor's carriage and servants waiting for him to come out. "Well!" said Richard Carstone. "THAT'S over! And where do we go next, Miss Summerson?" "Don't you know?" I said. "Not in the least," said he. "And don't YOU know, my love?" I asked Ada. "No!" said she. "Don't you?" "Not at all!" said I. We looked at one another, half laughing at our being like the children in the wood, when a curious little old woman in a squeezed bonnet and carrying a reticule came curtsying and smiling up to us with an air of great ceremony. "Oh!" said she. "The wards in Jarndyce! Ve-ry happy, I am sure, to have the honour! It is a good omen for youth, and hope, and beauty when they find themselves in this place, and don't know what's to come of it." "Mad!" whispered Richard, not thinking she could hear him. "Right! Mad, young gentleman," she returned so quickly that he was quite abashed. "I was a ward myself. I was not mad at that time," curtsying low and smiling between every little sentence. "I had youth and hope. I believe, beauty. It matters very little now. Neither of the three served or saved me. I have the honour to attend court regularly. With my documents. I expect a judgment. Shortly. On the Day of Judgment. I have discovered that the sixth seal mentioned in the Revelations is the Great Seal. It has been open a long time! Pray accept my blessing." As Ada was a little frightened, I said, to humour the poor old lady, that we were much obliged to her. "Ye-es!" she said mincingly. "I imagine so. And here is Conversation Kenge. With HIS documents! How does your honourable worship do?" "Quite well, quite well! Now don't be troublesome, that's a good soul!" said Mr. Kenge, leading the way back. "By no means," said the poor old lady, keeping up with Ada and me. "Anything but troublesome. I shall confer estates on both--which is not being troublesome, I trust? I expect a judgment. Shortly. On the Day of Judgment. This is a good omen for you. Accept my blessing!" She stopped at the bottom of the steep, broad flight of stairs; but we looked back as we went up, and she was still there, saying, still with a curtsy and a smile between every little sentence, "Youth. And hope. And beauty. And Chancery. And Conversation Kenge! Ha! Pray accept my blessing!" CHAPTER IV Telescopic Philanthropy We were to pass the night, Mr. Kenge told us when we arrived in his room, at Mrs. Jellyby's; and then he turned to me and said he took it for granted I knew who Mrs. Jellyby was. "I really don't, sir," I returned. "Perhaps Mr. Carstone--or Miss Clare--" But no, they knew nothing whatever about Mrs. Jellyby. "In-deed! Mrs. Jellyby," said Mr. Kenge, standing with his back to the fire and casting his eyes over the dusty hearth-rug as if it were Mrs. Jellyby's biography, "is a lady of very remarkable strength of character who devotes herself entirely to the public. She has devoted herself to an extensive variety of public subjects at various times and is at present (until something else attracts her) devoted to the subject of Africa, with a view to the general cultivation of the coffee berry--AND the natives--and the happy settlement, on the banks of the African rivers, of our superabundant home population. Mr. Jarndyce, who is desirous to aid any work that is considered likely to be a good work and who is much sought after by philanthropists, has, I believe, a very high opinion of Mrs. Jellyby." Mr. Kenge, adjusting his cravat, then looked at us. "And Mr. Jellyby, sir?" suggested Richard. "Ah! Mr. Jellyby," said Mr. Kenge, "is--a--I don't know that I can describe him to you better than by saying that he is the husband of Mrs. Jellyby." "A nonentity, sir?" said Richard with a droll look. "I don't say that," returned Mr. Kenge gravely. "I can't say that, indeed, for I know nothing whatever OF Mr. Jellyby. I never, to my knowledge, had the pleasure of seeing Mr. Jellyby. He may be a very superior man, but he is, so to speak, merged--merged--in the more shining qualities of his wife." Mr. Kenge proceeded to tell us that as the road to Bleak House would have been very long, dark, and tedious on such an evening, and as we had been travelling already, Mr. Jarndyce had himself proposed this arrangement. A carriage would be at Mrs. Jellyby's to convey us out of town early in the forenoon of to-morrow. He then rang a little bell, and the young gentleman came in. Addressing him by the name of Guppy, Mr. Kenge inquired whether Miss Summerson's boxes and the rest of the baggage had been "sent round." Mr. Guppy said yes, they had been sent round, and a coach was waiting to take us round too as soon as we pleased. "Then it only remains," said Mr. Kenge, shaking hands with us, "for me to express my lively satisfaction in (good day, Miss Clare!) the arrangement this day concluded and my (GOOD-bye to you, Miss Summerson!) lively hope that it will conduce to the happiness, the (glad to have had the honour of making your acquaintance, Mr. Carstone!) welfare, the advantage in all points of view, of all concerned! Guppy, see the party safely there." "Where IS 'there,' Mr. Guppy?" said Richard as we went downstairs. "No distance," said Mr. Guppy; "round in Thavies Inn, you know." "I can't say I know where it is, for I come from Winchester and am strange in London." "Only round the corner," said Mr. Guppy. "We just twist up Chancery Lane, and cut along Holborn, and there we are in four minutes' time, as near as a toucher. This is about a London particular NOW, ain't it, miss?" He seemed quite delighted with it on my account. "The fog is very dense indeed!" said I. "Not that it affects you, though, I'm sure," said Mr. Guppy, putting up the steps. "On the contrary, it seems to do you good, miss, judging from your appearance." I knew he meant well in paying me this compliment, so I laughed at myself for blushing at it when he had shut the door and got upon the box; and we all three laughed and chatted about our inexperience and the strangeness of London until we turned up under an archway to our destination--a narrow street of high houses like an oblong cistern to hold the fog. There was a confused little crowd of people, principally children, gathered about the house at which we stopped, which had a tarnished brass plate on the door with the inscription JELLYBY. "Don't be frightened!" said Mr. Guppy, looking in at the coach-window. "One of the young Jellybys been and got his head through the area railings!" "Oh, poor child," said I; "let me out, if you please!" "Pray be careful of yourself, miss. The young Jellybys are always up to something," said Mr. Guppy. I made my way to the poor child, who was one of the dirtiest little unfortunates I ever saw, and found him very hot and frightened and crying loudly, fixed by the neck between two iron railings, while a milkman and a beadle, with the kindest intentions possible, were endeavouring to drag him back by the legs, under a general impression that his skull was compressible by those means. As I found (after pacifying him) that he was a little boy with a naturally large head, I thought that perhaps where his head could go, his body could follow, and mentioned that the best mode of extrication might be to push him forward. This was so favourably received by the milkman and beadle that he would immediately have been pushed into the area if I had not held his pinafore while Richard and Mr. Guppy ran down through the kitchen to catch him when he should be released. At last he was happily got down without any accident, and then he began to beat Mr. Guppy with a hoop-stick in quite a frantic manner. Nobody had appeared belonging to the house except a person in pattens, who had been poking at the child from below with a broom; I don't know with what object, and I don't think she did. I therefore supposed that Mrs. Jellyby was not at home, and was quite surprised when the person appeared in the passage without the pattens, and going up to the back room on the first floor before Ada and me, announced us as, "Them two young ladies, Missis Jellyby!" We passed several more children on the way up, whom it was difficult to avoid treading on in the dark; and as we came into Mrs. Jellyby's presence, one of the poor little things fell downstairs--down a whole flight (as it sounded to me), with a great noise. Mrs. Jellyby, whose face reflected none of the uneasiness which we could not help showing in our own faces as the dear child's head recorded its passage with a bump on every stair--Richard afterwards said he counted seven, besides one for the landing--received us with perfect equanimity. She was a pretty, very diminutive, plump woman of from forty to fifty, with handsome eyes, though they had a curious habit of seeming to look a long way off. As if--I am quoting Richard again--they could see nothing nearer than Africa! "I am very glad indeed," said Mrs. Jellyby in an agreeable voice, "to have the pleasure of receiving you. I have a great respect for Mr. Jarndyce, and no one in whom he is interested can be an object of indifference to me." We expressed our acknowledgments and sat down behind the door, where there was a lame invalid of a sofa. Mrs. Jellyby had very good hair but was too much occupied with her African duties to brush it. The shawl in which she had been loosely muffled dropped onto her chair when she advanced to us; and as she turned to resume her seat, we could not help noticing that her dress didn't nearly meet up the back and that the open space was railed across with a lattice-work of stay-lace--like a summer-house. The room, which was strewn with papers and nearly filled by a great writing-table covered with similar litter, was, I must say, not only very untidy but very dirty. We were obliged to take notice of that with our sense of sight, even while, with our sense of hearing, we followed the poor child who had tumbled downstairs: I think into the back kitchen, where somebody seemed to stifle him. But what principally struck us was a jaded and unhealthy-looking though by no means plain girl at the writing-table, who sat biting the feather of her pen and staring at us. I suppose nobody ever was in such a state of ink. And from her tumbled hair to her pretty feet, which were disfigured with frayed and broken satin slippers trodden down at heel, she really seemed to have no article of dress upon her, from a pin upwards, that was in its proper condition or its right place. "You find me, my dears," said Mrs. Jellyby, snuffing the two great office candles in tin candlesticks, which made the room taste strongly of hot tallow (the fire had gone out, and there was nothing in the grate but ashes, a bundle of wood, and a poker), "you find me, my dears, as usual, very busy; but that you will excuse. The African project at present employs my whole time. It involves me in correspondence with public bodies and with private individuals anxious for the welfare of their species all over the country. I am happy to say it is advancing. We hope by this time next year to have from a hundred and fifty to two hundred healthy families cultivating coffee and educating the natives of Borrioboola-Gha, on the left bank of the Niger." As Ada said nothing, but looked at me, I said it must be very gratifying. "It IS gratifying," said Mrs. Jellyby. "It involves the devotion of all my energies, such as they are; but that is nothing, so that it succeeds; and I am more confident of success every day. Do you know, Miss Summerson, I almost wonder that YOU never turned your thoughts to Africa." This application of the subject was really so unexpected to me that I was quite at a loss how to receive it. I hinted that the climate-- "The finest climate in the world!" said Mrs. Jellyby. "Indeed, ma'am?" "Certainly. With precaution," said Mrs. Jellyby. "You may go into Holborn, without precaution, and be run over. You may go into Holborn, with precaution, and never be run over. Just so with Africa." I said, "No doubt." I meant as to Holborn. "If you would like," said Mrs. Jellyby, putting a number of papers towards us, "to look over some remarks on that head, and on the general subject, which have been extensively circulated, while I finish a letter I am now dictating to my eldest daughter, who is my amanuensis--" The girl at the table left off biting her pen and made a return to our recognition, which was half bashful and half sulky. "--I shall then have finished for the present," proceeded Mrs. Jellyby with a sweet smile, "though my work is never done. Where are you, Caddy?" "'Presents her compliments to Mr. Swallow, and begs--'" said Caddy. "'And begs,'" said Mrs. Jellyby, dictating, "'to inform him, in reference to his letter of inquiry on the African project--' No, Peepy! Not on my account!" Peepy (so self-named) was the unfortunate child who had fallen downstairs, who now interrupted the correspondence by presenting himself, with a strip of plaster on his forehead, to exhibit his wounded knees, in which Ada and I did not know which to pity most--the bruises or the dirt. Mrs. Jellyby merely added, with the serene composure with which she said everything, "Go along, you naughty Peepy!" and fixed her fine eyes on Africa again. However, as she at once proceeded with her dictation, and as I interrupted nothing by doing it, I ventured quietly to stop poor Peepy as he was going out and to take him up to nurse. He looked very much astonished at it and at Ada's kissing him, but soon fell fast asleep in my arms, sobbing at longer and longer intervals, until he was quiet. I was so occupied with Peepy that I lost the letter in detail, though I derived such a general impression from it of the momentous importance of Africa, and the utter insignificance of all other places and things, that I felt quite ashamed to have thought so little about it. "Six o'clock!" said Mrs. Jellyby. "And our dinner hour is nominally (for we dine at all hours) five! Caddy, show Miss Clare and Miss Summerson their rooms. You will like to make some change, perhaps? You will excuse me, I know, being so much occupied. Oh, that very bad child! Pray put him down, Miss Summerson!" I begged permission to retain him, truly saying that he was not at all troublesome, and carried him upstairs and laid him on my bed. Ada and I had two upper rooms with a door of communication between. They were excessively bare and disorderly, and the curtain to my window was fastened up with a fork. "You would like some hot water, wouldn't you?" said Miss Jellyby, looking round for a jug with a handle to it, but looking in vain. "If it is not being troublesome," said we. "Oh, it's not the trouble," returned Miss Jellyby; "the question is, if there IS any." The evening was so very cold and the rooms had such a marshy smell that I must confess it was a little miserable, and Ada was half crying. We soon laughed, however, and were busily unpacking when Miss Jellyby came back to say that she was sorry there was no hot water, but they couldn't find the kettle, and the boiler was out of order. We begged her not to mention it and made all the haste we could to get down to the fire again. But all the little children had come up to the landing outside to look at the phenomenon of Peepy lying on my bed, and our attention was distracted by the constant apparition of noses and fingers in situations of danger between the hinges of the doors. It was impossible to shut the door of either room, for my lock, with no knob to it, looked as if it wanted to be wound up; and though the handle of Ada's went round and round with the greatest smoothness, it was attended with no effect whatever on the door. Therefore I proposed to the children that they should come in and be very good at my table, and I would tell them the story of Little Red Riding Hood while I dressed; which they did, and were as quiet as mice, including Peepy, who awoke opportunely before the appearance of the wolf. When we went downstairs we found a mug with "A Present from Tunbridge Wells" on it lighted up in the staircase window with a floating wick, and a young woman, with a swelled face bound up in a flannel bandage blowing the fire of the drawing-room (now connected by an open door with Mrs. Jellyby's room) and choking dreadfully. It smoked to that degree, in short, that we all sat coughing and crying with the windows open for half an hour, during which Mrs. Jellyby, with the same sweetness of temper, directed letters about Africa. Her being so employed was, I must say, a great relief to me, for Richard told us that he had washed his hands in a pie-dish and that they had found the kettle on his dressing-table, and he made Ada laugh so that they made me laugh in the most ridiculous manner. Soon after seven o'clock we went down to dinner, carefully, by Mrs. Jellyby's advice, for the stair-carpets, besides being very deficient in stair-wires, were so torn as to be absolute traps. We had a fine cod-fish, a piece of roast beef, a dish of cutlets, and a pudding; an excellent dinner, if it had had any cooking to speak of, but it was almost raw. The young woman with the flannel bandage waited, and dropped everything on the table wherever it happened to go, and never moved it again until she put it on the stairs. The person I had seen in pattens, who I suppose to have been the cook, frequently came and skirmished with her at the door, and there appeared to be ill will between them. All through dinner--which was long, in consequence of such accidents as the dish of potatoes being mislaid in the coal skuttle and the handle of the corkscrew coming off and striking the young woman in the chin--Mrs. Jellyby preserved the evenness of her disposition. She told us a great deal that was interesting about Borrioboola-Gha and the natives, and received so many letters that Richard, who sat by her, saw four envelopes in the gravy at once. Some of the letters were proceedings of ladies' committees or resolutions of ladies' meetings, which she read to us; others were applications from people excited in various ways about the cultivation of coffee, and natives; others required answers, and these she sent her eldest daughter from the table three or four times to write. She was full of business and undoubtedly was, as she had told us, devoted to the cause. I was a little curious to know who a mild bald gentleman in spectacles was, who dropped into a vacant chair (there was no top or bottom in particular) after the fish was taken away and seemed passively to submit himself to Borrioboola-Gha but not to be actively interested in that settlement. As he never spoke a word, he might have been a native but for his complexion. It was not until we left the table and he remained alone with Richard that the possibility of his being Mr. Jellyby ever entered my head. But he WAS Mr. Jellyby; and a loquacious young man called Mr. Quale, with large shining knobs for temples and his hair all brushed to the back of his head, who came in the evening, and told Ada he was a philanthropist, also informed her that he called the matrimonial alliance of Mrs. Jellyby with Mr. Jellyby the union of mind and matter. This young man, besides having a great deal to say for himself about Africa and a project of his for teaching the coffee colonists to teach the natives to turn piano-forte legs and establish an export trade, delighted in drawing Mrs. Jellyby out by saying, "I believe now, Mrs. Jellyby, you have received as many as from one hundred and fifty to two hundred letters respecting Africa in a single day, have you not?" or, "If my memory does not deceive me, Mrs. Jellyby, you once mentioned that you had sent off five thousand circulars from one post-office at one time?"--always repeating Mrs. Jellyby's answer to us like an interpreter. During the whole evening, Mr. Jellyby sat in a corner with his head against the wall as if he were subject to low spirits. It seemed that he had several times opened his mouth when alone with Richard after dinner, as if he had something on his mind, but had always shut it again, to Richard's extreme confusion, without saying anything. Mrs. Jellyby, sitting in quite a nest of waste paper, drank coffee all the evening and dictated at intervals to her eldest daughter. She also held a discussion with Mr. Quale, of which the subject seemed to be--if I understood it--the brotherhood of humanity, and gave utterance to some beautiful sentiments. I was not so attentive an auditor as I might have wished to be, however, for Peepy and the other children came flocking about Ada and me in a corner of the drawing-room to ask for another story; so we sat down among them and told them in whispers "Puss in Boots" and I don't know what else until Mrs. Jellyby, accidentally remembering them, sent them to bed. As Peepy cried for me to take him to bed, I carried him upstairs, where the young woman with the flannel bandage charged into the midst of the little family like a dragon and overturned them into cribs. After that I occupied myself in making our room a little tidy and in coaxing a very cross fire that had been lighted to burn, which at last it did, quite brightly. On my return downstairs, I felt that Mrs. Jellyby looked down upon me rather for being so frivolous, and I was sorry for it, though at the same time I knew that I had no higher pretensions. It was nearly midnight before we found an opportunity of going to bed, and even then we left Mrs. Jellyby among her papers drinking coffee and Miss Jellyby biting the feather of her pen. "What a strange house!" said Ada when we got upstairs. "How curious of my cousin Jarndyce to send us here!" "My love," said I, "it quite confuses me. I want to understand it, and I can't understand it at all." "What?" asked Ada with her pretty smile. "All this, my dear," said I. "It MUST be very good of Mrs. Jellyby to take such pains about a scheme for the benefit of natives--and yet--Peepy and the housekeeping!" Ada laughed and put her arm about my neck as I stood looking at the fire, and told me I was a quiet, dear, good creature and had won her heart. "You are so thoughtful, Esther," she said, "and yet so cheerful! And you do so much, so unpretendingly! You would make a home out of even this house." My simple darling! She was quite unconscious that she only praised herself and that it was in the goodness of her own heart that she made so much of me! "May I ask you a question?" said I when we had sat before the fire a little while. "Five hundred," said Ada. "Your cousin, Mr. Jarndyce. I owe so much to him. Would you mind describing him to me?" Shaking her golden hair, Ada turned her eyes upon me with such laughing wonder that I was full of wonder too, partly at her beauty, partly at her surprise. "Esther!" she cried. "My dear!" "You want a description of my cousin Jarndyce?" "My dear, I never saw him." "And I never saw him!" returned Ada. Well, to be sure! No, she had never seen him. Young as she was when her mama died, she remembered how the tears would come into her eyes when she spoke of him and of the noble generosity of his character, which she had said was to be trusted above all earthly things; and Ada trusted it. Her cousin Jarndyce had written to her a few months ago--"a plain, honest letter," Ada said--proposing the arrangement we were now to enter on and telling her that "in time it might heal some of the wounds made by the miserable Chancery suit." She had replied, gratefully accepting his proposal. Richard had received a similar letter and had made a similar response. He HAD seen Mr. Jarndyce once, but only once, five years ago, at Winchester school. He had told Ada, when they were leaning on the screen before the fire where I found them, that he recollected him as "a bluff, rosy fellow." This was the utmost description Ada could give me. It set me thinking so that when Ada was asleep, I still remained before the fire, wondering and wondering about Bleak House, and wondering and wondering that yesterday morning should seem so long ago. I don't know where my thoughts had wandered when they were recalled by a tap at the door. I opened it softly and found Miss Jellyby shivering there with a broken candle in a broken candlestick in one hand and an egg-cup in the other. "Good night!" she said very sulkily. "Good night!" said I. "May I come in?" she shortly and unexpectedly asked me in the same sulky way. "Certainly," said I. "Don't wake Miss Clare." She would not sit down, but stood by the fire dipping her inky middle finger in the egg-cup, which contained vinegar, and smearing it over the ink stains on her face, frowning the whole time and looking very gloomy. "I wish Africa was dead!" she said on a sudden. I was going to remonstrate. "I do!" she said "Don't talk to me, Miss Summerson. I hate it and detest it. It's a beast!" I told her she was tired, and I was sorry. I put my hand upon her head, and touched her forehead, and said it was hot now but would be cool to-morrow. She still stood pouting and frowning at me, but presently put down her egg-cup and turned softly towards the bed where Ada lay. "She is very pretty!" she said with the same knitted brow and in the same uncivil manner. I assented with a smile. "An orphan. Ain't she?" "Yes." "But knows a quantity, I suppose? Can dance, and play music, and sing? She can talk French, I suppose, and do geography, and globes, and needlework, and everything?" "No doubt," said I. "I can't," she returned. "I can't do anything hardly, except write. I'm always writing for Ma. I wonder you two were not ashamed of yourselves to come in this afternoon and see me able to do nothing else. It was like your ill nature. Yet you think yourselves very fine, I dare say!" I could see that the poor girl was near crying, and I resumed my chair without speaking and looked at her (I hope) as mildly as I felt towards her. "It's disgraceful," she said. "You know it is. The whole house is disgraceful. The children are disgraceful. I'M disgraceful. Pa's miserable, and no wonder! Priscilla drinks--she's always drinking. It's a great shame and a great story of you if you say you didn't smell her to-day. It was as bad as a public-house, waiting at dinner; you know it was!" "My dear, I don't know it," said I. "You do," she said very shortly. "You shan't say you don't. You do!" "Oh, my dear!" said I. "If you won't let me speak--" "You're speaking now. You know you are. Don't tell stories, Miss Summerson." "My dear," said I, "as long as you won't hear me out--" "I don't want to hear you out." "Oh, yes, I think you do," said I, "because that would be so very unreasonable. I did not know what you tell me because the servant did not come near me at dinner; but I don't doubt what you tell me, and I am sorry to hear it." "You needn't make a merit of that," said she. "No, my dear," said I. "That would be very foolish." She was still standing by the bed, and now stooped down (but still with the same discontented face) and kissed Ada. That done, she came softly back and stood by the side of my chair. Her bosom was heaving in a distressful manner that I greatly pitied, but I thought it better not to speak. "I wish I was dead!" she broke out. "I wish we were all dead. It would be a great deal better for us." In a moment afterwards, she knelt on the ground at my side, hid her face in my dress, passionately begged my pardon, and wept. I comforted her and would have raised her, but she cried no, no; she wanted to stay there! "You used to teach girls," she said, "If you could only have taught me, I could have learnt from you! I am so very miserable, and I like you so much!" I could not persuade her to sit by me or to do anything but move a ragged stool to where she was kneeling, and take that, and still hold my dress in the same manner. By degrees the poor tired girl fell asleep, and then I contrived to raise her head so that it should rest on my lap, and to cover us both with shawls. The fire went out, and all night long she slumbered thus before the ashy grate. At first I was painfully awake and vainly tried to lose myself, with my eyes closed, among the scenes of the day. At length, by slow degrees, they became indistinct and mingled. I began to lose the identity of the sleeper resting on me. Now it was Ada, now one of my old Reading friends from whom I could not believe I had so recently parted. Now it was the little mad woman worn out with curtsying and smiling, now some one in authority at Bleak House. Lastly, it was no one, and I was no one. The purblind day was feebly struggling with the fog when I opened my eyes to encounter those of a dirty-faced little spectre fixed upon me. Peepy had scaled his crib, and crept down in his bed-gown and cap, and was so cold that his teeth were chattering as if he had cut them all. CHAPTER V A Morning Adventure Although the morning was raw, and although the fog still seemed heavy--I say seemed, for the windows were so encrusted with dirt that they would have made midsummer sunshine dim--I was sufficiently forewarned of the discomfort within doors at that early hour and sufficiently curious about London to think it a good idea on the part of Miss Jellyby when she proposed that we should go out for a walk. "Ma won't be down for ever so long," she said, "and then it's a chance if breakfast's ready for an hour afterwards, they dawdle so. As to Pa, he gets what he can and goes to the office. He never has what you would call a regular breakfast. Priscilla leaves him out the loaf and some milk, when there is any, overnight. Sometimes there isn't any milk, and sometimes the cat drinks it. But I'm afraid you must be tired, Miss Summerson, and perhaps you would rather go to bed." "I am not at all tired, my dear," said I, "and would much prefer to go out." "If you're sure you would," returned Miss Jellyby, "I'll get my things on." Ada said she would go too, and was soon astir. I made a proposal to Peepy, in default of being able to do anything better for him, that he should let me wash him and afterwards lay him down on my bed again. To this he submitted with the best grace possible, staring at me during the whole operation as if he never had been, and never could again be, so astonished in his life--looking very miserable also, certainly, but making no complaint, and going snugly to sleep as soon as it was over. At first I was in two minds about taking such a liberty, but I soon reflected that nobody in the house was likely to notice it. What with the bustle of dispatching Peepy and the bustle of getting myself ready and helping Ada, I was soon quite in a glow. We found Miss Jellyby trying to warm herself at the fire in the writing-room, which Priscilla was then lighting with a smutty parlour candlestick, throwing the candle in to make it burn better. Everything was just as we had left it last night and was evidently intended to remain so. Below-stairs the dinner-cloth had not been taken away, but had been left ready for breakfast. Crumbs, dust, and waste-paper were all over the house. Some pewter pots and a milk-can hung on the area railings; the door stood open; and we met the cook round the corner coming out of a public-house, wiping her mouth. She mentioned, as she passed us, that she had been to see what o'clock it was. But before we met the cook, we met Richard, who was dancing up and down Thavies Inn to warm his feet. He was agreeably surprised to see us stirring so soon and said he would gladly share our walk. So he took care of Ada, and Miss Jellyby and I went first. I may mention that Miss Jellyby had relapsed into her sulky manner and that I really should not have thought she liked me much unless she had told me so. "Where would you wish to go?" she asked. "Anywhere, my dear," I replied. "Anywhere's nowhere," said Miss Jellyby, stopping perversely. "Let us go somewhere at any rate," said I. She then walked me on very fast. "I don't care!" she said. "Now, you are my witness, Miss Summerson, I say I don't care--but if he was to come to our house with his great, shining, lumpy forehead night after night till he was as old as Methuselah, I wouldn't have anything to say to him. Such ASSES as he and Ma make of themselves!" "My dear!" I remonstrated, in allusion to the epithet and the vigorous emphasis Miss Jellyby set upon it. "Your duty as a child--" "Oh! Don't talk of duty as a child, Miss Summerson; where's Ma's duty as a parent? All made over to the public and Africa, I suppose! Then let the public and Africa show duty as a child; it's much more their affair than mine. You are shocked, I dare say! Very well, so am I shocked too; so we are both shocked, and there's an end of it!" She walked me on faster yet. "But for all that, I say again, he may come, and come, and come, and I won't have anything to say to him. I can't bear him. If there's any stuff in the world that I hate and detest, it's the stuff he and Ma talk. I wonder the very paving-stones opposite our house can have the patience to stay there and be a witness of such inconsistencies and contradictions as all that sounding nonsense, and Ma's management!" I could not but understand her to refer to Mr. Quale, the young gentleman who had appeared after dinner yesterday. I was saved the disagreeable necessity of pursuing the subject by Richard and Ada coming up at a round pace, laughing and asking us if we meant to run a race. Thus interrupted, Miss Jellyby became silent and walked moodily on at my side while I admired the long successions and varieties of streets, the quantity of people already going to and fro, the number of vehicles passing and repassing, the busy preparations in the setting forth of shop windows and the sweeping out of shops, and the extraordinary creatures in rags secretly groping among the swept-out rubbish for pins and other refuse. "So, cousin," said the cheerful voice of Richard to Ada behind me. "We are never to get out of Chancery! We have come by another way to our place of meeting yesterday, and--by the Great Seal, here's the old lady again!" Truly, there she was, immediately in front of us, curtsying, and smiling, and saying with her yesterday's air of patronage, "The wards in Jarndyce! Ve-ry happy, I am sure!" "You are out early, ma'am," said I as she curtsied to me. "Ye-es! I usually walk here early. Before the court sits. It's retired. I collect my thoughts here for the business of the day," said the old lady mincingly. "The business of the day requires a great deal of thought. Chancery justice is so ve-ry difficult to follow." "Who's this, Miss Summerson?" whispered Miss Jellyby, drawing my arm tighter through her own. The little old lady's hearing was remarkably quick. She answered for herself directly. "A suitor, my child. At your service. I have the honour to attend court regularly. With my documents. Have I the pleasure of addressing another of the youthful parties in Jarndyce?" said the old lady, recovering herself, with her head on one side, from a very low curtsy. Richard, anxious to atone for his thoughtlessness of yesterday, good-naturedly explained that Miss Jellyby was not connected with the suit. "Ha!" said the old lady. "She does not expect a judgment? She will still grow old. But not so old. Oh, dear, no! This is the garden of Lincoln's Inn. I call it my garden. It is quite a bower in the summer-time. Where the birds sing melodiously. I pass the greater part of the long vacation here. In contemplation. You find the long vacation exceedingly long, don't you?" We said yes, as she seemed to expect us to say so. "When the leaves are falling from the trees and there are no more flowers in bloom to make up into nosegays for the Lord Chancellor's court," said the old lady, "the vacation is fulfilled and the sixth seal, mentioned in the Revelations, again prevails. Pray come and see my lodging. It will be a good omen for me. Youth, and hope, and beauty are very seldom there. It is a long, long time since I had a visit from either." She had taken my hand, and leading me and Miss Jellyby away, beckoned Richard and Ada to come too. I did not know how to excuse myself and looked to Richard for aid. As he was half amused and half curious and all in doubt how to get rid of the old lady without offence, she continued to lead us away, and he and Ada continued to follow, our strange conductress informing us all the time, with much smiling condescension, that she lived close by. It was quite true, as it soon appeared. She lived so close by that we had not time to have done humouring her for a few moments before she was at home. Slipping us out at a little side gate, the old lady stopped most unexpectedly in a narrow back street, part of some courts and lanes immediately outside the wall of the inn, and said, "This is my lodging. Pray walk up!" She had stopped at a shop over which was written KROOK, RAG AND BOTTLE WAREHOUSE. Also, in long thin letters, KROOK, DEALER IN MARINE STORES. In one part of the window was a picture of a red paper mill at which a cart was unloading a quantity of sacks of old rags. In another was the inscription BONES BOUGHT. In another, KITCHEN-STUFF BOUGHT. In another, OLD IRON BOUGHT. In another, WASTE-PAPER BOUGHT. In another, LADIES' AND GENTLEMEN'S WARDROBES BOUGHT. Everything seemed to be bought and nothing to be sold there. In all parts of the window were quantities of dirty bottles--blacking bottles, medicine bottles, ginger-beer and soda-water bottles, pickle bottles, wine bottles, ink bottles; I am reminded by mentioning the latter that the shop had in several little particulars the air of being in a legal neighbourhood and of being, as it were, a dirty hanger-on and disowned relation of the law. There were a great many ink bottles. There was a little tottering bench of shabby old volumes outside the door, labelled "Law Books, all at 9d." Some of the inscriptions I have enumerated were written in law-hand, like the papers I had seen in Kenge and Carboy's office and the letters I had so long received from the firm. Among them was one, in the same writing, having nothing to do with the business of the shop, but announcing that a respectable man aged forty-five wanted engrossing or copying to execute with neatness and dispatch: Address to Nemo, care of Mr. Krook, within. There were several second-hand bags, blue and red, hanging up. A little way within the shop-door lay heaps of old crackled parchment scrolls and discoloured and dog's-eared law-papers. I could have fancied that all the rusty keys, of which there must have been hundreds huddled together as old iron, had once belonged to doors of rooms or strong chests in lawyers' offices. The litter of rags tumbled partly into and partly out of a one-legged wooden scale, hanging without any counterpoise from a beam, might have been counsellors' bands and gowns torn up. One had only to fancy, as Richard whispered to Ada and me while we all stood looking in, that yonder bones in a corner, piled together and picked very clean, were the bones of clients, to make the picture complete. As it was still foggy and dark, and as the shop was blinded besides by the wall of Lincoln's Inn, intercepting the light within a couple of yards, we should not have seen so much but for a lighted lantern that an old man in spectacles and a hairy cap was carrying about in the shop. Turning towards the door, he now caught sight of us. He was short, cadaverous, and withered, with his head sunk sideways between his shoulders and the breath issuing in visible smoke from his mouth as if he were on fire within. His throat, chin, and eyebrows were so frosted with white hairs and so gnarled with veins and puckered skin that he looked from his breast upward like some old root in a fall of snow. "Hi, hi!" said the old man, coming to the door. "Have you anything to sell?" We naturally drew back and glanced at our conductress, who had been trying to open the house-door with a key she had taken from her pocket, and to whom Richard now said that as we had had the pleasure of seeing where she lived, we would leave her, being pressed for time. But she was not to be so easily left. She became so fantastically and pressingly earnest in her entreaties that we would walk up and see her apartment for an instant, and was so bent, in her harmless way, on leading me in, as part of the good omen she desired, that I (whatever the others might do) saw nothing for it but to comply. I suppose we were all more or less curious; at any rate, when the old man added his persuasions to hers and said, "Aye, aye! Please her! It won't take a minute! Come in, come in! Come in through the shop if t'other door's out of order!" we all went in, stimulated by Richard's laughing encouragement and relying on his protection. "My landlord, Krook," said the little old lady, condescending to him from her lofty station as she presented him to us. "He is called among the neighbours the Lord Chancellor. His shop is called the Court of Chancery. He is a very eccentric person. He is very odd. Oh, I assure you he is very odd!" She shook her head a great many times and tapped her forehead with her finger to express to us that we must have the goodness to excuse him, "For he is a little--you know--M!" said the old lady with great stateliness. The old man overheard, and laughed. "It's true enough," he said, going before us with the lantern, "that they call me the Lord Chancellor and call my shop Chancery. And why do you think they call me the Lord Chancellor and my shop Chancery?" "I don't know, I am sure!" said Richard rather carelessly. "You see," said the old man, stopping and turning round, "they--Hi! Here's lovely hair! I have got three sacks of ladies' hair below, but none so beautiful and fine as this. What colour, and what texture!" "That'll do, my good friend!" said Richard, strongly disapproving of his having drawn one of Ada's tresses through his yellow hand. "You can admire as the rest of us do without taking that liberty." The old man darted at him a sudden look which even called my attention from Ada, who, startled and blushing, was so remarkably beautiful that she seemed to fix the wandering attention of the little old lady herself. But as Ada interposed and laughingly said she could only feel proud of such genuine admiration, Mr. Krook shrunk into his former self as suddenly as he had leaped out of it. "You see, I have so many things here," he resumed, holding up the lantern, "of so many kinds, and all as the neighbours think (but THEY know nothing), wasting away and going to rack and ruin, that that's why they have given me and my place a christening. And I have so many old parchmentses and papers in my stock. And I have a liking for rust and must and cobwebs. And all's fish that comes to my net. And I can't abear to part with anything I once lay hold of (or so my neighbours think, but what do THEY know?) or to alter anything, or to have any sweeping, nor scouring, nor cleaning, nor repairing going on about me. That's the way I've got the ill name of Chancery. I don't mind. I go to see my noble and learned brother pretty well every day, when he sits in the Inn. He don't notice me, but I notice him. There's no great odds betwixt us. We both grub on in a muddle. Hi, Lady Jane!" A large grey cat leaped from some neighbouring shelf on his shoulder and startled us all. "Hi! Show 'em how you scratch. Hi! Tear, my lady!" said her master. The cat leaped down and ripped at a bundle of rags with her tigerish claws, with a sound that it set my teeth on edge to hear. "She'd do as much for any one I was to set her on," said the old man. "I deal in cat-skins among other general matters, and hers was offered to me. It's a very fine skin, as you may see, but I didn't have it stripped off! THAT warn't like Chancery practice though, says you!" He had by this time led us across the shop, and now opened a door in the back part of it, leading to the house-entry. As he stood with his hand upon the lock, the little old lady graciously observed to him before passing out, "That will do, Krook. You mean well, but are tiresome. My young friends are pressed for time. I have none to spare myself, having to attend court very soon. My young friends are the wards in Jarndyce." "Jarndyce!" said the old man with a start. "Jarndyce and Jarndyce. The great suit, Krook," returned his lodger. "Hi!" exclaimed the old man in a tone of thoughtful amazement and with a wider stare than before. "Think of it!" He seemed so rapt all in a moment and looked so curiously at us that Richard said, "Why, you appear to trouble yourself a good deal about the causes before your noble and learned brother, the other Chancellor!" "Yes," said the old man abstractedly. "Sure! YOUR name now will be--" "Richard Carstone." "Carstone," he repeated, slowly checking off that name upon his forefinger; and each of the others he went on to mention upon a separate finger. "Yes. There was the name of Barbary, and the name of Clare, and the name of Dedlock, too, I think." "He knows as much of the cause as the real salaried Chancellor!" said Richard, quite astonished, to Ada and me. "Aye!" said the old man, coming slowly out of his abstraction. "Yes! Tom Jarndyce--you'll excuse me, being related; but he was never known about court by any other name, and was as well known there as--she is now," nodding slightly at his lodger. "Tom Jarndyce was often in here. He got into a restless habit of strolling about when the cause was on, or expected, talking to the little shopkeepers and telling 'em to keep out of Chancery, whatever they did. 'For,' says he, 'it's being ground to bits in a slow mill; it's being roasted at a slow fire; it's being stung to death by single bees; it's being drowned by drops; it's going mad by grains.' He was as near making away with himself, just where the young lady stands, as near could be." We listened with horror. "He come in at the door," said the old man, slowly pointing an imaginary track along the shop, "on the day he did it--the whole neighbourhood had said for months before that he would do it, of a certainty sooner or later--he come in at the door that day, and walked along there, and sat himself on a bench that stood there, and asked me (you'll judge I was a mortal sight younger then) to fetch him a pint of wine. 'For,' says he, 'Krook, I am much depressed; my cause is on again, and I think I'm nearer judgment than I ever was.' I hadn't a mind to leave him alone; and I persuaded him to go to the tavern over the way there, t'other side my lane (I mean Chancery Lane); and I followed and looked in at the window, and saw him, comfortable as I thought, in the arm-chair by the fire, and company with him. I hadn't hardly got back here when I heard a shot go echoing and rattling right away into the inn. I ran out--neighbours ran out--twenty of us cried at once, 'Tom Jarndyce!'" The old man stopped, looked hard at us, looked down into the lantern, blew the light out, and shut the lantern up. "We were right, I needn't tell the present hearers. Hi! To be sure, how the neighbourhood poured into court that afternoon while the cause was on! How my noble and learned brother, and all the rest of 'em, grubbed and muddled away as usual and tried to look as if they hadn't heard a word of the last fact in the case or as if they had--Oh, dear me!--nothing at all to do with it if they had heard of it by any chance!" Ada's colour had entirely left her, and Richard was scarcely less pale. Nor could I wonder, judging even from my emotions, and I was no party in the suit, that to hearts so untried and fresh it was a shock to come into the inheritance of a protracted misery, attended in the minds of many people with such dreadful recollections. I had another uneasiness, in the application of the painful story to the poor half-witted creature who had brought us there; but, to my surprise, she seemed perfectly unconscious of that and only led the way upstairs again, informing us with the toleration of a superior creature for the infirmities of a common mortal that her landlord was "a little M, you know!" She lived at the top of the house, in a pretty large room, from which she had a glimpse of Lincoln's Inn Hall. This seemed to have been her principal inducement, originally, for taking up her residence there. She could look at it, she said, in the night, especially in the moonshine. Her room was clean, but very, very bare. I noticed the scantiest necessaries in the way of furniture; a few old prints from books, of Chancellors and barristers, wafered against the wall; and some half-dozen reticles and work-bags, "containing documents," as she informed us. There were neither coals nor ashes in the grate, and I saw no articles of clothing anywhere, nor any kind of food. Upon a shelf in an open cupboard were a plate or two, a cup or two, and so forth, but all dry and empty. There was a more affecting meaning in her pinched appearance, I thought as I looked round, than I had understood before. "Extremely honoured, I am sure," said our poor hostess with the greatest suavity, "by this visit from the wards in Jarndyce. And very much indebted for the omen. It is a retired situation. Considering. I am limited as to situation. In consequence of the necessity of attending on the Chancellor. I have lived here many years. I pass my days in court, my evenings and my nights here. I find the nights long, for I sleep but little and think much. That is, of course, unavoidable, being in Chancery. I am sorry I cannot offer chocolate. I expect a judgment shortly and shall then place my establishment on a superior footing. At present, I don't mind confessing to the wards in Jarndyce (in strict confidence) that I sometimes find it difficult to keep up a genteel appearance. I have felt the cold here. I have felt something sharper than cold. It matters very little. Pray excuse the introduction of such mean topics." She partly drew aside the curtain of the long, low garret window and called our attention to a number of bird-cages hanging there, some containing several birds. There were larks, linnets, and goldfinches--I should think at least twenty. "I began to keep the little creatures," she said, "with an object that the wards will readily comprehend. With the intention of restoring them to liberty. When my judgment should be given. Ye-es! They die in prison, though. Their lives, poor silly things, are so short in comparison with Chancery proceedings that, one by one, the whole collection has died over and over again. I doubt, do you know, whether one of these, though they are all young, will live to be free! Ve-ry mortifying, is it not?" Although she sometimes asked a question, she never seemed to expect a reply, but rambled on as if she were in the habit of doing so when no one but herself was present. "Indeed," she pursued, "I positively doubt sometimes, I do assure you, whether while matters are still unsettled, and the sixth or Great Seal still prevails, I may not one day be found lying stark and senseless here, as I have found so many birds!" Richard, answering what he saw in Ada's compassionate eyes, took the opportunity of laying some money, softly and unobserved, on the chimney-piece. We all drew nearer to the cages, feigning to examine the birds. "I can't allow them to sing much," said the little old lady, "for (you'll think this curious) I find my mind confused by the idea that they are singing while I am following the arguments in court. And my mind requires to be so very clear, you know! Another time, I'll tell you their names. Not at present. On a day of such good omen, they shall sing as much as they like. In honour of youth," a smile and curtsy, "hope," a smile and curtsy, "and beauty," a smile and curtsy. "There! We'll let in the full light." The birds began to stir and chirp. "I cannot admit the air freely," said the little old lady--the room was close, and would have been the better for it--"because the cat you saw downstairs, called Lady Jane, is greedy for their lives. She crouches on the parapet outside for hours and hours. I have discovered," whispering mysteriously, "that her natural cruelty is sharpened by a jealous fear of their regaining their liberty. In consequence of the judgment I expect being shortly given. She is sly and full of malice. I half believe, sometimes, that she is no cat, but the wolf of the old saying. It is so very difficult to keep her from the door." Some neighbouring bells, reminding the poor soul that it was half-past nine, did more for us in the way of bringing our visit to an end than we could easily have done for ourselves. She hurriedly took up her little bag of documents, which she had laid upon the table on coming in, and asked if we were also going into court. On our answering no, and that we would on no account detain her, she opened the door to attend us downstairs. "With such an omen, it is even more necessary than usual that I should be there before the Chancellor comes in," said she, "for he might mention my case the first thing. I have a presentiment that he WILL mention it the first thing this morning." She stopped to tell us in a whisper as we were going down that the whole house was filled with strange lumber which her landlord had bought piecemeal and had no wish to sell, in consequence of being a little M. This was on the first floor. But she had made a previous stoppage on the second floor and had silently pointed at a dark door there. "The only other lodger," she now whispered in explanation, "a law-writer. The children in the lanes here say he has sold himself to the devil. I don't know what he can have done with the money. Hush!" She appeared to mistrust that the lodger might hear her even there, and repeating "Hush!" went before us on tiptoe as though even the sound of her footsteps might reveal to him what she had said. Passing through the shop on our way out, as we had passed through it on our way in, we found the old man storing a quantity of packets of waste-paper in a kind of well in the floor. He seemed to be working hard, with the perspiration standing on his forehead, and had a piece of chalk by him, with which, as he put each separate package or bundle down, he made a crooked mark on the panelling of the wall. Richard and Ada, and Miss Jellyby, and the little old lady had gone by him, and I was going when he touched me on the arm to stay me, and chalked the letter J upon the wall--in a very curious manner, beginning with the end of the letter and shaping it backward. It was a capital letter, not a printed one, but just such a letter as any clerk in Messrs. Kenge and Carboy's office would have made. "Can you read it?" he asked me with a keen glance. "Surely," said I. "It's very plain." "What is it?" "J." With another glance at me, and a glance at the door, he rubbed it out and turned an "a" in its place (not a capital letter this time), and said, "What's that?" I told him. He then rubbed that out and turned the letter "r," and asked me the same question. He went on quickly until he had formed in the same curious manner, beginning at the ends and bottoms of the letters, the word Jarndyce, without once leaving two letters on the wall together. "What does that spell?" he asked me. When I told him, he laughed. In the same odd way, yet with the same rapidity, he then produced singly, and rubbed out singly, the letters forming the words Bleak House. These, in some astonishment, I also read; and he laughed again. "Hi!" said the old man, laying aside the chalk. "I have a turn for copying from memory, you see, miss, though I can neither read nor write." He looked so disagreeable and his cat looked so wickedly at me, as if I were a blood-relation of the birds upstairs, that I was quite relieved by Richard's appearing at the door and saying, "Miss Summerson, I hope you are not bargaining for the sale of your hair. Don't be tempted. Three sacks below are quite enough for Mr. Krook!" I lost no time in wishing Mr. Krook good morning and joining my friends outside, where we parted with the little old lady, who gave us her blessing with great ceremony and renewed her assurance of yesterday in reference to her intention of settling estates on Ada and me. Before we finally turned out of those lanes, we looked back and saw Mr. Krook standing at his shop-door, in his spectacles, looking after us, with his cat upon his shoulder, and her tail sticking up on one side of his hairy cap like a tall feather. "Quite an adventure for a morning in London!" said Richard with a sigh. "Ah, cousin, cousin, it's a weary word this Chancery!" "It is to me, and has been ever since I can remember," returned Ada. "I am grieved that I should be the enemy--as I suppose I am--of a great number of relations and others, and that they should be my enemies--as I suppose they are--and that we should all be ruining one another without knowing how or why and be in constant doubt and discord all our lives. It seems very strange, as there must be right somewhere, that an honest judge in real earnest has not been able to find out through all these years where it is." "Ah, cousin!" said Richard. "Strange, indeed! All this wasteful, wanton chess-playing IS very strange. To see that composed court yesterday jogging on so serenely and to think of the wretchedness of the pieces on the board gave me the headache and the heartache both together. My head ached with wondering how it happened, if men were neither fools nor rascals; and my heart ached to think they could possibly be either. But at all events, Ada--I may call you Ada?" "Of course you may, cousin Richard." "At all events, Chancery will work none of its bad influences on US. We have happily been brought together, thanks to our good kinsman, and it can't divide us now!" "Never, I hope, cousin Richard!" said Ada gently. Miss Jellyby gave my arm a squeeze and me a very significant look. I smiled in return, and we made the rest of the way back very pleasantly. In half an hour after our arrival, Mrs. Jellyby appeared; and in the course of an hour the various things necessary for breakfast straggled one by one into the dining-room. I do not doubt that Mrs. Jellyby had gone to bed and got up in the usual manner, but she presented no appearance of having changed her dress. She was greatly occupied during breakfast, for the morning's post brought a heavy correspondence relative to Borrioboola-Gha, which would occasion her (she said) to pass a busy day. The children tumbled about, and notched memoranda of their accidents in their legs, which were perfect little calendars of distress; and Peepy was lost for an hour and a half, and brought home from Newgate market by a policeman. The equable manner in which Mrs. Jellyby sustained both his absence and his restoration to the family circle surprised us all. She was by that time perseveringly dictating to Caddy, and Caddy was fast relapsing into the inky condition in which we had found her. At one o'clock an open carriage arrived for us, and a cart for our luggage. Mrs. Jellyby charged us with many remembrances to her good friend Mr. Jarndyce; Caddy left her desk to see us depart, kissed me in the passage, and stood biting her pen and sobbing on the steps; Peepy, I am happy to say, was asleep and spared the pain of separation (I was not without misgivings that he had gone to Newgate market in search of me); and all the other children got up behind the barouche and fell off, and we saw them, with great concern, scattered over the surface of Thavies Inn as we rolled out of its precincts. CHAPTER VI Quite at Home The day had brightened very much, and still brightened as we went westward. We went our way through the sunshine and the fresh air, wondering more and more at the extent of the streets, the brilliancy of the shops, the great traffic, and the crowds of people whom the pleasanter weather seemed to have brought out like many-coloured flowers. By and by we began to leave the wonderful city and to proceed through suburbs which, of themselves, would have made a pretty large town in my eyes; and at last we got into a real country road again, with windmills, rick-yards, milestones, farmers' waggons, scents of old hay, swinging signs, and horse troughs: trees, fields, and hedge-rows. It was delightful to see the green landscape before us and the immense metropolis behind; and when a waggon with a train of beautiful horses, furnished with red trappings and clear-sounding bells, came by us with its music, I believe we could all three have sung to the bells, so cheerful were the influences around. "The whole road has been reminding me of my namesake Whittington," said Richard, "and that waggon is the finishing touch. Halloa! What's the matter?" We had stopped, and the waggon had stopped too. Its music changed as the horses came to a stand, and subsided to a gentle tinkling, except when a horse tossed his head or shook himself and sprinkled off a little shower of bell-ringing. "Our postilion is looking after the waggoner," said Richard, "and the waggoner is coming back after us. Good day, friend!" The waggoner was at our coach-door. "Why, here's an extraordinary thing!" added Richard, looking closely at the man. "He has got your name, Ada, in his hat!" He had all our names in his hat. Tucked within the band were three small notes--one addressed to Ada, one to Richard, one to me. These the waggoner delivered to each of us respectively, reading the name aloud first. In answer to Richard's inquiry from whom they came, he briefly answered, "Master, sir, if you please"; and putting on his hat again (which was like a soft bowl), cracked his whip, re-awakened his music, and went melodiously away. "Is that Mr. Jarndyce's waggon?" said Richard, calling to our post-boy. "Yes, sir," he replied. "Going to London." We opened the notes. Each was a counterpart of the other and contained these words in a solid, plain hand. I look forward, my dear, to our meeting easily and without constraint on either side. I therefore have to propose that we meet as old friends and take the past for granted. It will be a relief to you possibly, and to me certainly, and so my love to you. John Jarndyce I had perhaps less reason to be surprised than either of my companions, having never yet enjoyed an opportunity of thanking one who had been my benefactor and sole earthly dependence through so many years. I had not considered how I could thank him, my gratitude lying too deep in my heart for that; but I now began to consider how I could meet him without thanking him, and felt it would be very difficult indeed. The notes revived in Richard and Ada a general impression that they both had, without quite knowing how they came by it, that their cousin Jarndyce could never bear acknowledgments for any kindness he performed and that sooner than receive any he would resort to the most singular expedients and evasions or would even run away. Ada dimly remembered to have heard her mother tell, when she was a very little child, that he had once done her an act of uncommon generosity and that on her going to his house to thank him, he happened to see her through a window coming to the door, and immediately escaped by the back gate, and was not heard of for three months. This discourse led to a great deal more on the same theme, and indeed it lasted us all day, and we talked of scarcely anything else. If we did by any chance diverge into another subject, we soon returned to this, and wondered what the house would be like, and when we should get there, and whether we should see Mr. Jarndyce as soon as we arrived or after a delay, and what he would say to us, and what we should say to him. All of which we wondered about, over and over again. The roads were very heavy for the horses, but the pathway was generally good, so we alighted and walked up all the hills, and liked it so well that we prolonged our walk on the level ground when we got to the top. At Barnet there were other horses waiting for us, but as they had only just been fed, we had to wait for them too, and got a long fresh walk over a common and an old battle-field before the carriage came up. These delays so protracted the journey that the short day was spent and the long night had closed in before we came to St. Albans, near to which town Bleak House was, we knew. By that time we were so anxious and nervous that even Richard confessed, as we rattled over the stones of the old street, to feeling an irrational desire to drive back again. As to Ada and me, whom he had wrapped up with great care, the night being sharp and frosty, we trembled from head to foot. When we turned out of the town, round a corner, and Richard told us that the post-boy, who had for a long time sympathized with our heightened expectation, was looking back and nodding, we both stood up in the carriage (Richard holding Ada lest she should be jolted down) and gazed round upon the open country and the starlight night for our destination. There was a light sparkling on the top of a hill before us, and the driver, pointing to it with his whip and crying, "That's Bleak House!" put his horses into a canter and took us forward at such a rate, uphill though it was, that the wheels sent the road drift flying about our heads like spray from a water-mill. Presently we lost the light, presently saw it, presently lost it, presently saw it, and turned into an avenue of trees and cantered up towards where it was beaming brightly. It was in a window of what seemed to be an old-fashioned house with three peaks in the roof in front and a circular sweep leading to the porch. A bell was rung as we drew up, and amidst the sound of its deep voice in the still air, and the distant barking of some dogs, and a gush of light from the opened door, and the smoking and steaming of the heated horses, and the quickened beating of our own hearts, we alighted in no inconsiderable confusion. "Ada, my love, Esther, my dear, you are welcome. I rejoice to see you! Rick, if I had a hand to spare at present, I would give it you!" The gentleman who said these words in a clear, bright, hospitable voice had one of his arms round Ada's waist and the other round mine, and kissed us both in a fatherly way, and bore us across the hall into a ruddy little room, all in a glow with a blazing fire. Here he kissed us again, and opening his arms, made us sit down side by side on a sofa ready drawn out near the hearth. I felt that if we had been at all demonstrative, he would have run away in a moment. "Now, Rick!" said he. "I have a hand at liberty. A word in earnest is as good as a speech. I am heartily glad to see you. You are at home. Warm yourself!" Richard shook him by both hands with an intuitive mixture of respect and frankness, and only saying (though with an earnestness that rather alarmed me, I was so afraid of Mr. Jarndyce's suddenly disappearing), "You are very kind, sir! We are very much obliged to you!" laid aside his hat and coat and came up to the fire. "And how did you like the ride? And how did you like Mrs. Jellyby, my dear?" said Mr. Jarndyce to Ada. While Ada was speaking to him in reply, I glanced (I need not say with how much interest) at his face. It was a handsome, lively, quick face, full of change and motion; and his hair was a silvered iron-grey. I took him to be nearer sixty than fifty, but he was upright, hearty, and robust. From the moment of his first speaking to us his voice had connected itself with an association in my mind that I could not define; but now, all at once, a something sudden in his manner and a pleasant expression in his eyes recalled the gentleman in the stagecoach six years ago on the memorable day of my journey to Reading. I was certain it was he. I never was so frightened in my life as when I made the discovery, for he caught my glance, and appearing to read my thoughts, gave such a look at the door that I thought we had lost him. However, I am happy to say he remained where he was, and asked me what I thought of Mrs. Jellyby. "She exerts herself very much for Africa, sir," I said. "Nobly!" returned Mr. Jarndyce. "But you answer like Ada." Whom I had not heard. "You all think something else, I see." "We rather thought," said I, glancing at Richard and Ada, who entreated me with their eyes to speak, "that perhaps she was a little unmindful of her home." "Floored!" cried Mr. Jarndyce. I was rather alarmed again. "Well! I want to know your real thoughts, my dear. I may have sent you there on purpose." "We thought that, perhaps," said I, hesitating, "it is right to begin with the obligations of home, sir; and that, perhaps, while those are overlooked and neglected, no other duties can possibly be substituted for them." "The little Jellybys," said Richard, coming to my relief, "are really--I can't help expressing myself strongly, sir--in a devil of a state." "She means well," said Mr. Jarndyce hastily. "The wind's in the east." "It was in the north, sir, as we came down," observed Richard. "My dear Rick," said Mr. Jarndyce, poking the fire, "I'll take an oath it's either in the east or going to be. I am always conscious of an uncomfortable sensation now and then when the wind is blowing in the east." "Rheumatism, sir?" said Richard. "I dare say it is, Rick. I believe it is. And so the little Jell--I had my doubts about 'em--are in a--oh, Lord, yes, it's easterly!" said Mr. Jarndyce. He had taken two or three undecided turns up and down while uttering these broken sentences, retaining the poker in one hand and rubbing his hair with the other, with a good-natured vexation at once so whimsical and so lovable that I am sure we were more delighted with him than we could possibly have expressed in any words. He gave an arm to Ada and an arm to me, and bidding Richard bring a candle, was leading the way out when he suddenly turned us all back again. "Those little Jellybys. Couldn't you--didn't you--now, if it had rained sugar-plums, or three-cornered raspberry tarts, or anything of that sort!" said Mr. Jarndyce. "Oh, cousin--" Ada hastily began. "Good, my pretty pet. I like cousin. Cousin John, perhaps, is better." "Then, cousin John--" Ada laughingly began again. "Ha, ha! Very good indeed!" said Mr. Jarndyce with great enjoyment. "Sounds uncommonly natural. Yes, my dear?" "It did better than that. It rained Esther." "Aye?" said Mr. Jarndyce. "What did Esther do?" "Why, cousin John," said Ada, clasping her hands upon his arm and shaking her head at me across him--for I wanted her to be quiet--"Esther was their friend directly. Esther nursed them, coaxed them to sleep, washed and dressed them, told them stories, kept them quiet, bought them keepsakes"--My dear girl! I had only gone out with Peepy after he was found and given him a little, tiny horse!--"and, cousin John, she softened poor Caroline, the eldest one, so much and was so thoughtful for me and so amiable! No, no, I won't be contradicted, Esther dear! You know, you know, it's true!" The warm-hearted darling leaned across her cousin John and kissed me, and then looking up in his face, boldly said, "At all events, cousin John, I WILL thank you for the companion you have given me." I felt as if she challenged him to run away. But he didn't. "Where did you say the wind was, Rick?" asked Mr. Jarndyce. "In the north as we came down, sir." "You are right. There's no east in it. A mistake of mine. Come, girls, come and see your home!" It was one of those delightfully irregular houses where you go up and down steps out of one room into another, and where you come upon more rooms when you think you have seen all there are, and where there is a bountiful provision of little halls and passages, and where you find still older cottage-rooms in unexpected places with lattice windows and green growth pressing through them. Mine, which we entered first, was of this kind, with an up-and-down roof that had more corners in it than I ever counted afterwards and a chimney (there was a wood fire on the hearth) paved all around with pure white tiles, in every one of which a bright miniature of the fire was blazing. Out of this room, you went down two steps into a charming little sitting-room looking down upon a flower-garden, which room was henceforth to belong to Ada and me. Out of this you went up three steps into Ada's bedroom, which had a fine broad window commanding a beautiful view (we saw a great expanse of darkness lying underneath the stars), to which there was a hollow window-seat, in which, with a spring-lock, three dear Adas might have been lost at once. Out of this room you passed into a little gallery, with which the other best rooms (only two) communicated, and so, by a little staircase of shallow steps with a number of corner stairs in it, considering its length, down into the hall. But if instead of going out at Ada's door you came back into my room, and went out at the door by which you had entered it, and turned up a few crooked steps that branched off in an unexpected manner from the stairs, you lost yourself in passages, with mangles in them, and three-cornered tables, and a native Hindu chair, which was also a sofa, a box, and a bedstead, and looked in every form something between a bamboo skeleton and a great bird-cage, and had been brought from India nobody knew by whom or when. From these you came on Richard's room, which was part library, part sitting-room, part bedroom, and seemed indeed a comfortable compound of many rooms. Out of that you went straight, with a little interval of passage, to the plain room where Mr. Jarndyce slept, all the year round, with his window open, his bedstead without any furniture standing in the middle of the floor for more air, and his cold bath gaping for him in a smaller room adjoining. Out of that you came into another passage, where there were back-stairs and where you could hear the horses being rubbed down outside the stable and being told to "Hold up" and "Get over," as they slipped about very much on the uneven stones. Or you might, if you came out at another door (every room had at least two doors), go straight down to the hall again by half-a-dozen steps and a low archway, wondering how you got back there or had ever got out of it. The furniture, old-fashioned rather than old, like the house, was as pleasantly irregular. Ada's sleeping-room was all flowers--in chintz and paper, in velvet, in needlework, in the brocade of two stiff courtly chairs which stood, each attended by a little page of a stool for greater state, on either side of the fire-place. Our sitting-room was green and had framed and glazed upon the walls numbers of surprising and surprised birds, staring out of pictures at a real trout in a case, as brown and shining as if it had been served with gravy; at the death of Captain Cook; and at the whole process of preparing tea in China, as depicted by Chinese artists. In my room there were oval engravings of the months--ladies haymaking in short waists and large hats tied under the chin, for June; smooth-legged noblemen pointing with cocked-hats to village steeples, for October. Half-length portraits in crayons abounded all through the house, but were so dispersed that I found the brother of a youthful officer of mine in the china-closet and the grey old age of my pretty young bride, with a flower in her bodice, in the breakfast-room. As substitutes, I had four angels, of Queen Anne's reign, taking a complacent gentleman to heaven, in festoons, with some difficulty; and a composition in needlework representing fruit, a kettle, and an alphabet. All the movables, from the wardrobes to the chairs and tables, hangings, glasses, even to the pincushions and scent-bottles on the dressing-tables, displayed the same quaint variety. They agreed in nothing but their perfect neatness, their display of the whitest linen, and their storing-up, wheresoever the existence of a drawer, small or large, rendered it possible, of quantities of rose-leaves and sweet lavender. Such, with its illuminated windows, softened here and there by shadows of curtains, shining out upon the starlight night; with its light, and warmth, and comfort; with its hospitable jingle, at a distance, of preparations for dinner; with the face of its generous master brightening everything we saw; and just wind enough without to sound a low accompaniment to everything we heard, were our first impressions of Bleak House. "I am glad you like it," said Mr. Jarndyce when he had brought us round again to Ada's sitting-room. "It makes no pretensions, but it is a comfortable little place, I hope, and will be more so with such bright young looks in it. You have barely half an hour before dinner. There's no one here but the finest creature upon earth--a child." "More children, Esther!" said Ada. "I don't mean literally a child," pursued Mr. Jarndyce; "not a child in years. He is grown up--he is at least as old as I am--but in simplicity, and freshness, and enthusiasm, and a fine guileless inaptitude for all worldly affairs, he is a perfect child." We felt that he must be very interesting. "He knows Mrs. Jellyby," said Mr. Jarndyce. "He is a musical man, an amateur, but might have been a professional. He is an artist too, an amateur, but might have been a professional. He is a man of attainments and of captivating manners. He has been unfortunate in his affairs, and unfortunate in his pursuits, and unfortunate in his family; but he don't care--he's a child!" "Did you imply that he has children of his own, sir?" inquired Richard. "Yes, Rick! Half-a-dozen. More! Nearer a dozen, I should think. But he has never looked after them. How could he? He wanted somebody to look after HIM. He is a child, you know!" said Mr. Jarndyce. "And have the children looked after themselves at all, sir?" inquired Richard. "Why, just as you may suppose," said Mr. Jarndyce, his countenance suddenly falling. "It is said that the children of the very poor are not brought up, but dragged up. Harold Skimpole's children have tumbled up somehow or other. The wind's getting round again, I am afraid. I feel it rather!" Richard observed that the situation was exposed on a sharp night. "It IS exposed," said Mr. Jarndyce. "No doubt that's the cause. Bleak House has an exposed sound. But you are coming my way. Come along!" Our luggage having arrived and being all at hand, I was dressed in a few minutes and engaged in putting my worldly goods away when a maid (not the one in attendance upon Ada, but another, whom I had not seen) brought a basket into my room with two bunches of keys in it, all labelled. "For you, miss, if you please," said she. "For me?" said I. "The housekeeping keys, miss." I showed my surprise, for she added with some little surprise on her own part, "I was told to bring them as soon as you was alone, miss. Miss Summerson, if I don't deceive myself?" "Yes," said I. "That is my name." "The large bunch is the housekeeping, and the little bunch is the cellars, miss. Any time you was pleased to appoint to-morrow morning, I was to show you the presses and things they belong to." I said I would be ready at half-past six, and after she was gone, stood looking at the basket, quite lost in the magnitude of my trust. Ada found me thus and had such a delightful confidence in me when I showed her the keys and told her about them that it would have been insensibility and ingratitude not to feel encouraged. I knew, to be sure, that it was the dear girl's kindness, but I liked to be so pleasantly cheated. When we went downstairs, we were presented to Mr. Skimpole, who was standing before the fire telling Richard how fond he used to be, in his school-time, of football. He was a little bright creature with a rather large head, but a delicate face and a sweet voice, and there was a perfect charm in him. All he said was so free from effort and spontaneous and was said with such a captivating gaiety that it was fascinating to hear him talk. Being of a more slender figure than Mr. Jarndyce and having a richer complexion, with browner hair, he looked younger. Indeed, he had more the appearance in all respects of a damaged young man than a well-preserved elderly one. There was an easy negligence in his manner and even in his dress (his hair carelessly disposed, and his neck-kerchief loose and flowing, as I have seen artists paint their own portraits) which I could not separate from the idea of a romantic youth who had undergone some unique process of depreciation. It struck me as being not at all like the manner or appearance of a man who had advanced in life by the usual road of years, cares, and experiences. I gathered from the conversation that Mr. Skimpole had been educated for the medical profession and had once lived, in his professional capacity, in the household of a German prince. He told us, however, that as he had always been a mere child in point of weights and measures and had never known anything about them (except that they disgusted him), he had never been able to prescribe with the requisite accuracy of detail. In fact, he said, he had no head for detail. And he told us, with great humour, that when he was wanted to bleed the prince or physic any of his people, he was generally found lying on his back in bed, reading the newspapers or making fancy-sketches in pencil, and couldn't come. The prince, at last, objecting to this, "in which," said Mr. Skimpole, in the frankest manner, "he was perfectly right," the engagement terminated, and Mr. Skimpole having (as he added with delightful gaiety) "nothing to live upon but love, fell in love, and married, and surrounded himself with rosy cheeks." His good friend Jarndyce and some other of his good friends then helped him, in quicker or slower succession, to several openings in life, but to no purpose, for he must confess to two of the oldest infirmities in the world: one was that he had no idea of time, the other that he had no idea of money. In consequence of which he never kept an appointment, never could transact any business, and never knew the value of anything! Well! So he had got on in life, and here he was! He was very fond of reading the papers, very fond of making fancy-sketches with a pencil, very fond of nature, very fond of art. All he asked of society was to let him live. THAT wasn't much. His wants were few. Give him the papers, conversation, music, mutton, coffee, landscape, fruit in the season, a few sheets of Bristol-board, and a little claret, and he asked no more. He was a mere child in the world, but he didn't cry for the moon. He said to the world, "Go your several ways in peace! Wear red coats, blue coats, lawn sleeves; put pens behind your ears, wear aprons; go after glory, holiness, commerce, trade, any object you prefer; only--let Harold Skimpole live!" All this and a great deal more he told us, not only with the utmost brilliancy and enjoyment, but with a certain vivacious candour--speaking of himself as if he were not at all his own affair, as if Skimpole were a third person, as if he knew that Skimpole had his singularities but still had his claims too, which were the general business of the community and must not be slighted. He was quite enchanting. If I felt at all confused at that early time in endeavouring to reconcile anything he said with anything I had thought about the duties and accountabilities of life (which I am far from sure of), I was confused by not exactly understanding why he was free of them. That he WAS free of them, I scarcely doubted; he was so very clear about it himself. "I covet nothing," said Mr. Skimpole in the same light way. "Possession is nothing to me. Here is my friend Jarndyce's excellent house. I feel obliged to him for possessing it. I can sketch it and alter it. I can set it to music. When I am here, I have sufficient possession of it and have neither trouble, cost, nor responsibility. My steward's name, in short, is Jarndyce, and he can't cheat me. We have been mentioning Mrs. Jellyby. There is a bright-eyed woman, of a strong will and immense power of business detail, who throws herself into objects with surprising ardour! I don't regret that I have not a strong will and an immense power of business detail to throw myself into objects with surprising ardour. I can admire her without envy. I can sympathize with the objects. I can dream of them. I can lie down on the grass--in fine weather--and float along an African river, embracing all the natives I meet, as sensible of the deep silence and sketching the dense overhanging tropical growth as accurately as if I were there. I don't know that it's of any direct use my doing so, but it's all I can do, and I do it thoroughly. Then, for heaven's sake, having Harold Skimpole, a confiding child, petitioning you, the world, an agglomeration of practical people of business habits, to let him live and admire the human family, do it somehow or other, like good souls, and suffer him to ride his rocking-horse!" It was plain enough that Mr. Jarndyce had not been neglectful of the adjuration. Mr. Skimpole's general position there would have rendered it so without the addition of what he presently said. "It's only you, the generous creatures, whom I envy," said Mr. Skimpole, addressing us, his new friends, in an impersonal manner. "I envy you your power of doing what you do. It is what I should revel in myself. I don't feel any vulgar gratitude to you. I almost feel as if YOU ought to be grateful to ME for giving you the opportunity of enjoying the luxury of generosity. I know you like it. For anything I can tell, I may have come into the world expressly for the purpose of increasing your stock of happiness. I may have been born to be a benefactor to you by sometimes giving you an opportunity of assisting me in my little perplexities. Why should I regret my incapacity for details and worldly affairs when it leads to such pleasant consequences? I don't regret it therefore." Of all his playful speeches (playful, yet always fully meaning what they expressed) none seemed to be more to the taste of Mr. Jarndyce than this. I had often new temptations, afterwards, to wonder whether it was really singular, or only singular to me, that he, who was probably the most grateful of mankind upon the least occasion, should so desire to escape the gratitude of others. We were all enchanted. I felt it a merited tribute to the engaging qualities of Ada and Richard that Mr. Skimpole, seeing them for the first time, should be so unreserved and should lay himself out to be so exquisitely agreeable. They (and especially Richard) were naturally pleased, for similar reasons, and considered it no common privilege to be so freely confided in by such an attractive man. The more we listened, the more gaily Mr. Skimpole talked. And what with his fine hilarious manner and his engaging candour and his genial way of lightly tossing his own weaknesses about, as if he had said, "I am a child, you know! You are designing people compared with me" (he really made me consider myself in that light) "but I am gay and innocent; forget your worldly arts and play with me!" the effect was absolutely dazzling. He was so full of feeling too and had such a delicate sentiment for what was beautiful or tender that he could have won a heart by that alone. In the evening, when I was preparing to make tea and Ada was touching the piano in the adjoining room and softly humming a tune to her cousin Richard, which they had happened to mention, he came and sat down on the sofa near me and so spoke of Ada that I almost loved him. "She is like the morning," he said. "With that golden hair, those blue eyes, and that fresh bloom on her cheek, she is like the summer morning. The birds here will mistake her for it. We will not call such a lovely young creature as that, who is a joy to all mankind, an orphan. She is the child of the universe." Mr. Jarndyce, I found, was standing near us with his hands behind him and an attentive smile upon his face. "The universe," he observed, "makes rather an indifferent parent, I am afraid." "Oh! I don't know!" cried Mr. Skimpole buoyantly. "I think I do know," said Mr. Jarndyce. "Well!" cried Mr. Skimpole. "You know the world (which in your sense is the universe), and I know nothing of it, so you shall have your way. But if I had mine," glancing at the cousins, "there should be no brambles of sordid realities in such a path as that. It should be strewn with roses; it should lie through bowers, where there was no spring, autumn, nor winter, but perpetual summer. Age or change should never wither it. The base word money should never be breathed near it!" Mr. Jarndyce patted him on the head with a smile, as if he had been really a child, and passing a step or two on, and stopping a moment, glanced at the young cousins. His look was thoughtful, but had a benignant expression in it which I often (how often!) saw again, which has long been engraven on my heart. The room in which they were, communicating with that in which he stood, was only lighted by the fire. Ada sat at the piano; Richard stood beside her, bending down. Upon the wall, their shadows blended together, surrounded by strange forms, not without a ghostly motion caught from the unsteady fire, though reflecting from motionless objects. Ada touched the notes so softly and sang so low that the wind, sighing away to the distant hills, was as audible as the music. The mystery of the future and the little clue afforded to it by the voice of the present seemed expressed in the whole picture. But it is not to recall this fancy, well as I remember it, that I recall the scene. First, I was not quite unconscious of the contrast in respect of meaning and intention between the silent look directed that way and the flow of words that had preceded it. Secondly, though Mr. Jarndyce's glance as he withdrew it rested for but a moment on me, I felt as if in that moment he confided to me--and knew that he confided to me and that I received the confidence--his hope that Ada and Richard might one day enter on a dearer relationship. Mr. Skimpole could play on the piano and the violoncello, and he was a composer--had composed half an opera once, but got tired of it--and played what he composed with taste. After tea we had quite a little concert, in which Richard--who was enthralled by Ada's singing and told me that she seemed to know all the songs that ever were written--and Mr. Jarndyce, and I were the audience. After a little while I missed first Mr. Skimpole and afterwards Richard, and while I was thinking how could Richard stay away so long and lose so much, the maid who had given me the keys looked in at the door, saying, "If you please, miss, could you spare a minute?" When I was shut out with her in the hall, she said, holding up her hands, "Oh, if you please, miss, Mr. Carstone says would you come upstairs to Mr. Skimpole's room. He has been took, miss!" "Took?" said I. "Took, miss. Sudden," said the maid. I was apprehensive that his illness might be of a dangerous kind, but of course I begged her to be quiet and not disturb any one and collected myself, as I followed her quickly upstairs, sufficiently to consider what were the best remedies to be applied if it should prove to be a fit. She threw open a door and I went into a chamber, where, to my unspeakable surprise, instead of finding Mr. Skimpole stretched upon the bed or prostrate on the floor, I found him standing before the fire smiling at Richard, while Richard, with a face of great embarrassment, looked at a person on the sofa, in a white great-coat, with smooth hair upon his head and not much of it, which he was wiping smoother and making less of with a pocket-handkerchief. "Miss Summerson," said Richard hurriedly, "I am glad you are come. You will be able to advise us. Our friend Mr. Skimpole--don't be alarmed!--is arrested for debt." "And really, my dear Miss Summerson," said Mr. Skimpole with his agreeable candour, "I never was in a situation in which that excellent sense and quiet habit of method and usefulness, which anybody must observe in you who has the happiness of being a quarter of an hour in your society, was more needed." The person on the sofa, who appeared to have a cold in his head, gave such a very loud snort that he startled me. "Are you arrested for much, sir?" I inquired of Mr. Skimpole. "My dear Miss Summerson," said he, shaking his head pleasantly, "I don't know. Some pounds, odd shillings, and halfpence, I think, were mentioned." "It's twenty-four pound, sixteen, and sevenpence ha'penny," observed the stranger. "That's wot it is." "And it sounds--somehow it sounds," said Mr. Skimpole, "like a small sum?" The strange man said nothing but made another snort. It was such a powerful one that it seemed quite to lift him out of his seat. "Mr. Skimpole," said Richard to me, "has a delicacy in applying to my cousin Jarndyce because he has lately--I think, sir, I understood you that you had lately--" "Oh, yes!" returned Mr. Skimpole, smiling. "Though I forgot how much it was and when it was. Jarndyce would readily do it again, but I have the epicure-like feeling that I would prefer a novelty in help, that I would rather," and he looked at Richard and me, "develop generosity in a new soil and in a new form of flower." "What do you think will be best, Miss Summerson?" said Richard, aside. I ventured to inquire, generally, before replying, what would happen if the money were not produced. "Jail," said the strange man, coolly putting his handkerchief into his hat, which was on the floor at his feet. "Or Coavinses." "May I ask, sir, what is--" "Coavinses?" said the strange man. "A 'ouse." Richard and I looked at one another again. It was a most singular thing that the arrest was our embarrassment and not Mr. Skimpole's. He observed us with a genial interest, but there seemed, if I may venture on such a contradiction, nothing selfish in it. He had entirely washed his hands of the difficulty, and it had become ours. "I thought," he suggested, as if good-naturedly to help us out, "that being parties in a Chancery suit concerning (as people say) a large amount of property, Mr. Richard or his beautiful cousin, or both, could sign something, or make over something, or give some sort of undertaking, or pledge, or bond? I don't know what the business name of it may be, but I suppose there is some instrument within their power that would settle this?" "Not a bit on it," said the strange man. "Really?" returned Mr. Skimpole. "That seems odd, now, to one who is no judge of these things!" "Odd or even," said the stranger gruffly, "I tell you, not a bit on it!" "Keep your temper, my good fellow, keep your temper!" Mr. Skimpole gently reasoned with him as he made a little drawing of his head on the fly-leaf of a book. "Don't be ruffled by your occupation. We can separate you from your office; we can separate the individual from the pursuit. We are not so prejudiced as to suppose that in private life you are otherwise than a very estimable man, with a great deal of poetry in your nature, of which you may not be conscious." The stranger only answered with another violent snort, whether in acceptance of the poetry-tribute or in disdainful rejection of it, he did not express to me. "Now, my dear Miss Summerson, and my dear Mr. Richard," said Mr. Skimpole gaily, innocently, and confidingly as he looked at his drawing with his head on one side, "here you see me utterly incapable of helping myself, and entirely in your hands! I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free. Mankind will surely not deny to Harold Skimpole what it concedes to the butterflies!" "My dear Miss Summerson," said Richard in a whisper, "I have ten pounds that I received from Mr. Kenge. I must try what that will do." I possessed fifteen pounds, odd shillings, which I had saved from my quarterly allowance during several years. I had always thought that some accident might happen which would throw me suddenly, without any relation or any property, on the world and had always tried to keep some little money by me that I might not be quite penniless. I told Richard of my having this little store and having no present need of it, and I asked him delicately to inform Mr. Skimpole, while I should be gone to fetch it, that we would have the pleasure of paying his debt. When I came back, Mr. Skimpole kissed my hand and seemed quite touched. Not on his own account (I was again aware of that perplexing and extraordinary contradiction), but on ours, as if personal considerations were impossible with him and the contemplation of our happiness alone affected him. Richard, begging me, for the greater grace of the transaction, as he said, to settle with Coavinses (as Mr. Skimpole now jocularly called him), I counted out the money and received the necessary acknowledgment. This, too, delighted Mr. Skimpole. His compliments were so delicately administered that I blushed less than I might have done and settled with the stranger in the white coat without making any mistakes. He put the money in his pocket and shortly said, "Well, then, I'll wish you a good evening, miss. "My friend," said Mr. Skimpole, standing with his back to the fire after giving up the sketch when it was half finished, "I should like to ask you something, without offence." I think the reply was, "Cut away, then!" "Did you know this morning, now, that you were coming out on this errand?" said Mr. Skimpole. "Know'd it yes'day aft'noon at tea-time," said Coavinses. "It didn't affect your appetite? Didn't make you at all uneasy?" "Not a bit," said Coavinses. "I know'd if you wos missed to-day, you wouldn't be missed to-morrow. A day makes no such odds." "But when you came down here," proceeded Mr. Skimpole, "it was a fine day. The sun was shining, the wind was blowing, the lights and shadows were passing across the fields, the birds were singing." "Nobody said they warn't, in MY hearing," returned Coavinses. "No," observed Mr. Skimpole. "But what did you think upon the road?" "Wot do you mean?" growled Coavinses with an appearance of strong resentment. "Think! I've got enough to do, and little enough to get for it without thinking. Thinking!" (with profound contempt). "Then you didn't think, at all events," proceeded Mr. Skimpole, "to this effect: 'Harold Skimpole loves to see the sun shine, loves to hear the wind blow, loves to watch the changing lights and shadows, loves to hear the birds, those choristers in Nature's great cathedral. And does it seem to me that I am about to deprive Harold Skimpole of his share in such possessions, which are his only birthright!' You thought nothing to that effect?" "I--certainly--did--NOT," said Coavinses, whose doggedness in utterly renouncing the idea was of that intense kind that he could only give adequate expression to it by putting a long interval between each word, and accompanying the last with a jerk that might have dislocated his neck. "Very odd and very curious, the mental process is, in you men of business!" said Mr. Skimpole thoughtfully. "Thank you, my friend. Good night." As our absence had been long enough already to seem strange downstairs, I returned at once and found Ada sitting at work by the fireside talking to her cousin John. Mr. Skimpole presently appeared, and Richard shortly after him. I was sufficiently engaged during the remainder of the evening in taking my first lesson in backgammon from Mr. Jarndyce, who was very fond of the game and from whom I wished of course to learn it as quickly as I could in order that I might be of the very small use of being able to play when he had no better adversary. But I thought, occasionally, when Mr. Skimpole played some fragments of his own compositions or when, both at the piano and the violoncello, and at our table, he preserved with an absence of all effort his delightful spirits and his easy flow of conversation, that Richard and I seemed to retain the transferred impression of having been arrested since dinner and that it was very curious altogether. It was late before we separated, for when Ada was going at eleven o'clock, Mr. Skimpole went to the piano and rattled hilariously that the best of all ways to lengthen our days was to steal a few hours from night, my dear! It was past twelve before he took his candle and his radiant face out of the room, and I think he might have kept us there, if he had seen fit, until daybreak. Ada and Richard were lingering for a few moments by the fire, wondering whether Mrs. Jellyby had yet finished her dictation for the day, when Mr. Jarndyce, who had been out of the room, returned. "Oh, dear me, what's this, what's this!" he said, rubbing his head and walking about with his good-humoured vexation. "What's this they tell me? Rick, my boy, Esther, my dear, what have you been doing? Why did you do it? How could you do it? How much apiece was it? The wind's round again. I feel it all over me!" We neither of us quite knew what to answer. "Come, Rick, come! I must settle this before I sleep. How much are you out of pocket? You two made the money up, you know! Why did you? How could you? Oh, Lord, yes, it's due east--must be!" "Really, sir," said Richard, "I don't think it would be honourable in me to tell you. Mr. Skimpole relied upon us--" "Lord bless you, my dear boy! He relies upon everybody!" said Mr. Jarndyce, giving his head a great rub and stopping short. "Indeed, sir?" "Everybody! And he'll be in the same scrape again next week!" said Mr. Jarndyce, walking again at a great pace, with a candle in his hand that had gone out. "He's always in the same scrape. He was born in the same scrape. I verily believe that the announcement in the newspapers when his mother was confined was 'On Tuesday last, at her residence in Botheration Buildings, Mrs. Skimpole of a son in difficulties.'" Richard laughed heartily but added, "Still, sir, I don't want to shake his confidence or to break his confidence, and if I submit to your better knowledge again, that I ought to keep his secret, I hope you will consider before you press me any more. Of course, if you do press me, sir, I shall know I am wrong and will tell you." "Well!" cried Mr. Jarndyce, stopping again, and making several absent endeavours to put his candlestick in his pocket. "I--here! Take it away, my dear. I don't know what I am about with it; it's all the wind--invariably has that effect--I won't press you, Rick; you may be right. But really--to get hold of you and Esther--and to squeeze you like a couple of tender young Saint Michael's oranges! It'll blow a gale in the course of the night!" He was now alternately putting his hands into his pockets as if he were going to keep them there a long time, and taking them out again and vehemently rubbing them all over his head. I ventured to take this opportunity of hinting that Mr. Skimpole, being in all such matters quite a child-- "Eh, my dear?" said Mr. Jarndyce, catching at the word. "Being quite a child, sir," said I, "and so different from other people--" "You are right!" said Mr. Jarndyce, brightening. "Your woman's wit hits the mark. He is a child--an absolute child. I told you he was a child, you know, when I first mentioned him." Certainly! Certainly! we said. "And he IS a child. Now, isn't he?" asked Mr. Jarndyce, brightening more and more. He was indeed, we said. "When you come to think of it, it's the height of childishness in you--I mean me--" said Mr. Jarndyce, "to regard him for a moment as a man. You can't make HIM responsible. The idea of Harold Skimpole with designs or plans, or knowledge of consequences! Ha, ha, ha!" It was so delicious to see the clouds about his bright face clearing, and to see him so heartily pleased, and to know, as it was impossible not to know, that the source of his pleasure was the goodness which was tortured by condemning, or mistrusting, or secretly accusing any one, that I saw the tears in Ada's eyes, while she echoed his laugh, and felt them in my own. "Why, what a cod's head and shoulders I am," said Mr. Jarndyce, "to require reminding of it! The whole business shows the child from beginning to end. Nobody but a child would have thought of singling YOU two out for parties in the affair! Nobody but a child would have thought of YOUR having the money! If it had been a thousand pounds, it would have been just the same!" said Mr. Jarndyce with his whole face in a glow. We all confirmed it from our night's experience. "To be sure, to be sure!" said Mr. Jarndyce. "However, Rick, Esther, and you too, Ada, for I don't know that even your little purse is safe from his inexperience--I must have a promise all round that nothing of this sort shall ever be done any more. No advances! Not even sixpences." We all promised faithfully, Richard with a merry glance at me touching his pocket as if to remind me that there was no danger of OUR transgressing. "As to Skimpole," said Mr. Jarndyce, "a habitable doll's house with good board and a few tin people to get into debt with and borrow money of would set the boy up in life. He is in a child's sleep by this time, I suppose; it's time I should take my craftier head to my more worldly pillow. Good night, my dears. God bless you!" He peeped in again, with a smiling face, before we had lighted our candles, and said, "Oh! I have been looking at the weather-cock. I find it was a false alarm about the wind. It's in the south!" And went away singing to himself. Ada and I agreed, as we talked together for a little while upstairs, that this caprice about the wind was a fiction and that he used the pretence to account for any disappointment he could not conceal, rather than he would blame the real cause of it or disparage or depreciate any one. We thought this very characteristic of his eccentric gentleness and of the difference between him and those petulant people who make the weather and the winds (particularly that unlucky wind which he had chosen for such a different purpose) the stalking-horses of their splenetic and gloomy humours. Indeed, so much affection for him had been added in this one evening to my gratitude that I hoped I already began to understand him through that mingled feeling. Any seeming inconsistencies in Mr. Skimpole or in Mrs. Jellyby I could not expect to be able to reconcile, having so little experience or practical knowledge. Neither did I try, for my thoughts were busy when I was alone, with Ada and Richard and with the confidence I had seemed to receive concerning them. My fancy, made a little wild by the wind perhaps, would not consent to be all unselfish, either, though I would have persuaded it to be so if I could. It wandered back to my godmother's house and came along the intervening track, raising up shadowy speculations which had sometimes trembled there in the dark as to what knowledge Mr. Jarndyce had of my earliest history--even as to the possibility of his being my father, though that idle dream was quite gone now. It was all gone now, I remembered, getting up from the fire. It was not for me to muse over bygones, but to act with a cheerful spirit and a grateful heart. So I said to myself, "Esther, Esther, Esther! Duty, my dear!" and gave my little basket of housekeeping keys such a shake that they sounded like little bells and rang me hopefully to bed. CHAPTER VII The Ghost's Walk While Esther sleeps, and while Esther wakes, it is still wet weather down at the place in Lincolnshire. The rain is ever falling--drip, drip, drip--by day and night upon the broad flagged terrace-pavement, the Ghost's Walk. The weather is so very bad down in Lincolnshire that the liveliest imagination can scarcely apprehend its ever being fine again. Not that there is any superabundant life of imagination on the spot, for Sir Leicester is not here (and, truly, even if he were, would not do much for it in that particular), but is in Paris with my Lady; and solitude, with dusky wings, sits brooding upon Chesney Wold. There may be some motions of fancy among the lower animals at Chesney Wold. The horses in the stables--the long stables in a barren, red-brick court-yard, where there is a great bell in a turret, and a clock with a large face, which the pigeons who live near it and who love to perch upon its shoulders seem to be always consulting--THEY may contemplate some mental pictures of fine weather on occasions, and may be better artists at them than the grooms. The old roan, so famous for cross-country work, turning his large eyeball to the grated window near his rack, may remember the fresh leaves that glisten there at other times and the scents that stream in, and may have a fine run with the hounds, while the human helper, clearing out the next stall, never stirs beyond his pitchfork and birch-broom. The grey, whose place is opposite the door and who with an impatient rattle of his halter pricks his ears and turns his head so wistfully when it is opened, and to whom the opener says, "Woa grey, then, steady! Noabody wants you to-day!" may know it quite as well as the man. The whole seemingly monotonous and uncompanionable half-dozen, stabled together, may pass the long wet hours when the door is shut in livelier communication than is held in the servants' hall or at the Dedlock Arms, or may even beguile the time by improving (perhaps corrupting) the pony in the loose-box in the corner. So the mastiff, dozing in his kennel in the court-yard with his large head on his paws, may think of the hot sunshine when the shadows of the stable-buildings tire his patience out by changing and leave him at one time of the day no broader refuge than the shadow of his own house, where he sits on end, panting and growling short, and very much wanting something to worry besides himself and his chain. So now, half-waking and all-winking, he may recall the house full of company, the coach-houses full of vehicles, the stables full of horses, and the out-buildings full of attendants upon horses, until he is undecided about the present and comes forth to see how it is. Then, with that impatient shake of himself, he may growl in the spirit, "Rain, rain, rain! Nothing but rain--and no family here!" as he goes in again and lies down with a gloomy yawn. So with the dogs in the kennel-buildings across the park, who have their restless fits and whose doleful voices when the wind has been very obstinate have even made it known in the house itself--upstairs, downstairs, and in my Lady's chamber. They may hunt the whole country-side, while the raindrops are pattering round their inactivity. So the rabbits with their self-betraying tails, frisking in and out of holes at roots of trees, may be lively with ideas of the breezy days when their ears are blown about or of those seasons of interest when there are sweet young plants to gnaw. The turkey in the poultry-yard, always troubled with a class-grievance (probably Christmas), may be reminiscent of that summer morning wrongfully taken from him when he got into the lane among the felled trees, where there was a barn and barley. The discontented goose, who stoops to pass under the old gateway, twenty feet high, may gabble out, if we only knew it, a waddling preference for weather when the gateway casts its shadow on the ground. Be this as it may, there is not much fancy otherwise stirring at Chesney Wold. If there be a little at any odd moment, it goes, like a little noise in that old echoing place, a long way and usually leads off to ghosts and mystery. It has rained so hard and rained so long down in Lincolnshire that Mrs. Rouncewell, the old housekeeper at Chesney Wold, has several times taken off her spectacles and cleaned them to make certain that the drops were not upon the glasses. Mrs. Rouncewell might have been sufficiently assured by hearing the rain, but that she is rather deaf, which nothing will induce her to believe. She is a fine old lady, handsome, stately, wonderfully neat, and has such a back and such a stomacher that if her stays should turn out when she dies to have been a broad old-fashioned family fire-grate, nobody who knows her would have cause to be surprised. Weather affects Mrs. Rouncewell little. The house is there in all weathers, and the house, as she expresses it, "is what she looks at." She sits in her room (in a side passage on the ground floor, with an arched window commanding a smooth quadrangle, adorned at regular intervals with smooth round trees and smooth round blocks of stone, as if the trees were going to play at bowls with the stones), and the whole house reposes on her mind. She can open it on occasion and be busy and fluttered, but it is shut up now and lies on the breadth of Mrs. Rouncewell's iron-bound bosom in a majestic sleep. It is the next difficult thing to an impossibility to imagine Chesney Wold without Mrs. Rouncewell, but she has only been here fifty years. Ask her how long, this rainy day, and she shall answer "fifty year, three months, and a fortnight, by the blessing of heaven, if I live till Tuesday." Mr. Rouncewell died some time before the decease of the pretty fashion of pig-tails, and modestly hid his own (if he took it with him) in a corner of the churchyard in the park near the mouldy porch. He was born in the market-town, and so was his young widow. Her progress in the family began in the time of the last Sir Leicester and originated in the still-room. The present representative of the Dedlocks is an excellent master. He supposes all his dependents to be utterly bereft of individual characters, intentions, or opinions, and is persuaded that he was born to supersede the necessity of their having any. If he were to make a discovery to the contrary, he would be simply stunned--would never recover himself, most likely, except to gasp and die. But he is an excellent master still, holding it a part of his state to be so. He has a great liking for Mrs. Rouncewell; he says she is a most respectable, creditable woman. He always shakes hands with her when he comes down to Chesney Wold and when he goes away; and if he were very ill, or if he were knocked down by accident, or run over, or placed in any situation expressive of a Dedlock at a disadvantage, he would say if he could speak, "Leave me, and send Mrs. Rouncewell here!" feeling his dignity, at such a pass, safer with her than with anybody else. Mrs. Rouncewell has known trouble. She has had two sons, of whom the younger ran wild, and went for a soldier, and never came back. Even to this hour, Mrs. Rouncewell's calm hands lose their composure when she speaks of him, and unfolding themselves from her stomacher, hover about her in an agitated manner as she says what a likely lad, what a fine lad, what a gay, good-humoured, clever lad he was! Her second son would have been provided for at Chesney Wold and would have been made steward in due season, but he took, when he was a schoolboy, to constructing steam-engines out of saucepans and setting birds to draw their own water with the least possible amount of labour, so assisting them with artful contrivance of hydraulic pressure that a thirsty canary had only, in a literal sense, to put his shoulder to the wheel and the job was done. This propensity gave Mrs. Rouncewell great uneasiness. She felt it with a mother's anguish to be a move in the Wat Tyler direction, well knowing that Sir Leicester had that general impression of an aptitude for any art to which smoke and a tall chimney might be considered essential. But the doomed young rebel (otherwise a mild youth, and very persevering), showing no sign of grace as he got older but, on the contrary, constructing a model of a power-loom, she was fain, with many tears, to mention his backslidings to the baronet. "Mrs. Rouncewell," said Sir Leicester, "I can never consent to argue, as you know, with any one on any subject. You had better get rid of your boy; you had better get him into some Works. The iron country farther north is, I suppose, the congenial direction for a boy with these tendencies." Farther north he went, and farther north he grew up; and if Sir Leicester Dedlock ever saw him when he came to Chesney Wold to visit his mother, or ever thought of him afterwards, it is certain that he only regarded him as one of a body of some odd thousand conspirators, swarthy and grim, who were in the habit of turning out by torchlight two or three nights in the week for unlawful purposes. Nevertheless, Mrs. Rouncewell's son has, in the course of nature and art, grown up, and established himself, and married, and called unto him Mrs. Rouncewell's grandson, who, being out of his apprenticeship, and home from a journey in far countries, whither he was sent to enlarge his knowledge and complete his preparations for the venture of this life, stands leaning against the chimney-piece this very day in Mrs. Rouncewell's room at Chesney Wold. "And, again and again, I am glad to see you, Watt! And, once again, I am glad to see you, Watt!" says Mrs. Rouncewell. "You are a fine young fellow. You are like your poor uncle George. Ah!" Mrs. Rouncewell's hands unquiet, as usual, on this reference. "They say I am like my father, grandmother." "Like him, also, my dear--but most like your poor uncle George! And your dear father." Mrs. Rouncewell folds her hands again. "He is well?" "Thriving, grandmother, in every way." "I am thankful!" Mrs. Rouncewell is fond of her son but has a plaintive feeling towards him, much as if he were a very honourable soldier who had gone over to the enemy. "He is quite happy?" says she. "Quite." "I am thankful! So he has brought you up to follow in his ways and has sent you into foreign countries and the like? Well, he knows best. There may be a world beyond Chesney Wold that I don't understand. Though I am not young, either. And I have seen a quantity of good company too!" "Grandmother," says the young man, changing the subject, "what a very pretty girl that was I found with you just now. You called her Rosa?" "Yes, child. She is daughter of a widow in the village. Maids are so hard to teach, now-a-days, that I have put her about me young. She's an apt scholar and will do well. She shows the house already, very pretty. She lives with me at my table here." "I hope I have not driven her away?" "She supposes we have family affairs to speak about, I dare say. She is very modest. It is a fine quality in a young woman. And scarcer," says Mrs. Rouncewell, expanding her stomacher to its utmost limits, "than it formerly was!" The young man inclines his head in acknowledgment of the precepts of experience. Mrs. Rouncewell listens. "Wheels!" says she. They have long been audible to the younger ears of her companion. "What wheels on such a day as this, for gracious sake?" After a short interval, a tap at the door. "Come in!" A dark-eyed, dark-haired, shy, village beauty comes in--so fresh in her rosy and yet delicate bloom that the drops of rain which have beaten on her hair look like the dew upon a flower fresh gathered. "What company is this, Rosa?" says Mrs. Rouncewell. "It's two young men in a gig, ma'am, who want to see the house--yes, and if you please, I told them so!" in quick reply to a gesture of dissent from the housekeeper. "I went to the hall-door and told them it was the wrong day and the wrong hour, but the young man who was driving took off his hat in the wet and begged me to bring this card to you." "Read it, my dear Watt," says the housekeeper. Rosa is so shy as she gives it to him that they drop it between them and almost knock their foreheads together as they pick it up. Rosa is shyer than before. "Mr. Guppy" is all the information the card yields. "Guppy!" repeats Mrs. Rouncewell, "MR. Guppy! Nonsense, I never heard of him!" "If you please, he told ME that!" says Rosa. "But he said that he and the other young gentleman came from London only last night by the mail, on business at the magistrates' meeting, ten miles off, this morning, and that as their business was soon over, and they had heard a great deal said of Chesney Wold, and really didn't know what to do with themselves, they had come through the wet to see it. They are lawyers. He says he is not in Mr. Tulkinghorn's office, but he is sure he may make use of Mr. Tulkinghorn's name if necessary." Finding, now she leaves off, that she has been making quite a long speech, Rosa is shyer than ever. Now, Mr. Tulkinghorn is, in a manner, part and parcel of the place, and besides, is supposed to have made Mrs. Rouncewell's will. The old lady relaxes, consents to the admission of the visitors as a favour, and dismisses Rosa. The grandson, however, being smitten by a sudden wish to see the house himself, proposes to join the party. The grandmother, who is pleased that he should have that interest, accompanies him--though to do him justice, he is exceedingly unwilling to trouble her. "Much obliged to you, ma'am!" says Mr. Guppy, divesting himself of his wet dreadnought in the hall. "Us London lawyers don't often get an out, and when we do, we like to make the most of it, you know." The old housekeeper, with a gracious severity of deportment, waves her hand towards the great staircase. Mr. Guppy and his friend follow Rosa; Mrs. Rouncewell and her grandson follow them; a young gardener goes before to open the shutters. As is usually the case with people who go over houses, Mr. Guppy and his friend are dead beat before they have well begun. They straggle about in wrong places, look at wrong things, don't care for the right things, gape when more rooms are opened, exhibit profound depression of spirits, and are clearly knocked up. In each successive chamber that they enter, Mrs. Rouncewell, who is as upright as the house itself, rests apart in a window-seat or other such nook and listens with stately approval to Rosa's exposition. Her grandson is so attentive to it that Rosa is shyer than ever--and prettier. Thus they pass on from room to room, raising the pictured Dedlocks for a few brief minutes as the young gardener admits the light, and reconsigning them to their graves as he shuts it out again. It appears to the afflicted Mr. Guppy and his inconsolable friend that there is no end to the Dedlocks, whose family greatness seems to consist in their never having done anything to distinguish themselves for seven hundred years. Even the long drawing-room of Chesney Wold cannot revive Mr. Guppy's spirits. He is so low that he droops on the threshold and has hardly strength of mind to enter. But a portrait over the chimney-piece, painted by the fashionable artist of the day, acts upon him like a charm. He recovers in a moment. He stares at it with uncommon interest; he seems to be fixed and fascinated by it. "Dear me!" says Mr. Guppy. "Who's that?" "The picture over the fire-place," says Rosa, "is the portrait of the present Lady Dedlock. It is considered a perfect likeness, and the best work of the master." "Blest," says Mr. Guppy, staring in a kind of dismay at his friend, "if I can ever have seen her. Yet I know her! Has the picture been engraved, miss?" "The picture has never been engraved. Sir Leicester has always refused permission." "Well!" says Mr. Guppy in a low voice. "I'll be shot if it ain't very curious how well I know that picture! So that's Lady Dedlock, is it!" "The picture on the right is the present Sir Leicester Dedlock. The picture on the left is his father, the late Sir Leicester." Mr. Guppy has no eyes for either of these magnates. "It's unaccountable to me," he says, still staring at the portrait, "how well I know that picture! I'm dashed," adds Mr. Guppy, looking round, "if I don't think I must have had a dream of that picture, you know!" As no one present takes any especial interest in Mr. Guppy's dreams, the probability is not pursued. But he still remains so absorbed by the portrait that he stands immovable before it until the young gardener has closed the shutters, when he comes out of the room in a dazed state that is an odd though a sufficient substitute for interest and follows into the succeeding rooms with a confused stare, as if he were looking everywhere for Lady Dedlock again. He sees no more of her. He sees her rooms, which are the last shown, as being very elegant, and he looks out of the windows from which she looked out, not long ago, upon the weather that bored her to death. All things have an end, even houses that people take infinite pains to see and are tired of before they begin to see them. He has come to the end of the sight, and the fresh village beauty to the end of her description; which is always this: "The terrace below is much admired. It is called, from an old story in the family, the Ghost's Walk." "No?" says Mr. Guppy, greedily curious. "What's the story, miss? Is it anything about a picture?" "Pray tell us the story," says Watt in a half whisper. "I don't know it, sir." Rosa is shyer than ever. "It is not related to visitors; it is almost forgotten," says the housekeeper, advancing. "It has never been more than a family anecdote." "You'll excuse my asking again if it has anything to do with a picture, ma'am," observes Mr. Guppy, "because I do assure you that the more I think of that picture the better I know it, without knowing how I know it!" The story has nothing to do with a picture; the housekeeper can guarantee that. Mr. Guppy is obliged to her for the information and is, moreover, generally obliged. He retires with his friend, guided down another staircase by the young gardener, and presently is heard to drive away. It is now dusk. Mrs. Rouncewell can trust to the discretion of her two young hearers and may tell THEM how the terrace came to have that ghostly name. She seats herself in a large chair by the fast-darkening window and tells them: "In the wicked days, my dears, of King Charles the First--I mean, of course, in the wicked days of the rebels who leagued themselves against that excellent king--Sir Morbury Dedlock was the owner of Chesney Wold. Whether there was any account of a ghost in the family before those days, I can't say. I should think it very likely indeed." Mrs. Rouncewell holds this opinion because she considers that a family of such antiquity and importance has a right to a ghost. She regards a ghost as one of the privileges of the upper classes, a genteel distinction to which the common people have no claim. "Sir Morbury Dedlock," says Mrs. Rouncewell, "was, I have no occasion to say, on the side of the blessed martyr. But it IS supposed that his Lady, who had none of the family blood in her veins, favoured the bad cause. It is said that she had relations among King Charles's enemies, that she was in correspondence with them, and that she gave them information. When any of the country gentlemen who followed his Majesty's cause met here, it is said that my Lady was always nearer to the door of their council-room than they supposed. Do you hear a sound like a footstep passing along the terrace, Watt?" Rosa draws nearer to the housekeeper. "I hear the rain-drip on the stones," replies the young man, "and I hear a curious echo--I suppose an echo--which is very like a halting step." The housekeeper gravely nods and continues: "Partly on account of this division between them, and partly on other accounts, Sir Morbury and his Lady led a troubled life. She was a lady of a haughty temper. They were not well suited to each other in age or character, and they had no children to moderate between them. After her favourite brother, a young gentleman, was killed in the civil wars (by Sir Morbury's near kinsman), her feeling was so violent that she hated the race into which she had married. When the Dedlocks were about to ride out from Chesney Wold in the king's cause, she is supposed to have more than once stolen down into the stables in the dead of night and lamed their horses; and the story is that once at such an hour, her husband saw her gliding down the stairs and followed her into the stall where his own favourite horse stood. There he seized her by the wrist, and in a struggle or in a fall or through the horse being frightened and lashing out, she was lamed in the hip and from that hour began to pine away." The housekeeper has dropped her voice to a little more than a whisper. "She had been a lady of a handsome figure and a noble carriage. She never complained of the change; she never spoke to any one of being crippled or of being in pain, but day by day she tried to walk upon the terrace, and with the help of the stone balustrade, went up and down, up and down, up and down, in sun and shadow, with greater difficulty every day. At last, one afternoon her husband (to whom she had never, on any persuasion, opened her lips since that night), standing at the great south window, saw her drop upon the pavement. He hastened down to raise her, but she repulsed him as he bent over her, and looking at him fixedly and coldly, said, 'I will die here where I have walked. And I will walk here, though I am in my grave. I will walk here until the pride of this house is humbled. And when calamity or when disgrace is coming to it, let the Dedlocks listen for my step!'" Watt looks at Rosa. Rosa in the deepening gloom looks down upon the ground, half frightened and half shy. "There and then she died. And from those days," says Mrs. Rouncewell, "the name has come down--the Ghost's Walk. If the tread is an echo, it is an echo that is only heard after dark, and is often unheard for a long while together. But it comes back from time to time; and so sure as there is sickness or death in the family, it will be heard then." "And disgrace, grandmother--" says Watt. "Disgrace never comes to Chesney Wold," returns the housekeeper. Her grandson apologizes with "True. True." "That is the story. Whatever the sound is, it is a worrying sound," says Mrs. Rouncewell, getting up from her chair; "and what is to be noticed in it is that it MUST BE HEARD. My Lady, who is afraid of nothing, admits that when it is there, it must be heard. You cannot shut it out. Watt, there is a tall French clock behind you (placed there, 'a purpose) that has a loud beat when it is in motion and can play music. You understand how those things are managed?" "Pretty well, grandmother, I think." "Set it a-going." Watt sets it a-going--music and all. "Now, come hither," says the housekeeper. "Hither, child, towards my Lady's pillow. I am not sure that it is dark enough yet, but listen! Can you hear the sound upon the terrace, through the music, and the beat, and everything?" "I certainly can!" "So my Lady says." CHAPTER VIII Covering a Multitude of Sins It was interesting when I dressed before daylight to peep out of window, where my candles were reflected in the black panes like two beacons, and finding all beyond still enshrouded in the indistinctness of last night, to watch how it turned out when the day came on. As the prospect gradually revealed itself and disclosed the scene over which the wind had wandered in the dark, like my memory over my life, I had a pleasure in discovering the unknown objects that had been around me in my sleep. At first they were faintly discernible in the mist, and above them the later stars still glimmered. That pale interval over, the picture began to enlarge and fill up so fast that at every new peep I could have found enough to look at for an hour. Imperceptibly my candles became the only incongruous part of the morning, the dark places in my room all melted away, and the day shone bright upon a cheerful landscape, prominent in which the old Abbey Church, with its massive tower, threw a softer train of shadow on the view than seemed compatible with its rugged character. But so from rough outsides (I hope I have learnt), serene and gentle influences often proceed. Every part of the house was in such order, and every one was so attentive to me, that I had no trouble with my two bunches of keys, though what with trying to remember the contents of each little store-room drawer and cupboard; and what with making notes on a slate about jams, and pickles, and preserves, and bottles, and glass, and china, and a great many other things; and what with being generally a methodical, old-maidish sort of foolish little person, I was so busy that I could not believe it was breakfast-time when I heard the bell ring. Away I ran, however, and made tea, as I had already been installed into the responsibility of the tea-pot; and then, as they were all rather late and nobody was down yet, I thought I would take a peep at the garden and get some knowledge of that too. I found it quite a delightful place--in front, the pretty avenue and drive by which we had approached (and where, by the by, we had cut up the gravel so terribly with our wheels that I asked the gardener to roll it); at the back, the flower-garden, with my darling at her window up there, throwing it open to smile out at me, as if she would have kissed me from that distance. Beyond the flower-garden was a kitchen-garden, and then a paddock, and then a snug little rick-yard, and then a dear little farm-yard. As to the house itself, with its three peaks in the roof; its various-shaped windows, some so large, some so small, and all so pretty; its trellis-work, against the south-front for roses and honey-suckle, and its homely, comfortable, welcoming look--it was, as Ada said when she came out to meet me with her arm through that of its master, worthy of her cousin John, a bold thing to say, though he only pinched her dear cheek for it. Mr. Skimpole was as agreeable at breakfast as he had been overnight. There was honey on the table, and it led him into a discourse about bees. He had no objection to honey, he said (and I should think he had not, for he seemed to like it), but he protested against the overweening assumptions of bees. He didn't at all see why the busy bee should be proposed as a model to him; he supposed the bee liked to make honey, or he wouldn't do it--nobody asked him. It was not necessary for the bee to make such a merit of his tastes. If every confectioner went buzzing about the world banging against everything that came in his way and egotistically calling upon everybody to take notice that he was going to his work and must not be interrupted, the world would be quite an unsupportable place. Then, after all, it was a ridiculous position to be smoked out of your fortune with brimstone as soon as you had made it. You would have a very mean opinion of a Manchester man if he spun cotton for no other purpose. He must say he thought a drone the embodiment of a pleasanter and wiser idea. The drone said unaffectedly, "You will excuse me; I really cannot attend to the shop! I find myself in a world in which there is so much to see and so short a time to see it in that I must take the liberty of looking about me and begging to be provided for by somebody who doesn't want to look about him." This appeared to Mr. Skimpole to be the drone philosophy, and he thought it a very good philosophy, always supposing the drone to be willing to be on good terms with the bee, which, so far as he knew, the easy fellow always was, if the consequential creature would only let him, and not be so conceited about his honey! He pursued this fancy with the lightest foot over a variety of ground and made us all merry, though again he seemed to have as serious a meaning in what he said as he was capable of having. I left them still listening to him when I withdrew to attend to my new duties. They had occupied me for some time, and I was passing through the passages on my return with my basket of keys on my arm when Mr. Jarndyce called me into a small room next his bed-chamber, which I found to be in part a little library of books and papers and in part quite a little museum of his boots and shoes and hat-boxes. "Sit down, my dear," said Mr. Jarndyce. "This, you must know, is the growlery. When I am out of humour, I come and growl here." "You must be here very seldom, sir," said I. "Oh, you don't know me!" he returned. "When I am deceived or disappointed in--the wind, and it's easterly, I take refuge here. The growlery is the best-used room in the house. You are not aware of half my humours yet. My dear, how you are trembling!" I could not help it; I tried very hard, but being alone with that benevolent presence, and meeting his kind eyes, and feeling so happy and so honoured there, and my heart so full--I kissed his hand. I don't know what I said, or even that I spoke. He was disconcerted and walked to the window; I almost believed with an intention of jumping out, until he turned and I was reassured by seeing in his eyes what he had gone there to hide. He gently patted me on the head, and I sat down. "There! There!" he said. "That's over. Pooh! Don't be foolish." "It shall not happen again, sir," I returned, "but at first it is difficult--" "Nonsense!" he said. "It's easy, easy. Why not? I hear of a good little orphan girl without a protector, and I take it into my head to be that protector. She grows up, and more than justifies my good opinion, and I remain her guardian and her friend. What is there in all this? So, so! Now, we have cleared off old scores, and I have before me thy pleasant, trusting, trusty face again." I said to myself, "Esther, my dear, you surprise me! This really is not what I expected of you!" And it had such a good effect that I folded my hands upon my basket and quite recovered myself. Mr. Jarndyce, expressing his approval in his face, began to talk to me as confidentially as if I had been in the habit of conversing with him every morning for I don't know how long. I almost felt as if I had. "Of course, Esther," he said, "you don't understand this Chancery business?" And of course I shook my head. "I don't know who does," he returned. "The lawyers have twisted it into such a state of bedevilment that the original merits of the case have long disappeared from the face of the earth. It's about a will and the trusts under a will--or it was once. It's about nothing but costs now. We are always appearing, and disappearing, and swearing, and interrogating, and filing, and cross-filing, and arguing, and sealing, and motioning, and referring, and reporting, and revolving about the Lord Chancellor and all his satellites, and equitably waltzing ourselves off to dusty death, about costs. That's the great question. All the rest, by some extraordinary means, has melted away." "But it was, sir," said I, to bring him back, for he began to rub his head, "about a will?" "Why, yes, it was about a will when it was about anything," he returned. "A certain Jarndyce, in an evil hour, made a great fortune, and made a great will. In the question how the trusts under that will are to be administered, the fortune left by the will is squandered away; the legatees under the will are reduced to such a miserable condition that they would be sufficiently punished if they had committed an enormous crime in having money left them, and the will itself is made a dead letter. All through the deplorable cause, everything that everybody in it, except one man, knows already is referred to that only one man who don't know, it to find out--all through the deplorable cause, everybody must have copies, over and over again, of everything that has accumulated about it in the way of cartloads of papers (or must pay for them without having them, which is the usual course, for nobody wants them) and must go down the middle and up again through such an infernal country-dance of costs and fees and nonsense and corruption as was never dreamed of in the wildest visions of a witch's Sabbath. Equity sends questions to law, law sends questions back to equity; law finds it can't do this, equity finds it can't do that; neither can so much as say it can't do anything, without this solicitor instructing and this counsel appearing for A, and that solicitor instructing and that counsel appearing for B; and so on through the whole alphabet, like the history of the apple pie. And thus, through years and years, and lives and lives, everything goes on, constantly beginning over and over again, and nothing ever ends. And we can't get out of the suit on any terms, for we are made parties to it, and MUST BE parties to it, whether we like it or not. But it won't do to think of it! When my great uncle, poor Tom Jarndyce, began to think of it, it was the beginning of the end!" "The Mr. Jarndyce, sir, whose story I have heard?" He nodded gravely. "I was his heir, and this was his house, Esther. When I came here, it was bleak indeed. He had left the signs of his misery upon it." "How changed it must be now!" I said. "It had been called, before his time, the Peaks. He gave it its present name and lived here shut up, day and night poring over the wicked heaps of papers in the suit and hoping against hope to disentangle it from its mystification and bring it to a close. In the meantime, the place became dilapidated, the wind whistled through the cracked walls, the rain fell through the broken roof, the weeds choked the passage to the rotting door. When I brought what remained of him home here, the brains seemed to me to have been blown out of the house too, it was so shattered and ruined." He walked a little to and fro after saying this to himself with a shudder, and then looked at me, and brightened, and came and sat down again with his hands in his pockets. "I told you this was the growlery, my dear. Where was I?" I reminded him, at the hopeful change he had made in Bleak House. "Bleak House; true. There is, in that city of London there, some property of ours which is much at this day what Bleak House was then; I say property of ours, meaning of the suit's, but I ought to call it the property of costs, for costs is the only power on earth that will ever get anything out of it now or will ever know it for anything but an eyesore and a heartsore. It is a street of perishing blind houses, with their eyes stoned out, without a pane of glass, without so much as a window-frame, with the bare blank shutters tumbling from their hinges and falling asunder, the iron rails peeling away in flakes of rust, the chimneys sinking in, the stone steps to every door (and every door might be death's door) turning stagnant green, the very crutches on which the ruins are propped decaying. Although Bleak House was not in Chancery, its master was, and it was stamped with the same seal. These are the Great Seal's impressions, my dear, all over England--the children know them!" "How changed it is!" I said again. "Why, so it is," he answered much more cheerfully; "and it is wisdom in you to keep me to the bright side of the picture." (The idea of my wisdom!) "These are things I never talk about or even think about, excepting in the growlery here. If you consider it right to mention them to Rick and Ada," looking seriously at me, "you can. I leave it to your discretion, Esther." "I hope, sir--" said I. "I think you had better call me guardian, my dear." I felt that I was choking again--I taxed myself with it, "Esther, now, you know you are!"--when he feigned to say this slightly, as if it were a whim instead of a thoughtful tenderness. But I gave the housekeeping keys the least shake in the world as a reminder to myself, and folding my hands in a still more determined manner on the basket, looked at him quietly. "I hope, guardian," said I, "that you may not trust too much to my discretion. I hope you may not mistake me. I am afraid it will be a disappointment to you to know that I am not clever, but it really is the truth, and you would soon find it out if I had not the honesty to confess it." He did not seem at all disappointed; quite the contrary. He told me, with a smile all over his face, that he knew me very well indeed and that I was quite clever enough for him. "I hope I may turn out so," said I, "but I am much afraid of it, guardian." "You are clever enough to be the good little woman of our lives here, my dear," he returned playfully; "the little old woman of the child's (I don't mean Skimpole's) rhyme: "'Little old woman, and whither so high?' 'To sweep the cobwebs out of the sky.' "You will sweep them so neatly out of OUR sky in the course of your housekeeping, Esther, that one of these days we shall have to abandon the growlery and nail up the door." This was the beginning of my being called Old Woman, and Little Old Woman, and Cobweb, and Mrs. Shipton, and Mother Hubbard, and Dame Durden, and so many names of that sort that my own name soon became quite lost among them. "However," said Mr. Jarndyce, "to return to our gossip. Here's Rick, a fine young fellow full of promise. What's to be done with him?" Oh, my goodness, the idea of asking my advice on such a point! "Here he is, Esther," said Mr. Jarndyce, comfortably putting his hands into his pockets and stretching out his legs. "He must have a profession; he must make some choice for himself. There will be a world more wiglomeration about it, I suppose, but it must be done." "More what, guardian?" said I. "More wiglomeration," said he. "It's the only name I know for the thing. He is a ward in Chancery, my dear. Kenge and Carboy will have something to say about it; Master Somebody--a sort of ridiculous sexton, digging graves for the merits of causes in a back room at the end of Quality Court, Chancery Lane--will have something to say about it; counsel will have something to say about it; the Chancellor will have something to say about it; the satellites will have something to say about it; they will all have to be handsomely feed, all round, about it; the whole thing will be vastly ceremonious, wordy, unsatisfactory, and expensive, and I call it, in general, wiglomeration. How mankind ever came to be afflicted with wiglomeration, or for whose sins these young people ever fell into a pit of it, I don't know; so it is." He began to rub his head again and to hint that he felt the wind. But it was a delightful instance of his kindness towards me that whether he rubbed his head, or walked about, or did both, his face was sure to recover its benignant expression as it looked at mine; and he was sure to turn comfortable again and put his hands in his pockets and stretch out his legs. "Perhaps it would be best, first of all," said I, "to ask Mr. Richard what he inclines to himself." "Exactly so," he returned. "That's what I mean! You know, just accustom yourself to talk it over, with your tact and in your quiet way, with him and Ada, and see what you all make of it. We are sure to come at the heart of the matter by your means, little woman." I really was frightened at the thought of the importance I was attaining and the number of things that were being confided to me. I had not meant this at all; I had meant that he should speak to Richard. But of course I said nothing in reply except that I would do my best, though I feared (I really felt it necessary to repeat this) that he thought me much more sagacious than I was. At which my guardian only laughed the pleasantest laugh I ever heard. "Come!" he said, rising and pushing back his chair. "I think we may have done with the growlery for one day! Only a concluding word. Esther, my dear, do you wish to ask me anything?" He looked so attentively at me that I looked attentively at him and felt sure I understood him. "About myself, sir?" said I. "Yes." "Guardian," said I, venturing to put my hand, which was suddenly colder than I could have wished, in his, "nothing! I am quite sure that if there were anything I ought to know or had any need to know, I should not have to ask you to tell it to me. If my whole reliance and confidence were not placed in you, I must have a hard heart indeed. I have nothing to ask you, nothing in the world." He drew my hand through his arm and we went away to look for Ada. From that hour I felt quite easy with him, quite unreserved, quite content to know no more, quite happy. We lived, at first, rather a busy life at Bleak House, for we had to become acquainted with many residents in and out of the neighbourhood who knew Mr. Jarndyce. It seemed to Ada and me that everybody knew him who wanted to do anything with anybody else's money. It amazed us when we began to sort his letters and to answer some of them for him in the growlery of a morning to find how the great object of the lives of nearly all his correspondents appeared to be to form themselves into committees for getting in and laying out money. The ladies were as desperate as the gentlemen; indeed, I think they were even more so. They threw themselves into committees in the most impassioned manner and collected subscriptions with a vehemence quite extraordinary. It appeared to us that some of them must pass their whole lives in dealing out subscription-cards to the whole post-office directory--shilling cards, half-crown cards, half-sovereign cards, penny cards. They wanted everything. They wanted wearing apparel, they wanted linen rags, they wanted money, they wanted coals, they wanted soup, they wanted interest, they wanted autographs, they wanted flannel, they wanted whatever Mr. Jarndyce had--or had not. Their objects were as various as their demands. They were going to raise new buildings, they were going to pay off debts on old buildings, they were going to establish in a picturesque building (engraving of proposed west elevation attached) the Sisterhood of Mediaeval Marys, they were going to give a testimonial to Mrs. Jellyby, they were going to have their secretary's portrait painted and presented to his mother-in-law, whose deep devotion to him was well known, they were going to get up everything, I really believe, from five hundred thousand tracts to an annuity and from a marble monument to a silver tea-pot. They took a multitude of titles. They were the Women of England, the Daughters of Britain, the Sisters of all the cardinal virtues separately, the Females of America, the Ladies of a hundred denominations. They appeared to be always excited about canvassing and electing. They seemed to our poor wits, and according to their own accounts, to be constantly polling people by tens of thousands, yet never bringing their candidates in for anything. It made our heads ache to think, on the whole, what feverish lives they must lead. Among the ladies who were most distinguished for this rapacious benevolence (if I may use the expression) was a Mrs. Pardiggle, who seemed, as I judged from the number of her letters to Mr. Jarndyce, to be almost as powerful a correspondent as Mrs. Jellyby herself. We observed that the wind always changed when Mrs. Pardiggle became the subject of conversation and that it invariably interrupted Mr. Jarndyce and prevented his going any farther, when he had remarked that there were two classes of charitable people; one, the people who did a little and made a great deal of noise; the other, the people who did a great deal and made no noise at all. We were therefore curious to see Mrs. Pardiggle, suspecting her to be a type of the former class, and were glad when she called one day with her five young sons. She was a formidable style of lady with spectacles, a prominent nose, and a loud voice, who had the effect of wanting a great deal of room. And she really did, for she knocked down little chairs with her skirts that were quite a great way off. As only Ada and I were at home, we received her timidly, for she seemed to come in like cold weather and to make the little Pardiggles blue as they followed. "These, young ladies," said Mrs. Pardiggle with great volubility after the first salutations, "are my five boys. You may have seen their names in a printed subscription list (perhaps more than one) in the possession of our esteemed friend Mr. Jarndyce. Egbert, my eldest (twelve), is the boy who sent out his pocket-money, to the amount of five and threepence, to the Tockahoopo Indians. Oswald, my second (ten and a half), is the child who contributed two and nine-pence to the Great National Smithers Testimonial. Francis, my third (nine), one and sixpence halfpenny; Felix, my fourth (seven), eightpence to the Superannuated Widows; Alfred, my youngest (five), has voluntarily enrolled himself in the Infant Bonds of Joy, and is pledged never, through life, to use tobacco in any form." We had never seen such dissatisfied children. It was not merely that they were weazened and shrivelled--though they were certainly that too--but they looked absolutely ferocious with discontent. At the mention of the Tockahoopo Indians, I could really have supposed Egbert to be one of the most baleful members of that tribe, he gave me such a savage frown. The face of each child, as the amount of his contribution was mentioned, darkened in a peculiarly vindictive manner, but his was by far the worst. I must except, however, the little recruit into the Infant Bonds of Joy, who was stolidly and evenly miserable. "You have been visiting, I understand," said Mrs. Pardiggle, "at Mrs. Jellyby's?" We said yes, we had passed one night there. "Mrs. Jellyby," pursued the lady, always speaking in the same demonstrative, loud, hard tone, so that her voice impressed my fancy as if it had a sort of spectacles on too--and I may take the opportunity of remarking that her spectacles were made the less engaging by her eyes being what Ada called "choking eyes," meaning very prominent--"Mrs. Jellyby is a benefactor to society and deserves a helping hand. My boys have contributed to the African project--Egbert, one and six, being the entire allowance of nine weeks; Oswald, one and a penny halfpenny, being the same; the rest, according to their little means. Nevertheless, I do not go with Mrs. Jellyby in all things. I do not go with Mrs. Jellyby in her treatment of her young family. It has been noticed. It has been observed that her young family are excluded from participation in the objects to which she is devoted. She may be right, she may be wrong; but, right or wrong, this is not my course with MY young family. I take them everywhere." I was afterwards convinced (and so was Ada) that from the ill-conditioned eldest child, these words extorted a sharp yell. He turned it off into a yawn, but it began as a yell. "They attend matins with me (very prettily done) at half-past six o'clock in the morning all the year round, including of course the depth of winter," said Mrs. Pardiggle rapidly, "and they are with me during the revolving duties of the day. I am a School lady, I am a Visiting lady, I am a Reading lady, I am a Distributing lady; I am on the local Linen Box Committee and many general committees; and my canvassing alone is very extensive--perhaps no one's more so. But they are my companions everywhere; and by these means they acquire that knowledge of the poor, and that capacity of doing charitable business in general--in short, that taste for the sort of thing--which will render them in after life a service to their neighbours and a satisfaction to themselves. My young family are not frivolous; they expend the entire amount of their allowance in subscriptions, under my direction; and they have attended as many public meetings and listened to as many lectures, orations, and discussions as generally fall to the lot of few grown people. Alfred (five), who, as I mentioned, has of his own election joined the Infant Bonds of Joy, was one of the very few children who manifested consciousness on that occasion after a fervid address of two hours from the chairman of the evening." Alfred glowered at us as if he never could, or would, forgive the injury of that night. "You may have observed, Miss Summerson," said Mrs. Pardiggle, "in some of the lists to which I have referred, in the possession of our esteemed friend Mr. Jarndyce, that the names of my young family are concluded with the name of O. A. Pardiggle, F.R.S., one pound. That is their father. We usually observe the same routine. I put down my mite first; then my young family enrol their contributions, according to their ages and their little means; and then Mr. Pardiggle brings up the rear. Mr. Pardiggle is happy to throw in his limited donation, under my direction; and thus things are made not only pleasant to ourselves, but, we trust, improving to others." Suppose Mr. Pardiggle were to dine with Mr. Jellyby, and suppose Mr. Jellyby were to relieve his mind after dinner to Mr. Pardiggle, would Mr. Pardiggle, in return, make any confidential communication to Mr. Jellyby? I was quite confused to find myself thinking this, but it came into my head. "You are very pleasantly situated here!" said Mrs. Pardiggle. We were glad to change the subject, and going to the window, pointed out the beauties of the prospect, on which the spectacles appeared to me to rest with curious indifference. "You know Mr. Gusher?" said our visitor. We were obliged to say that we had not the pleasure of Mr. Gusher's acquaintance. "The loss is yours, I assure you," said Mrs. Pardiggle with her commanding deportment. "He is a very fervid, impassioned speaker--full of fire! Stationed in a waggon on this lawn, now, which, from the shape of the land, is naturally adapted to a public meeting, he would improve almost any occasion you could mention for hours and hours! By this time, young ladies," said Mrs. Pardiggle, moving back to her chair and overturning, as if by invisible agency, a little round table at a considerable distance with my work-basket on it, "by this time you have found me out, I dare say?" This was really such a confusing question that Ada looked at me in perfect dismay. As to the guilty nature of my own consciousness after what I had been thinking, it must have been expressed in the colour of my cheeks. "Found out, I mean," said Mrs. Pardiggle, "the prominent point in my character. I am aware that it is so prominent as to be discoverable immediately. I lay myself open to detection, I know. Well! I freely admit, I am a woman of business. I love hard work; I enjoy hard work. The excitement does me good. I am so accustomed and inured to hard work that I don't know what fatigue is." We murmured that it was very astonishing and very gratifying, or something to that effect. I don't think we knew what it was either, but this is what our politeness expressed. "I do not understand what it is to be tired; you cannot tire me if you try!" said Mrs. Pardiggle. "The quantity of exertion (which is no exertion to me), the amount of business (which I regard as nothing), that I go through sometimes astonishes myself. I have seen my young family, and Mr. Pardiggle, quite worn out with witnessing it, when I may truly say I have been as fresh as a lark!" If that dark-visaged eldest boy could look more malicious than he had already looked, this was the time when he did it. I observed that he doubled his right fist and delivered a secret blow into the crown of his cap, which was under his left arm. "This gives me a great advantage when I am making my rounds," said Mrs. Pardiggle. "If I find a person unwilling to hear what I have to say, I tell that person directly, 'I am incapable of fatigue, my good friend, I am never tired, and I mean to go on until I have done.' It answers admirably! Miss Summerson, I hope I shall have your assistance in my visiting rounds immediately, and Miss Clare's very soon." At first I tried to excuse myself for the present on the general ground of having occupations to attend to which I must not neglect. But as this was an ineffectual protest, I then said, more particularly, that I was not sure of my qualifications. That I was inexperienced in the art of adapting my mind to minds very differently situated, and addressing them from suitable points of view. That I had not that delicate knowledge of the heart which must be essential to such a work. That I had much to learn, myself, before I could teach others, and that I could not confide in my good intentions alone. For these reasons I thought it best to be as useful as I could, and to render what kind services I could to those immediately about me, and to try to let that circle of duty gradually and naturally expand itself. All this I said with anything but confidence, because Mrs. Pardiggle was much older than I, and had great experience, and was so very military in her manners. "You are wrong, Miss Summerson," said she, "but perhaps you are not equal to hard work or the excitement of it, and that makes a vast difference. If you would like to see how I go through my work, I am now about--with my young family--to visit a brickmaker in the neighbourhood (a very bad character) and shall be glad to take you with me. Miss Clare also, if she will do me the favour." Ada and I interchanged looks, and as we were going out in any case, accepted the offer. When we hastily returned from putting on our bonnets, we found the young family languishing in a corner and Mrs. Pardiggle sweeping about the room, knocking down nearly all the light objects it contained. Mrs. Pardiggle took possession of Ada, and I followed with the family. Ada told me afterwards that Mrs. Pardiggle talked in the same loud tone (that, indeed, I overheard) all the way to the brickmaker's about an exciting contest which she had for two or three years waged against another lady relative to the bringing in of their rival candidates for a pension somewhere. There had been a quantity of printing, and promising, and proxying, and polling, and it appeared to have imparted great liveliness to all concerned, except the pensioners--who were not elected yet. I am very fond of being confided in by children and am happy in being usually favoured in that respect, but on this occasion it gave me great uneasiness. As soon as we were out of doors, Egbert, with the manner of a little footpad, demanded a shilling of me on the ground that his pocket-money was "boned" from him. On my pointing out the great impropriety of the word, especially in connexion with his parent (for he added sulkily "By her!"), he pinched me and said, "Oh, then! Now! Who are you! YOU wouldn't like it, I think? What does she make a sham for, and pretend to give me money, and take it away again? Why do you call it my allowance, and never let me spend it?" These exasperating questions so inflamed his mind and the minds of Oswald and Francis that they all pinched me at once, and in a dreadfully expert way--screwing up such little pieces of my arms that I could hardly forbear crying out. Felix, at the same time, stamped upon my toes. And the Bond of Joy, who on account of always having the whole of his little income anticipated stood in fact pledged to abstain from cakes as well as tobacco, so swelled with grief and rage when we passed a pastry-cook's shop that he terrified me by becoming purple. I never underwent so much, both in body and mind, in the course of a walk with young people as from these unnaturally constrained children when they paid me the compliment of being natural. I was glad when we came to the brickmaker's house, though it was one of a cluster of wretched hovels in a brick-field, with pigsties close to the broken windows and miserable little gardens before the doors growing nothing but stagnant pools. Here and there an old tub was put to catch the droppings of rain-water from a roof, or they were banked up with mud into a little pond like a large dirt-pie. At the doors and windows some men and women lounged or prowled about, and took little notice of us except to laugh to one another or to say something as we passed about gentlefolks minding their own business and not troubling their heads and muddying their shoes with coming to look after other people's. Mrs. Pardiggle, leading the way with a great show of moral determination and talking with much volubility about the untidy habits of the people (though I doubted if the best of us could have been tidy in such a place), conducted us into a cottage at the farthest corner, the ground-floor room of which we nearly filled. Besides ourselves, there were in this damp, offensive room a woman with a black eye, nursing a poor little gasping baby by the fire; a man, all stained with clay and mud and looking very dissipated, lying at full length on the ground, smoking a pipe; a powerful young man fastening a collar on a dog; and a bold girl doing some kind of washing in very dirty water. They all looked up at us as we came in, and the woman seemed to turn her face towards the fire as if to hide her bruised eye; nobody gave us any welcome. "Well, my friends," said Mrs. Pardiggle, but her voice had not a friendly sound, I thought; it was much too business-like and systematic. "How do you do, all of you? I am here again. I told you, you couldn't tire me, you know. I am fond of hard work, and am true to my word." "There an't," growled the man on the floor, whose head rested on his hand as he stared at us, "any more on you to come in, is there?" "No, my friend," said Mrs. Pardiggle, seating herself on one stool and knocking down another. "We are all here." "Because I thought there warn't enough of you, perhaps?" said the man, with his pipe between his lips as he looked round upon us. The young man and the girl both laughed. Two friends of the young man, whom we had attracted to the doorway and who stood there with their hands in their pockets, echoed the laugh noisily. "You can't tire me, good people," said Mrs. Pardiggle to these latter. "I enjoy hard work, and the harder you make mine, the better I like it." "Then make it easy for her!" growled the man upon the floor. "I wants it done, and over. I wants a end of these liberties took with my place. I wants an end of being drawed like a badger. Now you're a-going to poll-pry and question according to custom--I know what you're a-going to be up to. Well! You haven't got no occasion to be up to it. I'll save you the trouble. Is my daughter a-washin? Yes, she IS a-washin. Look at the water. Smell it! That's wot we drinks. How do you like it, and what do you think of gin instead! An't my place dirty? Yes, it is dirty--it's nat'rally dirty, and it's nat'rally onwholesome; and we've had five dirty and onwholesome children, as is all dead infants, and so much the better for them, and for us besides. Have I read the little book wot you left? No, I an't read the little book wot you left. There an't nobody here as knows how to read it; and if there wos, it wouldn't be suitable to me. It's a book fit for a babby, and I'm not a babby. If you was to leave me a doll, I shouldn't nuss it. How have I been conducting of myself? Why, I've been drunk for three days; and I'da been drunk four if I'da had the money. Don't I never mean for to go to church? No, I don't never mean for to go to church. I shouldn't be expected there, if I did; the beadle's too gen-teel for me. And how did my wife get that black eye? Why, I give it her; and if she says I didn't, she's a lie!" He had pulled his pipe out of his mouth to say all this, and he now turned over on his other side and smoked again. Mrs. Pardiggle, who had been regarding him through her spectacles with a forcible composure, calculated, I could not help thinking, to increase his antagonism, pulled out a good book as if it were a constable's staff and took the whole family into custody. I mean into religious custody, of course; but she really did it as if she were an inexorable moral policeman carrying them all off to a station-house. Ada and I were very uncomfortable. We both felt intrusive and out of place, and we both thought that Mrs. Pardiggle would have got on infinitely better if she had not had such a mechanical way of taking possession of people. The children sulked and stared; the family took no notice of us whatever, except when the young man made the dog bark, which he usually did when Mrs. Pardiggle was most emphatic. We both felt painfully sensible that between us and these people there was an iron barrier which could not be removed by our new friend. By whom or how it could be removed, we did not know, but we knew that. Even what she read and said seemed to us to be ill-chosen for such auditors, if it had been imparted ever so modestly and with ever so much tact. As to the little book to which the man on the floor had referred, we acquired a knowledge of it afterwards, and Mr. Jarndyce said he doubted if Robinson Crusoe could have read it, though he had had no other on his desolate island. We were much relieved, under these circumstances, when Mrs. Pardiggle left off. The man on the floor, then turning his head round again, said morosely, "Well! You've done, have you?" "For to-day, I have, my friend. But I am never fatigued. I shall come to you again in your regular order," returned Mrs. Pardiggle with demonstrative cheerfulness. "So long as you goes now," said he, folding his arms and shutting his eyes with an oath, "you may do wot you like!" Mrs. Pardiggle accordingly rose and made a little vortex in the confined room from which the pipe itself very narrowly escaped. Taking one of her young family in each hand, and telling the others to follow closely, and expressing her hope that the brickmaker and all his house would be improved when she saw them next, she then proceeded to another cottage. I hope it is not unkind in me to say that she certainly did make, in this as in everything else, a show that was not conciliatory of doing charity by wholesale and of dealing in it to a large extent. She supposed that we were following her, but as soon as the space was left clear, we approached the woman sitting by the fire to ask if the baby were ill. She only looked at it as it lay on her lap. We had observed before that when she looked at it she covered her discoloured eye with her hand, as though she wished to separate any association with noise and violence and ill treatment from the poor little child. Ada, whose gentle heart was moved by its appearance, bent down to touch its little face. As she did so, I saw what happened and drew her back. The child died. "Oh, Esther!" cried Ada, sinking on her knees beside it. "Look here! Oh, Esther, my love, the little thing! The suffering, quiet, pretty little thing! I am so sorry for it. I am so sorry for the mother. I never saw a sight so pitiful as this before! Oh, baby, baby!" Such compassion, such gentleness, as that with which she bent down weeping and put her hand upon the mother's might have softened any mother's heart that ever beat. The woman at first gazed at her in astonishment and then burst into tears. Presently I took the light burden from her lap, did what I could to make the baby's rest the prettier and gentler, laid it on a shelf, and covered it with my own handkerchief. We tried to comfort the mother, and we whispered to her what Our Saviour said of children. She answered nothing, but sat weeping--weeping very much. When I turned, I found that the young man had taken out the dog and was standing at the door looking in upon us with dry eyes, but quiet. The girl was quiet too and sat in a corner looking on the ground. The man had risen. He still smoked his pipe with an air of defiance, but he was silent. An ugly woman, very poorly clothed, hurried in while I was glancing at them, and coming straight up to the mother, said, "Jenny! Jenny!" The mother rose on being so addressed and fell upon the woman's neck. She also had upon her face and arms the marks of ill usage. She had no kind of grace about her, but the grace of sympathy; but when she condoled with the woman, and her own tears fell, she wanted no beauty. I say condoled, but her only words were "Jenny! Jenny!" All the rest was in the tone in which she said them. I thought it very touching to see these two women, coarse and shabby and beaten, so united; to see what they could be to one another; to see how they felt for one another, how the heart of each to each was softened by the hard trials of their lives. I think the best side of such people is almost hidden from us. What the poor are to the poor is little known, excepting to themselves and God. We felt it better to withdraw and leave them uninterrupted. We stole out quietly and without notice from any one except the man. He was leaning against the wall near the door, and finding that there was scarcely room for us to pass, went out before us. He seemed to want to hide that he did this on our account, but we perceived that he did, and thanked him. He made no answer. Ada was so full of grief all the way home, and Richard, whom we found at home, was so distressed to see her in tears (though he said to me, when she was not present, how beautiful it was too!), that we arranged to return at night with some little comforts and repeat our visit at the brick-maker's house. We said as little as we could to Mr. Jarndyce, but the wind changed directly. Richard accompanied us at night to the scene of our morning expedition. On our way there, we had to pass a noisy drinking-house, where a number of men were flocking about the door. Among them, and prominent in some dispute, was the father of the little child. At a short distance, we passed the young man and the dog, in congenial company. The sister was standing laughing and talking with some other young women at the corner of the row of cottages, but she seemed ashamed and turned away as we went by. We left our escort within sight of the brickmaker's dwelling and proceeded by ourselves. When we came to the door, we found the woman who had brought such consolation with her standing there looking anxiously out. "It's you, young ladies, is it?" she said in a whisper. "I'm a-watching for my master. My heart's in my mouth. If he was to catch me away from home, he'd pretty near murder me." "Do you mean your husband?" said I. "Yes, miss, my master. Jenny's asleep, quite worn out. She's scarcely had the child off her lap, poor thing, these seven days and nights, except when I've been able to take it for a minute or two." As she gave way for us, she went softly in and put what we had brought near the miserable bed on which the mother slept. No effort had been made to clean the room--it seemed in its nature almost hopeless of being clean; but the small waxen form from which so much solemnity diffused itself had been composed afresh, and washed, and neatly dressed in some fragments of white linen; and on my handkerchief, which still covered the poor baby, a little bunch of sweet herbs had been laid by the same rough, scarred hands, so lightly, so tenderly! "May heaven reward you!" we said to her. "You are a good woman." "Me, young ladies?" she returned with surprise. "Hush! Jenny, Jenny!" The mother had moaned in her sleep and moved. The sound of the familiar voice seemed to calm her again. She was quiet once more. How little I thought, when I raised my handkerchief to look upon the tiny sleeper underneath and seemed to see a halo shine around the child through Ada's drooping hair as her pity bent her head--how little I thought in whose unquiet bosom that handkerchief would come to lie after covering the motionless and peaceful breast! I only thought that perhaps the Angel of the child might not be all unconscious of the woman who replaced it with so compassionate a hand; not all unconscious of her presently, when we had taken leave, and left her at the door, by turns looking, and listening in terror for herself, and saying in her old soothing manner, "Jenny, Jenny!" CHAPTER IX Signs and Tokens I don't know how it is I seem to be always writing about myself. I mean all the time to write about other people, and I try to think about myself as little as possible, and I am sure, when I find myself coming into the story again, I am really vexed and say, "Dear, dear, you tiresome little creature, I wish you wouldn't!" but it is all of no use. I hope any one who may read what I write will understand that if these pages contain a great deal about me, I can only suppose it must be because I have really something to do with them and can't be kept out. My darling and I read together, and worked, and practised, and found so much employment for our time that the winter days flew by us like bright-winged birds. Generally in the afternoons, and always in the evenings, Richard gave us his company. Although he was one of the most restless creatures in the world, he certainly was very fond of our society. He was very, very, very fond of Ada. I mean it, and I had better say it at once. I had never seen any young people falling in love before, but I found them out quite soon. I could not say so, of course, or show that I knew anything about it. On the contrary, I was so demure and used to seem so unconscious that sometimes I considered within myself while I was sitting at work whether I was not growing quite deceitful. But there was no help for it. All I had to do was to be quiet, and I was as quiet as a mouse. They were as quiet as mice too, so far as any words were concerned, but the innocent manner in which they relied more and more upon me as they took more and more to one another was so charming that I had great difficulty in not showing how it interested me. "Our dear little old woman is such a capital old woman," Richard would say, coming up to meet me in the garden early, with his pleasant laugh and perhaps the least tinge of a blush, "that I can't get on without her. Before I begin my harum-scarum day--grinding away at those books and instruments and then galloping up hill and down dale, all the country round, like a highwayman--it does me so much good to come and have a steady walk with our comfortable friend, that here I am again!" "You know, Dame Durden, dear," Ada would say at night, with her head upon my shoulder and the firelight shining in her thoughtful eyes, "I don't want to talk when we come upstairs here. Only to sit a little while thinking, with your dear face for company, and to hear the wind and remember the poor sailors at sea--" Ah! Perhaps Richard was going to be a sailor. We had talked it over very often now, and there was some talk of gratifying the inclination of his childhood for the sea. Mr. Jarndyce had written to a relation of the family, a great Sir Leicester Dedlock, for his interest in Richard's favour, generally; and Sir Leicester had replied in a gracious manner that he would be happy to advance the prospects of the young gentleman if it should ever prove to be within his power, which was not at all probable, and that my Lady sent her compliments to the young gentleman (to whom she perfectly remembered that she was allied by remote consanguinity) and trusted that he would ever do his duty in any honourable profession to which he might devote himself. "So I apprehend it's pretty clear," said Richard to me, "that I shall have to work my own way. Never mind! Plenty of people have had to do that before now, and have done it. I only wish I had the command of a clipping privateer to begin with and could carry off the Chancellor and keep him on short allowance until he gave judgment in our cause. He'd find himself growing thin, if he didn't look sharp!" With a buoyancy and hopefulness and a gaiety that hardly ever flagged, Richard had a carelessness in his character that quite perplexed me, principally because he mistook it, in such a very odd way, for prudence. It entered into all his calculations about money in a singular manner which I don't think I can better explain than by reverting for a moment to our loan to Mr. Skimpole. Mr. Jarndyce had ascertained the amount, either from Mr. Skimpole himself or from Coavinses, and had placed the money in my hands with instructions to me to retain my own part of it and hand the rest to Richard. The number of little acts of thoughtless expenditure which Richard justified by the recovery of his ten pounds, and the number of times he talked to me as if he had saved or realized that amount, would form a sum in simple addition. "My prudent Mother Hubbard, why not?" he said to me when he wanted, without the least consideration, to bestow five pounds on the brickmaker. "I made ten pounds, clear, out of Coavinses' business." "How was that?" said I. "Why, I got rid of ten pounds which I was quite content to get rid of and never expected to see any more. You don't deny that?" "No," said I. "Very well! Then I came into possession of ten pounds--" "The same ten pounds," I hinted. "That has nothing to do with it!" returned Richard. "I have got ten pounds more than I expected to have, and consequently I can afford to spend it without being particular." In exactly the same way, when he was persuaded out of the sacrifice of these five pounds by being convinced that it would do no good, he carried that sum to his credit and drew upon it. "Let me see!" he would say. "I saved five pounds out of the brickmaker's affair, so if I have a good rattle to London and back in a post-chaise and put that down at four pounds, I shall have saved one. And it's a very good thing to save one, let me tell you: a penny saved is a penny got!" I believe Richard's was as frank and generous a nature as there possibly can be. He was ardent and brave, and in the midst of all his wild restlessness, was so gentle that I knew him like a brother in a few weeks. His gentleness was natural to him and would have shown itself abundantly even without Ada's influence; but with it, he became one of the most winning of companions, always so ready to be interested and always so happy, sanguine, and light-hearted. I am sure that I, sitting with them, and walking with them, and talking with them, and noticing from day to day how they went on, falling deeper and deeper in love, and saying nothing about it, and each shyly thinking that this love was the greatest of secrets, perhaps not yet suspected even by the other--I am sure that I was scarcely less enchanted than they were and scarcely less pleased with the pretty dream. We were going on in this way, when one morning at breakfast Mr. Jarndyce received a letter, and looking at the superscription, said, "From Boythorn? Aye, aye!" and opened and read it with evident pleasure, announcing to us in a parenthesis when he was about half-way through, that Boythorn was "coming down" on a visit. Now who was Boythorn, we all thought. And I dare say we all thought too--I am sure I did, for one--would Boythorn at all interfere with what was going forward? "I went to school with this fellow, Lawrence Boythorn," said Mr. Jarndyce, tapping the letter as he laid it on the table, "more than five and forty years ago. He was then the most impetuous boy in the world, and he is now the most impetuous man. He was then the loudest boy in the world, and he is now the loudest man. He was then the heartiest and sturdiest boy in the world, and he is now the heartiest and sturdiest man. He is a tremendous fellow." "In stature, sir?" asked Richard. "Pretty well, Rick, in that respect," said Mr. Jarndyce; "being some ten years older than I and a couple of inches taller, with his head thrown back like an old soldier, his stalwart chest squared, his hands like a clean blacksmith's, and his lungs! There's no simile for his lungs. Talking, laughing, or snoring, they make the beams of the house shake." As Mr. Jarndyce sat enjoying the image of his friend Boythorn, we observed the favourable omen that there was not the least indication of any change in the wind. "But it's the inside of the man, the warm heart of the man, the passion of the man, the fresh blood of the man, Rick--and Ada, and little Cobweb too, for you are all interested in a visitor--that I speak of," he pursued. "His language is as sounding as his voice. He is always in extremes, perpetually in the superlative degree. In his condemnation he is all ferocity. You might suppose him to be an ogre from what he says, and I believe he has the reputation of one with some people. There! I tell you no more of him beforehand. You must not be surprised to see him take me under his protection, for he has never forgotten that I was a low boy at school and that our friendship began in his knocking two of my head tyrant's teeth out (he says six) before breakfast. Boythorn and his man," to me, "will be here this afternoon, my dear." I took care that the necessary preparations were made for Mr. Boythorn's reception, and we looked forward to his arrival with some curiosity. The afternoon wore away, however, and he did not appear. The dinner-hour arrived, and still he did not appear. The dinner was put back an hour, and we were sitting round the fire with no light but the blaze when the hall-door suddenly burst open and the hall resounded with these words, uttered with the greatest vehemence and in a stentorian tone: "We have been misdirected, Jarndyce, by a most abandoned ruffian, who told us to take the turning to the right instead of to the left. He is the most intolerable scoundrel on the face of the earth. His father must have been a most consummate villain, ever to have such a son. I would have had that fellow shot without the least remorse!" "Did he do it on purpose?" Mr. Jarndyce inquired. "I have not the slightest doubt that the scoundrel has passed his whole existence in misdirecting travellers!" returned the other. "By my soul, I thought him the worst-looking dog I had ever beheld when he was telling me to take the turning to the right. And yet I stood before that fellow face to face and didn't knock his brains out!" "Teeth, you mean?" said Mr. Jarndyce. "Ha, ha, ha!" laughed Mr. Lawrence Boythorn, really making the whole house vibrate. "What, you have not forgotten it yet! Ha, ha, ha! And that was another most consummate vagabond! By my soul, the countenance of that fellow when he was a boy was the blackest image of perfidy, cowardice, and cruelty ever set up as a scarecrow in a field of scoundrels. If I were to meet that most unparalleled despot in the streets to-morrow, I would fell him like a rotten tree!" "I have no doubt of it," said Mr. Jarndyce. "Now, will you come upstairs?" "By my soul, Jarndyce," returned his guest, who seemed to refer to his watch, "if you had been married, I would have turned back at the garden-gate and gone away to the remotest summits of the Himalaya Mountains sooner than I would have presented myself at this unseasonable hour." "Not quite so far, I hope?" said Mr. Jarndyce. "By my life and honour, yes!" cried the visitor. "I wouldn't be guilty of the audacious insolence of keeping a lady of the house waiting all this time for any earthly consideration. I would infinitely rather destroy myself--infinitely rather!" Talking thus, they went upstairs, and presently we heard him in his bedroom thundering "Ha, ha, ha!" and again "Ha, ha, ha!" until the flattest echo in the neighbourhood seemed to catch the contagion and to laugh as enjoyingly as he did or as we did when we heard him laugh. We all conceived a prepossession in his favour, for there was a sterling quality in this laugh, and in his vigorous, healthy voice, and in the roundness and fullness with which he uttered every word he spoke, and in the very fury of his superlatives, which seemed to go off like blank cannons and hurt nothing. But we were hardly prepared to have it so confirmed by his appearance when Mr. Jarndyce presented him. He was not only a very handsome old gentleman--upright and stalwart as he had been described to us--with a massive grey head, a fine composure of face when silent, a figure that might have become corpulent but for his being so continually in earnest that he gave it no rest, and a chin that might have subsided into a double chin but for the vehement emphasis in which it was constantly required to assist; but he was such a true gentleman in his manner, so chivalrously polite, his face was lighted by a smile of so much sweetness and tenderness, and it seemed so plain that he had nothing to hide, but showed himself exactly as he was--incapable, as Richard said, of anything on a limited scale, and firing away with those blank great guns because he carried no small arms whatever--that really I could not help looking at him with equal pleasure as he sat at dinner, whether he smilingly conversed with Ada and me, or was led by Mr. Jarndyce into some great volley of superlatives, or threw up his head like a bloodhound and gave out that tremendous "Ha, ha, ha!" "You have brought your bird with you, I suppose?" said Mr. Jarndyce. "By heaven, he is the most astonishing bird in Europe!" replied the other. "He IS the most wonderful creature! I wouldn't take ten thousand guineas for that bird. I have left an annuity for his sole support in case he should outlive me. He is, in sense and attachment, a phenomenon. And his father before him was one of the most astonishing birds that ever lived!" The subject of this laudation was a very little canary, who was so tame that he was brought down by Mr. Boythorn's man, on his forefinger, and after taking a gentle flight round the room, alighted on his master's head. To hear Mr. Boythorn presently expressing the most implacable and passionate sentiments, with this fragile mite of a creature quietly perched on his forehead, was to have a good illustration of his character, I thought. "By my soul, Jarndyce," he said, very gently holding up a bit of bread to the canary to peck at, "if I were in your place I would seize every master in Chancery by the throat to-morrow morning and shake him until his money rolled out of his pockets and his bones rattled in his skin. I would have a settlement out of somebody, by fair means or by foul. If you would empower me to do it, I would do it for you with the greatest satisfaction!" (All this time the very small canary was eating out of his hand.) "I thank you, Lawrence, but the suit is hardly at such a point at present," returned Mr. Jarndyce, laughing, "that it would be greatly advanced even by the legal process of shaking the bench and the whole bar." "There never was such an infernal cauldron as that Chancery on the face of the earth!" said Mr. Boythorn. "Nothing but a mine below it on a busy day in term time, with all its records, rules, and precedents collected in it and every functionary belonging to it also, high and low, upward and downward, from its son the Accountant-General to its father the Devil, and the whole blown to atoms with ten thousand hundredweight of gunpowder, would reform it in the least!" It was impossible not to laugh at the energetic gravity with which he recommended this strong measure of reform. When we laughed, he threw up his head and shook his broad chest, and again the whole country seemed to echo to his "Ha, ha, ha!" It had not the least effect in disturbing the bird, whose sense of security was complete and who hopped about the table with its quick head now on this side and now on that, turning its bright sudden eye on its master as if he were no more than another bird. "But how do you and your neighbour get on about the disputed right of way?" said Mr. Jarndyce. "You are not free from the toils of the law yourself!" "The fellow has brought actions against ME for trespass, and I have brought actions against HIM for trespass," returned Mr. Boythorn. "By heaven, he is the proudest fellow breathing. It is morally impossible that his name can be Sir Leicester. It must be Sir Lucifer." "Complimentary to our distant relation!" said my guardian laughingly to Ada and Richard. "I would beg Miss Clare's pardon and Mr. Carstone's pardon," resumed our visitor, "if I were not reassured by seeing in the fair face of the lady and the smile of the gentleman that it is quite unnecessary and that they keep their distant relation at a comfortable distance." "Or he keeps us," suggested Richard. "By my soul," exclaimed Mr. Boythorn, suddenly firing another volley, "that fellow is, and his father was, and his grandfather was, the most stiff-necked, arrogant imbecile, pig-headed numskull, ever, by some inexplicable mistake of Nature, born in any station of life but a walking-stick's! The whole of that family are the most solemnly conceited and consummate blockheads! But it's no matter; he should not shut up my path if he were fifty baronets melted into one and living in a hundred Chesney Wolds, one within another, like the ivory balls in a Chinese carving. The fellow, by his agent, or secretary, or somebody, writes to me 'Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, presents his compliments to Mr. Lawrence Boythorn, and has to call his attention to the fact that the green pathway by the old parsonage-house, now the property of Mr. Lawrence Boythorn, is Sir Leicester's right of way, being in fact a portion of the park of Chesney Wold, and that Sir Leicester finds it convenient to close up the same.' I write to the fellow, 'Mr. Lawrence Boythorn presents his compliments to Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, and has to call HIS attention to the fact that he totally denies the whole of Sir Leicester Dedlock's positions on every possible subject and has to add, in reference to closing up the pathway, that he will be glad to see the man who may undertake to do it.' The fellow sends a most abandoned villain with one eye to construct a gateway. I play upon that execrable scoundrel with a fire-engine until the breath is nearly driven out of his body. The fellow erects a gate in the night. I chop it down and burn it in the morning. He sends his myrmidons to come over the fence and pass and repass. I catch them in humane man traps, fire split peas at their legs, play upon them with the engine--resolve to free mankind from the insupportable burden of the existence of those lurking ruffians. He brings actions for trespass; I bring actions for trespass. He brings actions for assault and battery; I defend them and continue to assault and batter. Ha, ha, ha!" To hear him say all this with unimaginable energy, one might have thought him the angriest of mankind. To see him at the very same time, looking at the bird now perched upon his thumb and softly smoothing its feathers with his forefinger, one might have thought him the gentlest. To hear him laugh and see the broad good nature of his face then, one might have supposed that he had not a care in the world, or a dispute, or a dislike, but that his whole existence was a summer joke. "No, no," he said, "no closing up of my paths by any Dedlock! Though I willingly confess," here he softened in a moment, "that Lady Dedlock is the most accomplished lady in the world, to whom I would do any homage that a plain gentleman, and no baronet with a head seven hundred years thick, may. A man who joined his regiment at twenty and within a week challenged the most imperious and presumptuous coxcomb of a commanding officer that ever drew the breath of life through a tight waist--and got broke for it--is not the man to be walked over by all the Sir Lucifers, dead or alive, locked or unlocked. Ha, ha, ha!" "Nor the man to allow his junior to be walked over either?" said my guardian. "Most assuredly not!" said Mr. Boythorn, clapping him on the shoulder with an air of protection that had something serious in it, though he laughed. "He will stand by the low boy, always. Jarndyce, you may rely upon him! But speaking of this trespass--with apologies to Miss Clare and Miss Summerson for the length at which I have pursued so dry a subject--is there nothing for me from your men Kenge and Carboy?" "I think not, Esther?" said Mr. Jarndyce. "Nothing, guardian." "Much obliged!" said Mr. Boythorn. "Had no need to ask, after even my slight experience of Miss Summerson's forethought for every one about her." (They all encouraged me; they were determined to do it.) "I inquired because, coming from Lincolnshire, I of course have not yet been in town, and I thought some letters might have been sent down here. I dare say they will report progress to-morrow morning." I saw him so often in the course of the evening, which passed very pleasantly, contemplate Richard and Ada with an interest and a satisfaction that made his fine face remarkably agreeable as he sat at a little distance from the piano listening to the music--and he had small occasion to tell us that he was passionately fond of music, for his face showed it--that I asked my guardian as we sat at the backgammon board whether Mr. Boythorn had ever been married. "No," said he. "No." "But he meant to be!" said I. "How did you find out that?" he returned with a smile. "Why, guardian," I explained, not without reddening a little at hazarding what was in my thoughts, "there is something so tender in his manner, after all, and he is so very courtly and gentle to us, and--" Mr. Jarndyce directed his eyes to where he was sitting as I have just described him. I said no more. "You are right, little woman," he answered. "He was all but married once. Long ago. And once." "Did the lady die?" "No--but she died to him. That time has had its influence on all his later life. Would you suppose him to have a head and a heart full of romance yet?" "I think, guardian, I might have supposed so. But it is easy to say that when you have told me so." "He has never since been what he might have been," said Mr. Jarndyce, "and now you see him in his age with no one near him but his servant and his little yellow friend. It's your throw, my dear!" I felt, from my guardian's manner, that beyond this point I could not pursue the subject without changing the wind. I therefore forbore to ask any further questions. I was interested, but not curious. I thought a little while about this old love story in the night, when I was awakened by Mr. Boythorn's lusty snoring; and I tried to do that very difficult thing, imagine old people young again and invested with the graces of youth. But I fell asleep before I had succeeded, and dreamed of the days when I lived in my godmother's house. I am not sufficiently acquainted with such subjects to know whether it is at all remarkable that I almost always dreamed of that period of my life. With the morning there came a letter from Messrs. Kenge and Carboy to Mr. Boythorn informing him that one of their clerks would wait upon him at noon. As it was the day of the week on which I paid the bills, and added up my books, and made all the household affairs as compact as possible, I remained at home while Mr. Jarndyce, Ada, and Richard took advantage of a very fine day to make a little excursion, Mr. Boythorn was to wait for Kenge and Carboy's clerk and then was to go on foot to meet them on their return. Well! I was full of business, examining tradesmen's books, adding up columns, paying money, filing receipts, and I dare say making a great bustle about it when Mr. Guppy was announced and shown in. I had had some idea that the clerk who was to be sent down might be the young gentleman who had met me at the coach-office, and I was glad to see him, because he was associated with my present happiness. I scarcely knew him again, he was so uncommonly smart. He had an entirely new suit of glossy clothes on, a shining hat, lilac-kid gloves, a neckerchief of a variety of colours, a large hot-house flower in his button-hole, and a thick gold ring on his little finger. Besides which, he quite scented the dining-room with bear's-grease and other perfumery. He looked at me with an attention that quite confused me when I begged him to take a seat until the servant should return; and as he sat there crossing and uncrossing his legs in a corner, and I asked him if he had had a pleasant ride, and hoped that Mr. Kenge was well, I never looked at him, but I found him looking at me in the same scrutinizing and curious way. When the request was brought to him that he would go upstairs to Mr. Boythorn's room, I mentioned that he would find lunch prepared for him when he came down, of which Mr. Jarndyce hoped he would partake. He said with some embarrassment, holding the handle of the door, "Shall I have the honour of finding you here, miss?" I replied yes, I should be there; and he went out with a bow and another look. I thought him only awkward and shy, for he was evidently much embarrassed; and I fancied that the best thing I could do would be to wait until I saw that he had everything he wanted and then to leave him to himself. The lunch was soon brought, but it remained for some time on the table. The interview with Mr. Boythorn was a long one, and a stormy one too, I should think, for although his room was at some distance I heard his loud voice rising every now and then like a high wind, and evidently blowing perfect broadsides of denunciation. At last Mr. Guppy came back, looking something the worse for the conference. "My eye, miss," he said in a low voice, "he's a Tartar!" "Pray take some refreshment, sir," said I. Mr. Guppy sat down at the table and began nervously sharpening the carving-knife on the carving-fork, still looking at me (as I felt quite sure without looking at him) in the same unusual manner. The sharpening lasted so long that at last I felt a kind of obligation on me to raise my eyes in order that I might break the spell under which he seemed to labour, of not being able to leave off. He immediately looked at the dish and began to carve. "What will you take yourself, miss? You'll take a morsel of something?" "No, thank you," said I. "Shan't I give you a piece of anything at all, miss?" said Mr. Guppy, hurriedly drinking off a glass of wine. "Nothing, thank you," said I. "I have only waited to see that you have everything you want. Is there anything I can order for you?" "No, I am much obliged to you, miss, I'm sure. I've everything that I can require to make me comfortable--at least I--not comfortable--I'm never that." He drank off two more glasses of wine, one after another. I thought I had better go. "I beg your pardon, miss!" said Mr. Guppy, rising when he saw me rise. "But would you allow me the favour of a minute's private conversation?" Not knowing what to say, I sat down again. "What follows is without prejudice, miss?" said Mr. Guppy, anxiously bringing a chair towards my table. "I don't understand what you mean," said I, wondering. "It's one of our law terms, miss. You won't make any use of it to my detriment at Kenge and Carboy's or elsewhere. If our conversation shouldn't lead to anything, I am to be as I was and am not to be prejudiced in my situation or worldly prospects. In short, it's in total confidence." "I am at a loss, sir," said I, "to imagine what you can have to communicate in total confidence to me, whom you have never seen but once; but I should be very sorry to do you any injury." "Thank you, miss. I'm sure of it--that's quite sufficient." All this time Mr. Guppy was either planing his forehead with his handkerchief or tightly rubbing the palm of his left hand with the palm of his right. "If you would excuse my taking another glass of wine, miss, I think it might assist me in getting on without a continual choke that cannot fail to be mutually unpleasant." He did so, and came back again. I took the opportunity of moving well behind my table. "You wouldn't allow me to offer you one, would you miss?" said Mr. Guppy, apparently refreshed. "Not any," said I. "Not half a glass?" said Mr. Guppy. "Quarter? No! Then, to proceed. My present salary, Miss Summerson, at Kenge and Carboy's, is two pound a week. When I first had the happiness of looking upon you, it was one fifteen, and had stood at that figure for a lengthened period. A rise of five has since taken place, and a further rise of five is guaranteed at the expiration of a term not exceeding twelve months from the present date. My mother has a little property, which takes the form of a small life annuity, upon which she lives in an independent though unassuming manner in the Old Street Road. She is eminently calculated for a mother-in-law. She never interferes, is all for peace, and her disposition easy. She has her failings--as who has not?--but I never knew her do it when company was present, at which time you may freely trust her with wines, spirits, or malt liquors. My own abode is lodgings at Penton Place, Pentonville. It is lowly, but airy, open at the back, and considered one of the 'ealthiest outlets. Miss Summerson! In the mildest language, I adore you. Would you be so kind as to allow me (as I may say) to file a declaration--to make an offer!" Mr. Guppy went down on his knees. I was well behind my table and not much frightened. I said, "Get up from that ridiculous position immediately, sir, or you will oblige me to break my implied promise and ring the bell!" "Hear me out, miss!" said Mr. Guppy, folding his hands. "I cannot consent to hear another word, sir," I returned, "Unless you get up from the carpet directly and go and sit down at the table as you ought to do if you have any sense at all." He looked piteously, but slowly rose and did so. "Yet what a mockery it is, miss," he said with his hand upon his heart and shaking his head at me in a melancholy manner over the tray, "to be stationed behind food at such a moment. The soul recoils from food at such a moment, miss." "I beg you to conclude," said I; "you have asked me to hear you out, and I beg you to conclude." "I will, miss," said Mr. Guppy. "As I love and honour, so likewise I obey. Would that I could make thee the subject of that vow before the shrine!" "That is quite impossible," said I, "and entirely out of the question." "I am aware," said Mr. Guppy, leaning forward over the tray and regarding me, as I again strangely felt, though my eyes were not directed to him, with his late intent look, "I am aware that in a worldly point of view, according to all appearances, my offer is a poor one. But, Miss Summerson! Angel! No, don't ring--I have been brought up in a sharp school and am accustomed to a variety of general practice. Though a young man, I have ferreted out evidence, got up cases, and seen lots of life. Blest with your hand, what means might I not find of advancing your interests and pushing your fortunes! What might I not get to know, nearly concerning you? I know nothing now, certainly; but what MIGHT I not if I had your confidence, and you set me on?" I told him that he addressed my interest or what he supposed to be my interest quite as unsuccessfully as he addressed my inclination, and he would now understand that I requested him, if he pleased, to go away immediately. "Cruel miss," said Mr. Guppy, "hear but another word! I think you must have seen that I was struck with those charms on the day when I waited at the Whytorseller. I think you must have remarked that I could not forbear a tribute to those charms when I put up the steps of the 'ackney-coach. It was a feeble tribute to thee, but it was well meant. Thy image has ever since been fixed in my breast. I have walked up and down of an evening opposite Jellyby's house only to look upon the bricks that once contained thee. This out of to-day, quite an unnecessary out so far as the attendance, which was its pretended object, went, was planned by me alone for thee alone. If I speak of interest, it is only to recommend myself and my respectful wretchedness. Love was before it, and is before it." "I should be pained, Mr. Guppy," said I, rising and putting my hand upon the bell-rope, "to do you or any one who was sincere the injustice of slighting any honest feeling, however disagreeably expressed. If you have really meant to give me a proof of your good opinion, though ill-timed and misplaced, I feel that I ought to thank you. I have very little reason to be proud, and I am not proud. I hope," I think I added, without very well knowing what I said, "that you will now go away as if you had never been so exceedingly foolish and attend to Messrs. Kenge and Carboy's business." "Half a minute, miss!" cried Mr. Guppy, checking me as I was about to ring. "This has been without prejudice?" "I will never mention it," said I, "unless you should give me future occasion to do so." "A quarter of a minute, miss! In case you should think better at any time, however distant--THAT'S no consequence, for my feelings can never alter--of anything I have said, particularly what might I not do, Mr. William Guppy, eighty-seven, Penton Place, or if removed, or dead (of blighted hopes or anything of that sort), care of Mrs. Guppy, three hundred and two, Old Street Road, will be sufficient." I rang the bell, the servant came, and Mr. Guppy, laying his written card upon the table and making a dejected bow, departed. Raising my eyes as he went out, I once more saw him looking at me after he had passed the door. I sat there for another hour or more, finishing my books and payments and getting through plenty of business. Then I arranged my desk, and put everything away, and was so composed and cheerful that I thought I had quite dismissed this unexpected incident. But, when I went upstairs to my own room, I surprised myself by beginning to laugh about it and then surprised myself still more by beginning to cry about it. In short, I was in a flutter for a little while and felt as if an old chord had been more coarsely touched than it ever had been since the days of the dear old doll, long buried in the garden. CHAPTER X The Law-Writer On the eastern borders of Chancery Lane, that is to say, more particularly in Cook's Court, Cursitor Street, Mr. Snagsby, law-stationer, pursues his lawful calling. In the shade of Cook's Court, at most times a shady place, Mr. Snagsby has dealt in all sorts of blank forms of legal process; in skins and rolls of parchment; in paper--foolscap, brief, draft, brown, white, whitey-brown, and blotting; in stamps; in office-quills, pens, ink, India-rubber, pounce, pins, pencils, sealing-wax, and wafers; in red tape and green ferret; in pocket-books, almanacs, diaries, and law lists; in string boxes, rulers, inkstands--glass and leaden--pen-knives, scissors, bodkins, and other small office-cutlery; in short, in articles too numerous to mention, ever since he was out of his time and went into partnership with Peffer. On that occasion, Cook's Court was in a manner revolutionized by the new inscription in fresh paint, PEFFER AND SNAGSBY, displacing the time-honoured and not easily to be deciphered legend PEFFER only. For smoke, which is the London ivy, had so wreathed itself round Peffer's name and clung to his dwelling-place that the affectionate parasite quite overpowered the parent tree. Peffer is never seen in Cook's Court now. He is not expected there, for he has been recumbent this quarter of a century in the churchyard of St. Andrews, Holborn, with the waggons and hackney-coaches roaring past him all the day and half the night like one great dragon. If he ever steal forth when the dragon is at rest to air himself again in Cook's Court until admonished to return by the crowing of the sanguine cock in the cellar at the little dairy in Cursitor Street, whose ideas of daylight it would be curious to ascertain, since he knows from his personal observation next to nothing about it--if Peffer ever do revisit the pale glimpses of Cook's Court, which no law-stationer in the trade can positively deny, he comes invisibly, and no one is the worse or wiser. In his lifetime, and likewise in the period of Snagsby's "time" of seven long years, there dwelt with Peffer in the same law-stationering premises a niece--a short, shrewd niece, something too violently compressed about the waist, and with a sharp nose like a sharp autumn evening, inclining to be frosty towards the end. The Cook's Courtiers had a rumour flying among them that the mother of this niece did, in her daughter's childhood, moved by too jealous a solicitude that her figure should approach perfection, lace her up every morning with her maternal foot against the bed-post for a stronger hold and purchase; and further, that she exhibited internally pints of vinegar and lemon-juice, which acids, they held, had mounted to the nose and temper of the patient. With whichsoever of the many tongues of Rumour this frothy report originated, it either never reached or never influenced the ears of young Snagsby, who, having wooed and won its fair subject on his arrival at man's estate, entered into two partnerships at once. So now, in Cook's Court, Cursitor Street, Mr. Snagsby and the niece are one; and the niece still cherishes her figure, which, however tastes may differ, is unquestionably so far precious that there is mighty little of it. Mr. and Mrs. Snagsby are not only one bone and one flesh, but, to the neighbours' thinking, one voice too. That voice, appearing to proceed from Mrs. Snagsby alone, is heard in Cook's Court very often. Mr. Snagsby, otherwise than as he finds expression through these dulcet tones, is rarely heard. He is a mild, bald, timid man with a shining head and a scrubby clump of black hair sticking out at the back. He tends to meekness and obesity. As he stands at his door in Cook's Court in his grey shop-coat and black calico sleeves, looking up at the clouds, or stands behind a desk in his dark shop with a heavy flat ruler, snipping and slicing at sheepskin in company with his two 'prentices, he is emphatically a retiring and unassuming man. From beneath his feet, at such times, as from a shrill ghost unquiet in its grave, there frequently arise complainings and lamentations in the voice already mentioned; and haply, on some occasions when these reach a sharper pitch than usual, Mr. Snagsby mentions to the 'prentices, "I think my little woman is a-giving it to Guster!" This proper name, so used by Mr. Snagsby, has before now sharpened the wit of the Cook's Courtiers to remark that it ought to be the name of Mrs. Snagsby, seeing that she might with great force and expression be termed a Guster, in compliment to her stormy character. It is, however, the possession, and the only possession except fifty shillings per annum and a very small box indifferently filled with clothing, of a lean young woman from a workhouse (by some supposed to have been christened Augusta) who, although she was farmed or contracted for during her growing time by an amiable benefactor of his species resident at Tooting, and cannot fail to have been developed under the most favourable circumstances, "has fits," which the parish can't account for. Guster, really aged three or four and twenty, but looking a round ten years older, goes cheap with this unaccountable drawback of fits, and is so apprehensive of being returned on the hands of her patron saint that except when she is found with her head in the pail, or the sink, or the copper, or the dinner, or anything else that happens to be near her at the time of her seizure, she is always at work. She is a satisfaction to the parents and guardians of the 'prentices, who feel that there is little danger of her inspiring tender emotions in the breast of youth; she is a satisfaction to Mrs. Snagsby, who can always find fault with her; she is a satisfaction to Mr. Snagsby, who thinks it a charity to keep her. The law-stationer's establishment is, in Guster's eyes, a temple of plenty and splendour. She believes the little drawing-room upstairs, always kept, as one may say, with its hair in papers and its pinafore on, to be the most elegant apartment in Christendom. The view it commands of Cook's Court at one end (not to mention a squint into Cursitor Street) and of Coavinses' the sheriff's officer's backyard at the other she regards as a prospect of unequalled beauty. The portraits it displays in oil--and plenty of it too--of Mr. Snagsby looking at Mrs. Snagsby and of Mrs. Snagsby looking at Mr. Snagsby are in her eyes as achievements of Raphael or Titian. Guster has some recompenses for her many privations. Mr. Snagsby refers everything not in the practical mysteries of the business to Mrs. Snagsby. She manages the money, reproaches the tax-gatherers, appoints the times and places of devotion on Sundays, licenses Mr. Snagsby's entertainments, and acknowledges no responsibility as to what she thinks fit to provide for dinner, insomuch that she is the high standard of comparison among the neighbouring wives a long way down Chancery Lane on both sides, and even out in Holborn, who in any domestic passages of arms habitually call upon their husbands to look at the difference between their (the wives') position and Mrs. Snagsby's, and their (the husbands') behaviour and Mr. Snagsby's. Rumour, always flying bat-like about Cook's Court and skimming in and out at everybody's windows, does say that Mrs. Snagsby is jealous and inquisitive and that Mr. Snagsby is sometimes worried out of house and home, and that if he had the spirit of a mouse he wouldn't stand it. It is even observed that the wives who quote him to their self-willed husbands as a shining example in reality look down upon him and that nobody does so with greater superciliousness than one particular lady whose lord is more than suspected of laying his umbrella on her as an instrument of correction. But these vague whisperings may arise from Mr. Snagsby's being in his way rather a meditative and poetical man, loving to walk in Staple Inn in the summer-time and to observe how countrified the sparrows and the leaves are, also to lounge about the Rolls Yard of a Sunday afternoon and to remark (if in good spirits) that there were old times once and that you'd find a stone coffin or two now under that chapel, he'll be bound, if you was to dig for it. He solaces his imagination, too, by thinking of the many Chancellors and Vices, and Masters of the Rolls who are deceased; and he gets such a flavour of the country out of telling the two 'prentices how he HAS heard say that a brook "as clear as crystal" once ran right down the middle of Holborn, when Turnstile really was a turnstile, leading slap away into the meadows--gets such a flavour of the country out of this that he never wants to go there. The day is closing in and the gas is lighted, but is not yet fully effective, for it is not quite dark. Mr. Snagsby standing at his shop-door looking up at the clouds sees a crow who is out late skim westward over the slice of sky belonging to Cook's Court. The crow flies straight across Chancery Lane and Lincoln's Inn Garden into Lincoln's Inn Fields. Here, in a large house, formerly a house of state, lives Mr. Tulkinghorn. It is let off in sets of chambers now, and in those shrunken fragments of its greatness, lawyers lie like maggots in nuts. But its roomy staircases, passages, and antechambers still remain; and even its painted ceilings, where Allegory, in Roman helmet and celestial linen, sprawls among balustrades and pillars, flowers, clouds, and big-legged boys, and makes the head ache--as would seem to be Allegory's object always, more or less. Here, among his many boxes labelled with transcendent names, lives Mr. Tulkinghorn, when not speechlessly at home in country-houses where the great ones of the earth are bored to death. Here he is to-day, quiet at his table. An oyster of the old school whom nobody can open. Like as he is to look at, so is his apartment in the dusk of the present afternoon. Rusty, out of date, withdrawing from attention, able to afford it. Heavy, broad-backed, old-fashioned, mahogany-and-horsehair chairs, not easily lifted; obsolete tables with spindle-legs and dusty baize covers; presentation prints of the holders of great titles in the last generation or the last but one, environ him. A thick and dingy Turkey-carpet muffles the floor where he sits, attended by two candles in old-fashioned silver candlesticks that give a very insufficient light to his large room. The titles on the backs of his books have retired into the binding; everything that can have a lock has got one; no key is visible. Very few loose papers are about. He has some manuscript near him, but is not referring to it. With the round top of an inkstand and two broken bits of sealing-wax he is silently and slowly working out whatever train of indecision is in his mind. Now the inkstand top is in the middle, now the red bit of sealing-wax, now the black bit. That's not it. Mr. Tulkinghorn must gather them all up and begin again. Here, beneath the painted ceiling, with foreshortened Allegory staring down at his intrusion as if it meant to swoop upon him, and he cutting it dead, Mr. Tulkinghorn has at once his house and office. He keeps no staff, only one middle-aged man, usually a little out at elbows, who sits in a high pew in the hall and is rarely overburdened with business. Mr. Tulkinghorn is not in a common way. He wants no clerks. He is a great reservoir of confidences, not to be so tapped. His clients want HIM; he is all in all. Drafts that he requires to be drawn are drawn by special-pleaders in the temple on mysterious instructions; fair copies that he requires to be made are made at the stationers', expense being no consideration. The middle-aged man in the pew knows scarcely more of the affairs of the peerage than any crossing-sweeper in Holborn. The red bit, the black bit, the inkstand top, the other inkstand top, the little sand-box. So! You to the middle, you to the right, you to the left. This train of indecision must surely be worked out now or never. Now! Mr. Tulkinghorn gets up, adjusts his spectacles, puts on his hat, puts the manuscript in his pocket, goes out, tells the middle-aged man out at elbows, "I shall be back presently." Very rarely tells him anything more explicit. Mr. Tulkinghorn goes, as the crow came--not quite so straight, but nearly--to Cook's Court, Cursitor Street. To Snagsby's, Law-Stationer's, Deeds engrossed and copied, Law-Writing executed in all its branches, &c., &c., &c. It is somewhere about five or six o'clock in the afternoon, and a balmy fragrance of warm tea hovers in Cook's Court. It hovers about Snagsby's door. The hours are early there: dinner at half-past one and supper at half-past nine. Mr. Snagsby was about to descend into the subterranean regions to take tea when he looked out of his door just now and saw the crow who was out late. "Master at home?" Guster is minding the shop, for the 'prentices take tea in the kitchen with Mr. and Mrs. Snagsby; consequently, the robe-maker's two daughters, combing their curls at the two glasses in the two second-floor windows of the opposite house, are not driving the two 'prentices to distraction as they fondly suppose, but are merely awakening the unprofitable admiration of Guster, whose hair won't grow, and never would, and it is confidently thought, never will. "Master at home?" says Mr. Tulkinghorn. Master is at home, and Guster will fetch him. Guster disappears, glad to get out of the shop, which she regards with mingled dread and veneration as a storehouse of awful implements of the great torture of the law--a place not to be entered after the gas is turned off. Mr. Snagsby appears, greasy, warm, herbaceous, and chewing. Bolts a bit of bread and butter. Says, "Bless my soul, sir! Mr. Tulkinghorn!" "I want half a word with you, Snagsby." "Certainly, sir! Dear me, sir, why didn't you send your young man round for me? Pray walk into the back shop, sir." Snagsby has brightened in a moment. The confined room, strong of parchment-grease, is warehouse, counting-house, and copying-office. Mr. Tulkinghorn sits, facing round, on a stool at the desk. "Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Snagsby." "Yes, sir." Mr. Snagsby turns up the gas and coughs behind his hand, modestly anticipating profit. Mr. Snagsby, as a timid man, is accustomed to cough with a variety of expressions, and so to save words. "You copied some affidavits in that cause for me lately." "Yes, sir, we did." "There was one of them," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, carelessly feeling--tight, unopenable oyster of the old school!--in the wrong coat-pocket, "the handwriting of which is peculiar, and I rather like. As I happened to be passing, and thought I had it about me, I looked in to ask you--but I haven't got it. No matter, any other time will do. Ah! here it is! I looked in to ask you who copied this." "Who copied this, sir?" says Mr. Snagsby, taking it, laying it flat on the desk, and separating all the sheets at once with a twirl and a twist of the left hand peculiar to lawstationers. "We gave this out, sir. We were giving out rather a large quantity of work just at that time. I can tell you in a moment who copied it, sir, by referring to my book." Mr. Snagsby takes his book down from the safe, makes another bolt of the bit of bread and butter which seemed to have stopped short, eyes the affidavit aside, and brings his right forefinger travelling down a page of the book, "Jewby--Packer--Jarndyce." "Jarndyce! Here we are, sir," says Mr. Snagsby. "To be sure! I might have remembered it. This was given out, sir, to a writer who lodges just over on the opposite side of the lane." Mr. Tulkinghorn has seen the entry, found it before the law-stationer, read it while the forefinger was coming down the hill. "WHAT do you call him? Nemo?" says Mr. Tulkinghorn. "Nemo, sir. Here it is. Forty-two folio. Given out on the Wednesday night at eight o'clock, brought in on the Thursday morning at half after nine." "Nemo!" repeats Mr. Tulkinghorn. "Nemo is Latin for no one." "It must be English for some one, sir, I think," Mr. Snagsby submits with his deferential cough. "It is a person's name. Here it is, you see, sir! Forty-two folio. Given out Wednesday night, eight o'clock; brought in Thursday morning, half after nine." The tail of Mr. Snagsby's eye becomes conscious of the head of Mrs. Snagsby looking in at the shop-door to know what he means by deserting his tea. Mr. Snagsby addresses an explanatory cough to Mrs. Snagsby, as who should say, "My dear, a customer!" "Half after nine, sir," repeats Mr. Snagsby. "Our law-writers, who live by job-work, are a queer lot; and this may not be his name, but it's the name he goes by. I remember now, sir, that he gives it in a written advertisement he sticks up down at the Rule Office, and the King's Bench Office, and the Judges' Chambers, and so forth. You know the kind of document, sir--wanting employ?" Mr. Tulkinghorn glances through the little window at the back of Coavinses', the sheriff's officer's, where lights shine in Coavinses' windows. Coavinses' coffee-room is at the back, and the shadows of several gentlemen under a cloud loom cloudily upon the blinds. Mr. Snagsby takes the opportunity of slightly turning his head to glance over his shoulder at his little woman and to make apologetic motions with his mouth to this effect: "Tul-king-horn--rich--in-flu-en-tial!" "Have you given this man work before?" asks Mr. Tulkinghorn. "Oh, dear, yes, sir! Work of yours." "Thinking of more important matters, I forget where you said he lived?" "Across the lane, sir. In fact, he lodges at a--" Mr. Snagsby makes another bolt, as if the bit of bread and butter were insurmountable "--at a rag and bottle shop." "Can you show me the place as I go back?" "With the greatest pleasure, sir!" Mr. Snagsby pulls off his sleeves and his grey coat, pulls on his black coat, takes his hat from its peg. "Oh! Here is my little woman!" he says aloud. "My dear, will you be so kind as to tell one of the lads to look after the shop while I step across the lane with Mr. Tulkinghorn? Mrs. Snagsby, sir--I shan't be two minutes, my love!" Mrs. Snagsby bends to the lawyer, retires behind the counter, peeps at them through the window-blind, goes softly into the back office, refers to the entries in the book still lying open. Is evidently curious. "You will find that the place is rough, sir," says Mr. Snagsby, walking deferentially in the road and leaving the narrow pavement to the lawyer; "and the party is very rough. But they're a wild lot in general, sir. The advantage of this particular man is that he never wants sleep. He'll go at it right on end if you want him to, as long as ever you like." It is quite dark now, and the gas-lamps have acquired their full effect. Jostling against clerks going to post the day's letters, and against counsel and attorneys going home to dinner, and against plaintiffs and defendants and suitors of all sorts, and against the general crowd, in whose way the forensic wisdom of ages has interposed a million of obstacles to the transaction of the commonest business of life; diving through law and equity, and through that kindred mystery, the street mud, which is made of nobody knows what and collects about us nobody knows whence or how--we only knowing in general that when there is too much of it we find it necessary to shovel it away--the lawyer and the law-stationer come to a rag and bottle shop and general emporium of much disregarded merchandise, lying and being in the shadow of the wall of Lincoln's Inn, and kept, as is announced in paint, to all whom it may concern, by one Krook. "This is where he lives, sir," says the law-stationer. "This is where he lives, is it?" says the lawyer unconcernedly. "Thank you." "Are you not going in, sir?" "No, thank you, no; I am going on to the Fields at present. Good evening. Thank you!" Mr. Snagsby lifts his hat and returns to his little woman and his tea. But Mr. Tulkinghorn does not go on to the Fields at present. He goes a short way, turns back, comes again to the shop of Mr. Krook, and enters it straight. It is dim enough, with a blot-headed candle or so in the windows, and an old man and a cat sitting in the back part by a fire. The old man rises and comes forward, with another blot-headed candle in his hand. "Pray is your lodger within?" "Male or female, sir?" says Mr. Krook. "Male. The person who does copying." Mr. Krook has eyed his man narrowly. Knows him by sight. Has an indistinct impression of his aristocratic repute. "Did you wish to see him, sir?" "Yes." "It's what I seldom do myself," says Mr. Krook with a grin. "Shall I call him down? But it's a weak chance if he'd come, sir!" "I'll go up to him, then," says Mr. Tulkinghorn. "Second floor, sir. Take the candle. Up there!" Mr. Krook, with his cat beside him, stands at the bottom of the staircase, looking after Mr. Tulkinghorn. "Hi-hi!" he says when Mr. Tulkinghorn has nearly disappeared. The lawyer looks down over the hand-rail. The cat expands her wicked mouth and snarls at him. "Order, Lady Jane! Behave yourself to visitors, my lady! You know what they say of my lodger?" whispers Krook, going up a step or two. "What do they say of him?" "They say he has sold himself to the enemy, but you and I know better--he don't buy. I'll tell you what, though; my lodger is so black-humoured and gloomy that I believe he'd as soon make that bargain as any other. Don't put him out, sir. That's my advice!" Mr. Tulkinghorn with a nod goes on his way. He comes to the dark door on the second floor. He knocks, receives no answer, opens it, and accidentally extinguishes his candle in doing so. The air of the room is almost bad enough to have extinguished it if he had not. It is a small room, nearly black with soot, and grease, and dirt. In the rusty skeleton of a grate, pinched at the middle as if poverty had gripped it, a red coke fire burns low. In the corner by the chimney stand a deal table and a broken desk, a wilderness marked with a rain of ink. In another corner a ragged old portmanteau on one of the two chairs serves for cabinet or wardrobe; no larger one is needed, for it collapses like the cheeks of a starved man. The floor is bare, except that one old mat, trodden to shreds of rope-yarn, lies perishing upon the hearth. No curtain veils the darkness of the night, but the discoloured shutters are drawn together, and through the two gaunt holes pierced in them, famine might be staring in--the banshee of the man upon the bed. For, on a low bed opposite the fire, a confusion of dirty patchwork, lean-ribbed ticking, and coarse sacking, the lawyer, hesitating just within the doorway, sees a man. He lies there, dressed in shirt and trousers, with bare feet. He has a yellow look in the spectral darkness of a candle that has guttered down until the whole length of its wick (still burning) has doubled over and left a tower of winding-sheet above it. His hair is ragged, mingling with his whiskers and his beard--the latter, ragged too, and grown, like the scum and mist around him, in neglect. Foul and filthy as the room is, foul and filthy as the air is, it is not easy to perceive what fumes those are which most oppress the senses in it; but through the general sickliness and faintness, and the odour of stale tobacco, there comes into the lawyer's mouth the bitter, vapid taste of opium. "Hallo, my friend!" he cries, and strikes his iron candlestick against the door. He thinks he has awakened his friend. He lies a little turned away, but his eyes are surely open. "Hallo, my friend!" he cries again. "Hallo! Hallo!" As he rattles on the door, the candle which has drooped so long goes out and leaves him in the dark, with the gaunt eyes in the shutters staring down upon the bed. CHAPTER XI Our Dear Brother A touch on the lawyer's wrinkled hand as he stands in the dark room, irresolute, makes him start and say, "What's that?" "It's me," returns the old man of the house, whose breath is in his ear. "Can't you wake him?" "No." "What have you done with your candle?" "It's gone out. Here it is." Krook takes it, goes to the fire, stoops over the red embers, and tries to get a light. The dying ashes have no light to spare, and his endeavours are vain. Muttering, after an ineffectual call to his lodger, that he will go downstairs and bring a lighted candle from the shop, the old man departs. Mr. Tulkinghorn, for some new reason that he has, does not await his return in the room, but on the stairs outside. The welcome light soon shines upon the wall, as Krook comes slowly up with his green-eyed cat following at his heels. "Does the man generally sleep like this?" inquired the lawyer in a low voice. "Hi! I don't know," says Krook, shaking his head and lifting his eyebrows. "I know next to nothing of his habits except that he keeps himself very close." Thus whispering, they both go in together. As the light goes in, the great eyes in the shutters, darkening, seem to close. Not so the eyes upon the bed. "God save us!" exclaims Mr. Tulkinghorn. "He is dead!" Krook drops the heavy hand he has taken up so suddenly that the arm swings over the bedside. They look at one another for a moment. "Send for some doctor! Call for Miss Flite up the stairs, sir. Here's poison by the bed! Call out for Flite, will you?" says Krook, with his lean hands spread out above the body like a vampire's wings. Mr. Tulkinghorn hurries to the landing and calls, "Miss Flite! Flite! Make haste, here, whoever you are! Flite!" Krook follows him with his eyes, and while he is calling, finds opportunity to steal to the old portmanteau and steal back again. "Run, Flite, run! The nearest doctor! Run!" So Mr. Krook addresses a crazy little woman who is his female lodger, who appears and vanishes in a breath, who soon returns accompanied by a testy medical man brought from his dinner, with a broad, snuffy upper lip and a broad Scotch tongue. "Ey! Bless the hearts o' ye," says the medical man, looking up at them after a moment's examination. "He's just as dead as Phairy!" Mr. Tulkinghorn (standing by the old portmanteau) inquires if he has been dead any time. "Any time, sir?" says the medical gentleman. "It's probable he wull have been dead aboot three hours." "About that time, I should say," observes a dark young man on the other side of the bed. "Air you in the maydickle prayfession yourself, sir?" inquires the first. The dark young man says yes. "Then I'll just tak' my depairture," replies the other, "for I'm nae gude here!" With which remark he finishes his brief attendance and returns to finish his dinner. The dark young surgeon passes the candle across and across the face and carefully examines the law-writer, who has established his pretensions to his name by becoming indeed No one. "I knew this person by sight very well," says he. "He has purchased opium of me for the last year and a half. Was anybody present related to him?" glancing round upon the three bystanders. "I was his landlord," grimly answers Krook, taking the candle from the surgeon's outstretched hand. "He told me once I was the nearest relation he had." "He has died," says the surgeon, "of an over-dose of opium, there is no doubt. The room is strongly flavoured with it. There is enough here now," taking an old tea-pot from Mr. Krook, "to kill a dozen people." "Do you think he did it on purpose?" asks Krook. "Took the over-dose?" "Yes!" Krook almost smacks his lips with the unction of a horrible interest. "I can't say. I should think it unlikely, as he has been in the habit of taking so much. But nobody can tell. He was very poor, I suppose?" "I suppose he was. His room--don't look rich," says Krook, who might have changed eyes with his cat, as he casts his sharp glance around. "But I have never been in it since he had it, and he was too close to name his circumstances to me." "Did he owe you any rent?" "Six weeks." "He will never pay it!" says the young man, resuming his examination. "It is beyond a doubt that he is indeed as dead as Pharaoh; and to judge from his appearance and condition, I should think it a happy release. Yet he must have been a good figure when a youth, and I dare say, good-looking." He says this, not unfeelingly, while sitting on the bedstead's edge with his face towards that other face and his hand upon the region of the heart. "I recollect once thinking there was something in his manner, uncouth as it was, that denoted a fall in life. Was that so?" he continues, looking round. Krook replies, "You might as well ask me to describe the ladies whose heads of hair I have got in sacks downstairs. Than that he was my lodger for a year and a half and lived--or didn't live--by law-writing, I know no more of him." During this dialogue Mr. Tulkinghorn has stood aloof by the old portmanteau, with his hands behind him, equally removed, to all appearance, from all three kinds of interest exhibited near the bed--from the young surgeon's professional interest in death, noticeable as being quite apart from his remarks on the deceased as an individual; from the old man's unction; and the little crazy woman's awe. His imperturbable face has been as inexpressive as his rusty clothes. One could not even say he has been thinking all this while. He has shown neither patience nor impatience, nor attention nor abstraction. He has shown nothing but his shell. As easily might the tone of a delicate musical instrument be inferred from its case, as the tone of Mr. Tulkinghorn from his case. He now interposes, addressing the young surgeon in his unmoved, professional way. "I looked in here," he observes, "just before you, with the intention of giving this deceased man, whom I never saw alive, some employment at his trade of copying. I had heard of him from my stationer--Snagsby of Cook's Court. Since no one here knows anything about him, it might be as well to send for Snagsby. Ah!" to the little crazy woman, who has often seen him in court, and whom he has often seen, and who proposes, in frightened dumb-show, to go for the law-stationer. "Suppose you do!" While she is gone, the surgeon abandons his hopeless investigation and covers its subject with the patchwork counterpane. Mr. Krook and he interchange a word or two. Mr. Tulkinghorn says nothing, but stands, ever, near the old portmanteau. Mr. Snagsby arrives hastily in his grey coat and his black sleeves. "Dear me, dear me," he says; "and it has come to this, has it! Bless my soul!" "Can you give the person of the house any information about this unfortunate creature, Snagsby?" inquires Mr. Tulkinghorn. "He was in arrears with his rent, it seems. And he must be buried, you know." "Well, sir," says Mr. Snagsby, coughing his apologetic cough behind his hand, "I really don't know what advice I could offer, except sending for the beadle." "I don't speak of advice," returns Mr. Tulkinghorn. "I could advise--" "No one better, sir, I am sure," says Mr. Snagsby, with his deferential cough. "I speak of affording some clue to his connexions, or to where he came from, or to anything concerning him." "I assure you, sir," says Mr. Snagsby after prefacing his reply with his cough of general propitiation, "that I no more know where he came from than I know--" "Where he has gone to, perhaps," suggests the surgeon to help him out. A pause. Mr. Tulkinghorn looking at the law-stationer. Mr. Krook, with his mouth open, looking for somebody to speak next. "As to his connexions, sir," says Mr. Snagsby, "if a person was to say to me, 'Snagsby, here's twenty thousand pound down, ready for you in the Bank of England if you'll only name one of 'em,' I couldn't do it, sir! About a year and a half ago--to the best of my belief, at the time when he first came to lodge at the present rag and bottle shop--" "That was the time!" says Krook with a nod. "About a year and a half ago," says Mr. Snagsby, strengthened, "he came into our place one morning after breakfast, and finding my little woman (which I name Mrs. Snagsby when I use that appellation) in our shop, produced a specimen of his handwriting and gave her to understand that he was in want of copying work to do and was, not to put too fine a point upon it," a favourite apology for plain speaking with Mr. Snagsby, which he always offers with a sort of argumentative frankness, "hard up! My little woman is not in general partial to strangers, particular--not to put too fine a point upon it--when they want anything. But she was rather took by something about this person, whether by his being unshaved, or by his hair being in want of attention, or by what other ladies' reasons, I leave you to judge; and she accepted of the specimen, and likewise of the address. My little woman hasn't a good ear for names," proceeds Mr. Snagsby after consulting his cough of consideration behind his hand, "and she considered Nemo equally the same as Nimrod. In consequence of which, she got into a habit of saying to me at meals, 'Mr. Snagsby, you haven't found Nimrod any work yet!' or 'Mr. Snagsby, why didn't you give that eight and thirty Chancery folio in Jarndyce to Nimrod?' or such like. And that is the way he gradually fell into job-work at our place; and that is the most I know of him except that he was a quick hand, and a hand not sparing of night-work, and that if you gave him out, say, five and forty folio on the Wednesday night, you would have it brought in on the Thursday morning. All of which--" Mr. Snagsby concludes by politely motioning with his hat towards the bed, as much as to add, "I have no doubt my honourable friend would confirm if he were in a condition to do it." "Hadn't you better see," says Mr. Tulkinghorn to Krook, "whether he had any papers that may enlighten you? There will be an inquest, and you will be asked the question. You can read?" "No, I can't," returns the old man with a sudden grin. "Snagsby," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, "look over the room for him. He will get into some trouble or difficulty otherwise. Being here, I'll wait if you make haste, and then I can testify on his behalf, if it should ever be necessary, that all was fair and right. If you will hold the candle for Mr. Snagsby, my friend, he'll soon see whether there is anything to help you." "In the first place, here's an old portmanteau, sir," says Snagsby. Ah, to be sure, so there is! Mr. Tulkinghorn does not appear to have seen it before, though he is standing so close to it, and though there is very little else, heaven knows. The marine-store merchant holds the light, and the law-stationer conducts the search. The surgeon leans against the corner of the chimney-piece; Miss Flite peeps and trembles just within the door. The apt old scholar of the old school, with his dull black breeches tied with ribbons at the knees, his large black waistcoat, his long-sleeved black coat, and his wisp of limp white neckerchief tied in the bow the peerage knows so well, stands in exactly the same place and attitude. There are some worthless articles of clothing in the old portmanteau; there is a bundle of pawnbrokers' duplicates, those turnpike tickets on the road of poverty; there is a crumpled paper, smelling of opium, on which are scrawled rough memoranda--as, took, such a day, so many grains; took, such another day, so many more--begun some time ago, as if with the intention of being regularly continued, but soon left off. There are a few dirty scraps of newspapers, all referring to coroners' inquests; there is nothing else. They search the cupboard and the drawer of the ink-splashed table. There is not a morsel of an old letter or of any other writing in either. The young surgeon examines the dress on the law-writer. A knife and some odd halfpence are all he finds. Mr. Snagsby's suggestion is the practical suggestion after all, and the beadle must be called in. So the little crazy lodger goes for the beadle, and the rest come out of the room. "Don't leave the cat there!" says the surgeon; "that won't do!" Mr. Krook therefore drives her out before him, and she goes furtively downstairs, winding her lithe tail and licking her lips. "Good night!" says Mr. Tulkinghorn, and goes home to Allegory and meditation. By this time the news has got into the court. Groups of its inhabitants assemble to discuss the thing, and the outposts of the army of observation (principally boys) are pushed forward to Mr. Krook's window, which they closely invest. A policeman has already walked up to the room, and walked down again to the door, where he stands like a tower, only condescending to see the boys at his base occasionally; but whenever he does see them, they quail and fall back. Mrs. Perkins, who has not been for some weeks on speaking terms with Mrs. Piper in consequence for an unpleasantness originating in young Perkins' having "fetched" young Piper "a crack," renews her friendly intercourse on this auspicious occasion. The potboy at the corner, who is a privileged amateur, as possessing official knowledge of life and having to deal with drunken men occasionally, exchanges confidential communications with the policeman and has the appearance of an impregnable youth, unassailable by truncheons and unconfinable in station-houses. People talk across the court out of window, and bare-headed scouts come hurrying in from Chancery Lane to know what's the matter. The general feeling seems to be that it's a blessing Mr. Krook warn't made away with first, mingled with a little natural disappointment that he was not. In the midst of this sensation, the beadle arrives. The beadle, though generally understood in the neighbourhood to be a ridiculous institution, is not without a certain popularity for the moment, if it were only as a man who is going to see the body. The policeman considers him an imbecile civilian, a remnant of the barbarous watchmen times, but gives him admission as something that must be borne with until government shall abolish him. The sensation is heightened as the tidings spread from mouth to mouth that the beadle is on the ground and has gone in. By and by the beadle comes out, once more intensifying the sensation, which has rather languished in the interval. He is understood to be in want of witnesses for the inquest to-morrow who can tell the coroner and jury anything whatever respecting the deceased. Is immediately referred to innumerable people who can tell nothing whatever. Is made more imbecile by being constantly informed that Mrs. Green's son "was a law-writer his-self and knowed him better than anybody," which son of Mrs. Green's appears, on inquiry, to be at the present time aboard a vessel bound for China, three months out, but considered accessible by telegraph on application to the Lords of the Admiralty. Beadle goes into various shops and parlours, examining the inhabitants, always shutting the door first, and by exclusion, delay, and general idiotcy exasperating the public. Policeman seen to smile to potboy. Public loses interest and undergoes reaction. Taunts the beadle in shrill youthful voices with having boiled a boy, choruses fragments of a popular song to that effect and importing that the boy was made into soup for the workhouse. Policeman at last finds it necessary to support the law and seize a vocalist, who is released upon the flight of the rest on condition of his getting out of this then, come, and cutting it--a condition he immediately observes. So the sensation dies off for the time; and the unmoved policeman (to whom a little opium, more or less, is nothing), with his shining hat, stiff stock, inflexible great-coat, stout belt and bracelet, and all things fitting, pursues his lounging way with a heavy tread, beating the palms of his white gloves one against the other and stopping now and then at a street-corner to look casually about for anything between a lost child and a murder. Under cover of the night, the feeble-minded beadle comes flitting about Chancery Lane with his summonses, in which every juror's name is wrongly spelt, and nothing rightly spelt but the beadle's own name, which nobody can read or wants to know. The summonses served and his witnesses forewarned, the beadle goes to Mr. Krook's to keep a small appointment he has made with certain paupers, who, presently arriving, are conducted upstairs, where they leave the great eyes in the shutter something new to stare at, in that last shape which earthly lodgings take for No one--and for Every one. And all that night the coffin stands ready by the old portmanteau; and the lonely figure on the bed, whose path in life has lain through five and forty years, lies there with no more track behind him that any one can trace than a deserted infant. Next day the court is all alive--is like a fair, as Mrs. Perkins, more than reconciled to Mrs. Piper, says in amicable conversation with that excellent woman. The coroner is to sit in the first-floor room at the Sol's Arms, where the Harmonic Meetings take place twice a week and where the chair is filled by a gentleman of professional celebrity, faced by Little Swills, the comic vocalist, who hopes (according to the bill in the window) that his friends will rally round him and support first-rate talent. The Sol's Arms does a brisk stroke of business all the morning. Even children so require sustaining under the general excitement that a pieman who has established himself for the occasion at the corner of the court says his brandy-balls go off like smoke. What time the beadle, hovering between the door of Mr. Krook's establishment and the door of the Sol's Arms, shows the curiosity in his keeping to a few discreet spirits and accepts the compliment of a glass of ale or so in return. At the appointed hour arrives the coroner, for whom the jurymen are waiting and who is received with a salute of skittles from the good dry skittle-ground attached to the Sol's Arms. The coroner frequents more public-houses than any man alive. The smell of sawdust, beer, tobacco-smoke, and spirits is inseparable in his vocation from death in its most awful shapes. He is conducted by the beadle and the landlord to the Harmonic Meeting Room, where he puts his hat on the piano and takes a Windsor-chair at the head of a long table formed of several short tables put together and ornamented with glutinous rings in endless involutions, made by pots and glasses. As many of the jury as can crowd together at the table sit there. The rest get among the spittoons and pipes or lean against the piano. Over the coroner's head is a small iron garland, the pendant handle of a bell, which rather gives the majesty of the court the appearance of going to be hanged presently. Call over and swear the jury! While the ceremony is in progress, sensation is created by the entrance of a chubby little man in a large shirt-collar, with a moist eye and an inflamed nose, who modestly takes a position near the door as one of the general public, but seems familiar with the room too. A whisper circulates that this is Little Swills. It is considered not unlikely that he will get up an imitation of the coroner and make it the principal feature of the Harmonic Meeting in the evening. "Well, gentlemen--" the coroner begins. "Silence there, will you!" says the beadle. Not to the coroner, though it might appear so. "Well, gentlemen," resumes the coroner. "You are impanelled here to inquire into the death of a certain man. Evidence will be given before you as to the circumstances attending that death, and you will give your verdict according to the--skittles; they must be stopped, you know, beadle!--evidence, and not according to anything else. The first thing to be done is to view the body." "Make way there!" cries the beadle. So they go out in a loose procession, something after the manner of a straggling funeral, and make their inspection in Mr. Krook's back second floor, from which a few of the jurymen retire pale and precipitately. The beadle is very careful that two gentlemen not very neat about the cuffs and buttons (for whose accommodation he has provided a special little table near the coroner in the Harmonic Meeting Room) should see all that is to be seen. For they are the public chroniclers of such inquiries by the line; and he is not superior to the universal human infirmity, but hopes to read in print what "Mooney, the active and intelligent beadle of the district," said and did and even aspires to see the name of Mooney as familiarly and patronizingly mentioned as the name of the hangman is, according to the latest examples. Little Swills is waiting for the coroner and jury on their return. Mr. Tulkinghorn, also. Mr. Tulkinghorn is received with distinction and seated near the coroner between that high judicial officer, a bagatelle-board, and the coal-box. The inquiry proceeds. The jury learn how the subject of their inquiry died, and learn no more about him. "A very eminent solicitor is in attendance, gentlemen," says the coroner, "who, I am informed, was accidentally present when discovery of the death was made, but he could only repeat the evidence you have already heard from the surgeon, the landlord, the lodger, and the law-stationer, and it is not necessary to trouble him. Is anybody in attendance who knows anything more?" Mrs. Piper pushed forward by Mrs. Perkins. Mrs. Piper sworn. Anastasia Piper, gentlemen. Married woman. Now, Mrs. Piper, what have you got to say about this? Why, Mrs. Piper has a good deal to say, chiefly in parentheses and without punctuation, but not much to tell. Mrs. Piper lives in the court (which her husband is a cabinet-maker), and it has long been well beknown among the neighbours (counting from the day next but one before the half-baptizing of Alexander James Piper aged eighteen months and four days old on accounts of not being expected to live such was the sufferings gentlemen of that child in his gums) as the plaintive--so Mrs. Piper insists on calling the deceased--was reported to have sold himself. Thinks it was the plaintive's air in which that report originatinin. See the plaintive often and considered as his air was feariocious and not to be allowed to go about some children being timid (and if doubted hoping Mrs. Perkins may be brought forard for she is here and will do credit to her husband and herself and family). Has seen the plaintive wexed and worrited by the children (for children they will ever be and you cannot expect them specially if of playful dispositions to be Methoozellers which you was not yourself). On accounts of this and his dark looks has often dreamed as she see him take a pick-axe from his pocket and split Johnny's head (which the child knows not fear and has repeatually called after him close at his eels). Never however see the plaintive take a pick-axe or any other wepping far from it. Has seen him hurry away when run and called after as if not partial to children and never see him speak to neither child nor grown person at any time (excepting the boy that sweeps the crossing down the lane over the way round the corner which if he was here would tell you that he has been seen a-speaking to him frequent). Says the coroner, is that boy here? Says the beadle, no, sir, he is not here. Says the coroner, go and fetch him then. In the absence of the active and intelligent, the coroner converses with Mr. Tulkinghorn. Oh! Here's the boy, gentlemen! Here he is, very muddy, very hoarse, very ragged. Now, boy! But stop a minute. Caution. This boy must be put through a few preliminary paces. Name, Jo. Nothing else that he knows on. Don't know that everybody has two names. Never heerd of sich a think. Don't know that Jo is short for a longer name. Thinks it long enough for HIM. HE don't find no fault with it. Spell it? No. HE can't spell it. No father, no mother, no friends. Never been to school. What's home? Knows a broom's a broom, and knows it's wicked to tell a lie. Don't recollect who told him about the broom or about the lie, but knows both. Can't exactly say what'll be done to him arter he's dead if he tells a lie to the gentlemen here, but believes it'll be something wery bad to punish him, and serve him right--and so he'll tell the truth. "This won't do, gentlemen!" says the coroner with a melancholy shake of the head. "Don't you think you can receive his evidence, sir?" asks an attentive juryman. "Out of the question," says the coroner. "You have heard the boy. 'Can't exactly say' won't do, you know. We can't take THAT in a court of justice, gentlemen. It's terrible depravity. Put the boy aside." Boy put aside, to the great edification of the audience, especially of Little Swills, the comic vocalist. Now. Is there any other witness? No other witness. Very well, gentlemen! Here's a man unknown, proved to have been in the habit of taking opium in large quantities for a year and a half, found dead of too much opium. If you think you have any evidence to lead you to the conclusion that he committed suicide, you will come to that conclusion. If you think it is a case of accidental death, you will find a verdict accordingly. Verdict accordingly. Accidental death. No doubt. Gentlemen, you are discharged. Good afternoon. While the coroner buttons his great-coat, Mr. Tulkinghorn and he give private audience to the rejected witness in a corner. That graceless creature only knows that the dead man (whom he recognized just now by his yellow face and black hair) was sometimes hooted and pursued about the streets. That one cold winter night when he, the boy, was shivering in a doorway near his crossing, the man turned to look at him, and came back, and having questioned him and found that he had not a friend in the world, said, "Neither have I. Not one!" and gave him the price of a supper and a night's lodging. That the man had often spoken to him since and asked him whether he slept sound at night, and how he bore cold and hunger, and whether he ever wished to die, and similar strange questions. That when the man had no money, he would say in passing, "I am as poor as you to-day, Jo," but that when he had any, he had always (as the boy most heartily believes) been glad to give him some. "He was wery good to me," says the boy, wiping his eyes with his wretched sleeve. "Wen I see him a-layin' so stritched out just now, I wished he could have heerd me tell him so. He wos wery good to me, he wos!" As he shuffles downstairs, Mr. Snagsby, lying in wait for him, puts a half-crown in his hand. "If you ever see me coming past your crossing with my little woman--I mean a lady--" says Mr. Snagsby with his finger on his nose, "don't allude to it!" For some little time the jurymen hang about the Sol's Arms colloquially. In the sequel, half-a-dozen are caught up in a cloud of pipe-smoke that pervades the parlour of the Sol's Arms; two stroll to Hampstead; and four engage to go half-price to the play at night, and top up with oysters. Little Swills is treated on several hands. Being asked what he thinks of the proceedings, characterizes them (his strength lying in a slangular direction) as "a rummy start." The landlord of the Sol's Arms, finding Little Swills so popular, commends him highly to the jurymen and public, observing that for a song in character he don't know his equal and that that man's character-wardrobe would fill a cart. Thus, gradually the Sol's Arms melts into the shadowy night and then flares out of it strong in gas. The Harmonic Meeting hour arriving, the gentleman of professional celebrity takes the chair, is faced (red-faced) by Little Swills; their friends rally round them and support first-rate talent. In the zenith of the evening, Little Swills says, "Gentlemen, if you'll permit me, I'll attempt a short description of a scene of real life that came off here to-day." Is much applauded and encouraged; goes out of the room as Swills; comes in as the coroner (not the least in the world like him); describes the inquest, with recreative intervals of piano-forte accompaniment, to the refrain: With his (the coroner's) tippy tol li doll, tippy tol lo doll, tippy tol li doll, Dee! The jingling piano at last is silent, and the Harmonic friends rally round their pillows. Then there is rest around the lonely figure, now laid in its last earthly habitation; and it is watched by the gaunt eyes in the shutters through some quiet hours of night. If this forlorn man could have been prophetically seen lying here by the mother at whose breast he nestled, a little child, with eyes upraised to her loving face, and soft hand scarcely knowing how to close upon the neck to which it crept, what an impossibility the vision would have seemed! Oh, if in brighter days the now-extinguished fire within him ever burned for one woman who held him in her heart, where is she, while these ashes are above the ground! It is anything but a night of rest at Mr. Snagsby's, in Cook's Court, where Guster murders sleep by going, as Mr. Snagsby himself allows--not to put too fine a point upon it--out of one fit into twenty. The occasion of this seizure is that Guster has a tender heart and a susceptible something that possibly might have been imagination, but for Tooting and her patron saint. Be it what it may, now, it was so direfully impressed at tea-time by Mr. Snagsby's account of the inquiry at which he had assisted that at supper-time she projected herself into the kitchen, preceded by a flying Dutch cheese, and fell into a fit of unusual duration, which she only came out of to go into another, and another, and so on through a chain of fits, with short intervals between, of which she has pathetically availed herself by consuming them in entreaties to Mrs. Snagsby not to give her warning "when she quite comes to," and also in appeals to the whole establishment to lay her down on the stones and go to bed. Hence, Mr. Snagsby, at last hearing the cock at the little dairy in Cursitor Street go into that disinterested ecstasy of his on the subject of daylight, says, drawing a long breath, though the most patient of men, "I thought you was dead, I am sure!" What question this enthusiastic fowl supposes he settles when he strains himself to such an extent, or why he should thus crow (so men crow on various triumphant public occasions, however) about what cannot be of any moment to him, is his affair. It is enough that daylight comes, morning comes, noon comes. Then the active and intelligent, who has got into the morning papers as such, comes with his pauper company to Mr. Krook's and bears off the body of our dear brother here departed to a hemmed-in churchyard, pestiferous and obscene, whence malignant diseases are communicated to the bodies of our dear brothers and sisters who have not departed, while our dear brothers and sisters who hang about official back-stairs--would to heaven they HAD departed!--are very complacent and agreeable. Into a beastly scrap of ground which a Turk would reject as a savage abomination and a Caffre would shudder at, they bring our dear brother here departed to receive Christian burial. With houses looking on, on every side, save where a reeking little tunnel of a court gives access to the iron gate--with every villainy of life in action close on death, and every poisonous element of death in action close on life--here they lower our dear brother down a foot or two, here sow him in corruption, to be raised in corruption: an avenging ghost at many a sick-bedside, a shameful testimony to future ages how civilization and barbarism walked this boastful island together. Come night, come darkness, for you cannot come too soon or stay too long by such a place as this! Come, straggling lights into the windows of the ugly houses; and you who do iniquity therein, do it at least with this dread scene shut out! Come, flame of gas, burning so sullenly above the iron gate, on which the poisoned air deposits its witch-ointment slimy to the touch! It is well that you should call to every passerby, "Look here!" With the night comes a slouching figure through the tunnel-court to the outside of the iron gate. It holds the gate with its hands and looks in between the bars, stands looking in for a little while. It then, with an old broom it carries, softly sweeps the step and makes the archway clean. It does so very busily and trimly, looks in again a little while, and so departs. Jo, is it thou? Well, well! Though a rejected witness, who "can't exactly say" what will be done to him in greater hands than men's, thou art not quite in outer darkness. There is something like a distant ray of light in thy muttered reason for this: "He wos wery good to me, he wos!" CHAPTER XII On the Watch It has left off raining down in Lincolnshire at last, and Chesney Wold has taken heart. Mrs. Rouncewell is full of hospitable cares, for Sir Leicester and my Lady are coming home from Paris. The fashionable intelligence has found it out and communicates the glad tidings to benighted England. It has also found out that they will entertain a brilliant and distinguished circle of the ELITE of the BEAU MONDE (the fashionable intelligence is weak in English, but a giant refreshed in French) at the ancient and hospitable family seat in Lincolnshire. For the greater honour of the brilliant and distinguished circle, and of Chesney Wold into the bargain, the broken arch of the bridge in the park is mended; and the water, now retired within its proper limits and again spanned gracefully, makes a figure in the prospect from the house. The clear, cold sunshine glances into the brittle woods and approvingly beholds the sharp wind scattering the leaves and drying the moss. It glides over the park after the moving shadows of the clouds, and chases them, and never catches them, all day. It looks in at the windows and touches the ancestral portraits with bars and patches of brightness never contemplated by the painters. Athwart the picture of my Lady, over the great chimney-piece, it throws a broad bend-sinister of light that strikes down crookedly into the hearth and seems to rend it. Through the same cold sunshine and the same sharp wind, my Lady and Sir Leicester, in their travelling chariot (my Lady's woman and Sir Leicester's man affectionate in the rumble), start for home. With a considerable amount of jingling and whip-cracking, and many plunging demonstrations on the part of two bare-backed horses and two centaurs with glazed hats, jack-boots, and flowing manes and tails, they rattle out of the yard of the Hotel Bristol in the Place Vendome and canter between the sun-and-shadow-chequered colonnade of the Rue de Rivoli and the garden of the ill-fated palace of a headless king and queen, off by the Place of Concord, and the Elysian Fields, and the Gate of the Star, out of Paris. Sooth to say, they cannot go away too fast, for even here my Lady Dedlock has been bored to death. Concert, assembly, opera, theatre, drive, nothing is new to my Lady under the worn-out heavens. Only last Sunday, when poor wretches were gay--within the walls playing with children among the clipped trees and the statues in the Palace Garden; walking, a score abreast, in the Elysian Fields, made more Elysian by performing dogs and wooden horses; between whiles filtering (a few) through the gloomy Cathedral of Our Lady to say a word or two at the base of a pillar within flare of a rusty little gridiron-full of gusty little tapers; without the walls encompassing Paris with dancing, love-making, wine-drinking, tobacco-smoking, tomb-visiting, billiard card and domino playing, quack-doctoring, and much murderous refuse, animate and inanimate--only last Sunday, my Lady, in the desolation of Boredom and the clutch of Giant Despair, almost hated her own maid for being in spirits. She cannot, therefore, go too fast from Paris. Weariness of soul lies before her, as it lies behind--her Ariel has put a girdle of it round the whole earth, and it cannot be unclasped--but the imperfect remedy is always to fly from the last place where it has been experienced. Fling Paris back into the distance, then, exchanging it for endless avenues and cross-avenues of wintry trees! And, when next beheld, let it be some leagues away, with the Gate of the Star a white speck glittering in the sun, and the city a mere mound in a plain--two dark square towers rising out of it, and light and shadow descending on it aslant, like the angels in Jacob's dream! Sir Leicester is generally in a complacent state, and rarely bored. When he has nothing else to do, he can always contemplate his own greatness. It is a considerable advantage to a man to have so inexhaustible a subject. After reading his letters, he leans back in his corner of the carriage and generally reviews his importance to society. "You have an unusual amount of correspondence this morning?" says my Lady after a long time. She is fatigued with reading. Has almost read a page in twenty miles. "Nothing in it, though. Nothing whatever." "I saw one of Mr. Tulkinghorn's long effusions, I think?" "You see everything," says Sir Leicester with admiration. "Ha!" sighs my Lady. "He is the most tiresome of men!" "He sends--I really beg your pardon--he sends," says Sir Leicester, selecting the letter and unfolding it, "a message to you. Our stopping to change horses as I came to his postscript drove it out of my memory. I beg you'll excuse me. He says--" Sir Leicester is so long in taking out his eye-glass and adjusting it that my Lady looks a little irritated. "He says 'In the matter of the right of way--' I beg your pardon, that's not the place. He says--yes! Here I have it! He says, 'I beg my respectful compliments to my Lady, who, I hope, has benefited by the change. Will you do me the favour to mention (as it may interest her) that I have something to tell her on her return in reference to the person who copied the affidavit in the Chancery suit, which so powerfully stimulated her curiosity. I have seen him.'" My Lady, leaning forward, looks out of her window. "That's the message," observes Sir Leicester. "I should like to walk a little," says my Lady, still looking out of her window. "Walk?" repeats Sir Leicester in a tone of surprise. "I should like to walk a little," says my Lady with unmistakable distinctness. "Please to stop the carriage." The carriage is stopped, the affectionate man alights from the rumble, opens the door, and lets down the steps, obedient to an impatient motion of my Lady's hand. My Lady alights so quickly and walks away so quickly that Sir Leicester, for all his scrupulous politeness, is unable to assist her, and is left behind. A space of a minute or two has elapsed before he comes up with her. She smiles, looks very handsome, takes his arm, lounges with him for a quarter of a mile, is very much bored, and resumes her seat in the carriage. The rattle and clatter continue through the greater part of three days, with more or less of bell-jingling and whip-cracking, and more or less plunging of centaurs and bare-backed horses. Their courtly politeness to each other at the hotels where they tarry is the theme of general admiration. Though my Lord IS a little aged for my Lady, says Madame, the hostess of the Golden Ape, and though he might be her amiable father, one can see at a glance that they love each other. One observes my Lord with his white hair, standing, hat in hand, to help my Lady to and from the carriage. One observes my Lady, how recognisant of my Lord's politeness, with an inclination of her gracious head and the concession of her so-genteel fingers! It is ravishing! The sea has no appreciation of great men, but knocks them about like the small fry. It is habitually hard upon Sir Leicester, whose countenance it greenly mottles in the manner of sage-cheese and in whose aristocratic system it effects a dismal revolution. It is the Radical of Nature to him. Nevertheless, his dignity gets over it after stopping to refit, and he goes on with my Lady for Chesney Wold, lying only one night in London on the way to Lincolnshire. Through the same cold sunlight, colder as the day declines, and through the same sharp wind, sharper as the separate shadows of bare trees gloom together in the woods, and as the Ghost's Walk, touched at the western corner by a pile of fire in the sky, resigns itself to coming night, they drive into the park. The rooks, swinging in their lofty houses in the elm-tree avenue, seem to discuss the question of the occupancy of the carriage as it passes underneath, some agreeing that Sir Leicester and my Lady are come down, some arguing with malcontents who won't admit it, now all consenting to consider the question disposed of, now all breaking out again in violent debate, incited by one obstinate and drowsy bird who will persist in putting in a last contradictory croak. Leaving them to swing and caw, the travelling chariot rolls on to the house, where fires gleam warmly through some of the windows, though not through so many as to give an inhabited expression to the darkening mass of front. But the brilliant and distinguished circle will soon do that. Mrs. Rouncewell is in attendance and receives Sir Leicester's customary shake of the hand with a profound curtsy. "How do you do, Mrs. Rouncewell? I am glad to see you." "I hope I have the honour of welcoming you in good health, Sir Leicester?" "In excellent health, Mrs. Rouncewell." "My Lady is looking charmingly well," says Mrs. Rouncewell with another curtsy. My Lady signifies, without profuse expenditure of words, that she is as wearily well as she can hope to be. But Rosa is in the distance, behind the housekeeper; and my Lady, who has not subdued the quickness of her observation, whatever else she may have conquered, asks, "Who is that girl?" "A young scholar of mine, my Lady. Rosa." "Come here, Rosa!" Lady Dedlock beckons her, with even an appearance of interest. "Why, do you know how pretty you are, child?" she says, touching her shoulder with her two forefingers. Rosa, very much abashed, says, "No, if you please, my Lady!" and glances up, and glances down, and don't know where to look, but looks all the prettier. "How old are you?" "Nineteen, my Lady." "Nineteen," repeats my Lady thoughtfully. "Take care they don't spoil you by flattery." "Yes, my Lady." My Lady taps her dimpled cheek with the same delicate gloved fingers and goes on to the foot of the oak staircase, where Sir Leicester pauses for her as her knightly escort. A staring old Dedlock in a panel, as large as life and as dull, looks as if he didn't know what to make of it, which was probably his general state of mind in the days of Queen Elizabeth. That evening, in the housekeeper's room, Rosa can do nothing but murmur Lady Dedlock's praises. She is so affable, so graceful, so beautiful, so elegant; has such a sweet voice and such a thrilling touch that Rosa can feel it yet! Mrs. Rouncewell confirms all this, not without personal pride, reserving only the one point of affability. Mrs. Rouncewell is not quite sure as to that. Heaven forbid that she should say a syllable in dispraise of any member of that excellent family, above all, of my Lady, whom the whole world admires; but if my Lady would only be "a little more free," not quite so cold and distant, Mrs. Rouncewell thinks she would be more affable. "'Tis almost a pity," Mrs. Rouncewell adds--only "almost" because it borders on impiety to suppose that anything could be better than it is, in such an express dispensation as the Dedlock affairs--"that my Lady has no family. If she had had a daughter now, a grown young lady, to interest her, I think she would have had the only kind of excellence she wants." "Might not that have made her still more proud, grandmother?" says Watt, who has been home and come back again, he is such a good grandson. "More and most, my dear," returns the housekeeper with dignity, "are words it's not my place to use--nor so much as to hear--applied to any drawback on my Lady." "I beg your pardon, grandmother. But she is proud, is she not?" "If she is, she has reason to be. The Dedlock family have always reason to be." "Well," says Watt, "it's to be hoped they line out of their prayer-books a certain passage for the common people about pride and vainglory. Forgive me, grandmother! Only a joke!" "Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock, my dear, are not fit subjects for joking." "Sir Leicester is no joke by any means," says Watt, "and I humbly ask his pardon. I suppose, grandmother, that even with the family and their guests down here, there is no objection to my prolonging my stay at the Dedlock Arms for a day or two, as any other traveller might?" "Surely, none in the world, child." "I am glad of that," says Watt, "because I have an inexpressible desire to extend my knowledge of this beautiful neighbourhood." He happens to glance at Rosa, who looks down and is very shy indeed. But according to the old superstition, it should be Rosa's ears that burn, and not her fresh bright cheeks, for my Lady's maid is holding forth about her at this moment with surpassing energy. My Lady's maid is a Frenchwoman of two and thirty, from somewhere in the southern country about Avignon and Marseilles, a large-eyed brown woman with black hair who would be handsome but for a certain feline mouth and general uncomfortable tightness of face, rendering the jaws too eager and the skull too prominent. There is something indefinably keen and wan about her anatomy, and she has a watchful way of looking out of the corners of her eyes without turning her head which could be pleasantly dispensed with, especially when she is in an ill humour and near knives. Through all the good taste of her dress and little adornments, these objections so express themselves that she seems to go about like a very neat she-wolf imperfectly tamed. Besides being accomplished in all the knowledge appertaining to her post, she is almost an Englishwoman in her acquaintance with the language; consequently, she is in no want of words to shower upon Rosa for having attracted my Lady's attention, and she pours them out with such grim ridicule as she sits at dinner that her companion, the affectionate man, is rather relieved when she arrives at the spoon stage of that performance. Ha, ha, ha! She, Hortense, been in my Lady's service since five years and always kept at the distance, and this doll, this puppet, caressed--absolutely caressed--by my Lady on the moment of her arriving at the house! Ha, ha, ha! "And do you know how pretty you are, child?" "No, my Lady." You are right there! "And how old are you, child! And take care they do not spoil you by flattery, child!" Oh, how droll! It is the BEST thing altogether. In short, it is such an admirable thing that Mademoiselle Hortense can't forget it; but at meals for days afterwards, even among her countrywomen and others attached in like capacity to the troop of visitors, relapses into silent enjoyment of the joke--an enjoyment expressed, in her own convivial manner, by an additional tightness of face, thin elongation of compressed lips, and sidewise look, which intense appreciation of humour is frequently reflected in my Lady's mirrors when my Lady is not among them. All the mirrors in the house are brought into action now, many of them after a long blank. They reflect handsome faces, simpering faces, youthful faces, faces of threescore and ten that will not submit to be old; the entire collection of faces that have come to pass a January week or two at Chesney Wold, and which the fashionable intelligence, a mighty hunter before the Lord, hunts with a keen scent, from their breaking cover at the Court of St. James's to their being run down to death. The place in Lincolnshire is all alive. By day guns and voices are heard ringing in the woods, horsemen and carriages enliven the park roads, servants and hangers-on pervade the village and the Dedlock Arms. Seen by night from distant openings in the trees, the row of windows in the long drawing-room, where my Lady's picture hangs over the great chimney-piece, is like a row of jewels set in a black frame. On Sunday the chill little church is almost warmed by so much gallant company, and the general flavour of the Dedlock dust is quenched in delicate perfumes. The brilliant and distinguished circle comprehends within it no contracted amount of education, sense, courage, honour, beauty, and virtue. Yet there is something a little wrong about it in despite of its immense advantages. What can it be? Dandyism? There is no King George the Fourth now (more the pity) to set the dandy fashion; there are no clear-starched jack-towel neckcloths, no short-waisted coats, no false calves, no stays. There are no caricatures, now, of effeminate exquisites so arrayed, swooning in opera boxes with excess of delight and being revived by other dainty creatures poking long-necked scent-bottles at their noses. There is no beau whom it takes four men at once to shake into his buckskins, or who goes to see all the executions, or who is troubled with the self-reproach of having once consumed a pea. But is there dandyism in the brilliant and distinguished circle notwithstanding, dandyism of a more mischievous sort, that has got below the surface and is doing less harmless things than jack-towelling itself and stopping its own digestion, to which no rational person need particularly object? Why, yes. It cannot be disguised. There ARE at Chesney Wold this January week some ladies and gentlemen of the newest fashion, who have set up a dandyism--in religion, for instance. Who in mere lackadaisical want of an emotion have agreed upon a little dandy talk about the vulgar wanting faith in things in general, meaning in the things that have been tried and found wanting, as though a low fellow should unaccountably lose faith in a bad shilling after finding it out! Who would make the vulgar very picturesque and faithful by putting back the hands upon the clock of time and cancelling a few hundred years of history. There are also ladies and gentlemen of another fashion, not so new, but very elegant, who have agreed to put a smooth glaze on the world and to keep down all its realities. For whom everything must be languid and pretty. Who have found out the perpetual stoppage. Who are to rejoice at nothing and be sorry for nothing. Who are not to be disturbed by ideas. On whom even the fine arts, attending in powder and walking backward like the Lord Chamberlain, must array themselves in the milliners' and tailors' patterns of past generations and be particularly careful not to be in earnest or to receive any impress from the moving age. Then there is my Lord Boodle, of considerable reputation with his party, who has known what office is and who tells Sir Leicester Dedlock with much gravity, after dinner, that he really does not see to what the present age is tending. A debate is not what a debate used to be; the House is not what the House used to be; even a Cabinet is not what it formerly was. He perceives with astonishment that supposing the present government to be overthrown, the limited choice of the Crown, in the formation of a new ministry, would lie between Lord Coodle and Sir Thomas Doodle--supposing it to be impossible for the Duke of Foodle to act with Goodle, which may be assumed to be the case in consequence of the breach arising out of that affair with Hoodle. Then, giving the Home Department and the leadership of the House of Commons to Joodle, the Exchequer to Koodle, the Colonies to Loodle, and the Foreign Office to Moodle, what are you to do with Noodle? You can't offer him the Presidency of the Council; that is reserved for Poodle. You can't put him in the Woods and Forests; that is hardly good enough for Quoodle. What follows? That the country is shipwrecked, lost, and gone to pieces (as is made manifest to the patriotism of Sir Leicester Dedlock) because you can't provide for Noodle! On the other hand, the Right Honourable William Buffy, M.P., contends across the table with some one else that the shipwreck of the country--about which there is no doubt; it is only the manner of it that is in question--is attributable to Cuffy. If you had done with Cuffy what you ought to have done when he first came into Parliament, and had prevented him from going over to Duffy, you would have got him into alliance with Fuffy, you would have had with you the weight attaching as a smart debater to Guffy, you would have brought to bear upon the elections the wealth of Huffy, you would have got in for three counties Juffy, Kuffy, and Luffy, and you would have strengthened your administration by the official knowledge and the business habits of Muffy. All this, instead of being as you now are, dependent on the mere caprice of Puffy! As to this point, and as to some minor topics, there are differences of opinion; but it is perfectly clear to the brilliant and distinguished circle, all round, that nobody is in question but Boodle and his retinue, and Buffy and HIS retinue. These are the great actors for whom the stage is reserved. A People there are, no doubt--a certain large number of supernumeraries, who are to be occasionally addressed, and relied upon for shouts and choruses, as on the theatrical stage; but Boodle and Buffy, their followers and families, their heirs, executors, administrators, and assigns, are the born first-actors, managers, and leaders, and no others can appear upon the scene for ever and ever. In this, too, there is perhaps more dandyism at Chesney Wold than the brilliant and distinguished circle will find good for itself in the long run. For it is, even with the stillest and politest circles, as with the circle the necromancer draws around him--very strange appearances may be seen in active motion outside. With this difference, that being realities and not phantoms, there is the greater danger of their breaking in. Chesney Wold is quite full anyhow, so full that a burning sense of injury arises in the breasts of ill-lodged ladies'-maids, and is not to be extinguished. Only one room is empty. It is a turret chamber of the third order of merit, plainly but comfortably furnished and having an old-fashioned business air. It is Mr. Tulkinghorn's room, and is never bestowed on anybody else, for he may come at any time. He is not come yet. It is his quiet habit to walk across the park from the village in fine weather, to drop into this room as if he had never been out of it since he was last seen there, to request a servant to inform Sir Leicester that he is arrived in case he should be wanted, and to appear ten minutes before dinner in the shadow of the library-door. He sleeps in his turret with a complaining flag-staff over his head, and has some leads outside on which, any fine morning when he is down here, his black figure may be seen walking before breakfast like a larger species of rook. Every day before dinner, my Lady looks for him in the dusk of the library, but he is not there. Every day at dinner, my Lady glances down the table for the vacant place that would be waiting to receive him if he had just arrived, but there is no vacant place. Every night my Lady casually asks her maid, "Is Mr. Tulkinghorn come?" Every night the answer is, "No, my Lady, not yet." One night, while having her hair undressed, my Lady loses herself in deep thought after this reply until she sees her own brooding face in the opposite glass, and a pair of black eyes curiously observing her. "Be so good as to attend," says my Lady then, addressing the reflection of Hortense, "to your business. You can contemplate your beauty at another time." "Pardon! It was your Ladyship's beauty." "That," says my Lady, "you needn't contemplate at all." At length, one afternoon a little before sunset, when the bright groups of figures which have for the last hour or two enlivened the Ghost's Walk are all dispersed and only Sir Leicester and my Lady remain upon the terrace, Mr. Tulkinghorn appears. He comes towards them at his usual methodical pace, which is never quickened, never slackened. He wears his usual expressionless mask--if it be a mask--and carries family secrets in every limb of his body and every crease of his dress. Whether his whole soul is devoted to the great or whether he yields them nothing beyond the services he sells is his personal secret. He keeps it, as he keeps the secrets of his clients; he is his own client in that matter, and will never betray himself. "How do you do, Mr. Tulkinghorn?" says Sir Leicester, giving him his hand. Mr. Tulkinghorn is quite well. Sir Leicester is quite well. My Lady is quite well. All highly satisfactory. The lawyer, with his hands behind him, walks at Sir Leicester's side along the terrace. My Lady walks upon the other side. "We expected you before," says Sir Leicester. A gracious observation. As much as to say, "Mr. Tulkinghorn, we remember your existence when you are not here to remind us of it by your presence. We bestow a fragment of our minds upon you, sir, you see!" Mr. Tulkinghorn, comprehending it, inclines his head and says he is much obliged. "I should have come down sooner," he explains, "but that I have been much engaged with those matters in the several suits between yourself and Boythorn." "A man of a very ill-regulated mind," observes Sir Leicester with severity. "An extremely dangerous person in any community. A man of a very low character of mind." "He is obstinate," says Mr. Tulkinghorn. "It is natural to such a man to be so," says Sir Leicester, looking most profoundly obstinate himself. "I am not at all surprised to hear it." "The only question is," pursues the lawyer, "whether you will give up anything." "No, sir," replies Sir Leicester. "Nothing. I give up?" "I don't mean anything of importance. That, of course, I know you would not abandon. I mean any minor point." "Mr. Tulkinghorn," returns Sir Leicester, "there can be no minor point between myself and Mr. Boythorn. If I go farther, and observe that I cannot readily conceive how ANY right of mine can be a minor point, I speak not so much in reference to myself as an individual as in reference to the family position I have it in charge to maintain." Mr. Tulkinghorn inclines his head again. "I have now my instructions," he says. "Mr. Boythorn will give us a good deal of trouble--" "It is the character of such a mind, Mr. Tulkinghorn," Sir Leicester interrupts him, "TO give trouble. An exceedingly ill-conditioned, levelling person. A person who, fifty years ago, would probably have been tried at the Old Bailey for some demagogue proceeding, and severely punished--if not," adds Sir Leicester after a moment's pause, "if not hanged, drawn, and quartered." Sir Leicester appears to discharge his stately breast of a burden in passing this capital sentence, as if it were the next satisfactory thing to having the sentence executed. "But night is coming on," says he, "and my Lady will take cold. My dear, let us go in." As they turn towards the hall-door, Lady Dedlock addresses Mr. Tulkinghorn for the first time. "You sent me a message respecting the person whose writing I happened to inquire about. It was like you to remember the circumstance; I had quite forgotten it. Your message reminded me of it again. I can't imagine what association I had with a hand like that, but I surely had some." "You had some?" Mr. Tulkinghorn repeats. "Oh, yes!" returns my Lady carelessly. "I think I must have had some. And did you really take the trouble to find out the writer of that actual thing--what is it!--affidavit?" "Yes." "How very odd!" They pass into a sombre breakfast-room on the ground floor, lighted in the day by two deep windows. It is now twilight. The fire glows brightly on the panelled wall and palely on the window-glass, where, through the cold reflection of the blaze, the colder landscape shudders in the wind and a grey mist creeps along, the only traveller besides the waste of clouds. My Lady lounges in a great chair in the chimney-corner, and Sir Leicester takes another great chair opposite. The lawyer stands before the fire with his hand out at arm's length, shading his face. He looks across his arm at my Lady. "Yes," he says, "I inquired about the man, and found him. And, what is very strange, I found him--" "Not to be any out-of-the-way person, I am afraid!" Lady Dedlock languidly anticipates. "I found him dead." "Oh, dear me!" remonstrated Sir Leicester. Not so much shocked by the fact as by the fact of the fact being mentioned. "I was directed to his lodging--a miserable, poverty-stricken place--and I found him dead." "You will excuse me, Mr. Tulkinghorn," observes Sir Leicester. "I think the less said--" "Pray, Sir Leicester, let me hear the story out" (it is my Lady speaking). "It is quite a story for twilight. How very shocking! Dead?" Mr. Tulkinghorn re-asserts it by another inclination of his head. "Whether by his own hand--" "Upon my honour!" cries Sir Leicester. "Really!" "Do let me hear the story!" says my Lady. "Whatever you desire, my dear. But, I must say--" "No, you mustn't say! Go on, Mr. Tulkinghorn." Sir Leicester's gallantry concedes the point, though he still feels that to bring this sort of squalor among the upper classes is really--really-- "I was about to say," resumes the lawyer with undisturbed calmness, "that whether he had died by his own hand or not, it was beyond my power to tell you. I should amend that phrase, however, by saying that he had unquestionably died of his own act, though whether by his own deliberate intention or by mischance can never certainly be known. The coroner's jury found that he took the poison accidentally." "And what kind of man," my Lady asks, "was this deplorable creature?" "Very difficult to say," returns the lawyer, shaking his head. "He had lived so wretchedly and was so neglected, with his gipsy colour and his wild black hair and beard, that I should have considered him the commonest of the common. The surgeon had a notion that he had once been something better, both in appearance and condition." "What did they call the wretched being?" "They called him what he had called himself, but no one knew his name." "Not even any one who had attended on him?" "No one had attended on him. He was found dead. In fact, I found him." "Without any clue to anything more?" "Without any; there was," says the lawyer meditatively, "an old portmanteau, but--No, there were no papers." During the utterance of every word of this short dialogue, Lady Dedlock and Mr. Tulkinghorn, without any other alteration in their customary deportment, have looked very steadily at one another--as was natural, perhaps, in the discussion of so unusual a subject. Sir Leicester has looked at the fire, with the general expression of the Dedlock on the staircase. The story being told, he renews his stately protest, saying that as it is quite clear that no association in my Lady's mind can possibly be traceable to this poor wretch (unless he was a begging-letter writer), he trusts to hear no more about a subject so far removed from my Lady's station. "Certainly, a collection of horrors," says my Lady, gathering up her mantles and furs, "but they interest one for the moment! Have the kindness, Mr. Tulkinghorn, to open the door for me." Mr. Tulkinghorn does so with deference and holds it open while she passes out. She passes close to him, with her usual fatigued manner and insolent grace. They meet again at dinner--again, next day--again, for many days in succession. Lady Dedlock is always the same exhausted deity, surrounded by worshippers, and terribly liable to be bored to death, even while presiding at her own shrine. Mr. Tulkinghorn is always the same speechless repository of noble confidences, so oddly out of place and yet so perfectly at home. They appear to take as little note of one another as any two people enclosed within the same walls could. But whether each evermore watches and suspects the other, evermore mistrustful of some great reservation; whether each is evermore prepared at all points for the other, and never to be taken unawares; what each would give to know how much the other knows--all this is hidden, for the time, in their own hearts. CHAPTER XIII Esther's Narrative We held many consultations about what Richard was to be, first without Mr. Jarndyce, as he had requested, and afterwards with him, but it was a long time before we seemed to make progress. Richard said he was ready for anything. When Mr. Jarndyce doubted whether he might not already be too old to enter the Navy, Richard said he had thought of that, and perhaps he was. When Mr. Jarndyce asked him what he thought of the Army, Richard said he had thought of that, too, and it wasn't a bad idea. When Mr. Jarndyce advised him to try and decide within himself whether his old preference for the sea was an ordinary boyish inclination or a strong impulse, Richard answered, Well he really HAD tried very often, and he couldn't make out. "How much of this indecision of character," Mr. Jarndyce said to me, "is chargeable on that incomprehensible heap of uncertainty and procrastination on which he has been thrown from his birth, I don't pretend to say; but that Chancery, among its other sins, is responsible for some of it, I can plainly see. It has engendered or confirmed in him a habit of putting off--and trusting to this, that, and the other chance, without knowing what chance--and dismissing everything as unsettled, uncertain, and confused. The character of much older and steadier people may be even changed by the circumstances surrounding them. It would be too much to expect that a boy's, in its formation, should be the subject of such influences and escape them." I felt this to be true; though if I may venture to mention what I thought besides, I thought it much to be regretted that Richard's education had not counteracted those influences or directed his character. He had been eight years at a public school and had learnt, I understood, to make Latin verses of several sorts in the most admirable manner. But I never heard that it had been anybody's business to find out what his natural bent was, or where his failings lay, or to adapt any kind of knowledge to HIM. HE had been adapted to the verses and had learnt the art of making them to such perfection that if he had remained at school until he was of age, I suppose he could only have gone on making them over and over again unless he had enlarged his education by forgetting how to do it. Still, although I had no doubt that they were very beautiful, and very improving, and very sufficient for a great many purposes of life, and always remembered all through life, I did doubt whether Richard would not have profited by some one studying him a little, instead of his studying them quite so much. To be sure, I knew nothing of the subject and do not even now know whether the young gentlemen of classic Rome or Greece made verses to the same extent--or whether the young gentlemen of any country ever did. "I haven't the least idea," said Richard, musing, "what I had better be. Except that I am quite sure I don't want to go into the Church, it's a toss-up." "You have no inclination in Mr. Kenge's way?" suggested Mr. Jarndyce. "I don't know that, sir!" replied Richard. "I am fond of boating. Articled clerks go a good deal on the water. It's a capital profession!" "Surgeon--" suggested Mr. Jarndyce. "That's the thing, sir!" cried Richard. I doubt if he had ever once thought of it before. "That's the thing, sir," repeated Richard with the greatest enthusiasm. "We have got it at last. M.R.C.S.!" He was not to be laughed out of it, though he laughed at it heartily. He said he had chosen his profession, and the more he thought of it, the more he felt that his destiny was clear; the art of healing was the art of all others for him. Mistrusting that he only came to this conclusion because, having never had much chance of finding out for himself what he was fitted for and having never been guided to the discovery, he was taken by the newest idea and was glad to get rid of the trouble of consideration, I wondered whether the Latin verses often ended in this or whether Richard's was a solitary case. Mr. Jarndyce took great pains to talk with him seriously and to put it to his good sense not to deceive himself in so important a matter. Richard was a little grave after these interviews, but invariably told Ada and me that it was all right, and then began to talk about something else. "By heaven!" cried Mr. Boythorn, who interested himself strongly in the subject--though I need not say that, for he could do nothing weakly; "I rejoice to find a young gentleman of spirit and gallantry devoting himself to that noble profession! The more spirit there is in it, the better for mankind and the worse for those mercenary task-masters and low tricksters who delight in putting that illustrious art at a disadvantage in the world. By all that is base and despicable," cried Mr. Boythorn, "the treatment of surgeons aboard ship is such that I would submit the legs--both legs--of every member of the Admiralty Board to a compound fracture and render it a transportable offence in any qualified practitioner to set them if the system were not wholly changed in eight and forty hours!" "Wouldn't you give them a week?" asked Mr. Jarndyce. "No!" cried Mr. Boythorn firmly. "Not on any consideration! Eight and forty hours! As to corporations, parishes, vestry-boards, and similar gatherings of jolter-headed clods who assemble to exchange such speeches that, by heaven, they ought to be worked in quicksilver mines for the short remainder of their miserable existence, if it were only to prevent their detestable English from contaminating a language spoken in the presence of the sun--as to those fellows, who meanly take advantage of the ardour of gentlemen in the pursuit of knowledge to recompense the inestimable services of the best years of their lives, their long study, and their expensive education with pittances too small for the acceptance of clerks, I would have the necks of every one of them wrung and their skulls arranged in Surgeons' Hall for the contemplation of the whole profession in order that its younger members might understand from actual measurement, in early life, HOW thick skulls may become!" He wound up this vehement declaration by looking round upon us with a most agreeable smile and suddenly thundering, "Ha, ha, ha!" over and over again, until anybody else might have been expected to be quite subdued by the exertion. As Richard still continued to say that he was fixed in his choice after repeated periods for consideration had been recommended by Mr. Jarndyce and had expired, and he still continued to assure Ada and me in the same final manner that it was "all right," it became advisable to take Mr. Kenge into council. Mr. Kenge, therefore, came down to dinner one day, and leaned back in his chair, and turned his eye-glasses over and over, and spoke in a sonorous voice, and did exactly what I remembered to have seen him do when I was a little girl. "Ah!" said Mr. Kenge. "Yes. Well! A very good profession, Mr. Jarndyce, a very good profession." "The course of study and preparation requires to be diligently pursued," observed my guardian with a glance at Richard. "Oh, no doubt," said Mr. Kenge. "Diligently." "But that being the case, more or less, with all pursuits that are worth much," said Mr. Jarndyce, "it is not a special consideration which another choice would be likely to escape." "Truly," said Mr. Kenge. "And Mr. Richard Carstone, who has so meritoriously acquitted himself in the--shall I say the classic shades?--in which his youth had been passed, will, no doubt, apply the habits, if not the principles and practice, of versification in that tongue in which a poet was said (unless I mistake) to be born, not made, to the more eminently practical field of action on which he enters." "You may rely upon it," said Richard in his off-hand manner, "that I shall go at it and do my best." "Very well, Mr. Jarndyce!" said Mr. Kenge, gently nodding his head. "Really, when we are assured by Mr. Richard that he means to go at it and to do his best," nodding feelingly and smoothly over those expressions, "I would submit to you that we have only to inquire into the best mode of carrying out the object of his ambition. Now, with reference to placing Mr. Richard with some sufficiently eminent practitioner. Is there any one in view at present?" "No one, Rick, I think?" said my guardian. "No one, sir," said Richard. "Quite so!" observed Mr. Kenge. "As to situation, now. Is there any particular feeling on that head?" "N--no," said Richard. "Quite so!" observed Mr. Kenge again. "I should like a little variety," said Richard; "I mean a good range of experience." "Very requisite, no doubt," returned Mr. Kenge. "I think this may be easily arranged, Mr. Jarndyce? We have only, in the first place, to discover a sufficiently eligible practitioner; and as soon as we make our want--and shall I add, our ability to pay a premium?--known, our only difficulty will be in the selection of one from a large number. We have only, in the second place, to observe those little formalities which are rendered necessary by our time of life and our being under the guardianship of the court. We shall soon be--shall I say, in Mr. Richard's own light-hearted manner, 'going at it'--to our heart's content. It is a coincidence," said Mr. Kenge with a tinge of melancholy in his smile, "one of those coincidences which may or may not require an explanation beyond our present limited faculties, that I have a cousin in the medical profession. He might be deemed eligible by you and might be disposed to respond to this proposal. I can answer for him as little as for you, but he MIGHT!" As this was an opening in the prospect, it was arranged that Mr. Kenge should see his cousin. And as Mr. Jarndyce had before proposed to take us to London for a few weeks, it was settled next day that we should make our visit at once and combine Richard's business with it. Mr. Boythorn leaving us within a week, we took up our abode at a cheerful lodging near Oxford Street over an upholsterer's shop. London was a great wonder to us, and we were out for hours and hours at a time, seeing the sights, which appeared to be less capable of exhaustion than we were. We made the round of the principal theatres, too, with great delight, and saw all the plays that were worth seeing. I mention this because it was at the theatre that I began to be made uncomfortable again by Mr. Guppy. I was sitting in front of the box one night with Ada, and Richard was in the place he liked best, behind Ada's chair, when, happening to look down into the pit, I saw Mr. Guppy, with his hair flattened down upon his head and woe depicted in his face, looking up at me. I felt all through the performance that he never looked at the actors but constantly looked at me, and always with a carefully prepared expression of the deepest misery and the profoundest dejection. It quite spoiled my pleasure for that night because it was so very embarrassing and so very ridiculous. But from that time forth, we never went to the play without my seeing Mr. Guppy in the pit, always with his hair straight and flat, his shirt-collar turned down, and a general feebleness about him. If he were not there when we went in, and I began to hope he would not come and yielded myself for a little while to the interest of the scene, I was certain to encounter his languishing eyes when I least expected it and, from that time, to be quite sure that they were fixed upon me all the evening. I really cannot express how uneasy this made me. If he would only have brushed up his hair or turned up his collar, it would have been bad enough; but to know that that absurd figure was always gazing at me, and always in that demonstrative state of despondency, put such a constraint upon me that I did not like to laugh at the play, or to cry at it, or to move, or to speak. I seemed able to do nothing naturally. As to escaping Mr. Guppy by going to the back of the box, I could not bear to do that because I knew Richard and Ada relied on having me next them and that they could never have talked together so happily if anybody else had been in my place. So there I sat, not knowing where to look--for wherever I looked, I knew Mr. Guppy's eyes were following me--and thinking of the dreadful expense to which this young man was putting himself on my account. Sometimes I thought of telling Mr. Jarndyce. Then I feared that the young man would lose his situation and that I might ruin him. Sometimes I thought of confiding in Richard, but was deterred by the possibility of his fighting Mr. Guppy and giving him black eyes. Sometimes I thought, should I frown at him or shake my head. Then I felt I could not do it. Sometimes I considered whether I should write to his mother, but that ended in my being convinced that to open a correspondence would be to make the matter worse. I always came to the conclusion, finally, that I could do nothing. Mr. Guppy's perseverance, all this time, not only produced him regularly at any theatre to which we went, but caused him to appear in the crowd as we were coming out, and even to get up behind our fly--where I am sure I saw him, two or three times, struggling among the most dreadful spikes. After we got home, he haunted a post opposite our house. The upholsterer's where we lodged being at the corner of two streets, and my bedroom window being opposite the post, I was afraid to go near the window when I went upstairs, lest I should see him (as I did one moonlight night) leaning against the post and evidently catching cold. If Mr. Guppy had not been, fortunately for me, engaged in the daytime, I really should have had no rest from him. While we were making this round of gaieties, in which Mr. Guppy so extraordinarily participated, the business which had helped to bring us to town was not neglected. Mr. Kenge's cousin was a Mr. Bayham Badger, who had a good practice at Chelsea and attended a large public institution besides. He was quite willing to receive Richard into his house and to superintend his studies, and as it seemed that those could be pursued advantageously under Mr. Badger's roof, and Mr. Badger liked Richard, and as Richard said he liked Mr. Badger "well enough," an agreement was made, the Lord Chancellor's consent was obtained, and it was all settled. On the day when matters were concluded between Richard and Mr. Badger, we were all under engagement to dine at Mr. Badger's house. We were to be "merely a family party," Mrs. Badger's note said; and we found no lady there but Mrs. Badger herself. She was surrounded in the drawing-room by various objects, indicative of her painting a little, playing the piano a little, playing the guitar a little, playing the harp a little, singing a little, working a little, reading a little, writing poetry a little, and botanizing a little. She was a lady of about fifty, I should think, youthfully dressed, and of a very fine complexion. If I add to the little list of her accomplishments that she rouged a little, I do not mean that there was any harm in it. Mr. Bayham Badger himself was a pink, fresh-faced, crisp-looking gentleman with a weak voice, white teeth, light hair, and surprised eyes, some years younger, I should say, than Mrs. Bayham Badger. He admired her exceedingly, but principally, and to begin with, on the curious ground (as it seemed to us) of her having had three husbands. We had barely taken our seats when he said to Mr. Jarndyce quite triumphantly, "You would hardly suppose that I am Mrs. Bayham Badger's third!" "Indeed?" said Mr. Jarndyce. "Her third!" said Mr. Badger. "Mrs. Bayham Badger has not the appearance, Miss Summerson, of a lady who has had two former husbands?" I said "Not at all!" "And most remarkable men!" said Mr. Badger in a tone of confidence. "Captain Swosser of the Royal Navy, who was Mrs. Badger's first husband, was a very distinguished officer indeed. The name of Professor Dingo, my immediate predecessor, is one of European reputation." Mrs. Badger overheard him and smiled. "Yes, my dear!" Mr. Badger replied to the smile, "I was observing to Mr. Jarndyce and Miss Summerson that you had had two former husbands--both very distinguished men. And they found it, as people generally do, difficult to believe." "I was barely twenty," said Mrs. Badger, "when I married Captain Swosser of the Royal Navy. I was in the Mediterranean with him; I am quite a sailor. On the twelfth anniversary of my wedding-day, I became the wife of Professor Dingo." "Of European reputation," added Mr. Badger in an undertone. "And when Mr. Badger and myself were married," pursued Mrs. Badger, "we were married on the same day of the year. I had become attached to the day." "So that Mrs. Badger has been married to three husbands--two of them highly distinguished men," said Mr. Badger, summing up the facts, "and each time upon the twenty-first of March at eleven in the forenoon!" We all expressed our admiration. "But for Mr. Badger's modesty," said Mr. Jarndyce, "I would take leave to correct him and say three distinguished men." "Thank you, Mr. Jarndyce! What I always tell him!" observed Mrs. Badger. "And, my dear," said Mr. Badger, "what do I always tell you? That without any affectation of disparaging such professional distinction as I may have attained (which our friend Mr. Carstone will have many opportunities of estimating), I am not so weak--no, really," said Mr. Badger to us generally, "so unreasonable--as to put my reputation on the same footing with such first-rate men as Captain Swosser and Professor Dingo. Perhaps you may be interested, Mr. Jarndyce," continued Mr. Bayham Badger, leading the way into the next drawing-room, "in this portrait of Captain Swosser. It was taken on his return home from the African station, where he had suffered from the fever of the country. Mrs. Badger considers it too yellow. But it's a very fine head. A very fine head!" We all echoed, "A very fine head!" "I feel when I look at it," said Mr. Badger, "'That's a man I should like to have seen!' It strikingly bespeaks the first-class man that Captain Swosser pre-eminently was. On the other side, Professor Dingo. I knew him well--attended him in his last illness--a speaking likeness! Over the piano, Mrs. Bayham Badger when Mrs. Swosser. Over the sofa, Mrs. Bayham Badger when Mrs. Dingo. Of Mrs. Bayham Badger IN ESSE, I possess the original and have no copy." Dinner was now announced, and we went downstairs. It was a very genteel entertainment, very handsomely served. But the captain and the professor still ran in Mr. Badger's head, and as Ada and I had the honour of being under his particular care, we had the full benefit of them. "Water, Miss Summerson? Allow me! Not in that tumbler, pray. Bring me the professor's goblet, James!" Ada very much admired some artificial flowers under a glass. "Astonishing how they keep!" said Mr. Badger. "They were presented to Mrs. Bayham Badger when she was in the Mediterranean." He invited Mr. Jarndyce to take a glass of claret. "Not that claret!" he said. "Excuse me! This is an occasion, and ON an occasion I produce some very special claret I happen to have. (James, Captain Swosser's wine!) Mr. Jarndyce, this is a wine that was imported by the captain, we will not say how many years ago. You will find it very curious. My dear, I shall be happy to take some of this wine with you. (Captain Swosser's claret to your mistress, James!) My love, your health!" After dinner, when we ladies retired, we took Mrs. Badger's first and second husband with us. Mrs. Badger gave us in the drawing-room a biographical sketch of the life and services of Captain Swosser before his marriage and a more minute account of him dating from the time when he fell in love with her at a ball on board the Crippler, given to the officers of that ship when she lay in Plymouth Harbour. "The dear old Crippler!" said Mrs. Badger, shaking her head. "She was a noble vessel. Trim, ship-shape, all a taunto, as Captain Swosser used to say. You must excuse me if I occasionally introduce a nautical expression; I was quite a sailor once. Captain Swosser loved that craft for my sake. When she was no longer in commission, he frequently said that if he were rich enough to buy her old hulk, he would have an inscription let into the timbers of the quarter-deck where we stood as partners in the dance to mark the spot where he fell--raked fore and aft (Captain Swosser used to say) by the fire from my tops. It was his naval way of mentioning my eyes." Mrs. Badger shook her head, sighed, and looked in the glass. "It was a great change from Captain Swosser to Professor Dingo," she resumed with a plaintive smile. "I felt it a good deal at first. Such an entire revolution in my mode of life! But custom, combined with science--particularly science--inured me to it. Being the professor's sole companion in his botanical excursions, I almost forgot that I had ever been afloat, and became quite learned. It is singular that the professor was the antipodes of Captain Swosser and that Mr. Badger is not in the least like either!" We then passed into a narrative of the deaths of Captain Swosser and Professor Dingo, both of whom seem to have had very bad complaints. In the course of it, Mrs. Badger signified to us that she had never madly loved but once and that the object of that wild affection, never to be recalled in its fresh enthusiasm, was Captain Swosser. The professor was yet dying by inches in the most dismal manner, and Mrs. Badger was giving us imitations of his way of saying, with great difficulty, "Where is Laura? Let Laura give me my toast and water!" when the entrance of the gentlemen consigned him to the tomb. Now, I observed that evening, as I had observed for some days past, that Ada and Richard were more than ever attached to each other's society, which was but natural, seeing that they were going to be separated so soon. I was therefore not very much surprised when we got home, and Ada and I retired upstairs, to find Ada more silent than usual, though I was not quite prepared for her coming into my arms and beginning to speak to me, with her face hidden. "My darling Esther!" murmured Ada. "I have a great secret to tell you!" A mighty secret, my pretty one, no doubt! "What is it, Ada?" "Oh, Esther, you would never guess!" "Shall I try to guess?" said I. "Oh, no! Don't! Pray don't!" cried Ada, very much startled by the idea of my doing so. "Now, I wonder who it can be about?" said I, pretending to consider. "It's about--" said Ada in a whisper. "It's about--my cousin Richard!" "Well, my own!" said I, kissing her bright hair, which was all I could see. "And what about him?" "Oh, Esther, you would never guess!" It was so pretty to have her clinging to me in that way, hiding her face, and to know that she was not crying in sorrow but in a little glow of joy, and pride, and hope, that I would not help her just yet. "He says--I know it's very foolish, we are both so young--but he says," with a burst of tears, "that he loves me dearly, Esther." "Does he indeed?" said I. "I never heard of such a thing! Why, my pet of pets, I could have told you that weeks and weeks ago!" To see Ada lift up her flushed face in joyful surprise, and hold me round the neck, and laugh, and cry, and blush, was so pleasant! "Why, my darling," said I, "what a goose you must take me for! Your cousin Richard has been loving you as plainly as he could for I don't know how long!" "And yet you never said a word about it!" cried Ada, kissing me. "No, my love," said I. "I waited to be told." "But now I have told you, you don't think it wrong of me, do you?" returned Ada. She might have coaxed me to say no if I had been the hardest-hearted duenna in the world. Not being that yet, I said no very freely. "And now," said I, "I know the worst of it." "Oh, that's not quite the worst of it, Esther dear!" cried Ada, holding me tighter and laying down her face again upon my breast. "No?" said I. "Not even that?" "No, not even that!" said Ada, shaking her head. "Why, you never mean to say--" I was beginning in joke. But Ada, looking up and smiling through her tears, cried, "Yes, I do! You know, you know I do!" And then sobbed out, "With all my heart I do! With all my whole heart, Esther!" I told her, laughing, why I had known that, too, just as well as I had known the other! And we sat before the fire, and I had all the talking to myself for a little while (though there was not much of it); and Ada was soon quiet and happy. "Do you think my cousin John knows, dear Dame Durden?" she asked. "Unless my cousin John is blind, my pet," said I, "I should think my cousin John knows pretty well as much as we know." "We want to speak to him before Richard goes," said Ada timidly, "and we wanted you to advise us, and to tell him so. Perhaps you wouldn't mind Richard's coming in, Dame Durden?" "Oh! Richard is outside, is he, my dear?" said I. "I am not quite certain," returned Ada with a bashful simplicity that would have won my heart if she had not won it long before, "but I think he's waiting at the door." There he was, of course. They brought a chair on either side of me, and put me between them, and really seemed to have fallen in love with me instead of one another, they were so confiding, and so trustful, and so fond of me. They went on in their own wild way for a little while--I never stopped them; I enjoyed it too much myself--and then we gradually fell to considering how young they were, and how there must be a lapse of several years before this early love could come to anything, and how it could come to happiness only if it were real and lasting and inspired them with a steady resolution to do their duty to each other, with constancy, fortitude, and perseverance, each always for the other's sake. Well! Richard said that he would work his fingers to the bone for Ada, and Ada said that she would work her fingers to the bone for Richard, and they called me all sorts of endearing and sensible names, and we sat there, advising and talking, half the night. Finally, before we parted, I gave them my promise to speak to their cousin John to-morrow. So, when to-morrow came, I went to my guardian after breakfast, in the room that was our town-substitute for the growlery, and told him that I had it in trust to tell him something. "Well, little woman," said he, shutting up his book, "if you have accepted the trust, there can be no harm in it." "I hope not, guardian," said I. "I can guarantee that there is no secrecy in it. For it only happened yesterday." "Aye? And what is it, Esther?" "Guardian," said I, "you remember the happy night when first we came down to Bleak House? When Ada was singing in the dark room?" I wished to call to his remembrance the look he had given me then. Unless I am much mistaken, I saw that I did so. "Because--" said I with a little hesitation. "Yes, my dear!" said he. "Don't hurry." "Because," said I, "Ada and Richard have fallen in love. And have told each other so." "Already!" cried my guardian, quite astonished. "Yes!" said I. "And to tell you the truth, guardian, I rather expected it." "The deuce you did!" said he. He sat considering for a minute or two, with his smile, at once so handsome and so kind, upon his changing face, and then requested me to let them know that he wished to see them. When they came, he encircled Ada with one arm in his fatherly way and addressed himself to Richard with a cheerful gravity. "Rick," said Mr. Jarndyce, "I am glad to have won your confidence. I hope to preserve it. When I contemplated these relations between us four which have so brightened my life and so invested it with new interests and pleasures, I certainly did contemplate, afar off, the possibility of you and your pretty cousin here (don't be shy, Ada, don't be shy, my dear!) being in a mind to go through life together. I saw, and do see, many reasons to make it desirable. But that was afar off, Rick, afar off!" "We look afar off, sir," returned Richard. "Well!" said Mr. Jarndyce. "That's rational. Now, hear me, my dears! I might tell you that you don't know your own minds yet, that a thousand things may happen to divert you from one another, that it is well this chain of flowers you have taken up is very easily broken, or it might become a chain of lead. But I will not do that. Such wisdom will come soon enough, I dare say, if it is to come at all. I will assume that a few years hence you will be in your hearts to one another what you are to-day. All I say before speaking to you according to that assumption is, if you DO change--if you DO come to find that you are more commonplace cousins to each other as man and woman than you were as boy and girl (your manhood will excuse me, Rick!)--don't be ashamed still to confide in me, for there will be nothing monstrous or uncommon in it. I am only your friend and distant kinsman. I have no power over you whatever. But I wish and hope to retain your confidence if I do nothing to forfeit it." "I am very sure, sir," returned Richard, "that I speak for Ada too when I say that you have the strongest power over us both--rooted in respect, gratitude, and affection--strengthening every day." "Dear cousin John," said Ada, on his shoulder, "my father's place can never be empty again. All the love and duty I could ever have rendered to him is transferred to you." "Come!" said Mr. Jarndyce. "Now for our assumption. Now we lift our eyes up and look hopefully at the distance! Rick, the world is before you; and it is most probable that as you enter it, so it will receive you. Trust in nothing but in Providence and your own efforts. Never separate the two, like the heathen waggoner. Constancy in love is a good thing, but it means nothing, and is nothing, without constancy in every kind of effort. If you had the abilities of all the great men, past and present, you could do nothing well without sincerely meaning it and setting about it. If you entertain the supposition that any real success, in great things or in small, ever was or could be, ever will or can be, wrested from Fortune by fits and starts, leave that wrong idea here or leave your cousin Ada here." "I will leave IT here, sir," replied Richard smiling, "if I brought it here just now (but I hope I did not), and will work my way on to my cousin Ada in the hopeful distance." "Right!" said Mr. Jarndyce. "If you are not to make her happy, why should you pursue her?" "I wouldn't make her unhappy--no, not even for her love," retorted Richard proudly. "Well said!" cried Mr. Jarndyce. "That's well said! She remains here, in her home with me. Love her, Rick, in your active life, no less than in her home when you revisit it, and all will go well. Otherwise, all will go ill. That's the end of my preaching. I think you and Ada had better take a walk." Ada tenderly embraced him, and Richard heartily shook hands with him, and then the cousins went out of the room, looking back again directly, though, to say that they would wait for me. The door stood open, and we both followed them with our eyes as they passed down the adjoining room, on which the sun was shining, and out at its farther end. Richard with his head bent, and her hand drawn through his arm, was talking to her very earnestly; and she looked up in his face, listening, and seemed to see nothing else. So young, so beautiful, so full of hope and promise, they went on lightly through the sunlight as their own happy thoughts might then be traversing the years to come and making them all years of brightness. So they passed away into the shadow and were gone. It was only a burst of light that had been so radiant. The room darkened as they went out, and the sun was clouded over. "Am I right, Esther?" said my guardian when they were gone. He was so good and wise to ask ME whether he was right! "Rick may gain, out of this, the quality he wants. Wants, at the core of so much that is good!" said Mr. Jarndyce, shaking his head. "I have said nothing to Ada, Esther. She has her friend and counsellor always near." And he laid his hand lovingly upon my head. I could not help showing that I was a little moved, though I did all I could to conceal it. "Tut tut!" said he. "But we must take care, too, that our little woman's life is not all consumed in care for others." "Care? My dear guardian, I believe I am the happiest creature in the world!" "I believe so, too," said he. "But some one may find out what Esther never will--that the little woman is to be held in remembrance above all other people!" I have omitted to mention in its place that there was some one else at the family dinner party. It was not a lady. It was a gentleman. It was a gentleman of a dark complexion--a young surgeon. He was rather reserved, but I thought him very sensible and agreeable. At least, Ada asked me if I did not, and I said yes. CHAPTER XIV Deportment Richard left us on the very next evening to begin his new career, and committed Ada to my charge with great love for her and great trust in me. It touched me then to reflect, and it touches me now, more nearly, to remember (having what I have to tell) how they both thought of me, even at that engrossing time. I was a part of all their plans, for the present and the future. I was to write Richard once a week, making my faithful report of Ada, who was to write to him every alternate day. I was to be informed, under his own hand, of all his labours and successes; I was to observe how resolute and persevering he would be; I was to be Ada's bridesmaid when they were married; I was to live with them afterwards; I was to keep all the keys of their house; I was to be made happy for ever and a day. "And if the suit SHOULD make us rich, Esther--which it may, you know!" said Richard to crown all. A shade crossed Ada's face. "My dearest Ada," asked Richard, "why not?" "It had better declare us poor at once," said Ada. "Oh! I don't know about that," returned Richard, "but at all events, it won't declare anything at once. It hasn't declared anything in heaven knows how many years." "Too true," said Ada. "Yes, but," urged Richard, answering what her look suggested rather than her words, "the longer it goes on, dear cousin, the nearer it must be to a settlement one way or other. Now, is not that reasonable?" "You know best, Richard. But I am afraid if we trust to it, it will make us unhappy." "But, my Ada, we are not going to trust to it!" cried Richard gaily. "We know it better than to trust to it. We only say that if it SHOULD make us rich, we have no constitutional objection to being rich. The court is, by solemn settlement of law, our grim old guardian, and we are to suppose that what it gives us (when it gives us anything) is our right. It is not necessary to quarrel with our right." "No," said Ada, "but it may be better to forget all about it." "Well, well," cried Richard, "then we will forget all about it! We consign the whole thing to oblivion. Dame Durden puts on her approving face, and it's done!" "Dame Durden's approving face," said I, looking out of the box in which I was packing his books, "was not very visible when you called it by that name; but it does approve, and she thinks you can't do better." So, Richard said there was an end of it, and immediately began, on no other foundation, to build as many castles in the air as would man the Great Wall of China. He went away in high spirits. Ada and I, prepared to miss him very much, commenced our quieter career. On our arrival in London, we had called with Mr. Jarndyce at Mrs. Jellyby's but had not been so fortunate as to find her at home. It appeared that she had gone somewhere to a tea-drinking and had taken Miss Jellyby with her. Besides the tea-drinking, there was to be some considerable speech-making and letter-writing on the general merits of the cultivation of coffee, conjointly with natives, at the Settlement of Borrioboola-Gha. All this involved, no doubt, sufficient active exercise of pen and ink to make her daughter's part in the proceedings anything but a holiday. It being now beyond the time appointed for Mrs. Jellyby's return, we called again. She was in town, but not at home, having gone to Mile End directly after breakfast on some Borrioboolan business, arising out of a society called the East London Branch Aid Ramification. As I had not seen Peepy on the occasion of our last call (when he was not to be found anywhere, and when the cook rather thought he must have strolled away with the dustman's cart), I now inquired for him again. The oyster shells he had been building a house with were still in the passage, but he was nowhere discoverable, and the cook supposed that he had "gone after the sheep." When we repeated, with some surprise, "The sheep?" she said, Oh, yes, on market days he sometimes followed them quite out of town and came back in such a state as never was! I was sitting at the window with my guardian on the following morning, and Ada was busy writing--of course to Richard--when Miss Jellyby was announced, and entered, leading the identical Peepy, whom she had made some endeavours to render presentable by wiping the dirt into corners of his face and hands and making his hair very wet and then violently frizzling it with her fingers. Everything the dear child wore was either too large for him or too small. Among his other contradictory decorations he had the hat of a bishop and the little gloves of a baby. His boots were, on a small scale, the boots of a ploughman, while his legs, so crossed and recrossed with scratches that they looked like maps, were bare below a very short pair of plaid drawers finished off with two frills of perfectly different patterns. The deficient buttons on his plaid frock had evidently been supplied from one of Mr. Jellyby's coats, they were so extremely brazen and so much too large. Most extraordinary specimens of needlework appeared on several parts of his dress, where it had been hastily mended, and I recognized the same hand on Miss Jellyby's. She was, however, unaccountably improved in her appearance and looked very pretty. She was conscious of poor little Peepy being but a failure after all her trouble, and she showed it as she came in by the way in which she glanced first at him and then at us. "Oh, dear me!" said my guardian. "Due east!" Ada and I gave her a cordial welcome and presented her to Mr. Jarndyce, to whom she said as she sat down, "Ma's compliments, and she hopes you'll excuse her, because she's correcting proofs of the plan. She's going to put out five thousand new circulars, and she knows you'll be interested to hear that. I have brought one of them with me. Ma's compliments." With which she presented it sulkily enough. "Thank you," said my guardian. "I am much obliged to Mrs. Jellyby. Oh, dear me! This is a very trying wind!" We were busy with Peepy, taking off his clerical hat, asking him if he remembered us, and so on. Peepy retired behind his elbow at first, but relented at the sight of sponge-cake and allowed me to take him on my lap, where he sat munching quietly. Mr. Jarndyce then withdrawing into the temporary growlery, Miss Jellyby opened a conversation with her usual abruptness. "We are going on just as bad as ever in Thavies Inn," said she. "I have no peace of my life. Talk of Africa! I couldn't be worse off if I was a what's-his-name--man and a brother!" I tried to say something soothing. "Oh, it's of no use, Miss Summerson," exclaimed Miss Jellyby, "though I thank you for the kind intention all the same. I know how I am used, and I am not to be talked over. YOU wouldn't be talked over if you were used so. Peepy, go and play at Wild Beasts under the piano!" "I shan't!" said Peepy. "Very well, you ungrateful, naughty, hard-hearted boy!" returned Miss Jellyby with tears in her eyes. "I'll never take pains to dress you any more." "Yes, I will go, Caddy!" cried Peepy, who was really a good child and who was so moved by his sister's vexation that he went at once. "It seems a little thing to cry about," said poor Miss Jellyby apologetically, "but I am quite worn out. I was directing the new circulars till two this morning. I detest the whole thing so that that alone makes my head ache till I can't see out of my eyes. And look at that poor unfortunate child! Was there ever such a fright as he is!" Peepy, happily unconscious of the defects in his appearance, sat on the carpet behind one of the legs of the piano, looking calmly out of his den at us while he ate his cake. "I have sent him to the other end of the room," observed Miss Jellyby, drawing her chair nearer ours, "because I don't want him to hear the conversation. Those little things are so sharp! I was going to say, we really are going on worse than ever. Pa will be a bankrupt before long, and then I hope Ma will be satisfied. There'll he nobody but Ma to thank for it." We said we hoped Mr. Jellyby's affairs were not in so bad a state as that. "It's of no use hoping, though it's very kind of you," returned Miss Jellyby, shaking her head. "Pa told me only yesterday morning (and dreadfully unhappy he is) that he couldn't weather the storm. I should be surprised if he could. When all our tradesmen send into our house any stuff they like, and the servants do what they like with it, and I have no time to improve things if I knew how, and Ma don't care about anything, I should like to make out how Pa is to weather the storm. I declare if I was Pa, I'd run away." "My dear!" said I, smiling. "Your papa, no doubt, considers his family." "Oh, yes, his family is all very fine, Miss Summerson," replied Miss Jellyby; "but what comfort is his family to him? His family is nothing but bills, dirt, waste, noise, tumbles downstairs, confusion, and wretchedness. His scrambling home, from week's end to week's end, is like one great washing-day--only nothing's washed!" Miss Jellyby tapped her foot upon the floor and wiped her eyes. "I am sure I pity Pa to that degree," she said, "and am so angry with Ma that I can't find words to express myself! However, I am not going to bear it, I am determined. I won't be a slave all my life, and I won't submit to be proposed to by Mr. Quale. A pretty thing, indeed, to marry a philanthropist. As if I hadn't had enough of THAT!" said poor Miss Jellyby. I must confess that I could not help feeling rather angry with Mrs. Jellyby myself, seeing and hearing this neglected girl and knowing how much of bitterly satirical truth there was in what she said. "If it wasn't that we had been intimate when you stopped at our house," pursued Miss Jellyby, "I should have been ashamed to come here to-day, for I know what a figure I must seem to you two. But as it is, I made up my mind to call, especially as I am not likely to see you again the next time you come to town." She said this with such great significance that Ada and I glanced at one another, foreseeing something more. "No!" said Miss Jellyby, shaking her head. "Not at all likely! I know I may trust you two. I am sure you won't betray me. I am engaged." "Without their knowledge at home?" said I. "Why, good gracious me, Miss Summerson," she returned, justifying herself in a fretful but not angry manner, "how can it be otherwise? You know what Ma is--and I needn't make poor Pa more miserable by telling HIM." "But would it not be adding to his unhappiness to marry without his knowledge or consent, my dear?" said I. "No," said Miss Jellyby, softening. "I hope not. I should try to make him happy and comfortable when he came to see me, and Peepy and the others should take it in turns to come and stay with me, and they should have some care taken of them then." There was a good deal of affection in poor Caddy. She softened more and more while saying this and cried so much over the unwonted little home-picture she had raised in her mind that Peepy, in his cave under the piano, was touched, and turned himself over on his back with loud lamentations. It was not until I had brought him to kiss his sister, and had restored him to his place on my lap, and had shown him that Caddy was laughing (she laughed expressly for the purpose), that we could recall his peace of mind; even then it was for some time conditional on his taking us in turns by the chin and smoothing our faces all over with his hand. At last, as his spirits were not equal to the piano, we put him on a chair to look out of window; and Miss Jellyby, holding him by one leg, resumed her confidence. "It began in your coming to our house," she said. We naturally asked how. "I felt I was so awkward," she replied, "that I made up my mind to be improved in that respect at all events and to learn to dance. I told Ma I was ashamed of myself, and I must be taught to dance. Ma looked at me in that provoking way of hers as if I wasn't in sight, but I was quite determined to be taught to dance, and so I went to Mr. Turveydrop's Academy in Newman Street." "And was it there, my dear--" I began. "Yes, it was there," said Caddy, "and I am engaged to Mr. Turveydrop. There are two Mr. Turveydrops, father and son. My Mr. Turveydrop is the son, of course. I only wish I had been better brought up and was likely to make him a better wife, for I am very fond of him." "I am sorry to hear this," said I, "I must confess." "I don't know why you should be sorry," she retorted a little anxiously, "but I am engaged to Mr. Turveydrop, whether or no, and he is very fond of me. It's a secret as yet, even on his side, because old Mr. Turveydrop has a share in the connexion and it might break his heart or give him some other shock if he was told of it abruptly. Old Mr. Turveydrop is a very gentlemanly man indeed--very gentlemanly." "Does his wife know of it?" asked Ada. "Old Mr. Turveydrop's wife, Miss Clare?" returned Miss Jellyby, opening her eyes. "There's no such person. He is a widower." We were here interrupted by Peepy, whose leg had undergone so much on account of his sister's unconsciously jerking it like a bell-rope whenever she was emphatic that the afflicted child now bemoaned his sufferings with a very low-spirited noise. As he appealed to me for compassion, and as I was only a listener, I undertook to hold him. Miss Jellyby proceeded, after begging Peepy's pardon with a kiss and assuring him that she hadn't meant to do it. "That's the state of the case," said Caddy. "If I ever blame myself, I still think it's Ma's fault. We are to be married whenever we can, and then I shall go to Pa at the office and write to Ma. It won't much agitate Ma; I am only pen and ink to HER. One great comfort is," said Caddy with a sob, "that I shall never hear of Africa after I am married. Young Mr. Turveydrop hates it for my sake, and if old Mr. Turveydrop knows there is such a place, it's as much as he does." "It was he who was very gentlemanly, I think!" said I. "Very gentlemanly indeed," said Caddy. "He is celebrated almost everywhere for his deportment." "Does he teach?" asked Ada. "No, he don't teach anything in particular," replied Caddy. "But his deportment is beautiful." Caddy went on to say with considerable hesitation and reluctance that there was one thing more she wished us to know, and felt we ought to know, and which she hoped would not offend us. It was that she had improved her acquaintance with Miss Flite, the little crazy old lady, and that she frequently went there early in the morning and met her lover for a few minutes before breakfast--only for a few minutes. "I go there at other times," said Caddy, "but Prince does not come then. Young Mr. Turveydrop's name is Prince; I wish it wasn't, because it sounds like a dog, but of course he didn't christen himself. Old Mr. Turveydrop had him christened Prince in remembrance of the Prince Regent. Old Mr. Turveydrop adored the Prince Regent on account of his deportment. I hope you won't think the worse of me for having made these little appointments at Miss Flite's, where I first went with you, because I like the poor thing for her own sake and I believe she likes me. If you could see young Mr. Turveydrop, I am sure you would think well of him--at least, I am sure you couldn't possibly think any ill of him. I am going there now for my lesson. I couldn't ask you to go with me, Miss Summerson; but if you would," said Caddy, who had said all this earnestly and tremblingly, "I should be very glad--very glad." It happened that we had arranged with my guardian to go to Miss Flite's that day. We had told him of our former visit, and our account had interested him; but something had always happened to prevent our going there again. As I trusted that I might have sufficient influence with Miss Jellyby to prevent her taking any very rash step if I fully accepted the confidence she was so willing to place in me, poor girl, I proposed that she and I and Peepy should go to the academy and afterwards meet my guardian and Ada at Miss Flite's, whose name I now learnt for the first time. This was on condition that Miss Jellyby and Peepy should come back with us to dinner. The last article of the agreement being joyfully acceded to by both, we smartened Peepy up a little with the assistance of a few pins, some soap and water, and a hair-brush, and went out, bending our steps towards Newman Street, which was very near. I found the academy established in a sufficiently dingy house at the corner of an archway, with busts in all the staircase windows. In the same house there were also established, as I gathered from the plates on the door, a drawing-master, a coal-merchant (there was, certainly, no room for his coals), and a lithographic artist. On the plate which, in size and situation, took precedence of all the rest, I read, MR. TURVEYDROP. The door was open, and the hall was blocked up by a grand piano, a harp, and several other musical instruments in cases, all in progress of removal, and all looking rakish in the daylight. Miss Jellyby informed me that the academy had been lent, last night, for a concert. We went upstairs--it had been quite a fine house once, when it was anybody's business to keep it clean and fresh, and nobody's business to smoke in it all day--and into Mr. Turveydrop's great room, which was built out into a mews at the back and was lighted by a skylight. It was a bare, resounding room smelling of stables, with cane forms along the walls, and the walls ornamented at regular intervals with painted lyres and little cut-glass branches for candles, which seemed to be shedding their old-fashioned drops as other branches might shed autumn leaves. Several young lady pupils, ranging from thirteen or fourteen years of age to two or three and twenty, were assembled; and I was looking among them for their instructor when Caddy, pinching my arm, repeated the ceremony of introduction. "Miss Summerson, Mr. Prince Turveydrop!" I curtsied to a little blue-eyed fair man of youthful appearance with flaxen hair parted in the middle and curling at the ends all round his head. He had a little fiddle, which we used to call at school a kit, under his left arm, and its little bow in the same hand. His little dancing-shoes were particularly diminutive, and he had a little innocent, feminine manner which not only appealed to me in an amiable way, but made this singular effect upon me, that I received the impression that he was like his mother and that his mother had not been much considered or well used. "I am very happy to see Miss Jellyby's friend," he said, bowing low to me. "I began to fear," with timid tenderness, "as it was past the usual time, that Miss Jellyby was not coming." "I beg you will have the goodness to attribute that to me, who have detained her, and to receive my excuses, sir," said I. "Oh, dear!" said he. "And pray," I entreated, "do not allow me to be the cause of any more delay." With that apology I withdrew to a seat between Peepy (who, being well used to it, had already climbed into a corner place) and an old lady of a censorious countenance whose two nieces were in the class and who was very indignant with Peepy's boots. Prince Turveydrop then tinkled the strings of his kit with his fingers, and the young ladies stood up to dance. Just then there appeared from a side-door old Mr. Turveydrop, in the full lustre of his deportment. He was a fat old gentleman with a false complexion, false teeth, false whiskers, and a wig. He had a fur collar, and he had a padded breast to his coat, which only wanted a star or a broad blue ribbon to be complete. He was pinched in, and swelled out, and got up, and strapped down, as much as he could possibly bear. He had such a neckcloth on (puffing his very eyes out of their natural shape), and his chin and even his ears so sunk into it, that it seemed as though he must inevitably double up if it were cast loose. He had under his arm a hat of great size and weight, shelving downward from the crown to the brim, and in his hand a pair of white gloves with which he flapped it as he stood poised on one leg in a high-shouldered, round-elbowed state of elegance not to be surpassed. He had a cane, he had an eye-glass, he had a snuff-box, he had rings, he had wristbands, he had everything but any touch of nature; he was not like youth, he was not like age, he was not like anything in the world but a model of deportment. "Father! A visitor. Miss Jellyby's friend, Miss Summerson." "Distinguished," said Mr. Turveydrop, "by Miss Summerson's presence." As he bowed to me in that tight state, I almost believe I saw creases come into the whites of his eyes. "My father," said the son, aside, to me with quite an affecting belief in him, "is a celebrated character. My father is greatly admired." "Go on, Prince! Go on!" said Mr. Turveydrop, standing with his back to the fire and waving his gloves condescendingly. "Go on, my son!" At this command, or by this gracious permission, the lesson went on. Prince Turveydrop sometimes played the kit, dancing; sometimes played the piano, standing; sometimes hummed the tune with what little breath he could spare, while he set a pupil right; always conscientiously moved with the least proficient through every step and every part of the figure; and never rested for an instant. His distinguished father did nothing whatever but stand before the fire, a model of deportment. "And he never does anything else," said the old lady of the censorious countenance. "Yet would you believe that it's HIS name on the door-plate?" "His son's name is the same, you know," said I. "He wouldn't let his son have any name if he could take it from him," returned the old lady. "Look at the son's dress!" It certainly was plain--threadbare--almost shabby. "Yet the father must be garnished and tricked out," said the old lady, "because of his deportment. I'd deport him! Transport him would be better!" I felt curious to know more concerning this person. I asked, "Does he give lessons in deportment now?" "Now!" returned the old lady shortly. "Never did." After a moment's consideration, I suggested that perhaps fencing had been his accomplishment. "I don't believe he can fence at all, ma'am," said the old lady. I looked surprised and inquisitive. The old lady, becoming more and more incensed against the master of deportment as she dwelt upon the subject, gave me some particulars of his career, with strong assurances that they were mildly stated. He had married a meek little dancing-mistress, with a tolerable connexion (having never in his life before done anything but deport himself), and had worked her to death, or had, at the best, suffered her to work herself to death, to maintain him in those expenses which were indispensable to his position. At once to exhibit his deportment to the best models and to keep the best models constantly before himself, he had found it necessary to frequent all public places of fashionable and lounging resort, to be seen at Brighton and elsewhere at fashionable times, and to lead an idle life in the very best clothes. To enable him to do this, the affectionate little dancing-mistress had toiled and laboured and would have toiled and laboured to that hour if her strength had lasted so long. For the mainspring of the story was that in spite of the man's absorbing selfishness, his wife (overpowered by his deportment) had, to the last, believed in him and had, on her death-bed, in the most moving terms, confided him to their son as one who had an inextinguishable claim upon him and whom he could never regard with too much pride and deference. The son, inheriting his mother's belief, and having the deportment always before him, had lived and grown in the same faith, and now, at thirty years of age, worked for his father twelve hours a day and looked up to him with veneration on the old imaginary pinnacle. "The airs the fellow gives himself!" said my informant, shaking her head at old Mr. Turveydrop with speechless indignation as he drew on his tight gloves, of course unconscious of the homage she was rendering. "He fully believes he is one of the aristocracy! And he is so condescending to the son he so egregiously deludes that you might suppose him the most virtuous of parents. Oh!" said the old lady, apostrophizing him with infinite vehemence. "I could bite you!" I could not help being amused, though I heard the old lady out with feelings of real concern. It was difficult to doubt her with the father and son before me. What I might have thought of them without the old lady's account, or what I might have thought of the old lady's account without them, I cannot say. There was a fitness of things in the whole that carried conviction with it. My eyes were yet wandering, from young Mr. Turveydrop working so hard, to old Mr. Turveydrop deporting himself so beautifully, when the latter came ambling up to me and entered into conversation. He asked me, first of all, whether I conferred a charm and a distinction on London by residing in it? I did not think it necessary to reply that I was perfectly aware I should not do that, in any case, but merely told him where I did reside. "A lady so graceful and accomplished," he said, kissing his right glove and afterwards extending it towards the pupils, "will look leniently on the deficiencies here. We do our best to polish--polish--polish!" He sat down beside me, taking some pains to sit on the form, I thought, in imitation of the print of his illustrious model on the sofa. And really he did look very like it. "To polish--polish--polish!" he repeated, taking a pinch of snuff and gently fluttering his fingers. "But we are not, if I may say so to one formed to be graceful both by Nature and Art--" with the high-shouldered bow, which it seemed impossible for him to make without lifting up his eyebrows and shutting his eyes "--we are not what we used to be in point of deportment." "Are we not, sir?" said I. "We have degenerated," he returned, shaking his head, which he could do to a very limited extent in his cravat. "A levelling age is not favourable to deportment. It develops vulgarity. Perhaps I speak with some little partiality. It may not be for me to say that I have been called, for some years now, Gentleman Turveydrop, or that his Royal Highness the Prince Regent did me the honour to inquire, on my removing my hat as he drove out of the Pavilion at Brighton (that fine building), 'Who is he? Who the devil is he? Why don't I know him? Why hasn't he thirty thousand a year?' But these are little matters of anecdote--the general property, ma'am--still repeated occasionally among the upper classes." "Indeed?" said I. He replied with the high-shouldered bow. "Where what is left among us of deportment," he added, "still lingers. England--alas, my country!--has degenerated very much, and is degenerating every day. She has not many gentlemen left. We are few. I see nothing to succeed us but a race of weavers." "One might hope that the race of gentlemen would be perpetuated here," said I. "You are very good." He smiled with a high-shouldered bow again. "You flatter me. But, no--no! I have never been able to imbue my poor boy with that part of his art. Heaven forbid that I should disparage my dear child, but he has--no deportment." "He appears to be an excellent master," I observed. "Understand me, my dear madam, he IS an excellent master. All that can be acquired, he has acquired. All that can be imparted, he can impart. But there ARE things--" He took another pinch of snuff and made the bow again, as if to add, "This kind of thing, for instance." I glanced towards the centre of the room, where Miss Jellyby's lover, now engaged with single pupils, was undergoing greater drudgery than ever. "My amiable child," murmured Mr. Turveydrop, adjusting his cravat. "Your son is indefatigable," said I. "It is my reward," said Mr. Turveydrop, "to hear you say so. In some respects, he treads in the footsteps of his sainted mother. She was a devoted creature. But wooman, lovely wooman," said Mr. Turveydrop with very disagreeable gallantry, "what a sex you are!" I rose and joined Miss Jellyby, who was by this time putting on her bonnet. The time allotted to a lesson having fully elapsed, there was a general putting on of bonnets. When Miss Jellyby and the unfortunate Prince found an opportunity to become betrothed I don't know, but they certainly found none on this occasion to exchange a dozen words. "My dear," said Mr. Turveydrop benignly to his son, "do you know the hour?" "No, father." The son had no watch. The father had a handsome gold one, which he pulled out with an air that was an example to mankind. "My son," said he, "it's two o'clock. Recollect your school at Kensington at three." "That's time enough for me, father," said Prince. "I can take a morsel of dinner standing and be off." "My dear boy," returned his father, "you must be very quick. You will find the cold mutton on the table." "Thank you, father. Are YOU off now, father?" "Yes, my dear. I suppose," said Mr. Turveydrop, shutting his eyes and lifting up his shoulders with modest consciousness, "that I must show myself, as usual, about town." "You had better dine out comfortably somewhere," said his son. "My dear child, I intend to. I shall take my little meal, I think, at the French house, in the Opera Colonnade." "That's right. Good-bye, father!" said Prince, shaking hands. "Good-bye, my son. Bless you!" Mr. Turveydrop said this in quite a pious manner, and it seemed to do his son good, who, in parting from him, was so pleased with him, so dutiful to him, and so proud of him that I almost felt as if it were an unkindness to the younger man not to be able to believe implicitly in the elder. The few moments that were occupied by Prince in taking leave of us (and particularly of one of us, as I saw, being in the secret), enhanced my favourable impression of his almost childish character. I felt a liking for him and a compassion for him as he put his little kit in his pocket--and with it his desire to stay a little while with Caddy--and went away good-humouredly to his cold mutton and his school at Kensington, that made me scarcely less irate with his father than the censorious old lady. The father opened the room door for us and bowed us out in a manner, I must acknowledge, worthy of his shining original. In the same style he presently passed us on the other side of the street, on his way to the aristocratic part of the town, where he was going to show himself among the few other gentlemen left. For some moments, I was so lost in reconsidering what I had heard and seen in Newman Street that I was quite unable to talk to Caddy or even to fix my attention on what she said to me, especially when I began to inquire in my mind whether there were, or ever had been, any other gentlemen, not in the dancing profession, who lived and founded a reputation entirely on their deportment. This became so bewildering and suggested the possibility of so many Mr. Turveydrops that I said, "Esther, you must make up your mind to abandon this subject altogether and attend to Caddy." I accordingly did so, and we chatted all the rest of the way to Lincoln's Inn. Caddy told me that her lover's education had been so neglected that it was not always easy to read his notes. She said if he were not so anxious about his spelling and took less pains to make it clear, he would do better; but he put so many unnecessary letters into short words that they sometimes quite lost their English appearance. "He does it with the best intention," observed Caddy, "but it hasn't the effect he means, poor fellow!" Caddy then went on to reason, how could he be expected to be a scholar when he had passed his whole life in the dancing-school and had done nothing but teach and fag, fag and teach, morning, noon, and night! And what did it matter? She could write letters enough for both, as she knew to her cost, and it was far better for him to be amiable than learned. "Besides, it's not as if I was an accomplished girl who had any right to give herself airs," said Caddy. "I know little enough, I am sure, thanks to Ma! "There's another thing I want to tell you, now we are alone," continued Caddy, "which I should not have liked to mention unless you had seen Prince, Miss Summerson. You know what a house ours is. It's of no use my trying to learn anything that it would be useful for Prince's wife to know in OUR house. We live in such a state of muddle that it's impossible, and I have only been more disheartened whenever I have tried. So I get a little practice with--who do you think? Poor Miss Flite! Early in the morning I help her to tidy her room and clean her birds, and I make her cup of coffee for her (of course she taught me), and I have learnt to make it so well that Prince says it's the very best coffee he ever tasted, and would quite delight old Mr. Turveydrop, who is very particular indeed about his coffee. I can make little puddings too; and I know how to buy neck of mutton, and tea, and sugar, and butter, and a good many housekeeping things. I am not clever at my needle, yet," said Caddy, glancing at the repairs on Peepy's frock, "but perhaps I shall improve, and since I have been engaged to Prince and have been doing all this, I have felt better-tempered, I hope, and more forgiving to Ma. It rather put me out at first this morning to see you and Miss Clare looking so neat and pretty and to feel ashamed of Peepy and myself too, but on the whole I hope I am better-tempered than I was and more forgiving to Ma." The poor girl, trying so hard, said it from her heart, and touched mine. "Caddy, my love," I replied, "I begin to have a great affection for you, and I hope we shall become friends." "Oh, do you?" cried Caddy. "How happy that would make me!" "My dear Caddy," said I, "let us be friends from this time, and let us often have a chat about these matters and try to find the right way through them." Caddy was overjoyed. I said everything I could in my old-fashioned way to comfort and encourage her, and I would not have objected to old Mr. Turveydrop that day for any smaller consideration than a settlement on his daughter-in-law. By this time we were come to Mr. Krook's, whose private door stood open. There was a bill, pasted on the door-post, announcing a room to let on the second floor. It reminded Caddy to tell me as we proceeded upstairs that there had been a sudden death there and an inquest and that our little friend had been ill of the fright. The door and window of the vacant room being open, we looked in. It was the room with the dark door to which Miss Flite had secretly directed my attention when I was last in the house. A sad and desolate place it was, a gloomy, sorrowful place that gave me a strange sensation of mournfulness and even dread. "You look pale," said Caddy when we came out, "and cold!" I felt as if the room had chilled me. We had walked slowly while we were talking, and my guardian and Ada were here before us. We found them in Miss Flite's garret. They were looking at the birds, while a medical gentleman who was so good as to attend Miss Flite with much solicitude and compassion spoke with her cheerfully by the fire. "I have finished my professional visit," he said, coming forward. "Miss Flite is much better and may appear in court (as her mind is set upon it) to-morrow. She has been greatly missed there, I understand." Miss Flite received the compliment with complacency and dropped a general curtsy to us. "Honoured, indeed," said she, "by another visit from the wards in Jarndyce! Ve-ry happy to receive Jarndyce of Bleak House beneath my humble roof!" with a special curtsy. "Fitz-Jarndyce, my dear"--she had bestowed that name on Caddy, it appeared, and always called her by it--"a double welcome!" "Has she been very ill?" asked Mr. Jarndyce of the gentleman whom we had found in attendance on her. She answered for herself directly, though he had put the question in a whisper. "Oh, decidedly unwell! Oh, very unwell indeed," she said confidentially. "Not pain, you know--trouble. Not bodily so much as nervous, nervous! The truth is," in a subdued voice and trembling, "we have had death here. There was poison in the house. I am very susceptible to such horrid things. It frightened me. Only Mr. Woodcourt knows how much. My physician, Mr. Woodcourt!" with great stateliness. "The wards in Jarndyce--Jarndyce of Bleak House--Fitz-Jarndyce!" "Miss Flite," said Mr. Woodcourt in a grave kind of voice, as if he were appealing to her while speaking to us, and laying his hand gently on her arm, "Miss Flite describes her illness with her usual accuracy. She was alarmed by an occurrence in the house which might have alarmed a stronger person, and was made ill by the distress and agitation. She brought me here in the first hurry of the discovery, though too late for me to be of any use to the unfortunate man. I have compensated myself for that disappointment by coming here since and being of some small use to her." "The kindest physician in the college," whispered Miss Flite to me. "I expect a judgment. On the day of judgment. And shall then confer estates." "She will be as well in a day or two," said Mr. Woodcourt, looking at her with an observant smile, "as she ever will be. In other words, quite well of course. Have you heard of her good fortune?" "Most extraordinary!" said Miss Flite, smiling brightly. "You never heard of such a thing, my dear! Every Saturday, Conversation Kenge or Guppy (clerk to Conversation K.) places in my hand a paper of shillings. Shillings. I assure you! Always the same number in the paper. Always one for every day in the week. Now you know, really! So well-timed, is it not? Ye-es! From whence do these papers come, you say? That is the great question. Naturally. Shall I tell you what I think? I think," said Miss Flite, drawing herself back with a very shrewd look and shaking her right forefinger in a most significant manner, "that the Lord Chancellor, aware of the length of time during which the Great Seal has been open (for it has been open a long time!), forwards them. Until the judgment I expect is given. Now that's very creditable, you know. To confess in that way that he IS a little slow for human life. So delicate! Attending court the other day--I attend it regularly, with my documents--I taxed him with it, and he almost confessed. That is, I smiled at him from my bench, and HE smiled at me from his bench. But it's great good fortune, is it not? And Fitz-Jarndyce lays the money out for me to great advantage. Oh, I assure you to the greatest advantage!" I congratulated her (as she addressed herself to me) upon this fortunate addition to her income and wished her a long continuance of it. I did not speculate upon the source from which it came or wonder whose humanity was so considerate. My guardian stood before me, contemplating the birds, and I had no need to look beyond him. "And what do you call these little fellows, ma'am?" said he in his pleasant voice. "Have they any names?" "I can answer for Miss Flite that they have," said I, "for she promised to tell us what they were. Ada remembers?" Ada remembered very well. "Did I?" said Miss Flite. "Who's that at my door? What are you listening at my door for, Krook?" The old man of the house, pushing it open before him, appeared there with his fur cap in his hand and his cat at his heels. "I warn't listening, Miss Flite," he said, "I was going to give a rap with my knuckles, only you're so quick!" "Make your cat go down. Drive her away!" the old lady angrily exclaimed. "Bah, bah! There ain't no danger, gentlefolks," said Mr. Krook, looking slowly and sharply from one to another until he had looked at all of us; "she'd never offer at the birds when I was here unless I told her to it." "You will excuse my landlord," said the old lady with a dignified air. "M, quite M! What do you want, Krook, when I have company?" "Hi!" said the old man. "You know I am the Chancellor." "Well?" returned Miss Flite. "What of that?" "For the Chancellor," said the old man with a chuckle, "not to be acquainted with a Jarndyce is queer, ain't it, Miss Flite? Mightn't I take the liberty? Your servant, sir. I know Jarndyce and Jarndyce a'most as well as you do, sir. I knowed old Squire Tom, sir. I never to my knowledge see you afore though, not even in court. Yet, I go there a mortal sight of times in the course of the year, taking one day with another." "I never go there," said Mr. Jarndyce (which he never did on any consideration). "I would sooner go--somewhere else." "Would you though?" returned Krook, grinning. "You're bearing hard upon my noble and learned brother in your meaning, sir, though perhaps it is but nat'ral in a Jarndyce. The burnt child, sir! What, you're looking at my lodger's birds, Mr. Jarndyce?" The old man had come by little and little into the room until he now touched my guardian with his elbow and looked close up into his face with his spectacled eyes. "It's one of her strange ways that she'll never tell the names of these birds if she can help it, though she named 'em all." This was in a whisper. "Shall I run 'em over, Flite?" he asked aloud, winking at us and pointing at her as she turned away, affecting to sweep the grate. "If you like," she answered hurriedly. The old man, looking up at the cages after another look at us, went through the list. "Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach. That's the whole collection," said the old man, "all cooped up together, by my noble and learned brother." "This is a bitter wind!" muttered my guardian. "When my noble and learned brother gives his judgment, they're to be let go free," said Krook, winking at us again. "And then," he added, whispering and grinning, "if that ever was to happen--which it won't--the birds that have never been caged would kill 'em." "If ever the wind was in the east," said my guardian, pretending to look out of the window for a weathercock, "I think it's there to-day!" We found it very difficult to get away from the house. It was not Miss Flite who detained us; she was as reasonable a little creature in consulting the convenience of others as there possibly could be. It was Mr. Krook. He seemed unable to detach himself from Mr. Jarndyce. If he had been linked to him, he could hardly have attended him more closely. He proposed to show us his Court of Chancery and all the strange medley it contained; during the whole of our inspection (prolonged by himself) he kept close to Mr. Jarndyce and sometimes detained him under one pretence or other until we had passed on, as if he were tormented by an inclination to enter upon some secret subject which he could not make up his mind to approach. I cannot imagine a countenance and manner more singularly expressive of caution and indecision, and a perpetual impulse to do something he could not resolve to venture on, than Mr. Krook's was that day. His watchfulness of my guardian was incessant. He rarely removed his eyes from his face. If he went on beside him, he observed him with the slyness of an old white fox. If he went before, he looked back. When we stood still, he got opposite to him, and drawing his hand across and across his open mouth with a curious expression of a sense of power, and turning up his eyes, and lowering his grey eyebrows until they appeared to be shut, seemed to scan every lineament of his face. At last, having been (always attended by the cat) all over the house and having seen the whole stock of miscellaneous lumber, which was certainly curious, we came into the back part of the shop. Here on the head of an empty barrel stood on end were an ink-bottle, some old stumps of pens, and some dirty playbills; and against the wall were pasted several large printed alphabets in several plain hands. "What are you doing here?" asked my guardian. "Trying to learn myself to read and write," said Krook. "And how do you get on?" "Slow. Bad," returned the old man impatiently. "It's hard at my time of life." "It would be easier to be taught by some one," said my guardian. "Aye, but they might teach me wrong!" returned the old man with a wonderfully suspicious flash of his eye. "I don't know what I may have lost by not being learned afore. I wouldn't like to lose anything by being learned wrong now." "Wrong?" said my guardian with his good-humoured smile. "Who do you suppose would teach you wrong?" "I don't know, Mr. Jarndyce of Bleak House!" replied the old man, turning up his spectacles on his forehead and rubbing his hands. "I don't suppose as anybody would, but I'd rather trust my own self than another!" These answers and his manner were strange enough to cause my guardian to inquire of Mr. Woodcourt, as we all walked across Lincoln's Inn together, whether Mr. Krook were really, as his lodger represented him, deranged. The young surgeon replied, no, he had seen no reason to think so. He was exceedingly distrustful, as ignorance usually was, and he was always more or less under the influence of raw gin, of which he drank great quantities and of which he and his back-shop, as we might have observed, smelt strongly; but he did not think him mad as yet. On our way home, I so conciliated Peepy's affections by buying him a windmill and two flour-sacks that he would suffer nobody else to take off his hat and gloves and would sit nowhere at dinner but at my side. Caddy sat upon the other side of me, next to Ada, to whom we imparted the whole history of the engagement as soon as we got back. We made much of Caddy, and Peepy too; and Caddy brightened exceedingly; and my guardian was as merry as we were; and we were all very happy indeed until Caddy went home at night in a hackney-coach, with Peepy fast asleep, but holding tight to the windmill. I have forgotten to mention--at least I have not mentioned--that Mr. Woodcourt was the same dark young surgeon whom we had met at Mr. Badger's. Or that Mr. Jarndyce invited him to dinner that day. Or that he came. Or that when they were all gone and I said to Ada, "Now, my darling, let us have a little talk about Richard!" Ada laughed and said-- But I don't think it matters what my darling said. She was always merry. CHAPTER XV Bell Yard While we were in London Mr. Jarndyce was constantly beset by the crowd of excitable ladies and gentlemen whose proceedings had so much astonished us. Mr. Quale, who presented himself soon after our arrival, was in all such excitements. He seemed to project those two shining knobs of temples of his into everything that went on and to brush his hair farther and farther back, until the very roots were almost ready to fly out of his head in inappeasable philanthropy. All objects were alike to him, but he was always particularly ready for anything in the way of a testimonial to any one. His great power seemed to be his power of indiscriminate admiration. He would sit for any length of time, with the utmost enjoyment, bathing his temples in the light of any order of luminary. Having first seen him perfectly swallowed up in admiration of Mrs. Jellyby, I had supposed her to be the absorbing object of his devotion. I soon discovered my mistake and found him to be train-bearer and organ-blower to a whole procession of people. Mrs. Pardiggle came one day for a subscription to something, and with her, Mr. Quale. Whatever Mrs. Pardiggle said, Mr. Quale repeated to us; and just as he had drawn Mrs. Jellyby out, he drew Mrs. Pardiggle out. Mrs. Pardiggle wrote a letter of introduction to my guardian in behalf of her eloquent friend Mr. Gusher. With Mr. Gusher appeared Mr. Quale again. Mr. Gusher, being a flabby gentleman with a moist surface and eyes so much too small for his moon of a face that they seemed to have been originally made for somebody else, was not at first sight prepossessing; yet he was scarcely seated before Mr. Quale asked Ada and me, not inaudibly, whether he was not a great creature--which he certainly was, flabbily speaking, though Mr. Quale meant in intellectual beauty--and whether we were not struck by his massive configuration of brow. In short, we heard of a great many missions of various sorts among this set of people, but nothing respecting them was half so clear to us as that it was Mr. Quale's mission to be in ecstasies with everybody else's mission and that it was the most popular mission of all. Mr. Jarndyce had fallen into this company in the tenderness of his heart and his earnest desire to do all the good in his power; but that he felt it to be too often an unsatisfactory company, where benevolence took spasmodic forms, where charity was assumed as a regular uniform by loud professors and speculators in cheap notoriety, vehement in profession, restless and vain in action, servile in the last degree of meanness to the great, adulatory of one another, and intolerable to those who were anxious quietly to help the weak from failing rather than with a great deal of bluster and self-laudation to raise them up a little way when they were down, he plainly told us. When a testimonial was originated to Mr. Quale by Mr. Gusher (who had already got one, originated by Mr. Quale), and when Mr. Gusher spoke for an hour and a half on the subject to a meeting, including two charity schools of small boys and girls, who were specially reminded of the widow's mite, and requested to come forward with halfpence and be acceptable sacrifices, I think the wind was in the east for three whole weeks. I mention this because I am coming to Mr. Skimpole again. It seemed to me that his off-hand professions of childishness and carelessness were a great relief to my guardian, by contrast with such things, and were the more readily believed in since to find one perfectly undesigning and candid man among many opposites could not fail to give him pleasure. I should be sorry to imply that Mr. Skimpole divined this and was politic; I really never understood him well enough to know. What he was to my guardian, he certainly was to the rest of the world. He had not been very well; and thus, though he lived in London, we had seen nothing of him until now. He appeared one morning in his usual agreeable way and as full of pleasant spirits as ever. Well, he said, here he was! He had been bilious, but rich men were often bilious, and therefore he had been persuading himself that he was a man of property. So he was, in a certain point of view--in his expansive intentions. He had been enriching his medical attendant in the most lavish manner. He had always doubled, and sometimes quadrupled, his fees. He had said to the doctor, "Now, my dear doctor, it is quite a delusion on your part to suppose that you attend me for nothing. I am overwhelming you with money--in my expansive intentions--if you only knew it!" And really (he said) he meant it to that degree that he thought it much the same as doing it. If he had had those bits of metal or thin paper to which mankind attached so much importance to put in the doctor's hand, he would have put them in the doctor's hand. Not having them, he substituted the will for the deed. Very well! If he really meant it--if his will were genuine and real, which it was--it appeared to him that it was the same as coin, and cancelled the obligation. "It may be, partly, because I know nothing of the value of money," said Mr. Skimpole, "but I often feel this. It seems so reasonable! My butcher says to me he wants that little bill. It's a part of the pleasant unconscious poetry of the man's nature that he always calls it a 'little' bill--to make the payment appear easy to both of us. I reply to the butcher, 'My good friend, if you knew it, you are paid. You haven't had the trouble of coming to ask for the little bill. You are paid. I mean it.'" "But, suppose," said my guardian, laughing, "he had meant the meat in the bill, instead of providing it?" "My dear Jarndyce," he returned, "you surprise me. You take the butcher's position. A butcher I once dealt with occupied that very ground. Says he, 'Sir, why did you eat spring lamb at eighteen pence a pound?' 'Why did I eat spring lamb at eighteen pence a pound, my honest friend?' said I, naturally amazed by the question. 'I like spring lamb!' This was so far convincing. 'Well, sir,' says he, 'I wish I had meant the lamb as you mean the money!' 'My good fellow,' said I, 'pray let us reason like intellectual beings. How could that be? It was impossible. You HAD got the lamb, and I have NOT got the money. You couldn't really mean the lamb without sending it in, whereas I can, and do, really mean the money without paying it!' He had not a word. There was an end of the subject." "Did he take no legal proceedings?" inquired my guardian. "Yes, he took legal proceedings," said Mr. Skimpole. "But in that he was influenced by passion, not by reason. Passion reminds me of Boythorn. He writes me that you and the ladies have promised him a short visit at his bachelor-house in Lincolnshire." "He is a great favourite with my girls," said Mr. Jarndyce, "and I have promised for them." "Nature forgot to shade him off, I think," observed Mr. Skimpole to Ada and me. "A little too boisterous--like the sea. A little too vehement--like a bull who has made up his mind to consider every colour scarlet. But I grant a sledge-hammering sort of merit in him!" I should have been surprised if those two could have thought very highly of one another, Mr. Boythorn attaching so much importance to many things and Mr. Skimpole caring so little for anything. Besides which, I had noticed Mr. Boythorn more than once on the point of breaking out into some strong opinion when Mr. Skimpole was referred to. Of course I merely joined Ada in saying that we had been greatly pleased with him. "He has invited me," said Mr. Skimpole; "and if a child may trust himself in such hands--which the present child is encouraged to do, with the united tenderness of two angels to guard him--I shall go. He proposes to frank me down and back again. I suppose it will cost money? Shillings perhaps? Or pounds? Or something of that sort? By the by, Coavinses. You remember our friend Coavinses, Miss Summerson?" He asked me as the subject arose in his mind, in his graceful, light-hearted manner and without the least embarrassment. "Oh, yes!" said I. "Coavinses has been arrested by the Great Bailiff," said Mr. Skimpole. "He will never do violence to the sunshine any more." It quite shocked me to hear it, for I had already recalled with anything but a serious association the image of the man sitting on the sofa that night wiping his head. "His successor informed me of it yesterday," said Mr. Skimpole. "His successor is in my house now--in possession, I think he calls it. He came yesterday, on my blue-eyed daughter's birthday. I put it to him, 'This is unreasonable and inconvenient. If you had a blue-eyed daughter you wouldn't like ME to come, uninvited, on HER birthday?' But he stayed." Mr. Skimpole laughed at the pleasant absurdity and lightly touched the piano by which he was seated. "And he told me," he said, playing little chords where I shall put full stops, "The Coavinses had left. Three children. No mother. And that Coavinses' profession. Being unpopular. The rising Coavinses. Were at a considerable disadvantage." Mr. Jarndyce got up, rubbing his head, and began to walk about. Mr. Skimpole played the melody of one of Ada's favourite songs. Ada and I both looked at Mr. Jarndyce, thinking that we knew what was passing in his mind. After walking and stopping, and several times leaving off rubbing his head, and beginning again, my guardian put his hand upon the keys and stopped Mr. Skimpole's playing. "I don't like this, Skimpole," he said thoughtfully. Mr. Skimpole, who had quite forgotten the subject, looked up surprised. "The man was necessary," pursued my guardian, walking backward and forward in the very short space between the piano and the end of the room and rubbing his hair up from the back of his head as if a high east wind had blown it into that form. "If we make such men necessary by our faults and follies, or by our want of worldly knowledge, or by our misfortunes, we must not revenge ourselves upon them. There was no harm in his trade. He maintained his children. One would like to know more about this." "Oh! Coavinses?" cried Mr. Skimpole, at length perceiving what he meant. "Nothing easier. A walk to Coavinses' headquarters, and you can know what you will." Mr. Jarndyce nodded to us, who were only waiting for the signal. "Come! We will walk that way, my dears. Why not that way as soon as another!" We were quickly ready and went out. Mr. Skimpole went with us and quite enjoyed the expedition. It was so new and so refreshing, he said, for him to want Coavinses instead of Coavinses wanting him! He took us, first, to Cursitor Street, Chancery Lane, where there was a house with barred windows, which he called Coavinses' Castle. On our going into the entry and ringing a bell, a very hideous boy came out of a sort of office and looked at us over a spiked wicket. "Who did you want?" said the boy, fitting two of the spikes into his chin. "There was a follower, or an officer, or something, here," said Mr. Jarndyce, "who is dead." "Yes?" said the boy. "Well?" "I want to know his name, if you please?" "Name of Neckett," said the boy. "And his address?" "Bell Yard," said the boy. "Chandler's shop, left hand side, name of Blinder." "Was he--I don't know how to shape the question--" murmured my guardian, "industrious?" "Was Neckett?" said the boy. "Yes, wery much so. He was never tired of watching. He'd set upon a post at a street corner eight or ten hours at a stretch if he undertook to do it." "He might have done worse," I heard my guardian soliloquize. "He might have undertaken to do it and not done it. Thank you. That's all I want." We left the boy, with his head on one side and his arms on the gate, fondling and sucking the spikes, and went back to Lincoln's Inn, where Mr. Skimpole, who had not cared to remain nearer Coavinses, awaited us. Then we all went to Bell Yard, a narrow alley at a very short distance. We soon found the chandler's shop. In it was a good-natured-looking old woman with a dropsy, or an asthma, or perhaps both. "Neckett's children?" said she in reply to my inquiry. "Yes, Surely, miss. Three pair, if you please. Door right opposite the stairs." And she handed me the key across the counter. I glanced at the key and glanced at her, but she took it for granted that I knew what to do with it. As it could only be intended for the children's door, I came out without asking any more questions and led the way up the dark stairs. We went as quietly as we could, but four of us made some noise on the aged boards, and when we came to the second story we found we had disturbed a man who was standing there looking out of his room. "Is it Gridley that's wanted?" he said, fixing his eyes on me with an angry stare. "No, sir," said I; "I am going higher up." He looked at Ada, and at Mr. Jarndyce, and at Mr. Skimpole, fixing the same angry stare on each in succession as they passed and followed me. Mr. Jarndyce gave him good day. "Good day!" he said abruptly and fiercely. He was a tall, sallow man with a careworn head on which but little hair remained, a deeply lined face, and prominent eyes. He had a combative look and a chafing, irritable manner which, associated with his figure--still large and powerful, though evidently in its decline--rather alarmed me. He had a pen in his hand, and in the glimpse I caught of his room in passing, I saw that it was covered with a litter of papers. Leaving him standing there, we went up to the top room. I tapped at the door, and a little shrill voice inside said, "We are locked in. Mrs. Blinder's got the key!" I applied the key on hearing this and opened the door. In a poor room with a sloping ceiling and containing very little furniture was a mite of a boy, some five or six years old, nursing and hushing a heavy child of eighteen months. There was no fire, though the weather was cold; both children were wrapped in some poor shawls and tippets as a substitute. Their clothing was not so warm, however, but that their noses looked red and pinched and their small figures shrunken as the boy walked up and down nursing and hushing the child with its head on his shoulder. "Who has locked you up here alone?" we naturally asked. "Charley," said the boy, standing still to gaze at us. "Is Charley your brother?" "No. She's my sister, Charlotte. Father called her Charley." "Are there any more of you besides Charley?" "Me," said the boy, "and Emma," patting the limp bonnet of the child he was nursing. "And Charley." "Where is Charley now?" "Out a-washing," said the boy, beginning to walk up and down again and taking the nankeen bonnet much too near the bedstead by trying to gaze at us at the same time. We were looking at one another and at these two children when there came into the room a very little girl, childish in figure but shrewd and older-looking in the face--pretty-faced too--wearing a womanly sort of bonnet much too large for her and drying her bare arms on a womanly sort of apron. Her fingers were white and wrinkled with washing, and the soap-suds were yet smoking which she wiped off her arms. But for this, she might have been a child playing at washing and imitating a poor working-woman with a quick observation of the truth. She had come running from some place in the neighbourhood and had made all the haste she could. Consequently, though she was very light, she was out of breath and could not speak at first, as she stood panting, and wiping her arms, and looking quietly at us. "Oh, here's Charley!" said the boy. The child he was nursing stretched forth its arms and cried out to be taken by Charley. The little girl took it, in a womanly sort of manner belonging to the apron and the bonnet, and stood looking at us over the burden that clung to her most affectionately. "Is it possible," whispered my guardian as we put a chair for the little creature and got her to sit down with her load, the boy keeping close to her, holding to her apron, "that this child works for the rest? Look at this! For God's sake, look at this!" It was a thing to look at. The three children close together, and two of them relying solely on the third, and the third so young and yet with an air of age and steadiness that sat so strangely on the childish figure. "Charley, Charley!" said my guardian. "How old are you?" "Over thirteen, sir," replied the child. "Oh! What a great age," said my guardian. "What a great age, Charley!" I cannot describe the tenderness with which he spoke to her, half playfully yet all the more compassionately and mournfully. "And do you live alone here with these babies, Charley?" said my guardian. "Yes, sir," returned the child, looking up into his face with perfect confidence, "since father died." "And how do you live, Charley? Oh! Charley," said my guardian, turning his face away for a moment, "how do you live?" "Since father died, sir, I've gone out to work. I'm out washing to-day." "God help you, Charley!" said my guardian. "You're not tall enough to reach the tub!" "In pattens I am, sir," she said quickly. "I've got a high pair as belonged to mother." "And when did mother die? Poor mother!" "Mother died just after Emma was born," said the child, glancing at the face upon her bosom. "Then father said I was to be as good a mother to her as I could. And so I tried. And so I worked at home and did cleaning and nursing and washing for a long time before I began to go out. And that's how I know how; don't you see, sir?" "And do you often go out?" "As often as I can," said Charley, opening her eyes and smiling, "because of earning sixpences and shillings!" "And do you always lock the babies up when you go out?" "To keep 'em safe, sir, don't you see?" said Charley. "Mrs. Blinder comes up now and then, and Mr. Gridley comes up sometimes, and perhaps I can run in sometimes, and they can play you know, and Tom an't afraid of being locked up, are you, Tom?" "No-o!" said Tom stoutly. "When it comes on dark, the lamps are lighted down in the court, and they show up here quite bright--almost quite bright. Don't they, Tom?" "Yes, Charley," said Tom, "almost quite bright." "Then he's as good as gold," said the little creature--Oh, in such a motherly, womanly way! "And when Emma's tired, he puts her to bed. And when he's tired he goes to bed himself. And when I come home and light the candle and has a bit of supper, he sits up again and has it with me. Don't you, Tom?" "Oh, yes, Charley!" said Tom. "That I do!" And either in this glimpse of the great pleasure of his life or in gratitude and love for Charley, who was all in all to him, he laid his face among the scanty folds of her frock and passed from laughing into crying. It was the first time since our entry that a tear had been shed among these children. The little orphan girl had spoken of their father and their mother as if all that sorrow were subdued by the necessity of taking courage, and by her childish importance in being able to work, and by her bustling busy way. But now, when Tom cried, although she sat quite tranquil, looking quietly at us, and did not by any movement disturb a hair of the head of either of her little charges, I saw two silent tears fall down her face. I stood at the window with Ada, pretending to look at the housetops, and the blackened stack of chimneys, and the poor plants, and the birds in little cages belonging to the neighbours, when I found that Mrs. Blinder, from the shop below, had come in (perhaps it had taken her all this time to get upstairs) and was talking to my guardian. "It's not much to forgive 'em the rent, sir," she said; "who could take it from them!" "Well, well!" said my guardian to us two. "It is enough that the time will come when this good woman will find that it WAS much, and that forasmuch as she did it unto the least of these--This child," he added after a few moments, "could she possibly continue this?" "Really, sir, I think she might," said Mrs. Blinder, getting her heavy breath by painful degrees. "She's as handy as it's possible to be. Bless you, sir, the way she tended them two children after the mother died was the talk of the yard! And it was a wonder to see her with him after he was took ill, it really was! 'Mrs. Blinder,' he said to me the very last he spoke--he was lying there--'Mrs. Blinder, whatever my calling may have been, I see a angel sitting in this room last night along with my child, and I trust her to Our Father!'" "He had no other calling?" said my guardian. "No, sir," returned Mrs. Blinder, "he was nothing but a follerers. When he first came to lodge here, I didn't know what he was, and I confess that when I found out I gave him notice. It wasn't liked in the yard. It wasn't approved by the other lodgers. It is NOT a genteel calling," said Mrs. Blinder, "and most people do object to it. Mr. Gridley objected to it very strong, and he is a good lodger, though his temper has been hard tried." "So you gave him notice?" said my guardian. "So I gave him notice," said Mrs. Blinder. "But really when the time came, and I knew no other ill of him, I was in doubts. He was punctual and diligent; he did what he had to do, sir," said Mrs. Blinder, unconsciously fixing Mr. Skimpole with her eye, "and it's something in this world even to do that." "So you kept him after all?" "Why, I said that if he could arrange with Mr. Gridley, I could arrange it with the other lodgers and should not so much mind its being liked or disliked in the yard. Mr. Gridley gave his consent gruff--but gave it. He was always gruff with him, but he has been kind to the children since. A person is never known till a person is proved." "Have many people been kind to the children?" asked Mr. Jarndyce. "Upon the whole, not so bad, sir," said Mrs. Blinder; "but certainly not so many as would have been if their father's calling had been different. Mr. Coavins gave a guinea, and the follerers made up a little purse. Some neighbours in the yard that had always joked and tapped their shoulders when he went by came forward with a little subscription, and--in general--not so bad. Similarly with Charlotte. Some people won't employ her because she was a follerer's child; some people that do employ her cast it at her; some make a merit of having her to work for them, with that and all her draw-backs upon her, and perhaps pay her less and put upon her more. But she's patienter than others would be, and is clever too, and always willing, up to the full mark of her strength and over. So I should say, in general, not so bad, sir, but might be better." Mrs. Blinder sat down to give herself a more favourable opportunity of recovering her breath, exhausted anew by so much talking before it was fully restored. Mr. Jarndyce was turning to speak to us when his attention was attracted by the abrupt entrance into the room of the Mr. Gridley who had been mentioned and whom we had seen on our way up. "I don't know what you may be doing here, ladies and gentlemen," he said, as if he resented our presence, "but you'll excuse my coming in. I don't come in to stare about me. Well, Charley! Well, Tom! Well, little one! How is it with us all to-day?" He bent over the group in a caressing way and clearly was regarded as a friend by the children, though his face retained its stern character and his manner to us was as rude as it could be. My guardian noticed it and respected it. "No one, surely, would come here to stare about him," he said mildly. "May be so, sir, may be so," returned the other, taking Tom upon his knee and waving him off impatiently. "I don't want to argue with ladies and gentlemen. I have had enough of arguing to last one man his life." "You have sufficient reason, I dare say," said Mr. Jarndyce, "for being chafed and irritated--" "There again!" exclaimed the man, becoming violently angry. "I am of a quarrelsome temper. I am irascible. I am not polite!" "Not very, I think." "Sir," said Gridley, putting down the child and going up to him as if he meant to strike him, "do you know anything of Courts of Equity?" "Perhaps I do, to my sorrow." "To your sorrow?" said the man, pausing in his wrath, "if so, I beg your pardon. I am not polite, I know. I beg your pardon! Sir," with renewed violence, "I have been dragged for five and twenty years over burning iron, and I have lost the habit of treading upon velvet. Go into the Court of Chancery yonder and ask what is one of the standing jokes that brighten up their business sometimes, and they will tell you that the best joke they have is the man from Shropshire. I," he said, beating one hand on the other passionately, "am the man from Shropshire." "I believe I and my family have also had the honour of furnishing some entertainment in the same grave place," said my guardian composedly. "You may have heard my name--Jarndyce." "Mr. Jarndyce," said Gridley with a rough sort of salutation, "you bear your wrongs more quietly than I can bear mine. More than that, I tell you--and I tell this gentleman, and these young ladies, if they are friends of yours--that if I took my wrongs in any other way, I should be driven mad! It is only by resenting them, and by revenging them in my mind, and by angrily demanding the justice I never get, that I am able to keep my wits together. It is only that!" he said, speaking in a homely, rustic way and with great vehemence. "You may tell me that I over-excite myself. I answer that it's in my nature to do it, under wrong, and I must do it. There's nothing between doing it, and sinking into the smiling state of the poor little mad woman that haunts the court. If I was once to sit down under it, I should become imbecile." The passion and heat in which he was, and the manner in which his face worked, and the violent gestures with which he accompanied what he said, were most painful to see. "Mr. Jarndyce," he said, "consider my case. As true as there is a heaven above us, this is my case. I am one of two brothers. My father (a farmer) made a will and left his farm and stock and so forth to my mother for her life. After my mother's death, all was to come to me except a legacy of three hundred pounds that I was then to pay my brother. My mother died. My brother some time afterwards claimed his legacy. I and some of my relations said that he had had a part of it already in board and lodging and some other things. Now mind! That was the question, and nothing else. No one disputed the will; no one disputed anything but whether part of that three hundred pounds had been already paid or not. To settle that question, my brother filing a bill, I was obliged to go into this accursed Chancery; I was forced there because the law forced me and would let me go nowhere else. Seventeen people were made defendants to that simple suit! It first came on after two years. It was then stopped for another two years while the master (may his head rot off!) inquired whether I was my father's son, about which there was no dispute at all with any mortal creature. He then found out that there were not defendants enough--remember, there were only seventeen as yet!--but that we must have another who had been left out and must begin all over again. The costs at that time--before the thing was begun!--were three times the legacy. My brother would have given up the legacy, and joyful, to escape more costs. My whole estate, left to me in that will of my father's, has gone in costs. The suit, still undecided, has fallen into rack, and ruin, and despair, with everything else--and here I stand, this day! Now, Mr. Jarndyce, in your suit there are thousands and thousands involved, where in mine there are hundreds. Is mine less hard to bear or is it harder to bear, when my whole living was in it and has been thus shamefully sucked away?" Mr. Jarndyce said that he condoled with him with all his heart and that he set up no monopoly himself in being unjustly treated by this monstrous system. "There again!" said Mr. Gridley with no diminution of his rage. "The system! I am told on all hands, it's the system. I mustn't look to individuals. It's the system. I mustn't go into court and say, 'My Lord, I beg to know this from you--is this right or wrong? Have you the face to tell me I have received justice and therefore am dismissed?' My Lord knows nothing of it. He sits there to administer the system. I mustn't go to Mr. Tulkinghorn, the solicitor in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and say to him when he makes me furious by being so cool and satisfied--as they all do, for I know they gain by it while I lose, don't I?--I mustn't say to him, 'I will have something out of some one for my ruin, by fair means or foul!' HE is not responsible. It's the system. But, if I do no violence to any of them, here--I may! I don't know what may happen if I am carried beyond myself at last! I will accuse the individual workers of that system against me, face to face, before the great eternal bar!" His passion was fearful. I could not have believed in such rage without seeing it. "I have done!" he said, sitting down and wiping his face. "Mr. Jarndyce, I have done! I am violent, I know. I ought to know it. I have been in prison for contempt of court. I have been in prison for threatening the solicitor. I have been in this trouble, and that trouble, and shall be again. I am the man from Shropshire, and I sometimes go beyond amusing them, though they have found it amusing, too, to see me committed into custody and brought up in custody and all that. It would be better for me, they tell me, if I restrained myself. I tell them that if I did restrain myself I should become imbecile. I was a good-enough-tempered man once, I believe. People in my part of the country say they remember me so, but now I must have this vent under my sense of injury or nothing could hold my wits together. It would be far better for you, Mr. Gridley,' the Lord Chancellor told me last week, 'not to waste your time here, and to stay, usefully employed, down in Shropshire.' 'My Lord, my Lord, I know it would,' said I to him, 'and it would have been far better for me never to have heard the name of your high office, but unhappily for me, I can't undo the past, and the past drives me here!' Besides," he added, breaking fiercely out, "I'll shame them. To the last, I'll show myself in that court to its shame. If I knew when I was going to die, and could be carried there, and had a voice to speak with, I would die there, saying, 'You have brought me here and sent me from here many and many a time. Now send me out feet foremost!'" His countenance had, perhaps for years, become so set in its contentious expression that it did not soften, even now when he was quiet. "I came to take these babies down to my room for an hour," he said, going to them again, "and let them play about. I didn't mean to say all this, but it don't much signify. You're not afraid of me, Tom, are you?" "No!" said Tom. "You ain't angry with ME." "You are right, my child. You're going back, Charley? Aye? Come then, little one!" He took the youngest child on his arm, where she was willing enough to be carried. "I shouldn't wonder if we found a ginger-bread soldier downstairs. Let's go and look for him!" He made his former rough salutation, which was not deficient in a certain respect, to Mr. Jarndyce, and bowing slightly to us, went downstairs to his room. Upon that, Mr. Skimpole began to talk, for the first time since our arrival, in his usual gay strain. He said, Well, it was really very pleasant to see how things lazily adapted themselves to purposes. Here was this Mr. Gridley, a man of a robust will and surprising energy--intellectually speaking, a sort of inharmonious blacksmith--and he could easily imagine that there Gridley was, years ago, wandering about in life for something to expend his superfluous combativeness upon--a sort of Young Love among the thorns--when the Court of Chancery came in his way and accommodated him with the exact thing he wanted. There they were, matched, ever afterwards! Otherwise he might have been a great general, blowing up all sorts of towns, or he might have been a great politician, dealing in all sorts of parliamentary rhetoric; but as it was, he and the Court of Chancery had fallen upon each other in the pleasantest way, and nobody was much the worse, and Gridley was, so to speak, from that hour provided for. Then look at Coavinses! How delightfully poor Coavinses (father of these charming children) illustrated the same principle! He, Mr. Skimpole, himself, had sometimes repined at the existence of Coavinses. He had found Coavinses in his way. He could had dispensed with Coavinses. There had been times when, if he had been a sultan, and his grand vizier had said one morning, "What does the Commander of the Faithful require at the hands of his slave?" he might have even gone so far as to reply, "The head of Coavinses!" But what turned out to be the case? That, all that time, he had been giving employment to a most deserving man, that he had been a benefactor to Coavinses, that he had actually been enabling Coavinses to bring up these charming children in this agreeable way, developing these social virtues! Insomuch that his heart had just now swelled and the tears had come into his eyes when he had looked round the room and thought, "I was the great patron of Coavinses, and his little comforts were MY work!" There was something so captivating in his light way of touching these fantastic strings, and he was such a mirthful child by the side of the graver childhood we had seen, that he made my guardian smile even as he turned towards us from a little private talk with Mrs. Blinder. We kissed Charley, and took her downstairs with us, and stopped outside the house to see her run away to her work. I don't know where she was going, but we saw her run, such a little, little creature in her womanly bonnet and apron, through a covered way at the bottom of the court and melt into the city's strife and sound like a dewdrop in an ocean. CHAPTER XVI Tom-all-Alone's My Lady Dedlock is restless, very restless. The astonished fashionable intelligence hardly knows where to have her. To-day she is at Chesney Wold; yesterday she was at her house in town; to-morrow she may be abroad, for anything the fashionable intelligence can with confidence predict. Even Sir Leicester's gallantry has some trouble to keep pace with her. It would have more but that his other faithful ally, for better and for worse--the gout--darts into the old oak bed-chamber at Chesney Wold and grips him by both legs. Sir Leicester receives the gout as a troublesome demon, but still a demon of the patrician order. All the Dedlocks, in the direct male line, through a course of time during and beyond which the memory of man goeth not to the contrary, have had the gout. It can be proved, sir. Other men's fathers may have died of the rheumatism or may have taken base contagion from the tainted blood of the sick vulgar, but the Dedlock family have communicated something exclusive even to the levelling process of dying by dying of their own family gout. It has come down through the illustrious line like the plate, or the pictures, or the place in Lincolnshire. It is among their dignities. Sir Leicester is perhaps not wholly without an impression, though he has never resolved it into words, that the angel of death in the discharge of his necessary duties may observe to the shades of the aristocracy, "My lords and gentlemen, I have the honour to present to you another Dedlock certified to have arrived per the family gout." Hence Sir Leicester yields up his family legs to the family disorder as if he held his name and fortune on that feudal tenure. He feels that for a Dedlock to be laid upon his back and spasmodically twitched and stabbed in his extremities is a liberty taken somewhere, but he thinks, "We have all yielded to this; it belongs to us; it has for some hundreds of years been understood that we are not to make the vaults in the park interesting on more ignoble terms; and I submit myself to the compromise." And a goodly show he makes, lying in a flush of crimson and gold in the midst of the great drawing-room before his favourite picture of my Lady, with broad strips of sunlight shining in, down the long perspective, through the long line of windows, and alternating with soft reliefs of shadow. Outside, the stately oaks, rooted for ages in the green ground which has never known ploughshare, but was still a chase when kings rode to battle with sword and shield and rode a-hunting with bow and arrow, bear witness to his greatness. Inside, his forefathers, looking on him from the walls, say, "Each of us was a passing reality here and left this coloured shadow of himself and melted into remembrance as dreamy as the distant voices of the rooks now lulling you to rest," and hear their testimony to his greatness too. And he is very great this day. And woe to Boythorn or other daring wight who shall presumptuously contest an inch with him! My Lady is at present represented, near Sir Leicester, by her portrait. She has flitted away to town, with no intention of remaining there, and will soon flit hither again, to the confusion of the fashionable intelligence. The house in town is not prepared for her reception. It is muffled and dreary. Only one Mercury in powder gapes disconsolate at the hall-window; and he mentioned last night to another Mercury of his acquaintance, also accustomed to good society, that if that sort of thing was to last--which it couldn't, for a man of his spirits couldn't bear it, and a man of his figure couldn't be expected to bear it--there would be no resource for him, upon his honour, but to cut his throat! What connexion can there be between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabout of Jo the outlaw with the broom, who had that distant ray of light upon him when he swept the churchyard-step? What connexion can there have been between many people in the innumerable histories of this world who from opposite sides of great gulfs have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought together! Jo sweeps his crossing all day long, unconscious of the link, if any link there be. He sums up his mental condition when asked a question by replying that he "don't know nothink." He knows that it's hard to keep the mud off the crossing in dirty weather, and harder still to live by doing it. Nobody taught him even that much; he found it out. Jo lives--that is to say, Jo has not yet died--in a ruinous place known to the like of him by the name of Tom-all-Alone's. It is a black, dilapidated street, avoided by all decent people, where the crazy houses were seized upon, when their decay was far advanced, by some bold vagrants who after establishing their own possession took to letting them out in lodgings. Now, these tumbling tenements contain, by night, a swarm of misery. As on the ruined human wretch vermin parasites appear, so these ruined shelters have bred a crowd of foul existence that crawls in and out of gaps in walls and boards; and coils itself to sleep, in maggot numbers, where the rain drips in; and comes and goes, fetching and carrying fever and sowing more evil in its every footprint than Lord Coodle, and Sir Thomas Doodle, and the Duke of Foodle, and all the fine gentlemen in office, down to Zoodle, shall set right in five hundred years--though born expressly to do it. Twice lately there has been a crash and a cloud of dust, like the springing of a mine, in Tom-all-Alone's; and each time a house has fallen. These accidents have made a paragraph in the newspapers and have filled a bed or two in the nearest hospital. The gaps remain, and there are not unpopular lodgings among the rubbish. As several more houses are nearly ready to go, the next crash in Tom-all-Alone's may be expected to be a good one. This desirable property is in Chancery, of course. It would be an insult to the discernment of any man with half an eye to tell him so. Whether "Tom" is the popular representative of the original plaintiff or defendant in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, or whether Tom lived here when the suit had laid the street waste, all alone, until other settlers came to join him, or whether the traditional title is a comprehensive name for a retreat cut off from honest company and put out of the pale of hope, perhaps nobody knows. Certainly Jo don't know. "For I don't," says Jo, "I don't know nothink." It must be a strange state to be like Jo! To shuffle through the streets, unfamiliar with the shapes, and in utter darkness as to the meaning, of those mysterious symbols, so abundant over the shops, and at the corners of streets, and on the doors, and in the windows! To see people read, and to see people write, and to see the postmen deliver letters, and not to have the least idea of all that language--to be, to every scrap of it, stone blind and dumb! It must be very puzzling to see the good company going to the churches on Sundays, with their books in their hands, and to think (for perhaps Jo DOES think at odd times) what does it all mean, and if it means anything to anybody, how comes it that it means nothing to me? To be hustled, and jostled, and moved on; and really to feel that it would appear to be perfectly true that I have no business here, or there, or anywhere; and yet to be perplexed by the consideration that I AM here somehow, too, and everybody overlooked me until I became the creature that I am! It must be a strange state, not merely to be told that I am scarcely human (as in the case of my offering myself for a witness), but to feel it of my own knowledge all my life! To see the horses, dogs, and cattle go by me and to know that in ignorance I belong to them and not to the superior beings in my shape, whose delicacy I offend! Jo's ideas of a criminal trial, or a judge, or a bishop, or a government, or that inestimable jewel to him (if he only knew it) the Constitution, should be strange! His whole material and immaterial life is wonderfully strange; his death, the strangest thing of all. Jo comes out of Tom-all-Alone's, meeting the tardy morning which is always late in getting down there, and munches his dirty bit of bread as he comes along. His way lying through many streets, and the houses not yet being open, he sits down to breakfast on the door-step of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts and gives it a brush when he has finished as an acknowledgment of the accommodation. He admires the size of the edifice and wonders what it's all about. He has no idea, poor wretch, of the spiritual destitution of a coral reef in the Pacific or what it costs to look up the precious souls among the coco-nuts and bread-fruit. He goes to his crossing and begins to lay it out for the day. The town awakes; the great tee-totum is set up for its daily spin and whirl; all that unaccountable reading and writing, which has been suspended for a few hours, recommences. Jo and the other lower animals get on in the unintelligible mess as they can. It is market-day. The blinded oxen, over-goaded, over-driven, never guided, run into wrong places and are beaten out, and plunge red-eyed and foaming at stone walls, and often sorely hurt the innocent, and often sorely hurt themselves. Very like Jo and his order; very, very like! A band of music comes and plays. Jo listens to it. So does a dog--a drover's dog, waiting for his master outside a butcher's shop, and evidently thinking about those sheep he has had upon his mind for some hours and is happily rid of. He seems perplexed respecting three or four, can't remember where he left them, looks up and down the street as half expecting to see them astray, suddenly pricks up his ears and remembers all about it. A thoroughly vagabond dog, accustomed to low company and public-houses; a terrific dog to sheep, ready at a whistle to scamper over their backs and tear out mouthfuls of their wool; but an educated, improved, developed dog who has been taught his duties and knows how to discharge them. He and Jo listen to the music, probably with much the same amount of animal satisfaction; likewise as to awakened association, aspiration, or regret, melancholy or joyful reference to things beyond the senses, they are probably upon a par. But, otherwise, how far above the human listener is the brute! Turn that dog's descendants wild, like Jo, and in a very few years they will so degenerate that they will lose even their bark--but not their bite. The day changes as it wears itself away and becomes dark and drizzly. Jo fights it out at his crossing among the mud and wheels, the horses, whips, and umbrellas, and gets but a scanty sum to pay for the unsavoury shelter of Tom-all-Alone's. Twilight comes on; gas begins to start up in the shops; the lamplighter, with his ladder, runs along the margin of the pavement. A wretched evening is beginning to close in. In his chambers Mr. Tulkinghorn sits meditating an application to the nearest magistrate to-morrow morning for a warrant. Gridley, a disappointed suitor, has been here to-day and has been alarming. We are not to be put in bodily fear, and that ill-conditioned fellow shall be held to bail again. From the ceiling, foreshortened Allegory, in the person of one impossible Roman upside down, points with the arm of Samson (out of joint, and an odd one) obtrusively toward the window. Why should Mr. Tulkinghorn, for such no reason, look out of window? Is the hand not always pointing there? So he does not look out of window. And if he did, what would it be to see a woman going by? There are women enough in the world, Mr. Tulkinghorn thinks--too many; they are at the bottom of all that goes wrong in it, though, for the matter of that, they create business for lawyers. What would it be to see a woman going by, even though she were going secretly? They are all secret. Mr. Tulkinghorn knows that very well. But they are not all like the woman who now leaves him and his house behind, between whose plain dress and her refined manner there is something exceedingly inconsistent. She should be an upper servant by her attire, yet in her air and step, though both are hurried and assumed--as far as she can assume in the muddy streets, which she treads with an unaccustomed foot--she is a lady. Her face is veiled, and still she sufficiently betrays herself to make more than one of those who pass her look round sharply. She never turns her head. Lady or servant, she has a purpose in her and can follow it. She never turns her head until she comes to the crossing where Jo plies with his broom. He crosses with her and begs. Still, she does not turn her head until she has landed on the other side. Then she slightly beckons to him and says, "Come here!" Jo follows her a pace or two into a quiet court. "Are you the boy I've read of in the papers?" she asked behind her veil. "I don't know," says Jo, staring moodily at the veil, "nothink about no papers. I don't know nothink about nothink at all." "Were you examined at an inquest?" "I don't know nothink about no--where I was took by the beadle, do you mean?" says Jo. "Was the boy's name at the inkwhich Jo?" "Yes." "That's me!" says Jo. "Come farther up." "You mean about the man?" says Jo, following. "Him as wos dead?" "Hush! Speak in a whisper! Yes. Did he look, when he was living, so very ill and poor?" "Oh, jist!" says Jo. "Did he look like--not like YOU?" says the woman with abhorrence. "Oh, not so bad as me," says Jo. "I'm a reg'lar one I am! You didn't know him, did you?" "How dare you ask me if I knew him?" "No offence, my lady," says Jo with much humility, for even he has got at the suspicion of her being a lady. "I am not a lady. I am a servant." "You are a jolly servant!" says Jo without the least idea of saying anything offensive, merely as a tribute of admiration. "Listen and be silent. Don't talk to me, and stand farther from me! Can you show me all those places that were spoken of in the account I read? The place he wrote for, the place he died at, the place where you were taken to, and the place where he was buried? Do you know the place where he was buried?" Jo answers with a nod, having also nodded as each other place was mentioned. "Go before me and show me all those dreadful places. Stop opposite to each, and don't speak to me unless I speak to you. Don't look back. Do what I want, and I will pay you well." Jo attends closely while the words are being spoken; tells them off on his broom-handle, finding them rather hard; pauses to consider their meaning; considers it satisfactory; and nods his ragged head. "I'm fly," says Jo. "But fen larks, you know. Stow hooking it!" "What does the horrible creature mean?" exclaims the servant, recoiling from him. "Stow cutting away, you know!" says Jo. "I don't understand you. Go on before! I will give you more money than you ever had in your life." Jo screws up his mouth into a whistle, gives his ragged head a rub, takes his broom under his arm, and leads the way, passing deftly with his bare feet over the hard stones and through the mud and mire. Cook's Court. Jo stops. A pause. "Who lives here?" "Him wot give him his writing and give me half a bull," says Jo in a whisper without looking over his shoulder. "Go on to the next." Krook's house. Jo stops again. A longer pause. "Who lives here?" "HE lived here," Jo answers as before. After a silence he is asked, "In which room?" "In the back room up there. You can see the winder from this corner. Up there! That's where I see him stritched out. This is the public-ouse where I was took to." "Go on to the next!" It is a longer walk to the next, but Jo, relieved of his first suspicions, sticks to the forms imposed upon him and does not look round. By many devious ways, reeking with offence of many kinds, they come to the little tunnel of a court, and to the gas-lamp (lighted now), and to the iron gate. "He was put there," says Jo, holding to the bars and looking in. "Where? Oh, what a scene of horror!" "There!" says Jo, pointing. "Over yinder. Among them piles of bones, and close to that there kitchin winder! They put him wery nigh the top. They was obliged to stamp upon it to git it in. I could unkiver it for you with my broom if the gate was open. That's why they locks it, I s'pose," giving it a shake. "It's always locked. Look at the rat!" cries Jo, excited. "Hi! Look! There he goes! Ho! Into the ground!" The servant shrinks into a corner, into a corner of that hideous archway, with its deadly stains contaminating her dress; and putting out her two hands and passionately telling him to keep away from her, for he is loathsome to her, so remains for some moments. Jo stands staring and is still staring when she recovers herself. "Is this place of abomination consecrated ground?" "I don't know nothink of consequential ground," says Jo, still staring. "Is it blessed?" "Which?" says Jo, in the last degree amazed. "Is it blessed?" "I'm blest if I know," says Jo, staring more than ever; "but I shouldn't think it warn't. Blest?" repeats Jo, something troubled in his mind. "It an't done it much good if it is. Blest? I should think it was t'othered myself. But I don't know nothink!" The servant takes as little heed of what he says as she seems to take of what she has said herself. She draws off her glove to get some money from her purse. Jo silently notices how white and small her hand is and what a jolly servant she must be to wear such sparkling rings. She drops a piece of money in his hand without touching it, and shuddering as their hands approach. "Now," she adds, "show me the spot again!" Jo thrusts the handle of his broom between the bars of the gate, and with his utmost power of elaboration, points it out. At length, looking aside to see if he has made himself intelligible, he finds that he is alone. His first proceeding is to hold the piece of money to the gas-light and to be overpowered at finding that it is yellow--gold. His next is to give it a one-sided bite at the edge as a test of its quality. His next, to put it in his mouth for safety and to sweep the step and passage with great care. His job done, he sets off for Tom-all-Alone's, stopping in the light of innumerable gas-lamps to produce the piece of gold and give it another one-sided bite as a reassurance of its being genuine. The Mercury in powder is in no want of society to-night, for my Lady goes to a grand dinner and three or four balls. Sir Leicester is fidgety down at Chesney Wold, with no better company than the gout; he complains to Mrs. Rouncewell that the rain makes such a monotonous pattering on the terrace that he can't read the paper even by the fireside in his own snug dressing-room. "Sir Leicester would have done better to try the other side of the house, my dear," says Mrs. Rouncewell to Rosa. "His dressing-room is on my Lady's side. And in all these years I never heard the step upon the Ghost's Walk more distinct than it is to-night!" CHAPTER XVII Esther's Narrative Richard very often came to see us while we remained in London (though he soon failed in his letter-writing), and with his quick abilities, his good spirits, his good temper, his gaiety and freshness, was always delightful. But though I liked him more and more the better I knew him, I still felt more and more how much it was to be regretted that he had been educated in no habits of application and concentration. The system which had addressed him in exactly the same manner as it had addressed hundreds of other boys, all varying in character and capacity, had enabled him to dash through his tasks, always with fair credit and often with distinction, but in a fitful, dazzling way that had confirmed his reliance on those very qualities in himself which it had been most desirable to direct and train. They were good qualities, without which no high place can be meritoriously won, but like fire and water, though excellent servants, they were very bad masters. If they had been under Richard's direction, they would have been his friends; but Richard being under their direction, they became his enemies. I write down these opinions not because I believe that this or any other thing was so because I thought so, but only because I did think so and I want to be quite candid about all I thought and did. These were my thoughts about Richard. I thought I often observed besides how right my guardian was in what he had said, and that the uncertainties and delays of the Chancery suit had imparted to his nature something of the careless spirit of a gamester who felt that he was part of a great gaming system. Mr. and Mrs. Bayham Badger coming one afternoon when my guardian was not at home, in the course of conversation I naturally inquired after Richard. "Why, Mr. Carstone," said Mrs. Badger, "is very well and is, I assure you, a great acquisition to our society. Captain Swosser used to say of me that I was always better than land a-head and a breeze a-starn to the midshipmen's mess when the purser's junk had become as tough as the fore-topsel weather earings. It was his naval way of mentioning generally that I was an acquisition to any society. I may render the same tribute, I am sure, to Mr. Carstone. But I--you won't think me premature if I mention it?" I said no, as Mrs. Badger's insinuating tone seemed to require such an answer. "Nor Miss Clare?" said Mrs. Bayham Badger sweetly. Ada said no, too, and looked uneasy. "Why, you see, my dears," said Mrs. Badger, "--you'll excuse me calling you my dears?" We entreated Mrs. Badger not to mention it. "Because you really are, if I may take the liberty of saying so," pursued Mrs. Badger, "so perfectly charming. You see, my dears, that although I am still young--or Mr. Bayham Badger pays me the compliment of saying so--" "No," Mr. Badger called out like some one contradicting at a public meeting. "Not at all!" "Very well," smiled Mrs. Badger, "we will say still young." "Undoubtedly," said Mr. Badger. "My dears, though still young, I have had many opportunities of observing young men. There were many such on board the dear old Crippler, I assure you. After that, when I was with Captain Swosser in the Mediterranean, I embraced every opportunity of knowing and befriending the midshipmen under Captain Swosser's command. YOU never heard them called the young gentlemen, my dears, and probably would not understand allusions to their pipe-claying their weekly accounts, but it is otherwise with me, for blue water has been a second home to me, and I have been quite a sailor. Again, with Professor Dingo." "A man of European reputation," murmured Mr. Badger. "When I lost my dear first and became the wife of my dear second," said Mrs. Badger, speaking of her former husbands as if they were parts of a charade, "I still enjoyed opportunities of observing youth. The class attendant on Professor Dingo's lectures was a large one, and it became my pride, as the wife of an eminent scientific man seeking herself in science the utmost consolation it could impart, to throw our house open to the students as a kind of Scientific Exchange. Every Tuesday evening there was lemonade and a mixed biscuit for all who chose to partake of those refreshments. And there was science to an unlimited extent." "Remarkable assemblies those, Miss Summerson," said Mr. Badger reverentially. "There must have been great intellectual friction going on there under the auspices of such a man!" "And now," pursued Mrs. Badger, "now that I am the wife of my dear third, Mr. Badger, I still pursue those habits of observation which were formed during the lifetime of Captain Swosser and adapted to new and unexpected purposes during the lifetime of Professor Dingo. I therefore have not come to the consideration of Mr. Carstone as a neophyte. And yet I am very much of the opinion, my dears, that he has not chosen his profession advisedly." Ada looked so very anxious now that I asked Mrs. Badger on what she founded her supposition. "My dear Miss Summerson," she replied, "on Mr. Carstone's character and conduct. He is of such a very easy disposition that probably he would never think it worth-while to mention how he really feels, but he feels languid about the profession. He has not that positive interest in it which makes it his vocation. If he has any decided impression in reference to it, I should say it was that it is a tiresome pursuit. Now, this is not promising. Young men like Mr. Allan Woodcourt who take it from a strong interest in all that it can do will find some reward in it through a great deal of work for a very little money and through years of considerable endurance and disappointment. But I am quite convinced that this would never be the case with Mr. Carstone." "Does Mr. Badger think so too?" asked Ada timidly. "Why," said Mr. Badger, "to tell the truth, Miss Clare, this view of the matter had not occurred to me until Mrs. Badger mentioned it. But when Mrs. Badger put it in that light, I naturally gave great consideration to it, knowing that Mrs. Badger's mind, in addition to its natural advantages, has had the rare advantage of being formed by two such very distinguished (I will even say illustrious) public men as Captain Swosser of the Royal Navy and Professor Dingo. The conclusion at which I have arrived is--in short, is Mrs. Badger's conclusion." "It was a maxim of Captain Swosser's," said Mrs. Badger, "speaking in his figurative naval manner, that when you make pitch hot, you cannot make it too hot; and that if you only have to swab a plank, you should swab it as if Davy Jones were after you. It appears to me that this maxim is applicable to the medical as well as to the nautical profession. "To all professions," observed Mr. Badger. "It was admirably said by Captain Swosser. Beautifully said." "People objected to Professor Dingo when we were staying in the north of Devon after our marriage," said Mrs. Badger, "that he disfigured some of the houses and other buildings by chipping off fragments of those edifices with his little geological hammer. But the professor replied that he knew of no building save the Temple of Science. The principle is the same, I think?" "Precisely the same," said Mr. Badger. "Finely expressed! The professor made the same remark, Miss Summerson, in his last illness, when (his mind wandering) he insisted on keeping his little hammer under the pillow and chipping at the countenances of the attendants. The ruling passion!" Although we could have dispensed with the length at which Mr. and Mrs. Badger pursued the conversation, we both felt that it was disinterested in them to express the opinion they had communicated to us and that there was a great probability of its being sound. We agreed to say nothing to Mr. Jarndyce until we had spoken to Richard; and as he was coming next evening, we resolved to have a very serious talk with him. So after he had been a little while with Ada, I went in and found my darling (as I knew she would be) prepared to consider him thoroughly right in whatever he said. "And how do you get on, Richard?" said I. I always sat down on the other side of him. He made quite a sister of me. "Oh! Well enough!" said Richard. "He can't say better than that, Esther, can he?" cried my pet triumphantly. I tried to look at my pet in the wisest manner, but of course I couldn't. "Well enough?" I repeated. "Yes," said Richard, "well enough. It's rather jog-trotty and humdrum. But it'll do as well as anything else!" "Oh! My dear Richard!" I remonstrated. "What's the matter?" said Richard. "Do as well as anything else!" "I don't think there's any harm in that, Dame Durden," said Ada, looking so confidingly at me across him; "because if it will do as well as anything else, it will do very well, I hope." "Oh, yes, I hope so," returned Richard, carelessly tossing his hair from his forehead. "After all, it may be only a kind of probation till our suit is--I forgot though. I am not to mention the suit. Forbidden ground! Oh, yes, it's all right enough. Let us talk about something else." Ada would have done so willingly, and with a full persuasion that we had brought the question to a most satisfactory state. But I thought it would be useless to stop there, so I began again. "No, but Richard," said I, "and my dear Ada! Consider how important it is to you both, and what a point of honour it is towards your cousin, that you, Richard, should be quite in earnest without any reservation. I think we had better talk about this, really, Ada. It will be too late very soon." "Oh, yes! We must talk about it!" said Ada. "But I think Richard is right." What was the use of my trying to look wise when she was so pretty, and so engaging, and so fond of him! "Mr. and Mrs. Badger were here yesterday, Richard," said I, "and they seemed disposed to think that you had no great liking for the profession." "Did they though?" said Richard. "Oh! Well, that rather alters the case, because I had no idea that they thought so, and I should not have liked to disappoint or inconvenience them. The fact is, I don't care much about it. But, oh, it don't matter! It'll do as well as anything else!" "You hear him, Ada!" said I. "The fact is," Richard proceeded, half thoughtfully and half jocosely, "it is not quite in my way. I don't take to it. And I get too much of Mrs. Bayham Badger's first and second." "I am sure THAT'S very natural!" cried Ada, quite delighted. "The very thing we both said yesterday, Esther!" "Then," pursued Richard, "it's monotonous, and to-day is too like yesterday, and to-morrow is too like to-day." "But I am afraid," said I, "this is an objection to all kinds of application--to life itself, except under some very uncommon circumstances." "Do you think so?" returned Richard, still considering. "Perhaps! Ha! Why, then, you know," he added, suddenly becoming gay again, "we travel outside a circle to what I said just now. It'll do as well as anything else. Oh, it's all right enough! Let us talk about something else." But even Ada, with her loving face--and if it had seemed innocent and trusting when I first saw it in that memorable November fog, how much more did it seem now when I knew her innocent and trusting heart--even Ada shook her head at this and looked serious. So I thought it a good opportunity to hint to Richard that if he were sometimes a little careless of himself, I was very sure he never meant to be careless of Ada, and that it was a part of his affectionate consideration for her not to slight the importance of a step that might influence both their lives. This made him almost grave. "My dear Mother Hubbard," he said, "that's the very thing! I have thought of that several times and have been quite angry with myself for meaning to be so much in earnest and--somehow--not exactly being so. I don't know how it is; I seem to want something or other to stand by. Even you have no idea how fond I am of Ada (my darling cousin, I love you, so much!), but I don't settle down to constancy in other things. It's such uphill work, and it takes such a time!" said Richard with an air of vexation. "That may be," I suggested, "because you don't like what you have chosen." "Poor fellow!" said Ada. "I am sure I don't wonder at it!" No. It was not of the least use my trying to look wise. I tried again, but how could I do it, or how could it have any effect if I could, while Ada rested her clasped hands upon his shoulder and while he looked at her tender blue eyes, and while they looked at him! "You see, my precious girl," said Richard, passing her golden curls through and through his hand, "I was a little hasty perhaps; or I misunderstood my own inclinations perhaps. They don't seem to lie in that direction. I couldn't tell till I tried. Now the question is whether it's worth-while to undo all that has been done. It seems like making a great disturbance about nothing particular." "My dear Richard," said I, "how CAN you say about nothing particular?" "I don't mean absolutely that," he returned. "I mean that it MAY be nothing particular because I may never want it." Both Ada and I urged, in reply, not only that it was decidedly worth-while to undo what had been done, but that it must be undone. I then asked Richard whether he had thought of any more congenial pursuit. "There, my dear Mrs. Shipton," said Richard, "you touch me home. Yes, I have. I have been thinking that the law is the boy for me." "The law!" repeated Ada as if she were afraid of the name. "If I went into Kenge's office," said Richard, "and if I were placed under articles to Kenge, I should have my eye on the--hum!--the forbidden ground--and should be able to study it, and master it, and to satisfy myself that it was not neglected and was being properly conducted. I should be able to look after Ada's interests and my own interests (the same thing!); and I should peg away at Blackstone and all those fellows with the most tremendous ardour." I was not by any means so sure of that, and I saw how his hankering after the vague things yet to come of those long-deferred hopes cast a shade on Ada's face. But I thought it best to encourage him in any project of continuous exertion, and only advised him to be quite sure that his mind was made up now. "My dear Minerva," said Richard, "I am as steady as you are. I made a mistake; we are all liable to mistakes; I won't do so any more, and I'll become such a lawyer as is not often seen. That is, you know," said Richard, relapsing into doubt, "if it really is worth-while, after all, to make such a disturbance about nothing particular!" This led to our saying again, with a great deal of gravity, all that we had said already and to our coming to much the same conclusion afterwards. But we so strongly advised Richard to be frank and open with Mr. Jarndyce, without a moment's delay, and his disposition was naturally so opposed to concealment that he sought him out at once (taking us with him) and made a full avowal. "Rick," said my guardian, after hearing him attentively, "we can retreat with honour, and we will. But we must be careful--for our cousin's sake, Rick, for our cousin's sake--that we make no more such mistakes. Therefore, in the matter of the law, we will have a good trial before we decide. We will look before we leap, and take plenty of time about it." Richard's energy was of such an impatient and fitful kind that he would have liked nothing better than to have gone to Mr. Kenge's office in that hour and to have entered into articles with him on the spot. Submitting, however, with a good grace to the caution that we had shown to be so necessary, he contented himself with sitting down among us in his lightest spirits and talking as if his one unvarying purpose in life from childhood had been that one which now held possession of him. My guardian was very kind and cordial with him, but rather grave, enough so to cause Ada, when he had departed and we were going upstairs to bed, to say, "Cousin John, I hope you don't think the worse of Richard?" "No, my love," said he. "Because it was very natural that Richard should be mistaken in such a difficult case. It is not uncommon." "No, no, my love," said he. "Don't look unhappy." "Oh, I am not unhappy, cousin John!" said Ada, smiling cheerfully, with her hand upon his shoulder, where she had put it in bidding him good night. "But I should be a little so if you thought at all the worse of Richard." "My dear," said Mr. Jarndyce, "I should think the worse of him only if you were ever in the least unhappy through his means. I should be more disposed to quarrel with myself even then, than with poor Rick, for I brought you together. But, tut, all this is nothing! He has time before him, and the race to run. I think the worse of him? Not I, my loving cousin! And not you, I swear!" "No, indeed, cousin John," said Ada, "I am sure I could not--I am sure I would not--think any ill of Richard if the whole world did. I could, and I would, think better of him then than at any other time!" So quietly and honestly she said it, with her hands upon his shoulders--both hands now--and looking up into his face, like the picture of truth! "I think," said my guardian, thoughtfully regarding her, "I think it must be somewhere written that the virtues of the mothers shall occasionally be visited on the children, as well as the sins of the father. Good night, my rosebud. Good night, little woman. Pleasant slumbers! Happy dreams!" This was the first time I ever saw him follow Ada with his eyes with something of a shadow on their benevolent expression. I well remembered the look with which he had contemplated her and Richard when she was singing in the firelight; it was but a very little while since he had watched them passing down the room in which the sun was shining, and away into the shade; but his glance was changed, and even the silent look of confidence in me which now followed it once more was not quite so hopeful and untroubled as it had originally been. Ada praised Richard more to me that night than ever she had praised him yet. She went to sleep with a little bracelet he had given her clasped upon her arm. I fancied she was dreaming of him when I kissed her cheek after she had slept an hour and saw how tranquil and happy she looked. For I was so little inclined to sleep myself that night that I sat up working. It would not be worth mentioning for its own sake, but I was wakeful and rather low-spirited. I don't know why. At least I don't think I know why. At least, perhaps I do, but I don't think it matters. At any rate, I made up my mind to be so dreadfully industrious that I would leave myself not a moment's leisure to be low-spirited. For I naturally said, "Esther! You to be low-spirited. YOU!" And it really was time to say so, for I--yes, I really did see myself in the glass, almost crying. "As if you had anything to make you unhappy, instead of everything to make you happy, you ungrateful heart!" said I. If I could have made myself go to sleep, I would have done it directly, but not being able to do that, I took out of my basket some ornamental work for our house (I mean Bleak House) that I was busy with at that time and sat down to it with great determination. It was necessary to count all the stitches in that work, and I resolved to go on with it until I couldn't keep my eyes open, and then to go to bed. I soon found myself very busy. But I had left some silk downstairs in a work-table drawer in the temporary growlery, and coming to a stop for want of it, I took my candle and went softly down to get it. To my great surprise, on going in I found my guardian still there, and sitting looking at the ashes. He was lost in thought, his book lay unheeded by his side, his silvered iron-grey hair was scattered confusedly upon his forehead as though his hand had been wandering among it while his thoughts were elsewhere, and his face looked worn. Almost frightened by coming upon him so unexpectedly, I stood still for a moment and should have retired without speaking had he not, in again passing his hand abstractedly through his hair, seen me and started. "Esther!" I told him what I had come for. "At work so late, my dear?" "I am working late to-night," said I, "because I couldn't sleep and wished to tire myself. But, dear guardian, you are late too, and look weary. You have no trouble, I hope, to keep you waking?" "None, little woman, that YOU would readily understand," said he. He spoke in a regretful tone so new to me that I inwardly repeated, as if that would help me to his meaning, "That I could readily understand!" "Remain a moment, Esther," said he, "You were in my thoughts." "I hope I was not the trouble, guardian?" He slightly waved his hand and fell into his usual manner. The change was so remarkable, and he appeared to make it by dint of so much self-command, that I found myself again inwardly repeating, "None that I could understand!" "Little woman," said my guardian, "I was thinking--that is, I have been thinking since I have been sitting here--that you ought to know of your own history all I know. It is very little. Next to nothing." "Dear guardian," I replied, "when you spoke to me before on that subject--" "But since then," he gravely interposed, anticipating what I meant to say, "I have reflected that your having anything to ask me, and my having anything to tell you, are different considerations, Esther. It is perhaps my duty to impart to you the little I know." "If you think so, guardian, it is right." "I think so," he returned very gently, and kindly, and very distinctly. "My dear, I think so now. If any real disadvantage can attach to your position in the mind of any man or woman worth a thought, it is right that you at least of all the world should not magnify it to yourself by having vague impressions of its nature." I sat down and said after a little effort to be as calm as I ought to be, "One of my earliest remembrances, guardian, is of these words: 'Your mother, Esther, is your disgrace, and you were hers. The time will come, and soon enough, when you will understand this better, and will feel it too, as no one save a woman can.'" I had covered my face with my hands in repeating the words, but I took them away now with a better kind of shame, I hope, and told him that to him I owed the blessing that I had from my childhood to that hour never, never, never felt it. He put up his hand as if to stop me. I well knew that he was never to be thanked, and said no more. "Nine years, my dear," he said after thinking for a little while, "have passed since I received a letter from a lady living in seclusion, written with a stern passion and power that rendered it unlike all other letters I have ever read. It was written to me (as it told me in so many words), perhaps because it was the writer's idiosyncrasy to put that trust in me, perhaps because it was mine to justify it. It told me of a child, an orphan girl then twelve years old, in some such cruel words as those which live in your remembrance. It told me that the writer had bred her in secrecy from her birth, had blotted out all trace of her existence, and that if the writer were to die before the child became a woman, she would be left entirely friendless, nameless, and unknown. It asked me to consider if I would, in that case, finish what the writer had begun." I listened in silence and looked attentively at him. "Your early recollection, my dear, will supply the gloomy medium through which all this was seen and expressed by the writer, and the distorted religion which clouded her mind with impressions of the need there was for the child to expiate an offence of which she was quite innocent. I felt concerned for the little creature, in her darkened life, and replied to the letter." I took his hand and kissed it. "It laid the injunction on me that I should never propose to see the writer, who had long been estranged from all intercourse with the world, but who would see a confidential agent if I would appoint one. I accredited Mr. Kenge. The lady said, of her own accord and not of his seeking, that her name was an assumed one. That she was, if there were any ties of blood in such a case, the child's aunt. That more than this she would never (and he was well persuaded of the steadfastness of her resolution) for any human consideration disclose. My dear, I have told you all." I held his hand for a little while in mine. "I saw my ward oftener than she saw me," he added, cheerily making light of it, "and I always knew she was beloved, useful, and happy. She repays me twenty-thousandfold, and twenty more to that, every hour in every day!" "And oftener still," said I, "she blesses the guardian who is a father to her!" At the word father, I saw his former trouble come into his face. He subdued it as before, and it was gone in an instant; but it had been there and it had come so swiftly upon my words that I felt as if they had given him a shock. I again inwardly repeated, wondering, "That I could readily understand. None that I could readily understand!" No, it was true. I did not understand it. Not for many and many a day. "Take a fatherly good night, my dear," said he, kissing me on the forehead, "and so to rest. These are late hours for working and thinking. You do that for all of us, all day long, little housekeeper!" I neither worked nor thought any more that night. I opened my grateful heart to heaven in thankfulness for its providence to me and its care of me, and fell asleep. We had a visitor next day. Mr. Allan Woodcourt came. He came to take leave of us; he had settled to do so beforehand. He was going to China and to India as a surgeon on board ship. He was to be away a long, long time. I believe--at least I know--that he was not rich. All his widowed mother could spare had been spent in qualifying him for his profession. It was not lucrative to a young practitioner, with very little influence in London; and although he was, night and day, at the service of numbers of poor people and did wonders of gentleness and skill for them, he gained very little by it in money. He was seven years older than I. Not that I need mention it, for it hardly seems to belong to anything. I think--I mean, he told us--that he had been in practice three or four years and that if he could have hoped to contend through three or four more, he would not have made the voyage on which he was bound. But he had no fortune or private means, and so he was going away. He had been to see us several times altogether. We thought it a pity he should go away. Because he was distinguished in his art among those who knew it best, and some of the greatest men belonging to it had a high opinion of him. When he came to bid us good-bye, he brought his mother with him for the first time. She was a pretty old lady, with bright black eyes, but she seemed proud. She came from Wales and had had, a long time ago, an eminent person for an ancestor, of the name of Morgan ap-Kerrig--of some place that sounded like Gimlet--who was the most illustrious person that ever was known and all of whose relations were a sort of royal family. He appeared to have passed his life in always getting up into mountains and fighting somebody; and a bard whose name sounded like Crumlinwallinwer had sung his praises in a piece which was called, as nearly as I could catch it, Mewlinnwillinwodd. Mrs. Woodcourt, after expatiating to us on the fame of her great kinsman, said that no doubt wherever her son Allan went he would remember his pedigree and would on no account form an alliance below it. She told him that there were many handsome English ladies in India who went out on speculation, and that there were some to be picked up with property, but that neither charms nor wealth would suffice for the descendant from such a line without birth, which must ever be the first consideration. She talked so much about birth that for a moment I half fancied, and with pain--But what an idle fancy to suppose that she could think or care what MINE was! Mr. Woodcourt seemed a little distressed by her prolixity, but he was too considerate to let her see it and contrived delicately to bring the conversation round to making his acknowledgments to my guardian for his hospitality and for the very happy hours--he called them the very happy hours--he had passed with us. The recollection of them, he said, would go with him wherever he went and would be always treasured. And so we gave him our hands, one after another--at least, they did--and I did; and so he put his lips to Ada's hand--and to mine; and so he went away upon his long, long voyage! I was very busy indeed all day and wrote directions home to the servants, and wrote notes for my guardian, and dusted his books and papers, and jingled my housekeeping keys a good deal, one way and another. I was still busy between the lights, singing and working by the window, when who should come in but Caddy, whom I had no expectation of seeing! "Why, Caddy, my dear," said I, "what beautiful flowers!" She had such an exquisite little nosegay in her hand. "Indeed, I think so, Esther," replied Caddy. "They are the loveliest I ever saw." "Prince, my dear?" said I in a whisper. "No," answered Caddy, shaking her head and holding them to me to smell. "Not Prince." "Well, to be sure, Caddy!" said I. "You must have two lovers!" "What? Do they look like that sort of thing?" said Caddy. "Do they look like that sort of thing?" I repeated, pinching her cheek. Caddy only laughed in return, and telling me that she had come for half an hour, at the expiration of which time Prince would be waiting for her at the corner, sat chatting with me and Ada in the window, every now and then handing me the flowers again or trying how they looked against my hair. At last, when she was going, she took me into my room and put them in my dress. "For me?" said I, surprised. "For you," said Caddy with a kiss. "They were left behind by somebody." "Left behind?" "At poor Miss Flite's," said Caddy. "Somebody who has been very good to her was hurrying away an hour ago to join a ship and left these flowers behind. No, no! Don't take them out. Let the pretty little things lie here," said Caddy, adjusting them with a careful hand, "because I was present myself, and I shouldn't wonder if somebody left them on purpose!" "Do they look like that sort of thing?" said Ada, coming laughingly behind me and clasping me merrily round the waist. "Oh, yes, indeed they do, Dame Durden! They look very, very like that sort of thing. Oh, very like it indeed, my dear!" CHAPTER XVIII Lady Dedlock It was not so easy as it had appeared at first to arrange for Richard's making a trial of Mr. Kenge's office. Richard himself was the chief impediment. As soon as he had it in his power to leave Mr. Badger at any moment, he began to doubt whether he wanted to leave him at all. He didn't know, he said, really. It wasn't a bad profession; he couldn't assert that he disliked it; perhaps he liked it as well as he liked any other--suppose he gave it one more chance! Upon that, he shut himself up for a few weeks with some books and some bones and seemed to acquire a considerable fund of information with great rapidity. His fervour, after lasting about a month, began to cool, and when it was quite cooled, began to grow warm again. His vacillations between law and medicine lasted so long that midsummer arrived before he finally separated from Mr. Badger and entered on an experimental course of Messrs. Kenge and Carboy. For all his waywardness, he took great credit to himself as being determined to be in earnest "this time." And he was so good-natured throughout, and in such high spirits, and so fond of Ada, that it was very difficult indeed to be otherwise than pleased with him. "As to Mr. Jarndyce," who, I may mention, found the wind much given, during this period, to stick in the east; "As to Mr. Jarndyce," Richard would say to me, "he is the finest fellow in the world, Esther! I must be particularly careful, if it were only for his satisfaction, to take myself well to task and have a regular wind-up of this business now." The idea of his taking himself well to task, with that laughing face and heedless manner and with a fancy that everything could catch and nothing could hold, was ludicrously anomalous. However, he told us between-whiles that he was doing it to such an extent that he wondered his hair didn't turn grey. His regular wind-up of the business was (as I have said) that he went to Mr. Kenge's about midsummer to try how he liked it. All this time he was, in money affairs, what I have described him in a former illustration--generous, profuse, wildly careless, but fully persuaded that he was rather calculating and prudent. I happened to say to Ada, in his presence, half jestingly, half seriously, about the time of his going to Mr. Kenge's, that he needed to have Fortunatus' purse, he made so light of money, which he answered in this way, "My jewel of a dear cousin, you hear this old woman! Why does she say that? Because I gave eight pounds odd (or whatever it was) for a certain neat waistcoat and buttons a few days ago. Now, if I had stayed at Badger's I should have been obliged to spend twelve pounds at a blow for some heart-breaking lecture-fees. So I make four pounds--in a lump--by the transaction!" It was a question much discussed between him and my guardian what arrangements should be made for his living in London while he experimented on the law, for we had long since gone back to Bleak House, and it was too far off to admit of his coming there oftener than once a week. My guardian told me that if Richard were to settle down at Mr. Kenge's he would take some apartments or chambers where we too could occasionally stay for a few days at a time; "but, little woman," he added, rubbing his head very significantly, "he hasn't settled down there yet!" The discussions ended in our hiring for him, by the month, a neat little furnished lodging in a quiet old house near Queen Square. He immediately began to spend all the money he had in buying the oddest little ornaments and luxuries for this lodging; and so often as Ada and I dissuaded him from making any purchase that he had in contemplation which was particularly unnecessary and expensive, he took credit for what it would have cost and made out that to spend anything less on something else was to save the difference. While these affairs were in abeyance, our visit to Mr. Boythorn's was postponed. At length, Richard having taken possession of his lodging, there was nothing to prevent our departure. He could have gone with us at that time of the year very well, but he was in the full novelty of his new position and was making most energetic attempts to unravel the mysteries of the fatal suit. Consequently we went without him, and my darling was delighted to praise him for being so busy. We made a pleasant journey down into Lincolnshire by the coach and had an entertaining companion in Mr. Skimpole. His furniture had been all cleared off, it appeared, by the person who took possession of it on his blue-eyed daughter's birthday, but he seemed quite relieved to think that it was gone. Chairs and table, he said, were wearisome objects; they were monotonous ideas, they had no variety of expression, they looked you out of countenance, and you looked them out of countenance. How pleasant, then, to be bound to no particular chairs and tables, but to sport like a butterfly among all the furniture on hire, and to flit from rosewood to mahogany, and from mahogany to walnut, and from this shape to that, as the humour took one! "The oddity of the thing is," said Mr. Skimpole with a quickened sense of the ludicrous, "that my chairs and tables were not paid for, and yet my landlord walks off with them as composedly as possible. Now, that seems droll! There is something grotesque in it. The chair and table merchant never engaged to pay my landlord my rent. Why should my landlord quarrel with HIM? If I have a pimple on my nose which is disagreeable to my landlord's peculiar ideas of beauty, my landlord has no business to scratch my chair and table merchant's nose, which has no pimple on it. His reasoning seems defective!" "Well," said my guardian good-humouredly, "it's pretty clear that whoever became security for those chairs and tables will have to pay for them." "Exactly!" returned Mr. Skimpole. "That's the crowning point of unreason in the business! I said to my landlord, 'My good man, you are not aware that my excellent friend Jarndyce will have to pay for those things that you are sweeping off in that indelicate manner. Have you no consideration for HIS property?' He hadn't the least." "And refused all proposals," said my guardian. "Refused all proposals," returned Mr. Skimpole. "I made him business proposals. I had him into my room. I said, 'You are a man of business, I believe?' He replied, 'I am,' 'Very well,' said I, 'now let us be business-like. Here is an inkstand, here are pens and paper, here are wafers. What do you want? I have occupied your house for a considerable period, I believe to our mutual satisfaction until this unpleasant misunderstanding arose; let us be at once friendly and business-like. What do you want?' In reply to this, he made use of the figurative expression--which has something Eastern about it--that he had never seen the colour of my money. 'My amiable friend,' said I, 'I never have any money. I never know anything about money.' 'Well, sir,' said he, 'what do you offer if I give you time?' 'My good fellow,' said I, 'I have no idea of time; but you say you are a man of business, and whatever you can suggest to be done in a business-like way with pen, and ink, and paper--and wafers--I am ready to do. Don't pay yourself at another man's expense (which is foolish), but be business-like!' However, he wouldn't be, and there was an end of it." If these were some of the inconveniences of Mr. Skimpole's childhood, it assuredly possessed its advantages too. On the journey he had a very good appetite for such refreshment as came in our way (including a basket of choice hothouse peaches), but never thought of paying for anything. So when the coachman came round for his fee, he pleasantly asked him what he considered a very good fee indeed, now--a liberal one--and on his replying half a crown for a single passenger, said it was little enough too, all things considered, and left Mr. Jarndyce to give it him. It was delightful weather. The green corn waved so beautifully, the larks sang so joyfully, the hedges were so full of wild flowers, the trees were so thickly out in leaf, the bean-fields, with a light wind blowing over them, filled the air with such a delicious fragrance! Late in the afternoon we came to the market-town where we were to alight from the coach--a dull little town with a church-spire, and a marketplace, and a market-cross, and one intensely sunny street, and a pond with an old horse cooling his legs in it, and a very few men sleepily lying and standing about in narrow little bits of shade. After the rustling of the leaves and the waving of the corn all along the road, it looked as still, as hot, as motionless a little town as England could produce. At the inn we found Mr. Boythorn on horseback, waiting with an open carriage to take us to his house, which was a few miles off. He was overjoyed to see us and dismounted with great alacrity. "By heaven!" said he after giving us a courteous greeting. "This a most infamous coach. It is the most flagrant example of an abominable public vehicle that ever encumbered the face of the earth. It is twenty-five minutes after its time this afternoon. The coachman ought to be put to death!" "IS he after his time?" said Mr. Skimpole, to whom he happened to address himself. "You know my infirmity." "Twenty-five minutes! Twenty-six minutes!" replied Mr. Boythorn, referring to his watch. "With two ladies in the coach, this scoundrel has deliberately delayed his arrival six and twenty minutes. Deliberately! It is impossible that it can be accidental! But his father--and his uncle--were the most profligate coachmen that ever sat upon a box." While he said this in tones of the greatest indignation, he handed us into the little phaeton with the utmost gentleness and was all smiles and pleasure. "I am sorry, ladies," he said, standing bare-headed at the carriage-door when all was ready, "that I am obliged to conduct you nearly two miles out of the way. But our direct road lies through Sir Leicester Dedlock's park, and in that fellow's property I have sworn never to set foot of mine, or horse's foot of mine, pending the present relations between us, while I breathe the breath of life!" And here, catching my guardian's eye, he broke into one of his tremendous laughs, which seemed to shake even the motionless little market-town. "Are the Dedlocks down here, Lawrence?" said my guardian as we drove along and Mr. Boythorn trotted on the green turf by the roadside. "Sir Arrogant Numskull is here," replied Mr. Boythorn. "Ha ha ha! Sir Arrogant is here, and I am glad to say, has been laid by the heels here. My Lady," in naming whom he always made a courtly gesture as if particularly to exclude her from any part in the quarrel, "is expected, I believe, daily. I am not in the least surprised that she postpones her appearance as long as possible. Whatever can have induced that transcendent woman to marry that effigy and figure-head of a baronet is one of the most impenetrable mysteries that ever baffled human inquiry. Ha ha ha ha!" "I suppose," said my guardian, laughing, "WE may set foot in the park while we are here? The prohibition does not extend to us, does it?" "I can lay no prohibition on my guests," he said, bending his head to Ada and me with the smiling politeness which sat so gracefully upon him, "except in the matter of their departure. I am only sorry that I cannot have the happiness of being their escort about Chesney Wold, which is a very fine place! But by the light of this summer day, Jarndyce, if you call upon the owner while you stay with me, you are likely to have but a cool reception. He carries himself like an eight-day clock at all times, like one of a race of eight-day clocks in gorgeous cases that never go and never went--Ha ha ha!--but he will have some extra stiffness, I can promise you, for the friends of his friend and neighbour Boythorn!" "I shall not put him to the proof," said my guardian. "He is as indifferent to the honour of knowing me, I dare say, as I am to the honour of knowing him. The air of the grounds and perhaps such a view of the house as any other sightseer might get are quite enough for me." "Well!" said Mr. Boythorn. "I am glad of it on the whole. It's in better keeping. I am looked upon about here as a second Ajax defying the lightning. Ha ha ha ha! When I go into our little church on a Sunday, a considerable part of the inconsiderable congregation expect to see me drop, scorched and withered, on the pavement under the Dedlock displeasure. Ha ha ha ha! I have no doubt he is surprised that I don't. For he is, by heaven, the most self-satisfied, and the shallowest, and the most coxcombical and utterly brainless ass!" Our coming to the ridge of a hill we had been ascending enabled our friend to point out Chesney Wold itself to us and diverted his attention from its master. It was a picturesque old house in a fine park richly wooded. Among the trees and not far from the residence he pointed out the spire of the little church of which he had spoken. Oh, the solemn woods over which the light and shadow travelled swiftly, as if heavenly wings were sweeping on benignant errands through the summer air; the smooth green slopes, the glittering water, the garden where the flowers were so symmetrically arranged in clusters of the richest colours, how beautiful they looked! The house, with gable and chimney, and tower, and turret, and dark doorway, and broad terrace-walk, twining among the balustrades of which, and lying heaped upon the vases, there was one great flush of roses, seemed scarcely real in its light solidity and in the serene and peaceful hush that rested on all around it. To Ada and to me, that above all appeared the pervading influence. On everything, house, garden, terrace, green slopes, water, old oaks, fern, moss, woods again, and far away across the openings in the prospect to the distance lying wide before us with a purple bloom upon it, there seemed to be such undisturbed repose. When we came into the little village and passed a small inn with the sign of the Dedlock Arms swinging over the road in front, Mr. Boythorn interchanged greetings with a young gentleman sitting on a bench outside the inn-door who had some fishing-tackle lying beside him. "That's the housekeeper's grandson, Mr. Rouncewell by name," said, he, "and he is in love with a pretty girl up at the house. Lady Dedlock has taken a fancy to the pretty girl and is going to keep her about her own fair person--an honour which my young friend himself does not at all appreciate. However, he can't marry just yet, even if his Rosebud were willing; so he is fain to make the best of it. In the meanwhile, he comes here pretty often for a day or two at a time to--fish. Ha ha ha ha!" "Are he and the pretty girl engaged, Mr. Boythorn?" asked Ada. "Why, my dear Miss Clare," he returned, "I think they may perhaps understand each other; but you will see them soon, I dare say, and I must learn from you on such a point--not you from me." Ada blushed, and Mr. Boythorn, trotting forward on his comely grey horse, dismounted at his own door and stood ready with extended arm and uncovered head to welcome us when we arrived. He lived in a pretty house, formerly the parsonage house, with a lawn in front, a bright flower-garden at the side, and a well-stocked orchard and kitchen-garden in the rear, enclosed with a venerable wall that had of itself a ripened ruddy look. But, indeed, everything about the place wore an aspect of maturity and abundance. The old lime-tree walk was like green cloisters, the very shadows of the cherry-trees and apple-trees were heavy with fruit, the gooseberry-bushes were so laden that their branches arched and rested on the earth, the strawberries and raspberries grew in like profusion, and the peaches basked by the hundred on the wall. Tumbled about among the spread nets and the glass frames sparkling and winking in the sun there were such heaps of drooping pods, and marrows, and cucumbers, that every foot of ground appeared a vegetable treasury, while the smell of sweet herbs and all kinds of wholesome growth (to say nothing of the neighbouring meadows where the hay was carrying) made the whole air a great nosegay. Such stillness and composure reigned within the orderly precincts of the old red wall that even the feathers hung in garlands to scare the birds hardly stirred; and the wall had such a ripening influence that where, here and there high up, a disused nail and scrap of list still clung to it, it was easy to fancy that they had mellowed with the changing seasons and that they had rusted and decayed according to the common fate. The house, though a little disorderly in comparison with the garden, was a real old house with settles in the chimney of the brick-floored kitchen and great beams across the ceilings. On one side of it was the terrible piece of ground in dispute, where Mr. Boythorn maintained a sentry in a smock-frock day and night, whose duty was supposed to be, in cases of aggression, immediately to ring a large bell hung up there for the purpose, to unchain a great bull-dog established in a kennel as his ally, and generally to deal destruction on the enemy. Not content with these precautions, Mr. Boythorn had himself composed and posted there, on painted boards to which his name was attached in large letters, the following solemn warnings: "Beware of the bull-dog. He is most ferocious. Lawrence Boythorn." "The blunderbus is loaded with slugs. Lawrence Boythorn." "Man-traps and spring-guns are set here at all times of the day and night. Lawrence Boythorn." "Take notice. That any person or persons audaciously presuming to trespass on this property will be punished with the utmost severity of private chastisement and prosecuted with the utmost rigour of the law. Lawrence Boythorn." These he showed us from the drawing-room window, while his bird was hopping about his head, and he laughed, "Ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha!" to that extent as he pointed them out that I really thought he would have hurt himself. "But this is taking a good deal of trouble," said Mr. Skimpole in his light way, "when you are not in earnest after all." "Not in earnest!" returned Mr. Boythorn with unspeakable warmth. "Not in earnest! If I could have hoped to train him, I would have bought a lion instead of that dog and would have turned him loose upon the first intolerable robber who should dare to make an encroachment on my rights. Let Sir Leicester Dedlock consent to come out and decide this question by single combat, and I will meet him with any weapon known to mankind in any age or country. I am that much in earnest. Not more!" We arrived at his house on a Saturday. On the Sunday morning we all set forth to walk to the little church in the park. Entering the park, almost immediately by the disputed ground, we pursued a pleasant footpath winding among the verdant turf and the beautiful trees until it brought us to the church-porch. The congregation was extremely small and quite a rustic one with the exception of a large muster of servants from the house, some of whom were already in their seats, while others were yet dropping in. There were some stately footmen, and there was a perfect picture of an old coachman, who looked as if he were the official representative of all the pomps and vanities that had ever been put into his coach. There was a very pretty show of young women, and above them, the handsome old face and fine responsible portly figure of the housekeeper towered pre-eminent. The pretty girl of whom Mr. Boythorn had told us was close by her. She was so very pretty that I might have known her by her beauty even if I had not seen how blushingly conscious she was of the eyes of the young fisherman, whom I discovered not far off. One face, and not an agreeable one, though it was handsome, seemed maliciously watchful of this pretty girl, and indeed of every one and everything there. It was a Frenchwoman's. As the bell was yet ringing and the great people were not yet come, I had leisure to glance over the church, which smelt as earthy as a grave, and to think what a shady, ancient, solemn little church it was. The windows, heavily shaded by trees, admitted a subdued light that made the faces around me pale, and darkened the old brasses in the pavement and the time and damp-worn monuments, and rendered the sunshine in the little porch, where a monotonous ringer was working at the bell, inestimably bright. But a stir in that direction, a gathering of reverential awe in the rustic faces, and a blandly ferocious assumption on the part of Mr. Boythorn of being resolutely unconscious of somebody's existence forewarned me that the great people were come and that the service was going to begin. "'Enter not into judgment with thy servant, O Lord, for in thy sight--'" Shall I ever forget the rapid beating at my heart, occasioned by the look I met as I stood up! Shall I ever forget the manner in which those handsome proud eyes seemed to spring out of their languor and to hold mine! It was only a moment before I cast mine down--released again, if I may say so--on my book; but I knew the beautiful face quite well in that short space of time. And, very strangely, there was something quickened within me, associated with the lonely days at my godmother's; yes, away even to the days when I had stood on tiptoe to dress myself at my little glass after dressing my doll. And this, although I had never seen this lady's face before in all my life--I was quite sure of it--absolutely certain. It was easy to know that the ceremonious, gouty, grey-haired gentleman, the only other occupant of the great pew, was Sir Leicester Dedlock, and that the lady was Lady Dedlock. But why her face should be, in a confused way, like a broken glass to me, in which I saw scraps of old remembrances, and why I should be so fluttered and troubled (for I was still) by having casually met her eyes, I could not think. I felt it to be an unmeaning weakness in me and tried to overcome it by attending to the words I heard. Then, very strangely, I seemed to hear them, not in the reader's voice, but in the well-remembered voice of my godmother. This made me think, did Lady Dedlock's face accidentally resemble my godmother's? It might be that it did, a little; but the expression was so different, and the stern decision which had worn into my godmother's face, like weather into rocks, was so completely wanting in the face before me that it could not be that resemblance which had struck me. Neither did I know the loftiness and haughtiness of Lady Dedlock's face, at all, in any one. And yet I--I, little Esther Summerson, the child who lived a life apart and on whose birthday there was no rejoicing--seemed to arise before my own eyes, evoked out of the past by some power in this fashionable lady, whom I not only entertained no fancy that I had ever seen, but whom I perfectly well knew I had never seen until that hour. It made me tremble so to be thrown into this unaccountable agitation that I was conscious of being distressed even by the observation of the French maid, though I knew she had been looking watchfully here, and there, and everywhere, from the moment of her coming into the church. By degrees, though very slowly, I at last overcame my strange emotion. After a long time, I looked towards Lady Dedlock again. It was while they were preparing to sing, before the sermon. She took no heed of me, and the beating at my heart was gone. Neither did it revive for more than a few moments when she once or twice afterwards glanced at Ada or at me through her glass. The service being concluded, Sir Leicester gave his arm with much taste and gallantry to Lady Dedlock--though he was obliged to walk by the help of a thick stick--and escorted her out of church to the pony carriage in which they had come. The servants then dispersed, and so did the congregation, whom Sir Leicester had contemplated all along (Mr. Skimpole said to Mr. Boythorn's infinite delight) as if he were a considerable landed proprietor in heaven. "He believes he is!" said Mr. Boythorn. "He firmly believes it. So did his father, and his grandfather, and his great-grandfather!" "Do you know," pursued Mr. Skimpole very unexpectedly to Mr. Boythorn, "it's agreeable to me to see a man of that sort." "IS it!" said Mr. Boythorn. "Say that he wants to patronize me," pursued Mr. Skimpole. "Very well! I don't object." "I do," said Mr. Boythorn with great vigour. "Do you really?" returned Mr. Skimpole in his easy light vein. "But that's taking trouble, surely. And why should you take trouble? Here am I, content to receive things childishly as they fall out, and I never take trouble! I come down here, for instance, and I find a mighty potentate exacting homage. Very well! I say 'Mighty potentate, here IS my homage! It's easier to give it than to withhold it. Here it is. If you have anything of an agreeable nature to show me, I shall be happy to see it; if you have anything of an agreeable nature to give me, I shall be happy to accept it.' Mighty potentate replies in effect, 'This is a sensible fellow. I find him accord with my digestion and my bilious system. He doesn't impose upon me the necessity of rolling myself up like a hedgehog with my points outward. I expand, I open, I turn my silver lining outward like Milton's cloud, and it's more agreeable to both of us.' That's my view of such things, speaking as a child!" "But suppose you went down somewhere else to-morrow," said Mr. Boythorn, "where there was the opposite of that fellow--or of this fellow. How then?" "How then?" said Mr. Skimpole with an appearance of the utmost simplicity and candour. "Just the same then! I should say, 'My esteemed Boythorn'--to make you the personification of our imaginary friend--'my esteemed Boythorn, you object to the mighty potentate? Very good. So do I. I take it that my business in the social system is to be agreeable; I take it that everybody's business in the social system is to be agreeable. It's a system of harmony, in short. Therefore if you object, I object. Now, excellent Boythorn, let us go to dinner!'" "But excellent Boythorn might say," returned our host, swelling and growing very red, "I'll be--" "I understand," said Mr. Skimpole. "Very likely he would." "--if I WILL go to dinner!" cried Mr. Boythorn in a violent burst and stopping to strike his stick upon the ground. "And he would probably add, 'Is there such a thing as principle, Mr. Harold Skimpole?'" "To which Harold Skimpole would reply, you know," he returned in his gayest manner and with his most ingenuous smile, "'Upon my life I have not the least idea! I don't know what it is you call by that name, or where it is, or who possesses it. If you possess it and find it comfortable, I am quite delighted and congratulate you heartily. But I know nothing about it, I assure you; for I am a mere child, and I lay no claim to it, and I don't want it!' So, you see, excellent Boythorn and I would go to dinner after all!" This was one of many little dialogues between them which I always expected to end, and which I dare say would have ended under other circumstances, in some violent explosion on the part of our host. But he had so high a sense of his hospitable and responsible position as our entertainer, and my guardian laughed so sincerely at and with Mr. Skimpole, as a child who blew bubbles and broke them all day long, that matters never went beyond this point. Mr. Skimpole, who always seemed quite unconscious of having been on delicate ground, then betook himself to beginning some sketch in the park which he never finished, or to playing fragments of airs on the piano, or to singing scraps of songs, or to lying down on his back under a tree and looking at the sky--which he couldn't help thinking, he said, was what he was meant for; it suited him so exactly. "Enterprise and effort," he would say to us (on his back), "are delightful to me. I believe I am truly cosmopolitan. I have the deepest sympathy with them. I lie in a shady place like this and think of adventurous spirits going to the North Pole or penetrating to the heart of the Torrid Zone with admiration. Mercenary creatures ask, 'What is the use of a man's going to the North Pole? What good does it do?' I can't say; but, for anything I CAN say, he may go for the purpose--though he don't know it--of employing my thoughts as I lie here. Take an extreme case. Take the case of the slaves on American plantations. I dare say they are worked hard, I dare say they don't altogether like it. I dare say theirs is an unpleasant experience on the whole; but they people the landscape for me, they give it a poetry for me, and perhaps that is one of the pleasanter objects of their existence. I am very sensible of it, if it be, and I shouldn't wonder if it were!" I always wondered on these occasions whether he ever thought of Mrs. Skimpole and the children, and in what point of view they presented themselves to his cosmopolitan mind. So far as I could understand, they rarely presented themselves at all. The week had gone round to the Saturday following that beating of my heart in the church; and every day had been so bright and blue that to ramble in the woods, and to see the light striking down among the transparent leaves and sparkling in the beautiful interlacings of the shadows of the trees, while the birds poured out their songs and the air was drowsy with the hum of insects, had been most delightful. We had one favourite spot, deep in moss and last year's leaves, where there were some felled trees from which the bark was all stripped off. Seated among these, we looked through a green vista supported by thousands of natural columns, the whitened stems of trees, upon a distant prospect made so radiant by its contrast with the shade in which we sat and made so precious by the arched perspective through which we saw it that it was like a glimpse of the better land. Upon the Saturday we sat here, Mr. Jarndyce, Ada, and I, until we heard thunder muttering in the distance and felt the large raindrops rattle through the leaves. The weather had been all the week extremely sultry, but the storm broke so suddenly--upon us, at least, in that sheltered spot--that before we reached the outskirts of the wood the thunder and lightning were frequent and the rain came plunging through the leaves as if every drop were a great leaden bead. As it was not a time for standing among trees, we ran out of the wood, and up and down the moss-grown steps which crossed the plantation-fence like two broad-staved ladders placed back to back, and made for a keeper's lodge which was close at hand. We had often noticed the dark beauty of this lodge standing in a deep twilight of trees, and how the ivy clustered over it, and how there was a steep hollow near, where we had once seen the keeper's dog dive down into the fern as if it were water. The lodge was so dark within, now the sky was overcast, that we only clearly saw the man who came to the door when we took shelter there and put two chairs for Ada and me. The lattice-windows were all thrown open, and we sat just within the doorway watching the storm. It was grand to see how the wind awoke, and bent the trees, and drove the rain before it like a cloud of smoke; and to hear the solemn thunder and to see the lightning; and while thinking with awe of the tremendous powers by which our little lives are encompassed, to consider how beneficent they are and how upon the smallest flower and leaf there was already a freshness poured from all this seeming rage which seemed to make creation new again. "Is it not dangerous to sit in so exposed a place?" "Oh, no, Esther dear!" said Ada quietly. Ada said it to me, but I had not spoken. The beating of my heart came back again. I had never heard the voice, as I had never seen the face, but it affected me in the same strange way. Again, in a moment, there arose before my mind innumerable pictures of myself. Lady Dedlock had taken shelter in the lodge before our arrival there and had come out of the gloom within. She stood behind my chair with her hand upon it. I saw her with her hand close to my shoulder when I turned my head. "I have frightened you?" she said. No. It was not fright. Why should I be frightened! "I believe," said Lady Dedlock to my guardian, "I have the pleasure of speaking to Mr. Jarndyce." "Your remembrance does me more honour than I had supposed it would, Lady Dedlock," he returned. "I recognized you in church on Sunday. I am sorry that any local disputes of Sir Leicester's--they are not of his seeking, however, I believe--should render it a matter of some absurd difficulty to show you any attention here." "I am aware of the circumstances," returned my guardian with a smile, "and am sufficiently obliged." She had given him her hand in an indifferent way that seemed habitual to her and spoke in a correspondingly indifferent manner, though in a very pleasant voice. She was as graceful as she was beautiful, perfectly self-possessed, and had the air, I thought, of being able to attract and interest any one if she had thought it worth her while. The keeper had brought her a chair on which she sat in the middle of the porch between us. "Is the young gentleman disposed of whom you wrote to Sir Leicester about and whose wishes Sir Leicester was sorry not to have it in his power to advance in any way?" she said over her shoulder to my guardian. "I hope so," said he. She seemed to respect him and even to wish to conciliate him. There was something very winning in her haughty manner, and it became more familiar--I was going to say more easy, but that could hardly be--as she spoke to him over her shoulder. "I presume this is your other ward, Miss Clare?" He presented Ada, in form. "You will lose the disinterested part of your Don Quixote character," said Lady Dedlock to Mr. Jarndyce over her shoulder again, "if you only redress the wrongs of beauty like this. But present me," and she turned full upon me, "to this young lady too!" "Miss Summerson really is my ward," said Mr. Jarndyce. "I am responsible to no Lord Chancellor in her case." "Has Miss Summerson lost both her parents?" said my Lady. "Yes." "She is very fortunate in her guardian." Lady Dedlock looked at me, and I looked at her and said I was indeed. All at once she turned from me with a hasty air, almost expressive of displeasure or dislike, and spoke to him over her shoulder again. "Ages have passed since we were in the habit of meeting, Mr. Jarndyce." "A long time. At least I thought it was a long time, until I saw you last Sunday," he returned. "What! Even you are a courtier, or think it necessary to become one to me!" she said with some disdain. "I have achieved that reputation, I suppose." "You have achieved so much, Lady Dedlock," said my guardian, "that you pay some little penalty, I dare say. But none to me." "So much!" she repeated, slightly laughing. "Yes!" With her air of superiority, and power, and fascination, and I know not what, she seemed to regard Ada and me as little more than children. So, as she slightly laughed and afterwards sat looking at the rain, she was as self-possessed and as free to occupy herself with her own thoughts as if she had been alone. "I think you knew my sister when we were abroad together better than you know me?" she said, looking at him again. "Yes, we happened to meet oftener," he returned. "We went our several ways," said Lady Dedlock, "and had little in common even before we agreed to differ. It is to be regretted, I suppose, but it could not be helped." Lady Dedlock again sat looking at the rain. The storm soon began to pass upon its way. The shower greatly abated, the lightning ceased, the thunder rolled among the distant hills, and the sun began to glisten on the wet leaves and the falling rain. As we sat there, silently, we saw a little pony phaeton coming towards us at a merry pace. "The messenger is coming back, my Lady," said the keeper, "with the carriage." As it drove up, we saw that there were two people inside. There alighted from it, with some cloaks and wrappers, first the Frenchwoman whom I had seen in church, and secondly the pretty girl, the Frenchwoman with a defiant confidence, the pretty girl confused and hesitating. "What now?" said Lady Dedlock. "Two!" "I am your maid, my Lady, at the present," said the Frenchwoman. "The message was for the attendant." "I was afraid you might mean me, my Lady," said the pretty girl. "I did mean you, child," replied her mistress calmly. "Put that shawl on me." She slightly stooped her shoulders to receive it, and the pretty girl lightly dropped it in its place. The Frenchwoman stood unnoticed, looking on with her lips very tightly set. "I am sorry," said Lady Dedlock to Mr. Jarndyce, "that we are not likely to renew our former acquaintance. You will allow me to send the carriage back for your two wards. It shall be here directly." But as he would on no account accept this offer, she took a graceful leave of Ada--none of me--and put her hand upon his proffered arm, and got into the carriage, which was a little, low, park carriage with a hood. "Come in, child," she said to the pretty girl; "I shall want you. Go on!" The carriage rolled away, and the Frenchwoman, with the wrappers she had brought hanging over her arm, remained standing where she had alighted. I suppose there is nothing pride can so little bear with as pride itself, and that she was punished for her imperious manner. Her retaliation was the most singular I could have imagined. She remained perfectly still until the carriage had turned into the drive, and then, without the least discomposure of countenance, slipped off her shoes, left them on the ground, and walked deliberately in the same direction through the wettest of the wet grass. "Is that young woman mad?" said my guardian. "Oh, no, sir!" said the keeper, who, with his wife, was looking after her. "Hortense is not one of that sort. She has as good a head-piece as the best. But she's mortal high and passionate--powerful high and passionate; and what with having notice to leave, and having others put above her, she don't take kindly to it." "But why should she walk shoeless through all that water?" said my guardian. "Why, indeed, sir, unless it is to cool her down!" said the man. "Or unless she fancies it's blood," said the woman. "She'd as soon walk through that as anything else, I think, when her own's up!" We passed not far from the house a few minutes afterwards. Peaceful as it had looked when we first saw it, it looked even more so now, with a diamond spray glittering all about it, a light wind blowing, the birds no longer hushed but singing strongly, everything refreshed by the late rain, and the little carriage shining at the doorway like a fairy carriage made of silver. Still, very steadfastly and quietly walking towards it, a peaceful figure too in the landscape, went Mademoiselle Hortense, shoeless, through the wet grass. CHAPTER XIX Moving On It is the long vacation in the regions of Chancery Lane. The good ships Law and Equity, those teak-built, copper-bottomed, iron-fastened, brazen-faced, and not by any means fast-sailing clippers are laid up in ordinary. The Flying Dutchman, with a crew of ghostly clients imploring all whom they may encounter to peruse their papers, has drifted, for the time being, heaven knows where. The courts are all shut up; the public offices lie in a hot sleep. Westminster Hall itself is a shady solitude where nightingales might sing, and a tenderer class of suitors than is usually found there, walk. The Temple, Chancery Lane, Serjeants' Inn, and Lincoln's Inn even unto the Fields are like tidal harbours at low water, where stranded proceedings, offices at anchor, idle clerks lounging on lop-sided stools that will not recover their perpendicular until the current of Term sets in, lie high and dry upon the ooze of the long vacation. Outer doors of chambers are shut up by the score, messages and parcels are to be left at the Porter's Lodge by the bushel. A crop of grass would grow in the chinks of the stone pavement outside Lincoln's Inn Hall, but that the ticket-porters, who have nothing to do beyond sitting in the shade there, with their white aprons over their heads to keep the flies off, grub it up and eat it thoughtfully. There is only one judge in town. Even he only comes twice a week to sit in chambers. If the country folks of those assize towns on his circuit could see him now! No full-bottomed wig, no red petticoats, no fur, no javelin-men, no white wands. Merely a close-shaved gentleman in white trousers and a white hat, with sea-bronze on the judicial countenance, and a strip of bark peeled by the solar rays from the judicial nose, who calls in at the shell-fish shop as he comes along and drinks iced ginger-beer! The bar of England is scattered over the face of the earth. How England can get on through four long summer months without its bar--which is its acknowledged refuge in adversity and its only legitimate triumph in prosperity--is beside the question; assuredly that shield and buckler of Britannia are not in present wear. The learned gentleman who is always so tremendously indignant at the unprecedented outrage committed on the feelings of his client by the opposite party that he never seems likely to recover it is doing infinitely better than might be expected in Switzerland. The learned gentleman who does the withering business and who blights all opponents with his gloomy sarcasm is as merry as a grig at a French watering-place. The learned gentleman who weeps by the pint on the smallest provocation has not shed a tear these six weeks. The very learned gentleman who has cooled the natural heat of his gingery complexion in pools and fountains of law until he has become great in knotty arguments for term-time, when he poses the drowsy bench with legal "chaff," inexplicable to the uninitiated and to most of the initiated too, is roaming, with a characteristic delight in aridity and dust, about Constantinople. Other dispersed fragments of the same great palladium are to be found on the canals of Venice, at the second cataract of the Nile, in the baths of Germany, and sprinkled on the sea-sand all over the English coast. Scarcely one is to be encountered in the deserted region of Chancery Lane. If such a lonely member of the bar do flit across the waste and come upon a prowling suitor who is unable to leave off haunting the scenes of his anxiety, they frighten one another and retreat into opposite shades. It is the hottest long vacation known for many years. All the young clerks are madly in love, and according to their various degrees, pine for bliss with the beloved object, at Margate, Ramsgate, or Gravesend. All the middle-aged clerks think their families too large. All the unowned dogs who stray into the Inns of Court and pant about staircases and other dry places seeking water give short howls of aggravation. All the blind men's dogs in the streets draw their masters against pumps or trip them over buckets. A shop with a sun-blind, and a watered pavement, and a bowl of gold and silver fish in the window, is a sanctuary. Temple Bar gets so hot that it is, to the adjacent Strand and Fleet Street, what a heater is in an urn, and keeps them simmering all night. There are offices about the Inns of Court in which a man might be cool, if any coolness were worth purchasing at such a price in dullness; but the little thoroughfares immediately outside those retirements seem to blaze. In Mr. Krook's court, it is so hot that the people turn their houses inside out and sit in chairs upon the pavement--Mr. Krook included, who there pursues his studies, with his cat (who never is too hot) by his side. The Sol's Arms has discontinued the Harmonic Meetings for the season, and Little Swills is engaged at the Pastoral Gardens down the river, where he comes out in quite an innocent manner and sings comic ditties of a juvenile complexion calculated (as the bill says) not to wound the feelings of the most fastidious mind. Over all the legal neighbourhood there hangs, like some great veil of rust or gigantic cobweb, the idleness and pensiveness of the long vacation. Mr. Snagsby, law-stationer of Cook's Court, Cursitor Street, is sensible of the influence not only in his mind as a sympathetic and contemplative man, but also in his business as a law-stationer aforesaid. He has more leisure for musing in Staple Inn and in the Rolls Yard during the long vacation than at other seasons, and he says to the two 'prentices, what a thing it is in such hot weather to think that you live in an island with the sea a-rolling and a-bowling right round you. Guster is busy in the little drawing-room on this present afternoon in the long vacation, when Mr. and Mrs. Snagsby have it in contemplation to receive company. The expected guests are rather select than numerous, being Mr. and Mrs. Chadband and no more. From Mr. Chadband's being much given to describe himself, both verbally and in writing, as a vessel, he is occasionally mistaken by strangers for a gentleman connected with navigation, but he is, as he expresses it, "in the ministry." Mr. Chadband is attached to no particular denomination and is considered by his persecutors to have nothing so very remarkable to say on the greatest of subjects as to render his volunteering, on his own account, at all incumbent on his conscience; but he has his followers, and Mrs. Snagsby is of the number. Mrs. Snagsby has but recently taken a passage upward by the vessel, Chadband; and her attention was attracted to that Bark A 1, when she was something flushed by the hot weather. "My little woman," says Mr. Snagsby to the sparrows in Staple Inn, "likes to have her religion rather sharp, you see!" So Guster, much impressed by regarding herself for the time as the handmaid of Chadband, whom she knows to be endowed with the gift of holding forth for four hours at a stretch, prepares the little drawing-room for tea. All the furniture is shaken and dusted, the portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Snagsby are touched up with a wet cloth, the best tea-service is set forth, and there is excellent provision made of dainty new bread, crusty twists, cool fresh butter, thin slices of ham, tongue, and German sausage, and delicate little rows of anchovies nestling in parsley, not to mention new-laid eggs, to be brought up warm in a napkin, and hot buttered toast. For Chadband is rather a consuming vessel--the persecutors say a gorging vessel--and can wield such weapons of the flesh as a knife and fork remarkably well. Mr. Snagsby in his best coat, looking at all the preparations when they are completed and coughing his cough of deference behind his hand, says to Mrs. Snagsby, "At what time did you expect Mr. and Mrs. Chadband, my love?" "At six," says Mrs. Snagsby. Mr. Snagsby observes in a mild and casual way that "it's gone that." "Perhaps you'd like to begin without them," is Mrs. Snagsby's reproachful remark. Mr. Snagsby does look as if he would like it very much, but he says, with his cough of mildness, "No, my dear, no. I merely named the time." "What's time," says Mrs. Snagsby, "to eternity?" "Very true, my dear," says Mr. Snagsby. "Only when a person lays in victuals for tea, a person does it with a view--perhaps--more to time. And when a time is named for having tea, it's better to come up to it." "To come up to it!" Mrs. Snagsby repeats with severity. "Up to it! As if Mr. Chadband was a fighter!" "Not at all, my dear," says Mr. Snagsby. Here, Guster, who had been looking out of the bedroom window, comes rustling and scratching down the little staircase like a popular ghost, and falling flushed into the drawing-room, announces that Mr. and Mrs. Chadband have appeared in the court. The bell at the inner door in the passage immediately thereafter tinkling, she is admonished by Mrs. Snagsby, on pain of instant reconsignment to her patron saint, not to omit the ceremony of announcement. Much discomposed in her nerves (which were previously in the best order) by this threat, she so fearfully mutilates that point of state as to announce "Mr. and Mrs. Cheeseming, least which, Imeantersay, whatsername!" and retires conscience-stricken from the presence. Mr. Chadband is a large yellow man with a fat smile and a general appearance of having a good deal of train oil in his system. Mrs. Chadband is a stern, severe-looking, silent woman. Mr. Chadband moves softly and cumbrously, not unlike a bear who has been taught to walk upright. He is very much embarrassed about the arms, as if they were inconvenient to him and he wanted to grovel, is very much in a perspiration about the head, and never speaks without first putting up his great hand, as delivering a token to his hearers that he is going to edify them. "My friends," says Mr. Chadband, "peace be on this house! On the master thereof, on the mistress thereof, on the young maidens, and on the young men! My friends, why do I wish for peace? What is peace? Is it war? No. Is it strife? No. Is it lovely, and gentle, and beautiful, and pleasant, and serene, and joyful? Oh, yes! Therefore, my friends, I wish for peace, upon you and upon yours." In consequence of Mrs. Snagsby looking deeply edified, Mr. Snagsby thinks it expedient on the whole to say amen, which is well received. "Now, my friends," proceeds Mr. Chadband, "since I am upon this theme--" Guster presents herself. Mrs. Snagsby, in a spectral bass voice and without removing her eyes from Chadband, says with dreadful distinctness, "Go away!" "Now, my friends," says Chadband, "since I am upon this theme, and in my lowly path improving it--" Guster is heard unaccountably to murmur "one thousing seven hundred and eighty-two." The spectral voice repeats more solemnly, "Go away!" "Now, my friends," says Mr. Chadband, "we will inquire in a spirit of love--" Still Guster reiterates "one thousing seven hundred and eighty-two." Mr. Chadband, pausing with the resignation of a man accustomed to be persecuted and languidly folding up his chin into his fat smile, says, "Let us hear the maiden! Speak, maiden!" "One thousing seven hundred and eighty-two, if you please, sir. Which he wish to know what the shilling ware for," says Guster, breathless. "For?" returns Mrs. Chadband. "For his fare!" Guster replied that "he insistes on one and eightpence or on summonsizzing the party." Mrs. Snagsby and Mrs. Chadband are proceeding to grow shrill in indignation when Mr. Chadband quiets the tumult by lifting up his hand. "My friends," says he, "I remember a duty unfulfilled yesterday. It is right that I should be chastened in some penalty. I ought not to murmur. Rachael, pay the eightpence!" While Mrs. Snagsby, drawing her breath, looks hard at Mr. Snagsby, as who should say, "You hear this apostle!" and while Mr. Chadband glows with humility and train oil, Mrs. Chadband pays the money. It is Mr. Chadband's habit--it is the head and front of his pretensions indeed--to keep this sort of debtor and creditor account in the smallest items and to post it publicly on the most trivial occasions. "My friends," says Chadband, "eightpence is not much; it might justly have been one and fourpence; it might justly have been half a crown. O let us be joyful, joyful! O let us be joyful!" With which remark, which appears from its sound to be an extract in verse, Mr. Chadband stalks to the table, and before taking a chair, lifts up his admonitory hand. "My friends," says he, "what is this which we now behold as being spread before us? Refreshment. Do we need refreshment then, my friends? We do. And why do we need refreshment, my friends? Because we are but mortal, because we are but sinful, because we are but of the earth, because we are not of the air. Can we fly, my friends? We cannot. Why can we not fly, my friends?" Mr. Snagsby, presuming on the success of his last point, ventures to observe in a cheerful and rather knowing tone, "No wings." But is immediately frowned down by Mrs. Snagsby. "I say, my friends," pursues Mr. Chadband, utterly rejecting and obliterating Mr. Snagsby's suggestion, "why can we not fly? Is it because we are calculated to walk? It is. Could we walk, my friends, without strength? We could not. What should we do without strength, my friends? Our legs would refuse to bear us, our knees would double up, our ankles would turn over, and we should come to the ground. Then from whence, my friends, in a human point of view, do we derive the strength that is necessary to our limbs? Is it," says Chadband, glancing over the table, "from bread in various forms, from butter which is churned from the milk which is yielded unto us by the cow, from the eggs which are laid by the fowl, from ham, from tongue, from sausage, and from such like? It is. Then let us partake of the good things which are set before us!" The persecutors denied that there was any particular gift in Mr. Chadband's piling verbose flights of stairs, one upon another, after this fashion. But this can only be received as a proof of their determination to persecute, since it must be within everybody's experience that the Chadband style of oratory is widely received and much admired. Mr. Chadband, however, having concluded for the present, sits down at Mr. Snagsby's table and lays about him prodigiously. The conversion of nutriment of any sort into oil of the quality already mentioned appears to be a process so inseparable from the constitution of this exemplary vessel that in beginning to eat and drink, he may be described as always becoming a kind of considerable oil mills or other large factory for the production of that article on a wholesale scale. On the present evening of the long vacation, in Cook's Court, Cursitor Street, he does such a powerful stroke of business that the warehouse appears to be quite full when the works cease. At this period of the entertainment, Guster, who has never recovered her first failure, but has neglected no possible or impossible means of bringing the establishment and herself into contempt--among which may be briefly enumerated her unexpectedly performing clashing military music on Mr. Chadband's head with plates, and afterwards crowning that gentleman with muffins--at which period of the entertainment, Guster whispers Mr. Snagsby that he is wanted. "And being wanted in the--not to put too fine a point upon it--in the shop," says Mr. Snagsby, rising, "perhaps this good company will excuse me for half a minute." Mr. Snagsby descends and finds the two 'prentices intently contemplating a police constable, who holds a ragged boy by the arm. "Why, bless my heart," says Mr. Snagsby, "what's the matter!" "This boy," says the constable, "although he's repeatedly told to, won't move on--" "I'm always a-moving on, sar," cries the boy, wiping away his grimy tears with his arm. "I've always been a-moving and a-moving on, ever since I was born. Where can I possibly move to, sir, more nor I do move!" "He won't move on," says the constable calmly, with a slight professional hitch of his neck involving its better settlement in his stiff stock, "although he has been repeatedly cautioned, and therefore I am obliged to take him into custody. He's as obstinate a young gonoph as I know. He WON'T move on." "Oh, my eye! Where can I move to!" cries the boy, clutching quite desperately at his hair and beating his bare feet upon the floor of Mr. Snagsby's passage. "Don't you come none of that or I shall make blessed short work of you!" says the constable, giving him a passionless shake. "My instructions are that you are to move on. I have told you so five hundred times." "But where?" cries the boy. "Well! Really, constable, you know," says Mr. Snagsby wistfully, and coughing behind his hand his cough of great perplexity and doubt, "really, that does seem a question. Where, you know?" "My instructions don't go to that," replies the constable. "My instructions are that this boy is to move on." Do you hear, Jo? It is nothing to you or to any one else that the great lights of the parliamentary sky have failed for some few years in this business to set you the example of moving on. The one grand recipe remains for you--the profound philosophical prescription--the be-all and the end-all of your strange existence upon earth. Move on! You are by no means to move off, Jo, for the great lights can't at all agree about that. Move on! Mr. Snagsby says nothing to this effect, says nothing at all indeed, but coughs his forlornest cough, expressive of no thoroughfare in any direction. By this time Mr. and Mrs. Chadband and Mrs. Snagsby, hearing the altercation, have appeared upon the stairs. Guster having never left the end of the passage, the whole household are assembled. "The simple question is, sir," says the constable, "whether you know this boy. He says you do." Mrs. Snagsby, from her elevation, instantly cries out, "No he don't!" "My lit-tle woman!" says Mr. Snagsby, looking up the staircase. "My love, permit me! Pray have a moment's patience, my dear. I do know something of this lad, and in what I know of him, I can't say that there's any harm; perhaps on the contrary, constable." To whom the law-stationer relates his Joful and woeful experience, suppressing the half-crown fact. "Well!" says the constable, "so far, it seems, he had grounds for what he said. When I took him into custody up in Holborn, he said you knew him. Upon that, a young man who was in the crowd said he was acquainted with you, and you were a respectable housekeeper, and if I'd call and make the inquiry, he'd appear. The young man don't seem inclined to keep his word, but--Oh! Here IS the young man!" Enter Mr. Guppy, who nods to Mr. Snagsby and touches his hat with the chivalry of clerkship to the ladies on the stairs. "I was strolling away from the office just now when I found this row going on," says Mr. Guppy to the law-stationer, "and as your name was mentioned, I thought it was right the thing should be looked into." "It was very good-natured of you, sir," says Mr. Snagsby, "and I am obliged to you." And Mr. Snagsby again relates his experience, again suppressing the half-crown fact. "Now, I know where you live," says the constable, then, to Jo. "You live down in Tom-all-Alone's. That's a nice innocent place to live in, ain't it?" "I can't go and live in no nicer place, sir," replies Jo. "They wouldn't have nothink to say to me if I wos to go to a nice innocent place fur to live. Who ud go and let a nice innocent lodging to such a reg'lar one as me!" "You are very poor, ain't you?" says the constable. "Yes, I am indeed, sir, wery poor in gin'ral," replies Jo. "I leave you to judge now! I shook these two half-crowns out of him," says the constable, producing them to the company, "in only putting my hand upon him!" "They're wot's left, Mr. Snagsby," says Jo, "out of a sov-ring as wos give me by a lady in a wale as sed she wos a servant and as come to my crossin one night and asked to be showd this 'ere ouse and the ouse wot him as you giv the writin to died at, and the berrin-ground wot he's berrid in. She ses to me she ses 'are you the boy at the inkwhich?' she ses. I ses 'yes' I ses. She ses to me she ses 'can you show me all them places?' I ses 'yes I can' I ses. And she ses to me 'do it' and I dun it and she giv me a sov'ring and hooked it. And I an't had much of the sov'ring neither," says Jo, with dirty tears, "fur I had to pay five bob, down in Tom-all-Alone's, afore they'd square it fur to give me change, and then a young man he thieved another five while I was asleep and another boy he thieved ninepence and the landlord he stood drains round with a lot more on it." "You don't expect anybody to believe this, about the lady and the sovereign, do you?" says the constable, eyeing him aside with ineffable disdain. "I don't know as I do, sir," replies Jo. "I don't expect nothink at all, sir, much, but that's the true hist'ry on it." "You see what he is!" the constable observes to the audience. "Well, Mr. Snagsby, if I don't lock him up this time, will you engage for his moving on?" "No!" cries Mrs. Snagsby from the stairs. "My little woman!" pleads her husband. "Constable, I have no doubt he'll move on. You know you really must do it," says Mr. Snagsby. "I'm everyways agreeable, sir," says the hapless Jo. "Do it, then," observes the constable. "You know what you have got to do. Do it! And recollect you won't get off so easy next time. Catch hold of your money. Now, the sooner you're five mile off, the better for all parties." With this farewell hint and pointing generally to the setting sun as a likely place to move on to, the constable bids his auditors good afternoon and makes the echoes of Cook's Court perform slow music for him as he walks away on the shady side, carrying his iron-bound hat in his hand for a little ventilation. Now, Jo's improbable story concerning the lady and the sovereign has awakened more or less the curiosity of all the company. Mr. Guppy, who has an inquiring mind in matters of evidence and who has been suffering severely from the lassitude of the long vacation, takes that interest in the case that he enters on a regular cross-examination of the witness, which is found so interesting by the ladies that Mrs. Snagsby politely invites him to step upstairs and drink a cup of tea, if he will excuse the disarranged state of the tea-table, consequent on their previous exertions. Mr. Guppy yielding his assent to this proposal, Jo is requested to follow into the drawing-room doorway, where Mr. Guppy takes him in hand as a witness, patting him into this shape, that shape, and the other shape like a butterman dealing with so much butter, and worrying him according to the best models. Nor is the examination unlike many such model displays, both in respect of its eliciting nothing and of its being lengthy, for Mr. Guppy is sensible of his talent, and Mrs. Snagsby feels not only that it gratifies her inquisitive disposition, but that it lifts her husband's establishment higher up in the law. During the progress of this keen encounter, the vessel Chadband, being merely engaged in the oil trade, gets aground and waits to be floated off. "Well!" says Mr. Guppy. "Either this boy sticks to it like cobbler's-wax or there is something out of the common here that beats anything that ever came into my way at Kenge and Carboy's." Mrs. Chadband whispers Mrs. Snagsby, who exclaims, "You don't say so!" "For years!" replied Mrs. Chadband. "Has known Kenge and Carboy's office for years," Mrs. Snagsby triumphantly explains to Mr. Guppy. "Mrs. Chadband--this gentleman's wife--Reverend Mr. Chadband." "Oh, indeed!" says Mr. Guppy. "Before I married my present husband," says Mrs. Chadband. "Was you a party in anything, ma'am?" says Mr. Guppy, transferring his cross-examination. "No." "NOT a party in anything, ma'am?" says Mr. Guppy. Mrs. Chadband shakes her head. "Perhaps you were acquainted with somebody who was a party in something, ma'am?" says Mr. Guppy, who likes nothing better than to model his conversation on forensic principles. "Not exactly that, either," replies Mrs. Chadband, humouring the joke with a hard-favoured smile. "Not exactly that, either!" repeats Mr. Guppy. "Very good. Pray, ma'am, was it a lady of your acquaintance who had some transactions (we will not at present say what transactions) with Kenge and Carboy's office, or was it a gentleman of your acquaintance? Take time, ma'am. We shall come to it presently. Man or woman, ma'am?" "Neither," says Mrs. Chadband as before. "Oh! A child!" says Mr. Guppy, throwing on the admiring Mrs. Snagsby the regular acute professional eye which is thrown on British jurymen. "Now, ma'am, perhaps you'll have the kindness to tell us WHAT child." "You have got it at last, sir," says Mrs. Chadband with another hard-favoured smile. "Well, sir, it was before your time, most likely, judging from your appearance. I was left in charge of a child named Esther Summerson, who was put out in life by Messrs. Kenge and Carboy." "Miss Summerson, ma'am!" cries Mr. Guppy, excited. "I call her Esther Summerson," says Mrs. Chadband with austerity. "There was no Miss-ing of the girl in my time. It was Esther. 'Esther, do this! Esther, do that!' and she was made to do it." "My dear ma'am," returns Mr. Guppy, moving across the small apartment, "the humble individual who now addresses you received that young lady in London when she first came here from the establishment to which you have alluded. Allow me to have the pleasure of taking you by the hand." Mr. Chadband, at last seeing his opportunity, makes his accustomed signal and rises with a smoking head, which he dabs with his pocket-handkerchief. Mrs. Snagsby whispers "Hush!" "My friends," says Chadband, "we have partaken in moderation" (which was certainly not the case so far as he was concerned) "of the comforts which have been provided for us. May this house live upon the fatness of the land; may corn and wine be plentiful therein; may it grow, may it thrive, may it prosper, may it advance, may it proceed, may it press forward! But, my friends, have we partaken of anything else? We have. My friends, of what else have we partaken? Of spiritual profit? Yes. From whence have we derived that spiritual profit? My young friend, stand forth!" Jo, thus apostrophized, gives a slouch backward, and another slouch forward, and another slouch to each side, and confronts the eloquent Chadband with evident doubts of his intentions. "My young friend," says Chadband, "you are to us a pearl, you are to us a diamond, you are to us a gem, you are to us a jewel. And why, my young friend?" "I don't know," replies Jo. "I don't know nothink." "My young friend," says Chadband, "it is because you know nothing that you are to us a gem and jewel. For what are you, my young friend? Are you a beast of the field? No. A bird of the air? No. A fish of the sea or river? No. You are a human boy, my young friend. A human boy. O glorious to be a human boy! And why glorious, my young friend? Because you are capable of receiving the lessons of wisdom, because you are capable of profiting by this discourse which I now deliver for your good, because you are not a stick, or a staff, or a stock, or a stone, or a post, or a pillar. O running stream of sparkling joy To be a soaring human boy! And do you cool yourself in that stream now, my young friend? No. Why do you not cool yourself in that stream now? Because you are in a state of darkness, because you are in a state of obscurity, because you are in a state of sinfulness, because you are in a state of bondage. My young friend, what is bondage? Let us, in a spirit of love, inquire." At this threatening stage of the discourse, Jo, who seems to have been gradually going out of his mind, smears his right arm over his face and gives a terrible yawn. Mrs. Snagsby indignantly expresses her belief that he is a limb of the arch-fiend. "My friends," says Mr. Chadband with his persecuted chin folding itself into its fat smile again as he looks round, "it is right that I should be humbled, it is right that I should be tried, it is right that I should be mortified, it is right that I should be corrected. I stumbled, on Sabbath last, when I thought with pride of my three hours' improving. The account is now favourably balanced: my creditor has accepted a composition. O let us be joyful, joyful! O let us be joyful!" Great sensation on the part of Mrs. Snagsby. "My friends," says Chadband, looking round him in conclusion, "I will not proceed with my young friend now. Will you come to-morrow, my young friend, and inquire of this good lady where I am to be found to deliver a discourse unto you, and will you come like the thirsty swallow upon the next day, and upon the day after that, and upon the day after that, and upon many pleasant days, to hear discourses?" (This with a cow-like lightness.) Jo, whose immediate object seems to be to get away on any terms, gives a shuffling nod. Mr. Guppy then throws him a penny, and Mrs. Snagsby calls to Guster to see him safely out of the house. But before he goes downstairs, Mr. Snagsby loads him with some broken meats from the table, which he carries away, hugging in his arms. So, Mr. Chadband--of whom the persecutors say that it is no wonder he should go on for any length of time uttering such abominable nonsense, but that the wonder rather is that he should ever leave off, having once the audacity to begin--retires into private life until he invests a little capital of supper in the oil-trade. Jo moves on, through the long vacation, down to Blackfriars Bridge, where he finds a baking stony corner wherein to settle to his repast. And there he sits, munching and gnawing, and looking up at the great cross on the summit of St. Paul's Cathedral, glittering above a red-and-violet-tinted cloud of smoke. From the boy's face one might suppose that sacred emblem to be, in his eyes, the crowning confusion of the great, confused city--so golden, so high up, so far out of his reach. There he sits, the sun going down, the river running fast, the crowd flowing by him in two streams--everything moving on to some purpose and to one end--until he is stirred up and told to "move on" too. CHAPTER XX A New Lodger The long vacation saunters on towards term-time like an idle river very leisurely strolling down a flat country to the sea. Mr. Guppy saunters along with it congenially. He has blunted the blade of his penknife and broken the point off by sticking that instrument into his desk in every direction. Not that he bears the desk any ill will, but he must do something, and it must be something of an unexciting nature, which will lay neither his physical nor his intellectual energies under too heavy contribution. He finds that nothing agrees with him so well as to make little gyrations on one leg of his stool, and stab his desk, and gape. Kenge and Carboy are out of town, and the articled clerk has taken out a shooting license and gone down to his father's, and Mr. Guppy's two fellow-stipendiaries are away on leave. Mr. Guppy and Mr. Richard Carstone divide the dignity of the office. But Mr. Carstone is for the time being established in Kenge's room, whereat Mr. Guppy chafes. So exceedingly that he with biting sarcasm informs his mother, in the confidential moments when he sups with her off a lobster and lettuce in the Old Street Road, that he is afraid the office is hardly good enough for swells, and that if he had known there was a swell coming, he would have got it painted. Mr. Guppy suspects everybody who enters on the occupation of a stool in Kenge and Carboy's office of entertaining, as a matter of course, sinister designs upon him. He is clear that every such person wants to depose him. If he be ever asked how, why, when, or wherefore, he shuts up one eye and shakes his head. On the strength of these profound views, he in the most ingenious manner takes infinite pains to counterplot when there is no plot, and plays the deepest games of chess without any adversary. It is a source of much gratification to Mr. Guppy, therefore, to find the new-comer constantly poring over the papers in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, for he well knows that nothing but confusion and failure can come of that. His satisfaction communicates itself to a third saunterer through the long vacation in Kenge and Carboy's office, to wit, Young Smallweed. Whether Young Smallweed (metaphorically called Small and eke Chick Weed, as it were jocularly to express a fledgling) was ever a boy is much doubted in Lincoln's Inn. He is now something under fifteen and an old limb of the law. He is facetiously understood to entertain a passion for a lady at a cigar-shop in the neighbourhood of Chancery Lane and for her sake to have broken off a contract with another lady, to whom he had been engaged some years. He is a town-made article, of small stature and weazen features, but may be perceived from a considerable distance by means of his very tall hat. To become a Guppy is the object of his ambition. He dresses at that gentleman (by whom he is patronized), talks at him, walks at him, founds himself entirely on him. He is honoured with Mr. Guppy's particular confidence and occasionally advises him, from the deep wells of his experience, on difficult points in private life. Mr. Guppy has been lolling out of window all the morning after trying all the stools in succession and finding none of them easy, and after several times putting his head into the iron safe with a notion of cooling it. Mr. Smallweed has been twice dispatched for effervescent drinks, and has twice mixed them in the two official tumblers and stirred them up with the ruler. Mr. Guppy propounds for Mr. Smallweed's consideration the paradox that the more you drink the thirstier you are and reclines his head upon the window-sill in a state of hopeless languor. While thus looking out into the shade of Old Square, Lincoln's Inn, surveying the intolerable bricks and mortar, Mr. Guppy becomes conscious of a manly whisker emerging from the cloistered walk below and turning itself up in the direction of his face. At the same time, a low whistle is wafted through the Inn and a suppressed voice cries, "Hip! Gup-py!" "Why, you don't mean it!" says Mr. Guppy, aroused. "Small! Here's Jobling!" Small's head looks out of window too and nods to Jobling. "Where have you sprung up from?" inquires Mr. Guppy. "From the market-gardens down by Deptford. I can't stand it any longer. I must enlist. I say! I wish you'd lend me half a crown. Upon my soul, I'm hungry." Jobling looks hungry and also has the appearance of having run to seed in the market-gardens down by Deptford. "I say! Just throw out half a crown if you have got one to spare. I want to get some dinner." "Will you come and dine with me?" says Mr. Guppy, throwing out the coin, which Mr. Jobling catches neatly. "How long should I have to hold out?" says Jobling. "Not half an hour. I am only waiting here till the enemy goes, returns Mr. Guppy, butting inward with his head. "What enemy?" "A new one. Going to be articled. Will you wait?" "Can you give a fellow anything to read in the meantime?" says Mr. Jobling. Smallweed suggests the law list. But Mr. Jobling declares with much earnestness that he "can't stand it." "You shall have the paper," says Mr. Guppy. "He shall bring it down. But you had better not be seen about here. Sit on our staircase and read. It's a quiet place." Jobling nods intelligence and acquiescence. The sagacious Smallweed supplies him with the newspaper and occasionally drops his eye upon him from the landing as a precaution against his becoming disgusted with waiting and making an untimely departure. At last the enemy retreats, and then Smallweed fetches Mr. Jobling up. "Well, and how are you?" says Mr. Guppy, shaking hands with him. "So, so. How are you?" Mr. Guppy replying that he is not much to boast of, Mr. Jobling ventures on the question, "How is SHE?" This Mr. Guppy resents as a liberty, retorting, "Jobling, there ARE chords in the human mind--" Jobling begs pardon. "Any subject but that!" says Mr. Guppy with a gloomy enjoyment of his injury. "For there ARE chords, Jobling--" Mr. Jobling begs pardon again. During this short colloquy, the active Smallweed, who is of the dinner party, has written in legal characters on a slip of paper, "Return immediately." This notification to all whom it may concern, he inserts in the letter-box, and then putting on the tall hat at the angle of inclination at which Mr. Guppy wears his, informs his patron that they may now make themselves scarce. Accordingly they betake themselves to a neighbouring dining-house, of the class known among its frequenters by the denomination slap-bang, where the waitress, a bouncing young female of forty, is supposed to have made some impression on the susceptible Smallweed, of whom it may be remarked that he is a weird changeling to whom years are nothing. He stands precociously possessed of centuries of owlish wisdom. If he ever lay in a cradle, it seems as if he must have lain there in a tail-coat. He has an old, old eye, has Smallweed; and he drinks and smokes in a monkeyish way; and his neck is stiff in his collar; and he is never to be taken in; and he knows all about it, whatever it is. In short, in his bringing up he has been so nursed by Law and Equity that he has become a kind of fossil imp, to account for whose terrestrial existence it is reported at the public offices that his father was John Doe and his mother the only female member of the Roe family, also that his first long-clothes were made from a blue bag. Into the dining-house, unaffected by the seductive show in the window of artificially whitened cauliflowers and poultry, verdant baskets of peas, coolly blooming cucumbers, and joints ready for the spit, Mr. Smallweed leads the way. They know him there and defer to him. He has his favourite box, he bespeaks all the papers, he is down upon bald patriarchs, who keep them more than ten minutes afterwards. It is of no use trying him with anything less than a full-sized "bread" or proposing to him any joint in cut unless it is in the very best cut. In the matter of gravy he is adamant. Conscious of his elfin power and submitting to his dread experience, Mr. Guppy consults him in the choice of that day's banquet, turning an appealing look towards him as the waitress repeats the catalogue of viands and saying "What do YOU take, Chick?" Chick, out of the profundity of his artfulness, preferring "veal and ham and French beans--and don't you forget the stuffing, Polly" (with an unearthly cock of his venerable eye), Mr. Guppy and Mr. Jobling give the like order. Three pint pots of half-and-half are superadded. Quickly the waitress returns bearing what is apparently a model of the Tower of Babel but what is really a pile of plates and flat tin dish-covers. Mr. Smallweed, approving of what is set before him, conveys intelligent benignity into his ancient eye and winks upon her. Then, amid a constant coming in, and going out, and running about, and a clatter of crockery, and a rumbling up and down of the machine which brings the nice cuts from the kitchen, and a shrill crying for more nice cuts down the speaking-pipe, and a shrill reckoning of the cost of nice cuts that have been disposed of, and a general flush and steam of hot joints, cut and uncut, and a considerably heated atmosphere in which the soiled knives and tablecloths seem to break out spontaneously into eruptions of grease and blotches of beer, the legal triumvirate appease their appetites. Mr. Jobling is buttoned up closer than mere adornment might require. His hat presents at the rims a peculiar appearance of a glistening nature, as if it had been a favourite snail-promenade. The same phenomenon is visible on some parts of his coat, and particularly at the seams. He has the faded appearance of a gentleman in embarrassed circumstances; even his light whiskers droop with something of a shabby air. His appetite is so vigorous that it suggests spare living for some little time back. He makes such a speedy end of his plate of veal and ham, bringing it to a close while his companions are yet midway in theirs, that Mr. Guppy proposes another. "Thank you, Guppy," says Mr. Jobling, "I really don't know but what I WILL take another." Another being brought, he falls to with great goodwill. Mr. Guppy takes silent notice of him at intervals until he is half way through this second plate and stops to take an enjoying pull at his pint pot of half-and-half (also renewed) and stretches out his legs and rubs his hands. Beholding him in which glow of contentment, Mr. Guppy says, "You are a man again, Tony!" "Well, not quite yet," says Mr. Jobling. "Say, just born." "Will you take any other vegetables? Grass? Peas? Summer cabbage?" "Thank you, Guppy," says Mr. Jobling. "I really don't know but what I WILL take summer cabbage." Order given; with the sarcastic addition (from Mr. Smallweed) of "Without slugs, Polly!" And cabbage produced. "I am growing up, Guppy," says Mr. Jobling, plying his knife and fork with a relishing steadiness. "Glad to hear it." "In fact, I have just turned into my teens," says Mr. Jobling. He says no more until he has performed his task, which he achieves as Messrs. Guppy and Smallweed finish theirs, thus getting over the ground in excellent style and beating those two gentlemen easily by a veal and ham and a cabbage. "Now, Small," says Mr. Guppy, "what would you recommend about pastry?" "Marrow puddings," says Mr. Smallweed instantly. "Aye, aye!" cries Mr. Jobling with an arch look. "You're there, are you? Thank you, Mr. Guppy, I don't know but what I WILL take a marrow pudding." Three marrow puddings being produced, Mr. Jobling adds in a pleasant humour that he is coming of age fast. To these succeed, by command of Mr. Smallweed, "three Cheshires," and to those "three small rums." This apex of the entertainment happily reached, Mr. Jobling puts up his legs on the carpeted seat (having his own side of the box to himself), leans against the wall, and says, "I am grown up now, Guppy. I have arrived at maturity." "What do you think, now," says Mr. Guppy, "about--you don't mind Smallweed?" "Not the least in the world. I have the pleasure of drinking his good health." "Sir, to you!" says Mr. Smallweed. "I was saying, what do you think NOW," pursues Mr. Guppy, "of enlisting?" "Why, what I may think after dinner," returns Mr. Jobling, "is one thing, my dear Guppy, and what I may think before dinner is another thing. Still, even after dinner, I ask myself the question, What am I to do? How am I to live? Ill fo manger, you know," says Mr. Jobling, pronouncing that word as if he meant a necessary fixture in an English stable. "Ill fo manger. That's the French saying, and mangering is as necessary to me as it is to a Frenchman. Or more so." Mr. Smallweed is decidedly of opinion "much more so." "If any man had told me," pursues Jobling, "even so lately as when you and I had the frisk down in Lincolnshire, Guppy, and drove over to see that house at Castle Wold--" Mr. Smallweed corrects him--Chesney Wold. "Chesney Wold. (I thank my honourable friend for that cheer.) If any man had told me then that I should be as hard up at the present time as I literally find myself, I should have--well, I should have pitched into him," says Mr. Jobling, taking a little rum-and-water with an air of desperate resignation; "I should have let fly at his head." "Still, Tony, you were on the wrong side of the post then," remonstrates Mr. Guppy. "You were talking about nothing else in the gig." "Guppy," says Mr. Jobling, "I will not deny it. I was on the wrong side of the post. But I trusted to things coming round." That very popular trust in flat things coming round! Not in their being beaten round, or worked round, but in their "coming" round! As though a lunatic should trust in the world's "coming" triangular! "I had confident expectations that things would come round and be all square," says Mr. Jobling with some vagueness of expression and perhaps of meaning too. "But I was disappointed. They never did. And when it came to creditors making rows at the office and to people that the office dealt with making complaints about dirty trifles of borrowed money, why there was an end of that connexion. And of any new professional connexion too, for if I was to give a reference to-morrow, it would be mentioned and would sew me up. Then what's a fellow to do? I have been keeping out of the way and living cheap down about the market-gardens, but what's the use of living cheap when you have got no money? You might as well live dear." "Better," Mr. Smallweed thinks. "Certainly. It's the fashionable way; and fashion and whiskers have been my weaknesses, and I don't care who knows it," says Mr. Jobling. "They are great weaknesses--Damme, sir, they are great. Well," proceeds Mr. Jobling after a defiant visit to his rum-and-water, "what can a fellow do, I ask you, BUT enlist?" Mr. Guppy comes more fully into the conversation to state what, in his opinion, a fellow can do. His manner is the gravely impressive manner of a man who has not committed himself in life otherwise than as he has become the victim of a tender sorrow of the heart. "Jobling," says Mr. Guppy, "myself and our mutual friend Smallweed--" Mr. Smallweed modestly observes, "Gentlemen both!" and drinks. "--Have had a little conversation on this matter more than once since you--" "Say, got the sack!" cries Mr. Jobling bitterly. "Say it, Guppy. You mean it." "No-o-o! Left the Inn," Mr. Smallweed delicately suggests. "Since you left the Inn, Jobling," says Mr. Guppy; "and I have mentioned to our mutual friend Smallweed a plan I have lately thought of proposing. You know Snagsby the stationer?" "I know there is such a stationer," returns Mr. Jobling. "He was not ours, and I am not acquainted with him." "He IS ours, Jobling, and I AM acquainted with him," Mr. Guppy retorts. "Well, sir! I have lately become better acquainted with him through some accidental circumstances that have made me a visitor of his in private life. Those circumstances it is not necessary to offer in argument. They may--or they may not--have some reference to a subject which may--or may not--have cast its shadow on my existence." As it is Mr. Guppy's perplexing way with boastful misery to tempt his particular friends into this subject, and the moment they touch it, to turn on them with that trenchant severity about the chords in the human mind, both Mr. Jobling and Mr. Smallweed decline the pitfall by remaining silent. "Such things may be," repeats Mr. Guppy, "or they may not be. They are no part of the case. It is enough to mention that both Mr. and Mrs. Snagsby are very willing to oblige me and that Snagsby has, in busy times, a good deal of copying work to give out. He has all Tulkinghorn's, and an excellent business besides. I believe if our mutual friend Smallweed were put into the box, he could prove this?" Mr. Smallweed nods and appears greedy to be sworn. "Now, gentlemen of the jury," says Mr. Guppy, "--I mean, now, Jobling--you may say this is a poor prospect of a living. Granted. But it's better than nothing, and better than enlistment. You want time. There must be time for these late affairs to blow over. You might live through it on much worse terms than by writing for Snagsby." Mr. Jobling is about to interrupt when the sagacious Smallweed checks him with a dry cough and the words, "Hem! Shakspeare!" "There are two branches to this subject, Jobling," says Mr. Guppy. "That is the first. I come to the second. You know Krook, the Chancellor, across the lane. Come, Jobling," says Mr. Guppy in his encouraging cross-examination-tone, "I think you know Krook, the Chancellor, across the lane?" "I know him by sight," says Mr. Jobling. "You know him by sight. Very well. And you know little Flite?" "Everybody knows her," says Mr. Jobling. "Everybody knows her. VERY well. Now it has been one of my duties of late to pay Flite a certain weekly allowance, deducting from it the amount of her weekly rent, which I have paid (in consequence of instructions I have received) to Krook himself, regularly in her presence. This has brought me into communication with Krook and into a knowledge of his house and his habits. I know he has a room to let. You may live there at a very low charge under any name you like, as quietly as if you were a hundred miles off. He'll ask no questions and would accept you as a tenant at a word from me--before the clock strikes, if you chose. And I tell you another thing, Jobling," says Mr. Guppy, who has suddenly lowered his voice and become familiar again, "he's an extraordinary old chap--always rummaging among a litter of papers and grubbing away at teaching himself to read and write, without getting on a bit, as it seems to me. He is a most extraordinary old chap, sir. I don't know but what it might be worth a fellow's while to look him up a bit." "You don't mean--" Mr. Jobling begins. "I mean," returns Mr. Guppy, shrugging his shoulders with becoming modesty, "that I can't make him out. I appeal to our mutual friend Smallweed whether he has or has not heard me remark that I can't make him out." Mr. Smallweed bears the concise testimony, "A few!" "I have seen something of the profession and something of life, Tony," says Mr. Guppy, "and it's seldom I can't make a man out, more or less. But such an old card as this, so deep, so sly, and secret (though I don't believe he is ever sober), I never came across. Now, he must be precious old, you know, and he has not a soul about him, and he is reported to be immensely rich; and whether he is a smuggler, or a receiver, or an unlicensed pawnbroker, or a money-lender--all of which I have thought likely at different times--it might pay you to knock up a sort of knowledge of him. I don't see why you shouldn't go in for it, when everything else suits." Mr. Jobling, Mr. Guppy, and Mr. Smallweed all lean their elbows on the table and their chins upon their hands, and look at the ceiling. After a time, they all drink, slowly lean back, put their hands in their pockets, and look at one another. "If I had the energy I once possessed, Tony!" says Mr. Guppy with a sigh. "But there are chords in the human mind--" Expressing the remainder of the desolate sentiment in rum-and-water, Mr. Guppy concludes by resigning the adventure to Tony Jobling and informing him that during the vacation and while things are slack, his purse, "as far as three or four or even five pound goes," will be at his disposal. "For never shall it be said," Mr. Guppy adds with emphasis, "that William Guppy turned his back upon his friend!" The latter part of the proposal is so directly to the purpose that Mr. Jobling says with emotion, "Guppy, my trump, your fist!" Mr. Guppy presents it, saying, "Jobling, my boy, there it is!" Mr. Jobling returns, "Guppy, we have been pals now for some years!" Mr. Guppy replies, "Jobling, we have." They then shake hands, and Mr. Jobling adds in a feeling manner, "Thank you, Guppy, I don't know but what I WILL take another glass for old acquaintance sake." "Krook's last lodger died there," observes Mr. Guppy in an incidental way. "Did he though!" says Mr. Jobling. "There was a verdict. Accidental death. You don't mind that?" "No," says Mr. Jobling, "I don't mind it; but he might as well have died somewhere else. It's devilish odd that he need go and die at MY place!" Mr. Jobling quite resents this liberty, several times returning to it with such remarks as, "There are places enough to die in, I should think!" or, "He wouldn't have liked my dying at HIS place, I dare say!" However, the compact being virtually made, Mr. Guppy proposes to dispatch the trusty Smallweed to ascertain if Mr. Krook is at home, as in that case they may complete the negotiation without delay. Mr. Jobling approving, Smallweed puts himself under the tall hat and conveys it out of the dining-rooms in the Guppy manner. He soon returns with the intelligence that Mr. Krook is at home and that he has seen him through the shop-door, sitting in the back premises, sleeping "like one o'clock." "Then I'll pay," says Mr. Guppy, "and we'll go and see him. Small, what will it be?" Mr. Smallweed, compelling the attendance of the waitress with one hitch of his eyelash, instantly replies as follows: "Four veals and hams is three, and four potatoes is three and four, and one summer cabbage is three and six, and three marrows is four and six, and six breads is five, and three Cheshires is five and three, and four half-pints of half-and-half is six and three, and four small rums is eight and three, and three Pollys is eight and six. Eight and six in half a sovereign, Polly, and eighteenpence out!" Not at all excited by these stupendous calculations, Smallweed dismisses his friends with a cool nod and remains behind to take a little admiring notice of Polly, as opportunity may serve, and to read the daily papers, which are so very large in proportion to himself, shorn of his hat, that when he holds up the Times to run his eye over the columns, he seems to have retired for the night and to have disappeared under the bedclothes. Mr. Guppy and Mr. Jobling repair to the rag and bottle shop, where they find Krook still sleeping like one o'clock, that is to say, breathing stertorously with his chin upon his breast and quite insensible to any external sounds or even to gentle shaking. On the table beside him, among the usual lumber, stand an empty gin-bottle and a glass. The unwholesome air is so stained with this liquor that even the green eyes of the cat upon her shelf, as they open and shut and glimmer on the visitors, look drunk. "Hold up here!" says Mr. Guppy, giving the relaxed figure of the old man another shake. "Mr. Krook! Halloa, sir!" But it would seem as easy to wake a bundle of old clothes with a spirituous heat smouldering in it. "Did you ever see such a stupor as he falls into, between drink and sleep?" says Mr. Guppy. "If this is his regular sleep," returns Jobling, rather alarmed, "it'll last a long time one of these days, I am thinking." "It's always more like a fit than a nap," says Mr. Guppy, shaking him again. "Halloa, your lordship! Why, he might be robbed fifty times over! Open your eyes!" After much ado, he opens them, but without appearing to see his visitors or any other objects. Though he crosses one leg on another, and folds his hands, and several times closes and opens his parched lips, he seems to all intents and purposes as insensible as before. "He is alive, at any rate," says Mr. Guppy. "How are you, my Lord Chancellor. I have brought a friend of mine, sir, on a little matter of business." The old man still sits, often smacking his dry lips without the least consciousness. After some minutes he makes an attempt to rise. They help him up, and he staggers against the wall and stares at them. "How do you do, Mr. Krook?" says Mr. Guppy in some discomfiture. "How do you do, sir? You are looking charming, Mr. Krook. I hope you are pretty well?" The old man, in aiming a purposeless blow at Mr. Guppy, or at nothing, feebly swings himself round and comes with his face against the wall. So he remains for a minute or two, heaped up against it, and then staggers down the shop to the front door. The air, the movement in the court, the lapse of time, or the combination of these things recovers him. He comes back pretty steadily, adjusting his fur cap on his head and looking keenly at them. "Your servant, gentlemen; I've been dozing. Hi! I am hard to wake, odd times." "Rather so, indeed, sir," responds Mr. Guppy. "What? You've been a-trying to do it, have you?" says the suspicious Krook. "Only a little," Mr. Guppy explains. The old man's eye resting on the empty bottle, he takes it up, examines it, and slowly tilts it upside down. "I say!" he cries like the hobgoblin in the story. "Somebody's been making free here!" "I assure you we found it so," says Mr. Guppy. "Would you allow me to get it filled for you?" "Yes, certainly I would!" cries Krook in high glee. "Certainly I would! Don't mention it! Get it filled next door--Sol's Arms--the Lord Chancellor's fourteenpenny. Bless you, they know ME!" He so presses the empty bottle upon Mr. Guppy that that gentleman, with a nod to his friend, accepts the trust and hurries out and hurries in again with the bottle filled. The old man receives it in his arms like a beloved grandchild and pats it tenderly. "But, I say," he whispers, with his eyes screwed up, after tasting it, "this ain't the Lord Chancellor's fourteenpenny. This is eighteenpenny!" "I thought you might like that better," says Mr. Guppy. "You're a nobleman, sir," returns Krook with another taste, and his hot breath seems to come towards them like a flame. "You're a baron of the land." Taking advantage of this auspicious moment, Mr. Guppy presents his friend under the impromptu name of Mr. Weevle and states the object of their visit. Krook, with his bottle under his arm (he never gets beyond a certain point of either drunkenness or sobriety), takes time to survey his proposed lodger and seems to approve of him. "You'd like to see the room, young man?" he says. "Ah! It's a good room! Been whitewashed. Been cleaned down with soft soap and soda. Hi! It's worth twice the rent, letting alone my company when you want it and such a cat to keep the mice away." Commending the room after this manner, the old man takes them upstairs, where indeed they do find it cleaner than it used to be and also containing some old articles of furniture which he has dug up from his inexhaustible stores. The terms are easily concluded--for the Lord Chancellor cannot be hard on Mr. Guppy, associated as he is with Kenge and Carboy, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, and other famous claims on his professional consideration--and it is agreed that Mr. Weevle shall take possession on the morrow. Mr. Weevle and Mr. Guppy then repair to Cook's Court, Cursitor Street, where the personal introduction of the former to Mr. Snagsby is effected and (more important) the vote and interest of Mrs. Snagsby are secured. They then report progress to the eminent Smallweed, waiting at the office in his tall hat for that purpose, and separate, Mr. Guppy explaining that he would terminate his little entertainment by standing treat at the play but that there are chords in the human mind which would render it a hollow mockery. On the morrow, in the dusk of evening, Mr. Weevle modestly appears at Krook's, by no means incommoded with luggage, and establishes himself in his new lodging, where the two eyes in the shutters stare at him in his sleep, as if they were full of wonder. On the following day Mr. Weevle, who is a handy good-for-nothing kind of young fellow, borrows a needle and thread of Miss Flite and a hammer of his landlord and goes to work devising apologies for window-curtains, and knocking up apologies for shelves, and hanging up his two teacups, milkpot, and crockery sundries on a pennyworth of little hooks, like a shipwrecked sailor making the best of it. But what Mr. Weevle prizes most of all his few possessions (next after his light whiskers, for which he has an attachment that only whiskers can awaken in the breast of man) is a choice collection of copper-plate impressions from that truly national work The Divinities of Albion, or Galaxy Gallery of British Beauty, representing ladies of title and fashion in every variety of smirk that art, combined with capital, is capable of producing. With these magnificent portraits, unworthily confined in a band-box during his seclusion among the market-gardens, he decorates his apartment; and as the Galaxy Gallery of British Beauty wears every variety of fancy dress, plays every variety of musical instrument, fondles every variety of dog, ogles every variety of prospect, and is backed up by every variety of flower-pot and balustrade, the result is very imposing. But fashion is Mr. Weevle's, as it was Tony Jobling's, weakness. To borrow yesterday's paper from the Sol's Arms of an evening and read about the brilliant and distinguished meteors that are shooting across the fashionable sky in every direction is unspeakable consolation to him. To know what member of what brilliant and distinguished circle accomplished the brilliant and distinguished feat of joining it yesterday or contemplates the no less brilliant and distinguished feat of leaving it to-morrow gives him a thrill of joy. To be informed what the Galaxy Gallery of British Beauty is about, and means to be about, and what Galaxy marriages are on the tapis, and what Galaxy rumours are in circulation, is to become acquainted with the most glorious destinies of mankind. Mr. Weevle reverts from this intelligence to the Galaxy portraits implicated, and seems to know the originals, and to be known of them. For the rest he is a quiet lodger, full of handy shifts and devices as before mentioned, able to cook and clean for himself as well as to carpenter, and developing social inclinations after the shades of evening have fallen on the court. At those times, when he is not visited by Mr. Guppy or by a small light in his likeness quenched in a dark hat, he comes out of his dull room--where he has inherited the deal wilderness of desk bespattered with a rain of ink--and talks to Krook or is "very free," as they call it in the court, commendingly, with any one disposed for conversation. Wherefore, Mrs. Piper, who leads the court, is impelled to offer two remarks to Mrs. Perkins: firstly, that if her Johnny was to have whiskers, she could wish 'em to be identically like that young man's; and secondly, "Mark my words, Mrs. Perkins, ma'am, and don't you be surprised, Lord bless you, if that young man comes in at last for old Krook's money!" CHAPTER XXI The Smallweed Family In a rather ill-favoured and ill-savoured neighbourhood, though one of its rising grounds bears the name of Mount Pleasant, the Elfin Smallweed, christened Bartholomew and known on the domestic hearth as Bart, passes that limited portion of his time on which the office and its contingencies have no claim. He dwells in a little narrow street, always solitary, shady, and sad, closely bricked in on all sides like a tomb, but where there yet lingers the stump of an old forest tree whose flavour is about as fresh and natural as the Smallweed smack of youth. There has been only one child in the Smallweed family for several generations. Little old men and women there have been, but no child, until Mr. Smallweed's grandmother, now living, became weak in her intellect and fell (for the first time) into a childish state. With such infantine graces as a total want of observation, memory, understanding, and interest, and an eternal disposition to fall asleep over the fire and into it, Mr. Smallweed's grandmother has undoubtedly brightened the family. Mr. Smallweed's grandfather is likewise of the party. He is in a helpless condition as to his lower, and nearly so as to his upper, limbs, but his mind is unimpaired. It holds, as well as it ever held, the first four rules of arithmetic and a certain small collection of the hardest facts. In respect of ideality, reverence, wonder, and other such phrenological attributes, it is no worse off than it used to be. Everything that Mr. Smallweed's grandfather ever put away in his mind was a grub at first, and is a grub at last. In all his life he has never bred a single butterfly. The father of this pleasant grandfather, of the neighbourhood of Mount Pleasant, was a horny-skinned, two-legged, money-getting species of spider who spun webs to catch unwary flies and retired into holes until they were entrapped. The name of this old pagan's god was Compound Interest. He lived for it, married it, died of it. Meeting with a heavy loss in an honest little enterprise in which all the loss was intended to have been on the other side, he broke something--something necessary to his existence, therefore it couldn't have been his heart--and made an end of his career. As his character was not good, and he had been bred at a charity school in a complete course, according to question and answer, of those ancient people the Amorites and Hittites, he was frequently quoted as an example of the failure of education. His spirit shone through his son, to whom he had always preached of "going out" early in life and whom he made a clerk in a sharp scrivener's office at twelve years old. There the young gentleman improved his mind, which was of a lean and anxious character, and developing the family gifts, gradually elevated himself into the discounting profession. Going out early in life and marrying late, as his father had done before him, he too begat a lean and anxious-minded son, who in his turn, going out early in life and marrying late, became the father of Bartholomew and Judith Smallweed, twins. During the whole time consumed in the slow growth of this family tree, the house of Smallweed, always early to go out and late to marry, has strengthened itself in its practical character, has discarded all amusements, discountenanced all story-books, fairy-tales, fictions, and fables, and banished all levities whatsoever. Hence the gratifying fact that it has had no child born to it and that the complete little men and women whom it has produced have been observed to bear a likeness to old monkeys with something depressing on their minds. At the present time, in the dark little parlour certain feet below the level of the street--a grim, hard, uncouth parlour, only ornamented with the coarsest of baize table-covers, and the hardest of sheet-iron tea-trays, and offering in its decorative character no bad allegorical representation of Grandfather Smallweed's mind--seated in two black horsehair porter's chairs, one on each side of the fire-place, the superannuated Mr. and Mrs. Smallweed while away the rosy hours. On the stove are a couple of trivets for the pots and kettles which it is Grandfather Smallweed's usual occupation to watch, and projecting from the chimney-piece between them is a sort of brass gallows for roasting, which he also superintends when it is in action. Under the venerable Mr. Smallweed's seat and guarded by his spindle legs is a drawer in his chair, reported to contain property to a fabulous amount. Beside him is a spare cushion with which he is always provided in order that he may have something to throw at the venerable partner of his respected age whenever she makes an allusion to money--a subject on which he is particularly sensitive. "And where's Bart?" Grandfather Smallweed inquires of Judy, Bart's twin sister. "He an't come in yet," says Judy. "It's his tea-time, isn't it?" "No." "How much do you mean to say it wants then?" "Ten minutes." "Hey?" "Ten minutes." (Loud on the part of Judy.) "Ho!" says Grandfather Smallweed. "Ten minutes." Grandmother Smallweed, who has been mumbling and shaking her head at the trivets, hearing figures mentioned, connects them with money and screeches like a horrible old parrot without any plumage, "Ten ten-pound notes!" Grandfather Smallweed immediately throws the cushion at her. "Drat you, be quiet!" says the good old man. The effect of this act of jaculation is twofold. It not only doubles up Mrs. Smallweed's head against the side of her porter's chair and causes her to present, when extricated by her granddaughter, a highly unbecoming state of cap, but the necessary exertion recoils on Mr. Smallweed himself, whom it throws back into HIS porter's chair like a broken puppet. The excellent old gentleman being at these times a mere clothes-bag with a black skull-cap on the top of it, does not present a very animated appearance until he has undergone the two operations at the hands of his granddaughter of being shaken up like a great bottle and poked and punched like a great bolster. Some indication of a neck being developed in him by these means, he and the sharer of his life's evening again fronting one another in their two porter's chairs, like a couple of sentinels long forgotten on their post by the Black Serjeant, Death. Judy the twin is worthy company for these associates. She is so indubitably sister to Mr. Smallweed the younger that the two kneaded into one would hardly make a young person of average proportions, while she so happily exemplifies the before-mentioned family likeness to the monkey tribe that attired in a spangled robe and cap she might walk about the table-land on the top of a barrel-organ without exciting much remark as an unusual specimen. Under existing circumstances, however, she is dressed in a plain, spare gown of brown stuff. Judy never owned a doll, never heard of Cinderella, never played at any game. She once or twice fell into children's company when she was about ten years old, but the children couldn't get on with Judy, and Judy couldn't get on with them. She seemed like an animal of another species, and there was instinctive repugnance on both sides. It is very doubtful whether Judy knows how to laugh. She has so rarely seen the thing done that the probabilities are strong the other way. Of anything like a youthful laugh, she certainly can have no conception. If she were to try one, she would find her teeth in her way, modelling that action of her face, as she has unconsciously modelled all its other expressions, on her pattern of sordid age. Such is Judy. And her twin brother couldn't wind up a top for his life. He knows no more of Jack the Giant Killer or of Sinbad the Sailor than he knows of the people in the stars. He could as soon play at leap-frog or at cricket as change into a cricket or a frog himself. But he is so much the better off than his sister that on his narrow world of fact an opening has dawned into such broader regions as lie within the ken of Mr. Guppy. Hence his admiration and his emulation of that shining enchanter. Judy, with a gong-like clash and clatter, sets one of the sheet-iron tea-trays on the table and arranges cups and saucers. The bread she puts on in an iron basket, and the butter (and not much of it) in a small pewter plate. Grandfather Smallweed looks hard after the tea as it is served out and asks Judy where the girl is. "Charley, do you mean?" says Judy. "Hey?" from Grandfather Smallweed. "Charley, do you mean?" This touches a spring in Grandmother Smallweed, who, chuckling as usual at the trivets, cries, "Over the water! Charley over the water, Charley over the water, over the water to Charley, Charley over the water, over the water to Charley!" and becomes quite energetic about it. Grandfather looks at the cushion but has not sufficiently recovered his late exertion. "Ha!" he says when there is silence. "If that's her name. She eats a deal. It would be better to allow her for her keep." Judy, with her brother's wink, shakes her head and purses up her mouth into no without saying it. "No?" returns the old man. "Why not?" "She'd want sixpence a day, and we can do it for less," says Judy. "Sure?" Judy answers with a nod of deepest meaning and calls, as she scrapes the butter on the loaf with every precaution against waste and cuts it into slices, "You, Charley, where are you?" Timidly obedient to the summons, a little girl in a rough apron and a large bonnet, with her hands covered with soap and water and a scrubbing brush in one of them, appears, and curtsys. "What work are you about now?" says Judy, making an ancient snap at her like a very sharp old beldame. "I'm a-cleaning the upstairs back room, miss," replies Charley. "Mind you do it thoroughly, and don't loiter. Shirking won't do for me. Make haste! Go along!" cries Judy with a stamp upon the ground. "You girls are more trouble than you're worth, by half." On this severe matron, as she returns to her task of scraping the butter and cutting the bread, falls the shadow of her brother, looking in at the window. For whom, knife and loaf in hand, she opens the street-door. "Aye, aye, Bart!" says Grandfather Smallweed. "Here you are, hey?" "Here I am," says Bart. "Been along with your friend again, Bart?" Small nods. "Dining at his expense, Bart?" Small nods again. "That's right. Live at his expense as much as you can, and take warning by his foolish example. That's the use of such a friend. The only use you can put him to," says the venerable sage. His grandson, without receiving this good counsel as dutifully as he might, honours it with all such acceptance as may lie in a slight wink and a nod and takes a chair at the tea-table. The four old faces then hover over teacups like a company of ghastly cherubim, Mrs. Smallweed perpetually twitching her head and chattering at the trivets and Mr. Smallweed requiring to be repeatedly shaken up like a large black draught. "Yes, yes," says the good old gentleman, reverting to his lesson of wisdom. "That's such advice as your father would have given you, Bart. You never saw your father. More's the pity. He was my true son." Whether it is intended to be conveyed that he was particularly pleasant to look at, on that account, does not appear. "He was my true son," repeats the old gentleman, folding his bread and butter on his knee, "a good accountant, and died fifteen years ago." Mrs. Smallweed, following her usual instinct, breaks out with "Fifteen hundred pound. Fifteen hundred pound in a black box, fifteen hundred pound locked up, fifteen hundred pound put away and hid!" Her worthy husband, setting aside his bread and butter, immediately discharges the cushion at her, crushes her against the side of her chair, and falls back in his own, overpowered. His appearance, after visiting Mrs. Smallweed with one of these admonitions, is particularly impressive and not wholly prepossessing, firstly because the exertion generally twists his black skull-cap over one eye and gives him an air of goblin rakishness, secondly because he mutters violent imprecations against Mrs. Smallweed, and thirdly because the contrast between those powerful expressions and his powerless figure is suggestive of a baleful old malignant who would be very wicked if he could. All this, however, is so common in the Smallweed family circle that it produces no impression. The old gentleman is merely shaken and has his internal feathers beaten up, the cushion is restored to its usual place beside him, and the old lady, perhaps with her cap adjusted and perhaps not, is planted in her chair again, ready to be bowled down like a ninepin. Some time elapses in the present instance before the old gentleman is sufficiently cool to resume his discourse, and even then he mixes it up with several edifying expletives addressed to the unconscious partner of his bosom, who holds communication with nothing on earth but the trivets. As thus: "If your father, Bart, had lived longer, he might have been worth a deal of money--you brimstone chatterer!--but just as he was beginning to build up the house that he had been making the foundations for, through many a year--you jade of a magpie, jackdaw, and poll-parrot, what do you mean!--he took ill and died of a low fever, always being a sparing and a spare man, full of business care--I should like to throw a cat at you instead of a cushion, and I will too if you make such a confounded fool of yourself!--and your mother, who was a prudent woman as dry as a chip, just dwindled away like touchwood after you and Judy were born--you are an old pig. You are a brimstone pig. You're a head of swine!" Judy, not interested in what she has often heard, begins to collect in a basin various tributary streams of tea, from the bottoms of cups and saucers and from the bottom of the tea-pot for the little charwoman's evening meal. In like manner she gets together, in the iron bread-basket, as many outside fragments and worn-down heels of loaves as the rigid economy of the house has left in existence. "But your father and me were partners, Bart," says the old gentleman, "and when I am gone, you and Judy will have all there is. It's rare for you both that you went out early in life--Judy to the flower business, and you to the law. You won't want to spend it. You'll get your living without it, and put more to it. When I am gone, Judy will go back to the flower business and you'll still stick to the law." One might infer from Judy's appearance that her business rather lay with the thorns than the flowers, but she has in her time been apprenticed to the art and mystery of artificial flower-making. A close observer might perhaps detect both in her eye and her brother's, when their venerable grandsire anticipates his being gone, some little impatience to know when he may be going, and some resentful opinion that it is time he went. "Now, if everybody has done," says Judy, completing her preparations, "I'll have that girl in to her tea. She would never leave off if she took it by herself in the kitchen." Charley is accordingly introduced, and under a heavy fire of eyes, sits down to her basin and a Druidical ruin of bread and butter. In the active superintendence of this young person, Judy Smallweed appears to attain a perfectly geological age and to date from the remotest periods. Her systematic manner of flying at her and pouncing on her, with or without pretence, whether or no, is wonderful, evincing an accomplishment in the art of girl-driving seldom reached by the oldest practitioners. "Now, don't stare about you all the afternoon," cries Judy, shaking her head and stamping her foot as she happens to catch the glance which has been previously sounding the basin of tea, "but take your victuals and get back to your work." "Yes, miss," says Charley. "Don't say yes," returns Miss Smallweed, "for I know what you girls are. Do it without saying it, and then I may begin to believe you." Charley swallows a great gulp of tea in token of submission and so disperses the Druidical ruins that Miss Smallweed charges her not to gormandize, which "in you girls," she observes, is disgusting. Charley might find some more difficulty in meeting her views on the general subject of girls but for a knock at the door. "See who it is, and don't chew when you open it!" cries Judy. The object of her attentions withdrawing for the purpose, Miss Smallweed takes that opportunity of jumbling the remainder of the bread and butter together and launching two or three dirty tea-cups into the ebb-tide of the basin of tea as a hint that she considers the eating and drinking terminated. "Now! Who is it, and what's wanted?" says the snappish Judy. It is one Mr. George, it appears. Without other announcement or ceremony, Mr. George walks in. "Whew!" says Mr. George. "You are hot here. Always a fire, eh? Well! Perhaps you do right to get used to one." Mr. George makes the latter remark to himself as he nods to Grandfather Smallweed. "Ho! It's you!" cries the old gentleman. "How de do? How de do?" "Middling," replies Mr. George, taking a chair. "Your granddaughter I have had the honour of seeing before; my service to you, miss." "This is my grandson," says Grandfather Smallweed. "You ha'n't seen him before. He is in the law and not much at home." "My service to him, too! He is like his sister. He is very like his sister. He is devilish like his sister," says Mr. George, laying a great and not altogether complimentary stress on his last adjective. "And how does the world use you, Mr. George?" Grandfather Smallweed inquires, slowly rubbing his legs. "Pretty much as usual. Like a football." He is a swarthy brown man of fifty, well made, and good looking, with crisp dark hair, bright eyes, and a broad chest. His sinewy and powerful hands, as sunburnt as his face, have evidently been used to a pretty rough life. What is curious about him is that he sits forward on his chair as if he were, from long habit, allowing space for some dress or accoutrements that he has altogether laid aside. His step too is measured and heavy and would go well with a weighty clash and jingle of spurs. He is close-shaved now, but his mouth is set as if his upper lip had been for years familiar with a great moustache; and his manner of occasionally laying the open palm of his broad brown hand upon it is to the same effect. Altogether one might guess Mr. George to have been a trooper once upon a time. A special contrast Mr. George makes to the Smallweed family. Trooper was never yet billeted upon a household more unlike him. It is a broadsword to an oyster-knife. His developed figure and their stunted forms, his large manner filling any amount of room and their little narrow pinched ways, his sounding voice and their sharp spare tones, are in the strongest and the strangest opposition. As he sits in the middle of the grim parlour, leaning a little forward, with his hands upon his thighs and his elbows squared, he looks as though, if he remained there long, he would absorb into himself the whole family and the whole four-roomed house, extra little back-kitchen and all. "Do you rub your legs to rub life into 'em?" he asks of Grandfather Smallweed after looking round the room. "Why, it's partly a habit, Mr. George, and--yes--it partly helps the circulation," he replies. "The cir-cu-la-tion!" repeats Mr. George, folding his arms upon his chest and seeming to become two sizes larger. "Not much of that, I should think." "Truly I'm old, Mr. George," says Grandfather Smallweed. "But I can carry my years. I'm older than HER," nodding at his wife, "and see what she is? You're a brimstone chatterer!" with a sudden revival of his late hostility. "Unlucky old soul!" says Mr. George, turning his head in that direction. "Don't scold the old lady. Look at her here, with her poor cap half off her head and her poor hair all in a muddle. Hold up, ma'am. That's better. There we are! Think of your mother, Mr. Smallweed," says Mr. George, coming back to his seat from assisting her, "if your wife an't enough." "I suppose you were an excellent son, Mr. George?" the old man hints with a leer. The colour of Mr. George's face rather deepens as he replies, "Why no. I wasn't." "I am astonished at it." "So am I. I ought to have been a good son, and I think I meant to have been one. But I wasn't. I was a thundering bad son, that's the long and the short of it, and never was a credit to anybody." "Surprising!" cries the old man. "However," Mr. George resumes, "the less said about it, the better now. Come! You know the agreement. Always a pipe out of the two months' interest! (Bosh! It's all correct. You needn't be afraid to order the pipe. Here's the new bill, and here's the two months' interest-money, and a devil-and-all of a scrape it is to get it together in my business.)" Mr. George sits, with his arms folded, consuming the family and the parlour while Grandfather Smallweed is assisted by Judy to two black leathern cases out of a locked bureau, in one of which he secures the document he has just received, and from the other takes another similar document which he hands to Mr. George, who twists it up for a pipelight. As the old man inspects, through his glasses, every up-stroke and down-stroke of both documents before he releases them from their leathern prison, and as he counts the money three times over and requires Judy to say every word she utters at least twice, and is as tremulously slow of speech and action as it is possible to be, this business is a long time in progress. When it is quite concluded, and not before, he disengages his ravenous eyes and fingers from it and answers Mr. George's last remark by saying, "Afraid to order the pipe? We are not so mercenary as that, sir. Judy, see directly to the pipe and the glass of cold brandy-and-water for Mr. George." The sportive twins, who have been looking straight before them all this time except when they have been engrossed by the black leathern cases, retire together, generally disdainful of the visitor, but leaving him to the old man as two young cubs might leave a traveller to the parental bear. "And there you sit, I suppose, all the day long, eh?" says Mr. George with folded arms. "Just so, just so," the old man nods. "And don't you occupy yourself at all?" "I watch the fire--and the boiling and the roasting--" "When there is any," says Mr. George with great expression. "Just so. When there is any." "Don't you read or get read to?" The old man shakes his head with sharp sly triumph. "No, no. We have never been readers in our family. It don't pay. Stuff. Idleness. Folly. No, no!" "There's not much to choose between your two states," says the visitor in a key too low for the old man's dull hearing as he looks from him to the old woman and back again. "I say!" in a louder voice. "I hear you." "You'll sell me up at last, I suppose, when I am a day in arrear." "My dear friend!" cries Grandfather Smallweed, stretching out both hands to embrace him. "Never! Never, my dear friend! But my friend in the city that I got to lend you the money--HE might!" "Oh! You can't answer for him?" says Mr. George, finishing the inquiry in his lower key with the words "You lying old rascal!" "My dear friend, he is not to be depended on. I wouldn't trust him. He will have his bond, my dear friend." "Devil doubt him," says Mr. George. Charley appearing with a tray, on which are the pipe, a small paper of tobacco, and the brandy-and-water, he asks her, "How do you come here! You haven't got the family face." "I goes out to work, sir," returns Charley. The trooper (if trooper he be or have been) takes her bonnet off, with a light touch for so strong a hand, and pats her on the head. "You give the house almost a wholesome look. It wants a bit of youth as much as it wants fresh air." Then he dismisses her, lights his pipe, and drinks to Mr. Smallweed's friend in the city--the one solitary flight of that esteemed old gentleman's imagination. "So you think he might be hard upon me, eh?" "I think he might--I am afraid he would. I have known him do it," says Grandfather Smallweed incautiously, "twenty times." Incautiously, because his stricken better-half, who has been dozing over the fire for some time, is instantly aroused and jabbers "Twenty thousand pounds, twenty twenty-pound notes in a money-box, twenty guineas, twenty million twenty per cent, twenty--" and is then cut short by the flying cushion, which the visitor, to whom this singular experiment appears to be a novelty, snatches from her face as it crushes her in the usual manner. "You're a brimstone idiot. You're a scorpion--a brimstone scorpion! You're a sweltering toad. You're a chattering clattering broomstick witch that ought to be burnt!" gasps the old man, prostrate in his chair. "My dear friend, will you shake me up a little?" Mr. George, who has been looking first at one of them and then at the other, as if he were demented, takes his venerable acquaintance by the throat on receiving this request, and dragging him upright in his chair as easily as if he were a doll, appears in two minds whether or no to shake all future power of cushioning out of him and shake him into his grave. Resisting the temptation, but agitating him violently enough to make his head roll like a harlequin's, he puts him smartly down in his chair again and adjusts his skull-cap with such a rub that the old man winks with both eyes for a minute afterwards. "O Lord!" gasps Mr. Smallweed. "That'll do. Thank you, my dear friend, that'll do. Oh, dear me, I'm out of breath. O Lord!" And Mr. Smallweed says it not without evident apprehensions of his dear friend, who still stands over him looming larger than ever. The alarming presence, however, gradually subsides into its chair and falls to smoking in long puffs, consoling itself with the philosophical reflection, "The name of your friend in the city begins with a D, comrade, and you're about right respecting the bond." "Did you speak, Mr. George?" inquires the old man. The trooper shakes his head, and leaning forward with his right elbow on his right knee and his pipe supported in that hand, while his other hand, resting on his left leg, squares his left elbow in a martial manner, continues to smoke. Meanwhile he looks at Mr. Smallweed with grave attention and now and then fans the cloud of smoke away in order that he may see him the more clearly. "I take it," he says, making just as much and as little change in his position as will enable him to reach the glass to his lips with a round, full action, "that I am the only man alive (or dead either) that gets the value of a pipe out of YOU?" "Well," returns the old man, "it's true that I don't see company, Mr. George, and that I don't treat. I can't afford to it. But as you, in your pleasant way, made your pipe a condition--" "Why, it's not for the value of it; that's no great thing. It was a fancy to get it out of you. To have something in for my money." "Ha! You're prudent, prudent, sir!" cries Grandfather Smallweed, rubbing his legs. "Very. I always was." Puff. "It's a sure sign of my prudence that I ever found the way here." Puff. "Also, that I am what I am." Puff. "I am well known to be prudent," says Mr. George, composedly smoking. "I rose in life that way." "Don't be down-hearted, sir. You may rise yet." Mr. George laughs and drinks. "Ha'n't you no relations, now," asks Grandfather Smallweed with a twinkle in his eyes, "who would pay off this little principal or who would lend you a good name or two that I could persuade my friend in the city to make you a further advance upon? Two good names would be sufficient for my friend in the city. Ha'n't you no such relations, Mr. George?" Mr. George, still composedly smoking, replies, "If I had, I shouldn't trouble them. I have been trouble enough to my belongings in my day. It MAY be a very good sort of penitence in a vagabond, who has wasted the best time of his life, to go back then to decent people that he never was a credit to and live upon them, but it's not my sort. The best kind of amends then for having gone away is to keep away, in my opinion." "But natural affection, Mr. George," hints Grandfather Smallweed. "For two good names, hey?" says Mr. George, shaking his head and still composedly smoking. "No. That's not my sort either." Grandfather Smallweed has been gradually sliding down in his chair since his last adjustment and is now a bundle of clothes with a voice in it calling for Judy. That houri, appearing, shakes him up in the usual manner and is charged by the old gentleman to remain near him. For he seems chary of putting his visitor to the trouble of repeating his late attentions. "Ha!" he observes when he is in trim again. "If you could have traced out the captain, Mr. George, it would have been the making of you. If when you first came here, in consequence of our advertisement in the newspapers--when I say 'our,' I'm alluding to the advertisements of my friend in the city, and one or two others who embark their capital in the same way, and are so friendly towards me as sometimes to give me a lift with my little pittance--if at that time you could have helped us, Mr. George, it would have been the making of you." "I was willing enough to be 'made,' as you call it," says Mr. George, smoking not quite so placidly as before, for since the entrance of Judy he has been in some measure disturbed by a fascination, not of the admiring kind, which obliges him to look at her as she stands by her grandfather's chair, "but on the whole, I am glad I wasn't now." "Why, Mr. George? In the name of--of brimstone, why?" says Grandfather Smallweed with a plain appearance of exasperation. (Brimstone apparently suggested by his eye lighting on Mrs. Smallweed in her slumber.) "For two reasons, comrade." "And what two reasons, Mr. George? In the name of the--" "Of our friend in the city?" suggests Mr. George, composedly drinking. "Aye, if you like. What two reasons?" "In the first place," returns Mr. George, but still looking at Judy as if she being so old and so like her grandfather it is indifferent which of the two he addresses, "you gentlemen took me in. You advertised that Mr. Hawdon (Captain Hawdon, if you hold to the saying 'Once a captain, always a captain') was to hear of something to his advantage." "Well?" returns the old man shrilly and sharply. "Well!" says Mr. George, smoking on. "It wouldn't have been much to his advantage to have been clapped into prison by the whole bill and judgment trade of London." "How do you know that? Some of his rich relations might have paid his debts or compounded for 'em. Besides, he had taken US in. He owed us immense sums all round. I would sooner have strangled him than had no return. If I sit here thinking of him," snarls the old man, holding up his impotent ten fingers, "I want to strangle him now." And in a sudden access of fury, he throws the cushion at the unoffending Mrs. Smallweed, but it passes harmlessly on one side of her chair. "I don't need to be told," returns the trooper, taking his pipe from his lips for a moment and carrying his eyes back from following the progress of the cushion to the pipe-bowl which is burning low, "that he carried on heavily and went to ruin. I have been at his right hand many a day when he was charging upon ruin full-gallop. I was with him when he was sick and well, rich and poor. I laid this hand upon him after he had run through everything and broken down everything beneath him--when he held a pistol to his head." "I wish he had let it off," says the benevolent old man, "and blown his head into as many pieces as he owed pounds!" "That would have been a smash indeed," returns the trooper coolly; "any way, he had been young, hopeful, and handsome in the days gone by, and I am glad I never found him, when he was neither, to lead to a result so much to his advantage. That's reason number one." "I hope number two's as good?" snarls the old man. "Why, no. It's more of a selfish reason. If I had found him, I must have gone to the other world to look. He was there." "How do you know he was there?" "He wasn't here." "How do you know he wasn't here?" "Don't lose your temper as well as your money," says Mr. George, calmly knocking the ashes out of his pipe. "He was drowned long before. I am convinced of it. He went over a ship's side. Whether intentionally or accidentally, I don't know. Perhaps your friend in the city does. Do you know what that tune is, Mr. Smallweed?" he adds after breaking off to whistle one, accompanied on the table with the empty pipe. "Tune!" replied the old man. "No. We never have tunes here." "That's the Dead March in Saul. They bury soldiers to it, so it's the natural end of the subject. Now, if your pretty granddaughter--excuse me, miss--will condescend to take care of this pipe for two months, we shall save the cost of one next time. Good evening, Mr. Smallweed!" "My dear friend!" the old man gives him both his hands. "So you think your friend in the city will be hard upon me if I fall in a payment?" says the trooper, looking down upon him like a giant. "My dear friend, I am afraid he will," returns the old man, looking up at him like a pygmy. Mr. George laughs, and with a glance at Mr. Smallweed and a parting salutation to the scornful Judy, strides out of the parlour, clashing imaginary sabres and other metallic appurtenances as he goes. "You're a damned rogue," says the old gentleman, making a hideous grimace at the door as he shuts it. "But I'll lime you, you dog, I'll lime you!" After this amiable remark, his spirit soars into those enchanting regions of reflection which its education and pursuits have opened to it, and again he and Mrs. Smallweed while away the rosy hours, two unrelieved sentinels forgotten as aforesaid by the Black Serjeant. While the twain are faithful to their post, Mr. George strides through the streets with a massive kind of swagger and a grave-enough face. It is eight o'clock now, and the day is fast drawing in. He stops hard by Waterloo Bridge and reads a playbill, decides to go to Astley's Theatre. Being there, is much delighted with the horses and the feats of strength; looks at the weapons with a critical eye; disapproves of the combats as giving evidences of unskilful swordsmanship; but is touched home by the sentiments. In the last scene, when the Emperor of Tartary gets up into a cart and condescends to bless the united lovers by hovering over them with the Union Jack, his eyelashes are moistened with emotion. The theatre over, Mr. George comes across the water again and makes his way to that curious region lying about the Haymarket and Leicester Square which is a centre of attraction to indifferent foreign hotels and indifferent foreigners, racket-courts, fighting-men, swordsmen, footguards, old china, gaming-houses, exhibitions, and a large medley of shabbiness and shrinking out of sight. Penetrating to the heart of this region, he arrives by a court and a long whitewashed passage at a great brick building composed of bare walls, floors, roof-rafters, and skylights, on the front of which, if it can be said to have any front, is painted GEORGE'S SHOOTING GALLERY, &c. Into George's Shooting Gallery, &c., he goes; and in it there are gaslights (partly turned off now), and two whitened targets for rifle-shooting, and archery accommodation, and fencing appliances, and all necessaries for the British art of boxing. None of these sports or exercises being pursued in George's Shooting Gallery to-night, which is so devoid of company that a little grotesque man with a large head has it all to himself and lies asleep upon the floor. The little man is dressed something like a gunsmith, in a green-baize apron and cap; and his face and hands are dirty with gunpowder and begrimed with the loading of guns. As he lies in the light before a glaring white target, the black upon him shines again. Not far off is the strong, rough, primitive table with a vice upon it at which he has been working. He is a little man with a face all crushed together, who appears, from a certain blue and speckled appearance that one of his cheeks presents, to have been blown up, in the way of business, at some odd time or times. "Phil!" says the trooper in a quiet voice. "All right!" cries Phil, scrambling to his feet. "Anything been doing?" "Flat as ever so much swipes," says Phil. "Five dozen rifle and a dozen pistol. As to aim!" Phil gives a howl at the recollection. "Shut up shop, Phil!" As Phil moves about to execute this order, it appears that he is lame, though able to move very quickly. On the speckled side of his face he has no eyebrow, and on the other side he has a bushy black one, which want of uniformity gives him a very singular and rather sinister appearance. Everything seems to have happened to his hands that could possibly take place consistently with the retention of all the fingers, for they are notched, and seamed, and crumpled all over. He appears to be very strong and lifts heavy benches about as if he had no idea what weight was. He has a curious way of limping round the gallery with his shoulder against the wall and tacking off at objects he wants to lay hold of instead of going straight to them, which has left a smear all round the four walls, conventionally called "Phil's mark." This custodian of George's Gallery in George's absence concludes his proceedings, when he has locked the great doors and turned out all the lights but one, which he leaves to glimmer, by dragging out from a wooden cabin in a corner two mattresses and bedding. These being drawn to opposite ends of the gallery, the trooper makes his own bed and Phil makes his. "Phil!" says the master, walking towards him without his coat and waistcoat, and looking more soldierly than ever in his braces. "You were found in a doorway, weren't you?" "Gutter," says Phil. "Watchman tumbled over me." "Then vagabondizing came natural to YOU from the beginning." "As nat'ral as possible," says Phil. "Good night!" "Good night, guv'ner." Phil cannot even go straight to bed, but finds it necessary to shoulder round two sides of the gallery and then tack off at his mattress. The trooper, after taking a turn or two in the rifle-distance and looking up at the moon now shining through the skylights, strides to his own mattress by a shorter route and goes to bed too. CHAPTER XXII Mr. Bucket Allegory looks pretty cool in Lincoln's Inn Fields, though the evening is hot, for both Mr. Tulkinghorn's windows are wide open, and the room is lofty, gusty, and gloomy. These may not be desirable characteristics when November comes with fog and sleet or January with ice and snow, but they have their merits in the sultry long vacation weather. They enable Allegory, though it has cheeks like peaches, and knees like bunches of blossoms, and rosy swellings for calves to its legs and muscles to its arms, to look tolerably cool to-night. Plenty of dust comes in at Mr. Tulkinghorn's windows, and plenty more has generated among his furniture and papers. It lies thick everywhere. When a breeze from the country that has lost its way takes fright and makes a blind hurry to rush out again, it flings as much dust in the eyes of Allegory as the law--or Mr. Tulkinghorn, one of its trustiest representatives--may scatter, on occasion, in the eyes of the laity. In his lowering magazine of dust, the universal article into which his papers and himself, and all his clients, and all things of earth, animate and inanimate, are resolving, Mr. Tulkinghorn sits at one of the open windows enjoying a bottle of old port. Though a hard-grained man, close, dry, and silent, he can enjoy old wine with the best. He has a priceless bin of port in some artful cellar under the Fields, which is one of his many secrets. When he dines alone in chambers, as he has dined to-day, and has his bit of fish and his steak or chicken brought in from the coffee-house, he descends with a candle to the echoing regions below the deserted mansion, and heralded by a remote reverberation of thundering doors, comes gravely back encircled by an earthy atmosphere and carrying a bottle from which he pours a radiant nectar, two score and ten years old, that blushes in the glass to find itself so famous and fills the whole room with the fragrance of southern grapes. Mr. Tulkinghorn, sitting in the twilight by the open window, enjoys his wine. As if it whispered to him of its fifty years of silence and seclusion, it shuts him up the closer. More impenetrable than ever, he sits, and drinks, and mellows as it were in secrecy, pondering at that twilight hour on all the mysteries he knows, associated with darkening woods in the country, and vast blank shut-up houses in town, and perhaps sparing a thought or two for himself, and his family history, and his money, and his will--all a mystery to every one--and that one bachelor friend of his, a man of the same mould and a lawyer too, who lived the same kind of life until he was seventy-five years old, and then suddenly conceiving (as it is supposed) an impression that it was too monotonous, gave his gold watch to his hair-dresser one summer evening and walked leisurely home to the Temple and hanged himself. But Mr. Tulkinghorn is not alone to-night to ponder at his usual length. Seated at the same table, though with his chair modestly and uncomfortably drawn a little way from it, sits a bald, mild, shining man who coughs respectfully behind his hand when the lawyer bids him fill his glass. "Now, Snagsby," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, "to go over this odd story again." "If you please, sir." "You told me when you were so good as to step round here last night--" "For which I must ask you to excuse me if it was a liberty, sir; but I remember that you had taken a sort of an interest in that person, and I thought it possible that you might--just--wish--to--" Mr. Tulkinghorn is not the man to help him to any conclusion or to admit anything as to any possibility concerning himself. So Mr. Snagsby trails off into saying, with an awkward cough, "I must ask you to excuse the liberty, sir, I am sure." "Not at all," says Mr. Tulkinghorn. "You told me, Snagsby, that you put on your hat and came round without mentioning your intention to your wife. That was prudent I think, because it's not a matter of such importance that it requires to be mentioned." "Well, sir," returns Mr. Snagsby, "you see, my little woman is--not to put too fine a point upon it--inquisitive. She's inquisitive. Poor little thing, she's liable to spasms, and it's good for her to have her mind employed. In consequence of which she employs it--I should say upon every individual thing she can lay hold of, whether it concerns her or not--especially not. My little woman has a very active mind, sir." Mr. Snagsby drinks and murmurs with an admiring cough behind his hand, "Dear me, very fine wine indeed!" "Therefore you kept your visit to yourself last night?" says Mr. Tulkinghorn. "And to-night too?" "Yes, sir, and to-night, too. My little woman is at present in--not to put too fine a point on it--in a pious state, or in what she considers such, and attends the Evening Exertions (which is the name they go by) of a reverend party of the name of Chadband. He has a great deal of eloquence at his command, undoubtedly, but I am not quite favourable to his style myself. That's neither here nor there. My little woman being engaged in that way made it easier for me to step round in a quiet manner." Mr. Tulkinghorn assents. "Fill your glass, Snagsby." "Thank you, sir, I am sure," returns the stationer with his cough of deference. "This is wonderfully fine wine, sir!" "It is a rare wine now," says Mr. Tulkinghorn. "It is fifty years old." "Is it indeed, sir? But I am not surprised to hear it, I am sure. It might be--any age almost." After rendering this general tribute to the port, Mr. Snagsby in his modesty coughs an apology behind his hand for drinking anything so precious. "Will you run over, once again, what the boy said?" asks Mr. Tulkinghorn, putting his hands into the pockets of his rusty smallclothes and leaning quietly back in his chair. "With pleasure, sir." Then, with fidelity, though with some prolixity, the law-stationer repeats Jo's statement made to the assembled guests at his house. On coming to the end of his narrative, he gives a great start and breaks off with, "Dear me, sir, I wasn't aware there was any other gentleman present!" Mr. Snagsby is dismayed to see, standing with an attentive face between himself and the lawyer at a little distance from the table, a person with a hat and stick in his hand who was not there when he himself came in and has not since entered by the door or by either of the windows. There is a press in the room, but its hinges have not creaked, nor has a step been audible upon the floor. Yet this third person stands there with his attentive face, and his hat and stick in his hands, and his hands behind him, a composed and quiet listener. He is a stoutly built, steady-looking, sharp-eyed man in black, of about the middle-age. Except that he looks at Mr. Snagsby as if he were going to take his portrait, there is nothing remarkable about him at first sight but his ghostly manner of appearing. "Don't mind this gentleman," says Mr. Tulkinghorn in his quiet way. "This is only Mr. Bucket." "Oh, indeed, sir?" returns the stationer, expressing by a cough that he is quite in the dark as to who Mr. Bucket may be. "I wanted him to hear this story," says the lawyer, "because I have half a mind (for a reason) to know more of it, and he is very intelligent in such things. What do you say to this, Bucket?" "It's very plain, sir. Since our people have moved this boy on, and he's not to be found on his old lay, if Mr. Snagsby don't object to go down with me to Tom-all-Alone's and point him out, we can have him here in less than a couple of hours' time. I can do it without Mr. Snagsby, of course, but this is the shortest way." "Mr. Bucket is a detective officer, Snagsby," says the lawyer in explanation. "Is he indeed, sir?" says Mr. Snagsby with a strong tendency in his clump of hair to stand on end. "And if you have no real objection to accompany Mr. Bucket to the place in question," pursues the lawyer, "I shall feel obliged to you if you will do so." In a moment's hesitation on the part of Mr. Snagsby, Bucket dips down to the bottom of his mind. "Don't you be afraid of hurting the boy," he says. "You won't do that. It's all right as far as the boy's concerned. We shall only bring him here to ask him a question or so I want to put to him, and he'll be paid for his trouble and sent away again. It'll be a good job for him. I promise you, as a man, that you shall see the boy sent away all right. Don't you be afraid of hurting him; you an't going to do that." "Very well, Mr. Tulkinghorn!" cries Mr. Snagsby cheerfully. And reassured, "Since that's the case--" "Yes! And lookee here, Mr. Snagsby," resumes Bucket, taking him aside by the arm, tapping him familiarly on the breast, and speaking in a confidential tone. "You're a man of the world, you know, and a man of business, and a man of sense. That's what YOU are." "I am sure I am much obliged to you for your good opinion," returns the stationer with his cough of modesty, "but--" "That's what YOU are, you know," says Bucket. "Now, it an't necessary to say to a man like you, engaged in your business, which is a business of trust and requires a person to be wide awake and have his senses about him and his head screwed on tight (I had an uncle in your business once)--it an't necessary to say to a man like you that it's the best and wisest way to keep little matters like this quiet. Don't you see? Quiet!" "Certainly, certainly," returns the other. "I don't mind telling YOU," says Bucket with an engaging appearance of frankness, "that as far as I can understand it, there seems to be a doubt whether this dead person wasn't entitled to a little property, and whether this female hasn't been up to some games respecting that property, don't you see?" "Oh!" says Mr. Snagsby, but not appearing to see quite distinctly. "Now, what YOU want," pursues Bucket, again tapping Mr. Snagsby on the breast in a comfortable and soothing manner, "is that every person should have their rights according to justice. That's what YOU want." "To be sure," returns Mr. Snagsby with a nod. "On account of which, and at the same time to oblige a--do you call it, in your business, customer or client? I forget how my uncle used to call it." "Why, I generally say customer myself," replies Mr. Snagsby. "You're right!" returns Mr. Bucket, shaking hands with him quite affectionately. "--On account of which, and at the same time to oblige a real good customer, you mean to go down with me, in confidence, to Tom-all-Alone's and to keep the whole thing quiet ever afterwards and never mention it to any one. That's about your intentions, if I understand you?" "You are right, sir. You are right," says Mr. Snagsby. "Then here's your hat," returns his new friend, quite as intimate with it as if he had made it; "and if you're ready, I am." They leave Mr. Tulkinghorn, without a ruffle on the surface of his unfathomable depths, drinking his old wine, and go down into the streets. "You don't happen to know a very good sort of person of the name of Gridley, do you?" says Bucket in friendly converse as they descend the stairs. "No," says Mr. Snagsby, considering, "I don't know anybody of that name. Why?" "Nothing particular," says Bucket; "only having allowed his temper to get a little the better of him and having been threatening some respectable people, he is keeping out of the way of a warrant I have got against him--which it's a pity that a man of sense should do." As they walk along, Mr. Snagsby observes, as a novelty, that however quick their pace may be, his companion still seems in some undefinable manner to lurk and lounge; also, that whenever he is going to turn to the right or left, he pretends to have a fixed purpose in his mind of going straight ahead, and wheels off, sharply, at the very last moment. Now and then, when they pass a police-constable on his beat, Mr. Snagsby notices that both the constable and his guide fall into a deep abstraction as they come towards each other, and appear entirely to overlook each other, and to gaze into space. In a few instances, Mr. Bucket, coming behind some under-sized young man with a shining hat on, and his sleek hair twisted into one flat curl on each side of his head, almost without glancing at him touches him with his stick, upon which the young man, looking round, instantly evaporates. For the most part Mr. Bucket notices things in general, with a face as unchanging as the great mourning ring on his little finger or the brooch, composed of not much diamond and a good deal of setting, which he wears in his shirt. When they come at last to Tom-all-Alone's, Mr. Bucket stops for a moment at the corner and takes a lighted bull's-eye from the constable on duty there, who then accompanies him with his own particular bull's-eye at his waist. Between his two conductors, Mr. Snagsby passes along the middle of a villainous street, undrained, unventilated, deep in black mud and corrupt water--though the roads are dry elsewhere--and reeking with such smells and sights that he, who has lived in London all his life, can scarce believe his senses. Branching from this street and its heaps of ruins are other streets and courts so infamous that Mr. Snagsby sickens in body and mind and feels as if he were going every moment deeper down into the infernal gulf. "Draw off a bit here, Mr. Snagsby," says Bucket as a kind of shabby palanquin is borne towards them, surrounded by a noisy crowd. "Here's the fever coming up the street!" As the unseen wretch goes by, the crowd, leaving that object of attraction, hovers round the three visitors like a dream of horrible faces and fades away up alleys and into ruins and behind walls, and with occasional cries and shrill whistles of warning, thenceforth flits about them until they leave the place. "Are those the fever-houses, Darby?" Mr. Bucket coolly asks as he turns his bull's-eye on a line of stinking ruins. Darby replies that "all them are," and further that in all, for months and months, the people "have been down by dozens" and have been carried out dead and dying "like sheep with the rot." Bucket observing to Mr. Snagsby as they go on again that he looks a little poorly, Mr. Snagsby answers that he feels as if he couldn't breathe the dreadful air. There is inquiry made at various houses for a boy named Jo. As few people are known in Tom-all-Alone's by any Christian sign, there is much reference to Mr. Snagsby whether he means Carrots, or the Colonel, or Gallows, or Young Chisel, or Terrier Tip, or Lanky, or the Brick. Mr. Snagsby describes over and over again. There are conflicting opinions respecting the original of his picture. Some think it must be Carrots, some say the Brick. The Colonel is produced, but is not at all near the thing. Whenever Mr. Snagsby and his conductors are stationary, the crowd flows round, and from its squalid depths obsequious advice heaves up to Mr. Bucket. Whenever they move, and the angry bull's-eyes glare, it fades away and flits about them up the alleys, and in the ruins, and behind the walls, as before. At last there is a lair found out where Toughy, or the Tough Subject, lays him down at night; and it is thought that the Tough Subject may be Jo. Comparison of notes between Mr. Snagsby and the proprietress of the house--a drunken face tied up in a black bundle, and flaring out of a heap of rags on the floor of a dog-hutch which is her private apartment--leads to the establishment of this conclusion. Toughy has gone to the doctor's to get a bottle of stuff for a sick woman but will be here anon. "And who have we got here to-night?" says Mr. Bucket, opening another door and glaring in with his bull's-eye. "Two drunken men, eh? And two women? The men are sound enough," turning back each sleeper's arm from his face to look at him. "Are these your good men, my dears?" "Yes, sir," returns one of the women. "They are our husbands." "Brickmakers, eh?" "Yes, sir." "What are you doing here? You don't belong to London." "No, sir. We belong to Hertfordshire." "Whereabouts in Hertfordshire?" "Saint Albans." "Come up on the tramp?" "We walked up yesterday. There's no work down with us at present, but we have done no good by coming here, and shall do none, I expect." "That's not the way to do much good," says Mr. Bucket, turning his head in the direction of the unconscious figures on the ground. "It an't indeed," replies the woman with a sigh. "Jenny and me knows it full well." The room, though two or three feet higher than the door, is so low that the head of the tallest of the visitors would touch the blackened ceiling if he stood upright. It is offensive to every sense; even the gross candle burns pale and sickly in the polluted air. There are a couple of benches and a higher bench by way of table. The men lie asleep where they stumbled down, but the women sit by the candle. Lying in the arms of the woman who has spoken is a very young child. "Why, what age do you call that little creature?" says Bucket. "It looks as if it was born yesterday." He is not at all rough about it; and as he turns his light gently on the infant, Mr. Snagsby is strangely reminded of another infant, encircled with light, that he has seen in pictures. "He is not three weeks old yet, sir," says the woman. "Is he your child?" "Mine." The other woman, who was bending over it when they came in, stoops down again and kisses it as it lies asleep. "You seem as fond of it as if you were the mother yourself," says Mr. Bucket. "I was the mother of one like it, master, and it died." "Ah, Jenny, Jenny!" says the other woman to her. "Better so. Much better to think of dead than alive, Jenny! Much better!" "Why, you an't such an unnatural woman, I hope," returns Bucket sternly, "as to wish your own child dead?" "God knows you are right, master," she returns. "I am not. I'd stand between it and death with my own life if I could, as true as any pretty lady." "Then don't talk in that wrong manner," says Mr. Bucket, mollified again. "Why do you do it?" "It's brought into my head, master," returns the woman, her eyes filling with tears, "when I look down at the child lying so. If it was never to wake no more, you'd think me mad, I should take on so. I know that very well. I was with Jenny when she lost hers--warn't I, Jenny?--and I know how she grieved. But look around you at this place. Look at them," glancing at the sleepers on the ground. "Look at the boy you're waiting for, who's gone out to do me a good turn. Think of the children that your business lays with often and often, and that YOU see grow up!" "Well, well," says Mr. Bucket, "you train him respectable, and he'll be a comfort to you, and look after you in your old age, you know." "I mean to try hard," she answers, wiping her eyes. "But I have been a-thinking, being over-tired to-night and not well with the ague, of all the many things that'll come in his way. My master will be against it, and he'll be beat, and see me beat, and made to fear his home, and perhaps to stray wild. If I work for him ever so much, and ever so hard, there's no one to help me; and if he should be turned bad 'spite of all I could do, and the time should come when I should sit by him in his sleep, made hard and changed, an't it likely I should think of him as he lies in my lap now and wish he had died as Jenny's child died!" "There, there!" says Jenny. "Liz, you're tired and ill. Let me take him." In doing so, she displaces the mother's dress, but quickly readjusts it over the wounded and bruised bosom where the baby has been lying. "It's my dead child," says Jenny, walking up and down as she nurses, "that makes me love this child so dear, and it's my dead child that makes her love it so dear too, as even to think of its being taken away from her now. While she thinks that, I think what fortune would I give to have my darling back. But we mean the same thing, if we knew how to say it, us two mothers does in our poor hearts!" As Mr. Snagsby blows his nose and coughs his cough of sympathy, a step is heard without. Mr. Bucket throws his light into the doorway and says to Mr. Snagsby, "Now, what do you say to Toughy? Will HE do?" "That's Jo," says Mr. Snagsby. Jo stands amazed in the disk of light, like a ragged figure in a magic-lantern, trembling to think that he has offended against the law in not having moved on far enough. Mr. Snagsby, however, giving him the consolatory assurance, "It's only a job you will be paid for, Jo," he recovers; and on being taken outside by Mr. Bucket for a little private confabulation, tells his tale satisfactorily, though out of breath. "I have squared it with the lad," says Mr. Bucket, returning, "and it's all right. Now, Mr. Snagsby, we're ready for you." First, Jo has to complete his errand of good nature by handing over the physic he has been to get, which he delivers with the laconic verbal direction that "it's to be all took d'rectly." Secondly, Mr. Snagsby has to lay upon the table half a crown, his usual panacea for an immense variety of afflictions. Thirdly, Mr. Bucket has to take Jo by the arm a little above the elbow and walk him on before him, without which observance neither the Tough Subject nor any other Subject could be professionally conducted to Lincoln's Inn Fields. These arrangements completed, they give the women good night and come out once more into black and foul Tom-all-Alone's. By the noisome ways through which they descended into that pit, they gradually emerge from it, the crowd flitting, and whistling, and skulking about them until they come to the verge, where restoration of the bull's-eyes is made to Darby. Here the crowd, like a concourse of imprisoned demons, turns back, yelling, and is seen no more. Through the clearer and fresher streets, never so clear and fresh to Mr. Snagsby's mind as now, they walk and ride until they come to Mr. Tulkinghorn's gate. As they ascend the dim stairs (Mr. Tulkinghorn's chambers being on the first floor), Mr. Bucket mentions that he has the key of the outer door in his pocket and that there is no need to ring. For a man so expert in most things of that kind, Bucket takes time to open the door and makes some noise too. It may be that he sounds a note of preparation. Howbeit, they come at last into the hall, where a lamp is burning, and so into Mr. Tulkinghorn's usual room--the room where he drank his old wine to-night. He is not there, but his two old-fashioned candlesticks are, and the room is tolerably light. Mr. Bucket, still having his professional hold of Jo and appearing to Mr. Snagsby to possess an unlimited number of eyes, makes a little way into this room, when Jo starts and stops. "What's the matter?" says Bucket in a whisper. "There she is!" cries Jo. "Who!" "The lady!" A female figure, closely veiled, stands in the middle of the room, where the light falls upon it. It is quite still and silent. The front of the figure is towards them, but it takes no notice of their entrance and remains like a statue. "Now, tell me," says Bucket aloud, "how you know that to be the lady." "I know the wale," replies Jo, staring, "and the bonnet, and the gownd." "Be quite sure of what you say, Tough," returns Bucket, narrowly observant of him. "Look again." "I am a-looking as hard as ever I can look," says Jo with starting eyes, "and that there's the wale, the bonnet, and the gownd." "What about those rings you told me of?" asks Bucket. "A-sparkling all over here," says Jo, rubbing the fingers of his left hand on the knuckles of his right without taking his eyes from the figure. The figure removes the right-hand glove and shows the hand. "Now, what do you say to that?" asks Bucket. Jo shakes his head. "Not rings a bit like them. Not a hand like that." "What are you talking of?" says Bucket, evidently pleased though, and well pleased too. "Hand was a deal whiter, a deal delicater, and a deal smaller," returns Jo. "Why, you'll tell me I'm my own mother next," says Mr. Bucket. "Do you recollect the lady's voice?" "I think I does," says Jo. The figure speaks. "Was it at all like this? I will speak as long as you like if you are not sure. Was it this voice, or at all like this voice?" Jo looks aghast at Mr. Bucket. "Not a bit!" "Then, what," retorts that worthy, pointing to the figure, "did you say it was the lady for?" "Cos," says Jo with a perplexed stare but without being at all shaken in his certainty, "cos that there's the wale, the bonnet, and the gownd. It is her and it an't her. It an't her hand, nor yet her rings, nor yet her woice. But that there's the wale, the bonnet, and the gownd, and they're wore the same way wot she wore 'em, and it's her height wot she wos, and she giv me a sov'ring and hooked it." "Well!" says Mr. Bucket slightly, "we haven't got much good out of YOU. But, however, here's five shillings for you. Take care how you spend it, and don't get yourself into trouble." Bucket stealthily tells the coins from one hand into the other like counters--which is a way he has, his principal use of them being in these games of skill--and then puts them, in a little pile, into the boy's hand and takes him out to the door, leaving Mr. Snagsby, not by any means comfortable under these mysterious circumstances, alone with the veiled figure. But on Mr. Tulkinghorn's coming into the room, the veil is raised and a sufficiently good-looking Frenchwoman is revealed, though her expression is something of the intensest. "Thank you, Mademoiselle Hortense," says Mr. Tulkinghorn with his usual equanimity. "I will give you no further trouble about this little wager." "You will do me the kindness to remember, sir, that I am not at present placed?" says mademoiselle. "Certainly, certainly!" "And to confer upon me the favour of your distinguished recommendation?" "By all means, Mademoiselle Hortense." "A word from Mr. Tulkinghorn is so powerful." "It shall not be wanting, mademoiselle." "Receive the assurance of my devoted gratitude, dear sir." "Good night." Mademoiselle goes out with an air of native gentility; and Mr. Bucket, to whom it is, on an emergency, as natural to be groom of the ceremonies as it is to be anything else, shows her downstairs, not without gallantry. "Well, Bucket?" quoth Mr. Tulkinghorn on his return. "It's all squared, you see, as I squared it myself, sir. There an't a doubt that it was the other one with this one's dress on. The boy was exact respecting colours and everything. Mr. Snagsby, I promised you as a man that he should be sent away all right. Don't say it wasn't done!" "You have kept your word, sir," returns the stationer; "and if I can be of no further use, Mr. Tulkinghorn, I think, as my little woman will be getting anxious--" "Thank you, Snagsby, no further use," says Mr. Tulkinghorn. "I am quite indebted to you for the trouble you have taken already." "Not at all, sir. I wish you good night." "You see, Mr. Snagsby," says Mr. Bucket, accompanying him to the door and shaking hands with him over and over again, "what I like in you is that you're a man it's of no use pumping; that's what YOU are. When you know you have done a right thing, you put it away, and it's done with and gone, and there's an end of it. That's what YOU do." "That is certainly what I endeavour to do, sir," returns Mr. Snagsby. "No, you don't do yourself justice. It an't what you endeavour to do," says Mr. Bucket, shaking hands with him and blessing him in the tenderest manner, "it's what you DO. That's what I estimate in a man in your way of business." Mr. Snagsby makes a suitable response and goes homeward so confused by the events of the evening that he is doubtful of his being awake and out--doubtful of the reality of the streets through which he goes--doubtful of the reality of the moon that shines above him. He is presently reassured on these subjects by the unchallengeable reality of Mrs. Snagsby, sitting up with her head in a perfect beehive of curl-papers and night-cap, who has dispatched Guster to the police-station with official intelligence of her husband's being made away with, and who within the last two hours has passed through every stage of swooning with the greatest decorum. But as the little woman feelingly says, many thanks she gets for it! CHAPTER XXIII Esther's Narrative We came home from Mr. Boythorn's after six pleasant weeks. We were often in the park and in the woods and seldom passed the lodge where we had taken shelter without looking in to speak to the keeper's wife; but we saw no more of Lady Dedlock, except at church on Sundays. There was company at Chesney Wold; and although several beautiful faces surrounded her, her face retained the same influence on me as at first. I do not quite know even now whether it was painful or pleasurable, whether it drew me towards her or made me shrink from her. I think I admired her with a kind of fear, and I know that in her presence my thoughts always wandered back, as they had done at first, to that old time of my life. I had a fancy, on more than one of these Sundays, that what this lady so curiously was to me, I was to her--I mean that I disturbed her thoughts as she influenced mine, though in some different way. But when I stole a glance at her and saw her so composed and distant and unapproachable, I felt this to be a foolish weakness. Indeed, I felt the whole state of my mind in reference to her to be weak and unreasonable, and I remonstrated with myself about it as much as I could. One incident that occurred before we quitted Mr. Boythorn's house, I had better mention in this place. I was walking in the garden with Ada when I was told that some one wished to see me. Going into the breakfast-room where this person was waiting, I found it to be the French maid who had cast off her shoes and walked through the wet grass on the day when it thundered and lightened. "Mademoiselle," she began, looking fixedly at me with her too-eager eyes, though otherwise presenting an agreeable appearance and speaking neither with boldness nor servility, "I have taken a great liberty in coming here, but you know how to excuse it, being so amiable, mademoiselle." "No excuse is necessary," I returned, "if you wish to speak to me." "That is my desire, mademoiselle. A thousand thanks for the permission. I have your leave to speak. Is it not?" she said in a quick, natural way. "Certainly," said I. "Mademoiselle, you are so amiable! Listen then, if you please. I have left my Lady. We could not agree. My Lady is so high, so very high. Pardon! Mademoiselle, you are right!" Her quickness anticipated what I might have said presently but as yet had only thought. "It is not for me to come here to complain of my Lady. But I say she is so high, so very high. I will not say a word more. All the world knows that." "Go on, if you please," said I. "Assuredly; mademoiselle, I am thankful for your politeness. Mademoiselle, I have an inexpressible desire to find service with a young lady who is good, accomplished, beautiful. You are good, accomplished, and beautiful as an angel. Ah, could I have the honour of being your domestic!" "I am sorry--" I began. "Do not dismiss me so soon, mademoiselle!" she said with an involuntary contraction of her fine black eyebrows. "Let me hope a moment! Mademoiselle, I know this service would be more retired than that which I have quitted. Well! I wish that. I know this service would be less distinguished than that which I have quitted. Well! I wish that, I know that I should win less, as to wages here. Good. I am content." "I assure you," said I, quite embarrassed by the mere idea of having such an attendant, "that I keep no maid--" "Ah, mademoiselle, but why not? Why not, when you can have one so devoted to you! Who would be enchanted to serve you; who would be so true, so zealous, and so faithful every day! Mademoiselle, I wish with all my heart to serve you. Do not speak of money at present. Take me as I am. For nothing!" She was so singularly earnest that I drew back, almost afraid of her. Without appearing to notice it, in her ardour she still pressed herself upon me, speaking in a rapid subdued voice, though always with a certain grace and propriety. "Mademoiselle, I come from the South country where we are quick and where we like and dislike very strong. My Lady was too high for me; I was too high for her. It is done--past--finished! Receive me as your domestic, and I will serve you well. I will do more for you than you figure to yourself now. Chut! Mademoiselle, I will--no matter, I will do my utmost possible in all things. If you accept my service, you will not repent it. Mademoiselle, you will not repent it, and I will serve you well. You don't know how well!" There was a lowering energy in her face as she stood looking at me while I explained the impossibility of my engaging her (without thinking it necessary to say how very little I desired to do so), which seemed to bring visibly before me some woman from the streets of Paris in the reign of terror. She heard me out without interruption and then said with her pretty accent and in her mildest voice, "Hey, mademoiselle, I have received my answer! I am sorry of it. But I must go elsewhere and seek what I have not found here. Will you graciously let me kiss your hand?" She looked at me more intently as she took it, and seemed to take note, with her momentary touch, of every vein in it. "I fear I surprised you, mademoiselle, on the day of the storm?" she said with a parting curtsy. I confessed that she had surprised us all. "I took an oath, mademoiselle," she said, smiling, "and I wanted to stamp it on my mind so that I might keep it faithfully. And I will! Adieu, mademoiselle!" So ended our conference, which I was very glad to bring to a close. I supposed she went away from the village, for I saw her no more; and nothing else occurred to disturb our tranquil summer pleasures until six weeks were out and we returned home as I began just now by saying. At that time, and for a good many weeks after that time, Richard was constant in his visits. Besides coming every Saturday or Sunday and remaining with us until Monday morning, he sometimes rode out on horseback unexpectedly and passed the evening with us and rode back again early next day. He was as vivacious as ever and told us he was very industrious, but I was not easy in my mind about him. It appeared to me that his industry was all misdirected. I could not find that it led to anything but the formation of delusive hopes in connexion with the suit already the pernicious cause of so much sorrow and ruin. He had got at the core of that mystery now, he told us, and nothing could be plainer than that the will under which he and Ada were to take I don't know how many thousands of pounds must be finally established if there were any sense or justice in the Court of Chancery--but oh, what a great IF that sounded in my ears--and that this happy conclusion could not be much longer delayed. He proved this to himself by all the weary arguments on that side he had read, and every one of them sunk him deeper in the infatuation. He had even begun to haunt the court. He told us how he saw Miss Flite there daily, how they talked together, and how he did her little kindnesses, and how, while he laughed at her, he pitied her from his heart. But he never thought--never, my poor, dear, sanguine Richard, capable of so much happiness then, and with such better things before him--what a fatal link was riveting between his fresh youth and her faded age, between his free hopes and her caged birds, and her hungry garret, and her wandering mind. Ada loved him too well to mistrust him much in anything he said or did, and my guardian, though he frequently complained of the east wind and read more than usual in the growlery, preserved a strict silence on the subject. So I thought one day when I went to London to meet Caddy Jellyby, at her solicitation, I would ask Richard to be in waiting for me at the coach-office, that we might have a little talk together. I found him there when I arrived, and we walked away arm in arm. "Well, Richard," said I as soon as I could begin to be grave with him, "are you beginning to feel more settled now?" "Oh, yes, my dear!" returned Richard. "I'm all right enough." "But settled?" said I. "How do you mean, settled?" returned Richard with his gay laugh. "Settled in the law," said I. "Oh, aye," replied Richard, "I'm all right enough." "You said that before, my dear Richard." "And you don't think it's an answer, eh? Well! Perhaps it's not. Settled? You mean, do I feel as if I were settling down?" "Yes." "Why, no, I can't say I am settling down," said Richard, strongly emphasizing "down," as if that expressed the difficulty, "because one can't settle down while this business remains in such an unsettled state. When I say this business, of course I mean the--forbidden subject." "Do you think it will ever be in a settled state?" said I. "Not the least doubt of it," answered Richard. We walked a little way without speaking, and presently Richard addressed me in his frankest and most feeling manner, thus: "My dear Esther, I understand you, and I wish to heaven I were a more constant sort of fellow. I don't mean constant to Ada, for I love her dearly--better and better every day--but constant to myself. (Somehow, I mean something that I can't very well express, but you'll make it out.) If I were a more constant sort of fellow, I should have held on either to Badger or to Kenge and Carboy like grim death, and should have begun to be steady and systematic by this time, and shouldn't be in debt, and--" "ARE you in debt, Richard?" "Yes," said Richard, "I am a little so, my dear. Also, I have taken rather too much to billiards and that sort of thing. Now the murder's out; you despise me, Esther, don't you?" "You know I don't," said I. "You are kinder to me than I often am to myself," he returned. "My dear Esther, I am a very unfortunate dog not to be more settled, but how CAN I be more settled? If you lived in an unfinished house, you couldn't settle down in it; if you were condemned to leave everything you undertook unfinished, you would find it hard to apply yourself to anything; and yet that's my unhappy case. I was born into this unfinished contention with all its chances and changes, and it began to unsettle me before I quite knew the difference between a suit at law and a suit of clothes; and it has gone on unsettling me ever since; and here I am now, conscious sometimes that I am but a worthless fellow to love my confiding cousin Ada." We were in a solitary place, and he put his hands before his eyes and sobbed as he said the words. "Oh, Richard!" said I. "Do not be so moved. You have a noble nature, and Ada's love may make you worthier every day." "I know, my dear," he replied, pressing my arm, "I know all that. You mustn't mind my being a little soft now, for I have had all this upon my mind for a long time, and have often meant to speak to you, and have sometimes wanted opportunity and sometimes courage. I know what the thought of Ada ought to do for me, but it doesn't do it. I am too unsettled even for that. I love her most devotedly, and yet I do her wrong, in doing myself wrong, every day and hour. But it can't last for ever. We shall come on for a final hearing and get judgment in our favour, and then you and Ada shall see what I can really be!" It had given me a pang to hear him sob and see the tears start out between his fingers, but that was infinitely less affecting to me than the hopeful animation with which he said these words. "I have looked well into the papers, Esther. I have been deep in them for months," he continued, recovering his cheerfulness in a moment, "and you may rely upon it that we shall come out triumphant. As to years of delay, there has been no want of them, heaven knows! And there is the greater probability of our bringing the matter to a speedy close; in fact, it's on the paper now. It will be all right at last, and then you shall see!" Recalling how he had just now placed Messrs. Kenge and Carboy in the same category with Mr. Badger, I asked him when he intended to be articled in Lincoln's Inn. "There again! I think not at all, Esther," he returned with an effort. "I fancy I have had enough of it. Having worked at Jarndyce and Jarndyce like a galley slave, I have slaked my thirst for the law and satisfied myself that I shouldn't like it. Besides, I find it unsettles me more and more to be so constantly upon the scene of action. So what," continued Richard, confident again by this time, "do I naturally turn my thoughts to?" "I can't imagine," said I. "Don't look so serious," returned Richard, "because it's the best thing I can do, my dear Esther, I am certain. It's not as if I wanted a profession for life. These proceedings will come to a termination, and then I am provided for. No. I look upon it as a pursuit which is in its nature more or less unsettled, and therefore suited to my temporary condition--I may say, precisely suited. What is it that I naturally turn my thoughts to?" I looked at him and shook my head. "What," said Richard, in a tone of perfect conviction, "but the army!" "The army?" said I. "The army, of course. What I have to do is to get a commission; and--there I am, you know!" said Richard. And then he showed me, proved by elaborate calculations in his pocket-book, that supposing he had contracted, say, two hundred pounds of debt in six months out of the army; and that he contracted no debt at all within a corresponding period in the army--as to which he had quite made up his mind; this step must involve a saving of four hundred pounds in a year, or two thousand pounds in five years, which was a considerable sum. And then he spoke so ingenuously and sincerely of the sacrifice he made in withdrawing himself for a time from Ada, and of the earnestness with which he aspired--as in thought he always did, I know full well--to repay her love, and to ensure her happiness, and to conquer what was amiss in himself, and to acquire the very soul of decision, that he made my heart ache keenly, sorely. For, I thought, how would this end, how could this end, when so soon and so surely all his manly qualities were touched by the fatal blight that ruined everything it rested on! I spoke to Richard with all the earnestness I felt, and all the hope I could not quite feel then, and implored him for Ada's sake not to put any trust in Chancery. To all I said, Richard readily assented, riding over the court and everything else in his easy way and drawing the brightest pictures of the character he was to settle into--alas, when the grievous suit should loose its hold upon him! We had a long talk, but it always came back to that, in substance. At last we came to Soho Square, where Caddy Jellyby had appointed to wait for me, as a quiet place in the neighbourhood of Newman Street. Caddy was in the garden in the centre and hurried out as soon as I appeared. After a few cheerful words, Richard left us together. "Prince has a pupil over the way, Esther," said Caddy, "and got the key for us. So if you will walk round and round here with me, we can lock ourselves in and I can tell you comfortably what I wanted to see your dear good face about." "Very well, my dear," said I. "Nothing could be better." So Caddy, after affectionately squeezing the dear good face as she called it, locked the gate, and took my arm, and we began to walk round the garden very cosily. "You see, Esther," said Caddy, who thoroughly enjoyed a little confidence, "after you spoke to me about its being wrong to marry without Ma's knowledge, or even to keep Ma long in the dark respecting our engagement--though I don't believe Ma cares much for me, I must say--I thought it right to mention your opinions to Prince. In the first place because I want to profit by everything you tell me, and in the second place because I have no secrets from Prince." "I hope he approved, Caddy?" "Oh, my dear! I assure you he would approve of anything you could say. You have no idea what an opinion he has of you!" "Indeed!" "Esther, it's enough to make anybody but me jealous," said Caddy, laughing and shaking her head; "but it only makes me joyful, for you are the first friend I ever had, and the best friend I ever can have, and nobody can respect and love you too much to please me." "Upon my word, Caddy," said I, "you are in the general conspiracy to keep me in a good humour. Well, my dear?" "Well! I am going to tell you," replied Caddy, crossing her hands confidentially upon my arm. "So we talked a good deal about it, and so I said to Prince, 'Prince, as Miss Summerson--'" "I hope you didn't say 'Miss Summerson'?" "No. I didn't!" cried Caddy, greatly pleased and with the brightest of faces. "I said, 'Esther.' I said to Prince, 'As Esther is decidedly of that opinion, Prince, and has expressed it to me, and always hints it when she writes those kind notes, which you are so fond of hearing me read to you, I am prepared to disclose the truth to Ma whenever you think proper. And I think, Prince,' said I, 'that Esther thinks that I should be in a better, and truer, and more honourable position altogether if you did the same to your papa.'" "Yes, my dear," said I. "Esther certainly does think so." "So I was right, you see!" exclaimed Caddy. "Well! This troubled Prince a good deal, not because he had the least doubt about it, but because he is so considerate of the feelings of old Mr. Turveydrop; and he had his apprehensions that old Mr. Turveydrop might break his heart, or faint away, or be very much overcome in some affecting manner or other if he made such an announcement. He feared old Mr. Turveydrop might consider it undutiful and might receive too great a shock. For old Mr. Turveydrop's deportment is very beautiful, you know, Esther," said Caddy, "and his feelings are extremely sensitive." "Are they, my dear?" "Oh, extremely sensitive. Prince says so. Now, this has caused my darling child--I didn't mean to use the expression to you, Esther," Caddy apologized, her face suffused with blushes, "but I generally call Prince my darling child." I laughed; and Caddy laughed and blushed, and went on. "This has caused him, Esther--" "Caused whom, my dear?" "Oh, you tiresome thing!" said Caddy, laughing, with her pretty face on fire. "My darling child, if you insist upon it! This has caused him weeks of uneasiness and has made him delay, from day to day, in a very anxious manner. At last he said to me, 'Caddy, if Miss Summerson, who is a great favourite with my father, could be prevailed upon to be present when I broke the subject, I think I could do it.' So I promised I would ask you. And I made up my mind, besides," said Caddy, looking at me hopefully but timidly, "that if you consented, I would ask you afterwards to come with me to Ma. This is what I meant when I said in my note that I had a great favour and a great assistance to beg of you. And if you thought you could grant it, Esther, we should both be very grateful." "Let me see, Caddy," said I, pretending to consider. "Really, I think I could do a greater thing than that if the need were pressing. I am at your service and the darling child's, my dear, whenever you like." Caddy was quite transported by this reply of mine, being, I believe, as susceptible to the least kindness or encouragement as any tender heart that ever beat in this world; and after another turn or two round the garden, during which she put on an entirely new pair of gloves and made herself as resplendent as possible that she might do no avoidable discredit to the Master of Deportment, we went to Newman Street direct. Prince was teaching, of course. We found him engaged with a not very hopeful pupil--a stubborn little girl with a sulky forehead, a deep voice, and an inanimate, dissatisfied mama--whose case was certainly not rendered more hopeful by the confusion into which we threw her preceptor. The lesson at last came to an end, after proceeding as discordantly as possible; and when the little girl had changed her shoes and had had her white muslin extinguished in shawls, she was taken away. After a few words of preparation, we then went in search of Mr. Turveydrop, whom we found, grouped with his hat and gloves, as a model of deportment, on the sofa in his private apartment--the only comfortable room in the house. He appeared to have dressed at his leisure in the intervals of a light collation, and his dressing-case, brushes, and so forth, all of quite an elegant kind, lay about. "Father, Miss Summerson; Miss Jellyby." "Charmed! Enchanted!" said Mr. Turveydrop, rising with his high-shouldered bow. "Permit me!" Handing chairs. "Be seated!" Kissing the tips of his left fingers. "Overjoyed!" Shutting his eyes and rolling. "My little retreat is made a paradise." Recomposing himself on the sofa like the second gentleman in Europe. "Again you find us, Miss Summerson," said he, "using our little arts to polish, polish! Again the sex stimulates us and rewards us by the condescension of its lovely presence. It is much in these times (and we have made an awfully degenerating business of it since the days of his Royal Highness the Prince Regent--my patron, if I may presume to say so) to experience that deportment is not wholly trodden under foot by mechanics. That it can yet bask in the smile of beauty, my dear madam." I said nothing, which I thought a suitable reply; and he took a pinch of snuff. "My dear son," said Mr. Turveydrop, "you have four schools this afternoon. I would recommend a hasty sandwich." "Thank you, father," returned Prince, "I will be sure to be punctual. My dear father, may I beg you to prepare your mind for what I am going to say?" "Good heaven!" exclaimed the model, pale and aghast as Prince and Caddy, hand in hand, bent down before him. "What is this? Is this lunacy! Or what is this?" "Father," returned Prince with great submission, "I love this young lady, and we are engaged." "Engaged!" cried Mr. Turveydrop, reclining on the sofa and shutting out the sight with his hand. "An arrow launched at my brain by my own child!" "We have been engaged for some time, father," faltered Prince, "and Miss Summerson, hearing of it, advised that we should declare the fact to you and was so very kind as to attend on the present occasion. Miss Jellyby is a young lady who deeply respects you, father." Mr. Turveydrop uttered a groan. "No, pray don't! Pray don't, father," urged his son. "Miss Jellyby is a young lady who deeply respects you, and our first desire is to consider your comfort." Mr. Turveydrop sobbed. "No, pray don't, father!" cried his son. "Boy," said Mr. Turveydrop, "it is well that your sainted mother is spared this pang. Strike deep, and spare not. Strike home, sir, strike home!" "Pray don't say so, father," implored Prince, in tears. "It goes to my heart. I do assure you, father, that our first wish and intention is to consider your comfort. Caroline and I do not forget our duty--what is my duty is Caroline's, as we have often said together--and with your approval and consent, father, we will devote ourselves to making your life agreeable." "Strike home," murmured Mr. Turveydrop. "Strike home!" But he seemed to listen, I thought, too. "My dear father," returned Prince, "we well know what little comforts you are accustomed to and have a right to, and it will always be our study and our pride to provide those before anything. If you will bless us with your approval and consent, father, we shall not think of being married until it is quite agreeable to you; and when we ARE married, we shall always make you--of course--our first consideration. You must ever be the head and master here, father; and we feel how truly unnatural it would be in us if we failed to know it or if we failed to exert ourselves in every possible way to please you." Mr. Turveydrop underwent a severe internal struggle and came upright on the sofa again with his cheeks puffing over his stiff cravat, a perfect model of parental deportment. "My son!" said Mr. Turveydrop. "My children! I cannot resist your prayer. Be happy!" His benignity as he raised his future daughter-in-law and stretched out his hand to his son (who kissed it with affectionate respect and gratitude) was the most confusing sight I ever saw. "My children," said Mr. Turveydrop, paternally encircling Caddy with his left arm as she sat beside him, and putting his right hand gracefully on his hip. "My son and daughter, your happiness shall be my care. I will watch over you. You shall always live with me"--meaning, of course, I will always live with you--"this house is henceforth as much yours as mine; consider it your home. May you long live to share it with me!" The power of his deportment was such that they really were as much overcome with thankfulness as if, instead of quartering himself upon them for the rest of his life, he were making some munificent sacrifice in their favour. "For myself, my children," said Mr. Turveydrop, "I am falling into the sear and yellow leaf, and it is impossible to say how long the last feeble traces of gentlemanly deportment may linger in this weaving and spinning age. But, so long, I will do my duty to society and will show myself, as usual, about town. My wants are few and simple. My little apartment here, my few essentials for the toilet, my frugal morning meal, and my little dinner will suffice. I charge your dutiful affection with the supply of these requirements, and I charge myself with all the rest." They were overpowered afresh by his uncommon generosity. "My son," said Mr. Turveydrop, "for those little points in which you are deficient--points of deportment, which are born with a man, which may be improved by cultivation, but can never be originated--you may still rely on me. I have been faithful to my post since the days of his Royal Highness the Prince Regent, and I will not desert it now. No, my son. If you have ever contemplated your father's poor position with a feeling of pride, you may rest assured that he will do nothing to tarnish it. For yourself, Prince, whose character is different (we cannot be all alike, nor is it advisable that we should), work, be industrious, earn money, and extend the connexion as much as possible." "That you may depend I will do, dear father, with all my heart," replied Prince. "I have no doubt of it," said Mr. Turveydrop. "Your qualities are not shining, my dear child, but they are steady and useful. And to both of you, my children, I would merely observe, in the spirit of a sainted wooman on whose path I had the happiness of casting, I believe, SOME ray of light, take care of the establishment, take care of my simple wants, and bless you both!" Old Mr. Turveydrop then became so very gallant, in honour of the occasion, that I told Caddy we must really go to Thavies Inn at once if we were to go at all that day. So we took our departure after a very loving farewell between Caddy and her betrothed, and during our walk she was so happy and so full of old Mr. Turveydrop's praises that I would not have said a word in his disparagement for any consideration. The house in Thavies Inn had bills in the windows announcing that it was to let, and it looked dirtier and gloomier and ghastlier than ever. The name of poor Mr. Jellyby had appeared in the list of bankrupts but a day or two before, and he was shut up in the dining-room with two gentlemen and a heap of blue bags, account-books, and papers, making the most desperate endeavours to understand his affairs. They appeared to me to be quite beyond his comprehension, for when Caddy took me into the dining-room by mistake and we came upon Mr. Jellyby in his spectacles, forlornly fenced into a corner by the great dining-table and the two gentlemen, he seemed to have given up the whole thing and to be speechless and insensible. Going upstairs to Mrs. Jellyby's room (the children were all screaming in the kitchen, and there was no servant to be seen), we found that lady in the midst of a voluminous correspondence, opening, reading, and sorting letters, with a great accumulation of torn covers on the floor. She was so preoccupied that at first she did not know me, though she sat looking at me with that curious, bright-eyed, far-off look of hers. "Ah! Miss Summerson!" she said at last. "I was thinking of something so different! I hope you are well. I am happy to see you. Mr. Jarndyce and Miss Clare quite well?" I hoped in return that Mr. Jellyby was quite well. "Why, not quite, my dear," said Mrs. Jellyby in the calmest manner. "He has been unfortunate in his affairs and is a little out of spirits. Happily for me, I am so much engaged that I have no time to think about it. We have, at the present moment, one hundred and seventy families, Miss Summerson, averaging five persons in each, either gone or going to the left bank of the Niger." I thought of the one family so near us who were neither gone nor going to the left bank of the Niger, and wondered how she could be so placid. "You have brought Caddy back, I see," observed Mrs. Jellyby with a glance at her daughter. "It has become quite a novelty to see her here. She has almost deserted her old employment and in fact obliges me to employ a boy." "I am sure, Ma--" began Caddy. "Now you know, Caddy," her mother mildly interposed, "that I DO employ a boy, who is now at his dinner. What is the use of your contradicting?" "I was not going to contradict, Ma," returned Caddy. "I was only going to say that surely you wouldn't have me be a mere drudge all my life." "I believe, my dear," said Mrs. Jellyby, still opening her letters, casting her bright eyes smilingly over them, and sorting them as she spoke, "that you have a business example before you in your mother. Besides. A mere drudge? If you had any sympathy with the destinies of the human race, it would raise you high above any such idea. But you have none. I have often told you, Caddy, you have no such sympathy." "Not if it's Africa, Ma, I have not." "Of course you have not. Now, if I were not happily so much engaged, Miss Summerson," said Mrs. Jellyby, sweetly casting her eyes for a moment on me and considering where to put the particular letter she had just opened, "this would distress and disappoint me. But I have so much to think of, in connexion with Borrioboola-Gha and it is so necessary I should concentrate myself that there is my remedy, you see." As Caddy gave me a glance of entreaty, and as Mrs. Jellyby was looking far away into Africa straight through my bonnet and head, I thought it a good opportunity to come to the subject of my visit and to attract Mrs. Jellyby's attention. "Perhaps," I began, "you will wonder what has brought me here to interrupt you." "I am always delighted to see Miss Summerson," said Mrs. Jellyby, pursuing her employment with a placid smile. "Though I wish," and she shook her head, "she was more interested in the Borrioboolan project." "I have come with Caddy," said I, "because Caddy justly thinks she ought not to have a secret from her mother and fancies I shall encourage and aid her (though I am sure I don't know how) in imparting one." "Caddy," said Mrs. Jellyby, pausing for a moment in her occupation and then serenely pursuing it after shaking her head, "you are going to tell me some nonsense." Caddy untied the strings of her bonnet, took her bonnet off, and letting it dangle on the floor by the strings, and crying heartily, said, "Ma, I am engaged." "Oh, you ridiculous child!" observed Mrs. Jellyby with an abstracted air as she looked over the dispatch last opened; "what a goose you are!" "I am engaged, Ma," sobbed Caddy, "to young Mr. Turveydrop, at the academy; and old Mr. Turveydrop (who is a very gentlemanly man indeed) has given his consent, and I beg and pray you'll give us yours, Ma, because I never could be happy without it. I never, never could!" sobbed Caddy, quite forgetful of her general complainings and of everything but her natural affection. "You see again, Miss Summerson," observed Mrs. Jellyby serenely, "what a happiness it is to be so much occupied as I am and to have this necessity for self-concentration that I have. Here is Caddy engaged to a dancing-master's son--mixed up with people who have no more sympathy with the destinies of the human race than she has herself! This, too, when Mr. Quale, one of the first philanthropists of our time, has mentioned to me that he was really disposed to be interested in her!" "Ma, I always hated and detested Mr. Quale!" sobbed Caddy. "Caddy, Caddy!" returned Mrs. Jellyby, opening another letter with the greatest complacency. "I have no doubt you did. How could you do otherwise, being totally destitute of the sympathies with which he overflows! Now, if my public duties were not a favourite child to me, if I were not occupied with large measures on a vast scale, these petty details might grieve me very much, Miss Summerson. But can I permit the film of a silly proceeding on the part of Caddy (from whom I expect nothing else) to interpose between me and the great African continent? No. No," repeated Mrs. Jellyby in a calm clear voice, and with an agreeable smile, as she opened more letters and sorted them. "No, indeed." I was so unprepared for the perfect coolness of this reception, though I might have expected it, that I did not know what to say. Caddy seemed equally at a loss. Mrs. Jellyby continued to open and sort letters and to repeat occasionally in quite a charming tone of voice and with a smile of perfect composure, "No, indeed." "I hope, Ma," sobbed poor Caddy at last, "you are not angry?" "Oh, Caddy, you really are an absurd girl," returned Mrs. Jellyby, "to ask such questions after what I have said of the preoccupation of my mind." "And I hope, Ma, you give us your consent and wish us well?" said Caddy. "You are a nonsensical child to have done anything of this kind," said Mrs. Jellyby; "and a degenerate child, when you might have devoted yourself to the great public measure. But the step is taken, and I have engaged a boy, and there is no more to be said. Now, pray, Caddy," said Mrs. Jellyby, for Caddy was kissing her, "don't delay me in my work, but let me clear off this heavy batch of papers before the afternoon post comes in!" I thought I could not do better than take my leave; I was detained for a moment by Caddy's saying, "You won't object to my bringing him to see you, Ma?" "Oh, dear me, Caddy," cried Mrs. Jellyby, who had relapsed into that distant contemplation, "have you begun again? Bring whom?" "Him, Ma." "Caddy, Caddy!" said Mrs. Jellyby, quite weary of such little matters. "Then you must bring him some evening which is not a Parent Society night, or a Branch night, or a Ramification night. You must accommodate the visit to the demands upon my time. My dear Miss Summerson, it was very kind of you to come here to help out this silly chit. Good-bye! When I tell you that I have fifty-eight new letters from manufacturing families anxious to understand the details of the native and coffee-cultivation question this morning, I need not apologize for having very little leisure." I was not surprised by Caddy's being in low spirits when we went downstairs, or by her sobbing afresh on my neck, or by her saying she would far rather have been scolded than treated with such indifference, or by her confiding to me that she was so poor in clothes that how she was ever to be married creditably she didn't know. I gradually cheered her up by dwelling on the many things she would do for her unfortunate father and for Peepy when she had a home of her own; and finally we went downstairs into the damp dark kitchen, where Peepy and his little brothers and sisters were grovelling on the stone floor and where we had such a game of play with them that to prevent myself from being quite torn to pieces I was obliged to fall back on my fairy-tales. From time to time I heard loud voices in the parlour overhead, and occasionally a violent tumbling about of the furniture. The last effect I am afraid was caused by poor Mr. Jellyby's breaking away from the dining-table and making rushes at the window with the intention of throwing himself into the area whenever he made any new attempt to understand his affairs. As I rode quietly home at night after the day's bustle, I thought a good deal of Caddy's engagement and felt confirmed in my hopes (in spite of the elder Mr. Turveydrop) that she would be the happier and better for it. And if there seemed to be but a slender chance of her and her husband ever finding out what the model of deportment really was, why that was all for the best too, and who would wish them to be wiser? I did not wish them to be any wiser and indeed was half ashamed of not entirely believing in him myself. And I looked up at the stars, and thought about travellers in distant countries and the stars THEY saw, and hoped I might always be so blest and happy as to be useful to some one in my small way. They were so glad to see me when I got home, as they always were, that I could have sat down and cried for joy if that had not been a method of making myself disagreeable. Everybody in the house, from the lowest to the highest, showed me such a bright face of welcome, and spoke so cheerily, and was so happy to do anything for me, that I suppose there never was such a fortunate little creature in the world. We got into such a chatty state that night, through Ada and my guardian drawing me out to tell them all about Caddy, that I went on prose, prose, prosing for a length of time. At last I got up to my own room, quite red to think how I had been holding forth, and then I heard a soft tap at my door. So I said, "Come in!" and there came in a pretty little girl, neatly dressed in mourning, who dropped a curtsy. "If you please, miss," said the little girl in a soft voice, "I am Charley." "Why, so you are," said I, stooping down in astonishment and giving her a kiss. "How glad am I to see you, Charley!" "If you please, miss," pursued Charley in the same soft voice, "I'm your maid." "Charley?" "If you please, miss, I'm a present to you, with Mr. Jarndyce's love." I sat down with my hand on Charley's neck and looked at Charley. "And oh, miss," says Charley, clapping her hands, with the tears starting down her dimpled cheeks, "Tom's at school, if you please, and learning so good! And little Emma, she's with Mrs. Blinder, miss, a-being took such care of! And Tom, he would have been at school--and Emma, she would have been left with Mrs. Blinder--and me, I should have been here--all a deal sooner, miss; only Mr. Jarndyce thought that Tom and Emma and me had better get a little used to parting first, we was so small. Don't cry, if you please, miss!" "I can't help it, Charley." "No, miss, nor I can't help it," says Charley. "And if you please, miss, Mr. Jarndyce's love, and he thinks you'll like to teach me now and then. And if you please, Tom and Emma and me is to see each other once a month. And I'm so happy and so thankful, miss," cried Charley with a heaving heart, "and I'll try to be such a good maid!" "Oh, Charley dear, never forget who did all this!" "No, miss, I never will. Nor Tom won't. Nor yet Emma. It was all you, miss." "I have known nothing of it. It was Mr. Jarndyce, Charley." "Yes, miss, but it was all done for the love of you and that you might be my mistress. If you please, miss, I am a little present with his love, and it was all done for the love of you. Me and Tom was to be sure to remember it." Charley dried her eyes and entered on her functions, going in her matronly little way about and about the room and folding up everything she could lay her hands upon. Presently Charley came creeping back to my side and said, "Oh, don't cry, if you please, miss." And I said again, "I can't help it, Charley." And Charley said again, "No, miss, nor I can't help it." And so, after all, I did cry for joy indeed, and so did she. CHAPTER XXIV An Appeal Case As soon as Richard and I had held the conversation of which I have given an account, Richard communicated the state of his mind to Mr. Jarndyce. I doubt if my guardian were altogether taken by surprise when he received the representation, though it caused him much uneasiness and disappointment. He and Richard were often closeted together, late at night and early in the morning, and passed whole days in London, and had innumerable appointments with Mr. Kenge, and laboured through a quantity of disagreeable business. While they were thus employed, my guardian, though he underwent considerable inconvenience from the state of the wind and rubbed his head so constantly that not a single hair upon it ever rested in its right place, was as genial with Ada and me as at any other time, but maintained a steady reserve on these matters. And as our utmost endeavours could only elicit from Richard himself sweeping assurances that everything was going on capitally and that it really was all right at last, our anxiety was not much relieved by him. We learnt, however, as the time went on, that a new application was made to the Lord Chancellor on Richard's behalf as an infant and a ward, and I don't know what, and that there was a quantity of talking, and that the Lord Chancellor described him in open court as a vexatious and capricious infant, and that the matter was adjourned and readjourned, and referred, and reported on, and petitioned about until Richard began to doubt (as he told us) whether, if he entered the army at all, it would not be as a veteran of seventy or eighty years of age. At last an appointment was made for him to see the Lord Chancellor again in his private room, and there the Lord Chancellor very seriously reproved him for trifling with time and not knowing his mind--"a pretty good joke, I think," said Richard, "from that quarter!"--and at last it was settled that his application should be granted. His name was entered at the Horse Guards as an applicant for an ensign's commission; the purchase-money was deposited at an agent's; and Richard, in his usual characteristic way, plunged into a violent course of military study and got up at five o'clock every morning to practise the broadsword exercise. Thus, vacation succeeded term, and term succeeded vacation. We sometimes heard of Jarndyce and Jarndyce as being in the paper or out of the paper, or as being to be mentioned, or as being to be spoken to; and it came on, and it went off. Richard, who was now in a professor's house in London, was able to be with us less frequently than before; my guardian still maintained the same reserve; and so time passed until the commission was obtained and Richard received directions with it to join a regiment in Ireland. He arrived post-haste with the intelligence one evening, and had a long conference with my guardian. Upwards of an hour elapsed before my guardian put his head into the room where Ada and I were sitting and said, "Come in, my dears!" We went in and found Richard, whom we had last seen in high spirits, leaning on the chimney-piece looking mortified and angry. "Rick and I, Ada," said Mr. Jarndyce, "are not quite of one mind. Come, come, Rick, put a brighter face upon it!" "You are very hard with me, sir," said Richard. "The harder because you have been so considerate to me in all other respects and have done me kindnesses that I can never acknowledge. I never could have been set right without you, sir." "Well, well!" said Mr. Jarndyce. "I want to set you more right yet. I want to set you more right with yourself." "I hope you will excuse my saying, sir," returned Richard in a fiery way, but yet respectfully, "that I think I am the best judge about myself." "I hope you will excuse my saying, my dear Rick," observed Mr. Jarndyce with the sweetest cheerfulness and good humour, "that it's quite natural in you to think so, but I don't think so. I must do my duty, Rick, or you could never care for me in cool blood; and I hope you will always care for me, cool and hot." Ada had turned so pale that he made her sit down in his reading-chair and sat beside her. "It's nothing, my dear," he said, "it's nothing. Rick and I have only had a friendly difference, which we must state to you, for you are the theme. Now you are afraid of what's coming." "I am not indeed, cousin John," replied Ada with a smile, "if it is to come from you." "Thank you, my dear. Do you give me a minute's calm attention, without looking at Rick. And, little woman, do you likewise. My dear girl," putting his hand on hers as it lay on the side of the easy-chair, "you recollect the talk we had, we four when the little woman told me of a little love affair?" "It is not likely that either Richard or I can ever forget your kindness that day, cousin John." "I can never forget it," said Richard. "And I can never forget it," said Ada. "So much the easier what I have to say, and so much the easier for us to agree," returned my guardian, his face irradiated by the gentleness and honour of his heart. "Ada, my bird, you should know that Rick has now chosen his profession for the last time. All that he has of certainty will be expended when he is fully equipped. He has exhausted his resources and is bound henceforward to the tree he has planted." "Quite true that I have exhausted my present resources, and I am quite content to know it. But what I have of certainty, sir," said Richard, "is not all I have." "Rick, Rick!" cried my guardian with a sudden terror in his manner, and in an altered voice, and putting up his hands as if he would have stopped his ears. "For the love of God, don't found a hope or expectation on the family curse! Whatever you do on this side the grave, never give one lingering glance towards the horrible phantom that has haunted us so many years. Better to borrow, better to beg, better to die!" We were all startled by the fervour of this warning. Richard bit his lip and held his breath, and glanced at me as if he felt, and knew that I felt too, how much he needed it. "Ada, my dear," said Mr. Jarndyce, recovering his cheerfulness, "these are strong words of advice, but I live in Bleak House and have seen a sight here. Enough of that. All Richard had to start him in the race of life is ventured. I recommend to him and you, for his sake and your own, that he should depart from us with the understanding that there is no sort of contract between you. I must go further. I will be plain with you both. You were to confide freely in me, and I will confide freely in you. I ask you wholly to relinquish, for the present, any tie but your relationship." "Better to say at once, sir," returned Richard, "that you renounce all confidence in me and that you advise Ada to do the same." "Better to say nothing of the sort, Rick, because I don't mean it." "You think I have begun ill, sir," retorted Richard. "I HAVE, I know." "How I hoped you would begin, and how go on, I told you when we spoke of these things last," said Mr. Jarndyce in a cordial and encouraging manner. "You have not made that beginning yet, but there is a time for all things, and yours is not gone by; rather, it is just now fully come. Make a clear beginning altogether. You two (very young, my dears) are cousins. As yet, you are nothing more. What more may come must come of being worked out, Rick, and no sooner." "You are very hard with me, sir," said Richard. "Harder than I could have supposed you would be." "My dear boy," said Mr. Jarndyce, "I am harder with myself when I do anything that gives you pain. You have your remedy in your own hands. Ada, it is better for him that he should be free and that there should be no youthful engagement between you. Rick, it is better for her, much better; you owe it to her. Come! Each of you will do what is best for the other, if not what is best for yourselves." "Why is it best, sir?" returned Richard hastily. "It was not when we opened our hearts to you. You did not say so then." "I have had experience since. I don't blame you, Rick, but I have had experience since." "You mean of me, sir." "Well! Yes, of both of you," said Mr. Jarndyce kindly. "The time is not come for your standing pledged to one another. It is not right, and I must not recognize it. Come, come, my young cousins, begin afresh! Bygones shall be bygones, and a new page turned for you to write your lives in." Richard gave an anxious glance at Ada but said nothing. "I have avoided saying one word to either of you or to Esther," said Mr. Jarndyce, "until now, in order that we might be open as the day, and all on equal terms. I now affectionately advise, I now most earnestly entreat, you two to part as you came here. Leave all else to time, truth, and steadfastness. If you do otherwise, you will do wrong, and you will have made me do wrong in ever bringing you together." A long silence succeeded. "Cousin Richard," said Ada then, raising her blue eyes tenderly to his face, "after what our cousin John has said, I think no choice is left us. Your mind may be quite at ease about me, for you will leave me here under his care and will be sure that I can have nothing to wish for--quite sure if I guide myself by his advice. I--I don't doubt, cousin Richard," said Ada, a little confused, "that you are very fond of me, and I--I don't think you will fall in love with anybody else. But I should like you to consider well about it too, as I should like you to be in all things very happy. You may trust in me, cousin Richard. I am not at all changeable; but I am not unreasonable, and should never blame you. Even cousins may be sorry to part; and in truth I am very, very sorry, Richard, though I know it's for your welfare. I shall always think of you affectionately, and often talk of you with Esther, and--and perhaps you will sometimes think a little of me, cousin Richard. So now," said Ada, going up to him and giving him her trembling hand, "we are only cousins again, Richard--for the time perhaps--and I pray for a blessing on my dear cousin, wherever he goes!" It was strange to me that Richard should not be able to forgive my guardian for entertaining the very same opinion of him which he himself had expressed of himself in much stronger terms to me. But it was certainly the case. I observed with great regret that from this hour he never was as free and open with Mr. Jarndyce as he had been before. He had every reason given him to be so, but he was not; and solely on his side, an estrangement began to arise between them. In the business of preparation and equipment he soon lost himself, and even his grief at parting from Ada, who remained in Hertfordshire while he, Mr. Jarndyce, and I went up to London for a week. He remembered her by fits and starts, even with bursts of tears, and at such times would confide to me the heaviest self-reproaches. But in a few minutes he would recklessly conjure up some undefinable means by which they were both to be made rich and happy for ever, and would become as gay as possible. It was a busy time, and I trotted about with him all day long, buying a variety of things of which he stood in need. Of the things he would have bought if he had been left to his own ways I say nothing. He was perfectly confidential with me, and often talked so sensibly and feelingly about his faults and his vigorous resolutions, and dwelt so much upon the encouragement he derived from these conversations that I could never have been tired if I had tried. There used, in that week, to come backward and forward to our lodging to fence with Richard a person who had formerly been a cavalry soldier; he was a fine bluff-looking man, of a frank free bearing, with whom Richard had practised for some months. I heard so much about him, not only from Richard, but from my guardian too, that I was purposely in the room with my work one morning after breakfast when he came. "Good morning, Mr. George," said my guardian, who happened to be alone with me. "Mr. Carstone will be here directly. Meanwhile, Miss Summerson is very happy to see you, I know. Sit down." He sat down, a little disconcerted by my presence, I thought, and without looking at me, drew his heavy sunburnt hand across and across his upper lip. "You are as punctual as the sun," said Mr. Jarndyce. "Military time, sir," he replied. "Force of habit. A mere habit in me, sir. I am not at all business-like." "Yet you have a large establishment, too, I am told?" said Mr. Jarndyce. "Not much of a one, sir. I keep a shooting gallery, but not much of a one." "And what kind of a shot and what kind of a swordsman do you make of Mr. Carstone?" said my guardian. "Pretty good, sir," he replied, folding his arms upon his broad chest and looking very large. "If Mr. Carstone was to give his full mind to it, he would come out very good." "But he don't, I suppose?" said my guardian. "He did at first, sir, but not afterwards. Not his full mind. Perhaps he has something else upon it--some young lady, perhaps." His bright dark eyes glanced at me for the first time. "He has not me upon his mind, I assure you, Mr. George," said I, laughing, "though you seem to suspect me." He reddened a little through his brown and made me a trooper's bow. "No offence, I hope, miss. I am one of the roughs." "Not at all," said I. "I take it as a compliment." If he had not looked at me before, he looked at me now in three or four quick successive glances. "I beg your pardon, sir," he said to my guardian with a manly kind of diffidence, "but you did me the honour to mention the young lady's name--" "Miss Summerson." "Miss Summerson," he repeated, and looked at me again. "Do you know the name?" I asked. "No, miss. To my knowledge I never heard it. I thought I had seen you somewhere." "I think not," I returned, raising my head from my work to look at him; and there was something so genuine in his speech and manner that I was glad of the opportunity. "I remember faces very well." "So do I, miss!" he returned, meeting my look with the fullness of his dark eyes and broad forehead. "Humph! What set me off, now, upon that!" His once more reddening through his brown and being disconcerted by his efforts to remember the association brought my guardian to his relief. "Have you many pupils, Mr. George?" "They vary in their number, sir. Mostly they're but a small lot to live by." "And what classes of chance people come to practise at your gallery?" "All sorts, sir. Natives and foreigners. From gentlemen to 'prentices. I have had Frenchwomen come, before now, and show themselves dabs at pistol-shooting. Mad people out of number, of course, but THEY go everywhere where the doors stand open." "People don't come with grudges and schemes of finishing their practice with live targets, I hope?" said my guardian, smiling. "Not much of that, sir, though that HAS happened. Mostly they come for skill--or idleness. Six of one, and half-a-dozen of the other. I beg your pardon," said Mr. George, sitting stiffly upright and squaring an elbow on each knee, "but I believe you're a Chancery suitor, if I have heard correct?" "I am sorry to say I am." "I have had one of YOUR compatriots in my time, sir." "A Chancery suitor?" returned my guardian. "How was that?" "Why, the man was so badgered and worried and tortured by being knocked about from post to pillar, and from pillar to post," said Mr. George, "that he got out of sorts. I don't believe he had any idea of taking aim at anybody, but he was in that condition of resentment and violence that he would come and pay for fifty shots and fire away till he was red hot. One day I said to him when there was nobody by and he had been talking to me angrily about his wrongs, 'If this practice is a safety-valve, comrade, well and good; but I don't altogether like your being so bent upon it in your present state of mind; I'd rather you took to something else.' I was on my guard for a blow, he was that passionate; but he received it in very good part and left off directly. We shook hands and struck up a sort of friendship." "What was that man?" asked my guardian in a new tone of interest. "Why, he began by being a small Shropshire farmer before they made a baited bull of him," said Mr. George. "Was his name Gridley?" "It was, sir." Mr. George directed another succession of quick bright glances at me as my guardian and I exchanged a word or two of surprise at the coincidence, and I therefore explained to him how we knew the name. He made me another of his soldierly bows in acknowledgment of what he called my condescension. "I don't know," he said as he looked at me, "what it is that sets me off again--but--bosh! What's my head running against!" He passed one of his heavy hands over his crisp dark hair as if to sweep the broken thoughts out of his mind and sat a little forward, with one arm akimbo and the other resting on his leg, looking in a brown study at the ground. "I am sorry to learn that the same state of mind has got this Gridley into new troubles and that he is in hiding," said my guardian. "So I am told, sir," returned Mr. George, still musing and looking on the ground. "So I am told." "You don't know where?" "No, sir," returned the trooper, lifting up his eyes and coming out of his reverie. "I can't say anything about him. He will be worn out soon, I expect. You may file a strong man's heart away for a good many years, but it will tell all of a sudden at last." Richard's entrance stopped the conversation. Mr. George rose, made me another of his soldierly bows, wished my guardian a good day, and strode heavily out of the room. This was the morning of the day appointed for Richard's departure. We had no more purchases to make now; I had completed all his packing early in the afternoon; and our time was disengaged until night, when he was to go to Liverpool for Holyhead. Jarndyce and Jarndyce being again expected to come on that day, Richard proposed to me that we should go down to the court and hear what passed. As it was his last day, and he was eager to go, and I had never been there, I gave my consent and we walked down to Westminster, where the court was then sitting. We beguiled the way with arrangements concerning the letters that Richard was to write to me and the letters that I was to write to him and with a great many hopeful projects. My guardian knew where we were going and therefore was not with us. When we came to the court, there was the Lord Chancellor--the same whom I had seen in his private room in Lincoln's Inn--sitting in great state and gravity on the bench, with the mace and seals on a red table below him and an immense flat nosegay, like a little garden, which scented the whole court. Below the table, again, was a long row of solicitors, with bundles of papers on the matting at their feet; and then there were the gentlemen of the bar in wigs and gowns--some awake and some asleep, and one talking, and nobody paying much attention to what he said. The Lord Chancellor leaned back in his very easy chair with his elbow on the cushioned arm and his forehead resting on his hand; some of those who were present dozed; some read the newspapers; some walked about or whispered in groups: all seemed perfectly at their ease, by no means in a hurry, very unconcerned, and extremely comfortable. To see everything going on so smoothly and to think of the roughness of the suitors' lives and deaths; to see all that full dress and ceremony and to think of the waste, and want, and beggared misery it represented; to consider that while the sickness of hope deferred was raging in so many hearts this polite show went calmly on from day to day, and year to year, in such good order and composure; to behold the Lord Chancellor and the whole array of practitioners under him looking at one another and at the spectators as if nobody had ever heard that all over England the name in which they were assembled was a bitter jest, was held in universal horror, contempt, and indignation, was known for something so flagrant and bad that little short of a miracle could bring any good out of it to any one--this was so curious and self-contradictory to me, who had no experience of it, that it was at first incredible, and I could not comprehend it. I sat where Richard put me, and tried to listen, and looked about me; but there seemed to be no reality in the whole scene except poor little Miss Flite, the madwoman, standing on a bench and nodding at it. Miss Flite soon espied us and came to where we sat. She gave me a gracious welcome to her domain and indicated, with much gratification and pride, its principal attractions. Mr. Kenge also came to speak to us and did the honours of the place in much the same way, with the bland modesty of a proprietor. It was not a very good day for a visit, he said; he would have preferred the first day of term; but it was imposing, it was imposing. When we had been there half an hour or so, the case in progress--if I may use a phrase so ridiculous in such a connexion--seemed to die out of its own vapidity, without coming, or being by anybody expected to come, to any result. The Lord Chancellor then threw down a bundle of papers from his desk to the gentlemen below him, and somebody said, "Jarndyce and Jarndyce." Upon this there was a buzz, and a laugh, and a general withdrawal of the bystanders, and a bringing in of great heaps, and piles, and bags and bags full of papers. I think it came on "for further directions"--about some bill of costs, to the best of my understanding, which was confused enough. But I counted twenty-three gentlemen in wigs who said they were "in it," and none of them appeared to understand it much better than I. They chatted about it with the Lord Chancellor, and contradicted and explained among themselves, and some of them said it was this way, and some of them said it was that way, and some of them jocosely proposed to read huge volumes of affidavits, and there was more buzzing and laughing, and everybody concerned was in a state of idle entertainment, and nothing could be made of it by anybody. After an hour or so of this, and a good many speeches being begun and cut short, it was "referred back for the present," as Mr. Kenge said, and the papers were bundled up again before the clerks had finished bringing them in. I glanced at Richard on the termination of these hopeless proceedings and was shocked to see the worn look of his handsome young face. "It can't last for ever, Dame Durden. Better luck next time!" was all he said. I had seen Mr. Guppy bringing in papers and arranging them for Mr. Kenge; and he had seen me and made me a forlorn bow, which rendered me desirous to get out of the court. Richard had given me his arm and was taking me away when Mr. Guppy came up. "I beg your pardon, Mr. Carstone," said he in a whisper, "and Miss Summerson's also, but there's a lady here, a friend of mine, who knows her and wishes to have the pleasure of shaking hands." As he spoke, I saw before me, as if she had started into bodily shape from my remembrance, Mrs. Rachael of my godmother's house. "How do you do, Esther?" said she. "Do you recollect me?" I gave her my hand and told her yes and that she was very little altered. "I wonder you remember those times, Esther," she returned with her old asperity. "They are changed now. Well! I am glad to see you, and glad you are not too proud to know me." But indeed she seemed disappointed that I was not. "Proud, Mrs. Rachael!" I remonstrated. "I am married, Esther," she returned, coldly correcting me, "and am Mrs. Chadband. Well! I wish you good day, and I hope you'll do well." Mr. Guppy, who had been attentive to this short dialogue, heaved a sigh in my ear and elbowed his own and Mrs. Rachael's way through the confused little crowd of people coming in and going out, which we were in the midst of and which the change in the business had brought together. Richard and I were making our way through it, and I was yet in the first chill of the late unexpected recognition when I saw, coming towards us, but not seeing us, no less a person than Mr. George. He made nothing of the people about him as he tramped on, staring over their heads into the body of the court. "George!" said Richard as I called his attention to him. "You are well met, sir," he returned. "And you, miss. Could you point a person out for me, I want? I don't understand these places." Turning as he spoke and making an easy way for us, he stopped when we were out of the press in a corner behind a great red curtain. "There's a little cracked old woman," he began, "that--" I put up my finger, for Miss Flite was close by me, having kept beside me all the time and having called the attention of several of her legal acquaintance to me (as I had overheard to my confusion) by whispering in their ears, "Hush! Fitz Jarndyce on my left!" "Hem!" said Mr. George. "You remember, miss, that we passed some conversation on a certain man this morning? Gridley," in a low whisper behind his hand. "Yes," said I. "He is hiding at my place. I couldn't mention it. Hadn't his authority. He is on his last march, miss, and has a whim to see her. He says they can feel for one another, and she has been almost as good as a friend to him here. I came down to look for her, for when I sat by Gridley this afternoon, I seemed to hear the roll of the muffled drums." "Shall I tell her?" said I. "Would you be so good?" he returned with a glance of something like apprehension at Miss Flite. "It's a providence I met you, miss; I doubt if I should have known how to get on with that lady." And he put one hand in his breast and stood upright in a martial attitude as I informed little Miss Flite, in her ear, of the purport of his kind errand. "My angry friend from Shropshire! Almost as celebrated as myself!" she exclaimed. "Now really! My dear, I will wait upon him with the greatest pleasure." "He is living concealed at Mr. George's," said I. "Hush! This is Mr. George." "In--deed!" returned Miss Flite. "Very proud to have the honour! A military man, my dear. You know, a perfect general!" she whispered to me. Poor Miss Flite deemed it necessary to be so courtly and polite, as a mark of her respect for the army, and to curtsy so very often that it was no easy matter to get her out of the court. When this was at last done, and addressing Mr. George as "General," she gave him her arm, to the great entertainment of some idlers who were looking on, he was so discomposed and begged me so respectfully "not to desert him" that I could not make up my mind to do it, especially as Miss Flite was always tractable with me and as she too said, "Fitz Jarndyce, my dear, you will accompany us, of course." As Richard seemed quite willing, and even anxious, that we should see them safely to their destination, we agreed to do so. And as Mr. George informed us that Gridley's mind had run on Mr. Jarndyce all the afternoon after hearing of their interview in the morning, I wrote a hasty note in pencil to my guardian to say where we were gone and why. Mr. George sealed it at a coffee-house, that it might lead to no discovery, and we sent it off by a ticket-porter. We then took a hackney-coach and drove away to the neighbourhood of Leicester Square. We walked through some narrow courts, for which Mr. George apologized, and soon came to the shooting gallery, the door of which was closed. As he pulled a bell-handle which hung by a chain to the door-post, a very respectable old gentleman with grey hair, wearing spectacles, and dressed in a black spencer and gaiters and a broad-brimmed hat, and carrying a large gold-beaded cane, addressed him. "I ask your pardon, my good friend," said he, "but is this George's Shooting Gallery?" "It is, sir," returned Mr. George, glancing up at the great letters in which that inscription was painted on the whitewashed wall. "Oh! To be sure!" said the old gentleman, following his eyes. "Thank you. Have you rung the bell?" "My name is George, sir, and I have rung the bell." "Oh, indeed?" said the old gentleman. "Your name is George? Then I am here as soon as you, you see. You came for me, no doubt?" "No, sir. You have the advantage of me." "Oh, indeed?" said the old gentleman. "Then it was your young man who came for me. I am a physician and was requested--five minutes ago--to come and visit a sick man at George's Shooting Gallery." "The muffled drums," said Mr. George, turning to Richard and me and gravely shaking his head. "It's quite correct, sir. Will you please to walk in." The door being at that moment opened by a very singular-looking little man in a green-baize cap and apron, whose face and hands and dress were blackened all over, we passed along a dreary passage into a large building with bare brick walls where there were targets, and guns, and swords, and other things of that kind. When we had all arrived here, the physician stopped, and taking off his hat, appeared to vanish by magic and to leave another and quite a different man in his place. "Now lookee here, George," said the man, turning quickly round upon him and tapping him on the breast with a large forefinger. "You know me, and I know you. You're a man of the world, and I'm a man of the world. My name's Bucket, as you are aware, and I have got a peace-warrant against Gridley. You have kept him out of the way a long time, and you have been artful in it, and it does you credit." Mr. George, looking hard at him, bit his lip and shook his head. "Now, George," said the other, keeping close to him, "you're a sensible man and a well-conducted man; that's what YOU are, beyond a doubt. And mind you, I don't talk to you as a common character, because you have served your country and you know that when duty calls we must obey. Consequently you're very far from wanting to give trouble. If I required assistance, you'd assist me; that's what YOU'D do. Phil Squod, don't you go a-sidling round the gallery like that"--the dirty little man was shuffling about with his shoulder against the wall, and his eyes on the intruder, in a manner that looked threatening--"because I know you and won't have it." "Phil!" said Mr. George. "Yes, guv'ner." "Be quiet." The little man, with a low growl, stood still. "Ladies and gentlemen," said Mr. Bucket, "you'll excuse anything that may appear to be disagreeable in this, for my name's Inspector Bucket of the Detective, and I have a duty to perform. George, I know where my man is because I was on the roof last night and saw him through the skylight, and you along with him. He is in there, you know," pointing; "that's where HE is--on a sofy. Now I must see my man, and I must tell my man to consider himself in custody; but you know me, and you know I don't want to take any uncomfortable measures. You give me your word, as from one man to another (and an old soldier, mind you, likewise), that it's honourable between us two, and I'll accommodate you to the utmost of my power." "I give it," was the reply. "But it wasn't handsome in you, Mr. Bucket." "Gammon, George! Not handsome?" said Mr. Bucket, tapping him on his broad breast again and shaking hands with him. "I don't say it wasn't handsome in you to keep my man so close, do I? Be equally good-tempered to me, old boy! Old William Tell, Old Shaw, the Life Guardsman! Why, he's a model of the whole British army in himself, ladies and gentlemen. I'd give a fifty-pun' note to be such a figure of a man!" The affair being brought to this head, Mr. George, after a little consideration, proposed to go in first to his comrade (as he called him), taking Miss Flite with him. Mr. Bucket agreeing, they went away to the further end of the gallery, leaving us sitting and standing by a table covered with guns. Mr. Bucket took this opportunity of entering into a little light conversation, asking me if I were afraid of fire-arms, as most young ladies were; asking Richard if he were a good shot; asking Phil Squod which he considered the best of those rifles and what it might be worth first-hand, telling him in return that it was a pity he ever gave way to his temper, for he was naturally so amiable that he might have been a young woman, and making himself generally agreeable. After a time he followed us to the further end of the gallery, and Richard and I were going quietly away when Mr. George came after us. He said that if we had no objection to see his comrade, he would take a visit from us very kindly. The words had hardly passed his lips when the bell was rung and my guardian appeared, "on the chance," he slightly observed, "of being able to do any little thing for a poor fellow involved in the same misfortune as himself." We all four went back together and went into the place where Gridley was. It was a bare room, partitioned off from the gallery with unpainted wood. As the screening was not more than eight or ten feet high and only enclosed the sides, not the top, the rafters of the high gallery roof were overhead, and the skylight through which Mr. Bucket had looked down. The sun was low--near setting--and its light came redly in above, without descending to the ground. Upon a plain canvas-covered sofa lay the man from Shropshire, dressed much as we had seen him last, but so changed that at first I recognized no likeness in his colourless face to what I recollected. He had been still writing in his hiding-place, and still dwelling on his grievances, hour after hour. A table and some shelves were covered with manuscript papers and with worn pens and a medley of such tokens. Touchingly and awfully drawn together, he and the little mad woman were side by side and, as it were, alone. She sat on a chair holding his hand, and none of us went close to them. His voice had faded, with the old expression of his face, with his strength, with his anger, with his resistance to the wrongs that had at last subdued him. The faintest shadow of an object full of form and colour is such a picture of it as he was of the man from Shropshire whom we had spoken with before. He inclined his head to Richard and me and spoke to my guardian. "Mr. Jarndyce, it is very kind of you to come to see me. I am not long to be seen, I think. I am very glad to take your hand, sir. You are a good man, superior to injustice, and God knows I honour you." They shook hands earnestly, and my guardian said some words of comfort to him. "It may seem strange to you, sir," returned Gridley; "I should not have liked to see you if this had been the first time of our meeting. But you know I made a fight for it, you know I stood up with my single hand against them all, you know I told them the truth to the last, and told them what they were, and what they had done to me; so I don't mind your seeing me, this wreck." "You have been courageous with them many and many a time," returned my guardian. "Sir, I have been," with a faint smile. "I told you what would come of it when I ceased to be so, and see here! Look at us--look at us!" He drew the hand Miss Flite held through her arm and brought her something nearer to him. "This ends it. Of all my old associations, of all my old pursuits and hopes, of all the living and the dead world, this one poor soul alone comes natural to me, and I am fit for. There is a tie of many suffering years between us two, and it is the only tie I ever had on earth that Chancery has not broken." "Accept my blessing, Gridley," said Miss Flite in tears. "Accept my blessing!" "I thought, boastfully, that they never could break my heart, Mr. Jarndyce. I was resolved that they should not. I did believe that I could, and would, charge them with being the mockery they were until I died of some bodily disorder. But I am worn out. How long I have been wearing out, I don't know; I seemed to break down in an hour. I hope they may never come to hear of it. I hope everybody here will lead them to believe that I died defying them, consistently and perseveringly, as I did through so many years." Here Mr. Bucket, who was sitting in a corner by the door, good-naturedly offered such consolation as he could administer. "Come, come!" he said from his corner. "Don't go on in that way, Mr. Gridley. You are only a little low. We are all of us a little low sometimes. I am. Hold up, hold up! You'll lose your temper with the whole round of 'em, again and again; and I shall take you on a score of warrants yet, if I have luck." He only shook his head. "Don't shake your head," said Mr. Bucket. "Nod it; that's what I want to see you do. Why, Lord bless your soul, what times we have had together! Haven't I seen you in the Fleet over and over again for contempt? Haven't I come into court, twenty afternoons for no other purpose than to see you pin the Chancellor like a bull-dog? Don't you remember when you first began to threaten the lawyers, and the peace was sworn against you two or three times a week? Ask the little old lady there; she has been always present. Hold up, Mr. Gridley, hold up, sir!" "What are you going to do about him?" asked George in a low voice. "I don't know yet," said Bucket in the same tone. Then resuming his encouragement, he pursued aloud: "Worn out, Mr. Gridley? After dodging me for all these weeks and forcing me to climb the roof here like a tom cat and to come to see you as a doctor? That ain't like being worn out. I should think not! Now I tell you what you want. You want excitement, you know, to keep YOU up; that's what YOU want. You're used to it, and you can't do without it. I couldn't myself. Very well, then; here's this warrant got by Mr. Tulkinghorn of Lincoln's Inn Fields, and backed into half-a-dozen counties since. What do you say to coming along with me, upon this warrant, and having a good angry argument before the magistrates? It'll do you good; it'll freshen you up and get you into training for another turn at the Chancellor. Give in? Why, I am surprised to hear a man of your energy talk of giving in. You mustn't do that. You're half the fun of the fair in the Court of Chancery. George, you lend Mr. Gridley a hand, and let's see now whether he won't be better up than down." "He is very weak," said the trooper in a low voice. "Is he?" returned Bucket anxiously. "I only want to rouse him. I don't like to see an old acquaintance giving in like this. It would cheer him up more than anything if I could make him a little waxy with me. He's welcome to drop into me, right and left, if he likes. I shall never take advantage of it." The roof rang with a scream from Miss Flite, which still rings in my ears. "Oh, no, Gridley!" she cried as he fell heavily and calmly back from before her. "Not without my blessing. After so many years!" The sun was down, the light had gradually stolen from the roof, and the shadow had crept upward. But to me the shadow of that pair, one living and one dead, fell heavier on Richard's departure than the darkness of the darkest night. And through Richard's farewell words I heard it echoed: "Of all my old associations, of all my old pursuits and hopes, of all the living and the dead world, this one poor soul alone comes natural to me, and I am fit for. There is a tie of many suffering years between us two, and it is the only tie I ever had on earth that Chancery has not broken!" CHAPTER XXV Mrs. Snagsby Sees It All There is disquietude in Cook's Court, Cursitor Street. Black suspicion hides in that peaceful region. The mass of Cook's Courtiers are in their usual state of mind, no better and no worse; but Mr. Snagsby is changed, and his little woman knows it. For Tom-all-Alone's and Lincoln's Inn Fields persist in harnessing themselves, a pair of ungovernable coursers, to the chariot of Mr. Snagsby's imagination; and Mr. Bucket drives; and the passengers are Jo and Mr. Tulkinghorn; and the complete equipage whirls though the law-stationery business at wild speed all round the clock. Even in the little front kitchen where the family meals are taken, it rattles away at a smoking pace from the dinner-table, when Mr. Snagsby pauses in carving the first slice of the leg of mutton baked with potatoes and stares at the kitchen wall. Mr. Snagsby cannot make out what it is that he has had to do with. Something is wrong somewhere, but what something, what may come of it, to whom, when, and from which unthought of and unheard of quarter is the puzzle of his life. His remote impressions of the robes and coronets, the stars and garters, that sparkle through the surface-dust of Mr. Tulkinghorn's chambers; his veneration for the mysteries presided over by that best and closest of his customers, whom all the Inns of Court, all Chancery Lane, and all the legal neighbourhood agree to hold in awe; his remembrance of Detective Mr. Bucket with his forefinger and his confidential manner, impossible to be evaded or declined, persuade him that he is a party to some dangerous secret without knowing what it is. And it is the fearful peculiarity of this condition that, at any hour of his daily life, at any opening of the shop-door, at any pull of the bell, at any entrance of a messenger, or any delivery of a letter, the secret may take air and fire, explode, and blow up--Mr. Bucket only knows whom. For which reason, whenever a man unknown comes into the shop (as many men unknown do) and says, "Is Mr. Snagsby in?" or words to that innocent effect, Mr. Snagsby's heart knocks hard at his guilty breast. He undergoes so much from such inquiries that when they are made by boys he revenges himself by flipping at their ears over the counter and asking the young dogs what they mean by it and why they can't speak out at once? More impracticable men and boys persist in walking into Mr. Snagsby's sleep and terrifying him with unaccountable questions, so that often when the cock at the little dairy in Cursitor Street breaks out in his usual absurd way about the morning, Mr. Snagsby finds himself in a crisis of nightmare, with his little woman shaking him and saying "What's the matter with the man!" The little woman herself is not the least item in his difficulty. To know that he is always keeping a secret from her, that he has under all circumstances to conceal and hold fast a tender double tooth, which her sharpness is ever ready to twist out of his head, gives Mr. Snagsby, in her dentistical presence, much of the air of a dog who has a reservation from his master and will look anywhere rather than meet his eye. These various signs and tokens, marked by the little woman, are not lost upon her. They impel her to say, "Snagsby has something on his mind!" And thus suspicion gets into Cook's Court, Cursitor Street. From suspicion to jealousy, Mrs. Snagsby finds the road as natural and short as from Cook's Court to Chancery Lane. And thus jealousy gets into Cook's Court, Cursitor Street. Once there (and it was always lurking thereabout), it is very active and nimble in Mrs. Snagsby's breast, prompting her to nocturnal examinations of Mr. Snagsby's pockets; to secret perusals of Mr. Snagsby's letters; to private researches in the day book and ledger, till, cash-box, and iron safe; to watchings at windows, listenings behind doors, and a general putting of this and that together by the wrong end. Mrs. Snagsby is so perpetually on the alert that the house becomes ghostly with creaking boards and rustling garments. The 'prentices think somebody may have been murdered there in bygone times. Guster holds certain loose atoms of an idea (picked up at Tooting, where they were found floating among the orphans) that there is buried money underneath the cellar, guarded by an old man with a white beard, who cannot get out for seven thousand years because he said the Lord's Prayer backwards. "Who was Nimrod?" Mrs. Snagsby repeatedly inquires of herself. "Who was that lady--that creature? And who is that boy?" Now, Nimrod being as dead as the mighty hunter whose name Mrs. Snagsby has appropriated, and the lady being unproducible, she directs her mental eye, for the present, with redoubled vigilance to the boy. "And who," quoth Mrs. Snagsby for the thousand and first time, "is that boy? Who is that--!" And there Mrs. Snagsby is seized with an inspiration. He has no respect for Mr. Chadband. No, to be sure, and he wouldn't have, of course. Naturally he wouldn't, under those contagious circumstances. He was invited and appointed by Mr. Chadband--why, Mrs. Snagsby heard it herself with her own ears!--to come back, and be told where he was to go, to be addressed by Mr. Chadband; and he never came! Why did he never come? Because he was told not to come. Who told him not to come? Who? Ha, ha! Mrs. Snagsby sees it all. But happily (and Mrs. Snagsby tightly shakes her head and tightly smiles) that boy was met by Mr. Chadband yesterday in the streets; and that boy, as affording a subject which Mr. Chadband desires to improve for the spiritual delight of a select congregation, was seized by Mr. Chadband and threatened with being delivered over to the police unless he showed the reverend gentleman where he lived and unless he entered into, and fulfilled, an undertaking to appear in Cook's Court to-morrow night, "to--mor--row--night," Mrs. Snagsby repeats for mere emphasis with another tight smile and another tight shake of her head; and to-morrow night that boy will be here, and to-morrow night Mrs. Snagsby will have her eye upon him and upon some one else; and oh, you may walk a long while in your secret ways (says Mrs. Snagsby with haughtiness and scorn), but you can't blind ME! Mrs. Snagsby sounds no timbrel in anybody's ears, but holds her purpose quietly, and keeps her counsel. To-morrow comes, the savoury preparations for the Oil Trade come, the evening comes. Comes Mr. Snagsby in his black coat; come the Chadbands; come (when the gorging vessel is replete) the 'prentices and Guster, to be edified; comes at last, with his slouching head, and his shuffle backward, and his shuffle forward, and his shuffle to the right, and his shuffle to the left, and his bit of fur cap in his muddy hand, which he picks as if it were some mangy bird he had caught and was plucking before eating raw, Jo, the very, very tough subject Mr. Chadband is to improve. Mrs. Snagsby screws a watchful glance on Jo as he is brought into the little drawing-room by Guster. He looks at Mr. Snagsby the moment he comes in. Aha! Why does he look at Mr. Snagsby? Mr. Snagsby looks at him. Why should he do that, but that Mrs. Snagsby sees it all? Why else should that look pass between them, why else should Mr. Snagsby be confused and cough a signal cough behind his hand? It is as clear as crystal that Mr. Snagsby is that boy's father. "Peace, my friends," says Chadband, rising and wiping the oily exudations from his reverend visage. "Peace be with us! My friends, why with us? Because," with his fat smile, "it cannot be against us, because it must be for us; because it is not hardening, because it is softening; because it does not make war like the hawk, but comes home unto us like the dove. Therefore, my friends, peace be with us! My human boy, come forward!" Stretching forth his flabby paw, Mr. Chadband lays the same on Jo's arm and considers where to station him. Jo, very doubtful of his reverend friend's intentions and not at all clear but that something practical and painful is going to be done to him, mutters, "You let me alone. I never said nothink to you. You let me alone." "No, my young friend," says Chadband smoothly, "I will not let you alone. And why? Because I am a harvest-labourer, because I am a toiler and a moiler, because you are delivered over unto me and are become as a precious instrument in my hands. My friends, may I so employ this instrument as to use it to your advantage, to your profit, to your gain, to your welfare, to your enrichment! My young friend, sit upon this stool." Jo, apparently possessed by an impression that the reverend gentleman wants to cut his hair, shields his head with both arms and is got into the required position with great difficulty and every possible manifestation of reluctance. When he is at last adjusted like a lay-figure, Mr. Chadband, retiring behind the table, holds up his bear's-paw and says, "My friends!" This is the signal for a general settlement of the audience. The 'prentices giggle internally and nudge each other. Guster falls into a staring and vacant state, compounded of a stunned admiration of Mr. Chadband and pity for the friendless outcast whose condition touches her nearly. Mrs. Snagsby silently lays trains of gunpowder. Mrs. Chadband composes herself grimly by the fire and warms her knees, finding that sensation favourable to the reception of eloquence. It happens that Mr. Chadband has a pulpit habit of fixing some member of his congregation with his eye and fatly arguing his points with that particular person, who is understood to be expected to be moved to an occasional grunt, groan, gasp, or other audible expression of inward working, which expression of inward working, being echoed by some elderly lady in the next pew and so communicated like a game of forfeits through a circle of the more fermentable sinners present, serves the purpose of parliamentary cheering and gets Mr. Chadband's steam up. From mere force of habit, Mr. Chadband in saying "My friends!" has rested his eye on Mr. Snagsby and proceeds to make that ill-starred stationer, already sufficiently confused, the immediate recipient of his discourse. "We have here among us, my friends," says Chadband, "a Gentile and a heathen, a dweller in the tents of Tom-all-Alone's and a mover-on upon the surface of the earth. We have here among us, my friends," and Mr. Chadband, untwisting the point with his dirty thumb-nail, bestows an oily smile on Mr. Snagsby, signifying that he will throw him an argumentative back-fall presently if he be not already down, "a brother and a boy. Devoid of parents, devoid of relations, devoid of flocks and herds, devoid of gold and silver and of precious stones. Now, my friends, why do I say he is devoid of these possessions? Why? Why is he?" Mr. Chadband states the question as if he were propounding an entirely new riddle of much ingenuity and merit to Mr. Snagsby and entreating him not to give it up. Mr. Snagsby, greatly perplexed by the mysterious look he received just now from his little woman--at about the period when Mr. Chadband mentioned the word parents--is tempted into modestly remarking, "I don't know, I'm sure, sir." On which interruption Mrs. Chadband glares and Mrs. Snagsby says, "For shame!" "I hear a voice," says Chadband; "is it a still small voice, my friends? I fear not, though I fain would hope so--" "Ah--h!" from Mrs. Snagsby. "Which says, 'I don't know.' Then I will tell you why. I say this brother present here among us is devoid of parents, devoid of relations, devoid of flocks and herds, devoid of gold, of silver, and of precious stones because he is devoid of the light that shines in upon some of us. What is that light? What is it? I ask you, what is that light?" Mr. Chadband draws back his head and pauses, but Mr. Snagsby is not to be lured on to his destruction again. Mr. Chadband, leaning forward over the table, pierces what he has got to follow directly into Mr. Snagsby with the thumb-nail already mentioned. "It is," says Chadband, "the ray of rays, the sun of suns, the moon of moons, the star of stars. It is the light of Terewth." Mr. Chadband draws himself up again and looks triumphantly at Mr. Snagsby as if he would be glad to know how he feels after that. "Of Terewth," says Mr. Chadband, hitting him again. "Say not to me that it is NOT the lamp of lamps. I say to you it is. I say to you, a million of times over, it is. It is! I say to you that I will proclaim it to you, whether you like it or not; nay, that the less you like it, the more I will proclaim it to you. With a speaking-trumpet! I say to you that if you rear yourself against it, you shall fall, you shall be bruised, you shall be battered, you shall be flawed, you shall be smashed." The present effect of this flight of oratory--much admired for its general power by Mr. Chadband's followers--being not only to make Mr. Chadband unpleasantly warm, but to represent the innocent Mr. Snagsby in the light of a determined enemy to virtue, with a forehead of brass and a heart of adamant, that unfortunate tradesman becomes yet more disconcerted and is in a very advanced state of low spirits and false position when Mr. Chadband accidentally finishes him. "My friends," he resumes after dabbing his fat head for some time--and it smokes to such an extent that he seems to light his pocket-handkerchief at it, which smokes, too, after every dab--"to pursue the subject we are endeavouring with our lowly gifts to improve, let us in a spirit of love inquire what is that Terewth to which I have alluded. For, my young friends," suddenly addressing the 'prentices and Guster, to their consternation, "if I am told by the doctor that calomel or castor-oil is good for me, I may naturally ask what is calomel, and what is castor-oil. I may wish to be informed of that before I dose myself with either or with both. Now, my young friends, what is this Terewth then? Firstly (in a spirit of love), what is the common sort of Terewth--the working clothes--the every-day wear, my young friends? Is it deception?" "Ah--h!" from Mrs. Snagsby. "Is it suppression?" A shiver in the negative from Mrs. Snagsby. "Is it reservation?" A shake of the head from Mrs. Snagsby--very long and very tight. "No, my friends, it is neither of these. Neither of these names belongs to it. When this young heathen now among us--who is now, my friends, asleep, the seal of indifference and perdition being set upon his eyelids; but do not wake him, for it is right that I should have to wrestle, and to combat and to struggle, and to conquer, for his sake--when this young hardened heathen told us a story of a cock, and of a bull, and of a lady, and of a sovereign, was THAT the Terewth? No. Or if it was partly, was it wholly and entirely? No, my friends, no!" If Mr. Snagsby could withstand his little woman's look as it enters at his eyes, the windows of his soul, and searches the whole tenement, he were other than the man he is. He cowers and droops. "Or, my juvenile friends," says Chadband, descending to the level of their comprehension with a very obtrusive demonstration in his greasily meek smile of coming a long way downstairs for the purpose, "if the master of this house was to go forth into the city and there see an eel, and was to come back, and was to call unto him the mistress of this house, and was to say, 'Sarah, rejoice with me, for I have seen an elephant!' would THAT be Terewth?" Mrs. Snagsby in tears. "Or put it, my juvenile friends, that he saw an elephant, and returning said 'Lo, the city is barren, I have seen but an eel,' would THAT be Terewth?" Mrs. Snagsby sobbing loudly. "Or put it, my juvenile friends," said Chadband, stimulated by the sound, "that the unnatural parents of this slumbering heathen--for parents he had, my juvenile friends, beyond a doubt--after casting him forth to the wolves and the vultures, and the wild dogs and the young gazelles, and the serpents, went back to their dwellings and had their pipes, and their pots, and their flutings and their dancings, and their malt liquors, and their butcher's meat and poultry, would THAT be Terewth?" Mrs. Snagsby replies by delivering herself a prey to spasms, not an unresisting prey, but a crying and a tearing one, so that Cook's Court re-echoes with her shrieks. Finally, becoming cataleptic, she has to be carried up the narrow staircase like a grand piano. After unspeakable suffering, productive of the utmost consternation, she is pronounced, by expresses from the bedroom, free from pain, though much exhausted, in which state of affairs Mr. Snagsby, trampled and crushed in the piano-forte removal, and extremely timid and feeble, ventures to come out from behind the door in the drawing-room. All this time Jo has been standing on the spot where he woke up, ever picking his cap and putting bits of fur in his mouth. He spits them out with a remorseful air, for he feels that it is in his nature to be an unimprovable reprobate and that it's no good HIS trying to keep awake, for HE won't never know nothink. Though it may be, Jo, that there is a history so interesting and affecting even to minds as near the brutes as thine, recording deeds done on this earth for common men, that if the Chadbands, removing their own persons from the light, would but show it thee in simple reverence, would but leave it unimproved, would but regard it as being eloquent enough without their modest aid--it might hold thee awake, and thou might learn from it yet! Jo never heard of any such book. Its compilers and the Reverend Chadband are all one to him, except that he knows the Reverend Chadband and would rather run away from him for an hour than hear him talk for five minutes. "It an't no good my waiting here no longer," thinks Jo. "Mr. Snagsby an't a-going to say nothink to me to-night." And downstairs he shuffles. But downstairs is the charitable Guster, holding by the handrail of the kitchen stairs and warding off a fit, as yet doubtfully, the same having been induced by Mrs. Snagsby's screaming. She has her own supper of bread and cheese to hand to Jo, with whom she ventures to interchange a word or so for the first time. "Here's something to eat, poor boy," says Guster. "Thank'ee, mum," says Jo. "Are you hungry?" "Jist!" says Jo. "What's gone of your father and your mother, eh?" Jo stops in the middle of a bite and looks petrified. For this orphan charge of the Christian saint whose shrine was at Tooting has patted him on the shoulder, and it is the first time in his life that any decent hand has been so laid upon him. "I never know'd nothink about 'em," says Jo. "No more didn't I of mine," cries Guster. She is repressing symptoms favourable to the fit when she seems to take alarm at something and vanishes down the stairs. "Jo," whispers the law-stationer softly as the boy lingers on the step. "Here I am, Mr. Snagsby!" "I didn't know you were gone--there's another half-crown, Jo. It was quite right of you to say nothing about the lady the other night when we were out together. It would breed trouble. You can't be too quiet, Jo." "I am fly, master!" And so, good night. A ghostly shade, frilled and night-capped, follows the law-stationer to the room he came from and glides higher up. And henceforth he begins, go where he will, to be attended by another shadow than his own, hardly less constant than his own, hardly less quiet than his own. And into whatsoever atmosphere of secrecy his own shadow may pass, let all concerned in the secrecy beware! For the watchful Mrs. Snagsby is there too--bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh, shadow of his shadow. CHAPTER XXVI Sharpshooters Wintry morning, looking with dull eyes and sallow face upon the neighbourhood of Leicester Square, finds its inhabitants unwilling to get out of bed. Many of them are not early risers at the brightest of times, being birds of night who roost when the sun is high and are wide awake and keen for prey when the stars shine out. Behind dingy blind and curtain, in upper story and garret, skulking more or less under false names, false hair, false titles, false jewellery, and false histories, a colony of brigands lie in their first sleep. Gentlemen of the green-baize road who could discourse from personal experience of foreign galleys and home treadmills; spies of strong governments that eternally quake with weakness and miserable fear, broken traitors, cowards, bullies, gamesters, shufflers, swindlers, and false witnesses; some not unmarked by the branding-iron beneath their dirty braid; all with more cruelty in them than was in Nero, and more crime than is in Newgate. For howsoever bad the devil can be in fustian or smock-frock (and he can be very bad in both), he is a more designing, callous, and intolerable devil when he sticks a pin in his shirt-front, calls himself a gentleman, backs a card or colour, plays a game or so of billiards, and knows a little about bills and promissory notes than in any other form he wears. And in such form Mr. Bucket shall find him, when he will, still pervading the tributary channels of Leicester Square. But the wintry morning wants him not and wakes him not. It wakes Mr. George of the shooting gallery and his familiar. They arise, roll up and stow away their mattresses. Mr. George, having shaved himself before a looking-glass of minute proportions, then marches out, bare-headed and bare-chested, to the pump in the little yard and anon comes back shining with yellow soap, friction, drifting rain, and exceedingly cold water. As he rubs himself upon a large jack-towel, blowing like a military sort of diver just come up, his hair curling tighter and tighter on his sunburnt temples the more he rubs it so that it looks as if it never could be loosened by any less coercive instrument than an iron rake or a curry-comb--as he rubs, and puffs, and polishes, and blows, turning his head from side to side the more conveniently to excoriate his throat, and standing with his body well bent forward to keep the wet from his martial legs, Phil, on his knees lighting a fire, looks round as if it were enough washing for him to see all that done, and sufficient renovation for one day to take in the superfluous health his master throws off. When Mr. George is dry, he goes to work to brush his head with two hard brushes at once, to that unmerciful degree that Phil, shouldering his way round the gallery in the act of sweeping it, winks with sympathy. This chafing over, the ornamental part of Mr. George's toilet is soon performed. He fills his pipe, lights it, and marches up and down smoking, as his custom is, while Phil, raising a powerful odour of hot rolls and coffee, prepares breakfast. He smokes gravely and marches in slow time. Perhaps this morning's pipe is devoted to the memory of Gridley in his grave. "And so, Phil," says George of the shooting gallery after several turns in silence, "you were dreaming of the country last night?" Phil, by the by, said as much in a tone of surprise as he scrambled out of bed. "Yes, guv'ner." "What was it like?" "I hardly know what it was like, guv'ner," said Phil, considering. "How did you know it was the country?" "On account of the grass, I think. And the swans upon it," says Phil after further consideration. "What were the swans doing on the grass?" "They was a-eating of it, I expect," says Phil. The master resumes his march, and the man resumes his preparation of breakfast. It is not necessarily a lengthened preparation, being limited to the setting forth of very simple breakfast requisites for two and the broiling of a rasher of bacon at the fire in the rusty grate; but as Phil has to sidle round a considerable part of the gallery for every object he wants, and never brings two objects at once, it takes time under the circumstances. At length the breakfast is ready. Phil announcing it, Mr. George knocks the ashes out of his pipe on the hob, stands his pipe itself in the chimney corner, and sits down to the meal. When he has helped himself, Phil follows suit, sitting at the extreme end of the little oblong table and taking his plate on his knees. Either in humility, or to hide his blackened hands, or because it is his natural manner of eating. "The country," says Mr. George, plying his knife and fork; "why, I suppose you never clapped your eyes on the country, Phil?" "I see the marshes once," says Phil, contentedly eating his breakfast. "What marshes?" "THE marshes, commander," returns Phil. "Where are they?" "I don't know where they are," says Phil; "but I see 'em, guv'ner. They was flat. And miste." Governor and commander are interchangeable terms with Phil, expressive of the same respect and deference and applicable to nobody but Mr. George. "I was born in the country, Phil." "Was you indeed, commander?" "Yes. And bred there." Phil elevates his one eyebrow, and after respectfully staring at his master to express interest, swallows a great gulp of coffee, still staring at him. "There's not a bird's note that I don't know," says Mr. George. "Not many an English leaf or berry that I couldn't name. Not many a tree that I couldn't climb yet if I was put to it. I was a real country boy, once. My good mother lived in the country." "She must have been a fine old lady, guv'ner," Phil observes. "Aye! And not so old either, five and thirty years ago," says Mr. George. "But I'll wager that at ninety she would be near as upright as me, and near as broad across the shoulders." "Did she die at ninety, guv'ner?" inquires Phil. "No. Bosh! Let her rest in peace, God bless her!" says the trooper. "What set me on about country boys, and runaways, and good-for-nothings? You, to be sure! So you never clapped your eyes upon the country--marshes and dreams excepted. Eh?" Phil shakes his head. "Do you want to see it?" "N-no, I don't know as I do, particular," says Phil. "The town's enough for you, eh?" "Why, you see, commander," says Phil, "I ain't acquainted with anythink else, and I doubt if I ain't a-getting too old to take to novelties." "How old ARE you, Phil?" asks the trooper, pausing as he conveys his smoking saucer to his lips. "I'm something with a eight in it," says Phil. "It can't be eighty. Nor yet eighteen. It's betwixt 'em, somewheres." Mr. George, slowly putting down his saucer without tasting its contents, is laughingly beginning, "Why, what the deuce, Phil--" when he stops, seeing that Phil is counting on his dirty fingers. "I was just eight," says Phil, "agreeable to the parish calculation, when I went with the tinker. I was sent on a errand, and I see him a-sittin under a old buildin with a fire all to himself wery comfortable, and he says, 'Would you like to come along a me, my man?' I says 'Yes,' and him and me and the fire goes home to Clerkenwell together. That was April Fool Day. I was able to count up to ten; and when April Fool Day come round again, I says to myself, 'Now, old chap, you're one and a eight in it.' April Fool Day after that, I says, 'Now, old chap, you're two and a eight in it.' In course of time, I come to ten and a eight in it; two tens and a eight in it. When it got so high, it got the upper hand of me, but this is how I always know there's a eight in it." "Ah!" says Mr. George, resuming his breakfast. "And where's the tinker?" "Drink put him in the hospital, guv'ner, and the hospital put him--in a glass-case, I HAVE heerd," Phil replies mysteriously. "By that means you got promotion? Took the business, Phil?" "Yes, commander, I took the business. Such as it was. It wasn't much of a beat--round Saffron Hill, Hatton Garden, Clerkenwell, Smiffeld, and there--poor neighbourhood, where they uses up the kettles till they're past mending. Most of the tramping tinkers used to come and lodge at our place; that was the best part of my master's earnings. But they didn't come to me. I warn't like him. He could sing 'em a good song. I couldn't! He could play 'em a tune on any sort of pot you please, so as it was iron or block tin. I never could do nothing with a pot but mend it or bile it--never had a note of music in me. Besides, I was too ill-looking, and their wives complained of me." "They were mighty particular. You would pass muster in a crowd, Phil!" says the trooper with a pleasant smile. "No, guv'ner," returns Phil, shaking his head. "No, I shouldn't. I was passable enough when I went with the tinker, though nothing to boast of then; but what with blowing the fire with my mouth when I was young, and spileing my complexion, and singeing my hair off, and swallering the smoke, and what with being nat'rally unfort'nate in the way of running against hot metal and marking myself by sich means, and what with having turn-ups with the tinker as I got older, almost whenever he was too far gone in drink--which was almost always--my beauty was queer, wery queer, even at that time. As to since, what with a dozen years in a dark forge where the men was given to larking, and what with being scorched in a accident at a gas-works, and what with being blowed out of winder case-filling at the firework business, I am ugly enough to be made a show on!" Resigning himself to which condition with a perfectly satisfied manner, Phil begs the favour of another cup of coffee. While drinking it, he says, "It was after the case-filling blow-up when I first see you, commander. You remember?" "I remember, Phil. You were walking along in the sun." "Crawling, guv'ner, again a wall--" "True, Phil--shouldering your way on--" "In a night-cap!" exclaims Phil, excited. "In a night-cap--" "And hobbling with a couple of sticks!" cries Phil, still more excited. "With a couple of sticks. When--" "When you stops, you know," cries Phil, putting down his cup and saucer and hastily removing his plate from his knees, "and says to me, 'What, comrade! You have been in the wars!' I didn't say much to you, commander, then, for I was took by surprise that a person so strong and healthy and bold as you was should stop to speak to such a limping bag of bones as I was. But you says to me, says you, delivering it out of your chest as hearty as possible, so that it was like a glass of something hot, 'What accident have you met with? You have been badly hurt. What's amiss, old boy? Cheer up, and tell us about it!' Cheer up! I was cheered already! I says as much to you, you says more to me, I says more to you, you says more to me, and here I am, commander! Here I am, commander!" cries Phil, who has started from his chair and unaccountably begun to sidle away. "If a mark's wanted, or if it will improve the business, let the customers take aim at me. They can't spoil MY beauty. I'M all right. Come on! If they want a man to box at, let 'em box at me. Let 'em knock me well about the head. I don't mind. If they want a light-weight to be throwed for practice, Cornwall, Devonshire, or Lancashire, let 'em throw me. They won't hurt ME. I have been throwed, all sorts of styles, all my life!" With this unexpected speech, energetically delivered and accompanied by action illustrative of the various exercises referred to, Phil Squod shoulders his way round three sides of the gallery, and abruptly tacking off at his commander, makes a butt at him with his head, intended to express devotion to his service. He then begins to clear away the breakfast. Mr. George, after laughing cheerfully and clapping him on the shoulder, assists in these arrangements and helps to get the gallery into business order. That done, he takes a turn at the dumb-bells, and afterwards weighing himself and opining that he is getting "too fleshy," engages with great gravity in solitary broadsword practice. Meanwhile Phil has fallen to work at his usual table, where he screws and unscrews, and cleans, and files, and whistles into small apertures, and blackens himself more and more, and seems to do and undo everything that can be done and undone about a gun. Master and man are at length disturbed by footsteps in the passage, where they make an unusual sound, denoting the arrival of unusual company. These steps, advancing nearer and nearer to the gallery, bring into it a group at first sight scarcely reconcilable with any day in the year but the fifth of November. It consists of a limp and ugly figure carried in a chair by two bearers and attended by a lean female with a face like a pinched mask, who might be expected immediately to recite the popular verses commemorative of the time when they did contrive to blow Old England up alive but for her keeping her lips tightly and defiantly closed as the chair is put down. At which point the figure in it gasping, "O Lord! Oh, dear me! I am shaken!" adds, "How de do, my dear friend, how de do?" Mr. George then descries, in the procession, the venerable Mr. Smallweed out for an airing, attended by his granddaughter Judy as body-guard. "Mr. George, my dear friend," says Grandfather Smallweed, removing his right arm from the neck of one of his bearers, whom he has nearly throttled coming along, "how de do? You're surprised to see me, my dear friend." "I should hardly have been more surprised to have seen your friend in the city," returns Mr. George. "I am very seldom out," pants Mr. Smallweed. "I haven't been out for many months. It's inconvenient--and it comes expensive. But I longed so much to see you, my dear Mr. George. How de do, sir?" "I am well enough," says Mr. George. "I hope you are the same." "You can't be too well, my dear friend." Mr. Smallweed takes him by both hands. "I have brought my granddaughter Judy. I couldn't keep her away. She longed so much to see you." "Hum! She bears it calmly!" mutters Mr. George. "So we got a hackney-cab, and put a chair in it, and just round the corner they lifted me out of the cab and into the chair, and carried me here that I might see my dear friend in his own establishment! This," says Grandfather Smallweed, alluding to the bearer, who has been in danger of strangulation and who withdraws adjusting his windpipe, "is the driver of the cab. He has nothing extra. It is by agreement included in his fare. This person," the other bearer, "we engaged in the street outside for a pint of beer. Which is twopence. Judy, give the person twopence. I was not sure you had a workman of your own here, my dear friend, or we needn't have employed this person." Grandfather Smallweed refers to Phil with a glance of considerable terror and a half-subdued "O Lord! Oh, dear me!" Nor in his apprehension, on the surface of things, without some reason, for Phil, who has never beheld the apparition in the black-velvet cap before, has stopped short with a gun in his hand with much of the air of a dead shot intent on picking Mr. Smallweed off as an ugly old bird of the crow species. "Judy, my child," says Grandfather Smallweed, "give the person his twopence. It's a great deal for what he has done." The person, who is one of those extraordinary specimens of human fungus that spring up spontaneously in the western streets of London, ready dressed in an old red jacket, with a "mission" for holding horses and calling coaches, received his twopence with anything but transport, tosses the money into the air, catches it over-handed, and retires. "My dear Mr. George," says Grandfather Smallweed, "would you be so kind as help to carry me to the fire? I am accustomed to a fire, and I am an old man, and I soon chill. Oh, dear me!" His closing exclamation is jerked out of the venerable gentleman by the suddenness with which Mr. Squod, like a genie, catches him up, chair and all, and deposits him on the hearth-stone. "O Lord!" says Mr. Smallweed, panting. "Oh, dear me! Oh, my stars! My dear friend, your workman is very strong--and very prompt. O Lord, he is very prompt! Judy, draw me back a little. I'm being scorched in the legs," which indeed is testified to the noses of all present by the smell of his worsted stockings. The gentle Judy, having backed her grandfather a little way from the fire, and having shaken him up as usual, and having released his overshadowed eye from its black-velvet extinguisher, Mr. Smallweed again says, "Oh, dear me! O Lord!" and looking about and meeting Mr. George's glance, again stretches out both hands. "My dear friend! So happy in this meeting! And this is your establishment? It's a delightful place. It's a picture! You never find that anything goes off here accidentally, do you, my dear friend?" adds Grandfather Smallweed, very ill at ease. "No, no. No fear of that." "And your workman. He--Oh, dear me!--he never lets anything off without meaning it, does he, my dear friend?" "He has never hurt anybody but himself," says Mr. George, smiling. "But he might, you know. He seems to have hurt himself a good deal, and he might hurt somebody else," the old gentleman returns. "He mightn't mean it--or he even might. Mr. George, will you order him to leave his infernal fire-arms alone and go away?" Obedient to a nod from the trooper, Phil retires, empty-handed, to the other end of the gallery. Mr. Smallweed, reassured, falls to rubbing his legs. "And you're doing well, Mr. George?" he says to the trooper, squarely standing faced about towards him with his broadsword in his hand. "You are prospering, please the Powers?" Mr. George answers with a cool nod, adding, "Go on. You have not come to say that, I know." "You are so sprightly, Mr. George," returns the venerable grandfather. "You are such good company." "Ha ha! Go on!" says Mr. George. "My dear friend! But that sword looks awful gleaming and sharp. It might cut somebody, by accident. It makes me shiver, Mr. George. Curse him!" says the excellent old gentleman apart to Judy as the trooper takes a step or two away to lay it aside. "He owes me money, and might think of paying off old scores in this murdering place. I wish your brimstone grandmother was here, and he'd shave her head off." Mr. George, returning, folds his arms, and looking down at the old man, sliding every moment lower and lower in his chair, says quietly, "Now for it!" "Ho!" cries Mr. Smallweed, rubbing his hands with an artful chuckle. "Yes. Now for it. Now for what, my dear friend?" "For a pipe," says Mr. George, who with great composure sets his chair in the chimney-corner, takes his pipe from the grate, fills it and lights it, and falls to smoking peacefully. This tends to the discomfiture of Mr. Smallweed, who finds it so difficult to resume his object, whatever it may be, that he becomes exasperated and secretly claws the air with an impotent vindictiveness expressive of an intense desire to tear and rend the visage of Mr. George. As the excellent old gentleman's nails are long and leaden, and his hands lean and veinous, and his eyes green and watery; and, over and above this, as he continues, while he claws, to slide down in his chair and to collapse into a shapeless bundle, he becomes such a ghastly spectacle, even in the accustomed eyes of Judy, that that young virgin pounces at him with something more than the ardour of affection and so shakes him up and pats and pokes him in divers parts of his body, but particularly in that part which the science of self-defence would call his wind, that in his grievous distress he utters enforced sounds like a paviour's rammer. When Judy has by these means set him up again in his chair, with a white face and a frosty nose (but still clawing), she stretches out her weazen forefinger and gives Mr. George one poke in the back. The trooper raising his head, she makes another poke at her esteemed grandfather, and having thus brought them together, stares rigidly at the fire. "Aye, aye! Ho, ho! U--u--u--ugh!" chatters Grandfather Smallweed, swallowing his rage. "My dear friend!" (still clawing). "I tell you what," says Mr. George. "If you want to converse with me, you must speak out. I am one of the roughs, and I can't go about and about. I haven't the art to do it. I am not clever enough. It don't suit me. When you go winding round and round me," says the trooper, putting his pipe between his lips again, "damme, if I don't feel as if I was being smothered!" And he inflates his broad chest to its utmost extent as if to assure himself that he is not smothered yet. "If you have come to give me a friendly call," continues Mr. George, "I am obliged to you; how are you? If you have come to see whether there's any property on the premises, look about you; you are welcome. If you want to out with something, out with it!" The blooming Judy, without removing her gaze from the fire, gives her grandfather one ghostly poke. "You see! It's her opinion too. And why the devil that young woman won't sit down like a Christian," says Mr. George with his eyes musingly fixed on Judy, "I can't comprehend." "She keeps at my side to attend to me, sir," says Grandfather Smallweed. "I am an old man, my dear Mr. George, and I need some attention. I can carry my years; I am not a brimstone poll-parrot" (snarling and looking unconsciously for the cushion), "but I need attention, my dear friend." "Well!" returns the trooper, wheeling his chair to face the old man. "Now then?" "My friend in the city, Mr. George, has done a little business with a pupil of yours." "Has he?" says Mr. George. "I am sorry to hear it." "Yes, sir." Grandfather Smallweed rubs his legs. "He is a fine young soldier now, Mr. George, by the name of Carstone. Friends came forward and paid it all up, honourable." "Did they?" returns Mr. George. "Do you think your friend in the city would like a piece of advice?" "I think he would, my dear friend. From you." "I advise him, then, to do no more business in that quarter. There's no more to be got by it. The young gentleman, to my knowledge, is brought to a dead halt." "No, no, my dear friend. No, no, Mr. George. No, no, no, sir," remonstrates Grandfather Smallweed, cunningly rubbing his spare legs. "Not quite a dead halt, I think. He has good friends, and he is good for his pay, and he is good for the selling price of his commission, and he is good for his chance in a lawsuit, and he is good for his chance in a wife, and--oh, do you know, Mr. George, I think my friend would consider the young gentleman good for something yet?" says Grandfather Smallweed, turning up his velvet cap and scratching his ear like a monkey. Mr. George, who has put aside his pipe and sits with an arm on his chair-back, beats a tattoo on the ground with his right foot as if he were not particularly pleased with the turn the conversation has taken. "But to pass from one subject to another," resumes Mr. Smallweed. "'To promote the conversation,' as a joker might say. To pass, Mr. George, from the ensign to the captain." "What are you up to, now?" asks Mr. George, pausing with a frown in stroking the recollection of his moustache. "What captain?" "Our captain. The captain we know of. Captain Hawdon." "Oh! That's it, is it?" says Mr. George with a low whistle as he sees both grandfather and granddaughter looking hard at him. "You are there! Well? What about it? Come, I won't be smothered any more. Speak!" "My dear friend," returns the old man, "I was applied--Judy, shake me up a little!--I was applied to yesterday about the captain, and my opinion still is that the captain is not dead." "Bosh!" observes Mr. George. "What was your remark, my dear friend?" inquires the old man with his hand to his ear. "Bosh!" "Ho!" says Grandfather Smallweed. "Mr. George, of my opinion you can judge for yourself according to the questions asked of me and the reasons given for asking 'em. Now, what do you think the lawyer making the inquiries wants?" "A job," says Mr. George. "Nothing of the kind!" "Can't be a lawyer, then," says Mr. George, folding his arms with an air of confirmed resolution. "My dear friend, he is a lawyer, and a famous one. He wants to see some fragment in Captain Hawdon's writing. He don't want to keep it. He only wants to see it and compare it with a writing in his possession." "Well?" "Well, Mr. George. Happening to remember the advertisement concerning Captain Hawdon and any information that could be given respecting him, he looked it up and came to me--just as you did, my dear friend. WILL you shake hands? So glad you came that day! I should have missed forming such a friendship if you hadn't come!" "Well, Mr. Smallweed?" says Mr. George again after going through the ceremony with some stiffness. "I had no such thing. I have nothing but his signature. Plague pestilence and famine, battle murder and sudden death upon him," says the old man, making a curse out of one of his few remembrances of a prayer and squeezing up his velvet cap between his angry hands, "I have half a million of his signatures, I think! But you," breathlessly recovering his mildness of speech as Judy re-adjusts the cap on his skittle-ball of a head, "you, my dear Mr. George, are likely to have some letter or paper that would suit the purpose. Anything would suit the purpose, written in the hand." "Some writing in that hand," says the trooper, pondering; "may be, I have." "My dearest friend!" "May be, I have not." "Ho!" says Grandfather Smallweed, crest-fallen. "But if I had bushels of it, I would not show as much as would make a cartridge without knowing why." "Sir, I have told you why. My dear Mr. George, I have told you why." "Not enough," says the trooper, shaking his head. "I must know more, and approve it." "Then, will you come to the lawyer? My dear friend, will you come and see the gentleman?" urges Grandfather Smallweed, pulling out a lean old silver watch with hands like the leg of a skeleton. "I told him it was probable I might call upon him between ten and eleven this forenoon, and it's now half after ten. Will you come and see the gentleman, Mr. George?" "Hum!" says he gravely. "I don't mind that. Though why this should concern you so much, I don't know." "Everything concerns me that has a chance in it of bringing anything to light about him. Didn't he take us all in? Didn't he owe us immense sums, all round? Concern me? Who can anything about him concern more than me? Not, my dear friend," says Grandfather Smallweed, lowering his tone, "that I want YOU to betray anything. Far from it. Are you ready to come, my dear friend?" "Aye! I'll come in a moment. I promise nothing, you know." "No, my dear Mr. George; no." "And you mean to say you're going to give me a lift to this place, wherever it is, without charging for it?" Mr. George inquires, getting his hat and thick wash-leather gloves. This pleasantry so tickles Mr. Smallweed that he laughs, long and low, before the fire. But ever while he laughs, he glances over his paralytic shoulder at Mr. George and eagerly watches him as he unlocks the padlock of a homely cupboard at the distant end of the gallery, looks here and there upon the higher shelves, and ultimately takes something out with a rustling of paper, folds it, and puts it in his breast. Then Judy pokes Mr. Smallweed once, and Mr. Smallweed pokes Judy once. "I am ready," says the trooper, coming back. "Phil, you can carry this old gentleman to his coach, and make nothing of him." "Oh, dear me! O Lord! Stop a moment!" says Mr. Smallweed. "He's so very prompt! Are you sure you can do it carefully, my worthy man?" Phil makes no reply, but seizing the chair and its load, sidles away, tightly hugged by the now speechless Mr. Smallweed, and bolts along the passage as if he had an acceptable commission to carry the old gentleman to the nearest volcano. His shorter trust, however, terminating at the cab, he deposits him there; and the fair Judy takes her place beside him, and the chair embellishes the roof, and Mr. George takes the vacant place upon the box. Mr. George is quite confounded by the spectacle he beholds from time to time as he peeps into the cab through the window behind him, where the grim Judy is always motionless, and the old gentleman with his cap over one eye is always sliding off the seat into the straw and looking upward at him out of his other eye with a helpless expression of being jolted in the back. CHAPTER XXVII More Old Soldiers Than One Mr. George has not far to ride with folded arms upon the box, for their destination is Lincoln's Inn Fields. When the driver stops his horses, Mr. George alights, and looking in at the window, says, "What, Mr. Tulkinghorn's your man, is he?" "Yes, my dear friend. Do you know him, Mr. George?" "Why, I have heard of him--seen him too, I think. But I don't know him, and he don't know me." There ensues the carrying of Mr. Smallweed upstairs, which is done to perfection with the trooper's help. He is borne into Mr. Tulkinghorn's great room and deposited on the Turkey rug before the fire. Mr. Tulkinghorn is not within at the present moment but will be back directly. The occupant of the pew in the hall, having said thus much, stirs the fire and leaves the triumvirate to warm themselves. Mr. George is mightily curious in respect of the room. He looks up at the painted ceiling, looks round at the old law-books, contemplates the portraits of the great clients, reads aloud the names on the boxes. "'Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet,'" Mr. George reads thoughtfully. "Ha! 'Manor of Chesney Wold.' Humph!" Mr. George stands looking at these boxes a long while--as if they were pictures--and comes back to the fire repeating, "Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, and Manor of Chesney Wold, hey?" "Worth a mint of money, Mr. George!" whispers Grandfather Smallweed, rubbing his legs. "Powerfully rich!" "Who do you mean? This old gentleman, or the Baronet?" "This gentleman, this gentleman." "So I have heard; and knows a thing or two, I'll hold a wager. Not bad quarters, either," says Mr. George, looking round again. "See the strong-box yonder!" This reply is cut short by Mr. Tulkinghorn's arrival. There is no change in him, of course. Rustily drest, with his spectacles in his hand, and their very case worn threadbare. In manner, close and dry. In voice, husky and low. In face, watchful behind a blind; habitually not uncensorious and contemptuous perhaps. The peerage may have warmer worshippers and faithfuller believers than Mr. Tulkinghorn, after all, if everything were known. "Good morning, Mr. Smallweed, good morning!" he says as he comes in. "You have brought the sergeant, I see. Sit down, sergeant." As Mr. Tulkinghorn takes off his gloves and puts them in his hat, he looks with half-closed eyes across the room to where the trooper stands and says within himself perchance, "You'll do, my friend!" "Sit down, sergeant," he repeats as he comes to his table, which is set on one side of the fire, and takes his easy-chair. "Cold and raw this morning, cold and raw!" Mr. Tulkinghorn warms before the bars, alternately, the palms and knuckles of his hands and looks (from behind that blind which is always down) at the trio sitting in a little semicircle before him. "Now, I can feel what I am about" (as perhaps he can in two senses), "Mr. Smallweed." The old gentleman is newly shaken up by Judy to bear his part in the conversation. "You have brought our good friend the sergeant, I see." "Yes, sir," returns Mr. Smallweed, very servile to the lawyer's wealth and influence. "And what does the sergeant say about this business?" "Mr. George," says Grandfather Smallweed with a tremulous wave of his shrivelled hand, "this is the gentleman, sir." Mr. George salutes the gentleman but otherwise sits bolt upright and profoundly silent--very forward in his chair, as if the full complement of regulation appendages for a field-day hung about him. Mr. Tulkinghorn proceeds, "Well, George--I believe your name is George?" "It is so, Sir." "What do you say, George?" "I ask your pardon, sir," returns the trooper, "but I should wish to know what YOU say?" "Do you mean in point of reward?" "I mean in point of everything, sir." This is so very trying to Mr. Smallweed's temper that he suddenly breaks out with "You're a brimstone beast!" and as suddenly asks pardon of Mr. Tulkinghorn, excusing himself for this slip of the tongue by saying to Judy, "I was thinking of your grandmother, my dear." "I supposed, sergeant," Mr. Tulkinghorn resumes as he leans on one side of his chair and crosses his legs, "that Mr. Smallweed might have sufficiently explained the matter. It lies in the smallest compass, however. You served under Captain Hawdon at one time, and were his attendant in illness, and rendered him many little services, and were rather in his confidence, I am told. That is so, is it not?" "Yes, sir, that is so," says Mr. George with military brevity. "Therefore you may happen to have in your possession something--anything, no matter what; accounts, instructions, orders, a letter, anything--in Captain Hawdon's writing. I wish to compare his writing with some that I have. If you can give me the opportunity, you shall be rewarded for your trouble. Three, four, five, guineas, you would consider handsome, I dare say." "Noble, my dear friend!" cries Grandfather Smallweed, screwing up his eyes. "If not, say how much more, in your conscience as a soldier, you can demand. There is no need for you to part with the writing, against your inclination--though I should prefer to have it." Mr. George sits squared in exactly the same attitude, looks at the painted ceiling, and says never a word. The irascible Mr. Smallweed scratches the air. "The question is," says Mr. Tulkinghorn in his methodical, subdued, uninterested way, "first, whether you have any of Captain Hawdon's writing?" "First, whether I have any of Captain Hawdon's writing, sir," repeats Mr. George. "Secondly, what will satisfy you for the trouble of producing it?" "Secondly, what will satisfy me for the trouble of producing it, sir," repeats Mr. George. "Thirdly, you can judge for yourself whether it is at all like that," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, suddenly handing him some sheets of written paper tied together. "Whether it is at all like that, sir. Just so," repeats Mr. George. All three repetitions Mr. George pronounces in a mechanical manner, looking straight at Mr. Tulkinghorn; nor does he so much as glance at the affidavit in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, that has been given to him for his inspection (though he still holds it in his hand), but continues to look at the lawyer with an air of troubled meditation. "Well?" says Mr. Tulkinghorn. "What do you say?" "Well, sir," replies Mr. George, rising erect and looking immense, "I would rather, if you'll excuse me, have nothing to do with this." Mr. Tulkinghorn, outwardly quite undisturbed, demands, "Why not?" "Why, sir," returns the trooper. "Except on military compulsion, I am not a man of business. Among civilians I am what they call in Scotland a ne'er-do-weel. I have no head for papers, sir. I can stand any fire better than a fire of cross questions. I mentioned to Mr. Smallweed, only an hour or so ago, that when I come into things of this kind I feel as if I was being smothered. And that is my sensation," says Mr. George, looking round upon the company, "at the present moment." With that, he takes three strides forward to replace the papers on the lawyer's table and three strides backward to resume his former station, where he stands perfectly upright, now looking at the ground and now at the painted ceiling, with his hands behind him as if to prevent himself from accepting any other document whatever. Under this provocation, Mr. Smallweed's favourite adjective of disparagement is so close to his tongue that he begins the words "my dear friend" with the monosyllable "brim," thus converting the possessive pronoun into brimmy and appearing to have an impediment in his speech. Once past this difficulty, however, he exhorts his dear friend in the tenderest manner not to be rash, but to do what so eminent a gentleman requires, and to do it with a good grace, confident that it must be unobjectionable as well as profitable. Mr. Tulkinghorn merely utters an occasional sentence, as, "You are the best judge of your own interest, sergeant." "Take care you do no harm by this." "Please yourself, please yourself." "If you know what you mean, that's quite enough." These he utters with an appearance of perfect indifference as he looks over the papers on his table and prepares to write a letter. Mr. George looks distrustfully from the painted ceiling to the ground, from the ground to Mr. Smallweed, from Mr. Smallweed to Mr. Tulkinghorn, and from Mr. Tulkinghorn to the painted ceiling again, often in his perplexity changing the leg on which he rests. "I do assure you, sir," says Mr. George, "not to say it offensively, that between you and Mr. Smallweed here, I really am being smothered fifty times over. I really am, sir. I am not a match for you gentlemen. Will you allow me to ask why you want to see the captain's hand, in the case that I could find any specimen of it?" Mr. Tulkinghorn quietly shakes his head. "No. If you were a man of business, sergeant, you would not need to be informed that there are confidential reasons, very harmless in themselves, for many such wants in the profession to which I belong. But if you are afraid of doing any injury to Captain Hawdon, you may set your mind at rest about that." "Aye! He is dead, sir." "IS he?" Mr. Tulkinghorn quietly sits down to write. "Well, sir," says the trooper, looking into his hat after another disconcerted pause, "I am sorry not to have given you more satisfaction. If it would be any satisfaction to any one that I should be confirmed in my judgment that I would rather have nothing to do with this by a friend of mine who has a better head for business than I have, and who is an old soldier, I am willing to consult with him. I--I really am so completely smothered myself at present," says Mr. George, passing his hand hopelessly across his brow, "that I don't know but what it might be a satisfaction to me." Mr. Smallweed, hearing that this authority is an old soldier, so strongly inculcates the expediency of the trooper's taking counsel with him, and particularly informing him of its being a question of five guineas or more, that Mr. George engages to go and see him. Mr. Tulkinghorn says nothing either way. "I'll consult my friend, then, by your leave, sir," says the trooper, "and I'll take the liberty of looking in again with the final answer in the course of the day. Mr. Smallweed, if you wish to be carried downstairs--" "In a moment, my dear friend, in a moment. Will you first let me speak half a word with this gentleman in private?" "Certainly, sir. Don't hurry yourself on my account." The trooper retires to a distant part of the room and resumes his curious inspection of the boxes, strong and otherwise. "If I wasn't as weak as a brimstone baby, sir," whispers Grandfather Smallweed, drawing the lawyer down to his level by the lapel of his coat and flashing some half-quenched green fire out of his angry eyes, "I'd tear the writing away from him. He's got it buttoned in his breast. I saw him put it there. Judy saw him put it there. Speak up, you crabbed image for the sign of a walking-stick shop, and say you saw him put it there!" This vehement conjuration the old gentleman accompanies with such a thrust at his granddaughter that it is too much for his strength, and he slips away out of his chair, drawing Mr. Tulkinghorn with him, until he is arrested by Judy, and well shaken. "Violence will not do for me, my friend," Mr. Tulkinghorn then remarks coolly. "No, no, I know, I know, sir. But it's chafing and galling--it's--it's worse than your smattering chattering magpie of a grandmother," to the imperturbable Judy, who only looks at the fire, "to know he has got what's wanted and won't give it up. He, not to give it up! HE! A vagabond! But never mind, sir, never mind. At the most, he has only his own way for a little while. I have him periodically in a vice. I'll twist him, sir. I'll screw him, sir. If he won't do it with a good grace, I'll make him do it with a bad one, sir! Now, my dear Mr. George," says Grandfather Smallweed, winking at the lawyer hideously as he releases him, "I am ready for your kind assistance, my excellent friend!" Mr. Tulkinghorn, with some shadowy sign of amusement manifesting itself through his self-possession, stands on the hearth-rug with his back to the fire, watching the disappearance of Mr. Smallweed and acknowledging the trooper's parting salute with one slight nod. It is more difficult to get rid of the old gentleman, Mr. George finds, than to bear a hand in carrying him downstairs, for when he is replaced in his conveyance, he is so loquacious on the subject of the guineas and retains such an affectionate hold of his button--having, in truth, a secret longing to rip his coat open and rob him--that some degree of force is necessary on the trooper's part to effect a separation. It is accomplished at last, and he proceeds alone in quest of his adviser. By the cloisterly Temple, and by Whitefriars (there, not without a glance at Hanging-Sword Alley, which would seem to be something in his way), and by Blackfriars Bridge, and Blackfriars Road, Mr. George sedately marches to a street of little shops lying somewhere in that ganglion of roads from Kent and Surrey, and of streets from the bridges of London, centring in the far-famed elephant who has lost his castle formed of a thousand four-horse coaches to a stronger iron monster than he, ready to chop him into mince-meat any day he dares. To one of the little shops in this street, which is a musician's shop, having a few fiddles in the window, and some Pan's pipes and a tambourine, and a triangle, and certain elongated scraps of music, Mr. George directs his massive tread. And halting at a few paces from it, as he sees a soldierly looking woman, with her outer skirts tucked up, come forth with a small wooden tub, and in that tub commence a-whisking and a-splashing on the margin of the pavement, Mr. George says to himself, "She's as usual, washing greens. I never saw her, except upon a baggage-waggon, when she wasn't washing greens!" The subject of this reflection is at all events so occupied in washing greens at present that she remains unsuspicious of Mr. George's approach until, lifting up herself and her tub together when she has poured the water off into the gutter, she finds him standing near her. Her reception of him is not flattering. "George, I never see you but I wish you was a hundred mile away!" The trooper, without remarking on this welcome, follows into the musical-instrument shop, where the lady places her tub of greens upon the counter, and having shaken hands with him, rests her arms upon it. "I never," she says, "George, consider Matthew Bagnet safe a minute when you're near him. You are that restless and that roving--" "Yes! I know I am, Mrs. Bagnet. I know I am." "You know you are!" says Mrs. Bagnet. "What's the use of that? WHY are you?" "The nature of the animal, I suppose," returns the trooper good-humouredly. "Ah!" cries Mrs. Bagnet, something shrilly. "But what satisfaction will the nature of the animal be to me when the animal shall have tempted my Mat away from the musical business to New Zealand or Australey?" Mrs. Bagnet is not at all an ill-looking woman. Rather large-boned, a little coarse in the grain, and freckled by the sun and wind which have tanned her hair upon the forehead, but healthy, wholesome, and bright-eyed. A strong, busy, active, honest-faced woman of from forty-five to fifty. Clean, hardy, and so economically dressed (though substantially) that the only article of ornament of which she stands possessed appear's to be her wedding-ring, around which her finger has grown to be so large since it was put on that it will never come off again until it shall mingle with Mrs. Bagnet's dust. "Mrs. Bagnet," says the trooper, "I am on my parole with you. Mat will get no harm from me. You may trust me so far." "Well, I think I may. But the very looks of you are unsettling," Mrs. Bagnet rejoins. "Ah, George, George! If you had only settled down and married Joe Pouch's widow when he died in North America, SHE'D have combed your hair for you." "It was a chance for me, certainly," returns the trooper half laughingly, half seriously, "but I shall never settle down into a respectable man now. Joe Pouch's widow might have done me good--there was something in her, and something of her--but I couldn't make up my mind to it. If I had had the luck to meet with such a wife as Mat found!" Mrs. Bagnet, who seems in a virtuous way to be under little reserve with a good sort of fellow, but to be another good sort of fellow herself for that matter, receives this compliment by flicking Mr. George in the face with a head of greens and taking her tub into the little room behind the shop. "Why, Quebec, my poppet," says George, following, on invitation, into that department. "And little Malta, too! Come and kiss your Bluffy!" These young ladies--not supposed to have been actually christened by the names applied to them, though always so called in the family from the places of their birth in barracks--are respectively employed on three-legged stools, the younger (some five or six years old) in learning her letters out of a penny primer, the elder (eight or nine perhaps) in teaching her and sewing with great assiduity. Both hail Mr. George with acclamations as an old friend and after some kissing and romping plant their stools beside him. "And how's young Woolwich?" says Mr. George. "Ah! There now!" cries Mrs. Bagnet, turning about from her saucepans (for she is cooking dinner) with a bright flush on her face. "Would you believe it? Got an engagement at the theayter, with his father, to play the fife in a military piece." "Well done, my godson!" cries Mr. George, slapping his thigh. "I believe you!" says Mrs. Bagnet. "He's a Briton. That's what Woolwich is. A Briton!" "And Mat blows away at his bassoon, and you're respectable civilians one and all," says Mr. George. "Family people. Children growing up. Mat's old mother in Scotland, and your old father somewhere else, corresponded with, and helped a little, and--well, well! To be sure, I don't know why I shouldn't be wished a hundred mile away, for I have not much to do with all this!" Mr. George is becoming thoughtful, sitting before the fire in the whitewashed room, which has a sanded floor and a barrack smell and contains nothing superfluous and has not a visible speck of dirt or dust in it, from the faces of Quebec and Malta to the bright tin pots and pannikins upon the dresser shelves--Mr. George is becoming thoughtful, sitting here while Mrs. Bagnet is busy, when Mr. Bagnet and young Woolwich opportunely come home. Mr. Bagnet is an ex-artilleryman, tall and upright, with shaggy eyebrows and whiskers like the fibres of a coco-nut, not a hair upon his head, and a torrid complexion. His voice, short, deep, and resonant, is not at all unlike the tones of the instrument to which he is devoted. Indeed there may be generally observed in him an unbending, unyielding, brass-bound air, as if he were himself the bassoon of the human orchestra. Young Woolwich is the type and model of a young drummer. Both father and son salute the trooper heartily. He saying, in due season, that he has come to advise with Mr. Bagnet, Mr. Bagnet hospitably declares that he will hear of no business until after dinner and that his friend shall not partake of his counsel without first partaking of boiled pork and greens. The trooper yielding to this invitation, he and Mr. Bagnet, not to embarrass the domestic preparations, go forth to take a turn up and down the little street, which they promenade with measured tread and folded arms, as if it were a rampart. "George," says Mr. Bagnet. "You know me. It's my old girl that advises. She has the head. But I never own to it before her. Discipline must be maintained. Wait till the greens is off her mind. Then we'll consult. Whatever the old girl says, do--do it!" "I intend to, Mat," replies the other. "I would sooner take her opinion than that of a college." "College," returns Mr. Bagnet in short sentences, bassoon-like. "What college could you leave--in another quarter of the world--with nothing but a grey cloak and an umbrella--to make its way home to Europe? The old girl would do it to-morrow. Did it once!" "You are right," says Mr. George. "What college," pursues Bagnet, "could you set up in life--with two penn'orth of white lime--a penn'orth of fuller's earth--a ha'porth of sand--and the rest of the change out of sixpence in money? That's what the old girl started on. In the present business." "I am rejoiced to hear it's thriving, Mat." "The old girl," says Mr. Bagnet, acquiescing, "saves. Has a stocking somewhere. With money in it. I never saw it. But I know she's got it. Wait till the greens is off her mind. Then she'll set you up." "She is a treasure!" exclaims Mr. George. "She's more. But I never own to it before her. Discipline must be maintained. It was the old girl that brought out my musical abilities. I should have been in the artillery now but for the old girl. Six years I hammered at the fiddle. Ten at the flute. The old girl said it wouldn't do; intention good, but want of flexibility; try the bassoon. The old girl borrowed a bassoon from the bandmaster of the Rifle Regiment. I practised in the trenches. Got on, got another, get a living by it!" George remarks that she looks as fresh as a rose and as sound as an apple. "The old girl," says Mr. Bagnet in reply, "is a thoroughly fine woman. Consequently she is like a thoroughly fine day. Gets finer as she gets on. I never saw the old girl's equal. But I never own to it before her. Discipline must be maintained!" Proceeding to converse on indifferent matters, they walk up and down the little street, keeping step and time, until summoned by Quebec and Malta to do justice to the pork and greens, over which Mrs. Bagnet, like a military chaplain, says a short grace. In the distribution of these comestibles, as in every other household duty, Mrs. Bagnet developes an exact system, sitting with every dish before her, allotting to every portion of pork its own portion of pot-liquor, greens, potatoes, and even mustard, and serving it out complete. Having likewise served out the beer from a can and thus supplied the mess with all things necessary, Mrs. Bagnet proceeds to satisfy her own hunger, which is in a healthy state. The kit of the mess, if the table furniture may be so denominated, is chiefly composed of utensils of horn and tin that have done duty in several parts of the world. Young Woolwich's knife, in particular, which is of the oyster kind, with the additional feature of a strong shutting-up movement which frequently balks the appetite of that young musician, is mentioned as having gone in various hands the complete round of foreign service. The dinner done, Mrs. Bagnet, assisted by the younger branches (who polish their own cups and platters, knives and forks), makes all the dinner garniture shine as brightly as before and puts it all away, first sweeping the hearth, to the end that Mr. Bagnet and the visitor may not be retarded in the smoking of their pipes. These household cares involve much pattening and counter-pattening in the backyard and considerable use of a pail, which is finally so happy as to assist in the ablutions of Mrs. Bagnet herself. That old girl reappearing by and by, quite fresh, and sitting down to her needlework, then and only then--the greens being only then to be considered as entirely off her mind--Mr. Bagnet requests the trooper to state his case. This Mr. George does with great discretion, appearing to address himself to Mr. Bagnet, but having an eye solely on the old girl all the time, as Bagnet has himself. She, equally discreet, busies herself with her needlework. The case fully stated, Mr. Bagnet resorts to his standard artifice for the maintenance of discipline. "That's the whole of it, is it, George?" says he. "That's the whole of it." "You act according to my opinion?" "I shall be guided," replies George, "entirely by it." "Old girl," says Mr. Bagnet, "give him my opinion. You know it. Tell him what it is." It is that he cannot have too little to do with people who are too deep for him and cannot be too careful of interference with matters he does not understand--that the plain rule is to do nothing in the dark, to be a party to nothing underhanded or mysterious, and never to put his foot where he cannot see the ground. This, in effect, is Mr. Bagnet's opinion, as delivered through the old girl, and it so relieves Mr. George's mind by confirming his own opinion and banishing his doubts that he composes himself to smoke another pipe on that exceptional occasion and to have a talk over old times with the whole Bagnet family, according to their various ranges of experience. Through these means it comes to pass that Mr. George does not again rise to his full height in that parlour until the time is drawing on when the bassoon and fife are expected by a British public at the theatre; and as it takes time even then for Mr. George, in his domestic character of Bluffy, to take leave of Quebec and Malta and insinuate a sponsorial shilling into the pocket of his godson with felicitations on his success in life, it is dark when Mr. George again turns his face towards Lincoln's Inn Fields. "A family home," he ruminates as he marches along, "however small it is, makes a man like me look lonely. But it's well I never made that evolution of matrimony. I shouldn't have been fit for it. I am such a vagabond still, even at my present time of life, that I couldn't hold to the gallery a month together if it was a regular pursuit or if I didn't camp there, gipsy fashion. Come! I disgrace nobody and cumber nobody; that's something. I have not done that for many a long year!" So he whistles it off and marches on. Arrived in Lincoln's Inn Fields and mounting Mr. Tulkinghorn's stair, he finds the outer door closed and the chambers shut, but the trooper not knowing much about outer doors, and the staircase being dark besides, he is yet fumbling and groping about, hoping to discover a bell-handle or to open the door for himself, when Mr. Tulkinghorn comes up the stairs (quietly, of course) and angrily asks, "Who is that? What are you doing there?" "I ask your pardon, sir. It's George. The sergeant." "And couldn't George, the sergeant, see that my door was locked?" "Why, no, sir, I couldn't. At any rate, I didn't," says the trooper, rather nettled. "Have you changed your mind? Or are you in the same mind?" Mr. Tulkinghorn demands. But he knows well enough at a glance. "In the same mind, sir." "I thought so. That's sufficient. You can go. So you are the man," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, opening his door with the key, "in whose hiding-place Mr. Gridley was found?" "Yes, I AM the man," says the trooper, stopping two or three stairs down. "What then, sir?" "What then? I don't like your associates. You should not have seen the inside of my door this morning if I had thought of your being that man. Gridley? A threatening, murderous, dangerous fellow." With these words, spoken in an unusually high tone for him, the lawyer goes into his rooms and shuts the door with a thundering noise. Mr. George takes his dismissal in great dudgeon, the greater because a clerk coming up the stairs has heard the last words of all and evidently applies them to him. "A pretty character to bear," the trooper growls with a hasty oath as he strides downstairs. "A threatening, murderous, dangerous fellow!" And looking up, he sees the clerk looking down at him and marking him as he passes a lamp. This so intensifies his dudgeon that for five minutes he is in an ill humour. But he whistles that off like the rest of it and marches home to the shooting gallery. CHAPTER XXVIII The Ironmaster Sir Leicester Dedlock has got the better, for the time being, of the family gout and is once more, in a literal no less than in a figurative point of view, upon his legs. He is at his place in Lincolnshire; but the waters are out again on the low-lying grounds, and the cold and damp steal into Chesney Wold, though well defended, and eke into Sir Leicester's bones. The blazing fires of faggot and coal--Dedlock timber and antediluvian forest--that blaze upon the broad wide hearths and wink in the twilight on the frowning woods, sullen to see how trees are sacrificed, do not exclude the enemy. The hot-water pipes that trail themselves all over the house, the cushioned doors and windows, and the screens and curtains fail to supply the fires' deficiencies and to satisfy Sir Leicester's need. Hence the fashionable intelligence proclaims one morning to the listening earth that Lady Dedlock is expected shortly to return to town for a few weeks. It is a melancholy truth that even great men have their poor relations. Indeed great men have often more than their fair share of poor relations, inasmuch as very red blood of the superior quality, like inferior blood unlawfully shed, WILL cry aloud and WILL be heard. Sir Leicester's cousins, in the remotest degree, are so many murders in the respect that they "will out." Among whom there are cousins who are so poor that one might almost dare to think it would have been the happier for them never to have been plated links upon the Dedlock chain of gold, but to have been made of common iron at first and done base service. Service, however (with a few limited reservations, genteel but not profitable), they may not do, being of the Dedlock dignity. So they visit their richer cousins, and get into debt when they can, and live but shabbily when they can't, and find--the women no husbands, and the men no wives--and ride in borrowed carriages, and sit at feasts that are never of their own making, and so go through high life. The rich family sum has been divided by so many figures, and they are the something over that nobody knows what to do with. Everybody on Sir Leicester Dedlock's side of the question and of his way of thinking would appear to be his cousin more or less. From my Lord Boodle, through the Duke of Foodle, down to Noodle, Sir Leicester, like a glorious spider, stretches his threads of relationship. But while he is stately in the cousinship of the Everybodys, he is a kind and generous man, according to his dignified way, in the cousinship of the Nobodys; and at the present time, in despite of the damp, he stays out the visit of several such cousins at Chesney Wold with the constancy of a martyr. Of these, foremost in the front rank stands Volumnia Dedlock, a young lady (of sixty) who is doubly highly related, having the honour to be a poor relation, by the mother's side, to another great family. Miss Volumnia, displaying in early life a pretty talent for cutting ornaments out of coloured paper, and also for singing to the guitar in the Spanish tongue, and propounding French conundrums in country houses, passed the twenty years of her existence between twenty and forty in a sufficiently agreeable manner. Lapsing then out of date and being considered to bore mankind by her vocal performances in the Spanish language, she retired to Bath, where she lives slenderly on an annual present from Sir Leicester and whence she makes occasional resurrections in the country houses of her cousins. She has an extensive acquaintance at Bath among appalling old gentlemen with thin legs and nankeen trousers, and is of high standing in that dreary city. But she is a little dreaded elsewhere in consequence of an indiscreet profusion in the article of rouge and persistency in an obsolete pearl necklace like a rosary of little bird's-eggs. In any country in a wholesome state, Volumnia would be a clear case for the pension list. Efforts have been made to get her on it, and when William Buffy came in, it was fully expected that her name would be put down for a couple of hundred a year. But William Buffy somehow discovered, contrary to all expectation, that these were not the times when it could be done, and this was the first clear indication Sir Leicester Dedlock had conveyed to him that the country was going to pieces. There is likewise the Honourable Bob Stables, who can make warm mashes with the skill of a veterinary surgeon and is a better shot than most gamekeepers. He has been for some time particularly desirous to serve his country in a post of good emoluments, unaccompanied by any trouble or responsibility. In a well-regulated body politic this natural desire on the part of a spirited young gentleman so highly connected would be speedily recognized, but somehow William Buffy found when he came in that these were not times in which he could manage that little matter either, and this was the second indication Sir Leicester Dedlock had conveyed to him that the country was going to pieces. The rest of the cousins are ladies and gentlemen of various ages and capacities, the major part amiable and sensible and likely to have done well enough in life if they could have overcome their cousinship; as it is, they are almost all a little worsted by it, and lounge in purposeless and listless paths, and seem to be quite as much at a loss how to dispose of themselves as anybody else can be how to dispose of them. In this society, and where not, my Lady Dedlock reigns supreme. Beautiful, elegant, accomplished, and powerful in her little world (for the world of fashion does not stretch ALL the way from pole to pole), her influence in Sir Leicester's house, however haughty and indifferent her manner, is greatly to improve it and refine it. The cousins, even those older cousins who were paralysed when Sir Leicester married her, do her feudal homage; and the Honourable Bob Stables daily repeats to some chosen person between breakfast and lunch his favourite original remark, that she is the best-groomed woman in the whole stud. Such the guests in the long drawing-room at Chesney Wold this dismal night when the step on the Ghost's Walk (inaudible here, however) might be the step of a deceased cousin shut out in the cold. It is near bed-time. Bedroom fires blaze brightly all over the house, raising ghosts of grim furniture on wall and ceiling. Bedroom candlesticks bristle on the distant table by the door, and cousins yawn on ottomans. Cousins at the piano, cousins at the soda-water tray, cousins rising from the card-table, cousins gathered round the fire. Standing on one side of his own peculiar fire (for there are two), Sir Leicester. On the opposite side of the broad hearth, my Lady at her table. Volumnia, as one of the more privileged cousins, in a luxurious chair between them. Sir Leicester glancing, with magnificent displeasure, at the rouge and the pearl necklace. "I occasionally meet on my staircase here," drawls Volumnia, whose thoughts perhaps are already hopping up it to bed, after a long evening of very desultory talk, "one of the prettiest girls, I think, that I ever saw in my life." "A PROTEGEE of my Lady's," observes Sir Leicester. "I thought so. I felt sure that some uncommon eye must have picked that girl out. She really is a marvel. A dolly sort of beauty perhaps," says Miss Volumnia, reserving her own sort, "but in its way, perfect; such bloom I never saw!" Sir Leicester, with his magnificent glance of displeasure at the rouge, appears to say so too. "Indeed," remarks my Lady languidly, "if there is any uncommon eye in the case, it is Mrs. Rouncewell's, and not mine. Rosa is her discovery." "Your maid, I suppose?" "No. My anything; pet--secretary--messenger--I don't know what." "You like to have her about you, as you would like to have a flower, or a bird, or a picture, or a poodle--no, not a poodle, though--or anything else that was equally pretty?" says Volumnia, sympathizing. "Yes, how charming now! And how well that delightful old soul Mrs. Rouncewell is looking. She must be an immense age, and yet she is as active and handsome! She is the dearest friend I have, positively!" Sir Leicester feels it to be right and fitting that the housekeeper of Chesney Wold should be a remarkable person. Apart from that, he has a real regard for Mrs. Rouncewell and likes to hear her praised. So he says, "You are right, Volumnia," which Volumnia is extremely glad to hear. "She has no daughter of her own, has she?" "Mrs. Rouncewell? No, Volumnia. She has a son. Indeed, she had two." My Lady, whose chronic malady of boredom has been sadly aggravated by Volumnia this evening, glances wearily towards the candlesticks and heaves a noiseless sigh. "And it is a remarkable example of the confusion into which the present age has fallen; of the obliteration of landmarks, the opening of floodgates, and the uprooting of distinctions," says Sir Leicester with stately gloom, "that I have been informed by Mr. Tulkinghorn that Mrs. Rouncewell's son has been invited to go into Parliament." Miss Volumnia utters a little sharp scream. "Yes, indeed," repeats Sir Leicester. "Into Parliament." "I never heard of such a thing! Good gracious, what is the man?" exclaims Volumnia. "He is called, I believe--an--ironmaster." Sir Leicester says it slowly and with gravity and doubt, as not being sure but that he is called a lead-mistress or that the right word may be some other word expressive of some other relationship to some other metal. Volumnia utters another little scream. "He has declined the proposal, if my information from Mr. Tulkinghorn be correct, as I have no doubt it is. Mr. Tulkinghorn being always correct and exact; still that does not," says Sir Leicester, "that does not lessen the anomaly, which is fraught with strange considerations--startling considerations, as it appears to me." Miss Volumnia rising with a look candlestick-wards, Sir Leicester politely performs the grand tour of the drawing-room, brings one, and lights it at my Lady's shaded lamp. "I must beg you, my Lady," he says while doing so, "to remain a few moments, for this individual of whom I speak arrived this evening shortly before dinner and requested in a very becoming note"--Sir Leicester, with his habitual regard to truth, dwells upon it--"I am bound to say, in a very becoming and well-expressed note, the favour of a short interview with yourself and MYself on the subject of this young girl. As it appeared that he wished to depart to-night, I replied that we would see him before retiring." Miss Volumnia with a third little scream takes flight, wishing her hosts--O Lud!--well rid of the--what is it?--ironmaster! The other cousins soon disperse, to the last cousin there. Sir Leicester rings the bell, "Make my compliments to Mr. Rouncewell, in the housekeeper's apartments, and say I can receive him now." My Lady, who has heard all this with slight attention outwardly, looks towards Mr. Rouncewell as he comes in. He is a little over fifty perhaps, of a good figure, like his mother, and has a clear voice, a broad forehead from which his dark hair has retired, and a shrewd though open face. He is a responsible-looking gentleman dressed in black, portly enough, but strong and active. Has a perfectly natural and easy air and is not in the least embarrassed by the great presence into which he comes. "Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock, as I have already apologized for intruding on you, I cannot do better than be very brief. I thank you, Sir Leicester." The head of the Dedlocks has motioned towards a sofa between himself and my Lady. Mr. Rouncewell quietly takes his seat there. "In these busy times, when so many great undertakings are in progress, people like myself have so many workmen in so many places that we are always on the flight." Sir Leicester is content enough that the ironmaster should feel that there is no hurry there; there, in that ancient house, rooted in that quiet park, where the ivy and the moss have had time to mature, and the gnarled and warted elms and the umbrageous oaks stand deep in the fern and leaves of a hundred years; and where the sun-dial on the terrace has dumbly recorded for centuries that time which was as much the property of every Dedlock--while he lasted--as the house and lands. Sir Leicester sits down in an easy-chair, opposing his repose and that of Chesney Wold to the restless flights of ironmasters. "Lady Dedlock has been so kind," proceeds Mr. Rouncewell with a respectful glance and a bow that way, "as to place near her a young beauty of the name of Rosa. Now, my son has fallen in love with Rosa and has asked my consent to his proposing marriage to her and to their becoming engaged if she will take him--which I suppose she will. I have never seen Rosa until to-day, but I have some confidence in my son's good sense--even in love. I find her what he represents her, to the best of my judgment; and my mother speaks of her with great commendation." "She in all respects deserves it," says my Lady. "I am happy, Lady Dedlock, that you say so, and I need not comment on the value to me of your kind opinion of her." "That," observes Sir Leicester with unspeakable grandeur, for he thinks the ironmaster a little too glib, "must be quite unnecessary." "Quite unnecessary, Sir Leicester. Now, my son is a very young man, and Rosa is a very young woman. As I made my way, so my son must make his; and his being married at present is out of the question. But supposing I gave my consent to his engaging himself to this pretty girl, if this pretty girl will engage herself to him, I think it a piece of candour to say at once--I am sure, Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock, you will understand and excuse me--I should make it a condition that she did not remain at Chesney Wold. Therefore, before communicating further with my son, I take the liberty of saying that if her removal would be in any way inconvenient or objectionable, I will hold the matter over with him for any reasonable time and leave it precisely where it is." Not remain at Chesney Wold! Make it a condition! All Sir Leicester's old misgivings relative to Wat Tyler and the people in the iron districts who do nothing but turn out by torchlight come in a shower upon his head, the fine grey hair of which, as well as of his whiskers, actually stirs with indignation. "Am I to understand, sir," says Sir Leicester, "and is my Lady to understand"--he brings her in thus specially, first as a point of gallantry, and next as a point of prudence, having great reliance on her sense--"am I to understand, Mr. Rouncewell, and is my Lady to understand, sir, that you consider this young woman too good for Chesney Wold or likely to be injured by remaining here?" "Certainly not, Sir Leicester," "I am glad to hear it." Sir Leicester very lofty indeed. "Pray, Mr. Rouncewell," says my Lady, warning Sir Leicester off with the slightest gesture of her pretty hand, as if he were a fly, "explain to me what you mean." "Willingly, Lady Dedlock. There is nothing I could desire more." Addressing her composed face, whose intelligence, however, is too quick and active to be concealed by any studied impassiveness, however habitual, to the strong Saxon face of the visitor, a picture of resolution and perseverance, my Lady listens with attention, occasionally slightly bending her head. "I am the son of your housekeeper, Lady Dedlock, and passed my childhood about this house. My mother has lived here half a century and will die here I have no doubt. She is one of those examples--perhaps as good a one as there is--of love, and attachment, and fidelity in such a nation, which England may well be proud of, but of which no order can appropriate the whole pride or the whole merit, because such an instance bespeaks high worth on two sides--on the great side assuredly, on the small one no less assuredly." Sir Leicester snorts a little to hear the law laid down in this way, but in his honour and his love of truth, he freely, though silently, admits the justice of the ironmaster's proposition. "Pardon me for saying what is so obvious, but I wouldn't have it hastily supposed," with the least turn of his eyes towards Sir Leicester, "that I am ashamed of my mother's position here, or wanting in all just respect for Chesney Wold and the family. I certainly may have desired--I certainly have desired, Lady Dedlock--that my mother should retire after so many years and end her days with me. But as I have found that to sever this strong bond would be to break her heart, I have long abandoned that idea." Sir Leicester very magnificent again at the notion of Mrs. Rouncewell being spirited off from her natural home to end her days with an ironmaster. "I have been," proceeds the visitor in a modest, clear way, "an apprentice and a workman. I have lived on workman's wages, years and years, and beyond a certain point have had to educate myself. My wife was a foreman's daughter, and plainly brought up. We have three daughters besides this son of whom I have spoken, and being fortunately able to give them greater advantages than we have had ourselves, we have educated them well, very well. It has been one of our great cares and pleasures to make them worthy of any station." A little boastfulness in his fatherly tone here, as if he added in his heart, "even of the Chesney Wold station." Not a little more magnificence, therefore, on the part of Sir Leicester. "All this is so frequent, Lady Dedlock, where I live, and among the class to which I belong, that what would be generally called unequal marriages are not of such rare occurrence with us as elsewhere. A son will sometimes make it known to his father that he has fallen in love, say, with a young woman in the factory. The father, who once worked in a factory himself, will be a little disappointed at first very possibly. It may be that he had other views for his son. However, the chances are that having ascertained the young woman to be of unblemished character, he will say to his son, 'I must be quite sure you are in earnest here. This is a serious matter for both of you. Therefore I shall have this girl educated for two years,' or it may be, 'I shall place this girl at the same school with your sisters for such a time, during which you will give me your word and honour to see her only so often. If at the expiration of that time, when she has so far profited by her advantages as that you may be upon a fair equality, you are both in the same mind, I will do my part to make you happy.' I know of several cases such as I describe, my Lady, and I think they indicate to me my own course now." Sir Leicester's magnificence explodes. Calmly, but terribly. "Mr. Rouncewell," says Sir Leicester with his right hand in the breast of his blue coat, the attitude of state in which he is painted in the gallery, "do you draw a parallel between Chesney Wold and a--" Here he resists a disposition to choke, "a factory?" "I need not reply, Sir Leicester, that the two places are very different; but for the purposes of this case, I think a parallel may be justly drawn between them." Sir Leicester directs his majestic glance down one side of the long drawing-room and up the other before he can believe that he is awake. "Are you aware, sir, that this young woman whom my Lady--my Lady--has placed near her person was brought up at the village school outside the gates?" "Sir Leicester, I am quite aware of it. A very good school it is, and handsomely supported by this family." "Then, Mr. Rouncewell," returns Sir Leicester, "the application of what you have said is, to me, incomprehensible." "Will it be more comprehensible, Sir Leicester, if I say," the ironmaster is reddening a little, "that I do not regard the village school as teaching everything desirable to be known by my son's wife?" From the village school of Chesney Wold, intact as it is this minute, to the whole framework of society; from the whole framework of society, to the aforesaid framework receiving tremendous cracks in consequence of people (iron-masters, lead-mistresses, and what not) not minding their catechism, and getting out of the station unto which they are called--necessarily and for ever, according to Sir Leicester's rapid logic, the first station in which they happen to find themselves; and from that, to their educating other people out of THEIR stations, and so obliterating the landmarks, and opening the floodgates, and all the rest of it; this is the swift progress of the Dedlock mind. "My Lady, I beg your pardon. Permit me, for one moment!" She has given a faint indication of intending to speak. "Mr. Rouncewell, our views of duty, and our views of station, and our views of education, and our views of--in short, ALL our views--are so diametrically opposed, that to prolong this discussion must be repellent to your feelings and repellent to my own. This young woman is honoured with my Lady's notice and favour. If she wishes to withdraw herself from that notice and favour or if she chooses to place herself under the influence of any one who may in his peculiar opinions--you will allow me to say, in his peculiar opinions, though I readily admit that he is not accountable for them to me--who may, in his peculiar opinions, withdraw her from that notice and favour, she is at any time at liberty to do so. We are obliged to you for the plainness with which you have spoken. It will have no effect of itself, one way or other, on the young woman's position here. Beyond this, we can make no terms; and here we beg--if you will be so good--to leave the subject." The visitor pauses a moment to give my Lady an opportunity, but she says nothing. He then rises and replies, "Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock, allow me to thank you for your attention and only to observe that I shall very seriously recommend my son to conquer his present inclinations. Good night!" "Mr. Rouncewell," says Sir Leicester with all the nature of a gentleman shining in him, "it is late, and the roads are dark. I hope your time is not so precious but that you will allow my Lady and myself to offer you the hospitality of Chesney Wold, for to-night at least." "I hope so," adds my Lady. "I am much obliged to you, but I have to travel all night in order to reach a distant part of the country punctually at an appointed time in the morning." Therewith the ironmaster takes his departure, Sir Leicester ringing the bell and my Lady rising as he leaves the room. When my Lady goes to her boudoir, she sits down thoughtfully by the fire, and inattentive to the Ghost's Walk, looks at Rosa, writing in an inner room. Presently my Lady calls her. "Come to me, child. Tell me the truth. Are you in love?" "Oh! My Lady!" My Lady, looking at the downcast and blushing face, says smiling, "Who is it? Is it Mrs. Rouncewell's grandson?" "Yes, if you please, my Lady. But I don't know that I am in love with him--yet." "Yet, you silly little thing! Do you know that he loves YOU, yet?" "I think he likes me a little, my Lady." And Rosa bursts into tears. Is this Lady Dedlock standing beside the village beauty, smoothing her dark hair with that motherly touch, and watching her with eyes so full of musing interest? Aye, indeed it is! "Listen to me, child. You are young and true, and I believe you are attached to me." "Indeed I am, my Lady. Indeed there is nothing in the world I wouldn't do to show how much." "And I don't think you would wish to leave me just yet, Rosa, even for a lover?" "No, my Lady! Oh, no!" Rosa looks up for the first time, quite frightened at the thought. "Confide in me, my child. Don't fear me. I wish you to be happy, and will make you so--if I can make anybody happy on this earth." Rosa, with fresh tears, kneels at her feet and kisses her hand. My Lady takes the hand with which she has caught it, and standing with her eyes fixed on the fire, puts it about and about between her own two hands, and gradually lets it fall. Seeing her so absorbed, Rosa softly withdraws; but still my Lady's eyes are on the fire. In search of what? Of any hand that is no more, of any hand that never was, of any touch that might have magically changed her life? Or does she listen to the Ghost's Walk and think what step does it most resemble? A man's? A woman's? The pattering of a little child's feet, ever coming on--on--on? Some melancholy influence is upon her, or why should so proud a lady close the doors and sit alone upon the hearth so desolate? Volumnia is away next day, and all the cousins are scattered before dinner. Not a cousin of the batch but is amazed to hear from Sir Leicester at breakfast-time of the obliteration of landmarks, and opening of floodgates, and cracking of the framework of society, manifested through Mrs. Rouncewell's son. Not a cousin of the batch but is really indignant, and connects it with the feebleness of William Buffy when in office, and really does feel deprived of a stake in the country--or the pension list--or something--by fraud and wrong. As to Volumnia, she is handed down the great staircase by Sir Leicester, as eloquent upon the theme as if there were a general rising in the north of England to obtain her rouge-pot and pearl necklace. And thus, with a clatter of maids and valets--for it is one appurtenance of their cousinship that however difficult they may find it to keep themselves, they MUST keep maids and valets--the cousins disperse to the four winds of heaven; and the one wintry wind that blows to-day shakes a shower from the trees near the deserted house, as if all the cousins had been changed into leaves. CHAPTER XXIX The Young Man Chesney Wold is shut up, carpets are rolled into great scrolls in corners of comfortless rooms, bright damask does penance in brown holland, carving and gilding puts on mortification, and the Dedlock ancestors retire from the light of day again. Around and around the house the leaves fall thick, but never fast, for they come circling down with a dead lightness that is sombre and slow. Let the gardener sweep and sweep the turf as he will, and press the leaves into full barrows, and wheel them off, still they lie ankle-deep. Howls the shrill wind round Chesney Wold; the sharp rain beats, the windows rattle, and the chimneys growl. Mists hide in the avenues, veil the points of view, and move in funeral-wise across the rising grounds. On all the house there is a cold, blank smell like the smell of a little church, though something dryer, suggesting that the dead and buried Dedlocks walk there in the long nights and leave the flavour of their graves behind them. But the house in town, which is rarely in the same mind as Chesney Wold at the same time, seldom rejoicing when it rejoices or mourning when it mourns, excepting when a Dedlock dies--the house in town shines out awakened. As warm and bright as so much state may be, as delicately redolent of pleasant scents that bear no trace of winter as hothouse flowers can make it, soft and hushed so that the ticking of the clocks and the crisp burning of the fires alone disturb the stillness in the rooms, it seems to wrap those chilled bones of Sir Leicester's in rainbow-coloured wool. And Sir Leicester is glad to repose in dignified contentment before the great fire in the library, condescendingly perusing the backs of his books or honouring the fine arts with a glance of approbation. For he has his pictures, ancient and modern. Some of the Fancy Ball School in which art occasionally condescends to become a master, which would be best catalogued like the miscellaneous articles in a sale. As "Three high-backed chairs, a table and cover, long-necked bottle (containing wine), one flask, one Spanish female's costume, three-quarter face portrait of Miss Jogg the model, and a suit of armour containing Don Quixote." Or "One stone terrace (cracked), one gondola in distance, one Venetian senator's dress complete, richly embroidered white satin costume with profile portrait of Miss Jogg the model, one Scimitar superbly mounted in gold with jewelled handle, elaborate Moorish dress (very rare), and Othello." Mr. Tulkinghorn comes and goes pretty often, there being estate business to do, leases to be renewed, and so on. He sees my Lady pretty often, too; and he and she are as composed, and as indifferent, and take as little heed of one another, as ever. Yet it may be that my Lady fears this Mr. Tulkinghorn and that he knows it. It may be that he pursues her doggedly and steadily, with no touch of compunction, remorse, or pity. It may be that her beauty and all the state and brilliancy surrounding her only gives him the greater zest for what he is set upon and makes him the more inflexible in it. Whether he be cold and cruel, whether immovable in what he has made his duty, whether absorbed in love of power, whether determined to have nothing hidden from him in ground where he has burrowed among secrets all his life, whether he in his heart despises the splendour of which he is a distant beam, whether he is always treasuring up slights and offences in the affability of his gorgeous clients--whether he be any of this, or all of this, it may be that my Lady had better have five thousand pairs of fashionable eyes upon her, in distrustful vigilance, than the two eyes of this rusty lawyer with his wisp of neckcloth and his dull black breeches tied with ribbons at the knees. Sir Leicester sits in my Lady's room--that room in which Mr. Tulkinghorn read the affidavit in Jarndyce and Jarndyce--particularly complacent. My Lady, as on that day, sits before the fire with her screen in her hand. Sir Leicester is particularly complacent because he has found in his newspaper some congenial remarks bearing directly on the floodgates and the framework of society. They apply so happily to the late case that Sir Leicester has come from the library to my Lady's room expressly to read them aloud. "The man who wrote this article," he observes by way of preface, nodding at the fire as if he were nodding down at the man from a mount, "has a well-balanced mind." The man's mind is not so well balanced but that he bores my Lady, who, after a languid effort to listen, or rather a languid resignation of herself to a show of listening, becomes distraught and falls into a contemplation of the fire as if it were her fire at Chesney Wold, and she had never left it. Sir Leicester, quite unconscious, reads on through his double eye-glass, occasionally stopping to remove his glass and express approval, as "Very true indeed," "Very properly put," "I have frequently made the same remark myself," invariably losing his place after each observation, and going up and down the column to find it again. Sir Leicester is reading with infinite gravity and state when the door opens, and the Mercury in powder makes this strange announcement, "The young man, my Lady, of the name of Guppy." Sir Leicester pauses, stares, repeats in a killing voice, "The young man of the name of Guppy?" Looking round, he beholds the young man of the name of Guppy, much discomfited and not presenting a very impressive letter of introduction in his manner and appearance. "Pray," says Sir Leicester to Mercury, "what do you mean by announcing with this abruptness a young man of the name of Guppy?" "I beg your pardon, Sir Leicester, but my Lady said she would see the young man whenever he called. I was not aware that you were here, Sir Leicester." With this apology, Mercury directs a scornful and indignant look at the young man of the name of Guppy which plainly says, "What do you come calling here for and getting ME into a row?" "It's quite right. I gave him those directions," says my Lady. "Let the young man wait." "By no means, my Lady. Since he has your orders to come, I will not interrupt you." Sir Leicester in his gallantry retires, rather declining to accept a bow from the young man as he goes out and majestically supposing him to be some shoemaker of intrusive appearance. Lady Dedlock looks imperiously at her visitor when the servant has left the room, casting her eyes over him from head to foot. She suffers him to stand by the door and asks him what he wants. "That your ladyship would have the kindness to oblige me with a little conversation," returns Mr. Guppy, embarrassed. "You are, of course, the person who has written me so many letters?" "Several, your ladyship. Several before your ladyship condescended to favour me with an answer." "And could you not take the same means of rendering a Conversation unnecessary? Can you not still?" Mr. Guppy screws his mouth into a silent "No!" and shakes his head. "You have been strangely importunate. If it should appear, after all, that what you have to say does not concern me--and I don't know how it can, and don't expect that it will--you will allow me to cut you short with but little ceremony. Say what you have to say, if you please." My Lady, with a careless toss of her screen, turns herself towards the fire again, sitting almost with her back to the young man of the name of Guppy. "With your ladyship's permission, then," says the young man, "I will now enter on my business. Hem! I am, as I told your ladyship in my first letter, in the law. Being in the law, I have learnt the habit of not committing myself in writing, and therefore I did not mention to your ladyship the name of the firm with which I am connected and in which my standing--and I may add income--is tolerably good. I may now state to your ladyship, in confidence, that the name of that firm is Kenge and Carboy, of Lincoln's Inn, which may not be altogether unknown to your ladyship in connexion with the case in Chancery of Jarndyce and Jarndyce." My Lady's figure begins to be expressive of some attention. She has ceased to toss the screen and holds it as if she were listening. "Now, I may say to your ladyship at once," says Mr. Guppy, a little emboldened, "it is no matter arising out of Jarndyce and Jarndyce that made me so desirous to speak to your ladyship, which conduct I have no doubt did appear, and does appear, obtrusive--in fact, almost blackguardly." After waiting for a moment to receive some assurance to the contrary, and not receiving any, Mr. Guppy proceeds, "If it had been Jarndyce and Jarndyce, I should have gone at once to your ladyship's solicitor, Mr. Tulkinghorn, of the Fields. I have the pleasure of being acquainted with Mr. Tulkinghorn--at least we move when we meet one another--and if it had been any business of that sort, I should have gone to him." My Lady turns a little round and says, "You had better sit down." "Thank your ladyship." Mr. Guppy does so. "Now, your ladyship"--Mr. Guppy refers to a little slip of paper on which he has made small notes of his line of argument and which seems to involve him in the densest obscurity whenever he looks at it--"I--Oh, yes!--I place myself entirely in your ladyship's hands. If your ladyship was to make any complaint to Kenge and Carboy or to Mr. Tulkinghorn of the present visit, I should be placed in a very disagreeable situation. That, I openly admit. Consequently, I rely upon your ladyship's honour." My Lady, with a disdainful gesture of the hand that holds the screen, assures him of his being worth no complaint from her. "Thank your ladyship," says Mr. Guppy; "quite satisfactory. Now--I--dash it!--The fact is that I put down a head or two here of the order of the points I thought of touching upon, and they're written short, and I can't quite make out what they mean. If your ladyship will excuse me taking it to the window half a moment, I--" Mr. Guppy, going to the window, tumbles into a pair of love-birds, to whom he says in his confusion, "I beg your pardon, I am sure." This does not tend to the greater legibility of his notes. He murmurs, growing warm and red and holding the slip of paper now close to his eyes, now a long way off, "C.S. What's C.S. for? Oh! C.S.! Oh, I know! Yes, to be sure!" And comes back enlightened. "I am not aware," says Mr. Guppy, standing midway between my Lady and his chair, "whether your ladyship ever happened to hear of, or to see, a young lady of the name of Miss Esther Summerson." My Lady's eyes look at him full. "I saw a young lady of that name not long ago. This past autumn." "Now, did it strike your ladyship that she was like anybody?" asks Mr. Guppy, crossing his arms, holding his head on one side, and scratching the corner of his mouth with his memoranda. My Lady removes her eyes from him no more. "No." "Not like your ladyship's family?" "No." "I think your ladyship," says Mr. Guppy, "can hardly remember Miss Summerson's face?" "I remember the young lady very well. What has this to do with me?" "Your ladyship, I do assure you that having Miss Summerson's image imprinted on my 'eart--which I mention in confidence--I found, when I had the honour of going over your ladyship's mansion of Chesney Wold while on a short out in the county of Lincolnshire with a friend, such a resemblance between Miss Esther Summerson and your ladyship's own portrait that it completely knocked me over, so much so that I didn't at the moment even know what it WAS that knocked me over. And now I have the honour of beholding your ladyship near (I have often, since that, taken the liberty of looking at your ladyship in your carriage in the park, when I dare say you was not aware of me, but I never saw your ladyship so near), it's really more surprising than I thought it." Young man of the name of Guppy! There have been times, when ladies lived in strongholds and had unscrupulous attendants within call, when that poor life of yours would NOT have been worth a minute's purchase, with those beautiful eyes looking at you as they look at this moment. My Lady, slowly using her little hand-screen as a fan, asks him again what he supposes that his taste for likenesses has to do with her. "Your ladyship," replies Mr. Guppy, again referring to his paper, "I am coming to that. Dash these notes! Oh! 'Mrs. Chadband.' Yes." Mr. Guppy draws his chair a little forward and seats himself again. My Lady reclines in her chair composedly, though with a trifle less of graceful ease than usual perhaps, and never falters in her steady gaze. "A--stop a minute, though!" Mr. Guppy refers again. "E.S. twice? Oh, yes! Yes, I see my way now, right on." Rolling up the slip of paper as an instrument to point his speech with, Mr. Guppy proceeds. "Your ladyship, there is a mystery about Miss Esther Summerson's birth and bringing up. I am informed of that fact because--which I mention in confidence--I know it in the way of my profession at Kenge and Carboy's. Now, as I have already mentioned to your ladyship, Miss Summerson's image is imprinted on my 'eart. If I could clear this mystery for her, or prove her to be well related, or find that having the honour to be a remote branch of your ladyship's family she had a right to be made a party in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, why, I might make a sort of a claim upon Miss Summerson to look with an eye of more dedicated favour on my proposals than she has exactly done as yet. In fact, as yet she hasn't favoured them at all." A kind of angry smile just dawns upon my Lady's face. "Now, it's a very singular circumstance, your ladyship," says Mr. Guppy, "though one of those circumstances that do fall in the way of us professional men--which I may call myself, for though not admitted, yet I have had a present of my articles made to me by Kenge and Carboy, on my mother's advancing from the principal of her little income the money for the stamp, which comes heavy--that I have encountered the person who lived as servant with the lady who brought Miss Summerson up before Mr. Jarndyce took charge of her. That lady was a Miss Barbary, your ladyship." Is the dead colour on my Lady's face reflected from the screen which has a green silk ground and which she holds in her raised hand as if she had forgotten it, or is it a dreadful paleness that has fallen on her? "Did your ladyship," says Mr. Guppy, "ever happen to hear of Miss Barbary?" "I don't know. I think so. Yes." "Was Miss Barbary at all connected with your ladyship's family?" My Lady's lips move, but they utter nothing. She shakes her head. "NOT connected?" says Mr. Guppy. "Oh! Not to your ladyship's knowledge, perhaps? Ah! But might be? Yes." After each of these interrogatories, she has inclined her head. "Very good! Now, this Miss Barbary was extremely close--seems to have been extraordinarily close for a female, females being generally (in common life at least) rather given to conversation--and my witness never had an idea whether she possessed a single relative. On one occasion, and only one, she seems to have been confidential to my witness on a single point, and she then told her that the little girl's real name was not Esther Summerson, but Esther Hawdon." "My God!" Mr. Guppy stares. Lady Dedlock sits before him looking him through, with the same dark shade upon her face, in the same attitude even to the holding of the screen, with her lips a little apart, her brow a little contracted, but for the moment dead. He sees her consciousness return, sees a tremor pass across her frame like a ripple over water, sees her lips shake, sees her compose them by a great effort, sees her force herself back to the knowledge of his presence and of what he has said. All this, so quickly, that her exclamation and her dead condition seem to have passed away like the features of those long-preserved dead bodies sometimes opened up in tombs, which, struck by the air like lightning, vanish in a breath. "Your ladyship is acquainted with the name of Hawdon?" "I have heard it before." "Name of any collateral or remote branch of your ladyship's family?" "No." "Now, your ladyship," says Mr. Guppy, "I come to the last point of the case, so far as I have got it up. It's going on, and I shall gather it up closer and closer as it goes on. Your ladyship must know--if your ladyship don't happen, by any chance, to know already--that there was found dead at the house of a person named Krook, near Chancery Lane, some time ago, a law-writer in great distress. Upon which law-writer there was an inquest, and which law-writer was an anonymous character, his name being unknown. But, your ladyship, I have discovered very lately that that law-writer's name was Hawdon." "And what is THAT to me?" "Aye, your ladyship, that's the question! Now, your ladyship, a queer thing happened after that man's death. A lady started up, a disguised lady, your ladyship, who went to look at the scene of action and went to look at his grave. She hired a crossing-sweeping boy to show it her. If your ladyship would wish to have the boy produced in corroboration of this statement, I can lay my hand upon him at any time." The wretched boy is nothing to my Lady, and she does NOT wish to have him produced. "Oh, I assure your ladyship it's a very queer start indeed," says Mr. Guppy. "If you was to hear him tell about the rings that sparkled on her fingers when she took her glove off, you'd think it quite romantic." There are diamonds glittering on the hand that holds the screen. My Lady trifles with the screen and makes them glitter more, again with that expression which in other times might have been so dangerous to the young man of the name of Guppy. "It was supposed, your ladyship, that he left no rag or scrap behind him by which he could be possibly identified. But he did. He left a bundle of old letters." The screen still goes, as before. All this time her eyes never once release him. "They were taken and secreted. And to-morrow night, your ladyship, they will come into my possession." "Still I ask you, what is this to me?" "Your ladyship, I conclude with that." Mr. Guppy rises. "If you think there's enough in this chain of circumstances put together--in the undoubted strong likeness of this young lady to your ladyship, which is a positive fact for a jury; in her having been brought up by Miss Barbary; in Miss Barbary stating Miss Summerson's real name to be Hawdon; in your ladyship's knowing both these names VERY WELL; and in Hawdon's dying as he did--to give your ladyship a family interest in going further into the case, I will bring these papers here. I don't know what they are, except that they are old letters: I have never had them in my possession yet. I will bring those papers here as soon as I get them and go over them for the first time with your ladyship. I have told your ladyship my object. I have told your ladyship that I should be placed in a very disagreeable situation if any complaint was made, and all is in strict confidence." Is this the full purpose of the young man of the name of Guppy, or has he any other? Do his words disclose the length, breadth, depth, of his object and suspicion in coming here; or if not, what do they hide? He is a match for my Lady there. She may look at him, but he can look at the table and keep that witness-box face of his from telling anything. "You may bring the letters," says my Lady, "if you choose." "Your ladyship is not very encouraging, upon my word and honour," says Mr. Guppy, a little injured. "You may bring the letters," she repeats in the same tone, "if you--please." "It shall be done. I wish your ladyship good day." On a table near her is a rich bauble of a casket, barred and clasped like an old strong-chest. She, looking at him still, takes it to her and unlocks it. "Oh! I assure your ladyship I am not actuated by any motives of that sort," says Mr. Guppy, "and I couldn't accept anything of the kind. I wish your ladyship good day, and am much obliged to you all the same." So the young man makes his bow and goes downstairs, where the supercilious Mercury does not consider himself called upon to leave his Olympus by the hall-fire to let the young man out. As Sir Leicester basks in his library and dozes over his newspaper, is there no influence in the house to startle him, not to say to make the very trees at Chesney Wold fling up their knotted arms, the very portraits frown, the very armour stir? No. Words, sobs, and cries are but air, and air is so shut in and shut out throughout the house in town that sounds need be uttered trumpet-tongued indeed by my Lady in her chamber to carry any faint vibration to Sir Leicester's ears; and yet this cry is in the house, going upward from a wild figure on its knees. "O my child, my child! Not dead in the first hours of her life, as my cruel sister told me, but sternly nurtured by her, after she had renounced me and my name! O my child, O my child!" CHAPTER XXX Esther's Narrative Richard had been gone away some time when a visitor came to pass a few days with us. It was an elderly lady. It was Mrs. Woodcourt, who, having come from Wales to stay with Mrs. Bayham Badger and having written to my guardian, "by her son Allan's desire," to report that she had heard from him and that he was well "and sent his kind remembrances to all of us," had been invited by my guardian to make a visit to Bleak House. She stayed with us nearly three weeks. She took very kindly to me and was extremely confidential, so much so that sometimes she almost made me uncomfortable. I had no right, I knew very well, to be uncomfortable because she confided in me, and I felt it was unreasonable; still, with all I could do, I could not quite help it. She was such a sharp little lady and used to sit with her hands folded in each other looking so very watchful while she talked to me that perhaps I found that rather irksome. Or perhaps it was her being so upright and trim, though I don't think it was that, because I thought that quaintly pleasant. Nor can it have been the general expression of her face, which was very sparkling and pretty for an old lady. I don't know what it was. Or at least if I do now, I thought I did not then. Or at least--but it don't matter. Of a night when I was going upstairs to bed, she would invite me into her room, where she sat before the fire in a great chair; and, dear me, she would tell me about Morgan ap-Kerrig until I was quite low-spirited! Sometimes she recited a few verses from Crumlinwallinwer and the Mewlinnwillinwodd (if those are the right names, which I dare say they are not), and would become quite fiery with the sentiments they expressed. Though I never knew what they were (being in Welsh), further than that they were highly eulogistic of the lineage of Morgan ap-Kerrig. "So, Miss Summerson," she would say to me with stately triumph, "this, you see, is the fortune inherited by my son. Wherever my son goes, he can claim kindred with Ap-Kerrig. He may not have money, but he always has what is much better--family, my dear." I had my doubts of their caring so very much for Morgan ap-Kerrig in India and China, but of course I never expressed them. I used to say it was a great thing to be so highly connected. "It IS, my dear, a great thing," Mrs. Woodcourt would reply. "It has its disadvantages; my son's choice of a wife, for instance, is limited by it, but the matrimonial choice of the royal family is limited in much the same manner." Then she would pat me on the arm and smooth my dress, as much as to assure me that she had a good opinion of me, the distance between us notwithstanding. "Poor Mr. Woodcourt, my dear," she would say, and always with some emotion, for with her lofty pedigree she had a very affectionate heart, "was descended from a great Highland family, the MacCoorts of MacCoort. He served his king and country as an officer in the Royal Highlanders, and he died on the field. My son is one of the last representatives of two old families. With the blessing of heaven he will set them up again and unite them with another old family." It was in vain for me to try to change the subject, as I used to try, only for the sake of novelty or perhaps because--but I need not be so particular. Mrs. Woodcourt never would let me change it. "My dear," she said one night, "you have so much sense and you look at the world in a quiet manner so superior to your time of life that it is a comfort to me to talk to you about these family matters of mine. You don't know much of my son, my dear; but you know enough of him, I dare say, to recollect him?" "Yes, ma'am. I recollect him." "Yes, my dear. Now, my dear, I think you are a judge of character, and I should like to have your opinion of him." "Oh, Mrs. Woodcourt," said I, "that is so difficult!" "Why is it so difficult, my dear?" she returned. "I don't see it myself." "To give an opinion--" "On so slight an acquaintance, my dear. THAT'S true." I didn't mean that, because Mr. Woodcourt had been at our house a good deal altogether and had become quite intimate with my guardian. I said so, and added that he seemed to be very clever in his profession--we thought--and that his kindness and gentleness to Miss Flite were above all praise. "You do him justice!" said Mrs. Woodcourt, pressing my hand. "You define him exactly. Allan is a dear fellow, and in his profession faultless. I say it, though I am his mother. Still, I must confess he is not without faults, love." "None of us are," said I. "Ah! But his really are faults that he might correct, and ought to correct," returned the sharp old lady, sharply shaking her head. "I am so much attached to you that I may confide in you, my dear, as a third party wholly disinterested, that he is fickleness itself." I said I should have thought it hardly possible that he could have been otherwise than constant to his profession and zealous in the pursuit of it, judging from the reputation he had earned. "You are right again, my dear," the old lady retorted, "but I don't refer to his profession, look you." "Oh!" said I. "No," said she. "I refer, my dear, to his social conduct. He is always paying trivial attentions to young ladies, and always has been, ever since he was eighteen. Now, my dear, he has never really cared for any one of them and has never meant in doing this to do any harm or to express anything but politeness and good nature. Still, it's not right, you know; is it?" "No," said I, as she seemed to wait for me. "And it might lead to mistaken notions, you see, my dear." I supposed it might. "Therefore, I have told him many times that he really should be more careful, both in justice to himself and in justice to others. And he has always said, 'Mother, I will be; but you know me better than anybody else does, and you know I mean no harm--in short, mean nothing.' All of which is very true, my dear, but is no justification. However, as he is now gone so far away and for an indefinite time, and as he will have good opportunities and introductions, we may consider this past and gone. And you, my dear," said the old lady, who was now all nods and smiles, "regarding your dear self, my love?" "Me, Mrs. Woodcourt?" "Not to be always selfish, talking of my son, who has gone to seek his fortune and to find a wife--when do you mean to seek YOUR fortune and to find a husband, Miss Summerson? Hey, look you! Now you blush!" I don't think I did blush--at all events, it was not important if I did--and I said my present fortune perfectly contented me and I had no wish to change it. "Shall I tell you what I always think of you and the fortune yet to come for you, my love?" said Mrs. Woodcourt. "If you believe you are a good prophet," said I. "Why, then, it is that you will marry some one very rich and very worthy, much older--five and twenty years, perhaps--than yourself. And you will be an excellent wife, and much beloved, and very happy." "That is a good fortune," said I. "But why is it to be mine?" "My dear," she returned, "there's suitability in it--you are so busy, and so neat, and so peculiarly situated altogether that there's suitability in it, and it will come to pass. And nobody, my love, will congratulate you more sincerely on such a marriage than I shall." It was curious that this should make me uncomfortable, but I think it did. I know it did. It made me for some part of that night uncomfortable. I was so ashamed of my folly that I did not like to confess it even to Ada, and that made me more uncomfortable still. I would have given anything not to have been so much in the bright old lady's confidence if I could have possibly declined it. It gave me the most inconsistent opinions of her. At one time I thought she was a story-teller, and at another time that she was the pink of truth. Now I suspected that she was very cunning, next moment I believed her honest Welsh heart to be perfectly innocent and simple. And after all, what did it matter to me, and why did it matter to me? Why could not I, going up to bed with my basket of keys, stop to sit down by her fire and accommodate myself for a little while to her, at least as well as to anybody else, and not trouble myself about the harmless things she said to me? Impelled towards her, as I certainly was, for I was very anxious that she should like me and was very glad indeed that she did, why should I harp afterwards, with actual distress and pain, on every word she said and weigh it over and over again in twenty scales? Why was it so worrying to me to have her in our house, and confidential to me every night, when I yet felt that it was better and safer somehow that she should be there than anywhere else? These were perplexities and contradictions that I could not account for. At least, if I could--but I shall come to all that by and by, and it is mere idleness to go on about it now. So when Mrs. Woodcourt went away, I was sorry to lose her but was relieved too. And then Caddy Jellyby came down, and Caddy brought such a packet of domestic news that it gave us abundant occupation. First Caddy declared (and would at first declare nothing else) that I was the best adviser that ever was known. This, my pet said, was no news at all; and this, I said, of course, was nonsense. Then Caddy told us that she was going to be married in a month and that if Ada and I would be her bridesmaids, she was the happiest girl in the world. To be sure, this was news indeed; and I thought we never should have done talking about it, we had so much to say to Caddy, and Caddy had so much to say to us. It seemed that Caddy's unfortunate papa had got over his bankruptcy--"gone through the Gazette," was the expression Caddy used, as if it were a tunnel--with the general clemency and commiseration of his creditors, and had got rid of his affairs in some blessed manner without succeeding in understanding them, and had given up everything he possessed (which was not worth much, I should think, to judge from the state of the furniture), and had satisfied every one concerned that he could do no more, poor man. So, he had been honourably dismissed to "the office" to begin the world again. What he did at the office, I never knew; Caddy said he was a "custom-house and general agent," and the only thing I ever understood about that business was that when he wanted money more than usual he went to the docks to look for it, and hardly ever found it. As soon as her papa had tranquillized his mind by becoming this shorn lamb, and they had removed to a furnished lodging in Hatton Garden (where I found the children, when I afterwards went there, cutting the horse hair out of the seats of the chairs and choking themselves with it), Caddy had brought about a meeting between him and old Mr. Turveydrop; and poor Mr. Jellyby, being very humble and meek, had deferred to Mr. Turveydrop's deportment so submissively that they had become excellent friends. By degrees, old Mr. Turveydrop, thus familiarized with the idea of his son's marriage, had worked up his parental feelings to the height of contemplating that event as being near at hand and had given his gracious consent to the young couple commencing housekeeping at the academy in Newman Street when they would. "And your papa, Caddy. What did he say?" "Oh! Poor Pa," said Caddy, "only cried and said he hoped we might get on better than he and Ma had got on. He didn't say so before Prince, he only said so to me. And he said, 'My poor girl, you have not been very well taught how to make a home for your husband, but unless you mean with all your heart to strive to do it, you had better murder him than marry him--if you really love him.'" "And how did you reassure him, Caddy?" "Why, it was very distressing, you know, to see poor Pa so low and hear him say such terrible things, and I couldn't help crying myself. But I told him that I DID mean it with all my heart and that I hoped our house would be a place for him to come and find some comfort in of an evening and that I hoped and thought I could be a better daughter to him there than at home. Then I mentioned Peepy's coming to stay with me, and then Pa began to cry again and said the children were Indians." "Indians, Caddy?" "Yes," said Caddy, "wild Indians. And Pa said"--here she began to sob, poor girl, not at all like the happiest girl in the world--"that he was sensible the best thing that could happen to them was their being all tomahawked together." Ada suggested that it was comfortable to know that Mr. Jellyby did not mean these destructive sentiments. "No, of course I know Pa wouldn't like his family to be weltering in their blood," said Caddy, "but he means that they are very unfortunate in being Ma's children and that he is very unfortunate in being Ma's husband; and I am sure that's true, though it seems unnatural to say so." I asked Caddy if Mrs. Jellyby knew that her wedding-day was fixed. "Oh! You know what Ma is, Esther," she returned. "It's impossible to say whether she knows it or not. She has been told it often enough; and when she IS told it, she only gives me a placid look, as if I was I don't know what--a steeple in the distance," said Caddy with a sudden idea; "and then she shakes her head and says 'Oh, Caddy, Caddy, what a tease you are!' and goes on with the Borrioboola letters." "And about your wardrobe, Caddy?" said I. For she was under no restraint with us. "Well, my dear Esther," she returned, drying her eyes, "I must do the best I can and trust to my dear Prince never to have an unkind remembrance of my coming so shabbily to him. If the question concerned an outfit for Borrioboola, Ma would know all about it and would be quite excited. Being what it is, she neither knows nor cares." Caddy was not at all deficient in natural affection for her mother, but mentioned this with tears as an undeniable fact, which I am afraid it was. We were sorry for the poor dear girl and found so much to admire in the good disposition which had survived under such discouragement that we both at once (I mean Ada and I) proposed a little scheme that made her perfectly joyful. This was her staying with us for three weeks, my staying with her for one, and our all three contriving and cutting out, and repairing, and sewing, and saving, and doing the very best we could think of to make the most of her stock. My guardian being as pleased with the idea as Caddy was, we took her home next day to arrange the matter and brought her out again in triumph with her boxes and all the purchases that could be squeezed out of a ten-pound note, which Mr. Jellyby had found in the docks I suppose, but which he at all events gave her. What my guardian would not have given her if we had encouraged him, it would be difficult to say, but we thought it right to compound for no more than her wedding-dress and bonnet. He agreed to this compromise, and if Caddy had ever been happy in her life, she was happy when we sat down to work. She was clumsy enough with her needle, poor girl, and pricked her fingers as much as she had been used to ink them. She could not help reddening a little now and then, partly with the smart and partly with vexation at being able to do no better, but she soon got over that and began to improve rapidly. So day after day she, and my darling, and my little maid Charley, and a milliner out of the town, and I, sat hard at work, as pleasantly as possible. Over and above this, Caddy was very anxious "to learn housekeeping," as she said. Now, mercy upon us! The idea of her learning housekeeping of a person of my vast experience was such a joke that I laughed, and coloured up, and fell into a comical confusion when she proposed it. However, I said, "Caddy, I am sure you are very welcome to learn anything that you can learn of ME, my dear," and I showed her all my books and methods and all my fidgety ways. You would have supposed that I was showing her some wonderful inventions, by her study of them; and if you had seen her, whenever I jingled my housekeeping keys, get up and attend me, certainly you might have thought that there never was a greater imposter than I with a blinder follower than Caddy Jellyby. So what with working and housekeeping, and lessons to Charley, and backgammon in the evening with my guardian, and duets with Ada, the three weeks slipped fast away. Then I went home with Caddy to see what could be done there, and Ada and Charley remained behind to take care of my guardian. When I say I went home with Caddy, I mean to the furnished lodging in Hatton Garden. We went to Newman Street two or three times, where preparations were in progress too--a good many, I observed, for enhancing the comforts of old Mr. Turveydrop, and a few for putting the newly married couple away cheaply at the top of the house--but our great point was to make the furnished lodging decent for the wedding-breakfast and to imbue Mrs. Jellyby beforehand with some faint sense of the occasion. The latter was the more difficult thing of the two because Mrs. Jellyby and an unwholesome boy occupied the front sitting-room (the back one was a mere closet), and it was littered down with waste-paper and Borrioboolan documents, as an untidy stable might be littered with straw. Mrs. Jellyby sat there all day drinking strong coffee, dictating, and holding Borrioboolan interviews by appointment. The unwholesome boy, who seemed to me to be going into a decline, took his meals out of the house. When Mr. Jellyby came home, he usually groaned and went down into the kitchen. There he got something to eat if the servant would give him anything, and then, feeling that he was in the way, went out and walked about Hatton Garden in the wet. The poor children scrambled up and tumbled down the house as they had always been accustomed to do. The production of these devoted little sacrifices in any presentable condition being quite out of the question at a week's notice, I proposed to Caddy that we should make them as happy as we could on her marriage morning in the attic where they all slept, and should confine our greatest efforts to her mama and her mama's room, and a clean breakfast. In truth Mrs. Jellyby required a good deal of attention, the lattice-work up her back having widened considerably since I first knew her and her hair looking like the mane of a dustman's horse. Thinking that the display of Caddy's wardrobe would be the best means of approaching the subject, I invited Mrs. Jellyby to come and look at it spread out on Caddy's bed in the evening after the unwholesome boy was gone. "My dear Miss Summerson," said she, rising from her desk with her usual sweetness of temper, "these are really ridiculous preparations, though your assisting them is a proof of your kindness. There is something so inexpressibly absurd to me in the idea of Caddy being married! Oh, Caddy, you silly, silly, silly puss!" She came upstairs with us notwithstanding and looked at the clothes in her customary far-off manner. They suggested one distinct idea to her, for she said with her placid smile, and shaking her head, "My good Miss Summerson, at half the cost, this weak child might have been equipped for Africa!" On our going downstairs again, Mrs. Jellyby asked me whether this troublesome business was really to take place next Wednesday. And on my replying yes, she said, "Will my room be required, my dear Miss Summerson? For it's quite impossible that I can put my papers away." I took the liberty of saying that the room would certainly be wanted and that I thought we must put the papers away somewhere. "Well, my dear Miss Summerson," said Mrs. Jellyby, "you know best, I dare say. But by obliging me to employ a boy, Caddy has embarrassed me to that extent, overwhelmed as I am with public business, that I don't know which way to turn. We have a Ramification meeting, too, on Wednesday afternoon, and the inconvenience is very serious." "It is not likely to occur again," said I, smiling. "Caddy will be married but once, probably." "That's true," Mrs. Jellyby replied; "that's true, my dear. I suppose we must make the best of it!" The next question was how Mrs. Jellyby should be dressed on the occasion. I thought it very curious to see her looking on serenely from her writing-table while Caddy and I discussed it, occasionally shaking her head at us with a half-reproachful smile like a superior spirit who could just bear with our trifling. The state in which her dresses were, and the extraordinary confusion in which she kept them, added not a little to our difficulty; but at length we devised something not very unlike what a common-place mother might wear on such an occasion. The abstracted manner in which Mrs. Jellyby would deliver herself up to having this attire tried on by the dressmaker, and the sweetness with which she would then observe to me how sorry she was that I had not turned my thoughts to Africa, were consistent with the rest of her behaviour. The lodging was rather confined as to space, but I fancied that if Mrs. Jellyby's household had been the only lodgers in Saint Paul's or Saint Peter's, the sole advantage they would have found in the size of the building would have been its affording a great deal of room to be dirty in. I believe that nothing belonging to the family which it had been possible to break was unbroken at the time of those preparations for Caddy's marriage, that nothing which it had been possible to spoil in any way was unspoilt, and that no domestic object which was capable of collecting dirt, from a dear child's knee to the door-plate, was without as much dirt as could well accumulate upon it. Poor Mr. Jellyby, who very seldom spoke and almost always sat when he was at home with his head against the wall, became interested when he saw that Caddy and I were attempting to establish some order among all this waste and ruin and took off his coat to help. But such wonderful things came tumbling out of the closets when they were opened--bits of mouldy pie, sour bottles, Mrs. Jellyby's caps, letters, tea, forks, odd boots and shoes of children, firewood, wafers, saucepan-lids, damp sugar in odds and ends of paper bags, footstools, blacklead brushes, bread, Mrs. Jellyby's bonnets, books with butter sticking to the binding, guttered candle ends put out by being turned upside down in broken candlesticks, nutshells, heads and tails of shrimps, dinner-mats, gloves, coffee-grounds, umbrellas--that he looked frightened, and left off again. But he came regularly every evening and sat without his coat, with his head against the wall, as though he would have helped us if he had known how. "Poor Pa!" said Caddy to me on the night before the great day, when we really had got things a little to rights. "It seems unkind to leave him, Esther. But what could I do if I stayed! Since I first knew you, I have tidied and tidied over and over again, but it's useless. Ma and Africa, together, upset the whole house directly. We never have a servant who don't drink. Ma's ruinous to everything." Mr. Jellyby could not hear what she said, but he seemed very low indeed and shed tears, I thought. "My heart aches for him; that it does!" sobbed Caddy. "I can't help thinking to-night, Esther, how dearly I hope to be happy with Prince, and how dearly Pa hoped, I dare say, to be happy with Ma. What a disappointed life!" "My dear Caddy!" said Mr. Jellyby, looking slowly round from the wail. It was the first time, I think, I ever heard him say three words together. "Yes, Pa!" cried Caddy, going to him and embracing him affectionately. "My dear Caddy," said Mr. Jellyby. "Never have--" "Not Prince, Pa?" faltered Caddy. "Not have Prince?" "Yes, my dear," said Mr. Jellyby. "Have him, certainly. But, never have--" I mentioned in my account of our first visit in Thavies Inn that Richard described Mr. Jellyby as frequently opening his mouth after dinner without saying anything. It was a habit of his. He opened his mouth now a great many times and shook his head in a melancholy manner. "What do you wish me not to have? Don't have what, dear Pa?" asked Caddy, coaxing him, with her arms round his neck. "Never have a mission, my dear child." Mr. Jellyby groaned and laid his head against the wall again, and this was the only time I ever heard him make any approach to expressing his sentiments on the Borrioboolan question. I suppose he had been more talkative and lively once, but he seemed to have been completely exhausted long before I knew him. I thought Mrs. Jellyby never would have left off serenely looking over her papers and drinking coffee that night. It was twelve o'clock before we could obtain possession of the room, and the clearance it required then was so discouraging that Caddy, who was almost tired out, sat down in the middle of the dust and cried. But she soon cheered up, and we did wonders with it before we went to bed. In the morning it looked, by the aid of a few flowers and a quantity of soap and water and a little arrangement, quite gay. The plain breakfast made a cheerful show, and Caddy was perfectly charming. But when my darling came, I thought--and I think now--that I never had seen such a dear face as my beautiful pet's. We made a little feast for the children upstairs, and we put Peepy at the head of the table, and we showed them Caddy in her bridal dress, and they clapped their hands and hurrahed, and Caddy cried to think that she was going away from them and hugged them over and over again until we brought Prince up to fetch her away--when, I am sorry to say, Peepy bit him. Then there was old Mr. Turveydrop downstairs, in a state of deportment not to be expressed, benignly blessing Caddy and giving my guardian to understand that his son's happiness was his own parental work and that he sacrificed personal considerations to ensure it. "My dear sir," said Mr. Turveydrop, "these young people will live with me; my house is large enough for their accommodation, and they shall not want the shelter of my roof. I could have wished--you will understand the allusion, Mr. Jarndyce, for you remember my illustrious patron the Prince Regent--I could have wished that my son had married into a family where there was more deportment, but the will of heaven be done!" Mr. and Mrs. Pardiggle were of the party--Mr. Pardiggle, an obstinate-looking man with a large waistcoat and stubbly hair, who was always talking in a loud bass voice about his mite, or Mrs. Pardiggle's mite, or their five boys' mites. Mr. Quale, with his hair brushed back as usual and his knobs of temples shining very much, was also there, not in the character of a disappointed lover, but as the accepted of a young--at least, an unmarried--lady, a Miss Wisk, who was also there. Miss Wisk's mission, my guardian said, was to show the world that woman's mission was man's mission and that the only genuine mission of both man and woman was to be always moving declaratory resolutions about things in general at public meetings. The guests were few, but were, as one might expect at Mrs. Jellyby's, all devoted to public objects only. Besides those I have mentioned, there was an extremely dirty lady with her bonnet all awry and the ticketed price of her dress still sticking on it, whose neglected home, Caddy told me, was like a filthy wilderness, but whose church was like a fancy fair. A very contentious gentleman, who said it was his mission to be everybody's brother but who appeared to be on terms of coolness with the whole of his large family, completed the party. A party, having less in common with such an occasion, could hardly have been got together by any ingenuity. Such a mean mission as the domestic mission was the very last thing to be endured among them; indeed, Miss Wisk informed us, with great indignation, before we sat down to breakfast, that the idea of woman's mission lying chiefly in the narrow sphere of home was an outrageous slander on the part of her tyrant, man. One other singularity was that nobody with a mission--except Mr. Quale, whose mission, as I think I have formerly said, was to be in ecstasies with everybody's mission--cared at all for anybody's mission. Mrs. Pardiggle being as clear that the only one infallible course was her course of pouncing upon the poor and applying benevolence to them like a strait-waistcoat; as Miss Wisk was that the only practical thing for the world was the emancipation of woman from the thraldom of her tyrant, man. Mrs. Jellyby, all the while, sat smiling at the limited vision that could see anything but Borrioboola-Gha. But I am anticipating now the purport of our conversation on the ride home instead of first marrying Caddy. We all went to church, and Mr. Jellyby gave her away. Of the air with which old Mr. Turveydrop, with his hat under his left arm (the inside presented at the clergyman like a cannon) and his eyes creasing themselves up into his wig, stood stiff and high-shouldered behind us bridesmaids during the ceremony, and afterwards saluted us, I could never say enough to do it justice. Miss Wisk, whom I cannot report as prepossessing in appearance, and whose manner was grim, listened to the proceedings, as part of woman's wrongs, with a disdainful face. Mrs. Jellyby, with her calm smile and her bright eyes, looked the least concerned of all the company. We duly came back to breakfast, and Mrs. Jellyby sat at the head of the table and Mr. Jellyby at the foot. Caddy had previously stolen upstairs to hug the children again and tell them that her name was Turveydrop. But this piece of information, instead of being an agreeable surprise to Peepy, threw him on his back in such transports of kicking grief that I could do nothing on being sent for but accede to the proposal that he should be admitted to the breakfast table. So he came down and sat in my lap; and Mrs. Jellyby, after saying, in reference to the state of his pinafore, "Oh, you naughty Peepy, what a shocking little pig you are!" was not at all discomposed. He was very good except that he brought down Noah with him (out of an ark I had given him before we went to church) and WOULD dip him head first into the wine-glasses and then put him in his mouth. My guardian, with his sweet temper and his quick perception and his amiable face, made something agreeable even out of the ungenial company. None of them seemed able to talk about anything but his, or her, own one subject, and none of them seemed able to talk about even that as part of a world in which there was anything else; but my guardian turned it all to the merry encouragement of Caddy and the honour of the occasion, and brought us through the breakfast nobly. What we should have done without him, I am afraid to think, for all the company despising the bride and bridegroom and old Mr. Turveydrop--and old Mr. Thurveydrop, in virtue of his deportment, considering himself vastly superior to all the company--it was a very unpromising case. At last the time came when poor Caddy was to go and when all her property was packed on the hired coach and pair that was to take her and her husband to Gravesend. It affected us to see Caddy clinging, then, to her deplorable home and hanging on her mother's neck with the greatest tenderness. "I am very sorry I couldn't go on writing from dictation, Ma," sobbed Caddy. "I hope you forgive me now." "Oh, Caddy, Caddy!" said Mrs. Jellyby. "I have told you over and over again that I have engaged a boy, and there's an end of it." "You are sure you are not the least angry with me, Ma? Say you are sure before I go away, Ma?" "You foolish Caddy," returned Mrs. Jellyby, "do I look angry, or have I inclination to be angry, or time to be angry? How CAN you?" "Take a little care of Pa while I am gone, Mama!" Mrs. Jellyby positively laughed at the fancy. "You romantic child," said she, lightly patting Caddy's back. "Go along. I am excellent friends with you. Now, good-bye, Caddy, and be very happy!" Then Caddy hung upon her father and nursed his cheek against hers as if he were some poor dull child in pain. All this took place in the hall. Her father released her, took out his pocket handkerchief, and sat down on the stairs with his head against the wall. I hope he found some consolation in walls. I almost think he did. And then Prince took her arm in his and turned with great emotion and respect to his father, whose deportment at that moment was overwhelming. "Thank you over and over again, father!" said Prince, kissing his hand. "I am very grateful for all your kindness and consideration regarding our marriage, and so, I can assure you, is Caddy." "Very," sobbed Caddy. "Ve-ry!" "My dear son," said Mr. Turveydrop, "and dear daughter, I have done my duty. If the spirit of a sainted wooman hovers above us and looks down on the occasion, that, and your constant affection, will be my recompense. You will not fail in YOUR duty, my son and daughter, I believe?" "Dear father, never!" cried Prince. "Never, never, dear Mr. Turveydrop!" said Caddy. "This," returned Mr. Turveydrop, "is as it should be. My children, my home is yours, my heart is yours, my all is yours. I will never leave you; nothing but death shall part us. My dear son, you contemplate an absence of a week, I think?" "A week, dear father. We shall return home this day week." "My dear child," said Mr. Turveydrop, "let me, even under the present exceptional circumstances, recommend strict punctuality. It is highly important to keep the connexion together; and schools, if at all neglected, are apt to take offence." "This day week, father, we shall be sure to be home to dinner." "Good!" said Mr. Turveydrop. "You will find fires, my dear Caroline, in your own room, and dinner prepared in my apartment. Yes, yes, Prince!" anticipating some self-denying objection on his son's part with a great air. "You and our Caroline will be strange in the upper part of the premises and will, therefore, dine that day in my apartment. Now, bless ye!" They drove away, and whether I wondered most at Mrs. Jellyby or at Mr. Turveydrop, I did not know. Ada and my guardian were in the same condition when we came to talk it over. But before we drove away too, I received a most unexpected and eloquent compliment from Mr. Jellyby. He came up to me in the hall, took both my hands, pressed them earnestly, and opened his mouth twice. I was so sure of his meaning that I said, quite flurried, "You are very welcome, sir. Pray don't mention it!" "I hope this marriage is for the best, guardian," said I when we three were on our road home. "I hope it is, little woman. Patience. We shall see." "Is the wind in the east to-day?" I ventured to ask him. He laughed heartily and answered, "No." "But it must have been this morning, I think," said I. He answered "No" again, and this time my dear girl confidently answered "No" too and shook the lovely head which, with its blooming flowers against the golden hair, was like the very spring. "Much YOU know of east winds, my ugly darling," said I, kissing her in my admiration--I couldn't help it. Well! It was only their love for me, I know very well, and it is a long time ago. I must write it even if I rub it out again, because it gives me so much pleasure. They said there could be no east wind where Somebody was; they said that wherever Dame Durden went, there was sunshine and summer air. CHAPTER XXXI Nurse and Patient I had not been at home again many days when one evening I went upstairs into my own room to take a peep over Charley's shoulder and see how she was getting on with her copy-book. Writing was a trying business to Charley, who seemed to have no natural power over a pen, but in whose hand every pen appeared to become perversely animated, and to go wrong and crooked, and to stop, and splash, and sidle into corners like a saddle-donkey. It was very odd to see what old letters Charley's young hand had made, they so wrinkled, and shrivelled, and tottering, it so plump and round. Yet Charley was uncommonly expert at other things and had as nimble little fingers as I ever watched. "Well, Charley," said I, looking over a copy of the letter O in which it was represented as square, triangular, pear-shaped, and collapsed in all kinds of ways, "we are improving. If we only get to make it round, we shall be perfect, Charley." Then I made one, and Charley made one, and the pen wouldn't join Charley's neatly, but twisted it up into a knot. "Never mind, Charley. We shall do it in time." Charley laid down her pen, the copy being finished, opened and shut her cramped little hand, looked gravely at the page, half in pride and half in doubt, and got up, and dropped me a curtsy. "Thank you, miss. If you please, miss, did you know a poor person of the name of Jenny?" "A brickmaker's wife, Charley? Yes." "She came and spoke to me when I was out a little while ago, and said you knew her, miss. She asked me if I wasn't the young lady's little maid--meaning you for the young lady, miss--and I said yes, miss." "I thought she had left this neighbourhood altogether, Charley." "So she had, miss, but she's come back again to where she used to live--she and Liz. Did you know another poor person of the name of Liz, miss?" "I think I do, Charley, though not by name." "That's what she said!" returned Charley. "They have both come back, miss, and have been tramping high and low." "Tramping high and low, have they, Charley?" "Yes, miss." If Charley could only have made the letters in her copy as round as the eyes with which she looked into my face, they would have been excellent. "And this poor person came about the house three or four days, hoping to get a glimpse of you, miss--all she wanted, she said--but you were away. That was when she saw me. She saw me a-going about, miss," said Charley with a short laugh of the greatest delight and pride, "and she thought I looked like your maid!" "Did she though, really, Charley?" "Yes, miss!" said Charley. "Really and truly." And Charley, with another short laugh of the purest glee, made her eyes very round again and looked as serious as became my maid. I was never tired of seeing Charley in the full enjoyment of that great dignity, standing before me with her youthful face and figure, and her steady manner, and her childish exultation breaking through it now and then in the pleasantest way. "And where did you see her, Charley?" said I. My little maid's countenance fell as she replied, "By the doctor's shop, miss." For Charley wore her black frock yet. I asked if the brickmaker's wife were ill, but Charley said no. It was some one else. Some one in her cottage who had tramped down to Saint Albans and was tramping he didn't know where. A poor boy, Charley said. No father, no mother, no any one. "Like as Tom might have been, miss, if Emma and me had died after father," said Charley, her round eyes filling with tears. "And she was getting medicine for him, Charley?" "She said, miss," returned Charley, "how that he had once done as much for her." My little maid's face was so eager and her quiet hands were folded so closely in one another as she stood looking at me that I had no great difficulty in reading her thoughts. "Well, Charley," said I, "it appears to me that you and I can do no better than go round to Jenny's and see what's the matter." The alacrity with which Charley brought my bonnet and veil, and having dressed me, quaintly pinned herself into her warm shawl and made herself look like a little old woman, sufficiently expressed her readiness. So Charley and I, without saying anything to any one, went out. It was a cold, wild night, and the trees shuddered in the wind. The rain had been thick and heavy all day, and with little intermission for many days. None was falling just then, however. The sky had partly cleared, but was very gloomy--even above us, where a few stars were shining. In the north and north-west, where the sun had set three hours before, there was a pale dead light both beautiful and awful; and into it long sullen lines of cloud waved up like a sea stricken immovable as it was heaving. Towards London a lurid glare overhung the whole dark waste, and the contrast between these two lights, and the fancy which the redder light engendered of an unearthly fire, gleaming on all the unseen buildings of the city and on all the faces of its many thousands of wondering inhabitants, was as solemn as might be. I had no thought that night--none, I am quite sure--of what was soon to happen to me. But I have always remembered since that when we had stopped at the garden-gate to look up at the sky, and when we went upon our way, I had for a moment an undefinable impression of myself as being something different from what I then was. I know it was then and there that I had it. I have ever since connected the feeling with that spot and time and with everything associated with that spot and time, to the distant voices in the town, the barking of a dog, and the sound of wheels coming down the miry hill. It was Saturday night, and most of the people belonging to the place where we were going were drinking elsewhere. We found it quieter than I had previously seen it, though quite as miserable. The kilns were burning, and a stifling vapour set towards us with a pale-blue glare. We came to the cottage, where there was a feeble candle in the patched window. We tapped at the door and went in. The mother of the little child who had died was sitting in a chair on one side of the poor fire by the bed; and opposite to her, a wretched boy, supported by the chimney-piece, was cowering on the floor. He held under his arm, like a little bundle, a fragment of a fur cap; and as he tried to warm himself, he shook until the crazy door and window shook. The place was closer than before and had an unhealthy and a very peculiar smell. I had not lifted my veil when I first spoke to the woman, which was at the moment of our going in. The boy staggered up instantly and stared at me with a remarkable expression of surprise and terror. His action was so quick and my being the cause of it was so evident that I stood still instead of advancing nearer. "I won't go no more to the berryin ground," muttered the boy; "I ain't a-going there, so I tell you!" I lifted my veil and spoke to the woman. She said to me in a low voice, "Don't mind him, ma'am. He'll soon come back to his head," and said to him, "Jo, Jo, what's the matter?" "I know wot she's come for!" cried the boy. "Who?" "The lady there. She's come to get me to go along with her to the berryin ground. I won't go to the berryin ground. I don't like the name on it. She might go a-berryin ME." His shivering came on again, and as he leaned against the wall, he shook the hovel. "He has been talking off and on about such like all day, ma'am," said Jenny softly. "Why, how you stare! This is MY lady, Jo." "Is it?" returned the boy doubtfully, and surveying me with his arm held out above his burning eyes. "She looks to me the t'other one. It ain't the bonnet, nor yet it ain't the gownd, but she looks to me the t'other one." My little Charley, with her premature experience of illness and trouble, had pulled off her bonnet and shawl and now went quietly up to him with a chair and sat him down in it like an old sick nurse. Except that no such attendant could have shown him Charley's youthful face, which seemed to engage his confidence. "I say!" said the boy. "YOU tell me. Ain't the lady the t'other lady?" Charley shook her head as she methodically drew his rags about him and made him as warm as she could. "Oh!" the boy muttered. "Then I s'pose she ain't." "I came to see if I could do you any good," said I. "What is the matter with you?" "I'm a-being froze," returned the boy hoarsely, with his haggard gaze wandering about me, "and then burnt up, and then froze, and then burnt up, ever so many times in a hour. And my head's all sleepy, and all a-going mad-like--and I'm so dry--and my bones isn't half so much bones as pain. "When did he come here?" I asked the woman. "This morning, ma'am, I found him at the corner of the town. I had known him up in London yonder. Hadn't I, Jo?" "Tom-all-Alone's," the boy replied. Whenever he fixed his attention or his eyes, it was only for a very little while. He soon began to droop his head again, and roll it heavily, and speak as if he were half awake. "When did he come from London?" I asked. "I come from London yes'day," said the boy himself, now flushed and hot. "I'm a-going somewheres." "Where is he going?" I asked. "Somewheres," repeated the boy in a louder tone. "I have been moved on, and moved on, more nor ever I was afore, since the t'other one give me the sov'ring. Mrs. Snagsby, she's always a-watching, and a-driving of me--what have I done to her?--and they're all a-watching and a-driving of me. Every one of 'em's doing of it, from the time when I don't get up, to the time when I don't go to bed. And I'm a-going somewheres. That's where I'm a-going. She told me, down in Tom-all-Alone's, as she came from Stolbuns, and so I took the Stolbuns Road. It's as good as another." He always concluded by addressing Charley. "What is to be done with him?" said I, taking the woman aside. "He could not travel in this state even if he had a purpose and knew where he was going!" "I know no more, ma'am, than the dead," she replied, glancing compassionately at him. "Perhaps the dead know better, if they could only tell us. I've kept him here all day for pity's sake, and I've given him broth and physic, and Liz has gone to try if any one will take him in (here's my pretty in the bed--her child, but I call it mine); but I can't keep him long, for if my husband was to come home and find him here, he'd be rough in putting him out and might do him a hurt. Hark! Here comes Liz back!" The other woman came hurriedly in as she spoke, and the boy got up with a half-obscured sense that he was expected to be going. When the little child awoke, and when and how Charley got at it, took it out of bed, and began to walk about hushing it, I don't know. There she was, doing all this in a quiet motherly manner as if she were living in Mrs. Blinder's attic with Tom and Emma again. The friend had been here and there, and had been played about from hand to hand, and had come back as she went. At first it was too early for the boy to be received into the proper refuge, and at last it was too late. One official sent her to another, and the other sent her back again to the first, and so backward and forward, until it appeared to me as if both must have been appointed for their skill in evading their duties instead of performing them. And now, after all, she said, breathing quickly, for she had been running and was frightened too, "Jenny, your master's on the road home, and mine's not far behind, and the Lord help the boy, for we can do no more for him!" They put a few halfpence together and hurried them into his hand, and so, in an oblivious, half-thankful, half-insensible way, he shuffled out of the house. "Give me the child, my dear," said its mother to Charley, "and thank you kindly too! Jenny, woman dear, good night! Young lady, if my master don't fall out with me, I'll look down by the kiln by and by, where the boy will be most like, and again in the morning!" She hurried off, and presently we passed her hushing and singing to her child at her own door and looking anxiously along the road for her drunken husband. I was afraid of staying then to speak to either woman, lest I should bring her into trouble. But I said to Charley that we must not leave the boy to die. Charley, who knew what to do much better than I did, and whose quickness equalled her presence of mind, glided on before me, and presently we came up with Jo, just short of the brick-kiln. I think he must have begun his journey with some small bundle under his arm and must have had it stolen or lost it. For he still carried his wretched fragment of fur cap like a bundle, though he went bare-headed through the rain, which now fell fast. He stopped when we called to him and again showed a dread of me when I came up, standing with his lustrous eyes fixed upon me, and even arrested in his shivering fit. I asked him to come with us, and we would take care that he had some shelter for the night. "I don't want no shelter," he said; "I can lay amongst the warm bricks." "But don't you know that people die there?" replied Charley. "They dies everywheres," said the boy. "They dies in their lodgings--she knows where; I showed her--and they dies down in Tom-all-Alone's in heaps. They dies more than they lives, according to what I see." Then he hoarsely whispered Charley, "If she ain't the t'other one, she ain't the forrenner. Is there THREE of 'em then?" Charley looked at me a little frightened. I felt half frightened at myself when the boy glared on me so. But he turned and followed when I beckoned to him, and finding that he acknowledged that influence in me, I led the way straight home. It was not far, only at the summit of the hill. We passed but one man. I doubted if we should have got home without assistance, the boy's steps were so uncertain and tremulous. He made no complaint, however, and was strangely unconcerned about himself, if I may say so strange a thing. Leaving him in the hall for a moment, shrunk into the corner of the window-seat and staring with an indifference that scarcely could be called wonder at the comfort and brightness about him, I went into the drawing-room to speak to my guardian. There I found Mr. Skimpole, who had come down by the coach, as he frequently did without notice, and never bringing any clothes with him, but always borrowing everything he wanted. They came out with me directly to look at the boy. The servants had gathered in the hall too, and he shivered in the window-seat with Charley standing by him, like some wounded animal that had been found in a ditch. "This is a sorrowful case," said my guardian after asking him a question or two and touching him and examining his eyes. "What do you say, Harold?" "You had better turn him out," said Mr. Skimpole. "What do you mean?" inquired my guardian, almost sternly. "My dear Jarndyce," said Mr. Skimpole, "you know what I am: I am a child. Be cross to me if I deserve it. But I have a constitutional objection to this sort of thing. I always had, when I was a medical man. He's not safe, you know. There's a very bad sort of fever about him." Mr. Skimpole had retreated from the hall to the drawing-room again and said this in his airy way, seated on the music-stool as we stood by. "You'll say it's childish," observed Mr. Skimpole, looking gaily at us. "Well, I dare say it may be; but I AM a child, and I never pretend to be anything else. If you put him out in the road, you only put him where he was before. He will be no worse off than he was, you know. Even make him better off, if you like. Give him sixpence, or five shillings, or five pound ten--you are arithmeticians, and I am not--and get rid of him!" "And what is he to do then?" asked my guardian. "Upon my life," said Mr. Skimpole, shrugging his shoulders with his engaging smile, "I have not the least idea what he is to do then. But I have no doubt he'll do it." "Now, is it not a horrible reflection," said my guardian, to whom I had hastily explained the unavailing efforts of the two women, "is it not a horrible reflection," walking up and down and rumpling his hair, "that if this wretched creature were a convicted prisoner, his hospital would be wide open to him, and he would be as well taken care of as any sick boy in the kingdom?" "My dear Jarndyce," returned Mr. Skimpole, "you'll pardon the simplicity of the question, coming as it does from a creature who is perfectly simple in worldly matters, but why ISN'T he a prisoner then?" My guardian stopped and looked at him with a whimsical mixture of amusement and indignation in his face. "Our young friend is not to be suspected of any delicacy, I should imagine," said Mr. Skimpole, unabashed and candid. "It seems to me that it would be wiser, as well as in a certain kind of way more respectable, if he showed some misdirected energy that got him into prison. There would be more of an adventurous spirit in it, and consequently more of a certain sort of poetry." "I believe," returned my guardian, resuming his uneasy walk, "that there is not such another child on earth as yourself." "Do you really?" said Mr. Skimpole. "I dare say! But I confess I don't see why our young friend, in his degree, should not seek to invest himself with such poetry as is open to him. He is no doubt born with an appetite--probably, when he is in a safer state of health, he has an excellent appetite. Very well. At our young friend's natural dinner hour, most likely about noon, our young friend says in effect to society, 'I am hungry; will you have the goodness to produce your spoon and feed me?' Society, which has taken upon itself the general arrangement of the whole system of spoons and professes to have a spoon for our young friend, does NOT produce that spoon; and our young friend, therefore, says 'You really must excuse me if I seize it.' Now, this appears to me a case of misdirected energy, which has a certain amount of reason in it and a certain amount of romance; and I don't know but what I should be more interested in our young friend, as an illustration of such a case, than merely as a poor vagabond--which any one can be." "In the meantime," I ventured to observe, "he is getting worse." "In the meantime," said Mr. Skimpole cheerfully, "as Miss Summerson, with her practical good sense, observes, he is getting worse. Therefore I recommend your turning him out before he gets still worse." The amiable face with which he said it, I think I shall never forget. "Of course, little woman," observed my guardian, turning to me, "I can ensure his admission into the proper place by merely going there to enforce it, though it's a bad state of things when, in his condition, that is necessary. But it's growing late, and is a very bad night, and the boy is worn out already. There is a bed in the wholesome loft-room by the stable; we had better keep him there till morning, when he can be wrapped up and removed. We'll do that." "Oh!" said Mr. Skimpole, with his hands upon the keys of the piano as we moved away. "Are you going back to our young friend?" "Yes," said my guardian. "How I envy you your constitution, Jarndyce!" returned Mr. Skimpole with playful admiration. "You don't mind these things; neither does Miss Summerson. You are ready at all times to go anywhere, and do anything. Such is will! I have no will at all--and no won't--simply can't." "You can't recommend anything for the boy, I suppose?" said my guardian, looking back over his shoulder half angrily; only half angrily, for he never seemed to consider Mr. Skimpole an accountable being. "My dear Jarndyce, I observed a bottle of cooling medicine in his pocket, and it's impossible for him to do better than take it. You can tell them to sprinkle a little vinegar about the place where he sleeps and to keep it moderately cool and him moderately warm. But it is mere impertinence in me to offer any recommendation. Miss Summerson has such a knowledge of detail and such a capacity for the administration of detail that she knows all about it." We went back into the hall and explained to Jo what we proposed to do, which Charley explained to him again and which he received with the languid unconcern I had already noticed, wearily looking on at what was done as if it were for somebody else. The servants compassionating his miserable state and being very anxious to help, we soon got the loft-room ready; and some of the men about the house carried him across the wet yard, well wrapped up. It was pleasant to observe how kind they were to him and how there appeared to be a general impression among them that frequently calling him "Old Chap" was likely to revive his spirits. Charley directed the operations and went to and fro between the loft-room and the house with such little stimulants and comforts as we thought it safe to give him. My guardian himself saw him before he was left for the night and reported to me when he returned to the growlery to write a letter on the boy's behalf, which a messenger was charged to deliver at day-light in the morning, that he seemed easier and inclined to sleep. They had fastened his door on the outside, he said, in case of his being delirious, but had so arranged that he could not make any noise without being heard. Ada being in our room with a cold, Mr. Skimpole was left alone all this time and entertained himself by playing snatches of pathetic airs and sometimes singing to them (as we heard at a distance) with great expression and feeling. When we rejoined him in the drawing-room he said he would give us a little ballad which had come into his head "apropos of our young friend," and he sang one about a peasant boy, "Thrown on the wide world, doomed to wander and roam, Bereft of his parents, bereft of a home." quite exquisitely. It was a song that always made him cry, he told us. He was extremely gay all the rest of the evening, for he absolutely chirped--those were his delighted words--when he thought by what a happy talent for business he was surrounded. He gave us, in his glass of negus, "Better health to our young friend!" and supposed and gaily pursued the case of his being reserved like Whittington to become Lord Mayor of London. In that event, no doubt, he would establish the Jarndyce Institution and the Summerson Almshouses, and a little annual Corporation Pilgrimage to St. Albans. He had no doubt, he said, that our young friend was an excellent boy in his way, but his way was not the Harold Skimpole way; what Harold Skimpole was, Harold Skimpole had found himself, to his considerable surprise, when he first made his own acquaintance; he had accepted himself with all his failings and had thought it sound philosophy to make the best of the bargain; and he hoped we would do the same. Charley's last report was that the boy was quiet. I could see, from my window, the lantern they had left him burning quietly; and I went to bed very happy to think that he was sheltered. There was more movement and more talking than usual a little before daybreak, and it awoke me. As I was dressing, I looked out of my window and asked one of our men who had been among the active sympathizers last night whether there was anything wrong about the house. The lantern was still burning in the loft-window. "It's the boy, miss," said he. "Is he worse?" I inquired. "Gone, miss. "Dead!" "Dead, miss? No. Gone clean off." At what time of the night he had gone, or how, or why, it seemed hopeless ever to divine. The door remaining as it had been left, and the lantern standing in the window, it could only be supposed that he had got out by a trap in the floor which communicated with an empty cart-house below. But he had shut it down again, if that were so; and it looked as if it had not been raised. Nothing of any kind was missing. On this fact being clearly ascertained, we all yielded to the painful belief that delirium had come upon him in the night and that, allured by some imaginary object or pursued by some imaginary horror, he had strayed away in that worse than helpless state; all of us, that is to say, but Mr. Skimpole, who repeatedly suggested, in his usual easy light style, that it had occurred to our young friend that he was not a safe inmate, having a bad kind of fever upon him, and that he had with great natural politeness taken himself off. Every possible inquiry was made, and every place was searched. The brick-kilns were examined, the cottages were visited, the two women were particularly questioned, but they knew nothing of him, and nobody could doubt that their wonder was genuine. The weather had for some time been too wet and the night itself had been too wet to admit of any tracing by footsteps. Hedge and ditch, and wall, and rick and stack, were examined by our men for a long distance round, lest the boy should be lying in such a place insensible or dead; but nothing was seen to indicate that he had ever been near. From the time when he was left in the loft-room, he vanished. The search continued for five days. I do not mean that it ceased even then, but that my attention was then diverted into a current very memorable to me. As Charley was at her writing again in my room in the evening, and as I sat opposite to her at work, I felt the table tremble. Looking up, I saw my little maid shivering from head to foot. "Charley," said I, "are you so cold?" "I think I am, miss," she replied. "I don't know what it is. I can't hold myself still. I felt so yesterday at about this same time, miss. Don't be uneasy, I think I'm ill." I heard Ada's voice outside, and I hurried to the door of communication between my room and our pretty sitting-room, and locked it. Just in time, for she tapped at it while my hand was yet upon the key. Ada called to me to let her in, but I said, "Not now, my dearest. Go away. There's nothing the matter; I will come to you presently." Ah! It was a long, long time before my darling girl and I were companions again. Charley fell ill. In twelve hours she was very ill. I moved her to my room, and laid her in my bed, and sat down quietly to nurse her. I told my guardian all about it, and why I felt it was necessary that I should seclude myself, and my reason for not seeing my darling above all. At first she came very often to the door, and called to me, and even reproached me with sobs and tears; but I wrote her a long letter saying that she made me anxious and unhappy and imploring her, as she loved me and wished my mind to be at peace, to come no nearer than the garden. After that she came beneath the window even oftener than she had come to the door, and if I had learnt to love her dear sweet voice before when we were hardly ever apart, how did I learn to love it then, when I stood behind the window-curtain listening and replying, but not so much as looking out! How did I learn to love it afterwards, when the harder time came! They put a bed for me in our sitting-room; and by keeping the door wide open, I turned the two rooms into one, now that Ada had vacated that part of the house, and kept them always fresh and airy. There was not a servant in or about the house but was so good that they would all most gladly have come to me at any hour of the day or night without the least fear or unwillingness, but I thought it best to choose one worthy woman who was never to see Ada and whom I could trust to come and go with all precaution. Through her means I got out to take the air with my guardian when there was no fear of meeting Ada, and wanted for nothing in the way of attendance, any more than in any other respect. And thus poor Charley sickened and grew worse, and fell into heavy danger of death, and lay severely ill for many a long round of day and night. So patient she was, so uncomplaining, and inspired by such a gentle fortitude that very often as I sat by Charley holding her head in my arms--repose would come to her, so, when it would come to her in no other attitude--I silently prayed to our Father in heaven that I might not forget the lesson which this little sister taught me. I was very sorrowful to think that Charley's pretty looks would change and be disfigured, even if she recovered--she was such a child with her dimpled face--but that thought was, for the greater part, lost in her greater peril. When she was at the worst, and her mind rambled again to the cares of her father's sick bed and the little children, she still knew me so far as that she would be quiet in my arms when she could lie quiet nowhere else, and murmur out the wanderings of her mind less restlessly. At those times I used to think, how should I ever tell the two remaining babies that the baby who had learned of her faithful heart to be a mother to them in their need was dead! There were other times when Charley knew me well and talked to me, telling me that she sent her love to Tom and Emma and that she was sure Tom would grow up to be a good man. At those times Charley would speak to me of what she had read to her father as well as she could to comfort him, of that young man carried out to be buried who was the only son of his mother and she was a widow, of the ruler's daughter raised up by the gracious hand upon her bed of death. And Charley told me that when her father died she had kneeled down and prayed in her first sorrow that he likewise might be raised up and given back to his poor children, and that if she should never get better and should die too, she thought it likely that it might come into Tom's mind to offer the same prayer for her. Then would I show Tom how these people of old days had been brought back to life on earth, only that we might know our hope to be restored to heaven! But of all the various times there were in Charley's illness, there was not one when she lost the gentle qualities I have spoken of. And there were many, many when I thought in the night of the last high belief in the watching angel, and the last higher trust in God, on the part of her poor despised father. And Charley did not die. She flutteringly and slowly turned the dangerous point, after long lingering there, and then began to mend. The hope that never had been given, from the first, of Charley being in outward appearance Charley any more soon began to be encouraged; and even that prospered, and I saw her growing into her old childish likeness again. It was a great morning when I could tell Ada all this as she stood out in the garden; and it was a great evening when Charley and I at last took tea together in the next room. But on that same evening, I felt that I was stricken cold. Happily for both of us, it was not until Charley was safe in bed again and placidly asleep that I began to think the contagion of her illness was upon me. I had been able easily to hide what I felt at tea-time, but I was past that already now, and I knew that I was rapidly following in Charley's steps. I was well enough, however, to be up early in the morning, and to return my darling's cheerful blessing from the garden, and to talk with her as long as usual. But I was not free from an impression that I had been walking about the two rooms in the night, a little beside myself, though knowing where I was; and I felt confused at times--with a curious sense of fullness, as if I were becoming too large altogether. In the evening I was so much worse that I resolved to prepare Charley, with which view I said, "You're getting quite strong, Charley, are you not?' "Oh, quite!" said Charley. "Strong enough to be told a secret, I think, Charley?" "Quite strong enough for that, miss!" cried Charley. But Charley's face fell in the height of her delight, for she saw the secret in MY face; and she came out of the great chair, and fell upon my bosom, and said "Oh, miss, it's my doing! It's my doing!" and a great deal more out of the fullness of her grateful heart. "Now, Charley," said I after letting her go on for a little while, "if I am to be ill, my great trust, humanly speaking, is in you. And unless you are as quiet and composed for me as you always were for yourself, you can never fulfil it, Charley." "If you'll let me cry a little longer, miss," said Charley. "Oh, my dear, my dear! If you'll only let me cry a little longer. Oh, my dear!"--how affectionately and devotedly she poured this out as she clung to my neck, I never can remember without tears--"I'll be good." So I let Charley cry a little longer, and it did us both good. "Trust in me now, if you please, miss," said Charley quietly. "I am listening to everything you say." "It's very little at present, Charley. I shall tell your doctor to-night that I don't think I am well and that you are going to nurse me." For that the poor child thanked me with her whole heart. "And in the morning, when you hear Miss Ada in the garden, if I should not be quite able to go to the window-curtain as usual, do you go, Charley, and say I am asleep--that I have rather tired myself, and am asleep. At all times keep the room as I have kept it, Charley, and let no one come." Charley promised, and I lay down, for I was very heavy. I saw the doctor that night and asked the favour of him that I wished to ask relative to his saying nothing of my illness in the house as yet. I have a very indistinct remembrance of that night melting into day, and of day melting into night again; but I was just able on the first morning to get to the window and speak to my darling. On the second morning I heard her dear voice--Oh, how dear now!--outside; and I asked Charley, with some difficulty (speech being painful to me), to go and say I was asleep. I heard her answer softly, "Don't disturb her, Charley, for the world!" "How does my own Pride look, Charley?" I inquired. "Disappointed, miss," said Charley, peeping through the curtain. "But I know she is very beautiful this morning." "She is indeed, miss," answered Charley, peeping. "Still looking up at the window." With her blue clear eyes, God bless them, always loveliest when raised like that! I called Charley to me and gave her her last charge. "Now, Charley, when she knows I am ill, she will try to make her way into the room. Keep her out, Charley, if you love me truly, to the last! Charley, if you let her in but once, only to look upon me for one moment as I lie here, I shall die." "I never will! I never will!" she promised me. "I believe it, my dear Charley. And now come and sit beside me for a little while, and touch me with your hand. For I cannot see you, Charley; I am blind." CHAPTER XXXII The Appointed Time It is night in Lincoln's Inn--perplexed and troublous valley of the shadow of the law, where suitors generally find but little day--and fat candles are snuffed out in offices, and clerks have rattled down the crazy wooden stairs and dispersed. The bell that rings at nine o'clock has ceased its doleful clangour about nothing; the gates are shut; and the night-porter, a solemn warder with a mighty power of sleep, keeps guard in his lodge. From tiers of staircase windows clogged lamps like the eyes of Equity, bleared Argus with a fathomless pocket for every eye and an eye upon it, dimly blink at the stars. In dirty upper casements, here and there, hazy little patches of candlelight reveal where some wise draughtsman and conveyancer yet toils for the entanglement of real estate in meshes of sheep-skin, in the average ratio of about a dozen of sheep to an acre of land. Over which bee-like industry these benefactors of their species linger yet, though office-hours be past, that they may give, for every day, some good account at last. In the neighbouring court, where the Lord Chancellor of the rag and bottle shop dwells, there is a general tendency towards beer and supper. Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Perkins, whose respective sons, engaged with a circle of acquaintance in the game of hide and seek, have been lying in ambush about the by-ways of Chancery Lane for some hours and scouring the plain of the same thoroughfare to the confusion of passengers--Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Perkins have but now exchanged congratulations on the children being abed, and they still linger on a door-step over a few parting words. Mr. Krook and his lodger, and the fact of Mr. Krook's being "continually in liquor," and the testamentary prospects of the young man are, as usual, the staple of their conversation. But they have something to say, likewise, of the Harmonic Meeting at the Sol's Arms, where the sound of the piano through the partly opened windows jingles out into the court, and where Little Swills, after keeping the lovers of harmony in a roar like a very Yorick, may now be heard taking the gruff line in a concerted piece and sentimentally adjuring his friends and patrons to "Listen, listen, listen, tew the wa-ter fall!" Mrs. Perkins and Mrs. Piper compare opinions on the subject of the young lady of professional celebrity who assists at the Harmonic Meetings and who has a space to herself in the manuscript announcement in the window, Mrs. Perkins possessing information that she has been married a year and a half, though announced as Miss M. Melvilleson, the noted siren, and that her baby is clandestinely conveyed to the Sol's Arms every night to receive its natural nourishment during the entertainments. "Sooner than which, myself," says Mrs. Perkins, "I would get my living by selling lucifers." Mrs. Piper, as in duty bound, is of the same opinion, holding that a private station is better than public applause, and thanking heaven for her own (and, by implication, Mrs. Perkins') respectability. By this time the pot-boy of the Sol's Arms appearing with her supper-pint well frothed, Mrs. Piper accepts that tankard and retires indoors, first giving a fair good night to Mrs. Perkins, who has had her own pint in her hand ever since it was fetched from the same hostelry by young Perkins before he was sent to bed. Now there is a sound of putting up shop-shutters in the court and a smell as of the smoking of pipes; and shooting stars are seen in upper windows, further indicating retirement to rest. Now, too, the policeman begins to push at doors; to try fastenings; to be suspicious of bundles; and to administer his beat, on the hypothesis that every one is either robbing or being robbed. It is a close night, though the damp cold is searching too, and there is a laggard mist a little way up in the air. It is a fine steaming night to turn the slaughter-houses, the unwholesome trades, the sewerage, bad water, and burial-grounds to account, and give the registrar of deaths some extra business. It may be something in the air--there is plenty in it--or it may be something in himself that is in fault; but Mr. Weevle, otherwise Jobling, is very ill at ease. He comes and goes between his own room and the open street door twenty times an hour. He has been doing so ever since it fell dark. Since the Chancellor shut up his shop, which he did very early to-night, Mr. Weevle has been down and up, and down and up (with a cheap tight velvet skull-cap on his head, making his whiskers look out of all proportion), oftener than before. It is no phenomenon that Mr. Snagsby should be ill at ease too, for he always is so, more or less, under the oppressive influence of the secret that is upon him. Impelled by the mystery of which he is a partaker and yet in which he is not a sharer, Mr. Snagsby haunts what seems to be its fountain-head--the rag and bottle shop in the court. It has an irresistible attraction for him. Even now, coming round by the Sol's Arms with the intention of passing down the court, and out at the Chancery Lane end, and so terminating his unpremeditated after-supper stroll of ten minutes' long from his own door and back again, Mr. Snagsby approaches. "What, Mr. Weevle?" says the stationer, stopping to speak. "Are YOU there?" "Aye!" says Weevle, "Here I am, Mr. Snagsby." "Airing yourself, as I am doing, before you go to bed?" the stationer inquires. "Why, there's not much air to be got here; and what there is, is not very freshening," Weevle answers, glancing up and down the court. "Very true, sir. Don't you observe," says Mr. Snagsby, pausing to sniff and taste the air a little, "don't you observe, Mr. Weevle, that you're--not to put too fine a point upon it--that you're rather greasy here, sir?" "Why, I have noticed myself that there is a queer kind of flavour in the place to-night," Mr. Weevle rejoins. "I suppose it's chops at the Sol's Arms." "Chops, do you think? Oh! Chops, eh?" Mr. Snagsby sniffs and tastes again. "Well, sir, I suppose it is. But I should say their cook at the Sol wanted a little looking after. She has been burning 'em, sir! And I don't think"--Mr. Snagsby sniffs and tastes again and then spits and wipes his mouth--"I don't think--not to put too fine a point upon it--that they were quite fresh when they were shown the gridiron." "That's very likely. It's a tainting sort of weather." "It IS a tainting sort of weather," says Mr. Snagsby, "and I find it sinking to the spirits." "By George! I find it gives me the horrors," returns Mr. Weevle. "Then, you see, you live in a lonesome way, and in a lonesome room, with a black circumstance hanging over it," says Mr. Snagsby, looking in past the other's shoulder along the dark passage and then falling back a step to look up at the house. "I couldn't live in that room alone, as you do, sir. I should get so fidgety and worried of an evening, sometimes, that I should be driven to come to the door and stand here sooner than sit there. But then it's very true that you didn't see, in your room, what I saw there. That makes a difference." "I know quite enough about it," returns Tony. "It's not agreeable, is it?" pursues Mr. Snagsby, coughing his cough of mild persuasion behind his hand. "Mr. Krook ought to consider it in the rent. I hope he does, I am sure." "I hope he does," says Tony. "But I doubt it." "You find the rent too high, do you, sir?" returns the stationer. "Rents ARE high about here. I don't know how it is exactly, but the law seems to put things up in price. Not," adds Mr. Snagsby with his apologetic cough, "that I mean to say a word against the profession I get my living by." Mr. Weevle again glances up and down the court and then looks at the stationer. Mr. Snagsby, blankly catching his eye, looks upward for a star or so and coughs a cough expressive of not exactly seeing his way out of this conversation. "It's a curious fact, sir," he observes, slowly rubbing his hands, "that he should have been--" "Who's he?" interrupts Mr. Weevle. "The deceased, you know," says Mr. Snagsby, twitching his head and right eyebrow towards the staircase and tapping his acquaintance on the button. "Ah, to be sure!" returns the other as if he were not over-fond of the subject. "I thought we had done with him." "I was only going to say it's a curious fact, sir, that he should have come and lived here, and been one of my writers, and then that you should come and live here, and be one of my writers too. Which there is nothing derogatory, but far from it in the appellation," says Mr. Snagsby, breaking off with a mistrust that he may have unpolitely asserted a kind of proprietorship in Mr. Weevle, "because I have known writers that have gone into brewers' houses and done really very respectable indeed. Eminently respectable, sir," adds Mr. Snagsby with a misgiving that he has not improved the matter. "It's a curious coincidence, as you say," answers Weevle, once more glancing up and down the court. "Seems a fate in it, don't there?" suggests the stationer. "There does." "Just so," observes the stationer with his confirmatory cough. "Quite a fate in it. Quite a fate. Well, Mr. Weevle, I am afraid I must bid you good night"--Mr. Snagsby speaks as if it made him desolate to go, though he has been casting about for any means of escape ever since he stopped to speak--"my little woman will be looking for me else. Good night, sir!" If Mr. Snagsby hastens home to save his little woman the trouble of looking for him, he might set his mind at rest on that score. His little woman has had her eye upon him round the Sol's Arms all this time and now glides after him with a pocket handkerchief wrapped over her head, honouring Mr. Weevle and his doorway with a searching glance as she goes past. "You'll know me again, ma'am, at all events," says Mr. Weevle to himself; "and I can't compliment you on your appearance, whoever you are, with your head tied up in a bundle. Is this fellow NEVER coming!" This fellow approaches as he speaks. Mr. Weevle softly holds up his finger, and draws him into the passage, and closes the street door. Then they go upstairs, Mr. Weevle heavily, and Mr. Guppy (for it is he) very lightly indeed. When they are shut into the back room, they speak low. "I thought you had gone to Jericho at least instead of coming here," says Tony. "Why, I said about ten." "You said about ten," Tony repeats. "Yes, so you did say about ten. But according to my count, it's ten times ten--it's a hundred o'clock. I never had such a night in my life!" "What has been the matter?" "That's it!" says Tony. "Nothing has been the matter. But here have I been stewing and fuming in this jolly old crib till I have had the horrors falling on me as thick as hail. THERE'S a blessed-looking candle!" says Tony, pointing to the heavily burning taper on his table with a great cabbage head and a long winding-sheet. "That's easily improved," Mr. Guppy observes as he takes the snuffers in hand. "IS it?" returns his friend. "Not so easily as you think. It has been smouldering like that ever since it was lighted." "Why, what's the matter with you, Tony?" inquires Mr. Guppy, looking at him, snuffers in hand, as he sits down with his elbow on the table. "William Guppy," replies the other, "I am in the downs. It's this unbearably dull, suicidal room--and old Boguey downstairs, I suppose." Mr. Weevle moodily pushes the snuffers-tray from him with his elbow, leans his head on his hand, puts his feet on the fender, and looks at the fire. Mr. Guppy, observing him, slightly tosses his head and sits down on the other side of the table in an easy attitude. "Wasn't that Snagsby talking to you, Tony?" "Yes, and he--yes, it was Snagsby," said Mr. Weevle, altering the construction of his sentence. "On business?" "No. No business. He was only sauntering by and stopped to prose." "I thought it was Snagsby," says Mr. Guppy, "and thought it as well that he shouldn't see me, so I waited till he was gone." "There we go again, William G.!" cried Tony, looking up for an instant. "So mysterious and secret! By George, if we were going to commit a murder, we couldn't have more mystery about it!" Mr. Guppy affects to smile, and with the view of changing the conversation, looks with an admiration, real or pretended, round the room at the Galaxy Gallery of British Beauty, terminating his survey with the portrait of Lady Dedlock over the mantelshelf, in which she is represented on a terrace, with a pedestal upon the terrace, and a vase upon the pedestal, and her shawl upon the vase, and a prodigious piece of fur upon the shawl, and her arm on the prodigious piece of fur, and a bracelet on her arm. "That's very like Lady Dedlock," says Mr. Guppy. "It's a speaking likeness." "I wish it was," growls Tony, without changing his position. "I should have some fashionable conversation, here, then." Finding by this time that his friend is not to be wheedled into a more sociable humour, Mr. Guppy puts about upon the ill-used tack and remonstrates with him. "Tony," says he, "I can make allowances for lowness of spirits, for no man knows what it is when it does come upon a man better than I do, and no man perhaps has a better right to know it than a man who has an unrequited image imprinted on his 'eart. But there are bounds to these things when an unoffending party is in question, and I will acknowledge to you, Tony, that I don't think your manner on the present occasion is hospitable or quite gentlemanly." "This is strong language, William Guppy," returns Mr. Weevle. "Sir, it may be," retorts Mr. William Guppy, "but I feel strongly when I use it." Mr. Weevle admits that he has been wrong and begs Mr. William Guppy to think no more about it. Mr. William Guppy, however, having got the advantage, cannot quite release it without a little more injured remonstrance. "No! Dash it, Tony," says that gentleman, "you really ought to be careful how you wound the feelings of a man who has an unrequited image imprinted on his 'eart and who is NOT altogether happy in those chords which vibrate to the tenderest emotions. You, Tony, possess in yourself all that is calculated to charm the eye and allure the taste. It is not--happily for you, perhaps, and I may wish that I could say the same--it is not your character to hover around one flower. The ole garden is open to you, and your airy pinions carry you through it. Still, Tony, far be it from me, I am sure, to wound even your feelings without a cause!" Tony again entreats that the subject may be no longer pursued, saying emphatically, "William Guppy, drop it!" Mr. Guppy acquiesces, with the reply, "I never should have taken it up, Tony, of my own accord." "And now," says Tony, stirring the fire, "touching this same bundle of letters. Isn't it an extraordinary thing of Krook to have appointed twelve o'clock to-night to hand 'em over to me?" "Very. What did he do it for?" "What does he do anything for? HE don't know. Said to-day was his birthday and he'd hand 'em over to-night at twelve o'clock. He'll have drunk himself blind by that time. He has been at it all day." "He hasn't forgotten the appointment, I hope?" "Forgotten? Trust him for that. He never forgets anything. I saw him to-night, about eight--helped him to shut up his shop--and he had got the letters then in his hairy cap. He pulled it off and showed 'em me. When the shop was closed, he took them out of his cap, hung his cap on the chair-back, and stood turning them over before the fire. I heard him a little while afterwards, through the floor here, humming like the wind, the only song he knows--about Bibo, and old Charon, and Bibo being drunk when he died, or something or other. He has been as quiet since as an old rat asleep in his hole." "And you are to go down at twelve?" "At twelve. And as I tell you, when you came it seemed to me a hundred." "Tony," says Mr. Guppy after considering a little with his legs crossed, "he can't read yet, can he?" "Read! He'll never read. He can make all the letters separately, and he knows most of them separately when he sees them; he has got on that much, under me; but he can't put them together. He's too old to acquire the knack of it now--and too drunk." "Tony," says Mr. Guppy, uncrossing and recrossing his legs, "how do you suppose he spelt out that name of Hawdon?" "He never spelt it out. You know what a curious power of eye he has and how he has been used to employ himself in copying things by eye alone. He imitated it, evidently from the direction of a letter, and asked me what it meant." "Tony," says Mr. Guppy, uncrossing and recrossing his legs again, "should you say that the original was a man's writing or a woman's?" "A woman's. Fifty to one a lady's--slopes a good deal, and the end of the letter 'n,' long and hasty." Mr. Guppy has been biting his thumb-nail during this dialogue, generally changing the thumb when he has changed the cross leg. As he is going to do so again, he happens to look at his coat-sleeve. It takes his attention. He stares at it, aghast. "Why, Tony, what on earth is going on in this house to-night? Is there a chimney on fire?" "Chimney on fire!" "Ah!" returns Mr. Guppy. "See how the soot's falling. See here, on my arm! See again, on the table here! Confound the stuff, it won't blow off--smears like black fat!" They look at one another, and Tony goes listening to the door, and a little way upstairs, and a little way downstairs. Comes back and says it's all right and all quiet, and quotes the remark he lately made to Mr. Snagsby about their cooking chops at the Sol's Arms. "And it was then," resumes Mr. Guppy, still glancing with remarkable aversion at the coat-sleeve, as they pursue their conversation before the fire, leaning on opposite sides of the table, with their heads very near together, "that he told you of his having taken the bundle of letters from his lodger's portmanteau?" "That was the time, sir," answers Tony, faintly adjusting his whiskers. "Whereupon I wrote a line to my dear boy, the Honourable William Guppy, informing him of the appointment for to-night and advising him not to call before, Boguey being a slyboots." The light vivacious tone of fashionable life which is usually assumed by Mr. Weevle sits so ill upon him to-night that he abandons that and his whiskers together, and after looking over his shoulder, appears to yield himself up a prey to the horrors again. "You are to bring the letters to your room to read and compare, and to get yourself into a position to tell him all about them. That's the arrangement, isn't it, Tony?" asks Mr. Guppy, anxiously biting his thumb-nail. "You can't speak too low. Yes. That's what he and I agreed." "I tell you what, Tony--" "You can't speak too low," says Tony once more. Mr. Guppy nods his sagacious head, advances it yet closer, and drops into a whisper. "I tell you what. The first thing to be done is to make another packet like the real one so that if he should ask to see the real one while it's in my possession, you can show him the dummy." "And suppose he detects the dummy as soon as he sees it, which with his biting screw of an eye is about five hundred times more likely than not," suggests Tony. "Then we'll face it out. They don't belong to him, and they never did. You found that, and you placed them in my hands--a legal friend of yours--for security. If he forces us to it, they'll be producible, won't they?" "Ye-es," is Mr. Weevle's reluctant admission. "Why, Tony," remonstrates his friend, "how you look! You don't doubt William Guppy? You don't suspect any harm?" "I don't suspect anything more than I know, William," returns the other gravely. "And what do you know?" urges Mr. Guppy, raising his voice a little; but on his friend's once more warning him, "I tell you, you can't speak too low," he repeats his question without any sound at all, forming with his lips only the words, "What do you know?" "I know three things. First, I know that here we are whispering in secrecy, a pair of conspirators." "Well!" says Mr. Guppy. "And we had better be that than a pair of noodles, which we should be if we were doing anything else, for it's the only way of doing what we want to do. Secondly?" "Secondly, it's not made out to me how it's likely to be profitable, after all." Mr. Guppy casts up his eyes at the portrait of Lady Dedlock over the mantelshelf and replies, "Tony, you are asked to leave that to the honour of your friend. Besides its being calculated to serve that friend in those chords of the human mind which--which need not be called into agonizing vibration on the present occasion--your friend is no fool. What's that?" "It's eleven o'clock striking by the bell of Saint Paul's. Listen and you'll hear all the bells in the city jangling." Both sit silent, listening to the metal voices, near and distant, resounding from towers of various heights, in tones more various than their situations. When these at length cease, all seems more mysterious and quiet than before. One disagreeable result of whispering is that it seems to evoke an atmosphere of silence, haunted by the ghosts of sound--strange cracks and tickings, the rustling of garments that have no substance in them, and the tread of dreadful feet that would leave no mark on the sea-sand or the winter snow. So sensitive the two friends happen to be that the air is full of these phantoms, and the two look over their shoulders by one consent to see that the door is shut. "Yes, Tony?" says Mr. Guppy, drawing nearer to the fire and biting his unsteady thumb-nail. "You were going to say, thirdly?" "It's far from a pleasant thing to be plotting about a dead man in the room where he died, especially when you happen to live in it." "But we are plotting nothing against him, Tony." "May be not, still I don't like it. Live here by yourself and see how YOU like it." "As to dead men, Tony," proceeds Mr. Guppy, evading this proposal, "there have been dead men in most rooms." "I know there have, but in most rooms you let them alone, and--and they let you alone," Tony answers. The two look at each other again. Mr. Guppy makes a hurried remark to the effect that they may be doing the deceased a service, that he hopes so. There is an oppressive blank until Mr. Weevle, by stirring the fire suddenly, makes Mr. Guppy start as if his heart had been stirred instead. "Fah! Here's more of this hateful soot hanging about," says he. "Let us open the window a bit and get a mouthful of air. It's too close." He raises the sash, and they both rest on the window-sill, half in and half out of the room. The neighbouring houses are too near to admit of their seeing any sky without craning their necks and looking up, but lights in frowsy windows here and there, and the rolling of distant carriages, and the new expression that there is of the stir of men, they find to be comfortable. Mr. Guppy, noiselessly tapping on the window-sill, resumes his whispering in quite a light-comedy tone. "By the by, Tony, don't forget old Smallweed," meaning the younger of that name. "I have not let him into this, you know. That grandfather of his is too keen by half. It runs in the family." "I remember," says Tony. "I am up to all that." "And as to Krook," resumes Mr. Guppy. "Now, do you suppose he really has got hold of any other papers of importance, as he has boasted to you, since you have been such allies?" Tony shakes his head. "I don't know. Can't Imagine. If we get through this business without rousing his suspicions, I shall be better informed, no doubt. How can I know without seeing them, when he don't know himself? He is always spelling out words from them, and chalking them over the table and the shop-wall, and asking what this is and what that is; but his whole stock from beginning to end may easily be the waste-paper he bought it as, for anything I can say. It's a monomania with him to think he is possessed of documents. He has been going to learn to read them this last quarter of a century, I should judge, from what he tells me." "How did he first come by that idea, though? That's the question," Mr. Guppy suggests with one eye shut, after a little forensic meditation. "He may have found papers in something he bought, where papers were not supposed to be, and may have got it into his shrewd head from the manner and place of their concealment that they are worth something." "Or he may have been taken in, in some pretended bargain. Or he may have been muddled altogether by long staring at whatever he HAS got, and by drink, and by hanging about the Lord Chancellor's Court and hearing of documents for ever," returns Mr. Weevle. Mr. Guppy sitting on the window-sill, nodding his head and balancing all these possibilities in his mind, continues thoughtfully to tap it, and clasp it, and measure it with his hand, until he hastily draws his hand away. "What, in the devil's name," he says, "is this! Look at my fingers!" A thick, yellow liquor defiles them, which is offensive to the touch and sight and more offensive to the smell. A stagnant, sickening oil with some natural repulsion in it that makes them both shudder. "What have you been doing here? What have you been pouring out of window?" "I pouring out of window! Nothing, I swear! Never, since I have been here!" cries the lodger. And yet look here--and look here! When he brings the candle here, from the corner of the window-sill, it slowly drips and creeps away down the bricks, here lies in a little thick nauseous pool. "This is a horrible house," says Mr. Guppy, shutting down the window. "Give me some water or I shall cut my hand off." He so washes, and rubs, and scrubs, and smells, and washes, that he has not long restored himself with a glass of brandy and stood silently before the fire when Saint Paul's bell strikes twelve and all those other bells strike twelve from their towers of various heights in the dark air, and in their many tones. When all is quiet again, the lodger says, "It's the appointed time at last. Shall I go?" Mr. Guppy nods and gives him a "lucky touch" on the back, but not with the washed hand, though it is his right hand. He goes downstairs, and Mr. Guppy tries to compose himself before the fire for waiting a long time. But in no more than a minute or two the stairs creak and Tony comes swiftly back. "Have you got them?" "Got them! No. The old man's not there." He has been so horribly frightened in the short interval that his terror seizes the other, who makes a rush at him and asks loudly, "What's the matter?" "I couldn't make him hear, and I softly opened the door and looked in. And the burning smell is there--and the soot is there, and the oil is there--and he is not there!" Tony ends this with a groan. Mr. Guppy takes the light. They go down, more dead than alive, and holding one another, push open the door of the back shop. The cat has retreated close to it and stands snarling, not at them, at something on the ground before the fire. There is a very little fire left in the grate, but there is a smouldering, suffocating vapour in the room and a dark, greasy coating on the walls and ceiling. The chairs and table, and the bottle so rarely absent from the table, all stand as usual. On one chair-back hang the old man's hairy cap and coat. "Look!" whispers the lodger, pointing his friend's attention to these objects with a trembling finger. "I told you so. When I saw him last, he took his cap off, took out the little bundle of old letters, hung his cap on the back of the chair--his coat was there already, for he had pulled that off before he went to put the shutters up--and I left him turning the letters over in his hand, standing just where that crumbled black thing is upon the floor." Is he hanging somewhere? They look up. No. "See!" whispers Tony. "At the foot of the same chair there lies a dirty bit of thin red cord that they tie up pens with. That went round the letters. He undid it slowly, leering and laughing at me, before he began to turn them over, and threw it there. I saw it fall." "What's the matter with the cat?" says Mr. Guppy. "Look at her!" "Mad, I think. And no wonder in this evil place." They advance slowly, looking at all these things. The cat remains where they found her, still snarling at the something on the ground before the fire and between the two chairs. What is it? Hold up the light. Here is a small burnt patch of flooring; here is the tinder from a little bundle of burnt paper, but not so light as usual, seeming to be steeped in something; and here is--is it the cinder of a small charred and broken log of wood sprinkled with white ashes, or is it coal? Oh, horror, he IS here! And this from which we run away, striking out the light and overturning one another into the street, is all that represents him. Help, help, help! Come into this house for heaven's sake! Plenty will come in, but none can help. The Lord Chancellor of that court, true to his title in his last act, has died the death of all lord chancellors in all courts and of all authorities in all places under all names soever, where false pretences are made, and where injustice is done. Call the death by any name your Highness will, attribute it to whom you will, or say it might have been prevented how you will, it is the same death eternally--inborn, inbred, engendered in the corrupted humours of the vicious body itself, and that only--spontaneous combustion, and none other of all the deaths that can be died. CHAPTER XXXIII Interlopers Now do those two gentlemen not very neat about the cuffs and buttons who attended the last coroner's inquest at the Sol's Arms reappear in the precincts with surprising swiftness (being, in fact, breathlessly fetched by the active and intelligent beadle), and institute perquisitions through the court, and dive into the Sol's parlour, and write with ravenous little pens on tissue-paper. Now do they note down, in the watches of the night, how the neighbourhood of Chancery Lane was yesterday, at about midnight, thrown into a state of the most intense agitation and excitement by the following alarming and horrible discovery. Now do they set forth how it will doubtless be remembered that some time back a painful sensation was created in the public mind by a case of mysterious death from opium occurring in the first floor of the house occupied as a rag, bottle, and general marine store shop, by an eccentric individual of intemperate habits, far advanced in life, named Krook; and how, by a remarkable coincidence, Krook was examined at the inquest, which it may be recollected was held on that occasion at the Sol's Arms, a well-conducted tavern immediately adjoining the premises in question on the west side and licensed to a highly respectable landlord, Mr. James George Bogsby. Now do they show (in as many words as possible) how during some hours of yesterday evening a very peculiar smell was observed by the inhabitants of the court, in which the tragical occurrence which forms the subject of that present account transpired; and which odour was at one time so powerful that Mr. Swills, a comic vocalist professionally engaged by Mr. J. G. Bogsby, has himself stated to our reporter that he mentioned to Miss M. Melvilleson, a lady of some pretensions to musical ability, likewise engaged by Mr. J. G. Bogsby to sing at a series of concerts called Harmonic Assemblies, or Meetings, which it would appear are held at the Sol's Arms under Mr. Bogsby's direction pursuant to the Act of George the Second, that he (Mr. Swills) found his voice seriously affected by the impure state of the atmosphere, his jocose expression at the time being that he was like an empty post-office, for he hadn't a single note in him. How this account of Mr. Swills is entirely corroborated by two intelligent married females residing in the same court and known respectively by the names of Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Perkins, both of whom observed the foetid effluvia and regarded them as being emitted from the premises in the occupation of Krook, the unfortunate deceased. All this and a great deal more the two gentlemen who have formed an amicable partnership in the melancholy catastrophe write down on the spot; and the boy population of the court (out of bed in a moment) swarm up the shutters of the Sol's Arms parlour, to behold the tops of their heads while they are about it. The whole court, adult as well as boy, is sleepless for that night, and can do nothing but wrap up its many heads, and talk of the ill-fated house, and look at it. Miss Flite has been bravely rescued from her chamber, as if it were in flames, and accommodated with a bed at the Sol's Arms. The Sol neither turns off its gas nor shuts its door all night, for any kind of public excitement makes good for the Sol and causes the court to stand in need of comfort. The house has not done so much in the stomachic article of cloves or in brandy-and-water warm since the inquest. The moment the pot-boy heard what had happened, he rolled up his shirt-sleeves tight to his shoulders and said, "There'll be a run upon us!" In the first outcry, young Piper dashed off for the fire-engines and returned in triumph at a jolting gallop perched up aloft on the Phoenix and holding on to that fabulous creature with all his might in the midst of helmets and torches. One helmet remains behind after careful investigation of all chinks and crannies and slowly paces up and down before the house in company with one of the two policemen who have likewise been left in charge thereof. To this trio everybody in the court possessed of sixpence has an insatiate desire to exhibit hospitality in a liquid form. Mr. Weevle and his friend Mr. Guppy are within the bar at the Sol and are worth anything to the Sol that the bar contains if they will only stay there. "This is not a time," says Mr. Bogsby, "to haggle about money," though he looks something sharply after it, over the counter; "give your orders, you two gentlemen, and you're welcome to whatever you put a name to." Thus entreated, the two gentlemen (Mr. Weevle especially) put names to so many things that in course of time they find it difficult to put a name to anything quite distinctly, though they still relate to all new-comers some version of the night they have had of it, and of what they said, and what they thought, and what they saw. Meanwhile, one or other of the policemen often flits about the door, and pushing it open a little way at the full length of his arm, looks in from outer gloom. Not that he has any suspicions, but that he may as well know what they are up to in there. Thus night pursues its leaden course, finding the court still out of bed through the unwonted hours, still treating and being treated, still conducting itself similarly to a court that has had a little money left it unexpectedly. Thus night at length with slow-retreating steps departs, and the lamp-lighter going his rounds, like an executioner to a despotic king, strikes off the little heads of fire that have aspired to lessen the darkness. Thus the day cometh, whether or no. And the day may discern, even with its dim London eye, that the court has been up all night. Over and above the faces that have fallen drowsily on tables and the heels that lie prone on hard floors instead of beds, the brick and mortar physiognomy of the very court itself looks worn and jaded. And now the neighbourhood, waking up and beginning to hear of what has happened, comes streaming in, half dressed, to ask questions; and the two policemen and the helmet (who are far less impressible externally than the court) have enough to do to keep the door. "Good gracious, gentlemen!" says Mr. Snagsby, coming up. "What's this I hear!" "Why, it's true," returns one of the policemen. "That's what it is. Now move on here, come!" "Why, good gracious, gentlemen," says Mr. Snagsby, somewhat promptly backed away, "I was at this door last night betwixt ten and eleven o'clock in conversation with the young man who lodges here." "Indeed?" returns the policeman. "You will find the young man next door then. Now move on here, some of you." "Not hurt, I hope?" says Mr. Snagsby. "Hurt? No. What's to hurt him!" Mr. Snagsby, wholly unable to answer this or any question in his troubled mind, repairs to the Sol's Arms and finds Mr. Weevle languishing over tea and toast with a considerable expression on him of exhausted excitement and exhausted tobacco-smoke. "And Mr. Guppy likewise!" quoth Mr. Snagsby. "Dear, dear, dear! What a fate there seems in all this! And my lit--" Mr. Snagsby's power of speech deserts him in the formation of the words "my little woman." For to see that injured female walk into the Sol's Arms at that hour of the morning and stand before the beer-engine, with her eyes fixed upon him like an accusing spirit, strikes him dumb. "My dear," says Mr. Snagsby when his tongue is loosened, "will you take anything? A little--not to put too fine a point upon it--drop of shrub?" "No," says Mrs. Snagsby. "My love, you know these two gentlemen?" "Yes!" says Mrs. Snagsby, and in a rigid manner acknowledges their presence, still fixing Mr. Snagsby with her eye. The devoted Mr. Snagsby cannot bear this treatment. He takes Mrs. Snagsby by the hand and leads her aside to an adjacent cask. "My little woman, why do you look at me in that way? Pray don't do it." "I can't help my looks," says Mrs. Snagsby, "and if I could I wouldn't." Mr. Snagsby, with his cough of meekness, rejoins, "Wouldn't you really, my dear?" and meditates. Then coughs his cough of trouble and says, "This is a dreadful mystery, my love!" still fearfully disconcerted by Mrs. Snagsby's eye. "It IS," returns Mrs. Snagsby, shaking her head, "a dreadful mystery." "My little woman," urges Mr. Snagsby in a piteous manner, "don't for goodness' sake speak to me with that bitter expression and look at me in that searching way! I beg and entreat of you not to do it. Good Lord, you don't suppose that I would go spontaneously combusting any person, my dear?" "I can't say," returns Mrs. Snagsby. On a hasty review of his unfortunate position, Mr. Snagsby "can't say" either. He is not prepared positively to deny that he may have had something to do with it. He has had something--he don't know what--to do with so much in this connexion that is mysterious that it is possible he may even be implicated, without knowing it, in the present transaction. He faintly wipes his forehead with his handkerchief and gasps. "My life," says the unhappy stationer, "would you have any objections to mention why, being in general so delicately circumspect in your conduct, you come into a wine-vaults before breakfast?" "Why do YOU come here?" inquires Mrs. Snagsby. "My dear, merely to know the rights of the fatal accident which has happened to the venerable party who has been--combusted." Mr. Snagsby has made a pause to suppress a groan. "I should then have related them to you, my love, over your French roll." "I dare say you would! You relate everything to me, Mr. Snagsby." "Every--my lit--" "I should be glad," says Mrs. Snagsby after contemplating his increased confusion with a severe and sinister smile, "if you would come home with me; I think you may be safer there, Mr. Snagsby, than anywhere else." "My love, I don't know but what I may be, I am sure. I am ready to go." Mr. Snagsby casts his eye forlornly round the bar, gives Messrs. Weevle and Guppy good morning, assures them of the satisfaction with which he sees them uninjured, and accompanies Mrs. Snagsby from the Sol's Arms. Before night his doubt whether he may not be responsible for some inconceivable part in the catastrophe which is the talk of the whole neighbourhood is almost resolved into certainty by Mrs. Snagsby's pertinacity in that fixed gaze. His mental sufferings are so great that he entertains wandering ideas of delivering himself up to justice and requiring to be cleared if innocent and punished with the utmost rigour of the law if guilty. Mr. Weevle and Mr. Guppy, having taken their breakfast, step into Lincoln's Inn to take a little walk about the square and clear as many of the dark cobwebs out of their brains as a little walk may. "There can be no more favourable time than the present, Tony," says Mr. Guppy after they have broodingly made out the four sides of the square, "for a word or two between us upon a point on which we must, with very little delay, come to an understanding." "Now, I tell you what, William G.!" returns the other, eyeing his companion with a bloodshot eye. "If it's a point of conspiracy, you needn't take the trouble to mention it. I have had enough of that, and I ain't going to have any more. We shall have YOU taking fire next or blowing up with a bang." This supposititious phenomenon is so very disagreeable to Mr. Guppy that his voice quakes as he says in a moral way, "Tony, I should have thought that what we went through last night would have been a lesson to you never to be personal any more as long as you lived." To which Mr. Weevle returns, "William, I should have thought it would have been a lesson to YOU never to conspire any more as long as you lived." To which Mr. Guppy says, "Who's conspiring?" To which Mr. Jobling replies, "Why, YOU are!" To which Mr. Guppy retorts, "No, I am not." To which Mr. Jobling retorts again, "Yes, you are!" To which Mr. Guppy retorts, "Who says so?" To which Mr. Jobling retorts, "I say so!" To which Mr. Guppy retorts, "Oh, indeed?" To which Mr. Jobling retorts, "Yes, indeed!" And both being now in a heated state, they walk on silently for a while to cool down again. "Tony," says Mr. Guppy then, "if you heard your friend out instead of flying at him, you wouldn't fall into mistakes. But your temper is hasty and you are not considerate. Possessing in yourself, Tony, all that is calculated to charm the eye--" "Oh! Blow the eye!" cries Mr. Weevle, cutting him short. "Say what you have got to say!" Finding his friend in this morose and material condition, Mr. Guppy only expresses the finer feelings of his soul through the tone of injury in which he recommences, "Tony, when I say there is a point on which we must come to an understanding pretty soon, I say so quite apart from any kind of conspiring, however innocent. You know it is professionally arranged beforehand in all cases that are tried what facts the witnesses are to prove. Is it or is it not desirable that we should know what facts we are to prove on the inquiry into the death of this unfortunate old mo--gentleman?" (Mr. Guppy was going to say "mogul," but thinks "gentleman" better suited to the circumstances.) "What facts? THE facts." "The facts bearing on that inquiry. Those are"--Mr. Guppy tells them off on his fingers--"what we knew of his habits, when you saw him last, what his condition was then, the discovery that we made, and how we made it." "Yes," says Mr. Weevle. "Those are about the facts." "We made the discovery in consequence of his having, in his eccentric way, an appointment with you at twelve o'clock at night, when you were to explain some writing to him as you had often done before on account of his not being able to read. I, spending the evening with you, was called down--and so forth. The inquiry being only into the circumstances touching the death of the deceased, it's not necessary to go beyond these facts, I suppose you'll agree?" "No!" returns Mr. Weevle. "I suppose not." "And this is not a conspiracy, perhaps?" says the injured Guppy. "No," returns his friend; "if it's nothing worse than this, I withdraw the observation." "Now, Tony," says Mr. Guppy, taking his arm again and walking him slowly on, "I should like to know, in a friendly way, whether you have yet thought over the many advantages of your continuing to live at that place?" "What do you mean?" says Tony, stopping. "Whether you have yet thought over the many advantages of your continuing to live at that place?" repeats Mr. Guppy, walking him on again. "At what place? THAT place?" pointing in the direction of the rag and bottle shop. Mr. Guppy nods. "Why, I wouldn't pass another night there for any consideration that you could offer me," says Mr. Weevle, haggardly staring. "Do you mean it though, Tony?" "Mean it! Do I look as if I mean it? I feel as if I do; I know that," says Mr. Weevle with a very genuine shudder. "Then the possibility or probability--for such it must be considered--of your never being disturbed in possession of those effects lately belonging to a lone old man who seemed to have no relation in the world, and the certainty of your being able to find out what he really had got stored up there, don't weigh with you at all against last night, Tony, if I understand you?" says Mr. Guppy, biting his thumb with the appetite of vexation. "Certainly not. Talk in that cool way of a fellow's living there?" cries Mr. Weevle indignantly. "Go and live there yourself." "Oh! I, Tony!" says Mr. Guppy, soothing him. "I have never lived there and couldn't get a lodging there now, whereas you have got one." "You are welcome to it," rejoins his friend, "and--ugh!--you may make yourself at home in it." "Then you really and truly at this point," says Mr. Guppy, "give up the whole thing, if I understand you, Tony?" "You never," returns Tony with a most convincing steadfastness, "said a truer word in all your life. I do!" While they are so conversing, a hackney-coach drives into the square, on the box of which vehicle a very tall hat makes itself manifest to the public. Inside the coach, and consequently not so manifest to the multitude, though sufficiently so to the two friends, for the coach stops almost at their feet, are the venerable Mr. Smallweed and Mrs. Smallweed, accompanied by their granddaughter Judy. An air of haste and excitement pervades the party, and as the tall hat (surmounting Mr. Smallweed the younger) alights, Mr. Smallweed the elder pokes his head out of window and bawls to Mr. Guppy, "How de do, sir! How de do!" "What do Chick and his family want here at this time of the morning, I wonder!" says Mr. Guppy, nodding to his familiar. "My dear sir," cries Grandfather Smallweed, "would you do me a favour? Would you and your friend be so very obleeging as to carry me into the public-house in the court, while Bart and his sister bring their grandmother along? Would you do an old man that good turn, sir?" Mr. Guppy looks at his friend, repeating inquiringly, "The public-house in the court?" And they prepare to bear the venerable burden to the Sol's Arms. "There's your fare!" says the patriarch to the coachman with a fierce grin and shaking his incapable fist at him. "Ask me for a penny more, and I'll have my lawful revenge upon you. My dear young men, be easy with me, if you please. Allow me to catch you round the neck. I won't squeeze you tighter than I can help. Oh, Lord! Oh, dear me! Oh, my bones!" It is well that the Sol is not far off, for Mr. Weevle presents an apoplectic appearance before half the distance is accomplished. With no worse aggravation of his symptoms, however, than the utterance of divers croaking sounds expressive of obstructed respiration, he fulfils his share of the porterage and the benevolent old gentleman is deposited by his own desire in the parlour of the Sol's Arms. "Oh, Lord!" gasps Mr. Smallweed, looking about him, breathless, from an arm-chair. "Oh, dear me! Oh, my bones and back! Oh, my aches and pains! Sit down, you dancing, prancing, shambling, scrambling poll-parrot! Sit down!" This little apostrophe to Mrs. Smallweed is occasioned by a propensity on the part of that unlucky old lady whenever she finds herself on her feet to amble about and "set" to inanimate objects, accompanying herself with a chattering noise, as in a witch dance. A nervous affection has probably as much to do with these demonstrations as any imbecile intention in the poor old woman, but on the present occasion they are so particularly lively in connexion with the Windsor arm-chair, fellow to that in which Mr. Smallweed is seated, that she only quite desists when her grandchildren have held her down in it, her lord in the meanwhile bestowing upon her, with great volubility, the endearing epithet of "a pig-headed jackdaw," repeated a surprising number of times. "My dear sir," Grandfather Smallweed then proceeds, addressing Mr. Guppy, "there has been a calamity here. Have you heard of it, either of you?" "Heard of it, sir! Why, we discovered it." "You discovered it. You two discovered it! Bart, THEY discovered it!" The two discoverers stare at the Smallweeds, who return the compliment. "My dear friends," whines Grandfather Smallweed, putting out both his hands, "I owe you a thousand thanks for discharging the melancholy office of discovering the ashes of Mrs. Smallweed's brother." "Eh?" says Mr. Guppy. "Mrs. Smallweed's brother, my dear friend--her only relation. We were not on terms, which is to be deplored now, but he never WOULD be on terms. He was not fond of us. He was eccentric--he was very eccentric. Unless he has left a will (which is not at all likely) I shall take out letters of administration. I have come down to look after the property; it must be sealed up, it must be protected. I have come down," repeats Grandfather Smallweed, hooking the air towards him with all his ten fingers at once, "to look after the property." "I think, Small," says the disconsolate Mr. Guppy, "you might have mentioned that the old man was your uncle." "You two were so close about him that I thought you would like me to be the same," returns that old bird with a secretly glistening eye. "Besides, I wasn't proud of him." "Besides which, it was nothing to you, you know, whether he was or not," says Judy. Also with a secretly glistening eye. "He never saw me in his life to know me," observed Small; "I don't know why I should introduce HIM, I am sure!" "No, he never communicated with us, which is to be deplored," the old gentleman strikes in, "but I have come to look after the property--to look over the papers, and to look after the property. We shall make good our title. It is in the hands of my solicitor. Mr. Tulkinghorn, of Lincoln's Inn Fields, over the way there, is so good as to act as my solicitor; and grass don't grow under HIS feet, I can tell ye. Krook was Mrs. Smallweed's only brother; she had no relation but Krook, and Krook had no relation but Mrs. Smallweed. I am speaking of your brother, you brimstone black-beetle, that was seventy-six years of age." Mrs. Smallweed instantly begins to shake her head and pipe up, "Seventy-six pound seven and sevenpence! Seventy-six thousand bags of money! Seventy-six hundred thousand million of parcels of bank-notes!" "Will somebody give me a quart pot?" exclaims her exasperated husband, looking helplessly about him and finding no missile within his reach. "Will somebody obleege me with a spittoon? Will somebody hand me anything hard and bruising to pelt at her? You hag, you cat, you dog, you brimstone barker!" Here Mr. Smallweed, wrought up to the highest pitch by his own eloquence, actually throws Judy at her grandmother in default of anything else, by butting that young virgin at the old lady with such force as he can muster and then dropping into his chair in a heap. "Shake me up, somebody, if you'll be so good," says the voice from within the faintly struggling bundle into which he has collapsed. "I have come to look after the property. Shake me up, and call in the police on duty at the next house to be explained to about the property. My solicitor will be here presently to protect the property. Transportation or the gallows for anybody who shall touch the property!" As his dutiful grandchildren set him up, panting, and putting him through the usual restorative process of shaking and punching, he still repeats like an echo, "The--the property! The property! Property!" Mr. Weevle and Mr. Guppy look at each other, the former as having relinquished the whole affair, the latter with a discomfited countenance as having entertained some lingering expectations yet. But there is nothing to be done in opposition to the Smallweed interest. Mr. Tulkinghorn's clerk comes down from his official pew in the chambers to mention to the police that Mr. Tulkinghorn is answerable for its being all correct about the next of kin and that the papers and effects will be formally taken possession of in due time and course. Mr. Smallweed is at once permitted so far to assert his supremacy as to be carried on a visit of sentiment into the next house and upstairs into Miss Flite's deserted room, where he looks like a hideous bird of prey newly added to her aviary. The arrival of this unexpected heir soon taking wind in the court still makes good for the Sol and keeps the court upon its mettle. Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Perkins think it hard upon the young man if there really is no will, and consider that a handsome present ought to be made him out of the estate. Young Piper and young Perkins, as members of that restless juvenile circle which is the terror of the foot-passengers in Chancery Lane, crumble into ashes behind the pump and under the archway all day long, where wild yells and hootings take place over their remains. Little Swills and Miss M. Melvilleson enter into affable conversation with their patrons, feeling that these unusual occurrences level the barriers between professionals and non-professionals. Mr. Bogsby puts up "The popular song of King Death, with chorus by the whole strength of the company," as the great Harmonic feature of the week and announces in the bill that "J. G. B. is induced to do so at a considerable extra expense in consequence of a wish which has been very generally expressed at the bar by a large body of respectable individuals and in homage to a late melancholy event which has aroused so much sensation." There is one point connected with the deceased upon which the court is particularly anxious, namely, that the fiction of a full-sized coffin should be preserved, though there is so little to put in it. Upon the undertaker's stating in the Sol's bar in the course of the day that he has received orders to construct "a six-footer," the general solicitude is much relieved, and it is considered that Mr. Smallweed's conduct does him great honour. Out of the court, and a long way out of it, there is considerable excitement too, for men of science and philosophy come to look, and carriages set down doctors at the corner who arrive with the same intent, and there is more learned talk about inflammable gases and phosphuretted hydrogen than the court has ever imagined. Some of these authorities (of course the wisest) hold with indignation that the deceased had no business to die in the alleged manner; and being reminded by other authorities of a certain inquiry into the evidence for such deaths reprinted in the sixth volume of the Philosophical Transactions; and also of a book not quite unknown on English medical jurisprudence; and likewise of the Italian case of the Countess Cornelia Baudi as set forth in detail by one Bianchini, prebendary of Verona, who wrote a scholarly work or so and was occasionally heard of in his time as having gleams of reason in him; and also of the testimony of Messrs. Fodere and Mere, two pestilent Frenchmen who WOULD investigate the subject; and further, of the corroborative testimony of Monsieur Le Cat, a rather celebrated French surgeon once upon a time, who had the unpoliteness to live in a house where such a case occurred and even to write an account of it--still they regard the late Mr. Krook's obstinacy in going out of the world by any such by-way as wholly unjustifiable and personally offensive. The less the court understands of all this, the more the court likes it, and the greater enjoyment it has in the stock in trade of the Sol's Arms. Then there comes the artist of a picture newspaper, with a foreground and figures ready drawn for anything from a wreck on the Cornish coast to a review in Hyde Park or a meeting in Manchester, and in Mrs. Perkins' own room, memorable evermore, he then and there throws in upon the block Mr. Krook's house, as large as life; in fact, considerably larger, making a very temple of it. Similarly, being permitted to look in at the door of the fatal chamber, he depicts that apartment as three-quarters of a mile long by fifty yards high, at which the court is particularly charmed. All this time the two gentlemen before mentioned pop in and out of every house and assist at the philosophical disputations--go everywhere and listen to everybody--and yet are always diving into the Sol's parlour and writing with the ravenous little pens on the tissue-paper. At last come the coroner and his inquiry, like as before, except that the coroner cherishes this case as being out of the common way and tells the gentlemen of the jury, in his private capacity, that "that would seem to be an unlucky house next door, gentlemen, a destined house; but so we sometimes find it, and these are mysteries we can't account for!" After which the six-footer comes into action and is much admired. In all these proceedings Mr. Guppy has so slight a part, except when he gives his evidence, that he is moved on like a private individual and can only haunt the secret house on the outside, where he has the mortification of seeing Mr. Smallweed padlocking the door, and of bitterly knowing himself to be shut out. But before these proceedings draw to a close, that is to say, on the night next after the catastrophe, Mr. Guppy has a thing to say that must be said to Lady Dedlock. For which reason, with a sinking heart and with that hang-dog sense of guilt upon him which dread and watching enfolded in the Sol's Arms have produced, the young man of the name of Guppy presents himself at the town mansion at about seven o'clock in the evening and requests to see her ladyship. Mercury replies that she is going out to dinner; don't he see the carriage at the door? Yes, he does see the carriage at the door; but he wants to see my Lady too. Mercury is disposed, as he will presently declare to a fellow-gentleman in waiting, "to pitch into the young man"; but his instructions are positive. Therefore he sulkily supposes that the young man must come up into the library. There he leaves the young man in a large room, not over-light, while he makes report of him. Mr. Guppy looks into the shade in all directions, discovering everywhere a certain charred and whitened little heap of coal or wood. Presently he hears a rustling. Is it--? No, it's no ghost, but fair flesh and blood, most brilliantly dressed. "I have to beg your ladyship's pardon," Mr. Guppy stammers, very downcast. "This is an inconvenient time--" "I told you, you could come at any time." She takes a chair, looking straight at him as on the last occasion. "Thank your ladyship. Your ladyship is very affable." "You can sit down." There is not much affability in her tone. "I don't know, your ladyship, that it's worth while my sitting down and detaining you, for I--I have not got the letters that I mentioned when I had the honour of waiting on your ladyship." "Have you come merely to say so?" "Merely to say so, your ladyship." Mr. Guppy besides being depressed, disappointed, and uneasy, is put at a further disadvantage by the splendour and beauty of her appearance. She knows its influence perfectly, has studied it too well to miss a grain of its effect on any one. As she looks at him so steadily and coldly, he not only feels conscious that he has no guide in the least perception of what is really the complexion of her thoughts, but also that he is being every moment, as it were, removed further and further from her. She will not speak, it is plain. So he must. "In short, your ladyship," says Mr. Guppy like a meanly penitent thief, "the person I was to have had the letters of, has come to a sudden end, and--" He stops. Lady Dedlock calmly finishes the sentence. "And the letters are destroyed with the person?" Mr. Guppy would say no if he could--as he is unable to hide. "I believe so, your ladyship." If he could see the least sparkle of relief in her face now? No, he could see no such thing, even if that brave outside did not utterly put him away, and he were not looking beyond it and about it. He falters an awkward excuse or two for his failure. "Is this all you have to say?" inquires Lady Dedlock, having heard him out--or as nearly out as he can stumble. Mr. Guppy thinks that's all. "You had better be sure that you wish to say nothing more to me, this being the last time you will have the opportunity." Mr. Guppy is quite sure. And indeed he has no such wish at present, by any means. "That is enough. I will dispense with excuses. Good evening to you!" And she rings for Mercury to show the young man of the name of Guppy out. But in that house, in that same moment, there happens to be an old man of the name of Tulkinghorn. And that old man, coming with his quiet footstep to the library, has his hand at that moment on the handle of the door--comes in--and comes face to face with the young man as he is leaving the room. One glance between the old man and the lady, and for an instant the blind that is always down flies up. Suspicion, eager and sharp, looks out. Another instant, close again. "I beg your pardon, Lady Dedlock. I beg your pardon a thousand times. It is so very unusual to find you here at this hour. I supposed the room was empty. I beg your pardon!" "Stay!" She negligently calls him back. "Remain here, I beg. I am going out to dinner. I have nothing more to say to this young man!" The disconcerted young man bows, as he goes out, and cringingly hopes that Mr. Tulkinghorn of the Fields is well. "Aye, aye?" says the lawyer, looking at him from under his bent brows, though he has no need to look again--not he. "From Kenge and Carboy's, surely?" "Kenge and Carboy's, Mr. Tulkinghorn. Name of Guppy, sir." "To be sure. Why, thank you, Mr. Guppy, I am very well!" "Happy to hear it, sir. You can't be too well, sir, for the credit of the profession." "Thank you, Mr. Guppy!" Mr. Guppy sneaks away. Mr. Tulkinghorn, such a foil in his old-fashioned rusty black to Lady Dedlock's brightness, hands her down the staircase to her carriage. He returns rubbing his chin, and rubs it a good deal in the course of the evening. CHAPTER XXXIV A Turn of the Screw "Now, what," says Mr. George, "may this be? Is it blank cartridge or ball? A flash in the pan or a shot?" An open letter is the subject of the trooper's speculations, and it seems to perplex him mightily. He looks at it at arm's length, brings it close to him, holds it in his right hand, holds it in his left hand, reads it with his head on this side, with his head on that side, contracts his eyebrows, elevates them, still cannot satisfy himself. He smooths it out upon the table with his heavy palm, and thoughtfully walking up and down the gallery, makes a halt before it every now and then to come upon it with a fresh eye. Even that won't do. "Is it," Mr. George still muses, "blank cartridge or ball?" Phil Squod, with the aid of a brush and paint-pot, is employed in the distance whitening the targets, softly whistling in quick-march time and in drum-and-fife manner that he must and will go back again to the girl he left behind him. "Phil!" The trooper beckons as he calls him. Phil approaches in his usual way, sidling off at first as if he were going anywhere else and then bearing down upon his commander like a bayonet-charge. Certain splashes of white show in high relief upon his dirty face, and he scrapes his one eyebrow with the handle of the brush. "Attention, Phil! Listen to this." "Steady, commander, steady." "'Sir. Allow me to remind you (though there is no legal necessity for my doing so, as you are aware) that the bill at two months' date drawn on yourself by Mr. Matthew Bagnet, and by you accepted, for the sum of ninety-seven pounds four shillings and ninepence, will become due to-morrow, when you will please be prepared to take up the same on presentation. Yours, Joshua Smallweed.' What do you make of that, Phil?" "Mischief, guv'ner." "Why?" "I think," replies Phil after pensively tracing out a cross-wrinkle in his forehead with the brush-handle, "that mischeevious consequences is always meant when money's asked for." "Lookye, Phil," says the trooper, sitting on the table. "First and last, I have paid, I may say, half as much again as this principal in interest and one thing and another." Phil intimates by sidling back a pace or two, with a very unaccountable wrench of his wry face, that he does not regard the transaction as being made more promising by this incident. "And lookye further, Phil," says the trooper, staying his premature conclusions with a wave of his hand. "There has always been an understanding that this bill was to be what they call renewed. And it has been renewed no end of times. What do you say now?" "I say that I think the times is come to a end at last." "You do? Humph! I am much of the same mind myself." "Joshua Smallweed is him that was brought here in a chair?" "The same." "Guv'ner," says Phil with exceeding gravity, "he's a leech in his dispositions, he's a screw and a wice in his actions, a snake in his twistings, and a lobster in his claws." Having thus expressively uttered his sentiments, Mr. Squod, after waiting a little to ascertain if any further remark be expected of him, gets back by his usual series of movements to the target he has in hand and vigorously signifies through his former musical medium that he must and he will return to that ideal young lady. George, having folded the letter, walks in that direction. "There IS a way, commander," says Phil, looking cunningly at him, "of settling this." "Paying the money, I suppose? I wish I could." Phil shakes his head. "No, guv'ner, no; not so bad as that. There IS a way," says Phil with a highly artistic turn of his brush; "what I'm a-doing at present." "Whitewashing." Phil nods. "A pretty way that would be! Do you know what would become of the Bagnets in that case? Do you know they would be ruined to pay off my old scores? YOU'RE a moral character," says the trooper, eyeing him in his large way with no small indignation; "upon my life you are, Phil!" Phil, on one knee at the target, is in course of protesting earnestly, though not without many allegorical scoops of his brush and smoothings of the white surface round the rim with his thumb, that he had forgotten the Bagnet responsibility and would not so much as injure a hair of the head of any member of that worthy family when steps are audible in the long passage without, and a cheerful voice is heard to wonder whether George is at home. Phil, with a look at his master, hobbles up, saying, "Here's the guv'ner, Mrs. Bagnet! Here he is!" and the old girl herself, accompanied by Mr. Bagnet, appears. The old girl never appears in walking trim, in any season of the year, without a grey cloth cloak, coarse and much worn but very clean, which is, undoubtedly, the identical garment rendered so interesting to Mr. Bagnet by having made its way home to Europe from another quarter of the globe in company with Mrs. Bagnet and an umbrella. The latter faithful appendage is also invariably a part of the old girl's presence out of doors. It is of no colour known in this life and has a corrugated wooden crook for a handle, with a metallic object let into its prow, or beak, resembling a little model of a fanlight over a street door or one of the oval glasses out of a pair of spectacles, which ornamental object has not that tenacious capacity of sticking to its post that might be desired in an article long associated with the British army. The old girl's umbrella is of a flabby habit of waist and seems to be in need of stays--an appearance that is possibly referable to its having served through a series of years at home as a cupboard and on journeys as a carpet bag. She never puts it up, having the greatest reliance on her well-proved cloak with its capacious hood, but generally uses the instrument as a wand with which to point out joints of meat or bunches of greens in marketing or to arrest the attention of tradesmen by a friendly poke. Without her market-basket, which is a sort of wicker well with two flapping lids, she never stirs abroad. Attended by these her trusty companions, therefore, her honest sunburnt face looking cheerily out of a rough straw bonnet, Mrs. Bagnet now arrives, fresh-coloured and bright, in George's Shooting Gallery. "Well, George, old fellow," says she, "and how do YOU do, this sunshiny morning?" Giving him a friendly shake of the hand, Mrs. Bagnet draws a long breath after her walk and sits down to enjoy a rest. Having a faculty, matured on the tops of baggage-waggons and in other such positions, of resting easily anywhere, she perches on a rough bench, unties her bonnet-strings, pushes back her bonnet, crosses her arms, and looks perfectly comfortable. Mr. Bagnet in the meantime has shaken hands with his old comrade and with Phil, on whom Mrs. Bagnet likewise bestows a good-humoured nod and smile. "Now, George," said Mrs. Bagnet briskly, "here we are, Lignum and myself"--she often speaks of her husband by this appellation, on account, as it is supposed, of Lignum Vitae having been his old regimental nickname when they first became acquainted, in compliment to the extreme hardness and toughness of his physiognomy--"just looked in, we have, to make it all correct as usual about that security. Give him the new bill to sign, George, and he'll sign it like a man." "I was coming to you this morning," observes the trooper reluctantly. "Yes, we thought you'd come to us this morning, but we turned out early and left Woolwich, the best of boys, to mind his sisters and came to you instead--as you see! For Lignum, he's tied so close now, and gets so little exercise, that a walk does him good. But what's the matter, George?" asks Mrs. Bagnet, stopping in her cheerful talk. "You don't look yourself." "I am not quite myself," returns the trooper; "I have been a little put out, Mrs. Bagnet." Her bright quick eye catches the truth directly. "George!" holding up her forefinger. "Don't tell me there's anything wrong about that security of Lignum's! Don't do it, George, on account of the children!" The trooper looks at her with a troubled visage. "George," says Mrs. Bagnet, using both her arms for emphasis and occasionally bringing down her open hands upon her knees. "If you have allowed anything wrong to come to that security of Lignum's, and if you have let him in for it, and if you have put us in danger of being sold up--and I see sold up in your face, George, as plain as print--you have done a shameful action and have deceived us cruelly. I tell you, cruelly, George. There!" Mr. Bagnet, otherwise as immovable as a pump or a lamp-post, puts his large right hand on the top of his bald head as if to defend it from a shower-bath and looks with great uneasiness at Mrs. Bagnet. "George," says that old girl, "I wonder at you! George, I am ashamed of you! George, I couldn't have believed you would have done it! I always knew you to be a rolling stone that gathered no moss, but I never thought you would have taken away what little moss there was for Bagnet and the children to lie upon. You know what a hard-working, steady-going chap he is. You know what Quebec and Malta and Woolwich are, and I never did think you would, or could, have had the heart to serve us so. Oh, George!" Mrs. Bagnet gathers up her cloak to wipe her eyes on in a very genuine manner, "How could you do it?" Mrs. Bagnet ceasing, Mr. Bagnet removes his hand from his head as if the shower-bath were over and looks disconsolately at Mr. George, who has turned quite white and looks distressfully at the grey cloak and straw bonnet. "Mat," says the trooper in a subdued voice, addressing him but still looking at his wife, "I am sorry you take it so much to heart, because I do hope it's not so bad as that comes to. I certainly have, this morning, received this letter"--which he reads aloud--"but I hope it may be set right yet. As to a rolling stone, why, what you say is true. I AM a rolling stone, and I never rolled in anybody's way, I fully believe, that I rolled the least good to. But it's impossible for an old vagabond comrade to like your wife and family better than I like 'em, Mat, and I trust you'll look upon me as forgivingly as you can. Don't think I've kept anything from you. I haven't had the letter more than a quarter of an hour." "Old girl," murmurs Mr. Bagnet after a short silence, "will you tell him my opinion?" "Oh! Why didn't he marry," Mrs. Bagnet answers, half laughing and half crying, "Joe Pouch's widder in North America? Then he wouldn't have got himself into these troubles." "The old girl," says Mr. Bagnet, "puts it correct--why didn't you?" "Well, she has a better husband by this time, I hope," returns the trooper. "Anyhow, here I stand, this present day, NOT married to Joe Pouch's widder. What shall I do? You see all I have got about me. It's not mine; it's yours. Give the word, and I'll sell off every morsel. If I could have hoped it would have brought in nearly the sum wanted, I'd have sold all long ago. Don't believe that I'll leave you or yours in the lurch, Mat. I'd sell myself first. I only wish," says the trooper, giving himself a disparaging blow in the chest, "that I knew of any one who'd buy such a second-hand piece of old stores." "Old girl," murmurs Mr. Bagnet, "give him another bit of my mind." "George," says the old girl, "you are not so much to be blamed, on full consideration, except for ever taking this business without the means." "And that was like me!" observes the penitent trooper, shaking his head. "Like me, I know." "Silence! The old girl," says Mr. Bagnet, "is correct--in her way of giving my opinions--hear me out!" "That was when you never ought to have asked for the security, George, and when you never ought to have got it, all things considered. But what's done can't be undone. You are always an honourable and straightforward fellow, as far as lays in your power, though a little flighty. On the other hand, you can't admit but what it's natural in us to be anxious with such a thing hanging over our heads. So forget and forgive all round, George. Come! Forget and forgive all round!" Mrs. Bagnet, giving him one of her honest hands and giving her husband the other, Mr. George gives each of them one of his and holds them while he speaks. "I do assure you both, there's nothing I wouldn't do to discharge this obligation. But whatever I have been able to scrape together has gone every two months in keeping it up. We have lived plainly enough here, Phil and I. But the gallery don't quite do what was expected of it, and it's not--in short, it's not the mint. It was wrong in me to take it? Well, so it was. But I was in a manner drawn into that step, and I thought it might steady me, and set me up, and you'll try to overlook my having such expectations, and upon my soul, I am very much obliged to you, and very much ashamed of myself." With these concluding words, Mr. George gives a shake to each of the hands he holds, and relinquishing them, backs a pace or two in a broad-chested, upright attitude, as if he had made a final confession and were immediately going to be shot with all military honours. "George, hear me out!" says Mr. Bagnet, glancing at his wife. "Old girl, go on!" Mr. Bagnet, being in this singular manner heard out, has merely to observe that the letter must be attended to without any delay, that it is advisable that George and he should immediately wait on Mr. Smallweed in person, and that the primary object is to save and hold harmless Mr. Bagnet, who had none of the money. Mr. George, entirely assenting, puts on his hat and prepares to march with Mr. Bagnet to the enemy's camp. "Don't you mind a woman's hasty word, George," says Mrs. Bagnet, patting him on the shoulder. "I trust my old Lignum to you, and I am sure you'll bring him through it." The trooper returns that this is kindly said and that he WILL bring Lignum through it somehow. Upon which Mrs. Bagnet, with her cloak, basket, and umbrella, goes home, bright-eyed again, to the rest of her family, and the comrades sally forth on the hopeful errand of mollifying Mr. Smallweed. Whether there are two people in England less likely to come satisfactorily out of any negotiation with Mr. Smallweed than Mr. George and Mr. Matthew Bagnet may be very reasonably questioned. Also, notwithstanding their martial appearance, broad square shoulders, and heavy tread, whether there are within the same limits two more simple and unaccustomed children in all the Smallweedy affairs of life. As they proceed with great gravity through the streets towards the region of Mount Pleasant, Mr. Bagnet, observing his companion to be thoughtful, considers it a friendly part to refer to Mrs. Bagnet's late sally. "George, you know the old girl--she's as sweet and as mild as milk. But touch her on the children--or myself--and she's off like gunpowder." "It does her credit, Mat!" "George," says Mr. Bagnet, looking straight before him, "the old girl--can't do anything--that don't do her credit. More or less. I never say so. Discipline must be maintained." "She's worth her weight in gold," says the trooper. "In gold?" says Mr. Bagnet. "I'll tell you what. The old girl's weight--is twelve stone six. Would I take that weight--in any metal--for the old girl? No. Why not? Because the old girl's metal is far more precious--than the preciousest metal. And she's ALL metal!" "You are right, Mat!" "When she took me--and accepted of the ring--she 'listed under me and the children--heart and head, for life. She's that earnest," says Mr. Bagnet, "and true to her colours--that, touch us with a finger--and she turns out--and stands to her arms. If the old girl fires wide--once in a way--at the call of duty--look over it, George. For she's loyal!" "Why, bless her, Mat," returns the trooper, "I think the higher of her for it!" "You are right!" says Mr. Bagnet with the warmest enthusiasm, though without relaxing the rigidity of a single muscle. "Think as high of the old girl--as the rock of Gibraltar--and still you'll be thinking low--of such merits. But I never own to it before her. Discipline must be maintained." These encomiums bring them to Mount Pleasant and to Grandfather Smallweed's house. The door is opened by the perennial Judy, who, having surveyed them from top to toe with no particular favour, but indeed with a malignant sneer, leaves them standing there while she consults the oracle as to their admission. The oracle may be inferred to give consent from the circumstance of her returning with the words on her honey lips that they can come in if they want to it. Thus privileged, they come in and find Mr. Smallweed with his feet in the drawer of his chair as if it were a paper foot-bath and Mrs. Smallweed obscured with the cushion like a bird that is not to sing. "My dear friend," says Grandfather Smallweed with those two lean affectionate arms of his stretched forth. "How de do? How de do? Who is our friend, my dear friend?" "Why this," returns George, not able to be very conciliatory at first, "is Matthew Bagnet, who has obliged me in that matter of ours, you know." "Oh! Mr. Bagnet? Surely!" The old man looks at him under his hand. "Hope you're well, Mr. Bagnet? Fine man, Mr. George! Military air, sir!" No chairs being offered, Mr. George brings one forward for Bagnet and one for himself. They sit down, Mr. Bagnet as if he had no power of bending himself, except at the hips, for that purpose. "Judy," says Mr. Smallweed, "bring the pipe." "Why, I don't know," Mr. George interposes, "that the young woman need give herself that trouble, for to tell you the truth, I am not inclined to smoke it to-day." "Ain't you?" returns the old man. "Judy, bring the pipe." "The fact is, Mr. Smallweed," proceeds George, "that I find myself in rather an unpleasant state of mind. It appears to me, sir, that your friend in the city has been playing tricks." "Oh, dear no!" says Grandfather Smallweed. "He never does that!" "Don't he? Well, I am glad to hear it, because I thought it might be HIS doing. This, you know, I am speaking of. This letter." Grandfather Smallweed smiles in a very ugly way in recognition of the letter. "What does it mean?" asks Mr. George. "Judy," says the old man. "Have you got the pipe? Give it to me. Did you say what does it mean, my good friend?" "Aye! Now, come, come, you know, Mr. Smallweed," urges the trooper, constraining himself to speak as smoothly and confidentially as he can, holding the open letter in one hand and resting the broad knuckles of the other on his thigh, "a good lot of money has passed between us, and we are face to face at the present moment, and are both well aware of the understanding there has always been. I am prepared to do the usual thing which I have done regularly and to keep this matter going. I never got a letter like this from you before, and I have been a little put about by it this morning, because here's my friend Matthew Bagnet, who, you know, had none of the money--" "I DON'T know it, you know," says the old man quietly. "Why, con-found you--it, I mean--I tell you so, don't I?" "Oh, yes, you tell me so," returns Grandfather Smallweed. "But I don't know it." "Well!" says the trooper, swallowing his fire. "I know it." Mr. Smallweed replies with excellent temper, "Ah! That's quite another thing!" And adds, "But it don't matter. Mr. Bagnet's situation is all one, whether or no." The unfortunate George makes a great effort to arrange the affair comfortably and to propitiate Mr. Smallweed by taking him upon his own terms. "That's just what I mean. As you say, Mr. Smallweed, here's Matthew Bagnet liable to be fixed whether or no. Now, you see, that makes his good lady very uneasy in her mind, and me too, for whereas I'm a harum-scarum sort of a good-for-nought that more kicks than halfpence come natural to, why he's a steady family man, don't you see? Now, Mr. Smallweed," says the trooper, gaining confidence as he proceeds in his soldierly mode of doing business, "although you and I are good friends enough in a certain sort of a way, I am well aware that I can't ask you to let my friend Bagnet off entirely." "Oh, dear, you are too modest. You can ASK me anything, Mr. George." (There is an ogreish kind of jocularity in Grandfather Smallweed to-day.) "And you can refuse, you mean, eh? Or not you so much, perhaps, as your friend in the city? Ha ha ha!" "Ha ha ha!" echoes Grandfather Smallweed. In such a very hard manner and with eyes so particularly green that Mr. Bagnet's natural gravity is much deepened by the contemplation of that venerable man. "Come!" says the sanguine George. "I am glad to find we can be pleasant, because I want to arrange this pleasantly. Here's my friend Bagnet, and here am I. We'll settle the matter on the spot, if you please, Mr. Smallweed, in the usual way. And you'll ease my friend Bagnet's mind, and his family's mind, a good deal if you'll just mention to him what our understanding is." Here some shrill spectre cries out in a mocking manner, "Oh, good gracious! Oh!" Unless, indeed, it be the sportive Judy, who is found to be silent when the startled visitors look round, but whose chin has received a recent toss, expressive of derision and contempt. Mr. Bagnet's gravity becomes yet more profound. "But I think you asked me, Mr. George"--old Smallweed, who all this time has had the pipe in his hand, is the speaker now--"I think you asked me, what did the letter mean?" "Why, yes, I did," returns the trooper in his off-hand way, "but I don't care to know particularly, if it's all correct and pleasant." Mr. Smallweed, purposely balking himself in an aim at the trooper's head, throws the pipe on the ground and breaks it to pieces. "That's what it means, my dear friend. I'll smash you. I'll crumble you. I'll powder you. Go to the devil!" The two friends rise and look at one another. Mr. Bagnet's gravity has now attained its profoundest point. "Go to the devil!" repeats the old man. "I'll have no more of your pipe-smokings and swaggerings. What? You're an independent dragoon, too! Go to my lawyer (you remember where; you have been there before) and show your independence now, will you? Come, my dear friend, there's a chance for you. Open the street door, Judy; put these blusterers out! Call in help if they don't go. Put 'em out!" He vociferates this so loudly that Mr. Bagnet, laying his hands on the shoulders of his comrade before the latter can recover from his amazement, gets him on the outside of the street door, which is instantly slammed by the triumphant Judy. Utterly confounded, Mr. George awhile stands looking at the knocker. Mr. Bagnet, in a perfect abyss of gravity, walks up and down before the little parlour window like a sentry and looks in every time he passes, apparently revolving something in his mind. "Come, Mat," says Mr. George when he has recovered himself, "we must try the lawyer. Now, what do you think of this rascal?" Mr. Bagnet, stopping to take a farewell look into the parlour, replies with one shake of his head directed at the interior, "If my old girl had been here--I'd have told him!" Having so discharged himself of the subject of his cogitations, he falls into step and marches off with the trooper, shoulder to shoulder. When they present themselves in Lincoln's Inn Fields, Mr. Tulkinghorn is engaged and not to be seen. He is not at all willing to see them, for when they have waited a full hour, and the clerk, on his bell being rung, takes the opportunity of mentioning as much, he brings forth no more encouraging message than that Mr. Tulkinghorn has nothing to say to them and they had better not wait. They do wait, however, with the perseverance of military tactics, and at last the bell rings again and the client in possession comes out of Mr. Tulkinghorn's room. The client is a handsome old lady, no other than Mrs. Rouncewell, housekeeper at Chesney Wold. She comes out of the sanctuary with a fair old-fashioned curtsy and softly shuts the door. She is treated with some distinction there, for the clerk steps out of his pew to show her through the outer office and to let her out. The old lady is thanking him for his attention when she observes the comrades in waiting. "I beg your pardon, sir, but I think those gentlemen are military?" The clerk referring the question to them with his eye, and Mr. George not turning round from the almanac over the fire-place. Mr. Bagnet takes upon himself to reply, "Yes, ma'am. Formerly." "I thought so. I was sure of it. My heart warms, gentlemen, at the sight of you. It always does at the sight of such. God bless you, gentlemen! You'll excuse an old woman, but I had a son once who went for a soldier. A fine handsome youth he was, and good in his bold way, though some people did disparage him to his poor mother. I ask your pardon for troubling you, sir. God bless you, gentlemen!" "Same to you, ma'am!" returns Mr. Bagnet with right good will. There is something very touching in the earnestness of the old lady's voice and in the tremble that goes through her quaint old figure. But Mr. George is so occupied with the almanac over the fire-place (calculating the coming months by it perhaps) that he does not look round until she has gone away and the door is closed upon her. "George," Mr. Bagnet gruffly whispers when he does turn from the almanac at last. "Don't be cast down! 'Why, soldiers, why--should we be melancholy, boys?' Cheer up, my hearty!" The clerk having now again gone in to say that they are still there and Mr. Tulkinghorn being heard to return with some irascibility, "Let 'em come in then!" they pass into the great room with the painted ceiling and find him standing before the fire. "Now, you men, what do you want? Sergeant, I told you the last time I saw you that I don't desire your company here." Sergeant replies--dashed within the last few minutes as to his usual manner of speech, and even as to his usual carriage--that he has received this letter, has been to Mr. Smallweed about it, and has been referred there. "I have nothing to say to you," rejoins Mr. Tulkinghorn. "If you get into debt, you must pay your debts or take the consequences. You have no occasion to come here to learn that, I suppose?" Sergeant is sorry to say that he is not prepared with the money. "Very well! Then the other man--this man, if this is he--must pay it for you." Sergeant is sorry to add that the other man is not prepared with the money either. "Very well! Then you must pay it between you or you must both be sued for it and both suffer. You have had the money and must refund it. You are not to pocket other people's pounds, shillings, and pence and escape scot-free." The lawyer sits down in his easy-chair and stirs the fire. Mr. George hopes he will have the goodness to--"I tell you, sergeant, I have nothing to say to you. I don't like your associates and don't want you here. This matter is not at all in my course of practice and is not in my office. Mr. Smallweed is good enough to offer these affairs to me, but they are not in my way. You must go to Melchisedech's in Clifford's Inn." "I must make an apology to you, sir," says Mr. George, "for pressing myself upon you with so little encouragement--which is almost as unpleasant to me as it can be to you--but would you let me say a private word to you?" Mr. Tulkinghorn rises with his hands in his pockets and walks into one of the window recesses. "Now! I have no time to waste." In the midst of his perfect assumption of indifference, he directs a sharp look at the trooper, taking care to stand with his own back to the light and to have the other with his face towards it. "Well, sir," says Mr. George, "this man with me is the other party implicated in this unfortunate affair--nominally, only nominally--and my sole object is to prevent his getting into trouble on my account. He is a most respectable man with a wife and family, formerly in the Royal Artillery--" "My friend, I don't care a pinch of snuff for the whole Royal Artillery establishment--officers, men, tumbrils, waggons, horses, guns, and ammunition." "'Tis likely, sir. But I care a good deal for Bagnet and his wife and family being injured on my account. And if I could bring them through this matter, I should have no help for it but to give up without any other consideration what you wanted of me the other day." "Have you got it here?" "I have got it here, sir." "Sergeant," the lawyer proceeds in his dry passionless manner, far more hopeless in the dealing with than any amount of vehemence, "make up your mind while I speak to you, for this is final. After I have finished speaking I have closed the subject, and I won't re-open it. Understand that. You can leave here, for a few days, what you say you have brought here if you choose; you can take it away at once if you choose. In case you choose to leave it here, I can do this for you--I can replace this matter on its old footing, and I can go so far besides as to give you a written undertaking that this man Bagnet shall never be troubled in any way until you have been proceeded against to the utmost, that your means shall be exhausted before the creditor looks to his. This is in fact all but freeing him. Have you decided?" The trooper puts his hand into his breast and answers with a long breath, "I must do it, sir." So Mr. Tulkinghorn, putting on his spectacles, sits down and writes the undertaking, which he slowly reads and explains to Bagnet, who has all this time been staring at the ceiling and who puts his hand on his bald head again, under this new verbal shower-bath, and seems exceedingly in need of the old girl through whom to express his sentiments. The trooper then takes from his breast-pocket a folded paper, which he lays with an unwilling hand at the lawyer's elbow. "'Tis only a letter of instructions, sir. The last I ever had from him." Look at a millstone, Mr. George, for some change in its expression, and you will find it quite as soon as in the face of Mr. Tulkinghorn when he opens and reads the letter! He refolds it and lays it in his desk with a countenance as unperturbable as death. Nor has he anything more to say or do but to nod once in the same frigid and discourteous manner and to say briefly, "You can go. Show these men out, there!" Being shown out, they repair to Mr. Bagnet's residence to dine. Boiled beef and greens constitute the day's variety on the former repast of boiled pork and greens, and Mrs. Bagnet serves out the meal in the same way and seasons it with the best of temper, being that rare sort of old girl that she receives Good to her arms without a hint that it might be Better and catches light from any little spot of darkness near her. The spot on this occasion is the darkened brow of Mr. George; he is unusually thoughtful and depressed. At first Mrs. Bagnet trusts to the combined endearments of Quebec and Malta to restore him, but finding those young ladies sensible that their existing Bluffy is not the Bluffy of their usual frolicsome acquaintance, she winks off the light infantry and leaves him to deploy at leisure on the open ground of the domestic hearth. But he does not. He remains in close order, clouded and depressed. During the lengthy cleaning up and pattening process, when he and Mr. Bagnet are supplied with their pipes, he is no better than he was at dinner. He forgets to smoke, looks at the fire and ponders, lets his pipe out, fills the breast of Mr. Bagnet with perturbation and dismay by showing that he has no enjoyment of tobacco. Therefore when Mrs. Bagnet at last appears, rosy from the invigorating pail, and sits down to her work, Mr. Bagnet growls, "Old girl!" and winks monitions to her to find out what's the matter. "Why, George!" says Mrs. Bagnet, quietly threading her needle. "How low you are!" "Am I? Not good company? Well, I am afraid I am not." "He ain't at all like Bluffy, mother!" cries little Malta. "Because he ain't well, I think, mother," adds Quebec. "Sure that's a bad sign not to be like Bluffy, too!" returns the trooper, kissing the young damsels. "But it's true," with a sigh, "true, I am afraid. These little ones are always right!" "George," says Mrs. Bagnet, working busily, "if I thought you cross enough to think of anything that a shrill old soldier's wife--who could have bitten her tongue off afterwards and ought to have done it almost--said this morning, I don't know what I shouldn't say to you now." "My kind soul of a darling," returns the trooper. "Not a morsel of it." "Because really and truly, George, what I said and meant to say was that I trusted Lignum to you and was sure you'd bring him through it. And you HAVE brought him through it, noble!" "Thankee, my dear!" says George. "I am glad of your good opinion." In giving Mrs. Bagnet's hand, with her work in it, a friendly shake--for she took her seat beside him--the trooper's attention is attracted to her face. After looking at it for a little while as she plies her needle, he looks to young Woolwich, sitting on his stool in the corner, and beckons that fifer to him. "See there, my boy," says George, very gently smoothing the mother's hair with his hand, "there's a good loving forehead for you! All bright with love of you, my boy. A little touched by the sun and the weather through following your father about and taking care of you, but as fresh and wholesome as a ripe apple on a tree." Mr. Bagnet's face expresses, so far as in its wooden material lies, the highest approbation and acquiescence. "The time will come, my boy," pursues the trooper, "when this hair of your mother's will be grey, and this forehead all crossed and re-crossed with wrinkles, and a fine old lady she'll be then. Take care, while you are young, that you can think in those days, 'I never whitened a hair of her dear head--I never marked a sorrowful line in her face!' For of all the many things that you can think of when you are a man, you had better have THAT by you, Woolwich!" Mr. George concludes by rising from his chair, seating the boy beside his mother in it, and saying, with something of a hurry about him, that he'll smoke his pipe in the street a bit. CHAPTER XXXV Esther's Narrative I lay ill through several weeks, and the usual tenor of my life became like an old remembrance. But this was not the effect of time so much as of the change in all my habits made by the helplessness and inaction of a sick-room. Before I had been confined to it many days, everything else seemed to have retired into a remote distance where there was little or no separation between the various stages of my life which had been really divided by years. In falling ill, I seemed to have crossed a dark lake and to have left all my experiences, mingled together by the great distance, on the healthy shore. My housekeeping duties, though at first it caused me great anxiety to think that they were unperformed, were soon as far off as the oldest of the old duties at Greenleaf or the summer afternoons when I went home from school with my portfolio under my arm, and my childish shadow at my side, to my godmother's house. I had never known before how short life really was and into how small a space the mind could put it. While I was very ill, the way in which these divisions of time became confused with one another distressed my mind exceedingly. At once a child, an elder girl, and the little woman I had been so happy as, I was not only oppressed by cares and difficulties adapted to each station, but by the great perplexity of endlessly trying to reconcile them. I suppose that few who have not been in such a condition can quite understand what I mean or what painful unrest arose from this source. For the same reason I am almost afraid to hint at that time in my disorder--it seemed one long night, but I believe there were both nights and days in it--when I laboured up colossal staircases, ever striving to reach the top, and ever turned, as I have seen a worm in a garden path, by some obstruction, and labouring again. I knew perfectly at intervals, and I think vaguely at most times, that I was in my bed; and I talked with Charley, and felt her touch, and knew her very well; yet I would find myself complaining, "Oh, more of these never-ending stairs, Charley--more and more--piled up to the sky', I think!" and labouring on again. Dare I hint at that worse time when, strung together somewhere in great black space, there was a flaming necklace, or ring, or starry circle of some kind, of which I was one of the beads! And when my only prayer was to be taken off from the rest and when it was such inexplicable agony and misery to be a part of the dreadful thing? Perhaps the less I say of these sick experiences, the less tedious and the more intelligible I shall be. I do not recall them to make others unhappy or because I am now the least unhappy in remembering them. It may be that if we knew more of such strange afflictions we might be the better able to alleviate their intensity. The repose that succeeded, the long delicious sleep, the blissful rest, when in my weakness I was too calm to have any care for myself and could have heard (or so I think now) that I was dying, with no other emotion than with a pitying love for those I left behind--this state can be perhaps more widely understood. I was in this state when I first shrunk from the light as it twinkled on me once more, and knew with a boundless joy for which no words are rapturous enough that I should see again. I had heard my Ada crying at the door, day and night; I had heard her calling to me that I was cruel and did not love her; I had heard her praying and imploring to be let in to nurse and comfort me and to leave my bedside no more; but I had only said, when I could speak, "Never, my sweet girl, never!" and I had over and over again reminded Charley that she was to keep my darling from the room whether I lived or died. Charley had been true to me in that time of need, and with her little hand and her great heart had kept the door fast. But now, my sight strengthening and the glorious light coming every day more fully and brightly on me, I could read the letters that my dear wrote to me every morning and evening and could put them to my lips and lay my cheek upon them with no fear of hurting her. I could see my little maid, so tender and so careful, going about the two rooms setting everything in order and speaking cheerfully to Ada from the open window again. I could understand the stillness in the house and the thoughtfulness it expressed on the part of all those who had always been so good to me. I could weep in the exquisite felicity of my heart and be as happy in my weakness as ever I had been in my strength. By and by my strength began to be restored. Instead of lying, with so strange a calmness, watching what was done for me, as if it were done for some one else whom I was quietly sorry for, I helped it a little, and so on to a little more and much more, until I became useful to myself, and interested, and attached to life again. How well I remember the pleasant afternoon when I was raised in bed with pillows for the first time to enjoy a great tea-drinking with Charley! The little creature--sent into the world, surely, to minister to the weak and sick--was so happy, and so busy, and stopped so often in her preparations to lay her head upon my bosom, and fondle me, and cry with joyful tears she was so glad, she was so glad, that I was obliged to say, "Charley, if you go on in this way, I must lie down again, my darling, for I am weaker than I thought I was!" So Charley became as quiet as a mouse and took her bright face here and there across and across the two rooms, out of the shade into the divine sunshine, and out of the sunshine into the shade, while I watched her peacefully. When all her preparations were concluded and the pretty tea-table with its little delicacies to tempt me, and its white cloth, and its flowers, and everything so lovingly and beautifully arranged for me by Ada downstairs, was ready at the bedside, I felt sure I was steady enough to say something to Charley that was not new to my thoughts. First I complimented Charley on the room, and indeed it was so fresh and airy, so spotless and neat, that I could scarce believe I had been lying there so long. This delighted Charley, and her face was brighter than before. "Yet, Charley," said I, looking round, "I miss something, surely, that I am accustomed to?" Poor little Charley looked round too and pretended to shake her head as if there were nothing absent. "Are the pictures all as they used to be?" I asked her. "Every one of them, miss," said Charley. "And the furniture, Charley?" "Except where I have moved it about to make more room, miss." "And yet," said I, "I miss some familiar object. Ah, I know what it is, Charley! It's the looking-glass." Charley got up from the table, making as if she had forgotten something, and went into the next room; and I heard her sob there. I had thought of this very often. I was now certain of it. I could thank God that it was not a shock to me now. I called Charley back, and when she came--at first pretending to smile, but as she drew nearer to me, looking grieved--I took her in my arms and said, "It matters very little, Charley. I hope I can do without my old face very well." I was presently so far advanced as to be able to sit up in a great chair and even giddily to walk into the adjoining room, leaning on Charley. The mirror was gone from its usual place in that room too, but what I had to bear was none the harder to bear for that. My guardian had throughout been earnest to visit me, and there was now no good reason why I should deny myself that happiness. He came one morning, and when he first came in, could only hold me in his embrace and say, "My dear, dear girl!" I had long known--who could know better?--what a deep fountain of affection and generosity his heart was; and was it not worth my trivial suffering and change to fill such a place in it? "Oh, yes!" I thought. "He has seen me, and he loves me better than he did; he has seen me and is even fonder of me than he was before; and what have I to mourn for!" He sat down by me on the sofa, supporting me with his arm. For a little while he sat with his hand over his face, but when he removed it, fell into his usual manner. There never can have been, there never can be, a pleasanter manner. "My little woman," said he, "what a sad time this has been. Such an inflexible little woman, too, through all!" "Only for the best, guardian," said I. "For the best?" he repeated tenderly. "Of course, for the best. But here have Ada and I been perfectly forlorn and miserable; here has your friend Caddy been coming and going late and early; here has every one about the house been utterly lost and dejected; here has even poor Rick been writing--to ME too--in his anxiety for you!" I had read of Caddy in Ada's letters, but not of Richard. I told him so. "Why, no, my dear," he replied. "I have thought it better not to mention it to her." "And you speak of his writing to YOU," said I, repeating his emphasis. "As if it were not natural for him to do so, guardian; as if he could write to a better friend!" "He thinks he could, my love," returned my guardian, "and to many a better. The truth is, he wrote to me under a sort of protest while unable to write to you with any hope of an answer--wrote coldly, haughtily, distantly, resentfully. Well, dearest little woman, we must look forbearingly on it. He is not to blame. Jarndyce and Jarndyce has warped him out of himself and perverted me in his eyes. I have known it do as bad deeds, and worse, many a time. If two angels could be concerned in it, I believe it would change their nature." "It has not changed yours, guardian." "Oh, yes, it has, my dear," he said laughingly. "It has made the south wind easterly, I don't know how often. Rick mistrusts and suspects me--goes to lawyers, and is taught to mistrust and suspect me. Hears I have conflicting interests, claims clashing against his and what not. Whereas, heaven knows that if I could get out of the mountains of wiglomeration on which my unfortunate name has been so long bestowed (which I can't) or could level them by the extinction of my own original right (which I can't either, and no human power ever can, anyhow, I believe, to such a pass have we got), I would do it this hour. I would rather restore to poor Rick his proper nature than be endowed with all the money that dead suitors, broken, heart and soul, upon the wheel of Chancery, have left unclaimed with the Accountant-General--and that's money enough, my dear, to be cast into a pyramid, in memory of Chancery's transcendent wickedness." "IS it possible, guardian," I asked, amazed, "that Richard can be suspicious of you?" "Ah, my love, my love," he said, "it is in the subtle poison of such abuses to breed such diseases. His blood is infected, and objects lose their natural aspects in his sight. It is not HIS fault." "But it is a terrible misfortune, guardian." "It is a terrible misfortune, little woman, to be ever drawn within the influences of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. I know none greater. By little and little he has been induced to trust in that rotten reed, and it communicates some portion of its rottenness to everything around him. But again I say with all my soul, we must be patient with poor Rick and not blame him. What a troop of fine fresh hearts like his have I seen in my time turned by the same means!" I could not help expressing something of my wonder and regret that his benevolent, disinterested intentions had prospered so little. "We must not say so, Dame Durden," he cheerfully replied; "Ada is the happier, I hope, and that is much. I did think that I and both these young creatures might be friends instead of distrustful foes and that we might so far counter-act the suit and prove too strong for it. But it was too much to expect. Jarndyce and Jarndyce was the curtain of Rick's cradle." "But, guardian, may we not hope that a little experience will teach him what a false and wretched thing it is?" "We WILL hope so, my Esther," said Mr. Jarndyce, "and that it may not teach him so too late. In any case we must not be hard on him. There are not many grown and matured men living while we speak, good men too, who if they were thrown into this same court as suitors would not be vitally changed and depreciated within three years--within two--within one. How can we stand amazed at poor Rick? A young man so unfortunate," here he fell into a lower tone, as if he were thinking aloud, "cannot at first believe (who could?) that Chancery is what it is. He looks to it, flushed and fitfully, to do something with his interests and bring them to some settlement. It procrastinates, disappoints, tries, tortures him; wears out his sanguine hopes and patience, thread by thread; but he still looks to it, and hankers after it, and finds his whole world treacherous and hollow. Well, well, well! Enough of this, my dear!" He had supported me, as at first, all this time, and his tenderness was so precious to me that I leaned my head upon his shoulder and loved him as if he had been my father. I resolved in my own mind in this little pause, by some means, to see Richard when I grew strong and try to set him right. "There are better subjects than these," said my guardian, "for such a joyful time as the time of our dear girl's recovery. And I had a commission to broach one of them as soon as I should begin to talk. When shall Ada come to see you, my love?" I had been thinking of that too. A little in connexion with the absent mirrors, but not much, for I knew my loving girl would be changed by no change in my looks. "Dear guardian," said I, "as I have shut her out so long--though indeed, indeed, she is like the light to me--" "I know it well, Dame Durden, well." He was so good, his touch expressed such endearing compassion and affection, and the tone of his voice carried such comfort into my heart that I stopped for a little while, quite unable to go on. "Yes, yes, you are tired," said he. "Rest a little." "As I have kept Ada out so long," I began afresh after a short while, "I think I should like to have my own way a little longer, guardian. It would be best to be away from here before I see her. If Charley and I were to go to some country lodging as soon as I can move, and if I had a week there in which to grow stronger and to be revived by the sweet air and to look forward to the happiness of having Ada with me again, I think it would be better for us." I hope it was not a poor thing in me to wish to be a little more used to my altered self before I met the eyes of the dear girl I longed so ardently to see, but it is the truth. I did. He understood me, I was sure; but I was not afraid of that. If it were a poor thing, I knew he would pass it over. "Our spoilt little woman," said my guardian, "shall have her own way even in her inflexibility, though at the price, I know, of tears downstairs. And see here! Here is Boythorn, heart of chivalry, breathing such ferocious vows as never were breathed on paper before, that if you don't go and occupy his whole house, he having already turned out of it expressly for that purpose, by heaven and by earth he'll pull it down and not leave one brick standing on another!" And my guardian put a letter in my hand, without any ordinary beginning such as "My dear Jarndyce," but rushing at once into the words, "I swear if Miss Summerson do not come down and take possession of my house, which I vacate for her this day at one o'clock, P.M.," and then with the utmost seriousness, and in the most emphatic terms, going on to make the extraordinary declaration he had quoted. We did not appreciate the writer the less for laughing heartily over it, and we settled that I should send him a letter of thanks on the morrow and accept his offer. It was a most agreeable one to me, for all the places I could have thought of, I should have liked to go to none so well as Chesney Wold. "Now, little housewife," said my guardian, looking at his watch, "I was strictly timed before I came upstairs, for you must not be tired too soon; and my time has waned away to the last minute. I have one other petition. Little Miss Flite, hearing a rumour that you were ill, made nothing of walking down here--twenty miles, poor soul, in a pair of dancing shoes--to inquire. It was heaven's mercy we were at home, or she would have walked back again." The old conspiracy to make me happy! Everybody seemed to be in it! "Now, pet," said my guardian, "if it would not be irksome to you to admit the harmless little creature one afternoon before you save Boythorn's otherwise devoted house from demolition, I believe you would make her prouder and better pleased with herself than I--though my eminent name is Jarndyce--could do in a lifetime." I have no doubt he knew there would be something in the simple image of the poor afflicted creature that would fall like a gentle lesson on my mind at that time. I felt it as he spoke to me. I could not tell him heartily enough how ready I was to receive her. I had always pitied her, never so much as now. I had always been glad of my little power to soothe her under her calamity, but never, never, half so glad before. We arranged a time for Miss Flite to come out by the coach and share my early dinner. When my guardian left me, I turned my face away upon my couch and prayed to be forgiven if I, surrounded by such blessings, had magnified to myself the little trial that I had to undergo. The childish prayer of that old birthday when I had aspired to be industrious, contented, and true-hearted and to do good to some one and win some love to myself if I could came back into my mind with a reproachful sense of all the happiness I had since enjoyed and all the affectionate hearts that had been turned towards me. If I were weak now, what had I profited by those mercies? I repeated the old childish prayer in its old childish words and found that its old peace had not departed from it. My guardian now came every day. In a week or so more I could walk about our rooms and hold long talks with Ada from behind the window-curtain. Yet I never saw her, for I had not as yet the courage to look at the dear face, though I could have done so easily without her seeing me. On the appointed day Miss Flite arrived. The poor little creature ran into my room quite forgetful of her usual dignity, and crying from her very heart of hearts, "My dear Fitz Jarndyce!" fell upon my neck and kissed me twenty times. "Dear me!" said she, putting her hand into her reticule, "I have nothing here but documents, my dear Fitz Jarndyce; I must borrow a pocket handkerchief." Charley gave her one, and the good creature certainly made use of it, for she held it to her eyes with both hands and sat so, shedding tears for the next ten minutes. "With pleasure, my dear Fitz Jarndyce," she was careful to explain. "Not the least pain. Pleasure to see you well again. Pleasure at having the honour of being admitted to see you. I am so much fonder of you, my love, than of the Chancellor. Though I DO attend court regularly. By the by, my dear, mentioning pocket handkerchiefs--" Miss Flite here looked at Charley, who had been to meet her at the place where the coach stopped. Charley glanced at me and looked unwilling to pursue the suggestion. "Ve-ry right!" said Miss Flite, "Ve-ry correct. Truly! Highly indiscreet of me to mention it; but my dear Miss Fitz Jarndyce, I am afraid I am at times (between ourselves, you wouldn't think it) a little--rambling you know," said Miss Flite, touching her forehead. "Nothing more." "What were you going to tell me?" said I, smiling, for I saw she wanted to go on. "You have roused my curiosity, and now you must gratify it." Miss Flite looked at Charley for advice in this important crisis, who said, "If you please, ma'am, you had better tell then," and therein gratified Miss Flite beyond measure. "So sagacious, our young friend," said she to me in her mysterious way. "Diminutive. But ve-ry sagacious! Well, my dear, it's a pretty anecdote. Nothing more. Still I think it charming. Who should follow us down the road from the coach, my dear, but a poor person in a very ungenteel bonnet--" "Jenny, if you please, miss," said Charley. "Just so!" Miss Flite acquiesced with the greatest suavity. "Jenny. Ye-es! And what does she tell our young friend but that there has been a lady with a veil inquiring at her cottage after my dear Fitz Jarndyce's health and taking a handkerchief away with her as a little keepsake merely because it was my amiable Fitz Jarndyce's! Now, you know, so very prepossessing in the lady with the veil!" "If you please, miss," said Charley, to whom I looked in some astonishment, "Jenny says that when her baby died, you left a handkerchief there, and that she put it away and kept it with the baby's little things. I think, if you please, partly because it was yours, miss, and partly because it had covered the baby." "Diminutive," whispered Miss Flite, making a variety of motions about her own forehead to express intellect in Charley. "But exceedingly sagacious! And so dear! My love, she's clearer than any counsel I ever heard!" "Yes, Charley," I returned. "I remember it. Well?" "Well, miss," said Charley, "and that's the handkerchief the lady took. And Jenny wants you to know that she wouldn't have made away with it herself for a heap of money but that the lady took it and left some money instead. Jenny don't know her at all, if you please, miss!" "Why, who can she be?" said I. "My love," Miss Flite suggested, advancing her lips to my ear with her most mysterious look, "in MY opinion--don't mention this to our diminutive friend--she's the Lord Chancellor's wife. He's married, you know. And I understand she leads him a terrible life. Throws his lordship's papers into the fire, my dear, if he won't pay the jeweller!" I did not think very much about this lady then, for I had an impression that it might be Caddy. Besides, my attention was diverted by my visitor, who was cold after her ride and looked hungry and who, our dinner being brought in, required some little assistance in arraying herself with great satisfaction in a pitiable old scarf and a much-worn and often-mended pair of gloves, which she had brought down in a paper parcel. I had to preside, too, over the entertainment, consisting of a dish of fish, a roast fowl, a sweetbread, vegetables, pudding, and Madeira; and it was so pleasant to see how she enjoyed it, and with what state and ceremony she did honour to it, that I was soon thinking of nothing else. When we had finished and had our little dessert before us, embellished by the hands of my dear, who would yield the superintendence of everything prepared for me to no one, Miss Flite was so very chatty and happy that I thought I would lead her to her own history, as she was always pleased to talk about herself. I began by saying "You have attended on the Lord Chancellor many years, Miss Flite?" "Oh, many, many, many years, my dear. But I expect a judgment. Shortly." There was an anxiety even in her hopefulness that made me doubtful if I had done right in approaching the subject. I thought I would say no more about it. "My father expected a judgment," said Miss Flite. "My brother. My sister. They all expected a judgment. The same that I expect." "They are all--" "Ye-es. Dead of course, my dear," said she. As I saw she would go on, I thought it best to try to be serviceable to her by meeting the theme rather than avoiding it. "Would it not be wiser," said I, "to expect this judgment no more?" "Why, my dear," she answered promptly, "of course it would!" "And to attend the court no more?" "Equally of course," said she. "Very wearing to be always in expectation of what never comes, my dear Fitz Jarndyce! Wearing, I assure you, to the bone!" She slightly showed me her arm, and it was fearfully thin indeed. "But, my dear," she went on in her mysterious way, "there's a dreadful attraction in the place. Hush! Don't mention it to our diminutive friend when she comes in. Or it may frighten her. With good reason. There's a cruel attraction in the place. You CAN'T leave it. And you MUST expect." I tried to assure her that this was not so. She heard me patiently and smilingly, but was ready with her own answer. "Aye, aye, aye! You think so because I am a little rambling. Ve-ry absurd, to be a little rambling, is it not? Ve-ry confusing, too. To the head. I find it so. But, my dear, I have been there many years, and I have noticed. It's the mace and seal upon the table." What could they do, did she think? I mildly asked her. "Draw," returned Miss Flite. "Draw people on, my dear. Draw peace out of them. Sense out of them. Good looks out of them. Good qualities out of them. I have felt them even drawing my rest away in the night. Cold and glittering devils!" She tapped me several times upon the arm and nodded good-humouredly as if she were anxious I should understand that I had no cause to fear her, though she spoke so gloomily, and confided these awful secrets to me. "Let me see," said she. "I'll tell you my own case. Before they ever drew me--before I had ever seen them--what was it I used to do? Tambourine playing? No. Tambour work. I and my sister worked at tambour work. Our father and our brother had a builder's business. We all lived together. Ve-ry respectably, my dear! First, our father was drawn--slowly. Home was drawn with him. In a few years he was a fierce, sour, angry bankrupt without a kind word or a kind look for any one. He had been so different, Fitz Jarndyce. He was drawn to a debtors' prison. There he died. Then our brother was drawn--swiftly--to drunkenness. And rags. And death. Then my sister was drawn. Hush! Never ask to what! Then I was ill and in misery, and heard, as I had often heard before, that this was all the work of Chancery. When I got better, I went to look at the monster. And then I found out how it was, and I was drawn to stay there." Having got over her own short narrative, in the delivery of which she had spoken in a low, strained voice, as if the shock were fresh upon her, she gradually resumed her usual air of amiable importance. "You don't quite credit me, my dear! Well, well! You will, some day. I am a little rambling. But I have noticed. I have seen many new faces come, unsuspicious, within the influence of the mace and seal in these many years. As my father's came there. As my brother's. As my sister's. As my own. I hear Conversation Kenge and the rest of them say to the new faces, 'Here's little Miss Flite. Oh, you are new here; and you must come and be presented to little Miss Flite!' Ve-ry good. Proud I am sure to have the honour! And we all laugh. But, Fitz Jarndyce, I know what will happen. I know, far better than they do, when the attraction has begun. I know the signs, my dear. I saw them begin in Gridley. And I saw them end. Fitz Jarndyce, my love," speaking low again, "I saw them beginning in our friend the ward in Jarndyce. Let some one hold him back. Or he'll be drawn to ruin." She looked at me in silence for some moments, with her face gradually softening into a smile. Seeming to fear that she had been too gloomy, and seeming also to lose the connexion in her mind, she said politely as she sipped her glass of wine, "Yes, my dear, as I was saying, I expect a judgment shortly. Then I shall release my birds, you know, and confer estates." I was much impressed by her allusion to Richard and by the sad meaning, so sadly illustrated in her poor pinched form, that made its way through all her incoherence. But happily for her, she was quite complacent again now and beamed with nods and smiles. "But, my dear," she said, gaily, reaching another hand to put it upon mine. "You have not congratulated me on my physician. Positively not once, yet!" I was obliged to confess that I did not quite know what she meant. "My physician, Mr. Woodcourt, my dear, who was so exceedingly attentive to me. Though his services were rendered quite gratuitously. Until the Day of Judgment. I mean THE judgment that will dissolve the spell upon me of the mace and seal." "Mr. Woodcourt is so far away, now," said I, "that I thought the time for such congratulation was past, Miss Flite." "But, my child," she returned, "is it possible that you don't know what has happened?" "No," said I. "Not what everybody has been talking of, my beloved Fitz Jarndyce!" "No," said I. "You forget how long I have been here." "True! My dear, for the moment--true. I blame myself. But my memory has been drawn out of me, with everything else, by what I mentioned. Ve-ry strong influence, is it not? Well, my dear, there has been a terrible shipwreck over in those East Indian seas." "Mr. Woodcourt shipwrecked!" "Don't be agitated, my dear. He is safe. An awful scene. Death in all shapes. Hundreds of dead and dying. Fire, storm, and darkness. Numbers of the drowning thrown upon a rock. There, and through it all, my dear physician was a hero. Calm and brave through everything. Saved many lives, never complained in hunger and thirst, wrapped naked people in his spare clothes, took the lead, showed them what to do, governed them, tended the sick, buried the dead, and brought the poor survivors safely off at last! My dear, the poor emaciated creatures all but worshipped him. They fell down at his feet when they got to the land and blessed him. The whole country rings with it. Stay! Where's my bag of documents? I have got it there, and you shall read it, you shall read it!" And I DID read all the noble history, though very slowly and imperfectly then, for my eyes were so dimmed that I could not see the words, and I cried so much that I was many times obliged to lay down the long account she had cut out of the newspaper. I felt so triumphant ever to have known the man who had done such generous and gallant deeds, I felt such glowing exultation in his renown, I so admired and loved what he had done, that I envied the storm-worn people who had fallen at his feet and blessed him as their preserver. I could myself have kneeled down then, so far away, and blessed him in my rapture that he should be so truly good and brave. I felt that no one--mother, sister, wife--could honour him more than I. I did, indeed! My poor little visitor made me a present of the account, and when as the evening began to close in she rose to take her leave, lest she should miss the coach by which she was to return, she was still full of the shipwreck, which I had not yet sufficiently composed myself to understand in all its details. "My dear," said she as she carefully folded up her scarf and gloves, "my brave physician ought to have a title bestowed upon him. And no doubt he will. You are of that opinion?" That he well deserved one, yes. That he would ever have one, no. "Why not, Fitz Jarndyce?" she asked rather sharply. I said it was not the custom in England to confer titles on men distinguished by peaceful services, however good and great, unless occasionally when they consisted of the accumulation of some very large amount of money. "Why, good gracious," said Miss Flite, "how can you say that? Surely you know, my dear, that all the greatest ornaments of England in knowledge, imagination, active humanity, and improvement of every sort are added to its nobility! Look round you, my dear, and consider. YOU must be rambling a little now, I think, if you don't know that this is the great reason why titles will always last in the land!" I am afraid she believed what she said, for there were moments when she was very mad indeed. And now I must part with the little secret I have thus far tried to keep. I had thought, sometimes, that Mr. Woodcourt loved me and that if he had been richer he would perhaps have told me that he loved me before he went away. I had thought, sometimes, that if he had done so, I should have been glad of it. But how much better it was now that this had never happened! What should I have suffered if I had had to write to him and tell him that the poor face he had known as mine was quite gone from me and that I freely released him from his bondage to one whom he had never seen! Oh, it was so much better as it was! With a great pang mercifully spared me, I could take back to my heart my childish prayer to be all he had so brightly shown himself; and there was nothing to be undone: no chain for me to break or for him to drag; and I could go, please God, my lowly way along the path of duty, and he could go his nobler way upon its broader road; and though we were apart upon the journey, I might aspire to meet him, unselfishly, innocently, better far than he had thought me when I found some favour in his eyes, at the journey's end. CHAPTER XXXVI Chesney Wold Charley and I did not set off alone upon our expedition into Lincolnshire. My guardian had made up his mind not to lose sight of me until I was safe in Mr. Boythorn's house, so he accompanied us, and we were two days upon the road. I found every breath of air, and every scent, and every flower and leaf and blade of grass, and every passing cloud, and everything in nature, more beautiful and wonderful to me than I had ever found it yet. This was my first gain from my illness. How little I had lost, when the wide world was so full of delight for me. My guardian intending to go back immediately, we appointed, on our way down, a day when my dear girl should come. I wrote her a letter, of which he took charge, and he left us within half an hour of our arrival at our destination, on a delightful evening in the early summer-time. If a good fairy had built the house for me with a wave of her wand, and I had been a princess and her favoured god-child, I could not have been more considered in it. So many preparations were made for me and such an endearing remembrance was shown of all my little tastes and likings that I could have sat down, overcome, a dozen times before I had revisited half the rooms. I did better than that, however, by showing them all to Charley instead. Charley's delight calmed mine; and after we had had a walk in the garden, and Charley had exhausted her whole vocabulary of admiring expressions, I was as tranquilly happy as I ought to have been. It was a great comfort to be able to say to myself after tea, "Esther, my dear, I think you are quite sensible enough to sit down now and write a note of thanks to your host." He had left a note of welcome for me, as sunny as his own face, and had confided his bird to my care, which I knew to be his highest mark of confidence. Accordingly I wrote a little note to him in London, telling him how all his favourite plants and trees were looking, and how the most astonishing of birds had chirped the honours of the house to me in the most hospitable manner, and how, after singing on my shoulder, to the inconceivable rapture of my little maid, he was then at roost in the usual corner of his cage, but whether dreaming or no I could not report. My note finished and sent off to the post, I made myself very busy in unpacking and arranging; and I sent Charley to bed in good time and told her I should want her no more that night. For I had not yet looked in the glass and had never asked to have my own restored to me. I knew this to be a weakness which must be overcome, but I had always said to myself that I would begin afresh when I got to where I now was. Therefore I had wanted to be alone, and therefore I said, now alone, in my own room, "Esther, if you are to be happy, if you are to have any right to pray to be true-hearted, you must keep your word, my dear." I was quite resolved to keep it, but I sat down for a little while first to reflect upon all my blessings. And then I said my prayers and thought a little more. My hair had not been cut off, though it had been in danger more than once. It was long and thick. I let it down, and shook it out, and went up to the glass upon the dressing-table. There was a little muslin curtain drawn across it. I drew it back and stood for a moment looking through such a veil of my own hair that I could see nothing else. Then I put my hair aside and looked at the reflection in the mirror, encouraged by seeing how placidly it looked at me. I was very much changed--oh, very, very much. At first my face was so strange to me that I think I should have put my hands before it and started back but for the encouragement I have mentioned. Very soon it became more familiar, and then I knew the extent of the alteration in it better than I had done at first. It was not like what I had expected, but I had expected nothing definite, and I dare say anything definite would have surprised me. I had never been a beauty and had never thought myself one, but I had been very different from this. It was all gone now. Heaven was so good to me that I could let it go with a few not bitter tears and could stand there arranging my hair for the night quite thankfully. One thing troubled me, and I considered it for a long time before I went to sleep. I had kept Mr. Woodcourt's flowers. When they were withered I had dried them and put them in a book that I was fond of. Nobody knew this, not even Ada. I was doubtful whether I had a right to preserve what he had sent to one so different--whether it was generous towards him to do it. I wished to be generous to him, even in the secret depths of my heart, which he would never know, because I could have loved him--could have been devoted to him. At last I came to the conclusion that I might keep them if I treasured them only as a remembrance of what was irrevocably past and gone, never to be looked back on any more, in any other light. I hope this may not seem trivial. I was very much in earnest. I took care to be up early in the morning and to be before the glass when Charley came in on tiptoe. "Dear, dear, miss!" cried Charley, starting. "Is that you?" "Yes, Charley," said I, quietly putting up my hair. "And I am very well indeed, and very happy." I saw it was a weight off Charley's mind, but it was a greater weight off mine. I knew the worst now and was composed to it. I shall not conceal, as I go on, the weaknesses I could not quite conquer, but they always passed from me soon and the happier frame of mind stayed by me faithfully. Wishing to be fully re-established in my strength and my good spirits before Ada came, I now laid down a little series of plans with Charley for being in the fresh air all day long. We were to be out before breakfast, and were to dine early, and were to be out again before and after dinner, and were to talk in the garden after tea, and were to go to rest betimes, and were to climb every hill and explore every road, lane, and field in the neighbourhood. As to restoratives and strengthening delicacies, Mr. Boythorn's good housekeeper was for ever trotting about with something to eat or drink in her hand; I could not even be heard of as resting in the park but she would come trotting after me with a basket, her cheerful face shining with a lecture on the importance of frequent nourishment. Then there was a pony expressly for my riding, a chubby pony with a short neck and a mane all over his eyes who could canter--when he would--so easily and quietly that he was a treasure. In a very few days he would come to me in the paddock when I called him, and eat out of my hand, and follow me about. We arrived at such a capital understanding that when he was jogging with me lazily, and rather obstinately, down some shady lane, if I patted his neck and said, "Stubbs, I am surprised you don't canter when you know how much I like it; and I think you might oblige me, for you are only getting stupid and going to sleep," he would give his head a comical shake or two and set off directly, while Charley would stand still and laugh with such enjoyment that her laughter was like music. I don't know who had given Stubbs his name, but it seemed to belong to him as naturally as his rough coat. Once we put him in a little chaise and drove him triumphantly through the green lanes for five miles; but all at once, as we were extolling him to the skies, he seemed to take it ill that he should have been accompanied so far by the circle of tantalizing little gnats that had been hovering round and round his ears the whole way without appearing to advance an inch, and stopped to think about it. I suppose he came to the decision that it was not to be borne, for he steadily refused to move until I gave the reins to Charley and got out and walked, when he followed me with a sturdy sort of good humour, putting his head under my arm and rubbing his ear against my sleeve. It was in vain for me to say, "Now, Stubbs, I feel quite sure from what I know of you that you will go on if I ride a little while," for the moment I left him, he stood stock still again. Consequently I was obliged to lead the way, as before; and in this order we returned home, to the great delight of the village. Charley and I had reason to call it the most friendly of villages, I am sure, for in a week's time the people were so glad to see us go by, though ever so frequently in the course of a day, that there were faces of greeting in every cottage. I had known many of the grown people before and almost all the children, but now the very steeple began to wear a familiar and affectionate look. Among my new friends was an old old woman who lived in such a little thatched and whitewashed dwelling that when the outside shutter was turned up on its hinges, it shut up the whole house-front. This old lady had a grandson who was a sailor, and I wrote a letter to him for her and drew at the top of it the chimney-corner in which she had brought him up and where his old stool yet occupied its old place. This was considered by the whole village the most wonderful achievement in the world, but when an answer came back all the way from Plymouth, in which he mentioned that he was going to take the picture all the way to America, and from America would write again, I got all the credit that ought to have been given to the post-office and was invested with the merit of the whole system. Thus, what with being so much in the air, playing with so many children, gossiping with so many people, sitting on invitation in so many cottages, going on with Charley's education, and writing long letters to Ada every day, I had scarcely any time to think about that little loss of mine and was almost always cheerful. If I did think of it at odd moments now and then, I had only to be busy and forget it. I felt it more than I had hoped I should once when a child said, "Mother, why is the lady not a pretty lady now like she used to be?" But when I found the child was not less fond of me, and drew its soft hand over my face with a kind of pitying protection in its touch, that soon set me up again. There were many little occurrences which suggested to me, with great consolation, how natural it is to gentle hearts to be considerate and delicate towards any inferiority. One of these particularly touched me. I happened to stroll into the little church when a marriage was just concluded, and the young couple had to sign the register. The bridegroom, to whom the pen was handed first, made a rude cross for his mark; the bride, who came next, did the same. Now, I had known the bride when I was last there, not only as the prettiest girl in the place, but as having quite distinguished herself in the school, and I could not help looking at her with some surprise. She came aside and whispered to me, while tears of honest love and admiration stood in her bright eyes, "He's a dear good fellow, miss; but he can't write yet--he's going to learn of me--and I wouldn't shame him for the world!" Why, what had I to fear, I thought, when there was this nobility in the soul of a labouring man's daughter! The air blew as freshly and revivingly upon me as it had ever blown, and the healthy colour came into my new face as it had come into my old one. Charley was wonderful to see, she was so radiant and so rosy; and we both enjoyed the whole day and slept soundly the whole night. There was a favourite spot of mine in the park-woods of Chesney Wold where a seat had been erected commanding a lovely view. The wood had been cleared and opened to improve this point of sight, and the bright sunny landscape beyond was so beautiful that I rested there at least once every day. A picturesque part of the Hall, called the Ghost's Walk, was seen to advantage from this higher ground; and the startling name, and the old legend in the Dedlock family which I had heard from Mr. Boythorn accounting for it, mingled with the view and gave it something of a mysterious interest in addition to its real charms. There was a bank here, too, which was a famous one for violets; and as it was a daily delight of Charley's to gather wild flowers, she took as much to the spot as I did. It would be idle to inquire now why I never went close to the house or never went inside it. The family were not there, I had heard on my arrival, and were not expected. I was far from being incurious or uninterested about the building; on the contrary, I often sat in this place wondering how the rooms ranged and whether any echo like a footstep really did resound at times, as the story said, upon the lonely Ghost's Walk. The indefinable feeling with which Lady Dedlock had impressed me may have had some influence in keeping me from the house even when she was absent. I am not sure. Her face and figure were associated with it, naturally; but I cannot say that they repelled me from it, though something did. For whatever reason or no reason, I had never once gone near it, down to the day at which my story now arrives. I was resting at my favourite point after a long ramble, and Charley was gathering violets at a little distance from me. I had been looking at the Ghost's Walk lying in a deep shade of masonry afar off and picturing to myself the female shape that was said to haunt it when I became aware of a figure approaching through the wood. The perspective was so long and so darkened by leaves, and the shadows of the branches on the ground made it so much more intricate to the eye, that at first I could not discern what figure it was. By little and little it revealed itself to be a woman's--a lady's--Lady Dedlock's. She was alone and coming to where I sat with a much quicker step, I observed to my surprise, than was usual with her. I was fluttered by her being unexpectedly so near (she was almost within speaking distance before I knew her) and would have risen to continue my walk. But I could not. I was rendered motionless. Not so much by her hurried gesture of entreaty, not so much by her quick advance and outstretched hands, not so much by the great change in her manner and the absence of her haughty self-restraint, as by a something in her face that I had pined for and dreamed of when I was a little child, something I had never seen in any face, something I had never seen in hers before. A dread and faintness fell upon me, and I called to Charley. Lady Dedlock stopped upon the instant and changed back almost to what I had known her. "Miss Summerson, I am afraid I have startled you," she said, now advancing slowly. "You can scarcely be strong yet. You have been very ill, I know. I have been much concerned to hear it." I could no more have removed my eyes from her pale face than I could have stirred from the bench on which I sat. She gave me her hand, and its deadly coldness, so at variance with the enforced composure of her features, deepened the fascination that overpowered me. I cannot say what was in my whirling thoughts. "You are recovering again?" she asked kindly. "I was quite well but a moment ago, Lady Dedlock." "Is this your young attendant?" "Yes." "Will you send her on before and walk towards your house with me?" "Charley," said I, "take your flowers home, and I will follow you directly." Charley, with her best curtsy, blushingly tied on her bonnet and went her way. When she was gone, Lady Dedlock sat down on the seat beside me. I cannot tell in any words what the state of my mind was when I saw in her hand my handkerchief with which I had covered the dead baby. I looked at her, but I could not see her, I could not hear her, I could not draw my breath. The beating of my heart was so violent and wild that I felt as if my life were breaking from me. But when she caught me to her breast, kissed me, wept over me, compassionated me, and called me back to myself; when she fell down on her knees and cried to me, "Oh, my child, my child, I am your wicked and unhappy mother! Oh, try to forgive me!"--when I saw her at my feet on the bare earth in her great agony of mind, I felt, through all my tumult of emotion, a burst of gratitude to the providence of God that I was so changed as that I never could disgrace her by any trace of likeness, as that nobody could ever now look at me and look at her and remotely think of any near tie between us. I raised my mother up, praying and beseeching her not to stoop before me in such affliction and humiliation. I did so in broken, incoherent words, for besides the trouble I was in, it frightened me to see her at MY feet. I told her--or I tried to tell her--that if it were for me, her child, under any circumstances to take upon me to forgive her, I did it, and had done it, many, many years. I told her that my heart overflowed with love for her, that it was natural love which nothing in the past had changed or could change. That it was not for me, then resting for the first time on my mother's bosom, to take her to account for having given me life, but that my duty was to bless her and receive her, though the whole world turned from her, and that I only asked her leave to do it. I held my mother in my embrace, and she held me in hers, and among the still woods in the silence of the summer day there seemed to be nothing but our two troubled minds that was not at peace. "To bless and receive me," groaned my mother, "it is far too late. I must travel my dark road alone, and it will lead me where it will. From day to day, sometimes from hour to hour, I do not see the way before my guilty feet. This is the earthly punishment I have brought upon myself. I bear it, and I hide it." Even in the thinking of her endurance, she drew her habitual air of proud indifference about her like a veil, though she soon cast it off again. "I must keep this secret, if by any means it can be kept, not wholly for myself. I have a husband, wretched and dishonouring creature that I am!" These words she uttered with a suppressed cry of despair, more terrible in its sound than any shriek. Covering her face with her hands, she shrank down in my embrace as if she were unwilling that I should touch her; nor could I, by my utmost persuasions or by any endearments I could use, prevail upon her to rise. She said, no, no, no, she could only speak to me so; she must be proud and disdainful everywhere else; she would be humbled and ashamed there, in the only natural moments of her life. My unhappy mother told me that in my illness she had been nearly frantic. She had but then known that her child was living. She could not have suspected me to be that child before. She had followed me down here to speak to me but once in all her life. We never could associate, never could communicate, never probably from that time forth could interchange another word on earth. She put into my hands a letter she had written for my reading only and said when I had read it and destroyed it--but not so much for her sake, since she asked nothing, as for her husband's and my own--I must evermore consider her as dead. If I could believe that she loved me, in this agony in which I saw her, with a mother's love, she asked me to do that, for then I might think of her with a greater pity, imagining what she suffered. She had put herself beyond all hope and beyond all help. Whether she preserved her secret until death or it came to be discovered and she brought dishonour and disgrace upon the name she had taken, it was her solitary struggle always; and no affection could come near her, and no human creature could render her any aid. "But is the secret safe so far?" I asked. "Is it safe now, dearest mother?" "No," replied my mother. "It has been very near discovery. It was saved by an accident. It may be lost by another accident--to-morrow, any day." "Do you dread a particular person?" "Hush! Do not tremble and cry so much for me. I am not worthy of these tears," said my mother, kissing my hands. "I dread one person very much." "An enemy?" "Not a friend. One who is too passionless to be either. He is Sir Leicester Dedlock's lawyer, mechanically faithful without attachment, and very jealous of the profit, privilege, and reputation of being master of the mysteries of great houses." "Has he any suspicions?" "Many." "Not of you?" I said alarmed. "Yes! He is always vigilant and always near me. I may keep him at a standstill, but I can never shake him off." "Has he so little pity or compunction?" "He has none, and no anger. He is indifferent to everything but his calling. His calling is the acquisition of secrets and the holding possession of such power as they give him, with no sharer or opponent in it." "Could you trust in him?" "I shall never try. The dark road I have trodden for so many years will end where it will. I follow it alone to the end, whatever the end be. It may be near, it may be distant; while the road lasts, nothing turns me." "Dear mother, are you so resolved?" "I AM resolved. I have long outbidden folly with folly, pride with pride, scorn with scorn, insolence with insolence, and have outlived many vanities with many more. I will outlive this danger, and outdie it, if I can. It has closed around me almost as awfully as if these woods of Chesney Wold had closed around the house, but my course through it is the same. I have but one; I can have but one." "Mr. Jarndyce--" I was beginning when my mother hurriedly inquired, "Does HE suspect?" "No," said I. "No, indeed! Be assured that he does not!" And I told her what he had related to me as his knowledge of my story. "But he is so good and sensible," said I, "that perhaps if he knew--" My mother, who until this time had made no change in her position, raised her hand up to my lips and stopped me. "Confide fully in him," she said after a little while. "You have my free consent--a small gift from such a mother to her injured child!--but do not tell me of it. Some pride is left in me even yet." I explained, as nearly as I could then, or can recall now--for my agitation and distress throughout were so great that I scarcely understood myself, though every word that was uttered in the mother's voice, so unfamiliar and so melancholy to me, which in my childhood I had never learned to love and recognize, had never been sung to sleep with, had never heard a blessing from, had never had a hope inspired by, made an enduring impression on my memory--I say I explained, or tried to do it, how I had only hoped that Mr. Jarndyce, who had been the best of fathers to me, might be able to afford some counsel and support to her. But my mother answered no, it was impossible; no one could help her. Through the desert that lay before her, she must go alone. "My child, my child!" she said. "For the last time! These kisses for the last time! These arms upon my neck for the last time! We shall meet no more. To hope to do what I seek to do, I must be what I have been so long. Such is my reward and doom. If you hear of Lady Dedlock, brilliant, prosperous, and flattered, think of your wretched mother, conscience-stricken, underneath that mask! Think that the reality is in her suffering, in her useless remorse, in her murdering within her breast the only love and truth of which it is capable! And then forgive her if you can, and cry to heaven to forgive her, which it never can!" We held one another for a little space yet, but she was so firm that she took my hands away, and put them back against my breast, and with a last kiss as she held them there, released them, and went from me into the wood. I was alone, and calm and quiet below me in the sun and shade lay the old house, with its terraces and turrets, on which there had seemed to me to be such complete repose when I first saw it, but which now looked like the obdurate and unpitying watcher of my mother's misery. Stunned as I was, as weak and helpless at first as I had ever been in my sick chamber, the necessity of guarding against the danger of discovery, or even of the remotest suspicion, did me service. I took such precautions as I could to hide from Charley that I had been crying, and I constrained myself to think of every sacred obligation that there was upon me to be careful and collected. It was not a little while before I could succeed or could even restrain bursts of grief, but after an hour or so I was better and felt that I might return. I went home very slowly and told Charley, whom I found at the gate looking for me, that I had been tempted to extend my walk after Lady Dedlock had left me and that I was over-tired and would lie down. Safe in my own room, I read the letter. I clearly derived from it--and that was much then--that I had not been abandoned by my mother. Her elder and only sister, the godmother of my childhood, discovering signs of life in me when I had been laid aside as dead, had in her stern sense of duty, with no desire or willingness that I should live, reared me in rigid secrecy and had never again beheld my mother's face from within a few hours of my birth. So strangely did I hold my place in this world that until within a short time back I had never, to my own mother's knowledge, breathed--had been buried--had never been endowed with life--had never borne a name. When she had first seen me in the church she had been startled and had thought of what would have been like me if it had ever lived, and had lived on, but that was all then. What more the letter told me needs not to be repeated here. It has its own times and places in my story. My first care was to burn what my mother had written and to consume even its ashes. I hope it may not appear very unnatural or bad in me that I then became heavily sorrowful to think I had ever been reared. That I felt as if I knew it would have been better and happier for many people if indeed I had never breathed. That I had a terror of myself as the danger and the possible disgrace of my own mother and of a proud family name. That I was so confused and shaken as to be possessed by a belief that it was right and had been intended that I should die in my birth, and that it was wrong and not intended that I should be then alive. These are the real feelings that I had. I fell asleep worn out, and when I awoke I cried afresh to think that I was back in the world with my load of trouble for others. I was more than ever frightened of myself, thinking anew of her against whom I was a witness, of the owner of Chesney Wold, of the new and terrible meaning of the old words now moaning in my ear like a surge upon the shore, "Your mother, Esther, was your disgrace, and you are hers. The time will come--and soon enough--when you will understand this better, and will feel it too, as no one save a woman can." With them, those other words returned, "Pray daily that the sins of others be not visited upon your head." I could not disentangle all that was about me, and I felt as if the blame and the shame were all in me, and the visitation had come down. The day waned into a gloomy evening, overcast and sad, and I still contended with the same distress. I went out alone, and after walking a little in the park, watching the dark shades falling on the trees and the fitful flight of the bats, which sometimes almost touched me, was attracted to the house for the first time. Perhaps I might not have gone near it if I had been in a stronger frame of mind. As it was, I took the path that led close by it. I did not dare to linger or to look up, but I passed before the terrace garden with its fragrant odours, and its broad walks, and its well-kept beds and smooth turf; and I saw how beautiful and grave it was, and how the old stone balustrades and parapets, and wide flights of shallow steps, were seamed by time and weather; and how the trained moss and ivy grew about them, and around the old stone pedestal of the sun-dial; and I heard the fountain falling. Then the way went by long lines of dark windows diversified by turreted towers and porches of eccentric shapes, where old stone lions and grotesque monsters bristled outside dens of shadow and snarled at the evening gloom over the escutcheons they held in their grip. Thence the path wound underneath a gateway, and through a court-yard where the principal entrance was (I hurried quickly on), and by the stables where none but deep voices seemed to be, whether in the murmuring of the wind through the strong mass of ivy holding to a high red wall, or in the low complaining of the weathercock, or in the barking of the dogs, or in the slow striking of a clock. So, encountering presently a sweet smell of limes, whose rustling I could hear, I turned with the turning of the path to the south front, and there above me were the balustrades of the Ghost's Walk and one lighted window that might be my mother's. The way was paved here, like the terrace overhead, and my footsteps from being noiseless made an echoing sound upon the flags. Stopping to look at nothing, but seeing all I did see as I went, I was passing quickly on, and in a few moments should have passed the lighted window, when my echoing footsteps brought it suddenly into my mind that there was a dreadful truth in the legend of the Ghost's Walk, that it was I who was to bring calamity upon the stately house and that my warning feet were haunting it even then. Seized with an augmented terror of myself which turned me cold, I ran from myself and everything, retraced the way by which I had come, and never paused until I had gained the lodge-gate, and the park lay sullen and black behind me. Not before I was alone in my own room for the night and had again been dejected and unhappy there did I begin to know how wrong and thankless this state was. But from my darling who was coming on the morrow, I found a joyful letter, full of such loving anticipation that I must have been of marble if it had not moved me; from my guardian, too, I found another letter, asking me to tell Dame Durden, if I should see that little woman anywhere, that they had moped most pitiably without her, that the housekeeping was going to rack and ruin, that nobody else could manage the keys, and that everybody in and about the house declared it was not the same house and was becoming rebellious for her return. Two such letters together made me think how far beyond my deserts I was beloved and how happy I ought to be. That made me think of all my past life; and that brought me, as it ought to have done before, into a better condition. For I saw very well that I could not have been intended to die, or I should never have lived; not to say should never have been reserved for such a happy life. I saw very well how many things had worked together for my welfare, and that if the sins of the fathers were sometimes visited upon the children, the phrase did not mean what I had in the morning feared it meant. I knew I was as innocent of my birth as a queen of hers and that before my Heavenly Father I should not be punished for birth nor a queen rewarded for it. I had had experience, in the shock of that very day, that I could, even thus soon, find comforting reconcilements to the change that had fallen on me. I renewed my resolutions and prayed to be strengthened in them, pouring out my heart for myself and for my unhappy mother and feeling that the darkness of the morning was passing away. It was not upon my sleep; and when the next day's light awoke me, it was gone. My dear girl was to arrive at five o'clock in the afternoon. How to help myself through the intermediate time better than by taking a long walk along the road by which she was to come, I did not know; so Charley and I and Stubbs--Stubbs saddled, for we never drove him after the one great occasion--made a long expedition along that road and back. On our return, we held a great review of the house and garden and saw that everything was in its prettiest condition, and had the bird out ready as an important part of the establishment. There were more than two full hours yet to elapse before she could come, and in that interval, which seemed a long one, I must confess I was nervously anxious about my altered looks. I loved my darling so well that I was more concerned for their effect on her than on any one. I was not in this slight distress because I at all repined--I am quite certain I did not, that day--but, I thought, would she be wholly prepared? When she first saw me, might she not be a little shocked and disappointed? Might it not prove a little worse than she expected? Might she not look for her old Esther and not find her? Might she not have to grow used to me and to begin all over again? I knew the various expressions of my sweet girl's face so well, and it was such an honest face in its loveliness, that I was sure beforehand she could not hide that first look from me. And I considered whether, if it should signify any one of these meanings, which was so very likely, could I quite answer for myself? Well, I thought I could. After last night, I thought I could. But to wait and wait, and expect and expect, and think and think, was such bad preparation that I resolved to go along the road again and meet her. So I said to Charley, "Charley, I will go by myself and walk along the road until she comes." Charley highly approving of anything that pleased me, I went and left her at home. But before I got to the second milestone, I had been in so many palpitations from seeing dust in the distance (though I knew it was not, and could not, be the coach yet) that I resolved to turn back and go home again. And when I had turned, I was in such fear of the coach coming up behind me (though I still knew that it neither would, nor could, do any such thing) that I ran the greater part of the way to avoid being overtaken. Then, I considered, when I had got safe back again, this was a nice thing to have done! Now I was hot and had made the worst of it instead of the best. At last, when I believed there was at least a quarter of an hour more yet, Charley all at once cried out to me as I was trembling in the garden, "Here she comes, miss! Here she is!" I did not mean to do it, but I ran upstairs into my room and hid myself behind the door. There I stood trembling, even when I heard my darling calling as she came upstairs, "Esther, my dear, my love, where are you? Little woman, dear Dame Durden!" She ran in, and was running out again when she saw me. Ah, my angel girl! The old dear look, all love, all fondness, all affection. Nothing else in it--no, nothing, nothing! Oh, how happy I was, down upon the floor, with my sweet beautiful girl down upon the floor too, holding my scarred face to her lovely cheek, bathing it with tears and kisses, rocking me to and fro like a child, calling me by every tender name that she could think of, and pressing me to her faithful heart. CHAPTER XXXVII Jarndyce and Jarndyce If the secret I had to keep had been mine, I must have confided it to Ada before we had been long together. But it was not mine, and I did not feel that I had a right to tell it, even to my guardian, unless some great emergency arose. It was a weight to bear alone; still my present duty appeared to be plain, and blest in the attachment of my dear, I did not want an impulse and encouragement to do it. Though often when she was asleep and all was quiet, the remembrance of my mother kept me waking and made the night sorrowful, I did not yield to it at another time; and Ada found me what I used to be--except, of course, in that particular of which I have said enough and which I have no intention of mentioning any more just now, if I can help it. The difficulty that I felt in being quite composed that first evening when Ada asked me, over our work, if the family were at the house, and when I was obliged to answer yes, I believed so, for Lady Dedlock had spoken to me in the woods the day before yesterday, was great. Greater still when Ada asked me what she had said, and when I replied that she had been kind and interested, and when Ada, while admitting her beauty and elegance, remarked upon her proud manner and her imperious chilling air. But Charley helped me through, unconsciously, by telling us that Lady Dedlock had only stayed at the house two nights on her way from London to visit at some other great house in the next county and that she had left early on the morning after we had seen her at our view, as we called it. Charley verified the adage about little pitchers, I am sure, for she heard of more sayings and doings in a day than would have come to my ears in a month. We were to stay a month at Mr. Boythorn's. My pet had scarcely been there a bright week, as I recollect the time, when one evening after we had finished helping the gardener in watering his flowers, and just as the candles were lighted, Charley, appearing with a very important air behind Ada's chair, beckoned me mysteriously out of the room. "Oh! If you please, miss," said Charley in a whisper, with her eyes at their roundest and largest. "You're wanted at the Dedlock Arms." "Why, Charley," said I, "who can possibly want me at the public-house?" "I don't know, miss," returned Charley, putting her head forward and folding her hands tight upon the band of her little apron, which she always did in the enjoyment of anything mysterious or confidential, "but it's a gentleman, miss, and his compliments, and will you please to come without saying anything about it." "Whose compliments, Charley?" "His'n, miss," returned Charley, whose grammatical education was advancing, but not very rapidly. "And how do you come to be the messenger, Charley?" "I am not the messenger, if you please, miss," returned my little maid. "It was W. Grubble, miss." "And who is W. Grubble, Charley?" "Mister Grubble, miss," returned Charley. "Don't you know, miss? The Dedlock Arms, by W. Grubble," which Charley delivered as if she were slowly spelling out the sign. "Aye? The landlord, Charley?" "Yes, miss. If you please, miss, his wife is a beautiful woman, but she broke her ankle, and it never joined. And her brother's the sawyer that was put in the cage, miss, and they expect he'll drink himself to death entirely on beer," said Charley. Not knowing what might be the matter, and being easily apprehensive now, I thought it best to go to this place by myself. I bade Charley be quick with my bonnet and veil and my shawl, and having put them on, went away down the little hilly street, where I was as much at home as in Mr. Boythorn's garden. Mr. Grubble was standing in his shirt-sleeves at the door of his very clean little tavern waiting for me. He lifted off his hat with both hands when he saw me coming, and carrying it so, as if it were an iron vessel (it looked as heavy), preceded me along the sanded passage to his best parlour, a neat carpeted room with more plants in it than were quite convenient, a coloured print of Queen Caroline, several shells, a good many tea-trays, two stuffed and dried fish in glass cases, and either a curious egg or a curious pumpkin (but I don't know which, and I doubt if many people did) hanging from his ceiling. I knew Mr. Grubble very well by sight, from his often standing at his door. A pleasant-looking, stoutish, middle-aged man who never seemed to consider himself cozily dressed for his own fire-side without his hat and top-boots, but who never wore a coat except at church. He snuffed the candle, and backing away a little to see how it looked, backed out of the room--unexpectedly to me, for I was going to ask him by whom he had been sent. The door of the opposite parlour being then opened, I heard some voices, familiar in my ears I thought, which stopped. A quick light step approached the room in which I was, and who should stand before me but Richard! "My dear Esther!" he said. "My best friend!" And he really was so warm-hearted and earnest that in the first surprise and pleasure of his brotherly greeting I could scarcely find breath to tell him that Ada was well. "Answering my very thoughts--always the same dear girl!" said Richard, leading me to a chair and seating himself beside me. I put my veil up, but not quite. "Always the same dear girl!" said Richard just as heartily as before. I put up my veil altogether, and laying my hand on Richard's sleeve and looking in his face, told him how much I thanked him for his kind welcome and how greatly I rejoiced to see him, the more so because of the determination I had made in my illness, which I now conveyed to him. "My love," said Richard, "there is no one with whom I have a greater wish to talk than you, for I want you to understand me." "And I want you, Richard," said I, shaking my head, "to understand some one else." "Since you refer so immediately to John Jarndyce," said Richard, "--I suppose you mean him?" "Of course I do." "Then I may say at once that I am glad of it, because it is on that subject that I am anxious to be understood. By you, mind--you, my dear! I am not accountable to Mr. Jarndyce or Mr. Anybody." I was pained to find him taking this tone, and he observed it. "Well, well, my dear," said Richard, "we won't go into that now. I want to appear quietly in your country-house here, with you under my arm, and give my charming cousin a surprise. I suppose your loyalty to John Jarndyce will allow that?" "My dear Richard," I returned, "you know you would be heartily welcome at his house--your home, if you will but consider it so; and you are as heartily welcome here!" "Spoken like the best of little women!" cried Richard gaily. I asked him how he liked his profession. "Oh, I like it well enough!" said Richard. "It's all right. It does as well as anything else, for a time. I don't know that I shall care about it when I come to be settled, but I can sell out then and--however, never mind all that botheration at present." So young and handsome, and in all respects so perfectly the opposite of Miss Flite! And yet, in the clouded, eager, seeking look that passed over him, so dreadfully like her! "I am in town on leave just now," said Richard. "Indeed?" "Yes. I have run over to look after my--my Chancery interests before the long vacation," said Richard, forcing a careless laugh. "We are beginning to spin along with that old suit at last, I promise you." No wonder that I shook my head! "As you say, it's not a pleasant subject." Richard spoke with the same shade crossing his face as before. "Let it go to the four winds for to-night. Puff! Gone! Who do you suppose is with me?" "Was it Mr. Skimpole's voice I heard?" "That's the man! He does me more good than anybody. What a fascinating child it is!" I asked Richard if any one knew of their coming down together. He answered, no, nobody. He had been to call upon the dear old infant--so he called Mr. Skimpole--and the dear old infant had told him where we were, and he had told the dear old infant he was bent on coming to see us, and the dear old infant had directly wanted to come too; and so he had brought him. "And he is worth--not to say his sordid expenses--but thrice his weight in gold," said Richard. "He is such a cheery fellow. No worldliness about him. Fresh and green-hearted!" I certainly did not see the proof of Mr. Skimpole's worldliness in his having his expenses paid by Richard, but I made no remark about that. Indeed, he came in and turned our conversation. He was charmed to see me, said he had been shedding delicious tears of joy and sympathy at intervals for six weeks on my account, had never been so happy as in hearing of my progress, began to understand the mixture of good and evil in the world now, felt that he appreciated health the more when somebody else was ill, didn't know but what it might be in the scheme of things that A should squint to make B happier in looking straight or that C should carry a wooden leg to make D better satisfied with his flesh and blood in a silk stocking. "My dear Miss Summerson, here is our friend Richard," said Mr. Skimpole, "full of the brightest visions of the future, which he evokes out of the darkness of Chancery. Now that's delightful, that's inspiriting, that's full of poetry! In old times the woods and solitudes were made joyous to the shepherd by the imaginary piping and dancing of Pan and the nymphs. This present shepherd, our pastoral Richard, brightens the dull Inns of Court by making Fortune and her train sport through them to the melodious notes of a judgment from the bench. That's very pleasant, you know! Some ill-conditioned growling fellow may say to me, 'What's the use of these legal and equitable abuses? How do you defend them?' I reply, 'My growling friend, I DON'T defend them, but they are very agreeable to me. There is a shepherd--youth, a friend of mine, who transmutes them into something highly fascinating to my simplicity. I don't say it is for this that they exist--for I am a child among you worldly grumblers, and not called upon to account to you or myself for anything--but it may be so.'" I began seriously to think that Richard could scarcely have found a worse friend than this. It made me uneasy that at such a time when he most required some right principle and purpose he should have this captivating looseness and putting-off of everything, this airy dispensing with all principle and purpose, at his elbow. I thought I could understand how such a nature as my guardian's, experienced in the world and forced to contemplate the miserable evasions and contentions of the family misfortune, found an immense relief in Mr. Skimpole's avowal of his weaknesses and display of guileless candour; but I could not satisfy myself that it was as artless as it seemed or that it did not serve Mr. Skimpole's idle turn quite as well as any other part, and with less trouble. They both walked back with me, and Mr. Skimpole leaving us at the gate, I walked softly in with Richard and said, "Ada, my love, I have brought a gentleman to visit you." It was not difficult to read the blushing, startled face. She loved him dearly, and he knew it, and I knew it. It was a very transparent business, that meeting as cousins only. I almost mistrusted myself as growing quite wicked in my suspicions, but I was not so sure that Richard loved her dearly. He admired her very much--any one must have done that--and I dare say would have renewed their youthful engagement with great pride and ardour but that he knew how she would respect her promise to my guardian. Still I had a tormenting idea that the influence upon him extended even here, that he was postponing his best truth and earnestness in this as in all things until Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be off his mind. Ah me! What Richard would have been without that blight, I never shall know now! He told Ada, in his most ingenuous way, that he had not come to make any secret inroad on the terms she had accepted (rather too implicitly and confidingly, he thought) from Mr. Jarndyce, that he had come openly to see her and to see me and to justify himself for the present terms on which he stood with Mr. Jarndyce. As the dear old infant would be with us directly, he begged that I would make an appointment for the morning, when he might set himself right through the means of an unreserved conversation with me. I proposed to walk with him in the park at seven o'clock, and this was arranged. Mr. Skimpole soon afterwards appeared and made us merry for an hour. He particularly requested to see little Coavinses (meaning Charley) and told her, with a patriarchal air, that he had given her late father all the business in his power and that if one of her little brothers would make haste to get set up in the same profession, he hoped he should still be able to put a good deal of employment in his way. "For I am constantly being taken in these nets," said Mr. Skimpole, looking beamingly at us over a glass of wine-and-water, "and am constantly being bailed out--like a boat. Or paid off--like a ship's company. Somebody always does it for me. I can't do it, you know, for I never have any money. But somebody does it. I get out by somebody's means; I am not like the starling; I get out. If you were to ask me who somebody is, upon my word I couldn't tell you. Let us drink to somebody. God bless him!" Richard was a little late in the morning, but I had not to wait for him long, and we turned into the park. The air was bright and dewy and the sky without a cloud. The birds sang delightfully; the sparkles in the fern, the grass, and trees, were exquisite to see; the richness of the woods seemed to have increased twenty-fold since yesterday, as if, in the still night when they had looked so massively hushed in sleep, Nature, through all the minute details of every wonderful leaf, had been more wakeful than usual for the glory of that day. "This is a lovely place," said Richard, looking round. "None of the jar and discord of law-suits here!" But there was other trouble. "I tell you what, my dear girl," said Richard, "when I get affairs in general settled, I shall come down here, I think, and rest." "Would it not be better to rest now?" I asked. "Oh, as to resting NOW," said Richard, "or as to doing anything very definite NOW, that's not easy. In short, it can't be done; I can't do it at least." "Why not?" said I. "You know why not, Esther. If you were living in an unfinished house, liable to have the roof put on or taken off--to be from top to bottom pulled down or built up--to-morrow, next day, next week, next month, next year--you would find it hard to rest or settle. So do I. Now? There's no now for us suitors." I could almost have believed in the attraction on which my poor little wandering friend had expatiated when I saw again the darkened look of last night. Terrible to think it had in it also a shade of that unfortunate man who had died. "My dear Richard," said I, "this is a bad beginning of our conversation." "I knew you would tell me so, Dame Durden." "And not I alone, dear Richard. It was not I who cautioned you once never to found a hope or expectation on the family curse." "There you come back to John Jarndyce!" said Richard impatiently. "Well! We must approach him sooner or later, for he is the staple of what I have to say, and it's as well at once. My dear Esther, how can you be so blind? Don't you see that he is an interested party and that it may be very well for him to wish me to know nothing of the suit, and care nothing about it, but that it may not be quite so well for me?" "Oh, Richard," I remonstrated, "is it possible that you can ever have seen him and heard him, that you can ever have lived under his roof and known him, and can yet breathe, even to me in this solitary place where there is no one to hear us, such unworthy suspicions?" He reddened deeply, as if his natural generosity felt a pang of reproach. He was silent for a little while before he replied in a subdued voice, "Esther, I am sure you know that I am not a mean fellow and that I have some sense of suspicion and distrust being poor qualities in one of my years." "I know it very well," said I. "I am not more sure of anything." "That's a dear girl," retorted Richard, "and like you, because it gives me comfort. I had need to get some scrap of comfort out of all this business, for it's a bad one at the best, as I have no occasion to tell you." "I know perfectly," said I. "I know as well, Richard--what shall I say? as well as you do--that such misconstructions are foreign to your nature. And I know, as well as you know, what so changes it." "Come, sister, come," said Richard a little more gaily, "you will be fair with me at all events. If I have the misfortune to be under that influence, so has he. If it has a little twisted me, it may have a little twisted him too. I don't say that he is not an honourable man, out of all this complication and uncertainty; I am sure he is. But it taints everybody. You know it taints everybody. You have heard him say so fifty times. Then why should HE escape?" "Because," said I, "his is an uncommon character, and he has resolutely kept himself outside the circle, Richard." "Oh, because and because!" replied Richard in his vivacious way. "I am not sure, my dear girl, but that it may be wise and specious to preserve that outward indifference. It may cause other parties interested to become lax about their interests; and people may die off, and points may drag themselves out of memory, and many things may smoothly happen that are convenient enough." I was so touched with pity for Richard that I could not reproach him any more, even by a look. I remembered my guardian's gentleness towards his errors and with what perfect freedom from resentment he had spoken of them. "Esther," Richard resumed, "you are not to suppose that I have come here to make underhanded charges against John Jarndyce. I have only come to justify myself. What I say is, it was all very well and we got on very well while I was a boy, utterly regardless of this same suit; but as soon as I began to take an interest in it and to look into it, then it was quite another thing. Then John Jarndyce discovers that Ada and I must break off and that if I don't amend that very objectionable course, I am not fit for her. Now, Esther, I don't mean to amend that very objectionable course: I will not hold John Jarndyce's favour on those unfair terms of compromise, which he has no right to dictate. Whether it pleases him or displeases him, I must maintain my rights and Ada's. I have been thinking about it a good deal, and this is the conclusion I have come to." Poor dear Richard! He had indeed been thinking about it a good deal. His face, his voice, his manner, all showed that too plainly. "So I tell him honourably (you are to know I have written to him about all this) that we are at issue and that we had better be at issue openly than covertly. I thank him for his goodwill and his protection, and he goes his road, and I go mine. The fact is, our roads are not the same. Under one of the wills in dispute, I should take much more than he. I don't mean to say that it is the one to be established, but there it is, and it has its chance." "I have not to learn from you, my dear Richard," said I, "of your letter. I had heard of it already without an offended or angry word." "Indeed?" replied Richard, softening. "I am glad I said he was an honourable man, out of all this wretched affair. But I always say that and have never doubted it. Now, my dear Esther, I know these views of mine appear extremely harsh to you, and will to Ada when you tell her what has passed between us. But if you had gone into the case as I have, if you had only applied yourself to the papers as I did when I was at Kenge's, if you only knew what an accumulation of charges and counter-charges, and suspicions and cross-suspicions, they involve, you would think me moderate in comparison." "Perhaps so," said I. "But do you think that, among those many papers, there is much truth and justice, Richard?" "There is truth and justice somewhere in the case, Esther--" "Or was once, long ago," said I. "Is--is--must be somewhere," pursued Richard impetuously, "and must be brought out. To allow Ada to be made a bribe and hush-money of is not the way to bring it out. You say the suit is changing me; John Jarndyce says it changes, has changed, and will change everybody who has any share in it. Then the greater right I have on my side when I resolve to do all I can to bring it to an end." "All you can, Richard! Do you think that in these many years no others have done all they could? Has the difficulty grown easier because of so many failures?" "It can't last for ever," returned Richard with a fierceness kindling in him which again presented to me that last sad reminder. "I am young and earnest, and energy and determination have done wonders many a time. Others have only half thrown themselves into it. I devote myself to it. I make it the object of my life." "Oh, Richard, my dear, so much the worse, so much the worse!" "No, no, no, don't you be afraid for me," he returned affectionately. "You're a dear, good, wise, quiet, blessed girl; but you have your prepossessions. So I come round to John Jarndyce. I tell you, my good Esther, when he and I were on those terms which he found so convenient, we were not on natural terms." "Are division and animosity your natural terms, Richard?" "No, I don't say that. I mean that all this business puts us on unnatural terms, with which natural relations are incompatible. See another reason for urging it on! I may find out when it's over that I have been mistaken in John Jarndyce. My head may be clearer when I am free of it, and I may then agree with what you say to-day. Very well. Then I shall acknowledge it and make him reparation." Everything postponed to that imaginary time! Everything held in confusion and indecision until then! "Now, my best of confidantes," said Richard, "I want my cousin Ada to understand that I am not captious, fickle, and wilful about John Jarndyce, but that I have this purpose and reason at my back. I wish to represent myself to her through you, because she has a great esteem and respect for her cousin John; and I know you will soften the course I take, even though you disapprove of it; and--and in short," said Richard, who had been hesitating through these words, "I--I don't like to represent myself in this litigious, contentious, doubting character to a confiding girl like Ada." I told him that he was more like himself in those latter words than in anything he had said yet. "Why," acknowledged Richard, "that may be true enough, my love. I rather feel it to be so. But I shall be able to give myself fair-play by and by. I shall come all right again, then, don't you be afraid." I asked him if this were all he wished me to tell Ada. "Not quite," said Richard. "I am bound not to withhold from her that John Jarndyce answered my letter in his usual manner, addressing me as 'My dear Rick,' trying to argue me out of my opinions, and telling me that they should make no difference in him. (All very well of course, but not altering the case.) I also want Ada to know that if I see her seldom just now, I am looking after her interests as well as my own--we two being in the same boat exactly--and that I hope she will not suppose from any flying rumours she may hear that I am at all light-headed or imprudent; on the contrary, I am always looking forward to the termination of the suit, and always planning in that direction. Being of age now and having taken the step I have taken, I consider myself free from any accountability to John Jarndyce; but Ada being still a ward of the court, I don't yet ask her to renew our engagement. When she is free to act for herself, I shall be myself once more and we shall both be in very different worldly circumstances, I believe. If you tell her all this with the advantage of your considerate way, you will do me a very great and a very kind service, my dear Esther; and I shall knock Jarndyce and Jarndyce on the head with greater vigour. Of course I ask for no secrecy at Bleak House." "Richard," said I, "you place great confidence in me, but I fear you will not take advice from me?" "It's impossible that I can on this subject, my dear girl. On any other, readily." As if there were any other in his life! As if his whole career and character were not being dyed one colour! "But I may ask you a question, Richard?" "I think so," said he, laughing. "I don't know who may not, if you may not." "You say, yourself, you are not leading a very settled life." "How can I, my dear Esther, with nothing settled!" "Are you in debt again?" "Why, of course I am," said Richard, astonished at my simplicity. "Is it of course?" "My dear child, certainly. I can't throw myself into an object so completely without expense. You forget, or perhaps you don't know, that under either of the wills Ada and I take something. It's only a question between the larger sum and the smaller. I shall be within the mark any way. Bless your heart, my excellent girl," said Richard, quite amused with me, "I shall be all right! I shall pull through, my dear!" I felt so deeply sensible of the danger in which he stood that I tried, in Ada's name, in my guardian's, in my own, by every fervent means that I could think of, to warn him of it and to show him some of his mistakes. He received everything I said with patience and gentleness, but it all rebounded from him without taking the least effect. I could not wonder at this after the reception his preoccupied mind had given to my guardian's letter, but I determined to try Ada's influence yet. So when our walk brought us round to the village again, and I went home to breakfast, I prepared Ada for the account I was going to give her and told her exactly what reason we had to dread that Richard was losing himself and scattering his whole life to the winds. It made her very unhappy, of course, though she had a far, far greater reliance on his correcting his errors than I could have--which was so natural and loving in my dear!--and she presently wrote him this little letter: My dearest cousin, Esther has told me all you said to her this morning. I write this to repeat most earnestly for myself all that she said to you and to let you know how sure I am that you will sooner or later find our cousin John a pattern of truth, sincerity, and goodness, when you will deeply, deeply grieve to have done him (without intending it) so much wrong. I do not quite know how to write what I wish to say next, but I trust you will understand it as I mean it. I have some fears, my dearest cousin, that it may be partly for my sake you are now laying up so much unhappiness for yourself--and if for yourself, for me. In case this should be so, or in case you should entertain much thought of me in what you are doing, I most earnestly entreat and beg you to desist. You can do nothing for my sake that will make me half so happy as for ever turning your back upon the shadow in which we both were born. Do not be angry with me for saying this. Pray, pray, dear Richard, for my sake, and for your own, and in a natural repugnance for that source of trouble which had its share in making us both orphans when we were very young, pray, pray, let it go for ever. We have reason to know by this time that there is no good in it and no hope, that there is nothing to be got from it but sorrow. My dearest cousin, it is needless for me to say that you are quite free and that it is very likely you may find some one whom you will love much better than your first fancy. I am quite sure, if you will let me say so, that the object of your choice would greatly prefer to follow your fortunes far and wide, however moderate or poor, and see you happy, doing your duty and pursuing your chosen way, than to have the hope of being, or even to be, very rich with you (if such a thing were possible) at the cost of dragging years of procrastination and anxiety and of your indifference to other aims. You may wonder at my saying this so confidently with so little knowledge or experience, but I know it for a certainty from my own heart. Ever, my dearest cousin, your most affectionate Ada This note brought Richard to us very soon, but it made little change in him if any. We would fairly try, he said, who was right and who was wrong--he would show us--we should see! He was animated and glowing, as if Ada's tenderness had gratified him; but I could only hope, with a sigh, that the letter might have some stronger effect upon his mind on re-perusal than it assuredly had then. As they were to remain with us that day and had taken their places to return by the coach next morning, I sought an opportunity of speaking to Mr. Skimpole. Our out-of-door life easily threw one in my way, and I delicately said that there was a responsibility in encouraging Richard. "Responsibility, my dear Miss Summerson?" he repeated, catching at the word with the pleasantest smile. "I am the last man in the world for such a thing. I never was responsible in my life--I can't be." "I am afraid everybody is obliged to be," said I timidly enough, he being so much older and more clever than I. "No, really?" said Mr. Skimpole, receiving this new light with a most agreeable jocularity of surprise. "But every man's not obliged to be solvent? I am not. I never was. See, my dear Miss Summerson," he took a handful of loose silver and halfpence from his pocket, "there's so much money. I have not an idea how much. I have not the power of counting. Call it four and ninepence--call it four pound nine. They tell me I owe more than that. I dare say I do. I dare say I owe as much as good-natured people will let me owe. If they don't stop, why should I? There you have Harold Skimpole in little. If that's responsibility, I am responsible." The perfect ease of manner with which he put the money up again and looked at me with a smile on his refined face, as if he had been mentioning a curious little fact about somebody else, almost made me feel as if he really had nothing to do with it. "Now, when you mention responsibility," he resumed, "I am disposed to say that I never had the happiness of knowing any one whom I should consider so refreshingly responsible as yourself. You appear to me to be the very touchstone of responsibility. When I see you, my dear Miss Summerson, intent upon the perfect working of the whole little orderly system of which you are the centre, I feel inclined to say to myself--in fact I do say to myself very often--THAT'S responsibility!" It was difficult, after this, to explain what I meant; but I persisted so far as to say that we all hoped he would check and not confirm Richard in the sanguine views he entertained just then. "Most willingly," he retorted, "if I could. But, my dear Miss Summerson, I have no art, no disguise. If he takes me by the hand and leads me through Westminster Hall in an airy procession after fortune, I must go. If he says, 'Skimpole, join the dance!' I must join it. Common sense wouldn't, I know, but I have NO common sense." It was very unfortunate for Richard, I said. "Do you think so!" returned Mr. Skimpole. "Don't say that, don't say that. Let us suppose him keeping company with Common Sense--an excellent man--a good deal wrinkled--dreadfully practical--change for a ten-pound note in every pocket--ruled account-book in his hand--say, upon the whole, resembling a tax-gatherer. Our dear Richard, sanguine, ardent, overleaping obstacles, bursting with poetry like a young bud, says to this highly respectable companion, 'I see a golden prospect before me; it's very bright, it's very beautiful, it's very joyous; here I go, bounding over the landscape to come at it!' The respectable companion instantly knocks him down with the ruled account-book; tells him in a literal, prosaic way that he sees no such thing; shows him it's nothing but fees, fraud, horsehair wigs, and black gowns. Now you know that's a painful change--sensible in the last degree, I have no doubt, but disagreeable. I can't do it. I haven't got the ruled account-book, I have none of the tax-gathering elements in my composition, I am not at all respectable, and I don't want to be. Odd perhaps, but so it is!" It was idle to say more, so I proposed that we should join Ada and Richard, who were a little in advance, and I gave up Mr. Skimpole in despair. He had been over the Hall in the course of the morning and whimsically described the family pictures as we walked. There were such portentous shepherdesses among the Ladies Dedlock dead and gone, he told us, that peaceful crooks became weapons of assault in their hands. They tended their flocks severely in buckram and powder and put their sticking-plaster patches on to terrify commoners as the chiefs of some other tribes put on their war-paint. There was a Sir Somebody Dedlock, with a battle, a sprung-mine, volumes of smoke, flashes of lightning, a town on fire, and a stormed fort, all in full action between his horse's two hind legs, showing, he supposed, how little a Dedlock made of such trifles. The whole race he represented as having evidently been, in life, what he called "stuffed people"--a large collection, glassy eyed, set up in the most approved manner on their various twigs and perches, very correct, perfectly free from animation, and always in glass cases. I was not so easy now during any reference to the name but that I felt it a relief when Richard, with an exclamation of surprise, hurried away to meet a stranger whom he first descried coming slowly towards us. "Dear me!" said Mr. Skimpole. "Vholes!" We asked if that were a friend of Richard's. "Friend and legal adviser," said Mr. Skimpole. "Now, my dear Miss Summerson, if you want common sense, responsibility, and respectability, all united--if you want an exemplary man--Vholes is THE man." We had not known, we said, that Richard was assisted by any gentleman of that name. "When he emerged from legal infancy," returned Mr. Skimpole, "he parted from our conversational friend Kenge and took up, I believe, with Vholes. Indeed, I know he did, because I introduced him to Vholes." "Had you known him long?" asked Ada. "Vholes? My dear Miss Clare, I had had that kind of acquaintance with him which I have had with several gentlemen of his profession. He had done something or other in a very agreeable, civil manner--taken proceedings, I think, is the expression--which ended in the proceeding of his taking ME. Somebody was so good as to step in and pay the money--something and fourpence was the amount; I forget the pounds and shillings, but I know it ended with fourpence, because it struck me at the time as being so odd that I could owe anybody fourpence--and after that I brought them together. Vholes asked me for the introduction, and I gave it. Now I come to think of it," he looked inquiringly at us with his frankest smile as he made the discovery, "Vholes bribed me, perhaps? He gave me something and called it commission. Was it a five-pound note? Do you know, I think it MUST have been a five-pound note!" His further consideration of the point was prevented by Richard's coming back to us in an excited state and hastily representing Mr. Vholes--a sallow man with pinched lips that looked as if they were cold, a red eruption here and there upon his face, tall and thin, about fifty years of age, high-shouldered, and stooping. Dressed in black, black-gloved, and buttoned to the chin, there was nothing so remarkable in him as a lifeless manner and a slow, fixed way he had of looking at Richard. "I hope I don't disturb you, ladies," said Mr. Vholes, and now I observed that he was further remarkable for an inward manner of speaking. "I arranged with Mr. Carstone that he should always know when his cause was in the Chancellor's paper, and being informed by one of my clerks last night after post time that it stood, rather unexpectedly, in the paper for to-morrow, I put myself into the coach early this morning and came down to confer with him." "Yes," said Richard, flushed, and looking triumphantly at Ada and me, "we don't do these things in the old slow way now. We spin along now! Mr. Vholes, we must hire something to get over to the post town in, and catch the mail to-night, and go up by it!" "Anything you please, sir," returned Mr. Vholes. "I am quite at your service." "Let me see," said Richard, looking at his watch. "If I run down to the Dedlock, and get my portmanteau fastened up, and order a gig, or a chaise, or whatever's to be got, we shall have an hour then before starting. I'll come back to tea. Cousin Ada, will you and Esther take care of Mr. Vholes when I am gone?" He was away directly, in his heat and hurry, and was soon lost in the dusk of evening. We who were left walked on towards the house. "Is Mr. Carstone's presence necessary to-morrow, Sir?" said I. "Can it do any good?" "No, miss," Mr. Vholes replied. "I am not aware that it can." Both Ada and I expressed our regret that he should go, then, only to be disappointed. "Mr. Carstone has laid down the principle of watching his own interests," said Mr. Vholes, "and when a client lays down his own principle, and it is not immoral, it devolves upon me to carry it out. I wish in business to be exact and open. I am a widower with three daughters--Emma, Jane, and Caroline--and my desire is so to discharge the duties of life as to leave them a good name. This appears to be a pleasant spot, miss." The remark being made to me in consequence of my being next him as we walked, I assented and enumerated its chief attractions. "Indeed?" said Mr. Vholes. "I have the privilege of supporting an aged father in the Vale of Taunton--his native place--and I admire that country very much. I had no idea there was anything so attractive here." To keep up the conversation, I asked Mr. Vholes if he would like to live altogether in the country. "There, miss," said he, "you touch me on a tender string. My health is not good (my digestion being much impaired), and if I had only myself to consider, I should take refuge in rural habits, especially as the cares of business have prevented me from ever coming much into contact with general society, and particularly with ladies' society, which I have most wished to mix in. But with my three daughters, Emma, Jane, and Caroline--and my aged father--I cannot afford to be selfish. It is true I have no longer to maintain a dear grandmother who died in her hundred and second year, but enough remains to render it indispensable that the mill should be always going." It required some attention to hear him on account of his inward speaking and his lifeless manner. "You will excuse my having mentioned my daughters," he said. "They are my weak point. I wish to leave the poor girls some little independence, as well as a good name." We now arrived at Mr. Boythorn's house, where the tea-table, all prepared, was awaiting us. Richard came in restless and hurried shortly afterwards, and leaning over Mr. Vholes's chair, whispered something in his ear. Mr. Vholes replied aloud--or as nearly aloud I suppose as he had ever replied to anything--"You will drive me, will you, sir? It is all the same to me, sir. Anything you please. I am quite at your service." We understood from what followed that Mr. Skimpole was to be left until the morning to occupy the two places which had been already paid for. As Ada and I were both in low spirits concerning Richard and very sorry so to part with him, we made it as plain as we politely could that we should leave Mr. Skimpole to the Dedlock Arms and retire when the night-travellers were gone. Richard's high spirits carrying everything before them, we all went out together to the top of the hill above the village, where he had ordered a gig to wait and where we found a man with a lantern standing at the head of the gaunt pale horse that had been harnessed to it. I never shall forget those two seated side by side in the lantern's light, Richard all flush and fire and laughter, with the reins in his hand; Mr. Vholes quite still, black-gloved, and buttoned up, looking at him as if he were looking at his prey and charming it. I have before me the whole picture of the warm dark night, the summer lightning, the dusty track of road closed in by hedgerows and high trees, the gaunt pale horse with his ears pricked up, and the driving away at speed to Jarndyce and Jarndyce. My dear girl told me that night how Richard's being thereafter prosperous or ruined, befriended or deserted, could only make this difference to her, that the more he needed love from one unchanging heart, the more love that unchanging heart would have to give him; how he thought of her through his present errors, and she would think of him at all times--never of herself if she could devote herself to him, never of her own delights if she could minister to his. And she kept her word? I look along the road before me, where the distance already shortens and the journey's end is growing visible; and true and good above the dead sea of the Chancery suit and all the ashy fruit it cast ashore, I think I see my darling. CHAPTER XXXVIII A Struggle When our time came for returning to Bleak House again, we were punctual to the day and were received with an overpowering welcome. I was perfectly restored to health and strength, and finding my housekeeping keys laid ready for me in my room, rang myself in as if I had been a new year, with a merry little peal. "Once more, duty, duty, Esther," said I; "and if you are not overjoyed to do it, more than cheerfully and contentedly, through anything and everything, you ought to be. That's all I have to say to you, my dear!" The first few mornings were mornings of so much bustle and business, devoted to such settlements of accounts, such repeated journeys to and fro between the growlery and all other parts of the house, so many rearrangements of drawers and presses, and such a general new beginning altogether, that I had not a moment's leisure. But when these arrangements were completed and everything was in order, I paid a visit of a few hours to London, which something in the letter I had destroyed at Chesney Wold had induced me to decide upon in my own mind. I made Caddy Jellyby--her maiden name was so natural to me that I always called her by it--the pretext for this visit and wrote her a note previously asking the favour of her company on a little business expedition. Leaving home very early in the morning, I got to London by stage-coach in such good time that I got to Newman Street with the day before me. Caddy, who had not seen me since her wedding-day, was so glad and so affectionate that I was half inclined to fear I should make her husband jealous. But he was, in his way, just as bad--I mean as good; and in short it was the old story, and nobody would leave me any possibility of doing anything meritorious. The elder Mr. Turveydrop was in bed, I found, and Caddy was milling his chocolate, which a melancholy little boy who was an apprentice--it seemed such a curious thing to be apprenticed to the trade of dancing--was waiting to carry upstairs. Her father-in-law was extremely kind and considerate, Caddy told me, and they lived most happily together. (When she spoke of their living together, she meant that the old gentleman had all the good things and all the good lodging, while she and her husband had what they could get, and were poked into two corner rooms over the Mews.) "And how is your mama, Caddy?" said I. "Why, I hear of her, Esther," replied Caddy, "through Pa, but I see very little of her. We are good friends, I am glad to say, but Ma thinks there is something absurd in my having married a dancing-master, and she is rather afraid of its extending to her." It struck me that if Mrs. Jellyby had discharged her own natural duties and obligations before she swept the horizon with a telescope in search of others, she would have taken the best precautions against becoming absurd, but I need scarcely observe that I kept this to myself. "And your papa, Caddy?" "He comes here every evening," returned Caddy, "and is so fond of sitting in the corner there that it's a treat to see him." Looking at the corner, I plainly perceived the mark of Mr. Jellyby's head against the wall. It was consolatory to know that he had found such a resting-place for it. "And you, Caddy," said I, "you are always busy, I'll be bound?" "Well, my dear," returned Caddy, "I am indeed, for to tell you a grand secret, I am qualifying myself to give lessons. Prince's health is not strong, and I want to be able to assist him. What with schools, and classes here, and private pupils, AND the apprentices, he really has too much to do, poor fellow!" The notion of the apprentices was still so odd to me that I asked Caddy if there were many of them. "Four," said Caddy. "One in-door, and three out. They are very good children; only when they get together they WILL play--children-like--instead of attending to their work. So the little boy you saw just now waltzes by himself in the empty kitchen, and we distribute the others over the house as well as we can." "That is only for their steps, of course?" said I. "Only for their steps," said Caddy. "In that way they practise, so many hours at a time, whatever steps they happen to be upon. They dance in the academy, and at this time of year we do figures at five every morning." "Why, what a laborious life!" I exclaimed. "I assure you, my dear," returned Caddy, smiling, "when the out-door apprentices ring us up in the morning (the bell rings into our room, not to disturb old Mr. Turveydrop), and when I put up the window and see them standing on the door-step with their little pumps under their arms, I am actually reminded of the Sweeps." All this presented the art to me in a singular light, to be sure. Caddy enjoyed the effect of her communication and cheerfully recounted the particulars of her own studies. "You see, my dear, to save expense I ought to know something of the piano, and I ought to know something of the kit too, and consequently I have to practise those two instruments as well as the details of our profession. If Ma had been like anybody else, I might have had some little musical knowledge to begin upon. However, I hadn't any; and that part of the work is, at first, a little discouraging, I must allow. But I have a very good ear, and I am used to drudgery--I have to thank Ma for that, at all events--and where there's a will there's a way, you know, Esther, the world over." Saying these words, Caddy laughingly sat down at a little jingling square piano and really rattled off a quadrille with great spirit. Then she good-humouredly and blushingly got up again, and while she still laughed herself, said, "Don't laugh at me, please; that's a dear girl!" I would sooner have cried, but I did neither. I encouraged her and praised her with all my heart. For I conscientiously believed, dancing-master's wife though she was, and dancing-mistress though in her limited ambition she aspired to be, she had struck out a natural, wholesome, loving course of industry and perseverance that was quite as good as a mission. "My dear," said Caddy, delighted, "you can't think how you cheer me. I shall owe you, you don't know how much. What changes, Esther, even in my small world! You recollect that first night, when I was so unpolite and inky? Who would have thought, then, of my ever teaching people to dance, of all other possibilities and impossibilities!" Her husband, who had left us while we had this chat, now coming back, preparatory to exercising the apprentices in the ball-room, Caddy informed me she was quite at my disposal. But it was not my time yet, I was glad to tell her, for I should have been vexed to take her away then. Therefore we three adjourned to the apprentices together, and I made one in the dance. The apprentices were the queerest little people. Besides the melancholy boy, who, I hoped, had not been made so by waltzing alone in the empty kitchen, there were two other boys and one dirty little limp girl in a gauzy dress. Such a precocious little girl, with such a dowdy bonnet on (that, too, of a gauzy texture), who brought her sandalled shoes in an old threadbare velvet reticule. Such mean little boys, when they were not dancing, with string, and marbles, and cramp-bones in their pockets, and the most untidy legs and feet--and heels particularly. I asked Caddy what had made their parents choose this profession for them. Caddy said she didn't know; perhaps they were designed for teachers, perhaps for the stage. They were all people in humble circumstances, and the melancholy boy's mother kept a ginger-beer shop. We danced for an hour with great gravity, the melancholy child doing wonders with his lower extremities, in which there appeared to be some sense of enjoyment though it never rose above his waist. Caddy, while she was observant of her husband and was evidently founded upon him, had acquired a grace and self-possession of her own, which, united to her pretty face and figure, was uncommonly agreeable. She already relieved him of much of the instruction of these young people, and he seldom interfered except to walk his part in the figure if he had anything to do in it. He always played the tune. The affectation of the gauzy child, and her condescension to the boys, was a sight. And thus we danced an hour by the clock. When the practice was concluded, Caddy's husband made himself ready to go out of town to a school, and Caddy ran away to get ready to go out with me. I sat in the ball-room in the interval, contemplating the apprentices. The two out-door boys went upon the staircase to put on their half-boots and pull the in-door boy's hair, as I judged from the nature of his objections. Returning with their jackets buttoned and their pumps stuck in them, they then produced packets of cold bread and meat and bivouacked under a painted lyre on the wall. The little gauzy child, having whisked her sandals into the reticule and put on a trodden-down pair of shoes, shook her head into the dowdy bonnet at one shake, and answering my inquiry whether she liked dancing by replying, "Not with boys," tied it across her chin, and went home contemptuous. "Old Mr. Turveydrop is so sorry," said Caddy, "that he has not finished dressing yet and cannot have the pleasure of seeing you before you go. You are such a favourite of his, Esther." I expressed myself much obliged to him, but did not think it necessary to add that I readily dispensed with this attention. "It takes him a long time to dress," said Caddy, "because he is very much looked up to in such things, you know, and has a reputation to support. You can't think how kind he is to Pa. He talks to Pa of an evening about the Prince Regent, and I never saw Pa so interested." There was something in the picture of Mr. Turveydrop bestowing his deportment on Mr. Jellyby that quite took my fancy. I asked Caddy if he brought her papa out much. "No," said Caddy, "I don't know that he does that, but he talks to Pa, and Pa greatly admires him, and listens, and likes it. Of course I am aware that Pa has hardly any claims to deportment, but they get on together delightfully. You can't think what good companions they make. I never saw Pa take snuff before in my life, but he takes one pinch out of Mr. Turveydrop's box regularly and keeps putting it to his nose and taking it away again all the evening." That old Mr. Turveydrop should ever, in the chances and changes of life, have come to the rescue of Mr. Jellyby from Borrioboola-Gha appeared to me to be one of the pleasantest of oddities. "As to Peepy," said Caddy with a little hesitation, "whom I was most afraid of--next to having any family of my own, Esther--as an inconvenience to Mr. Turveydrop, the kindness of the old gentleman to that child is beyond everything. He asks to see him, my dear! He lets him take the newspaper up to him in bed; he gives him the crusts of his toast to eat; he sends him on little errands about the house; he tells him to come to me for sixpences. In short," said Caddy cheerily, "and not to prose, I am a very fortunate girl and ought to be very grateful. Where are we going, Esther?" "To the Old Street Road," said I, "where I have a few words to say to the solicitor's clerk who was sent to meet me at the coach-office on the very day when I came to London and first saw you, my dear. Now I think of it, the gentleman who brought us to your house." "Then, indeed, I seem to be naturally the person to go with you," returned Caddy. To the Old Street Road we went and there inquired at Mrs. Guppy's residence for Mrs. Guppy. Mrs. Guppy, occupying the parlours and having indeed been visibly in danger of cracking herself like a nut in the front-parlour door by peeping out before she was asked for, immediately presented herself and requested us to walk in. She was an old lady in a large cap, with rather a red nose and rather an unsteady eye, but smiling all over. Her close little sitting-room was prepared for a visit, and there was a portrait of her son in it which, I had almost written here, was more like than life: it insisted upon him with such obstinacy, and was so determined not to let him off. Not only was the portrait there, but we found the original there too. He was dressed in a great many colours and was discovered at a table reading law-papers with his forefinger to his forehead. "Miss Summerson," said Mr. Guppy, rising, "this is indeed an oasis. Mother, will you be so good as to put a chair for the other lady and get out of the gangway." Mrs. Guppy, whose incessant smiling gave her quite a waggish appearance, did as her son requested and then sat down in a corner, holding her pocket handkerchief to her chest, like a fomentation, with both hands. I presented Caddy, and Mr. Guppy said that any friend of mine was more than welcome. I then proceeded to the object of my visit. "I took the liberty of sending you a note, sir," said I. Mr. Guppy acknowledged the receipt by taking it out of his breast-pocket, putting it to his lips, and returning it to his pocket with a bow. Mr. Guppy's mother was so diverted that she rolled her head as she smiled and made a silent appeal to Caddy with her elbow. "Could I speak to you alone for a moment?" said I. Anything like the jocoseness of Mr. Guppy's mother just now, I think I never saw. She made no sound of laughter, but she rolled her head, and shook it, and put her handkerchief to her mouth, and appealed to Caddy with her elbow, and her hand, and her shoulder, and was so unspeakably entertained altogether that it was with some difficulty she could marshal Caddy through the little folding-door into her bedroom adjoining. "Miss Summerson," said Mr. Guppy, "you will excuse the waywardness of a parent ever mindful of a son's appiness. My mother, though highly exasperating to the feelings, is actuated by maternal dictates." I could hardly have believed that anybody could in a moment have turned so red or changed so much as Mr. Guppy did when I now put up my veil. "I asked the favour of seeing you for a few moments here," said I, "in preference to calling at Mr. Kenge's because, remembering what you said on an occasion when you spoke to me in confidence, I feared I might otherwise cause you some embarrassment, Mr. Guppy." I caused him embarrassment enough as it was, I am sure. I never saw such faltering, such confusion, such amazement and apprehension. "Miss Summerson," stammered Mr. Guppy, "I--I--beg your pardon, but in our profession--we--we--find it necessary to be explicit. You have referred to an occasion, miss, when I--when I did myself the honour of making a declaration which--" Something seemed to rise in his throat that he could not possibly swallow. He put his hand there, coughed, made faces, tried again to swallow it, coughed again, made faces again, looked all round the room, and fluttered his papers. "A kind of giddy sensation has come upon me, miss," he explained, "which rather knocks me over. I--er--a little subject to this sort of thing--er--by George!" I gave him a little time to recover. He consumed it in putting his hand to his forehead and taking it away again, and in backing his chair into the corner behind him. "My intention was to remark, miss," said Mr. Guppy, "dear me--something bronchial, I think--hem!--to remark that you was so good on that occasion as to repel and repudiate that declaration. You--you wouldn't perhaps object to admit that? Though no witnesses are present, it might be a satisfaction to--to your mind--if you was to put in that admission." "There can be no doubt," said I, "that I declined your proposal without any reservation or qualification whatever, Mr. Guppy." "Thank you, miss," he returned, measuring the table with his troubled hands. "So far that's satisfactory, and it does you credit. Er--this is certainly bronchial!--must be in the tubes--er--you wouldn't perhaps be offended if I was to mention--not that it's necessary, for your own good sense or any person's sense must show 'em that--if I was to mention that such declaration on my part was final, and there terminated?" "I quite understand that," said I. "Perhaps--er--it may not be worth the form, but it might be a satisfaction to your mind--perhaps you wouldn't object to admit that, miss?" said Mr. Guppy. "I admit it most fully and freely," said I. "Thank you," returned Mr. Guppy. "Very honourable, I am sure. I regret that my arrangements in life, combined with circumstances over which I have no control, will put it out of my power ever to fall back upon that offer or to renew it in any shape or form whatever, but it will ever be a retrospect entwined--er--with friendship's bowers." Mr. Guppy's bronchitis came to his relief and stopped his measurement of the table. "I may now perhaps mention what I wished to say to you?" I began. "I shall be honoured, I am sure," said Mr. Guppy. "I am so persuaded that your own good sense and right feeling, miss, will--will keep you as square as possible--that I can have nothing but pleasure, I am sure, in hearing any observations you may wish to offer." "You were so good as to imply, on that occasion--" "Excuse me, miss," said Mr. Guppy, "but we had better not travel out of the record into implication. I cannot admit that I implied anything." "You said on that occasion," I recommenced, "that you might possibly have the means of advancing my interests and promoting my fortunes by making discoveries of which I should be the subject. I presume that you founded that belief upon your general knowledge of my being an orphan girl, indebted for everything to the benevolence of Mr. Jarndyce. Now, the beginning and the end of what I have come to beg of you is, Mr. Guppy, that you will have the kindness to relinquish all idea of so serving me. I have thought of this sometimes, and I have thought of it most lately--since I have been ill. At length I have decided, in case you should at any time recall that purpose and act upon it in any way, to come to you and assure you that you are altogether mistaken. You could make no discovery in reference to me that would do me the least service or give me the least pleasure. I am acquainted with my personal history, and I have it in my power to assure you that you never can advance my welfare by such means. You may, perhaps, have abandoned this project a long time. If so, excuse my giving you unnecessary trouble. If not, I entreat you, on the assurance I have given you, henceforth to lay it aside. I beg you to do this, for my peace." "I am bound to confess," said Mr. Guppy, "that you express yourself, miss, with that good sense and right feeling for which I gave you credit. Nothing can be more satisfactory than such right feeling, and if I mistook any intentions on your part just now, I am prepared to tender a full apology. I should wish to be understood, miss, as hereby offering that apology--limiting it, as your own good sense and right feeling will point out the necessity of, to the present proceedings." I must say for Mr. Guppy that the snuffling manner he had had upon him improved very much. He seemed truly glad to be able to do something I asked, and he looked ashamed. "If you will allow me to finish what I have to say at once so that I may have no occasion to resume," I went on, seeing him about to speak, "you will do me a kindness, sir. I come to you as privately as possible because you announced this impression of yours to me in a confidence which I have really wished to respect--and which I always have respected, as you remember. I have mentioned my illness. There really is no reason why I should hesitate to say that I know very well that any little delicacy I might have had in making a request to you is quite removed. Therefore I make the entreaty I have now preferred, and I hope you will have sufficient consideration for me to accede to it." I must do Mr. Guppy the further justice of saying that he had looked more and more ashamed and that he looked most ashamed and very earnest when he now replied with a burning face, "Upon my word and honour, upon my life, upon my soul, Miss Summerson, as I am a living man, I'll act according to your wish! I'll never go another step in opposition to it. I'll take my oath to it if it will be any satisfaction to you. In what I promise at this present time touching the matters now in question," continued Mr. Guppy rapidly, as if he were repeating a familiar form of words, "I speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so--" "I am quite satisfied," said I, rising at this point, "and I thank you very much. Caddy, my dear, I am ready!" Mr. Guppy's mother returned with Caddy (now making me the recipient of her silent laughter and her nudges), and we took our leave. Mr. Guppy saw us to the door with the air of one who was either imperfectly awake or walking in his sleep; and we left him there, staring. But in a minute he came after us down the street without any hat, and with his long hair all blown about, and stopped us, saying fervently, "Miss Summerson, upon my honour and soul, you may depend upon me!" "I do," said I, "quite confidently." "I beg your pardon, miss," said Mr. Guppy, going with one leg and staying with the other, "but this lady being present--your own witness--it might be a satisfaction to your mind (which I should wish to set at rest) if you was to repeat those admissions." "Well, Caddy," said I, turning to her, "perhaps you will not be surprised when I tell you, my dear, that there never has been any engagement--" "No proposal or promise of marriage whatsoever," suggested Mr. Guppy. "No proposal or promise of marriage whatsoever," said I, "between this gentleman--" "William Guppy, of Penton Place, Pentonville, in the county of Middlesex," he murmured. "Between this gentleman, Mr. William Guppy, of Penton Place, Pentonville, in the county of Middlesex, and myself." "Thank you, miss," said Mr. Guppy. "Very full--er--excuse me--lady's name, Christian and surname both?" I gave them. "Married woman, I believe?" said Mr. Guppy. "Married woman. Thank you. Formerly Caroline Jellyby, spinster, then of Thavies Inn, within the city of London, but extra-parochial; now of Newman Street, Oxford Street. Much obliged." He ran home and came running back again. "Touching that matter, you know, I really and truly am very sorry that my arrangements in life, combined with circumstances over which I have no control, should prevent a renewal of what was wholly terminated some time back," said Mr. Guppy to me forlornly and despondently, "but it couldn't be. Now COULD it, you know! I only put it to you." I replied it certainly could not. The subject did not admit of a doubt. He thanked me and ran to his mother's again--and back again. "It's very honourable of you, miss, I am sure," said Mr. Guppy. "If an altar could be erected in the bowers of friendship--but, upon my soul, you may rely upon me in every respect save and except the tender passion only!" The struggle in Mr. Guppy's breast and the numerous oscillations it occasioned him between his mother's door and us were sufficiently conspicuous in the windy street (particularly as his hair wanted cutting) to make us hurry away. I did so with a lightened heart; but when we last looked back, Mr. Guppy was still oscillating in the same troubled state of mind. CHAPTER XXXIX Attorney and Client The name of Mr. Vholes, preceded by the legend Ground-Floor, is inscribed upon a door-post in Symond's Inn, Chancery Lane--a little, pale, wall-eyed, woebegone inn like a large dust-binn of two compartments and a sifter. It looks as if Symond were a sparing man in his way and constructed his inn of old building materials which took kindly to the dry rot and to dirt and all things decaying and dismal, and perpetuated Symond's memory with congenial shabbiness. Quartered in this dingy hatchment commemorative of Symond are the legal bearings of Mr. Vholes. Mr. Vholes's office, in disposition retiring and in situation retired, is squeezed up in a corner and blinks at a dead wall. Three feet of knotty-floored dark passage bring the client to Mr. Vholes's jet-black door, in an angle profoundly dark on the brightest midsummer morning and encumbered by a black bulk-head of cellarage staircase against which belated civilians generally strike their brows. Mr. Vholes's chambers are on so small a scale that one clerk can open the door without getting off his stool, while the other who elbows him at the same desk has equal facilities for poking the fire. A smell as of unwholesome sheep blending with the smell of must and dust is referable to the nightly (and often daily) consumption of mutton fat in candles and to the fretting of parchment forms and skins in greasy drawers. The atmosphere is otherwise stale and close. The place was last painted or whitewashed beyond the memory of man, and the two chimneys smoke, and there is a loose outer surface of soot everywhere, and the dull cracked windows in their heavy frames have but one piece of character in them, which is a determination to be always dirty and always shut unless coerced. This accounts for the phenomenon of the weaker of the two usually having a bundle of firewood thrust between its jaws in hot weather. Mr. Vholes is a very respectable man. He has not a large business, but he is a very respectable man. He is allowed by the greater attorneys who have made good fortunes or are making them to be a most respectable man. He never misses a chance in his practice, which is a mark of respectability. He never takes any pleasure, which is another mark of respectability. He is reserved and serious, which is another mark of respectability. His digestion is impaired, which is highly respectable. And he is making hay of the grass which is flesh, for his three daughters. And his father is dependent on him in the Vale of Taunton. The one great principle of the English law is to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings. Viewed by this light it becomes a coherent scheme and not the monstrous maze the laity are apt to think it. Let them but once clearly perceive that its grand principle is to make business for itself at their expense, and surely they will cease to grumble. But not perceiving this quite plainly--only seeing it by halves in a confused way--the laity sometimes suffer in peace and pocket, with a bad grace, and DO grumble very much. Then this respectability of Mr. Vholes is brought into powerful play against them. "Repeal this statute, my good sir?" says Mr. Kenge to a smarting client. "Repeal it, my dear sir? Never, with my consent. Alter this law, sir, and what will be the effect of your rash proceeding on a class of practitioners very worthily represented, allow me to say to you, by the opposite attorney in the case, Mr. Vholes? Sir, that class of practitioners would be swept from the face of the earth. Now you cannot afford--I will say, the social system cannot afford--to lose an order of men like Mr. Vholes. Diligent, persevering, steady, acute in business. My dear sir, I understand your present feelings against the existing state of things, which I grant to be a little hard in your case; but I can never raise my voice for the demolition of a class of men like Mr. Vholes." The respectability of Mr. Vholes has even been cited with crushing effect before Parliamentary committees, as in the following blue minutes of a distinguished attorney's evidence. "Question (number five hundred and seventeen thousand eight hundred and sixty-nine): If I understand you, these forms of practice indisputably occasion delay? Answer: Yes, some delay. Question: And great expense? Answer: Most assuredly they cannot be gone through for nothing. Question: And unspeakable vexation? Answer: I am not prepared to say that. They have never given ME any vexation; quite the contrary. Question: But you think that their abolition would damage a class of practitioners? Answer: I have no doubt of it. Question: Can you instance any type of that class? Answer: Yes. I would unhesitatingly mention Mr. Vholes. He would be ruined. Question: Mr. Vholes is considered, in the profession, a respectable man? Answer:"--which proved fatal to the inquiry for ten years--"Mr. Vholes is considered, in the profession, a MOST respectable man." So in familiar conversation, private authorities no less disinterested will remark that they don't know what this age is coming to, that we are plunging down precipices, that now here is something else gone, that these changes are death to people like Vholes--a man of undoubted respectability, with a father in the Vale of Taunton, and three daughters at home. Take a few steps more in this direction, say they, and what is to become of Vholes's father? Is he to perish? And of Vholes's daughters? Are they to be shirt-makers, or governesses? As though, Mr. Vholes and his relations being minor cannibal chiefs and it being proposed to abolish cannibalism, indignant champions were to put the case thus: Make man-eating unlawful, and you starve the Vholeses! In a word, Mr. Vholes, with his three daughters and his father in the Vale of Taunton, is continually doing duty, like a piece of timber, to shore up some decayed foundation that has become a pitfall and a nuisance. And with a great many people in a great many instances, the question is never one of a change from wrong to right (which is quite an extraneous consideration), but is always one of injury or advantage to that eminently respectable legion, Vholes. The Chancellor is, within these ten minutes, "up" for the long vacation. Mr. Vholes, and his young client, and several blue bags hastily stuffed out of all regularity of form, as the larger sort of serpents are in their first gorged state, have returned to the official den. Mr. Vholes, quiet and unmoved, as a man of so much respectability ought to be, takes off his close black gloves as if he were skinning his hands, lifts off his tight hat as if he were scalping himself, and sits down at his desk. The client throws his hat and gloves upon the ground--tosses them anywhere, without looking after them or caring where they go; flings himself into a chair, half sighing and half groaning; rests his aching head upon his hand and looks the portrait of young despair. "Again nothing done!" says Richard. "Nothing, nothing done!" "Don't say nothing done, sir," returns the placid Vholes. "That is scarcely fair, sir, scarcely fair!" "Why, what IS done?" says Richard, turning gloomily upon him. "That may not be the whole question," returns Vholes, "The question may branch off into what is doing, what is doing?" "And what is doing?" asks the moody client. Vholes, sitting with his arms on the desk, quietly bringing the tips of his five right fingers to meet the tips of his five left fingers, and quietly separating them again, and fixedly and slowly looking at his client, replies, "A good deal is doing, sir. We have put our shoulders to the wheel, Mr. Carstone, and the wheel is going round." "Yes, with Ixion on it. How am I to get through the next four or five accursed months?" exclaims the young man, rising from his chair and walking about the room. "Mr. C.," returns Vholes, following him close with his eyes wherever he goes, "your spirits are hasty, and I am sorry for it on your account. Excuse me if I recommend you not to chafe so much, not to be so impetuous, not to wear yourself out so. You should have more patience. You should sustain yourself better." "I ought to imitate you, in fact, Mr. Vholes?" says Richard, sitting down again with an impatient laugh and beating the devil's tattoo with his boot on the patternless carpet. "Sir," returns Vholes, always looking at the client as if he were making a lingering meal of him with his eyes as well as with his professional appetite. "Sir," returns Vholes with his inward manner of speech and his bloodless quietude, "I should not have had the presumption to propose myself as a model for your imitation or any man's. Let me but leave the good name to my three daughters, and that is enough for me; I am not a self-seeker. But since you mention me so pointedly, I will acknowledge that I should like to impart to you a little of my--come, sir, you are disposed to call it insensibility, and I am sure I have no objection--say insensibility--a little of my insensibility." "Mr. Vholes," explains the client, somewhat abashed, "I had no intention to accuse you of insensibility." "I think you had, sir, without knowing it," returns the equable Vholes. "Very naturally. It is my duty to attend to your interests with a cool head, and I can quite understand that to your excited feelings I may appear, at such times as the present, insensible. My daughters may know me better; my aged father may know me better. But they have known me much longer than you have, and the confiding eye of affection is not the distrustful eye of business. Not that I complain, sir, of the eye of business being distrustful; quite the contrary. In attending to your interests, I wish to have all possible checks upon me; it is right that I should have them; I court inquiry. But your interests demand that I should be cool and methodical, Mr. Carstone; and I cannot be otherwise--no, sir, not even to please you." Mr. Vholes, after glancing at the official cat who is patiently watching a mouse's hole, fixes his charmed gaze again on his young client and proceeds in his buttoned-up, half-audible voice as if there were an unclean spirit in him that will neither come out nor speak out, "What are you to do, sir, you inquire, during the vacation. I should hope you gentlemen of the army may find many means of amusing yourselves if you give your minds to it. If you had asked me what I was to do during the vacation, I could have answered you more readily. I am to attend to your interests. I am to be found here, day by day, attending to your interests. That is my duty, Mr. C., and term-time or vacation makes no difference to me. If you wish to consult me as to your interests, you will find me here at all times alike. Other professional men go out of town. I don't. Not that I blame them for going; I merely say I don't go. This desk is your rock, sir!" Mr. Vholes gives it a rap, and it sounds as hollow as a coffin. Not to Richard, though. There is encouragement in the sound to him. Perhaps Mr. Vholes knows there is. "I am perfectly aware, Mr. Vholes," says Richard, more familiarly and good-humouredly, "that you are the most reliable fellow in the world and that to have to do with you is to have to do with a man of business who is not to be hoodwinked. But put yourself in my case, dragging on this dislocated life, sinking deeper and deeper into difficulty every day, continually hoping and continually disappointed, conscious of change upon change for the worse in myself, and of no change for the better in anything else, and you will find it a dark-looking case sometimes, as I do." "You know," says Mr. Vholes, "that I never give hopes, sir. I told you from the first, Mr. C., that I never give hopes. Particularly in a case like this, where the greater part of the costs comes out of the estate, I should not be considerate of my good name if I gave hopes. It might seem as if costs were my object. Still, when you say there is no change for the better, I must, as a bare matter of fact, deny that." "Aye?" returns Richard, brightening. "But how do you make it out?" "Mr. Carstone, you are represented by--" "You said just now--a rock." "Yes, sir," says Mr. Vholes, gently shaking his head and rapping the hollow desk, with a sound as if ashes were falling on ashes, and dust on dust, "a rock. That's something. You are separately represented, and no longer hidden and lost in the interests of others. THAT'S something. The suit does not sleep; we wake it up, we air it, we walk it about. THAT'S something. It's not all Jarndyce, in fact as well as in name. THAT'S something. Nobody has it all his own way now, sir. And THAT'S something, surely." Richard, his face flushing suddenly, strikes the desk with his clenched hand. "Mr. Vholes! If any man had told me when I first went to John Jarndyce's house that he was anything but the disinterested friend he seemed--that he was what he has gradually turned out to be--I could have found no words strong enough to repel the slander; I could not have defended him too ardently. So little did I know of the world! Whereas now I do declare to you that he becomes to me the embodiment of the suit; that in place of its being an abstraction, it is John Jarndyce; that the more I suffer, the more indignant I am with him; that every new delay and every new disappointment is only a new injury from John Jarndyce's hand." "No, no," says Vholes. "Don't say so. We ought to have patience, all of us. Besides, I never disparage, sir. I never disparage." "Mr. Vholes," returns the angry client. "You know as well as I that he would have strangled the suit if he could." "He was not active in it," Mr. Vholes admits with an appearance of reluctance. "He certainly was not active in it. But however, but however, he might have had amiable intentions. Who can read the heart, Mr. C.!" "You can," returns Richard. "I, Mr. C.?" "Well enough to know what his intentions were. Are or are not our interests conflicting? Tell--me--that!" says Richard, accompanying his last three words with three raps on his rock of trust. "Mr. C.," returns Vholes, immovable in attitude and never winking his hungry eyes, "I should be wanting in my duty as your professional adviser, I should be departing from my fidelity to your interests, if I represented those interests as identical with the interests of Mr. Jarndyce. They are no such thing, sir. I never impute motives; I both have and am a father, and I never impute motives. But I must not shrink from a professional duty, even if it sows dissensions in families. I understand you to be now consulting me professionally as to your interests? You are so? I reply, then, they are not identical with those of Mr. Jarndyce." "Of course they are not!" cries Richard. "You found that out long ago." "Mr. C.," returns Vholes, "I wish to say no more of any third party than is necessary. I wish to leave my good name unsullied, together with any little property of which I may become possessed through industry and perseverance, to my daughters Emma, Jane, and Caroline. I also desire to live in amity with my professional brethren. When Mr. Skimpole did me the honour, sir--I will not say the very high honour, for I never stoop to flattery--of bringing us together in this room, I mentioned to you that I could offer no opinion or advice as to your interests while those interests were entrusted to another member of the profession. And I spoke in such terms as I was bound to speak of Kenge and Carboy's office, which stands high. You, sir, thought fit to withdraw your interests from that keeping nevertheless and to offer them to me. You brought them with clean hands, sir, and I accepted them with clean hands. Those interests are now paramount in this office. My digestive functions, as you may have heard me mention, are not in a good state, and rest might improve them; but I shall not rest, sir, while I am your representative. Whenever you want me, you will find me here. Summon me anywhere, and I will come. During the long vacation, sir, I shall devote my leisure to studying your interests more and more closely and to making arrangements for moving heaven and earth (including, of course, the Chancellor) after Michaelmas term; and when I ultimately congratulate you, sir," says Mr. Vholes with the severity of a determined man, "when I ultimately congratulate you, sir, with all my heart, on your accession to fortune--which, but that I never give hopes, I might say something further about--you will owe me nothing beyond whatever little balance may be then outstanding of the costs as between solicitor and client not included in the taxed costs allowed out of the estate. I pretend to no claim upon you, Mr. C., but for the zealous and active discharge--not the languid and routine discharge, sir: that much credit I stipulate for--of my professional duty. My duty prosperously ended, all between us is ended." Vholes finally adds, by way of rider to this declaration of his principles, that as Mr. Carstone is about to rejoin his regiment, perhaps Mr. C. will favour him with an order on his agent for twenty pounds on account. "For there have been many little consultations and attendances of late, sir," observes Vholes, turning over the leaves of his diary, "and these things mount up, and I don't profess to be a man of capital. When we first entered on our present relations I stated to you openly--it is a principle of mine that there never can be too much openness between solicitor and client--that I was not a man of capital and that if capital was your object you had better leave your papers in Kenge's office. No, Mr. C., you will find none of the advantages or disadvantages of capital here, sir. This," Vholes gives the desk one hollow blow again, "is your rock; it pretends to be nothing more." The client, with his dejection insensibly relieved and his vague hopes rekindled, takes pen and ink and writes the draft, not without perplexed consideration and calculation of the date it may bear, implying scant effects in the agent's hands. All the while, Vholes, buttoned up in body and mind, looks at him attentively. All the while, Vholes's official cat watches the mouse's hole. Lastly, the client, shaking hands, beseeches Mr. Vholes, for heaven's sake and earth's sake, to do his utmost to "pull him through" the Court of Chancery. Mr. Vholes, who never gives hopes, lays his palm upon the client's shoulder and answers with a smile, "Always here, sir. Personally, or by letter, you will always find me here, sir, with my shoulder to the wheel." Thus they part, and Vholes, left alone, employs himself in carrying sundry little matters out of his diary into his draft bill book for the ultimate behoof of his three daughters. So might an industrious fox or bear make up his account of chickens or stray travellers with an eye to his cubs, not to disparage by that word the three raw-visaged, lank, and buttoned-up maidens who dwell with the parent Vholes in an earthy cottage situated in a damp garden at Kennington. Richard, emerging from the heavy shade of Symond's Inn into the sunshine of Chancery Lane--for there happens to be sunshine there to-day--walks thoughtfully on, and turns into Lincoln's Inn, and passes under the shadow of the Lincoln's Inn trees. On many such loungers have the speckled shadows of those trees often fallen; on the like bent head, the bitten nail, the lowering eye, the lingering step, the purposeless and dreamy air, the good consuming and consumed, the life turned sour. This lounger is not shabby yet, but that may come. Chancery, which knows no wisdom but in precedent, is very rich in such precedents; and why should one be different from ten thousand? Yet the time is so short since his depreciation began that as he saunters away, reluctant to leave the spot for some long months together, though he hates it, Richard himself may feel his own case as if it were a startling one. While his heart is heavy with corroding care, suspense, distrust, and doubt, it may have room for some sorrowful wonder when he recalls how different his first visit there, how different he, how different all the colours of his mind. But injustice breeds injustice; the fighting with shadows and being defeated by them necessitates the setting up of substances to combat; from the impalpable suit which no man alive can understand, the time for that being long gone by, it has become a gloomy relief to turn to the palpable figure of the friend who would have saved him from this ruin and make HIM his enemy. Richard has told Vholes the truth. Is he in a hardened or a softened mood, he still lays his injuries equally at that door; he was thwarted, in that quarter, of a set purpose, and that purpose could only originate in the one subject that is resolving his existence into itself; besides, it is a justification to him in his own eyes to have an embodied antagonist and oppressor. Is Richard a monster in all this, or would Chancery be found rich in such precedents too if they could be got for citation from the Recording Angel? Two pairs of eyes not unused to such people look after him, as, biting his nails and brooding, he crosses the square and is swallowed up by the shadow of the southern gateway. Mr. Guppy and Mr. Weevle are the possessors of those eyes, and they have been leaning in conversation against the low stone parapet under the trees. He passes close by them, seeing nothing but the ground. "William," says Mr. Weevle, adjusting his whiskers, "there's combustion going on there! It's not a case of spontaneous, but it's smouldering combustion it is." "Ah!" says Mr. Guppy. "He wouldn't keep out of Jarndyce, and I suppose he's over head and ears in debt. I never knew much of him. He was as high as the monument when he was on trial at our place. A good riddance to me, whether as clerk or client! Well, Tony, that as I was mentioning is what they're up to." Mr. Guppy, refolding his arms, resettles himself against the parapet, as resuming a conversation of interest. "They are still up to it, sir," says Mr. Guppy, "still taking stock, still examining papers, still going over the heaps and heaps of rubbish. At this rate they'll be at it these seven years." "And Small is helping?" "Small left us at a week's notice. Told Kenge his grandfather's business was too much for the old gentleman and he could better himself by undertaking it. There had been a coolness between myself and Small on account of his being so close. But he said you and I began it, and as he had me there--for we did--I put our acquaintance on the old footing. That's how I come to know what they're up to." "You haven't looked in at all?" "Tony," says Mr. Guppy, a little disconcerted, "to be unreserved with you, I don't greatly relish the house, except in your company, and therefore I have not; and therefore I proposed this little appointment for our fetching away your things. There goes the hour by the clock! Tony"--Mr. Guppy becomes mysteriously and tenderly eloquent--"it is necessary that I should impress upon your mind once more that circumstances over which I have no control have made a melancholy alteration in my most cherished plans and in that unrequited image which I formerly mentioned to you as a friend. That image is shattered, and that idol is laid low. My only wish now in connexion with the objects which I had an idea of carrying out in the court with your aid as a friend is to let 'em alone and bury 'em in oblivion. Do you think it possible, do you think it at all likely (I put it to you, Tony, as a friend), from your knowledge of that capricious and deep old character who fell a prey to the--spontaneous element, do you, Tony, think it at all likely that on second thoughts he put those letters away anywhere, after you saw him alive, and that they were not destroyed that night?" Mr. Weevle reflects for some time. Shakes his head. Decidedly thinks not. "Tony," says Mr. Guppy as they walk towards the court, "once again understand me, as a friend. Without entering into further explanations, I may repeat that the idol is down. I have no purpose to serve now but burial in oblivion. To that I have pledged myself. I owe it to myself, and I owe it to the shattered image, as also to the circumstances over which I have no control. If you was to express to me by a gesture, by a wink, that you saw lying anywhere in your late lodgings any papers that so much as looked like the papers in question, I would pitch them into the fire, sir, on my own responsibility." Mr. Weevle nods. Mr. Guppy, much elevated in his own opinion by having delivered these observations, with an air in part forensic and in part romantic--this gentleman having a passion for conducting anything in the form of an examination, or delivering anything in the form of a summing up or a speech--accompanies his friend with dignity to the court. Never since it has been a court has it had such a Fortunatus' purse of gossip as in the proceedings at the rag and bottle shop. Regularly, every morning at eight, is the elder Mr. Smallweed brought down to the corner and carried in, accompanied by Mrs. Smallweed, Judy, and Bart; and regularly, all day, do they all remain there until nine at night, solaced by gipsy dinners, not abundant in quantity, from the cook's shop, rummaging and searching, digging, delving, and diving among the treasures of the late lamented. What those treasures are they keep so secret that the court is maddened. In its delirium it imagines guineas pouring out of tea-pots, crown-pieces overflowing punch-bowls, old chairs and mattresses stuffed with Bank of England notes. It possesses itself of the sixpenny history (with highly coloured folding frontispiece) of Mr. Daniel Dancer and his sister, and also of Mr. Elwes, of Suffolk, and transfers all the facts from those authentic narratives to Mr. Krook. Twice when the dustman is called in to carry off a cartload of old paper, ashes, and broken bottles, the whole court assembles and pries into the baskets as they come forth. Many times the two gentlemen who write with the ravenous little pens on the tissue-paper are seen prowling in the neighbourhood--shy of each other, their late partnership being dissolved. The Sol skilfully carries a vein of the prevailing interest through the Harmonic nights. Little Swills, in what are professionally known as "patter" allusions to the subject, is received with loud applause; and the same vocalist "gags" in the regular business like a man inspired. Even Miss M. Melvilleson, in the revived Caledonian melody of "We're a-Nodding," points the sentiment that "the dogs love broo" (whatever the nature of that refreshment may be) with such archness and such a turn of the head towards next door that she is immediately understood to mean Mr. Smallweed loves to find money, and is nightly honoured with a double encore. For all this, the court discovers nothing; and as Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Perkins now communicate to the late lodger whose appearance is the signal for a general rally, it is in one continual ferment to discover everything, and more. Mr. Weevle and Mr. Guppy, with every eye in the court's head upon them, knock at the closed door of the late lamented's house, in a high state of popularity. But being contrary to the court's expectation admitted, they immediately become unpopular and are considered to mean no good. The shutters are more or less closed all over the house, and the ground-floor is sufficiently dark to require candles. Introduced into the back shop by Mr. Smallweed the younger, they, fresh from the sunlight, can at first see nothing save darkness and shadows; but they gradually discern the elder Mr. Smallweed seated in his chair upon the brink of a well or grave of waste-paper, the virtuous Judy groping therein like a female sexton, and Mrs. Smallweed on the level ground in the vicinity snowed up in a heap of paper fragments, print, and manuscript which would appear to be the accumulated compliments that have been sent flying at her in the course of the day. The whole party, Small included, are blackened with dust and dirt and present a fiendish appearance not relieved by the general aspect of the room. There is more litter and lumber in it than of old, and it is dirtier if possible; likewise, it is ghostly with traces of its dead inhabitant and even with his chalked writing on the wall. On the entrance of visitors, Mr. Smallweed and Judy simultaneously fold their arms and stop in their researches. "Aha!" croaks the old gentleman. "How de do, gentlemen, how de do! Come to fetch your property, Mr. Weevle? That's well, that's well. Ha! Ha! We should have been forced to sell you up, sir, to pay your warehouse room if you had left it here much longer. You feel quite at home here again, I dare say? Glad to see you, glad to see you!" Mr. Weevle, thanking him, casts an eye about. Mr. Guppy's eye follows Mr. Weevle's eye. Mr. Weevle's eye comes back without any new intelligence in it. Mr. Guppy's eye comes back and meets Mr. Smallweed's eye. That engaging old gentleman is still murmuring, like some wound-up instrument running down, "How de do, sir--how de--how--" And then having run down, he lapses into grinning silence, as Mr. Guppy starts at seeing Mr. Tulkinghorn standing in the darkness opposite with his hands behind him. "Gentleman so kind as to act as my solicitor," says Grandfather Smallweed. "I am not the sort of client for a gentleman of such note, but he is so good!" Mr. Guppy, slightly nudging his friend to take another look, makes a shuffling bow to Mr. Tulkinghorn, who returns it with an easy nod. Mr. Tulkinghorn is looking on as if he had nothing else to do and were rather amused by the novelty. "A good deal of property here, sir, I should say," Mr. Guppy observes to Mr. Smallweed. "Principally rags and rubbish, my dear friend! Rags and rubbish! Me and Bart and my granddaughter Judy are endeavouring to make out an inventory of what's worth anything to sell. But we haven't come to much as yet; we--haven't--come--to--hah!" Mr. Smallweed has run down again, while Mr. Weevle's eye, attended by Mr. Guppy's eye, has again gone round the room and come back. "Well, sir," says Mr. Weevle. "We won't intrude any longer if you'll allow us to go upstairs." "Anywhere, my dear sir, anywhere! You're at home. Make yourself so, pray!" As they go upstairs, Mr. Guppy lifts his eyebrows inquiringly and looks at Tony. Tony shakes his head. They find the old room very dull and dismal, with the ashes of the fire that was burning on that memorable night yet in the discoloured grate. They have a great disinclination to touch any object, and carefully blow the dust from it first. Nor are they desirous to prolong their visit, packing the few movables with all possible speed and never speaking above a whisper. "Look here," says Tony, recoiling. "Here's that horrible cat coming in!" Mr. Guppy retreats behind a chair. "Small told me of her. She went leaping and bounding and tearing about that night like a dragon, and got out on the house-top, and roamed about up there for a fortnight, and then came tumbling down the chimney very thin. Did you ever see such a brute? Looks as if she knew all about it, don't she? Almost looks as if she was Krook. Shoohoo! Get out, you goblin!" Lady Jane, in the doorway, with her tiger snarl from ear to ear and her club of a tail, shows no intention of obeying; but Mr. Tulkinghorn stumbling over her, she spits at his rusty legs, and swearing wrathfully, takes her arched back upstairs. Possibly to roam the house-tops again and return by the chimney. "Mr. Guppy," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, "could I have a word with you?" Mr. Guppy is engaged in collecting the Galaxy Gallery of British Beauty from the wall and depositing those works of art in their old ignoble band-box. "Sir," he returns, reddening, "I wish to act with courtesy towards every member of the profession, and especially, I am sure, towards a member of it so well known as yourself--I will truly add, sir, so distinguished as yourself. Still, Mr. Tulkinghorn, sir, I must stipulate that if you have any word with me, that word is spoken in the presence of my friend." "Oh, indeed?" says Mr. Tulkinghorn. "Yes, sir. My reasons are not of a personal nature at all, but they are amply sufficient for myself." "No doubt, no doubt." Mr. Tulkinghorn is as imperturbable as the hearthstone to which he has quietly walked. "The matter is not of that consequence that I need put you to the trouble of making any conditions, Mr. Guppy." He pauses here to smile, and his smile is as dull and rusty as his pantaloons. "You are to be congratulated, Mr. Guppy; you are a fortunate young man, sir." "Pretty well so, Mr. Tulkinghorn; I don't complain." "Complain? High friends, free admission to great houses, and access to elegant ladies! Why, Mr. Guppy, there are people in London who would give their ears to be you." Mr. Guppy, looking as if he would give his own reddening and still reddening ears to be one of those people at present instead of himself, replies, "Sir, if I attend to my profession and do what is right by Kenge and Carboy, my friends and acquaintances are of no consequence to them nor to any member of the profession, not excepting Mr. Tulkinghorn of the Fields. I am not under any obligation to explain myself further; and with all respect for you, sir, and without offence--I repeat, without offence--" "Oh, certainly!" "--I don't intend to do it." "Quite so," says Mr. Tulkinghorn with a calm nod. "Very good; I see by these portraits that you take a strong interest in the fashionable great, sir?" He addresses this to the astounded Tony, who admits the soft impeachment. "A virtue in which few Englishmen are deficient," observes Mr. Tulkinghorn. He has been standing on the hearthstone with his back to the smoked chimney-piece, and now turns round with his glasses to his eyes. "Who is this? 'Lady Dedlock.' Ha! A very good likeness in its way, but it wants force of character. Good day to you, gentlemen; good day!" When he has walked out, Mr. Guppy, in a great perspiration, nerves himself to the hasty completion of the taking down of the Galaxy Gallery, concluding with Lady Dedlock. "Tony," he says hurriedly to his astonished companion, "let us be quick in putting the things together and in getting out of this place. It were in vain longer to conceal from you, Tony, that between myself and one of the members of a swan-like aristocracy whom I now hold in my hand, there has been undivulged communication and association. The time might have been when I might have revealed it to you. It never will be more. It is due alike to the oath I have taken, alike to the shattered idol, and alike to circumstances over which I have no control, that the whole should be buried in oblivion. I charge you as a friend, by the interest you have ever testified in the fashionable intelligence, and by any little advances with which I may have been able to accommodate you, so to bury it without a word of inquiry!" This charge Mr. Guppy delivers in a state little short of forensic lunacy, while his friend shows a dazed mind in his whole head of hair and even in his cultivated whiskers. CHAPTER XL National and Domestic England has been in a dreadful state for some weeks. Lord Coodle would go out, Sir Thomas Doodle wouldn't come in, and there being nobody in Great Britain (to speak of) except Coodle and Doodle, there has been no government. It is a mercy that the hostile meeting between those two great men, which at one time seemed inevitable, did not come off, because if both pistols had taken effect, and Coodle and Doodle had killed each other, it is to be presumed that England must have waited to be governed until young Coodle and young Doodle, now in frocks and long stockings, were grown up. This stupendous national calamity, however, was averted by Lord Coodle's making the timely discovery that if in the heat of debate he had said that he scorned and despised the whole ignoble career of Sir Thomas Doodle, he had merely meant to say that party differences should never induce him to withhold from it the tribute of his warmest admiration; while it as opportunely turned out, on the other hand, that Sir Thomas Doodle had in his own bosom expressly booked Lord Coodle to go down to posterity as the mirror of virtue and honour. Still England has been some weeks in the dismal strait of having no pilot (as was well observed by Sir Leicester Dedlock) to weather the storm; and the marvellous part of the matter is that England has not appeared to care very much about it, but has gone on eating and drinking and marrying and giving in marriage as the old world did in the days before the flood. But Coodle knew the danger, and Doodle knew the danger, and all their followers and hangers-on had the clearest possible perception of the danger. At last Sir Thomas Doodle has not only condescended to come in, but has done it handsomely, bringing in with him all his nephews, all his male cousins, and all his brothers-in-law. So there is hope for the old ship yet. Doodle has found that he must throw himself upon the country, chiefly in the form of sovereigns and beer. In this metamorphosed state he is available in a good many places simultaneously and can throw himself upon a considerable portion of the country at one time. Britannia being much occupied in pocketing Doodle in the form of sovereigns, and swallowing Doodle in the form of beer, and in swearing herself black in the face that she does neither--plainly to the advancement of her glory and morality--the London season comes to a sudden end, through all the Doodleites and Coodleites dispersing to assist Britannia in those religious exercises. Hence Mrs. Rouncewell, housekeeper at Chesney Wold, foresees, though no instructions have yet come down, that the family may shortly be expected, together with a pretty large accession of cousins and others who can in any way assist the great Constitutional work. And hence the stately old dame, taking Time by the forelock, leads him up and down the staircases, and along the galleries and passages, and through the rooms, to witness before he grows any older that everything is ready, that floors are rubbed bright, carpets spread, curtains shaken out, beds puffed and patted, still-room and kitchen cleared for action--all things prepared as beseems the Dedlock dignity. This present summer evening, as the sun goes down, the preparations are complete. Dreary and solemn the old house looks, with so many appliances of habitation and with no inhabitants except the pictured forms upon the walls. So did these come and go, a Dedlock in possession might have ruminated passing along; so did they see this gallery hushed and quiet, as I see it now; so think, as I think, of the gap that they would make in this domain when they were gone; so find it, as I find it, difficult to believe that it could be without them; so pass from my world, as I pass from theirs, now closing the reverberating door; so leave no blank to miss them, and so die. Through some of the fiery windows beautiful from without, and set, at this sunset hour, not in dull-grey stone but in a glorious house of gold, the light excluded at other windows pours in rich, lavish, overflowing like the summer plenty in the land. Then do the frozen Dedlocks thaw. Strange movements come upon their features as the shadows of leaves play there. A dense justice in a corner is beguiled into a wink. A staring baronet, with a truncheon, gets a dimple in his chin. Down into the bosom of a stony shepherdess there steals a fleck of light and warmth that would have done it good a hundred years ago. One ancestress of Volumnia, in high-heeled shoes, very like her--casting the shadow of that virgin event before her full two centuries--shoots out into a halo and becomes a saint. A maid of honour of the court of Charles the Second, with large round eyes (and other charms to correspond), seems to bathe in glowing water, and it ripples as it glows. But the fire of the sun is dying. Even now the floor is dusky, and shadow slowly mounts the walls, bringing the Dedlocks down like age and death. And now, upon my Lady's picture over the great chimney-piece, a weird shade falls from some old tree, that turns it pale, and flutters it, and looks as if a great arm held a veil or hood, watching an opportunity to draw it over her. Higher and darker rises shadow on the wall--now a red gloom on the ceiling--now the fire is out. All that prospect, which from the terrace looked so near, has moved solemnly away and changed--not the first nor the last of beautiful things that look so near and will so change--into a distant phantom. Light mists arise, and the dew falls, and all the sweet scents in the garden are heavy in the air. Now the woods settle into great masses as if they were each one profound tree. And now the moon rises to separate them, and to glimmer here and there in horizontal lines behind their stems, and to make the avenue a pavement of light among high cathedral arches fantastically broken. Now the moon is high; and the great house, needing habitation more than ever, is like a body without life. Now it is even awful, stealing through it, to think of the live people who have slept in the solitary bedrooms, to say nothing of the dead. Now is the time for shadow, when every corner is a cavern and every downward step a pit, when the stained glass is reflected in pale and faded hues upon the floors, when anything and everything can be made of the heavy staircase beams excepting their own proper shapes, when the armour has dull lights upon it not easily to be distinguished from stealthy movement, and when barred helmets are frightfully suggestive of heads inside. But of all the shadows in Chesney Wold, the shadow in the long drawing-room upon my Lady's picture is the first to come, the last to be disturbed. At this hour and by this light it changes into threatening hands raised up and menacing the handsome face with every breath that stirs. "She is not well, ma'am," says a groom in Mrs. Rouncewell's audience-chamber. "My Lady not well! What's the matter?" "Why, my Lady has been but poorly, ma'am, since she was last here--I don't mean with the family, ma'am, but when she was here as a bird of passage like. My Lady has not been out much, for her, and has kept her room a good deal." "Chesney Wold, Thomas," rejoins the housekeeper with proud complacency, "will set my Lady up! There is no finer air and no healthier soil in the world!" Thomas may have his own personal opinions on this subject, probably hints them in his manner of smoothing his sleek head from the nape of his neck to his temples, but he forbears to express them further and retires to the servants' hall to regale on cold meat-pie and ale. This groom is the pilot-fish before the nobler shark. Next evening, down come Sir Leicester and my Lady with their largest retinue, and down come the cousins and others from all the points of the compass. Thenceforth for some weeks backward and forward rush mysterious men with no names, who fly about all those particular parts of the country on which Doodle is at present throwing himself in an auriferous and malty shower, but who are merely persons of a restless disposition and never do anything anywhere. On these national occasions Sir Leicester finds the cousins useful. A better man than the Honourable Bob Stables to meet the Hunt at dinner, there could not possibly be. Better got up gentlemen than the other cousins to ride over to polling-booths and hustings here and there, and show themselves on the side of England, it would be hard to find. Volumnia is a little dim, but she is of the true descent; and there are many who appreciate her sprightly conversation, her French conundrums so old as to have become in the cycles of time almost new again, the honour of taking the fair Dedlock in to dinner, or even the privilege of her hand in the dance. On these national occasions dancing may be a patriotic service, and Volumnia is constantly seen hopping about for the good of an ungrateful and unpensioning country. My Lady takes no great pains to entertain the numerous guests, and being still unwell, rarely appears until late in the day. But at all the dismal dinners, leaden lunches, basilisk balls, and other melancholy pageants, her mere appearance is a relief. As to Sir Leicester, he conceives it utterly impossible that anything can be wanting, in any direction, by any one who has the good fortune to be received under that roof; and in a state of sublime satisfaction, he moves among the company, a magnificent refrigerator. Daily the cousins trot through dust and canter over roadside turf, away to hustings and polling-booths (with leather gloves and hunting-whips for the counties and kid gloves and riding-canes for the boroughs), and daily bring back reports on which Sir Leicester holds forth after dinner. Daily the restless men who have no occupation in life present the appearance of being rather busy. Daily Volumnia has a little cousinly talk with Sir Leicester on the state of the nation, from which Sir Leicester is disposed to conclude that Volumnia is a more reflecting woman than he had thought her. "How are we getting on?" says Miss Volumnia, clasping her hands. "ARE we safe?" The mighty business is nearly over by this time, and Doodle will throw himself off the country in a few days more. Sir Leicester has just appeared in the long drawing-room after dinner, a bright particular star surrounded by clouds of cousins. "Volumnia," replies Sir Leicester, who has a list in his hand, "we are doing tolerably." "Only tolerably!" Although it is summer weather, Sir Leicester always has his own particular fire in the evening. He takes his usual screened seat near it and repeats with much firmness and a little displeasure, as who should say, I am not a common man, and when I say tolerably, it must not be understood as a common expression, "Volumnia, we are doing tolerably." "At least there is no opposition to YOU," Volumnia asserts with confidence. "No, Volumnia. This distracted country has lost its senses in many respects, I grieve to say, but--" "It is not so mad as that. I am glad to hear it!" Volumnia's finishing the sentence restores her to favour. Sir Leicester, with a gracious inclination of his head, seems to say to himself, "A sensible woman this, on the whole, though occasionally precipitate." In fact, as to this question of opposition, the fair Dedlock's observation was superfluous, Sir Leicester on these occasions always delivering in his own candidateship, as a kind of handsome wholesale order to be promptly executed. Two other little seats that belong to him he treats as retail orders of less importance, merely sending down the men and signifying to the tradespeople, "You will have the goodness to make these materials into two members of Parliament and to send them home when done." "I regret to say, Volumnia, that in many places the people have shown a bad spirit, and that this opposition to the government has been of a most determined and most implacable description." "W-r-retches!" says Volumnia. "Even," proceeds Sir Leicester, glancing at the circumjacent cousins on sofas and ottomans, "even in many--in fact, in most--of those places in which the government has carried it against a faction--" (Note, by the way, that the Coodleites are always a faction with the Doodleites, and that the Doodleites occupy exactly the same position towards the Coodleites.) "--Even in them I am shocked, for the credit of Englishmen, to be constrained to inform you that the party has not triumphed without being put to an enormous expense. Hundreds," says Sir Leicester, eyeing the cousins with increasing dignity and swelling indignation, "hundreds of thousands of pounds!" If Volumnia have a fault, it is the fault of being a trifle too innocent, seeing that the innocence which would go extremely well with a sash and tucker is a little out of keeping with the rouge and pearl necklace. Howbeit, impelled by innocence, she asks, "What for?" "Volumnia," remonstrates Sir Leicester with his utmost severity. "Volumnia!" "No, no, I don't mean what for," cries Volumnia with her favourite little scream. "How stupid I am! I mean what a pity!" "I am glad," returns Sir Leicester, "that you do mean what a pity." Volumnia hastens to express her opinion that the shocking people ought to be tried as traitors and made to support the party. "I am glad, Volumnia," repeats Sir Leicester, unmindful of these mollifying sentiments, "that you do mean what a pity. It is disgraceful to the electors. But as you, though inadvertently and without intending so unreasonable a question, asked me 'what for?' let me reply to you. For necessary expenses. And I trust to your good sense, Volumnia, not to pursue the subject, here or elsewhere." Sir Leicester feels it incumbent on him to observe a crushing aspect towards Volumnia because it is whispered abroad that these necessary expenses will, in some two hundred election petitions, be unpleasantly connected with the word bribery, and because some graceless jokers have consequently suggested the omission from the Church service of the ordinary supplication in behalf of the High Court of Parliament and have recommended instead that the prayers of the congregation be requested for six hundred and fifty-eight gentlemen in a very unhealthy state. "I suppose," observes Volumnia, having taken a little time to recover her spirits after her late castigation, "I suppose Mr. Tulkinghorn has been worked to death." "I don't know," says Sir Leicester, opening his eyes, "why Mr. Tulkinghorn should be worked to death. I don't know what Mr. Tulkinghorn's engagements may be. He is not a candidate." Volumnia had thought he might have been employed. Sir Leicester could desire to know by whom, and what for. Volumnia, abashed again, suggests, by somebody--to advise and make arrangements. Sir Leicester is not aware that any client of Mr. Tulkinghorn has been in need of his assistance. Lady Dedlock, seated at an open window with her arm upon its cushioned ledge and looking out at the evening shadows falling on the park, has seemed to attend since the lawyer's name was mentioned. A languid cousin with a moustache in a state of extreme debility now observes from his couch that man told him ya'as'dy that Tulkinghorn had gone down t' that iron place t' give legal 'pinion 'bout something, and that contest being over t' day, 'twould be highly jawlly thing if Tulkinghorn should 'pear with news that Coodle man was floored. Mercury in attendance with coffee informs Sir Leicester, hereupon, that Mr. Tulkinghorn has arrived and is taking dinner. My Lady turns her head inward for the moment, then looks out again as before. Volumnia is charmed to hear that her delight is come. He is so original, such a stolid creature, such an immense being for knowing all sorts of things and never telling them! Volumnia is persuaded that he must be a Freemason. Is sure he is at the head of a lodge, and wears short aprons, and is made a perfect idol of with candlesticks and trowels. These lively remarks the fair Dedlock delivers in her youthful manner, while making a purse. "He has not been here once," she adds, "since I came. I really had some thoughts of breaking my heart for the inconstant creature. I had almost made up my mind that he was dead." It may be the gathering gloom of evening, or it may be the darker gloom within herself, but a shade is on my Lady's face, as if she thought, "I would he were!" "Mr. Tulkinghorn," says Sir Leicester, "is always welcome here and always discreet wheresoever he is. A very valuable person, and deservedly respected." The debilitated cousin supposes he is "'normously rich fler." "He has a stake in the country," says Sir Leicester, "I have no doubt. He is, of course, handsomely paid, and he associates almost on a footing of equality with the highest society." Everybody starts. For a gun is fired close by. "Good gracious, what's that?" cries Volumnia with her little withered scream. "A rat," says my Lady. "And they have shot him." Enter Mr. Tulkinghorn, followed by Mercuries with lamps and candles. "No, no," says Sir Leicester, "I think not. My Lady, do you object to the twilight?" On the contrary, my Lady prefers it. "Volumnia?" Oh! Nothing is so delicious to Volumnia as to sit and talk in the dark. "Then take them away," says Sir Leicester. "Tulkinghorn, I beg your pardon. How do you do?" Mr. Tulkinghorn with his usual leisurely ease advances, renders his passing homage to my Lady, shakes Sir Leicester's hand, and subsides into the chair proper to him when he has anything to communicate, on the opposite side of the Baronet's little newspaper-table. Sir Leicester is apprehensive that my Lady, not being very well, will take cold at that open window. My Lady is obliged to him, but would rather sit there for the air. Sir Leicester rises, adjusts her scarf about her, and returns to his seat. Mr. Tulkinghorn in the meanwhile takes a pinch of snuff. "Now," says Sir Leicester. "How has that contest gone?" "Oh, hollow from the beginning. Not a chance. They have brought in both their people. You are beaten out of all reason. Three to one." It is a part of Mr. Tulkinghorn's policy and mastery to have no political opinions; indeed, NO opinions. Therefore he says "you" are beaten, and not "we." Sir Leicester is majestically wroth. Volumnia never heard of such a thing. 'The debilitated cousin holds that it's sort of thing that's sure tapn slongs votes--giv'n--Mob. "It's the place, you know," Mr. Tulkinghorn goes on to say in the fast-increasing darkness when there is silence again, "where they wanted to put up Mrs. Rouncewell's son." "A proposal which, as you correctly informed me at the time, he had the becoming taste and perception," observes Sir Leicester, "to decline. I cannot say that I by any means approve of the sentiments expressed by Mr. Rouncewell when he was here for some half-hour in this room, but there was a sense of propriety in his decision which I am glad to acknowledge." "Ha!" says Mr. Tulkinghorn. "It did not prevent him from being very active in this election, though." Sir Leicester is distinctly heard to gasp before speaking. "Did I understand you? Did you say that Mr. Rouncewell had been very active in this election?" "Uncommonly active." "Against--" "Oh, dear yes, against you. He is a very good speaker. Plain and emphatic. He made a damaging effect, and has great influence. In the business part of the proceedings he carried all before him." It is evident to the whole company, though nobody can see him, that Sir Leicester is staring majestically. "And he was much assisted," says Mr. Tulkinghorn as a wind-up, "by his son." "By his son, sir?" repeats Sir Leicester with awful politeness. "By his son." "The son who wished to marry the young woman in my Lady's service?" "That son. He has but one." "Then upon my honour," says Sir Leicester after a terrific pause during which he has been heard to snort and felt to stare, "then upon my honour, upon my life, upon my reputation and principles, the floodgates of society are burst open, and the waters have--a--obliterated the landmarks of the framework of the cohesion by which things are held together!" General burst of cousinly indignation. Volumnia thinks it is really high time, you know, for somebody in power to step in and do something strong. Debilitated cousin thinks--country's going--Dayvle--steeple-chase pace. "I beg," says Sir Leicester in a breathless condition, "that we may not comment further on this circumstance. Comment is superfluous. My Lady, let me suggest in reference to that young woman--" "I have no intention," observes my Lady from her window in a low but decided tone, "of parting with her." "That was not my meaning," returns Sir Leicester. "I am glad to hear you say so. I would suggest that as you think her worthy of your patronage, you should exert your influence to keep her from these dangerous hands. You might show her what violence would be done in such association to her duties and principles, and you might preserve her for a better fate. You might point out to her that she probably would, in good time, find a husband at Chesney Wold by whom she would not be--" Sir Leicester adds, after a moment's consideration, "dragged from the altars of her forefathers." These remarks he offers with his unvarying politeness and deference when he addresses himself to his wife. She merely moves her head in reply. The moon is rising, and where she sits there is a little stream of cold pale light, in which her head is seen. "It is worthy of remark," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, "however, that these people are, in their way, very proud." "Proud?" Sir Leicester doubts his hearing. "I should not be surprised if they all voluntarily abandoned the girl--yes, lover and all--instead of her abandoning them, supposing she remained at Chesney Wold under such circumstances." "Well!" says Sir Leicester tremulously. "Well! You should know, Mr. Tulkinghorn. You have been among them." "Really, Sir Leicester," returns the lawyer, "I state the fact. Why, I could tell you a story--with Lady Dedlock's permission." Her head concedes it, and Volumnia is enchanted. A story! Oh, he is going to tell something at last! A ghost in it, Volumnia hopes? "No. Real flesh and blood." Mr. Tulkinghorn stops for an instant and repeats with some little emphasis grafted upon his usual monotony, "Real flesh and blood, Miss Dedlock. Sir Leicester, these particulars have only lately become known to me. They are very brief. They exemplify what I have said. I suppress names for the present. Lady Dedlock will not think me ill-bred, I hope?" By the light of the fire, which is low, he can be seen looking towards the moonlight. By the light of the moon Lady Dedlock can be seen, perfectly still. "A townsman of this Mrs. Rouncewell, a man in exactly parallel circumstances as I am told, had the good fortune to have a daughter who attracted the notice of a great lady. I speak of really a great lady, not merely great to him, but married to a gentleman of your condition, Sir Leicester." Sir Leicester condescendingly says, "Yes, Mr. Tulkinghorn," implying that then she must have appeared of very considerable moral dimensions indeed in the eyes of an iron-master. "The lady was wealthy and beautiful, and had a liking for the girl, and treated her with great kindness, and kept her always near her. Now this lady preserved a secret under all her greatness, which she had preserved for many years. In fact, she had in early life been engaged to marry a young rake--he was a captain in the army--nothing connected with whom came to any good. She never did marry him, but she gave birth to a child of which he was the father." By the light of the fire he can be seen looking towards the moonlight. By the moonlight, Lady Dedlock can be seen in profile, perfectly still. "The captain in the army being dead, she believed herself safe; but a train of circumstances with which I need not trouble you led to discovery. As I received the story, they began in an imprudence on her own part one day when she was taken by surprise, which shows how difficult it is for the firmest of us (she was very firm) to be always guarded. There was great domestic trouble and amazement, you may suppose; I leave you to imagine, Sir Leicester, the husband's grief. But that is not the present point. When Mr. Rouncewell's townsman heard of the disclosure, he no more allowed the girl to be patronized and honoured than he would have suffered her to be trodden underfoot before his eyes. Such was his pride, that he indignantly took her away, as if from reproach and disgrace. He had no sense of the honour done him and his daughter by the lady's condescension; not the least. He resented the girl's position, as if the lady had been the commonest of commoners. That is the story. I hope Lady Dedlock will excuse its painful nature." There are various opinions on the merits, more or less conflicting with Volumnia's. That fair young creature cannot believe there ever was any such lady and rejects the whole history on the threshold. The majority incline to the debilitated cousin's sentiment, which is in few words--"no business--Rouncewell's fernal townsman." Sir Leicester generally refers back in his mind to Wat Tyler and arranges a sequence of events on a plan of his own. There is not much conversation in all, for late hours have been kept at Chesney Wold since the necessary expenses elsewhere began, and this is the first night in many on which the family have been alone. It is past ten when Sir Leicester begs Mr. Tulkinghorn to ring for candles. Then the stream of moonlight has swelled into a lake, and then Lady Dedlock for the first time moves, and rises, and comes forward to a table for a glass of water. Winking cousins, bat-like in the candle glare, crowd round to give it; Volumnia (always ready for something better if procurable) takes another, a very mild sip of which contents her; Lady Dedlock, graceful, self-possessed, looked after by admiring eyes, passes away slowly down the long perspective by the side of that nymph, not at all improving her as a question of contrast. CHAPTER XLI In Mr. Tulkinghorn's Room Mr. Tulkinghorn arrives in his turret-room a little breathed by the journey up, though leisurely performed. There is an expression on his face as if he had discharged his mind of some grave matter and were, in his close way, satisfied. To say of a man so severely and strictly self-repressed that he is triumphant would be to do him as great an injustice as to suppose him troubled with love or sentiment or any romantic weakness. He is sedately satisfied. Perhaps there is a rather increased sense of power upon him as he loosely grasps one of his veinous wrists with his other hand and holding it behind his back walks noiselessly up and down. There is a capacious writing-table in the room on which is a pretty large accumulation of papers. The green lamp is lighted, his reading-glasses lie upon the desk, the easy-chair is wheeled up to it, and it would seem as though he had intended to bestow an hour or so upon these claims on his attention before going to bed. But he happens not to be in a business mind. After a glance at the documents awaiting his notice--with his head bent low over the table, the old man's sight for print or writing being defective at night--he opens the French window and steps out upon the leads. There he again walks slowly up and down in the same attitude, subsiding, if a man so cool may have any need to subside, from the story he has related downstairs. The time was once when men as knowing as Mr. Tulkinghorn would walk on turret-tops in the starlight and look up into the sky to read their fortunes there. Hosts of stars are visible to-night, though their brilliancy is eclipsed by the splendour of the moon. If he be seeking his own star as he methodically turns and turns upon the leads, it should be but a pale one to be so rustily represented below. If he be tracing out his destiny, that may be written in other characters nearer to his hand. As he paces the leads with his eyes most probably as high above his thoughts as they are high above the earth, he is suddenly stopped in passing the window by two eyes that meet his own. The ceiling of his room is rather low; and the upper part of the door, which is opposite the window, is of glass. There is an inner baize door, too, but the night being warm he did not close it when he came upstairs. These eyes that meet his own are looking in through the glass from the corridor outside. He knows them well. The blood has not flushed into his face so suddenly and redly for many a long year as when he recognizes Lady Dedlock. He steps into the room, and she comes in too, closing both the doors behind her. There is a wild disturbance--is it fear or anger?--in her eyes. In her carriage and all else she looks as she looked downstairs two hours ago. Is it fear or is it anger now? He cannot be sure. Both might be as pale, both as intent. "Lady Dedlock?" She does not speak at first, nor even when she has slowly dropped into the easy-chair by the table. They look at each other, like two pictures. "Why have you told my story to so many persons?" "Lady Dedlock, it was necessary for me to inform you that I knew it." "How long have you known it?" "I have suspected it a long while--fully known it a little while." "Months?" "Days." He stands before her with one hand on a chair-back and the other in his old-fashioned waistcoat and shirt-frill, exactly as he has stood before her at any time since her marriage. The same formal politeness, the same composed deference that might as well be defiance; the whole man the same dark, cold object, at the same distance, which nothing has ever diminished. "Is this true concerning the poor girl?" He slightly inclines and advances his head as not quite understanding the question. "You know what you related. Is it true? Do her friends know my story also? Is it the town-talk yet? Is it chalked upon the walls and cried in the streets?" So! Anger, and fear, and shame. All three contending. What power this woman has to keep these raging passions down! Mr. Tulkinghorn's thoughts take such form as he looks at her, with his ragged grey eyebrows a hair's breadth more contracted than usual under her gaze. "No, Lady Dedlock. That was a hypothetical case, arising out of Sir Leicester's unconsciously carrying the matter with so high a hand. But it would be a real case if they knew--what we know." "Then they do not know it yet?" "No." "Can I save the poor girl from injury before they know it?" "Really, Lady Dedlock," Mr. Tulkinghorn replies, "I cannot give a satisfactory opinion on that point." And he thinks, with the interest of attentive curiosity, as he watches the struggle in her breast, "The power and force of this woman are astonishing!" "Sir," she says, for the moment obliged to set her lips with all the energy she has, that she may speak distinctly, "I will make it plainer. I do not dispute your hypothetical case. I anticipated it, and felt its truth as strongly as you can do, when I saw Mr. Rouncewell here. I knew very well that if he could have had the power of seeing me as I was, he would consider the poor girl tarnished by having for a moment been, although most innocently, the subject of my great and distinguished patronage. But I have an interest in her, or I should rather say--no longer belonging to this place--I had, and if you can find so much consideration for the woman under your foot as to remember that, she will be very sensible of your mercy." Mr. Tulkinghorn, profoundly attentive, throws this off with a shrug of self-depreciation and contracts his eyebrows a little more. "You have prepared me for my exposure, and I thank you for that too. Is there anything that you require of me? Is there any claim that I can release or any charge or trouble that I can spare my husband in obtaining HIS release by certifying to the exactness of your discovery? I will write anything, here and now, that you will dictate. I am ready to do it." And she would do it, thinks the lawyer, watchful of the firm hand with which she takes the pen! "I will not trouble you, Lady Dedlock. Pray spare yourself." "I have long expected this, as you know. I neither wish to spare myself nor to be spared. You can do nothing worse to me than you have done. Do what remains now." "Lady Dedlock, there is nothing to be done. I will take leave to say a few words when you have finished." Their need for watching one another should be over now, but they do it all this time, and the stars watch them both through the opened window. Away in the moonlight lie the woodland fields at rest, and the wide house is as quiet as the narrow one. The narrow one! Where are the digger and the spade, this peaceful night, destined to add the last great secret to the many secrets of the Tulkinghorn existence? Is the man born yet, is the spade wrought yet? Curious questions to consider, more curious perhaps not to consider, under the watching stars upon a summer night. "Of repentance or remorse or any feeling of mine," Lady Dedlock presently proceeds, "I say not a word. If I were not dumb, you would be deaf. Let that go by. It is not for your ears." He makes a feint of offering a protest, but she sweeps it away with her disdainful hand. "Of other and very different things I come to speak to you. My jewels are all in their proper places of keeping. They will be found there. So, my dresses. So, all the valuables I have. Some ready money I had with me, please to say, but no large amount. I did not wear my own dress, in order that I might avoid observation. I went to be henceforward lost. Make this known. I leave no other charge with you." "Excuse me, Lady Dedlock," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, quite unmoved. "I am not sure that I understand you. You want--" "To be lost to all here. I leave Chesney Wold to-night. I go this hour." Mr. Tulkinghorn shakes his head. She rises, but he, without moving hand from chair-back or from old-fashioned waistcoat and shirt-frill, shakes his head. "What? Not go as I have said?" "No, Lady Dedlock," he very calmly replies. "Do you know the relief that my disappearance will be? Have you forgotten the stain and blot upon this place, and where it is, and who it is?" "No, Lady Dedlock, not by any means." Without deigning to rejoin, she moves to the inner door and has it in her hand when he says to her, without himself stirring hand or foot or raising his voice, "Lady Dedlock, have the goodness to stop and hear me, or before you reach the staircase I shall ring the alarm-bell and rouse the house. And then I must speak out before every guest and servant, every man and woman, in it." He has conquered her. She falters, trembles, and puts her hand confusedly to her head. Slight tokens these in any one else, but when so practised an eye as Mr. Tulkinghorn's sees indecision for a moment in such a subject, he thoroughly knows its value. He promptly says again, "Have the goodness to hear me, Lady Dedlock," and motions to the chair from which she has risen. She hesitates, but he motions again, and she sits down. "The relations between us are of an unfortunate description, Lady Dedlock; but as they are not of my making, I will not apologize for them. The position I hold in reference to Sir Leicester is so well known to you that I can hardly imagine but that I must long have appeared in your eyes the natural person to make this discovery." "Sir," she returns without looking up from the ground on which her eyes are now fixed, "I had better have gone. It would have been far better not to have detained me. I have no more to say." "Excuse me, Lady Dedlock, if I add a little more to hear." "I wish to hear it at the window, then. I can't breathe where I am." His jealous glance as she walks that way betrays an instant's misgiving that she may have it in her thoughts to leap over, and dashing against ledge and cornice, strike her life out upon the terrace below. But a moment's observation of her figure as she stands in the window without any support, looking out at the stars--not up--gloomily out at those stars which are low in the heavens, reassures him. By facing round as she has moved, he stands a little behind her. "Lady Dedlock, I have not yet been able to come to a decision satisfactory to myself on the course before me. I am not clear what to do or how to act next. I must request you, in the meantime, to keep your secret as you have kept it so long and not to wonder that I keep it too." He pauses, but she makes no reply. "Pardon me, Lady Dedlock. This is an important subject. You are honouring me with your attention?" "I am." "Thank you. I might have known it from what I have seen of your strength of character. I ought not to have asked the question, but I have the habit of making sure of my ground, step by step, as I go on. The sole consideration in this unhappy case is Sir Leicester." "Then why," she asks in a low voice and without removing her gloomy look from those distant stars, "do you detain me in his house?" "Because he IS the consideration. Lady Dedlock, I have no occasion to tell you that Sir Leicester is a very proud man, that his reliance upon you is implicit, that the fall of that moon out of the sky would not amaze him more than your fall from your high position as his wife." She breathes quickly and heavily, but she stands as unflinchingly as ever he has seen her in the midst of her grandest company. "I declare to you, Lady Dedlock, that with anything short of this case that I have, I would as soon have hoped to root up by means of my own strength and my own hands the oldest tree on this estate as to shake your hold upon Sir Leicester and Sir Leicester's trust and confidence in you. And even now, with this case, I hesitate. Not that he could doubt (that, even with him, is impossible), but that nothing can prepare him for the blow." "Not my flight?" she returned. "Think of it again." "Your flight, Lady Dedlock, would spread the whole truth, and a hundred times the whole truth, far and wide. It would be impossible to save the family credit for a day. It is not to be thought of." There is a quiet decision in his reply which admits of no remonstrance. "When I speak of Sir Leicester being the sole consideration, he and the family credit are one. Sir Leicester and the baronetcy, Sir Leicester and Chesney Wold, Sir Leicester and his ancestors and his patrimony"--Mr. Tulkinghorn very dry here--"are, I need not say to you, Lady Dedlock, inseparable." "Go on!" "Therefore," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, pursuing his case in his jog-trot style, "I have much to consider. This is to be hushed up if it can be. How can it be, if Sir Leicester is driven out of his wits or laid upon a death-bed? If I inflicted this shock upon him to-morrow morning, how could the immediate change in him be accounted for? What could have caused it? What could have divided you? Lady Dedlock, the wall-chalking and the street-crying would come on directly, and you are to remember that it would not affect you merely (whom I cannot at all consider in this business) but your husband, Lady Dedlock, your husband." He gets plainer as he gets on, but not an atom more emphatic or animated. "There is another point of view," he continues, "in which the case presents itself. Sir Leicester is devoted to you almost to infatuation. He might not be able to overcome that infatuation, even knowing what we know. I am putting an extreme case, but it might be so. If so, it were better that he knew nothing. Better for common sense, better for him, better for me. I must take all this into account, and it combines to render a decision very difficult." She stands looking out at the same stars without a word. They are beginning to pale, and she looks as if their coldness froze her. "My experience teaches me," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, who has by this time got his hands in his pockets and is going on in his business consideration of the matter like a machine. "My experience teaches me, Lady Dedlock, that most of the people I know would do far better to leave marriage alone. It is at the bottom of three fourths of their troubles. So I thought when Sir Leicester married, and so I always have thought since. No more about that. I must now be guided by circumstances. In the meanwhile I must beg you to keep your own counsel, and I will keep mine." "I am to drag my present life on, holding its pains at your pleasure, day by day?" she asks, still looking at the distant sky. "Yes, I am afraid so, Lady Dedlock." "It is necessary, you think, that I should be so tied to the stake?" "I am sure that what I recommend is necessary." "I am to remain on this gaudy platform on which my miserable deception has been so long acted, and it is to fall beneath me when you give the signal?" she said slowly. "Not without notice, Lady Dedlock. I shall take no step without forewarning you." She asks all her questions as if she were repeating them from memory or calling them over in her sleep. "We are to meet as usual?" "Precisely as usual, if you please." "And I am to hide my guilt, as I have done so many years?" "As you have done so many years. I should not have made that reference myself, Lady Dedlock, but I may now remind you that your secret can be no heavier to you than it was, and is no worse and no better than it was. I know it certainly, but I believe we have never wholly trusted each other." She stands absorbed in the same frozen way for some little time before asking, "Is there anything more to be said to-night?" "Why," Mr. Tulkinghorn returns methodically as he softly rubs his hands, "I should like to be assured of your acquiescence in my arrangements, Lady Dedlock." "You may be assured of it." "Good. And I would wish in conclusion to remind you, as a business precaution, in case it should be necessary to recall the fact in any communication with Sir Leicester, that throughout our interview I have expressly stated my sole consideration to be Sir Leicester's feelings and honour and the family reputation. I should have been happy to have made Lady Dedlock a prominent consideration, too, if the case had admitted of it; but unfortunately it does not." "I can attest your fidelity, sir." Both before and after saying it she remains absorbed, but at length moves, and turns, unshaken in her natural and acquired presence, towards the door. Mr. Tulkinghorn opens both the doors exactly as he would have done yesterday, or as he would have done ten years ago, and makes his old-fashioned bow as she passes out. It is not an ordinary look that he receives from the handsome face as it goes into the darkness, and it is not an ordinary movement, though a very slight one, that acknowledges his courtesy. But as he reflects when he is left alone, the woman has been putting no common constraint upon herself. He would know it all the better if he saw the woman pacing her own rooms with her hair wildly thrown from her flung-back face, her hands clasped behind her head, her figure twisted as if by pain. He would think so all the more if he saw the woman thus hurrying up and down for hours, without fatigue, without intermission, followed by the faithful step upon the Ghost's Walk. But he shuts out the now chilled air, draws the window-curtain, goes to bed, and falls asleep. And truly when the stars go out and the wan day peeps into the turret-chamber, finding him at his oldest, he looks as if the digger and the spade were both commissioned and would soon be digging. The same wan day peeps in at Sir Leicester pardoning the repentant country in a majestically condescending dream; and at the cousins entering on various public employments, principally receipt of salary; and at the chaste Volumnia, bestowing a dower of fifty thousand pounds upon a hideous old general with a mouth of false teeth like a pianoforte too full of keys, long the admiration of Bath and the terror of every other community. Also into rooms high in the roof, and into offices in court-yards, and over stables, where humbler ambition dreams of bliss, in keepers' lodges, and in holy matrimony with Will or Sally. Up comes the bright sun, drawing everything up with it--the Wills and Sallys, the latent vapour in the earth, the drooping leaves and flowers, the birds and beasts and creeping things, the gardeners to sweep the dewy turf and unfold emerald velvet where the roller passes, the smoke of the great kitchen fire wreathing itself straight and high into the lightsome air. Lastly, up comes the flag over Mr. Tulkinghorn's unconscious head cheerfully proclaiming that Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock are in their happy home and that there is hospitality at the place in Lincolnshire. CHAPTER XLII In Mr. Tulkinghorn's Chambers From the verdant undulations and the spreading oaks of the Dedlock property, Mr. Tulkinghorn transfers himself to the stale heat and dust of London. His manner of coming and going between the two places is one of his impenetrabilities. He walks into Chesney Wold as if it were next door to his chambers and returns to his chambers as if he had never been out of Lincoln's Inn Fields. He neither changes his dress before the journey nor talks of it afterwards. He melted out of his turret-room this morning, just as now, in the late twilight, he melts into his own square. Like a dingy London bird among the birds at roost in these pleasant fields, where the sheep are all made into parchment, the goats into wigs, and the pasture into chaff, the lawyer, smoke-dried and faded, dwelling among mankind but not consorting with them, aged without experience of genial youth, and so long used to make his cramped nest in holes and corners of human nature that he has forgotten its broader and better range, comes sauntering home. In the oven made by the hot pavements and hot buildings, he has baked himself dryer than usual; and he has in his thirsty mind his mellowed port-wine half a century old. The lamplighter is skipping up and down his ladder on Mr. Tulkinghorn's side of the Fields when that high-priest of noble mysteries arrives at his own dull court-yard. He ascends the door-steps and is gliding into the dusky hall when he encounters, on the top step, a bowing and propitiatory little man. "Is that Snagsby?" "Yes, sir. I hope you are well, sir. I was just giving you up, sir, and going home." "Aye? What is it? What do you want with me?" "Well, sir," says Mr. Snagsby, holding his hat at the side of his head in his deference towards his best customer, "I was wishful to say a word to you, sir." "Can you say it here?" "Perfectly, sir." "Say it then." The lawyer turns, leans his arms on the iron railing at the top of the steps, and looks at the lamplighter lighting the court-yard. "It is relating," says Mr. Snagsby in a mysterious low voice, "it is relating--not to put too fine a point upon it--to the foreigner, sir!" Mr. Tulkinghorn eyes him with some surprise. "What foreigner?" "The foreign female, sir. French, if I don't mistake? I am not acquainted with that language myself, but I should judge from her manners and appearance that she was French; anyways, certainly foreign. Her that was upstairs, sir, when Mr. Bucket and me had the honour of waiting upon you with the sweeping-boy that night." "Oh! Yes, yes. Mademoiselle Hortense." "Indeed, sir?" Mr. Snagsby coughs his cough of submission behind his hat. "I am not acquainted myself with the names of foreigners in general, but I have no doubt it WOULD be that." Mr. Snagsby appears to have set out in this reply with some desperate design of repeating the name, but on reflection coughs again to excuse himself. "And what can you have to say, Snagsby," demands Mr. Tulkinghorn, "about her?" "Well, sir," returns the stationer, shading his communication with his hat, "it falls a little hard upon me. My domestic happiness is very great--at least, it's as great as can be expected, I'm sure--but my little woman is rather given to jealousy. Not to put too fine a point upon it, she is very much given to jealousy. And you see, a foreign female of that genteel appearance coming into the shop, and hovering--I should be the last to make use of a strong expression if I could avoid it, but hovering, sir--in the court--you know it is--now ain't it? I only put it to yourself, sir." Mr. Snagsby, having said this in a very plaintive manner, throws in a cough of general application to fill up all the blanks. "Why, what do you mean?" asks Mr. Tulkinghorn. "Just so, sir," returns Mr. Snagsby; "I was sure you would feel it yourself and would excuse the reasonableness of MY feelings when coupled with the known excitableness of my little woman. You see, the foreign female--which you mentioned her name just now, with quite a native sound I am sure--caught up the word Snagsby that night, being uncommon quick, and made inquiry, and got the direction and come at dinner-time. Now Guster, our young woman, is timid and has fits, and she, taking fright at the foreigner's looks--which are fierce--and at a grinding manner that she has of speaking--which is calculated to alarm a weak mind--gave way to it, instead of bearing up against it, and tumbled down the kitchen stairs out of one into another, such fits as I do sometimes think are never gone into, or come out of, in any house but ours. Consequently there was by good fortune ample occupation for my little woman, and only me to answer the shop. When she DID say that Mr. Tulkinghorn, being always denied to her by his employer (which I had no doubt at the time was a foreign mode of viewing a clerk), she would do herself the pleasure of continually calling at my place until she was let in here. Since then she has been, as I began by saying, hovering, hovering, sir"--Mr. Snagsby repeats the word with pathetic emphasis--"in the court. The effects of which movement it is impossible to calculate. I shouldn't wonder if it might have already given rise to the painfullest mistakes even in the neighbours' minds, not mentioning (if such a thing was possible) my little woman. Whereas, goodness knows," says Mr. Snagsby, shaking his head, "I never had an idea of a foreign female, except as being formerly connected with a bunch of brooms and a baby, or at the present time with a tambourine and earrings. I never had, I do assure you, sir!" Mr. Tulkinghorn had listened gravely to this complaint and inquires when the stationer has finished, "And that's all, is it, Snagsby?" "Why yes, sir, that's all," says Mr. Snagsby, ending with a cough that plainly adds, "and it's enough too--for me." "I don't know what Mademoiselle Hortense may want or mean, unless she is mad," says the lawyer. "Even if she was, you know, sir," Mr. Snagsby pleads, "it wouldn't be a consolation to have some weapon or another in the form of a foreign dagger planted in the family." "No," says the other. "Well, well! This shall be stopped. I am sorry you have been inconvenienced. If she comes again, send her here." Mr. Snagsby, with much bowing and short apologetic coughing, takes his leave, lightened in heart. Mr. Tulkinghorn goes upstairs, saying to himself, "These women were created to give trouble the whole earth over. The mistress not being enough to deal with, here's the maid now! But I will be short with THIS jade at least!" So saying, he unlocks his door, gropes his way into his murky rooms, lights his candles, and looks about him. It is too dark to see much of the Allegory overhead there, but that importunate Roman, who is for ever toppling out of the clouds and pointing, is at his old work pretty distinctly. Not honouring him with much attention, Mr. Tulkinghorn takes a small key from his pocket, unlocks a drawer in which there is another key, which unlocks a chest in which there is another, and so comes to the cellar-key, with which he prepares to descend to the regions of old wine. He is going towards the door with a candle in his hand when a knock comes. "Who's this? Aye, aye, mistress, it's you, is it? You appear at a good time. I have just been hearing of you. Now! What do you want?" He stands the candle on the chimney-piece in the clerk's hall and taps his dry cheek with the key as he addresses these words of welcome to Mademoiselle Hortense. That feline personage, with her lips tightly shut and her eyes looking out at him sideways, softly closes the door before replying. "I have had great deal of trouble to find you, sir." "HAVE you!" "I have been here very often, sir. It has always been said to me, he is not at home, he is engage, he is this and that, he is not for you." "Quite right, and quite true." "Not true. Lies!" At times there is a suddenness in the manner of Mademoiselle Hortense so like a bodily spring upon the subject of it that such subject involuntarily starts and fails back. It is Mr. Tulkinghorn's case at present, though Mademoiselle Hortense, with her eyes almost shut up (but still looking out sideways), is only smiling contemptuously and shaking her head. "Now, mistress," says the lawyer, tapping the key hastily upon the chimney-piece. "If you have anything to say, say it, say it." "Sir, you have not use me well. You have been mean and shabby." "Mean and shabby, eh?" returns the lawyer, rubbing his nose with the key. "Yes. What is it that I tell you? You know you have. You have attrapped me--catched me--to give you information; you have asked me to show you the dress of mine my Lady must have wore that night, you have prayed me to come in it here to meet that boy. Say! Is it not?" Mademoiselle Hortense makes another spring. "You are a vixen, a vixen!" Mr. Tulkinghorn seems to meditate as he looks distrustfully at her, then he replies, "Well, wench, well. I paid you." "You paid me!" she repeats with fierce disdain. "Two sovereign! I have not change them, I re-fuse them, I des-pise them, I throw them from me!" Which she literally does, taking them out of her bosom as she speaks and flinging them with such violence on the floor that they jerk up again into the light before they roll away into corners and slowly settle down there after spinning vehemently. "Now!" says Mademoiselle Hortense, darkening her large eyes again. "You have paid me? Eh, my God, oh yes!" Mr. Tulkinghorn rubs his head with the key while she entertains herself with a sarcastic laugh. "You must be rich, my fair friend," he composedly observes, "to throw money about in that way!" "I AM rich," she returns. "I am very rich in hate. I hate my Lady, of all my heart. You know that." "Know it? How should I know it?" "Because you have known it perfectly before you prayed me to give you that information. Because you have known perfectly that I was en-r-r-r-raged!" It appears impossible for mademoiselle to roll the letter "r" sufficiently in this word, notwithstanding that she assists her energetic delivery by clenching both her hands and setting all her teeth. "Oh! I knew that, did I?" says Mr. Tulkinghorn, examining the wards of the key. "Yes, without doubt. I am not blind. You have made sure of me because you knew that. You had reason! I det-est her." Mademoiselle Hortense folds her arms and throws this last remark at him over one of her shoulders. "Having said this, have you anything else to say, mademoiselle?" "I am not yet placed. Place me well. Find me a good condition! If you cannot, or do not choose to do that, employ me to pursue her, to chase her, to disgrace and to dishonour her. I will help you well, and with a good will. It is what YOU do. Do I not know that?" "You appear to know a good deal," Mr. Tulkinghorn retorts. "Do I not? Is it that I am so weak as to believe, like a child, that I come here in that dress to rec-eive that boy only to decide a little bet, a wager? Eh, my God, oh yes!" In this reply, down to the word "wager" inclusive, mademoiselle has been ironically polite and tender, then as suddenly dashed into the bitterest and most defiant scorn, with her black eyes in one and the same moment very nearly shut and staringly wide open. "Now, let us see," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, tapping his chin with the key and looking imperturbably at her, "how this matter stands." "Ah! Let us see," mademoiselle assents, with many angry and tight nods of her head. "You come here to make a remarkably modest demand, which you have just stated, and it not being conceded, you will come again." "And again," says mademoiselle with more tight and angry nods. "And yet again. And yet again. And many times again. In effect, for ever!" "And not only here, but you will go to Mr. Snagsby's too, perhaps? That visit not succeeding either, you will go again perhaps?" "And again," repeats mademoiselle, cataleptic with determination. "And yet again. And yet again. And many times again. In effect, for ever!" "Very well. Now, Mademoiselle Hortense, let me recommend you to take the candle and pick up that money of yours. I think you will find it behind the clerk's partition in the corner yonder." She merely throws a laugh over her shoulder and stands her ground with folded arms. "You will not, eh?" "No, I will not!" "So much the poorer you; so much the richer I! Look, mistress, this is the key of my wine-cellar. It is a large key, but the keys of prisons are larger. In this city there are houses of correction (where the treadmills are, for women), the gates of which are very strong and heavy, and no doubt the keys too. I am afraid a lady of your spirit and activity would find it an inconvenience to have one of those keys turned upon her for any length of time. What do you think?" "I think," mademoiselle replies without any action and in a clear, obliging voice, "that you are a miserable wretch." "Probably," returns Mr. Tulkinghorn, quietly blowing his nose. "But I don't ask what you think of myself; I ask what you think of the prison." "Nothing. What does it matter to me?" "Why, it matters this much, mistress," says the lawyer, deliberately putting away his handkerchief and adjusting his frill; "the law is so despotic here that it interferes to prevent any of our good English citizens from being troubled, even by a lady's visits against his desire. And on his complaining that he is so troubled, it takes hold of the troublesome lady and shuts her up in prison under hard discipline. Turns the key upon her, mistress." Illustrating with the cellar-key. "Truly?" returns mademoiselle in the same pleasant voice. "That is droll! But--my faith!--still what does it matter to me?" "My fair friend," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, "make another visit here, or at Mr. Snagsby's, and you shall learn." "In that case you will send me to the prison, perhaps?" "Perhaps." It would be contradictory for one in mademoiselle's state of agreeable jocularity to foam at the mouth, otherwise a tigerish expansion thereabouts might look as if a very little more would make her do it. "In a word, mistress," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, "I am sorry to be unpolite, but if you ever present yourself uninvited here--or there--again, I will give you over to the police. Their gallantry is great, but they carry troublesome people through the streets in an ignominious manner, strapped down on a board, my good wench." "I will prove you," whispers mademoiselle, stretching out her hand, "I will try if you dare to do it!" "And if," pursues the lawyer without minding her, "I place you in that good condition of being locked up in jail, it will be some time before you find yourself at liberty again." "I will prove you," repeats mademoiselle in her former whisper. "And now," proceeds the lawyer, still without minding her, "you had better go. Think twice before you come here again." "Think you," she answers, "twice two hundred times!" "You were dismissed by your lady, you know," Mr. Tulkinghorn observes, following her out upon the staircase, "as the most implacable and unmanageable of women. Now turn over a new leaf and take warning by what I say to you. For what I say, I mean; and what I threaten, I will do, mistress." She goes down without answering or looking behind her. When she is gone, he goes down too, and returning with his cobweb-covered bottle, devotes himself to a leisurely enjoyment of its contents, now and then, as he throws his head back in his chair, catching sight of the pertinacious Roman pointing from the ceiling. CHAPTER XLIII Esther's Narrative It matters little now how much I thought of my living mother who had told me evermore to consider her dead. I could not venture to approach her or to communicate with her in writing, for my sense of the peril in which her life was passed was only to be equalled by my fears of increasing it. Knowing that my mere existence as a living creature was an unforeseen danger in her way, I could not always conquer that terror of myself which had seized me when I first knew the secret. At no time did I dare to utter her name. I felt as if I did not even dare to hear it. If the conversation anywhere, when I was present, took that direction, as it sometimes naturally did, I tried not to hear: I mentally counted, repeated something that I knew, or went out of the room. I am conscious now that I often did these things when there can have been no danger of her being spoken of, but I did them in the dread I had of hearing anything that might lead to her betrayal, and to her betrayal through me. It matters little now how often I recalled the tones of my mother's voice, wondered whether I should ever hear it again as I so longed to do, and thought how strange and desolate it was that it should be so new to me. It matters little that I watched for every public mention of my mother's name; that I passed and repassed the door of her house in town, loving it, but afraid to look at it; that I once sat in the theatre when my mother was there and saw me, and when we were so wide asunder before the great company of all degrees that any link or confidence between us seemed a dream. It is all, all over. My lot has been so blest that I can relate little of myself which is not a story of goodness and generosity in others. I may well pass that little and go on. When we were settled at home again, Ada and I had many conversations with my guardian of which Richard was the theme. My dear girl was deeply grieved that he should do their kind cousin so much wrong, but she was so faithful to Richard that she could not bear to blame him even for that. My guardian was assured of it, and never coupled his name with a word of reproof. "Rick is mistaken, my dear," he would say to her. "Well, well! We have all been mistaken over and over again. We must trust to you and time to set him right." We knew afterwards what we suspected then, that he did not trust to time until he had often tried to open Richard's eyes. That he had written to him, gone to him, talked with him, tried every gentle and persuasive art his kindness could devise. Our poor devoted Richard was deaf and blind to all. If he were wrong, he would make amends when the Chancery suit was over. If he were groping in the dark, he could not do better than do his utmost to clear away those clouds in which so much was confused and obscured. Suspicion and misunderstanding were the fault of the suit? Then let him work the suit out and come through it to his right mind. This was his unvarying reply. Jarndyce and Jarndyce had obtained such possession of his whole nature that it was impossible to place any consideration before him which he did not, with a distorted kind of reason, make a new argument in favour of his doing what he did. "So that it is even more mischievous," said my guardian once to me, "to remonstrate with the poor dear fellow than to leave him alone." I took one of these opportunities of mentioning my doubts of Mr. Skimpole as a good adviser for Richard. "Adviser!" returned my guardian, laughing, "My dear, who would advise with Skimpole?" "Encourager would perhaps have been a better word," said I. "Encourager!" returned my guardian again. "Who could be encouraged by Skimpole?" "Not Richard?" I asked. "No," he replied. "Such an unworldly, uncalculating, gossamer creature is a relief to him and an amusement. But as to advising or encouraging or occupying a serious station towards anybody or anything, it is simply not to be thought of in such a child as Skimpole." "Pray, cousin John," said Ada, who had just joined us and now looked over my shoulder, "what made him such a child?" "What made him such a child?" inquired my guardian, rubbing his head, a little at a loss. "Yes, cousin John." "Why," he slowly replied, roughening his head more and more, "he is all sentiment, and--and susceptibility, and--and sensibility, and--and imagination. And these qualities are not regulated in him, somehow. I suppose the people who admired him for them in his youth attached too much importance to them and too little to any training that would have balanced and adjusted them, and so he became what he is. Hey?" said my guardian, stopping short and looking at us hopefully. "What do you think, you two?" Ada, glancing at me, said she thought it was a pity he should be an expense to Richard. "So it is, so it is," returned my guardian hurriedly. "That must not be. We must arrange that. I must prevent it. That will never do." And I said I thought it was to be regretted that he had ever introduced Richard to Mr. Vholes for a present of five pounds. "Did he?" said my guardian with a passing shade of vexation on his face. "But there you have the man. There you have the man! There is nothing mercenary in that with him. He has no idea of the value of money. He introduces Rick, and then he is good friends with Mr. Vholes and borrows five pounds of him. He means nothing by it and thinks nothing of it. He told you himself, I'll be bound, my dear?" "Oh, yes!" said I. "Exactly!" cried my guardian, quite triumphant. "There you have the man! If he had meant any harm by it or was conscious of any harm in it, he wouldn't tell it. He tells it as he does it in mere simplicity. But you shall see him in his own home, and then you'll understand him better. We must pay a visit to Harold Skimpole and caution him on these points. Lord bless you, my dears, an infant, an infant!" In pursuance of this plan, we went into London on an early day and presented ourselves at Mr. Skimpole's door. He lived in a place called the Polygon, in Somers Town, where there were at that time a number of poor Spanish refugees walking about in cloaks, smoking little paper cigars. Whether he was a better tenant than one might have supposed, in consequence of his friend Somebody always paying his rent at last, or whether his inaptitude for business rendered it particularly difficult to turn him out, I don't know; but he had occupied the same house some years. It was in a state of dilapidation quite equal to our expectation. Two or three of the area railings were gone, the water-butt was broken, the knocker was loose, the bell-handle had been pulled off a long time to judge from the rusty state of the wire, and dirty footprints on the steps were the only signs of its being inhabited. A slatternly full-blown girl who seemed to be bursting out at the rents in her gown and the cracks in her shoes like an over-ripe berry answered our knock by opening the door a very little way and stopping up the gap with her figure. As she knew Mr. Jarndyce (indeed Ada and I both thought that she evidently associated him with the receipt of her wages), she immediately relented and allowed us to pass in. The lock of the door being in a disabled condition, she then applied herself to securing it with the chain, which was not in good action either, and said would we go upstairs? We went upstairs to the first floor, still seeing no other furniture than the dirty footprints. Mr. Jarndyce without further ceremony entered a room there, and we followed. It was dingy enough and not at all clean, but furnished with an odd kind of shabby luxury, with a large footstool, a sofa, and plenty of cushions, an easy-chair, and plenty of pillows, a piano, books, drawing materials, music, newspapers, and a few sketches and pictures. A broken pane of glass in one of the dirty windows was papered and wafered over, but there was a little plate of hothouse nectarines on the table, and there was another of grapes, and another of sponge-cakes, and there was a bottle of light wine. Mr. Skimpole himself reclined upon the sofa in a dressing-gown, drinking some fragrant coffee from an old china cup--it was then about mid-day--and looking at a collection of wallflowers in the balcony. He was not in the least disconcerted by our appearance, but rose and received us in his usual airy manner. "Here I am, you see!" he said when we were seated, not without some little difficulty, the greater part of the chairs being broken. "Here I am! This is my frugal breakfast. Some men want legs of beef and mutton for breakfast; I don't. Give me my peach, my cup of coffee, and my claret; I am content. I don't want them for themselves, but they remind me of the sun. There's nothing solar about legs of beef and mutton. Mere animal satisfaction!" "This is our friend's consulting-room (or would be, if he ever prescribed), his sanctum, his studio," said my guardian to us. "Yes," said Mr. Skimpole, turning his bright face about, "this is the bird's cage. This is where the bird lives and sings. They pluck his feathers now and then and clip his wings, but he sings, he sings!" He handed us the grapes, repeating in his radiant way, "He sings! Not an ambitious note, but still he sings." "These are very fine," said my guardian. "A present?" "No," he answered. "No! Some amiable gardener sells them. His man wanted to know, when he brought them last evening, whether he should wait for the money. 'Really, my friend,' I said, 'I think not--if your time is of any value to you.' I suppose it was, for he went away." My guardian looked at us with a smile, as though he asked us, "Is it possible to be worldly with this baby?" "This is a day," said Mr. Skimpole, gaily taking a little claret in a tumbler, "that will ever be remembered here. We shall call it Saint Clare and Saint Summerson day. You must see my daughters. I have a blue-eyed daughter who is my Beauty daughter, I have a Sentiment daughter, and I have a Comedy daughter. You must see them all. They'll be enchanted." He was going to summon them when my guardian interposed and asked him to pause a moment, as he wished to say a word to him first. "My dear Jarndyce," he cheerfully replied, going back to his sofa, "as many moments as you please. Time is no object here. We never know what o'clock it is, and we never care. Not the way to get on in life, you'll tell me? Certainly. But we DON'T get on in life. We don't pretend to do it." My guardian looked at us again, plainly saying, "You hear him?" "Now, Harold," he began, "the word I have to say relates to Rick." "The dearest friend I have!" returned Mr. Skimpole cordially. "I suppose he ought not to be my dearest friend, as he is not on terms with you. But he is, I can't help it; he is full of youthful poetry, and I love him. If you don't like it, I can't help it. I love him." The engaging frankness with which he made this declaration really had a disinterested appearance and captivated my guardian, if not, for the moment, Ada too. "You are welcome to love him as much as you like," returned Mr. Jarndyce, "but we must save his pocket, Harold." "Oh!" said Mr. Skimpole. "His pocket? Now you are coming to what I don't understand." Taking a little more claret and dipping one of the cakes in it, he shook his head and smiled at Ada and me with an ingenuous foreboding that he never could be made to understand. "If you go with him here or there," said my guardian plainly, "you must not let him pay for both." "My dear Jarndyce," returned Mr. Skimpole, his genial face irradiated by the comicality of this idea, "what am I to do? If he takes me anywhere, I must go. And how can I pay? I never have any money. If I had any money, I don't know anything about it. Suppose I say to a man, how much? Suppose the man says to me seven and sixpence? I know nothing about seven and sixpence. It is impossible for me to pursue the subject with any consideration for the man. I don't go about asking busy people what seven and sixpence is in Moorish--which I don't understand. Why should I go about asking them what seven and sixpence is in Money--which I don't understand?" "Well," said my guardian, by no means displeased with this artless reply, "if you come to any kind of journeying with Rick, you must borrow the money of me (never breathing the least allusion to that circumstance), and leave the calculation to him." "My dear Jarndyce," returned Mr. Skimpole, "I will do anything to give you pleasure, but it seems an idle form--a superstition. Besides, I give you my word, Miss Clare and my dear Miss Summerson, I thought Mr. Carstone was immensely rich. I thought he had only to make over something, or to sign a bond, or a draft, or a cheque, or a bill, or to put something on a file somewhere, to bring down a shower of money." "Indeed it is not so, sir," said Ada. "He is poor." "No, really?" returned Mr. Skimpole with his bright smile. "You surprise me. "And not being the richer for trusting in a rotten reed," said my guardian, laying his hand emphatically on the sleeve of Mr. Skimpole's dressing-gown, "be you very careful not to encourage him in that reliance, Harold." "My dear good friend," returned Mr. Skimpole, "and my dear Miss Simmerson, and my dear Miss Clare, how can I do that? It's business, and I don't know business. It is he who encourages me. He emerges from great feats of business, presents the brightest prospects before me as their result, and calls upon me to admire them. I do admire them--as bright prospects. But I know no more about them, and I tell him so." The helpless kind of candour with which he presented this before us, the light-hearted manner in which he was amused by his innocence, the fantastic way in which he took himself under his own protection and argued about that curious person, combined with the delightful ease of everything he said exactly to make out my guardian's case. The more I saw of him, the more unlikely it seemed to me, when he was present, that he could design, conceal, or influence anything; and yet the less likely that appeared when he was not present, and the less agreeable it was to think of his having anything to do with any one for whom I cared. Hearing that his examination (as he called it) was now over, Mr. Skimpole left the room with a radiant face to fetch his daughters (his sons had run away at various times), leaving my guardian quite delighted by the manner in which he had vindicated his childish character. He soon came back, bringing with him the three young ladies and Mrs. Skimpole, who had once been a beauty but was now a delicate high-nosed invalid suffering under a complication of disorders. "This," said Mr. Skimpole, "is my Beauty daughter, Arethusa--plays and sings odds and ends like her father. This is my Sentiment daughter, Laura--plays a little but don't sing. This is my Comedy daughter, Kitty--sings a little but don't play. We all draw a little and compose a little, and none of us have any idea of time or money." Mrs. Skimpole sighed, I thought, as if she would have been glad to strike out this item in the family attainments. I also thought that she rather impressed her sigh upon my guardian and that she took every opportunity of throwing in another. "It is pleasant," said Mr. Skimpole, turning his sprightly eyes from one to the other of us, "and it is whimsically interesting to trace peculiarities in families. In this family we are all children, and I am the youngest." The daughters, who appeared to be very fond of him, were amused by this droll fact, particularly the Comedy daughter. "My dears, it is true," said Mr. Skimpole, "is it not? So it is, and so it must be, because like the dogs in the hymn, 'it is our nature to.' Now, here is Miss Summerson with a fine administrative capacity and a knowledge of details perfectly surprising. It will sound very strange in Miss Summerson's ears, I dare say, that we know nothing about chops in this house. But we don't, not the least. We can't cook anything whatever. A needle and thread we don't know how to use. We admire the people who possess the practical wisdom we want, but we don't quarrel with them. Then why should they quarrel with us? Live and let live, we say to them. Live upon your practical wisdom, and let us live upon you!" He laughed, but as usual seemed quite candid and really to mean what he said. "We have sympathy, my roses," said Mr. Skimpole, "sympathy for everything. Have we not?" "Oh, yes, papa!" cried the three daughters. "In fact, that is our family department," said Mr. Skimpole, "in this hurly-burly of life. We are capable of looking on and of being interested, and we DO look on, and we ARE interested. What more can we do? Here is my Beauty daughter, married these three years. Now I dare say her marrying another child, and having two more, was all wrong in point of political economy, but it was very agreeable. We had our little festivities on those occasions and exchanged social ideas. She brought her young husband home one day, and they and their young fledglings have their nest upstairs. I dare say at some time or other Sentiment and Comedy will bring THEIR husbands home and have THEIR nests upstairs too. So we get on, we don't know how, but somehow." She looked very young indeed to be the mother of two children, and I could not help pitying both her and them. It was evident that the three daughters had grown up as they could and had had just as little haphazard instruction as qualified them to be their father's playthings in his idlest hours. His pictorial tastes were consulted, I observed, in their respective styles of wearing their hair, the Beauty daughter being in the classic manner, the Sentiment daughter luxuriant and flowing, and the Comedy daughter in the arch style, with a good deal of sprightly forehead, and vivacious little curls dotted about the corners of her eyes. They were dressed to correspond, though in a most untidy and negligent way. Ada and I conversed with these young ladies and found them wonderfully like their father. In the meanwhile Mr. Jarndyce (who had been rubbing his head to a great extent, and hinted at a change in the wind) talked with Mrs. Skimpole in a corner, where we could not help hearing the chink of money. Mr. Skimpole had previously volunteered to go home with us and had withdrawn to dress himself for the purpose. "My roses," he said when he came back, "take care of mama. She is poorly to-day. By going home with Mr. Jarndyce for a day or two, I shall hear the larks sing and preserve my amiability. It has been tried, you know, and would be tried again if I remained at home." "That bad man!" said the Comedy daughter. "At the very time when he knew papa was lying ill by his wallflowers, looking at the blue sky," Laura complained. "And when the smell of hay was in the air!" said Arethusa. "It showed a want of poetry in the man," Mr. Skimpole assented, but with perfect good humour. "It was coarse. There was an absence of the finer touches of humanity in it! My daughters have taken great offence," he explained to us, "at an honest man--" "Not honest, papa. Impossible!" they all three protested. "At a rough kind of fellow--a sort of human hedgehog rolled up," said Mr. Skimpole, "who is a baker in this neighbourhood and from whom we borrowed a couple of arm-chairs. We wanted a couple of arm-chairs, and we hadn't got them, and therefore of course we looked to a man who HAD got them, to lend them. Well! This morose person lent them, and we wore them out. When they were worn out, he wanted them back. He had them back. He was contented, you will say. Not at all. He objected to their being worn. I reasoned with him, and pointed out his mistake. I said, 'Can you, at your time of life, be so headstrong, my friend, as to persist that an arm-chair is a thing to put upon a shelf and look at? That it is an object to contemplate, to survey from a distance, to consider from a point of sight? Don't you KNOW that these arm-chairs were borrowed to be sat upon?' He was unreasonable and unpersuadable and used intemperate language. Being as patient as I am at this minute, I addressed another appeal to him. I said, 'Now, my good man, however our business capacities may vary, we are all children of one great mother, Nature. On this blooming summer morning here you see me' (I was on the sofa) 'with flowers before me, fruit upon the table, the cloudless sky above me, the air full of fragrance, contemplating Nature. I entreat you, by our common brotherhood, not to interpose between me and a subject so sublime, the absurd figure of an angry baker!' But he did," said Mr. Skimpole, raising his laughing eyes in playful astonishment; "he did interpose that ridiculous figure, and he does, and he will again. And therefore I am very glad to get out of his way and to go home with my friend Jarndyce." It seemed to escape his consideration that Mrs. Skimpole and the daughters remained behind to encounter the baker, but this was so old a story to all of them that it had become a matter of course. He took leave of his family with a tenderness as airy and graceful as any other aspect in which he showed himself and rode away with us in perfect harmony of mind. We had an opportunity of seeing through some open doors, as we went downstairs, that his own apartment was a palace to the rest of the house. I could have no anticipation, and I had none, that something very startling to me at the moment, and ever memorable to me in what ensued from it, was to happen before this day was out. Our guest was in such spirits on the way home that I could do nothing but listen to him and wonder at him; nor was I alone in this, for Ada yielded to the same fascination. As to my guardian, the wind, which had threatened to become fixed in the east when we left Somers Town, veered completely round before we were a couple of miles from it. Whether of questionable childishness or not in any other matters, Mr. Skimpole had a child's enjoyment of change and bright weather. In no way wearied by his sallies on the road, he was in the drawing-room before any of us; and I heard him at the piano while I was yet looking after my housekeeping, singing refrains of barcaroles and drinking songs, Italian and German, by the score. We were all assembled shortly before dinner, and he was still at the piano idly picking out in his luxurious way little strains of music, and talking between whiles of finishing some sketches of the ruined old Verulam wall to-morrow, which he had begun a year or two ago and had got tired of, when a card was brought in and my guardian read aloud in a surprised voice, "Sir Leicester Dedlock!" The visitor was in the room while it was yet turning round with me and before I had the power to stir. If I had had it, I should have hurried away. I had not even the presence of mind, in my giddiness, to retire to Ada in the window, or to see the window, or to know where it was. I heard my name and found that my guardian was presenting me before I could move to a chair. "Pray be seated, Sir Leicester." "Mr. Jarndyce," said Sir Leicester in reply as he bowed and seated himself, "I do myself the honour of calling here--" "You do ME the honour, Sir Leicester." "Thank you--of calling here on my road from Lincolnshire to express my regret that any cause of complaint, however strong, that I may have against a gentleman who--who is known to you and has been your host, and to whom therefore I will make no farther reference, should have prevented you, still more ladies under your escort and charge, from seeing whatever little there may be to gratify a polite and refined taste at my house, Chesney Wold." "You are exceedingly obliging, Sir Leicester, and on behalf of those ladies (who are present) and for myself, I thank you very much." "It is possible, Mr. Jarndyce, that the gentleman to whom, for the reasons I have mentioned, I refrain from making further allusion--it is possible, Mr. Jarndyce, that that gentleman may have done me the honour so far to misapprehend my character as to induce you to believe that you would not have been received by my local establishment in Lincolnshire with that urbanity, that courtesy, which its members are instructed to show to all ladies and gentlemen who present themselves at that house. I merely beg to observe, sir, that the fact is the reverse." My guardian delicately dismissed this remark without making any verbal answer. "It has given me pain, Mr. Jarndyce," Sir Leicester weightily proceeded. "I assure you, sir, it has given--me--pain--to learn from the housekeeper at Chesney Wold that a gentleman who was in your company in that part of the county, and who would appear to possess a cultivated taste for the fine arts, was likewise deterred by some such cause from examining the family pictures with that leisure, that attention, that care, which he might have desired to bestow upon them and which some of them might possibly have repaid." Here he produced a card and read, with much gravity and a little trouble, through his eye-glass, "Mr. Hirrold--Herald--Harold--Skampling--Skumpling--I beg your pardon--Skimpole." "This is Mr. Harold Skimpole," said my guardian, evidently surprised. "Oh!" exclaimed Sir Leicester, "I am happy to meet Mr. Skimpole and to have the opportunity of tendering my personal regrets. I hope, sir, that when you again find yourself in my part of the county, you will be under no similar sense of restraint." "You are very obliging, Sir Leicester Dedlock. So encouraged, I shall certainly give myself the pleasure and advantage of another visit to your beautiful house. The owners of such places as Chesney Wold," said Mr. Skimpole with his usual happy and easy air, "are public benefactors. They are good enough to maintain a number of delightful objects for the admiration and pleasure of us poor men; and not to reap all the admiration and pleasure that they yield is to be ungrateful to our benefactors." Sir Leicester seemed to approve of this sentiment highly. "An artist, sir?" "No," returned Mr. Skimpole. "A perfectly idle man. A mere amateur." Sir Leicester seemed to approve of this even more. He hoped he might have the good fortune to be at Chesney Wold when Mr. Skimpole next came down into Lincolnshire. Mr. Skimpole professed himself much flattered and honoured. "Mr. Skimpole mentioned," pursued Sir Leicester, addressing himself again to my guardian, "mentioned to the housekeeper, who, as he may have observed, is an old and attached retainer of the family--" ("That is, when I walked through the house the other day, on the occasion of my going down to visit Miss Summerson and Miss Clare," Mr. Skimpole airily explained to us.) "--That the friend with whom he had formerly been staying there was Mr. Jarndyce." Sir Leicester bowed to the bearer of that name. "And hence I became aware of the circumstance for which I have professed my regret. That this should have occurred to any gentleman, Mr. Jarndyce, but especially a gentleman formerly known to Lady Dedlock, and indeed claiming some distant connexion with her, and for whom (as I learn from my Lady herself) she entertains a high respect, does, I assure you, give--me--pain." "Pray say no more about it, Sir Leicester," returned my guardian. "I am very sensible, as I am sure we all are, of your consideration. Indeed the mistake was mine, and I ought to apologize for it." I had not once looked up. I had not seen the visitor and had not even appeared to myself to hear the conversation. It surprises me to find that I can recall it, for it seemed to make no impression on me as it passed. I heard them speaking, but my mind was so confused and my instinctive avoidance of this gentleman made his presence so distressing to me that I thought I understood nothing, through the rushing in my head and the beating of my heart. "I mentioned the subject to Lady Dedlock," said Sir Leicester, rising, "and my Lady informed me that she had had the pleasure of exchanging a few words with Mr. Jarndyce and his wards on the occasion of an accidental meeting during their sojourn in the vicinity. Permit me, Mr. Jarndyce, to repeat to yourself, and to these ladies, the assurance I have already tendered to Mr. Skimpole. Circumstances undoubtedly prevent my saying that it would afford me any gratification to hear that Mr. Boythorn had favoured my house with his presence, but those circumstances are confined to that gentleman himself and do not extend beyond him." "You know my old opinion of him," said Mr. Skimpole, lightly appealing to us. "An amiable bull who is determined to make every colour scarlet!" Sir Leicester Dedlock coughed as if he could not possibly hear another word in reference to such an individual and took his leave with great ceremony and politeness. I got to my own room with all possible speed and remained there until I had recovered my self-command. It had been very much disturbed, but I was thankful to find when I went downstairs again that they only rallied me for having been shy and mute before the great Lincolnshire baronet. By that time I had made up my mind that the period was come when I must tell my guardian what I knew. The possibility of my being brought into contact with my mother, of my being taken to her house, even of Mr. Skimpole's, however distantly associated with me, receiving kindnesses and obligations from her husband, was so painful that I felt I could no longer guide myself without his assistance. When we had retired for the night, and Ada and I had had our usual talk in our pretty room, I went out at my door again and sought my guardian among his books. I knew he always read at that hour, and as I drew near I saw the light shining out into the passage from his reading-lamp. "May I come in, guardian?" "Surely, little woman. What's the matter?" "Nothing is the matter. I thought I would like to take this quiet time of saying a word to you about myself." He put a chair for me, shut his book, and put it by, and turned his kind attentive face towards me. I could not help observing that it wore that curious expression I had observed in it once before--on that night when he had said that he was in no trouble which I could readily understand. "What concerns you, my dear Esther," said he, "concerns us all. You cannot be more ready to speak than I am to hear." "I know that, guardian. But I have such need of your advice and support. Oh! You don't know how much need I have to-night." He looked unprepared for my being so earnest, and even a little alarmed. "Or how anxious I have been to speak to you," said I, "ever since the visitor was here to-day." "The visitor, my dear! Sir Leicester Dedlock?" "Yes." He folded his arms and sat looking at me with an air of the profoundest astonishment, awaiting what I should say next. I did not know how to prepare him. "Why, Esther," said he, breaking into a smile, "our visitor and you are the two last persons on earth I should have thought of connecting together!" "Oh, yes, guardian, I know it. And I too, but a little while ago." The smile passed from his face, and he became graver than before. He crossed to the door to see that it was shut (but I had seen to that) and resumed his seat before me. "Guardian," said I, "do you remember, when we were overtaken by the thunder-storm, Lady Dedlock's speaking to you of her sister?" "Of course. Of course I do." "And reminding you that she and her sister had differed, had gone their several ways?" "Of course." "Why did they separate, guardian?" His face quite altered as he looked at me. "My child, what questions are these! I never knew. No one but themselves ever did know, I believe. Who could tell what the secrets of those two handsome and proud women were! You have seen Lady Dedlock. If you had ever seen her sister, you would know her to have been as resolute and haughty as she." "Oh, guardian, I have seen her many and many a time!" "Seen her?" He paused a little, biting his lip. "Then, Esther, when you spoke to me long ago of Boythorn, and when I told you that he was all but married once, and that the lady did not die, but died to him, and that that time had had its influence on his later life--did you know it all, and know who the lady was?" "No, guardian," I returned, fearful of the light that dimly broke upon me. "Nor do I know yet." "Lady Dedlock's sister." "And why," I could scarcely ask him, "why, guardian, pray tell me why were THEY parted?" "It was her act, and she kept its motives in her inflexible heart. He afterwards did conjecture (but it was mere conjecture) that some injury which her haughty spirit had received in her cause of quarrel with her sister had wounded her beyond all reason, but she wrote him that from the date of that letter she died to him--as in literal truth she did--and that the resolution was exacted from her by her knowledge of his proud temper and his strained sense of honour, which were both her nature too. In consideration for those master points in him, and even in consideration for them in herself, she made the sacrifice, she said, and would live in it and die in it. She did both, I fear; certainly he never saw her, never heard of her from that hour. Nor did any one." "Oh, guardian, what have I done!" I cried, giving way to my grief; "what sorrow have I innocently caused!" "You caused, Esther?" "Yes, guardian. Innocently, but most surely. That secluded sister is my first remembrance." "No, no!" he cried, starting. "Yes, guardian, yes! And HER sister is my mother!" I would have told him all my mother's letter, but he would not hear it then. He spoke so tenderly and wisely to me, and he put so plainly before me all I had myself imperfectly thought and hoped in my better state of mind, that, penetrated as I had been with fervent gratitude towards him through so many years, I believed I had never loved him so dearly, never thanked him in my heart so fully, as I did that night. And when he had taken me to my room and kissed me at the door, and when at last I lay down to sleep, my thought was how could I ever be busy enough, how could I ever be good enough, how in my little way could I ever hope to be forgetful enough of myself, devoted enough to him, and useful enough to others, to show him how I blessed and honoured him. CHAPTER XLIV The Letter and the Answer My guardian called me into his room next morning, and then I told him what had been left untold on the previous night. There was nothing to be done, he said, but to keep the secret and to avoid another such encounter as that of yesterday. He understood my feeling and entirely shared it. He charged himself even with restraining Mr. Skimpole from improving his opportunity. One person whom he need not name to me, it was not now possible for him to advise or help. He wished it were, but no such thing could be. If her mistrust of the lawyer whom she had mentioned were well-founded, which he scarcely doubted, he dreaded discovery. He knew something of him, both by sight and by reputation, and it was certain that he was a dangerous man. Whatever happened, he repeatedly impressed upon me with anxious affection and kindness, I was as innocent of as himself and as unable to influence. "Nor do I understand," said he, "that any doubts tend towards you, my dear. Much suspicion may exist without that connexion." "With the lawyer," I returned. "But two other persons have come into my mind since I have been anxious. Then I told him all about Mr. Guppy, who I feared might have had his vague surmises when I little understood his meaning, but in whose silence after our last interview I expressed perfect confidence. "Well," said my guardian. "Then we may dismiss him for the present. Who is the other?" I called to his recollection the French maid and the eager offer of herself she had made to me. "Ha!" he returned thoughtfully. "That is a more alarming person than the clerk. But after all, my dear, it was but seeking for a new service. She had seen you and Ada a little while before, and it was natural that you should come into her head. She merely proposed herself for your maid, you know. She did nothing more." "Her manner was strange," said I. "Yes, and her manner was strange when she took her shoes off and showed that cool relish for a walk that might have ended in her death-bed," said my guardian. "It would be useless self-distress and torment to reckon up such chances and possibilities. There are very few harmless circumstances that would not seem full of perilous meaning, so considered. Be hopeful, little woman. You can be nothing better than yourself; be that, through this knowledge, as you were before you had it. It is the best you can do for everybody's sake. I, sharing the secret with you--" "And lightening it, guardian, so much," said I. "--will be attentive to what passes in that family, so far as I can observe it from my distance. And if the time should come when I can stretch out a hand to render the least service to one whom it is better not to name even here, I will not fail to do it for her dear daughter's sake." I thanked him with my whole heart. What could I ever do but thank him! I was going out at the door when he asked me to stay a moment. Quickly turning round, I saw that same expression on his face again; and all at once, I don't know how, it flashed upon me as a new and far-off possibility that I understood it. "My dear Esther," said my guardian, "I have long had something in my thoughts that I have wished to say to you." "Indeed?" "I have had some difficulty in approaching it, and I still have. I should wish it to be so deliberately said, and so deliberately considered. Would you object to my writing it?" "Dear guardian, how could I object to your writing anything for ME to read?" "Then see, my love," said he with his cheery smile, "am I at this moment quite as plain and easy--do I seem as open, as honest and old-fashioned--as I am at any time?" I answered in all earnestness, "Quite." With the strictest truth, for his momentary hesitation was gone (it had not lasted a minute), and his fine, sensible, cordial, sterling manner was restored. "Do I look as if I suppressed anything, meant anything but what I said, had any reservation at all, no matter what?" said he with his bright clear eyes on mine. I answered, most assuredly he did not. "Can you fully trust me, and thoroughly rely on what I profess, Esther?" "Most thoroughly," said I with my whole heart. "My dear girl," returned my guardian, "give me your hand." He took it in his, holding me lightly with his arm, and looking down into my face with the same genuine freshness and faithfulness of manner--the old protecting manner which had made that house my home in a moment--said, "You have wrought changes in me, little woman, since the winter day in the stage-coach. First and last you have done me a world of good since that time." "Ah, guardian, what have you done for me since that time!" "But," said he, "that is not to be remembered now." "It never can be forgotten." "Yes, Esther," said he with a gentle seriousness, "it is to be forgotten now, to be forgotten for a while. You are only to remember now that nothing can change me as you know me. Can you feel quite assured of that, my dear?" "I can, and I do," I said. "That's much," he answered. "That's everything. But I must not take that at a word. I will not write this something in my thoughts until you have quite resolved within yourself that nothing can change me as you know me. If you doubt that in the least degree, I will never write it. If you are sure of that, on good consideration, send Charley to me this night week--'for the letter.' But if you are not quite certain, never send. Mind, I trust to your truth, in this thing as in everything. If you are not quite certain on that one point, never send!" "Guardian," said I, "I am already certain, I can no more be changed in that conviction than you can be changed towards me. I shall send Charley for the letter." He shook my hand and said no more. Nor was any more said in reference to this conversation, either by him or me, through the whole week. When the appointed night came, I said to Charley as soon as I was alone, "Go and knock at Mr. Jarndyce's door, Charley, and say you have come from me--'for the letter.'" Charley went up the stairs, and down the stairs, and along the passages--the zig-zag way about the old-fashioned house seemed very long in my listening ears that night--and so came back, along the passages, and down the stairs, and up the stairs, and brought the letter. "Lay it on the table, Charley," said I. So Charley laid it on the table and went to bed, and I sat looking at it without taking it up, thinking of many things. I began with my overshadowed childhood, and passed through those timid days to the heavy time when my aunt lay dead, with her resolute face so cold and set, and when I was more solitary with Mrs. Rachael than if I had had no one in the world to speak to or to look at. I passed to the altered days when I was so blest as to find friends in all around me, and to be beloved. I came to the time when I first saw my dear girl and was received into that sisterly affection which was the grace and beauty of my life. I recalled the first bright gleam of welcome which had shone out of those very windows upon our expectant faces on that cold bright night, and which had never paled. I lived my happy life there over again, I went through my illness and recovery, I thought of myself so altered and of those around me so unchanged; and all this happiness shone like a light from one central figure, represented before me by the letter on the table. I opened it and read it. It was so impressive in its love for me, and in the unselfish caution it gave me, and the consideration it showed for me in every word, that my eyes were too often blinded to read much at a time. But I read it through three times before I laid it down. I had thought beforehand that I knew its purport, and I did. It asked me, would I be the mistress of Bleak House. It was not a love letter, though it expressed so much love, but was written just as he would at any time have spoken to me. I saw his face, and heard his voice, and felt the influence of his kind protecting manner in every line. It addressed me as if our places were reversed, as if all the good deeds had been mine and all the feelings they had awakened his. It dwelt on my being young, and he past the prime of life; on his having attained a ripe age, while I was a child; on his writing to me with a silvered head, and knowing all this so well as to set it in full before me for mature deliberation. It told me that I would gain nothing by such a marriage and lose nothing by rejecting it, for no new relation could enhance the tenderness in which he held me, and whatever my decision was, he was certain it would be right. But he had considered this step anew since our late confidence and had decided on taking it, if it only served to show me through one poor instance that the whole world would readily unite to falsify the stern prediction of my childhood. I was the last to know what happiness I could bestow upon him, but of that he said no more, for I was always to remember that I owed him nothing and that he was my debtor, and for very much. He had often thought of our future, and foreseeing that the time must come, and fearing that it might come soon, when Ada (now very nearly of age) would leave us, and when our present mode of life must be broken up, had become accustomed to reflect on this proposal. Thus he made it. If I felt that I could ever give him the best right he could have to be my protector, and if I felt that I could happily and justly become the dear companion of his remaining life, superior to all lighter chances and changes than death, even then he could not have me bind myself irrevocably while this letter was yet so new to me, but even then I must have ample time for reconsideration. In that case, or in the opposite case, let him be unchanged in his old relation, in his old manner, in the old name by which I called him. And as to his bright Dame Durden and little housekeeper, she would ever be the same, he knew. This was the substance of the letter, written throughout with a justice and a dignity as if he were indeed my responsible guardian impartially representing the proposal of a friend against whom in his integrity he stated the full case. But he did not hint to me that when I had been better looking he had had this same proceeding in his thoughts and had refrained from it. That when my old face was gone from me, and I had no attractions, he could love me just as well as in my fairer days. That the discovery of my birth gave him no shock. That his generosity rose above my disfigurement and my inheritance of shame. That the more I stood in need of such fidelity, the more firmly I might trust in him to the last. But I knew it, I knew it well now. It came upon me as the close of the benignant history I had been pursuing, and I felt that I had but one thing to do. To devote my life to his happiness was to thank him poorly, and what had I wished for the other night but some new means of thanking him? Still I cried very much, not only in the fullness of my heart after reading the letter, not only in the strangeness of the prospect--for it was strange though I had expected the contents--but as if something for which there was no name or distinct idea were indefinitely lost to me. I was very happy, very thankful, very hopeful; but I cried very much. By and by I went to my old glass. My eyes were red and swollen, and I said, "Oh, Esther, Esther, can that be you!" I am afraid the face in the glass was going to cry again at this reproach, but I held up my finger at it, and it stopped. "That is more like the composed look you comforted me with, my dear, when you showed me such a change!" said I, beginning to let down my hair. "When you are mistress of Bleak House, you are to be as cheerful as a bird. In fact, you are always to be cheerful; so let us begin for once and for all." I went on with my hair now, quite comfortably. I sobbed a little still, but that was because I had been crying, not because I was crying then. "And so Esther, my dear, you are happy for life. Happy with your best friends, happy in your old home, happy in the power of doing a great deal of good, and happy in the undeserved love of the best of men." I thought, all at once, if my guardian had married some one else, how should I have felt, and what should I have done! That would have been a change indeed. It presented my life in such a new and blank form that I rang my housekeeping keys and gave them a kiss before I laid them down in their basket again. Then I went on to think, as I dressed my hair before the glass, how often had I considered within myself that the deep traces of my illness and the circumstances of my birth were only new reasons why I should be busy, busy, busy--useful, amiable, serviceable, in all honest, unpretending ways. This was a good time, to be sure, to sit down morbidly and cry! As to its seeming at all strange to me at first (if that were any excuse for crying, which it was not) that I was one day to be the mistress of Bleak House, why should it seem strange? Other people had thought of such things, if I had not. "Don't you remember, my plain dear," I asked myself, looking at the glass, "what Mrs. Woodcourt said before those scars were there about your marrying--" Perhaps the name brought them to my remembrance. The dried remains of the flowers. It would be better not to keep them now. They had only been preserved in memory of something wholly past and gone, but it would be better not to keep them now. They were in a book, and it happened to be in the next room--our sitting-room, dividing Ada's chamber from mine. I took a candle and went softly in to fetch it from its shelf. After I had it in my hand, I saw my beautiful darling, through the open door, lying asleep, and I stole in to kiss her. It was weak in me, I know, and I could have no reason for crying; but I dropped a tear upon her dear face, and another, and another. Weaker than that, I took the withered flowers out and put them for a moment to her lips. I thought about her love for Richard, though, indeed, the flowers had nothing to do with that. Then I took them into my own room and burned them at the candle, and they were dust in an instant. On entering the breakfast-room next morning, I found my guardian just as usual, quite as frank, as open, and free. There being not the least constraint in his manner, there was none (or I think there was none) in mine. I was with him several times in the course of the morning, in and out, when there was no one there, and I thought it not unlikely that he might speak to me about the letter, but he did not say a word. So, on the next morning, and the next, and for at least a week, over which time Mr. Skimpole prolonged his stay. I expected, every day, that my guardian might speak to me about the letter, but he never did. I thought then, growing uneasy, that I ought to write an answer. I tried over and over again in my own room at night, but I could not write an answer that at all began like a good answer, so I thought each night I would wait one more day. And I waited seven more days, and he never said a word. At last, Mr. Skimpole having departed, we three were one afternoon going out for a ride; and I, being dressed before Ada and going down, came upon my guardian, with his back towards me, standing at the drawing-room window looking out. He turned on my coming in and said, smiling, "Aye, it's you, little woman, is it?" and looked out again. I had made up my mind to speak to him now. In short, I had come down on purpose. "Guardian," I said, rather hesitating and trembling, "when would you like to have the answer to the letter Charley came for?" "When it's ready, my dear," he replied. "I think it is ready," said I. "Is Charley to bring it?" he asked pleasantly. "No. I have brought it myself, guardian," I returned. I put my two arms round his neck and kissed him, and he said was this the mistress of Bleak House, and I said yes; and it made no difference presently, and we all went out together, and I said nothing to my precious pet about it. CHAPTER XLV In Trust One morning when I had done jingling about with my baskets of keys, as my beauty and I were walking round and round the garden I happened to turn my eyes towards the house and saw a long thin shadow going in which looked like Mr. Vholes. Ada had been telling me only that morning of her hopes that Richard might exhaust his ardour in the Chancery suit by being so very earnest in it; and therefore, not to damp my dear girl's spirits, I said nothing about Mr. Vholes's shadow. Presently came Charley, lightly winding among the bushes and tripping along the paths, as rosy and pretty as one of Flora's attendants instead of my maid, saying, "Oh, if you please, miss, would you step and speak to Mr. Jarndyce!" It was one of Charley's peculiarities that whenever she was charged with a message she always began to deliver it as soon as she beheld, at any distance, the person for whom it was intended. Therefore I saw Charley asking me in her usual form of words to "step and speak" to Mr. Jarndyce long before I heard her. And when I did hear her, she had said it so often that she was out of breath. I told Ada I would make haste back and inquired of Charley as we went in whether there was not a gentleman with Mr. Jarndyce. To which Charley, whose grammar, I confess to my shame, never did any credit to my educational powers, replied, "Yes, miss. Him as come down in the country with Mr. Richard." A more complete contrast than my guardian and Mr. Vholes I suppose there could not be. I found them looking at one another across a table, the one so open and the other so close, the one so broad and upright and the other so narrow and stooping, the one giving out what he had to say in such a rich ringing voice and the other keeping it in in such a cold-blooded, gasping, fish-like manner that I thought I never had seen two people so unmatched. "You know Mr. Vholes, my dear," said my guardian. Not with the greatest urbanity, I must say. Mr. Vholes rose, gloved and buttoned up as usual, and seated himself again, just as he had seated himself beside Richard in the gig. Not having Richard to look at, he looked straight before him. "Mr. Vholes," said my guardian, eyeing his black figure as if he were a bird of ill omen, "has brought an ugly report of our most unfortunate Rick." Laying a marked emphasis on "most unfortunate" as if the words were rather descriptive of his connexion with Mr. Vholes. I sat down between them; Mr. Vholes remained immovable, except that he secretly picked at one of the red pimples on his yellow face with his black glove. "And as Rick and you are happily good friends, I should like to know," said my guardian, "what you think, my dear. Would you be so good as to--as to speak up, Mr. Vholes?" Doing anything but that, Mr. Vholes observed, "I have been saying that I have reason to know, Miss Summerson, as Mr. C.'s professional adviser, that Mr. C.'s circumstances are at the present moment in an embarrassed state. Not so much in point of amount as owing to the peculiar and pressing nature of liabilities Mr. C. has incurred and the means he has of liquidating or meeting the same. I have staved off many little matters for Mr. C., but there is a limit to staving off, and we have reached it. I have made some advances out of pocket to accommodate these unpleasantnesses, but I necessarily look to being repaid, for I do not pretend to be a man of capital, and I have a father to support in the Vale of Taunton, besides striving to realize some little independence for three dear girls at home. My apprehension is, Mr. C.'s circumstances being such, lest it should end in his obtaining leave to part with his commission, which at all events is desirable to be made known to his connexions." Mr. Vholes, who had looked at me while speaking, here emerged into the silence he could hardly be said to have broken, so stifled was his tone, and looked before him again. "Imagine the poor fellow without even his present resource," said my guardian to me. "Yet what can I do? You know him, Esther. He would never accept of help from me now. To offer it or hint at it would be to drive him to an extremity, if nothing else did." Mr. Vholes hereupon addressed me again. "What Mr. Jarndyce remarks, miss, is no doubt the case, and is the difficulty. I do not see that anything is to be done. I do not say that anything is to be done. Far from it. I merely come down here under the seal of confidence and mention it in order that everything may be openly carried on and that it may not be said afterwards that everything was not openly carried on. My wish is that everything should be openly carried on. I desire to leave a good name behind me. If I consulted merely my own interests with Mr. C., I should not be here. So insurmountable, as you must well know, would be his objections. This is not a professional attendance. This can he charged to nobody. I have no interest in it except as a member of society and a father--AND a son," said Mr. Vholes, who had nearly forgotten that point. It appeared to us that Mr. Vholes said neither more nor less than the truth in intimating that he sought to divide the responsibility, such as it was, of knowing Richard's situation. I could only suggest that I should go down to Deal, where Richard was then stationed, and see him, and try if it were possible to avert the worst. Without consulting Mr. Vholes on this point, I took my guardian aside to propose it, while Mr. Vholes gauntly stalked to the fire and warmed his funeral gloves. The fatigue of the journey formed an immediate objection on my guardian's part, but as I saw he had no other, and as I was only too happy to go, I got his consent. We had then merely to dispose of Mr. Vholes. "Well, sir," said Mr. Jarndyce, "Miss Summerson will communicate with Mr. Carstone, and you can only hope that his position may be yet retrievable. You will allow me to order you lunch after your journey, sir." "I thank you, Mr. Jarndyce," said Mr. Vholes, putting out his long black sleeve to check the ringing of the bell, "not any. I thank you, no, not a morsel. My digestion is much impaired, and I am but a poor knife and fork at any time. If I was to partake of solid food at this period of the day, I don't know what the consequences might be. Everything having been openly carried on, sir, I will now with your permission take my leave." "And I would that you could take your leave, and we could all take our leave, Mr. Vholes," returned my guardian bitterly, "of a cause you know of." Mr. Vholes, whose black dye was so deep from head to foot that it had quite steamed before the fire, diffusing a very unpleasant perfume, made a short one-sided inclination of his head from the neck and slowly shook it. "We whose ambition it is to be looked upon in the light of respectable practitioners, sir, can but put our shoulders to the wheel. We do it, sir. At least, I do it myself; and I wish to think well of my professional brethren, one and all. You are sensible of an obligation not to refer to me, miss, in communicating with Mr. C.?" I said I would be careful not to do it. "Just so, miss. Good morning. Mr. Jarndyce, good morning, sir." Mr. Vholes put his dead glove, which scarcely seemed to have any hand in it, on my fingers, and then on my guardian's fingers, and took his long thin shadow away. I thought of it on the outside of the coach, passing over all the sunny landscape between us and London, chilling the seed in the ground as it glided along. Of course it became necessary to tell Ada where I was going and why I was going, and of course she was anxious and distressed. But she was too true to Richard to say anything but words of pity and words of excuse, and in a more loving spirit still--my dear devoted girl!--she wrote him a long letter, of which I took charge. Charley was to be my travelling companion, though I am sure I wanted none and would willingly have left her at home. We all went to London that afternoon, and finding two places in the mail, secured them. At our usual bed-time, Charley and I were rolling away seaward with the Kentish letters. It was a night's journey in those coach times, but we had the mail to ourselves and did not find the night very tedious. It passed with me as I suppose it would with most people under such circumstances. At one while my journey looked hopeful, and at another hopeless. Now I thought I should do some good, and now I wondered how I could ever have supposed so. Now it seemed one of the most reasonable things in the world that I should have come, and now one of the most unreasonable. In what state I should find Richard, what I should say to him, and what he would say to me occupied my mind by turns with these two states of feeling; and the wheels seemed to play one tune (to which the burden of my guardian's letter set itself) over and over again all night. At last we came into the narrow streets of Deal, and very gloomy they were upon a raw misty morning. The long flat beach, with its little irregular houses, wooden and brick, and its litter of capstans, and great boats, and sheds, and bare upright poles with tackle and blocks, and loose gravelly waste places overgrown with grass and weeds, wore as dull an appearance as any place I ever saw. The sea was heaving under a thick white fog; and nothing else was moving but a few early ropemakers, who, with the yarn twisted round their bodies, looked as if, tired of their present state of existence, they were spinning themselves into cordage. But when we got into a warm room in an excellent hotel and sat down, comfortably washed and dressed, to an early breakfast (for it was too late to think of going to bed), Deal began to look more cheerful. Our little room was like a ship's cabin, and that delighted Charley very much. Then the fog began to rise like a curtain, and numbers of ships that we had had no idea were near appeared. I don't know how many sail the waiter told us were then lying in the downs. Some of these vessels were of grand size--one was a large Indiaman just come home; and when the sun shone through the clouds, making silvery pools in the dark sea, the way in which these ships brightened, and shadowed, and changed, amid a bustle of boats pulling off from the shore to them and from them to the shore, and a general life and motion in themselves and everything around them, was most beautiful. The large Indiaman was our great attraction because she had come into the downs in the night. She was surrounded by boats, and we said how glad the people on board of her must be to come ashore. Charley was curious, too, about the voyage, and about the heat in India, and the serpents and the tigers; and as she picked up such information much faster than grammar, I told her what I knew on those points. I told her, too, how people in such voyages were sometimes wrecked and cast on rocks, where they were saved by the intrepidity and humanity of one man. And Charley asking how that could be, I told her how we knew at home of such a case. I had thought of sending Richard a note saying I was there, but it seemed so much better to go to him without preparation. As he lived in barracks I was a little doubtful whether this was feasible, but we went out to reconnoitre. Peeping in at the gate of the barrack-yard, we found everything very quiet at that time in the morning, and I asked a sergeant standing on the guardhouse-steps where he lived. He sent a man before to show me, who went up some bare stairs, and knocked with his knuckles at a door, and left us. "Now then!" cried Richard from within. So I left Charley in the little passage, and going on to the half-open door, said, "Can I come in, Richard? It's only Dame Durden." He was writing at a table, with a great confusion of clothes, tin cases, books, boots, brushes, and portmanteaus strewn all about the floor. He was only half dressed--in plain clothes, I observed, not in uniform--and his hair was unbrushed, and he looked as wild as his room. All this I saw after he had heartily welcomed me and I was seated near him, for he started upon hearing my voice and caught me in his arms in a moment. Dear Richard! He was ever the same to me. Down to--ah, poor poor fellow!--to the end, he never received me but with something of his old merry boyish manner. "Good heaven, my dear little woman," said he, "how do you come here? Who could have thought of seeing you! Nothing the matter? Ada is well?" "Quite well. Lovelier than ever, Richard!" "Ah!" he said, leaning back in his chair. "My poor cousin! I was writing to you, Esther." So worn and haggard as he looked, even in the fullness of his handsome youth, leaning back in his chair and crushing the closely written sheet of paper in his hand! "Have you been at the trouble of writing all that, and am I not to read it after all?" I asked. "Oh, my dear," he returned with a hopeless gesture. "You may read it in the whole room. It is all over here." I mildly entreated him not to be despondent. I told him that I had heard by chance of his being in difficulty and had come to consult with him what could best be done. "Like you, Esther, but useless, and so NOT like you!" said he with a melancholy smile. "I am away on leave this day--should have been gone in another hour--and that is to smooth it over, for my selling out. Well! Let bygones be bygones. So this calling follows the rest. I only want to have been in the church to have made the round of all the professions." "Richard," I urged, "it is not so hopeless as that?" "Esther," he returned, "it is indeed. I am just so near disgrace as that those who are put in authority over me (as the catechism goes) would far rather be without me than with me. And they are right. Apart from debts and duns and all such drawbacks, I am not fit even for this employment. I have no care, no mind, no heart, no soul, but for one thing. Why, if this bubble hadn't broken now," he said, tearing the letter he had written into fragments and moodily casting them away, by driblets, "how could I have gone abroad? I must have been ordered abroad, but how could I have gone? How could I, with my experience of that thing, trust even Vholes unless I was at his back!" I suppose he knew by my face what I was about to say, but he caught the hand I had laid upon his arm and touched my own lips with it to prevent me from going on. "No, Dame Durden! Two subjects I forbid--must forbid. The first is John Jarndyce. The second, you know what. Call it madness, and I tell you I can't help it now, and can't be sane. But it is no such thing; it is the one object I have to pursue. It is a pity I ever was prevailed upon to turn out of my road for any other. It would be wisdom to abandon it now, after all the time, anxiety, and pains I have bestowed upon it! Oh, yes, true wisdom. It would be very agreeable, too, to some people; but I never will." He was in that mood in which I thought it best not to increase his determination (if anything could increase it) by opposing him. I took out Ada's letter and put it in his hand. "Am I to read it now?" he asked. As I told him yes, he laid it on the table, and resting his head upon his hand, began. He had not read far when he rested his head upon his two hands--to hide his face from me. In a little while he rose as if the light were bad and went to the window. He finished reading it there, with his back towards me, and after he had finished and had folded it up, stood there for some minutes with the letter in his hand. When he came back to his chair, I saw tears in his eyes. "Of course, Esther, you know what she says here?" He spoke in a softened voice and kissed the letter as he asked me. "Yes, Richard." "Offers me," he went on, tapping his foot upon the floor, "the little inheritance she is certain of so soon--just as little and as much as I have wasted--and begs and prays me to take it, set myself right with it, and remain in the service." "I know your welfare to be the dearest wish of her heart," said I. "And, oh, my dear Richard, Ada's is a noble heart." "I am sure it is. I--I wish I was dead!" He went back to the window, and laying his arm across it, leaned his head down on his arm. It greatly affected me to see him so, but I hoped he might become more yielding, and I remained silent. My experience was very limited; I was not at all prepared for his rousing himself out of this emotion to a new sense of injury. "And this is the heart that the same John Jarndyce, who is not otherwise to be mentioned between us, stepped in to estrange from me," said he indignantly. "And the dear girl makes me this generous offer from under the same John Jarndyce's roof, and with the same John Jarndyce's gracious consent and connivance, I dare say, as a new means of buying me off." "Richard!" I cried out, rising hastily. "I will not hear you say such shameful words!" I was very angry with him indeed, for the first time in my life, but it only lasted a moment. When I saw his worn young face looking at me as if he were sorry, I put my hand on his shoulder and said, "If you please, my dear Richard, do not speak in such a tone to me. Consider!" He blamed himself exceedingly and told me in the most generous manner that he had been very wrong and that he begged my pardon a thousand times. At that I laughed, but trembled a little too, for I was rather fluttered after being so fiery. "To accept this offer, my dear Esther," said he, sitting down beside me and resuming our conversation, "--once more, pray, pray forgive me; I am deeply grieved--to accept my dearest cousin's offer is, I need not say, impossible. Besides, I have letters and papers that I could show you which would convince you it is all over here. I have done with the red coat, believe me. But it is some satisfaction, in the midst of my troubles and perplexities, to know that I am pressing Ada's interests in pressing my own. Vholes has his shoulder to the wheel, and he cannot help urging it on as much for her as for me, thank God!" His sanguine hopes were rising within him and lighting up his features, but they made his face more sad to me than it had been before. "No, no!" cried Richard exultingly. "If every farthing of Ada's little fortune were mine, no part of it should be spent in retaining me in what I am not fit for, can take no interest in, and am weary of. It should be devoted to what promises a better return, and should be used where she has a larger stake. Don't be uneasy for me! I shall now have only one thing on my mind, and Vholes and I will work it. I shall not be without means. Free of my commission, I shall be able to compound with some small usurers who will hear of nothing but their bond now--Vholes says so. I should have a balance in my favour anyway, but that would swell it. Come, come! You shall carry a letter to Ada from me, Esther, and you must both of you be more hopeful of me and not believe that I am quite cast away just yet, my dear." I will not repeat what I said to Richard. I know it was tiresome, and nobody is to suppose for a moment that it was at all wise. It only came from my heart. He heard it patiently and feelingly, but I saw that on the two subjects he had reserved it was at present hopeless to make any representation to him. I saw too, and had experienced in this very interview, the sense of my guardian's remark that it was even more mischievous to use persuasion with him than to leave him as he was. Therefore I was driven at last to asking Richard if he would mind convincing me that it really was all over there, as he had said, and that it was not his mere impression. He showed me without hesitation a correspondence making it quite plain that his retirement was arranged. I found, from what he told me, that Mr. Vholes had copies of these papers and had been in consultation with him throughout. Beyond ascertaining this, and having been the bearer of Ada's letter, and being (as I was going to be) Richard's companion back to London, I had done no good by coming down. Admitting this to myself with a reluctant heart, I said I would return to the hotel and wait until he joined me there, so he threw a cloak over his shoulders and saw me to the gate, and Charley and I went back along the beach. There was a concourse of people in one spot, surrounding some naval officers who were landing from a boat, and pressing about them with unusual interest. I said to Charley this would be one of the great Indiaman's boats now, and we stopped to look. The gentlemen came slowly up from the waterside, speaking good-humouredly to each other and to the people around and glancing about them as if they were glad to be in England again. "Charley, Charley," said I, "come away!" And I hurried on so swiftly that my little maid was surprised. It was not until we were shut up in our cabin-room and I had had time to take breath that I began to think why I had made such haste. In one of the sunburnt faces I had recognized Mr. Allan Woodcourt, and I had been afraid of his recognizing me. I had been unwilling that he should see my altered looks. I had been taken by surprise, and my courage had quite failed me. But I knew this would not do, and I now said to myself, "My dear, there is no reason--there is and there can be no reason at all--why it should be worse for you now than it ever has been. What you were last month, you are to-day; you are no worse, you are no better. This is not your resolution; call it up, Esther, call it up!" I was in a great tremble--with running--and at first was quite unable to calm myself; but I got better, and I was very glad to know it. The party came to the hotel. I heard them speaking on the staircase. I was sure it was the same gentlemen because I knew their voices again--I mean I knew Mr. Woodcourt's. It would still have been a great relief to me to have gone away without making myself known, but I was determined not to do so. "No, my dear, no. No, no, no!" I untied my bonnet and put my veil half up--I think I mean half down, but it matters very little--and wrote on one of my cards that I happened to be there with Mr. Richard Carstone, and I sent it in to Mr. Woodcourt. He came immediately. I told him I was rejoiced to be by chance among the first to welcome him home to England. And I saw that he was very sorry for me. "You have been in shipwreck and peril since you left us, Mr. Woodcourt," said I, "but we can hardly call that a misfortune which enabled you to be so useful and so brave. We read of it with the truest interest. It first came to my knowledge through your old patient, poor Miss Flite, when I was recovering from my severe illness." "Ah! Little Miss Flite!" he said. "She lives the same life yet?" "Just the same." I was so comfortable with myself now as not to mind the veil and to be able to put it aside. "Her gratitude to you, Mr. Woodcourt, is delightful. She is a most affectionate creature, as I have reason to say." "You--you have found her so?" he returned. "I--I am glad of that." He was so very sorry for me that he could scarcely speak. "I assure you," said I, "that I was deeply touched by her sympathy and pleasure at the time I have referred to." "I was grieved to hear that you had been very ill." "I was very ill." "But you have quite recovered?" "I have quite recovered my health and my cheerfulness," said I. "You know how good my guardian is and what a happy life we lead, and I have everything to be thankful for and nothing in the world to desire." I felt as if he had greater commiseration for me than I had ever had for myself. It inspired me with new fortitude and new calmness to find that it was I who was under the necessity of reassuring him. I spoke to him of his voyage out and home, and of his future plans, and of his probable return to India. He said that was very doubtful. He had not found himself more favoured by fortune there than here. He had gone out a poor ship's surgeon and had come home nothing better. While we were talking, and when I was glad to believe that I had alleviated (if I may use such a term) the shock he had had in seeing me, Richard came in. He had heard downstairs who was with me, and they met with cordial pleasure. I saw that after their first greetings were over, and when they spoke of Richard's career, Mr. Woodcourt had a perception that all was not going well with him. He frequently glanced at his face as if there were something in it that gave him pain, and more than once he looked towards me as though he sought to ascertain whether I knew what the truth was. Yet Richard was in one of his sanguine states and in good spirits and was thoroughly pleased to see Mr. Woodcourt again, whom he had always liked. Richard proposed that we all should go to London together; but Mr. Woodcourt, having to remain by his ship a little longer, could not join us. He dined with us, however, at an early hour, and became so much more like what he used to be that I was still more at peace to think I had been able to soften his regrets. Yet his mind was not relieved of Richard. When the coach was almost ready and Richard ran down to look after his luggage, he spoke to me about him. I was not sure that I had a right to lay his whole story open, but I referred in a few words to his estrangement from Mr Jarndyce and to his being entangled in the ill-fated Chancery suit. Mr. Woodcourt listened with interest and expressed his regret. "I saw you observe him rather closely," said I, "Do you think him so changed?" "He is changed," he returned, shaking his head. I felt the blood rush into my face for the first time, but it was only an instantaneous emotion. I turned my head aside, and it was gone. "It is not," said Mr. Woodcourt, "his being so much younger or older, or thinner or fatter, or paler or ruddier, as there being upon his face such a singular expression. I never saw so remarkable a look in a young person. One cannot say that it is all anxiety or all weariness; yet it is both, and like ungrown despair." "You do not think he is ill?" said I. No. He looked robust in body. "That he cannot be at peace in mind, we have too much reason to know," I proceeded. "Mr. Woodcourt, you are going to London?" "To-morrow or the next day." "There is nothing Richard wants so much as a friend. He always liked you. Pray see him when you get there. Pray help him sometimes with your companionship if you can. You do not know of what service it might be. You cannot think how Ada, and Mr. Jarndyce, and even I--how we should all thank you, Mr. Woodcourt!" "Miss Summerson," he said, more moved than he had been from the first, "before heaven, I will be a true friend to him! I will accept him as a trust, and it shall be a sacred one!" "God bless you!" said I, with my eyes filling fast; but I thought they might, when it was not for myself. "Ada loves him--we all love him, but Ada loves him as we cannot. I will tell her what you say. Thank you, and God bless you, in her name!" Richard came back as we finished exchanging these hurried words and gave me his arm to take me to the coach. "Woodcourt," he said, unconscious with what application, "pray let us meet in London!" "Meet?" returned the other. "I have scarcely a friend there now but you. Where shall I find you?" "Why, I must get a lodging of some sort," said Richard, pondering. "Say at Vholes's, Symond's Inn." "Good! Without loss of time." They shook hands heartily. When I was seated in the coach and Richard was yet standing in the street, Mr. Woodcourt laid his friendly hand on Richard's shoulder and looked at me. I understood him and waved mine in thanks. And in his last look as we drove away, I saw that he was very sorry for me. I was glad to see it. I felt for my old self as the dead may feel if they ever revisit these scenes. I was glad to be tenderly remembered, to be gently pitied, not to be quite forgotten. CHAPTER XLVI Stop Him! Darkness rests upon Tom-All-Alone's. Dilating and dilating since the sun went down last night, it has gradually swelled until it fills every void in the place. For a time there were some dungeon lights burning, as the lamp of life hums in Tom-all-Alone's, heavily, heavily, in the nauseous air, and winking--as that lamp, too, winks in Tom-all-Alone's--at many horrible things. But they are blotted out. The moon has eyed Tom with a dull cold stare, as admitting some puny emulation of herself in his desert region unfit for life and blasted by volcanic fires; but she has passed on and is gone. The blackest nightmare in the infernal stables grazes on Tom-all-Alone's, and Tom is fast asleep. Much mighty speech-making there has been, both in and out of Parliament, concerning Tom, and much wrathful disputation how Tom shall be got right. Whether he shall be put into the main road by constables, or by beadles, or by bell-ringing, or by force of figures, or by correct principles of taste, or by high church, or by low church, or by no church; whether he shall be set to splitting trusses of polemical straws with the crooked knife of his mind or whether he shall be put to stone-breaking instead. In the midst of which dust and noise there is but one thing perfectly clear, to wit, that Tom only may and can, or shall and will, be reclaimed according to somebody's theory but nobody's practice. And in the hopeful meantime, Tom goes to perdition head foremost in his old determined spirit. But he has his revenge. Even the winds are his messengers, and they serve him in these hours of darkness. There is not a drop of Tom's corrupted blood but propagates infection and contagion somewhere. It shall pollute, this very night, the choice stream (in which chemists on analysis would find the genuine nobility) of a Norman house, and his Grace shall not be able to say nay to the infamous alliance. There is not an atom of Tom's slime, not a cubic inch of any pestilential gas in which he lives, not one obscenity or degradation about him, not an ignorance, not a wickedness, not a brutality of his committing, but shall work its retribution through every order of society up to the proudest of the proud and to the highest of the high. Verily, what with tainting, plundering, and spoiling, Tom has his revenge. It is a moot point whether Tom-all-Alone's be uglier by day or by night, but on the argument that the more that is seen of it the more shocking it must be, and that no part of it left to the imagination is at all likely to be made so bad as the reality, day carries it. The day begins to break now; and in truth it might be better for the national glory even that the sun should sometimes set upon the British dominions than that it should ever rise upon so vile a wonder as Tom. A brown sunburnt gentleman, who appears in some inaptitude for sleep to be wandering abroad rather than counting the hours on a restless pillow, strolls hitherward at this quiet time. Attracted by curiosity, he often pauses and looks about him, up and down the miserable by-ways. Nor is he merely curious, for in his bright dark eye there is compassionate interest; and as he looks here and there, he seems to understand such wretchedness and to have studied it before. On the banks of the stagnant channel of mud which is the main street of Tom-all-Alone's, nothing is to be seen but the crazy houses, shut up and silent. No waking creature save himself appears except in one direction, where he sees the solitary figure of a woman sitting on a door-step. He walks that way. Approaching, he observes that she has journeyed a long distance and is footsore and travel-stained. She sits on the door-step in the manner of one who is waiting, with her elbow on her knee and her head upon her hand. Beside her is a canvas bag, or bundle, she has carried. She is dozing probably, for she gives no heed to his steps as he comes toward her. The broken footway is so narrow that when Allan Woodcourt comes to where the woman sits, he has to turn into the road to pass her. Looking down at her face, his eye meets hers, and he stops. "What is the matter?" "Nothing, sir." "Can't you make them hear? Do you want to be let in?" "I'm waiting till they get up at another house--a lodging-house--not here," the woman patiently returns. "I'm waiting here because there will be sun here presently to warm me." "I am afraid you are tired. I am sorry to see you sitting in the street." "Thank you, sir. It don't matter." A habit in him of speaking to the poor and of avoiding patronage or condescension or childishness (which is the favourite device, many people deeming it quite a subtlety to talk to them like little spelling books) has put him on good terms with the woman easily. "Let me look at your forehead," he says, bending down. "I am a doctor. Don't be afraid. I wouldn't hurt you for the world." He knows that by touching her with his skilful and accustomed hand he can soothe her yet more readily. She makes a slight objection, saying, "It's nothing"; but he has scarcely laid his fingers on the wounded place when she lifts it up to the light. "Aye! A bad bruise, and the skin sadly broken. This must be very sore." "It do ache a little, sir," returns the woman with a started tear upon her cheek. "Let me try to make it more comfortable. My handkerchief won't hurt you." "Oh, dear no, sir, I'm sure of that!" He cleanses the injured place and dries it, and having carefully examined it and gently pressed it with the palm of his hand, takes a small case from his pocket, dresses it, and binds it up. While he is thus employed, he says, after laughing at his establishing a surgery in the street, "And so your husband is a brickmaker?" "How do you know that, sir?" asks the woman, astonished. "Why, I suppose so from the colour of the clay upon your bag and on your dress. And I know brickmakers go about working at piecework in different places. And I am sorry to say I have known them cruel to their wives too." The woman hastily lifts up her eyes as if she would deny that her injury is referable to such a cause. But feeling the hand upon her forehead, and seeing his busy and composed face, she quietly drops them again. "Where is he now?" asks the surgeon. "He got into trouble last night, sir; but he'll look for me at the lodging-house." "He will get into worse trouble if he often misuses his large and heavy hand as he has misused it here. But you forgive him, brutal as he is, and I say no more of him, except that I wish he deserved it. You have no young child?" The woman shakes her head. "One as I calls mine, sir, but it's Liz's." "Your own is dead. I see! Poor little thing!" By this time he has finished and is putting up his case. "I suppose you have some settled home. Is it far from here?" he asks, good-humouredly making light of what he has done as she gets up and curtsys. "It's a good two or three and twenty mile from here, sir. At Saint Albans. You know Saint Albans, sir? I thought you gave a start like, as if you did." "Yes, I know something of it. And now I will ask you a question in return. Have you money for your lodging?" "Yes, sir," she says, "really and truly." And she shows it. He tells her, in acknowledgment of her many subdued thanks, that she is very welcome, gives her good day, and walks away. Tom-all-Alone's is still asleep, and nothing is astir. Yes, something is! As he retraces his way to the point from which he descried the woman at a distance sitting on the step, he sees a ragged figure coming very cautiously along, crouching close to the soiled walls--which the wretchedest figure might as well avoid--and furtively thrusting a hand before it. It is the figure of a youth whose face is hollow and whose eyes have an emaciated glare. He is so intent on getting along unseen that even the apparition of a stranger in whole garments does not tempt him to look back. He shades his face with his ragged elbow as he passes on the other side of the way, and goes shrinking and creeping on with his anxious hand before him and his shapeless clothes hanging in shreds. Clothes made for what purpose, or of what material, it would be impossible to say. They look, in colour and in substance, like a bundle of rank leaves of swampy growth that rotted long ago. Allan Woodcourt pauses to look after him and note all this, with a shadowy belief that he has seen the boy before. He cannot recall how or where, but there is some association in his mind with such a form. He imagines that he must have seen it in some hospital or refuge, still, cannot make out why it comes with any special force on his remembrance. He is gradually emerging from Tom-all-Alone's in the morning light, thinking about it, when he hears running feet behind him, and looking round, sees the boy scouring towards him at great speed, followed by the woman. "Stop him, stop him!" cries the woman, almost breathless. "Stop him, sir!" He darts across the road into the boy's path, but the boy is quicker than he, makes a curve, ducks, dives under his hands, comes up half-a-dozen yards beyond him, and scours away again. Still the woman follows, crying, "Stop him, sir, pray stop him!" Allan, not knowing but that he has just robbed her of her money, follows in chase and runs so hard that he runs the boy down a dozen times, but each time he repeats the curve, the duck, the dive, and scours away again. To strike at him on any of these occasions would be to fell and disable him, but the pursuer cannot resolve to do that, and so the grimly ridiculous pursuit continues. At last the fugitive, hard-pressed, takes to a narrow passage and a court which has no thoroughfare. Here, against a hoarding of decaying timber, he is brought to bay and tumbles down, lying gasping at his pursuer, who stands and gasps at him until the woman comes up. "Oh, you, Jo!" cries the woman. "What? I have found you at last!" "Jo," repeats Allan, looking at him with attention, "Jo! Stay. To be sure! I recollect this lad some time ago being brought before the coroner." "Yes, I see you once afore at the inkwhich," whimpers Jo. "What of that? Can't you never let such an unfortnet as me alone? An't I unfortnet enough for you yet? How unfortnet do you want me fur to be? I've been a-chivied and a-chivied, fust by one on you and nixt by another on you, till I'm worritted to skins and bones. The inkwhich warn't MY fault. I done nothink. He wos wery good to me, he wos; he wos the only one I knowed to speak to, as ever come across my crossing. It ain't wery likely I should want him to be inkwhiched. I only wish I wos, myself. I don't know why I don't go and make a hole in the water, I'm sure I don't." He says it with such a pitiable air, and his grimy tears appear so real, and he lies in the corner up against the hoarding so like a growth of fungus or any unwholesome excrescence produced there in neglect and impurity, that Allan Woodcourt is softened towards him. He says to the woman, "Miserable creature, what has he done?" To which she only replies, shaking her head at the prostrate figure more amazedly than angrily, "Oh, you Jo, you Jo. I have found you at last!" "What has he done?" says Allan. "Has he robbed you?" "No, sir, no. Robbed me? He did nothing but what was kind-hearted by me, and that's the wonder of it." Allan looks from Jo to the woman, and from the woman to Jo, waiting for one of them to unravel the riddle. "But he was along with me, sir," says the woman. "Oh, you Jo! He was along with me, sir, down at Saint Albans, ill, and a young lady, Lord bless her for a good friend to me, took pity on him when I durstn't, and took him home--" Allan shrinks back from him with a sudden horror. "Yes, sir, yes. Took him home, and made him comfortable, and like a thankless monster he ran away in the night and never has been seen or heard of since till I set eyes on him just now. And that young lady that was such a pretty dear caught his illness, lost her beautiful looks, and wouldn't hardly be known for the same young lady now if it wasn't for her angel temper, and her pretty shape, and her sweet voice. Do you know it? You ungrateful wretch, do you know that this is all along of you and of her goodness to you?" demands the woman, beginning to rage at him as she recalls it and breaking into passionate tears. The boy, in rough sort stunned by what he hears, falls to smearing his dirty forehead with his dirty palm, and to staring at the ground, and to shaking from head to foot until the crazy hoarding against which he leans rattles. Allan restrains the woman, merely by a quiet gesture, but effectually. "Richard told me--" He falters. "I mean, I have heard of this--don't mind me for a moment, I will speak presently." He turns away and stands for a while looking out at the covered passage. When he comes back, he has recovered his composure, except that he contends against an avoidance of the boy, which is so very remarkable that it absorbs the woman's attention. "You hear what she says. But get up, get up!" Jo, shaking and chattering, slowly rises and stands, after the manner of his tribe in a difficulty, sideways against the hoarding, resting one of his high shoulders against it and covertly rubbing his right hand over his left and his left foot over his right. "You hear what she says, and I know it's true. Have you been here ever since?" "Wishermaydie if I seen Tom-all-Alone's till this blessed morning," replies Jo hoarsely. "Why have you come here now?" Jo looks all round the confined court, looks at his questioner no higher than the knees, and finally answers, "I don't know how to do nothink, and I can't get nothink to do. I'm wery poor and ill, and I thought I'd come back here when there warn't nobody about, and lay down and hide somewheres as I knows on till arter dark, and then go and beg a trifle of Mr. Snagsby. He wos allus willin fur to give me somethink he wos, though Mrs. Snagsby she was allus a-chivying on me--like everybody everywheres." "Where have you come from?" Jo looks all round the court again, looks at his questioner's knees again, and concludes by laying his profile against the hoarding in a sort of resignation. "Did you hear me ask you where you have come from?" "Tramp then," says Jo. "Now tell me," proceeds Allan, making a strong effort to overcome his repugnance, going very near to him, and leaning over him with an expression of confidence, "tell me how it came about that you left that house when the good young lady had been so unfortunate as to pity you and take you home." Jo suddenly comes out of his resignation and excitedly declares, addressing the woman, that he never known about the young lady, that he never heern about it, that he never went fur to hurt her, that he would sooner have hurt his own self, that he'd sooner have had his unfortnet ed chopped off than ever gone a-nigh her, and that she wos wery good to him, she wos. Conducting himself throughout as if in his poor fashion he really meant it, and winding up with some very miserable sobs. Allan Woodcourt sees that this is not a sham. He constrains himself to touch him. "Come, Jo. Tell me." "No. I dustn't," says Jo, relapsing into the profile state. "I dustn't, or I would." "But I must know," returns the other, "all the same. Come, Jo." After two or three such adjurations, Jo lifts up his head again, looks round the court again, and says in a low voice, "Well, I'll tell you something. I was took away. There!" "Took away? In the night?" "Ah!" Very apprehensive of being overheard, Jo looks about him and even glances up some ten feet at the top of the hoarding and through the cracks in it lest the object of his distrust should be looking over or hidden on the other side. "Who took you away?" "I dustn't name him," says Jo. "I dustn't do it, sir. "But I want, in the young lady's name, to know. You may trust me. No one else shall hear." "Ah, but I don't know," replies Jo, shaking his head fearfully, "as he DON'T hear." "Why, he is not in this place." "Oh, ain't he though?" says Jo. "He's in all manner of places, all at wanst." Allan looks at him in perplexity, but discovers some real meaning and good faith at the bottom of this bewildering reply. He patiently awaits an explicit answer; and Jo, more baffled by his patience than by anything else, at last desperately whispers a name in his ear. "Aye!" says Allan. "Why, what had you been doing?" "Nothink, sir. Never done nothink to get myself into no trouble, 'sept in not moving on and the inkwhich. But I'm a-moving on now. I'm a-moving on to the berryin ground--that's the move as I'm up to." "No, no, we will try to prevent that. But what did he do with you?" "Put me in a horsepittle," replied Jo, whispering, "till I was discharged, then giv me a little money--four half-bulls, wot you may call half-crowns--and ses 'Hook it! Nobody wants you here,' he ses. 'You hook it. You go and tramp,' he ses. 'You move on,' he ses. 'Don't let me ever see you nowheres within forty mile of London, or you'll repent it.' So I shall, if ever he doos see me, and he'll see me if I'm above ground," concludes Jo, nervously repeating all his former precautions and investigations. Allan considers a little, then remarks, turning to the woman but keeping an encouraging eye on Jo, "He is not so ungrateful as you supposed. He had a reason for going away, though it was an insufficient one." "Thankee, sir, thankee!" exclaims Jo. "There now! See how hard you wos upon me. But ony you tell the young lady wot the genlmn ses, and it's all right. For YOU wos wery good to me too, and I knows it." "Now, Jo," says Allan, keeping his eye upon him, "come with me and I will find you a better place than this to lie down and hide in. If I take one side of the way and you the other to avoid observation, you will not run away, I know very well, if you make me a promise." "I won't, not unless I wos to see HIM a-coming, sir." "Very well. I take your word. Half the town is getting up by this time, and the whole town will be broad awake in another hour. Come along. Good day again, my good woman." "Good day again, sir, and I thank you kindly many times again." She has been sitting on her bag, deeply attentive, and now rises and takes it up. Jo, repeating, "Ony you tell the young lady as I never went fur to hurt her and wot the genlmn ses!" nods and shambles and shivers, and smears and blinks, and half laughs and half cries, a farewell to her, and takes his creeping way along after Allan Woodcourt, close to the houses on the opposite side of the street. In this order, the two come up out of Tom-all-Alone's into the broad rays of the sunlight and the purer air. CHAPTER XLVII Jo's Will As Allan Woodcourt and Jo proceed along the streets where the high church spires and the distances are so near and clear in the morning light that the city itself seems renewed by rest, Allan revolves in his mind how and where he shall bestow his companion. "It surely is a strange fact," he considers, "that in the heart of a civilized world this creature in human form should be more difficult to dispose of than an unowned dog." But it is none the less a fact because of its strangeness, and the difficulty remains. At first he looks behind him often to assure himself that Jo is still really following. But look where he will, he still beholds him close to the opposite houses, making his way with his wary hand from brick to brick and from door to door, and often, as he creeps along, glancing over at him watchfully. Soon satisfied that the last thing in his thoughts is to give him the slip, Allan goes on, considering with a less divided attention what he shall do. A breakfast-stall at a street-corner suggests the first thing to be done. He stops there, looks round, and beckons Jo. Jo crosses and comes halting and shuffling up, slowly scooping the knuckles of his right hand round and round in the hollowed palm of his left, kneading dirt with a natural pestle and mortar. What is a dainty repast to Jo is then set before him, and he begins to gulp the coffee and to gnaw the bread and butter, looking anxiously about him in all directions as he eats and drinks, like a scared animal. But he is so sick and miserable that even hunger has abandoned him. "I thought I was amost a-starvin, sir," says Jo, soon putting down his food, "but I don't know nothink--not even that. I don't care for eating wittles nor yet for drinking on 'em." And Jo stands shivering and looking at the breakfast wonderingly. Allan Woodcourt lays his hand upon his pulse and on his chest. "Draw breath, Jo!" "It draws," says Jo, "as heavy as a cart." He might add, "And rattles like it," but he only mutters, "I'm a-moving on, sir." Allan looks about for an apothecary's shop. There is none at hand, but a tavern does as well or better. He obtains a little measure of wine and gives the lad a portion of it very carefully. He begins to revive almost as soon as it passes his lips. "We may repeat that dose, Jo," observes Allan after watching him with his attentive face. "So! Now we will take five minutes' rest, and then go on again." Leaving the boy sitting on the bench of the breakfast-stall, with his back against an iron railing, Allan Woodcourt paces up and down in the early sunshine, casting an occasional look towards him without appearing to watch him. It requires no discernment to perceive that he is warmed and refreshed. If a face so shaded can brighten, his face brightens somewhat; and by little and little he eats the slice of bread he had so hopelessly laid down. Observant of these signs of improvement, Allan engages him in conversation and elicits to his no small wonder the adventure of the lady in the veil, with all its consequences. Jo slowly munches as he slowly tells it. When he has finished his story and his bread, they go on again. Intending to refer his difficulty in finding a temporary place of refuge for the boy to his old patient, zealous little Miss Flite, Allan leads the way to the court where he and Jo first foregathered. But all is changed at the rag and bottle shop; Miss Flite no longer lodges there; it is shut up; and a hard-featured female, much obscured by dust, whose age is a problem, but who is indeed no other than the interesting Judy, is tart and spare in her replies. These sufficing, however, to inform the visitor that Miss Flite and her birds are domiciled with a Mrs. Blinder, in Bell Yard, he repairs to that neighbouring place, where Miss Flite (who rises early that she may be punctual at the divan of justice held by her excellent friend the Chancellor) comes running downstairs with tears of welcome and with open arms. "My dear physician!" cries Miss Flite. "My meritorious, distinguished, honourable officer!" She uses some odd expressions, but is as cordial and full of heart as sanity itself can be--more so than it often is. Allan, very patient with her, waits until she has no more raptures to express, then points out Jo, trembling in a doorway, and tells her how he comes there. "Where can I lodge him hereabouts for the present? Now, you have a fund of knowledge and good sense and can advise me." Miss Flite, mighty proud of the compliment, sets herself to consider; but it is long before a bright thought occurs to her. Mrs. Blinder is entirely let, and she herself occupies poor Gridley's room. "Gridley!" exclaims Miss Flite, clapping her hands after a twentieth repetition of this remark. "Gridley! To be sure! Of course! My dear physician! General George will help us out." It is hopeless to ask for any information about General George, and would be, though Miss Flite had not already run upstairs to put on her pinched bonnet and her poor little shawl and to arm herself with her reticule of documents. But as she informs her physician in her disjointed manner on coming down in full array that General George, whom she often calls upon, knows her dear Fitz Jarndyce and takes a great interest in all connected with her, Allan is induced to think that they may be in the right way. So he tells Jo, for his encouragement, that this walking about will soon be over now; and they repair to the general's. Fortunately it is not far. From the exterior of George's Shooting Gallery, and the long entry, and the bare perspective beyond it, Allan Woodcourt augurs well. He also descries promise in the figure of Mr. George himself, striding towards them in his morning exercise with his pipe in his mouth, no stock on, and his muscular arms, developed by broadsword and dumbbell, weightily asserting themselves through his light shirt-sleeves. "Your servant, sir," says Mr. George with a military salute. Good-humouredly smiling all over his broad forehead up into his crisp hair, he then defers to Miss Flite, as, with great stateliness, and at some length, she performs the courtly ceremony of presentation. He winds it up with another "Your servant, sir!" and another salute. "Excuse me, sir. A sailor, I believe?" says Mr. George. "I am proud to find I have the air of one," returns Allan; "but I am only a sea-going doctor." "Indeed, sir! I should have thought you was a regular blue-jacket myself." Allan hopes Mr. George will forgive his intrusion the more readily on that account, and particularly that he will not lay aside his pipe, which, in his politeness, he has testified some intention of doing. "You are very good, sir," returns the trooper. "As I know by experience that it's not disagreeable to Miss Flite, and since it's equally agreeable to yourself--" and finishes the sentence by putting it between his lips again. Allan proceeds to tell him all he knows about Jo, unto which the trooper listens with a grave face. "And that's the lad, sir, is it?" he inquires, looking along the entry to where Jo stands staring up at the great letters on the whitewashed front, which have no meaning in his eyes. "That's he," says Allan. "And, Mr. George, I am in this difficulty about him. I am unwilling to place him in a hospital, even if I could procure him immediate admission, because I foresee that he would not stay there many hours if he could be so much as got there. The same objection applies to a workhouse, supposing I had the patience to be evaded and shirked, and handed about from post to pillar in trying to get him into one, which is a system that I don't take kindly to." "No man does, sir," returns Mr. George. "I am convinced that he would not remain in either place, because he is possessed by an extraordinary terror of this person who ordered him to keep out of the way; in his ignorance, he believes this person to be everywhere, and cognizant of everything." "I ask your pardon, sir," says Mr. George. "But you have not mentioned that party's name. Is it a secret, sir?" "The boy makes it one. But his name is Bucket." "Bucket the detective, sir?" "The same man." "The man is known to me, sir," returns the trooper after blowing out a cloud of smoke and squaring his chest, "and the boy is so far correct that he undoubtedly is a--rum customer." Mr. George smokes with a profound meaning after this and surveys Miss Flite in silence. "Now, I wish Mr. Jarndyce and Miss Summerson at least to know that this Jo, who tells so strange a story, has reappeared, and to have it in their power to speak with him if they should desire to do so. Therefore I want to get him, for the present moment, into any poor lodging kept by decent people where he would be admitted. Decent people and Jo, Mr. George," says Allan, following the direction of the trooper's eyes along the entry, "have not been much acquainted, as you see. Hence the difficulty. Do you happen to know any one in this neighbourhood who would receive him for a while on my paying for him beforehand?" As he puts the question, he becomes aware of a dirty-faced little man standing at the trooper's elbow and looking up, with an oddly twisted figure and countenance, into the trooper's face. After a few more puffs at his pipe, the trooper looks down askant at the little man, and the little man winks up at the trooper. "Well, sir," says Mr. George, "I can assure you that I would willingly be knocked on the head at any time if it would be at all agreeable to Miss Summerson, and consequently I esteem it a privilege to do that young lady any service, however small. We are naturally in the vagabond way here, sir, both myself and Phil. You see what the place is. You are welcome to a quiet corner of it for the boy if the same would meet your views. No charge made, except for rations. We are not in a flourishing state of circumstances here, sir. We are liable to be tumbled out neck and crop at a moment's notice. However, sir, such as the place is, and so long as it lasts, here it is at your service." With a comprehensive wave of his pipe, Mr. George places the whole building at his visitor's disposal. "I take it for granted, sir," he adds, "you being one of the medical staff, that there is no present infection about this unfortunate subject?" Allan is quite sure of it. "Because, sir," says Mr. George, shaking his head sorrowfully, "we have had enough of that." His tone is no less sorrowfully echoed by his new acquaintance. "Still I am bound to tell you," observes Allan after repeating his former assurance, "that the boy is deplorably low and reduced and that he may be--I do not say that he is--too far gone to recover." "Do you consider him in present danger, sir?" inquires the trooper. "Yes, I fear so." "Then, sir," returns the trooper in a decisive manner, "it appears to me--being naturally in the vagabond way myself--that the sooner he comes out of the street, the better. You, Phil! Bring him in!" Mr. Squod tacks out, all on one side, to execute the word of command; and the trooper, having smoked his pipe, lays it by. Jo is brought in. He is not one of Mrs. Pardiggle's Tockahoopo Indians; he is not one of Mrs. Jellyby's lambs, being wholly unconnected with Borrioboola-Gha; he is not softened by distance and unfamiliarity; he is not a genuine foreign-grown savage; he is the ordinary home-made article. Dirty, ugly, disagreeable to all the senses, in body a common creature of the common streets, only in soul a heathen. Homely filth begrimes him, homely parasites devour him, homely sores are in him, homely rags are on him; native ignorance, the growth of English soil and climate, sinks his immortal nature lower than the beasts that perish. Stand forth, Jo, in uncompromising colours! From the sole of thy foot to the crown of thy head, there is nothing interesting about thee. He shuffles slowly into Mr. George's gallery and stands huddled together in a bundle, looking all about the floor. He seems to know that they have an inclination to shrink from him, partly for what he is and partly for what he has caused. He, too, shrinks from them. He is not of the same order of things, not of the same place in creation. He is of no order and no place, neither of the beasts nor of humanity. "Look here, Jo!" says Allan. "This is Mr. George." Jo searches the floor for some time longer, then looks up for a moment, and then down again. "He is a kind friend to you, for he is going to give you lodging room here." Jo makes a scoop with one hand, which is supposed to be a bow. After a little more consideration and some backing and changing of the foot on which he rests, he mutters that he is "wery thankful." "You are quite safe here. All you have to do at present is to be obedient and to get strong. And mind you tell us the truth here, whatever you do, Jo." "Wishermaydie if I don't, sir," says Jo, reverting to his favourite declaration. "I never done nothink yit, but wot you knows on, to get myself into no trouble. I never was in no other trouble at all, sir, 'sept not knowin' nothink and starwation." "I believe it, now attend to Mr. George. I see he is going to speak to you." "My intention merely was, sir," observes Mr. George, amazingly broad and upright, "to point out to him where he can lie down and get a thorough good dose of sleep. Now, look here." As the trooper speaks, he conducts them to the other end of the gallery and opens one of the little cabins. "There you are, you see! Here is a mattress, and here you may rest, on good behaviour, as long as Mr., I ask your pardon, sir"--he refers apologetically to the card Allan has given him--"Mr. Woodcourt pleases. Don't you be alarmed if you hear shots; they'll be aimed at the target, and not you. Now, there's another thing I would recommend, sir," says the trooper, turning to his visitor. "Phil, come here!" Phil bears down upon them according to his usual tactics. "Here is a man, sir, who was found, when a baby, in the gutter. Consequently, it is to be expected that he takes a natural interest in this poor creature. You do, don't you, Phil?" "Certainly and surely I do, guv'ner," is Phil's reply. "Now I was thinking, sir," says Mr. George in a martial sort of confidence, as if he were giving his opinion in a council of war at a drum-head, "that if this man was to take him to a bath and was to lay out a few shillings in getting him one or two coarse articles--" "Mr. George, my considerate friend," returns Allan, taking out his purse, "it is the very favour I would have asked." Phil Squod and Jo are sent out immediately on this work of improvement. Miss Flite, quite enraptured by her success, makes the best of her way to court, having great fears that otherwise her friend the Chancellor may be uneasy about her or may give the judgment she has so long expected in her absence, and observing "which you know, my dear physician, and general, after so many years, would be too absurdly unfortunate!" Allan takes the opportunity of going out to procure some restorative medicines, and obtaining them near at hand, soon returns to find the trooper walking up and down the gallery, and to fall into step and walk with him. "I take it, sir," says Mr. George, "that you know Miss Summerson pretty well?" Yes, it appears. "Not related to her, sir?" No, it appears. "Excuse the apparent curiosity," says Mr. George. "It seemed to me probable that you might take more than a common interest in this poor creature because Miss Summerson had taken that unfortunate interest in him. 'Tis MY case, sir, I assure you." "And mine, Mr. George." The trooper looks sideways at Allan's sunburnt cheek and bright dark eye, rapidly measures his height and build, and seems to approve of him. "Since you have been out, sir, I have been thinking that I unquestionably know the rooms in Lincoln's Inn Fields, where Bucket took the lad, according to his account. Though he is not acquainted with the name, I can help you to it. It's Tulkinghorn. That's what it is." Allan looks at him inquiringly, repeating the name. "Tulkinghorn. That's the name, sir. I know the man, and know him to have been in communication with Bucket before, respecting a deceased person who had given him offence. I know the man, sir. To my sorrow." Allan naturally asks what kind of man he is. "What kind of man! Do you mean to look at?" "I think I know that much of him. I mean to deal with. Generally, what kind of man?" "Why, then I'll tell you, sir," returns the trooper, stopping short and folding his arms on his square chest so angrily that his face fires and flushes all over; "he is a confoundedly bad kind of man. He is a slow-torturing kind of man. He is no more like flesh and blood than a rusty old carbine is. He is a kind of man--by George!--that has caused me more restlessness, and more uneasiness, and more dissatisfaction with myself than all other men put together. That's the kind of man Mr. Tulkinghorn is!" "I am sorry," says Allan, "to have touched so sore a place." "Sore?" The trooper plants his legs wider apart, wets the palm of his broad right hand, and lays it on the imaginary moustache. "It's no fault of yours, sir; but you shall judge. He has got a power over me. He is the man I spoke of just now as being able to tumble me out of this place neck and crop. He keeps me on a constant see-saw. He won't hold off, and he won't come on. If I have a payment to make him, or time to ask him for, or anything to go to him about, he don't see me, don't hear me--passes me on to Melchisedech's in Clifford's Inn, Melchisedech's in Clifford's Inn passes me back again to him--he keeps me prowling and dangling about him as if I was made of the same stone as himself. Why, I spend half my life now, pretty well, loitering and dodging about his door. What does he care? Nothing. Just as much as the rusty old carbine I have compared him to. He chafes and goads me till--Bah! Nonsense! I am forgetting myself. Mr. Woodcourt," the trooper resumes his march, "all I say is, he is an old man; but I am glad I shall never have the chance of setting spurs to my horse and riding at him in a fair field. For if I had that chance, in one of the humours he drives me into--he'd go down, sir!" Mr. George has been so excited that he finds it necessary to wipe his forehead on his shirt-sleeve. Even while he whistles his impetuosity away with the national anthem, some involuntary shakings of his head and heavings of his chest still linger behind, not to mention an occasional hasty adjustment with both hands of his open shirt-collar, as if it were scarcely open enough to prevent his being troubled by a choking sensation. In short, Allan Woodcourt has not much doubt about the going down of Mr. Tulkinghorn on the field referred to. Jo and his conductor presently return, and Jo is assisted to his mattress by the careful Phil, to whom, after due administration of medicine by his own hands, Allan confides all needful means and instructions. The morning is by this time getting on apace. He repairs to his lodgings to dress and breakfast, and then, without seeking rest, goes away to Mr. Jarndyce to communicate his discovery. With him Mr. Jarndyce returns alone, confidentially telling him that there are reasons for keeping this matter very quiet indeed and showing a serious interest in it. To Mr. Jarndyce, Jo repeats in substance what he said in the morning, without any material variation. Only that cart of his is heavier to draw, and draws with a hollower sound. "Let me lay here quiet and not be chivied no more," falters Jo, "and be so kind any person as is a-passin nigh where I used fur to sleep, as jist to say to Mr. Sangsby that Jo, wot he known once, is a-moving on right forards with his duty, and I'll be wery thankful. I'd be more thankful than I am aready if it wos any ways possible for an unfortnet to be it." He makes so many of these references to the law-stationer in the course of a day or two that Allan, after conferring with Mr. Jarndyce, good-naturedly resolves to call in Cook's Court, the rather, as the cart seems to be breaking down. To Cook's Court, therefore, he repairs. Mr. Snagsby is behind his counter in his grey coat and sleeves, inspecting an indenture of several skins which has just come in from the engrosser's, an immense desert of law-hand and parchment, with here and there a resting-place of a few large letters to break the awful monotony and save the traveller from despair. Mr Snagsby puts up at one of these inky wells and greets the stranger with his cough of general preparation for business. "You don't remember me, Mr. Snagsby?" The stationer's heart begins to thump heavily, for his old apprehensions have never abated. It is as much as he can do to answer, "No, sir, I can't say I do. I should have considered--not to put too fine a point upon it--that I never saw you before, sir." "Twice before," says Allan Woodcourt. "Once at a poor bedside, and once--" "It's come at last!" thinks the afflicted stationer, as recollection breaks upon him. "It's got to a head now and is going to burst!" But he has sufficient presence of mind to conduct his visitor into the little counting-house and to shut the door. "Are you a married man, sir?" "No, I am not." "Would you make the attempt, though single," says Mr. Snagsby in a melancholy whisper, "to speak as low as you can? For my little woman is a-listening somewheres, or I'll forfeit the business and five hundred pound!" In deep dejection Mr. Snagsby sits down on his stool, with his back against his desk, protesting, "I never had a secret of my own, sir. I can't charge my memory with ever having once attempted to deceive my little woman on my own account since she named the day. I wouldn't have done it, sir. Not to put too fine a point upon it, I couldn't have done it, I dursn't have done it. Whereas, and nevertheless, I find myself wrapped round with secrecy and mystery, till my life is a burden to me." His visitor professes his regret to hear it and asks him does he remember Jo. Mr. Snagsby answers with a suppressed groan, oh, don't he! "You couldn't name an individual human being--except myself--that my little woman is more set and determined against than Jo," says Mr. Snagsby. Allan asks why. "Why?" repeats Mr. Snagsby, in his desperation clutching at the clump of hair at the back of his bald head. "How should I know why? But you are a single person, sir, and may you long be spared to ask a married person such a question!" With this beneficent wish, Mr. Snagsby coughs a cough of dismal resignation and submits himself to hear what the visitor has to communicate. "There again!" says Mr. Snagsby, who, between the earnestness of his feelings and the suppressed tones of his voice is discoloured in the face. "At it again, in a new direction! A certain person charges me, in the solemnest way, not to talk of Jo to any one, even my little woman. Then comes another certain person, in the person of yourself, and charges me, in an equally solemn way, not to mention Jo to that other certain person above all other persons. Why, this is a private asylum! Why, not to put too fine a point upon it, this is Bedlam, sir!" says Mr. Snagsby. But it is better than he expected after all, being no explosion of the mine below him or deepening of the pit into which he has fallen. And being tender-hearted and affected by the account he hears of Jo's condition, he readily engages to "look round" as early in the evening as he can manage it quietly. He looks round very quietly when the evening comes, but it may turn out that Mrs. Snagsby is as quiet a manager as he. Jo is very glad to see his old friend and says, when they are left alone, that he takes it uncommon kind as Mr. Sangsby should come so far out of his way on accounts of sich as him. Mr. Snagsby, touched by the spectacle before him, immediately lays upon the table half a crown, that magic balsam of his for all kinds of wounds. "And how do you find yourself, my poor lad?" inquires the stationer with his cough of sympathy. "I am in luck, Mr. Sangsby, I am," returns Jo, "and don't want for nothink. I'm more cumfbler nor you can't think. Mr. Sangsby! I'm wery sorry that I done it, but I didn't go fur to do it, sir." The stationer softly lays down another half-crown and asks him what it is that he is sorry for having done. "Mr. Sangsby," says Jo, "I went and giv a illness to the lady as wos and yit as warn't the t'other lady, and none of 'em never says nothink to me for having done it, on accounts of their being ser good and my having been s'unfortnet. The lady come herself and see me yesday, and she ses, 'Ah, Jo!' she ses. 'We thought we'd lost you, Jo!' she ses. And she sits down a-smilin so quiet, and don't pass a word nor yit a look upon me for having done it, she don't, and I turns agin the wall, I doos, Mr. Sangsby. And Mr. Jarnders, I see him a-forced to turn away his own self. And Mr. Woodcot, he come fur to giv me somethink fur to ease me, wot he's allus a-doin' on day and night, and wen he come a-bending over me and a-speakin up so bold, I see his tears a-fallin, Mr. Sangsby." The softened stationer deposits another half-crown on the table. Nothing less than a repetition of that infallible remedy will relieve his feelings. "Wot I was a-thinkin on, Mr. Sangsby," proceeds Jo, "wos, as you wos able to write wery large, p'raps?" "Yes, Jo, please God," returns the stationer. "Uncommon precious large, p'raps?" says Jo with eagerness. "Yes, my poor boy." Jo laughs with pleasure. "Wot I wos a-thinking on then, Mr. Sangsby, wos, that when I wos moved on as fur as ever I could go and couldn't be moved no furder, whether you might be so good p'raps as to write out, wery large so that any one could see it anywheres, as that I wos wery truly hearty sorry that I done it and that I never went fur to do it, and that though I didn't know nothink at all, I knowd as Mr. Woodcot once cried over it and wos allus grieved over it, and that I hoped as he'd be able to forgive me in his mind. If the writin could be made to say it wery large, he might." "It shall say it, Jo. Very large." Jo laughs again. "Thankee, Mr. Sangsby. It's wery kind of you, sir, and it makes me more cumfbler nor I was afore." The meek little stationer, with a broken and unfinished cough, slips down his fourth half-crown--he has never been so close to a case requiring so many--and is fain to depart. And Jo and he, upon this little earth, shall meet no more. No more. For the cart so hard to draw is near its journey's end and drags over stony ground. All round the clock it labours up the broken steps, shattered and worn. Not many times can the sun rise and behold it still upon its weary road. Phil Squod, with his smoky gunpowder visage, at once acts as nurse and works as armourer at his little table in a corner, often looking round and saying with a nod of his green-baize cap and an encouraging elevation of his one eyebrow, "Hold up, my boy! Hold up!" There, too, is Mr. Jarndyce many a time, and Allan Woodcourt almost always, both thinking, much, how strangely fate has entangled this rough outcast in the web of very different lives. There, too, the trooper is a frequent visitor, filling the doorway with his athletic figure and, from his superfluity of life and strength, seeming to shed down temporary vigour upon Jo, who never fails to speak more robustly in answer to his cheerful words. Jo is in a sleep or in a stupor to-day, and Allan Woodcourt, newly arrived, stands by him, looking down upon his wasted form. After a while he softly seats himself upon the bedside with his face towards him--just as he sat in the law-writer's room--and touches his chest and heart. The cart had very nearly given up, but labours on a little more. The trooper stands in the doorway, still and silent. Phil has stopped in a low clinking noise, with his little hammer in his hand. Mr. Woodcourt looks round with that grave professional interest and attention on his face, and glancing significantly at the trooper, signs to Phil to carry his table out. When the little hammer is next used, there will be a speck of rust upon it. "Well, Jo! What is the matter? Don't be frightened." "I thought," says Jo, who has started and is looking round, "I thought I was in Tom-all-Alone's agin. Ain't there nobody here but you, Mr. Woodcot?" "Nobody." "And I ain't took back to Tom-all-Alone's. Am I, sir?" "No." Jo closes his eyes, muttering, "I'm wery thankful." After watching him closely a little while, Allan puts his mouth very near his ear and says to him in a low, distinct voice, "Jo! Did you ever know a prayer?" "Never knowd nothink, sir." "Not so much as one short prayer?" "No, sir. Nothink at all. Mr. Chadbands he wos a-prayin wunst at Mr. Sangsby's and I heerd him, but he sounded as if he wos a-speakin to hisself, and not to me. He prayed a lot, but I couldn't make out nothink on it. Different times there was other genlmen come down Tom-all-Alone's a-prayin, but they all mostly sed as the t'other 'wuns prayed wrong, and all mostly sounded to be a-talking to theirselves, or a-passing blame on the t'others, and not a-talkin to us. WE never knowd nothink. I never knowd what it wos all about." It takes him a long time to say this, and few but an experienced and attentive listener could hear, or, hearing, understand him. After a short relapse into sleep or stupor, he makes, of a sudden, a strong effort to get out of bed. "Stay, Jo! What now?" "It's time for me to go to that there berryin ground, sir," he returns with a wild look. "Lie down, and tell me. What burying ground, Jo?" "Where they laid him as wos wery good to me, wery good to me indeed, he wos. It's time fur me to go down to that there berryin ground, sir, and ask to be put along with him. I wants to go there and be berried. He used fur to say to me, 'I am as poor as you to-day, Jo,' he ses. I wants to tell him that I am as poor as him now and have come there to be laid along with him." "By and by, Jo. By and by." "Ah! P'raps they wouldn't do it if I wos to go myself. But will you promise to have me took there, sir, and laid along with him?" "I will, indeed." "Thankee, sir. Thankee, sir. They'll have to get the key of the gate afore they can take me in, for it's allus locked. And there's a step there, as I used for to clean with my broom. It's turned wery dark, sir. Is there any light a-comin?" "It is coming fast, Jo." Fast. The cart is shaken all to pieces, and the rugged road is very near its end. "Jo, my poor fellow!" "I hear you, sir, in the dark, but I'm a-gropin--a-gropin--let me catch hold of your hand." "Jo, can you say what I say?" "I'll say anythink as you say, sir, for I knows it's good." "Our Father." "Our Father! Yes, that's wery good, sir." "Which art in heaven." "Art in heaven--is the light a-comin, sir?" "It is close at hand. Hallowed be thy name!" "Hallowed be--thy--" The light is come upon the dark benighted way. Dead! Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, right reverends and wrong reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day. CHAPTER XLVIII Closing In The place in Lincolnshire has shut its many eyes again, and the house in town is awake. In Lincolnshire the Dedlocks of the past doze in their picture-frames, and the low wind murmurs through the long drawing-room as if they were breathing pretty regularly. In town the Dedlocks of the present rattle in their fire-eyed carriages through the darkness of the night, and the Dedlock Mercuries, with ashes (or hair-powder) on their heads, symptomatic of their great humility, loll away the drowsy mornings in the little windows of the hall. The fashionable world--tremendous orb, nearly five miles round--is in full swing, and the solar system works respectfully at its appointed distances. Where the throng is thickest, where the lights are brightest, where all the senses are ministered to with the greatest delicacy and refinement, Lady Dedlock is. From the shining heights she has scaled and taken, she is never absent. Though the belief she of old reposed in herself as one able to reserve whatsoever she would under her mantle of pride is beaten down, though she has no assurance that what she is to those around her she will remain another day, it is not in her nature when envious eyes are looking on to yield or to droop. They say of her that she has lately grown more handsome and more haughty. The debilitated cousin says of her that she's beauty nough--tsetup shopofwomen--but rather larming kind--remindingmanfact--inconvenient woman--who WILL getoutofbedandbawthstahlishment--Shakespeare. Mr. Tulkinghorn says nothing, looks nothing. Now, as heretofore, he is to be found in doorways of rooms, with his limp white cravat loosely twisted into its old-fashioned tie, receiving patronage from the peerage and making no sign. Of all men he is still the last who might be supposed to have any influence upon my Lady. Of all women she is still the last who might be supposed to have any dread of him. One thing has been much on her mind since their late interview in his turret-room at Chesney Wold. She is now decided, and prepared to throw it off. It is morning in the great world, afternoon according to the little sun. The Mercuries, exhausted by looking out of window, are reposing in the hall and hang their heavy heads, the gorgeous creatures, like overblown sunflowers. Like them, too, they seem to run to a deal of seed in their tags and trimmings. Sir Leicester, in the library, has fallen asleep for the good of the country over the report of a Parliamentary committee. My Lady sits in the room in which she gave audience to the young man of the name of Guppy. Rosa is with her and has been writing for her and reading to her. Rosa is now at work upon embroidery or some such pretty thing, and as she bends her head over it, my Lady watches her in silence. Not for the first time to-day. "Rosa." The pretty village face looks brightly up. Then, seeing how serious my Lady is, looks puzzled and surprised. "See to the door. Is it shut?" Yes. She goes to it and returns, and looks yet more surprised. "I am about to place confidence in you, child, for I know I may trust your attachment, if not your judgment. In what I am going to do, I will not disguise myself to you at least. But I confide in you. Say nothing to any one of what passes between us." The timid little beauty promises in all earnestness to be trustworthy. "Do you know," Lady Dedlock asks her, signing to her to bring her chair nearer, "do you know, Rosa, that I am different to you from what I am to any one?" "Yes, my Lady. Much kinder. But then I often think I know you as you really are." "You often think you know me as I really am? Poor child, poor child!" She says it with a kind of scorn--though not of Rosa--and sits brooding, looking dreamily at her. "Do you think, Rosa, you are any relief or comfort to me? Do you suppose your being young and natural, and fond of me and grateful to me, makes it any pleasure to me to have you near me?" "I don't know, my Lady; I can scarcely hope so. But with all my heart, I wish it was so." "It is so, little one." The pretty face is checked in its flush of pleasure by the dark expression on the handsome face before it. It looks timidly for an explanation. "And if I were to say to-day, 'Go! Leave me!' I should say what would give me great pain and disquiet, child, and what would leave me very solitary." "My Lady! Have I offended you?" "In nothing. Come here." Rosa bends down on the footstool at my Lady's feet. My Lady, with that motherly touch of the famous ironmaster night, lays her hand upon her dark hair and gently keeps it there. "I told you, Rosa, that I wished you to be happy and that I would make you so if I could make anybody happy on this earth. I cannot. There are reasons now known to me, reasons in which you have no part, rendering it far better for you that you should not remain here. You must not remain here. I have determined that you shall not. I have written to the father of your lover, and he will be here to-day. All this I have done for your sake." The weeping girl covers her hand with kisses and says what shall she do, what shall she do, when they are separated! Her mistress kisses her on the cheek and makes no other answer. "Now, be happy, child, under better circumstances. Be beloved and happy!" "Ah, my Lady, I have sometimes thought--forgive my being so free--that YOU are not happy." "I!" "Will you be more so when you have sent me away? Pray, pray, think again. Let me stay a little while!" "I have said, my child, that what I do, I do for your sake, not my own. It is done. What I am towards you, Rosa, is what I am now--not what I shall be a little while hence. Remember this, and keep my confidence. Do so much for my sake, and thus all ends between us!" She detaches herself from her simple-hearted companion and leaves the room. Late in the afternoon, when she next appears upon the staircase, she is in her haughtiest and coldest state. As indifferent as if all passion, feeling, and interest had been worn out in the earlier ages of the world and had perished from its surface with its other departed monsters. Mercury has announced Mr. Rouncewell, which is the cause of her appearance. Mr. Rouncewell is not in the library, but she repairs to the library. Sir Leicester is there, and she wishes to speak to him first. "Sir Leicester, I am desirous--but you are engaged." Oh, dear no! Not at all. Only Mr. Tulkinghorn. Always at hand. Haunting every place. No relief or security from him for a moment. "I beg your pardon, Lady Dedlock. Will you allow me to retire?" With a look that plainly says, "You know you have the power to remain if you will," she tells him it is not necessary and moves towards a chair. Mr. Tulkinghorn brings it a little forward for her with his clumsy bow and retires into a window opposite. Interposed between her and the fading light of day in the now quiet street, his shadow falls upon her, and he darkens all before her. Even so does he darken her life. It is a dull street under the best conditions, where the two long rows of houses stare at each other with that severity that half-a-dozen of its greatest mansions seem to have been slowly stared into stone rather than originally built in that material. It is a street of such dismal grandeur, so determined not to condescend to liveliness, that the doors and windows hold a gloomy state of their own in black paint and dust, and the echoing mews behind have a dry and massive appearance, as if they were reserved to stable the stone chargers of noble statues. Complicated garnish of iron-work entwines itself over the flights of steps in this awful street, and from these petrified bowers, extinguishers for obsolete flambeaux gasp at the upstart gas. Here and there a weak little iron hoop, through which bold boys aspire to throw their friends' caps (its only present use), retains its place among the rusty foliage, sacred to the memory of departed oil. Nay, even oil itself, yet lingering at long intervals in a little absurd glass pot, with a knob in the bottom like an oyster, blinks and sulks at newer lights every night, like its high and dry master in the House of Lords. Therefore there is not much that Lady Dedlock, seated in her chair, could wish to see through the window in which Mr. Tulkinghorn stands. And yet--and yet--she sends a look in that direction as if it were her heart's desire to have that figure moved out of the way. Sir Leicester begs his Lady's pardon. She was about to say? "Only that Mr. Rouncewell is here (he has called by my appointment) and that we had better make an end of the question of that girl. I am tired to death of the matter." "What can I do--to--assist?" demands Sir Leicester in some considerable doubt. "Let us see him here and have done with it. Will you tell them to send him up?" "Mr. Tulkinghorn, be so good as to ring. Thank you. Request," says Sir Leicester to Mercury, not immediately remembering the business term, "request the iron gentleman to walk this way." Mercury departs in search of the iron gentleman, finds, and produces him. Sir Leicester receives that ferruginous person graciously. "I hope you are well, Mr. Rouncewell. Be seated. (My solicitor, Mr. Tulkinghorn.) My Lady was desirous, Mr. Rouncewell," Sir Leicester skilfully transfers him with a solemn wave of his hand, "was desirous to speak with you. Hem!" "I shall be very happy," returns the iron gentleman, "to give my best attention to anything Lady Dedlock does me the honour to say." As he turns towards her, he finds that the impression she makes upon him is less agreeable than on the former occasion. A distant supercilious air makes a cold atmosphere about her, and there is nothing in her bearing, as there was before, to encourage openness. "Pray, sir," says Lady Dedlock listlessly, "may I be allowed to inquire whether anything has passed between you and your son respecting your son's fancy?" It is almost too troublesome to her languid eyes to bestow a look upon him as she asks this question. "If my memory serves me, Lady Dedlock, I said, when I had the pleasure of seeing you before, that I should seriously advise my son to conquer that--fancy." The ironmaster repeats her expression with a little emphasis. "And did you?" "Oh! Of course I did." Sir Leicester gives a nod, approving and confirmatory. Very proper. The iron gentleman, having said that he would do it, was bound to do it. No difference in this respect between the base metals and the precious. Highly proper. "And pray has he done so?" "Really, Lady Dedlock, I cannot make you a definite reply. I fear not. Probably not yet. In our condition of life, we sometimes couple an intention with our--our fancies which renders them not altogether easy to throw off. I think it is rather our way to be in earnest." Sir Leicester has a misgiving that there may be a hidden Wat Tylerish meaning in this expression, and fumes a little. Mr. Rouncewell is perfectly good-humoured and polite, but within such limits, evidently adapts his tone to his reception. "Because," proceeds my Lady, "I have been thinking of the subject, which is tiresome to me." "I am very sorry, I am sure." "And also of what Sir Leicester said upon it, in which I quite concur"--Sir Leicester flattered--"and if you cannot give us the assurance that this fancy is at an end, I have come to the conclusion that the girl had better leave me." "I can give no such assurance, Lady Dedlock. Nothing of the kind." "Then she had better go." "Excuse me, my Lady," Sir Leicester considerately interposes, "but perhaps this may be doing an injury to the young woman which she has not merited. Here is a young woman," says Sir Leicester, magnificently laying out the matter with his right hand like a service of plate, "whose good fortune it is to have attracted the notice and favour of an eminent lady and to live, under the protection of that eminent lady, surrounded by the various advantages which such a position confers, and which are unquestionably very great--I believe unquestionably very great, sir--for a young woman in that station of life. The question then arises, should that young woman be deprived of these many advantages and that good fortune simply because she has"--Sir Leicester, with an apologetic but dignified inclination of his head towards the ironmaster, winds up his sentence--"has attracted the notice of Mr Rouncewell's son? Now, has she deserved this punishment? Is this just towards her? Is this our previous understanding?" "I beg your pardon," interposes Mr. Rouncewell's son's father. "Sir Leicester, will you allow me? I think I may shorten the subject. Pray dismiss that from your consideration. If you remember anything so unimportant--which is not to be expected--you would recollect that my first thought in the affair was directly opposed to her remaining here." Dismiss the Dedlock patronage from consideration? Oh! Sir Leicester is bound to believe a pair of ears that have been handed down to him through such a family, or he really might have mistrusted their report of the iron gentleman's observations. "It is not necessary," observes my Lady in her coldest manner before he can do anything but breathe amazedly, "to enter into these matters on either side. The girl is a very good girl; I have nothing whatever to say against her, but she is so far insensible to her many advantages and her good fortune that she is in love--or supposes she is, poor little fool--and unable to appreciate them." Sir Leicester begs to observe that wholly alters the case. He might have been sure that my Lady had the best grounds and reasons in support of her view. He entirely agrees with my Lady. The young woman had better go. "As Sir Leicester observed, Mr. Rouncewell, on the last occasion when we were fatigued by this business," Lady Dedlock languidly proceeds, "we cannot make conditions with you. Without conditions, and under present circumstances, the girl is quite misplaced here and had better go. I have told her so. Would you wish to have her sent back to the village, or would you like to take her with you, or what would you prefer?" "Lady Dedlock, if I may speak plainly--" "By all means." "--I should prefer the course which will the soonest relieve you of the incumbrance and remove her from her present position." "And to speak as plainly," she returns with the same studied carelessness, "so should I. Do I understand that you will take her with you?" The iron gentleman makes an iron bow. "Sir Leicester, will you ring?" Mr. Tulkinghorn steps forward from his window and pulls the bell. "I had forgotten you. Thank you." He makes his usual bow and goes quietly back again. Mercury, swift-responsive, appears, receives instructions whom to produce, skims away, produces the aforesaid, and departs. Rosa has been crying and is yet in distress. On her coming in, the ironmaster leaves his chair, takes her arm in his, and remains with her near the door ready to depart. "You are taken charge of, you see," says my Lady in her weary manner, "and are going away well protected. I have mentioned that you are a very good girl, and you have nothing to cry for." "She seems after all," observes Mr. Tulkinghorn, loitering a little forward with his hands behind him, "as if she were crying at going away." "Why, she is not well-bred, you see," returns Mr. Rouncewell with some quickness in his manner, as if he were glad to have the lawyer to retort upon, "and she is an inexperienced little thing and knows no better. If she had remained here, sir, she would have improved, no doubt." "No doubt," is Mr. Tulkinghorn's composed reply. Rosa sobs out that she is very sorry to leave my Lady, and that she was happy at Chesney Wold, and has been happy with my Lady, and that she thanks my Lady over and over again. "Out, you silly little puss!" says the ironmaster, checking her in a low voice, though not angrily. "Have a spirit, if you're fond of Watt!" My Lady merely waves her off with indifference, saying, "There, there, child! You are a good girl. Go away!" Sir Leicester has magnificently disengaged himself from the subject and retired into the sanctuary of his blue coat. Mr. Tulkinghorn, an indistinct form against the dark street now dotted with lamps, looms in my Lady's view, bigger and blacker than before. "Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock," says Mr. Rouncewell after a pause of a few moments, "I beg to take my leave, with an apology for having again troubled you, though not of my own act, on this tiresome subject. I can very well understand, I assure you, how tiresome so small a matter must have become to Lady Dedlock. If I am doubtful of my dealing with it, it is only because I did not at first quietly exert my influence to take my young friend here away without troubling you at all. But it appeared to me--I dare say magnifying the importance of the thing--that it was respectful to explain to you how the matter stood and candid to consult your wishes and convenience. I hope you will excuse my want of acquaintance with the polite world." Sir Leicester considers himself evoked out of the sanctuary by these remarks. "Mr. Rouncewell," he returns, "do not mention it. Justifications are unnecessary, I hope, on either side." "I am glad to hear it, Sir Leicester; and if I may, by way of a last word, revert to what I said before of my mother's long connexion with the family and the worth it bespeaks on both sides, I would point out this little instance here on my arm who shows herself so affectionate and faithful in parting and in whom my mother, I dare say, has done something to awaken such feelings--though of course Lady Dedlock, by her heartfelt interest and her genial condescension, has done much more." If he mean this ironically, it may be truer than he thinks. He points it, however, by no deviation from his straightforward manner of speech, though in saying it he turns towards that part of the dim room where my Lady sits. Sir Leicester stands to return his parting salutation, Mr. Tulkinghorn again rings, Mercury takes another flight, and Mr. Rouncewell and Rosa leave the house. Then lights are brought in, discovering Mr. Tulkinghorn still standing in his window with his hands behind him and my Lady still sitting with his figure before her, closing up her view of the night as well as of the day. She is very pale. Mr. Tulkinghorn, observing it as she rises to retire, thinks, "Well she may be! The power of this woman is astonishing. She has been acting a part the whole time." But he can act a part too--his one unchanging character--and as he holds the door open for this woman, fifty pairs of eyes, each fifty times sharper than Sir Leicester's pair, should find no flaw in him. Lady Dedlock dines alone in her own room to-day. Sir Leicester is whipped in to the rescue of the Doodle Party and the discomfiture of the Coodle Faction. Lady Dedlock asks on sitting down to dinner, still deadly pale (and quite an illustration of the debilitated cousin's text), whether he is gone out? Yes. Whether Mr. Tulkinghorn is gone yet? No. Presently she asks again, is he gone YET? No. What is he doing? Mercury thinks he is writing letters in the library. Would my Lady wish to see him? Anything but that. But he wishes to see my Lady. Within a few more minutes he is reported as sending his respects, and could my Lady please to receive him for a word or two after her dinner? My Lady will receive him now. He comes now, apologizing for intruding, even by her permission, while she is at table. When they are alone, my Lady waves her hand to dispense with such mockeries. "What do you want, sir?" "Why, Lady Dedlock," says the lawyer, taking a chair at a little distance from her and slowly rubbing his rusty legs up and down, up and down, up and down, "I am rather surprised by the course you have taken." "Indeed?" "Yes, decidedly. I was not prepared for it. I consider it a departure from our agreement and your promise. It puts us in a new position, Lady Dedlock. I feel myself under the necessity of saying that I don't approve of it." He stops in his rubbing and looks at her, with his hands on his knees. Imperturbable and unchangeable as he is, there is still an indefinable freedom in his manner which is new and which does not escape this woman's observation. "I do not quite understand you." "Oh, yes you do, I think. I think you do. Come, come, Lady Dedlock, we must not fence and parry now. You know you like this girl." "Well, sir?" "And you know--and I know--that you have not sent her away for the reasons you have assigned, but for the purpose of separating her as much as possible from--excuse my mentioning it as a matter of business--any reproach and exposure that impend over yourself." "Well, sir?" "Well, Lady Dedlock," returns the lawyer, crossing his legs and nursing the uppermost knee. "I object to that. I consider that a dangerous proceeding. I know it to be unnecessary and calculated to awaken speculation, doubt, rumour, I don't know what, in the house. Besides, it is a violation of our agreement. You were to be exactly what you were before. Whereas, it must be evident to yourself, as it is to me, that you have been this evening very different from what you were before. Why, bless my soul, Lady Dedlock, transparently so!" "If, sir," she begins, "in my knowledge of my secret--" But he interrupts her. "Now, Lady Dedlock, this is a matter of business, and in a matter of business the ground cannot be kept too clear. It is no longer your secret. Excuse me. That is just the mistake. It is my secret, in trust for Sir Leicester and the family. If it were your secret, Lady Dedlock, we should not be here holding this conversation." "That is very true. If in my knowledge of THE secret I do what I can to spare an innocent girl (especially, remembering your own reference to her when you told my story to the assembled guests at Chesney Wold) from the taint of my impending shame, I act upon a resolution I have taken. Nothing in the world, and no one in the world, could shake it or could move me." This she says with great deliberation and distinctness and with no more outward passion than himself. As for him, he methodically discusses his matter of business as if she were any insensible instrument used in business. "Really? Then you see, Lady Dedlock," he returns, "you are not to be trusted. You have put the case in a perfectly plain way, and according to the literal fact; and that being the case, you are not to be trusted." "Perhaps you may remember that I expressed some anxiety on this same point when we spoke at night at Chesney Wold?" "Yes," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, coolly getting up and standing on the hearth. "Yes. I recollect, Lady Dedlock, that you certainly referred to the girl, but that was before we came to our arrangement, and both the letter and the spirit of our arrangement altogether precluded any action on your part founded upon my discovery. There can be no doubt about that. As to sparing the girl, of what importance or value is she? Spare! Lady Dedlock, here is a family name compromised. One might have supposed that the course was straight on--over everything, neither to the right nor to the left, regardless of all considerations in the way, sparing nothing, treading everything under foot." She has been looking at the table. She lifts up her eyes and looks at him. There is a stern expression on her face and a part of her lower lip is compressed under her teeth. "This woman understands me," Mr. Tulkinghorn thinks as she lets her glance fall again. "SHE cannot be spared. Why should she spare others?" For a little while they are silent. Lady Dedlock has eaten no dinner, but has twice or thrice poured out water with a steady hand and drunk it. She rises from table, takes a lounging-chair, and reclines in it, shading her face. There is nothing in her manner to express weakness or excite compassion. It is thoughtful, gloomy, concentrated. "This woman," thinks Mr. Tulkinghorn, standing on the hearth, again a dark object closing up her view, "is a study." He studies her at his leisure, not speaking for a time. She too studies something at her leisure. She is not the first to speak, appearing indeed so unlikely to be so, though he stood there until midnight, that even he is driven upon breaking silence. "Lady Dedlock, the most disagreeable part of this business interview remains, but it is business. Our agreement is broken. A lady of your sense and strength of character will be prepared for my now declaring it void and taking my own course." "I am quite prepared." Mr. Tulkinghorn inclines his head. "That is all I have to trouble you with, Lady Dedlock." She stops him as he is moving out of the room by asking, "This is the notice I was to receive? I wish not to misapprehend you." "Not exactly the notice you were to receive, Lady Dedlock, because the contemplated notice supposed the agreement to have been observed. But virtually the same, virtually the same. The difference is merely in a lawyer's mind." "You intend to give me no other notice?" "You are right. No." "Do you contemplate undeceiving Sir Leicester to-night?" "A home question!" says Mr. Tulkinghorn with a slight smile and cautiously shaking his head at the shaded face. "No, not to-night." "To-morrow?" "All things considered, I had better decline answering that question, Lady Dedlock. If I were to say I don't know when, exactly, you would not believe me, and it would answer no purpose. It may be to-morrow. I would rather say no more. You are prepared, and I hold out no expectations which circumstances might fail to justify. I wish you good evening." She removes her hand, turns her pale face towards him as he walks silently to the door, and stops him once again as he is about to open it. "Do you intend to remain in the house any time? I heard you were writing in the library. Are you going to return there?" "Only for my hat. I am going home." She bows her eyes rather than her head, the movement is so slight and curious, and he withdraws. Clear of the room he looks at his watch but is inclined to doubt it by a minute or thereabouts. There is a splendid clock upon the staircase, famous, as splendid clocks not often are, for its accuracy. "And what do YOU say," Mr. Tulkinghorn inquires, referring to it. "What do you say?" If it said now, "Don't go home!" What a famous clock, hereafter, if it said to-night of all the nights that it has counted off, to this old man of all the young and old men who have ever stood before it, "Don't go home!" With its sharp clear bell it strikes three quarters after seven and ticks on again. "Why, you are worse than I thought you," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, muttering reproof to his watch. "Two minutes wrong? At this rate you won't last my time." What a watch to return good for evil if it ticked in answer, "Don't go home!" He passes out into the streets and walks on, with his hands behind him, under the shadow of the lofty houses, many of whose mysteries, difficulties, mortgages, delicate affairs of all kinds, are treasured up within his old black satin waistcoat. He is in the confidence of the very bricks and mortar. The high chimney-stacks telegraph family secrets to him. Yet there is not a voice in a mile of them to whisper, "Don't go home!" Through the stir and motion of the commoner streets; through the roar and jar of many vehicles, many feet, many voices; with the blazing shop-lights lighting him on, the west wind blowing him on, and the crowd pressing him on, he is pitilessly urged upon his way, and nothing meets him murmuring, "Don't go home!" Arrived at last in his dull room to light his candles, and look round and up, and see the Roman pointing from the ceiling, there is no new significance in the Roman's hand to-night or in the flutter of the attendant groups to give him the late warning, "Don't come here!" It is a moonlight night, but the moon, being past the full, is only now rising over the great wilderness of London. The stars are shining as they shone above the turret-leads at Chesney Wold. This woman, as he has of late been so accustomed to call her, looks out upon them. Her soul is turbulent within her; she is sick at heart and restless. The large rooms are too cramped and close. She cannot endure their restraint and will walk alone in a neighbouring garden. Too capricious and imperious in all she does to be the cause of much surprise in those about her as to anything she does, this woman, loosely muffled, goes out into the moonlight. Mercury attends with the key. Having opened the garden-gate, he delivers the key into his Lady's hands at her request and is bidden to go back. She will walk there some time to ease her aching head. She may be an hour, she may be more. She needs no further escort. The gate shuts upon its spring with a clash, and he leaves her passing on into the dark shade of some trees. A fine night, and a bright large moon, and multitudes of stars. Mr. Tulkinghorn, in repairing to his cellar and in opening and shutting those resounding doors, has to cross a little prison-like yard. He looks up casually, thinking what a fine night, what a bright large moon, what multitudes of stars! A quiet night, too. A very quiet night. When the moon shines very brilliantly, a solitude and stillness seem to proceed from her that influence even crowded places full of life. Not only is it a still night on dusty high roads and on hill-summits, whence a wide expanse of country may be seen in repose, quieter and quieter as it spreads away into a fringe of trees against the sky with the grey ghost of a bloom upon them; not only is it a still night in gardens and in woods, and on the river where the water-meadows are fresh and green, and the stream sparkles on among pleasant islands, murmuring weirs, and whispering rushes; not only does the stillness attend it as it flows where houses cluster thick, where many bridges are reflected in it, where wharves and shipping make it black and awful, where it winds from these disfigurements through marshes whose grim beacons stand like skeletons washed ashore, where it expands through the bolder region of rising grounds, rich in cornfield wind-mill and steeple, and where it mingles with the ever-heaving sea; not only is it a still night on the deep, and on the shore where the watcher stands to see the ship with her spread wings cross the path of light that appears to be presented to only him; but even on this stranger's wilderness of London there is some rest. Its steeples and towers and its one great dome grow more ethereal; its smoky house-tops lose their grossness in the pale effulgence; the noises that arise from the streets are fewer and are softened, and the footsteps on the pavements pass more tranquilly away. In these fields of Mr. Tulkinghorn's inhabiting, where the shepherds play on Chancery pipes that have no stop, and keep their sheep in the fold by hook and by crook until they have shorn them exceeding close, every noise is merged, this moonlight night, into a distant ringing hum, as if the city were a vast glass, vibrating. What's that? Who fired a gun or pistol? Where was it? The few foot-passengers start, stop, and stare about them. Some windows and doors are opened, and people come out to look. It was a loud report and echoed and rattled heavily. It shook one house, or so a man says who was passing. It has aroused all the dogs in the neighbourhood, who bark vehemently. Terrified cats scamper across the road. While the dogs are yet barking and howling--there is one dog howling like a demon--the church-clocks, as if they were startled too, begin to strike. The hum from the streets, likewise, seems to swell into a shout. But it is soon over. Before the last clock begins to strike ten, there is a lull. When it has ceased, the fine night, the bright large moon, and multitudes of stars, are left at peace again. Has Mr. Tulkinghorn been disturbed? His windows are dark and quiet, and his door is shut. It must be something unusual indeed to bring him out of his shell. Nothing is heard of him, nothing is seen of him. What power of cannon might it take to shake that rusty old man out of his immovable composure? For many years the persistent Roman has been pointing, with no particular meaning, from that ceiling. It is not likely that he has any new meaning in him to-night. Once pointing, always pointing--like any Roman, or even Briton, with a single idea. There he is, no doubt, in his impossible attitude, pointing, unavailingly, all night long. Moonlight, darkness, dawn, sunrise, day. There he is still, eagerly pointing, and no one minds him. But a little after the coming of the day come people to clean the rooms. And either the Roman has some new meaning in him, not expressed before, or the foremost of them goes wild, for looking up at his outstretched hand and looking down at what is below it, that person shrieks and flies. The others, looking in as the first one looked, shriek and fly too, and there is an alarm in the street. What does it mean? No light is admitted into the darkened chamber, and people unaccustomed to it enter, and treading softly but heavily, carry a weight into the bedroom and lay it down. There is whispering and wondering all day, strict search of every corner, careful tracing of steps, and careful noting of the disposition of every article of furniture. All eyes look up at the Roman, and all voices murmur, "If he could only tell what he saw!" He is pointing at a table with a bottle (nearly full of wine) and a glass upon it and two candles that were blown out suddenly soon after being lighted. He is pointing at an empty chair and at a stain upon the ground before it that might be almost covered with a hand. These objects lie directly within his range. An excited imagination might suppose that there was something in them so terrific as to drive the rest of the composition, not only the attendant big-legged boys, but the clouds and flowers and pillars too--in short, the very body and soul of Allegory, and all the brains it has--stark mad. It happens surely that every one who comes into the darkened room and looks at these things looks up at the Roman and that he is invested in all eyes with mystery and awe, as if he were a paralysed dumb witness. So it shall happen surely, through many years to come, that ghostly stories shall be told of the stain upon the floor, so easy to be covered, so hard to be got out, and that the Roman, pointing from the ceiling shall point, so long as dust and damp and spiders spare him, with far greater significance than he ever had in Mr. Tulkinghorn's time, and with a deadly meaning. For Mr. Tulkinghorn's time is over for evermore, and the Roman pointed at the murderous hand uplifted against his life, and pointed helplessly at him, from night to morning, lying face downward on the floor, shot through the heart. CHAPTER XLIX Dutiful Friendship A great annual occasion has come round in the establishment of Mr. Matthew Bagnet, otherwise Lignum Vitae, ex-artilleryman and present bassoon-player. An occasion of feasting and festival. The celebration of a birthday in the family. It is not Mr. Bagnet's birthday. Mr. Bagnet merely distinguishes that epoch in the musical instrument business by kissing the children with an extra smack before breakfast, smoking an additional pipe after dinner, and wondering towards evening what his poor old mother is thinking about it--a subject of infinite speculation, and rendered so by his mother having departed this life twenty years. Some men rarely revert to their father, but seem, in the bank-books of their remembrance, to have transferred all the stock of filial affection into their mother's name. Mr. Bagnet is one of these. Perhaps his exalted appreciation of the merits of the old girl causes him usually to make the noun-substantive "goodness" of the feminine gender. It is not the birthday of one of the three children. Those occasions are kept with some marks of distinction, but they rarely overleap the bounds of happy returns and a pudding. On young Woolwich's last birthday, Mr. Bagnet certainly did, after observing on his growth and general advancement, proceed, in a moment of profound reflection on the changes wrought by time, to examine him in the catechism, accomplishing with extreme accuracy the questions number one and two, "What is your name?" and "Who gave you that name?" but there failing in the exact precision of his memory and substituting for number three the question "And how do you like that name?" which he propounded with a sense of its importance, in itself so edifying and improving as to give it quite an orthodox air. This, however, was a speciality on that particular birthday, and not a general solemnity. It is the old girl's birthday, and that is the greatest holiday and reddest-letter day in Mr. Bagnet's calendar. The auspicious event is always commemorated according to certain forms settled and prescribed by Mr. Bagnet some years since. Mr. Bagnet, being deeply convinced that to have a pair of fowls for dinner is to attain the highest pitch of imperial luxury, invariably goes forth himself very early in the morning of this day to buy a pair; he is, as invariably, taken in by the vendor and installed in the possession of the oldest inhabitants of any coop in Europe. Returning with these triumphs of toughness tied up in a clean blue and white cotton handkerchief (essential to the arrangements), he in a casual manner invites Mrs. Bagnet to declare at breakfast what she would like for dinner. Mrs. Bagnet, by a coincidence never known to fail, replying fowls, Mr. Bagnet instantly produces his bundle from a place of concealment amidst general amazement and rejoicing. He further requires that the old girl shall do nothing all day long but sit in her very best gown and be served by himself and the young people. As he is not illustrious for his cookery, this may be supposed to be a matter of state rather than enjoyment on the old girl's part, but she keeps her state with all imaginable cheerfulness. On this present birthday, Mr. Bagnet has accomplished the usual preliminaries. He has bought two specimens of poultry, which, if there be any truth in adages, were certainly not caught with chaff, to be prepared for the spit; he has amazed and rejoiced the family by their unlooked-for production; he is himself directing the roasting of the poultry; and Mrs. Bagnet, with her wholesome brown fingers itching to prevent what she sees going wrong, sits in her gown of ceremony, an honoured guest. Quebec and Malta lay the cloth for dinner, while Woolwich, serving, as beseems him, under his father, keeps the fowls revolving. To these young scullions Mrs. Bagnet occasionally imparts a wink, or a shake of the head, or a crooked face, as they made mistakes. "At half after one." Says Mr. Bagnet. "To the minute. They'll be done." Mrs. Bagnet, with anguish, beholds one of them at a standstill before the fire and beginning to burn. "You shall have a dinner, old girl," says Mr. Bagnet. "Fit for a queen." Mrs. Bagnet shows her white teeth cheerfully, but to the perception of her son, betrays so much uneasiness of spirit that he is impelled by the dictates of affection to ask her, with his eyes, what is the matter, thus standing, with his eyes wide open, more oblivious of the fowls than before, and not affording the least hope of a return to consciousness. Fortunately his elder sister perceives the cause of the agitation in Mrs. Bagnet's breast and with an admonitory poke recalls him. The stopped fowls going round again, Mrs. Bagnet closes her eyes in the intensity of her relief. "George will look us up," says Mr. Bagnet. "At half after four. To the moment. How many years, old girl. Has George looked us up. This afternoon?" "Ah, Lignum, Lignum, as many as make an old woman of a young one, I begin to think. Just about that, and no less," returns Mrs. Bagnet, laughing and shaking her head. "Old girl," says Mr. Bagnet, "never mind. You'd be as young as ever you was. If you wasn't younger. Which you are. As everybody knows." Quebec and Malta here exclaim, with clapping of hands, that Bluffy is sure to bring mother something, and begin to speculate on what it will be. "Do you know, Lignum," says Mrs. Bagnet, casting a glance on the table-cloth, and winking "salt!" at Malta with her right eye, and shaking the pepper away from Quebec with her head, "I begin to think George is in the roving way again. "George," returns Mr. Bagnet, "will never desert. And leave his old comrade. In the lurch. Don't be afraid of it." "No, Lignum. No. I don't say he will. I don't think he will. But if he could get over this money trouble of his, I believe he would be off." Mr. Bagnet asks why. "Well," returns his wife, considering, "George seems to me to be getting not a little impatient and restless. I don't say but what he's as free as ever. Of course he must be free or he wouldn't be George, but he smarts and seems put out." "He's extra-drilled," says Mr. Bagnet. "By a lawyer. Who would put the devil out." "There's something in that," his wife assents; "but so it is, Lignum." Further conversation is prevented, for the time, by the necessity under which Mr. Bagnet finds himself of directing the whole force of his mind to the dinner, which is a little endangered by the dry humour of the fowls in not yielding any gravy, and also by the made gravy acquiring no flavour and turning out of a flaxen complexion. With a similar perverseness, the potatoes crumble off forks in the process of peeling, upheaving from their centres in every direction, as if they were subject to earthquakes. The legs of the fowls, too, are longer than could be desired, and extremely scaly. Overcoming these disadvantages to the best of his ability, Mr. Bagnet at last dishes and they sit down at table, Mrs. Bagnet occupying the guest's place at his right hand. It is well for the old girl that she has but one birthday in a year, for two such indulgences in poultry might be injurious. Every kind of finer tendon and ligament that is in the nature of poultry to possess is developed in these specimens in the singular form of guitar-strings. Their limbs appear to have struck roots into their breasts and bodies, as aged trees strike roots into the earth. Their legs are so hard as to encourage the idea that they must have devoted the greater part of their long and arduous lives to pedestrian exercises and the walking of matches. But Mr. Bagnet, unconscious of these little defects, sets his heart on Mrs. Bagnet eating a most severe quantity of the delicacies before her; and as that good old girl would not cause him a moment's disappointment on any day, least of all on such a day, for any consideration, she imperils her digestion fearfully. How young Woolwich cleans the drum-sticks without being of ostrich descent, his anxious mother is at a loss to understand. The old girl has another trial to undergo after the conclusion of the repast in sitting in state to see the room cleared, the hearth swept, and the dinner-service washed up and polished in the backyard. The great delight and energy with which the two young ladies apply themselves to these duties, turning up their skirts in imitation of their mother and skating in and out on little scaffolds of pattens, inspire the highest hopes for the future, but some anxiety for the present. The same causes lead to confusion of tongues, a clattering of crockery, a rattling of tin mugs, a whisking of brooms, and an expenditure of water, all in excess, while the saturation of the young ladies themselves is almost too moving a spectacle for Mrs. Bagnet to look upon with the calmness proper to her position. At last the various cleansing processes are triumphantly completed; Quebec and Malta appear in fresh attire, smiling and dry; pipes, tobacco, and something to drink are placed upon the table; and the old girl enjoys the first peace of mind she ever knows on the day of this delightful entertainment. When Mr. Bagnet takes his usual seat, the hands of the clock are very near to half-past four; as they mark it accurately, Mr. Bagnet announces, "George! Military time." It is George, and he has hearty congratulations for the old girl (whom he kisses on the great occasion), and for the children, and for Mr. Bagnet. "Happy returns to all!" says Mr. George. "But, George, old man!" cries Mrs. Bagnet, looking at him curiously. "What's come to you?" "Come to me?" "Ah! You are so white, George--for you--and look so shocked. Now don't he, Lignum?" "George," says Mr. Bagnet, "tell the old girl. What's the matter." "I didn't know I looked white," says the trooper, passing his hand over his brow, "and I didn't know I looked shocked, and I'm sorry I do. But the truth is, that boy who was taken in at my place died yesterday afternoon, and it has rather knocked me over." "Poor creetur!" says Mrs. Bagnet with a mother's pity. "Is he gone? Dear, dear!" "I didn't mean to say anything about it, for it's not birthday talk, but you have got it out of me, you see, before I sit down. I should have roused up in a minute," says the trooper, making himself speak more gaily, "but you're so quick, Mrs. Bagnet." "You're right. The old girl," says Mr. Bagnet. "Is as quick. As powder." "And what's more, she's the subject of the day, and we'll stick to her," cries Mr. George. "See here, I have brought a little brooch along with me. It's a poor thing, you know, but it's a keepsake. That's all the good it is, Mrs. Bagnet." Mr. George produces his present, which is greeted with admiring leapings and clappings by the young family, and with a species of reverential admiration by Mr. Bagnet. "Old girl," says Mr. Bagnet. "Tell him my opinion of it." "Why, it's a wonder, George!" Mrs. Bagnet exclaims. "It's the beautifullest thing that ever was seen!" "Good!" says Mr. Bagnet. "My opinion." "It's so pretty, George," cries Mrs. Bagnet, turning it on all sides and holding it out at arm's length, "that it seems too choice for me." "Bad!" says Mr. Bagnet. "Not my opinion." "But whatever it is, a hundred thousand thanks, old fellow," says Mrs. Bagnet, her eyes sparkling with pleasure and her hand stretched out to him; "and though I have been a crossgrained soldier's wife to you sometimes, George, we are as strong friends, I am sure, in reality, as ever can be. Now you shall fasten it on yourself, for good luck, if you will, George." The children close up to see it done, and Mr. Bagnet looks over young Woolwich's head to see it done with an interest so maturely wooden, yet pleasantly childish, that Mrs. Bagnet cannot help laughing in her airy way and saying, "Oh, Lignum, Lignum, what a precious old chap you are!" But the trooper fails to fasten the brooch. His hand shakes, he is nervous, and it falls off. "Would any one believe this?" says he, catching it as it drops and looking round. "I am so out of sorts that I bungle at an easy job like this!" Mrs. Bagnet concludes that for such a case there is no remedy like a pipe, and fastening the brooch herself in a twinkling, causes the trooper to be inducted into his usual snug place and the pipes to be got into action. "If that don't bring you round, George," says she, "just throw your eye across here at your present now and then, and the two together MUST do it." "You ought to do it of yourself," George answers; "I know that very well, Mrs. Bagnet. I'll tell you how, one way and another, the blues have got to be too many for me. Here was this poor lad. 'Twas dull work to see him dying as he did, and not be able to help him." "What do you mean, George? You did help him. You took him under your roof." "I helped him so far, but that's little. I mean, Mrs. Bagnet, there he was, dying without ever having been taught much more than to know his right hand from his left. And he was too far gone to be helped out of that." "Ah, poor creetur!" says Mrs. Bagnet. "Then," says the trooper, not yet lighting his pipe, and passing his heavy hand over his hair, "that brought up Gridley in a man's mind. His was a bad case too, in a different way. Then the two got mixed up in a man's mind with a flinty old rascal who had to do with both. And to think of that rusty carbine, stock and barrel, standing up on end in his corner, hard, indifferent, taking everything so evenly--it made flesh and blood tingle, I do assure you." "My advice to you," returns Mrs. Bagnet, "is to light your pipe and tingle that way. It's wholesomer and comfortabler, and better for the health altogether." "You're right," says the trooper, "and I'll do it." So he does it, though still with an indignant gravity that impresses the young Bagnets, and even causes Mr. Bagnet to defer the ceremony of drinking Mrs. Bagnet's health, always given by himself on these occasions in a speech of exemplary terseness. But the young ladies having composed what Mr. Bagnet is in the habit of calling "the mixtur," and George's pipe being now in a glow, Mr. Bagnet considers it his duty to proceed to the toast of the evening. He addresses the assembled company in the following terms. "George. Woolwich. Quebec. Malta. This is her birthday. Take a day's march. And you won't find such another. Here's towards her!" The toast having been drunk with enthusiasm, Mrs. Bagnet returns thanks in a neat address of corresponding brevity. This model composition is limited to the three words "And wishing yours!" which the old girl follows up with a nod at everybody in succession and a well-regulated swig of the mixture. This she again follows up, on the present occasion, by the wholly unexpected exclamation, "Here's a man!" Here IS a man, much to the astonishment of the little company, looking in at the parlour-door. He is a sharp-eyed man--a quick keen man--and he takes in everybody's look at him, all at once, individually and collectively, in a manner that stamps him a remarkable man. "George," says the man, nodding, "how do you find yourself?" "Why, it's Bucket!" cries Mr. George. "Yes," says the man, coming in and closing the door. "I was going down the street here when I happened to stop and look in at the musical instruments in the shop-window--a friend of mine is in want of a second-hand wiolinceller of a good tone--and I saw a party enjoying themselves, and I thought it was you in the corner; I thought I couldn't be mistaken. How goes the world with you, George, at the present moment? Pretty smooth? And with you, ma'am? And with you, governor? And Lord," says Mr. Bucket, opening his arms, "here's children too! You may do anything with me if you only show me children. Give us a kiss, my pets. No occasion to inquire who YOUR father and mother is. Never saw such a likeness in my life!" Mr. Bucket, not unwelcome, has sat himself down next to Mr. George and taken Quebec and Malta on his knees. "You pretty dears," says Mr. Bucket, "give us another kiss; it's the only thing I'm greedy in. Lord bless you, how healthy you look! And what may be the ages of these two, ma'am? I should put 'em down at the figures of about eight and ten." "You're very near, sir," says Mrs. Bagnet. "I generally am near," returns Mr. Bucket, "being so fond of children. A friend of mine has had nineteen of 'em, ma'am, all by one mother, and she's still as fresh and rosy as the morning. Not so much so as yourself, but, upon my soul, she comes near you! And what do you call these, my darling?" pursues Mr. Bucket, pinching Malta's cheeks. "These are peaches, these are. Bless your heart! And what do you think about father? Do you think father could recommend a second-hand wiolinceller of a good tone for Mr. Bucket's friend, my dear? My name's Bucket. Ain't that a funny name?" These blandishments have entirely won the family heart. Mrs. Bagnet forgets the day to the extent of filling a pipe and a glass for Mr. Bucket and waiting upon him hospitably. She would be glad to receive so pleasant a character under any circumstances, but she tells him that as a friend of George's she is particularly glad to see him this evening, for George has not been in his usual spirits. "Not in his usual spirits?" exclaims Mr. Bucket. "Why, I never heard of such a thing! What's the matter, George? You don't intend to tell me you've been out of spirits. What should you be out of spirits for? You haven't got anything on your mind, you know." "Nothing particular," returns the trooper. "I should think not," rejoins Mr. Bucket. "What could you have on your mind, you know! And have these pets got anything on THEIR minds, eh? Not they, but they'll be upon the minds of some of the young fellows, some of these days, and make 'em precious low-spirited. I ain't much of a prophet, but I can tell you that, ma'am." Mrs. Bagnet, quite charmed, hopes Mr. Bucket has a family of his own. "There, ma'am!" says Mr. Bucket. "Would you believe it? No, I haven't. My wife and a lodger constitute my family. Mrs. Bucket is as fond of children as myself and as wishful to have 'em, but no. So it is. Worldly goods are divided unequally, and man must not repine. What a very nice backyard, ma'am! Any way out of that yard, now?" There is no way out of that yard. "Ain't there really?" says Mr. Bucket. "I should have thought there might have been. Well, I don't know as I ever saw a backyard that took my fancy more. Would you allow me to look at it? Thank you. No, I see there's no way out. But what a very good-proportioned yard it is!" Having cast his sharp eye all about it, Mr. Bucket returns to his chair next his friend Mr. George and pats Mr. George affectionately on the shoulder. "How are your spirits now, George?" "All right now," returns the trooper. "That's your sort!" says Mr. Bucket. "Why should you ever have been otherwise? A man of your fine figure and constitution has no right to be out of spirits. That ain't a chest to be out of spirits, is it, ma'am? And you haven't got anything on your mind, you know, George; what could you have on your mind!" Somewhat harping on this phrase, considering the extent and variety of his conversational powers, Mr. Bucket twice or thrice repeats it to the pipe he lights, and with a listening face that is particularly his own. But the sun of his sociality soon recovers from this brief eclipse and shines again. "And this is brother, is it, my dears?" says Mr. Bucket, referring to Quebec and Malta for information on the subject of young Woolwich. "And a nice brother he is--half-brother I mean to say. For he's too old to be your boy, ma'am." "I can certify at all events that he is not anybody else's," returns Mrs. Bagnet, laughing. "Well, you do surprise me! Yet he's like you, there's no denying. Lord, he's wonderfully like you! But about what you may call the brow, you know, THERE his father comes out!" Mr. Bucket compares the faces with one eye shut up, while Mr. Bagnet smokes in stolid satisfaction. This is an opportunity for Mrs. Bagnet to inform him that the boy is George's godson. "George's godson, is he?" rejoins Mr. Bucket with extreme cordiality. "I must shake hands over again with George's godson. Godfather and godson do credit to one another. And what do you intend to make of him, ma'am? Does he show any turn for any musical instrument?" Mr. Bagnet suddenly interposes, "Plays the fife. Beautiful." "Would you believe it, governor," says Mr. Bucket, struck by the coincidence, "that when I was a boy I played the fife myself? Not in a scientific way, as I expect he does, but by ear. Lord bless you! 'British Grenadiers'--there's a tune to warm an Englishman up! COULD you give us 'British Grenadiers,' my fine fellow?" Nothing could be more acceptable to the little circle than this call upon young Woolwich, who immediately fetches his fife and performs the stirring melody, during which performance Mr. Bucket, much enlivened, beats time and never fails to come in sharp with the burden, "British Gra-a-anadeers!" In short, he shows so much musical taste that Mr. Bagnet actually takes his pipe from his lips to express his conviction that he is a singer. Mr. Bucket receives the harmonious impeachment so modestly, confessing how that he did once chaunt a little, for the expression of the feelings of his own bosom, and with no presumptuous idea of entertaining his friends, that he is asked to sing. Not to be behindhand in the sociality of the evening, he complies and gives them "Believe Me, if All Those Endearing Young Charms." This ballad, he informs Mrs. Bagnet, he considers to have been his most powerful ally in moving the heart of Mrs. Bucket when a maiden, and inducing her to approach the altar--Mr. Bucket's own words are "to come up to the scratch." This sparkling stranger is such a new and agreeable feature in the evening that Mr. George, who testified no great emotions of pleasure on his entrance, begins, in spite of himself, to be rather proud of him. He is so friendly, is a man of so many resources, and so easy to get on with, that it is something to have made him known there. Mr. Bagnet becomes, after another pipe, so sensible of the value of his acquaintance that he solicits the honour of his company on the old girl's next birthday. If anything can more closely cement and consolidate the esteem which Mr. Bucket has formed for the family, it is the discovery of the nature of the occasion. He drinks to Mrs. Bagnet with a warmth approaching to rapture, engages himself for that day twelvemonth more than thankfully, makes a memorandum of the day in a large black pocket-book with a girdle to it, and breathes a hope that Mrs. Bucket and Mrs. Bagnet may before then become, in a manner, sisters. As he says himself, what is public life without private ties? He is in his humble way a public man, but it is not in that sphere that he finds happiness. No, it must be sought within the confines of domestic bliss. It is natural, under these circumstances, that he, in his turn, should remember the friend to whom he is indebted for so promising an acquaintance. And he does. He keeps very close to him. Whatever the subject of the conversation, he keeps a tender eye upon him. He waits to walk home with him. He is interested in his very boots and observes even them attentively as Mr. George sits smoking cross-legged in the chimney-corner. At length Mr. George rises to depart. At the same moment Mr. Bucket, with the secret sympathy of friendship, also rises. He dotes upon the children to the last and remembers the commission he has undertaken for an absent friend. "Respecting that second-hand wiolinceller, governor--could you recommend me such a thing?" "Scores," says Mr. Bagnet. "I am obliged to you," returns Mr. Bucket, squeezing his hand. "You're a friend in need. A good tone, mind you! My friend is a regular dab at it. Ecod, he saws away at Mozart and Handel and the rest of the big-wigs like a thorough workman. And you needn't," says Mr. Bucket in a considerate and private voice, "you needn't commit yourself to too low a figure, governor. I don't want to pay too large a price for my friend, but I want you to have your proper percentage and be remunerated for your loss of time. That is but fair. Every man must live, and ought to it." Mr. Bagnet shakes his head at the old girl to the effect that they have found a jewel of price. "Suppose I was to give you a look in, say, at half arter ten to-morrow morning. Perhaps you could name the figures of a few wiolincellers of a good tone?" says Mr. Bucket. Nothing easier. Mr. and Mrs. Bagnet both engage to have the requisite information ready and even hint to each other at the practicability of having a small stock collected there for approval. "Thank you," says Mr. Bucket, "thank you. Good night, ma'am. Good night, governor. Good night, darlings. I am much obliged to you for one of the pleasantest evenings I ever spent in my life." They, on the contrary, are much obliged to him for the pleasure he has given them in his company; and so they part with many expressions of goodwill on both sides. "Now George, old boy," says Mr. Bucket, taking his arm at the shop-door, "come along!" As they go down the little street and the Bagnets pause for a minute looking after them, Mrs. Bagnet remarks to the worthy Lignum that Mr. Bucket "almost clings to George like, and seems to be really fond of him." The neighbouring streets being narrow and ill-paved, it is a little inconvenient to walk there two abreast and arm in arm. Mr. George therefore soon proposes to walk singly. But Mr. Bucket, who cannot make up his mind to relinquish his friendly hold, replies, "Wait half a minute, George. I should wish to speak to you first." Immediately afterwards, he twists him into a public-house and into a parlour, where he confronts him and claps his own back against the door. "Now, George," says Mr. Bucket, "duty is duty, and friendship is friendship. I never want the two to clash if I can help it. I have endeavoured to make things pleasant to-night, and I put it to you whether I have done it or not. You must consider yourself in custody, George." "Custody? What for?" returns the trooper, thunderstruck. "Now, George," says Mr. Bucket, urging a sensible view of the case upon him with his fat forefinger, "duty, as you know very well, is one thing, and conversation is another. It's my duty to inform you that any observations you may make will be liable to be used against you. Therefore, George, be careful what you say. You don't happen to have heard of a murder?" "Murder!" "Now, George," says Mr. Bucket, keeping his forefinger in an impressive state of action, "bear in mind what I've said to you. I ask you nothing. You've been in low spirits this afternoon. I say, you don't happen to have heard of a murder?" "No. Where has there been a murder?" "Now, George," says Mr. Bucket, "don't you go and commit yourself. I'm a-going to tell you what I want you for. There has been a murder in Lincoln's Inn Fields--gentleman of the name of Tulkinghorn. He was shot last night. I want you for that." The trooper sinks upon a seat behind him, and great drops start out upon his forehead, and a deadly pallor overspreads his face. "Bucket! It's not possible that Mr. Tulkinghorn has been killed and that you suspect ME?" "George," returns Mr. Bucket, keeping his forefinger going, "it is certainly possible, because it's the case. This deed was done last night at ten o'clock. Now, you know where you were last night at ten o'clock, and you'll be able to prove it, no doubt." "Last night! Last night?" repeats the trooper thoughtfully. Then it flashes upon him. "Why, great heaven, I was there last night!" "So I have understood, George," returns Mr. Bucket with great deliberation. "So I have understood. Likewise you've been very often there. You've been seen hanging about the place, and you've been heard more than once in a wrangle with him, and it's possible--I don't say it's certainly so, mind you, but it's possible--that he may have been heard to call you a threatening, murdering, dangerous fellow." The trooper gasps as if he would admit it all if he could speak. "Now, George," continues Mr. Bucket, putting his hat upon the table with an air of business rather in the upholstery way than otherwise, "my wish is, as it has been all the evening, to make things pleasant. I tell you plainly there's a reward out, of a hundred guineas, offered by Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet. You and me have always been pleasant together; but I have got a duty to discharge; and if that hundred guineas is to be made, it may as well be made by me as any other man. On all of which accounts, I should hope it was clear to you that I must have you, and that I'm damned if I don't have you. Am I to call in any assistance, or is the trick done?" Mr. George has recovered himself and stands up like a soldier. "Come," he says; "I am ready." "George," continues Mr. Bucket, "wait a bit!" With his upholsterer manner, as if the trooper were a window to be fitted up, he takes from his pocket a pair of handcuffs. "This is a serious charge, George, and such is my duty." The trooper flushes angrily and hesitates a moment, but holds out his two hands, clasped together, and says, "There! Put them on!" Mr. Bucket adjusts them in a moment. "How do you find them? Are they comfortable? If not, say so, for I wish to make things as pleasant as is consistent with my duty, and I've got another pair in my pocket." This remark he offers like a most respectable tradesman anxious to execute an order neatly and to the perfect satisfaction of his customer. "They'll do as they are? Very well! Now, you see, George"--he takes a cloak from a corner and begins adjusting it about the trooper's neck--"I was mindful of your feelings when I come out, and brought this on purpose. There! Who's the wiser?" "Only I," returns the trooper, "but as I know it, do me one more good turn and pull my hat over my eyes." "Really, though! Do you mean it? Ain't it a pity? It looks so." "I can't look chance men in the face with these things on," Mr. George hurriedly replies. "Do, for God's sake, pull my hat forward." So strongly entreated, Mr. Bucket complies, puts his own hat on, and conducts his prize into the streets, the trooper marching on as steadily as usual, though with his head less erect, and Mr. Bucket steering him with his elbow over the crossings and up the turnings. CHAPTER L Esther's Narrative It happened that when I came home from Deal I found a note from Caddy Jellyby (as we always continued to call her), informing me that her health, which had been for some time very delicate, was worse and that she would be more glad than she could tell me if I would go to see her. It was a note of a few lines, written from the couch on which she lay and enclosed to me in another from her husband, in which he seconded her entreaty with much solicitude. Caddy was now the mother, and I the godmother, of such a poor little baby--such a tiny old-faced mite, with a countenance that seemed to be scarcely anything but cap-border, and a little lean, long-fingered hand, always clenched under its chin. It would lie in this attitude all day, with its bright specks of eyes open, wondering (as I used to imagine) how it came to be so small and weak. Whenever it was moved it cried, but at all other times it was so patient that the sole desire of its life appeared to be to lie quiet and think. It had curious little dark veins in its face and curious little dark marks under its eyes like faint remembrances of poor Caddy's inky days, and altogether, to those who were not used to it, it was quite a piteous little sight. But it was enough for Caddy that SHE was used to it. The projects with which she beguiled her illness, for little Esther's education, and little Esther's marriage, and even for her own old age as the grandmother of little Esther's little Esthers, was so prettily expressive of devotion to this pride of her life that I should be tempted to recall some of them but for the timely remembrance that I am getting on irregularly as it is. To return to the letter. Caddy had a superstition about me which had been strengthening in her mind ever since that night long ago when she had lain asleep with her head in my lap. She almost--I think I must say quite--believed that I did her good whenever I was near her. Now although this was such a fancy of the affectionate girl's that I am almost ashamed to mention it, still it might have all the force of a fact when she was really ill. Therefore I set off to Caddy, with my guardian's consent, post-haste; and she and Prince made so much of me that there never was anything like it. Next day I went again to sit with her, and next day I went again. It was a very easy journey, for I had only to rise a little earlier in the morning, and keep my accounts, and attend to housekeeping matters before leaving home. But when I had made these three visits, my guardian said to me, on my return at night, "Now, little woman, little woman, this will never do. Constant dropping will wear away a stone, and constant coaching will wear out a Dame Durden. We will go to London for a while and take possession of our old lodgings." "Not for me, dear guardian," said I, "for I never feel tired," which was strictly true. I was only too happy to be in such request. "For me then," returned my guardian, "or for Ada, or for both of us. It is somebody's birthday to-morrow, I think." "Truly I think it is," said I, kissing my darling, who would be twenty-one to-morrow. "Well," observed my guardian, half pleasantly, half seriously, "that's a great occasion and will give my fair cousin some necessary business to transact in assertion of her independence, and will make London a more convenient place for all of us. So to London we will go. That being settled, there is another thing--how have you left Caddy?" "Very unwell, guardian. I fear it will be some time before she regains her health and strength." "What do you call some time, now?" asked my guardian thoughtfully. "Some weeks, I am afraid." "Ah!" He began to walk about the room with his hands in his pockets, showing that he had been thinking as much. "Now, what do you say about her doctor? Is he a good doctor, my love?" I felt obliged to confess that I knew nothing to the contrary but that Prince and I had agreed only that evening that we would like his opinion to be confirmed by some one. "Well, you know," returned my guardian quickly, "there's Woodcourt." I had not meant that, and was rather taken by surprise. For a moment all that I had had in my mind in connexion with Mr. Woodcourt seemed to come back and confuse me. "You don't object to him, little woman?" "Object to him, guardian? Oh no!" "And you don't think the patient would object to him?" So far from that, I had no doubt of her being prepared to have a great reliance on him and to like him very much. I said that he was no stranger to her personally, for she had seen him often in his kind attendance on Miss Flite. "Very good," said my guardian. "He has been here to-day, my dear, and I will see him about it to-morrow." I felt in this short conversation--though I did not know how, for she was quiet, and we interchanged no look--that my dear girl well remembered how merrily she had clasped me round the waist when no other hands than Caddy's had brought me the little parting token. This caused me to feel that I ought to tell her, and Caddy too, that I was going to be the mistress of Bleak House and that if I avoided that disclosure any longer I might become less worthy in my own eyes of its master's love. Therefore, when we went upstairs and had waited listening until the clock struck twelve in order that only I might be the first to wish my darling all good wishes on her birthday and to take her to my heart, I set before her, just as I had set before myself, the goodness and honour of her cousin John and the happy life that was in store for me. If ever my darling were fonder of me at one time than another in all our intercourse, she was surely fondest of me that night. And I was so rejoiced to know it and so comforted by the sense of having done right in casting this last idle reservation away that I was ten times happier than I had been before. I had scarcely thought it a reservation a few hours ago, but now that it was gone I felt as if I understood its nature better. Next day we went to London. We found our old lodging vacant, and in half an hour were quietly established there, as if we had never gone away. Mr. Woodcourt dined with us to celebrate my darling's birthday, and we were as pleasant as we could be with the great blank among us that Richard's absence naturally made on such an occasion. After that day I was for some weeks--eight or nine as I remember--very much with Caddy, and thus it fell out that I saw less of Ada at this time than any other since we had first come together, except the time of my own illness. She often came to Caddy's, but our function there was to amuse and cheer her, and we did not talk in our usual confidential manner. Whenever I went home at night we were together, but Caddy's rest was broken by pain, and I often remained to nurse her. With her husband and her poor little mite of a baby to love and their home to strive for, what a good creature Caddy was! So self-denying, so uncomplaining, so anxious to get well on their account, so afraid of giving trouble, and so thoughtful of the unassisted labours of her husband and the comforts of old Mr. Turveydrop; I had never known the best of her until now. And it seemed so curious that her pale face and helpless figure should be lying there day after day where dancing was the business of life, where the kit and the apprentices began early every morning in the ball-room, and where the untidy little boy waltzed by himself in the kitchen all the afternoon. At Caddy's request I took the supreme direction of her apartment, trimmed it up, and pushed her, couch and all, into a lighter and more airy and more cheerful corner than she had yet occupied; then, every day, when we were in our neatest array, I used to lay my small small namesake in her arms and sit down to chat or work or read to her. It was at one of the first of these quiet times that I told Caddy about Bleak House. We had other visitors besides Ada. First of all we had Prince, who in his hurried intervals of teaching used to come softly in and sit softly down, with a face of loving anxiety for Caddy and the very little child. Whatever Caddy's condition really was, she never failed to declare to Prince that she was all but well--which I, heaven forgive me, never failed to confirm. This would put Prince in such good spirits that he would sometimes take the kit from his pocket and play a chord or two to astonish the baby, which I never knew it to do in the least degree, for my tiny namesake never noticed it at all. Then there was Mrs. Jellyby. She would come occasionally, with her usual distraught manner, and sit calmly looking miles beyond her grandchild as if her attention were absorbed by a young Borrioboolan on its native shores. As bright-eyed as ever, as serene, and as untidy, she would say, "Well, Caddy, child, and how do you do to-day?" And then would sit amiably smiling and taking no notice of the reply or would sweetly glide off into a calculation of the number of letters she had lately received and answered or of the coffee-bearing power of Borrioboola-Gha. This she would always do with a serene contempt for our limited sphere of action, not to be disguised. Then there was old Mr. Turveydrop, who was from morning to night and from night to morning the subject of innumerable precautions. If the baby cried, it was nearly stifled lest the noise should make him uncomfortable. If the fire wanted stirring in the night, it was surreptitiously done lest his rest should be broken. If Caddy required any little comfort that the house contained, she first carefully discussed whether he was likely to require it too. In return for this consideration he would come into the room once a day, all but blessing it--showing a condescension, and a patronage, and a grace of manner in dispensing the light of his high-shouldered presence from which I might have supposed him (if I had not known better) to have been the benefactor of Caddy's life. "My Caroline," he would say, making the nearest approach that he could to bending over her. "Tell me that you are better to-day." "Oh, much better, thank you, Mr. Turveydrop," Caddy would reply. "Delighted! Enchanted! And our dear Miss Summerson. She is not quite prostrated by fatigue?" Here he would crease up his eyelids and kiss his fingers to me, though I am happy to say he had ceased to be particular in his attentions since I had been so altered. "Not at all," I would assure him. "Charming! We must take care of our dear Caroline, Miss Summerson. We must spare nothing that will restore her. We must nourish her. My dear Caroline"--he would turn to his daughter-in-law with infinite generosity and protection--"want for nothing, my love. Frame a wish and gratify it, my daughter. Everything this house contains, everything my room contains, is at your service, my dear. Do not," he would sometimes add in a burst of deportment, "even allow my simple requirements to be considered if they should at any time interfere with your own, my Caroline. Your necessities are greater than mine." He had established such a long prescriptive right to this deportment (his son's inheritance from his mother) that I several times knew both Caddy and her husband to be melted to tears by these affectionate self-sacrifices. "Nay, my dears," he would remonstrate; and when I saw Caddy's thin arm about his fat neck as he said it, I would be melted too, though not by the same process. "Nay, nay! I have promised never to leave ye. Be dutiful and affectionate towards me, and I ask no other return. Now, bless ye! I am going to the Park." He would take the air there presently and get an appetite for his hotel dinner. I hope I do old Mr. Turveydrop no wrong, but I never saw any better traits in him than these I faithfully record, except that he certainly conceived a liking for Peepy and would take the child out walking with great pomp, always on those occasions sending him home before he went to dinner himself, and occasionally with a halfpenny in his pocket. But even this disinterestedness was attended with no inconsiderable cost, to my knowledge, for before Peepy was sufficiently decorated to walk hand in hand with the professor of deportment, he had to be newly dressed, at the expense of Caddy and her husband, from top to toe. Last of our visitors, there was Mr. Jellyby. Really when he used to come in of an evening, and ask Caddy in his meek voice how she was, and then sit down with his head against the wall, and make no attempt to say anything more, I liked him very much. If he found me bustling about doing any little thing, he sometimes half took his coat off, as if with an intention of helping by a great exertion; but he never got any further. His sole occupation was to sit with his head against the wall, looking hard at the thoughtful baby; and I could not quite divest my mind of a fancy that they understood one another. I have not counted Mr. Woodcourt among our visitors because he was now Caddy's regular attendant. She soon began to improve under his care, but he was so gentle, so skilful, so unwearying in the pains he took that it is not to be wondered at, I am sure. I saw a good deal of Mr. Woodcourt during this time, though not so much as might be supposed, for knowing Caddy to be safe in his hands, I often slipped home at about the hours when he was expected. We frequently met, notwithstanding. I was quite reconciled to myself now, but I still felt glad to think that he was sorry for me, and he still WAS sorry for me I believed. He helped Mr. Badger in his professional engagements, which were numerous, and had as yet no settled projects for the future. It was when Caddy began to recover that I began to notice a change in my dear girl. I cannot say how it first presented itself to me, because I observed it in many slight particulars which were nothing in themselves and only became something when they were pieced together. But I made it out, by putting them together, that Ada was not so frankly cheerful with me as she used to be. Her tenderness for me was as loving and true as ever; I did not for a moment doubt that; but there was a quiet sorrow about her which she did not confide to me, and in which I traced some hidden regret. Now, I could not understand this, and I was so anxious for the happiness of my own pet that it caused me some uneasiness and set me thinking often. At length, feeling sure that Ada suppressed this something from me lest it should make me unhappy too, it came into my head that she was a little grieved--for me--by what I had told her about Bleak House. How I persuaded myself that this was likely, I don't know. I had no idea that there was any selfish reference in my doing so. I was not grieved for myself: I was quite contented and quite happy. Still, that Ada might be thinking--for me, though I had abandoned all such thoughts--of what once was, but was now all changed, seemed so easy to believe that I believed it. What could I do to reassure my darling (I considered then) and show her that I had no such feelings? Well! I could only be as brisk and busy as possible, and that I had tried to be all along. However, as Caddy's illness had certainly interfered, more or less, with my home duties--though I had always been there in the morning to make my guardian's breakfast, and he had a hundred times laughed and said there must be two little women, for his little woman was never missing--I resolved to be doubly diligent and gay. So I went about the house humming all the tunes I knew, and I sat working and working in a desperate manner, and I talked and talked, morning, noon, and night. And still there was the same shade between me and my darling. "So, Dame Trot," observed my guardian, shutting up his book one night when we were all three together, "so Woodcourt has restored Caddy Jellyby to the full enjoyment of life again?" "Yes," I said; "and to be repaid by such gratitude as hers is to be made rich, guardian." "I wish it was," he returned, "with all my heart." So did I too, for that matter. I said so. "Aye! We would make him as rich as a Jew if we knew how. Would we not, little woman?" I laughed as I worked and replied that I was not sure about that, for it might spoil him, and he might not be so useful, and there might be many who could ill spare him. As Miss Flite, and Caddy herself, and many others. "True," said my guardian. "I had forgotten that. But we would agree to make him rich enough to live, I suppose? Rich enough to work with tolerable peace of mind? Rich enough to have his own happy home and his own household gods--and household goddess, too, perhaps?" That was quite another thing, I said. We must all agree in that. "To be sure," said my guardian. "All of us. I have a great regard for Woodcourt, a high esteem for him; and I have been sounding him delicately about his plans. It is difficult to offer aid to an independent man with that just kind of pride which he possesses. And yet I would be glad to do it if I might or if I knew how. He seems half inclined for another voyage. But that appears like casting such a man away." "It might open a new world to him," said I. "So it might, little woman," my guardian assented. "I doubt if he expects much of the old world. Do you know I have fancied that he sometimes feels some particular disappointment or misfortune encountered in it. You never heard of anything of that sort?" I shook my head. "Humph," said my guardian. "I am mistaken, I dare say." As there was a little pause here, which I thought, for my dear girl's satisfaction, had better be filled up, I hummed an air as I worked which was a favourite with my guardian. "And do you think Mr. Woodcourt will make another voyage?" I asked him when I had hummed it quietly all through. "I don't quite know what to think, my dear, but I should say it was likely at present that he will give a long trip to another country." "I am sure he will take the best wishes of all our hearts with him wherever he goes," said I; "and though they are not riches, he will never be the poorer for them, guardian, at least." "Never, little woman," he replied. I was sitting in my usual place, which was now beside my guardian's chair. That had not been my usual place before the letter, but it was now. I looked up to Ada, who was sitting opposite, and I saw, as she looked at me, that her eyes were filled with tears and that tears were falling down her face. I felt that I had only to be placid and merry once for all to undeceive my dear and set her loving heart at rest. I really was so, and I had nothing to do but to be myself. So I made my sweet girl lean upon my shoulder--how little thinking what was heavy on her mind!--and I said she was not quite well, and put my arm about her, and took her upstairs. When we were in our own room, and when she might perhaps have told me what I was so unprepared to hear, I gave her no encouragement to confide in me; I never thought she stood in need of it. "Oh, my dear good Esther," said Ada, "if I could only make up my mind to speak to you and my cousin John when you are together!" "Why, my love!" I remonstrated. "Ada, why should you not speak to us!" Ada only dropped her head and pressed me closer to her heart. "You surely don't forget, my beauty," said I, smiling, "what quiet, old-fashioned people we are and how I have settled down to be the discreetest of dames? You don't forget how happily and peacefully my life is all marked out for me, and by whom? I am certain that you don't forget by what a noble character, Ada. That can never be." "No, never, Esther." "Why then, my dear," said I, "there can be nothing amiss--and why should you not speak to us?" "Nothing amiss, Esther?" returned Ada. "Oh, when I think of all these years, and of his fatherly care and kindness, and of the old relations among us, and of you, what shall I do, what shall I do!" I looked at my child in some wonder, but I thought it better not to answer otherwise than by cheering her, and so I turned off into many little recollections of our life together and prevented her from saying more. When she lay down to sleep, and not before, I returned to my guardian to say good night, and then I came back to Ada and sat near her for a little while. She was asleep, and I thought as I looked at her that she was a little changed. I had thought so more than once lately. I could not decide, even looking at her while she was unconscious, how she was changed, but something in the familiar beauty of her face looked different to me. My guardian's old hopes of her and Richard arose sorrowfully in my mind, and I said to myself, "She has been anxious about him," and I wondered how that love would end. When I had come home from Caddy's while she was ill, I had often found Ada at work, and she had always put her work away, and I had never known what it was. Some of it now lay in a drawer near her, which was not quite closed. I did not open the drawer, but I still rather wondered what the work could be, for it was evidently nothing for herself. And I noticed as I kissed my dear that she lay with one hand under her pillow so that it was hidden. How much less amiable I must have been than they thought me, how much less amiable than I thought myself, to be so preoccupied with my own cheerfulness and contentment as to think that it only rested with me to put my dear girl right and set her mind at peace! But I lay down, self-deceived, in that belief. And I awoke in it next day to find that there was still the same shade between me and my darling. CHAPTER LI Enlightened When Mr. Woodcourt arrived in London, he went, that very same day, to Mr. Vholes's in Symond's Inn. For he never once, from the moment when I entreated him to be a friend to Richard, neglected or forgot his promise. He had told me that he accepted the charge as a sacred trust, and he was ever true to it in that spirit. He found Mr. Vholes in his office and informed Mr. Vholes of his agreement with Richard that he should call there to learn his address. "Just so, sir," said Mr. Vholes. "Mr. C.'s address is not a hundred miles from here, sir, Mr. C.'s address is not a hundred miles from here. Would you take a seat, sir?" Mr. Woodcourt thanked Mr. Vholes, but he had no business with him beyond what he had mentioned. "Just so, sir. I believe, sir," said Mr. Vholes, still quietly insisting on the seat by not giving the address, "that you have influence with Mr. C. Indeed I am aware that you have." "I was not aware of it myself," returned Mr. Woodcourt; "but I suppose you know best." "Sir," rejoined Mr. Vholes, self-contained as usual, voice and all, "it is a part of my professional duty to know best. It is a part of my professional duty to study and to understand a gentleman who confides his interests to me. In my professional duty I shall not be wanting, sir, if I know it. I may, with the best intentions, be wanting in it without knowing it; but not if I know it, sir." Mr. Woodcourt again mentioned the address. "Give me leave, sir," said Mr. Vholes. "Bear with me for a moment. Sir, Mr. C. is playing for a considerable stake, and cannot play without--need I say what?" "Money, I presume?" "Sir," said Mr. Vholes, "to be honest with you (honesty being my golden rule, whether I gain by it or lose, and I find that I generally lose), money is the word. Now, sir, upon the chances of Mr. C.'s game I express to you no opinion, NO opinion. It might be highly impolitic in Mr. C., after playing so long and so high, to leave off; it might be the reverse; I say nothing. No, sir," said Mr. Vholes, bringing his hand flat down upon his desk in a positive manner, "nothing." "You seem to forget," returned Mr. Woodcourt, "that I ask you to say nothing and have no interest in anything you say." "Pardon me, sir!" retorted Mr. Vholes. "You do yourself an injustice. No, sir! Pardon me! You shall not--shall not in my office, if I know it--do yourself an injustice. You are interested in anything, and in everything, that relates to your friend. I know human nature much better, sir, than to admit for an instant that a gentleman of your appearance is not interested in whatever concerns his friend." "Well," replied Mr. Woodcourt, "that may be. I am particularly interested in his address." "The number, sir," said Mr. Vholes parenthetically, "I believe I have already mentioned. If Mr. C. is to continue to play for this considerable stake, sir, he must have funds. Understand me! There are funds in hand at present. I ask for nothing; there are funds in hand. But for the onward play, more funds must be provided, unless Mr. C. is to throw away what he has already ventured, which is wholly and solely a point for his consideration. This, sir, I take the opportunity of stating openly to you as the friend of Mr. C. Without funds I shall always be happy to appear and act for Mr. C. to the extent of all such costs as are safe to be allowed out of the estate, not beyond that. I could not go beyond that, sir, without wronging some one. I must either wrong my three dear girls or my venerable father, who is entirely dependent on me, in the Vale of Taunton; or some one. Whereas, sir, my resolution is (call it weakness or folly if you please) to wrong no one." Mr. Woodcourt rather sternly rejoined that he was glad to hear it. "I wish, sir," said Mr. Vholes, "to leave a good name behind me. Therefore I take every opportunity of openly stating to a friend of Mr. C. how Mr. C. is situated. As to myself, sir, the labourer is worthy of his hire. If I undertake to put my shoulder to the wheel, I do it, and I earn what I get. I am here for that purpose. My name is painted on the door outside, with that object." "And Mr. Carstone's address, Mr. Vholes?" "Sir," returned Mr. Vholes, "as I believe I have already mentioned, it is next door. On the second story you will find Mr. C.'s apartments. Mr. C. desires to be near his professional adviser, and I am far from objecting, for I court inquiry." Upon this Mr. Woodcourt wished Mr. Vholes good day and went in search of Richard, the change in whose appearance he began to understand now but too well. He found him in a dull room, fadedly furnished, much as I had found him in his barrack-room but a little while before, except that he was not writing but was sitting with a book before him, from which his eyes and thoughts were far astray. As the door chanced to be standing open, Mr. Woodcourt was in his presence for some moments without being perceived, and he told me that he never could forget the haggardness of his face and the dejection of his manner before he was aroused from his dream. "Woodcourt, my dear fellow," cried Richard, starting up with extended hands, "you come upon my vision like a ghost." "A friendly one," he replied, "and only waiting, as they say ghosts do, to be addressed. How does the mortal world go?" They were seated now, near together. "Badly enough, and slowly enough," said Richard, "speaking at least for my part of it." "What part is that?" "The Chancery part." "I never heard," returned Mr. Woodcourt, shaking his head, "of its going well yet." "Nor I," said Richard moodily. "Who ever did?" He brightened again in a moment and said with his natural openness, "Woodcourt, I should be sorry to be misunderstood by you, even if I gained by it in your estimation. You must know that I have done no good this long time. I have not intended to do much harm, but I seem to have been capable of nothing else. It may be that I should have done better by keeping out of the net into which my destiny has worked me, but I think not, though I dare say you will soon hear, if you have not already heard, a very different opinion. To make short of a long story, I am afraid I have wanted an object; but I have an object now--or it has me--and it is too late to discuss it. Take me as I am, and make the best of me." "A bargain," said Mr. Woodcourt. "Do as much by me in return." "Oh! You," returned Richard, "you can pursue your art for its own sake, and can put your hand upon the plough and never turn, and can strike a purpose out of anything. You and I are very different creatures." He spoke regretfully and lapsed for a moment into his weary condition. "Well, well!" he cried, shaking it off. "Everything has an end. We shall see! So you will take me as I am, and make the best of me?" "Aye! Indeed I will." They shook hands upon it laughingly, but in deep earnestness. I can answer for one of them with my heart of hearts. "You come as a godsend," said Richard, "for I have seen nobody here yet but Vholes. Woodcourt, there is one subject I should like to mention, for once and for all, in the beginning of our treaty. You can hardly make the best of me if I don't. You know, I dare say, that I have an attachment to my cousin Ada?" Mr. Woodcourt replied that I had hinted as much to him. "Now pray," returned Richard, "don't think me a heap of selfishness. Don't suppose that I am splitting my head and half breaking my heart over this miserable Chancery suit for my own rights and interests alone. Ada's are bound up with mine; they can't be separated; Vholes works for both of us. Do think of that!" He was so very solicitous on this head that Mr. Woodcourt gave him the strongest assurances that he did him no injustice. "You see," said Richard, with something pathetic in his manner of lingering on the point, though it was off-hand and unstudied, "to an upright fellow like you, bringing a friendly face like yours here, I cannot bear the thought of appearing selfish and mean. I want to see Ada righted, Woodcourt, as well as myself; I want to do my utmost to right her, as well as myself; I venture what I can scrape together to extricate her, as well as myself. Do, I beseech you, think of that!" Afterwards, when Mr. Woodcourt came to reflect on what had passed, he was so very much impressed by the strength of Richard's anxiety on this point that in telling me generally of his first visit to Symond's Inn he particularly dwelt upon it. It revived a fear I had had before that my dear girl's little property would be absorbed by Mr. Vholes and that Richard's justification to himself would be sincerely this. It was just as I began to take care of Caddy that the interview took place, and I now return to the time when Caddy had recovered and the shade was still between me and my darling. I proposed to Ada that morning that we should go and see Richard. It a little surprised me to find that she hesitated and was not so radiantly willing as I had expected. "My dear," said I, "you have not had any difference with Richard since I have been so much away?" "No, Esther." "Not heard of him, perhaps?" said I. "Yes, I have heard of him," said Ada. Such tears in her eyes, and such love in her face. I could not make my darling out. Should I go to Richard's by myself? I said. No, Ada thought I had better not go by myself. Would she go with me? Yes, Ada thought she had better go with me. Should we go now? Yes, let us go now. Well, I could not understand my darling, with the tears in her eyes and the love in her face! We were soon equipped and went out. It was a sombre day, and drops of chill rain fell at intervals. It was one of those colourless days when everything looks heavy and harsh. The houses frowned at us, the dust rose at us, the smoke swooped at us, nothing made any compromise about itself or wore a softened aspect. I fancied my beautiful girl quite out of place in the rugged streets, and I thought there were more funerals passing along the dismal pavements than I had ever seen before. We had first to find out Symond's Inn. We were going to inquire in a shop when Ada said she thought it was near Chancery Lane. "We are not likely to be far out, my love, if we go in that direction," said I. So to Chancery Lane we went, and there, sure enough, we saw it written up. Symond's Inn. We had next to find out the number. "Or Mr. Vholes's office will do," I recollected, "for Mr. Vholes's office is next door." Upon which Ada said, perhaps that was Mr. Vholes's office in the corner there. And it really was. Then came the question, which of the two next doors? I was going for the one, and my darling was going for the other; and my darling was right again. So up we went to the second story, when we came to Richard's name in great white letters on a hearse-like panel. I should have knocked, but Ada said perhaps we had better turn the handle and go in. Thus we came to Richard, poring over a table covered with dusty bundles of papers which seemed to me like dusty mirrors reflecting his own mind. Wherever I looked I saw the ominous words that ran in it repeated. Jarndyce and Jarndyce. He received us very affectionately, and we sat down. "If you had come a little earlier," he said, "you would have found Woodcourt here. There never was such a good fellow as Woodcourt is. He finds time to look in between-whiles, when anybody else with half his work to do would be thinking about not being able to come. And he is so cheery, so fresh, so sensible, so earnest, so--everything that I am not, that the place brightens whenever he comes, and darkens whenever he goes again." "God bless him," I thought, "for his truth to me!" "He is not so sanguine, Ada," continued Richard, casting his dejected look over the bundles of papers, "as Vholes and I are usually, but he is only an outsider and is not in the mysteries. We have gone into them, and he has not. He can't be expected to know much of such a labyrinth." As his look wandered over the papers again and he passed his two hands over his head, I noticed how sunken and how large his eyes appeared, how dry his lips were, and how his finger-nails were all bitten away. "Is this a healthy place to live in, Richard, do you think?" said I. "Why, my dear Minerva," answered Richard with his old gay laugh, "it is neither a rural nor a cheerful place; and when the sun shines here, you may lay a pretty heavy wager that it is shining brightly in an open spot. But it's well enough for the time. It's near the offices and near Vholes." "Perhaps," I hinted, "a change from both--" "Might do me good?" said Richard, forcing a laugh as he finished the sentence. "I shouldn't wonder! But it can only come in one way now--in one of two ways, I should rather say. Either the suit must be ended, Esther, or the suitor. But it shall be the suit, my dear girl, the suit, my dear girl!" These latter words were addressed to Ada, who was sitting nearest to him. Her face being turned away from me and towards him, I could not see it. "We are doing very well," pursued Richard. "Vholes will tell you so. We are really spinning along. Ask Vholes. We are giving them no rest. Vholes knows all their windings and turnings, and we are upon them everywhere. We have astonished them already. We shall rouse up that nest of sleepers, mark my words!" His hopefulness had long been more painful to me than his despondency; it was so unlike hopefulness, had something so fierce in its determination to be it, was so hungry and eager, and yet so conscious of being forced and unsustainable that it had long touched me to the heart. But the commentary upon it now indelibly written in his handsome face made it far more distressing than it used to be. I say indelibly, for I felt persuaded that if the fatal cause could have been for ever terminated, according to his brightest visions, in that same hour, the traces of the premature anxiety, self-reproach, and disappointment it had occasioned him would have remained upon his features to the hour of his death. "The sight of our dear little woman," said Richard, Ada still remaining silent and quiet, "is so natural to me, and her compassionate face is so like the face of old days--" Ah! No, no. I smiled and shook my head. "--So exactly like the face of old days," said Richard in his cordial voice, and taking my hand with the brotherly regard which nothing ever changed, "that I can't make pretences with her. I fluctuate a little; that's the truth. Sometimes I hope, my dear, and sometimes I--don't quite despair, but nearly. I get," said Richard, relinquishing my hand gently and walking across the room, "so tired!" He took a few turns up and down and sunk upon the sofa. "I get," he repeated gloomily, "so tired. It is such weary, weary work!" He was leaning on his arm saying these words in a meditative voice and looking at the ground when my darling rose, put off her bonnet, kneeled down beside him with her golden hair falling like sunlight on his head, clasped her two arms round his neck, and turned her face to me. Oh, what a loving and devoted face I saw! "Esther, dear," she said very quietly, "I am not going home again." A light shone in upon me all at once. "Never any more. I am going to stay with my dear husband. We have been married above two months. Go home without me, my own Esther; I shall never go home any more!" With those words my darling drew his head down on her breast and held it there. And if ever in my life I saw a love that nothing but death could change, I saw it then before me. "Speak to Esther, my dearest," said Richard, breaking the silence presently. "Tell her how it was." I met her before she could come to me and folded her in my arms. We neither of us spoke, but with her cheek against my own I wanted to hear nothing. "My pet," said I. "My love. My poor, poor girl!" I pitied her so much. I was very fond of Richard, but the impulse that I had upon me was to pity her so much. "Esther, will you forgive me? Will my cousin John forgive me?" "My dear," said I, "to doubt it for a moment is to do him a great wrong. And as to me!" Why, as to me, what had I to forgive! I dried my sobbing darling's eyes and sat beside her on the sofa, and Richard sat on my other side; and while I was reminded of that so different night when they had first taken me into their confidence and had gone on in their own wild happy way, they told me between them how it was. "All I had was Richard's," Ada said; "and Richard would not take it, Esther, and what could I do but be his wife when I loved him dearly!" "And you were so fully and so kindly occupied, excellent Dame Durden," said Richard, "that how could we speak to you at such a time! And besides, it was not a long-considered step. We went out one morning and were married." "And when it was done, Esther," said my darling, "I was always thinking how to tell you and what to do for the best. And sometimes I thought you ought to know it directly, and sometimes I thought you ought not to know it and keep it from my cousin John; and I could not tell what to do, and I fretted very much." How selfish I must have been not to have thought of this before! I don't know what I said now. I was so sorry, and yet I was so fond of them and so glad that they were fond of me; I pitied them so much, and yet I felt a kind of pride in their loving one another. I never had experienced such painful and pleasurable emotion at one time, and in my own heart I did not know which predominated. But I was not there to darken their way; I did not do that. When I was less foolish and more composed, my darling took her wedding-ring from her bosom, and kissed it, and put it on. Then I remembered last night and told Richard that ever since her marriage she had worn it at night when there was no one to see. Then Ada blushingly asked me how did I know that, my dear. Then I told Ada how I had seen her hand concealed under her pillow and had little thought why, my dear. Then they began telling me how it was all over again, and I began to be sorry and glad again, and foolish again, and to hide my plain old face as much as I could lest I should put them out of heart. Thus the time went on until it became necessary for me to think of returning. When that time arrived it was the worst of all, for then my darling completely broke down. She clung round my neck, calling me by every dear name she could think of and saying what should she do without me! Nor was Richard much better; and as for me, I should have been the worst of the three if I had not severely said to myself, "Now Esther, if you do, I'll never speak to you again!" "Why, I declare," said I, "I never saw such a wife. I don't think she loves her husband at all. Here, Richard, take my child, for goodness' sake." But I held her tight all the while, and could have wept over her I don't know how long. "I give this dear young couple notice," said I, "that I am only going away to come back to-morrow and that I shall be always coming backwards and forwards until Symond's Inn is tired of the sight of me. So I shall not say good-bye, Richard. For what would be the use of that, you know, when I am coming back so soon!" I had given my darling to him now, and I meant to go; but I lingered for one more look of the precious face which it seemed to rive my heart to turn from. So I said (in a merry, bustling manner) that unless they gave me some encouragement to come back, I was not sure that I could take that liberty, upon which my dear girl looked up, faintly smiling through her tears, and I folded her lovely face between my hands, and gave it one last kiss, and laughed, and ran away. And when I got downstairs, oh, how I cried! It almost seemed to me that I had lost my Ada for ever. I was so lonely and so blank without her, and it was so desolate to be going home with no hope of seeing her there, that I could get no comfort for a little while as I walked up and down in a dim corner sobbing and crying. I came to myself by and by, after a little scolding, and took a coach home. The poor boy whom I had found at St. Albans had reappeared a short time before and was lying at the point of death; indeed, was then dead, though I did not know it. My guardian had gone out to inquire about him and did not return to dinner. Being quite alone, I cried a little again, though on the whole I don't think I behaved so very, very ill. It was only natural that I should not be quite accustomed to the loss of my darling yet. Three or four hours were not a long time after years. But my mind dwelt so much upon the uncongenial scene in which I had left her, and I pictured it as such an overshadowed stony-hearted one, and I so longed to be near her and taking some sort of care of her, that I determined to go back in the evening only to look up at her windows. It was foolish, I dare say, but it did not then seem at all so to me, and it does not seem quite so even now. I took Charley into my confidence, and we went out at dusk. It was dark when we came to the new strange home of my dear girl, and there was a light behind the yellow blinds. We walked past cautiously three or four times, looking up, and narrowly missed encountering Mr. Vholes, who came out of his office while we were there and turned his head to look up too before going home. The sight of his lank black figure and the lonesome air of that nook in the dark were favourable to the state of my mind. I thought of the youth and love and beauty of my dear girl, shut up in such an ill-assorted refuge, almost as if it were a cruel place. It was very solitary and very dull, and I did not doubt that I might safely steal upstairs. I left Charley below and went up with a light foot, not distressed by any glare from the feeble oil lanterns on the way. I listened for a few moments, and in the musty rotting silence of the house believed that I could hear the murmur of their young voices. I put my lips to the hearse-like panel of the door as a kiss for my dear and came quietly down again, thinking that one of these days I would confess to the visit. And it really did me good, for though nobody but Charley and I knew anything about it, I somehow felt as if it had diminished the separation between Ada and me and had brought us together again for those moments. I went back, not quite accustomed yet to the change, but all the better for that hovering about my darling. My guardian had come home and was standing thoughtfully by the dark window. When I went in, his face cleared and he came to his seat, but he caught the light upon my face as I took mine. "Little woman," said he, "You have been crying." "Why, yes, guardian," said I, "I am afraid I have been, a little. Ada has been in such distress, and is so very sorry, guardian." I put my arm on the back of his chair, and I saw in his glance that my words and my look at her empty place had prepared him. "Is she married, my dear?" I told him all about it and how her first entreaties had referred to his forgiveness. "She has no need of it," said he. "Heaven bless her and her husband!" But just as my first impulse had been to pity her, so was his. "Poor girl, poor girl! Poor Rick! Poor Ada!" Neither of us spoke after that, until he said with a sigh, "Well, well, my dear! Bleak House is thinning fast." "But its mistress remains, guardian." Though I was timid about saying it, I ventured because of the sorrowful tone in which he had spoken. "She will do all she can to make it happy," said I. "She will succeed, my love!" The letter had made no difference between us except that the seat by his side had come to be mine; it made none now. He turned his old bright fatherly look upon me, laid his hand on my hand in his old way, and said again, "She will succeed, my dear. Nevertheless, Bleak House is thinning fast, O little woman!" I was sorry presently that this was all we said about that. I was rather disappointed. I feared I might not quite have been all I had meant to be since the letter and the answer. CHAPTER LII Obstinacy But one other day had intervened when, early in the morning as we were going to breakfast, Mr. Woodcourt came in haste with the astounding news that a terrible murder had been committed for which Mr. George had been apprehended and was in custody. When he told us that a large reward was offered by Sir Leicester Dedlock for the murderer's apprehension, I did not in my first consternation understand why; but a few more words explained to me that the murdered person was Sir Leicester's lawyer, and immediately my mother's dread of him rushed into my remembrance. This unforeseen and violent removal of one whom she had long watched and distrusted and who had long watched and distrusted her, one for whom she could have had few intervals of kindness, always dreading in him a dangerous and secret enemy, appeared so awful that my first thoughts were of her. How appalling to hear of such a death and be able to feel no pity! How dreadful to remember, perhaps, that she had sometimes even wished the old man away who was so swiftly hurried out of life! Such crowding reflections, increasing the distress and fear I always felt when the name was mentioned, made me so agitated that I could scarcely hold my place at the table. I was quite unable to follow the conversation until I had had a little time to recover. But when I came to myself and saw how shocked my guardian was and found that they were earnestly speaking of the suspected man and recalling every favourable impression we had formed of him out of the good we had known of him, my interest and my fears were so strongly aroused in his behalf that I was quite set up again. "Guardian, you don't think it possible that he is justly accused?" "My dear, I CAN'T think so. This man whom we have seen so open-hearted and compassionate, who with the might of a giant has the gentleness of a child, who looks as brave a fellow as ever lived and is so simple and quiet with it, this man justly accused of such a crime? I can't believe it. It's not that I don't or I won't. I can't!" "And I can't," said Mr. Woodcourt. "Still, whatever we believe or know of him, we had better not forget that some appearances are against him. He bore an animosity towards the deceased gentleman. He has openly mentioned it in many places. He is said to have expressed himself violently towards him, and he certainly did about him, to my knowledge. He admits that he was alone on the scene of the murder within a few minutes of its commission. I sincerely believe him to be as innocent of any participation in it as I am, but these are all reasons for suspicion falling upon him." "True," said my guardian. And he added, turning to me, "It would be doing him a very bad service, my dear, to shut our eyes to the truth in any of these respects." I felt, of course, that we must admit, not only to ourselves but to others, the full force of the circumstances against him. Yet I knew withal (I could not help saying) that their weight would not induce us to desert him in his need. "Heaven forbid!" returned my guardian. "We will stand by him, as he himself stood by the two poor creatures who are gone." He meant Mr. Gridley and the boy, to both of whom Mr. George had given shelter. Mr. Woodcourt then told us that the trooper's man had been with him before day, after wandering about the streets all night like a distracted creature. That one of the trooper's first anxieties was that we should not suppose him guilty. That he had charged his messenger to represent his perfect innocence with every solemn assurance he could send us. That Mr. Woodcourt had only quieted the man by undertaking to come to our house very early in the morning with these representations. He added that he was now upon his way to see the prisoner himself. My guardian said directly he would go too. Now, besides that I liked the retired soldier very much and that he liked me, I had that secret interest in what had happened which was only known to my guardian. I felt as if it came close and near to me. It seemed to become personally important to myself that the truth should be discovered and that no innocent people should be suspected, for suspicion, once run wild, might run wilder. In a word, I felt as if it were my duty and obligation to go with them. My guardian did not seek to dissuade me, and I went. It was a large prison with many courts and passages so like one another and so uniformly paved that I seemed to gain a new comprehension, as I passed along, of the fondness that solitary prisoners, shut up among the same staring walls from year to year, have had--as I have read--for a weed or a stray blade of grass. In an arched room by himself, like a cellar upstairs, with walls so glaringly white that they made the massive iron window-bars and iron-bound door even more profoundly black than they were, we found the trooper standing in a corner. He had been sitting on a bench there and had risen when he heard the locks and bolts turn. When he saw us, he came forward a step with his usual heavy tread, and there stopped and made a slight bow. But as I still advanced, putting out my hand to him, he understood us in a moment. "This is a load off my mind, I do assure you, miss and gentlemen," said he, saluting us with great heartiness and drawing a long breath. "And now I don't so much care how it ends." He scarcely seemed to be the prisoner. What with his coolness and his soldierly bearing, he looked far more like the prison guard. "This is even a rougher place than my gallery to receive a lady in," said Mr. George, "but I know Miss Summerson will make the best of it." As he handed me to the bench on which he had been sitting, I sat down, which seemed to give him great satisfaction. "I thank you, miss," said he. "Now, George," observed my guardian, "as we require no new assurances on your part, so I believe we need give you none on ours." "Not at all, sir. I thank you with all my heart. If I was not innocent of this crime, I couldn't look at you and keep my secret to myself under the condescension of the present visit. I feel the present visit very much. I am not one of the eloquent sort, but I feel it, Miss Summerson and gentlemen, deeply." He laid his hand for a moment on his broad chest and bent his head to us. Although he squared himself again directly, he expressed a great amount of natural emotion by these simple means. "First," said my guardian, "can we do anything for your personal comfort, George?" "For which, sir?" he inquired, clearing his throat. "For your personal comfort. Is there anything you want that would lessen the hardship of this confinement?" "Well, sir," replied George, after a little cogitation, "I am equally obliged to you, but tobacco being against the rules, I can't say that there is." "You will think of many little things perhaps, by and by. Whenever you do, George, let us know." "Thank you, sir. Howsoever," observed Mr. George with one of his sunburnt smiles, "a man who has been knocking about the world in a vagabond kind of a way as long as I have gets on well enough in a place like the present, so far as that goes." "Next, as to your case," observed my guardian. "Exactly so, sir," returned Mr. George, folding his arms upon his breast with perfect self-possession and a little curiosity. "How does it stand now?" "Why, sir, it is under remand at present. Bucket gives me to understand that he will probably apply for a series of remands from time to time until the case is more complete. How it is to be made more complete I don't myself see, but I dare say Bucket will manage it somehow." "Why, heaven save us, man," exclaimed my guardian, surprised into his old oddity and vehemence, "you talk of yourself as if you were somebody else!" "No offence, sir," said Mr. George. "I am very sensible of your kindness. But I don't see how an innocent man is to make up his mind to this kind of thing without knocking his head against the walls unless he takes it in that point of view. "That is true enough to a certain extent," returned my guardian, softened. "But my good fellow, even an innocent man must take ordinary precautions to defend himself." "Certainly, sir. And I have done so. I have stated to the magistrates, 'Gentlemen, I am as innocent of this charge as yourselves; what has been stated against me in the way of facts is perfectly true; I know no more about it.' I intend to continue stating that, sir. What more can I do? It's the truth." "But the mere truth won't do," rejoined my guardian. "Won't it indeed, sir? Rather a bad look-out for me!" Mr. George good-humouredly observed. "You must have a lawyer," pursued my guardian. "We must engage a good one for you." "I ask your pardon, sir," said Mr. George with a step backward. "I am equally obliged. But I must decidedly beg to be excused from anything of that sort." "You won't have a lawyer?" "No, sir." Mr. George shook his head in the most emphatic manner. "I thank you all the same, sir, but--no lawyer!" "Why not?" "I don't take kindly to the breed," said Mr. George. "Gridley didn't. And--if you'll excuse my saying so much--I should hardly have thought you did yourself, sir." "That's equity," my guardian explained, a little at a loss; "that's equity, George." "Is it, indeed, sir?" returned the trooper in his off-hand manner. "I am not acquainted with those shades of names myself, but in a general way I object to the breed." Unfolding his arms and changing his position, he stood with one massive hand upon the table and the other on his hip, as complete a picture of a man who was not to be moved from a fixed purpose as ever I saw. It was in vain that we all three talked to him and endeavoured to persuade him; he listened with that gentleness which went so well with his bluff bearing, but was evidently no more shaken by our representations that his place of confinement was. "Pray think, once more, Mr. George," said I. "Have you no wish in reference to your case?" "I certainly could wish it to be tried, miss," he returned, "by court-martial; but that is out of the question, as I am well aware. If you will be so good as to favour me with your attention for a couple of minutes, miss, not more, I'll endeavour to explain myself as clearly as I can." He looked at us all three in turn, shook his head a little as if he were adjusting it in the stock and collar of a tight uniform, and after a moment's reflection went on. "You see, miss, I have been handcuffed and taken into custody and brought here. I am a marked and disgraced man, and here I am. My shooting gallery is rummaged, high and low, by Bucket; such property as I have--'tis small--is turned this way and that till it don't know itself; and (as aforesaid) here I am! I don't particular complain of that. Though I am in these present quarters through no immediately preceding fault of mine, I can very well understand that if I hadn't gone into the vagabond way in my youth, this wouldn't have happened. It HAS happened. Then comes the question how to meet it." He rubbed his swarthy forehead for a moment with a good-humoured look and said apologetically, "I am such a short-winded talker that I must think a bit." Having thought a bit, he looked up again and resumed. "How to meet it. Now, the unfortunate deceased was himself a lawyer and had a pretty tight hold of me. I don't wish to rake up his ashes, but he had, what I should call if he was living, a devil of a tight hold of me. I don't like his trade the better for that. If I had kept clear of his trade, I should have kept outside this place. But that's not what I mean. Now, suppose I had killed him. Suppose I really had discharged into his body any one of those pistols recently fired off that Bucket has found at my place, and dear me, might have found there any day since it has been my place. What should I have done as soon as I was hard and fast here? Got a lawyer." He stopped on hearing some one at the locks and bolts and did not resume until the door had been opened and was shut again. For what purpose opened, I will mention presently. "I should have got a lawyer, and he would have said (as I have often read in the newspapers), 'My client says nothing, my client reserves his defence': my client this, that, and t'other. Well, 'tis not the custom of that breed to go straight, according to my opinion, or to think that other men do. Say I am innocent and I get a lawyer. He would be as likely to believe me guilty as not; perhaps more. What would he do, whether or not? Act as if I was--shut my mouth up, tell me not to commit myself, keep circumstances back, chop the evidence small, quibble, and get me off perhaps! But, Miss Summerson, do I care for getting off in that way; or would I rather be hanged in my own way--if you'll excuse my mentioning anything so disagreeable to a lady?" He had warmed into his subject now, and was under no further necessity to wait a bit. "I would rather be hanged in my own way. And I mean to be! I don't intend to say," looking round upon us with his powerful arms akimbo and his dark eyebrows raised, "that I am more partial to being hanged than another man. What I say is, I must come off clear and full or not at all. Therefore, when I hear stated against me what is true, I say it's true; and when they tell me, 'whatever you say will be used,' I tell them I don't mind that; I mean it to be used. If they can't make me innocent out of the whole truth, they are not likely to do it out of anything less, or anything else. And if they are, it's worth nothing to me." Taking a pace or two over the stone floor, he came back to the table and finished what he had to say. "I thank you, miss and gentlemen both, many times for your attention, and many times more for your interest. That's the plain state of the matter as it points itself out to a mere trooper with a blunt broadsword kind of a mind. I have never done well in life beyond my duty as a soldier, and if the worst comes after all, I shall reap pretty much as I have sown. When I got over the first crash of being seized as a murderer--it don't take a rover who has knocked about so much as myself so very long to recover from a crash--I worked my way round to what you find me now. As such I shall remain. No relations will be disgraced by me or made unhappy for me, and--and that's all I've got to say." The door had been opened to admit another soldier-looking man of less prepossessing appearance at first sight and a weather-tanned, bright-eyed wholesome woman with a basket, who, from her entrance, had been exceedingly attentive to all Mr. George had said. Mr. George had received them with a familiar nod and a friendly look, but without any more particular greeting in the midst of his address. He now shook them cordially by the hand and said, "Miss Summerson and gentlemen, this is an old comrade of mine, Matthew Bagnet. And this is his wife, Mrs. Bagnet." Mr. Bagnet made us a stiff military bow, and Mrs. Bagnet dropped us a curtsy. "Real good friends of mine, they are," sald Mr. George. "It was at their house I was taken." "With a second-hand wiolinceller," Mr. Bagnet put in, twitching his head angrily. "Of a good tone. For a friend. That money was no object to." "Mat," said Mr. George, "you have heard pretty well all I have been saying to this lady and these two gentlemen. I know it meets your approval?" Mr. Bagnet, after considering, referred the point to his wife. "Old girl," said he. "Tell him. Whether or not. It meets my approval." "Why, George," exclaimed Mrs. Bagnet, who had been unpacking her basket, in which there was a piece of cold pickled pork, a little tea and sugar, and a brown loaf, "you ought to know it don't. You ought to know it's enough to drive a person wild to hear you. You won't be got off this way, and you won't be got off that way--what do you mean by such picking and choosing? It's stuff and nonsense, George." "Don't be severe upon me in my misfortunes, Mrs. Bagnet," said the trooper lightly. "Oh! Bother your misfortunes," cried Mrs. Bagnet, "if they don't make you more reasonable than that comes to. I never was so ashamed in my life to hear a man talk folly as I have been to hear you talk this day to the present company. Lawyers? Why, what but too many cooks should hinder you from having a dozen lawyers if the gentleman recommended them to you." "This is a very sensible woman," said my guardian. "I hope you will persuade him, Mrs. Bagnet." "Persuade him, sir?" she returned. "Lord bless you, no. You don't know George. Now, there!" Mrs. Bagnet left her basket to point him out with both her bare brown hands. "There he stands! As self-willed and as determined a man, in the wrong way, as ever put a human creature under heaven out of patience! You could as soon take up and shoulder an eight and forty pounder by your own strength as turn that man when he has got a thing into his head and fixed it there. Why, don't I know him!" cried Mrs. Bagnet. "Don't I know you, George! You don't mean to set up for a new character with ME after all these years, I hope?" Her friendly indignation had an exemplary effect upon her husband, who shook his head at the trooper several times as a silent recommendation to him to yield. Between whiles, Mrs. Bagnet looked at me; and I understood from the play of her eyes that she wished me to do something, though I did not comprehend what. "But I have given up talking to you, old fellow, years and years," said Mrs. Bagnet as she blew a little dust off the pickled pork, looking at me again; "and when ladies and gentlemen know you as well as I do, they'll give up talking to you too. If you are not too headstrong to accept of a bit of dinner, here it is." "I accept it with many thanks," returned the trooper. "Do you though, indeed?" said Mrs. Bagnet, continuing to grumble on good-humouredly. "I'm sure I'm surprised at that. I wonder you don't starve in your own way also. It would only be like you. Perhaps you'll set your mind upon THAT next." Here she again looked at me, and I now perceived from her glances at the door and at me, by turns, that she wished us to retire and to await her following us outside the prison. Communicating this by similar means to my guardian and Mr. Woodcourt, I rose. "We hope you will think better of it, Mr. George," said I, "and we shall come to see you again, trusting to find you more reasonable." "More grateful, Miss Summerson, you can't find me," he returned. "But more persuadable we can, I hope," said I. "And let me entreat you to consider that the clearing up of this mystery and the discovery of the real perpetrator of this deed may be of the last importance to others besides yourself." He heard me respectfully but without much heeding these words, which I spoke a little turned from him, already on my way to the door; he was observing (this they afterwards told me) my height and figure, which seemed to catch his attention all at once. "'Tis curious," said he. "And yet I thought so at the time!" My guardian asked him what he meant. "Why, sir," he answered, "when my ill fortune took me to the dead man's staircase on the night of his murder, I saw a shape so like Miss Summerson's go by me in the dark that I had half a mind to speak to it." For an instant I felt such a shudder as I never felt before or since and hope I shall never feel again. "It came downstairs as I went up," said the trooper, "and crossed the moonlighted window with a loose black mantle on; I noticed a deep fringe to it. However, it has nothing to do with the present subject, excepting that Miss Summerson looked so like it at the moment that it came into my head." I cannot separate and define the feelings that arose in me after this; it is enough that the vague duty and obligation I had felt upon me from the first of following the investigation was, without my distinctly daring to ask myself any question, increased, and that I was indignantly sure of there being no possibility of a reason for my being afraid. We three went out of the prison and walked up and down at some short distance from the gate, which was in a retired place. We had not waited long when Mr. and Mrs. Bagnet came out too and quickly joined us. There was a tear in each of Mrs. Bagnet's eyes, and her face was flushed and hurried. "I didn't let George see what I thought about it, you know, miss," was her first remark when she came up, "but he's in a bad way, poor old fellow!" "Not with care and prudence and good help," said my guardian. "A gentleman like you ought to know best, sir," returned Mrs. Bagnet, hurriedly drying her eyes on the hem of her grey cloak, "but I am uneasy for him. He has been so careless and said so much that he never meant. The gentlemen of the juries might not understand him as Lignum and me do. And then such a number of circumstances have happened bad for him, and such a number of people will be brought forward to speak against him, and Bucket is so deep." "With a second-hand wiolinceller. And said he played the fife. When a boy," Mr. Bagnet added with great solemnity. "Now, I tell you, miss," said Mrs. Bagnet; "and when I say miss, I mean all! Just come into the corner of the wall and I'll tell you!" Mrs. Bagnet hurried us into a more secluded place and was at first too breathless to proceed, occasioning Mr. Bagnet to say, "Old girl! Tell 'em!" "Why, then, miss," the old girl proceeded, untying the strings of her bonnet for more air, "you could as soon move Dover Castle as move George on this point unless you had got a new power to move him with. And I have got it!" "You are a jewel of a woman," said my guardian. "Go on!" "Now, I tell you, miss," she proceeded, clapping her hands in her hurry and agitation a dozen times in every sentence, "that what he says concerning no relations is all bosh. They don't know of him, but he does know of them. He has said more to me at odd times than to anybody else, and it warn't for nothing that he once spoke to my Woolwich about whitening and wrinkling mothers' heads. For fifty pounds he had seen his mother that day. She's alive and must be brought here straight!" Instantly Mrs. Bagnet put some pins into her mouth and began pinning up her skirts all round a little higher than the level of her grey cloak, which she accomplished with surpassing dispatch and dexterity. "Lignum," said Mrs. Bagnet, "you take care of the children, old man, and give me the umbrella! I'm away to Lincolnshire to bring that old lady here." "But, bless the woman," cried my guardian with his hand in his pocket, "how is she going? What money has she got?" Mrs. Bagnet made another application to her skirts and brought forth a leathern purse in which she hastily counted over a few shillings and which she then shut up with perfect satisfaction. "Never you mind for me, miss. I'm a soldier's wife and accustomed to travel my own way. Lignum, old boy," kissing him, "one for yourself, three for the children. Now I'm away into Lincolnshire after George's mother!" And she actually set off while we three stood looking at one another lost in amazement. She actually trudged away in her grey cloak at a sturdy pace, and turned the corner, and was gone. "Mr. Bagnet," said my guardian. "Do you mean to let her go in that way?" "Can't help it," he returned. "Made her way home once from another quarter of the world. With the same grey cloak. And same umbrella. Whatever the old girl says, do. Do it! Whenever the old girl says, I'LL do it. She does it." "Then she is as honest and genuine as she looks," rejoined my guardian, "and it is impossible to say more for her." "She's Colour-Sergeant of the Nonpareil battalion," said Mr. Bagnet, looking at us over his shoulder as he went his way also. "And there's not such another. But I never own to it before her. Discipline must be maintained." CHAPTER LIII The Track Mr. Bucket and his fat forefinger are much in consultation together under existing circumstances. When Mr. Bucket has a matter of this pressing interest under his consideration, the fat forefinger seems to rise, to the dignity of a familiar demon. He puts it to his ears, and it whispers information; he puts it to his lips, and it enjoins him to secrecy; he rubs it over his nose, and it sharpens his scent; he shakes it before a guilty man, and it charms him to his destruction. The Augurs of the Detective Temple invariably predict that when Mr. Bucket and that finger are in much conference, a terrible avenger will be heard of before long. Otherwise mildly studious in his observation of human nature, on the whole a benignant philosopher not disposed to be severe upon the follies of mankind, Mr. Bucket pervades a vast number of houses and strolls about an infinity of streets, to outward appearance rather languishing for want of an object. He is in the friendliest condition towards his species and will drink with most of them. He is free with his money, affable in his manners, innocent in his conversation--but through the placid stream of his life there glides an under-current of forefinger. Time and place cannot bind Mr. Bucket. Like man in the abstract, he is here to-day and gone to-morrow--but, very unlike man indeed, he is here again the next day. This evening he will be casually looking into the iron extinguishers at the door of Sir Leicester Dedlock's house in town; and to-morrow morning he will be walking on the leads at Chesney Wold, where erst the old man walked whose ghost is propitiated with a hundred guineas. Drawers, desks, pockets, all things belonging to him, Mr. Bucket examines. A few hours afterwards, he and the Roman will be alone together comparing forefingers. It is likely that these occupations are irreconcilable with home enjoyment, but it is certain that Mr. Bucket at present does not go home. Though in general he highly appreciates the society of Mrs. Bucket--a lady of a natural detective genius, which if it had been improved by professional exercise, might have done great things, but which has paused at the level of a clever amateur--he holds himself aloof from that dear solace. Mrs. Bucket is dependent on their lodger (fortunately an amiable lady in whom she takes an interest) for companionship and conversation. A great crowd assembles in Lincoln's Inn Fields on the day of the funeral. Sir Leicester Dedlock attends the ceremony in person; strictly speaking, there are only three other human followers, that is to say, Lord Doodle, William Buffy, and the debilitated cousin (thrown in as a make-weight), but the amount of inconsolable carriages is immense. The peerage contributes more four-wheeled affliction than has ever been seen in that neighbourhood. Such is the assemblage of armorial bearings on coach panels that the Herald's College might be supposed to have lost its father and mother at a blow. The Duke of Foodle sends a splendid pile of dust and ashes, with silver wheel-boxes, patent axles, all the last improvements, and three bereaved worms, six feet high, holding on behind, in a bunch of woe. All the state coachmen in London seem plunged into mourning; and if that dead old man of the rusty garb be not beyond a taste in horseflesh (which appears impossible), it must be highly gratified this day. Quiet among the undertakers and the equipages and the calves of so many legs all steeped in grief, Mr. Bucket sits concealed in one of the inconsolable carriages and at his ease surveys the crowd through the lattice blinds. He has a keen eye for a crowd--as for what not?--and looking here and there, now from this side of the carriage, now from the other, now up at the house windows, now along the people's heads, nothing escapes him. "And there you are, my partner, eh?" says Mr. Bucket to himself, apostrophizing Mrs. Bucket, stationed, by his favour, on the steps of the deceased's house. "And so you are. And so you are! And very well indeed you are looking, Mrs. Bucket!" The procession has not started yet, but is waiting for the cause of its assemblage to be brought out. Mr. Bucket, in the foremost emblazoned carriage, uses his two fat forefingers to hold the lattice a hair's breadth open while he looks. And it says a great deal for his attachment, as a husband, that he is still occupied with Mrs. B. "There you are, my partner, eh?" he murmuringly repeats. "And our lodger with you. I'm taking notice of you, Mrs. Bucket; I hope you're all right in your health, my dear!" Not another word does Mr. Bucket say, but sits with most attentive eyes until the sacked depository of noble secrets is brought down--Where are all those secrets now? Does he keep them yet? Did they fly with him on that sudden journey?--and until the procession moves, and Mr. Bucket's view is changed. After which he composes himself for an easy ride and takes note of the fittings of the carriage in case he should ever find such knowledge useful. Contrast enough between Mr. Tulkinghorn shut up in his dark carriage and Mr. Bucket shut up in HIS. Between the immeasurable track of space beyond the little wound that has thrown the one into the fixed sleep which jolts so heavily over the stones of the streets, and the narrow track of blood which keeps the other in the watchful state expressed in every hair of his head! But it is all one to both; neither is troubled about that. Mr. Bucket sits out the procession in his own easy manner and glides from the carriage when the opportunity he has settled with himself arrives. He makes for Sir Leicester Dedlock's, which is at present a sort of home to him, where he comes and goes as he likes at all hours, where he is always welcome and made much of, where he knows the whole establishment, and walks in an atmosphere of mysterious greatness. No knocking or ringing for Mr. Bucket. He has caused himself to be provided with a key and can pass in at his pleasure. As he is crossing the hall, Mercury informs him, "Here's another letter for you, Mr. Bucket, come by post," and gives it him. "Another one, eh?" says Mr. Bucket. If Mercury should chance to be possessed by any lingering curiosity as to Mr. Bucket's letters, that wary person is not the man to gratify it. Mr. Bucket looks at him as if his face were a vista of some miles in length and he were leisurely contemplating the same. "Do you happen to carry a box?" says Mr. Bucket. Unfortunately Mercury is no snuff-taker. "Could you fetch me a pinch from anywheres?" says Mr. Bucket. "Thankee. It don't matter what it is; I'm not particular as to the kind. Thankee!" Having leisurely helped himself from a canister borrowed from somebody downstairs for the purpose, and having made a considerable show of tasting it, first with one side of his nose and then with the other, Mr. Bucket, with much deliberation, pronounces it of the right sort and goes on, letter in hand. Now although Mr. Bucket walks upstairs to the little library within the larger one with the face of a man who receives some scores of letters every day, it happens that much correspondence is not incidental to his life. He is no great scribe, rather handling his pen like the pocket-staff he carries about with him always convenient to his grasp, and discourages correspondence with himself in others as being too artless and direct a way of doing delicate business. Further, he often sees damaging letters produced in evidence and has occasion to reflect that it was a green thing to write them. For these reasons he has very little to do with letters, either as sender or receiver. And yet he has received a round half-dozen within the last twenty-four hours. "And this," says Mr. Bucket, spreading it out on the table, "is in the same hand, and consists of the same two words." What two words? He turns the key in the door, ungirdles his black pocket-book (book of fate to many), lays another letter by it, and reads, boldly written in each, "Lady Dedlock." "Yes, yes," says Mr. Bucket. "But I could have made the money without this anonymous information." Having put the letters in his book of fate and girdled it up again, he unlocks the door just in time to admit his dinner, which is brought upon a goodly tray with a decanter of sherry. Mr. Bucket frequently observes, in friendly circles where there is no restraint, that he likes a toothful of your fine old brown East Inder sherry better than anything you can offer him. Consequently he fills and empties his glass with a smack of his lips and is proceeding with his refreshment when an idea enters his mind. Mr. Bucket softly opens the door of communication between that room and the next and looks in. The library is deserted, and the fire is sinking low. Mr. Bucket's eye, after taking a pigeon-flight round the room, alights upon a table where letters are usually put as they arrive. Several letters for Sir Leicester are upon it. Mr. Bucket draws near and examines the directions. "No," he says, "there's none in that hand. It's only me as is written to. I can break it to Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, to-morrow." With that he returns to finish his dinner with a good appetite, and after a light nap, is summoned into the drawing-room. Sir Leicester has received him there these several evenings past to know whether he has anything to report. The debilitated cousin (much exhausted by the funeral) and Volumnia are in attendance. Mr. Bucket makes three distinctly different bows to these three people. A bow of homage to Sir Leicester, a bow of gallantry to Volumnia, and a bow of recognition to the debilitated Cousin, to whom it airily says, "You are a swell about town, and you know me, and I know you." Having distributed these little specimens of his tact, Mr. Bucket rubs his hands. "Have you anything new to communicate, officer?" inquires Sir Leicester. "Do you wish to hold any conversation with me in private?" "Why--not to-night, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet." "Because my time," pursues Sir Leicester, "is wholly at your disposal with a view to the vindication of the outraged majesty of the law." Mr. Bucket coughs and glances at Volumnia, rouged and necklaced, as though he would respectfully observe, "I do assure you, you're a pretty creetur. I've seen hundreds worse looking at your time of life, I have indeed." The fair Volumnia, not quite unconscious perhaps of the humanizing influence of her charms, pauses in the writing of cocked-hat notes and meditatively adjusts the pearl necklace. Mr. Bucket prices that decoration in his mind and thinks it as likely as not that Volumnia is writing poetry. "If I have not," pursues Sir Leicester, "in the most emphatic manner, adjured you, officer, to exercise your utmost skill in this atrocious case, I particularly desire to take the present opportunity of rectifying any omission I may have made. Let no expense be a consideration. I am prepared to defray all charges. You can incur none in pursuit of the object you have undertaken that I shall hesitate for a moment to bear." Mr. Bucket made Sir Leicester's bow again as a response to this liberality. "My mind," Sir Leicester adds with a generous warmth, "has not, as may be easily supposed, recovered its tone since the late diabolical occurrence. It is not likely ever to recover its tone. But it is full of indignation to-night after undergoing the ordeal of consigning to the tomb the remains of a faithful, a zealous, a devoted adherent." Sir Leicester's voice trembles and his grey hair stirs upon his head. Tears are in his eyes; the best part of his nature is aroused. "I declare," he says, "I solemnly declare that until this crime is discovered and, in the course of justice, punished, I almost feel as if there were a stain upon my name. A gentleman who has devoted a large portion of his life to me, a gentleman who has devoted the last day of his life to me, a gentleman who has constantly sat at my table and slept under my roof, goes from my house to his own, and is struck down within an hour of his leaving my house. I cannot say but that he may have been followed from my house, watched at my house, even first marked because of his association with my house--which may have suggested his possessing greater wealth and being altogether of greater importance than his own retiring demeanour would have indicated. If I cannot with my means and influence and my position bring all the perpetrators of such a crime to light, I fail in the assertion of my respect for that gentleman's memory and of my fidelity towards one who was ever faithful to me." While he makes this protestation with great emotion and earnestness, looking round the room as if he were addressing an assembly, Mr. Bucket glances at him with an observant gravity in which there might be, but for the audacity of the thought, a touch of compassion. "The ceremony of to-day," continues Sir Leicester, "strikingly illustrative of the respect in which my deceased friend"--he lays a stress upon the word, for death levels all distinctions--"was held by the flower of the land, has, I say, aggravated the shock I have received from this most horrible and audacious crime. If it were my brother who had committed it, I would not spare him." Mr. Bucket looks very grave. Volumnia remarks of the deceased that he was the trustiest and dearest person! "You must feel it as a deprivation to you, miss," replies Mr. Bucket soothingly, "no doubt. He was calculated to BE a deprivation, I'm sure he was." Volumnia gives Mr. Bucket to understand, in reply, that her sensitive mind is fully made up never to get the better of it as long as she lives, that her nerves are unstrung for ever, and that she has not the least expectation of ever smiling again. Meanwhile she folds up a cocked hat for that redoubtable old general at Bath, descriptive of her melancholy condition. "It gives a start to a delicate female," says Mr. Bucket sympathetically, "but it'll wear off." Volumnia wishes of all things to know what is doing? Whether they are going to convict, or whatever it is, that dreadful soldier? Whether he had any accomplices, or whatever the thing is called in the law? And a great deal more to the like artless purpose. "Why you see, miss," returns Mr. Bucket, bringing the finger into persuasive action--and such is his natural gallantry that he had almost said "my dear"--"it ain't easy to answer those questions at the present moment. Not at the present moment. I've kept myself on this case, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet," whom Mr. Bucket takes into the conversation in right of his importance, "morning, noon, and night. But for a glass or two of sherry, I don't think I could have had my mind so much upon the stretch as it has been. I COULD answer your questions, miss, but duty forbids it. Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, will very soon be made acquainted with all that has been traced. And I hope that he may find it"--Mr. Bucket again looks grave--"to his satisfaction." The debilitated cousin only hopes some fler'll be executed--zample. Thinks more interest's wanted--get man hanged presentime--than get man place ten thousand a year. Hasn't a doubt--zample--far better hang wrong fler than no fler. "YOU know life, you know, sir," says Mr. Bucket with a complimentary twinkle of his eye and crook of his finger, "and you can confirm what I've mentioned to this lady. YOU don't want to be told that from information I have received I have gone to work. You're up to what a lady can't be expected to be up to. Lord! Especially in your elevated station of society, miss," says Mr. Bucket, quite reddening at another narrow escape from "my dear." "The officer, Volumnia," observes Sir Leicester, "is faithful to his duty, and perfectly right." Mr. Bucket murmurs, "Glad to have the honour of your approbation, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet." "In fact, Volumnia," proceeds Sir Leicester, "it is not holding up a good model for imitation to ask the officer any such questions as you have put to him. He is the best judge of his own responsibility; he acts upon his responsibility. And it does not become us, who assist in making the laws, to impede or interfere with those who carry them into execution. Or," says Sir Leicester somewhat sternly, for Volumnia was going to cut in before he had rounded his sentence, "or who vindicate their outraged majesty." Volumnia with all humility explains that she had not merely the plea of curiosity to urge (in common with the giddy youth of her sex in general) but that she is perfectly dying with regret and interest for the darling man whose loss they all deplore. "Very well, Volumnia," returns Sir Leicester. "Then you cannot be too discreet." Mr. Bucket takes the opportunity of a pause to be heard again. "Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, I have no objections to telling this lady, with your leave and among ourselves, that I look upon the case as pretty well complete. It is a beautiful case--a beautiful case--and what little is wanting to complete it, I expect to be able to supply in a few hours." "I am very glad indeed to hear it," says Sir Leicester. "Highly creditable to you." "Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet," returns Mr. Bucket very seriously, "I hope it may at one and the same time do me credit and prove satisfactory to all. When I depict it as a beautiful case, you see, miss," Mr. Bucket goes on, glancing gravely at Sir Leicester, "I mean from my point of view. As considered from other points of view, such cases will always involve more or less unpleasantness. Very strange things comes to our knowledge in families, miss; bless your heart, what you would think to be phenomenons, quite." Volumnia, with her innocent little scream, supposes so. "Aye, and even in gen-teel families, in high families, in great families," says Mr. Bucket, again gravely eyeing Sir Leicester aside. "I have had the honour of being employed in high families before, and you have no idea--come, I'll go so far as to say not even YOU have any idea, sir," this to the debilitated cousin, "what games goes on!" The cousin, who has been casting sofa-pillows on his head, in a prostration of boredom yawns, "Vayli," being the used-up for "very likely." Sir Leicester, deeming it time to dismiss the officer, here majestically interposes with the words, "Very good. Thank you!" and also with a wave of his hand, implying not only that there is an end of the discourse, but that if high families fall into low habits they must take the consequences. "You will not forget, officer," he adds with condescension, "that I am at your disposal when you please." Mr. Bucket (still grave) inquires if to-morrow morning, now, would suit, in case he should be as for'ard as he expects to be. Sir Leicester replies, "All times are alike to me." Mr. Bucket makes his three bows and is withdrawing when a forgotten point occurs to him. "Might I ask, by the by," he says in a low voice, cautiously returning, "who posted the reward-bill on the staircase." "I ordered it to be put up there," replies Sir Leicester. "Would it be considered a liberty, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, if I was to ask you why?" "Not at all. I chose it as a conspicuous part of the house. I think it cannot be too prominently kept before the whole establishment. I wish my people to be impressed with the enormity of the crime, the determination to punish it, and the hopelessness of escape. At the same time, officer, if you in your better knowledge of the subject see any objection--" Mr. Bucket sees none now; the bill having been put up, had better not be taken down. Repeating his three bows he withdraws, closing the door on Volumnia's little scream, which is a preliminary to her remarking that that charmingly horrible person is a perfect Blue Chamber. In his fondness for society and his adaptability to all grades, Mr. Bucket is presently standing before the hall-fire--bright and warm on the early winter night--admiring Mercury. "Why, you're six foot two, I suppose?" says Mr. Bucket. "Three," says Mercury. "Are you so much? But then, you see, you're broad in proportion and don't look it. You're not one of the weak-legged ones, you ain't. Was you ever modelled now?" Mr. Bucket asks, conveying the expression of an artist into the turn of his eye and head. Mercury never was modelled. "Then you ought to be, you know," says Mr. Bucket; "and a friend of mine that you'll hear of one day as a Royal Academy sculptor would stand something handsome to make a drawing of your proportions for the marble. My Lady's out, ain't she?" "Out to dinner." "Goes out pretty well every day, don't she?" "Yes." "Not to be wondered at!" says Mr. Bucket. "Such a fine woman as her, so handsome and so graceful and so elegant, is like a fresh lemon on a dinner-table, ornamental wherever she goes. Was your father in the same way of life as yourself?" Answer in the negative. "Mine was," says Mr. Bucket. "My father was first a page, then a footman, then a butler, then a steward, then an inn-keeper. Lived universally respected, and died lamented. Said with his last breath that he considered service the most honourable part of his career, and so it was. I've a brother in service, AND a brother-in-law. My Lady a good temper?" Mercury replies, "As good as you can expect." "Ah!" says Mr. Bucket. "A little spoilt? A little capricious? Lord! What can you anticipate when they're so handsome as that? And we like 'em all the better for it, don't we?" Mercury, with his hands in the pockets of his bright peach-blossom small-clothes, stretches his symmetrical silk legs with the air of a man of gallantry and can't deny it. Come the roll of wheels and a violent ringing at the bell. "Talk of the angels," says Mr. Bucket. "Here she is!" The doors are thrown open, and she passes through the hall. Still very pale, she is dressed in slight mourning and wears two beautiful bracelets. Either their beauty or the beauty of her arms is particularly attractive to Mr. Bucket. He looks at them with an eager eye and rattles something in his pocket--halfpence perhaps. Noticing him at his distance, she turns an inquiring look on the other Mercury who has brought her home. "Mr. Bucket, my Lady." Mr. Bucket makes a leg and comes forward, passing his familiar demon over the region of his mouth. "Are you waiting to see Sir Leicester?" "No, my Lady, I've seen him!" "Have you anything to say to me?" "Not just at present, my Lady." "Have you made any new discoveries?" "A few, my Lady." This is merely in passing. She scarcely makes a stop, and sweeps upstairs alone. Mr. Bucket, moving towards the staircase-foot, watches her as she goes up the steps the old man came down to his grave, past murderous groups of statuary repeated with their shadowy weapons on the wall, past the printed bill, which she looks at going by, out of view. "She's a lovely woman, too, she really is," says Mr. Bucket, coming back to Mercury. "Don't look quite healthy though." Is not quite healthy, Mercury informs him. Suffers much from headaches. Really? That's a pity! Walking, Mr. Bucket would recommend for that. Well, she tries walking, Mercury rejoins. Walks sometimes for two hours when she has them bad. By night, too. "Are you sure you're quite so much as six foot three?" asks Mr. Bucket. "Begging your pardon for interrupting you a moment?" Not a doubt about it. "You're so well put together that I shouldn't have thought it. But the household troops, though considered fine men, are built so straggling. Walks by night, does she? When it's moonlight, though?" Oh, yes. When it's moonlight! Of course. Oh, of course! Conversational and acquiescent on both sides. "I suppose you ain't in the habit of walking yourself?" says Mr. Bucket. "Not much time for it, I should say?" Besides which, Mercury don't like it. Prefers carriage exercise. "To be sure," says Mr. Bucket. "That makes a difference. Now I think of it," says Mr. Bucket, warming his hands and looking pleasantly at the blaze, "she went out walking the very night of this business." "To be sure she did! I let her into the garden over the way." "And left her there. Certainly you did. I saw you doing it." "I didn't see YOU," says Mercury. "I was rather in a hurry," returns Mr. Bucket, "for I was going to visit a aunt of mine that lives at Chelsea--next door but two to the old original Bun House--ninety year old the old lady is, a single woman, and got a little property. Yes, I chanced to be passing at the time. Let's see. What time might it be? It wasn't ten." "Half-past nine." "You're right. So it was. And if I don't deceive myself, my Lady was muffled in a loose black mantle, with a deep fringe to it?" "Of course she was." Of course she was. Mr. Bucket must return to a little work he has to get on with upstairs, but he must shake hands with Mercury in acknowledgment of his agreeable conversation, and will he--this is all he asks--will he, when he has a leisure half-hour, think of bestowing it on that Royal Academy sculptor, for the advantage of both parties? CHAPTER LIV Springing a Mine Refreshed by sleep, Mr. Bucket rises betimes in the morning and prepares for a field-day. Smartened up by the aid of a clean shirt and a wet hairbrush, with which instrument, on occasions of ceremony, he lubricates such thin locks as remain to him after his life of severe study, Mr. Bucket lays in a breakfast of two mutton chops as a foundation to work upon, together with tea, eggs, toast, and marmalade on a corresponding scale. Having much enjoyed these strengthening matters and having held subtle conference with his familiar demon, he confidently instructs Mercury "just to mention quietly to Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, that whenever he's ready for me, I'm ready for him." A gracious message being returned that Sir Leicester will expedite his dressing and join Mr. Bucket in the library within ten minutes, Mr. Bucket repairs to that apartment and stands before the fire with his finger on his chin, looking at the blazing coals. Thoughtful Mr. Bucket is, as a man may be with weighty work to do, but composed, sure, confident. From the expression of his face he might be a famous whist-player for a large stake--say a hundred guineas certain--with the game in his hand, but with a high reputation involved in his playing his hand out to the last card in a masterly way. Not in the least anxious or disturbed is Mr. Bucket when Sir Leicester appears, but he eyes the baronet aside as he comes slowly to his easy-chair with that observant gravity of yesterday in which there might have been yesterday, but for the audacity of the idea, a touch of compassion. "I am sorry to have kept you waiting, officer, but I am rather later than my usual hour this morning. I am not well. The agitation and the indignation from which I have recently suffered have been too much for me. I am subject to--gout"--Sir Leicester was going to say indisposition and would have said it to anybody else, but Mr. Bucket palpably knows all about it--"and recent circumstances have brought it on." As he takes his seat with some difficulty and with an air of pain, Mr. Bucket draws a little nearer, standing with one of his large hands on the library-table. "I am not aware, officer," Sir Leicester observes; raising his eyes to his face, "whether you wish us to be alone, but that is entirely as you please. If you do, well and good. If not, Miss Dedlock would be interested--" "Why, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet," returns Mr. Bucket with his head persuasively on one side and his forefinger pendant at one ear like an earring, "we can't be too private just at present. You will presently see that we can't be too private. A lady, under the circumstances, and especially in Miss Dedlock's elevated station of society, can't but be agreeable to me, but speaking without a view to myself, I will take the liberty of assuring you that I know we can't be too private." "That is enough." "So much so, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet," Mr. Bucket resumes, "that I was on the point of asking your permission to turn the key in the door." "By all means." Mr. Bucket skilfully and softly takes that precaution, stooping on his knee for a moment from mere force of habit so to adjust the key in the lock as that no one shall peep in from the outerside. "Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, I mentioned yesterday evening that I wanted but a very little to complete this case. I have now completed it and collected proof against the person who did this crime." "Against the soldier?" "No, Sir Leicester Dedlock; not the soldier." Sir Leicester looks astounded and inquires, "Is the man in custody?" Mr. Bucket tells him, after a pause, "It was a woman." Sir Leicester leans back in his chair, and breathlessly ejaculates, "Good heaven!" "Now, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet," Mr. Bucket begins, standing over him with one hand spread out on the library-table and the forefinger of the other in impressive use, "it's my duty to prepare you for a train of circumstances that may, and I go so far as to say that will, give you a shock. But Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, you are a gentleman, and I know what a gentleman is and what a gentleman is capable of. A gentleman can bear a shock when it must come, boldly and steadily. A gentleman can make up his mind to stand up against almost any blow. Why, take yourself, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet. If there's a blow to be inflicted on you, you naturally think of your family. You ask yourself, how would all them ancestors of yours, away to Julius Caesar--not to go beyond him at present--have borne that blow; you remember scores of them that would have borne it well; and you bear it well on their accounts, and to maintain the family credit. That's the way you argue, and that's the way you act, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet." Sir Leicester, leaning back in his chair and grasping the elbows, sits looking at him with a stony face. "Now, Sir Leicester Dedlock," proceeds Mr. Bucket, "thus preparing you, let me beg of you not to trouble your mind for a moment as to anything having come to MY knowledge. I know so much about so many characters, high and low, that a piece of information more or less don't signify a straw. I don't suppose there's a move on the board that would surprise ME, and as to this or that move having taken place, why my knowing it is no odds at all, any possible move whatever (provided it's in a wrong direction) being a probable move according to my experience. Therefore, what I say to you, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, is, don't you go and let yourself be put out of the way because of my knowing anything of your family affairs." "I thank you for your preparation," returns Sir Leicester after a silence, without moving hand, foot, or feature, "which I hope is not necessary; though I give it credit for being well intended. Be so good as to go on. Also"--Sir Leicester seems to shrink in the shadow of his figure--"also, to take a seat, if you have no objection." None at all. Mr. Bucket brings a chair and diminishes his shadow. "Now, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, with this short preface I come to the point. Lady Dedlock--" Sir Leicester raises himself in his seat and stares at him fiercely. Mr. Bucket brings the finger into play as an emollient. "Lady Dedlock, you see she's universally admired. That's what her ladyship is; she's universally admired," says Mr. Bucket. "I would greatly prefer, officer," Sir Leicester returns stiffly, "my Lady's name being entirely omitted from this discussion." "So would I, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, but--it's impossible." "Impossible?" Mr. Bucket shakes his relentless head. "Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, it's altogether impossible. What I have got to say is about her ladyship. She is the pivot it all turns on." "Officer," retorts Sir Leicester with a fiery eye and a quivering lip, "you know your duty. Do your duty, but be careful not to overstep it. I would not suffer it. I would not endure it. You bring my Lady's name into this communication upon your responsibility--upon your responsibility. My Lady's name is not a name for common persons to trifle with!" "Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, I say what I must say, and no more." "I hope it may prove so. Very well. Go on. Go on, sir!" Glancing at the angry eyes which now avoid him and at the angry figure trembling from head to foot, yet striving to be still, Mr. Bucket feels his way with his forefinger and in a low voice proceeds. "Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, it becomes my duty to tell you that the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn long entertained mistrusts and suspicions of Lady Dedlock." "If he had dared to breathe them to me, sir--which he never did--I would have killed him myself!" exclaims Sir Leicester, striking his hand upon the table. But in the very heat and fury of the act he stops, fixed by the knowing eyes of Mr. Bucket, whose forefinger is slowly going and who, with mingled confidence and patience, shakes his head. "Sir Leicester Dedlock, the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn was deep and close, and what he fully had in his mind in the very beginning I can't quite take upon myself to say. But I know from his lips that he long ago suspected Lady Dedlock of having discovered, through the sight of some handwriting--in this very house, and when you yourself, Sir Leicester Dedlock, were present--the existence, in great poverty, of a certain person who had been her lover before you courted her and who ought to have been her husband." Mr. Bucket stops and deliberately repeats, "Ought to have been her husband, not a doubt about it. I know from his lips that when that person soon afterwards died, he suspected Lady Dedlock of visiting his wretched lodging and his wretched grave, alone and in secret. I know from my own inquiries and through my eyes and ears that Lady Dedlock did make such visit in the dress of her own maid, for the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn employed me to reckon up her ladyship--if you'll excuse my making use of the term we commonly employ--and I reckoned her up, so far, completely. I confronted the maid in the chambers in Lincoln's Inn Fields with a witness who had been Lady Dedlock's guide, and there couldn't be the shadow of a doubt that she had worn the young woman's dress, unknown to her. Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, I did endeavour to pave the way a little towards these unpleasant disclosures yesterday by saying that very strange things happened even in high families sometimes. All this, and more, has happened in your own family, and to and through your own Lady. It's my belief that the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn followed up these inquiries to the hour of his death and that he and Lady Dedlock even had bad blood between them upon the matter that very night. Now, only you put that to Lady Dedlock, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, and ask her ladyship whether, even after he had left here, she didn't go down to his chambers with the intention of saying something further to him, dressed in a loose black mantle with a deep fringe to it." Sir Leicester sits like a statue, gazing at the cruel finger that is probing the life-blood of his heart. "You put that to her ladyship, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, from me, Inspector Bucket of the Detective. And if her ladyship makes any difficulty about admitting of it, you tell her that it's no use, that Inspector Bucket knows it and knows that she passed the soldier as you called him (though he's not in the army now) and knows that she knows she passed him on the staircase. Now, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, why do I relate all this?" Sir Leicester, who has covered his face with his hands, uttering a single groan, requests him to pause for a moment. By and by he takes his hands away, and so preserves his dignity and outward calmness, though there is no more colour in his face than in his white hair, that Mr. Bucket is a little awed by him. Something frozen and fixed is upon his manner, over and above its usual shell of haughtiness, and Mr. Bucket soon detects an unusual slowness in his speech, with now and then a curious trouble in beginning, which occasions him to utter inarticulate sounds. With such sounds he now breaks silence, soon, however, controlling himself to say that he does not comprehend why a gentleman so faithful and zealous as the late Mr. Tulkinghorn should have communicated to him nothing of this painful, this distressing, this unlooked-for, this overwhelming, this incredible intelligence. "Again, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet," returns Mr. Bucket, "put it to her ladyship to clear that up. Put it to her ladyship, if you think it right, from Inspector Bucket of the Detective. You'll find, or I'm much mistaken, that the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn had the intention of communicating the whole to you as soon as he considered it ripe, and further, that he had given her ladyship so to understand. Why, he might have been going to reveal it the very morning when I examined the body! You don't know what I'm going to say and do five minutes from this present time, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet; and supposing I was to be picked off now, you might wonder why I hadn't done it, don't you see?" True. Sir Leicester, avoiding, with some trouble those obtrusive sounds, says, "True." At this juncture a considerable noise of voices is heard in the hall. Mr. Bucket, after listening, goes to the library-door, softly unlocks and opens it, and listens again. Then he draws in his head and whispers hurriedly but composedly, "Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, this unfortunate family affair has taken air, as I expected it might, the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn being cut down so sudden. The chance to hush it is to let in these people now in a wrangle with your footmen. Would you mind sitting quiet--on the family account--while I reckon 'em up? And would you just throw in a nod when I seem to ask you for it?" Sir Leicester indistinctly answers, "Officer. The best you can, the best you can!" and Mr. Bucket, with a nod and a sagacious crook of the forefinger, slips down into the hall, where the voices quickly die away. He is not long in returning; a few paces ahead of Mercury and a brother deity also powdered and in peach-blossomed smalls, who bear between them a chair in which is an incapable old man. Another man and two women come behind. Directing the pitching of the chair in an affable and easy manner, Mr. Bucket dismisses the Mercuries and locks the door again. Sir Leicester looks on at this invasion of the sacred precincts with an icy stare. "Now, perhaps you may know me, ladies and gentlemen," says Mr. Bucket in a confidential voice. "I am Inspector Bucket of the Detective, I am; and this," producing the tip of his convenient little staff from his breast-pocket, "is my authority. Now, you wanted to see Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet. Well! You do see him, and mind you, it ain't every one as is admitted to that honour. Your name, old gentleman, is Smallweed; that's what your name is; I know it well." "Well, and you never heard any harm of it!" cries Mr. Smallweed in a shrill loud voice. "You don't happen to know why they killed the pig, do you?" retorts Mr. Bucket with a steadfast look, but without loss of temper. "No!" "Why, they killed him," says Mr. Bucket, "on account of his having so much cheek. Don't YOU get into the same position, because it isn't worthy of you. You ain't in the habit of conversing with a deaf person, are you?" "Yes," snarls Mr. Smallweed, "my wife's deaf." "That accounts for your pitching your voice so high. But as she ain't here; just pitch it an octave or two lower, will you, and I'll not only be obliged to you, but it'll do you more credit," says Mr. Bucket. "This other gentleman is in the preaching line, I think?" "Name of Chadband," Mr. Smallweed puts in, speaking henceforth in a much lower key. "Once had a friend and brother serjeant of the same name," says Mr. Bucket, offering his hand, "and consequently feel a liking for it. Mrs. Chadband, no doubt?" "And Mrs. Snagsby," Mr. Smallweed introduces. "Husband a law-stationer and a friend of my own," says Mr. Bucket. "Love him like a brother! Now, what's up?" "Do you mean what business have we come upon?" Mr. Smallweed asks, a little dashed by the suddenness of this turn. "Ah! You know what I mean. Let us hear what it's all about in presence of Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet. Come." Mr. Smallweed, beckoning Mr. Chadband, takes a moment's counsel with him in a whisper. Mr. Chadband, expressing a considerable amount of oil from the pores of his forehead and the palms of his hands, says aloud, "Yes. You first!" and retires to his former place. "I was the client and friend of Mr. Tulkinghorn," pipes Grandfather Smallweed then; "I did business with him. I was useful to him, and he was useful to me. Krook, dead and gone, was my brother-in-law. He was own brother to a brimstone magpie--leastways Mrs. Smallweed. I come into Krook's property. I examined all his papers and all his effects. They was all dug out under my eyes. There was a bundle of letters belonging to a dead and gone lodger as was hid away at the back of a shelf in the side of Lady Jane's bed--his cat's bed. He hid all manner of things away, everywheres. Mr. Tulkinghorn wanted 'em and got 'em, but I looked 'em over first. I'm a man of business, and I took a squint at 'em. They was letters from the lodger's sweetheart, and she signed Honoria. Dear me, that's not a common name, Honoria, is it? There's no lady in this house that signs Honoria is there? Oh, no, I don't think so! Oh, no, I don't think so! And not in the same hand, perhaps? Oh, no, I don't think so!" Here Mr. Smallweed, seized with a fit of coughing in the midst of his triumph, breaks off to ejaculate, "Oh, dear me! Oh, Lord! I'm shaken all to pieces!" "Now, when you're ready," says Mr. Bucket after awaiting his recovery, "to come to anything that concerns Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, here the gentleman sits, you know." "Haven't I come to it, Mr. Bucket?" cries Grandfather Smallweed. "Isn't the gentleman concerned yet? Not with Captain Hawdon, and his ever affectionate Honoria, and their child into the bargain? Come, then, I want to know where those letters are. That concerns me, if it don't concern Sir Leicester Dedlock. I will know where they are. I won't have 'em disappear so quietly. I handed 'em over to my friend and solicitor, Mr. Tulkinghorn, not to anybody else." "Why, he paid you for them, you know, and handsome too," says Mr. Bucket. "I don't care for that. I want to know who's got 'em. And I tell you what we want--what we all here want, Mr. Bucket. We want more painstaking and search-making into this murder. We know where the interest and the motive was, and you have not done enough. If George the vagabond dragoon had any hand in it, he was only an accomplice, and was set on. You know what I mean as well as any man." "Now I tell you what," says Mr. Bucket, instantaneously altering his manner, coming close to him, and communicating an extraordinary fascination to the forefinger, "I am damned if I am a-going to have my case spoilt, or interfered with, or anticipated by so much as half a second of time by any human being in creation. YOU want more painstaking and search-making! YOU do? Do you see this hand, and do you think that I don't know the right time to stretch it out and put it on the arm that fired that shot?" Such is the dread power of the man, and so terribly evident it is that he makes no idle boast, that Mr. Smallweed begins to apologize. Mr. Bucket, dismissing his sudden anger, checks him. "The advice I give you is, don't you trouble your head about the murder. That's my affair. You keep half an eye on the newspapers, and I shouldn't wonder if you was to read something about it before long, if you look sharp. I know my business, and that's all I've got to say to you on that subject. Now about those letters. You want to know who's got 'em. I don't mind telling you. I have got 'em. Is that the packet?" Mr. Smallweed looks, with greedy eyes, at the little bundle Mr. Bucket produces from a mysterious part of his coat, and identifies it as the same. "What have you got to say next?" asks Mr. Bucket. "Now, don't open your mouth too wide, because you don't look handsome when you do it." "I want five hundred pound." "No, you don't; you mean fifty," says Mr. Bucket humorously. It appears, however, that Mr. Smallweed means five hundred. "That is, I am deputed by Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, to consider (without admitting or promising anything) this bit of business," says Mr. Bucket--Sir Leicester mechanically bows his head--"and you ask me to consider a proposal of five hundred pounds. Why, it's an unreasonable proposal! Two fifty would be bad enough, but better than that. Hadn't you better say two fifty?" Mr. Smallweed is quite clear that he had better not. "Then," says Mr. Bucket, "let's hear Mr. Chadband. Lord! Many a time I've heard my old fellow-serjeant of that name; and a moderate man he was in all respects, as ever I come across!" Thus invited, Mr. Chadband steps forth, and after a little sleek smiling and a little oil-grinding with the palms of his hands, delivers himself as follows, "My friends, we are now--Rachael, my wife, and I--in the mansions of the rich and great. Why are we now in the mansions of the rich and great, my friends? Is it because we are invited? Because we are bidden to feast with them, because we are bidden to rejoice with them, because we are bidden to play the lute with them, because we are bidden to dance with them? No. Then why are we here, my friends? Air we in possession of a sinful secret, and do we require corn, and wine, and oil, or what is much the same thing, money, for the keeping thereof? Probably so, my friends." "You're a man of business, you are," returns Mr. Bucket, very attentive, "and consequently you're going on to mention what the nature of your secret is. You are right. You couldn't do better." "Let us then, my brother, in a spirit of love," says Mr. Chadband with a cunning eye, "proceed unto it. Rachael, my wife, advance!" Mrs. Chadband, more than ready, so advances as to jostle her husband into the background and confronts Mr. Bucket with a hard, frowning smile. "Since you want to know what we know," says she, "I'll tell you. I helped to bring up Miss Hawdon, her ladyship's daughter. I was in the service of her ladyship's sister, who was very sensitive to the disgrace her ladyship brought upon her, and gave out, even to her ladyship, that the child was dead--she WAS very nearly so--when she was born. But she's alive, and I know her." With these words, and a laugh, and laying a bitter stress on the word "ladyship," Mrs. Chadband folds her arms and looks implacably at Mr. Bucket. "I suppose now," returns that officer, "YOU will be expecting a twenty-pound note or a present of about that figure?" Mrs. Chadband merely laughs and contemptuously tells him he can "offer" twenty pence. "My friend the law-stationer's good lady, over there," says Mr. Bucket, luring Mrs. Snagsby forward with the finger. "What may YOUR game be, ma'am?" Mrs. Snagsby is at first prevented, by tears and lamentations, from stating the nature of her game, but by degrees it confusedly comes to light that she is a woman overwhelmed with injuries and wrongs, whom Mr. Snagsby has habitually deceived, abandoned, and sought to keep in darkness, and whose chief comfort, under her afflictions, has been the sympathy of the late Mr. Tulkinghorn, who showed so much commiseration for her on one occasion of his calling in Cook's Court in the absence of her perjured husband that she has of late habitually carried to him all her woes. Everybody it appears, the present company excepted, has plotted against Mrs. Snagsby's peace. There is Mr. Guppy, clerk to Kenge and Carboy, who was at first as open as the sun at noon, but who suddenly shut up as close as midnight, under the influence--no doubt--of Mr. Snagsby's suborning and tampering. There is Mr. Weevle, friend of Mr. Guppy, who lived mysteriously up a court, owing to the like coherent causes. There was Krook, deceased; there was Nimrod, deceased; and there was Jo, deceased; and they were "all in it." In what, Mrs. Snagsby does not with particularity express, but she knows that Jo was Mr. Snagsby's son, "as well as if a trumpet had spoken it," and she followed Mr. Snagsby when he went on his last visit to the boy, and if he was not his son why did he go? The one occupation of her life has been, for some time back, to follow Mr. Snagsby to and fro, and up and down, and to piece suspicious circumstances together--and every circumstance that has happened has been most suspicious; and in this way she has pursued her object of detecting and confounding her false husband, night and day. Thus did it come to pass that she brought the Chadbands and Mr. Tulkinghorn together, and conferred with Mr. Tulkinghorn on the change in Mr. Guppy, and helped to turn up the circumstances in which the present company are interested, casually, by the wayside, being still and ever on the great high road that is to terminate in Mr. Snagsby's full exposure and a matrimonial separation. All this, Mrs. Snagsby, as an injured woman, and the friend of Mrs. Chadband, and the follower of Mr. Chadband, and the mourner of the late Mr. Tulkinghorn, is here to certify under the seal of confidence, with every possible confusion and involvement possible and impossible, having no pecuniary motive whatever, no scheme or project but the one mentioned, and bringing here, and taking everywhere, her own dense atmosphere of dust, arising from the ceaseless working of her mill of jealousy. While this exordium is in hand--and it takes some time--Mr. Bucket, who has seen through the transparency of Mrs. Snagsby's vinegar at a glance, confers with his familiar demon and bestows his shrewd attention on the Chadbands and Mr. Smallweed. Sir Leicester Dedlock remains immovable, with the same icy surface upon him, except that he once or twice looks towards Mr. Bucket, as relying on that officer alone of all mankind. "Very good," says Mr. Bucket. "Now I understand you, you know, and being deputed by Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, to look into this little matter," again Sir Leicester mechanically bows in confirmation of the statement, "can give it my fair and full attention. Now I won't allude to conspiring to extort money or anything of that sort, because we are men and women of the world here, and our object is to make things pleasant. But I tell you what I DO wonder at; I am surprised that you should think of making a noise below in the hall. It was so opposed to your interests. That's what I look at." "We wanted to get in," pleads Mr. Smallweed. "Why, of course you wanted to get in," Mr. Bucket asserts with cheerfulness; "but for a old gentleman at your time of life--what I call truly venerable, mind you!--with his wits sharpened, as I have no doubt they are, by the loss of the use of his limbs, which occasions all his animation to mount up into his head, not to consider that if he don't keep such a business as the present as close as possible it can't be worth a mag to him, is so curious! You see your temper got the better of you; that's where you lost ground," says Mr. Bucket in an argumentative and friendly way. "I only said I wouldn't go without one of the servants came up to Sir Leicester Dedlock," returns Mr. Smallweed. "That's it! That's where your temper got the better of you. Now, you keep it under another time and you'll make money by it. Shall I ring for them to carry you down?" "When are we to hear more of this?" Mrs. Chadband sternly demands. "Bless your heart for a true woman! Always curious, your delightful sex is!" replies Mr. Bucket with gallantry. "I shall have the pleasure of giving you a call to-morrow or next day--not forgetting Mr. Smallweed and his proposal of two fifty." "Five hundred!" exclaims Mr. Smallweed. "All right! Nominally five hundred." Mr. Bucket has his hand on the bell-rope. "SHALL I wish you good day for the present on the part of myself and the gentleman of the house?" he asks in an insinuating tone. Nobody having the hardihood to object to his doing so, he does it, and the party retire as they came up. Mr. Bucket follows them to the door, and returning, says with an air of serious business, "Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, it's for you to consider whether or not to buy this up. I should recommend, on the whole, it's being bought up myself; and I think it may be bought pretty cheap. You see, that little pickled cowcumber of a Mrs. Snagsby has been used by all sides of the speculation and has done a deal more harm in bringing odds and ends together than if she had meant it. Mr. Tulkinghorn, deceased, he held all these horses in his hand and could have drove 'em his own way, I haven't a doubt; but he was fetched off the box head-foremost, and now they have got their legs over the traces, and are all dragging and pulling their own ways. So it is, and such is life. The cat's away, and the mice they play; the frost breaks up, and the water runs. Now, with regard to the party to be apprehended." Sir Leicester seems to wake, though his eyes have been wide open, and he looks intently at Mr. Bucket as Mr. Bucket refers to his watch. "The party to be apprehended is now in this house," proceeds Mr. Bucket, putting up his watch with a steady hand and with rising spirits, "and I'm about to take her into custody in your presence. Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, don't you say a word nor yet stir. There'll be no noise and no disturbance at all. I'll come back in the course of the evening, if agreeable to you, and endeavour to meet your wishes respecting this unfortunate family matter and the nobbiest way of keeping it quiet. Now, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, don't you be nervous on account of the apprehension at present coming off. You shall see the whole case clear, from first to last." Mr. Bucket rings, goes to the door, briefly whispers Mercury, shuts the door, and stands behind it with his arms folded. After a suspense of a minute or two the door slowly opens and a Frenchwoman enters. Mademoiselle Hortense. The moment she is in the room Mr. Bucket claps the door to and puts his back against it. The suddenness of the noise occasions her to turn, and then for the first time she sees Sir Leicester Dedlock in his chair. "I ask you pardon," she mutters hurriedly. "They tell me there was no one here." Her step towards the door brings her front to front with Mr. Bucket. Suddenly a spasm shoots across her face and she turns deadly pale. "This is my lodger, Sir Leicester Dedlock," says Mr. Bucket, nodding at her. "This foreign young woman has been my lodger for some weeks back." "What do Sir Leicester care for that, you think, my angel?" returns mademoiselle in a jocular strain. "Why, my angel," returns Mr. Bucket, "we shall see." Mademoiselle Hortense eyes him with a scowl upon her tight face, which gradually changes into a smile of scorn, "You are very mysterieuse. Are you drunk?" "Tolerable sober, my angel," returns Mr. Bucket. "I come from arriving at this so detestable house with your wife. Your wife have left me since some minutes. They tell me downstairs that your wife is here. I come here, and your wife is not here. What is the intention of this fool's play, say then?" mademoiselle demands, with her arms composedly crossed, but with something in her dark cheek beating like a clock. Mr. Bucket merely shakes the finger at her. "Ah, my God, you are an unhappy idiot!" cries mademoiselle with a toss of her head and a laugh. "Leave me to pass downstairs, great pig." With a stamp of her foot and a menace. "Now, mademoiselle," says Mr. Bucket in a cool determined way, "you go and sit down upon that sofy." "I will not sit down upon nothing," she replies with a shower of nods. "Now, mademoiselle," repeats Mr. Bucket, making no demonstration except with the finger, "you sit down upon that sofy." "Why?" "Because I take you into custody on a charge of murder, and you don't need to be told it. Now, I want to be polite to one of your sex and a foreigner if I can. If I can't, I must be rough, and there's rougher ones outside. What I am to be depends on you. So I recommend you, as a friend, afore another half a blessed moment has passed over your head, to go and sit down upon that sofy." Mademoiselle complies, saying in a concentrated voice while that something in her cheek beats fast and hard, "You are a devil." "Now, you see," Mr. Bucket proceeds approvingly, "you're comfortable and conducting yourself as I should expect a foreign young woman of your sense to do. So I'll give you a piece of advice, and it's this, don't you talk too much. You're not expected to say anything here, and you can't keep too quiet a tongue in your head. In short, the less you PARLAY, the better, you know." Mr. Bucket is very complacent over this French explanation. Mademoiselle, with that tigerish expansion of the mouth and her black eyes darting fire upon him, sits upright on the sofa in a rigid state, with her hands clenched--and her feet too, one might suppose--muttering, "Oh, you Bucket, you are a devil!" "Now, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet," says Mr. Bucket, and from this time forth the finger never rests, "this young woman, my lodger, was her ladyship's maid at the time I have mentioned to you; and this young woman, besides being extraordinary vehement and passionate against her ladyship after being discharged--" "Lie!" cries mademoiselle. "I discharge myself." "Now, why don't you take my advice?" returns Mr. Bucket in an impressive, almost in an imploring, tone. "I'm surprised at the indiscreetness you commit. You'll say something that'll be used against you, you know. You're sure to come to it. Never you mind what I say till it's given in evidence. It is not addressed to you." "Discharge, too," cries mademoiselle furiously, "by her ladyship! Eh, my faith, a pretty ladyship! Why, I r-r-r-ruin my character by remaining with a ladyship so infame!" "Upon my soul I wonder at you!" Mr. Bucket remonstrates. "I thought the French were a polite nation, I did, really. Yet to hear a female going on like that before Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet!" "He is a poor abused!" cries mademoiselle. "I spit upon his house, upon his name, upon his imbecility," all of which she makes the carpet represent. "Oh, that he is a great man! Oh, yes, superb! Oh, heaven! Bah!" "Well, Sir Leicester Dedlock," proceeds Mr. Bucket, "this intemperate foreigner also angrily took it into her head that she had established a claim upon Mr. Tulkinghorn, deceased, by attending on the occasion I told you of at his chambers, though she was liberally paid for her time and trouble." "Lie!" cries mademoiselle. "I ref-use his money all togezzer." "If you WILL PARLAY, you know," says Mr. Bucket parenthetically, "you must take the consequences. Now, whether she became my lodger, Sir Leicester Dedlock, with any deliberate intention then of doing this deed and blinding me, I give no opinion on; but she lived in my house in that capacity at the time that she was hovering about the chambers of the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn with a view to a wrangle, and likewise persecuting and half frightening the life out of an unfortunate stationer." "Lie!" cries mademoiselle. "All lie!" "The murder was committed, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, and you know under what circumstances. Now, I beg of you to follow me close with your attention for a minute or two. I was sent for, and the case was entrusted to me. I examined the place, and the body, and the papers, and everything. From information I received (from a clerk in the same house) I took George into custody as having been seen hanging about there on the night, and at very nigh the time of the murder, also as having been overheard in high words with the deceased on former occasions--even threatening him, as the witness made out. If you ask me, Sir Leicester Dedlock, whether from the first I believed George to be the murderer, I tell you candidly no, but he might be, notwithstanding, and there was enough against him to make it my duty to take him and get him kept under remand. Now, observe!" As Mr. Bucket bends forward in some excitement--for him--and inaugurates what he is going to say with one ghostly beat of his forefinger in the air, Mademoiselle Hortense fixes her black eyes upon him with a dark frown and sets her dry lips closely and firmly together. "I went home, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, at night and found this young woman having supper with my wife, Mrs. Bucket. She had made a mighty show of being fond of Mrs. Bucket from her first offering herself as our lodger, but that night she made more than ever--in fact, overdid it. Likewise she overdid her respect, and all that, for the lamented memory of the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn. By the living Lord it flashed upon me, as I sat opposite to her at the table and saw her with a knife in her hand, that she had done it!" Mademoiselle is hardly audible in straining through her teeth and lips the words, "You are a devil." "Now where," pursues Mr. Bucket, "had she been on the night of the murder? She had been to the theayter. (She really was there, I have since found, both before the deed and after it.) I knew I had an artful customer to deal with and that proof would be very difficult; and I laid a trap for her--such a trap as I never laid yet, and such a venture as I never made yet. I worked it out in my mind while I was talking to her at supper. When I went upstairs to bed, our house being small and this young woman's ears sharp, I stuffed the sheet into Mrs. Bucket's mouth that she shouldn't say a word of surprise and told her all about it. My dear, don't you give your mind to that again, or I shall link your feet together at the ankles." Mr. Bucket, breaking off, has made a noiseless descent upon mademoiselle and laid his heavy hand upon her shoulder. "What is the matter with you now?" she asks him. "Don't you think any more," returns Mr. Bucket with admonitory finger, "of throwing yourself out of window. That's what's the matter with me. Come! Just take my arm. You needn't get up; I'll sit down by you. Now take my arm, will you? I'm a married man, you know; you're acquainted with my wife. Just take my arm." Vainly endeavouring to moisten those dry lips, with a painful sound she struggles with herself and complies. "Now we're all right again. Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, this case could never have been the case it is but for Mrs. Bucket, who is a woman in fifty thousand--in a hundred and fifty thousand! To throw this young woman off her guard, I have never set foot in our house since, though I've communicated with Mrs. Bucket in the baker's loaves and in the milk as often as required. My whispered words to Mrs. Bucket when she had the sheet in her mouth were, 'My dear, can you throw her off continually with natural accounts of my suspicions against George, and this, and that, and t'other? Can you do without rest and keep watch upon her night and day? Can you undertake to say, 'She shall do nothing without my knowledge, she shall be my prisoner without suspecting it, she shall no more escape from me than from death, and her life shall be my life, and her soul my soul, till I have got her, if she did this murder?' Mrs. Bucket says to me, as well as she could speak on account of the sheet, 'Bucket, I can!' And she has acted up to it glorious!" "Lies!" mademoiselle interposes. "All lies, my friend!" "Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, how did my calculations come out under these circumstances? When I calculated that this impetuous young woman would overdo it in new directions, was I wrong or right? I was right. What does she try to do? Don't let it give you a turn? To throw the murder on her ladyship." Sir Leicester rises from his chair and staggers down again. "And she got encouragement in it from hearing that I was always here, which was done a-purpose. Now, open that pocket-book of mine, Sir Leicester Dedlock, if I may take the liberty of throwing it towards you, and look at the letters sent to me, each with the two words 'Lady Dedlock' in it. Open the one directed to yourself, which I stopped this very morning, and read the three words 'Lady Dedlock, Murderess' in it. These letters have been falling about like a shower of lady-birds. What do you say now to Mrs. Bucket, from her spy-place having seen them all 'written by this young woman? What do you say to Mrs. Bucket having, within this half-hour, secured the corresponding ink and paper, fellow half-sheets and what not? What do you say to Mrs. Bucket having watched the posting of 'em every one by this young woman, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet?" Mr. Bucket asks, triumphant in his admiration of his lady's genius. Two things are especially observable as Mr. Bucket proceeds to a conclusion. First, that he seems imperceptibly to establish a dreadful right of property in mademoiselle. Secondly, that the very atmosphere she breathes seems to narrow and contract about her as if a close net or a pall were being drawn nearer and yet nearer around her breathless figure. "There is no doubt that her ladyship was on the spot at the eventful period," says Mr. Bucket, "and my foreign friend here saw her, I believe, from the upper part of the staircase. Her ladyship and George and my foreign friend were all pretty close on one another's heels. But that don't signify any more, so I'll not go into it. I found the wadding of the pistol with which the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn was shot. It was a bit of the printed description of your house at Chesney Wold. Not much in that, you'll say, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet. No. But when my foreign friend here is so thoroughly off her guard as to think it a safe time to tear up the rest of that leaf, and when Mrs. Bucket puts the pieces together and finds the wadding wanting, it begins to look like Queer Street." "These are very long lies," mademoiselle interposes. "You prose great deal. Is it that you have almost all finished, or are you speaking always?" "Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet," proceeds Mr. Bucket, who delights in a full title and does violence to himself when he dispenses with any fragment of it, "the last point in the case which I am now going to mention shows the necessity of patience in our business, and never doing a thing in a hurry. I watched this young woman yesterday without her knowledge when she was looking at the funeral, in company with my wife, who planned to take her there; and I had so much to convict her, and I saw such an expression in her face, and my mind so rose against her malice towards her ladyship, and the time was altogether such a time for bringing down what you may call retribution upon her, that if I had been a younger hand with less experience, I should have taken her, certain. Equally, last night, when her ladyship, as is so universally admired I am sure, come home looking--why, Lord, a man might almost say like Venus rising from the ocean--it was so unpleasant and inconsistent to think of her being charged with a murder of which she was innocent that I felt quite to want to put an end to the job. What should I have lost? Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, I should have lost the weapon. My prisoner here proposed to Mrs. Bucket, after the departure of the funeral, that they should go per bus a little ways into the country and take tea at a very decent house of entertainment. Now, near that house of entertainment there's a piece of water. At tea, my prisoner got up to fetch her pocket handkercher from the bedroom where the bonnets was; she was rather a long time gone and came back a little out of wind. As soon as they came home this was reported to me by Mrs. Bucket, along with her observations and suspicions. I had the piece of water dragged by moonlight, in presence of a couple of our men, and the pocket pistol was brought up before it had been there half-a-dozen hours. Now, my dear, put your arm a little further through mine, and hold it steady, and I shan't hurt you!" In a trice Mr. Bucket snaps a handcuff on her wrist. "That's one," says Mr. Bucket. "Now the other, darling. Two, and all told!" He rises; she rises too. "Where," she asks him, darkening her large eyes until their drooping lids almost conceal them--and yet they stare, "where is your false, your treacherous, and cursed wife?" "She's gone forrard to the Police Office," returns Mr. Bucket. "You'll see her there, my dear." "I would like to kiss her!" exclaims Mademoiselle Hortense, panting tigress-like. "You'd bite her, I suspect," says Mr. Bucket. "I would!" making her eyes very large. "I would love to tear her limb from limb." "Bless you, darling," says Mr. Bucket with the greatest composure, "I'm fully prepared to hear that. Your sex have such a surprising animosity against one another when you do differ. You don't mind me half so much, do you?" "No. Though you are a devil still." "Angel and devil by turns, eh?" cries Mr. Bucket. "But I am in my regular employment, you must consider. Let me put your shawl tidy. I've been lady's maid to a good many before now. Anything wanting to the bonnet? There's a cab at the door." Mademoiselle Hortense, casting an indignant eye at the glass, shakes herself perfectly neat in one shake and looks, to do her justice, uncommonly genteel. "Listen then, my angel," says she after several sarcastic nods. "You are very spiritual. But can you restore him back to life?" Mr. Bucket answers, "Not exactly." "That is droll. Listen yet one time. You are very spiritual. Can you make a honourable lady of her?" "Don't be so malicious," says Mr. Bucket. "Or a haughty gentleman of HIM?" cries mademoiselle, referring to Sir Leicester with ineffable disdain. "Eh! Oh, then regard him! The poor infant! Ha! Ha! Ha!" "Come, come, why this is worse PARLAYING than the other," says Mr. Bucket. "Come along!" "You cannot do these things? Then you can do as you please with me. It is but the death, it is all the same. Let us go, my angel. Adieu, you old man, grey. I pity you, and I despise you!" With these last words she snaps her teeth together as if her mouth closed with a spring. It is impossible to describe how Mr. Bucket gets her out, but he accomplishes that feat in a manner so peculiar to himself, enfolding and pervading her like a cloud, and hovering away with her as if he were a homely Jupiter and she the object of his affections. Sir Leicester, left alone, remains in the same attitude, as though he were still listening and his attention were still occupied. At length he gazes round the empty room, and finding it deserted, rises unsteadily to his feet, pushes back his chair, and walks a few steps, supporting himself by the table. Then he stops, and with more of those inarticulate sounds, lifts up his eyes and seems to stare at something. Heaven knows what he sees. The green, green woods of Chesney Wold, the noble house, the pictures of his forefathers, strangers defacing them, officers of police coarsely handling his most precious heirlooms, thousands of fingers pointing at him, thousands of faces sneering at him. But if such shadows flit before him to his bewilderment, there is one other shadow which he can name with something like distinctness even yet and to which alone he addresses his tearing of his white hair and his extended arms. It is she in association with whom, saving that she has been for years a main fibre of the root of his dignity and pride, he has never had a selfish thought. It is she whom he has loved, admired, honoured, and set up for the world to respect. It is she who, at the core of all the constrained formalities and conventionalities of his life, has been a stock of living tenderness and love, susceptible as nothing else is of being struck with the agony he feels. He sees her, almost to the exclusion of himself, and cannot bear to look upon her cast down from the high place she has graced so well. And even to the point of his sinking on the ground, oblivious of his suffering, he can yet pronounce her name with something like distinctness in the midst of those intrusive sounds, and in a tone of mourning and compassion rather than reproach. CHAPTER LV Flight Inspector Bucket of the Detective has not yet struck his great blow, as just now chronicled, but is yet refreshing himself with sleep preparatory to his field-day, when through the night and along the freezing wintry roads a chaise and pair comes out of Lincolnshire, making its way towards London. Railroads shall soon traverse all this country, and with a rattle and a glare the engine and train shall shoot like a meteor over the wide night-landscape, turning the moon paler; but as yet such things are non-existent in these parts, though not wholly unexpected. Preparations are afoot, measurements are made, ground is staked out. Bridges are begun, and their not yet united piers desolately look at one another over roads and streams like brick and mortar couples with an obstacle to their union; fragments of embankments are thrown up and left as precipices with torrents of rusty carts and barrows tumbling over them; tripods of tall poles appear on hilltops, where there are rumours of tunnels; everything looks chaotic and abandoned in full hopelessness. Along the freezing roads, and through the night, the post-chaise makes its way without a railroad on its mind. Mrs. Rouncewell, so many years housekeeper at Chesney Wold, sits within the chaise; and by her side sits Mrs. Bagnet with her grey cloak and umbrella. The old girl would prefer the bar in front, as being exposed to the weather and a primitive sort of perch more in accordance with her usual course of travelling, but Mrs. Rouncewell is too thoughtful of her comfort to admit of her proposing it. The old lady cannot make enough of the old girl. She sits, in her stately manner, holding her hand, and regardless of its roughness, puts it often to her lips. "You are a mother, my dear soul," says she many times, "and you found out my George's mother!" "Why, George," returns Mrs. Bagnet, "was always free with me, ma'am, and when he said at our house to my Woolwich that of all the things my Woolwich could have to think of when he grew to be a man, the comfortablest would be that he had never brought a sorrowful line into his mother's face or turned a hair of her head grey, then I felt sure, from his way, that something fresh had brought his own mother into his mind. I had often known him say to me, in past times, that he had behaved bad to her." "Never, my dear!" returns Mrs. Rouncewell, bursting into tears. "My blessing on him, never! He was always fond of me, and loving to me, was my George! But he had a bold spirit, and he ran a little wild and went for a soldier. And I know he waited at first, in letting us know about himself, till he should rise to be an officer; and when he didn't rise, I know he considered himself beneath us, and wouldn't be a disgrace to us. For he had a lion heart, had my George, always from a baby!" The old lady's hands stray about her as of yore, while she recalls, all in a tremble, what a likely lad, what a fine lad, what a gay good-humoured clever lad he was; how they all took to him down at Chesney Wold; how Sir Leicester took to him when he was a young gentleman; how the dogs took to him; how even the people who had been angry with him forgave him the moment he was gone, poor boy. And now to see him after all, and in a prison too! And the broad stomacher heaves, and the quaint upright old-fashioned figure bends under its load of affectionate distress. Mrs. Bagnet, with the instinctive skill of a good warm heart, leaves the old housekeeper to her emotions for a little while--not without passing the back of her hand across her own motherly eyes--and presently chirps up in her cheery manner, "So I says to George when I goes to call him in to tea (he pretended to be smoking his pipe outside), 'What ails you this afternoon, George, for gracious sake? I have seen all sorts, and I have seen you pretty often in season and out of season, abroad and at home, and I never see you so melancholy penitent.' 'Why, Mrs. Bagnet,' says George, 'it's because I AM melancholy and penitent both, this afternoon, that you see me so.' 'What have you done, old fellow?' I says. 'Why, Mrs. Bagnet,' says George, shaking his head, 'what I have done has been done this many a long year, and is best not tried to be undone now. If I ever get to heaven it won't be for being a good son to a widowed mother; I say no more.' Now, ma'am, when George says to me that it's best not tried to be undone now, I have my thoughts as I have often had before, and I draw it out of George how he comes to have such things on him that afternoon. Then George tells me that he has seen by chance, at the lawyer's office, a fine old lady that has brought his mother plain before him, and he runs on about that old lady till he quite forgets himself and paints her picture to me as she used to be, years upon years back. So I says to George when he has done, who is this old lady he has seen? And George tells me it's Mrs. Rouncewell, housekeeper for more than half a century to the Dedlock family down at Chesney Wold in Lincolnshire. George has frequently told me before that he's a Lincolnshire man, and I says to my old Lignum that night, 'Lignum, that's his mother for five and for-ty pound!'" All this Mrs. Bagnet now relates for the twentieth time at least within the last four hours. Trilling it out like a kind of bird, with a pretty high note, that it may be audible to the old lady above the hum of the wheels. "Bless you, and thank you," says Mrs. Rouncewell. "Bless you, and thank you, my worthy soul!" "Dear heart!" cries Mrs. Bagnet in the most natural manner. "No thanks to me, I am sure. Thanks to yourself, ma'am, for being so ready to pay 'em! And mind once more, ma'am, what you had best do on finding George to be your own son is to make him--for your sake--have every sort of help to put himself in the right and clear himself of a charge of which he is as innocent as you or me. It won't do to have truth and justice on his side; he must have law and lawyers," exclaims the old girl, apparently persuaded that the latter form a separate establishment and have dissolved partnership with truth and justice for ever and a day. "He shall have," says Mrs. Rouncewell, "all the help that can be got for him in the world, my dear. I will spend all I have, and thankfully, to procure it. Sir Leicester will do his best, the whole family will do their best. I--I know something, my dear; and will make my own appeal, as his mother parted from him all these years, and finding him in a jail at last." The extreme disquietude of the old housekeeper's manner in saying this, her broken words, and her wringing of her hands make a powerful impression on Mrs. Bagnet and would astonish her but that she refers them all to her sorrow for her son's condition. And yet Mrs. Bagnet wonders too why Mrs. Rouncewell should murmur so distractedly, "My Lady, my Lady, my Lady!" over and over again. The frosty night wears away, and the dawn breaks, and the post-chaise comes rolling on through the early mist like the ghost of a chaise departed. It has plenty of spectral company in ghosts of trees and hedges, slowly vanishing and giving place to the realities of day. London reached, the travellers alight, the old housekeeper in great tribulation and confusion, Mrs. Bagnet quite fresh and collected--as she would be if her next point, with no new equipage and outfit, were the Cape of Good Hope, the Island of Ascension, Hong Kong, or any other military station. But when they set out for the prison where the trooper is confined, the old lady has managed to draw about her, with her lavender-coloured dress, much of the staid calmness which is its usual accompaniment. A wonderfully grave, precise, and handsome piece of old china she looks, though her heart beats fast and her stomacher is ruffled more than even the remembrance of this wayward son has ruffled it these many years. Approaching the cell, they find the door opening and a warder in the act of coming out. The old girl promptly makes a sign of entreaty to him to say nothing; assenting with a nod, he suffers them to enter as he shuts the door. So George, who is writing at his table, supposing himself to be alone, does not raise his eyes, but remains absorbed. The old housekeeper looks at him, and those wandering hands of hers are quite enough for Mrs. Bagnet's confirmation, even if she could see the mother and the son together, knowing what she knows, and doubt their relationship. Not a rustle of the housekeeper's dress, not a gesture, not a word betrays her. She stands looking at him as he writes on, all unconscious, and only her fluttering hands give utterance to her emotions. But they are very eloquent, very, very eloquent. Mrs. Bagnet understands them. They speak of gratitude, of joy, of grief, of hope; of inextinguishable affection, cherished with no return since this stalwart man was a stripling; of a better son loved less, and this son loved so fondly and so proudly; and they speak in such touching language that Mrs. Bagnet's eyes brim up with tears and they run glistening down her sun-brown face. "George Rouncewell! Oh, my dear child, turn and look at me!" The trooper starts up, clasps his mother round the neck, and falls down on his knees before her. Whether in a late repentance, whether in the first association that comes back upon him, he puts his hands together as a child does when it says its prayers, and raising them towards her breast, bows down his head, and cries. "My George, my dearest son! Always my favourite, and my favourite still, where have you been these cruel years and years? Grown such a man too, grown such a fine strong man. Grown so like what I knew he must be, if it pleased God he was alive!" She can ask, and he can answer, nothing connected for a time. All that time the old girl, turned away, leans one arm against the whitened wall, leans her honest forehead upon it, wipes her eyes with her serviceable grey cloak, and quite enjoys herself like the best of old girls as she is. "Mother," says the trooper when they are more composed, "forgive me first of all, for I know my need of it." Forgive him! She does it with all her heart and soul. She always has done it. She tells him how she has had it written in her will, these many years, that he was her beloved son George. She has never believed any ill of him, never. If she had died without this happiness--and she is an old woman now and can't look to live very long--she would have blessed him with her last breath, if she had had her senses, as her beloved son George. "Mother, I have been an undutiful trouble to you, and I have my reward; but of late years I have had a kind of glimmering of a purpose in me too. When I left home I didn't care much, mother--I am afraid not a great deal--for leaving; and went away and 'listed, harum-scarum, making believe to think that I cared for nobody, no not I, and that nobody cared for me." The trooper has dried his eyes and put away his handkerchief, but there is an extraordinary contrast between his habitual manner of expressing himself and carrying himself and the softened tone in which he speaks, interrupted occasionally by a half-stifled sob. "So I wrote a line home, mother, as you too well know, to say I had 'listed under another name, and I went abroad. Abroad, at one time I thought I would write home next year, when I might be better off; and when that year was out, I thought I would write home next year, when I might be better off; and when that year was out again, perhaps I didn't think much about it. So on, from year to year, through a service of ten years, till I began to get older, and to ask myself why should I ever write." "I don't find any fault, child--but not to ease my mind, George? Not a word to your loving mother, who was growing older too?" This almost overturns the trooper afresh, but he sets himself up with a great, rough, sounding clearance of his throat. "Heaven forgive me, mother, but I thought there would be small consolation then in hearing anything about me. There were you, respected and esteemed. There was my brother, as I read in chance North Country papers now and then, rising to be prosperous and famous. There was I a dragoon, roving, unsettled, not self-made like him, but self-unmade--all my earlier advantages thrown away, all my little learning unlearnt, nothing picked up but what unfitted me for most things that I could think of. What business had I to make myself known? After letting all that time go by me, what good could come of it? The worst was past with you, mother. I knew by that time (being a man) how you had mourned for me, and wept for me, and prayed for me; and the pain was over, or was softened down, and I was better in your mind as it was." The old lady sorrowfully shakes her head, and taking one of his powerful hands, lays it lovingly upon her shoulder. "No, I don't say that it was so, mother, but that I made it out to be so. I said just now, what good could come of it? Well, my dear mother, some good might have come of it to myself--and there was the meanness of it. You would have sought me out; you would have purchased my discharge; you would have taken me down to Chesney Wold; you would have brought me and my brother and my brother's family together; you would all have considered anxiously how to do something for me and set me up as a respectable civilian. But how could any of you feel sure of me when I couldn't so much as feel sure of myself? How could you help regarding as an incumbrance and a discredit to you an idle dragooning chap who was an incumbrance and a discredit to himself, excepting under discipline? How could I look my brother's children in the face and pretend to set them an example--I, the vagabond boy who had run away from home and been the grief and unhappiness of my mother's life? 'No, George.' Such were my words, mother, when I passed this in review before me: 'You have made your bed. Now, lie upon it.'" Mrs. Rouncewell, drawing up her stately form, shakes her head at the old girl with a swelling pride upon her, as much as to say, "I told you so!" The old girl relieves her feelings and testifies her interest in the conversation by giving the trooper a great poke between the shoulders with her umbrella; this action she afterwards repeats, at intervals, in a species of affectionate lunacy, never failing, after the administration of each of these remonstrances, to resort to the whitened wall and the grey cloak again. "This was the way I brought myself to think, mother, that my best amends was to lie upon that bed I had made, and die upon it. And I should have done it (though I have been to see you more than once down at Chesney Wold, when you little thought of me) but for my old comrade's wife here, who I find has been too many for me. But I thank her for it. I thank you for it, Mrs. Bagnet, with all my heart and might." To which Mrs. Bagnet responds with two pokes. And now the old lady impresses upon her son George, her own dear recovered boy, her joy and pride, the light of her eyes, the happy close of her life, and every fond name she can think of, that he must be governed by the best advice obtainable by money and influence, that he must yield up his case to the greatest lawyers that can be got, that he must act in this serious plight as he shall be advised to act and must not be self-willed, however right, but must promise to think only of his poor old mother's anxiety and suffering until he is released, or he will break her heart. "Mother, 'tis little enough to consent to," returns the trooper, stopping her with a kiss; "tell me what I shall do, and I'll make a late beginning and do it. Mrs. Bagnet, you'll take care of my mother, I know?" A very hard poke from the old girl's umbrella. "If you'll bring her acquainted with Mr. Jarndyce and Miss Summerson, she will find them of her way of thinking, and they will give her the best advice and assistance." "And, George," says the old lady, "we must send with all haste for your brother. He is a sensible sound man as they tell me--out in the world beyond Chesney Wold, my dear, though I don't know much of it myself--and will be of great service." "Mother," returns the trooper, "is it too soon to ask a favour?" "Surely not, my dear." "Then grant me this one great favour. Don't let my brother know." "Not know what, my dear?" "Not know of me. In fact, mother, I can't bear it; I can't make up my mind to it. He has proved himself so different from me and has done so much to raise himself while I've been soldiering that I haven't brass enough in my composition to see him in this place and under this charge. How could a man like him be expected to have any pleasure in such a discovery? It's impossible. No, keep my secret from him, mother; do me a greater kindness than I deserve and keep my secret from my brother, of all men." "But not always, dear George?" "Why, mother, perhaps not for good and all--though I may come to ask that too--but keep it now, I do entreat you. If it's ever broke to him that his rip of a brother has turned up, I could wish," says the trooper, shaking his head very doubtfully, "to break it myself and be governed as to advancing or retreating by the way in which he seems to take it." As he evidently has a rooted feeling on this point, and as the depth of it is recognized in Mrs. Bagnet's face, his mother yields her implicit assent to what he asks. For this he thanks her kindly. "In all other respects, my dear mother, I'll be as tractable and obedient as you can wish; on this one alone, I stand out. So now I am ready even for the lawyers. I have been drawing up," he glances at his writing on the table, "an exact account of what I knew of the deceased and how I came to be involved in this unfortunate affair. It's entered, plain and regular, like an orderly-book; not a word in it but what's wanted for the facts. I did intend to read it, straight on end, whensoever I was called upon to say anything in my defence. I hope I may be let to do it still; but I have no longer a will of my own in this case, and whatever is said or done, I give my promise not to have any." Matters being brought to this so far satisfactory pass, and time being on the wane, Mrs. Bagnet proposes a departure. Again and again the old lady hangs upon her son's neck, and again and again the trooper holds her to his broad chest. "Where are you going to take my mother, Mrs. Bagnet?" "I am going to the town house, my dear, the family house. I have some business there that must be looked to directly," Mrs. Rouncewell answers. "Will you see my mother safe there in a coach, Mrs. Bagnet? But of course I know you will. Why should I ask it!" Why indeed, Mrs. Bagnet expresses with the umbrella. "Take her, my old friend, and take my gratitude along with you. Kisses to Quebec and Malta, love to my godson, a hearty shake of the hand to Lignum, and this for yourself, and I wish it was ten thousand pound in gold, my dear!" So saying, the trooper puts his lips to the old girl's tanned forehead, and the door shuts upon him in his cell. No entreaties on the part of the good old housekeeper will induce Mrs. Bagnet to retain the coach for her own conveyance home. Jumping out cheerfully at the door of the Dedlock mansion and handing Mrs. Rouncewell up the steps, the old girl shakes hands and trudges off, arriving soon afterwards in the bosom of the Bagnet family and falling to washing the greens as if nothing had happened. My Lady is in that room in which she held her last conference with the murdered man, and is sitting where she sat that night, and is looking at the spot where he stood upon the hearth studying her so leisurely, when a tap comes at the door. Who is it? Mrs. Rouncewell. What has brought Mrs. Rouncewell to town so unexpectedly? "Trouble, my Lady. Sad trouble. Oh, my Lady, may I beg a word with you?" What new occurrence is it that makes this tranquil old woman tremble so? Far happier than her Lady, as her Lady has often thought, why does she falter in this manner and look at her with such strange mistrust? "What is the matter? Sit down and take your breath." "Oh, my Lady, my Lady. I have found my son--my youngest, who went away for a soldier so long ago. And he is in prison." "For debt?" "Oh, no, my Lady; I would have paid any debt, and joyful." "For what is he in prison then?" "Charged with a murder, my Lady, of which he is as innocent as--as I am. Accused of the murder of Mr. Tulkinghorn." What does she mean by this look and this imploring gesture? Why does she come so close? What is the letter that she holds? "Lady Dedlock, my dear Lady, my good Lady, my kind Lady! You must have a heart to feel for me, you must have a heart to forgive me. I was in this family before you were born. I am devoted to it. But think of my dear son wrongfully accused." "I do not accuse him." "No, my Lady, no. But others do, and he is in prison and in danger. Oh, Lady Dedlock, if you can say but a word to help to clear him, say it!" What delusion can this be? What power does she suppose is in the person she petitions to avert this unjust suspicion, if it be unjust? Her Lady's handsome eyes regard her with astonishment, almost with fear. "My Lady, I came away last night from Chesney Wold to find my son in my old age, and the step upon the Ghost's Walk was so constant and so solemn that I never heard the like in all these years. Night after night, as it has fallen dark, the sound has echoed through your rooms, but last night it was awfullest. And as it fell dark last night, my Lady, I got this letter." "What letter is it?" "Hush! Hush!" The housekeeper looks round and answers in a frightened whisper, "My Lady, I have not breathed a word of it, I don't believe what's written in it, I know it can't be true, I am sure and certain that it is not true. But my son is in danger, and you must have a heart to pity me. If you know of anything that is not known to others, if you have any suspicion, if you have any clue at all, and any reason for keeping it in your own breast, oh, my dear Lady, think of me, and conquer that reason, and let it be known! This is the most I consider possible. I know you are not a hard lady, but you go your own way always without help, and you are not familiar with your friends; and all who admire you--and all do--as a beautiful and elegant lady, know you to be one far away from themselves who can't be approached close. My Lady, you may have some proud or angry reasons for disdaining to utter something that you know; if so, pray, oh, pray, think of a faithful servant whose whole life has been passed in this family which she dearly loves, and relent, and help to clear my son! My Lady, my good Lady," the old housekeeper pleads with genuine simplicity, "I am so humble in my place and you are by nature so high and distant that you may not think what I feel for my child, but I feel so much that I have come here to make so bold as to beg and pray you not to be scornful of us if you can do us any right or justice at this fearful time!" Lady Dedlock raises her without one word, until she takes the letter from her hand. "Am I to read this?" "When I am gone, my Lady, if you please, and then remembering the most that I consider possible." "I know of nothing I can do. I know of nothing I reserve that can affect your son. I have never accused him." "My Lady, you may pity him the more under a false accusation after reading the letter." The old housekeeper leaves her with the letter in her hand. In truth she is not a hard lady naturally, and the time has been when the sight of the venerable figure suing to her with such strong earnestness would have moved her to great compassion. But so long accustomed to suppress emotion and keep down reality, so long schooled for her own purposes in that destructive school which shuts up the natural feelings of the heart like flies in amber and spreads one uniform and dreary gloss over the good and bad, the feeling and the unfeeling, the sensible and the senseless, she had subdued even her wonder until now. She opens the letter. Spread out upon the paper is a printed account of the discovery of the body as it lay face downward on the floor, shot through the heart; and underneath is written her own name, with the word "murderess" attached. It falls out of her hand. How long it may have lain upon the ground she knows not, but it lies where it fell when a servant stands before her announcing the young man of the name of Guppy. The words have probably been repeated several times, for they are ringing in her head before she begins to understand them. "Let him come in!" He comes in. Holding the letter in her hand, which she has taken from the floor, she tries to collect her thoughts. In the eyes of Mr. Guppy she is the same Lady Dedlock, holding the same prepared, proud, chilling state. "Your ladyship may not be at first disposed to excuse this visit from one who has never been welcome to your ladyship"--which he don't complain of, for he is bound to confess that there never has been any particular reason on the face of things why he should be--"but I hope when I mention my motives to your ladyship you will not find fault with me," says Mr. Guppy. "Do so." "Thank your ladyship. I ought first to explain to your ladyship," Mr. Guppy sits on the edge of a chair and puts his hat on the carpet at his feet, "that Miss Summerson, whose image, as I formerly mentioned to your ladyship, was at one period of my life imprinted on my 'eart until erased by circumstances over which I had no control, communicated to me, after I had the pleasure of waiting on your ladyship last, that she particularly wished me to take no steps whatever in any manner at all relating to her. And Miss Summerson's wishes being to me a law (except as connected with circumstances over which I have no control), I consequently never expected to have the distinguished honour of waiting on your ladyship again." And yet he is here now, Lady Dedlock moodily reminds him. "And yet I am here now," Mr. Guppy admits. "My object being to communicate to your ladyship, under the seal of confidence, why I am here." He cannot do so, she tells him, too plainly or too briefly. "Nor can I," Mr. Guppy returns with a sense of injury upon him, "too particularly request your ladyship to take particular notice that it's no personal affair of mine that brings me here. I have no interested views of my own to serve in coming here. If it was not for my promise to Miss Summerson and my keeping of it sacred--I, in point of fact, shouldn't have darkened these doors again, but should have seen 'em further first." Mr. Guppy considers this a favourable moment for sticking up his hair with both hands. "Your ladyship will remember when I mention it that the last time I was here I run against a party very eminent in our profession and whose loss we all deplore. That party certainly did from that time apply himself to cutting in against me in a way that I will call sharp practice, and did make it, at every turn and point, extremely difficult for me to be sure that I hadn't inadvertently led up to something contrary to Miss Summerson's wishes. Self-praise is no recommendation, but I may say for myself that I am not so bad a man of business neither." Lady Dedlock looks at him in stern inquiry. Mr. Guppy immediately withdraws his eyes from her face and looks anywhere else. "Indeed, it has been made so hard," he goes on, "to have any idea what that party was up to in combination with others that until the loss which we all deplore I was gravelled--an expression which your ladyship, moving in the higher circles, will be so good as to consider tantamount to knocked over. Small likewise--a name by which I refer to another party, a friend of mine that your ladyship is not acquainted with--got to be so close and double-faced that at times it wasn't easy to keep one's hands off his 'ead. However, what with the exertion of my humble abilities, and what with the help of a mutual friend by the name of Mr. Tony Weevle (who is of a high aristocratic turn and has your ladyship's portrait always hanging up in his room), I have now reasons for an apprehension as to which I come to put your ladyship upon your guard. First, will your ladyship allow me to ask you whether you have had any strange visitors this morning? I don't mean fashionable visitors, but such visitors, for instance, as Miss Barbary's old servant, or as a person without the use of his lower extremities, carried upstairs similarly to a guy?" "No!" "Then I assure your ladyship that such visitors have been here and have been received here. Because I saw them at the door, and waited at the corner of the square till they came out, and took half an hour's turn afterwards to avoid them." "What have I to do with that, or what have you? I do not understand you. What do you mean?" "Your ladyship, I come to put you on your guard. There may be no occasion for it. Very well. Then I have only done my best to keep my promise to Miss Summerson. I strongly suspect (from what Small has dropped, and from what we have corkscrewed out of him) that those letters I was to have brought to your ladyship were not destroyed when I supposed they were. That if there was anything to be blown upon, it IS blown upon. That the visitors I have alluded to have been here this morning to make money of it. And that the money is made, or making." Mr. Guppy picks up his hat and rises. "Your ladyship, you know best whether there's anything in what I say or whether there's nothing. Something or nothing, I have acted up to Miss Summerson's wishes in letting things alone and in undoing what I had begun to do, as far as possible; that's sufficient for me. In case I should be taking a liberty in putting your ladyship on your guard when there's no necessity for it, you will endeavour, I should hope, to outlive my presumption, and I shall endeavour to outlive your disapprobation. I now take my farewell of your ladyship, and assure you that there's no danger of your ever being waited on by me again." She scarcely acknowledges these parting words by any look, but when he has been gone a little while, she rings her bell. "Where is Sir Leicester?" Mercury reports that he is at present shut up in the library alone. "Has Sir Leicester had any visitors this morning?" Several, on business. Mercury proceeds to a description of them, which has been anticipated by Mr. Guppy. Enough; he may go. So! All is broken down. Her name is in these many mouths, her husband knows his wrongs, her shame will be published--may be spreading while she thinks about it--and in addition to the thunderbolt so long foreseen by her, so unforeseen by him, she is denounced by an invisible accuser as the murderess of her enemy. Her enemy he was, and she has often, often, often wished him dead. Her enemy he is, even in his grave. This dreadful accusation comes upon her like a new torment at his lifeless hand. And when she recalls how she was secretly at his door that night, and how she may be represented to have sent her favourite girl away so soon before merely to release herself from observation, she shudders as if the hangman's hands were at her neck. She has thrown herself upon the floor and lies with her hair all wildly scattered and her face buried in the cushions of a couch. She rises up, hurries to and fro, flings herself down again, and rocks and moans. The horror that is upon her is unutterable. If she really were the murderess, it could hardly be, for the moment, more intense. For as her murderous perspective, before the doing of the deed, however subtle the precautions for its commission, would have been closed up by a gigantic dilatation of the hateful figure, preventing her from seeing any consequences beyond it; and as those consequences would have rushed in, in an unimagined flood, the moment the figure was laid low--which always happens when a murder is done; so, now she sees that when he used to be on the watch before her, and she used to think, "if some mortal stroke would but fall on this old man and take him from my way!" it was but wishing that all he held against her in his hand might be flung to the winds and chance-sown in many places. So, too, with the wicked relief she has felt in his death. What was his death but the key-stone of a gloomy arch removed, and now the arch begins to fall in a thousand fragments, each crushing and mangling piecemeal! Thus, a terrible impression steals upon and overshadows her that from this pursuer, living or dead--obdurate and imperturbable before her in his well-remembered shape, or not more obdurate and imperturbable in his coffin-bed--there is no escape but in death. Hunted, she flies. The complication of her shame, her dread, remorse, and misery, overwhelms her at its height; and even her strength of self-reliance is overturned and whirled away like a leaf before a mighty wind. She hurriedly addresses these lines to her husband, seals, and leaves them on her table: If I am sought for, or accused of, his murder, believe that I am wholly innocent. Believe no other good of me, for I am innocent of nothing else that you have heard, or will hear, laid to my charge. He prepared me, on that fatal night, for his disclosure of my guilt to you. After he had left me, I went out on pretence of walking in the garden where I sometimes walk, but really to follow him and make one last petition that he would not protract the dreadful suspense on which I have been racked by him, you do not know how long, but would mercifully strike next morning. I found his house dark and silent. I rang twice at his door, but there was no reply, and I came home. I have no home left. I will encumber you no more. May you, in your just resentment, be able to forget the unworthy woman on whom you have wasted a most generous devotion--who avoids you only with a deeper shame than that with which she hurries from herself--and who writes this last adieu. She veils and dresses quickly, leaves all her jewels and her money, listens, goes downstairs at a moment when the hall is empty, opens and shuts the great door, flutters away in the shrill frosty wind. CHAPTER LVI Pursuit Impassive, as behoves its high breeding, the Dedlock town house stares at the other houses in the street of dismal grandeur and gives no outward sign of anything going wrong within. Carriages rattle, doors are battered at, the world exchanges calls; ancient charmers with skeleton throats and peachy cheeks that have a rather ghastly bloom upon them seen by daylight, when indeed these fascinating creatures look like Death and the Lady fused together, dazzle the eyes of men. Forth from the frigid mews come easily swinging carriages guided by short-legged coachmen in flaxen wigs, deep sunk into downy hammercloths, and up behind mount luscious Mercuries bearing sticks of state and wearing cocked hats broadwise, a spectacle for the angels. The Dedlock town house changes not externally, and hours pass before its exalted dullness is disturbed within. But Volumnia the fair, being subject to the prevalent complaint of boredom and finding that disorder attacking her spirits with some virulence, ventures at length to repair to the library for change of scene. Her gentle tapping at the door producing no response, she opens it and peeps in; seeing no one there, takes possession. The sprightly Dedlock is reputed, in that grass-grown city of the ancients, Bath, to be stimulated by an urgent curiosity which impels her on all convenient and inconvenient occasions to sidle about with a golden glass at her eye, peering into objects of every description. Certain it is that she avails herself of the present opportunity of hovering over her kinsman's letters and papers like a bird, taking a short peck at this document and a blink with her head on one side at that document, and hopping about from table to table with her glass at her eye in an inquisitive and restless manner. In the course of these researches she stumbles over something, and turning her glass in that direction, sees her kinsman lying on the ground like a felled tree. Volumnia's pet little scream acquires a considerable augmentation of reality from this surprise, and the house is quickly in commotion. Servants tear up and down stairs, bells are violently rung, doctors are sent for, and Lady Dedlock is sought in all directions, but not found. Nobody has seen or heard her since she last rang her bell. Her letter to Sir Leicester is discovered on her table, but it is doubtful yet whether he has not received another missive from another world requiring to be personally answered, and all the living languages, and all the dead, are as one to him. They lay him down upon his bed, and chafe, and rub, and fan, and put ice to his head, and try every means of restoration. Howbeit, the day has ebbed away, and it is night in his room before his stertorous breathing lulls or his fixed eyes show any consciousness of the candle that is occasionally passed before them. But when this change begins, it goes on; and by and by he nods or moves his eyes or even his hand in token that he hears and comprehends. He fell down, this morning, a handsome stately gentleman, somewhat infirm, but of a fine presence, and with a well-filled face. He lies upon his bed, an aged man with sunken cheeks, the decrepit shadow of himself. His voice was rich and mellow and he had so long been thoroughly persuaded of the weight and import to mankind of any word he said that his words really had come to sound as if there were something in them. But now he can only whisper, and what he whispers sounds like what it is--mere jumble and jargon. His favourite and faithful housekeeper stands at his bedside. It is the first act he notices, and he clearly derives pleasure from it. After vainly trying to make himself understood in speech, he makes signs for a pencil. So inexpressively that they cannot at first understand him; it is his old housekeeper who makes out what he wants and brings in a slate. After pausing for some time, he slowly scrawls upon it in a hand that is not his, "Chesney Wold?" No, she tells him; he is in London. He was taken ill in the library this morning. Right thankful she is that she happened to come to London and is able to attend upon him. "It is not an illness of any serious consequence, Sir Leicester. You will be much better to-morrow, Sir Leicester. All the gentlemen say so." This, with the tears coursing down her fair old face. After making a survey of the room and looking with particular attention all round the bed where the doctors stand, he writes, "My Lady." "My Lady went out, Sir Leicester, before you were taken ill, and don't know of your illness yet." He points again, in great agitation, at the two words. They all try to quiet him, but he points again with increased agitation. On their looking at one another, not knowing what to say, he takes the slate once more and writes "My Lady. For God's sake, where?" And makes an imploring moan. It is thought better that his old housekeeper should give him Lady Dedlock's letter, the contents of which no one knows or can surmise. She opens it for him and puts it out for his perusal. Having read it twice by a great effort, he turns it down so that it shall not be seen and lies moaning. He passes into a kind of relapse or into a swoon, and it is an hour before he opens his eyes, reclining on his faithful and attached old servant's arm. The doctors know that he is best with her, and when not actively engaged about him, stand aloof. The slate comes into requisition again, but the word he wants to write he cannot remember. His anxiety, his eagerness, and affliction at this pass are pitiable to behold. It seems as if he must go mad in the necessity he feels for haste and the inability under which he labours of expressing to do what or to fetch whom. He has written the letter B, and there stopped. Of a sudden, in the height of his misery, he puts Mr. before it. The old housekeeper suggests Bucket. Thank heaven! That's his meaning. Mr. Bucket is found to be downstairs, by appointment. Shall he come up? There is no possibility of misconstruing Sir Leicester's burning wish to see him or the desire he signifies to have the room cleared of every one but the housekeeper. It is speedily done, and Mr. Bucket appears. Of all men upon earth, Sir Leicester seems fallen from his high estate to place his sole trust and reliance upon this man. "Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, I'm sorry to see you like this. I hope you'll cheer up. I'm sure you will, on account of the family credit." Sir Leicester puts her letter in his hands and looks intently in his face while he reads it. A new intelligence comes into Mr. Bucket's eye as he reads on; with one hook of his finger, while that eye is still glancing over the words, he indicates, "Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, I understand you." Sir Leicester writes upon the slate. "Full forgiveness. Find--" Mr. Bucket stops his hand. "Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, I'll find her. But my search after her must be begun out of hand. Not a minute must be lost." With the quickness of thought, he follows Sir Leicester Dedlock's look towards a little box upon a table. "Bring it here, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet? Certainly. Open it with one of these here keys? Certainly. The littlest key? TO be sure. Take the notes out? So I will. Count 'em? That's soon done. Twenty and thirty's fifty, and twenty's seventy, and fifty's one twenty, and forty's one sixty. Take 'em for expenses? That I'll do, and render an account of course. Don't spare money? No I won't." The velocity and certainty of Mr. Bucket's interpretation on all these heads is little short of miraculous. Mrs. Rouncewell, who holds the light, is giddy with the swiftness of his eyes and hands as he starts up, furnished for his journey. "You're George's mother, old lady; that's about what you are, I believe?" says Mr. Bucket aside, with his hat already on and buttoning his coat. "Yes, sir, I am his distressed mother." "So I thought, according to what he mentioned to me just now. Well, then, I'll tell you something. You needn't be distressed no more. Your son's all right. Now, don't you begin a-crying, because what you've got to do is to take care of Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, and you won't do that by crying. As to your son, he's all right, I tell you; and he sends his loving duty, and hoping you're the same. He's discharged honourable; that's about what HE is; with no more imputation on his character than there is on yours, and yours is a tidy one, I'LL bet a pound. You may trust me, for I took your son. He conducted himself in a game way, too, on that occasion; and he's a fine-made man, and you're a fine-made old lady, and you're a mother and son, the pair of you, as might be showed for models in a caravan. Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, what you've trusted to me I'll go through with. Don't you be afraid of my turning out of my way, right or left, or taking a sleep, or a wash, or a shave till I have found what I go in search of. Say everything as is kind and forgiving on your part? Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, I will. And I wish you better, and these family affairs smoothed over--as, Lord, many other family affairs equally has been, and equally will be, to the end of time." With this peroration, Mr. Bucket, buttoned up, goes quietly out, looking steadily before him as if he were already piercing the night in quest of the fugitive. His first step is to take himself to Lady Dedlock's rooms and look all over them for any trifling indication that may help him. The rooms are in darkness now; and to see Mr. Bucket with a wax-light in his hand, holding it above his head and taking a sharp mental inventory of the many delicate objects so curiously at variance with himself, would be to see a sight--which nobody DOES see, as he is particular to lock himself in. "A spicy boudoir, this," says Mr. Bucket, who feels in a manner furbished up in his French by the blow of the morning. "Must have cost a sight of money. Rum articles to cut away from, these; she must have been hard put to it!" Opening and shutting table-drawers and looking into caskets and jewel-cases, he sees the reflection of himself in various mirrors, and moralizes thereon. "One might suppose I was a-moving in the fashionable circles and getting myself up for almac's," says Mr. Bucket. "I begin to think I must be a swell in the Guards without knowing it." Ever looking about, he has opened a dainty little chest in an inner drawer. His great hand, turning over some gloves which it can scarcely feel, they are so light and soft within it, comes upon a white handkerchief. "Hum! Let's have a look at YOU," says Mr. Bucket, putting down the light. "What should YOU be kept by yourself for? What's YOUR motive? Are you her ladyship's property, or somebody else's? You've got a mark upon you somewheres or another, I suppose?" He finds it as he speaks, "Esther Summerson." "Oh!" says Mr. Bucket, pausing, with his finger at his ear. "Come, I'll take YOU." He completes his observations as quietly and carefully as he has carried them on, leaves everything else precisely as he found it, glides away after some five minutes in all, and passes into the street. With a glance upward at the dimly lighted windows of Sir Leicester's room, he sets off, full-swing, to the nearest coach-stand, picks out the horse for his money, and directs to be driven to the shooting gallery. Mr. Bucket does not claim to be a scientific judge of horses, but he lays out a little money on the principal events in that line, and generally sums up his knowledge of the subject in the remark that when he sees a horse as can go, he knows him. His knowledge is not at fault in the present instance. Clattering over the stones at a dangerous pace, yet thoughtfully bringing his keen eyes to bear on every slinking creature whom he passes in the midnight streets, and even on the lights in upper windows where people are going or gone to bed, and on all the turnings that he rattles by, and alike on the heavy sky, and on the earth where the snow lies thin--for something may present itself to assist him, anywhere--he dashes to his destination at such a speed that when he stops the horse half smothers him in a cloud of steam. "Unbear him half a moment to freshen him up, and I'll be back." He runs up the long wooden entry and finds the trooper smoking his pipe. "I thought I should, George, after what you have gone through, my lad. I haven't a word to spare. Now, honour! All to save a woman. Miss Summerson that was here when Gridley died--that was the name, I know--all right--where does she live?" The trooper has just come from there and gives him the address, near Oxford Street. "You won't repent it, George. Good night!" He is off again, with an impression of having seen Phil sitting by the frosty fire staring at him open-mouthed, and gallops away again, and gets out in a cloud of steam again. Mr. Jarndyce, the only person up in the house, is just going to bed, rises from his book on hearing the rapid ringing at the bell, and comes down to the door in his dressing-gown. "Don't be alarmed, sir." In a moment his visitor is confidential with him in the hall, has shut the door, and stands with his hand upon the lock. "I've had the pleasure of seeing you before. Inspector Bucket. Look at that handkerchief, sir, Miss Esther Summerson's. Found it myself put away in a drawer of Lady Dedlock's, quarter of an hour ago. Not a moment to lose. Matter of life or death. You know Lady Dedlock?" "Yes." "There has been a discovery there to-day. Family affairs have come out. Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, has had a fit--apoplexy or paralysis--and couldn't be brought to, and precious time has been lost. Lady Dedlock disappeared this afternoon and left a letter for him that looks bad. Run your eye over it. Here it is!" Mr. Jarndyce, having read it, asks him what he thinks. "I don't know. It looks like suicide. Anyways, there's more and more danger, every minute, of its drawing to that. I'd give a hundred pound an hour to have got the start of the present time. Now, Mr. Jarndyce, I am employed by Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, to follow her and find her, to save her and take her his forgiveness. I have money and full power, but I want something else. I want Miss Summerson." Mr. Jarndyce in a troubled voice repeats, "Miss Summerson?" "Now, Mr. Jarndyce"--Mr. Bucket has read his face with the greatest attention all along--"I speak to you as a gentleman of a humane heart, and under such pressing circumstances as don't often happen. If ever delay was dangerous, it's dangerous now; and if ever you couldn't afterwards forgive yourself for causing it, this is the time. Eight or ten hours, worth, as I tell you, a hundred pound apiece at least, have been lost since Lady Dedlock disappeared. I am charged to find her. I am Inspector Bucket. Besides all the rest that's heavy on her, she has upon her, as she believes, suspicion of murder. If I follow her alone, she, being in ignorance of what Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, has communicated to me, may be driven to desperation. But if I follow her in company with a young lady, answering to the description of a young lady that she has a tenderness for--I ask no question, and I say no more than that--she will give me credit for being friendly. Let me come up with her and be able to have the hold upon her of putting that young lady for'ard, and I'll save her and prevail with her if she is alive. Let me come up with her alone--a hard matter--and I'll do my best, but I don't answer for what the best may be. Time flies; it's getting on for one o'clock. When one strikes, there's another hour gone, and it's worth a thousand pound now instead of a hundred." This is all true, and the pressing nature of the case cannot be questioned. Mr. Jarndyce begs him to remain there while he speaks to Miss Summerson. Mr. Bucket says he will, but acting on his usual principle, does no such thing, following upstairs instead and keeping his man in sight. So he remains, dodging and lurking about in the gloom of the staircase while they confer. In a very little time Mr. Jarndyce comes down and tells him that Miss Summerson will join him directly and place herself under his protection to accompany him where he pleases. Mr. Bucket, satisfied, expresses high approval and awaits her coming at the door. There he mounts a high tower in his mind and looks out far and wide. Many solitary figures he perceives creeping through the streets; many solitary figures out on heaths, and roads, and lying under haystacks. But the figure that he seeks is not among them. Other solitaries he perceives, in nooks of bridges, looking over; and in shadowed places down by the river's level; and a dark, dark, shapeless object drifting with the tide, more solitary than all, clings with a drowning hold on his attention. Where is she? Living or dead, where is she? If, as he folds the handkerchief and carefully puts it up, it were able with an enchanted power to bring before him the place where she found it and the night-landscape near the cottage where it covered the little child, would he descry her there? On the waste where the brick-kilns are burning with a pale blue flare, where the straw-roofs of the wretched huts in which the bricks are made are being scattered by the wind, where the clay and water are hard frozen and the mill in which the gaunt blind horse goes round all day looks like an instrument of human torture--traversing this deserted, blighted spot there is a lonely figure with the sad world to itself, pelted by the snow and driven by the wind, and cast out, it would seem, from all companionship. It is the figure of a woman, too; but it is miserably dressed, and no such clothes ever came through the hall and out at the great door of the Dedlock mansion. CHAPTER LVII Esther's Narrative I had gone to bed and fallen asleep when my guardian knocked at the door of my room and begged me to get up directly. On my hurrying to speak to him and learn what had happened, he told me, after a word or two of preparation, that there had been a discovery at Sir Leicester Dedlock's. That my mother had fled, that a person was now at our door who was empowered to convey to her the fullest assurances of affectionate protection and forgiveness if he could possibly find her, and that I was sought for to accompany him in the hope that my entreaties might prevail upon her if his failed. Something to this general purpose I made out, but I was thrown into such a tumult of alarm, and hurry and distress, that in spite of every effort I could make to subdue my agitation, I did not seem, to myself, fully to recover my right mind until hours had passed. But I dressed and wrapped up expeditiously without waking Charley or any one and went down to Mr. Bucket, who was the person entrusted with the secret. In taking me to him my guardian told me this, and also explained how it was that he had come to think of me. Mr. Bucket, in a low voice, by the light of my guardian's candle, read to me in the hall a letter that my mother had left upon her table; and I suppose within ten minutes of my having been aroused I was sitting beside him, rolling swiftly through the streets. His manner was very keen, and yet considerate when he explained to me that a great deal might depend on my being able to answer, without confusion, a few questions that he wished to ask me. These were, chiefly, whether I had had much communication with my mother (to whom he only referred as Lady Dedlock), when and where I had spoken with her last, and how she had become possessed of my handkerchief. When I had satisfied him on these points, he asked me particularly to consider--taking time to think--whether within my knowledge there was any one, no matter where, in whom she might be at all likely to confide under circumstances of the last necessity. I could think of no one but my guardian. But by and by I mentioned Mr. Boythorn. He came into my mind as connected with his old chivalrous manner of mentioning my mother's name and with what my guardian had informed me of his engagement to her sister and his unconscious connexion with her unhappy story. My companion had stopped the driver while we held this conversation, that we might the better hear each other. He now told him to go on again and said to me, after considering within himself for a few moments, that he had made up his mind how to proceed. He was quite willing to tell me what his plan was, but I did not feel clear enough to understand it. We had not driven very far from our lodgings when we stopped in a by-street at a public-looking place lighted up with gas. Mr. Bucket took me in and sat me in an arm-chair by a bright fire. It was now past one, as I saw by the clock against the wall. Two police officers, looking in their perfectly neat uniform not at all like people who were up all night, were quietly writing at a desk; and the place seemed very quiet altogether, except for some beating and calling out at distant doors underground, to which nobody paid any attention. A third man in uniform, whom Mr. Bucket called and to whom he whispered his instructions, went out; and then the two others advised together while one wrote from Mr. Bucket's subdued dictation. It was a description of my mother that they were busy with, for Mr. Bucket brought it to me when it was done and read it in a whisper. It was very accurate indeed. The second officer, who had attended to it closely, then copied it out and called in another man in uniform (there were several in an outer room), who took it up and went away with it. All this was done with the greatest dispatch and without the waste of a moment; yet nobody was at all hurried. As soon as the paper was sent out upon its travels, the two officers resumed their former quiet work of writing with neatness and care. Mr. Bucket thoughtfully came and warmed the soles of his boots, first one and then the other, at the fire. "Are you well wrapped up, Miss Summerson?" he asked me as his eyes met mine. "It's a desperate sharp night for a young lady to be out in." I told him I cared for no weather and was warmly clothed. "It may be a long job," he observed; "but so that it ends well, never mind, miss." "I pray to heaven it may end well!" said I. He nodded comfortingly. "You see, whatever you do, don't you go and fret yourself. You keep yourself cool and equal for anything that may happen, and it'll be the better for you, the better for me, the better for Lady Dedlock, and the better for Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet." He was really very kind and gentle, and as he stood before the fire warming his boots and rubbing his face with his forefinger, I felt a confidence in his sagacity which reassured me. It was not yet a quarter to two when I heard horses' feet and wheels outside. "Now, Miss Summerson," said he, "we are off, if you please!" He gave me his arm, and the two officers courteously bowed me out, and we found at the door a phaeton or barouche with a postilion and post horses. Mr. Bucket handed me in and took his own seat on the box. The man in uniform whom he had sent to fetch this equipage then handed him up a dark lantern at his request, and when he had given a few directions to the driver, we rattled away. I was far from sure that I was not in a dream. We rattled with great rapidity through such a labyrinth of streets that I soon lost all idea where we were, except that we had crossed and re-crossed the river, and still seemed to be traversing a low-lying, waterside, dense neighbourhood of narrow thoroughfares chequered by docks and basins, high piles of warehouses, swing-bridges, and masts of ships. At length we stopped at the corner of a little slimy turning, which the wind from the river, rushing up it, did not purify; and I saw my companion, by the light of his lantern, in conference with several men who looked like a mixture of police and sailors. Against the mouldering wall by which they stood, there was a bill, on which I could discern the words, "Found Drowned"; and this and an inscription about drags possessed me with the awful suspicion shadowed forth in our visit to that place. I had no need to remind myself that I was not there by the indulgence of any feeling of mine to increase the difficulties of the search, or to lessen its hopes, or enhance its delays. I remained quiet, but what I suffered in that dreadful spot I never can forget. And still it was like the horror of a dream. A man yet dark and muddy, in long swollen sodden boots and a hat like them, was called out of a boat and whispered with Mr. Bucket, who went away with him down some slippery steps--as if to look at something secret that he had to show. They came back, wiping their hands upon their coats, after turning over something wet; but thank God it was not what I feared! After some further conference, Mr. Bucket (whom everybody seemed to know and defer to) went in with the others at a door and left me in the carriage, while the driver walked up and down by his horses to warm himself. The tide was coming in, as I judged from the sound it made, and I could hear it break at the end of the alley with a little rush towards me. It never did so--and I thought it did so, hundreds of times, in what can have been at the most a quarter of an hour, and probably was less--but the thought shuddered through me that it would cast my mother at the horses' feet. Mr. Bucket came out again, exhorting the others to be vigilant, darkened his lantern, and once more took his seat. "Don't you be alarmed, Miss Summerson, on account of our coming down here," he said, turning to me. "I only want to have everything in train and to know that it is in train by looking after it myself. Get on, my lad!" We appeared to retrace the way we had come. Not that I had taken note of any particular objects in my perturbed state of mind, but judging from the general character of the streets. We called at another office or station for a minute and crossed the river again. During the whole of this time, and during the whole search, my companion, wrapped up on the box, never relaxed in his vigilance a single moment; but when we crossed the bridge he seemed, if possible, to be more on the alert than before. He stood up to look over the parapet, he alighted and went back after a shadowy female figure that flitted past us, and he gazed into the profound black pit of water with a face that made my heart die within me. The river had a fearful look, so overcast and secret, creeping away so fast between the low flat lines of shore--so heavy with indistinct and awful shapes, both of substance and shadow; so death-like and mysterious. I have seen it many times since then, by sunlight and by moonlight, but never free from the impressions of that journey. In my memory the lights upon the bridge are always burning dim, the cutting wind is eddying round the homeless woman whom we pass, the monotonous wheels are whirling on, and the light of the carriage-lamps reflected back looks palely in upon me--a face rising out of the dreaded water. Clattering and clattering through the empty streets, we came at length from the pavement on to dark smooth roads and began to leave the houses behind us. After a while I recognized the familiar way to Saint Albans. At Barnet fresh horses were ready for us, and we changed and went on. It was very cold indeed, and the open country was white with snow, though none was falling then. "An old acquaintance of yours, this road, Miss Summerson," said Mr. Bucket cheerfully. "Yes," I returned. "Have you gathered any intelligence?" "None that can be quite depended on as yet," he answered, "but it's early times as yet." He had gone into every late or early public-house where there was a light (they were not a few at that time, the road being then much frequented by drovers) and had got down to talk to the turnpike-keepers. I had heard him ordering drink, and chinking money, and making himself agreeable and merry everywhere; but whenever he took his seat upon the box again, his face resumed its watchful steady look, and he always said to the driver in the same business tone, "Get on, my lad!" With all these stoppages, it was between five and six o'clock and we were yet a few miles short of Saint Albans when he came out of one of these houses and handed me in a cup of tea. "Drink it, Miss Summerson, it'll do you good. You're beginning to get more yourself now, ain't you?" I thanked him and said I hoped so. "You was what you may call stunned at first," he returned; "and Lord, no wonder! Don't speak loud, my dear. It's all right. She's on ahead." I don't know what joyful exclamation I made or was going to make, but he put up his finger and I stopped myself. "Passed through here on foot this evening about eight or nine. I heard of her first at the archway toll, over at Highgate, but couldn't make quite sure. Traced her all along, on and off. Picked her up at one place, and dropped her at another; but she's before us now, safe. Take hold of this cup and saucer, ostler. Now, if you wasn't brought up to the butter trade, look out and see if you can catch half a crown in your t'other hand. One, two, three, and there you are! Now, my lad, try a gallop!" We were soon in Saint Albans and alighted a little before day, when I was just beginning to arrange and comprehend the occurrences of the night and really to believe that they were not a dream. Leaving the carriage at the posting-house and ordering fresh horses to be ready, my companion gave me his arm, and we went towards home. "As this is your regular abode, Miss Summerson, you see," he observed, "I should like to know whether you've been asked for by any stranger answering the description, or whether Mr. Jarndyce has. I don't much expect it, but it might be." As we ascended the hill, he looked about him with a sharp eye--the day was now breaking--and reminded me that I had come down it one night, as I had reason for remembering, with my little servant and poor Jo, whom he called Toughey. I wondered how he knew that. "When you passed a man upon the road, just yonder, you know," said Mr. Bucket. Yes, I remembered that too, very well. "That was me," said Mr. Bucket. Seeing my surprise, he went on, "I drove down in a gig that afternoon to look after that boy. You might have heard my wheels when you came out to look after him yourself, for I was aware of you and your little maid going up when I was walking the horse down. Making an inquiry or two about him in the town, I soon heard what company he was in and was coming among the brick-fields to look for him when I observed you bringing him home here." "Had he committed any crime?" I asked. "None was charged against him," said Mr. Bucket, coolly lifting off his hat, "but I suppose he wasn't over-particular. No. What I wanted him for was in connexion with keeping this very matter of Lady Dedlock quiet. He had been making his tongue more free than welcome as to a small accidental service he had been paid for by the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn; and it wouldn't do, at any sort of price, to have him playing those games. So having warned him out of London, I made an afternoon of it to warn him to keep out of it now he WAS away, and go farther from it, and maintain a bright look-out that I didn't catch him coming back again." "Poor creature!" said I. "Poor enough," assented Mr. Bucket, "and trouble enough, and well enough away from London, or anywhere else. I was regularly turned on my back when I found him taken up by your establishment, I do assure you." I asked him why. "Why, my dear?" said Mr. Bucket. "Naturally there was no end to his tongue then. He might as well have been born with a yard and a half of it, and a remnant over." Although I remember this conversation now, my head was in confusion at the time, and my power of attention hardly did more than enable me to understand that he entered into these particulars to divert me. With the same kind intention, manifestly, he often spoke to me of indifferent things, while his face was busy with the one object that we had in view. He still pursued this subject as we turned in at the garden-gate. "Ah!" said Mr. Bucket. "Here we are, and a nice retired place it is. Puts a man in mind of the country house in the Woodpecker-tapping, that was known by the smoke which so gracefully curled. They're early with the kitchen fire, and that denotes good servants. But what you've always got to be careful of with servants is who comes to see 'em; you never know what they're up to if you don't know that. And another thing, my dear. Whenever you find a young man behind the kitchen-door, you give that young man in charge on suspicion of being secreted in a dwelling-house with an unlawful purpose." We were now in front of the house; he looked attentively and closely at the gravel for footprints before he raised his eyes to the windows. "Do you generally put that elderly young gentleman in the same room when he's on a visit here, Miss Summerson?" he inquired, glancing at Mr. Skimpole's usual chamber. "You know Mr. Skimpole!" said I. "What do you call him again?" returned Mr. Bucket, bending down his ear. "Skimpole, is it? I've often wondered what his name might be. Skimpole. Not John, I should say, nor yet Jacob?" "Harold," I told him. "Harold. Yes. He's a queer bird is Harold," said Mr. Bucket, eyeing me with great expression. "He is a singular character," said I. "No idea of money," observed Mr. Bucket. "He takes it, though!" I involuntarily returned for answer that I perceived Mr. Bucket knew him. "Why, now I'll tell you, Miss Summerson," he replied. "Your mind will be all the better for not running on one point too continually, and I'll tell you for a change. It was him as pointed out to me where Toughey was. I made up my mind that night to come to the door and ask for Toughey, if that was all; but willing to try a move or so first, if any such was on the board, I just pitched up a morsel of gravel at that window where I saw a shadow. As soon as Harold opens it and I have had a look at him, thinks I, you're the man for me. So I smoothed him down a bit about not wanting to disturb the family after they was gone to bed and about its being a thing to be regretted that charitable young ladies should harbour vagrants; and then, when I pretty well understood his ways, I said I should consider a fypunnote well bestowed if I could relieve the premises of Toughey without causing any noise or trouble. Then says he, lifting up his eyebrows in the gayest way, 'It's no use mentioning a fypunnote to me, my friend, because I'm a mere child in such matters and have no idea of money.' Of course I understood what his taking it so easy meant; and being now quite sure he was the man for me, I wrapped the note round a little stone and threw it up to him. Well! He laughs and beams, and looks as innocent as you like, and says, 'But I don't know the value of these things. What am I to DO with this?' 'Spend it, sir,' says I. 'But I shall be taken in,' he says, 'they won't give me the right change, I shall lose it, it's no use to me.' Lord, you never saw such a face as he carried it with! Of course he told me where to find Toughey, and I found him." I regarded this as very treacherous on the part of Mr. Skimpole towards my guardian and as passing the usual bounds of his childish innocence. "Bounds, my dear?" returned Mr. Bucket. "Bounds? Now, Miss Summerson, I'll give you a piece of advice that your husband will find useful when you are happily married and have got a family about you. Whenever a person says to you that they are as innocent as can be in all concerning money, look well after your own money, for they are dead certain to collar it if they can. Whenever a person proclaims to you 'In worldly matters I'm a child,' you consider that that person is only a-crying off from being held accountable and that you have got that person's number, and it's Number One. Now, I am not a poetical man myself, except in a vocal way when it goes round a company, but I'm a practical one, and that's my experience. So's this rule. Fast and loose in one thing, fast and loose in everything. I never knew it fail. No more will you. Nor no one. With which caution to the unwary, my dear, I take the liberty of pulling this here bell, and so go back to our business." I believe it had not been for a moment out of his mind, any more than it had been out of my mind, or out of his face. The whole household were amazed to see me, without any notice, at that time in the morning, and so accompanied; and their surprise was not diminished by my inquiries. No one, however, had been there. It could not be doubted that this was the truth. "Then, Miss Summerson," said my companion, "we can't be too soon at the cottage where those brickmakers are to be found. Most inquiries there I leave to you, if you'll be so good as to make 'em. The naturalest way is the best way, and the naturalest way is your own way." We set off again immediately. On arriving at the cottage, we found it shut up and apparently deserted, but one of the neighbours who knew me and who came out when I was trying to make some one hear informed me that the two women and their husbands now lived together in another house, made of loose rough bricks, which stood on the margin of the piece of ground where the kilns were and where the long rows of bricks were drying. We lost no time in repairing to this place, which was within a few hundred yards; and as the door stood ajar, I pushed it open. There were only three of them sitting at breakfast, the child lying asleep on a bed in the corner. It was Jenny, the mother of the dead child, who was absent. The other woman rose on seeing me; and the men, though they were, as usual, sulky and silent, each gave me a morose nod of recognition. A look passed between them when Mr. Bucket followed me in, and I was surprised to see that the woman evidently knew him. I had asked leave to enter of course. Liz (the only name by which I knew her) rose to give me her own chair, but I sat down on a stool near the fire, and Mr. Bucket took a corner of the bedstead. Now that I had to speak and was among people with whom I was not familiar, I became conscious of being hurried and giddy. It was very difficult to begin, and I could not help bursting into tears. "Liz," said I, "I have come a long way in the night and through the snow to inquire after a lady--" "Who has been here, you know," Mr. Bucket struck in, addressing the whole group with a composed propitiatory face; "that's the lady the young lady means. The lady that was here last night, you know." "And who told YOU as there was anybody here?" inquired Jenny's husband, who had made a surly stop in his eating to listen and now measured him with his eye. "A person of the name of Michael Jackson, with a blue welveteen waistcoat with a double row of mother of pearl buttons," Mr. Bucket immediately answered. "He had as good mind his own business, whoever he is," growled the man. "He's out of employment, I believe," said Mr. Bucket apologetically for Michael Jackson, "and so gets talking." The woman had not resumed her chair, but stood faltering with her hand upon its broken back, looking at me. I thought she would have spoken to me privately if she had dared. She was still in this attitude of uncertainty when her husband, who was eating with a lump of bread and fat in one hand and his clasp-knife in the other, struck the handle of his knife violently on the table and told her with an oath to mind HER own business at any rate and sit down. "I should like to have seen Jenny very much," said I, "for I am sure she would have told me all she could about this lady, whom I am very anxious indeed--you cannot think how anxious--to overtake. Will Jenny be here soon? Where is she?" The woman had a great desire to answer, but the man, with another oath, openly kicked at her foot with his heavy boot. He left it to Jenny's husband to say what he chose, and after a dogged silence the latter turned his shaggy head towards me. "I'm not partial to gentlefolks coming into my place, as you've heerd me say afore now, I think, miss. I let their places be, and it's curious they can't let my place be. There'd be a pretty shine made if I was to go a-wisitin THEM, I think. Howsoever, I don't so much complain of you as of some others, and I'm agreeable to make you a civil answer, though I give notice that I'm not a-going to be drawed like a badger. Will Jenny be here soon? No she won't. Where is she? She's gone up to Lunnun." "Did she go last night?" I asked. "Did she go last night? Ah! She went last night," he answered with a sulky jerk of his head. "But was she here when the lady came? And what did the lady say to her? And where is the lady gone? I beg and pray you to be so kind as to tell me," said I, "for I am in great distress to know." "If my master would let me speak, and not say a word of harm--" the woman timidly began. "Your master," said her husband, muttering an imprecation with slow emphasis, "will break your neck if you meddle with wot don't concern you." After another silence, the husband of the absent woman, turning to me again, answered me with his usual grumbling unwillingness. "Wos Jenny here when the lady come? Yes, she wos here when the lady come. Wot did the lady say to her? Well, I'll tell you wot the lady said to her. She said, 'You remember me as come one time to talk to you about the young lady as had been a-wisiting of you? You remember me as give you somethink handsome for a handkercher wot she had left?' Ah, she remembered. So we all did. Well, then, wos that young lady up at the house now? No, she warn't up at the house now. Well, then, lookee here. The lady was upon a journey all alone, strange as we might think it, and could she rest herself where you're a setten for a hour or so. Yes she could, and so she did. Then she went--it might be at twenty minutes past eleven, and it might be at twenty minutes past twelve; we ain't got no watches here to know the time by, nor yet clocks. Where did she go? I don't know where she go'd. She went one way, and Jenny went another; one went right to Lunnun, and t'other went right from it. That's all about it. Ask this man. He heerd it all, and see it all. He knows." The other man repeated, "That's all about it." "Was the lady crying?" I inquired. "Devil a bit," returned the first man. "Her shoes was the worse, and her clothes was the worse, but she warn't--not as I see." The woman sat with her arms crossed and her eyes upon the ground. Her husband had turned his seat a little so as to face her and kept his hammer-like hand upon the table as if it were in readiness to execute his threat if she disobeyed him. "I hope you will not object to my asking your wife," said I, "how the lady looked." "Come, then!" he gruffly cried to her. "You hear what she says. Cut it short and tell her." "Bad," replied the woman. "Pale and exhausted. Very bad." "Did she speak much?" "Not much, but her voice was hoarse." She answered, looking all the while at her husband for leave. "Was she faint?" said I. "Did she eat or drink here?" "Go on!" said the husband in answer to her look. "Tell her and cut it short." "She had a little water, miss, and Jenny fetched her some bread and tea. But she hardly touched it." "And when she went from here," I was proceeding, when Jenny's husband impatiently took me up. "When she went from here, she went right away nor'ard by the high road. Ask on the road if you doubt me, and see if it warn't so. Now, there's the end. That's all about it." I glanced at my companion, and finding that he had already risen and was ready to depart, thanked them for what they had told me, and took my leave. The woman looked full at Mr. Bucket as he went out, and he looked full at her. "Now, Miss Summerson," he said to me as we walked quickly away. "They've got her ladyship's watch among 'em. That's a positive fact." "You saw it?" I exclaimed. "Just as good as saw it," he returned. "Else why should he talk about his 'twenty minutes past' and about his having no watch to tell the time by? Twenty minutes! He don't usually cut his time so fine as that. If he comes to half-hours, it's as much as HE does. Now, you see, either her ladyship gave him that watch or he took it. I think she gave it him. Now, what should she give it him for? What should she give it him for?" He repeated this question to himself several times as we hurried on, appearing to balance between a variety of answers that arose in his mind. "If time could be spared," said Mr. Bucket, "which is the only thing that can't be spared in this case, I might get it out of that woman; but it's too doubtful a chance to trust to under present circumstances. They are up to keeping a close eye upon her, and any fool knows that a poor creetur like her, beaten and kicked and scarred and bruised from head to foot, will stand by the husband that ill uses her through thick and thin. There's something kept back. It's a pity but what we had seen the other woman." I regretted it exceedingly, for she was very grateful, and I felt sure would have resisted no entreaty of mine. "It's possible, Miss Summerson," said Mr. Bucket, pondering on it, "that her ladyship sent her up to London with some word for you, and it's possible that her husband got the watch to let her go. It don't come out altogether so plain as to please me, but it's on the cards. Now, I don't take kindly to laying out the money of Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, on these roughs, and I don't see my way to the usefulness of it at present. No! So far our road, Miss Summerson, is for'ard--straight ahead--and keeping everything quiet!" We called at home once more that I might send a hasty note to my guardian, and then we hurried back to where we had left the carriage. The horses were brought out as soon as we were seen coming, and we were on the road again in a few minutes. It had set in snowing at daybreak, and it now snowed hard. The air was so thick with the darkness of the day and the density of the fall that we could see but a very little way in any direction. Although it was extremely cold, the snow was but partially frozen, and it churned--with a sound as if it were a beach of small shells--under the hoofs of the horses into mire and water. They sometimes slipped and floundered for a mile together, and we were obliged to come to a standstill to rest them. One horse fell three times in this first stage, and trembled so and was so shaken that the driver had to dismount from his saddle and lead him at last. I could eat nothing and could not sleep, and I grew so nervous under those delays and the slow pace at which we travelled that I had an unreasonable desire upon me to get out and walk. Yielding to my companion's better sense, however, I remained where I was. All this time, kept fresh by a certain enjoyment of the work in which he was engaged, he was up and down at every house we came to, addressing people whom he had never beheld before as old acquaintances, running in to warm himself at every fire he saw, talking and drinking and shaking hands at every bar and tap, friendly with every waggoner, wheelwright, blacksmith, and toll-taker, yet never seeming to lose time, and always mounting to the box again with his watchful, steady face and his business-like "Get on, my lad!" When we were changing horses the next time, he came from the stable-yard, with the wet snow encrusted upon him and dropping off him--plashing and crashing through it to his wet knees as he had been doing frequently since we left Saint Albans--and spoke to me at the carriage side. "Keep up your spirits. It's certainly true that she came on here, Miss Summerson. There's not a doubt of the dress by this time, and the dress has been seen here." "Still on foot?" said I. "Still on foot. I think the gentleman you mentioned must be the point she's aiming at, and yet I don't like his living down in her own part of the country neither." "I know so little," said I. "There may be some one else nearer here, of whom I never heard." "That's true. But whatever you do, don't you fall a-crying, my dear; and don't you worry yourself no more than you can help. Get on, my lad!" The sleet fell all that day unceasingly, a thick mist came on early, and it never rose or lightened for a moment. Such roads I had never seen. I sometimes feared we had missed the way and got into the ploughed grounds or the marshes. If I ever thought of the time I had been out, it presented itself as an indefinite period of great duration, and I seemed, in a strange way, never to have been free from the anxiety under which I then laboured. As we advanced, I began to feel misgivings that my companion lost confidence. He was the same as before with all the roadside people, but he looked graver when he sat by himself on the box. I saw his finger uneasily going across and across his mouth during the whole of one long weary stage. I overheard that he began to ask the drivers of coaches and other vehicles coming towards us what passengers they had seen in other coaches and vehicles that were in advance. Their replies did not encourage him. He always gave me a reassuring beck of his finger and lift of his eyelid as he got upon the box again, but he seemed perplexed now when he said, "Get on, my lad!" At last, when we were changing, he told me that he had lost the track of the dress so long that he began to be surprised. It was nothing, he said, to lose such a track for one while, and to take it up for another while, and so on; but it had disappeared here in an unaccountable manner, and we had not come upon it since. This corroborated the apprehensions I had formed, when he began to look at direction-posts, and to leave the carriage at cross roads for a quarter of an hour at a time while he explored them. But I was not to be down-hearted, he told me, for it was as likely as not that the next stage might set us right again. The next stage, however, ended as that one ended; we had no new clue. There was a spacious inn here, solitary, but a comfortable substantial building, and as we drove in under a large gateway before I knew it, where a landlady and her pretty daughters came to the carriage-door, entreating me to alight and refresh myself while the horses were making ready, I thought it would be uncharitable to refuse. They took me upstairs to a warm room and left me there. It was at the corner of the house, I remember, looking two ways. On one side to a stable-yard open to a by-road, where the ostlers were unharnessing the splashed and tired horses from the muddy carriage, and beyond that to the by-road itself, across which the sign was heavily swinging; on the other side to a wood of dark pine-trees. Their branches were encumbered with snow, and it silently dropped off in wet heaps while I stood at the window. Night was setting in, and its bleakness was enhanced by the contrast of the pictured fire glowing and gleaming in the window-pane. As I looked among the stems of the trees and followed the discoloured marks in the snow where the thaw was sinking into it and undermining it, I thought of the motherly face brightly set off by daughters that had just now welcomed me and of MY mother lying down in such a wood to die. I was frightened when I found them all about me, but I remembered that before I fainted I tried very hard not to do it; and that was some little comfort. They cushioned me up on a large sofa by the fire, and then the comely landlady told me that I must travel no further to-night, but must go to bed. But this put me into such a tremble lest they should detain me there that she soon recalled her words and compromised for a rest of half an hour. A good endearing creature she was. She and her three fair girls, all so busy about me. I was to take hot soup and broiled fowl, while Mr. Bucket dried himself and dined elsewhere; but I could not do it when a snug round table was presently spread by the fireside, though I was very unwilling to disappoint them. However, I could take some toast and some hot negus, and as I really enjoyed that refreshment, it made some recompense. Punctual to the time, at the half-hour's end the carriage came rumbling under the gateway, and they took me down, warmed, refreshed, comforted by kindness, and safe (I assured them) not to faint any more. After I had got in and had taken a grateful leave of them all, the youngest daughter--a blooming girl of nineteen, who was to be the first married, they had told me--got upon the carriage step, reached in, and kissed me. I have never seen her, from that hour, but I think of her to this hour as my friend. The transparent windows with the fire and light, looking so bright and warm from the cold darkness out of doors, were soon gone, and again we were crushing and churning the loose snow. We went on with toil enough, but the dismal roads were not much worse than they had been, and the stage was only nine miles. My companion smoking on the box--I had thought at the last inn of begging him to do so when I saw him standing at a great fire in a comfortable cloud of tobacco--was as vigilant as ever and as quickly down and up again when we came to any human abode or any human creature. He had lighted his little dark lantern, which seemed to be a favourite with him, for we had lamps to the carriage; and every now and then he turned it upon me to see that I was doing well. There was a folding-window to the carriage-head, but I never closed it, for it seemed like shutting out hope. We came to the end of the stage, and still the lost trace was not recovered. I looked at him anxiously when we stopped to change, but I knew by his yet graver face as he stood watching the ostlers that he had heard nothing. Almost in an instant afterwards, as I leaned back in my seat, he looked in, with his lighted lantern in his hand, an excited and quite different man. "What is it?" said I, starting. "Is she here?" "No, no. Don't deceive yourself, my dear. Nobody's here. But I've got it!" The crystallized snow was in his eyelashes, in his hair, lying in ridges on his dress. He had to shake it from his face and get his breath before he spoke to me. "Now, Miss Summerson," said he, beating his finger on the apron, "don't you be disappointed at what I'm a-going to do. You know me. I'm Inspector Bucket, and you can trust me. We've come a long way; never mind. Four horses out there for the next stage up! Quick!" There was a commotion in the yard, and a man came running out of the stables to know if he meant up or down. "Up, I tell you! Up! Ain't it English? Up!" "Up?" said I, astonished. "To London! Are we going back?" "Miss Summerson," he answered, "back. Straight back as a die. You know me. Don't be afraid. I'll follow the other, by G----" "The other?" I repeated. "Who?" "You called her Jenny, didn't you? I'll follow her. Bring those two pair out here for a crown a man. Wake up, some of you!" "You will not desert this lady we are in search of; you will not abandon her on such a night and in such a state of mind as I know her to be in!" said I, in an agony, and grasping his hand. "You are right, my dear, I won't. But I'll follow the other. Look alive here with them horses. Send a man for'ard in the saddle to the next stage, and let him send another for'ard again, and order four on, up, right through. My darling, don't you be afraid!" These orders and the way in which he ran about the yard urging them caused a general excitement that was scarcely less bewildering to me than the sudden change. But in the height of the confusion, a mounted man galloped away to order the relays, and our horses were put to with great speed. "My dear," said Mr. Bucket, jumping to his seat and looking in again, "--you'll excuse me if I'm too familiar--don't you fret and worry yourself no more than you can help. I say nothing else at present; but you know me, my dear; now, don't you?" I endeavoured to say that I knew he was far more capable than I of deciding what we ought to do, but was he sure that this was right? Could I not go forward by myself in search of--I grasped his hand again in my distress and whispered it to him--of my own mother. "My dear," he answered, "I know, I know, and would I put you wrong, do you think? Inspector Bucket. Now you know me, don't you?" What could I say but yes! "Then you keep up as good a heart as you can, and you rely upon me for standing by you, no less than by Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet. Now, are you right there?" "All right, sir!" "Off she goes, then. And get on, my lads!" We were again upon the melancholy road by which we had come, tearing up the miry sleet and thawing snow as if they were torn up by a waterwheel. CHAPTER LVIII A Wintry Day and Night Still impassive, as behoves its breeding, the Dedlock town house carries itself as usual towards the street of dismal grandeur. There are powdered heads from time to time in the little windows of the hall, looking out at the untaxed powder falling all day from the sky; and in the same conservatory there is peach blossom turning itself exotically to the great hall fire from the nipping weather out of doors. It is given out that my Lady has gone down into Lincolnshire, but is expected to return presently. Rumour, busy overmuch, however, will not go down into Lincolnshire. It persists in flitting and chattering about town. It knows that that poor unfortunate man, Sir Leicester, has been sadly used. It hears, my dear child, all sorts of shocking things. It makes the world of five miles round quite merry. Not to know that there is something wrong at the Dedlocks' is to augur yourself unknown. One of the peachy-cheeked charmers with the skeleton throats is already apprised of all the principal circumstances that will come out before the Lords on Sir Leicester's application for a bill of divorce. At Blaze and Sparkle's the jewellers and at Sheen and Gloss's the mercers, it is and will be for several hours the topic of the age, the feature of the century. The patronesses of those establishments, albeit so loftily inscrutable, being as nicely weighed and measured there as any other article of the stock-in-trade, are perfectly understood in this new fashion by the rawest hand behind the counter. "Our people, Mr. Jones," said Blaze and Sparkle to the hand in question on engaging him, "our people, sir, are sheep--mere sheep. Where two or three marked ones go, all the rest follow. Keep those two or three in your eye, Mr. Jones, and you have the flock." So, likewise, Sheen and Gloss to THEIR Jones, in reference to knowing where to have the fashionable people and how to bring what they (Sheen and Gloss) choose into fashion. On similar unerring principles, Mr. Sladdery the librarian, and indeed the great farmer of gorgeous sheep, admits this very day, "Why yes, sir, there certainly ARE reports concerning Lady Dedlock, very current indeed among my high connexion, sir. You see, my high connexion must talk about something, sir; and it's only to get a subject into vogue with one or two ladies I could name to make it go down with the whole. Just what I should have done with those ladies, sir, in the case of any novelty you had left to me to bring in, they have done of themselves in this case through knowing Lady Dedlock and being perhaps a little innocently jealous of her too, sir. You'll find, sir, that this topic will be very popular among my high connexion. If it had been a speculation, sir, it would have brought money. And when I say so, you may trust to my being right, sir, for I have made it my business to study my high connexion and to be able to wind it up like a clock, sir." Thus rumour thrives in the capital, and will not go down into Lincolnshire. By half-past five, post meridian, Horse Guards' time, it has even elicited a new remark from the Honourable Mr. Stables, which bids fair to outshine the old one, on which he has so long rested his colloquial reputation. This sparkling sally is to the effect that although he always knew she was the best-groomed woman in the stud, he had no idea she was a bolter. It is immensely received in turf-circles. At feasts and festivals also, in firmaments she has often graced, and among constellations she outshone but yesterday, she is still the prevalent subject. What is it? Who is it? When was it? Where was it? How was it? She is discussed by her dear friends with all the genteelest slang in vogue, with the last new word, the last new manner, the last new drawl, and the perfection of polite indifference. A remarkable feature of the theme is that it is found to be so inspiring that several people come out upon it who never came out before--positively say things! William Buffy carries one of these smartnesses from the place where he dines down to the House, where the Whip for his party hands it about with his snuff-box to keep men together who want to be off, with such effect that the Speaker (who has had it privately insinuated into his own ear under the corner of his wig) cries, "Order at the bar!" three times without making an impression. And not the least amazing circumstance connected with her being vaguely the town talk is that people hovering on the confines of Mr. Sladdery's high connexion, people who know nothing and ever did know nothing about her, think it essential to their reputation to pretend that she is their topic too, and to retail her at second-hand with the last new word and the last new manner, and the last new drawl, and the last new polite indifference, and all the rest of it, all at second-hand but considered equal to new in inferior systems and to fainter stars. If there be any man of letters, art, or science among these little dealers, how noble in him to support the feeble sisters on such majestic crutches! So goes the wintry day outside the Dedlock mansion. How within it? Sir Leicester, lying in his bed, can speak a little, though with difficulty and indistinctness. He is enjoined to silence and to rest, and they have given him some opiate to lull his pain, for his old enemy is very hard with him. He is never asleep, though sometimes he seems to fall into a dull waking doze. He caused his bedstead to be moved out nearer to the window when he heard it was such inclement weather, and his head to be so adjusted that he could see the driving snow and sleet. He watches it as it falls, throughout the whole wintry day. Upon the least noise in the house, which is kept hushed, his hand is at the pencil. The old housekeeper, sitting by him, knows what he would write and whispers, "No, he has not come back yet, Sir Leicester. It was late last night when he went. He has been but a little time gone yet." He withdraws his hand and falls to looking at the sleet and snow again until they seem, by being long looked at, to fall so thick and fast that he is obliged to close his eyes for a minute on the giddy whirl of white flakes and icy blots. He began to look at them as soon as it was light. The day is not yet far spent when he conceives it to be necessary that her rooms should be prepared for her. It is very cold and wet. Let there be good fires. Let them know that she is expected. Please see to it yourself. He writes to this purpose on his slate, and Mrs. Rouncewell with a heavy heart obeys. "For I dread, George," the old lady says to her son, who waits below to keep her company when she has a little leisure, "I dread, my dear, that my Lady will never more set foot within these walls." "That's a bad presentiment, mother." "Nor yet within the walls of Chesney Wold, my dear." "That's worse. But why, mother?" "When I saw my Lady yesterday, George, she looked to me--and I may say at me too--as if the step on the Ghost's Walk had almost walked her down." "Come, come! You alarm yourself with old-story fears, mother." "No I don't, my dear. No I don't. It's going on for sixty year that I have been in this family, and I never had any fears for it before. But it's breaking up, my dear; the great old Dedlock family is breaking up." "I hope not, mother." "I am thankful I have lived long enough to be with Sir Leicester in this illness and trouble, for I know I am not too old nor too useless to be a welcomer sight to him than anybody else in my place would be. But the step on the Ghost's Walk will walk my Lady down, George; it has been many a day behind her, and now it will pass her and go on." "Well, mother dear, I say again, I hope not." "Ah, so do I, George," the old lady returns, shaking her head and parting her folded hands. "But if my fears come true, and he has to know it, who will tell him!" "Are these her rooms?" "These are my Lady's rooms, just as she left them." "Why, now," says the trooper, glancing round him and speaking in a lower voice, "I begin to understand how you come to think as you do think, mother. Rooms get an awful look about them when they are fitted up, like these, for one person you are used to see in them, and that person is away under any shadow, let alone being God knows where." He is not far out. As all partings foreshadow the great final one, so, empty rooms, bereft of a familiar presence, mournfully whisper what your room and what mine must one day be. My Lady's state has a hollow look, thus gloomy and abandoned; and in the inner apartment, where Mr. Bucket last night made his secret perquisition, the traces of her dresses and her ornaments, even the mirrors accustomed to reflect them when they were a portion of herself, have a desolate and vacant air. Dark and cold as the wintry day is, it is darker and colder in these deserted chambers than in many a hut that will barely exclude the weather; and though the servants heap fires in the grates and set the couches and the chairs within the warm glass screens that let their ruddy light shoot through to the furthest corners, there is a heavy cloud upon the rooms which no light will dispel. The old housekeeper and her son remain until the preparations are complete, and then she returns upstairs. Volumnia has taken Mrs. Rouncewell's place in the meantime, though pearl necklaces and rouge pots, however calculated to embellish Bath, are but indifferent comforts to the invalid under present circumstances. Volumnia, not being supposed to know (and indeed not knowing) what is the matter, has found it a ticklish task to offer appropriate observations and consequently has supplied their place with distracting smoothings of the bed-linen, elaborate locomotion on tiptoe, vigilant peeping at her kinsman's eyes, and one exasperating whisper to herself of, "He is asleep." In disproof of which superfluous remark Sir Leicester has indignantly written on the slate, "I am not." Yielding, therefore, the chair at the bedside to the quaint old housekeeper, Volumnia sits at a table a little removed, sympathetically sighing. Sir Leicester watches the sleet and snow and listens for the returning steps that he expects. In the ears of his old servant, looking as if she had stepped out of an old picture-frame to attend a summoned Dedlock to another world, the silence is fraught with echoes of her own words, "Who will tell him!" He has been under his valet's hands this morning to be made presentable and is as well got up as the circumstances will allow. He is propped with pillows, his grey hair is brushed in its usual manner, his linen is arranged to a nicety, and he is wrapped in a responsible dressing-gown. His eye-glass and his watch are ready to his hand. It is necessary--less to his own dignity now perhaps than for her sake--that he should be seen as little disturbed and as much himself as may be. Women will talk, and Volumnia, though a Dedlock, is no exceptional case. He keeps her here, there is little doubt, to prevent her talking somewhere else. He is very ill, but he makes his present stand against distress of mind and body most courageously. The fair Volumnia, being one of those sprightly girls who cannot long continue silent without imminent peril of seizure by the dragon Boredom, soon indicates the approach of that monster with a series of undisguisable yawns. Finding it impossible to suppress those yawns by any other process than conversation, she compliments Mrs. Rouncewell on her son, declaring that he positively is one of the finest figures she ever saw and as soldierly a looking person, she should think, as what's his name, her favourite Life Guardsman--the man she dotes on, the dearest of creatures--who was killed at Waterloo. Sir Leicester hears this tribute with so much surprise and stares about him in such a confused way that Mrs. Rouncewell feels it necessary to explain. "Miss Dedlock don't speak of my eldest son, Sir Leicester, but my youngest. I have found him. He has come home." Sir Leicester breaks silence with a harsh cry. "George? Your son George come home, Mrs. Rouncewell?" The old housekeeper wipes her eyes. "Thank God. Yes, Sir Leicester." Does this discovery of some one lost, this return of some one so long gone, come upon him as a strong confirmation of his hopes? Does he think, "Shall I not, with the aid I have, recall her safely after this, there being fewer hours in her case than there are years in his?" It is of no use entreating him; he is determined to speak now, and he does. In a thick crowd of sounds, but still intelligibly enough to be understood. "Why did you not tell me, Mrs. Rouncewell?" "It happened only yesterday, Sir Leicester, and I doubted your being well enough to be talked to of such things." Besides, the giddy Volumnia now remembers with her little scream that nobody was to have known of his being Mrs. Rouncewell's son and that she was not to have told. But Mrs. Rouncewell protests, with warmth enough to swell the stomacher, that of course she would have told Sir Leicester as soon as he got better. "Where is your son George, Mrs. Rouncewell?" asks Sir Leicester, Mrs. Rouncewell, not a little alarmed by his disregard of the doctor's injunctions, replies, in London. "Where in London?" Mrs. Rouncewell is constrained to admit that he is in the house. "Bring him here to my room. Bring him directly." The old lady can do nothing but go in search of him. Sir Leicester, with such power of movement as he has, arranges himself a little to receive him. When he has done so, he looks out again at the falling sleet and snow and listens again for the returning steps. A quantity of straw has been tumbled down in the street to deaden the noises there, and she might be driven to the door perhaps without his hearing wheels. He is lying thus, apparently forgetful of his newer and minor surprise, when the housekeeper returns, accompanied by her trooper son. Mr. George approaches softly to the bedside, makes his bow, squares his chest, and stands, with his face flushed, very heartily ashamed of himself. "Good heaven, and it is really George Rouncewell!" exclaims Sir Leicester. "Do you remember me, George?" The trooper needs to look at him and to separate this sound from that sound before he knows what he has said, but doing this and being a little helped by his mother, he replies, "I must have a very bad memory, indeed, Sir Leicester, if I failed to remember you." "When I look at you, George Rouncewell," Sir Leicester observes with difficulty, "I see something of a boy at Chesney Wold--I remember well--very well." He looks at the trooper until tears come into his eyes, and then he looks at the sleet and snow again. "I ask your pardon, Sir Leicester," says the trooper, "but would you accept of my arms to raise you up? You would lie easier, Sir Leicester, if you would allow me to move you." "If you please, George Rouncewell; if you will be so good." The trooper takes him in his arms like a child, lightly raises him, and turns him with his face more towards the window. "Thank you. You have your mother's gentleness," returns Sir Leicester, "and your own strength. Thank you." He signs to him with his hand not to go away. George quietly remains at the bedside, waiting to be spoken to. "Why did you wish for secrecy?" It takes Sir Leicester some time to ask this. "Truly I am not much to boast of, Sir Leicester, and I--I should still, Sir Leicester, if you was not so indisposed--which I hope you will not be long--I should still hope for the favour of being allowed to remain unknown in general. That involves explanations not very hard to be guessed at, not very well timed here, and not very creditable to myself. However opinions may differ on a variety of subjects, I should think it would be universally agreed, Sir Leicester, that I am not much to boast of." "You have been a soldier," observes Sir Leicester, "and a faithful one." George makes his military bow. "As far as that goes, Sir Leicester, I have done my duty under discipline, and it was the least I could do." "You find me," says Sir Leicester, whose eyes are much attracted towards him, "far from well, George Rouncewell." "I am very sorry both to hear it and to see it, Sir Leicester." "I am sure you are. No. In addition to my older malady, I have had a sudden and bad attack. Something that deadens," making an endeavour to pass one hand down one side, "and confuses," touching his lips. George, with a look of assent and sympathy, makes another bow. The different times when they were both young men (the trooper much the younger of the two) and looked at one another down at Chesney Wold arise before them both and soften both. Sir Leicester, evidently with a great determination to say, in his own manner, something that is on his mind before relapsing into silence, tries to raise himself among his pillows a little more. George, observant of the action, takes him in his arms again and places him as he desires to be. "Thank you, George. You are another self to me. You have often carried my spare gun at Chesney Wold, George. You are familiar to me in these strange circumstances, very familiar." He has put Sir Leicester's sounder arm over his shoulder in lifting him up, and Sir Leicester is slow in drawing it away again as he says these words. "I was about to add," he presently goes on, "I was about to add, respecting this attack, that it was unfortunately simultaneous with a slight misunderstanding between my Lady and myself. I do not mean that there was any difference between us (for there has been none), but that there was a misunderstanding of certain circumstances important only to ourselves, which deprives me, for a little while, of my Lady's society. She has found it necessary to make a journey--I trust will shortly return. Volumnia, do I make myself intelligible? The words are not quite under my command in the manner of pronouncing them." Volumnia understands him perfectly, and in truth he delivers himself with far greater plainness than could have been supposed possible a minute ago. The effort by which he does so is written in the anxious and labouring expression of his face. Nothing but the strength of his purpose enables him to make it. "Therefore, Volumnia, I desire to say in your presence--and in the presence of my old retainer and friend, Mrs. Rouncewell, whose truth and fidelity no one can question, and in the presence of her son George, who comes back like a familiar recollection of my youth in the home of my ancestors at Chesney Wold--in case I should relapse, in case I should not recover, in case I should lose both my speech and the power of writing, though I hope for better things--" The old housekeeper weeping silently; Volumnia in the greatest agitation, with the freshest bloom on her cheeks; the trooper with his arms folded and his head a little bent, respectfully attentive. "Therefore I desire to say, and to call you all to witness--beginning, Volumnia, with yourself, most solemnly--that I am on unaltered terms with Lady Dedlock. That I assert no cause whatever of complaint against her. That I have ever had the strongest affection for her, and that I retain it undiminished. Say this to herself, and to every one. If you ever say less than this, you will be guilty of deliberate falsehood to me." Volumnia tremblingly protests that she will observe his injunctions to the letter. "My Lady is too high in position, too handsome, too accomplished, too superior in most respects to the best of those by whom she is surrounded, not to have her enemies and traducers, I dare say. Let it be known to them, as I make it known to you, that being of sound mind, memory, and understanding, I revoke no disposition I have made in her favour. I abridge nothing I have ever bestowed upon her. I am on unaltered terms with her, and I recall--having the full power to do it if I were so disposed, as you see--no act I have done for her advantage and happiness." His formal array of words might have at any other time, as it has often had, something ludicrous in it, but at this time it is serious and affecting. His noble earnestness, his fidelity, his gallant shielding of her, his generous conquest of his own wrong and his own pride for her sake, are simply honourable, manly, and true. Nothing less worthy can be seen through the lustre of such qualities in the commonest mechanic, nothing less worthy can be seen in the best-born gentleman. In such a light both aspire alike, both rise alike, both children of the dust shine equally. Overpowered by his exertions, he lays his head back on his pillows and closes his eyes for not more than a minute, when he again resumes his watching of the weather and his attention to the muffled sounds. In the rendering of those little services, and in the manner of their acceptance, the trooper has become installed as necessary to him. Nothing has been said, but it is quite understood. He falls a step or two backward to be out of sight and mounts guard a little behind his mother's chair. The day is now beginning to decline. The mist and the sleet into which the snow has all resolved itself are darker, and the blaze begins to tell more vividly upon the room walls and furniture. The gloom augments; the bright gas springs up in the streets; and the pertinacious oil lamps which yet hold their ground there, with their source of life half frozen and half thawed, twinkle gaspingly like fiery fish out of water--as they are. The world, which has been rumbling over the straw and pulling at the bell, "to inquire," begins to go home, begins to dress, to dine, to discuss its dear friend with all the last new modes, as already mentioned. Now does Sir Leicester become worse, restless, uneasy, and in great pain. Volumnia, lighting a candle (with a predestined aptitude for doing something objectionable), is bidden to put it out again, for it is not yet dark enough. Yet it is very dark too, as dark as it will be all night. By and by she tries again. No! Put it out. It is not dark enough yet. His old housekeeper is the first to understand that he is striving to uphold the fiction with himself that it is not growing late. "Dear Sir Leicester, my honoured master," she softly whispers, "I must, for your own good, and my duty, take the freedom of begging and praying that you will not lie here in the lone darkness watching and waiting and dragging through the time. Let me draw the curtains, and light the candles, and make things more comfortable about you. The church-clocks will strike the hours just the same, Sir Leicester, and the night will pass away just the same. My Lady will come back, just the same." "I know it, Mrs. Rouncewell, but I am weak--and she has been so long gone." "Not so very long, Sir Leicester. Not twenty-four hours yet." "But that is a long time. Oh, it is a long time!" He says it with a groan that wrings her heart. She knows that this is not a period for bringing the rough light upon him; she thinks his tears too sacred to be seen, even by her. Therefore she sits in the darkness for a while without a word, then gently begins to move about, now stirring the fire, now standing at the dark window looking out. Finally he tells her, with recovered self-command, "As you say, Mrs. Rouncewell, it is no worse for being confessed. It is getting late, and they are not come. Light the room!" When it is lighted and the weather shut out, it is only left to him to listen. But they find that however dejected and ill he is, he brightens when a quiet pretence is made of looking at the fires in her rooms and being sure that everything is ready to receive her. Poor pretence as it is, these allusions to her being expected keep up hope within him. Midnight comes, and with it the same blank. The carriages in the streets are few, and other late sounds in that neighbourhood there are none, unless a man so very nomadically drunk as to stray into the frigid zone goes brawling and bellowing along the pavement. Upon this wintry night it is so still that listening to the intense silence is like looking at intense darkness. If any distant sound be audible in this case, it departs through the gloom like a feeble light in that, and all is heavier than before. The corporation of servants are dismissed to bed (not unwilling to go, for they were up all last night), and only Mrs. Rouncewell and George keep watch in Sir Leicester's room. As the night lags tardily on--or rather when it seems to stop altogether, at between two and three o'clock--they find a restless craving on him to know more about the weather, now he cannot see it. Hence George, patrolling regularly every half-hour to the rooms so carefully looked after, extends his march to the hall-door, looks about him, and brings back the best report he can make of the worst of nights, the sleet still falling and even the stone footways lying ankle-deep in icy sludge. Volumnia, in her room up a retired landing on the staircase--the second turning past the end of the carving and gilding, a cousinly room containing a fearful abortion of a portrait of Sir Leicester banished for its crimes, and commanding in the day a solemn yard planted with dried-up shrubs like antediluvian specimens of black tea--is a prey to horrors of many kinds. Not last nor least among them, possibly, is a horror of what may befall her little income in the event, as she expresses it, "of anything happening" to Sir Leicester. Anything, in this sense, meaning one thing only; and that the last thing that can happen to the consciousness of any baronet in the known world. An effect of these horrors is that Volumnia finds she cannot go to bed in her own room or sit by the fire in her own room, but must come forth with her fair head tied up in a profusion of shawl, and her fair form enrobed in drapery, and parade the mansion like a ghost, particularly haunting the rooms, warm and luxurious, prepared for one who still does not return. Solitude under such circumstances being not to be thought of, Volumnia is attended by her maid, who, impressed from her own bed for that purpose, extremely cold, very sleepy, and generally an injured maid as condemned by circumstances to take office with a cousin, when she had resolved to be maid to nothing less than ten thousand a year, has not a sweet expression of countenance. The periodical visits of the trooper to these rooms, however, in the course of his patrolling is an assurance of protection and company both to mistress and maid, which renders them very acceptable in the small hours of the night. Whenever he is heard advancing, they both make some little decorative preparation to receive him; at other times they divide their watches into short scraps of oblivion and dialogues not wholly free from acerbity, as to whether Miss Dedlock, sitting with her feet upon the fender, was or was not falling into the fire when rescued (to her great displeasure) by her guardian genius the maid. "How is Sir Leicester now, Mr. George?" inquires Volumnia, adjusting her cowl over her head. "Why, Sir Leicester is much the same, miss. He is very low and ill, and he even wanders a little sometimes." "Has he asked for me?" inquires Volumnia tenderly. "Why, no, I can't say he has, miss. Not within my hearing, that is to say." "This is a truly sad time, Mr. George." "It is indeed, miss. Hadn't you better go to bed?" "You had a deal better go to bed, Miss Dedlock," quoth the maid sharply. But Volumnia answers No! No! She may be asked for, she may be wanted at a moment's notice. She never should forgive herself "if anything was to happen" and she was not on the spot. She declines to enter on the question, mooted by the maid, how the spot comes to be there, and not in her room (which is nearer to Sir Leicester's), but staunchly declares that on the spot she will remain. Volumnia further makes a merit of not having "closed an eye"--as if she had twenty or thirty--though it is hard to reconcile this statement with her having most indisputably opened two within five minutes. But when it comes to four o'clock, and still the same blank, Volumnia's constancy begins to fail her, or rather it begins to strengthen, for she now considers that it is her duty to be ready for the morrow, when much may be expected of her, that, in fact, howsoever anxious to remain upon the spot, it may be required of her, as an act of self-devotion, to desert the spot. So when the trooper reappears with his, "Hadn't you better go to bed, miss?" and when the maid protests, more sharply than before, "You had a deal better go to bed, Miss Dedlock!" she meekly rises and says, "Do with me what you think best!" Mr. George undoubtedly thinks it best to escort her on his arm to the door of her cousinly chamber, and the maid as undoubtedly thinks it best to hustle her into bed with mighty little ceremony. Accordingly, these steps are taken; and now the trooper, in his rounds, has the house to himself. There is no improvement in the weather. From the portico, from the eaves, from the parapet, from every ledge and post and pillar, drips the thawed snow. It has crept, as if for shelter, into the lintels of the great door--under it, into the corners of the windows, into every chink and crevice of retreat, and there wastes and dies. It is falling still; upon the roof, upon the skylight, even through the skylight, and drip, drip, drip, with the regularity of the Ghost's Walk, on the stone floor below. The trooper, his old recollections awakened by the solitary grandeur of a great house--no novelty to him once at Chesney Wold--goes up the stairs and through the chief rooms, holding up his light at arm's length. Thinking of his varied fortunes within the last few weeks, and of his rustic boyhood, and of the two periods of his life so strangely brought together across the wide intermediate space; thinking of the murdered man whose image is fresh in his mind; thinking of the lady who has disappeared from these very rooms and the tokens of whose recent presence are all here; thinking of the master of the house upstairs and of the foreboding, "Who will tell him!" he looks here and looks there, and reflects how he MIGHT see something now, which it would tax his boldness to walk up to, lay his hand upon, and prove to be a fancy. But it is all blank, blank as the darkness above and below, while he goes up the great staircase again, blank as the oppressive silence. "All is still in readiness, George Rouncewell?" "Quite orderly and right, Sir Leicester." "No word of any kind?" The trooper shakes his head. "No letter that can possibly have been overlooked?" But he knows there is no such hope as that and lays his head down without looking for an answer. Very familiar to him, as he said himself some hours ago, George Rouncewell lifts him into easier positions through the long remainder of the blank wintry night, and equally familiar with his unexpressed wish, extinguishes the light and undraws the curtains at the first late break of day. The day comes like a phantom. Cold, colourless, and vague, it sends a warning streak before it of a deathlike hue, as if it cried out, "Look what I am bringing you who watch there! Who will tell him!" CHAPTER LIX Esther's Narrative It was three o'clock in the morning when the houses outside London did at last begin to exclude the country and to close us in with streets. We had made our way along roads in a far worse condition than when we had traversed them by daylight, both the fall and the thaw having lasted ever since; but the energy of my companion never slackened. It had only been, as I thought, of less assistance than the horses in getting us on, and it had often aided them. They had stopped exhausted half-way up hills, they had been driven through streams of turbulent water, they had slipped down and become entangled with the harness; but he and his little lantern had been always ready, and when the mishap was set right, I had never heard any variation in his cool, "Get on, my lads!" The steadiness and confidence with which he had directed our journey back I could not account for. Never wavering, he never even stopped to make an inquiry until we were within a few miles of London. A very few words, here and there, were then enough for him; and thus we came, at between three and four o'clock in the morning, into Islington. I will not dwell on the suspense and anxiety with which I reflected all this time that we were leaving my mother farther and farther behind every minute. I think I had some strong hope that he must be right and could not fail to have a satisfactory object in following this woman, but I tormented myself with questioning it and discussing it during the whole journey. What was to ensue when we found her and what could compensate us for this loss of time were questions also that I could not possibly dismiss; my mind was quite tortured by long dwelling on such reflections when we stopped. We stopped in a high-street where there was a coach-stand. My companion paid our two drivers, who were as completely covered with splashes as if they had been dragged along the roads like the carriage itself, and giving them some brief direction where to take it, lifted me out of it and into a hackney-coach he had chosen from the rest. "Why, my dear!" he said as he did this. "How wet you are!" I had not been conscious of it. But the melted snow had found its way into the carriage, and I had got out two or three times when a fallen horse was plunging and had to be got up, and the wet had penetrated my dress. I assured him it was no matter, but the driver, who knew him, would not be dissuaded by me from running down the street to his stable, whence he brought an armful of clean dry straw. They shook it out and strewed it well about me, and I found it warm and comfortable. "Now, my dear," said Mr. Bucket, with his head in at the window after I was shut up. "We're a-going to mark this person down. It may take a little time, but you don't mind that. You're pretty sure that I've got a motive. Ain't you?" I little thought what it was, little thought in how short a time I should understand it better, but I assured him that I had confidence in him. "So you may have, my dear," he returned. "And I tell you what! If you only repose half as much confidence in me as I repose in you after what I've experienced of you, that'll do. Lord! You're no trouble at all. I never see a young woman in any station of society--and I've seen many elevated ones too--conduct herself like you have conducted yourself since you was called out of your bed. You're a pattern, you know, that's what you are," said Mr. Bucket warmly; "you're a pattern." I told him I was very glad, as indeed I was, to have been no hindrance to him, and that I hoped I should be none now. "My dear," he returned, "when a young lady is as mild as she's game, and as game as she's mild, that's all I ask, and more than I expect. She then becomes a queen, and that's about what you are yourself." With these encouraging words--they really were encouraging to me under those lonely and anxious circumstances--he got upon the box, and we once more drove away. Where we drove I neither knew then nor have ever known since, but we appeared to seek out the narrowest and worst streets in London. Whenever I saw him directing the driver, I was prepared for our descending into a deeper complication of such streets, and we never failed to do so. Sometimes we emerged upon a wider thoroughfare or came to a larger building than the generality, well lighted. Then we stopped at offices like those we had visited when we began our journey, and I saw him in consultation with others. Sometimes he would get down by an archway or at a street corner and mysteriously show the light of his little lantern. This would attract similar lights from various dark quarters, like so many insects, and a fresh consultation would be held. By degrees we appeared to contract our search within narrower and easier limits. Single police-officers on duty could now tell Mr. Bucket what he wanted to know and point to him where to go. At last we stopped for a rather long conversation between him and one of these men, which I supposed to be satisfactory from his manner of nodding from time to time. When it was finished he came to me looking very busy and very attentive. "Now, Miss Summerson," he said to me, "you won't be alarmed whatever comes off, I know. It's not necessary for me to give you any further caution than to tell you that we have marked this person down and that you may be of use to me before I know it myself. I don't like to ask such a thing, my dear, but would you walk a little way?" Of course I got out directly and took his arm. "It ain't so easy to keep your feet," said Mr. Bucket, "but take time." Although I looked about me confusedly and hurriedly as we crossed the street, I thought I knew the place. "Are we in Holborn?" I asked him. "Yes," said Mr. Bucket. "Do you know this turning?" "It looks like Chancery Lane." "And was christened so, my dear," said Mr. Bucket. We turned down it, and as we went shuffling through the sleet, I heard the clocks strike half-past five. We passed on in silence and as quickly as we could with such a foot-hold, when some one coming towards us on the narrow pavement, wrapped in a cloak, stopped and stood aside to give me room. In the same moment I heard an exclamation of wonder and my own name from Mr. Woodcourt. I knew his voice very well. It was so unexpected and so--I don't know what to call it, whether pleasant or painful--to come upon it after my feverish wandering journey, and in the midst of the night, that I could not keep back the tears from my eyes. It was like hearing his voice in a strange country. "My dear Miss Summerson, that you should be out at this hour, and in such weather!" He had heard from my guardian of my having been called away on some uncommon business and said so to dispense with any explanation. I told him that we had but just left a coach and were going--but then I was obliged to look at my companion. "Why, you see, Mr. Woodcourt"--he had caught the name from me--"we are a-going at present into the next street. Inspector Bucket." Mr. Woodcourt, disregarding my remonstrances, had hurriedly taken off his cloak and was putting it about me. "That's a good move, too," said Mr. Bucket, assisting, "a very good move." "May I go with you?" said Mr. Woodcourt. I don't know whether to me or to my companion. "Why, Lord!" exclaimed Mr. Bucket, taking the answer on himself. "Of course you may." It was all said in a moment, and they took me between them, wrapped in the cloak. "I have just left Richard," said Mr. Woodcourt. "I have been sitting with him since ten o'clock last night." "Oh, dear me, he is ill!" "No, no, believe me; not ill, but not quite well. He was depressed and faint--you know he gets so worried and so worn sometimes--and Ada sent to me of course; and when I came home I found her note and came straight here. Well! Richard revived so much after a little while, and Ada was so happy and so convinced of its being my doing, though God knows I had little enough to do with it, that I remained with him until he had been fast asleep some hours. As fast asleep as she is now, I hope!" His friendly and familiar way of speaking of them, his unaffected devotion to them, the grateful confidence with which I knew he had inspired my darling, and the comfort he was to her; could I separate all this from his promise to me? How thankless I must have been if it had not recalled the words he said to me when he was so moved by the change in my appearance: "I will accept him as a trust, and it shall be a sacred one!" We now turned into another narrow street. "Mr. Woodcourt," said Mr. Bucket, who had eyed him closely as we came along, "our business takes us to a law-stationer's here, a certain Mr. Snagsby's. What, you know him, do you?" He was so quick that he saw it in an instant. "Yes, I know a little of him and have called upon him at this place." "Indeed, sir?" said Mr. Bucket. "Then you will be so good as to let me leave Miss Summerson with you for a moment while I go and have half a word with him?" The last police-officer with whom he had conferred was standing silently behind us. I was not aware of it until he struck in on my saying I heard some one crying. "Don't be alarmed, miss," he returned. "It's Snagsby's servant." "Why, you see," said Mr. Bucket, "the girl's subject to fits, and has 'em bad upon her to-night. A most contrary circumstance it is, for I want certain information out of that girl, and she must be brought to reason somehow." "At all events, they wouldn't be up yet if it wasn't for her, Mr. Bucket," said the other man. "She's been at it pretty well all night, sir." "Well, that's true," he returned. "My light's burnt out. Show yours a moment." All this passed in a whisper a door or two from the house in which I could faintly hear crying and moaning. In the little round of light produced for the purpose, Mr. Bucket went up to the door and knocked. The door was opened after he had knocked twice, and he went in, leaving us standing in the street. "Miss Summerson," said Mr. Woodcourt, "if without obtruding myself on your confidence I may remain near you, pray let me do so." "You are truly kind," I answered. "I need wish to keep no secret of my own from you; if I keep any, it is another's." "I quite understand. Trust me, I will remain near you only so long as I can fully respect it." "I trust implicitly to you," I said. "I know and deeply feel how sacredly you keep your promise." After a short time the little round of light shone out again, and Mr. Bucket advanced towards us in it with his earnest face. "Please to come in, Miss Summerson," he said, "and sit down by the fire. Mr. Woodcourt, from information I have received I understand you are a medical man. Would you look to this girl and see if anything can be done to bring her round. She has a letter somewhere that I particularly want. It's not in her box, and I think it must be about her; but she is so twisted and clenched up that she is difficult to handle without hurting." We all three went into the house together; although it was cold and raw, it smelt close too from being up all night. In the passage behind the door stood a scared, sorrowful-looking little man in a grey coat who seemed to have a naturally polite manner and spoke meekly. "Downstairs, if you please, Mr. Bucket," said he. "The lady will excuse the front kitchen; we use it as our workaday sitting-room. The back is Guster's bedroom, and in it she's a-carrying on, poor thing, to a frightful extent!" We went downstairs, followed by Mr. Snagsby, as I soon found the little man to be. In the front kitchen, sitting by the fire, was Mrs. Snagsby, with very red eyes and a very severe expression of face. "My little woman," said Mr. Snagsby, entering behind us, "to wave--not to put too fine a point upon it, my dear--hostilities for one single moment in the course of this prolonged night, here is Inspector Bucket, Mr. Woodcourt, and a lady." She looked very much astonished, as she had reason for doing, and looked particularly hard at me. "My little woman," said Mr. Snagsby, sitting down in the remotest corner by the door, as if he were taking a liberty, "it is not unlikely that you may inquire of me why Inspector Bucket, Mr. Woodcourt, and a lady call upon us in Cook's Court, Cursitor Street, at the present hour. I don't know. I have not the least idea. If I was to be informed, I should despair of understanding, and I'd rather not be told." He appeared so miserable, sitting with his head upon his hand, and I appeared so unwelcome, that I was going to offer an apology when Mr. Bucket took the matter on himself. "Now, Mr. Snagsby," said he, "the best thing you can do is to go along with Mr. Woodcourt to look after your Guster--" "My Guster, Mr. Bucket!" cried Mr. Snagsby. "Go on, sir, go on. I shall be charged with that next." "And to hold the candle," pursued Mr. Bucket without correcting himself, "or hold her, or make yourself useful in any way you're asked. Which there's not a man alive more ready to do, for you're a man of urbanity and suavity, you know, and you've got the sort of heart that can feel for another. Mr. Woodcourt, would you be so good as see to her, and if you can get that letter from her, to let me have it as soon as ever you can?" As they went out, Mr. Bucket made me sit down in a corner by the fire and take off my wet shoes, which he turned up to dry upon the fender, talking all the time. "Don't you be at all put out, miss, by the want of a hospitable look from Mrs. Snagsby there, because she's under a mistake altogether. She'll find that out sooner than will be agreeable to a lady of her generally correct manner of forming her thoughts, because I'm a-going to explain it to her." Here, standing on the hearth with his wet hat and shawls in his hand, himself a pile of wet, he turned to Mrs. Snagsby. "Now, the first thing that I say to you, as a married woman possessing what you may call charms, you know--'Believe Me, if All Those Endearing,' and cetrer--you're well acquainted with the song, because it's in vain for you to tell me that you and good society are strangers--charms--attractions, mind you, that ought to give you confidence in yourself--is, that you've done it." Mrs. Snagsby looked rather alarmed, relented a little and faltered, what did Mr. Bucket mean. "What does Mr. Bucket mean?" he repeated, and I saw by his face that all the time he talked he was listening for the discovery of the letter, to my own great agitation, for I knew then how important it must be; "I'll tell you what he means, ma'am. Go and see Othello acted. That's the tragedy for you." Mrs. Snagsby consciously asked why. "Why?" said Mr. Bucket. "Because you'll come to that if you don't look out. Why, at the very moment while I speak, I know what your mind's not wholly free from respecting this young lady. But shall I tell you who this young lady is? Now, come, you're what I call an intellectual woman--with your soul too large for your body, if you come to that, and chafing it--and you know me, and you recollect where you saw me last, and what was talked of in that circle. Don't you? Yes! Very well. This young lady is that young lady." Mrs. Snagsby appeared to understand the reference better than I did at the time. "And Toughey--him as you call Jo--was mixed up in the same business, and no other; and the law-writer that you know of was mixed up in the same business, and no other; and your husband, with no more knowledge of it than your great grandfather, was mixed up (by Mr. Tulkinghorn, deceased, his best customer) in the same business, and no other; and the whole bileing of people was mixed up in the same business, and no other. And yet a married woman, possessing your attractions, shuts her eyes (and sparklers too), and goes and runs her delicate-formed head against a wall. Why, I am ashamed of you! (I expected Mr. Woodcourt might have got it by this time.)" Mrs. Snagsby shook her head and put her handkerchief to her eyes. "Is that all?" said Mr. Bucket excitedly. "No. See what happens. Another person mixed up in that business and no other, a person in a wretched state, comes here to-night and is seen a-speaking to your maid-servant; and between her and your maid-servant there passes a paper that I would give a hundred pound for, down. What do you do? You hide and you watch 'em, and you pounce upon that maid-servant--knowing what she's subject to and what a little thing will bring 'em on--in that surprising manner and with that severity that, by the Lord, she goes off and keeps off, when a life may be hanging upon that girl's words!" He so thoroughly meant what he said now that I involuntarily clasped my hands and felt the room turning away from me. But it stopped. Mr. Woodcourt came in, put a paper into his hand, and went away again. "Now, Mrs. Snagsby, the only amends you can make," said Mr. Bucket, rapidly glancing at it, "is to let me speak a word to this young lady in private here. And if you know of any help that you can give to that gentleman in the next kitchen there or can think of any one thing that's likelier than another to bring the girl round, do your swiftest and best!" In an instant she was gone, and he had shut the door. "Now my dear, you're steady and quite sure of yourself?" "Quite," said I. "Whose writing is that?" It was my mother's. A pencil-writing, on a crushed and torn piece of paper, blotted with wet. Folded roughly like a letter, and directed to me at my guardian's. "You know the hand," he said, "and if you are firm enough to read it to me, do! But be particular to a word." It had been written in portions, at different times. I read what follows: I came to the cottage with two objects. First, to see the dear one, if I could, once more--but only to see her--not to speak to her or let her know that I was near. The other object, to elude pursuit and to be lost. Do not blame the mother for her share. The assistance that she rendered me, she rendered on my strongest assurance that it was for the dear one's good. You remember her dead child. The men's consent I bought, but her help was freely given. "'I came.' That was written," said my companion, "when she rested there. It bears out what I made of it. I was right." The next was written at another time: I have wandered a long distance, and for many hours, and I know that I must soon die. These streets! I have no purpose but to die. When I left, I had a worse, but I am saved from adding that guilt to the rest. Cold, wet, and fatigue are sufficient causes for my being found dead, but I shall die of others, though I suffer from these. It was right that all that had sustained me should give way at once and that I should die of terror and my conscience. "Take courage," said Mr. Bucket. "There's only a few words more." Those, too, were written at another time. To all appearance, almost in the dark: I have done all I could do to be lost. I shall be soon forgotten so, and shall disgrace him least. I have nothing about me by which I can be recognized. This paper I part with now. The place where I shall lie down, if I can get so far, has been often in my mind. Farewell. Forgive. Mr. Bucket, supporting me with his arm, lowered me gently into my chair. "Cheer up! Don't think me hard with you, my dear, but as soon as ever you feel equal to it, get your shoes on and be ready." I did as he required, but I was left there a long time, praying for my unhappy mother. They were all occupied with the poor girl, and I heard Mr. Woodcourt directing them and speaking to her often. At length he came in with Mr. Bucket and said that as it was important to address her gently, he thought it best that I should ask her for whatever information we desired to obtain. There was no doubt that she could now reply to questions if she were soothed and not alarmed. The questions, Mr. Bucket said, were how she came by the letter, what passed between her and the person who gave her the letter, and where the person went. Holding my mind as steadily as I could to these points, I went into the next room with them. Mr. Woodcourt would have remained outside, but at my solicitation went in with us. The poor girl was sitting on the floor where they had laid her down. They stood around her, though at a little distance, that she might have air. She was not pretty and looked weak and poor, but she had a plaintive and a good face, though it was still a little wild. I kneeled on the ground beside her and put her poor head upon my shoulder, whereupon she drew her arm round my neck and burst into tears. "My poor girl," said I, laying my face against her forehead, for indeed I was crying too, and trembling, "it seems cruel to trouble you now, but more depends on our knowing something about this letter than I could tell you in an hour." She began piteously declaring that she didn't mean any harm, she didn't mean any harm, Mrs. Snagsby! "We are all sure of that," said I. "But pray tell me how you got it." "Yes, dear lady, I will, and tell you true. I'll tell true, indeed, Mrs. Snagsby." "I am sure of that," said I. "And how was it?" "I had been out on an errand, dear lady--long after it was dark--quite late; and when I came home, I found a common-looking person, all wet and muddy, looking up at our house. When she saw me coming in at the door, she called me back and said did I live here. And I said yes, and she said she knew only one or two places about here, but had lost her way and couldn't find them. Oh, what shall I do, what shall I do! They won't believe me! She didn't say any harm to me, and I didn't say any harm to her, indeed, Mrs. Snagsby!" It was necessary for her mistress to comfort her--which she did, I must say, with a good deal of contrition--before she could be got beyond this. "She could not find those places," said I. "No!" cried the girl, shaking her head. "No! Couldn't find them. And she was so faint, and lame, and miserable, Oh so wretched, that if you had seen her, Mr. Snagsby, you'd have given her half a crown, I know!" "Well, Guster, my girl," said he, at first not knowing what to say. "I hope I should." "And yet she was so well spoken," said the girl, looking at me with wide open eyes, "that it made a person's heart bleed. And so she said to me, did I know the way to the burying ground? And I asked her which burying ground. And she said, the poor burying ground. And so I told her I had been a poor child myself, and it was according to parishes. But she said she meant a poor burying ground not very far from here, where there was an archway, and a step, and an iron gate." As I watched her face and soothed her to go on, I saw that Mr. Bucket received this with a look which I could not separate from one of alarm. "Oh, dear, dear!" cried the girl, pressing her hair back with her hands. "What shall I do, what shall I do! She meant the burying ground where the man was buried that took the sleeping-stuff--that you came home and told us of, Mr. Snagsby--that frightened me so, Mrs. Snagsby. Oh, I am frightened again. Hold me!" "You are so much better now," sald I. "Pray, pray tell me more." "Yes I will, yes I will! But don't be angry with me, that's a dear lady, because I have been so ill." Angry with her, poor soul! "There! Now I will, now I will. So she said, could I tell her how to find it, and I said yes, and I told her; and she looked at me with eyes like almost as if she was blind, and herself all waving back. And so she took out the letter, and showed it me, and said if she was to put that in the post-office, it would be rubbed out and not minded and never sent; and would I take it from her, and send it, and the messenger would be paid at the house. And so I said yes, if it was no harm, and she said no--no harm. And so I took it from her, and she said she had nothing to give me, and I said I was poor myself and consequently wanted nothing. And so she said God bless you, and went." "And did she go--" "Yes," cried the girl, anticipating the inquiry. "Yes! She went the way I had shown her. Then I came in, and Mrs. Snagsby came behind me from somewhere and laid hold of me, and I was frightened." Mr. Woodcourt took her kindly from me. Mr. Bucket wrapped me up, and immediately we were in the street. Mr. Woodcourt hesitated, but I said, "Don't leave me now!" and Mr. Bucket added, "You'll be better with us, we may want you; don't lose time!" I have the most confused impressions of that walk. I recollect that it was neither night nor day, that morning was dawning but the street-lamps were not yet put out, that the sleet was still falling and that all the ways were deep with it. I recollect a few chilled people passing in the streets. I recollect the wet house-tops, the clogged and bursting gutters and water-spouts, the mounds of blackened ice and snow over which we passed, the narrowness of the courts by which we went. At the same time I remember that the poor girl seemed to be yet telling her story audibly and plainly in my hearing, that I could feel her resting on my arm, that the stained house-fronts put on human shapes and looked at me, that great water-gates seemed to be opening and closing in my head or in the air, and that the unreal things were more substantial than the real. At last we stood under a dark and miserable covered way, where one lamp was burning over an iron gate and where the morning faintly struggled in. The gate was closed. Beyond it was a burial ground--a dreadful spot in which the night was very slowly stirring, but where I could dimly see heaps of dishonoured graves and stones, hemmed in by filthy houses with a few dull lights in their windows and on whose walls a thick humidity broke out like a disease. On the step at the gate, drenched in the fearful wet of such a place, which oozed and splashed down everywhere, I saw, with a cry of pity and horror, a woman lying--Jenny, the mother of the dead child. I ran forward, but they stopped me, and Mr. Woodcourt entreated me with the greatest earnestness, even with tears, before I went up to the figure to listen for an instant to what Mr. Bucket said. I did so, as I thought. I did so, as I am sure. "Miss Summerson, you'll understand me, if you think a moment. They changed clothes at the cottage." They changed clothes at the cottage. I could repeat the words in my mind, and I knew what they meant of themselves, but I attached no meaning to them in any other connexion. "And one returned," said Mr. Bucket, "and one went on. And the one that went on only went on a certain way agreed upon to deceive and then turned across country and went home. Think a moment!" I could repeat this in my mind too, but I had not the least idea what it meant. I saw before me, lying on the step, the mother of the dead child. She lay there with one arm creeping round a bar of the iron gate and seeming to embrace it. She lay there, who had so lately spoken to my mother. She lay there, a distressed, unsheltered, senseless creature. She who had brought my mother's letter, who could give me the only clue to where my mother was; she, who was to guide us to rescue and save her whom we had sought so far, who had come to this condition by some means connected with my mother that I could not follow, and might be passing beyond our reach and help at that moment; she lay there, and they stopped me! I saw but did not comprehend the solemn and compassionate look in Mr. Woodcourt's face. I saw but did not comprehend his touching the other on the breast to keep him back. I saw him stand uncovered in the bitter air, with a reverence for something. But my understanding for all this was gone. I even heard it said between them, "Shall she go?" "She had better go. Her hands should be the first to touch her. They have a higher right than ours." I passed on to the gate and stooped down. I lifted the heavy head, put the long dank hair aside, and turned the face. And it was my mother, cold and dead. CHAPTER LX Perspective I proceed to other passages of my narrative. From the goodness of all about me I derived such consolation as I can never think of unmoved. I have already said so much of myself, and so much still remains, that I will not dwell upon my sorrow. I had an illness, but it was not a long one; and I would avoid even this mention of it if I could quite keep down the recollection of their sympathy. I proceed to other passages of my narrative. During the time of my illness, we were still in London, where Mrs. Woodcourt had come, on my guardian's invitation, to stay with us. When my guardian thought me well and cheerful enough to talk with him in our old way--though I could have done that sooner if he would have believed me--I resumed my work and my chair beside his. He had appointed the time himself, and we were alone. "Dame Trot," said he, receiving me with a kiss, "welcome to the growlery again, my dear. I have a scheme to develop, little woman. I propose to remain here, perhaps for six months, perhaps for a longer time--as it may be. Quite to settle here for a while, in short." "And in the meanwhile leave Bleak House?" said I. "Aye, my dear? Bleak House," he returned, "must learn to take care of itself." I thought his tone sounded sorrowful, but looking at him, I saw his kind face lighted up by its pleasantest smile. "Bleak House," he repeated--and his tone did NOT sound sorrowful, I found--"must learn to take care of itself. It is a long way from Ada, my dear, and Ada stands much in need of you." "It's like you, guardian," said I, "to have been taking that into consideration for a happy surprise to both of us." "Not so disinterested either, my dear, if you mean to extol me for that virtue, since if you were generally on the road, you could be seldom with me. And besides, I wish to hear as much and as often of Ada as I can in this condition of estrangement from poor Rick. Not of her alone, but of him too, poor fellow." "Have you seen Mr. Woodcourt, this morning, guardian?" "I see Mr. Woodcourt every morning, Dame Durden." "Does he still say the same of Richard?" "Just the same. He knows of no direct bodily illness that he has; on the contrary, he believes that he has none. Yet he is not easy about him; who CAN be?" My dear girl had been to see us lately every day, some times twice in a day. But we had foreseen, all along, that this would only last until I was quite myself. We knew full well that her fervent heart was as full of affection and gratitude towards her cousin John as it had ever been, and we acquitted Richard of laying any injunctions upon her to stay away; but we knew on the other hand that she felt it a part of her duty to him to be sparing of her visits at our house. My guardian's delicacy had soon perceived this and had tried to convey to her that he thought she was right. "Dear, unfortunate, mistaken Richard," said I. "When will he awake from his delusion!" "He is not in the way to do so now, my dear," replied my guardian. "The more he suffers, the more averse he will be to me, having made me the principal representative of the great occasion of his suffering." I could not help adding, "So unreasonably!" "Ah, Dame Trot, Dame Trot," returned my guardian, "what shall we find reasonable in Jarndyce and Jarndyce! Unreason and injustice at the top, unreason and injustice at the heart and at the bottom, unreason and injustice from beginning to end--if it ever has an end--how should poor Rick, always hovering near it, pluck reason out of it? He no more gathers grapes from thorns or figs from thistles than older men did in old times." His gentleness and consideration for Richard whenever we spoke of him touched me so that I was always silent on this subject very soon. "I suppose the Lord Chancellor, and the Vice Chancellors, and the whole Chancery battery of great guns would be infinitely astonished by such unreason and injustice in one of their suitors," pursued my guardian. "When those learned gentlemen begin to raise moss-roses from the powder they sow in their wigs, I shall begin to be astonished too!" He checked himself in glancing towards the window to look where the wind was and leaned on the back of my chair instead. "Well, well, little woman! To go on, my dear. This rock we must leave to time, chance, and hopeful circumstance. We must not shipwreck Ada upon it. She cannot afford, and he cannot afford, the remotest chance of another separation from a friend. Therefore I have particularly begged of Woodcourt, and I now particularly beg of you, my dear, not to move this subject with Rick. Let it rest. Next week, next month, next year, sooner or later, he will see me with clearer eyes. I can wait." But I had already discussed it with him, I confessed; and so, I thought, had Mr. Woodcourt. "So he tells me," returned my guardian. "Very good. He has made his protest, and Dame Durden has made hers, and there is nothing more to be said about it. Now I come to Mrs. Woodcourt. How do you like her, my dear?" In answer to this question, which was oddly abrupt, I said I liked her very much and thought she was more agreeable than she used to be. "I think so too," said my guardian. "Less pedigree? Not so much of Morgan ap--what's his name?" That was what I meant, I acknowledged, though he was a very harmless person, even when we had had more of him. "Still, upon the whole, he is as well in his native mountains," said my guardian. "I agree with you. Then, little woman, can I do better for a time than retain Mrs. Woodcourt here?" No. And yet-- My guardian looked at me, waiting for what I had to say. I had nothing to say. At least I had nothing in my mind that I could say. I had an undefined impression that it might have been better if we had had some other inmate, but I could hardly have explained why even to myself. Or, if to myself, certainly not to anybody else. "You see," said my guardian, "our neighbourhood is in Woodcourt's way, and he can come here to see her as often as he likes, which is agreeable to them both; and she is familiar to us and fond of you." Yes. That was undeniable. I had nothing to say against it. I could not have suggested a better arrangement, but I was not quite easy in my mind. Esther, Esther, why not? Esther, think! "It is a very good plan indeed, dear guardian, and we could not do better." "Sure, little woman?" Quite sure. I had had a moment's time to think, since I had urged that duty on myself, and I was quite sure. "Good," said my guardian. "It shall be done. Carried unanimously." "Carried unanimously," I repeated, going on with my work. It was a cover for his book-table that I happened to be ornamenting. It had been laid by on the night preceding my sad journey and never resumed. I showed it to him now, and he admired it highly. After I had explained the pattern to him and all the great effects that were to come out by and by, I thought I would go back to our last theme. "You said, dear guardian, when we spoke of Mr. Woodcourt before Ada left us, that you thought he would give a long trial to another country. Have you been advising him since?" "Yes, little woman, pretty often." "Has he decided to do so?" "I rather think not." "Some other prospect has opened to him, perhaps?" said I. "Why--yes--perhaps," returned my guardian, beginning his answer in a very deliberate manner. "About half a year hence or so, there is a medical attendant for the poor to be appointed at a certain place in Yorkshire. It is a thriving place, pleasantly situated--streams and streets, town and country, mill and moor--and seems to present an opening for such a man. I mean a man whose hopes and aims may sometimes lie (as most men's sometimes do, I dare say) above the ordinary level, but to whom the ordinary level will be high enough after all if it should prove to be a way of usefulness and good service leading to no other. All generous spirits are ambitious, I suppose, but the ambition that calmly trusts itself to such a road, instead of spasmodically trying to fly over it, is of the kind I care for. It is Woodcourt's kind." "And will he get this appointment?" I asked. "Why, little woman," returned my guardian, smiling, "not being an oracle, I cannot confidently say, but I think so. His reputation stands very high; there were people from that part of the country in the shipwreck; and strange to say, I believe the best man has the best chance. You must not suppose it to be a fine endowment. It is a very, very commonplace affair, my dear, an appointment to a great amount of work and a small amount of pay; but better things will gather about it, it may be fairly hoped." "The poor of that place will have reason to bless the choice if it falls on Mr. Woodcourt, guardian." "You are right, little woman; that I am sure they will." We said no more about it, nor did he say a word about the future of Bleak House. But it was the first time I had taken my seat at his side in my mourning dress, and that accounted for it, I considered. I now began to visit my dear girl every day in the dull dark corner where she lived. The morning was my usual time, but whenever I found I had an hour or so to spare, I put on my bonnet and bustled off to Chancery Lane. They were both so glad to see me at all hours, and used to brighten up so when they heard me opening the door and coming in (being quite at home, I never knocked), that I had no fear of becoming troublesome just yet. On these occasions I frequently found Richard absent. At other times he would be writing or reading papers in the cause at that table of his, so covered with papers, which was never disturbed. Sometimes I would come upon him lingering at the door of Mr. Vholes's office. Sometimes I would meet him in the neighbourhood lounging about and biting his nails. I often met him wandering in Lincoln's Inn, near the place where I had first seen him, oh how different, how different! That the money Ada brought him was melting away with the candles I used to see burning after dark in Mr. Vholes's office I knew very well. It was not a large amount in the beginning, he had married in debt, and I could not fail to understand, by this time, what was meant by Mr. Vholes's shoulder being at the wheel--as I still heard it was. My dear made the best of housekeepers and tried hard to save, but I knew that they were getting poorer and poorer every day. She shone in the miserable corner like a beautiful star. She adorned and graced it so that it became another place. Paler than she had been at home, and a little quieter than I had thought natural when she was yet so cheerful and hopeful, her face was so unshadowed that I half believed she was blinded by her love for Richard to his ruinous career. I went one day to dine with them while I was under this impression. As I turned into Symond's Inn, I met little Miss Flite coming out. She had been to make a stately call upon the wards in Jarndyce, as she still called them, and had derived the highest gratification from that ceremony. Ada had already told me that she called every Monday at five o'clock, with one little extra white bow in her bonnet, which never appeared there at any other time, and with her largest reticule of documents on her arm. "My dear!" she began. "So delighted! How do you do! So glad to see you. And you are going to visit our interesting Jarndyce wards? TO be sure! Our beauty is at home, my dear, and will be charmed to see you." "Then Richard is not come in yet?" said I. "I am glad of that, for I was afraid of being a little late." "No, he is not come in," returned Miss Flite. "He has had a long day in court. I left him there with Vholes. You don't like Vholes, I hope? DON'T like Vholes. Dan-gerous man!" "I am afraid you see Richard oftener than ever now," said I. "My dearest," returned Miss Flite, "daily and hourly. You know what I told you of the attraction on the Chancellor's table? My dear, next to myself he is the most constant suitor in court. He begins quite to amuse our little party. Ve-ry friendly little party, are we not?" It was miserable to hear this from her poor mad lips, though it was no surprise. "In short, my valued friend," pursued Miss Flite, advancing her lips to my ear with an air of equal patronage and mystery, "I must tell you a secret. I have made him my executor. Nominated, constituted, and appointed him. In my will. Ye-es." "Indeed?" said I. "Ye-es," repeated Miss Flite in her most genteel accents, "my executor, administrator, and assign. (Our Chancery phrases, my love.) I have reflected that if I should wear out, he will be able to watch that judgment. Being so very regular in his attendance." It made me sigh to think of him. "I did at one time mean," said Miss Flite, echoing the sigh, "to nominate, constitute, and appoint poor Gridley. Also very regular, my charming girl. I assure you, most exemplary! But he wore out, poor man, so I have appointed his successor. Don't mention it. This is in confidence." She carefully opened her reticule a little way and showed me a folded piece of paper inside as the appointment of which she spoke. "Another secret, my dear. I have added to my collection of birds." "Really, Miss Flite?" said I, knowing how it pleased her to have her confidence received with an appearance of interest. She nodded several times, and her face became overcast and gloomy. "Two more. I call them the Wards in Jarndyce. They are caged up with all the others. With Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach!" The poor soul kissed me with the most troubled look I had ever seen in her and went her way. Her manner of running over the names of her birds, as if she were afraid of hearing them even from her own lips, quite chilled me. This was not a cheering preparation for my visit, and I could have dispensed with the company of Mr. Vholes, when Richard (who arrived within a minute or two after me) brought him to share our dinner. Although it was a very plain one, Ada and Richard were for some minutes both out of the room together helping to get ready what we were to eat and drink. Mr. Vholes took that opportunity of holding a little conversation in a low voice with me. He came to the window where I was sitting and began upon Symond's Inn. "A dull place, Miss Summerson, for a life that is not an official one," said Mr. Vholes, smearing the glass with his black glove to make it clearer for me. "There is not much to see here," said I. "Nor to hear, miss," returned Mr. Vholes. "A little music does occasionally stray in, but we are not musical in the law and soon eject it. I hope Mr. Jarndyce is as well as his friends could wish him?" I thanked Mr. Vholes and said he was quite well. "I have not the pleasure to be admitted among the number of his friends myself," said Mr. Vholes, "and I am aware that the gentlemen of our profession are sometimes regarded in such quarters with an unfavourable eye. Our plain course, however, under good report and evil report, and all kinds of prejudice (we are the victims of prejudice), is to have everything openly carried on. How do you find Mr. C. looking, Miss Summerson?" "He looks very ill. Dreadfully anxious." "Just so," said Mr. Vholes. He stood behind me with his long black figure reaching nearly to the ceiling of those low rooms, feeling the pimples on his face as if they were ornaments and speaking inwardly and evenly as though there were not a human passion or emotion in his nature. "Mr. Woodcourt is in attendance upon Mr. C., I believe?" he resumed. "Mr. Woodcourt is his disinterested friend," I answered. "But I mean in professional attendance, medical attendance." "That can do little for an unhappy mind," said I. "Just so," said Mr. Vholes. So slow, so eager, so bloodless and gaunt, I felt as if Richard were wasting away beneath the eyes of this adviser and there were something of the vampire in him. "Miss Summerson," said Mr. Vholes, very slowly rubbing his gloved hands, as if, to his cold sense of touch, they were much the same in black kid or out of it, "this was an ill-advised marriage of Mr. C.'s." I begged he would excuse me from discussing it. They had been engaged when they were both very young, I told him (a little indignantly) and when the prospect before them was much fairer and brighter. When Richard had not yielded himself to the unhappy influence which now darkened his life. "Just so," assented Mr. Vholes again. "Still, with a view to everything being openly carried on, I will, with your permission, Miss Summerson, observe to you that I consider this a very ill-advised marriage indeed. I owe the opinion not only to Mr. C.'s connexions, against whom I should naturally wish to protect myself, but also to my own reputation--dear to myself as a professional man aiming to keep respectable; dear to my three girls at home, for whom I am striving to realize some little independence; dear, I will even say, to my aged father, whom it is my privilege to support." "It would become a very different marriage, a much happier and better marriage, another marriage altogether, Mr. Vholes," said I, "if Richard were persuaded to turn his back on the fatal pursuit in which you are engaged with him." Mr. Vholes, with a noiseless cough--or rather gasp--into one of his black gloves, inclined his head as if he did not wholly dispute even that. "Miss Summerson," he said, "it may be so; and I freely admit that the young lady who has taken Mr. C.'s name upon herself in so ill-advised a manner--you will I am sure not quarrel with me for throwing out that remark again, as a duty I owe to Mr. C.'s connexions--is a highly genteel young lady. Business has prevented me from mixing much with general society in any but a professional character; still I trust I am competent to perceive that she is a highly genteel young lady. As to beauty, I am not a judge of that myself, and I never did give much attention to it from a boy, but I dare say the young lady is equally eligible in that point of view. She is considered so (I have heard) among the clerks in the Inn, and it is a point more in their way than in mine. In reference to Mr. C.'s pursuit of his interests--" "Oh! His interests, Mr. Vholes!" "Pardon me," returned Mr. Vholes, going on in exactly the same inward and dispassionate manner. "Mr. C. takes certain interests under certain wills disputed in the suit. It is a term we use. In reference to Mr. C,'s pursuit of his interests, I mentioned to you, Miss Summerson, the first time I had the pleasure of seeing you, in my desire that everything should be openly carried on--I used those words, for I happened afterwards to note them in my diary, which is producible at any time--I mentioned to you that Mr. C. had laid down the principle of watching his own interests, and that when a client of mine laid down a principle which was not of an immoral (that is to say, unlawful) nature, it devolved upon me to carry it out. I HAVE carried it out; I do carry it out. But I will not smooth things over to any connexion of Mr. C.'s on any account. As open as I was to Mr. Jarndyce, I am to you. I regard it in the light of a professional duty to be so, though it can be charged to no one. I openly say, unpalatable as it may be, that I consider Mr. C.'s affairs in a very bad way, that I consider Mr. C. himself in a very bad way, and that I regard this as an exceedingly ill-advised marriage. Am I here, sir? Yes, I thank you; I am here, Mr. C., and enjoying the pleasure of some agreeable conversation with Miss Summerson, for which I have to thank you very much, sir!" He broke off thus in answer to Richard, who addressed him as he came into the room. By this time I too well understood Mr. Vholes's scrupulous way of saving himself and his respectability not to feel that our worst fears did but keep pace with his client's progress. We sat down to dinner, and I had an opportunity of observing Richard, anxiously. I was not disturbed by Mr. Vholes (who took off his gloves to dine), though he sat opposite to me at the small table, for I doubt if, looking up at all, he once removed his eyes from his host's face. I found Richard thin and languid, slovenly in his dress, abstracted in his manner, forcing his spirits now and then, and at other intervals relapsing into a dull thoughtfulness. About his large bright eyes that used to be so merry there was a wanness and a restlessness that changed them altogether. I cannot use the expression that he looked old. There is a ruin of youth which is not like age, and into such a ruin Richard's youth and youthful beauty had all fallen away. He ate little and seemed indifferent what it was, showed himself to be much more impatient than he used to be, and was quick even with Ada. I thought at first that his old light-hearted manner was all gone, but it shone out of him sometimes as I had occasionally known little momentary glimpses of my own old face to look out upon me from the glass. His laugh had not quite left him either, but it was like the echo of a joyful sound, and that is always sorrowful. Yet he was as glad as ever, in his old affectionate way, to have me there, and we talked of the old times pleasantly. These did not appear to be interesting to Mr. Vholes, though he occasionally made a gasp which I believe was his smile. He rose shortly after dinner and said that with the permission of the ladies he would retire to his office. "Always devoted to business, Vholes!" cried Richard. "Yes, Mr. C.," he returned, "the interests of clients are never to be neglected, sir. They are paramount in the thoughts of a professional man like myself, who wishes to preserve a good name among his fellow-practitioners and society at large. My denying myself the pleasure of the present agreeable conversation may not be wholly irrespective of your own interests, Mr. C." Richard expressed himself quite sure of that and lighted Mr. Vholes out. On his return he told us, more than once, that Vholes was a good fellow, a safe fellow, a man who did what he pretended to do, a very good fellow indeed! He was so defiant about it that it struck me he had begun to doubt Mr. Vholes. Then he threw himself on the sofa, tired out; and Ada and I put things to rights, for they had no other servant than the woman who attended to the chambers. My dear girl had a cottage piano there and quietly sat down to sing some of Richard's favourites, the lamp being first removed into the next room, as he complained of its hurting his eyes. I sat between them, at my dear girl's side, and felt very melancholy listening to her sweet voice. I think Richard did too; I think he darkened the room for that reason. She had been singing some time, rising between whiles to bend over him and speak to him, when Mr. Woodcourt came in. Then he sat down by Richard and half playfully, half earnestly, quite naturally and easily, found out how he felt and where he had been all day. Presently he proposed to accompany him in a short walk on one of the bridges, as it was a moonlight airy night; and Richard readily consenting, they went out together. They left my dear girl still sitting at the piano and me still sitting beside her. When they were gone out, I drew my arm round her waist. She put her left hand in mine (I was sitting on that side), but kept her right upon the keys, going over and over them without striking any note. "Esther, my dearest," she said, breaking silence, "Richard is never so well and I am never so easy about him as when he is with Allan Woodcourt. We have to thank you for that." I pointed out to my darling how this could scarcely be, because Mr. Woodcourt had come to her cousin John's house and had known us all there, and because he had always liked Richard, and Richard had always liked him, and--and so forth. "All true," said Ada, "but that he is such a devoted friend to us we owe to you." I thought it best to let my dear girl have her way and to say no more about it. So I said as much. I said it lightly, because I felt her trembling. "Esther, my dearest, I want to be a good wife, a very, very good wife indeed. You shall teach me." I teach! I said no more, for I noticed the hand that was fluttering over the keys, and I knew that it was not I who ought to speak, that it was she who had something to say to me. "When I married Richard I was not insensible to what was before him. I had been perfectly happy for a long time with you, and I had never known any trouble or anxiety, so loved and cared for, but I understood the danger he was in, dear Esther." "I know, I know, my darling." "When we were married I had some little hope that I might be able to convince him of his mistake, that he might come to regard it in a new way as my husband and not pursue it all the more desperately for my sake--as he does. But if I had not had that hope, I would have married him just the same, Esther. Just the same!" In the momentary firmness of the hand that was never still--a firmness inspired by the utterance of these last words, and dying away with them--I saw the confirmation of her earnest tones. "You are not to think, my dearest Esther, that I fail to see what you see and fear what you fear. No one can understand him better than I do. The greatest wisdom that ever lived in the world could scarcely know Richard better than my love does." She spoke so modestly and softly and her trembling hand expressed such agitation as it moved to and fro upon the silent notes! My dear, dear girl! "I see him at his worst every day. I watch him in his sleep. I know every change of his face. But when I married Richard I was quite determined, Esther, if heaven would help me, never to show him that I grieved for what he did and so to make him more unhappy. I want him, when he comes home, to find no trouble in my face. I want him, when he looks at me, to see what he loved in me. I married him to do this, and this supports me." I felt her trembling more. I waited for what was yet to come, and I now thought I began to know what it was. "And something else supports me, Esther." She stopped a minute. Stopped speaking only; her hand was still in motion. "I look forward a little while, and I don't know what great aid may come to me. When Richard turns his eyes upon me then, there may be something lying on my breast more eloquent than I have been, with greater power than mine to show him his true course and win him back." Her hand stopped now. She clasped me in her arms, and I clasped her in mine. "If that little creature should fail too, Esther, I still look forward. I look forward a long while, through years and years, and think that then, when I am growing old, or when I am dead perhaps, a beautiful woman, his daughter, happily married, may be proud of him and a blessing to him. Or that a generous brave man, as handsome as he used to be, as hopeful, and far more happy, may walk in the sunshine with him, honouring his grey head and saying to himself, 'I thank God this is my father! Ruined by a fatal inheritance, and restored through me!'" Oh, my sweet girl, what a heart was that which beat so fast against me! "These hopes uphold me, my dear Esther, and I know they will. Though sometimes even they depart from me before a dread that arises when I look at Richard." I tried to cheer my darling, and asked her what it was. Sobbing and weeping, she replied, "That he may not live to see his child." CHAPTER LXI A Discovery The days when I frequented that miserable corner which my dear girl brightened can never fade in my remembrance. I never see it, and I never wish to see it now; I have been there only once since, but in my memory there is a mournful glory shining on the place which will shine for ever. Not a day passed without my going there, of course. At first I found Mr. Skimpole there, on two or three occasions, idly playing the piano and talking in his usual vivacious strain. Now, besides my very much mistrusting the probability of his being there without making Richard poorer, I felt as if there were something in his careless gaiety too inconsistent with what I knew of the depths of Ada's life. I clearly perceived, too, that Ada shared my feelings. I therefore resolved, after much thinking of it, to make a private visit to Mr. Skimpole and try delicately to explain myself. My dear girl was the great consideration that made me bold. I set off one morning, accompanied by Charley, for Somers Town. As I approached the house, I was strongly inclined to turn back, for I felt what a desperate attempt it was to make an impression on Mr. Skimpole and how extremely likely it was that he would signally defeat me. However, I thought that being there, I would go through with it. I knocked with a trembling hand at Mr. Skimpole's door--literally with a hand, for the knocker was gone--and after a long parley gained admission from an Irishwoman, who was in the area when I knocked, breaking up the lid of a water-butt with a poker to light the fire with. Mr. Skimpole, lying on the sofa in his room, playing the flute a little, was enchanted to see me. Now, who should receive me, he asked. Who would I prefer for mistress of the ceremonies? Would I have his Comedy daughter, his Beauty daughter, or his Sentiment daughter? Or would I have all the daughters at once in a perfect nosegay? I replied, half defeated already, that I wished to speak to himself only if he would give me leave. "My dear Miss Summerson, most joyfully! Of course," he said, bringing his chair nearer mine and breaking into his fascinating smile, "of course it's not business. Then it's pleasure!" I said it certainly was not business that I came upon, but it was not quite a pleasant matter. "Then, my dear Miss Summerson," said he with the frankest gaiety, "don't allude to it. Why should you allude to anything that is NOT a pleasant matter? I never do. And you are a much pleasanter creature, in every point of view, than I. You are perfectly pleasant; I am imperfectly pleasant; then, if I never allude to an unpleasant matter, how much less should you! So that's disposed of, and we will talk of something else." Although I was embarrassed, I took courage to intimate that I still wished to pursue the subject. "I should think it a mistake," said Mr. Skimpole with his airy laugh, "if I thought Miss Summerson capable of making one. But I don't!" "Mr. Skimpole," said I, raising my eyes to his, "I have so often heard you say that you are unacquainted with the common affairs of life--" "Meaning our three banking-house friends, L, S, and who's the junior partner? D?" said Mr. Skimpole, brightly. "Not an idea of them!" "--That perhaps," I went on, "you will excuse my boldness on that account. I think you ought most seriously to know that Richard is poorer than he was." "Dear me!" said Mr. Skimpole. "So am I, they tell me." "And in very embarrassed circumstances." "Parallel case, exactly!" said Mr. Skimpole with a delighted countenance. "This at present naturally causes Ada much secret anxiety, and as I think she is less anxious when no claims are made upon her by visitors, and as Richard has one uneasiness always heavy on his mind, it has occurred to me to take the liberty of saying that--if you would--not--" I was coming to the point with great difficulty when he took me by both hands and with a radiant face and in the liveliest way anticipated it. "Not go there? Certainly not, my dear Miss Summerson, most assuredly not. Why SHOULD I go there? When I go anywhere, I go for pleasure. I don't go anywhere for pain, because I was made for pleasure. Pain comes to ME when it wants me. Now, I have had very little pleasure at our dear Richard's lately, and your practical sagacity demonstrates why. Our young friends, losing the youthful poetry which was once so captivating in them, begin to think, 'This is a man who wants pounds.' So I am; I always want pounds; not for myself, but because tradespeople always want them of me. Next, our young friends begin to think, becoming mercenary, 'This is the man who HAD pounds, who borrowed them,' which I did. I always borrow pounds. So our young friends, reduced to prose (which is much to be regretted), degenerate in their power of imparting pleasure to me. Why should I go to see them, therefore? Absurd!" Through the beaming smile with which he regarded me as he reasoned thus, there now broke forth a look of disinterested benevolence quite astonishing. "Besides," he said, pursuing his argument in his tone of light-hearted conviction, "if I don't go anywhere for pain--which would be a perversion of the intention of my being, and a monstrous thing to do--why should I go anywhere to be the cause of pain? If I went to see our young friends in their present ill-regulated state of mind, I should give them pain. The associations with me would be disagreeable. They might say, 'This is the man who had pounds and who can't pay pounds,' which I can't, of course; nothing could be more out of the question! Then kindness requires that I shouldn't go near them--and I won't." He finished by genially kissing my hand and thanking me. Nothing but Miss Summerson's fine tact, he said, would have found this out for him. I was much disconcerted, but I reflected that if the main point were gained, it mattered little how strangely he perverted everything leading to it. I had determined to mention something else, however, and I thought I was not to be put off in that. "Mr. Skimpole," said I, "I must take the liberty of saying before I conclude my visit that I was much surprised to learn, on the best authority, some little time ago, that you knew with whom that poor boy left Bleak House and that you accepted a present on that occasion. I have not mentioned it to my guardian, for I fear it would hurt him unnecessarily; but I may say to you that I was much surprised." "No? Really surprised, my dear Miss Summerson?" he returned inquiringly, raising his pleasant eyebrows. "Greatly surprised." He thought about it for a little while with a highly agreeable and whimsical expression of face, then quite gave it up and said in his most engaging manner, "You know what a child I am. Why surprised?" I was reluctant to enter minutely into that question, but as he begged I would, for he was really curious to know, I gave him to understand in the gentlest words I could use that his conduct seemed to involve a disregard of several moral obligations. He was much amused and interested when he heard this and said, "No, really?" with ingenuous simplicity. "You know I don't intend to be responsible. I never could do it. Responsibility is a thing that has always been above me--or below me," said Mr. Skimpole. "I don't even know which; but as I understand the way in which my dear Miss Summerson (always remarkable for her practical good sense and clearness) puts this case, I should imagine it was chiefly a question of money, do you know?" I incautiously gave a qualified assent to this. "Ah! Then you see," said Mr. Skimpole, shaking his head, "I am hopeless of understanding it." I suggested, as I rose to go, that it was not right to betray my guardian's confidence for a bribe. "My dear Miss Summerson," he returned with a candid hilarity that was all his own, "I can't be bribed." "Not by Mr. Bucket?" said I. "No," said he. "Not by anybody. I don't attach any value to money. I don't care about it, I don't know about it, I don't want it, I don't keep it--it goes away from me directly. How can I be bribed?" I showed that I was of a different opinion, though I had not the capacity for arguing the question. "On the contrary," said Mr. Skimpole, "I am exactly the man to be placed in a superior position in such a case as that. I am above the rest of mankind in such a case as that. I can act with philosophy in such a case as that. I am not warped by prejudices, as an Italian baby is by bandages. I am as free as the air. I feel myself as far above suspicion as Caesar's wife." Anything to equal the lightness of his manner and the playful impartiality with which he seemed to convince himself, as he tossed the matter about like a ball of feathers, was surely never seen in anybody else! "Observe the case, my dear Miss Summerson. Here is a boy received into the house and put to bed in a state that I strongly object to. The boy being in bed, a man arrives--like the house that Jack built. Here is the man who demands the boy who is received into the house and put to bed in a state that I strongly object to. Here is a bank-note produced by the man who demands the boy who is received into the house and put to bed in a state that I strongly object to. Here is the Skimpole who accepts the bank-note produced by the man who demands the boy who is received into the house and put to bed in a state that I strongly object to. Those are the facts. Very well. Should the Skimpole have refused the note? WHY should the Skimpole have refused the note? Skimpole protests to Bucket, 'What's this for? I don't understand it, it is of no use to me, take it away.' Bucket still entreats Skimpole to accept it. Are there reasons why Skimpole, not being warped by prejudices, should accept it? Yes. Skimpole perceives them. What are they? Skimpole reasons with himself, this is a tamed lynx, an active police-officer, an intelligent man, a person of a peculiarly directed energy and great subtlety both of conception and execution, who discovers our friends and enemies for us when they run away, recovers our property for us when we are robbed, avenges us comfortably when we are murdered. This active police-officer and intelligent man has acquired, in the exercise of his art, a strong faith in money; he finds it very useful to him, and he makes it very useful to society. Shall I shake that faith in Bucket because I want it myself; shall I deliberately blunt one of Bucket's weapons; shall I positively paralyse Bucket in his next detective operation? And again. If it is blameable in Skimpole to take the note, it is blameable in Bucket to offer the note--much more blameable in Bucket, because he is the knowing man. Now, Skimpole wishes to think well of Bucket; Skimpole deems it essential, in its little place, to the general cohesion of things, that he SHOULD think well of Bucket. The state expressly asks him to trust to Bucket. And he does. And that's all he does!" I had nothing to offer in reply to this exposition and therefore took my leave. Mr. Skimpole, however, who was in excellent spirits, would not hear of my returning home attended only by "Little Coavinses," and accompanied me himself. He entertained me on the way with a variety of delightful conversation and assured me, at parting, that he should never forget the fine tact with which I had found that out for him about our young friends. As it so happened that I never saw Mr. Skimpole again, I may at once finish what I know of his history. A coolness arose between him and my guardian, based principally on the foregoing grounds and on his having heartlessly disregarded my guardian's entreaties (as we afterwards learned from Ada) in reference to Richard. His being heavily in my guardian's debt had nothing to do with their separation. He died some five years afterwards and left a diary behind him, with letters and other materials towards his life, which was published and which showed him to have been the victim of a combination on the part of mankind against an amiable child. It was considered very pleasant reading, but I never read more of it myself than the sentence on which I chanced to light on opening the book. It was this: "Jarndyce, in common with most other men I have known, is the incarnation of selfishness." And now I come to a part of my story touching myself very nearly indeed, and for which I was quite unprepared when the circumstance occurred. Whatever little lingerings may have now and then revived in my mind associated with my poor old face had only revived as belonging to a part of my life that was gone--gone like my infancy or my childhood. I have suppressed none of my many weaknesses on that subject, but have written them as faithfully as my memory has recalled them. And I hope to do, and mean to do, the same down to the last words of these pages, which I see now not so very far before me. The months were gliding away, and my dear girl, sustained by the hopes she had confided in me, was the same beautiful star in the miserable corner. Richard, more worn and haggard, haunted the court day after day, listlessly sat there the whole day long when he knew there was no remote chance of the suit being mentioned, and became one of the stock sights of the place. I wonder whether any of the gentlemen remembered him as he was when he first went there. So completely was he absorbed in his fixed idea that he used to avow in his cheerful moments that he should never have breathed the fresh air now "but for Woodcourt." It was only Mr. Woodcourt who could occasionally divert his attention for a few hours at a time and rouse him, even when he sunk into a lethargy of mind and body that alarmed us greatly, and the returns of which became more frequent as the months went on. My dear girl was right in saying that he only pursued his errors the more desperately for her sake. I have no doubt that his desire to retrieve what he had lost was rendered the more intense by his grief for his young wife, and became like the madness of a gamester. I was there, as I have mentioned, at all hours. When I was there at night, I generally went home with Charley in a coach; sometimes my guardian would meet me in the neighbourhood, and we would walk home together. One evening he had arranged to meet me at eight o'clock. I could not leave, as I usually did, quite punctually at the time, for I was working for my dear girl and had a few stitches more to do to finish what I was about; but it was within a few minutes of the hour when I bundled up my little work-basket, gave my darling my last kiss for the night, and hurried downstairs. Mr. Woodcourt went with me, as it was dusk. When we came to the usual place of meeting--it was close by, and Mr. Woodcourt had often accompanied me before--my guardian was not there. We waited half an hour, walking up and down, but there were no signs of him. We agreed that he was either prevented from coming or that he had come and gone away, and Mr. Woodcourt proposed to walk home with me. It was the first walk we had ever taken together, except that very short one to the usual place of meeting. We spoke of Richard and Ada the whole way. I did not thank him in words for what he had done--my appreciation of it had risen above all words then--but I hoped he might not be without some understanding of what I felt so strongly. Arriving at home and going upstairs, we found that my guardian was out and that Mrs. Woodcourt was out too. We were in the very same room into which I had brought my blushing girl when her youthful lover, now her so altered husband, was the choice of her young heart, the very same room from which my guardian and I had watched them going away through the sunlight in the fresh bloom of their hope and promise. We were standing by the opened window looking down into the street when Mr. Woodcourt spoke to me. I learned in a moment that he loved me. I learned in a moment that my scarred face was all unchanged to him. I learned in a moment that what I had thought was pity and compassion was devoted, generous, faithful love. Oh, too late to know it now, too late, too late. That was the first ungrateful thought I had. Too late. "When I returned," he told me, "when I came back, no richer than when I went away, and found you newly risen from a sick bed, yet so inspired by sweet consideration for others and so free from a selfish thought--" "Oh, Mr. Woodcourt, forbear, forbear!" I entreated him. "I do not deserve your high praise. I had many selfish thoughts at that time, many!" "Heaven knows, beloved of my life," said he, "that my praise is not a lover's praise, but the truth. You do not know what all around you see in Esther Summerson, how many hearts she touches and awakens, what sacred admiration and what love she wins." "Oh, Mr. Woodcourt," cried I, "it is a great thing to win love, it is a great thing to win love! I am proud of it, and honoured by it; and the hearing of it causes me to shed these tears of mingled joy and sorrow--joy that I have won it, sorrow that I have not deserved it better; but I am not free to think of yours." I said it with a stronger heart, for when he praised me thus and when I heard his voice thrill with his belief that what he said was true, I aspired to be more worthy of it. It was not too late for that. Although I closed this unforeseen page in my life to-night, I could be worthier of it all through my life. And it was a comfort to me, and an impulse to me, and I felt a dignity rise up within me that was derived from him when I thought so. He broke the silence. "I should poorly show the trust that I have in the dear one who will evermore be as dear to me as now"--and the deep earnestness with which he said it at once strengthened me and made me weep--"if, after her assurance that she is not free to think of my love, I urged it. Dear Esther, let me only tell you that the fond idea of you which I took abroad was exalted to the heavens when I came home. I have always hoped, in the first hour when I seemed to stand in any ray of good fortune, to tell you this. I have always feared that I should tell it you in vain. My hopes and fears are both fulfilled to-night. I distress you. I have said enough." Something seemed to pass into my place that was like the angel he thought me, and I felt so sorrowful for the loss he had sustained! I wished to help him in his trouble, as I had wished to do when he showed that first commiseration for me. "Dear Mr. Woodcourt," said I, "before we part to-night, something is left for me to say. I never could say it as I wish--I never shall--but--" I had to think again of being more deserving of his love and his affliction before I could go on. "--I am deeply sensible of your generosity, and I shall treasure its remembrance to my dying hour. I know full well how changed I am, I know you are not unacquainted with my history, and I know what a noble love that is which is so faithful. What you have said to me could have affected me so much from no other lips, for there are none that could give it such a value to me. It shall not be lost. It shall make me better." He covered his eyes with his hand and turned away his head. How could I ever be worthy of those tears? "If, in the unchanged intercourse we shall have together--in tending Richard and Ada, and I hope in many happier scenes of life--you ever find anything in me which you can honestly think is better than it used to be, believe that it will have sprung up from to-night and that I shall owe it to you. And never believe, dear dear Mr. Woodcourt, never believe that I forget this night or that while my heart beats it can be insensible to the pride and joy of having been beloved by you." He took my hand and kissed it. He was like himself again, and I felt still more encouraged. "I am induced by what you said just now," said I, "to hope that you have succeeded in your endeavour." "I have," he answered. "With such help from Mr. Jarndyce as you who know him so well can imagine him to have rendered me, I have succeeded." "Heaven bless him for it," said I, giving him my hand; "and heaven bless you in all you do!" "I shall do it better for the wish," he answered; "it will make me enter on these new duties as on another sacred trust from you." "Ah! Richard!" I exclaimed involuntarily, "What will he do when you are gone!" "I am not required to go yet; I would not desert him, dear Miss Summerson, even if I were." One other thing I felt it needful to touch upon before he left me. I knew that I should not be worthier of the love I could not take if I reserved it. "Mr. Woodcourt," said I, "you will be glad to know from my lips before I say good night that in the future, which is clear and bright before me, I am most happy, most fortunate, have nothing to regret or desire." It was indeed a glad hearing to him, he replied. "From my childhood I have been," said I, "the object of the untiring goodness of the best of human beings, to whom I am so bound by every tie of attachment, gratitude, and love, that nothing I could do in the compass of a life could express the feelings of a single day." "I share those feelings," he returned. "You speak of Mr. Jarndyce." "You know his virtues well," said I, "but few can know the greatness of his character as I know it. All its highest and best qualities have been revealed to me in nothing more brightly than in the shaping out of that future in which I am so happy. And if your highest homage and respect had not been his already--which I know they are--they would have been his, I think, on this assurance and in the feeling it would have awakened in you towards him for my sake." He fervently replied that indeed indeed they would have been. I gave him my hand again. "Good night," I said, "Good-bye." "The first until we meet to-morrow, the second as a farewell to this theme between us for ever." "Yes." "Good night; good-bye." He left me, and I stood at the dark window watching the street. His love, in all its constancy and generosity, had come so suddenly upon me that he had not left me a minute when my fortitude gave way again and the street was blotted out by my rushing tears. But they were not tears of regret and sorrow. No. He had called me the beloved of his life and had said I would be evermore as dear to him as I was then, and I felt as if my heart would not hold the triumph of having heard those words. My first wild thought had died away. It was not too late to hear them, for it was not too late to be animated by them to be good, true, grateful, and contented. How easy my path, how much easier than his! CHAPTER LXII Another Discovery I had not the courage to see any one that night. I had not even the courage to see myself, for I was afraid that my tears might a little reproach me. I went up to my room in the dark, and prayed in the dark, and lay down in the dark to sleep. I had no need of any light to read my guardian's letter by, for I knew it by heart. I took it from the place where I kept it, and repeated its contents by its own clear light of integrity and love, and went to sleep with it on my pillow. I was up very early in the morning and called Charley to come for a walk. We bought flowers for the breakfast-table, and came back and arranged them, and were as busy as possible. We were so early that I had a good time still for Charley's lesson before breakfast; Charley (who was not in the least improved in the old defective article of grammar) came through it with great applause; and we were altogether very notable. When my guardian appeared he said, "Why, little woman, you look fresher than your flowers!" And Mrs. Woodcourt repeated and translated a passage from the Mewlinnwillinwodd expressive of my being like a mountain with the sun upon it. This was all so pleasant that I hope it made me still more like the mountain than I had been before. After breakfast I waited my opportunity and peeped about a little until I saw my guardian in his own room--the room of last night--by himself. Then I made an excuse to go in with my housekeeping keys, shutting the door after me. "Well, Dame Durden?" said my guardian; the post had brought him several letters, and he was writing. "You want money?" "No, indeed, I have plenty in hand." "There never was such a Dame Durden," said my guardian, "for making money last." He had laid down his pen and leaned back in his chair looking at me. I have often spoken of his bright face, but I thought I had never seen it look so bright and good. There was a high happiness upon it which made me think, "He has been doing some great kindness this morning." "There never was," said my guardian, musing as he smiled upon me, "such a Dame Durden for making money last." He had never yet altered his old manner. I loved it and him so much that when I now went up to him and took my usual chair, which was always put at his side--for sometimes I read to him, and sometimes I talked to him, and sometimes I silently worked by him--I hardly liked to disturb it by laying my hand on his breast. But I found I did not disturb it at all. "Dear guardian," said I, "I want to speak to you. Have I been remiss in anything?" "Remiss in anything, my dear!" "Have I not been what I have meant to be since--I brought the answer to your letter, guardian?" "You have been everything I could desire, my love." "I am very glad indeed to hear that," I returned. "You know, you said to me, was this the mistress of Bleak House. And I said, yes." "Yes," said my guardian, nodding his head. He had put his arm about me as if there were something to protect me from and looked in my face, smiling. "Since then," said I, "we have never spoken on the subject except once." "And then I said Bleak House was thinning fast; and so it was, my dear." "And I said," I timidly reminded him, "but its mistress remained." He still held me in the same protecting manner and with the same bright goodness in his face. "Dear guardian," said I, "I know how you have felt all that has happened, and how considerate you have been. As so much time has passed, and as you spoke only this morning of my being so well again, perhaps you expect me to renew the subject. Perhaps I ought to do so. I will be the mistress of Bleak House when you please." "See," he returned gaily, "what a sympathy there must be between us! I have had nothing else, poor Rick excepted--it's a large exception--in my mind. When you came in, I was full of it. When shall we give Bleak House its mistress, little woman?" "When you please." "Next month?" "Next month, dear guardian." "The day on which I take the happiest and best step of my life--the day on which I shall be a man more exulting and more enviable than any other man in the world--the day on which I give Bleak House its little mistress--shall be next month then," said my guardian. I put my arms round his neck and kissed him just as I had done on the day when I brought my answer. A servant came to the door to announce Mr. Bucket, which was quite unnecessary, for Mr. Bucket was already looking in over the servant's shoulder. "Mr. Jarndyce and Miss Summerson," said he, rather out of breath, "with all apologies for intruding, WILL you allow me to order up a person that's on the stairs and that objects to being left there in case of becoming the subject of observations in his absence? Thank you. Be so good as chair that there member in this direction, will you?" said Mr. Bucket, beckoning over the banisters. This singular request produced an old man in a black skull-cap, unable to walk, who was carried up by a couple of bearers and deposited in the room near the door. Mr. Bucket immediately got rid of the bearers, mysteriously shut the door, and bolted it. "Now you see, Mr. Jarndyce," he then began, putting down his hat and opening his subject with a flourish of his well-remembered finger, "you know me, and Miss Summerson knows me. This gentleman likewise knows me, and his name is Smallweed. The discounting line is his line principally, and he's what you may call a dealer in bills. That's about what YOU are, you know, ain't you?" said Mr. Bucket, stopping a little to address the gentleman in question, who was exceedingly suspicious of him. He seemed about to dispute this designation of himself when he was seized with a violent fit of coughing. "Now, moral, you know!" said Mr. Bucket, improving the accident. "Don't you contradict when there ain't no occasion, and you won't be took in that way. Now, Mr. Jarndyce, I address myself to you. I've been negotiating with this gentleman on behalf of Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, and one way and another I've been in and out and about his premises a deal. His premises are the premises formerly occupied by Krook, marine store dealer--a relation of this gentleman's that you saw in his lifetime if I don't mistake?" My guardian replied, "Yes." "Well! You are to understand," said Mr. Bucket, "that this gentleman he come into Krook's property, and a good deal of magpie property there was. Vast lots of waste-paper among the rest. Lord bless you, of no use to nobody!" The cunning of Mr. Bucket's eye and the masterly manner in which he contrived, without a look or a word against which his watchful auditor could protest, to let us know that he stated the case according to previous agreement and could say much more of Mr. Smallweed if he thought it advisable, deprived us of any merit in quite understanding him. His difficulty was increased by Mr. Smallweed's being deaf as well as suspicious and watching his face with the closest attention. "Among them odd heaps of old papers, this gentleman, when he comes into the property, naturally begins to rummage, don't you see?" said Mr. Bucket. "To which? Say that again," cried Mr. Smallweed in a shrill, sharp voice. "To rummage," repeated Mr. Bucket. "Being a prudent man and accustomed to take care of your own affairs, you begin to rummage among the papers as you have come into; don't you?" "Of course I do," cried Mr. Smallweed. "Of course you do," said Mr. Bucket conversationally, "and much to blame you would be if you didn't. And so you chance to find, you know," Mr. Bucket went on, stooping over him with an air of cheerful raillery which Mr. Smallweed by no means reciprocated, "and so you chance to find, you know, a paper with the signature of Jarndyce to it. Don't you?" Mr. Smallweed glanced with a troubled eye at us and grudgingly nodded assent. "And coming to look at that paper at your full leisure and convenience--all in good time, for you're not curious to read it, and why should you be?--what do you find it to be but a will, you see. That's the drollery of it," said Mr. Bucket with the same lively air of recalling a joke for the enjoyment of Mr. Smallweed, who still had the same crest-fallen appearance of not enjoying it at all; "what do you find it to be but a will?" "I don't know that it's good as a will or as anything else," snarled Mr. Smallweed. Mr. Bucket eyed the old man for a moment--he had slipped and shrunk down in his chair into a mere bundle--as if he were much disposed to pounce upon him; nevertheless, he continued to bend over him with the same agreeable air, keeping the corner of one of his eyes upon us. "Notwithstanding which," said Mr. Bucket, "you get a little doubtful and uncomfortable in your mind about it, having a very tender mind of your own." "Eh? What do you say I have got of my own?" asked Mr. Smallweed with his hand to his ear. "A very tender mind." "Ho! Well, go on," said Mr. Smallweed. "And as you've heard a good deal mentioned regarding a celebrated Chancery will case of the same name, and as you know what a card Krook was for buying all manner of old pieces of furniter, and books, and papers, and what not, and never liking to part with 'em, and always a-going to teach himself to read, you begin to think--and you never was more correct in your born days--'Ecod, if I don't look about me, I may get into trouble regarding this will.'" "Now, mind how you put it, Bucket," cried the old man anxiously with his hand at his ear. "Speak up; none of your brimstone tricks. Pick me up; I want to hear better. Oh, Lord, I am shaken to bits!" Mr. Bucket had certainly picked him up at a dart. However, as soon as he could be heard through Mr. Smallweed's coughing and his vicious ejaculations of "Oh, my bones! Oh, dear! I've no breath in my body! I'm worse than the chattering, clattering, brimstone pig at home!" Mr. Bucket proceeded in the same convivial manner as before. "So, as I happen to be in the habit of coming about your premises, you take me into your confidence, don't you?" I think it would be impossible to make an admission with more ill will and a worse grace than Mr. Smallweed displayed when he admitted this, rendering it perfectly evident that Mr. Bucket was the very last person he would have thought of taking into his confidence if he could by any possibility have kept him out of it. "And I go into the business with you--very pleasant we are over it; and I confirm you in your well-founded fears that you will get yourself into a most precious line if you don't come out with that there will," said Mr. Bucket emphatically; "and accordingly you arrange with me that it shall be delivered up to this present Mr. Jarndyce, on no conditions. If it should prove to be valuable, you trusting yourself to him for your reward; that's about where it is, ain't it?" "That's what was agreed," Mr. Smallweed assented with the same bad grace. "In consequence of which," said Mr. Bucket, dismissing his agreeable manner all at once and becoming strictly business-like, "you've got that will upon your person at the present time, and the only thing that remains for you to do is just to out with it!" Having given us one glance out of the watching corner of his eye, and having given his nose one triumphant rub with his forefinger, Mr. Bucket stood with his eyes fastened on his confidential friend and his hand stretched forth ready to take the paper and present it to my guardian. It was not produced without much reluctance and many declarations on the part of Mr. Smallweed that he was a poor industrious man and that he left it to Mr. Jarndyce's honour not to let him lose by his honesty. Little by little he very slowly took from a breast-pocket a stained, discoloured paper which was much singed upon the outside and a little burnt at the edges, as if it had long ago been thrown upon a fire and hastily snatched off again. Mr. Bucket lost no time in transferring this paper, with the dexterity of a conjuror, from Mr. Smallweed to Mr. Jarndyce. As he gave it to my guardian, he whispered behind his fingers, "Hadn't settled how to make their market of it. Quarrelled and hinted about it. I laid out twenty pound upon it. First the avaricious grandchildren split upon him on account of their objections to his living so unreasonably long, and then they split on one another. Lord! There ain't one of the family that wouldn't sell the other for a pound or two, except the old lady--and she's only out of it because she's too weak in her mind to drive a bargain." "Mr Bucket," said my guardian aloud, "whatever the worth of this paper may be to any one, my obligations are great to you; and if it be of any worth, I hold myself bound to see Mr. Smallweed remunerated accordingly." "Not according to your merits, you know," said Mr. Bucket in friendly explanation to Mr. Smallweed. "Don't you be afraid of that. According to its value." "That is what I mean," said my guardian. "You may observe, Mr. Bucket, that I abstain from examining this paper myself. The plain truth is, I have forsworn and abjured the whole business these many years, and my soul is sick of it. But Miss Summerson and I will immediately place the paper in the hands of my solicitor in the cause, and its existence shall be made known without delay to all other parties interested." "Mr. Jarndyce can't say fairer than that, you understand," observed Mr. Bucket to his fellow-visitor. "And it being now made clear to you that nobody's a-going to be wronged--which must be a great relief to YOUR mind--we may proceed with the ceremony of chairing you home again." He unbolted the door, called in the bearers, wished us good morning, and with a look full of meaning and a crook of his finger at parting went his way. We went our way too, which was to Lincoln's Inn, as quickly as possible. Mr. Kenge was disengaged, and we found him at his table in his dusty room with the inexpressive-looking books and the piles of papers. Chairs having been placed for us by Mr. Guppy, Mr. Kenge expressed the surprise and gratification he felt at the unusual sight of Mr. Jarndyce in his office. He turned over his double eye-glass as he spoke and was more Conversation Kenge than ever. "I hope," said Mr. Kenge, "that the genial influence of Miss Summerson," he bowed to me, "may have induced Mr. Jarndyce," he bowed to him, "to forego some little of his animosity towards a cause and towards a court which are--shall I say, which take their place in the stately vista of the pillars of our profession?" "I am inclined to think," returned my guardian, "that Miss Summerson has seen too much of the effects of the court and the cause to exert any influence in their favour. Nevertheless, they are a part of the occasion of my being here. Mr. Kenge, before I lay this paper on your desk and have done with it, let me tell you how it has come into my hands." He did so shortly and distinctly. "It could not, sir," said Mr. Kenge, "have been stated more plainly and to the purpose if it had been a case at law." "Did you ever know English law, or equity either, plain and to the purpose?" said my guardian. "Oh, fie!" said Mr. Kenge. At first he had not seemed to attach much importance to the paper, but when he saw it he appeared more interested, and when he had opened and read a little of it through his eye-glass, he became amazed. "Mr. Jarndyce," he said, looking off it, "you have perused this?" "Not I!" returned my guardian. "But, my dear sir," said Mr. Kenge, "it is a will of later date than any in the suit. It appears to be all in the testator's handwriting. It is duly executed and attested. And even if intended to be cancelled, as might possibly be supposed to be denoted by these marks of fire, it is NOT cancelled. Here it is, a perfect instrument!" "Well!" said my guardian. "What is that to me?" "Mr. Guppy!" cried Mr. Kenge, raising his voice. "I beg your pardon, Mr. Jarndyce." "Sir." "Mr. Vholes of Symond's Inn. My compliments. Jarndyce and Jarndyce. Glad to speak with him." Mr. Guppy disappeared. "You ask me what is this to you, Mr. Jarndyce. If you had perused this document, you would have seen that it reduces your interest considerably, though still leaving it a very handsome one, still leaving it a very handsome one," said Mr. Kenge, waving his hand persuasively and blandly. "You would further have seen that the interests of Mr. Richard Carstone and of Miss Ada Clare, now Mrs. Richard Carstone, are very materially advanced by it." "Kenge," said my guardian, "if all the flourishing wealth that the suit brought into this vile court of Chancery could fall to my two young cousins, I should be well contented. But do you ask ME to believe that any good is to come of Jarndyce and Jarndyce?" "Oh, really, Mr. Jarndyce! Prejudice, prejudice. My dear sir, this is a very great country, a very great country. Its system of equity is a very great system, a very great system. Really, really!" My guardian said no more, and Mr. Vholes arrived. He was modestly impressed by Mr. Kenge's professional eminence. "How do you do, Mr. Vholes? Will you be so good as to take a chair here by me and look over this paper?" Mr. Vholes did as he was asked and seemed to read it every word. He was not excited by it, but he was not excited by anything. When he had well examined it, he retired with Mr. Kenge into a window, and shading his mouth with his black glove, spoke to him at some length. I was not surprised to observe Mr. Kenge inclined to dispute what he said before he had said much, for I knew that no two people ever did agree about anything in Jarndyce and Jarndyce. But he seemed to get the better of Mr. Kenge too in a conversation that sounded as if it were almost composed of the words "Receiver-General," "Accountant-General," "report," "estate," and "costs." When they had finished, they came back to Mr. Kenge's table and spoke aloud. "Well! But this is a very remarkable document, Mr. Vholes," said Mr. Kenge. Mr. Vholes said, "Very much so." "And a very important document, Mr. Vholes," said Mr. Kenge. Again Mr. Vholes said, "Very much so." "And as you say, Mr. Vholes, when the cause is in the paper next term, this document will be an unexpected and interesting feature in it," said Mr. Kenge, looking loftily at my guardian. Mr. Vholes was gratified, as a smaller practitioner striving to keep respectable, to be confirmed in any opinion of his own by such an authority. "And when," asked my guardian, rising after a pause, during which Mr. Kenge had rattled his money and Mr. Vholes had picked his pimples, "when is next term?" "Next term, Mr. Jarndyce, will be next month," said Mr. Kenge. "Of course we shall at once proceed to do what is necessary with this document and to collect the necessary evidence concerning it; and of course you will receive our usual notification of the cause being in the paper." "To which I shall pay, of course, my usual attention." "Still bent, my dear sir," said Mr. Kenge, showing us through the outer office to the door, "still bent, even with your enlarged mind, on echoing a popular prejudice? We are a prosperous community, Mr. Jarndyce, a very prosperous community. We are a great country, Mr. Jarndyce, we are a very great country. This is a great system, Mr. Jarndyce, and would you wish a great country to have a little system? Now, really, really!" He said this at the stair-head, gently moving his right hand as if it were a silver trowel with which to spread the cement of his words on the structure of the system and consolidate it for a thousand ages. CHAPTER LXIII Steel and Iron George's Shooting Gallery is to let, and the stock is sold off, and George himself is at Chesney Wold attending on Sir Leicester in his rides and riding very near his bridle-rein because of the uncertain hand with which he guides his horse. But not to-day is George so occupied. He is journeying to-day into the iron country farther north to look about him. As he comes into the iron country farther north, such fresh green woods as those of Chesney Wold are left behind; and coal pits and ashes, high chimneys and red bricks, blighted verdure, scorching fires, and a heavy never-lightening cloud of smoke become the features of the scenery. Among such objects rides the trooper, looking about him and always looking for something he has come to find. At last, on the black canal bridge of a busy town, with a clang of iron in it, and more fires and more smoke than he has seen yet, the trooper, swart with the dust of the coal roads, checks his horse and asks a workman does he know the name of Rouncewell thereabouts. "Why, master," quoth the workman, "do I know my own name?" "'Tis so well known here, is it, comrade?" asks the trooper. "Rouncewell's? Ah! You're right." "And where might it be now?" asks the trooper with a glance before him. "The bank, the factory, or the house?" the workman wants to know. "Hum! Rouncewell's is so great apparently," mutters the trooper, stroking his chin, "that I have as good as half a mind to go back again. Why, I don't know which I want. Should I find Mr. Rouncewell at the factory, do you think?" "Tain't easy to say where you'd find him--at this time of the day you might find either him or his son there, if he's in town; but his contracts take him away." And which is the factory? Why, he sees those chimneys--the tallest ones! Yes, he sees THEM. Well! Let him keep his eye on those chimneys, going on as straight as ever he can, and presently he'll see 'em down a turning on the left, shut in by a great brick wall which forms one side of the street. That's Rouncewell's. The trooper thanks his informant and rides slowly on, looking about him. He does not turn back, but puts up his horse (and is much disposed to groom him too) at a public-house where some of Rouncewell's hands are dining, as the ostler tells him. Some of Rouncewell's hands have just knocked off for dinner-time and seem to be invading the whole town. They are very sinewy and strong, are Rouncewell's hands--a little sooty too. He comes to a gateway in the brick wall, looks in, and sees a great perplexity of iron lying about in every stage and in a vast variety of shapes--in bars, in wedges, in sheets; in tanks, in boilers, in axles, in wheels, in cogs, in cranks, in rails; twisted and wrenched into eccentric and perverse forms as separate parts of machinery; mountains of it broken up, and rusty in its age; distant furnaces of it glowing and bubbling in its youth; bright fireworks of it showering about under the blows of the steam-hammer; red-hot iron, white-hot iron, cold-black iron; an iron taste, an iron smell, and a Babel of iron sounds. "This is a place to make a man's head ache too!" says the trooper, looking about him for a counting-house. "Who comes here? This is very like me before I was set up. This ought to be my nephew, if likenesses run in families. Your servant, sir." "Yours, sir. Are you looking for any one?" "Excuse me. Young Mr. Rouncewell, I believe?" "Yes." "I was looking for your father, sir. I wish to have a word with him." The young man, telling him he is fortunate in his choice of a time, for his father is there, leads the way to the office where he is to be found. "Very like me before I was set up--devilish like me!" thinks the trooper as he follows. They come to a building in the yard with an office on an upper floor. At sight of the gentleman in the office, Mr. George turns very red. "What name shall I say to my father?" asks the young man. George, full of the idea of iron, in desperation answers "Steel," and is so presented. He is left alone with the gentleman in the office, who sits at a table with account-books before him and some sheets of paper blotted with hosts of figures and drawings of cunning shapes. It is a bare office, with bare windows, looking on the iron view below. Tumbled together on the table are some pieces of iron, purposely broken to be tested at various periods of their service, in various capacities. There is iron-dust on everything; and the smoke is seen through the windows rolling heavily out of the tall chimneys to mingle with the smoke from a vaporous Babylon of other chimneys. "I am at your service, Mr. Steel," says the gentleman when his visitor has taken a rusty chair. "Well, Mr. Rouncewell," George replies, leaning forward with his left arm on his knee and his hat in his hand, and very chary of meeting his brother's eye, "I am not without my expectations that in the present visit I may prove to be more free than welcome. I have served as a dragoon in my day, and a comrade of mine that I was once rather partial to was, if I don't deceive myself, a brother of yours. I believe you had a brother who gave his family some trouble, and ran away, and never did any good but in keeping away?" "Are you quite sure," returns the ironmaster in an altered voice, "that your name is Steel?" The trooper falters and looks at him. His brother starts up, calls him by his name, and grasps him by both hands. "You are too quick for me!" cries the trooper with the tears springing out of his eyes. "How do you do, my dear old fellow? I never could have thought you would have been half so glad to see me as all this. How do you do, my dear old fellow, how do you do!" They shake hands and embrace each other over and over again, the trooper still coupling his "How do you do, my dear old fellow!" with his protestation that he never thought his brother would have been half so glad to see him as all this! "So far from it," he declares at the end of a full account of what has preceded his arrival there, "I had very little idea of making myself known. I thought if you took by any means forgivingly to my name I might gradually get myself up to the point of writing a letter. But I should not have been surprised, brother, if you had considered it anything but welcome news to hear of me." "We will show you at home what kind of news we think it, George," returns his brother. "This is a great day at home, and you could not have arrived, you bronzed old soldier, on a better. I make an agreement with my son Watt to-day that on this day twelvemonth he shall marry as pretty and as good a girl as you have seen in all your travels. She goes to Germany to-morrow with one of your nieces for a little polishing up in her education. We make a feast of the event, and you will be made the hero of it." Mr. George is so entirely overcome at first by this prospect that he resists the proposed honour with great earnestness. Being overborne, however, by his brother and his nephew--concerning whom he renews his protestations that he never could have thought they would have been half so glad to see him--he is taken home to an elegant house in all the arrangements of which there is to be observed a pleasant mixture of the originally simple habits of the father and mother with such as are suited to their altered station and the higher fortunes of their children. Here Mr. George is much dismayed by the graces and accomplishments of his nieces that are and by the beauty of Rosa, his niece that is to be, and by the affectionate salutations of these young ladies, which he receives in a sort of dream. He is sorely taken aback, too, by the dutiful behaviour of his nephew and has a woeful consciousness upon him of being a scapegrace. However, there is great rejoicing and a very hearty company and infinite enjoyment, and Mr. George comes bluff and martial through it all, and his pledge to be present at the marriage and give away the bride is received with universal favour. A whirling head has Mr. George that night when he lies down in the state-bed of his brother's house to think of all these things and to see the images of his nieces (awful all the evening in their floating muslins) waltzing, after the German manner, over his counterpane. The brothers are closeted next morning in the ironmaster's room, where the elder is proceeding, in his clear sensible way, to show how he thinks he may best dispose of George in his business, when George squeezes his hand and stops him. "Brother, I thank you a million times for your more than brotherly welcome, and a million times more to that for your more than brotherly intentions. But my plans are made. Before I say a word as to them, I wish to consult you upon one family point. How," says the trooper, folding his arms and looking with indomitable firmness at his brother, "how is my mother to be got to scratch me?" "I am not sure that I understand you, George," replies the ironmaster. "I say, brother, how is my mother to be got to scratch me? She must be got to do it somehow." "Scratch you out of her will, I think you mean?" "Of course I do. In short," says the trooper, folding his arms more resolutely yet, "I mean--TO--scratch me!" "My dear George," returns his brother, "is it so indispensable that you should undergo that process?" "Quite! Absolutely! I couldn't be guilty of the meanness of coming back without it. I should never be safe not to be off again. I have not sneaked home to rob your children, if not yourself, brother, of your rights. I, who forfeited mine long ago! If I am to remain and hold up my head, I must be scratched. Come. You are a man of celebrated penetration and intelligence, and you can tell me how it's to be brought about." "I can tell you, George," replies the ironmaster deliberately, "how it is not to be brought about, which I hope may answer the purpose as well. Look at our mother, think of her, recall her emotion when she recovered you. Do you believe there is a consideration in the world that would induce her to take such a step against her favourite son? Do you believe there is any chance of her consent, to balance against the outrage it would be to her (loving dear old lady!) to propose it? If you do, you are wrong. No, George! You must make up your mind to remain UNscratched, I think." There is an amused smile on the ironmaster's face as he watches his brother, who is pondering, deeply disappointed. "I think you may manage almost as well as if the thing were done, though." "How, brother?" "Being bent upon it, you can dispose by will of anything you have the misfortune to inherit in any way you like, you know." "That's true!" says the trooper, pondering again. Then he wistfully asks, with his hand on his brother's, "Would you mind mentioning that, brother, to your wife and family?" "Not at all." "Thank you. You wouldn't object to say, perhaps, that although an undoubted vagabond, I am a vagabond of the harum-scarum order, and not of the mean sort?" The ironmaster, repressing his amused smile, assents. "Thank you. Thank you. It's a weight off my mind," says the trooper with a heave of his chest as he unfolds his arms and puts a hand on each leg, "though I had set my heart on being scratched, too!" The brothers are very like each other, sitting face to face; but a certain massive simplicity and absence of usage in the ways of the world is all on the trooper's side. "Well," he proceeds, throwing off his disappointment, "next and last, those plans of mine. You have been so brotherly as to propose to me to fall in here and take my place among the products of your perseverance and sense. I thank you heartily. It's more than brotherly, as I said before, and I thank you heartily for it," shaking him a long time by the hand. "But the truth is, brother, I am a--I am a kind of a weed, and it's too late to plant me in a regular garden." "My dear George," returns the elder, concentrating his strong steady brow upon him and smiling confidently, "leave that to me, and let me try." George shakes his head. "You could do it, I have not a doubt, if anybody could; but it's not to be done. Not to be done, sir! Whereas it so falls out, on the other hand, that I am able to be of some trifle of use to Sir Leicester Dedlock since his illness--brought on by family sorrows--and that he would rather have that help from our mother's son than from anybody else." "Well, my dear George," returns the other with a very slight shade upon his open face, "if you prefer to serve in Sir Leicester Dedlock's household brigade--" "There it is, brother," cries the trooper, checking him, with his hand upon his knee again; "there it is! You don't take kindly to that idea; I don't mind it. You are not used to being officered; I am. Everything about you is in perfect order and discipline; everything about me requires to be kept so. We are not accustomed to carry things with the same hand or to look at 'em from the same point. I don't say much about my garrison manners because I found myself pretty well at my ease last night, and they wouldn't be noticed here, I dare say, once and away. But I shall get on best at Chesney Wold, where there's more room for a weed than there is here; and the dear old lady will be made happy besides. Therefore I accept of Sir Leicester Dedlock's proposals. When I come over next year to give away the bride, or whenever I come, I shall have the sense to keep the household brigade in ambuscade and not to manoeuvre it on your ground. I thank you heartily again and am proud to think of the Rouncewells as they'll be founded by you." "You know yourself, George," says the elder brother, returning the grip of his hand, "and perhaps you know me better than I know myself. Take your way. So that we don't quite lose one another again, take your way." "No fear of that!" returns the trooper. "Now, before I turn my horse's head homewards, brother, I will ask you--if you'll be so good--to look over a letter for me. I brought it with me to send from these parts, as Chesney Wold might be a painful name just now to the person it's written to. I am not much accustomed to correspondence myself, and I am particular respecting this present letter because I want it to be both straightforward and delicate." Herewith he hands a letter, closely written in somewhat pale ink but in a neat round hand, to the ironmaster, who reads as follows: Miss Esther Summerson, A communication having been made to me by Inspector Bucket of a letter to myself being found among the papers of a certain person, I take the liberty to make known to you that it was but a few lines of instruction from abroad, when, where, and how to deliver an enclosed letter to a young and beautiful lady, then unmarried, in England. I duly observed the same. I further take the liberty to make known to you that it was got from me as a proof of handwriting only and that otherwise I would not have given it up, as appearing to be the most harmless in my possession, without being previously shot through the heart. I further take the liberty to mention that if I could have supposed a certain unfortunate gentleman to have been in existence, I never could and never would have rested until I had discovered his retreat and shared my last farthing with him, as my duty and my inclination would have equally been. But he was (officially) reported drowned, and assuredly went over the side of a transport-ship at night in an Irish harbour within a few hours of her arrival from the West Indies, as I have myself heard both from officers and men on board, and know to have been (officially) confirmed. I further take the liberty to state that in my humble quality as one of the rank and file, I am, and shall ever continue to be, your thoroughly devoted and admiring servant and that I esteem the qualities you possess above all others far beyond the limits of the present dispatch. I have the honour to be, GEORGE "A little formal," observes the elder brother, refolding it with a puzzled face. "But nothing that might not be sent to a pattern young lady?" asks the younger. "Nothing at all." Therefore it is sealed and deposited for posting among the iron correspondence of the day. This done, Mr. George takes a hearty farewell of the family party and prepares to saddle and mount. His brother, however, unwilling to part with him so soon, proposes to ride with him in a light open carriage to the place where he will bait for the night, and there remain with him until morning, a servant riding for so much of the journey on the thoroughbred old grey from Chesney Wold. The offer, being gladly accepted, is followed by a pleasant ride, a pleasant dinner, and a pleasant breakfast, all in brotherly communion. Then they once more shake hands long and heartily and part, the ironmaster turning his face to the smoke and fires, and the trooper to the green country. Early in the afternoon the subdued sound of his heavy military trot is heard on the turf in the avenue as he rides on with imaginary clank and jingle of accoutrements under the old elm-trees. CHAPTER LXIV Esther's Narrative Soon after I had that conversation with my guardian, he put a sealed paper in my hand one morning and said, "This is for next month, my dear." I found in it two hundred pounds. I now began very quietly to make such preparations as I thought were necessary. Regulating my purchases by my guardian's taste, which I knew very well of course, I arranged my wardrobe to please him and hoped I should be highly successful. I did it all so quietly because I was not quite free from my old apprehension that Ada would be rather sorry and because my guardian was so quiet himself. I had no doubt that under all the circumstances we should be married in the most private and simple manner. Perhaps I should only have to say to Ada, "Would you like to come and see me married to-morrow, my pet?" Perhaps our wedding might even be as unpretending as her own, and I might not find it necessary to say anything about it until it was over. I thought that if I were to choose, I would like this best. The only exception I made was Mrs. Woodcourt. I told her that I was going to be married to my guardian and that we had been engaged some time. She highly approved. She could never do enough for me and was remarkably softened now in comparison with what she had been when we first knew her. There was no trouble she would not have taken to have been of use to me, but I need hardly say that I only allowed her to take as little as gratified her kindness without tasking it. Of course this was not a time to neglect my guardian, and of course it was not a time for neglecting my darling. So I had plenty of occupation, which I was glad of; and as to Charley, she was absolutely not to be seen for needlework. To surround herself with great heaps of it--baskets full and tables full--and do a little, and spend a great deal of time in staring with her round eyes at what there was to do, and persuade herself that she was going to do it, were Charley's great dignities and delights. Meanwhile, I must say, I could not agree with my guardian on the subject of the will, and I had some sanguine hopes of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. Which of us was right will soon appear, but I certainly did encourage expectations. In Richard, the discovery gave occasion for a burst of business and agitation that buoyed him up for a little time, but he had lost the elasticity even of hope now and seemed to me to retain only its feverish anxieties. From something my guardian said one day when we were talking about this, I understood that my marriage would not take place until after the term-time we had been told to look forward to; and I thought the more, for that, how rejoiced I should be if I could be married when Richard and Ada were a little more prosperous. The term was very near indeed when my guardian was called out of town and went down into Yorkshire on Mr. Woodcourt's business. He had told me beforehand that his presence there would be necessary. I had just come in one night from my dear girl's and was sitting in the midst of all my new clothes, looking at them all around me and thinking, when a letter from my guardian was brought to me. It asked me to join him in the country and mentioned by what stage-coach my place was taken and at what time in the morning I should have to leave town. It added in a postscript that I would not be many hours from Ada. I expected few things less than a journey at that time, but I was ready for it in half an hour and set off as appointed early next morning. I travelled all day, wondering all day what I could be wanted for at such a distance; now I thought it might be for this purpose, and now I thought it might be for that purpose, but I was never, never, never near the truth. It was night when I came to my journey's end and found my guardian waiting for me. This was a great relief, for towards evening I had begun to fear (the more so as his letter was a very short one) that he might be ill. However, there he was, as well as it was possible to be; and when I saw his genial face again at its brightest and best, I said to myself, he has been doing some other great kindness. Not that it required much penetration to say that, because I knew that his being there at all was an act of kindness. Supper was ready at the hotel, and when we were alone at table he said, "Full of curiosity, no doubt, little woman, to know why I have brought you here?" "Well, guardian," said I, "without thinking myself a Fatima or you a Blue Beard, I am a little curious about it." "Then to ensure your night's rest, my love," he returned gaily, "I won't wait until to-morrow to tell you. I have very much wished to express to Woodcourt, somehow, my sense of his humanity to poor unfortunate Jo, his inestimable services to my young cousins, and his value to us all. When it was decided that he should settle here, it came into my head that I might ask his acceptance of some unpretending and suitable little place to lay his own head in. I therefore caused such a place to be looked out for, and such a place was found on very easy terms, and I have been touching it up for him and making it habitable. However, when I walked over it the day before yesterday and it was reported ready, I found that I was not housekeeper enough to know whether things were all as they ought to be. So I sent off for the best little housekeeper that could possibly be got to come and give me her advice and opinion. And here she is," said my guardian, "laughing and crying both together!" Because he was so dear, so good, so admirable. I tried to tell him what I thought of him, but I could not articulate a word. "Tut, tut!" said my guardian. "You make too much of it, little woman. Why, how you sob, Dame Durden, how you sob!" "It is with exquisite pleasure, guardian--with a heart full of thanks." "Well, well," said he. "I am delighted that you approve. I thought you would. I meant it as a pleasant surprise for the little mistress of Bleak House." I kissed him and dried my eyes. "I know now!" said I. "I have seen this in your face a long while." "No; have you really, my dear?" said he. "What a Dame Durden it is to read a face!" He was so quaintly cheerful that I could not long be otherwise, and was almost ashamed of having been otherwise at all. When I went to bed, I cried. I am bound to confess that I cried; but I hope it was with pleasure, though I am not quite sure it was with pleasure. I repeated every word of the letter twice over. A most beautiful summer morning succeeded, and after breakfast we went out arm in arm to see the house of which I was to give my mighty housekeeping opinion. We entered a flower-garden by a gate in a side wall, of which he had the key, and the first thing I saw was that the beds and flowers were all laid out according to the manner of my beds and flowers at home. "You see, my dear," observed my guardian, standing still with a delighted face to watch my looks, "knowing there could be no better plan, I borrowed yours." We went on by a pretty little orchard, where the cherries were nestling among the green leaves and the shadows of the apple-trees were sporting on the grass, to the house itself--a cottage, quite a rustic cottage of doll's rooms; but such a lovely place, so tranquil and so beautiful, with such a rich and smiling country spread around it; with water sparkling away into the distance, here all overhung with summer-growth, there turning a humming mill; at its nearest point glancing through a meadow by the cheerful town, where cricket-players were assembling in bright groups and a flag was flying from a white tent that rippled in the sweet west wind. And still, as we went through the pretty rooms, out at the little rustic verandah doors, and underneath the tiny wooden colonnades garlanded with woodbine, jasmine, and honey-suckle, I saw in the papering on the walls, in the colours of the furniture, in the arrangement of all the pretty objects, MY little tastes and fancies, MY little methods and inventions which they used to laugh at while they praised them, my odd ways everywhere. I could not say enough in admiration of what was all so beautiful, but one secret doubt arose in my mind when I saw this, I thought, oh, would he be the happier for it! Would it not have been better for his peace that I should not have been so brought before him? Because although I was not what he thought me, still he loved me very dearly, and it might remind him mournfully of what be believed he had lost. I did not wish him to forget me--perhaps he might not have done so, without these aids to his memory--but my way was easier than his, and I could have reconciled myself even to that so that he had been the happier for it. "And now, little woman," said my guardian, whom I had never seen so proud and joyful as in showing me these things and watching my appreciation of them, "now, last of all, for the name of this house." "What is it called, dear guardian?" "My child," said he, "come and see," He took me to the porch, which he had hitherto avoided, and said, pausing before we went out, "My dear child, don't you guess the name?" "No!" said I. We went out of the porch and he showed me written over it, Bleak House. He led me to a seat among the leaves close by, and sitting down beside me and taking my hand in his, spoke to me thus, "My darling girl, in what there has been between us, I have, I hope, been really solicitous for your happiness. When I wrote you the letter to which you brought the answer," smiling as he referred to it, "I had my own too much in view; but I had yours too. Whether, under different circumstances, I might ever have renewed the old dream I sometimes dreamed when you were very young, of making you my wife one day, I need not ask myself. I did renew it, and I wrote my letter, and you brought your answer. You are following what I say, my child?" I was cold, and I trembled violently, but not a word he uttered was lost. As I sat looking fixedly at him and the sun's rays descended, softly shining through the leaves upon his bare head, I felt as if the brightness on him must be like the brightness of the angels. "Hear me, my love, but do not speak. It is for me to speak now. When it was that I began to doubt whether what I had done would really make you happy is no matter. Woodcourt came home, and I soon had no doubt at all." I clasped him round the neck and hung my head upon his breast and wept. "Lie lightly, confidently here, my child," said he, pressing me gently to him. "I am your guardian and your father now. Rest confidently here." Soothingly, like the gentle rustling of the leaves; and genially, like the ripening weather; and radiantly and beneficently, like the sunshine, he went on. "Understand me, my dear girl. I had no doubt of your being contented and happy with me, being so dutiful and so devoted; but I saw with whom you would be happier. That I penetrated his secret when Dame Durden was blind to it is no wonder, for I knew the good that could never change in her better far than she did. Well! I have long been in Allan Woodcourt's confidence, although he was not, until yesterday, a few hours before you came here, in mine. But I would not have my Esther's bright example lost; I would not have a jot of my dear girl's virtues unobserved and unhonoured; I would not have her admitted on sufferance into the line of Morgan ap-Kerrig, no, not for the weight in gold of all the mountains in Wales!" He stopped to kiss me on the forehead, and I sobbed and wept afresh. For I felt as if I could not bear the painful delight of his praise. "Hush, little woman! Don't cry; this is to be a day of joy. I have looked forward to it," he said exultingly, "for months on months! A few words more, Dame Trot, and I have said my say. Determined not to throw away one atom of my Esther's worth, I took Mrs. Woodcourt into a separate confidence. 'Now, madam,' said I, 'I clearly perceive--and indeed I know, to boot--that your son loves my ward. I am further very sure that my ward loves your son, but will sacrifice her love to a sense of duty and affection, and will sacrifice it so completely, so entirely, so religiously, that you should never suspect it though you watched her night and day.' Then I told her all our story--ours--yours and mine. 'Now, madam,' said I, 'come you, knowing this, and live with us. Come you, and see my child from hour to hour; set what you see against her pedigree, which is this, and this'--for I scorned to mince it--'and tell me what is the true legitimacy when you shall have quite made up your mind on that subject.' Why, honour to her old Welsh blood, my dear," cried my guardian with enthusiasm, "I believe the heart it animates beats no less warmly, no less admiringly, no less lovingly, towards Dame Durden than my own!" He tenderly raised my head, and as I clung to him, kissed me in his old fatherly way again and again. What a light, now, on the protecting manner I had thought about! "One more last word. When Allan Woodcourt spoke to you, my dear, he spoke with my knowledge and consent--but I gave him no encouragement, not I, for these surprises were my great reward, and I was too miserly to part with a scrap of it. He was to come and tell me all that passed, and he did. I have no more to say. My dearest, Allan Woodcourt stood beside your father when he lay dead--stood beside your mother. This is Bleak House. This day I give this house its little mistress; and before God, it is the brightest day in all my life!" He rose and raised me with him. We were no longer alone. My husband--I have called him by that name full seven happy years now--stood at my side. "Allan," said my guardian, "take from me a willing gift, the best wife that ever man had. What more can I say for you than that I know you deserve her! Take with her the little home she brings you. You know what she will make it, Allan; you know what she has made its namesake. Let me share its felicity sometimes, and what do I sacrifice? Nothing, nothing." He kissed me once again, and now the tears were in his eyes as he said more softly, "Esther, my dearest, after so many years, there is a kind of parting in this too. I know that my mistake has caused you some distress. Forgive your old guardian, in restoring him to his old place in your affections; and blot it out of your memory. Allan, take my dear." He moved away from under the green roof of leaves, and stopping in the sunlight outside and turning cheerfully towards us, said, "I shall be found about here somewhere. It's a west wind, little woman, due west! Let no one thank me any more, for I am going to revert to my bachelor habits, and if anybody disregards this warning, I'll run away and never come back!" What happiness was ours that day, what joy, what rest, what hope, what gratitude, what bliss! We were to be married before the month was out, but when we were to come and take possession of our own house was to depend on Richard and Ada. We all three went home together next day. As soon as we arrived in town, Allan went straight to see Richard and to carry our joyful news to him and my darling. Late as it was, I meant to go to her for a few minutes before lying down to sleep, but I went home with my guardian first to make his tea for him and to occupy the old chair by his side, for I did not like to think of its being empty so soon. When we came home we found that a young man had called three times in the course of that one day to see me and that having been told on the occasion of his third call that I was not expected to return before ten o'clock at night, he had left word that he would call about then. He had left his card three times. Mr. Guppy. As I naturally speculated on the object of these visits, and as I always associated something ludicrous with the visitor, it fell out that in laughing about Mr. Guppy I told my guardian of his old proposal and his subsequent retraction. "After that," said my guardian, "we will certainly receive this hero." So instructions were given that Mr. Guppy should be shown in when he came again, and they were scarcely given when he did come again. He was embarrassed when he found my guardian with me, but recovered himself and said, "How de do, sir?" "How do you do, sir?" returned my guardian. "Thank you, sir, I am tolerable," returned Mr. Guppy. "Will you allow me to introduce my mother, Mrs. Guppy of the Old Street Road, and my particular friend, Mr. Weevle. That is to say, my friend has gone by the name of Weevle, but his name is really and truly Jobling." My guardian begged them to be seated, and they all sat down. "Tony," said Mr. Guppy to his friend after an awkward silence. "Will you open the case?" "Do it yourself," returned the friend rather tartly. "Well, Mr. Jarndyce, sir," Mr. Guppy, after a moment's consideration, began, to the great diversion of his mother, which she displayed by nudging Mr. Jobling with her elbow and winking at me in a most remarkable manner, "I had an idea that I should see Miss Summerson by herself and was not quite prepared for your esteemed presence. But Miss Summerson has mentioned to you, perhaps, that something has passed between us on former occasions?" "Miss Summerson," returned my guardian, smiling, "has made a communication to that effect to me." "That," said Mr. Guppy, "makes matters easier. Sir, I have come out of my articles at Kenge and Carboy's, and I believe with satisfaction to all parties. I am now admitted (after undergoing an examination that's enough to badger a man blue, touching a pack of nonsense that he don't want to know) on the roll of attorneys and have taken out my certificate, if it would be any satisfaction to you to see it." "Thank you, Mr. Guppy," returned my guardian. "I am quite willing--I believe I use a legal phrase--to admit the certificate." Mr. Guppy therefore desisted from taking something out of his pocket and proceeded without it. "I have no capital myself, but my mother has a little property which takes the form of an annuity"--here Mr. Guppy's mother rolled her head as if she never could sufficiently enjoy the observation, and put her handkerchief to her mouth, and again winked at me--"and a few pounds for expenses out of pocket in conducting business will never be wanting, free of interest, which is an advantage, you know," said Mr. Guppy feelingly. "Certainly an advantage," returned my guardian. "I HAVE some connexion," pursued Mr. Guppy, "and it lays in the direction of Walcot Square, Lambeth. I have therefore taken a 'ouse in that locality, which, in the opinion of my friends, is a hollow bargain (taxes ridiculous, and use of fixtures included in the rent), and intend setting up professionally for myself there forthwith." Here Mr. Guppy's mother fell into an extraordinary passion of rolling her head and smiling waggishly at anybody who would look at her. "It's a six-roomer, exclusive of kitchens," said Mr. Guppy, "and in the opinion of my friends, a commodious tenement. When I mention my friends, I refer principally to my friend Jobling, who I believe has known me," Mr. Guppy looked at him with a sentimental air, "from boyhood's hour." Mr. Jobling confirmed this with a sliding movement of his legs. "My friend Jobling will render me his assistance in the capacity of clerk and will live in the 'ouse," said Mr. Guppy. "My mother will likewise live in the 'ouse when her present quarter in the Old Street Road shall have ceased and expired; and consequently there will be no want of society. My friend Jobling is naturally aristocratic by taste, and besides being acquainted with the movements of the upper circles, fully backs me in the intentions I am now developing." Mr. Jobling said "Certainly" and withdrew a little from the elbow of Mr Guppy's mother. "Now, I have no occasion to mention to you, sir, you being in the confidence of Miss Summerson," said Mr. Guppy, "(mother, I wish you'd be so good as to keep still), that Miss Summerson's image was formerly imprinted on my 'eart and that I made her a proposal of marriage." "That I have heard," returned my guardian. "Circumstances," pursued Mr. Guppy, "over which I had no control, but quite the contrary, weakened the impression of that image for a time. At which time Miss Summerson's conduct was highly genteel; I may even add, magnanimous." My guardian patted me on the shoulder and seemed much amused. "Now, sir," said Mr. Guppy, "I have got into that state of mind myself that I wish for a reciprocity of magnanimous behaviour. I wish to prove to Miss Summerson that I can rise to a heighth of which perhaps she hardly thought me capable. I find that the image which I did suppose had been eradicated from my 'eart is NOT eradicated. Its influence over me is still tremenjous, and yielding to it, I am willing to overlook the circumstances over which none of us have had any control and to renew those proposals to Miss Summerson which I had the honour to make at a former period. I beg to lay the 'ouse in Walcot Square, the business, and myself before Miss Summerson for her acceptance." "Very magnanimous indeed, sir," observed my guardian. "Well, sir," replied Mr. Guppy with candour, "my wish is to BE magnanimous. I do not consider that in making this offer to Miss Summerson I am by any means throwing myself away; neither is that the opinion of my friends. Still, there are circumstances which I submit may be taken into account as a set off against any little drawbacks of mine, and so a fair and equitable balance arrived at." "I take upon myself, sir," said my guardian, laughing as he rang the bell, "to reply to your proposals on behalf of Miss Summerson. She is very sensible of your handsome intentions, and wishes you good evening, and wishes you well." "Oh!" said Mr. Guppy with a blank look. "Is that tantamount, sir, to acceptance, or rejection, or consideration?" "To decided rejection, if you please," returned my guardian. Mr. Guppy looked incredulously at his friend, and at his mother, who suddenly turned very angry, and at the floor, and at the ceiling. "Indeed?" said he. "Then, Jobling, if you was the friend you represent yourself, I should think you might hand my mother out of the gangway instead of allowing her to remain where she ain't wanted." But Mrs. Guppy positively refused to come out of the gangway. She wouldn't hear of it. "Why, get along with you," said she to my guardian, "what do you mean? Ain't my son good enough for you? You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Get out with you!" "My good lady," returned my guardian, "it is hardly reasonable to ask me to get out of my own room." "I don't care for that," said Mrs. Guppy. "Get out with you. If we ain't good enough for you, go and procure somebody that is good enough. Go along and find 'em." I was quite unprepared for the rapid manner in which Mrs. Guppy's power of jocularity merged into a power of taking the profoundest offence. "Go along and find somebody that's good enough for you," repeated Mrs. Guppy. "Get out!" Nothing seemed to astonish Mr. Guppy's mother so much and to make her so very indignant as our not getting out. "Why don't you get out?" said Mrs. Guppy. "What are you stopping here for?" "Mother," interposed her son, always getting before her and pushing her back with one shoulder as she sidled at my guardian, "WILL you hold your tongue?" "No, William," she returned, "I won't! Not unless he gets out, I won't!" However, Mr. Guppy and Mr. Jobling together closed on Mr. Guppy's mother (who began to be quite abusive) and took her, very much against her will, downstairs, her voice rising a stair higher every time her figure got a stair lower, and insisting that we should immediately go and find somebody who was good enough for us, and above all things that we should get out. CHAPTER LXV Beginning the World The term had commenced, and my guardian found an intimation from Mr. Kenge that the cause would come on in two days. As I had sufficient hopes of the will to be in a flutter about it, Allan and I agreed to go down to the court that morning. Richard was extremely agitated and was so weak and low, though his illness was still of the mind, that my dear girl indeed had sore occasion to be supported. But she looked forward--a very little way now--to the help that was to come to her, and never drooped. It was at Westminster that the cause was to come on. It had come on there, I dare say, a hundred times before, but I could not divest myself of an idea that it MIGHT lead to some result now. We left home directly after breakfast to be at Westminster Hall in good time and walked down there through the lively streets--so happily and strangely it seemed!--together. As we were going along, planning what we should do for Richard and Ada, I heard somebody calling "Esther! My dear Esther! Esther!" And there was Caddy Jellyby, with her head out of the window of a little carriage which she hired now to go about in to her pupils (she had so many), as if she wanted to embrace me at a hundred yards' distance. I had written her a note to tell her of all that my guardian had done, but had not had a moment to go and see her. Of course we turned back, and the affectionate girl was in that state of rapture, and was so overjoyed to talk about the night when she brought me the flowers, and was so determined to squeeze my face (bonnet and all) between her hands, and go on in a wild manner altogether, calling me all kinds of precious names, and telling Allan I had done I don't know what for her, that I was just obliged to get into the little carriage and calm her down by letting her say and do exactly what she liked. Allan, standing at the window, was as pleased as Caddy; and I was as pleased as either of them; and I wonder that I got away as I did, rather than that I came off laughing, and red, and anything but tidy, and looking after Caddy, who looked after us out of the coach-window as long as she could see us. This made us some quarter of an hour late, and when we came to Westminster Hall we found that the day's business was begun. Worse than that, we found such an unusual crowd in the Court of Chancery that it was full to the door, and we could neither see nor hear what was passing within. It appeared to be something droll, for occasionally there was a laugh and a cry of "Silence!" It appeared to be something interesting, for every one was pushing and striving to get nearer. It appeared to be something that made the professional gentlemen very merry, for there were several young counsellors in wigs and whiskers on the outside of the crowd, and when one of them told the others about it, they put their hands in their pockets, and quite doubled themselves up with laughter, and went stamping about the pavement of the Hall. We asked a gentleman by us if he knew what cause was on. He told us Jarndyce and Jarndyce. We asked him if he knew what was doing in it. He said really, no he did not, nobody ever did, but as well as he could make out, it was over. Over for the day? we asked him. No, he said, over for good. Over for good! When we heard this unaccountable answer, we looked at one another quite lost in amazement. Could it be possible that the will had set things right at last and that Richard and Ada were going to be rich? It seemed too good to be true. Alas it was! Our suspense was short, for a break-up soon took place in the crowd, and the people came streaming out looking flushed and hot and bringing a quantity of bad air with them. Still they were all exceedingly amused and were more like people coming out from a farce or a juggler than from a court of justice. We stood aside, watching for any countenance we knew, and presently great bundles of paper began to be carried out--bundles in bags, bundles too large to be got into any bags, immense masses of papers of all shapes and no shapes, which the bearers staggered under, and threw down for the time being, anyhow, on the Hall pavement, while they went back to bring out more. Even these clerks were laughing. We glanced at the papers, and seeing Jarndyce and Jarndyce everywhere, asked an official-looking person who was standing in the midst of them whether the cause was over. Yes, he said, it was all up with it at last, and burst out laughing too. At this juncture we perceived Mr. Kenge coming out of court with an affable dignity upon him, listening to Mr. Vholes, who was deferential and carried his own bag. Mr. Vholes was the first to see us. "Here is Miss Summerson, sir," he said. "And Mr. Woodcourt." "Oh, indeed! Yes. Truly!" said Mr. Kenge, raising his hat to me with polished politeness. "How do you do? Glad to see you. Mr. Jarndyce is not here?" No. He never came there, I reminded him. "Really," returned Mr. Kenge, "it is as well that he is NOT here to-day, for his--shall I say, in my good friend's absence, his indomitable singularity of opinion?--might have been strengthened, perhaps; not reasonably, but might have been strengthened." "Pray what has been done to-day?" asked Allan. "I beg your pardon?" said Mr. Kenge with excessive urbanity. "What has been done to-day?" "What has been done," repeated Mr. Kenge. "Quite so. Yes. Why, not much has been done; not much. We have been checked--brought up suddenly, I would say--upon the--shall I term it threshold?" "Is this will considered a genuine document, sir?" said Allan. "Will you tell us that?" "Most certainly, if I could," said Mr. Kenge; "but we have not gone into that, we have not gone into that." "We have not gone into that," repeated Mr. Vholes as if his low inward voice were an echo. "You are to reflect, Mr. Woodcourt," observed Mr. Kenge, using his silver trowel persuasively and smoothingly, "that this has been a great cause, that this has been a protracted cause, that this has been a complex cause. Jarndyce and Jarndyce has been termed, not inaptly, a monument of Chancery practice." "And patience has sat upon it a long time," said Allan. "Very well indeed, sir," returned Mr. Kenge with a certain condescending laugh he had. "Very well! You are further to reflect, Mr. Woodcourt," becoming dignified almost to severity, "that on the numerous difficulties, contingencies, masterly fictions, and forms of procedure in this great cause, there has been expended study, ability, eloquence, knowledge, intellect, Mr. Woodcourt, high intellect. For many years, the--a--I would say the flower of the bar, and the--a--I would presume to add, the matured autumnal fruits of the woolsack--have been lavished upon Jarndyce and Jarndyce. If the public have the benefit, and if the country have the adornment, of this great grasp, it must be paid for in money or money's worth, sir." "Mr. Kenge," said Allan, appearing enlightened all in a moment. "Excuse me, our time presses. Do I understand that the whole estate is found to have been absorbed in costs?" "Hem! I believe so," returned Mr. Kenge. "Mr. Vholes, what do YOU say?" "I believe so," said Mr. Vholes. "And that thus the suit lapses and melts away?" "Probably," returned Mr. Kenge. "Mr. Vholes?" "Probably," said Mr. Vholes. "My dearest life," whispered Allan, "this will break Richard's heart!" There was such a shock of apprehension in his face, and he knew Richard so perfectly, and I too had seen so much of his gradual decay, that what my dear girl had said to me in the fullness of her foreboding love sounded like a knell in my ears. "In case you should be wanting Mr. C., sir," said Mr. Vholes, coming after us, "you'll find him in court. I left him there resting himself a little. Good day, sir; good day, Miss Summerson." As he gave me that slowly devouring look of his, while twisting up the strings of his bag before he hastened with it after Mr. Kenge, the benignant shadow of whose conversational presence he seemed afraid to leave, he gave one gasp as if he had swallowed the last morsel of his client, and his black buttoned-up unwholesome figure glided away to the low door at the end of the Hall. "My dear love," said Allan, "leave to me, for a little while, the charge you gave me. Go home with this intelligence and come to Ada's by and by!" I would not let him take me to a coach, but entreated him to go to Richard without a moment's delay and leave me to do as he wished. Hurrying home, I found my guardian and told him gradually with what news I had returned. "Little woman," said he, quite unmoved for himself, "to have done with the suit on any terms is a greater blessing than I had looked for. But my poor young cousins!" We talked about them all the morning and discussed what it was possible to do. In the afternoon my guardian walked with me to Symond's Inn and left me at the door. I went upstairs. When my darling heard my footsteps, she came out into the small passage and threw her arms round my neck, but she composed herself directly and said that Richard had asked for me several times. Allan had found him sitting in the corner of the court, she told me, like a stone figure. On being roused, he had broken away and made as if he would have spoken in a fierce voice to the judge. He was stopped by his mouth being full of blood, and Allan had brought him home. He was lying on a sofa with his eyes closed when I went in. There were restoratives on the table; the room was made as airy as possible, and was darkened, and was very orderly and quiet. Allan stood behind him watching him gravely. His face appeared to me to be quite destitute of colour, and now that I saw him without his seeing me, I fully saw, for the first time, how worn away he was. But he looked handsomer than I had seen him look for many a day. I sat down by his side in silence. Opening his eyes by and by, he said in a weak voice, but with his old smile, "Dame Durden, kiss me, my dear!" It was a great comfort and surprise to me to find him in his low state cheerful and looking forward. He was happier, he said, in our intended marriage than he could find words to tell me. My husband had been a guardian angel to him and Ada, and he blessed us both and wished us all the joy that life could yield us. I almost felt as if my own heart would have broken when I saw him take my husband's hand and hold it to his breast. We spoke of the future as much as possible, and he said several times that he must be present at our marriage if he could stand upon his feet. Ada would contrive to take him, somehow, he said. "Yes, surely, dearest Richard!" But as my darling answered him thus hopefully, so serene and beautiful, with the help that was to come to her so near--I knew--I knew! It was not good for him to talk too much, and when he was silent, we were silent too. Sitting beside him, I made a pretence of working for my dear, as he had always been used to joke about my being busy. Ada leaned upon his pillow, holding his head upon her arm. He dozed often, and whenever he awoke without seeing him, said first of all, "Where is Woodcourt?" Evening had come on when I lifted up my eyes and saw my guardian standing in the little hall. "Who is that, Dame Durden?" Richard asked me. The door was behind him, but he had observed in my face that some one was there. I looked to Allan for advice, and as he nodded "Yes," bent over Richard and told him. My guardian saw what passed, came softly by me in a moment, and laid his hand on Richard's. "Oh, sir," said Richard, "you are a good man, you are a good man!" and burst into tears for the first time. My guardian, the picture of a good man, sat down in my place, keeping his hand on Richard's. "My dear Rick," said he, "the clouds have cleared away, and it is bright now. We can see now. We were all bewildered, Rick, more or less. What matters! And how are you, my dear boy?" "I am very weak, sir, but I hope I shall be stronger. I have to begin the world." "Aye, truly; well said!" cried my guardian. "I will not begin it in the old way now," said Richard with a sad smile. "I have learned a lesson now, sir. It was a hard one, but you shall be assured, indeed, that I have learned it." "Well, well," said my guardian, comforting him; "well, well, well, dear boy!" "I was thinking, sir," resumed Richard, "that there is nothing on earth I should so much like to see as their house--Dame Durden's and Woodcourt's house. If I could be removed there when I begin to recover my strength, I feel as if I should get well there sooner than anywhere." "Why, so have I been thinking too, Rick," said my guardian, "and our little woman likewise; she and I have been talking of it this very day. I dare say her husband won't object. What do you think?" Richard smiled and lifted up his arm to touch him as he stood behind the head of the couch. "I say nothing of Ada," said Richard, "but I think of her, and have thought of her very much. Look at her! See her here, sir, bending over this pillow when she has so much need to rest upon it herself, my dear love, my poor girl!" He clasped her in his arms, and none of us spoke. He gradually released her, and she looked upon us, and looked up to heaven, and moved her lips. "When I get down to Bleak House," said Richard, "I shall have much to tell you, sir, and you will have much to show me. You will go, won't you?" "Undoubtedly, dear Rick." "Thank you; like you, like you," said Richard. "But it's all like you. They have been telling me how you planned it and how you remembered all Esther's familiar tastes and ways. It will be like coming to the old Bleak House again." "And you will come there too, I hope, Rick. I am a solitary man now, you know, and it will be a charity to come to me. A charity to come to me, my love!" he repeated to Ada as he gently passed his hand over her golden hair and put a lock of it to his lips. (I think he vowed within himself to cherish her if she were left alone.) "It was a troubled dream?" said Richard, clasping both my guardian's hands eagerly. "Nothing more, Rick; nothing more." "And you, being a good man, can pass it as such, and forgive and pity the dreamer, and be lenient and encouraging when he wakes?" "Indeed I can. What am I but another dreamer, Rick?" "I will begin the world!" said Richard with a light in his eyes. My husband drew a little nearer towards Ada, and I saw him solemnly lift up his hand to warn my guardian. "When shall I go from this place to that pleasant country where the old times are, where I shall have strength to tell what Ada has been to me, where I shall be able to recall my many faults and blindnesses, where I shall prepare myself to be a guide to my unborn child?" said Richard. "When shall I go?" "Dear Rick, when you are strong enough," returned my guardian. "Ada, my darling!" He sought to raise himself a little. Allan raised him so that she could hold him on her bosom, which was what he wanted. "I have done you many wrongs, my own. I have fallen like a poor stray shadow on your way, I have married you to poverty and trouble, I have scattered your means to the winds. You will forgive me all this, my Ada, before I begin the world?" A smile irradiated his face as she bent to kiss him. He slowly laid his face down upon her bosom, drew his arms closer round her neck, and with one parting sob began the world. Not this world, oh, not this! The world that sets this right. When all was still, at a late hour, poor crazed Miss Flite came weeping to me and told me she had given her birds their liberty. CHAPTER LXVI Down in Lincolnshire There is a hush upon Chesney Wold in these altered days, as there is upon a portion of the family history. The story goes that Sir Leicester paid some who could have spoken out to hold their peace; but it is a lame story, feebly whispering and creeping about, and any brighter spark of life it shows soon dies away. It is known for certain that the handsome Lady Dedlock lies in the mausoleum in the park, where the trees arch darkly overhead, and the owl is heard at night making the woods ring; but whence she was brought home to be laid among the echoes of that solitary place, or how she died, is all mystery. Some of her old friends, principally to be found among the peachy-cheeked charmers with the skeleton throats, did once occasionally say, as they toyed in a ghastly manner with large fans--like charmers reduced to flirting with grim death, after losing all their other beaux--did once occasionally say, when the world assembled together, that they wondered the ashes of the Dedlocks, entombed in the mausoleum, never rose against the profanation of her company. But the dead-and-gone Dedlocks take it very calmly and have never been known to object. Up from among the fern in the hollow, and winding by the bridle-road among the trees, comes sometimes to this lonely spot the sound of horses' hoofs. Then may be seen Sir Leicester--invalided, bent, and almost blind, but of worthy presence yet--riding with a stalwart man beside him, constant to his bridle-rein. When they come to a certain spot before the mausoleum-door, Sir Leicester's accustomed horse stops of his own accord, and Sir Leicester, pulling off his hat, is still for a few moments before they ride away. War rages yet with the audacious Boythorn, though at uncertain intervals, and now hotly, and now coolly, flickering like an unsteady fire. The truth is said to be that when Sir Leicester came down to Lincolnshire for good, Mr. Boythorn showed a manifest desire to abandon his right of way and do whatever Sir Leicester would, which Sir Leicester, conceiving to be a condescension to his illness or misfortune, took in such high dudgeon, and was so magnificently aggrieved by, that Mr. Boythorn found himself under the necessity of committing a flagrant trespass to restore his neighbour to himself. Similarly, Mr. Boythorn continues to post tremendous placards on the disputed thoroughfare and (with his bird upon his head) to hold forth vehemently against Sir Leicester in the sanctuary of his own home; similarly, also, he defies him as of old in the little church by testifying a bland unconsciousness of his existence. But it is whispered that when he is most ferocious towards his old foe, he is really most considerate, and that Sir Leicester, in the dignity of being implacable, little supposes how much he is humoured. As little does he think how near together he and his antagonist have suffered in the fortunes of two sisters, and his antagonist, who knows it now, is not the man to tell him. So the quarrel goes on to the satisfaction of both. In one of the lodges of the park--that lodge within sight of the house where, once upon a time, when the waters were out down in Lincolnshire, my Lady used to see the keeper's child--the stalwart man, the trooper formerly, is housed. Some relics of his old calling hang upon the walls, and these it is the chosen recreation of a little lame man about the stable-yard to keep gleaming bright. A busy little man he always is, in the polishing at harness-house doors, of stirrup-irons, bits, curb-chains, harness bosses, anything in the way of a stable-yard that will take a polish, leading a life of friction. A shaggy little damaged man, withal, not unlike an old dog of some mongrel breed, who has been considerably knocked about. He answers to the name of Phil. A goodly sight it is to see the grand old housekeeper (harder of hearing now) going to church on the arm of her son and to observe--which few do, for the house is scant of company in these times--the relations of both towards Sir Leicester, and his towards them. They have visitors in the high summer weather, when a grey cloak and umbrella, unknown to Chesney Wold at other periods, are seen among the leaves; when two young ladies are occasionally found gambolling in sequestered saw-pits and such nooks of the park; and when the smoke of two pipes wreathes away into the fragrant evening air from the trooper's door. Then is a fife heard trolling within the lodge on the inspiring topic of the "British Grenadiers"; and as the evening closes in, a gruff inflexible voice is heard to say, while two men pace together up and down, "But I never own to it before the old girl. Discipline must be maintained." The greater part of the house is shut up, and it is a show-house no longer; yet Sir Leicester holds his shrunken state in the long drawing-room for all that, and reposes in his old place before my Lady's picture. Closed in by night with broad screens, and illumined only in that part, the light of the drawing-room seems gradually contracting and dwindling until it shall be no more. A little more, in truth, and it will be all extinguished for Sir Leicester; and the damp door in the mausoleum which shuts so tight, and looks so obdurate, will have opened and received him. Volumnia, growing with the flight of time pinker as to the red in her face, and yellower as to the white, reads to Sir Leicester in the long evenings and is driven to various artifices to conceal her yawns, of which the chief and most efficacious is the insertion of the pearl necklace between her rosy lips. Long-winded treatises on the Buffy and Boodle question, showing how Buffy is immaculate and Boodle villainous, and how the country is lost by being all Boodle and no Buffy, or saved by being all Buffy and no Boodle (it must be one of the two, and cannot be anything else), are the staple of her reading. Sir Leicester is not particular what it is and does not appear to follow it very closely, further than that he always comes broad awake the moment Volumnia ventures to leave off, and sonorously repeating her last words, begs with some displeasure to know if she finds herself fatigued. However, Volumnia, in the course of her bird-like hopping about and pecking at papers, has alighted on a memorandum concerning herself in the event of "anything happening" to her kinsman, which is handsome compensation for an extensive course of reading and holds even the dragon Boredom at bay. The cousins generally are rather shy of Chesney Wold in its dullness, but take to it a little in the shooting season, when guns are heard in the plantations, and a few scattered beaters and keepers wait at the old places of appointment for low-spirited twos and threes of cousins. The debilitated cousin, more debilitated by the dreariness of the place, gets into a fearful state of depression, groaning under penitential sofa-pillows in his gunless hours and protesting that such fernal old jail's--nough t'sew fler up--frever. The only great occasions for Volumnia in this changed aspect of the place in Lincolnshire are those occasions, rare and widely separated, when something is to be done for the county or the country in the way of gracing a public ball. Then, indeed, does the tuckered sylph come out in fairy form and proceed with joy under cousinly escort to the exhausted old assembly-room, fourteen heavy miles off, which, during three hundred and sixty-four days and nights of every ordinary year, is a kind of antipodean lumber-room full of old chairs and tables upside down. Then, indeed, does she captivate all hearts by her condescension, by her girlish vivacity, and by her skipping about as in the days when the hideous old general with the mouth too full of teeth had not cut one of them at two guineas each. Then does she twirl and twine, a pastoral nymph of good family, through the mazes of the dance. Then do the swains appear with tea, with lemonade, with sandwiches, with homage. Then is she kind and cruel, stately and unassuming, various, beautifully wilful. Then is there a singular kind of parallel between her and the little glass chandeliers of another age embellishing that assembly-room, which, with their meagre stems, their spare little drops, their disappointing knobs where no drops are, their bare little stalks from which knobs and drops have both departed, and their little feeble prismatic twinkling, all seem Volumnias. For the rest, Lincolnshire life to Volumnia is a vast blank of overgrown house looking out upon trees, sighing, wringing their hands, bowing their heads, and casting their tears upon the window-panes in monotonous depressions. A labyrinth of grandeur, less the property of an old family of human beings and their ghostly likenesses than of an old family of echoings and thunderings which start out of their hundred graves at every sound and go resounding through the building. A waste of unused passages and staircases in which to drop a comb upon a bedroom floor at night is to send a stealthy footfall on an errand through the house. A place where few people care to go about alone, where a maid screams if an ash drops from the fire, takes to crying at all times and seasons, becomes the victim of a low disorder of the spirits, and gives warning and departs. Thus Chesney Wold. With so much of itself abandoned to darkness and vacancy; with so little change under the summer shining or the wintry lowering; so sombre and motionless always--no flag flying now by day, no rows of lights sparkling by night; with no family to come and go, no visitors to be the souls of pale cold shapes of rooms, no stir of life about it--passion and pride, even to the stranger's eye, have died away from the place in Lincolnshire and yielded it to dull repose. CHAPTER LXVII The Close of Esther's Narrative Full seven happy years I have been the mistress of Bleak House. The few words that I have to add to what I have written are soon penned; then I and the unknown friend to whom I write will part for ever. Not without much dear remembrance on my side. Not without some, I hope, on his or hers. They gave my darling into my arms, and through many weeks I never left her. The little child who was to have done so much was born before the turf was planted on its father's grave. It was a boy; and I, my husband, and my guardian gave him his father's name. The help that my dear counted on did come to her, though it came, in the eternal wisdom, for another purpose. Though to bless and restore his mother, not his father, was the errand of this baby, its power was mighty to do it. When I saw the strength of the weak little hand and how its touch could heal my darling's heart and raised hope within her, I felt a new sense of the goodness and the tenderness of God. They throve, and by degrees I saw my dear girl pass into my country garden and walk there with her infant in her arms. I was married then. I was the happiest of the happy. It was at this time that my guardian joined us and asked Ada when she would come home. "Both houses are your home, my dear," said he, "but the older Bleak House claims priority. When you and my boy are strong enough to do it, come and take possession of your home." Ada called him "her dearest cousin, John." But he said, no, it must be guardian now. He was her guardian henceforth, and the boy's; and he had an old association with the name. So she called him guardian, and has called him guardian ever since. The children know him by no other name. I say the children; I have two little daughters. It is difficult to believe that Charley (round-eyed still, and not at all grammatical) is married to a miller in our neighbourhood; yet so it is; and even now, looking up from my desk as I write early in the morning at my summer window, I see the very mill beginning to go round. I hope the miller will not spoil Charley; but he is very fond of her, and Charley is rather vain of such a match, for he is well to do and was in great request. So far as my small maid is concerned, I might suppose time to have stood for seven years as still as the mill did half an hour ago, since little Emma, Charley's sister, is exactly what Charley used to be. As to Tom, Charley's brother, I am really afraid to say what he did at school in ciphering, but I think it was decimals. He is apprenticed to the miller, whatever it was, and is a good bashful fellow, always falling in love with somebody and being ashamed of it. Caddy Jellyby passed her very last holidays with us and was a dearer creature than ever, perpetually dancing in and out of the house with the children as if she had never given a dancing-lesson in her life. Caddy keeps her own little carriage now instead of hiring one, and lives full two miles further westward than Newman Street. She works very hard, her husband (an excellent one) being lame and able to do very little. Still, she is more than contented and does all she has to do with all her heart. Mr. Jellyby spends his evenings at her new house with his head against the wall as he used to do in her old one. I have heard that Mrs. Jellyby was understood to suffer great mortification from her daughter's ignoble marriage and pursuits, but I hope she got over it in time. She has been disappointed in Borrioboola-Gha, which turned out a failure in consequence of the king of Borrioboola wanting to sell everybody--who survived the climate--for rum, but she has taken up with the rights of women to sit in Parliament, and Caddy tells me it is a mission involving more correspondence than the old one. I had almost forgotten Caddy's poor little girl. She is not such a mite now, but she is deaf and dumb. I believe there never was a better mother than Caddy, who learns, in her scanty intervals of leisure, innumerable deaf and dumb arts to soften the affliction of her child. As if I were never to have done with Caddy, I am reminded here of Peepy and old Mr. Turveydrop. Peepy is in the Custom House, and doing extremely well. Old Mr. Turveydrop, very apoplectic, still exhibits his deportment about town, still enjoys himself in the old manner, is still believed in in the old way. He is constant in his patronage of Peepy and is understood to have bequeathed him a favourite French clock in his dressing-room--which is not his property. With the first money we saved at home, we added to our pretty house by throwing out a little growlery expressly for my guardian, which we inaugurated with great splendour the next time he came down to see us. I try to write all this lightly, because my heart is full in drawing to an end, but when I write of him, my tears will have their way. I never look at him but I hear our poor dear Richard calling him a good man. To Ada and her pretty boy, he is the fondest father; to me he is what he has ever been, and what name can I give to that? He is my husband's best and dearest friend, he is our children's darling, he is the object of our deepest love and veneration. Yet while I feel towards him as if he were a superior being, I am so familiar with him and so easy with him that I almost wonder at myself. I have never lost my old names, nor has he lost his; nor do I ever, when he is with us, sit in any other place than in my old chair at his side, Dame Trot, Dame Durden, Little Woman--all just the same as ever; and I answer, "Yes, dear guardian!" just the same. I have never known the wind to be in the east for a single moment since the day when he took me to the porch to read the name. I remarked to him once that the wind seemed never in the east now, and he said, no, truly; it had finally departed from that quarter on that very day. I think my darling girl is more beautiful than ever. The sorrow that has been in her face--for it is not there now--seems to have purified even its innocent expression and to have given it a diviner quality. Sometimes when I raise my eyes and see her in the black dress that she still wears, teaching my Richard, I feel--it is difficult to express--as if it were so good to know that she remembers her dear Esther in her prayers. I call him my Richard! But he says that he has two mamas, and I am one. We are not rich in the bank, but we have always prospered, and we have quite enough. I never walk out with my husband but I hear the people bless him. I never go into a house of any degree but I hear his praises or see them in grateful eyes. I never lie down at night but I know that in the course of that day he has alleviated pain and soothed some fellow-creature in the time of need. I know that from the beds of those who were past recovery, thanks have often, often gone up, in the last hour, for his patient ministration. Is not this to be rich? The people even praise me as the doctor's wife. The people even like me as I go about, and make so much of me that I am quite abashed. I owe it all to him, my love, my pride! They like me for his sake, as I do everything I do in life for his sake. A night or two ago, after bustling about preparing for my darling and my guardian and little Richard, who are coming to-morrow, I was sitting out in the porch of all places, that dearly memorable porch, when Allan came home. So he said, "My precious little woman, what are you doing here?" And I said, "The moon is shining so brightly, Allan, and the night is so delicious, that I have been sitting here thinking." "What have you been thinking about, my dear?" said Allan then. "How curious you are!" said I. "I am almost ashamed to tell you, but I will. I have been thinking about my old looks--such as they were." "And what have you been thinking about THEM, my busy bee?" said Allan. "I have been thinking that I thought it was impossible that you COULD have loved me any better, even if I had retained them." "'Such as they were'?" said Allan, laughing. "Such as they were, of course." "My dear Dame Durden," said Allan, drawing my arm through his, "do you ever look in the glass?" "You know I do; you see me do it." "And don't you know that you are prettier than you ever were?" "I did not know that; I am not certain that I know it now. But I know that my dearest little pets are very pretty, and that my darling is very beautiful, and that my husband is very handsome, and that my guardian has the brightest and most benevolent face that ever was seen, and that they can very well do without much beauty in me--even supposing--."